THE “SENTIENT PLUME” :

THE THEORY OF THE PATHETIC FALLACY

IN ANGLO-AMERICAN AVIAN POETRY, 1856-1945

By

ERIC EARNHARDT

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Doctor of Philosophy

Department of English

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

May, 2016

CASE WESTERN RESERVE UNIVERSITY

SCHOOL OF GRADUATE STUDIES

We hereby approve the dissertation of

Eric Earnhardt

Candidate for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy.*

Committee Chair

Kurt Koenigsberger

Committee Member

Michael Clune

Committee Member

Sarah Gridley

Committee Member

Todd Oakley

Date of Defense

22 March 2016

*We also certify that written approval has been obtained

for any proprietary material contained therein.

2 Table of Contents

Table of Contents 2

Acknowledgments 3

Abstract 6

Chapter 1: Introduction 8

Part 1: History and Theory

Chapter 2: The History and Theory of the Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century 38

Chapter 3: Critical Anthropomorphism and the Pathetic Fallacy: Ruskin, Darwin, 75 and the Birds of Victorian Ecology

Chapter 4: The History and Theory of the Pathetic Fallacy in the Early Twentieth 101 Century

Chapter 5: The History and Theory of the Pathetic Fallacy from the Late Twentieth 154 Century to the Present

Part 2: Poetry

Chapter 6: The Missing of Minds in Matthew Arnold’s “Poor Matthias!” 190

Chapter 7: Nested Fallacies: The Pathos of the Mockingbird in Whitman’s “Out of 199 the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”

Chapter 8: Prosopopoeia and Overheard Bird Speech: Theories of Animal Lyric in 211 G. M. Hopkins and J. S. Mill

Chapter 9: Impersonal Impersonations: The Birds of The Waste Land, “Landscapes,” 239 and Four Quartets

Chapter 10: Other Voices: Extending the Method 284

Epilogue 309

Appendix 313

Bibliography 315

3

Acknowledgments

This dissertation would not have been possible without the extraordinarily generous and intelligent mentorship of Kurt Koenigsberger. Thanks for accepting and encouraging my project, and for knowing what I needed to hear, and when. To Michael

W. Clune, I am eternally grateful for your emphatic defense of literature, for the excellent speakers you brought to campus, and for your encouragement and insight along the way.

To Sarah Gridley, I owe the incalculable debt of keener insights than anyone has a right to expect delivered at every stage of this dissertation. Thank you for noticing when my syntax betrayed an intellectual knot in need of untying. Thanks also for the marvelous books, and for proving that one can both keep one’s soul and cultivate it through the trials of the academy. To Todd Oakley, for agreeing to serve as an outside reader and then providing exceptional feedback not just on metaphor, cognitive science, and philosophy, but also, and unexpectedly, on birds, thank you so much.

To my colleagues with whom I discussed portions of this project, you have my sincerest thanks. These include Catherine Forsa (who pointed out the “nature faker” controversy to me), Jason Carney, Cara Byrne, Marcus Mitchell, Scott Weedon, Thom

Dawkins, Kristin Kondrlik, Ray Horton, Drew Banghart, Kate Allen, Michelle Lyons-

McFarland, Jess Slentz, and CWRU lecturers Denna Iammarino, Joshua Hoeynck, Eric

Chilton, Mark Pedretti, and others. Thank you, Kate Allen, for organizing an environmental reading group. To Kenny Fountain, thanks for sharing your time and tracking down rhetorical figures that illuminated the pathetic fallacy. To Erika Olbricht, thanks for meeting with me to discuss pastoral and ecocriticism. Kim Emmons, thank you

4 for accommodating my teaching requests and making our courses truly educational and enjoyable for everyone involved.

I’d like to thank the English department for awarding me with the MacIntyre

Prize and Adrian & Salomon Fellowship. The first provided me with much needed confidence, the second with much needed time. To Marie Lathers, my French professor, merci beaucoup! Thanks to my fellow graduate students in the College of Arts and

Sciences Dissertation Seminar and to its directors, Ken Ledford and Martha

Woodmansee. Also, thank you to Marshall Brown for providing feedback on Darwin,

Ruskin, and Arnold. To Mark Turner for early comments and interest, you have my gratitude. To my fellow presenters on “the pathetic fallacy and animal life” at ASLE,

George Hart and Thomas Doran, thanks for your thoughts on birds, science, and poetry.

To members of my family who supported me in this very long educational endeavor, the Dieters, Earnhardts, Flickingers, and Leasures, thank you so much. To

DeeAnna and Dana Leasure, thank you for letting us live in your house and enjoy your hospitality for what turned into five years––no thanks could ever be enough. I’d like to thank my partner, Amber, for her love. Thank you for the companionship that both informed and distracted me from this work. Thank you for your heroic sacrifice and your irrational and incessant faith in me. I could not have done it without you. To my brilliant and beautiful children, Lochlann and Molly, thank you for being so magnificent. Finally,

I’d like to thank my sister Kimberly, who lived somewhere behind or before or beyond this project. I imagine her now with the parakeets she loved, and who seemed to love her, too. I would say that this dissertation is for her, but it seems more fitting to say, for her, that it’s for the birds.

5 The “Sentient Plume” : The Theory of the Pathetic Fallacy in Anglo-American Avian

Poetry, 1856-1945

Abstract

by

ERIC EARNHARDT

Critics often deem John Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy a prohibition on projections of human-like qualities onto nature, including animals. This supposed prohibition has seemed not only anthropocentric by denying real resemblances between human and nonhuman life, but also a severe restriction upon the freedom of poets to use figurative language to express sympathy or emotional connection with nature. Critics have not, however, sufficiently accounted for how Ruskin, a recognized forerunner of ecological consciousness, could have developed this supposedly anti-ecological theory; moreover, they have overlooked how the twentieth-century dismissal of the theory’s relevance contradicts its evident influence upon Victorian and modernist poetry. This dissertation addresses these neglected critical problems by examining the humanization of birds in literature and science, considering the theory of the pathetic fallacy alongside the scientific practice of “critical anthropomorphism.” This approach explains how the theory of the pathetic fallacy advocates critical anthropomorphism among poets while distinguishing between figurative language and illusions amidst violent emotions.

Ruskin’s theory appreciated the aesthetic and artistic possibilities produced by “the instinct which leads us…to attribute life to the lowest forms of organic nature,” as well as

6 the human susceptibility to be deceived by it. By advocating an informed and critical awareness of this instinct, Ruskin theorized a less personal style of lyric poetry and urged poets to use pathetic fallacies only as tools for faithfully representing interior landscapes, thereby anticipating T. S. Eliot’s impersonal theory of poetry and his concept of the

“objective correlative.”

The first part of this dissertation, therefore, explains the history and theory of the pathetic fallacy, often as it relates to birds, from Ruskin and Charles Darwin’s anthropomorphic methods of speculation, to the theory’s continued if often concealed influence in the literary criticism of George Santayana and T. S. Eliot, to the theory’s relevance for today’s ecological and cognitive literary critics. The second part applies this critical method to poems that attempt to present “real birds,” such as Matthew Arnold’s

“Poor Matthias!,” Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” Gerard

Manley Hopkins’s “The Sea and the Skylark” and “The Woodlark,” and T. S. Eliot’s The

Waste Land, “Landscapes,” and Four Quartets, as well as a number of other poems by modernist, postwar, and contemporary poets. Instead of rejecting Ruskin’s aesthetic values, modern poetry that attends to the lives of animals often exhibits Ruskin’s aesthetic and ethical commitment to a more critical and “careful anthropomorphization” as encouraged by Jane Bennett and other ecological critics. A sympathetic reading of the theory of the pathetic fallacy, therefore, enhances understandings of Anglo-American poets who imagine the inner lives of animals in poetry, and reveals the necessity of critically relating their imaginings to human perception and interior experience.

7 Chapter 1: Introduction

The idea that poets are only “Pretending to be interested in birds” (Andrews) speaks to a truth about a lot of poetry, which is that poets use birds to talk about other things. Robert Frost defined metaphor as “saying one thing in terms of another,” and wrote that “Poetry is simply made of metaphor” (“The Constant Symbol” 446). Likewise,

A. R. Ammons stated that “clarification or intensification by distraction, seeing one thing better by looking at something else,” was a central method of poetry (“A Poem is a

Walk” 115). Ammons even drew upon Robert Frost’s “The Wood-Pile” to illustrate his point. Indeed, “The Wood-Pile” stages an encounter with a bird that is not really about the bird – or is it? The speaker narrates his meandering through a frozen swamp when a bird flies into view:

A small bird flew before me. He was careful To put a tree between us when he lighted, And say no word to tell me who he was Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. He thought that I was after him for a feather–– The white one in his tail; like one who takes Everything said as personal to himself. (Frost 101)

Imagining the bird’s careful flight, Frost’s speaker seems to realize only dimly that he cannot know the bird’s thoughts. After registering the foolishness of assuming he knew what the bird thought, the speaker assumes in the very next line that the bird “thought that I was after him for a feather.” Should readers trust this assumption? Furthermore, does the bird also recognize the foolishness of such thought-projection? The poem’s careful phrasing makes the third-person pronouns of the third and fourth lines ambiguous, so that the he who is so foolish as to think he knows the other’s thoughts could refer to the bird or the speaker. As a result, the poem implicates not only the bird, but also the 8 speaker, as resembling one who takes everything that is said (or done) personally. Still, readers may conclude that Frost talks about a bird only in order to present a human topic.

The bird is only “like” one “who” takes things personally, and is probably not contemplating the same philosophical problem, i.e., the human “problem of other minds.”

By this logic, uncertainty about the reality and substance of the thoughts of others is what Frost, through the figure of the bird, makes clearer and more intense. But doesn’t the poem in some sense depend upon the bird? Is Frost concerned only with projections of human minds? Could the poem have staged the same encounter with a rock, or a plant, or some human artifact? Would the effect be the same, or merely another kind of pathetic fallacy: a reflection of human thoughts and feelings on a different surface? Is the human mind the only important feature of the poem? For that matter, would it not be more prudent to stage the problem with another human? Such a poem would avoid the troubling ambiguity of the unknowns of birdbrains. In reality, this ambiguity, the speaker’s alienation from the bird’s consciousness, is precisely what makes the encounter so interesting, strange, and even a little unsettling.

For one thing, conceiving of similarities between human and avian cognition contrasts with human habits of thinking about animals. The mechanistic view of nature proposed by Descartes, which strongly separated thinking from the body, justified a view of animals as soulless machines, automatons ensnared in the mechanisms of instinctual and unthinking nature. From this point of view, humans only falsely invest animals with feelings, sensations, emotions, and thoughts resembling those we, personally, feel. Yet, such thinking contains one uncomfortable proviso, the conspicuous exception that it makes for human animals. In its momentary admission of a reciprocation or equivalency

9 in some aspect of avian and human thought processes, Frost’s poem glimpses the flimsiness of this humanistic exception, but does not explicitly consider its more frightening implication, the implication that extending thought to animals may also extend the automaticity perceived in animals to humanity. Although the “song of birds is found beautiful by everyone,” according to Adorno, “something frightening lurks in the song of birds precisely because it is not a song but obeys the spell in which it is enmeshed” (Aesthetic Theory 91). The spell of nature that ensnares the birds alarms humans because it initiates doubts about our freedom; it hints at nature’s domination of the human that is always already achieved by our inextricable entanglement in the ecological “mesh” (Morton The Ecological Thought 28).

This possibility does not trouble Frost’s speaker, who simply forgets the bird’s

“little fear” and shifts his attention “without so much as wishing him good-night” (101).

However, the speaker’s attention shifts to a long-forgotten pile of wood and its “slow smokeless burning of decay” (102), which begins to signal to him the fate he shares with everything else in nature, wherein purposeful lives and careful handiwork are all forgotten, all decay, life and poetry included. At the poem’s end, the speaker feels fear at the sight of the forgotten woodpile, but readers may remember, too, how the speaker has forgotten his encounter with the bird, a creature that signified for the speaker “the way I might have gone” (101). The speaker’s forgetfulness, therefore, makes the poem’s final scene both ironic and poignant, since following the bird might have kept him from becoming lost in a frozen swamp, morbidly contemplating a pile of wood.

A more accurate picture of humans and birds analogously “caught” within nature occurs in W. B. Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium,” a poem in which Yeats scorns any

10 feeling of resignation over the loss of poetry to time and memory. In Yeats, “The young /

In one another’s arms, birds in the trees / – Those dying generations – at their song,” are all “Caught in that sensual music” which only commends “Whatever is begotten, born, and dies” (Yeats 526). Unlike Frost’s woodpile, Yeats’s poetry does not lament nature’s cycles but rejects them through the fashioning of a mechanical bird. For Yeats, being

“fastened to a dying animal” that “knows not what it is” proves so unbearable that he attempts to escape mortal life by transforming into immortal artifice.

Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake; Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come. (Yeats 526)

These lines express the hope that art will preserve the soul of the author by animating, and therefore being animated by, future life. The aging artist sacrifices life to preserve the soul, becoming an object that keeps drowsy emperors awake. As such, the poem radically attempts to overcome the dominating force of nature’s death sentence.

Frost’s poem does not consider this idealistic option, but it is not quite resigned to death either. It glimpses a form of life that does not depend on preservation through cultural memory. All will be forgotten, but as long as life lasts, there are those, like the woodcutter, who “are always turning to fresh tasks” and who by virtue of their liveliness are capable, even, of “forgetting their handiwork” (102). Unlike the speaker transfixed by the woodpile and by nature’s domination, the woodcutter and the bird both signify for the speaker “the way I might have gone” (101). Their active life suggests enlivening pleasures in purposeful behavior, not morbidly installing oneself in frozen swamps for 11 the purpose of melancholy contemplation. Yet, by registering something “foolish” about such speculation with regard to the bird, Frost’s poem exhibits the skepticism humans routinely exhibit when projecting humanlike qualities onto animals, even if the speaker overrides this skepticism and just as routinely projects his version of the bird’s thoughts.

Meanwhile, Yeats’s idealistic image of the automaton displays something even more essential to the “dual nature,” “the basic ambiguity” of animal life as both material and spiritual, mechanical and emotional. Daniel Tiffany observes that the lyric automaton in the poem may be regarded as “an emblem of the immaterial soul, as well as an emblem of immateriality” confronting “its double, the automaton of mechanical philosophy, which depicts the body of scientific materialism.” Yeats’s mechanical bird, therefore, sustains within itself “a dialectic of sensuality and intellect, matter and immateriality”

(Toy Medium 19-20). Therefore, although Yeats’s bird is an automaton, its nature according to scientific materialism is not ontologically different from Frost’s live bird.

Yeats’s extraordinary poem, therefore, relates to Frost’s rustic one in speculating on aspects of the life of a bird in a scientific age. In both poems, the speaker implicates the self with another form of “life.” Each confronts the materiality of the embodied self and the immateriality of the soul, and each comes to conclusions about the enchanting spell of nature’s rhythms that belie nature’s deathly portent, looking for resolutions to the problem of death in life through the experience of consciousness or the “soul,” either by dimly perceiving how one could live life differently, or attempting to preserve something of the soul in art. Either way, in both poems, the problem of the mind and the soul, in the self and in others, foolish or mysterious to ponder, remains, ultimately, unresolved.

