Signs for the Times

Symbolic Realism in the Mid-Victorian World

Chris Brooks

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138641112
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317247760
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: 19th Century History
• Index: History

First published in 1984. Signs for the Times explores imaginative and creative relationships between three major areas of mid-Victorian arts: literature, painting and architecture. Through the detailed critical analysis of particular novels, prose writings, paintings and buildings, Chris Brooks establishes a fusion of realistic and symbolic values that he sees as central to the Victorian creative imagination. He argues that the creative achievement of the mid-nineteenth century needs to be seen far more as a whole than it has previously, and that fundamental imaginative terms are common to art and architecture, to major theoretical writers such as Carlyle, Ruskin and Rugin as well as to the central literary figure of Dickens.

All those interested in literature, art, or architecture will welcome this interpretation of symbolic realism within the mid-Victorian world.

1

Introductory

Each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency, because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer.

Emerson, The Poet’, Essays: Second Series

If one were to compose a list of the half-dozen most vexed words in the English language, ‘real’ would have to be included. Yet there is no escape from it, or from its use. The difficulties lie, primarily, in the fact that the word straddles the two halves of that basic philosophical and psychological dichotomy, the separation of the self and the non-self, the dichotomy between ‘the real’ of individual consciousness – basis of cogito ergo sum – and ‘the real’ of the world outside that consciousness. We try to resolve this dichotomy every time we ask any one of the numberless questions that evolve from inquiring ‘What is real?’ There is no shortage of answers, but a remarkable absence of conclusiveness. Against Plato and the Socratic ascent to absolutes, there is Fichte’s assertion of the autonomous will as sole arbiter of reality; against Thomist ‘proof’ are the ‘proofs’ of Ayer and the logical positivists. Cartesian rationalism, Bergsonian life-force, Existentialist alienation, all the succession of Western European philosophies have laid claim – if not siege – to reality; while poets, political economists and nuclear physicists all have their say as well. And the problems remain. Yet the very diversity of possible – and impossible – solutions suggests a workable hypothesis: because externality is inaccessible to an ultimate formulation, we must regard the real not as a ‘something’ with necessarily predicable qualities, but as open-ended, as an ‘essentially contested concept’.¹ At the centre of the contest of argument and counter-argument is the necessity to make one of two decisions: either to say, solipsistically with Carroll, ‘Life, what is it but a dream?’, or to say that, although one cannot lock reality into a definition, it is, nevertheless, emphatically there, beyond the self. Dr Johnson’s refutation of Berkeley is a quite adequate common-sense technique, and one followed, in the present century, by – with delightful appropriateness – Professor Wisdom, among others. A real world is there, but our knowledge of it can only be partial; this does not mean that we can dispense with the philosopher’s formulations – or even with the solipsist’s. What it does mean is that we can never regard the real as, in some sense, ‘pure’; in order for there to be a definition there must be a definer. The philosopher’s world-view must be seen, not as a definitive statement, but as the working hypothesis the self adopts in its attempt to construe the non-self. To say that Leibniz’s Monadology is untrue as an explanation of reality exhausts neither its imaginative potential nor its relevance to the debate.

Such processes, the constuction of working hypotheses, are not, of course, the sole prerogative of philosophers. The primary means of their construction are linguistic, and all discourse both presupposes and embodies an interpretation of the real. As such, all discourse partakes of the nature of fiction: the order in which statements are made, what is included, what omitted, what stressed, not only determines precisely what is being said but also what is being talked about. We cannot ‘tell the truth’ about the world because there is ultimately too much of it for us to encompass linguistically. In any but the most restricted linguistic contexts ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ thus cease to have an absolute valency and become relative, for there is no final solution to reality to which they are referable, and reality, as we perceive it, has no necessary a priori order.

Just as, in the existential view, man is confronted in his search for ethical order by the indifference of the universe, man is his search for perceptual order faces a chaotic world-stuff which gives no hints as to the proper method of sorting.²

The fictions we construct by means of language are, as was suggested earlier, the primary tool that we use to sort reality. Through language the myriad components of the real are labelled and, thus, discriminated: through the organisation of labels, reality becomes manageable. The process is not one of simply imposing labels, like the tagging of so much external lumber. We take the external into ourselves in the act of talking about it, for linguistic organisation is, necessarily, organisation in the very fabric of experience. We continually make and remake our world:

… the object … in the world beyond individual consciousness … is not ready-made but results from a way of taking the world. The making of a picture commonly participates in making what is to be pictured. The object and its aspects depend upon organisation; and labels of all sorts are the tools of organisation.³

There is no unequivocal ‘way of taking the world’, and, in the end, the process of structuring – of fictionalising – is as important as the structure – the fiction – that is its product, for it is through the most profound acts of language that we reach the most profound acts of interpretation. In this sense, the historical phenomenon of literary realism may be seen as a concentrated development, an intensification perhaps, of our habitual modes of language-use. A realist fiction – whether that fiction is a history of the French Revolution or a novel about the Court of Chancery – always implies that its linguistic structure, the way it organises labels, has a precise correlation to the world of direct experience. This is well put by David Lodge.

