Romantic Legacies: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts 9780367076726, 9780429243080

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Series Page
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
List of Figures
Foreword
Notes on Contributors
Acknowledgements
Introduction: Romantic Legacies: An Incomplete Project
PART I: Realist Romanticism
1 Romantic Walking and Railway Realism
2 The Use and Abuse of Romance: Realist Revisions of Walter Scott in England, France, and Germany
3 Chekhov on the Meaning of Life: After Romanticism and Nihilism
PART II: Fin-de-Siècle Romanticism
4 Keats Gone Wilde: Wilde’s Romantic Self-Fashioning at the Fin de Siècle
5 Delacroix, Signac, and the Aesthetic Revolution in Fin-de-Siècle France
6 Mediating Richard Wagner and Henry Bishop: Frederick Corder and the Different Legacies of German and English Romantic Opera
PART III: (Post)Modern Romanticism
7 Platonism, Its Heirs, and the Last Romantic
8 Vexed Meditation: Romantic Idealism in Coleridge and Its Afterlife in Bataille and Irigaray
9 “You have to be a transparent eyeball”: Transcendental Afterlives in Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men
PART IV: Environmental Romanticism
10 Tracing Romanticism in the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Reading of Ludwig Tieck’s Rune Mountain
11 The Eye of the Earth: Nonhuman Vision from Blake to Contemporary Ecocriticism
12 “Indistinctness is my forte”: Turner, Ruskin, and the Climate of Art
PART V: Oriental Romanticism
13 ReOrienting Romanticism: The Legacy of Indian Romantic Poetry in English
14 Grafting German Romanticism onto the Chinese Revolution: Goethe, Guo Morou, and the Pursuit of Self-Transcendence
15 Two Chinese Wordsworths: The Reception of Wordsworth in Twentieth-Century China
16 “The world must be made Romantic”: The Sentimental Grotesque in Tetsuya Ishida’s “Self-Portraits of Others”
Index

Citation preview

Romantic Legacies

Romantic Legacies: Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts presents the most wide-ranging treatment of Romantic regenerations, covering the cross-pollination between the arts or between art and thought within or across the borders of Germany, Britain, France, the US, Russia, India, China, and Japan. Each chapter in the volume examines a legacy or afterlife in a comparative context to demonstrate ongoing Romantic legacies as fully as possible in their complexity and richness. The volume provides readers a lens through which to understand Romanticism not merely as an artistic heritage but as a dynamic site of intellectual engagement that crosses nations and time periods and entails no less than the shaping of our global cultural currents. Shun-liang Chao, PhD, is Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature at National Chengchi University, Taiwan, and the author of Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque: Crashaw, Baudelaire, Magritte (2010). John Michael Corrigan, PhD, is Associate Professor of American literature and digital humanities at National Chengchi University, Taiwan, and the author of American Metempsychosis: Emerson, Whitman, and the New Poetry (2012).

Routledge Studies in Comparative Literature

This series is our home for cutting-edge, upper-level scholarly studies and edited collections. Taking a comparative approach to literary studies, this series visits the relationship of literature and language alongside a variety of interdisciplinary and transnational topics. Titles are characterized by dynamic interventions into established subjects and innovative studies on emerging topics. Bicultural Literature and Film in French and English Edited by Peter I. Barta and Phil Powrie Modernism and the Avant-garde Body in Spain and Italy Edited by Nicolás Fernández-Medina and Maria Truglio The Historical Novel, Transnationalism, and the Postmodern Era Susan Brantly Literature and Ethics in Contemporary Brazil Edited by Vinicius de Carvalho and Nicola Gavioli Cryptic Subtexts in Literature and Film Secret Messages and Buried Treasure Steven F. Walker Narrating Death The Limit of Literature Edited by Daniel K. Jernigan, Walter Wadiak and W. Michelle Wang Spanish Vampire Fiction since 1900 Blood Relations Abigail Lee Six The Limits of Cosmopolitanism Globalization and Its Discontents in Contemporary Literature Aleksandar Stević and Philip Tsang Romantic Legacies Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts Edited by Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan To learn more about this series, please visit https://www.routledge.com/ literature/series/RSCOL

Romantic Legacies Transnational and Transdisciplinary Contexts

Edited by Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan Foreword by James Engell

Josef Danhauser, Franz Liszt am Flügel phantasierend (Franz Liszt Fantasising at the Piano), 1840. Oil on wood, 119 × 167 cm, Staatliche Mussen zu Berlin, Germany. Public Domain.

First published 2019 by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 and by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2019 Taylor & Francis The right of Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this title has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-07672-6 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-24308-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by codeMantra

Contents

List of Figures Foreword Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Introduction: Romantic Legacies: An Incomplete Project

ix xi xvii xxiii 1

S h un - liang C h ao and J o h n M ic h ael C orrigan

Part I

Realist Romanticism

31

1 Romantic Walking and Railway Realism

33

R ac h el B ow lby

2 The Use and Abuse of Romance: Realist Revisions of Walter Scott in England, France, and Germany

50

G eoffrey B a k er

3 Chekhov on the Meaning of Life: After Romanticism and Nihilism

67

Y uri C orrigan

Part II

Fin-de-Siècle Romanticism

83

4 Keats Gone Wilde: Wilde’s Romantic Self-Fashioning at the Fin de Siècle

85

Ya - F eng Wu

vi Contents 5 Delacroix, Signac, and the Aesthetic Revolution in Fin-de-Siècle France

102

S h ao - C h ien T seng

6 Mediating Richard Wagner and Henry Bishop: Frederick Corder and the Different Legacies of German and English Romantic Opera

123

David C h andler

Part III

(Post)Modern Romanticism

139

7 Platonism, Its Heirs, and the Last Romantic

141

A rt h ur V ersluis

8 Vexed Meditation: Romantic Idealism in Coleridge and Its Afterlife in Bataille and Irigaray

158

J ustin P rystas h

9 “You have to be a transparent eyeball”: Transcendental Afterlives in Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men

175

J o h n M ic h ael C orrigan

Part IV

Environmental Romanticism

193

10 Tracing Romanticism in the Anthropocene: An Ecocritical Reading of Ludwig Tieck’s Rune Mountain

195

C aroline S c h aumann

11 The Eye of the Earth: Nonhuman Vision from Blake to Contemporary Ecocriticism

213

S op h ie L aniel - M usitelli

12 “Indistinctness is my forte”: Turner, Ruskin, and the Climate of Art C armen C asaliggi

233

Contents  vii Part V

Oriental Romanticism

249

13 ReOrienting Romanticism: The Legacy of Indian Romantic Poetry in English

251

S teve C lar k

14 Grafting German Romanticism onto the Chinese Revolution: Goethe, Guo Morou, and the Pursuit of Self-Transcendence

270

J o h annes D. Kamins k i

15 Two Chinese Wordsworths: The Reception of Wordsworth in Twentieth-Century China

287

Ou Li

16 “The world must be made Romantic”: The Sentimental Grotesque in Tetsuya Ishida’s “Self-Portraits of Others”

304

S h un - liang C h ao

Index

329

List of Figures

5.1 Eugène Delacroix, La Mort de Sardanapale (The Death of Sardanapalus), 1827 105 5.2 Georges Seurat, Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte (Sunday on La Grande Jatte), 1884–1886 107 5.3 Paul Signac, Application du Cercle Chromatique de Mr. Ch. Henry (Application of Mr. Charles Henry’s Chromatic Circle), 1889 111 5.4 Paul Signac, Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones, and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon, 1890 112 5.5 Eugène Delacroix, La Mer à Dieppe (The Sea Viewed from the Heights of Dieppe), 1852 113 5.6 Paul Signac, Portrieux, La Houle, Opus 190 (The Harbour of Portrieux, Opus 190), 1888 114 5.7 Paul Signac, Au Temps d’Harmonie: L’âge d’or n’est pas dans le passé, il est dans l’avenir (In the Time of Harmony: The Golden Age is Not in the Past, It is in the Future), 1893–1895 116 5.8 Eugène Delacroix, Le 28 Juillet: La Liberté guidant le peuple (July 28: Liberty Leading the People), 1830 118 11.1 William Blake, Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion, Copy E, Plate 98, 1821 217 11.2 William Blake, Milton a Poem, Copy D, Plate 50, 1818 218 11.3 William Blake, “The Fly,” Songs of Experience, Copy F, 1794 221 11.4 William Blake, “Ah! Sun-Flower!” Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Copy Y, detail, 1825 227 11.5 William Blake, Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion, Plate 28, Copy E, 1821 229 12.1 J. M. W. Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhon [sic] Coming on, 1840 238 16.1 Tetsuya Ishida, Untitled, 1997 305 16.2 Tetsuya Ishida, Untitled, 1997 306 16.3 Testuya Ishida, The Visitor, 1999 314

x  List of Figures 16.4 Tetsuya Ishida, Restless Dream, 1996 315 16.5 Tetsuya Ishida, Debris, 2004 317 16.6 Tetsuya Ishida, Drawer, 1996 318 16.7 Tetsuya Ishida, Awakening, 1998 319 16.8 Tetsuya Ishida, Interview, 1998 320 16.9 Tetsuya Ishida, Prisoner, 1999 320 16.10 Tetsuya Ishida, Cargo, 1997 321 16.11 Tetsuya Ishida, Long Distance, 1999 322 16.12 Tetsuya Ishida, Body Fluids, 2004 323

Foreword

The Romantics are the Classics of the modern world. Their art, criticism, and philosophies of art open a wellspring from which we continue to draw. At times, the legacy prompts reaction, as in certain Modernist tendencies to throw off the sentiment of the nineteenth century and its “spilt religion” (T. E. Hulme’s phrase in his essay “Romanticism and Classicism,” published in Speculations). More often, a complex inheritance occurs, in part because there is so much to inherit from the two generations that span roughly 1770–1830. Compelling conjectures and debates about “the last Romantic” testify to the enduring values, creative styles, and convictions of this remarkable transnational movement. In taste, intellectual thought, politics, and the various arts—fine, performing, and decorative—Romanticism is so penetrating and multifarious that there will always be discussions about when, exactly, it occurs and what, exactly, it is. At a simple yet profound level, Romanticism signals the end of a dominant classical foundation for culture and society, one hundreds of years old, rooted in texts and monuments far older. The modern world that Romanticism helps to initiate might be called, to adopt Roland Barthes’s term for a phase of French literature, post-classical. Whether in lyric or longer poetry, music, painting, the novel, philosophical orientation, or attitudes to the human soul and religious belief, the tectonic shift of the Romantic Era produces a new landscape that acts as a vast watershed for the future. Its legacies are rich and enduring. The so-called “spirit of the age,” its Zeitgeist, consists of spirits—­ plural. The legacies of Romanticism are multiple, too, and recall Arthur O. Lovejoy’s famous paper “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” (1924), with various strands neither perfectly unified nor perfectly consistent, yet, I would argue, held together by a marked revaluation of the classical inheritance, a premium on the power of imagination in art, ethics, and philosophy, and an elevation of art above even its traditional roles of instruction and pleasure. In his brilliant study now in preparation, what Andrew Warren calls “entanglements” characterise the rapid developments amongst new attitudes, new ideas, and new artistic styles.

xii Foreword It is an age of experimentation, fascinated with fragments, fleeting v­ isions, and dreams. Art is seen uniquely to inhabit realms of the spirit as well as the sensuous. It engages the transcendental, even the transcendent, while keeping contact with what Ralph Waldo Emerson calls the low and familiar: “There was a new consciousness” (“Historic Notes of Life and Letters in New England”). The mind became aware of itself. The face of Nature takes on a new visage, the Book of Nature demands new interpretation. Stress falls on values of feeling and sympathy. A new focus turns to the character of the artist, often as a prophet, sometimes an alienated one. Directly connected to artistic developments of Romanticism are political and economic events: two democratic revolutions, one in the New World, then one in the Old, the first important for world history, the second seen by many as the most stunning single event since the fall of Rome. There is a transformation of older tenets of natural law into what today we call universal human rights. Creating wealth and comfort, yet also squalid conditions and deeper slavery, either by cruel wages—or yet crueller chattel bondage by race—modern economics, the industrial revolution, and new technologies begin utterly to transform the material world. This is thus, too, the germ of the Anthropocene. During the Romantic Era, the word “acceleration” is employed for the first time to describe the pace of change in human history. William Hazlitt and others speak of the “modern” age. The Romantic Era brings new understandings of history. Since Newton, if not earlier, science had been making swift strides, though now chemistry, electricity, geology, and biology, along with ­classical physics, optics, and astronomy, enter new territories with rapidity. The sensation excited in “some watcher of the skies / When a new planet swims into his ken” (Keats, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”) becomes as striking in science as in art. Alan Richardson, Noel Jackson, Charles Lansley, Richard Sha, and others have shown that the science of the age, and even Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution itself, cannot be separated from Romantic thought at large, a sense that human perceptions of nature and of reality are changing, casting off static hierarchies and stable boundaries of knowledge. The universe is constantly shifting, the world ever in flight. Natural history preserves pinned specimens but keeps an eye on the living present and the future it harbours. Permanence, authority, and stability are questioned. Percy Shelley registers at a hotel in Chamonix, near Mont Blanc, as “Democrat, Philanthropist, and Atheist.” (Byron suggests he be more circumspect.) The age-old presence of mountains evokes new feelings and aesthetic values. Ideas are seen by many to be organic, not fixed. The thought of Spinoza is revived. Henry David Thoreau, muses, “I suppose that what in other men is religion is in me love of nature” (Journal, 30 October 1842). But it is a nature in process, so that he can

Foreword  xiii also say, “Shall I not have intelligence with the earth? Am I not partly leaves and vegetable mould myself?” (Walden, “Solitude”). The Romantic Era, then, is a protest on behalf of an organic vision of the world. Process, growth, transformation, and metamorphosis: the potential of a living organism or an entire society becomes realised through interaction with its environment, its history, and the seeds of will and determination it carries within. This is true whether the living being is a sensitive plant, a person, or an artistic genre. Materialist philosophies and dogmatism are increasingly rejected by figures such as S. T. Coleridge, F. W. J. von Schelling, John Ruskin, and, later, by the American Pragmatists, amongst them William James, deeply conversant with Romantic thought. Alfred North Whitehead revivifies strains of Romantic organicism in his process philosophy. Romanticism is a movement without borders and without disciplines. Well, that’s an exaggeration—there are indeed national characteristics, as Germaine de Staël elaborates, and there are forms of knowledge, as Kant analyses them. The point is that boundaries of disciplines are permeable. They follow new vantage points, as Coleridge does in his outline for organising encyclopaedic knowledge. A commonality of dialogue, an urgency to read what comes from over the mountains, across the Channel, or beyond the sea, fuels curiosity. Indeed, this part of the Enlightenment inheritance Romanticism does not reject but embraces, though in new ways. It involves a further triumph of print culture, rising literacy—a love of literature new in its features, as Deidre Lynch has shown—and an increased ease and speed of travel and mobility. The railroad and telegraph will enhance these tendencies. Views of language (Rousseau, Monboddo, Herder, Tooke), of the physical universe and natural world (Herschel, Lavoisier, Volta), of time itself (Hegel, the revival of Vico, Michelet), and of the human mind and its capacities (Tetens, Reid, Pinel)—all enjoy expanded scrutiny. The orientations of logos, cosmos, chronos, and psyche all change. So do visions of the polis. With social contract theory and the rights of man (Rousseau, Paine)—and of woman (Wollstonecraft, Olympe de Gouges)—elemental features of the modern political world emerge, sometimes violently, but permanently. Reform movements of abolition, feminism, vegetarianism, animal rights, and children’s rights attain higher levels of urgency and establish agendas still active today. Older, classical mythology was already waning when Alexander Pope used Rosicrucian beings for his supernatural machinery in The Rape of the Lock (1712). Coleridge calls classical mythology “exploded” (­Biographia Literaria, Chapter 18). Writers such as Novalis, Mary ­Shelley, and ­Thoreau seek to create new myths. Prometheus and Psyche are two older figures susceptible to Romantic and modern adaptation. Frankenstein (1818) carries the subtitle “the Modern Prometheus.” Keats’s poems on the defeat of the Titans depict the demise of whole systems of belief and a

xiv Foreword revolution producing new ones. Don Juan, whether by Mozart or Byron, Goethe’s Faust, Byron’s Manfred: these contribute to a set of modern myths. Northern histories and mythologies, whether in Ossian, Scott, Nordic renderings, or later in Wagner’s operas, supplant ancient ones. As Svetlana Boym has explored, the life and often tragic, early death of the artist becomes another modern myth in truth and in fiction. Biography and soon autobiography flourish, evident in Dichtung und Wahrheit, The Prelude, Wilhelm Meister, Sartor Resartus, and numerous other works. The inner life of the individual psyche, its private mythology, its anxieties and aspirations, receives fresh treatment in lyric verse, in free indirect discourse in the novel. Later writers will pursue this interiority, as Matthew Arnold does in his poem “The Buried Life,” or as Virginia Woolf and James Joyce do, entering in their fictions the sanctum sanctorum of personal memory, consciousness, and identity. A clear shift marks the late eighteenth-century Discourses of Sir Joshua Reynolds, president of the Royal Academy of Art. He moves from neo-classical principles to those frankly not pre-Romantic but ­Romantic themselves. Aware of changes around him, Reynolds moves his own theory of painting and the arts from a rather conventional neo-­ classical stance, stressing study and imitation, to a fresh one that elevates the powers of imagination, sublimity, and intuition. J. M. W. Turner, Eugène Delacroix, and other artists will follow their own imaginations, and, much as William Blake could scorn Reynolds, he follows in spirit many of the recommendations of the later Discourses. The aesthetic, a word absent from modern usage until the mid-­ eighteenth century, becomes a guide not only for art but also for living and thinking. Schelling is praised for having made the world safe again for poetry, religion, and love. The highest faculty is proclaimed not to be reason but imagination, something Santayana will attribute to Emerson, though Schelling is there before and claims that philosophy is completed only by art. Coleridge is tempted to champion imagination above reason, though finally seems to settle on reason, will, and conscience as supreme. Arnold Schopenhauer underscores the vital importance of the will. “Imaginative reason” approximates the new awareness, a phrase Francis Bacon had used in The Advancement of Learning (“imaginative or insinuative reason”), and one Arnold resurrects in his essay “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment” as “the element by which the modern spirit, if it would live right, has chiefly to live.” ­ lexander Theories of all the arts and the rise of the aesthetic from A ­Gottlieb Baumgarten and Johann Winckelmann through Kant, Coleridge, Hegel, and Schopenhauer, down through Ruskin and ­others—­eventually Oscar Wilde and the Fin de Siècle—alter the shape and emphasis of cultures. The veneration of beauty and renovated ideas of the soul resonate for decades. Only near the turn of the twentieth century will Santayana’s Sense of Beauty signal a farewell to philosophy

Foreword  xv preoccupied with aesthetics. Leo Tolstoy then will mock various definitions of beauty in “What Is Art?” (1897) A death knell for beauty—a temporary death knell, however—comes with T. S. Eliot’s only use of the word in The Waste-Land: “the beauty of it hot,” speaking of a piece of hot gammon. Romantics sometimes do not even call themselves that. In Great Britain, poets and writers are known by particular associations, such as the Lake School or the Byronic School, groupings modelled after schools of Italian art. In 1829, Goethe protested that the Classic is healthy and the Romantic sickly, then confessed a year later that Friedrich Schiller proved to him against his will that he himself is a Romantic. In English, the word Romanticism identifies an entire movement only later in the nineteenth century. Soon, then, many scholars consider the entire nineteenth century “Romantic,” and in some fields this continues to be the case. Only later do terms such as “Victorian” emerge. In anthologies of the 1920s and 1930s, Robert Browning, Alfred Lord Tennyson, and the Rossettis remain amongst the Romantics, in part because they learn from and share much with them. Despite what might later be seen as errors of anthropocentrism or an evaluation of nature by aesthetic rather than scientific criteria, the foundation of much modern environmental thought and consciousness, of ecocriticism, and of the environmental humanities is laid by figures such as Wordsworth, Thoreau, John Clare, Susan Fenimore Cooper, and Alexander von Humboldt. Romanticism is far from being confined to Europe and the Western Hemisphere. As several contributions to this volume attest, along with work by Masashi Suzuki, Steve Clark, Kaz Oishi, and many others, the Romantic Movement leaves fertile impressions on Asia and the East, just as cultures there respond and likewise leave reciprocal, indelible marks. Various encounters with the Orient, forming now a burgeoning field of study, attest yet again to the comparative and transnational character of Romanticism and its legacies. James Engell October 2018

Notes on Contributors

Geoffrey Baker  is Associate Professor of Humanities (Literature) at Yale-NUS College, Singapore. In addition to articles on political aesthetics, literary ethics, and the law in Victorian literature, he has published Realism’s Empire: Empiricism and Enchantment in the ­Nineteenth-Century Novel (Ohio State UP, 2009) and The Aesthetics of Clarity and Confusion: Literature and Engagement since Nietzsche and the Naturalists (Palgrave, 2017). His current project examines the roles of belief and evidence in nineteenth-century novels from Austen to Trollope. Rachel Bowlby  is Professor of Comparative Literature at University ­College London (UCL), UK. She works on writing in English, French, ancient Greek, and Latin. She was Lord Northcliffe Professor of Modern English Literature at UCL from 2004 to 2014 and has taught at Sussex, Oxford, York, and, most recently, Princeton. She gave the F. W. Bateson Memorial Lecture at Oxford (2006), the Gauss Seminars in Criticism at Princeton (2008), the Winston Churchill Lecture at Bristol (2013), and the Richard Hoggart Lecture at Goldsmiths, London (2018). She is an author of nine books, two of which have been translated into Japanese and Italian. Her most recent books are Talking Walking (2018) and Everyday Stories (2016). She has translated a number of books of contemporary French philosophy, by writers including Derrida and Lyotard. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. Carmen Casaliggi is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at Cardiff Metropolitan University, UK. Her research interests include Romantic literature and art, the relationship between British and European Romanticism, Romantic literary circles, Romantic legacies, and the work of John Ruskin. She has co-edited Ruskin in Perspective: Contemporary Essays (2007) and Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Culture, Aesthetics (2012) in addition to having co-­ authored Romanticism: A Literary and Cultural History (2016). She is currently working on a new book-length study entitled Romantic

xviii  Notes on Contributors Networks in Europe, 1770–1832: Transnational Encounters and a project on British Romantic Writing and Contemporary Europe. David Chandler is Professor of English at Doshisha University, Kyoto, Japan. Trained as a Romanticist, he has published widely on the ­Romantic period in journals such as European Romantic Review, ­Essays in Criticism, and Review of English Studies. In the last decade, his work has focussed mostly on opera and musical theatre. He has published edited books on the Italian Wagnerians, Alfredo Catalani, and Italo Montemezzi, and many essays on English musical theatre, ranging from the eighteenth century to Andrew Lloyd Webber. He is a trustee of the Wordsworth Foundation Conference, a former director of the Japan Association of English Romanticism, and a founding director of Retrospect Opera, a charitable recording company devoted to preserving and popularising the legacy of opera and operetta in Britain. Shun-liang Chao  teaches English and Comparative Literature at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. He holds a PhD in Comparative Literature from University College London (UCL), UK and was a Fulbright Scholar at Harvard University, USA. He has authored Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque: Crashaw, Baudelaire, Magritte (Legenda, 2010), awarded in 2013 the Anna Balakian Prize (Honourable Mention) of the ICLA, and co-edited Humour in the Arts: New Perspectives (Routledge, 2018). In 2014, he received the A ­ cademia Sinica Award for Junior Research Investigators. His research interests cover literature, visual culture, and intellectual history from the ­Enlightenment to the present. He has published in journals such as Orbis Litterarum, Études britanniques contemporaines, and Criticism: A Quarterly for Literature and the Arts. Steve Clark is Professor of English at the Graduate School of Humanities and Sociology at the University of Tokyo, Japan. His research interests include Romanticism, critical theory, and travel writing. He is the author of two books, Paul Ricœur (1990) and Sordid Images: The Poetry of Masculine Desire (1994), published by Routledge. He has also co-edited several books on Romanticism, including British Romanticism in European Perspectives (Palgrave, 2015) and Blake 2.0: William Blake in Twentieth-Century Art, Music and Culture (Palgrave, 2012). John Michael Corrigan  is Associate Professor of English at National Chengchi University, Taiwan. He received his PhD in American literature at the University of Toronto, Canada and was a post-­doctoral fellow at Emory University, USA. Specialising in ­nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature, he is the author of ­A merican Metempsychosis: Emerson, Whitman, and the New Poetry (Fordham

Notes on Contributors  xix UP, 2012) and has published in journals such as The Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, The Journal of the History of Ideas, and ­Modernism/Modernity. He also serves as a senior editor of Digital Yoknapatawpha at the University of Virginia. Yuri Corrigan is Assistant Professor of Russian and Comparative Literature at Boston University, USA. He holds a PhD in Russian literature from Princeton University, USA and studies the intersections of literature, philosophy, religion, and psychology in modern and contemporary Russian, European, and American culture—with a focus on the Russian nineteenth century. His articles have appeared and will appear in journals such as Comparative Literature, Slavic Review, and The Russian Review. He is the author of Dostoevsky and the Riddle of the Self (Northwestern UP, 2017). James Engell is Gurney Professor of English and Professor of Comparative Literature at Harvard University, USA. He chaired the Department of English there from 2004 to 2010. In 2017, with K. P. Van Anglen, he edited and contributed to The Call of Classical Literature in the Romantic Age. His books include The Creative Imagination: Enlightenment to Romanticism (1981); Forming the Critical Mind: Dryden to Coleridge (1989); The Committed Word: Literature and Public Values (1999); and, with Anthony Dangerfield, Saving Higher Education in the Age of Money (2005). He has edited or co-edited several volumes, including Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria. In 2016, he edited from the manuscripts a fully illustrated edition of The ­Prelude (1805). Currently, he is working on an intellectual biography of Coleridge. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Johannes D. Kaminski is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the University of Vienna, Austria and works on German and Chinese literature, preferably in a comparative context. The present article is part of a book project which explores the impact of Goethe’s Werther on Chinese literature in the 1920s. He is the author of Der Schwärmer auf der Bühne: Ausgrenzung und Rehabbilitation einer literarischen Figur in Goethes Dramen und Prosa (Wehrhahn, 2012) and the editor of Erotic Literature in Translation and Adaptation (Legenda, 2018). He has published in journals such as Publications of the ­English Goethe Society and Monatshefte. Sophie Laniel-Musitelli  is Associate Professor of English at the University of Lille, France and a Junior Fellow at the Institut Universitaire de France. Her research focuses on the interactions amongst literature, the sciences, and philosophy in the Romantic era. She is the author of “The Harmony of Truth”: Sciences et poésie dans l’œuvre de P. B. ­Shelley (PUL-ELLUG, 2012) and of several articles and book chapters on the

xx  Notes on Contributors relationship between scientific discourse and literary writing in the works of Erasmus Darwin, Blake, Wordsworth, Percy Shelley, and De Quincey. She has edited Sciences et poésie de Wordsworth à Hopkins (Etudes Anglaises, 2011), co-authored Muses et ptérodactyles: La poésie de la science de Chénier à Rimbaud (Seuil, 2013), and co-­edited Romanticism and the Philosophical Tradition (PU de Nancy, 2015) and Romanticism and Philosophy (Routledge, 2015). Ou Li  is Associate Professor of English at the Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong. She also serves as the International Liaison Officer for the Romantic Studies Association of Australasia. Her research interests include English Romantic poetry and cultural/literary relations between China and the West. She is the author of Keats and Negative Capability (Continuum, 2009) and has published in such journals as Romanticism, Romantic Circles, and Irish Studies Reviews. Justin Prystash  is Associate Professor of English at National Taiwan Normal University, Taiwan. Specialising in Victorian literature and culture and science fiction, he has contributed to journals such as Nineteenth-Century Literature, Victorian Literature and Culture, Science Fiction Studies, and Mosaic amongst others. He is currently exploring the relationship between British idealism and Fin-de-Siècle science fiction. Caroline Schaumann is Associate Professor of German Studies at ­Emory University, USA, where she is also affiliated with Jewish Studies and Film Studies. She is the author of Memory Matters: Generational Responses to Germany’s Nazi Past in Recent Women’s Literature (2008) and established her presence in the field of ecocriticism with research articles on Alexander von Humboldt and on mountain literature and film. She has co-edited the volumes Heights of Reflection: Mountains in the German Imagination from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century with Sean Ireton (2012) and, more recently, German Ecocriticism in the Anthropocene with Heather I. Sullivan (2017). She is currently working on a monograph on the cultural history of mountaineering. Shao-Chien Tseng is Professor of Art History at ­National Central University in Taiwan. She has written widely on the representation of the city and the body, and her articles on modern and contemporary ­ ulletin, History of art have appeared in journals such as The Art B Photography, and Journal of Art Theory and Practice. She has also contributed essays to Perspectives on Degas ­(Routledge, 2016) and various exhibition catalogues. She has received international travel awards from the CAA/Getty Foundation and ­Nineteenth-Century Studies Association.

Notes on Contributors  xxi Arthur Versluis is Professor and Department Chair of Religious Studies at Michigan State University (MSU), USA. His research interests include American Transcendentalism, Asian religions, and intellectual history. He has published many books, the most recent of which are Platonic Mysticism: Contemplative Science, Philosophy, Literature and Art (SUNY P, 2017), American Gurus: From Transcendentalism to New Age Religion (Oxford UP, 2014), Magic and Mysticism: An Introduction to Western Esotericism (Rowman & Littlefield, 2017), and The New Inquisitions: Heretic-Hunting and the Intellectual ­Origins of Modern Totalitarianism (Oxford UP, 2006). He was a Fulbright scholar in Germany and is the founding editor of Esoterica as well as co-editor of JSR: Journal for the Study of Radicalism. He is the founding president of the Association for the Study of Esotericism. Ya-Feng Wu  is Professor of Foreign Languages and Literatures and Vice Dean of the College of Liberal Arts at National Taiwan University, Taiwan. She has published in numerous journals, notably the Keats-Shelley Review and Studies in Literature and Language. She is the co-editor of Gothic Crossings: From the Middle Ages to the Modern Era (NTU P, 2011). She is currently working on nineteenth-­ century East/West encounters.

Acknowledgements

This volume of essays grew out of an international conference on ­Romantic legacies that took place on 18–19 November 2016, sponsored by National Chengchi University (NCCU), the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan, and Romantic Bicentennials in North America. We would like to express our gratitude to the funding bodies, participants, and staff in the English Department. We are particularly grateful to the organising committee: Li-hsin Hsu (NCCU), Yih-Dau Wu (NCCU), Jing-fen Su (NCCU), Emily Sun (Barnard College, USA), Alex Watson (Nagoya University, Japan), and Laurence Williams (Sophia University, Japan). Our thanks also go to the contributors of this volume and to Jennifer Abbot and her team at Routledge. Shun-liang Chao would like to acknowledge NCCU-Top University Strategic Alliance in Taiwan and the Fulbright Program for funding one year of research leave in the Department of Comparative Literature at Harvard University in 2017–2018, whose excellent library resources enormously facilitated the writing of the volume’s Introduction. He also greatly appreciates his sponsor James Engell’s gracious hospitality during his visit to Harvard. Taipei, Taiwan, October 2018

Introduction Romantic Legacies: An Incomplete Project Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan

[E]very century is differently romantic. —Jean Paul Richter, School for Aesthetics (1973, 63)

In the noted Fragment No. 116 in the Athenäum (1798–1800), Friedrich Schlegel (1968), who spearheaded Frühromantik, the first school of European Romanticism, plants a seed for continuous Romantic regenerations by endowing “Romantic poetry” with a mission to reunite all separate genres of poetry and to put poetry in touch with philosophy and rhetorics. It will, and should, now mingle and now amalgamate poetry and prose, genius and criticism, the poetry of art and the poetry of nature, render poetry living and social, and life and society poetic, . . . . The Romantic type of poetry is still becoming; indeed, its peculiar essence is that it is always becoming and that it can never be completed. (140–141) By “Romantic poetry,” Schlegel refers not merely to the Roman (novel) or, broadly, art as a (con)fusion of all genres but also to a way of life or a state of society that strives to embrace all. To be all-inclusive and always becoming, “Romantic poetry” constantly annihilates and regenerates itself; it is, so to speak, an incomplete project. In Dialogue on Poetry (Gespräch über die Poesie, 1800), Schlegel goes on to liken “Romantic poetry” to the grotesque, the unfinished metamorphosis of one bodily form into another, and state that “the Romantic” is an “aesthetic” element that “may be more or less dominant or recessive, but never entirely absent” (101), a claim that later found an echo in Jean Paul Richter (generally known as Jean Paul), who maintained in 1804 that “every century is differently romantic” (1973, 63). Schlegel (1968) did not find his age dominantly Romantic and, therefore, looked backwards to artworks of the past and placed Shakespeare “at the core of the Romantic imagination” (101). Unlike Schlegel, we have the advantage of looking forwards from the turn of the nineteenth century to the present to depict an inevitably imperfect picture of the ongoing project of Romanticism.

2  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan Since Romanticism is always in the state of becoming, there should be no such a thing as Romanic legacies or afterlives. To avoid, though, the quandary that Isiah Berlin describes in The Roots of Romanticism (1999), we recognise Romanticism as a designation for a historical movement in which a mindset or worldview, if not first formed, at least emerged to prevail in the West. Berlin (1999) points out that students of Romanticism often have to choose either to consider the subject as an event that occurs historically or to identify it as a state of mind that recurs trans-historically. While Berlin confines his attention to the former to justify Romanticism as “the greatest transformation of Western consciousness” in human history (5–6), we intend the present volume to pick up where Berlin left off by demonstrating how the transformation fashioned a mindset that has continued to resonate after the heyday of Romanticism, roughly from the 1800s to 1850s, from Frühromantik to the American Renaissance. Louis Dupré (2013) begins his The Quest of the Absolute (2013), a penetrating study of European Romanticism as a historical event, by pithily describing the endurance of “the Romantic mind” in our time: Our contemporaries, like the Romantics, typically resist political restrictions, social divisions, fixed moral rules, and dogmatic religions. They experience the same desire for global unity while fiercely ­ resisting any attack on their regional autonomy. The seeds of the two powerful ideologies of the twentieth century, communist universalism and fascist nationalism, were buried deep in Romantic thought, waiting to germinate and overturn the entire twentieth century. Much in our social behavior we have inherited from the Romantic response to pressure in spontaneous outbursts of protest or exuberance, cultural rebellions, vociferous strikes, and street demonstrations. The Romantic cult of nature has survived in our present care for the earth . . . . A fascination with the mysterious . . . testifies to a continuing spiritual unrest that can be traced back to the Romantic era. (viii) Admittedly, Romanticism, as a movement, has long ended but, as a state of mind, has survived the sea change of taste from one period to another. In order for readers better to understand the temporal and geographical import of Romantic survival, we do not limit the present study to the presence of the Romantic mind in our time and in the West but rather map out its vicissitude in the West since the second half of the nineteenth century and its reception in the (Far) East. This volume provides the most wide-ranging treatment of Romantic legacies or regenerations that are not merely transnational but transdisciplinary. It is not bounded by a national Romanticism and by literature only. Transnationalism as an expanded framework for critical activity

Introduction  3 now lies at the heart of Romantic studies, a framework that the present study adopts in order to do justice to Romanticism in its origins. In addition, the transdisciplinary character of the volume emulates Schlegel’s idea of “Romantic poetry” by providing an all-inclusive quality to the transnational structure with our contributors considering literature, art history, philosophy, music, material culture, politics, media studies, environmental studies, oriental studies, and so forth. The “resistance to generic boundaries of all kinds,” as Paul Hamilton (2016) notes, renders a manner “Romantic” in the post-classical period in Europe: “the naturally interdisciplinary quality of European Romanticism, the typical transitions writers of the time made between different discourses and periods, set up an internal comparative dynamic” (2). The transnational and transdisciplinary character of Romanticism invites a study of its legacies through the approach of comparative literature, briefly, the exploration of literature or the arts across national, cultural, disciplinary, and temporal borders. Each chapter in the present volume examines a legacy or afterlife within a transnational and/or transdisciplinary context to demonstrate ongoing Romantic legacies as fully as possible in their complexity and richness and to provide readers a lens through which to understand Romanticism not merely as an artistic heritage but as a dynamic site of intellectual engagement that crosses nations and time periods and entails no less than the shaping of our global cultural currents.

Comparative Romanticism Romanticism as a subject is indeed “naturally” congenial to the discipline of comparative literature. There are at least two reasons. First, of the three inaugural “patrons” of the discipline (Saussy 2006, 6), two are key players of the Romantic Movement: Madame de Staël and Goethe. Staël sowed the seeds of comparative literature with On Germany (De l’Allemagne, 1813), in which she elaborates on the manners, arts, philosophy, and religion of Germany in relation to those of France, thereby providing a rich loam for French Romanticism to bloom in the 1820s and, more significantly, “invent[ing] a European Romanticism” (Isbell 1994, 4). In “The Spirit of Translation” (“De l’esprit des traductions,” 1816), Staël (2006) irrigated comparative literature by punctuating that it would enrich each nation and benefit humankind to “transport the [literary] masterpieces of the human intellect from one language to another” (279).1 As early as 1827, taking Staël’s project one step further, Goethe (1973), a forefather of Romanticism, 2 announced the inception of “the age of Weltliteratur” (6) in which different nations learn to know or, better still, to love one another through the circulation or translation of literary productions, an exchange of spiritual and intellectual needs that would help nations to avoid political conflicts and expand economic

4  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan relations (10–11). “One cannot judge without comparing,” as Staël once wrote (1871, 20). The second, and perhaps more significant, reason is that the Romantic Movement is quintessentially transnational and transdisciplinary—­ despite its contribution to the rise of nationalism against Enlightenment universalism and despite Arthur O. Lovejoy’s judgement that “the Romanticism of one country may have little in common with that of another” (1924, 235). Indeed, during the heyday of the Movement, the cross-fertilisation or reciprocal encounter occurs frequently between the arts or between art and thought within or across national boundaries. For instance, in 1810, Goethe published his scientific study of colour phenomena as a treatise, Zur Farbenlehre, whose English translation Theory of Colours (1840) J. M. W. Turner studied arduously, notably the section on the sensory-moral effects caused by the mediation between “plus” radiances of yellow/light and “minus” radiances of blue/ darkness (Goethe 1840, 304–355; see also Finley 1997). Turner particularly dedicated to Goethe a landscape painting that, accompanied by a verse, depicts a morning sky dominated by yellow, assisted by orange and red: Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) (1843). In addition, in his The Flowers of Evil (Les Fleurs du mal), first published in 1857, Baudelaire (1976) lists as one of his artistic “beacons” (“phares”) Eugène Delacroix (2:14), the greatest colourist in Romantic France who regarded Turner and John Constable as “true reformers” (“véritable réformateurs”) of landscape paintings (Delacroix 1878, 297). In addition, Delacroix illustrated Goethe’s Faust, Part One (Faust. Eine Tragödie, 1806)3 and Walter Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor (1819), and transformed into paint scenes in Scott’s historical novels like Ivanhoe (1820) and Quentin Durward (1823) and Byron’s Oriental tales like The Giaour (1813) and The Bride of Abydos (1813) (Joannides 2001, 132–133).4 Scott’s and Byron’s works were food for the soul for ­A lexander Pushkin at different stages of his life. Fascinated by Scott’s fusion of history and imagination, Pushkin in his late years wrote historical novels à la Scott, such as The Captain’s Daughter (Kapitanskaya dochka, 1833–1836), that he vowed to “delight even the foreigners” (quoted in Altshuller 2006, 217). Before veering towards Scott, Pushkin fell under the spell of Byron’s Oriental tales and Child Harold’s Pilgrimage (in French translations) while exiled from St Petersburg to a southern province of Russia from 1820 to 1826 and fashioned a Byronic outcast as his persona in four narrative poems, the so-called “Southern Poems” (1820–1824) (Diakonova and Vatsuro 2004, 336). The impact of Byron, a Romantic rebel par excellence, on comparative Romanticism pervades through Romantic Europe and travels across the Atlantic Ocean. For instance, Giuseppe Mazzini, a political activist and the architect of Italian nationalism, urged the Italian working class

Introduction  5 to shoulder the mission to achieve “the moral unity of Europe” (1919, 58) and regarded the combination of Byron and Goethe as the very incubator of a “new social poetry, which will soothe the suffering soul by teaching it to rise towards God through Humanity” (1887, 102). 5 Also, spearheading the Hudson River School, the first major American art movement, active between 1825 and 1870, Thomas Cole, both a painter and a poet, took inspiration from Canto 4 of Child Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812–1818) to create his most important work The Course of Empire (1833–1836), a series of five landscape paintings narrating the rise and fall of an ancient state (Wallach 1968, 377–378). Apart from Byron, Cole produced in 1827 two landscape paintings based on James ­Fenimore Cooper’s most beloved novel The Last of the Mohicans (1826). Cooper (1960), in turn, sympathised with Cole because of sharing the same goal “to work up nature as fine as possible” (2:167). About one year after Cole’s untimely death in 1848, Cooper not only championed Cole as “one of the very first geniuses of the age” but esteemed The Course of Empire as “one of the noblest works of art that has been ever wrought” (4:386–398). Romantic cross-pollination also manifests itself in the meeting between literature and music. For example, Richter, gifted with a talent for music, was fond of sprinkling his novels with sentimental musings on music as follows: “O Music! thou that bringest the Past and the Future with their flying flames so near to our wounds, art thou the evening breath of this life, or the morning air of this life to come?” (1864, 2:93). Richter’s writing style intrigued Robert Schumann so much that his musical writings are riddled with lively tropes. For instance, after listening to the Ninth Symphony in D minor by Beethoven, Schumann (1946) wrote: “A wonderful glow fills the sky—whether morning or evening, I do not know. But let your creations penetrate the darkness about us!” (98).6 Richter’s novels nurtured not only Schumann’s musical criticism but his musical composition. Schuman was particularly attracted to the doubling of the self (doppelgänger) in Richter’s novels—notably, Siebenkäs and Leibgeber in Siebenkäs (1796–1797) and Walt and Vult in Die Flegeljahre (Walt and Vult, or the Twins, 1804–1805)7—so much as to incorporate the last, climactic scenes of the masked ball in Die ­Flegeljahre into one of his most popular works Papillons, Op. 2 (1831) (Jacobs 1949, 252–253). In sum, the Austrian painter Josef Danhauser’s Franz Liszt Fantasising at the Piano (Franz Liszt am Flügel phantasierend, 1840) perhaps best epitomises the transnational and transdisciplinary nature of the Romantic Movement. This painting presents a room—containing a portrait of Byron on the wall and a bust of Beethoven by the window against a backdrop of a stormy sunset—where the Hungarian composer Liszt is playing piano to six of his fellow Romantics: two are Italian musicians Niccolò Paganini and Gioachino ­Rossini and the rest French

6  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan writers Victor Hugo (also an amateur painter), George Sand, ­A lexandre Dumas père, and Marie d’Agoult (the mother of Liszt’s illegitimate daughter Cosima, the second wife of the German composer Richard Wagner). Romantic cross-fertilisation, of course, does not mean Romanticism is a movement or concept of homogeneous nature. Lovejoy (1941, 261) rightly points out that the ideas of the Romantic Movement are heterogeneous “and sometimes essentially antithetic to one another in their implications.” Indeed, even within one country alone, Romantic artists are not always on the same page. For instance, in Germany, Hegel criticised Friedrich Schlegel’s aphoristic way of writing and found Schelling’s way of thinking philosophically unscientific (Durpé 2013, 295–296). For Heinrich von Kleist, the foreground-less composition in Caspar ­David Friedrich’s Monk by the Sea (Mönch am Meer, 1808–1810) is so disorientating as if “one’s eyelids had been cut away” (quoted in Traeger 1996, 414). In France, while Staël opposed Napoléon so adamantly as to be sent into exile, Stendhal adored the Emperor and joined his army in its invasion of Russia in 1812. In Britain, Wordsworth (2011) affirmed “rustic life” as “a better soil” in which to refine feelings (597) in opposition to life in London, a “Parliament of Monsters” (485, line 692). By contrast, in a letter to Wordsworth, dated 30 January 1801, Charles Lamb (1912, 213) writes that he is emotionally attached not to “dead nature” as are “mountaineers” like Wordsworth but to London, whose urban spectacles day and night “work themselves into my mind and feed me, without a power of satiating me” (see also his “The Londoner. No. 1.” 242–245). In the US, where, as in Britain, no manifestos were published to pit the Romantic against the Classical (see Peer 1988), there is perhaps no better example than the mutual derisiveness between Ralph Waldo Emerson and Edgar Allan Poe. Emerson dismissed Poe as a mere “jingle man” (quoted in McGann 2014, 120) and Poe, for his part, placed Emerson amongst “a class of gentlemen with whom we have no patience whatever—the mystic for mysticism’s sake” (quoted in Quinn 1998, 328). Such irreducible discord impelled Lovejoy to suggest that one abandon using the term “Romanticism” collectively or at least use it in plural form (1924, 234; 1941, 261). Prudent in its own terms, Lovejoy’s proposal has not been wholly adopted by students and scholars of Romanticism. Instead, they have treated artists, philosophers, and critics of the Romantic Movement, to quote Peter Gay (2015), “as a set of families, quarrelsome perhaps but essentially expressive of some unmistakably shared features” (xiii). While the present volume does not seek to join the heated debate over the defining nature of Romanticism, one cannot discuss its legacies without having some sense of trans-linguistic “family resemblance[s]” (Prickett 2010, 15). Before reviewing the recent scholarship on Romantic legacies, we, therefore, would like to mention several

Introduction  7 notable attempts to identify the shared threads that run through major Romantic schools during the Movement.

A Review René Wellek (1949) is one of the first to repudiate Lovejoy’s argument by putting forth three dominant features: “imagination for the view of poetry, nature for the view of the world, and symbol and myth for poetic style” (147). Berlin followed (1999) suit in 1969 by arguing that Romanticism marks “the greatest single shift in the consciousness of the West” (1) from the conformity to “a body of facts” to the necessity of “the indomitable will” (119) and “the absence of a structure of the world to which one must adjust oneself” (133), two core values of Romanticism whose direct scions are existentialism and fascism (139). In their edited volume Romanticism in National Context (1988), Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich (1988) tease out the following traits common to Romanticism across Europe: the Romantics “revolted against shallow, narrow conventionality, the banal art of the academies, the prostitution of mind to the service of money, power, and political taste” (2) and forged “historical myths to bolster indigenous national cultures” (5). In E ­ uropean Romanticism: A Brief History with Documents (2008), Warren Breckman (2008) recognises three interconnected motifs fundamental to ­European Romanticism: a cult of unrestrained self-expression, a longing for an (impossible) harmony between self and community, and a penchant for a style of paradoxical or dialectical thinking (3–4). Taking his cue from Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy’s project in The Literary Absolute: The Theory of Literature in German Romanticism (1988), Dupré (2013) argues that their heterogeneity notwithstanding, major European Romantic artists and thinkers are united by their quest to “break through [in various ways] the limits of finitude . . . toward an all-inclusive absolute” (339). For Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre (2001), all the shared traits we have seen—aesthetic, philosophical, religious, ethical, etc.—would be merely symptoms of “a collective mental structure” (14), a Weltanschauung that was formed within capitalist modernity to critique it “from the standpoint of a value system—with reference to an ideal—drawn from the past” (28). While established in the second half of the eighteenth century, the Romantic worldview, Löwy and Sayre emphasise, “has not yet disappeared” (17) but, in fact, has since then continued to shape the mental landscape of artists and thinkers under the sway of industrial capitalism—which has disenchanted, quantified, and mechanised the world, disintegrated social bonds, and instrumentalised rationality—“on a planetary scale” (29–43, 19). Löwy and Sayre’s Hegelian-Marxist idea of the Romantic Weltanschauung has been adopted by some, including art historian Andrew Hemingway (2015, 6–8) in his co-edited volume

8  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan Transatlantic Romanticism: British and American Art and Literature, 1790–1860 (2015), while discredited by some such as Dupré (2013, 3) as the reduction of the inherently comprehensive term Weltanschauung to a particular socio-economic system. Either way, Löwy and Sayre’s Romanticism Against the Tide of Modernity (2001) remains arguably the most comprehensive monograph of comparative nature that deals with Romanticism both as a historical event and as a state of mind or, rather, worldview. They devote more than half of their monograph to discussing the presence of the Romantic worldview—as a past-orientated reaction against industrial capitalism— in the second half of the nineteenth century and, notably, the twentieth century. The Victorian sage John Ruskin is considered as a pivotal figure in sustaining the Romantic worldview while “dark Satanic Mills,” to use Blake’s terms (1910, 233), were in full swing in nineteenth-century Europe. Ruskin was a champion of Turner’s paintings, and his socialist view of art and society made him a spiritual father of William M ­ orris and nurtured the left at the turn of the century (Löwy and Sayre 2001, 146). In the early twentieth century, Surrealism took over and endeavoured to re-enchant the world with the invention of a new collective myth, one that is inspired by ancient and indigenous myths and by “the prophetic power of certain visionaries” such as Sade, Lautréamont, Rimbaud, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Max Ernst, and so on (218–219). Also, the Surrealist embrace of anarchy gave impetus to the May 1968 movement which in turn kindled many of the social movements with Romantic aspirations in the 1970s and 1980s (220, 229). Overall, due to its Hegelian-Marxist approach, Löwy and Sayre’s monograph, while comparative and comprehensive, engages with artworks primarily as subservient to political thought, a method of reading that is likely to leave students and scholars of literary studies unsated. Two short monographs are also dynamically comparative but much less extensive in scope: The Romantic Legacy (1996) by philosopher Charles Larmore and Why the Romantics Matter (2015) by intellectual historian Peter Gay. Larmore and Gay should have swapped the titles of their books. Despite the title, The Romantic Legacy reads not so much an examination of Romantic inheritance as an elucidation of the three interconnected strands that Larmore argues are vital to European Romanticism and yet have been misconceived: imagination, community, and subjectivity (irony and authenticity). For instance, the Romantic imagination, as in Wordsworth and Keats, is “creative and responsive at once” (14) in the sense that the poet exercises the creative imagination neither to escape from reality nor to replace reality with art but to respond to “the untameable power of reality itself” (15). The imagination, thus understood, helps to illuminate the Romantic vision of society, which is often mistakenly reduced to fascist nationalism. The Romantic sense of belonging, Larmore explains, is an act of understanding the

Introduction  9 self as belonging not to “a community that is simply given” such as our nation but, as in Novalis and Friedrich Schlegel, to “a community that we also at the same time reconceive [morally], a community no less imagined than real” (61). Though not confined mostly to literature as is Lamore’s book, Gay’s Why the Romantics Matter similarly has a misleading title in that the majority of it deals not with Romanticism per se but with Romantic legacies. For Gay (2015), Romanticism is important because the Romantics in Germany, France, and Britain vowed to poeticise or indeed re-enchant the world—with love, religious and erotic, sacred and profane—when Enlightenment rationality had robbed the world of its enchantment. In so doing, they gazed inwardly in such an earnest way as to translate feeling into art, thereby clearing the path for “new romantics” (32) from the mid-nineteenth century onwards to claim “the subjective nature of their aesthetic passions” (29) and pursue “the shock of the new” (20). Amongst the “new romantics” Gay discusses, Wilde and Kandinsky are given most attention insofar as they carried Romanic inwardness (Innerlichkeit)8 the furthest. A “Nietzschean” immoralist (71), Wilde is the prime heir of Théophile Gautier’s campaign for l’art pour l’art by decidedly cutting the intimate tie between the arts and life (78). Kandinsky determined to restore the lost soul of the modern world with art and went so far as to eliminate all references to nature in his paintings (110). While exploring Romantic regenerations with fluent authority across all the fields of culture, Gay often offers snapshots and sometimes sweeping claims: e.g. Baudelaire belongs to the camp of l’art pour l’art, a thread to which we shall return. Approach-wise, the afore-mentioned three books are most in tune with the comparative nature of the present volume while largely lacking in-depth treatments of texts in question. In addition to them, the past two decades have witnessed a surge of interest in Romantic legacies, afterlives, or regenerations. To name a few monographs, collections, and exhibition catalogues: The New Romanticism: A Collection of Critical Essays (2000), Ideal Worlds: New Romanticism in Contemporary Art (2005), The Monstrous Debt: Modalities of Romantic Influence in Twentieth-Century Literature (2006), The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry since 1900 (2007), Romantic Presences in the Twentieth Century (2012), Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Culture, Aesthetics (2012), Time of Beauty, Time of Fear: The Romantic Legacy in the Literature of Childhood (2012), Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst (2012), American Gurus: From Transcendentalism to New Age Religion (2014), Aesthetics and Neo-Romanticism in Film: Landscapes in Contemporary British Cinema (2014), and English Romanticism in East Asia (2016). Although treating texts thoroughly, most of these publications are not extensive geographically and/or disciplinarily and are

10  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan limited completely or mostly to the legacies of one national, particularly British or English, literary Romanticism. Amongst those that take various Romantic topoi on board, most comprehensive and impressive is Legacies of Romanticism: Literature, Culture, and Aesthetics (2012), edited by Carmen Casaliggi and Paul March-Russell. Devoted to the legacies of British Romanticism, the collection presents an array of 16 essays that cover all major British Romantic writers and the ongoing legacies of their works in the literary and theoretical writings of the Victorian, modern, postmodern, and postcolonial eras. The primacy of British Romanticism, though, creates a few issues. For example, in considering what kind of legacy can be defined as “Romantic,” Casaliggi and March-Russell (2012) maintain that “the term is an anachronism” because Coleridge did not use it “to describe himself and his near-contemporaries until 1820” (5), a claim that, albeit valid in its own right, becomes refutable in the context of German Romanticism. Also, the Far East is absent in the postcolonial exploration of Romantic legacies while British Romanticism fundamentally affected intellectual circles in modern China and Japan (see Watson and Williams 2019), the first modernised nation outside the West. This gap is filled by English Romanticism in East Asia (2016), a Romantic Circles Praxis volume edited by Suh-Reen Han that contains 5 essays on the reception of English Romanticism in Japan, China, Taiwan, and Korea to illustrate how “the Romantic mindset serves as a universally applicable antidote to a totalitarian system of knowledge and power” (Han 2016). While multinational and cross-cultural, this small collection is restricted to the legacy of English literary Romanticism, or rather, Keats and Percy Shelley. In addition, there are monographs and collections devoted completely to the legacy of one specific Romantic motif. For example, built on Lawrence Buell’s The Environmental Imagination (1996), a seminal book that anticipated the ecocritical turn in the humanities, Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies (2016), edited by Dewey W. Hall (2016, 4), is a collection of 12 essays that seeks to confront that “the Romantic sense of natura remove[s] the scientific from the material realm.” This collection establishes a transdisciplinary bridge between natural philosophers and literary figures and a transatlantic connection between British and American writers in the formation of ecological sensibilities. Situated within the temporal contexts of the Holocene and the Anthropocene, Romantic Ecocriticism offers a most thorough and extensive study of the inheritance of Romanticism in the understanding of the intricate interrelations of humans and nature but inevitably at the cost of other important legacies of Romanticism. This situation is also true of American Gurus: From Transcendentalism to New Age Religion (2014) by Arthur Versluis. Going one step further than Russell B. Goodman in his American Philosophy and the Romantic Tradition

Introduction  11 (1990), Versluis (2014) explores New England Transcendentalism, led by Emerson, and its influence—alongside its Platonic and hermetic moorings—on twentieth-­century American spiritual teachers who acted as gurus and declared to achieve what he calls “immediatism,” an assertion of obtaining “spiritual illumination spontaneously . . . often without meditation or years of guided praxis” (2). Also noteworthy is Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst, a collection of 13 essays edited by Felix Krämer in conjunction with the eponymous exhibition in Frankfurt from September 2012 to January 2013 and subsequently in Paris in 2013. Inspired by Mario Praz’s The Romantic Agony of 1933 (originally published in Italy in 1930), whose ­German translation is Liebe, Tod und Teufel: Die schwarze Romantik (Love, Death, and Devil: Dark Romanticism, 1963), the exhibition, the first major project of its kind, displayed over 200 visual artworks—­ ranging from paintings to films—across Western countries. Multinational but only partly transnational, the catalogue consists of 12 fairly short essays and one long introduction of transdisciplinary nature in which Kramer (2012) defines Romanticism as “a state of mind” (24) and dexterously teases out a history of the taste for “the terrible, the wondrous, and the grotesque” (14) from the late Enlightenment to Surrealism. Romantic Legacies recognises but moves beyond these earlier studies by offering transnational contexts and transdisciplinary perspectives. The volume brings together well-established, mid-career, and junior scholars—from across international academia—who work within a wide range of disciplines to present in-depth discussions of transhistorical, ongoing Romantic legacies that are crucial to a volume of this kind. We organise the chapters into five paradigms—Realist, Fin-de-Siècle, (Post) Modern, Environmental, and Oriental Romanticism—to ­investigate how the Romantic mind responds or corresponds to the values, tensions, and contradictions of ensuing historical periods inside and outside the borders of Germany, Britain, France, the US, Russia, India, China, and Japan.

Figures of Transition: Ruskin, Baudelaire, Nietzsche The Jena Romantics, such as the Schlegels, Novalis, and Schleiermacher, initiated the German school of the Romantic Movement with the publication of the Athenäum in 1798. In the same year, Wordsworth and Coleridge published Lyrical Ballads in Britain, but did not launch a Romantic school; nevertheless, the collection of poems, along with the manifesto-like Preface by Wordsworth,9 marked the beginning of “a new style and a new spirit,” as William Hazlitt (1902) recalled the “deeper power and pathos” he felt after listening to Coleridge reciting some of the poems (270). In France, aligning himself with the line the Schlegels drew between Romanticism and Classicism, Stendhal (1962)

12  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan opened Racine and Shakespeare (Racine et Shakespeare, 1823–1825) by saying that France was on the eve of a “revolution in poetry” (15) and that Romanticism was the art of pleasing the artist’s contemporaries and Classicism the art of pleasing his/her “great-grand-fathers” (38). Subsequently, announcing that “[w]e are on the eve of a revolution in the fine arts” (93), Stendhal (1973) in his evaluation of the Salon of 1824 castigated the school of Jacques-Loui David, the then academic painter par excellence, as being “decidedly inept at painting souls” (101). Romanticism in the US emerged later than in Europe, and there are varying accounts of its inception and duration. Certainly, Washington Irving, William Cullen Bryant, and James Fenimore Cooper are seen as Romantic pioneers of a distinctively American literature—with Irving’s The Sketch Book (1819) often heralded as a seminal publication. Emerson’s publication of Nature (1836) is also seen as a foundational text for the Romanticism that F. O. Matthiessen first termed the American Renaissance in his 1941 work of scholarship bearing such a title. While major Romantic schools took shape at different times, the Romantic Movement as a whole became “recessive” (to use Schlegel’s terms) by 1863 “with the death of Delacroix and the revolt against French academic painting shown in the Salon des Refusés” (Longyear 1973, 12) and with Realism and Naturalism coming to the fore. In the second half of the nineteenth century, many figures carried the torch of Romanticism and helped to keep the fire burning to date. Three figures, we suggest, stand out and have exerted the greatest influence, respectively, in sustaining the social, aesthetic, and philosophical forces of Romanticism: John Ruskin, Charles Baudelaire, and Friedrich Nietzsche. Löwy and Sayre have elaborated superbly on the socio-political import of Ruskin (1819–1900) in the legacies of Romanticism. Therefore, we will not go into detail but briefly chart his far-reaching influence: inspired by Wordsworth, Scott, Turner, and, notably, Carlyle, Ruskin regarded aesthetics and morality as integral to an ideal society that realises “humanity-in-nature”; his anti-capitalist attitude towards art and society shaped the vision of the Pre-Raphaelites and Morris, inspired Frank Lloyd Wright to conceive of organic architecture through Seven Lamps of Architecture (1849), and exercised a great impact on the founders of the Labour Party in Britain and on Gandhi through Unto This Last (1860), a series of four essays on wealth, morality, justice, value, and production which Gandhi translated into an Indian dialect (Löwy and Sayre 2001, 129, 131, 145–146). If, socio-politically, Ruskin is most instrumental in keeping up the afterlife of the Romantic Movement, Baudelaire (1821–1867), who translated Poe’s works into French and published them in five volumes between 1856 and 1865, plays the cardinal role in prolonging Romantic aesthetics with a modern twist. By the time Baudelaire wrote as an art critic, Romanticism began to lose ground in France. To boost Romanticism,

Introduction  13 Baudelaire did not hold the typical Romantic animosity towards the bourgeois but instead endeavoured to educate, or rather shock, the most powerful class into one that could appreciate the Romantic sense of beauty. He dedicated The Salon of 1846 (Salon de 1846, 1846) to the bourgeois by addressing them at the beginning of the book: “But you must also be able to feel beauty. . . . You can live without bread for three days;—without poetry, never” (1976, 2:415). By “beauty,” Baudelaire referred neither to the academic beauty of formal perfection as typified by the works of Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres nor to the beauty of the past for which some Romantics nostalgically long, but to the “most modern [actuelle] expression of beauty” as epitomised by the works of Delacroix (2:420) and the urban sketches of Constantin Guys (2:688). In Baudelaire, the Romantic expression of beauty stems primarily from the present life (in Paris)10 transformed by the imagination, “the queen of all faculties,” into art that “creates a new world and produces the sensation of novelty” (2:695; 2:328; 2:621), as seen particularly in the poems set in Paris in The Flowers of Evil and the prose poems in The Spleen of Paris (Le Spleen de Paris, 1869). The Romantics before him often regarded and thus presented modern industrial life as ugly and vulgar; nevertheless, Baudelaire deemed it “one of the tremendous privileges of Art that the horrible, artistically rendered, becomes beautiful” (2:123). As the first flâneur who relished le mal of urban life (2:691), Baudelaire reconciled the “irreversible split” (Calinescu 1987, 41) that occurred in the first half of the nineteenth century between two opposing modernities, industrial and aesthetic, bourgeois and Romantic. He aestheticised modern life and thereby cleared the path for French Symbolism, in which, as Margarete Kohlenbach notes (2009), “German Romanticism had travelled from Tieck’s and Eichendorff’s forest solitudes to the modern metropolis of Baudelaire’s Paris” (265). In University Exhibition of 1855 (Exposition universelle de 1855, 1855), Baudelaire (1976) accentuates Romantic beauty as becoming, heterogeneous, and incomplete (as did Schlegel “Romantic poetry”), a definition that he would later materialise in his The Flowers of Evil (see Chao 2014) and thereby becomes for many the very forerunner of modernism: [B]eauty itself would disappear from the earth [if we have to comply with its academic rules] because all types, all ideas, all sensations would merge into one vast monotonous and impersonal unity, as immense as ennui and nothingness. Variety, the sine qua non of life, would be eradicated from life. So true is it that in the multiple productions of art, there is something always new that eternally eludes the rule and the analyses of the school! Astonishment, which is one of the great sources of jouissance aroused by art and literature, partakes of this very variety of types and sensations. (2:578)

14  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan In other words, life is of diverse nature, and so is beauty; life is always in a state of flux, and so is beauty; and the forms of beauty are as manifold as the ways of producing astonishment or sensation of novelty. Baudelaire’s pursuit of new sensations motivated him to champion Delacroix over Ingres and Hugo and to find in Wagner “something new” that enabled him to outperform any other musician including Beethoven and Carl Maria von Weber in “painting space and depth, material and spiritual” (2:785). Baudelaire himself culled beauty most frequently from that which is conventionally divorced from beauty—the bizarre, the morbid, the evil, the grotesque, and so forth—as suggested by the title Les Fleurs du mal, whose character can be defined by the following line of the introductory poem: “In repugnant objects we find charm” (1:5, line 14). In his “Preface to Cromwell” (“La préface de Cromwell,” 1827), Hugo (1968) celebrates the grotesque, or the ugly, as “the richest source nature can offer art” and yet goes on to treat it merely as “a term of comparison” that allows one to perceive “[universal] beauty more freshly and keenly” (72). Hugo thus did not fundamentally confront the Platonic primacy of uniform beauty, whereas Baudelaire regarded the grotesque or, broadly, le mal as an indispensable quarry of beauty and thus placed Delacroix, whose women figures Hugo denigrated as “frogs” (2:593), far above Hugo, an adroit “craftsman” (“travailleur”) but not a “creator” (2:431). Therefore, we cannot agree with Gay (2015) when he positions ­Baudelaire amongst the “most conspicuous representatives” of the battle cry of l’art pour l’art, led by Gautier (67). It is true that Baudelaire dedicated Les Fleurs du mal to Gautier; nevertheless, Gautier went so far as to predicate the autonomy of art on formal perfection as seen in Ingres, whereas Baudelaire modernised Romantic beauty in such a forcible way that Arthur Rimbaud (2003) saluted him in 1871 as the “king of poets, a true God” (253); that Guillaume Apollinaire (1971) hailed him in 1917 as the first to breathe “the modern spirit,” the surprise of the new, over Europe (243); that Paul Valéry trumpeted him in 1924 as the first French poet that became internationally renowned (142); and that T. S. Eliot (1975) esteemed him in 1930 as “the greatest exemplar in modern poetry in any language” (234). Indeed, through Baudelaire, Romanticism has retained a significant impact on modern and postmodern discourse. For instance, the members of Surrealism, the most far-flung international cultural movement after Romanticism, considered him a forefather (Breton 1988, 320). Amongst them, René Magritte, whom Fredric Jameson (1991) saw as a “unique” Surrealist who “survived the sea change from the modern to its sequel [the postmodern]” (10), is particularly beholden to Baudelaire. Declaring that painting must be made “visible poetry” and that his “painting must resemble the world in order to be able to evoke its mystery,” Magritte (2001) did not look up to Novalis or Nerval but to

Introduction  15 Baudelaire, whose great poems evoked mystery “in the world of familiar objects” (565, 537, 609). Baudelaire’s legacy manifests itself not merely in painting but in music and children’s literature. The Baudelaire Song Project, funded from 2015 to 2019 by the Arts and Humanities Research Council in Britain, was created to generate a dataset of more than 200 songs, classical and popular, that Baudelaire’s poetry has inspired to date—a monograph growing out of this project, Baudelaire in Song: 1880–1930, was published in 2017. Attracted to the beautiful presentation of the dreadful in Les Fleurs du mal, Daniel Handler named the siblings the Baudelaires in his A Series of Unfortunate Events (Dugdale 2017), a series of 13 children’s novels that was published from 1999 to 2006 and adapted into a black comedy film in 2004 and a TV series in 2017. Baudelaire’s widespread influence is not limited to the West. Some of his major poems were introduced to literary circles in Japan at the turn of the twentieth century during the Meiji Restoration (1868–1912), but they did not exert a profound influence on high and popular culture until after the Pacific War. His complete poetical works were translated into Japanese in 1963–1964; he appears as an assistant of Dupin (a detective created by Poe) in The Demon of the Crowd: The Fourth Case of Dupin (Gunshû no akuma, 1996), a novel set in the French Revolution of 1848 by Kasai Kiyoshi, a mystery writer who was a leader of the 1968 movement in Japan. Also, Oshimi Shûzô’s manga series The Flowers of Evil (Aku no hana, 2009–2014), published as an 11-volume book which was translated into English in 2012–2014 and adapted into an animation film in 2013, is set in a small town in Japan where the protagonist Takao Kasuka, a middle school student in the throes of adolescent weltschmerz, most enjoys reading Les Fleurs du mal illustrated by Odilon Redon (Kitamura 2017). In Taiwan, the cultural bedrock of the Chinese-speaking world, a group of avant-garde poets, led by Ji Xian, founded the Modern School (現代派, 1956–1962) in 1956 on “the spirits and elements of all schools of new poetry since Baudelaire” (Ji 1956, 4). In addition, The Epoch Poetry Quarterly (創世紀詩刊, 1954–1969, 1972–), arguably the most influential modern poetry magazine in Taiwan, pioneered in the large-scale introduction into Taiwan of poems by Baudelaire and those inspired by him in the 1950s and 1960s. In 1980, Baudelaire was declared “to be the French poet best received in China; that claim still holds true today,” writes Gloria Bien (2013, 1) in Baudelaire in China (2013). Like Baudelaire, Nietzsche (1844–1900) wrote in a time that was moving away from the Romantic avenues of enquiry that had been so dominant in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Nietzsche himself can be seen as a transitional figure from the tensions implicit in Romanticism to a modern sensibility that sought to demystify the concept of existence and bear its burden joyfully and creatively. Nietzsche’s

16  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan influence has touched virtually every feature of aesthetic modernity, not only in the German-speaking world with Rainer Maria Rilke, George Hofmannsthal, Herman Hesse, and Thomas Mann as notable examples (Del Caro 2013, 114), but throughout Europe, across the Atlantic and in Asia as well. Identifying Nietzsche’s place in the history of thought requires that we first clarify several misconceptions of him. Even today, readers still greatly misunderstand Nietzsche’s conception of art and the authenticity required to engage in it properly as there have been a number of impediments to considering it both on its own terms and in a Romantic context. In the following pages, we identify these hurdles, draw out his principal philosophical insistences, and consider his transnational and transdisciplinary afterlives. As most are aware, Nietzsche became a pejorative buzzword for the perils of nihilism in the cultural imagination of the postwar West. The reasons for this popular misconception of the German philosopher are numerous, but we can identify two important factors most quickly. First, upon his death in 1900, with his popularity in Europe already ascendant, his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche (1846–1935) manipulated his philosophy to suit her proto-fascist proclivities. She had created the Nietzsche Archive in 1894 and became a fervent supporter of Adolf Hitler. In the postwar US, moreover, Nietzsche became intractably linked with “‘the death of God movement’ led by a handful of radical Protestant theologians.” In the 1960s, the press reported on this movement so widely that “the philosopher became a household word . . . almost overnight” (Santaniello 2017, 202). In both cases, the associations were profoundly negative, connecting Nietzsche to fascist ideas of power and racial purity, on the one hand, and to a nihilism of “radical despair” and “bitter indignation,” on the other (206). In academia, through the middle and latter half of the twentieth century, scholars generally interpreted Nietzsche as an existentialist and dismissed any Romantic foundation to his thinking. In the classic Irrational Man (1958), William Barret introduced many English speakers to the German philosopher for the first time, setting up a paradigmatic identification of Nietzsche’s struggle for meaning within an existentialist genealogy. “Nietzsche’s fate is one of the great episodes in man’s historic effort to know himself,” Barret (2011) writes dramatically. “After him, the problem of man could never quite return to its pre-Nietzschean level” (179). Alongside Søren Kierkegaard, Nietzsche thus became the forefather of the thinkers he influenced, Jean-Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, and Martin Heidegger, most prominent amongst them. While Barrett made no mention of Nietzsche’s connection to Romanticism, Walter Kaufmann enshrined the view of the German philosopher as virulently anti-Romantic (Picart 1997, 273). As a foremost English-language translator and a prolific scholar himself, Kaufmann did more than anyone else not only to salvage Nietzsche’s reputation in the English-speaking

Introduction  17 world, but also to foreground his own, at times, stubborn view of the philosopher (Schacht 2012, 68–69). Kaufman’s view of Nietzsche did not stand without challenge, however. Amongst the many works to emerge on the subject, Adrian Del Caro’s Dionysian Aesthetics (1980) and Nietzsche contra Nietzsche (1989) offer a more nuanced portrayal of the philosopher’s debt to the Romantic writers of the past, even while detailing his critique of them. For Del Caro (2015), a young Nietzsche was vitally engaged in the works of Hölderlin, Goethe, and Wagner—and his affinity for Hölderlin and for his Hyperion particularly were the longest lasting. “When Nietzsche began the long process of cutting ties to romanticism,” Del Caro argues, “he conveniently forgot what Hölderlin had achieved and what this remarkably modern poet had meant to him early on” (115). Azade Seyhan (1992) places Nietzsche, moreover, within the theoretical genealogy of Jena Romanticism, arguing that the group “was not laid to rest with the Athenäum,” but “extends well into Friedrich Nietzsche’s work and beyond” (2). Seyhan considers, for instance, the cognitive trope of the labyrinth—one of Nietzsche’s favourite analogues—and argues: Nietzsche’s rejection of interpretive closure reaffirms a revolutionary reversal in the order of knowledge, a reversal already accredited by the early Romantics. The understanding that joins Nietzsche with his Romantic forebears is the realization that there is no minotaur of dictatorial truth at the center of the labyrinth but rather an energetic and restless inquiry consistent with the desire to face the flux of becoming. (140) Here Nietzsche takes his place amongst the Schlegels, Schiller, Novalis, and others to espouse the site of an interior human restlessness with coercive metaphysical structures. In the figurative terms above, the tyrannising minotaur has no place at the centre of Romantic consciousness. Rather, it was for the whole human individual that these Romantics conceptually sought, the proper unity of the self, not one-part tyrannising over any other. We must simultaneously make an important distinction. As Judith Norman (2002) observes, the ideas of the Jena Romantics “are fundamentally anchored in the project of exploring or giving expression to an a priori transcendental ground of all knowing and being,” but such an anchorage is “foreign” to Nietzsche (519). Thus, Nietzsche searches for an underlying foundation upon which to realise an authentic state of becoming and thereby places himself both within a Romantic purview and on novel ground not easily subsumed under such a mantle. To be sure, Nietzsche’s advocation of authenticity entails a double project that most clearly influenced modern psychology, the European existentialists, and French postmodernism: a project to

18  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan disentangle the finite human being from the Socratic and Christian refractions of him that were culturally reinforced for millennia and to reinvent the human being free from the abstractions and dualisms that had so weakened him. As with all Romantic artists, Nietzsche shared the belief ­ ichard Schacht (1995) in, and fascination with, art and creativity. As R poetically phrases it, Nietzsche “ultimately came to understand . . . that life is essentially artistic and that art is an expression of the fundamental nature of life” (133). In The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music (Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik, 1872), Nietzsche (2000) begins his writing career by affirming the original dramatic form of Hellenic tragedy and identifying the “content of the tragic myth” as “an epic event involving the glorification of the struggling hero” (127). This tragic form was important because it was the first example, ­Nietzsche believed, of how art allowed the spectator to withstand and accept the terror of existence through the dramatic transfiguration of “the world of phenomena in the image of the suffering hero” (127). The consequences of this early view are numerous, but we can simplify by saying that art becomes the sole means by which the individual can accept his or her existence and begin to invent an ethnic in which to be and become in the world. In one respect, Nietzsche’s belief is in keeping with Emerson, whom the German philosopher read and admired. In 1841, Emerson (1979) famously articulated a philosophy of individuality and self-reliance: “Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string” (28). Above all, Emerson championed individual novelty and the simultaneous refusal to be imprisoned by convention. “Whoso would be a man must be a nonconformist,” he wrote, since it is in conforming that the individual “scatters” his creative “force” (29, 31). Nietzsche took this transcendental view one step further, not simply rejecting Christianity, as the Concord philosopher had done, but also refusing its philosophical underpinnings in the Platonic heritage. This difference—Nietzsche’s rejection of Platonism—indicates his break with Romanticism more broadly and his anticipation of both an existential and postmodern critique of metaphysics. Where Romanticism in its many forms rejected Enlightenment rationality, Nietzsche attempted to delve deeper into what he considered the pathology of reason which originated in Socratic dialogue and the Platonic heritage. As Nietzsche (1977) writes in The Twilight of the Idols (Götzen-Dämmerung, 1889), the “moralism of Greek philosophers from Plato onwards is pathologically conditioned; so is their esteem of dialectics” (166). For Nietzsche, such a pathology entails the repression of instinct and desire, indicating a profound anticipation of modern psychology and helping to explain, in turn, Freud’s and Jung’s interest in the German philosopher.11 “Reason—virtue—happiness, that means,” ­Nietzsche continues, “that one must imitate Socrates and counter the dark appetites with a permanent daylight—the daylight of

Introduction  19 reason. One  must be clever, clear, bright at any price: any concession to the instincts, to the unconscious, leads downwards” (478). Where many Romantics would insist upon exploring the instinctual and accept the self-annihilating consequences of such a process, Nietzsche is much more adamant that the artist requires frenzy, that he must rediscover an “indispensable” drive that once animated Dionysian revelry in the ancient world and was at its most authentic as sexual desire: If there is to be art, if there is to be any aesthetic doing and seeing, one physiological condition is indispensable: frenzy . . . above all, the frenzy of sexual excitement, this most ancient and original form of frenzy. (518) The resonance of Nietzschean frenzy with Freud’s pleasure principle is evident, except that Nietzsche’s conception channels a more unsettled path. Whereas the pleasure principle underlies the id and entails the seeking of pleasure and the avoidance of pain, Nietzsche’s mythopoetic vision of frenzy vitally involves the tearing apart of Dionysus, the twice-born god. The tragic suffering of the hero—and, by extension, the artist—likewise bears Dionysus’ fate, to be torn apart and transfigured without the classical consolations of philosophy that came afterwards. In Nietzsche’s articulation of the necessity to delve into the darkness of the unconscious, we may thereby recognise a Romantic—and ­psychological—emphasis upon accessing the hidden and instinctual depths of the self. Yet, Nietzsche’s vision is undoubtedly a more perilous posture and, upon it, rests the mystique of his philosophy. As much as it intends to liberate, it aims to provoke the spectator, too. In the first part of Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–1891), the eponymous protagonist announces Nietzsche’s project most explicitly: Man is a rope stretched between the animal and the Superman—a rope over an abyss. A dangerous crossing, a dangerous wayfaring, a dangerous looking back, a dangerous trembling and halting. What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not a goal; what is lovable in man is that he is a crossing-over and a down-going. (1995, 14) Here again, we see a complex picture that at once underscores the Romantic belief in the power of the creative act and eschews the succour of Idealism. Importantly, the context of this espousal is affirmative, not a warning of calamity. To be sure, Zarathustra implores his audience to accept themselves in becoming more than they are in an act of ­becoming—and he similarly affirms the tight-rope walker who afterwards loses his footing and crashes to earth. He has risked everything in the act and his fall is not a defeat, but a creative act of becoming.

20  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan Nietzsche’s archetypal imagery above—of the human being grappling fundamentally with the chaotic underpinnings of his own nature, even while gesturing beyond himself—provides an appropriate analogy for the existential quest for meaning. Just as assuredly, such imagery anticipates the postmodern critique of a metaphysics of presence, namely, a critique of the a priori foundation for consciousness and being, to use the term above. Jacques Derrida closes his famous “Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (1967), an article that for many inaugurated Deconstruction, by ­a ffirming play as “the disruption of presence” and recognising “­Nietzschean affirmation” as “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world and of the innocence of becoming, the affirmation of a world of signs without fault, without truth, and without origin which is offered to an active interpretation” (223). For Michel Foucault, Nietzsche is just as imperative for learning to create a way of living in the world now the idea of man, that eighteenth-century artefact, was passing away. Foucault predicated his own concept of the end of man and the advent of the posthuman on Nietzsche’s ideas. For both of them, “the death of God entailed the death of man as a transcendental subject, demanding . . . a new concept of man, of human being” (Milchman and Rosenberg 2018, 99). Nietzsche, as we have seen, proclaimed this new becoming to be the superman, or übermensch, and, similarly, for Foucault, human beings needed to “create a new mode of subjectivity” (100). As Schlegel emphasised “Romantic poetry” as an art form that is always becoming, so Nietzsche’s philosophy has been remade successive times, in many cultures and languages. Nietzsche’s influence thereby extends beyond Europe and America to Asia, particularly China (Moeller 2004, 57). Here it is not simply a matter of influence, since transnational paradigms often entail a reciprocity in which what was transplanted is informed by its new soil and transformed as a result. Nietzsche and Asian Thought (1991) provides the first collection in English to map out this terrain—with Hindu, Buddhist, and Daoist readings germane to considering Nietzsche. Hans-Georg Moeller (2004) is helpful in identifying two types of Sino-Nietzscheanism, moreover: (1) the Western variety advanced by theorists such as Günter Wohlfart and Graham Parkes who came to view Nietzsche as a pre-postmodernist; and (2) the Asian one that was primarily developed by Chen Guying’s Daoist engagement of the German philosopher (64–66). One of the leading scholars of Daoism in the Chinese speaking world, Chen Guying (陳鼓應), educated in Taiwan, published Nietzsche: A Tragic Philosopher (2015) after decades of writing on the German philosopher. One may discover, as Moeller states, “that studying or practicing Sino-Nietzscheanism, whether the Chinese or Western variety, can sometimes reveal more about Sino-­ Nietzscheanism itself than about either Nietzsche or Chinese philosophy” (66). This suggests again that legacies are tricky things to pin

Introduction  21 down, since they often become their own foundations, informed by, but not entirely bound to, the materials that compose them.

A Preview In this collection of essays, we offer five paradigms or strands to focus what are overlapping legacies—Realist, Fin-de-Siècle, (Post)Modern, Environmental, and Oriental Romanticism—so as to stretch the reach— temporal and spatial—of the Romantic Movement and its regenerations. The Realist strand begins by considering the transition from Romanticism to realism both in artistic terms and in view of a changing culture of mobility and movement. While realism is often seen as a rejection of Romanticism, in “Romantic Walking and Railway Realism,” Rachel Bowlby argues that both Romanticism and realism as ways of thinking are interwoven with an emergent mode of machinic logic that emphasises, above all, speed and efficiency. With the advent of the train and, thus, a “framework of regularity,” walking itself came to possess new meaning, too; it became leisurely and instilled nostalgia for a vanishing mode of being. From this point of view, industrial modernity came to reinforce the very Romantic practices that it was simultaneously supplanting. In “The Use and Abuse of Romance,” Geoffrey Baker similarly argues that there is no absolute dividing line between Romanticism and realism. Baker uses Walter Scott as a touchstone for how realist writers, while overtly decrying the excesses of the previous age, made Romanticism a complex site for engaging their own questions about identity and representation. Baker thereby considers how realist practitioners in England, France, and Germany employed Scott both as a “relic” of a “less advanced age” and as a “challenge” to their own understanding of modernity. With “Chekhov and the Meaning of Life,” Yuri Corrigan also problematises a univocal reading of realism contra Romanticism. Typically seen as one of the paradigmatic realists of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Chekhov, Corrigan argues, held firmly to the Romantic legacy of resistance to nihilism. Corrigan uses Nietzsche’s project as a mirror for Chekhov, illustrating the similarities between the two, while distinguishing the means that each considered for such a resistance. Whereas Nietzsche celebrated the “creative potential of the self as the ultimate source of all meaning,” Chekhov distrusted wilful creations of meaning, implicitly upholding the discovery of meaning in everyday life, even while demanding that such discoveries require “vigilant receptivity, a gift of insight” and, most of all, “emphatic self-restraint.” Our second strand concentrates on Romantic legacies at the turn of the twentieth century when the moral responsibility of art became a major aesthetic issue that confronted Fin-de-Siècle artists. In “Keats Gone Wilde,” Ya-Feng Wu explores how a Romantic framework can be adapted into a defiant art form that celebrates the sensual and the aesthetic. Wu  traces the Victorian reception of John

22  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan Keats and shows how Oscar Wilde invigorated a particular aestheticised version of Keats that became central both to his writing and to his own self-fashioning. In “Delacroix, Signac and the Aesthetic Revolution in Fin-de-Siècle France,” Shao-Chien Tseng examines Delacroix’s influence on the Neo-Impressionist painter Paul Signac. She demonstrates how Signac adapted the Romantic painter’s technique, mixing it with the latest artistic and scientific innovations of the day to create his own style that increasingly came to reflect his political belief in individual freedom and class equality. David Chandler’s chapter completes the second paradigm with a transcultural study of Richard Wagner’s impact on Frederick Corder in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, who was also fascinated with Henry Bishop, the leading composer of English Romantic opera who may well be considered Wagner’s polar opposite. Chandler sets his study in the broader context of English Romantic opera, arguing that where the Germans pushed the boundaries of their craft, the British had to contend with commercial constraints that hampered their freedom to innovate. The third paradigm considers the (post)modern problem of disenchantment and makes the case for Romantic affirmations of being in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Arthur Versluis in “Platonism, Its Heirs, and the Last Romantic” explores the tail-end of the Romantic period in the transcendentalism of Bronson Alcott and Emerson and uses this context to explore Kathleen Raine’s engagement of Romanticism as Platonic praxis. His argument that Raine is the last Romantic operates rhetorically since there can certainly be other late Romantic figures, even today, centuries after those significant clusters in Europe and the US died out. Versluis thereby makes a deeper claim that Romanticism continues the Platonic heritage in its aim to overcome duality through attending to forms of interior illumination. In his chapter, Justin Prystash follows a similar path when investigating Romantic idealism in Coleridge, Bataille, and Irigaray. He identifies Coleridge’s desire for self-transcendence as one that attempts “to dissolve subjectivity into the animate universe” and concentrates particularly on Coleridge’s study of Eastern meditation practices, placing the postmodern thinkers, Bataille and Irigaray, into productive tension with Coleridge’s intercultural engagements. John Michael Corrigan’s “You have to be a transparent eyeball” concludes this third strand by drawing on Versluis’s and Prystash’s chapters to situate the award-winning television drama, Mad Men, within a Romantic context. Corrigan argues that the drama, first, employs an Emersonian and Whitmanian conception of self-­transcendence in its representations of Don Draper’s identity jumping and, second, concludes its seven-­season run by affirming Romantic interiority as a source of creativity and reinvention. Our fourth paradigm centres on a cardinal legacy of Romanticism, the environmental movement, by offering three examples derived from

Introduction  23 German and British Romanticism. The paradigm begins with an analysis of Ludwig Tieck, one of the forefathers of German Romanticism. In “Tracing Romanticism in the Anthropocene,” Caroline Schaumann draws upon Tieck’s Rune Mountain to investigate “Romantic notions of nature in a time of ecological crisis.” She shows how Tieck depicts human beings in tense symbiosis with the natural world, both altering and being altered by it. The tragic quality of Tieck’s short tale, Schaumann argues, involves human hypocrisy and blindness to the depth of this symbiosis, thereby suggesting an ethic for how to live in the Anthropocene. As Tieck shaped early Romantic thought in Germany, so William Blake was a forerunner in Britain. Sophie Laniel-Musitelli’s “The Eye of the Earth” shares Schaumann’s emphasis on the blurring of boundaries between human and non-human and offers close readings of Blake’s illuminated poetry whose aim, she argues, is “to free the human mind from nature as an abstract and separate entity.” Blake’s poetry is vital for us today, since it urges a “new covenant with nonhuman life” asking us to adopt a nonhuman vision so as to understand our environment and, thus, ourselves more fully. Where Schaumann and Laniel-Musitelli provide readings that validate the Romantic desire to overcome false and illusory dichotomies between human beings and the environment, Carmen Casaliggi attends to the gradual processes by which art becomes environmentally self-aware. She reads the art of J. M. W. Turner through John Ruskin’s later appraisal of it, noting how Ruskin, unlike many of his contemporaries, affirmed Turner’s atmospheric style and came to realise that it reflected the environmental and moral crises of industrial modernity. Casaliggi thus sees Turner’s art—and Ruskin’s responses to it—as indicative of the “moral tension between tradition and progress,” and she contends that the two men anticipated an awareness of ecological sustainability. The fifth paradigm extends the transnational focus of the volume to Asia, where Romanticism helped to shape the artistic modernity of many countries in the region and at the same time nourished itself with Oriental tropes and philosophy. While the first four strands largely consider Romantic legacies within a continental or transatlantic purview, Oriental Romanticism involves the cross-pollination of Romantic currents in India, China, and Japan. Steve Clark’s initial offering seeks to reverse Britannia’s imperial privilege by attending to the legacy of Romantic poetry written in India. Clark questions the widespread assumption that Romanticism is simply imported from European traditions and mapped onto far-flung lands peripheral to the hubs of empire. With a series of close readings, he attends to the poetry that arose in cities like Calcutta and eschewed binaries of power in favour of a cosmopolitan future. In “Grafting German Romanticism onto the Chinese Revolution,” Johannes D. Kaminski shifts our focus to another of the great hubs of world affairs during a time of turmoil and rapid change. He begins by

24  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan concentrating on Goethe’s reception in early twentieth-century China and ultimately employs Goethe as a foil for the artistic—and eventually political—career of Guo Moruo, a leading writer of both Republican and Communist China. Here we find not merely the transplantation of Western ideas into Chinese culture, but a glimpse into an intercultural conversation that one of China’s leading writers was having with himself as he transformed from an aspiring Romantic to a Communist official. As Kaminski recounts Goethe’s reception in China, Ou Li does the same for Wordsworth. In “Two Chinese Wordsworths,” she analyses the various afterlives the British Romantic assumed in translation. In the hands of Liang Qichao and Lu Zhiwei, Wordsworth took on traditional Chinese features. With the advent of the New Culture Movement, Wordsworth came to reflect the modern values of Hu Shi, Tian Han, and others before falling into virtual obscurity under Communist rule and being subsequently revived in the 1980s. Li’s chapter provides a precise account of Wordsworth’s history in China, while giving the reader a sense of the various literary movements that swept China in the twentieth century. Our final chapter moves us from China to Japan and from considering various Asian receptions of Romantic figures to the artistic development of one of Japan’s most compassionate painters. In “‘The world must be made Romantic’,” Shun-liang Chao explores Tetsuya Ishida’s grotesque self-portraits which turned a Kafkaesque mirror upon Japanese society just as it entered into a period of economic stagnation and cultural malaise, the so-called Lost Two Decades (1991–2010). Ishida, Chao argues, sustains the cultural critique of industrial modernity in the 1930s and 1940s in Japan, led by the Japan Romantic School (Nihon Rōmanha), an offshoot of Frühromantik. More significantly, going one step further than the School, Ishida’s ethical project takes on board an older German Romantic self-mockery, a form of sentimental humour that turns art into socially engaged practice through sympathetic inclusion, the bildung of love, rather than scornful exclusion. In sum, a collection of essays can by its very nature never be complete, or, to revise Friedrich Schlegel’s dictum on “Romantic poetry,” that there can never be such a thing as a complete collection, but only collections forever trying to be complete.

Notes 1 Responding enthusiastically to Staël’s call for translation, Thomas Carlyle devoted himself to introducing to the English-speaking world in the 1820s and 1830s the works of Goethe, Schiller, Novalis, Ludwig Tieck, Richter, etc. through translations and introductory essays, works that Ralph Waldo Emerson found so thought-provoking as to decide to visit Carlyle in Scotland in 1833 and thereafter begin a lifelong correspondence with him (Bosco and Myserson 2003, 28). 2 Goethe (1906, 166) was on good terms with the early Romanics until proclaiming in his late years that “the classical is health; and the romantic,

Introduction  25 disease.” While disapproving of Goethe as a reactionary, the early Romantics admired him as a, if not the, greatest German genius. Novalis (1997) wrote in 1798 that Goethe “had done for German literature what Wedgwood has for English art world” (111). Friedrich Schlegel (1968) held Goethe in high esteem by saying in 1800 that Goethe “will be the founder and head of a new poetry for us and for posterity, as Dante was in a different way in the Middle Ages” (113). In 1808, A. W. Schlegel (1871) hailed Goethe and Schiller as “two writers of whom our nation is justly proud” (514). 3 Goethe (1986), in turn, admired Delacroix’s series of lithographs to Faust so much as to write in 1828 that as a “painter of undeniable talent,” Delacroix “seems to have felt at home with my work and to have treated it as his own invention” (186). 4 Berlin (1999) goes so far as to say that “[t]he French romantics from Hugo onwards are disciples of Byron. . . . Byron acted out his beliefs in the most convincing fashion [such that his romantic will] entered into European consciousness and infected the entire romantic movement” (132). 5 The encounter between Byron and Goethe proved to be reciprocal when in 1820 Goethe (1986) wrote favourably of Byron’s ingenious assimilation of Faust into his own tragedy Manfred (1817): “This strangely brilliant poet” Byron “has used motifs [in Faust] which suited his purpose in his own way, with the result that none is the same anymore, which is precisely the reason why I cannot praise him enough” (175). 6 E. T. A. Hoffman, best known for his Gothic story The Sandman (Der Sandmann, 1816), is another writer who influenced—albeit less fundamentally— Schumann’s musical writings. Writing on Beethoven’s instrumental music in 1813, Hoffman (1989, 97–98) considered music “the most Romantic of all arts” (96) and trumpeted Beethoven as the most Romantic of all composers: his music reveals “the realm of the mighty and the immeasurable shining rays of light shoot through the darkness of night and we become aware of giant shadows swaying back and forth, moving ever closer around us and destroying us but not the pain of infinite yearning . . . which is the essence of romanticism.” 7 Richter first coined the term doppeltgänger with a “t” between the two compounds in Siebenkäs to describe the intimate friendship between Siebenkäs and Leibgeber. For an account of the genesis of the term and its legacy in literature and philosophy in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, see Vardoulakis (2010). 8 Ritchie Robertson (2004) instances a legacy of Romantic Innerlichkeit in modern German novels. He argues that major modern German novelists explored sexuality and identity by returning to the Bildungsroman, best represented by Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister’s Apprenticeship (Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, 1795–1796) and Novalis’s Heinrich von Ofterdingen (1802). While Goethe engaged his hero primarily in the social world, Novalis attended mainly to the hero’s inner world of dreams and fantasies. Their distinction epitomises two opposite views of the self—empirical and ­psychoanalytical—at the turn of the twentieth century. The empirical line “returns to the Enlightenment, [while] psychoanalysis is rooted in Romanticism” (46–48). 9 In his Biographia Literaria (1817), however, Coleridge (1907) disagrees with Wordsworth’s celebration of rustic life in the Preface by highlighting that the best part of human language is not derived from rural life but from “[philosophical] reflection on the acts of the mind itself” (40). 10 Rachel Bowlby (2011) suggests that the present life is for Baudelaire “already and always half art, awaiting its completion or visibility” via the artist’s imagination (3).

