The Age of Eclecticism

The Age of Eclecticism Q The Age of Eclecticism Literature and Culture in Britain, 1815–1885 Christine Bolus-Reichert The Ohio State University Press Columbus Copyright © 2009 by The Ohio State University. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Bolus-Reichert, Christine, 1969– The age of eclecticism : literature and culture in Britain, 1815–1885 / Christine Bolus- Reichert. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8142-1103-8 (cloth : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-8142-9201-3 (cd-rom) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Eclecticism in literature. 3. Tennyson, Alfred Tennyson, Baron, 1809–1892—Criticism and interpretation. 4. Kingsley, Charles, 1819–1875—Criticism and interpretation. 5. Arnold, Matthew, 1822–1888—Criticism and interpretation. 6. Pater, Walter, 1839–1894—Criticism and interpretation. 7. Hardy, Thomas, 1840–1928—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PR451.B64 2009 820.9'008—dc22 2009015109 This book is available in the following editions: Cloth (ISBN 978-0-8142-1103-8) CD-ROM (ISBN 978-0-8142-9201-3) Cover design by Janna Thompson-Chordas Text design by Juliet Williams Type set in Adobe Granjon Printed by Thomson-Shore, Inc. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials. ANSI Z39.48-1992. 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Y CONTENTS Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 P A R T I T O W A R D A N A G E O F EC LE C T ICI SM Chapter 1 History’s Diverse Beauties 19 Chapter 2 The Philosophy of the Nineteenth Century 65 Chapter 3 Eclecticism and Literary Modernity 102 P A R T I I E C LE C T IC V IC TOR I ANS Chapter 4 Alfred Tennyson: The Originality of Medley 139 Chapter 5 Charles Kingsley: The Alexandrian Age 169 Chapter 6 Matthew Arnold: The Second Best Life 190 Chapter 7 Walter Pater and Thomas Hardy: “Triumph in Mutability” 223 Afterword 248 Notes 257 Works Cited 278 Index 289 m AC KNOWLEDGMENTS any thanks to those who were present as teachers, readers, and friends in the early stages of this project—to James Eli M Adams, Patrick Brantlinger, Matei Calinescu, Kathleen Fos- ter, Oscar Kenshur, and Andrew H. Miller; to my reading group partners David J. Carlson and Martin Harris; and to Katherine Gehr, who heard all about the Victorian eclectics on long walks around Bloomington, Indiana. I’m especially grateful to Andrew Miller who wrote me a very encourag- ing letter just before I moved to Toronto: I was to take the time to make the book what I wanted it to be. It’s not exactly that, and it never could be, but it’s closer to what it ought to be, thanks to everyone who was there at the beginning and to colleagues at the University of Toronto who gave me the time and the space I needed to bring The Age of Eclecticism to a fit end- ing—to Russell Brown who saw that I wanted a leave, and to Elizabeth Cowper who gave it to me. I dedicate this book, with intense gratitude, to my parents, Michael and Kathleen Bolus, and to my husband, Aaron Reichert. vii r INTRODU C T I ON he return of “eclectic” to the critical vocabulary of art history and aesthetics in the eighteenth century signaled both a Tnew way of understanding creativity in relation to history and an implicitly negative judgment on any work of art deserving the label. “Eclectic” and “eclecticism” were concepts that provoked anxiety about the possibility for progress in the arts, the consequences of historical belat- edness, and the use of historical styles in the absence of an appropriately modern style. In nineteenth-century Britain, the connotations of eclectic were largely negative: to be eclectic was to be mediocre, undiscriminating, middle-class, confused, decadent, liberal, mixed, and unoriginal. Works of genius were not eclectic. The art of the nineteenth century, if eclectic, would not adequately represent the age to itself or to future generations. In once again reviving the language of eclecticism, this study aims to restore a way of seeing and explaining nineteenth-century culture that was typically used to denigrate the period and only rarely to acclaim its contributions to the arts. To denominate Victorian literature eclectic might seem, therefore, to risk its canonical status; but to ignore the role of eclecticism in shaping the canon of Victorian literature we have today is to overlook those quali- ties that make it continually fresh and accessible, that seemingly collapse all the intervening time and distance between our historical moment and that of the Victorians. 