12 A difficulty in both poems, in this regard, is that there is no way to extricate one’s personal embodied perception from the equation. Frost cannot strip away his humanity and for a moment become a bird and know its thoughts. Yeats’s personal wish to become a mechanical bird that scorns the “Common bird” still takes its form from a natural thing, a bird, despite Yeats’s protest; all is enfolded back into nature, and seen through human eyes and ears still caught in nature’s music. According to Drew Milne, Frost and Yeats each confront what he calls the “limits of lyric humanism,” in that each exhibits the ancient effort of humans to dominate “human nature for the sake of lyric experience,” and thereby “to imagine the voices of nature beyond the human” (Milne 362). Frost and

Yeats each attempt to restrict or escape their personality in order to attain a higher grade of objectivity, either through a modest recognition of something potentially true about the natural bird’s thoughts, or through an ambitious rejection of the natural bird as the emblem of nature’s ensnaring spell and a paradoxical modeling of the immaterial soul in material form. Milne finds the “ur-image” of this essential struggle with human nature in

Homer’s Odyssey, when Odysseus binds himself to the mast of the ship in order to hear the sirens. The sirens, represented as alluring, winged, feminine creatures, are never heard without losing one’s life, if they are ever truly heard at all (Kafka played on this possibility, that Odysseus was only “pretending” to hear their songs). As Milne points out, however, written lyric introduces a freedom for imagining nature’s voices beyond the human, since writing frees itself from the clumsiness of human speech that would attempt to vocally perform siren songs, a sound and an experience that cannot be heard or had.

Milne cites Eliot’s mermaids (the ones that Prufrock does not think will sing to him), as an example of a registration of the difficulty of imagining these voices, but he takes

13 Wallace Stevens’s “The Idea of Order At Key West” as more fully partaking of the imaginative project.

Stevens’s personification of a “feminized but inhuman lyric power of sea,” for

Milne, constitutes a pathetic fallacy that composes an “enchanting” night “in order to enjoy the artifice of the lyric imagination” (363). For Milne, Stevens’s attempt to hear the song of the sea is more purely for the sake of lyric experience than I have described

Frost’s desire to imagine the thoughts of the bird, or Yeats’s ambition to escape nature.

Yet, Stevens acknowledges within the poem that the appearance of the sea as humanized muse––a genius of voice and sea and air––amounts to a sort of hallucination or “false appearance,” since “there never was a world for her, / Except the one she sang, and singing, made.” The image is self-consciously an idea, but also an important experience of reality for the speaker. Because Stevens dwells on the personification of the sound of the sea, the picture the poem creates very readily appears as a prized picture of Stevens’s mind. The fallacious personification, therefore, represents first and foremost the conscious imagination that shapes it. In John Ruskin’s terms, the feminized sea is

“unconnected with any real character or power in the object, and only imputed to it”

(5.204), and for this reason Milne states that the poem’s “dialectic of subjectivity and objectivity,” while “exemplary,” is also “perhaps too tidily organised.” Stevens’s poetic persona “evades the lure of self-aggrandizing first person sensitivity,” but Milne still thinks that the speaker seems “a little too proud of his ‘idea’ and of his ability to tame the powers of nature in song” (363). The sea is all too easily conformed to the self’s desires and made to reflect the self’s ideas. The sea is but a passive partner in Stevens’s pathetic fallacy; it makes sounds, but it does not have a voice. But, birds have voices. Do they

14 more powerfully resist such personalizing personification, or do they attract it, and thereby attract even more intense anthropomorphism?

The theory of pathetic fallacy is known as a caution against overly personalizing nature, against violent emotions and tempting perceptual illusions distorting “true appearances.” Yet, it is sometimes customary to think about the pathetic fallacy only in terms of the personification of inanimate natural things, not animals or other persons.

However, Ruskin’s culminating example of an “exquisite” pathetic fallacy is one in which a bird appears to exhibit “triumphant constancy and love” in Wordsworth’s The

Excursion, which not only contradicts interpretations of the theory as a check upon the personification of inanimate things only, but also upon interpretations of the pathetic fallacy as necessarily a term of censure. So what is a pathetic fallacy?

Firstly, a close reading of the chapter of Modern Painters III in which it Ruskin coins the term reveals that a fallacy is a “false appearance,” pure and simple, regardless of the object that “appears” falsely. Moreover, Ruskin saw that false appearances were part and parcel of humanity. They both reflected human feeling and served as a marker of human mental ability, “a sign of the incapacity of … human sight or thought to bear what has been revealed to it” (5.218). As he wrestled with personification throughout Modern

Painters III and other major works, Ruskin developed his theory in response to metaphysical ideas that deeply troubled him. Ruskin felt beset by the extreme tendencies of Enlightenment and Romantic philosophy to think of reality either as a soulless and eminently calculable mass of dead matter, or as purely ideal, a fictional human construct doomed only to further humanize and personalize its perceptions. Ruskin could not countenance the idea that anyone could reasonably live with a great degree of skepticism

15 over the solidity of nature and the reality of experience. Yet Ruskin’s faith in substantial reality and its emotional effects, encouraged by his intensely sensitive observation of the natural world, rejected a scientistic world. The reality of timeless experiences of a living beauty shining through landscapes and their inhabitants converted Ruskin to a natural piety that never left him. However, poetry and art that seemed to falsify such experiences by attempting fantastic or easy shortcuts, forms that circumvented the necessity of studying the aesthetic material of experience (clouds, leaves, waves, rocks, birds) and pursuing the truth of experience they revealed, to Ruskin played into the hands of those arguing that perceptions of beauty and “nobility” in the world were merely subjective illusions. Through his theory of the pathetic fallacy, therefore, Ruskin critiqued poets given to “enunciate moral aphorisms over every pebble they stumble against” (5.385), even as he expressed his own passion for sacred landscape experiences.

Indeed, Ruskin himself was a passionate moralist. But Ruskin was scientific enough in temper to make every attempt to describe his experiences in nature professionally. He navigated his own doubts about the sources of his sacred experiences in nature when he stated that the “noblest we can know” is the “energy” that “either imagines, or perceives, the existence of a living power greater than its own” (The Eagle’s

Nest 22.170). In order to better know this “energy,” Ruskin himself took to mythic imaginings of minerals. He asked of a crystal in the Socratic dialogues of The Ethics of

Dust (1866), “what will you gain from unpersonifying it?” Any sufficient answer to this question, for Ruskin, finally required reference to the corollary question he thought would forever be asked in vain, “What is it to be alive?” (18.232, 341). This complex modern point of view may not be the outlook one expects from the author of the theory of

16 the pathetic fallacy, the dry rhetoric of which has been taken as a strict ban on anthropomorphism. In fact, Ruskin supported enthusiastically investing life or a “living power” in the world, which enriched human sympathy with reality, so long as such investments were made with respect to that reality, with a sense of such investments’ mythological power, their truth to human feelings and their value for human emotional life, not their literal truth. Prefiguring Stevens’s pathetic fallacy, for instance, Ruskin wrote that he was very glad of “perceiving and feeling” the sea as a friend because the personification allowed him the “possession of a higher truth, which did not interfere with my hold of the physical one” (Letters 36.88). Indeed, possessing higher truths that do not interfere with physical ones names the psychological origin of the theory of the pathetic fallacy, and made the “spiritual natures” of birds exciting, fascinating, and worthy of protection for Ruskin.

To resolve all of Ruskin’s apparent contradictions quickly and cogently is to do what Ruskin and scores of subsequent readers never could. His uneven application of his own theories, his ideas on poetry qua landscape description, and his occasional moralizing condescension and pomposity, all confuse the more sophisticated aesthetic ideas with which he struggles in Modern Painters. Nevertheless, by studying the fluid connections between Ruskin’s scattered apercus, as Jessica Feldman suggests, his confusions become visible as his insights. When we recognize this, Feldman writes, we can recognize Ruskin “for the aesthetic pragmatist and Victorian Modernist that he was”

(Feldman 18). No theory of Ruskin’s has seemed more confused, or confused as many critics, than the theory of the pathetic fallacy, and his almost hyper-pragmatic dismissal of philosophy in order to make sweeping and definite statements about the entirety of

17 artists’ works has, itself, smacked of the egotism of an overly personal, petted, and spoiled genius, but a genius nevertheless. While there is plenty in Ruskin’s thirty-nine volumes that is indefensible, I sympathetically reinterpret the theory of the pathetic fallacy in this dissertation in order to turn some of the thinking about Ruskin’s supposed derogation of metaphor and his supposed ban on anthropomorphism on its head. As

“false appearances” resulting from violent emotions that may also serve as faithful and powerfully pathetic expressions of feeling, pathetic fallacies explain just how poetry imagining the lives of animals achieves its effects while also indicating the quality of the sight and thought of its characters and lyric personae.

Specifically, this reinterpretation of the theory of the pathetic fallacy examines pathetic fallacies that attribute humanlike thoughts to birds in an attempt to explain poetic dynamics around the ancient and “unreconciled affinity between humans and birds”

(Milne 364). This unreconciled affinity involves uncanny appearances of analogous emotional life in birds, their taste for beauty, their habits of life and thought, and their artistic production of “song.” At the same time, my reappraisal explains how Ruskin’s once influential theory deeply influenced major values of poetry in the modernist period, poetry that continued to draw inspiration from realist attempts to capture the inner lives of creatures, and that continued to use birds as central and vital aesthetic resources.

Through the theory of the pathetic fallacy, Ruskin urged a greater degree of impersonality among poets and a higher grade of objectivity in literary criticism and aesthetics, of which T. S. Eliot became the principal beneficiary in the early twentieth century. Ruskin directed criticism toward the poetry, and treated poems as combinatory formulas for presenting objects that faithfully conveyed feelings, feelings that he believed could have

18 cognates in other beings. By bodily experiencing a work of art, one might also be reminded of the bodily existence that humans shared with animals. Ruskin viewed the

“dim image and gleam of humanity” “in every animal’s eye,” and felt every human obliged to recognize in animals “the fellowship of the creature, if not of the soul”

(14.174).

Despite his definite statements about the noble and true or morbid and false, for

Ruskin the perception of value in the world depended upon the person capable of perceiving or imagining it. Like many modernists after him, Ruskin realized that valuing things in the world resulted from imagination imbuing the world, precisely observed, with feeling. Those with strong feelings and informed and powerful intellects aided in exploring the workings of human imagination, and mastered the effects of form upon human perception in order to convey in art what T. S. Eliot called “significant emotion.”

For Ruskin, and for his admirer William James, such mapping of inner life deepened the moral sense that one should restrict “pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own,” but “tolerate, respect, and indulge” them, since “neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer” (James

Pragmatism 284). However, these sentiments of the likes of William James or T. S. Eliot are rarely taken as derivatives of Ruskin’s rambling works. While Ruskin’s volumes are surely neither their only nor always their primary source, there is ample reason to look again at Ruskin for insights into ways of thinking about poetry and about animals that follow from his writings.

With the notable exception of Pound and Proust, Ruskin’s place as a harbinger of modernism was unappreciated by early twentieth-century critics as it is relatively

19 unappreciated today. As Cianci and Nicholl argue in their introduction to Ruskin and

Modernism (2001), although “Ruskin may be remembered by the modernists only as a distant, symbolic presence, … in practice his ideas color much of their thinking about aesthetics – so much so that we may often find those ideas ‘reinvented’ with no conscious sense of an intellectual debt to Ruskin” (xiv). Although the essays collected by Cianci and Nicholl’s disclose much of Ruskin’s essential influence in modernism through a variety of figures in art, architecture, and economics, his aesthetic influence on major figures of literary modernism is subdued except for the essays of Cianci and Ronald

Bush. Cianci acknowledges in “Tradition, Architecture and Rappel à l’Ordre: Ruskin and

Eliot” (1917-1921) that “Surprisingly little has been written about the relationship between Ruskin and T. S. Eliot’s work” (133). In “Eliot and Ruskin: Second Thoughts,”

Bush writes that “The story of T. S. Eliot and John Ruskin is a tale … of absorption, rejection, and positive second thoughts” (155). Nevertheless, Cianci’s focus is architectural, and Bush’s is economic and political, leaving Modern Painters III, which

“contains Ruskin’s principal achievement as a literary critic” (Bloom xxv), completely unexplored. As a clarion call for depersonalization and objective attention to “the science of the aspects” of things, Ruskin’s literary criticism anticipates high modernist values espoused forcefully by T. S. Eliot, who drew from Ruskin through his own reading as well as through the influence that Ruskin’s writings, and the theory of the pathetic fallacy in particular, exerted upon Eliot’s Harvard professor, George Santayana. By tracing this strain of the theory of the pathetic fallacy into modernism and poetic naturalism, I specifically relate Ruskin’s idea to forms of “critical anthropomorphism” in the study of animal behavior.

20 The philosophical and poetic problem that this dissertation explores, therefore, is fundamentally trans-Atlantic. It examines a poetic term and a theory that Ruskin applied to American and European authors which was subsequently used by American and

English critics in the United States and Europe. I trace its influence to Santayana, a

Spanish American literary philosopher, and to T. S. Eliot, who was absorbed into both

American and English canons with as wide a geographical sphere of influence in his day as Ruskin enjoyed in his own. Furthermore, since Ruskin used his term to check the excesses of Romantic and Victorian poetic expression, this dissertation sometimes engages with Victorianism’s relation to Romanticism and literary modernism’s relation to both. Finally, this project begins just before the Darwinian moment of the nineteenth century, proceeding through subsequent scientific developments of premises and presumptions of evolution by natural selection that affected artistic, religious, and biological/ornithological thought.

Immediately before Darwin’s revolution in biology and the storm of cultural and theological re-organization it brought to Victorian England (Modern Painters III-1856,

On the Origin of Species-1859), Ruskin preached the essential consonance of science and art as they pursued, respectively, truth to essence (matter) and to aspect (effects of nature upon the human “heart and mind”). After Darwin, with whose theories he had little sympathy, Ruskin advocated the study of material essence in order to better discern and represent affecting natural forms in art, including perceiving “spiritual natures” of birds

“diffused among thousands … in the skies” (Love’s Meinie 25.56-57). Ruskin argued for realist artistic standards and was wary of uninformed and personal projections of false appearances, but he strongly sympathized with animating nature when precisely

21 observed. In fact, Ruskin’s method of observation and representation actually paralleled

Darwin’s method of what is now called “critical anthropomorphism,” the ethological method of extrapolation from human experience in order to hypothesize about experiential states that exist in nonhuman life (Burghardt 136-138). That this sort of critical anthropomorphizing inheres within Ruskin’s broader aesthetic theory, and its subsequent development by Santayana as cases of “justified illusion,” has never been adequately appreciated. In part, perhaps, the difficulty has resulted from confusion over the use of “fallacy” as a synonym for “figure” or “metaphor” in one sense and for

“mistake” or “illusion” or “hallucination” in another.