26  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan 11 Ffytche (2012) provides a genealogy of the “way in which proto-­psychoanalytic concepts . . . emerge in the nineteenth century, and what their original implications were” (5). He locates “a much deeper historical context” for psychoanalysis “historically at the threshold of the nineteenth century in Germany, under the wings of Romanticism and post-Kantian idealism” (2). “Here, at the very least, one finds the initial integration of a theory of the unconscious with the mind’s inner medium, named as the ‘psyche’ or the ‘soul’. . . . Here, too, in the work of figures such as the idealist F. W. J. Schelling and the nature philosopher and anthropologist G. H. Schubert, one finds many of the characteristic idioms associated with psychoanalytic theory in the twentieth century: the notion of an internal mental division and a dialogue between a conscious and an unconscious self; the sense of concealed or repressed aspects of one’s moral nature; a new concern with memory and the past, and with both developmental accounts of the self and reconstructions of the origins of consciousness” (2–3). The connection between Nietzsche and Freudianism is particularly well-established. Although Freud denied reading Nietzsche, scholars have refuted this claim to show direct influence. See, for instance, Chapman (1995, 251–253) and Pippin (2010).

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Introduction  27 Chapman, A. H., and Mirian Chapman-Santana. 1995. “The Influence of Nietzsche on Freud’s Ideas.” The British Journal of Psychiatry 166 (2): 251–253. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. (1817) 1907. Biographia Literaria. Vol. 2. Edited by J. Showcrass. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Cooper, James Fenimore. 1960. The Letters and Journals of James Fenimore Cooper. 6 vols. Edited by James Franklin Beard. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Del Caro, Adrian. 2013. “Nietzsche and Romanticism: Goethe, Hölderlin, Wagner.” In The Oxford Handbook of Nietzsche, edited by Ken Gemes and John Richardson, 108–133. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Delacroix, Eugène. 1878. Lettres de Eugène Delacroix (1815 à 1863). Edited by Philippe Burty. Paris: A. Quantin. Derrida, Jacques. (1967) 2013. “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences.” In Modern Criticism and Theory, 3rd ed., translated by Alan Bass and edited by Nigel Wood and David Lodge, 211–224. London: Routledge. Diakonova, Nina, and Vadim Vatsuro. 2004. “‘No Great Mind and Generous Heart Could Avoid Byronism’: Russia and Byron.” In The Reception of Byron in Europe, Vol. 2, edited by Richard Cardwell, 333–352. London: Continuum. Dugdale, John. 2017. “Charles Baudelaire: The Debauchee’s Debauchee.” The Guardian. Accessed 28 July 2018. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/ sep/01/charles-baudelaire-debauchee-150-years-death. Dupré, Louis. 2013. The Quest of the Absolute: Birth and Decline of European Romanticism. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Eliot, T. S. (1930) 1975. “from Baudelaire.” In Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode, 231–236. London: Faber & Faber. Ffytche, Matt. 2012. The Foundation of the Unconscious: Schelling, Freud and the Birth of the Modern Psyche. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Finley, Gerald. 1997. “The Deluge Pictures: Reflections on Goethe, J.M.W. Turner and Early Nineteenth-Century Science.” Zeitschrift für Kunstgeschich 60 (4): 530–548. Gay, Peter. 2015. Why the Romantics Matter. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von. (1810) 1840. Theory of Colours. Translated by Charles Lock Eastlake. London: John Murray. ———. 1906. The Maxims and Reflections of Goethe. Translated by Bailey Saunders. London: Macmillan & Co. ———. 1973. “Some Passages Pertaining to the Concept of World Literature.” In Comparative Literature: The Early Years: An Anthology of Essays, edited by Hanz-Joachim Schulz and Phillip H. Rhein, 5–11. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. ———. 1986. Essays on Art and Literature. Edited by John Gearey and translated by Ellen von Nardroff and Ernest H. von Nardroff. New York: Suhrkamp Publishers. Hamilton, Paul. 2016. “Introduction.” In The Oxford Handbook of European Romanticism, edited by Paul Hamilton, 1–11. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Han, Suh-Reen. 2016. “Introduction.” In English Romanticism in Asia. Edited by Suh-Reen Han. Romantic Circles. Accessed 20 July 2018. http://www. rc.umd.edu/praxis/eastasia/praxis.2016.eastasia.intro.html.

28  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan Hazlitt, William. (1823) 1902. “My First Acquaintance with Poets.” In The Collected Works of William Hazlitt, Vol. 12, edited by A. R. Waller and ­A rnold Glover, 259–275. London: Dent. Hemingway, Andrew. 2015. “Introduction.” In Transatlantic Romanticism: British and American Art and Literature, 1790–1860, edited by Andrew H ­ emingway and Alan Wallach, 1–25. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts. Hoffman, E. T. A. 1989. E. T. A. Hoffman’s Musical Writings: Kreisleriana, the Poet and the Composer, Music Criticism. Edited by David Charlton and translated by Martyn Clarke. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hugo, Victor. (1827) 1968. Cromwell. Edited by Annie Ubersfeld. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion. Isbell, John Claiborne. 1994. The Birth of European Romanticism: Truth and Propaganda in Staël’s ‘De l’Allemange’, 1810–1813. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Jacobs, Robert L. 1949. “Schumann and Jean Paul.” Music & Letters 30 (3): 250–258. Jameson, Fredric. 1991. Postmodern, or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Ji Xian 紀弦. 1956.〈現代派信條釋義〉.《現代詩》13: 4. Joannides, Paul. 2001. “Delacroix and Modern Literature.” In The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix, edited by Beth S. Wright, 130–153. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kitamura, Takashi. 2017. “Perspective on Baudelaire’s Reception in Japan: Form the Meiji Era to the Present.” AmeriQuests 13 (1). Accessed 28 July 2018. http://www.ameriquests.org/index.php/ameriquests/article/view/4239. Kohlenbach, Margarete. 2009. “Transformations of German Romanticism 1830–2000.” In The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism, edited by Nicholas Saul, 257–280. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Krämer, Felix. 2012. “Dark Romanticism: An Approach.” In Dark Romanticism: From Goya to Max Ernst, edited by Felix Krämer, 14–28. Frankfurt: Hatje Cantz. Lamb, Charles. 1912. The Works of Charles and Mary Lamb. Vol. 5. Edited by E. V. Lucas. London: Methuen. Longyear, Rey M. 1973. Nineteenth-Century Romanticism in Music. 2nd ed. Englewoods Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall. Lovejoy, Arthur O. 1924. “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms.” PMLA 39 (2): 229–253. ———. 1941. “The Meaning of Romanticism in the Historian of Ideas.” Journal of the History of Ideas 2 (3): 257–278. Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. 2001. Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. Translated by Catherine Porter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Magritte, René. 2001. Écrits complets. Edited by André Blavier. Paris: Flammarion. Mazzini, Giuseppe. (1839) 1887. “Byron and Goethe.” In Essays, Selected from Writings, Literary, Political, Religious of Joseph Mazzini, edited by William Clarke, 83–108. London: Water Scott. ———. (1844) 1919. The Duties of Man and Other Essays. Translated by Miss Ella Noyes. London: Dent.

Introduction  29 McGann, Jerome. 2014. The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Milchman, Alan, and Alan Rosenberg. 2018. “Nietzsche and Foucault: Modalities of Appropriating the World for an Art of Living.” In Foucault and Nietzsche: A Critical Encounter, edited by Joseph Westfall and Alan ­Rosenberg, 99–126. London: Bloomsbury. Moeller, Hans Georg. 2004. “The ‘Exotic’ Nietzsche—East and West.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 28: 57–69. Nietzsche, Friedrich. (1872) 2000. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Douglas Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (1883–1891) 1995. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Translated by Walter Kaufman. New York: The Modern Library. ———. (1889) 1977. “Twilight of the Idols.” In The Portable Nietzsche, translated and edited by Walter Kaufmann, 464–564. New York: Penguin. Norman, Judith. 2002. “Nietzsche and Early Romanticism.” Journal of the History of Ideas 63 (3): 501–519. Novalis. 1997. Novalis: Philosophical Writings. Translated and edited by Margaret Mahony Stoljar. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Parkes, Graham, ed. 1991. Nietzsche and Asian Thought. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Peer, Larry H., ed. 1988. The Romantic Manifesto: An Anthology. New York: Peter Lang. Picart, Caroline Joan S. 1997. “Nietzsche as Masked Romantic.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 55 (3): 273–291. Pippin, Robert B. 2010. Nietzsche, Psychology, and First Philosophy. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Porter, Roy, and Mikuláš Teich. 1988. “Introduction.” In Romanticism in National Context, edited by Roy Porter and Mikuláš Teich, 1–8. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Prickett, Stephen. 2010. “General Introduction: Of Fragments, Monsters and Translations.” In European Romanticism: A Reader, edited by Stephen Prickett, 3–23. London: Continuum. Quinn, Arthur Hobson. (1941) 1998. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. Richter, Jean Paul. (1795) 1864. Hesperus; or Forty-Five Dog-Post-Days: A ­Biography. 2 vols. Translated by Charles T. Brooks. New York: John W. Lovell. ———. (1804) 1973. Horn of Oberon: Jean Paul Richter’s School for Aesthetics. Translated by Margaret R. Hale. Detroit, MI: Wayne State University Press. Rimbaud, Arthur. 2003. Œuvres complètes. Edited by Antoine Adam. Paris: Gallimard. Robertson, Ritchie. 2004. “Gender Anxiety and the Shaping of the Self in Some Modernist Writers: Musil, Hess, Hofmannsthal, Jahnn.” In The Cambridge Companion to the Modern German Novel, edited by Graham Bartram, 46–61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Santaniello, Weaver. 2017. “Nietzsche: American Idol or European Prophet? The ‘Death of God’ in America and Nietzsche’s Madmen.” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 38 (2–3): 201–222.

30  Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan Saussy, Haun. 2006. “Exquisite Cadavers Stitched from Fresh Nightmares: Of Memes, Hives, and Selfish Genes.” In Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization, edited by Haun Saussy, 3–42. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Schacht, Richard. 1995. Making Sense of Nietzsche: Reflections Timely and Untimely. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. ———. 2012. “Translating Nietzsche: The Case of Kaufmann.” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 43 (1): 68–86. Schlegel, August Wilhelm. (1809–1811) 1871. A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature. Translated by John Black. London: Bell & Daldy. Schlegel, Friedrich. (1800) 1968. Dialogue on Poetry and Literary Aphorisms. Translated by Ernst Behler and Roman Struc. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Schumann, Robert. (1834–1844) 1946. Robert Schumann: On Music and Musicians. Edited by Konrad Wolff and translated by Paul Rosenfeld and. ­B erkeley: University of California Press. Seyhan, Azade. 1992. Representation and its Discontents: The Critical Legacy of German Romanticism. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Staël, Madame de. (1799) 1860. De la littérature dans ses rapports avec les institutions sociales. Paris: Charpentier. ———. (1816) 2006. “The Spirit of Translation.” Translated by Joseph Luzzi. The Romantic Review 97 (3–4): 279–284. Stendhal. (1823–1825) 1962. Racine and Shakespeare. Translated by Guy Daniels. Springfield, OH: Crowell-Collier. ———. (1824) 1973. “The Salon of 1824.” In Stendhal and the Arts, edited by David Wakefield, 88–121. London: Phaidon. Traeger, Jorg. 1996. “‘ . . . As if one’s Eyelids had been Cut Away’: Imagination in Turner, Friedrich, and David.” In The Romantic Imagination: Literature and Art in England and Germany, edited by Frederick Burwick and Jurgen Klein, 413–434. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Valéry, Paul. 1930. Variété II. Paris: Gallimard. Vardoulakis, Dimitris. 2010. The Doppelganger: Literature’s Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press. Versluis, Arthur. 2014. American Gurus: From Transcendentalism to New Age Religion. New York: Oxford University Press. Wallach, Alan P. 1968. “Cole, Byron, and the Couse of Empire.” The Art Bulletin 50 (4): 375–379. Watson, Alex, and Laurence Williams, eds. 2019. British Romanticism in Asia: The Reception, Translation, and Transformation of British Romanticism in India and East Asia. London: Palgrave. Wellek, René. 1949. “The Concept of ‘Romanticism’ in Literary History II. The Unity of European Romanticism.” Comparative Literature 1 (2): 147–172. Wordsworth, William. 2011. William Wordsworth: The Major Works. Edited by Stephen Hill. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part I

Realist Romanticism

1 Romantic Walking and Railway Realism Rachel Bowlby

I would like to start off with some words about Rousseau’s walking. It may seem perverse to begin by returning to a moment that is before, not after, the period of Romanticism: by going backwards into some pre-­Romantic place of thought, when the whole direction of the topic of this book is for an onward movement beyond or after Romanticism. However, in a certain sense, we can see that Rousseau is not only proto-­ Romantic in the widely acknowledged sense of having directly inspired or furthered some of the thinking that came to be called Romantic. He is also, on the topic of walking that I am about to consider, post-Romantic as well. But I do not want to get ahead of myself, and I will explain that in a little while. First of all, let us look at one or two passages from the Confessions (1782), where Rousseau speaks of his passion for walking and his preference for that mode of travel. In other words, let us look at legs before legacies. Rousseau (1977) is speaking, in relation to his own life, about the absence of a legacy, of a tangible written record of what has meant most; but he is also supplying just that in now setting down a statement of what, he says, has been lost. Here is what he says: The thing I most regret in the details of my life that are lost to memory is not having kept journals of my journeys. Never have I so much thought, so much existed, so much lived, so much been me, if I can put it like that, as in the journeys I made on my own and on foot. Walking has something that animates and brings to life my ideas; I can barely think when I stay in one place; my body has to be in motion for my mind to be put to it [pour y mettre mon esprit]. (215) Here the stationary body precludes thinking; but the thinking, moving body precludes writing—writing it down, as English curiously puts it. For writing, you need to be sitting (or sitting down): there is an absence of movement and therefore (in Rousseau’s terms) an absence of thinking: “I can barely think when I stay in one place; my body has to be in motion for my mind to be put to it.” Later in the passage, he elaborates

34  Rachel Bowlby further on this tension between walking and writing, referring to the splendid sights he has seen and the wonderful thoughts he has thought. He stages a dialogue with an imaginary interlocutor: “‘Why not write them down?’ you will say. And why write them down, I will reply: why take from myself the present charm of enjoyment in order to tell other people that I have enjoyed [que j’ai joui]?” (215). (This, by the way, goes against the post-post-Romantic logic of social media, in which there is implicitly a pleasure of its own in telling other people that you have enjoyed or are enjoying, or “liking”: and by implication, that the representation and publication of one’s enjoyment takes precedence over the enjoying itself, or is already a component of it.) So Rousseau makes walking a pre-condition of imaginative thinking—­ with the two brought together in a solitary and pleasurable activity. But walking is also explicitly set above other modes of travel. Planning a journey to see his beloved Madame de Wahrens, Rousseau refuses the opportunity of going on horseback, even though he has the money to pay for it: I couldn’t agree, and I was right: I would have lost the pleasure of the last journey on foot that I made in my life; for I cannot give that name to the excursions I often used to make in my neighbourhood, when I was living at Motier. (226) Here Rousseau compares two modes of travel for a journey that has a fixed end. He is going to a specific destination for a specific purpose, which is to see the woman he calls Maman. But at the same time, the reason for preferring walking to riding is that walking goes against the teleology of a definite end, and thus against the subordination of the journey itself to its destination. He says: I am, in recounting my journeys, the way I was in making them; I couldn’t arrive. My heart was beating with joy when I was approaching my dear Maman, and I wasn’t going any faster. I like walking at leisure, and stopping when I please. The ambling life is the one for me. To travel on foot in beautiful weather in beautiful country, in no hurry, and to have a pleasant object as the end-point of my way [course]: that of all the modes of living is the one that is most to my taste. (227) An absence of haste, no speeding up when in sight of the end: this is the mark of the happy walk, of the superiority of walking over the alternative method of travel. Speed is precisely not the criterion for choosing between the two ways: or rather, speed, which makes the time of arrival

Romantic Walking and Railway Realism  35 more important than the journey, carries a negative value. It makes the journeying itself into a matter of quantifiable distance and time, to be abbreviated as far as possible. There is a pleasurable anticipation in the prospect of seeing Maman at the end of the journey, but there is no rush to get to her, and every advantage in enjoying the different places encountered en route. Those places along Rousseau’s route, by the way—and literally “by the way”—are just what we associate with the landscapes of the Romantics, with the opposition of the sublime and the beautiful that Edmund Burke brought into view: Never did a flat region, however beautiful it was, appear so in my view. I have to have torrents, rocks, willows, dark woodlands, mountains, paths that are resistant [raboteux] to climb and to come down, and precipices right next to me that make me really afraid. I had this pleasure, and I tasted it in all its charm when I was getting near to Chambéry. (227) Torrents, rocks, willows, dark woodlands, mountains, precipices: this sounds like a checklist of the dramatic painterly landscape of the sublime. In Rousseau’s experience, however, the “pleasure” and even more, the “charm” seem also bound up with the anticipated return to the familiarity of the safe maternal place at the end of the journey.

1. But now, after passing the leisurely time of day with Rousseau as he slowly moves on his own two legs through his romantically rocky terrains, we will have to speed up. We will have to leap over the moment of Romanticism itself. We cannot do this on foot, not by fisherman’s hook or shepherd’s crook, and so we will have to make use of the mode of transport eschewed by Rousseau and instead avail ourselves of an exceptionally well-endowed steed. We have to do it this way because as yet, at this time, there is no other possible way to go. We could try the stagecoach, which would be faster than mounting a horse of our own—but that is a horse-drawn vehicle, too. What we are waiting for, really, and this is the reason for the return to Rousseau, for the journey back to Romantic nest-eggs rather than Romantic legacies—what we are waiting for is the train. Once the train arrives and becomes established as part of the landscape, actually and metaphorically; once the train is a normal way of getting around, and once the countryside is covered with bridges and viaducts and cuttings and embankments and lines of carriages rolling across the valley—then the whole meaning of walking is changed. Walking ceases to be a mode of travel that is somewhat slower

36  Rachel Bowlby than a horse, but still a viable option if there is a journey to be made. Instead—like the horse as well—it belongs in a different travelling orbit from what has become the customary way of getting from one place to another. If you want to go from London to Birmingham, you are going to go by train; in fact, it is because you can go by train, within a single day, that you might have the idea of making that journey at all. Rural walking is no longer likely to serve for other than short, local journeys. But on the other hand, and for the same reason, walking can now take on the leisurely, solitary, experiential qualities that Rousseau was already celebrating and enjoying long before the first puff of a steam engine had made its appearance on the horizon. In that sense, Rousseau the philosopher of walking is already post-Romantic: in celebrating the pleasures of slow pedestrian movement he is writing, or walking, for the age of the train. Just as the period of Romantic art and philosophy was drawing to a close, or coming to an end—in textbook form, it has often been presented as something like a colourful performance—two things happened which, in retrospect, appear to have marked this termination with needle-­ sharp punctuality. We are in the 1820s. In Britain, the very first trains set off, with the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway in the northeast of England, in 1825, the first railway in the world. (There has always been a certain amount of dispute, by the way, about what constitutes a railway, or a railroad, whether in terms of the material method of carriage—the rails themselves, and the rolling stock—or in terms of the framework of regularity and public service provision, for carrying goods or people. But certainly it is generally agreed that it was in the late 1820s, and in the north of England, that what quickly came to be understood as the railways got started.)1 This is the first post-­Romantic event. The second occurred across the Channel in Paris, in 1826, when a writer in a short-lived literary periodical called Le Mercure du XIX è siècle (Mercury in the 19th Century) threw out a new word for a new phenomenon. That word was realism (or rather, le réalisme). Realism was defined as a “literary doctrine . . . which would lead to the imitation not of artistic masterpieces but of the originals that nature offers us.” He then suggested that there were indications that such a practice might turn out to be “the literature of the nineteenth century, the literature of truth” (quoted in Hemmings 1974, 9–10). As if to highlight and confirm the significance of the juxtaposition of realism and the train, F. W. J. Hemmings (1974), writing in the middle of the twentieth century, began his book about the first of them with the words: “The Age of Realism was the age of railways” (9). Admittedly, this is not the end of the sentence, which reads in full: “The Age of Realism was the age of railways and of wireless telegraphy and of countless other mechanical inventions that collectively revolutionised the nature of society and the quality of human life within a short span of time” (9).

Romantic Walking and Railway Realism  37 But the railways are first in that list, and there is a kind of lilting alliteration, anti-realistic in its way, which softly links the two words with their shared Rs and Ls, as if sending you to sleep for an overnight journey with the naturalness of their association. Both of these phenomena, realism and the railways, with their small beginnings in the 1820s, were destined to leave a defining mark on the cultural and intellectual history of the nineteenth century (and beyond). And both, in their different ways, appear to be leaving Romanticism far behind—without, it might be said, so much as a backward glance. By their very differences from it, they help to shed light on how Romanticism itself has come to be defined and understood: they provide, as it were, a kind of post-life of Romanticism in the sense of both a reaction to it and a diversion away from it. That is to say, they take it in new directions, and at the same time they leave it in the background. In this first description, we can immediately see how railways and realism are unromantic, are anything but “Romantic” legacies—except insofar as they could be said to represent a rejection of Romanticism, or at least a turn away from it. This is directly the case with realism, which is an artistic and intellectual movement that consciously goes against Romanticism; and obliquely with the railways, which represent the triumph of a certain kind of practical enterprise and straight-line rationality, in another world from the ideals of the Romantics.

2. Let us pursue a little further the analogy between realism and railways, in order to bring out just how well they seem to complement one another in their post-Romantic pairing, as though they had arisen along perfectly laid out parallel lines, thrusting themselves forwards into the future, and far away from the mists and myths of romance and Romanticism. There is something about that smoothly fitting coupling of Rs and Ls, rolling along together, that suggests that they might have been made for each other—or at least, made alongside each other, as mid-nineteenth-­ century products or offshoots of the that earlier R, ­Romanticism—along with many other industrial and artistic parents, too numerous and multifarious to mention. For after their small, not very significant starts in the 1820s, realism and the railways both became prominent and proudly indicative of a nineteenth-century modern world. Thousands of miles of rail track had been laid across Britain by the early 1840s, by thousands of labourers called navvies doing backbreaking and lung-wrecking work, and by numerous companies that were rapidly set up, drawing on wealthy investors and also making new fortunes. By that time the railway was established as a mode of transport for human beings as well as for the goods which it had first been designed to move (the popularity of the

38  Rachel Bowlby train as a people-carrier was a surprise of its first decade in existence). The railway was the first form of “mass” transport, with a capacity for carrying many, many more bodies than the old horse-driven stagecoaches which it superseded. This phenomenal increase of scale went along with an equally dramatic increase of speed. The time taken for a journey is not a new question, as we saw in relation to Rousseau and the question of riding versus walking. But the railways changed the scale of speed out of all recognition: in effect they changed the world, because they connected places, as possible destinations from one to the other, which would have previously been impossibly far away from each other in travelling time. Thus railways brought into being the modern compacting of geographical space to the point that places that had been several days’ journey apart became accessible to one another at a distance of an hour or two. And simultaneously they inaugurated a new kind of time, a regimented and homogeneous timetable time, called “railway time.” This even took over from spatial measurement as an expression of the gap between two places: so you might say that London is “five hours” from Edinburgh, rather than 400 miles. Realism, meanwhile, was making its own inroads into the literary world. Like the railways in another mode, it was branching out along new narrative lines that changed the face of the literary landscape from what it had been. Realism became a prominent international movement, within Europe especially in France and French-influenced countries (such as Portugal). Throughout the second half of the nineteenth century, the term was invoked in relation to authors such as Balzac, Flaubert, Sand, and Zola, with fierce arguments about who was or was not a realist, and who did or did not desire or agree to be called one. In Britain, the word itself was not so commonly used as a point of either identification or repudiation, but the general trend of narrative ­discussion was towards a consensus that the representation of ordinary life was what novels should now be doing, and in the 1850s there was a forceful promotion of realism, called by that name, particularly in the pages of the Westminster Review, and particularly on the part of critics such as G. H. Lewes. The industrial novels of the 1840s and 1850s— from Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848) to Charles ­Dickens’s Hard Times (1854)—were thematically at the forefront of the new direction away from idealisation or “romance,” and towards a representation of the modern working world. These novels were urban without being metropolitan (Manchester, not London); and they are certainly not rural or romantic. They presented regions of life that had hitherto had no place on the literary map: the working classes, the industrial cities, the factory world. They made visible previously unseen worlds to a middle-­class readership, and there was often a sense of an educational or consciousness-­raising mission.

Romantic Walking and Railway Realism  39 This realist extension of the view, of knowledge of the world “around” us, is comparable to what the railways brought about in their own domain. The new railway network would eventually create a complete map of the British Isles, not to mention the rest of Europe and ultimately most of the rest of the world. Realism is a comparable practice of charting the territory. It brings into representational sight all kinds of place and practice and person that had not been considered appropriate artistic subjects before. Both developments can be seen as forms of expansion in a positive and not necessarily imperialistic sense (though the building of colonial railways was certainly very much part of an imperial project). They equalise and they level. All regions, all people, all ways of life are potentially open to the new mode of realist representation. Individual places are understood as points on a network, stops on the line, any one of which is open to arrival or departure on the same basis as all the others. At the same time, their particular qualities, whatever their place in a hierarchy of social privilege, are accorded a new kind of value. With realism, there are no longer just certain categories of people and certain milieux—the upper classes and their lives—that are deemed to be worth attention. And with railways, anyone and everyone is free to buy a ticket and board the train. (I leave to one side, for the purpose of this part of the argument, the discrimination of passengers into first class, second class, and so on; which in the early decades did tend to correspond quite closely to the existing differences of social class. You would not have bought a ticket that did not reflect your “place” in the world outside the train. So in this sense, railway ticket classifications operated in a very different way from the equally divided airline distinctions of today, which are much more a matter of what you are able to pay—or how many “miles” you have previously notched up—than of some notion of an unchanging status or “station”: a curious word!) The accessibility of railways meant, in practice, that people started to move around the country in unprecedented numbers—and they moved, in most cases, for pleasure: this was the first age of lower-class leisure travel. In England, the Great Exhibition of 1851 is the landmark moment here, when no fewer than six million people (out of a population of 27 million) visited the Crystal Palace in south London, travelling in special “excursion” trains. So the railways, neutrally bringing together distant and virtually unconnected areas, also convey their inhabitants away from home. People are no longer so likely to remain where they live all year round; nor are places, as they used to be, set apart from one another in isolation and uniqueness, each its own locality, unmarked in relation to others. Instead, the people are now passengers, and the places have become stations. But there are other ramifications, other branch lines, which complicate this preliminary sketch of the changes. In many instances, the stations

40  Rachel Bowlby were built at a distance from an existing village or town, whether for reasons of land availability (it was not always possible to purchase the sections needed) or because the terrain made it difficult to run the train through the place where the people lived. This could result in the development of new towns and villages that grew up around the stations themselves, and in some cases took over priority from the original settlement where the station had failed to be built. In other cases, the situation of a town might change anyway, just because (for whatever reason) the new railway lines had missed it out. The French Romantic poet Gérard de Nerval (1972) has a passage about such places in his Rousseauesque memoir, Promenades et souvenirs (1854–1855): If I could do a bit of good along the way, I would try to draw some attention to these poor abandoned [délaissées] towns from which the railways have diverted the traffic and the life. They sit sadly on the débris of their bygone fortune, and are focused on themselves, casting a disenchanted gaze at the marvels of a civilisation that condemns them or forgets them. (76) This thought is prompted by the condition of the town of Saint-­Germain, which has made him think of another town, Senlis; such backward places, with their illusionless personified stare at the modern world that has left them behind, and condemned them to anachronism, can be treated, collectively, as a type: “these poor abandoned towns.” Nerval, it is touching to read, here presents himself as an eccentric sympathiser with places like these, recounting how he insisted on spurning the railway and going by the old road—taking much longer and costing much more—to visit his friend in Brussels. The friend is none other than the famous writer Dumas, so there may be a touch of name-dropping going on, but this is nonetheless a delightful anecdote about the altered significance of a slower old mode of travel in the context of the speedier new one. The memoir was written in 1854, which gives some sense of how quickly the railways had established themselves as the dominant mode of transport, and how radically they had altered the sense of place in the areas that they affected: I like going against the railways, and Alexandre Dumas, whom I accuse of a bit of embroidery recently on the subject of my youthful follies, has accurately said that I spent two hundred francs and took a week to go and see him in Brussels, by the old Flanders road—and in spite of the northern line railway. (76) The eclectic Nerval, quite proudly reporting his eccentricity, comes over here as something like the equivalent of a twentieth-century railway

Romantic Walking and Railway Realism  41 buff: in the age when the railway itself was the new technology and it is the older modes of transport that are perversely clung to and enjoyed for their aura of old-world charm. We could also note that from another point of view Nerval looks like a precocious manifestation of a man in touch with the many options on offer from Google directions: the one who, when given the choice between 28 minutes by car and 3 hours 45 minutes by train and bus, will be sure to pick the second. As early as 1842, just ten years into the new developments, Balzac (1951) begins his short novel Un début dans la vie (A Start in Life) with a comparable reflection about the changes the railway is making to the situation of the towns it either visits or passes by. In this case, the narrator is looking back 20 years to the time of the novel’s setting, and also looking forwards to a future in which the early 1820s will be even further behind: The railways, in a future which today is not very distant, must bring about the disappearance of some industries, and modify others, above all those that involve the different modes of transport in use for the Paris region. As a result, soon the people and things that are the elements of this story [Scène] will give it the value of an archaeological work. The next generation will be delighted, won’t they, to get to know the social material of a period that they will call the olden days? (600) This striking passage, which is the very beginning of this “beginning” novel—lays out three points on a straightforward journey through the years in which the “elements” of the present narrative, scientifically denominated, will have been reconfigured according to a schema which is predictable, now, at the middle stage. At this present moment, the development of the railways is already underway, and the line of its progress, before and after this midpoint, is projected into a future retrospective summary in which the beginning, the pre-railway time of the story, will be seen at once scientifically and nostalgically: an archaeological work, or travail, on the one hand, and on the other the olden days, le vieux temps. Balzac thus begins Un début dans la vie with his adumbration of a railway story that is both abstract, in that it can be analysed into its elements, and subjective, in that it takes on different colours and associations for different generations. There is a presumption of social change, meaning a change in the modes and norms of perception and everyday understanding, as well as a change in the outer forms, the external “material,” in which a given social subject can be found. In the passage from Nerval, the same point emerges through a description not of change, but of stasis. Nerval (1972) describes the stationless town of Pontoise like this: Pontoise is another of those towns situated at a height, which I like because of their patriarchal appearance, their walks, their views,

42  Rachel Bowlby and the conservation of certain ways [mœurs] that are no longer found elsewhere. Here there is still playing in the street, and conversation, and singing in the evening in front of the doorways; the restaurateurs are pâtissiers; there is a feeling of family life in their establishments. . . . The church is beautiful and perfectly maintained. Nearby a shop selling Parisian novelties is lit up, and its young female assistants are alive and laughing like the ones in M. Scribe’s play, La Fiancée. . . . For me, what makes the charm of small towns that are a little abandoned [abandonnées] is that I recover in them something of the Paris of my youth. The appearance of the houses, the shape of the shops, certain habits, some customs. . . . From this point of view, if Saint-Germain recalls 1830, Pontoise recalls 1820. (77; first ellipsis mine) At first sight, such a passage resembles any number of scenes in Romantic literature in which a speaker encounters a ruin or deserted dwelling which is a sign of human loss; it evokes the lives and the death of those who once lived within its bounds and for Wordsworth, for instance, in “The Ruined Cottage” (written in 1797–1798), it is a prompt for a whole story of the people who are encountered in their absence now from a place which is itself no longer the place it was. Superficially, by the use of the word “abandoned”—abandonné in this passage, and délaissé, left behind, in the passage cited before—the structure is the same. It is as if we are confronted with a ruin or wreck, in which lives were once lived but are lived no more. But in fact, the contrary is the case. For Pontoise is still Pontoise, still a place where children are growing up (there they are, playing on the streets), where would-be fashionable articles are sold in a magasin de nouveautés, and where there are restaurants to eat in. There is not even a suggestion that any of these activities are in decline; instead, everything is going on just as it was several decades before when the speaker was young. The power of the passage, then, is that it makes the town appear in a new light: appear outdated and old-fashioned, that is, in the context of the new world that now passes it by. It is as if it is no longer real, as if it is only a replica or performance of what it once was; but in fact, nothing has changed, and it is precisely this non-changing aspect, in a world which is now all about change and movement, which casts Pontoise in its anachronistic role. We are coming to the end of this preliminary excursion through the terrain which brings together those two great nineteenth-century inventions of realism and the railways. And until now I have barely hinted at one feature which associates them all the way, as it were: and this is the fact that both of them run on straight lines—to the greatest possible extent, in the case of the railway, and in the form of that much-maligned “linear” narrative in the case of realism. The first use of the term railway “line” that the OED records is in July 1836, with a quotation from the Times newspaper: “The Duke of Richmond presented a petition . . .

Romantic Walking and Railway Realism  43 against Cundy’s Brighton railway line.” Railways were constructed with minimal bends and minimal hills: as far as possible, for reasons of economy and safety, they kept to the straight and narrow and level. A realist narrative, meanwhile, like a railway journey, is supposedly straight and regular. You know where you are with it (so it is said), and you know where you’re going because it will be clearly announced or signposted: no labyrinthine or gothic mysteries in a realist narrative. The world is a visible and visitable place, just as it is on the train. Nerval’s sense of the old towns left behind and becoming backwaters when they did not have a railway station draws on the juxtaposition, in the real world, of two sorts of place, those on a line and those not, or the towns and villages with stations and those without one. In turn, that local doubling or clash is linked with the temporal movement from the world before the railways and the world of the later time of writing. S­ enlis, ­ resent, not Saint-Germain, and the rest have become old towns in the p because their buildings have aged, but because a new development, both physical and symbolic, has put them in the shade—or off the map. In their topographical separation, they are also consigned to ­contemporary demotion, in relation to a line of progress that has taken over as the default way of seeing. And it is not simply that some kind of new standard has superseded an older one. The trains confirmed a historically unprecedented sense of perpetual movement and change: of the displacement of one kind of settlement, one way of life, by another. That model of historical movement, of a line of progress and a speed of change, was the new world—and time—that the railways brought with them.

3. Existing places and ways of life are not only seen as left out or abandoned in the wake of railway realities, however. They may also find themselves strangely yoked to the new possibilities and constraints of what the English novelist Thomas Hardy (2008), in just such a context, calls “modern life” (204). In Tess of the D’Urbervilles (1891), Tess and Angel Clare are in a vehicle with the wonderful name of a “spring-­ waggon” (202), pulled by a horse. They are on their way to the local train station, and the wagon is carrying churns of milk that has just been collected from the cows at the dairy farm where they work. At the station, the milk will be uploaded onto a passing train and carried to the capital city in time for tomorrow morning’s doorstep deliveries. This juxtaposition of the age-old and the modern at the station represents the meeting, momentarily and daily, of two places and two historical times, and Hardy makes this explicit. Here, as the wagon makes its way along the lane, Tess and Angel are getting close to their destination: They crept along towards a point in the expanse of shade just at hand at which a feeble light was beginning to assert its presence; a

44  Rachel Bowlby spot where, by day, a fitful white streak of steam at intervals upon the dark green background denoted intermittent moments of contact between their secluded world and modern life. (202) Because it involves a sign that appears against a landscape background, this view bears a first-sight resemblance to the famous episode in Greek mythology when Theseus’s father tragically hurls himself over the cliff because his son returning from Crete and his fight with the Minotaur has forgotten to put out the sign of victory. As the ship comes into view, the father sees what he thinks is the token of his son’s death, the absence of a white sail. In reality, though, Theseus in his happy haste has simply forgotten what he had said he would do. The story can be taken as suggesting an insidiously binary logic of human interpretation such that, in this case, what is not there—the white sail—takes precedence over the comforting sight of what is, the ship rounding the horizon. In Hardy’s passage, rather than a one-off sign (or a one-off absence of a specific sign), there is a regular visible incursion into an otherwise natural view, and this white stream of steam, as real in its way as Theseus’s missing white sail, is taken as a settled and repeated sign that both separates and brings together the two realms that Hardy calls first, “modern life” and second, “their secluded world.” But of course, as with Nerval’s towns “left behind,” it is a world that only appears to be secluded from the perspective of the modern. The passage continues: Modern life stretched out its steam feeler to this point three or four times a day, touched the native existences, and quickly withdrew its feeler again, as if what it touched had been uncongenial. (204) Now we have a (literally) touching metamorphosis of the steam train into a primitive organism. But this is not the monster of size or fearfulness that one might expect from such a likeness. Here the associations are not, as they so inescapably are in Zola’s railway novel, La Bête humaine (The Human Beast), published the year before Tess, with a savage bestial power; but rather with the softness of what is called a “feeler,” a word that is not even moderately formalised into the zoological Latin of an antenna. Modern life, in the form of this gentle giant, enters and quickly withdraws, and it does this over and over again. It is as if the strange contiguity of the old and the modern is being endlessly re-­enacted or re-presented in the form of this particular sign of the white flare against the “dark green background.” If this looks painterly, a passage a little further on verges on the cinematic in the way that it poses the woman dramatically caught in the flare,

Romantic Walking and Railway Realism  45 as “the light of the engine flashed for a second upon Tess Durbeyfield’s figure” (205). On the one hand, there is the slow motion of the rhythmic journey in the cart to get to the station: a journey which, Hardy tells us, proceeds at “walking pace” because it is getting dark, and in which there are no sounds to be heard but “the smack of the horse’s hoofs on the moistening road, and the cluck of the milk in the cans behind them” (204); that delightful homely “cluck” of the cans is itself, like a farmyard echo, repeated from an earlier phrase on the way. 2 Sometimes, the two of them, Tess and Angel, are shown as if lulled towards another kind of existence, outside and before human time. They are travelling along a lane where ripe clusters of blackberries and hazelnuts hang from the hedgerow branches, there for the plucking. It is all theirs, and for this moment it is as if they are in paradise, where the food offers itself without toil, and where there is no other human soul to be seen apart from the two of them. But the distinction between old times and modern times is not consistent with the simple difference between rural Wessex and urban ­London. The journey with the milk was begun when the dairyman looked at his “heavy watch” (201) and realised the time was later than he thought. The agricultural world is from this point of view fully incorporated into the larger world of trains and their timings, and of mechanical devices that enable each person to remain functionally connected to that system. Hardy deploys Tess herself as a commentator on the distance between the two worlds and the speed with which it is crossed by the train: Tess was so receptive that the few minutes of contact with the whirl of material progress lingered in her thought. ‘Londoners will drink it at their breakfasts to-morrow, won’t they?’ she asked. ‘Strange people, that we have never seen.’ (205) This is the line of reciprocal imagining that brings “strange” Londoners into Tess’s consciousness at the same time as she herself is an alien in comparison to the locomotive: she “could not have looked more foreign to the gleaming cranks and wheels” (205). Her word “Londoners”—she gives them quite an upbeat modern label—is then childishly amplified as she expands them into “Noble men and noble women—ambassadors and centurions—ladies and tradeswomen—and babies who have never seen a cow” (205); Angel teases her about the centurions, but as far as Tess is concerned, ancient Romans and present-day Londoners are equally distant (or close). In his imagining of Tess’s imagining, Hardy touches on a fundamental point about realist representation at this time, whether pictorial or literary. Realism implies the presentation of actual worlds, existing or formerly existing, that the reader may or may not already know, and

46  Rachel Bowlby that may or may not have established conventions of representation that already attach to them. Tess here sets her contemporary Londoners very concretely in a normal daily routine: what could be more realistic than sitting down to breakfast on a specific day (tomorrow)? But they are then splayed out into a fantastical cast of characters mixing classes and generations and epochs, even: from the long-gone centurion all the way down to the new babies. London, for Tess, is the place where all people ordinary and exotic are mixed together, those “strange people” whom she—like Clare as well, she supposes—has “never seen.” At the same time, Tess can realistically picture in reverse the likely effects of ignorance on the imagination or knowledge of the other. In her list it is only the babies who may not have seen a cow (how nice, as well, that she pictures a baby that would obviously understand a cow to be a cow, and to be the source of milk); she assumes that all the grown-up folk, from the noblemen to the tradeswomen, will know a cow when they see one—even if their experience is visual and removed, and not the multisensual hands-on experience of a dairy worker like herself. Hardy’s novel was written the year after the first publication of Oscar Wilde’s novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), one of whose many jabs at realism is the memorable line (spoken by Lord Henry Wotton): “The man who could call a spade a spade should be compelled to use one” (Wilde 1998, 159). Those who could call a cow a cow, might well, by the same Wildean logic, be compelled to milk one. Tess has called a cow a cow all her life; she has also seen them and handled them and known them as individuals, and it is fair to say that the single word cow would hardly begin to suggest all the meanings and uses of this kind of creature, for her. But now her contact with the London train—which she, a Wessex girl, has seen—has turned her into a speculative philosopher. By way of the train she is comparing two worlds, imagining what it might be like to drink milk without knowing where it has come from. Tess never does see London, or Londoners in their home town, and on this night she returns with Angel along the same lane, now in darkness, back to the dairy farm. But at the time when this novel was published, many Londoners, and many more from many cities, would in fact have seen their first cows, along with many other new sights, from the windows of a train. In this sense, the railways accomplished something that went beyond their dramatic diminishment of the distances between different places. They were providing their passengers with an ever-­ changing and moving view of the regions through which they passed, as fields and towns rolled along in the world outside the window. The reality newly available to the passenger-spectator might well be the sort of extraordinary and beautiful landscape prized by the Romantics (and by Rousseau): from early on, there were railways built through the most mountainous parts of the countryside as well as through every other kind of terrain. In that sense, there was in effect a democratisation of

Romantic Walking and Railway Realism  47 aesthetic travel, as ordinary people were given a sight of the places they would not have had the means to travel to or through before. And there was also, by the same token, a widening of the Romantic view, as people of all classes were offered the scope of travel that previously only the aristocrat or gentleman might have aspired to. These are the Romantic, or post-Romantic railways. But there is another kind of view that the railways make available to their passengers, as though from the opposite side of the train, and that is the sights ­exposed when the route passes so close to private dwellings that it is possible to see inside them. The passenger becomes not a tourist so much as an involuntary voyeur; what is open to view is not the grand spectacle of nature but an intimate picture of domestic life. This, in other words, is where railway romanticism meets railway realism. A passage in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Blithedale Romance (1852) says it all: The posterior aspect of any old farm-house, behind which a railroad has unexpectedly been opened, is so different from that looking upon the immemorial highway, that the spectator gets new ideas of rural life and individuality, in the puff or two of steam-breath which shoots him past the premises. (Hawthorne 1991, 149) “New ideas of rural life and individuality”: what could be a more concise advertisement for realism in the sense of expanding the reader’s or spectator’s knowledge of other people and other ways of life? But there is also an aspect of exposé, in that this is not a view that was ever meant to be seen. The side of the house that faces the main road is for Hawthorne a “front” in both senses of the word: “it is meant for the world’s eye, and is therefore a veil and a concealment. Realities keep in the rear” (149). Railways and novels are clearly opening up new realities to the travelling and reading public. And often, of course, these people are one and the same, as the passenger moves her eyes from the view outside the window to the novel on her lap which she has purchased from the selection of “railway novels” available at the station bookstore. But what of the narrative lines along which these realities are to be shown? It is one thing to imagine reality as a snapshot of a scene that is glimpsed from a train window; but what kind of stories will count as the real links that put together the disparate images encountered on the way, or else that make sense of the single picture presented to the passing spectator, like a tableau vivant: the back-story of the rear view? In time, at the start of the twentieth century, a new technology would provide a further model of the link between railways and realism, and that is film. For the steadily moving view from the train window is just like the roll of film that projects its 24 images per second as if they form a continuous and unbroken story. The cinema, in its very name, is movement—­and the train, in a comparable way, moves its passengers

48  Rachel Bowlby through both space and time while keeping them exactly where they are, seated in the train carriage. I want to end, however, with a slower picture of realism—indeed an argument about the very identity of realism, which is prompted by missing a train. We are once again with Nerval, and another of his projects for going on a journey to an old-fashioned town at a certain distance from Paris. One day, he gets the idea of going to Meaux, but he’s already too late for the train—he didn’t realise that the timetable had been changed on the first of the month, and characteristically, he gives us this detail. Therefore, by his own extempore planning logic, he now has many hours to occupy before the next train is due to depart, at three in the morning. What does he do? He goes into a café, and there he comes across a recent journal in which, he says, is a translation of a short story by Dickens (actually, it is not: it is a translation of a piece called “The Key of the Street” by someone else, George Augustus Sala; but that’s the kind of detail that we can ignore . . . ). Reading this piece leads Nerval to the thought that the English are so fortunate, because they can get away with telling reality like it really is, whereas a French writer would be pushed into making a neat ending with either a death or a marriage. This first chapter of Nerval’s Les Nuits d’octobre (October Nights, 1852), in which these incidents occur, is actually called “Le Réalisme,” and as he meanders through the following nights of real life in Paris and Meaux and a few places in between (he manages to get arrested after leaving his ID card behind at a hotel in an obscure provincial town), Nerval is offering his experiences, and his writing up of them, as an example of just what real realism should be, which is to say, the English type, devoid of false plots and finishes and consisting of “observation” rather than “invention.” The topic of realism comes up again explicitly at a later point in Nerval’s October ramblings. He begins his chapter with three dots, followed by: “I’m stopping. The job of a realist is too difficult to do” (Nerval 1974, 238). There is another chance encounter with printed realism, this time a diatribe against the realist movement itself, “l’école du vrai” (“the school of truth”), in a journal found under a heap in another café. Here is Nerval’s reconstruction of the critic’s response to the idea that literature should be true, not fictional (and therefore false): Is it entertaining for me if you recount your life step by step, if you analyse your dreams, your impressions, your sensations? . . . What do I care if you slept at the Sirène hotel, at Vallois’s place? I take it that that’s not true, or else that it is contrived, you will tell me to go and see . . . I have no need to take myself to Meaux! And moreover, if the same things happened to me, I wouldn’t have the nerve to share it with the public. (238)

Romantic Walking and Railway Realism  49 Nerval’s realist pièce de résistance, at this point, is “the woman with merino hair” whom he saw advertised on a poster when he first arrived in Meaux, and whose reality he has now verified for himself by going to the show where she performs. Reality, in this instance, is fantastic: stranger than fiction. For the most part, though, Nerval’s wanderings round a minor province of north-eastern France is presented as a demonstration of the delightful randomness of reality, seen most clearly in its defiance of the predictability or regularity of timetables and plans. This is no ordinary railway realism; instead, it is realism against the straight linear order, a realism that is played out along different ways and in other places than the rational routes of the modern world.

Notes 1 On the definition of a railway, in relation to the railways’ beginnings, see Robbins (1965, 11–17). 2 As Tess and Angel make their way to the station, the only sound is “the clucking of the milk in the tall cans behind them” (209).

References Balzac, Honoré de. (1842) 1951. Un début dans la vie. Vol. 1. Edited by Marcel Bouteron. Paris: Gallimard. Hardy, Thomas. (1891) 2008. Tess of the D’Urbevilles. Edited by Juliet Grindle and Simon Cattrell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. (1852) 1991. The Blithedale Romance. Edited by Tony Tanner. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hemmings, F. W. J. 1974. “Realism and the Novel: The Eighteen-Century Beginnings.” In The Age of Realism, edited by F. W. J. Hemmings, 9–35. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Nerval, Gérard de. (1852) 1974. “Les Nuits d’octobre.” In Poésies et souvenirs, Vol. XXI, edited by Jean Richer, 201–250. Paris: Gallimard. ———. (1854–1855) 1972. Promenades et souvenirs. Paris: Garnier Flammarion. Robbins, Michael. 1965. The Railway Age. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. (1782) 1977. Les Confessions. Edited by Bernard ­Gagnebin and Marcel Raymond. Paris: Gallimard. Wilde, Oscar. (1890) 1998. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited by Isobel ­Murray. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

2 The Use and Abuse of Romance Realist Revisions of Walter Scott in England, France, and Germany Geoffrey Baker On New Year’s Eve, 1876, Gustave Flaubert (1982; 1926–1933) wrote to his niece Caroline Commanville with some thoughts on reading Balzac’s published correspondence. “It was for me,” he begins, “edifying reading” (237).1 He goes on to admire Balzac’s life, stamina, and work ethic before then disparaging an overly practical “preoccupation with money” and a lack of concern for “Art,” with a capital A. “Not once does he speak of it,” Flaubert rants. “He had ambitions for Glory, but not for Beauty.” Flaubert concludes with one final, damning sign of Balzac’s impoverished literary sensibility: “His greatest literary admiration is for Walter Scott” (237). One might be surprised to see, in Flaubert, a pivotal figure of nineteenth-century realism so critical of Scott, because Scott’s reputation amongst novelists throughout the nineteenth-century seems otherwise fairly assured. Already during Scott’s lifetime, his contribution to the so-called “historical novel” was widely acknowledged, and more recent critics have emphasised the role his work played towards ideas of national identity well beyond Scotland. Flaubert’s not-so-great Scott is nevertheless emblematic of the strangely changing reception of a key writer of the Romantic era amongst realist novelists who came after him. Realism has often been touted as a clear reaction against Romanticism. Émile Zola (1893; 2003–2009) makes this case explicitly in the 1880s, as his essays on The Experimental Novel eschew the idealism he sees at work in the Romantics and favour instead the empirical epistemology on which he grounds his realist method. The realist “experimental novel,” he writes, “is in one word the literature of our scientific age, as the classical and romantic literature corresponded to a scholastic and theological age” (23; 9:333). Romanticism is, for Zola, a “disease,” either “embodied in the genius of one man [or] in the ravings of a group of men” (36, 44; 9:339, 9:343). More recent critics, too, like George Levine (1981) in The Realistic Imagination, argue that “nineteenth-­century realism defined itself against romance” and sought to “resist or circumvent” its narrative conventions (9, 15). Levine shows realist novelists attacking the formal and thematic traits of romance, such as the happy

Use and Abuse of Romance  51 ending and the idealised countryside, and in so doing staking a greater claim to realistic representation and to a realism so named. Yet Scott presents an interesting problem here even if Zola and Levine are right, because views of Scott’s novels and representational contributions shifted over the course of the nineteenth century, when they were not downright ambivalent. Moreover, while realist works frequently invoke the novels and characters and name of Scott, it is not always to rebuke. On the contrary, realist novels used the fiction, name, and idea of Scott for a variety of purposes. An analysis of those varied purposes reveals to us how important Scott was to realism’s own sense of its narrative project, especially in terms of its ability to consider problems of identity, epistemology, space, and textuality. In this chapter, I shall briefly document Scott’s changing reputation as a novelist in (particularly) Western Europe, with a primary focus on his reception in France, England, and Germany. The relationship between Scott and his realist readers, to begin with, emphasises problems with periodisation or narrative categorisation; it becomes tempting to ask exactly where and when Romantic narrative ends and realism begins. Scott might even be emblematic of such literary-historical complications. A closer look at a few canonical authors of realism—including George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Theodor Fontane, and Gustave Flaubert—will then demonstrate how these realists used Scott not just as a simple punching bag in order to demonstrate the difference and superiority of realism, but rather as a complex site for engaging realism’s fundamental questions about the representation of identities and spaces, the epistemology on which representation can be based, and indeed the possibility and fate of textual representation itself.

Critical Revisions of Scott To trace the reception and categorisation of Scott through the nineteenth century in Europe is to witness shifts not just in his status but also in his related categorisation as a Romantic or a forebear of realism. 2 It is also to note the codification of realism as separable from Romanticism and the changing reputation enjoyed by both of these labels as the nineteenth century wore on. While figures central to German Romanticism, like Jakob Grimm, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Ludwig Tieck, were the first to praise Scott in Germany, Scott’s champions in France included authors who would later be seen to straddle the border between romance and realism. Stendhal and Victor Hugo, for example, both praised Scott as early as 1819, the year that The Bride of Lammermoor and The Legend of Montrose were translated into French. Then there is Balzac, named by many critics and literary histories as the inaugurator of a somewhat codified nineteenth-century realism. It is Scott whom Balzac essentially credits with providing the spark for the

52  Geoffrey Baker entire Comédie humaine (Human Comedy), and he writes in the 1842 “General Preface” (Balzac 1976) about his early attempts to give shape to what would become his life’s project: If I could conceive of the importance and of the poetry of this history of the human heart, I saw no means of executing it; for, up to our times, the most celebrated storytellers had spent their talent creating one or two typical characters, painting one side of life. It was with this thought that I read the works of Walter Scott. (1:10) Balzac states that he “found the reason for [Scott’s] talent in the infinite variety of human nature,” and this claim simultaneously debases the idea of genius as an expression of the individual artist or of sentiment as against reason (both of which were stereotyped ideas of Romanticism to which we saw Zola allude, above) and describes the thematic territory of the human that grounds The Human Comedy (1:11). Beyond this, Scott provided Balzac with both a template and a goal. Scott, Balzac writes, “combined drama, dialogue, portrait, landscape, and description; he introduced the marvelous and the true—the two elements of the times” (1:10). The presence of the marvellous in Balzac’s “General Preface,” which is often regarded as a sort of mission statement for realism, might surprise us. Yet we must recall that many early novels of The Human Comedy are just such a fusion of the marvellous and the real; undeniably realistic scenes from private and public life inhabit the same novelistic word as philosophical studies tinged with the supernatural, like La Peau de chagrin (The Wild Ass’s Skin, 1831) and La Recherche de l’Absolu (The Search for the Absolute, 1834). We must also remind ourselves of Balzac’s role as a transitional figure between these modes and even as a writer who could simultaneously occupy both. Indeed, Scott’s general reputation in France at the time is best captured by a similar tension between praise of his development of the historical novel and praise of Scott’s accommodation of the marvellous. One sees the former in Balzac’s citing Scott as the founding figure of the historical novel and of its unique respect for historical reality and context, in a savage review of M. James’s Richelieu in 1830 that Balzac (1872) authored right as he was writing some of the first novels that would belong to The Human Comedy (90). One sees the latter in essays like those by Balzac’s friend Philarète Chasles between 1831 and 1839 (when Chasles published the essay “Littérature anglaise depuis Scott” in the Revue des deux mondes, highlighting the Romantic marvellous in Scott). If incipient realism was, at this point, caught somewhere between history and marvel in France, well, the rest of the nineteenth century would take care of that. Realism would be increasingly portrayed as the mortal enemy of romance, in theory if not always in practice, and the value

Use and Abuse of Romance  53 of realistic narrative itself would be subject to criticism. Disentangling these distinctions sheds light on the complicated and changing view of Scott’s relation to realism and of the understanding and value of realism. For example, Flaubert’s ungracious linking of Scott in 1876 to the pragmatic realism he felt in Balzac’s Correspondence was echoed more charitably that same year by Danish critic Georg Brandes (1897), who argues in his book Naturalism in England that Scott was actually an author of what Brandes labels “a historical and ethnographical naturalism” (112). Zola would see it differently, however. He repeatedly claimed Balzac as an early naturalist, a decidedly realist writer, and Zola actually used this as a means of disengaging Balzac from Scott rather than linking Balzac to Scott. In one of the short critical pieces included in The Experimental Novel in 1880 called “Jules Janin et Balzac,” Zola (1893; 2003–2009) writes that “Balzac . . . felt for Walter Scott an admiration which it is difficult to understand to-day” (345; 9:476). As Zola goes on to mock Janin’s defence of the allegedly idealised and uncomplicated portrayal of women as symbolic types in Scott’s novels, it becomes clear that ­Zola’s problem with Scott is precisely that he is not enough of a realist. Therefore, within a few years of each other, Flaubert, Brandes, and Zola all mark some of the key ways in which Scott’s reputation in the context of realist narration was being and would be disputed. On the one hand, Scott is a realist, either because he fails to prioritise beauty and art (Flaubert) or because he deploys tactics later adopted by naturalism (Brandes). Flaubert appears to see this as a bad thing, while Brandes sees it as a good thing. On the other hand, according to Zola, Scott is not a realist, because he fails to portray a complex world accurately and leans instead on idealisations. For Zola, that is a very bad thing. Zola’s view appears to win out, at least in France, and possibly in England, by the turn of the twentieth century. In the ensuing decades, as both realism and Romanticism began to pale alongside the burgeoning interest in modernist writing, Scott was increasingly linked to Romanticism against realism, and the scholarly attention to him saw a palpable reduction in quantity. Emblematic of these shifts are Henri Bremond’s 1914 essay, “Walter Scott et le Romantisme conservateur” (“Walter Scott and Conservative Romanticism”), and a piece on what J. M. ­Devonshire called in 1919 “The ‘Decline’ of Walter Scott in France.” (In 1999, Harry E. Shaw could still lament that “criticism in this century has . . . accorded [Scott] marginal attention” [168].) Such claims of decline are corroborated by a quick survey of titles from Barnaby’s documentation of the reception of Scott from about 1900 to the 1937 publication of Georg Lukács’ The Historical Novel. When not declared in “decline,” Scott is routinely linked to figures of Romanticism like Heine, Byron, and early Manzoni and to Romanticism more generally by important scholars like Fernand Baldensperger and E. Preston Dargan (Barnaby 2014). Baldensperger founded, with Paul Hazard in 1921, the Revue de

54  Geoffrey Baker littérature comparée, one of the first periodicals dedicated to comparative literary study; Dargan, a long-time faculty member at the University of Chicago, was in his time one of the pre-eminent scholars of Balzac and nineteenth-century French literature. These biographical matters merit mention, because they remind us that leading figures in their fields were often driving the perception and reception of Scott. The idea of an uncomplicatedly Romantic Scott would not be rethought significantly until the translation of Lukács’s Historical Novel (1937) from Russian into western European languages in the 1950s and 1960s. (The German translation of The Historical Novel appeared in 1954, for example, and the French one in 1965.) Against the critical tendency to locate Scott as a Romantic, Lukács highlights his realism, as Balzac had also done. While acknowledging a rich prehistory to the sub-genre, Lukács (1983) separates Scott out as one of “those great writers whose depth . . . they often do not understand themselves, because it has sprung from a truly realistic mastery of their material in conflict with their personal views and prejudices” (31). This is, one might note, the exact same praise Friedrich Engels heaps on Balzac’s realism in an 1888 letter to the British novelist Margaret Harkness. Engels (Marx and Engels 1976) expresses awe for Balzac’s complete history of French Society from which, even in economic details (for instance the rearrangement of real and personal property after the Revolution) I have learned more than from all the professed historians, economists, and statisticians of the period together. (91–92) Engels goes on to praise the ability of Balzac’s realism “to go against his own class sympathies and political prejudices” (92). Yet Lukács’s assessment of the realism in Scott stands out as a significant reappraisal, not just because it confronts a then-dominant tendency to read Scott as Romantic, but also because it overturns Lukács’s own earlier dismissal of Scott. In his first book, The Theory of the Novel (1914–1915), Lukács (1996) had critiqued Scott’s “flight from the present” and read him as a Romantic and idealist (116). Thus, though some in the nineteenth century and most in the early twentieth century oversee a slow but finally successful categorisation of Scott as a Romantic, the twentieth century in the wake of Lukács’s essay on the historical novel seems to rethink that assignation. This categorisation of Scott sees him in greater complexity, acknowledging his affinities with realism, like Balzac and Brandes had done. With this bus tour of Scott’s changing face in the context of debates over realism on the Continent, I hope mainly to highlight a few key concerns. First, Scott’s name and novelistic legacy were in some ways

Use and Abuse of Romance  55 inextricable from the rise and codification of realism, either because he was viewed and cited as a proto-realist or because he was seen, by those who disliked realism, as a popular symbol of “ye olde days” before the dominance of a drab and mundane quotidian realism began. Second, the extent to which Scott was assimilable to realism depended heavily on which version or understanding of realism was serving as the metric. If one is talking about what Marshall Brown (1981) calls “realisms of content” (233) then obviously Scott’s often extraordinary characters, exoticised settings, and penchant for marvel (and for what he terms “the big Bow Wow strain”) were anathema. Yet Scott’s historicism and narrative method, as Erich Auerbach (1968) points out in Mimesis (1946), suggested to Balzac and later Lukács the mode and means of realistic narration. This is what Brown calls “realisms of form,” narrative that adopts structures and styles from empirical science and historiography. And finally, one has the frequent if not extensive use of Scott’s name, novels, and characters within the novels of realism. I refer here not merely to the manner in which just about every realist author took a crack at a historical novel explicitly indebted to those of Scott: Theodor Fontane’s first novel Vor dem Sturm (Before the Storm, 1878); George Eliot’s Romola (1862–1863); Balzac’s Les Chouans (The Chouans, 1829); Anthony Trollope’s third novel, La Vendée (1850); Tolstoy’s Voyná i mir (War and Peace, 1869); and so forth. I shall concentrate instead on a few of the many moments within realist novels where Scott is read, where his characters are invoked or where his scenes are rewritten in order to elaborate some of the pressing concerns of realist narrative or of narrative writ large.

Realist Revisions of Scott: Gender, Epistemology, Space It would be impossible to catalogue the instances of reference to Scott— even limiting oneself to the explicit ones—in later nineteenth-century fiction, but examining a few specific examples can demonstrate exactly how varied were the uses to which novelists after him put his figure. I begin with a series of allusions in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860) and Middlemarch (1871–1872) that showcase three key elements. First, the use of Scott in both novels touches on his reputation as extraordinary, what Shaw (1999) refers to as “his status as a cultural icon for nineteenth-century British culture” (168). Second, The Mill on the Floss conjures the manner in which Scott’s portrayal of women—to which I have already alluded, through criticism of it by Zola—­contextualises the negotiations of gender roles by Eliot’s protagonist Maggie T ­ ulliver. Certainly, this is one of the most important themes of that novel, which spotlights the paths laid out for one based on one’s sex, and even structures itself into sections labelled, for example, “Boy and Girl.”

56  Geoffrey Baker And finally, the use of Scott in Middlemarch opens questions of epistemology that are central to many realist texts, as well as to many theorisations of realism specifically and of narrative more broadly. When Scott first enters The Mill on the Floss, it is through the reading habits of the precocious and intelligent Maggie: Sometimes Maggie thought she could have been contented with absorbing fancies; if she could have had all Scott’s novels and all Byron’s poems!—then, perhaps, she might have found happiness enough to dull her sensibility to her actual daily life. (Eliot 1998b, 286) It is the Romantic Scott who appears here, tethered to Byron and allied with “fanc[y]” against “actual daily life.” Yet these fancies incorporate Scott in a slightly different way one page later, as Maggie’s brain becomes busy with wild romances of a flight from home in search of something less sordid and dreary; she would go to some great man—­ Walter Scott, perhaps—and tell him how wretched and how clever she was, and he would surely do something for her. But, in the middle of her vision, her father would perhaps enter the room for the evening, and, surprised that she sat still without noticing him, would say complainingly, “Come, am I to fetch my slippers myself?” (287) Still at odds with crude quotidian life, now Scott is even more specifically and yet less literarily Romantic; located elsewhere and yet apparently somewhere locatable, he figures as a real “great man,” one capable of actually assisting someone in need, and not just as an author of escapist texts. The next and final time Scott appears in The Mill on the Floss, it is as if these two understandings of Scott—as creator of fictional characters and as potential saviour of the downtrodden—have merged. Maggie claims, to her impossible love Philip Wakem, “I want to avenge Rebecca and Flora MacIvor, and Minna and all the rest of the dark unhappy ones” (Eliot 1998b, 332). Philip’s reply is intriguing, because it explicitly turns Scott’s characters into a lens for reading The Mill on the Floss and its elaboration of gender roles. “Perhaps you will avenge the dark women in your own person,” he says, “and carry away all the love from your cousin Lucy” (332). Because Lucy and Maggie are drawn as overt foils (one light, the other dark; one properly behaved, the other a deep-down renegade), this episode makes of Scott’s fiction something much more important than a fanciful model to be discarded by a realist narrative in order to demonstrate its own superior vraisemblance. Rather, Scott’s

Use and Abuse of Romance  57 work is shown to possess actual hermeneutic and ideological potential in Eliot’s negotiation of gender, making Scott important not just to this novel but to the idea of understanding the relevance of fiction to one’s lived experience more generally. Indeed, this potential value had been noted as early as 1832, when Harriet Martineau (1832) wrote that Scott in his novels “advocated the rights of woman with a force all the greater for his being unaware of the import and tendency of what he was saying” and that he had spoken to “the power of fiction as an agent of morals and philosophy” (457–458). (Oddly, both Martineau and, as I pointed out earlier, Lukács suggest that Scott’s political contributions through literature were largely inadvertent, just as Engels noted of Balzac’s.) As Linda H. Peterson (2009) has argued, Martineau’s take on Scott should even be read as instrumental in Martineau’s own development as an author of politically engaged works (74). A different Eliot novel, Middlemarch (1998a), reveals Scott’s importance to another fundamental concern of realist fiction: epistemology, or our sense of how we know and represent the world we see. Middlemarch invokes Scott’s name many times, most often to show him praised by characters who are either children or adults with questionable judgement, or to show him disparaged by adults who suggest Scott is a mere phase one passes through when young. “I suppose Mr. Lydgate knows” Walter Scott, “young Plymdale” says, to which Lydgate responds: “Oh, I read no literature now. . . . I read so much when I was a lad, that I suppose it will last me all my life. I used to know Scott’s poems by heart” (254). It might be important that Lydgate is the novel’s representative of modern science; the fact that he disparages Scott emphasises the distance between Scott on the one hand and realist adulthood on the other. A chapter much later in Middlemarch makes Scott fodder for philistines, as Mr. Brooke says to Mary Garth: You have an interesting work there, I see, Miss Garth. . . . It is by the author of “Waverley”: that is Sir Walter Scott. I have bought one of his works myself—a very nice thing, a very superior publication, entitled “Ivanhoe.” You will not get any writer to beat him in a hurry, I think—he will not, in my opinion, be speedily surpassed. I have just been reading a portion at the commencement of “Anne of Jeersteen.” It commences well. (292) Brooke is frequently the object of light mockery in the novel, and his political ambitions are thwarted in a superbly comical scene during which he inadvertently renders himself tipsy before delivering a catastrophically bad public speech. In his mouth, this flattery of Scott is thus not without its complications. Brooke later discusses with the protagonist Dorothea a recent altercation he witnessed, saying, “it was rather comic:

58  Geoffrey Baker Fielding would have made something of it—or Scott, now—Scott might have worked it up” (369). This assessment of Scott’s ability to enlarge a scene for aesthetic effect or bombast is only fair, since Scott himself commented on his own abilities in that direction. The praise of Scott here, though, should probably not be taken too seriously when placed between, on the one hand, the mispronunciation of Scott’s title Anne Of Geierstein and Brooke’s own comical, ineptly repetitive speech in the first passage, and, on the other hand, Brooke’s emphasis on Scott’s alleged powers of exaggeration in the second passage. This does not mean, however, that Scott himself is never taken seriously by Middlemarch. Further on in the novel, he appears as the central figure in the epigraph to Chapter 57, one of a handful of epigraphs in the novel that Eliot actually authored herself. The lyric eulogises Scott, drawing his Waverley (1814) through a description of a childlike readerly experience that speaks again to the powerful role that literature can play in shaping lives: They numbered scarce eight summers when a name Rose on their souls and stirred such motions there As thrill the buds and shape their hidden frame At penetration of the quickening air: His name who told of loyal Evan Dhu, Of quaint Bradwardine, and Vich Ian Vor, Making the little world their childhood knew Large with a land of mountain lake and scaur, And larger yet with wonder love belief Toward Walter Scott who living far away Sent them this wealth of joy and noble grief. The book and they must part, but day by day, In lines that thwart like portly spiders ran They wrote the tale, from Tully Veolan. (Eliot 1998a, 536) The poem ostensibly introduces the ensuing scene in Middlemarch, during which characters are described reading “aloud from that beloved writer who has made a chief part in the happiness of many young lives. The volume was ‘Ivanhoe’.” Yet what interests me most about this epigraph is its insistence on Scott’s ability to foster “wonder love belief.” These words might seem at odds with realist narrative, because they express forms of knowledge disconnected from empirical evidence, restricted to lesser forms of conviction according to an empiricist epistemology. Yet the epistemological status of belief has a much richer history, both in British empiricism and the institutional extension of its philosophies into areas like the law and nineteenth-century fiction writ large, including realism. Belief is especially important to realism’s many

Use and Abuse of Romance  59 metafictional moments, where it operates within discussions of what sort of narrative evidence is necessary in order for a novelistic representation to foster the readerly credulity that is a necessary part of fictionality (see Gallagher 2006). The best example of this situation from her works occurs in a pivotal scene late in Middlemarch, in which Dorothea first supports and then intervenes to help Lydgate, who stands accused in the court of public opinion of having abetted a murder. “I feel convinced that his conduct has not been guilty,” Dorothea says on hearing the accusations levelled by gossips against Lydgate. “I believe that people are almost always better than their neighbours think they are” (Eliot 1998a, 691). One should note the distinction Eliot’s narrative seems to draw here between “I feel” and “I believe,” on the one hand, and “their neighbours think,” on the other. Dorothea cannot know the charges against Lydgate to be false, though, just as neither she nor anybody but Lydgate can know that Lydgate, in all of his life, has “never done anything vile” and “would not do anything dishonourable,” as she declares to his face (717). Yet despite having no real evidence on her side apart from her feeling for Lydgate’s character, and despite the either absent or at least unspecified grounds for her beliefs beyond a humanitarian faith in others, Dorothea’s mere belief turns out to be pretty much correct. Furthermore, this later episode reinforces an earlier moment in Middlemarch in which Dorothea similarly backs Will Ladislaw against public gossip. “Do you suppose,” she asks him, “that I ever disbelieved in you?” (593). One could argue that these later beliefs in Lydgate and Ladislaw are essential to understanding the development of Dorothea as a character. Her negative experience with marriage in the first half of the novel is frequently termed as a mistaken belief in her husband, but the instances of later, correct belief in Lydgate and Ladislaw might demonstrate her having learned when and in whom to believe, absent real evidence on which to base belief. Scott is linked with the value of belief in one of Eliot’s self-authored epigraphs in Middlemarch, a link that permits Eliot to draw Scott crucially into the novel’s development of its main character as well as its longer discourse on forms of knowledge. This representational discourse, as numerous studies of epistemology and the nineteenth-century novel have shown over the last few decades, is also one of the deepest preoccupations of realism. If in Eliot one sees Scott’s role in elaborating concerns of gender and epistemology in the nineteenth-century novel, in Trollope the deployment of Scott gave nineteenth-century realism another means of articulating shifting conceptions of space and modernity. I mentioned earlier that Trollope had consciously adopted Scott’s historical novel model for La Vendée, and indeed Trollope’s novels frequently invoke Scott. An episode in one of the Palliser novels in particular suggests that the references to Scott in Trollope’s work cannot be reduced to reminders of

60  Geoffrey Baker an outmoded Romanticism whose presence in these fictions from the later nineteenth century is meant merely to highlight their own superior realism. (In his 1883 Autobiography, Trollope goes so far as to suggest that Scott managed to maintain a level of realism even while writing in a sensationalising mode.) In Trollope’s Phineas Finn (1868), as Phineas the protagonist speaks to Lady Laura in Scotland, she tells him of the Highlanders’ recent change of allegiance from their clan to their landlord, and Phineas remarks disappointedly, “That is unpoetical.” Lady Laura replies, “Yes;—but then poetry is so usually false. I doubt whether Scotland would not have been as prosaic a country as any under the sun but for Walter Scott” (Trollope 1992, 1:124). This is the familiar accusation that Romanticism was not realistic, but Trollope’s Phineas novels mean to do more interesting things with Scott than accuse him of poetic exaggeration. In a later chapter, Phineas is running late for an appointment and borrows a pony from a “Donald Bean.” As an allusion to Scott’s Waverley, Donald Bean shares his name with that of a Highland warrior in that novel, where Scott’s presentation of him is the stuff of adventure. En route to Bean’s hideout, for example, Waverley stops to rest and reflect: He had now time to give himself up to the full romance of his situation. Here he sate on the banks of an unknown lake, under the guidance of a wild native, whose language was unknown to him, on a visit to the den of some renowned outlaw, a second Robin Hood perhaps, or Adam o’Gordon, and that at deep midnight, through scenes of difficulty and toil, separated from his attendant, left by his guide:—what a fund of circumstances for the exercise of a romantic imagination, and all enhanced by the solemn feeling of uncertainty at least, if not of danger! (Scott 1998, 78; emphases mine) Scott’s narration is absolutely saturated with indicators of Romantic potential, which I have emphasised in italics, but this all changes in the later novel. Trollope’s Donald Bean, by contrast, is a mere tenant, his pony described by Mr. Kennedy (Lady Laura’s suitor and Phineas’ rival) as “not much bigger than a dog.” The narrator continues by telling us how “before three o’clock Phineas found himself mounted on a shaggy steed, which, in sober truth, was not much bigger than a large dog” (Trollope 1992, 1:134). Yet if Scott’s Scotland finds itself brutally reduced, “in sober truth,” and undeniably tamed in Trollope’s reimagining of it, this does not simply speak to the romance that realistic imagination denigrates. Rather, Trollope’s move here produces the novel’s depiction of the shifting value of certain spaces in a modernising world, one of the pre-eminent concerns of realist narrative in the nineteenth century, from Balzac and

Use and Abuse of Romance  61 Brontë to Flaubert and Fontane. Trollope portrays Scott’s terrain as stripped of its romance and thereby emphasises other moments in the Palliser novels in which modernity recodes landscapes and alters their relation to human experience. In Phineas Redux, for example, the sequel to Phineas Finn, characters note and the novel portrays the changing face of London—­increasingly diverse, increasingly connected to an increasingly connected world—and even the collapse of spaces tied to tradition, such as the hunting grounds of Trumpeton Wood. In an incongruous but insistent subplot of Phineas Redux, Trumpeton Wood sees all of its foxes removed through traps and poisons, thus dramatically altering the traditional resonance of a space where “foxes had always hitherto been preserved” for the purpose of hunting (Trollope 2011, 98). A new understanding of the space of modernity pervades the Pallisers, and it is through a discussion of Scott that Trollope’s novels grapple most explicitly with this problem. One can glimpse similar moments of disenchanted diminishment of the romance associated with Scott in the novels of Theodor Fontane. ­Fontane, who had spent considerable time in the British Isles as a journalist before embarking on a late-begun career writing fiction, knew Scott and Scotland fairly well. As I noted above, Fontane’s first novel was a historical one, Before the Storm: Novel from the Winter of 1812–13 (1878), modelled on those of Scott. Before the Storm is legible as a chronicle of burgeoning national sentiment; it documents an episode in the Napoleonic Wars but was written at a time of ascendant German national and imperial feeling in the wake of the unification in 1871. Though a key sign of the impact of Scott on Fontane, this historical novel admittedly deviates from Fontane’s œuvre when his other works are inseparable from a more domestic strain of realism that depicts the transformation of Berlin into a metropolis and traces human relationships in northern areas of Germany. While references to Scots stereotypes and a romantic Scotland pervade Fontane’s fiction, direct references to Scott occur somewhat seldom. In his most famous novel, Effi Briest (1894–1895), though, Fontane does with Scott what Trollope seems to, using him to anchor an elaboration of the new symbolic function of space in a globalising world.3 As her husband, Geert von Innstetten, introduces her to Macpherson, a gardener and according to Innstetten “a genuine Highlander” now living in a remote German coastal town, Effi enquires whether Macpherson fits the visual romantic type of a Highlander ­(Fontane 2000, 33; 1974, 1:4.46). “No, thank goodness,” Innstetten replies; “he’s a wizened little man, of whom neither his clan nor Walter Scott would be proud” (34; 1:4.46). But this reference to Scott, even though capturing a certain disenchantment, occurs within a chapter emphatic on the cosmopolitan and international assemblage of residents in the small town, including figures from Poland, Portugal, Africa, and China. That this Scottish gardener lives on

62  Geoffrey Baker the margins of Germany is, Innstetten contends, fascinating in itself. In other words, whatever romance one loses in the unromantic Scot of Effi Briest is, according to Innstetten, compensated for by the international potential of local space in an increasingly interconnected modernity.

Realist Revisions of Scott: Textuality There are numerous other celebrated uses and abuses of Scott of which space will not permit discussion here, but they, too, show his importance as a marker for the renegotiation of central concerns of realist narrative and even of concerns one might see eclipsing realist narrative and speaking to problems of narrative more generally. By way of conclusion, I shall address this final use of Scott by returning to Flaubert, where this essay began. In Flaubert’s most celebrated and influential novel, ­M adame ­Bovary (1857), Scott’s appearance—at times mediated through adaptation and at other times quite direct—once again captures the specific themes and formal excesses with which nineteenth-century realism often associated him. The narrator lists Scott as amongst the readings favored by the young Emma Bovary, for example: [W]hen she was fifteen, Emma spent six months breathing the dust of old lending libraries. Later, with Walter Scott, she became enthralled by things historical and would dream of oaken chests, guardrooms, and minstrels. She would have liked to live in some old manor house, like those ladies in long-waisted gowns who, leaning chin in hand on the stone ledge of a window, spent their days gazing from beneath its trefoil arch at a white-plumed cavalier, mounted on a black steed, riding towards them from the distant horizon. (Flaubert 2008, 34) This is, as we have seen so many times, Scott as romance. As Thierry ­Laget (2001) points out in his notes to this edition of Madame Bovary, “the reading of Walter Scott is an obligatory step in the formation of Flaubert’s characters” (475). In Emma Bovary’s case, this step is importantly emblematic of the Romantic streak which she is unable to shake. This Romantic streak, which leads to the novel’s catastrophic ­conclusion, appears to be savagely critiqued by Flaubert’s plot. Flaubert’s inclusion of Scott in Madame Bovary, however, also heightens one’s sense of slippery textuality in a way that the other novels discussed above do not. If the Romantic Scott provides a problematic and unrealistic foundation for Emma’s expectations in life, Flaubert’s Scott ultimately becomes less a vessel of outmoded or reality-endangering content and more a symbol of the possible fates of texts in modernity. Late in the novel, as Charles and Emma sit in the theatre watching Donizetti’s operatic adaptation of Scott’s The Bride of Lammermoor

Use and Abuse of Romance  63 (1819), Flaubert’s narration fuses its rehearsal of the plot with Emma’s internal reflections on and emotional responses to the play and the novel on which it is based. The narrator sets the opera’s scene, for starters: It was a clearing in a wood, with, on the left, a spring, shaded by an oak. A group of peasants and nobles, their tartans on their shoulders, were singing a hunting song in chorus; next entered a captain who, raising both arms to heaven, called up on the Spirit of Evil; another captain then joined him, they left together and the hunters took up their song again. She found herself back in the familiar woods of her youth, deep in Walter Scott. She fancied she could hear, through the mist, the sound of bagpipes echoing [se répéter] across the heather. Her recollections of the novel helped her to grasp the story, so that she followed the libretto line by line, while fleeting memories [insaisissables pensées] kept straying into her mind, only to vanish instantly under the impetus of the music. (2008, 197; 2001, 302) From this beginning through to the emotional climax of the performance— ­in which she simultaneously “recognized that same rapture, that same anguish that had brought her so close to death” (198; 303) and yet contrasts her own lover’s duplicity with the genuine emotion of the novel’s hero—Emma inhabits and is inhabited by the performance, even as she maintains enough distance from it to make comparisons and contrasts. In this way, Flaubert’s reliance on Scott foregrounds the drift of texts, their inescapability, their easy adaptability into different media, the confusion enabled when fictional characters transform into flesh-and-blood actors with real-world reputations and histories who then transform into celebrities associated with the characters they play, and finally the manner in which texts are always the active and ongoing constructions of individual readers. Madame Bovary does not just adapt or reiterate Scott. Rather, its sustained and self-conscious interaction with Scott highlights, at its most extreme moments, textuality itself and the many ways in which any text or aesthetic mode survives through a complex combination of incidents of resistance, adaptation, and adoption.

Conclusion The legacy of Scott that was carried into European fiction through the length of the nineteenth century is thus as complex and varied as the critical appraisals of Scott have proven to be from the time of his death until today. As I have shown, in a number of realist novels Scott is a convenient shorthand for the Romantic or the enchanted, a useful encapsulation of a paradigm that realist authors repeatedly deploy. To be sure, the purposes

64  Geoffrey Baker in figuring Scott differ; in some, the Romanticism he represents is looked upon as woefully outmoded and passé, while in others, the look backwards to Scott is freighted more fondly with nostalgia for lost possibility and departed newness, in an era that often saw itself as disenchanted and developed. At times, too, Scott’s legacy emerges as an even more complex site for the mixture of these modes: of enchantment and disenchantment, of the promise of progress and of the comforts of nostalgia. Scott’s widely translated status, immense readership, and adaptability to other genres (like drama or the opera) made him perhaps a more useful cipher for the legacy of Romanticism in realist novels than other prominent figures of Romanticism could have been, whose reputation or plots were characterised more by excess than Scott’s were: Byron, say, or Hoffmann. I would suggest that, in the close wrestling of realism with Scott, there might be something even deeper going on to explain his regular appearance in later nineteenth-century novels, in comparison with other Romantic authors. It is perhaps not just Scott’s function as a legacy of Romanticism but rather his simultaneous necessity to the rise of realism that made it so necessary for realist authors to engage him and to credit his influence on their own prose, while also permitting their characters or narrators to dismiss him as the relic of a more credulous, less advanced age. Scott’s innovations and his own mixture of historicism and enchantment made him an enduring problem to realism, concerned as it was with the forms and epistemologies of historicism and the fates of enchantment. His legacy in later nineteenth-century narrative is perhaps best seen as a constant challenge to those writing fiction in his wake.

Notes 1 I include citations both for translations, which I have occasionally modified for fidelity to the original, and for the original, for those who wish to consult it. When no translation is cited, the translation is my own. For the Flaubert correspondence (accessed 24 December 2016), no page numbers for the original are given, as his letters are housed in un-paginated, open-access form on the Université de Rouen’s website. All emphases in quotes from his correspondence are his. 2 I lean heavily here on the fantastic timeline of Scott reception in Europe assembled by Barnaby (2014) and cited below. 3 The title protagonist of Fontane’s novel has even been read as a nod to Effie Deans of Scott’s The Heart of Midlothian (1818).

References Auerbach, Erich. (1946) 1968. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature. Translated by Willard Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Balzac, Honoré de. 1872. “Richelieu: Chronique française, par M. James.” In Œuvres complètes, Vol. 22, edited by Calmann Lévy, 88–91. Paris: Michel Lévy Frères.

Use and Abuse of Romance  65 ———. 1976. La Comédie humaine. 12 vols. Edited by Pierre Citron. Paris: Gallimard. Barnaby, Paul. 2014. “Timeline of the European Reception of Sir Walter Scott, 1802–2005.” In The Reception of Sir Walter Scott in Europe, edited by Murray Pittock, xxiv–lxxiv. London: Bloomsbury. Brandes, Georg. 1897. Naturalismus in England: Die Seeschule: Byron und seine Gruppe. Translated by Adolf Strodtmann. Leipzig: Barsdorf. Brown, Marshall. 1981. “The Logic of Realism: A Hegelian Approach.” PMLA 96 (2): 224–241. Eliot, George. (1871–1872) 1998a. Middlemarch. Edited by David Carroll. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (1860) 1998b. The Mill on the Floss. Edited by Gordon Haight. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Flaubert, Gustave. (1856) 2001. Madame Bovary. Edited by Thierry Laget. Paris: Gallimard. ———. (1856) 2008. Madame Bovary. Translated by Margaret Mauldon. O ­ xford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1926–1933. Correspondance. Edited by Louis Conard. Université de Rouen. Accessed 24 December 2016. http://flaubert.univ-rouen.fr/correspon dance/conard/lettres/lettres1.html. ———. 1982. The Letters of Gustave Flaubert. Edited by Francis Steegmuller. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Fontane, Theodor. (1895) 2000. Effi Briest. Translated by Helen Chambers. Harmondsworth: Penguin. ———. 1974. Werke, Schriften und Briefe. 20 vols in 4 sections. Edited by ­Walter Keitel and Helmuth Nürnberger. Munich: Hanser. Gallagher, Catherine. 2006. “The Rise of Fictionality.” In The Novel, vol. 1, edited by Franco Moretti, 336–363. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lukács, Georg. (1916) 1996. Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature. Translated by Anna Bostock. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. ———. (1937) 1983. The Historical Novel. Translated by Hannah and Stanley Mitchell. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Levine, George. 1981. The Realistic Imagination: English Fiction from Frankenstein to Lady Chatterley. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Martineau, Harriet. 1832. “The Achievements of the Genius of Scott.” Tait’s Edinburgh Magazine 9 (December): 445–460. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1976. Marx Engels on Literature and Art. Moscow: Progress Publishers. Peterson, Linda H. 2009. Becoming a Woman of Letters: Myths of Authorship and Facts of the Victorian Market. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Scott, Walter. (1814) 1998. Waverley; Or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since. Edited by Claire Lamont. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shaw, Harry E. 1999. Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot. Ithaca, NY: ­Cornell University Press. Trollope, Anthony. (1869) 1992. Phineas Finn: The Irish Member. 2 vols. Edited by Jacques Berthoud. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (1874) 2011. Phineas Redux. Edited by John Bowen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

66  Geoffrey Baker ———. (1883) 1999. An Autobiography. Edited by Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zola, Émile. (1880) 1893. The Experimental Novel and Other Essays. Translated by Belle M. Sherman. New York: Cassell Publishing. ———. 2003–2009. Œuvres Complètes. 20 vols. Edited by Henri Mitterand. Paris: Nouveau Monde.

3 Chekhov on the Meaning of Life After Romanticism and Nihilism Yuri Corrigan Anton Chekhov (1860–1904) once mused that he would have liked “to meet a philosopher like Nietzsche somewhere on a train car or a steamship and to stay up all night talking with him” (PSSP 1977, 6:29).1 The conversation is tempting to imagine. As two major artists thinking and writing at the Fin de Siècle, Nietzsche (1844–1900) and Chekhov would have had much to discuss. Both stood at what felt eerily like the dead end of a magnificent era for literature and thought in the nineteenth century, Nietzsche as the iconoclastic inheritor of German Romanticism, Chekhov as the last major writer of Russian realism. Both placed this sense of finality—the end of an age, the eve of something new and as yet ­unarticulated—­at the centre of their creative projects. Both were acutely aware of living in a time of widespread disillusionment and disenchantment, and both had closely studied the phenomena of depression, boredom, and despair that were reaching what seemed like epidemic proportions around them. In their very different attempts to search for the sources and conditions of re-enchantment, both Chekhov and Nietzsche held firmly, each in his own way, to the Romantic legacy of resistance to nihilism. What might have made their conversation especially interesting was how starkly they differed over what elements of this tradition they chose to empower. The early Romantics responded to the Enlightenment prospect of a reductively materialistic universe where “every idea of meaning and significance” had been potentially “undermined” (Bates 2016, 554) with the creative mission, in the words of the poet N ­ ovalis, to “make the world Romantic,” that is, to “find the original meaning again” and “to endow the commonplace with a higher meaning” (1997, 60). These activities of “finding” and “endowing” meaning were roughly synonymous for the Romantics, since to create, in its highest sense, meant also to discover the universal will within oneself (Abrams 1971, 48–53; Berlin 1999, 98). For both Nietzsche and Chekhov, by contrast, neither of whom could accept so harmonious a union between self and world, the difference between creating and discovering meaning was critical. Nietzsche, for his part, emphasised the vital importance of creating meaning as opposed to discovering it, since, in the absence

68  Yuri Corrigan of a divine universal will, it was only the intentional force of personal creativity that could transform the “desert” of the world, as he put it, “into bountiful farmland” (2008, 235; see also Young 2003, 94–96). Nietzsche’s daring injunction to become an artist of life and to create the meanings of the world seized the imagination of Russia’s leading modernists during Chekhov’s time, and galvanised a neo-Romantic Symbolist movement that enthusiastically proclaimed the theurgical task of the artist to transform the “false, filthy, boring, hideous” life of the past into a “new life” that would be “just, pure, cheerful, and beautiful” (Blok 1966, 366). 2 Chekhov took a very different view, intensely suspicious as he was of the intentions that lurked behind the impulse to endow meaning. If Nietzsche saw the creative potential of the self as the ultimate source of all meaning, Chekhov advocated a more relational and contemplative approach. In this chapter, I shall explore the distinctive case he made in his stories and plays for the extreme dangers of creating meaning and for the importance of discovering it. In presenting Chekhov’s artistic meditation on the problem of meaning, I should first note that such a reading might clash with our canonical understanding of his work. Indeed, any attempt to evaluate Chekhov as a moral thinker must take into account his tendency to use the word “philosophy” pejoratively (Kataev 2008, 69), his professed discomfort with the grand moral cast of the Russian novel, and his passionate commitment to being what he called a “free artist and only that” (PSSP 1976 3:12). Unlike Dostoevsky and Tolstoy, who sought to alleviate and repair the many ailments of a disintegrating society (personal malaise, political polarisation, ideological inflammation) through their writing, Chekhov has been canonised more as a portrayer of such illnesses than a prescriber of remedies. Amongst his contemporary writers, many of whom were eager to offer their own solutions to the cultural crises of the time, Chekhov was both loved and hated for his ostensible moral agnosticism. Maxim Gorky, for one, wholeheartedly approved of Chekhov’s aesthetic programme as unwittingly revolutionary; in his view, Chekhov was depicting the dreariness of everyday life so faithfully that his readers would have to rebel in “disgust” both against the status quo as replicated in his works and against the mimetic realism itself that presented it so neutrally (Gorky 1997, 53). Conversely, the Symbolist poet Zinaida Gippius (2003), anticipating many of Russia’s foremost twentieth-­century modernists (including Akhmatova, Tsvetaeva, and Mandel’shtam), roundly rejected Chekhov’s “tender, subtle, and blind tedium,” which, in her view, could lead “nowhere” except into the “final sweetness of death by freezing” (7:92). I submit that such canonical appraisals of Chekhov’s realist project, whether positive or negative, undervalue, if not entirely overlook, his constructive reinvention of the Romantic quest for meaning. Chekhov’s implicit critique of Nietzsche’s doctrine—and his anticipatory warning to the modernist and existentialist movements for which that doctrine

Chekhov on the Meaning of Life  69 would prove so formative—was that the wilful creation of meaning represents not a deliverance from meaninglessness, but an escape from the meanings that are already present, even abundant, in the landscapes of daily life. In his stories and plays, Chekhov warned his readers against an implicit (and unlikely) alliance in modernist thought between popular forms of nihilism and Romanticism that sought to negate life’s meanings in order to create new meanings according to their creator’s own preferences. Chekhov endeavoured to salvage and amend the Romantic project by injecting it with an ethical dimension, by insisting on the moral weight of meaning as the mark of its authenticity. He rejected the iteration of Romanticism that was gaining ground at the Fin de Siècle as all but indistinguishable from nihilism—both inclinations, the ­Romantic and the nihilistic, in Chekhov’s view, had become widely abused anaesthetic drugs, ready-made paths of escape from the trials and demands of a meaningful life. He portrayed the discovery of meaning, by contrast, while vitalising and redemptive, as imposing extreme moral and emotional demands that required considerable inward resources both to see and to bear. I shall begin by tracing Chekhov’s critique of meaning-­ creation through a brief selection of his stories and plays, before turning to his more foundational study of the concealment, suppression, and discovery of meaning.

