Romantic and the Afterlife Author(s): Ted Underwood Source: PMLA, Vol. 117, No. 2 (Mar., 2002), pp. 237-251 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/823271 . Accessed: 12/08/2013 17:56

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Romantic Historicism and the Afterlife

TED UNDERWOOD

WIA{IRITING ABOUTWILLIAM WORDSWORTH'S VISION OF the British past on SalisburyPlain, Alan Bewell has remarked that "Wordsworthbelieved he had a special sense that enabled him to 'look into past times as prophetslook / Into futurity'and to hear in the distant winds 'the ghostly language of the ancient earth'" (43). The observationis also applicableto many of Wordsworth'scontempo- raries.Romantic-era representations of history often dependon a special sense that sees or hears historical depth in the inanimateworld. Felicia Hemans's "Voice of the Wind"(1828), for instance, is premised on the conceit that the wind carriesthe sounds of vanished civilizations, which merge into a single hollow note as they echo down "the darkaisles of a thousand years" (487). The history that Hemans and Wordsworthhear on the wind lacks dates and footnotes, to be sure, but it is more than a generalized sense of time. Hemans's poem lists sounds systematically enough to suggest the specific social differences (between conqueror and conquered and between public and privaterealms) that create vari- ous ways of life.

Thouart come from cities lighted up for the conquerorpassing by; Thouart wafting from their streets a soundof haughtyrevelry; Therolling of triumphantwheels, the harpingsin thehall, The far-offshout of multitudes,are in thyrise andfall.

TEDUNDERWOOD, assistant professor of TEDUNDERWOOD, assistant pr r of At the same time, this list of sounds is randomenough to suggest that it Englishat ColbyCollege, has published alarticles on Romanti poet merely samples a largerfield of historical differences that stretchesbe- and science.This essay is drawnfrom yond the poem's ability to discern them. The wind's voice finally has a a newproject on nineteenth-century haunting remoteness (like a "far-off shout of multitudes") because it historicism. evokes the enormousrange of forms humanexistence can take.

? 2002 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA 2237

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These poems are hauntedby historical dif- an earthly alternativeto Christianity's increas- ference, but they are also more obviously ingly doubtfulheaven. This connection between hauntedby ghosts. After describing the sounds historicism and immortality was central to the of ancient and recent history that seem audible poems' popularity,as I will show by examining on the wind, Hemans's poem finally addresses their reception.When writers imitated Ossian's the wind as a ghost: "Be still, be still, and haunt evocativeotherworldliness, they were chiefly im- us not with music from the dead!"Wordsworth, itating a way of describing historical difference too, representshistorical difference as a ghostly so thatit seemed to promiseearthly immortality. presence: aside from the reference to ghostly texts had already playfully language cited above, one could examine his comparedposthumous fame to immortality."So sonnets on the Cave of Staffa, where historical long as men can breatheor eyes can see / So long consciousness is figuredas the ability to see the lives this, and this gives life to thee" (Shake- cave shadows as ghosts of bardsand chiefs (son- speare 1929). But this sort of immortalityis sim- nets 28 and 30 [Works40-41]). In this essay I ply an extension of the fame enjoyed in life: argue that the pleasure Romantic poems take in what lives on in writing is not consciousness but projecting historical difference onto the inani- reputation.The historicalimmortality envisioned mate worldis relatedto the pleasureof seeing (or by Macpherson'sbards, and by early Romantic imagining that one sees) a ghost. To explain the philosophersof history such as J. G. Herder,is a connection, I begin with a set of earlier works literal continuationof life after death. Implicitly thatare alludedto in all the texts by Hemansand or explicitly, these texts promise that the con- Wordsworthconsidered above: the poems of Os- stituent parts of human consciousness will sur- sian, writtenin the 1760s by JamesMacpherson.1 vive in the physical realm, just as the body's The internationalvogue for Macpherson's constituentpowers and particles live on inside a Ossian poems lasted from 1760 into the 1830s, worm or a leaf. After exploringthe appealof this leaving behind a large numberof literaryimita- promise in Ossian, I examine some of its subse- tions and tributes, as well as a slightly smaller quent transformations.Looking particularlyat numberof Frenchchildren named after Ossianic JohnKeats and Hemans,I arguethat the "histori- heroes (Van Tieghem 28-30). The poems' suc- cal sense" in Romanticpoetry continuesto draw cess is now most often explainedby referenceto its evocative power from the same promise of their fictitious byline, since the rediscovery of a earthlyimmortality we see in Ossian-although third-centuryScottish bardlent supportnot just that promise is transformed,in the first few de- to Scottish nationalists but to culturalnational- cades of the nineteenth century, by changes in ism in general (Trumpener78). Withoutdenying the British system of class distinction. Finally, I the importanceof nationalism,I propose to pay ask whether the pleasures of historicism today attention to an underexploredaspect of the po- may not still derive from a similarly half- ems-the way they imagine history through acknowledgedlonging for life afterdeath. conversations between ancient bards and yet- more-ancient and material) (but earthly ghosts. Historical Difference as Ghostliness Although these conversationspose as a preliter- ate, and thereforeprehistorical, attempt to think James Macpherson may have set out with the abouthistory, they projectand combine two late- idea thathe was reconstructingan enormousepic Enlightenment obsessions. By translatingcon- from fragmentaryremains, but his extrapolative tinuous time into a discrete boundary between zeal was based on such firm preconceptions the dead and the living, they emphasize the oth- about the past that it amounted to invention. erness of the past. At the same time, they hint at Though he had access to some genuine Gaelic