Linguistically, human symbolic representation is always already involved in humanizing metaphor and employs anthropomorphism as a matter of course, having a “+ human” feature, in R. S. Sharma’s terms, when speaking of the eye of the needle, foot of the mountain, or leg of the table (3). Ruskin’s theory grants this linguistic point and goes further, allowing that human poetic creativity uses language to make beautiful images through metaphors he called “fallacies of wilful fancy” (fallacies in the sense of being figurative as opposed to literal). The pathetic fallacy, however, concerned “the effect of

[landscape] on any mind” (MP III 5.200), and often applied to the process by which life and animation was seriously projected onto all it saw. Therefore, the method of speculating about and projecting human souls onto birds and other animals existed long before Ruskin or Darwin, since poetry began when the pathetic fallacy began. Cognitive scientists broadly accept the analogist position that humans instinctively “make sense of other things by viewing them as people too” (Mark Turner Death is the Mother of Beauty

129), and R. S. Sharma writes that “anthropomorphism played a great role in forming

22 [primitive and ancient humans’] conception of nature and religion” (Applied Linguistics

2). Anthropologist Stewart Guthrie argues that “because of our perceptual uncertainty and our need to see any people who are present,” religions “are born from the search for human form and behavior, and all constitute claims to have found such form and behavior in the nonhuman world” (Guthrie 197). But if “ostensible communication with humanlike, yet nonhuman, beings through some form of symbolic action” (Guthrie 197) is common to all religions, it is common to our relationships with all of reality, especially animals (Guthrie 183). It is no coincidence, therefore, that mythological communications with gods and with animals have often collided, especially when it comes to birds.

As Mircea Eliade wrote in Shamanism, “All over the world learning the language of animals, especially of birds, is equivalent to knowing the secrets of nature and hence being able to prophesy.” Eliade wrote that “learning their language, imitating their voice is equivalent to the ability to communicate with the beyond and the heavens” (Eliade 98).

These functions also made birds “psychopomps” or “soul conductors,” which in Greek mythology guided human souls to the places of the dead. Across cultures, “Imitating animal voices, using this secret language during the séance is yet another sign that the shaman can move freely through the three cosmic zones – underworld, earth and sky”

(Eliade 99). Similarly, in Birds With Human Souls, Beryl Rowland traced the symbolism of shamans wearing bird masks (whom Joseph Campbell wrote were sometimes thought to have been descended from birds), to obvious examples from Christian symbolism like doves and eagles, and to lesser-known examples, like God’s breath reviving two dead prophets portrayed as “two birds flying into their mouths” (Rowland xiv). Indeed, even as humans developed more sophisticated and less narrowly intuitive explanations for natural

23 phenomena, birds never lost their power over the human mind, no matter how closely and scientifically they were observed.

While most sincere religious belief about birds passed gradually into myth and poetry, bird poetry can still be “located on a scale that ranges from naturalistic examination to romantic conjuring” (Bright Wings Collins 3). In poetry in English, it is not hard to make the case that no one group embodied the far ends of the entire scale better than the English Romantics. On the side of naturalistic description, John Clare mimicked the nightingale thus in “The Progress of Rhyme,”

“Chew-chew chew-chew” and higher still, “Cheer-cheer cheer-cheer” more loud and shrill, “Cheer-up cheer-up cheer-up”—and dropped Low—“Tweet tweet jug jug jug”—and stopped One moment just to drink the sound Her music made, and then a round Of stranger witching notes was heard As if it was a stranger bird: “Wew-wew wew-wew chur-chur chur-chur Woo-it woo-it”—could this be her? “Tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew tee-rew Chew-rit chew-rit”—and ever new— “Will-will will-will grig-grig grig-grig.” (Clare The Selected Poetry 127-128)

Clare grasped lyric as a vehicle for faithfully recording nature’s voices as sound, so that

David Rothenberg in Why Birds Sing stated that one of Clare’s transcriptions of birdsong was “the most accurate rendering in words of any bird’s voice for nearly a century” (25).

At other times, however, Clare was concerned, alongside many of his fellows, with recording more than the sounds of the birds.

Somewhere in the middle of the scale, Samuel Taylor Coleridge began questioning human projections onto the nightingale as conditioned by the myth of

Philomela only to reinvest the bird with feeling via his own sympathetic illusion of a bird

24 experiencing love and joy. Similarly, Shelley’s “blithe spirit!” in “To a Skylark” imbued the nightingale, now recast as the Romantic emblem of the poet, with “joy” and

“delight.” As Shelley wrote in his A Defence of Poetry, “the poet is a nightingale who sits in darkness, and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds; his auditors are as men entranced by the melody of an unseen musician, who feel that they are moved and softened, yet know not whence or why” (Shelley 595). At the far end of “Romantic conjuring,” what Edward Hirsch calls “the very pinnacle of the tradition,” John Keats’s

“Ode to a Nightingale” expressed the longing of the lyric imagination that pursues the experience of unity with the “Immortal Bird!” by timelessly flying on “the viewless wings of poesy.” Despite the profusion of sympathetic bird poetry by the Romantics, and despite the differences between Keats’s unseen singer and Yeats’s mechanical bird, the ancient impulse to unite with the timeless avian form through song is as vividly apparent in both, and this dissertation traces the evolution of this impulse as one with an answer that is in part poetic and in part evolutionary.

For instance, cognitive neuroscientists have attempted to narrow down more reliable answers to the question “what is it like to be alive for a bird?” While Thomas

Nagel is skeptical about the degree to which we may be able to even minimally understand the “what-its-likeness” of another creature like a bat (or a bird, many of which, like the bat, also echo-locate), we can practically understand why, apart from primates and our pet dogs, “We identify more closely with birds than with any other group of animals” (Birkhead x). One of today’s leading ornithologists, Tim Birkhead, writes that we primarily rely on the same two senses as birds, vision and hearing, and that although “we can probably never know if birds experience emotions in the same way as

25 we do” (Birkhead 202), new cognitive measures are providing more types of data alongside traditional field observation. In 2012, a group of prominent neuroscientists met at Cambridge to discuss problems of studying human consciousness and published a declaration of unequivocal consensus statements. Amidst broad generalizations in the meager two-page document, an unusually specific third article of agreement stated that,

Birds appear to offer, in their behavior, neurophysiology, and neuroanatomy a striking case of parallel evolution of consciousness. Evidence of near human-like levels of consciousness has been most dramatically observed in African grey parrots. Mammalian and avian emotional networks and cognitive microcircuitries appear to be far more homologous than previously thought. (Low 1)

In addition, with regard to human powers of speech and vocal innovation, we have “no true precursors of syntax to be found among our nearest relatives” (qtd. in Petkov and

Jarvis 1). Roman Jakobsen noted as early as 1960 that “the endeavor to start and sustain communication is typical of talking birds; thus the phatic function of language is the only one they share with human beings. The class of aves contains the only creatures that can mimic and innovate in very similar ways to human spoken language” (“Linguistics and

Poetics” 355-356). As has been more recently demonstrated by the Harvard Researcher,

Irene Pepperberg, and her work with the famous African Grey Parrot “Alex,” as well as the work of Erik Jarvis at Duke University Medical Lab, who works on the neuro- genomic mapping of zebra finch vocalizations, some birds’ spoken language capacities go far beyond the phatic function of gaining attention for communicative activity.

Therefore, given the ancient aesthetic and spiritual power of birds, and their convergent evolution of consciousness and vocal communication, it is safe to assume that even if poets use birds to talk about a very great number of things, poets may also be genuinely interested in and intuiting aspects of the lives of birds with analogs in human

26 experience. The poets I examine certainly do not feign this interest. The poets I examine, in the poems I present, are passionately, scientifically, philosophically, and even religiously fascinated by birds. For this study, I have chosen to investigate those critics and poets who studied bird behaviors and songs in order to present birds in poetry as powerfully and as truly as they felt them in person, and as they viewed birds posing fundamental questions about human being as well as poetic practice. The poets I explore in detail, Walt Whitman, Matthew Arnold, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot, all present “real birds” (Eliot Letters V 7) as fellow creatures, possessing emotional and spiritual lives with their own species-specific grasp of the physical world. These poets observed Ruskin’s suggestion that poets make use of a close and informed attention to nature, and they appreciated his sliding scale for appreciating the pathetic fallacy, which will be “powerful only so far as it is pathetic, feeble so far as it is fallacious” (5.220).

Therefore, this study traces the tradition that remains closest to Ruskin’s line of influence from the Victorian period into modernism, with gestures toward its relevance for today’s ecological and cognitive critics concerned with anthropomorphism in language and literature.

Part One, “History and Theory,” begins with chapter two, “The History and

Theory of the Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century.” This chapter introduces the theory of the pathetic fallacy as a materialist tool for criticizing deceptive “false appearances” in art and literature while preserving their dramatic power for communicating truths about interior life. Although some have interpreted Ruskin’s term as derogatory and a belittling of metaphor itself, I deal with such objections by detailing how Ruskin accounts for conventional poetic metaphor (fallacies of “wilful fancy”) and

27 qualifies his critique of pathetic fallacies in poetry. Ruskin actually praised the potential of pathetic fallacies for reflecting emotional states, especially when such states occurred in those with the greatest capability for sight as they confront perceptual ambiguities and difficulties (such as the thoughts and communications of other species). By delving into a body of virtually unknown nineteenth-century responses to the theory of the pathetic fallacy by Oliver Wendell Holmes, Roden Noël, George Eliot, and other Victorian writers in British and American books and periodicals, I revive the spirit of Ruskin’s critique of the sentimental and moralizing excess of the Romantics, and I consider the controversy that Ruskin’s passion for definite statement elicited in sympathizers and opponents alike. Ruskin’s sometimes clinical rhetoric mixed with provocative agnostic versions of natural theology, and his infamous ordering of first and second order poets, were all heralded and condemned by turns. Indeed, no individual seems to have embodied the contradictions and convictions of his time better than Ruskin, whose life spanned from 1819 to1900, overlapping with the life of Queen Victoria herself, from

1819-1901. This chapter demonstrates that Ruskin’s critical term, “pathetic fallacy,” was both widely known and used in England and America until the end of the century. It was credited with having reined in the abuses of shallow sentimentality, cliché, narrow and hasty moralizing, and intellectually lazy poetry. However, it was also immediately misused as a dogmatic refusal of even the subtlest suggestions of anthropomorphism or personification.

In the third chapter, “Critical Anthropomorphism and the Pathetic Fallacy:

Ruskin, Darwin, and the Birds of Victorian Ecology,” I examine correspondences between the theory of the pathetic fallacy and the ethological concept and practice of

28 “critical anthropomorphism.” I compare Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy and his

1870s ornithological lectures at Oxford, published as Love’s Meinie (1881), with Charles

Darwin’s thinking on the minds of birds in On the Origin of Species (1859) and The

Descent of Man (1871), in which Darwin attributed to birds the same basic capacities that

Ruskin required for artists: “strong affections, acute perception, and a taste for the beautiful” (DM V.II 108). Today’s ecologists and critics widely credit Darwin and

Ruskin as important forerunners of a modern ecological consciousness, though each has seemingly taken his place in an opposing corner on the value of anthropomorphism to ecological thought. While Darwin evidently placed humans and creatures on a cognitive continuum, Ruskin appeared to mark all projections of humanity onto nonhuman nature as false in his theory of the pathetic fallacy. I continue overturning this false conception by showing that Ruskin actually advocated personification (5.135) and the “delicate attribution of life” (5.385) in order to preserve and investigate the truths of material reality and the truths gleaned from moments of “sympathetic illusion” (as O. W. Holmes recognized) when even “the simplest forms of nature are strangely animated” (5.386). By examining Ruskin’s primary example of a successful use of a pathetic fallacy in

Wordsworth’s The Excursion, which attributes religious feeling to a bird, I establish the theory’s extension to animals as well as objects. Moreover, I consider the debate over

Ruskin’s agon with Darwinian science among Victorianist scholars such as George

Levine, Jonathon Smith, and Sharon Aranovsky Weltman by claiming, with Weltman, that Ruskin eventually accepted the truth of Darwin’s theory. However, I also add the idea that Darwin and Ruskin found common scientific and moral ground not only when it came to the importance of recognizing the thinking and feeling “spiritual natures” of

29 birds, but also when Darwin expressed Ruskinian sentiments about the value of cultivating the “higher aesthetic tastes” that he regretted his own habits of mind had allowed to atrophy.

Examining the somewhat more complicated life of the theory of the pathetic fallacy after 1900, chapter four, “The History and Theory of the Pathetic Fallacy in the

Early Twentieth Century,” explains two central paradoxes in the criticism. First, it explains how the pathetic fallacy, considered by Josephine Miles purely as a poetic expression involving an object and an attributed emotion, which she argues appeared “on every second page or so of a poet’s work” in the nineteenth century, seemingly lost all claim to dominance in the twentieth century (Miles 3). This apparent change is complicated by the fact that Ruskin’s term, ostensibly having brought about the shift in poetic practice, succumbed to harsh critiques and more or less dissipated as a prevailing critical tool. The weaknesses in Ruskin’s style, his phrasing of the theory, his ordering of poets, and his passionate moralism, all evidently hampered the theory’s continued efficacy and influence. However, I argue that significant Ruskinian values of impersonality and the dramatic presentation of interior landscapes continued covertly in the literary philosophical work of George Santayana. Through his own reading and through Santayana, T. S. Eliot absorbed significant Ruskinian concepts concerning the importance of “impersonality” and intellect for poets, as well as the idea of the “objective correlative” as a formula for creating an “interior landscape” that could transfer “a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling” (Eliot Selected

Essays 246) through poetry.

30 In chapter five, “The History and Theory of the Pathetic Fallacy from the Late-

Twentieth Century to the Present,” I explain how the theory of the pathetic fallacy, while understood and received more or less sympathetically by scholars of Victorian literature, is largely either misunderstood or ignored by critics concerned with modern ecological philosophy and literature. It is dismissed as a pathological evasion of the power of language over thought (J. Hillis Miller) and arbitrary in its application (Hecht and

Shoptaw), or as an egotistical “ban” on anthropomorphism and metaphor as tools for expressing and exploring emotional attachments to nature and to place (Everndon and

Sprung). I attempt to recuperate the central idea of the pathetic fallacy as a form of

“critical anthropomorphism” in poetry through Santayana’s ethological concept of the

“justified illusion” and Kenneth Burke’s discussion of action-motion ambiguities. I propose how the theory of the pathetic fallacy may be further explained with the help of cognitive scientists interested in theories of conceptual metaphor and cognitive linguistics. Finally, I consider how the theory actually aligns with ecological or new materialist criticism and speculative realisms. Jane Bennett suggests that “careful anthropomorphization” (Vibrant Matter 120) may assist humans seeking to transcend the

“pro-human-conatus perspective from which we apprehend the world” or, if we cannot, to “stretch and strain” such modes of apprehension “to make room for the outlooks, rhythms, and trajectories of a greater number of actants” that may allow humans to “get a better sense of the ‘operating system’ upon which we humans rely” (Bennett “Systems and Things” 231). I argue that Ruskin, too, felt that using poetic forms that could be faithful to human feeling at those moments when informed sight becomes most difficult could, in the master’s hand, enable the better “watching of human nature” (5.359).