The Sky-Packers Chekhov’s critique of meaning-creation is directly linked to his complex but largely sceptical view of the neo-Romantic Symbolist movement (see Nichiporov 2011) that was ascendant in Russia in the 1890s—a group of poets and writers who, as Boris Pasternak (1991) once quipped, “nurtured a whole generation of packers [pokolenie upakovshchikov]” in their eagerness to “overfill the sky to its very limits” with lofty meanings (4:126). Such “sky-packers,” in Chekhov’s works of this period, employ their idealistic and narcissistic mythologies as a means of distracting themselves from an array of painful realisations. “The Princess” (1889) is an expressive case in point, worth relating in some detail as illustrative of Chekhov’s impatience with the abuses of Romanticism. The story portrays the 29-year-old Princess Vera Gavrilovna as she stays the night at a monastery in the Russian countryside, eager to inspire the simple people around her, imagining that “each person looking at her must be thinking: ‘God has sent us an angel’” (PSS 1977, 7:237). On her evening walk, she encounters a doctor who had once worked on her estate; she greets him warmly and, sensing his hostility, asks for his opinion about her. To her surprise and horror, the doctor seizes the opportunity to launch—at first falteringly, but in increasingly avid detail—into an account of her many offenses: her callous treatment of her servants, her injurious attempts at philanthropy, her ruthless dealings with himself and his now dead wife, and her collectively dreaded visits to the

70  Yuri Corrigan monastery. When the doctor finally recollects himself, apologises, and leaves, the Princess conjures a swarm of Romantic remedies against the force of these ­revelations; she imagines “that the trees, and stars, and bats were sorry for her, and that the bell was tolling melodically only to comfort her,” and she spends a highly pleasurable evening imagining further afflictions and insults, all to the eventual shame and regret of her “enemies.” When, in the morning, the distraught doctor apologises for his outburst, the princess, “trying to resemble a bird, floats into her carriage,” feeling the “delight” of “forgiving offenses,” remaining both impenetrably insulated within her fantasy and ecstatically happy (7:247). The story calls attention to itself in its departure from Chekhov’s much-celebrated even-handedness and anti-didacticism (his letters indicate the awkwardness he felt about the story’s “protesting tone” [PSSP 1976, 3:74]). The theme itself—of the invention of an uplifting story about one’s life that erases the experience of others and thus enables the commission of further harms—repeatedly shook Chekhov from his preferred authorial position as “impartial witness” (PSSP 1975, 2:280). He would show his hand in similar thematic circumstances in his fable-like “Grasshopper” (1892), which describes the bitterly ironic come-uppance of a young woman who “worships great men” and “sees them every night in her dreams” (PSS 1977, 8:10), and who conducts an affair with a talented painter while neglecting her husband—a seemingly ordinary doctor—only to discover at her husband’s untimely deathbed that he was, in fact, “a great, extraordinary man,” a luminary of the medical world who had been on his way to glorious renown. Harsher yet is ­Chekhov’s characterisation, in The Three Sisters (1900), of the officer Solyony, who, fashioning himself after the heroes of Russian Romanticism, forces others to participate unwillingly in his heroic fantasies, and ultimately draws the Baron Tuzenbach into the scenery of his imagination for long enough to murder him in a duel. The above cases present the creation of meaning largely as a by-­product of narcissism and obtuseness. In this sense, they constitute only one part of Chekhov’s more even-handed and expansive study of the abuses of Romanticism, in which he explored how meaning-creation could also work to sustain, rather than destroy, larger social and interpersonal networks. Amongst the more complex of such studies is the figure of Kovrin in “The Black Monk” (1894), an overwrought and overworked scholar who experiences psychotic hallucinations in which a monk appears to him and praises him as a genius and a prophet. In his conversations with the monk, Kovrin is aware of his own insanity, but he resolves to indulge the fantasy for a variety of reasons, including the joy of feeling special and chosen that brings the world to radiant life around him. In the midst of his ecstasy, he readily accepts the thought, suggested by the monk, possibly channeling Nietzsche (Debreczeny 1993, 179), that his madness is only madness to “the herd” and might, in fact, be a form of inspired

Chekhov on the Meaning of Life  71 genius that will chart new paths forwards for humanity. Kovrin’s megalomania, in this instance, however, is not entirely self-serving. Apart from the imagined benefits to humankind, his delusions also serve a specific function within his family: his father-in-law is similarly seized by a manic quest for greatness, in his case as a professional gardener; and Kovrin’s young wife is passionately involved in sustaining her father’s mania. Kovrin himself is treated as an extension of his fatherin-law’s garden, since the latter raised him as a son and therefore sees him proudly as his own product. To the delight of his family members, preoccupied as they are with visions of fame and glory, Kovrin’s dreams of grandeur render his features “special, radiant, inspired, and very attractive” (PSS 1977, 8:234–235), while also propelling him in his career. When his wife finally discovers his illness and forces him to seek a cure, the hero’s confrontation with his own mediocrity and with the absurdity of his family destroys the equilibrium of the household which had bolstered itself on his greatness, inciting a profound disappointment that hastens the father-in-law’s despairing death, the dissolution of Kovrin’s marriage, and the demise of the once flourishing garden. “The Black Monk” can be said to anticipate the doctrine of theurgy that, partly under Nietzsche’s influence, would become central to R ­ ussian Symbolism over the next decade—that is, the notion of the artist as creator, as “transformer” or “transfigurer” of reality, that evolves over this period from its more careful theoretical formulation in Vladimir ­Solovyov’s writings (where it is as much a project of discovery as of creation) into a more radical “utopian project” for “the total reorganization and divinization of the world and man” (Paperno 1994, 7). 3 In “The Black Monk,” Chekhov presents the theurgical impulse to transform the world (regardless of how inspired or beneficial the artist’s programme may be) as an escape from the undesirable and unflattering project of self-­knowledge: in Kovrin’s case, from contempt for himself as “an ordinary professor, who expounds in flat, boring, and heavy language the ordinary ideas of other people” (PSS 1977, 8:256).4 Theurgy, in this sense, Chekhov seems to suggest, is not a new idea, but yet another instantiation of the expedient delusions that already sustain a fragile bourgeois order. Indeed, the function of Kovrin’s fantasy of self-glorification within his family recalls the life of the estate in Uncle Vanya (1898), which had been upheld, according to Vanya, by its inhabitants’ collective inclination to imbue its master (the professor Serebryakov) with divine qualities: as Vanya tells the professor, all our thoughts and feelings for twenty-five years belonged to you alone; in the day we talked about you, took pride in you, pronounced your name with reverence. . . . For us, you were a being of a higher order. (PSS 1978, 13:101–102)

72  Yuri Corrigan Or we might recall the even measlier country estate of Nikolai Ivanych in “Gooseberries” (1898), which the landowner, by means of his own theurgical will and imagination, transfigures into a bourgeois paradise. In portraying tenuous and crumbling estates founded on wilful delusions, Chekhov is also inquiring into the possibility of discovering other, more stable and generative systems of meaning. In The Cherry Orchard (1904), Simeonov-Pishchik comments that Nietzsche, “a man of colossal intellect,” says that “it’s okay to forge bank notes” (13:230); but when Anisim, from “In the Ravine” (1900), is imprisoned for forgery, his father laments that the coins his son has forged have become mixed together with his real money, thus rendering the two currencies mutually indistinguishable and therefore equally valueless (PSS 1977, 10:169). If one accepts Nietzsche’s programme for the creation of meaning—so the extended metaphor seems to suggest—then the whole concept of meaning itself crumbles, unless—importantly for Chekhov—one might find some way of grounding the currency.

Buried (and Suppressed) Meanings By way of introduction to the more constructive dimension of Chekhov’s treatment of the search for meaning, we can briefly consider a parable that he wrote at the age of 27, his favourite of his early stories. In “Fortune” (1887), three men look out over the steppe at dusk. One of them, an old shepherd, tells the other two a story about Efim Zhmenya, a solitary and eccentric villager who was widely distrusted and feared in the countryside. The villagers, according to the old shepherd, wanted to kill Zhmenya, but chose to spare his life since he alone knew the location of treasures that had been buried under the ground (the old shepherd calls these buried treasures “schast’e,” which can be rendered either as “fortune” or “happiness”). These fortunes, the old shepherd explains, “are enchanted, so you could find them and still not see them”: “In order to find them and see them, you would need a talisman,” which Zhmenya apparently possessed (PSS 1976, 6:213). While the three men, each in his own way, ponder the existence of these buried treasures, Chekhov describes the barren appearance of the steppe where the fortunes are supposedly concealed. The landscape, as if disavowing any suspicion of abundance, has “a sullen and death-like look,” showing an “utter indifference to man” in its “immobility and silence.” “No meaning,” we are told, “could be seen in any of it”: “No soul would ever know why the burial mounds stood there, nor what secret was hidden beneath them” (6:216–217). The story offers both a parable on the hiddenness of life’s meanings and a preliminary sketch of Chekhov’s aesthetic programme. Chekhov was fascinated with austere physical and moral landscapes that seemed, like the steppe, “sullen,” “death-like,” “immobile,” “silent,” “meaningless,”

Chekhov on the Meaning of Life  73 but that yielded greater degrees of access to what was hidden within them to the more active or engaged observer. The motif of buried meanings would reappear in a more literal form over a decade later in “Lady with a Dog” (1899), in Gurov’s realisation that, beneath Moscow’s oppressively shallow and impersonal veneer, there lies a secret dimension where everything that is “important, interesting, necessary” and that “constituted the core of his life” is utterly invisible to others (PSS 1977, 10:141). The discovery of hitherto undetected layers of potential experience, we are told, teaches Gurov to see the world as unplumbed and mysterious: “he no longer believed what he saw and supposed that each person, under the cover of secrecy, as under the cover of night, was living his own real and most interesting life” (10:141). As a psychologist, Chekhov was interested in the problem of Zhmenya’s talisman—or, in other words, in what the experience of meaning would demand from its discoverer, in terms of both insight and personal sacrifice (since, from the old shepherd’s account, we can infer that Zhmenya’s gift was also a significant burden). The notion of concealed or buried meanings was also at the heart of Chekhov’s theatrical revolution, and this placed his work in productive tension with European modernist theatre at the turn of the century. Maurice Maeterlinck’s manifesto for a new kind of Symbolist theater, for example, comes very close to describing Chekhov’s own project. In attempting to rid the stage of the “blood, screams, and swords” of “high adventure,” Maeterlinck sought to portray instead the “tragedy of everyday life” that, in his view, was “far more real, far more profound, and far more attuned to our true being.” The concern of the playwright, according to Maeterlinck, was “to render visible that which is astonishing in the simple fact of living” (Maeterlinck 2011, 300–301). Maeterlinck’s statement closely parallels Chekhov’s intention to embed the heights of happiness and tragedy within the commonplace—that is, as he is said to have put it on one occasion, to show people “eating their dinner, just eating their dinner, while at the same time their happiness is being formed or their lives are being broken” (Surkov 1961, 206). The important difference here is that Chekhov, unlike Maeterlinck, did not seek to render these “astonishing” elements “visible,” but often quite the opposite. Dr Chebutykin’s goodbye to Irina in The Three Sisters (1900) can serve as an example of Chekhov’s attempts to render the “astonishing” invisible. The old man’s extreme fondness for Irina can be explained by the suggestion that Irina is, in fact, his daughter (on this point, see Shelekhov 2009). We recall that when Masha asks Chebutykin whether her mother returned his love for her, the doctor answers that he does not remember (PSS 1978, 13:176) and, of course, he would be unable to admit it if it were the case, since such a revelation could jeopardise both Irina’s memory of her parents and her relationship with her family. The possibility of a familial connection between Chebutykin and Irina,

74  Yuri Corrigan though suggested with extreme subtlety, adds a significant dimension to the play’s final act, where the doctor, a lonely and embittered alcoholic, finds himself suddenly forced to part forever from his daughter whose existence constitutes for him, as he puts it, “all that is most precious on earth” (13:125). In parting from Irina, Chebutykin finds himself suddenly overtaken by grief and tenderness (“my glorious one, my good one  .  .  . my golden one”), and then, recollecting himself, conceals his emotion through the use of sarcasm. The moment passes apparently undetected by all on stage (not to mention by most audiences, and perhaps even by many directors), thus provoking the question why one might choose to conceal the dramatic substance of one’s play from general view—or, to quote the old shepherd’s frustrated question in “Fortune,” “what’s the point of these fortunes if they’re buried under the ground?” (PSS 1976, 6:214). Chekhov’s implicit answer, as we shall see below, is threefold: first, that to detect these meanings requires something from their discoverer; second, that the viewer (or reader, or director, or actor) should be able to choose whether or not to engage with these potentials; and third, that the moral weight of such revelations tends, in Chekhov’s view, to repel rather than to attract attention. Indeed, what is most distinctive in Chekhov’s depiction of the discovery of meaning is how carefully his characters avoid it. His final play, The Cherry Orchard (1904), probes the oppressive and haunting qualities of a landscape oversaturated with meaning. The play’s principal characters are marked by their palpable, but almost universally unacknowledged, desire to be liberated from an environment where the trees resemble the ghosts of the deceased (PSS 1978, 13:210), where the river carries the memory of a drowned child (13:202, 211, 234), and where the souls of former slaves “watch” “from every leaf, every tree trunk” (13:227). The designation of “comedy” in the play flows from the obstinate temperamental lightness of characters who will do everything in their power not to tap into the morally demanding currents (personal tragedies, social crises, political impasses) underlying all of their interactions, and who dance over the ballroom of a house that carries the burden of centuries of personal and collective memory, while pretending (even to themselves) that they wish to save their estate from ruin. The estate, in this context, is not really the embodiment of an ideal and beautiful past (Gromov 1993, 373–375) as it has canonically been viewed (see Parts 2008, 109–138); nor can the family’s failure to save the estate be attributed ultimately to aristocratic “fecklessness and incompetence” (Braun 2000, 112–113), since their actions are in keeping with their largely unacknowledged desire to be disembarrassed of an unpalatably distressing and emotionally charged landscape. When Ranevskaya attacks Trofimov’s utopian idealism by accusing him of being able to “look boldly ahead”—only because, as she puts it, “you don’t see or expect anything horrible, since life is still hidden from your young eyes” (PSS 1978, 13:233)—her words

Chekhov on the Meaning of Life  75 touch on the play’s unspoken pact between the Romantic idealists (Anya and ­Trofimov) eager to invent new forms, and the incipient nihilists (Ranevskaya and Gaev) who would prefer to forget and avoid all that lies concealed within the old forms. After the loss of the estate, Anya’s eyes “shine like diamonds” as she heralds the beginning of a new life; Ranevskaya admits that she is sleeping better; and Gaev rejoices that they have all “stopped worrying and suffering” and have “calmed down and cheered up” (13:247–248). The celebration, which ends in a rushed departure (leaving the old servant locked up inside the house), has the eerie and overly hasty quality of a frantic flight or getaway. Such an alliance between Romanticism and nihilism—as two pathways of escape from the discovery of meaning—appears continually in Chekhov’s prose work, and is most concisely distilled in “The Student” (1894), which, of all his short stories, Chekhov described as his favourite. Here, Ivan, a 22-year-old seminarian, is on his way home from hunting, cold, hungry, and in a bad mood, on the evening of Good Friday. As he walks, he reflects on the vicious cycle of poverty, ignorance, and grief that connects the present to the distant past and the future in a continuous loop. He stops by a fire tended by two widows, mother and daughter, Vasilisa and Lukeriya, and continues his line of thought by reflecting aloud on how the apostle Peter must have warmed himself by a similar fire on the night he denied Christ. Carried away, Ivan proceeds to describe in detail Peter’s fear, shame, grief, and powerlessness on that night as he watched Christ being beaten in the courtyard. The widows respond emotionally to Ivan’s story; Vasilisa bursts into tears, and the daughter Lukeriya seems to be “holding back intense pain” (PSS 1977, 8:308). As Ivan continues on his way, inspired by the effect of his words on the widows, he is overtaken by a feeling of joy at the thought that all things, “governed” as they are by “truth and beauty” (8:309), are connected by a “continuous chain” extending throughout history. In this new light, “life,” we are told, “seemed to him wondrous, miraculous, and filled with a lofty meaning” (8:309). Scholarship on this story has been polarised—unnecessarily, I would argue—between the Romantic and the nihilistic. Robert Louis Jackson (1993) has proposed an influential Romantic reading by insisting on the redemptive message of Ivan’s “paschal transfiguration” as “profoundly affirmative in its eternal yes to life” (133); against such an interpretation, Wolf Schmid has highlighted the inherent pessimism of the story. From the brief descriptions of the widows, as Schmid points out, we can surmise that the mother lived a generally good life among gentlefolk as a nurse and nanny, while the daughter is scarred from having lived with a violently abusive husband in the peasant village. The reader, therefore, is invited to discern what the student does not: that the mother and daughter have experienced the passion narrative of Peter and Christ from within—that Vasilisa has lived through Peter’s anguish in

76  Yuri Corrigan having stood by helplessly and watched her daughter’s life of abuse from a place of comfort. This “terror” that the student fails to see, in Schmid’s view, ironically “confirms the pessimistic image of the [endless loop] more than it does the optimistic image of the chain” (Schmid 1998, 291). Both readings seem to fall into the trap of acceding to the student’s dual world views, the nihilistic and the Romantic. Indeed, both of the student’s philosophical ruminations—on the absurdity of human striving and on the glorious interconnection of all things—are presented as diversions from the concealed catharsis of the story, in which two women are astonished, whether joyfully or not, by their direct participation in a narrative whose meaning extends beyond them. That the student only touches lightly on this point confirms neither of his conflicting world views, but only suggests that, on this occasion, he lacks the sensitivity of insight to perceive “that which is astonishing in the simple fact of living” and, perhaps, the moral generosity to respond to its demands. In this sense, Ivan’s journey shows us how the apparently juxtaposed Romantic and nihilistic worldviews (both of which the student embraces on the night in question) conspire to obscure what is more substantive from view. Indeed, if the Romantic attempt to imbue the world with “lofty significance” represents a form of escape from life’s morally challenging meanings, so too, for Chekhov, does the nihilistic impulse to perceive it as empty and absurd. Such is the tenor of Chekhov’s decisive study of nihilistic despair, “A Boring Story” (1889), where the hero, a famous medical scholar, discovers with horror, in the months before his imminent death, that “everything is disgusting” and that “there’s nothing to live for” (PSS 1977, 7:291). As has often been observed, the story responds implicitly to Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich,” published three years earlier, in presenting a “more honest reflection of the dying process” (Emerson 1997, 121; see also Hahn 1997), or in pushing back aesthetically against Tolstoy’s forceful didacticism (Kataev 2011, 170). Chekhov’s disagreement with Tolstoy, I would suggest, extends to their very different conceptions of the crisis of meaninglessness. Whereas Tolstoy presents his protagonist’s despair as an awakening, a discovery of having lived thoughtlessly and immorally, Chekhov is at pains to point out that his protagonist suffers primarily from a lack of insight into his immediate surroundings, that is, from “relating,” as Chekhov put it to his publisher, “too carelessly to the inner lives of those around him” (PSSP 1976, 3:256). The epiphany of meaninglessness, for the protagonist, represents an escape rather than an awakening. Chekhov offers us the subtle irony of a highly intelligent scholar lamenting the futility and pointlessness of existence while the “ceiling” of his country house “moans” with his daughter’s mysterious weeping, a phenomenon which he never thinks of enquiring into, since to enquire further would be to accept the moral burden of his daughter’s unhappiness. “I can do

Chekhov on the Meaning of Life  77 nothing,” he claims, “the girl has some weight on her soul, but I understand nothing” (PSS 1977, 7:302). In responding to Tolstoy’s own personal crisis as documented in his “Confession” (1882), Chekhov, in “A Boring Story,” diagnoses the discovery of meaninglessness not as an awakening “to the dreadful situation in which we all find ourselves” (Tolstoy 1987, 45), but as a flight from the moral claims of others upon us that would make our lives meaningful (while also making them more difficult). For Chekhov, the worldviews of Romanticism and nihilism, in their popular and simplified forms at the turn of century, were used widely as anaesthetics to protect the mind from the harrowing and morally demanding experience of meaning. As the character Ananyev in C ­ hekhov’s “Lights” (1888) observes, “thoughts about the pointlessness of life” “contain in their essence something alluring, narcotic, like tobacco or morphine” (PSS 1977, 7:115–116). When Ananyev struggles with pangs of conscience after seducing and abandoning a married woman, he immediately summons the nihilistic world view as a calming sedative: “My conscience tormented me. In order to suppress this unbearable feeling, I assured myself that it was all nonsense and vanity, that [she] and I will both die and rot, that her grief is nothing in comparison with death.” As his moral anxiety keeps mounting, however, Ananyev finds that the consolation that “life had no meaning” is “no longer helping” (7:134). Similarly, in “Ward Six” (1892), Dr Ragin justifies his neglect of his patients by consoling himself with elaborate meditations on the inevitability of death, the comparative smallness of the planet earth in the universe, and the insignificance of all human striving when viewed from far away. Eventually, as with Ananyev, attempts to medicate moral anxiety through nihilism stop working; Ragin’s “assurances” that “everything in time will decay and turn to clay” (PSS 1977, 8:122) lose out to the force of the “terrible, unbearable thought” that the prisoners of the ward, who had been under his care, “had been forced to endure this same pain day after day for years.” On awakening from his narcotised state, he asks himself “how it could have happened that for more than 20 years he had not known it and had refused to know it” (8:125).

Free and Contemplative Reading It has been noted that the phrase “the meaning of life” is problematic in that meaning, strictly speaking, is something that can be attributed to words but not to objects (Eagleton 2007, 1). Chekhov was wary of treating “life” as a loaded signifier. As he wrote to his wife shortly before his death, “You’re asking: what is life? That’s the same as asking: what is a carrot? A carrot is a carrot, and nothing else is known” (PSSP 1982, 12:93). At the same time, however, Chekhov’s meditation on the revelation of meaning rests on an implicit analogy between the texts that

78  Yuri Corrigan he shares with his readers and the environments in which his characters find themselves. Chekhov was interested in the mind that is forced to respond to a boring (monotonous, claustrophobic, and finite) landscape with the task of bringing its secrets and potentialities to life, a situation directly analogous to the activity of reading. For Chekhov, there were at least two kinds of especially bad readers: the nihilistic reader, eager to conclude that the text itself is both boring and meaningless; and the Romantic reader, eager to impose a radiant system of meaning in order to animate the text according to his or her own preferences. In the emergent modernism that was extending from art into politics during his time, Chekhov perceived a dangerous alliance between these two kinds of readers—the nihilistic and the Romantic—in what he saw as an eagerness to declare, first, that the text of the world was devoid of meaning and, second, that new meanings had to be created and imposed upon reality in order to animate it. More than anything, Chekhov was suspicious of the eye that chose to read the world as dead—the reader who, either oblivious or uninterested, would reject the undiscovered “fortunes” that lay everywhere beneath the surface in order to declare (along with Treplev’s “world soul” in The Seagull) that everything was “empty, empty, empty” and “cold, cold, cold” (PSS 1978, 13:13). Over the course of his writing, he conceived of this kind of spiritual claustrophobia more and more as a failure of the moral imagination and as a conscious or semi-conscious flight from the claims of others upon oneself. There were amongst the Russian Symbolists those who shared Chekhov’s anxieties about the wilful creation of meaning. The poet and philosopher Viacheslav Ivanov (1886–1949), for one, adapted the concept of theurgy as a programme of discovery rather than creation—as an endeavour, that is, “to discern the noumenal within the phenomenal world” (Wachtel 1994, 145). Ivanov (1987) distinguished two ways of understanding the task of the artist: the way of discovery, which he saw embodied in Goethe, and the way of creation, which he associated with Novalis. Whereas Novalis saw poetic cognition as the “act of creating the world,” Goethe called “for a pure contemplation” that would be “independent of will” (bezvol’noe) (4:264). At the end of the nineteenth century, in an age of greater metaphysical doubt, these two polarities can be seen as represented by Nietzsche and Chekhov. Chekhov, according to this schema, is very much of Goethe’s persuasion in his conception of meaning as revelatory. If, however, for Goethe, the world as brought to life by contemplative insight comes to express its own infinite and transcendent sources, Chekhov, in his meditation on hidden depths, avoids speculating on the ultimate sources of meaning. Indeed, for Chekhov the search for meaning is primarily an ethical, rather than metaphysical, problem. Chekhov was interested in the possibility of moral theurgy—the development of an ability, through the awakening of an ethical imagination, to unlock the potential concealed

Chekhov on the Meaning of Life  79 within apparently desolate sites of spiritual imprisonment. Such is the journey of Laevsky in “The Duel” (1891), who initially finds himself intolerably incarcerated within the conditions of his life, in the midst of unredeemable debts and an entanglement with an unwanted lover, Nadezhda Fyodorovna, a married woman who depends on him entirely and whom he, in his state of conjugal imprisonment, has come to despise with a “heavy hatred . . . insulting even for a dog” (PSS 1977, 7:366). After consoling himself with Romantic dreams of escape and the advent of a new and beautiful existence, Laevsky lives through a painful series of humiliations, exposures, and shocks until he finds himself “looking into the face” of Nadezhda Fyodorovna to discover “that this unhappy and depraved woman was for him the only close, kindred and irreplaceable person” (7:439). “Like one released from prison or hospital,” he finds himself “peering into long-familiar objects and marveling that the tables, windows, chairs, light, and sea excited a living, childlike joy in him” (7:450); and he finds, on having deciphered these potentials, that he wishes to remain where he is and to work to redeem his situation. 5 As a consequence of his view that meaning should be revelatory, Chekhov was reticent in depicting positive moments of discovery in his works. When his characters descend from the heights of rapture or indifference and become engaged in projects of worth, Chekhov’s narrative instinct is invariably to destabilise and de-glamorise these discoveries so as to give his reader freedom over how to respond to them, if at all. In the case of Laevsky’s inward transformation in “The Duel,” his corresponding outward transformation into a “pitiful, shy, and defeated” creature (7:453) is given the weight of emphasis. When Laptev, in the conclusion of “Three Years” (1895), overcomes his fear and hatred of the family factory and takes responsibility for it, his moral triumph is carefully undermined by the overwhelming impression that his “life” is “ruined” and that he has turned himself into a “slave” (PSS 1977, 9:89). Similarly, when Ananyev, of “Lights,” is “forced by his conscience” to travel back to the small town of the woman he has deceived in order to “repent” and “beg her forgiveness” “without any sly philosophising,” (PSS 1977, 7:136), the moral epiphany is undermined by a narrative frame in which the narrator’s interlocutors either express uncertainty or scoff contemptuously at his conclusions. By camouflaging the discovery of meaning in his texts as subtly as he saw it embedded in life, Chekhov actively allowed his project to be reduced to “gloomy realism,” especially by his Romantically and nihilistically inclined readers. Chekhov’s realism, however, is distinctive in that it pushes back against the unguardedly affirmative and the sentimental not in order to undermine the Romantic project but in order to amend and preserve it. Chekhov wanted these kinds of epiphanies to demand something from their discoverers—a vigilant receptivity, a gift of insight, an emphatic self-restraint with regard to one’s own preferred narratives, a moral generosity and willingness

80  Yuri Corrigan to accept their weight and consequences. For the project of meaning to have any validity, it would have to hurt in some way, undertaken, as it would have to be, in the absence of philosophical anaesthetic.

Notes 1 I refer to the multivolume collection of Chekhov’s works (1974–1983) throughout as PSS (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii) and to the corresponding collection of his letters (1974–1983) as PSSP (Polnoe sobranie sochinenii. Pi’sma). All translations are mine. 2 Chekhov showed significant interest, throughout the 1890s, in Nietzsche’s thought, which he characterised (in 1895) as “not so much convincing as it is grandiose [bravurno]” (PSSP 1977, 6:29). For an overview of the ­Nietzsche-Chekhov connection, see Kapustin 2011. For the vital importance for the Russian Symbolists of Nietzsche’s call to “assign value and significance” to the “chaotic, meaningless agglomeration of events and things” (69) that constitute reality, see Clowes (1983; 1988, 115–172). 3 For a related interpretation of “The Black Monk” as anticipating “the fusion of symbolism and mysticism by some eight or ten years” (179), see Debreczeny (1993). 4 Nietzsche considered such an objection to his notion of meaning-creation. In The Gay Science, he noted that the desire for destruction, for change and for becoming can be the expression of an overflowing energy pregnant with the future, . . . but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, deprived, and underprivileged one who destroys and must destroy because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes him. (Nietzsche 2008, 235) 5 In his related reading of “The Duel,” Sobennikov (1997) describes Chekhov’s formulation of the “meaning of life” as “the thirst for truth” and “the movement toward it” which begins with the “reorganisation of oneself” through “persistent work” (29–30).

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82  Yuri Corrigan Pasternak, Boris. 1991. Sobranie sochinenii v pyati tomakh. 5 vols. Moscow: “Khudozhestvennaya Literatura.” Schmid, Wolf. 1998. Proza kak poeziia: Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, Avangard. St Petersburg: “Inapress.” Shelekhov, S. L. 2009. “Pered spektaklem.” Voprosy literatury 4: 130–166. Sobennikov, A. S. 1997. “Mezhdu ‘est Bog’ I ‘net Boga…” (O religiozno-­ filosofskikh traditsiiakh v tvorchestve A. P. Chekhova. Irkutsk: Izdatel’stvo Irkutskogo universiteta. Surkov, E. D. 1961. Chekhov i teatr. Moscow: Iskusstvo. Tolstoy, Leo. (1882) 1987. A Confession and Other Religious Writings. Translated by Jane Kentish. London: Penguin Books. Wachtel, Michael. 1994. Russian Symbolism and Literary Tradition: Goethe, Novalis, and the Poetics of Vyacheslav Ivanov. Madison, WI: The University of Wisconsin Press. Young, Julian. 2003. The Death of God and the Meaning of Life. New York: Routledge.

Part II

Fin-de-Siècle Romanticism

4 Keats Gone Wilde Wilde’s Romantic SelfFashioning at the Fin de Siècle Ya-Feng Wu

This chapter explores the Victorian afterlife of John Keats (1795–1821) and demonstrates how he was hailed as the Prototype Aesthete in the hands of Walter Pater and, notably, Oscar Wilde (1854–1900). At the outset of his career, Wilde invigorates a particular Keatsian afterimage, at once paying homage to the neglected tomb of Keats in Rome and ­enshrining the Romantic poet at the core of his Aestheticism. For Wilde, Keats’s pursuit of a life of sensations renders him a pure and serene artist. Keats’s notion of the “poetical character” provides Wilde the best dynamism to engage in “self-fashioning,” a process of constructing one’s identity and presenting it to the world which, as Stephen Greenblatt (1980) describes, involves “a consistent mode of perceiving and behaving” (2).1 As Keats’s “poetical character” “lives in gusto” by “enjoy[ing] light and shade” (Keats 1925, 184), so Wilde values the bodily and sensuous reality that comprises both human identity and the production of art. I begin by outlining the Victorian reception of Keats from Richard M. Milnes’s attempt to salvage Keats’s reputation to Pater’s endeavour to mould the Romantic poet into the Prototype Aesthete. In the second section, I examine Wilde’s life-long admiration and adaptation of Keats, focussing particularly on the four principal phases of his career with “The Tomb of Keats” (1877), “The English Renaissance of Art” (1882), The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and De Profundis (1905). Where Keats’s ideal is materialised in his famous dyad Hyperion-Apollo in Hyperion: A Fragment (1820), I show that Wilde similarly crafts his own dyad Christ-Marsyas in De Profundis in order to fashion a new image and voice for the Fin de Siècle.

Fashioning the Prototype Aesthete Two passages from Keats’s letters reveal a striking window into both the poet’s artistic aspirations and the quality that many Victorians valued so highly after his death. First, while revising his first major poem Endymion (1818), Keats (1925) adumbrates the tenor of his life and poetry in a letter to Benjamin Bailey dated 22 November 1817. He advocates “the

86  Ya-Feng Wu Wings of Imagination” (42) rather than “consecutive reasoning” (42) as the royal road to truth and “eternal happiness” (43): O for a life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts! It is “a Vision in the form of Youth,” a shadow of reality to come . . . . [W]e shall enjoy ourselves hereafter by having what we called happiness on Earth repeated in a finer tone—And yet such a fate can only befall those who delight in Sensation rather than hunger, as you do, after Truth. (41–42) Keats urges his friend Bailey, a clergyman, to strive “for a life of Sensations” by deserting his “complex [and philosophic] mind” (43) for a “Simple imaginative mind” (42) because “[w]hat the Imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth” (41). Second, nearly a year later in a letter to Richard Woodhouse on 27 October 1818, Keats (1925) makes a statement that would become for many a declaration of his own art and poetic personhood: It [The poetical character] is everything and nothing—It has no character—It enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, . . . What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the cameleon poet. . . . A poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity . . . but the identity of every one in the room begins to so press upon me that I am in a very little time annihilated. (184) For Keats, unlike “the virtuous philosopher,” the poet desires to live “in gusto,” with an expansive empathy, to shatter opposites and, most importantly, to “annihilate” oneself. That is, the poetical character allows the world to infuse the self so deeply that the self is “annihilated” in a way not easily recognisable to those accustomed to thinking in conventional philosophical terms. In sum, these two passages testify to his ability to think beyond contradictions and to fashion a poetical identity that is in a perpetual state of becoming. Many of Keats’s detractors singled out the sensuous propensity in Keats’s poetry as indicative of his low-class upbringing. For instance, John Gibson Lockhart (“Z”) of Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine (­August 1818) lampoons Keats in association with Leigh Hunt under the derogatory term “Cockney School of Poetry.” Lockhart recommends that this “boy of pretty abilities” abandon poetry and go “back to ‘plasters, pills, and ointment boxes,’ &c’” (522–524). This line of harsh criticism persisted even after Keats’s death. In the preface to the January issue of 1826, a reviewer of the same magazine satirises the recently deceased poet: “[Keats] outhunted Hunt in a species of emasculated pruriency, that, . . . looks as if it were the product of some imaginative Eunuch’s muse within the melancholy inspiration of the Haram” (quoted

Keats Gone Wilde  87 in Matthews 1971, 35). Keats’s depreciators, as Geoffrey M. Matthews notes, demonstrate a feature of relentless “socio-sexual revulsion” (35) in which class and sexuality are intertwined. For instance, the comparison of Keats to a “Eunuch” reveals that his critics target Keats’s class disadvantage and his penchant for the sensuous, a quality which they equate not with vigour but with effeminacy. Such a charge continued to plague Keats’s reputation and trouble his followers. Nevertheless, Keats’s popularity continued to grow, especially amongst the aspiring young poets at Cambridge, including ­Alfred Lloyd Tennyson, Arthur Hallam, and Milnes (Matthews 1971, 29). Milnes’s Life, Letters and Literary Remains of John Keats [Life] (1848) ensured Keats’s fame for the second half of the nineteenth century. In Life, Milnes seeks to “vindicate” Keats for all “those who delight in sensations” (1:104) and recognises his daring pursuit of “a life of Sensations” as the very foundation of his strength. Milnes’s vindication of Keats rests above all on the poet’s Romantic admiration of Greek culture. In Life, Milnes claims that Keats’s “paradoxical temperament” and “mercurial nature” predispose him to appreciate ancient Greek culture: it was this “interfusion of ideal and sensual life which rendered the Grecian mythology so peculiarly congenial to the mind of Keats” (1:14). Milnes, therefore, concludes that the “excellence of [Endymion] consists in its clear comprehension of that ancient spirit of beauty” (1:14). Here, Milnes seeks to reassess Keats’s fraught engagement with the Greek subject in Endymion and the two fragments on Hyperion. Keats (1990) conceded in the second preface to Endymion that this piece of “mawkishness” is produced when the soul is “in a ferment” at “a space of life” between boy and man and that “I hope I have not in too late a day touched the beautiful mythology of Greece, and dulled its brightness” (60). Milnes turns such self-abasement to Keats’s advantage, entrenching Keats as a fledgling poet aspiring to a classical legacy that hinges on an “interfusion of ideal and sensual life.” Developing the Hellenic celebration of aesthetic beauty, Milnes also pays special attention to the personal beauty of Keats. He records a woman’s account at one of William Hazlitt’s lectures: His [Keats’s] eyes were large and blue, his hair auburn; . . . his mouth was full, and less intellectual than his other features. His countenance lives in my mind as one of singular beauty and brightness—it had an expression as if he had been looking on some glorious sight. (1:103–104) This account prefigures a literary fan culture that sees the beauty of the poet as parallel to the beauty of his poetry. To be sure, Milnes affirms that Keats’s poetic expression is steeped in “Grecian beauty” while wishing that “[i]f his classical learning had been deeper, his seizure of the full spirit of Grecian beauty would have been less surprising” (2:104).

88  Ya-Feng Wu Milnes portrays Keats as a poet of remarkable beauty and impressive potential but under-appreciated due to his disadvantaged circumstances, thereby paving the way for the Pre-Raphaelites in the 1860s and, notably, Pater to admire Keats. In the conclusion to his Aestheticism manifesto, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), Pater (1986) particularly seizes on Keats’s preference for sensations while expounding Aestheticism as a philosophical outlook: Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself is the end. . . . To burn always with this hard gem-like flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life. . . . With this sense of the splendour of our experience and of its awful brevity, gathering all we are into one desperate effort to see and touch, we shall hardly have time to make theories about the things we see and touch. (152) Pater patently rejects the “facile orthodoxy” of any systematising philosophy like Comte’s or Hegel’s (152). What matters is the “experience itself” as its own end. With this, Pater emphasises the primacy of sensory experience: “the effort to see and to touch” but not “to make theories about the things we see and touch.” In Pater’s hands, Keats represents a pure Aesthete who values experience above the attendant orthodoxies of philosophical reason. In order to make his case, Pater pairs Keats with another ur-aesthete, Johann Joachim Winckelmann (1717–1768), whose main achievement, according to Pater, lies in turning ancient Greece into a site of aesthetic pleasure and a symbol of political and intellectual freedom (Evangelista 2009, 27). In his “Essay on Winckelmann,” first published in 1867 and later included in The Renaissance, Pater (1986) charts the development of Winckelmann from a child in the “dusky precincts of a German school” to a scholar basking in the newly excavated light and pleasure proffered by the classical Greek art that he saw in Italy (124). In Pater’s eyes, even before coming into contact with Greek art, Winckelmann already shows his enthusiasm for Herodotus and Homer owing to “their ‘vowelled’ Greek” (115), an anachronistic allusion Pater makes to the wedding banquet in Keats’s Lamia (1820) (Keats 1990, 320, 2.200). Pater thereby suggests that Winckelmann, though blessed with the Greek language, shares with Keats an outsider’s aspiration for Greek culture. Noticeably, Pater celebrates Winckelmann’s likeness to Keats while lamenting Winckelmann’s later years which were tainted by scandal: “He may live, as Keats lived, a pure life; but his soul, . . . becomes more and more immersed in sense, until nothing which lacks the appeal to sense has interest for him” (142). Here, Pater turns Winckelmann into a Keats manqué and Keats into an exemplary aesthete. In planting Keats in ancient Greece, whose crucial significance Winckelmann clarifies, Pater lays the foundation for Aestheticism as it was first

Keats Gone Wilde  89 intimated in Milnes’s celebration of Keats’s penchant for intuition as a primary faculty. Indeed, Pater’s notion of intuition allows for material nature to be fundamental rather than secondary as in traditional Idealism. Pater, therefore, moulds Winckelmann into an intuitive Aesthete: “The quick, susceptible enthusiast, betraying his [Winckelmann’s] temperament even in appearance, by his olive complexion, his deep-seated, piercing eyes, his rapid movements, apprehended the subtlest principles of the Hellenic manner, not through the understanding, but by instinct or touch” (124). Pater represents Winckelmann as one driven by an “instinct[ive]” and tactile understanding of Greek culture, a characterisation that significantly echoes Milnes’s portrayal of Keats. By highlighting “instinct and touch,” Pater upholds humanity’s material nature as the sure ground for the expression of “the ideal.” He argues, therefore, that Winckelmann tends to “escape from abstract theory to intuition” and thus propels himself to solve questions “in the concrete” (118–119). For Pater, Winckelmann’s preference for sculpture evinces that “[t]he influences which perfected the animal nature of the Greeks are part of the process by which ‘the ideal’ was evolved” (133). Greek sculpture expresses “the ideal” through “the animal nature” and thus represents the “unperplexed youth of humanity” (134). With the term “unperplexed youth,” Pater conceives of Hellenic ideals as the basis of all art and expressive culture, while also recalling Keats’s own turn of phrase in Lamia. Keats (1990) presents Lamia a poetical character that wields the power to purify joy because she can “unperplex bliss from its neighbouring pain” (309, 1.192). Thus, as Milnes emphasises “the interfusion of ideal and sensual life” (1.14) as the keystone of ancient Greek culture, so Pater champions the material expression of the ideal as the foundation for a general cultural renewal. Pater’s Aestheticism, which makes Keats its standard bearer, allows Wilde to fashion himself as the epitome of the age.

Keats à la Wilde Following in the footsteps of Pater, Wilde adapts the Aesthetic reinterpretation of Keats to suit his own changing circumstances. He shows his lifelong admiration of the Romantic poet primarily in three works, his pilgrimage essay “The Tomb of Keats” (1877), his American lecture “The English Renaissance of Art” (1882), and his prison memoir De Profundis (1905). Also, while not mentioning Keats in his only novel The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), Wilde draws upon the Keatsian pursuit of a “life of Sensations” as the principal maxim of Dorian throughout the narrative. Wilde casts Dorian in the mould of Winckelmann’s Belvedere Apollo while allowing him to exchange fate with his portrait—Apollo’s satyric double. Markedly, in the memoir, Wilde fashions another double in the figure of Christ and Marsyas, a dyad built on Keats’s Apollo and Hyperion in Hyperion: A Fragment. The legacy

90  Ya-Feng Wu of Keats, as we will see, figures most pronouncedly in the novel and the memoir. As early as 1877, during his years at Magdalen College, Oxford, Wilde tried to connect his own identity to the Romantic poet. After visiting Keats’s burial site in the Old Protestant Cemetery in Rome, Wilde published “The Tomb of Keats” in the Irish Monthly (July 1877), an essay that consists of a prose introduction and a sonnet “Heu Miserande puer” (“Alas Wretched Boy”). In the introduction, Wilde uses the banner, “Priest of Beauty,” to associate Keats with St Sebastian, the subject of Guido’s famous oil painting which Wilde saw at Genoa (n.p.). In superimposing the picture of St Sebastian onto the figure of Keats, Wilde attempts to revitalise the legacy of Keats by invoking the cult of St Sebastian, a cult which originated in Roman antiquity and gained new momentum in the second half of the nineteenth century. St S­ ebastian was worshipped as a plague saint, and the artworks featuring him have become one of the focal points for English gentlemen on the Grand Tour of the Continent. As Richard Kaye (1999) explains, this pre-Christian martyr came to embody the value of “muscular Christianity” which constitutes “stoic patience” and “defiance of authority” (271). Meanwhile, criticism abounded because the typical portrayal of the martyr featured a male nude in ­agony and thus appeared controversial to conservative Victorian morality. ­Markedly, John Symonds, in The Renaissance in Italy (1877), ascribes part of the charm of Giovanni Bazzi’s painting St Sebastian (1525) to the “bold thought of combining the beauty of a Greek Hylas with the Christian sentiment of martyrdom” (quoted in Kaye 1999, 291). Here, we see that the figure of St Sebastian carries within itself Hellenism and Hebraism, a co-existence that is central to Wilde’s self-fashioning, which is to feature again in his lecture, the novel, and the memoir. In the introduction to “The Tomb of Keats,” Wilde grafts the coalescing power of St Sebastian onto Keats. The pairing certainly strikes a chord with St Sebastian the healing saint and Keats the poet-physician. One month before the publication of the essay, Wilde enclosed his sonnet on Keats in a letter to Milnes (c. 16 June 1877), whom Wilde had met during Milnes’s visit to Ireland in October and November 1876. The letter shares phrasing with the published article and, moreover, demonstrates how thoroughly Wilde (1962) identifies himself with the Victorian view of Keats that Milnes has helped to propagate: Someway standing by his grave I felt that he too was a Martyr, and worthy to lie in the City of Martyrs. I thought of him as a Priest of Beauty slain before his time, a lovely Sebastian killed by the arrows of a lying and unjust tongue. Hence—my sonnet. But I really have other views in writing to you [Milnes] than merely to gain your criticism of a boyish poem. (41)

Keats Gone Wilde  91 Here Wilde elaborates upon his portrayal of Keats as a “Martyr” of beauty and his own alliance with Keats as a “boy poet” (Raby 1988, 5). After soliciting Milnes’s comment on his “boyish poem,” Wilde then pleads Milnes to join, if not lead, the campaign to take down the “ugly libel” of Keats (42) and to erect a new memorial for the poet to replace the medallion that John Warrington Wood carved for him. Both in the published article and in his correspondence with Milnes, Wilde aligns himself with Keats at the outset of his career. He addressed the legacy of Keats more substantially on an American lecture tour in 1882. In the first lecture, entitled “The English Renaissance of Art,” Wilde (1913) attributes the current flourishing of English culture—the “English Renaissance” as he calls it—to the union between Hellenism and Romanticism: It is really from the union of Hellenism, in its breadth, its sanity of purpose, its calm possession of beauty, with the adventive, the intensified individualism, the passionate colour of the romantic spirit, that springs the art of the nineteenth century in England. (n.p.) Wilde elevates the Romantic spirit as “the new birth of the spirit of man” with its “passion for physical beauty, its exclusive attention to form” (n.p.). Significantly, Wilde upholds Keats as the herald of the English Renaissance: “It is in Keats that the artistic spirit of this century first found its absolute incarnation” (n.p.). In Keats, he continues, the joy of poetry comes from the “inventive handling of rhythmical language”—namely, Keats’s “sensuous life of verse”—rather than from the subject matter. Wilde thereby singles out Keats as the “absolute incarnation” of the age in very specific language, drawing as he does upon the imagery of opposition and unification. The union of Hellenic principles and “intensified individualism” of the modern age is capable of revitalising culture and civilisation (n.p.). For Wilde, Keats inherits the classical legacy and ushers in Aestheticism in his very person. Wilde’s self-fashioning through the revival of Keats culminates in The Picture of Dorian Gray and, notably, De Profundis. Wilde propels The Picture of Dorian Gray with Keatsian energy to trace the formation and degeneration of Dorian. The young Dorian at the beginning of the novel embodies what Wilde identifies as the prime motor of progress in “The English Renaissance of Art”—the rapport between Romanticism and Hellenism. Indeed, Wilde (2006) draws upon the main principles of Milnes and Pater in the portrait with the painter Basil Hallward explaining Dorian’s appeal to Lord Henry Wotton: “Unconsciously he [Dorian] defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek” (12–13). Dorian’s very person “defines” Basil’s artistic ideals.

92  Ya-Feng Wu He embodies the perfection of Greece and “all the passion of the romantic spirit.” In his initial depiction of Dorian, Wilde draws on the Aesthetic value of intuition and tactility. Wilde depicts the union of the Hellenic and Romantic spirit as a process in which the emergence of self-awareness unfolds as an artistic and erotic form of self-becoming with Lord Henry touching Dorian and awakening the “hidden” life within: He [Lord Henry] came close to him, and put his hand upon his shoulder. . . . The lad started and drew back. He was bare-headed, and the leaves had tossed his rebellious curls and tangled all their gilded threads. . . . His finely-chiseled nostrils quivered, and some hidden nerve shook the scarlet of his lips and felt them trembling. (20–21) Like Pygmalion, who animates the statue with his warm touch in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Lord Henry evokes a series of sensuous responses from Dorian, symbolically initiating the respiration of the young man so that his “nostrils quivered,” and the “hidden nerve” within him rouses the blood and life to his lips. Wilde also offers a self-reflexive layer of signification, since he invites the reader to touch Dorian and, in touching, witness him “shaking” and “trembling” into sexual awareness. While the archetype of Pygmalion serves to elucidate one level of significance, Wilde develops this first encounter between Lord Henry and Dorian in light of Winckelmann’s ekphrasis. Winckelmann’s set piece on the Belvedere Apollo similarly depicts the tactile relationship between the viewer and the artwork as an auto-erotic form of self-becoming: His [Apollo’s] soft hair plays about this divine head like the tender, waving tendrils of the noble grapevine stirred, as it were, by a gentle breeze: . . . In gazing upon this masterpiece of art, . . . [m]y chest seems to expand with veneration and to heave like those I have seen swollen as if by the spirit of prophecy, and I feel myself transported to Delos and to the Lycian groves, places Apollo honours with his presence—for my figure seems to take on life and movement, like Pygmalion’s beauty. (Winckelmann 2006, 334) Considering the statue of Apollo as the “highest ideal of art among all the works of antiquity that have escaped its destruction” (333), Winckelmann celebrates his encounter with Apollo in an ecstatic experience that “transport[s]” him to those sacred sites and “enables his own figure to take on life and movement, like Pygmalion’s beauty.” Moreover, Winckelmann’s account provides a modern take on the ancient paradigm because he underscores not simply the power of the

Keats Gone Wilde  93 sculptor to bring the artwork to life, but the viewer’s endeavour to keep apace with the sculptor and the work. In gazing upon and describing the sculpture, Winckelmann imbibes the spirit of Apollo and turns himself into a sculpture worthy of Apollo. In other words, the artist does not simply bestow life upon an object but is engaged in a process of heightened self-becoming or self-fashioning. Wilde fully adapts Winckelmann’s model in evoking a mysterious interplay between subject and object in the encounter between Dorian and Lord Henry. Wilde suggests something as intense as the erotic feeling between Winckelmann and his sculpture, foreshadowing an unsettled union between subject and object that is the key to the core dynamism of the novel, the transaction between Dorian and his own portrait. Significantly, Wilde goes one step further than Winckelmann by incorporating Keats’s model of creation, one that carries within itself generation and annihilation, pleasure and sorrow, and the victorious Apollo and the defeated Hyperion. Where Winckelmann depicts the auto-erotic ennoblement of the perceiver of art, Wilde reveals a less pleasant aspect of this relationship. To be sure, Dorian has to enter into a pact with his portrait, which allows him to stay beautiful while leaving the traces of his depravity to the portrait. But Dorian cannot remain so discretely separated from the other half of himself. In due course, Basil is shocked to recognise that his portrait of Dorian, modelled on Apollo, has taken on the look of a “satyr” (Wilde 2006, 132). The transformation accelerates with a series of wrongdoings which climaxes in the murder of Basil. Eventually, Dorian “stab[s]” his portrait with the knife which he has killed the painter with, only to facilitate the face-swap between the portrait and himself (187). At the end of the novel, the portrait is certainly restored in “all the wonder of his [Dorian’s] exquisite youth and beauty” (188), but the price paid for this vision of loveliness is Dorian himself, “withered, wrinkled, and loathsome of visage” (188). Here Wilde juxtaposes the portrait “hanging upon the wall” (188) and the grotesque corpse below it to illustrate that the Apollonian beauty of Dorian is only a façade masked by, and masking, his satyric portrait. Dorian is blind to the fact that his self contains these two aspects and thus thinks mistakenly that by eliminating the portrait he could live on forever and stay forever beautiful, a mistake that eventually drives him to self-destruction. In short, the novel foreshadows a fuller understanding of self-fashioning that is continuously wrought with contrary forces of generation and annihilation, an understanding that Wilde would develop in prison. The symbiotic relationship between Dorian and his portrait in The Picture for Dorian Gray provides a striking preface for the development of Wilde’s thought during his prison years. The memoir De Profundis (1905) exemplifies Wilde’s continuing faith in beauty which he now identifies as the true spirit of Christianity. Wilde draws on the convention of spiritual autobiography while performing a defiant contrition by

94  Ya-Feng Wu preserving his Keatsian interpretation of the poetical character in a new mode. “My nature,” as he declares forcefully, “is seeking a fresh mode of self-realisation” (14), 2 an announcement that opposes the penal system and its effort to efface his sense of self under the cell number C.3.3. Also, Wilde (1905) writes in a letter to his literary executor Robert Ross, “I am not prepared to sit in the grotesque pillory they put me into, for all time. I don’t defend my conduct. I explain it” (vi). This posture of defiance in contrition indicates that from the very beginning Wilde has been ready to see the ordeal as integral to his self-fashioning. To undercut the disciplinary apparatus, Wilde develops a coping strategy that involves, as Regina Gagnier explains (1986), “the realism of Bosie (Lord Alfred Douglas)” and “the Romance of Christ” (180). Both serve to appease the authority and to deliver him from the plight of incarceration. Wilde seeks to incorporate Romantic individualism into the archetypal image of Christ. At the beginning of the memoir, Wilde (1905) presents a self-image in parallel with Christ outside and above human law by asserting that “I am a born antinomian. I am one of those who are made for exceptions not for laws” (18). He returns to this idea later, writing that for Christ, “there were no laws: there were exceptions merely” (84). As Nobert Kohl (1989) notes, Wilde saw himself “standing beside Christ—two prophets of an individualistic aesthetic gospel, . . . united in their struggle against the Pharisees of yesterday and the Philistines of today, despised and rejected, punished and finally martyred for their cause” (285). Wilde thus grafts the individualist strains of Romanticism and Aestheticism onto his new posture of a martyr, particularly drawing on Ernest Renan, who in Life of Jesus (1863) regards Jesus as an individualist who shows sympathy and treasures imagination. Renan (1955), a French Orientalist scholar, examines the development of Christianity that is grounded in the historical milieu of the Levant and presents a picture of tolerant Christianity which “exclude[s] nothing, and determin[es] nothing unless it be the spirit” (384). For Renan, Christ’s creeds are not fixed dogmas, but images “susceptible of indefinite interpretations” (384). Following Renan, Wilde repurposes the role of Mary Magdalen and Christ’s Passion. Wilde emphasises both bodily trauma and psychical anguish in the life of Christ as Renan had daringly done (Priest 2015, 3). Indeed, Wilde (1905) considers that Christ’s life begins as “an idyll” and ends with “the veil of the temple being rent, and the darkness coming over the face of the earth, and the stone rolled to the door of the sepulchre” (58). He presents Magdalen as a prefiguration of this process of salvation: Those whom he [Christ] saved from their sins are saved simply for beautiful moments in their lives. Mary Magdalen, when she sees Christ, breaks the rich vase of alabaster that one of her seven lovers

Keats Gone Wilde  95 had given her, and spills the odorous spices over his tired dusty feet, . . . . All that Christ says to us by the way of a little warning is every moment should be beautiful, that the soul should always be ready for the coming of the bridegroom, Philistinism being simply that side of man’s nature that is not illumined by the imagination. (88–89) Magdalen’s act of repentance is one of aesthetic beauty in which human nature is illumined by the imagination and, as such, saved from sin. Having anointed Jesus’s “tired dusty feet,” Magdalen shows her humility and foreknowledge of Jesus’s impending Crucifixion and Resurrection (Haskins 2005, 24). Her act literally and figuratively opens up her sensuous self. She sacrifices the mimetic alabaster vase in a gesture that achieves a deeper interfusion of body and soul with the spices released from the container cleaning Christ’s feet in preparation for his funeral. Wilde understands Magdalen’s imagination as the agent that impels her to anoint Jesus while he is alive and later to announce the news of his Resurrection while his embalmed body goes missing from the sepulchre. Wilde thus reinvigorates Renan’s interpretation of Resurrection not as a supernatural miracle, but as a creative act springing from “the strong imagination of Mary Magdalen . . . Divine power of love! Sacred moments in which the passion of one possessed gave to the world a resuscitated God!” (Renan 1955, 375). Renan’s historically based Life of Jesus thus motivated Wilde to picture a Christ that is immersed in an idealised Greek culture. Wilde argues that in the figure of Christ, the Hebraic dictum for right action can be fused with the Hellenic emphasis on beauty. This union enables Wilde (1905) to work out “a far more intimate and immediate connection between the true life of Christ and the true life of the artist” (50). Christ becomes, in this respect, the epitome of the artist because of his “intense and flamelike imagination” and “imaginative sympathy” (51). In other words, Wilde’s prison experience allows him to render Christ as one who “valued plenitude, participated in every human situation,” who “understood the leprosy of the leper, the darkness of the blind” (52). Yet it is the very physical suffering of Christ that impresses Wilde most, paralleling Renan’s (1955) visceral account of Crucifixion: They commenced by fixing it [the cross], then they fastened the sufferer to it by driving nails into his hands; the feet were often nailed, though sometimes only bound with cords. . . . Jesus tasted these horrors in all their atrocity. (363–364) Renan elaborates the process of Crucifixion to allow the reader to experience “these horrors” with Jesus “in all their atrocity.” For Wilde

96  Ya-Feng Wu (1905), his own experience of being transferred from London to Reading Gaol relates to the Stations of Christ’s Passion: It is said that all martyrdoms seemed mean to the looker on. . . . On ­November 13th, 1895, I was brought down here from London . . . to stand on the centre platform of Clapham Junction in convict dress, and handcuffed, for the world to look at. . . . Of all possible objects I was the most grotesque. . . . For half an hour I stood there in the grey November rain surrounded by a jeering mob. (104–106) Only at this point, towards the end of his memoir, can Wilde bear to relive the harrowing moment of being jeered at by placing himself besides Jesus and Marsyas as fellow martyrs. In his memoir, Wilde also seeks the Keatsian “poetical character” in the “fresh mode of self-realisation,” for such birth both coincides with and necessitates the anguish of self-annihilation as exemplified in the dyad Hyperion and Apollo. Christ is not simply himself, but the whole human experience individualised, and Wilde goes one step further, I suggest, by grafting Marsyas onto this individualisation to represent his own resurrection in front of the “jeering mob.” Where Wilde’s Christ is one side of Keats’s “poetical character,” a figure of empathy who is ready to reach out to any character and object, Marsyas is the other aspect whose deprivation prepares Wilde to be inhabited by other characters, a necessary process of self-fashioning in its own right. Put together, Christ and Marsyas allow Wilde to approximate Keats’s ideal poet. Wilde’s dyad, therefore, adapts Keats’s poetical character not simply conceptually, but also by incorporating the shriek of Apollo so powerfully depicted at the close of Keats’s Hyperion: A Fragment. While comprehending that Christ’s Passion epitomises ultimate redemption, Wilde has to learn from Keats’s fraught Hyperion project that redemption is by nature precarious. Keats’s poem tells the transition of power from the ­Titans (amongst whom Hyperion is one of the leaders) to the Olympians (whose representative is Apollo). Keats’s double depiction of Hyperion and Apollo requires some initial elucidation, for it presents the coincidence of opposites, life and death, pleasure and sorrow, as the essence of the creative act. Keats (1990) intimates this situation in his portrayal of Hyperion’s arrival amongst his fellow Titans who are “seiz’d” by “[d]espondence” (243, 2.379): Golden his hair of short Numidian curl Regal his shape majestic, a vast shade In midst of his own brightness, like the bulk Of Memnon’s image at the set of sun

Keats Gone Wilde  97 To one who travels from the dusking East: Sighs, too, as mournful as that Memnon’s harp He utter’d, . . . (243, 2.371–2.377) Hyperion is the only Titan who retains authority—the still “undisgraced” one (243, 2.344)—but his particular glamour is doomed since a new pantheon of gods is in the process of materialising their power. Keats captures this fate by making the “dejected King of the Day” (243, 2.381) “a vast shade / In midst of his own brightness.” Travelling towards his own setting, Hyperion can only sigh, just as the statue of Memnon, erected near Thebes, is reputed to sing at sunrise and mourn at sunset. Hyperion’s sigh prefigures the much more forceful shriek of Apollo at the abrupt end of the poem. Keats’s Apollo draws out the experience of the old sun god in a new visceral way. Here again, the amalgamation of opposites is crucial to the regenerative process. In Apollo’s case, though, he must realise this process in himself, for the first phase of his deification is to allow both life and death to interfuse in him, to “pour into the hollows of [his] brain”: Tell me why thus I rave, . . . Knowledge enormous makes a God of me. Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, Sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once Pour into the wide hollows of my brain, And deify me, as if some blithe wine Or bright elixir peerless I had drunk, And so become immortal. (246, 3.110–3.120) Apollo entreats Mnemosyne to explain his turmoil and comes to realise that the interplay between “[c]reations and destroyings” is predicated on the successive cycles of filling and emptying his own mind. Markedly, Keats preserves an ambiguity by showing the demise of Hyperion’s power but stopping short at Apollo’s apotheosis: Most like the struggle at the gate of death; Or liker still to one who should take leave Of pale immortal death, and with a pang As hot as death’s is chill, with fierce convulse Die into life: so young Apollo anguish’d: His very hair, his golden tresses famed Kept undulation round his eager neck.

98  Ya-Feng Wu . . . —At length Apollo shriek’d; —and lo! from all his limbs Celestial (247, 3.126–3.136) The “young Apollo” shrieks upon transfiguration, a process described as a paradoxical “d[ying] into life” in the sense that the promised new life demands a total break from the past. Keats underscores the similarities between the experiences of the two gods since Apollo’s “golden tresses” and shriek are set in parallel with Hyperion’s golden curl and sigh. In both instances, apparent opposites—in Hyperion’s case, shade and brightness and in Apollo’s, death and life—are welded within the annihilating shriek that nonetheless heralds a new age and a new form of being. In pairing Christ with Marsyas, Wilde viscerally captures the anguish that Keats emphasises at the end of his poem. Indeed, Marsyas enables Wilde not simply to side with the martyr, as he does with Christ, but to use that identity to paradoxically preserve his own artistic voice even in the midst of repenting. This reminds us of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1986), where Marsyas “scream[s]” while being skinned alive after losing a contest of music to Apollo: “Why tear me from my self? Oh, I repent! A pipe’s not worth the price!” and as he [Marsyas] screamed Apollo striped his skin; . . . . . . You could count his twitching guts, And the tissues as the light shone through his ribs. (133, 6.387–6.393) Ovid’s account of Maryas’s suffering here encourages Wilde to justify his own dissection of wounds in the memoir. It is not simply victimisation, though, on which Wilde meditates. Wilde’s Marsyas is referenced through Dante’s allusion. At the beginning of Paradiso, Dante pleads Apollo to make him his mouthpiece with an analogy of Marsyas’s ordeal: “Enter my breast and breathe in me / As when you drew out Marsyas, / Out from the sheathing of his limbs” (1.19–1.21). Dante, as Jessica Levenstein (2003) explains, changes the sad metamorphosis of Marsyas into the process of his own artistic rebirth in preparation to enter Paradise (409). Likewise, Wilde appropriates Marsyas to announce a new phase of his self-fashioning outside prison. While regarding Christ as the archetype of such renewal, Wilde (1905) turns Marsyas into a resilient sufferer so as to make his own voice last: When Marsyas was “torn from the scabbard of his limbs”—della vagina della membre sue, to use one of Dante’s most terrible Tacitean

Keats Gone Wilde  99 phrases—he had no more song, the Greeks said. Apollo had been victor. The lyre had vanquished the reed. But perhaps the Greeks were mistaken. I hear in much modern art the cry of Marsyas. It is bitter in Baudelaire, sweet and plaintive in Lamartine, mystic in Verlaine. It is the deferred resolution of Chopin’s music. . . . But whether or not the Phrygian Faun was silent, I cannot be. (102–103) For the Greeks, Marsyas loses his voice after being defeated by Apollo. Wilde takes sides with the loser because he discerns the various timbres of Marsyas’s cry in modern art and, therefore, determines to sing on even if the satyr is silenced. Also, Wilde aligns himself with Marsyas because the satyr has been regarded as a primal rebel since the first century AD, as Pliny the Elder in Natural History (AD 77–79) recalls seeing Zeuxis’s painting Marsyas religatus hung in the temple of Concordia in Rome as a warning to those who might disturb the concord of the state (quoted in Niżyńsk 2001, 152). Wilde thus reproduces the visual potency of “the Phrygian Faun” so as to present his own ordeal as a rebuke to the state and the church. By interweaving “the Romance of Christ” with “the cry of Marsyas” in his prison memoir, Wilde challenges the moral authority of his detractors while seemingly submitting to their moral dictates. His insistence on voicing Marsyas reveals a faith in the value of his own art. Wilde’s complex rendering of Christ and Marsyas also preserves Keats as the Prototype Aesthete. As Pater imagines Keats to be a purer embodiment of his Aestheticism than Winckelmann, so does Wilde adapt him in the various phases of his own creative life as a process of self-fashioning. Keats’s Hyperion project initiates Wilde into the mystery of Christ and Marsyas, the combination of which forms a dynamic version of Keats’s poetical character. By shaping the Man of Sorrows into the absolute aesthete and having the cry of the excoriated satyr reverberate throughout his prison memoir, Wilde pioneers an understanding of the spirit of modern art, a spirit of defiance to the bourgeois reprobation on “a life of Sensations.”

Notes 1 The scholarship on Wilde, as Ian Small (2000) notes, can be categorised into three dimensions—homosexuality, Irishness, and marketplace—through which runs the consistent theme of “self-fashioning” (see Doylen 1999; Schwandt 2002; Fang 2004; Ivory 2009). Critics, though, tend to tie ­Wilde’s self-fashioning particularly to his homosexual identity (Dollimore 1991; ­Cohen 1993; Vanita 2011), a focus from which I would like to diverge in order to avoid making his attraction to Keats one-dimensional. 2 Wilde (1905) realises the new life he is seeking actually continues his former life as he looks back at his years at Oxford: I wanted to eat of the fruit of all the trees in the garden of the world, . . . And so, indeed, I went out, and so I lived. My only mistake was that I

100  Ya-Feng Wu confined myself so exclusively to the trees of what seemed to me that sun-lit side of the garden, and shunned the other side for its shadow and its gloom. (46) He draws a conclusion for his life up to now that “[t]here was no pleasure I did not experience. . . . But to have continued the same life would have been wrong because it would have been limiting” (47). He determines to live beyond all possible limitations by exploring what he has shunned so far, that is, the “other side” of the garden with “its shadow and its gloom.”

References Cohen, Ed. 1993. Talk on the Wilde Side: Toward a Genealogy of a Discourse on Male Sexualities. London: Routledge. Dante, Alighieri. Paradise. Princeton Dante Project. Accessed 26 September 2017. http://etcweb.princeton.edu/dante/pdp/. Dollimore, Jonathan. 1991. Sexual Dissidence: Augustine to Wilde, Freud to Foucault. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doylen, Michael R. 1999. “Oscar Wilde’s De Profundis: Homosexual Self-­ Fashioning on the Other Side of Scandal.” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (2): 547–566. Evangelista, Stefano. 2009. British Aestheticism and Ancient Greece: Hellenism, Reception, Gods in Exile. New York: Palgrave. Fang, Po. 2004. “Style as the Man: The Aesthetics of Self-(Re)construction in Pater, Wilde, and Yeats.” Concentric: Literary and Cultural Studies 30 (1): 169–202. Gagnier, Regina. 1986. Idylls of the Marketplace: Oscar Wilde and the Victorian Public. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Greenblatt, Stephen. 1980. Renaissance Self-Fashioning. From More to Shakespeare. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press. Haskins, Susan. 2005. Mary Magdalen. Myth and Metaphor. London: Pimlico. Ivory, Yvonne. 2009. The Homosexual Revival of Renaissance Style, 1850– 1930. London: Palgrave. Kaye, Richard A. 1999. “‘Determined Raptures’: St Sebastian and the Victorian Discourse of Decadence.” Victorian Literature and Culture 27 (1): 269–303. Keats, John. 1925. Letters of John Keats to His Family and Friends. Edited by Sidney Colvin. London: Macmillan. ———. 1990. The Poems of John Keats. Edited by Elizabeth Cook. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kohl, Norbert. (1980) 1989. Oscar Wilde: The Works of a Conformist Rebel. Translated by David Henry Wilson. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Levenstein, Jessica. 2003. “The Re-Formation of Marsyas in Paradiso 1.” In Dante for the New Millennium, edited by Teodolinda Barolini and H. Wayne Storey, 408–421. New York: Fordham University Press. Lockhart, John Gibson. 1818. “Cockney School of Poetry.” Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine 3 (17): 519–524. Matthews, Geoffrey M., ed. 1971. Keats: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge and K. Paul.

Keats Gone Wilde  101 Milnes, Richard M., ed. 1848. Life, Letters, and Literary Remains of John Keats. 2 vols. London: Edward Moxon. Niżyńska, Joanna. 2001. “Marsyas’s Howl: the Myth of Marsyas in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and Zbigniew Herbert’s ‘Apollo and Marsyas.’” Comparative Literature 53 (2): 151–169. Ovid. 1986. Metamorphoses. Translated by A. D. Melville. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pater, Walter. (1873) 1986. The Renaissance. Studies in Art and Poetry. Edited by Adam Philips. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Priest, Robert D. 2015. The Gospel According to Renan: Reading, Writing, and Religion in Nineteenth-Century France. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Raby, Peter. 1988. Oscar Wilde. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Renan, Ernest. (1863) 1955. The Life of Jesus. New York: Modern Library. Schwandt, Waleska. 2002. “Oscar Wilde and the Stereotype of the Aesthete: An Investigation into the Prerequisites of Wilde’s Aesthetic Self-Fashioning.” In The Importance of Reinventing Oscar: Versions of Wilde during the Last 100 Years, edited by Uwe Böker, Richard Corballis, and Julie A. Hibbard, 91–102. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Small, Ian. 2000. Oscar Wilde: Recent Research. A Supplement to “Oscar Wilde Revalued.” Greensboro, NC: ELT Press. Vanita, Ruth. 2011. “The Homoerotics of Travel: People, Ideas, Genres.” In The Cambridge Companion to Gay and Lesbian Writing, edited by Hugh Stevens, 99–115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wilde, Oscar. (1877) 1908. “The Tomb of Keats.” In Miscellanies, edited by Robert Ross. Accessed 6 August 2016. http://www.gutenberg.org/ files/14062/14062-h/14062-h.htm. ———. (1882) 1913. “The English Renaissance of Art.” In Essays and Lectures by Oscar Wilde. London: Methuen & Co. 4th ed. Accessed 23 July 2016. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/774/774-0.txt. ———. (1891) 2006. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Edited by Joseph Bristow. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1905. De Profundis. New York and London: Knickerboker Press. ———. 1962. Letters. Edited by Rupert Hart-Davis. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World. Winckelmann, Johann Joachim. (1764) 2006. History of the Art of Antiquity. Translated by Harry Francis Mallgrave. Los Angeles, CA: The Getty Research Institute Publications.

5 Delacroix, Signac, and the Aesthetic Revolution in Fin-de-Siècle France Shao-Chien Tseng

This chapter explores the legacy of Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863), the leading light of French Romanticism, in the aesthetic revolution of anarchist nature that Paul Signac (1863–1935)—a major Neo-Impressionist painter and founder of Société des Artistes Indépendants—trumpeted at the turn of the twentieth century. Delacroix’s artistic ideas and pioneering techniques had a profound impact on modern painters. His Journal, published posthumously in three volumes from 1893 to 1895, inspired Signac to write the famous treatise D’Eugène Delacroix au néo-­ impressionnisme (1899), in which the master’s colourist innovation is hailed as the root of the Neo-Impressionist inventions of divisionism and pointillism. Signac was born in 1863, the same year when Delacroix died. In spite of the age difference, he closely followed the master’s aesthetic views and colour application, and privileged visual harmony and personal expression over the subject matter. At the same time, he departed from Delacroix in several crucial aspects. In keeping with Georges Seurat’s colour study and Hermann von Helmholtz’s physiology of vision, Signac juxtaposed minute dots to achieve optical mixture instead of applying Romantic shading and dynamic brushstrokes. In addition, Signac was an anarchist associated with Félix Fénéon, Elisée Reclus, and Peter Kropotkin, committed to individual freedom and class equality in contrast to Delacroix’s cultural elitism and Bonapartist sympathy. At the juncture of heightened civil turmoil during the Third Republic (1870–1940), Signac carefully sought to balance aesthetic autonomy against political engagement and envisioned an anarchist existence motivated by creative dissent. Previous scholarship has focussed on the debt Neo-Impressionism owes to Delacroix in terms of stylistic characteristics and strategic consideration. For example, Floyd Ratliff (1992) and Susan Alyson Stein (2001) point out that Delacroix’s art exemplified formal qualities that were fundamental to Neo-Impressionist paintings, and their comparison of Delacroix and Signac is restricted to colour combinations. Also, Christopher Riopelle (2015) maintains that Signac narrowly understood the master’s achievement and his invocation of Delacroix was no more than a calculated tactic to promote Neo-Impressionism (55). With this

Delacroix, Signac, and the Aesthetic Revolution  103 in mind, I will tease out the affinities and disparities between the two painters and address questions such as: Why did Signac trace his art historical lineage to Delacroix? How did he examine the nature and extent of the heritage of Romanticism? I investigate Signac’s multifaceted dialogue with Delacroix and his engagement in certain Romantic ideologies in Fin-de-Siècle France. Signac, as we shall see, at once revived and revised Delacroix’s legacy in order to place Neo-Impressionism in the history of the avant-garde. This chapter consists of three sections. I first outline the impact of Delacroix’s art on various movements in the late nineteenth century and examine his legacy of colourist innovation in Neo-Impressionism. I then move on to compare Delacroix’s and Signac’s explorations of visual perception through their writings and paintings of the sea motif. Finally, I examine the ways in which Signac adapted the Romantic aesthetic revolution to his participation in anarcho-communism.

Delacroix’s Legacy in Neo-Impressionism: Colourist Innovation Through his public murals, exhibitions, and writings, Delacroix’s influence persisted over several generations of modern artists in groups as divergent as Symbolism, Impressionism, Neo-Impressionism, and Fauvism. His abundant work in various genres, such as religion, mythology, portrait, landscape, and still life, became a beacon for new artistic tendencies. Édouard Manet, Henri Fantin-Latour, Auguste Renoir, and Vincent Van Gogh copied his paintings and incorporated his formal and technical features such as vibrant colours and turbulent brushwork into their paintings. Also, Paul Cézanne extolled Delacroix as “one of the giants . . . his palette still the most beautiful in France” (Gasquet 1991, 197). In addition to his artworks, Delacroix’s Journal not only illustrated his creative process and intellectual breadth, but recounted his study of masters, such as Nicolas Poussin and Peter Paul Rubens, and his passion for literature, ranging from Ovid, Dante, Tasso, Shakespeare, Goethe, Byron, to Walter Scott. His tireless search for original expressions and broad interest in the natural sciences shone out of the writing.1 Delacroix’s thought reached a broader public and permeated the aesthetic tenets of Symbolism through Baudelaire (1885), who glorified Delacroix as the most Romantic of all painters in his critical writings on art, notably Salon de 1846 and L’œuvre et de la vie d’Eugène Delacroix. There were telling parallels between the ideas of Delacroix and Baudelaire as they both prioritised feeling, suggestiveness, and mystery, and accentuated the probing of the self and the communion between the artist and the viewer. Their emphasis on intuition, imagination, and memory was a major source for Symbolism, a literary and artistic movement that countered Naturalist and Positivist trends of seeking truth through

104  Shao-Chien Tseng empirical evidence and realistic description. Symbolists saw in Romanticism a search for the ideal and the mystery of life that resonated with their principles (Dorra 1994). Artists like Pierre Puvis de Chavannes, Gustave Moreau, Paul Gauguin, and Odilon Redon all borrowed from Delacroix and carried forth the Romantic aesthetic goals, albeit in new guises, of expressing inner emotions and dreamlike atmosphere. Their paintings emanate a spirit of Idealism, an evocation of poetry and music, and intense moods, qualities that drew the attention of Symbolist critics such as Émile Verhaeren, Gustave Kahn, and Félix Fénéon. These characteristics of Symbolist aesthetics have their origins in Romanticism, especially in the works of Delacroix and Baudelaire. Signac was closely associated with Symbolists, but he regarded Delacroix in a very different light. He hosted weekly gatherings in his studio, mingling Symbolist writers with Neo-Impressionist painters including Henri-Edmond Cross, Charles Angrand, Maximilien Luce, and Henry Van de Velde. Like his Symbolist colleagues, he valued subjective sensations and poetic expressions and avidly read Delacroix’s Journal and Baudelaire’s art reviews, as evidenced in his treatise. Nevertheless, he diverged from Symbolism to a considerable extent in that his paintings featured themes of modern life rather than literary narrative, psychological states, and mystical visions. He engaged with Delacroix’s legacy in terms of colourist innovation, controlled brushmarks, and visual experience. As the spokesperson of Neo-Impressionism, he heralded Delacroix as a harbinger of modern colourist reform grounded on optical science. Following the Romantic master’s footsteps, Neo-Impressionist painters sought to uncover the hidden law of light and visual perception of colour. At the core of Delacroix’s art is an emphasis on colour over line, as he regarded colour as more lifelike and sensual—fully capable of representing objects with sensations powerful enough to touch the viewer’s soul (1895, 2:88). 2 He created a harmony through colour contrast instead of blending similar tones to produce a unified effect in an academic manner as seen in the work of his contemporary Jean-Auguste-­Dominique Ingres, the pillar of Neo-Classicism. With the saying that “The enemy of all painting is grey” (2:136), Delacroix warned painters against mixing their colours on the palette. He discovered the general rule in colour phenomenon—“more opposition, more brilliance” (2:42)—and found confirmation in the chemist Michel-Eugène Chevreul’s colour science. Chevreul (1839) made important observations about how primary colours—red, yellow, and blue—interact with their respective secondaries—­green, violet, and orange. He demonstrated that these pairs intensify their opposites and produce the strongest chromatic reaction to each other. Delacroix’s painting, La Mort de Sardanapale (The Death of Sardanapalus, 1827) (Figure 5.1), provides a prime example of how delicate touches of complementary colours enhance the hue of each other and enliven the entire scene. Its bold experimentation in colour

Delacroix, Signac, and the Aesthetic Revolution  105

Figure 5.1  Eugène Delacroix, La Mort de Sardanapale (The Death of Sardanapalus), 1827. Oil on canvas, 392 × 496 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Hervé Lewandowski / Dist. Seven Apex Co., Ltd.

interplay and the unstable structure bring to life Byron’s tragic drama about the decadent King of Assyria. Signac enthusiastically adopted Delacroix’s colour interactions and similarly advocated for use of luminous colours rather than earth tones. In his treatise, Signac (1978) followed Delacroix’s advice word by word: “colour is nothing if it does not suit the subject and enhance the effect of painting through the imagination” (51). He concurred that colour sets the mood appropriate to the chosen subject, exalts the viewer’s visual experience, and stimulates his or her imagination. In addition, Signac constructed a colourist tradition that can be traced back to the Romantic generation of Delacroix, William Turner, and John Constable whose forerunners are Titian (Tiziano Vecellio) and Peter-Paul Rubens. Positioning Neo-Impressionists as the heirs to this illustrious lineage, Signac articulated the common goal of this family of artists to be visual clarity and chromatic luminosity, as opposed to the dullness and flatness found in academic art. While mentioning the colourist lineage from the Renaissance through the Baroque to the Romantic period, Signac concentrated on Delacroix’s contribution primarily because he shared Delacroix’s remarkable synthesis of passion and reason in the applications of colour and brushwork. Signac explained that the misunderstood Neo-­I mpressionist divisionist method is actually “traditional and normal” because it “is entirely anticipated and almost formulated by

106  Shao-Chien Tseng Delacroix” (33). Indeed, together with his Neo-Impressionist colleagues, Signac pushed colour science and rigorous craftsmanship to their fullest potential in the techniques of divisionism and pointillism. In order to add vibrancy to a picture, Neo-Impressionists used small strokes to render the ever-changing light, to decompose and to recompose colours. The touché divisée (divided touch) is Neo-Impressionism’s most recognisable feature and unique contribution to modern art. Signac (1978) spelled out its first rule, “Every brushstroke, taken pure from the palette, remains pure on the canvas,” followed by the second rule that the painter should apply contrasting colours side-by-side in order to achieve optical mixture and produce harmonious effects (102). Thus, painters do not mix but juxtapose colours on the palette to enhance their differences, and the reverberation of seeing one colour affects the perception of another. Neo-Impressionists expanded Delacroix’s method of colour interplay to pursue the purity of tints and luminosity of colours. Just as Delacroix found corroboration in Chevreul’s colour science, Neo-Impressionists drew inspiration from the physicist Ogden Rood’s theory of optical mixture (Signac 1978, 148–149). Understanding that the beholder’s eye blends colours juxtaposed in their pure form on the canvas, Neo-Impressionists devised methods of applying the dots and dabs of paint by dividing and recombining colour sensations. Markedly, Signac also aligned himself with Delacroix in disciplining the painter’s hand movement and restraining virtuoso brushstrokes. They both recommended reasoned methods of paint application and sensible colour contrast in conjunction with poetic expressions and subjective feelings. Delacroix created his paintings through animated and irregular brushstrokes, but he warned against facile execution and the trap of bravura hand movement. Signac (1978) quoted the master’s journal: “The most important thing is to avoid this terrible convenience of the brushwork” (46). He further explained that the hand is less important than the eye and brain for the Neo-Impressionist technique: [T]his means of expression, the optical blending of small coloured strokes, placed methodically one beside the other, hardly permits skill or virtuosity; the hand has little importance; only the brain and the eye of the painter have a role to play. (46) For both Delacroix and Signac, the painter should execute the visible touch of brushstroke coherently in order to show his creativeness and command. The painter’s brushwork carried artistic intent as well as technical skill; as such, any excessive or capricious marks were detrimental to the true merit of painting. Neo-Impressionist painting is a result of careful planning and patient handiwork, for it resists the erratic handling of colours and brushstrokes. Fénéon (1886), for instance, commented on Seurat’s meticulous

Delacroix, Signac, and the Aesthetic Revolution  107

Figure 5.2  G  eorges Seurat, Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday on La Grande Jatte), 1884–1886. Oil on canvas, 207.5 × 308.1 cm. The Art Institute of Chicago, Chicago / Art Resource, NY.

and intensive labour in his famous painting Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte (A Sunday on the La Grande Jatte, 1884–1886) (Figure 5.2): Whatever part of it you examine unrolls a monotonous and patient tapestry: here in truth the accidents of the brush are futile, trickery is impossible; there is no place for bravura—let the hand be numb, but let the eye be agile, perceptive, wise. (22) Many of Seurat’s friends observed his commitment to manual labour and dense texture of painting, and compared his work to the needlework of embroidery or composition of a mosaic. In fact, the surface of Un dimanche après-midi à l’île de la Grande Jatte shows different shapes, sizes, and textures of brushstrokes, as if unconscious emotions and habits escaped the regularisation of brushstrokes (Herbert 2015, 95–106). Recognising the unevenness of brushmarks, Signac (1978) particularly clarified in his treatise that the Neo-Impressionist stroke is not necessarily in the shape of a dot, and it is not a dead matter or a strict rule that limits artistic creativity (122). This variation was crucial for Signac, who tried to correct the misconception of the group as one that enthralled itself to science, negated individual sentiments, and used only identical dots. While most Impressionist and Symbolist painters were drawn to the sumptuous colour and fertile imagination in Delacroix’s grand style, Signac delved into the master’s work and writing, extracting valuable lessons of colour contrast and disciplined brushwork for the Neo-Impressionists

108  Shao-Chien Tseng to learn. When the group faced criticism, he defended their contribution based on Delacroix’s great fusion of sentiment and reason and pioneering study of colour interaction. Neo-Impressionism affirmed the Romantic master as the scientifically grounded modern colourist, and sustained his discovery in the visual perception of colour.

Delacroix’s Legacy in Neo-Impressionism: Visual Experience The similarities between Delacroix and Signac exist not only in their commitment to colour research and controlled brushwork, but also in other aesthetic issues regarding visual experience, encompassing the belief in the power of visual images, the ways to look at art, and the representation of the natural world. This section demonstrates that Signac built on Delacroix’s ideas about the visual experience of art and nature to develop a concept of aesthetic autonomy. At the heart of Delacroix’s aesthetics is a deep-seated conviction in the puissance de la peinture, a belief in the unique power of painting that offers vicarious visual pleasure and vivaciously evokes thoughts and feelings (1895, 2:253–255). He preferred painting to literature mainly because the former imparts a forceful concentration of effect and “tangible” emotions whereas the latter performs in discursive progression. The materiality of painting is valuable for producing dual pleasure for the mind and the eye and gives an enduring charm and mystery worth continual re-viewing and recollecting. Delacroix recognised visual pleasure as the chief quality in art: [T]he first merit in a painting is to be a delight for the eyes. This does not mean that there need be no sense in it. . . . The eyes of many people are false or inert; they see objects literally, but see nothing of the exquisite. (3:438) Here we see his judgement of different levels of approaching art, distinguishing false from genuine looking, superficial from refined understanding. For him, the training of the eye required a long process of learning and cultivation. Given his artistic formation and profound knowledge of the canon, Delacroix may have held that studying old masters is a prerequisite to acquiring a discerning eye that can truly enjoy the nuances of a painting. Following Delacroix’s emphasis on the visual delight and power of painting, Signac believed in art’s impact through formal features rather than subjects alone. Notwithstanding a bibliophile and avid reader of Stendhal, Flaubert, Zola, Rimbaud, and Mallarmé, Signac maintained

Delacroix, Signac, and the Aesthetic Revolution  109 in his essay “Le sujet en peinture” (“The Subject of Painting,” 1935) that visual representations elicited more aesthetic emotions and exerted greater impact on receivers than literature. Like Delacroix, Signac understood painting as a material object unique for stimulating the senses and imagination. He thought that the harmony of lines and colours, rather than the subject matter, possesses ample potential to move the spectator. Signac (1978), though, admitted that the public was not yet appreciative of the daring, bright, and vibrant colours in Neo-­I mpressionism because they tended to prefer works with legible narratives rendered in a naturalist manner, the “official conventions” dominating the Salon and market at the time. Therefore, he found it necessary to “educate the eye” fundamentally through basic courses of colour science at the elementary school so that the general public would be able eventually to learn “a new way of seeing things” and to become sensitive to “the charm of line and colour” (147–151). As regards the way of looking at art, both Delacroix and Signac recommended that distant viewing was a necessary step to appreciate paintings with vibrating colour contrasts and noticeable brushstrokes. From afar, the viewer is able to grasp the harmony of a painting’s entire composition because its details are blurred and flattened upon close inspection. Delacroix (1895) stressed that with sufficient distance from a painting, the visual effect and emotional resonance would intensify and make a deep impression on the beholder regardless of the subject (3:211). Likewise, in his treatise, Signac (1978) pointed out that the viewer at a proper distance would perceive the luminous effects of Neo-­I mpressionist paintings as the brushstrokes dissolve into the whole canvas. He quoted Delacroix to reinforce his idea of spectatorship: “From a certain distance, brushstrokes melt into the whole, but it gives the painting an emphatic effect that a blend of hues cannot produce” (48). To relish a Neo-­Impressionist painting thus requires the spectator to adjust the distance between him/ her and the work. Those who find its bright pigments and pulsating patterns disconcerting are able to see its coherent whole at an appropriate distance. In this way, the optical mixture of complementary colours produces livelier sensations of material presence than the traditional method of blending hues. Colours exist in a dynamic relation to one another, giving an impression of vibration. Hence, Delacroix and Signac no longer relied on a fixed and single viewpoint to observe paintings at a glance, but encouraged a mobile spectatorship in which individuals should attend to their visual and bodily encounters with artworks. The two artists thereby underscored the fact that visual perception of a painting is bound to the physical position and movement of the viewer. Delacroix and Signac were both concerned with how vision worked and how one could produce paintings around the operations of sight to communicate visual impact. The Romantic master learnt about the

110  Shao-Chien Tseng emerging physiological study of sense perception in the first half of the nineteenth century, especially the body of work about subjective vision. This new discovery, expounded by important thinkers like Goethe and Arthur Schopenhauer, emphasises that the physiological makeup of the individual and, particularly, the functioning of the eyes condition one’s understanding and representation of the world (Crary 1990, 22, 69–79). The observer’s body and brain thus become the sites of generating specific visual perception, which may not always resemble or correspond to external objects. The knowledge about subjective vision exerted great influence on the Romantic generation, especially Delacroix, who emphasised the imaginative power of painting and the active viewership responsive to the exquisite visual characteristics of art. Signac and other Neo-Impressionists further took the physiological condition of perception as their focus of study. The group was interested in Hermann von Helmholtz’s physiology of the senses that helped them to locate the core of visual pleasure and attention in harmonic and vivid sensations. From Helmholtz’s essay “On the Relation of Optics to Painting” (1881), they learnt that by skillful colour contrast a painting could keep the eye in a state of most agreeable and delicate sensuous impressions. In addition, they applied Charles Henry’s psychophysical theory of line and colour that correlated emotional reactions of joy and sorrow with pictorial elements. With an aim to link psychology and science, Henry analysed various emotive potentials of line and colour in his study Introduction à une esthétique scientifique (Introduction to a Scientific Aesthetics, 1885). His findings demonstrated that lines moving upwards and to the right are agreeable, while those moving downwards and to the left are disagreeable (9–11). Red, orange, and yellow are delightful, while dark blue, violet, and green evoke sadness (16). Neo-­I mpressionists’ approaches chimed with Helmholtz’s and Henry’s research as they were deeply engaged in the viewer’s sensory and psychical response to pictorial elements. Noticeably, Signac applied the physiological study of sense perception more systematically than Delacroix did about the notion of subjective vision. From 1888 onwards, Signac started an intensive phase of working with Henry to make the scientific aesthetics accessible to designers of industrial art in typography, architecture, fashion, and furniture. They conducted a historical study on decorative objects such as carpets, utensils, clothing, and furniture and tested their aesthetic features with the modern tools of rapporteur esthétique (aesthetic protractor) and chromatic circle (Henry 1890). By introducing these instruments and a catalogue of historical artefacts, they aimed to aid artisans and designers to produce beautiful and utilitarian things with precise harmony of line and colour. Using Henry’s method, Signac sought to reform French

Delacroix, Signac, and the Aesthetic Revolution  111 industrial art and forged a connection between physiological aesthetics and social education in the broader domain of visual culture. Also, he illustrated Henry’s colour wheel in his design for the Théâtre-Libre program, with the inscription “Application du Cercle Chromatique de Mr. Ch. Henry” (Application of Mr. Charles Henry’s Chromatic Circle, 1889) (Figure 5.3). This modern-styled lithograph cleverly shows Henry’s pairs of colour combinations in the double frame, purple-haired spectator, bright-lit stage, and the letters T and L. Signac’s famous painting Portrait de Félix Fénéon (Portrait of Félix Fénéon, 1890) (Figure 5.4) is another salient example of how he absorbed Henry’s theory to stimulate wondrous sensations. Fénéon is seen holding a flower in profile against a gleaming background of rhythmic patterns and fluent lines. The dynamic composition of swirl and wave and the remarkable interplay of brilliant and sombre colours take hold of the visual attention. In this way, the painting is not understood as a portrait in the traditional sense but as a visual field that brings forwards energetic colours and intricate shapes. Signac regarded physiological aesthetics as a useful resource to focus on the beholder’s response rather than representation, but he did not rigidly adopt Henry’s theory as a universal template to engineer the spectator’s sensory-motor reactions. The point here is that painting, through the tangible impact of colour and line, strives to elicit the viewer’s manifold feelings and imagination.

Figure 5.3  P  aul Signac, Application du Cercle Chromatique de Mr. Ch. Henry (Application of Mr. Charles Henry’s Chromatic Circle), 1889, Théâtre-­ Libre Playbill. Colour lithograph on heavy wove paper, 15.5 × 18 cm. Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Public Domain.

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Figure 5.4  P  aul Signac, Opus 217. Portrait de Félix Fénéon sur l’émail d’un fond rythmique de mesures et d’angles, de tons et de teintes (Opus 217. Against the Enamel of a Background Rhythmic with Beats and Angles, Tones and Tints, Portrait of M. Félix Fénéon), 1890. Oil on canvas, 73.5 × 92.5 cm. Digital image © 2018 The Museum of Modern Art, New York / Scala, Florence.

While engaging in the physiology of vision in different ways, Delacroix and Signac shared the common view of translating nature into art. Signac (1978) quoted Delacroix’s famous words: Nature is only a dictionary. We look for meanings of words in it. We extract the elements that compose a sentence or a story, but no one considers the dictionary as a composition in the poetic sense of the word. (53) This passage means that nature is an infinite repository of materials for the artist to select suitable subjects and then make aesthetic compositions to generate meanings according to expressive needs. Like Delacroix, Signac treated nature as a vast stock of images and signs to digest and transform into a meaningful work in light of subjective perspective. He similarly stressed that artists should reshape the selected elements by chromatic and linear arrangements instead of directly copying nature (53). For him, open-air sketches in situ resemble gathering references in the creative process, but the subsequent alteration of first-hand nature studies is necessary to complete an artwork that presents visual delight and poetic association.

