Victorian Poetry

Poetry, Poetics and Politics

Isobel Armstrong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781317688808
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Collections
• Index: Literature

In Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, Isobel Armstrong rescued Victorian poetry from its longstanding sepia image as 'a moralised form of romantic verse' and unearthed its often subversive critique of nineteenth-century culture and politics. In this uniquely comprehensive and theoretically astute new edition, Armstrong provides an entirely new preface that notes the key advances in the criticism of Victorian poetry since her classic work was first published in 1993. A new chapter on the alternative fin de siècle sees Armstrong discuss Michael Field, Rudyard Kipling, Alice Meynell and a selection of Hardy lyrics. The extensive bibliography acts as a key resource for students and scholars alike.

Part I
Conservative and Benthamite Aesthetics of the Avant-Garde

Tennyson and Browning in the 1830s

1
Two Systems of Concentric Circles

One fact, however, is sufficiently evident, that we are in a state of transition: that old things are passing away and giving place to new; and that society is in the very act, an act ever attended with convulsive throes and conflicting fears and hopes, of assuming a new form, – brighter and happier may it be than all the past! Whichever way we look we behold symptoms of change. The billows are tossing and tumbling, heaving, rolling and breaking, at every point of the compass. The public mind has outgrown public institutions, which must soon be shattered unless possessed of flexibility to admit of a proportionate expansion. Our forms, laws, establishments, whether for the purpose of education, commerce, politics, or religion, are become so insufficient to represent the intelligence, harmonize with the condition, satisfy the wants, and realize the desires of the community that they must evidently undergo extensive changes, – gradual and peaceful changes it is to be hoped…. The work has commenced, we are in the process of renovation; in some departments its rate may be more rapid than in others, but it extends to all. The conflict for reform in the Legislature is but the type and index of a wider, deeper, and mightier conflict between principles which began their struggle for mastery over man in the Garden of Eden, and shall continue till the Kingdoms of this world become the Kingdoms of our God and of his Christ. That struggle is like the elemental strife of the material world. It is like the storm that clears the heavens. It is the process by which Providence conducts mankind to higher and yet higher degrees of knowledge and happiness.

According to the law of progress, both individual and social, by which God governs the world, the transition is made from one gradation of order, harmony, and beauty to a higher gradation, by the intervention of a state of apparent confusion and conflict….

The question of reform in the representation of the people could never have arisen into its present interest and importance but in connexion with a strong and general conviction of the necessity of a multitude of other changes which it is expected will be facilitated by the adoption of that measure. The Church cannot remain as it is; its temples have long ceased to be national, in any other respect save that of the taxation by which they are supported…. The Law cannot remain as it is… public opinion demands more than any man will be found bold enough to propose in an unreformed parliament… almost every man who has either had occasion to enforce the payment of a just debt, or to resist an unfair demand, is impatient of the needless delay, complication, and expense of the present system. Education cannot remain as it is. The poor must be educated, though it be at the public expense… nor will the word education continue to designate merely reading and writing for the offspring of poor parents, and Latin and Greek for that of the rich ones. Science, history, and morals, the elements of real knowledge, are ceasing to be excluded…. The means for disseminating information cannot remain as they are. The taxes on paper, books, newspapers etc., have been rightly described as taxes on knowledge. They intercept information in its passage to the people…. They suppress or restrict…. Above all, the relative condition of the working class cannot remain the same. A different principle in the distribution of wealth must gradually make its way into society, and speedily commence its operation. It cannot be necessary to civilized society, that the producers of its wealth should be kept on the very borders of starvation, and paupers succeed to paupers, world without end. It cannot be necessary that the interests of the lower classes, and of all above them, should be in a state of interminable and bitter hostility…. These evils have made themselves felt through the whole frame of society. The perception of them has generated the science of political economy.

