Tact: Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain 9781400887903

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: An Art of Handling
“Our Debt to Lamb”: The Romantic Essay and the Emergence of Tact
Aesthetic Liberalism: John Stuart Mill as Essayist
Teaching Tact: Matthew Arnold and the Function of Criticism
The Grounds of Tact: George Eliot’s Rage
Relief Work: Walter Pater’s Tact
Tact in Psychoanalysis: Marion Milner
Notes
Index

Citation preview

Tac T

Tact a esT heT ic L iber a L ism a n d T he ess ay For m i n n i n eT een T h- cen T u ry br i Ta i n

David Russell

Pr i nc eT on u n i v e r si T y Pr e ss Pr i nc eT on & ox For d

Copyright © 2018 by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 6 Oxford Street, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1TR press.princeton.edu Jacket image: A composite of fingerprint images taken from Edward Richard Henry’s Classification and Uses of Fingerprints, 1900. Science History Images / Alamy Stock Photo. All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Russell, David, 1981 Sept. 27– author. Title: Tact : aesthetic liberalism and the essay form in nineteenth-century Britain / David Russell. Other titles: Aesthetic liberalism and the essay form in nineteenth-century Britain Description: Princeton, New Jersey : Princeton University Press, 2017. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017024557 | ISBN 9780691161198 (hardback) Subjects: LCSH: English prose literature—19th century—History and criticism. | Aesthetics in literature. | Essay. | Tact. | Social values in literature. | Milner, Marion, 1900–1998— Psychoanalysis. | BISAC: LITERARY COLLECTIONS / Essays. | LITERARY CRITICISM / Semiotics & Theory. | LITERARY CRITICISM / European / English, Irish, Scottish, Welsh. Classification: LCC PR766.A38 R87 2017 | DDC 808.40941/09034—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017024557 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Miller Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ Printed in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

For Jeff Nunokawa and Adam Phillips

con T e n Ts

Acknowledgments · ix inTroducTion

An Art of Handling

chaPTer 1

“Our Debt to Lamb”: The Romantic Essay and the Emergence of Tact

12

chaPTer 2

Aesthetic Liberalism: John Stuart Mill as Essayist

41

chaPTer 3

Teaching Tact: Matthew Arnold and the Function of Criticism

59

chaPTer 4

The Grounds of Tact: George Eliot’s Rage

97

chaPTer 5

Relief Work: Walter Pater’s Tact

111

chaPTer 6

Tact in Psychoanalysis: Marion Milner

142

Notes · 165 Index · 191

[ vii ]

1

Ack now l edgm e n ts

I’ve been lucky. At Princeton I was part of a close community of graduate students and faculty, and I had brilliant and caring advisors in Diana Fuss, Jeff Nunokawa, and Esther Schor, and mentorship from Jeff Dolven. At­ tending the School of Criticism and Theory at Cornell, where I took Simon During’s class, taught me a lot; and there I met the then director, Amanda Anderson, whose kindness and insight I’ve benefited from ever since. My work has been supported by the Mahindra Center for the Humanities at Har­ vard and the Society of Fellows in the Humanities at Columbia University (an intellectual paradise run tirelessly by Eileen Gillooly, where conversations with Brian Goldstone and Emily Ogden began). I finished this book while holding academic posts among brilliant colleagues at King’s College London and now at Corpus Christi College and the faculty of English at the University of Oxford. I thank the presidents (Carwardine and Cowley) and fellows (espe­ cially my colleagues Helen Moore and Jaś Elsner) and staff and students of Corpus, and faculty colleagues (especially those Trinity fellows), for their warm welcome and conversation. Working with Princeton University Press, I’m very grateful for the perceptive encouragement of Alison MacKeen, who took on the book, and Anne Savarese, who saw it through; and the thoughtful work of Molan Goldstein, Nathan Carr, and Thalia Leaf. The insightful reports from the press’s two anonymous readers gave me much help. A partial version of chapter 1 was first published in ELH 79.1 (2012), 179– 209 (Copyright © 2012 The Johns Hopkins University Press. Reprinted with permission by Johns Hopkins University Press); a version of chapter 2 has appeared in Victorian Studies (Indiana University Press, Journals. Victorian Studies (VIC). Vol. 56, #1. pp. 7–30. © 2013 Reprinted with permission of Indi­ ana University Press); and a partial version of chapter 3 first appeared in Raritan. I am grateful to all three journals for permission to reprint material here. This book is about trying to be (despite everything) open to the world. I’m grateful to those who, through their friendship or collegiality or help— whether sustained or for a moment—opened ways or kept them open: Julian Baird­Gewirtz; Luke Brunning; Michelle Coghlan; Henry Cowles; Sergio Delgado; Silvia Diazgranados; Robert Douglas­Fairhurst; James Eli­Adams; Jane Elliott; Stefano Evangelista; Morwenna Ferrier; Kantik Ghosh; Edmund Gordon; Rae Greiner; Andy O’Hagan; Mike Hatch; Dorothy Hughes; Richard Hutchins; Freya Johnston; Chad Kia; Evan Kindley; David Kurnick; Emily Ryan Lerner; Sarah Lewis; John and Jan Logan; Heather Love; Shannon and John Mackey; Erica McAlpine; Barry McCrea; Jo Mcdonagh, Andrew Miller;

[ ix ]

[ x ] ack now Ledgmen Ts

Ankhi Mukherjee; Brendan Murdock; Ivan Ortiz; Ruth Padel; Clare Pettitt; John Plotz; Lloyd Pratt; Orlando Reade; Jake Short; Karen Sisti; Ellen Smith; Robert Stagg; Jim Steichen; Matthew Sussman; Alice, Cathy, and Stewart Tendler; Kate Tomas; Julianne Werlin; Edmund White; Louis Wise; and Lili Zhang. Things just wouldn’t be possible without George Pitcher and the Gang, and Matt Bevis, Oscar Rickett, Michael Russell, Minnie Scott, Mark Turner, Denise Wardell, and Amelia Worsley. Justin Torres changed everything. This book is dedicated to two friends and teachers, with thanks for their imaginative generosity—and their genius for kindness.

Tac T

i n T roduc T ion

An Art of Handling

our Lives are in our own hands; this is unavoidable. But how to handle life? Might there be an art of relating to the world, and feeling our way among others? This book is about the art of tact, as it is performed in the essays of six writers: Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, Walter Pater and Marion Milner. I will outline in this introduction my basic claims about tact, the subjects it touches upon, and the way this book is framed. I won’t take up too much of your time. Not for reasons of politeness, you understand (tact, we will see, is not reducible to manners), but because, as this book is about an art of the encounter, what it has to offer must come in the showing. “We cannot spend the day in explanation,” a great essayist declared.1 Introductions know what is to come; their vantage of retrospection may sacrifice the evocation of experience even as they furnish the reader with an organized framing knowledge. A book about the tact of the literary essay can offer no systematic theory in advance, to be dutifully filled in. I will frame the concerns of this book here in the broadest terms, and from these we must go straight to our subject—to essays in critical handling—and let them teach us how to consider them. In broadest terms: tact privileges encounters over knowledge, and an aesthetic of handling over more abstract conceptualization or observation— whether of people or objects.2 The essays explored in this book describe a close and haptic attention to the moment, preferring a present ambivalence to a future perfection. Tact lends itself to political uses just where—in its refusal of assertion—it seems most impertinent to practical ends. It is a literary art that draws upon the particular resources of the essay as form; and it provides the grounds for a claim about the relationship between art and human freedom—an “aesthetic liberalism”—not encompassed by traditional political philosophy. Tact has its origins in a particular time and place, the British nineteenth century, but it is also a more generalizable and available style (it

[ 1 ]

[ 2 ] in TroducTion

is taken up, this book will claim, in the therapeutic practice of twentiethcentury British psychoanalysis). To dwell for a moment on the word tact: it has had some bad press. It may seem rather an old-fashioned term, even one best left in the nineteenth century. The word suggests a certain stuffiness, a retrograde attachment to social hierarchies, and a pedantic knowingness about the right thing to do, now all but useless in a modern and diverse world. (Think of the deadening “exact courtesy” of Mr. Casaubon in Middlemarch.)3 Or, what’s worse, tact might seem to survive, even to thrive, from the nineteenth century to our own time as cynical ruse—as a cover for dissimulation, and a technique of manipulation— in relationships, in politics, in business, in the media. (Think of the “deep art” of entrapment contained in Gilbert Osmond’s perfect tact in The Portrait of a Lady.)4 But these views would neglect tact’s resources, or look for it in the places where it is co-opted by the forces it has sought to oppose. For tact, in its invention and its creative instantiation in essays of the nineteenth century and beyond, was an egalitarian and artful response to a complex, modernizing world. It is opposed to modernization in the sense of innovation (as this buzzword is intoned through our own marketized environments), and so to the jettisoning of old forms for new. It maintains a grasp on the ambivalent complexity of the cultural field, the difficult conditions we all inherit, while proposing new—more just, more creative, even more vital—ways of handling established forms. Tact has a critical edge. As it was never dominant in its own time, it made a virtue of its marginality, to challenge, impertinently, the orthodoxies that surrounded it. It is an art of redirection and revaluation, working within the terms it seeks to critique in order—by handling a shift of mode, or tone, or approach—to open up new avenues for relation. “For every mood there is an appropriate impossibility,” G. K. Chesterton remarked, “a decent and tactful impossibility.”5 The practices of tact I trace in this book sought to oppose to relations of knowledge as power, and a dominant liberalism of the free market founded in activities of persuasion, transaction, competition—a different, aesthetic, liberalism. Tact seeks to ensure social relations in which people are at once most equal and more individually alive. It begins with the question of whether there are other things we can do with people, with any objects of our attention, than know them. And whether coming to an answer about, or exposing the truth of, something or someone is the most useful, or the most imaginative, or the most kind thing we can do with them. Literary and cultural critics have for some time been attuned to the way power is linked to knowledge, and how ruses of power structure the most ordinary social relations. A brilliant suspicion has exposed the ways social encounters are symptomatic of broader relations of domination. A version of tact is used to explain how this happens. It restrains people, even without their knowing it, from asking difficult questions. What is most decorously assumed

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is most deeply coercive; what goes tactfully unsaid is empowered: the most normative assumptions are privileged by latency, and all the more naturalized for a lack of open discussion. “Disciplinary power constitutively mobilizes a tactic of tact,” as a seminal account of such processes has it.6 Moreover, we know that works of literature often understand the smallest moments of social interaction, on the micro level, to be part of the enforcement of a society’s most sweeping and insidious relationships of knowledge to power, of identity definitions, status hierarchies, and regimes of control.7 Tactful speech knows, and withholds, too much. These are compelling diagnoses, and all too persuasive; while frequently invigorating in their style and acumen, they are disheartening in their message. After such criticism, what forgiveness? But what of the tact that provides the conditions for trust: the relation of collaborative hope that makes new demands on the world?8 There has been less attention to the suggestion that social relations also could be imagined from, as it were, the inside out: that small, tactful moments of handling could contain within them claims and assumptions from which to demand new relationships in a shared world.9 This requires a clearing, at least provisionally, of established means and ends, and so a renewed insistence on mediation, considered not as technology but as a quality of attention: on the qualities and distributions of spaces and experiences between people, rather than focusing on identitarian knowledge about the constitution of individual subjects. Such demands do not deny the history and conditions of a given encounter, but they widen the sphere of the virtual, the “as if,” in remedy to certain regimes of subjectification and interpellation. They prefer an attention in the moment to shared predicaments, to the knowledge of predicates of identity.10 Tact proposes an oblique and distantiating mediation (Lamb calls this an “honest obliquity”) where things seem all too clear, too direct, and too close to the knives. Especially in situations where everything has become too traumatically personal for communication to continue, or where the acceptance or rejection of an abstract truth has become a matter of life or death. There can be violence in an epistemological approach to others.11 Claims to knowledge of the inner experience of another can be more coercive than kind, and so demands for empathy may intensify rather than attenuate violence. The practice of tact, through the ways it doesn’t want to know, provides a means of preferring the potential of the borderline to the policing of identities (an activity that can be well or ill intentioned.) The essays explored in this book seek to evoke—to describe and perform—the kinds of relation that the need to know obstructs. Although the essayists are very different from one another, and each evokes the process according to his or her own idiom and vocabulary (Lamb, for instance, endorses relations of theatrical “illusion”; and Arnold, of a critical “disinterest”), they all seek to describe the promise of a tactful unknowing. “Barriers to clarity can in themselves be modes of communication, expressions of human bonding,” Richard Poirier has proposed.12

[ 4 ] in TroducTion

Tactful essayists seek to thicken the medium between people, to open a creatively neutral or virtual space (at the boundaries of assumptions about subjectivity and objectivity, the personal and impersonal, truth and fiction) to overcome fixed lines of opposition, and to put new possibilities for relation in play. Each chapter of this book is devoted to an essayist. By approaching the essayists through an exploration of their performance of tact, the chapters offer revisionary accounts of their subjects, who vary in canonical fame. By way of such handling, we apprehend, for instance, the profundity of Lamb’s sociable philosophy, the surprisingly aesthetic essayism of Mill, Arnold’s egalitarianism and the reasons for his abandonment of poetry for prose, Eliot’s essays in outrage, Pater’s practical and radical suggestions for liberalism, and Milner’s centrality to British psychoanalysis. This book offers neither an exhaustive nor a strictly progressive account of the tactful essay: other essayists might have been chosen (many others do appear, from Montaigne to Ruskin to Barthes to Wojnarowicz); while of those who were chosen, some of them were not only essayists—and some of them were not often tactful. The book proceeds chronologically, to make a claim about a practice of its period; taken together, as an essay collection, its chapters build in consort a picture of the techniques of a sustained art of tactful handling, and the way the essay form provides its resources.

Aesthetic Liberalism and Modern Life “Use,” though, to what ends? It should be difficult to define the aims of tact, since it is exercised by the task of evading ends that have been (tactlessly) imposed on a given encounter. I describe tact’s aims through the concept of “aesthetic liberalism”: in order to link a variety of experience (aesthetic) with a claim about human freedom, and the relations by which people might live together (liberalism). They are tricky words to handle; both are notoriously elusive of definition. Critical and political theory has tended to be suspicious of the “aestheticization” of freedom. The aesthetic has seemed the sphere into which political freedom is translated only so it may be betrayed.13 But to discuss the aesthetic encounter is to pose foundational questions of freedom: questions of what is subjective and what is objective, of the way a new encounter is conditioned, of the line between the real and the virtual, and of the experience of one’s own aliveness in creative contact with the world. Tactful essays seek to render this experience open and somehow more available to us, as active between us. They assume our aesthetic experiences are inextricable from questions of freedom—from our actions in and claims on the world. For Mill, whose 1859 On Liberty offers one of the seminal texts of liberalism, an aesthetic conception of human freedom is just what a liberal society ought to ensure: the aim of a liberal society is to guarantee for everyone the

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conditions for a creative relation to one’s own life, for “spontaneity” and “experiments in living.” Although (as chapter 2 explores) their style of tact diverges from Mill’s rational method for attaining it, all of the essays considered in this book stand for some version of this demand—for a vivid stake in the world, from which they might make claims upon it. For Arnold this is the definition of criticism—as a way to the sense of the “creative activity [which] is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive”—and he wanted an education system that would make everyone a critic. Pater calls it the “freedom to see and feel,” which provides grounds for political freedoms. For Milner it forms the experiential “baseline” from which we gain our own mind and relate to the world—with which it is often the work of psychoanalysis to increase or restore contact. Such freedom has its painful rigors—and its enemies. A tactful perception assumes this aesthetic liberty is always vulnerable; it is to be protected as well as encouraged—whence Lamb’s care for the dignity in the most eccentric and minor of social fictions. The history of liberalism, as another essayist, Lionel Trilling, pointed out, contains “the paradox . . . that liberalism is concerned with the emotions above all else, as proof of which the word happiness stands at the very center of its thought, but in its effort to establish the emotions, or certain among them, in some sort of freedom, liberalism somehow tends to deny them in their full possibility.”14 (This is why, for Trilling, the question of liberalism must be addressed in aesthetic, literary, terms.) An aesthetic liberalism is compromised by just those attempts to ensure it through a total finalizing knowledge of it—whence the condemnation by Arnold’s and Eliot’s essays of the places in their culture (including political controversy, novels, religion, and poetry) where what Eliot calls “spontaneous impulse” is stifled in the name of liberty. An aesthetic liberalism complements and challenges, as chapter 2 argues, liberalisms of individualistic market competition or even rationalist debate. It must also, with Arnold in chapter 3, propose a picture of education founded in shared experience before instrumental criteria (of employability, say, or test results.) What Arnold termed “modern problems” provide these essayists with these challenges to tact. The nineteenth century in Britain, it is often pointed out, was the great age of liberalism, and it witnessed a dialogue and contest between its varieties.15 After the shock of revolutionary wars in America and France, after enlightenment challenges to “old society” custom, tact emerged in Britain as an aesthetic and ethical response to the beginnings of urban modernity, as the first decades of the nineteenth century experienced unprecedented rates of growth in population and urbanization and an increasing confusion in social valuation.16 In the decade before Lamb began his Essays of Elia, England experienced an 18 percent increase in its population, a figure that is slightly higher in London. The first half of the nineteenth century experienced a spurt in the growth of urbanization, with the urban population increasing at more than twice the rate of the population as a whole.

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Thirty-four percent of the British population lived in urban areas by 1801; by 1851 that figure had risen to 54 percent.17 This social confusion was at once anxious, as the “truth” about other people could not be grasped as firmly as before, but also full of potential, as many different truths, and ways of handling people, became plausible. Faced with such a predicament, one might opt to become more or less knowing. Social confusion could be forestalled with more comprehensive systems of classification; whether in the exact and exacting utilitarian systems of James Mill or in the stricter sorts of positivism and scientism found later in the century. The social codes that proliferated in Victorian Britain, its ever more regulated etiquette, are part of our familiar conception of the time, and testament to its social strains.18 But instead, the Romantic essay sought to succeed the conduct book, presenting social conventions as forms to be creatively used, not doctrine to be obeyed. As Theodor Adorno has put it, “the precondition of tact is convention no longer intact but still present.”19 Social convention remains, but it is no longer felt to be total and totalizing; there are gaps in it, room for the maneuver by which one might make social forms one’s own. The OED credits Dugald Stewart with the first use of “tact” to mean a practice of sociability in 1793. Stewart observed that the French found a need for tact—for a person’s capacity to “feel his way” among others—in the context of the immense upheaval of the French Revolution and the ensuing Terror. Stewart implies that modern social changes, if they are not to become violent, require a less certain and knowing way of handling others. One must get up close and feel things out. Tact emerged as a stylistic approach to the incorporation of difference in social interaction, and an ethic and aesthetic of nonprescriptive inclusiveness. Stewart’s student, Sydney Smith, in delivering his wildly popular lectures on moral philosophy at the Royal Society from 1804 to 1806, remarked on the novel but increasing use of touch as a metaphor specifically for the nuance of social interaction. He notes that people formerly relied on metaphors of taste to describe a person’s sensibility, but that “we have begun, though of late years, to use the word tact; we say of such a man that he has good tact in manners, that he has a fine tact exactly as we would say he has a good taste.”20 In this period, the word “tact” shifted registers from politesse to politics, changing its meaning from a knowledge of what is fitting in a hierarchy of taste to a democratic social practice for uncertain times. The word really caught on: by 1814, a reviewer in the British Critic could call it a “cant word . . . of the present year,” distinct enough to distinguish later from earlier emendations in Walter Scott’s Waverly.21 Before long, tact was commonplace, shorn of its novelty and immersed in everyday language. At a time when people were living in closer proximity than ever before, and among ever more different people, tactful essays proposed a new mode of feeling one’s way in society, which depended less on knowing other people, and placing them in hierarchical categories of status, and instead inventing new ways to

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value others and to live with them. The urban scene, then, provides a metaphor for the complexity of modern social life most broadly, and the question of how people are to live together in it: tact addresses liberalism’s central question. And as the nineteenth century wore on, these inventions increasingly became the basis for answering questions about how people might best influence one another: that is, they became the basis for theories of education. As Parliament debated the nature and scope of a national education (culminating in the Education Act of 1870), the essayists discussed in this book were experimenting with the question of what educational experience might look and feel like at the level of person-to-person interaction.

The Tact of the Essay Form Tact, as chapter 1 will demonstrate, has an originating scene in Romantic essays, which offered mimetic accounts of city encounters; but it became generalizable as a style, and more closely aligned with a literary form than with a place and a time.22 By the 1860s, Arnold had borrowed from the street life of the Romantic essayists to bring their approach to bear on national projects of education and public discourse. Eliot insisted on the rigors of tact in her essays in cultural criticism, which would inform and shape her later career as a novelist; while Pater in his Renaissance took from Arnold the principles of tact in order to imagine a world made from them. Milner would adopt the particular desire for freedom for which tact stands in her personal essays and therapeutic practice. This diverse continuation was made possible by analogizing tact to its home in that most flexible of genres—the essay form. The reflective, experimental, personal essay flourished in the British nineteenth century. The essay, claimed William Hazlitt in 1815 “is in morals and manners what the experimental is in natural philosophy, as opposed to the dogmatical method. It does not deal in sweeping clauses of proscription and anathema, but in nice distinctions and liberal constructions.”23 The word “liberal” here offers the sense of a generous expansion of experience, but also, as chapter 2 explains, a political stance and a claim about freedom. Essayists reflecting on the essay form often claim for it a capacity both for seeking and conveying a sense of freedom. Alexander Smith in 1863 put the matter bluntly: “The essay-writer is a chartered libertine, and a law unto himself.”24 And this freedom often begins in the confidence, even the impudence, that knows when to reject the proper and disciplined approach to a subject, to try out alternatives, provisionally or virtually, to put them in play in order to break free of an injustice or an impasse. “In the realm of thought,” Theodor Adorno would claim in 1958, “it is virtually the essay alone that has successfully raised doubts about the absolute privilege of method.”25 Great claims are made for essays. Can this fluid and

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fluent form be pinned down to a set of identifying criteria? I don’t think so; the essay spends so much of its time in the margins of other forms, or exceeding what it proposes as its own boundaries. But there are some general activities or principles that the essay form lends itself to, and which we will observe at play in the chapters that follow. The essays considered in this book take their liberty to start from anywhere, simply from the place where we find ourselves. Against propriety, Lamb admires street life, and Leigh Hunt takes an observation of pig driving as the beginning of his reflection on tactful grace, while Pater begins his Renaissance in his own experience before launching its history from the wrong century. These essayists follow the lead of Montaigne in demanding the right to begin from the resources they find at hand. And then, even where a conventional beginning is made and a path seems laid out, the essay demands the privilege of digression to perform a handling in the moment. Arnold veers from an analysis of political discourse to remark on the ugliness of Anglo-Saxon surnames; Pater makes his own uses of just about everything he writes about. A performative break from convention, allowed in the digressive prose of the essay, is a technique of tact. The brevity of the essay encourages such digression. It is a transient form, good for describing dreams and visions, glimpses of other worlds and ways: from Lamb’s essay “Dream Children” to Pater’s shadowy portraits of Leonardo and Michelangelo. The tentativeness of the essay form means it does not have to be burdened by the need to be taken seriously; it may ease itself from under the weight of established customs and truths. The essay has a knack for breaking bounds with decorum (as Arthur Symons says of Lamb, discussed later). It often handles dangerously heavy subjects with a light touch—“antinomian,” but with “unsinged hands,” in Pater’s words—and so can find its way to moments of new seriousness in seeming to lower the stakes. Most of all, the essay is formally lacking in a concerted narrative: any final end towards which tension is raised and in which resolution, and its value judgments, are expected. The essay is on its guard against eschatologies of all kinds. People and artworks may be the objects of our handling, but we do not know their ends; to imagine that we do may found a tactless attempt to coerce them. The essayist Walter Benjamin’s distinction between what he calls the “story” and the novel is useful here. The story is related to the world: it offers us its company, and a manner of handling it, a “counsel” in living. Its resistance to final definition, to being like “information,” “understandable in itself,” allows for its being made creative use of; its resonance exceeds its form. Lamb’s essays, we will see, are full of stories in this sense—opposed to the purposes of a (Benthamite) information economy, richly suggestive, and offered for use in living. For Benjamin, the novel, conversely, through its structure of suspended definition, of holding back before discharging its full meaning in final satisfaction, isolates the reader from others, in a greed to reach the end, towards a sense of privately possessing its truth. The reader “is ready to

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make it completely his own, to devour it.” This is because of the novel’s temporal logic, which assumes things are judged from their ends, according to which, as Benjamin summarizes, “a man who dies at the age of thirty-five . . . is at every point of his life a man who dies at the age of thirty-five.”26 For Benjamin, the end of a novel is a “figurative death,” by which “remembered life” replaces “real life.” This logic feeds a hunger for definition and information, to the detriment of the nuance of lived experience. Now, the terminology of this distinction is less important (one might think that the story is that part of a novel most invested in ends) than the attitudes it evokes. Geörgy Lukács makes a similar claim for the essay in his consideration of its form. For Lukács as for Pater, Plato is the first essayist.27 Lukács opposes the form of tragic drama to the essay form, which he ascribes to Plato’s dialogues: “a tragic life is crowned only by its end, only the end gives meaning, sense and form to the whole, and it is precisely the end which is arbitrary and ironic here, in every dialogue and in Socrates’ whole life.” The essay keeps questions open, and allows a person to maintain an “elusive essence” against demands that a meaning and role be finally fixed.28 The essays explored in this book distinguish themselves by such an attitude, which is strangely both elusive and open. They lend themselves to a particular, tactful, style of thought and approach to new encounters, which is unknowingly provisional, virtual, and experimental. “Essay” after all means just this, a try-out. The formal features of the essay lend it in particular to tact, but a poem, novel, or play may be tactful too. The argument of this book does not seek final generic boundaries.29 What makes the essay form comport well with a tactful style is its recurring concern with a moment of an encounter: of a voice or style meeting the world, meeting the reader. It is free to focus on such moments as moments, to be repeated, varied, replaced, and ever needing to be achieved again. All the essays considered in this book, whatever else they are about, take as their subject the conditions of the encounter, of how the world is met and handled. The essay is a genre interested in its own framing, and—through its evasiveness—in proposing alternatives to frames already given.

The Frame of this Book In building its picture of tact, this book is framed by many phrases and philosophies: from Georg Simmel’s sociology to Roland Barthes’s criticism, to Stanley Cavell’s moral perfectionism, to Eve Sedgwick and Leo Bersani’s queer theories, to Jacques Rancière’s work on the pedagogy of ignorance. I have begun from the claims of the essayists this book studies before seeking resonances in other (often later) works. But there is one theoretical approach that has framed this book’s attention more than others, and that is psychoanalysis: as it was invented by Sigmund Freud, but in particular as it was developed in

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Britain in the twentieth century by the “middle group” of analysts, who include Donald Winnicott and Marion Milner. I will conclude this introduction with a brief account of this approach and indicate why this book turns in its last chapter from five nineteenth-century essayists to a twentieth-century psychoanalyst. Freud is famous for inventing a technique of interpretation. The seemingly inconsequential or recalcitrant aspects of someone’s life (their dreams, or slips of the tongue or physical symptoms, like a tic, or a persistent cough) are interpreted and given a meaning, which would reveal something previously hidden about the patient’s inner self, personal history, desires, and traumas. But also, by proposing a listening encounter that encouraged his patients to freely associate—to think out loud, to say whatever came into their heads, without suffering judgment or ordinary social consequences—Freud invented a way to take people seriously without taking them personally. Through his clinical setting, Freud created a frame for an experience in which a person might come freely to new relations, ideas, and assumptions, which might, in the most fortunate cases, liberate the patient from the ones (the “symptoms”) that caused intolerable suffering. As many critics have pointed out, however, Freud can appear far from tactful in his case histories. Freud’s zeal for interpretation at times appears to impinge on any freedom of association. Psychoanalysis has seemed coercive to many critics—as bullying people into offering evidence from their private lives for a prefabricated dogma about sexuality, which, far from liberating anyone, only reinforces already unequal power relations.30 Winnicott, in a 1954 paper, explicitly addresses these two sides to Freud’s work, the interpretative and the situational. Freud’s technique could be divided into its hermeneutic method, by which “material presented by the patient is to be understood and to be interpreted,” on the one hand, and into “the setting in which the work is carried through,” on the other.31 This framing function of the “setting,” Winnicott remarks, had more rarely been attended to, and only acknowledged broadly as something supplementary—as merely the “art” of the clinician. But Winnicott emphasizes how revolutionary was Freud’s invention of a clinical setting for therapy, in which at a stated time, a number of times a week, Freud put himself at the service of his patient and would be reliably there, awake and attentive, in a room dedicated to the analysis. In this situation, “the analyst is much more reliable than people are in ordinary life; on the whole punctual, free from temper tantrums, free from compulsive falling in love, etc.” The analyst does not take desires and dreams of the patient personally: “the absence of the talion reaction can be counted on.” This is a world without retribution. Most therapeutically, the analyst simply “survives,” by showing up week after week, unperturbed by fantasies, loves and hatreds.32

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The “setting” is not just a matter of place and time, but also of how the analyst handles the patient: somehow personally and impersonally at once, with a care that allows the boundaries of subjectivity and objectivity, the personal and impersonal, truth and fiction, to be held in suspension, in a safeenough environment. Winnicott calls this process “holding,” and analogizes it to the care of a mother for an infant. In this environment, the patient has a chance to “reveal himself to himself.” Such holding grants patients, if all goes well, a freedom to play, to experiment with their relationships to the world. It cultivates what Winnicott calls “illusion,” and a “transitional area of experiencing,” a mediating area between subject and object, which separates and joins people at the same time.33 The “first human aesthetic,” claims the analyst Christopher Bollas, is the “aesthetic of handling” an infant receives from its mother, and from which it is encouraged to develop a fundamental connection to and a “style of being” with others in the world.34 Plenty of adults, this version of psychoanalysis assumes, have not had a chance at this development because their environment has not been good enough. A tact of handling provides the conditions in which it may occur. The theory of transitional and middle spaces, and their relationship to creativity and mental health, is one direction of travel for tact after the nineteenth century. The middle group put a tactful, essayistic sensibility—what Pater called a “beautiful way of handling things”—to therapeutic use, and they produced a theoretical elaboration of the kinds of experience tactfulness encourages. Chapter 6 explores the connection between aesthetic experience and a clinical tact. Milner was an essayist before she was an analyst and, like others in the middle group, deeply influenced by Romantic and postRomantic British literature. She played a central role in conceiving of the idea of transitional experience: it was, we will see, through her own drawing practice that she was able to describe the experience for which Winnicott would later coin the term. But there are other directions too. I have tried to keep in mind various contexts and afterlives for the tactful essay while writing this book, and the different modes of handling they may require. Tact touches on questions of education and whether it is measured by experience or results; on criticism and its relationship to close or distant, depth or surface reading; on the relationship between liberal politics and identity politics; and on the relationship between art and method.35 And it touches on the question of social mediation now, when technology promises to make interactions—and all manner of choices about other people—more efficient, by providing as much knowledge as possible in the advance of a new encounter. In writing a criticism of tact, I have sought evocation before information. I will consider this book successful if the reader, taking it into her own hands, makes her own uses of it.

ch a P T er on e

“Our Debt to Lamb” T he rom a n T ic ess ay a n d T he e m erge nce oF Tac T

charLes Lamb made no great claims for himself. We tend to observe this minor figure, whose whimsical essays won him, according to Roy Park, the rather uninspiring status of “cultural teddy-bear in the Victorian Establishment,” only now and again, as he traces his own shy orbit around the greater Romantics.1 And “eccentric”—with all the charm and irrelevance awarded by that label—has tended to be the way critics have defined him; Lamb has suffered an enduring trivialization as “gentle-hearted Charles,” with the effect, in the words of Denise Gigante, of “damning him to the critically irrelevant world of the benign.”2 What is so unsettling about Lamb, we might wonder, that he has been so often quarantined by sentimentality? There’s a hint of some higher stakes in a scathing 1934 essay by the Cambridge critic Denys Thompson, sardonically titled “Our Debt to Lamb.” Thompson condemns Lamb’s essays for eschewing the moral legislation of the Spectator in favor of a democratic populism. For Thompson, Lamb’s aesthetic marks a shift in the essay genre from the dignified Addisonian “lay pulpit” to the (overly) familiar essay; without an elevated standpoint, the essayist becomes dangerously democratic: a close connoisseur of intimacy. For Thompson, this is too close for comfort; he admits that reading Lamb makes him want to shout “don’t breathe in my ear.”3 Thompson was right to sense a change in relation. Borrowing his title, I will examine the question of what “our debt to Lamb” might be. The answer is that Lamb reconceived the essay genre to democratic ends. He made use of the essay form to practice tact, which responds to modern social conditions by maintaining a discursively constructed social space. This space shares formal properties, and democratic aims, with a contemporaneous model of a discursive sociality: the panoptical theories of Jeremy Bentham. But they [ 12 ]

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represent different approaches to the same social pressures. While Bentham proposes a totalizing methodical approach that would produce transparent and egalitarian social systems, such as his rationalized legal system, Lamb insists upon values that methods of rationalization and demystification can destroy. Because he is the figure who throws the differences of their two approaches into highest relief, I will approach the connections between Lamb and Bentham by way of Lamb’s critique of Bentham’s most aggressive popularizer and disciple, James Mill. Lamb proposes a tactful social sensibility, a democratizing feeling one’s way among others, opposed to the Utilitarians’ democratizing transparency and privileging of method. He is concerned with the conditions of possibility for a sociability in which no party is diminished and in which multiple possible worlds or ways of life may thrive. To this end, tact proposes a less knowing form of kindness; it resists the codification of social laws and the pinning of individuals to fixed meanings. It is an ethic of the ad hoc, continually rereading and rewriting the social. Tact provides a strong basis from which to resituate Lamb within our understanding of literary history as not simply an eccentric but, at the same time, a central and originary exponent of an important modern sensibility. In this chapter I consider Lamb’s deviation from eighteenth-century social and literary conventions, reading together Lamb’s tactful persona of Elia with his fellow essayists, and contemporaneous debates about social change. Tact is a product of the modern city: never before had so many different people lived in such close proximity to one another, in a situation that required new forms of relating to difference and a reform of established, absolutist systems of status evaluation. Lamb’s essays resist coercive claims to truth, keep meaning on the move, and preserve desire and possibility within social relations. Elia’s language makes use of the possibilities of the essay form in order to provide the conditions for a phenomenology of tactful relation, a virtual reality, or what Lamb calls “illusion”: the cultivation of a neutral and impersonal space existing between people. Finally, I draw a comparison with a similar cultivation of a virtual space in social relations in the work of Jeremy Bentham. I identify what is tactful in Benthamism but also explain, in contradistinction to him, a central component of the essayistic style of tact: its relation to the idea of progress. Lamb critiques the temporal assumptions of liberal progressivism, by which the present is understood in terms of its contribution to the future, and difference in terms of the future perfect, or what it will have been. The Essays of Elia reject this assumption by opposing the form of the essay to the narrative progress of the novel. In the process, Lamb uses the essay to propose a kind of aesthetic liberalism, which provides an alternative to a liberalism that would attain shared principles by means of rational consensus. This aesthetic liberalism offers the alternative of an essayistic tact to the model of subjectification

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through internalized laws and the totalizing regimes of power familiar to our present conceptions of nineteenth-century liberal society, from Michel Foucault’s influential reading of Bentham to D. A. Miller’s famous conjunction of the novel and the police.

Living by Essay Lamb’s evasion of a social code, and his subtle proposition of an essayistic life, produces the tact of his response to his times. From Denys Thompson’s Leavisite perspective, this evasion is irresponsible, even ethically lax. Lamb’s perverse reticence means that he “never . . . requires his reader to re-orientate himself.”4 It is an important observation. A too-direct requirement to “reorientate” was the basis of Lamb’s private criticism of Wordsworth’s “Old Cumberland Beggar.” In a letter to Wordsworth of 1801, Lamb opined, “it appears to me a fault in the Beggar, that the instructions conveyed in it are too direct and like a lecture: they don’t slide into the mind of the reader while he is imagining no such matter.—An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult in being told, I will teach you how to think on this subject.”5 In protesting the “too direct” and advocating the “slide into the mind of the reader,” Lamb articulates an essential element of what would become his Elian mode. Through his persona, Elia, Lamb would develop a technique of modulation in tone and voice, and in closeness and distance to others. He playfully suggested just how essential such evasiveness is to Elia’s character when he added his own wry preface to his 1833 collected Last Essays of Elia. The preface is an obituary of his persona, “by a friend of the late Elia.” A hint at literary explication, at how the reader ought to approach the Essays, is found in its final paragraph, which narrates the event that sent Elia to his grave: Discoursing with him latterly . . . he expressed a pettishness, which I thought unworthy of him. In our walks about his suburban retreat . . . some children belonging to a school of industry had met us, and bowed and curtseyed, as he thought, in an especial manner to him. “They take me for a visiting governor,” he muttered earnestly. He had a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like anything important or parochial. He thought that he approached nearer to that stamp daily. He had a general aversion from being treated like a grave or respectable character, and kept a wary eye upon the advances of age that should so entitle him. He did not conform to the march of time, but was dragged along in the procession. His manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never sate gracefully on his shoulders. . . . These were weaknesses; but such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings.6 A hint is contained in this “key,” should the reader let it slide into mind. If Elia’s essays always disclaim the moralizing standpoint, or fixed point of au-

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thority in a scale of values, the question raised here is what it might mean to attain one, and why anyone would want to: Lamb punningly suggests that advancing to the “grave” might be just that. Elia’s ill-fitting toga virilis gestures to a recurring theme of the essays: their exploration of the gap between role or stance and the identity of the actor in all forms of sociability, and the sense of the possibilities of a dramatic virtuality in ordinary interactions. (What also recurs is just how vulnerable this gap is to being stripped away). The toga is worn, but not too well: the story suggests Elia’s defining refusal to assume completely any role, particularly an authoritative one; he rejects the “decent drapery,” the moral wardrobe, of Burkean status hierarchy.7 Elia’s transitional position as a “boy-man” is not quite a Romantic celebration of the authenticity of childhood; nor is it a wish to remain irresponsible, eternally a feckless youth (Romantic essayists were often disparaged on these grounds).8 It is a protest about the common ideals of “grave” adulthood to which the young are dragged in the name of educational progress. The consummately evasive Elia is mortified before he dies, finally transfixed in an unwanted social position. His ironic humor fails him. He is made “pettish,” found to be muttering his protests too “earnestly.” Lamb’s imagined obituary hints that if we don’t dismiss Elia as someone who ought to grow up, we might instead take him seriously as a critic of established ideals of social value and comportment. The Essays of Elia are a response to the ever more urgent questions of social status and behavior in an increasingly dense and diverse urban society. The early decades of the nineteenth century in Britain experienced the profoundly unsettling effects of the emergence of modern metropolitan life.9 Georg Simmel, the nineteenthcentury sociologist of urban modernity, provides a useful insight into the phenomenology of this change with his concept of “strangeness.”10 In urban space, a great many people are crowded together with people of uncertain origin, status and, intention. Established codes for reading other people become less and less useful as urbanization increases; the city becomes a place of intense unknowing. For Simmel, individuals must respond to the “synthesis of nearness and distance which constitutes the formal position of the stranger.”11 He notes that one response to the overstimulating strangeness of the city is a rationalistic mode that flattens qualitative distinction to a single scale of (monetary) value. He calls this the rise of the “matter-of-fact attitude.” This attitude of relation assumes knowledge of others in order to evade interest in them; it is the response of the defensively blasé. But strangeness also produces responses that challenge this affective flattening and call for the appreciation of ever finer modes of differentiation. The impersonal space of strangeness “enters even the most intimate relationships” in the modern city. It is “full of dangerous possibilities,” which “thrust themselves between us, like shadows.” This shadowy middle space of possibility, of appreciation, is what the Elian sensibility keeps in play, and defends against colonization by universal codes of status or the matter-of-fact attitude.

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It is a familiar notion that the Romantic period experienced a “crisis of sociability”; but what might this mean to someone living it?12 To come to grips with this question, it is worth looking again at a famous controversy about social valuation. There was something new about the famous 1817 attack by “Z” on the “Cockney School” in Blackwoods Magazine: not in terms of its prescriptions (literature should defer to social and moral codes), but in the histrionic intensity of its style. Z’s outrage is leveled not only against a new form of poetics but also against their links to forms of sociability, forms that seemed to confound established scales of value and codes of behavior. The shrill fury of Z (or John Gibson Lockhart) is directed not only at notorious poets like Leigh Hunt but at some strange contiguity of Hunt’s sensibility (as demonstrated in his Story of Rimini) with the gentilities of the lower middle classes: One feels the same disgust at the idea of opening Rimini, that impresses itself on the mind of a man of fashion, when he is invited to enter, for a second time, the gilded drawing-room of a little mincing boarding school mistress, who would fain have an At Home in her house. Everything is pretence, affectation, finery and gaudiness. The beaux are attorneys’ apprentices . . . and clerks of genius: the belles are faded fan twinkling spinsters, prurient vulgar misses from school and enormous citizens’ wives.13 Lockhart’s “mistress” stands metonymically for changing practices of sociability—encompassing social forms from lyric to tea parties. Lockhart’s rage reflects a time in which the rules of what the social historian Harold Perkin called the “old society”—that required people to produce the kinds of signification that matched their station in the social hierarchy—came to be felt untenable.14 By the old rules, a casual visual appraisal is thus sufficient to effectively “place” someone. Terry Eagleton has summarized the “cultural politics” of this situation with reference to the eighteenth-century essay and the novel: “as in the fiction of Richardson or Austen, stray empirical details can prove morally momentous: it is in the crook of the finger or the cut of a waistcoat that virtuous or vicious dispositions may be disclosed.” On this basis, Eagleton explains, Addison was able to promote a “programme” of correct sensibility, by which his and Steele’s “cultural authority ran all the way from the reform of dress to homilies against duelling, from modes of polite address to eulogies of commerce.”15 Should someone produce the wrong signs, a qualified reader may intervene to correct the error. By the early nineteenth century, there were simply too many styles on offer. In 1819, William Hazlitt had rounded on his Tory critics, insisting that “[w]hen you say that an author cannot write common sense or English, you mean that he does not believe in the doctrine of divine right.”16 Raymond Williams has observed that “one of the marks of a conservative society is that it

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regards style as an absolute.” And Williams notes that this absolute, while never fully abandoned, is increasingly “set aside” in literary prose from the Romantic period as it became impossible to insist on a single approved code.17 The Romantic essay appeared at a time when social rulebooks—the system of imperatives put forward by a thriving production of the “conduct book” genre—became obsolete. Admittedly, it may seem unlikely that Lamb could be responding to the work of authors like Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, who were separated from him by over a century. But William St. Clair has shown that Addison and Steele’s essays and eighteenth-century conduct books formed a significant part of the “old canon” of out-of-copyright texts that were most accessible to the common reader in the Romantic period. The older works were supplemented by an early-nineteenth-century boom in newly composed conduct books that sought to preserve deference and order in a time of social instability.18 St. Clair points out that “much of the prose literature of the Romantic period can be read against the foil of the conduct books, a presence always felt even when not referred to explicitly”19 This is particularly true of the periodical essay, which as St. Clair’s statistics demonstrate, was accessible to the same markets of readers as conduct books. The values of conduct literature were traditional, rural, and hierarchical. Elia challenges this conception of social order by depicting an urban setting in which the exactitude and logic of conduct literature are repeatedly baffled. Fred Randel has demonstrated that Lamb’s essays often return to the same binary oppositions as the Spectator, in which one term is valued above another in order to illustrate correct and incorrect conduct: lenders are better than borrowers, for example, or married men are better than bachelors. But Elia refuses such neat resolutions; Randel points out that in essays like “The Two Races of Men” or “A Complaint on the Behaviour of Married People,” Elia both “means what he says and the opposite too.”20 Elia cites and frustrates the grammatical structure of a newly resurgent conduct literature. His style works to evade the limitations of controversial positions, and to achieve a truthfulness without making claims to fixed truth. It relies on a certain impertinence, the kind which for Roland Barthes ensures “the neutral,” or the “side-stepping of meaning,” a serious discourse of the “non-pertinent, the im-pertinent.”21 Elia performs this impertinence in an early (1821) essay titled “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist.” He playfully analogizes the form of outdated social modes to the card games preferred by “old Sarah Battle (now with God).” Mrs. Battle’s preferences were exact and exacting: A grave simplicity was what she chiefly admired in her favourite game. There was nothing silly in it. . . . No flushes—that most irrational of all pleas that a reasonable being can set up—that any one should claim four by virtue of holding cards of the same mark and colour, without

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reference to the playing of the game, or the individual worth or pretensions of the cards themselves! (C, 32) Mrs. Battle demands a game in which everybody is certain of the fixed positions—“the individual worth and pretensions”—of each card. Adversaries must give no quarter (none may “only play at playing”) and the game must progress in a manner equivalent to the “long, steady, deep-rooted, rational antipathies of the great French and English nations.” Mrs. Battle could not stand “an ungrammatical game.” She championed whist, which, having two perfectly opposed sides, “abhors neutrality.” Until this point, Elia’s essay is a perfect parody of conduct book convention. It expounds a social grammar to illustrate a binary with a superior and an inferior term—serious and unserious players. Elia even mimics Edmund Burke to insist on an aesthetic support—by means of picture cards—to clear gradations in status value, without which “the beauty of cards would be extinguished for ever” (C, 32).22 But then the essay makes an interesting turn. This is not to unveil the parody and explain the moral of his story—Elia never departs from a tone of ingenuous admiration, even if he stretches its limits, in conflating the language of parlor games and codes of social valuation. Instead the essay avoids progressing to closure, opening instead a vaguer, actively neutral space. Elia admits his own incapacity for militantly taking sides, confessing instead a fondness for irrelevancy. He retreats from the field under the excuse of illness, playing instead with his beloved cousin Bridget for “nothing,” “for love” and for only the “shadows of winning” (C, 35). “Mrs Battle’s Opinions . . .” formally encapsulates Elian style. The essay passes from an old social grammar, represented by Mrs. Battle, her admiration of Pope and her “fine last-century countenance,” to a luxurious retreat from pertinence (C, 31). Remarking on his delighted evasion of Mrs. Battle’s insistence on a perfect paradigm of epic conflict, Elia concedes with relish, “I grant it is not the highest style of man” (C, 35). (One is reminded of Lamb’s comment, reporting on his reading of Hazlitt’s Life of Napoleon, that he “skipped all the battles”).23 Elia registers a desire to conjure new, less militant possibilities, evading assertions that there is only one way to play the social game and making room for “neutral” spaces and for shadowy, idiosyncratic pleasures: “There is such a thing in nature, I am convinced, as sick whist,” Elia mildly insists (C, 35).

Defining Vulgarity If one cannot rely on the rules of Battle in order to distinguish correct from incorrect form, then how does one appraise a social encounter? The essayists of the “Cockney School” proposed a new sensibility that democratized refinement. William Hazlitt provides an explicit theorization of an essayistic reform

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of social thought in his essay “On Vulgarity and Affectation,” with which he concluded his Table Talk of 1821. Hazlitt denies that distinctions between the vulgar and refined accord with any rules by which correct behavior means keeping to one’s place. He redefines a person’s social value from terms of wealth and status to desires, commitments, and appreciations. As would Mill’s On Liberty, Hazlitt’s essay calls for the relocation of aesthetic standards—likings and dislikings—from social codes to the free individual. He insists that such relocation is a basis for equality. After all, a king and his people, a mistress and her maid, will share the same desires in life: “the young lady longs to ride in a coach and six, and so does the maid, if she could.”24 Vulgarity is really defined, he argues, not by the faux pas of stepping out of one’s assigned role (boarding-school mistresses should not hold “at homes”), but by the failure of appreciation that insists on the rules of status. Vulgarity, then, is prejudicing things in the lump, by names and places and classes, instead of judging them by what they are in themselves, by their real qualities and shades of distinction. There is no selection, truth, or delicacy in such a mode of proceeding. It is affecting ignorance and making it a title to wisdom. It is a vapid assumption of superiority.25 Hazlitt’s call to judge things “by what they are in themselves” will resonate with Matthew Arnold’s later injunction to “see the object as it really is.” Hazlitt prefers an “individual refinement” to the certainty of preexisting authorities about “names and places and classes.” He redefines vulgarity, from the essence of the common—“A thing is not vulgar merely because it is common. ’Tis common to breathe, to see, to feel, to live”—to a sensibility or attitude.26 An earlier essay in the same volume of Table Talk, “On Genius and Common Sense,” approaches the subject from the perspective of critical practice. Hazlitt proposes “tact” as a preferable alternative to the assumption, held by people “of more gravity than understanding,” that questions of aesthetic and social valuation are “strictly reducible” to “rules.” Hazlitt insists that “the plainest common sense” is “subject to a particular sort of acquired and indefinable tact.” His argument rejects social rules for a physical sensibility: It is asked, “If you do not know the rule by which is done, how can you be sure of doing it a second time?” And the answer is, “If you do not know the muscles by the help of which you walk, how is it you do not fall down at every step you take?” In art, in taste, in life, in speech, you decide from feeling and not from reason.27 Ordinary life demands an aesthetic of the encounter. Both art criticism and social interaction—Hazlitt brilliantly blends examples of the acts of appraisal required by both, ranging between Titian’s art and snide remarks—require a rejection of the comforts of abstraction for a more hands-on approach: “rules

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are applicable to abstractions, but expression is concrete and individual.”28 An aesthetic of handling applies to art and life.29 This is an “airy, intuitive faculty,” which “skim[s] the surfaces of things,” and also a tacit moral sense.30 Hazlitt stresses that “tact, finesse” is a capacity rather than a code, it “is nothing but the being completely aware of the feeling belonging to certain situations, passions &c. and the being consequently sensible to their slightest indications or movements in others.”31 A more “concrete” manner of handling people than abstract social “rules” apparently entails a great deal more skepticism about just what one is handling, while tact seems at once a refinement and “plainest common sense.” David Bromwich has remarked that “Lamb, Hazlitt and Hunt perhaps do not make a critical school between them, but if they ever did one might praise it as the least moralistic school that ever was.”32 These essayists deliberately worry conventional moral hierarchies, and the opposition of the exceptional to the common by recognizing the incomparable within the commonplace. Hazlitt extols the art of a five’s player (a ball game played with the hands), while Elia can opine that “to have the feeling of gentility, it is not necessary to have been born gentle” (C, 140). Hunt meditates on the potential for grace and charm in making breakfast, window-shopping, or traveling by coach. Hunt’s essay “The Graces and Anxieties of Pig Driving” insists comically on refinement in the commonplace: “talents are not to be despised in the humblest walks of life; we will add, nor in the muddiest.” The pig driver’s refinement is evidenced in his style of handling: To see the hand with which he did it! How hovering, yet firm; how encouraging, yet compelling; how indicative of the space on each side of him, and yet of the line before him; how general, how particular, how perfect! No barber’s could quiver about a head with more lightness of apprehension; no cook’s pat up and proportion the side of a pasty with a more final eye.33 Hunt conflates the language of art criticism with modes of handling in manual trades. Upon entering the city, the pig outplays the driver, exploiting the anonymity of the urban setting to escape down alleyways. This sudden turn provokes Hunt to award the most consummate tact to the escaping pig, “a chap with a tendency to take every path but the proper one, and with a sidelong tact for the alleys.” Identifying the pig with tact develops Hunt’s common refinement to a limit case. It answers back to Edmund Burke’s famous derogation in his Reflections on the Revolution in France of the masses as the “swinish multitude,” and the revaluation of this moniker by Thomas Spence’s Jacobin publication, Pig’s Meat. But awarding greater tact to the pig over the driver suggests that although tact is a matter of handling, it is much more about evasion than domination. It is a technique of playful survival before

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mastery, and Lamb’s essays refine this technique. Hazlitt once remarked that Lamb possessed a fine tact for the blind alleys of literature. The correspondence of tact and evasion in Hunt’s essay is likely in direct tribute to him.34

Tact and the Essay Form We gain a rare glimpse of Lamb’s explicit reflections on the capacities of essay form in an 1821 review of Hazlitt’s Table Talk, written a year after the first of the Essays of Elia had appeared in the London Magazine. The review was never published, but it contains a consideration of essay writing and the challenges to social and aesthetic form that we have seen Hazlitt raise in his volume. Lamb insists that collections of essays, if they are to be successful at all, must derive a “unity” from “some pervading character.” He provides the example of Samuel Johnson, who “deals out opinion, which he would have you take for argument; and is perpetually obtruding his own particular views of life as universal truths.”35 While “another class of essayists” employ an “ideal character,” enabling “still fuller licence” for the delivery of “peculiar humours and opinions,” but without the “invidiousness of a perpetual self-reference” (L, 300). Lamb admires this technique for allowing the play of an eccentric individuality to succeed moralism, citing with approval Steele’s employment of Jonathan Swift’s Isaac Bickerstaff. And yet this innovation was short-lived: before long, “Addison had stepped in with his wit, his criticism, his morality— the cold generalities which extinguish humour” (L, 300–301). At the conclusion of the Tatler, moralism returned with the Spectator. Lamb criticizes the unsociable style of the Spectator: “except that he never opens his mouth, we know nothing about him . . . he colours nothing with his own hues”; he is removed “from any possibility of our sympathies” (L, 301). Moreover, this lapse in social grace is contagious: Addison misled later essayists with his famous “Vision of Mirza” (an allegorical morality tale with an oriental setting, featuring importunate abstractions like Envy, Avarice, Superstition, Despair, and Love), after the success of which “no book of Essays was thought complete without a Vision” (L, 301).36 This fashion converted sociable essayists into crashing bores: “these authors seem not to have been content to entertain you with their day-light fancies, but you must share their vacant slumbers” (L, 302). By contrast, Lamb introduces Hazlitt with the praise that he is “no visionary”: “he talks to you in broad daylight. He comes in no imaginary character” (L, 302). But Hazlitt’s “strong realities” can be too pungent; Lamb finds his ad hominem style aggressive and unfair. Lamb implies, paradoxically, that essayists with such a direct and personal mode of engagement are the least in touch with their subjects. They reduce their subjects to mere placeholders in an argument “till they have built up in their fancies an Abstract, widely differing indeed from their poor concrete friend!” (L, 305).

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Lamb’s critique of Addison and Hazlitt offers a guide to his own stance. Elia, his phantom persona, introduces instead a style that is at once impersonal and rich in idiosyncrasy, spectral yet embodied, chronically evasive yet ardent in civility. When Walter Pater described Lamb’s “working ever close to the concrete” and eschewing “mere abstract theories,” he was not praising a realist commitment to empiricism but a faithfulness to the spontaneous play of impression that does not seek to possess its object, or attempt to unearth its true meaning.37 For Pater, this is the source of Lamb’s “enduring moral effect” (A, 112).38 The Essays of Elia shift attention from fixed personal identities to an impersonal space of metaphorical play between people. To this end, Elia occupies boundary areas between the personal and impersonal, subject and object, society and individual. He is the product of between-spaces; existing in “border land[s]” and “middle actions” (“Imperfect Sympathies,” C, 52, 53), in “little Goshen” (“Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago,” C, 18; and “On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Age,” C, 128), “undisputed space” (“A Quaker’s Meeting,” C, 44), and “neutral ground” (“On the Artificial Comedy of the Last Century,” C, 126). Like his own “Child Angel,” he is a “glorious amphibian” (C, 222). Elia maintains this space with a generous irony and an evasive tact. A tact for the alleys.

Rhetorical Tact Lamb’s essays propose a sensibility of concrete appreciation. They do not deal in argument, but perform a sensibility towards a coming encounter.39 The 1821 essay “Imperfect Sympathies,” for example, identifies a rather eccentric right. This might be called the right to be vague, or to a certain coyness when it comes to taking a firm position on the field of meaning. Reserving this right (reservation is itself the right) Elia explains that it is constitutionally essential to him. Ranking himself in an “order of imperfect intellects,” he admits that “Truth” never shows a “full front” to him. Instead he makes do with “hints and glimpses, germs and crude essays at a system” (C, 52). In claiming to be an unreliable thinker, Elia proposes a relational style (and so borrows a trick from Montaigne’s essay book.)40 An apparent confession of “crude essays” develops into a defence of this very “imperfect” relationship to meaning against those most unsympathetic to it—in this case, Scotsmen. For Elia, the “perfect order and completeness” of a Scotsman’s mind is its gravest deficiency: “[H]e never hints, or suggests anything, but unlades his stock of ideas in perfect order and completion. . . . [H]e never stops to catch a glittering something in your presence, to share it with you, before he quite knows whether it be true touch or not.” The Scotsman’s allegiance to “Truth” means he cannot tolerate paradox, and in particular the paradox of the ambiguous “glittering thing”—as to whether it is subjective or objective. This ambiguity opens for consideration the space of experiencing that the psycho-

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analyst Donald Winnicott was to call “transitional.” This “third area of experiencing,” between subject and object, is for Winnicott the basis for the appreciation of others as creative objects. Elia tactfully avoids the question that would resolve the paradox and thus denude it of its usefulness; but this is what the Scotsman insists upon. The question, in Winnicott’s words, is, “[D]id you conceive of this or was it presented to you from without?” He states, “[T]he important point is that no decision on this point is expected. The question is not to be formulated.”41 This particular form of conversational negative capability guides Elia’s descriptions of the space between people.42 The time and space of Elian tactfulness, and its manner of prizing of metaphor and virtuality, furnish Winnicott’s concepts with an everyday aesthetic. And Winnicott’s work suggests Elian tactfulness might be a matter not only of restraint— refusing acts of imperialism—but also of opening the way to conceiving of the non-imperial subject as an active form of desire.43 The Scotsman has no care for “middle actions.” Between him and his interlocutor, there is no “border-land” or space of play: “you cannot hover with him on the confines of truth, or wander in the maze of probable argument. He always keeps the path. You cannot make excursions with him—for he sets you right” (C, 52). The space of the borderland has contracted, becoming a front line: he “stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy’s country.” Refusing metaphor, he rejects its capacity to sustain sameness and difference to keep the transitional possibilities of language in play. As Barthes puts it in Le Neutre: “[T]act is consubstantially tied to the power of metaphorizing, that is, of isolating a feature and letting it proliferate as language, in a movement of exaltation.” Metaphor preserves individuation, which Barthes distinguishes from individualism, as the “fragile moment of the individual,” both full of potential, vulnerable, and irreducible in desire. Barthes explains, “each time that in my pleasure, my desire, or my distress, the other’s discourse . . . reduces me to a case that fits an all-purpose explanation or classification . . . I feel there is a breach in the principle of tact.”44 Interaction on the basis of fixed categories of meaning may seem like the valuing of truth and integrity on both sides, but it in fact results in someone, the vaguer someone, suffering. Given no demilitarized “border-land” in which to unfold, no hope of imaginative possibilities, the Eros of interaction is stifled. For Barthes, tact supports an active neutrality, the suspension of “orders, laws, summons, arrogances, terrorisms, puttings on notice, the will to possess” by way of a “refusal of pure discourse of opposition and a dissolution of one’s own image.”45 Metaphor unfixes as it makes meanings, and staves off the more imperious claims of a fixed identity. In “Imperfect Sympathies” the only positive description of this tactful mode is oblique (a “glittering something”), reticent, and tactile (a stopping to “catch,” an exploration of the “true touch.”) As an interaction based not on definition but on the offering of a vague “something.” It is temporally imperfect:

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not containing its own teleology within it, it is not so finished as to deny its recipient a handhold; one is able to make use of it, to make it one’s own. Interaction for Elia involves giving people something that can be used, before any communication of information. It does not require so much an accretion of meaning between essayist and reader as it does a performance of meaning’s unraveling to the transitional, in order that more possibilities of meaning might glitter.