Delacroix, Signac, and the Aesthetic Revolution  113 In a diary entry, Signac confirmed that nature provides abundant compositional and emotional ideas, but the artwork must be a creation shaped by the artist’s will and memory and completed in the studio (Rewald 1953). Signac’s writings displayed a strong belief in the subjective interpretation of nature, a notion linked with Romantic aesthetics. While valuing the physiological study of human vision as scientifically valid, he equally affirmed the artistic originality in rendering visual experience. To understand Delacroix’s and Signac’s treatment of the nature motif, one should look at examples of their marine paintings, as the ocean is one of their favourite subjects and proves a great aesthetic challenge. Sea painting, as Øystein Sjåstad observed (2014), is an experimental ground of technique and expression for nineteenth-century painters. Bodies of water and elements of sky and air are extremely difficult to represent insofar as the seascape points to vagueness and nothingness (36–40). Delacroix’s La mer vue des hauteurs de Dieppe (The Sea Viewed from the Heights of Dieppe, 1852) (Figure 5.5) features a wide expanse of sky and ocean indicated by spatial recession and gradating light of the dusk. In the distillation of fresh hues and the soothing rhythm of the waves, the painting presents his memory of a stranded boat and seaside stroll in Normandy. The seascape demonstrates a visual harmony through colour contrast and Delacroix’s privileging of recollection and imagination over the empirical imitation of nature motif. In comparison, in Signac’s work, the sea opened up an important arena to explore the boatman’s relationship to the ocean and the materiality of painting. Sailing was his second vocation and lifelong leisure activity: he operated various boats

Figure 5.5  Eugène Delacroix, La mer vue des hauteurs de Dieppe (The Sea Viewed from the Heights of Dieppe), 1852. Oil on canvas, 35 × 51 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du ­Louvre) / Philippe Fuzeau / Dist. Seven Apex Co., Ltd.

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Figure 5.6  P  aul Signac, Portrieux, La Houle, Opus 190 (The Harbour of Portrieux, Opus 190), 1888. Oil on canvas, 61 × 92 cm, Staatsgalerie Stuttgart. Bpk Bildagentur / Art Resource, NY.

along the Seine and the coasts of Brittany and the Mediterranean, and he was a proud owner of 29 boats and winner of professional racing (Distel 2001). Sometimes, the artist-sailor suggested, the presence of human operation in seascapes implies the viewpoint of the boatman and the technical knowledge of sailing. Most of Signac’s marine paintings radiate in lively shimmer by the optical mixture of luminous colours, and his well-organised brushstrokes gave concrete shape to the rippling water, clear air, and calm yachts, as seen in Portrieux, La Houle, Opus 190 (The Harbor of Portrieux, Opus 190, 1888) (Figure 5.6). Signac’s later sea paintings often border on abstraction, embodying his pursuit of the contemplative aesthetic experience analogous to musical harmony and free from the constraint of subject matter. Both Delacroix and Signac, as we have seen, deemed visual pleasure as the chief asset of painting and developed a keen interest in studying visual perception to heighten aesthetic experience. They shared similar views of translating nature into painting in conjunction with the artistic sensibility and technique. Signac’s application of the physiological study was more extensive, for he assimilated Henry’s psychophysical findings to illustrate the connections between visual stimuli and emotional reactions and to propagate the modern aesthetic tools for the improvement of French industrial art.

Anarchist Romanticism Signac not only continued the pictorial innovations fostered by Delacroix, but also drew on certain elements of aesthetic-political philosophy

Delacroix, Signac, and the Aesthetic Revolution  115 from Romanticism to bring art and politics together. To grasp better Signac’s debt to Romanticism, one has to look into his involvement in anarcho-communism and his endeavour to reform society through art. This aspect marks his paradoxical relationship to Delacroix, for Signac sustained Delacroix’s study of colour and visual perception yet revised his legacy in the domain of cultural politics. Signac, I suggest, assimilated Delacroix’s legacy through an anarchist lens while attempting to sustain the revolutionary dimension of Romanticism. Friedrich Schiller was one of the first in late eighteenth-century ­Germany to develop the idea of aesthetic revolution in relation to human freedom. In Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (On the Aesthetic Education of Man, 1795), Schiller (1967) shows his discontent with the terror in the French Revolution by stressing that the emancipation of humankind rests on the “aesthetic state”: “If man is ever to solve the problem of politics in practice he will have to approach it through the problem of the aesthetic, because it is only through beauty that man makes his way to freedom” (9). For Schiller, the aesthetic realm underpinned all aspects of human activity and enabled individuals to fulfill their innate Spieltrieb (play drive) and restore the balance of their spiritual and sensual needs. Ultimately, Schiller saw an aesthetic revolution rather than a political revolution as the key to realising genuine freedom and human potential. 3 Schiller believed in the capacity of art to better all spheres of life, a belief that found an echo in French utopian socialism. In the heyday of Romanticism, utopian socialist thinkers such as Henri de Saint-Simon and Gabriel-Désiré Laverdant developed the concept of the avant-garde and upheld the essential role of art in their blueprints of future civilisations. Saint-Simon (1824) seized on the decisive and moving power of art, and regarded artists, together with savants and industrialists, as the engine of social amelioration. Laverdant (1845), in his essay “Mission de l’art et du rôle des artistes” (“Mission of Art and the Role of Artists”), considered the avant-garde artist as a forerunner and initiator who knew “where humanity is going and what the destiny of the human race is” (254). Like Schiller, these social theorists of the French Romantic generation saw the aesthetic attitude not only in purely artistic representation, but also in the holistic domain of political and social life. Signac attempted to fuse art and politics by combining the Romantic aesthetic revolution and the avant-garde. He was part of an intellectual circle that often invoked the 1830s precedents of social thoughts. For example, his anarchist associates Kropotkin and Reclus took their inspirations from libertarian Romanticism (Löwy and Sayre 2001, 80). They shared the Romantic critique of a reactionary regime in France and industrial modernity, condemning the government’s abuse of power and lack of social equity. Anarcho-communism was their answer to pressing social problems, for it advocated a more just society based on individual autonomy, free association, and the fair distribution of wealth.

116  Shao-Chien Tseng Neo-Impressionists supported the anarcho-communist cause by contributing illustrations to anarchist magazines such as La Révolte and Les Temps nouveaux. They believed in peaceful and rational approaches to social reform rather than “propaganda by the deed” which favoured drastic means and terrorism (Herbert and Herbert 1960). Signac’s monumental painting, Au Temps d’Harmonie: L’âge d’or n’est pas dans le passé, il est dans l’avenir (In the Era of Harmony: The Golden Age is Not in the Past, It is in the Future, 1893–1895) (Figure 5.7), conflates the Romantic and anarchist visions of the ideal society. It depicts a modern arcadia of social harmony in a peaceful seaside village in the Mediterranean. The original title was In the Era of Anarchy, indicating the anarchist perspective underpinning the painting. The “golden age” in the subtitle harkens back to the Romantic philosophy of Friedrich Schlegel and Saint-Simon. In the well-known Fragment published in the magazine Athenäum in 1798, Schlegel called for an “eternal revolution,” a radical change in life and culture, and a universal rejuvenation of humanity. The eternal revolution will allow one to recognise the “character of the golden age which is yet to come” (Nivala 2017, 58). Likewise, Saint-Simon believed in the perfectibility of civilisation and changed the past myth of an idyllic golden age to a foreseeable future, writing with utopian energy: “The golden age of the human race is no longer behind us, it is before us; it is in the perfection of the social order” (1951, 99). Both Schlegel and Saint-Simon affirmed that social and moral betterment would breed a new future golden age for humankind,

Figure 5.7  P  aul Signac, Au Temps d’Harmonie: L’âge d’or n’est pas dans le passé, il est dans l’avenir (In the Era of Harmony: The Golden Age is Not in the Past, It is in the Future), 1893–1895. Oil on canvas, 300 × 400 cm. Mairie de Montreuil, Paris. Erich Lessing / Art Resource, NY.

Delacroix, Signac, and the Aesthetic Revolution  117 and this Romantic optimism in progress inspired the anarchist writers and artists of the late nineteenth century. Au Temps d’Harmonie visualises Signac’s conception of an anarcho-­ communist society where agriculture, education, leisure, family, and art can flourish in harmony. The painting shows anarcho-­communism as the alternative to the existing state of affairs because it would enable people to live in a healthy environment, to maintain social bonds, and to enjoy agrarian life. People share resources and assist one another in a decentralised mutual-aid community. Cultural activities, such as dance, reading, and painting, occur naturally along with harvesting, housework, and sport. The idyll corresponds to Kropotkin’s view of varied human needs: “After bread has been secured, leisure is the supreme aim” (1995, 95). By this statement, Kropotkin meant that the anarchist commune would satisfy human basic needs in food and shelter and strive to develop all human faculties and passions, especially in art and culture. Signac agreed with this perspective by depicting an artist at his easel on the beach, implying that people would make art and appreciate beauty in the time of anarchy. He later wrote about the socio-economic prerequisites of leisure and education for the artistic cultivation: “When the society that we dream of exists, when rid of the exploiters who exhaust him, the worker will have time to think and to learn. He will appreciate all the qualities of a work of art” (quoted in Herbert and Herbert 1960). Convinced that Neo-Impressionism manifested a struggle for a new and better society, Signac stated, “Justice in sociology, harmony in art: the same thing” (quoted in Herbert and Herbert 1960). For him, harmony as a political ideal is embodied in the concordant effects of colour and composition. Art can offer a harmony of visual experience and inspire a social consciousness without necessarily serving the function of political propaganda. To oppose the views of some anarchists that artists had to provide propaganda, Signac published an essay “Impressionnistes et Révolutionnaires” (“Impressionists and Revolutionaries”) in Jean Grave’s journal La Révolte in 1891. He countered the demand for a precise socialist tendency in art because this tendency is more strong and eloquent in the work of pure aesthetes, revolutionaries by temperament who, distancing themselves from beaten paths, paint what they see and feel, and often unconsciously give a solid blow to the old social edifice. (796–797) Signac maintained that the revolutionary tendency of the Neo-­Impressionist group was evident in their pictorial innovations and moral attitude. Derived from natural inclinations and aesthetic emotions, their art always carried within itself an “unconsciously social dimension” that marked the literature of Flaubert, the Goncourt brothers, and Zola. Thus, to submit

118  Shao-Chien Tseng art to propaganda or didacticism would be a mistake, for artistic individuality and quality would become clouded by political doctrines. Signac’s essay articulates the idea of the aesthetic revolution in terms of anarcho-­ communism and artistic independence, encapsulating his aspiration for a union of aesthetic autonomy and progressive politics. By contrast, Delacroix (1895) never embraced socialist or anarchist ideas, remaining sceptical of the utopian theories of Saint-Simon, Charles Fourier, and Pierre Leroux (1:428). Interestingly, in the battle between Classicism and Romanticism, Delacroix was nicknamed “the Proudhon of colour”4 and regarded as revolutionary in the field of art while Jean-Auguste-Dominique Ingres, the giant of Classicism, was labelled as “the Thiers of line” and the “dictator of line” (Goncourt 1855, 32) because of his conservative politics and impeccable mastery of line. In the politicised aesthetic debates, Delacroix’s passionate colour carried insurgent connotations. Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, the chief anarchist of his day, railed against government authority and exploitive capitalism, and called for direct action by the people and the equivalent exchange of individuals. Although Delacroix did not subscribe to Proudhon’s revolutionary politics, he embodied the Romantic rebel who challenged the established artistic conventions throughout the century. His painting Le 28 Juillet: La Liberté guidant le peuple (July 28: Liberty Leading the People, 1830) (Figure 5.8) epitomises his “revolutionary” tendency as it depicts the uprising that overthrew the repressive Bourbon regime and

Figure 5.8  Eugène Delacroix, Le 28 Juillet: La Liberté guidant le peuple (July 28: Liberty Leading the People), 1830. Oil on canvas, 260 × 325 cm. Musée du Louvre, Paris. © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre) / Michel Urtado / Dist. Seven Apex Co., Ltd.

Delacroix, Signac, and the Aesthetic Revolution  119 pays tribute to the heroes of the Three Glorious Days in 1830. The rich colours reach a saturated intensity, evoking the heat, dust, and smoke of the barricades. It exceptionally combines pyramidal and frieze structure, allegory and realism to constitute an innovation in representing a contemporary political event. The work has become a potent visual icon of the French people’s struggle for freedom. Delacroix, albeit a “revolutionary” artist, did gain the acceptance of the Salon and Academy and the sponsorship of the Church and the State. He also had powerful patrons, including the duchess de Berry and the King Louis-Philippe. Besides, Delacroix still studied and respected classical tradition transmitted in the Royal Academy of Art. He adhered to the hierarchy of genres, the reading of canonical texts, and the didactic role of art (Johnson 2001). Delacroix further consolidated his standing at the heart of the Paris art scene with his prominent mural projects of mythological subjects for the Palais Bourbon and the library of the Palais du Luxembourg. Towards the end of his career, in the mural programmes commissioned for the Chapel of the Holy Angels at SaintSulpice (1856–1861), Delacroix created monumental compositions with profound religious sentiment and in broad masses of colour. This chapel won acclaim from Signac (1978), who declared that Delacroix’s rich palette “achieved unity in complexity and brightness in harmony” (82). While Delacroix earned official recognition and thrived in obtaining public projects, Neo-Impressionists never had ties with the State or the Church and had to find new venues to show their works. Facing the moribund system of the Salon and fickle art market, Neo-Impressionists, together with other artists, launched the Société des Artistes Indépendants in 1884, and Signac acted as its president from 1909 to 1934. The artist-­ run organisation had neither juries nor awards to hand out but gave equal opportunities to a multitude of independent artists without official support. This collaborative initiative fulfilled the Romantic avant-garde notion that artists took the leadership role and held a social responsibility to contribute to the public good. Countering the privatisation and exclusivity of the then art world, the Society’s inclusive and egalitarian principles echo the anti-authoritarian and anti-capitalist ideas of anarcho-communism. With the advent of the Society, Signac blended the concepts of the Romantic aesthetic revolution and anarcho-communism in realising an open art space for the benefits of the creative community and the public. In sum, Signac, as I have shown, revived Delacroix’s aesthetic legacy by sustaining the primacy of pictorial harmony and modernising chromatic research. He saw the master as a source of learning and legitimacy, paving the way for Neo-Impressionists’ discovery of divisionism and pointillism. Both Delacroix and Signac recognised a physiological study of visual perception as a vital resource of intensifying aesthetic experience, and they shared similar views on creatively transforming the

120  Shao-Chien Tseng natural world in their art. While absorbing Delacroix’s insights in colour contrast, controlled brushwork, and proper viewing condition, Signac departed from the master in the aspects of political attitude and exhibition strategy. Though regarded as the “Proudhon of colour” and rebel artist, Delacroix was Bonapartist who had no interest in socialism and anarchism. By contrast, Signac’s commitment to anarcho-­communism led him to characterise Neo-Impressionists as “revolutionaries” in overthrowing the unjust political system and in portraying a new golden age. His belief in the progress of humanity and the artistic potential of the common people set him apart from Delacroix’s view of cultural politics, and further enabled him to organise the long-standing democratic forum Société des Artistes Indépendants. Staying true to anarchist principles, Signac strove to synthesise artistic freedom and progressive social attitudes through his artwork, critical writing, and public engagements. Bridging the dichotomy between individuality and communality, Signac adjusted the aesthetic-political dimension of Romanticism to the Fin-deSiècle context of the anarchist movement and thereby cleared a new path for modern art.

Acknowledgement I wish to thank the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan for its support of my research. I am also grateful to Shun-liang Chao and John Michael Corrigan for their insightful comments on this article.

Notes 1 The later part of the journal also contained his cogent reflections on art and culture in a series of commentaries for a projected treatise, Dictionnaire des Beaux-Arts. 2 All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 3 For an account of Schiller’s influence on early German Romanticism, see Chapter 16 in this volume. 4 This nickname derives from Bertall’s famous caricature, “République des arts,” published in Journal pour rire on 28 July 1849. The inscription reads, “The Republic of Art. Duel to the death between M. Ingres, the Thiers of Line, and M. Delacroix, the Proudhon of Colour.”

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Delacroix, Signac, and the Aesthetic Revolution  121 Delacroix, Eugène. 1893–1895. Journal de Eugène Delacroix. 3 vols. Paris: Plon-Nourrit. Distel, Anne. 2001. “Portrait of Paul Signac: Yachtsman, Writer, Indépendant, and Revolutionary.” In Signac 1863–1935, edited by Marina Ferretti-­ Bocquillon, Anne Distel, John Leighton, and Susan Alyson Stein, 37–50. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art. Dorra, Henri. 1994. “Prologue: Baudelaire, Delacroix, and the Premises of Symbolist Aesthetics.” In Symbolist Art Theories: A Critical Anthology, ­edited by Henri Dorra, 1–7. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fénéon, Félix. 1886. Les Impressionnistes en 1886. Paris: La Vogue. Gasquet, Joachim. 1991. Cézanne: A Memoir with Conversations. Translated by C. Pemberton. London: Thames & Hudson. Goncourt, Edmond, and Jules de Goncourt. 1855. La peinture à l’exposition de 1855. Paris: Dentu. Helmhotz, Hermann von. (1881) 1998. “On the Relation of Optics.” In Art in Theory 1815–1900: An Anthology of Changing Ideas, edited by Charles Harrison, Paul Wood, and Jason Gaiger, 636–640. Oxford: Blackwell. Henry, Charles. 1885. Introduction à une esthétique scientifique. Paris: La Revue contemporaine. ———. 1890. Application de nouveaux instruments de précision (cercle chromatique, rapporteur et triple décimètre esthétiques) à l’archéologie. Paris: Leroux. Herbert, James D. 2015. Brushstroke and Emergence: Courbet, Impressionism, Picasso. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Herbert, Robert, and Eugenia W. Herbert. 1960. “Artists and Anarchism: Unpublished Letters of Pissarro, Signac, and Others.” Burlington Magazine 102 (692): 473–482. Johnson, Dorothy. 2001. “Delacroix’s Dialogue with the French Classical Tradition.” In The Cambridge Companion to Delacroix, edited by Beth S. Wright, 108–129. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kropotkin, Peter. 1995. The Conquest of Bread and Other Writings. Edited by Marshall S. Shatz. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Laverdant, Désiré. 1845. “De la mission de l’art et du rôle des artistes.” In La Phalange. Revue de la science sociale, Vol. 1, 253–272. Paris: Aux bureaux de La Phalange. Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. 2001. Romanticism against the Tide of Modernity. Translated by Catherine Porter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Nivala, Asko. 2017. The Romantic Idea of the Golden Age in Friedrich Schlegel’s Philosophy of History. London: Routledge. Ratliff, Floyd. 1992. Paul Signac and Color in Neo-Impressionism. New York: Rockefeller University Press. Rewald, John, ed. 1953. “Extraits du journal inédit de Paul Signac, III, 1898– 99.” Gazette des Beaux-Arts 42 (1014–1015): 27–57. Riopelle, Christopher. 2015. “Afterlife: Delacroix’s Posthumous Fame.” In Delacroix and the Rise of Modern Art, edited by Patrick Noon and Christopher Riopelle, 37–63. London: National Gallery of Art. Saint-Simon, Henri de. (1824) 1875. “L’Artiste, le savant et l’industriel.” In Œuvres complètes de Saint-Simon et d’Enfantin, Vol. 39, edited by Adolphe Guéroult, 201–258. Paris: Dentu.

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6 Mediating Richard Wagner and Henry Bishop Frederick Corder and the Different Legacies of German and English Romantic Opera David Chandler “What would the musician of to-day not give,” Frederick Corder ­(1852–1932) enthused in the 1920s, to have formed one of that party at the villa at Zurich on that memorable day in 1859 when Wagner [1813–1883], bursting with pride, brought downstairs the M.S. of the first act of Tristan, and Liszt played it straight off from the score! (Corder 1925, 92)1 For Corder, as for most lovers of “art,” or “classical,” music, the greatest works were almost by definition in the past, but he was quite clear that Tristan und Isolde (1865) was the summit of humankind’s musical achievement: “the greatest music that ever has been—or probably ever will be—­written!” (118). For decades he had been a devotee, describing it as early as 1882 as a “stupendous, crushing effort of genius,” “the supreme masterpiece of its author—an ideally perfect lyric tragedy” (Corder 1882, 126, 131). Its only possible peer, he later concluded, had been composed by Wagner himself: “The only rival this glorious work has ever had is its immediate successor, The Mastersingers of Nuremberg” (Corder 1912, 19). Not everyone would agree that Tristan und Isolde is the greatest of all operas, but if it is a question of Romantic opera in particular, Corder’s judgement still stands as almost conventional, certainly unexceptionable. But one of the most remarkable things about Corder is that this leading British champion of Wagner and the Germanic tradition of music also had a profound, if critical, fascination with Henry Bishop ­(1786–1855), Britain’s leading composer of theatre music in the 1800–1830 period: a man who might almost be judged Wagner’s polar opposite. This makes Corder a particularly apt reference point for thinking about the very different legacies of German and English Romantic opera: the emergence of “high art,” progressive ideals in Germany, culminating in Wagner, and the substantial failure of Britain’s more commercialised musical culture to produce anything comparable. As Corder is now a little-known figure, I begin with some account of his career, intended to establish

124  David Chandler that Romantic opera was, for him, no mere academic interest. I then explore his critical views on Bishop and the musical culture of the British Romantic period in relation to his understanding of the evolution of ­German Romantic opera in the same decades.

Frederick Corder: The Trials of an English Wagnerian Frederick Corder was born in London on 26 January 1852, into a musical family. After an abortive career “in a merchant’s office” (Corder 1922a, 82), he became a student at the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) in 1873, having already “imbibed deeply at Wagnerian springs” (“Frederick Corder” 1913, 713). He cannot have had many opportunities to actually hear Wagner’s music this early, but extracts from Tannhäuser had been played at the Crystal Palace in 1868, and portions of this and other operas had been included in the Wagner Society’s 1873 concerts. Corder later recalled how he “was a youth when Wagner’s Tannhäuser and Lohengrin first made their way to England, and he was amazed at the obtuseness of even the best critics of that day in depreciating the obvious merits of these works” (Corder 1912, 24). In 1875, Corder won the Mendelssohn Scholarship, allowing him to study in Germany. He spent three years at the Cologne Conservatoire, studying under Ferdinand Hiller, and then a year in Italy, where he “made the acquaintance of Boito and Verdi and other Italian musicians” (“Frederick Corder” 1913, 713). He returned to England in 1879. Corder was quickly acclaimed as a composer of importance. A lengthy review in The Times in 1880 names him and Hubert Parry as the leading progressive English composers attempting to lead English music away from “Mendelssohnian sentiment clad in Mendelssohnian form”: Mr. Corder’s style . . . is essentially founded on the neo-German, more especially on Wagner’s model, and his polyphony reminds one of that composer rather than of the older masters of strict counterpoint. . . . Mr. Corder’s music is fresh and sympathetic, and at times full of genuine feeling. A more promising opus [than Corder’s In the Black Forest] it has rarely been our good fortune to mention. (“Two English Composers,” The Times, 6 April 1880, 4) Despite such success with his early instrumental compositions, Corder’s major work of the 1870s went largely unperformed: a four-act “Grand ­ 877–1878. Opera” entitled Le Morte d’Arthur, composed in Germany in 1 Almost nothing is known of this, apart from its being “founded on such parts of Sir Thomas Malory’s book as refer to the death of King Arthur” (Programme 1879, 363). The second act was “principally taken up with a May-day festival,” including a detachable “masque,” “The Triumph of Spring,” which was performed at a Crystal Palace concert on 8 February

Mediating Richard Wagner and Henry Bishop  125 1879, apparently the first public performance of Corder’s music in Britain. The various reference works referring to the entire opera being performed in Brighton are manifestly in error, and the score, like so much of Corder’s music, is lost. 2 But given what else we know of Corder, it is difficult to resist the conclusion that this was an attempt at a Wagnerian “music drama” founded on national myth: in all probability, the first truly Wagnerian opera composed by a British composer. Despite obtaining positive reviews, Corder found British publishers uninterested in his music, and economic necessity forced him to turn to other kinds of work. As he later recalled, There was, as there is now, no possible opening for a composer, and I was thrust into an organist’s appointment, though I had never studied the instrument. . . . I ‘devilled’ for one or two critics, and wrote articles for Grove’s ‘Dictionary.’ I wrote comic music articles for the papers; even edited a paper for six months during the illness of the chief; arranged music and furnished translations of songs for any publisher who would let me—they were all fairly ready to take this sort of work, but the mere sight of an original MS. made them want to call for the police. (quoted in “Frederick Corder” 1913, 714) These years demonstrate a steady commitment to Wagner on Corder’s part, not only in his own advanced music, but also in his ambitious undertaking to translate Wagner’s librettos into English. He started with Parsifal, published in 1879, before Wagner had even completed the opera, suggesting the possibility of direct contact with the German composer; he continued with Tristan and The Mastersingers, published in 1882. In 1882, he also published a series of analyses of Wagner’s later operas in the Musical Times. He was back in Germany in July that year for “Wagner’s crowning triumph—the [premiere] production of Parsifal at Bayreuth” (Corder 1912, 15). One senses this may have been the highlight of his musical career. Alongside such efforts, though, Corder also made a remarkable turn to “light” musical theatre as remote from the Wagnerian music drama as possible. This appears to have come about through his connection with a company variously known as the Alice Barth Opera Company, the Alice Barth Ballad Opera Company, or the Alice Barth Ballad and Operetta Company. They premiered his operetta, A Storm in a Teacup, in Brighton on 18 February 1882, giving Corder, five months before his visit to Bayreuth, his first chance to see any of his theatrical works staged. The reception was very positive: A more unequivocal success can hardly have been wished for than the reception accorded to Mr Corder’s new operetta . . . .

126  David Chandler It shows remarkable knowledge of stage effect, and the dialogue is often pointed and witty, while the plot, which turns upon the “illusioning” of a romantic young lady, gives scope to much amusing “business.” The music is, of course, in the same vein, and is light and tuneful. Two numbers were encored, and the whole is remarkably popular in style. (“Mr. Corder’s New Operetta,” Brighton and Sussex Daily Post, 20 February 1882, 5) Corder composed two more operettas for Alice Barth, The Nabob’s Pickle (1883) and The Noble Savage (1885). Reviews continued to be very good, with critics not afraid of comparisons with the works of ­Gilbert and Sullivan. On The Nabob’s Pickle, for example: It is written in much the same style as the earlier combinations of Mr W. S. Gilbert and the then Mr Arthur Sullivan [knighted in May 1883], and in many points it is not unworthy of comparison with Trial by Jury. (“Brighton Aquarium,” Brighton Gazette, 20 September 1883, 6) Ultimately, though, these operettas embarrassed Corder. They are simply not mentioned in his autobiographical notes quoted above; he did not publish them; after his appointment at the RAM in 1889 they disappeared from public view; and for the most part, he kept them out of London. They may have brought in welcome income when Corder, in his own report, “lived from hand to mouth in the most precarious way” (quoted in “Frederick Corder” 1913, 714), but in his understanding they did not constitute an “opening for a composer,” or offer him anything of which to be proud. The longed-for “opening” finally came with a commission for a cantata, The Bridal of Triermain (after Walter Scott), performed at the Wolverhampton Festival in 1886. This led in turn to the acceptance of Corder’s opera, Nordisa, by the Carl Rosa Opera Company, who premiered it in Liverpool on 26 January 1887. The preface to the published libretto states: The libretto has purposely been written on old-fashioned lines rather than according to modern models, partly because it does not pretend to be a Musik-drama, or grand opera, but simply a Singspiel, or romantic light opera, such as Wagner recommended all beginners to write. (Corder 1887, 3)3 This reads as a rather desperate attempt on Corder’s part to give his career path a Wagnerian contour after his long detour into operetta.

Mediating Richard Wagner and Henry Bishop  127 Critics did find some Wagnerian influence in the score, but Corder was seemingly intent mainly on continuing the tradition of “English ­Romantic Opera”—emerging in the 1830s and epitomised by the works of Michael William Balfe and William Vincent Wallace—that made up much of the Carl Rosa repertoire. His purpose was perhaps to lead his audience gently beyond what they were familiar with, and he must have been gratified by many of the reviews. The possibility of a successful operatic career now beckoned, but the death of Carl Rosa on 30 April 1889 ended Corder’s expectation of further commissions. His “whole heart” was “set upon operatic composition,” he later wrote, and “the demise of Carl Rosa was a death-blow to my hopes” (quoted in “­Frederick Corder” 1913, 714). In 1889, Corder took up a position as Professor of Harmony and Composition at the RAM. It was a choice, he said, “really against my will,” but dictated by economic necessity and the desire for stability (quoted in “Frederick Corder” 1913, 714). He continued in this position until his retirement in 1924, and as with many composers who have accepted teaching positions the longer he taught the less he composed. By the turn of the century, he was notable more as a teacher than an active composer. Some of the leading composers of the following generations studied with him, notably Granville Bantock, Arnold Bax, Alan Bush, and Josef Holbrooke. It seems safe to conclude in general terms with Meirion Hughes and Robert Stradling (2001) that Corder’s inculcation of “Wagnerian” principles at the RAM made “an interesting, but volatile, contrast with the essentially ‘Brahmin’ orientation of the RCM [Royal College of Music, founded 1882]” (39), though they do not expand on the point and their reference offers no support. Even here Corder was rather unlucky, for the idea which later developed, that an “English Musical Renaissance” was taking place at this time, was, for the most part, an RCM narrative, highlighting the achievements of Parry and Charles Villiers Stanford. Thus, Corder came to be sidelined in histories of English music to the point where, shockingly, he does not feature in the Dictionary of National Biography at all, while Parry and Stanford are both given lengthy articles.

Henry Bishop versus Carl Maria von Weber: British Commercialism and German Progressiveness Corder’s career involves a remarkable tension between a commitment to Wagner and an acute understanding of the difficulties facing the British composer with aspirations to compose serious opera. Out of that gulf between ideal art and such manifestations of imperfect reality as the Alice Barth Opera Company, I propose, emerged his deep interest in the career of Henry Bishop. The first practical manifestation of this was an 1885 essay for the Musical Times which already suggests considerable

128  David Chandler familiarity with Bishop’s career. It is reasonable to conclude that Corder’s interest in Bishop developed alongside his work for Alice Barth and was, in a sense, an attempt to historicise problems he was facing in his own career. It allowed him, from the very beginning, to indirectly criticise the immature taste of the British public: I suppose that most of my readers are aware that until about half a century ago opera in England meant nothing more nor less than a farce or melodrama with just so many songs and choruses stuck in as the piece would bear without being absolutely killed by them. (Corder 1885, 189) Readers of the Musical Times were presumably expected to be able to place this assertion in some sort of transnational perspective. Things had not been like this in Germany, or Italy, or France, and the more developed culture of musical drama in those countries had gone on to produce a Wagner, a Verdi, a Gounod. Before Corder, Bishop had been very little studied, despite his dominance in his own time and a large number of his songs still in circulation. Indeed, there was already a clear tendency to write him out of the history of English opera, along with the period he represented. This is strikingly evident in an 1882 Musical Times article on “English Opera” that Corder almost certainly knew4 and which may even have prompted his study of Bishop. The anonymous author, despite knowing much about the history of English opera, and dilating a good deal on the early nineteenth-­ century repertoire, astonishingly makes no mention of Bishop at all: Even when English Opera was, during the first quarter of the [nineteenth] century, a recognised institution in the capital, and the works of Arnold, Shield, Arne, and others were successfully given, the success they gained was owing in a great measure to the ability of one or two prominent singers . . . . (“English Opera” 1882, 245) Samuel Arnold (1740–1802), William Shield (1748–1829) and Thomas Arne (1710–1778) were all eighteenth-century composers (all but one of Shield’s many operas were composed by 1797), so it is distinctly odd to find them evoked here as representatives of the early nineteenth century, though of course their most popular works continued to be revived. The article gives the general impression that the eighteenth-century favourites sufficed British audiences’ appetite for opera until a new school of English opera emerged in the 1830s with Balfe. This was a narrative leaving no room for Bishop, and one with an enduring impact on perceptions of British operatic history: the period 1800–1830 has attracted much less interest from scholars, and from the recording industry, than

Mediating Richard Wagner and Henry Bishop  129 any other three-decade period. In drawing attention to Bishop’s career, then, Corder was filling a gap in Britain’s awareness of its own musical past. Nevertheless, he was not broadly interested in the Romantic period and barely mentions Bishop’s contemporaries, predecessors, and successors. Rather, he singled out Bishop as the dominant British theatre composer of the period when Romantic opera rapidly evolved in Germany. Bishop was the obvious figure for comparative purposes; indeed, the perfect one given the truly stunning coincidence that he was born on 18 November 1786, the day Carl Maria von Weber was born in ­G ermany. Weber was the most important composer of German opera in the 1810s and 1820s, as Bishop was, in the same decades, of B ­ ritish opera. Weber was widely regarded, including by Wagner himself, as Wagner’s most important predecessor in the field of German opera. Corder’s biography of Wagner makes “the fascination of Weber’s opera, Der Freischütz, then in the heyday of its frantic popularity” critical to the later composer’s commitment to a career as an opera composer (Corder 1912, 6). And Corder placed Der Freischütz with Mozart’s Magic Flute as “two of the finest works ever penned” (Corder 1884, 512). Weber, then, was a sort of John the Baptist figure to the Messiah of Wagner, the greatest opera composer who had ever lived. For a British Wagnerian attempting to come to terms with the enormous cultural gap, in the sphere of Romantic opera, between Britain and Germany, Bishop, Weber’s exact contemporary, was a uniquely valuable reference point. Corder knew well that Bishop’s and Weber’s careers had briefly coincided in a remarkable way. In 1824, at the end of his life, Weber accepted a commission from Covent Garden to compose an English opera, Oberon. This was premiered in London on 12 April 1826, to great publicity and acclaim. Eager not to be outdone, Drury Lane, Covent Garden’s great rival, turned to Bishop for a comparable oriental extravaganza, and his Aladdin, the most ambitious opera he ever composed, followed there on 29 April. This was effectively a competition between the leading German and British composers of opera, and in 1826, and ever since, the general verdict has pronounced an overwhelming victory for Weber. Corder held this view very strongly; though he is, at best, a severe critic of Bishop’s work, on the subject of Aladdin he is absolutely scathing, apparently finding the music almost unbearable: ALADDIN was lavishly mounted, but was damned by the poor quality of the music, which was so phenomenally dull as to engender the idea of its not being by Bishop at all. The vocal score is extant, and any one who makes the attempt to peruse it—it can only be an attempt—will hardly fail to endorse this doubt. (Corder 1913, 41)

130  David Chandler I would fain omit mention of Bishop’s one real opera—that is, opera with music all through—as it is by very far his least good work; indeed so extraordinarily bad that one would be inclined to doubt its genuineness were this not proven. (Corder 1914, 71) These judgements surely cross the line of critical objectivity; there is strong emotion involved, as though Corder could not stomach Bishop’s effrontery in thinking he could compete with Weber, or that the inferior state of British opera had been so cruelly exposed. By contrast, he judged “There is no finer piece of dramatic declamation than ‘Ocean, thou mighty monster!’ [from Oberon]” (Corder 1922b, 19). Corder also considered the overture to Oberon a masterpiece of evocative orchestration (Corder 1896, 7). Despite, or perhaps because of, his almost pathological feeling that when put to the ultimate test, a comparison with German work, Bishop had failed abysmally, Corder’s interest in his British forbear continued for decades. He patiently accumulated information and collected scores and such theatrical ephemera as programmes, engravings, and illustrations. By 1913, he had enough material to compile a large, beautifully-bound typescript volume, “Henry Bishop and his Operas: A Descriptive Catalogue,” also serving as a scrapbook for his theatrical ephemera. In 1914, in the course of a series of public lectures for the Royal Institution on “neglected musical worthies,” he discussed Bishop between two ­G erman composers, Joachim Raff and Louis Spohr. The lecture on Bishop was subsequently published in the Musical Herald. A substantial article appeared in Musical Quarterly in 1918, and has become a standard part of the slim Bishop bibliography. Corder was left with much unused material; I believe he intended to write a book on Bishop and was only prevented from doing so by Richard Northcott publishing his still-­standard critical biography in 1920. If Corder judged Aladdin Bishop’s worst opera, by which he probably meant the one falling most short of its own ambitions rather than the least competent and inspired, the one he judged generally the best was Maid Marian: The best approach to a genuine English opera which Bishop ever made was one called Maid Marian (1822). Here are half-a-dozen of his best glees or choral pieces, a beautiful ballad ‘O well do I remember,’ and a display song of the ‘Should he upbraid’ sort. (Corder 1914, 71)5 It is worth remarking the historical proximity of Maid Marian to Der Freischütz of 1821: Bishop and Weber, in Corder’s view, produced their best work at more or less the same juncture. Corder’s full itemisation

Mediating Richard Wagner and Henry Bishop  131 of the music in Maid Marian admirably illustrates his schoolmasterly approach to evaluating Bishop’s achievement: 1 Overture. In regular form, but sadly commonplace. 2 Glee “Listen! He must be near”. Effective. 3 Ballad, “A damsel stood”. Simple, but not bad. 4 Song, “The love that follows fain”. Good of its kind. 5 Quintet, “Though he be now a grey, grey friar”. A charming Glee. 6 Song, “The slender beech”[.] A rather absurd setting of very absurd lines. 7 Glee, “Hart and Hind”. Most charming. 8 Villagers’ Chorus, “Gather each flow’rt”[.] Lively: quite Sullivan­­esque. 9 Villagers’ March. Good character. 10 Glee, “With hawk and hound”. Rather poor; restricted melody. 11 Song, “Let us seek the yellow shore”. [L]ike “Should he upbraid”. 12 Duet, “Come hither”. Poor. 13 Chorus, “Revenge!” Short but vigorous piece of unison. 14 The Minstrel Glee. Extended, but not very interesting. 15 Glee, in 6 parts; “O bold Robin Hood!” A superior specimen. 16 Scena, “To arms!” Vigorous, but very Rossini-ish. 17 Ballad, “O well do I remember”. A truly national ballad air. 18 Chorus, “Shout for the monarch!” A much better Finale than usual. (Corder 1913, 34) It is a shame that Corder appears to have undertaken no evaluation and analysis of Weber’s work which could be productively compared with this. He did, though, write a series of analytical articles on the operas of Spohr, another close contemporary and another leading architect of ­German Romantic opera: the composer Corder discussed alongside Bishop in 1914, as a fellow “neglected worthy.” Here, again, Corder must have been aware of striking parallels: Spohr (1784–1859) had his first success in the opera house in 1811, two years after Bishop had his, and his “most satisfactory operatic effort”—in the opinion of Corder and many others—Jessonda, was completed in December 1822, the very month Maid Marian was premiered in London (Corder 1884, 445). Corder recognised that Bishop and Spohr posed similar problems. His surprisingly fierce view of the German composer’s Faust (premiered under Weber’s baton in 1816) is closely akin to his most severe judgements on Bishop’s works: It is really astonishing how Spohr can have accepted such a mass of absurdity as this libretto. It is a chaotic heap of totally unconnected melodramatic incidents, no part of which ‘yearns for musical expression’; on the contrary, the musical numbers seem, one and all, dragged in by the heels. (389)6

132  David Chandler But Faust was, in Corder’s view, the low point of Spohr’s operatic career (mainly on account of the unfortunate libretto), whereas, in contrast, Jessonda had the great benefit of “a very fair libretto,” one which encouraged the German composer to dispense with spoken dialogue altogether (for the first time), even though Corder was carping about “the old-fashioned, wearisome style of recitative” offered instead (445). Corder’s analysis of Jessonda is disappointing, though; apart from the quality of the libretto, it is not clear on what grounds he ranks it Spohr’s best opera, and he fails to capture its significance as “the standard-bearer of German grand opera until the advent of Wagner” (Brown 1992). As with his accounts of the other operas, he summarises the story, quotes some of the themes, and delivers a series of judgements on particular numbers, only one example of which need be given here: “He [Tristan, the hero] bewails his sorrows in a lively Aria all polacca, which, being in strict rondo form, has its interest considerably spoilt by excessive length, like most old-fashioned Arias” (Corder 1884, 446). Simply placing his accounts of Jessonda and Maid Marian together, it is hardly clear if or how Corder intended his readers to recognise German Romantic opera in 1822 as qualitatively superior to contemporary English Romantic opera, apart perhaps from Germany possessing the volcanic genius of Weber (later appropriated by London) and German opera being more thoroughly musical. The key differences between Bishop and Spohr emerge, in fact, not so much in the accounts of their operas but in the often-incidental remarks about the creative environments in which they worked. Here the contrast is often stark. Between 1806 and 1845, Spohr composed ten complete, original operas. Between 1804 and 1840, in Corder’s catalogue, Bishop composed music for some 127 stage works. Only a minority of these were operas like Maid Marian, in which Bishop took exclusive responsibility for an original score. In dozens of cases, he was adapting operas composed by other people, and in a good number, he was working in conjunction with other composers. Allied to this enormous difference in productivity, Corder emphasises that Spohr was, for the most part, composing the operas he wanted to compose at times he felt inspired to do so. Corder starts his account of Jessonda, for example, with the statement “Towards the close of 1821, while living in Dresden, Spohr felt the spirit move him to write another opera.” Spohr then read an “old romance”—a revealing mistake on Corder’s part; it was actually a 1770 play7—which seemed promising in terms of source material and “sketched out a skeleton of the libretto” himself (Corder 1884, 445). There is no suggestion in Corder’s accounts—or anyone else’s, for that matter—of Bishop ever being able to go about composing an opera in such a leisurely, personal, and deeply involved way, as “the spirit move[d] him.” This difference meant Spohr’s career had a coherent overall shape

Mediating Richard Wagner and Henry Bishop  133 with a personal imprint: “The librettos of [his] operas are all based on romantic subjects involving gallant knights, persecuted maidens, demons and magicians, such as Weber, Marschner, and other composers of this epoch were so fond of” (386). (Part of some sort of “spirit of the age,” then.) Bishop, by contrast, was expected to treat a very wide range of subject matter and a whole variety of dramatic genres, so whatever the personal element in his style he was never able to evolve a distinct artistic form. If Maid Marian was especially good, it was because of a fortunate coincidence of subject and inspiration, not because Bishop had steadily worked towards such an opera. Particularly significant for Corder was the recognition of a steady development in Spohr, foreshadowing Wagner. In the later operas, “there is more freedom of form, there is even a striving towards that more intimate blending of drama and music which the modern school aims at” (Corder 1884, 447). In Spohr’s last opera, Die Kreuzfahrer (commenced in 1832, according to Corder), “he [Spohr] boldly attempted to realise the music drama at which Wagner was then commencing to labour” (510). “To this end,” Corder continues, “he [Spohr] became his own librettist, and with the aid of his wife . . . extracted from a novel of Kotzebue’s a very fair set of words.” There was surely some strong fellow feeling about this: Corder wrote his own librettos, usually in collaboration with his wife. Yet Die Kreuzfahrer revealed so much Wagnerian ambition that Corder, rather paradoxically, felt compelled to condemn it as too ambitious: “Spohr trying to write a Music-Drama is as much out of his element as Wagner would have been had he tried to write a Pianoforte Concerto.” He is unlikely to have spoken so critically of Weber’s most Wagnerian opera, Euryanthe (1823), even though Wagner himself had a very complicated relationship with it, sometimes resulting in fierce criticism (Tusa 1986). But whether German opera was being advanced by the genius of Weber, or the more modest talents of Spohr, there was clearly a progressive element at work, that progress being ultimately towards the ne plus ultra of Tristan, completed the year of Spohr’s death. (However impressive this progressiveness, Corder would presumably have accepted that Tristan was still a quantum leap forwards and arguably influenced more by such Italian operas as Vincenzo Bellini’s Norma [1831] than the operas of Weber and Spohr.) In Bishop, by contrast, Corder could find no principle of progress. British opera was basically no closer to Wagner in 1830 than it had been in 1800, and any positive developments were down to the influence of Weber. When British opera did start to evolve in the 1830s, it was through the absorption of foreign elements (including German Romantic opera) rather than because of anything incubated by Bishop. Should Bishop be blamed? On the whole, Corder judges not. Though he does not go into the fact, he must have been aware that composers

134  David Chandler like Weber and Spohr were fortunate in having positions allowing them to compose without being dependent on income from their music: Weber was Kapellmeister at Dresden from 1816, Spohr Kapellmeister at Kassel from 1822. (The young Wagner was not so fortunate; Corder presumably wrote with strong fellow feeling when describing Wagner’s career between 1837 and 1842: “grinding poverty . . . the hopeless struggle for recognition. . . . A period of hackwork . . . such as most composers undergo” [Corder 1912, 9]). They could afford to devote long periods of composition to unsuccessful operas: only three of Spohr’s ten operas were enduring successes; several were outright failures. But Corder is clear that in the much more commercialised culture of early nineteenth-century Britain, Bishop’s music had to be produced quickly and be directly remunerative. As Deborah Rohr (2001) has analysed, by about 1750, Britain offered composers very little in the way of court, aristocratic, church, or university patronage. The majority of musicians wanting to compose had to operate in a common marketplace; for the most part that meant working for the theatres. Corder represents Bishop as a skilled practitioner in this highly commercial and competitive world: Bishop . . . was called upon to supply the most varied pieces of music to suit the most various requirements, and from the t­ radesman’s—i.e. music-publisher’s and stage-manager’s point of view—he must be held to have fulfilled to the letter all demands. (Corder 1913, 48) But the world of commercial music was a harsh one, and the composer was alienated, in the Marxist sense, from the products of his labour: “after a life of incessant and badly rewarded labour, [Bishop] died almost in indigence” (Corder 1918, 79). This alienation had been severely detrimental to Bishop’s art: “when we regard the matter from the artistic, instead of from the pecuniary side, the words of praise freeze in our pen” (Corder 1913, 48). Getting the balance right between praise, blame, and excuse was difficult for Corder, though, not least because he knew his own career as an opera composer had been thoroughly compromised by the very issues afflicting Bishop seven decades earlier. Some of his statements about Bishop actually seem to say more about himself, one of the most striking being: “Beginning, like all young composers, with the usual futile symphony and violin sonata, he [Bishop] quickly abandoned high art for the music shop . . .” (Corder 1914, 71). Corder’s most generous assessment, at the end of his 1914 lecture (and therefore for a general audience), is actually rather surprising: I count Henry Bishop, along with Arthur Sullivan and Mr. Edward German, as a truly national English composer. That his work is on a humble plane is no fault of his: he supplied the article that was

Mediating Richard Wagner and Henry Bishop  135 wanted, and if quantity predominated over quality, that again was hardly his fault. With such a hasty and abundant production it was not possible that more than a small proportion should live. (71) Gilbert and Sullivan were, of course, the most successful and celebrated creators of English comic opera, or operetta, in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. Edward German (1862–1936) was in many ways Sullivan’s successor, his greatest success being Merrie England of 1902. Although it is not perfectly clear what Corder means by “national ­English composer,” we must conclude he did not consider Bishop, Sullivan, and German “national composers” in the sense he might have applied that term to Wagner, Liszt, or Dvořák. It is more the case that they caught a sort of popular zeitgeist, producing music in a recognisably English tradition which appealed to a broad social base and benefitted from the technologies of cheap reproduction. In making such a statement, Corder was presumably well aware that his own, less ambitious stage works had been compared to Sullivan’s. Perhaps the young Corder had imagined his own Morte d’Arthur an ­English Tristan, or at least a proper preparation for a great Wagnerian music drama. But as the decades passed, his intended operatic career amounted to so little, and he witnessed the inexorable rise of the “musical comedy,” forerunner to what later generations would call a “musical,” Corder became cynical about the possibility of serious opera ever establishing itself in Britain. There is a particularly revealing comment in his manuscript volume on Bishop, compiled in the centenary of Wagner’s birth: when we come to examine these so-called Operas of Bishop in detail, what shall we say of their intrinsic merit? We must not judge them from too high a standpoint, always bearing in mind that the English public has never yet grasped that an Opera is a work of art . . . . (Corder 1913, 48) The “yet” is telling and rather painful. As German audiences had eagerly embraced Der Freischütz in 1821, thus creating the cultural environment in which a Wagner could emerge, Corder presumably felt British audiences were at least nine decades behind in terms of “grasp[ing] that an Opera is a work of art”—or at least, if we unpack the comment a little, audiences for English opera were nine decades behind in grasping that an English opera should be a work of art. A casual comment in Corder’s book on Liszt slightly undermines the point, however. He notes the great popularity of piano transcriptions of “popular melodies” in the nineteenth century, before asserting: there is just the difference between this rubbish and a Liszt transcription that there is between an ordinary ‘Musical Comedy’ and a

136  David Chandler Gilbert-and-Sullivan opera, or between an ordinary juggler juggling with balls and Cinquevalli making them play a game of billiards over his body. To do anything whatever supremely well, however unworthy in itself, is to be an artist. (Corder 1925, 39) Corder apparently concedes here that the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, at least, are works of art: therefore, their great success with contemporary British audiences must count as a form of art appreciation. But the concession only goes so far; in context, and from everything else we know of Corder, it is clear he means Gilbert and Sullivan produced “supremely” good examples of second rate, popular musical theatre—certainly not “stupendous, crushing effort[s] of genius” or “ideally perfect” works to be named alongside Tristan und Isolde.8 Putting Corder’s various comments together, we might conclude that as Weber prepared the way for Wagner, so Bishop prepared the way for Sullivan. The difference is that, in Germany, the legacy took the form of lofty inspiration and a determination to advance the frontiers of musical drama, while in Britain it took the form of an expert handling of recognisably “English” song and the development of musical theatre as a commercial enterprise. Ultimately, the central difference between the legacies of British and German Romantic opera is indeed one of ambition and freedom from commercial constraint. Bishop’s most ambitious opera, Aladdin, composed simply because Drury Lane needed a work to compete with Oberon, eloquently makes the point that the “so-called Operas” he was usually concerned with had rather more circumscribed artistic horizons. On the other hand, in composing Oberon, for an irresistibly large sum of money, Weber felt he was producing a sub-operatic work far less musically and theatrically ambitious than he would have liked—so as to satisfy British taste. We will never know whether Weber, had he spent his entire career in London, would have been able to escape or transcend the commercial constraints afflicting Bishop, but certainly no British composer of the period was able to. Thus, while we think of British Romantic poets, novelists, and painters as extending the frontiers of their art and influencing the progressive aspirations of fellow artists across Europe, the legacy of British opera from the period 1800–1830 is not to be looked for in terms of artistic innovation or even the propagation of Romantic attitudes, but in the continued commitment to a popular musical theatre determined by managerial ideas concerning profitability. That legacy is very evident today in commercial theatres across Britain, and for that matter around the world. But if Corder had to learn the hard lesson that his theatrical works would please British audiences in roughly inverse proportion to their musical ambition, his efforts to popularise Wagner’s music dramas themselves were largely successful: by the end of his career he could, presumably, take considerable satisfaction

Mediating Richard Wagner and Henry Bishop  137 in knowing Wagner was established as a basic part of the British (and international) operatic repertoire. And this has gone on being the case: wherever operatic art is subsidised, and “high art” can be prioritised, Wagner is a gigantic presence. By contrast, Bishop’s successors, on both sides of the Atlantic, generally have their works produced outside systems of subsidy, and still need to consult the needs of the “music shop.”

Notes 1 The anecdote is actually thoroughly confused. Wagner completed the first act of Tristan in Zurich in April 1858, but Liszt was not there to play it for him. The opera was finished in 1859. Corder was clearly thinking of a later episode, from 1867, in which Liszt played the just-completed Die Meister-­ singer von Nürnberg from the manuscript. 2 Older reference books, dating back to Corder’s own time, generally list Le Morte d’Arthur as unperformed. Franz Stieger’s Opernlexikon (1975, 2:831) is apparently the first publication to record a supposed Brighton performance. By accident or false assumption, Stieger (1843–1938) registered this on the basis of Corder’s subsequent operettas having been performed in Brighton. Unfortunately, the mistake was then reproduced in other reference works. Corder’s unpublished manuscripts appear to have passed to his son Paul Corder (1879–1942), also a composer. Paul’s “musical manuscripts” were destroyed after his death by his sister Dolly (Parlett 2001), and it is probable his father’s perished at the same time. 3 I am not aware of such a statement by Wagner, and Barry Millington, editor of the Wagner Journal, kindly confirmed that he does not know what Corder alludes to here in an email to me of 13 December 2016. Wagner did start work on an unfinished “Singspiel, or romantic light opera,” Männerlist größer als Frauenlist oder Die glückliche Bärenfamilie, in 1837–1838, but this was very different from Nordisa (Millington 2007). 4 “English Opera,” the lead article in the Musical Times for May 1882, is immediately followed by Corder’s article on “The Nibelung’s Ring.” 5 “Should he upbraid” was one of Bishop’s most celebrated songs, composed for an 1821 revival of The Two Gentlemen of Verona. 6 It is worth explaining the significance of Corder’s quotation here, which comes from Joseph Bennett’s influential account of “Wagner’s theory”: An intimate union of poetry and music for the production of an effect which neither can create alone, and for the purposes of which each is subjected to a condition, viz., the poetry must be that only which ‘yearns’ for musical expression, while, on its side, the music must unreservedly adapt itself to the requirements of the poetry. (Bennett 1877, 18) Spohr is being faulted for failing to display any proto-Wagnerian sensitivity to the importance of dramatic poetry yearning to the condition of music. 7 Antoine-Marin Lemierre’s La Veuve du Malabar. 8 The highest praise for Sullivan I have located in Corder’s writings states that: Undoubtedly the greatest modern master of the art of irregular rhythm is Sir Arthur Sullivan. In his comic operas he produces a variety and freshness which no one else has approached by his dexterous manipulation of the verses . . . (Corder 1893, 39)

138  David Chandler

References Bennett, Joseph. 1877. Letters from Bayreuth Descriptive and Critical of ­Wagner’s “Der Ring des Nibelungen.” London: Novello, Ewer. Brown, Clive. 1992. “Jessonda.” The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. ­London: Macmillan Press. Corder, Frederick. 1882. “‘Tristan and Isolde’: An Analysis of Richard Wagner’s Music-Drama.” Musical Times 23: 126–131. ———. 1884. “Spohr’s Operas.” Musical Times 25: 385–389, 444–448, 508–512. ———. 1885. “Sir Henry Bishop’s Operas.” Musical Times 26: 189–193. ———. 1887. Nordisa. N.p. ———. [1893?] A Plain and Easy Introduction to Music. 2nd ed. London: ­Forsyth Bros. ———. 1896. The Orchestra and How to Write for It. London: R. Cocks & Co. ———. [1912?] Wagner. London: T. C. and E. C. Jack. ———. 1913. “Henry Bishop and his Operas: A Descriptive Catalogue.” Unpublished typescript, author’s collection. ———. 1914. “Henry Bishop. A Neglected English Composer.” Musical Herald, March, 70–71. ———. 1918. “The Works of Sir Henry Bishop.” Musical Quarterly 4: 78–97. ———. 1922a. A History of the Royal Academy of Music from 1822 to 1922. London: F. Corder. ———. [1922b?] Vocal Recitative: Historically and Practically Described with 54 Examples. London: Associated Board of the R.A.M. and the R.C.M. ———. 1925. Ferencz (François) Liszt. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. “English Opera.” 1882. Musical Times 23: 245–246. “Frederick Corder.” 1913. Musical Times 54: 713–716. Hughes, Meirion, and Robert Stradling. 2001. The English Musical Renaissance 1840–1940: Constructing a National Music. 2nd ed. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Millington, Barry. 2007. “Happy Families: A Wagner Singspiel Rediscovered.” Wagner Journal 1 (3): 3–18. Northcott, Richard. 1920. The Life of Sir Henry R. Bishop. London: Press Printers. Parlett, Graham. 2001. “Note on Paul Corder.” Musicweb International. Accessed 10 January 2017. http://www.musicweb-international.com/classrev/ 2001/Apr01/hounds.htm. Programme of the Twelfth Saturday Concert, February 8th, 1879. 1879. London. Rohr, Deborah. 2001. The Careers of British Musicians, 1750–1850: A Profession of Artisans. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stieger, Franz. 1975. Opernlexikon: Teil I: Titelkatalog. 3 vols. Tützing: Hans Schneider. Tusa, Michael C. 1986. “Richard Wagner and Weber’s Euryanthe.” 19th-­ Century Music 9: 206–221.

Part III

(Post)Modern Romanticism

7 Platonism, Its Heirs, and the Last Romantic Arthur Versluis

Who was the last of the Romantics? One can think of a number of candidates. After all, the American Renaissance, as it is sometimes termed, was comparatively late; Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882) and Amos Bronson Alcott (1799–1888) died in the 1880s, and one could reasonably argue that American Romanticism more or less died with them. But I would like to propose, as the last of the Romantics, Kathleen Raine (1908–2003), the British poet, scholar, and founder of Temenos, an international network of scholars, artists, filmmakers, musicians, and poets. Like Emerson in the nineteenth century, Kathleen Raine was an essayist as well as a poet. But to these two genres she added also complementary scholarship of her own, hence providing a unique body of work that is quite illuminating in terms of understanding not only her own particular work, but Romanticism more broadly. Raine’s scholarly work emphasises two figures above all: William Blake and Thomas Taylor, the indefatigable translator of Platonism. I will discuss briefly Raine’s poetry, but it is her emphasis on Blake and Taylor that is most valuable. Both Emerson and Raine shared a common influence that is not yet fully recognised in contemporary scholarship, but that is quite important for understanding their work. I am referring here to Platonism as made available to them both via that extraordinary translator, Thomas Taylor (1758–1835). In American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (1993), I argued for the central importance of Asian religious texts in the development of American Transcendentalism, and in The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance (2001) I explored Emerson’s and Alcott’s esoteric sources, but in so doing I did not emphasise the importance of Platonism and of Thomas Taylor. While Asian religions, particularly Hinduism, were quite important for both Emerson and Raine, we should recognise that they were understood by both figures through a Platonic lens. Platonism, I would argue, provides us with important keys to understanding Romanticism. In his discussion of how to define European Romanticism, Christoph Bode argues that terminology, chronology, and ideological consistency do not provide a sufficient definition. Romantics were historically a

142  Arthur Versluis heterogeneous group, some calling themselves Romantic, others not, some were leftist, others belonging more to the right, some idealist, some reactionary, some belonging to a particular early modern historical period, others not. What then defines Romanticism? Bode (2006) remarks that fundamentally, Romanticism should be understood as a “set of responses, highly differentiated and at times downright contradictory, to a historically specific challenge: the challenge of the ever-accelerating modernisation of European society” (127). Bode’s point here is an important one: Romanticism indeed can be understood as an anti-modern movement and, seen this way, is, fundamentally, reactionary against industrialisation, against the destructive aspects of the modern world and the correlative erosion of cultural coherence. However, I would add that Romanticism is not only reactionary, that is, it does not only exist as a reaction against industrial modernity but also is affirmative. What it affirms is well known: self-transcendence in wild nature, the sublime, natural human innocence unless and until one is sullied by modernity. Romanticism is intuitionist. What is less well recognised is that these affirmations have a traditional source in the Western tradition. That source is Platonism. And not the Platonism that is reductively thrown about in contemporary humanities as a belief in various forms of essentialism, but Platonism in “its entirety as a tradition” which I defined in Platonic Mysticism (2017) as a “conceptual map for understanding contemplative ascent and illumination” (5). It is a contemplative praxis that entails therefore “an inner dimension where the observing subject is not separate from the revealing object, but rather where the divine ‘other’ reveals itself to ‘me’” (3). In the following four sections, we will look at three late Romantic figures, Bronson Alcott, Ralph Waldo ­Emerson, and Kathleen Raine in order to explore what they affirm, and how it has its origin in this Platonic tradition.

Late American Romanticism We begin with Bronson Alcott, who has been lauded as the primary figure within American Transcendentalism, a movement that belongs to the larger category of American Romanticism. Like Wordsworth and Blake, Alcott held that children were born naturally innocent and with access to higher knowledge that, because of exposure to the modern world, they progressively lose. Hence, Alcott came to public attention with his Conversations with Students on the Gospels, published in 1837, for which he was pilloried in the press and attacked by Andrews Norton—a prominent Unitarian spokesman known to some as “the Unitarian Pope”—as having written a book “one third absurd, one third blasphemous, and one third obscene” (Myerson 2000, 160–162).1 The book that incensed Norton was based on Alcott’s time teaching students at Temple School, where he engaged children in a Platonic dialogue. It is

Platonism, Its Heirs, and the Last Romantic  143 no accident that Alcott had a bust of Plato above a bust of Jesus in ­Temple School. The origins of Alcott’s Romanticism are in Platonism. As I discussed in much more detail in American Gurus (2014), Alcott’s oracular prose style; the public “Conversations” that engaged him all his life and took him across a swathe of the United States; and the Concord School of Philosophy and other philosophical groups that he inspired around the country, all these have their precedent in Platonism. As more than one scholar has suggested, the entire Transcendentalist movement, and Emerson in particular, owed a greater unacknowledged debt to Alcott than to anyone else. If so, Alcott owed a greater debt to Plato and Platonism than to anywhere else. In 1849, Alcott (1966) had what he termed an “apotheosis,” that is, a series of spiritual illuminations (208). During this spiritual awakening, his experience was sometimes so powerful that it nearly overwhelmed him. ­A lcott was convinced that if one only could “Emancipate the Soul from Things,” then “lo! a new Heaven and Earth springs into vision” (quoted in Dahlstrand 1982, 226). From his spiritual experiences, Alcott (1966) developed further his theory that “Nature, and man, his mind and being, are but means to a higher and final end, above and beyond, themselves” (227). Alcott thought revelation was to be found in “an instant solution, in the immediate action of Spirit through Nature in man.” Ultimately, “mind and matter are one, indivisible and the same” (230). In Tablets in Colours: Disposed on Twelve Tables (1849), Alcott outlined in nearly 800 pages an intellectual model or synthesis he began to work out from the Platonic illumination experience he had (774). This is not the same work as his collection of essays also entitled Tablets (1868). Alcott’s Tablets in Colours is a bound volume of handwritten notes, combined with various tables and marked with hand-pasted images from the Zodiac to mark the beginning of sections or chapters. In the book, Alcott meditates on religion and science in observations like “Man is a conductor of heavenly forces, and a wondrous instrument, a cerebral magnet, and electric battery, telegraph, glass, crucible, molten fluids traversing his frame” (43–44). Tablets in Colours is really a kind of commonplace book that includes some things Alcott might not have been inclined to make public. In “Clairvoyance,” for instance, he includes remarks on how “blissful” are experiences of “the Godhead,” full of “grace” and “beatific” (1949, 757). And he also includes one of his principal ideas, that “Spirit is imaged in matter” (665). He speculates on how the testicles are brainlike in shape, and how for its part the “brain is the Egg of the future state” (667). And he reflects on what a delight it is to see a “beautiful body flourishing and fruitful,” on the beauty of married life, as a reflection of eternity, and on how “the soul delights in the Beauty of the Body” (447, 461–463, 765). By and large, the book is a meditation on how “Mind and body are [an] Instrument of Nature and Spirit” (31). Underlying all of these is the conceptual framework found in the works of Plato like Phaedrus.

144  Arthur Versluis In his Concord Days (1872), Alcott reflects on themes organised by “months.” It includes reflections on various figures and themes, including Emerson and Margaret Fuller, Goethe and Carlyle, arranged in months from April to September. Topics do include “rural affairs” and “childhood,” as well as “woman.” But at the book’s centre is Platonism. Alcott writes: “mysticism is the sacred spark that has lighted the piety and illuminated the philosophy of all places and times” (1872, 237). Alcott’s Platonic mysticism is, in fact, the key to his life and thought, and the source for his American Romanticism. Alcott was, Odell Shepard wrote, “the one complete representative of American Transcendentalism” ­(Alcott 1966, xvii), to whom the entire movement was indebted, confirming Emerson’s remark that Alcott was “the most extraordinary man and the highest genius of the time” (xvi). Shepard went on to observe “the mind and heart of Bronson Alcott enriched the coloring of many an essay that does not bear his name,” for he “made one realize that the world of Platonic Ideas was no mere cloudland but was ‘as solid as Massachusetts’” (xx–xxi). Of course other sources are also valuable for Alcott, but they corroborate his fundamentally Platonic perspective. Even Jacob Boehme’s mysticism must be seen in a broadly Platonic context. If one is looking for the primary source for all of Alcott’s endeavours and approaches, the template is in Platonism. His Conversations are modern forms of Plato’s dialogues; his educational methods with children, even on the Gospels, were Socratic; and his writings are shot through with Platonism. Even his Fruitlands utopia was modelled on Platonopolis. Like Alcott’s, Emerson’s Romanticism had Platonic origins. As early as 1876, Octavius Brooks Frothingham noted in Transcendentalism in New England that Platonism is the essence of transcendental philosophy (in the generic sense). 2 In 1908, Harold Clarke Goddard, in Studies in New England Transcendentalism, sketched the Platonic sources of Alcott and Emerson. Briefly put, for more than a century, there has been awareness amongst scholars of how important Platonism was to ­A merican Transcendentalism. What I am arguing here is that Platonism is also the source for their American Romanticism. In his first book, Nature, as is well known, Emerson (1971) alludes to his “standing on bare ground” “uplifted into infinite space,” become a “transparent eyeball,” in which “I am nothing. I see all. The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God” (10). In the next passage, Emerson remarks upon his “greatest delight”: “an occult relation between man and the vegetable.” For, he continues, “they nod to me and I to them.” And in the third paragraph, he remarks, “the power to produce this delight, does not reside in nature, but in man, or in a harmony of both” (10). As an American Romantic, ­Emerson

Platonism, Its Heirs, and the Last Romantic  145 finds his mystical experience in nature, where “all mean egotism vanishes” (13–14). He enjoys a unity with the natural world and simultaneously a sense of the sublime, very much like William Wordsworth before him. His experience of beauty depends upon “the presence of a higher, namely, of the spiritual element” (15). Beauty in nature, Emerson observes, is not only outward but is “the herald of inward and eternal beauty” (17), precisely, the contemplative Platonic affirmation of inner illumination beyond subject and object. The book as a whole is in essence a guidebook to how we too may have access to such an experience. “Idealism” reveals how “nature is made to conspire with spirit to emancipate us” (1971, 30). If we choose, we can see things anew simply by changing how we see them, for instance, riding in a carriage rather than walking, or with our head upside down between our legs. His point is that we can change our perspective and as a result can regain the sense of childhood innocence and spiritual insight (36). In “Spirit,” Emerson also emphasises the immediacy of insight possible to us. It is possible to recognise that the highest is present to the soul of man, that the dread universal essence, which is not wisdom, or love, or beauty, or power, but all in one, and each entirely, is that for which all things exist, and that by which they are; that spirit creates; that behind nature, through nature, spirit is present; that spirit is one and not compound; that spirit does not act upon us from without, that is, in space and time, but spiritually, or through ourselves. Therefore, that spirit, that is, the Supreme Being, does not build up nature around us, but puts it forth through us, as the life of the tree puts forth new branches and leaves through the pores of the old. (38) Quoting John Milton, Emerson presents “The golden key / Which opes the palace of eternity” (38). Emerson here is suggesting a Platonic idea of creativity as anamnesis, that is, of remembering what we already know. Emerson argues that the spiritual is a unified process of natural growth and transformation, a pouring forth in which life infuses the past from within and makes it young again. Emerson, in the final chapter “Prospects” (1971), observes that the most refined truth may seem dim only because it resides deepest in the mind “among the eternal verities.” What seems empirical, the categorising, rationalistic faculty, actually occludes the “metaphysics” of nature, and “a certain occult recognition and sympathy” (39–40). The “end is lost sight of in attention to the means,” but he calls us towards our higher self by referring to an Orphic poet who offers transcendent insight, probably Alcott. 3 Through the voice

146  Arthur Versluis of his Orphic poet, Emerson calls us to awaken our higher reason, in one leap, as a banished king who vaults at once into his throne (43). His invocation of a power beyond space and time is a kind of Platonic initiatory rebirth. “So,” Emerson concludes, “shall we come to look at the world with new eyes.” And a “correspondent revolution in things will attend the influx of the spirit.” Evil will vanish, and this realisation will draw around it “beautiful faces, and warm hearts, and wise discourse, and heroic acts” (45). One who is so reborn enters a dominion “such as now is beyond his dream of God,” and with the wonder of a “blind man” who is gradually restored to “perfect sight.” In “Intellect” from his First Series of Essays (1841), Emerson’s theme is the intellect and how it becomes illuminated. While our mind can be caught in “time and place,” “you and me,” “profit and hurt,” intellect transcends polarities (1979a, 193). It allows us to become “as a god upraised above care and fear” (194). But our path to this truth is individual: “each mind has its own method” (196). The mind has many teachers, Emerson says, each one seeming the best at that time, only  to be superseded by another (203–204). Emerson invokes the Trismegisti, the “expounders of the principles of thought from age to age,” amongst whom are Hermes, Plato, Plotinus, Olympiadorus, Proclus, and Synesius, those who speak with one another across the ages, “without a moment’s heed of the universal astonishment of the human race below.” The angels, he concludes, pay no attention to the language of men “but speak their own, whether there be any who understand it or not” (204–205). Essays: Second Series also features a Platonic perspective. “The Poet” begins by recognising that modern notions of beauty are debased and have no Platonic “doctrine of forms,” but in fact Emerson writes, “we are children of the fire, made of it, and only the same divinity transmuted” (1979b, 3–4). It is no accident that when Octavius Brooks Frothingham published his Transcendentalism in New England: A History in 1876 (while both Alcott and Emerson were still alive), he emphasised the centrality of Platonism not only for them, but also for the whole of the Transcendentalist group and philosophy. Brooks begins by remarking that the “religion of New England was Protestant and of the most intellectual type.” Yet “its root ran back to Platonism, and its flower was a mysticism which, on the intellectual side, bordered closely on Transcendentalism” (1876, 107–108). Transcendentalism goes back to these Platonic roots, as it r­ equires neither Trinity nor descent of the Holy Spirit because for its e­ xponents, the “Inner Light” is “a natural endowment of the mind” (119). His Platonic intuitionism was exactly what incensed E ­ merson’s bitterest critics. In “The Latest Form of Infidelity,” given after ­Emerson’s Divinity School Address, Andrews Norton said “I know of no absolute certainty beyond the limit of momentary consciousness;

Platonism, Its Heirs, and the Last Romantic  147 a certainty that vanishes the instant it exists, and is lost in the region of metaphysical doubt.” Norton held that only an ordinary dualistic state of consciousness exists, and “there can be no intuition, no direct perception of the truth of Christianity, no metaphysical certainty.” Another critic asserted ex cathedra that “the doctrine that the mind possesses a faculty of intuitively discovering the truths of religion, is . . . utterly untenable” (Frothingham 1876, 123–124). For “consciousness or intuition can inform us of nothing but what exists in our own minds” (124). In fact, Romanticism as a whole is not only reactionary (anti-modern) but also has an affirmative dimension. What it affirms is the broadly Platonic view that direct intuition of spiritual reality is possible. American Transcendentalism represents a particularly strong type of Platonism in this regard, and its enemies are anti-intuitionist and anti-Platonic. There is a type of intransigent dualistic consciousness that, for whatever reason, cannot abide the claims of transcendence of an Alcott or of an Emerson.4 In short, Transcendentalism is the archetypal American form of Platonic intuitionism. Now one could make a case that Emerson was the last Romantic in the movement of Romanticism that essentially ended in the second half of the nineteenth century, to be followed by a succession of other movements and individual perspectives that were, collectively, Romanticism’s inheritors. However, the last Romantic arguably is not American, and not nineteenth-century at all, but died in the ­twenty-first century. Here I am not referring to Romanticism in a loose way, but sensu stricto, to someone who explicitly and clearly identified herself with and whose poetic sensibility directly inherited and reflected the ­English ­Romantic tradition precisely as it has been understood in the academy. I am referring, as the title of this chapter suggests, to the ­English poet, essayist, and literary critic Kathleen Raine. Most biographies describe Raine as a poet, as a scholar of William Blake, W. B. Yeats, and Thomas Taylor, whose world view was to a great extent informed by Platonism, and who was the leading founder of Temenos, a London-based charity devoted to the arts and literature whose various aspects include the Temenos Academy (a venue for public talks and workshops) as well as the periodicals Temenos Review, and Temenos Academy Review (the latter still ongoing). All of this is, as a matter of fact, true. But what we will delve into in the sections to come is the central, defining role that Platonism had in Kathleen Raine’s poetry and non-fiction works, including her works of literary criticism. As an undergraduate and then a PhD student in English literature, I took various courses that included or focussed on English Romanticism and the Romantic Movement more broadly. I also studied with a specialist in William Blake’s poetry and engravings, John Wright. In no course, nor in my reading at the time, was it suggested that Platonism had any role of significance in Romanticism. It was only later, as a professor,

148  Arthur Versluis that I discovered in the course of things that Romanticism owed more than a little to Platonism. In the sections that follows, I will look at (1)  the role of Platonism in Kathleen Raine’s poetry; (2) the role of Platonism in Kathleen Raine’s literary scholarship; and (3) how Kathleen Raine herself can be understood as the last Romantic as well as the larger significance of Kathleen Raine’s work for understanding the legacy of Romanticism.

The Role of Platonism in Kathleen Raine’s Poetry A few years before her death, Kathleen Raine published a volume of selected poetry to which she contributed an introduction that recapitulated the primary themes of her life: her idyllic childhood in the countryside of England and the primacy of nature for her, not in the form of “­nature-poetry,” but rather “the language of images in which nature daily speaks to us of the timeless, age-old mystery in which we participate.” Here she situates herself squarely in the tradition of Wordsworth, Blake, and Shelley. And, she continues a bit gnomically: “I suppose that I have written so that I may have a roof over my head in the invisible country” (1988, 5–6). Now there is a lot that can be said about this single line, but here I will primarily say that for Raine, the poetic act belongs not only to a world understood materialistically, but also at once to this world and to the “invisible country” of the spirit. Poetry fuses these two or reveals the hidden spiritual realm in the midst of this one. This perspective (which is not, as it is usually presented, dualistic, but the transcendence of dualism) is fundamentally Platonic. Raine’s poems are suffused with what I term an implicit Platonism. I have already shown how Emerson’s essays and poetry are filled with hidden allusions to Platonic sources and ideas. Here I evince only a few examples amongst many of how Platonism provides the keys for understanding and explicating Raine’s poetry. I begin with a few poems from The Hollow Hill and Other Poems, a collection that dates from 1960 to 1964, the period when Raine was also working on her Mellon lectures, which became her two-volume series Blake and Tradition. The Hollow Hill begins with an epigraph given no attribution because it needs none: “Consider men as in a subterraneous habitation, resembling a cave, with its entrance expanding to the light. . . . Suppose them to have been in this cave from their childhood . . .” (1965, ix). This is, of course, the allegory of the Cave from Plato’s Republic, taken from Thomas Taylor’s translation, which in turn Raine showed (during this period) to have been central to understanding Blake’s poetry and engravings. Just as Raine’s epigraph from Plato is unattributed, so also the Platonism in The Hollow Hill is implicit throughout. For example, the title poem, “The Hollow Hill,” begins in its first stanza with “the stone that

Platonism, Its Heirs, and the Last Romantic  149 seals the tomb,” and its second stanza turns on the line “the raveled record of the dead,” but the third stanza opens with a different emphasis, with the correspondences of the “earth-cave” complexes below and the sky above: We cannot look from the world into their house, Or they look from their house into our sky; For the low door where we crawl from world to world Into the earth-cave bends and turns away To close the hidden state of the dead from light of day. (1965, 16) The occasion of Raine’s poem is a visit to the great Irish monuments of Brú na Bóinne, the vast ancient megalithic complex whose passageways are illuminated by the rays of the sun at certain key times of the year. But the allusions here are very much to Plato and to the Platonic cave, as well as to that other great Platonic myth, the myth of Er, that is, of the man who saw what happened to the dead. And indeed, the poem ends with her recollection of a poet who had died and come to her in a dream: “Led me up the ancient stair / Of an ancestral tower of stone,” where she felt the “warm breath of the spirit” she had known in childhood, and there “Beyond the fallen barrier / Bright over sweet meadows rose the sun” (23). Here the experience of childhood is akin to a foretaste of the soul’s entry into the Elysian fields of the “invisible country,” paradise. She imagines this landscape as an interior cartography that I initially identified in terms of “contemplative ascent and illumination” (2017, 5). The “ancestral tower of stone” leads upwards and thus inwards to a direct encounter with “the warm breath of the spirit” within, a breath that interpenetrates every aspect of the self (1965, 23). Or again, in the poem “The Wilderness,” Raine begins with the familiar trope of Wordsworth and Blake, the sense of the fallen modern world, the recognition that “I came too late to the hills: they were swept bare / Winters before I was born of song and story, / Of spell or speech with power of oracle or invocation” (1965, 43). In the second stanza, we see a “great ash long dead by a roofless house,” and each subsequent stanza extends the sense of spiritual loss, save the last: “Yet I have glimpsed the bright mountain behind the mountain. / Knowledge under the leaves, tasted the bitter berries red, / Drunk water cold and clear from an inexhaustible hidden fountain” (43). What is the bright mountain behind the mountain? What is the “inexhaustible hidden fountain”? Here again, we see the Platonic theme of this world opening up to reveal its hidden source, the illuminated hidden country, the paradise of which this world is a reflection and to which it (in certain wild and sacred places) provides an entrance. As before, the spatial cartography of ascent and interiority

150  Arthur Versluis serve to structure a way of imagining something so deeply interpenetrating that it can only be “glimpsed” from afar. Once one recognises this central theme—that this world, especially in its pristine natural places, reflects and can be an entry point into the transcendent otherworld—one finds it everywhere in Raine’s poetry. In “The Halt,” she reflects on the “trains of time, succession and causality,” “from dream to dream,” of our “exiled selves.” But she remembers “the high unchanging country beyond time, / Given back the spring, the tree, the singing bird” (1965, 36). She observes (reminding us of Plato’s idea of the moving image of eternity) “Worlds within world each iridescent sphere of life revolves.” And this Platonic theme resounds through all Raine’s mature poetry. In The Oracle in the Heart (1978), she writes even more explicitly in the Platonic tradition: Into what pattern, into what music have the spheres whirled us, Of travelling light upon spindles of the stars wound us, The great winds upon the hills and in hollows swirled us, Into what currents the hollow waves and crested waters, Molten veins of ancestral rock wrought us . . . Our arrivals assigned us, our times and our places, Sanctuaries for all love’s meetings and partings, departings Healings and woundings and weepings and transfigurations? (1988, 125) Her allusions are to the Myth of Er and the cosmic spindle at the end of Plato’s Republic, as well as to the “moving image of eternity” in Plato’s Timaeus. In these beautiful lines of poetry, we see a descending movement by degrees from the highest first principles to the material, sublunary world of matter, at first the Pythagorean musica universalis, more commonly known as the music of the spheres, that is then transformed into a celestial web of light and stars before being expressed in the language of nature, the wind, hills, moving water, and the deep volcanic earth below. Yet the passage is not hierarchal in any reductive sense, since every level of reality expresses an ordering principle, whether it is the music, the light, the wind, or molten veins—all moving as one to put us into our present form. The cosmic dimension of Raine’s poetry has a corollary, which is that the self is not real, not truly separate from the past or future, nor from nature, nor from the transcendent joy it sometimes glimpses when sublimely united with the natural world. Thus, in “Monessie Gorge,” Raine (1988) writes: ‘I am the stream,’ I said: And yet not I the seer,

Platonism, Its Heirs, and the Last Romantic  151 The running water, The joy unbounded. (129) And she concludes that death might be like this Opening, this boundless Coming forth . . . Yet I had lost my situation in time and place And wondered, after, Who it was who had Been I when I said In fleeting joy ‘I am the river.’ (129) There is a hint of Emerson’s famous poem “Brahma” in her line “not I the seer,” but the fundamental inspiration for the poem is the moment of self-transcendence akin to that of Emerson in his first book, Nature, when he felt himself become a transparent eyeball. This self-­ transcendence is the central part of the Platonic tradition, where illumination involves the opening of “an inner dimension where the observing subject is not separate from the revealing object, but rather where the divine ‘other’ reveals itself to ‘me’” (2017, 3). For Raine, the opening of this inner dimension entails a radical change in perspective. No longer is the subject looking within from without, as if peering into a now open room. By contrast, in the experience of “opening,” we find a “­boundless / Coming forth,” a springing up from within that profoundly unsettles one’s “situation in time and place” (1988, 129). Here is not dualism, but the breaking apart of our usual subject/object cartography to reveal a direct encounter with spiritual reality.

The Role of Platonism in Kathleen Raine’s Literary Scholarship Not surprisingly, Platonism is vital to Raine’s literary criticism. Here I draw on a few key passages from her work that demonstrate Platonism’s centrality for understanding Raine’s perspective. It is important to remember that Raine’s finest poetry was written during and after her intensive study of William Blake that began with her Mellon lectures in the early 1960s, and in particular with the two-volume set that resulted, Blake and Tradition (1968a). Raine often later said, and said to me, that Blake was not only her literary subject but in a very real sense also her spiritual teacher. What did she find in Blake?

152  Arthur Versluis Tradition, of course, but tradition is another word, as she makes clear, for Platonism. In her introduction to Blake and Antiquity, Raine (1977) remarks, in summary of her large study of Blake of the 1960s, that Blake was drawing upon a tradition rich in literature, age-old, continuous, coherent, whose members were as reputable as Plato and Plotinus. This great body of excluded knowledge has long been unacceptable, not on account of its inaccessibility, still less its paucity, but because its premises run counter to those of a materialist civilization. (viii) She found it surprising that scholars had so seldom associated Blake with Thomas Taylor, the great translator of Platonism, for “the first translator of Plato and Plotinus into English was certainly a central figure in the Romantic revival” (viii–ix). Raine, as she points out, was by no means alone in recognising the importance of Platonism for understanding the work of Blake, or Romanticism more broadly. She refers, in passing, to Foster Damon’s William Blake: His Philosophy and Symbols (1924), Milton Percival’s William Blake’s Circle of Destiny (1938), and George Mills Harper’s The Neoplatonism of William Blake (1961). But Raine (1977) goes on to observe that Neoplatonism may be compared to an underground river that flows through ­European history, sending up, from time to time, springs and fountains, and wherever its fertilizing stream emerges, there imaginative thought revives, and we have a period of great art and poetry. The works [translated by Thomas Taylor] that taught Blake and the other English Romantic poets are the same that inspired the Florentine School of Athens, the American Transcendentalists, and . . . the Irish renaissance [of W. B. Yeats]. (4) Just as in Nature, Emerson (1971) sees the highest reality “present to the soul of man” as a natural “pouring forth” of life-giving waters so as to renew the old (38), so Raine (1977) imagines this in terms of history itself, so that culture is periodically renewed and revived by “an underground river” of “imaginative thought” (4). Likewise, near the end of Blake and Antiquity, Raine (1977) writes that in her lectures she sought to show that “Blake was not, as has often been supposed, an eccentric in a traditional civilisation.” He was, rather, a “traditionalist in a society that had as a whole lapsed from tradition” (100–101). For “it is quite possible” “for a whole society to depart from

Platonism, Its Heirs, and the Last Romantic  153 tradition, while a solitary individual, rejecting his historical inheritance and speaking in terms strange to his contemporaries” “may yet be traditional” (101). She could be describing herself here as well. In this context, “traditional” means “that whole body of canonical symbolic language in which such metaphysical knowledge is enshrined,” fundamentally in this case, the Platonic tradition that includes middle and late Platonism as well as subsequent revivals or rediscoveries of it (101). I highlight these quotations because they represent the chief reframing of the argument in Blake and Antiquity, as opposed to that in Blake and Tradition. Raine made the centrality of Platonism much clearer in the far smaller 1977 book drawn from the earlier 1968 two-volume Blake and Tradition. In fact, in the later Blake and Antiquity, Platonism provides the frame for the book’s beginning and conclusion. This is not to say, of course, that Platonism was not important in Blake and Tradition. Clearly it was. Raine recognised that Blake emphasised the Christian nature of his work, even writing, “What Jesus came to Remove was the Heathen or Platonic Philosophy, which blinds the Eye of Imagination.” But Raine noted also Blake’s affirmation that in his words All Religions are One, and that his work drew upon and should be seen in the context of Taylor’s translations of Plotinus and Porphyry, as well as the Pymander of Hermes (1968b, 102). Of course, quotations like this from Blake do raise the question of the degree to which Raine’s Blake, especially in her later work, presents a filtered image of him that overemphasises the Platonic dimensions of his work in order to make the case for her mature world view that by the 1970s and certainly by the 1980s and 1990s, when she founded the Temenos network and publications, she had come to represent. At the same time, Raine as the last Romantic was making a case about Blake that was really also a case about how to understand Romanticism itself as a Platonic movement. Hence, in The Inner Journey of the Poet, Raine (1982) writes not only of Blake, but also of the contemporary artist Cecil Collins and others as belonging “to the tradition not of ‘religious’ art . . . but of mystical vision” (141). Collins, like Blake, represents “the rediscovery, in this century, of the inner worlds, ‘the eternal worlds,’ which Blake had declared it his prophetic task to ‘open’” (141). In other words, Raine the scholar is not writing as a doctrinaire Platonist—that is not my point at all—but rather as a poet whose work is inspired by Platonism, Hermeticism, and whatever other works or authors (including Henry Corbin and Persian mysticism5) she sees as giving access to one’s inner life populated by living myths and symbols.

Raine as the Last Romantic In many respects, Kathleen Raine seems to me a figure born from a different time. I think it is accurate to term her the last Romantic because

154  Arthur Versluis her poetry and her sensibility belong fundamentally not so much to the modern era as to the era of Blake and Wordsworth. Indeed, she writes in her scholarship of Blake as if he were a contemporary of hers, his work refracted into our own era and illuminated by the light of Platonism even when Blake himself might well have been resistant to some aspects of her reading. In addition to being a poet very much in the Romantic tradition, she was also self-aware as a literary critic reflecting on Romanticism more broadly as well as specifically with regard to her primary subjects, Blake and Yeats. In this regard, she is arguably unique, though perhaps most akin to her near contemporary, T. S. Eliot, who also was well known both as a poet and as a literary critic. What makes Raine’s work so distinctive is that she is simultaneously a creator of Romantic poetry self-aware that she is writing in an era at least as hostile to Romanticism as the era of Blake, and a literary scholar aware that her discoveries (chiefly of the essential importance of Platonism) were not likely to be widely welcomed in what she rightly described as a materialistic age. She was herself a Romantic, speaking out against a materialistic and industrialised society dead to the acts of the poetic imagination that engages sublime experiences in the natural world. Like Blake, she saw herself as a prophetic figure, and in this, too, she was the last Romantic. Generally, the Romantics share a mysticism that manifests itself most in close proximity to nature. There is, in Wordsworth’s poetry, to draw the English strand of Romanticism more fully into this picture, a Platonic sense that in nature we can glimpse what transcends nature, its archetypal and enduring beautiful source. In the poetry, prose, and fiction of the Romantics, one does not see a rationalistic subject-object division in which God is “out there” divorced from nature and from man. Rather, in Romanticism, man in nature can experience the divine unity of man and nature, fundamentally a Platonic vision. For instance, Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” (1807) is deeply imbued with a kind of natural Platonism. The poem begins with the famous lines: There was a time when meadow, grove, and stream, The earth, and every common sight, To me did seem Apparelled in celestial light, The glory and the freshness of a dream. Shortly thereafter, we read: Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting: The Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star, Hath had elsewhere its setting,

Platonism, Its Heirs, and the Last Romantic  155 And cometh from afar: Not in entire forgetfulness, And not in utter nakedness, But trailing clouds of glory do we come From God, which is our home. (Wordsworth 1983, 273) The primary ideas here, so beautifully evoked, come from Plato, and although the speaker is chagrined about the loss of the “visionary gleam” available in childhood and in nature, where he is naturally “Nature’s Priest,” he nonetheless recognises that these riches remain accessible. The child is a “best Philosopher” “Haunted for ever by the eternal mind.” Even though the weight of years bears down on us, to each of us are given “primal sympathy” and the consolations of “the philosophic mind” (273 ff.). This poem and, indeed, much of Wordsworth’s poetry are infused with a deeply Platonic world view, signalled by the references near the beginning and the end, to the philosopher and to the philosophic mind. To the extent a poetic inclination can be traced, Wordsworth got his Plato and Platonism where Emerson and Alcott got theirs, chiefly from the translations and publications of Thomas Taylor (1758–1835).6 What the British poet Kathleen Raine recognised of Taylor’s work in relation to the English Romantics is true also of Emerson and Alcott, of course: that all of them conceived themselves as going back, through the vehicle of Platonic recognition, to “first principles” and to the original and perpetually renewed illumination occasioned by Platonic teachings when the seed, so to speak, falls on fertile ground. That fertile ground was present with the English Romantics, and again with the American Transcendentalists. “I have come to believe that every flowering of poetry and the other arts originates in a ‘revival of learning,’ not in ‘originality’ in the modern sense, but in a return to the origins, to first principles,” Raine wrote (1968b, 99) in her article “Thomas Taylor, Plato, and the English Romantic Movement.” Kathleen Raine’s point here is a vital one and entirely germane to my larger argument. That is, Platonism, as reflected in the work of these poets and creators of culture, is not a set of specific doctrines, though it might include those. It is, rather, at heart, a set of approaches to knowing that includes an emphasis on direct intuitive individual knowledge of transcendence; on dialogue as an expression of and means to such knowledge; on nature as divine expression and as conducive to realising transcendent knowledge; and on a metaphysics that emphasises the originally unfallen or divine nature of man, as well as the possibility of recovering that original state. This is not meant as an exhaustive, so much as an indicative list; it conveys a sense of Platonism in practice.

156  Arthur Versluis Ultimately, Raine’s observation that where Platonism emerges in culture, one finds a Renaissance, is borne out not only by her own work, but also by that of the Renaissance around her through the development of the network of poets, essayists, visual artists, and musicians that came to constitute the Temenos network in her later years. Temenos itself as a series of publications, conferences, workshops, talks, and seminars, is itself a manifestation, much like the Concord School of Philosophy was in American a century before, of applied Platonism. Here Platonism is not understood as dogmatic or as a collection of doctrines or ideas even, but of Platonism in praxis, which realises itself in a new era through dialogue and openness to inspiration. Alcott, Emerson, and Raine, in fact, represent exactly what Raine herself wrote about many times, that is, the new efforts in a new time to make the Platonic tradition a lived reality for those of creative spirit. It is not that Platonism is the only influence for these figures—after all, my own book American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions (1993) amply demonstrates a range of other influences for this seminal movement. Rather, it is that these authors’ works, like those of Pico della Mirandola and Marsilio Ficino, or for that matter, those of the Christian mystical tradition that owes so much to Dionysius the Areopagite, cannot be fully understood without recognising the central importance of the Platonic tradition.

Notes 1 See Andrews Norton, “Letter to the Editor,” Boston Daily Advertiser (5  November 1836, reprinted in Myerson 2000, 2). For a much more detailed reading of Transcendentalist Platonism, see Versluis (2014, 26–70). 2 See Frothingham (1876, 107–108). 3 The “Orphic poet” may be an alter ego of Emerson, but it seems more likely, given these passages are in quotation marks, that the poet is in part, Alcott. 4 See, for instance, Major and Sinche (2010), where two professors of English attempt to expel Emerson from the American collegiate curriculum. 5 See Raine (1982, 206–207). 6 See Raine (1968b, 99–123).

References Alcott, Bronson. 1849. Works of Amos Bronson Alcott, Volume 11, Tablets in Colours: Disposed on Twelve Tables. Cambridge, MA: Houghton Library, Harvard University, bMS Am 1130.10: II. ———. 1966. The Journals of Bronson Alcott, Volume I. Edited by Odell Shepard. Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press. ———. 1972. Concord Days. Boston, MA: Roberts Brothers. Bode, Christophe. 2006. “Europe.” In Romanticism: An Oxford Guide, edited by Nicholas Roe, 126–136. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Platonism, Its Heirs, and the Last Romantic  157 Dahlstrand, Frederick. 1982. Amos Bronson Alcott: An Intellectual Biography. Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1971. Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume I: Nature, Addresses, and Lectures. Rep. ed. Edited by Robert E. Spiller and Alfred R. Ferguson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 1979a. Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II: Essays: First Series. Rep. ed. Edited by Joseph Slater, Alfred R. Ferguson, and Jean Ferguson Carr. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 1979b. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume III: Essays: Second Series. Rep. ed. Edited by Joseph Slater, Alfred R. Ferguson, and Jean Ferguson Carr. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Frothingham, Octavius Brooks. 1876. Transcendentalism in New England. New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons. Major, William, and Bryan Sinche. 2010. “Giving Emerson the Boot.” The Chronicle of Higher Education, 17 January. Accessed 20 October 2017. http://chronicle.com/article/Giving-Emerson-the-Boot/63512/. Myerson, Joel. ed. 2000. Transcendentalism: A Reader. New York: Oxford University Press. Raine, Kathleen. 1965. The Hollow Hill and Other Poems. London: Hamish Hamilton. ———. 1968a. Blake and Tradition, Volume II. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1968b. “Thomas Taylor, Plato, and the English Romantic Movement.” British Journal of Aesthetics 8 (2): 99–123. ———. 1977. Blake and Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1982. The Inner Journey of the Poet. London: Allen & Unwin. ———. 1988. Selected Poems. Ipswich: Golgonooza Press. Versluis, Arthur. 1993. American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions. ­Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2001. The Esoteric Origins of the American Renaissance. Oxford: ­Oxford University Press. ———. 2014. American Gurus: From Transcendentalism to New Age Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 2017. Platonic Mysticism: Contemplative Science, Philosophy, Literature, and Art. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Wordsworth, William. 1983. Poems, in Two Volumes, and Other Poems. ­E dited by Jared Curtis. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press.