31 In Part Two, on “Poetry,” I demonstrate how Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy may be used to help interpret bird poems. Chapter six, “The Missing of Minds in

Matthew Arnold’s ‘Poor Matthias!’” (1867), analyzes the passionate grief of Arnold’s speaker as he responds to the failure to properly project thought and feeling onto a dying bird. An elegy for Arnold’s pet canary, “Poor Matthias!” passionately pleads for recognition of the “Human suffering at our side” that like the bird’s “is undescried!” Like the bird’s suffering, “Human longings, human fears, / Miss our eyes and miss our ears”

(Arnold Poems 561). In his late pet elegies, Arnold not only rejects his earlier austere poetic style, but also discards earlier fears over identification with animality. He reflects deeply on his personal grief at the loss of the bird, which mixes with his feelings about his deceased sons. By lamenting the futility of his efforts to sympathize with Matthias’s dying loneliness, Arnold comes to recognize the degree to which projecting on others what individuals know of themselves involves “the same unskilfullness” occurring between animals and humans. For Arnold, this unskillfulness binds human and nonhuman animals ethically by appealing to sympathy with animal suffering, and involves a strong capability for vision and thought amidst violent emotion like that for which Ruskin calls in his theory of the pathetic fallacy.

“Nested Fallacies: The Pathos of the Mockingbird in Whitman’s ‘Out of the

Cradle Endlessly Rocking’” is the seventh chapter, and examines a distinctly American form of bird poem that treats and “translates” the song of a mockingbird. The poem creates a false appearance by presenting the transcription of a bird in human language (a

“translation” made slightly less fallacious by the capacity of some mockingbirds to mimic human speech). Whitman’s poem dramatically stages the pathetic fallacies admitted on

32 the part of the bird itself. The male bird’s instinctive projection of life to elements of the landscape through apostrophes, questions, and entreaties suggests that birds, like humans, also instinctively and fallaciously animate nature, and may share both the sublime exaltations of love as well as the excruciating pain of loss and grief, and perhaps even something of the melancholy of the knowledge of mortality. Observing these projections powerfully connects Whitman to the landscape and to the birds, and provides him with the philosophical and formal “clew” to his own poetic vocation as translator of the world that he then personifies as a whisperer of the mortal fate and identity he shares with the animals. I briefly relate Whitman’s treatment of the mockingbird to the remarks of John

Burroughs, a famous literary naturalist and arbiter of “the nature fakers” controversy, who suggested that Whitman’s projections of avian pathos in “Out of the Cradle” hit upon truths of animal feeling that he believed existed across species, despite being clearly fallacious in its human “translation” of bird speech.

Chapter Eight, “Prosopopoeia and Overheard Bird Speech: Theories of Animal

Lyric in G. M. Hopkins and J. S. Mill,” examines treatments of bird behavior and bird song in Gerard Manley Hopkins’s journals and in two of his bird poems, “The Sea and the Skylark” and the lesser known and unfinished “The Woodlark.” Hopkins’s ambitions to perfect the soundscapes of his poems not only labor under the metaphysical and spiritual desire to honor the Christian God as nature’s author and to purify the voice of human kind, they also bear the stamp of Ruskin’s close naturalist perception and of

Walter Pater’s notion that all art aspires to music’s unity of matter and form. “The Sea and the Skylark” provides an emblem for the type of idealistic auditory-metaphysical harmony to which Hopkins’s poetry aspired, while “The Woodlark,” the only poem in

33 which Hopkins offers an extended translation of birdsong, attempts a vocal performance that unites his formal and theological ambitions by straining human language to capture the rhythms and repetitions of bird speech and of avian consciousness. While Hopkins’s unfinished poem predictably fails to achieve all of his idealistic ambitions, “The

Woodlark” gains from being considered as a human model of avian personhood consistently overheard by humans. According to John Stuart Mill’s definition of poetry, which offers a way of thinking about lyric poems as models or theories of a person, “The

Woodlark” can be viewed as an example of how one might conceive of and model a nonhuman person. Drawing on recent conversations generated by Oren Izenberg’s discussion of lyric form as “an important site for the articulation of a new humanism” (4),

I link Hopkins’s presentation of avian personhood not only to Mill’s definition of lyric form, but to Mill’s own sympathy with animals and commitment to their natural rights as persons.

Chapter Nine, “Impersonal Impersonations: The Birds of The Waste Land,

‘Landscapes,’ and Four Quartets,” explains T. S. Eliot’s largely unnoticed fascination with birds and uses representations of birds and birdsong in his poetry to chart his

Ruskinian struggle with the personal and emotional perception of landscapes. In The

Waste Land, fragments of bird speech loosely unify through the person of Tiresias, but emerge in themselves as isolated glimpses into depressed and constrained psychological landscapes, negating Romantic associations of songbirds as emblems of a liberated poetic imagination. In “Landscapes,” a mockingbird in the still landscape of “Virginia” and the mocking performance of birdsongs in “Cape Ann” point to an intensified effort to depersonalize landscape and to restrict the self’s projection to the inevitable point at

34 which all that is left, when emotional speech is only “palaver” and “toughness” the only standard, is silence. This struggle is apparent in After Strange Gods, delivered in America during the writing of three of the five “Landscapes,” and interacts with Eliot’s thinking on the mockingbird as a superior emblem for the impersonal poet in the 1930s. Finally, working with Sharon Cameron’s discussion of the radically impersonal style of Four

Quartets, I argue that “Burnt Norton” and “Little Gidding” deepen Eliot’s experiment with the ambiguities of avian and human speech, uniting the two through the thrush’s refrain of “Quick now, here, now always–.” Eliot partly resolves his struggle to restrict the personalization and humanization of nature by finding an embodiment of faith in substantial reality and meaningful activity in the landscape through the seemingly timeless activity birds. I liken these faithful, meaningful, timeless qualities, inherent in the thrush’s refrain, to George Santayana’s discussion of “animal faith,” a philosophical justification for significant emotional experiences of reality as a necessary supplement to skepticism as form of belief.

In Chapter Ten, “Other Voices: Extending the Method,” I suggest other authors and bird poems, and conduct short readings, that extend the scope of my argument and the relevance of the method I develop. I deal at somewhat greater length with a few significant poems by Wallace Stevens before considering works by Robert Frost,

Robinson Jeffers, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and A. R. Ammons, forgoing equally relevant works by Elizabeth Bishop, W. S. Merwin, and Jorie Graham, to name a few. I briefly note the continued disparagement of Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy by ecocritics like John Shoptaw, who are enthusiastic audiences of such poems, even as

35 Forrest Gander, Beverly Bie Brahic, and Marie Ponsot thematize the pathetic fallacy as potentially “positive” and enabling of vision, each explicitly with regard to birds.

In a brief Epilogue, I consider the pressure under which passionate personifications of animals are put in the intense contemporary context of mass species extinction. The idea of Earth’s sixth mass extinction event or the potential beginning of a cataclysmic human-caused extinction cascade should evidently concern humans and extends to concerns over bird populations, since birds perform important ecological actions for practical human purposes as pollinators, seed dispersers, pest controllers, and many other direct and indirect services. I offer short readings of two bird poems by Mark

Jarman and Theodore Roethke that point to ways in which feeling can lead to action, in which extinction can lead to mourning, and in which language can point to reality.

36

History and Theory

37

Chapter 2: The History and Theory of the Pathetic Fallacy

in the Nineteenth Century

Introduction:

If literary critics know one thing about John Ruskin, it is that he coined the term

“pathetic fallacy.” No aspect of Ruskin’s literary criticism has been more influential or controversial than this theory. Formerly, critics wielded the term to accuse poets of sentimentality for allowing personifications of nature. Later, major poets and critics came to accuse Ruskin’s theory itself of fallaciousness, as nothing more or less than a belittling of metaphor, the heart of poetry. Practically, the term has sunk into apparent irrelevance, its history seemingly subsumed as a blip within a wide and ever widening body of work on theories of poetry and metaphor. Nevertheless, no modern history of the once omnipresent theory of the pathetic fallacy has been written. Its current status in literary criticism as a minor and more or less “neutral name for a procedure in which human traits are ascribed to natural objects,” according to M. H. Abrams’s Glossary of Literary Terms

(241-242), suggests why the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics cites the

“overall weariness of the concept in [contemporary] usage” (Burris 1010). However, in

Ruskin’s day the idea carried a powerful critical force, stemming the tide of a poetry seen as indulging in moralizing sentimentality and that some worried would “break up our poetry into so many foam-wreaths of loose, luxuriant images” (Noël 621). So what led to the decline in the use of the term “pathetic fallacy” among poets and critics?

Ruskin’s multi-faceted but unsystematic style, his oversized thirty-nine volume oeuvre, as well as the supersession of Ruskin’s dispersed theories by more cogent modern

38 ones, have rendered a fair accounting of Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy, at once

“so suggestive and at the same time so confusing” (Payson Morton 63, 1900), an elusive task. For one thing, the rigidity of Ruskin’s rhetoric, its ideas always stated definitely and sometimes contradictorily, alienated even sympathetic critics. Similarly, the difficulties of Ruskin’s personal life, which William James and Charles Eliot Norton both viewed as eminently tragic in the figure they revered, render some of Ruskin’s later statements untrustworthy (Babbit 384; Letters of William James 206-207). This is especially true after as his mental health declined after the death of Rose La Touche (1875) and after his unsuccessful defense against the Whistler libel suit (1877-1878). Whatever the reason, calls by scholars to “think more positively about the pathetic fallacy than is customary,” by which they meant both Ruskin’s critical theory and the state of mind that Ruskin himself allowed could create false appearances, have largely fallen on deaf ears (P. Ball

2; also, Bloom xxv-xxvii; Landow 379-390; Miles vii). This silence on the pathetic fallacy registers as a particular absence in the turn toward ecological criticism, in that little to no work has been done to reconcile the theory (interpreted as a backwards and idiosyncratic belittling of the metaphorical extension of emotion to nature) with its founder, an early advocate of ecological awareness. In reality, Ruskin’s theory seeks to energize close attention to appearances of matter that could contribute to the effects of what critics now term ecological or eco-poetry, and it will be my task to point out where some of his essential insights remain salient, and in whose work they became part of the basis for major modernist theories of poetry.

The term pathetic fallacy first appears in the third volume of John Ruskin’s

Modern Painters (1856). Ruskin defines the pathetic fallacy as a falseness in human

39 impressions (fallacy) produced by violent feelings (pathos). He analyses a representative example from Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke, in which the title character of the novel composes lines of poetry that refer to the perception of sea-foam by a grieving lover as

“cruel, crawling foam.” Ruskin dryly notes that

The foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl. The state of mind which attributes to it these characters of a living creature is one in which reason is unhinged by grief. All violent feelings have the same effect. They produce in us a falseness in all our impressions of external things, which I would generally characterize as the “pathetic fallacy.” (MP III 5.205)

The shortest possible definition of the pathetic fallacy that remains faithful to Ruskin’s language in this passage is: a general term denoting the falseness in human impressions of external things produced as the effect of violent feelings (especially as represented in art and poetry). One may also note the unreasonable “state of mind” as constitutive of any definition, a state of mind attributing to things “characters” that they do not possess.

However, it should be noted that this example from Kingsley, while attributing to it the

“characters of a living creature,” is not necessarily attributing uniquely human characteristics, nor are such characteristics of living creatures defined as the only sorts of false appearances that could constitute a pathetic fallacy. With this important point in mind, we may proceed by looking at the state of mind, and the instinct that produces it, as

Ruskin’s psychological concern.

Speaking of a violently emotional state of mind as producing “false appearances .

. . entirely unconnected with any real power in the object, and only imputed to it by us”

(5.204), may strike a modern ear as assuming that an un-emotional and “real” or “true” appearance is actually apprehensible, which would simply make Ruskin a naive realist.

Indeed, some have taken Ruskin’s introductory rejection of the terms subject and object

40 in the pathetic fallacy chapter, which mocks both idealist German philosophy and its

Coleridgean interpretation, as evidence for this view. But Ruskin’s emphasis on “false appearance” is not a denial of the contingency of all appearance upon the mediation of embodied sight, but a recognition of normal appearances against the hyper-subjectivism that would deny the existence of a real material world on the basis of their own mediated and contingent account of it, that would “believe, and say, that everything in the world depends upon his seeing or thinking of it, and that nothing, therefore, exists, but what he sees or thinks of” (5.202). What Ruskin means by a false appearance resulting from violent emotions is a moment of perceptual rupture in what usually “seems so” to an individual, a distortion of what is normative (5.203). This distortion of the everyday and rational appearance of foam as lifeless matter lacking thought and intention is different from the self-conscious borrowing from another domain of experience to artistically view that foam differently or more vividly through the use of metaphor, though it shares with poetry the same cognitive source in imaginative projection.

That Ruskin’s concern with the pathetic fallacy involves conceptual metaphor and a convincing psychological phenomenon related to the effect of “landscape” “upon any mind,” and not with deliberate linguistic uses of metaphor as such, cannot be stressed enough (5.200). To make this distinction apparent, Ruskin frames pathetic fallacies as distinct from fallacies of “wilful fancy.” Ruskin refers to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s

“spendthrift crocus” as a fallacy of “wilful fancy” since it uses metaphor in such a way that it “involves no real expectation that it will be believed” (5.205). Holmes’s false appearance, Ruskin wrote, is comprehended as a deliberate use of metaphor for poetic effect. Therefore, Holmes’s crocus does not offend because it does not seem to coerce the

41 reader with any pretense of serious conviction that the flower is anything other than a flower (5.204).1 By contrast, the pathetic fallacy involves expectation that it will be believed. It is produced by, and may in turn produce, more or less irrational beliefs in intensely passionate minds. While Ruskin did not believe that anyone could ultimately escape this essentially human weakness, he argued that poets who too quickly or easily invested belief in their own unconsidered, passionate, and inattentive perceptions were subject to admitting falseness in their poetry instead of raising their poetry to a more ambitious vision, and therefore did not become seers capable of guiding human thought, but deceivers entangling good people in bad metaphysics (5.208, 5.359).

However, Ruskin granted that pathetic fallacies had their uses when taken as self- conscious aspects of personae or “characters imagined,” i.e., as essentially dramatic forms. For instance, Ruskin’s critique of Pope has been taken as a particularly strong and unfair attack on the pathetic fallacy by many of Ruskin’s interpreters. However,

Ulysses’s attribution of nimbleness to sails and laziness to wind in Pope’s translation is particularly offensive to Ruskin precisely because it is “not a pathetic fallacy, at all” but because such attributions are presented as coming from a character devoid of violent passion but in a state of “agonized curiosity,” and are therefore “put into the mouth of the wrong passion” (5.207). To Ruskin, Ulysses’s dramatic scene called neither for deliberate poetic ornamentation nor a pathetic fallacy, and therefore rings utterly false. Ruskin

1 Ruskin quotes the full passage from Holmes: “The spendthrift crocus, bursting through the mould / Naked and shivering, with his cup of gold.” Ruskin states that this expression “is very beautiful, and yet very untrue. The crocus is not a spendthrift, but a hardy plant; its yellow is not gold, but saffron. How is it that we enjoy so much the having it put into our heads that it is anything else than a plain crocus? It is an important question” (5.204).