Illusion: Elia’s Virtual Reality The persona of Elia cultivates a transitional space of relation. But the Essays also describe this space; they contain mimetic representations of the social world, telling stories of London encounters that illustrate a tactful sociability. This illustration rests on Elia’s description of the theatrical artificiality of ordinary life: the play is found in the street. “Ellistoniana,” an 1831 elegy for the comedian Robert Elliston, praises his social style as “the harmonious fusion of the manners of the player into everyday life, which brought the stage boards into streets, and dining parlours, and kept up the play when the play was ended” (C, 155). An earlier (1825) essay, “Stage Illusion,” describes the quality of this play. Elia defines the most accomplished comedic performance not as the pursuit of a sealed illusion, which separates irrevocably audience from actor, but that in which this separateness is maintained and given up at the same time: “without absolutely appealing to the audience,” the comedian “keeps up a tacit understanding with them: and makes them, unconsciously to themselves, a part in the scene.” He provides “droll looks and gestures—meant at us, and not at all supposed to be visible to his fellows in the scene” (C, 150–151). To fail to supply this tacit “subreference” is unsociable; Elia provides the warning example of the abrasive “Mr. Emery” who, though “earnest and true,” carried from his tragic mode “the same rigid exclusiveness of attention to the stage business, and willful blindness and oblivion of everything before the curtain into his comedy.” This produced a “harsh and dissonant effect” and rendered him “out of keeping with the rest of the Personae Dramatis. There was as little link between him and them, as betwixt himself and the audience. He was a third estate—dry, repulsive, and unsocial to all” (C, 151–152). But the “pleasant impertinent of comedy” makes an art of sociability. Maintaining a gap between the stage and audience, an “artificial” middle ground, such a comic theatrical sense allows sociability to prevail where unnecessary clinging to a “real-life” manner “must necessarily provoke a duel” (C, 152). In taking their cues from the theater, Elia’s essays advise a less insistent grip on pertinence in modern sociability. The admission of layers of illusion within the social scene allows interaction to continue where a frank earnestness would

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render it impossible. Elia describes a kind of liberalism in which his characters all have a right to the illusions through which they live. “Little arts of happiness he is ready to teach to others,” Pater admiringly observed of Lamb, and Elia is interested in how social life is made an art on even the most limited means and gifts. The “shabby genteel,” whom Dickens was to make famous as a social type in his Sketches by Boz, features prominently in Elia’s essays, which frequently offer paeans to individual idioms of dignity in the face of hardship. The facts of the matter are less consequential than the dignity of the scrutinized.46 Dignity for Lamb is a matter of making one’s meanings one’s own. Elia’s first (1820) essay, on London’s defunct “South Sea House” illustrates this kind of liberal sociability.47 The house’s days of expansionism are over; it is a “magnificent relic,” containing “huge charts, which subsequent discoveries have antiquated;—dusty maps of Mexico, dim as dreams,” where “an indolence almost cloistral” reigns; it is a “delightful” scene to the fancies of the “idle and merely contemplative” such as Elia. Corporate consensus and imperial aims are over. Amidst purposeless charm, the clerks cultivate “their separate habits and oddities, unqualified” by, yet in, a “common stock.” It is “a sort of Noah’s ark. Odd fishes. A lay-monastery.” Elia depicts a freedom of individuation in living with social forms that are revealed to have been provisional; his Essays exhibit a recurring preoccupation with the grace of ruins and survivals. There is no nostalgia for a lost purpose. Elia’s tact is to admire ruins as ruins; his affection is for unrestrictive realities: codes that have been found wanting and are now out of time, shadows of themselves that can make no attempt at totalization. There is a law, but its touch is too light to harm. And yet its ethical and aesthetic use remains, to be taken hold of. Elia lives with and without the law at the same time. Arthur Symons accounts for Lamb’s “faultless tact,” by describing him as a “mental gipsy” who saw “in every orderly section of social life magic possibilities of vagrancy.” Symons notes the importance to Lamb of cherishing the rule in its evasion: “he broke bounds with exquisite decorum.”48 The tone of “The South Sea House” is strange—both lively and elegiac. Elia depicts lost worlds encouragingly, as a living part of present realities. The distancing effect of Elia’s elegiac eye on his contemporaries reminds his readers of incommensurabilities between experiences that he analogizes to the distance between the living and the dead.49 As Walter Pater noted, Lamb’s sensibility enabled him to “look upon the tricks in manner of the life about him with that same refined, purged sort of vision, which will come naturally to those of a later generation, in observing whatever may have survived by chance of its mere external habit” (A, 71–72, 76). This elegiac gaze offers a medium for the interaction of differences; the conditions of the house infuse observers with an appreciative forbearance. Thus, the “insignificance of the pretensions” to rank cherished by Thomas

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Tame (with “intellect of the shallowest order”) and his wife (“of meagre person”) attain to dignity as Elia handles them: This was the thought—the sentiment—the bright solitary star of your lives—ye mild and happy pair,—which cheered you in the night of your intellect, and in the obscurity of your station! This was to you instead of riches, instead of rank . . . and it was worth them all together. You insulted none with it; but while you wore it as a piece of defensive armour only, no insult likewise could reach you through it.50 Similarly, the essay “Captain Jackson” describes a destitute man who lived according to an aristocratic magnanimity: “Wine we had none . . . but the sensation of wine was there” and “with nothing to live on, he seemed to live on everything” (C, 170–171). Life’s illusions are precious to Lamb. Jackson’s fantastic disregard for fact allows him to possess “a stock of wealth in his mind”—a wry allusion to Elia’s earlier description of the Scotsman’s “stock of ideas” and the Benthamite theories of education that aimed to furnish the lower orders with (in the words of Bentham’s Chrestomathia) quantifiable “intellectual resources” (C, 52).51 This is where Lamb’s essays, for all their delight in irrelevance, critique their times. For if the performative repertoires of theater provide resources for everyday sociability, the theatrical arts themselves are vulnerable to colonization by a matter-of-fact attitude. Too often, claims Elia, modern art assumes the wrong mode of critical relation to its own material. It proclaims a purpose of stripping away the illusory or artificial in the service of “real life.” In “The Bareness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art,” Elia laments that “so much truth as is enough to convey a story with clearness” is too often the only aim of the respectable artist, who sacrifices “that individualizing property, which should keep the subject so treated distinct in feature from every other subject, however similar” (C, 201). Elia illustrates his point with a parable on its aesthetic and ethical consequences. Modern artistic portrayals of Don Quixote neglect “generosities” in favor of “fooleries.” Sancho abandons the strange insights gleaned by a tactful maintenance of the middle space between him and the knight, the “twilight state of semi-insanity,” and becomes “a downright knave . . . for his own ends only following a confessed madman.” The romance of individualization is lost to individualism: “from the moment that Sancho loses his reverence, Don Quixote is become—a treatable lunatic. Our artists handle him accordingly” (C, 209).52 Lamb’s essays are democratic, but there is a protest here against certain methods of democratization. Sancho’s challenge to Quixote may bring them closer, but a rationalizing demystification can strip too much away, leaving room on the stage for only a cynical individualism. Elia elaborates his theme in his 1821 essay “The Artificial Comedy of the Last Age,” which is less a criticism of the art of a past age than a complaint

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about the moral imagination of the present. “The artificial comedy, or comedy of manners, is quite extinct on our stage,” he begins, because the business of their dramatic characters will not stand the moral test. We screw everything up to that. Idle gallantry in a fiction, a dream, the passing pageant of an evening, startles us in the same way as the alarming indications of profligacy in a son or ward in real life should startle a parent or guardian. We have no such middle emotions as dramatic interests left. We see a stage libertine . . . with the severe eyes which inspect real vices with their bearings upon two worlds. . . . We try him in our courts, from which there is no appeal to the dramatis personae, his peers. (C, 126) The collapse of the virtual space of fiction and dreams is effected by the denial of other worlds: they are lost in a general reduction to “real life.” Everything is taken personally. The judgmental rejection of any ironic double vision is a colonization of the virtual. The same “severe eyes” are directed at “two worlds,” with no imaginative sense of difference in customs and associations of the world of the object under scrutiny. Elia claims the enthusiasm to judge everything by a universal moralism to know no bounds: “we would indict our very dreams” (C, 128). The essay calls for a conception of the dramatic that would open a space between moral codes and manners of living. Elia calls this the “neutral ground of character,” and a “happy breathing place from the burthen of perpetual moral questioning.” The insistence on moralistic realism in drama thwarts this possibility, “the sanctuary and quiet Alsatia of hunted casuistry—is broken up and disenfranchised . . . the privileges of the place are taken away by law” and “instead of the half-believed personages of the stage (the phantoms of old comedy), we recognize ourselves, our brothers, aunts, kinsfolk, allies, patrons, enemies.” The tentative, parenthetical phantom is overcome by a brutal onrush of realism; its demands of self-mirroring become tautological, producing strident materialities. The temporal movement here—the crowding out of old phantoms by a bustle of present acquaintance—suggests false certainties of progress: a triumphalism of the present that limits the present moment, because it denies the continuing potential of meaning of different worlds in our world. Elia’s virtual sensibility, conversely, allows for a more agile thinking of differences and an evasion of moral systems. Elia condenses this state into the phrase “impertinent Goshen,” its biblical reference implying that impertinence is a sanctuary, but one at risk of a pharaonical oppression. Impertinent Goshens appear often in the Essays, as Elia explores imaginative states (of both place and manner) of an aesthetic liberalism. These entail both reverie and sociable communion—a withholding and a touching at once—in which an individual is protectively isolated and yet not insulated from human

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contact. A shared social medium remains vivid; it guarantees equality without depression—without draining life of its color. This is what Elia calls the “perfect solitude” of his 1821 essay “A Quaker’s Meeting,” which offers him the model of an unknowing sympathy between utterly different interiorities in unimpinging communion. “Reader” he begins, would’st thou enjoy at once solitude and society; would’st thou possess the depth of thy own spirit in stillness, without being shut out from the consolatory faces of thy species; would’st thou be alone, and yet accompanied; solitary, yet not desolate; singular, yet not without some to keep thee in countenance; a unit in aggregate; a simple in composite:— come with me into a Quaker’s Meeting. (C, 41) Such conditions (like the South Sea House and its “odd fishes”) give freest play to individual desire, and admit the enrichment of life by illusion; essays like “Dream Children” (1822) or “Old China” (1823) begin from seeming trivialities before unfolding to depict experimental reveries of possible lives. Elia draws attention to the use of language in effecting what Winnicott calls “the right not to communicate,” which means communicating so as to protect the separateness of the self as much as to join it to others.53 In “A Quaker’s Meeting,” Elia depicts the kinds of experience that the function of language as transitional object allows. Elia’s language is concerned here with setting tactful conditions of relation rather than with proposition or persuasion. The essays remind their readers of the value of language as contact, before it takes further instrumental function. Elia’s most assertive ethical statements are injunctions to this tact and describe the moral effects of the virtual and impersonal space that it cultivates. When faced with the tall tales of “Beggars in the Metropolis” (1822), for instance, becoming a stickler for the truth is the least ethical response. Instead, Elia advises, Shut not thy purse strings always against painted distress. Act a charity sometimes. When a poor creature (outward and visibly such) comes before thee, do not stay to enquire whether the “seven small children,” in whose name he implores thy assistance, have a veritable existence. Rake not into the bowels of unwelcome truth to save a halfpenny. It is good to believe him. If he be not all that he pretendeth, give, and under a personate father of a family, think (if thou pleasest) that thou hast relieved an indigent bachelor . . . think them players. You pay your money to see a comedian feign these things. (C, 107) “It is good to believe him”: this is not a matter of sentimentalizing poverty, to turn an act of charity to personal gratification, but to point out that a supposedly practical demand for the facts of the matter can be an equally self-

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indulgent—even cruel—act. Elia is suspicious of the motivations behind any rush to occupy the unbalanced power relations between knower and known. The kindness of acting a charity is to respond to the virtual in kind, with the tact of a dramatic imagination, to “think them players.” This tact avoids imposing a single reality—the reality of the privileged—by means of an absolute moral code according to which a beggar is considered deserving or not. Truth is “unwelcome” here not in a particular sense (that is, because Elia knows the beggar is a liar and wants to deceive himself on this fact) but in a general one: the notion that he could know the truth of the other is quite inappropriate to the situation. Lamb confronts his reader with the ordinariness of a suspicious critical mode in social interaction (a “hermeneutics of suspicion” is defined, for Paul Ricoeur, by a situation in which “the man of suspicion carries out in reverse the work of falsification of the man of guile”) only to propose an alternative relation.54 As with “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions,” Elia evades seemingly inevitable terms of conflictual opposition (here, of judger and judged) in favor of more promising possibilities. The essay proposes a tactful sociability that prefers relations of play to those of power and knowledge. Lamb refuses to decide whether the beggar really is in as much trouble as he says. But he also refuses to treat him, finally, as a stage performer; he and his sufferings are unavoidably in the world and “concerning these poor people, though canst not know if they are feigned or not.” Lamb’s tact keeps a precious attitude of the “as if ” in play. “Valentine’s Day” (1819) depicts the impersonal pleasures of this refusal of knowledge. This essay links the social intensity of the urban stage—valentines, like city dwellers, “cross and intercross each other at every street and turning” —to social relations of benign unknowing. A friend of Elia sends an anonymous gift, but Elia’s admiration, and the effect of the essay, dwells with the reaction of the recipient rather than the sender, whose possible enjoyment of the scene is not described. The girl in receipt of the ingenious card is not so “foolish” as to seek to uncover the facts of the matter, or become enthralled in the power dynamics of an imaginary relation between seer and seen. Rather, she danced about, not with light love or foolish expectations, for she had no lover; or, if she had, none she knew who could have created those bright images which delighted her. It was more like some fairy present; a God-send, as our familiarly pious ancestors termed a benefit received where the benefactor was unknown. It would do her no harm. It would do her good for ever after. It is good to love the unknown. (C, 63) “It is good to love the unknown.” This sentence could serve as a motto for Elia’s entire ethos of tactful appreciation in the city. It is an attitude of disinterest, of not wanting to know the facts, that provides the conditions for the

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pleasurable surprises of new experience. “Beggars in the Metropolis” and “Valentine’s Day” suggest ordinary examples of the illusion of his theater essays, and the virtual transitional space that he defends in “Imperfect Sympathies.” Elia’s complaint in “The Artificial Comedy” centers on the absence of this illusion in modern aesthetics, and the failure of society to recognize its importance—its preference for knowing judgment over richer mediations between art and life. For “we dare not contemplate an Atlantis, a scheme, out of which our coxcombical moral sense is . . . excluded. We have not the courage to imagine a state of things for which there is neither reward nor punishment. We cling to the painful necessities of shame and blame” (C, 128). Such an attitude militates against hope: Elia suggests that his neutral “state of things” is the necessary foundation for any utopian thought.

Utilitarian Tact But an Atlantis, built to exclude a coxcombical moral sense, was being contemplated just as Lamb was conceiving his Elia essays. The Utilitarians, preeminent among them James Mill and Jeremy Bentham, proposed the systematic rationalization and democratization of British society through the development of transparent and egalitarian legal and social codes. They responded to the same social exigencies as Lamb, but while Lamb proposed a solution of essayistic handling, the Utilitarians proposed a reformed social method. The solutions proffered by James Mill, Jeremy Bentham’s popularizer and disciple, ran to greater extremes than his mentor’s, and it is Mill’s brand of imperious rationalism that Elia’s essays seek to frustrate. I will explore Lamb’s oppositional relationship to Mill’s thought, before moving on to the intriguing similarities between Lamb’s tact and Bentham’s democratizing method for modern urban life, and their divergence on the point of progress. It’s tempting to conclude that the “Scotsman” of “Imperfect Sympathies” is a direct reference to James Mill. Lamb considered his own idiom to have suffered some violence from Mill’s editing of “Confessions of a Drunkard,” published in Mill’s periodical the Philanthropist in 1813. He cut much of Lamb’s rhetorical flourish and tempered the intriguing bravado of the confessional piece (“I have no puling apology to make to mankind . . .”); and he reduced the complexity and increased the earnestness of the essay—as appropriate for a publication that viewed its contributions as direct agents of social reform and had little time for literature. Lamb protested in a letter of 1814 at the “sniveling methodistical adulteration of my essay on drunkenness . . . there was certainly no crying ‘Peccavi’ in the 1st Draught.”55 By 1822, the year of “Imperfect Sympathies,” Mill was famous for his voluminous History of British India, which earned him a senior position in the East India Company where Lamb worked as a clerk. The History is written in exactly the kind of style that Elia opposes. It is a work of epistemological

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theory, positing that there is only one point of authority from which history and culture may be judged, and that only the Western historian possesses the “structures of understanding” that grant this perspective: Mill thus never made the mistake of actually going to India in order to study it. British India, denounced as a culture of “unparalleled vagueness,” provides the basis for Mill’s argument for expunging all the vagueness and metaphorical complexity from the English language and legal system. Completeness and precision are the only criteria for the judgment of a system of language. English is thus superior to Hindi—farther along in a single developmental scale—because it contains less metaphorical indirectness and “obliquity.”56

The Time of Tact Elia, conversely, is extremely skeptical of the use of narrative as a mechanism of valuation; that is, about the idea of progress. He admits “some mental twist which makes it difficult in me to face the prospective,” and the 1821 essay “New Year’s Eve” finds him thinking only of the old, “I begin to know its worth, as when a person dies” (C, 26). Here is another of Elia’s uses for elegy. In this way, he avoids prescriptive scales of value that rely on the future perfect— whether the Addisonian snobbery decried by Hazlitt in “Vulgarity and Affectation” or the Benthamite scale of progress in utility. In another 1821 essay, “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire” (like “The South Sea House,” an appreciation of an antique survival), Elia ruminates on the difference between his temperament and the narrative predilections of his cousin Bridget: Narrative teases me. I have little concern in the progress of events. She must have a story—well, ill, or indifferently told. . . . The fluctuations of fortune in fiction—and almost in real life—have ceased to interest, or operate but dully upon me. Out-of-the-way humours and opinions— heads with some diverting twist in them—the oddities of authorship, please me most. My cousin has a disrelish of anything that sounds odd or bizarre. Nothing goes down with her that is quaint, irregular, or out of the road of common sympathy. . . . I can pardon her blindness to the beautiful obliquities of the Religio Medici; but she must apologize to me for certain disrespectful insinuations [against the] somewhat fantastical and original-brained, generous Margaret Newcastle. (C, 68) Elia finds the “road of common sympathy” too narrow. Its mode of evaluation relies on a narrative of progress, which bypasses “beautiful obliquities.” An Elian tact for the alleys, conversely, appreciates the “out-of-the-way” without relying on a scheme of development. Not one of Elia’s subjects is on the same road.

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But the end of the road was hard to avoid. Frances Ferguson has connected the teleological structure of evaluation in the novel to the rise of utilitarian thought during this time. Novels, Ferguson observes, “typically achieve their completion in the moment in which the characters have been hierarchically ranked. The very formlessness of the novel creates the demand for the evaluation and ranking of the characters, so that the novel form revolves around how it comes out.”57 For Elia, however, such a framework neglects the idiosyncrasies of style, those “heads with some diverting twist in them,” to which the more tactful, essayistic mode of appreciation attends. This contrast suggests that essays and narratives are useful for different things, and in particular that they produce a different relation to value. His essays manage to maintain an evasion of conclusiveness, keeping up a recursive play between temporalities, subjects, and objects, and rejecting what Henry James would dub the novel’s “distribution at the last of prizes, pensions, husbands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs, and cheerful remarks.”58 The bachelor Essays of Elia are about keeping modes of experience and their distribution up for negotiation. Lamb’s essays refuse to evaluate others on the basis of what they will have been; indeed, his Elia 1822 essay “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” presents a mock narrative of the progress of a civilization in terms of a series of absurd blunders. Mill’s History, conversely, admits only one line of temporal progress. Uday Mehta has suggested a connection of the discourses of this kind of liberalism and imperialism in their shared narratizing approach to “experiences of the unfamiliar,” by which any given present is to be understood by reference to its contribution to a common future. Difference is disregarded in favor of a shared teleology of “progress.”59 Bentham, in his treatise “Of the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation,” points out that all places and times would benefit equally from such a future perfect, in which the greatest proportion of laws were based on the principle of utility, which in turn stems from a singular basis in the universal physiology of mankind; “they will hold good,” Bentham assures his reader, “so long is pleasure is pleasure, and pain is pain.”60 The treatise insists on a universal code of laws as equally applicable to both Britain and Bengal. Bentham was aware of the potential violence of his propositions. He points out that although many problems in need of reform in Hindustan stem from the excessive quantity of “sensibility” in the populace, it is this very quantity that calls for “great forbearance on the part of the legislator.”61 James Mill was troubled by none of these scruples, and it is likely that his History of British India was, as Elie Halévy has proposed, an attempt to put Bentham’s treatise into a more extensive theoretical practice.62 In his History, the elimination of vagueness provides Mill’s measure for the utility of a language, which in turn forms the basis of a hierarchy of languages. This hierarchy is also a progress through time for Mill, from the least to the most ad-

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vanced nations; it is headed by Britain, with Muslim India in advance of Hindu India. The progress of time must bring consensus. Rationalizing utility also eliminates difficulties posed by geographical difference: Mill asserts that previous administrative disasters befallen by the British in India had less to do with the vast distance between the East India Company’s headquarters in London and their base of operation than with the insufficient clarity and completeness of their epistemological systems.63 Correct “structures of understanding” know no geographical limitation; they travel well; they are efficacious everywhere.64

The Space of Tact Elia, on the other hand, devotes an essay to the difficulties of anyone’s ideas traveling anywhere. “Distant Correspondents” (1822) provides an example of the way Elia’s tact for middle spaces is inseparable from his sense of time. The essay reflects on the strangeness of sending a letter to one “B. F.” in Sydney (the situation of Lamb’s friend, the judge Barron Field): “The weary world of waters between us oppresses the imagination. It is difficult to conceive how a scrawl of mine should ever stretch across it. It is a sort of presumption to expect that one’s thoughts should live so far.” At such distance of space and time, it is hubristic to assume a sentiment can be dictated. Elia narrates the story of one “Lord C”: [T]raveling somewhere about Geneva, he came to some pretty green spot, or nook, where a willow, or something, hung so fantastically and invitingly over a stream—was it?—or a rock—no matter—but the stillness and the repose, after a weary journey, ’tis likely, in a languid moment of his Lordship’s hot, restless life, so took his fancy that he could imagine no place so proper, in the event of his death, to lay his bones in. This was all very natural and excusable as a sentiment, and shows his character in a very pleasing light. But when from passing sentiment it came to be an act; and when, by a positive testamentary disposal, his remains were actually carried all that way from England . . . Conceive the sentiment boarded up, freighted, entered at the Custom House . . . hoisted into a ship. Conceive it pawed about and handled between the rude jests of tarpaulin ruffians—a thing of its delicate texture—the salt bilge wetting it till it became as vapid as a damaged lustring. Suppose it in material danger (mariners have some superstition about sentiments) of being tossed over in a fresh gale to some propitiatory shark (spirit of Saint Gothard, save us from a quietus so foreign to the deviser’s purpose!), but it has happily evaded a fishy consummation. Trace it then to its lucky landing . . . jostled on four men’s shoulders—baiting at this town—stopping to refresh at t’other

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village—waiting a passport here, a license there; the sanction of the magistracy in this district, the concurrence of the ecclesiastics in that canton; till at length it arrives at its destination, tired out and jaded, from a brisk sentiment into a feature of silly pride or tawdry senseless affectation. How few sentiments, my dear F., I am afraid we can set down, in the sailor’s phrase, as quite seaworthy. (C, 95) “Lord C” refers to Thomas Pitt, second Baron Camelford, who requested, in his testament the night before a fatal duel in 1804, that his “body may be removed in the cheapest manner to the Island of St Pierre in the Lake of Bienne in Switzerland; there to be deposited in the centre of the 3 trees that stand on the right of the pavilion.”65 The venture proved impracticable, and Camelford’s remains were never removed from storage in the vaults of St Anne’s church in Soho. The affair was covered in 1804 by the same periodicals to which Lamb contributed his first articles, the Morning Post in particular, and the death of the lord, in life a notorious and violent bully, was met with the popular refrain, “What has become of Lord Camelford’s body?”66 But Elia’s narrative inverts the historical situation; he renders the will vague (“a stream—was it?”) but fulfills it, supplying the imaginary journey with comically tortuous material detail. Elia confounds Camelford’s imperious command by imaginatively dragging it into embodiment. He relishes its heavy handling through all the relentless punctuation of his sinuous sentences. The point of Elia’s story is not so much the complaint of an aesthetic purist, directed against making sentiment material, as it is against the way such sentiment can be tactlessly dictated, with an imperializing certainty about its progress, range, and time. The rough handling of Lord C—with the “tawdry” nature of his demand exposed through the recalcitrant tactility of the social world, his corpse “pawed about and handled”—is employed to depict a concrete resistance to the contemporaneous totalizing visions of Mill and the kind of parlor imperialists to whom the metonymic label of “Scotsman” could be applied. But the turn to the tactile is also the necessary condition for the playful and ephemeral idiom of Elian sociability. He remarks to B. F. that his “puns and small jests” are so far from a capacity of being packed up and sent beyond the sea, they will scarce to be transported by hand from this room to the next. Their vigour is at the instant of their birth. Their nutriment for their brief existence is the intellectual atmosphere of the by-standers: or this last is the fine slime of Nilus—the melior lutus—whose maternal recipiency is the sol pater to their equivocal generation. A pun hath a hearty kind of present ear-kissing smack with it; you can no more transmit it in its pristine flavour than you can send a kiss. (C, 96) A tactile social style—metaphorically conducted “by hand” and resonating with an “ear-kissing smack”—insists on the transitional contingency of socia-

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bility, its “equivocal generation,” even in an intimate setting. The “fine slime” of the “intellectual atmosphere” between subject and object is perhaps a less appealing version of Elia’s transitional “glittering something,” but apposite in suggesting its membranous status between two communicating subjects, separating them yet remaining permeable. “[E]quivocal generation” recalls one of Lamb’s favorite authors, Sir Thomas Browne, who coined this phrase, in his 1658 Garden of Cyrus, to mean production without parent; it is a fitting metaphor for the impersonal virtuality—the transitional space, neither subject nor object—of Elian sociability. The “grand solecism of two presents” attends every domestic communication, a “confusion of tenses” by which truth may “un-essence herself ” and a lie may “ripen into a truth.” A more concrete handling of the social involves a more uncertain and skeptical attitude: Elia invests the ordinary elements of his own social life with the doubtfulness of a round-the-world voyage. Communication is a form of vagrancy, open to accident, and none too sure of its destination.

Bentham’s Neutrality Jeremy Bentham was more careful than his disciple Mill, and subtler in his prescriptions. He proposed, like Lamb, an artificial, neutral, social space in response to exigencies of modern urban life. Reading Bentham with Lamb illuminates the tactful possibilities of Bentham’s infamous panoptical institutions, and challenges the dominant understanding of them (following the work of Michel Foucault) as doctrines of discipline and thoroughgoing systems of power. But with the example of James Mill in mind, however, reading Lamb with Bentham reveals an important and distinctive element of Elian tact in contrast to Bentham’s political philosophy: Elia’s resistance to “progress.” Like Bentham, Elia is egalitarian; but unlike him, he is not progressive. This distinction provides the key to understanding how their models of sociability differ. Bentham proposed that his principle of utility could undo oppressive power relations by expanding the realm of impersonal “matters of indifference” where social and political “sanction” could “remain neuter.” Like Elia, he recommended providing a neutral space in order to evade hierarchies of power that relied on the moral condemnation of essentialized identities, and that persecuted certain forms of behavior (sodomy, for instance) or religious custom.67 An important epistemological model for his thought was the labyrinthine system of common law, which the rich could manipulate at the expense of the baffled poor. Indeed, it didn’t matter if the privileged knew the law; its very obscurity and inconsistency meant it could be employed to confound the less moneyed and less well educated, and support arbitrary systems of social valuation. (This is the experience of the law Dickens would brilliantly portray

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in Bleak House.) Even everyday language, Bentham insisted, must be purged of its unhappy accretions of value hierarchies: he proposed replacing common words that were loaded with emotional and social judgment with more neutral counterparts: “avarice” for instance, was to become “pecuniary interest”; “lust” was to become “sexual desire.”68 Bentham sought to reform social systems to make them consistent, complete, and transparent. For him any system, legal or educational, should be equally visible and comprehensible in its entirety to everyone within it. Bentham proposed social structures that function as depersonalized virtual spaces of interaction, in which—as in Lamb and Hunt’s egalitarian thought—each person is distinctly individualized without recourse to a rigid or essentializing hierarchy.69 But while Lamb’s style assumes the incommensurability of individuals— insisting on refusals of any too-knowing position and a right not to communicate knowledge—Bentham’s strategy increases the quantity of knowledge transferred in social relations, in order to ensure that this knowledge is ephemeral and non-essentializing. Bentham sought to furnish individuals with a neutral plane of constant and varying information, in which multiple social hierarchies are continually in flux. Bentham’s social systems intend only a “loose” hold on individuals, a lack of rigidity that like Elia’s evasive vagueness, means they can slip away from meanings experienced as oppressive. Bentham proposes not a social style of evasiveness but a superabundance of non-essentializing information, which ensures that the “idea of degradation . . . is not produced.”70 Both Lamb and Bentham depict the same social subject in their rethinking of value. They address the question of the maintenance of dignity or “refinement” by people of limited means and status: the first advantage of learning, in Bentham’s view, is its “securing to the possessor a proportionate share of the general respect.”71 Unsurprisingly, both are deeply interested in education. I will compare Chrestomathia, Bentham’s 1816 plan for an education system, with Elia’s essays on education. Instead of reading a social encounter according preestablished hermeneutic codes, Bentham’s models of transparent interpretation, as Frances Ferguson has shown, create a virtual plane that “intensively uses comparison and displays relative value to create extreme perceptibility.”72 What comes to matter is not identities but actions, in a perceptible field that is mobile and subject to continual negotiation. The extreme visibility of the panoptic system is not simply a matter of everyone internalizing a disciplined existence in the sight of power. It also makes new forms of merit visible, unimpeded by the trappings of an essential social status. Everyone occupies an equal position on this neutral plane (there is no single correct vision) and employs the same medium by which to evaluate everyone else. The same panoptic principle was at work in Bentham’s writings on law; his plan for a Pannomion, or legal code,

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aimed at everyone having equal access to a complete and entirely visible legal system, disseminated so that all of it could be seen at once. In the chrestomathic classroom, status is continually redefined by each student’s ranking according to a series of discrete tasks, the results of which are clearly visible to all, including the other students. Qualities of birth, wealth, or religion in a student’s identity are occluded by his or her (Bentham explicitly included female students in his school) task-based performances. Thus Bentham’s plans for reform sought a more egalitarian redistribution of social value. He introduces his education system with an example of the situation he wishes to improve: “The case of Mr Beardmore,” cited from a recent obituary of the Gentleman’s Magazine, was that of an industrious clerk who, unfurnished with a sense of his own value, wasted away in “listlessness and ennui.”73 Bentham’s work, in Ferguson’s words, was “central in moving politics from a way of representing property rights to a way of capturing the importance of actions, and of using the social group as a way of establishing a relative value for individual actions.”74 Revaluation precedes reform. Like Elia, Bentham refutes the abstract awarding of individual rights according to an outmoded absolutism of rank. Both seek ways to avoid the coercive insistence on knowledge of the other person in a social interaction in a context of competing social and epistemological codes. Breaking the deadlock between Hazlitt’s “vulgarity and affectation,” Bentham proposes an impersonal third space: a plane of information. Ferguson explains it as “an economy of experiential information, in which we bracket the question of absolute truth or reality” in favor of “the regular experience of information about where [we stand] here and now, in this or that particular group.”75 The meritocratic basis of Bentham’s artificial social structures was underpinned by his intention that they proliferate and not congeal into new absolutes. A multiplicity of systems would make for a multiplicity of ways in which new forms of value could be created. Both Bentham and Lamb, then, are tactful in their skillful indirection: they advocate a swerve away from attempts to apprise the core of another. While Elia responds to a beggar’s fiction with a virtual style, Bentham would place the beggar in a new relation to value. Both render irrelevant the essentializing moral status of deserving or undeserving beggar; and both want to curb the viciousness of veracity in order to promote what Bentham terms a more even share of dignity. But when they are more closely compared, we can detect a marked tension between the systematic proliferation of place, and the essayistic resistance to placing; and between Bentham’s attempt to purge social life of accreted fictions and replace them with neutral information, and Lamb’s tactful insistence on finding more consciously rich uses for sociable fictions.76 Whereas Elia posits the coexistence of incommensurable life worlds and the layers of illusion through which they communicate, for Bentham there is always a sense that, no matter the diversity of interests and values, they share

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a common basis and “progressive” teleology, to which everyone ought to conform. Indeed, Bentham alerts us to ways in which this indirection to the tactile, tangible details of social relation can effect new and much more coercive relations of power. Such strategies of discipline are charted in the work of Michel Foucault, who examines tact as the micromanagement of social relations.77 Bentham intended students to internalize down to the finest details a specific habit of order in mental and social deportment: “the habit of and the disposition to order.”78 The chrestomathic system requires an attitude of constant vigilance from everyone in the classroom. Indeed, since the transparency of the system enables anyone to judge the correctness of a given exercise, it is this demand that unifies and blurs the distinction between student and teacher: it is the means by which authority is diffused. The system is closed and complete, with the aim of every exercise made entirely clear; all time within the system is utilized towards this aim. “Fragments of time,” no matter how seemingly insignificant (such as the moments between the conclusion of the day and the students’ departure) are not to remain fragments but are subsumed within a greater common aim: “this portion of free time shall spontaneously be filled up, by some occupation, that shall be conducive to the universal end.”79 This universal end is also a matter of filling up a total scheme of learning, since Bentham offers headings for the classification of all knowledge (some of which remain “gaps” to be “filled up” by science) and the necessary order of progression through them.80 Benthamite systems must be totalities; he insisted, for instance, that no “void spaces” be possible in his pannomic code of law.81 Thus, the final portion of the Chrestomathia is devoted to an outline for a “universal grammar” of all languages, the final stage of instruction. The possibility that two people could sit at the same table and, like Elia and Captain Jackson, experience the truths of their environments entirely differently, is not countenanced. There is only one standard of judgment for each educational exercise, and all distraction from it is minimized, with even the windows of the classroom arranged so that students can’t gaze out of them.82 By contrast, Elia describes his own school experience at Christ’s Hospital as completely unsystematic. It did not teach prescribed habits of order, but rather a vague sensibility, inculcating both “pride” and “a restraining modesty” that insists upon neither the servility of the mechanical schools nor the “disgusting forwardness of the lad brought up at some other of the public schools” (C, 282).83 Christ’s Hospital is another “little Goshen”; it is entirely antipathetic to Bentham’s method (C, 18). (Bentham in the Chrestomathia makes a point of opprobriating this school in particular.)84 Elia deliberately juxtaposes the two pedagogical styles in his 1821 essay “The Old and the New Schoolmaster,” published four years after Bentham’s treatise. He begins the essay with the confession that he has no capacity for mental habits of order,

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and that his “reading has been lamentably desultory and unmethodical.” Study has furnished him, not with organized knowledge of history or geography, but with “notions, and ways of feeling.” Elia recounts his discomfort at finding himself in a coach with a man who insisted on pressing him with specific factual questions. However, finding Elia “rather dimly impressed with some glimmering notions from old poetic associations, than strongly fortified with any speculations reducible to calculation . . . he gave the matter up” (C, 46) After the man leaves the coach Elia realizes he had been talking to a modern schoolmaster, incapable of genial conversation, and interested only in “obtaining information at any rate.” Elia meditates on the difference between the pastoral situation of his schoolmasters, “reaping harvests of their golden time,” and that of the new type, tyrannized by moral efficiency: He must seize every occasion . . . to inculcate something useful. . . . Nothing comes to him not spoiled by the sophisticating medium of moral uses. The Universe—the Great Book, as it has been called—is to him, indeed, to all intents and purposes, a book out of which he is condemned to read tedious homilies to distasting schoolboys. . . . [C]ommonly he has some intrusive upper-boy fastened upon him . . . that he must drag after him to the play, to the Panorama, to Mr. Bartley’s Orrery, to the Panopticon. . . . He is boy-rid, sick of perpetual boy. (C, 48) Elia presents the situation of the teacher who has internalized the demand for a constant flow of information, and works according to Benthamite strictures of total efficiency towards fixed aims in interpretation, duration, and visibility. The “Great Book” shrinks to an actual schoolbook, with metaphor lost in the glare of too much clarity. The schoolmaster’s time is consumed by a series of visual edifications, as the panoptical principle turns inward (the “Panopticon” here is a reference to a popular London spectacle, but is surely also a swipe at Bentham’s shibboleth). The master cannot escape the eyes of his students. Elia’s essays undermine claims to a comprehensive hermeneutic of visibility, whether Addisonian or Benthamite. Whereas Bentham addresses his reforms of epistemological equality to the task of bringing society’s final aims into clearer view (the goal of the legislator, for instance, is to “raise his contemplation to that elevated point from which the whole map of human interests and situations lies expanded to his view”) the Elian lexicon looks back, evoking shadows, ruins, and fragments.85 Elia’s criticism insists upon the shadowy; he admires the “dark hints” of Sir Thomas Browne, Cervantes’s depiction of a “twilight state” (C, 209), and Congreve’s ability to “spread a privation of moral light” (C, 128).86 His essays explore tact, the new tactile metaphor for social interaction; and for Elia, modern living must be cautious, a feeling of one’s way in conditions of low light. He maintains a respectful awareness of

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the ruins of past lives and methods, which provide little in the way of monitory example but offer creative, less coercive resources for present sociability. Elia’s tact feels its way among fragments and evokes the past in order to widen the promise of relations now, rather than envisioning total ends for the progress of the present.

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Aesthetic Liberalism Joh n sT ua rT m iL L a s ess ay isT

success, said Freud, is something from which people are often keen to be rescued (SE, 19: 316). Recent critical interest in Victorian liberalism appears to prove his point. This interest often takes the form of rescue projects that seek to reclaim or rehabilitate a liberalism that has been eclipsed, not (as in the case of Marxism, say, or British Idealism) by alternative and supervening theories, but by particular aspects of itself—aspects that have proved dishearteningly brutal in their success. They look past this uncomfortable victory in order to argue persuasively for some of liberalism’s currently marginal nobilities.1 If we don’t now have the liberalism we want, are there resources in its history for proposing the kinds of liberalism we can live with? Such projects, I think, follow the example of Albert Hirschman in his masterpiece on capitalism, The Passions and the Interests. Hirschman looks at early theorists and codifiers of what capitalism was, and what they intended it to be, despite the fact that these intentions did not come to pass (and what did come to pass would horrify them were they to witness it today.) It is important for us now, Hirschman shows us, to attempt to reclaim not only the intentions of political and moral projects that failed but also alternative visions of those that have succeeded. In reopening the case of Victorian liberalism, we may adjust our sense of the resources of liberalism more generally. In describing the shape of Victorian liberalism’s rationality, these critics are attuned to questions of aesthetic form more specifically: they are alert to formal correspondences between the shape of a style of reflexive reasoned deliberation and the shape of the life that would practice it. All of these projects— however they might disagree about their desirability or relevance to us now— are interested primarily in famously liberal preoccupations with a discourse of objectivity, with the kinds of progress that can be made by rationality and rational argument, and the ways in which these concerns ground procedures [ 41 ]

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for deliberation, opinion-formation, and agency within an individual’s reflective life. Working against a critical tradition that is distrustful of liberalism and its methods, these projects insist on the richness of Victorian liberal culture and (again, with marked variation among them) in the process suggest new functions for criticism at the present time. I want to propose a rescue project of my own: to trace the lineaments of a liberalism founded in tact. This is a liberalism, like Lamb’s in the previous chapter, not so much interested in procedures and lived methods for regulating speculative opinion and rational argument, as with what Guido de Ruggiero, in his classic History of European Liberalism, called the “soul” of liberalism’s development: “the subjective kernel of freedom” found in people’s felt experience of the freedom to “create a spiritual world of their own.”2 Liberalism covers a notoriously heterogeneous range of positions and contents, which have been well charted elsewhere.3 I am interested here in one aspect of it, what Ruggiero calls “spiritual” and I, for reasons that will become clear, call “aesthetic.” This emphasis in aspect does not marginalize reason so much as insist that reasoned positions begin in affective and relational modes. And that any too-immediate need for argumentative assertion—for knowing what one thinks, or what others think—can stifle anybody’s process of coming to apprehend meaning, vividly and creatively, for themselves. To put the problem simply: in a culture of debate, the requirement to have a voice may obstruct the finding of a voice of one’s own, which is founded in what Walter Pater calls (as we will see in chapter 5) “the freedom to see and feel.” This is a problem for the practice of criticism as well as political procedure. If the activity of a certain kind of critique—of the exposure of error and of persuading through competitive argument—entails the injunction to know as fully as possible in a given encounter what are our own opinions and those of others in the encounter, then we subject ourselves to the risks incumbent on the tooknowing. The risk is that, as critics of literature or of other people, not only do we think we know in advance what we are going to find, but we think of knowing as the only kind of finding. I don’t mean to suggest that we can or should do without liberal procedures of reasoned critical detachment. Far from it. But I do want to describe two of the different relational modes—political and aesthetic—that are in tension within nineteenth-century liberalism, with the aim of better describing the tactful, aesthetic mode marginalized by this opposition. A political liberalism might seek to establish a common life through reasoned consensus, prizing those methods of persuasion that are required to have as many people as possible knowingly on the same page. An aesthetic liberalism of tactful apprehension, on the other hand, is more interested in encouraging vitalities of mediated relation than in framing arguments or transmitting knowledge. So much of the valuable prose writing of the nineteenth century begins from the recognition, in the words of Andrew Miller, that “[w]e appear to need encour-

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agement or sanction to enter into what we already are or own.”4 The task of this encouragement makes great demands on style. I will explore these demands by examining of the career of perhaps the most canonical of nineteenthcentury liberals, John Stuart Mill. Mill was raised, famously, according to a severely rigorous educational program, and in a culture of debate. In the late 1820s, when still a youth, he grew tired of it all. Mill explains in his Autobiography, “I withdrew from attendance on the Debating society. I had had enough of speech-making, and was glad to carry on my private studies and meditations without any immediate call for outward assertion of their results” (126–127).5 In his essays of this period, he considers modes of withdrawal not as a means of rejecting social relations so much as a way of finding new forms for them. Mill was able, in these essays, to transmute his despair into a new critical mode: he outlined an alternative, aesthetic liberalism. This aesthetic liberalism didn’t win out, in liberalism generally or within the development of Mill’s own thinking. But it suggests the origins within the essays of a founder of British liberal thought of an aesthetic conception of liberalism, which is founded in a practice of tact. This tentative, tactful Mill has been passed over. Critics of Mill have tended, mistakenly, as John Plotz has pointed out, to “isolate” his youthful essays on poetry “from his later accounts of the basis for interaction with others in the social realm.”6 Mill’s writings on poetry have been neglected at best, and at worst judged as a misguided retreat from the social field—a sort of cul-de-sac in Mill’s career before he began work on the important stuff: his seminal writings on political economy and on liberty. But what if the essays on poetry are more than that? In what follows, I aim to resituate Mill’s early essays on aesthetics and poetry within the tradition of the tactful essayists studied in the other chapters of this book. As much as those of Charles Lamb, Mill’s early essays are experiments, at once in both aesthetic and social form. Moreover, we can propose that the young Mill’s aesthetic liberalism did survive: only not so much in the development of the discipline of political theory as in the nineteenth-century literary essay—in the work, for instance of Arnold and Pater. I will look closely at the tension between Mill’s aesthetic and his argumentative liberalisms, and consider how and why the latter won out over the former during the course of his career. But first I will explicate further the distinction between them.

The Varieties of Liberal Experience The adjective “liberal” gained new currency in Britain in the second decade of the nineteenth century in two arenas. The first was the political, where it increasingly signaled the policies of “Liberal-Tories” George Canning and Sir Robert Peel, who sought to cultivate the force of public opinion.7 The second was the aesthetic, where “liberal” provided both the name of a new and ill-fated

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publication from Italy, under the direction of Leigh Hunt, Lord Byron, and Percy Shelley, and the main term of abuse from other British periodicals, which saw nothing but trouble in the Liberal’s confusion of class and national hierarchies and its promotion of new aesthetic doctrines.8 Mill, who came of age at this time, absorbed the debates surrounding these two registers of liberalism. Indeed, we might say that from the beginning of his mature writings, what makes John Mill John Mill is his divergence from the exclusively “political” radical social critique of the Utilitarians—in particular his father, James Mill, and Jeremy Bentham—towards a consideration of the felt quality of and the role of what he called the “aesthetic emotions” in a full human life.9 Bentham’s secretary John Bowring wrote wearily in 1840 that Mill used to be a philosopher, “but then he read Wordsworth, and that muddled him, and he has been in strange confusion ever since endeavoring to unite poetry and philosophy.” This muddled task, his attempt to bridge the gap between these two arenas, between politics and poetry, became an important project for the young Mill, a project encapsulated by his two complementary essays, on Bentham and Coleridge, published in 1838 and 1840, respectively. The first essay concerned Bentham’s contribution of a method for establishing rational truth as a tool for reforming social abuses. The second appreciated Coleridge’s emotional and aesthetic sense of how life might have “meaning” for the person living it. These “two systems of concentric circles,” as Mill famously called them, were both essential to understanding the mind of the nation; between them, they “possess the entire English philosophy of their age.” Mill took elements from Bentham’s radical theory in order to derive his liberalism of rational method; he borrowed from Coleridge’s philosophy to outline a liberalism founded in aesthetic experience. What are these two liberalisms? The story of the “crisis” in Mill’s “mental history” is a familiar one, but I want to advert to it briefly in order to elucidate what I mean by an “aesthetic” liberalism distinct from a liberalism of method. Mill in his Autobiography describes the precipitation of his crisis, which began in 1826, in this way: [I]t occurred to me to put the question directly to myself: “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions, which you were looking forward, could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” and an irrepressible self-consciousness distinctly answered, “No!” At this my heart sank within me: the whole foundation on which my life was constructed fell down. All my happiness was to have been found in the continual pursuit of this end. The end had ceased to charm, and how could there ever again be any interest in the means? I seemed to have nothing left to live for. (111)

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Mill describes his breakdown as a problem with means and ends. Once the “end had ceased to charm,” what good were the means—what good were the ordinary relations of life and the day-to-day living of them? Mill’s salvation came not from finding new ends (“changes in institutions and opinions” is a good description of what Mill spent the rest of his life attempting), but in a new attention to the means: as famous as Mill’s crisis itself is his means of rescue from it, his cure by art. The young Mill, we know, turned his attention, and his pen, to the role of the aesthetic emotions in a full life, and to the idea of poetry as a means that is also an end in itself. This turn was the foundation to his project of combining the aesthetic insight of Coleridge with the Bentham’s theory of rational interest. Here is how Mill describes the dichotomy he would seek to overcome. Coleridge, says Mill, was like Bentham, “a great questioner of things established”; but unlike Bentham, he was not only the enemy of these things. By Bentham, Mill proposes, men have been led to ask themselves, in regard to any ancient or received opinion, Is it true? and by Coleridge, What is the meaning of it? The one took his stand outside the received opinion, and surveyed it as an entire stranger to it: the other looked at it from within, and endeavoured to see it with the eyes of a believer in it; to discover by what apparent facts it was at first suggested, and by what appearances it has ever since been rendered continually credible—has seemed, to a succession of persons, to be a faithful interpretation of their experience.10 Not “Is it true?” but “What is the meaning of it?” was Coleridge’s question. And more specifically, his question was about how an inherited—given—belief relates to one’s own experience. The question (to phrase it as Arnold and Pater will later adopt it) is: what does it mean to me? Mill admires Coleridge’s insistence that any conception of politics or society must contain an experiential depth. For Mill, eighteenth-century philosophers (like Bentham) had too often neglected this need: they “threw away the shell without preserving the kernel; and attempting to new-model society without the forces that hold society together,” they failed in their efforts (198). Bentham’s theory, says Mill, derives from the “empiricism of one who has had little experience.”11 Such a criticism gives us a clue to Mill’s distinction between Bentham on truth and Coleridge on meaning: the former might rest with logical proposition, but the latter must involve nonpropositional commitment, a relational stance to the world. And so it is that Mill can—and this seems a wild departure from both earlier utilitarian theory and much of his own later writing—praise Coleridge’s religious mode of intellection. For Coleridge, Mill explains, rational understanding, to be of any value, had to be grounded in faith, which is, “in his view, a state of the will and of the affections, not of the understanding.” Error for Coleridge is not so much a fault of

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the understanding as it is a “perversion of the will”; and thus “there may be orthodox heretics, since indifference to truth may as well be shown on the right side of the question as on the wrong.” Mill explicates this point with a quotation from Coleridge, who insists that neither will truth, as a mere conviction of the understanding, save, nor error condemn. To love truth sincerely is spiritually to have truth; and an error becomes a personal error not by its aberration from logic or history, but so far as the causes of the error are in the heart. (“Coleridge,” 223) This is a striking passage because it removes the criteria for truth and error from the propositional and historical (from logic and precedent) to the relational (to love and the heart). It suggests the qualities that Mill found lacking in his father and Bentham: not so much logic as will, not so much knowing but experience, and not so much accuracy but love. It is as if, Mill suggests here, the Utilitarians before him had lost too much by falling into what Oscar Wilde would later call careless habits of accuracy. In removing any vagueness from relations, and anything affective from truth, they had lost any reason for commitment to it, for loving it. It is important to keep in mind Mill’s admiration of Coleridge’s sense of heresy. We will see that this experiential, relational sense of knowing is what Mill hopes to insist upon as a right, ensured by the principle of liberty, in his On Liberty of 1859. It is also, we will see, a very difficult commitment to maintain: Mill does, it is well known, return to a full embrace of rational propositional logic as the only register of truth. He would in later life, in his 1873 Autobiography, confess his regret at having praised Coleridge excessively in his early years, and having criticized Bentham too much (167), and we can see this return happening in On Liberty. But the impulse is not lost. The liberalism of “meaning” that Mill broaches in his essay on Coleridge and in his early writing on aesthetics is also to be found—and is more fully developed in the nineteenth century—in a manner and a form more suited to its expression: in the tact of the reflective essay. For now, though, I want to point out how Mill’s insistence on meaning, on what he calls in On Liberty a “lively” or a “living apprehension,” does form an important (and neglected) strand of his theory of liberty.12 Mill has chosen his words carefully; his emphasis is on “lively” as much as it is on “apprehension.” Examining Mill’s writings, we cannot separate his procedural or political theory of liberalism from his theory of liberty as about personal expression, and concerned with the richness of one’s own relation to the materials of one’s own life. On Liberty insists that people attain autonomy in their own “discussion and experience” and, if we are to do justice to Mill’s liberalism, it is impossible to separate the civic and procedural areas of liberalism (the discussion) from his sense of liberalism’s purpose as ensuring the fullest individ-

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ual expression (the experience).13 I stress the importance of retaining both these senses of liberalism because—although Mill did consider the former more important—the latter has been lost sight of, first in the development of Mill’s own work, and later in the critical tradition that has followed it. Discussion has subsumed experience. I will show why I think this happened in Mill’s own career, beginning with On Liberty, before going back to look more closely at how he had defined the aesthetic, experience-based side of liberalism in his earlier literary essays on poetry.

On Liberty On Liberty is not about free will and determinism. Nor is it about the limits to legitimate state power, or the economics of the free market.14 It defines liberty, rather, by a single principle: as that (as summarized in his Autobiography) which gives “full freedom to human nature to expand itself in innumerable and conflicting directions.”15 As he puts it in On Liberty, “the free development of individuality is one of the leading essentials of well-being.” Now just what Mill means by this free “expansion” is not precisely defined, and this is one of the sticking points of the book. On Liberty provides a number of descriptive words and phrases towards this definition; they include “spontaneity,” “experiments in living,” “eccentricity” and “self-development.” We might, with Stefan Collini, call the book’s central concern that of “human flourishing,” but what this looks like remains fairly vague (On Liberty, xxv). On Liberty concerns itself more with the conditions in which this flourishing might occur, and the social impediments to them, the chief of these being the constricted shape to life insisted upon by the weight of unreflecting custom, habit, and prejudice. Mill’s target is the effect of conformity on desire, and the difference between a self-directed life that follows its “inclinations” and a moribund existence, without “character,” that simply does what it imagines custom would prescribe. The central question of Mill’s book is about how one finds a relation of one’s desires (Mill calls them “inclinations”) to one’s own culture and society that is really alive (a “living apprehension.”) This is what liberty is supposed to ensure. Mill wants people to be able to develop their values and commitments from the inside out, as it were, and not through compliance with custom. In this way, the question of liberalism—of why liberalism is required—begins with aesthetics. He wants to change the basic prescribed relations of individuals to aesthetic judgment: refuting the “likings and dislikings of society,” he wants to transfer the Humean standard of taste as a basis for deciding value and determining conduct, to the newly endorsed “eccentric,” doing as she likes. These inclinations, however, must also be rationally defensible. People have erred, Mill suggests, in permitting the judgment of acts on grounds other than the rational, and this has led to the neglect of a needed discourse of justification

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around the actions of individuals in society. This is why, for example, Mill opposed intuitionism, which he saw as transmuting social or aesthetic prejudice (rather than rational preference) into a priori laws of perception.16 Mill does not, however, define the qualities of the individual liberal condition in On Liberty. To do this would run counter to his aim: he is explicitly opposed to any prescription that might coerce people into the good life. Mill proceeds instead to describe the method by which the confusion of judgments and lack of justification he has diagnosed might be rectified. In this way might room be made for an aesthetic, or even merely prudential, freedom. It is a method worthy of his father, and his father’s patron: rational, empirical, and fully conscious, it leaves no room for nuance in describing experience, or indeed for any notion of nonpropositional knowledge. Perhaps this is why Friedrich Nietzsche was so scornfully dismissive of Mill’s writings, which, he said, did nothing more than “formulate his moral sensations” when “something quite different is called for: the capacity for one to have different sensations.”17 Mill’s method works according to a singular insistence that opinions and inclinations are not left vague or implicit but are instead brought out into the open and contrasted with others. This insistence produces two guiding rhetorical tropes that recur in On Liberty: the bringing out into the light what by custom had been left hidden in the dark, and the necessity of a battlefield of conflicting opinions. Feelings are not sufficient justification alone; they must be reasoned out. In this way, the airing of inclinations and points of view furthers the general progress of mankind, since opinions once aired are subjected to a battle royal, where the truth is found by virtue of being left standing in the field once the dust settles on rational debate. So while it is true that Mill believes one should be free to “do as one likes,” and be protected from the harmful interference of society, it is also true that one cannot do it in the dark, as it were: opinions and inclinations must be subject to the salutary airing of debate. (Mill opposed the introduction of the secret ballot.) It is only then that their value may be ascertained, and mankind may progress to a better, more truthful life. The problem (whether or not it proposes a good way to live) is that the rational method of On Liberty subsumes the other, “experiential,” idea of a nature expanding in innumerable directions. The rigor of justificatory procedure fills up the aesthetic or social space it is supposed to safeguard. This is because Mill’s method requires a teleology of “self-development,” which is equated with a narrowing in on the consensual truths gleaned from the battlefields of reason. “Modern Liberalism,” to borrow a definition from Alan Ryan, “is exemplified by Mill’s On Liberty, with its appeal to ‘man as a progressive being’ and its romantic appeal to an individuality that should be allowed to develop itself in all its ‘manifold diversity.’ ”18 This is true. But, we might add, it is important to stress what an uneasy conjunction these two

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terms make in Mill’s thought. Can we reconcile manifold diversity with a scale of progress, which, because Mill believes in a rational consensus, must be singular and true for everyone? Mill’s method for progress militates against diversity of inclination and experience; it limits the possibilities of human flourishing to what can be explicitly formulated within a rational procedure. Can this rational method for establishing truth really endorse eccentricity? On Liberty does imply a positive practice of living, based on a rational method that demands a discipline, an ascesis. This method demands sincerity of character and a rigor of clarity and truthfulness in explication. Moreover, it was a practice of living that was fully and consciously adopted by self-described liberals, including disciples of Mill like John Morley and Henry Fawcett. Elaine Hadley has shown how this character became a dominant pattern for the attributes of the active citizen in the third quarter of the nineteenth century—it is how what Stefan Collini has called the “manly” liberalism of the period was lived.19 Mill proposes an ethos of argument. He cites the example of Cicero, who “always studied his adversary’s case with as great, if not still greater, intensity than even his own. What Cicero practiced as a means of forensic success, requires to be imitated by all who study any subject in order to arrive at the truth” (On Liberty, 38). And not only in studying but in living truthfully is this ethos required. Here, then, is Mill’s prescription for avoiding Coleridgean heresy. Cicero’s practice, Mill implies a few paragraphs on, is an exercise in the cultivation of the required conditions for sincere and decent living among others.20 Those who have never attempted to emulate Cicero, Mill explains, “have never thrown themselves into the mental position of those who think differently from them” (On Liberty, 39). Without using the word, Mill is here describing sympathy, which he had defined in his essay on Bentham (after Adam Smith) as “the faculty by which one mind understands a mind different from itself, and throws itself into the feelings of that other mind” (“Bentham,” 148). Bentham, argues Mill, had lacked this faculty entirely, and this deficiency had severely limited his theory. Mill wants to avoid such a mistake, and by providing the same formal principle for reconciling “mental positions” and “feelings,” he links up his own theory of affect and aesthetics (Mill’s early essays considered sympathy the particular talent of the poet) with his ethos of rational method. Both theory and ethos share the same forensic structure: forensic in their oppositional reconciliation of differing cases —whether in a courtroom or between antipathetic natures—as well as in the word’s sense (derived as it is from “forum”) of bringing to light what had been hidden or implicit: from vague darkness into the light of the forum, for everyone to see. Mill’s ethos, as he describes it in On Liberty, has the great appeal of remedying the emotional and imaginative limitations of earlier utilitarian method

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by building the structure of the sympathetic imagination into a practice of rational living towards the truth. But as Mill’s method comes to fill in his picture of a liberal character, some other versions of liberalism, strongly latent in the stated ideals of On Liberty, are lost. Any interest in a more, loosely speaking, experiential or aesthetic relation to life is subsumed by rational method. And this has colored accounts of nineteenth-century liberalism, which, although it doesn’t dismiss aesthetic questions (often, indeed, insisting on their indispensability to any full account of liberalism), includes them as complement and assistance to a rational political liberalism. This critical response is unimpeachably true to the development of Mill’s own thought. As Mill’s career developed, the more aesthetic or imaginative forms of liberty suggested in On Liberty become further marginalized. An intriguing moment in the history of this marginalization comes when Mill considers directly the problem of how a method for accumulating knowledge of the good life may illiberally flatten its range of expressions. His short book of 1865, Auguste Comte and Positivism, provides a monitory tale about such a process. The book is a trenchant commentary on Comte’s career, and it is also a parable of a wrong turning, about how a commitment to freeing humanity from superstition and into the spontaneity of free discussion produced a directly opposed result, an oppressive “frenzy for regulation.”21 The book is divided into two sections. The first is full of admiration for Comte’s rationalization of the human endeavor to know, his attempt to place science on a positivist basis, and his establishment of the foundations of the science of social relations in his Cours de Philosophie Positive. Comte’s immense intellectual labor clears the ground for progress to a more enlightened society. But, as part two explains, Comte’s method and his growing certainty about his knowledge of human nature produced a tyrannical insistence on the forms of the good life, in which “liberty and spontaneity on the part of individuals form no part of the scheme.” Indeed, “M. Comte looks on them with as great jealousy as any scholastic pedagogue, or ecclesiastical director of consciences.”22 From liberalizing and rationalizing the means for attaining the good life, Comte moves to legislating for its substance. A great undertaking of enlightenment ends up producing a priesthood. With great acuity, Mill reveals how in Comte’s later system the apparent forms of experimentation and free discussion are maintained, while they are divested of any authority: allowed to produce any conclusion they wish, so long as it is the one sanctioned in advance by the high priest of the positivist system, M. Comte himself. Although Mill’s detailed commentary on the intellectual fall of his former friend does not make the comparison explicit, it touches closely on the risks of On Liberty’s program: a method of rational progress in knowledge could produce the coercive effects that it was genuinely designed to obviate. How, in Mill’s view, is such a painful irony to be avoided? His implicit distancing of

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his own method from that of Comte is found in his explanation of how Comte went wrong, and here we find ourselves on familiar Millian ground, the ground of proof. Comte was a systematizer who sought to insulate his system against the rigors of falsifiability; he became “almost indifferent to proof, provided he attained theoretic coherency.”23 Whereas as we have seen, On Liberty’s forensic method is all about the process of proving, or rather disproving (along the lines of what Karl Popper would later call falsifiability) and it is a process that Mill wants everyone to adopt in daily life. Reasserting the lesson of On Liberty, Mill discovers that he has already found the answer to the problem of how individuals protect themselves, as positivist protestants, against any Comtean priesthood. Or do they? For while Mill, with his insistence on proving, improves Comte’s method, he cannot remove Comte’s central assumption, which his own work shares, of the zero-sum relation between knowledge and liberty. As knowledge about life progresses, the range of experiments in living must diminish.24 And this assumption Mill only consolidates over the course of his career. By his 1874 essay “Theism,” for example, aesthetic imagination is for Mill at best a speculative compensation, to be taken up when the limits of reason are reached, and to diminish, felicitously, as the territory of rational truth expands. It is relegated to the status of one of life’s optional extras, only permissible when the ramparts of reason have been well secured. Mill explains that Truth is the province of reason, and it is by the cultivation of the rational faculty that provision is made for its being known always. . . . But when the reason is strongly cultivated, the imagination may safely follow its own end and do its best to make life pleasant and lovely inside the castle, in reliance on the fortifications raised and maintained by Reason round the outward bounds.”25 The benign and quarantined role ascribed here to aesthetic activity, as a sort of interior decorator of the mind, invokes rather than dispels anxieties about the proper realm and influence of aesthetic experience. Why should such “fortifications” be necessary? Surely, in their looking inward, they must detract from the outward vigilance (the usual vector of Mill’s militarized metaphors) required by the argumentative method for attaining truth. The specter is raised of an enemy within, as if not just aesthetic activity but human psychology are allied antagonists to the stability of Mill’s liberal rational subject. Must we put our faith in a capitalized Reason? In Mill’s last statement on the relationship between aesthetic literature and rationality, his 1867 inaugural address as Lord Rector of the University of St. Andrews, aesthetic activity is further quarantined: no longer an autonomous activity, albeit one kept within reasonable and fortified bounds, literature and the aesthetic emotions

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it produces are to be practiced only instrumentally, as the expressive clothing for the more telling communication of rational truth. Aesthetics is put in its proper place; it becomes the handmaiden of forensic deliberation. But it wasn’t always this way with Mill. He had developed his alternative, aesthetic, liberalism in his early essays on poetry. And, although the tension between it and his procedural method is most acute in On Liberty, while it is fully eclipsed in his later treatises, his early essays present it in its most unadulterated form. The aesthetic liberalism of Mill’s early writing is not based in his forensic virtues of clarity and conflict at all. Instead, a funny thing happens on the way to the forum. On Liberty’s questions about spontaneity, about avoiding compliance, and ensuring a “lively apprehension of truth” for all are posed in the younger Mill’s literary essays on poetry and aesthetics, where they receive a very different, less epistemologically focused, and much more tactful, answer (On Liberty, 41).