This content downloaded from 130.126.32.13 on Mon, 12 Aug 2013 17:56:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 1172I Ted Underwood 239 ballads and drew on them for a few passages and the songs of bards can cross the numinous outlines of plot, his "translations"take place in a boundarythat separatesthe present from "other world entirely their own (Thomson 14). But if times"-a phrase,ceaselessly repeatedin the po- Macphersonwas a bad historian,he became one ems, that can refer to the past or to the future.In through an excess of historicist zeal. His fixed Temora,for instance, one warriorurges another desire to recognize the past as something differ- to free captive bards in these terms: "Cairbar! ent from the present converted the past into an loose the bards:they are the sons of other times. icon of pastnessas such and thus into a model of Their voice shall be heard in other ages, when his historicism. the kings of Temorahave failed" (Macpherson, By describingMacpherson as a historicist,I Poems 155). Unlike the scop in Beowulf "who mean that he sought, not to measure historical could recall many of the stories of the old days" moments against a common standard(civility, (16), these bards represent, not tradition, but say, or conformityto nature),but to describe the radicaldiscontinuity. Sons of the alien past, they way standards change their meanings. Early- also speak to an alien future in which the civi- eighteenth-century historians began to under- lization of Temorawill have ceased to exist. standthese changesas legitimatetransformations Macpherson'sbards, then, are creaturesthat rather than disagreements to be resolved. In live outside the present and belong more to the 1735, for instance, Thomas Blackwell defends dead or the unbornthan to the living. Their self- Homer'sseemingly coarse descriptions of Mene- consciously historical perspective is literalized laos as "loud-voic'd"(3orlv ayaOocv)by arguing in the poems as knowledge about ghosts. These that strong lungs made up a large partof leader- ghosts, J. S. Smarthas commented,were largely ship "before the Invention of Trumpets or inventedby Macpherson;ghosts rarelyappear in Drums"(Blackwell 317).2Appreciation of this the Gaelic ballad tradition, and when they do, sort of difference grows gradually more articu- they lack the auraof mystery and the connection late in the years that separate Blackwell from to "the more terriblephenomena of nature"that Herder and Hegel. When we historicize con- distinguishthem in Macpherson(71, 124). Bards it cepts, we perform an operation learned in this sing, turns out, mainly about ghosts from an period. Even the inevitable first words voiced even more ancientpast and (projectingthe same over the previews for costume dramas-"In a perspective into the future) about a time when Time, when X was a Y" (love was a crime or they will have become ghosts themselves. "The dance an obsession)-would be hardfor us to un- War of Caros,"for instance, breaks off before the war named in the title is under because derstandwithout the assumption,borrowed from way, the is overwhelmed increas- eighteenth-century historicism, that the mean- speaker(Ossian) by consciousness of the distance that ings of basic concepts are transmutedby time ing separates him from of other The into somethingunfamiliar. For a historicistaudi- "days years." deliberately ence that transmutation,not the mere numberof ambiguous "other"in that phrase refers, first of all, to a when his son Oscar was alive. But elapsed years, turnsthe past into history. past the is used to set re- Since Ossian's world is supposed to be phrase simultaneously up flection on the distantfuture. largely preliterate,the poems representhistori- cism in terms of the ghosts of heroes and the The sons of the feeble hereafterwill lift the songs of bards. But these songs and ghosts, voice on Cona;and, looking up to the rocks, which exclude the anachro- carefully superficial say "HereOssian dwelt."They shall admire nism of writing, saturatethe poems with a more the chiefsof old, andthe race that are no more: radical anachronism-an eighteenth-century while we ride on our clouds, Malvina,on the conception of historical time as otherness.Only wings of the roaringwinds. Our voice shallbe

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heard,at times,in the desart;and we shall sing logic is at work: the light of song is what allows on the windsof the rock. (Poems114) ghosts to exist, but ghosts also exist in order to adumbratethe darknessof times before song- Two are at work here. Since the an- perspectives just as historical difference, for the Enlighten- cient Celts are as that represented believing ment,is envisionedfirst of all as the possibilityof on clouds and ride on Ossian "ghostsfly winds," being unenlightenedand ahistorical. is simply and literally envisioning the life he and his interlocutor will lead after death (66). But the eighteenth-centuryreader is also being Spirits in the Material World asked to a of to winds in imagine way listening If the afterlife in Ossian is about historical dif- desolate places that can hear them as the singing ference and thereforein a sense otherworldly,it of Ossian's ghost. The speaker's consciousness neverthelessremains surprisingly earthly. Ghosts of "otheryears" in the past thus smoothly meta- lose most, but not all, of their physical strength. morphoses into awareness of the ghostly other They can be threatenedwith weapons;Macpher- he will represent for a future civilization.3 Os- son explains that this is because the Celts sianic bards are at once experts on the condition "thoughtthat the souls of the dead were material, of ghostliness and self-conscious ghosts-pro- and consequently susceptible of pain"(463; see fessional historians who are already aware of also 426). The innovationhere is not simply that the way time is turningthem into monuments. Ossian'safterlife is a bodily one. It is-but tradi- History in Ossian is thus literally an after- tional Christianbelief aboutthe afterlifehad also life-it is the place charactersgo when they die. included an eventual resurrection of the body. But the ghosts of the Ossian poems do not repre- The about the Ossianic afterlife sent the past in the way that, for example, the importantpoint is that it manifestsitself here and now, as partof ghost of Hamlet's father does. They are specifi- nature,instead of for a supernat- cally historicist ghosts; they represent,not past earthly waiting ural hereafter.There is no realm as events or paternaltradition, but a feeling of his- supernatural such in the as would toricaldifference. This is not to say thatthe poems poems; for, Macpherson in his GreatBritain and Ireland detail a wide range of anthropologicalpossibili- argue History of and as Blair stressed in his ties; they usuallyenvision historical difference by ([1771] 178), Hugh to the the ancientCelts en- representing its limiting case-the absence of preface poems (369), visioned theirdivinities as of nature. historical memory. For instance, the ghost of parts the it out Trenmor,an ancestralking, carries marks of its By naturalizing afterlife-moving of the and into the winds"- origin in a past even more archaicthan Ossian's. graveyard "roaring a that was "His face is without form and dark. [. . .] Many Macphersonechoes project becoming in the 1760s: an were his words to Oscar:but they came only by central to philosophic thought on halves to our ears: they were darkas the tales of attemptto rob death of its terrorsby focusing of life. othertimes, before the light of song arose"(112- its continuity with the naturalprocesses "the 13). As Macphersonspecifies in severalfootnotes Accordingto Denis Diderot'sEncyclopedie, on our to his poems, ghosts only achieve distinct form causes of decline are constantly acting and ascend to their dwelling in the winds when materialbeing," so that "old age is perhapsmore is from they are eulogized by bards;without that funeral widely separatedfrom youth than death song they remaininchoate mist driftingover the decrepitude.""Since death is quite as naturalas ground(246, 279,490, 515). Trenmor'sghost is life," the article asks, "why do we fear it so formless and inarticulatebecause it representsa strongly?"The answer is that a morbid religion time without"the light of song,"which is in effect has filled ourimagination with "funerealimages" to say thatit representsprehistory. A paradoxical (Jaucourt937-38). G. E. Lessing's essay "How