42 returns to the example from Kingsley to demonstrate a successful use of the pathetic fallacy.

If you were to view a young man whose beloved had drowned, and who, upon seeing her wet body rowed across the water, thought that the foam on the waves was heartless and hungry, you would understand that the lover’s grief had inspired his momentary belief in the cruelty of nature. You would understand that the lover’s attribution of cruelty, while technically false, was true to his feeling. Therefore, the pathetic fallacy would serve as a proper mode of expressing emotion in a poetic character or persona. This is precisely Ruskin’s narratological point about the pathetic fallacy. He writes,

so long as we see that the feeling is true, we pardon, or are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight which it induces: we are pleased, for instance, with those lines of Kingsley’s above quoted, not because they fallaciously describe foam, but because they faithfully describe sorrow. (5.210)

The poet who crafts pathetic fallacies in order to present the personal and irrational states of mind of their characters are justified or unjustified, according to Ruskin, if the fallacy seems consistent with “the genuineness of the emotion from which it springs” (5.218). He gives another example of such a dramatic use of a pathetic fallacy in Delavigne’s “La

Toilette de Constance,” this time within a lyric persona. The poet-narrator “stands by, impassive as a statue” recording events without a single “poetical (so called) expression” until, in the presence of the fiery death of a young girl who is the subject of the poem, he records “no longer the facts only, but the facts as they seem to him” and the fire begins to

“gnaw voluptuously––without pity” (5.215). For Ruskin, Delavigne displayed the “exact type of the consummate poetical temperament” having a great “acuteness of feeling” and a great “command of it” (5.215). It is only those poets who “much delight” in pathetic 43 fallacies in their own voice whom Ruskin viewed as lacking even modest control over their feelings. Ruskin’s ideal poet showed greater control not by a comparative lack of passion but by the ability to “feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly” (5.209). For

Ruskin, first order poets avoid allowing their own precise observation of nature to be distorted by emotion, and they desire not to deceive others by misrepresenting their faithful account of reality.

It follows, therefore, that Ruskin believed that poets should be able to feel as deeply as those who, with lesser powers of reflection in intensity, are overcome by emotion. Indeed, he wrote that it is “no credit” to a person that he or she is morbid

(meaning false) in perception without strength of feeling to “warp” it. In general, Ruskin wrote that it is “a sign of higher capacity and stand in the ranks of being, that the emotions should be strong enough to vanquish, partly, the intellect” (5.208). Ruskin even thought that it would be inhuman for the governance of strong feeling to be present always, thereby disallowing any possibility of being overcome and being put into an irrational state of mind. However self-governed a poet may be, “there are always some subjects which ought to throw him off his balance” (5.215), such as the death of a lover or an innocent youth, or the perceived presence of divinity, or passionate love, or in his final and most “exquisite” example, the loneliness of a spurned lover perceiving constancy and love in a bird. It is in the extremity of emotion, “when the soul cries out for relief,” partly knowing that something is impossible but partly believing that it might be possible, since one knows not what is possible for such emotion as he or she experiences, that the pathetic fallacy is most justified in those with strongest reason and sight (5.217). Coming to this pluralist and qualified conclusion, Ruskin can only provide

44 a continuum to generally guide appreciation of a pathetic fallacy, which will be

“powerful only so far as it is pathetic, feeble so far as it is fallacious” (5.220). The poet fixed upon the pure fact, who sustains a reasoned interpretation of reality even in the exhilaration of “whatever and how many soever associations and passions may be that crowd around it” (5.209), achieves Ruskin’s ideal for poetry, as the poet strains to faithfully represent humanity locked in a scrutinizing and emotionally powerful vision of material reality up to the point that human reason and perception fails, and poetry wildly grasps at the unknown.

With this understanding of the pathetic fallacy in place––a false appearance induced by violent emotion that is true so far as it realizes emotion overwhelming the intellect––I aim to provide a view of the excitement and controversy this term produced in the nineteenth century. By placing the term within its Victorian literary and aesthetic context, I clarify the intervention it made and the value it had for poets and poetry reacting to Romantic sentimentality. I also begin to establish Ruskin’s concept as a seminal statement of aesthetic values that would help shape poetry in the next century.

The theory of the pathetic fallacy essentially urged or modeled the reformation of poetry in the image of science as advocated by T. S. Eliot, and was influential in addressing the way in which poetic treatments of visual landscapes allowed for a less conventional and less rhetorical poetry (what Marshall McLuhan called the “interior landscape” or “le paysage interieur” as developed by Rimbaud, Baudelaire, and Laforgue) which was essential to Eliot’s poetry and his theory of the “objective correlative.”

45

Early Excitement and Controversy, 1856-1900

I begin this section by examining two representative reviews of Ruskin’s volumes of Modern Painters III and IV, each published in 1856. In an unsigned article in the

Westminster Review of April 1856, three months after the publication of Modern Painters

III and IV, George Eliot expressed her admiration for Ruskin, singling out his theory of the pathetic fallacy for special mention. Amused by his occasional absurdities, illogicalities, and unsteady valuations of this or that author, Eliot nevertheless wrote that

“We value a writer not in proportion to his freedom from faults, but in proportion to his positive excellences – to the variety of thought he contributes and suggests, to the amount of gladdening and energizing emotions he excites” (George Eliot 180). The future novelist saw an inspiring truth of “infinite value” preached in Ruskin’s prose: “realism– the doctrine that all truth and beauty are to be attained by a humble and faithful study of nature, and not by substituting vague forms, bred by imagination on the mists of feeling, in place of definite, substantial reality” (180). Indeed, while Ruskin appeared as the quintessential theorist of Victorian realism, he was also the champion of the gothic and an advocate of greater use of symbolism and personification in painting. For Ruskin, realism meant eschewing “vague” forms. However, realism also meant understanding that “false appearances,” employed by the greatest poets, could more powerfully convey definite emotions in response to real limits imposed by human perception and thought. A burden of the theory of the pathetic fallacy, therefore, was to install a precise, informed, and self-conscious use of metaphor as the most admirable response to reality. Referring to the mechanism of the pathetic fallacy as the “transference to external objects of the

46 spectator’s own emotions,” George Eliot recognized that Ruskin viewed fallacies as indices to the strength of a poet’s feeling, sight, and thought. She seemed to agree with

Ruskin that the mental state that used false appearances did so most effectively by making them appear inevitable by being particularly true to an aspect of experience, not resorting to a convenient metaphor as a deflection of reality (181).

George Eliot’s short but sympathetic and generous review valued Ruskin’s new theory as an exciting principle at home with Victorian realism that advocated an intellect

“strong enough to assert its rule against” equally strong emotions (181-182). This review contrasts with that of Lady Eastlake, who excoriated Ruskin’s new volumes in May of

1856. A familiar of Euphemia Chalmers Millais, Ruskin’s ex-wife, Lady Eastlake accused Ruskin in the Quarterly Review of expressing “all the qualities of premature old age,” “an overbearing spirit,” “crotchedy contradictions,” and “peevish paradoxes”

(Rigby 187). In a backhanded compliment, Eastlake likened Ruskin’s aging mind to the

“often charming” spectacle of conflict between “the arrogance and timidity of a juvenile reasoner” (Rigby 187). To her mind, Ruskin’s championing of J. M. W. Turner seemed a dishonest and disingenuous work of self-promotion masquerading as vindication on behalf of an artist who had already enjoyed “the unfeigned and unstinted admiration of every British artist worthy of the name” (Rigby 189). Though Eastlake’s disdain for

Ruskin led to particularly vicious rhetoric, her critiques were not exceptional.

By and large representative, Eliot’s and Eastlake’s reviews reflect the healthy amount of support and opposition that Ruskin attracted in the 1850s. As the editors of

Ruskin: The Critical Heritage (RCH) remark, the “weeklies treated him quite roughly” in

1856, and the Athenaeum, an old enemy, berated his logic and style (RCH 13). Yet,

47 others reflected favorably upon the long-awaited third volume of a work that had first

“startled the Art-loving public by its brilliant eloquence, daring originality of thought, and want of reverence for great names” (RCH 199) in 1843. Ruskin’s status as “one of the finest writers of our day” (RCH 179) remained worthily intact in the Eclectic Review, which stated that Ruskin “succeeded in persuading many to embrace those views of Art which he has himself adopted; and with reference to landscape painting especially, has effected a reformation – almost a revolution – in the popular judgment” (RCH 199-200).2

Indeed, Ruskin’s reformation of taste in visual art was the more obvious one at the time.

However, as Eliot’s review intimates, the theory of the pathetic fallacy had begun a parallel intervention, if not reformation, of literary aesthetics, including an increased scrutiny of the natural theological philosophy that the Romantic aesthetic had been used to preserve and support.

Ruskin’s critical approach to the psychological effects of literature and landscape combined with his realist sensibilities upset established norms of poetic animation of nature common not only in Romantic poetry but also in natural theological and devotional poetry and practice. As a result, Rev. Edward Young’s Pre-Raffealitism; or, A

Popular Inquiry into Some Newly-Asserted Principles Connected With The Philosophy,

Poetry, Religion, and Revolution of Art (1857) contains the earliest theological objections to the pathetic fallacy as part of Young’s much larger and more general objection to

2 Those seeking a fuller assessment of “Ruskin’s reputation in the Eighteen-Fifties” may inspect J. D. Jump’s article of that title, which concludes that while Ruskin was no “Art- Dictator” in the decade, as a well-regarded and the most popularly known Victorian writer on art, his writings clearly merited serious consideration (678-685). 48 Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites.3 Young mocked the theory of the pathetic fallacy as symptomatic of the disenchantment enforced by Ruskin’s clinical and irreverent way of speaking about art and nature. Young wrote:

The faculty of perception is inconceivably above the natural object it embraces; thought is immeasurably beyond perception; feeling is far higher and nobler than thought: what shall be said of a system that reduces poetic communing with nature into “the pathetic fallacy;” would hand over to something like contempt those words of the great poet [Milton], about “an injury and sullenness against Nature not to go forth and see her rejoicings;” and reserves its raptures for “hill anatomy” (75-76)

From the vantage point of Rev. Young, Ruskin’s theory elevated the natural object over the human and the divine, and elevated disinterested thought over religious feeling.

Ruskin’s primary failing is not a lack of accuracy, therefore, but “a want of special sympathy with the grand, the solemn, the tender, and the beautiful; a want of keeping things in their right places, a want of distinguishing the master chords from the inconsequential notes of Nature's music” (76). In short, Young felt that Ruskin was giving up the necessary and necessarily vague faith in the idea of communion with a substantial, divinely animated Nature and calling such belief fallacious. Dissections of poetic projections onto landscapes, to Rev. Young, worked against the cause of drawing attention to Nature’s music in the first place. But Young’s objections in many ways constituted an internal dispute.

3 Like Lady Eastlake, Rev. Young had felt personally abused by Ruskin, this time for a slight printed in the addenda to Ruskin’s “Edinburgh Lectures” that objected to Young’s opinion of the Pre-Raphaelites. Reverend of Trinity College, Cambridge, Young treated the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, “over and above its moral delinquencies, of arrogance, bigotry, and destructiveness,” as a movement pandering “to the downward tendency of the age” (qtd. in Ruskin 12.164). These slights, at least in part, were provoked by Ruskin’s championing of the brotherhood and dismissal of one of the Reverend’s still earlier chastisements of the group. 49 Like Young, Ruskin believed that scientific pursuits were to blame if they restrained “higher contemplation” (5.386). Truly, unlike Young, Ruskin placed a much higher value on the capacity of “scientific pursuits” to “[raise] us from the first state of inactive reverie to the second of useful thought” (5.386). For Ruskin, useful thought dispelled inactive reverie, but useful thought plus free contemplation resulted in something still “higher.” Therefore, Ruskin took pride in consistently honing perception through scientific knowledge alongside an equally disciplined “innocence of the eye.”

Such discipline, he thought, allowed him to resist or surpass the deadening certainty of

“mere” scientific description, and to resist or surpass dogmatic and unthinking certainty in vague religious abstractions. In one sense, therefore, Ruskin had imbibed even more fully than Young the idea that all of nature possessed the same divine “living power” that humans possessed, and he pursued its realization more strenuously. Ruskin’s more passionate pursuit of the origins of his perception of a “living power” in Nature directly animated his writing of the better part of Modern Painters III, devoted as it is to a history of the “landscape instinct” and its metaphorizing and personification of natural forces.

But because Ruskin saw that the experience of a “living power” in nature rested on the human imagination of that living power, he needed the theory of the pathetic fallacy to draw a distinction between its more suspicious and more sacred expressions, which he did through a delineation of its inspiration of “noble emotions.”

Developing the theory of the pathetic fallacy satisfied in Ruskin his sense that sacred experiences of a living power in nature were formed through human perception and imagination, and no less real or important for the fact, but less authentic in proportion to the intelligence and vision of the person who sought them. The theory’s entire thrust is

50 to engage the poet, not the orthodox clergyman, in the more self-conscious pursuit of only the most sincere and genuine experiences of “the simplest forms of nature” as they become “strangely animated by the sense of the Divine presence” (5.386). Reverend

Young rejected Ruskin’s implication that obtaining religious moods from Nature and poetry was potentially indistinguishable from “communing with God,” and stated that

Ruskin’s ignoble Pre-Raphaelite program ushered in a “‘new earth’ but with no ‘new heaven’” (316). Responses like Young’s may have led the anonymous reviewer in The

London Review of 1860 to state “No part of Ruskin’s work has been so anxiously criticized by men really interested in the subject, as the chapter ‘On the Pathetic

Fallacy;’” with its “novel mode of apprehending nature” (The London Review 79).

Indeed, this 1860 reviewer credits Ruskin as the first to have noticed and named the modern employment of the idea of nature as a living creature on a wide scale as opposed to the separate nature-force divinities of the Greco-Roman pantheons (e.g.,

Poseidon for water, and zephyrs for winds). “The ancients never regarded nature as a living organized creature;” he writes, while “the moderns do so continually” (79). But, instead of casting Ruskin’s theory as an assault on natural theology and sympathy with nature, this reviewer thought that Ruskin explicated a method for the “intensification of metaphor” that expressed an “intense sympathy” with nature and its “exhaustless beauty”

(80). Equally untroubled by the glimmers of agnosticism in Ruskin’s theory, this reviewer grasped that Ruskin found himself and his generation endlessly and intensely sympathetic with material nature. However, The London Review’s competent outline of

Ruskin’s entire aesthetic program in Modern Painters emphasizes Ruskin’s feeling for nature at the expense of his critique of the weaknesses of overwhelmed states of mind

51 that too often delight in false appearances. For instance, the reviewer takes it for granted that

This intense sympathy with nature seems to be a new fact of the world,––a gain and an advance; modern sentiment is not to be depreciated; and it may be questioned whether any poet, however great in creative power, will ever be either able or desirous to escape its conditions. The fact is to be accepted, that the tendency of the poetical intellect of mankind is to make a symbol of nature. (80)

The reviewer is clearly responding to Ruskin’s historical argument that the modern regard for nature as a “living organized creature” resulted from incremental developments and aesthetic discoveries of earlier artists and thinkers. Ruskin did, in fact, eventually define the sacred, symbolic animation of nature as an improvement over ancient and medieval art and thought. Yet Ruskin’s more critical purpose was here left unanalyzed, which was to check poets’ habitual recourse to false appearances in coldness of emotion, or out of the turning away from a perceptual difficulty. Sympathy with nature was well and good, but thinking about the organization of matter, and the matter of organisms, actually resulted in truer perceptions that could be worked into poetry with greater symbolic power. A sentimental weakness for “weeping” (Keats) or “lonely”

(Wordsworth) clouds, or “blithe spirit[s]” in the form of nightingales, dispensed with true appearances altogether too quickly for Ruskin’s taste. In its glowing forty-eight page praise of “the greatest English prose work of this generation,” therefore, the London

Review was less concerned with this more critical and potentially confusing aspect of

Ruskin’s theory, and more concerned with placing Modern Painters as the third of the

“three interpretations … given by man to man.” After Plato’s interpretation of the soul and Bacon’s interpretation of nature, they added Ruskin’s interpretation of art (110-111).