Mill’s Essays on Aesthetics Poetry is valuable, Mill argues in his 1833 essay “What Is Poetry,” because it is the only genre that provides “the nearest possible representation . . . [of] feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind.”26 Mill contrasts poetry with eloquence. His famous dictum runs: “eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard.” Eloquence seeks directly to engage an opposed or at least resistant point of view; it seeks to “influence or move others.” This aligns eloquence more closely with Mill’s later forensic solution to living with others, which seeks to bring together, clearly and directly, oppositional opinions. Could poetry offer, then, an alternative solution? If eloquence prefigures Mill’s depiction in On Liberty of Britain as an expanded and more sociable House of Commons, what kind of a world does poetry seek to make? If eloquence is aligned with the later rational method of Mill’s liberty, poetry is aligned with its fundamental aims. Mill’s aims for liberalism are to be found in his description not of eloquence but of poetry. Poetry is not only a means to an end but an end in itself, says Mill in “What Is Poetry?”; it is the kind of liberal individual expression that rescued Mill from his “crisis” and that he wants in On Liberty—by a principle of liberty—to ensure for everyone. Poetry is produced by those who have the “most feeling of their own,” while the “persons of nations, who commonly excel in poetry, are those whose character and tastes render them least dependent for their happiness on the applause, or sympathy, or concurrence of the world in general.” This is precisely the kind of character, following her own inclinations without compliance to public prejudice, that On Liberty seeks to foster. Later in the essay, poetry becomes so inextricable from individuality that the terms come to seem interchangeable, as when Mill points out, for example, that poetry is found in painting when it depicts individual character in preference to the

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stock generalities of narrative. And yet, if we convert On Liberty to the terms of “What is Poetry?” we find that by the later work Mill has rejected a poetic liberalism for a liberalism of eloquence. The “overheard” condition of poetry described in “What is Poetry?” provides an alternative structure of communication to a direct, clear, and oppositional eloquence. As John Guillory has put it, “if Mill’s statement has any cogency, the rule of clarity is abrogated for poetry,” because Mill wants to “establish the principle that true poetry must be written in a state of mind in which communication is disregarded.” This principle has the effect, Guillory points out, of “a thickening of the medium, a darkening of its substance even as attention is drawn to it.”27 And this is Mill’s criterion for different forms of poetry or music being more or less poetic: if a composition like Robert Burns’s “Scots wha hae wi’ Wallace bled,” for example, seeks to move its hearers directly, then it must contain more eloquence than poetry. Mill proposes an air about a mountaineer in exile as an example of a more poetic composition because “it has always seemed to us like the lament of a prisoner in a solitary cell.” The experience of a distantiating medium—a transmitting obliquity, like the walls of a cell—is necessary, else a lament might be clearly directed to a hearer, in a plea for aid, and this would convert poetry into eloquence. Mill’s definition of poetry does not depend on a criterion of literal overhearing: he’s not assuming that Alfred Tennyson, for example, wrote poems with no thought about their audience. Rather, Mill uses the metaphor of an overheard poetry in order to raise the possibility of a more mediated style of communication, a style that is in marked contrast to the method of On Liberty. That method, as we saw, is direct, clear, knowing and oppositional, with a telos in consensual truth. Poetry is indirect, vague, uncertain of its audience, and seemingly seeking other forms of relation than the conflictual. With no aim at a final resolution to a shared truth, it is entirely unsuited to the task of persuasion. Mill defines eloquence according to its function of “presenting a proposition to the understanding,” whereas poetry functions “by offering interesting objects of contemplation to the sensibilities.”28 We have seen Mill’s attempt to ground a theory of liberalism in a method of eloquence. But what is the difference between (as eloquence) presenting a proposition to the understanding and (as poetry) offering interesting objects for contemplation? The first might define communication as driving a point home, to a target; the second as giving somebody something they might use. The latter is suggestive of a kind of communication that is paradoxically richer, and more generous, for its lack of interest in its audience, or for not knowing whether it even has an audience. It might be a tactful communication that doesn’t attempt to control or define how its message is received, but rather offers something, hanging there, in the space between. Having something in common, perhaps, with what Charles Lamb calls a “glittering something” that someone might “share

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. . . with you, before he quite knows whether it will be true touch or not” (see chapter 1). What would a liberalism built from such experiences be like? Mill gives us more hints in other essays on aesthetics. His 1834 review of Tennyson’s poems points out that this poet’s virtues begin in his lack of immediate clarity, “for sentiments and imagery which can be received at once, and with equal ease into every mind, must necessarily be trite.” This is a powerful intuition about the resources of obliquity in communication. Propaganda possesses the virtue of clarity; poetry doesn’t. There is the interesting suggestion in this essay that the very thing Mill would later make foundational to the method for ensuring his principle of liberty—clarity and certainty in the apprehension of another’s expressions—is productive of precisely the conventional thinking that he wrote On Liberty to oppose. His early essays mediate; they bring his readers face-to-face with the virtues of poetic obliquity as a social mode. Mill is attuned here to the deadening effects of a too-pellucid commonality; he suggests that truth, if it is to remain vivid, is better told with more mediation, and at a more oblique angle. We know Mill suffered anxiety about this tension between clarity and a “lively apprehension,” and we know which way he resolved his doubts, even before On Liberty (as evinced by diary entries and his distancing himself from the work of Carlyle).29 But his aesthetic liberalism revises the older Utilitarians’ social model of disaggregated individuals in pursuit of interest towards, not a telos of consensual truth, but an alternative foundation in aesthetic experience. Such a model attends tactfully to the quality of the medium, to middle space, and not just to the quantity of shared information between people. It is a provisional and stylistic response to persons and things rather than a predefined method for interaction or an insistence on full knowledge.

Two Versions of Sympathy The common ground of this aesthetic liberalism could not be consensus in a predecided, or even deferred, truth. But it would encourage less knowing, even nonpropositional modes of interaction, where the truth of self and others is, for the sake of the play of interaction, bracketed. It would be more concerned with style than with epistemology; and with a distinction between how people are handled, and used, rather than known and identified with.30 And it would have to result in an attention, as Guillory’s gloss suggests, to the medium, to the quality of the space between people. Such an aim, however, would require a reconception of Mill’s famous definition of sympathy as “entering into” the mind of another. And this means nothing less than a reconception of the dominant eighteenth-century form of sympathy first proposed by Adam Smith which, as historicist literary criticism has told us, provides a basic form for the structuring of subject-readers through the well-documented interaction of the novel and the lyric form in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.31 The essay

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does not fit this picture. It contains the potential for another version of sympathy. And sure enough, it is in his essays on aesthetics that Mill provides one. Mill’s 1838 essay “The Writings of Alfred de Vigny” is an appreciation of a conservative poet whose work is political without being rhetorical. Vigny’s work is contrasted with explicitly “political” poetry, like Ebenezer Elliot’s “CornLaw Rhymes” which “are rather oratory than poetry”: the poetic and political quality of writers like Vigny is not “by virtue of what is negative or combative in their feelings,” for Mill, but in their offering of an example of sympathy. It is another kind of sympathy to that which Mill in On Liberty enlists to temper through knowledge the stridency of opposition, and ensure a more methodical and progressive combat. Vigny possesses rather the sympathy of disenchantment, which has lost “blind faith” in an old order without gaining a blind faith in the new. This is an elegiac, and a strangely medial, state; but it is also the most sympathetic. For a person in this position, nothing partial or one-sided in his sympathies: no sense of a conflict to be maintained, of a position to be defended against assailants, will warp the impartiality of his pity—will make him feel that there are wrongs and sufferings which must be dissembled, inconsistencies which must be patched up, vanities which he must attempt to consider serious, false pretenses which he must try to mistake for truths, lest he should be too little satisfied with his own cause to do his duty as a combatant for it: he will no longer feel obliged to treat all that part of human nature which rebelled against the old ideas, as if it were accursed—all those human joys and sufferings, hopes and fears, which are the strength of the new doctrines, and which the old ones did not take sufficient account of, as if they were unworthy of his sympathy. His heart will open itself freely and largely to the love of all that is loveable, to pity of all that is pitiable: every cry of suffering humanity will strike a responsive chord in his breast; whoever carries nobly his own share of the general burthen of human life, or generously helps to lighten that of others, is sure of his homage; while he has a deep fraternal charity for the erring and disappointed—for those who have aspired and fallen—who have fallen because they have aspired, because they too have felt those infinite longings for something greater than merely to live and die, which he as a poet has felt—which, as a poet, he cannot but have been conscious that he would have purchased the realization of by an even greater measure of error and suffering—and which, as a poet disenchanted, he knows too well the pain of renouncing, not to feel a deep indulgence for those who are victims of their inability to make the sacrifice.32 This passage finds Mill in a suggestive and evocative mode that is far removed from the more familiar language of his propositional treatises. These two—

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very long—sentences seek to perform the expansiveness that such a sympathy attempts; but, more than mimetic technique, they are an exercise in appreciative description, which explores the possibilities of more diverse forms of relation to life. The polarized alternatives of poetic solipsism, on the one hand, and the eloquence of persuasion, on the other, are here overcome. Instead we get an attention to, and a description of, a particular quality of relation. Mill offers us a version of sympathy quite unlike his more familiar account in “Bentham,” or his comments on Cicero in On Liberty. The passage ends on the kind of note that Walter Pater will sound: something like an inverse complement to Botticelli’s “men and women, in their mixed and uncertain condition . . . saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink.”33 Mill’s Vigny also pities those suffering under consciousness of a road not taken. But Mill’s might be the more nuanced idea here. He is not so much concerned with the acceptance or rejection of demands for action, for taking sides, as with the ability to cease from struggle when that struggle has lost purchase on the world. Here is an insight about how forms of controversy can take on a totalizing life of their own, limiting people’s range of stances towards, and experience of, the world. In praising Vigny’s avoidance of such a state of affairs, Mill allows us to find capacity in the difficult subsidence of self-assertion, and suggests that a combative position can become a blind defiance of this capacity. Vigny’s kind of sympathy is more tactfully impersonal than Mill’s other (more famous) version, and it is not, like that one, epistemologically driven. Knowing here is of no help, so it does not desire to know more fully, to “enter into” the thoughts and feelings of another, but cultivates the consciousness of a shared predicament of mediation: that the world resists our methods, that there is a darkening gap between our ideas and their expression in the world. And yet it finds also the welcome paradox of mediation: that—as in the poetry of Tennyson, or in the imagined cell (something like Pater’s sense of “each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world”), or the lonely mountaineer’s air—an apparent diversion from the world, or only an oblique connection, can provide the means for new forms of connection.34 Mill’s essay tactfully refuses knowledge, in order to call for a sympathy rooted in shared predicaments, not predicates. This version of sympathy becomes unsustainable in Mill’s later work. It suggests that the knowing and oppositional structure of Mill’s rational method, his “forensic” version of sympathy, may in practice undermine the truthfulness of expression it is supposed to serve. But by these, Mill’s earlier, more Romantic lights, the relations of conflict that support Mill’s theory of liberty by 1859 threaten to narrow the forms of relation on offer. For now there is no position outside the fight, and the sincere march under one’s chosen colors, that provides the only engine of progress.

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Essays in Liberalism Mill rejected his youthful views on the relations between poetry and politics; by the terms of his own opposition, poetry lost place to eloquence, and in generic terms, narrative—which Mill had opposed to poetry—regained a dominant aesthetic position as a help and a mirror to the progress of society. (Biography would become Mill’s preferred recreational reading.) A stimulus for such a rejection, was, as I have suggested, his discomfort with the opacity of poetic communication. How could a political theory, let alone the practical procedures of practical government, be constructed on such obscure foundations? Mill turned from a darkening medium to opt for a method of liberalism that was clear, direct, and progressive rather than vague, mediated, and autotelic. And yet, for all that, Mill’s essays on aesthetics propose a way of handling the world. They contain a promise of overcoming, through sympathetic attention to a mediated existence, the antinomy between the poet swaddled in solipsism, on the one hand, and the partisan coercive in clarity, on the other. As with Vigny, a consciousness of distance between the self and the world mediates between exposition and reserve, and between a common experience and a private one. Mill anticipates, as John Guillory has suggested, mediation as a dominant concern of twentieth-century critical theory. But in Mill’s own century, it is essayists like Charles Lamb, Matthew Arnold, and Walter Pater who best take up the issue. In their hands, the essay form instantiated the practice and techniques—the tact—of an aesthetic liberalism. Looking at Mill’s early work raises both the possibility of an aesthetic and an ethic of tact as a complement to a liberalism of method, and also suggests some formal arrangements conducive to it. An aesthetic liberalism would have to enact commitments through the description of possible relations, and unsettle the progressive framework of proposition and counterproposition. It would have to resist the deferral of valuation to a given end that is characteristic of the novel, instead seeking to proliferate ways to value passing moments.35 Seeking neither absorption nor assent, it could not produce the mimesis of a closed world or deal out propositions seeking proof. What it would have to be good at is offering brief essays at richer possible responses to the confusions of modern life, what Mill calls “offering interesting objects of contemplation to the sensibilities.” And this may be the practice of so deceptively simple an activity as, and a wider conception of the uses of, description. These qualities, as we saw in chapter 1, and will explore in the chapters that follow, are to be found in reflective essays of this period: essays that offer examples, not so much of propositions about the world, as of possible forms of commitment to it. By tactfully evading fantasies of knowledge as power, they raise questions about liberalism, about the conundrum of how people

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are to live together. They make suppositions about the lived quality of sociable relations: about how this relationality is arranged, of the distribution of relations to experience, and of the distributions of attention and appreciation. Pointing the way to them is the example of Mill’s moment of essayism with “Alfred de Vigny,” and the question, however implausible, of what if John Stuart Mill had kept, as a complement and critique of his liberalism’s rational method, his other version of sympathy; conjoined his liberalism of overhearing with his liberalism of eloquence; and tempered the proposition of argument with the offering of essays.

ch a P T er T hr ee

Teaching Tact m aT T he w a r noL d a n d T he F u nc T ion oF cr i T icism

iT was a gLancing reFerence, but a telling one, when a November 1864 review in the Guardian mentioned that “most dogmatic of anti-dogmatists, Arnold of Rugby.” So telling, in fact, that Matthew Arnold, in a letter to his mother, felt impelled to defend his late father from such an epitaph. Far from narrow, Arnold countered, his father’s “mind was constantly working, and open.” And yet this dutiful response is no sooner performed than he doubles back, to admit the justice of the Guardian’s reproach: for, he concedes, when “[Papa] held a thing, he held it very hard, and without the sense some people always have that there are two sides to the question.” Arnold implicitly counts himself among “some people” who are “always” more even handed, and who possess a lighter touch; noting that he has come “nearly within 5 years” of his father’s age of death, he closes his letter with a reflection on his own accomplishments as compared with his father’s.1 And well might this question of handling things provoke reflection. This “sense” of a lighter touch—of tact in the criticism of ideas, artworks, and people—was the defining aim of Arnold’s career, of both his personal style and educational endeavor. Like Lamb in his Essays of Elia, Arnold recommended tact in making contact with modern social life—and with a particular awareness of how preexisting conditions—of social form, knowledge, dogma, system, controversy—might limit the range and vitality of this contact. Unlike Lamb, however, Arnold proposed a pedagogy of tact on a national scale; he refined and rendered more capacious his father’s educational mission. So the reason, perhaps, that Arnold gives the Guardian’s unflattering remark its due lies in the review’s neat summation of the great risk of his own project: of becoming dogmatic in one’s anti-dogmatism. Tact, we saw in chapters 1 and 2, keeps open an ethical and aesthetic medium, a creative middle space [ 59 ]

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in interaction. This delicate task seems ill suited to prescription on a large scale. Can one teach tact, a nondidactic reticent sensibility, without recourse to an assertive didacticism? Matthew Arnold’s writings might seem the worst place to look for answers. Critics have long regarded him as a staunch universalist opponent of the kind of contingent pluralism that tact demands. Insisting upon canonical hierarchies of literary, national, and even racial value, Arnold is recognizable through a lens of critical suspicion as the high priest of a reactionary “culture,” the curator of an ideologically suspect aesthetics, and an early advocate of the insidious and totalizing influence of state power on everyday life. Edward Said, for example, describes Arnold’s pedagogy of culture as a “system of values saturating downward almost everything within its purview,” which “dominates from above without being available to everything and everyone it dominates.” Arnold’s culture is a “system of exclusions” maintained by the “power of the state and its institutions.” His call for a more civil public discourse deploys tact as a tactic: good manners provide a means by which a top-down, locked-down model of cultural hegemony co-opts the very forces that might oppose it—criticism itself—into the basis for the state’s stability. (Those who condemn an uncivil disobedience are often on the side of an unjust business as usual.) By this view, Arnold is the subduer of criticism. His civilizing mission, Said explains, “covered critical writing with the mantle of cultural authority and reactionary political quietism.”2 This influential critique of Arnold is true—at least in part.3 He was capable of responding with patrician anxiety to the rising power of the lower orders (one reason, it seems, for his joining a rifle corps, and for his outrage at the 1861 Hyde Park riots).4 His aesthetic claims can contain an authoritarian and centralizing impulse, which many have found rebarbative, in his time and ours. (In the introduction to his 1869 Culture and Anarchy, he notes critics had summarized his position: “You mustn’t make a fuss because you have no vote,—that is vulgarity; you mustn’t hold big meetings to agitate for reform bills and to repeal corn laws,—that is the very height of vulgarity.”)5 But this critique provides less than half of the story. It denies Arnold the complexities of his ambivalence—his sense of just how difficult was the world he had on his hands—and it omits what is radical in his claims for culture: his argument for the relationship between national education, a literary aesthetic, and social equality.6 For while it is true that throughout his careers as poet, essayist, and educationalist, Arnold focused on, in the words of Stefan Collini, “the question of cultural values and intellectual and aesthetic standards” rather than “political institutions” or “economic arrangements,” I will suggest that it was precisely this focus that enabled Arnold to develop, against the grain of public discourse, an egalitarian ethic and a theory of education founded in the practice of tact (CA, xiii). Arnold’s writings propose, not a prescriptive content (of spe-

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cific objects, rules, values, canonical goods), but a tactful mode of relation, a handling of experience, which is “adequate,” in Arnold’s term, both to relieving the strain of, and finding new—egalitarian and creative—possibilities for, aesthetic freedom in modern social life. This effect of tact Arnold calls “deliverance” (Pater will call it “relief ”), and a “help out of our present difficulties.” It is a relation, a formal movement of making contact with the world, rather than an appropriation of the knowledge that would master it. Arnold had a talent for slogans. But tact is not recognizable as one of them (unlike “Hebraism and Hellenism,” say, or “sweetness and light.”)7 To gain a sense of Arnold’s tact requires reading his writings for their “function” (to use his term) and placing them within a tradition of perfectionist philosophy (“perfection” being one of Arnold’s key words), which urges our attendance, not only on logical propositions, but on proposals of attitude and relational mode that might bring us to an apprehension of better ways of living.8 The function of tact begins with a negative task. Arnold summarizes it in his most famous definition of the function of criticism: to “see the object as it really is.” This much misunderstood phrase does not call for scientific objectivity (a term and an attitude which, the historians of science Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have shown, was still in formation at the time of Arnold’s writing), but insists on an encounter—between critic and object, or between people—that is not structured in advance by what Arnold called the “machinery” of predetermined ends: of “power and pre-eminence and other external goods,” whether of capital gains, political system, controversy, class status, habit, official knowledge or public opinion (CA, 107).9 Seeing the object as it really is insists on anyone’s capacity for the appreciation of their own experience, and on the rigors of handling that might encourage this capacity; it requires a redistribution of aesthetic experience that considers the way mediation is conditioned. For Arnold, everyone’s a critic. This principle is neglected by Arnold’s own critics when they describe him as pleading for criticism as a specialist task of an elite. Attending to the aims of Arnold’s career in education brings this principle into focus: it illuminates the tact that is also at the center of his poetry and essays, and it provides a developmental narrative for his career. It accounts for Arnold’s famous abandonment of poetry for the essay form, not as a betrayal of early Romantic hopes (“he thrust his gift in prison till it died,” said Auden), but as a continuation of them: in particular, for a national concern with an aesthetic sense of freedom, ensured by an essayistic tact that might counter the strident certainties of a demoralizing public discourse.10 Arnold’s writings on education were not an unfortunate diversion from his critical work (a shame he had to earn his bread) but essential to it. While many of Arnold’s most famous essays were composed in the library of the Athenaeum Club, locus of England’s literary elite, many others were written in provincial classrooms, in snatched moments between shifts of examining

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work. Arnold often complained about the labor of his inspectorial duties—“I have had a hard day,” he wrote to his wife Lucy in December 1851, “Thirty pupil teachers to examine in an inconvenient room and nothing to eat except a biscuit, which a charitable lady gave me”—but he was a committed public servant.11 His best essays draw upon his experiences in the field of public education—a field that saw both a widening of its activities and an intensifying of the debate around it in the second half of the nineteenth century. Without Arnold the school inspector, we would not have Arnold the critic. Arnold’s own critics, however, have often approached his writing with the assumption that its different genres are discrete and unconnected. Arnold’s transition from poetry to prose, for example, is most often understood as a disjuncture—as the (conscious or not) “sacrifice of poetry on the altar of criticism”—while literary critics hardly ever mention his educational writings.12 But the three genres of Arnold’s career are closely interwoven. Arnold’s poetry articulates the desire to which his essays respond; and when we examine his neglected reports and proposals on education, a pedagogy of tact emerges at the center of this response. It links Arnold’s work as poet, critic, and inspector.

The Poet Before Arnold was a either a critic or an inspector, he was something of a dandy. In his youth, Arnold’s foppish lightness of touch both charmed and worried his more earnest intimates; not least his father, who remarked on his son’s lack of application to any particular work or principle: “he likes general society, and flitters about from flower to flower, but is not apt to fix.”13 In this and other concerned depictions by friends like Arthur Clough, Matt Arnold seemed a social and intellectual wanderer, as fey and vagrant as the “Scholar Gypsy” of his 1853 poem.14 This aversion to fixing is worth taking seriously, appearing as it does in the atmosphere of controversies and implacably firm standpoints—in the conflict between the Tractarians and his father—that formed the context to his school and undergraduate life. Arnold’s transition from poetry to prose allowed him formally to develop this capacity; his essays respond in a new form to tasks he first defined and elaborated in verse. Preeminent among these tasks was finding what he termed an “adequate” response to life in modern society. Arnold, wrote Henry James in 1884, is above all “the poet . . . of our ‘modernity.’ ”15 His poetry is concerned with the troubled relation of the individual to a society that has hurtled far down the road of Gesellschaft: with the rise of democracy, increasing social disaggregation, and ebbing of religious faith (its “melancholy, long withdrawing roar,” as Arnold put it in “Dover Beach”). In his first lecture as Oxford Professor of Poetry in November 1857, “On the Modern Element in Literature,” Arnold signaled his desire to communicate with

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more—and more ordinary—people (Arnold was the first to speak from the chair in English, not Latin) about the problem of living in a modern society in which “the relations of life” have become “immeasurably multiplied,” presenting “an infinitely larger school for the men reared in it” than had past ages.16 The definition of “modern” is for Arnold based in the relative complexity of social experience, and the corresponding strain under which it places individual lives, rather than chronology (Periclean Athens was more modern, Arnold explains, than Elizabethan England). An “adequate” literature is capable of responding fully to this modernity, making it “intelligible to us,” and delivering us from “that impatient irritation of mind which we feel in presence of an immense, moving, confused spectacle.” “Man’s true freedom,” Arnold claims, requires “an intellectual deliverance” from this strain, which “is the peculiar demand of those ages which are called modern,” and “emphatically . . . the demand of the age in which we ourselves live.” Deliverance doesn’t mean just making bearable (like the narcotics by which Freud would define modern life in his 1929 Civilization and Its Discontents). We achieve deliverance not only when we suffer less, but when we gain a new sense of relation to the social world: “to know how others stand, that we may know how we ourselves stand; and to know how we ourselves stand, that we may correct our mistakes and achieve our deliverance—that is our problem” (CW, I, 21). These claims for literature are both vague and bold, more diagnosis than experiment (he would later reflect that his approach in the lecture was “that of the doctor rather than that of the explorer”).17 “Man’s true freedom” seems a good thing to aim for, but Arnold’s lecture only hints at the inadequacy of rival accounts of freedom, the liberalism he finds around him (a mistake he will define in Culture and Anarchy as “freedom worshipped in itself ” by “our liberal practitioners”; CA, 83, 153). What “adequate” literature provides towards true freedom Arnold defines as an “instructive fullness of experience”: he suggests that the quality, texture, and volume of a person’s experience is the place to begin when thinking about freedom—rather than, say, with laws, or rights, or security—and also that freedom may come as instruction, or education. The only other hint Arnold offers in this lecture is about a misconception in need of correction: people have previously sought “moral” to the neglect of “intellectual deliverance”; they attend to rules, laws, and codes of conduct, rather than to the individual’s comprehension of “how we ourselves stand” in relation to others. They have followed a rule instead of apprehending their own intellectual and sensible experience. This distinction recurs in Arnold’s writing: “They had thought their real and only important homage was owed to a power concerned with their obedience rather than with their intelligence,” as he will put it later, in Culture and Anarchy, renaming these two “forces” for “schooling us” as “Hebraism” and “Hellenism,” respectively (CA, 138, 127). Arnold’s poems attempt formally to describe this “true freedom,” in an intellectual deliverance adequate to modern life. Geörgy Lukács, that great

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theorist of the essay, claimed the form’s capacity to convey “intellectuality, conceptuality as sensed experience, as immediate reality, as spontaneous principle of existence.”18 Arnold’s career proposes a recognition of such a complicated affordance. The task motivates his shift of genre—from poetry to the tact of the critical essay. It is tempting at first glance to understand Arnold’s poetry as he would later qualify his lectures—as more diagnostic than exploratory. (This was certainly the way he characterized his poem “Empedocles on Etna” when he famously retracted it from his 1853 Poems.) The plaintive lyricism of Arnold’s poetic voice seems a direct expression of the impossible conditions of modern social existence. Often, Arnold presents binary terms, between which one cannot choose, but which make the strain of living between them unbearable. To be, as in the “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” (1867), “Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / The other powerless to be born” is only the most famous instance of many an impasse.19 Arnold’s poetic thought, in the words of J. Hillis Miller, is “dominated by the theme of irreconcilable opposites.”20 But while Arnold’s poetry often depicts the lack of purchase by any subjective creativity on an inhospitable, fragmented, and unstable world, it also attempts adequacy. Arnold’s poems often seek a rhythm, or rule, that might condition an “instructive fullness of experience”; a creative engagement that keeps multiple forms of relation in contact, while becoming neither entrenched in differences nor lost in confusion. They often seek routes from paralysis to potential, without sacrificing the present to a future consummation. Their recurring concern with the marginal protagonist—someone who is against the law, whether alien, exile, or gypsy—has often been noted.21 We might understand these figures as seekers of Arnold’s “true freedom” and “deliverance.” His 1849 poem “Resignation” provides an example of how he explores these themes. In “Resignation,” Arnold’s speaker offers advice to his sister about what she loses by a systematic thought that seeks a final knowledge (to underscore the point, he names her “Fausta”). She seeks a progressive knowledge, towards a mastery of the world. For her it is “Pain to thread back and to renew / Past straits, and currents long steered through.”22 Arnold’s speaker urges his sister’s emulation of those “milder natures, and more free” who, whether from “schooling” or from “birth,” have the good sense to “claim not every laughing hour / For handmaid to their striding power” (22–30). The scene of the poem is a return to grounds traversed on a pleasure walk ten years earlier. It is a slower and more pensive lingering on the site of a previous clear and fixed action (its biographical source is an exhausting family excursion under Thomas Arnold’s firm direction), a purposeful “march with serious air.”23 Now there is the space, given the necessary patience, to “again unroll / Though slowly, the familiar whole,” and to approach established subjects—the family history, the family style—in a new way (94–95).

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Arnold’s reflections lead him to a useful example. He implicitly compares his mental vagaries in returning to old grounds to the movements of a group of gypsies: “Chance guides the migratory race, / Where, though long wanderings intervene, / They recognize a former scene” (113–115). “Resignation” is a reflection on a poetic inheritance too: Wordsworth’s “Lines Written a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey.” Arnold is not content simply to intuit, like Wordsworth, the presence of gypsies, “vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,” from the evidence of camp smoke. He brings his gypsies into the foreground, and considers whether they propose a plausible alternative to Fausta’s attitude to life: Crowded and keen the country grows; It seems as if, in their decay, The law grew stronger every day. So might they reason, so compare, Fausta, times past with times that are. But no!—they rubbed through yesterday In their hereditary way, And they will rub through if they can, Tomorrow on the self-same plan (133–141) The gypsies offer an alternative, a way of living at a tangent to the harsh laws of the land.24 Then Arnold turns to another possible approach: the “poet” is entirely free from social ties, and able to look down on society “from some high station” (164). Critical discussions of “Resignation” have tended to assume that Arnold’s speaker identifies with the poet.25 But, though he may experience deep passions, the poet is too far from “the general life” to be a useful example (152–153). Arnold marks out the gypsies’ style as their mode of survival in a turbulent modern country, “crowded and keen.” This is not the conventional turning of the nature poet to an animated natural world—“the country” has few resources to offer—it is rather a recourse to a social technique or “way.” The gypsies’ “self-same plan” imposes its own temporal order on the environment. (“As an undergraduate,” the biographer Park Honan notes, “Matthew had defeated laws of purpose and consecutive time by doing the same thing over and over— throwing a line into a brook, repeating hilly walks or skiffing expeditions—or by turning logical discussions into circular ones”).26 Arnold formally signals this change of style with a metrical shift. Once the gypsies begin to “rub through,” this section becomes a lot harder to scan, baffling attempts to lay down the metrical law. This change slackens and eases the rigid iambic tetrameter and harsh consonants (“crowded and keen the country”) found in the description of the gypsies’ plight. The missing beat in the alternating lines is complemented by longer syllables, allowing the reader some breathing room, since the section spends the same amount of time over fewer stresses.27

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A sense of extra space is temporarily conjured within the poem itself. For a moment, the meter comes under the influence of the gypsies’ collective style. Yet reassurance is not so easily won. Arnold’s speaker ventriloquizes in italics Fausta’s skeptical response. He imagines her unimpressed with both the gypsies and the poet: Those Gipsies, so your thoughts I scan, Are less, the Poet more, than man. They feel not, though they move and see; Deeper the poet feels; but he Breathes, when he will, immortal air (203–207) Where does this leave us? Fausta wonders. By this odd italicized formulation both the speaker’s and Fausta’s views on the uses of the gypsies’ example are left ambiguous. It is a question left hanging in the air, between sister and brother—in one’s imagination of the other’s response. The poet is of even less use: “He leaves his kind, o’erleaps their pen, / And flees the common life of men” (211–212). Less paragon than runaway, he leaves altogether the frame of our collective life. Arnold restates between gypsies and poet his familiar poles: embedded in painfully constraining forms in time and space, on the one hand, and beyond any social solidarity on the other, to a formless lack of purchase on the world. Only the last four lines of the poem gesture at overcoming this predicament: Not milder is the general lot Because our spirits have forgot, In action’s dizzying eddy whirled, The something that infects the world (275–279) “Not milder” makes for a feeble claim to end on. Freedom is at stake, in this unavailable mode of mildness, but it relies on “something” the spirit has forgotten. The sheer vagueness of “something” is modified with a suggestive verb: “infects” seems rather an ambivalent word to use, suggesting both desire for and anxieties about the transmission of something immaterial, even pathological, on a large scale. It might imply a process of identification, but of an impersonal kind: with a condition rather than an idealized person. It suggests perhaps a hopeful immanence, a resource within rather than outside the world (Pater will describe the role of the critic in his essay “Winckelmann” as a susceptibility to aesthetic contagion). But it is attended with many possibilities and difficulties of detection: how is one to read the symptoms of this benign infection? Does one know it when one has it? Can it be taught, or caught some other way? The word raises a number of themes that will recur through Arnold’s career: of the “something” modern society lacks, the idea of a “one

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thing needful” for a vital culture, and who gets to say what this is—and then, how it can be spread. “Resignation” leaves us with the suggestion this “something” is located in a style or mode of relating. Arnold’s poetry often laments a lack of certain conditions of relation, the “common air” that Walter Pater would memorably describe in the preface to his Renaissance, in which people “catch light and heat from each other’s thoughts.”28 The “Scholar Gipsy” of the eponymous 1853 poem seems to have caught the infection, with knowledge of unknown ways of living hidden behind his “dark vague eyes and soft abstracted air,” but he will not give up his secret. Arnold’s imaginary landscapes appear to suffer from the lack of an epidemic. They figure its mediating atmosphere as air or water, whether it is the “sea of life” becoming the “unplumb’d, salt, estranging sea” in “To Marguerite—Continued” (1852), or ebbing “sea of faith” at “Dover Beach” (1867). For the “Forsaken Merman” (1849) both sea and song separate when they ought to connect. Where a channel of communication should be in the “Buried Life” (1852), come only “airs, and floating echoes, and convey / A melancholy into all our day.” Often, Arnold’s poetry diagnoses a missing conduit that could grant, as he puts it in his 1852 “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens,” the “power to feel what others give.”29 Arnold’s poetry isn’t looking for the removal of distance between people—something like the “sympathy” we have seen (in chapter 2) Mill define as the “faculty by which one mind understands a mind different from itself, and throws itself into the feelings of that other mind,” but a medium more like Lamb’s “honest obliquity,” which connects while it separates. Arnold elaborates this desire: first through his theory of prosody, then through his essayism of tact. Through his experiments in form, he found his distinctive critical mode.

The Turn to Criticism Arnold developed the themes of “Resignation” in his 1852 “Empedocles on Etna,” which brought about a crisis in his poetic career. “The poem’s drama”, as Lionel Trilling pointed out, “lies not so much in the internal struggle of its hero or in its resolution as in its juxtaposition of two kinds of poetry,” and two forms of relation to society.30 It is a dialogue with three characters. Empedocles is the philosopher-poet on the mountain, a man for whom the time is out of joint; Callicles is a strayed reveler who, by his music steeped in tradition, seeks to soothe and inspirit the philosopher; the doctor Pausanias is mediator between them. For all his “longing for the life of life,” Empedocles is not reconciled to it by Callicles, and the poem through its dialogue form leaves open the question of whether the philosopher is sound in his diagnosis of a corrupt world or just morbidly disillusioned. Callicles debates this question with Pausanias.

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He says “ ’Tis not the times, ’tis not the Sophists vex him; / There is some root of suffering in himself ” (149–150). But Callicles is a “boy whose tongue outruns his knowledge,” Pausanias responds (161). Is Empedocles powerful or weak? Is he noble or bitter? All we know is that the world is too much for him; he cannot find a form that is adequate to its demands: “Man’s measures cannot mete the immeasurable All” (340). (There is a pun here on metrical measures, of course; and it is difficult to scan the word “immeasurable” in this line.) The poem offers no firm judgment about the philosopher, or his suicide. But Arnold, famously, made a firm decision about “Empedocles on Etna.” He omitted it from his 1853 collection, Poems, and included a preface to explain why he had done so; in the process, he provided a new definition for the “something” missing from “Resignation.” Arnold’s preface explains the suppression of Empedocles by his decision to publish only work that offers help to its times, which will “inspirit and rejoice the reader.” This doesn’t mean the subject of the poetry must be cheerful; it compasses representation of terrible actions, as in Greek tragedy. What Arnold rejects is representations where “suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.” When such moments of paralysis occur in “actual life,” says Arnold, “they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry is painful also” (CW, I, 2–3). Although “Empedocles” responds to “modern problems,” it records too faithfully a response of unresolved anguish. Arnold offers, as alternative, an educational treatise that seeks to set the curriculum for modern poetry, and a standard of poetic judgment according to a poem’s “pragmatic” effect on the modern mind. Arnold makes the case that poetry must offer resources for living that come from outside its own age and actions, avoiding at all costs the “false aims” of producing (here Arnold quotes the rival recommendation of critic David Masson) “a true allegory of the state of one’s own mind” (CW, I, 8). The last thing we need from poetry, Arnold insists, is an expressive preoccupation with our own suffering. We need more examples of great and noble action in the face of suffering. Greek literature provides a model because it rejected the contemporary, the lyrical, the disjointed, and attended instead to “excellent action” and the “grand style.” With the Greeks, “the action predominated over the expression of it; with us, the expression predominates over the action” (CW, I, 5). It is by “commerce with the ancients,” who are like “persons who have had a very weighty and impressive experience,” that we will gain a poetry that will not simply fall into the confusion of “irritation and impatience,” or unthinkingly “praise the age,” or retreat into lyric isolation. Against the “confusion of the present times,” this poetry will both “educe and cultivate” us (CW, I, 13). Poetry promised to educate people for modern life by providing qualities the times were in need of: inspiration, a sense of vitality and joy in one’s lived

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experience, and a medium (action) by which the individual is rescued from isolation to make uncomplacent contact with others. Arnold kept this ambition throughout his career. Such an education provides the basis for Arnold’s version of liberalism, which might free people into vitality, from both the constriction of unthinking social habit and the abstractions of isolated principles, and towards a basis for equality in social relations. At this moment in his career, Arnold (like Bentham in chapter 1) proposed a remedial focus on action. But poetry is no remedy for depression; Arnold’s own poetry continued to diagnose the missing mediating “something” the world required, while his attempts at composition according to his theory of action were failures. His 1858 poem Merope, for example, adapts the story of a lost tragedy by Euripides. The trappings of Greek noble action are there, but it lacks precisely that freedom and vitality it was intended to produce. “Mr. Arnold’s theory upon poesy is much better than his practice,” remarked a reviewer in the Athenaeum.31 Swinburne put it more wittily: “the clothes are well enough but where has the body gone?”32 Arnold’s next attempt to define a more vital medium also turned to the resources of Greek poetry, in the most renowned of his Oxford lectures, his 1860–1861 series “On Translating Homer,” in which he proposes, instead of a quality of action, a metrical form—a shared rule and rhythm—that might condition it. But over the course of these lectures, something strange happens. They spark a controversy, in response to which he abandons his prosodic theory to propose an essayistic tact. The Homer lectures are the crucible of Arnold’s criticism, which mark his shift in genre, from poetry to the essay form. They launch his project of educating his readers, not in the fixed examples of a poetry of action or a metrical system, but in a more contingent practice of tactful critical intervention, which would define Arnold’s critical persona— and indeed make the word “criticism” itself newly current in Britain. The lectures repay close study, because they show us a critic finding his voice. Arnold gathers his preoccupations—modernity, ethics, inspiration, sociability, and judgment—through a new theme: of what it means to have faith in, to be faithful to, one’s object. The lectures focus on the task of the translator. A translator faced not only with a historical text, but also with translation as a metaphor: as an imperative in the face of the sociological complexity of life with others in the modern world—as a negotiation of closeness and distance, strangeness and intimacy (Arnold’s sense of intimacy will be founded in the mediating distance between people)—and so with what Arnold comes to term “culture,” both as condition and demand. In his first lecture, Arnold begins with the maxim that the first duty of the translator is to be faithful to one’s object. But this entails the question of “in what faithfulness consists” (CW, I, 98). Arnold’s first appeal is entirely conventional: it is to a judicial authority, what he calls “the only competent tribunal in this matter,” of professional scholars of Greek. But he doesn’t remain

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satisfied with this solution for long, and the question of authority returns with renewed urgency. He transfers his interest from external authorities to what obstructs an individual’s own sense of authority in judgment, and outlines two pitfalls for the practice of translation. The first is an excessive impersonality, and a literalist assumption that the object of translation can be immediately known in its entirety by simply converting each word exactly. This excessive correctness, argues Arnold, misses the object and lands mired in pedantry, because “the peculiar effect of the poet resides in his manner and movement, not in his words taken separately” (105). The second mistake of translation is in taking the object too personally, by fully converting it into the translator’s own idiom. Hence Pope’s translation of Homer is faulty because he doesn’t keep “his eye on the object,” he “composes with his eye on his style, into which he translates his object, whatever it is.” What the translator must learn to do instead, says Arnold, is “describe” (110). Arnold defines this task in his second lecture as the “critical effort” to “see the object as in itself it really is” (140; italics in original.) Arnold’s famous maxim first appears as the task of the translator, and as a way of talking about description. He points to the same seductive extremes Lamb had warned against in his review of Hazlitt’s Table Talk: the aridly pedantic and the overbearingly personal (Arnold exemplifies these two poles with the London University classicist Francis Newman and the art critic John Ruskin, respectively). Description that makes faithful contact with its object is more difficult to achieve than one might assume; the role of criticism is to establish the conditions that make description possible.33 This effort of “seeing the object as in itself as it really is” is not an epistemological claim but a kind of framing, a making space—of a middle space that might allow for a tactful relation to an object. What are the formal implications of this practice? Arnold’s third lecture takes up the challenge positively, offering “practical suggestions.” He first attempts a prosodic solution, proposing the hexameter, not on the grounds of its “truth” to Homer’s poetry, not even for any specific particularity of style, but rather because it offers the most hospitable framework for the expression of the poem and the translator to meet. The hexameter is “plain” and “natural” (two cardinal virtues in these lectures); a regular form that also capaciously allows for a “loose and idiomatic grammar” (CW, I, 153). Arnold proposes the provision of more hospitable laws that will neither “force the quantity” nor distort accent to make a line scan. For a moment in these lectures he places great social faith in the poetic form, a faith that sets him in numerous company in nineteenth-century Britain. The right meter, says Arnold, will provide form for nothing less than a “spiritual diversity.” His proposal is a development of certain reflections by Wordsworth and John Keble, among others, on a metrical law that might restrain the passions generated by the content of poetry, in which there is a “danger that the excite-

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ment may be carried beyond its proper bounds.”34 It was certainly a particular source of outrage for Francis Newman who, in his reply to the Homer lectures, insisted that Arnold’s disregard for the regularity of metrical ‘true time’ led to a state of affairs in which the “moral genius of the metre is fundamentally subverted.”35 Newman has a point. Arnold seems to be challenging the purpose of rules as forms: are they to be obeyed, or are they there to be made use of as a framework for a more creative contact? Arnold and Newman’s quarrel was also about what Homer could be used for. In Arnold’s opinion, as Sidney Coulling has pointed out, Newman’s pedantry obscured the Homer who “had been one of Arnold’s chief props” in what Arnold had called “these bad days”: a source of creativity and hope in troubled times. Newman came to represent for Arnold the kind of person who denied such efficacy to literature. (Incidentally, he was also the kind of person who could compose an epitaph for his wife declaring she had “no superiority of intellect.”)36 The argument between Arnold and Newman centered on the use of formal laws, and so the uses of literature too. Newman’s angry response to Arnold’s third lecture provoked Arnold’s fourth and final contribution to the series, his “Last Words.” Here his metrical analysis is fully converted to its social analogue, as Arnold proposes an essayistic tact, which, in a manner that would become characteristic of Arnold’s criticism, responds to a controversy by demonstrating an alternative, anticontroversial style. Arnold begins this new departure with a parable about “Buffon, the great French naturalist,” who “imposed on himself the rule of steadily abstaining from all attacks made upon him.” So wise was this resolve, insists Arnold, that Buffon’s fame was built on it; his success was the success of an “equitableness of temper” and a “resolute distain of personal controversy.” Arnold describes “the baleful effects of controversy” in similar terms to an ill-chosen metrical form: it makes their victims conform to its own rules, resulting in the stymieing of their creativity, “their productive force, their genuine activity.” Controversy “checks the free play of the spirit, and often ends by stopping it altogether” (CW, I, 169). Arnold’s invocation of the “great naturalist” signals the direction he will take in the rest of his career. Buffon stands for a commitment to style (the subject of his speech on election to the Academie Francaise), and as the exemplary man of science who, in the words of intellectual historian Wolf Lepenies, became emblematic for the way he “paid heed not only to what he said but also to the way in which he said it.”37 By the mid-nineteenth century, Buffon also represented something lost and in need of renewal. He was, as Lepenies has shown, the first scientist to suffer in reputation for being too much an author and not enough a researcher: the “formula that put an end to Buffon’s career and inhibited the reception of his works was: Stilo primus, doctrina ultimus.”38 Before we encounter, in this lecture, Arnold’s injunction to

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see “the object as it really is,” we are given the key to understanding it: the manner, the handling, is all. This example tendered, Arnold apologizes for offending Newman, and goes on to set out the principles of his critical practice. They are the principles that will guide his career as critic and essayist, and become the basis of his pedagogy of tact. Tact begins with the cultivation of a certain ignorance. Newman had accused Arnold of not knowing enough about his subject: “Alas! That is very true,” Arnold responds, “And yet,” perverse as it seems to say so, I sometimes find myself wishing, when dealing with these matters of poetical criticism, that my ignorance were even greater than it is. To handle these matters properly there is needed a poise so perfect that the least overweight in any direction tends to destroy the balance. Temper destroys it, a crotchet destroys it, even erudition may destroy it. To press to the sense of the thing itself with which one is dealing . . . is the hardest matter in the world. The “thing itself ” with which one is here dealing,—the critical perception of poetic truth,—is of all things the most volatile, elusive, and evanescent; by even pressing too impetuously after it, one runs the risk of losing it. The critic of poetry should have the finest tact, the nicest moderation, the most free, flexible, and elastic spirit imaginable; he should be indeed the “ondoyant et divers,” the undulating and diverse being of Montaigne. (CW, I, 174; italics in original) “Undulating” is a sea word. Arnold formally reconceives in prose the aqueous connections of his poetry. He invokes the founder of essayism to describe a missing element of public discourse, a tact that begins (like Elia’s) with a refusal of knowledge about its object. Instead it must come close to its object, must “handle” it without “pressing too impetuously” (holding a thing too hard, like his father did). Arnold relies on ignorance to define his ethics. His tact wards off the dominance of both the too personal, which he calls the “crotchet,” and the supposed neutrality of objective “erudition.” He reproaches Newman for being “like all learned men, accustomed to desire definite rules,” but insists that such codes are inadequate, a fantasy of control: Newman “wants to include too much under his rules; he does not quite perceive that in poetical criticism the shade, the fine distinction, is everything” (CW, I, 175). After prescribing in his 1853 preface a focus on action, and in his earlier lectures a metrical rule, which might offer a mediation adequate to modern life, Arnold settles on a mode of handling in the form of the essay. But how does one come adequately to handle shades and fine distinctions? Isn’t there a risk here of stepping back into the vague elitism of an aristocratic taste as the measure of judgment? Here Arnold’s wider pedagogical project comes into view. It emerges from a metaphor of translation, which here becomes an atti-

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tude or mode of everyday criticism that enables one to appreciate the complexity of modern life; without becoming lost in confusion, or resorting to a peremptory foreclosure of meaning and reliance on established hierarchy. Instead of a set of rules for translation, transmitted from an authority, Arnold proposes translation as a guide to the sense that one is really feeling one’s way. Once a certain willing ignorance, a refusal of philological expertise, is admitted, space is made for a more “poetical” approach to the object, just as the translator, faced with an uncertain meaning, will turn to a poetical sense. For, as a scholar he [the translator] may know that he cannot be sure whether this sense is the right one or not. But poetically he feels clearly about the word, although philologically he may not. . . . The same thing happens to us with our own language. How many words occur in the Bible, for instance, to which thousands of hearers do not feel sure they attach the precise real meaning; but they make a meaning for them out of what materials they have at hand. (CW, I, 183) The shift to a monolingual context is striking. Arnold does not limit translation to the finding of an equivalence between two languages. He describes the phenomenology of a creative relation to the “materials” of life in order to make meaning. Even the possession of one language makes us all translators. Arnold traces a tactful, tactile relation to meaning, a relation all the more necessary in confused modern times, when one is less assured about what one has “at hand.” (George Steiner, who also links criticism to translation, suggests that both require the tactful sensibility of an open relation: “By virtue of tact, and tact intensified is moral vision, the translator-interpreter creates a condition of significant exchange.”)39 Meaning is made in continual acts of translation, as when ordinary people are faced with the King James Version. This is, broadly, what Arnold will call in his education reports an “evangelical” point of view: to condition the imagining of life—one’s inherited history, one’s inherited divinity—as a general human project, not the sole privilege of the learned and authorized. As for the Romantic essayists of chapter 1, tact is the task of “thousands”: Arnold’s tribunal of expert authority is banished from this final lecture. Instead, Arnold presents the same situation that, thirty-six years later—and also through the analogy of everyday biblical interpretation—the sociologist Emile Durkheim would cite as paradigmatic of the relation to meaning of the ordinary person in the modern world. Everybody becomes an interpreter of his world: “the Bible is put in his hands and no interpretation is imposed on him.”40 And while it is true that the specter of the “tribunal” returns in Arnold’s writing—the idea of a centralized cultural authority disseminating correct opinion to the people, in his suggestion of a national “academy,” for example, or for the guidance of the people by the state—it has been overstated.41

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Arnold’s “Last Words,” with its suggestion of a sensibility that provides the framework of a creative relation to meaning, is the center of his critical project, his pedagogy of tact—for which everyone, equally, has meaning on his or her hands.

The Tact of Aesthetic Criticism Arnold’s essays of the 1860s apply his tact in translation—his seeing the object as it really is—to his cultural criticism. He approaches controversies with a light touch, evading their tendency to translate a wider experience into their narrower terms. This evasion is what Arnold means by the word “disinterestedness,” which he uses to define his critical project in his 1864 essay “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time.” Disinterest is not disengagement from the world, but provides a “frame” for new terms of investment. By “keeping aloof from the practical view of things” and promoting the “free play of the mind on all subjects which it touches,” Arnold explains, a disinterested criticism seeks “to create a current of true and fresh ideas” from tired dogmatisms (CA, 37). These are the same ambitions as in his poetry: criticism provides the conditions, an “intellectual and spiritual atmosphere,” for creative activity between people and the world (CA, 28). For Arnold, a creative and vital life could be provided to all by the condition of society, not relegated to genius: anyone could be encouraged by criticism to “the sense of creative activity [which] is the great happiness and the great proof of being alive” (CA, 51). Disinterestedness is the path to vitality. Not to be confused with the objectivity of a Stoic “indifference,” it seeks not the removal but the reinvestment of passionate attitudes towards the world, along less economic, or scientific—or even rational—lines. This is why Arnold’s criticism is so often conducted in the aesthetic register: it relies on the imaginative uses of a standard of judgment to provoke a change in the culture’s established investments in life shared with others. Arnold asserts in an 1863 Oxford lecture that “to see and exhibit things in beauty, is to see and show things as in their essence they really are” (CW, III, 196). Disinterest begins with a movement of capacious dissatisfaction with the way things are, through which one’s “spiritual horizon may gradually widen” (CA, 38).42 The point of Arnold’s prose is more often to set his readers into motion than it is to transmit information or clinch an argument. The “true value of culture,” he declares in Culture and Anarchy, citing his own research in education, is not found in “a having and a resting, but a growing and a becoming” (CA, 62). “Around every circle another can be drawn,” said one of Arnold’s cultural heroes, Ralph Waldo Emerson, “and man can only be reformed by showing him a new idea which commands his own.”43 Aesthetics has always been dangerous ground. Making aesthetic criticism the ground of a critical practice has seemed a suspicious activity to commen-

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tators on Arnold, then and now.44 His contemporaries frequently charged him with a detached and retrograde aestheticism, and he was often caricatured as the effete courtier described by Hotspur in Henry IV, Part 1: “pouncet-box” in hand, a snobbish weakling holding his nose at real life while claiming to be above the fray.45 But Arnold knew what he was up against. His aesthetic register enabled him to approach his opponents with a sly obliquity. His principal opponent in the 1860s is the dominant reason of his own class and culture, the economic rationality of Victorian liberal society at the highest point of its confidence and wealth.46 His target was not the aristocracy, the “Barbarians” whose time was passing; nor was it the “Populace,” whose time was coming. It was those who held the cultural and economic power: the triumphant middle classes of Britain. These are Arnold’s famous “Philistines” (a term he borrows from Goethe), against whom the use of culture is that it helps us, by means of its spiritual standard of perfection, to regard wealth as but machinery and not only to say as a matter of words that we regard wealth as but machinery, but really to perceive and feel that it is so. If it were not for the purging effect wrought upon our minds by culture, the whole world, the future as well as the present, would inevitably belong to the Philistines. The people who believe most that our greatness and welfare are proved by our being very rich, and who most give their lives and thoughts to becoming rich, are just the very people whom we call Philistines. (CA, 65) The work of culture is not just to understand that wealth is machinery “as a matter of words” but, through its “standard,” also to “perceive and feel that it is so.” There’s knowing something, and then there’s allowing it to affect the ways we are invested in the world. Arnold here echoes his preferred reading in ancient philosophy, and he looks forward to J. H. Newman’s distinction, in his 1870 Essay in Aid of a Grammar of Assent, between a “notional assent,” or an adherence to an abstract proposition, and “real assent,” which, in the words of one commentator, “involves the whole being; one understands that the proposition to which one adheres is going to change one’s life.”47 Arnold and Newman understood this relational sense of knowledge in a way many of their more positivist, or systematic, contemporaries did not.48 Many of Arnold’s essays from the 1860s to the 1880s offer appreciations of varying forms of relational wisdom. Arnold’s 1865 Essays in Criticism, for instance, admire the complex identities of Heinrich Heine, the relational philosophy of Spinoza, or the spiritual exercises of Marcus Aurelius. His 1877 essay on Falkland praises an authentic sense of relation maintained during the polarizing turbulence of the English civil war. His 1884 essay on Emerson provocatively subordinates the sage of Concord’s achievements in poetry, politics, and philosophy to his “temper,” a plausible “happiness and hope” by which he related to the world (CW, X, 182).