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the Ancients Represented Death" (1769) mar- some power of sensation as they mingled with shals scores of citationsand artifactsto show that those of Sophie Volland in the grave (38). Or, if the Greeks and Romans neverrepresented death the soul was a subtle nervous fluid, akin to the as a skeleton; contemporaryartists, he argues, electric fluid, might it not simply escape into na- should likewise banish "the terrible skeletons," ture at death? AbrahamTucker described such since "only misunderstoodreligion can estrange an earthly afterlife in 1768, in a dream vision us from "(226). Macpherson'saccount of later admired and edited by William Hazlitt. the Celtic afterlife, in his History of Britain and Tucker imagines leaving his body as a tenuous in the Ossian poems, follows the same agenda. but material soul, to converse with the souls of Macpherson stresses that "the ideas of those his dead wife and John Locke, who explain that times, concerning the spirits of the deceased, this personalafterlife is a temporarystage on the were not so gloomy and disagreeable,as those of way to union with the impersonal agency that succeeding ages" (Poems 497). The Druids are animatesnature (220-31). said to have deduced the immortalityof individ- Traditional views about the afterlife had ual souls by analogy to the permanence of na- come to seem implausibly and embarrassingly ture's "activeprinciple." But they envisioned no specific. Hell, with its "strangeextra-terrestrial heaven and (more emphatically)no hell (History paraphernaliaof vengeance,"was incompatible 187). Insteadthe ghosts of the deceasedpersist in with the dignity of God (McMaster 183). Ortho- the physical world-especially in "lonely unfre- dox belief in the resurrection of the self-same quented places"-where they are "supposed to body could involve one in grotesque questions: pursue, after death, the pleasures and employ- if a cannibal consumes and assimilates part of ments of theirformer life" (Poems461, 473). anotherperson's body, to whom will those parti- This streamlined natural immortality ap- cles of flesh belong on JudgmentDay (Almond pealed to late-eighteenth-century readers be- 131-43)? Problems like this offended the En- cause it was the sort of afterlife many of them lightenment's simplifying instincts and, just as hoped to enjoy. Here I am not speaking solely important,its growing aversionto death's fleshy about neopagans or freethinkers.Though Mac- contingency.The sixteenthand seventeenthcen- pherson described ancient Celtic religion affec- turies had exulted in the shrouds and skulls that tionately,he was a professed Christian.But it is revealed the body's frailty, because those signs not uncommonfor humanbeings to hold several also revealed,as theirnecessary complement, the conflicting ideas about the afterlife. If atheists unqualifiedfreedom of the soul. Observersless cherish secret hopes, Christiansin a secularizing certainof the soul's independencefrom the body age prepare a fallback position-a way of sur- could not quite so franklyat the body's limi- viving even if the Gospels turn out not to have tations. In L'homme devant la mort (1977), a been divinely inspired.In the period of Ossian's wide-rangingstudy translated into Englishas The peak popularity-1760 to roughly 1830-the se- Hour of OurDeath (1981), PhilippeAries points cret hopes of atheists and the fallback positions out that late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth- of believers tended to converge on a common century witnesses of the deathbed consistently groundthat looked very much like the misty but play down its indignities.They begin to represent earthlyafterlife enjoyed by Ossian's ghosts. Be- death,instead, as an affective spectaclethat reaf- lievers and skeptics alike were tempted to strip firmsbonds of sentiment,by temporarilyparting the afterlife of its supernaturalarchitecture, and loved ones who are to be reunited in eternity the permanenceof nature'sactive principles of- (409-32,471-72). fered itself as an alternativemodel. Diderot fan- Building on the work of Aries, TerryCastle tasized thatthe particlesof his body might retain has arguedthat sentimentaldiscourse in Gothic

