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The Idea of Joy: Robert Browning and the Nineteenth-Century Tradition

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Louisiana State University LSU Digital Commons LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses Graduate School 1968 The deI a of Joy: Robert Browning and the Nineteenth-Century Tradition. Mary Gorton Mcbride Louisiana State University and Agricultural & Mechanical College Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses Recommended Citation Mcbride, Mary Gorton, "The deI a of Joy: Robert Browning and the Nineteenth-Century Tradition." (1968). LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses. 1505. https://digitalcommons.lsu.edu/gradschool_disstheses/1505 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at LSU Digital Commons. It has been accepted for inclusion in LSU Historical Dissertations and Theses by an authorized administrator of LSU Digital Commons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This dissertation has been microfilmed exactly as received 69-4488 McBRIDE, Mary Gorton, 1937- IHE IDEA OF JOY: ROBERT BROWNING AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRADITION. Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College, Ph.D., 1968 Language and Literature, modem University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan THE IDEA OF JOY: ROBERT BROWNING AND THE NINETEENTH-CENTURY TRADITION A Dissertation Submitted to the Graduate Faculty of the Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in The Department of English by Mary Gorton McBride B.A., Louisiana Polytechnic Institute, 1959 M.A., Louisiana State University, 1965 August, 1968 ACKNOWLEDGMENT I am grateful to Dr. Annette McCormick for he.v guidance and generous assistance in the preparation of this dissertation. 1 am also indebted to Dr. Fabian Gudas and to Dr. Darwin Shrell for their recommendations and advice. TABLE OF CONTENTS Page ACKNOWLEDGMENT.......................................... ii ABSTRACT................................................ IV Chapter I THE IDEA OF JOY: ROBERT BROWNING AND THE TRADITION.................................. 1 II WORDSWORTHIAN JOY: THE CONCEPT OF JOY IN THE P R E L U D E ............................... 41 III WORDSWORTH, BROWNING, AND "KINDRED JOY": THE JOY MOTIF IN BROWNING'S POETRY, 1833-1850 .................................... 73 IV "CAPABILITY FOR JOY": MEN AND WOMEN AND DRAMATIS PERSONAE ............................ 110 V JOY, ENERGY, AND THE GROTESQUE: THE RING AND THE BOOK.................................. 149 VI JOY, STRUGGLE AND EQUIPOISE: SELECTED POEMS OF THE 1870’s AND 1880’s .......... .188 BIBLIOGRAPHY...........................................224 VITA 229 ABSTRACT In his poetic exploration of the idea of Joy, Robert Browning makes an important contribution to the development of one of the most vital concepts in nineteenth-century English literature, a contribution which also elucidates the nature of his strategic place midway in the evolving Romantic tradition between Wordsworth and Yeats. In the traditional Christian ethos, the concept of Joy was associated with supernatural virtue which man struggled to attain. With the disintegration of a viable Christian tradition, however, the idea of Joy came to be seen, partly through the impetus of the French Revolution, both as an egalitarian human right and as the unique pos­ session of the poetic consciousness. Chapter I examines Browning's idea of Joy against the background of some of the most important touchstones of the concept from Schiller's "Ode to Joy" to W. B. Yeats's "tragic joy," with special emphasis given Coleridge, Wordsworth, and Arnold. Since The Prelude is the most important embodiment of the idea of Joy in nineteenth-century English literature. Chapter II is devoted to an exploration of the complex and manifold iv implications which Wordsworth gives the concept of Joy. Wordsworth carefully identifies Joy as a power which partakes of "happiness" and "pleasure" but ultimately transcends both of these qualities and is associated with the essential dignity of human nature, with unity, with power and energy, and with the universality of the poetic imagination. Browning's earliest attempts at the formulation of his idea of Joy are discussed in Chapter III from the standpoint of these aspects of the Wordsworthian concept of Joy. In Pauline, Paracelsus, and Sordello, Browning both extends and modifies the Romantic idea of Joy, while in Easter-Pay and in "Saul," he incorporates the concept firmly within the framework of his religious faith, recalling the tradi­ tional relation of the idea of Joy to Christian virtue. Browning dramatizes his concept of man's capability for Joy in some of his finest poems, and twenty-two of the poems of Men and Women and Dramatis Personae are examined in Chapter IV as they demonstrate his developing poetic concern with the idea of Joy. In Chapter V, the relationship between Joy, energy, and the grotesque which John Ruskin emphasizes in the chapter on "The Nature of Gothic" in The Stones of Venice