The circumstantial particularity of the novel is … a kind of anti-convention. It attempts to disguise the fact that the novel is discontinuous with real life. It suggests that the life of a novel is a bit of real life which we happen not to have heard about before, but which somewhere is or was going on … The novelist moves cautiously from the real to the fictional world, and takes pains to conceal the movement. Fictional characters are therefore provided with a context of particularity much like that with which we define ourselves and others in the real world; they have names, parents, possessions, occupations, etc., ordered in such a way as not to violate our sense of probability derived from the empirical world.⁴

This does not mean that we experience the medium of realism as in some way transparent: the medium itself is, after all, our primary experience and ‘our sense of probability’ will depend as much on the consistency with which the medium is structured as it will upon its imputed relationship to the empirical world. The languages by means of which we sort reality are not, of course, exclusively verbal, and this book, in dealing with a period in which realism was a major creative mode, will also consider the visual language of painting and the tactile, three-dimensional language of architecture. The different relationship of these languages to the reality of the empiric world will be explored when the arts that use them are discussed.

The enterprise of realism is an attempt to capture what the being of the real world is like. The distinctive character of the artists discussed in this book is that, for them, such an enterprise was co-extensive with an attempt to capture the meaning of the real world as well. In this, Dickens is the dominant figure – as he must, indeed, be a dominant figure in any discussion of the creative and imaginative life of the nineteenth century. What his novels hold in common with the world of Carlyle, with Ruskin and Pre-Raphaelite realist painting, with the theorists of the Gothic Revival and the architecture of Butterfield is a concern to give to the interpretative structures by means of which we understand reality a phenomenal existence within the fabric of that reality: in other words, to give to the semantic connotations of the real a tangibility like that of physical reality itself. In practice this results in a conflation of the immediate nature of direct experience with the mediate nature of our experience of symbolism, in which the sign mediates between ourselves and the reality it signifies. This is the process I have called symbolic realism and it is, in my view, a fundamental mode of the Victorian imagination. Its nature varies with different arts and different artists, and the further definition and examination of symbolic realism must wait their detailed discussion.

Terms like ‘real’ and ‘symbolic’, phrases like ‘the meaning of the real world’ are large indeed and can seem unwieldy and faintly embarrassing to us now. But they are the terms that we must use in talking about the Victorian creative achievement, for the writers, painters and architects who made that achievement possible were not frightened, as we so often are, by large thoughts and larger imaginations. In writing about them, about Carlyle and Ruskin, the Pre-Raphaelite painters, Pugin and Butterfield, Dickens above all, I am conscious of how limited critical commentary and exposition looks when set beside the imaginative and creative scope and quality of their work. Nunc ubi sunt? What Katherine Mansfield said about Dickens could well be extended to include them all: ‘How little they make our little men look – mere pencil-sharpeners!’

PART ONE

2

‘Flame-Images’:
Carlyle and the Symbolic Reading of History

Brought up in the rural isolation of Annandale and the austerity of Calvinism, Thomas Carlyle saw early nineteenth-century Britain not only as chaotic, but as increasingly and inescapably so. As an undergraduate in Edinburgh, the fundamentalist piety of his upbringing was challenged and permanently affected by the uneasy scepticism of post-Humean rationalism. The excitement of London, which he first visited in 1824 and where he moved ten years later, was both imaginatively invigorating and psychically disorienting. Acutely aware of a current climate of moral and intellectual conflict, Carlyle also experienced the physical world with a distressing intensity – most evident in a pathological aversion to noise which lasted throughout his life. Dissociation, both mental and physical, was aggravated by what seemed an unprecedented proliferation in the very substance of the surrounding conflict: ever more ideas, ever more objects seemed to crowd upon the consciousness until the mind became incapable of ordering or even grasping the sheer multiplicity of things. In ‘On History Again’, speaking through the persona of Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, Carlyle expresses just such a sense – half-fascinated, half-horrified – of the unmanageable density of contemporary experience, and of the sheer mass of unsorted data with which the modern mind is every day confronted.¹

Consider, now, two things: first, that one Tongue, of average velocity, will publish at the rate of a thick octavo volume per day; and then how many nimble-enough Tongues may be supposed to be at work on this Planet Earth, in this City London, at this hour! Secondly, that a Literary Contributor, if in good heart and urged by hunger, will many times, as we are credibly informed, accomplish his two Magazine sheets within the four-and-twenty hours; such Contributors being now numerable not by the thousand, but by the million … Allow even the thousandth part of human publishing for the emission of thought … we still have the nine hundred and ninety-nine employed in History proper, in relating occurrences, or conjecturing probabilities of such … Courage reader! Never can the historical inquirer want pabulum, better or worse: are there not forty-eight longitudinal feet of small-printed History in thy Daily Newspaper? (28, pp. 170–1)