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Arnold’s own approach to a relational wisdom begins with what gets in the way of it. Although his criticism, like Mill’s On Liberty, is a work of dissent from a dominant culture deemed triumphantly conformist, it does not, with Mill, oppose to this conformity a rational method that would establish truth through conflict. Controversy, for Arnold, limits the relational repertoire; it fixes unequal relations and privileges the empowered—who tend, as the world submits to them, to feel they are in the right.49 Arnold takes his cues instead from the Romantic essayists and their tact, their more equivocal techniques of handling, relation, and tone. In its practice, this can be difficult to discern: as John Holloway has put it, Arnold’s “task was a more elusive one” than that of a contemporaneous cultural thinker and stylist, John Henry Newman, “because he had no rigid doctrines to argue for, only attitudes.”50 So our own analysis must be oblique; we must observe Arnold’s tact at play. Fortunately, there is consistent practice that provides a way in to this analysis: Arnold’s concern with one tone in particular, which is the very feeling of progressivism itself, of security in a complacent sense of rightness. He makes use of it in order to come to his own critical mode. Arnold understands the power of complacency as a political affect. His target, as he puts it in Culture and Anarchy, is the tone of “laudation,” a revel of rectitude, and a complacency in public discourse, which “debauches the minds of the middle classes” who hold the power in Britain (CA, 75). It is a solid, right-minded feeling—the feeling of the bourgeois, we might call it (the tone of that great Victorian social category)—that centers on the claim that things cannot be otherwise than they are. While it announces righteousness and anesthetizes fear, this attitude, the “fatality of British decorum,” in Henry James’s phrase, conceals poverties of spiritual life and the suffering of the exploited.51 Arnold’s particular object of criticism is the nonconformist culture of a confident middle class, a culture of spiritual dissent he thought had turned sclerotic, hardened in its stiff-necked “Hebraism.” Obviously, not all middleclass Britons were dissenters. But Arnold expands the notion of dissent to a class identity, in order to explore the conformity of certain nonconformist positions. Rather like Lamb’s “Scotsman,” Arnold provides a social fiction to define by synecdoche a whole tone, or way of approaching the world. The task for Arnold’s criticism is to find a form that could respond to this tone. A conviction of being in the right is difficult to unsettle by challenge of reason. Opposing triumphalism risks making one look simply opposed, out of touch with what is called progress, even dog-in-the-manger. This is a recurring problem for the cultural critic, then and now. (We may have witnessed the decline of the bourgeois, but we still are faced by its structures of feeling, its strategies of assertion and denial in the face of failed economic systems, social injustice, foreign policy, climate change.)52 Arnold’s approach is not to build an alternative picture of society (as in Thomas Carlyle’s medievalism, for example), a minor story competing with the dominant narrative. Nor does

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he moralize in the language of shame and repentance, a language that has already been co-opted by the very economic reason he wants to unsettle. Like the Romantic essay, he performs impertinence, coming as close to the reason and language of his target as possible, before unsettling it, by insisting on different—aesthetic—grounds. A performance of a discriminating dissatisfaction evokes what is for Arnold the defining experience of education. Faced with the plenitude of triumph, pointing to aesthetic inadequacy comes as a relief. It makes space for a different relation. It is not satire, precisely, or the systematic refutation of an argument. Arnold employs his tact from the Homer lectures—his insistence that “the shade, the fine distinction, is everything”—as the basis of education defined most broadly, as stimulus to the widening of one’s horizons. Early in Culture and Anarchy, Arnold demonstrates this process with a story from his own education. I remember, when I was under the influence of a mind to which I feel the greatest obligations, the mind of a man who was the very incarnation of sanity and clear sense, a man the most considerable, it seems to me, whom America has yet produced,—Benjamin Franklin,—I remember the relief with which, after long feeling the sway of Franklin’s imperturbable common-sense, I came upon a project of his for a new version of the Book of Job, to replace the old version, the style of which, says Franklin, has become obsolete, and thence less agreeable. “I give,” he continues “a few verses, which may serve as a sample of the kind of version I would recommend.” We all recollect the famous verse in our translation: “Then Satan answered the Lord and said: ‘Doth Job fear God for nought?’” Franklin makes this: “Does your majesty imagine that Job’s good conduct is the effect of mere personal attachment and affection?” I well remember how, when I first read that, I drew a deep breath of relief, and said to myself: “After all, there is a stretch of humanity beyond Franklin’s victorious good sense!” (CA, 77) Here is Arnold’s technique in action. Franklin is still admired. But while the moment is comic, the relief is genuine. Arnold describes a vexed scene of assent as an experience of oppression by an encompassing worldview: of what Emerson called “alienated majesty.”53 We need relief from its triumph if we are to find room for our own thoughts. There is something coercive about a too-conspicuous sanity. This sense of compliance explains Arnold’s unease with, and his “relief ” at escape from, even a set of views he could find nothing to disagree with, considered as mere propositions. And it is the aesthetic mode in which Arnold demands something more. Against complacency (the choice of episode from Job, a debate about complacency, emphasizes its dangers), we are returned to Arnold’s tact of translation from his Homer lectures—another scene of Bible study as a secularized

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metaphor of an evangelical, personal reception of received wisdom. Arnold isn’t interested in the best rendering of Hebrew; he shifts emphasis to a monolingual comparison, an exercise in construal that reveals a sensibility and its limits. Two versions in English are put side by side, and the result shows the inadequacies of the total victory of a modernizing, practical, communicative reason alone. Something is lost in Franklin’s translation. Arnold wants his reader to grasp this intuitively—and then to ask what might be lost in the discourse of their culture at large, in the various translations it offers. “Arnold’s self-imposed mission,” Sir James Fitzjames Stephen said dryly in 1864, is to “give good advice to the English as to their manifold faults.”54 But the point of criticism for Arnold is not so much to lament the vulgarity of modern society (with Arnold as a sort of national maiden aunt, forever correcting Britain’s table manners) as it is to find through aesthetic discrimination the limits of a dominant form of reason and its prescribed modes of contact between people. This involves refusing the game as one finds it, its tone and relational approach—its dominant, “victorious good sense”—because it is a game that the alternative, nondominant reason is bound to lose, since it cannot set the terms of debate. The first step is an aesthetic repulsion. (The “way to perfection,” Walter Pater would remark in his 1873 Renaissance, “is through a series of disgusts.”)55 This process links Arnold’s writings on criticism and education: culture teaches the aesthetic dissatisfaction that leads to seeing the object as it really is. It is through this process that Arnold’s writings seek the renewed mediation, the missing “something” his poetry demanded. This tact has no set content. Arnold can only demonstrate the kinds of motion, in affect and relation, it involves. In his work as a school inspector, from 1851 to 1886, Arnold, as we will see, called for the same process, through the same methods of dissatisfaction in translation, as the basis of classroom activity. Arnold’s critical works are theories of education, and his education reports are theories of criticism. Both education and criticism must be offered equally to all. Culture, Arnold explains, is not “an engine of social and class distinction, separating its holder, like a badge or title, from other people who have not got it,” but the first principle of a general education (CA, 58). It does not try to teach down to the level of inferior classes; it does not try to win them for this or that sect of its own, with ready-made judgments and watchwords. It seeks to do away with classes; to make the best that is thought and known in the world current everywhere; to make all men live in an atmosphere of sweetness and light, where they may use ideas, as it uses them itself, freely,—nourished and not bound by them. (CA, 79) “This,” Arnold insists, “is the social idea; and the men of culture are the true apostles of equality” (CA, 79; italics in original).56 The “best that is thought

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and known” is not a national curriculum but a relation to knowing by which people may use ideas for themselves in a moment of tact—like the ordinary Bible readers of Arnold’s “Last Words.” It is an extraordinary claim: if society were really organized around this nourishing experience, then for Arnold there could be no class order. Education provides touchstones, which are not set texts but (as the name implies) tests of experience. Instead of machinery “justifying in us vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence,” education transforms our “vulgarity, hideousness, ignorance, violence” into “so many touchstones” that prove machinery “is not all we want” (CA, 142). Taking unhappy ends and converting them to stimulating means, Arnold’s grammar inverts the logic of machinery. By showing us we have “not all we want,” touchstones evoke us. So criticism must work obliquely, like Lamb’s tact, as an impertinent diversion from what seems overwhelmingly the matter at hand. Arnold’s “Function of Criticism” essay opposes to the polemical reason of political criticism a criticism that “demands absolute beauty.” For a “polemical practical criticism,” Arnold explains, produces “sterile controversy.” It makes people “blind even to the ideal imperfection of their practice, makes them willingly assert its ideal perfection, in order the better to secure it against attack; and clearly this is narrowing and baneful for them” (CA, 38). Now, for Mill, as we saw in chapter 2, securing one’s opinions against attack, and opposing them to rival views, is precisely what purifies one’s criticism of error. But for Arnold, this process is anti-liberal as it is anti-aesthetic, imprisoning the possibility of any free experience in the ends-based machinery of winning a fight. The need of political discourse to win arguments and votes strips it of a wider promise. Faced with the banal laudations required by political discourse, Arnold offers a lesson in not holding one’s ground. In the “Function of Criticism,” he cites two political speeches made over the previous year, 1863–1864: Sir Charles Adderley says to the Warwickshire farmers:— “Talk of the improvement of breed! Why, the race we ourselves represent, the men and women, the old Anglo-Saxon race, are the best breed in the whole world. . . . The absence of a too enervating climate, too unclouded skies, and a too luxurious nature, has produced so vigorous a race of people, and has rendered us so superior to all the world.” Mr. Roebuck says to the Sheffield cutlers:— “I look around me and ask what is the state of England? Is not property safe? Is not every man able to say what he likes? Can you not walk from one end of England to the other in perfect security? I ask you whether the world over or in past history, there is anything like it? Nothing. I pray that our unrivalled happiness may last.” (CA, 38–39) Here is a much more stifling common sense than Benjamin Franklin’s: party political common sense. Despite the fact that these two MPs are members of

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opposed parties—Adderley is a Tory; Roebuck, a Radical—and address the different interests of an agricultural and an industrial constituency respectively, Arnold exposes their similarity in rhetorical devices, tone, and claims. One speaks of perfect breeding to those who breed, and the other of the perfect security of commodities to those who manufacture them. But their message is the same. Both only speak to people as producers: this is the “antipolitical” effect of a time when, in the words of the political philosopher Sheldon Wolin, the “status of citizen was absorbed into that of producer.”57 Roebuck’s and Adderley’s political language relies on complacency, and a bad optimism. A framework of competition (for votes) drains the substance from any meaningful conflict, which might be founded on values and ideas. What Arnold calls “the controversial life we all lead” doesn’t bring them into contact with each other, but precludes ideas entirely (CA, 39). “Now obviously,” Arnold responds, “there is peril for poor human nature in words and thoughts of such exuberant self-satisfaction, until we find ourselves safe in the streets of the Celestial City” (CA, 39). The peril is of imprisonment “in a sphere, to say the truth, perfectly unvital, a sphere in which spiritual progression is impossible” (CA, 40). A “perfectly unvital” sphere plays on an unhappy sense of perfection—as a closed and final state, offering no contact with a world beyond its narrow terms—while it raises the idea, with however light a touch, of perfection, the “Celestial City,” that might unsettle thoughts of final accomplishment on a shared Earth. Arnold opposes the movement of his perfectionist philosophy to the spurious perfection of controversy, with its competitive political grammar. But in undermining the rhetoric of the MPs, what Arnold supplies is not a picture of a rival perfection—the Celestial City is a long way off—but a different piece of evidence from our fallen world. He turns to a source outside the “unvital sphere” of the “controversial life we all lead,” by opposing to it “a paragraph on which I stumbled in a newspaper.” He quotes it in full: A shocking child murder has just been committed at Nottingham. A girl named Wragg left the workhouse there on Saturday morning with her young illegitimate child. The child was soon afterward found dead on Mapperly Hills, having been strangled. Wragg is in custody. (CA, 40) Arnold makes this contrast in order to launch his aesthetic turn. Not as a matter of content—he doesn’t reach towards a masterpiece of literature, or other humanistic reassurance as evidence of our best selves—but in his critical handling of the contrast between these bulletins from ordinary life. “In juxtaposition with the absolute eulogies of Sir Charles Adderley and Mr. Roebuck, how eloquent, how suggestive are those few lines!” Because, Arnold goes on to explain, If we are to talk of ideal perfection . . . has anyone reflected what a touch of grossness in our race, what an original shortcoming in the

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more delicate spiritual perceptions, is shown by the natural growth amongst us of such hideous names,—Higginbottom, Stiggins, Bugg! . . . And the final touch,—short, bleak, and inhuman: Wragg is in custody. The sex lost in the confusion of our unrivalled happiness; or (shall I say?) the superfluous Christian name lopped off by the straightforward vigour of our old Anglo-Saxon breed! There is profit for the spirit in such contrasts as this; criticism serves the cause of perfection by establishing them. By eluding sterile conflict, by refusing to remain in the sphere where alone narrow and relative conceptions have any worth and validity, criticism may diminish its momentary importance, but only in this way has it a chance of gaining admittance for those wider and more perfect conceptions to which all its duty is really owed. Mr. Roebuck will have a poor opinion of an adversary who replies to his defiant songs of triumph only by murmuring under his breath, Wragg is in custody; but in no other way will these songs of triumph be induced gradually to moderate themselves, to get rid of what in them is excessive and offensive, and to fall into a softer and truer key. (CA, 41; italics in original) What is going on here? Lamenting the ugliness of Anglo-Saxon names, Arnold appears to give up the grounds of a more appropriate indignation—and so terribly to miss the social point. He adopts the role of aesthete, pronouncing on the qualities of names in a way that may repel the reader (many of Arnold’s own critics have taken offense)—but to a calculated effect.58 Maybe there is something ugly about Adderley’s “Anglo-Saxon race” after all. Arnold does not critique Adderley and Roebuck by bringing to bear an experimental empiricism in order to test their claims: turning (as Mill would) to the facts in order to ask, for example, for evidence as to whether English liberty and free trade really do benefit people as fully and widely as the honorable members claim.59 Arnold’s irony evades, with Elian obliquity, the arguments a reader might expect from a public critic. Even for the sympathetic critic John Gross, for instance, who claims Arnold showed us “perhaps more forcibly than any English critic, that questions of taste are also questions of morality,” this moment goes too far; it is a “piece of snobbery” that “leaves an unpleasant taste behind.”60 But given, precisely, the seriousness with which Arnold considers taste, we must suspect that he intends an excess here, to pull us up short: his response highlights—by an absurd extremity—his aesthetic turn, and so insists upon what cannot be recognized within the frame of Tory against Radical. The reader must consider whether some offense ought to be taken, as Arnold shifts, with all too great a flourish, from the political to the aesthetic register—and moves from the ugliness of Wragg’s name to the ugliness of the style, the manner, of Wragg’s handling. The aesthetic and the ethical modes are joined, and the grounds of valuation are shifted. This is how, Arnold points out, the aesthetic idea provides both a diversion from and

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a more concrete handling of social experience: by which “criticism may diminish its momentary importance” in order to “gain a chance of gaining admittance for those wider and more perfect conceptions” (CA, 41). Arnold’s criticism teaches, not a hermeneutic of depth (the paragraph was simply “stumbled upon” in a newspaper), but the impertinent use of what is on the surface. And not by application of a fixed law or precept, but by what Roland Barthes calls a “non-pertinent, im-pertinent” discourse, by means of an essayistic voice that “speak[s] in implying, in making understood that every paradigm is badly put.” By “paradigm,” Barthes employs a term from linguistics to suggest a grammatical structure that offers apparently mutually exclusive choices, which form a closed system: like Arnold’s “perfectly unvital sphere.” Echoing the word with which Arnold described his own project, Barthes names this impertinent mode “sweetness”: I would suggest calling the nonviolent refusal of reduction, the parrying of the generality by inventive, unexpected, nonparadigmatizable behaviour, the elegant and discreet flight in the face of dogmatism, in short, the principle of tact, I would call it, all being said: sweetness.61 This approach relies on a faux-polite impertinence; Arnold and Barthes share a sweet technique of tact. They show us the way apparent diversions from realism, momentary diminishments of importance, may widen possibilities of the moment. Arnold repeats this technique. He wrote most of his essays in response to controversies.62 In Culture and Anarchy, he comments on a series of them: arguments for and against the Irish church, for example, or about divorce laws, or Mormonism. Although the subjects vary, Arnold makes consistent use of them. With each controversy, he is at pains to show that, whatever the importance of their subject, each side only touches the other, and that “neither one nor the other, in themselves, touch the human spirit vitally at all” (CA, 156). They require a more distracted approach. In his 1869 preface to the second edition of his Essays in Criticism, Arnold noted the volume of criticism his essays had received over the four years of its publication. While explaining that it is “not in my nature—some of my critics would say, not in my power—to dispute on behalf of any opinion, even my own, very obstinately,” Arnold does defend his impertinence. He replies to an accusation about a particularly glib moment with the reflection that perhaps his critic “would be more indulgent to my vivacity, if he considered that we are none of us likely to be lively much longer. My vivacity is but the last sparkle of flame before we are all in the dark, the last glimpse of colour before we all go into drab—the drab of the earnest, prosaic, practical, austerely literal future” (CW, III, 287).63 Since this explanation comes as a preface to his criticism, we should take it as a clue to his critical aims. And since it is offered lightly as an aside, we should know, by now, to take it seriously. Discussing in Culture and Anarchy,

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for instance, the controversy in the House of Commons over the 1866 Deceased Wife’s Sister Bill, Arnold wants to reorient interest in the subject: from whether it should be legal to marry one’s deceased wife’s sister to the process, “as far as the relations of love and marriage are concerned,” of “becoming alive to the finer shades of feeling which arise within these relations, in being able to enter with tact and sympathy into the subtle instinctive propensions and repugnances of the person with whose life his own life is bound up . . . and thus to enlarge his spiritual and intellectual life and liberty” (CA, 167). Philistines legislate before they love. Legal controversy forecloses cultural discussion about how love and marriage might be considered as resources for feeling alive in the world. Marriage here is a metaphor for a connected relation with others, for feeling what others give—as in Milton’s definition of “the end of marriage” as a “meet and happy conversation.”64 By starting with tact, Arnold’s criticism inverts the thinking about forms and experiences he diagnoses: he insists we begin from as rich an idea as possible of the vital quality of the experience, and then turn to the formal arrangements that make these qualities possible—a theme he will develop in his late essay on equality. (One might, in following this process out, even end up with a form other than marriage.) Much of our emancipatory academic cultural criticism works the opposite way: it begins from the forms of oppression, however occluded, then points to their effects.65 Arnold’s version of criticism would complement it.

A Theory of Education Arnold’s critical and educational writings both begin with the forms of knowledge and relation that impoverish vitality; they seek to change the demands that structure a life temporally, from the imperative of economic dogma to divining a form of the future that does not sacrifice to it the fullness of present experience. In his 1884 essay on Emerson, Arnold reports he was inspecting a classroom where he found children reading a piece of poetry on the common theme that we are here to-day and gone tomorrow. I shall soon be gone, the speaker in the poem was made to say,— And I shall be glad to go, For the world at best is a weary place, And my pulse is getting low. How usual a language of popular religion that is. . . . But then our popular religion, in disparaging happiness here below, knows very well what it is after. It has an eye on the future life above the clouds, in the New Jerusalem. . . . And so long as his ideal stands fast, it is very well. But for many it now stands fast no longer. (CW, X, 184)

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This anecdote follows a reflection on the denigration of pleasure in English society, a society where the quality of immediate experience is sacrificed to an imagined national millennium of perfect prosperity. “Mr. Gladstone” may be right, Arnold writes in Culture and Anarchy, to insist on “the present great movement towards wealth and industrialism, in order to lay broad foundations of material well-being for the society of the future.” But in the meantime, “passing generations of industrialists . . . are sacrificed to it.” Dictating to the young the obsessive pursuit of sports may produce “a better and sounder physical type for the future to work with.” But “our passing generation of boys and young men is[,] in the meantime, sacrificed” (CA, 72). Most of all, Arnold insists, a fixation on industrial strength has sacrificed the poor. They are neglected, as an abstract future is served by the pursuit of “our social progress,” which becomes “one triumphant and enjoyable course of what is sometimes called, vulgarly, outrunning the constable” (CA, 169–170). From the Chancellor of the Exchequer to the provincial classroom, a relation of bad optimism, a tone of pernicious triumph, sacrifices present experience.66 But the classroom, for Arnold, was a site not only for diagnosis of these relations but also for their renegotiation. Arnold understood something about the role of education in the formation of the liberal subject (what critics, after Althusser, would term “interpellation”), but he did not only promote its disciplinary functions. His theory of education consists of encouraging essays in apprehension, in order that resources might be found for emancipating an individual towards an “adequate” handling of the modern world. This aim joins Arnold’s educational writings to his critical writings. Arnold outlines the stakes of this emancipatory aim in his 1863 essay “Heinrich Heine.” He justifies Goethe’s self-description as a “liberator” of the German people, because, understanding that people in “modern times” are faced with inherited conditions of “an immense system of institutions, established facts, accredited dogmas, customs, rules” (this is modernity figured as lateness, as overwhelming in the depth of historical convention at which it arrives) and the question of an adequate response to them, he puts the standard, once and for all, inside every man instead of outside him; when he is told, such a thing must be so, there is immense authority and custom in favour of its being so, it has been held to be so for a thousand years, he answers with Olympian politeness, “But is it so? is it so to me?” Nothing could be more really subversive of the foundations on which the old European order rested. (CW, III, 110; italics in original) Arnold presents Goethe’s injunction as a moral reformation. This demand contains the practice of criticism; education cultivates the capacity to make it. We have seen Arnold, in his criticism, recur to scenes of biblical interpretation as a metaphor for this practice, which he wanted to see in the classrooms he visited. This is what Arnold means when, in his 1868 inspector’s report on

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the Wesleyan training college at Westminster, he calls for an “evangelical” education; he cites the German sense of this word, Evangelisch, which “means simply the man who goes to the New Testament . . . on contradistinction from any man who goes to any other authority for it—the authority of the Church, of tradition, of the Pope . . . it is in this sense alone that the State in its relations with schools should consent to employ the term.”67 To this end, then, it is important to recognize that Arnold’s theory of pedagogy is not pastoral; it does not posit the transmission of information, however elevating, from pastor to flock. And yet this is always the basis on which Arnold’s critics have sought to dismiss him. An 1866 Daily Telegraph article, for instance, dubbed him our “high-priest of the kid-gloved persuasion,” an “elegant Jeremiah”; and thus like his biblical, if less dapper, counterpart, an explainer of truth to the masses.68 At first glance, this sobriquet seems to stick, and to summarize Arnold’s enduring reputation now. Isn’t he the one who gave us, with his famous theory of “touchstones,” the first literary canon? Didn’t he call for an educated minority, a Coleridgean clerisy, to ensure state oversight of the development of culture in society? Isn’t all this the very essence of secular pastoral authority? Lauren Goodlad has proposed that pastoral governance was the primary way that power formed subjects in Victorian Britain.69 After all, Britain, unlike France or Germany at this time, didn’t have much of a state to speak of: the sociologist Max Weber pointed to the curious fact that Britain may have been the first state to develop modern capitalism, but it was also “the slowest of all countries to succumb to bureaucratization.”70 Disciplinary power in Victorian Britain functioned through the direct pedagogy of interpersonal relations: between schoolmaster and students, home visitor and visitees, vicar and flock. In this way, “the normativising tendencies of civilization,” Goodlad suggests, were embedded in “everyday socializing processes.”71 Goodlad aligns these processes with the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of “habitus,” which means the reproduction of hierarchical social structure through the dispositions, tastes, styles, and habits of individuals. Goodlad’s argument is important, and would appear to have particular relevance to Arnold. Statist and nonstatist critiques of Victorian discipline have agreed that Arnold called for a clerisy of the cultivated to guide the masses.72 He furthered the work of the state as Bourdieu defines it, which “brings into existence by naming and distinguishing.”73 The power of the state defines and enforces social hierarchies because it defines people according to the attitudes and behavior appropriate to the social class to which they belong.74 This happens at the level of personal relations, and the subtle, normativizing formation by those who know of those who don’t. It is one account of how education works. It was certainly the point of education for contemporaneous theorists and policy makers like Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, who defended the pastoral functions of education against its more narrow conception, endorsed by Robert

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Lowe, vice president of the Committee of Council on Education, as the transmission of measurable skills suited to status. (Narrow, but orthodox: Sir Charles Adderley was Lowe’s predecessor on the council, where he had maintained that “any attempt to keep children of the labouring classes under intellectual culture after the very earliest age at which they could earn their living, would be as arbitrary and improper as it would be to keep the boys at Eton and Harrow at spade labour.”)75 Kay-Shuttleworth, in his July 1861 “Letter to Earl Granville” (a public document addressed to the Lord President of Council), accused Lowe’s model of education of being concerned only with economic doctrine, and of limiting the education of the poor to increasing their efficiency in labor, and so neglecting the responsibility of the state to “civilize” its subjects. The “uncivilized classes,” countered Kay-Shuttleworth, must be “trained by example and discipline; they are, as minors are, the care of governing classes.”76 KayShuttleworth’s and Lowe’s rival definitions of education clashed in the 1862 controversy over the “Revised Code,” which determined schools’ eligibility for state grants with a series of standardized tests of students—“payment by results.” In the name of efficiency, the Revised Code sought to cut state support for education by around two-fifths, Arnold estimated.77 Arnold, at some risk to his career, opposed Lowe’s Revised Code in his first periodical essay.78 “The Twice Revised Code” (1862) was intended to convey the objections of the “Letter to Earl Granville” to a wider audience. Literary critics and historians of education have read this moment as Arnold’s conversion to Kay-Shuttleworth’s pastoralist faith in state education; they connect it to the call for an educated clerisy to guide the masses, which Arnold made in his 1864 essay on “The Literary Influence of Academies.”79 But while Arnold does assert that schools “civilize the neighbourhood in which they are placed” better than do prisons, which, Arnold suggests, no one is seeking to defund by test score, he does not repeat Kay-Shuttleworth’s definition of education as the personal influence of teachers (CW, II, 228). Kay-Shuttleworth likens the teacher to a “missionary” by whom poor children may be “rescued” into civilization, and describes how education “infiltrates from the upper and governing classes to the lower.”80 But nowhere does Arnold repeat these scenes of clerical life.81 “The Twice-Revised Code” refrains from descriptions of educational experience. Arnold prefers general to particular terms, endorsing, for instance, the recommendation of a Royal Commission that “maintenance grants” that maintain the “general character” of a given school be prioritized over “prize grants” that reward the performance of individual students (CW, II, 218). When he does make specific recommendations, they are about the quality of classroom materials, or the length of pupils’ school careers.82 Arnold’s main point in this essay is about the best relationship between the state and popular education: the Revised Code would substitute “for the idea of a debt and a

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duty on the State’s part towards this” with “the idea of a free gift, a gratuitous boon of prizes,” and “for a supervision of the whole movement of popular education—its method, its spirit, and its tendency,—a mechanical examination of certain scholars” in a few subjects (CW, II, 240–241). Arnold calls for the state to define the aim of education as the furtherance of equality, and to recognize the “understandable desire of the lower classes to raise themselves” to a greater share of cultural resources, a desire he claims is too strongly resisted in Britain by a “tide of reactionary sentiment against everything supposed to be in the least akin to democracy” (CW, II, 226). A citizen’s relationship to the state, Arnold insists in his book on secondary education, A French Eton, ought not to be “that of a dependent to a paternal benefactor,” but “that of a member in a partnership of a whole firm.” His model of education is not the cultivation of a parental elite who might diffuse knowledge; it is based rather in the diffusion of the conditions of an invigorating creativity in everyday life, which, as he put it in the “Function of Criticism,” even if it is not capable of the highest art, might still be exercised in “well-doing,” or “learning” or “even in criticizing” (CA, 28). Concluding his 1868 report on continental education to the Schools Enquiry Commission, Arnold stressed that no one should be excluded from a “general, liberal training,” insisting that “the grand thing in teaching is to have faith that some aptitudes of this kind everyone has” (CW, IV, 300). An education worth the name puts the future in play, and unsettles the hierarchical partition of capacities in advance. Arnold’s writings on education take up the question of what the theorist Jacques Rancière has called the “distribution of the sensible.” Arnold realizes, to borrow from Rancière’s relational understanding of the stakes of education, that the “distribution of knowledges is only socially efficacious to the extent that it is also a redistribution of positions.”83 Since for Arnold, as I have suggested, everyone’s a critic, this capacity becomes a basis for an egalitarian politics. The classroom text itself becomes the object of handling, occupying the space between people; each person can have their own thoughts, while collaborating in a shared middle space. It shares aims with those of the early nineteenth-century French pedagogue Joseph Jacotot. Rancière quotes approvingly Jacotot’s granting of the text as a middle space of interaction (a variant on the Winnicottian middle space of interaction discussed in chapter 1) the central place in the classroom. It is “the only bridge of communication between two minds.” The bridge is a “passage,” Rancière explains, “but it is also a distance maintained. The materiality of the book keeps two minds at an equal distance, whereas explication is the annihilation of one mind by another.”84 Jacotot is an “ignorant schoolmaster”; it is the same ignorance, a refusal of knowing, that we have seen Arnold’s essays call for repeatedly. A tactful refusal of information maintains a virtual space of interaction that, while it connects other minds, does not demand to know them.

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Arnold’s criticism and his educational theory are two sides of the same coin. We can’t really explain one without the other. “It was . . . disgraceful to England,” insisted John Churton Collins, that great campaigner for the discipline and dignity of English literature, that Arnold “should have had to execute some of the most beautiful poems and some of the most precious critical essays in our language, as he actually did, in elementary schools.”85 But Arnold’s writings on education are joined to his better-known essays in criticism by his framework for seeing object as it really is. Arnold began work as a school inspector in 1851; his educational writings describe the grounds of tact that his public criticism demands. So when the publisher Alexander Macmillan approached him about a school text of Johnson’s Lives of the Poets with “notes of an illustrative and explanatory kind,” Arnold responded with his view of the kinds of materials that schools should obtain: “I am against having many notes. Let us not aim at a school-book, but rather at a literary book which schools can and will use.” This apparently slight distinction—between the information supplied by the “school-book,” and the uses of the “literary book”—indicates Arnold’s wider principles. In the preface to his edition of the Lives, published in 1878 (also published as an essay in Macmillan’s Magazine in the same year), Arnold provided an educational manifesto. He returns to the distinction he suggested in his letter to Macmillan, rejecting any method by which quantities of information are “thrown upon our minds” in favor of something we can use. He advises the selection of “a certain series of works to serve as what the French . . . call points de repère,—points which stand as so many natural centres, and by returning to which we can always find our way again, if we are embarrassed” (CW, VIII, 308). “Points de repère” is not one of Arnold’s enduring slogans, but it was a new way of teaching literature. Arnold’s points are a complement to his touchstones, and an idea about the kinds of thinking that might allow for the diffusion of the experience of literature: as if what was wanted were landmarks in exploration, and not information to be learned or a hierarchy of values to be acquiesced in. Its importance was not lost on the critic George Saintsbury who, in evaluating Arnold’s legacy in 1899, asserted that the preface’s “opening passage about the points de repère itself, the fixed halting-place to which we can always resort for fresh starts . . . is one of the great critical loci of the world, and especially involves the main contribution of the nineteenth century to criticism if not to literature altogether.”86 It is a startling thing for Saintsbury to say: it is as if Arnold’s classroom recommendations provided a new definition of criticism itself, a new way of handling literary works. The text is not explained, but rather offered to be used, within a framework that enables individual students to handle the material themselves, make meaning for themselves “out of what materials they

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have at hand,” just as Arnold had described in his “poetical” practice of monolingual “translation” in his “Last Words.” This is how, Arnold proposes, the “knowledge and sure tact” of Johnsonian criticism might be made part of a student’s everyday experience. Arnold’s method requires a redistribution of material texts, to transform Johnson’s Lives from a “work to stand in a library” into a “text book . . . in the hands of every one who desires even so much as a general acquaintance with English literature.” Successive editions were produced in large print runs, in Britain and America; and Arnold was an advocate for cheaper reading material for the public: “I praise cheap books and insist on the need for them.”87 But the method also requires the redistribution of experience: the democratization of the critical sensibility in a practice of tact, and the supersession of the authority of the master by that of a shared literary work to be handled—to “cry halves,” in Lamb’s phrase, to the text. Arnold draws on his experience of school inspection to assert that “we give the learner too much to do, and we are overzealous to tell him what he ought to think.” He opposes such pedagogy to quote Johnson’s call for the provision of materials for a certain kind of “experience,” an experience that fosters a practice of comparison in students, so that they may “distinguish, reject and prefer” for themselves. The “aim and end of education through letters is to get this experience,” Arnold insists, while “our being told by another what its results will properly be found to be, is not, even if we are told aright, at all the same thing as getting the experience for ourselves.” (This aim suggests a source in Arnold’s educational thought for I. A. Richards’s Practical Criticism, and so for later conventions of close reading in the classroom.)88 Arnold goes on to insist that the teacher is not the source of the experience, but rather its tactful safeguard: to place the teacher at the center of the class is the most fundamental mistake, Arnold suggests, for what if “we are not the power in letters for our century which [Johnson] was for his. We may be pedantic, obscure, dull,—everything that bores, rather than everything that stimulates; and so Johnson and his Lives will repel, and will not be received, because we insist on being received along with them” (CW, VIII, 309–310). Through his impertinently retreating, provocative yet distancing mode, Arnold sought to follow this advice in his essays just as he recommended it to classrooms.89 This is not to claim that Arnold has no ambivalence about democratic criticism. A passage in the first (1869) edition of Culture and Anarchy, for instance, recommends draconian punishment for participants in an apparent scene of criticism in process; the 1866 Hyde Park riots at a Reform League demonstration for extension of the franchise. He quotes with approval his father’s endorsement of the “Roman way” of dealing with rioters: “flog the rank and file, and fling the leaders from the Tarpeian rock!”90 Arnold removed this passage from subsequent editions of the book, but it has remained notorious.

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It represents for many critics Arnold’s true endorsement of patrician politics and his contemptuous attitude towards democratic struggle and redistributions of authority, which is usually kept better hidden behind Arnold’s barricades of bonhomie. But, granting Arnold the capacity of his ambivalence, we can see his countervailing, egalitarian tendency in another, understudied, omission from subsequent editions of Culture and Anarchy. Also in the preface to the 1869 edition, Arnold insists on an equality of intelligence and the capacity for a free play of thought. The possession of culture depends not so much, Arnold argues, on the quality of the books one owns, or the pastors who shepherd one to knowledge, but rather on whether one has access to the kind of experience Arnold calls for in his preface to Johnson, the Schillerian experience of the critical play of thought itself. This is what culture means, says Arnold: hence, if “a man without books or reading, or reading nothing but his letters and the newspapers, gets nevertheless a fresh and free play of the best thoughts upon his stock notions and habits, he has got culture. . . . This inward operation is the very life and essence of culture as we conceive it.”91 This is, for Arnold, rather a risky way of proposing a distinctly literary sensibility, since it would be easy to accuse him of dropping literature entirely (Arnold consistently claimed that literature was undervalued and under threat).92 The cancellation of this passage illustrates a central problem for Arnold: how can one be sure of the validity of such an “inward operation”? How could it be taught? Arnold takes up the question directly in his yearly reports made as an inspector of elementary schools between 1852 and 1882. His recommendations in these reports display his awareness that rules for this education cannot be set; instead it requires a framework of tact. Arnold insists in his 1860 report that his idea of cultivation cannot be attained by the teaching of “rules” to pupil teachers, but in introducing an object of appreciation, “which has a value in itself whether it leads to something more or not, and which, in happy natures, will probably lead to this something more. The learning by heart extracts from great authors is such a lesson.” This kind of educational practice and experience, Arnold remarks, was formerly only available to the rich (R, 94–95). (Arnold was inspecting ordinary provincial schools, where pupil teachers, themselves children as young as thirteen, were being trained to instruct large classes.) Too often, Arnold remarks, the education of the poor is seen as a mechanical filling up of stocks of information; he wants taught instead the practice and the privilege of a less “correct” attitude. Arnold calls this tact: “ignorance is nothing,” Arnold asserts, compared to the serious condition of a “want of tact and apprehensiveness” (R, 106). Arnold doesn’t want to teach the poor the habitus of the rich, with an education system as a kind of domestic imperialism, turning out mimic men of the class system, Headstones obsessed with Wrayburns.93 He wants to provide poor students with a kind of experience that had been formerly and formally denied them. His

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education reports dissuade teachers from distinguishing middle- from lowerclass students by addressing them as “miss” or “master,” and he urged that classes should be of mixed gender (R, 79). Arnold links tact to “apprehension” and so suggests that it involves both a kind of holding and a kind of caution: the careful manner of handling his father had lacked. He insists as the privilege of teacher and students alike a freedom from the kind of exactitude in knowing for which he chides Frances Newman in his Homer lectures. His report for 1874 elaborates this theme. “Scientific” laws of observation are overstated, Arnold claims, when they cause pupils (here pupil-teacher candidates) to paraphrase the line from Thomas Campbell’s Gertrude of Wyoming, “As monumental bronze unchanged his look,” with the words “His countenance was fixed as though it had been a memorial of copper and zinc.” (Arnold drily notes that had the scientific equivalent for bronze been given correctly the reading would have been no better). What is missing here is the framework for a more tactful and appreciative observation, the kind that doesn’t seek the definitive answer as to an object’s meaning, but rather “observation, the tact acquired by observation, which tells us that the scientific equivalent for bronze is here out of place and ludicrous” (R, 178). A sense of the ludicrous is a first step to Arnold’s liberating tact of impertinence. Arnold wants to provide pupil teachers with an experience like his own liberation from Franklin at the scene from Job that he reports in Culture and Anarchy: to gain their own apprehension of a work, which escapes thralldom to a dominant discourse and vocabulary. In his 1878 report, Arnold explains his recommendation of the recitation of poetry in schools on the basis of its contribution to the “opening of the soul and the imagination, for which the central purchase should be found in that poetry” (R, 215; italics in original). Arnold uses the word “purchase” to describe granting of the landmarks and coordinates of his points de repère. He is careful to emphasize, in his final (1882) report, that such a “poetry exercise” is not a test of information. Rather, the poetry is offered for a purchase on a “creative activity” that “relieve[s] the passive reception of knowledge.” Children might learn at school the distinction on which he had insisted in Culture and Anarchy: between knowledge considered “as a matter of words” and a relational sense of knowledge, which they are able to “perceive and feel” for themselves. Arnold comments that although “people talk contemptuously of ‘learning lines by heart,’ if a child is brought, as he easily can be brought, to throw himself into a piece of poetry, an exercise of creative activity has been set up in him” (R, 257; italics in original).94 A maxim of Bishop Butler provides the last words of Arnold’s reports to the Committee of Council: “ ‘Of education,’ says Butler, ‘information itself is really the least part’ ” (R, 259; italics in original). Arnold does not see any sense in insisting on examining students by paraphrase when they have never been offered the experience of literature as their

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own. Two years before he criticized the results of the Thomas Campbell paraphrase, Arnold had replied to a letter from William Seward, a “working man at Bedford,” who had sent him an essay on the “Advancement and Contentment of the Working Classes.” Arnold praises Seward’s essay, except for its insistence on education only in “useful” knowledge, as if the poorer classes ought only to acquire instrumental information. “And as to useful knowledge,” says Arnold, “a single line of poetry, working in the mind, may produce more thoughts and lead to more light, which is what man wants, than the fullest acquaintance (to take your own instance) with the processes of digestion.”95 Arnold took Seward’s views seriously (he quotes from his correspondence with him about popular religion in his first preface to his 1873 Literature and Dogma), but he insists on the dangers of neglecting in education the relational experience of discrimination that he thought it the first duty of an education system to supply. It is no simple undertaking to propose a space of free play without its content, and to prescribe a framework for ideas without fixing its ideals. The strain accounts for the strangeness of another of Arnold’s essays in public education, “The Study of Poetry,” which was an introduction to Macmillan’s 1880 anthology for the common reader English Poets. Here Arnold elaborates his theory of “touchstones,” representative literary passages that set the standard of quality by which all poetry may be measured. It is a questionable undertaking, and has been understood (after its inheritance and interpretation by twentieth-century critics) as an undemocratic self-investiture of critical authority.96 Our reading of this essay must recall Arnold’s use of “touchstones” in Culture and Anarchy: they are for our evocation, not our veneration. Arnold certainly declares strong opinions, but his merit (in this essay, seemingly despite himself ) is that he won’t let go of dubiety. He wants to encourage the same kind of “uses” of poetry his school reports recommend. He begins by urging that we take seriously the idea that poetry is “capable of higher uses,” that literary texts can become the shared objects of creative thought. To this end, he wants to set standards by selecting texts that might safeguard the experience of the free play of the mind, by virtue of their irrefutable quality. His essay echoes his school reports, which lament the low quality of classroom material. But this aim doesn’t really work. The safeguards of literary experience cannot be anchored in touchstones. Arnold’s attempts at selection are so restless and unstable that he keeps grinding down his touchstones in order to find the purest specimens. He ends up with very little: a line here and a line there, a scattering of dust. The more consistent pattern in the essay is that the lines that do make the grade are repeatedly hedged with a qualifying conditional clause; touchstones only become “infallible” guides to literary experience “if we have any tact,” or “if we have tact and can use them” (CW, VI, 168, 170).

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Lapidary certitude is lost as Arnold returns to a subjective attitude of relation that he cannot define too closely. (“I am my one touchstone. / This is a test more hard. / Than any ever known.”—as the poet Thom Gunn put it in 1957.)97 Arnold is returned to the problem of teaching tact, and his earlier, selfcensored reflection that even newspaper readers may be cultured, should they possess an admirable way of handling things. On a suspicious reading, all this vagueness, this fine faith in a tactful way of handling things, could look like a cover story, a smokescreen obfuscating a power grab. As Herbert Tucker has glossed the call for tact in this essay: “Arnold means to forbid all appeal to techniques or rules for reading, and to throw us back, on the shortest of rations, towards those critical resources summed up in the curt word ‘tact.’ ” This “virtually survivalist exercise in intellectual deprivation,” Tucker suggests, while it “conjures a charmed space for the privacy of literary response . . . also creates an ideological vacuum” and “what rushes in to fill this space” is “the authoritarianism of a cult of personality.”98 But what if we understood Arnold’s explicit deprivation as a search for implicit gains? The vagueness of Arnold’s demands—for the mediating “something” of his poetry, the “idea” of his essays, and the “experience” of his education writings—perform the predicament of the pedagogue: how to teach thinking without teaching what to think. “Compliance with the conventional” is “simply fatal,” Arnold would declare in an 1875 public speech at the Royal Academy (CW, VIII, 375). Arnold’s method seeks to deprive the field of certain knowledge in order to expand its resources of relation.

Equality Arnold’s faith in an implicit tact asserts local, relational modes, in private, as the foundation for public claims—and in particular for claims to equality. Arnold’s later essays develop the themes of his poetry, criticism, and educational writings to focus on equality as his explicit concern. In the preface to his Mixed Essays (1879) Arnold insists that criticism of literature seeks a more vital human life in society. British society, he points out, champions liberty against absolutism, but “of the love of equality we English have little” (CW, VIII, 371). And yet “the one insuperable objection to inequality is the same as the one insuperable objection to absolutism: namely, that inequality, like absolutism, thwarts a vital instinct, and being against nature, is against our humanization. On the one side, in fact, inequality harms by pampering; on the other, by vulgarizing and depressing” (CW, VIII, 372). Literature, through the touchstones it provides, evoking us restlessly to wider and richer lives, is good for us. But Arnold doesn’t think simply doling it out and watching its effects is sufficient for a national understanding of education. Whatever the salutary effects of literature, Arnold insists in this preface, it is of

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limited use outside a culture of equality: “it cannot do all. In other words, literature is a part of civilization; it is not the whole” (370). So criticism must demand the relations that would make literature efficacious. Arnold’s commitment to equality, which was, in the words of Stefan Collini, “deliberately heterodox and remarkably radical,” is grounded in the principles he developed over his critical and educational writings, about what life with others in society is for, and about what kind of relational tact might ensure it (CA, xxiii). It is the consequence of his relational claims because it is essential to the kind of society that could provide the frame for the relational modes he believed in. Arnold’s preface prepares his reader for the importance of one of the essays from the 1879 collection, in which he expounds this view most fully. “Equality” was first delivered as a lecture to the Royal Institution in February 1878 (a bold topic for a privileged audience), and it was published in the Fortnightly Review in May. “Equality before the law we all take as a matter of course,” Arnold suggests at the beginning of his lecture, but “that is not the equality we mean when we talk of equality; and for this Frenchified sense of the term almost everybody in England has a hard word” (CA, 213). But shouldn’t it make us curious, Arnold asks with his usual false ingenuousness, why so many “gifted spirits” from Menander to George Sand, “believe so passionately in it”? He praises the French for the way they have acted on this belief: by restricting the freedom of bequest, and deliberately breaking up the vast concentrations of wealth in few hands that had structured French society before the Revolution and the Code Napoléon. “Equality” recommends to an immensely unequal society the diffusion and redistribution of wealth. Arnold’s argument dismisses the abstract principles or natural laws that would justify extreme wealth disparity because material equality is for him the necessary frame for the relational equality he calls for in his poetry, essays, and education reports. This is equality in the service of a more vital life, not in service of the banality that everyone is the same: “socialistic and communistic schemes have generally . . . a fatal defect,” says Arnold, when “they are content with too low and material a standard of well-being” (CA, 224).99 Inequality, rather, thrives on a defensive banality in demanding the right to property before all other values. It also coarsens the culture of public discourse because, by entrenching divisions, it diminishes the possible modes of address between people and makes available a ready armory of contempt. Turning from the ugliness of lives in an unequal society, Arnold proposes “clearing our minds as to the uses of equality” on a national scale (CA, 221). The desire for equality must follow from taking seriously “the power of social life and manners”: [U]nless we have cultivated it, we are incomplete. The impulse for cultivating it is not, indeed, a moral impulse. It is by no means identical with the moral impulse to help our neighbour and do him good. Yet in

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many ways it works to a like end. It brings men together, makes them feel in need of one another, be considerate of one another, understand one another. But above all things, it is a promoter of equality. It is by the humanity of their manners that men are made equal . . . and in such a community great social inequalities have really no meaning, while they are at the same time a menace and an embarrassment to perfect ease of social intercourse. (CA, 223) Manners are not a matter of Kantian moral imperative; to think of them as a duty easily becomes an excuse for a too-righteous Hebraism and grounds for superiority: for knowing others, and knowing what is best for them. Intriguingly, Arnold’s distinction between manners and morals here contains an assertion that manners are better at achieving what it is he thinks morals should be for: an understanding of our need for, our exposure to, and our dependence on one another. A moral imagination has its social conditions. Arnold cites the art critic Philip Hamerton’s observation that the French peasantry is “exceedingly ignorant.” This ignorance, says Hamerton, coexists with their being “at the same time full of intelligence; their manners are excellent, they have delicate perceptions, they have tact. . . . If you talk to one of them . . . he will enter into conversation with you quite easily . . . with a pleasant combination of dignity and quiet humour” (CA, 224–225). The point of this example is to suggest that what seems at first a flaw is revealed to be a strength. (Arnold prepares our response to this quotation by the way it echoes the rhetorical structure of his essay, which announces its aim to reappraise a vice as a virtue. It begins with English assumptions that French equality is a cause of economic woe, only to revaluate it as the source of the vitality of French culture.) An intelligent manner, a true tact, relies on a kind of ignorance. By contrast, Arnold reflects, too often in Britain people from different class backgrounds cannot communicate at all—they feel there is a “wall of partition” between them, that “they seem to live in two different worlds”—because, he implies, they think they know one another. They know their social status, and so know their corresponding desires, “their pleasures, recreations, eating and drinking and so on.” On which grounds, the upper classes declare the lower “unpalatable and impossible” (CA, 225). But knowing that people desire, without prescribing desire’s content, is to trace the grounds of equality, and “a world where people make the same sort of demands upon life, in things of this sort, which he himself does” (CA, 225). This is not to insist on communication through a single standard of taste for everyone. Like Hazlitt in his essay “Vulgarity and Affectation” (see chapter 1) Arnold locates a ground for equality in the shared activity of making demands on life: in likings and dislikings. A lot of work, and a great deal of space, is maintained by Arnold’s vague “things of this sort” because the task Arnold describes is neither a recognition of sameness nor an affirmation of

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difference, and an identification not with specific demands but with desire itself. Arnold concludes his essay with the claim that modern society is “ill at ease.” The “remedy is social equality.” It is the task set before all who are “bent on seeing things as they really are” (CA, 239). Returning to his famous slogan, Arnold signals the link between this essay and his critical and educational projects: his consistent search for a tactful relational frame that would allow everybody the creative handling of their own experience, and the consequent demands for changes in social practices and forms—in public discourse, in education, in material resources—that this frame requires. Throughout his career, Arnold maintained a lightness of touch and remained, in his father’s words, “not apt to fix,” precisely because he was committed to the necessary vagueness of his project, which might demand this change without foreclosing its potential. This same vagueness has made Arnold’s inheritance to us now difficult to evaluate or finally to sum up; he remains clearly a representative of criticism—one of its most famous representatives —while the function of criticism remains a contested subject. Arnold’s own criticism, he insisted, was a criticism of virtuality, of possible relations, to be never finally achieved (“we shall die in the wilderness” he declares in “The Function of Criticism”; CA, 51). His was not the dominant voice of his time; but it maintained that all lives are expansive, and deserve the resources for this expansion, for “a creative relation to their own life,” and for a leading out to wider spheres. All Arnold’s hopes for tact are founded in its demand for education, and the demand of an education towards equality.

ch a P T er Fou r

The Grounds of Tact george eL io T ’s r age

george eLioT, The noveLisT, is about as central to the British literary canon (however we define or contest that term) as it is possible for a novelist to be. But her essays are eccentric. They don’t fit in. Eliot’s essays were written in London in a concentrated period, between 1851 and 56, when she was employed as the de facto editor of the Westminster Review.1 It was perhaps the most turbulent period in her life: she was a single woman of limited means, who had come to London from rural Warwickshire, without many connections and under strained relations with her family. For most of this period, she lived in the house of her employer, the nominal editor of the Westminster Review, John Chapman—and with Chapman’s wife and Chapman’s mistress. Passionate and anguishing scenes between the four of them were, if exciting, taxingly frequent. It was a time, as one critic has put it—passing a little too quickly over possible connections between these two realms—of “sexual fiddlefaddle . . . as well as of high intellectual pursuits.”2 During this time of upheaval, Eliot (then Marian Evans—George Eliot was the pseudonym that marked the advent of her prose fiction) felt radically isolated, and all too aware that certain pressing forms of knowledge, culturally available doctrines for living, either offered her little or were painfully constraining. Eliot’s essays seem markedly different from her novels—the writing for which she would, over a longer time, become so famous. Nor do they seem to fit in with the theme of this book—with any unfolding story about the tact of the essay form. For they are not tactful. They are, in fact, rather blunt; and they are surprisingly angry in tone. I say “surprisingly” angry for two reasons. First, because other people’s anger is often surprising: there can be something instructive about this. “In my bad temper,” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips suggests, “I expose my furtive utopianism.”3 An access of anger in someone reveals their sense of what they are entitled to, and how it isn’t happening: [ 97 ]

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the ways in which they feel the world should be otherwise than it is. There are, we know, many uninspiring responses to experiences of rage, in oneself or others, but Eliot came up with a creative one—in the writing of essays, and more specifically essays that grapple with a particular conviction, or mode of knowing, that provoked her rage through the way it seemed too much to organize the world around her; a conviction that is formally seductive and so all the more invidious, and which Eliot calls the “doctrine of Compensation.” But, second, it is a surprise in more specific terms: a surprise to find—just at the moment when this persona was being formed—George Eliot so angry. For anyone who has read her novels, it must seem counterintuitive to talk about Eliot’s rage. While critics like Neil Hertz have excavated subtle forms of violence behind her poise, Eliot as narrator never loses her temper; she is an acknowledged virtuoso of tone, maintaining a calm and steady gaze through all emotional weather.4 Indeed, Eliot’s capacity for a serene sympathy is so famous as to be among English literature’s most widely known facts. During her own lifetime, Eliot found herself a victim of her own reputation for insightful equanimity, which she felt placed limits on her freedom to be surprising. Complaining to Georgiana Burne-Jones in 1880, when contemplating an unexpected marriage, she remarked on how her reputation for perfect poise had not left her much room for maneuver: “I am so tired of being set on a pedestal and expected to vent wisdom.”5 A fact less often remarked on, however, is that this capacity was rather a long time in coming. Eliot did not begin her career in fiction until she was thirty-nine, and for six years before that, she was an editor and essayist. Her essays, most of which were written for the Westminster Review, are erudite, trenchant, and assertive. But they are not sympathetic; nor are they serene in tone. Most often they are irritable, objurgatory, and more than occasionally contemptuous. I will dwell in this chapter on a momentous but, I think, rather understudied transition in Eliot’s career —a transition both generic (from essay to novel) and attitudinal (from contempt to sympathy)—to suggest how her work as indignant essayist came to shape her more famous novelistic mode. Tactless essays open the way to tactful novels: the resources of the essay form here are marshaled, not to make use of more hospitable modes of mediation, wider repertoires of relation, but rather to protest precisely the lack of any desire for, or attention to them in the culture in which Eliot lived. Essays, for Eliot, are still the form in which our choices of relation are brought to the fore; it is just that, from this point of view, the world’s inadequacies are glaring. Her novels will share her essays’ commitment to an immense aesthetic project: seeking to redescribe the world in such ways as new relationships to it, and states of mind about it, become possible. The task of Eliot’s essays was to find through critique a way in to alternative mediations of the world. More specifically, Eliot’s essays share a tone, a set of themes, and even a project of opposition to a particular mode of relation, none of which is explicitly declared. It is not a sufficient critical approach to the essays to comb them

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for propositions later evidenced in her fiction. But they have usually been read (when read at all) in just this way: as, in the words of critic Finnouala Dillane, a “blueprint for her fiction,” and a “manifesto” for her novels. As raw material from which we might excavate theories (her theory of realism in fiction is set out in her essay on German naturalism, for instance).6 Dillane has rightly warned against this practice, arguing that the essays are works in their own right—and journalism responding to a competitive market. Her “ ‘slashing essays’ on Cumming and Young or on silly novels by lady novelists,” Dillane points out, are not just driven by her antagonism to specific types of religion or specific trends in literature. The articles are periodical essays and by their nature invoke generic features that require the writer to entertain as well as to offer instructive opinion. It is an important and definitive rubric, which she was obliged to adopt to hook an audience.”7 But I think there is a coherent theme to these essays, beyond a response to market forces, which relies on a violence of tone. Much as her audience made demands on her, Eliot as a critic had a specific demand to make of them. She made it repeatedly. They key to this theme is to be found, I think, in Eliot’s apprehension of the ways in which social and aesthetic formal relations condition the kinds of life that are available within a given culture, and her sense of the ways in which the forms of life that are available are made use of and felt as experience. All of Eliot’s writing offers a great insight into the constraint imposed on life by certain forms of knowledge, or knowingness, that drain vitality, or hope, from people’s relationships to the world. Or to put the case more precisely, and inverting these terms: insight into the kinds of knowledge of relational form that shape or obstruct lives. “Meanness of opportunity” is the great theme of Middlemarch, claimed Henry James in his famous 1873 Galaxy review of the novel. James contends that such a formal remedy as Dorothea Brooke’s marriage to the “vague and impalpable” Will Ladislaw offers insufficient “spiritual compensations” for this meanness.8 We might wonder if Middlemarch is more interested in the insufficiency of compensatory logics themselves. The exquisite disappointments suffered by the protagonists of this novel do not originate in a too-certain knowledge of any specific proposition— Dorothea’s idealism or Lydgate’s ambition, say, are vague commitments when described in terms of propositional content (and this vagueness, for some critics, has been at the root of their misfortunes).9 But I don’t think their problem lies in vagueness so much as in the kind of knowing certainty for which this vagueness is paradoxically a support. This certainty lies in their conviction as to what will be the formal shape of their lives: that they will progress towards revelation, whether spiritual or scientific. “Among all forms of mistake,” Eliot’s narrator remarks in refusing to predict the fortunes of that curiously vague character, Will Ladislaw, “prophecy is the most gratuitous.”10

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The Doctrine of Compensation Revelation, to which Eliot links in her essays what she calls the “doctrine of Compensation,” is a formally seductive experience. Eliot diagnosed it as the formal condition in which truth, or an intensity of meaning, is assumed to be couched; and this is a problem, because its form can come to obscure the meaning it supposedly reveals. “Revelation,” the psychoanalyst Leslie Farber has commented, “tends to have a certain loveliness of form that is quite unrelated to—and in fact may be quite in defiance of—what is revealed.” And one can make a habit of it: it is “addictive,” Farber goes on to explain, because “ordinary, fragmentary truth, on a more modest scale, appears by contrast trivial and inadequate—appears, in short, untrue, since it so conspicuously lacks the splendor and intensity of feeling by which one has come to recognize the validity of revelation.”11 This insight presents particular problems for the novel which, long considered by literary critics as the dominant form through which to examine the relations of the individual to society in the nineteenth century, proceeds of necessity to revelation, to ends-based final judgments that cap a narrative and evaluate its protagonists.12 We read novels, one influential line of narratology and literary criticism tells us, to their ends, and for their revelations. But if an addiction to revelation is what we are suffering from, might novels be the last place to turn for help? Well, yes and no: Eliot used the essay genre to reflect on the formal features that were to make her novels so distinctive. Eliot’s essays comport with an important preoccupation of the essay (in particular, in the essays discussed in the other chapters of this book) in nineteenth-century Britain that, in contradistinction to the novel, I would suggest, is interested more in the performance of different relational modes than in progress of character, and in the testing out, the essaying, of various possible relational modes within the experience of the immediate moment and with the richness of what Farber calls “fragmentary truth.” The skepticism of the essay form insists on careful attention to the practice of mediation, and to the mediated arrangement of cultural forms in the present moment. But Eliot’s novels are the place in which the potential of her essayism is most fully realized; her essays are at once the site of her confrontation with the forms of knowing that she felt diminished life, but also of her most vituperative anger towards them, and a severity of judgment that she would later modulate and critique. Her essays record—unfold for us—an experience of confrontation with, rather than a realization of, the necessity of more generous and tactful relational modes. They conjure the necessity for what they do not achieve. Eliot’s moments of quarrel with a revelatory doctrine in everyday life are easy to spot. They correspond to the moments when her essays are at their highest temperature, when Eliot lets slip her most vehement critical tirades.

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When she names it explicitly, Eliot calls her target the “doctrine of Compensation,” which appears in an 1856 letter to Chapman. Noting the recent publication of a novel, Compensation, by Georgiana, Lady Chatterton, Eliot comments, “I wonder what the story called ‘Compensation’ is. I have long wanted to fire away at the doctrine of Compensation, which I detest, considered as a theory of life.”13 What is this detested limiting doctrine; and how could it become a theory of life? In a wider than theological sense, what is it about the culture, as Eliot saw it (and as that famous synthesizer of the Victorian mindset, Walter Houghton, would define it) that led to a seeking of compensations?14 What did these compensations obscure? Now, admittedly, there are other possible reasons for Eliot’s indignation. It could have provided the fervor required to use her essays to disown her past and break with embarrassingly provincial tastes and origins. Critics have pointed out that in the early 1850s, she was undertaking the necessarily painful work of repudiating commitments now passed through. She was “clearing the ground,” as A. S. Byatt has put it. Eliot’s essay on the popular preacher Dr. Cumming, for instance, exposes mercilessly the style of evangelicalism she had once practiced, and the kind of false prophets (like her once admired mentor, Dr. Brabant) to whom she had cleaved; and her criticism of Edward Young savages the poetry on which, as a youth, she had doted. But I don’t think this explanation is in itself sufficient; her essays are not only justifications against the past, or testaments of a belated desire to have been more foolproof. They handle culture in their own moment—its potential or precluding of new commitments. I will turn now to specific examples. Eliot addresses both Compensation, and the doctrine of compensation in contemporary fiction in her 1856 essay “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists.” The essay is all judgment and no mercy: We had imagined that destitute women turned novelists, as they turned governesses, because they had no other “lady-like” means of getting their bread. On this supposition, vacillating syntax and improbable incident had a certain pathos for us, like extremely supererogatory pincushions and ill-devised nightcaps that are offered for sale by a blind man. We felt the commodity to be a nuisance, but we were glad to think that the money went to relieve the necessitous.15 The passage goes on for some time in this complaisant-aggressive way, offering a detailed picture of humiliated “lonely women, struggling for a maintenance” as providing the only justification for their publishing. And this makes the coming reversal all the more emphatic: no, Eliot asserts, there are no grounds for compassion; these women are not forced by penury to write. Their “twaddle” is not “consecrated by tears”; they deserve no pity. Eliot’s essay draws on a Johnsonian armory of rhetorical indignation (one is reminded of Johnson’s verdict on Soame Jenyns’s philosophical inquiry: “I should wish,

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that he would solve this question: Why he, that has nothing to write, should desire to be a writer.”) But there is an outrage in her tone that overflows Augustan boundaries. This scene of disillusionment is comic of course, and, in an anonymous article (standard practice in periodicals of the time) a way of performing a male, because misogynist, voice. But I want to try taking its vehemence seriously. It suggests that something very important to Eliot is at stake. Contempt is often our very last line of defense. At stake here are the uses of fiction, and the way fictionality is handled. Fictions, the critic Frank Kermode explained in his Sense of an Ending, propose forms of relation to life. They create confidence in the world. From the perspective of Eliot’s essay “Silly Novels,” most of them are doing a very bad job. This is not because they choose the wrong subjects for literary treatment (Eliot’s example of a standard plot, involving a woman without means who “gets into high society,” “marries the wrong person to begin with” and suffers the “intrigues of a vicious baronet,” is a pretty good description of much of the action of her own final novel, Daniel Deronda), but because they handle their subjects in the wrong way and so cannot justly apprehend them.16 By understanding the world through narrative doctrines of compensation, they betray confidence in it. Compensation as false confidence begins, Eliot’s essay suggests, with a defensive certainty. The heroine of a silly novel is tactlessly too knowing; what Eliot calls her “depth of insight” is too deep, while “her superior instincts are a sort of dial by which men have only to set their clocks and watches, and all will go well.”17 The full command of time and timing possessed by these clockwork heroines is, moreover, a reflection of the prophetic pretentions of the novelists themselves. Eliot tips out an extra vial of scorn when she claims The most pitiable of all silly novels by lady novelists are what we may call the oracular species—novels intended to expound the writer’s religious, philosophical or moral theories. There seems to be a notion abroad among women, rather akin to the superstition that the speech and actions of idiots are inspired, and that the human being most entirely exhausted of common sense is the fittest vehicle of revelation. To judge from their writings, there are certain ladies who think that an amazing ignorance, both of science and of life, is the best possible qualification for forming an opinion on the knottiest moral and speculative questions. Apparently, their recipe for solving all such difficulties is something like this: Take a woman’s head, stuff it with a smattering of philosophy and literature chopped small, and with false notions of society baked hard, let it hang over a desk a few hours every day, and serve up hot in feeble English, when not required.18 A few pages later, Eliot chastises a particular novelist for her absurd pretentions to cultural criticism, and her preacherly rhetoric in sermonizing her

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readers on the subject of how the “false lights of thy morbid civilization” are evidenced in the dress of footmen.“[W]e have heard,” Eliot remarks on this passage, “of various ‘false lights’ from Dr. Cumming to Robert Owen, from Dr. Pusey to the Spirit-rappers, but we have never before heard of the false light that emanates from plush and powder.”19 I do not think it is just the bathetic disjuncture between tone and subject— high theories in the mouths of idiots—that raises Eliot’s ire here, but rather the way in which it is grounded in a particular attitude to time. The recipe analogy offers more misogyny (this is what happens to the novel reduced to women’s work). But it also proposes the problem of a form (of fiction) not fitted to a predicament (in life). The recipe offers, again, a sort of inadequate but syntactically breezy violence because it is kind of violence to approach moral questions with the form of a recipe—with a simple preparation and a certain attitude, requiring, once set in motion, the mere investment of time (“a few hours every day”). The rhythm of her prose adopts the cadences of the attitude she would assault. And so it is significant that Eliot describes the sensibility of silly heroines as a “sort of dial,” and the aspirations of silly novelists as pseudo-prophetic. In such “oracular” novels, the novelist’s knowledge of the ends of the plot seems to have passed to the heroine—whose garrulous serenity and neglect of any responsibility to the present is ensured by her knowledge that compensation for any suffering is built into life, since the compensating end of the novel is on its way—and then from the heroine to the male characters (who set their watches accordingly and stand back from life.) The narrator herself is so selfflattered, from knowing the ends of her own plot, to pronounce on the basis of such shaky foundations upon life in general, constructing doctrine from her total control over her own small revelation. The sardonic comparison with such Christian or secular millenarians as Cumming and Owen does no one a compliment. Swathed in hieratic certainty, the lady novelist evades any honest apprehension of forms of life, in all their particularities and resistances, and so easily mistakes “foolish facility for mastery.” An aesthetic failure and an ethical failure are exactly correlated. Eliot establishes a link between violence, an attitude to time, and an easy complacency in a prose style. Eliot’s moral critique of this consolatory temporal structure recurs in other novel reviews, of Charles Kingsley’s Westward Ho! and Geraldine Jewsbury’s Constance Herbert, for example, both in 1855. The latter is seemingly a more principled work than those Eliot will dismiss as “Silly Novels.” In fact, it is a work about principles—and heroic sacrifice to them. Eliot explains that the novel presents the illustration of a “general principle,” which is “the abstinence from marriage where there is an inheritance of insanity.” “So far,” Eliot concedes, “we have no difference of opinion with Miss Jewsbury. But the mode in which she enforces the principles . . . implies, we think, a false view of life.”20 This is because Constance Herbert suggests that the performance of

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a difficult duty will always be rewarded, by the conclusion of a lifetime or a novel. Endowed with such a certainty, Jewsbury’s narrator explains that although sacrifice to a duty by a protagonist “may at the time seem to slay them, it will in the end prove life,” while “[n]othing they renounce for the sake of a higher principle, will prove to have been worth the keeping.” Such a doctrine, Eliot counters, is “not a true representation of the realities of life.” It is a dodge, a consolatory story about life’s compensations. “The notion that duty looks stern, but all the while has her hand full of sugar-plums, with which she will reward us by and by, is the favourite cant of optimists . . . but it really undermines all true moral development by substituting something extrinsic as a motive to action, instead of the immediate impulse of love or justice, which alone makes an action truly moral.”21 Eliot critiques the novel’s perpetuation of a bad optimism, of the wrong kind of hope or faith in the future—one that sacrifices spontaneous impulse and experience in the present for a willfully imagined reward. One only has to keep one’s mind on the novel’s coming end and the intensity or pain or ambivalence of any ethical decision-making in the moment fades away. Living in this way, and succumbing to the temptations of prophecy in everyday life, might be comforting, but it drains the lived present of meaning. Her critique of Kingsley carries the same burden of complaint. He treats of life as if the battle of Armageddon were to be declared at any moment, in which “all the saints fight on one side,” and consequently what is lost is any sense of an actively apprehended present experience, what Eliot calls “the sense in which every great artist is a teacher—namely, by giving us his higher sensibility as a medium . . . bringing home to our coarser senses what would otherwise be unperceived by us.”22 Eliot’s quarrel, then, is not with any particular article of faith in these novels, but with their attitude of relation. She diagnoses an attitude towards time that is similar to what Jean-Paul Sartre will famously define as bad faith, by which people treat as immovable fact, with a fixed place in a temporal relation, something that really is “in play” in the Kantian sense—to which they really have the freedom of a wide range of possible attitudinal relation. Often this bad faith is addressed to the past, in the sort of moral dodge that says I have always been the kind of person whom people find unlovable, or who never could be brave, and so on, but Eliot perceives how it can be lodged in a sort of pernicious hope, by a living as if one knows one’s own condition in the future, with a too-knowing relation to the future perfect limiting the possible tenses of one’s existence. (It is such sensitivity to the coercion of tenses, to the sham faith of the future perfect, that links Eliot’s commitments in ethics and aesthetics to the Essays of Elia, and to Arnold’s writings on education.) And for Eliot, just as for Sartre, this relation drains life of vividness: a spontaneous responsiveness becomes impossible; life is not experienced with what Eliot defines as lacking in Jewsbury: “immediate impulse.” A possible ethical fail-

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ure of the novel, James Baldwin points out in an essay, is formally analogous to a false, unethical relation to one’s own life: when life is “turned to nothing through our terrible attempts to insure it.”23 Even the greatest novelists fail to apprehend this impulse, and so fail at psychological description, the very description that might offer resources for handling life. As Eliot explains in her 1856 essay on “The Natural History of German Life,” We have one great novelist who is gifted with the utmost power of rendering the external traits of our town population; and if he could give us their psychological character—their conceptions of life, and their emotions—with the same truth as their idiom and manners, his books would be the greatest contribution Art has ever made to the awakening of social sympathies.24 But instead this novelist, who is Charles Dickens, relies on a “false psychology,” which encourages “the miserable fallacy that high morality and refined sentiment can grow out of harsh social conditions, ignorance and want” and that “the working classes are in a condition to enter at once into a millennial state of altruism, wherein everyone is caring for everyone else, and no one for himself.”25 Dickens is another millenarian; and by invoking altruism, that positivist shibboleth, Eliot renders him an unwitting, too-ardent disciple of the extremes of Auguste Comte. She implies that his novels, like the philosopher’s famous ritual prescriptions, in working backwards from a resolution, vitiate usable descriptions of character in moments of response to the world and stall analysis of the connections between psychology and “social relations.” It is an account of positivism that foreshadows J. S. Mill’s criticisms of Comte in his 1865 August Comte and Positivism (see chapter 2). One cannot learn from a millennium. One can only announce its arrival. Such are the hazards of novel reading and writing, which organizes relations according to a final revelation or valuation; but Eliot’s essays find this structuring of narrative relation across her cultural field. Her 1855 essay on Dr. Cumming mercilessly dissects a Christianity that revels in the impending pageant of Revelation and cares nothing for the claims of the present. John Cumming was a Scottish divine who had published a deluge of popular books in the 1840s and ’50s interpreting biblical prophesy (they were the favorite reading of Alfred Tennyson’s mother); he was notorious for his assertion that the seventh vial of the Apocalypse was to be poured out between 1848 and 1867.26 Such an insistence, as Eliot points out, constrains daily—what Eliot calls “working-day”—life within a “comfortable” conformity just as it paints the pains and pleasures of a future revelation in lurid detail; it is a worldview “ardent and imaginative on the pre-millennial advent of Christ, but cold and cautious towards every other infringement of the status-quo.”27 Cumming’s formula imprisons the intellect, “depriving it of its proper function—the free

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search for truth—and making it the mere servant-of-all-work to a foregone conclusion.”28 A revelation in the future perfect makes for a rushed and anxious present: the “sense of alarm and haste, the anxiety for personal safety . . . unmans nature, and allows no thorough, calm-thinking, no truly noble, disinterested feeling.”29 Whether one’s revelation is anticipated with complaisance (as in silly novels), or with alarm (as in evangelical teaching), it is not only rational enquiries that are constrained but the affective experience of life, its tempo, and its range of “feeling.” As are the creative responsibilities of any life towards its own meanings—meanings that are not plot-driven, or God-given, but very much a task on one’s hands. Eliot develops her analysis of the psychology and the poetics of such an avoidance of the world through a doctrine of compensation in her 1857 essay “Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young.” She attacks an eighteenth-century poet as if he were a present danger, and traces the “radical insincerity” of Edward Young’s life and works to his prevailing attitude of eschatological moralizing.30 His obsession with the last things relates directly to his aversion to the concrete experience of life. Young’s “want of taking for a criterion the true qualities of the object described, or the emotion expressed” unmoors him from the world and leads him to a poetic style that is rife with empty extravagance and solecism. He “float[s] away into utter inanity,” for example, when he rhapsodizes, “An eye of awe and wonder let me roll, / And roll for ever.” Eliot comments that “This is hardly less absurd than if he had wished to stand for ever with his mouth open.”31 Just as with the “Silly” novelists, and Dr. Cumming, Young’s doctrine of compensation removes him from precisely that responsibility to the world’s forms upon which he might base an artistic creativity. Eliot’s objection here, and in the case of “Silly Novels,” is not only to the moral risks of an antinomianism found to be alive and well in Victorian England, but also to refute the way the doctrine covers over with a fantasy of simplicity the thick and complex processes of mediation between individuals and the world, and between individuals. It provides the formal conditions for a narcissistic assertion, a grandiose concentration on one’s own plot, which refuses contact with others. Once again, it is not so much morality that is Eliot’s concern here, but the vividness of felt life and the question of what are the existentials of possibility towards it that the forms of her culture provide.32 Eliot diagnoses in the culture around her the irresponsible use of narrative fiction, which alienates people from both moral responsibility and creative apprehension of the world by exploiting the temporal structure of a particular attitude—which denies present experience by living as if there will be a final revelation. Eliot doesn’t suggest that all novels exploit a revelatory logic. Her trouble is not so much with narrative structure, tout court, as with a particular way of living with it. The distinction she draws is not between the imprisoning features of narrative opposed to the destabilizing, deconstructive forces of the un-narratable, as it is between what we might term different attitudes to surprise within a

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given narrative: between the surprise by which one defines the future and the surprise that makes a future. And yet in spite of the power of Eliot’s critique, her essays do not give us much guidance towards these better attitudes. (They do not, for example, develop that aesthetic of the singular impression that, as we will see in chapter 5, characterizes the essays of Walter Pater.) Instead they prepare the ground— set relational conditions—for the work of the novels. The essay form (which, as this book claims, is often in this period more interested in the performance of structures of relation than in developing character over time or locating final value in conclusive revelation) gave Eliot the space and time to critique the common temporal structure of the novel. What the essay form knows, for Eliot, is that “in life,” as Marcel Proust wrote in a notebook, “novels don’t finish.” Her narrative conclusions, as critics have remarked, are strange, often providing not so much ends as hard-won foundations for new beginnings, as in Gwendolen’s “I shall live. I shall be better” in Daniel Deronda, or Daniel’s own translation to an entirely new plane, and a new life-project. In Middlemarch Dorothea, we recall, must fall in love with the prospect of a revelation before she can fall in love; while characters who live millenarily on the promises of a future resolution receive the most violent treatment—although by the plot and not the narrators of the novels, who pass the aggression from their own moral statements to the actions of characters, or to unforeseen catastrophe. Moreover, the novels are able to compassionate the very same temporal attitude of bad optimism (in the case of Mr. Bulstrode in Middlemarch, for example) that are diagnosed by the essays, and to reflect on the reasons that might make such a doctrine a tempting response to the difficulties of life in the first place. Debra Gettelman has shown how much trouble Eliot had with fans who plagued her with their desires to know outcomes in advance of her serialized plots, and with their anger when anticipated—desired and assumed— resolutions failed to transpire. As Eliot noted in an exasperated letter about the response to the serialized Deronda, “people in their eagerness about my characters are quite angry, it appears, when their own expectations are not fulfilled . . . one reader is sure that Mirah is going to die very soon, and I suppose will be disgusted at her remaining alive. Such are the reproaches to which I make myself liable.”33 Gettelman proposes that Eliot’s novels recapitulate her attitude to her readers, preferring reverie in the moment to predictions of the future. I think this is an insightful opposition, and it suggests the kind of reflective or relational mode that a culture of revelation obscures.

