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Six Studies in Nineteenth^Century English Literature and Thought

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Six Studies in Nineteenth^Century English Literature and Thought SIX STUDIES IN NINETEENTH^CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THOUGHT edited by Harold Orel and George J. Worth UNIVERSITY OE KANSAS PUBLICATIONS LAWRENCE, 1962 UNIVERSITY, OF KANSAS PUBLICATIONS ? HUMANISTIC STUDIES, NO. 35 SIX STUDIES IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THOUGHT SIX STUDIES IN NINETEENTH^CENTURY ENGLISH LITERATURE AND THOUGHT edited by Harold Orel and George J. Worth Contributors: W. P. ALBRECHT HAROLD OREL WALTER E. SANDELIUS GEORGE J. WORTH PETER CAWS W. D. PADEN UNIVERSITY OF KANSAS PUBLICATIONS LAWRENCE, 1962 © Copyright 1962 by the University of Kansas Press L.C.C.C. Number 62-63635 PRINTED IN THE U.S.A. PREFACE This collection of essays by various members of the faculty of the University of Kansas is, we hope, of interest to students of the nineteenth century. There is something new, and perhaps something im• portant, in each of these discussions. We hope, above all, that they convey a sense of the abundant excitement which we find in this period. H. O. G. W. Contents Hazlitt on Wordsworth; or, The Poetry of Paradox 1 W. P. ALBRECHT Browning's Use of Historical Sources in Strafford 23 HAROLD OREL Liberalism and the Political Philosophy of Thomas Hill Green 39 WALTER E. SANDELIUS The Intruder-Motif in George Eliot's Fiction 55 GEORGE J. WORTH Evidence and Testimony: Philip Henry Gosse and the Omphalos Theory 69 PETER CAWS Swinburne, the Spectator in 1862, and Walter Bagehot 91 W. D. PADEN Index 117 Hazlitt on Wordsworth; or, The Poetry of Paradox by W. P. ALBRECHT The "poetry of paradox," says Hazlitt, "had its origin in the French revolution, or rather in those sentiments and opinions which produced that revolution. ." It was founded "on a principle of sheer humanity, on pure nature void of art." Although always a great defender of the French Revolu• tion, humanity, and nature, especially as the gauge of art, Hazlitt put the poetry of paradox at the bottom of a scale of excellence down which English poetry had been sliding since the Renaissance. From "the poetry of imagi• nation, in the time of Elizabeth," he says, poetry declined "by successive gradations" to "the poetry of paradox" in his own time.1 Much of contemporary poetry seemed "paradoxical" to Hazlitt, but most often his "poets of paradox" are the Lake School, especially Wordsworth. "The paradox [these poets] set out with was, that all things are by nature equally fit subjects for poetry; or that if there is any preference to be given, those that are the meanest and most unpromising are the best, as they leave the greatest scope for the unbounded stores of thought and fancy in the writer's own mind." It is in this sense, not in any political one, that the paradoxical poets leveled distinctions and, in an excess of revolutionary zeal, flouted "authority and fashion."2 Indeed, the fact that the chief practitioners of paradox had turned against the French Revolution, and against Hazlitt as well, may suggest that Hazlitt's evaluation of the poetry of paradox was not entirely disinterested. This was the view of Wordsworth, who in 1817 wrote to Haydon that "the miscreant Hazlitt continues ... his abuse of Southey Coleridge and myself. ..." A hundred years later Hazlitt's old enemy Blackwood's Magazine asserted the "whimsical paradox" that "Haz• litt, a Jacobin in politics, was a violent anti-Jacobin in literature."3 This proposition is acceptable only if "anti-Jacobin" is adequately defined. The Blackwood's article proceeds to confuse Hazlitt's literary anti-Jacobinism with the abuse of "Wordsworth's private character," but the paradoxes in Hazlitt's position may be resolved without recourse to his personal or politi• cal disputes: Hazlitt is not guilty of his own charge against the "Ministerial Press" of making "literature the mere tool ... of party-spirit,"4 nor is he repudiating the French Revolution, humanity, or nature. Hazlitt's dislike for Wordsworth's and Coleridge's politics is distinguish• able from his evaluation of their poetry, just as his attacks on Scott the Tory are distinct from his admiration of Scott the novelist. Although he 1 NINETEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES singled out the paradoxical elements for disapproval, Hazlitt admired a great deal of Wordsworth's poetry; in fact, he placed Wordsworth "at the head of the poets of the present day, or rather ... in a totally distinct class of excellence." Hazlitt, as Wellek has pointed out, recognized "the best of his time remarkably well"; and shortly after Hazlitt's death T. N. Talfourd could write in the Examiner that, despite his personal bitterness toward Wordsworth and Coleridge, only Hazlitt "has done justice to the immortal works of the one, and the genius of the other."5 Thanks especially to Howe's Life, it is no longer as difficult as the Victorians found it to respect Hazlitt; but it is nevertheless pleasant to note how firm Hazlitt's critical principles stood against political pressures and personal