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novels operates to displace death and deny its destiny"(Aries 151). Besides a personalconsola- corporeal reality. Emily is "haunted"by her tion for death, premodernChristian practice had memories of Valancourt, in The Mysteries of offered a communal one, dramatizedby church Udolpho, because "the new sensibility of the burial and by public inclusion of "all those who late eighteenth century was, quite literally, a sleep" in the "universal brotherhood" of the growing sense of the ghostliness of other peo- church (149-50). The need for this sort of reas- ple. [.. .] The corporealityof the other [...] be- surance did not vanish with the advent of early came strangely insubstantial and indistinct: modem individualism;the consolationsof Chris- what matteredwas the mentalpicture, the ghost, tian collective destiny were merely replaced by the hauntingimage" (237). In 's account, those of historical fame. In the late Enlighten- this attemptto escape the body leads finally to a ment, those consolations were in turnproblema- solipsistic focus on subjectiveexperience: since tized by historicism,which conceived of history "we seek to deny our own corporeality[...] we as cultural change. To envision radical cultural have come to cherish the life of the mind over differenceas a reassuringlycollective destiny re- life itself" (250). quired a considerable effort of imagination, but Castleis right,I think,to suggest thatthe fig- the effort was made and has left its traces in Ro- urative hauntedness of late-eighteenth-century manticwriting-in particular,in the period'sfas- writingis a secularway of denying death'sfinal- cination with the idea that naturehas historical ity. But in generalizingthis theoryI propose two depthand echoes with a multitudeof voices.4 substantialamendments to it. First,it is not quite I thus do not entirely agree with Adam Pot- accurateto say thatnew Romanticconceptions of kay's extension of Castle's theory to encompass the afterliferepress the corporealas such. On the Macpherson. Arguing that "each of Ossian's contrary,the naturalized afterlife tends to be a charactersis obsessed with his or her own private physical one. Macpherson'sghosts are corporeal specters,"Potkay reads the ghosts as signs of Ro- beings. Late-eighteenth- and early-nineteenth- mantic subjectivity (216, 208). Macpherson's centurynatural philosophers, like Macpherson's ghosts are undeniablymodem creations,but they Druids, usually argue that life is a physical phe- are not privatespecters assigned to hauntpartic- nomenon and deduce its immortality from the ular individuals.They have an insistently social indestructibility of matter,or of nature's active function, because they represent historical dif- principles(Diderot 38; Davy 1: 234-35, 9: 239- ference and because they embody aspirationsfor 49). What late-eighteenth-century thinkers ob- communalimmortality. In the lattercapacity, the ject to is not materialitybut confiningparticular- ghosts of the dead are usually invoked as, and ity; this is why writers from James Macpherson appearas, a collectivity. "O ye ghosts of heroes to Emily Bronte insist on moving the afterlife dead! ye ridersof the storm,"Fingal calls out be- outside the churchyard gates, into the winds fore a battle,"receive my falling people withjoy, and mists. While assuredly more physical than andbring them to your hills" (Poems85; see also heaven, these boundless phenomenado a better 62, 77, 88). Though it dresses up as ancestor job of emblematizinguniversality. worship, Macpherson'sinvocation of the ghosts Second, and more important,I suggest that of "othertimes" is neither ancestor worship nor the subjective and spectral afterlife Castle no- Romantic solipsism but an attemptto make cul- tices in Gothic texts was able to take the place of turalchange serve as a satisfyinglysocial and be- religiousbelief only because it was fused with an lievably naturalisticalternative to heaven. evocationof publichistory. The fear of deathis in In Macpherson,this attempt took the form largepart a fear of isolation, and the belief in im- of anthropologicalfantasy, but it was defended mortalityresponds to it by affirminga "collective more earnestly as eighteenth-century histori-

This content downloaded from 130.126.32.13 on Mon, 12 Aug 2013 17:56:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 117.2 2 Ted Underwood 243 cism grew more articulate.Herder was aware of through this process of participation and shar- the threat radical cultural difference posed to ing" (59, 62). "Therefore," Herder writes in existing conceptions of historical immortality. "Ideastoward a Philosophyof History"(48-58), Since "peoples and periods succeed one another "I am no longer confusedby the workingsof his- in perpetualflux like waves of the sea" the con- torical changes: They are as necessary for our solations of fame are illusory; "no humanmon- race as a current for a stream that prevents it ument [. . .] can endure intact and eternal, for it from becoming a stagnant pool. The genius of was formed in the streamof generationsonly by humanityblooms in ever new forms, and it is re- the hands of a certain time for that time" (38, generated[...] as it proceeds"(55). Diderothad 54). But in Herder'sview this process of cease- arguedthat the constituentparts of the body sur- less change, which makes it impossible for any vive in the metabolismof nature;Herder argues, representationof a mind to survive, also makes in effect, that the constituent parts of the mind the constituent parts of the mind substantially survivein the metabolismof history. immortal.Herder's of this explanation paradox Herderwas not the firstor the only writerto is statedmost in "On Human fully Immortality," reconceive immortalityin these terms. In 1770, a lecture in 1792 There he published (58-63). for instance, J. H. Remy published Les jours, the thathuman is the rejects assumption identity an optimistic reply to Edward Young's Night of a culture;what we call organicproduct single Thoughts. Remy refuses to share Young's mel- our self is a of ideas and really collage practices ancholy mood. Instead of mourningthe dead in createdby other civilizations. many graveyards, we should visit them in libraries. Death has no power over man now that we have [O]urunderstanding along with its powers,the discovered "the secret of way in which we think,act, andexist, is, as it thought"(19; No one were, inherited.We think in a language that my trans.). truly dies; instead the planet our ancestorsinvented. [.. .] Eachday we en- grows, enlarged by the written contributionsof joy anduse thousandsof inventionsthat have the dead, whose qualities of mind thereby sur- come to us from the past andin partfrom the vive in succeeding generations. Past civiliza- most distantregions of the earth,and without tions have not ceased to exist; they have simply which we would have been forced to lead a changed latitude."Ancient towns rise up next to bleak and life. We have inheritedmax- paltry modem ones,"and Paris has to expand to make ims and moralswhich not only illuminatethe room for a swelling population of ghosts (20; naturallaw that lies obscurelywithin us, but my trans.). This model of historical also inspireand empower us [...]. (58-59) continuity stresses writing,whereas Herder stresses uncon- scious but both writers transform The process by which these elements of identity emulation, are handed on is historical, but it has little to do posthumous fame into a literal afterlife located with fame and need not be conscious. It takes in historicaltransmission. We survivein history, place through unconscious emulation, in mo- not because we are spoken about, but because ments when we "let go of ourselves and open our minds live on in a process that has the conti- ourselves to others,"and it is thereforea process nuity and permanenceof naturallaw. in which every parent, teacher, and friend can The poems of Ossian, as I have shown, were participate.This transmissionand transformation alreadysuggesting the same thing a decade ear- of humanidentity is a "chainof effects" with the lier. Ossian's dead want more from bards than inevitabilityof a physical process. More perma- mentionby name:the dead acquirethrough song nent and universal than fame, it reaches back to a ghostly form that allows them to live on in the antiquityand forwardinto the distantfuture, and materialworld. The natureof Macpherson'sproj- "ourshort life is lengthenedand becomes eternal ect gave him a license to literalize, in seemingly