is dis­ cussed as it is manifested in Book One of The Ring and the Book. Ruskin, following Coleridge and Wordsworth, identifies the concept of Joy with purity, energy, and universality. Browning extends this identification further through the dramatization of these qualities in his characterization of Pompilia, Caponsacchi, and the Pope. In the final chapter, Browning's struggle to maintain his idea of Joy is seen in a few of the poems of the 1870's and 1880's, especially in "Numpholeptos," La Saisiaz, and several of the poems of Ferishtah1s Fancies. The idea of Joy is an attempt of the nineteenth- century literary consciousness to embody the most powerful experience discernible by the poetic vision and to draw upon- the concept of Joy as a unifying cultural experience which could rejuvenate a society that was being rapidly trans­ formed by technological progress. When it is identified and traced through some of his most important poems, Robert Browning's idea of Joy emerges as the most dynamic Victorian attempt to transmit and transmute the Romantic legacy of Joy-consciousness. CHAPTER I THE IDEA OP JOY: ROBERT BROWNING AND THE TRADITION The concept of Joy includes some of the most dynamic and crucial developments in nineteenth-century literature. Robert Browning's contribution to the idea of Joy is an important aspect of his poetry, important because it greatly enriches the poetic texture itself, but important also because it indicates one facet of Browning's strategic place in the Romantic tradition midway between Wordsworth and Yeats. Browning's modifications and extensions of the idea of Joy will be more relevant if they are considered against the background of a few of the important touchstones of the idea in the entire Romantic tradition. For the idea of Joy is one of the complex literary motifs of the nineteenth century; it is a vital, protean concept which appears with varying subtlety and complexity in the chief Romantics and Victorians, and is modified and metamorphosed as it enters the twentieth century in the work of Hardy and Yeats. One thinks of Schiller's "Ode to Joy," most probably of its musical embodiment in Beethoven's 2 Ninth Symphony; of the claim that Wordsworth makes for the "never-failing principle of joy"; of the loss of Joy des­ cribed by Coleridge in "Dejection"; of Keats's lament for the transitory visitations of "Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips / Bidding adieu"; of Browning's Cleon and his "joy hunger"; of Arnold's longing for "joy whose grounds are true"; of Meredith's exultation in "the joy of earth"; of Hardy's description of man's insatiable "appetite for joy" as the force which drives Tess D'Urberville in the climactic pages of that novel; or of W. B. Yeats's savage attempt to reconcile the paradox of "tragic joy." These examples suggest both the importance and the scope of nineteenth-century explorations of the idea of Joy, an idea treated briefly by Frank Kermode in Romantic Image, where Joy is termed a "crucial concept" for the understand­ ing not only of earlier nineteenth-century literature, but also of Symbolism and the entire modern movement in poetry from Baudelaire to Yeats. This brief catalogue also suggests that the importance given Joy in the imaginative thought of poets as diverse in their aesthetic aims as Wordsworth, Browning, and Yeats, makes it more than a convenient synonym for "happiness" or "pleasure," though Joy certainly includes these connotations. Thomas Hardy's description of Tess's "appetite for joy" is quoted, although no source is indi­ cated in the text of the novel, from Browning's poem, Paracelsus. Browning's phrase, as Hardy must have recognized, is a telling one: the metaphoric equivalence of "hunger" and "joy" suggests the transformation of Joy to the status of a basic human drive as powerful as man's biological drives and more important to his total being. Joy is one of the perennial needs of the human personality. It is a value defined, cherished, and sought after by the major Romantic poets. This initial chapter should both dispel the obvious but rather simplistic associations of the concept of Joy and establish evidence of the rich poetic and cultural ramifications of the Joy motif in a few of the chief figures of the nineteenth century. In "The Everlasting Yea" of Sartor Resartus, Thomas Carlyle voices one of the central ideas of the Romantic movement: "Man's Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness? it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite." Carlyle's prescription for this infinite unrest is, paradoxically, that man should simply accept infinitude as his necessary condition and stop his ceaseless search for the means of happiness, "Love not Pleasure; love God. This is the EVERLASTING YEA, wherein all contradiction is solved; wherein whoso walks and works, it is well with him. But the idea of the infinite possibilities of human life which reached its apotheosis in the French Revolution could not be stilled even by the thundering rhetoric of Carlyle.
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