8 Vexed Meditation Romantic Idealism in Coleridge and Its Afterlife in Bataille and Irigaray Justin Prystash ‘Tis calm indeed! so calm, that it disturbs And vexes meditation with its strange And extreme silentness. —Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “Frost at Midnight” (1997, 229, lines 8–10)

Throughout S. T. Coleridge’s poetry and philosophy, we find the desire for self-transcendence: a desire to smudge the lines dividing the subject from myriad encircling objects; a mystical desire, ultimately, to dissolve subjectivity into the animate universe, variously identified with Spirit, Mind, or God. Coleridge (1772–1834) offers at least two methods for achieving this desire, methods grounded in his philosophical system and exemplified in his poetic practice: meditation and poetry itself.1 For Coleridge, these practices are mutually reinforcing, because meditation facilitates the composition of poetry, which in turn causes its readers to meditate. His poetic meditations are deeply vexed, reflecting the often incomplete and contradictory nature of his work, but many of these inconsistencies can be navigated by attaching Coleridge to a larger genealogy. Through a consideration of the immediate influence of Indian philosophy, it becomes clear that Hindu imagery and concepts suffuse his writings, and this incorporation was done not (only) in an orientalising manner, but out of genuine respect. I use the phrase “Romantic idealism” to refer to this earnest combination of Eastern and Western approaches that attempts to overcome the difference between subject and object. Romantic idealism can be further understood by examining two later philosophers who also analyse the ontological, epistemological, and ethical implications of meditation. Georges Bataille’s Inner Experience (L’expérience intérieure, 1943) and Luce Irigaray’s Between East and West (Entre Orient et Occident, 1999) resonate with, clarify, and contest Coleridge’s approach; although they do not consider him directly, they consider meditation from within the legacy of Romantic and German Idealism, as well as Eastern traditions. Although probably unaware that Coleridge afforded a philosophy of meditation and self-transcendence

Vexed Meditation  159 congenial to their own, Bataille and Irigaray can be placed into productive tension with him (and with each other). Ultimately, the genealogy I examine suggests that Romantic idealism survived the ascendancy of analytic philosophy in the early twentieth century and, because it has important implications for feminist and ecocritical theories, among others, what was once a subterranean presence is currently undergoing a resurgence. Pantheism, hylozoism, Spinozism, animism, panpsychism, vital materialism: the first three are Coleridge’s preferred terms (and the remainder more recent ones) for what is essentially the same concept: objects are alive, and therefore the absolute distinction between subject and object does not hold. These terms may assume a different basis for the vital element itself—God, spirit, soul, mind—but, following Coleridge’s relatively interchangeable usage and in order to simplify a dizzying cascade, we can identify them as part of the same general philosophical approach that effloresced around 1800 and influenced many of the German Idealists. Coleridge also participated in this approach, 2 which clearly aligns with his philosophy and praxis of self-transcendence. Thomas ­McFarland (1969) describes Coleridge’s ambivalent relationship with pantheism as “the central truth of Coleridge’s philosophical activity” (107). Moreover, he notes the affinity between pantheism and poetry, both of which “tend to obliterate the boundaries between the realm of thing and the realm of mind” (275). Coleridge (1997) sometimes expresses this affinity in the content of his poetry, as in “Frost at Midnight,” when, after engaging in vexed meditation, the speaker’s mind finds a “companionable form” (229, line 19) in a fluttering cinder. This leads to the further insight that God is “in all, and all things in himself” (230, line 62). The poems of Wordsworth, Shelley, and other Romantics contain many similar expressions of vibrant things. 3 Another current of thought that converges with pantheism during this period is Indian philosophy, which was introduced through the work of orientalists and Sanskrit scholars like William Jones, whose work Coleridge read.4 Indeed, Coleridge absorbed Eastern ideas more intensely than any of his peers: “Coleridge engages more profoundly with oriental ideas and cultures—and in ways more extensively informed by contemporary and earlier scholarship—than any other British ­Romantic” (­Vallins 2013b, 2). Coleridge locates the origin of all Western philosophy in the pre-Socratic Pythagoras because he was traditionally believed to be the first to receive influence from the East. As Andrew Warren (2013) explains, The origin and subsequent history of philosophy consists of, first, a rupture between subject and object, and then various attempts to reconcile that division. This is how Coleridge thinks about philosophy, and the history of philosophy. Pythagoras takes up Thales’

160  Justin Prystash search for first principles, tears asunder self and world, and then attempts to reconcile that divide by drawing upon Eastern wisdom about the pantheistic unity of the world. (109) Coleridge admires (and emulates) Pythagoras for attempting to create an ontological system grounded in first principles. The catalyst for such an attempt emerges, for both men, in the productive commingling of Western and Eastern traditions. They both find in Eastern philosophy conceptual tools for negotiating the central problem they identify within their own tradition: the subject/object split. Coleridge’s Romantic idealism is, therefore, like Western philosophy itself, fundamentally cross-cultural. Eastern praxis, particularly meditation, also informed Coleridge’s poetry. For instance, Natalie Tal Harries (2013) documents several of Coleridge’s “poetic expressions of meditative contemplation” (133), as in “The Eolian Harp,” when the speaker ponders whether “all of animated nature / Be but organic harps diversely framed, / That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps / Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, / At once the Soul of each, and God of All?” (Coleridge 1997, 86, lines 44–48). Just before this realisation, he beholds “through [his] halfclosed eye-lids . . . / The sunbeams dance, like diamonds, on the main, / And tranquil muse[s] upon tranquility” (85–86, lines 36–38). 5 What is remarkable here, in addition to the pantheistic language, is his use of meditative, half-closed eyes to symbolise a kind of valve that streams energetic external objects into and across the “passive brain” (86, line 41). In other words, the speaker does not gaze with what Mary Louise Pratt (1992) calls “imperial eyes” (7), the characteristically Western vision that objectifies the Other and Nature in order to control them. Quite the opposite: natural objects—and in the contextual background, Eastern discourses—play his passive brain like a lute. Thus, we can think of Romantic idealism, especially as expressed by Coleridge, as the articulation of a “contact zone” (7) where traditional binaries are powerfully blurred. This chapter extends the scholarship sketched in the previous paragraphs by analysing the role of meditation in Coleridge’s poetics, its function within his elaboration of an idealist philosophy, and the implications of this idealism for later philosophers. The meditative art of poetry plays a crucial role in the development and substantiation of Coleridge’s metaphysical claims. Poetry, in concert with the faculty of the imagination, enables him to overcome the divide between subject and object and, contra Kant, gain direct knowledge of things in themselves—“precisely the knowledge that the Romantics are most interested in” (Fischer 1988, 180).6 Bataille and Irigaray allow us to clarify the vexed nature of this Romantic idealism and discern some of Coleridge’s implicit assumptions. First, Bataille (1988) critiques the naïve “desire to be everything” (xxxii),

Vexed Meditation  161 which he associates with Hegel, although it could with some justice describe Coleridge as well. Bataille stresses that meditation and poetry are practices not for the infinite expansion of the subject, but its dissolution in the absolute, an ultimate “fusion of object and subject” (9) that goes beyond the very distinction. Although Bataille insists that such an experience cannot be fully captured through the representations of language, he defends the ethical necessity to pursue such experiences through meditation and poetry, since they will interrupt the tyrannical desire to “be everything” and possess the other as object. Irigaray also argues that a meditative concentration on breath, which again includes poetry, is a powerful practice for achieving self-transcendence that emerged at the origin of the Western and Eastern philosophical traditions. However, in a significant departure from Coleridge and to a much greater extent than Bataille, Irigaray suggests that the impossibility of achieving full knowledge of the absolute rests on the irreducible natural fact of sexual difference. She claims that there are distinctly male and female modes of breathing, meditating, and accessing nature. By emphasising sexual difference, Irigaray reorients our understanding of meditation and Hinduism in a way that revitalises the legacy of Romantic idealism.

Coleridge In Biographia Literaria of 1817, Coleridge (1985) identifies Shakespeare and Milton as quintessential poets because they mark the polarity of poetic self-transcendence: Shakespeare centrifugally “becomes all things,” shifting the subject into objects; Milton “attracts all forms and things to himself,” gravitating objects into the subject (2:27–28). Poetry creates an ontological relation, an opportunity to expand and contract, to breathe. It exceeds language, forming a “chain of flowers” that link poet and pen, reader and words, breath and body, mind and imagination.7 It distils an entire ambient atmosphere that exists beyond the conscious mind or, rather, allures consciousness beyond itself: poetry as meditation, incantation, and dilation. To support this conception, Coleridge pays particular attention to poetic form. Meter is like a subtle drug that acts through the continued excitement of surprize [sic], and by the quick reciprocations of curiosity still gratified and still re-excited, which are too slight indeed to be at any one moment objects of distinct consciousness, yet become considerable in their aggregate influence. As a medicated atmosphere, or as wine during animated conversation; they act powerfully, though themselves unnoticed. (2:66) This extends poetic structure outside the reader’s consciousness. Meter creates an “atmosphere” of “objects” too subtle to discern, like the

162  Justin Prystash alcohol in wine or the medicated particles in a puff of smoke that, once imbibed or inhaled past a certain threshold, elicit conscious feelings of curiosity, gratification, and excitement. Poetry is not just a mental exercise, but a series of intellectual and affective states that arise when imperceptible objects permeate the body. Poetry is, therefore, an essentially relational phenomenon. In his notebooks, Coleridge (1957–1990) stresses the importance of breathing for developing this relational cohesion between mind and body, subject and object. Punctuation marks, he wrote in 1809, are not “logical Symbols” but “dramatic directions representing the process of Thinking & Speaking conjointly—either therefore the regulation of the breath simply . . . or as the movements in the Speaker’s Thoughts makes [sic] him regulate his Breath” (3:3504). In other words, punctuation, like metre, functions outside of rational consciousness. It plays a somatic role, regulating the breath so that speech can be dramatically enacted and meaning imparted. One could say that all of these objects—metre, punctuation, all the particles in the “medicated atmosphere”—expand consciousness after being inhaled. Coleridge says as much in another entry from 1806, where the Greek letter theta symbolises breath and existence: The ⊙ [is] a Circle, with the Kentron, or central Point, creating the circumference & both together the infinite Radii / —the Central point is primary Consciousness = living Action; the circumference = secondary Consciousness and the passing to and fro from the one to the other Thought, Things, necessary Possibilities, contingent Realities . . . . The • is I which is the articulated Breath drawn inward, the О is the same sent outward, the ⊙ or Theta expresses the synthesis and coinstantaneous reciprocation of the two Acts. (2:2784) This passage contains a rich condensation of Coleridge’s philosophical views and, taken as a description of subjectivity, divides the subject into two layers of consciousness. The first is primary consciousness, where “living Action,” or what we earlier called dramatic interaction with external objects, occurs. Secondary consciousness is our “common sense” understanding of mental activity as rational awareness. These layers are connected (forming a “contingent” constitution of the subject) as “Thought” and “Things” circulate between them during the act of breathing. Moreover, just as primary imagination, says Coleridge (1985) in the Biographia, is “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (1:304), his theta can also be read as a symbolic rendering of the entire universe, with primary ­consciousness—the dot at the centre of the circle—representing God. The radii then trace the thoughts and objects that connect God to the secondary consciousness

Vexed Meditation  163 of human subjects, which form the circumference. According to this metaphysical structure, humans can approach God by “inhaling” objects, just as they were generated by an exhalation. Coleridge’s theta embodies a dense amalgamation of Neoplatonic and Hindu concepts, a synthesis characterising many of his early writings (Vallins 2013a, 122–124). The Hindu strain in his account of meditation becomes clearer when we consider Charles Wilkins’s translation, The Bhagvat-Geeta (1785), which Coleridge read in the 1790s (Harries 2013, 132–133). In a letter appended to the beginning of the text, Warren Hastings, Governor-General of India, suggests that its “highly metaphysical” nature is best understood through a consideration of Hindu “spiritual discipline,” in which the attention must “be abstracted from every external object, and absorbed, with every sense, in the prescribed subject of their meditation” (Wilkins 1785, 8). In the act of approaching Krishna through meditation, the devotee begins to experientially grasp that the division between subject and object is merely an illusion to be transcended. Krishna says that “all things rest in me, as the mighty air, which passeth every where, resteth for ever in the aetherial space” (78). Employing one of Coleridge’s favourite pantheistic metaphors, he says that as a single sun illuminateth the whole world, even so doth the spirit enlighten every body. They who, with the eye of wisdom, perceive the body and the spirit to be thus distinct, and that there is a final release from the animal nature, go to the Supreme. (106) In these passages, Krishna sometimes appears to advocate a metaphysical dualism, where body and spirit are completely divorced or objects are merely illusory. But in fact, Krishna is overturning dualism: objects are real, but one animating principle—Krishna’s spirit—suffuses all these objects. “There is not any thing greater than I,” Krishna says, “and all things hang on me, even as precious gems upon a string. I am moisture in the water, light in the sun and moon” (70). Through meditation, one recognises that all objects, like subjects, are vitalised by the universal spirit. Acquiring this vision of the universe is difficult, requiring a rigorous programme of meditation to intensify one’s relation to objects. Krishna advises his followers to sit “with his mind fixed on one object alone . . . keeping his head, his neck, and body, steady without motion, his eyes fixed on the point of his nose, looking at no other place around” (1785, 63). By lowering the eyelids and repetitively allowing one object to pierce the mind, the meditator grasps the animating principle of spirit and, through an expansion of consciousness, approaches a fuller union with God. Krishna insists that through this spiritual practice, “thou shalt behold all nature in the spirit; that is,

164  Justin Prystash in me” (55). One’s mind becomes intensively focussed on the body and then extends until, ultimately, it comes into full contact with the universe. This supreme object of wisdom is all hands and feet; it is all faces, heads, and eyes; and, all ear, it sitteth in the midst of the world possessing the vast whole. Itself exempt from every organ, it is the reflected light of every faculty of the organs . . . . It is the inside and the outside, and it is the moveable and immoveable of all nature. (103) This experience is self-transcendence taken to the limit, but it nevertheless occurs “in the midst of the world,” within “all nature,” emanating in the glow of organs.8 It is the infinite exponentiation of body as spirit. With its frequent use of simile, metaphor, and lush visual imagery, Wilkins’s Bhagvat-Geeta poetically describes how to overcome the split between subject and object. Meditation resolves the problem from an object-oriented perspective because it starts by literally focussing on objects: physical objects, one realises, are infused with mind or spirit, and therefore form a continuity with the mind and body of the meditating subject (and with God). As we have seen, Coleridge (1985) incorporates this idea into his poetics and poetry. It also forms the basis of his philosophy, despite frequent hesitations and disavowals. For example, consider his dismissal of hylozoism, a term taken from the Greek words hyle (matter) and zoē (life): The hypothesis of Hylozoism . . . answers no purpose; unless indeed a difficulty can be solved by multiplying it, or that we can acquire a clearer notion of our soul, by being told that we have a million souls, and that every atom of our bodies has a soul of its own. Far more prudent is it to admit the difficulty once for all, and then let it lie at rest. There is a sediment indeed at the bottom of the vessel, but all the water above it is clear and transparent. The Hylozoist only shakes it up, and renders the whole turbid. (1:131–132) After admitting that the relationship between body and soul9 is a recalcitrant problem, Coleridge considers the solution offered by hylozoism or the idea that all matter is alive (with soul). The doctrine of hylozoism appears to overcome the binary that troubles Coleridge, because it argues that soul is everywhere; in other words, there is no fundamental difference between living subjects and (apparently lifeless) objects. Yet, he reflects, doesn’t this just multiply the problem? I began with the question of how the soul relates to my body, and now I have to explain how the soul relates to each atom in my body! Thus, at this point in the Biographia, he argues that hylozoism may further obscure, rather

Vexed Meditation  165 than resolve, the subject/object problem. He does not reject hylozoism outright, but it would be more “prudent” to allow subject and object to settle into the familiar opposition. In later chapters of the Biographia, however, Coleridge explains how soul relates to body in a way that is consonant with hylozoism. Certainly, he flirted with hylozoism in 1801, some 14 years before Biographia was composed. In that year, Coleridge (1997) wrote “The Night-Scene: A Dramatic Fragment,” in which the character Earl Henry describes life with his lover in identical terms to the passage on hylozoism: “Life was in us: / We were all life, each atom of our frames / A living soul” (289, lines 43–45). Such love, he states, “is joy above the name of pleasure, / Deep self-possession, an intense repose” (lines 50–51). His interlocutor, Sandoval, replies: “No other than as eastern sages paint, / The God, who floats upon a lotos leaf, / Dreams for a thousand ages; then awaking, / Creates a world, and smiling at the bubble, / Relapses into bliss” (lines 52–56). As it does with the speaker of “The Eolian Harp,” love provokes a meditative state of “intense repose” in which Earl Henry paradoxically finds both “deep self-possession” and realises that this self is atomised into a million souls. Yet, although Sandoval makes his rejoinder “with a sarcastic smile” (line 52), Coleridge (1956–1971) had imagined becoming this same god in a 1797 letter to John Thelwall: I should much wish, like the Indian Vishna [sic], to float along an infinite ocean cradled in the flower of the Lotus, and wake once in a million years for a few minutes just to know that I was going to sleep a million years or more. (1:350) For Coleridge, meditation can make one like a god: it brings tranquility, bliss, and the potential for an endless cycle of creativity. As we have seen, these earlier, positive depictions of hylozoism or Hindu pantheism become more ambivalent by the writing of the Biographia, but there is more continuity in his thought than is often acknowledged.10 In the Biographia, Coleridge proposes a unification of subject and object through the faculty of the imagination, an essential part of the poetic—and therefore meditative—process. Like Krishna’s meditation, Coleridge’s imagination vitalises objects (including the subject as object) and enfolds them within a provisional, more expansive relation. This attempt to bring aesthetics, epistemology, and ontology into one unified theory is indebted to contemporary philosophers11 as well as the “pantheistic” or “hylozoistic” Hinduism I explored above. Before I examine a few specific passages from the Biographia, it may be worthwhile to review the main content of Chapters 12–15. These chapters are famously convoluted and full of digressions, but essentially, Chapter 12 gives a philosophical account of the subject/object problem and suggests that it can be resolved, Chapter 13 provides a mechanism for its resolution in

166  Justin Prystash the faculty of the imagination, and Chapters 14 and 15 discuss poetry. This arrangement suggests that Coleridge sees poetry as a crucial practice, one that exemplifies and embodies his philosophical system. Coleridge (1985) begins this section of the Biographia by setting forth a system of “idealism,” which is “at the same time, and on that very account, the truest and most binding realism” (1:261). In other words, his is not the type of idealism where nothing actually exists outside of the mind of the perceiving subject; rather, he defends ontological idealism, where objects are real and, like the subject, composed of something mind- or spirit-like. He argues that “things without us” are “unconsciously involved” within us (1:260), just like the “chain of flowers” that entangles the writer and reader of poetry. Indeed, objects are “identical, and one and the same thing with our own immediate self-consciousness” (1:260). This is because the spirit is the foundation of all subjects and objects, and the totality of this spirit is God, in which, as in Krishna, “all things rest.” Coleridge then turns to a definition of the primary and secondary imagination. The former is “a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (1:304), which resonates, as I suggested earlier, with the use of theta as a symbol of meditation. The secondary imagination dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealise and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead. (1:304) This is the practice through which the subject, by creating new assemblages with objects, idealises and vitalises them—or more precisely, realises that objects are never just “objects (as objects),” but inherently ideal and vital in themselves. Finally, Coleridge argues that we see the imagination vividly at work in poetry: Shakespeare, he says, “gives a dignity and a passion to the objects which he presents. Unaided by any previous excitement, they burst upon us at once in life and in power” (2:23–24). Shakespeare’s excellence marks an ontological becoming: through poetry, he “becomes all things, yet for ever remaining himself” (2:28). But anyone who breathes while reading the lines of Shakespeare or Milton also becomes entangled in things. Ultimately, Coleridge’s writings suggest that both meditation and poetry are carefully orchestrated practices for experiencing and expressing self-transcendence. Such spiritual becoming is not diaphanous, dreamy, or detached from reality, but always grounded in bodies and materiality. This embodied form of Romantic idealism, as we will see shortly, is a significant precursor of twentieth-­ century idealisms in that they also attempt to articulate how subjects and objects (be)come together, both experientially and materially.

Vexed Meditation  167

Bataille and Irigaray Bataille contends with many of the same problems as Coleridge and answers them in remarkably similar ways. As Jennifer Alla Timoner (2001) puts it, both “Coleridge and Bataille choose to focus on issues revolving around the limits/borders/margins of human existence and experience, the artist being a prime emblem of liminality and the transgressive character” (95). Meditation, which Bataille studied in Tibet, provides both writers a concrete practice for exploring these borders of human existence and experience, and, like Coleridge’s, Bataille’s mysticism is integral to his entire philosophical oeuvre (Pawlett 2016, 110). Although Bataille acknowledges that “I know little, at bottom about India” (1988, 17), Hinduism attracts him because it offers a method for focussing the energy of his breath (“an object which is not an object” [16]) and other liminal objects (what he refers to as “points”) in order to “fus[e] object and subject” (9). The goal of meditation, then, is to move beyond the instrumentalising behaviour that accompanies a division of the world into subject and object. Such self-transcendence gives an immediate experience of the ineffable that eludes all possession and discourse, an ineffable inadequately captured in the word “God.”12 By pointing to the inadequacy of language, Bataille renders much more starkly the problem of representation that Coleridge also confronts. Moreover, as Hugh B. Urban (2015) and Amy Hollywood (2002) respectively demonstrate, Bataille (unlike Coleridge) is cognisant of the important role women play in the history of Hindu and Christian mysticism. He makes it clear that overcoming the subject/ object split through meditation and mysticism requires a serious consideration of sexuality and sexual difference, and he opposes the objectification of women. Bataille meditates by focussing upon one object or “point.” The intense internalisation of the object, which is projected into the subject like a “magnifying glass,” has the reciprocal effect of streaming the subject into the surrounding “wave of life” (1988, 118) where both dissolve “in the world like water in water” (1989, 19). Frequent meditation gives him  the ability to “stream” without the presence of a physical object, using the faculty of the imagination alone: This streaming is within us of a disarming plasticity. To imagine suffices, and the dreamed-of form vaguely takes shape. It is thus that years ago, when this streaming remained diffuse within me, without object, I felt myself, in the darkness of my room, become a tree and even a tree struck by lightning: my arms lifted little by little and their movement became knotted like that of strong branches broken almost at the level of the trunk. (1988, 126)

168  Justin Prystash The irruption of a tree and lightning within Bataille’s body, which he describes as both imaginative and real, infiltrates and augments his subjectivity, although some sense of subjectivity endures. Later, he is more profoundly shaken when he becomes a “flame,” although this word imperfectly captures the experience, which “answered to nothing which one could have evoked in advance” (127)—indeed, the flame is God (128). The fiery torso of his body disappears in a series of “sensations which could [not] be isolated,” a dance where “everything mingles,” while his lower body remains in contact with the floor, maintaining “a link to what I had been” (127). Through powerful images like these, Bataille articulates the inexpressible sensation of finding that one’s body is part of a continuous stream of objects. During the meditative experience, these sensations cannot be articulated by the consciousness they scatter. Only afterwards the subject reasserts itself, crystallising the experience in language: Bataille includes several poems in this vein. For Bataille (1988), poetry chiasmatically marks the limitations and possibilities of using language as the object of meditation. On the one hand, the pool of non-objects that surrounds us will always elude the sluice of language; words artificially partition the living stream into dead “objects.” In its analytic, instrumentalising capacity, language runs counter to meditation, which requires an atmospheric, relational synthesis bound to vague inner movements, which depend on no object and have no intent—states which, similar to others linked to the purety [sic] of the sky, to the fragrance of a room, are not warranted by anything definable, so that language which, with respect to the others, has the sky, the room, to which it can refer—and which directs attention towards what it grasps is dispossessed, can say nothing. (14) Coleridge might suggest, contrarily, that poetic metre creates precisely this type of “medicated atmosphere” (in Bataille’s words, “the fragrance of a room”), linking words affectively to the subject. Bataille is indeed more positive about poetry because it avoids using language for merely “practical ends” (135). “The poetic,” he writes, “is the familiar dissolving into the strange, and ourselves with it. It never dispossesses us entirely, for the words, the images (once dissolved) are charged with emotions already experienced, attached to objects which link them to the known” (5). For example, a stable boy and a farm girl may use the words “butter” and “horse,” and we know what these words signify as practical objects. But “poetry leads from the known to the unknown. It can do what neither the boy nor the girl can do: introduce the idea of a butter horse” (136). By linking two objects that were previously separated, the

Vexed Meditation  169 strange idea of “a butter horse” potentially brings the reader into contact with the unknown, and herein lies the value of poetry. In addition to breathing and poetry, Bataille (1988) mentions other, more “heavy-handed” modes of meditation (183). One is drugs, which Coleridge used frequently, but Bataille finds “repugnant.” Another is sex: “Tantric yoga uses sexual pleasure, not in order to ruin oneself in it, but to detach oneself before the end from the object, from the woman, whom they make use of (they avoid the last moment of pleasure).”13 Bataille also disapproves of this “use” of women because utility presupposes the distinction between subject and object; it is therefore precisely this objectification of women that needs to be overcome. He replaces conventional “possessive” concepts of sex and love with “ecstasy,” a sexual experience that dissolves subject and object while simultaneously maintaining a gap of difference: “Ecstasy is not love: love is possession for which the object is necessary, and at the same time possession of the subject, possessed by it. [In ecstasy there] is no longer subject-object, but a ‘yawning gap’ between the one and the other and, in the gap, the subject, the object are dissolved” (59). Ecstasy, therefore, marks the passage from jealous control to dispossession. The distinction between the persons who merge in ecstatic embrace persists, but within or because of that distinction they dissolve into a non-hierarchical relation. Here Bataille takes a similar position to Irigaray. Although he does not develop a theory of sexual difference as such, Bataille can be fruitfully read alongside her. As Ladelle McWhorter contends, Bataille and Irigaray both resist “the voracious incorporation of the other that marks so much of our masculinist, heterosexist culture”; instead, they attempt to “think difference set free from its servitude to the same” (1995, 40). Like Coleridge and Bataille, Irigaray seeks to cultivate within the body a more expansive, spiritual relation to the natural world. She argues that Hindu breathing techniques allow one to achieve this more connected state, but insists that men and women need to approach meditation differently because sexual dimorphism involves different manners of respiration. (Despite this pneumatic divergence, however, all humans can become more attuned to nature by tending to their breath—and poetry is one way to do so.)14 This return to breath and sexual difference as foundational aspects of ontology and ethics complicates the universalising, patriarchal tendency of German Idealism (2002, 16, 27) by reattaching it to both the Greek roots of Western philosophy, where breath is equated with soul (7), and to the pre-patriarchal cultures of ancient India, in which “men and women are gods together” (29). She is particularly attracted to Hinduism because “it is one of the only traditions where women goddesses and divine loving couples are still venerated” (65). For instance, she notes that Krishna, lord of all things in the Bhagavad Gita, has “a very feminine aspect” (40). Irigaray’s argument has several weaknesses: her historical claims about a pre-Aryan gynocentric

170  Justin Prystash period in India are contested; she seems unaware of postcolonial and other feminist readings of Hinduism, and her focus on one form of yoga disregards the rich variety of movements within the tradition (Joy 2006, 130–135). She also focusses exclusively on heterosexuality. Still, connecting her to Coleridge and Bataille helps illuminate the feminist and ecological strains of my genealogy. Sexual difference plays two central functions in Irigaray’s mysticism. First, echoing Bataille, Irigaray formulates heterosexual acts of “carnal sharing” that enable two people to transcend the exploitative subject/ object relation: sexuality becomes a poetic, even mystical, progression of love, a path of renunciation of absolute love of oneself with a view to carry out love with the other in the giving up of both self and other, emotionally as well as intellectually. (2002, 116) Second, sexual difference is vital for understanding how breathing can create a more spiritual, respectful relation, not only between two people in sexual embrace but also between subject and ecosystem. According to Irigaray, men tend to focus on exhalation: “[man] puts his vital or spiritual breath into the things that he produces; he employs it in order to build a world, his world. He keeps little of his breath, his soul, in him” (85). This suggests that the particular danger of male-centred mysticism is to succumb to what Bataille calls “the desire to be everything”: the projection of the self into all things without respect for difference or anything “other.” Because women are the only ones who breathe in place of the child during pregnancy (50), they have a more balanced mode of breathing. Born of someone like herself, [t]he little girl is born with familiarity to self, to the natural world, to the other. She intuitively knows the origin of life. She knows that the source of life is in her, that she need not construct it outside of herself. Her breath need not leave her in order to build, to fabricate, to create. It needs, on the contrary, to remain in her to be able to be shared, to be made fertile. Woman also remains in greater harmony with the cosmos. This allows her to inhale and to exhale more naturally that which nourishes the vital breath: air. (85) Here Irigaray makes the contentious claim that women are biologically more attuned to the natural world because they literally breathe differently; in other words, they are naturally better at meditating. Presumably, she would concede that men can learn to breathe like women because she argues that yoga teachers should train men and women

Vexed Meditation  171 differently (66). However, regardless of whether her claim makes sense biologically or only metaphorically, her emphasis on sexual difference and nature powerfully clarifies the meaning and legacy of Coleridge’s philosophy of meditation. Irigaray renders much more starkly the implicitly gendered nature of Coleridge’s account of meditation. Recall that, for Coleridge, poetry and meditation steep the subject in an atmosphere of objects that unravel its self-consistency. The unravelling is accomplished affectively rather than cognitively, through the inhalation of objects. Irigaray’s association of such inhalation with women reflects “modern scholarly distinctions between affective or erotic forms of mysticism, usually associated with women, and more speculative or intellectual forms of mysticism associated with men” (Hollywood 2002, 5). Writing on Christian mysticism, Hollywood traces the revival of feminist mysticism through twentieth-century French theory: it emerges in Bataille and later appears in Simone de Beauvoir, Jacques Lacan, and Irigaray (5). As I hope to have shown, Coleridge, Hindu mysticism, and Romantic idealism are important sites for extending this genealogy deeper into the past. Future scholarship will undoubtedly reveal in more detail how the confluence of Eastern and Western poetry and philosophy in the long nineteenth century created fertile ground for meditations on the embodied, affective, sexual, and spiritual connections humans can develop with objects and nature. Ultimately, Romantic idealism is a hybrid, multivocal construction that emerged during the convergence of different cultural traditions. In both its historical development and the various forms its arguments take, Romantic idealism reflects an ongoing struggle to articulate difference. Such a struggle runs several risks, which postcolonialist, feminist, and ecocritical scholars have amply demonstrated. Some of these risks are dangerous, such as self-aggrandisement, false attribution, and domination. At its best, however, Romantic idealism emphasises the ways in which differences, such as those among cultures or sexes, or humans and their natural environments, can mutually enhance without being subsumed. Despite his contradictory attitudes and biases, Coleridge is an early exemplar of what remains an admirable impulse, one that requires a certain humility and naivety to successfully negotiate: the desire to understand what lies outside the self. Coleridge, and others like Bataille and Irigaray who can be placed within the Romantic idealist tradition, suggest that differences are not utterly sealed from me, but can be (partially, ephemerally) known in themselves because they are in some respects like me. Furthermore, they argue that I can induce and express this experience of difference through particular activities, such as poetry and meditation, and these pursuits necessarily alter my ontological relation to, and ethical investment in, these differences. This turn towards difference and the nonhuman—a turn which can be understood

172  Justin Prystash as a departure away from Kant or rather, a return to the Romantic idealisms that were eclipsed by or that contested Kant—is reflected in the contemporary theoretical landscape, especially in movements like new materialism and speculative realism.15 The recent resurgence of interest in the same issues Coleridge struggled with indicates the continued significance of Romantic idealism for aesthetics, feminism, and ecocriticism at a time when the objectification of art, women, and nature is deeply and globally entrenched.

Notes 1 In this chapter, meditation refers specifically to the Eastern spiritual exercises that enable the experience of the divine. While the word “meditation” had been used in the Christian context for centuries, it began carrying an association with Eastern religions in 1727 (OED). The Hindu inflection I give to Coleridge’s “meditation” differs from the Christian one first advanced by Abrams (1965), where he connects Coleridge’s “meditation poems” to seventeenth-­century British antecedents. In this context, see also Parker (1975). 2 For discussions of Coleridge and the pantheism controversy, see Berkeley (2007), McFarland (1969), and Piper (1962). Neoplatonism is also a powerful and interrelated influence; see Quinney (2011). 3 One thinks, for instance, of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” and Shelley’s “Mont Blanc.” Cf. Shaviro’s Whiteheadian reading of Shelley’s “Mont Blanc” (2014, 56–59). 4 See Versluis (1993, 16–36) for a discussion of Eastern influences on German Idealism and British Romanticism. 5 Harries (2013) emphasises that, in the aughts, Coleridge began expressing an antipathy for Hinduism that became venomous late in his life. Yet a continuity of thought persists. For instance, as late as Aids to Reflection (1825), Coleridge proposes, Hedley (2004) notes, “an Idealistic philosophy . . . . that ultimate reality does not consist of material objects but of consciousness or personality” (23). This philosophy is now aided by Christian-Neoplatonic “meditative” (8) exercises rather than Hindu-Neoplatonic ones, but it seems a nominal deviation from his earlier thought. 6 Fischer (1988) refers to the dominant Romantic philosophy as “animism.” 7 “Even your writing desk with its blank paper and all its other implements will appear as a chain of flowers, capable of linking your feelings as well as thoughts to events and characters past or to come” (Coleridge 1985, 1:225). 8 The double meaning of “organ” is at play here: both “a part of an animal or plant body that serves a particular physiological function” and “a mental or spiritual faculty regarded as an instrument of the mind or soul” (OED). 9 Coleridge often uses “soul” in an ambiguously Greek way, suggesting the various qualities of life and mind. 10 For more on Coleridge and Vishnu, see Mazumder (1993). John Drew (1987) argues that the Indian god became Coleridge’s “most appropriate image for his own most abstruse meditative states” (193). 11 For an analysis of Coleridge’s relationship to Schelling’s philosophy, see Reid (1994). Roy examines his “egregious misreading” (2007, 299) of Kant, while Roy (2007) and Simons (2006) both explore his remarkable affinities to (and ignorance of) Hegel. 12 See Irwin (1993) for an insightful overview of Bataille’s aims in cultivating inner experience.

Vexed Meditation  173 13 The association of Tantra with excessive sexuality is a widespread stereotype; see Hewitson (2014) for a broader historical account. 14 “The writing of a poem, the singing of praise—possibly addressed to nature, to the lover, to a divinity that we incarnate or could incarnate—use respiration in a way other than obedience to an already written word or text, expressing orders or laws, more than praises or graces” (Irigaray 2002, 54). 15 For a collection of new materialist scholarship, see Coole and Frost (2010). Shaviro (2014) provides an overview of speculative realism.

References Abrams, M. H. 1965. “Structure and Style in the Greater Romantic Lyric.” In From Sensibility to Romanticism: Essays Presented to Frederick A. Pottle, edited by Frederick W. Hilles and Harold Bloom, 527–560. New York: ­Oxford University Press. Bataille, Georges. (1943) 1988. Inner Experience. Translated by Leslie Anne Boldt. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. ———. 1989. Theory of Religion. Translated by Robert Hurley. New York: Zone Books. Berkeley, Richard. 2007. Coleridge and the Crisis of Reason. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. (1817) 1985. Biographia Literaria. 2 vols. Edited by James Engell and W. Jackson Bate. Vol. 7 of The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1956–1971. Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 6 vols. Edited by E. L. Griggs. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1957–1990. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge. 5 vols. Edited by Kathleen Coburn. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. ———. 1997. The Complete Poems. Edited by William Keach. New York: Penguin. Coole, Diana, and Samantha Frost, eds. 2010. New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Drew, John. 1987. India and the Romantic Imagination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fischer, Michael. 1988. “Accepting the Romantics as Philosophers.” Philosophy and Literature 12 (2): 179–189. Harries, Natalie Tal. 2013. “‘The One Life Within Us and Abroad’: Coleridge and Hinduism.” In Coleridge, Romanticism, and the Orient: Cultural Negotiations, edited by David Vallins, Kaz Oishi, and Seamus Perry, 131–144. London: Bloomsbury. Hedley, Douglas. 2004. Coleridge, Philosophy and Religion: Aids to Reflection and the Mirror of the Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hewitson, Justin Michael. 2014. “Sarkar’s Tantra: A Comparative and Historical Review of Transcendental Praxis.” PhD diss., National Taiwan University. Hollywood, Amy. 2002. Sensible Ecstasy: Mysticism, Sexual Difference, and the Demands of History. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Irigaray, Luce. (1999) 2002. Between East and West. Translated by Stephen Pluháček. New York: Columbia University Press.

174  Justin Prystash Irwin, Alexander C. 1993. “Ecstasy, Sacrifice, Communication: Bataille on Religion and Inner Experience.” Soundings: An Interdisciplinary Journal 76 (1): 105–128. Joy, Morny. 2006. Divine Love: Luce Irigaray, Women, Gender and Religion. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mazumder, Aparajita. 1993. “Coleridge, Vishnu, and the Infinite.” Comparative Literature Studies 30 (1): 32–52. McFarland, Thomas. 1969. Coleridge and the Pantheist Tradition. Oxford: ­Oxford University Press. McWhorter, Ladelle. 1995. “Is There Sexual Difference in the Work of Georges Bataille?” International Studies in Philosophy 27 (1): 33–41. Parker, Reeve. 1975. Coleridge’s Meditative Art. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Pawlett, William. 2016. Georges Bataille: The Sacred and Society. New York: Routledge. Piper, H. W. 1962. The Active Universe: Pantheism and the Concept of Imagination in the English Romantic Poets. London: Athlone Press. Pratt, Mary Louise. 1992. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Quinney, Laura. 2011. “Romanticism, Gnosticism and Neoplatonism.” In A Companion to Romantic Poetry, edited by Charles Mahoney, 412–424. ­Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Reid, Nicholas. 1994. “Coleridge and Schelling: The Missing Transcendental Deduction.” Studies in Romanticism 33 (3): 451–479. Roy, Ayon. 2007. “The Specter of Hegel in Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria.” Journal of the History of Ideas 68 (2): 279–304. Shaviro, Steven. 2014. The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Simons, Thomas R. 2006. “Coleridge Beyond Kant and Hegel: Transcendent Aesthetics and the Dialectic Pentad.” Studies in Romanticism 45 (3): 465–481. Timoner, Jennifer Alla. 2001. “Romanticizing Bataille: Subject-Object Relations and the ‘Extreme Limit’ of Knowledge in Blake, Coleridge, and Shelley.” PhD diss., The University of New Mexico. Urban, Hugh B. 2015. “Desire, Blood, and Power: Georges Bataille and the Study of Hindu Tantra in Northeastern India.” In Negative Ecstasies: Georges Bataille and the Study of Religion, edited by Jeremy Biles and Kent L. Brintnall, 68–80. New York: Fordham University Press. Vallins, David. 2013a. “Immanence and Transcendence in Coleridge’s Orient.” In Coleridge, Romanticism, and the Orient: Cultural Negotiations, edited by David Vallins, Kaz Oishi, and Seamus Perry, 119–130. London: Bloomsbury. ———. 2013b. “Introduction.” In Coleridge, Romanticism, and the Orient: Cultural Negotiations, edited by David Vallins, Kaz Oishi, and Seamus Perry, 1–15. London: Bloomsbury. Versluis, Arthur. 1993. American Transcendentalism and Asian Religions. New York: Oxford University Press. Warren, Andrew. 2013. “Coleridge, Orient, Philosophy.” In Coleridge, Romanticism, and the Orient: Cultural Negotiations, edited by David Vallins, Kaz Oishi, and Seamus Perry, 103–118. London: Bloomsbury. Wilkins, Charles, trans. 1785. The Bhagvat-Geeta, or Dialogues of Kreeshna and Arjoon. London: C. Nourse.

9 “You have to be a transparent eyeball” Transcendental Afterlives in Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men John Michael Corrigan At the outset of this chapter, I draw the reader’s attention to a significant, if not peculiar discrepancy between various critical responses to Don Draper, Mad Men’s chief protagonist, and his own creator’s assessment and expression of loyalty for him. Draper’s uber-masculinity and serial philandering drew quite a negative response from many members of its audience over the series’ seven-season run. Media analysts even had a group of doctors, psychologists, and psychiatrists diagnose Draper with a range of pathologies and personality disorders. According to a four-person panel of professionals, Draper suffers from “antisocial personality disorder, narcissistic personality disorder, paranoid personality disorder, impulse control disorder, attachment disorder, borderline personality disorder, and alcoholism” (Barcella 2013). Several prominent scholars were no less denunciatory in their appraisal of Draper and, more generally, of the award-winning TV series. Deborah Tudor (2012) criticises Mad Men’s “trivialization of history” (334) and contends that Don Draper “offers a salient case study” for the “new subjectivity” that arose in late capitalism. Only seeming to be the “perfect self-made man,” Draper “has a dual identity that embodies the contradictions of neoliberal identity” (336). Daniel Mendelsohn (2011) denounces the hypocrisy of the series and the flatness of the characters in even stronger terms, stating that Mad Men “shares virtually no significant qualities except its design.” As Mad Men (2007–2015) approached its final season, there emerged a desire amongst media commentators and the audience for the series to end with some form of moral comeuppance, in short, for Draper to be punished for his behaviour. Matthew Weiner, the creator of the series, publicly resisted this desire: “I don’t agree with you that most people want him to be punished,” he stated in a 2015 interview. There are people who say that. There are people who—I think it’s what they enjoy about the show: he’s so dastardly. But as soon as you’re in a language of putting Don on trial for being good or bad, you’re missing out on a lot of fun of the show. (Rosen 2015)

176  John Michael Corrigan In striking contrast to the rejection of Draper for his perceived moral failings, Weiner defended his protagonist precisely (and perhaps surprisingly) on the grounds of the character’s intrinsic sense of moral value. In a National Public Radio interview conducted before the final two episodes of the series were aired, Weiner stated that Draper possesses an “integrity you can’t argue with” and that viewers “superimposed” their own narratives upon him. It is “not about a man out of touch with his times,” Weiner contended; “this is about a man having a reckoning with himself.” Draper is “acutely trained and ready to understand what is going on in the world. He just doesn’t have anything to hold on to” (NPR’s Fresh Air 2015, 105). This chapter argues that Matthew Weiner’s affirmation of his protagonist’s integrity points to a richer heritage at play in the series. In concluding this volume’s strand on (Post)Modern Romanticism, I draw upon the two preceding chapters of this strand that identify Romanticism not simply in conflict with industrial modernity, not merely resisting the disenchantment of the modern age, but as an “affirmation” that “direct intuition of spiritual reality is possible,” as Arthur Versluis writes in his examination of Bronson Alcott and Ralph Waldo Emerson. I show, moreover, that Weiner personifies this Romantic affirmation in the personal and professional struggles of Don Draper who despite his many moral failings remains steadfast in his devotion to self-­transcendence, which Justin Prystash described as a “vexed,” but fruitful “desire to smudge the lines dividing the subject from myriad encircling objects.” In this context, I argue that Mad Men identifies itself explicitly with the American Romantic heritage and conceives of its chief protagonist, Don Draper, as a representative of its core philosophy and practice. To be sure, Draper’s double identity and creativity are part of a Romantic process that promises self-transcendence, one that the series suggests repeatedly in various iterations through its seven-season run and uses to great effect in its concluding episode. Nor do the topoi of duality and self-reinvention appear in a casual manner. As the first part of this chapter argues, these Romantic affinities are constituted intertextually in direct reference to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman. In the second and third sections, I show the consistent manner with which Weiner stages Draper’s creative desire for self-transcendence—namely, Draper’s attempts to overcome the ostensible duality of the self in favour of an integrative and productive experience that is both generated by the self and yet seeks to transcend its narrow ego-bound limitations. Draper’s identity performance draws upon the Emersonian and Whitmanian figuration of what I have defined elsewhere as a “form of metempsychotic becoming” in which the self “seeks and potentially possesses a plethora of experience, not simply that of one self or body, but that of many bodies” (Corrigan 2012, 9). This metempsychotic self resembles a postmodern play of identity and difference, while inheriting the metaphysics of the American Romantics

“You have to be a transparent eyeball”  177 that values above all the spiritual interiority of the human being. What is significant for our purposes is that Weiner both preserves the context and the resonances of this older metaphysics and refuses to dilute it in favour of a secularised form of Romantic self-becoming.

What’s in a Name? In the modern era, double selves populate our narratives.1 From ­nineteenth-century fictions that include The Strange Tale of Doctor Jekyll and Mister Hyde, The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, and The Picture of Dorian Gray, the tradition remains fruitful to present-day billion-dollar comic book franchises, as the dramatisation of double selves underwrites a conception of identity deeply embedded in our collective imagination. The superhero ethos is especially indicative of the double self I explore in Mad Men. So many of our iconic protagonists operate as disseminators of corporate culture in their public lives. To provide a few salient examples, Clark Kent and Peter Parker are reporters; Bruce Wayne and Tony Stark are CEOs. Indeed, part of the mystique of comic-book lore lies in the superhero’s double identification with the corporate manoeuvrings of American culture and, at the same time, with a secret self, carefully concealed from the public world. Such comic-book characters underwrite a conception of identity whose touchstone inevitably includes the mastery and control of appearances. Clark Kent is at once an immortal being and a writer, a maker of media culture and a disseminator of its content, as he mediates between the public’s knowledge of events and those events themselves. Peter Parker’s role as news photographer emphasises an analogous dynamic. Parker performs heroic feats and simultaneously captures himself in the act, afterwards selling those photos and attempting to redeem his own image against his relentless adversary and media boss Jay Jonas Jameson. In AMC’s Mad Men, Donald Draper follows a very similar formula: he is a purveyor of consumer culture, a man who dresses up products to sell to the American public, while his private self—his “original” self— remains hidden from public view. Even Draper’s assumed name suggests this discrepancy between his public persona and secret life. As has been widely recognised, he drapes products with a desirable façade for the public eye, but he also conceals himself behind the drape he creates. Mad Men’s portrayal of a double self—while firmly set in the arena of popular and modern culture—draws upon an older model of American identity from the nineteenth century. To draw out the connection between Don Draper and American Romanticism, we must emphasise Weiner’s name play with its implicit homage to Walt Whitman. Whereas the name Don Draper signals the character’s advertising artistry, the ability to drape both present objects and his own past with a pleasing appearance, his original name, Dick Whitman, connects him to Walt Whitman and the Romanticism of the antebellum and Civil War periods. 2

178  John Michael Corrigan A number of scholars have loosely connected Weiner’s play on Whitman’s name to a poeticised notion of American identity. David Marc (2011), for one, views Don Draper as a “twentieth-century update of Walt Whitman’s vision of American masculinity, as articulated in Leaves of Grass” (231). Mike Chasar (2013) applies Peter Coviello’s analysis of Walt Whitman’s “dialectics of substitution and supplement” to Don Draper’s flight from his past. For Chasar, Dick Whitman “us[es] Walt’s ‘dialectics of substitution’ to escape his identity” but, unlike the ­nineteenth-century poet, the character “doesn’t embrace this play” for he has committed the “initial act of substitution for self-serving purposes” and, afterwards, endeavours “to become the single, stable, coherent identity that he wants to be: successful ad exec, hyper-hetero womanizer and normative Cold War parent who reproduces in normative heterosexual ways.” The rub, as Chasar sees it, is that “the play of identity and difference that [Dick Whitman] thought promised him liberation and stability is not a one-time deal.” These scholars tend to view Weiner’s Whitmanian name play through a negative lens, a corporatisation whereby a subversive poetics of substitution is made to serve consumer culture, an alignment that Chasar (2013) characterises as “Draper inhabiting the mindset of, or ‘becoming,’ the psychologically wounded American consumer.” However, if we are to turn our attention to the series itself, we see that this paradigm explains only one aspect of Draper’s “dialectics of substitution,” to use Coviello’s term (2013, 80). Weiner engages in Romantic name play and appends to it a deeply existential question about identity that includes, but cannot be limited to American consumerism alone. In some cases, Weiner employs in passing a rather straightforward amalgamation of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman when he introduces the doctor Walter Emerson in two episodes, “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” and “The Good News.” In Season 2, Episode 12, Weiner’s name play is even more obviously intertwined with Draper’s flight from an assumed identity, a pattern that is a touchstone for the entire series. In this episode, Draper engages in one of his many disappearing acts, leaving his employers without warning. He travels to California, reassumes his real name, and begins to fantasise about entering upon a new career, to assume yet another identity. Meeting two car builders, Don is introduced to a colour coater by the name of Walt. Walt is “a real artist,” Don is told and, with that, Don stops to talk with Walt and admire his Red Ford. Here, Don has encountered a man with a kindred skill and artistry, a master of appearances, a veritable alter ego, a twin-artisan whose name “Walt” underscores Draper’s own Romantic origins. As Weiner thus engages in a Whitmanian name play, this particular episode indicates that Draper’s series of identity switches is not simply a matter of mastering or manipulating appearances—spraying paint upon an essential self, as it were. Rather, in emphasising a shared artistic impulse, Weiner intimates that the realm of the private self is also

“You have to be a transparent eyeball”  179 the “infinitude of the private man” (1969, 7:342), as Emerson famously characterised it in his journals; and it is from this interior realm that the individual draws his or her deepest resources in order to re-enter more fully into the world of appearances and other selves. Here, we see the reawakening of an older metaphysics concerning creativity and self-transcendence that permeates the American Romantic project in its many different forms and not merely the postmodern play of identity and difference that Peter Coviello (2013) and others have argued is vital to a Whitmanian poetics. In Episode 12, Weiner presents not simply a poetics of substitution but, as I will show further, the transcendental ground of the double self—a self not fully assigned to any single identity, but able to participate in the identity-making relationships of time and being. Having re-embraced his original name as Dick Whitman, Draper finds himself struggling within a nexus of identities, even while visiting the real Draper’s widow and assuming the clothes of that other man. In the midst of his identity-jumping, Draper realises that these selves are not intrinsically his, for he struggles to inhabit the life he is living as Don Draper, the New York ad man. “I have been watching my life,” he tells the authentic Mrs. Draper. “It’s right there. I keep scratching at it, trying to get into it. I can’t.” When he suspects that his role is that of a separate, witnessing consciousness, Mrs. Draper divines an answer, drawing out the tarot card, the World, which is the final card of the Major Arcana. She tells Don that it is “the soul of the world” and that “he is connected to every living thing.” As he listens to the explanation that the card represents the sacred centre or the soul within being that animates the cosmic pattern of death and rebirth, Don insists that he is alone. Both interpretations—the solitude of the self and the self as a recipient of the world—are plausible in the metaphysical terms of American transcendentalism, as we will see in the next section. At the close of the episode, Weiner reinforces this arc with Don stripping off his clothes, closing his eyes, and walking alone into the Pacific Ocean. The imagery suggests that Don seeks to embrace an immanence beyond any one identity and is now drawn into a period of incubation, preparing to re-enter the world renewed and revivified. Through this rebirth in the supernal waters, Don will be able once again to scratch his way into the Draper identity, thereby returning home to his family and work responsibilities. In this episode, moreover, Weiner clarifies the artistic ingenuity of the Draper character, his perpetual ability to engage in the ego-dissolution and ­identity-producing paradigm that is so central to the transcendentalism of Emerson and poeticised in Whitman’s Leaves of Grass (1855–1992).

The Double Consciousness and the Transparent Eyeball With the examples above, I have identified Weiner’s rather obvious name play upon Emerson and Whitman and begun to demonstrate that Draper’s double identity unfolds as the protagonist attempts to overcome the

180  John Michael Corrigan limitation of a single identity and aligning himself with the “soul of the world,” if we are to use the language of that particular season finale. This pattern is not a one-time occurrence in Mad Men, but an often-repeated dynamic in which Draper revivifies himself by finding yet another creative solution to escape each of his life’s impasses. In Season 5, Weiner reinforces this Romantic view of creativity and explicitly connects it to the iconic (and much debated) image of Emerson’s transparent eyeball, which outlines a way to overcome opposition through correspondences. In Season 5, Episode 11, “The Other Woman,” Weiner introduces a new character, Ted Chaough from rival firm CGC. Ted is a clear doppelgänger of the Draper character, competing with the protagonist for the role of leading creative artist in the Manhattan advertising community. Ted not only convinces Peggy Olson, Don’s protégé, to leave Draper, but explicitly espouses a transcendentalist philosophy in his very first appearance. “Do you know anything about Ralph Waldo Emerson?” Ted asks Peggy when they are introduced, and then proceeds to explain: Emerson said that you have to be a transparent eyeball. What he meant was that you have to take in the world and pass it through you. I am tired of people who treat this like math. I looked at your book and I saw somebody who was writing like every product was for them, no clichés, no homilies, no formula. Ted thereby propounds the experience of becoming a transparent eyeball as a higher order of imaginative practice. According to Ted, to become a transparent eyeball underlies the work of the advertiser as artist and means that the self can reverse its relationship with the world. Instead of being mediated by the world, the self has to become the mediator, so that the world starts to flow through the self and is thereby changed in this creative correspondence between interior and exterior spaces. In other words, what seems separate and in opposition becomes fluid under the right creative conditions, transformed through the transparent eyeball. The paradigmatic image of the eyeball has been so hotly debated in Emerson scholarship that it is necessary to step away (if briefly) from Mad Men and focus on the significance and history of the image’s interpretation in order to elucidate Weiner’s Emersonian allusion. Scholars have long had a contentious relationship with what is unquestionably the most famous Emersonian passage not simply in Nature (1836), but in any of his writing. Barbara Packer (1977) recounts how “critic after critic . . . regards the passage as a silly gaffe” (328), and she considers the often-­ discussed question of whether the passage was deliberate on Emerson’s part. More recent criticism has not been kinder to Emerson’s transparent eyeball. J. Heath Atchley (2006) writes that it is “difficult to address”

“You have to be a transparent eyeball”  181 these “well-worn words . . . with any philosophical sophistication” (81). “The image of the transparent eyeball has become a staple of nature ­mysticism” and articulates “a sentiment reek[ing] of narcissism and wish-­ fulfilment” (81). Atchley, then, mitigates his distaste by arguing that the “passage appears early in the essay [as] more a point of departure in the essay’s thinking than its destination” (81). Joseph Alkana (2015) draws a similar conclusion, stating that the passage’s “importance within the scheme of Nature is limited. Successive chapters develop a repudiation— or, perhaps more properly, a transcendence and recontextualization—of earlier ideas about the lessons of Nature” (4). A number of other scholars go as far as to discern in this Emersonian image decidedly sinister overtones. For Jenine Abboushi Dallal (2001), the passage is a “symbolic counterpart to U.S. expansionism,” for it “translates conquest into ‘inquest,’ Ralph Waldo Emerson’s term for self-inquiry.” Dallal explains, moreover, that “a successful inquest occurs at the moment of greatest cultural power and self-possession, when one’s perception absorbs nature (the body and untouched landscape) by dissolving it” (48). If we pay attention to the language in the iconic passage of the transparent eyeball from Nature (1836), we find Emerson (2000) championing the unsettled fluidity of identity neither in terms of wide-eyed nature mysticism nor as an invitation to hegemonic appropriations of nature. In the passage, the self that has its feet upon the bare ground and its consciousness in the unbounded air is certainly composed of opposites; however, the process that Emerson attempts to capture concerns the transformation of the self into a threshold through which the “currents” of a greater force “circulate” and move: Standing on the bare ground—my head bathed by the blithe air and uplifted into infinite space—all mean egotism vanishes. I become a transparent eyeball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God. The name of the nearest friend sounds then foreign and accidental: to be brothers, to be acquaintances, master or servant, is then a trifle and a disturbance. I am the lover of uncontained and immortal beauty. (7) Here, the self is not absorbing nature for selfish purposes; rather, the self has become a medium for a fluid experience in which its physical and cultural boundaries are temporarily dissolved in favour of a reality that is not easily or not-at-all containable, the exact opposite of a hegemonic manipulation of objects. There is a humorous, even grotesque emphasis upon the physicality of eyeball, as critics like Barbara Packer have noted, an emphasis that significantly contributes to the representation of a novelty in which cultural categorisation breaks down and relationships of power become unstable.

182  John Michael Corrigan It is unlikely, therefore, that the passage was a gaffe on Emerson’s part. To be sure, he opens the first chapter of Nature by providing a very specific context of creation. The self, Emerson (2000) shows, can transform itself into a mediatrix capable of making correspondences between the “heavenly” and physical worlds: To go into solitude, a man needs to retire as much from his chamber as from society. I am not solitary whilst I read and write, though nobody is with me. But if a man would be alone, let him look at the stars. The rays that come from those heavenly worlds will separate between him and what he touches. One might think the atmosphere was made transparent with this design, to give man, in the heavenly bodies, the perpetual presence of the sublime. (2000, 6) In this opening passage, it is quite clear that Emerson is advocating an experience outside of our habitual patterns of behaviour. It is not simply a matter of being alone; one must escape all routines, Emerson urges. Only in the solitary movement of consciousness back to its source can the human being become a mediator between the above and the below, between the boundless and the finite. It is in this mid-world, in inhabiting the position of a mediatrix that an artistic, novel energy is unlocked—the ray of light passes through the medium of the body and splits into multiplicity, a figuration that makes the human body a type of prismatic experience where one becomes many or, conversely, many become one. While the esoteric underpinnings of this representation may dismay the hard-nosed critic, the contemplative practice advocated by Emerson (1979a) makes physical “touch” a key ingredient of the creative process in question—so that human thought and touch are dynamically and tactilely involved in the larger arc of an “all-creating nature” (8). Here, Emerson also provides a key to his later thought. In the imagistic terms of the passage above, the experience of novelty involves the “rays” of the “heavenly worlds” flowing through the human body and separating into new objects and selves. Emerson extols the similar principle of the “metempsychosis of nature” (1979a, 8) four years later in the opening of his First Series of Essays (1841) when he recaptures the imagery of rays of light emanating into multiplicity and producing, as a result, the “entire series of days” (1979a, 3): Genius studies the casual thought, and far back in the womb of things, sees the rays parting from one orb, that diverge ere they fall by infinite diameters. Genius watches the monad through all his masks as he performs the metempsychosis of nature. (8)

“You have to be a transparent eyeball”  183 This way of thinking is so prevalent in Emerson’s writing that one could choose virtually any essay and find an expression of how the double consciousness seeks to make correspondences and produce novelty in its prospective journey into new selves. I argued in American Metempsychosis (2012) that double consciousness is “a carefully conceived and highly coherent dialectical philosophy that Emerson initially employs to problematize the prospect of a unified self” (14). Emerson recognises “that consciousness unfolds in the temporal present” while ceaselessly yearning for “the soul whose life is in the future.” As the Concord philosopher matures, he ceases to lament this polarity in consciousness and sees that its fluid “oscillation underscores the eternal vicissitudes of an unsettled universe.” At the close of another of his most famous essays, “Experience” (1844), Emerson (1979b) rearticulates the way in which double consciousness lays the ground for the self’s transmigrating journey into new identities: We dress our garden, eat our dinners, discuss the household with our wives, and these things make no impression, are forgotten next week; but in the solitude to which every man is always returning, he has a sanity and revelations, which in his passage into new worlds he will carry with him. (86) As in Nature, Emerson characteristically affirms the “solitude” of consciousness as the privileged aspect of a process through which the self is reconstituted in its transmigration into “new worlds” and thus into new identities. By the time of “Fate” (1860), Emerson’s emphasis has changed somewhat, but the “propounding of the double consciousness” still involves the processes by which the human being negotiates his or her private and public nature and brings together the two sides in his own body. Here, the double consciousness is not expressly in conflict; as before, it unfolds as a creative performance in which polarities are unified in the nimble actions of the mediator: One key, one solution to the mysteries of human condition, one solution to the old knots of fate, freedom, and foreknowledge, exists, the propounding, namely, of the double consciousness. A man must ride alternately on the horses of his private and his public nature, as the equestrians in the circus throw themselves nimbly from horse to horse, or plant one foot on the back of one, and the other foot on the back of the other. (2004, 25) Here, Emerson rearticulates the principal features of the double consciousness with which his fellow American Romantics grappled and

184  John Michael Corrigan which was to become fundamental to the poetic identity that Walt Whitman adopts and dramatises throughout his Leaves of Grass. In Section 4 of “Song of Myself” (1891–1892), Whitman (2002) presents the dynamics of this double consciousness most explicitly when the speaker of the poem whose identity is ever-shifting finds himself “surrounded” by the life of New York, yet realises that all these events and relationships “are not the Me myself”: These come to me days and nights and go from me again, But they are not the Me myself. Apart from the pulling and hauling stands what I am, Stands amused, complacent, compassionating, idle, unitary, Looks down, is erect, or bends an arm on an impalpable certain rest, Looking with side-curved head curious what will come next, Both in and out of the game and watching and wondering at it. (29) This self who can be conceived through negation (“not the Me myself) thereby waits outside the game of time; he “looks down” and “backwards” on it. Importantly, the speaker cannot remain so for long, which is already suggested by the fact that he “both in and out of the game.” The vital feature of Emerson’s double consciousness and the metempsychotic self it expresses is that these privileged moments of spiritual solitude or withdrawal require the physical dimension of being. Thus, the speaker comes to realise that he cannot stand apart or remain above, immune from the game of time that unfolds beneath him. “I discover myself on the verge of a usual mistake,” he confesses. “That I could look with a separate look on my own crucifixion and bloody crowning” (63). The speaker must then take on new identities through a creative descent into being and begin once again the process of climbing upwards through the temporal sequence to the place where there are no more steps, so that he strengthens himself to become a “robust soul” (71) no longer wholly swayed by history, but capable of recreating it. 3 That these texts—the works of Emerson, Whitman, and Weiner—are not above laughing at themselves contributes to their effectiveness. Reynolds (2011) links the transparent eyeball to frontier humour (451), and Richard Chase (1960) argues that “Song of Myself” is “the profound and lovely comic drama of the self,” an assertion developed decades later by Ronald Wallace (1984), who writes that Whitman’s speaker arises out of the “tall talks of Davy Crockett, Mike Fink, and others” (57). Mad Men similarly pokes fun at the Romantic ethos it embraces. Ted Chaough may articulate the transparent eyeball as a higher order of artistic process, but he also appears comically in Peggy Olson’s daydreams

“You have to be a transparent eyeball”  185 in Season 6, Episode 6, “For Immediate Release.” Where Don Draper was the primary lens through which the audience was originally introduced to the vicissitudes of double consciousness, the series refigures this dilemma in the struggles of its female characters. Here, Peggy is the person divided, between her actual beau and her fantasy for Ted. As she talks to her lover on the bed, she superimposes Ted onto him and, in her mind’s eye, it is Ted who lies on the bed in a dinner jacket with a book entitled Something by Ralph Waldo Emerson. In the last season, Weiner again humorously channels the American Romantics with the bourgeois Jim Cutler awkwardly offering to recite Walt Whitman’s “O Captain! My Captain!” upon receiving the news of Bertie Cooper’s death. In each case, the humour diminishes the seriousness with which the audience approaches these dilemmas of personhood, but it does not undermine the Romanticism that underpins them. Until the series’ last episode, duality and reinvention are challenges not only for Draper, but for many of the characters who seek to balance their interior lives with the social expectations of their time.

The Soul’s Leeward Way into the Waves As we saw in the last section, to become a transparent eyeball is not to reject opposition and/or paradox, but to mediate them through oneself so that they become fluid and are capable of generating new identities. In Emerson, this process is often depicted as terrifying and, in Whitman, it can be even more disconcerting. At the conclusion of “Song of Myself,” the speaker who has entered into successive identities has to concede his physical being to the listener who now looms above him as the speaker once hovered above the game of time. Without offering any assurance of immortal life, this metempsychotic journey captures something of the self-annihilating poetic character that Ya-Feng Wu astutely analyses in John Keats and Oscar Wilde in the second strand of this volume. Weiner’s conclusion to Season 2 with Dick Whitman entering the Pacific Ocean offers an appropriate and kindred visual language with water as the self’s authentic element, dissolving and washing away past formulations. That this imagery may border on cliché for the sophisticated viewer is beside the point; the visual language offers a representation of ego-dissolution in the search for novelty, in physical and protean rather than spiritually abstract terms. Nor is this watery conversion a comforting end to Dick Whitman’s journey. In that episode, he has found a way back into the Draper persona, but this entails a reconstitution of all the dilemmas that this personality involves. Weiner’s engagement of Emerson and Whitman is so striking because he preserves the spiritual component of the self in American Romanticism without diluting it in favour of a secularised form of artistic self-fashioning. Don Draper’s “genius” in advertising, as it is referred to in the series, resonates time and time again with specifically Emersonian

186  John Michael Corrigan overtones. Three final examples offer an illustration of Draper’s Romantic advertising genius. The first is perhaps the most iconic and unsettling of the series. In pursuing an account with American Airlines, Draper’s agency has to figure out how to spin a major plane crash to the general public. Draper’s sudden burst of creativity shocks the entire office. “There is no past, only an endless frontier,” he proclaims to the entire staff of Sterling/Cooper. For Draper, the firm does not need to address the crash at all because the incessant creative push outwards to new vistas and identities trumps having to turn backwards. Draper’s proclamation powerfully parallels one of Emerson’s most famous declarations. “I unsettle all things,” Emerson (1979a) writes in “Circles” (1841). “No facts are to me sacred; none are profane; I simply experiment, an endless seeker with no Past at my back” (188). This Emersonian insistence that the past ceases to be and only the creative impulse holds sway is not a one-time occurrence for Don. “It will shock you how much it never happened,” Don tells Peggy Olson in the premiere of Season 2, urging her to close the door on her pregnancy and mental breakdown. However, this is not simply friendly advice, for he is really restating his own modus operandi, the transcendentalist privilege of the pursuit of new identities and selves. To be true to this Romantic vision is to reject the seeming solidity of the past, its institutions, and its claims. In “Circles,” Emerson (1979a) expands the focus of his transparent eyeball passage, opening the essay by writing that to see with the eyes of God is to perceive a “transparent” law as it dissolves all assurances and holds reality “fluid and volatile”: There are no fixtures in nature. The universe is fluid and volatile. Permanence is but a word of degrees. Our globe seen by God is a transparent law, not a mass of facts. The law dissolves the fact and holds it fluid. (179) A similar idea is developed by Whitman towards the conclusion of “Song of Myself”: “The past and present wilt—I have fill’d them, emptied them./ And proceed to fill my next fold of the future” (Whitman 2002, 77). For Emerson as for Whitman, reality does not bind individuality; rather, it is the transforming and fluid medium of the self. In its original context, Emerson argues, this belief is a mystical idea, and he articulates as much in Representative Men (1850) where he writes that Platonic recollection and Hindu transmigration describe the same experience of the soul’s flight from, and subsequent reintegration into, the body: For, by being assimilated to the original soul, by whom, and after whom, all things subsist, the soul of man does easily flow into all things, and all things flow into it: they mix; and he is present

“You have to be a transparent eyeball”  187 and sympathetic with their structure and law. This path is difficult, secret, and beset with terror. The ancients called it ecstasy or absence,—a getting out of their bodies to think. All religious history contains traces of the trance of saints,—a beatitude, but without any sign of joy, earnest, solitary, even sad; “the flight,” Plotinus called it, “of the alone to the alone.” (1987, 55) Emerson calls this solitary experience the “remarkable example” of the “introverted mind,” one that “drives the man mad; or, gives a certain violent bias, which taints his judgment” (55). Yet it is also the experience most capable of changing society, for afterwards the individual begins to spread himself into the minds of thousands. As happens in great men, he seemed, by the variety and amount of his powers, to be a composition of several persons,—like the giant fruits which are matured in gardens by the union of four or five single blossoms. (56) The most telling example of how such self-transcendence underlies Draper’s advertising “genius” can be found in the opening of Season 6, the episodes entitled “The Doorway.” Here, Emerson’s articulation of the soul’s flight from the body is paramount. As the title of the season premiere suggests, we are again observing the mid-world, that place of thresholding or mediation through which and by which correspondences are made—correspondences between above and below, inner and outer and, explicitly in this case, soul and body. In this season opener, Weiner establishes this mid-world position by having Don read the opening of Dante’s Divine Comedy: “Midway in the journey of life, I lost myself in deep dark wood.” This passage provides the context for Don’s pitch to the executives of the Pink Palace Hotel in Hawaii’s Diamond Head. “We’re not selling a geographical location, we’re selling an experience,” he tells them as he begins to unfold a larger metaphysical view of physically attuning the body so that the soul can make its escape into the sea: It’s not just a different place; you are different. And you think there’d be an unsettling feeling about something so drastically different, but there’s something else. You don’t miss anything, you’re not homesick; it puts you in this state, the air and the water are all the same temperature as your body, it’s sensory, the music, the fragrance, the breeze and the blue. As Don speaks, his associate uncovers the visual imagery of the advertisement. In the picture, a man’s clothes, suit, tie, and shoes are tossed upon the beach with his footprints leading into the sea—with

188  John Michael Corrigan “the jumping off point” inscribed with big black letters. Don continues: “­Hawaiian legend has it that the soul can go in and out of the body, but that it usually leaves from a leeward point into the waves. Hawaii, the jumping off point.” Don’s pitch crystallises the major themes of American Romanticism that have been evoked throughout the entire series: he recreates the dynamics of the double consciousness and upholds the liminal space between soul and body as the place of the imagination, a place in which a creative self-expression is unlocked and made manifest. As in Season 2, this liminal space is aligned with the supernal waters of the Pacific; the self is imagined as a fluid state not locked into any one identity, but participating in the transformative experience of discarding and assuming bodies—the self-same drive of Emersonianism and Walt ­W hitman’s speaker in “Song of Myself.” In an interview with National Public ­R adio, Weiner, in fact, stated that the opening of Season 6 is “not about death.” “The transformation involves becoming a new person,” he clarifies. “My producers and I,” Weiner continues, “love this myth of what part’s your body and what part’s your soul, this duality. So the whole idea of coming up with the ad was can Don become another person.” Weiner also recognises that this metaphysics is uncomfortable for many. Even in his interview, he hedges his explanation with the words “not to sound too bizarre.” Similarly, Don’s ad pitch is not well received within the narrative itself. While Don is often called a genius for the fruits of his imagination, his dual-identity is a closely guarded secret for a reason. “So what happened to him?” one of the hotel executives asks of the man in the advertisement. Don responds: “He got off the plane, took a deep breath, shed his skin, and jumped off.” For the executives, Don’s idea may be “very poetic,” but it is “a little morbid,” and they protest as much: “Where’s our hotel, where’s the Pink Palace, where’s Diamond Head, you’ve got to have Diamondhead in the shot.” “Anyone can do that,” Don retorts. With this imagery of preternatural, indeed metaphysical, fluidity, it becomes evident that Weiner will refuse the moral comeuppance for which so many of his audience continually hoped, closing the series in much the same as he opened it—with Don Draper embracing an interior creative experience and achieving, as a result, the capacity to be made new. The series finale artfully encapsulates this vital characteristic of the series, concluding with an Americanised Hindu meditation ritual where self-transformation is intertwined with the corporate illusion of authenticity. In the series finale, Draper has once again come to a breaking point. In short, his life has fallen apart—another marriage ruined, his very future as an advertising executive in jeopardy. But despite these disasters, the final scene restages Draper’s creative ingenuity. He sits cross-legged on a cliff overlooking the Pacific Ocean, the sacred Vedic Om issuing from his lips and denoting atman, the soul within that

“You have to be a transparent eyeball”  189 is directly connected to the ultimate, inexpressible reality. For Draper, this is the transcendental experience he has sought to embody throughout the entire series: to be and create with “no clichés, no homilies, no formula,” as Ted clarified for us earlier. It is this experience in this last scene that leads Draper to invent the most famous advertisement of that era, “I’d Like to Buy the World a Coke” (1971). Three days after the airing of the finale, Weiner weighed in on this scene at an event in the New York Public Library. “The idea that some enlightened state, and not just co-option, might’ve created something that is very pure” was a fitting conclusion to the series, he said. “To me, it’s the best ad ever made, and it comes from a very good place” (Duboff 2015). A number of critics have attended to the ways that Mad Men unsettles any clear ideological agenda. They undermine the widespread negative view that the series deals chiefly in nostalgia while “encouraging its viewers to take up a position of moral superiority with respect to the absurd errors of the past” (Ong 2012, 1015). These scholars counter these two reproaches by contending that the series’ camera technique and its larger thematic consideration of historical perspective frustrate any moral certitude. Yi-Ping Ong (2012) argues, for instance, that the “uncanny impact of the series as a whole . . . deliberately subverts the supposed superiority of a present perspective over that of a past one” (1016). In Katherine Kinney’s view (2015), “Mad Men trades not on nostalgia, but on the faded aura of obsolescence, gestures of change, and succession that cannot be neatly folded into patriarchal narratives of historical progress and personal development” (2015, 285). This present chapter points to the importance of the Romantic ethos of the series and analyses Draper’s perpetual pursuit of inspiration and novelty even while he never resolves the duress of his personal and historical entanglements. Draper’s creativity, like that of his creator Matthew Weiner, may be offered in service to a consumer culture, something which may be damning enough in the eyes of some critics, but in the terms of the series itself, this cultural vantage point does not diminish its power, nor does it minimise the singular vitality of the tradition that underlies its vision. The self-transcendence at the heart of Mad Men helps to explain the allure of a deeper legacy that persists centuries after the flowering of the great Romantic artists and philosophers. The Romanticism that emerged in New England and then culminated in the poetry of Whitman embraced an evolutionary view of self-development and perpetual change. We may be creatures shaped by contingent environmental and cultural forces, but Emerson and Whitman firmly believed that these conditions are not an impediment to the creative powers of the individual; rather, they are the conditions within which each individual has to realise his or her own powers more fully. In this sense, the American Romantics championed our adaptive nature and held fast to an older spiritual belief that

190  John Michael Corrigan we can actively participate in a far greater vitality, or what they would call the universal process of creative transformation. Self-transcendence, in this sense, is not what it is often assumed: an optimistic metaphysics that naively upholds the creative powers of the individual. For Emerson and Whitman, such individuality is an emergent property—a proleptic possibility that arises out of the greater mass of humanity with its movement, behaviour, and thinking across time to seek novelty and variation. Draper may be personally flawed but, as Weiner admits, he is “acutely trained and ready to understand what is going on in the world.” What the series makes abundantly clear is that it is precisely Draper’s fidelity to the possibility of illumination that gives him such understanding. To write without formula, as the transparent eyeball makes manifest, entails this readiness for abandonment. The “jumping off point” is thereby much more than a clever turn of phrase for Draper; it is the persistent spiritual and Romantic affirmation that the self’s interior depths provide liberty, even though they are perpetually constrained by history and by our own failings.

Notes 1 The doubling of the self, or doppelgänger, is a German Romantic legacy, stemming from Jean Paul Richter (or Jean Paul). See Vardoulakis’s The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy (2010). 2 For an analysis of the pun on Draper, see Melanie Hernandez and David Thomas Holmberg (2011, 25–26). 3 For a fuller analysis of the ascending and descending double consciousness in the poetry of Walt Whitman, see Corrigan (2012, 104–166).

References Alkana, Joseph. 2015. The Social Self: Hawthorne, Howells, William James, and Nineteenth-Century Psychology. Lexington, KY: University Press of Kentucky. Atchely, J. Heath. 2006. “The Death of Emerson: Writing, Loss and Divine Presence.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy 20 (4): 251–265. Barcella, Laura. 2013. “What the Hell’s Wrong with Don Draper?” Esquire, 21 June. Accessed 29 May 2019. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/tv/ a23178/don-draper-whats-wrong/. Chasar, Mike. 2013. “Whitman’s Grandchildren: Becoming and Unbecoming Walt Whitman.” Arcade: Literature, the Humanities, & the World, 27 June. http://arcade.stanford.edu/blogs/whitmans-grandchildren-becoming-andunbecoming-walt-whitman. Chase, Richard. 1960. “Whitman and the Comic Spirit.” In The Americanness of Walt Whitman. edited by Leo Marx, 120–134. Lexington, KY: D. C. Health and Company. Corrigan, John Michael. 2012. American Metempsychosis: Emerson, Whitman and the New Poetry. New York: Fordham University Press. Coviello, Peter. 2013. “Whitman’s Children.” PMLA 128 (1): 73–86.

“You have to be a transparent eyeball”  191 Dannal, Jenine Abboushi. 2001. “American Imperialism UnManifest: Emerson’s ‘Inquest’ and Cultural Regeneration.” American Literature 73 (1): 47–83. Duboff, Josh. 2015. “Matthew Weiner Reveals Whether Don Wrote the Mad Men Finale-Closing Coke Ad.” Vanity Fair, 21 May. Accessed 20 May 2018. https://www.vanityfair.com/hollywood/2015/05/matthew-weiner-mad-men finale-coke-ad. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. 1969. The Journals and Miscellaneous Notebooks of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VII 1838–1942. Edited by A. W. Plumstead and Harrison Hayford. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 1979a. Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume II: Essays: First Series. Rpt. ed. Edited by Joseph Slater, Alfred R. Ferguson, and Jean Ferguson Carr. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 1979b. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume III: Essays: Second Series. Rpt. ed. Edited by Joseph Slater, Alfred R. Ferguson, and Jean Ferguson Carr. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 1987. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume IV: Representative Men. Edited by Wallace E. Williams and Douglas Emory Wilson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. ———. 2000. The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson. Edited by Brooks Atkinson. New York: The Modern Library. ———. 2004. The Collected Works of Ralph Waldo Emerson, Volume VI: The Conduct of Life. Rpt. ed. Edited by Barbara Packer, Joseph Slater, and Douglas Emory Wilson. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Fresh Air. 2015. “Mad Men Creator on Don Draper’s Losses and the End of the Road.” National Public Radio, 7 May. ­Accessed 19 May 2018. https://www.npr.org/2015/05/07/404904172/mad-men-creator-on-dondrapers-losses-and-the-end-of-the-road. Hernandez, Melanie and David Thomas Holmberg. 2011. “‘We’ll start over like Adam and Eve’: The Subversion of Classic American Mythology.” In Analyzing Mad Men: Critical Essays on the Television Series, edited by Scott F. Stoddart, 15–44. Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Company. Kinney, Katherine. 2015. “The Haunting of Don Draper.” Pacific Coast Philology 50 (2): 268–287. Marc, David. 2011. “Mad Men: A Roots Tale of the Information Age.” In Mad Men: Dream Come True TV, edited by Gary R. Edgerton, 226–238. New York: I. B. Tauris. Mendelsohn, Daniel. 2011. “The Mad Men Account.” The New York Review of Books, 24 February. Accessed 3 March 2018. https://www.nybooks.com/ articles/2011/02/24/mad-men-account/ Ong, Yi-Ping. 2012. “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes: Mad Men and Moral Ambiguity.” MLN 127 (5): 1013–1039. Packer, Barbara. 1977. “Uriel’s Cloud: Emerson’s Rhetoric.” The Georgia Review 31 (2): 322–342. Reynolds, David S. 2011. Beneath the American Renaissance: The Subversive Imagination in the Age of Emerson and Melville. New York: Oxford University Press.

192  John Michael Corrigan Rosen, Christopher. 2015. “This is Why ‘Mad Men’ Won’t End with Don Draper Being Punished.” Huffington Post, 1 April. Accessed 5 June 2018. https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/04/01/matthew-weiner-loves-don draper_n_6957324.html. Tudor, Deborah. “Selling Nostalgia: Mad Men, Postmodernism and Neoliberalism.” Society 49 (4): 333–338. Vardoulakis, Dimitris. 2010. The Doppelgänger: Literature’s Philosophy. New York: Fordham University Press. Wallace, Ronald. 1984. God Be with the Clown: Humor in American Poetry. Columbia, MO: University of Missouri Press. Whitman, Walt. (1891–1892) 2002. Leaves of Grass and Other Writings. ­E dited by Michael Moon. New York: W. W. Norton.

Part IV

Environmental Romanticism

10 Tracing Romanticism in the Anthropocene An Ecocritical Reading of Ludwig Tieck’s Rune Mountain Caroline Schaumann In 2000, the chemist Paul Crutzen and the biologist Eugene Stoermer put forth the term Anthropocene as a geological epoch characterised by “the central role of mankind in geology and ecology” (17). This claim has since been supported by evidence of anthropogenically altered sedimentations rates, ocean chemistry, carbon dioxide ratios, climate change, global distribution of plants and animals, and species extinction. In our current age of the Anthropocene, romantic dreams of a wholesome, unscathed nature seem more distant than ever. Yet this chapter suggests that Romantic literature, while not posing solutions to accelerating environmental dilemmas, contributes relevant insights to the challenges at hand. Specifically, I chart two qualities that make Romantic enquiries timely for environmental debates: first, an openness and mixing of genres that provides new impetus to established and predetermined narrative modes; second, a fluidity of boundaries between humans and nature that permeates Romantic thought and reflects some of the insights of recent theories on material ecocriticism. Whereas material ecocriticism offers a theoretical framework to scrutinise the systematic separation of human and nonhuman life, Romantic characters model an embeddedness in a nature that remains animated, inexplicable, and indefinite. The reality of the Anthropocene leaves little room for nostalgic clichés of undisturbed nature but underscores the mysteriousness and capriciousness of our environment as we realise that human beings are simultaneously part of nature and destroying it. The connections between ecocriticism and British Romanticism have already received some scholarly attention since Jonathan Bate’s seminal book of 1991, Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition (see Hutchings, 2007; Rigby, 2014; Hall, 2016). Indeed, the emergence of ecocritical studies in the 1970s and 1980s in the Anglophone context went hand in hand with a reconsideration of (Romantic) nature writing. Early German Romanticism has rarely been part of these discussions,1 even though it significantly engenders and arguably expands Romantic ecology. With this context in mind, I draw on Rune Mountain (Der Runenberg, 1804) by Ludwig Tieck (1773–1853)—a

196  Caroline Schaumann tale Thomas Carlyle translated into English and published in German Romance (1827)—as an example to probe Romantic notions of nature in a time of ecological crisis. Written overnight in 1802, Rune Mountain, a short enigmatic tale that has long puzzled readers and scholars alike, shows the destructive consequences of perceiving the world in strictly dualistic terms, encouraging us to face the unexpected, mysterious, and strange forces of nature. In the following, I first discuss the timeliness of Romantic approaches embracing the fantastic, grotesque, and strange after showing the insufficiency of narrative tropes such as tragedy, apocalypse, pollution, and the sublime to meet the challenges of our ecological decline. I then move on to demonstrate how Tieck specifically rejects binary models and instead blurs boundaries in genre, structure, and plot. Reaching beyond Romantic escapism, Tieck depicts how the physical landscape enters and alters human consciousness, providing the protagonist Christian with crucial opportunities to contemplate and negotiate the places he inhabits. Christian, as we shall see, fails to benefit from these opportunities: rather than finding contentment and pleasure in the environments where he dwells, he begins to exploit them while finding new natures of desire. Rune Mountain, therefore, draws our attention to the hypocrisy of human hubris and the necessity of coping with an unstable, volatile, and unpredictable world in the Anthropocene.

Genres in the Anthropocene As Stephanie LeMenager (2017, 221) recently put it, “climate change represents, among other things, an assault on the everyday.” The acute awareness of anthropogenic planetary changes—such as climate change, deforestation, river damming and diversion, the use of fertilisers, and the depletion of fossil fuels—calls for human engagement at all levels and in all fields. Since a business as usual approach is not possible any more, we have to critically reassess narrative traditions that tend to promote stability and causality rather than offer models of how to negotiate Anthropocene uncertainty. Based on the trust in predictability and human power that comes with seemingly infinite resources, our prevalent cultural narratives seem insufficient to understand today’s rapidly changing, volatile nature. For instance, the genre of tragedy, deriving from Greek models of mimesis and catharsis, provides us with examples for dealing with disaster and conflict but emphasises a moral lesson grounded in the optimism of making the world a better place that in an age of climate change becomes inadequate if not futile. According to Melinda Harm Benson and Robin Kundis Craig (2017), in the case of Rachel Carson’s watershed book Silent Spring (1962) and the influential “earthrise” photos taken during the Apollo 8 mission (1968), elements of tragedy triggered broad measures

Tracing Romanticism in the Anthropocene  197 of regulatory laws promoting environmental management in the 1960s and 1970s. But nowadays we seem to have run out of time, capacity, and optimism to provoke similar actions despite the increased exigency. As Benson and Craig pose, “Carson’s formula of ‘science + fear = change’—a recipe that is still the main strategy embraced by the American environmental movement today—has realistically not worked for decades” (32). The concept of planetary boundaries, first formulated in 2009 by Johan Rockström and Will Steffen whose work was instrumental in formulating the Anthropocene concept, dramatically underscores the urgency. Nine planetary boundaries delineate a threshold or tipping point that, when crossed, indicates a risk of irreversible and abrupt environmental change; three of them that have already been crossed include greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere contributing to climate change, loss of biodiversity (the so-called Sixth Extinction), and nitrogen accumulation in the atmosphere and water systems due to the worldwide use of artificial fertilisers. Other boundaries that we have not yet crossed but are approaching include rising ocean acidity due to increased CO2 (leading to coral bleaching), land use surface converted to cropland, 2 dwindling freshwater reserves (mostly for irrigation), atmospheric pollution, high levels of toxic chemicals, and ozone depletion. Lawrence Buell (1995, 285) called Apocalypse “the single most powerful master metaphor that the contemporary environmental imagination has at its disposal,” a trope that stages catastrophic destruction without the possibility of redemption. Apocalypse relies on the imagination to conjure unimaginable destruction, but can also leave readers or, indeed, citizens of the planet in helpless awe and resignation at the scale of damage. As Greg Garrard (2012, 116) pointedly argues, “only if we believe that the planet has a future, after all, are we likely to take responsibility for it.” Blowing up the scale of devastation elicits scaled-up responses, ranging from dismissal to panic or even violence. In all these cases, the trope of apocalypse elicits a cause-and-effect logic that invariably reduces ecological complexities to environmentalist rhetoric. Conversely, narratives of pollution, as Buell (1998, 651) noted, rely on the nostalgic longing for a pastoral landscape but stage a moralistic David versus Goliath battle. These narratives lead us to believe in the possibility of winning a heroic call to action while continuing to promote an ideal of pristine nature that does not correspond to our polluted reality. The reality of climate change points in a different direction, neither a heroic fight that leads to the rescuing of planet earth, nor total destruction, nor a moral lesson that can be drawn from environmental degradation. Instead, the often unknown effects of global warming require us to deal with uncertainty and chaos by accepting unpredictability and instability. Some Anthropocene scholars have thus looked to traditions

198  Caroline Schaumann of the fantastic, non-realist, and post-human as narratives that embody transformation, adaptation, and change. In “Nature, Post Nature,” for instance, Timothy Clark (2013) suggests: It [the Anthropocene] may find its analogue in modes of the fantastic, new forms of magic realism or science fiction, or texts in which distinctions between “character” and “environment” become fragile or break down, or in which the thoughts and desires of an individual are not intelligible in themselves but only as the epiphenomenal sign of entrapment in some larger and not necessarily benign dynamic. Thus some forms of gothic, myth, or science fiction may well seem more interesting than a new novel displaying the latest subtleties of nuance in psychological or social observation, confining itself, that is, to the anthropocentric and arguably illusory world of conventional realism. (81) According to Clark, fantastic and fictional elements contribute more to an effective representation of the volatility of our environmental crisis than the logic and predictability of psychological realism. My approach to Romantic legacies in the Anthropocene emerges in this context. While British and American Romanticism, in particular, have long been heralded as proto-ecological, my focus in this chapter lies less in the environmental aspects of Romantic writing than in its fundamentally altered approaches to a nature not conceived as separate from humans. When nature changes from an object being described to a force exerting its own agency and power, psychological determinism and linear logic fail to structure and explain Romantic narratives. Romantic characters, in turn, are not in control of their environment but rather interact with it by way of adaptation, transformation, or resilience. Romanticism therefore allows for unexpected, radical shifts, making room for bewildering and undefined experiences. While Romanticism, in general, can be characterised by its embrace of magical and fantastical elements, in Rune Mountain these elements come to the fore in such a way as to prohibit any one conclusive interpretation. For this reason, I read Tieck’s story as a paradigmatic early Romantic tale that advances a relevant non-realist genre in the Anthropocene.

The Domestic and the Sublime As scholars have long agreed, Rune Mountain is an especially stupefying story that has prompted diverse and wide-ranging interpretations. The narrative itself entails a restless oscillation between conventional life and the world beyond its demarcations. Dissatisfied with everyday life, the protagonist Christian decides to leave behind family and

Tracing Romanticism in the Anthropocene  199 friends for the nearest mountains in order to escape what he perceives to be the limited domain of his home. Under the guidance of an old woodsman he meets in the mountains, Christian becomes an accomplished hunter and immerses himself in the pleasures of nature. Yet the new environment, as it turns out, cannot sustain to satisfy him; a sense of dissatisfaction enshrouds him again. Encouraged by a stranger he comes across, Christian ventures atop Rune Mountain where he witnesses a giant wild woman performing a striptease to show off her jewellery; mesmerised and fatigued, he falls asleep. When he wakes the next morning, he returns to the lowlands and finds himself in an unknown yet picturesque countryside where he soon meets Elisabeth and, ironically, begins to work as a gardener like his father did back home. Christian marries Elisabeth, who bears him several children, and before long reunites with his father; together they live in blissful union until another stranger appears in their life and entrusts a sum of money to them. The happiness of the young family is soon corrupted by ­Christian’s greed for money. Once again, Christian leaves his family, seeking the majestic mountain woman, but instead chances upon a hideous woman of the woods, following her into a derelict mine. Meanwhile, Elisabeth remarries, but bad luck leads her into poverty, unhappiness, and despair. A few years later, once more she meets ­Christian in a pasture, but barely recognises the by now dishevelled creature, speaking in an incoherent language, who proceeds to empty a sack of pebbles, claiming they are gemstones. After making his farewells, Christian disappears into the woods with the appalling woman of the woods, never to resurface again. Scholars have termed Tieck’s tale a novella, a fairytale, and a ­hybrid of both (Kunstmärchen) (Tismar 1977), 3 an a­ nti-fairytale that uses fairytale elements but reverses them (Fries 1975, 1206),4 or a new form altogether. Thomas Althaus (2005, 107–112) tellingly provides two different readings of Tieck’s story according to its genre: one elucidates Christian’s obsession with money by approaching the text with logic and congruity as a novella, and the other reads it as a fairy tale, seeking to divulge a deeper truth beyond the layers of reality. Tieck himself consciously blurred these boundaries in his thoughts on the fairytale-novella in Phantasus (1812–1816), claiming that we produce such a genre when our imagination populates an awe-inspiring, incomprehensible nature with equally mystifying characters (1985, 128–129). Tieck’s views notably point to sublime emotions, and several scholars have interpreted Rune Mountain further in this vein. James Landes (2009), for instance, read the tale as an encounter with sublime nature: “the narrative aims to ‘initiate’ the reader into the feeling of the sublime as it is set against the backdrop of the ‘ordinary’ world” (6). As early as 1978, Maria M. Tartar had already distinguished these two terrains,

200  Caroline Schaumann disregarding the fact that Rune Mountain is precisely not an area untouched by man: “The woman who captures Christian’s imagination is primarily associated with that part of nature untamed by man. Hers is the realm of forests, streams, and mountains, in contrast to the gardens, rivers, and plains cultivated and controlled by man” (290). In his essay entitled “Split Terrain,” Gordon Birrel (1979) likewise interprets the text’s spatial configurations in strictly dualistic terms: “The spatial arenas of the mountains and the plains confront each other with a hostility that precludes any possibility of synthesis” (52). While these scholars have sought to unravel the text’s mysteries, others have tended to accept the text’s ambivalent character, acknowledging that seemingly contradictory readings may not exclude each other but rather add layers of meaning. For instance, Norbert Mecklenburg (1982, 62) maintained, “I propose to read the work as testimony of a societal phase of upheaval, in which two opposing ways of life are represented in one story; this produces the unsolvable mysteries.” Similarly, Devin O’Neal (2016, 282) recently claimed that “readings of Der Runenberg vary widely in direction and focus—which, in light of the text’s inherent confusion and uncertainty, is understandable.” While surely imbuing the mountainous landscape with sublime attributes, Tieck complicates the straightforward contrast between the domestic and the wild over the course of the narrative. In Phantasus, Tieck (1812–1814) elaborates that sublime feelings may arise not only in wild mountain heights, but also in other environments: It is not just on the deserted heights of the Gotthard that our spirit is filled with horror, . . . even the most beautiful place has ghosts that stride through our heart; driving such strange forebodings, such confused shadows through our imagination that we flee. 5 (128) Rune Mountain, as we shall see, exemplifies how sublime awe and terror cannot be limited to the mountain heights but instead pervade life in the seemingly picturesque lowlands. As an Anthropocene tale, Rune Mountain dismisses such narrow definitions in favour of a nature that is boundless and dynamic, and includes the organic and inorganic worlds. Not unlike some interpreters, however, the story’s protagonists continually attempt to define and categorise nature. For instance, Christian deliberates about his parental home: The flat plain, the castle, my father’s little walled garden with its well-ordered flower beds, the cramped house, the sky that stretched so sadly all around, and not a groundswell, not a proper promontory for miles about—all this became more and more depressing and hateful. (Tieck 2012, 57)

Tracing Romanticism in the Anthropocene  201 Already from the very beginning, Christian’s harsh words divulge his narrow-mindedness that would prevent the reader from identifying with him. When debasing his father’s gardening as a trivial activity that establishes petty control over a limited nature, Christian ignores the fact that his father does not control his environment but rather becomes attuned to it when tending his garden and guarding its growth, immersing himself in the garden environment and speaking with his plants. When finally making true his dreams of roaming amongst majestic mountains with dense forests and deep river gorges, Christian is “reeling like a drunk,” temporarily spellbound by the dynamic environment: Soon the plain disappeared from view and the forests streams came surging towards me. Beech and oak trees shook their shaggy manes over steep precipices; my path led me past dizzying abysses, blue peaks loomed tall and proud in the background. A new world revealed itself to me, and I did not grow tired of its charms. (58) After only three months, Christian does grow tired of this sublime environment (against his previous assertion) and loses interest in his new surroundings, becoming once more engulfed in depression and loneliness, even stronger than before. Unlike other Romantic protagonists, ­Christian does not enjoy Waldeinsamkeit, the bliss of solitude in the woods that Ralph Waldo Emerson (2015, 207, lines 9–12) described in 1858 as follows: “Or on the mountain-crest sublime, / Or down the oaken glade, / O what have I to do with time?” In such rejection of Waldeinsamkeit, we first meet Christian in the story, stuck between his aversion to his parental home and his disinclination to stay where he is. The narrative’s first sentence characterises him anonymously as “a young hunter . . . lost in thought before a bird trap in a remote mountain hollow” (Tieck 2012, 54). Tellingly, the sentence corresponds to Christian’s later claim that at home he felt like a bird caught in a net trying to break free, making readers suspect that the mountainous environment is but another entrapment of his desires. By causing the same desolation and unhappiness, the environments of the sublime mountainscape and domesticated gardenscape are less distinct than one would assume.