52 On the other side of the Atlantic, Ralph Waldo Emerson developed a somewhat similar idea after Ruskin, whom Emerson had met during a trip to England and greatly admired. In “Poetry and Imagination” (1872), Emerson was predictably more at peace with the idea that “The world is thoroughly anthropomorphized, as if it had passed through the body and mind of man, and taken his mould and form” (733). There was no question with Emerson, as has been the case with Ruskin, that he had realized the import of Kant’s Copernican revolution and the contingency of any account of the real upon human cognitive capacities. For Emerson, people organized their lives according to honest fables constructed through the faith they invest in symbols drawn from experiences in and projections onto nature. By virtue of its human source, according to

Emerson, “good poetry is always personification, and heightens every species of force in

Nature by giving it a human volition” (733). But lest Emerson should seem completely sanguine about the dependence of human reality and human meaning upon subjective transformations of nature into symbol––and therefore out of step with Ruskin’s argument for admitting a greater place for scientific scrutiny in aesthetic and poetic practice––we should understand Emerson’s distinction between fanciful play (Ruskin’s “inactive reverie”) and the higher possibilities of creative imagination.

Of the “problem of metaphysics to define the province of Fancy and Imagination”

(Coleridgean terms Emerson thought were often used and often confounded), Emerson stated,

Imagination respects the cause. It is the vision of an inspired soul reading arguments and affirmations in all Nature of that which it is driven to say. But as soon as this soul is released a little from its passion, and at leisure plays with the resemblances and types, for amusement, and not for its moral end, we call its action Fancy. (735)

53 Emerson personifies Nature in this very argument, as Ruskin also often did, suggesting that Nature, also, speaks. Emerson therefore praised imagination as central, spontaneous, expanding, and exalting in human kind, while fancy is superficial, wilful, amusing, and idle. The personifications that truly heighten the forces of nature by investing them with human volition do so through imagination, which “animates,” not fancy, which merely

“aggregates.”

Most of all, because imagination is not wilful but spontaneous, Emerson thought that poets must be sincere to their own account of a real felt relation between a thought and some material fact, since only those false appearances in which the poet in some sense truly believes will satisfy the demand for veracity to human nature. As Emerson expressed the desire, “I do not wish, therefore, to find that my poet … would kindle or amuse me with that which does not kindle or amuse him. He must believe in his poetry”

(Emerson 735). Emerson’s Romantic theory of the 1870s gives less of the impression that there is an inherent deficiency in presenting “false appearances” in poetry so long as the ultimate result is passionate and sincere and “respects the cause.” Ruskin’s combative personal style, and arguably, his Romantic literary context, called for his stronger statement of the case, but his meaning in his earlier statements is generally consistent with Emerson’s.

Recognizing the parallel between Ruskin and Emerson, Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote appreciatively of the abundance of pathetic fallacies in Emerson’s poetry in 1886, thinking it unfortunate that “The expression employed by Ruskin gives the idea that he is dealing with a defect.” Holmes proposed that, instead, “if [Ruskin] had called the state of mind to which he refers the sympathetic illusion, his readers might have looked upon it

54 more justly” (Holmes 337).4 Holmes’s proposal marks “sympathy” as the operative emotion involved in the state of mind as opposed to violent “pathos” more generally, but helpfully subverts the potential to interpret “fallacy,” meant by Ruskin to mean “false appearance,” as a logical fallacy. Therefore, Holmes’s alternative of “sympathetic illusion” works as a term of approbation for thoughtful and sincere poetic figuration, describing the feature of illusion that had been important since Kant’s statement that

“Poetry plays with illusion, which it produces at will, and yet without using illusion to deceive us” (qtd. in Penny 382-383). Both Ruskin and Emerson, operating from a broadly

Romantic paradigm of natural theology, ultimately believed in the moral promise of the poetic imagination as it accelerated poetry toward the sincere construction of ideals for life in Nature, relating to Nature as an animate and speaking person.

If this latter description of landscape still sounds more Emersonian than

Ruskinian in its poetic heightening of “every species of force in Nature by giving it a human volition” (733), it is probably because most scholars and critics casually looking into the matter of the pathetic fallacy rarely read “The Moral of Landscape” in Modern

Painters III to find Ruskin’s eventual embrace of poetic animations of nature. This chapter concludes his earlier investigation into the curious effect of landscape “on any mind” (5.200) that Ruskin began with the “Of the Pathetic Fallacy” chapter as a mere

“prefatory inquiry” (5.220). In “The Moral of Landscape,” Ruskin notes how Christ’s admonition to consider the lilies of the field in the Sermon on the Mount states that the wild flowers “toil not” (Matthew 6:28). Ruskin sees in Christ’s words “precisely the

4 Oliver Wendell Holmes states that in Emerson’s poetry “there is always a mirage in the horizon” (336) and that the pathetic fallacy “may be found almost anywhere” in Emerson (337).

55 delicate attribution of life which we have seen to be characteristic of the modern view of landscape” (5.385), an animating impulse that is in fact childish but profound. Glossing this example, Ruskin restates his qualified appreciation of the pathetic fallacy in a yet more appreciative light, understanding that the animating “landscape instinct,” indeed, often manifests as a product of sympathy and illusion rather than violent emotion and unreason.

And we see in this [example of the flowers], therefore, that the instinct which leads us thus to attribute life to the lowest forms of organic nature, does not necessarily spring from faithlessness, nor the deducing a moral out of them from an irregular and languid conscientiousness. In this, as in almost all things connected with moral discipline, the same results may follow from contrary causes; and as there are a good and evil contentment, a good and evil discontent, a good and evil care, fear, ambition, and so on, there are also good and evil forms of this sympathy with nature, and disposition to moralize over it. (MP III 5.385)

For Ruskin, imagining an animated nature could be authentic in its capacity to enliven a moral point. However, given the acknowledged plurality of reasons and methods for animating nature, he acknowledged that it could be difficult to generalize about the moral of the fundamental instinct at all. Always seeking to move beyond pluralism to definite judgment, however, Ruskin reiterated his previous pragmatic belief that the practical results of the moral symbols one extracted from nature mattered most. So, one could make general statements about the dispositions of those who tended to either exhibit the instinct in a morbid and languid or in a more “sacred” way. In effect, Ruskin attempts to make a moral out of uniting the scientific and “useful” temper with the creative and artistic temper, effecting the union by authenticating the landscape experience that could be expected to be common to both.

Ruskin begins by describing types of persons whose “strong sense and stern principle” find nothing “new or notable” in the symbolizations of material nature, which 56 they accept without contemplation. A very different second type possesses a “morbid temperament, like Shelley’s,” which regards trees as sentient and begins to “enunciate moral aphorisms over every pebble they stumble against” (5.385). The third type, which roughly corresponds to the first order of poets from the pathetic fallacy chapter, achieves something new––the sacred landscape experience:

But when the active life is nobly fulfilled, and the mind is then raised beyond it into clear and calm beholding of the world around us, the same tendency again manifests itself in the most sacred way: the simplest forms of nature are strangely animated by the sense of the Divine presence; the trees and flowers seem all, in a sort, children of God; and we ourselves, their fellows, made out of the same dust, and greater than they only in having a greater portion of the Divine power exerted on our frame, and all the common uses and palpably visible forms of things, become subordinate in our minds to their inner glory,—to the mysterious voices in which they talk to us about God, and the changeful and typical aspects by which they witness to us of holy truth, and fill us with obedient, joyful, and thankful emotion. (MP III 5.385-386)

Although Ruskin maintained the “strong presumption” of morbidity whenever he first detected the usual poetic and moralistic tropes, he very clearly granted that an enlightened animation of nature also occurs, usually in those who are actively employed by affairs of the world. These active minds, in active bodies, may clearly and calmly behold the world, and their impulse to perceive nature’s life was stripped of the egotism, personality, and sentimentality of the temperament that merely fancies the world as superficially vital for its own enjoyment. This deeper animation of the simplest forms of nature does not deceive, to Ruskin, but speaks to a fundamental truth of unity of visible forms “made out of the same dust.” Ruskin speaks of this ecological truth in religious rhetoric, but its truth may be affirmed regardless of theological outlook, which is the essential unity of humanity with all the rest of nonhuman nature, and the potential that this unity possessed for inspiring humble, joyful, and thankful emotions that also

57 heightened nature to the senses. Indeed, because Ruskin held that the achievement of this landscape experience as a moral good required a coupling of the scientific and artistic mind, Ruskin allowed that there was an “exact relation between landscape painting and natural science” that he attempted to outline.

Ruskin expressed the typically Romantic fears over secular disenchantment and the tendency of science “to chill and subdue the feelings, and to resolve all things into atoms and numbers” (5.386). He worried that the settled ideas of science potentially restrained and checked “impulses towards higher contemplation.” But Ruskin was also committed to the idea that so long as scientific minds could remain consistent with higher contemplation, both were to be actively pursued, but such consistency came “only by an effort” and against the nature of each. Ruskin readily admitted that “For most men, an ignorant enjoyment is better than an informed one,” and he doubted whether “any one who knows optics, however religious he may be, can feel in equal degree the pleasure or reverence which an unlettered peasant may feel at the sight of a rainbow” (5.387). But this was not to say that the cultivation of accuracy and the gaining of information, as well as religious experience, was not in itself desirable or possible, but rare and the result of effort. Indeed, Ruskin’s own observations had taught him that there was one merciful and natural fact that encouraged the effort.

Ruskin felt that nature’s mysteries were unfathomable. Nature’s ultimate impenetrability to human attempts to sufficiently inform themselves about it was a merciful state of affairs manifesting as a moral good. For Ruskin, “the law of life, for a finite being, with respect to the works of an infinite one, must be always an infinite ignorance,” meaning that “the mystery of a single flower” would remain in some respects

58 always a mystery hidden within the quotidian. This fact of human ignorance meant that, whatever the design of empirical investigation, “the pursuit of science should constantly be stayed by the love of beauty, and accuracy of knowledge by tenderness of emotion”

(5.386-387). Indeed, for Ruskin, this mystery and beauty in nature was not in danger of being exhausted by explanations of human experience through the mechanics of human cognition and aesthetics.

Ruskin claimed that mastery of the mechanics of presentation in order to inspire emotions and experiences constituted art in the same way that the mastery of the scientific method, as championed by Francis Bacon, constituted science. To speak of the love of beauty as “in all respects unscientific” (5.387), therefore, insulted the idea that there could be a more or less refined aesthetic sensibility. Such sensibility, in fact, was the result of observation and education about nature, including human nature:

[F]or there is a science of the aspects of things, as well as of their nature; and it is as much a fact to be noted in their constitution, that they produce such and such an effect upon the eye or heart (as, for instance, that minor scales of sound cause melancholy), as that they are made up of certain atoms or vibrations of matter. (5.387)

Nevertheless, even if certain aspects of things produced definite aesthetic responses, a viewer’s knowledge that a thing consisted of “certain atoms or vibrations of matter” could transform its effect, and the more complex the art, the more liable to this sort of variability it would seem to be. This fact did not strike Ruskin as a threat to the idea of a

“science of the aspects,” but as a point to be acknowledged in order to deepen investigations into aesthetic effects of art and literature. Ruskin’s “The Nature of Gothic” displays the enactment of this conviction well, as Ruskin makes arguments for the organizations and formations of individuals and societies who produced Gothic art more

59 than any universal value of Gothic art in itself. Nevertheless, after his statement on the science of the aspects Ruskin goes on:

It is as the master of this science of Aspects, that I said, some time ago, Turner must eventually be named always with Bacon, the master of the science of Essence. As the first poet who has, in all their range, understood the grounds of noble emotion which exist in landscape… (5.387)

Ruskin more positively defined poetry in the next volume of Modern Painters as “the suggestion by the imagination of noble grounds for the noble emotions” (Ruskin 6.28).

This earlier passage citing Turner as the first “poet” to have understood “the grounds of noble emotion which exist in landscape,” however, hints toward the essential scientific grounding of noble emotions in Nature itself. Ruskin’s tautological definition does little more than point to visible nature as the source of the forms that become meaningful to humans when re-presented in art. The nobility of the emotions being grounded in Nature is what makes the definition interesting. For, it is not the actual nobility of Nature, but the mere “suggestion by the imagination” that nature inspires nobility, which allows Ruskin to maintain his Romantic faith in the midst of his increasingly naturalistic worldview.

Ruskin published his theory of the pathetic fallacy precisely at a time when his religious faith, imbued in him by his strict Evangelical mother, was waning to the point of agnosticism. Immediately after his experience of being “unconverted” in 1858 (29.89),

Ruskin turned to social and economic writing in Unto This Last (1860), which showed a marked concern with the material conditions of labor and the one common wealth of

“Life!” as opposed to treasures of the hereafter. However, Ruskin kept his longstanding doubts and skepticisms private except in letters and the types of elaborate equivocations,

60 or sincere lyrical treatments, that he gave them in Modern Painters and elsewhere.5

Contemporary critics have demonstrated, for example, how Ruskin’s thought is permeated by Christian concepts and imagery even in his middle period of liberal agnosticism (See Wheeler’s Ruskin’s God, 1999), and Jessica Feldman has astutely located Ruskin’s statement of something very like William James’s pragmatic “will to believe” in his commitment to “the best mystery,” “that which gave me Christ for a master,” in a letter Ruskin wrote to his father in 1852 (10.xxxix). The quality of this sincerely stated will to believe may, indeed, have influenced James’s own conviction about Ruskin being “one of the noblest of sons of men” who possessed, in spite of his

“inconcistencies and extravagances” a distinctly visible “Great Heart” (Letters of William

James 206, 1904).6 But what did this crisis of faith have to do with the theory of the pathetic fallacy, which was causing such a stir by criticizing the experience of landscape that had become so central to Romantic art and natural theology alike?