(W. J. Fox, Monthly Repository)¹

One duty I still feel I have to perform… it is my last but my greatest: when I think of it, I am full of hope, and to it all my thoughts and feelings turn: It is to lend my hand to do the great work of regenerating England, not by Political institutions! not by extrinsic and conventional forms! By a higher and a holier work, by breathing into her the vigorous feeling of a Poet, and a Religious man, by pouring out the dull and stagnant blood which circulates in her veins, to replenish them with a youthful stream, fresh from the heart… my hope is in ourselves [R. C. Trench, John Sterling, F. D. Maurice], and in that spirit of a higher feeling which the young men of this age universally possess…. Wordsworth has begun…. My plan of operation I will expound… thus much, that we must strike through Education, and first at the Universities…. We shall do nothing until we get rid of AntiChrist, and he walks abroad boldly in a Doctor of Divinity’s hood, and his thought and cry are ‘Nego!’

(Letter from John Kemble to William Bodham Donne, from Germany, 1829)²

The country is in a more awful state than you can well conceive…. While I write Maddingley [sic], or some adjoining village, is in a state of conflagration, and the sky above is coloured flame-red. This is one of a thousand such actions committed daily through England. The laws are almost suspended; the money of foreign factions is at work with a population exasperated into reckless fury.

(Letter from Arthur Hallam to Richard Chenevix Trench, 1830)³

The passages which introduce this chapter have a characteristic rhetoric. William Johnson Fox, writing as editor of a radical Utilitarian and Unitarian journal at the beginning of 1832, the year of the great Reform Bill, argues passionately for fundamental structural change in the country’s institutions, in religion, parliamentary representation, the law, education, a change which necessitates the redistribution of wealth. Nothing, he reiterates, can ‘remain as it is’. It is a pre-eminently public debate, mounted through the polemic of the printed word in the cadences of political oratory. The second group of quotations is from the private letters of a university coterie, the opposite pole from public journalism, a group of friends who all belonged to an exclusive society, the Cambridge Apostles, in the 1830s. Written with the sophisticated élan of shared intimacy, the project under discussion is not political change but the ‘regeneration’ of society, not revolution, as Arthur Hallam’s sickened fear of the rick-burners round Cambridge indicates, but a transformation of the mind of the country. They were as much against the 1832 Reform Bill as Fox was for it. Browning was associated with Fox and the Monthly Repository group, Tennyson belonged to the Apostles. These groups represent two quite different intellectual formations in the 1830s. Yet both conceived themselves as avant-garde, experimenting with the new in political, theological and aesthetic matters, defining new categories and defamiliarising the old. Avant-garde as a term for experimental minority groups had not been invented. But arguably these two formations were the first recognisably avant-garde groups to emerge in Britain. Both were in the process of defining what minority groups of intellectuals might mean in a culture, and since the very notion of a culture was new, and the idea of the minority intellectual, this entailed constructing the idea of culture and defining what in particular a literary culture was. While the Monthly Repository was dissenting and radical, and the Apostles were subversive conservatives nominally assenting to the Anglican establishment, they did have some things in common. Both groups belonged to a new middle-class intelligentsia who repudiated aristocratic privilege and wanted change. Both saw themselves as living in a time of unprecedented crisis when poverty was endemic and violence ever possible. By virtue of dissent the radicals were excluded from power. Theoretically, the Apostles were not. However, both groups explored a theology which transgressed orthodoxy and both saw literature and politics as inseparable from one another. In fact, both groups are at the beginnings of the conceptualisation of literature and the ‘literary’ as a distinct category with a particularly important part to play in the education of a mass culture.

Later in the century these groups, or their formative ideas, interpenetrated and together developed the terms in which literature, and poetry in particular, was to be discussed. They were both part of the ‘shock’ spreading from what John Stuart Mill described in 1838 as ‘two systems of concentric circles’ created by Bentham, the ‘Progressive’, on the one hand, and Coleridge, the ‘Conservative’, on the other.⁴ The way in which they ‘meet and intersect’ conditions the form of discussions of poetry and poetry itself. But in the early 1830s the experience of crisis and the radical intellectual and political events which Mill both describes and participated in were perceived differently by each group. To borrow from Walter Benjamin’s distinction, the Monthly Repository group developed a politicised aesthetics while the Apostles developed an aestheticised politics. This chapter describes what this meant for the early work of Tennyson and Browning and the poets surrounding them. But since the way these groups conceptualised poetry and culture is fundamentally important to the nature of Victorian poetry up to the time of the early Yeats and Hardy, this chapter explores the formative moment of Victorian poetry at some length. For radicals and conservatives were both, as Mill put it, ‘the greater questioner of things established’.⁵ Both were writing at the limits of what has been called the conventional ‘doxa’. One group developed Benthamite thought, the other the thought of the late Coleridge.⁶ One wrote at the limit of the radical, one at the limit of the conservative doxa. So much so that there are no real equivalents for these formations in twentieth-century thought and one must be cautious about using terminology.