From Essay to Novel It is the task of this book to keep the essay in mind; but by way of conclusion, I will take a closer look at Eliot’s first novel, her 1859 Adam Bede, as a transition from the essay to the novel form, to suggest that the novel itself can be

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read as all about a transition from a revelatory narrative to a suggestion of its alternatives. As I have claimed, characters who live millenarily are a focus of Eliot’s moral commentary. This is nowhere more true than in the case of Arthur Donnithorne, the squire in waiting and well-meaning villain of the village of Hayslope. His affair with the dairymaid Hetty Sorrel shatters the calm life of the village, and ruins the lives of both Hetty and her child by Arthur, whom she abandons to its death. Arthur is led into his crimes, not by the determined callousness of the conventional melodramatic squire (as would be familiar, for example, from Coventry Patmore’s 1844 poem “The Woodman’s Daughter,” rendered to acclaim in paint by John Everett Millais in 1851), but by his conviction of his own invulnerability—underwritten by his personal millennium. He is presented by the narrator as “a good fellow,” who must in the future come to good, as a “sea-worthy vessel that no one would refuse to insure.”34 The free indirect discourse of this description and others suggests this is general village wisdom, and elsewhere we see it frequently compounded in the explicit casuistry of Arthur’s internal speech, and corroborated by individual villagers, as in the satisfaction of Mrs. Poyser, for example, in the view that “every tenant was quite sure things would be different when the reins got into [Arthur’s] hands—there was to be a millennial abundance of new gates, allowances of lime, and returns of ten percent.”35 The characters are living, at least for the moment, within the given assumptions of a silly novel, in which ends must come to good, so that the characters may stand back from their actions even in the doing of them, and set their watches accordingly. Arthur’s is a world in which, in his words, “the future should make amends.”36 But, as readers of this novel know, this futures trading proves disastrous. And for none more than Hetty, who finds the heavy promise of Arthur’s sense of the future to be viscerally suffocating, to “press on her like an invisible weight of air” and to impose on her like a “dark unknown water” that grimly foreshadows the “dark shrouded pool” where she will contemplate suicide.37 The more insistently promising the future, the more tyrannical its “possibilities to which [one can] give no shape,” Eliot suggests, the darker and less sustaining the present. It makes for a daily life in which Arthur can live with himself, but in which Hetty can find no contact with reality, or resources against despair. She kills her child and is sentenced to transportation. But to stop here would be unsatisfying. Arthur’s story provides a moral parable on millennial confidence, for which he is exiled to army service— after, significantly, giving away his watch—but the eponymous, much more sympathetic Adam Bede also undergoes the painful transition to an alternative attitude towards the future. He had assumed, with all of Hayslope, that he was to marry Hetty, and reap the reward of certain virtue in a familiar narrative expectation. But instead he is forced by shock from what the narrator terms a “peasant” complaisance—a faith in the social order and its proposed futures—to confront both the need to critique millennial thinking and the

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task of finding a livable alternative to it. Thus when Arthur, before his departure, proposes some vague sacrifice to be made by him as a future solution to his wrongs, Adam diagnoses Arthur’s reliance on a pernicious promise: “Arthur’s words had precisely the opposite effect to that he had anticipated. Adam thought he perceived in them that notion of compensation for irretrievable wrong, that self-serving attempt to make evil bear the same fruits as good, which, most of all roused his indignation” (467). Adam’s fury is only softened later, when he is read a letter from the exiled Arthur. As Adam explains to the Poyser family, “There’s one thing in the letter cut me a good deal:—‘You can’t think what an old fellow I feel,’ he says; ‘I make no schemes now. I’m the best when I’ve a good day’s march or fighting before me’.” Now Arthur, it seems, is without any compensation; he has no future to trade on, and Adam finds this a poignant reversal. Adam Bede then is not so much a melodrama or morality tale as a story of disenchantment. Adam’s own attitude makes a transition from one of rage at a failed social order, to one founded in his discovery of the resources of vulnerability. His previously harsh moralism is modulated by a change in his sense of an ending—which is no longer so freighted with consequence and final meaning. The narrator describes Adam’s convalescence from the traumatic events of the plot in stages of recovery: at first he could conceive “no picture of the future,” but he did not know that the power of loving was all the while gaining new force within him; that the new sensibilities bought by a deep experience were so many new fibres by which it was possible, nay, necessary to him, that his nature should intertwine with another. Yet he was aware that common affection and friendship were more precious to him than they used to be,—that he clung more to his mother and Seth, and had an unspeakable satisfaction in the sight or imagination of any small addition to their happiness. The Poysers, too—hardly three or four days passed but he felt the need of seeing them, and interchanging words and looks of friendliness with them. (489) These new sensibilities and new fibers remake the first man of Hayslope; they make for a new Adam, who has been throughout the novel quite admirable, but rather forbidding in his rectitude. They are the product of his exchanging a sociability ruled by providential conviction to one of present appetite, and an attitude of unfolding implication for an openness to surprise. Here is Eliot’s secular theory of a happy fall. This loss of a particular attitude to the future provides the grounds for his falling in love with and marrying Dinah Morris, the Methodist preacher, but this is does not represent a return to a providential marriage plot. Catherine Gallagher has remarked that “Eliot’s ethics are preceded and animated by an erotics of particularization.”38 And before that, I would add, the development of a capacity for surprise, which is

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necessary to this erotics in the first place. The novel Adam Bede is much more interested in how this erotic particularization occurs than it is in a final revelation of value. The last page of the book attends, not to the happy couple, but to the final reunion of Adam and Arthur, where Arthur finally admits a changed attitude to the future, with the existence of “a sort of wrong that can never be made up for.” Eliot concludes her first novel with essays on the relationship between vulnerability and love, a rather Baconian reflection on the diffusion of the affections through the promptings of disappointment. And this makes the narrative of Adam Bede, in spite of its need for an ending, more like the record of a particular change of attitude than a general doctrine of consolation. This change is a rejection of the imagined invulnerability conferred by the providential deferring of meaning and the good to any final revelation. And this is why there is a touch of triumph as well as pathos in the last words of the book, which are given to Adam’s mother Lisbeth: “Come in, Adam, and rest; it has been a hard day for thee.” We as readers are encouraged to share some of the pride, I think, in such a fortunate fall, in our apprehension of the kind of providence that Adam, and Adam Bede, have managed to avoid.

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Self-Help Walter Pater wanted more from life. His essays raise the question of what this more might be, and where it might come from. They ask how we might become both more at home in and more penetrable by the vivid world. In an early essay, “Diaphaneitè” (1864), Pater rather mysteriously proposed: “He who is ever looking for the breaking of a light he knows not whence about him, notes with a strange heedfulness the faintest paleness in the sky.” All of Pater’s subjects seem engaged in this strangely heedful notation, as if on the lookout for a particular quality of life. “The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit” says Pater, glossing a statement by Novalis, “is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.”1 Pater’s writing speculates, as James Eli Adams has pointed out, at the boundary point of a “quickened sense of life.”2 Pater’s style seeks not so much to impress as to seek the points where people become impressible by the world. These are shifting boundaries; to stay close to them, Pater’s writing eddies and flows, approaching and recoiling from its ostensible subjects in a way that often frustrated his critics. Instead of a destination, Pater offers us a rhythm. Against achieved narrative, Pater attends to the value of the present moment, in the space of a breath, and to the difference a moment can make (recurring themes are the metaphors of inspiration and expiration). The last words of his Renaissance claim that “art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake” (RS, 190). Pater’s writing recurs to the moment’s quality, which teaches us—as for the ancient philosophers he echoed and queer theorists he anticipated—that the present alone is our happiness.3 His Renaissance is a curious work of history because it is not about what has happened, but what might happen. [ 111 ]

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“Since our office is with moments,” declared Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1844, “let us husband them.”4 By “husband” Emerson doesn’t mean to store them up, but to care for them as resources. Pater shares Emerson’s perfectionist commitments. His writings comprise a project in self-help: both in the sense proposed in his contemporary culture of perfectionism and in the sense we may be familiar with it now, from bookstore shelves and internet searches.5 Pater’s perfectionism is a “life philosophy,” which rejects alike the methodology of a system of imperative, as in Kantian deontology, or an articulated progress towards a concept of the good, as in utilitarian teleology.6 Like his contemporary Friedrich Nietzche, Pater urges his readers to help themselves to more life, while refusing to endorse a teleological progress to a final perfected state, or a culture in which the many serve the perfection of the few (what the philosopher James Conant calls “excellence-consequentialism”).7 We don’t know if Pater read Nietzsche, but we do know that Pater took philosophical direction from Friedrich Schiller, whom he read well, in aiming through an education in aesthetic experience at an improvement in moods and relations between people, rather than (as in Samuel Smiles’s famous 1859 work Self-Help) at economic independence from them.8 Perfectionism, in the words of the philosopher Stanley Cavell, provides an account of “coming to see oneself, and hence the possibilities of one’s world, in a transformed light.”9 Pater’s lightening requires “strange heedfulness” to supplant vigilance— towards a life intensified, but not on the qui vive. Here is where Pater’s critical tact, his own aesthetic of handling, comes in. It attends to the small detail, the evocative gesture or impression, not as symptoms of higher truth or hidden power, but as hints by which we may reach towards other ways of living. His tact is evasive, specifically of those practices and forms that would reduce our susceptibility to the world through shame or fear. He advances, like his diaphanous character, queerly slantwise, avoiding the practice of criticism as a logic of claims, hermeneutics of exposure, or study of power relations.10 His curious claims seem to have nothing to prove. Except in the “Conclusion” to his 1874 Renaissance, Pater rarely exhorts us. He performs his critical tact by suggesting a mode of educative contact: a care for what he calls “latent claims,” a criticism of handling, and rhythm for attaining a sense of freedom and trust, which functions (like the tact of Lamb and Arnold) by way of a sociable association. Pater’s essays, “like persons, live with us,” to borrow his description of how we learn from art, “for a day or a lifetime” (RS, 111). In his famous “Conclusion” to The Renaissance, Pater declared “not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end” (RS, 188–189). Notoriously, he insisted that to “burn always” with a “hard, gemlike flame,” is “success in life” (189). As to what these maxims mean, even those most enthused by them have never been certain. How are we to burn always? Such a doctrine

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might seem, like the Freudian superego (or its correlative, the proverbial pushy parent), to propose to its beneficiaries a stressful and unimaginative combination of vagueness and demand: “Be better! Burn harder!” But Pater, says Adam Phillips “made vagueness, informed vagueness, intellectually respectable.”11 According to some versions of education, clear thinking is a good habit. For Pater, there are other ways to be informed: “our education becomes complete as our susceptibility to . . . impressions increases in depth and variety” (RS, xx). And this takes us to grounds (real or imagined) where form is not yet fixed, where the subject is still in the process of being made up. “When we speak about subject formation,” says the philosopher Judith Butler, “we invariably presume a threshold of susceptibility or impressionability that may be said to precede the formation of a conscious and deliberate ‘I.’ ”12 Clarity can be a defense against a susceptibility. If it is “our failure,” as Pater claims in the “Conclusion,” “to form habits,” he leads us to wonder what makes us want to form habits in the first place (RS, 189). Pater never shies from the complexities, even the strain, of this question. He inherits the Romantic task of becoming at home in the world (all philosophy, as Novalis also said, is really homesickness)—which he inflects as a matter of becoming trustful, and susceptible to it. His essays offer a different form of relief, which shifts his reader’s attention from assumed facts to possible relations. In the process, he proposes an alternative—vaguely aesthetic—liberalism to the content-based, conflictual liberalism of logical method we have (in chapter 2) seen expounded by his contemporary, John Stuart Mill. Pater’s liberalism is founded in what he calls the “liberty to see and feel” (RS, 198). It is concerned with vivid relations rather than with logical propositions, and the question of how we handle the world rather than of whether we can know it. Pater’s style professes his aesthetic liberalism through the formal shape of a tactful mode of relation. This form is best understood by means of Pater’s own recurring trope of a repetitive “relief,” which develops as a tactful handling of Schiller’s suggestion that the modern subject, riven by reason’s opposition to sensation and by the social division of labor, refinds him- or herself in the freedom of aesthetic experience by means of a process of “oscillation.”13 In explaining this process, we must proceed with caution. It should give any critic pause that The Renaissance warns against “acquiescing in a facile orthodoxy, of Comte, or Hegel, or of our own,” and insists that “the theory or idea or system” that requires the sacrifice of experience “has no real claim upon us” (RS, 189). While he draws on the resources of Hegelian dialectic, we cannot adduce the movement of his thought by showing a masterful process that results in higher unities. Nor should we read his writing suspiciously, in order to reveal the latent content of a hidden truth (psychological, sexual, social, ethical, or historical). Pater’s writing raises and refuses the seduction of critical ends. He holds his style back from method.

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Dream Style The “way to overcome theory correctly, philosophically,” Stanley Cavell has suggested, “is to let the object or the work of your interest teach you how to consider it.”14 Pater’s prose style offers us many hints. We must begin, though, with the unavoidable fact that Pater’s style is one that divides its readers. It arouses impatience. Many of his critics have deemed it precisely not an expansive embrace but a narrow evasion of life. These are astute misapprehensions, which take us swiftly to our grounds for valuing the work. When told of the death of Pater, his former mentor, Oscar Wilde supposedly replied, “Was he ever alive?”15 As Gerald Monsman has remarked, critics have often read both Pater and the subjects of his essays as “mere spectators, dreamers separated from all the purposes of life.”16 This reading has provided both a symptomology and a cause for the diagnosis of Pater’s writings as limited and inhibited, spectatorial and inactive. Pater didn’t get out there and act in the world; his was too quiet a life. (He was not successful in his career; his letters are few and unrevealing.)17 By this logic, Pater’s limited social habits limited his aesthetic, and so they limit its interest and value to us. He may have proposed a “dream of a world”—but in the unfortunate sense that dreams are only interesting to the person who dreamt them. Pater’s writing, the critic René Wellek once claimed, proceeds directly from the psychology of a “retiring, shy and unloving man.”18 Later critical accounts often agree, whether in expressing frustration with the fact that he didn’t seem to “act bodily on his desires and stop etherealizing them in that sickly way,” or more sympathetically diagnosing “Pater’s sadness.”19 All he wanted, as the critic Graham Hough wittily put it, was a “womb with a view.”20 There is a conundrum here. The way that Pater’s essays have seemed to many critics to avoid life in general is through their attention to life in the moment. Too focused on handling a fleeting now, they are disengaged from narrative goals or developing claims, and so divested of traction in the world. Pater, after all, had insisted in his “Conclusion” that “experience dwindles down . . . all that is actual in it being a single moment,” which is reduced to “the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as solitary prisoner its own dream of a world” (RS, 187–188). The theologian Jonathan Wordsworth argued in a letter to Pater on the 1873 publication of The Renaissance that in such a book “no fixed principles either of religion or morality can be regarded as certain” because it claims that “the only thing worth living for is momentary enjoyment.”21 This accusation of a lack of “fixed principles” in favor of an enervating hedonism recurs. (“I wish they wouldn’t call me a ‘hedonist,’ ” Edmund Gosse recalled Pater lamenting in 1876, “it produces such a bad effect on the minds of people who don’t know Greek”).22 Pater’s sensuousness has disqualified him from seriousness, leading Christopher Ricks to declare, for example, “Arnold’s little finger”—the little finger of a

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socially committed critic—to be “worth Pater’s whole hand of little fingers.”23 Ricks’s barb is a remarkable compression: it suggests too feeble a grasp on the world, a stunted lack of maturity in relating to it, and a phallic inadequacy. There is, as Michael Davis has pointed out, a “persistent strain of homophobia” in Pater criticism.24 It originates in the scandal of a deeply penetrable man. Scenes of contempt are scenes of recognition. These critics identify Pater’s qualities in revealing their allergy to them. In particular, they identify qualities of Paterian liberalism. It is not, as the critic Kate Hext has pointed out, “the Victorian social, reason-based form of freedom specified by Mill or Hegel, but the individualistic, imaginative freedoms of Schiller that are sought in Pater’s Renaissance . . . [a] weak form of freedom, like a daydream that cannot be realized when aesthetic experience has ended.”25 Pater’s dreamy style does not tell upon the world: both the man and his writing, in the words of one of his exasperated admirers, the poet and critic Edward Thomas, “sought neither to influence nor to oppose.”26 Those who value a language of practical assertion must find other reasons to read Pater. But if it is true that in dreams begin responsibilities, then one of the reasons to read Pater is for his sense of conditions—the forms and manners by which we come to our own experience (this sense links Pater’s essays to Emerson’s).27 Dreams, after all, are atmospheres and not arguments. In The Renaissance, people “do not live in isolation, but breathe a common air, and catch light and heat from each other’s thoughts” (RS, xxiv). They have come to trust their world. This theme runs through all of Pater’s work from his first essay to his last book, Plato and Platonism (1893), where he defines education as an inspiriting widening of the “space of experience”).28 Matthew Arnold, we saw, called in his 1864 “Function of Criticism” for the cultivation of an “intellectual and spiritual atmosphere” that might inspire the “exercise of a creative power” in which people might find “true happiness” and “proof of being alive.”29 Pater takes Arnold’s precepts and makes a world from them. He begins with the tactful refusal of established oppositions; preferring enchantment to competition, he seeks shared grounds that leave nobody out: “within the enchanted region of the Renaissance,” Pater explains, “one needs not be forever on one’s guard. Here there are no fixed parties, no exclusions” (RS, 20). Pater’s social style does not imagine discrete subjects acting upon one another, but a losing and finding oneself with others—a recursive structure of “delicious recoil” followed by new forms of immersion (RS, 186). Like Erich Auerbach’s portrait of Plato, he describes for us a rhythm of “losing oneself in reality and finding oneself again.”30 Pater’s tact shares structural features with the tact of Lamb and Arnold, in which an evasion of oppositional logic and a refusal of knowing opens wider, virtual grounds of relation: a way to a new life.

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What Is a Renaissance For? The Renaissance in the nineteenth century was contested territory. Intellectuals from Jules Michelet to John Addington Symonds claimed it for a genealogy of liberal republicanism that led to the French Revolution and the reformists of Victorian Britain. For Jacob Burckhardt in 1860, the Renaissance was the point at which “man became a spiritual individual, and recognized himself as such.”31 It seemed a time and place uniquely suited to explaining modern society. For the Cambridge scholar William Cory Johnson, in an 1869 lecture that bears some striking affinities to Pater’s essays, this period (for which Johnson coined the phrase “early modern”) was defined by a “revival of friendship.” Acknowledging that “it may seem strange to speak of friendship as part of history,” he proposed that its revival created the conditions for a new atmosphere of collaboration, and through them, the collective formation of “modern, as opposed to medieval, humanity.”32 Pater’s account of trust in tact provides a stylistic foundation to this atmosphere. Many of Pater’s contemporaries, Linda Dowling has suggested, understood his Renaissance as a contribution to a political debate on the “liberal ideal of aesthetic democracy”: Victorians of varied political convictions—John Morley and W. J. Courthope, for example—read Pater’s book as “a political tract” that shared emancipatory aims with John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty.33 In 1875, two years after his own was published, Pater wrote a review of another critic’s Renaissance. This was the first volume of John Addington Symonds’s Renaissance in Italy, and Pater used the occasion to distinguish his own project. Pater admires the form of Symonds’s writing. It is a cunning sort of admiration, because it confirms Pater’s own primary trope for understanding the subject. Pater lauds the artful correspondence in Symonds’s writing between ground and figure, a relief that delineates a historical “background upon which the artists and men of letters are moving figures not to be detached from it.” But while Symonds’s figural intelligence demonstrates an awareness of “the Renaissance as an ‘emancipation,’ ” his relief doesn’t go far enough. He does not recognize that “on the same background . . . products emerge, the unlikeness of which is the chief thing to be noticed.”34 Treating of Alexander VI and Savanarola, Symonds omits Tasso and Leonardo, and this neglect of the aesthetic in favor of the political means Symonds neglects the inflection of liberty that is really at the heart of the Renaissance. Quoting from Symonds to correct him, Pater explains that the Renaissance is an assertion of liberty indeed, but of liberty to see and feel those things the seeing and feeling of which generate not the “barbarous ferocity of temper, the savage and coarse tastes” of the Renaissance Popes, but a sympathy with life everywhere, even in its weakest and most frail manifestations. Sympathy, appreciation, a sense of latent claims in

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things which even ordinary good men pass rudely by—these on the whole are the characteristic traits of artists, though it may still be true that “aesthetic propriety, rather than strict conceptions of duty, ruled the conduct even of the best.” (RS, 198–199) In this short passage, Pater describes his own aesthetic criticism more directly than anywhere in his Renaissance. A “sympathy with life everywhere” calls for a wider version of liberalism than that encompassed by Symonds’s political history of despots, popes, and city-states; one founded in “aesthetic propriety” before any detached Kantian “duty.” Pater concludes his review of Symonds’s Renaissance by censuring his neglect of the implicit. In relief, figure not only stands against ground, but may retreat into it. “Notwithstanding Mr. Symonds’s many good gifts,” Pater insists, “there is one quality which I think in this book is singularly absent, the quality of reserve, a quality by no means purely negative, and so indispensable to the full effect of all artistic means” (RS, 201). Pater’s review isn’t entirely fair—Symonds’s book was, after all, subtitled The Age of the Despots, and in 1877, volume three would bear the title The Fine Arts—but it sets out what is, for Pater, at stake in aesthetic criticism. An “aesthetic” is opposed to a “political” sense of liberty, and related to a feeling for the latent and a “quality of reserve.” Reserve recurs in Pater’s work.35 It defines for him the art of the Tuscan sculptors in The Renaissance, Charles Lamb’s style in Appreciations (1889), and the form of Plato’s philosophic attitude in Plato and Platonism (1893). The hero of his 1885 novel, Marius the Epicurean, is distinguished by his “habitual reserve of manner.”36 Reserve allows Pater to critique the kind of liberalism that would narrow life by privileging explicit political conflict as the basis of all social relations. Reserve alone is not a sufficient response to the world. But a feeling for the latent, which conditions intimacy, and courts as yet unknown desires and relations, prepares the ground for a more vivid life. In “Diaphaneitè,” Pater had elaborated on what is at stake in such a life.

A Manifesto for Latency Mill’s 1859 On Liberty, we saw in chapter 2, presents an eloquent case against reserve. It is for making passive claims active, and implicit opinions explicit. Mill begins his book by claiming that “Civil, or Social Liberty,” which has been “hardly ever discussed,” must be converted from a “latent presence” to become recognized as the “vital question of the future.”37 Mill exposes a latent question, and so announces the rhetorical work of his text. Throughout On Liberty, he insists on the task of raising the latent and assumed into the sphere of the explicit and reasoned in order to produce conditions for rational conflict. By this explication and conflict, truth may be brought into “collision

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with error.” “[I]mplicit trust” in one’s own social environment ought to be replaced with explicit analysis of its real virtues, while “tacit convention” against the disputation of social principles must be swept away. Our unspoken communications are enemies of truth.38 Pater, by contrast, began his career as an essayist with a near oxymoron, a manifesto for latency. He read his essay “Diaphaneitè” to his Oxford discussion group, the Old Mortality, in 1864. This unusual Greek word is a perfectionist injunction, likely in the second person plural future, functioning as an imperative: “You shall be diaphanous.”39 The essay is a plea for a neglected character type in society, neglected because it doesn’t fit within forms of social classification or conflict. The diaphanous person fits into no category of action, not even as dialectical negation: for even those who refuse ordinary action, “the saint, the artist, even the speculative thinker, out of the world’s order as they are, yet work . . . in and by means of the main current of the world’s energy. Often it gives them late, or scanty, or mistaken acknowledgment; still it has room for them in its scheme of life, a place made ready for them in its affections.” The diaphanous character, by contrast, “crosses rather than follows the main current of the world’s life.” Its “colourless, unclassified purity of life” the world can “neither use for its service, nor contemplate as an ideal.” 40 Colorlessness seems an unlikely state for which a vivid aesthetic life might strive. Pater explains: Most of us are neutralized by the play of circumstances. To most of us only one chance is given in the life of the spirit and the intellect, and circumstances prevent us from dexterously seizing that one chance. The one happy spot in our nature has no room to burst into life. Our collective life, pressing equally on every part of every one of us, reduces nearly all of us to the level of a colourless, uninteresting existence.41 This is an infelicitous lack of color. It is not diaphaneitè, but describes the conditions against which the diaphanous type struggles. Pater critiques the limitations of the social forms on offer. They fill prematurely the spaces between subject and object, self and other; relentlessly and repetitiously “pressing equally on every part of every one of us,” they offer no room for expression—or even breath—within their monotonous rhythm. Mill’s On Liberty had, five years earlier, diagnosed the same stifling in society of the creative play of the individual mind and spirit. “[T]he evil is,” Mill explains, “that individual spontaneity is hardly recognised by the common modes of thinking, as having any intrinsic worth . . . spontaneity forms no part of the ideal of the majority of moral and social reformers.” Both Mill’s On Liberty and Pater’s “Diaphaneitè” insist that a goal of liberal society is ensuring for individuals an existence with its own vital rhythms—which is felt to be

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creative and not only compliant (Mill’s “automatons in human form”).42 Both Mill and Pater distrust habit. Both invoke metaphors of constriction: the pressing of Pater’s “collective life” finds its counterpart in Mill’s metonymic trope of foot binding.43 Mill insists that contemporary society suppresses individual desire: its “idea of character is to be without any marked character; to maim by compression, like a Chinese lady’s foot, every part of human nature which stands out prominently.”44 But instead of insisting, like Mill, on an imperative of explication, Pater proposes a new rhythm to neutrality. If “most of us” are neutralized and limited to a “colourless, uninteresting existence,” then, says Pater, “others are neutralised, not by suppression of gifts, but by just equipoise among them. In these, no single gift, or virtue, or idea, has an unmusical predominance. The world easily confounds these two conditions.” For Pater, the real danger is not that the world neutralizes that which ought to have a positive status, but that it might “confound,” and so fail to recognize, richer nuances of the neutral. (This is his particular conception of that recurring liberal ideal, the neutral subject position.) The diaphanous character may be “impotent,” says Pater, simply because its demands are not for acquisition, power, or supremacy over rivals. It exhibits a kind of longing for relief from explicit ends and identities. A diaphanous life is “the very opposite of that which regards life as a game of skill, and values things and persons as marks and counters of something to be gained, or achieved, beyond them.” It is defined by its mode of attention, its “strange heedfulness.”45 There is a precious moment of potential, before idea must become opinion. The conditions of argument are at odds with the conditions for hope. And Pater has high hopes for the diaphanous attitude. It manifests as rhythm, and as a capacity rather than a fixed state: “perhaps there are flushes of it in all of us, recurring moments of it in every period of life.” All Pater’s criticism attends to rhythmic form (this is why, as we will see, he insists on linking painting to music), often before spatial forms of narrative, or even logic.46 Currently, he laments, “there is a violence, an impossibility about men who have ideas, which makes one suspect that they could never be the type of any widespread life.” Pater posits the potential of the diaphanous person as a “basement type,” and the foundation of a liberal life. “A majority of such,” Pater insists, “would be the renewal of the world.” But how are we to distinguish tact from inhibition; or the reserve of an attentive and trusting suspension, full of potential, from a constricted and quietistic resignation? Both conditions might look similar from the outside, but one acquiesces, chafing or insensible, while the other is reconciled with the world, able to use it handsomely. The Renaissance is Pater’s account of a renewal. It explores the tactful styles that would condition it. These styles form the essays of the book, which offers a series of activities as approaches to the world.

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The Renaissance: Style and the Subject At the beginning of The Renaissance, so the usual critical story goes, Pater ostentatiously abandoned the famous maxim of his predecessor Matthew Arnold; its preface, in the words of Donald Hill’s excellent commentary to The Renaissance, “subverts Arnold’s meaning profoundly” when it claims: “To see the object as in itself it really is,” has been justly said to be the aim of all true criticism whatever; and in aesthetic criticism the first step towards seeing one’s object as it really is, is to know one’s impression as it really is, to discriminate it, to realise it distinctly. (RS, xix) This moment has usually been read as a “first step” away from Arnoldian objectivity towards a Paterian solipsism.47 An “objectivist criticism is overturned, almost at a stroke, by a subjectivist one” suggests Matthew Beaumont, in “an unassuming but . . . shocking critique of Arnoldian aesthetics.”48 It is true that Pater brings us up short. We confront an apparent shift of critical focus, from the truth of the object to whether we get a kick out of it. But I don’t think we can oppose Arnoldian objectivism to Paterian subjectivism so neatly.49 As we saw in chapter 3, Arnold’s call “to see the object as in itself it really is” urges not “objectivity” but a tactful handling of the encountered object. Far from contradicting this injunction, Pater extends it. His preface continues: The objects with which aesthetic criticism deals—music, poetry, artistic [a]nd accomplished forms of human life—are indeed receptacles of so many powers or forces: they possess, like the products of nature, so many virtues or qualities. What is this song or picture, this engaging personality presented in life or in a book to me? What effect does it really produce on me? Does it give me pleasure? and if so, what sort or degree of pleasure? How is my nature modified by its presence, and under its influence? The answers to these questions are the original facts with which the aesthetic critic has to do; and, as in the study of light, of morals, of number, one must realise such primary data for oneself, or not at all. (RS, xx; italics in original). It might look like solipsism: Margaret Oliphant, reviewing The Renaissance on its publication, accused it of “treating all the great art and artists of the past . . . as chiefly important and attractive in their relation to that Me who is the centre of the dilettante’s world.”50 But once again, this is Pater echoing Arnold’s words (this time from his essay on Heine) in order to elaborate Arnold’s interest in the nature of influence: in the recursive modification of the self and its sources.51 Pater draws seemingly casual analogies, to natural science, morals, or mathematics, in order to suggest that they rely, no less than aesthetic criticism, on the conditions of the observer.

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Instead of retreating into solipsism, Pater invigorates the question of influence. Aesthetic experience is for Pater, just as for Kant and Hegel, a privileged site of negotiation between self and world—even as it unsettles the grammatical, or juridical, or political self. What is distinctly Paterian is his tactful approach to these borders. His criticism seeks the grounds where this borderline becomes tangible—contacts with the world in which the world somehow fulfills a powerful inner vision—and understands it as the grounds of style. Pater elaborated on this borderland between the third and fourth editions of The Renaissance in his “Essay on Style,” which opened his 1889 Appreciations. It is the point where into the mind sensitive to “form,” a flood of random sounds, colours, incidents, is ever penetrating from the world without, to become, by sympathetic selection, a part of its very structure, and, in turn, the visible vesture and expression of that other world it sees so steadily within, nay, already with a partial conformity thereto, to be refined, enlarged, corrected, at a hundred points; and it is just there, just at those doubtful points, that the function of style, as tact, or taste, intervenes.52 (A, 31) “Those doubtful points” of mediation are where the self is penetrated by the world, and reforms itself by its use of the world.53 Style (as alternative to habit) helps us to face reality by our developing a “personal sense of fact.”54 No individual character is like another, and the world has been made to fit precisely nobody. Style, “as tact,” makes use of doubt, negotiates the claims of world and self. Pater takes up Flaubert’s sense of strain in finding le mot juste (“Style” is in part an essay on Flaubert), and threads through it his own perfectionist optimism. The restraint of tact offers “a security against the otiose, a jealous exclusion towards that which does not really tell towards the pursuit of relief, of life and vigour in the portraiture of one’s sense.”55 Habit may defend us too well; or facing the “flood of random sounds, colours, incidents” could drive us crazy. Style as rhythm enjoins and repulses the world at once.56 These are not novel themes in aesthetic philosophy. But in opening his Renaissance with them, Pater announces his creative response to a central predicament of philosophy after Romanticism. If our inner vision is not to be betrayed, we must practice selection as both an ethical and aesthetic imperative. Our life is on our own hands. Some worlds are better than others at offering resources for the “portraiture of one’s sense.” Pater imagines in his Renaissance a better world. It happened for Pater in medieval France, in fifteenth-century Italy, and in the eighteenth-century life of Johann Winckelmann. It could happen, as Pater urges in his “Conclusion,” again. It could happen to us.

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From Knowing to Handling How does it happen? In answer, Pater proposes the formal resources of the essay collection—as distinct from, say, the novel, or the poem—as spiritual exercise for his times.57 It is an alternative to the novel form, “whose cultural hegemony and diffusion,” in the words of the critic D. A. Miller, “well qualified it to be the spiritual exercise of an entire age.” For Miller, the novel “confirm[ed] the novel-reader in his identity as ‘liberal subject,’ ” in a way that constituted his or her supposed freedom in a private life but was, in fact, in the service of regimes of power supposedly escaped by it.58 Could a book of essays propose a different kind of liberal subject? 59 As The Renaissance develops, it builds cumulatively a strange way of handling the world. The book’s first essay, “Two Early French Stories,” outlines the promise of the Renaissance for an aesthetic freedom. It began with a desire for a “more liberal and comely way of conceiving life,” and at a surprisingly early time: at the “middle age” in France (RS, 1–2). This is not a familiar historical account. Pater proposes his own criteria for continuation and disjunction; declaring his avoidance of the familiar themes of classical learning, and of architecture (“the sculpture of Chartres, the windows of Le Mans”), he defines as his subject the desire for a “liberty of the heart” (RS, 2–3).60 The French stories of the essay —of Abelard and Eloise, Amis and Amile, and Aucissin and Nicolette—are all love stories in which the protagonists all abandon their established roles and duties: as cleric, as husband and father, as soldier. This is the specific sense in which Pater calls the Renaissance “antinomian”: it is a rebellion that breaks with old social and aesthetic forms to demand new relations of the heart (RS, 19). In his second essay, Pater turns from what to how the Renaissance wants: to its interpretive techniques and ways of handling the world. He begins by ruling one out. “Pico della Mirandola” describes a transition from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance as the “attempt made by certain Italian scholars of the fifteenth century” to “reconcile Christianity with the religion of ancient Greece” (RS, 23). Pater admires the scholars’ “generous instincts,” which were susceptible to the “natural charm” of Greek gods instead of suppressing them as “malignant spirits” (RS, 23). But he deems their efforts at reconciliation successful only in part. Lacking “the very rudiments of the historic sense,” the scholars were “thrown back upon the quicksand of allegorical interpretation,” and sought to “go below the surface, and bring up the supposed secondary, or still more remote meaning” (RS, 26). They looked for a subtext by which “Plato and Homer must be made to speak agreeably to Moses”: a “diviner signification, held in reserve, in recessu divinis aliquid, latent in some stray touch of Homer, or figure of speech in books of Moses” (RS, 26). The second essay of The Renaissance is a sort of feint. What looks at first like an exposition of Paterian virtues—basing intellectual apprehension in sociable relation, a susceptible attitude, and a sense of the latent and the

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recessive—turns out to be errors of both interpretation and sociability. All because Pico prefers allegory to a tactful handling. Pater distinguishes between latent truths awaiting exposure and latent claims awaiting acknowledgment.61 There is no hidden meaning—higher or lower—by which “unlikeness” (to borrow vocabulary from the review of Symonds) may be explained away. Pico’s revelatory mode of criticism forces intimacies from a “stray touch.” Plato and Homer are made to speak agreeably to Moses and to find something in common, as if coerced in a drawing room. Allegory is too knowing a method of interpretation to stand with obscurity in people and art. But this knowingness is introduced to prepare us for an alternative: the tact of the artists. For whatever “philosophers had to say on one side or the other, whether they were successful or not in their attempts to reconcile the old to the new . . . the imagery of the Greek religion, the direct charm of its story, were by artists cultivated for their own sake” (RS, 36). So, “false as its basis was, [Pico’s] theory had its use” (RS, 31). Pico performs the function of a criticism which, even if “not absolutely true,” “makes an intellectual situation of which the creative power can profitably avail itself.”62 He made new resources of culture available for artists, as “so much imaginative material to be received and assimilated”—to virtual uses, for a vivid life (RS, 37). Turning now to his portraits of the artists, Pater marks a transition, from the Arnoldian critic’s resources to the uses of what Wilde would later call the “critic as artist.” His next essay, on Sandro Botticelli, elaborates on these uses. Botticelli’s life, like that of Pater’s diaphanous man, “is almost colourless” (RS, 39). The neutrality of the book’s first artist introduces a new relational mode. “[T]he genius of which Botticelli is the type”—the type of all Pater’s artist subjects—“usurps the data before it as the exponent of ideas, moods, visions of its own” (RS, 39, 42). The particular data to be usurped is the poetry of Dante, whose “conventional orthodoxy . . . referring all human action to the simple formula of purgatory, heaven and hell” suffers from an “insoluble element of prose” (RS, 42). Pater’s Dante is an impeccable utilitarian in moral method (of the kind we saw Lamb critique in chapter 1): he possesses certain knowledge of the value of individual lives by working, as it were, backwards from a final judgment—from the eschatological “formula” of where each person ends up. “Eternity turns . . . the daring minute into a useless hammer,” said the poet Edmond Jabès.63 Cutting across a Dantean eternity, Botticelli opens a vision of less certain middle spaces, and so, says Pater, [J]ust what Dante scorns as unworthy alike of heaven and hell, Botticelli accepts, that middle world in which men take no side in great conflicts, and decide no great conflicts, and make great refusals. He thus sets for himself the limits within which art, undisturbed by any moral ambition, does its most sincere and surest work. His interest is

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neither in the untempered goodness of Angelico’s saints, nor the untempered evil of Orcagna’s Inferno; but with men and women, in their mixed and uncertain condition, always attractive, clothed sometimes by passion with a character of loveliness and energy, but saddened perpetually by the shadow upon them of the great things from which they shrink. His morality is all sympathy; and it is this sympathy, conveying into his work somewhat more than is usual of the true complexion of humanity, which makes him, visionary as he is, so forcible a realist. (RS, 43–44) Botticelli is a realist because he specializes in the hard to judge. His subjects’ qualities are diaphanous, not made visible by being thrown into a course of action in the world (Pater revalues Dante’s famous “gran rifiuto.”) These people are “comely, and in a certain sense like angels, but with a sense of displacement or loss about them—the wistfulness of exiles” (RS, 43). Boticelli’s refusal to judge directs us to a “middle world” which is the world of all of us. Not a world without conflict, but one in which conflictual action is not the means by which clarity of judgment is achieved. The sincerity of art, for Pater, is not a refusal of ethics, but an ethics that begins in a refusal. Not being at home in the world, Botticelli’s people have the task of mediation on their hands: he lauds Botticelli’s subtle depictions of this task, which Pater considers to be the key to appreciating, for instance, his numerous depictions of the Madonna as also of the middle sort, “neither for Jehovah nor for His enemies,” her hands full of difficult marvels: “her trouble is in the very caress of the mysterious child” (RS, 44).64 The question here is not whether Pater’s description of Dante is accurate (for Erich Auerbach for instance, Dante is a recursive Paterian genius of the “inner life”) but what Pater is using Dante for.65 He is Pater’s hinge point, marking his own preferred boundary between time periods: from medieval certainty to an art of tact, and their corresponding relationships to mediation and middleness (Dante at the start of his Inferno, after all, emphasized the confusion and peril to be found in the middle of things).66 Here is Pater’s version of a familiar story of sociological change: from Gemeinschaft to Gesellschaft; from a time of certainty about others to a more unknowing, tactful feeling one’s way among them. Pater posits to his Renaissance a necessary art of trust, and an opening of shared culture to a wider range of uses by the individual imagination. His next essays turn from sketching the conditions to exploring the practice of this trust.

Trusting To Botticelli, the world “comes with all its incisive and importunate reality; but awakes in him, moreover, by some subtle law of its own structure, a mood which it awakes in no one else, of which it is the double or repetition, and

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which it clothes, that all may share it, with visible circumstance” (RS, 42). He rejects a claim to direct expression in favor of the provision of intermediate layers in relief: Botticelli offers not his mood, but a “double” of it, a material of contact, an extra gradation between self and other to be made use of by both. It is an odd suggestion: making experience one’s own also means giving it up, or rather shifting the location of aesthetic experience from the poles of self and object to something in between. The middle essays of The Renaissance have the most to say about the qualities of these middle actions (to borrow Lamb’s phrase from chapter 1) and about their formal properties as the conditions of trust. Throughout “Luca della Robbia,” “The Poetry of Michelangelo,” “Leonardo da Vinci,” and “The School of Giorgione,” Pater frames and reframes the conditions of tactful relief as a practice of approach to the world. The rigor of trust is not only in the task of finding it, but in giving up one’s prior trust in one’s self, in what one is, or thought one was. People have a hard time trusting, not only because others are unreliable, but because the experience of trust is itself a solvent of a fixed identity. Pater’s middle essays are attuned to trust because they insist not on character but on conditions. “Conditions,” the critic Angela Leighton has pointed out, is one of Pater’s favorite words: through his attention to the shifting conditions of the encounter, Leighton suggests, Pater “refuses to let the self harden into a diamond.”67 His is a humanism not of definitions but of the self ’s undoing into richer commitments. In search of trust’s decompositions, Pater turns next to the della Robbias and the Tuscan sculptors who are “haters of all heaviness and emphasis, of strongly opposed light and shade” (RS, 50). They sought a sculpture that could unfix the tendency of its materials to “a hard realism, a one-sided presentment of mere form, that solid material frame which only motion can relieve” (RS, 51). The sculptors sought to express a reliable world through its very transitoriness: in its shifting “play of life”; as the “passing of a smile over the face of a child, the ripple of air on a still day over the curtain of a window ajar” (RS, 50–51). “The precise value” of the Tuscan “system of sculpture, this low relief ” is in their finding reality (as Milner will in the next chapter) not a matter of solid boundaries but of uncertain ones (RS, 50). Through their relief work, these sculptors brought to the most solid forms a sense of the mysterious freighting of life with the “etherealization of death” (RS, 50). Already within this brief essay on sculpture, the example of Michelangelo rises from the background. Against the risk of petrifying into “hard realism,” Michelangelo secured for his work individuality and intensity of expression, while he avoided a too heavy realism, that tendency to harden into sculpture which the representation of feeling in sculpture is apt to display. What time and accident, its centuries of darkness under the furrows of the “little Melian farm,” have done with singular felicity of touch for the

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Venus of Melos, fraying its surface and softening its lines, so that some spirit in the thing seems always on the point of breaking out, as though in it classical sculpture had advanced already one step into the mystical Christian age . . . this effect Michelangelo gains by leaving nearly all his sculpture in a puzzling sort of incompleteness, which suggests rather than realizes actual form. . . . Well! That incompleteness is Michelangelo’s equivalent for colour in sculpture; it is his way of etherealizing pure form, of relieving its stiff realism, and communicating to it breath, pulsation, the effect of life. (RS, 52–53) In this passage, relief graduates from technique to metaphor; and from “relief ” as a descriptive noun to “relieving” as enlivening gerund. The preferred form of the Tuscan sculptors is transformed into an expression of Michelangelo’s shaping of his world—an attitude or mode of apprehension open to luck and accident, which resists a “tendency to harden” (the failure of forming habits). It opens the way to an “individuality and intensity of expression.” Michelangelo relieves the hardness of the world without betraying it, or turning from it to a higher sphere. In slipping from the Venus de Milo to Michelangelo, Pater does not distinguish between mutilation and incompleteness, but suggests that Michelangelo anticipates the inevitable violence of time by incorporating it into his sculpture, which looks forward to its continually shifting conditions of existence. Many of Pater’s contemporaries protested the idea that Michelangelo had deliberately left his sculpture unfinished. This isn’t how genius, considered as a source of perfectionism, is supposed to work.68 Pater dissolves Michelangelo into a “relieving” mode of handling the world: opening a middle space by a kind of rhythm, a fraying and a softening, a blurring of boundary lines, as the curtain rippling over the window ajar. But why should “a tendency to harden” be such a problem for Pater? What is at stake here? And what is the “etherealization of death” anyway? Pater both repeats and develops his themes in his next essay, now devoted entirely to Michelangelo. He approaches his subject via the task of style: of responding creatively to the overwhelming world without either falling victim to its strain or merely evading it. The art of the middle ages, for Pater, was inadequate to this task, producing works that were overwhelmed (“merely monstrous or forbidding”) or irrelevant (“felt, even in its most graceful products, as a subdued quaintness”; RS, 57). But Michelangelo rose to this challenge, because it “belongs to the quality of his genius . . . to concern itself almost exclusively with the making of man” (RS, 58). There is deliberate ambiguity to the genitive here: Michelangelo’s work is not only about Genesis, but genesis more generally; not just about the creation of the first man, but mankind’s making contact with the world. And so Pater describes the Creation of Adam (“his whole form is gathered into an expression of mere expectancy and reception”), only to expand the theme:

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This creation of life—life coming always as relief or recovery, and always in strong contrast with the rough-hewn mass in which it is kindled—is in various ways the motive of all [Michelangelo’s] work, whether its immediate subject be pagan or Christian, legend or allegory. . . . As I have already pointed out, he secures that ideality of expression which in Greek sculpture depends on a delicate system of abstraction, and in early Italian sculpture on lowness of relief, by an incompleteness, which is surely not undesigned, and which, as I think, no one regrets, and trusts to the spectator to complete the halfemergent form. (RS, 59) A particular aesthetic experience of relief, and a specific shaping of material becomes, in a movement characteristic of Pater’s writing, the basis for a social relation: its forms are rendered metaphorical and reach out to the world. Trust itself relies on a blurring of form, on a more unknowing handling of a world “half-emergent.” Where Mill had argued that free relations are founded in the replacement of “implicit trust” with explicit discussion, Pater insists on the relation of trust’s enlivening qualities to unknown and unfinished sources. Instead of mimesis of the natural world (“he gives us indeed no lovely natural objects”), Michelangelo demonstrates the use of it: “he penetrates us with a feeling of that power which we associate with all the warmth and fulness of the world, the sense which brings into one’s thoughts a swarm of birds and flowers and insects. The brooding spirit of life itself is there; and summer may burst out in a moment” (RS, 60). Through his tactful handling of stone, Michelangelo trusts us. We become open to him—and through him, the world. Good manners do not ensure trust, and Michelangelo was not a polished man. His gift for “sweetness,” says Pater, was an occasional achievement, often overmastered by the contentious world, or by his own too-captious strength. His tact is founded in his preoccupation with death, which etherealizes its subject, softening bright hard abstractions of knowledge to vaguer suggestions, bringing subtler relations to the foreground. The titles assigned, for example, to Michelangelo’s “four symbolical figures, Night and Day, The Twilight and The Dawn, are far too definite for them” because “they concentrate and express, less by way of definite conceptions than by the touches, the promptings of a piece of music, all those vague fancies, misgivings, presentiments, which shift and mix and are defined and fade again” (RS, 74–75). Michelangelo’s tact, his deft touches, begins with his disclaiming a knowing attitude towards his subjects. Death places this disclaiming in the starkest relief: Michelangelo’s tombs and his pietàs are the focus of the chapter, and Pater recurs to them by contrast with Dante’s worldview. For Dante’s belief in immortality is formal, precise, and firm, almost as much so as that of a child, who thinks that the dead will hear if you cry loud enough. But in Michelangelo you have maturity, the mind of the

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grown man, dealing cautiously and dispassionately with serious things; and what hope he has is based on the consciousness of ignorance— ignorance of man, ignorance of the nature of the mind, its origin and capacities. (RS, 75) “Trust,” the philosopher Alphonso Lingis has observed, “is a force that can arise and hold on to someone whose motivations are unknown as those of death. . . . There is an exhilaration in trusting that builds upon itself.”69 Again, Pater proposes an aesthetic experience by which the lines (“formal, precise, and firm”) along which we apprehend the world are softened. Maturity does not ensure knowledge but loosens it. Death is the first point of this unraveling— and from death to man, to mind, to its origins and capacities. We do not require, Pater had insisted in his preface, an abstract scheme of ideals by which critically to apprehend our own experience. Now he gives us a reason why. A true realism must etherealize the world, since death takes our closest objects from our grasp, while asserting the vivid transience of what is most real to us. In his 1844 essay “Experience,” Emerson had remarked on this idealizing by loss: “I take this evanescence and lubricity of all objects, which lets them slip through our fingers when we clutch hardest, to be the most unhandsome part of our condition.”70 “Unhandsome” means difficult to handle or make use of—and so a challenge and demand for tact. The famous evanescence and lubricity of Pater’s “Conclusion,” is a call to such handling. Death makes idealists of us all. For Pater, this predicament is rendered tangible in works of art, in which the “etherealization of death” is darkly visible—in the relief of form. Michelangelo’s handsome maturity is in his coming to trust a world he doesn’t know. His work grants us the potential of an art unloosed from an oppressive perfection by its encounter with death. Death reveals life unfinished, never complete, and art tends, not towards a final perfection, but to the handling of a present moment of form, which finds, paradoxically, its promise for future forms. This is perfectionism as an openness to the next self, and the next world, which posits no finally perfect form or fixed standard, and so for which, as Cavell has put it, “both that significance is always deferred and that equally it is never deferred.”71 Each state constitutes our world, and opens us to new forms of desire. Pater’s essays attempt to keep up with this process. Pater asks of Michelangelo’s art what the critic Richard Poirier in his book The Performing Self (which also takes its lead from Michelangelo’s sculpture) calls “the most elementary and therefore the toughest question” for criticism: “what it must have felt like to do this—not to mean anything, but to do it.”72 Pater’s experience of Michelangelo’s performance encourages him to take a performative flight of his own. Michelangelo seems to grant Pater a new openness to his own thoughts when he comments that he is a poet still alive, and in possession of our inmost thoughts—dumb inquiry over the relapse of death into the formlessness which preceded

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life, the change, the revolt from that change, then the correcting, hallowing, consoling rush of pity; at last, far off, thin and vague, yet not more vague than the most definite thoughts men have had through three centuries on a matter that has been so near their hearts, the new body—a passing light, a mere intangible, external effect, over those too rigid, or too formless faces; a dream that lingers a moment, retreating in the dawn, incomplete, aimless, helpless; a thing with faint hearing, faint memories, faint power of touch; a breath, a flame in the doorway, a feather in the wind. (RS, 76) Pater’s prose formally conveys the effect of Michelangelo’s influence on him, as though it offers him a rhythm for expression. Contemplating the pietà, Pater secularizes the next life and its “new body” to relocate it, transferred to this life and in his own body. Pater finds in Michelangelo’s encounter with death a shape for his own reflection: a recoiling, and then a “consoling rush” like the turn of the tide from which a new way of handling the world emerges. He signals the stakes of his criticism of the moment: in what he will call in his “Conclusion” one of life’s “exquisite intervals,” a “delicious recoil.” Pater concludes his essay on Michelangelo with prose of less substance but more potential, as a floating dream that enchants the cold rigidities of a closed life. (“Forms of closure are perhaps more hospitable to description than forms of openness,” the psychoanalyst Adam Phillips has remarked in writing about the borderlines of the self.)73 Pater’s punctuated, aerated prose performs a dissolution of known forms as a connection, diaphanous and fleeting, to otherness coming as a sudden portent: flamelike, as Coleridge’s fluttering stranger on the grate.74 As Dante is the poet of the world beyond, Michelangelo is the unknowing poet of the borderland, of the uncertain excitement of a moment of transition. He rejects the movement of a dialectic, which would lead to higher unities; death is not recuperated in the service of a Hegelian progress.75 Against the strain, even revolt, we may feel at the self-dissolution required by such transitions, and those dissatisfactions necessary to impel a movement beyond the self, Pater is interested in an art that would keep us to the point of them (art as ascesis). Transitional states: waking and sleeping, creation and death, dawn and twilight, keep alive an enchanting sense of the next worlds always contiguous with ours—that we may seek their horizons.