It may be a result of the agnostic implications of the theory of the pathetic fallacy––its rationalist emphasis on the weakness of a state of mind that clings to

5 As Ruskin began work on MP III, he had this to say in a letter to Henry Acland: “You speak of the flimsiness of your own faith. Mine, which was never strong, is being beaten into mere gold leaf, and flutters in weak rags from the letter of its old forms; but the only letters it can hold by at all are the old Evangelical formulæ. If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses—and on the other side, these unhappy, blinking Puseyisms; men trying to do right and losing their very Humanity” (36.115). 6 Feldman pulls from an 1852 letter from Ruskin to his father that speaks to the quality of Ruskin’s doubt and his pragmatic choice of “the best mystery” that reads: “So after thinking a little more about it, I resolved that at any rate I would act as if the Bible were true; that if it were not, at all events I should be no worse off than I was before; that I would believe in Christ, and take Him for my Master in whatever I did; that assuredly to disbelieve the Bible was quite as difficult as to believe it; that there were mysteries either way; and that the best mystery was that which gave me Christ for a Master.” (10.xxxix)

61 anthropomorphic illusions out of insufficient sight and intellect, being overwhelmed by emotion––that Ruskin chose never to respond to the controversy swirling around his term, at least in writing. This reserve or reticence is especially remarkable for an individual so opinionated and with so combative a defensive streak as Ruskin. He had undoubtedly upset more Reverends than Edward Young with his theory, but he apparently found no reason to revisit it. It may be pertinent to this point to consider that

Ruskin’s religious doubts, corresponding to his own scientific training and interests, had long been leading him up to the point of his 1858 unconversion, which coincided with an important event in the Victorian scientific community. It was the year that Darwin and

Wallace published their paper on natural selection, the year before the publication of On

The Origin of Species. Ruskin’s unconversion apparently occurred without the aid of this theory, which he railed against for some time before eventual acceptance. In fact, despite

Ruskin’s scientific tendencies and his conclusive turn away from the old Evangelical formula, brought on by disdain for the “dull” and hopeless discourses of preachers on the fixity of terrestrial conditions of life and the “wickedness of the wide world” (35.495),

Ruskin viewed evolutionary theory as a far greater threat to moral progress than rigid orthodoxy. In short, directly upon losing his faith Ruskin found himself contending with the threat that the new science posed to the validity of the traditional religious feelings that still remained at the heart of his aesthetic and moral philosophy. The theory of the pathetic fallacy, perhaps as a result of this dilemma, became a popular term for others to employ in their aesthetic and philosophical arguments, but it was one that Ruskin would not use again.

62 One of those who chose to adopt the term in the Victorian culture wars, an advocate and friend of Ruskin’s, was William H. Mallock, who wrote what is perhaps the most famous Victorian defense of a reinvigorated religious sensibility over positivism in the 1879 volume, Is Life Worth Living? (a title William James re-used in his own essay of

1895). Mallock’s volume, dedicated to Ruskin, uses the term pathetic fallacy only once, and rather curiously.7 Mallock does not defend Ruskin’s theory or refute its potential interpretation as agnostic or atheistic. Nevertheless, he very clearly suggests this interpretation of the term by suggesting that the positivists regarded the attribution of sentience above or behind or over nature as a “pathetic fallacy” and in all respects an unmitigated and deplorable fiction:

It is true, indeed, … that a sense of awe and hushed solemnity is, as a fact, born in us at the spectacle of the starry heavens–– ... a spontaneous feeling connects such a sense somehow with our deepest moral being. But this, on positive principles, must be feeling only. It means absolutely nothing: it can have no positive fact that corresponds to it. It is an illusion, a pathetic fallacy. And to say that the heavens with their stars declare to us anything high or holy, is no more rational than to say that Brighton does, which itself, seen at night from the sea, is a long braid of stars descended upon the wide horizon. (Mallock 171)

Mallock used the term pathetic fallacy to name what he saw as a gross error of the positivists, the evacuation of all meaning from life by the insistence on positive principles only. Mallock thought the feeling of communion with a “vaster power” connected humans with their deepest moral being, and that denying this fact could only show that

“no such communion is possible” (171), and make it “impossible even thus to conceive of life as a valuable possession” (172). Mallock’s use of Ruskin’s term, with Ruskin’s supposed stamp of approval, speaks to the confused interpretations that the term pathetic

7 Returning the favor of this dedication in Fors Clavigera, Ruskin called Mallock “faultlessly logical” and recommended the work for readers interested in “the real position of the modern English mind with respect to its former religion” (29.216 1879). 63 fallacy could produce. If Ruskin really appreciated Mallock’s use of the term and the theory, as the province of a positivist outlook, it would suggest that Ruskin’s actual sympathies remained with the use of “consummate” or “exquisite” pathetic fallacies in poetry and culture, even if Ruskin’s chapter coining the term, and occasional other points in Modern Painters III, gave the impression that poetic animation of nature was always a defect. Ruskin never referred to Mallock’s use of the term, however, and Ruskin’s late interest in intellectual Catholicism and occult spiritualism make his seeming approval of

Mallock’s hyperbolic, anti-scientific statements even more difficult to interpret. But, particularly for those interested in poetry, Ruskin’s faithfulness or agnosticism proved of less concern than what seemed to be his surprising ordering of modern poets, including his elevation of Sir Walter Scott.

For instance, the same laudatory London Review article of 1860 that praised

Ruskin’s historicizing of the conception of nature as a living organism also disputed

Ruskin’s placement of Wordsworth, Keats, and Tennyson into a Second Order of

Reflective and Perceptive poets, which opposed them to a First Order of Creative poets that included Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer. The reviewer felt certain that Shakespeare, at least in the sonnets, easily belonged to the Reflective order, and thought the

“marvellous versatility” of Tennyson warranted his belonging to “one order as much as to the other” (80). In general, therefore, the review found Ruskin’s grand divisions too universal, questioning if it would not be “simpler and truer to admit the unity of poetic temperament, and to divide … according as imagination rather predominates over sense of beauty.” After all, the reviewer argued, “Superiority is of man over man, not of class over class; and there must be some defect in a principle of division which assigns to all

64 modern invention a secondary place, and makes Scott the representative of modern poetry” (81). Although Ruskin’s ordering of poets is very obviously the least essential and the most unsound aspect of the chapter on the pathetic fallacy, it has been responsible for raising the ire of critics and thus calling into question the intention and the proper application of Ruskin’s theory. This questioning has persisted despite Ruskin’s evident and explicit reverence for the English Romantics (which the reviewer acknowledges with regard to Keats) and his long qualifications of the ordering of poets.8

Still, from the time of this review in 1860, to the time the theory reached its first decade of existence, it had apparently been accepted and applied enough to warrant substantive reassessment by the Victorian poet and critic Roden Noël in The Eclectic

Magazine of 1866. In spite of his “profound sense of Mr. Ruskin’s teaching on aesthetic matters,” Noël felt that “in this instance his decision has been too hastily accepted as final” (Noël 621). Noël saw the benefit of the theory of the pathetic fallacy in its chastening of the “undiscriminating admiration for mere pretty disconnected freaks of fancy, which at one time threatened to break up our poetry into so many foam-wreaths of loose, luxuriant images” (621). However, its application had begun to exhibit a “blind dogmatism, very injurious to the natural and healthy development of poetic art” (621). As

8 For instance, an excerpt from Wordsworth’s The Excursion, which perfectly illustrates the error and the ideal that Ruskin develops the theory of the pathetic fallacy to either expose or espouse, serves as the epigraph to each volume of Modern Painters: “Accuse me not / Of arrogance, / If, having walked with Nature, / And offered, far as frailty would allow, / My heart a daily sacrifice to Truth, / I now affirm of Nature and of Truth, / Whom I have served, that their Divinity / Revolts, offended at the ways of men, / Philosophers, who, though the human soul / Be of a thousand faculties composed, / And twice ten thousand interests, do yet prize / This soul, and the transcendent universe, / No more than as a mirror that reflects / To proud Self-love her own intelligence.” Notice how divinity in nature “revolts” and is “offended” at men; in fact, the whole passage is a personification, Wordsworth’s speaking on behalf of nature. 65 a practitioner of poetry, there is much to admire in Noël’s fair-minded and critical take on

Ruskin’s literary theory. Noël introduced the idea that basic metaphorical attributes of ordinary language, which Ruskin seemingly omitted from his account of poetic metaphor, function commonly in speech and thought (e.g., “an upright man” [624]), and cannot rightly be branded “fallacious.” Noël, too, faulted the extension of the pathetic fallacy into the categorization of poets into first and second orders.

Noël provided classical, medieval, and early modern counter-examples to call into question the ordering of central figures of Ruskin’s Creative and Reflective poets; yet here, as elsewhere, Noël seemed to object to subsequent interpretations of Ruskin’s argument more than he objected to Ruskin’s central point of view. Close attention to

Modern Painters III shows Ruskin qualifying his divisions of Creative and Reflective orders of poets according to their treatment of ranges of experience, introspective and personal or social and interpersonal, not according to their quality. As Ruskin wrote,

“these two orders . . . must be first-rate in their range, though their range is different; and with poetry second-rate in quality no one ought to be allowed to trouble mankind”

(5.205-206).9 For his part, Noël granted that any such classification of artists “must always be somewhat arbitrary,” and he reserved his real criticism for critics after Ruskin who used his theory as “ground of serious objection” (621) to any and all metaphorical attributions of perceived qualities to material objects. According to Noël, these critics

“too much confounded legitimate and genuine metaphor, illustrative of the poet’s main design, with mere disconnected conceits of a nimble ingenious fancy” (630), thereby

9 This explanation is included in an extensive qualifying footnote included, but heavily edited, in all the major anthologies of Ruskin’s work in the twentieth century (Ball, Bloom, and Rosenberg). 66 condemning poetry as such and missing Ruskin’s central aim. To the positive examples of pathetic fallacies I have already cited, I add Ruskin’s citation of an “exquisite” pathetic fallacy in Tennyson’s Maud, when “flying gold of the ruin’d woodlands drove thro’ the air” and when a number of roses speak. These instances communicate feelings of despair and longing, respectively, on the part of the poem’s characters, and Ruskin quotes them appreciatively. Tennyson apparently did not appreciate the compliment of Ruskin’s inclusion in this chapter, though I have been unable to locate his statement of resentment.

Nevertheless, this feeling did not keep Tennyson from naming Ruskin as among the stateliest writers of the English language (3.xxxviii). 10

Ultimately, Noël’s sensitive reading of Ruskin laments his tone of rigid definition and his ordering of poets, which encouraged his followers’ to rigidly apply his theory in order to condemn poetry as such. Noël acknowledged the irony that the theory had derived from the major advocate of the “landscape instinct.” “Surely we owe the restoration of our faith in the glorious animation of nature very largely to Mr. Ruskin’s own teaching,” Noël wrote, “which makes his inconsistent doctrine on this subject of metaphor the more to be regretted” (624). But in his intent to critique the application of

Ruskin’s theory, I argue that Noël’s sentiments echo and clarify Ruskin’s intended effort.

Noël worked to stem the tide of critics abusing the theory of the pathetic fallacy by

10 Ruskin’s editors, Cook and Wedderburn, include an uncited note in Sesame and Lilies that Tennyson initially “resented” Maud’s inclusion in Ruskin’s chapter (18.141), though I have been unable to locate the source. Nevertheless, Tennyson learned from letters and personal meetings, on Ruskin’s invitation, of the critic’s strong admiration for his work (36.xxxix). The case was not so genial with Kingsley, who disliked Ruskin, but whom Ruskin recalled himself having praised in addition to having paid him the compliment of quoting from Alton Locke in the pathetic fallacy chapter, which suggests that Ruskin saw the inclusion as complimentary to Kingsley (36.257), and subsequently, that the pathetic fallacy in the instance of “cruel crawling foam” constituted a most apt use of a conceit. 67 drawing attention back to the human instinct for metaphor as a phenomenon of real importance at the theory’s center. The perception of moods in nature need not be a mere

“amiable delusion” (629), Noël wrote, since human moods often intensify and make more salient certain aspects of nature that, in their natural effect upon the human mind (like minor scales in music), consistently and normally present ideas of “bright, rich, joyous” or “desolate, decaying” phases. As Noël restates Ruskin’s “science of the aspects” in the context of the debate over the pathetic fallacy, “We may indulge these feelings to a morbid degree and see things too brightly or too gloomily; but the sense of sympathy in nature has its basis in fact” (629). Therefore, without the attention and commitment of

Ruskin to the difficulties of separating normal and consistent aesthetic aspects from material substance in definite terms, Noël more or less asserts rather barely what Ruskin attempted to qualify over an entire volume, namely, that “sympathy with nature has its basis in fact.” This psychological project turned out to be the province of another book published the same year as Noël’s analysis by the Scottish journalist and critic, Eneus

Dallas.

In The Gay Science (1866), Dallas sought to accurately trace “the dividing line between science and art” and denied any pretension of poetry to the practice of science

(4). Dallas used science in connection to poetry only in the comparative sense of developing a “critical theory of [poetry’s] processes and of its influence in the world” (4).

Ruskin’s theory had previously stated that two types of truth were subject to scientific investigation: truth to essence (material substance) and truth to aspect (aesthetic effect).

For Ruskin, poetry constituted a method within the second science that experimented with and discovered techniques and effects. Dallas admitted effects that appeared in the

68 “Hidden Soul” of humans, which he made a place for as “an outlying territory beyond the stretch of observation” (249). Therefore, Dallas grasped that poetry, as metaphor, operated upon this “outlying territory” but that metaphor, also, extended beyond special effects of poetic language, and functioned in everyday speech, and that “from metaphor we cannot escape” (249). Dallas’s attempt to expand upon effects of metaphor not as a linguistic construct, but as a concept in the “vast world of thought, out of consciousness”

(250) provided three expressions of “the tendency of the mind to similitude” (273). The three expressions were:

1. I am that or like that. [Assimilating tendency of sympathy]

2. That is I or like me. [Assimilating tendency of egotism]

3. That is that or like that. [Purely objective likeness] (273)

Dallas called the second tendency the very “germ of lyrical art” begetting imagery most recognizable as “anthropomorphism and personification” (281). Drawing the connection to the pathetic fallacy, Dallas also objected to Ruskin’s division of poets into first or second orders. He felt that a particular type of anthropomorphic imagery belongs not to a “height” of art but to a “lyrical mood” (282). However, scientifically speaking,

Dallas was happy to call the anthropomorphic instinct an egotistical one:

The egotism which would make me see in a tree the double of myself is but the inability to imagine an existence different from my own. Call this assimilating tendency of egotism by the name of imagination if you will, but let us not be misled by words, let us fully understand that imagination means no more than egotism, the natural play of thought and the automatic action of the mind. (283)

By drawing attention to the automaticity of metaphor and personification in humans,

Dallas’s aim in The Gay Science was essentially to drain the Romantic idea of

Imagination of its power as a pseudo-religious category of critical importance, thereby

69 moving literary study toward the objective, impersonal condition of science and psychology. In Dallas’s new context, Ruskin’s inheritance of the term “Imagination” served as an umbrella for “modes of automatic action,” whether of identification through sympathy or egotism, or of recognition in the comparison of objects (281). To Dallas,

Ruskin upheld a vacuous worship of “Imagination” by defining poetry as “the suggestion by the imagination of noble grounds for the noble emotions” (Ruskin 6.28; qtd. in Dallas

170). As I have attempted to show, Ruskin can be viewed as accepting the naturalistic and psychological basis for such instinctual mental activities, and Dallas, to his credit, admitted that if Ruskin could not define Imagination to his satisfaction, Ruskin had nevertheless introduced a more honest, frank, transparent, and clear-sighted treatment of the idea in his “several magnificent chapters on the work of imagination” (193). Ruskin’s sympathetic preservation of the Romantic ideal of a transcendental imagination, as Dallas ultimately recognized, was not inconsistent with psychological explanations.