There is no simple reflective relationship between the poets and the intellectual positions of the groups to which they were connected, no straightforward co-relation between theory and praxis. Rather, both Tennyson and Browning belonged to intellectual formations developing strenuous and often contradictory debates. Both poets are actively in dialogue with the ideas circulating in their groups. Nevertheless their intellectual provenance is recognisable. Tennyson is marked by the dazzling brilliance and insouciance of Arthur Hallam and Browning by the energetic polemic of William Johnson Fox, whom he called his literary godfather. Hallam reviewed Tennyson’s early poems in 1831. Fox printed some of Browning’s earlier poems in the Monthly Repository and reviewed Pauline in 1833. Indeed, since Pauline sold no copies it did not exist except in the pages of the Monthly Repository.

Before considering the early work of Tennyson and Browning it is important to look briefly at the debates being negotiated in each group to see what possibilities open up for two kinds of art. In both a highly self-conscious debate on the interconnected questions, literature and ideology, consciousness and knowledge, language and the nature of class, culture, race and gender, was being pursued on very different lines. Though these headings are not strictly separable they are convenient and will indicate the sophistication of the enterprise undertaken both by the Monthly Repository and the Apostles. Discussion of the individual poets later in the chapter will elaborate this preliminary account of two formations.

When W. J. Fox took over the Monthly Repository in the early 1830s (he became editor in 1828 and bought it in 1831) it is clear that its project changed. From being a sectarian and Unitarian organ with radical traditions it became a more overtly political journal with the aim of forging a Utilitarian, Benthamite aesthetic. Fox’s aim was to deepen and enrich the Benthamite tradition by correcting misapprehensions of it and associating it above all with literature. His reading of Benthamism meant in the first place, the dissemination of pleasure in its widest sense, the democratisation of literature and the exploration of the links between literature and politics. These links were not simply between the Zeitgeist or a loosely defined ‘spirit of the age’ but involve the conceptualising of what we would now call an ideological relation between literature and the power structure of society.

It is typical of Fox that he welcomed album books, popular gatherings of contemporary writing for the middle classes, while Tennyson viewed them with contempt or professed contempt. Fox was excited by these as sociological phenomena indicating the wider dissemination of literature, and commented on the accessibility of the writing in contrast to the narrow and intimidating presentation of tales and poems in former times.⁷ This political and sociological awareness is part of a Monthly Repository tradition: in 1820, Thomas Noon Talfourd had attacked Hazlitt’s anti-levelling account of art, in which Hazlitt had described the ‘literature of power’ in hierarchical terms as an aristocracy of letters, distinguishing the aristocracy of taste from actual political democracy. Talfourd saw this celebration of arbitrary power and superstitious faith as an ideological manipulation for political purposes which went back to Burke, who ‘made the cause of tyranny appear the cause of the imagination and the affections’.⁸ Hazlitt’s radical and Unitarian background must have made this resort to the reactionary a major betrayal. It does not seem to have occurred to Talfourd that Hazlitt was being ironical, so serious is his democratic feeling. Fox’s constant attack on Scott and his politics of privilege are of a piece with such positions.⁹ But he went much further than other writers to make ‘the imagination and the affections’ belong to a radical analysis. Talfourd had argued that particular imaginative associations do not belong of necessity to evocations of power. They can be directed towards a range of phenomena, particularly the natural landscape which, he thought (perhaps naively), is innocent of class. Imaginative associations can be constructed through culture. Fox carried this analysis much further into cultural relativism. A proper democratic poetry should take modern subjects and scenes such as the French Revolution or the prisons as its materials. It should also become a poetry of the poor: and poetry for the poor or about the poor would be different from poetry by the poor because the history of the working class is formed in diff...