Christian’s Disparate Worlds We learn that Christian tends to pin his happiness on his environment— while remaining unaware that he depends on nature for his physical and spiritual well-being. In what might be reflective of human ignorance

202  Caroline Schaumann and hubris in the Anthropocene, this unawareness coincides with his appropriation of nature: I took possession of this rugged country in which I roamed as if it were my kingdom; I got to know every cliff and every ravine; I was happy in my element when early in the morning we set out for the forest, when we chopped down trees, when I trained my eye and my musket on a fleeting target, and when I helped train our trusted comrades, the dogs, to track down game. (58) Christian utilises and exploits the natural resources of his “kingdom”: he takes from the soil as a gardener, from the prey as a hunter, from the timber as a forester, and from the metals as a miner. These acts of appropriation allow Christian to profit from the now domesticated landscape while fuelling his desires for other “untouched” nature. Kate Rigby (2014, 73) points out that a similar hypocrisy is the target of Romantic irony in Heinrich Heine’s Harz Journey (Die Harzreise, 1826), when a group of bourgeois tourists seeks “a spiritual high in designated places of natural beauty when on holiday, while participating in the ruthless exploitation and commodification of natural resources during the workaday week.” In his seminal essay “The Trouble with Wilderness,” historian William Cronon (1995) described this seeming paradox as a nostalgic and somewhat naïve attempt to evade environmental responsibility: [T]he trouble with wilderness is that it quietly expresses and reproduces the very values its devotees seek to reject. The flight from history that is very nearly the core of wilderness represents the false hope of an escape from responsibility, the illusion that we can somehow wipe clean the slate of our past and return to the tabula rasa that supposedly existed before we began to leave our marks on the world. (80) Preoccupied with (illusory) fantasies of grand wilderness, we are exploiting the environment that sustains us, oblivious to the damage we cause. As Cronon elaborates, the ultimate consequence of such paradox would be to kill ourselves since humans cannot inhabit wilderness. Therefore, Cronon advocates a non-dualistic understanding of the supposed natural and non-natural that would help overcome the boundaries of wilderness and the domestic and thus foster more responsibility for the nature at our doorsteps. With no relation to the scale of the current environmental devastation, Tieck presents us with the seeds of our twisted and tragically

Tracing Romanticism in the Anthropocene  203 flawed relationship with nature, in which we exploit and destroy the very environment we utterly depend on. How fitting it is that in his ignorance, Christian “thoughtlessly” (Tieck 2012, 56) plucks a mandrake root from the ground but becomes alarmed by the plant’s mournful sounds from the wound he caused. When a mysterious stranger appears, Christian elaborates on his predicament and readily rushes off to yet another unknown environment, that is, the titular Rune Mountain, at the stranger’s prompting. Cliffs, forests, and rivers coax him upwards along a dangerous path, speaking in furious voices, until Christian cannot continue any farther. He peeks into a lit hall lined with sparkling crystals and rocks, in which a beautiful, enormous woman undresses herself and then looks at diamonds and other jewels in her dresser. Awestruck, Christian becomes seduced simultaneously by sex and money as the wild woman proceeds to hand him a stone tablet, saying “‘Take this to remember me by!’” (61). On his descent, however, Christian loses the tablet and forgets much of what happened. He brings closure to his own mystification by (dis) regarding the episode as temporary madness: Stunned and confused, he tried to pull himself together and retrieve his recent recollections, but his memory was all muddled, like a dense fog in which formless figures moved wildly and imperceptibly about. His entire former life lay as though in the far distance behind him; the strange and the ordinary were so jumbled together that he found it impossible to tell them apart. Hesitating, following a long dispute with himself, he finally came to the conclusion that is was a dream or a sudden madness that took hold of him that night. (62) Missing the opportunity to learn from this strange encounter by acknowledging and possibly integrating his desires, Christian instead dismisses it, insisting on the boundaries that separate his life experiences into disparate directions: the familiar, domestic, and pastoral world of his upbringing and hometown village, and the unrestrained, fantastical world beyond. He, therefore, remains caught in the tensions of both forces, swaggering back and forth between different realms of being.

Going in Circles Christian initially left his village in order to “escape the ever-reoccurring cycle [Kreise] of the ordinary” (Tieck 2012, 54), but it turns out that he merely enters another circle when returning to the lowlands and walking into an unfamiliar village where his longing for society is satisfied. Enthralled by Elisabeth, a devout slender girl with blonde hair and blue

204  Caroline Schaumann eyes (in stark contrast to the mountain woman), Christian becomes employed by her father as a gardener, the very line of work he used to detest, and eventually marries her. In yet another circular path, Christian now diligently and happily completes his gardening tasks, caring not only for plants but also for his new bride and their growing family. Christian’s own father eventually joins the fray, and with capital, effort, and discipline, the extended family rises to become one of the wealthiest and most respectable in the village. The story, of course, does not end here. Five years later, another (or the same?) stranger visits their house and entrusts to the family a sizeable fortune upon his departure; thereafter, Christian becomes infatuated with the treasure. When his father discovers that Christian counts the stranger’s money every night, he begs Christian to stop, and he reluctantly agrees. After more than a year has passed without the stranger returning, the father eventually gives in to his son’s wish to invest the money in lands and goods. Christian once again turns his attention to the inorganic rather than organic world, which culminates in a decisive rift between father and son. Confronting Christian about his obsession with gold, his father is quick to denounce the love of stones and metals that, to his mind, has perverted Christian’s “natural” path and moral education: “It was an unlucky star,” said the old man, “that pulled you away from us; you were born for a quiet life, your spirit was inclined to peacefulness and plants, but your impatience led you astray into the society of stones. The cliffs, the crooked crags with their sharpedged shapes shattered your spirit and instilled in you the devastating hunger for metal.” (70) The accusations culminate in the father’s demand to throw away the lost-yet-found-again stone tablet “that turns your heart into stone” (72) and a devastating indictment of his son: “Then his [Christian’s] haunted heart isn’t human any more, it’s the stuff of cold metal. Anyone who has lost his love of flowers has forsaken all love and fear of God” (69). As can be expected, Christian does not respond well to these accusations, equally denouncing his father’s preference for flowers and plants in opposing terms: That’s why I find all green things so irritating, so much at odds with my life; they try to erase the image of that beloved figure from my heart and to win over my soul every spring with their twisted cadaverous pose. It’s unheard of and cunning how they pulled the wool over your eyes, old man, why they’ve taken possession of your soul. Just ask the stones, you’ll be surprised to hear what they have to say. (70)

Tracing Romanticism in the Anthropocene  205 Once again, the narrative reveals the two opposing positions in direct speech, hinting that neither of these absolute positions is true. The father, of course, does not attempt to listen to the stones, but neither is Christian able to communicate with stones or even read the inscription of the mysterious stone tablet. In their respective rants, Christian ignores the happy times he spent as a gardener, while his father seems to forget that he himself benefitted from the stranger’s money to further their wealth. Tieck presents these two clashing perspectives without reconciling the conflict in the end. Christian is no Romantic hero precisely because he cannot accept an ambivalent, multifaceted world but feels the need to decide for one side in favour of the other, continually swaying between extremes rather than negotiating various directions. This either-or conflict most blatantly arises in his encounters with women. While the voluptuous, black-haired, and sexual wild woman appears as a polar opposite to the slender, blond, and domestic Elisabeth, we have reason to suspect that the contrast may be a product of Christian’s projections. As Christian forgets his erotic encounter on Rune Mountain, deciding to discount the episode as a fantasy rather than taking his confusion as an impetus to integrate his dreams into reality, we fear that his return to domestic life is bound to fail. Indeed, as soon as Christian briefly leaves his new home and nears the mountains on the way to his native village, the brittleness of his familial ties becomes evident: “How well do I know you, madness,” he cried out, “you and your perilous allure, but I’m a man and I will resist you! Elisabeth is no pipe dream; I know that she’s thinking of me now, that she’s waiting for me and lovingly counting the hours of my absence. Don’t I already see forests waving like black hair before me? Don’t the flashing eyes of the stream peer after me? Are the mighty limbs of the mountain not marching towards me?” (65) In Christian’s fearful fantasies of an encroaching female threat, the mountain woman becomes nature, insanity, and seduction, whereas he presumes Elisabeth to be her opposite, safely waiting at home. Yet Christian’s self-assurance that Elisabeth “is no pipe dream” precisely betrays his increasing confusion about who is real and who is a dream, and the women’s identities begin to shift. As in E. T. A. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (“Der Sandmann,” 1816), when the male protagonist Nathanael wavers back and forth between two women, one is figured as domestic, secure, and prosaic and the other as alluring, mysterious, and foreign. In Hoffmann, too, these overt projections reveal Nathanael’s limited perspective that ultimately hinders him from accepting a complex, shape-shifting world.

206  Caroline Schaumann It comes as no surprise that Christian eventually abandons Elisabeth and all she represents. In a cruel and cold calculation that stands in contrast to his lofty fantasies, he now ruthlessly denounces Elisabeth’s ageing body that he had once admired: “I’ve lost my life in a dream!” he said to himself. . . . “Elisabeth is no longer the bright-eyed young girl she was, her youth has faded, I no longer seek out her gaze with the same longing I felt before. I wilfully forsook a lofty eternal bliss for a temporary, fleeting fling with happiness.” (71) In his misconception, Christian now takes his life with Elisabeth as a dream, turning once more towards what he perceives to be wild, sublime nature. At the end of the story, though, he does not reach sublime heights with the beautiful mountain woman, but instead becomes entranced with a “hideously ugly” “Wench of the Woods” (70), blindly following her along into dark woods and derelict mountain shafts. With such Romantic irony, Tieck therefore lays bare his protagonist’s tragic, if understandable, misperceptions of nature and the people around him. While the majestic mountain woman and the forest old woman— possibly the same figure—precisely blur the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic, the (male) protagonists in the story insist on them. The same holds true for the spaces that Christian inhabits. Since he needs continually to define and fixate people and environments he encounters, Christian is unable to live in ambiguous natures, remaining caught in a back-and-forth wavering between two assumed extremes, with no ground that can be negotiated in the middle. Christian’s identity shifts from a gardener to a hunter, back to a gardener and head of household until he merely becomes an “unfortunate wanderer” (75) with no home or profession. If Christian has trouble perceiving a world whose shapes are continually shifting, he prematurely opts to fixate upon and determine highly uncertain encounters. Christian’s demise is therefore not rooted in his greed for wealth or in his increasing insanity, but stems from an all too human desire to fit a nonlinear and nondeterministic world into neat and tidy categories. As we will see, much of the previous scholarship on Rune Mountain has followed Christian’s dualistic perspective rather than accepting the impossibility of controlling and defining nature in a strange and continually changing world.

Hybrid Natures Reading Tieck in clearly defined opposing categories, Jens Tismar (1977,  35) interprets Christian’s fascination with gold and stone as an act of sinning against organic nature and thus Tieck’s critique of

Tracing Romanticism in the Anthropocene  207 the emerging monetary economy. Detlev Kremer (1989, 130–133) conversely sees an innocent protagonist seduced by a destructive female. In this vein, the story has motivated several Freudian interpretations. Wolfdietrich Rasch (1971) reads it as an example of a powerful death drive, a descent into insanity that befalls Christian each time he leaves the customary and domestic sphere. In her Lacanian analysis, Alice Kuzniar (1995) does not attach value judgements to Christian’s disparate mental states, but explains them similarly in Freudian terms, as a return of the repressed: “The mandrake seems to represent the return of a forgotten, repressed materiality that becomes isolated and embodied in the vengeful scream” (56). Looking more specifically at the different environments in the story, Klaus F. Gille (1993) asserts: In the plot of Tieck’s fairytales, society (village, plain, cultivated nature) and non-social sphere (mountains/Rune Mountain, unworked nature) are diametrically opposed. In these two areas, the (de)socialisation of the hero takes place: he oscillates back and forth until he finally falls into the reaches of the Rune Mountain. (613) Contrary to what Gille claims, though, Rune Mountain is hardly a wilderness untouched by human hands but reveals a labyrinth of ruins including paths, walls, stairways, windows, and halls, proving that ancient civilisations used to live here. On Rune Mountain, the boundaries between the organic and the inorganic dissolve: the body of the naked majestic woman gleams like marble, and her song, recalling the castle’s ancestors, imbues crystals, columns, and living ghosts. The dynamic repeats itself when Christian (hardly the hero as Gille calls him) meets the forest woman (Waldweib), hoping to find her in another ruin, “an abandoned mine shaft nearby dug centuries ago by a miner” (73). On Rune Mountain as well as in other environs, the very division between the human body and its surroundings becomes confused. As Heather Sullivan (2003) notes, this “bodily instability also plays a major role in Tieck’s novella where the mineral woman represents the inorganic and yet her body appears anything but fixed in the text” (35). This instability corresponds to recent notions of transcorporeality (Alaimo 2010) looking at human bodies as open and porous systems that have gained increased importance in an age of climate change. Stephanie LeMenager (2017) succinctly puts it: “As Stacy Alaimo and other new materialist thinkers remind us, the environment is not an externality. Toxic off-gassing from our carpets, intestinal bacteria, and climate all make clear that the world lives inside of us, and we [in] it” (221). Tieck’s Rune Mountain, therefore, becomes a fitting example of a much-expanded view of hybrid nature. Acknowledging this

208  Caroline Schaumann intertwinement rather than separation of different spheres, Jason Groves (2017) concludes his discussion of the tale as follows: In celebrating the vibrancy of the Earth, the romantics are not so much evoking the imaginative legacy of medieval thought as they are articulating life in a way that does not sharply distinguish between organic and inorganic matter. (260) Read in conjunction with theories on material ecocriticism, Tieck’s story delineates what Jane Bennett (2010, 5) has called “the vitality of matter,” that is, the creative force of plants, rocks, earth, and gems. In constant interaction with the protagonists, these forces prompt decisive developments in the characters, morph into different shapes, and take on features of personhood. As in other Romantic texts from John Clare to Wordsworth to Byron, nature does not merely function as a setting or backdrop; it becomes an independently acting—though not demonic, as Tismar claims6 —force. In an age of Anthropocene hubris, Rune Mountain specifically reminds us of the destructive, enriching, and transformative environmental forces around us calling out for attention rather than consumption, exploitation, and neglect. Underscoring our intrinsic entanglement with the “more-than-human world” (Abram 1996) around us, the text not only calls on us to share agency with many other “actants,” as Bruno Latour (2004) has defined them, but also elucidates the kind of shape-shifting that David Abram (2010, 3) described as “becoming earth. Becoming animal. Becoming, in this manner, fully human.” As we have seen, Tieck does not necessarily contrast the sublime and the pastoral, even though his protagonists consistently draw such distinctions. Emphasising blurred environments and shape-shifting bodies, Tieck draws attention to our (mis)perception of our environment. Indeed, all protagonists in Rune Mountain grapple with recognition and non-recognition, a major motif in the story, as exemplified by the shifting perspectives of what constitutes a “stranger.” The often-repeated words “strange” and “stranger” in the text assume particular importance, characterising both the environment and people in different contexts. At the beginning of the story, set in mountains, Christian finds himself in “strange surroundings” (Tieck 2012, 54) to find happiness “among strange people” (55), pulled by a “strange force” (56) before meeting the mysterious “stranger” (56). Up in the “strange” regions of the Rune Mountain, “everything seemed strange to him” (62). Later, Christian tellingly becomes a “stranger” (64) himself when mingling with the village crowd to meet and marry Elisabeth. After the family has settled comfortably in the village, a visit by another “stranger” (67) who leaves a sizeable amount of money sets into motion Christian’s obsession

Tracing Romanticism in the Anthropocene  209 with gold. Both Elisabeth and his father now deem Christian’s gaze and manner fremd and fremdartig (“strange”) (Tieck 2011, 32, 33). When confronted by his father, Christian admits to the “strange force” rising inside of him, and admits that he freely and easily leads a “strange life” (32). “Strange” (fremd) is an attribute both fascinating and fear-­ provoking, mirroring Christian’s desire to transcend the ordinary. The fact that Christian himself becomes a “stranger,” however, lends the story an atmosphere of alienation and unsettles a simple dichotomy of the domestic and the strange. We see that the familiar all too easily slips into the unfamiliar and vice versa, proving that seemingly firm foundations, be they environments, people, or inner drives, are subject to change and transform continually. In keeping with the theme of estrangement, the story’s title, Rune Mountain, provides additional hints towards an interpretation. Runes, the letters of the runic Germanic alphabet used before the adoption of the Latin alphabet, were frequently inscribed in runestones that memorialised Norsemen in the Viking Age. In the modern age, runes are essentially incomprehensible symbols from a lost world, left open to attempts at deciphering and interpretation and thus of particular interest to the German Romantics (see Gasperi 2015). In Tieck’s story, rune refers to both the symbols inscribed in the magic stone tablet and to the titular Rune Mountain where the mountain woman dwells. There is also a connection to the mysterious mandrake root (Alrunenwurzel, from oldhigh-German runen, that is, to speak mysteriously or in secrets) that, resembling a humanlike-form, contains intoxicating substances and is said to emit a scream when pulled out of the ground. Thus, Christian’s tearing of the mandrake from the ground is already an indication of the violence of separating the human being from the natural world. As a symbolic act to divide the human being from a proper integration with the natural world, it foreshadows the various iterations of self-­separation and abstraction we later see in the novel. While all three etymological references underscore the theme of mystification and disorientation, with the tablet Christian’s task is to interpret a system of signs in a language that is not legible to him. Such a position in some ways mirrors humankind’s predicament in the Anthropocene, when we find ourselves confounded by the task of deciphering disturbing, often illegible, news from nature that require urgent action. Other works of British, American, and German Romanticism likewise conceive the nonhuman world beyond the dualism of subject and object. In her astute analysis “Romanticism and Ecocriticism,” Rigby (2014, 73) elucidates that early British Romanticism did not conceive of nature as an environment untouched by humans, but rather idealised blended landscapes such as the Lake District that resisted the grasp of power and profit. But while Wordsworth, Clare, Byron, Thoreau, and Eichendorff tend to celebrate the natural world as an antidote to urban

210  Caroline Schaumann corruption and industrialism, Tieck’s complex tale distorts categories of nature altogether. In this way, Tieck’s legacy extends beyond a Romantic sacralisation of nature to challenge the idealisation of sublime landscapes and point to the fluidity of such environments. Rune Mountain, therefore, questions classifications of definition. While Tieck’s protagonists fail to benefit from these insights, contemporary readers continue to grapple with a world in which the organic and inorganic imperceptibly intersect. More than 200 years after its publication, we read Rune Mountain in a phase of environmental and social upheavals, when the well-being and the future of humans on this planet have turned into a puzzle that remains yet to be solved. In this time of crisis, it is critical to assess various propositions of meeting the challenges at hand while we acknowledge the impossibility of coming up with any one solution. Tieck’s Rune Mountain does not present us with answers or even useful strategies, but encourages us to learn to live with uncertainty and ambivalence in the face of the complexities of our predicaments. As such, it engenders a genre in which the realist and the fantastic invariably intersect, pointing to new ways of narrating an inconceivable and incredulous future in the Anthropocene. In addition, the tale explicates the ineffectiveness and, in fact, tragic ignorance, of perceiving the world in neat categories that do not correspond to a multifaceted, ever-shifting reality.

Notes 1 A notable exception to this trend is Kate Rigby’s (2014) work. 2 With the current deforestation rate, this boundary will be breached in 50 years though with increased meat consumption, it could be much sooner. 3 Jens Tismar (1977) distinguishes literary fairy tales from folk tales in that the former have known authors, do not originate in an oral tradition, and follow psychological consistency. Tismar calls Tieck’s earlier “Eckbert the Blond” (“Der blonde Eckbert,” 1797) the first German literary fairy tale (33). 4 Thomas Fries (1975) used the term for Tieck’s other novella in 1802, “­E ckbert the Blond,” and the term has since been used for both stories. 5 All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 6 Tismsar (1977) claims that nature takes on a demonising role: “Wie im ‘­E ckbert’ sind zwei Sphären gegeneinandergestellt: die Welt der gesellig ­tätigen Menschen und die zu einsamer Verfallenheit verlockende Natur” (35).

References Abram, David. 2010. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Pantheon. ———. 1996. The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a Morethan-human World. New York: Pantheon. Alaimo, Stacy. 2010. Bodily Natures: Science, Environment, and the Material Self. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Tracing Romanticism in the Anthropocene  211 Althaus, Thomas. 2005. “Doppelte Erscheinung: Zwei Konzepte der Erzählprosa des frühen Tieck, zwei notwendige Denkweisen um 1800 und zwei Lektüren von Tiecks Märchennovelle Der Runenberg.” In Die Prosa Ludwig Tiecks, edited by Detlef Kremer, 95–114. Bielefeld: Aisthesis Verlag. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Benson, Melinda Harm, and Robin Kundis Craig. 2017. The End of Sustainability: Resilience and the Future of Environmental Governance in the ­Anthropocene. Lawrence, KS: University of Kansas Press. Birrell, Gordon. 1979. The Boundless Present: Space and Time in the Literary Fairy Tales of Novalis and Tieck. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North ­Carolina Press. Buell, Lawrence. 1995. The Environmental Imagination: Thoreau, Nature Writing and the Formation of American Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. ———. 1998. “Toxic Discourse.” Critical Inquiry 24 (3): 639–665. Clark, Timothy. 2013. “Nature, Post-Nature.” In The Cambridge Companion to Literature and the Environment, edited by Louise Westling, 75–89. ­Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cronon, William. 1995. “The Trouble with Wilderness; or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” In Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature, edited by William Cronon, 69–90. New York: W. W. Norton. Crutzen, Paul and Eugene F. Stoermer. 2000. “The Anthropocene.” Global Change Newsletter 41: 17–18. Emerson, Ralph Waldo. (1858) 2015. “Waldeinsamkeit.” In Ralph Waldo ­Emerson: The Major Poetry, edited by Albert J. von Frank, 207–208. ­Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Fries, Thomas. 1975. “Ein romantisches Märchen: Der blonde Eckbert.” Modern Language Notes 88: 1204–1206. Garrard, Greg. 2012. Ecocriticism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge. Gasperi, Carlos. 2015. “On the Language of Nature in Ludwig Tieck’s Der Runenberg.” Monatshefte 107 (3): 405–430. Gille, Klaus F. 1993. “Der Berg und die Seele: Überlegungen zu Tiecks ‘Runenberg.’” Neophilologus 77 (4): 611–623. Groves, Jason. 2017. “Petrification: Reimagining the Mine in German Romanticism.” In Readings in the Anthropocene: The Environmental Humanities, German Studies, and Beyond, edited by Sabine Wilke and Japhet Johnstone, 245–262. New York: Bloomsbury. Hall, Dewey W. 2016. Romantic Ecocriticism: Origins and Legacies. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Hutchings, Kevin. 2007. “Ecocriticism in British Romantic Studies.” Literature Compass 4 (1): 172–202. Kremer, Detlev. 1989. “Die Schrift des ‘Runenbergs.’ Literarische Selbstreflektion in Tiecks Märchen.” Jahrbuch der Jean-Paul-Gesellschaft 24: 117–144. Kuzniar, Alice. 1995. “Stones that Stare, or, the Gorgon’s Gaze in Ludwig Tieck’s Der Runenberg.” In Mimetic Desire: Essays on Narcissism in ­German Literature from Romanticism to Post Modernism, edited by Jeffrey ­Adams and Eric Williams, 50–64. Columbia, SC: Camden House.

212  Caroline Schaumann Landes, James. 2009. “The Kantian Analytic of the Sublime in Tieck’s ‘Runenberg.’” Colloquia Germanica 42 (1): 5–18. Latour, Bruno. 2004. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into ­Democracy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. LeMenager, Stephanie. 2017. “Climate Change and the Struggle for Genre.” In Anthropocene Reading: Literary History in Geologic Times, edited by Tobias Menely and Jesse Oak Taylor, 220–238. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Mecklenburg, Norbert. 1982. “‘Die Gesellschaft der verwilderten Steine’: ­I nterpretationsprobleme von Ludwig Tiecks Erzählung ‘Der Runenberg.’” Der Deutschunterricht 34: 62–76. O’Neal, Devin. 2016. “Beyond Borders: Pantheistic Confusion and Monotheistic Orthodoxy in Tieck’s Der Runenberg.” The German Quarterly 89 (3): 282–296. Rasch, Wolfdietrich. 1971. “Blume und Stein. Zur Deutung von Ludwig Tiecks Erzählung ‘Der Runenberg.’” In The Discontinuous Tradition, edited by ­Peter Felix Ganz, 113–128. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Rigby, Kate. 2014. “Romanticism and Ecocriticism.” In The Oxford Handbook of Ecocriticism, edited by Greg Garrard, 60–79. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Sullivan, Heather. 2003. “Organic and Inorganic Bodies in the Age of Goethe: An Ecocritical Reading of Ludwig Tieck’s ‘Rune Mountain’ and the Earth Sciences.” Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 10 (2): 21–46. Tartar, Maria M. 1978. “Deracination and Alienation in Ludwig Tieck’s Der Runenberg.” The German Quarterly 51 (3): 285–304. Tieck, Ludwig. (1804) 2011. Der blonde Eckbert/Der Runenberg. Husum: Hamburger Lesehefte Verlag. ———. (1804) 2012. “Rune Mountain.” In Tales of the German Imagination from the Brothers Grimm to Ingeborg Bachmann, translated by Peter ­Wortsman, 54–75. London: Penguin. ———. (1812–1816) 1985. Schriften. Volume 6: Phantasus, edited by Manfred Frank. Frankfurt a.M.: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag. Tismar, Jens. 1977. Kunstmärchen. Stuttgart: Metzler.

11 The Eye of the Earth Nonhuman Vision from Blake to Contemporary Ecocriticism Sophie Laniel-Musitelli

Can attentiveness to other senses than ours bring us closer to opening the doors of our own perception? At the threshold of mankind’s regeneration, William Blake (1757–1827) wrote in c. 1797, “Man looks out in tree & herb & fish & bird & beast / Collecting up the scatterd portions of immortal body” (The Four Zoas, 1988, 385, Plate 114, lines 6–7).1 In a similar manner, at the close of his prophetic books Milton (c. 1810) and Jerusalem (c. 1810), animals, insects, and plants do not fade away with the imminent advent of “Eternal Great Humanity Divine” (­Milton, 1988, 96, Plate 2, line 8). On the contrary, the illuminated plates teem with nonhuman life: with insects and birds, tendrils and efflorescence, in an expansion of human visionary powers towards nonhuman experience. Do we need to embrace nonhuman modes of vision to reach “Humanity Divine”? In Blake’s illuminated poetry, the senses “do not simply reflect a prior historical development, but rather serve as an active harbinger or agent of change” (Jackson 2008, 93), and the advent of a regenerated polis is inseparable from a revolution of the senses. Blake’s “politics of vision” (see Schorer 1946) effects, as Rancière (2004) would say, a radical “recomposition of the landscape of the visible, a recomposition of the relationship between doing, making, being, seeing, and saying” (45). Yet, the visual resources deployed in Blake’s illuminated poetry reach beyond the centrality of logos developed in Rancière’s “politics of literature” to envision a community with nonlinguistic beings. Blake’s well-documented distrust for nature is political: his poetry is a critique of conceptions of nature which “sanctif[y] the existing social order by placing it beyond human control” (Ferber 1985, 95). Rather, his poetry aims to free the human mind from nature as an abstract and separate entity, creating the possibility of a new covenant with nonhuman life and opening a path for contemporary thinkers to envision and conceptualise their own environmental theories. From Timothy Morton to Timothy Clark, from Jonathan Bate to Karl Kroeber, and from Lawrence Buell to Jane Bennett, a significant number of environmental thinkers are also critical readers of Romantic literature. For the sake of brevity, this chapter focusses on Morton and his Ecology without Nature because of its explicit and recurrent engagement with Blake’s poetics of nonhuman visionary powers. Morton’s intellectual

214  Sophie Laniel-Musitelli trajectory2 reflects the complex disciplinarity of environmental studies, a field located at the crossroads of literary analysis, ecological theory, and political science. To develop their theories, contemporary environmental thinkers had to both build on and overcome the Romantics’ construction of nature. Did Blake’s challenge to the concept of nature open the possibility for an “ecology without nature” based on the premise that “[t]he idea of nature is getting in the way of properly ecological forms of culture, philosophy, politics, and art” (Morton 2007, 1)? Which role does that challenge play in Morton’s project to “establish collective forms of identity that [include] other species and their worlds, real and possible” (141)? It is at the heart of his reading of Blake’s “The Fly” that Morton delivers the gist of his project for a “politics of vision” in the twenty-first century: “we have lost nature, but gained a collective” (202). The recognition that Romantic writing has determined our current modes of engagement with the nonhuman is Morton’s starting point in Ecology without Nature: “the literature of the Romantic period, commonly seen as crucially about nature, is the target of my investigation, since it still influences the ways in which the ecological imagery works” (1). Tracing Morton’s Blakean legacy is less a matter of seeing Morton as an exegete of Blake’s poetry than of attending to the intersections of two intellectual projects and two forms of activism. One of the aims of Morton’s work is to enroll the powers of Romantic art in the project of reshaping the body politic around collectives, those “productions of natures-cultures” (Latour 1993, 106–07), those tightly-knit communities we have always formed with nonhumans. This chapter demonstrates that Morton’s work brings to light and builds on Blake’s exploration of nonhuman vision. Indeed, Blake’s poetry takes up the “task of developing a vocabulary and syntax for… the active powers issuing from nonsubjects” (Bennett 2010, ix), but also offers a series of sensory experiments into nonhuman experience. It mobilises the forces of text and image to make us see through nonhuman eyes: to make us see with the eye of the Earth. This investigation starts with Blake’s poetic and visual exploration of the visionary powers of animals. It moves on to examine the way Morton’s work draws on Blake’s poetic experiment to conceptualise the collectives we share with nonhumans. I then turn my attention to the humblest yet most forceful examples of Blakean nonhuman vision: Blake’s garden of visionary flowers. Lastly, I look into the centrality of sensual enjoyment in both human and nonhuman visionary experiences in Blake’s illuminated poetry and in contemporary environmental discourse.

Blake’s Visionary Animals Does the “Eternal Great Humanity Divine” seek its embodiment and expression exclusively in humans? Critics have raised the important question of whether the nonhuman is subsumed within the human in

The Eye of the Earth  215 “Humanity Divine”: for example, Kurt Fosso (2014) asked, “is animality thereupon to be collapsed within the human or is it to be kept in some way separate(d) from it?” (128). What is at stake in this chapter is less animality itself—taken as “animal nature” in its relation to “human nature”—than the visionary powers of animals themselves or, more widely, nonhuman vision as opposed to our “senses five.” Thus, to displace Fosso’s question towards the problem of vision as poetic and spiritual inspiration: do we need to imaginatively embrace nonhuman modes of sensation and inspiration to reach our own “Humanity ­Divine”? Blake’s illuminated work encourages the reader to experience the convergence of humans and nonhumans in terms of visionary force. “Humanity Divine” is not circumscribed to the human species, because vision is not limited to the human senses. “For every thing that lives is Holy” (1988, 45, Plate 25), Blake insists in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790); the quest for regeneration must mobilises all the senses in all living beings. In Milton, Blake’s modality of the “Not Human” is distinct from what we call today “the nonhuman.” When seeking to “wash off the Not Human,” Blake directs his attempt at narrowly mechanistic forms of scientific materialism. He endeavours to “cast off Rational Demonstration . . . / . . . / . . . cast off Bacon, Locke & Newton” (1988, 142, Plate 41, lines 3, 5) so as to “cast aside from Poetry, all that is not Inspiration” (line 6). Beyond its frequent depictions of animals as mere symbols of human tendencies and passions, Blake’s illuminated poetry often becomes an exploration of what we could call nonhuman visionary powers. Blake’s poetry also displays a bestiary of inspired animals such as Milton’s lark: “[h]is little throat labours with inspiration; every feather / On throat & breast & wings vibrates with the effluence Divine” (1988, 130, Plate 31, lines 34–35). What is it that remains of nonhuman living forms once man has reached “Humanity Divine” or, rather, once the illusion of linear time has been rent and man discovers his “Humanity Divine”? As the end of Jerusalem (c. 1820) announces the imminent advent of “Humanity Divine,” the question arises of the fate of other life forms. Are animals and insects integrated into that “Humanity Divine,” thus losing their nonhuman form and specificity? Is the otherness of nonhuman visionary powers irretrievably lost with the triumph of “Eternal Great Humanity Divine?” At the end of Jerusalem, animals and insects do not disappear: On Chariots of gold & jewels with Living Creatures starry & flaming With every Colour, Lion, Tyger, Horse, Elephant, Eagle Dove,  Fly, Worm, And the all wondrous Serpent clothed in gems & rich array  Humanize In the Forgiveness of Sins according to the Covenant of Jehovah. (1988, 258, Plate 98, lines 42–45)

216  Sophie Laniel-Musitelli In “Humanize,” the capitalisation is significant. Nonhumans do not become humans as we understand humanity in our current divided state: they play an active role in the process mankind has to complete to reach Humanity, as men and women strive to “Humanize.” As Kevin Hutchings (2002) perceptively notes, “when Blake says that animals ‘­Humanize,’ he speaks not only of their transformations into human form but also of an activity they perform transitively upon others” (217). In order to qualify the first part of that statement and to reinforce the second possibility raised by Hutchings, we need to turn to the interaction between text and image in Plate 98 and to note the fact that animals and insects keep their nonhuman forms as they “Humanize” (Figure  11.1). They are an “active source” (Fosso 2014) rather than a “regained portion” of “Humanity Divine” (128), in that they keep their nonhuman specificity and thus their ability to decentre human perception, even after mankind’s regeneration. Such recognition of the unalienable specificity of the nonhuman experience is inseparable from the identification of nonhumans as part of a regenerated body politic. As the passage from Jerusalem unfolds, nonhumans denounce the current state of the polis and spell out their demands for a new collective: Where are the Kingdoms of the World & all their glory that grew  on Desolation The Fruit of Albions Poverty Tree when the Triple Headed Gog Magog Giant Of Albion Taxed the Nations into Desolation & then gave the  Spectrous Oath Such is the Cry from all the Earth from all the Living Creatures of  the Earth And from the great City of Golgonooza in the Shadowy Generation And from the Thirty-two Nations of the Earth among the Living  Creatures (1988, 258, lines 51–56) Hutchings (2002) perceptively highlights the reshaping of the political sphere around the integration of the nonhuman: “both humans and animals are united in their freedom from the authoritative discourse that had earlier sanctioned the violence and ‘Desolation’ upon which ‘the Kingdoms of the Worlds & all their glory . . . grew’” (216–217). The end of Jerusalem reaches towards a renewed “distribution of the sensible” by building a sense of community with nonlinguistic beings, in an invitation to think beyond Rancière’s exclusive association of demos to logos. Similarly, in the last plate of Milton (Figure 11.2), the human form ­symbolising the promise of regeneration is not exclusively anthropomorphic, but sports vegetable nervures and a chrysalis, in a “critique

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Figure 11.1  William Blake, Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion, Copy E, Plate 98, 1821. Public Domain.

of the anthropomorphic idea of ‘man’ itself” (Morton 2002, 203). The verse joins the image in the endeavour to envision a political revolution encompassing nonhumans as “terrific Lions and Tygers sport & play / All Animals upon the Earth, are prepared in all their strength / To go forth to the Great Harvest and Vintage of the Nations” (Milton, 1988, 144, Plate 42, lines 38–39; Plate 43, line 1). That force of vision does

218  Sophie Laniel-Musitelli not necessarily amount to a becoming-human of the animal; rather, it entails a becoming-Human that transcends the human species as it is in its divided state. Then, how do we unite “[t]hirty-Two Nations of the Earth among the Living Creatures” or, to use Morton’s phrase, how do we “gain a collective” in the new Jerusalem? How do we redeem the “fall from an integrative consciousness” (Jackson 2008, 96) if not by including nonhuman vision?

Figure 11.2  William Blake, Milton a Poem, Copy D, Plate 50, 1818. Public Domain.

The Eye of the Earth  219

Of Flies and Men: Morton Reading Blake That visionary convergence between humans and nonhumans implies a revolution of the senses: “How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way, / Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?” writes Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) (1988,  35). How can we open “our senses five” to other Umwelts—or perceptual worlds (Agamben 2004, 40)—than ours?3 For Blake, the anatomical complexity and physiological sophistication of an organ of sense do not determine its visionary power. There is no superiority of the human eye, “a little narrow orb closd up & dark” (Milton, 1988, 99, Plate 5, line 21). Just as, Blake writes, “Mans perceptions are not bound by organs of perception” (There is NO Natural Religion, I[b], 1988, 2), very simple beings equipped with what science would deem rudimentary sensoria can also be endowed with visionary powers. Amongst the nonhumans equipped with radically different sensoria, was Blake drawn to the fly because of the multiplicity of vision promised by its compound eyes? We will see that Blake’s “The Fly” (1794) stages the convergence of radically different experiences: Am I not A fly like thee Art thou not A fly like me? (1988, 23, lines 5–8) In the illuminated poem, Blake envisions an extreme form of sensory hybridisation. That in-betweenness of vision as an imaginative displacement towards the other was later mobilised by Morton in his project not “to naturalize or collapse otherness” (2007, 196). Morton’s analysis of Blake’s “The Fly” revolves round the fact that “[t]he fly is not humanized; rather, the human becomes a fly” (2007, 202). Such a reversal of the traditional polarities of identification shapes Morton’s project, which aims at helping mankind develop a relation to nonhumans as such. Morton sees in Blake’s “The Fly” a reconfiguration of our relation to the radical otherness of nonhumans and a way to “achieve an identity with the fly beyond the usual sentimental identification through distance” (202). Morton’s analysis reveals his intellectual engagement with Deleuze and Guattari, for whom “[a] becoming is not a correspondence between relations. But neither is it a resemblance, an imitation, or, at the limit, an identification” (1987, 237). In Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of becoming-animal, heterogenous beings fleetingly merge, and the two poles involved are never fixities. Neither human nor animal remains unchanged in the process: “[t]he quality must be considered from

220  Sophie Laniel-Musitelli the standpoint of the becoming that grasps it, instead of becoming being considered from the standpoint of intrinsic qualities having the value of archetypes or phylogenetic memories” (306). Becoming is a process rather than a stable structure: what better symbol of the transient process of becoming than the fly? Morton’s comparative approach to textual analysis reconfigures traditional interpretations of “The Fly”; also, it informs his own conception of ecocriticism: becoming is no filiation and is not about finding out our own origins in animality. It is rather an alliance which opens up the field of the political. This is probably why the concept of becoming is so instrumental in Morton’s project to redraw the lines of our own communities. These “unnatural participations” (Deleuze and ­Guattari 1987, 241) work against traditional conceptions of nature as a separate realm. Morton’s reading of the Romantics, like Deleuze’s perspective on Bacon, locates the process of becoming-animal on a sensory plane, not only in a shift in perspective, but in a straining, a bending of the senses to embrace other modes of vision in which neither the human subject nor the modalities of sensation itself remain unchanged: “at one and the same time I become in the sensation and something happens through the sensation, one through the other, one in the other” (Deleuze 2003, 35). In his effort to displace our vantage point and tear it away from an anthropocentric perspective, Morton (2007) sees the Romantic poetic endeavour as a revolution of our senses “to glimpse humans through nonhuman eyes” (202), generating a mutual convergence between two realms and two wildly differing configurations of the sensory. Why did Blake choose such a humble ambassador as the fly? As the verb “to fly” suggests, its whole being is contained within the activity of flying. Blake’s representation of the fly in his Milton plate resonates with Rilke’s poetic concept of the Open and, in particular, with the unalienable freedom contained within it: With all its eyes the natural world looks out into the Open. Only our eyes are turned backward, and surround plant, animal, child like traps, as they emerge into their freedom. (Rilke 1980, 193, lines 1–4) Rilke’s “Eighth Duino Elegy” develops a type of poetic thinking in which a nonhuman mode of perception contains within itself the promise of absolute freedom. In that freedom potentially lies a renewed articulation of nature and politics. That sense of community with nonlinguistic beings is achieved in Blake’s poetry through visuality. In “The Fly” (Figure 11.3), there is no fly to be seen. Yet, it is present: the Open of the fly is contained within the transient and playful gesture of a young girl throwing a shuttlecock, in an invitation to experience the flight of the insect

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Figure 11.3  William Blake, “The Fly,” Songs of Experience, Copy F, 1794. Public Domain.

in its gratuity and ephemerality. Milton also enjoins us to attend to the animal’s ability to open the doors of perception: Seest thou the little winged fly, smaller than a grain of sand? It has a heart like thee; a brain open to heaven & hell, Withinside wondrous & expansive; its gates are not clos’d, I hope thine are not: (1988, 114, Plate 20, lines 27–30)

222  Sophie Laniel-Musitelli The gates of nonhuman perception are not closed: mankind needs to “hearken to [their] perceptual fly” (Cooper 2013, 117), to try and experience the Open of the animal in order to rebuild collectives around a shared experience of freedom. The “grain of sand” mentioned above is the poetic signature of a mode of vision also developed in “Auguries of Innocence,” a poem meshing together human and nonhuman visionary powers to achieve a regeneration of the polis. The poem “Auguries of Innocence” (c. 1803) points to the ethical and political necessity of reaching the recognition of the collectives we form with nonhumans, when, for instance, “A dog starvd at his Masters Gate / Predicts the ruin of the State” (1988, 490, lines 9–10). In this passage, human institutions are threatened from the inside by the inability to widen the scope of the polis and to oppose the suffering and exploitation of nonhumans. Since Blake compares the fly to a grain of sand, we should then follow the advice to “see a World in a grain of sand” (1988, 490, line 1) and strive to discern what we could call the fly’s “richness in world.”4 Beyond the illusions of Vala, nature can then be seen as a “pure plane of immanence . . . upon which unformed elements and materials dance” (Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 255). The ephemeral creature invites eternity into the world through the endless circles of its dance: Thou seest the gorgeous clothed Flies that dance & sport in summer Upon the sunny brooks & meadows: every one the dance Knows in its intricate mazes of delight artful to weave: Each one to sound his instruments of music in the dance, To touch each other & recede; to cross & change & return These are the Children of Los; Thou seest the Trees on mountains The wind blows heavy, loud they thunder thro’ the darksom sky, Uttering prophecies & speaking instructive words to the sons Of men: These are the Sons of Los! These the Visions of Eternity But we see only as it were the hem of their garments When with our vegetable eyes we view these wond’rous Visions. (Milton, 1988, 123, Plate 26, lines 2–12) Do we need to open our “vegetable eyes” to see “the Visions of Eternity”? The “vegetable eye” is often read as a symbol of fallen vision, as a poetic representation of the opaque integuments of our sensory organs covering these “wond’rous Visions.” The “hem of their garments” does suggest a journey into the other side of sensation: its reverse side made up of organic tissues obstructing vision. Yet we do view those visions with (not through) our vegetable eyes. 5 In an invitation to expand the scope of the human senses, the lines above shift the centre of sensation from the tyranny of the human eye

The Eye of the Earth  223 to hearing and touch. The dance proceeds from the pleasure “[t]o touch each other & recede, to cross & change & return.” The sound of the wind displaces sight towards hearing to allow us to listen to the wind uttering prophecies through the trees rather than through a human mouthpiece. Opening “our vegetable eye[s]” is also a passage to nonhuman vision: it is a fall into a visionary body, an awakening to other senses than ours and to the energies of nonhuman life in its multiple perceptual modalities. It is an exploration of the “vibrant materiality” (Bennett 2010, viii) of nonhuman life, an attempt at seeing with the eye of the Earth. These “Wond’rous Visions” are not absolute revelations but endarkened and partial ones. Yet, they have the grace of the unredeemed flesh fervently awaiting regeneration. Visionary nonhumans also are “the Sons of Los,” the sons of divine vision in a fallen world. They are also “Labourers of the Vintage” (Milton, 1988, 123, Plate 26, line 1), harbingers of a political revolution and auguries of new collectives.

“[O]ur vegetable eyes:” Blake’s Visionary Flowers Is the opening of a “vegetable ey[e]”—when a flower blooms—a sensory event worthy of the poet’s attention? Is there a force of vision in such humble living beings, so close to the earth? In Blake’s poetry, plants sometimes symbolise the rootedness of human perception in ­error—in such nightmarish visions as the “tree of Mystery” (The Four Zoas, 1988, 360, Page 85, line 16)—but Blake also invites us to see “a Heaven in a Wild Flower” (“Auguries of Innocence,” 1988, 490, line 2). In Milton, Blake introduces the reader to his garden of visionary flowers: Thou percievest the Flowers put forth their precious Odours! And none can tell how from so small a centre comes such sweets Forgetting that within that Centre Eternity expands Its ever-during doors. (1988, 131, Plate 31, lines 46–49) This passage constructs the flower’s vision as a synæsthetic experience. Smell is present through the “precious Odours,” taste through “sweets,” and touch through the syntactic and semantic ambiguity of “ever-during,” as the archaic verb to dure refers both to duration and to durability.6 Smell, taste, and touch thus come together in a spontaneous opening of the “doors of perception,” in an expansion of visionary powers as immediate and natural to the flower as the act of blooming. We will see how Blake’s imaginative efforts to represent the visionary powers of such humble beings draws on research into plant Umwelts during Blake’s times, allowing Blake to invent a new poetic paradigm for

224  Sophie Laniel-Musitelli the circulation between humans and nonhumans beyond the traditional motif of metamorphosis. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, some of the men of science who studied the physiology of plants raised the question of the existence of “vegetable” senses. Blake was aware of the investigations into animal and plant Umwelts in the works of Erasmus Darwin. In his treatise Zoonomia (1794–1796), Darwin (1801) tried to demonstrate “the richness in world” of plants: Thus, besides a kind of taste at the extremities of their roots, similar to that of the extremities of our lacteal vessels, for the purpose of selecting their proper food: and besides different kinds of irritability residing in the various glands, which separate honey, wax, resin, and other juices from their blood; vegetable life seems to possess an organ of sense to distinguish the variations of heat, another to distinguish the varying degrees of moisture, another of light, another of touch, and probably another analogous to our sense of smell. (1:106) As one of the first proponents of the transformation of species, Erasmus Darwin drew parallels between plant life and animal physiology in order to substantiate the idea of a continuity from plants to animals. Darwin’s plants are endowed with a complex nexus of sensory organs that he terms the vegetable “sensorium.” The Umwelt of the Darwinian flower is determined by that strange plant-sense into which converge variously tuned sensitivities to light and darkness, to moisture, smells, and touch. It is difficult to ascertain whether Blake read Zoonomia, although he did engrave some of Fuseli’s illustrations for Darwin’s poem The Economy of Vegetation (1791). The poem dedicates some of its most beautiful lines to plants’ sensitivity to light and, more specifically, to the way light enters the vegetable body through physiological processes. Canto IV of The Economy of Vegetation develops Darwin’s concept of “vegetable respiration” which “wed[s] enamoured oxygen to light” (1791, 163, Canto IV, line 34). Darwin’s plants live on light: they assimilate light into the very fabric of their bodies. Plant respiration is a playful and pleasurable encounter, as “spread in air, the leaves respiring play, / Or drink the golden quintessence of day” (195, Canto IV, lines 421–422). Though blind, plants develop an intimate and vital relationship to light. Darwin used sunflowers as a case study to develop his theories on “vegetable respiration” (see King-Hele 1986, 47), and it seems that for Darwin, sunflowers are literally made out of sunlight. The Economy of Vegetation also dwells on the caress of light on the plant’s external tissues, tissues which seem to act as a skin, a mouth, and an eye. To quote John Milton, a poet both Erasmus Darwin and ­William Blake admired for his poetic exploration of the fraught

The Eye of the Earth  225 relationship between sight and vision, a plant’s relationship to light is not “to such a tender ball as the eye confin’d” (Milton 1991, 94): in Darwin’s conceptualisation of the plant’s Umwelt, photosensitivity is distributed throughout the vegetable body, and light can “look at will through every pore” (97). In Darwin’s pre-evolutionary vision, the plant is a creature from before the development of increasingly specialised sense organs, from before the division of the senses, a division Blake deplored as one of the origins of our limited powers of perception. In The Economy of Vegetation, Nymphs even “pour the light” on the “damask eyelids” of each flower (1791, 47, Canto I, line 472). The tenuous yet pleasurable contact of light on those closed eyelids is less an anthropomorphisation of the flower than an invitation to experience the world through a “vegetable eye.” Since, according to Darwin, the photosensitive surface of a plant’s body acts as an eye and a skin, it responds to light the way a human skin responds to direct contact. The closest sensation a human being can have to try and envision what a “vegetable eye” sees is to remember the warmth and pleasure of a ray of light on closed eyelids. While distrusting scientific observation, Blake did acknowledge the presence of visionary insights, although transient and limited, within scientific discourse. Darwin explores the analogies between plant life and animal life in The Economy of Vegetation, an exploration that, although less detailed than the one in Zoonomia, is more likely to have awakened Blake’s interest because it is a poetic account. From Blake’s perspective, Darwin’s vision can only be limited by his reliance on the experimental method of Bacon and Newton. Yet, in some of his poems dedicated to flowers, Blake endeavours to reclaim the visionary within the scientific, and thus he demonstrates his sensitivity to that glimpse at “Humanity Divine” within such humble beings, such rudimentary yet visionary creatures from before the division of the senses. In “Ah! Sun-Flower” (1794), Blake explores the primal sensory experience shared by all forms of life awaiting the advent of light. Blake never idealises the “vegetable eye,” which can be partial and opaque, as when Urizen’s organs of sense fall from eternity in a movement reminiscent of roots descending into the soil: He arose on the waters, but soon Heavy falling his organs like roots Shooting out from the seed, shot beneath, And a vast world of waters around him In furious torrents began. (The Book of Los, 1988, 93, Plate 4, lines 63–67) The antithetical movements of growth and rootedness is conveyed by the opposition between “arose” and “falling,” generating a sense of

226  Sophie Laniel-Musitelli entrapment of the spirit within the vegetable body akin to the representation of metamorphosis as a punishment one often finds in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. According to Blake, “[t]he ancient Poets … adorn[ed] [all sensible Objects] with the properties of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1988, 38, Plate II), and such fluid circulation between humans and nonhumans relied on “whatever [the ancient poets’] enlarged & numerous senses could perceive” (38). Blake thus apprehends Ovidian metamorphosis in terms of sensation: as an experiment shifting the axis of sensation from the human to the nonhuman, as an event rerouting the intensity of sensation from the imminent erasure of a human self to an emergent human-­ nonhuman hybrid. Ovid’s plants still feel as strongly as humans. The bodies of Ovid’s weeping trees and bleeding flowers in the Metamorphoses are sensitive on their entire surface and to their core and are still ruled by the remanence of passions from their former selves. It is the case with Clytie’s troubling blend of steadfastness and lack of agency in its captivation for the sun: “[s]till the loved Object the fond Leafs pursue, / Still move their Root, the moving Sun to view” (1742, 114, Book IV, lines 21–22). Clytie, a lover of the Sun, was spurned by Apollo for her jealousy. She is one of the most eloquent embodiments of the circulation between the realms of nature in the Metamorphoses: her fate lies in the dissolution of a vital and fleshly bond between a human being, a plant, and the embodiment of light. Clytie’s metamorphosis resonates within Blake’s poem through the shared aspiration of humans and nonhumans alike towards light. In Ovid’s text, the dark core of the sunflower’s corolla is referred to as an eye following Apollo, “the moving Sun to view.” Sight becomes a symbol of the estrangement from the god of sunlight, and of the lover’s exclusion from direct contact. In that context of circulation from one reign to another, Clytie’s metamorphosis can be read as a grammar of captivation in the Heideggerian sense: the nonhuman “in its captivation is essentially held out in something other than itself, something that indeed cannot be manifest to the animal either as a being or as a non-being” (Heidegger 1995, 273; see also Agamben 2004, 61). In Heideggerian captivation, the nonhuman is entirely absorbed: it abandons itself to the object. Yet this is no love and no fusion, as the object of captivation will not deliver itself over in return. In the way Clytie abandons herself to the Sun god, there is no room for desire, no room for non-coincidence, or seduction. In “Preface to Milton,” Blake cultivated a critical distance towards the “Stolen and Perverted Writings of . . . Ovid . . . which all Men ought to contemn” (1988, 95) and tried to reinvent a new form of metamorphosis away from the modalities of captivation in “Ah! Sun-flower.” Blake’s sunflower is “weary of time” (1988, 25, line 1): it surprisingly offers an image of boredom as it “countest the steps of the Sun” (line 2). It looks beyond the sun’s course, towards twilight rather than the zenith: “[s]eeking

The Eye of the Earth  227 after that sweet golden clime / Where the travellers journey is done” (lines 3–4). For Heidegger, captivation determines the animal’s “poverty in world,” creating a distinction between nonhumans and humans. As Morton (2007, 171) points out, that distinction “is only undermined when we think of humans and animals as connected in a profound inactivity, or désœuvrement.” In the experience of boredom, “[b]oth [humans and nonhumans] are, in their most proper gesture, open to a closedness; they are totally delivered over to something that obstinately refuses itself” (Agamben 2004, 65). The absolute désœuvrement of the sunflower, “weary of time” itself, challenges the distance between humans and nonhumans. Blakean metamorphosis is a form of sensory and metaphysical convergence between humans, animals, and plants (rather than an entrapment within a nonhuman form). In a reversal of the traditional polarities of allegories, the “Youth” and “the Virgin” can be read as symbols of the sunflower’s dim and troubled aspiration towards a spiritual regeneration it feverishly awaits but cannot apprehend. To see beyond Ovidian captivation in Blake’s illuminated poem, to “[seek] after” the sunflower as a true flower of the sun in the continuity of Darwin’s research into the vegetable “sensorium,” we must turn to the visual. On the top left-hand side of the illuminated page, a hybrid figure hovers above the text (Figure 11.4), with golden hair, like sun-rays, resembling the fine and slightly twisted petals of a sunflower.

Figure 11.4  William Blake, “Ah! Sun-Flower!” Songs of Innocence and of Experience, Copy Y, detail, 1825. Public Domain.

228  Sophie Laniel-Musitelli Its  legs grow into rhizomatic lines, and one of them extends into the long green tendril running along the left-hand side of the text. The figure sports a bright halo behind its head partly merging with its hair. It has no face, reinforcing the uncanny sense of hybridisation between human and plant. The halo identifies the figure as one of Blake’s visionary flowers, along with the marygold7 in the Argument of Visions of the Daughters of Albion (1793). Indeed, the continuity between the bright halo, the golden hair of the figure, and the green tendril shooting from its legs is reminiscent of the Darwinian flowers of the sun, in which light runs through the very texture of the vegetable body. The absence of eyes echoes the strange combination of blindness and intimate relation to light one finds in the Darwinian vegetable “sensorium.” The illuminated figure above the text of “Ah! Sun-Flower” is one of Blake’s first attempts at figuring nonhuman visionary powers. The interaction between the textual and the visual opens the possibility of an escape from Ovidian captivation. The “wheres” upsetting the syntax of the second stanza point towards that possibility of escaping and thus work against the grammar of pure captivation. The textual sunflower “seeking” and “wish[ing]” bears the mere promise of the leap from captivation to desire the illuminated figure actually effects. The tense interaction between text and image reveals the fervour of the vegetable flesh in its intimate relation to light.

Conclusion: From Captivation to Desire Humans have to acknowledge the force of nonhuman vision to realise their own Humanity. Does this mean that nonhuman vision must be subsumed within “Humanity Divine”? In Blake, looking through nonhuman eyes is less a revelation in itself than a method to decentre human perception. Jerusalem’s Plate 28 (Figure 11.5) effects the articulation of human and nonhuman vision through sensual enjoyment. The illumination shows a couple inside the cup of a flower, “that Center [within which] Eternity expands / Its ever-during doors” (Milton, 1988, 131, Plate 31, lines 46–49); it is no mere illustration of the text below: the visual frees itself from Albion’s voice in his divided state. Albion refuses sexual pleasure, thus “building A Strong / Fortification against the Divine Humanity” (1988, 174, lines 25–26); meanwhile, the flowing lines of the expanding corolla forces upon us the beauty of desire, and the flower fully participates in “an improvement of sensual enjoyment” (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 1988, 39, Plate 14). The flesh tint and lineaments of the human figures merge with the hues and nervures of the petals. Man, woman, and flower are united by the golden mantle partly covering the humans and the corolla, and offering, from inside the flower, an additional source of light to the sun rising in the background. Humans and nonhuman are united in their

The Eye of the Earth  229

Figure 11.5  William Blake, Jerusalem, The Emanation of the Giant Albion, Plate 28, Copy E, 1821. Public Domain.

shared sensual enjoyment of light. Yet, the figures are no chimeras: both humans and nonhuman keep their specific form in that moment of regeneration through sensual enjoyment. While the flower could be interpreted as a mere symbolic reflection of the couple’s joy, there is an actual complementarity between human and nonhuman figures, as the openness of the flower balances out the closed position of the couple, locked in their embrace. Despite their fault line, text and image display a common endeavour to move beyond nature conceived as a Garden of Eden, “an envied horror, and a remembrance of jealousy”

230  Sophie Laniel-Musitelli (Jerusalem, 1988, 174, Plate 28, line 3). The illuminated poem seeks less a state of prelapsarian innocence than a state of sensual enjoyment beyond the Fall. To explore the creative tension between man and animal inside humanity as a constant process of becoming, Agamben (2004, 82) meditates on Benjamin’s musings on sexual pleasure: “[t]he salvation . . . concerns, rather, the lost and the forgotten as such—that is, something unsavable.” Blake is also looking for that ever-shifting line, within “Humanity Divine,” between the drive to subsume all perceptions into complete revelation and the uncanny force of resistance of nonhuman vision. In Blake’s illuminated poetry, not everything can be resolved, or sublated in the Hegelian sense, into “Humanity Divine.” Even once the Urizenic force of the negative is lifted, something remains, teeming at the margins and resisting the unifying drive. “Humanity Divine” still needs otherness and must test and experience itself from outside, from nonhuman vision. Nonhuman vision has the fierce beauty of what resists and cannot be subsumed. Blake is part of the “English Romantics [who] . . . sought to refine their senses . . . to be able to detect natura naturans” (Bennett 2010, 117), creating an experiment into the visionary force of other modes of sensation than ours. The Romantics’ “sensory attunement” (Morton 2007, 75) is one of the driving forces behind contemporary environmental studies, in their aim to widen the scope of human experience in order to recognise the place of nonhumans within the polis. Blake, along with other Romantic poets, led the way to the “cultivated, patient, sensory attentiveness to nonhuman forces” (Bennett 2010, xiv) that opens up “the possibility of a radical openness to other beings” (Morton 2007, 164) in contemporary environmental theory.

Notes 1 All citations from Blake’s poetry are taken from The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake (1988). 2 Morton wrote a thesis on Percy B. Shelley before turning to ecological studies with Ecology Without Nature (2007), Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (2013), and Dark Ecology (2016). 3 The Umwelt can be defined as “the environment-world that is constituted by a more or less broad series of elements that [Uexküll] calls “carriers of significance” (Agamben 2004, 40). 4 To play on the opposition between Blake’s depiction of the fly’s visionary powers and Heidegger’s concept of “poverty in world” (Heidegger 1995, 263; see Agamben 2004, 51). 5 This is a reference to Blake’s A Vision of the Last Judgment: “I question not my corporeal eye any more than I would question a window concerning a sight. I look through it, and not with it” (1988, 566). 6 See OED “dure, v.” 4. and 5. 7 The Marigold used to be classified as a sunflower according to the OED. ­David Worrall (1975) perceptively links “flashes of light from certain

The Eye of the Earth  231 flowers” in Erasmus Darwin’s The Economy of Vegetation to the presence of “steady flashes [issuing] from the marigold” (402) that Oothoon places between her breasts to gain “a visionary glow” in Blake’s Visions of the Daughters of Albion.

References Agamben, Giorgio. (2002) 2004. The Open: Man and Animal. Translated by Kevin Attell. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Bennett, Jane. 2010. Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Blake, William. 1988. The Complete Poetry & Prose of William Blake. Edited by David V. Erdman. Rev. ed. New York: Random House. Cooper, Andrew. 2013. William Blake and the Productions of Time. Farnham: Ashgate. Darwin, Erasmus. (1794–1796) 1801. Zoonomia, or the Laws of Organic Life. 4 vols. London: J. Johnson. ———. 1791. The Botanic Garden, A Poem in Two Parts Containing: Part I, The Economy of Vegetation and Part II, The Loves of the Plants. 2 vols. London: J. Johnson. Deleuze, Gilles and Félix Guattari. (1980) 1987. A Thousand Plateaus: ­C apitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Deleuze, Gilles. (1981) 2003. Francis Bacon: The Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel W. Smith. London and New York: Continuum. Ferber, Michael. 1985. The Social Vision of William Blake. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fosso, Kurt. 2014. “Feet of Beasts: Tracking the Animal in Blake.” European Romantic Review 25 (2): 113–138. Heidegger, Martin. (1983) 1995. Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude. Translated by William McNeill and Nicholas Walker. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Hutchings, Kevin. 2002. Imagining Nature: Blake’s Environmental Poetics. Montreal, QC and Kingston, ON: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Jackson, Noel. 2008. Science and Sensation in Romantic Poetry. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. King-Hele, Desmond. 1986. Erasmus Darwin and The Romantic Poets. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Latour, Bruno. (1991) 1993. We Have Never Been Modern. Translated by ­Catherine Porter. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Milton, John. (1671) 1991. “Samson Agonistes.” In The Major Works, edited by Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg, 671–716. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Morton, Timothy. 2007. Ecology without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Ovid, P. Naso. 1742. Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Fifteen Books Translated by the most Eminent Hands. Translated by J. Dryden, J. Addison, L. Eusden, A. Mainwaring, S. Croxall, N. Tate, J. Gay, and W. Congreve and edited by Sir S. Garth. London: Jacob Tonson.

232  Sophie Laniel-Musitelli Rancière, Jacques. (2000) 2004. The Politics of Aesthetics. Translated by Gabriel Rockhill. London: Continuum. Rilke, Rainer Maria. (1923) 1980. The Selected Poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke. Edited and translated by Stephen Mitchell. New York: Vintage International. Schorer, Mark. 1946. William Blake: The Politics of Vision. New York: Doubleday. Worrall, David. 1975. “William Blake and Erasmus Darwin’s Botanic Garden.” Bulletin of the New York Public Library 78: 397–417.

12 “Indistinctness is my forte” Turner, Ruskin, and the Climate of Art Carmen Casaliggi

The Victorian writer John Ruskin (1819–1900) is heavily indebted to J. M. W. Turner (1775–1851), and numerous critics have argued that Ruskin’s more successful works could not exist without the painter’s influence. To be sure, when Turner’s painting, Staffa, Fingal’s Cave (c.  1832), was criticised for its vagueness and he allegedly answered, “­I ndistinctness is my forte” (quoted in Lindsay 1966, 203), Ruskin stood out as Turner’s most fervent advocate and praised the atmospheric style of the painter’s work. Environmental preoccupations and related climate issues are a prerogative of Turner’s work throughout most of his career, and Staffa was certainly not an isolated example. Turner’s indistinctness, so much criticised by the Victorian periodical press, is a fundamental quality of his work, and the haziness of his landscape art has affinities with environmental pollution in his time. For example, in his analysis of Turner’s Snow Storm—Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth making Signals in Shallow Water, and going to the Lead. The Author was in the Storm on the Night the Ariel left Harwich (1842) in the first volume of Modern Painters, Ruskin praised the indistinct qualities of the painting and, by using the language of atmosphere and air, discussed Snow Storm as “one of the very grandest statements of sea-motion, mist, and light, that has ever been put on canvas” (1903, 3:571). In contrast to the critics of the day who notoriously dismissed Snow Storm as a mass of “soapsuds and whitewash” (1904, 13:161), Ruskin focussed on both its atmospheric and climatic consequences while valorising its rendering of “the effect on the sea of a powerful gale” and “the complete annihilation of the limit between sea and air” (1903, 3:569). Ruskin’s continued appropriation of Turner’s mode of presenting the landscape is particularly concerned with the impact of colour, light, and their effects on the atmosphere. In their seminal study of Romanticism as a fundamental reaction against industrial modernity, Michael Löwy and Robert Sayre (2011) consider Ruskin as the very writer who sustained the Romantic “worldview” in the second half of the nineteenth century. More specifically, Ruskin is praised for his Romantic rejection of industrialism and for his condemnation of the injustices of a capitalist society that have

234  Carmen Casaliggi evident repercussions on the landscape and the environment of Britain (127–146). Turner plays a key role in Ruskin’s Romantic worldview. For Ruskin, Turner offered an alternative model of looking at the landscape, one that shaped Ruskin’s radical critique of mechanisation, particularly the degradation of labour under industrialism and the destruction of the environment; Ruskin saw both forms of mechanisation as consequences of an iniquitous economy and society. Following Turner, Ruskin used landscape art as an analogue for relations in other spheres such as history and politics. Also, he responded variously to air and water pollution in the former’s paintings such as Snow Storm, The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged To Her Last Berth to Be Broken up (1838), and Rain, Steam and Speed—The Great Western Railway (1844), responses that illuminated some key aspects of Turner’s work, including the latter’s anxieties about environmental degradation as well as a related cultural questioning of the association between ecological disasters and the transatlantic slave trade as in Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhon [sic] Coming on (1840) (The Slave Ship). This chapter, therefore, aims to illuminate the ways in which the radical questions raised by Turner’s landscapes found new answers and forms of signification in the works of Ruskin—questions ranging from nineteenth-century ecological reflections on the sky and water, to the relationship between ecological disasters and episodes of human exploitation, and to the affiliations between Romantic landscape art and Victorian environmentalism. Turner’s landscape art, as we shall see, exerted a profound influence on Ruskin’s work, from his early volumes of Modern Painters (1843–1845) through The Harbours of England (1856) to his two lectures The Storm Clouds of the Nineteenth Century (1884). While concerning themselves with the moral tension between tradition and progress, Turner and Ruskin were both political idealists who aimed at creating an ecologically sustainable society rooted in environmentalism and social justice through their work.

The Politics of Air and Water In 1826, at the age of seven (and when Turner was already 51), Ruskin wrote his very first poem, “The Steam Engine.” The verses are about clouds produced by steam from the new trains, clouds which move dangerously in the air, polluting the atmosphere all around. References to steamboats are also very significant in this poem. Although recognising “the weight of smokey barge,” Ruskin read the steamboat with the innocent eye of a child and consider it “the most useful engine brought to man” (1903, 2:254, lines 8, 12), a view that, as we shall see, was to change with time. Ruskin’s most famous early poem is perhaps “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water” (1828), which he wrote at the age of nine and published at 11. This poem particularly offers a window into Ruskin’s thinking about “a playful cloud, . . . / soon melting into air; / . . . / And

Turner, Ruskin, and the Climate of Art  235 making more intense the sun’s return” (1903, 2:265, lines 3, 4, 6). These early lines anticipate one of Ruskin’s main concerns about air and water pollution as discussed in Modern Painters I. Markedly, in the section “Of Truth of Water” (where both Slavers and Snow Storm are examined) (see 1903, 3:494–527), Ruskin takes an active interest in marine art, notably that of Turner. What emerges early on in Ruskin’s writing is his critique of industrial modernity, a subject which he would later deal with in Turner’s paintings The Fighting Temeraire and Rain, Steam and Speed. Therefore, by reading Turner’s art through Ruskin’s ecological and ecocritical lens, we could learn what climate change would mean to us today when the relation of physical climates to cultural, political, and literary environments is being transformed as it was in the Victorian age, only more drastically. His artworks also determine art’s responsibility for the production of concepts related to modern environmental criticism and anti-industrial argument (Clark 2011, 18) as in the first case study given below. Turner’s specific attention to the climate of art is particularly evidenced in The Fighting Temeraire, in which he portrays the final voyage of the once ship of Admiral Nelson’s glorious fleet at Trafalgar. Although national and patriotic elements were the centre of attention in the Victorian periodical press, the Spectator for 11 May 1839 was concerned with the painting’s more natural connotation when highlighting that “the grand image of the last days of one of Britain’s bulwarks: the huge hulk” was “looming vast in the distance in the midst of a faint gleam of moonlight, that invests with a halo the ghost of her former self,” thus accentuating the criticality associated with the atmosphere and its depiction (quoted in Butlin and Joll 1984, 1:209). In recent years, Sam Willis (2009) has purposefully noticed that the Temeraire’s crossing of the Thames was “full of significance” not so much because she fought at the Battle of Trafalgar and was, therefore, one of the main nineteenth-century British emblems, as because “she was being led not out to sea, but inland, away from her natural environment” (226). Willis is correct when suggesting that taking the ship from her ecosystem threatens the stability of the waterscape, an issue which Turner portrayed in devastating terms because the air and water pollution characterised a man-made environment. Willis, though, misses a crucial point in considering Ruskin’s take on the painting. When regarding The Fighting Temeraire as “the last thoroughly perfect picture [Turner] ever painted” (1904, 13:41) and the one in which Turner’s “execution is . . . firm and faultless” (1904, 13:168), Ruskin engaged with other less perceptible but equally significant languages of the landscape: the symbolic value attributed to the colour of the picture; its attention to tradition on one side and progress on the other; its interest in the old and the new and birth and death; and so forth. Critics have rather neglected the association of these themes with the politics of air and water when examining the Romantic legacy of Turner in shaping Ruskin’s environmental thinking.

236  Carmen Casaliggi Whether Turner appears to be primarily captivated by the calmness of the river or that of the ships on the canvas, his genius is displayed in using colours, both light and dark, to serve as a visual equivalent to the pollution of the atmosphere. Turner was fascinated by the contaminated air of the then world’s largest industrial city, and his work indicated the impact that air pollution had on the different shades of the sky. Recent research by Jonathan Hill, Alexandra Harris, and others has identified that following the eruption of Mount Tambora in 1815, ash and gas spewed into the atmosphere in such a way as to produce bright red and orange sunsets in Europe for several years; hence, polluted skies result in redder sunsets. Since this volcanic explosion, Turner had recorded climatic changes and the mutability of nature in his work when painting sunsets and skies a little more reddish than ever before (Hill 2012, 169; Harris 2015, 258). A great example is The Fighting Temeraire, mainly constructed out of the primary colours of blue and yellow, along with their respective deeper shades. The yellows, reds, and oranges are intensified, moreover, by the still burning sun which lights the black tug on the opposite side and an even darker spot (a rock?) in the close foreground. Reflecting on the causes of the yellow tinge of the sky which can be applied to the sky of The Fighting Temeraire, Peter Brimblecombe (2011) indicates that “fine smoke particle in the atmosphere could absorb the blue wavelengths from the sunlight above the fog in such a way that the fog at grand level was illuminated by a yellow light” (125). This explanation gains some favour when the Victorian writing of Ruskin is examined, especially when in the first volume of Modern Painters he acknowledges “that the lemon yellow,” although “not properly representative of the yellow of the sky,” is “perfect” and “incapable . . . of any improvement conceivable by human mind” (1903, 3:247). The painting’s colours are also very much representative of the effects of polluted particles in the atmosphere and, therefore, more truthful and more natural. On a similar note, a critic of The Athenaeum in Britain, on viewing Turner’s picture at the 1839 Royal Academy exhibition, stressed the moral values inherent in some colours when, linking colours to some emotional conditions, he suggested that the artist had imbued his painting with “a sort of sacrificial solemnity . . . given to the scene by the blood-red light cast upon the waters by the round descending sun, and by the paler gleam from the faint rising crescent moon” (quoted in Butlin and Joll 1984, 1:209). Critics often relate Turner’s moral use of colours to Goethe’s 1810 treatise Zur Farbenlehre, published in English in 1840 as Theory of Colours, in which Goethe described the sensory-moral effects of colours on man’s inner nature. Turner, though, was nearly 70 when he read Charles Eastlake’s English translation. While evidently incorporating Goethe’s theory in his oil paintings such as Shade and Darkness—The Evening of the Deluge and Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory)—The Morning after the Deluge—Moses Writing the Book of

Turner, Ruskin, and the Climate of Art  237 Genesis, both dated 1843 (the year Ruskin’s Modern Painters I was also published), Turner in the Fighting Temeraire had already experimented on the sensory-moral effects of art. The Fighting Temeraire presents a world of silence and timelessness, in which, although there is no temporal movement, the small yet significant detail of the blue of the sky conjures up images of an uncontaminated atmosphere typical of the green language of the Romantic period and of Ruskin’s Romantic reading of one of Turner’s “greatest works” (1904, 13:168). This painting displays an evening “under the blazing veil of vaulted fire,” an effect that also becomes the mirror of “a blue, deep, desolate hollow of darkness, out of which you can hear the voice of the night wind, and the dull boom of the disturbed sea” (1903, 3:275). This seems to emphasise a sense of loss and the decline of British maritime power. Turner depicted the white-grey clouds which are further blackened by the smoke of the steamer, a depiction that, one can say, results from the new era of progress which sets a strong contrast to the blue sky taken over by fumes and poisonous chemicals and relegated to a mere background. Great emotion is also conveyed by chiaroscuro shades with a striking immediacy that absorbs itself into the represented forms. As William M. Thackeray (1839) had perceptively noticed as early as 1839, “the little demon of a steamer is belching out a volume . . . of foul, lurid, red-hot, malignant smoke” (744), a volume which reverberates into water and air, leaving in the atmosphere traces of the new “progressive,” mechanised era. One can argue that the painter is primarily preoccupied with ships and related readings of air and water pollution as well as the contaminated colours of the sky; nevertheless, this riverside scene also betokens the end of sail, wooden, and oak vessels (tradition) and boldly sets the ground for the onset of the age of steam and iron (progress) and related concerns associated with it. Turner’s Temeraire (and Ruskin’s reading of it) can be understood as a metaphor of the new machine age, embodied by the little steamer and, more broadly, as an allegory of industrial development and power. Notwithstanding the artist’s well-defined interest in the “new age,” it is on the “Old Temeraire”—as Ruskin would later refer to it—that Turner was mainly focussing his attention. The Romantic legacy of Turner in Ruskin’s critical thinking offers new insight into the relationship between tradition and progress. In the first instance, Turner struggled through much of this picture to confer greatness and eminence upon the ship, which, remaining at the centre of attention, looks ghost-like and pale yet dignified, floating majestically (and temerariously) tall, with a kingly grace. Evidently, Turner presented her as bigger than the steamer and sought to emphasise the value and strength of the former over that of the latter, “the little demon” (Thackeray 1839, 744) which, as ­William Rodner (1997) has reminded us, represents the “first, strong, almost prophetic idea of smoke, soot, iron, and steam, coming to the front in all naval matters” (52).

238  Carmen Casaliggi

Figure 12.1  J . M. W. Turner, Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhon [sic] Coming on, 1840. Oil on canvas, 91 cm × 122.6 cm. © The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston: Henry Lillie Pierce Fund. (To face page 572 of Vol. III of the Library Edition of Works [plate 12]).

Turner also intended his painting to record outwardly an elaborate political polemic of what can be seen as a coloured critique of heroism: “the old bulwark of a nation” embodies the glory of Trafalgar and the sunset sky the death of such valour. The painting also represents the sunset of uncontaminated air, where air and water pollution, as generated by the fumes of “the mean thing that is to take [the] place” of the old man-of-war (quoted in Butlin and Joll 1984, 1:209), kill the glories of the past. As one critic suggested in the Art Union on 15 May 1839 in the above assessment, the deconstruction of a victorious past couples with both the deconstruction and death of the landscape. In an artwork which Ruskin read as “the most pathetic that was ever painted” because “no ruin was ever so affecting as this gliding of the vessel to her grave” (1904, 13:170–171), he inherited Turner’s Romantic concerns about air and water pollution, an ecological issue that, nowadays, needs our urgent attention. In this respect, Hill (2012) convincingly argues in Weather Architecture (2012) that “the hybrised weather depicted by Turner paralleled a transformation in physical nature that we increasingly experience today” (169). Seen in this light, the sunset of the manof-war in The Fighting Temeraire not only becomes the mirror of the human condition, but also reflects the decline of the landscape where ecological disasters in the painting link to human deaths as in Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying (Figure 12.1).

Ecological Disasters Slavers is an oil painting that powerfully conveys Turner’s sublime idea of a disaster at sea in its representation of what Anthony Bailey (1998)

Turner, Ruskin, and the Climate of Art  239 perceptively defines as “a watery chasm” where “[a]ll is about to be lost” (360). With this epical narration of the Zong incident of 1781 when 132 slaves were thrown in the open water in order to claim insurance money, the painter not only openly denounced the slave trade, but also invoked the implications that the transatlantic traffic in human beings had on climate change and environmental degradation. Ruskin astutely recognised Turner’s intent to reconcile the complex relationship between humans and the environment including its natural resources. Although initially appearing to be a straightforward denunciation of slavery, the painting should also be seen as Turner’s meditation on the political implications of a landscape where, according to Marcus Wood (2000), “only a fraction of the painting’s surface describes anything other than sea and sky” (63). Along this line, Ruskin made the sea and the sky the core of his analysis. While transcending the naturalism of picturesque or pastoral scenes, Slavers contributes to an understanding of Turner’s work in apocalyptic terms, where the slaves begin to function as a synecdoche for a more general ecological and political crisis—or what Greg Garrard (2012) names “environmental apocalypticism” (101–112). Environmental catastrophes and human tragedies are captured by Turner’s palette, and they are made to speak by way of the canvas’s colours and its ecological implications. As Ruskin famously reminded us, the canvas is all about “the power, majesty, and deathfulness of the open, deep, illimitable sea” (3:573). For Ruskin, in Slavers, “the torn and streaming rain-clouds are moving in scarlet lines,” and “the whole surface of sea included in the picture” expresses “the torture of the storm.” This natural and human disaster points ahead to the present-day European migrant crisis across the Mediterranean Sea which has become increasingly a security matter and a threat to state sovereignty and maritime security. All this helps to renew the symbolism that the sea is a rite of passage, a space of escape and transition. Yet the sea also signifies uncertainty, fear, and ambivalence. Ruskin uses imagery relating to colours as well as moral and religious concepts in order to represent “the awful but glorious light” and “the intense and lurid splendour which burns like gold, and bathes like blood” and which takes place “along this fiery path and valley” made of “dark, indefinite, fantastic forms” of water (1903, 3:572–573). The rest of Ruskin’s description immediately suggests Turner’s focus on the distinctive strangeness and calculatedly apocalyptic style of the canvas, where “nature,” according to Clive Wilmer (2015), “is presented as the agent of God’s judgement” (239). In particular, Ruskin verbally recreates Turner’s painting, focussing on its moral aspect: Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the sky in lines of blood, girded with condemnation in that

240  Carmen Casaliggi fearful hue which signs the sky with horror, and mixes its flaming flood with the sunlight, and, cast far along the desolate heave of the sepulchral waves, incarnadines the multitudinous sea. (1903, 3:572–573) The heart of Ruskin’s analysis is inhabited by the slave ship, surrounded by the variety of colours and motions of the undulating waters. Turner’s work illustrates the moral essence of art and the link between landscape painting and human degradation. In this respect, Stephen J. May (2014) has suggested that the presence of slaves in Turner’s painting indicates not so much “a feeding frenzy” as “a scene of total consumption” where “the storm consumes the ship and the slaves; the waves consume the slaves, the manacles, shackles and all the tools of slavery” (113). Ruskin quietly approved of this scene of destruction, where the cradle of innocent people’s deaths links with the code of nobility of the time, as the sea becomes ­responsible for their destiny: “the noblest sea that Turner has ever painted, and, if so, the noblest certainly ever painted by man” (1903, 3:572). Somewhat contradicting his own critique of pathetic fallacy, Ruskin’s reiteration of the adjective “noble” confers human connotations on a natural element. In Ruskin’s mind, Turner’s art is as noble as it is naturally superior to others; his painting richly represents a virtuous theme which implies human beauty as he would later argue in Modern Painters V. Yet, the idea that every noble subject is an act of beauty (see 1905, 7:345–346) is also paired with the rhetoric of violence and sacrifice. Wood specifically devotes a section of Blind Memory to the analysis of “the aesthetic of violence in Ruskin’s reading of the ‘Slave Ship’” (59). Ruskin’s direct reference to Shakespeare’s “multitudinous sea” in ­Macbeth further emphasises the atmosphere of fright and trepidation which lies behind a sky made of blood and a sea convulsed with pain, where the dead and dying can be related to a general sense of guilt and displacement experienced by Western maritime nations for the treatment of slaves. Turner and Ruskin were well aware of discourses around abolitionism such as those of Thomas Clarkson and were familiar with S. T. Coleridge’s 1795 lecture on “The Slave Trade.” Abolition in 1806 had not ended the slave trade; nor had the partial emancipation of 1833 to 1838 eliminated the ongoing issues posed by the legacy of slavery at home and abroad. Consequently, reading the painting as an example of greed under uncontrolled capitalism, Jack Lindsay (1985) pertinently suggests that “Turner is recognising that the guilt of the slave trade was something too vast to be wiped out by any belated act of Parliament” (250). The painting specifically links air and water pollution to the deaths of the slaves, associating the ruination of the natural world with the ruination of the slaves and, more generally, with the British national body. Yet Britain’s involvement in the slave trade is just one possible sign of guilt in the painting. Emphasising the transnational implications of

Turner, Ruskin, and the Climate of Art  241 human trafficking, Eric Shanes (2012) has recently reminded us that at the time Turner was painting Slavers, “ships from other countries—and especially Spanish and Portuguese vessels—were still very active in the slave trade between Africa and South America” (222). The climate of art in this depiction of nature joins images of colonial usurpation, brutal carnage, and deaths; both Turner and Ruskin turn the natural causes of the disaster into more mysterious moral ones where the landscape becomes “the most sublime of subjects and impressions” (1903, 3:573). In other words, the painting suggests many symbols and images in relation to debates on abolition and slavery, with an argument that both the ship and the dead and dying slaves can be associated with the resulting death of the landscape. Yet there was hope of regeneration as death suggests that we ultimately go back to where we came from: the noble seascape in Slavers memorialises the deaths and suffering of those slaves who experienced the crossing. Turner’s “Slave Ship” can, therefore, be seen as a radical critique of British (and European) imperialism and colonialism by showing the actual deaths of the slaves. Turner’s legacy in Ruskin takes the form of Romanticism’s abolitionism sentiment. Although Ruskin did not disregard in full the significance of the ship and the slaves in the picture, he commented only in an end page note on “the throwing overboard of the dead and dying.” This suggests not so much that these issues are to him less essential or even marginal, but rather that the dead bodies at sea constitute something emotionally disturbing for the author. For Ruskin, Turner’s Slavers is, therefore, a response to the ecological and political imperatives of the age. Ruskin’s study of this “sunset on the Atlantic after prolonged storm” (1903, 3:571) here began to take shape, and so did the topic of humanity’s relationship with the natural world. In Victorian Writers and the Environment (2016), Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison have recently established the ways in which Victorian authors engage not only with humans’ interaction with the environment, but also with how authors such as Ruskin anticipated more recent attitudes towards the environment. More significantly, Mark Frost (2016) examines the way in which nature in Modern Painters I “was at once a defence of J. M. W. Turner and a call for landscape artists to engage intensely with the environment in order to observe and describe its various ‘truths’” (15). In Ruskin, Frost argues, the cooperation between science and humanities can lead to developments in knowledge and enhance each other, and convinces the reader that a provocative interplay between art and science is not only possible but also inevitable.

Victorian Environmentalism Turner’s art seems to give Ruskin eyes on the Victorian world, especially on Victorian ecological issues. Ruskin was interested in how Turner

242  Carmen Casaliggi represented disasters at sea and ecological calamities in his Snow Storm of 1842. In this later painting, Turner portrayed the weight of an indistinct yet intensely perceptible environmental pollution, in which the landscape of indistinctness was nonetheless distinguishable because of the misty and hazy skies: “[w]here the steam-boat is—where the harbour begins, or where it ends—which are the signals, and which the author in the Ariel . . . are matters past our finding out” (quoted in Blayney Brown et al. 2014, 158). Ruskin’s elaborate account of Snow Storm is in itself a depiction of natural effects but more than everything, an evident praise of water and of Turner’s perfect rendering of a storm (which the painter himself was said to have experienced in the first place). Water is represented in the form of “masses [which] are taken up by the wind, not in dissipating dust, but bodily, in writhing, hanging, coiling masses, which make the air white and thick as with snow,” and where “the surges . . . are torn to pieces by the wind whenever they rise, and carried away in roaring smoke, which chokes and strangles like actual water” (1903, 3:569–571). Margaret Cohen (2017) has recently noted that in his assessment of Snow Storm, Ruskin “understood Turner as inspired by the specific murky meteorological conditions of the coast” (209). For Ruskin, “the air has been exhausted of its moisture by long rain, the spray of the sea is caught by it . . . and covers its surface not merely with the smoke of finely divided water, but with boiling mist.” Ruskin then concluded forcibly that ultimately “the heaven is all spray, and the ocean all cloud” (1903, 3:569–571) and that there are no boundaries anymore between “sea” and “air.” These substances become almost one and the same thing. Ruskin’s account of Turner’s painting is long, over-elaborated, and reveals through his passionate and impetuous prose not only the full fury and chaos of the sea-storm, but also the ferocity and dangers of industrial modernity. Snow Storm tells the story of how our climate has varied naturally and of how pollutions levels have changed; it implies environmental risks and uncertainty and thus benefits global warming studies. The Romantic sentiment of Turner shapes the environmental thinking of Ruskin, who described the storm so intensely as to draw his readers into the rage of the sea and provided a fuller explanation of the violence, energy, and movements of water. Ruskin particularly aimed to explain that violent rain storms at sea often produce a mist on the surface of the water. In Ruskin’s hands, Turner’s painting teaches Romantic lessons that point directly to the scale and mutability of nature when natural disasters occur at a time of climate change, lessons that are recognisable in the disasters of the present world. Jonathan Ribner (2004) has suggested how “astonishing atmospheric effects” were a prerogative of Turner, whose artworks “repeatedly represented black coal fumes blending with moist air” (51). Ruskin understands the storm’s power and the motion of water, and through his conspicuously

Turner, Ruskin, and the Climate of Art  243 stylish language, he accurately conveys the total chaos of Turner’s scene. In essence, the picture’s “sea” and “air” turn into closely linked elements; the indistinctness of air and water merge with each other; indistinctness becomes pollution—the “sea” becomes “water,” “waves,” “surges,” “foam,” “cataract,” and “spray”; also, “air” transforms itself in “flakes,” “surges” and “wind,” “smoke,” “rain,” “mist,” and “rain-clouds.” This situation is an ambience where the foam is “creaming,” where rain-clouds are “whirling and flying,” and where the flakes’ masses are “torn to pieces” by the air-stream when they lift themselves up (1903, 3:569–571). As Martin ­Danahay has rightly pointed out in “A Matter out of Place: the Politics of Pollution in Ruskin and Turner” (1991), the aesthetic, ethical, and social connotations of smoke and mist are causally interconnected; pollution in its moral aesthetics implies conflict, corruption, and death (63). Turner raised the scene in Snow Storm to such a pitch that the viewer has to recognise the major significance of the picture’s various natural elements in comparison to its artificial components such as the steamer and the harbour. Ruskin in Modern Painters I fulfilled his aim to describe Snow Storm by focussing on issues related to global warming. The language of his work turns green, despite the fact that the green acquires different tinges, particularly those of the emergence of ecological understanding amongst English Romantic artists who offer a conceptual and ideological basis for modern environmentalism. Ruskin devoted so much space to natural descriptions in this painting as well as in Slavers, thereby confirming that rather than the steamer which is here submerged in the gale, the sea and the storm constitute the real subject of Ruskin’s passage as they are in Turner’s Romantic rendering of such themes. Both Turner and Ruskin effectively combined a focus on the natural hazards and environmental risks inherent in the canvas. However, later in his life, Ruskin’s views on Turner’s painting did remarkably change. The writer revisited his opinions in 1856 in Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House (1856) and declared: Interesting, however, as this picture is, in marking how far the sense of foaming mystery, and blinding whiteness of surf and salt, now influenced Turner’s conception of the sea, rather than the old theories of black clouds relieving terminated edges of waves, the sea is, however, even thus, not quite right: it is not yeasty enough: the linear wave-action is still too much dwelt upon, and confused with the true foam. (1904, 13:162–163) This late analysis encounters some complications, as the atmosphere in this painting appears difficult or even impossible to distinguish. Even later, in The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century I (1884), Ruskin looked back at Snow Storm and acknowledged that “below their

244  Carmen Casaliggi assigned horizon the surges of the cloud sea may not sink, and the floods of the mist lagoon may not be swollen” (1908, 34:15). In their analysis of the painting, Christine Riding and Richard Johns (2014) have interestingly suggested that “the image is too indistinct to decipher, despite the long and highly specific title given in the catalogue” (258). Choosing a long and very precise title for an imprecise subject indicates the blurred line between literal and visual atmospheres. Erich Auerbach’s observation (2003) on the close connection between “atmospheric Historism and atmospheric realism” (473) could well apply to both Turner and Ruskin in that they were both able to transform the former into the latter. Here the concept of history turns into the present of a concrete and particular environment. It is a remarkable feature of Turner’s fugitive “atmospheric realism”—or indeed, a form of precocious impressionism— that he dissolved objects to communicate the impact of industrialisation on the environment during the Industrial Revolution in Britain. In his late paintings such as Rain, Steam and Speed, Turner, according to Martin Butlin (2001), reflected his “interest in up-to-date imagery and the symbolic contrasts between the train and the countryside” (254), between culture and nature. Turner depicted the hare in flight from a machine, the small rowing boat, and a horse-drawn plough working the field, depictions that suggest mankind’s inventiveness and the purity of forms, against more man-made examples of transience and speed. However, with this watery image of a heavy storm, Turner also provided a further lesson on environmental crisis: the increasing concern over vegetation deterioration attributed to acid rain. Ruskin, who argued passionately against railways and tourism, river pollution and acid rain, famously remarked that Turner painted Rain, Steam and Speed “to show what he could do even with an ugly subject” (1908, 35:601), an observation that is nevertheless a far cry from Turner’s position. As Hill (2012) has perceptively noted, with his comments “Ruskin misinterpreted Turner’s more subtle and nuanced response to mechanisation, which extended Turnerian topography to industrial landscape” (161). For the writer, all modern advances, such as the world of trains and steam, can be justified only if they free humanity to contemplate and create art. Turner enjoyed the whole journey of industrial civilisation, whereas Ruskin thought only about its detrimental effects. If the climate of art, in Ruskin’s later years, became mainly the site of the decay of the new age, there was, despite everything, still some hope left when he made the following observation one morning in 1878. While seated at his desk and looking over Coniston Lake, presumably with the Romantic teaching of Turner in mind, Ruskin remarked: Morning breaks, as I write, along those Coniston Fells, and the level mists, motionless, and grey beneath the rose of the moorlands, veil the lower woods, and the sleeping village, and the long lawns by

Turner, Ruskin, and the Climate of Art  245 the lake-shore. Oh, that some one had but told me, in my youth, when all my heart seemed to be set on these colours and clouds, that appear for a little while and then vanish away, how little my love of them would serve me, when the silence of lawn and wood in the dews of morning should be completed; and all my thoughts should be of those whom, by neither, I was to meet more! (1904, 13:409–410) For Ruskin, the sense of serenity was conveyed by a “misty” landscape near the “lake,” a landscape of peace and beauty where, despite the dominance of industrial modernity, everything conformed to a simple plan over which the fascination of air and water could be draped. For Turner, the climate of art also meant a desire for purification, regeneration, and survival. Indeed, between 1845 and 1850, the painter was still experimenting on the climate of art with a placid landscape such as Norham Castle where the calmness and purity of the aquatic scenery and the surrounding atmosphere around acted as a refuge from the filth of the Victorian world. Turner and Ruskin witnessed, in different ways, the spread of modernisation. More specifically, Turner and Ruskin were turning air and water pollution into a site of their artistic and literal denunciation while emphasising an alternative to the new: the tranquillity of a still and uncontaminated waterscape, through which to find refuge from the menaces of the outside world. Ruskin transformed Turner’s works on pollution into a text woven into the intricate flows of the age’s tide. Air and water pollution became the language of books and pictures, a natural metaphor for poetic examination, for the body and the spirit. In interpreting its textual ambiguity, water and air acquired moral connotations while serving as a physical domain. Turner, for his part, painted the environment as a symbol of life, a ray of hope keeping alive a possibility that the nineteenth century discovered for itself: that water and air come in many shapes; they are plural, complex, and unpredictable. Ruskin viewed Britain and industrial society at large ecologically and ecocritically in light of Turner’s art. Turner’s and Ruskin’s environmental radicalism continue with the present-day ecology movement which offers sympathetic readings of Romanticism and represents “the most important form of renewal of the Romantic critique of modern industrial civilization” (Löwy and Sayre 2001, 230). English Romantic environmentalism took many forms and shapes, and Jonathan Bate (1991) rightly sees as part of the legacy from the Romantics present-day concerns such as “the greenhouse effect and the depletion of the ozone layer, the destruction of the tropical rainforest, acid rain, the pollution of the sea” (9). In Turner’s paintings of water and air and in Ruskin’s prophetic writings such as Moderns Painters, we see insights that are as relevant in our time as they were in the nineteenth century and help, to use Bate’s words, “post-industrial human society to reconnect itself to the environment” (Bate 1993, 161).