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archaicform, his era's complex wishful thinking Ghostsride on the tempesttonight: about a secularafterlife. He could invent ghosts, Sweetis theirvoice betweenthe gustsof wind; are other worlds! for instance, that are simultaneously natural Their songs of (686)5 forces, shadows of other times, and representa- As we have seen, there is no supernaturalrealm tions of collective destiny. Archaic ghosts could in Ossian. The otherworld that the speakerhears even retain something that philosophic concep- on the wind is the othernessof the past. Goethe's tions of the earthlyafterlife were often forced to Werthercites a similarmaterialization of history sacrifice: the of identity. indivisibility personal as the reason for his fascinationwith Ossian: Macpherson's prose poems became an interna- tional in because so phenomenon large part they Ossianhas displaced Homer in myheart. What a successfully embodied and reconciled these worldthe magnificentpoet carriesme into!To competingfantasies about the afterlife. wanderacross the heath,with the storm-winds To test this claim, we can glance at the way roaringabout me, carryingthe ghostsof ances- Ossian was reproduced for successive genera- tors in steamingmists throughthe dim moon- the amidthe roar tions of readers.The poems were not just widely light.To hear from mountains, of theforest streams, the read;they were adaptedinto variousverse forms, half-dispersedgroaning of thespirits from their caves. (264;my trans.) rewritten, imitated, echoed. This reproduction turns out to have been ratherselective. Roman- To say that Wertheris attractedto Ossian's mel- tic writers rarely borrowed the contorted plots ancholy would be too vague. The passage de- of Macpherson's epics. They had little to say rives its power from the contact of two ideas: about the battles. In and imitating reproducing awareness of the distance that separates the Ossian, focused overwhelmingly on the they speaker from his ancestors and a belief that the Ossianic for instance, in ghosts. ghosts appear, energies of the soul may continue to live on as Anna Seward's Ghost"(3: 15- poems "Crugal's naturalagency (expressedhere as the roaringof and "The Ghost of Cuchullin" as 20) (3: 21), streams and storm winds). By conflating those in her well as long poem "Alpine Scenery" (2: two ideas, the passage reproducesMacpherson's Richard Polwhele has a 352-73; esp. 363-64). specific magic-which is to saturatethe inani- poem entitled "Ossian Departing to His Fa- mate world with historicalotherness, while sug- "Imitated thers." Samuel Taylor Coleridge's gesting that historical processes share in the from Ossian" (38-39) and "Complaintof Nina- permanenceof nature.6 th6ma" (39-40), Michael Bruce's "Verses on Hearing an AEolianHarp," Byron's "Oscar of Historical Sensations and the Alva" (54-66) and "Deathof Calmarand Orla" Poem (112-16), and Wordsworth's sonnets on the Catalog Cave of Staffa all focus on Ossianic ghosts. Immediate access to historical otherness, made None of these writerswere interestedin the visible in the landscape or audible on the wind, generic ghostliness needed for a tale of terror. continuesto be one of the centralpleasures prom- All reproducethe particularequivocation through ised by Romanticpoetry; in the early nineteenth which Ossian's ghosts become figures at once century,it even gives rise, as we will see, to a new for historical otherness and for a personal after- lyric form. But the pleasure of historical sensa- life. Thomas Gray,one of the first English writ- tion is also relatedin complex ways to class feel- ers to analyzetheir enthusiasm for Ossian,marks ing, and to understandthe form the historicist "the idea that struckand surprisedme most" by lyric takes we must first examine that connec- quoting the following passage in a letter, with tion. Almost fifty years ago, RaymondWilliams addeditalics: pointed out that the word culture (which had in