Profaning Pater’s essay on Leonardo, whose “life is one of sudden revolts” and for whom “the way to perfection is through a series of disgusts,” is about just such a dissatisfied subject (RS, 77, 81). Leonardo was born before Michelangelo, and Pater wrote his essay on Leonardo first too, but Pater’s curation reverses this

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order because in the development of his Renaissance, Leonardo realizes the potential of Michelangelo’s unknowing. Another diaphanous type, Leonardo lived aslant the world of conflict, he “passes unmoved through the most tragic events, overwhelming his country and friends, like one who comes across them by chance on some secret errand” (RS, 78). From his earliest years, he “constructed models in relief.” His genius, Pater suggests, was for negotiating transitional spaces: he lived a multiplied existence of “strange swiftness and double sight,” both in clamorous Florence and another world “of which he alone possessed the key” (RS, 84). In describing Leonardo’s doubleness, Pater diaphanizes his source in Vasari’s Life, in which Leonardo stands apart as a sort of vicar, a direct representative on this earth of the world to come: “everything he does comes from God rather than from human art.”76 For Pater, on the other hand, Leonardo is of the world; like Michelangelo and the Tuscan sculptors, he transforms his experience of it though the etherealization of death. Pater cites a story from Vasari about a childhood work, a medusa painted on a wooden shield—a condensation of the sight of death and the obliquely mediating mirror that would render it tolerable. Leonardo’s later Medusa, in the Uffizi, condenses for Pater the meaning of the myth: “he alone realizes it as the head of a corpse, exercising its powers through all the circumstances of death” (RS, 83).77 Pater explains the function of Leonardo’s sensibility for death, and how it relates to his obliquity, his “occult gifts”: they ensure life because they thicken the medium of his apprehension, throwing a “strange veil” over a common world (RS, 84). His landscapes are not of dreams or fancy, but of places far withdrawn, and hours selected from a thousand with a miracle of finesse. Through Leonardo’s strange veil of sight things reach him so; in no ordinary night or day, but as in faint light of eclipse, or in some brief interval of falling rain at daybreak, or through deep water. (RS, 87) Leonardo’s selective esprit de finesse—his “sympathetic selection” of tact, in the terms of Pater’s essay on “Style”—does not seek other worlds, but offers unfamiliar glimpses of this one. His Last Supper, for instance, takes us “out the range of its traditional associations”—from the mystic abstraction of the Eucharist we are brought to a shared leave-taking among friends. (For Vasari, by contrast, the painting is precisely about the mystery of Christ, and the apostles’ attempt to grasp it; RS, 95.) While in Leonardo’s Saint John the Baptist, we recognise one of those symbolical interventions in which the ostensible subject is used, not as a matter for definite pictorial realisation, but as the starting-point of a train of sentiment, subtle and vague as a piece of music. No one ever ruled over the mere subject in hand more

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entirely than Leonardo, or bent it more dexterously to purely artistic ends. And so it comes to pass that though he handles sacred subjects continually, he is the most profane of painters; the given person or subject . . . is often merely the pretext for a kind of work which carries one all together beyond the range of its conventional associations. (RS, 94) For all the dexterous handling here, surely this is tactless. Leonardo begins to look like the kind of critic who would be condemned by an I. A. Richards or a Cleanth Brooks—the kind who gets too close to his material, and smears it with his own subjectivity. The way Leonardo “handles sacred subjects continually” profanes them—as if he were casually thumbing through sacred books. He renders the extraordinary and sacred the everyday and profane. He “rule[s] over” established meanings in order to impose his own. Is this not what Arnold, in his Homer lectures, called pressing too impetuously after one’s object, as the very opposite of tact? As if to compound the sin, Pater’s description of the artist’s style appears to launch his own prose, as in his Michelangelo essay, away from its object and into a flight of its own. He follows the passage with his famous, luxurious (and to some critics, scandalous) rapture over Leonardo’s Mona Lisa—“She is older than the rocks among which she sits; like the vampire, she has been dead many times and learned the secrets of the grave; and has been a diver in deep seas, and keeps their fallen day about her . . .” (RS, 97–98)—lines so striking as poetry to Yeats, he famously used them to introduce his 1936 Oxford Book of Modern Verse. If Pico had traduced his subjects by his rationalizing allegory, then what kind of criticism is instigated by this ruling-over by “sentiment”? The answer to this question lies in Pater’s recurring distinction between the diaphanous and the merely compliant. Liberty, as we have seen, for Pater depends on an environment that offers itself for “use”—a word that never has an instrumental or merely exploitative sense in Pater’s prose. The terms of use in a given encounter tend to be fixed in advance (Lamb calls this “malice aforethought”; Arnold, “controversy”). Which is why Pater supports his sense of use with strong terms, like usurpation (in the case of Botticelli, above), or ruling-over. Pater’s sense of use encourages the kind of aggression that creativity demands, what the psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott called “the backcloth of unconscious destruction”: this is not, crucially, an assertion that seeks recognition by others, but one that seeks grounds for its own way of handling the world.78 Music is Pater’s frequent analogy for this situation—Michelangelo’s art offers the “promptings of a piece of music,” Leonardo’s is “subtle and vague as a piece of music”—in its resistance to rationalizing explanation. Pater rules over politeness, moralism, and even accuracy, as impediments to tact in trust. He offers a revaluation of profanation: it reduces certainty, performs susceptibility, and resituates art from an elite experience to a common

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one. “The way that Pater reads the Mona Lisa,” Angela Leighton has commented, “almost unframes it altogether, leaving no dividing line between the work of art and the swimmingly impressionistic memories it inspires.”79 Pater insists on a kind of profanation—a form of perfectionist self-reliance, or affirmation of one’s own impression as the basis of what he called in “Diaphaneitè” with Nietzschean temerity, the “renewal of the world”—and a refusal to defer to a transcendental realm, or a nostalgia for the past, or an instrumental faith in future progress. Leonardo’s obligation is to his individuality, and next worlds are found only in this one. Ruling over the “mere”—in the word’s sense of pure, unmediated, strictly bounded—subject is a strangely tactful activity. It refuses any too-independent or sovereign self, and rejects any standard edition of self and other. It is an activity that will define, we will see in the next chapter, the clinical practice of Marion Milner, who is exercised by this question of tact as a ruling-over.80 We catch only glimpses of Leonardo as he slips between these lines. But in the “School of Giorgione” which follows, Pater expands upon this theme to describe more fully the grounds of his critical practice. The essay only appeared in the third (1888) edition of The Renaissance, which also reintroduced his “Conclusion,” which was omitted from the second edition in response to critical displeasure. It is possible that, finding his readers uncomprehending of the themes of “Leonardo” and the “Conclusion,” he composed the essay as a recapitulation. Pater insisted in a letter to his printers that the essay was to be “printed between those on Leonardo da Vinci and Joachim du Bellay.”81 “Giorgione”—an early version of which, Lawrence Evans has suggested, became the preface of The Renaissance—arrives to elaborate Pater’s project, without explaining it away.

Flying, Playing, Listening It is as if Pater, as his essays unfold, stages the finding and refinding of a sensibility, and ever deferring a last word. The Giorgione essay, however, is a return to something like a manifesto. It opens with an objection to a modern criticism that neglects the “sensuous element in art” because it regards its different forms and materials as reducible to a single and totalizing scale of quantitative value: “as but translations into different languages of one and the same fixed quantity of imaginative thought” (RS, 102). Criticism is still making Pico’s allegorizing mistake. It assumes a spurious binary of “pure sense” and “pure reason,” then subsumes difference beneath a critical rationality. (“There are two ways of disliking art,” Gilbert remarks in Wilde’s 1891 dialogue “The Critic as Artist”: “One is to dislike it. The other, to like it rationally.”)82 “Giorgione” endorses with a renewed cogency a criticism that moves susceptibly at boundaries: the “true pictorial quality” of a painting, for instance, lies between

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“technical acquirement,” on the one hand, and a “poetical, or what may be called literary interest,” on the other (RS, 104). It is found in the inventive or creative handling of pure line and colour, which . . . is quite independent of anything definitively poetical in the subject it accompanies. It is the drawing—the design projected from that peculiar pictorial temperament or constitution, in which, while it may possibly be ignorant of true anatomical proportions, all things whatever, all poetry, all ideas however abstract or obscure, float up as visible scene or image: it is the colouring—that weaving of light, as of just perceptible gold threads, through the dress, the flesh, the atmosphere, in Titian’s Lace-girl, the staining of the whole fabric of the thing with a new, delightful, physical quality. This drawing, then—the arabesques traced through the air by Tintoret’s flying figures, by Titian’s forest branches; this colouring —the magic conditions of light and hue in the atmosphere of Titian’s Lace-girl, or Rubens’s Descent from the Cross:—these essential pictorial qualities must first of all delight the sense, delight it as directly and sensuously as a fragment of Venetian glass; and through this delight alone become the vehicle of whatever poetry or science may lie beyond them in the intention of the composer. (RS, 103–104; italics in original) Pater’s critical grammar insists upon the gerund. The triadic structures of his prose gesture beyond the binarism he has just condemned. He replaces achieved terms (technical acquirement, literary interest) with activities in the moment. Drawing, coloring, even flying, are the forming activities—ongoing in the present moment—by which Pater wants us to experience art. His prose style raises for us what the art critic John Berger calls painting’s “strange contrast between static and dynamic,” and so opens painting as a present space of experience in which we can move.83 We respond to a mode of handling in a painting, and a previously unimagined way of approaching the world becomes available to us, usable by us. Pater writes the scene of looking at a painting as its coming to engage us; to touch us more closely through its aesthetic of handling than if we were as critics to decipher its subject or explain its technical prowess.84 He doesn’t want us to be knowledgeable about a painting’s subject or its workmanship, if these attitudes prevent us from being taken by it—by the hand. Pater, like Nietzsche, would undermine a criticism that stands as consumer before a finished work.85 He attends instead to the question of what kind of activity a painting is, and how we are placed in relation to it. “In its primary aspect,” Pater explains, a great picture has no more definite message for us than an accidental play of sunlight and shadow for a few moments on the wall or floor: is itself, in truth, a space of such fallen light, caught as the colours are in

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an Eastern carpet, but refined upon, and dealt with more subtly and exquisitely than by nature itself. (RS, 104) The critic selects the artistic experience, because she or he intuits the handling that has brought us into this space as a set of formal, relational conditions, which are refined versions of those we experience in daily life. So the “mere matter of a picture,” Pater explains, is “nothing without the form, the spirit, of the handling, that this form, this mode of handling, should become an end in itself. . . . [T]his is what all art constantly strives after” (RS, 106). Pater’s explanation arrives as an elaboration, in a parallel phrase, of his famous maxim: “all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music” (RS, 106; italics in original). Which does not mean all art can be subsumed as if in allegory, beneath the conventions of music—as if music provides the single common language of art—but rather that for Pater, music, which evades final and mortifying explanations, confronts us with an experience in the moment of handling. For Pater, art must form us, rather than inform us. He follows up his distinction between types of meaning with the insistence that “this principle holds good of all things that partake to any degree of artistic qualities, of the furniture of our houses, and of dress, for instance, of life itself, of gesture and speech, and the details of daily intercourse; these also, for the wise, being susceptible of a suavity and charm, caught from the way in which they are done, which gives them a worth in themselves” (RS, 108). Art comes to life; and Pater introduces his subject as an origins myth for this process. Giorgione appears as the inventor of genre, of those easily moveable pictures which serve neither for uses of devotion, nor of allegorical or historical teaching—little groups of real men and women, amid congruous furniture or landscape —morsels of actual life, conversation or music or play, but refined upon or idealised, till they come to seem like glimpses of life from afar. Those spaces of more cunningly blent colour, obediently filling their places, hitherto, in mere architectural scheme, Giorgione detaches from the wall. He frames them by the hands of some skilful carver, so that people may move them readily and take with them where they go, as one might a poem in manuscript, or a musical instrument, to be used, at will, as a means of self-education, stimulus or solace, coming like an animated presence, into one’s cabinet, to enrich the air as with some choice aroma, and, like persons, live with us, for a day or a lifetime. Of art such as this, art which has played so large a part in men’s culture since that time, Giorgione is the initiator (RS, 111). Leonardo’s profanation is extended, becoming a transmittable practice of enchantment, a technique for tact. Giorgione’s invention provides a parable for

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all art after the Renaissance: this is how art becomes usable for Pater. For John Ruskin, on the other hand, in his 1851 essay on Pre-Raphaelitism, this was exactly where art had gone wrong, ethically and aesthetically. “For a long time,” Ruskin explains, the function of a painter remained a religious one: it was to impress upon the popular mind the reality of the objects of faith, and the truth of the histories of Scripture, by giving visible form to both. That function has now passed away, and none has as yet taken its place. The painter has no profession, no purpose. He is an idler on the earth, chasing the shadows of his own fancies.86 Pater agrees, of course; but he locates in this fall the resources of newly mediated, shadowy intercourse between art and life. Both Pater and Ruskin locate what is often understood by philosophers and critics to be the post-Kantian predicament of aesthetics in the Renaissance. This predicament, in the words of the critic Frances Ferguson, was that “while the production of art had once been seen as largely a matter of following rules and copying successful past achievements, Kant’s emphasis on the apprehension rather than the production of beauty meant that artists were in a sense the last to know about the rules they should be following, the keys to the hearts of their audiences.”87 Hegel’s aesthetic philosophy had made the historical case for the secularization of art; Pater is interested in what this process feels like—its use to him. This not knowing, fatal to art for Ruskin, is art’s very condition for Pater—as the precondition of maturity, and for trust in tact. Giorgione is a hero of diffusion. He instigates an aesthetics of acquaintance: art that lives with us, and helps us to live. Pater describes a culture, to borrow words from art critic Dave Hickey in another context, “where art is chosen, not accredited or anointed” by religious or political or market forces.88 Such art deliberately confuses boundaries of status between fine and decorative arts, a confusion that continues the Romantic essayists’ insistence on the graces of commonplace life.89 The social metaphor of the frame, so important to Lamb and Arnold (and, we will see, to Milner) appears here with Pater’s transition from a frame as a fixed social context, sanctioning a particular reading only of a given social form, to the idea of aesthetics as a tact of active selection and framing, which offers experience for use. The school of Giorgione provides us with “ideal instants” to be used in this way, selected with “admirable tact from that feverish, tumultuously coloured world of the old citizens of Venice” (RS, 118). What Pater also calls Giorgione’s “wonderful tact” relies on a moment in which an absolute style, and its ordering of experience, becomes negotiable by individuals—but without the dissolution of specific forms. It is analogous to Theodor Adorno’s account of the emergence of a “dialectic of tact,” which also has its “precise historical hour” (his source is Goethe) in which a space of free play opens between forms and

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uses, which frees without decomposing those forms (to allow, for instance, Beethoven’s late style.) Adorno’s summary of tact’s conditions could easily be applied by Pater: “the precondition of tact is convention intact but no longer present.”90 The recursive style of The Renaissance insists on the rigors of this boundary. It resists the recuperating onward movement of the dialectic.91 Pater wants us to linger with Giorgione’s liberating moment. He seeks repeatedly to reopen the space of tact as experience: a critical task of description that is ever pressing—ever required in the new moment, which is both the subject and the form of Giorgione’s art: In these then, the favourite incidents of Giorgione’s school, music or the musical intervals in our existence, life itself is conceived as a sort of listening—listening to music, to the reading of Bandello’s novels, to the sounds of water, to time as it flies. Often such moments are really our moments of play and we are surprised at the unexpected blessedness of what may seem our least important part of time; not merely because play is in many instances that to which people apply their own best powers, but also because at such times, the stress of our servile, everyday attentiveness being relaxed, the happier powers in things without are permitted free passage, and have their way with us. And so, from music, the school of Giorgione passed often to the play which is like music; to those masques in which men avowedly do but play at real life, like children “dressing up.” (RS, 119–120) Giorgione’s paintings evoke Pater’s diaphanous attitude; its “strange heedfulness” seems here to replace the compliance of “our servile, everyday attentiveness.” Such contemplation is an exercise by which the “happier powers in things” might “have their way with us.” Here is the education in susceptibility Pater had promised in his preface (RS, xx). Theatrical metaphors meet his description of painting as listening: as in Lamb’s middle space of “illusion,” a virtual world is conjured which invests “real life” with a more vivid range of experience. Pater goes on to remark on the unusually rich harmony of horizons in such painting, in which “neither personage nor scenery is ever a mere pretext for the other” (RS, 121). Art, for Pater, finds more equal relations between subject and world to be a matter of scale and rhythm.92 How are we to gain the point of view of the daring minute? The middle essays of The Renaissance repeat themselves, as if continually looking for new ways to come to the same—never held, never mastered—point.93 Such experiences cannot be ordered within a narrative of conversion, which even if it laments the difficulty of its achievement, seeks a final rest as proof of its authenticity (Augustine’s “Our heart is restless until it rests in you”).94 Hence the mobility of Pater’s prose, its mercurial syntax, in which clause conditions

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clause. Pater’s aesthetics is a philosophy of infinite tasks.95 His injunction in The Renaissance is to keep returning to the momentous boundary between the diaphanous and the merely colorless life—the position of the tactful critic.

Criticism “Winckelmann” begins by describing a friendship between two men who never met. (It is a relationship between a writer and a reader, and so a model for that between Pater and us.) Goethe classed Winckelmann with “certain works of art, possessing an inexhaustible gift of suggestion, to which criticism may return again and again with renewed freshness” (RS, 141). In fact, as Stefano Evangelista has shown, the essay draws so extensively from Goethe’s writings, in quotation and allusion, that it is as much an essay about Goethe as about Winckelmann. Or really it is about affinities: about Goethe’s use of Winckelmann, and Pater’s use of them both.96 Winckelmann is the critic as artwork. For Hegel, Pater notes, Winckelmann opened a “new sense . . . a new organ for the human spirit,” and this, Pater remarks, “is the highest that can be said for any critical effort” (RS, 141). The final portrait of The Renaissance turns to the question of the critical character: “what kind of man it was who thus laid open a new organ. Under what conditions was it effected?” (RS, 141). Pater understands Winckelmann’s criticism as a tactile, profane alternative to Kant’s conceptual rigor: “a constant handling of the antique, with its eternal outline, maintains that limitation as effectually as a critical philosophy” (RS, 145). Winckelmann’s criticism “reproduces for us the earlier sentiment of the Renaissance” as an aesthetic liberalism. On a sudden the imagination feels itself free. How facile and direct, it seems to say, is this life of the senses and the understanding, when once we have apprehended it! Here, surely, is that more liberal mode of life we have been seeking so long, so near to us all the while. . . . Here, then, in vivid realisation, we see the native tendency of Winckelmann to escape from abstract theory to intuition, to the exercise of sight and touch. (RS, 146–147) “One learns nothing from him,” says Pater, “but one becomes something” (RS, 147). Winckelmann is an example of one who took his aesthetic chances in life, and so was “saved from a mediocrity, which, breaking no bounds, moves ever in a bloodless routine, and misses its one chance in the life of the spirit and the intellect” (RS, 149). His portrait is a pilgrim’s progress, towards a life in relief, which begins from the “beating of the soul against its bars” to discover “adequate conditions of culture,” “intellectual light,” and “repression, removed at last” (RS, 151–152). Winckelmann’s life in turn offered relief. It formed the background, the very conditions, of the life of Goethe. “The aim of

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right criticism, Pater comments, “is to place Winckelmann in an intellectual perspective, of which Goethe is the foreground” (RS, 181). Learning from Winckelmann, Goethe escaped a culture of “trenchant and absolute divisions” to achieve the “union of the Romantic spirit, its adventure, its variety, its deep subjectivity, with Hellenism, its transparency, its rationality, its desire of beauty—that marriage of Faust and Helena, of which the art of the nineteenth century is the child” (RS, 181). The essay is a story about a contagious education. When in the Renaissance the “relics of the antique were restored to the world,” says Pater, “in the view of the Christian asceticism it was as if an ancient plague-pit had been opened. All the world took the contagion of the life of nature and the senses” (RS, 180). Pater uses the same image to define Winckelmann’s style—as finding the moment of the Renaissance in his own time, in the precise revaluation of a defensive fear: “the key to the understanding of the Greek spirit, Winckelmann possessed in his own nature, itself like a relic of classical antiquity, laid open by accident to our alien, modern atmosphere” (RS, 175). Pater takes these words from “Diaphaneitè” almost directly. It comes at the end of The Renaissance in fulfillment of Pater’s early manifesto.97 Winckelmann approached the world “not through the understanding, but by instinct or touch.” Not everything that is feared can be loved; but shame is often a fear of exposure, not of what is exposed. Winckelmann does not redefine but revaluates his object, and so takes in, becomes susceptible to, the alien plague of the ancient world and its strange orientations. He allows it to become formative of his nature. Winckelmann’s critical temperament is defined by an unembarrassed wholeness, “a serenity—Heiterkeit—which characterizes Winckelmann’s handling of the sensuous side of Greek art. This serenity is, perhaps, in great measure, a negative quality: it is the absence of any sense of want, or corruption, or shame” (RS, 176). This essayistic quality of Heiterkeit, for which Nietzsche envied Montaigne, is a mood of approach that refuses a constitution of the self in the world according to the policed boundaries of shame.98 It is as if Pater finds in Winckelmann an example of an alternative grounding of the self: not in the shame of our first parents, but just where we find ourselves, fascinated, now. So Pater’s formula for a critical character rests in a mediating relational mode (between, in this case, Winckelmann and Goethe); and in the formal possibilities for arranging one’s experience in the world which are put into play by a new arrangement of feelings and objects. Shame—and the boundaries it enforces—is the enemy of trust (the critical temper). Tact’s care for the latent is a way of handling things shamelessly, profanely. A kind of relief and critical triumph is contained in Pater’s declaration that Winckelmann “fingers those pagan marbles with unsigned hands, with no sense of shame or loss” (RS, 177). Though critics have defined such statements as Pater’s defense of homosexuality, they go further, to describe criticism’s response to the “demand

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of the intellect . . . to feel itself alive,” by helping forward the capacities of art “to mould our lives to artistic perfection” through the task of aesthetic experience. “[S]o to rearrange the details of modern life, so to reflect it, that it may satisfy the spirit” (RS, 183–184). “And what,” Pater asks, “does the spirit need in the face of modern life?” He answers: The sense of freedom. That naïve, rough sense of freedom which supposes man’s will to be limited, if at all, only by a will stronger than his, he can never have again. The attempt to represent it in art would have so little verisimilitude that it would be flat and uninteresting. . . . For us, necessity is not, as of old, a sort of mythological personage without us, with whom we can do warfare. It is rather a magic web woven through and through us, like that magnetic system of which modern science speaks, penetrating us with a network, subtler than our subtlest nerves, yet bearing in it the central forces of the world. Can art represent men and women in these bewildering toils so as to give the spirit at least an equivalent for the sense of freedom? (RS, 185) Pater ends his essay on Winckelmann by urging for a more refined sense of freedom, which is, something more like perceiving a web than like asserting freedoms of conflict and competition (“the task,” for those who would describe subjectivity, Judith Butler has remarked, “is to think of being acted upon and acting as simultaneous, and not only as a sequence”).99 Pater’s aesthetic liberalism insists on a sense of freedom, or “at least an equivalent” for it, which is not an illusion of agency concealing relations of domination, but a susceptibility from which liberatory demands can be made. Pater realizes that freedom must first depend on facing one’s own dependence and penetrability, with less of a shamefaced sense of the wall between an inner and outer world. Such a practice of tact is not without its risks (Pater describes Winckelmann’s death at the hands of a hustler as a moment of “characteristic openness”; RS, 156). It may even be impossible: we may only have a choice of the “more or less noble attitude with which we watch [the] fatal combinations” of natural laws (RS, 185). But Pater’s sense of courage is all in this penetrability, this handling.

Concluding Of all Pater’s essays, the “Conclusion” to his Renaissance is the most read. But although it is regularly excerpted by those seeking summation of the principles and temper of British aestheticism, we might do better to take its title at face value. What if it doesn’t stand alone, as a manifesto of sorts, but provides an envoi, a bridge: a valediction forbidding habit. Pater leaves us with a mediating transition, from the work to the world.

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The essay opens with a briefer sketch of a by-now-familiar boundary; between “that which is without—our physical life” and the “combination of natural elements” which, constantly changing, constitute us—and the “inward world of thought and feeling” where “the whirlpool is still more rapid . . . a drift of momentary acts of sight and passion and thought” (RS, 186–187). Taking this essay alone, the reader is struck by Pater’s evocation of transience. Coming from the rest of The Renaissance, we realize we are just where Pater prefers his reader to be: aware, on the edge of things, where the importunate world meets the inner life. This is where Pater introduces his image of mediation, the site of “impression,” which is the “impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world” (RS, 187–188). What may look like an injunction to solipsism (it did to many of Pater’s critics) is in fact a declaration for mediation, the same that we have seen in Botticelli’s middle worlds, or Leonardo’s twilight existence. The sources of the self, in such an account, are difficult to grasp: To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our lives fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations, that analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves. (RS, 188) Read as part of a manifesto, this passage leaves us with little to go on with; its punctuation once again seeming to diaphanize any “hard realism” in the prose. But we know, from the essays that have led us here, that Pater wants to turn our attention from fixing a content to evoking a rhythm. The “very perfection” of the work of his artists, he said in his “Giorgione” essay, relies on “a certain suppression or vagueness of mere subject, so that the meaning reaches us through ways not distinctly traceable by the understanding” (RS, 108). This is the recursive rhythm of relief, which leads to an insistence on the vagaries of borderlines, and to what Pater calls in his essay on Michelangelo “the making of man,” the point of the making of the self in the world. How much agency an individual has in this “weaving and unweaving of ourselves,” Pater leaves vague: it is “strange” to us, but continuous and certain—“perpetual.” Like Winckelmann, we are compromised by it, and granted its potential. The whole of the “Conclusion” is indeterminate in the way that “Winckelmann” has prepared the reader to understand. Pater tactfully declines to apportion what is the individual’s and what is the world’s possession; not because the claims of a life are not concerned with this question (claims about justice in particular are), but because this task for knowledge, its accurate opposition, obscures creative possibilities for handling the world. It is in this handling, says Pater, that “the sense of freedom” may emerge. A sense that may

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form the basis for a vivid life, and so for the claims such a life will go on to make. Pater has offered us a series of portraits, or styles of handling this process. What Pater wants to oppose, the preceding collection has shown, is any too-simple clarity in the understanding of our agency, any dismissive defense against our susceptibilities. (Pater will, in his late work Plato and Platonism, define the essay form as conveying a refined sense of one’s ignorance.) By taking us to the grounds of the self in the world, Pater’s tact seeks to clear the way, affectively, for the feelings through which we become susceptible to our own experience. This is what he means when he warns his readers to “be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness” (RS, 190). Aesthetic experience is privileged in its insistence on the boundary between self and world: “Of such wisdom,” Pater comments, in the last words of his book, “the poetic passion, the desire for beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most. For art comes to you proposing frankly to give nothing but the highest quality to your moments as they pass, and simply for those moments’ sake” (RS, 190). Art takes our attention to points which seem “by a lifted horizon to set the spirit free for a moment” (RS, 189). Pater’s conclusion to his work of self-help is really a tactful gesture: a hand extended, an invitation. The rest, he insists, is up to us.

ch a P T er si x

Tact in Psychoanalysis m a r ion m iL n er

Facing Reality How do people ever come to face reality? Where do they find an appetite for their lives? The British psychoanalyst Marion Milner opened her brilliant 1952 paper, “The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation,” with such a question. How is it, Milner asks, that an “infant’s interest is transferred from an original primary object to a secondary one”?1 In a less theoretical register, this is to ask: how does the child makes use of its mother in order to face the world beyond the mother; born into a unit with the mother, how does he or she come to love other people? Milner was a central figure in the “Middle Group” of twentieth-century British psychoanalysis. From this psychoanalytic point of view, we never grow out of asking this question—about the conditions of what another member of the group, Donald Winnicott, called “aliveness”— whether we ask it consciously or not. Milner’s earliest writings, before she became a psychoanalyst, were essays about her own diaries: A Life of One’s Own (1934) and An Experiment in Leisure (1937). The latter book begins from Montaigne’s observation that “leisure always breeds a divided mind,” to which Milner adds her own observation that people often hate to be left in their own company. They just don’t know what to make of themselves. Many people, she comments, “as soon as they had a moment to themselves free from obligation . . . would rush off to find another obligation” for lack of any capacity to be alone.2 Milner’s epigraphs to A Life of One’s Own are mostly drawn from Montaigne’s Essays and Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe—two characters faced with the problem of having one’s time, and one’s life, on one’s hands. And it was Montaigne who provided Milner with a model of response to this condition of being with oneself: she would recall in 1981 that she “had been stimulated by reading Montaigne’s essays

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and his insistence that what one calls the soul is totally different from all one expects it to be, often being the very opposite.”3 Being with herself, and being open to finding herself quite different than she had thought, was the beginning of her experiment in feeling alive: “was there not a way,” she asks, “by which each person could find out for himself what he was like, not by reading about what other people thought he ought to be, but directly, as directly as knowing the sky is blue and how an apple tastes, not needing anyone to tell him? Perhaps, then, if one could not write for other people one could write for oneself, and perhaps draw for oneself.”4 These are lifelong questions for all Milner’s remarkable writings, over her long career as essayist, diarist, artist, educationalist, as well as psychoanalyst. They provide a basis for her theories about interpersonal relations. In her diary books, she recorded her own ebb and flow of interest in the world. To find her sense of herself, Milner attends closely to her own confusions and most fleeting, least directed thoughts. She proposes practices of writing and drawing from a position of uncertainty and weakness—inhabiting the skepticism which they seek to address—and against a situation in which people (“very often they are women”) are offered little support from culture in establishing their own sense of the world, and are encouraged to be “more aware of other people’s identity than their own.”5 Like George Eliot in her essays, Milner laments the inadequacy of cultural resource available to support a creative life; but unlike Eliot in her essays, Milner is on the lookout for new uses for vulnerability. If the resources of the strong only serve to suppress the capacities and perceptions of those who are marginalized, then what use can they be to the weak? Reflecting in her Experiment on her reading of Homer, Milner wonders what Telemachus might have done with his weakness: “he merely searched for and finally relied upon the strength of his father, as woman do when they fall in love with such a man as Odysseus.” But is strength what people ought to search for: “was there not” Milner asks, “an Odyssey for those who were continually aware of their own weakness?”6 This would be, one imagines, a Telemachy that makes it past the fourth book, and that does not become subsumed in the Odyssey’s violent strivings. Although they make for fascinating reading, I am not, in the pages that follow, going to consider the diary books in detail. My interest is in how their concerns with a freedom to see and feel for oneself, and the uses of vulnerability, shape her analytic work—and in particular, how this work calls for a clinical sensibility with striking affinities to the tact of the nineteenth-century essayists described in this book. In her “Role of Illusion” paper, Milner turns to a specific clinical example of finding and losing of interest in the world. She cites the case of Simon, “a boy of 11 who was suffering from a loss of talent for schoolwork.” Simon had been “remarkably interested and successful” at

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school from the ages of four to six, but now he was unhappy, and “at times totally unable to get himself to school at all.”7 Simon had, as it were, fallen out of love with the world, and had become immune to the influence of objects loved and loving—to the influence of education, broadly conceived. In Milner’s consulting room, Simon’s attention turned to conflict. He played at “a game of war between two villages.” Milner explains that “all the toys had been set out in the form of a village, full of people and animals; the boy would then bomb the village by dropping balls of burning paper upon it, my role being to play the part of the villagers, and try to save the toys from actual destruction. The rules of the game were such that this was often very difficult.”8 Milner notes that Simon had lived through part of the Blitz on London. She interprets his game as an attempt to account for conflict, beginning with his own conflicts about the “relation between father and mother, both internally and externally, and trying to find ways of dealing with his jealousy and envy of his mother.”9 So far, so Kleinian—by which I mean Milner draws on an orthodox psychoanalytic reading, for the time, of Simon’s activities. Melanie Klein, a dominant theorist of childhood play and aggression, was Milner’s supervisor in this case, and Simon was the pseudonym for Michael Clyne, Klein’s grandson. By a Kleinian reading, implicit symptoms are interpreted and rendered explicit: aggressive play reveals violent feelings towards parental objects. And there is an Oedipal explanation here too. Milner also proposes a Freudian interpretation of a symbolic identification between the war-ravaged village, Simon’s mother, and his school: if Simon associated his school with his mother, then his inhibition in schoolwork would be explained by his identification of it with the “forbidden mother’s body.”10 In such a zero-sum relationship, Simon couldn’t go to school—really get interested in it—if it meant leaving, and so betraying his mother. But Milner goes beyond these symptomatic readings. As an essayist, in the tradition this book has been tracing, she wants to know what Simon is doing with this world he has created—how he is handling it. She lets Simon teach her about the meaning of his objects, and the stakes of his games. Milner comes to see Simon’s play as about something creative and compelling: as “also something to do with difficulties in establishing the relation to external reality as such.”11 She offers Simon the space for this “something” to develop, holding back from telling him what his behavior means, to instead reflect essayistically on the kind of experience that Simon was offering her, when considered as a matter of tone and handling. Milner’s aims are at first obstructed, however, by Simon proving himself an excellent fault-finder. He would adopt, says Milner, “a particularly bullying tone when talking to me.” Simon lectures Milner on her failures of knowledge, her conduct and her punctuality. He rejects the authority of her impressions of him. But she notes that a change came in his mode of relating to her when he began his play:

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he always dropped this tone when he began imaginative play with the toys. This observation suggested that perhaps this boy could drop the hectoring tone, during this kind of play, because it was a situation in which he could have a different kind of relation to external reality, by means of the toys; he could do what he liked with them, and yet they were outside him. . . . [A]s soon as he had settled down to using the toys as a pliable medium, external to himself, but not insisting on their own separate objective existence, then apparently he could treat me with friendliness and consideration, and even accept real frustration from me.12 From a change in the handling and quality of the space between them, Milner intuits something about Simon’s experience of the world. Bullies have their backs to the wall. Simon is rendered strident by the quality of mediation in his face-to-face contact with Milner. Because the world seems so dangerous to him, Simon reduces the relational repertoire on offer and cuts out the middle ground: he is faced with the anxious alternatives of insisting that Milner is part of him, and so bullied and policed and kept in line (“he treated me as totally his own to do what he liked with, as though I were dirt, his dirt, or as a tool, an extension of his own hand”), or as terrifyingly separate, unpredictable, and a source of threat—as an enemy village.13 Simon is at first in the position of Lamb’s “Scotsman,” from chapter 1, for whom there is no “border-land,” and who “stops a metaphor like a suspected person in an enemy’s country.” In thinking about Simon’s predicament, established psychoanalytic concepts of projection or identification, Milner reflects, were not much use to her, since they rely on the firm sense of the boundaries between people that Simon both questioned and was tormented by. Milner’s clinical tact is in her providing the mediation that allows Simon an experience of what Lamb calls “middle actions,” and what Milner calls “something half-way between day-dreaming and purposeful instinctive or expedient action.” This “something” opens for Simon a way of being at home in the world, a meeting point for outer and inner realities, and also a more promising sense of the future: “As soon as he moved a toy in response to some wish or fantasy then the play-village was different, and the new sight set off a new set of possibilities.”14 Milner compares this experience to her own practice of free or “doodle” drawing recorded in her 1950 diary book about her own creativity, On Not Being Able to Paint, in which the “sight of a mark on the paper provokes new associations.”15 In that book, Milner’s practice of sketching, in the sense of mediation it grants her, alters her apperceptive mode. It suggests that the outlines between objects are not in fact defined but are “continually merging. . . . I noticed that the effort needed to see the edges of objects as they really look stirred a dim fear, a fear of what might happen if one let go one’s

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mental hold on the outline which kept everything separate and in its place.”16 “[A]fter thinking about this,” Milner reports on a moment that would have great consequences for her later work and for the development of British psychoanalysis: I woke one morning and saw two jugs on the table; and without any mental struggle I saw the edges in relation to each other, and how gaily they seemed to ripple now they were freed from the grimly practical business of enclosing an object and keeping it in its place. This is surely what the painters meant about the play of edges; certainly they did play and I tried a five-minute sketch of the jugs. . . . Now also it was easier to understand what painters meant by the phrase “freedom of line” because here was a reason for its opposite; that is, the emotional need to imprison objects rigidly within themselves.17 The jugs (pictured) are “freed,” and Milner’s language, in its passive construction, is once again carefully uninterested in the origins or location of this freedom, which entails delight and fear at once. It is something that happens between her and the objects of her world. In her last diary book, Bothered by Alligators, which was left unfinished at her death at the age of ninety-eight, Milner reflects of her “Two Jugs” that the “overlap of their two shapes gradually led me, over the years, to develop the symbol of two overlapping circles which was to become central to my thinking about concentration, reverie and creativity.”18 Milner’s report about the jugs would provide the basis for Winnicott’s famous “transitional objects,” and his concept of a “transitional area of experiencing” (see chapter 1). For Milner, they suggest that the ordinary work one is always doing—that one could, as it were, unlearn—is the keeping of things in their places. “When trying to think about what might be the reason for this need to make objects keep themselves to themselves within a rigid boundary,” Milner “remembered reading” in a book by her art critic friend, Jan Gordon, the claim that the “outline is . . . the first and plainest statement of a tangible reality,” and Milner goes on to “suppose that, in one part of the mind, there really could be a fear of losing all sense of separating boundaries; particularly the boundaries between the tangible realities of the external world and the imaginative realities of the inner world of feeling and idea; in fact, a fear of being mad.”19 This must be the reason, Milner concludes, why experiments in painting can make people so angry: “they must surely be afraid, without knowing it, that their hold upon reason and sanity is precarious, else they would not so resent being asked to look at visual experience in a new way.”20 There could also be a motive on the border of the social and the psychological: the vehement force with which people are kept in their place, by which the more oppressive boundaries of difference are drawn, may be linked to a psychological

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urgency and a terror of insanity. What Milner is most explicit about though, is that this fear and consequent rigidity of line must be overcome. Here is an ascesis upon which the very vividness, the felt experience, of our lives depends. Milner notes that when she could find this way of looking at a thing, she found it could bring about an “intense feeling for and belief in its living reality”; she describes it as a “vital experience,” a “transfiguration comparable . . . to the transfiguration of falling in love.”21 In her “Illusion” paper, Milner tactfully attempts to offer this experience to Simon. Instead of showing Simon what she knows about him, she adopts an attitude of appreciation. She substitutes for a trained register of interpretation towards cure the critical tact of a Lamb, Arnold, or Pater. She allows herself to be moved by the experiences Simon offers her, and to show him how her own imagination is caught by him. She recognizes the fact that at times there was a quality in his play which I can only describe as beautiful—occasions in when it was he who did the stage managing and it was my imagination which caught fire. It was in fact play with light and fire. He would close the shutters of the room and insist that it be lit only by candle light, sometimes a dozen candles arranged together, or all grouped together in a solid block. And then he would make what he called furnaces, with a very careful choice of what ingredients should make the fire . . . and often there had to be a sacrifice, a lead soldier had to be added to the fire. . . . In fact, all this type of play had a dramatic ritual quality comparable to the fertility rites described by Frazer in primitive societies. And this effect was the more striking because this boy’s conscious interests were entirely conventional for his age; he was absorbed in Meccano and model railways. . . . [T]he boy’s play nearly became “a play,” in that there was a sense of pattern and dramatic form in what he produced.22 Milner’s response to Simon changes genre: from analytic interpretation to the essays in appreciation she had practiced in the diary books (where she recorded interests in the early anthropological description of James Frazer’s Golden Bough). And whereas Simon had responded with intense frustration to Milner’s attempts to explain his behavior as fully explained by aggressive instinct (“when I did this the aggression did not seem to lessen and I was sometimes in despair at its quite implacable quality,” it is the seemingly noninterpretive attention to his play as an aesthetic production, as simply “play with light and fire,” that really helps him because it makes room for illusion, in Lamb’s sense of the word.23 Without this illusion, Milner comments, we are left only with the “common sense perception which would see a picture as only an attempt at photography, or the analyst as only a present-day person.”24 Milner doesn’t suggest here that what is called in psychoanalytic theory “transference”—the powerful layers of meaning we bring to new relationships—

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is a mistaken impression to be cleared away in the service of objective truth. She implies that, given the right relational conditions, transference relations are a source of vitality, and a way to be impressed by other people. Tactfully here, Milner argues against a therapeutics that would seek to return people together to so-called reality, and too common a ground, lest we are left only with the least part of our experience, which is the part that we all can agree upon. A confident consensus in a shared reality can too often be underpinned by denied experiences of compliance and fear. (“We are poor indeed if we are only sane,” as Winnicott had put it in a 1945 paper.)25 What is surprising about Milner’s technique is that she doesn’t want to know: she eschews the kind of propositional and causal interpretation that would seem, in adding layers of meaning to an experience, to deepen it by accretion of knowledge. Instead she intervenes in the quality of Simon’s environment by understanding the quality of attention she pays his situation as constitutive of their shared environment. It is Milner’s apparently tautological response—playing with fire is playing with fire—that proves so liberating. This is because Milner, working in a tactful idiom of relation, takes Simon to be expressing something about relationality per se, without defining its content. Rather, she reflects on the effect his expression has on her, when she looks at it as a work of art. Between them, a modality of the as-if, “a framed space and a pliable medium,” is restored to Simon. Milner’s appreciation is itself carefully staged. She is impressed (not seduced or coerced or cowed), and this relation to Simon makes room for his wider range of expression. (The case suggests that for Milner, an analyst needs to be in touch with her own aesthetic sensibility.) Milner relents, and so forms a medium; she offers Simon a kind of recessive action that makes his world more malleable, more available for handling: “Sometimes he would give me the name of a chemical which is used as a water-softener,” Milner comments.26 A demarcated antagonism is diminished, not only between Simon and Milner, but between Simon’s own clear-thinking rationality and his aptitude for more creative and less organized activity. He becomes less intent in claims for his own separating specialness, less of a stickler for the right way of doing things, and generally less didactic. He also, crucially, becomes less apologetic about his own aesthetic experiences (when formerly he told Milner of the “delight he took in the colours of the various crystals he had studied in his chemistry” he used to add “it’s childish to like them so much.”)27 Milner is careful in her enthusiasm for this change: a narrative of aggression, followed by guilt and a feel-good redemption may obscure what is at stake in such a change. Simon isn’t making up for anything. He is having a new kind of experience; he feels alive, Milner suggests, not forgiven. The predicament is defined, Milner explains, by the “problem of establishing object relationships at all, rather than on the restoration of the injured object once it is established”

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(here is Milner’s diversion from Klein’s narrative of aggression and reparation).28 Simon’s play, says Milner, is expressive of what the art critic Bernard Berenson called the “aesthetic moment” in which “the spectator is at one with the work of art he is looking at.” Milner concludes that psychoanalysts must view such experiences as an “essential recurrent phase in the development of a creative relation to the world” and not only as a “defensive regression.”29 As soon as Milner, in her tactful abandonment of psychoanalytic orthodoxy, adopted the former view, her encounters with Simon lost their tone of despair.

Being Born into the World Simon, because he has parents and has been to school, knows that creative experience is often foreclosed because the spaces between people are constituted, inhospitably, in advance. (The artist David Wojnarowicz called this the “preinvented world,” suggesting by this construction both a lack of room and malice aforethought.)30 Children receive from adults both the stimulation and the undermining of their appetites for relating to the world.31 British psychoanalysis is particularly interested in the common plight of those who suffer life on other people’s terms, and so—in the words of Winnicott in his paper “Dreaming, Fantasying and Living”—“an abandonment of hope in objectrelating.”32 Preexisting relational forms limit their lives; they “fit in only on a compliance basis.”33 Academic literary and cultural studies frequently criticize just such social arrangements. As “effects of power,” Leo Bersani has put it, in a useful gloss, which, as Foucault has argued, are inherent in the relational itself (they are immediately produced by “the divisions, inequalities and disequilibriums” inescapably present “in every relation from one point to another”) can perhaps most easily be exacerbated, and polarized into relations of mastery and subordination, in sex, and that this potential may be grounded in the shifting experience that every human being has of his or her body’s capacity, or failure, to control and to manipulate the world beyond the self.34 Faced with such an arrangement, which permeates one’s bodily experience of the world, one might seek not to participate at all. Or one might seek to keep all the power and knowledge on one’s own side, and all the vulnerabilities on the other. The quotation from Bersani provokes the suggestion that Milner’s work is always implicitly talking about sexual relations too—one’s sense of aliveness and one’s erotic possibilities being unavoidably connected.35 Milner feels sympathy with Simon’s frustration at having been born into the adult world, even as she is on the receiving end of his methods for dealing with this frustration. She describes, for instance, a “ritual catechism which would begin

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with ‘Why are you a fool?’ and I had to say, ‘Why am I a fool?’ Then he would answer, ‘Because I say so.’ Clearly if he had to feel that all the foolishness of adults was his doing, as well as their goodness, then he was going to bear a heavy burden.”36 Milner’s tact—as a matter of attitude—changes things for Simon, or helps him to change things; she allows for a new sense of the world’s uses by which, in Milner’s words, he could “have a bit of his own experience incorporated in the social world.” Simon calls this finding of his own creative material his “lovely stuff.”37 What is at stake here for Milner is, I’ve suggested, the central question of her life’s work: of how people come to a belief in the reality of their own experience and the vitality of their connection to the world. This is not, of course, to suggest that the world is not in fact full of injustices and impositions in social arenas of every scale (about suffering, masters like Wojnarowicz are never wrong), just that for Milner belief in one’s own experience is required for there to be any vibrant grounds from which to resist them, to begin from something more than a preinvented world. And the finding of these grounds is not a given. One can exist in the world, Milner’s work insists, without having been born into one’s own existence. Milner’s most sustained case history, an account of a twenty-year-long psychoanalytic treatment, is a sustained exploration of this distinction. Her 1969 book The Hands of the Living God is about Susan, “a patient who came to her first session saying three things: that she had lost her soul; that the world was no longer outside her; and that all this had happened since she received E.C.T. [electroconvulsive therapy] in hospital, three weeks before coming to me.”38 Milner describes the analysis from this point to a moment when Susan records in a note in her diary that she is “in the world for the first time for sixteen years,” and beyond, to when Susan prepares to get “ready to come out” to a life in the world (H, xxxvii, 323). A touchstone for understanding this case, Milner explains, is Anna Freud’s proposal that a baby “wants to love its mother with all its bodily powers.” Unless readers are prepared to comprehend this statement, she counsels, they “may boggle at the archaic ways of wanting to relate herself to the world that the patient revealed, ways to which Freud gave the name of infantile sexuality” (H, xxxix). For psychoanalysis, as we’ve seen, one’s relation to one’s mother precedes a connection to the world. Susan’s trouble is with her basic relation to, and her love for, her environment (Milner relates that Susan’s “mother seemed to have almost no recognition of her daughter’s separate existence”; H, 11) and, consequently, her sense of having a body in the world. Milner began her treatment of Susan in November 1943, three weeks after she had undergone electroconvulsive therapy at a hospital. Susan began by talking quite freely and gave me a coherent account of her life up to the time of entry into the hospital, five months before the

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E.C.T.; but she constantly complained that since the E.C.T. something was missing in her, for she had no feelings and nothing mattered any more. Later she said that if I had seen her before the E.C.T. it would have been very difficult to talk, but that now, as she had no feelings and nothing mattered, she could just tell me everything. (H, 4) Inhibitions imply commitments. For Susan there is nothing to be gained by linguistic incapacity, because her language is now unconnected to her life. Susan reports that, before the ECT, she had had much trouble feeling real but had begun a process of “breaking down into reality”; she had felt that “she was ‘in the world’: she discovered that she was in her body, that space existed, that if she walked away from things they got farther away; and she discovered that she had not made herself—this was ‘such a relief ’ ” (H, 10). Before the ECT, Susan had been working on a bas-relief clay head copied from a photo of Michelangelo’s Dying Slave, and “when she had first been offered clay to work with she had thought it ‘horrible dirty stuff,’ but then had become excited about it, and wanted to get her arms right into it.” She worked on the head at her own pace, and after the ECT she “came back to finish it; but now she had lost the sense of something in herself that would make it possible to finish it” (H, 13–14). Susan arrives on the analytic scene with a report of once having had a place in the world and a source of vital creativity within her: in her changing relation to the clay she had once discovered her own “lovely stuff.” Taken together, these reports suggest that Susan could once negotiate relief in Walter Pater’s senses: as the manipulation of figure and ground in aesthetic representation and as one’s own positioning in the world, between self and other, depth and surface (see chapter 4). Her bas-relief is a rich metaphor. Susan signals to Milner that she had had a tangible sense of relationality itself, of the aesthetic moment as the location at which, in the words of the art critic T. J. Clark, in his own fascinating aesthetic diary book, “the relations between things are still being made up.”39 Now, however, Susan has lost her formerly strong intuitive connection between her aesthetic sense and her sense of a position in, and vivid commitment to, the world: “she talks of her loss of power to appreciate, particularly music which meant so very much to her and is now just a ‘jingle of sound’; also that her fingers are now all thumbs . . . also that she feels she has lost her background, is ‘shot forward,’ and no longer behind her eyes” (H, 20). Susan’s treatment begins during the Blitz on London, which is to her rendered all the more terrifying because “as she had now lost the feeling of outside space . . . there was nowhere else for the bomb to fall except on her, since everything was her (H, 17). Susan also feels that she has lost her capacity to care. She feels she is possessed by the devil (H, 20). Milner quickly understands that Susan’s case presents grave difficulties for the practice of analysis: “I began to have growing misgivings about whether

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analysis could help her at all,” Milner comments, since “she continued to maintain that neither she nor I was there” (H, 26). Orientation in speech depends on having a place from which to speak. The analytic relation cannot be established where there is no relationality, where one person has not been born into a place in the world. And so the question of the analysis became “the problem of how to find a setting in which [Susan] would feel it would be safe to be born into a separate existence” (H, 28). The problem wasn’t that Susan had no language, it was that language wasn’t meaningful for her, did not come alive in the space of, as the medium of, communication. There is no pretext on which to build any text. Susan would either defend her absolute and inviolable separateness, maintaining with satanic plausibility an uncompromising autarky and an invulnerable contempt for the world (she points out that “when you are a devil things cannot come into you”; H, 167), or she would insist on the impossibility of separation, becoming, like Simon, a furious catechizer in moments when, Milner reflects, she felt there was a threat to her “experiencing herself and me as one person, not two” (H, 102). Milner notes that Susan’s case provided her with the ideas she needed for treating Simon; both cases are about the easing of dogma and the seeking of alternatives to controversy. Both begin from an insecurity in childhood, and a “constant need to keep a watchful eye on the world” which starves one of experimentation: of “that very state of reverie, of absent-mindedness, in which the distinction between fantasy and actuality can be temporarily suspended” (H, 47). Susan distrusts the outside world so much that she reports that she could never settle down to read a book when at home, thus returning Milner to a most severe version of an ordinary predicament: the predicament with which she had begun her diary book, An Experiment in Leisure, many years earlier—a restless intolerance of absorptive illusion, in the sense of this word shared both by Milner and Charles Lamb. The Hands of the Living God asks how an essayistic tact might help, and so evoke illusion within in a life that resists one of its most fundamental means of illusion’s evocation—in metaphorical speech.40 Faced with Susan’s refusal of metaphor—“I remembered what she had told me about her difficulties at school with symbolic or metaphorical expressions; for instance, how she had said . . . ‘What on earth did they mean by talking of the head or the mouth of the river?’ ”—Milner couldn’t persuade her of deeper meanings at work in her language, nor could her feats of hermeneutic ingenuity, as psychoanalyst-sleuth, produce any impression on her. Like Lamb’s Scotsman, Susan would stop a metaphor in its tracks with an insistence that “a thing is what it is and can’t be anything else” (H, 46). “In fact,” Milner comments, “she seemed to cling fiercely to the rules of Aristotelian logic” (H, 46). Susan insisted, too, on Euclidean boundaries in space, the same boundaries about which Milner had recorded her own struggle in her 1950 book On Not Being Able to Paint. Susan’s experience is diminished by the clarity she must enlist

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against her anguish. (“Pain,” remarked the painterly poet Frank O’Hara in 1959, “always produces logic, which is very bad for you.”)41 Just as for the essayists in the preceding chapters of this book, Milner’s tact opposes a too-insistent clarity without offering instead either an equally exigent counterclaim or a dispiriting kind of vagueness. She comes to intuit instead “something that there was a special need to achieve in my relation to Susan” precisely through the way this achievement was threatened. Milner explains that Susan was adept at producing a state of tension in me, not only by the urgency of her demands for help, but also by her total angry rejection of any idea that was not completely formulated; for instance, one of her most frequent complaints against me was that I was “not clear.” At first I used to feel, when she said this, how right she was, but later came to see, and say, that she seemed unable to tolerate the idea that I could be groping after understanding. . . . What I thought, but did not say, was that she seemed to expect all ideas to leap fully formed from my forehead, like Athena from the head of Zeus. (H, 56) Milner thinks but doesn’t speak. Providing armed and plausible wisdom (what Lamb calls “Minerva in panoply”) for Susan to accept or deny is to fall into a prearranged binary choice of dependence or autarky: of either doing Susan’s thinking for her or oppressing her with the glare of an enlightening insight that she cannot make her own. “[T]o try to do it all for her was not only useless, it landed her in a hopeless situation of envy and wish to destroy my wrongfully claimed power” (H, 56). Milner wants to help Susan to a transition from a world of (to quote Emerson) “alienated majesty,” to a world that she can get her hands on, that has in it (to quote Simon) some “lovely stuff.”42 The transition requires an oblique and tactfully impertinent approach. The quality of Milner’s reticence is to hold Susan in a kind of “body attention” that allowed both of them undirected and essayistic thought: what Susan calls “muddle” and from which, Milner thinks, “new experiences would become possible for her” (H, 56–57). But this exercise in negative capability proves hard work. Susan’s “constant, though usually hidden, terror, seemed to be that she would exhaust me beyond all endurance and then I would then turn her out. She was indeed a very exhausting patient” (H, 57). Susan often finds her own state of mind intolerable, and she wants, understandably, to make intolerability Milner’s problem. What are we to do with unbearable experience? she implicitly asks. In response, Milner directs Susan’s attention to her own resources in a capacity for relief, in an awareness that she can contain herself, can hold herself through a crisis, through a “state of direct contact with the undifferentiated sea of one’s own body awareness . . . which can become something, as I had discovered, that one can directly attend to, letting go the ‘figure’ of ideas and finding the ‘ground,’ an act of attention” (H, 61).

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The sense of reality is hard to bear, but not having it makes a nonsense to Susan of foreground and background. It makes the world inapprehensible. Susan is in need of relief, in precisely Pater’s senses of the word in aesthetic experience: as an easing of the mind and a capacity for recursion between figure and ground, between one’s activity in the world and one’s sense of bodily awareness, between performance and frame. But she recognizes that gaining a sense of the background requires some trust in the world. The philosopher and psychologist William James called this the “sense of the world’s presence,” a “sense of reality . . . a perception of what we may call ‘something there,’ more deep and more general than any of the special and particular ‘senses’ by which the current psychology supposes existent realities to be originally revealed.”43 For James, this is the basis of religious experience. So psychoanalysis is for Milner, as Adam Phillips has suggested in his introduction to The Hands of the Living God, “the attempt to make that paradoxical thing, a secular theology . . . a body-based theology that tries to describe the body’s forms of attention, and our attention to bodily states” (H, xxxi). This is religion as James defines it: as part of “human nature” in our sense of the reality of ourselves in the world.44 We must, like Milner, keep re-beginning at the same question: if one hasn’t got this sense, how does one get it? Towards the end of Hands, Milner expresses regret at how long it took her to transfer her analytic interest from familiar therapeutic questions about instinct—about aggression and its reparation and getting what one wants and wanting what one gets—to something more fundamental, to the baseline of life: “how slow I had been to see that what she was urgently concerned with and trying to tell me about was not yet the satisfaction of instinct but the establishing of a sense of being” (H, 452). The progress of this case depends less on Milner’s advancing enlightenment than on the more uncertain movements of unfolding affinities, for which Milner’s tact of attention provides a frame. The first of these comes when Susan “happens to come across and read my first book,” A Life of One’s Own: “Her comment on the book was that it was so like her she felt I must have thought she had been reading it before” (H, 44). A comment that is curious and wonderful for its insight into the kind of knowledge that affinities are: as if to say, who knew that you already knew that about me which you couldn’t possibly have known. It’s something of a free gift. The knowledge is impossible, but it’s somehow there; it can’t be leveraged, plausibly, for any purposes of domination, but it can be made use of. Here is a first step into the virtual certainties of illusion, which is the kind of communication for which tact cares. A second moment of contact comes when Susan begins a regular practice of doodle drawing, in the same way that Milner had in her On Not Being Able to Paint. This surprises Milner because, although she had been thinking about the subject a great deal, she had never mentioned it to Susan, and her book was not published until two months after Susan began her doodles (H, 95).

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Through her drawings, Susan is able to make something of her predicament. From 1950, she “sometimes brought ninety in one day, and then another huge batch on the next day” (it was a daily analysis) so that Milner would only have time to look at a fraction of them (H, 267). But just as important to the process of the treatment as Susan’s intuitive use of aesthetic practice is Milner’s response of essayistic appreciation. Talking about Susan’s drawings, they are able to meet at their uncommon ground of a shared perplexity about reality. Milner records her first way of looking at the “sheer amount of them” in “terms of what I saw as a desperate need for a continued contact with a bit of external reality which was ‘other’ and yet completely responsive to what came from her . . . a reciprocal give-and-take on a primitive non-verbal level.” Milner describes this contact as a matter of Figure 1. “Post ECT Drawing.” holding and touching, a feeling of one’s way Source: The Hands of the towards a sense of reality (a running theme of Living God: An Account of a this case is Susan’s relationship to her own Psycho-analytic Treatment, Marion Milner, page 278. hands, and when they do and do not feel real Copyright 1969, Routledge, to her; at times they are prehensile and apreproduced by permission of prehending her world; at times, useless slabs Taylor & Francis Books UK. of meat; H, 267). Milner understands Susan’s drawings in many ways: as attempts at reparation, as expressions of conflict, as attempts to drive Milner mad; but most of all as “a non-discursive affirmation of her own reality” and the “reality of her own experience” (H, 269). Susan’s task is the affirmation of her own life. “The crucial battle,” Milner comments in a 1955 paper that refers to Susan, was over how she “was to communicate her love, how she was to convey her pleasure, not her anger”— with how to achieve a “yell of joy.”45 Milner’s insistence on giving priority to an affirming joy means that she understands Susan’s drawings as depicting a mode of relation, rather than symptoms or propositional messages. The contemplation of one drawing in particular would provide Milner with a “framework” for attending to all the others in their overwhelming multiplicity. This is the earliest drawing that Susan brings to her sessions, her “post ECT drawing” (fig. 1), which was made “almost ten years before,” on the eve of her treatment with Milner. Susan doesn’t bring it to a session until 1952, two years after she had begun her practice of regular doodling (H, 266). It is an image of great distress. It’s

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rather like a Matisse painting in the force and economy of its lines, but as if a tonal inversion of his famous Dream of 1940. It is all discomfort and restriction rather than ease and repose. Matisse’s dreamer has her head resting comfortably on an arm liquid in its flow and support; in Susan’s drawing, the head is also surrounded, but seems radically unsupported. In fact, there are two figures, but only one head, which baby and mother share in such a way that a viewer can only attend to one figure at a time. The mother appears cowled and sorrowful; the baby, vigilant and ill at ease. The drawing reveals either the breasts of the mother or the arms of the baby, not both at once. For her part, Milner admits that “the impact of this drawing had been so intense that I had been unable at first to bring myself to concentrate upon its meaning. . . . I did not really know what to do with it” (H, 277). Milner goes on to explain, There was one thing I had done, however, which, when I came to write this book, shocked me by its cavalier treatment of someone else’s drawing. I had inked it over—in order I thought, to see it better since it was so faint—instead of, as I should have done, making a traced copy. I was to remember this action of mine as a warning of how too great enthusiasm for the clarity of verbal interpretation can also, at times, disastrously distort what the patient is experiencing. (H, 277–278) Here is a lapse in tact. And Milner suggests the motivation for such a lapse, in how hard it is to maintain a frame of unknowing—particularly in the face of suffering—long enough to be able to make something of it. An unbearable indeterminacy is too swiftly resolved. When she thought she was seeing better, Milner was obtaining clarity at the expense, to borrow Matthew Arnold’s phrase, of the object as it really is. If an essayistic psychoanalysis gives priority, in Adam Phillips’s words, to “enlarging one’s experience . . . over winning an argument, proving a point, or coming to conclusions,” then the danger here, to borrow from an old-fashioned idiom, is of falling into despair.46 A widening of experience, Milner and Susan well know, might be hard to bear because it brings hope into play—and so puts it at risk. Milner’s tactful response is to bear with Susan in a way that allows her a widened relationship to the world that is not freighted with the burden of optimism. “I was beginning to see more why one must not set out to ‘cure’ anyone by psycho-analysis, even beginning to see that Susan’s clinging to what she called her symptoms could be, in part at least, a protest against my past tendency to collude with her belief that I could cure her” (H, 294). Milner continues to attend, instead, to Susan’s drawings not interpretively, but as “a non-discursive affirmation of her own reality”—a Blakean joy that could evade the snares of the preinvented world and its mind-forged manacles (H, 269). What Milner does, instead of embarking on a symptomology—toward a future-perfect of sanity—is attempt, through attending to Susan, to “give her

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back to herself,” as if Milner herself were a version of Susan’s drawing paper, a medium which Susan could use in experimenting with her own relations to the world, her own essays (H, 268). A good example of this process comes earlier in the case, when instead of inking over a drawing of Susan’s (fig. 2), Milner reports “I find myself making a rough copy of it from memory, and then see that it clearly shows the type of visual phenomenon called ‘alternating perspective’ ” (H, 127). Here Milner sees something at stake in the way the drawing is composed seemingly as two mutually exclusive pictures. Is it, she wonders, an insect-like figure, or two profiles pressed against each other? Is it a symbol of the “genital area,” or a kiss (H, 128)? Then Milner wonders, is it Susan’s “pictorial intuition to choose this alternating symbol . . . to express the feeling of total irreconcilability between her love for her mother and her genital sexuality?” (H, 128) It is this sensitivity to pictorial and relational intuitions that comes more to the fore in the case as Milner increasingly adopts an appreciative attention over a curative one to Susan. (Alternating perspective is there to see in the post-ECT drawing, but Milner doesn’t mention this, the picture seems to provoke Milner to a curative idiom.) Copying from memory maintains at once a closeness and a separation from Susan’s drawings; Milner takes them in and gives them back to her. In the process, and as their relationship develops, Milner becomes more attuned to Susan’s relational intuitions—formal organizations which suggest aspects, ways of seeing herself and others—both according to one’s interpretation, and also for what they are: they are first steps in relating to the world. There is a contribution here, I think, in Susan’s collaboration with Milner, to a philosophical question formulated by Wittgenstein, of how a “change of aspect” might become a “change of life” (in elaborating which he also offers the example of copying a drawing).47 For Wittgenstein, “The expression of a change of aspect is the expression of a new perception and at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged. . . . When it looks as though there were no room for such a form between other ones, you have to look for it in another dimension.” Finding a way to this new dimension (or a sense of dimensions) is the point for Milner, since it leads to a sense of reality. It is the beginning of the act of interpretation itself. (Stanley Cavell provides the gloss that what Wittgenstein “calls ‘seeing an aspect’ is the form of interpretation: it is seeing something as something.”)48 The tact required in approaching it links a demand on the analyst with a demand on the literary critic.49 What is striking in this example, and in Milner’s technique generally, is not so much her perspicacity in offering an interpretation of hidden knowledge, but her stamina of hospitality in offering an appreciative vision of the world, a vision encouraging variations in aspect. It is a style that is somehow both sanguine and unsure at once: the hearty skepticism of the essayist, an affirmative uncertainty that maintains a key of “cheerfulness”—the “Heiterkeit”

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Figure 2. “The Kiss-Insect.” Source: The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psycho-analytic Treatment, Marion Milner, page 126. Copyright 1969, Routledge, reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK.

for which Pater admired Winckelmann, and for which Nietzsche both praised and envied Montaigne—put to a therapeutic use.50 It is only after this false start, and her shift of idiom to an appreciative skepticism, that Milner is able to see the indeterminacy of the ECT picture, that it is about an inadequate holding of Susan by her environment but also a hope for a relationship of

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undemanding communion, in which there is “no clear distinction” between “holder and held” (H, 279). Milner finds in it “an urge to indeterminacy . . . as the necessary counterpart to the urge to be something” and a merging into the background of life in “a good kind of self-loss” (H, 280). Milner realizes that Susan requires her to be capable of this indeterminacy first, before she might encourage Susan to relate to her own sense of a background. She is sustained by a style, a tact of appreciation of Susan’s drawings that does not, as it were, ink them over. Milner’s appreciative mode doesn’t become too knowing, or plausible, or even accountable. She is interested in shifting the grounds of relation from justifying or evaluating her own performance and its effects on Susan to what it is they are doing together. Milner wants to make this same shift of attention available to Susan, whose manic and contemptuous devil self “who does it all himself ” and radically denies dependence and so the world is, like Milton’s Satan, an expert in distributing accountability.51 Milner (in a rather Wildean way) wants to encourage Susan to suspend her concern about “her own goodness and badness” which “at once introduces a fatal prejudice, just for the very reason that it is concern with one’s own self-image, and therefore can cut one off from plunging into the regenerative sea of self-loss, of undifferentiation” of the background (H, 301). Milner’s approach draws her attention to two very important relational aspects of Susan’s drawings. The first is the baseline, which Susan’s earlier drawings either lack entirely, with her figures left floating in white space, or which appears in an inadequate or compromised way, as for example in a drawing that Susan calls “Miserable Pig” (fig. 3). The pig has no hands, and the distinction between figure and ground is represented by the puddles on the ground created by the pig’s tears and urine, above which the pig’s feet hover. Milner speculates that Susan as a child would create her own baseline, her own environmental frame and “her own warm nest when she urinated into her nappy” (H, 180). Susan also draws a woman with the body of a cello who is contained by waves of music.52 In her later drawings, however, a baseline begins to appear in her pictures, which often depict ducks or boats on water. Susan represents her finding of a frame and grounds for her own creativity, which are not the products of her own will or her subjection. They require neither her devil-self ’s contemptuous denial of any dependency upon others nor the “delusory cocoon,” in Milner’s words, “shown in her continually trying to make a cosy place to inhabit out of an imagined admirable picture of herself in other people’s eyes” (interestingly, Milner describes this as an abiding problem of her own in her 1987 diary book, Eternity’s Sunrise; H, 37). A second development in Susan’s drawings from her dialogue with Milner’s essayistic reflections is in how they increasingly explore the coming together of what was formerly irreconcilable in her life. Through them she sketches out a place in the world. Susan finds a way of living with the paradox

Figure 3. “Miserable Pig.” Source: The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psycho-analytic Treatment, Marion Milner, page 181. Copyright 1969, Routledge, reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK.