1 Introduction While it is never possible to select a single cause to explain a complex series of effects, in following a dominant thread, the problem of authority, one can detect a regular pattern in Victorian culture—a pattern that will help to explain the pervasiveness of eclecticism. In every aspect of life, certainty had seemingly been replaced by anxiety; reliable guides to belief and action no longer waited at the door to experience. The image of being pushed into a vast expanse of uncharted territory or onto the trackless sea recurs again and again in the literature of the nineteenth century, figuring the modern sense of historical ruin and isolation. The Established Church, the intellectual elite, the aristocracy, communal traditions—none could withstand the onslaught of competing opinions or the deepening sense of the individual’s prerogative in shaping his destiny; but looking one’s liber- ated self in the mirror raised an uncomfortable and persistent question: who would validate all the choices one now had to make? If religious dis- senters had the same rights as those who cleaved to the Church of England, then faith was a matter of conscience, the choice of the individual rather than an Establishment. If it was no longer the case that a small number of educated persons controlled the press or the publication of books, then authors would compete in an open marketplace for the attention of readers. If one no longer believed in the absolute right of the aristocracy to direct the economic and political forces of the nation, then new persons fit to rule would have to be chosen. If the mass migrations from country to city and from homeland to colony separated individuals from traditional communities, then a new communal fabric would have to be woven from the remnants of the old. The sense of authority lost must have been pro- found. The resulting eclecticism often looked like an admission of defeat or surpassing arrogance. What was the principle of selection to be? This question was not an idle one, either for the Victorians or for those historians determined to give some account of what we now recognize to have been the first information age. In his brief preface to Eminent Victo- rians, Lytton Strachey offers some prescient advice to present and future historians of the period: “It is not by the direct method of scrupulous nar- ration that the explorer of the past can hope to depict that singular epoch. If he is wise, he will adopt a subtler strategy. He will attack the subject in unexpected places; he will fall upon the flank, or the rear; he will shoot a sudden revealing light into obscure recesses, hitherto undivined. He will row out over that great ocean of material, and lower down into it, here and there, a little bucket, which will bring up to the light of day some char- acteristic specimen, from those far depths, to be examined with a careful curiosity” (9). Strachey’s methodological metaphor addresses the difficulty of attaining a position of authority over so extensive a field of inquiry as the 2 Introduction sixty-four years of Victoria’s reign. In its framing it manages to align future historians with the objects of their study; for surely, the Victorians, too, must have been overwhelmed, even “submerged,” by the sheer range and quantity of writing, past and present, through which they might attempt to telescope their times. In characterizing his efforts as “haphazard,” made up of “fragments of truth,” and motivated by “convenience and art” (9), Strachey brings into view one aspect of the eclecticism that beset the Vic- torian Age and his own: it was fraught with a sense of randomness and indiscriminate picking and choosing, “here and there”; in emphasizing his “careful curiosity,” the necessity “of selection, of detachment, of design,” and his goal of writing with “becoming brevity” (9–10), Strachey points to another understanding of eclecticism that emerged during the nineteenth century: it could also be a self-conscious process of selecting from past and present, which might lead to creative synthesis. Strachey’s analysis of the situation of the critic and historian speaks to the central issues of this study, both how I plan to articulate the problem of eclecticism in the Victorian period, and why I think it necessary to erect an imposing new conceptual framework in a field of scholarship notable for its rigorous historicism. “The burden of the past” invoked by any discus- sion of eclecticism is a familiar aspect of modernity, particularly in the history of literature. This study aims to reframe that dynamic, and to place it in a much broader context, by examining the rise in the nineteenth century of a manifold eclecticism. A potentially protean category, eclecticism may be a symptom of decay or renewal—or both. In this study I am especially concerned with two broad understandings of eclecticism in the period— one understood as an unreflective embrace of either conflicting beliefs or divergent historical styles, the other a mode of critical engagement that ultimately could lead to a rethinking of the contrast between creation and criticism, and of the very idea of the original.

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