246  Carmen Casaliggi

References Auerbach, Erich. (1953) 2003. Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in ­Western Thought. Translated by Willard R. Trask. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Bailey, Anthony. 1998. Standing in the Sun: A Life of J.M.W. Turner. London: Pimlico. Bate, Jonathan.1991. Romantic Ecology: Wordsworth and the Environmental Tradition. London: Routledge. ———. 1993. “Romantic Ecology Revisited.” The Wordsworth Circle 24 (3): 159–162. Blayney Brown, David, Amy Concannon, and Sam Smiles, eds. 2014. J.M.W. Turner: Painting Set Free. Los Angeles, CA: J. Paul Getty Museum. Brimblecombe, Peter. (1987) 2011. The Big Smoke: A History of Air Pollution in London since Medieval Times. London: Routledge. Butlin, Martin, and Evelyn Joll. (1977) 1984. The Paintings of J. M. W. Turner. 2nd ed. 2 vols. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Clark, Timothy. 2011. The Cambridge Introduction to Literature and the Environment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cohen, Margaret. 2017. “Seeing through Water: The Paintings of Zarh Pritchard.” In Coastal Works: Cultures of the Atlantic Edge, edited by N ­ icholas Allen, Nick Groom, and Jos Smith, 205–224. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Danahay, Martin A. 1991. “A Matter Out of Place: the Politics of Pollution in Ruskin and Turner.” Clio 21 (1): 61–77. Frost, Mark. 2016. “Reading Nature. John Ruskin, Environment and the ­E cological Impulse.” In Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspective, edited by Laurence W. Mazzeno and Ronald D. Morrison, 13–28. London: Routledge. Garrard, Greg. (2004) 2012. Ecocriticism. London: Routledge. Harris, Alexandra. 2015. Weatherland: Writers and Artists under English Skies. London: Thames and Hudson. Hill, Jonathan. 2012. Weather Architecture. London: Routledge. Joll, Evelyn, Martin Butlin, and Luke Herrmann, eds. 2001. The Oxford Companion to J.M.W. Turner. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Knickerbocker, Scott. 2012. Ecopoetics: The Language of Nature, the Nature of Language. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Lindsay, Jack. 1985. Turner: The Man and His Art. London: Granada. Löwy, Michael, and Robert Sayre. 2001. Romanticism against the Tide of ­Modernity. Translated by Catherine Porter. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. May, Stephen J. 2014. Voyage of the Slave Ship: J.M.W. Turner’s Masterpiece in Historical Context. Jefferson, NC: MacFarland & Co. Mazzeno, Laurence W., and Ronald D. Morrison, eds. 2016. Victorian Writers and the Environment: Ecocritical Perspective. London: Routledge. Riding, Christine, and Richard Johns. 2014. Turner and The Sea. London: Thames and Hudson. Rigby, Kate. 2004. Topographies of the Sacred: The Poetics of Place in ­European Romanticism. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Rodner, William S. 1997. J.M.W. Turner: Romantic Painter of the Industrial Revolution. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Turner, Ruskin, and the Climate of Art  247 Ruskin, John. 1903–1912. The Works of John Ruskin. 39 vols. Edited by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen. Thackeray, W. M. 1839. “A Second Lecture on the Fine Arts, by Michael Angelo Titmarsh, Esquire.” Fraser’s Magazine 10: 743–750. Wheeler, Michael, ed. 1995. Ruskin and the Environment: The Storm Cloud of the Nineteenth Century. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Willis, Sam. (2009) 2012. The Fighting Temeraire: Legend of Trafalgar. ­London: Quercus. Wilmer, Clive. 2015. “Creativity.” In The Cambridge Companion to John Ruskin, edited by Francis O’Gorman, 230–245. Cambridge: Cambridge ­University Press. Wood, Marcus. 2000. Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America 1790–1865. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Part V

Oriental Romanticism

13 ReOrienting Romanticism The Legacy of Indian Romantic Poetry in English Steve Clark

Andre Frank’s ReORIENT (1998) made the influential argument that European ascendency in the global economy should be regarded as no more than a brief interlude in an Asian-dominated world order. What implications might this thesis have for the theme of Romantic legacies? It should be stressed that traditional demarcations of the Romantic period tend to be fairly arbitrary. If 1789 is selected for the Fall of the Bastille, why privilege this event in French history rather than the execution of Louis XVI or the Terror in 1793? 1798, for the publication of the Athenäum when Romantic idealist aesthetics first emerged (as well as the year of Lyrical Ballads), inevitably privileges a philosophical (and lyrical) canon. If 1832 is chosen for the passing of the Reform Act, why single out this date in British constitutional history rather than 1837 as the accession of Queen Victoria? In national-imperial context, 1815 would appear more logical as initiating the century-long dominance of a maritime empire over global mercantile networks. How different would the period look if its temporal markers were based on Asian history instead, beginning with the Macartney Embassy to China (1793) through to the Opium Wars (1839–1842; 1856–1860), the opening of Japan to the West (1853) or the Indian Rebellion (1857)? Defining Romanticism from an Asian perspective introduces time-lags in terms of reception history: there is little impact in Japan before 1853 or in China until after the May Fourth Movement in 1919. Defining Romanticism in this way also tends to imply that what comes after is inevitably lesser (though why should not the process of cultural translation open new dimensions of possibility?), and that its legacy—a word which, according to Dr Johnson (1756), refers to “a particular thing given by last will and testament”—should be regarded as an imposition, simply a covert form of ideological control. In this chapter, I would like to challenge both this successionist chronology and the diffusionist model whereby Romanticism is imported from European traditions whose residual authority remains unquestioned. I shall demonstrate their approximate simultaneity by using examples by Anna Maria, Henry Derozio, David Richardson, and Toru Dutt from India from the late eighteenth century to the end of the nineteenth century and restricting myself to

252  Steve Clark English-language writing.1 This corpus had been previously largely ignored, regarded in Britain as secondary and derivative, and by Indian criticism as supine and complicit in imperial rule. However, this body of work now increasingly seems to exemplify a trans- or trans-national poetics: a legacy, after all, is bequeathed to the future. By the early nineteenth century, Calcutta, a centre of the British East India Company, had already established itself as a major world city, whose cosmopolitan population of 600,000 generated enough wealth to support a major publishing industry (White 2013, 2–3). Its Public Library “paid close attention to the British literary scene and bought poetry with discrimination and remarkable speed after its p ­ ublication” (Gibson 2011a, 115). Selections from the British Poets (1840), a textbook compiled by David Lester Richardson (1801–1865), Head of the Hindu College, its major educational institution, is contemporary enough, as its subtitle From the Time of Chaucer to the Present Day indicates, to include selections from Alfred Tennyson and even from John Keats, “scarcely read in the first half of the century” (St Clair 2004, 422). The city, supposedly at the colonial periphery, was situated in the same cultural temporality as London and may be regarded as in advance of the metropolitan capital in many respects. James Atkinson (1759–1839), surgeon, painter, chemist, man of letters, and assistant assay master of the Calcutta mint (1813–1828), famously observed of Calcutta in “The City of Palaces: A Fragment” (1824): . . . But we here behold A prodigy of power, transcending all The conquests, and the governments, of old, An empire of the Sun, a gorgeous realm of gold. (Gibson 2011b, 73, lines 6–9) Meditation on the longevity of “empires” confirms their ultimate transience, while also compelling respect for the “power” of such “a prodigy,” a word which, Dr Johnson (1756) explains, could refer to “monster.” “For us, in half a century, India blooms / The garden of Hesperides,” but while we “May taste its sweets, yet bitters too there be / Under attractive seeming” (AP, 73, lines 10–11, 14–15). A frequent occupational hazard of service in India, whether bureaucratic, commercial or military, was early death from disease; hence, the “deathscape” quality of Atkinson’s satirical-elegiac verse (Arnold 2006, 51–52). Atkinson continued, . . . Drink again The frothy draughts, and revel joyously; From the gay round of pleasure why refrain! Thou’rt on the brink of death, luxuriate on thy bane. (AP, 73, lines 15–18)

ReOrienting Romanticism  253 The term “Brink of death” (prefigured by “Tombs”) reminds us of the importance of probated wills and inventories in attesting to intellectual genealogies (Gibson 2011a, 110–112). The “gay round of pleasure” includes extensive personal book collections, evidence of a desperate eagerness to keep up with intellectual fashions of the home culture. Simple voyaging time (up to six months) would seem to make it ­inevitable that Calcutta must lag behind London, yet the Indian port-­ metropolis benefitted from absence of direct administrative control in developing increasingly independent elites, with the innovative curriculum of the Hindu College from 1817 and vigorously free press after suspension of censorship from 1818. The role of British India as experimental laboratory for Utilitarian theory has long been recognised; the “transnational masque” (White 2013, 122) of Indian Romanticism has only recently received critical attention as well as high-quality editorial scholarship (Lokuge 2006; Chaudhuri 2008). In “Ode to an Indian Gold Coin” (1803), another colonial administrator John Leyden (1775–1811) berates his hard-earned remuneration: Slave of the dark and dirty mine! What vanity has brought thee here? How can I love to see thee shine So bright, whom I have bought so dear? (AP, 66, lines 1–4) The status of “slave” applies equally to the East India Company official, toiling at the “dark and dirty mine” of imperial commerce. After two stanzas of reminiscences on Scotland, this “vanity” is further elaborated in the final stanza: Ha! comest thou so late to mock A wanderer’s banish’d heart forlorn, Now that his frame the lightning shock Of sun-rays tipt with death has borne? From love, from friendship, country, torn, To memory’s fond regrets the prey, Vile slave, thy yellow dross I scorn! – Go mix thee with thy kindred clay! (AP, 67, lines 41–48) The final line hauntingly prefigures Leyden’s death from fever in Java: the word “dross” refers not only to the residue left after processing gold, but also to the body, discoloured “yellow,” rapidly interred in “kindred clay” to prevent rapid decomposition in a tropical climate. The “wanderer” describes himself as “prey” to “memory’s fond regrets,” perhaps for a “country” now almost forgotten; but his “banished heart” might

254  Steve Clark also possess a defiant fidelity to the qualities of “love” and “friendship” even in exile. Before embarking for Asia, John Leyden had assisted Walter Scott in the compilation of Border Ballads (1802); the latter contributed a biographical tribute to Leyden’s posthumous works (1858). Numerous other instances can be found of such a striking contemporaneity in personal networks across continents. Romanticism in India, as we shall see, is not subsequent to its emergence in Britain (and Europe) but simultaneous.

Anna Maria’s “Adieu to India” The epistolary exchange initiated by the Della Cruscan circle in the late 1780s expands to include a writer in Calcutta: the eponymous and unidentified Anna Maria (c. 1778–1852), who announces her farewell to India in “Adieu to India” (1793): OCEAN, I call thee from the sapphire Deep, Where the young Billows on their pearl-beds sleep; And the fair Beauties of the boist’rous Main, Far from the jarring Elements complain: Where in the coral Groves transparent Court, The green-hair’d Tritons and their Nymphs resort: Haste and subdue the Turbulence that laves The long-drawn Shadows of the mountain Waves: Still the proud Tempest, whose impetuous Sway, Heaves into monstrous Forms the watry Way. MARIA asks—nor thou the Boon refuse, Urg’d by the pensive melancholy Muse! Who oft to Thee, when keen Despair hath spread Her awful Terrors o’er her timid Head, Has pour’d with fervid Lay the suppliant Pray’r, And twin’d her Sorrows in thy sedgy Hair: While Thou attentive to the weeping Tale, Dispers’d her Fears, and quell’d the ruthless Gale. (AP, 58, lines 1–18) The poem opens by apostrophising Ocean as deity, whose “transparent Court” is located in subterranean “coral Groves” rather than in Atkinson’s palaces of Calcutta. The phrase “I call thee” becomes an act of necromancy to summon “boist’rous” passion within the self, as if Anna Maria herself were submerged in the “sapphire Deep,” pulsating with “young Billows” of desire. The word “Main” could refer to either sea or land (Johnson 1756), an ambiguity reinforced by the oxymoron of “mountain Waves.” Ocean acquires solidity, and the continent itself becomes oddly viscous as the “proud Tempest . . . Heaves into monstrous forms the watry Way.”

ReOrienting Romanticism  255 A “suppliant Pray’r” is then offered to “subdue the Turbulence,” but the “fervent Lay” almost incites it. Anna Maria, while asking for calm weather for safe sailing, also seems to be hoping for a “ruthless Gale” to postpone departure. The “Fears” to be “dispers’d” are as much those prompted by the prospect of return as by the dangers of the voyage. The second section moves from what is being left behind to anticipation of what might be to come: Adieu to INDIA’s fertile Plains, Where Brahma’s holy Doctrine reigns: Whose virt’ous Principles still bind The Hindoo’s meek untainted Mind: Far other Scenes my Thoughts employ, Source of Anguish, Hope and Joy; I hasten to my NATIVE SHORE, Where Art and Science blend their Lore; There Learning keeps her chosen Seat— A million Vot’ries at her Feet, Ambitious of the LAUREL BOUGH, To wind about their honor’d Brow. Yet ere I go—a grateful Pain Involves the Muse’s parting Strain; The sad Regret my Mind imbues, And fills with Grief—my last Adieus! For I have felt the subtle Praise, That cheer’d the Minstrel’s doubtful Lays; That fed the infant lambent Flame, And bade me hope for FUTURE FAME. (AP, 58–59, lines 19–38) The “plains” of India are more usually parched, though Anna Maria herself, if one of the “fair Beauties” constituting the annual ‘fishing fleet’ in search of husbands, might be marketing herself as “fertile.” It is strikingly culturally relativist to acknowledge Brahma’s “Doctrine” as “holy,” one whose “Virtuous Principles” seem valued more highly than the unmentioned Christian Bible. Are the “Far other Scenes” which engage the “Mind” as the “Source” of “Anguish, Hope and Joy” projected onto a future life in Britain or the result of recent experiences in India? The implied narrative sequence appears to be “Anguish” at the decision to leave, “Hope” for a peaceful transit and “Joy” at the prospect of eventual arrival. Anna Maria declares that “I hasten to my NATIVE SHORE,” but has India already become home? Art, Science, and Learning might all plausibly be located in Calcutta, whose “million Vot’ries” comprised an energetic scholarly community. Anna Maria’s “parting Strain” offers “last Adieus” to her own Muse made “fertile” in India, but also hints at the “grateful Pain”

256  Steve Clark of birth pangs of the new self to be delivered. “FUTURE FAME” is perhaps envisaged in Britain, but the phrase “bade me hope” locates this hope for reputation in the past tense; the “subtle Praise” lavished by a receptive audience in Calcutta is confirmed by the illustrious subscription list that has “cheer’d the Minstrel’s doubtful Lays.” In the third strophe, Anna Maria mournfully offers a final leave-­ taking to “winding Hougly’s tide”: FAREWELL!—the Mariners unfurl the Sails, Eager to meet the Pressure of the Gales; And now the lofty Vessel cleaves the Way, Dashing th’ impelling Waves with silver Spray.— Why springs my Heart with many an aching Sigh, Why stands impearl’d the Trembler on mine eye?— Alas! Fond Mem’ry weeps the Vision past, “For ever fled, like yonder sweeping Blast:” Those Hours of Bliss, those Scenes of soft Delight, Vanish like Mists before the Rays of Light; But still Remembrance holds the Objects dear, And bathes their Shadows with Regret’s pure Tear; Nor shall th’ oblivious Pow’r of TIME subdue, The painful Feelings of the last –ADIEU! (AP, 59, lines 41, 43–57) It proves impossible to return to the “NATIVE SHORE,” as the emphasis on date and location insists, “[Eden] Gardens, November 24, 1793 [in Calcutta].” The poem ends with a goodbye to goodbyes. “Adieu to India” becomes the monologue of one who has chosen to remain behind, at least in terms of authorial persona, communicating across the globe in a kind of chatroom of virtual presences. The subtitle of “Ode Inscribed to Della Crusca,” for example, impishly announces “Anna Maria has the pleasure of knowing Mr Merry still lives” (AP, 54). She has poems that deal with subjects as topical as “Stanzas to the Memory of Louis, the Unfortunate” (39–42) and “Stanzas. ­Marie Antoinette’s Complaint in Prison” (49–52). In “Adieu to India,” the line “For ever fled, like yonder sweeping Blast,” quoted from “To Anna Matilda” (Cowley et al. 1790, 1:133–136), similarly appeals to global synchronicity. Moreover, in the fourth line, the word “jarring” refers self-reflexively to the fashionable Della Cruscan style in Europe: the word “elements” has a subordinate sense of “letters” (see Johnson 1756). What Wordsworth (1984, 599) in “Preface to Lyrical Ballads” (1798) famously denounced as a “degrading thirst after outrageous stimulation” had evolved into an inclusive practice of ensemble composition, notably hospitable to women writers and permitting relative sexual openness. “Those Hours of Bliss, those Scenes of soft Delight”

ReOrienting Romanticism  257 are encapsulated in the phallic “lofty Vessel” that “cleaves thy way / Dashing th’impelling Waves with Silver Spray” (recalling “pearl-beds” in line 2), leading to the erotically charged question, “Why stands impearled the Trembler on mine Eye?” The ship which brought Anna Maria to India and inspiration is now taking her away; the sense of loss seems attached not to a specific lover but to her entire experience of the continent. Gibson (2011a, 54–55) argues that Anna Maria’s verse “heightens a sense of fleetingness” which is “experienced as an inability to create poetry in the metropolitan moment.” The “Dedication” to her volume, however, declares that “Proud of the Encomiums bestowed on the Efforts of her Muse, Anna Maria will be ever zealous to merit the applause of a polished People—to whom these Poems are most respectfully dedicated.” The “polished People” of Calcutta are in no sense regarded as inferior to the “NATIVE SHORE” to which Anna Maria is about to return. It asserts what “Ode Inscribed to Della Crusca” describes as a “Proud Token of far distant Vows” even if composed in “Regions far from laurel’d Fame” (AP, 55, lines 50, 53). The epigraph of “Adieu to India” (AP, 58) from Ovid, “Et vix sustinuit dicere ­Lingua—vale!” (“Your tongue was scarcely able to utter a last farewell”), leaves it ambiguous whether the persona adopted is that of Oenone lamenting desertion by Paris or whether the poet herself, by leaving Calcutta, is betraying her own loved one. In either case, the poem, rather than acknowledging its own transience, becomes a final defiant protest against “th’ oblivious Pow’r of TIME.” The identity of the author remains unknown. Anna Maria Jones, wife of William Jones, has been suggested, but both appear on the list of subscribers to the volume (Gibson 2011a, 55–56). The simplest explanation is that the name combines Anna Matilda with Laura Maria, the Della Cruscan pseudonyms of Hannah Cowley and Mary Robinson. The anonymity, however, acquires a curious poignancy with Anna Maria’s own subsequent disappearance from literary history. She has, however, left her own proclamation of attachment, transforming exile’s lament into anticipation of a new beginning. Anna Maria’s high reputation as first woman poet writing in English in India is confirmed by the purchase price of one gold mohur, approximately a guinea for a volume of only 70 pages. By comparison, the two volumes of Lyrical Ballads (1789), by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, were priced at 10s 6d: their copyright was valued by Cottle as nil when he sold rights to the volume to Longman (St Clair 2004, 161). Anna Maria’s cosmopolitan poetry of self-­reinvention proved more appealing to her contemporaries than a display of the “essential passions of the heart” within the “sameness and narrow circle” of a localised community (Wordsworth 1984, 597). Such a reversal of priority between British and Indian Romanticism,

258  Steve Clark as we shall see shortly, exits also in the relation of John Keats and Henry Derozio.

“Pigmented Keats” or “White Derozio”? In the two decades following Keats’s death, his work was arguably better known in India through its inclusion in Richardson’s Selections from the British Poets (1840). This includes the entire “Eve of St Agnes” and sonnets “Solitude,” “On first looking into Chapman’s Homer,” and “The Grasshopper and the Cricket”; its biographical notes also discuss “Endymion” and “Hyperion.” The precociously gifted Eurasian Derozio (1809–1831), frequently described as the “Keats of Anglo-Indian literature” (Anthony 1969, 61), would undoubtedly have been familiar with a wide range of his poetry as Richardson’s pupil, then lecturer-colleague at Hindu College. Keats’s “Bright Star,” however, could not have been known by Derozio; the sonnet was probably composed between October and November 1819, but its first appearance in print was in Plymouth and Devonport Weekly Journal on 27 September 1838. Over a decade before “Bright Star” was published in 1838, Derozio (who died in 1831) published “To the Dog Star” in April 1827: How the Chaldean watched thee, brightest star! Brightest, and loveliest in the vault of heaven! There dost thou shine, and shine like Hope afar; And at the soft, sweet, silent hour of even, While airy spirits breathing fragrance fly, And fan my temples with their odorous wings, Thy trembling light to watch and worship, I Go forth;—this to my heart such rapture brings, As never may be told!—thy lovely light Eternal Sirius, calls one dear to mind; For Oh! her form was beautiful and bright, And, like thy ray, her soul was most refined, And made for tenderness, and purest love;— Then smile on her, bright star, smile sweetly from above. (Derozio 1827, 64–65) The “Chaldean” is invoked as originator of astronomy, a body of knowledge which for Derozio would be close to the ancient achievements of Indian science. “Dog star” may sound bathetic, but is the nearest “lovely light,” more familiar under the name of Sirius; as India is in the northern hemisphere, the view of the constellations would be shared by both poets. There is a peculiar sense of rays crossing “space” taking thousands of years crossing “afar” through the “vault of heaven,” a Ptolemaic sphere

ReOrienting Romanticism  259 rather than Newtonian sensorium. “Airy spirits” fly upon “breathing fragrance”: the verb could also be read as “flee from,” emerging from a kind of originary black hole from which light is trying to escape. The word “temples,” referring to the poet’s forehead, also links to Chaldean scientific laboratories, as sacred places in which to “watch and worship” in order to understand the universe through Deistic prayer. The enjambment issues an endless promise to “Go forth” (and multiply?) in “rapture,” both intense ecstasy and literal movement, towards “one dear” whose “form was beautiful and bright.” Given that, in publication history, “To the Dog Star” precedes “Bright Star,” why is Derozio regarded as a “pigmented Keats” (Dover 1937, 144), rather than Keats as a white Derozio? Why is one so central to the Western canon and the other virtually unknown outside India? For all the resonance of Keats’ opening lines, Bright star! Would I were steadfast as thou art— Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night (Keats 1970, 737, lines 1–2) Sirius shines not in “lone splendour” but as part of the group Canis Major; galaxies are not particularly “steadfast.” The star is “watching” the universe below “with eternal lids apart” (line 3) verging on solecism (unlike Derozio’s defensible “eternal Sirius”); would a stellar gaze have eyeballs? It is difficult to see how “nature’s patient, sleepless eremite” can simultaneously engage in a “priestlike task” (lines 4–5). The “pure ablution” performed by “moving waters” seems a ceremonial washing of the shores conceived as body; the “new soft-fallen mask / Of snow” becomes faintly necrophiliac (lines 5–8). The term “tender-taken breath” (line 13) has parallels in Derozio in “tenderness and purest love” and “breathing fragrance”; “sweet unrest” (line 12) recalls “smile sweetly from above”; “still unchangeable” (line 9) parallels “so live ever”; and there is similar slightly cloying use of alliteration: “Star . . . shine . . . Soft . . . sweet . . . silent”; “fly . . . fan . . . forth”; “wings . . . Watch . . . worship.” The phrase “swoon to death” (line 14) in the closing line of Keats’s “Bright Star” invites comparison with his own famous fragment, “This living hand, now warm and capable” (Keats 1970, 700–701, line 1), whose “earnest grasping” (line 2) is pulling the reader towards the grave. The threat is made to “haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights” with the prospect of vampiric feasting, “So in my veins red life might stream again” (lines 4, 6). “[T]hine own heart” must be drained “dry of blood” (line 5), before entering the “icy silence of the tomb” (line 3) to allow the narrator to return. Mortality becomes a zero sum game. No collective project is envisaged: to be “conscience-calmed” (line 7) is to be annihilated. In contrast, Derozio’s “The Harp of India” insists upon social and political continuity, reaching back to “many a hand more

260  Steve Clark worthy far than mine” (Derozio 1827, 1, line 9) and forwards to future generations: Those hands are cold – but if thy notes divine May be by mortal wakened once again, Harp of my country, let me strike thy strain! (1, lines 12–14) India remains a purely hypothetical “country,” yet is summoned into being through the proleptic gesture of clasping forwards. Daniel White (2013, 122) comments that reading Derozio “can sometimes feel like entering an echo chamber in which the Romantic canon reverberates.” It should, however, be stressed that the “Romantic canon” had no tangible existence in the 1840s except as in often derogatory remarks on Lake poets or Cockney or Satanic Schools. Yet in the Calcutta and Utturpara library catalogues, “the number of early or first editions of British poets is moreover astonishing,” constituting “almost the entirety of the British romantic canon” (Gibson 2011a, 113–114). In  ­Derozio, as in Anna Maria, Romanticism is arguably defined well before it was visible as a distinctive movement in Britain itself. This situation will be more evident when we consider Richardson’s and Dutt’s contribution to this process in the following section.

Revising the Precursor in David Richardson and Toru Dutt Richardson’s Selections was compiled specifically at Thomas Babington Macaulay’s request to reconstitute Indian education in the English language. As such, it obviously invites scepticism, if not dismissal, as one of the Masks of Conquest (Viswanathan 2015). Yet it is at the very least remarkable for the way in which Richardson “could place his British Indian authors without apology or even comment within a compendium of the canonical British poets” (Stafford 2016, 31). A continuous co-­ presence is established between the two traditions. This “compendium” effect is evident in how two of Richardson’s own sonnets below (1836) revise Wordsworth’s “Composed on Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802.” The latter famously opens: Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would he be of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: (Wordsworth 1984, 285, lines 1–3) In the course of 14 lines, the viewpoint expands over the entire “Earth” to culminate in a vision that “all that mighty heart is lying still!”

ReOrienting Romanticism  261 (line 14). “This City” becomes a global hub constituted by “Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples,” but also so devoid of human presence that “the very houses seem asleep” (lines 4, 6, 13). A metropolis of over a million people is defined in terms of “fields” and “sky” (line 7); “The river glideth at his own sweet will” (line 12), but with no sign of docks, boats, bridges, or raucous clamour of commerce (the London markets, starting around 2.00am, would already have been busy for hours). Richardson writes two sonnets directly in response to Wordsworth. In “London, in the Morning,” the scene is reconstituted thus: The morning wakes, and through the misty air In sickly radiance struggles—like the dream Of sorrow-shrouded hope. O’er Thames’ dull stream, Whose sluggish waves a wealthy burden bear From every port and clime, the pallid glare Of early sunlight spreads. The long streets seem, Unpeopled now, but soon each path shall teem With hurried feet and visages of care; And eager throngs shall meet where dusky marts Resound like ocean-caverns with the din Of toil and strife and agony and sin Traders’ busy Babel! Ah! How many hearts By lust of gold to thy dim temples brought In happier hours have scorned the prize they sought! (AP, 152) Instead of displaying pristine “beauty” as in Wordsworth, the morning simply “wakes”; rather than Wordsworth’s “smokeless” atmosphere (line 8), Richardson’s London has “misty air”; instead of luminous clarity, “in sickly radiance . . . The pallid glare / Of early sunlight spreads.” “The dream / Of sorrow-shrouded hope” suggests the laying out of a “silent, bare” corpse rather than the bridal attire of the lines by Wordsworth: “The City now doth like a garment wear / The beauty of the morning” (Wordsworth 1984, 285, lines 4–5). The epithet “Dull” is transferred from “soul” in Wordsworth to “Thames’ dull stream” (whose “burden” would include the city’s untreated sewage) in ­R ichardson. If “The long streets seem / Unpeopled now,” it is only a momentary illusion (rather than Wordsworth’s “calm so deep” [line 11]) because “soon each path shall teem / With hurried feet and v­ isages of care.” “Dusky” suggests dark-skinned; “eager throngs” conjure up sinister Oriental multitudes, as in De Quincey (2000, 70–71); “ocean-­ caverns” suggest trading networks whose “marts” span “every port and clime.” Wordsworth’s “temples” become in Richardson shrines to “lust of gold.” The former sublimates  imperial infra-­structure into vacant

262  Steve Clark “splendour,” whereas the latter ruefully acquiesces in the necessary “din” of “toil and strife.” Another topographic sonnet by Richardson, “View of Calcutta,” contains within itself both the preceding visions of London: Here Passion’s restless eye and spirit rude May get no kindred images of power To fear and wonder ministrant. (AP, 153, lines 1–3) “Restless eye and spirit rude” encapsulates the imperial gaze of “Passion,” whether motivated by duty or greed or even desire (begetting mixed-race children with native concubines). The phrase “Kindred images of power” neatly combines Leyden’s “kindred clay” and Atkinson’s “prodigy of power,” both “ministrant” functionaries of the East India Company in Johnson’s (1756) sense of “attendant; acting at command.” This assertive energy is immediately negated by the insistence on what is absent from the scene: . . . No tower Time-struck and tenantless, here seems to brood, In the dread majesty of solitude, O’er human pride departed—no rocks lower O’er ravenous billows—no vast hollow wood Rings with the lion’s thunder—no dark bower The crouching tiger haunts—no gloomy cave Glitters with savage eyes! (AP, 153, lines 3–10) Wordsworth’s “sight so touching in its majesty” becomes “dread majesty of solitude,” negatively defined through “No Tower . . . No rocks . . . no vast hollow wood . . . no dark bower . . . no gloomy cave.” “Tower,” recalling the hubristic “Traders’ busy Babel” in “London, in the Morning,” suggests the magnificent ruins of Mughal architecture, “Time-struck and tenantless,” with an apparently redundant listing of what is not actually present. This somewhat gothic penumbra is then dispersed in favour of a celebration of mercantile empire: . . . But all the scene Is calm and cheerful. At the mild command Of Britain’s sons, the skilful and the brave, Fair Palace-structures decorate the land And proud ships float on Hooghly’s breast serene. (AP, 153, lines 10–14)

ReOrienting Romanticism  263 This “scene” of prosperity appears “calm and cheerful,” yet the “Palace-­ structures” will eventually be as desolate as Babel’s “Tower,” and the “proud ships” evacuate “Britain’s sons” in a mass exodus, prefigured in “human pride departed.” The “mild command” of imperial rule is not entirely sanitised. “The crouching Tiger . . . with savage eyes” alludes to the iconography of Tipu Sultan, feared opponent in the Mysore wars of the late eighteenth century (Jasanoff 2006). Gibson (2011a, 134–135), however, is surely right to emphasise the “unexpected reversal” whereby London and Calcutta acquire a kind of uncanny simultaneity, mutually defining each other from opposite sides of the globe. A similar telescoping occurs in Toru Dutt (1856–1877), the first Indian woman to write poetry in English, who, like Derozio, was to die tragically young at 21, of tuberculosis. Her poem “Our Casuarina Tree” (1882) (AP, 302–304) transposes European conventions of landscape lyric onto a specifically Indian setting but also self-reflexively meditates on its broader relationship with the British Romantic legacy (though Dutt also translated French poetry and composed a novel in that language). The casuarina’s Bangla name, belatio jhau, foreign tamarisk, implies that it is already an import and as such a potential interloper (Gibson 2011a, 206). The word “Our” in the title may refer to the close bond between herself and her father; to her other writer-relatives, contributors to The Dutt Family Album (1870); or, to an Indian community yet to come into being (from which, as Christan converts, the Dutts would be largely excluded). The word “Tree” also exemplifies a literary tradition, in which, as with Richardson and Wordsworth, there seems a near total immersion. The elaborately ornate stanzas employed in “Our Casuarina Tree” create the impression that the poem is aspiring to the status of a lost Keatsian ode: Like a huge Python, winding round and round The rugged trunk, indented deep with scars Up to its very summit near the stars, A creeper climbs, in whose embraces bound No other tree could live. (AP, 302, lines 1–5) Does the Romantic tradition, like the “huge Python” of the opening line, engorge and devour its “creeper” successor, or is it transformed through its altered site of enunciation? The “rugged trunk” seems so dominant that there is no room for any other life in its shadow: “lacking a life of its own, Indian Romanticism was a graft onto the already hybrid trunk of British colonialism” (Aravamudan 2006, 64). Dutt, however, takes up the challenge: . . . But gallantly The giant wears the scarf, and flowers are hung

264  Steve Clark In crimson clusters all the boughs among. Whereon all day are gathered bird and bee; And oft at nights the garden overflows With one sweet song that seems to have no close, Sung darkling from our tree, while men repose. (AP, 302, lines 5–11) While there is an oddly playful aside, “gallantly / the giant wears the scarf,” anticipating later meditations on Romantic tradition by Wallace Stevens in, say, “The Plot against the Giant” (1975, 6–7). Reversing the Miltonic resonances of snake, tree of life, temptation and expulsion, “the garden overflows.” Whereas the speaker of “Ode to a Nightingale” (Keats 1970, 523–538) declares, “I cannot see what flowers are at my feet, / Nor what soft incense hangs upon the boughs,” so “Darkling, I listen” (lines 41–42, 51); in Dutt, the “crimson clusters” are vividly abundant in daylight, accompanied by “one sweet song that seems to have no close.” The second stanza opens up the vista of Dutt’s Indian surroundings: When first my casement is wide open thrown At dawn, my eyes delighted on it rest; Sometimes, and most in winter,—on its crest A grey baboon sits statue-like alone Watching the sunrise; while on lower boughs His puny offspring leap about and play; And far and near kokilas hail the day; And to their pastures wend our sleepy cows; And in the shadow, on the broad tank cast By that hoar tree, so beautiful and vast, The water-lilies spring, like snow enmassed. (AP, 303, lines 12–22) Whereas in “Ode to a Nightingale” Keats’s “Charmed magic casements” are “opening” onto “fairy lands forlorn” (lines 69–70), Dutt’s “casement” is “wide open thrown” to reveal familiar, beloved “pastures.” Also, the line “A grey baboon sits statue-like alone” recalls the “grey-haired Saturn, quiet as a stone” in Keats’s Hyperion (1970, 396, Book I, line 4); in Dutt, its supposedly “puny offspring leap about and play.” The setting is “dawn” when “kokilas hail the day” in a promise of renewal, while “in the shadow” of that “hoar tree,” the “water-lilies spring.” The tree is bound up with associations of the “sweet companions” of youth, mourned “till the hot tears blind mine eyes”: What is the dirge-like murmur that I hear Like the sea breaking on a shingle-beach?

ReOrienting Romanticism  265 It is the tree’s lament, an eerie speech, That haply to the unknown land may reach. (AP, 303, lines 30–33) The “dirge-like murmur” endows “The tree’s lament” with “an eerie speech” resonating in “the unknown land,” beyond mortality but also perhaps in a far-off and indifferent Europe. “That wail far, far away / In distant lands” (lines 35–36) evokes the distinctive noise made by the wind in the casuarina, and a cry of grief for the recently dead. The noise is both heard in “distant lands” and uttered there, in a kind of telepathic transmission, that render both sites part of “my own loved native clime” (line 44). In the final stanza of “Our Casuarina Tree,” this sound is transformed into a threnody for lost loved ones: “Who now in blessed sleep, for aye, repose, / Dearer than life to me, alas! were they!” (AP, 303–304, lines 45–46). The “Tree” is beloved both for the “beloved” memories that it evokes, and for the Romantic tradition that it embodies: “Therefore I fain would consecrate a lay / Unto thy honour” (AP, 303–304, lines 48–51). This sacred “lay,” both lyric song and death-bed, is immediately challenged by personifications directly cited from Wordsworth’s “YewTrees” (1803): Mayst thou be numbered when my days are done With deathless trees—like those in Borrowdale, Under whose awful branches lingered pale “Fear, trembling Hope, and Death, the skeleton, And Time the shadow”; and though weak the verse That would thy beauty fain, oh fain rehearse, May Love defend thee from Oblivion’s curse. (AP, 304, lines 49–55) The word “Deathless” suggest not immortality, but the roots of the yewtree traditionally feeding off the graves of the newly buried, reaching out its “awful branches” to smother and asphyxiate. In Wordsworth, . . . ghostly Shapes May meet at noontide: Fear and trembling Hope, Silence and Foresight, Death the Skeleton And Time the Shadow,—there to celebrate As in a natural temple scatter’d o’er With altars undisturb’d of mossy stone, United worship; . . . . (1984, 335, lines 25–31) The “altars” of this “natural temple” suggest sacrifice of a “trembling” victim, whose “Fear” is succeeded by momentary “trembling Hope,”

266  Steve Clark then “Silence.” In Wordsworth, “Foresight” can only bleakly envision “Death the Skeleton / And Time the Shadow,” presences notably omitted in “Our Casuarina Tree.” As with Anna Maria’s resistance to the “oblivious Pow’r of TIME,” the line “May Love defend thee from Oblivion’s curse” is both as a gesture of remembrance to those Dutt herself has lost and an appeal to future generations to endow her life and work with permanent significance. Jane Stafford (2016, 53), however, finds in this poem only a “generalized frame of Romantic loss and regret” of a native author who “filters a realist Indian locale through a range of English literary references.” This is indicative of a more general problem of how to evaluate writers in this tradition, an issue which I will address in my final section.

Future Legacies of Indian Romanticism Reading any of these poets—Anna Maria, Derozio, Richardson, or Dutt—perhaps produce a sense of lingering unease. What kind of claim can be made for the quality of their writing, and can they seriously be expected to displace the familiar canon? What would have to be discarded to make room for them? Jane Stafford (2016) acknowledges that as the native author does “as much writing into or with as writing back,” the reductive antithesis between “informants and collaborators” and “anticipators of postcolonial resistance” should be abandoned (8–9). Yet this does not help in evaluating specific texts, as she wonders whether Dutt’s “Our Casuarina Tree” should be read as “the actions of an inept and derivative provincial poet or a conscious entanglement of a global literary landscape and colonial place?” (53). The so-called “conscious entanglement” hardly counterbalances the tersely dismissive “inept and derivative.” Throughout Richardson’s anthology, Stafford finds “the English models are adapted in a manner that verges on the plagiaristic” (27). Yet why should “pieces about the sun sinking on the Ganges” (26) be any more “wearying” than views of Tintern Abbey or Mont Blanc? How can “the number of poems about the voyage to India” be “disproportionate,” for a nearly universal rite of passage whose duration gave ample time for composition (27)? Far from disparagement of “the vulgarity” of Indian vegetation (28), botanical erudition is frequently displayed, most notably by William Jones (Franklin 2011, 246–250). The Anglo-Indian tradition is described as “a lost literature” (28), implicitly deservedly so; therefore, “Who will now own these writers?” (28, 32). One counter-argument would be that they inhabit such a polyglot and multilingual milieu that it is difficult for Anglophone readers to determine how Derozio adapts Persian tropes or Dutt borrows from Sanskrit. Furthermore, plagiarism implies a process of complex reworking, and the intrinsic value of “original” work is itself a concept that only introduced

ReOrienting Romanticism  267 by Romanticism. Terms such as allusion, influence, and revision seem inadequate, as do citation, intertextuality, and mimicry. ­Perhaps most appropriate is Harold Bloom’s trope of aprophrades (1973), where a successor poet paradoxically seems to precede the earlier writer. “Provincial Calcutta” stands comparison with “literary London,” as Stafford (2016) herself acknowledges, in its “confident energy in both the editorial voice and the poems themselves” and the “wildly proliferating literary activity within a close community of readers and writers” (27–28). She somewhat grudgingly concedes, “The use by both Richardson’s British-­I ndians and the Dutts of the Romantic canon is thus not derivative or imitative—its very clumsiness is a clear signal of joint membership in a common enterprise that transcends nationalisms” (33). This poetry, far from marred by “clumsiness,” is formally superior to much of the other indigenous writing cited by Stafford. Indeed, the level of education, international awareness, and cultural visibility of these writers arguably makes the entire category of “native author” problematic. The “membership in a common enterprise” includes British, Eurasian, and Indian writers who are often generously supportive of each other. “Transcend[ing] nationalism” is perhaps less important than overcoming other forms of cultural differentiation; it is impossible to construct a narrative that does not include multiple racial, ethnic, and linguistic groups. Whereas Priyamvada Gopal’s The Indian English Novel (2009) simply excludes from consideration Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, Gibson has no hesitation in including in her anthology “Recessional” by this ­Bombay-born writer whose first language was Hindi (AP, 341–342). Binyon (1926, 17–18) shrewdly remarks, “with English people I fancy the orientalism of a Flecker or Lafcadio Hearn finds much readier sympathy than the romantic admiration of English that inspired Manmohan Ghose”; the full force of that “romantic admiration” should be acknowledged rather than positing an ironic or subversive relationship. If, as Stafford (2016) contends, “however limited and derivative their means of expression, these poems are registrations of encounters with the new” (33), how best can that innovation be defined? White (2013) argues that we need literary studies that do not view India primarily through the lens of British Orientalist representations, seeing India essentially as an abstraction, a reflection, and a projection of British imaginations. For that perspective . . . is a legacy of a specific Romantic ideology of imperial rule, born in and of the period itself. (1–2) The term “legacy” here suggests burden rather than enriching inheritance. Yet might there not be positive aspects of that “specific Romantic

268  Steve Clark ideology,” directed towards a cosmopolitan future, in which such binaries as coloniser-colonised, modern-primitive, and even West-East appear increasingly obsolescent. To return to one of my initial points: what might a Romanticism look like when defined in terms of Asian chronology. It is now a well-­ established point that the encounter with Indian traditions may be seen as an inaugural moment in European Romanticism. However, one might argue that this vogue for exotic cosmology was still viewed through White’s “lens of British Orientalist representations.” I would close on a slightly different point. In an Indian context, the legacy of Romanticism is not bequeathed from texts with chronological priority or geographical dominance but located in a possible future. In the spirit of Gandhi’s apocryphal quip, “What do I think of Western Civilisation? I think it would be a very good idea,” perhaps the legacy is yet to come.

Note 1 In this, I broadly follow Mary Ellis Gibson (2011b), Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India (AP), to whose skill as anthologist and commentator I am deeply indebted.

References Anna Maria. 1793. The Poems of Anna Maria. Calcutta: Thomson & Ferris. Anthony, Frank. 1969. Britain’s Betrayal in India: The Story of the Anglo-­ Indian Community. Bombay: Allied Publishers. Aravamudan, Srinivas. 2006. Guru English: South Asian Religion in a Cosmopolitan Language. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Arnold, David. 2006. The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape and Science, 1800–1856. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press. Atkinson, James. 1824. The City of Palaces; A Fragment, and Other Poems. Calcutta: Government Gazette Press. Binyon, Laurence. 1926. “Introduction.” In Songs of Love and Death, edited by Laurence Binyon, 7–23. Oxford: Blackwell. Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. New York: Oxford University Press. Chaudhuri, Rosinka, ed. 2008. Derozio, Poet of India: The Definitive Edition. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Cowley, Hannah et al. 1790. British Album, Containing the Poems of Della Crusca etc. 2 vols. London: J. Bell. De Quincey, Thomas. 2000. Confessions of an English Opium-Easter, 1821– 1856. In The Works of Thomas De Quincey, vol. 2, edited by Grevel Lindop. London: Pickering & Chatto. Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian. 1827. The Poems by H.L.V. Derozio. Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press. Dover, Cedric. 1937. Half-Caste. London: Martin Secker & Warburg.

ReOrienting Romanticism  269 Dutt, Govin Chundee et al. 1870. The Dutt Family Album. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Dutt, Toru. 1876. A Sheaf Gleaned in French Fields. Bhowanipore: Saptahik Sambad Press. ———. 1882. Ancient Ballads and Legends of Hindustan. London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co. Frank, Andre Gunder. 1998. ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asian Age. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Franklin, Michael J. 2011. ‘Orientalist Jones’: Sir William Jones, Poet, Lawyer and Linguist, 1746–1794. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gibson, Mary Ellis. 2011a. Indian Angles: English Verse in Colonial India from Jones to Tagore. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. ———. 2011b. Anglophone Poetry in Colonial India, 1780–1913: A Critical Anthology. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Gopal, Priyamvada. 2009. The Indian English Novel: Nation, History and Narration. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jasanoff, Maya. 2006. Empire’s Edge: Lives, Culture and Conquest in the East, 1750–1850. New York: Vintage, 2006. Johnson, Samuel. 1756. A Dictionary of the English Language. 2 vols. London: J. Knapton. Keats, John. 1970. The Poems of John Keats. Edited by Miriam Allott. London: Longman. Leyden, John. 1858. Poems and Ballads: with a Memoir of the Author by Sir Walter Scott. Kelso, Scotland: J. and J.H. Rutherford. Lokugé, Chandani, ed. 2006. Toru Dutt: Collected Prose and Poetry. New Delhi: Oxford University Press. Richardson, David Lester. 1836. Literary Leaves; or Prose and Verse. Calcutta: Samuel Smith. ———. 1840. Selections from the British Poets, from the Times of Chaucer to the Present Day. Calcutta: Baptist Mission Press. St Clair, William. 2004. The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stafford, Jane. 2016. Colonial Literature and the Native Author: Indigeneity and Empire. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Stevens, Wallace. 1975. The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens. New York: Knopf. Viswanathan, Gauri. 2015. Masks of Conquest: Literary Study and British Rule in India. 2nd ed. New York: Columbia University Press. White, Daniel. 2013. From Little London to Little Bengal: Religion, Print, and Modernity in Early British India, 1793–1835. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Wordsworth, William. 1984. William Wordsworth. Edited by Stephen Gill. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

14 Grafting German Romanticism onto the Chinese Revolution Goethe, Guo Morou, and the Pursuit of Self-Transcendence Johannes D. Kaminski In China, the advent of Romanticism coincided with the turbulent period following the fall of the Qing dynasty (1644–1912). In the wake of the May Fourth Movement in 1919, many literary circles emerged and sought to reshape the artistic, social, and political landscapes of China by supplanting the Confucian tradition with Western ideologies. As Western liberalism, democracy, and science were promoted to transform imperial China into a modern nation state, aestheticism and the philosophy of l’art pour l’art left their mark on the literary production of the time. Amongst these innovative literary circles, the Creation Society (創造社), founded in Tokyo in 1921 by young scholars such as Gou ­Morou (1892–1978) and Yu Dafu, stands out as a hotbed of radical ideas and thus deserves our special attention. In the 1920s, Gou translated into Chinese many English and German Romantic masterpieces, notably Johann Wolfgang Goethe’s epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther (The Sorrows of Young Werther, 1774) and the first part of his play Faust. Eine Tragödie (Faust: A Tragedy, 1808). The Society’s import of European Romanticism vouched for a radical revaluation of the human subject which Confucianism previously had reduced to mere passivity. Emphasising the power of the individual to transform external reality, the Society promoted a “potent admixture of nineteenth-­century German Romantic discourse and a more amorphous fin-de-siècle neo-­ Romanticism that could range from aestheticism to proto-­socialism” (Tang and Hockx 2008, 108). This generous cross-pollination of different ideological strands, confusing as it may appear, allowed Chinese intellectuals, notably Romantics, to imagine the continuity between ­European cultural artefacts and modernity in astonishing ways. In 1922, Guo published the first Chinese translation of Goethe’s epistolary novel Die Leiden des jungen Werther. Since Werther’s letters abound with poetic descriptions of nature, ecstatic invocations of his beloved, and constant mood vacillation between narcissism and self-contempt, the translation became a milestone in the import of

German Romanticism and the Chinese Revolution  271 Western cultural motifs into modern China, above all the notion of the creative genius. Similarly, Guo’s early poetry and the works of his collaborators are populated by melancholic wanderers, suicidal loners, and rebellious outcasts. To conceive of his works as a by-product of Western Romanticism, however, would over-simplify the complex process involved in transplanting cultural tropes. As the tragic victim of the conflict between free love and arranged marriage as well as the figurehead of artistic self-expression, Werther indeed lends himself to transplantation into societies in the midst of negotiating cultural clashes. In late eighteenth-century Germany, the sentimental protagonist became an emblem of bourgeois cultural ascendance over aristocratic models. Likewise, Werther’s arrival in China coincided with a socio-historical rupture when Confucianism as a dominant intellectual force was increasingly replaced by a Western-inspired emphasis on subjectivity and individualism as the core values of the modern nation state. While, as conventional wisdom has it, Chinese modernity radically broke away from the norms established during the feudal era, there exist important continuities between feudal and modern ideologies. Western imports, as we will see, in fact also reiterate and reinforce classical notions, thus setting in motion a complex transcultural process. Rather than representing a seamless dialectical process, the import of Werther, a Romantic trope par excellence, did not sweep away local concepts of subjectivity in their entirety. Instead, Werther’s oscillation between passionate outbursts and weltschmerz was adapted by Guo to complement the Daoist concept of creativity and to frame ancient and contemporary discussions of self-transcendence in China. In this chapter, I first discuss Werther’s place in European Romanticism and the intellectual and political climate in China which facilitated the novel’s successful appropriation in the country. I draw on Jacques Derrida’s concept of “grafting” to explain the semantic process of transferring a cultural trope from one context to another. I then analyse Guo’s translation of Werther and his forced reinterpretation of pantheism, as evinced by his preface to the translation. I explore the flexibility of the author’s thought through references to his own poetic production and, finally, to one of his most outrageous revolutionary works, an homage to the guillotine—the very symbol of the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution—as a cleansing force of society. In Guo’s biography, the “potent admixture” of Romanticisms facilitates his shockingly smooth transition from aestheticism to the totalitarian ideology of the Chinese Communist Party.

Grafting Romanticism While wertherisme radiated across Europe during the late eighteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, it is difficult to find an overarching

272  Johannes D. Kaminski definition of Romanticism beyond a national scope. For instance, the British and French Romantics considered Goethe a fellow Romantic, whereas Goethe thought of himself as the prime antagonist against the Romantic school. In a poignant and polemical manner, he postulated: “I call the classical healthy and the Romantic sick” (quoted in Richards 2002, 3). Despite the fact that global Werther readers tend to identify the author with the protagonist, Goethe’s anti-Romantic sentiment had little influence on the figure’s afterlife. As Romantic literature shows, the enthusiastic reception of wertherisme can take on different forms of representation. Some texts like Charlotte Smith’s Emmeline (1788), for example, embrace intertextual references when literary characters compulsively read Goethe’s novel. Also, Ugo Foscolo’s Ultime lettere di Jacopo Ortis (The Last Letters of Jacopo Ortis, 1802) stylistically emulates Wertherian writing while allowing the protagonist’s passion to aim for a new, nationalist target: the patriotic awakening of Italy. Moreover, two treatises show that 50 years after the publication of Werther, Werther had become an exemplary man across Europe: while Stendhal’s De l’amour (On Love, 1822) sets his deep-felt amour passion apart from Don Juan’s superficial amour propre, Søren Kierkegaard’s Enten–Eller (Either/Or, 1843) addresses his problematic rejection of moral responsibility. Beyond Goethe’s polemical simplification, the term “Romantic” has been a complex of signifiers which lend themselves to clichés. Nowadays, for example, critics still relate Romanticism to a set of recurring tropes: “landscape, feeling (predominantly love), or eccentric character” (Seyhan 2009, 1). These three tropes, albeit prominent in Romantic literature and art, can be transplanted into many cultural contexts while hardly providing any clue for the specific concerns which unite different strands of Romanticism across the globe and across the ages. On a more abstract level, however, this term can be related to creative outputs during periods of socio-political and cultural changes. Stuart Curran (2010) conceives of the term as a discursive membrane that “reflects the tensions that attend and often empower its creation” (xii). Akin to Romanticism at large, Werther also acts as a discursive membrane that represents a state of in-betweenness, caught up between the ages and antagonistic value systems. This state not only aided his popularity across Europe during the Romantic period, but also facilitated his easy absorption into modern China. Ignoring Goethe’s stance against Romanticism, the members of the Creation Society emphatically read his works and perceived themselves as “Romantics.” To be precise, they called themselves langman zhuyizhe (浪漫主義者), a term adopted from the Japanese phonetic translation rōman (浪漫). Such a neologism exactly brings into relief the alterity of this foreign term in modern China when traditional values were increasingly regarded as something dispensable and replaceable by something new

German Romanticism and the Chinese Revolution  273 and better. Thus far, scholars have presented two conflicting narratives to explain the creative explosion that took place in Chinese letters between 1918 and 1925. On the one hand, there is the notion that this period inaugurated a thorough rupture with the past. Jaroslav Průžek (1980), for example, considers it “natural that the birth of a modern, free and self-determining individual was possible only at the price of shattering and discarding these traditional views and customs and the whole social structure on which they were based” (2). On the other hand, much attention has been devoted in recent years to the idea of continuity. David Der-wei Wang (2015) argues against “the common wisdom that the May Fourth era was a period of total antitraditionalism” (xv). For Wang, the kernels of modernism can already be found in late Qing dynasty letters. While it is tempting to subscribe to either of the narratives, the problem with wertherisme in China is that it fits neither. Although, undoubtedly, foreign literature played an immensely important role in fashioning Chinese Romanticism, Goethe’s Werther, I suggest, echoed and reinforced concepts that had already existed as prototypes in Chinese intellectual and cultural history. For example, equipped with the notion of creativity in the Zhuangzi, Chinese readers would not find Werther’s longing for ecstasy unfamiliar or foreign in the first place, a factor that was crucial to the favourable reception of the novel in China. The Werther case will, after all, illustrate that a literary text, once transplanted into a different cultural setting, could facilitate surprising interpretations. Such lapses in interpretation often have an anecdotal quality, as exemplified by I. A. Richard’s recollections about teaching English literature at Tsinghua University, Beijing, in the 1930s. Richards was struck by the students’ (mis)reading of Thomas Hardy’s novel Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891): they had little sympathy for the hanged heroine because she was for them an unfilial daughter in the Confucian sense and deserved her punishment (Koeneke 2004, 66). Such unintended readings demonstrate that cultural distance results in semantic generosity. One often finds the term “misrepresentation” used in such cases of transcultural transfer (as seen in Ou Li’s chapter in the present volume). Yet the teleological trajectory of this approach implies the existence of a “truth” about Hardy’s work. Once this truth is identified in authorial intentions or a belated reconstruction thereof, the critic can put his or her finger on the reader’s mistake. Irrespective of the merits of this approach, though, “misunderstanding” has its own merits, as it does not act as a mere doubling of existing reading habits. In order to valorise the surprising turns and twists of the afterlife of Goethe’s Werther, Jacques Derrida’s concept of “grafting” can help us to conceptualise better the hidden logic behind eccentric readings. In Signature Event Context, Derrida (1988) addresses the problem of textual belatedness by arguing that given the absence of both the original sender

274  Johannes D. Kaminski and receiver, a written sign does not exhaust itself in the moment of its creation, but defies the limitations of space and time. A written sign can always be detached from the chain in which it is inserted or given without causing it to lose all possibility of functioning, if not all possibility of “communicating,” precisely. One can perhaps come to recognize other possibilities in it by inscribing it or grafting it onto other chains. No context can entirely enclose it. (9) Writing, so to speak, is not a means of transferring identical meaning, but the continuous production of variants. In Richard’s episode, grafting shows how the students deliberately apply Confucian values to a text in which Hardy intends to denounce the power structure of Victorian society. Seen in this light, Tess’s condemnation outmanoeuvres the manipulation which the text intends to set in motion—if one goes by canonical interpretations. In refusing to sympathise with the heroine, the students detach the text from an established chain of signification. Furthermore, they answer to a narrative device that is present in the text itself: the narrator’s discretion in not recounting Tess’s rape. As a consequence, there exists some ambivalence concerning the question whether the heroine allows herself to be seduced (DeVine 2005, 99). In other words, once we strip a text of its canonised reception history, unexpected reference systems step in and modify its meaning. While the Confucian interpretation of Tess is limited to the Tsinghua context, Guo’s Chinese translation of Werther was so widely read amongst the Chinese intelligentsia as to have become an important page in the history of Chinese modernity.

Guo’s Notion of Self-Transcendence Guo’s reading of Werther focusses on a small number of episodes which he regards as epitomic of the novel as a whole and, of course, of the author’s philosophy of life. First and foremost, in one specific letter, the protagonist lays out his vision of pantheistic ecstasy. After arriving in a small village, he makes new acquaintances and finds himself greatly rewarded for his gentle, uncynical attitude towards the countryside and its people. Surrounded by nature and hypnotised by his own reveries, he renders his ecstasy in a letter dated 10 May: When the lovely valley teems with mist around me, and the high sun strikes the impenetrable foliage of my trees, and but a few rays steal into the inner sanctuary, I lie in the tall grass by the trickling stream and notice a thousand familiar things; when I hear the humming of the little world among the stalks, and am near the countless indescribable forms of the worms and insects, then I feel the presence of the

German Romanticism and the Chinese Revolution  275 Almighty Who created us in His own image, and the breath of that universal love which sustains us, as we float in an eternity of bliss; . . . . (Goethe 1998, 6) In his Chinese translation, Guo maintains the long-winded syntactic structure of the original: 當那秀美的山谷在我周圍蒸騰，杲杲的太陽照在濃蔭沒破的森林上，只 有二三光線偷入林內的聖地來時，我便睡在溪旁的深草中，地上千萬種 的細草更帖1近地爲我所注意；我的心上更帖切地感覺著草間小世界的 嗡營，那不可數，不可窮狀的種種昆蟲蚊蚋，而我便感覺著那全能者的 存在; . . . . (Goethe 1928, 4) While Chinese landscape descriptions, even those in Guo’s own prose, 2 usually employ quatrains that recall the elegance of Li Bai’s and Du Fu’s classical poetry, this passage avoids such aesthetic references to the Chinese poetic heritage. No intertextual reference should distract from the main idea of this passage: nature is a divine and benevolent entity. For Guo, though not entirely supported by the text itself, this notion lies at the heart of Werther. One should notice that, at a later stage, when feeling the rage of jealousy and indulging himself in self-pity, Werther resorts to relating nature negatively to “an all-consuming, devouring monster” (Goethe 1998, 37). The co-existence of these mutually exclusive notions of the universe—one as benevolent and motherly and the other as brutal and non-personal—is often seen as an indicator for Werther’s psychological instability (Sasse 1999, 245). Some critics have even questioned the authenticity of Werther’s feelings and suggested that they are the product of an open loop system set in motion by the writing process itself (see Haverkamp 1982, 259). In his preface, however, Guo does not occupy himself with the contradictions behind the protagonist’s notion of the cosmos: benevolent and brute aspects of nature are equally related to pantheist thought, that is, the identification of nature with the divine. Guo’s definition of pantheism is striking for its unconcerned amalgamation of different philosophical strands: 一切自然都是我的表現。人到無我的時候，與神合體，超絕時空，而等 齊生死。. . . 除是一個永遠貪婪永遠反芻的怪物而外，不見有別的。此力 卻是創生萬彙的本源，卻是宇宙意志。卻是物之自身 (Ding an sich)。 (Guo 1928, 4) The creation is entirely an expression of one’s self. When one reaches the non-self and fuses with the Divine, one transcends space and time, life and death become equal. . . . There is nothing apart from

276  Johannes D. Kaminski one eternally rapacious, eternally ruminant monster. In fact, this force is the source that creates the thousand things, it is the will of the universe. It actually is the thing-in-itself.3 The mystical undertone reflects the ecstasy in Werther’s letter. The divine entity, however, is identified as a “ruminant monster” rather than the Biblical “Almighty,” a term first used in the Protestant Union Bible (和合本, 1911) (Zetzsche 1999, 158). Despite this Christian undertone, Guo’s notion of pantheism is a concept that highlights the shared ground between Western and Eastern philosophy. Pantheism is not seen in Baruch Spinoza’s rigid philosophical terms. His fundamental notion Deus sive Natura (God or Nature) states that God is identical with nature, a stance that was the subject of much theological debate (Goetschel 2003, 24), but holds little significance for the relationship between God and the phenomenological experience of the individual self. Guo’s idea of pantheism is more akin to Alexander Pope’s notion of a universe which “Lives through all life, extends through all extent, . . . Breathes in our soul” (Pope 1808, 219). Here, the interconnected cosmos is not merely a theoretical stance as seen in Spinoza; instead, every individual soul can feel its participation in God’s creation. Rephrased in idealist terminology, this unitary perspective explores the all-encompassing consciousness of the “absolute ego” that has overcome the limitations of phenomenal reality (Richards 2002, 31). One can further relate Guo’s reference to “one eternally rapacious, eternally ruminant monster” to Arthur Schopenhauer’s idea of the will and Immanuel Kant’s notion of the thing-in-itself. While a connection exists between these two philosophical concepts—Schopenhauer identifies the will with the thing-in-itself (see Wicks 2012, 156)—Guo affirms that “the creation is entirely an expression of one’s self” and thereby shows his disregard for the nuances between Schopenhauer’s pessimism and Kant’s radical disjunction between subject and object. Guo intends to address neither the ceaseless suffering induced by the will nor the effect of Kant’s categories—space and time—on our perception of the world. Instead, he elaborates on what he thinks is their shared ground: the dichotomy between the solitary self and the cosmos. This dichotomy is not a final condition of human existence, but entails the promise of an enlightened state of mind. It has been argued that despite his enthusiasm for Western learning, Guo’s early philosophy is heavily influenced by the Zhuangzi (see Lü 2010, 91), an ancient Daoist text full of “contempt for social values, hierarchies, and conventional reasoning” (Kern 2010, 74). Guo builds on its attack on our rational faculties in order to conceive of a supremely creative mindset that merges with the cosmos. In the Zhuangzi, the story of Qing the woodcutter (梓慶為鐻) serves as a paradigm for the dissolution of the boundaries between the self and the cosmos. Asked how he

German Romanticism and the Chinese Revolution  277 produced a perfect bell-stand, the legendary woodcutter explains that his production involved forgetting egotistical impulses in the first place: And when I have fasted for seven days, I am so still that I forget I have four limbs and a form and body. By that time, the ruler and his court no longer exist for me. My skill is concentrated, and all outside distractions fade away. (Zhuangzi 2013, 152) In other words, a true artist must first “obtain a state of natural spontaneity that takes no unnatural action” (Yearley 1996, 160) before approaching his work. The artist must overcome his false self in order to attain a true self. According to Lü Tongzhuang (2010), Guo’s understanding of the Zhuangzi astonishes readers the most when he substitutes the Zhuangzian notion of the Dao (道) with wo (我), the personal pronoun indicating the speaker (92). Guo argues that “the creation is entirely an expression of one’s self” by differentiating this “true” self (我) from the “false” self, the ego (自我) or a self which cannot look beyond its limited and self-interested scope. Accordingly, the source of this “pantheistic self” lies in a personalised self, not an abstract, impersonal entity. Instead of lamenting the disjunction of subjective experience and cosmic vision, Guo insists on a phenomenological shortcut which facilitates the communication between the individual and the cosmos. On the basis of this epistemic proposition, Guo draws a surprising conclusion for Goethe’s novel. Werther is not a story about emotional excess and disastrous anger management, but a parable of man’s lofty yearnings; after all, “committing suicide of the ego is truly the highest virtue” (完成自我的自殺，正是至高道德) (Guo 1928, 5). By simultaneously drawing on Western and Chinese sources, Guo does not elaborate a nuanced appreciation of different strands of pantheism; rather, he develops a mystic notion of universal oneness. In his hands, the story of Werther’s death drive becomes a parable of self-transcendence.

The Cosmic Self in Guo’s Own Works Prior to his translation of Goethe, Guo had already made a name for himself as a poet. In 1919, the publication of Goddess (神女), a poetry collection through which the idea of universal oneness also runs, established him as the “most provocative voice in modern Chinese literature” (Wang 2010, 481). In “Heavenly Dog” (天狗), for example, humble self-transcendence gives way to a boastful display of “cosmic” arrogance: 我是一條天狗呀！ 我把月來吞了， 我把日來吞了，

278  Johannes D. Kaminski 我把一切的的星球來吞了， 我把全宇宙來吞了。 我便是我了！ (Guo 2002, 35) I am a heavenly dog! I will swallow the moon, I will swallow the sun, I will swallow all the stars, I will swallow the universe. I will then become myself! In this poem, pantheism casts aside its humble tone: the ego suddenly emerges as an archaic mythical animal which bears little resemblance to the benevolent Almighty in Werther’s letter. In subjecting the planetary system to the hunger fits of a “ruminant monster,” the poem gives a premonition of Guo’s future celebration of revolutionary violence. The speaker aims at the destruction of the universe in order to emerge as a supreme self that embraces and contains everything. This cosmic self leaps beyond the phenomenal world and indulges itself in a phantasmagorical vision. Although ordinary humans cannot transform themselves directly into cosmic canines, Guo believes that the realisation of the cosmic self is possible by means of idolatry. In his early works, idols are primarily sourced from the Western cultural canon. The poem “When the Spark Hits” (電火光中), for instance, represents a moment of intimacy between a worshipper and his idol. It starts off as ekphrasis of the portrait that embodies the cult of genius like no other: Joseph Karl Stieler’s 1820 portrait of Ludwig van Beethoven. The portrait shows Beethoven composing the Missa solemnis, his facial expression cramped and aggressive so much that Guo (1957) cannot help but exclaim: 哦，貝多芬！貝多芬！ 你解除了我無名的愁苦！ 你蓬蓬的亂髮如像奔流的海濤， 你高張的白領如像戴雪的山椒。 你如獅的額，如虎的眼， 你這如像“大宇宙意志”自身的頭腦！ 你右手持著鉛筆，左手持著原稿， 你那筆尖頭上正在傾瀉著怒潮。 貝多芬喲！你可在傾聽什麼？ 我好像聽著你的symphony了！ (1:67) Oh, Beethoven! Beethoven! You have eased my unspeakable sorrows!

German Romanticism and the Chinese Revolution  279 Your unkempt hair undulates like the sea, Your wide collar is like the ferns4 covered with snow. Your lion-like forehead, your tiger-like eyes, This brain of yours: “the cosmic will!” In your right hand a pen, in your left hand the manuscript, The tip of the pen is channelling your anger. Oh, Beethoven! What are you hearing? Can it be that I heard your symphony? Stieler’s dishevelled Beethoven does not bring forwards an anatomy of melancholy; instead, Guo invokes majestic animals to illustrate the mighty presence of the genius incarnate. What becomes audible to the observer’s inner ear, however, is much more than a musical score. One witnesses the transcendental ecstasy that makes possible the articulation of the cosmic will through Beethoven’s music. The late-born poet ascends to the pantheon of literary and cultural heroes who accept him as one of their own kind, a fellow genius. This enthusiastic appropriation of the Western canon indicates a sweeping optimism amongst Chinese intellectuals who maintain that the introduction of Western culture to China will be beneficial for the country’s modernisation and allow individuals to reach a desirable state of self-transcendence. While Guo’s cosmic poetry suggests that realising this lofty goal is feasible, his novellas paint a different picture by offering a more realistic take on idolatry. The burden of following in the footsteps of foreign literary giants, it turns out, takes a high psychological toll. For instance, in The Trilogy of Wandering (漂泊三部曲, 1926), Guo (1993) articulates this struggle through the protagonist’s despairing monologues. Enclosed by two portraits of Goethe and, once again, Beethoven, Aimou, an aspiring writer, finds their eyes full of disdain for the shallowness of his own feelings and selfishness: 悲多汶唷，歌德唷，你們莫用怒視著我，我總不是你們藝術的國度理的 居民，我不再掛著你們的羊頭賣我的狗肉了。我要同你們告別，我是要 永遠同你們告別。 (47) Oh, Beethoven! Oh, Goethe! Do not look down on me in anger, for I will never inhabit your world of artistic creation, I will no longer dress up my miserable work with a façade of your grandeur to hide my mediocre work. I will bid you farewell, I will bid you farewell forever. Here, Guo presents Aimou’s painful transition from reverie to despair. After a moment of elation, he must again face the disjunction between

280  Johannes D. Kaminski his projected ideal and the gritty reality of his life. This passage recalls Werther’s passionate dream of Lotte, in which he sensually embraces and kisses his beloved, only to wake up alone, confused, and thinking about suicide (14 December). In addition, this remarkable passage features highly expressive language which exemplifies Guo’s unorthodox style, one that makes ample uses of exclamation particles (唷) for emotionally charged expressions (see Kaminski 2017, 38). The pattern of self-apotheosis and subsequent collapse is a recurring theme in Guo’s prose. For example, as Aimou sees his self-sacrificing wife leave Shanghai alongside their children, he first thinks himself freed from the shackles of ordinary life. Pleased that he can finally exert the full potential of his creativity, Aimou breaks out in praise: 哦，我感謝你！我感謝你！我的愛人唷，你是我的Beatrice！你是我的Beatrice！你是我的！長篇？是的，最好是做長篇。Dante為她的愛人做了一 部「神曲」，我是定要做一篇長篇的創作來紀念你，使你永遠不死。 (Guo 1993, 27) Oh, I thank you! I thank you! Oh, my beloved, you are my Beatrice! You are my Beatrice! You are mine! A novel? Indeed, ideally a novel. Dante wrote the Divine Comedy in honour of his beloved, and I will write a novel to remember you—so you will become immortal. Even more so here than in the Beethoven example, the speaker hopes to stand on equal footing with the writer who crafted the modern Italian idiom. Immediately, though, his self-comparison with Dante fires back. After a mood swing, this self-comparison no longer appears justified: 自己做的東西究竟有什麼存在的價值呢？一知半解的評論，媒婆根性的 翻譯，這有什麼！這有什麼！ . . . 我真愧死！我真愧死！ (28) Does my own writing have any right to exist? My half-baked essays, my procuring essays, what of that! What of that! . . . I am ashamed to death! I am ashamed to death! Here, Beethoven and Dante are not thought of as heroes of a bygone golden age of art, but as divine entities or spirits who keep a watchful eye on their successors. Aimou articulates his worship of these idols by means of his artistic production, yet he cannot rely on their good-will and benevolence to continue his artistic vocation. Quite the contrary, they deride his vain efforts. The ensuing state of shame and self-denigration indicates that there exists no redemption from leading a trivial existence. In German criticism, such examples of epigonism are often understood as a “strategy to

German Romanticism and the Chinese Revolution  281 deal with the unsurpassable formal perfection of tradition” (“Strategie des Umgangs mit der in ihrer formalen Fertigkeit kaum überbietbaren Tradition”) (Frank 2004, 243). In opposition to this polemic stance, Harold Bloom (1973) established the notion of “anxiety of influence,” a defining literary paradigm facilitating creative work. Once an artist is confronted with the masterworks of the past, “the melancholy of the creative mind’s desperate insistence upon priority” crushes the late-born writer. One mode of response to this dilemma is askesis, which facilitates the writer’s “self-purgation which intends the attainment of a state of solitude” (13). Seen in this light, the scenes of self-dejection found in Guo’s novellas are essential to the creative process. These scenes of despair are followed by moments of creativity. Similar to a character in a musical whose speech turns from dialogue to song, Aimou, depressed, suddenly erupts into a speech act rendered in the form of a poem. Eventually, the narrator explains: “This is a common experience amongst literati: every time their pain becomes unbearable, they vent their feelings and they turn them into a text” (這是文人們的一 種常有的經驗，每到痛苦得不能忍耐的時候，忽然經一次的發泄，表現成為 文章) (Guo 1993, 49). That is, the feeling of worthlessness is an outburst of energy that connects the individual to the higher self. Arguably, this passage reiterates the moment of self-realisation described in the aforementioned anecdote of Qing the woodcutter, who “obtain[s] a state of natural spontaneity that takes no unnatural action.” Of course, Aimou’s psychological portrait offers a pitiful picture that hardly repeats the sombre tone of the woodcutter. Both texts nonetheless demonstrate how the ego can be extinguished—albeit only momentarily—in order to give way to something bigger and more encompassing, the self.

Revolutionary Poetry Thus far, one can conceptualise Guo’s reinterpretation of pantheism as forceful yet conventional; after all, the clout of his creativity remains within the bounds of aestheticism. After Guo’s conversion to Marxism in 1924, however, the “potent admixture” of Chinese Romanticism was further expanded to include Marxism and a Jacobin inclination to praise the virtues of violent repression. Amid the socio-political upheaval of the 1930s, the delicate sprouts of Chinese aestheticism were uprooted and subordinated to the “higher cause” of the revolution. After the May 30 Incident (五卅惨案) in 1925, when the Shanghai Municipal Police opened fire on student protests, the intellectual scene underwent a period of political radicalisation. While his colleague Yu Dafu hesitated to subordinate his writings to politics, Guo reinvented himself willingly as a proletarian writer. Now as a member of the newly established Chinese Communist Party, Guo approached criticism from a new perspective and adopted an entirely different tone that scrapped his earlier sentimentalism. In the

282  Johannes D. Kaminski essay “Revolution and Literature” (革命與文學), he dismisses the aestheticism of his earlier period, arguing that literature should always be a subordinate variable to the revolutionary cause (see Gálik 1980, 53). Guo’s literary career, as C. T. Hsia (1971) harshly comments, “only underscores . . . the tragedy of a generation of intellectuals who began in romantic revolt and ended in subservience to a despotism which they themselves had helped to create” (94). There is more continuity in Guo’s literary career, however, than Hsia has realised. In the wake of his “anxiety of influence,” Guo increasingly distanced himself from Goethe, the German poet whom he had regarded as his literary beacon. Looking back at his Marxist conversion during the 1930s, he wrote in his posthumous memoirs May Fourth Recollections (五四運動回憶錄, 1979) how it took him some time to come to terms with Goethe’s non-revolutionary stance. He realised that Goethe, upon assuming a public office in the Duchy of Weimar, became a suppressor of the people himself. Compared to Karl Marx, the other great German, Goethe appeared to him a negligible historical figure. Guo went so far as to say that “he [Goethe] is a firefly sitting in the light of the sun [i.e. Marx]!” (他簡直可以說是太陽光中的一個螢火蟲！) (Guo 1997, 320). Despite his conversion, Guo still clung to his belief that “suicide of the ego is truly the highest virtue,” but provided a thoroughly new interpretation of this stance. As early as 1928, Guo published the poem “The Heroic Tree” (英雄樹), addressing the new conditions of art production in the wake of the Shanghai massacre. The age of individualism and Romanticism, he proclaimed, had ended, and so had decadence because its emphasis on subjectivism only isolates minds rather than uniting them against the oppressors. The role of artists therefore had to be redefined: 你們不要亂吹你們的破喇叭，暫時當一個留聲機器吧！ 當一個留聲機器──這是文藝青年們的最好的信條。 你們不要以為這是太容易了，這兒有幾個必要的條件： 第一，要你接近那種聲音； 第二，要你無我； 第三，要你能夠活動。 你們以為是受了侮辱麼？ 那沒有同你說話的餘地，只好敦請你們上斷頭台! (Guo 1982, 16:46) Stop blowing your broken horn, and for the time being you should become a gramophone! To be a phonograph, this is the best article of faith for young artists.

German Romanticism and the Chinese Revolution  283 Don’t think that’s easy, you have to follow a number of conditions: First, you must get close to that voice; Second, you must elide your ego; Third, you must be mobile. Do you feel insulted? There is no leeway for you to speak; instead, you’re cordially invited to step on the Guillotine! Here Guo urges the new poet to give up his ego in order to realise self-­ transcendence in the service of Communist doctrines while threatening those unwilling to conform. This chilling move to send non-­conformists to the guillotine is the cynical culmination of Guo’s pantheism. After having taken Werther’s ecstasy as guidance for the dissolution of the self, after having celebrated mythological self-transcendence (“­Heavenly Dog”) and suffered humiliation from venerated idols (Trilogy of Wandering), Guo decidedly turned his back on aestheticism and subordinated artistic creativity to the demands of the Communist Party.

Conclusion: Cross-Cultural Grafting Guo’s reinterpretation of Werther’s pantheism is a fitting example for the process of cross-cultural grafting. If Chinese thought acts as the rootstock, which sources water and nutrition from the ground, then Western references act as the scions on top. The prime concern of Guo’s poetry remains Zhuangzian self-transcendence, a line of thought that is compatible, but not identical, with European Romantic concepts. By conceiving the creation as “an expression of one’s self,” Guo brings forth a very deliberate interpretation of pantheism. What is more, he does not mind taking into account its cruel aspects and emphatically perceives of the universe as “one eternally rapacious, eternally ruminant monster.” The violent undercurrent of Guo’s reading of Werther—“committing suicide of the ego is truly the highest virtue”—foreshadows his role call to fellow poets. From a moral standpoint, Zhuangzian creativity, Wertherian pantheism and prompt to become a phonograph of the revolutionary cause have little in common. Yet its deliberate cruelty is reminiscent of Richards’s recollections of teaching at Tsinghua University: by simply adopting a different value system, the Chinese students completely recast the conventional reading of Tess as a critique of Victorian patriarchal morality. A similarly radical revaluation takes place in Guo’s readings of Werther. His dismissal of transcendental pantheism does not give way to a watered-down reading of Werther as a pathological case history, as exemplified by contemporary scholarship on Goethe. Guo aims for a more sweeping solution of his case: the vanguard party, imagined as an entity with privileged insights and entitled to exercise violence, steps in as a logical substitute of the absent divine.

284  Johannes D. Kaminski Guo’s Jacobin reinterpretation of pantheism only underscores the power of semantic grafting; after all, “[e]very sign, linguistic or nonlinguistic, spoken or written. . . , in a small or large unit, can be cited, put between quotation marks” (Derrida 1988, 12). Aside from the startled look of posterity, there is no silent authority that can reproach Guo for freely turning Werther’s suffering into the seedbed soil of the Chinese Communist Revolution. In following this impulse, however, he emphasises the socio-political poignancy of the Romantic Movement, which Curran understands as a discursive membrane reflecting the tensions that accompany and empower its creation. Guo’s take on German Romanticism, iconoclastic as it may appear, repeats a familiar motif in the history of Chinese encounters with the West. His compulsive grafting arguably serves as an example of a wellprobed technique used to connect the foreign and the local, accurately summed up by the late-Qing formula “Chinese (ethical) knowledge as the foundation, Western knowledge (and technology) for practical application” (中學為體西學為用) (Qi 2014, 76–78). The transplantation of European wertherisme into the Chinese setting, as I have shown, did not contribute to the “shattering and discarding these traditional views” as Průžek describes it, but amplified lofty aims that have been already articulated in Chinese classics. This period of cross-pollination did not merely continue, either, what Chinese intellectuals began during the late Qing dynasty, as David Wang insists. In fact, the foreign seed of wertherisme was carefully modified in order to suit new on-the-ground contexts.

Notes 1 In Classical Chinese, 帖 and 貼are exchangeable. 2 A passage from Guo’s novella Purgatory (煉獄) illustrates this literary convention: “The sound of the wind and the birds, the sound of the pines and ravines, everything in tranquillity, pure sound of nature” (風聲鳥聲，松聲澗 聲，凝靜之中，時流天籟) (1993, 39). 3 All translation are mine unless otherwise indicated. 4 The original reads 山椒, the pepper tree, a plant largely unknown in the West. In my translation, I opted for ferns, which are also evergreens and grow in a similar shape.

References Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Curran, Stuart. 2010. “Preface.” In The Cambridge Companion to British ­Romanticism, edited by Stuart Curran, xi–xiii. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1988. Limited Inc. Translated by Alan Bass. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

German Romanticism and the Chinese Revolution  285 DeVine, Christine. 2005. Class in Turn-of-the-Century Novels of Gissing, James, Hardy and Wells. London: Routledge. Frank, Gustav. 2004. “Dichtung in Prosa(ischen Zeiten): Lyrik zwischen Goethezeit und Vormärz in Erzähltexten Goethes, Heines, Mörikes und Eichendorffs.” In Lyrik im 19. Jahrhundert: Gattungspoetik als Reflexionsmedium der Kultur, edited by Steffen Martus, Stefan Scherer, and Claudia Stockinger, 237–271. Frankfurt a.M.: Peter Lang. Gálik, Marián. 1980. The Genesis of Modern Chinese Literary Criticism (1917–1930). London: Curzon Press. Goethe, Johann Wolfgang. (1774) 1928. Sorrows of Young Werther (少年維特 之煩惱). Translated by Guo Moruo 郭沫若. Shanghai: Taidong tushu. ———. (1774) 1998. The Sorrows of Young Werther—Elective Affinities—­ Novella. Translated by Victor Lange. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Goetschel, Willi. 2003. Spinoza’s Modernity: Mendelssohn, Lessing, and Heine. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Guo, Moruo 郭沫若. 1928. “Preface.” Goethe, Sorrows of Young Werther (少年維特之煩惱), 1–15. Shanghai: Taidong. ———. (1921/1923) 2002. Goddess—Qu Yuan (Nüshen—Qu Yuan, 女神—— 屈原). Beijing: Dangdai shijie chubanshe. ———. (1925) 1993. Caramel Girl (卡爾美夢姑娘). Beijing: Shifan daxue chubanshe. ———. 1957. Collected Works (文集). 3 vols. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe. ———. 1982–1989. Collected Works (Quanji, 全集). 20 vols. Beijing: Renmin wenxue chubanshe. ———. 1997. Classic Works (經典作品). Beijing: Zhongguo huaqiao chubanshe. Haverkamp, Anselm. 1982. “Illusion und Empathie: Die Struktur der teilnehmenden Lektüre in den Leiden Werthers.” In Erzählforschung, edited by Eberhard Lämmert, 245–268. Stuttgart: Metzler. Hsia, C. T. 1971. A History of Modern Chinese Fiction. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Kaminski, Johannes D. 2017. “Punctuation, Exclamation and Tears: The Sorrows of Young Werther in Japanese and Chinese Translation (1889–1922).” Comparative Critical Studies 14 (1): 29–48. Kern, Martin. 2010. “The Texts of Warring States Philosophical and Political Discourse.” In Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, edited by Kang-i Sun Chang and Stephen Owen, Vol. I, 66–76. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Koeneke, Rodney. 2004. Empires of the Mind: I.A. Richards and Basic English in China, 1929–1979. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Lü, Tongzhuang 侶同壯. 2010. “Guo Moruo’s Reception of Zhuangzian ­Aesthetics” (郭沫若對莊子美學的新開拓). Guangxi University Journal: Philosophy and Sociology 1: 90–94. Pope, Alexander. (1733/34) 1808. “An Essay on Man.” In The Poetical Works, 209–251. London: J. Walker. Průžek, Jaroslav. 1980. The Lyrical and the Epic: Studies of Modern Chinese Literature. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. Qi, Xiaoying. 2014. Globalized Knowledge Flows and Chinese Social Theory. New York: Routledge.

286  Johannes D. Kaminski Richards, Robert J. 2002. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and ­Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Sasse, Günter. 1999. “Woran leidet Werther? Zum Zwiespalt zwischen idealistischer Schwärmerei und sinnlichem Begehren.” Goethe-Jahrbuch 116: 245–258. Seyhan, Azade. 2009. “What is Romanticism, and where did it come from?” In The Cambridge Companion to German Romanticism, edited by Nicholas Saul, 1–21. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tang, Xiaobing, and Michel Hockx. 2008. “The Creation Society (­1921–1930).” In Literary Societies of Republican China, edited by Kirk A. Denton and ­M ichel Hockx, 103–136. Lanham, MD: Lexington. Wang, David Der-wei. 2010. “Chinese Literature from 1841 to 1937.” In The Cambridge History of Chinese Literature, Vol. II, edited by Kang-i Sun Chang and Stephen Owen, 413–564. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2015. The Lyrical in Epic Time: Modern Chinese Intellectuals and ­Artists through the 1949 Crisis. New York: Columbia University Press. Wicks, Robert. 2012. “Schopenhauer’s On the Will in Nature: The Reciprocal Containment of Idealism and Realism.” In A Companion to Schopenhauer, edited by Bart Vandenabeele, 147–163. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Yearley, Lee H. 1996. “Zhuangzi’s Understanding of Skilfulness and the ­U ltimate Spiritual State.” In Essays on Scepticism, Relativism, and Ethics in the Zhuangzi, edited by Paul Kjellberg and Philip J. Ivanhoe, 152–182. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Zetzsche, Jost Oliver. 1999. The Bible in China: The History of the Union ­Version. Nettetal: Steyler. Zhuangzi. 2013. The Complete Works. Translated by Burton Watson. New York: Columbia University Press.

15 Two Chinese Wordsworths The Reception of Wordsworth in Twentieth-Century China Ou Li

By outlining William Wordsworth’s reception in twentieth-century China, this chapter makes the case for the inevitable transfiguration of a literary text in its transport to a foreign context.1 In being introduced to China and translated into Chinese, Wordsworth (1770–1850) passed on a more complex legacy to his Chinese readers than merely leaving them in debt to his poetry and poetics. Rather, his Chinese reception gave him an “afterlife,” one in which the original, to quote Benjamin (1996), undergoes “a transformation and a renewal of something living” (256). Since Wordsworth was first introduced to China in 1900, he has been compared with ancient Chinese pastoral (田園, tianyuan) poets and linked to the Daoist and Buddhist traditions. 2 Wordsworth’s appeal to the Chinese reader chiefly derived from this sense of affinity his poetry seemed to have with traditional Chinese culture. The validity of such readings of Wordsworth, however, is questionable for their disregard of the submerged politics in his apparently innocent “nature poems.” On the other hand, Wordsworth’s originality for Chinese readership mainly resided in his revolutionary Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), which was conveniently appropriated by the New Culture Movement leaders to advance the Chinese literary revolution. There appears to be, therefore, a strange dissociation between the author who penned this radical piece of prose and the poet who produced poems that looked traditionalist enough to be readily transplanted to an ancient foreign culture. To borrow Abrams’s (1972, 4) famous phrase, “two Wordsworths” seemed to be present in China as well. The coexistence of his traditionalist poetry and radical poetics could perhaps explain the odd fact that before 1949, Wordsworth was promoted by rivalling literary groups with conflicting political agendas and poetic values, unlike Byron or Keats, whose respective Chinese followers shared more or less the same ideological or literary inclinations. The misrepresentation of Wordsworth the poet as pastoral and apolitical partly resulted from the rather narrow scope of the translation and discussion of his poems, a telling sign of which was the consistent neglect of his masterpiece The Prelude. Ironically, this misrepresentation made Wordsworth a welcome figure before 1949, but turned him

288  Ou Li into a denigrated reactionary Romantic in Communist China who fell out of favour and into oblivion in the subsequent three decades. These misconceptions about Wordsworth began to be redressed towards the end of the twentieth century, when a handful of scholars endeavoured to provide a more holistic picture of the poet, especially by highlighting the complex dynamics between his disillusioning revolutionary experience and the tragic power of his poetry. Until this day, however, the Chinese Wordsworth still looks much like the Victorian sage whose canon is confined to the short lyrics and whose greatness is diminished by his deceptive simplicity.