This content downloaded from 130.126.32.13 on Mon, 12 Aug 2013 17:56:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 117.2 2 Ted Underwood 245 the eighteenth century described a general pro- convey prestige by suggesting distance from cess of human development) specializes in the contemporarylife ratherthan dominion over it. early nineteenthcentury to describedevelopment For this reason the past is re-createdwith delib- through"the practice and study of the "(42). erately naive antiquarianism-as seen in Mac- What Williams describedas specializationliter- pherson'sstyle or in the flatteningof perspective ary scholars drawing on the sociology of Pierre cultivated by neoclassical entrepreneurs like Bourdieuhave morerecently described as a sepa- John Flaxman and Josiah Wedgwood.8"[M]od- rationof "cultural"distinction from other forms ern manners,"in contrast,"because they are fa- of prestige(Bourdieu 37-45). Briefly:in the early miliar, uniform, artificial, and polished, are, in eighteenth century, it is difficult to disentangle their very nature,unfit for any lofty effort of the what we would call culture from other forms of Muse" (Warton762). By making a work's cul- symbolic capital (dress, deportment,elocution), turalprestige depend on its distance from exist- because the criteriaof culturaltaste (e.g., urban- ing social standards,Joseph Warton'sjudgment ity) are still the same criteria that organize the on Pope guaranteesthe autonomyof the cultural broaderfield of class relations. TrevorRoss has field (Ross 451). But in depreciatingthe uniform persuasively read mid-eighteenth-century po- and valuing the unfamiliar,it also premises the lemics for "purepoetry" as attemptsto separate autonomy of "culture"(in the normativesense) culturaldistinction from other signs of class and on the pluralityof "cultures"(in the descriptive to make indifference to those other signs (indif- sense)-which is to say, on historicism. ference to "contemporarymanners") the hierar- In Regency Britain, the social function of chizing principleof a newly autonomouscultural the past undergoes a furtherchange. Instead of field (451-52). The Preface to Lyrical Ballads appropriatingthe signs of any particularancient makes a new kind of historical sense when world, poets increasingly locate prestige in the viewed as the culmination of the traditionRoss historicistconception of time: time conceived as describes.7Wordsworth's commitment to the sep- a field of potentialcultural differences. They fix arationof cultural distinction from other social their not on monumentsof the remotepast standardsis evident in his deliberate choice of but on the gulfs of estrangement that separate "low and rustic"subjects and in his contemptfor those monumentsfrom each other and from the those who "conversewith us [...] gravelyabout a present-and thereby lay claim to a spacious- for , as they express it, as if it were a ness of historical existence that encompasses thing as indifferentas a taste for Rope-dancing, and transcends all the specific forms of human or Frontiniacor Sherry"(139). Poetryis not to be life. Regency historicism, in other words, turns one class signifier among others but a realm of the cultural field's autonomy from other kinds distinctionunto itself. of class distinction into an argumentfor its pri- By reconceiving antiquity's authority as macy over them. historical difference, historicism played an im- This Regency argument could even trans- portantrole in the effort to separatecultural dis- form a lower-middle-classwriter's distance from tinction from other forms of prestige. Sixteenth- contemporarysources of symbolic capital into a and seventeenth-centuryclassicisms had sought positive advantage.How is shown nowheremore to appropriateancient styles and signs because beautifully than in Keats's sonnet "On Seeing they were understoodas synecdoches for values the Elgin Marbles"([1817] 93), which describes that continued to regulate the present. Late- not the marbles but the "dizzy pain" of appre- eighteenth-centuryappropriations of the primi- hendingthem across a gulf thatis at once histori- tive practice a similar synecdochic strategy,but cal difference and the cultural marginality of a the ancient signs being appropriatednow tend to writer who cannot claim to have visited Greece

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or to know Greek. For the "sick eagle" the son- flection on class distinction, to position itself net's speakerimagines himself to be, the marbles above the categoryof class (61-68). are the sky. But his gaze can travel to them only The seventh stanza of Keats's Nightingale after climbing "each imagined pinnacle and ode ("Thou wast not born for death, immortal steep / Of godlike hardship,"and it is thus infi- Bird!" [369-72; line 61]) is a thumbnailsketch nitely deferred;by the end of the poem, we have of this genre, and it sometimes provided an ex- graspedonly "therude / Wastingof old time-a plicit model for longer versions-for instance, billowy main- / A sun-a shadow of a magni- for "A Hymn of the Night" (1827), by Mary tude." The intervening shadow acknowledges Howitt and William Howitt, which gives a nod the mediatednessof Keats'srelation to a cultural to the immortalBird's "self-same song" by ask- icon he cannotfully possess, but at the same time ing, "[A]rt thou the self-same moon that rose / the "indescribablefeud" that deranges his senses O'er the blest Eden"(lines 15-16)? Immortality presses his claim to possess a source of prestige is still at issue in this genre, and since most of now far more importantthan Greek or the Grand the authors are not just (like Keats) coming Tour-an immediate experience of historical from the trading classes and aspiring to belong time itself. By looking right throughthe marble to the culturalclass but also (unlike Keats) pro- into the dizzy gulf of "old time" that lies behind fessedly Christian, the concept has to do two it, the speakerreveals that he is one of the those jobs at once. "Immortality"is first of all the who live simultaneously in the physical world name of a class identity; it is the state the cul- itself and on the plane of history.Mediatedness speaks turalclass aspiresto achieveby identifying the to him immediately. with history (and thereby walking "among it is also life after in a In the 1820s, this peculiarlyoblique histori- immortals"). But death, have seen worked out cal sense servedas the premisefor a new genre I sense we by Macpherson. of the two ideas a will call the historicist catalog poem. Gazing at The superimposition produces kind of historicist a natural phenomenon-the moon, sun, or sea magic-for instance, when, after the and will do nicely-the speakerfinds his or her con- cataloging Adamitic, Chaldean, of the the Howitts sciousness pulled back across the centuries to Egyptian experiences moon, ask Luna to wake the dead of other reflect on the many civilizations that saw the ages: same thing. The form is historicist, not just his- Oh,call backfrom thy memory'streasury all torical,because it makes clear that each civiliza- Thouhast beheld;-wake kingdomspast away; tion sees different: history something slightly Imageforth deeds of wonder,and recall alters and inflects even the eternal forms of na- Thegreat ones of the earthfrom dark decay; ture. But the lyric emphasis falls more heavily Givelife untothe dust-breathe soul into the clay! on the continuityof the phenomenonthan on its (38-42) metamorphoses,because the point of this genre is less to define the uniquenessof individualhis- The poem fulfills its own request imaginatively torical moments than to evoke the overarching in the act of making it. Similarly, in Hemans's structureof historicisttime. Meanwhile, the cat- poem "TheTreasures of the Deep" (1823), after alog form dramatizes the power of immediate cataloging the cities, galleons, and warships historical sensationto encompass and transcend swallowed up by the ocean, the poet calls on the other forms of human experience and thereby sea to make restitution:"Restore the dead, thou presses the speaker's claim to belong to what sea!" (385-86; line 36). The commandis not se- Jon Klancherhas called the "culturalclass"-a rious, but the imperative mood of the sentence new class that emerges in the late Romanticpe- is: it dramatizesthe expansion of the speaker's riod and that seeks, through self-conscious re- consciousness by the historical expanse she has