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of being separate and together with Milner when she explores a transition from alternating perspective to symbols of overlapping circles (as had Milner in her drawing book) and of blossoming diagonal lines (fig. 4). This picture, Milner notes, has a less stark and rigid line than in previous drawings; it makes her think of a spinal column, and the pulses of the heart—a motor for life and a framework for moving—and also the suggestion of two faces coming into contact, with genital creativity, a supporting environment (the house) and the idea of communication (the letter) coming into play. Reflecting on the diagonal drawings in general, Milner proposes that “when the idea of duality is suggested as one half of living, it need not only be a matter for pain and hard endurance; it can also be a source of delight, since the line which is the boundary between two becomes also the meeting-place.” Susan makes room for maneuver between formerly unbearable antinomies which had been rigidly and clearly separated from one another—between self and other, figure and ground, conscious and undirected thought, between her life and her ideals. Milner notes that in the last case, “the special instance of the duality between her ideal for herself and her actuality, if she accepts this discrepancy, instead of the desperate struggle to make it not exist, there is the psychophysical release of freed energy that is laughter” (H, 396). Laughter is an excellent example of a relation—distantiating and appreciative at once—that successfully maintains closeness and distance between two poles, and even makes it a pleasure. You can’t be taught how to laugh (no one finds a joke funny by having it explained to them), but perhaps you can learn how: in a change of aspect, and as a newly available dimension to a shared, otherwise unchanged world. With help from Milner, Susan comes to know something new, and of another order than the all-too-conscious kind of knowledge—both incarcerating and unrelated to the world (or related to only a preinvented world)—with which she had embarked on her sessions with Milner. One of the reasons The Hands of the Living God is such a remarkable book is because it charts a transition between the two relational modes of knowing. A response to the fact that, in Cavell’s summary of Freud’s insight about “the process of coming into one’s own through the talking cure: ‘There is knowing, and there is knowing.’ ”53 If it is not exactly the story of a cure, it does recount a widening of life’s relations. Adam Phillips records a conversation he had with Milner about the case: “I asked her about Susan, about whether she thought the analysis had worked. ‘Of course she never got better,’ she said briskly and there was a pause. And then she said, ‘but we got somewhere, she got somewhere,’ and there was another pause, and she said, ‘better’ ” (H, xxxiii). This “better” is modest in its claim, a matter of feeling one’s way to new dimensions, to a more vivid sense of ordinary life. It is founded, for Milner as for Susan, in a constitutive disorientation in the world, and a gift for its expression far rarer than the disorientation itself. More and more, a sense of

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Figure 4. “Fourth Diagonal with Bows as Testicles.” Source: The Hands of the Living God: An Account of a Psycho-analytic Treatment, Marion Milner, page 378. Copyright 1969, Routledge, reproduced by permission of Taylor & Francis Books UK.

aliveness accompanies Susan’s drawings, and (to borrow a phrase from Milner’s much earlier writing on the purposes of education) a “confidence in the inner life.”54 Late in the book, Susan for the first time makes a life drawing —of a vase of anemones—and she feels, as did Milner when drawing the two jugs, both excited and disturbed by their aliveness. Susan finds herself, in Milner’s words, for the first time “able to take the image of the flowers in through her eyes and give it out as something different, with something uniquely her own added to what she gives back” (H, 383). This is a widening

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of experience which is not rooted in explanation, information, or suspicion. It delights Susan but (as for Milner in her own drawing experiments) it frightens her too. It causes Susan to “say she is mad,” and when Milner asks how this is she replies, “it is all too lively, too full of life,” to which Milner suggests that it is a “picture of how lively she could feel inside” (H, 383–384). Fear and aliveness are the affective touchstones of Milner’s and Susan’s work, and of their work together. Fairly early in Hands, Milner reports that “[t]here was a contribution from my unconscious that slowly managed to draw attention to itself, to do with the problem of [Susan’s] lost background” (H, 60). It begins as only a rhythm recalled, but Milner comes to identify it as two lines from D. H. Lawrence’s poem “The Hands of God,” collected in his 1929 Pansies. They run: “It is a fearful thing to fall into the hands of the living God / But it is a much more fearful thing to fall out of them” (H, 60). Susan finds herself, gradually, to be in safer hands—to find herself to be in the world, and to find in the world some enchantment, and new dimensions. Throughout this case, Milner’s task is in helping Susan to bear this vivid existence. For Susan and for Milner, there is no immunity from this fear. But what this case—and indeed all of Milner’s writings—offer us is a technique of tact as an essaying of possible relations by which people might help one another with its burden—even to the coming of joy.

no T es

Introduction: An Art of Handling 1. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 135. 2. I borrow the suggestive phrase, “aesthetic of handling,” which I will elaborate on later in this introduction, from the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas. See his The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 33. 3. George Eliot, Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life (London: Penguin, 1994), 74–75. 4. Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, London: Penguin, 1984), 355, 390. 5. G. K. Chesterton, The Everyman Chesterton (New York: Everyman’s Library, 2011), 56–57. 6. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 17. 7. See Eve Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press: 2002), 123–152, for a discussion of the resources and the limits of “suspicious” reading. Sedgwick proposes a turn to British object relations psychoanalysis (in her case, the work of Melanie Klein) as a source for a contrasting and complementary “reparative” theory of reading. 8. See chapter 5 for the fullest elaboration of tact as a condition for trust. 9. For a provocative and rich critique of the assumptions of “suspicious” criticism of the nineteenth-century novel, see Brigid Lowe, Victorian Fiction and the Insights of Sympathy: An Alternative to the Hermeneutics of Suspicion (London: Anthem, 2007). Lowe advocates a closely sympathetic reading, but retains a suspicion of tact, however—urging the retrieval of “basic” questions formerly “too well wadded in tactful silence”; 2. For a theoretical elaboration of imagining “new modes of relating and relationality” as the basis for a more egalitarian politics, see the work of Leo Bersani, who also insists that these modes are part of our ordinary social world, just aspects of it that we have been “been trained, culturally, not to notice.” Is the Rectum a Grave? and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 201. 10. I draw this contrast between “predicates of identity” and a shared situational thinking from Stanley Cavell. See “Finding Words,” review of Terrors and Experts by Adam Phillips, London Review of Books 19:4 (20 February 1997), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n04 /stanley-cavell/finding-words. 11. The violence of the desire to know others fully, as if one could enter them and finally define them—a sadistic epistemophilia—is a central problem and provocation for the psychoanalytic theories of Melanie Klein. See The Selected Melanie Klein, ed. Juliet Mitchell (New York: Free Press, 1987), chap. 5. 12. Richard Poirier, Poetry and Pragmatism (Faber & Faber, 1992), 148. 13. For a summary of, and challenge to, such criticism, see Juliane Rebentisch, “Aestheticism, an Apologia,” in The Art of Freedom: On the Dialectics of Democratic Existence, trans. Joseph Ganahl (Cambridge: Polity, 2016), 1–13. For some specific examples of this critique of aestheticization in Arnold’s critical heritage, see chapter 3.

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[ 166 ] noTes To in TroducTion 14. Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination (New York: NYRB, 2008), xviii–xix. 15. For a sense of the breadth of the varieties of liberal experience, see Alan Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), and see the discussion in Duncan Bell, Reordering the World: Essays in Liberalism and Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), chap. 3. 16. On the transition from the “old society,” see Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society, 1780–1880 (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969), chap. 2. 17. See F.M.L. Thompson, “Town and City,” in The Cambridge Social History of Britain 1750–1950, vol. 1, Regions and Communities, ed. F.M.L. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 8. 18. For a rich account of the nineteenth-century novel’s deep engagement with, and anxieties about, codes of etiquette, see Kent Puckett, Bad Form: Social Mistakes and the Nineteenth-Century Novel (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 19. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005), 36. 20. Sydney Smith, “On Taste,” Elementary Sketches of Moral Philosophy, Delivered at the Royal Institution in the Years 1804, 1805, and 1806 (London: Longman, Brown, Green & Longmans, 1850), 154. 21. Walter Scott, The Critical Heritage, ed. John Hayden (London: Routledge, 1970), 74. Byron comments on the neologism in his 1819 Don Juan: “A hint, in tender cases, is enough; / Silence is best, besides there is a tact / (That modern phrase appears to me sad stuff, / But it will serve to keep my verse compact)—” Canto 1, CLXXVIII, 1–4. 22. Denise Gigante has written interestingly about essayists’ changing conception of themselves in early-nineteenth-century London: from an eighteenth-century culture of close association in coffee houses where the “wits,” in Leigh Hunt’s words, were “familiar to everybody,” to an environment where, as Gigante puts it, the essayist “would not have been recognized past the borders of his own home.” Denise Gigante, “Sometimes a Stick Is Just a Stick: The Essay as (Organic) Form,” European Romantic Review, 21:5 (2010), 553– 565, 560. 23. William Hazlitt, “On the Periodical Essayists,” in Essayists on the Essay: Montaigne to Our Time, ed. Carl H. Klaus and Ned Stuckey-French (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2012), 16. 24. Alexander Smith, “On the Writing of Essays,” in Klaus and Stuckey-French, Essayists on the Essay, 25. 25. Theodor Adorno, “The Essay as Form,” in Notes to Literature, vol. 1 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), 9. 26. Walter Benjamin, “The Storyteller” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken, 1968), 100–101. 27. For Pater, Plato’s philosophical essayism is defined by the humility of not knowing the ends of things in a time “perplexed by theory.” Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (New York: Barnes & Noble, 2005), 2. For his reading of Plato as an essayistic philosopher, see in particular 89–90, 120–121. 28. Geörgy Lukács, Soul and Form, ed. John T. Sanders and Katie Terezakis (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 14. 29. As chapter 2 shows, in Mill’s version of tactful contact he names (admittedly in an essay) a poetic communication, while chapter 4 considers how Eliot’s essays, particularly when compared to her novels, are not tactful at all. And of course, as much as there is a critical tradition proposing the novel’s deep investment in subjectification by power, there is a tradition that insists on the realist novel form’s own liberal or democratic potential, in

noTes To ch a PTer one [ 167 ] the work of Erich Auerbach and Mikhail Bakhtin, for instance, or more recently by Isobel Armstrong and Amanda Anderson. 30. Freud’s famous 1905 “Dora” case, or A Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria, Standard Edition of the Works of Sigmund Freud, ed. James Strachey (London: Hogarth, 1973), vol. 7, 1–122, has provided one significant touchstone for these criticisms. For commentary on this case, see for example the collection of essays in In Dora’s Case: Freud—Hysteria—Feminism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). 31. D. W. Winnicott, “Metapsychological and Clinical Aspects of Regression,” in Collected Papers: Through Paediatrics to Psychoanalysis (New York: Basic Books, 1958), 285. 32. Ibid., 285–286. 33. For Winnicott’s statement of this theory, see his “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” in Playing and Reality (London: Tavistock, 1971), chap. 1. For the best introduction to Winnicott’s work, see Adam Phillips, Winnicott (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988). 34. Bollas, Shadow of the Object, 31–37. 35. For a rich essay on tact at an originating scene of critical close reading, see Matthew Creasy, “Empson’s Tact,” in Some Versions of Empson, ed. Matthew Bevis (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). For important recent debates on the depths and distances of criticism, “The Way We Read Now,” Representations 108 (Fall 2009), special issue, ed. Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus, with Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood. And for an important account of the relationships between identity and liberal politics and theory, see Amanda Anderson, The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006) .

Chapter One: “Our Debt to Lamb”: The Romantic Essay and the Emergence of Tact 1. Charles Lamb, Lamb as Critic, ed. Roy Park (London: Routledge, 1980), 2. 2. Denise Gigante, “Lamb’s Low-Urban Taste,” in Taste, A Literary History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005), 91. 3. Denys Thompson, “Our Debt to Lamb,” in Determinations, Critical Essays, ed. F. R. Leavis (London: Chatto & Windus, 1934), 203–205. 4. Ibid., 202–203. 5. No. 98, “CL to William Wordsworth, 30th January 1801,” in The Letters of Charles and Mary Anne Lamb, vol. 1, ed. Edwin Marrs (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975), 265. His opinions earned him the angry reproval of both Wordsworth and Coleridge: “Cumberland and Westmoreland have already declared a state of war,” Lamb confided to Thomas Manning in February (No. 101, February 7, 1801, “CL to Manning,” in Marrs, Letters, vol. 1, 272). 6. “Preface by a Friend of the Late Elia,” in Charles Lamb, Complete Works and Letters (New York: Modern Library, 1935), 136–137 (hereafter cited in text as C). 7. Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1986), 171. 8. The most famous example is Charles Dickens’s rendering of Leigh Hunt as Mr. Skimpole in Bleak House, but consider also the critical response to William Hazlitt’s Liber Amoris—see Duncan Wu, William Hazlitt, the First Modern Man (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2008), 337–338. And see Thomas Carlyle’s description of Thomas De Quincey: “this child has been in hell.” Thomas Carlyle, Reminiscences, ed. J. A. Froude (New York: Harper Brothers, 1881), 127.

[ 168 ] noTes To ch a PTer one 9. For specific details, see the introduction to this book. 10. James Chandler has noted the relevance of Georg Simmel’s theories of urban modernity to the Romantic period in his introduction to Romantic Metropolis: The Urban Scene of British Culture 1780–1840 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005). 11. I have drawn from two of Simmel’s most famous essays: on strangeness, see “The Stranger,” in Georg Simmel, The Sociology of Georg Simmel, ed. Kurt Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1950), 404; and on the blasé attitude, see “The Metropolis and Mental Life,” in ibid., 409. 12. See Gillian Russell and Clara Tuite, “Introduction,” in Romantic Sociability, ed. Russell and Tuite (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 3. 13. “Z,” “On the Cockney School of Poetry,” Blackwood’s Magazine (October 1817). 14. Harold Perkin, The Origins of Modern English Society (London: Routledge, 1971). 15. Terry Eagleton, Trouble With Strangers, A Study of Ethics (Chichester: WileyBlackwell, 2009), 17. 16. William Hazlitt, “Letter to William Gifford,” in Complete Works ed. P. P. Howe (London: J. M. Dent, 1930–1934), IX, 14. Cited and discussed in Mary Jacobus, “The Art of Managing Books: Romantic Prose and the Writing of the Past,” Romanticism and Language, ed. Arden Reed (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1984), 225. 17. Raymond Williams, Writing in Society (London: Verso, 1983), 73. 18. William St. Clair, The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 275–277. It is telling that conduct books were among the first printed books to be stereotyped when this technology was first widely used in publishing in the early nineteenth century, such was the industry’s confidence in their popularity. 19. St. Clair, Reading Nation, 277. 20. Fred Randel, The World of Elia: Charles Lamb’s Essayistic Romanticism (New York: Kennikat, 1975), 13–14. 21. Roland Barthes, The Neutral, Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977– 1978), trans. Rosalind Krauss and Dennis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 46. 22. This is mimicry of Burke’s famous judgment of the violation of the boudoir of Marie Antoinette as proof that the “glory of Europe is extinguished for ever” in Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. Conor Cruise O’Brien (London: Penguin, 1986), 170. 23. Cited in David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 19. 24. William Hazlitt, Table Talk, or Original Essays (London: John Warren, 1821), 379. 25. Ibid., 384. 26. According to the OED, it became linguistically possible to be “vulgar-minded” around this time, with the phrase first appearing in 1815. 27. Hazlitt, Table Talk, 67. 28. Ibid., 86. 29. I borrow the phrase “aesthetic of handling” from the psychoanalyst Christopher Bollas. See the introduction to this book. 30. Hazlitt, Table Talk, 69. 31. Ibid., 90. 32. David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of Critic (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), 110. 33. Leigh Hunt, Essays, ed. Arthur Symons (London: Walter Scott, 1903), 53 (italics in original).

noTes To ch a PTer one [ 169 ] 34. Hunt considered Lamb the epitome of an urban tact. Contrasting him to the Lake School of poets, he claims for Lamb “a more real tact of humanity, a modester, Shakespearian wisdom, than any of them.” Cited in Edmund Blunden, Leigh Hunt’s Examiner Examined 1808–1825 (London: Cobden-Sanderson, 1928), 131. 35. Charles Lamb, “Review of the First Volume of Hazlitt’s Table Talk, 1821” (unpublished), in Lamb as Critic, ed. Roy Park (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1980), 300 (hereafter cited in text as L). 36. Also see “The Vision of Mirza” in Spectator no. 159 (1711). 37. Walter Pater, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1910), 112. 38. Ibid., 112. 39. Seamus Perry points to how tempting critics have found the error of constructing a systematic philosophy from Lamb’s essays, by accounting his irony as a rhetorical strategy in a scheme of persuasion. By these lights, Elia becomes a shyer Coleridge. See Seamus Perry, “Charles Lamb and the Cost of Seriousness,” Charles Lamb Bulletin 83 (1993), 78–89, 83. 40. Anne Hartle remarks of this technique that “Montaigne’s deficiency in memory is his freedom from unexamined presuppositions” in her Michel de Montaigne: Accidental Philosopher (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 109. 41. D. W. Winnicott, “Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena,” Playing and Reality (London 1971), 12. 42. Mary Jacobus has suggested that “the culture of the British Object Relations tradition is rooted in the values of British Romanticism” in her The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 148. 43. See D. W. Winnicott, “Communicating and Not Communicating Leading to a Study of Certain Opposites,” in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (London: Hogarth, 1965), 179–192. Barbara Johnson has pointed to Winnicott’s insight into the active possibilities of the non-imperial subject—“is ethics only a form of restraint?”—in the essay “Using People, Kant with Winnicott,” in her Persons and Things (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 94. Roland Barthes’s aforementioned lecture series, The Neutral is an exploration of just such an erotics of the non-imperial subject. 44. Barthes, Neutral, 35–36. 45. Ibid., 12. 46. Mary Shelley recalled with amusement Lamb’s proposing the existence of the “matter-of-lie man” as alternative to the “matter-of-fact.” Mary Shelley to Marianne Hunt, November 27, 1823, in The Letters of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, ed. Betty T. Bennett (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1980), 403. 47. Another essay, “The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple” presents the idiosyncratic coexistence of a similar cast of characters (C, 78). 48. “Charles Lamb,” in Arthur Symons, Figures of Several Centuries (London: Constable, 1916), 34. 49. See, for example, Elia’s descriptions of “GD” (Lamb’s friend George Dyer) in “Oxford in the Vacation” and “Amicus Redivivus” (C, 8, 186). 50. “The South Sea House” (C, 6). 51. See also Jeremy Bentham, Chrestomathia, ed. M. J. Smith and W. H. Burston (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), 22. 52. We know that Lamb was painfully aware of a lack of reverence in the handling of “lunatics.” The committal to an asylum of Lamb’s sister Mary after the “day of horrors,” of 22 September 1796 in which she killed her mother and wounded her father is a well-known

[ 170 ] noTes To ch a PTer one part of Lamb’s biography. Lamb himself spent some time in an asylum a short time prior to this event. He writes in a letter to Coleridge of 27 May 1796, “the 6 weeks that finished last year this your very humble servant spent very agreeably in a mad house at Hoxton—. I am got somewhat rational now, & don’t bite any one.” The “day of horrors” and Lamb’s reaction to it—he worked at the East India Company with little respite for most of his life in order to support his sister and other members of his family—provided a basis for his canonization as “Saint Charles” among Victorian admirers, and, for many twentieth-century critics, has provided a key by which to interpret his writings; see, e.g., Gerald Monsman’s Confessions of a Prosaic Dreamer (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1986). 53. Winnicott, “Communicating and Not Communicating.” For Roland Barthes, noncommunication is a delicate art because silence is a sign, and thus always incorporated into binary systems of meaning making. The effect of silence requires a kind of indirect communication that would “neutralize silence as a sign.” The Neutral, 21–29. 54. Paul Ricoeur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay in Interpretation (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1970), 33–34. 55. Marrs, Letters, vol. 1, 90. For the differences between the “Confessions” in the Philanthropist and as published in the second volume of the Essays of Elia, compare Lamb, C, 223, with the version of the essay in The Philanthropist, vol. 3, 1813 (New York: Radical Periodicals of Great Britain, 1968), 48. 56. James Mill, History of British India, ed. William Thomas (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), 210. 57. Frances Ferguson, Pornography, the Theory: What the Utilitarians Did to Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 30. 58. Henry James, “The Art of Fiction,” in Literary Criticism (New York: Library of America, 1984), 48. 59. Uday Singh Mehta, Liberalism and Empire (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 190–217. 60. Bentham, Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. John Bowring (Edinburgh: William Tait, 1843), vol. 1, 193. 61. Ibid., 174. 62. Elie Halévy, The Growth of Philosophic Radicalism (Boston: Beacon, 1960), 302. 63. Mill, History, 8. 64. Ibid., 583. 65. Nikolai Tolstoy, The Half Mad Lord (London: Cape, 1978), 192. 66. See the Morning Post, March 8, 10, 13, 14, 26, 28, 1804. 67. See Jeremy Bentham, “Of the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation,” in Works, vol. 1, 181; and his “Offences against One’s Self: Paederasty,” Journal of Homosexuality 3:4 (1978), 389–405. 68. See Jeremy Bentham, Jeremy Bentham’s Theory of Fictions, ed. C. K. Ogden (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1932), xxxii. 69. This is another point at which utilitarian and Romantic thinking has been found to be closer than traditionally represented. See Philip Connell on the close relations and interchange of ideas between the Hunt and Bentham circles in his Romanticism, Economics and the Question of “Culture” (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), chap. 4. 70. Bentham, Chrestomathia, 114. 71. Ibid., 19. 72. Ferguson, Pornography, xiv. 73. Bentham, Chrestomathia, 21–22. 74. Ferguson, Pornography, xv. 75. Ibid., xiv.

noTes To ch a PTer T wo [ 171 ] 76. For Bentham’s fullest explication of the dangers of unregulated fictionality, see his Theory of Fictions. 77. See, e.g., Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1, The Will to Knowledge (London: Penguin, 1998), 18; and D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 17. 78. Bentham, Chrestomathia, 28. This comparison is useful in demonstrating why we cannot think of Elian tact in terms of an internalized set of significations and dispositions along the lines of Pierre Bourdieu’s “habitus.” 79. Ibid., 112. 80. Ibid., 67. 81. Bentham, Works, vol. 4, 537. 82. Bentham, Chrestomathia, 113. 83. See “Christ’s Hospital Five and Thirty Years Ago” and “Recollections of Christ’s Hospital”; C, 12–20 and 281–288. 84. Bentham, Chrestomathia, 42–43. 85. See Bentham, Works, vol. 1, 193. 86. Lamb’s comments on Browne can be found in E. V. Lucas, The Life of Charles Lamb (London: Methuen, 1907), 381.

Chapter Two: Aesthetic Liberalism: John Stuart Mill as Essayist 1. It is in this spirit, for example, that David Wayne Thomas has called for the renewal of a liberal conception of agency to be distinguished from liberalism as imperialism or as atomistic individualism; see his Cultivating Victorians: Liberal Culture and the Aesthetic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004). Amanda Anderson has made a case for recuperating a liberal “ethos” of a rigorous critical reason that has been foreclosed by the successes of laissez-faire neoliberalism and poststructuralist theory alike in her The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004). And Daniel Malachuck has urged the remedy of a neglect of the specific ethical texture of Victorian liberal discourse, its confidence in the capacity of reason to “locate compelling universal moral goods,” and its avowed project of perfectionism in his Perfection, the State, and Victorian Liberalism (London: Palgrave, 2005), 4. Elaine Hadley has called attention to the lived practices and resources of Victorian liberal rationalism, while also urging skepticism about the applicability of these practices and resources to our own criticism and to politics today. See her Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian Britain (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010) and her “On a Darkling Plain: Victorian Liberalism and the Fantasy of Agency,” Victorian Studies 48:1 (2004), 92–101, respectively. 2. Guido de Ruggiero, The History of European Liberalism, trans. R. G. Collingwood (Boston: Beacon, 1959), 13–14. 3. See, e.g., Alan Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012); and Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System IV: Centrist Liberalism Triumphant, 1789–1914 (Oakland: University of California Press, 2011). 4. Andrew H. Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in NineteenthCentury British Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), 15. 5. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. John M. Robson (London: Penguin, 1989), 126–127. 6. John Plotz, “Mediated Involvement: John Stuart Mill’s Antisocial Sociability,” in The Feeling of Reading: Affective Experience and Victorian Literature, ed. Rachel Ablow (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 76. Plotz’s ingenious chapter also proposes the

[ 172 ] noTes To ch a PTer T wo basis of an “alternative history of liberalism” in Mill’s essays on poetry, drawing from the essays a proposed sociability of reading, in which “the textual trace precedes and conditions mere social contact” (86, 78). For Plotz, Mill’s alternative liberalism, extended in On Liberty, is founded in the experience of reading—a “reading-based mediated involvement” (78) and a “text-based . . . solidarity” (80). 7. J. P. Parry, The Rise and Fall of Liberal Government in Victorian Britain (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1993), 27–45. 8. See William Marshall, Byron, Shelley, Hunt and “The Liberal” (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1960), 69, 112, 119. 9. F. Parvin Sharpless, The Literary Criticism of John Stuart Mill (The Hague: Mouton, 1967), 152–162. 10. J. S. Mill, “Coleridge,” in John Stuart Mill and Jeremy Bentham, Utilitarianism and Other Essays, ed. Alan Ryan (London: Penguin, 1987), 177. 11. J. S. Mill, “Bentham,” in ibid., 149. 12. J. S. Mill, On Liberty; with The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 41, 45. 13. Ibid., 23. 14. See Stefan Collini’s illuminating discussion of the book’s subject in his introduction to On Liberty, xxv. 15. John Stuart Mill, Autobiography, ed. J. A. Robson (London: Penguin, 1990), 189. 16. See, e.g., Mill’s attack on intuitionism’s famous nineteenth-century proponent in his essay “William Whewell’s Moral Philosophy,” in Mill and Bentham, Utilitarianism. 17. See Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 107. 18. Alan Ryan, The Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 25. 19. See Elaine Hadley, Living Liberalism: Practical Citizenship in Mid-Victorian England (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2010), chap. 1; and Stefan Collini, Public Moralists: Political Thought and Intellectual Life in Britain, 1850–1930 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1991), chap. 5. The recent work of literary critics on liberalism has followed Mill’s move to a lived method. Their liberal subject is not a crude imperialist, assuming for himself an inflated agency and separation from world he acts upon, but a more creative, and more confused, subject of a discipline, who attempts to weave the precepts of proceduralism into the fabric of a more conscientious life. See in particular Hadley, Living Liberalism, chap. 2, and Amanda Anderson, The Powers of Distance: Cosmopolitanism and the Cultivation of Detachment (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), introduction. 20. This is not, of course, the version of Cicero that would see him as the supremely skeptical rhetorician, aiming simply to discredit the other side, without undue regard for consensus. For a brilliant reflection on this, and on skepticism generally, see Christian Thorne, The Dialectic of Counter-Enlightenment (Cambridge, MA: Harvard, 2009), 32. 21. J. S. Mill, Auguste Comte and Positivism (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), 118. 22. Ibid., 74. 23. Ibid., 112. 24. John Gray has noted that according to Mill’s thought, the “sphere of liberty must wane as human knowledge waxes,” thus producing the “frightening possibility of a postliberal order.” He also points to August Comte and Positivism as Mill’s unsuccessful attempt to resolve this problem. John Gray, Essays in Political Philosophy (London: Routledge, 1989), 245.

noTes To ch a PTer Three [ 173 ] 25. John Stuart Mill, “Theism,” in Three Essays on Religion (London: Longmans, 1885), 249. 26. J. S. Mill, “What Is Poetry?” in Mill’s Essays on Literature and Society, ed. Jerome B. Schneewind (New York: Collier, 1965), 110. 27. John Guillory, “Genesis of the Media Concept,” Critical Inquiry 36:2 (2010), 321– 362, 345. 28. Mill, “What Is Poetry?” 104. 29. On which see Sharpless, Literary Criticism, 116–130. 30. This is a Winnicottian distinction: see the introduction and chapter 1 of this book. Barbara Johnson provides a brilliant gloss on this distinction in “Using People: Kant with Winnicott” in Persons and Things, 101. 31. See in particular the work of G. Gabrielle Starr, who finds in Adam Smith’s knowing sympathy the basis for the recursive debt between, and shared techniques of subject formation of, the novel and the lyric forms in this period: Lyric Generations: Poetry and the Novel in the Long Eighteenth Century (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004), 27, 39, 92. 32. “Alfred de Vigny,” in Mill’s Essays, 123–124. 33. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, the 1893 Text, ed. Donald L. Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 43. 34. Ibid., 188. 35. D. A. Miller proposes that the “characteristic length” of the nineteenth-century novel trained readers to internalize “the close imbrication of individual and social, domestic and institutional, private and public, leisure and work” in his Novel and the Police, 83. Frances Ferguson, I have noted, links the novel form to the form of utilitarian progressivism on the basis of their shared ends-based structure in her Pornography, 30. William Flesch has proposed that ends-based structures of punishment and reward are the basis of “our moral interest in fiction” and are what connects narrative to “our evolutionary heritage” in his Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment, and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge; MA, 2007), ix, 163).

Chapter Three: Teaching Tact: Matthew Arnold and the Function of Criticism 1. Matthew Arnold, “To Mary Penrose Arnold,” 20 December 1864, The Letters of Matthew Arnold, vol. 2, ed. Cecil Lang (Charlotteville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 358. 2. Edward Said, “Secular Criticism,” in The World, the Text, and the Critic (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1983), 9–11, 28 (italics in original). 3. See, e.g., Raymond Williams on Arnold’s desire for the state to become the “maximum of order” and the “centre of authority” in Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 125; and Terry Eagleton’s analysis of Arnold’s attempt to disseminate a totalizing bourgeois value system by means of the “apparatus of state schools” and to replace the “horizontal power relations” of the public sphere with the vertical ones of a “clerisy” in The Function of Criticism (London: Verso, 2005), 62–64. On Arnold’s racialized “culture” as imperialism, see David Lloyd, “Arnold, Ferguson, Schiller: Aesthetic Culture and the Politics of Aesthetics,” Cultural Critique, no. 2 (Winter 1985– 86), 137–69; and Robert Young, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race (London: Routledge, 1995), chap. 3. For an insightful summary of, and challenge to, the influential condemnation of Arnold’s cultural politics in Marxist and deconstructionist criticism, see Matthew Bevis, The Art of Eloquence: Byron, Dickens, Tennyson, Joyce (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 8–15.

[ 174 ] noTes To ch a PTer Three 4. In 1859, he joined the Queen’s Volunteers, commenting in a letter to his mother, “it seems to me that the establishment of these Rifle Corps will more than ever throw the power into the hands of the upper and middle classes . . . and those classes will thus have over the lower classes the superiority, not only of wealth and intelligence, which they have now, but of physical force.” “To Mary Penrose Arnold, 21 November 1859,” Letters, vol. 1, 507. On the Hyde Park riots, see later in this chapter. 5. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings ed. Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 56 (hereafter cited in text as CA). 6. This approach to Arnold’s tact complements and contrasts with Amanda Anderson’s compelling suggestion that “we can trace a pattern of response to the challenge of modernity that considerably complicates the view of Arnold as authoritarian in his appeals to absolute standards or foundational values” by emphasizing Arnold’s proposition of a subjective attitude or style of universality, as opposed to moments when he appears to valorize collective or impersonal standards. The Powers of Distance (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 96. 7. On Arnold’s slogans, see David Russell, “The Idea of Arnold,” in Thinking through Style: Non-Fiction Prose of the Long Nineteenth Century, ed. Marcus Waithe and Michael Hurley (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). 8. On the subject of perfectionism, see chapter 5, on Pater, where I consider its relation to an essayistic prose in more detail. For a wider account of perfectionism in nineteenth-century literary culture, see Andrew Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in Nineteenth-Century British Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008). 9. Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, Objectivity (Cambridge, MA: Zone, 2010). 10. “Matthew Arnold,” in The English Auden, ed. Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1977), 241. 11. “To Frances Lucy Wightman Arnold,” December 2, 1851, Letters, vol. 1, 227. He wrote to his friend Arthur Clough the next month: “What with Schools in the Potteries starting & 2 hours to inspect, tooth ache and other incommodities I have been sore put to it lately.” “To Arthur Hugh Clough,” January 10, 1852, Letters, vol. 1, 233. To Louisa Rothschild in 1865, he wrote of “having been both morning and afternoon at the Free School . . . what an awful morning it was! The attendance of children was immense, in spite of the day; I complained of the girls chattering and looking at one another’s work incessantly, but they were so crowded that their sins in this respect ought not, perhaps, to be judged too severely.” “To Louisa Lady de Rothschild,” February 11, 1864 [for 1864], Letters, vol. 2, 379. Arnold sympathized with a certain J. T. Rawlings in 1881, “I am a school-inspector myself, and know well what it is to feel oneself tied and bound, and unable to do what one would like to do,” “To J. T. Rawlings,” June 11, 1881, Letters, vol. 5, 150. 12. In the words of the critic Herbert Tucker, who argues that Arnold’s suppression of his own poem Empedocles on Etna in 1853 was a planned “media event,” a ceremony that conjured Arnold’s authority as a critic and that inaugurated a critical practice of authorization through repudiation. “Arnold and the Authorization of Criticism,” in Knowing the Past: Victorian Literature and Culture, ed. Suzy Anger (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2001), 101. There is a strong critical tradition of regarding Arnold’s transition from poetry to prose as a betrayal of his potential, and a personal failure. For a sense of the breadth of this tradition see, e.g., Rowland Prothero’s influential assertion in an 1888 Edinburgh Review article that the “real” Arnold was the poet Arnold: Matthew Arnold, The Poetry: The Critical Heritage, ed. Carl Dawson (London: Routledge, 1973), 337; a point echoed in 1899 by George Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold (New York: William Blackwood, 1899), 219. Ian Hamilton’s A Gift Imprisoned: the Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (New

noTes To ch a PTer Three [ 175 ] York: Basic Books, 1999) takes up Auden’s line to chart Arnold’s abandonment of poetry and consequent literary decline. 13. Cited in D. G. James, Matthew Arnold and the Decline of English Romanticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), 2. 14. See the chorus of disapproving comments from the 1840s recorded in Edward Alexander, Matthew Arnold, John Ruskin and the Modern Temper (Columbus: Ohio State University Press 1973), 13. 15. Henry James in the English Illustrated Magazine, January 1884, in Matthew Arnold, The Poetry: The Critical Heritage ed. Carl Dawson (London: Routledge, 1973), 282. 16. Matthew Arnold, “On the Modern Element in Literature,” in The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960), vol. 1, 32 (hereafter cited in text as CW). 17. In the preface to the published edition of the lecture; CW, I, 18. 18. Geörgy Lukács, “On the Nature and Form of the Essay,” Soul and Form (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010). 19. Matthew Arnold, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Longmans, 1965), 288, l85–186. 20. J. Hillis Miller, The Disappearance of God (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 257. 21. See, e.g., Isobel Armstrong, who understands these liminal figures in terms of Arnold’s anxiety as a “European poet whose cultural boundaries are threatened with dissolution”; Victorian Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993), 207. For Deborah Nord, Arnold’s recurring concern with gypsies neglects their real economic and social conditions in order to allegorize them into “mythic” representatives of a lost pre-industrial England, Gypsies and the British Imagination 1807–1930 (New York: Columbia University Press, 2006), 44–45. 22. Arnold, Poems, 85, ll. 20–21. Further line references will be incorporated into the text. 23. On this excursion, see Park Honan, Matthew Arnold, A Life (London: Weidenfeld, 1981), 23–24. 24. “Resignation” also echoes Wordsworth’s 1807 “Gipsies.” Here the speaker wanders, reaping “bounteous hours” in a vivid life, while the gypsies provide the emblem of a “torpid” existence: “. . . the same unbroken knot / Of human beings, in the self-same spot.” Arnold alludes to the poem to divert interest to the gypsies’ techniques for surviving modern life, their “self-same plan.” William Wordsworth, “Gipsies,” in Poems in Two Volumes and Other Poems, 1800–1807, ed. Jared Curtis (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1983), 211. 25. This is the reading of “Resignation,” for example, in two of the fullest treatments of Arnold’s poetry: Dwight Culler, Imaginative Reason, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1966), 42–43, 111–112; and Ian Hamilton, A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (New York: Basic Books, 1999), 88–89. 26. Honan, Matthew Arnold, 86. 27. See “On Translating Homer” for Arnold’s insistence on the attention to quantity as well as stress in metrical theory (CW I). 28. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), xxxiii. 29. Arnold, Poems, 258. 30. Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold (New York: Columbia University Press, 1949), 82–83. 31. Quoted in Hamilton, Gift Imprisoned, 193. 32. The Swinburne Letters, ed. Cecil Lang (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1959–62), vol. 1, 115.

[ 176 ] noTes To ch a PTer Three 33. It’s worth noting that I. A. Richards’s 1929 Practical Criticism will take up exactly the same task, with an attempt to teach real contact with the object against the same two pitfalls: irrelevant biography, and mechanical “stock” convention; the too personal, and the not personal enough. Here is an important unrecognized connection between Arnold’s thinking about literature and the development of practical classroom technique—a connection further strengthened (we will see) in Arnold’s own writing about classrooms. See I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969). 34. See the 1800 “Preface” to Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads and Other Poems, 755. This is not, of course, a sufficient summary of Wordsworthian meter: his prosody is much more complex and varied in its aims and effects, which are explored elegantly, for instance, by Susan Wolfson in “Wordsworth’s Craft,” The Cambridge Companion to Wordsworth, ed. Stephen Gill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 108–124. 35. Francis Newman, “Homeric Translation in Theory and Practice, a Reply to Matthew Arnold,” in Matthew Arnold: Prose Writings; the Critical Heritage, ed. Carl Dawson and John Pfordresher (London: Routledge, 1979), 73 (italics in original). 36. Sidney Coulling, Matthew Arnold and His Critics (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1974), 71. Coulling quotes from Arnold’s 1848 poem “To a Friend”: see Arnold, Poems, 104. 37. Wolf Lepenies, Between Literature and Science: The Rise of Sociology, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), 3. 38. Ibid., 3. 39. George Steiner, After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 318. 40. Durkheim allegorizes nineteenth-century social change in terms of a shift from a shared structured and mediated Catholic system, a “conscience collective” (allowing a few authorities to do the interpreting for the people), to an immediate, Protestant worldview, with “fewer collective beliefs and practices.” Emile Durkheim, Suicide, trans. J. A. Spaulding and G. Simpson (New York: Free Press, 1965), 117. 41. This is partly the result of the tendency to read Arnold’s work as insisting on fixed canons of cultural value; partly it is the product of academic literary criticism’s often antistatist principles, and suspicion of aesthetics. See, e.g., Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 380; Eagleton, Function of Criticism, 51–52, 64; and Williams, Culture and Society, 239. For an alternative reading of the academies essay, see Russell, “The Idea of Matthew Arnold,” in Waithe and Hurley, Thinking through Style. 42. On “indifference” as objectivity in Stoicism, see Pierre Hadot, “Marcus Aurelius,” in Philosophy as a Way of Life, ed. Arnold Davidson (London: Blackwell, 1995), 197. It’s interesting to note that Arnold’s own (1863) essay on Aurelius makes the emperor much more of an essayistic appreciator, holding the world to an aesthetic standard. 43. See Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Circles,” in The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 252, 253. 44. As Linda Dowling has pointed out, Arnold’s writings of the 1860s have been most commonly read by critics, then and now, as mere evasion—as the launching point of an apolitical, socially irresponsible aestheticism: Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1996), 1. 45. See, e.g., Dawson and Pfordresher, Matthew Arnold: Prose Writings, 126, 363. 46. For a classic account of this period in Europe, see Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Capital: 1848–1875 (New York: Vintage, 1996). 47. The commentator is Pierre Hadot, who relates the practice of ancient philosophers (whom Arnold studied—in particular Epictetus and Marcus Aurelius) to Newman’s work.

noTes To ch a PTer Three [ 177 ] See Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness, trans. Marc Djaballah (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009), 58. 48. “As Freud says,” the philosopher Stanley Cavell, has commented, “there is knowledge and there is knowledge. . . . It requires statistics to know how many of our fellow citizens . . . live in poverty. But it requires something else to articulate what our attitudes to the poor are.” Stanley Cavell, “John Stuart Mill,” Cities of Words: Pedagogical Letters on a Register of the Moral Life (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 82. 49. To make this point, Arnold in Culture and Anarchy refutes (without citing it) a set piece from Mill’s On Liberty about the Mormon Church. Mill suggests reasoned debate will settle religious conviction. For Arnold, conviction (right or wrong) precedes reason. The followers of a given doctrine may be really “dupes, or worse,” and still be certain of the rightness of their convictions over their neighbors, on the basis not of their reasonableness, but their militancy: that their doctrine possesses “200, 000 souls . . . to hold it, and 20, 000 rifles to defend it” (CA, 112). 50. John Holloway, The Victorian Sage: Studies in Argument (London: Macmillan, 1953), 203. 51. In his 1873 Galaxy review of Middlemarch, Henry James, The Critical Muse (London: Penguin, 1987), 79. 52. After the so-called end of history, our most dangerous current triumphalist complacency, as the political theorist Wendy Brown has recently suggested, may be about the persistence and resilience of democracy itself. Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone, 2015), 11. On the decline of the bourgeois class see, e.g., Franco Moretti, The Bourgeois: Between History and Literature (London: Verso, 2013). 53. Emerson, “Self-Reliance,” in Essential Writings, 132. 54. In an article in reply to the “Function of Criticism,” which stimulated Arnold to the essays that comprise Culture and Anarchy. James Fitzjames Stephen, “Mr. Arnold and His Countrymen,” Saturday Review, 3 December 1864, 683. 55. Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, the 1893 Text, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 81. 56. Arnold cites Abelard as representative of culture as atmosphere. Pater, as we will see in chapter 5, will begin his Renaissance, a portrait of an atmosphere of aesthetic freedom, with Abelard too. 57. Sheldon Wolin, Politics and Vision, expanded ed. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004), 273. 58. Many critics have read the Wragg episode as evidence of Arnold’s callous lack of political commitment. See, e.g., Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism, 1848–1932 (Oxford: Oxford University Press 1983), 32. For Geoffrey Hill, Arnold’s distraction by an ugly name from a real social tragedy means that “the indignation of a just and compassionate man is degraded into a whinny of petty revulsion,” in “ ‘Perplexed Persistence’: The Exemplary Failure of T. H. Green,” Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford: Oxford University Press), 98. 59. This is the method of criticism that Mill would recommend to students three years later, in his 1867 inaugural address as Lord Rector of St. Andrews. John Stuart Mill, “Inaugural Address,” Mill’s Essays on Literature and Society, ed. J. B. Schneewind (New York: Collier, 1965), 381. 60. John Gross, The Rise and Fall of the Man of Letters (New York: Collier, 1970), 47. 61. Barthes, Neutral, 46, 36. 62. A point well noted and explored by Coulling, Arnold and His Critics. 63. Was Pater thinking of this flame, we may wonder, when he wrote his famous conclusion to his Renaissance (on which, see chapter 5)?

[ 178 ] noTes To ch a PTer Three 64. For this quotation, and a fascinating philosophical elaboration of it, see Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 87. 65. For a diagnosis of this practice in criticism after Foucault, see Sedgwick’s muchdebated essay, which places late-twentieth-century criticism of Victorian literature at the center of its discussion. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You’re so Paranoid You Probably Think This Essay Is About You,” Touching Feeling (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 123–152. 66. For a very interesting reflection on painful and self-subverting relationships to hope, see Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 67. Matthew Arnold, Reports on Elementary Schools, ed. Francis Sandford (London: Macmillan 1889), 297 (hereafter cited in text as R). 68. Daily Telegraph, 8 September 1866, in Arnold, Prose Writings, 164–165. 69. Goodlad argues that Michel Foucault’s late emphasis on forms of “governmentality,” and particularly the specific form of pastorship, provides a more suitable basis for theorizing the disciplinary construction of the subject in Victorian Britain than Foucault’s earlier, more familiar book Discipline and Punish, which focuses on state power’s action on the individual through institutions and professional and scientific discourse. Lauren Goodlad, Victorian Literature and the Victorian State (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press 2003). 70. Max Weber, From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1946), 228. Quoted in Goodlad, Victorian Literature, 7. As the historian K. Theodore Hoppen explains: “[A]s a direct operator the state was doing little more in 1865 than in 1790.” There was no industrial economy where the state played a smaller role than in Britain in the 1860s. And yet the mid century was when the idea of the state first took hold with the nation: the word “state,” Hoppen tells us, which in 1832 made no appearance in political treatises, was by 1880 universal coin. See “What the State Did,” in K. Theodore Hoppen, The Mid-Victorian Generation, 1846–1886 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 108–124. 71. Goodlad, Victorian Literature, 17. 72. For a decidedly anti-statist critique, see David Lloyd and Paul Thomas, Culture and the State (London: Routledge, 1998), who argue that F. R. Leavis’s “idea of the ‘clerisy’ as cultural guardian resumes an argument initiated by Coleridge and developed by Arnold”; 182. 73. Pierre Bourdieu, Pascalian Meditations, trans. Richard Nice (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 245. 74. I am paraphrasing the lucid gloss on the quotation from Bourdieu, and on Bourdieu’s theory more broadly, by Leo Bersani, Thoughts and Things (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), 20. 75. Quoted in Gross, Man of Letters, 54. 76. Sir James Kay-Shuttleworth, Four Periods of Public Education (London: Routledge, 1993), 610. 77. Arnold cites several sources estimating the reduction of funding to education proposed by the code at about two-fifths (CW, II, 213). 78. Arnold wrote to his wife that if they were “thrown on the world I daresay we should be on our legs again before very long. Any way, I think I owed as much as this to a cause in which I have now a deep interest, and always shall have, even if I cease to serve it officially.” “To Lucy Wightman, 28 March 1862,” Letters, vol. 2. 79. See in particular a classic text on Arnold’s educational thinking, W. F. Connell, The Educational Thought and Influence of Matthew Arnold (London: Routledge, 1950).

noTes To ch a PTer Three [ 179 ] 80. Kay-Shuttleworth, Four Periods, 610. 81. D. M. Mason has also noted this surprising fact. For Mason, however, this is explained by Arnold’s greater interest in the role of aristocrats and legislators than in classroom teachers, and even simply by his inconsistency as a theorist of education, sometimes swayed by Kay-Shuttleworth’s approach and sometimes by Lowe’s. Mason, “Matthew Arnold and Elementary Education: A Reconsideration,” History of Education 12:3 (1983), 177–189. 82. Arnold comments on the neglect by Lowe and his supporters of what really could be improved by education reformers, such as the inappropriately turgid and obscure materials employed for the teaching of reading and speaking: “It can hardly have been by the deliberate judgment of men of sagacity that that meritorious work, Morell’s Analysis of Sentences, was made the intellectual food of girls of sixteen. It can hardly have been by the deliberate judgment of men of taste that another meritorious work, Warren’s Extracts from Blackstone’s Commentaries, was selected, for the astonishment of Quintilians yet unborn, to be the authorized textbook for readers, the chosen field in which the student of elocution should exhibit his powers” (CW, II, 237). 83. Jacques Rancière, Hatred of Democracy (London: Verso, 2006), 68. 84. Jacques Rancière, The Ignorant Schoolmaster, Five Lessons in Intellectual Emancipation, ed. Kristin Ross (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1991), 32. 85. John Churton Collins, “Matthew Arnold,” in Posthumous Essays, ed. L. C. Collins (New York: Dutton, 1912), 178–179. 86. Saintsbury, Matthew Arnold, 169. 87. On the Lives, see R. H. Super’s notes, CW, VIII, 459–460. Arnold’s praise for cheap books opens his 1883 preface to the “popular edition” of his Literature and Dogma (CW, VI, 141). 88. Richards describes his critical and educational project as seeking to educe not a particular experience of literature, but “the capacity to get the experience.” I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1956), 10. On Richards and the origins of close reading, see John Guillory, “Close Reading: Prologue and Epilogue,” ADE Bulletin, no. 149 (2010), 8–14. 89. “In the long-run one makes enemies by having one’s brilliance and ability praised,” he wrote in a letter to his mother, “one can only get oneself really accepted by men by making oneself forgotten in the people and doctrines one recommends.” “To Mary Penrose Arnold,” January 22, 1864, Letters, vol. 2, 266. 90. See Raymond Williams, “A Hundred Years of Culture and Anarchy,” in Culture and Materialism (London: Verso, 2005); “Culture and Anarchy, a Publishing History,” in Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, ed. Samuel Lipman (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1994), xvi; Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold, 278; P. J. Keating, “Arnold’s Social and Political Thought,” Matthew Arnold: Writers and Their Background, ed. Kenneth Allott (London: Bell 1975), 208, 233. 91. See the canceled passage from the preface in CW, V, 529. 92. For an example, see his defense of literature in his 1882 Rede lecture at Cambridge, “Literature and Science” (CW, X). 93. I refer to an envious relationship as Charles Dickens portrays it through the hostility—and excruciating admiration—that the poor teacher Bradley Headstone feels for the urbane and well-born Eugene Wrayburn, his rival in love, in the 1865 novel Our Mutual Friend. 94. Catherine Robson has shown that there was a transition, after the initiation of the Revised Code, from exercises of paraphrase to testable rote learning. Here, then, is an odd conjunction of Arnold’s preferred educational methods with those encouraged by

[ 180 ] noTes To ch a PTer Four the code, although of course they entailed utterly different modes of handling: the code insisted on measurable (and penalizable) feats of memorization, while Arnold insisted on the provision of literature into the hands of the students, for furthering their own development in “tact and apprehension.” He was against standardized testing. Robson also charts the development, after 1882, of guidelines for literature of a higher quality to be offered to students, a development that must have pleased Arnold in the year of his retirement. “Standing on the Burning Deck: Poetry, Performance, History,” PMLA 120:1 (2005), 148–160. 95. Matthew Arnold, “To William Seward,” May 8, 1872, Letters, vol. 4, 118–119. 96. For an account of this process see, e.g., Jan Gorak, The Making of the Modern Canon: Genesis and Crisis of a Literary Idea (London: Bloomsbury, 2014), 58–59. 97. Thom Gunn, “The Human Condition,” in The Sense of Movement (London: Faber, 1957), 18. 98. Tucker, “Authorization of Criticism,” 117. 99. Oscar Wilde will take up this contention—and run with it—in his 1891 essay, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism.”

Chapter Four: The Grounds of Tact: George Eliot’s Rage 1. I do not consider Eliot’s brief, late, 1879 “Impressions of Theophrastus Such.” For an interesting reflection on the place of this book in Eliot’s career see Fionnuala Dillane, Before George Eliot: Marian Evans and the Periodical Press (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013). 2. Avrom Fleishman, George Eliot’s Intellectual Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010), 44. 3. Adam Phillips, The Beast in the Nursery (London: Faber, 1998), 95. 4. See, e.g., Neil Hertz, “Poor Hetty,” in Compassion: The Culture and Politics of an Emotion, ed. Lauren Berlant (London: Routledge, 2004), 87–104. 5. Quoted in Gordon Haight, George Eliot, a Biography (London: Penguin, 1985), 537. 6. Fionnuala Dillane, Before George Eliot, 8. 7. Ibid., 80. 8. Henry James, The Critical Muse: Selected Literary Criticism (London: Penguin Classics, 1987), 77. 9. Dorothea and Lydgate, as D. A. Miller has put it, “indulge in a meaningfulness that is insufficiently concerned with its own incarnation,” Narrative and Its Discontents: Problems of Closure in the Traditional Novel (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1981), xxx. 10. George Eliot, Middlemarch, ed. Rosemary Ashton (London: Penguin, 1994), 84. 11. Leslie Farber, The Ways of the Will, and Other Essays (New York: Basic Books, 2000), 11–12. 12. For two different accounts of the ends-based evaluative structure of the novel, in correspondence with utilitarian and evolutionary psychological theory respectively, see Frances Ferguson, Pornography, the Theory: What Utilitarianism Did to Action (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); and William Flesch, Comeuppance: Costly Signaling, Altruistic Punishment and Other Biological Components of Fiction (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007). 13. “To John Chapman, 5 July 1856,” in Letters of George Eliot, vol. 2, 1852–1858, ed. Gordon S. Haight (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1954), 258. 14. See Walter Houghton, “Compensation,” in The Victorian Frame of Mind, 1830–1870 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1957), 331–340.

noTes To ch a PTer Fi v e [ 181 ] 15. Eliot, The Essays of George Eliot, ed. Thomas Pinney (London: Routledge, 1963), 303. 16. Ibid., 302. 17. Ibid., 302. 18. Ibid., 310. 19. Ibid., 313. 20. George Eliot, Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings, ed. A. S. Byatt (London: Penguin, 2005), 320–321. 21. Ibid., 322. 22. Ibid., 322. 23. James Baldwin, Collected Essays (New York: Library of America, 1998), 18. 24. Ibid., 271. 25. Ibid., 271–272. 26. Ibid., 158–159. 27. Ibid., 160. 28. Ibid., 167. 29. Ibid., 168. 30. Eliot chose this topic herself. Although an eighteenth-century poet, as part of what William St. Clair calls the “old canon” of out-of-copyright texts, his work was widely available. See “The Old Canon,” Reading Nation. 31. Eliot, Essays, 366–368. 32. I borrow the phrase “existentials of possibility” from Stanley Cavell and his gloss of Martin Heidegger’s sense of form in life, in particular his claim that “the understanding of the human life-form takes the form of attributing to it not predicates of identity but existentials of possibility.” “Finding Words,” review of Terrors and Experts by Adam Phillips, London Review of Books 19:4 (20 February 1997), http://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n04/stanley -cavell/finding-words. 33. Deborah Gettelman, “Reading Ahead in George Eliot,” Novel: A Forum on Fiction 39:1 (Fall 2005), 28. 34. George Eliot, Adam Bede (London: Penguin Classics, 1985), 124–125. 35. Ibid., 87. 36. Ibid., 442. 37. Ibid., 321, 364. 38. Catherine Gallagher, “George Eliot: Immanent Victorian,” Representations 90:1 (Spring 2005), 70.