abuse. Hazlitt's literary anti-Jacobinism affirms, rather than rejects, his own political ideas. Probably better than any other part of his critical writings, Hazlitt's analysis of the poetry of paradox shows his belief that the good poet, like the good citizen, must fulfill the possibilities of his imagination: that poetic structure, like the best government, requires an escape from egotism into imaginative completeness. This principle is the key to Hazlitt's criticism of Wordsworth and other contemporaries. Occasionally, when Hazlitt expresses this principle in the commonplace terms of logic, decorum, and general nature, he may seem to apply it too harshly and mechanically; more often, however, the criterion of imaginative completeness leads Hazlitt to appreciate Wordsworth's excellence and to censure—in Wordsworth and others—what may justifiably be considered idiosyncrasy, bathos, and struc• tural ineptitude. Hazlitt may sometimes, like many of his contemporaries, blur the distinctions between art and nature, but in his treatment of the poetry of paradox he takes a clear stand against subjectivism and formless• ness, and insists that poetry attain a structured objectivity. I Hazlitt's general charge against the poets of his time is that they have gone to such extremes of subjectivity that they have failed to achieve either (1) a high degree of truth, (2) the means of poetic communication, or (3) both. Everywhere he finds a perverse individuality. Southey's "impressions are accidental, immediate, personal, instead of being permanent and univer• sal." Shelley "trusted too implicitly to the light of his own mind. ." Keats, in Endymion, "painted his own thoughts and character. ." Byron is a "pampered egotist" who, instead of "bowing to the authority of nature, . only consults the . workings of his own breast, and gives them out as 2 HAZLITT ON WORDSWORTH oracles to the world." Landor's Imaginary Conversations is "a chef-d'oeuvre of self-opinion and self-will. ." Landor and, to a lesser degree, Southey are the principal examples of that extreme form of paradox that Hazlitt calls "Literary Jacobinism." Hazlitt has a number of good things to say about the style, characterization, and humor in the Imaginary Conversations, but all is "defeated" by Landor's outrageous love of paradox that offends both reason and common sense.6 At this point, Hazlitt's criticism of the poetry of paradox approaches a kind of commonplace logic-chopping, but his main concern is that the poets of paradox failed to consummate the imaginative process that great poetry exacts. Hazlitt's principal criterion for literary excellence is truth to nature, and all the kinds of poetry inferior to the "poetry of imagination" fall short of "truth," in one way or another. Inferior poetry suffers, in other words, from "abstraction." The truth-finding faculty is imagination, and whatever limits its scope limits the poet's perception and representation of truth. The imagination is a combining faculty. In our perception of everyday phe• nomena, imagination immediately unites sensation with thought and feeling, and in poetry it continues to exert its amalgamating power in order to attain a still greater truth. Here its role is an objectifying and generalizing one. In a state of intense feeling the associations are more abundant; the imagination links the present with the past, summoning up thoughts and feelings which modify the present perception and give it the validity of repeated experience. Conditioned by past thoughts and feelings, the poet in a state of intense feeling immediately reaches "unpremeditated conclusions" of a high order of truth. Indispensable to the conditioning process is habitual sympathetic identification, which gives the poet's intuition of truth the validity of com• mon experience. Emotion is important to the poet, therefore, both as a dimension of truth and as a condition in which he associates most copiously and, after proper conditioning by sympathetic identification, immediately ar• rives at "profound sentiments."7 The greatest poetry, Hazlitt believes, must not only comprise "profound sentiments" but also objectify these sentiments in generally moving images and exciting events. The state of feeling wherein the imagination defines the "internal character" or "the living principle" of its subject Hazlitt calls "gusto." This is also the state in which the imagination shapes the poet's experience into a work of art, selecting and combining those particulars that stimulate the reader's imagination to realize what is permanent and meaning• ful in human life.8 Reviewing The Excursion in 1814, Hazlitt divides poetry 3 NINETEENTH-CENTURY STUDIES into "two classes; the poetry of imagination and the poetry of sentiment." The first arises "out of the faculties of memory and invention, conversant with the world of external nature; the other from the fund of our moral sensibility." Here Hazlitt uses the term "poetry of imagination" in a nar• rower sense than he usually does, for he apparently wants to emphasize the objectifying or externalizing power of imagination, its ability to fuse thoughts and feelings with concrete particulars.
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