This content downloaded from 130.126.32.13 on Mon, 12 Aug 2013 17:56:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions I 7.2 i Ted Underwood 247 glimpsed, and in that way it lays claim to the thing unchangingand timeless, to the transitory same immortalityit invokes. shows of public history. Rather, the text de- Many of Hemans'spoems belong to the his- duces the heart's immortality from the impres- toricist catalog genre ("The Treasures of the sion of a woman's body, a dated relic from a Deep," "The Voice of the Wind," "The Magic vanishedtime-"Thou thing of years departed!" Glass,""The Departed")or hinge in some other (1). The immortalityevoked has less to do with way on immediate historical sensation ("The religion than with historicism. Songs of OurFathers," "The Ruin," "The Image in Lava").Her contemporaries received these poems The Desire to with the Dead as intimationsof Christianimmortality, which is Speak surely how she intended them. "The Image in The kind of wishful thinkingexplored in this ar- Lava" ([1827] 469-70), for instance, infers the ticle twines aroundhistoricist conceptions of the immortalityof the humanheart from the impres- past, making them seem to promise a personal, sion of a woman'sform, found at Herculaneum: earthly immortality that is at the same time a form of class distinction. The promise is at- oh! immortal Immortal, tractive, and it seems likely that the prestige Thouart, whose earthlyglow of historicism in the nineteenth century owed Hathgiven these ashes holiness- something to the belief in earthlyimmortality it It must,it mustbe so! (lines41-44) licensed. But it would be easy to overstate this claim. I have not tried to show that the fantasies Today we are inclined to read the same poems of immortalityassociated with early-nineteenth- as celebrationsof sentiment;we notice the way century historicism vitiate it intellectually or Hemans always turns from the pomp of public that the nineteenth-centurypopularity of histori- history to the human heart and to what Castle cism was solely due to wishful thinking. To calls "hauntedconsciousness"-a phantasmatic demonstrate that, one would need further evi- presence of absent loved ones as mental images dence: though the labels come easily, not all as- (237). Both interpretationsmake sense, but we sociations between ideas are inextricable, and can enlarge them by considering the way they not all relationsare constitutive. relate to each other. The mystery of historicist I do want to suggest, however,that the asso- time-time measured by cultural change- ciation between historicism and the spiritualist constantly intervenes, in Hemans, between sen- imagination has proved enduring. M. Night timent and immortality. Thus, "The Image in Shyamalan'sfilm The Sixth Sense provides a re- Lava" reads the heart's affections as signs of cent example. Visually, the work is nearly as immortal life, not through a Christian argu- hauntedby Philadelphia's past as Cole Sears is ment, but by allowing the affections to set up by the stories of the dead people he sees. Since awful reverberationsin a space constituted by the film leaves the with a historicalalteration. young boy continuing responsibilityto decode injusticesreaching back to the it is difficult Templeand tower have moulder'd, eighteenth century, to imag- Empiresfrom earth have passed ine that he will grow up to become anything Andwoman's heart hath left a trace but a local historian-perhaps the kind of eru- Thoseglories to outlast! (lines5-8) dite bookstore owner who is consulted in Ver- tigo about the meaning of masculine power in The conjunction is "And,"not "But,"because nineteenth-centurySan Francisco.For a theoret- the poetic effect is one of association.The poem ical perspective on these movies' attempts to does not contrast "woman's heart," as some- speak with the dead,we could do worse thanturn

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to StephenGreenblatt's Shakespearean Negotia- "Tinter Abbey":a loss is followed by abundant tions. I should explain that I am consideringthis recompense.In the past, Greenblattexplains, we book as an example of late-twentieth-century believed that the "lost life" of the past could be historicismand not specificallyas an example of sought in a single authority-whether that au- the criticalapproach called new historicism.His- thority was constituted by the author or by the toricismhas in the latterphrase a differentmean- text. "The great attraction of this authority is ing than it does when used to describe the late that it appears to bind and fix the energies we Enlightenment. New historicists have not re- prize, to identify a stable and permanentform of jected the historicist discovery that the world literary power [...]" (3). But, the argument changes shape-that our most basic concepts goes, we have to give up that belief, since it are historically contingent-but their returnto turns out that textual energy is collective and history has not been a return to that insight in social, never contained. There is, however, a particular. In fact, insofar as new historicism "compensatorysatisfaction": by tracing textual challenges the primacy of the "period"as an or- energy throughits social circuit, we can expose ganizing conception, in favor of plural and di- the transactionsand exchanges that gave rise to achronic "discourses," it militates against the it in the first place. This process of circulation Romanticreification of "othertimes." and exchange continues to "refigure"the text But this is not to say that contemporaryhis- after it is written and conveys social energy to toricists live (or pretend to live) in a disillu- us across the interveningcenturies (6). Commu- sioned world. Quite the reverse:new historicists nion with the dead is possible, then, but it can have deliberatelyforegrounded the mythopoeic only be a collective and hermeneutic commu- impulses in their work. When Alan Liu com- nion. "If I wanted to hear one, I had to hear the ments that "New Historicism in the romantic many voices of the dead. And if I wanted to field is primarilya form of elegy," he means not hear the voice of the other,I had to hear my own to demystify the elegiac satisfactions of history voice" (20). Ratherlike Scottie Fergusonin Ver- but to validate them. "[H]istoryconsidered uni- tigo, we trace a dead voice back in time only to versally is loss. History,as it were, is the perpet- discover, first, that it speaks about a system of uation or retentionof the process of loss" ("New power rather than about an individual experi- Historicism"559).9 In ShakespeareanNegotia- ence and, second, that it may be at least partly tions, Greenblattis equally frankabout the emo- our invention. tional rewards of historical study. In the first The only thing about this argumentI pro- sentence of the book's first chapter,"The Circu- pose to view skepticallyis its rhetoricalstructure, lation of Social Energy,"he explains, "I began which hinges on a loss followed by abundantrec- with the desire to speak with the dead" (1). The ompense.The rewardspromised by Greenblatt's verb "speak"may understatethe rewardGreen- conclusion are much greater, and the losses re- blatt has in mind, because his goal is less to get quired to reach it much smaller, than that struc- the dead to answerquestions ("Whythe second- turesuggests. "The Circulation of Social Energy" best bed?")than to recover what he calls "inten- celebrates a positive immortality that Herder sity," "social energy," or "lost life." "[W]e do would recognize. In arguing that "our under- experience unmistakable pleasure and interest standingalong with its powers, the way in which in the literarytraces of the dead, and I returnto we think,act, andexist" is transmittedto us from the question how it is possible for those traces the dead, Herderdoes for human selfhood what to convey lost life" (3). Greenblattdoes for the text: he revealsit as a his- The answer that follows takes a form that toricalconstruction. What we lose in autonomyis will be familiar to readers of Wordsworth's more than made up for by participation in cul-