Wordsworth’s Reception Before 1949 Early Introduction and Translation When Wordsworth’s works first entered China at the beginning of the twentieth century, he was presented as a China-friendly figure who showed affinity with Chinese cultural roots, rather than someone exotic who, while inspiring his foreign readers, often posed aesthetic or ideological challenges. Liang Qichao (1873–1929), a leading intellectual and reformist3 in late Qing China, uses Wordsworth as an example of someone who possesses “wise insight” (慧觀, huiguan) in his own essay with the same title, published in Liang’s journal, The China Discussion (Qing yi bao), on 1 February 1900 (1900, 2047). He writes, “Consider nameless wild flowers—ploughmen cut them; shepherd boys trod them down. But Wordsworth saw in them the extraordinary beauty of the Creation” (2409).4 This, of course, captures the quintessentially Wordsworthian capability of finding “thoughts” even in “the meanest flower” (Wordsworth 1933, 590). Yet, Liang also transfigures Wordsworth into a secluded, meditating monk-like figure from the post-revolutionary worshipper of nature whose celebration of “nameless wild flowers” cannot be separated from revolutionary ideals. For “wise insight” is a Buddhist term, which means, Liang (1900) tells us, “to learn from what one knows about what one does not know” (2409); and in original Chinese, huiguan was indeed the name of an enlightened Buddhist monk who lived during the fourth and fifth centuries. Not just the introduction of Wordsworth, but the initial translation of his poetry was also imbued with a sense of Chineseness. The first Chinese translator of Wordsworth was Lu Zhiwei (1894–1970), psychologist, linguist, and one of the earliest writers of New Poetry (新詩, xin shi), that is, poetry written in vernacular Chinese. Lu selected two poems, neither of which is an anthologised piece today: “Alice Fell, or Poverty” and “A place of burial in the south of Scotland.” The former is a ballad about an orphan girl who moans over her lost cloak and is later given a new one by the speaker. It was often dropped from Wordsworth’s

Two Chinese Wordsworths  289 collection after it first appeared in his 1807 Poems. The latter, a sonnet from Yarrow Revisited (1831), is not much read today. Whether Lu’s selection was random or deliberate is impossible to say. The Chinese title he gave to “Alice Fell,” “Ballad of a Poor Child” (Pin er xing) reminds one of the ancient Chinese ballad genre that originated from folk songs in Han Dynasty (1914, 123). The sonnet, too, can be easily integrated into the Chinese poetic tradition with its subject on the ruins of time. Popularisation During the New Culture Movement Juxtaposed with Wordsworth’s poetry which was translated to fit nicely into the Chinese poetic tradition, was his ground-breaking Preface to Lyrical Ballads, an essay which became known to the Chinese reader during the radically anti-traditionalist New Culture Movement (新文化 運動, xinwenhua yundong). The movement, taking place from 1915 to the 1920s, promoted a thorough break with traditional Chinese culture with Confucianism at its main target, and it advocated individualism, science, and democracy among other Western ideas together with a literary revolution that proposed the replacement of classical Chinese with the vernacular. Hu Shi (1891–1962), a leading New Culturist, looks back on the course of the Chinese literary revolution in his 1919 essay, “On New Poetry—the Major Event of the Past Eight Years” (Tan xinshi— banian lai de yijian dashi) and stresses that “all literary revolutions . . . started with the form of language” (1919, 1). He refers to Wordsworth as the initiator of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary revolution, which was “an emancipation of poetic language and diction” (1). The English poet was clearly an important source of inspiration for Hu, who launched a similar emancipation of the Chinese language and poetry in his monumental essay with a rather humble title, “Some Modest Proposals for the Reform of Literature” (Wenxue gailiang chuyi) (1917). In Hu’s first proposal, one can already detect the implicit influence of Wordsworth’s Preface: “Writing should have substance” and by “substance,” he means first of all “feeling,” without which, he writes, literature “is like a man without a soul” (1996, 124). Hu’s (1996, 123– 124) other principles of literary form—“do not imitate the ancients,” “eliminate hackneyed and formal language,” “do not use allusions,” “do not use parallelism,” and “do not avoid vulgar diction”—suggest evident parallels to Wordsworth’s (2013, 100) opposition to artificial poetic diction, rejection of personification of abstract ideas, and endeavour “to adopt the very language of men.” At the same time, it is not clear how well Hu knew Wordsworth’s poetry. Whatever the case, Hu, together with other leading New Culturists, forever changed the course of the Chinese language and poetry. On this account, Wordsworth’s Preface, to which Hu’s “modest proposals” were indebted, played a vital role in shaping modern Chinese literature and culture.

290  Ou Li The tremendous influence of the Preface was evident not just in Hu, but in other active figures in the New Culture Movement. In 1919, Wordsworth’s Preface featured more prominently in a long article, “The Poet and the Issue of Labour” (Shiren yu laodong wenti) by Tian Han (1898–1968), a founding member of an important Chinese modern literary group, the Creation Society (創造社, chuangzao she), a leading playwright till the time of the Cultural Revolution, and the author of the lyrics of the national anthem of the People’s Republic of China. In this article, Tian (1919) introduces Wordsworth as “the most important poet” who contributed to the inauguration of modern poetry which puts greater emphasis on the content than the form of poetry: “His famous theory on lyrical poetry . . . thoroughly established the nature and value of emotion” (7). Tian refers to Wordsworth’s Preface extensively, including Wordsworth’s famous statement about poetry: “Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity” (7; Wordsworth 2013, 111). 5 Tian also includes a particularly long passage from the Preface in both the original and translation in which Wordsworth makes clear that the subject of his poetry is drawn from “humble and rustic life” and rendered in “language really used by men,” deriving its power from “the passion of men” “incorporated with beautiful and permanent forms of Nature” (33; Wordsworth 2013, 97).6 Tian celebrates Wordsworth as “the first figure who entered the stage of the nineteenth-century British Romanticism” and gives an overview of the Romantic era and the French Revolution (31). While he turns Wordsworth into an innovator leading his time, Tian, however, gives his poetry an anachronistic interpretation. Regarding Wordsworth’s naturalism as an important component of Romanticism, Tian suggests that it can be linked to Tao Yuanming’s idea of “Returning to Nature” (31). By connecting Wordsworth’s naturalism with Tao (365–427), the most important ancient Chinese pastoral poet who lived more than a thousand years before Wordsworth, Tian takes Wordsworth’s nature poetry out of its historical context and dissociates it from his revolutionary poetics. Another founding member of the Creation Society and a leading modern Chinese poet, Guo Moruo (1892–1978) alludes to Wordsworth’s Preface as well. In his letter in 1920, collected in correspondences between Guo, Tian, and Zong Baihua, a close associate of theirs, Guo (1920) mentions his high regard for poetry with “the spontaneous overflow” (45). Wordsworth appears again in his 1925 essay “My View on Children’s Literature” (Ertong wenxue zhi guanjian), where Guo (1925) refers to Wordsworth’s “Immortality Ode” and quotes its opening five lines in translation (154). Even though Guo’s explicit references to Wordsworth are rather sparse, it is not difficult to associate his pantheistic spirit7 and egotistical sublime—both of which were unprecedented in traditional Chinese poetry—with his English predecessor.

Two Chinese Wordsworths  291 Wordsworth’s revolutionary Preface and his self-expressiveness were probably the most appealing qualities for the Creation Society, which claimed itself Romantic, as famously expressed in its slogan “literature for art’s sake.” The Creation Society was opposed to “literature for life’s sake,” the slogan of the Literary Research Association (文學研究會, wenxue yanjiu hui), another important literary group that advocated realism. However, like the realism upheld by the Literary Research Association, the Romanticism promoted by the Creation Society already departed from its Western origins. The Chinese Romantics celebrated individualism and self-expression for “their iconoclastic purposes”; ironically, though, “that very autonomy [of the self] threatened to sever the self from the promise of social transformation inherent” in the New Culture Movement (Denton 1996, 44). This explains why before long many Creationists embraced Marxism and political activism, a fact that seemed at odds with their self-­declared aestheticism. By the same token, “[t]he principal focus of much modern Chinese Realism is not on the aesthetic means of representing the Real, but on the writer’s cultivating a personal, meaningful relationship with the exterior” so as to “maintain for the self a pivotal role in the process of social transformation” (41). In a sense, the distortion of both Romanticism and realism by their Chinese successors is analogous to the transfiguration Wordsworth had undergone in China, one that was also caught in the tension between the New Culturists’ enthusiastic reception of Western literature and culture on the one hand, and their keen sense of mission for nation-building and cultural transformation on the other. This sense of mission, descended from the traditional Chinese view that literature should convey the Way (載道, zai dao), was in essence utilitarian and inevitably altered the Western sources. Before the Creation Society turned from “literary revolution” to “revolutionary literature” (Cheng 1996, 269), another Creationist, Yu Dafu (1896–1945), appropriated Wordsworth more radically than his peers had done in the early 1920s. Yu’s most famous short story, “Sinking” (Chenlun) (1921), opens with the protagonist holding a collection of Wordsworth’s poems while walking in solitude in the rice field. His first utterance is in English, “Oh, you serene gossamer! you beautiful gossamer!” (Yu 1998, 2), which brings tears to his eyes. His tearful eyes then turn to the collection and find “The Solitary Reaper.” After reading the opening stanza, our solitary protagonist jumps to the third stanza (both stanzas are included in the text in the original) and is overtaken by a whim to translate the poem into Chinese. Upon finishing the translation of these two stanzas “in one breath” (in the form of New Poetry), he suddenly loses interest, asking himself: “What is this? As boring as hymns in the church! English poetry is English poetry, Chinese poetry is Chinese poetry. Why bother to translate?” (5–6).

292  Ou Li Wordsworth’s poetry, together with the natural setting, forms a psychological landscape for Yu’s protagonist, who sees nature as his “refuge” from “the philistines” (3). It was no longer strange to find the Chinese Wordsworth a recluse, but Yu’s association of the stoic English poet with his melancholy protagonist is rather a novelty. “The Solitary Reaper” does not lend itself to the protagonist’s excessive sensibility, either. Despite this misplaced affinity, Wordsworth and his poetry, along with the protagonist’s immersion in an exotic culture, provide a proper ground for the story’s pioneering exploration of the human psyche and its unprecedented confessional nature in the Chinese fictional tradition. Wordsworth’s appeal, however, was not confined to the Creation Society. Xu Zhimo (1897–1931), one of the most important modern ­Chinese poets, pays tribute to Wordsworth in both his poetry and prose. Xu became fascinated with British Romantic poetry while studying at the University of Cambridge in the 1920s. In two poems he wrote shortly before he left Cambridge, “Night” (Ye) (1922) and “Farewell, Cambridge” (Kangqiao zaihui ba) (1922), Xu (1990) evokes Wordsworth as a chief poetic inspiration. In “Night,” the poet hears in the nocturnal silence “his own imagination” “flapping its long-folded wings to fly away from its dull nest” and sees it travel “backwards a hundred years’ time” to “the hometown of the Lake poets” (17, 19). Passing by Dove Cottage, his personified Imagination hears these lines by Wordsworth (quoted in the original and then translated): The poets who in earth have made us heir Of truth and pure delight by heavenly lays! Oh! Might my name be numbered among theirs, Then gladly would I end my mortal days. (20) Just as Wordsworth apostrophises his poetic predecessors, so Xu is invoking Wordsworth as an inspiration for himself to be one such poet. His inspired Imagination endows him with a vision of Wordsworth sitting together with Dorothy and Coleridge at the fireside, a vision that evokes these lines by Wordsworth: To sit without emotion, hope, or aim, In the loved pressure of my cottage fire, And listen to the flapping of the flame, Or kettle whispering its faint undersong. (20–21) What Wordsworth suggests in this sonnet is a paradox, that it is the “long, barren silence” (1933, 488) that sharpens his perception, as

Two Chinese Wordsworths  293 captured in the “faint” sound he hears made by “the flapping of the flame” and the kettle’s “undersong”. The same paradox is at work in Xu’s poem, in which his imagination is set in motion by the stillness of the night. In “Farewell, Cambridge,” the other poem Xu wrote before leaving Cambridge, he similarly emphasises the creative power of the mind. He bids farewell to the “spirit of beauty” that he finds omnipresent in Cambridge, a beauty that is, he quotes “Tintern Abbey” in translation, “felt in the blood, and felt along with the heart,” “with ample power / to chasten and subdue” (31; Wordsworth 2013, 88–89). In celebrating the spiritual presence of beauty that imbues the actual town of Cambridge, Xu again inherits a central Wordsworthian theme on the creative power of the human mind. That same year, he also translated “Lucy Gray.” Wordsworth frequents Xu’s prose as well. In his 1923 essay, “Nothing Is Wrong with the World” (Tianxia ben wushi), which is occasioned by the discord between rivalling literary groups, Xu (2005) pleads for a fair-minded judgement of writers and their works: If one says that Shelley’s ‘Daemon of the World’ is naïve, it does not mean that Prometheus Unbound or The Cenci are naïve as well. To claim that most of Wordsworth’s poems are absolutely boring does not affect the evaluation that he was one of the greatest poets. (1:281–282) This rather odd comment on Wordsworth begs the question of whether Xu, after all, finds his poems “absolutely boring” despite his consistent recognition of Wordsworth as a great poet. His reference to Wordsworth in his 1924 “Call for Translations of Poetry” (Zheng yishi qi), for instance, shows such recognition. Xu remarks on the rarity of real “lyrical genius,” but comments on Wordsworth’s lyrics as rare “pure art”: “Who has not seen grass and flowers in the field, but why only Wordsworth’s ‘Daffodils’ is passed on and becomes immortal?” (1:426). He then depicts Wordsworth as “shedding tears of wonder and admiration” at the sight of a common flower (1:426). Reminiscent of Yu’s protagonist of sensibility in “Sinking,” Xu’s Wordsworth also seems somewhat too mawkish to resemble the Lake poet of unfaltering sanity. In his 1926 long essay “Utterance” (Hua), where he discusses the aesthetics of poetic language more closely, Xu suggests that the immortal verses by Wordsworth and Shelley were mostly accomplished in “whispering to themselves while they were walking solitarily in the fields, on the beach, or in the woods like homeless souls” (2:1007). Xu also elevates nature above the “barren leaves” of book knowledge, where he is clearly echoing “The Tables Turned” (2:1011). He quotes “Tintern Abbey” again that nature has “ample power to chasten and subdue” (2:1012). Xu’s frequent references to Wordsworth, both specific

294  Ou Li quotations and general comments, suggest that Wordsworth, together with other English Romantics, had been an important influence on his New Poetry, which could not have developed its unique voice without his absorption of these exotic poets. One finds the Romantic traces in Xu’s poetry which combines self-expressive lyricism with colloquialism, experimentalism with formalism, including his borrowing from the English metre. Although Wordsworth’s legacy in modern Chinese poetry was most conspicuously seen in Xu’s numerous remarks on him, it can also be detected in another leading modern Chinese poet’s brief but important reference to Wordsworth. Wen Yiduo (1899–1946), in one of his most famous poems “Dead Water” (Sishui), may very well be alluding to “stagnant waters” in Wordsworth’s (1933, 307) sonnet “London, 1802.”8 Wen, alongside Hu and Xu, founded the Crescent Moon Society (新月社, xinyue she), a literary society which was composed of Anglo-American-educated intellectuals. These leading modern Chinese poets’ common indebtedness to Wordsworth reveals his significant contribution to the early development of Chinese New Poetry, even though these Crescent Moon poets were perhaps more heavily influenced by Wordsworth’s younger contemporaries than Wordsworth himself. Wen, for example, was an ardent admirer of Keats. All the above-discussed writers and intellectuals, with the exception of Liang, were actively involved in the New Culture Movement; yet, even in the writings of Wu Mi (1894–1978), a leading anti-New Culture Movement figure, Wordsworth has a prominent presence. These New Culturists, despite their divergences, seemed to have found whatever they needed from Wordsworth, be it his withdrawal from the world or his revolutionary poetics, his egotistical sublime or his ability to “make us feel” (Arnold 1961, 109). Strangely enough, something about Wordsworth seemed to transcend the literary polemics of the era, so that he could appeal to the anti-New-Culturist readers as well. The phenomenon can probably be attributed to the self-dividedness in Wordsworth, whose radicalism in both politics and poetics is often effaced by an almost mundane ordinariness and traditionalist ethics. Wu was a member of the conservative Critical Review group (學衡派, xueheng pai)—named after the journal Wu established together with Mei Guangdi. Like other members of the group, Wu was also Western-educated and was not so much against Westernisation advocated by the New Culturists as their wholesale rejection of traditional Chinese culture. In particular, Wu was opposed to the replacement of classical Chinese with the vernacular practised by those promoters of the literary revolution, in which almost all of the above-discussed figures actively participated. ­ ordsworth Different from Xu the poet and Yu the novelist, who found W a kindred spirit, Wu took a more scholarly stance towards Wordsworth and showed a typically mixed attitude. His reservation about

Two Chinese Wordsworths  295 Wordsworth probably derived from both his rivals’ promotion of Wordsworth’s revolutionary poetics and the influential anti-­Romanticism of Irving Babbitt under whom he studied at Harvard. In his 1920 article, “Remarks on English Poetry” (Yingwen shihua), Wu (2005) affirms Wordsworth as the one who curbs emotional excesses with reflective power and puts him in the same rank with ancient Chinese poets such as Tao on account of his poetic genius and fresh style (51). On the other hand, Wu claims that Wordsworth’s poetics in the Preface is “entirely false” (52). His great poems, according to Wu, are those that contradict his poetic theory, whereas those poems he composed in accordance with it are all inferior (52). Quoting Coleridge, Wu is firmly against Wordsworth’s proposal to adopt the language used by low, rustic men. He adds that if Wordsworth’s prosaic diction could still be compensated by his poetic genius, then his followers went too far in adopting the vernacular language in poetry and prose, no doubt referring to the Chinese literary revolutionaries (52). In his 1922 article, “An Overview of Poetics” (Shixue zong lun), Wu (1922) employs Wordsworth as an instance of both the elevated style, as shown in his “Ode to Milton”, and crudeness, as exemplified in the notorious lines in “The Thorn” (“I’ve measured it from side to side, / ’Tis three feet long, and two feet wide”) and “Peter Bell” (“Only the ass, with motion dull, / Upon the pivot of his skull / Turns round his long left ear”) (6–7). Siding with Coleridge, Wu ridicules these lines as “dull, clumsy, and vulgar” (7). With the firm belief in the unity of “matter” and “form” in poetry, Wu then turns to “the current crude and inferior vernacular poetry” in China (4), arguing that the aim of introducing English poetry is to “clarify that versification and formalism are indispensable to poetry” (4). If that can be understood, he exclaims, “then there may be a glimpse of hope for the future of Chinese poetry” (4). Wu seeks to promote English poetry while keeping the Chinese poetic tradition intact, an attempt that can also be seen in a column that he included in Issue No. 39 of the 1925 Critical Review as its editor. The column contains eight translations of Wordsworth’s “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” by important figures including He Lin, philosopher, and Zhang Yinlin, historian. Unsurprisingly, all translations are rendered in classical poetic forms. Wu’s editorial head-note conveys the same divided attitude towards Wordsworth. He first points out that Wordsworth’s biography and poetics “have become familiar to the Chinese reader after being promoted by the New Poets and literary revolutionaries” (Wu 1925, 14). As if to redress his rivals’ partial representation of Wordsworth, Wu then stresses the sublime yet simple power in Wordsworth’s poetry as akin to that in the works of ancient Chinese poets, namely, “Tao Yuanming, Wang Wei, and Bai Juyi” (14–15). By emphasising Wordsworth’s affinity with the classical Chinese poetic tradition, Wu endeavours to salvage the poet from these radical Chinese

296  Ou Li champions of Wordsworth. The choice of this Lucy poem, which has a remarkable sense of simplicity and restraint, might also be deliberate, probably intended to show its resonance with the classical Chinese poetic tradition and dissonance with New Poetry, the trendy poetry that must look excessive and formless in Wu’s eyes. In 1926, Zheng Zhenduo (1898–1958), a leading figure of the leftist Literary Research Association, gave one of the first overviews of Wordsworth. His article, “Nineteenth-Century British Poetry” (Shijiu shiji de yingguo shige), a chapter from his Outlines of Literature (Wenxue dagang), was published in Fiction Monthly (Xiaoshuo yuebao) in 1926, the journal edited by the Association. Leading the article, Wordsworth and Coleridge are described as two “new” and “great” poets entering the English literary world with their Lyrical Ballads and its Preface (Zheng 1926, 1). Zheng also provides a brief biography of Wordsworth which, though covering his two visits to the revolutionary France, says nothing about Annette Vallon. Mostly likely, Zheng had not yet read about the rather recent discovery of Wordsworth’s love affair, first mentioned in George McLean Harper’s 1916 biography, then in Émile Legouis’s William Wordsworth and Annette Vallon published in 1922 (Kroeber 1985, 260). Nor had, it seems, other Chinese readers of Wordsworth. Among Wordsworth’s works, Zheng mainly discusses The Excursion and other short lyrics, whereas The Prelude is not mentioned at all. On the whole, Zheng’s attitude towards Wordsworth is lukewarm, especially when one compares it with his fervent admiration of Byron. As the editor of Fiction Monthly, Zheng had compiled a special issue in commemoration of Byron’s centennial two years earlier, for which he (1924 Editorial) wrote the passionate opening editorial: “We love great writers, and we especially love great rebels.” The Quieter 1930s and 1940s After the 1920s, the large amount of introductions and translations of Western writers ushered in by the New Culture Movement dropped drastically. In the ensuing two decades, China was plunged into deep crisis by the rift of the Nationalists and Communists and the invasion of Japan. Consequently, Westernisation and iconoclasm promoted by the New Culture Movement were gradually overtaken by intellectuals’ preoccupation with national salvation and their growing concern for the masses. In such a context, Wordsworth appeared much less often in their writings, probably because they found both the secluded poet and the radical prefacer incongruous with the prevalent spirit of the age. Wordsworth’s waning popularity, therefore, further underscores the powerful myth about his apoliticalness formed in the early twentieth century. Amongst the handful of scholars who referred to Wordsworth in the 1930s–1940s was Zhu Guangqian (1897–1986), the most important

Two Chinese Wordsworths  297 Chinese scholar on aesthetics, who briefly mentions Wordsworth in his 1934 article, “The Subjectivity and Objectivity of Poetry” (Shi de zhuguan yu keguan). Zhu (1934) employs Wordsworth as an example of a poet who feels a stronger passion than ordinary people and at the same time possesses a self-distancing power, quoting in translation the famous paradox in Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” that “takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquillity” (13). The most important writing on Wordsworth in these two decades was perhaps the 1947 short monograph, Wordsworth and His Prelude (Huacihuasi ji qi xuqu), by Li Qi (1902–1989). Before then, Wordsworth’s verse autobiography, commonly regarded as his masterpiece in the twentieth-century English-speaking world, had received little attention, readerly or scholarly, in China. The first female Chinese student to study at Oxford in 1933, supervised by Helen Darbishire, Li (1947) opens her book by noting the frequent comparison of Wordsworth with Tao in China, yet she observes, perhaps as the first Chinese scholar to do so, that such a comparison can be problematic (1). She maintains that the affinity between Wordsworth’s view of nature and the traditional Chinese one makes it “easier for Chinese readers to appreciate Wordsworth” and thus, “among the English poets, with the exception of Byron, Wordsworth’s poetry is the most translated in China” (2). She then rightly points out, if we merely remark on his similarity with Tao “with terms like ‘seclusion’ or ‘tranquillity’ and yet ignore his uniqueness, then our reading is only superficial” (3). She explains that many English poets before Wordsworth have written on nature, and it is “their poems, rather than Wordsworth’s, that are closer to Chinese nature poems,” for in these English and Chinese poems, nature serves only as the background of human activities (2). Yet not until Wordsworth did poems on nature develop a self-awareness (2). Other than his nature poetry, Li also discusses Wordsworth’s revolutionary experience in great detail, mentioning in passing that “he was in love” during his stay in France (23). Despite its scholarly import, Li’s book did not seem to gain enough attention to turn the tide of the neglect of The Prelude in China.

Wordsworth’s Reception After 1949 Censure in Communist China Before 1949, despite these divergent takes on Wordsworth, the poet had been popularised as a central figure of British Romanticism, even though his canon was mostly confined to the Preface and several most famous pieces in Lyrical Ballads. Having never inspired the kind of passionate admiration as Byron, Shelley, or even Keats had done, Wordsworth was nevertheless widely acclaimed amongst Chinese readership. After 1949,

298  Ou Li however, with the founding of the People’s Republic of China, the poet became essentially the “lost leader” who “left us” “[j]ust for a handful of silver” (Browning 1989, 42), the one who betrayed the younger radical self as the enthusiastic supporter of the French Revolution. Wordsworth’s political conservatism in later years was the chief reason for his Communist evaluators to give him a drastically different appraisal as a figure to be censured for his reactionary political stance. This can be clearly seen in an article published in 1949, “Reflections upon Teaching English Poetry” (Kai jiang yinguoshi xiangdao de yixie tiyan) by Bian Zhilin (1910–2000), poet and translator. Recalling his experience of studying and teaching English poetry at Peking University, Bian (1949) first remarks on the popularity of British Romantic poets in China, especially Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Wordsworth (31). Although acknowledging that these Romantics were “revolutionary,” he unequivocally asserts that the nature of their revolution was “bourgeois”: for example, Wordsworth “returned to nature” only after “abandoning the fight for freedom” (31). Bian’s view of debasing poetry into the product of class struggle bespeaks the drastic turn of literary policy in Communist China, a sovereign state which in essence regarded literature as subservient to the Party’s ideology. If literary works contradicted the Party line in any way as in Wordsworth’s case, they had to be denounced and cleansed. The official stance to Romanticism in post-1949 China was borrowed from the Soviet literary theory that divided Romanticism into two camps, revolutionary or active and reactionary or passive. Wordsworth, as the representation of the latter group, was not just slighted but often caricatured, as can be seen in various Soviet-compiled histories of British literature used as standard references in China. In Outlines of British Literature (Yingguo wenxue shi gang), Anikst (1959) recognises the vital role Wordsworth’s Preface has played in reforming British poetry but condemns it as “the manifesto of reactionary Romanticism” for his opposition to the progressive Industrial Revolution and his nostalgic clinging to the feudalist system (287). Wordsworth’s portrayal of the humble and rustic life is ridiculed as the “absurd elevation of anti-rationalism” (287) as best exemplified in “The Idiot Boy,” whereas The Prelude is offered as evidence for his turncoat politics (289). The Soviet disapproval of Wordsworth is also evident in a lesser poet he is degraded to and the lighter weight he is given in these literary histories. The Soviet stance was closely followed by Chinese scholars who had to watch out even more carefully for reactionary Romanticism after Mao’s following slogan was introduced in 1958: “revolutionary Realism in combination with revolutionary Romanticism.” The slogan was purported to endorse the impractical scheme of industrialisation launched in the Great Leap Forward (大躍進, dayuejin) campaign, during which fanatical practices went by the name of Romanticism. In a popular

Two Chinese Wordsworths  299 university textbook European Literary History (Ouzhou wenxue shi) published in 1964, Wordsworth is mentioned only briefly in the introduction to British Romanticism as the foil to Byron and Shelley, two revolutionary Romantics. The labels attached to him are obviously lifted from the Soviet sources: the reactionary Romantic “glorifying feudalism,” “terrified by and hostile to the Revolution” (Yang 1964, 2:49). The textbook, edited by Yang Zhouhan (1915–1989), an Oxford-educated professor at Peking University, was adopted till the end of the twentieth century. Revival After the 1980s Except for these summary remarks of disparagement and dismissal, Wordsworth remained more or less unread for three decades until after the conclusion of the Cultural Revolution, when translations and studies of Western literature revived with the relaxation of the Party’s control over the literary and artistic realm. One of the first scholars to restore Wordsworth’s reputation from several decades’ unjust censure was Wang Zuoliang (1916–1995), who studied at Oxford in 1947–1949 before returning to China to teach. In his long article, “The Rise of Romantic Poetry in England” (Yingguo langmanzhuyi shige de xingqi), rather than simply labelling Wordsworth as a reactionary Romantic, Wang (1980) calls attention to Wordsworth’s “traumatic experience” during the French Revolution and his subsequent worship of nature as a “healing” process (71). Amongst Wordsworth’s works, Wang re-affirms the tremendous influence of the Preface and discusses not just his famous lyrical ballads, but the sonnets and The Prelude as well. He was also probably the first Chinese scholar who noted the personal and political significance of the revolutionary experience for the poet in addition to mentioning Wordsworth’s love affair with Annette and their illegitimate daughter (91). This article later developed into two chapters—on Lyrical Ballads and Wordsworth, respectively—in his 1991 History of English Romantic Poetry (Yingguo langmanzhuyi shige shi), the first scholarly work on Romanticism in Communist China that is finally rid of the sloganeering critical discourse that reduces literature to a mere instrument of the Party’s political tasks. At the end of the Wordsworth chapter, Wang (1991) remarks on the “irrevocable decline of Wordsworth’s poetic power” after 1807 and his political conservatism in later years (88). Nevertheless, he makes the evaluation in a neutral, disinterested tone, without the familiar disapprobation and sarcasm that prevailed in Wordsworth criticism in the preceding four decades. From the 1980s onwards, various translations of Wordsworth have appeared, such as those of his lyrics by Gu Zixin, Huang Gaoxin, and Yang Deyu. In 1999, more than half a century after Li Qi put the first two books of The Prelude into Chinese, the translation of the entire

300  Ou Li poetic autobiography was finally published. The translator, Ding Hongwei, professor at Peking University, also authored a monograph on The Prelude, titled Ideology and “Sad Music”: Wordsworth’s Post-­ revolutionary Turn (Linian yu beiqu: huazihuasi hougeming zhi bian). In its preface, Ding (2002) highlights that the complex interaction between Wordsworth’s revolutionary experience and his poetic creation is particularly relevant to China, a nation that “had gone through endless upheavals in the past hundred years” (1). In saying so, he rightly points out a previously unnoted resonance Wordsworth has for contemporary Chinese readership, which lies not in his naturalism but in his “post-­ revolutionary turn.” Ding (2002) also sharply perceives a strange “time difference” that existed between the study of Wordsworth in China and that in the English-speaking world. Wordsworth’s political conservatism was a common target in nineteenth-century England, but it did not become a central issue until almost a hundred years later in post-1949 China (7). From the 1980s onwards, while the Chinese Wordsworthians began to turn away from their earlier overpoliticised reading, the West had shifted towards a historicist and materialist approach (7–8). Looking at the future tendency in apprehension, Ding asks, “are Chinese scholars about to be dictated by the trendy political criticism from overseas now, before some basic misconceptions about Wordsworth are cleared up?” (8) This persistent sense of anxiety to catch up with the English-speaking world, much like the busy emulation of the Soviet model in the 1950s, only reveals the lack of autonomy of the study of Wordsworth in China and of foreign literary studies in general. The current state of Chinese Wordsworth criticism can be captured by this “time gap” on the one hand, and an obstinate comparative interest on the other.9 There still seem to be two Wordsworths in today’s China: one is the slightly dated poet that was circulated in English scholarship several decades ago; the other is the Sinicised Wordsworth, unperturbed, retreating to nature with a Daoist “wise passiveness.” Neither bears much likeness, however, to the man who, in Roe’s (1988, 275) words, was “made a poet” by “failure [of the Revolution].” In their continuous adaptation of Wordsworth to the turbulent context of twentieth-­century China, Wordsworth’s Chinese readers and critics have irrevocably changed his original text which, in travelling to a foreign land, has to surrender its autonomy to its readers, whose modification constantly reshapes the original even in the process of renewing its life.

Notes 1 For the post-1949 Chinese reception of Wordsworth, this article focusses on the mainland China. 2 Tianyuan poetry, literally poetry of “the fields and gardens,” refers to ancient landscape poetry inspired by pastoral scenes.

Two Chinese Wordsworths  301 3 The term refers to the advocate of constitutional monarchy (as against revolution) in the late Qing era. 4 All translations in this article are mine unless otherwise indicated. 5 Tian’s translation is translated back into the English original here. 6 The wording “humble and rustic life” (instead of “low and rustic life” as adopted in the 1802 Preface) suggests that Tian quotes from the 1800 preface. The present article uses the 1802 Preface for the common references to it in scholarship. 7 For Guo, Goethe was a more important source of the pantheistic influence, as Kaminski discusses in detail in his chapter in this volume. See also his chapter for a discussion of the Creation Society’s turn from Romanticism to Marxism. 8 “Dead Water” is the common translation of Sishui, but Wordsworth’s “stagnant waters” can be translated into the same Chinese term Sishui. As Denton (1996) points out in his note to Wen’s essay “Form in Poetry,” “[Wen] quotes part of [Wordsworth’s sonnet] . . . . The similarity of Wen’s line to that of Wordsworth is probably not coincidental” (326n). 9 See Ge Guilu (2003, 148–150).

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16 “The world must be made Romantic” The Sentimental Grotesque in Tetsuya Ishida’s “Self-Portraits of Others”1 Shun-liang Chao Man was born free, and everywhere he is in chains. —Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract (1994, 45) [R]omantic [is that] which presents a sentimental theme in a fantastic form. —Friedrich Schlegel, Dialogue on Poetry (1968a, 98)

In this chapter, I argue that the incongruous body of the self-portraits by Tetsuya Ishida (石田徹也, 1973–2005) is a modern form of the grotesque growing out of a German Romantic notion of humour that values sympathetic inclusion and fantastic amalgamation. Romantic humour, vital to Romantic ethics, is rooted in love, one form of which is self-­ mockery that drives audiences to extract the general from the particular. By age 26, Ishida (2013), a prize-winning painter whose works have been exhibited worldwide, had already declared his will to predicate his self-portraits on redemptive self-mockery (267): he fashioned himself as those plagued by the ills of Japanese modernity in order to embody their “psychical wounds” (精神的外傷) (Ejiri 2013, 5) through the grotesque degradation of the artist himself. During his ten-year career as a painter, Ishida composed nearly 200 paintings, set during the Lost Two Decades (1991–2010) of economic depression and dubbed “self-portraits of others” (他人の自画像) (Horikiri 2010, 8). Ishida’s paintings feature a chagrined self-portrait—frequently as a salaryman or a secondary school student—that is merged comically with rusty machines or everyday objects into a hybrid, 2 a grotesque violation of the human body that symbolises the unequal battle between the self and the mechanised society that engulfs it. The two identities are socially significant: salarymen are the bedrock of Japan’s economy and school students the promise of Japan’s future. An untitled painting of 1997 (Figure 16.1), for instance, evinces the grimness of Japanese work culture that “working to the point of exhaustion is regarded as

“The world must be made Romantic”  305 a virtue and proof of one’s indispensability” (Tipton 2008, 228). Here Ishida portrays himself as a drained salaryman fused into a worn down lifebuoy on a stretcher that, ironically, is waiting to be saved, a short step away from karōshi (literally, overwork death), a social issue that has become alarming since the 1970s and that, as we shall see, is symptomatic of the Japanese culture of collectivism and conformity. Likewise, in another untitled painting of 1997 (Figure 16.2), Ishida mulls over the brutality of the “exam hell” (juken jigoku) that has turned students into spoon-fed yet tortured exam machines: he casts himself as several students who sit an entrance exam apprehensively with their left hands turning into sewing machines that fill in optical answer sheets. In these two self-portraits, as well as others we shall see, Ishida degrades or depreciates himself grotesquely so as to unveil the inhuman toll on individuals in modern Japan. During the Lost Two Decades, Ishida was devoted to healing the social ego crushed and caged by the inhuman forces of capitalist modernity: economic recession, institutional violence, and intense urbanisation. He thereby joined Japanese avant-garde artists in the 1990s in challenging “the legacy of [prewar] imperial policies” (Mason 2005, 346) devised to turn Japan into the first industrialised country outside the West. These artists sustained the cultural critique of modernity in the 1930s and 1940s, one that Meiji Japan (1868–1912) built by adopting Bismarckian “iron-like political control and cold efficiency” to enhance the Confucian supremacy of the state over individuals (Nagai 1971, 76). Intellectual groups, including the Japan Romantic School (Nihon Rōmanha), revolted against Western utilitarianism while calling for a revival of

Figure 16.1  Tetsuya Ishida, Untitled, 1997. Acrylic on board, 103.0 × 145.6 cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

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Figure 16.2  Tetsuya Ishida, Untitled, 1997. Acrylic on board, 182.0 × 91.0 cm. The National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo, Japan. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

folk culture that Meiji bureaucratism smothered. Western Romanticism, Löwy and Sayre stress (2001), emerged as “a reaction against the way of life in capitalist societies” within capitalist modernity itself (19), and this self-criticism is also true of the School. Founded in 1935, the School sought to reinstate “a native aesthetic sensibility” as the foundation of an ideal society to come (Najinta and Harootunian 1988, 755) by following Frühromantik to advocate an aesthetic education as the key to socio-­ political reform, to overcoming modernity (Doak 1994, xxxv–xxxvii;

“The world must be made Romantic”  307 Beiser 2003, 47–50). During the Second World War, however, the School lost its critical edge when its pursuit of sublimity was appropriated by Imperial Japan as part of its militarist discourse (Ohnuki-Tierney 2002, 267). After the fall of the Japanese Empire, the wheel of Japanese modernity did not stop turning. As postwar Japan implemented American capitalism to drive its economy to become the world’s second largest by 1968, the School, stripped of its militarist potential, has been restored since the mid-1960s as “a moral basis for individual action in a world where politics seemed totally corrupt and devoid of any possibility for shaping new, critical responses to the threat of modernity” (Doak 1994, 150). In line with this shaping of an ethical subject, Ishida (2013) intended his paintings to inspire moral action against the onslaught of industrial capitalism: “I am strongly drawn to saint-like artists, those who truly believe that ‘the world is saved a little with each brushstroke,’ who ‘can hear the pain of all humankind in the face of a sheep’” (265). Amongst his “saint-like artists” are Ben Shahn (1898–1969), Anselm Kiefer (1945–), and Franz Kafka (1883–1924), the last two of whom were heavily influenced by German Romanticism. Ishida valorised the works of Kiefer (249), a German Neo-Expressionist painter who followed in the footsteps of Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843) and employed art to explore his individual psyche and the collective psyche of Germany (Rosenthal 1987, 14, 17). More importantly, Ishida’s “favorite novelist” was Kafka (Hanawa 2010, 127), who regarded Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) as an artistic relative perhaps because of Kleist’s “Michael Kohlhaas” (1810), a novella which tells the story of a man who stands up to bureaucracy and unfairness only to be cruelly treated and punished horribly. In his novels like The Metamorphosis and The Trial, Kafka shares Kleist’s Romantic desire to “overcome the polar divisions of existence” in modern civil society (Grandin 1987, 15, 93) and his Romantic belief that “without love of human beings there is no possible [true] happiness” (quoted in Fink 2014, 40). As we shall see, Ishida’s ethical project, while in line with the legacy of the Japan Romantic School, goes one step further by taking on board self-mockery, a type of humour central to German Romantic ethics. In the following pages, I shall first elucidate the nature of Romantic ethics formulated by early Romantics and picked up by Kafka, and then move on to illuminate how Ishida’s grotesque self-portraits figure a confined world that, as Novalis (1997, 60) would say, “must be made Romantic.”

A Romantic Bildung of Love: The Sentimental, the Grotesque, the Humorous Love lies at the heart of Romantic ethics, whose goal is to liberate humankind from the cage of capitalist realism and restore holistic humanity. In Dialogue on Poetry (Gespräch über die Poesie, 1800), Friedrich

308  Shun-liang Chao Schlegel (1772–1829), the ringleader of Frühromantik, grounds Romantic ethics on sentimentality: “The source and soul of all [sentimental] emotions is love, and the spirit of love must hover everywhere invisibly visible in romantic poetry” (1968a, 99). By “romantic poetry,” Schlegel refers to all creative activities, including the sciences, in that Frühromantik seeks to educate (bilden) “all human powers into a whole,” a holistic ideal that exists perfectly in ancient Greece but vanishes with the advent of modern society (Beiser 2003, 19, 22): “render poetry living and social, and life and society poetic, poetize wit, fill and saturate the forms of art . . . with vibrations of humor,” Schlegel (1968a, 140) writes in the Athenäum (1798–1800) (see also Novalis 2007, 8). To foster holistic humanity, Schlegel and his fellow Romantics aligned themselves with the pre-Romantic Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805), who aimed to aestheticise feeling and thereby satisfy our “play drive” (Spieltrieb)3 —an exercise of creativity that Jean Paul Richter (or Jean Paul, 1763–1825) later described as “the first poetry of the human being” (1891, 152) in his treatise on early childhood education and thus paved the way for Freud (1959) to advocate children’s play. In Schiller (1993), such satisfaction will optimally coordinate our sensual pleasure and moral duty to turn us into “a complete being” (125–127, 144), one that does not yield to the primacy of (Kant’s) rational morality and fall prey to the “fragmentary specialization of human powers” (103): “Everlastingly chained to a single little fragment of the whole, man himself develops into nothing but a fragment; everlastingly in his ear the monotonous sound of the wheel that he turns, he never develops the harmony of his being” (100). Unlike Schiller, though, the early Romantics celebrated the aesthetic Bildung of love as the antidote to “the divisive wounds” (or weltschmerz or le mal du siècle) that capitalist modernity had inflicted on humankind: self-alienation, social alienation, and the alienation of the self from nature (Beiser 2003, 30–33). Like Schlegel, Novalis (1772–1801) had in mind the spirit of love, “the unum of the universe,” when urging humankind to Romanticise, or re-enchant, the world: “The world must be made Romantic” so as to render it all-embracing again (1997, 122, 60). To Romanticise the world is to cultivate a loving heart with which we sensuously and spiritually experience the world without and within us, thereby realising the ideal and idealising the real4: [W]e can rediscover its [the world’s] lost beauty, mystery, and magic—only if we see all things in the spirit of love. It is through love that we see ourselves in nature and others, and so again identify with the world and become at home with it once more. (Beiser 2003, 104; see also Nassar 2014, 67–70) Schlegel granted art the cardinal role in the Bildung of love. For him, crucial to Romantic art are three intertwined elements—the sentimental,

“The world must be made Romantic”  309 the grotesque, and the humorous—each of which symbolises the Romantic striving (Sehnsucht) for the combination of disparate realms into a whole, for all-inclusiveness. In Dialogue on Poetry, Schlegel (1968a) puts forth these three elements in the section on the novel (Roman)—a literary genre that, derived from medieval romances, inspired him to coin the adjective romantisch—when defending Richter’s humorous novels against the criticism that they are “a colorful hodgepodge of sickly wit” and that they are “sentimental” (95, 98). 5 Responding to the first criticism, Schlegel connects “a colorful hodgepodge of sickly wit” to the “grotesque,” saluting the “grotesques” of Richter’s novels as “the only romantic productions of our unromantic age” (95). By “grotesque,” a term he interchanges with “arabesque,” Schlegel refers to the style Raphael adopted to decorate the Vatican Loggia in the 1510s (99), a style that, established as early as 100 BC, features hybrid images of human, animal, and vegetal forms (Dacos 1969, 8).6 Schlegel finds it necessary to “cultivate [bilden] in ourselves this sense for the grotesque and remain in this mood” (1968a, 97; 1968b, 332). For one thing, the composite form of the grotesque encapsulates the Romantic persistent pursuit of all-inclusiveness. With its unfinished metamorphosis of one bodily form into another, the grotesque body is forever in the state of “becoming” as is “Romantic poetry,” “a progressive universal poetry” (Schlegel 1968a, 140–141). “Romantic poetry” is “universal” because it never stops embracing manifold forms and elements (be they literary or not); it is “progressive” due to its self-reflexive, self-critical, and even self-annihilating nature (Dahlstrom 2014, 123). “One can,” as Schlegel (1971) writes elsewhere, “only become a philosopher, not be one. As soon as one thinks one is a philosopher, one stops becoming one” (167). For another, Schlegel deems the grotesque an imaginative “form” so “witty” as to “nourish the play of our inner makeup [­Bildung]” (1996a, 96; 1996b, 330), an echo of Schiller’s Spieltrieb. For Schlegel (1971), wit, or coincidentia oppositorum, is “the outward lightening bolt of the imagination” (243) and finds a happy habitat for itself in the grotesque, whose coalition of disparate items provides a richest loam for new associations to grow. While endorsing the “divine wit” in the Romantic imagination of Cervantes and, notably, Shakespeare, Schlegel justifies the “sickly wit” in the imagination of Laurence Sterne and Richter as the natural product of the “sickly environment” of their time (1968a, 97). Between them, Schlegel continues, Richter’s “imagination is far more sickly, and therefore far more eccentric and fantastic” such that “his [German] sentimentality” eclipses Stern’s “English sensibility” (97).7 This comparison leads us to Schlegel’s response to the second disapproval of Richter’s novels as being “sentimental.” In Schlegel (1968a), sentimentality, whose marrow is love, underpins the cultivation of wit (100)—or, as Novalis called it, “the menstruum universale”

310  Shun-liang Chao (1971c, 32)—since nothing is more powerful than love in integrating incongruities, in piercing into the affinities, however occult, between things apparently unlike and distant. We can, therefore, infer that by “fantastic” Schlegel may well mean “witty” when proclaiming “romantic [is that] which presents a sentimental theme in a fantastic form”: the fantastic, or witty, form could be literally grotesque by commingling human and inhuman parts into aesthetic hybrids or figuratively grotesque by coalescing imaginatively remote realms into aesthetic entities. Both serve to invest the theme of moral beauty with humour to delight our imagination with something higher and ideal: “Humor,” as Schlegel once put it, “is the wit of sentiment” (1971, 195). In School for Aesthetics (Vorschule der Äesthetik, 1804), Richter (1973) goes one step further than Schlegel by equating “romantic” with “humorous” (90). Richter anchors humour in cosmopolitan benevolence that “recognizes no individual foolishness, no fools, but only folly and a mad world . . . because before infinity everything is equal” (88–89).8 Within this “world-humor” (88), individual folly, like Uncle Toby’s mock-military campaigns in Sterne’s 1759 Tristram Shandy, represents “the allegory of all human hobbyhorses” (89). Richter goes on to differentiate between the true humourist and the “cold persifleur” (or “­pseudo-humorist”) according to compassion. While the latter is “selfishly aware of his own superiority,” the former, “rich in feeling,” bears the image of Christ because “he cannot deny his own kinship with humanity” (91, 95): The humorist . . . would almost rather take individual folly into protection, while taking the constable of pillory together with all the spectators into custody; it is not civic folly but human folly, the universal that touches him within. (89)9 For Richter (1973, 96), this “noble spirit” of the true humourist manifests itself paradigmatically in Shakespeare’s self-parody “when he uses the humorous Falstaff as commentator of his wild life of sin!” Richter himself used comical characters in his novels like the one-legged Jean Paul and the timid and paranoid Schmelzle to parody his own hypochondria (1883, 353; 1898, 176). In short, the true humourist wounds nobody but himself to impel audiences to induce the universal from individual follies and foibles, to measure out the small against the great. His self-victimisation or self-annihilation is thus “a lex inversa”: “its descent to hell paves its way for an ascent to heaven” (Richter 1973, 91–92; see also Vieweg 2013). Richter’s “world-humor,” typical of his novels, took nineteenth-­ century Europe by storm: apart from Schlegel, his admirers include German-speaking authors like E. T. A. Hoffman, Heine, and Gottfried

“The world must be made Romantic”  311 Keller, French authors like Nerval, Hugo, Baudelaire, and Flaubert (Fleming 2006, 9–12), and British authors like Coleridge, De Quincey, and Thomas Carlyle (Tave 1960, 237–243). Carlyle best portrayed Richter as a sui generis humourist. In line with Schlegel’s plaudit of Richter’s sentimentality, Carlyle (1847) stressed that no writers had ventured more deeply than Richter into the heart of humour, where “warm, tender fellow-feeling with all forms of existence” triumphs (15–17). In his novels, Richter shows a colossal intellectual faculty of “piercing into the most hidden combination of things” because he “feels, imagines, acts as a humorist” (14). In the twentieth century, within the borders of the German-speaking world alone, writers like Herman Hesse and Paul Celan revealed their debt to Richter (Fleming 2006, 10). Kafka did not list Richter amongst his “‘blood relatives,’ namely, Dickens, Kierkegaard, Dostoevsky, Flaubert, and Kleist” (Grandin 1987, 15). Nevertheless, Kafka, as mentioned before, shared Kleist’s Romantic faith in the love of humankind, a faith that could link Richter to Kafka if we parallel the Richterian lex inversa to Kafka’s celebration of humility: “Humility provides everyone, even him who despairs in solitude, with the strongest relationship to his fellow man” (1954, 52). Central to his autobiographical allegories like The Metamorphosis, A Hunger Artist, and The Burrow, humility is realised in common with the rest of humanity: “You can hold yourself back,” Kafka (1954) paradoxically wrote, “from the sufferings of the world, this is something you are free to do . . . , but perhaps precisely this holding back is the only suffering that you might be able to avoid” (51). In, say, The Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung, 1915), Kafka abases himself by turning his doppelgänger Gregor Samsa halfway into a gigantic vermin so as to take into custody a mad world where commuters are estranged by their work from themselves, their families, and their society. In Kafka’s self-portrayal, as well as in Ishida’s we shall see, the sentimental grotesque body is a site not of self-pity but of self-mockery which connects the artist intimately to his fellow human beings.

“I tried to turn my feeble self into something one could laugh at” Sentimental humour, albeit not espoused by the Japan Romantic School, does find its niche in Japanese intellectual discourse in general. From the 1890s onwards, sentimental humour, in tune with Buddhist compassion, began to figure conspicuously in the formulation of J­ apanese humour when European ideas of humour—alongside the debate on its ethical nature—became “a matter of consuming interest in ­Japan” (Wells 1997, 59, 67–68, 110).10 For example, Japan’s leading modern novelist Natsume Sōseki, who taught English literature at ­Tokyo Imperial University after studying at University College London in 1900–1902, maintained

312  Shun-liang Chao in 1907 that “derision and abuse are not true humour; and it is the work that has deep sympathy within its humour that is first rate” (quoted in Wells 1997, 95) while deploring the dearth of true humour in Meiji Japan. Along this line, in A Study of Humour in Literature (1917), the first major Japanese work on humour, Naruse Mukyoku, a professor of the Sturm und Drang at Kyoto Imperial University and founder of the Goethe-Gesellschaft in Japan (1931–), examines Japanese humorous literature by referring to the ideas of humour and literary works by Shakespeare, Molière, G. E. Lessing, Goethe, Richter, Keller, amongst others (Wells 1997, 110–111). While lamenting that “warm, bright laughter” is barren not only in literature but in daily life in Japan due to the stress of modern life, Mukyoku hails Keller as “the great humourist [fumorisuto] since Shakespeare and Goethe” because his laughter “harbours the laughter of the gods” (quoted in Wells 1997, 112). It seems far-fetched to ascribe the paucity of warm humour to the ills of modernity, but Mukyoku cleared the path for subsequent critics and writers to grant humour an ethical role in cultivating the collective psychology of Japanese society. For instance, Honda Kenshō, a Shakespearean, advocates what he calls “deep humour” over satirical and obscene humour in his “Humour in Contemporary Literature,” one of the 25 essays published in 1938 (one year after the Second Sino-Japanese War started) that accompany the first Japanese translation of Henri Bergon’s Le Rire (Laughter, 1900). Kenshō considers “deep humour” so favourably as to conjure up Richter’s distinction between the true humourist and the “cold persifleur”; he advocates “deep humour” as “laughing with tears,” “born of a warm heart,” and “a deep love of human beings” while claiming that deep humour is scanty in Japanese literature because the Japanese “are basically lacking” (Wells 1997, 133–135). The call for sentimental humour became even more vociferous in postwar Japan when “common humanity seemed more urgent than it had been in times past” (145) and when society as a whole was inundated with the excessive hunt for economic growth (147). Ishida, I suggest, picked up where the Japan Romantic School had left off by taking on board this interest in the function of sentimental humour to reform modern Japan. The self-mockery in his self-portraits exemplifies the Richterian lex inversa: if Japanese ethics, as Ruth Benedict (2005) notes, is dominated not by (internal) guilt but by (external) shame (haji), or the fear of “being openly ridiculed” (223), then Ishida does not shrink at all from ridiculing himself publicly to provide himself “with the strongest relationship to his fellow man” (in Kafka’s terms).11 Self-mockery or self-humiliation, of course, is not necessarily sentimental in the Romantic sense unless it drives audiences to derive the general from the individual, to challenge or, better still, change the absurd lifeworld practices they share. This all-embracing quality is what renders

“The world must be made Romantic”  313 self-mockery sentimental or, as Simon Critchley (2002) might say, “redemptive or messianic” (16). At the age of 26, Ishida (2013) wrote of the rationale for his redemptive self-mockery in his journal as follows: At first [the paintings] were close to a self-portrait. Through gags and humour, I tried to turn my feeble self into something one could laugh at [弱い自分をギャグやユーモアで笑えるものにしようとした]. . . . As I continued in this process, I myself began to expand as consumers, urban dwellers, workers, and the social problems that I felt became a consciousness of them. I could strongly feel the pain, suffering, anxiety, and loneliness of other people. I wanted to digest these feelings inside myself and find a way to express them. (267) By expressing the pain of others, Ishida empowered his “feeble self” to move beyond self-pity and used in his self-portraits the grotesque body as a sharp instrument to burrow deep into the wreck of modern life in Japan. Ishida’s grotesque body, as Novalis (1997, 26–27) would say, is quintessentially Romantic in that it is born of an inward gaze on the self that opens a window for an active outward gaze on the external world that in turn penetrates into the internal world of the artist himself. Strategically, Ishida invited his fellow Japanese to laugh with him at his incongruous body, whose grotesqueness epitomised the sickness of modern Japan that also tortured them. The laughter was thus elicited with tears. Indeed, Ishida intended his self-mockery to be redemptive and inclusive. For he did not shy away from shaming himself even when dealing with terrorist incidents like the 1995 Tokyo subway sarin gas attack, perpetrated by members of Aum Shinrikyo, that injured nearly 6,000 people. Their mentality, Ishida (2013, 257) noted, quashed the deeply entrenched belief the Japanese generally had held that they could understand one another without saying a word. Rather than simply satirising Shoko Asahara, the founder of the doomsday cult, as caricaturists would do, Ishida in The Visitor of 1999 (Figure 16.3), as Richter would say, does not recognise individual folly but a mad world by portraying himself as Asahara with lacklustre eyes within a nautilus to make viewers comically yet painfully aware of a shared everyday practice that underlies this atrocity: the rupture of the social bond between individuals in Tokyo due to urbanisation. This self-portrait shows a grotesque creature at the door of a flat typically designed for singles or nuclear families during the strong economic growth in postwar Japan, a type of housing that contributed to the isolation of residents from their community. Recalling early modern European nautilus cups whose motifs are frequently grotesque, the nautilus here serves as a witty metaphor for isolation since, as a living creature, it tends to avoid human contact

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Figure 16.3  T  etsuya Ishida, The Visitor, 1999. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 45.5 × 53.0 cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

(Zuroski 2017). In this self-portrait, as well as others we shall see, Ishida sacrifices himself to call on Japanese viewers to face and reform the absurd situations in which they find themselves. His self-sacrifice, as Novalis (1997) would say, “is the source of all humiliation, as also on the contrary it is the foundation of all true exaltation” (27). To understand better the moral function of the grotesque body in Ishida’s self-portraits to exalt or redeem modern Japan, we have to look into the nature of the modern grotesque. In his seminal book The Grotesque in Art and Literature (1957), Wolfgang Kayser (1981) explains that the grotesque arises from the sudden intrusion of abysmal, infernal forces into our familiar world such that it “ceases to be reliable, and we feel that we would be unable to live in this changed world. The grotesque instils fear of life rather than fear of death” (185). Taking a cue from Kayser, Bernard Mc Elroy (1989) argues that the source of the modern grotesque is “internal, not infernal” because the modern grotesque finds its source in the aberrations of individual psychic life—such as shame, guilt, fear, and paranoid—which result from the persecution of the self by an alien, inimical environment (21). In the modern world, wherein inhuman, amorphous forces on every hand entrap and engulf individuals, the grotesque violation of the body symbolises the unequal battle between the self and the brutal other. Such a violation is used by artists to unmask the protagonist’s view of the external world, thereby undermining the viewer’s or reader’s “desire to live in such a world, shocking his sensibility, [and] reversing conventional values” (29). Characteristic

“The world must be made Romantic”  315 of the modern grotesque are Kafka’s novels such as The Metamorphosis in which humans are animalistic, not merely to lay bare the fundamental monstrosity beneath urban life but also to embody Samsa’s paranoiac fear of being unloved and humiliated by the dominant authority (whose archetype is his father). Ishida’s debt to Kafka is prominent in his self-portraits. Specific references to Samsa can be found in four of his self-portraits of 1995 and 1996 featuring a lonely young salaryman turning into a half-human, half-bug creature. Restless Dream of 1996 (Figure 16.4) particularly reminds us of the sentimental scene in which Samsa crawls laboriously through the junk heap his family creates in his room: “after such excursions, he would once again remain motionless for hours, sad and tired

Figure 16.4  T  etsuya Ishida, Restless Dream, 1996. Acrylic on board, 145.6 × 103.0 cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

316  Shun-liang Chao to death” (Kafka 2009, 64). In Restless Dream, looking aside with a shameful glance, a young salesman transforms halfway into a gigantic cockroach wearing a muddy suit; he rummages through a large rubbish bin with his left hand while holding an opened can of coffee, his comfort drink, in his right hand. The rubbish bin serves as a witty metaphor for the crumbling of Japan after its bubble economy burst and its stock market slumped in 1991. In Restless Dream, Ishida again openly ridicules himself, this time by identifying with a cockroach as his doppelgänger to communicate the weariness and distress of drifting without dignity from one place to another in order to make a living when the end of nightmarish economic stagnation is nowhere in sight. Ishida’s self-portraits are Kafkaesque inasmuch as they lay bare the absurdity of modern life through the surreal distortion of physical integrity by the dehumanising forces of an atomised and mechanised world. Economic recession is the first aspect of capitalist modernity Ishida engaged with in his presentation of Kafkaesque Japan. He frequently represented his body mixed with rusty and dysfunctional objects or machines, especially those with mobility, to symbolise the imprisonment or persecution of individuals by economic meltdown: the loss of job or career prospect. After the economic bubble burst, firms and factories had to slash payrolls to cut costs, a restructuring that hit not only junior staff, like the salaryman in Restless Dreams, but also core staff and university graduates. Many middle managers were sacked, and unemployment for them meant “not only the loss of income, but also social and psychological humiliation” (Tipton 2008, 226). In Section Chief’s Chair inside an Out-of-Commission Building (1996), Ishida expresses the gnawing shame by creating an ironic contrast between a well-dressed salaryman and the rundown office that encloses him: Ishida victimises nobody but himself as a section chief who transforms halfway into a rusty office chair and sits despairingly in a corner—the rusty chair metonymically referring to the firm that has gone bankrupt and metaphorically to the section chief’s loss of dignity. When the economic environment in Japan was shrouded in stagnation, companies could not afford to hire new blood to replace sacked middle managers. Full-time permanent jobs were therefore no longer a norm: university graduates were either unemployed or hired part-time. Thus began the so-called “employment ice age,” roughly 1993–2005 (the years after 2000 have been called “super ice age”). Graduating from the university in 1996 and immediately exposed to such dramatic changes, Ishida embodied on his canvases his empathetic concern for the younger generation. A great example is Debris of 2004 (Figure 16.5), whose background are a house under construction and a woman lying face downwards and foreground seems a car accident where a car and a couple all turn upside down, a scene that suggests the collapse of ­middle-class families under the sway of economic depression. At the

“The world must be made Romantic”  317

Figure 16.5  T  etsuya Ishida, Debris, 2004. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 45.5 × 53.0 cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

centre of this painting lies a grotesque figure—a composite of Ishida and a wheelbarrow—that has a face “whereupon the worm of suffering,” to quote Richter (1884) on sympathy, “was ploughing its tortuous track” (158). Once a part-time construction worker, Ishida amalgamated his dirt-stained body with a heavily weathered wheelbarrow forsaken in a construction site to incorporate the angst and agony of temporary workers who lived in constant fear of being cast off by their companies. Economic recession, however traumatic, is only a shallow cut in the skin of modern Japan, a confined society which, for Ishida, has deeper wounds inflicted by other brutal forces: institutional violence and intense urbanisation. To begin with, institutional violence often takes the form of conformity and obedience, qualities that are highly valorised in Japan. We have seen Ishida’s sentimental reflection on karōshi, a tragic consequence of Japan’s overwork culture. Drawer of 1996 (Figure 16.6) is another painting in which Ishida lays bare the debilitating and suffocating working environment. Here Ishida portrays himself as a young salaryman who, sitting disquietly in his office, seems to be forced to bury his own self—that appears incomplete in a coffin-like drawer—by his senior behind him who makes a fist with his left hand. The four vehicle models in this self-portrait could symbolise career mobility, an upward movement which would not happen unless the young man submits to his senior. Likewise, on the desk sits a beverage can branded with “Peace,” which may intimate that peace in his office would be possible

318  Shun-liang Chao

Figure 16.6  T  etsuya Ishida, Drawer, 1996. Acrylic on canvas, 59.4 × 42.0 cm. Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

only if the young man succumbs to his senior (or that the young man wishes his own self to rest in peace). Noticeably, Ishida makes the face of the authority figure invisible to suggest the omnipresence of institutional violence. Institutional violence exists, of course, not only in the workplace but at schools. If modern schooling, as Kafka once stated, is “to erase all trace of peculiarity” inherent in every human being, then Japanese education, in Ishida’s experience, would be the prime example of intellectual homogenisation. In Awakening of 1998 (Figure 16.7), for example, Ishida takes on the role of secondary school students who sit in a classroom with the same poker face and vacant eyes while a teacher whose face is invisible (as in Drawer) stands autocratically by one of them with a textbook in his hand. None of these students seems to show interest

“The world must be made Romantic”  319

Figure 16.7  Tetsuya Ishida, Awakening, 1998. Acrylic on board, 145.6 × 206.0 (103.2 × 2) cm. Shizuoka Prefectural Museum of Art, Japan. ©­Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

in the textbook before them; moreover, two of them metamorphose into human-size microscopes except for their faces, a witty use of the optical instrument to expose the failure of Japanese students to see the forest for the trees. Ishida thereby awakens Japanese viewers to the shared relentless agony of the authoritarian educational system that strips students of grand vision and intellectual autonomy and turns them into exam machines such as those in the 1997 untitled painting (Figure 16.2). Worse still, these microscope-men, in Interview of 1998 (Figure 16.8), become executives in a company interviewing Ishida as a university graduate who looks very worried and shamed, presumably due to the high pressure of conformity and obedience the microscope-interviewers place on him. His face appears in concave mirrors, bespeaking that his obedience to authority will be closely examined once he is admitted into their company. Japanese students, the future of the country, are therefore enmeshed in the vicious circle occasioned by slavish adherence to textbooks and authority. Prisoner of 1999 (Figure 16.9) shows Ishida’s remitting worry about Japanese education. This painting presents a gigantic Ishida comically embedded into an elementary school building under a sunlit sky where ominous clouds are sailing to the centre to dominate the horizon, an inauspicious scene that forebodes the future afflictions of Japanese schoolchildren. Here Ishida, the prisoner, looks pensively at the schoolchildren wearing sports uniforms on the playground as if to warn them

320  Shun-liang Chao

Figure 16.8  Tetsuya Ishida, Interview, 1998. Acrylic on board, 103.0 × 145.6 cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

Figure 16.9  Tetsuya Ishida, Prisoner, 1999. Acrylic on board, 103.0 × 145.6 cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

of the inhibiting education that is nurturing or indeed imprisoning them. Even more stifling is the other Prisoner, published in the same year, in which once again Ishida coalesces himself into a school building, but

“The world must be made Romantic”  321 this time the prisoner with sadder eyes submerges his mouth into the building to suggest the absolute compliance with authority while an elementary school girl (representing lost freedom and innocence?) seems to try to interact with him. Boxlike structures, as seen in Drawer and Prisoner, constantly appear throughout Ishida’s paintings as a symbol of spiritual imprisonment (Horikiri 2010, 7). Imprisonment, though, is not just metaphorical but a persistent lived reality in Japan, one of the world’s most densely urbanised countries. A prime example is the commuting in Tokyo, which foments a heightened sense of claustrophobia on a daily basis. Cargo of 1997 (Figure 16.10) stages a familiar everyday scene of contortion in the Tokyo underground—that which the German photographer Michael Wolf termed “Tokyo Compression” for his project starting in 1995. Commuters in Tokyo, known as commuter slaves, have to spend each day commuting on trains which are so claustrophobic that passengers have trouble breathing and sometimes faint. Behind the tormenting scene lies an even more harrowing truth which Ishida requested Japanese viewers to face through the incisively humorous image of cargo-commuters (redolent of Samsa as a nomadic commuter): modern workers are alienated, becoming ultimately a commodity, a piece of freight transported from place to place for the benefit of their firms—which may well sack them in times of financial crisis. People become things, an inhuman phenomenon which the Romantics would protest against as the grossest violation of ethics itself. Urban living could stimulate claustrophobia as well as agoraphobia, as in the phenomenon of “shakaiteki hikikomori” (“social withdrawal”),

Figure 16.10  T  etsuya Ishida, Cargo, 1997. Acrylic on board, 103.0 × 145.6 cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

322  Shun-liang Chao or “hikikomori.”12 The term was first coined in 1988 by Saitō Tamaki (2013, 24), a Japanese psychiatrist, to describe a problematic mental state “that involves cooping oneself up in one’s own home and not participating in society for six months or longer.” This problem, which often started out as a fear of school, was found most commonly in the youth back then (but has spread to older generations and other urban societies since then), and gradually became so worrying that in 2003 the Ministry of Health, Labour and Welfare in Japan published a 141-page white paper on how to respond to hikikomori. As early as 1995, one year before graduating from university, Ishida was aware of the issue of social isolation that struck the younger generation (Horikiri 2010, 7–8). The lonely figure in many of his self-portraits can be regarded as his consistent concern for the issue. Amongst them, Long Distance of 1999 (Figure 16.11) and Body Fluids of 2004 (Figure 16.12) are arguably most poignantly humorous. The

Figure 16.11  Tetsuya Ishida, Long Distance, 1999. Acrylic on board, 206.0 × 145.6 cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

“The world must be made Romantic”  323

Figure 16.12  Tetsuya Ishida, Body Fluids, 2004. Acrylic and oil on canvas, 45.5 × 53.0 cm. Private Collection. ©Tetsuya Ishida (TETSU Inc.).

first painting presents a sad-looking Ishida as a cross between a human and a seahorse floating inside a pay phone booth in the middle of nowhere at night. This confined floating man-seahorse can be seen as a hikikomori victim who finds the distance from himself to society far too long to overcome; or broadly, as a diasporic figure who longs for a sense of belonging in a megacity so crowded that people are physically close and yet psychologically distant from one another, an issue Ishida reflects upon also in The Visitor (Figure 16.3). No less agoraphobic is the figure in the second painting, published one year before Ishida died, that shows an enclosure within an enclosure; it depicts a white washbasin by a window whose tap is the head of Ishida, who is shedding tears to fill up the basin in which lives some kind of crustacean, a mysterious creature that perhaps acts as a metaphor for the ambiguous psychology of hikikomori. In these two self-portraits, Ishida again grotesquely mortifies himself to take into protection the hikikomori seinen (“withdrawn young men”), the prey of urbanisation, whose lives are curtained by “shame and conflict”: they are ashamed of being unable to have a proper job and torn between the self that takes pity on their failure to fit into society and the self that condemns their failure (Hiroshi 2017). Kafka (1954) once stated in the spirit of Romantic ethics: “We too must suffer all the suffering around us . . . Just as the child develops through all the stages of life into old age and to death . . . , so also we develop (no less deeply bound up with mankind than with ourselves)

324  Shun-liang Chao through all the sufferings of this world” (51). With his “self-portraits of others,” Ishida suffers all the suffering around him by fashioning himself as a salaryman, a student, a labourer, or a hikikomori seinen in order to develop himself and his Japanese viewers into ethical subjects to Romanticise modern Japan. In so doing, Ishida involves himself in the ethical legacy of the Japan Romantic School while going one step further by engaging with Romantic humour. He endows the grotesque body with sentimental humour in Richter’s sense: he mocks or humiliates himself to awaken the sensible soul of the viewer to the depths of human suffering and unhappiness in modern Japan. In fact, his self-portraits, albeit highly Japanese, can readily resonate beyond Japanese culture with viewers of various cultural backgrounds who have been devastated or dehumanised by the collapse of a bubble economy, the compulsion of institutional conformity, or the rapid pace of urbanisation. For his self-portraits give them courage and intelligence to see themselves in his grotesque body and educate themselves better to perceive and receive what it means to be human, to be Romantic.

Notes 1 This article results from a research project funded in 2016–2018 by the Ministry of Science and Technology in Taiwan. I would like to express my immense gratitude to James Engell (Harvard), Earl Jackson, Jr (NCTU), John Corrigan (NCCU), and Johannes Kaminsky (Vienna) for reading various drafts. 2 Ishida’s self-portraits are often considered Surrealist; they do not, however, aim at a state of cheerful anarchy, the ultimate goal of Surrealism (see Chao 2019). 3 For an account of Schiller’s impact on French Romantic art, see Chapter 5 in this volume. 4 Charles Larmore (1996, 8) deems this intertwining of imagination and reality as the true nature of what he calls the “creative-responsive imagination” of Romanticism. 5 Schlegel (1968a) attends to the novel because the genre, debuting in the eighteenth century, is distinctly “modern” and because it synthesises all previous genres, epic, dramatic, lyrical, philosophical, musical, historical, and so forth (101–102; see also Firchow 1971, 19–20): his autobiographical roman à clef, Lucinde (1799), is a playful practice of such a novelistic potpourri, and so is the early Romantic Ludwig Tieck’s Rue Mountain (Der Runenberg, 1804) (see Chapter 10 in this volume). 6 In “The Preface to Cromwell” (“La Préface de Cromwell,” 1827), a manifesto of French Romanticism, Victor Hugo (1968) considers the grotesque vital to the creation of drama, “the complete poetry” (“la poésie complète”) (71). 7 Echoing Schlegel, Thomas De Quincey (2000) wrote in 1821 that, second only to Shakespeare, Richter outperforms Sterne in showing “the interpenetration of the humorous and the pathetic” (22). 8 Similarly, Richter (1891) explained in 1807 why the love of (little) animals functions to educate children into moral beings: Little animals must be brought nearer to the eye and heart by means of a magnifying glass. Thus we may become friends of the denizens of a leaf.

“The world must be made Romantic”  325 The prejudice which values life by the yard—why, then, are not elephants and whales ranked higher than ourselves?—disappears by the contemplation of the infinity which is the same in every living creature. (345) 9 This quality characterises several humourists in Richter’s novels, the first of whom is Doctor Fenk in The Invisible Lodge (Die unsichtbare Loge, 1793), who is popular in the novel due to “the quicksilver of humor which shines out from him side by side with the warmth of his heart” (Richter 1883, 207). 10 As early as the Muromachi period (c. 1336–1573), elements of sentimental humour could be rarely found in kyōgen, a comic relief performed as part of nō plays (Wells and Davis 2006, 143–144). Also, self-deprecating jokes contributed peripherally to the humour of the Edo period (1603–1868) (Hibbett 2002, 24, 28). 11 In the history of self-portraiture, Ishida’s self-mockery can be linked to “mock-heroic self-portraits,” a sub-genre that emerged in sixteenth-century Europe with a Biblical rationale that “‘he that humbleth himself shall be exalted’ (Luke 14:11)” (Hall 2014, 107). 12 I owe this thread to Yūko Hasagawa (2014).

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Index

Note: Page numbers followed by “n” denote endnotes. Abram, David 208 Abrams, M. H. 67 aesthetic revolution see Romanticism aestheticism 85, 88, 89, 91, 94, 99 Agamben, Giorgio 219, 226–7, 230–1 Akhmatova, Anna 68 Alaimo, Stacy 207 Alcott, Amos Bronson 141, 142–4, 176 Alice Barth Opera Company 125–6, 127–8 allegory 227 anarchism 114–20 Anthony, Frank 258 Anthropocene 195–8, 200, 202, 208, 209, 210 Anti-intuitionism 147 Apocalypse 196, 197 Apollinaire, Guillaume 14 Aravamudan, Srinivas 263 Arne, Thomas 128 Arnold, David 252 Arnold, Samuel 128 l’art pour l’art 9, 14, 270 the Athenäum 1, 17, 251, 308 Atkinson, James 252, 262; “The City of Palaces” 252 Auerbach, Erich 55 avant-garde 15, 103, 115–16, 119, 305

Bate, Jonathan 195, 245 Bates, Stanley 67 Baudelaire, Charles 4, 9, 12–15, 25n10, 311 Bax, Arnold 127 Beethoven, Ludwig van 5, 14, 25n6, 278–80 Bellini, Vincenzo 133; Norma 133 Bennett, Jane 208, 213–14, 223, 230–1 Bennett, Joseph 137n6 Berlin, Isaiah 2, 25n4, 67 The Bhagvat-Geeta 163–4 Bian, Zhilin 298 Binyon, Laurence 267 Bishop, Henry 123–4, 127–37; Aladdin 129–30, 136; Maid Marian 130–3 Blake, William 8, 23, 147–9, 151–4, 213–31 Blok, Alexander 68 Bloom, Harold 267 Bode, Christopher 141–2 Boito, Arrigo 124 Brandes, Georg 53–4 Buell, Lawrence 197 Bush, Alan 127 Byron, George Gordon 4–5, 25n5, 53, 56, 64, 208, 209, 287, 296, 297, 298, 299

Bailey, Anthony 238 Balfe, Michael William 127, 128 Balzac, Honoré de 38; 50–5; Un début dans la vie 41 Bantock, Granville 127 Bastille 251 Bataille, Georges 167–9

Calcutta 252, 253, 254–7, 260, 262–3 captivation 226–8 Carl Rosa Opera Company 126–7 Carlyle, Thomas 24n1, 311, 196 Carson, Rachel 196, 197 Chekhov, Anton 21; “The Black Monk” 70–1; The Cherry Orchard 74;

330 Index and critique of Romanticism 69–72; and discovery of meaning 67–8, 72–80; “The Duel” 79, 80n5; “Fortune” 72–3; “Gooseberries” 72; “The Grasshopper” 70; “Lady with a Dog” 73; “Lights” 77, 79; and philosophy 68; “The Princess” 69–70; “In the Ravine” 72; “The Student” 75–6; The Three Sisters 70, 73–4; “Three Years” 79; Uncle Vanya 71; “Ward Six” 77 the Chinese literary revolution 287, 289, 291, 294, 295 Christ 85, 89, 94–6, 98–9, 310 Cinquevalli, Paul 136 Clare, John 208, 209 Clark, Timothy 198 Clarkson, Thomas 240 climate change 196, 197 Clowes, Edith 80n2 Cole, Thomas 5 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor 11, 22, 158–66, 240, 257, 292, 295, 296; Biographia Literaria 25n9, 165–6 Collins, Cecil 153 comic book culture 177 Concord School of Philosophy 156 Confucian(ism) 270, 271, 273, 274, 305 Cooper, James Fenimore 5, 12 Corbin, Henri 153 Corder, Frederick 123–37; The Bridal of Triermain 126; In the Black Forest 124; Le Morte d’Arthur 124–5, 135, 137n2; The Nabob’s Pickle 126; The Noble Savage 126; Nordisa 126–7, 137n3; A Storm in a Teacup 125–6 Corder, Paul 137n2 Cowley, Hannah 257 the Creation Society 270, 272, 290–2, 301n7 the Crescent Moon Society 294 Critical Review group 294 Cronon, William 202 Crutzen, Paul 195 the Cultural Revolution 290, 299

Debreczeny, Paul 70, 80n3 Delacroix, Eugène 4, 12, 14, 22, 25n3, 102–20 Deleuze, Gilles 219–20, 222, 231 Della Crusca 256; “To Anna Matilda” 256 De Quincey, Thomas 261, 311, 324n7 Derozio, Henry Louis Vivian 251, 258–60, 266; “The Harp of India” 259–60; “To the Dog Star” 258–60 Derrida, Jacques 20, 271–2, 284 Dickens, Charles 48; Hard Times 38 Ding, Hongwei 300 Dionysius the Areopagite 156 divisionism 105–6, 109 doppelgänger 5, 23n7, 180, 190n1, 311, 316 Dostoevsky, Fyodor 68, 311 double self 177; see also doppelgänger Dover, Cedric 259 Dumas, Alexandre 40 Dutt, Toru 251, 263–6, 266–8; “Our Casuarina Tree” 263–6; The Dutt Family Album 263 Dvořák, Antonín 135

Damon, Foster 152 Danhauser, Josef 5 Dante 98, 100, 187 Dao(ist) 271, 276, 277 Darwin, Erasmus 224–5, 227–8, 231–2 deathscape 252

Fénéon, Félix 102, 104, 106–7, 111 Ficino, Marsilio 156 Fiction Monthly 296 Fielding, Henry 58 Fin de Siècle (Fin-de-Siècle) 21, 22, 67, 85, 103, 120, 270; and social malaise 68

Eagleton, Terry 77 the East India Company 252, 253, 262 Eastlake, Charles 236 ecocriticism 172, 213–14, 220; material 195, 208 Eichendorff, Joseph von 209 Eliot, George 51, 55–9 Eliot, T. S. 14, 154 Emerson, Ralph Waldo 6, 12, 18, 22, 24n1, 141, 144–6, 151, 176, 178–9, 189–90, 201; “Brahma” 151; “Circles” 186; “Experience” 183; “History” 182; Nature 151–2, 180–1; transparent eyeball 180–2, 190; “Waldeinsamkeit” 201 empiricism 50, 55, 58 Engels, Friedrich 54 Enlightenment 4, 9, 11, 18, 25n8; and materialism 67 existentialism 7, 68

Index  331 Flaubert, Gustave 38, 50–1, 53, 62–3, 311 Fontane, Theodor 51, 61–2 Foucault, Michel 20 Frank, Andre Gunder 251 Franklin, Michael 266 Freud, Sigmund 18–19, 26n11, 207, 308 Friedrich, Caspar David 6 Frost, Mark 241 Frothingham, Octavius Brooks 146 Garrard, Greg 197, 239 Gaskell, Elizabeth, Mary Barton 38 Gautier, Théophile 9, 14 Gay, Peter 6, 8–9, 14 German, Edward 134–135; Merrie England 135 Ghandi, Mahmatma 268 Gibson, Mary Ellis 251–69 Gilbert, W. S. 126, 135, 136 Gille, Klaus F. 207 Gippius, Zinaida 68 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 3, 4, 5, 24, 24n2–25n2, 25n3, 25n5, 25n8, 270, 272–5, 277, 279, 282, 283, 78, 236, 301n7, 312; Werther/ Werther/wertherisme 270–8, 280, 283–4; Zur Farbenlehre (Theory of Colours) 4, 236 golden age 116–17 Gopal, Pryamvada 267 Gorky, Maxim 68 grotesque 1, 11, 14, 304–5, 307, 309–11, 313–15, 317, 323–4, 324n6 Gounod, Charles 128 the Great Exhibition (1851) 39 Grimm, Jakob 51 Groves, Jason 208 Guattari, Félix 219–20, 222, 231 Guo, Moruo 24, 270–84, 290, 301n7 Hall, Dewey 195 Hardy, Thomas, Tess of the D’Urbevilles 43–7 Harkness, Margaret 54 Harper, George Mills 152 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, The Blithedale Romance 47 Hazlitt, William 11 Heine, Heinrich 53, 202, 310; Harz Journey 202 Helmholtz, Hermann von 102, 110

Hemmings, F. W. J. 36–7 Henry, Charles 110–11 Hermeticism 153 Hiller, Ferdinand 124 Hindu College 252, 253, 258 Hinduism 159–60, 167, 169–70, 186, 188 Hoffmann, E. T. A. 25n6, 51, 64, 205, 310; “The Sandman” 25n6, 205 Holbrooke, Josef 127 Hu, Shi 289–90, 294 Hugo, Victor 6, 14, 51, 324n6 human and nonhuman collectives 214, 216, 218, 222–3 humour 304, 307, 310–13, 324; frontier humour 184; Japanese humour 311–12; selfhumiliation/self-mockery/self-parody 304, 307, 310–11, 312–13, 313–24, 325n11; sentimental humour 311–13, 324; “world-humour” (Richter) 310–11 Hutchings, Kevin 195 hybrid(isation) 171, 199, 219, 226, 227, 228, 263, 304, 309, 310; hybrid natures 206–10 hylozoism 164–5 imagination 1, 4, 7, 8, 13, 16, 25n10, 46, 60, 68, 70, 72, 78, 86, 94–5, 103, 105, 107, 109, 111, 113, 153, 154, 160–2, 165–7, 177, 188, 197, 199, 200, 267, 292, 293, 309, 310, 324n4 India 251–68 the Indian Rebellion 251 industrial art 110–11, 114 Ingres, Jean-Auguste-Dominique 13, 14, 104, 118, 120 Irigaray, Luce 169–71 Ishida, Tetsuya 24, 304–7, 312–24, 325n11 Ivanov, Viacheslav 78 Jackson, Robert Louis 75–6 Japan, opening of 251 Jasanoff, Maya 263 Johns, Richard 244 Jones, Anna Maria 257 Jones William 257, 266 Kafka, Franz 307, 311, 312, 315–16, 318, 323–4 Kataev, V. B. 68, 76

332 Index Keats, John 22, 85–91, 93, 96, 97–9, 100, 185, 252, 258–60, 263–4, 287, 294, 297, 298; “Bright Star” 258–60; Hyperion: A Fragment 85, 87, 89, 96, 264; “Ode to a Nightingale” 263–4; “This living hand, now warm and capable” 259 Kiefer, Anselm 307 Kipling, Rudyard 267 Kleist, Heinrich von 6, 307, 311 Kropotkin, Peter 102, 115, 117 Kuzniar, Alice 207 Lamb, Charles 6 late capitalism 175 Latour, Bruno 208, 214, 231 LeMenager, Stephanie 196, 207 Levine, George 50–1 Lewes, G. H. 38 Leyden, John 253–4, 262; “Ode to an Indian Gold Coin” 253 Li, Qi 297, 299 Liang, Qichao 288, 294 Lindsay, Jack 240 Liszt, Franz 123, 135–6 the Literary Research Association 291, 296 Louis XVI, execution of 251, 256 Lovejoy, Arthur O. 4, 6 Löwy, Michael (and Robert Sayre) 7–8, 12, 115, 233, 245, 306 Lu, Zhiwei 288–9 Lukács, Georg 53–4 Macartney Embassy 251 Macaulay, Thomas Babington 260 Mad Men 22, 175–90 Maeterlinck, Maurice 73 Magdalen, Mary 94, 95, 100 Magritte, René 14–15 Malory, Thomas 124 Mandel’shtam, Osip 68 Manzoni, Alessandro 53 Maria, Anna 251, 254–7, 266; “Adieu to India” 254–7; “Ode inscribed to Della Crusca” 256–7; “Stanzas, Marie Antoinette’s Complaint in Prison” 256; “Stanzas to the Memory of Louis, the Unfortunate” 256 Marschner, Heinrich 133 Marsyas 85, 89, 96, 98–99 Martineau, Harriet 57 Marx, Karl 282

the May Fourth Movement 251, 270, 274, 282 May, Stephen J. 240 Mazzini, Giuseppe 4–5 meaning: as buried 72–4; creation of 67–72; discovery of 67–9, 72–80; as oppressive 74–5 meditation 160, 162–4, 167–9; sexual difference and 170–1 metamorphosis 224, 226–7, 309 metempsychotic self 176, 184 modernism 13, 273; European 73; Russian 68–9, 78 modernity 59, 61, 62, 270, 271, 274, 303, 307, 312; aesthetic (or artistic) 13, 16, 23; capitalist (or industrial) 7, 13, 21, 23, 115, 142, 176, 233, 235, 242, 245, 305–7, 308, 316; Chinese 274; Japanese 303 Morton, Timothy 213–14, 217–20, 227, 230–1 Mozart, Wolfgang Amadeus 129; The Magic Flute 129 mysticism 171 native author 266–8 Nelson, Horatio 235 Neo-Impressionism 102–20 Neoplatonism 152, 172n1 Nerval, Gérard de 14, 311; Les Nuits d’octobre 48–9; Promenades et souvenirs 40–3 the New Culture Movement 287, 289–96 New Poetry 288, 289, 291, 294, 295, 296 Nietzsche, Friedrich 8, 12, 15–20, 21, 26n11; 67–8, 70, 71, 72, 78, 80n2, 80n4 nihilism 67, 69; as allied with Romanticism 74–9; as anaesthetic 69, 77 Norton, Andrews 146 Novalis (Georg von Hardenburg) 9, 11, 14, 17, 24n1, 25n2, 25n8, 307, 308, 313; and meaning creation 67, 78 the Opium Wars 251 Ovid(ian) 92, 98, 103, 226–8, 257 pantheism 159, 271, 275–6, 277, 278, 281, 283–4 Paperno, Irina 71

Index  333 Pastoral 197, 208 Pater, Walter 85, 88–99 Parry, Hubert 124, 127 Percival, Milton 152 Persian Mysticism 153 Pico della Mirandola, Giovanni 156 Planetary Boundaries 197 Plato 150, 152; the Republic 148; the Timaeus 150 Platonism 141–56, 186 Platonic intuitionism 147 Plotinus 152, 187 Poe, Edgar Allan 6, 12 pointillism 106, 109 Proudhon, Pierre-Joseph 118, 120 Pushkin, Alexander 4 Pythagorean music of the spheres 150 Raff, Joachim 130 Raine, Kathleen 22, 141, 147–56; Blake and Antiquity 152, 153; Blake and Tradition 148, 151, 153; The Hollow Hill and Other Poems 148–9; The Inner Journey of the Poet 153; The Oracle in the Heart 150 railways 35–49 Rancière, Jacques 213, 216, 232 realism 12, 21, 36–49, 50–56, 59–62, 64, 79, 94, 119, 166, 172, 198, 244, 291, 298, 307; Russian 67, 68, 79 Renaissance as Platonic-inspired 155–6 Renan, Ernest 94, 95 Richardson, David Lester 251, 252, 258, 260–3, 267; “London in the Morning” 261–2; Selections from the British Poets 251, 252, 258, 260, 267; “View of Calcutta” 262–3 Richter, Jean Paul 1, 5, 25n7, 190, 308, 310–11, 312, 313, 317, 324n7, 324n8325n8, 325n9 Riding, Christine 244 Rigby, Kate 195, 202, 209, 210 Rilke, Rainer Maria 220, 232 Rimbaud, Arthur 8, 14 Robinson, Mary 257 Rockström, Johan 197 Rodner, William 237 Romantic idealism 158–9, 166, 171–2 the Romantic Movement 2–7, 11–12, 21; American school (incl. the American Renaissance and the

Hudson River School) 2, 5, 6, 12, 141, 177, 179, 188–9; British school 6, 10, 11; German school (incl. Frühromantik, or Jena Romanticism) 1, 2, 6, 11, 13, 17, 24n2–25n2, 141, 177, 179, 188–9, 306–7, 308; French school 3, 6, 11–12; Italian school 4–5; Japanese school (Nihon Rōmanha, or the Japan Romantic School) 24, 305–7, 311, 312 Romanticism: abuses of 69–72; aesthetic revolution 102–3, 115–20; American141–8, 177, 186, 188, 198, 209; anti-Romanticism 295; as allied with nihilism 74–9; British (or English) 10, 23, 147, 172n4, 195, 198, 209, 297, 299; Chinese 273, 281; dark 9, 11; European 1, 2, 3, 7, 8, 141, 268, 270, 271, 283; French 3, 102, 324n6; German 10, 13, 23, 51, 67, 196, 209, 284, 307; Indian 266–8; reactionary/ passive 288, 298–9; revolutionary/ active 298–9; Soviet literary theory on 298–9, 300; quest for meaning 67, 68 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, Confessions 33–5, 38 the Royal Academy of Music (RAM) 124, 126–7 the Royal College of Music (RCM) 127 Ruskin, John 8, 12, 23, 233–45; “On Skiddaw and Derwent Water” 234; The Harbours of England 234; Modern Painters 233–7, 243; Notes on the Turner Gallery at Marlborough House 243; “The Steam Engine” 234; The Storm Clouds of the Nineteenth Century 234 Saint-Simon, Henri de 115–16, 118 Sala, George Augustus 48 Sand, George 6, 38 Sayre, Robert 233, 245 Schlegel, Friedrich 1, 6, 9, 11, 13, 20, 25n2, 307–10, 311, 324n5, 324n7; “Romantic poetry” 1, 3, 13, 20, 24, 308–9 Schiller, Friedrich 115, 308 Schmid, Wolf 75–6 Schumann, Robert 5

334 Index Scott, Walter 4, 12, 21, 126, 253; Anne of Geierstein; or, The Maiden of the Mist (1829) 57; Border Ballads 253; The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) 51, 62–3; Ivanhoe (1819) 56–8; A Legend of Montrose (1819) 51; The Pirate (1822) 56; Waverley; or, ‘Tis Sixty Years Since (1814) 56–8, 60 self-transcendence 22, 142, 151, 158, 159, 161, 164, 166, 167, 176, 179, 187, 189–90, 270, 271, 274–7, 279, 283 sensorium 224, 227–8 sentimental(ity) 271, 307–10, 311–13, 317; Bildung of love 308–9 Seurat, Georges 102, 107 sexuality 169–70 Shakespeare, William 1, 103, 161, 166, 240, 309, 310, 312, 324n7 Shelley, Percy Bysshe 148, 293, 297, 298, 299 Shield, William 128 Signac, Paul 22, 102–20 Sobennikov, A. S. 80n5 Solovyov, Vladimir 71 Spohr, Louis 130, 131–4; Faust 131–2; Jessonda 131–2; Die Kreuzfahrer 133 Staël, Madame de 3–4, 6, 24 Stafford, Jane 260, 266–8 Stanford, Charles Villiers 127 St Clair, William 252, 257 Steffen, Will 197 Stendhal 6, 11–12, 51, 272 Stevens, Wallace 264 Stoermer, Eugene 195 St Sebastian 90 subjective vision 109–10 sublime 35, 142, 145, 150, 154, 182, 196, 198–201, 206, 208, 210, 238, 241, 280, 294, 295 Sullivan, Arthur 126, 134–6, 137n8; Trial by Jury 126 Sullivan, Heather 207 Surrealism 8, 14, 324n2 Symbolism (French) 13, 73, 103–4; Russian Symbolism 68, 69 Tao, Yuanming 290, 295, 297 Taylor, Thomas 141, 147, 148, 153, 155 temporality 252–3, 254–7, 260–3

Tennyson, Alfred 252 Terror, The (1793) 251 Thackeray, William Makepeace 237 Thoreau, Henry David 209 Tian, Han 290, 301n6 Tianyuan poets 287, 290, 300 Tieck, Ludwig 23, 51, 195–212; Phantasus 199, 200 Tipu Sultan 263 Tismar, Jens 210 theurgy 71, 78 Tolstoy, Leo 55, 68, 76–7 Trafalgar 235 Trollope, Anthony 51, 55, 59–61 Tsvetaeva, Marina 68 Turner, J. M. W. 4, 8, 12, 23, 233–45; The Fighting Temeraire, Tugged to her Last Berth to be Broken Up 233–7; Light and Colour 4, 236; Norham Castle 245; Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead And Dying, Typhon [sic] Coming On 234–5, 238–9, 241, 243; Rain, Steam and Speed 234–5; Staffa, Fingal’s Cave 233; Shade and Darkness 236; Snow Storm 233–5, 242 Valéry, Paul 14 Verdi, Giuseppe 124, 128 Versluis, Arthur 141–2 visual pleasure 108–9 Viswanathan, Gauri 260 Wagner, Richard 5, 14, 22, 123–9, 132–7; Lohengrin 124; Männerlist größer als Frauenlist oder Die glückliche Bärenfamilie 137n3; Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg 123, 125, 137n1; Parsifal 125; Tannhäuser 124; Tristan und Isolde 123, 125, 133, 135, 136, 137n1 Waldeinsamkeit 201 walking 33–6 Wallace, William Vincent 127 Wang, Zuoliang 299 Weber, Carl Maria von 14, 129–34, 136; Euryanthe 133; Der Freischütz 129, 130, 135; Oberon 129–30, 136 Weiner, Matthew 175, 184, 188–90 weltschmerz (or le mal du siècle)15, 271, 308

Index  335 Wen, Yiduo 294, 301n8 Westminster Review 38 White, Daniel 252, 260, 267–8 Whitman, Walt 22, 176–9, 184, 185, 189–90; “Song of Myself” 184, 185–6 Wilde, Oscar 22, 85, 89–96, 98–99, 100n2, 185; De Profundis 85, 91, 93, 100n2; The Picture of Dorian Gray 46 85, 91, 93; The Tomb of Keats 85, 90 Willis, Sam 235 Wilmer, Clive 239 Winckelmann, Johann Joachim 88–9, 92–3, 99 Wood, Marcus 239 Wordsworth, William 6, 8, 11, 12, 24, 142, 148, 154–5, 208, 209, 251, 256–7, 260–3, 265–6, 287–300; “Alice Fell, or Poverty” 288–9; and Annette 296, 297, 299; “Composed Upon Westminster Bridge, September 3, 1802” 260–3; The Excursion 296; and the French Revolution 288, 296, 297, 298, 299, 300; “I am not one who much or oft delight” 292–3; “The Idiot Boy” 298; “Immortality Ode” (“Ode: Intimations of Immortality”) 290; “I wandered lonely as a cloud” (“Daffodils”) 293; “London 1802” (“Ode to Milton”) 294, 295; Lyrical Ballads 251, 256–7, 287,

289, 296, 297, 299; and nature 287, 288, 290, 297, 298, 299, 300; “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood” 153; “Peter Bell” 295; “A Place of Burial in the south of Scotland” 288–9; Preface to Lyrical Ballads 287, 289–91, 295, 296, 297, 298, 299, 301n6; The Prelude 287, 296, 297, 298, 299–300; “The Ruined Cottage” 41; “She Dwelt among the Untrodden Ways” 295–6; “The Solitary Reaper” 291–2; “The Tables Turned” 293; “The Thorn” 295; “Tintern Abbey” (“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey”) 293; “Yew-Trees” 265–6 Wright, John 147 Wu, Mi 294–6 Xu, Zhimo 292–4 Yeats, William Butler 147 Yu, Dafu 270, 281, 291–2, 293, 294 Zola, Émile 38, 50–1, 53; La Bête humaine 44 Zong incident of 1781 239 Zheng, Zhenduo 296 Zhu, Guangqian 296–7 Zhuangzi/Zhuangzi(an) 273, 276–7, 283