Chapter Five: Relief Work: Walter Pater’s Tact 1. “Philosophiren, says Novalis, ist dephlegmatisiren, vivificiren”; Walter Pater, The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry, the 1893 Text, ed. Donald Hill (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980), 188 (hereafter cited in text as RS). 2. James Eli Adams, “Introduction,” in Walter Pater: Transparencies of Desire, ed. Laurel Brake, Lesley Higgins, and Carolyn Williams (Greensboro, NC: ELT, 2002), 2. 3. The phrase is that of the historian of ancient philosophy Pierre Hadot. See Pierre Hadot, The Present Alone Is Our Happiness: Conversations with Jeannie Carlier and Arnold I. Davidson (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009). I am thinking of Pater’s debt to his scholarship of the Stoic and Epicurean emphasis on the value of the present instant. In a very different context, Pater’s essays resonate with queer critiques of the tyranny of future-oriented productivity as ethics in the work of a number of theorists including Lee

[ 182 ] noTes To ch a PTer Fi v e Edelman, No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004) and Sarah Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010). 4. Ralph Waldo Emerson, “Experience,” in Complete Essays (New York: Modern Library, 2000). 5. For a rich account of the culture of perfectionism in nineteenth-century literature, see Andrew Miller, The Burdens of Perfection: On Ethics and Reading in NineteenthCentury British Literature (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008), which understands the work of Stanley Cavell as a development and extension of this tradition. 6. Gerald Bruns places Pater’s work in a tradition of “life philosophy” that includes the work of Thomas Carlyle, J. H. Newman, and Matthew Arnold, the form of which offers a “set of ideas, beliefs, attitudes and feelings whose structure is that of experience rather than system.” “The Formal Nature of Victorian Thinking,” PMLA 90:5 (October 1975), 904–918, 907. For an important account of perfectionism defined against Kantian deontology and utilitarian ethics, see Stanley Cavell, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 1–2. More recently, Andrew Miller has taken up Cavell’s categories of perfectionism to point to its finding a home in the British nineteenth century in the novel and in the nonfiction prose essay, Burdens, 2. 7. James Conant, “Nietzsche’s Perfectionism,” in Nietzsche’s Postmoralism, ed. Richard Schacht (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 187. 8. The phrase “self-help” was popularized by Samuel Smiles’s 1859 book of that title— the Victorian gospel of individualistic material improvement through industry and thrift. On what we know Pater to have read, see Billie Andrew Inman, Walter Pater and His Reading (London: Garland, 1990). On Pater’s “singular debt to Schiller,”, see Kate Hext, “The Limitations of Schilleresque Self-Culture in Pater’s Individualist Aesthetics,” in Victorian Aesthetic Conditions: Pater Across the Arts, ed. Elicia Clements and Lesley J. Higgins (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), 206. 9. Cavell does not discuss Pater’s writing directly. He lists the Renaissance in his canon of perfectionist philosophical works, Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome: The Constitution of Emersonian Perfectionism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990), xx. 10. Pater’s diaphanous character, as we will see, “crosses rather than follows the main current of the world’s life.” By these, Pater’s own, terms, I relate Pater’s work to a perfectionist strand in queer theory, as signaled in the late work of Michel Foucault on the care of the self and the ethics of friendship. For Foucault, “Homosexuality is a historic occasion to reopen affective and relational virtualities, not so much through the intrinsic qualities of the homosexual but because the ‘slantwise’ position of the latter, as it were, the diagonal lines he can lay out in the social fabric allow these virtualities to come to light.” “Friendship as a Way of Life,” Ethics, Subjectivity and Truth Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954–1984 (New York: New Press, 1998), 138. 11. Adam Phillips, “Introduction,” in The Renaissance (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), xv. 12. Judith Butler, Senses of the Subject (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015), 1. 13. Friedrich Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man (Mineola, NY: Dover, 2004), 80–81. 14. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 10. 15. According to Max Beerbohm; see Richard Ellman, Oscar Wilde (London: Vintage, 1988), 52.

noTes To ch a PTer Fi v e [ 183 ] 16. Gerald Monsman, Walter Pater (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1977), 9. 17. Pater was not careerist. His writings obstructed his professional advancement. He was passed over for a junior proctorship in 1874, the Oxford Professorship of Poetry in 1876, and for the Slade Professorship in Fine Art in 1885. He never rose beyond the rank of his initial appointment, a fellowship at Brasenose. 18. René Wellek, History of Modern Criticism, vol. 4, The Later Nineteenth Century (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press), 389. 19. Denis Donoghue, Walter Pater, Lover of Strange Souls (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1995), 40; and Jacques Khalip, “Pater’s Sadness,” Raritan (Fall 2000), 136–158. 20. Graham Hough, The Last Romantics (London: Taylor & Francis, 1961), 167. 21. Letters of Walter Pater, ed. Lawrence Evans (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970), 20. Angela Leighton quotes this letter to point out the classical origins in Lucretian materialism for Pater’s focus on the moment in her very interesting “Pater’s Re-forming Style,” On Form, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 78. 22. Edmund Gosse, “Walter Pater, A Portrait,” Critical Kit-Kats (New York: Dodd, Mead, 1896). 23. Christopher Ricks, The Force of Poetry (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984), 392. 24. Michael F. Davis, “Walter Pater’s ‘Latent Intelligence’ and the Conception of Queer ‘Theory,’ ,” in Brake, Higgins, and Williams, Pater: Transparencies, 261. 25. Hext, “Limitations of Schilleresque Self-Culture,” 209–210. 26. Edward Thomas, Walter Pater, A Critical Study (New York: Kennearly, 1913), 30. 27. See Angela Leighton, “Aesthetic Conditions: Returning to Pater,” in Brake, Higgins, and Williams, Pater: Transparencies. On Emerson and conditions see Cavell, Conditions. 28. Walter Pater, Plato and Platonism (New York: Barnes & Noble Library, 2005), 78. 29. Matthew Arnold, “The Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (CA, 28, 51). 30. Erich Auerbach, Dante, Poet of the Secular World (New York: NYRB, 2007), 8. 31. Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S.G.C. Middlemore (London: Penguin, 1980), 98 (italics in original). 32. Quoted in Phil Withington, Society in Early Modern England (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 24–25. 33. Linda Dowling, The Vulgarization of Art: The Victorians and Aesthetic Democracy (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996), 76. 34. Walter Pater, “Pater’s Review of Renaissance in Italy: The Age of the Despots, by John Addington Symonds” (RS, 196–198). 35. The critic Uttara Natarajan calls it “the defining stance” of Pater’s criticism. She understands Pater’s use of the word to describe Elia as absorbing Lamb “into the stance of ‘reserve’ that is his [Pater’s] own unique and particular commitment,” but I think Pater in his essay apprehends an affinity in tact—a practice of unknowing that opens up new grounds of relation—shared by them both. See chapter 1 for an account of Lamb’s tact. 36. Walter Pater, Marius the Epicurean (London: Penguin, 1985), 154. 37. J. S. Mill, On Liberty; with The Subjection of Women and Chapters on Socialism, ed. Stefan Collini (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989), 5. 38. Ibid., 20–21, 36, 49. 39. The classicist Richard Hutchins at Princeton University explained to me the possible form of this word. 40. Walter Pater, The Renaissance, ed. Adam Phillips (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), 154. 41. Ibid., 157. 42. Mill, On Liberty, 59.

[ 184 ] noTes To ch a PTer Fi v e 43. An image that derives, as James Eli Adams has pointed out, from Thomas Paine’s liberationist 1791 Rights of Man (private communication). 44. Mill, On Liberty, 69. 45. Pater, Renaissance (ed. Adam Phillips), 156. 46. Nicholas Dames has argued that criticism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century came to prioritize a spatial over a temporal understanding of literature that today conditions our criticism. Pater, writing in the period of this change, writes against this grain. Nicholas Dames, The Physiology of the Novel: Reading, Neural Science, and the Form of Victorian Fiction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 34. 47. As the critic Andrea Henderson suggests, for instance, “Whether deliberately or unwittingly, Pater entirely misconstrues the Arnoldian tenet with which he opens, slipping from the object into the depths of the subject.” Henderson, “The ‘Gold Bar of Heaven’: Framing Objectivity in D. G. Rosetti’s Poetry and Painting,” ELH 76:4 (2009), 911–929, 912. For an incisive account of this subjectivist slide, see David Bromwich, “The Genealogy of Disinterestedness,” in A Choice of Inheritance: Self and Community from Edmund Burke to Robert Frost (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1989). 48. Beaumont, “Introduction,” xviii. For Kate Hext, “Pater’s aesthetic is founded on principles of subjectivity and imagination that are ultimately at odds with the objective, rational self suggested by Arnoldian Hellenism.” Hext, Walter Pater: Individualism and Aesthetic Philosophy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013), 68. 49. As we saw in chapter 3, Arnold’s maxim is not a call to “objectivity” as we understand it—a term that, as historians Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have shown, was yet to attain the kind of epistemological supremacy since accorded it. Daston and Galison, Objectivity (New York: Zone, 2010). 50. Margaret Oliphant, unsigned review, Blackwood’s Magazine, November 1873, 604– 609, in Walter Pater: The Critical Heritage, ed. R. M. Seiler (London: Routledge, 1980), 86–87. 51. As we saw in chapter 3, Arnold in “Heinrich Heine” describes Goethe as a “liberator,” because with “Olympian politeness” he answers the inherited injunctions of power and custom with the question “Is it so? Is it so to me?” For Arnold, the “politeness” of Goethe’s response really matters. It enables old foundations to be put to new, more generous uses. Matthew Arnold, “Heinrich Heine,” CW, III, 110 (italics in original.) 52. Walter Pater, Appreciations, with an Essay on Style (London: Macmillan, 1910), 31. 53. Pater’s autobiographical essay “The Child in the House” calls this process “the building of the brain.” Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Columbia University Press, 1974), 129. 54. Pater, “Style,” 34. 55. Ibid., 35. 56. Were we undefended, in the words of the poet and critic John Ashbery, “the whole question of behavior in life” would have “to be rethought each second . . . not a breath can be drawn nor a footstep taken without out being forced in some way to reassess the ageold problem of what we are to do here and how did we get here.” “Style,” the poet and critic Jeff Dolven has commented, “affords one way out of this skeptical predicament.” (Dolven quotes the forerunning passage from John Ashbery’s “The System.”) Jeff Dolven, “Styles of Disjunction,” Southwest Review 95:1/2 (2010), 116–131, 124. 57. Carolyn Williams has suggested Pater’s Renaissance is emblematized by his “house beautiful” in her Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989). 58. D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), x.

noTes To ch a PTer Fi v e [ 185 ] 59. Here, and in the following paragraph, I am following a hint laid by Miller himself, whose own essays are much more than the steady application of an airless hermeneutic method. He invokes in the foreword to the Novel and the Police the potential of the “fully contradictory status a ‘book of essays,’ whole enough, at moments, to cohere in an identifiable set of concerns, but partial enough, at other or even the same moments, to frustrate the totalization that could here betoken only the unresisted triumph of the subject matter—of “the police,” that is, who (as Raskolnikov needlessly points out to Porfiry Petrovich in Crime and Punishment) “turn everything to account” (xii–xiv). 60. We might reflect on the absence of draftsmanship, pictorial or verbal, in Pater’s book—particularly if we compare his work to that of John Ruskin, with its plates, its details of mountain range and aspen, spandrel and lancet. 61. For an elaboration of this distinction in a different context, see Stanley Cavell, “Knowing and Acknowledging,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 238–266. 62. Arnold, “Function of Criticism,” 29. 63. Edmond Jabès, A Foreigner Carrying in the Crook of His Arm a Tiny Book, trans. Rosmarie Waldrop (Hanover, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1993), 3. 64. The phrase “hands full of difficult marvels” is borrowed from James Merrill’s 1946 poem, the “Black Swan.” 65. See Erich Auerbach on Dante’s style in Dante: Poet of the Secular World (New York: NYRB, 2007), 59. 66. In an introduction to C. L. Shadwell’s 1896 translation of the Purgatorio, Pater would insist that the modern age, too, is characterized by its distance from the “doctrinal symmetry and completeness of Dante’s position” and as such, the Purgatorio must “for the modern student” become the “favourite section of the Divina Commedia.” “Shadwell’s Dante,” in Walter Pater, Uncollected Essays (Portland, ME: Thomas Mosher, 1903), 153– 154. 67. Angela Leighton, “Aesthetic Conditions: Returning to Pater,” in Brake, Higgins, and Williams, Pater: Transparencies, 15. 68. On these unconvinced critics see Donald Hill’s summary; RS, 339–340. 69. Alphonso Lingis, Trust (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2004), x–xi. 70. Emerson, “Experience,” in Essential Writings, 309. 71. Stanley Cavell, Conditions, 3. 72. Poirier also takes Michelangelo’s unfinished sculpture as a touchstone and point of departure in thinking about creative relationships between foreground and background, self and culture. Richard Poirier, The Performing Self (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971), 111. 73. Adam Phillips, “Narcissism, For and Against,” Promises, Promises (London: Faber, 2000), 218. 74. See Coleridge’s 1798 poem “Frost at Midnight.” 75. For a detailed account of the Renaissance as a work that refuses Hegelian sublation and is both invested in the form but opposed to the teleology of a totalizing Hegelian dialectic, see Giles Whiteley, Aestheticism and the Philosophy of Death (Oxford: Legenda, 2010). 76. Giorgio Vasari, The Lives of the Artists, vol. 1, trans. George Bull (London: Penguin, 1987), 255. 77. Scholars no longer believe this painting is by Leonardo, but it is central to Pater’s myth of Leonardo and his closeness to death. 78. D. W. Winnicott, “The Use of an Object and Relating through Identifications,” in Playing and Reality, 124. Winnicott’s theory of the “use of an object” is strikingly similar

[ 186 ] noTes To ch a PTer Fi v e to Pater’s sense of the verb “to use.” On the essay form and psychoanalysis, see the next chapter, on Milner. See also the contemporary work of Adam Phillips, the writer who has most successfully demonstrated the affinity between the essay as literary and psychoanalytic form. 79. Leighton, “Aesthetic Conditions,” 17. 80. She transfers the problematic to the psychology of narcissism, to the boundary lines between self and other, and to the medium of drawing, to drawing out, and drawing over, the aesthetic experiences of her patients. See chapter 6. 81. “120. To Messrs R & R Clark, 1 December [1887],” Letters of Walter Pater, ed. Laurence Evans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1970), 78. 82. Oscar Wilde, The Major Works, ed. Isobel Murray (Oxford: Oxford World’s Classics, 2000), 284. 83. “In early Renaissance art,” says Berger, “in paintings from non-European cultures, in certain modern works, the image implies a passage of time. . . . Yet the ensuing images are still static whilst referring to the dynamic world beyond their edges, and this poses the problem of what is the meaning of that strange contrast between static and dynamic. Strange because it is both so flagrant and so taken for granted.” John Berger, And Our Faces, My Heart, Brief as Photos (New York, Vintage, 1991), 26. 84. I take the phrase “aesthetic of handling” from the psychoanalyst and critic Christopher Bollas, The Shadow of the Object: Psychoanalysis of the Unthought Known (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 33. (Also, see the introduction to the present book.) The contemporary art critic T. J. Clark has in his remarkable book, The Sight of Death (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press 2006), also reflected on the way painting “opens up” a “structure of experience” (222) for us to inhabit, how it provides “new way[s] of handling” the world (200), and how appreciation of this process requires the evasion of familiar critical approaches to painting of explicating its subject, or tracing its sources (118). He also, through the diary structure of his work as a series of re-encounters, undoes the finishedness of his criticism before its objects. See also the next chapter on this question of aesthetic experience. 85. On this subject see, e.g., Raymond Geuss, “Must Criticism Be Constructive?” in A World without Why (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 89. 86. John Ruskin, “Pre-Raphaelistism,” in “A New and Noble School”: Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites, ed. Stephen Wildman (London: Pallas, 2012), 71. 87. Frances Ferguson, “Now It’s Personal: D.A. Miller and Too-Close Reading,” Critical Inquiry 41:3 (Spring 2015) 522. 88. Dave Hickey, “In the Sunshine of Absolute Neglect,” in Pirates and Farmers: Essays on Taste (London: Ridinghouse, 2013), 72. 89. See chapter 1. On aestheticism’s disturbance of the “hierarchical relationship between the fine and the decorative arts,” both insisting on the aesthetic value of quotidian objects, and the decorative status of “fine” painting, see Caroline Arscott, William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones: Interlacings (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008), 13. 90. Theodor Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (London: Verso, 2005), 35–37. Adorno’s full explanation runs as follows: It was the hour when the bourgeois individual rid himself of absolutist compulsion. Free and solitary, he answers for himself, while the form of hierarchical respect and consideration developed by absolutism, divested of their economic basis and their menacing power, are still just sufficiently present to make living together within privileged groups bearable. This seemingly paradoxical interchange between absolutism and liberality is perceptible . . . in Beethoven’s attitude towards the traditional patterns of composition, and

noTes To ch a PTer six [ 187 ] even in logic, in Kant’s subjective reconstruction of objectively binding ideas. There is a sense in which Beethoven’s regular recapitulations of flowing dynamic expositions, Kant’s deductions of scholastic categories from the unity of consciousness, are eminently “tactful.” The precondition of tact is convention intact but no longer present. (36) The problem with tact for Adorno is that it is unsustainable; since authority cannot be grounded in either the individual or the social form, the paradox must be unraveled and give way to unmediated power—what Adorno calls “a life of direct domination.” Closing up the space of play, a new hierarchical absolutism of rationalized knowledge comes to dominate a bureaucratized and disenchanted world. For Adorno, however, this tactful relationship must end—has, for us, ended—as the dialectic pushes on, towards unmediated relations of “direct domination.” Pater does not assume this will happen. 91. Kate Hext comments perceptively, “the stage of synthesis—essential to Hegelian dialectic—is absent in Pater’s formulation. It is another version of dialectical form, another way of formally describing a human predicament. (We could apply Thomas Merton’s reflection on Blake’s work, as possessing a “ground of dialectic” which, “though not Hegelian, is nevertheless fully concerned with man’s predicament in the world.”) Thomas Merton, “Blake and the New Theology,” in The Literary Essays of Thomas Merton (New York: New Directions, 1981), 10. 92. In his notes for a 1977 lecture, Roland Barthes remarks: “From my window . . . I see a mother pushing an empty stroller, holding her child by the hand. She walks at her own pace, imperturbably; the child, meanwhile, is being pulled, dragged along, is forced to keep running, like an animal, or one of Sade’s victims being whipped. She walks at her own pace, unaware of the fact that her son’s rhythm is different. And she’s his mother! → Power—the subtlety of power—is effected through disrhythmy, heterorhythmy.” “Session of January 12, 1977, How to Live Together: Novelist Simulations of Some Everyday Spaces, trans. Kate Briggs (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013), 9. 93. I have omitted discussion of Pater’s next essay, “Joachim du Bellay.” It hints suggestively at the themes—of a school or style at work on the interaction between aesthetic experience and the everyday world, and the “happy and dexterous way in which a thing slight in itself is handled”—which the Giorgione essay, a later addition, explores more fully (RS, 140). 94. Saint Augustine, The Confessions, trans. Henry Chadwick (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008), 3. 95. To apply Edmund Husserl’s words about his own phenomenological work. 96. Evangelista, “ ‘Life in the Whole’: Goethe and English Aestheticism,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 82:3 (2013), 180–192, 184. 97. Donald Hill notes this precise repetition (among many others); RS, 435. 98. See Robert Pippin, Nietzsche, Psychology and First Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 12. 99. Butler, Senses, 6.

Chapter Six: Tact in Psychoanalysis: Marion Milner 1. Marion Milner, “The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation,” in The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men: Forty-Four Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 2005), 62. 2. Marion Milner, An Experiment in Leisure (New York: JP Tarcher, 1981), 34. This situation contains, well before its official formulation in psychoanalytic theory, both the central diagnostic category and the criterion of health in the work of D. W. Winnicott, for

[ 188 ] noTes To ch a PTer six whom the “false self ” organization, which “collects demands” in order to suppress and protect the functioning of the “true self,” obstructs the capacity that would allow for a fruitful interaction between the true self and the world, in the “capacity to be alone.” See Winnicott, “Ego Distortion in Terms of True and False Self ” (1960) and “The Capacity to be Alone” (1958) in The Maturational Processes and the Facilitating Environment (London: Hogarth, 1965), 140–152 and 29–36. 3. Marion Milner, A Life of One’s Own (New York: JP Tarcher, 1981), 218. 4. Ibid., 1. 5. Milner, Experiment, xix. 6. Ibid., 48. 7. Marion Milner, “The Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation” in The Suppressed Madness of Sane Men: Forty-Four Years of Exploring Psychoanalysis, (London: Routledge, 2005), 88–89 (hereafter cited in text as SMSM). 8. Ibid., 89. 9. Ibid., 91. 10. Ibid., 91. 11. SMSM, 92. 12. Ibid., 92. 13. Ibid., 94. 14. Ibid., 92. 15. Marion Milner, On Not Being Able to Paint (New York: International Universities Press, 1990), 16. 16. Ibid., 16. 17. Ibid., 16. 18. Marion Milner, Bothered by Alligators (London: Routledge, 2013), 94. 19. Milner, On Not Being Able, 17. 20. Ibid., 17. 21. Ibid., 21. 22. SMSM, 96. 23. Ibid., 102. 24. Ibid., 98. 25. D. W. Winnicott, “Primitive Emotional Development,” Collected Papers (New York: Basic Books, 1958), 150 n1. 26. Ibid., 103. 27. Ibid., 97. 28. Ibid., 97. 29. Ibid., 104 30. David Wojnarowicz, Close to the Knives, A Memoir of Disintegration (New York: Vintage, 1991), 87–88, 116–117. 31. On the overwhelming stimulation of the child by the adult world, see Sandor Ferenczi, “A Confusion of Tongues Between Adult and Child,” in Final Contributions to the Problems and Methods of Psychoanalysis (London: Karnac, 1994); and Jean Laplanche (whose fascinating theory of the “enigmatic signifier” begins from this situation), Essays on Otherness (London: Routledge, 1998)—and, of course, very many nineteenth-century British novels. 32. Winnicott, Playing and Reality, 28. 33. Ibid., 28. 34. Leo Bersani, “Is the Rectum a Grave?” in Is the Rectum a Grave and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 23.

noTes To ch a PTer six [ 189 ] 35. On the implicit sense of erotic possibility in a psychoanalytic idiom of aliveness, see Adam Phillips, Winnicott (London: Penguin, 2007), xi. 36. SMSM, 104. 37. Ibid., 99. 38. Marion Milner, The Hands of the Living God: an Account of a Psychoanalytic Treatment (London: Routledge, 2010), xxxvii. Hereafter cited in text as H. 39. T. J. Clark, The Sight of Death: An Experiment in Art Writing (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006), 118. 40. There is an extensive psychoanalytic literature on the relationship between psychosis and the capacity for metaphorical language. It’s a major theme, for instance, of the work of Milner’s contemporary Wilfred Bion. For a more recent perspective, see Alan Bass, Difference and Disavowal: The Trauma of Eros (Palo Alto, CA: Stanford University Press, 2001). But I want to focus here on Milner’s interest in a wider capacity for illusion, and an experimental essayism that occupies and explores this capacity: these essays both describe its absence and provide the relational conditions for its restitution. 41. Frank O’Hara, “Personism,” Selected Poems ed. Mark Ford (New York: Knopf, 2011), 247. 42. Emerson, “Self Reliance,” Essential Writings (New York: Modern Library, 2000), 132. 43. William James, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature (New York: Modern Library, 2002), 40, 66. 44. Milner comments in a late (1987) book, Eternity’s Sunrise, that “I bought William James’ Variations of Religious Experience at Harvard in 1928 and have not even yet managed to read it” a detail that seems (like Freud’s more famous relationship of non-reading to Nietzsche) too good to be true. It is also enlivened by Milner’s misremembering of James’s title: as if she has provided a variation on his investigation, rather than a survey of his varieties. Eternity’s Sunrise (London: Routledge 2011), 119. 45. SMSM, 121, 114. 46. Adam Phillips, “Up to a Point,” One Way and Another: New and Selected Essays (London: Hamish Hamilton, 2013), 389. 47. Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius (London: Penguin, 1991), 516. See Monk’s lucid account of Wittgenstein’s formulation of the question, by means of his famous example of the “duck-rabbit” drawing, of how a change in aspect comes about (507–516). As Wittgenstein puts it in his Philosophical Investigations (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons, 2010), “expression of a change in aspect is the expression of a new perception, and at the same time of the perception’s being unchanged.” How is something, which is itself unchanged, seen in a new way? (196–197) On copying a drawing, see Investigations, 214. Milner also provides insight, and a possible response, to Wittgenstein’s lament that “ ‘Wisdom is grey.’ Life on the other hand and religion are full of colour”; quoted in Monk, Duty, 490. 48. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness: The Hollywood Comedy of Remarriage (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1981), 36. 49. Michael Wood, commenting on this same reflection of Wittgenstein, notes that here “the riddle for the philosopher is that he regards thinking as an action and seeing as a condition. How can an experience be made up of both elements at once?” Wood gives Wittgenstein’s question, “How is it possible to see an object according to an interpretation?” “Literature doesn’t answer this question,” Wood comments, but it does enact the riddle constantly, offering what seem to be direct perceptions intricately entwined with often elaborate interpretations. It does this so constantly that we can hardly speak of a

[ 190 ] noTes To ch a PTer six riddle any more.” Michael Wood, Literature and the Taste of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 6. 50. See the previous chapter, and see Pippin, Nietzsche, 10. 51. Milner explores these themes further in her 1956 essay “The Sense in Nonsense, Freud and Blake’s Job,” in SMSM, chap. 11. 52. Mary Jacobus has written interestingly about this image in particular, and the relationship between music and bodily boundaries. See Mary Jacobus, The Poetics of Psychoanalysis: In the Wake of Klein (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), chap. 5. 53. Cavell, “Companionable Thinking,” in Wittgenstein and the Moral Life, ed. Alice Crary (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2007), 283. 54. Marion Milner, The Human Problem in Schools (London: Methuen, 1938), 176.

I n de x

abstraction, 1; Arnold and, 69, 75, 94; Lamb’s rejection of, 19–22; Pater’s rejection of, 127–28, 137 “A Complaint of the Behaviour of Married People” (Lamb), 17 Adam Bede (Eliot), 107–10 Adams, James Eli, 111 Adderley, Charles, 79–81, 86 Addison, Joseph, 16–17, 21–22, 31 Adorno, Theodor, 6, 7–8, 135–36 aesthetic liberalism, 1–2, 4–7; Lamb and, 13–14, 27, 42; Mill and, 57; Pater’s, 113, 137–39 “aliveness,” 4, 142, 149, 162–63, 189n35 allegory, 21, 68, 122–23, 131–32, 134 altruism, 105 ambiguity. See uncertainty; vagueness ambivalence, 1, 104; Arnold and, 60, 66, 90; Lamb and, 17 Anderson, Amanda, 171n1 anger: Eliot and, 97–98, 100–107; as response to experimental paintings, 146–47 appreciation: Arnold and “seeing the object as it really is,” 61, 90; Hazlitt and social value of the individual, 19; Lamb and tactful or concrete, 15, 22, 29–30, 32; J.S. Mill’s attention and, 58; in Milner’s psychoanalytic practice, 143, 147–49, 153, 155–60; Pater on, 116–17 (see also Appreciations (Pater)) Appreciations (Pater), 117, 121 apprehension, 42, 46–47, 52, 54, 63, 84, 91, 102–6, 110, 126, 128, 135 Arnold, Matthew, 1, 4, 7–8, 19; and controversy, 59–60, 71, 74, 76, 79–80, 82–83; on criticism, 5; deliverance or relief and, 60–61, 63–64, 77; educational theory and egalitarianism, 60–61, 86–87; faith and, 62, 66–67, 69, 93; on Franklin’s influence, 77–78; and freedom, 63–65; and Hebraism/ Hellenism dichotomy, 63, 68–69, 76, 94–95; and points de repère or

“touchstones,” 79, 85, 88, 91–93; and rejection of dogma, 59–60; shift from poetry to critical essay, 61, 63–64, 67–74; and vagueness, 96 “The Artificial Comedy of the Last Age” (Lamb), 26–27, 30 aspect, change of, 157 assent, 75, 77 Auerbach, Erich, 115 Auguste Comte and Positivism (J.S. Mill), 50–52, 105 Autobiography (J.S. Mill), 43, 44–45 Baldwin, James, 104–5 “The Bareness of the Imaginative Faculty in the Productions of Modern Art” (Lamb), 26 Barthes, Roland, 17, 23, 82 Beaumont, Matthew, 120 “Beggars in the Metropolis” (Lamb), 28–30 Benjamin, Walter, 8–9 Bentham, Jeremy, 12–13, 30; and chrestomatic education system, 26, 36–39; J.S. Mill and, 44–46, 49, 56; Lamb and, 8, 12–13, 30–32; and moral efficiency, 38–39; and neutrality, 35–37; and panoptical institutions, 12–13, 35–39 “Bentham” (J.S. Mill), 49, 56 Berenson, Bernard, 149 Berger, John, 133 Bersani, Leo, 9, 149 biblical interpretation and criticism, 73, 77–78, 84–85 body awareness, 153–54 Bollas, Christopher, 11 borderlines and boundaries, 3; boundaries between people, 145; in Lamb, 22–23; objects and freedom from, 145–47; Pater and, 121, 125–26, 132–33, 136–38, 140–41; between the self and the world, 140–41, 146–47; and self identity, 143, 145

[ 191 ]

[ 192 ] Index Bothered by Alligators (Milner), 146 Botticelli, Sandro, 56, 123–25, 140 Bourdieu, Pierre, 85 Bowring, John, 44 Bromwich, David, 20 Brooks, Cleanth, 131 Browne, Thomas, 35, 39 Buffon, Georges-Luis Leclerc, Comte de, 71 Burckhardt, Jacob, 116 “Buried Life” (Arnold), 67 Burke, Edmund, 18, 20 Burne-Jones, Georgiana, 98 Butler, Joseph, Bishop, 91 Butler, Judith, 113, 139 Byatt, A. S., 101 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 43–44 Campbell, Thomas, 91–92 capitalism, 41, 85 “Captain Jackson” (Lamb), 26 Cavell, Stanley, 9, 112, 114, 128, 161 Cervantes, Miguel de, 26, 39 Chatterton, Georgiana, 101 Chesterton, G. K., 2 Chrestomathia (Bentham), 26, 36–39 Cicero, 49 clarity, 26, 39, 49, 52–54, 113, 124, 141, 152–53, 156 Clark, T. J., 151 closure, 18, 129. See also conclusions Clough, Arthur, 62 Cockney School, 16, 18–19 coercion, 2–3, 8, 13, 37–38, 48, 50–51, 77, 148, 154 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 44–45, 46, 129 Collini, Stefan, 47, 60, 94 Collins, John Churton, 88 “common sense,” 16, 19–20, 77–80, 102, 147 Compensation (Chatterton), 101 “Conclusion” (Pater, Renaissance), 112–14, 121, 128–29, 132, 139–41 conclusions: ambiguity and lack of, 66; Eliot and thwarted expectations, 108; essay form as open ended, 8–9, 17; lack of final judgement, 68; Lamb and evasion of, 32; novels and focus on, 8–9, 57, 100; Pater and deferral of, 132, 136; revelatory logic of, 105–7

conduct books or literature, 6, 17 “Confessions of a Drunkard” (Lamb), 30 conflict, relations of, 56; aggressive play, 144–45; controversy, 56, 59–60, 71, 74, 76, 79–80, 82–83; debate or argument as, 42–43, 48, 78; games as, 17–18 conformity, 47; Arnold and, 76, 93; Benthamite Utilitarianism and, 37–38; Eliot on the status quo, 105; J.S. Mill and, 76; poetry and individual nonconformity, 52–53; preexisting relational forms, 149; social constraints and maiming of the individual, 119 Congreve, William, 39 consensus, 49, 53–54; as coercive, 148; political liberalism and, 13, 42 Constance Herbert (Jewsbury), 103–4 contagion, aesthetic, 66 contempt, 94, 98, 102, 114–15, 152, 159 controversy: Arnold and, 62, 69, 71, 76, 79–82, 131; Lamb and evasion of, 17; J.S. Mill and controversy as restrictive, 56 Coulling, Sidney, 71 creativity: convention as restriction on, 71; criticism as creative activity, 74; and destruction, 131; and freedom, 131; loss of, 145; and mental health, 11; Milner on, 143, 145, 146, 151, 159; Pater on Michelangelo’s, 126–27 criticism, 5, 11, 69; as art, 123–24; biblical interpretation and, 73, 77–78, 84–85; as creative activity, 74; and cultural equality, 93–94, 96; and detachment, 42–43, 74; and disinterestedness, 74; education and, 78–79, 84–85, 88–89; as encounter with the object as it really is, 61, 120; Hazlitt on, 19–20; obliquity and, 79; sympathy and, 54–55; tact and, 69, 74, 112; translation and, 72–74 Culture and Anarchy (Arnold), 60, 63, 74, 76, 82–83, 89–90 Cumming, John, 101, 103, 105–6 Daniel Deronda (Eliot), 102, 107 Dante Alighieri, 123–24, 127–29 Daston, Lorraine, 61 Davis, Michael, 115

Index [ 193 ] death, Pater and etherealization of, 127–29, 130 debate, 42–43, 48, 78 deliverance, 60–61, 63–64, 77. See also relief democratization: education and, 89, 90–91; essay and, 12–13 “Diaphaneitè” (Pater), 111, 118 the diaphanous, in Pater, 111, 114–19, 123–24, 131–32, 136–37 Dickens, Charles, 25, 105 dignity: Bentham and, 36, 37; Lamb and, 5, 25–26 digression, 8. See also evasion Dillane, Finnouala, 99 disgust, 78, 131 disinterestedness, 3, 74–75 “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig” (Lamb), 32 distance, 3; Arnold and, 67; media and distantiating, 57; thickening of medium as distantiating, 53 “Distant Correspondents” (Lamb), 33–35 “doctrine of Compensation,” 98, 100–107 dogmatism, 7–8, 59, 74, 84, 92, 152 “Dover Beach” (Arnold), 62, 67 Dowling, Linda, 116 “Dream Children” (Lamb), 8, 28 “Dreaming, Fantasying, and Living” (Winnicott), 149 Durkheim, Emile, 73 Eagleton, Terry, 16 eccentricity, 5, 12–13, 21, 47–49 education: Arnold’s theory of, 60–62, 68–69, 77, 83–93; Bentham’s chrestomathic system of, 26, 36–39; as contagion, 138; criticism as, 88–89; as distribution of knowledge, 87; and equality, 78–79, 86–87, 90, 93–96; experience and, 115; as information transfer, 90–91; Lamb’s unsystematic, 38–39; J.S. Mill’s Utilitarian, 43; pedagogy of ignorance, 9; as social interaction, 7; the teaching of tact, 59–61 Elia (Charles Lamb). See Lamb, Charles Eliot, George (Marian Evans), 1, 4, 7; and “doctrine of Compensation,” 98, 100–107; and essay form, 97–98; and

“spontaneous impulse,” 5, 104–5; transition to novel form, 98, 107–10 “Ellistoniana” (Lamb), 24 eloquence, 52–54, 56, 58 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 74–75, 77, 83, 112, 128 “Empedocles on Etna” (Arnold), 67–68 encounter, aesthetic of, 1, 5, 19–20 ends: evasion of, 4; means and ends, 3, 45, 52; novels and narrative endings, 8–9, 100–110 equality, 2–3; Arnold’s egalitarianism, 4, 60–61, 69, 76, 78–79, 83, 87, 90, 93–96; Bentham and, 32, 36–39; education and, 78–79, 86–87, 90, 93–96; Hazlitt and, 19, 107; inequalities (see hierarchies); knowledge as barrier to, 95; Lamb and, 28–29; and neutral or middle space, 28–29, 36–37; Pater’s link between art and, 136; redistribution of wealth, 93–94; as social remedy, 96 “Equality” (Arnold), 93–96 essay form: as alternative to novel, 98, 107–10; Arnold and shift to, 61–62, 69, 72–73; Eliot use of, 97–100, 107; experimentation and, 4; Lamb’s uses of, 12–13, 21–22; mediation and, 100; Mill’s use of, 58; Pater on ignorance and the, 141; as spiritual exercise, 122; tact of the, 7–9, 21–22 Essays in Criticism (Arnold), 75, 82–83 Eternity’s Sunrise (Milner), 159 etiquette books, 6, 17–18 Evangelista, Stefano, 137 Evans, Lawrence, 132 evasion: Arnold’s use of irony and diversion, 81–82; Bentham and indirection, 38; and impertinence, 17–18; Lamb’s obliquity or vagueness, 3, 14, 17–18, 22–23, 27–28, 31–32; Pater and, 112, 114, 115; superabundance of information as alternative to, 36; tact and, 20–21; as a technique of playful survival, 20–21 experience: in Arnold, 63–65; experiential interaction, 54; faith and, 154; focus on future perfection rather than present, 40, 83, 104; and freedom, 63; knowledge as barrier to lived, 1, 9, 39,

[ 194 ] Index experience (continued ) 45–46, 54, 63–65, 83–84, 88; J.S. Mill and rational, experiential knowing, 45–46; Pater’s focus on, 112–13; transitional experience, 11. See also present “Experience” (Emerson), 128 An Experiment in Leisure (Milner), 142, 143, 152 faith: Arnold and, 62, 66–67, 69, 93; “blind,” 55; Eliot and “bad faith” in the future, 104; experience and, 154; faithfulness to the object, 69–70; J.S. Mill on faith and reason, 45–46, 51–52, 55; in the poetic form, 70–71 falsifiability, 51 Farber, Leslie, 100 Ferguson, Frances, 32, 36, 37, 135 figure/ground relationships, 116–17, 151–54, 159 Flaubert, Gustave, 121 “Forsaken Merman” (Arnold), 67 Foucault, Michel, 14, 38, 149 frames: for encounter, 10, 74, 94, 96; relational, 125, 132, 135, 148, 154–56 Franklin, Benjamin: as influence on Arnold, 77–78 freedom: aestheticization of, 4–5, 61; Arnold on deliverance and “true,” 63–64; education as emancipatory, 84–85; and the essay form, 7–8; of imagination, 33, 51, 115, 137; and individual experience, 63; knowledge as threat to, 51; liberty to see and feel, 113, 116; objects as imprisoned by outlines, 145–47; Pater and, 42, 137, 140–41; preexisting relational forms as constricting, 149; the Renaissance as, 116 A French Eton (Arnold), 87 Freud, Sigmund, 9–10, 41, 161 friendship, 116, 137 “Function of Criticism at the Present Time” (Arnold), 74, 79–80, 87, 96, 115 future, 1, 13, 31–32, 40, 83, 104–6, 156–57 Galison, Peter, 61 Gallagher, Catherine, 109–10

Garden of Cyrus (Browne), 35 Gertrude of Wyoming (Campbell), 91 Gettleman, Debra, 107 Gigante, Denise, 12, 166n22 Goethe, Johan Wolfgang von, 84–85, 137–39 Goodlad, Lauren, 85 Gordon, Jan, 146 Gosse, Edmund, 114 “The Graces and Anxieties of Pig Driving” (Hunt), 20 Guillory, John, 53, 57 habits, 47; of order, 38–39; Pater and distrust of, 113, 119, 137, 139; as protection, 121 habitus, Bourdieu’s theory of, 85, 90 Hadley, Elaine, 49, 171n1 Halévy, Elie, 32–33 Hamerton, Philip, 95 handling: as alternative to knowing certainty, 6, 8–9, 34–35; and Arnold’s “object as it really is,” 71–72; Bollas’ “aesthetic of handling,” 11; education and, 59, 84, 87–91; essay form and tactful, 72–73, 76; Hazlitt and aesthetic of, 19–20; “holding” and psychological, 10–11; Hunt and handling as style, 20–21; parental care as, 11; Pater’s aesthetic of, 112–13, 120–23, 126–29, 133–34, 141; privileged over abstraction or observation, 1, 20–21, 92–93, 120; and trust relationships, 3, 127 The Hands of a Living God (Milner), 150–64 Hazlitt, William, 7, 16, 18–22 “Heinrich Heine” (Arnold), 84 Heiterkeit, 138, 157 Hertz, Neil, 98 Hext, Kate, 115 Hickey, Dave, 135 hierarchies, 2, 3, 6; Arnold’s critiques of social class, 60, 75–76; Bentham’s panoptic system and, 36–39; and education as vocation preparation, 85–86; essayists and challenges to, 20–21; fear and enforcement of social, 146–47; Lamb’s rejection of, 15, 20, 32; novels and, 32; rejection of essential-

Index [ 195 ] izing, 35–36; Romantic crisis of social valuation, 16. See also equality Hirschman, Albert, 41 History of British India (James Mill), 31, 32–33 History of European Liberalism (Ruggiero), 42 “holding” during psychoanalysis, 11, 155, 158 Holloway, John, 76 Honan, Park, 65 Hough, Graham, 114 Houghton, Walter, 101 Hume, David, 47 Hunt, Leigh, 8, 16, 20–21, 43–44 idiosyncracy, 18, 22, 32 ignorance, 9, 141; and intelligence, 95; Pater and consciousness of, 127–28; pedagogy of, 1, 87–88; tact and willing, 72–73; unknowing, 3–4, 156 illusion: Lamb and theatrical, 3, 13, 24–30, 37–38, 136; metaphor as, 152; Milner on, 143–44, 147, 152–53; Pater and, 136; Winnicott’s “holding” and, 11 “Imperfect Sympathies” (Lamb), 22–24, 30 impertinence, 2, 82; Arnold and, 77, 82, 89, 91; Barthes on, 17, 82; Lamb and, 17–18, 24, 27, 79; and Milner’s psychological approach, 153; tact and, 1–2 “inclinations” or desire in J.S. Mill, 47–49, 52 indeterminacy, 140–41, 156, 158–59. See also uncertainty individuality, 2; and diversity as a value, 48; and eccentricity, 20, 47; in lieu of conventional morality, 21; as maimed by social convention, 118–19; and particularization, 109–10; the Renaissance and, 116 information: Arnold’s educational theory and, 85–88, 90–92; Benthamite information economy, 8, 36–39; essays and transmission of, 74, 85; novel form and, 8–9; tactful refusal of, 87; as threat to lived experience, 9, 39, 88. See also knowledge interpretation: allegory and, 122–23; Benthamite ideal of transparent, 36;

biblical interpretation as metaphor, 73, 84; as education, 36, 39; psychoanalytic, 10, 144, 147–48, 150, 155–56 Jabès, Edmond, 123 James, Henry, 2, 32, 62–63, 76, 99 James, William, 154 Jewsbury, Geraldine, 103–4 Jacotot, Joseph, 87 Johnson, Samuel, 20, 21, 88–90 Johnson, William Cory, 116 joy, 155–56, 163; hedonism, 114; J.S. Mill’s loss of purpose and, 44–45 Kay-Shuttleworth, James, 85–86 Keble, John, 70–71 Kermode, Frank, 102 Kingsley, Charles, 103, 104 Klein, Melanie, 144 knowledge: assumed knowledge of others, 15; certainty and, 108–9, 124; as coercive or restrictive, 3, 8, 37–38, 50–51, 61, 154; experience as alternative to, 1, 61, 63–65; information contrasted with, 38–39; and meaning, 42; J.S. Mill and rational, experiential knowing, 45–46; as power, 2–3, 28–29, 57–58; prophetic, 104–5, 108–9; psychology and relational ways of, 161; rejection of, 2–3, 115; as relational, 75–76; and Sartre’s “bad faith,” 104; and social heirarchy, 95; sympathy as alternative to, 56 Lamb, Charles, 1, 4, 8; and eccentricity, 5, 12–13, 21; education and, 38–39; Elia persona of, 13, 14–15, 22; evasion or obliquity and, 3, 14, 17–18, 22–23, 27–28, 31–32; familiarity of style, 12; and “glittering something,” 22–24; on Hazlitt, 21; as idiosyncratic, 18, 22, 32; and impertinence, 17–18; on narrative, 31; opposition to James Mill, 30–31; and theatrical “illusion,” 3, 13, 24–30; transitional space of relation and, 13, 15–16, 20–30, 34–35; and uncertainty or ambiguity, 34–35, 39–40; works as response to Bentham, 12–13, 38–39 language: loss of meaning in, 150–52; as metaphor, 152; as transitional object,

[ 196 ] Index language (continued ) 28; as translation, 72–73, 132; “universal grammar,” 38; Utilitarianism and hierarchy of, 32–33, 35–36 The Last Supper (Da Vinci), 130 “Last Words” (Arnold), 71–74, 79, 89 latency, 3, 112, 116–19, 122–23, 137 laughter, 161 law, British common, 35–36 Leighton, Angela, 125 Le Neutre (Barthes), 23 “Leonardo da Vinci” (Pater), 125, 129–30 Lepenies, Wolf, 72 “Letter to Earl Granville” (KayShuttleworth), 85 liberalism, 4; aesthetic, 1–2, 4–7, 13–14, 27, 42, 57, 113, 137–39; and the critical tradition, 41–42; of eloquence, 53, 58; and imperialism, 32; J.S. Mill’s aesthetic of freedom, 4–5; modern, 48; and objectivity, 41–42; “of meaning” in J.S. Mill, 46–47; political, 42, 43, 116; of rational method, 42–45, 50, 52–54, 57, 113; Victorian, 41–42 Liberal (magazine), 43–44 liberty. See freedom A Life of One’s Own (Milner), 142, 154 “Lines Written in Kensington Gardens,” 67 Lingis, Alphonso, 128 “The Literary Influence of Academies” (Arnold), 86 Literature and Dogma (Arnold), 92 Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets (Johnson), 88, 91 Lockhart, John Gibson, 16 Lowe, Robert, 85–86 “Luca Della Robia” (Pater), 125 Lukács, Geörgy, 63–64 “Mackery End, in Hertfordshire” (Lamb), 31 Macmillan, Alexander, 88 Malachuck, Daniel, 171n1 malice aforethought, 131 manners: conduct books, 6, 17–18; equality and, 60, 94–95; of the essay form, 6; morals and, 95; tact associated with, 6

marginalization: of aesthetic liberalism, 42, 50–52; tact and critique from the margins, 2; weakness or vulnerability and, 143 Masson, David, 68 meaning: allegory and, 122–23; as created or made, 1–6, 73–74, 127–28, 133–34, 144; and individual experience, 45–46; interpretation and, 147–48, 157–58; J.S. Mill and dichotomy of truth and, 45–46; as potential, 27; as transitional, 23–24 means and ends, 3, 45, 52 mediation: Arnold and, 69, 78, 93; essay form and, 100; J.S. Mill and, 53, 54, 56–57; Pater and, 121, 124–25, 130, 138–40; setting and, 3, 11, 56 Mehta, Uday, 32 Merope (Arnold), 69 metaphor: Lamb’s “middle space” and, 22–23; language as, 152; relief as, 125–26; as shared illusion, 152; tact as metaphor for social interaction, 6; as translation, 72–73; and truth, 23 meter, in poetry, 65–66, 68, 70–72 Middle Group, 9–11, 142 Mill, James, 6, 13, 30, 32–35, 44 Mill, John Stuart, 1, 4; and aesthetic liberalism, 43, 48–50; and dichotomy of truth and meaning, 45–46; divergence from Utilitarianism, 44–45, 49–50, 54; eloquence and, 52–54, 57, 58; and ethos of argument, 49–50; and individual inclination (desire), 47, 52; and marginalization of aesthetic liberalism, 50–52; “mental crisis” of, 44–45; Pater and, 113; poetry as focus of early essays, 43, 52–53, 57; and rational method, 42–45, 48–54, 56, 57, 113; on sympathy, 54–56, 58 millenarianism, 103, 105–9 Miller, Andrew, 42–43 Miller, D. A., 14, 122 Miller, J. Hillis, 64 Milner, Marion, 1, 4, 132; and creativity, 143, 145, 146, 149, 151, 159; on criticism, 5; as diarist, 142–43; and the essay form, 142–43; “Simon’s” analysis, 143–45, 147–50; “Susan’s” analysis,

Index [ 197 ] 150–61; and tactful appreciation as clinical practice, 143, 147–49, 153, 155–60; and transitional experience, 11; and transitional objects, 145–46 Mixed Essays (Arnold), 93 modernity, 2, 59, 62–64 Mona Lisa (Da Vinci), 131–32 Monsman, Gerald, 114 Montaigne, Michel de, 138, 142–43 moralism: in Eliot, 109; Lamb and, 20–21, 27, 38–39; Pater and, 131 “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist” (Lamb), 17–18 music, in Pater, 110, 127, 130–31, 134, 136 narrative: Eliot and rejection of revelatory, 100–108; Lamb and essay as alternative to, 13, 31–32; Pater and resistance to, 111, 114; progress and narrativization, 13, 31–32; story and, 8–9. See also novels “The Natural History of German Life” (Eliot), 105 negative capability, 23, 153 neutrality: Barthes and, 17, 23; Bentham and, 35–37; equality linked to, 35–37; Lamb’s “neutral ground of character,” 13, 22, 27–30; neutral space and performance of tact, 4, 28; Pater and “neutralized” existence, 119, 123 Newman, Francis, 70–72, 92 Newman, John Henry, 76 “New Year’s Eve” (Lamb), 31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 48, 112, 138 novels, 54; as alienating, 106–7; and “bad optimism,” 103–4, 107; conclusions and meaning in, 8–9, 32; Eliot and “bad faith” in the future, 104; essay form as alternative to, 122; and information, 8–9; narrative and, 8–9, 106–7; revelatory, 100–108; temporal logic of, 8, 103; and utilitarian thought, 32 objectivity, 41–42; critical detachment and, 42; disinterest contrasted with, 74; and “the object as it really is,” 61, 70, 120–21, 156; scientific, 61, 91. See also neutrality

objects: appreciation of others as creative, 22–23; aspect changes and, 157; outlines and imprisonment of, 145–46 obliquity, 3, 56; Arnold and, 75, 76, 79; Lamb and, 3, 22–23, 27–28, 31–32; J.S. Mill and, 53–54; Pater on, 130; utilitarian rejection of, 31 “Of the Influence of Time and Place in Matters of Legislation” (Bentham), 32 O’Hara, Frank, 153 “The Old and the New Schoolmaster” (Lamb), 38–39 “Old China” (Lamb), 28 “Old Cumberland Beggar” (Wordsworth), 14 Oliphant, Margaret, 120 “On Genius and Common Sense” (Hazlitt), 19 On Liberty (J.S. Mill), 4–5, 46–52, 52–53, 117–18 On Not Being Able to Paint (Milner), 145–46, 152–54 “On the Modern Element in Literature” (Arnold), 62–63 “On Translating Homer” (Arnold), 69–71 “On Vulgarity and Affectation” (Hazlitt), 18–19, 31 optimism, 80, 84, 104, 107, 156 oracular novels, 102–4 oscillation, 113 Owen, Robert, 103 panoptical theories (Bentham), 12–13, 35–39 Pansies (Lawrence), 163 Park, Honan, 65 Park, Roy, 12 particularization, 109–10 The Passions and the Interests (Hirschman), 41 Pater, Walter, 1, 4, 7–8, 11, 42, 56, 66, 67, 78; and adoption of essay form, 118; and the present moment, 114, 133, 135–36; and Arnold, 120–21; on criticism, 5; and the diaphanous, 111, 114–19, 123–24, 131–32, 136–37; and distrust of habit, 113, 119, 137, 139; and etherealizing, 114; individuality and, 118–19; on Lamb, 22, 25; and latency,

[ 198 ] Index Pater, Walter (continued ) 112, 116–19, 122–23, 137; and J.S. Mill, 113; and music, 110, 127, 130–31, 134, 136; and recursion, 136–37; relief in, 113, 119, 124–27, 138–39; on reserve, 117, 119; rhythm in works of, 111–12, 115, 119, 121, 126, 129, 136, 140; style and, 121–22; on Symonds, 116–17 perfection, the future and, 1, 13, 31–32, 104–6, 156–57 perfectionist philosophy, 61, 80, 112, 118, 121, 126, 128 The Performing Self (Poirier), 128 persuasion, 2–3, 28, 42, 53 Phillips, Adam, 97, 113, 129, 154, 161 “Pico della Mirandola” (Pater), 122–23, 131, 132 Pig’s Meat (Spence), 20–21 Pitt, Thomas, 33–34 Plato, 9 Plato and Platonism (Pater), 115 play: aggressive, 144–45; evasion as a technique of playful survival, 20–21; games and rules, 17–18; psychoanalysis and freedom to, 11 Plotz, John, 43 Poems (Arnold), 68 poetry: as an end in itself, 52; Arnold’s shift to essay from, 61, 63–64, 67–74; education and use of, 92–93; as ends in itself, 52; as medium for tact, 67; meter and time in poetry, 65–66, 68, 70–72; J.S. Mill and, 43, 52–53, 57; as “overheard,” 52–53, 58; political, 55; as relief, 68–69 “The Poetry of Michelangelo” (Pater), 125–27 points de repère, 79, 85, 88, 91–93 Poirier, Richard, 3–4, 128 politics: and aesthetics, 4–5, 7, 42–44, 55, 116; Arnold on political discourse, 8, 79–82; Bentham’s political philosophy, 35–37; liberal as political term, 43–44; J.S. Mill as political philosopher, 43–46, 57; party “common sense,” 79–80; Pater’s Renaissance as political tract, 116; poetry as instrument of, 55; tact and, 1–2, 6, 11 Popper, Karl, 51 The Portrait of a Lady (James), 2

positivism, 6, 50–52, 75, 105 power: knowledge as, 2–3, 28–29, 57–58; panopticon institutions and, 35; pastoral governance and, 84–85; and preexisting relational forms, 149 present: Pater and the present moment, 111–12, 114, 128–29, 133–37, 141; preferred to future, 1, 83; progressivism and the, 13, 27, 32; sacrificed for future, 104–6, 108; tact and focus on the, 1 profaning the sacred, 129–32, 138 progress or progressivism: Arnold and, 76, 80, 84; Bentham and, 13, 30, 38–39; Lamb and resistance to, 18, 27, 30–32, 35, 40; J.S. Mill and, 48–51, 56–57; James Mill and, 32–33; narrativization and, 13, 31–32; Utilitarianism and, 32–33, 35 psychoanalysis, 1–2, 4, 9–10; symbolic interpretation in, 10, 144, 147–48, 150, 155–56 “A Quaker’s Meeting” (Lamb), 28 queer theory, 9, 111, 180n3, 182n10 Rancière, Jacques, 9, 87 Randel, Fred, 17 rationalism, 13, 15, 26, 30–33, 41–42, 48, 50–52, 138 realism, 27, 82, 99, 123–26, 128, 140 recursion, 32, 115, 124, 136, 140 reform, social, 16, 114–16, 118. See also Utilitarianism relief: as metaphor, 125–26, 151; from the modern, 63–64, 139; in Pater, 113, 119, 124–27, 138–39; poetry as, 68–69; and reality during psychoanalysis, 153–54 religion: art as instrument of, 135; perception as religious experience, 154 Renaissance in Italy (Symonds), 116–17 Renaissance (Pater), 7–8, 67, 78, 111–17, 120–25, 132, 136–41. See also specific essays by title reserve, Pater on, 117, 119 “Resignation” (Arnold), 64–67 revelation, 99, 100–108, 110 rhythm: Arnold and poetic meter, 65–66, 68, 70–72; Eliot’s prose cadence, 103;

Index [ 199 ] Pater’s, 111–12, 115, 119, 121, 126, 129, 136, 140; and power, 187n92 Richards, I. A., 131 Ricks, Christopher, 114–15 Ricoeur, Paul, 29 Robison, Crusoe (Defoe), 142 Roebuck, John Arthur, 79–81 “Role of Illusion in Symbol Formation” (Milner), 142–49 Romanticism: and “crisis of sociability,” 16–17; and essay form, 7 Ruggiero, Guido de, 42 rules: Arnold on obedience to, 63, 76, 94–95; conventional morality and, 63; meter as “rule” of poetry, 70–72; tact as alternative to, 90; tact as a “ruling over,” 130–32 Ruskin, John, 70, 135 Ryan, Alan, 48 Said, Edward, 60 Saintbury, George, 88–89 Saint John the Baptist (Da Vinci), 130 sanity, 77, 146–47, 156–57 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 104 Schiller, Friedrich, 112, 113 “The Scholar Gipsy” (Arnold), 62, 67 “The School of Giorgione” (Pater), 125, 132, 134, 140 scientism, 6 Sedgwick, Eve, 9 Seward, William, 92 shame, 30, 76–77, 138–39 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 43–44 silence, 23, 28, 153 “Silly Novels by Lady Novelists” (Eliot), 101–3, 106 Simmel, Georg, 9, 15 skepticism, 20, 35, 66, 100, 143, 158 Smith, Adam, 54 Smith, Sydney, 6 snobbery, 75, 81 social media, 11–12 social value, 15; Bentham and redistribution of, 37; Hazlitt and redefinition of, 19 solipsism, 56, 57, 120–21, 140 “South Sea House” (Lamb), 25–26 spaces, relational. See transitional spaces of relation

Spectator (magazine), 12, 17, 21 Spence, Thomas, 20–21 spontaneity, 5, 22, 47, 50, 52, 64, 104–5, 118–19 “Stage Illusion” (Lamb), 24 “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” (Arnold), 64 Steele, Richard, 16–17, 21 Steiner, George, 73 Stephen, James Fitzjames, 78 Story of Rimini (Hunt), 16 “The Study of Poetry” (Arnold), 92 style: Arnold’s anti-controversial, 71–72; essay form and tact as, 7–9, 13–14; Lamb’s, 13, 16–18, 21–22, 32, 36; linked to violence, 81–82, 103; and meter in Arnold’s poetry, 65–67; J.S. Mill on poetry and, 53; Milner’s relational, 157–59; Pater’s, 111, 113–15, 119–21, 130–33, 136; tact as style of sociability, 1–3, 16–17, 36–37, 157–59 “Style” (Pater), 121, 130–31 subject formation, 113; alternatives to subjectification, 13–14 suspicion, 29 sweetness, 82, 127 Swinburne, Charles Algernon, 69 Symonds, John Addington, 116–17 sympathy, 49–50, 54–56, 58, 67, 123–24; Eliot and, 98; Pater and, 116–17 Table Talk (Hazlitt), 18–19, 21, 70 tact: as metaphor for sensibility, 6; as term, 2 taste: as individual inclination, 47; as measure of value, 47, 72, 95; as metaphor for sensibility, 6; and morality, 81 Tennyson, Alfred, Lord, 53, 54 “Theism” (J.S. Mill), 51 “thickening” of media, 3–4, 53, 130 Thomas, David Wayne, 171n1 Thomas, Edward, 115 Thompson, Denys, 12, 14 time: communication and confusion of tenses, 35; meter and time in poetry, 65–66, 68; novelistic, 8, 103 “To Marguerite—Continued” (Arnold), 67 touch: as metaphor for social interaction, 6. See also handling

[ 200 ] Index tragedy, 9, 68 transference, 142, 147–48 transitional experience, 11 transitional spaces of relation: Arnold and negotiation of, 69, 87; Bentham and, 13, 36–37; borderlands or boundaries, 3–4, 11, 111, 121, 129, 140–41, 146–47, 161; equality and, 28–29, 36–37; “illusion” and, 11, 13, 24–30, 136; Lamb and, 13, 15–16, 20–30, 34–35; as neutral, 4, 28; Pater’s diaphanous type and negotiation of, 129–30; play and, 145; psychoanalysis and, 10–11, 23, 145–46, 148–49, 161; text as social space, 87; Winnicott’s concept of, 11 translation, Arnold on, 69–71, 72–73, 77–78 Trilling, Lionel, 5, 67 trust, 3, 112; Pater on, 124–29, 131; suspicion and social interaction, 29 truth: as consensual, 53; and experience, 37; as fragmentary, 100; as individual rather than consensual, 54; Lamb and truthfulness, 17, 28–29, 117–18; and meaning, 45–46, 73; and metaphor, 23; in Mill, 45–46, 51; Pater on latency and, 117–18 Tucker, Herbert, 93 “The Twice Revised Code” (Arnold), 86–87 “Two Early French Stories” (Pater), 122 “The Two Races of Men” (Lamb), 17 uncertainty: Arnold and, 66–67, 92–93; Lamb and, 34–35, 39–40; Milner and, 143, 157–58; Pater and, 121, 125–26 unknowing, 3–4, 134–35, 156 urbanization, 5–7; and anonymity, 20; and change of social order, 17; Lamb’s Essays of Elia as response to, 15 Utilitarianism, 6; consensus and, 33, 48–49; J.S. Mill and divergence from, 44–45, 49–50, 54; progress and, 32–33, 35; social reform focus of, 30, 35–36; vagueness rejected by, 30–31, 46, 48, 57

vagueness: Arnold and, 63, 66–67, 92–93, 96; and digression, 65; in Eliot’s fiction, 99–100; and evasion of closure, 18; incompleteness, 125–26; Lamb’s “glittering something,” 22–24; Lamb’s obliquity or, 3, 14, 17–18, 22–23, 27–28; Pater and value of, 112–13, 127–28, 130–31, 140–41; Utilitarianism and rejection of, 30–31, 46, 48, 57 “Valentine’s Day” (Lamb), 29–30 value, social: “crisis of sociability” and, 16; Lamb and refusal to evaluate others, 32; Mill’s emphasis on individual, 47–48 violence: in Eliot’s tone and style, 99, 103; and knowledge of the other, 3; and modern social changes, 6; psychological theories of, 144 “Vision of Mirza” (Addison), 21 vulgarity, 18–21, 78; Arnold on, 60, 78–79; Hazlitt on, 18–19, 31 Weber, Max, 84 Wellek, René, 114 Westward Ho! (Kingsley), 103, 104 “What is Poetry?” (J.S. Mill), 52–53 Wilde, Oscar, 46, 114, 132, 134 Williams, Raymond, 16–17 Winckelmann, Johann, 121, 137–39 “Winckelmann” (Pater), 66, 121, 137–39 Winnicott, Donald, 10–11, 22–23, 28, 87, 131, 142, 146, 149; “aliveness” and, 4, 142, 149, 162–63, 189n35 withdrawal from society, 43 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 157 Wojnarowicz, David, 15 Wolin, Sheldon, 80 Wordsworth, Jonathan, 114 Wordsworth, William, 14, 44, 65, 70–71 “Worldliness and Other-Worldliness: The Poet Young” (Eliot), 106 “The Writings of Alfred de Vigny,” 55 Young, Edward, 99, 101, 106 “Z” (John Gibson Lockhart), 16

a no T e on T he T y Pe

This book has been composed in Miller, a Scotch Roman typeface designed by Matthew Carter and first released by Font Bureau in 1997. It resembles Monticello, the typeface developed for The Papers of Thomas Jefferson in the 1940s by C. H. Griffith and P. J. Conkwright and reinterpreted in digital form by Carter in 2003. Pleasant Jefferson (“P. J.”) Conkwright (1905–1986) was Typographer at Princeton University Press from 1939 to 1970. He was an acclaimed book designer and aiga Medalist. The ornament used throughout this book was designed by Pierre Simon Fournier (1712–1768) and was a favorite of Conkwright’s, used in his design of the Princeton University Library Chronicle.