This content downloaded from 130.126.32.13 on Mon, 12 Aug 2013 17:56:44 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions I I7.2 Ted Underwood 249 turalchange, throughwhich we transmitthe best emblem of a mind "prompt/ To hold fit converse with the / And with the of mankind / partsof ourselvesto the futureand are assuredof spiritual world, generations Spreadover time, past, present, and to come [...]" (Prelude a collective destiny.In the late twentiethcentury, [1850] 14.107-10). The phenomena that Romantic writers Greenblattoffers his readers the same remark- choose as emblems of imaginative power-such as the able bargain.We give up the ability "to bind and sound of the sea (see Auden) or of the wind (see Abrams)- fix the energies we prize" in a single authority. are used so often as sources of historicalsensation as to hint of Romantic is foundedon But since social energy only lives throughnego- that the pleasure imagination his- toricism. Certainlyin The Prelude the "under-presence"that tiation and circulation, we sacrifice nothing of exalts the imaginative mind involves an awareness of other value. To bind social would be to energy destroy biographicalmoments superimposedon presentexperience, it. Meanwhile, in exchange for acknowledging so that the speaker feels "two consciousnesses-conscious the social constructionof textual agency, we are of myself, / And of some other being" ([1805] 2.32-33). As promised the right to participatein the refigura- Kevis Goodman has suggested in discussing the fifth book of The Prelude, it is difficult to separate these meditations tion of the text and thus to become part of the on autobiographicalotherness from a "meditationon histor- which lost life foreverlives on. processby ical experience"(567-68). 7 In Cultural Capital, John Guillory presented Words- worth'sattack on poetic diction as a failed attemptto reestab- lish a culturaldistinction between the languagesof verse and of prose (124-33). Guillory's argument broke ground on NOTES this topic, but I would arguethat Ross's recent contributions significantly advance our understandingof it, because Ross Scholars are no doubt drawnto theses about the social con- avoids the anachronismof describing all class distinctions structionof writingbecause scholarlywriting is constructed mediatedby literatureas "cultural"distinctions. In describ- so very sociably. This essay is indebted to conversations ing the cultural politics of the Preface, I therefore extrapo- with Eleanor Courtemanche,Reeve Parker,Elizabeth Saga- late from Ross's accountof mid-eighteenth-centurypoetry. ser, HarryShaw, and David Suchoff. Thanks also go to Na- 8 AlbertBoime out that the neoclassical nora Sweet and Paula Feldman, who provided the dates of points flattening of had an industrialas well as an ra- first publication for Felicia Hemans's poems, and to Adam perspective antiquarian tionale Potkay and John Richetti. Workon the essay was supported (273, 370-89). 9 by a HumanitiesResearch Grant from Colby College. See also Liu's epilogue to Wordsworth:The Sense of 1 Hemans's epigraph to "The Voice of the Wind" is History (500-02). taken from Gray'scorrespondence about Ossian. 2 Of the many mid-eighteenth-centurywriters one could cite to illustratethe period's incipient historicism,I mention WORKSCITED Blackwell simply because he happenedto teach at Aberdeen University. Macpherson was taught there by Blackwell's Abrams, M. H. "The CorrespondentBreeze: A Romantic students and absorbed his many of ideas about history Metaphor."The CorrespondentBreeze: Essays on En- (Stafford28-33). glish .New York:Norton, 1984. 25-43. 3 Ossian's awarenessof a future that will view proleptic Almond, Philip C. Heaven and Hell in EnlightenmentEn- him as the has a rich in Romanti- past subsequent history gland. Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 1994. cism. James Chandler has recently discussed this kind of Aries, Philippe. The Hour of Our Death. Trans. Helen double vision in connection with Anna Barbauld's "Eigh- Weaver.New York:Knopf, 1981. teen Hundredand Eleven" (114-20); see also Andrew Ben- Auden. W H. The Enchaftd Flood; or, The RomanticIcon- nett's accountof the structureof "posterity"in Shelley as "a the Sea. London:Faber, 1951. kind of hauntingof the presentby the future"(170). ographyof 4 Andrew.Romantic Poets and the Esther Schor has shown, for instance, how The Ruined Bennett, Cultureof Poster- Cottageand The Excursion find consolation in a collective his- ity. Cambridge:Cambridge UP, 1999. tory suggestedby naturalimages (117-25, 149-50, 186-95). Beowulf. Ed. E. TalbotDonaldson. New York:Norton, 1966. 5 Gray is quoting from manuscript;the poem he quotes Bewell, Alan. Wordsworthand the Enlightenment:Nature, appearsin a revised form in Macpherson,Poems 190. Man, and Society in the ExperimentalPoetry. New Ha- 6 The steamingmists and roaringstreams in this passage ven: Yale UP, 1989. from Goethe may evoke Wordsworth'sdescription of the sea Blackwell, Thomas. An Enquiry into the Life and Writings of mist atop Snowdon, which he similarly interpretsas the of Homer. 1735. New York:Garland, 1970.

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