The passage, with its unstable irony and its odd mix of the conceptual with the minutely physical, is typical of Carlyle in the guise of Teufelsdröckh. Indeed, in Sartor Resartus, Teufelsdröckh, as ‘Professor der Allerley-Wissenschaft … “Professor of Things in General”’ (1, p. 13) at the University of Weissnichtswo – Don’t-know-where – is not only the perfect investigator of the complexity of experience, but also its primary exemplar.² His volume on the Philosophy of Clothes, with its ‘almost total want of arrangement’ and with many of its parts ‘quite nondescript and unnameable’ (1, pp. 26–7), suggests an analogy to the world itself, at least as it appears to the consciousness of the anonymous editor. Certainly, Ohmann’s remark – quoted in the previous chapter – about the undifferentiated ‘world-stuff’ that confronts the individual in his quest for perceptual order could be applied directly to Sartor Resartus. In a similar fashion, Teufelsdröckh’s life-story is contained in a collection of waste paper bundled into bags, ‘a universal medley of high and low, of hot, cold, moist and dry’ (1, p. 62), which constantly frustrates the editor’s attempts at arrangement.

The experience of the world – and particularly the man-made world – as unmanageable, ungovernably diverse, is a familiar feature of Romanticism, occurring most centrally perhaps in Wordsworth’s poetry. In The Prelude, his description of Bartholomew Fair becomes a fragmented series of isolated impressions, syntactic control threatening to disintegrate into a mere catalogue of dissociated phrases.

– All moveables of wonders from all parts,

Are here, Albinos, painted Indians, Dwarfs,

The Horse of Knowledge, and the learned Pig,

The Stone-eater, the Man that swallows fire,

Giants, Ventriloquists, the Invisible Girl,

The Bust that speaks, and moves its goggling eyes,

The Wax-work, Clock-work, all the marvellous craft

Of modern Merlins, wild Beasts, Puppet-shows,

All out-o’-the-way, far fetch’d, perverted things,

All freaks of Nature, all Promethean thoughts

Of Man; his dulness, madness, and their feats,

All jumbled up together to make up

This Parliament of Monsters.³

Such disjunction precludes any apprehension of significant order in the phenomenal world, reducing perceived reality to ‘the same perpetual flow/Of trivial objects, melted and reduced/To one identity, by differences/That have no law, no meaning, and no end’.⁴ The effect upon Wordsworth is one of profound alienation, not only from the people who throng the London scene but also from any sense of substantial reality; perceptual confusion becomes a radical crisis of identity that threatens a loss of selfhood.

Thus have I look’d, nor ceas’d to look, oppress’d

By thoughts of what, and whither, when and how

Until the shapes before my eyes became

A second-sight procession, such as glides

Over still mountains, or appears in dreams;

And all the ballast of familiar life,

All laws of acting, thinking, speaking man

Went from me, neither knowing me nor known.⁵

Wordsworth’s experience is strikingly paralleled in a passage from Carlyle’s journal written in 1835.

The world looks often quite spectral to me; sometimes, as in Regent Street the other night (my nerves being all shattered), quite hideous, discordant, almost infernal. I had been at Mrs. Austin’s, heard Sydney Smith for the first time guffawing, other persons prating, jargoning.⁶

The remedy for Wordsworth lay in a reassertion of the creative nature of perception itself, and in the healing process whereby the imagination remakes reality through a dynamic synthesis of self and non-self. Such a process, subjective in origin, was not available to Carlyle. Despite the influence of German Idealism upon his thinking, it was precisely in the subjectivity of contemporary literature that Carlyle located what he believed to be its crucial flaw, unreality.

How is it that of all these countless [authors], no one can attain to the smallest mark of excellence, or produce aught that shall endure longer than ‘snow-flake on the river’, or the foam of penny-beer? We answer: Because they are foam; because there is no Reality in them … Nothing but a pitiful Image of their own pitiful Self, with its vanities, and grudgings, and ravenous hunger of all kinds, hangs forever painted in the retina of these unfortunate persons; so that the starry ALL, with whatsoever it embraces, does but appear as some expanded magic-lantern shadow of that same Image, – and naturally looks pitiful enough. (28, p. 58)⁷

As Carlyle asserts earlier in the same essay, it is only ‘by working more and more on REALITY, and evolving more and more wisely its inexhaustible meanings’ (28, p. 53), that imaginative literature can find a future.

Carlyle’s argument implicitly asserts the existence of a reality independent of the perceiver that is not only objectively there, but also objectively knowable. Such a reality is, moreover, qualitatively superior to any creative effort mounted by the subjective. It is vanity, the lack of ‘an open loving heart’ (28, p. 57), that locks the soul into the self and denies access to an authentically real existence. The peculiarity of Carlyle’s argument, however, and its significance in terms of so much subsequent Victorian literature and art, lies in the fact that his rejection of the subjective is balanced by an equally strenuous rejection of any simply materialist definition of reality. Materialism, for Carlyle, was the product of Newtonian physics and eighteenth-century scepticism, and the materialist cosmos, as seen by Teufelsdröckh in Sartor Resartus, nothing but a soulless and hopeless machine.

‘To me the Universe was all void of Life, of Purpose, of Volition, even of Hostility: it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb. O, the vast,...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Prefatory Note
• 1 Introductory
• Part One
• Part Two
• Part Three
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index