Therefore, not counting those reactionary critics objecting to the theory on purely personal or moral grounds, commenters on the pathetic fallacy in the thirty years following Modern Painters III generally testified to its importance in highlighting the fundamental symbolizing and metaphorical tendency of the mind toward nature. Noël recognized that metaphor operated in everyday language (624), and Dallas insisted on defining “imagination” as “automatic actions” of the mind toward similitudes, but both deferred to Ruskin who, they understood, was engaged in a complex project of aesthetic, philosophical, and moral instruction in addition to critical and psychological concerns.

Theodore Watts, friend of Swinburne, did not extend the same courtesy in 1887, but asserted that Ruskin did not understand that the pathetic fallacy was “part and parcel

70 of the illogical soul of man … without it there could have been no poetry at all, no language at all, no intelligence at all save that which belongs to the ‘pensive somnambulism of the lower animals’” (113). Watts thought that Ruskin had forgotten that “every word in every tongue is charged with this ‘pathetic fallacy’––nay, is the outcome of this ‘pathetic fallacy’” (113). In reality, Ruskin would probably not have disputed the point, but suggested that to remain in a state that allowed violent passion to consistently overwhelm reason and informed employment of concepts (which would be always false on some level) would be to remain nearer to the “pensive somnambulism of the lower animals” instead of rising to human possibility.

Indeed, in the last decade of the century, Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy remained subject to spirited debate reflecting philosophical and religious questions important to many in England and America. Is there a moral in the beautiful personification of nature, or is the instinct merely fallacious? What do we make of metaphor’s centrality to thinking and to language? Is it a linguistic construction, a conceptual commonplace, or both? Are the facts of nature, “red in tooth and claw,” also a factual ground of noble emotions in human kind, and on what level of primitive or civilized feeling? The debate led Edward Payson Morton to suggest in 1900, “We are now, I think, in a position to see why Mr. Ruskin’s chapter on the Pathetic Fallacy is so suggestive and at the same time so confusing” (Payson Morton 63). The pathetic fallacy had been derided as an “amiable delusion” (Noël), had been attributed to the

“assimilating tendency of the ego” (Dallas), had been more moderately proposed as a

“sympathetic illusion” (Holmes), as “the cloak, the drapery, the spiritual environment, which the emotion of man supplies” (Anonymous “An Arcadian Summer” 745, 1889),

71 and as the “subjective illusion” (Stedman 205) of each individual. Morton ostentatiously considered around fifteen words including clinical psychological terms like

“physempsychosis” and “psychenthesis” before settling on “vivification” as the most appropriate term for false appearances of life in nature that he found expressed in Keats.

Other critics, however, were happy to continue using “pathetic fallacy.” Maxwell Gray

(Mary Tuttiett), for instance, wrote in 1896 of a “fascinating forest scene” in The Scarlet

Letter, in which “the pathetic fallacy is doubtless a fallacy, but never was it more delightful or convincing” (23). Gray approached Ruskin’s greater hope for the pathetic fallacy in describing Hawthorne’s accomplishment of a “wild and deeply poetic nature, so magically touched by the hand of a great master of imaginative and spiritual art, and so splendidly woven with human interest” (23). Frederic Harrison, in 1900, wrote that

“Ruskin himself allows a beautiful [pathetic fallacy] in his early career” (400), and would be one of many to notice the personifications and attributions of emotions to natural objects that Ruskin, himself, delighted in expanding into elaborate frames for wild nature.

The Scottish author, Peter Bayne, who had once questioned why Ruskin would call the excited imaginings of a poetic character a fallacy at all (Lessons 236), later concluded that “If I have entered into the spirit and penetrated the depths of Mr. Ruskin’s criticism

… I cannot be wrong in believing that he holds it a mark of true poetic genius, that it gives life to all on which it looks” (Studies 326 1882). It is no exaggeration, therefore, to state that the “so suggestive and at the same time so confusing” (Payson Morton 63) phrasings of Ruskin had inspired debates that remained unresolved at the end of the century.

72 Perhaps no single author benefitted more from this debate than George Santayana.

Santayana’s Interpretations of Poetry and Religion, published the year of Ruskin’s death in 1900, showed the result of having thoroughly engaged with the fundamental terms of the pathetic fallacy. Santayana centrally examined the “curious but well-known psychological phenomenon, viz., the transformation of an element of sensation into the quality of a thing” (The Sense of Beauty 28-29, 1896) that operated as a necessary article of faith in life.11 It would be Santayana’s influential essay, published as the last chapter of

Interpretations, “The Elements and Function of Poetry,” that would recognize and modernize the pragmatic naturalistic idealism inherent in Ruskin’s hope for poetry as a new religious mythology. Santayana provided philosophical justifications for a conceptual unification of religion and art, in large part, by extracting principles from concepts such as Ruskin’s “pathetic fallacy,” the “innocence of the eye,” and the

“landscape instinct” reinterpreted as a poet’s finding or feigning of correlative objects for

11 Santayana’s language in The Sense of Beauty strongly recalls Ruskin’s in the beginning of the pathetic fallacy chapter: “There is, however, something more in the claim to universality in aesthetic judgments than the desire to generalize our own opinions. There is the expression of a curious but well-known psychological phenomenon, viz., the transformation of an element of sensation into the quality of a thing. If we say that other men should see the beauties we see, it is because we think those beauties are in the object, like its colour, proportion, or size. Our judgment appears to us merely the perception and discovery of an external existence, of the real excellence that is without. But this notion is radically absurd and contradictory. Beauty, as we have seen, is a value; it cannot be conceived as an independent existence which affects our senses and which we consequently perceive. It exists in perception, and cannot exist otherwise. A beauty not perceived is a pleasure not felt, and a contradiction. But modern philosophy has taught us to say the same thing of every element of the perceived world; all are sensations; and their grouping into objects imagined to be permanent and external is the work of certain habits of our intelligence. We should be incapable of surveying or retaining the diffused experiences of life, unless we organized and classified them, and out of the chaos of impressions framed the world of conventional and recognizable objects. (The Sense of Beauty 28-29)

73 interior states through the construction of a “cosmic landscape” according to an interior

“topographical sense.”

Santayana’s Darwinian philosophy restated what Ruskin had only obliquely intimated in his criticisms of Darwin and the “scientific mechanists,” that the pathetic fallacy could be more easily navigated and reveal its essentially social form of cognition when applied less fallaciously to a particular group of natural “objects,” i.e., animals. But before jumping to Santayana’s development of the theory of the pathetic fallacy, which initiates its next phase in the early twentieth century in the poetry and criticism of T. S.

Eliot, the next chapter considers Ruskin’s theory in Darwinian terms. For, the instinctual symbolizing of nature and landscapes, as Santayana later realized, sometimes happens upon reciprocity and likeness authentic both in human feeling and in fact. Indeed, in

Ruskin’s final example of the most perfect pathetic fallacy of Wordsworth’s The

Excursion, and in his ornithological lectures of the early 1870s–– which along with

Darwin’s statements on birds make up the substance of the next chapter––Ruskin gave credence to the idea that the consciousness of birds provided fascinating objects of nonhuman nature onto which projections of human sensations and emotions could be particularly illuminating for the watching of human nature.

74 Chapter 3: Critical Anthropomorphism and the Pathetic Fallacy:

Ruskin, Darwin, and the Birds of Victorian Ecology

Birds are good for thinking. Both Charles Darwin and John Ruskin recognized as much in works like The Descent of Man (1871) and Love’s Meinie (1881). But while today’s ecological critics widely credit Darwin and Ruskin as important forerunners of a modern ecological consciousness, each has taken his place on opposing sides of the debate over the value of anthropomorphism to ecological thought. Darwin placed humans and creatures such as birds on a cognitive continuum, while Ruskin appeared to mark all projections of humanity onto nonhuman nature as false through his theory of the pathetic fallacy. As a result, twentieth century poetic criticism on one hand, and twentieth century ecological thinking on the other, have each overlooked Ruskin’s theory either because it supposedly rested on literalist assumptions about language that would be “fatal to poetry”

(Richards Practical Criticism 157), or because his anti-Darwinian bias has seemed to insist upon a strong separation between humans and nonhuman species. In reality, Ruskin keenly interrogated how appearances of birds and other aspects of the nonhuman world both invited and resisted humanization and identification, and he attempted to apply scientific observation to the human instinct to anthropomorphize and to the use of personification in poetry. Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy actually mounts a critique of the Romantic program of humanizing nature in order to develop a more

“critical anthropomorphism” roughly analogous to the ethological method, traceable to

Darwin, which extrapolates from human experience in order to hypothesize about experiential states that exist in nonhuman life (Burghardt 136-138). The application of

75 this method of observation by poets could steer poetry between egocentric sentimentality and lifeless scientific description. This did not mean that Ruskin wanted all poetry to be literal prose description, since he advocated personification (5.135). Ruskin allowed for the beauty of deliberate metaphorical figuration (fallacies of wilful fancy), and appreciated the “delicate attribution of life” (5.385) in order to preserve and investigate truths gleaned from moments of “sympathetic illusion” (as O. W. Holmes recognized), when “the simplest forms of nature are strangely animated” (5.386). Such illusions of sympathy were particularly powerful, and increasingly recognized as only minimally false, when observing birds.

Undoubtedly, innumerable visible attributes contradict ideas of avian-human similitude. The unexpressive faces of songbirds sport beaks attached to tiny bodies of feather, skin, and hollow bone. Birds dart into the sky on wings, tousle disheveled lice- infested feathers, and bounce around on twiggy reptilian claws eating insects and seeds.

Yet the bird symbolizes the high Romantic poet, the organic being nobly living out its instinctual life above us, a bridge between earth and heaven. Birds perpetually renew their vocal expressions of feeling in musical forms of a mysterious language characterized as “song.” Bird language is overheard in time, but has seemed to carry mysterious auspices from before and for all time. The strange and strong pathos of birds, therefore, offers ample opportunity to strike the right balance on Ruskin’s continuum for appreciating a pathetic fallacy, which is “powerful only so far as it is pathetic, feeble so far as it is fallacious” (5.220). So far as an illusion sustains indecision over truth or falsity, readers are powerfully stimulated in resolving its problem.

76 Ruskin valued “consummate” and “exquisite” pathetic fallacies because they could reveal correlations between distorted objects and the states of mind that distort them. In particular, he valued minds capable of maintaining the stability of the artistic process of combination in moments when it was most difficult to do so, when it was most tempting to grasp at some reason, transcendent and Romantic or scientistic and reductive, to explain away appearances as sublime or merely false.12 Birds challenged this stability of mind because, while so visibly different, birds present superior impressions of likeness by appearing to possess minds capable of aesthetic appreciation and human-like emotion

(which Darwin quickly recognized). Thus, Ruskin chooses an avian example to end his chapter on the pathetic fallacy, citing the attribution of “triumphant constancy and love” to an unnamed, unseen bird in Wordsworth’s The Excursion as an “exquisite” and “most perfect” instance of a pathetic fallacy.

As I have already stated, Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy was not a ban on any and all poetic anthropomorphism. Although a pathetic fallacy may be literally false

(foam is not cruel and does not crawl), Ruskin states that “So long as we see that the feeling is true, we pardon, or are even pleased by, the confessed fallacy of sight that it induces” (5.210). As masters of the science of the aspects of things, the best poets carefully and critically ascribe human attributes to natural aspects in order to activate illusions of certain forms of life in things. Good poems must instigate a measure of belief in the illusion they create, and express the human truth that Ruskin thought most worthy of investigation: the instinct to perceive or imagine a “living power” (22.170) in nature.

Moreover, this “living power” could not be separated from “the idea of a life above us, in

12 See Levine (93) and Shattuck (The Innocent Eye) on Ruskin’s version of “negative capability.” 77 other creatures,” a life nobler than our own “as ours is nobler than that of the dust” (The

Ethics of Dust 18.347). Ruskin himself found such a life being dramatically expressed by birds, and went about discerning their lives by a critical process of anthropomorphism not unlike Darwin’s, but not without reservations about the moral import of a dogmatic and survivalist Darwinism.

Truly, Ruskin sometimes rejected theories that did not suit the “clearer lines of demarcation” he appreciated in philosophies of nature from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, “before Natural Theology had been fatally assaulted by materialism”

(O’Gorman 279). It is a pity that Ruskin’s combativeness sometimes kept him from contemplating investigations into human and animal consciousness and aesthetics pursued by Darwin, A. R. Wallace, Grant Allen, and George Romanes.13 Nevertheless,

Ruskin usually (if belatedly) admitted the truth of such investigations, if only in order to cultivate a sense of what such “conclusions” had yet to conclude, i.e., inquiry into big but practical questions about how humans should dispose themselves toward life and toward the absolute. Because such questions remained beyond the scope of the new science, which seemed to Ruskin to be eager to bury religious feeling and introduce its own final resolutions, Ruskin appealed to the reality of feelings produced from his own scrutinizing attention to nature, which he attempted to define more precisely and in more objective terms than his Romantic forebears. Far from being “hostile to introspection” (P. Ball 105) or “unconcerned with the symbiosis of inner and outer” (Burris 1010), Ruskin’s scrupulous introspection strived to consider his own feelings impersonally as processes of

13 Francis O’Gorman writes that “we must not think in terms of an absolute divide between Ruskin and Victorian men of science” (O’Gorman Ruskin’s Science of the 1870’s 37-38), with whom he retained friendships, being esteemed or defended by the likes of Henry Acland, John Tyndall, and Darwin, despite his disagreements with them. 78 human instincts, personal temperaments, and the conditioning of education and experience. Ruskin hoped that by robust explanation of his reverence for nature his experiences could remain, in spite of his personal tendencies, subject to scientific investigation, and thereby survive as worthy pursuits in the scientific age that he appreciated.

Between a scientistic certainty ready to dispense with the human mind by behaviorist formulas, and a Romantic world that had countered the clipping of angel’s wings too sentimentally, Ruskin grappled with ways to be usefully true to human perception, to offer a “precise contribution” in the poetic “phrasing of sense perception”

(Miles 3). The theory of the pathetic fallacy and the argument about landscape-instinct that it begins is perhaps Ruskin’s finest attempt at this project. Nevertheless, the theory of the pathetic fallacy remains almost completely absent from discussions where its mention is most appropriate, critical writing on Ruskin, science, and anthropomorphism. George

Levine, Clive Wilmer, and Francis O’Gorman all ignore it in essays where it is supremely relevant. In his tribute to Ruskin’s aesthetics, Lars Spuybroek states “If there ever was a vitalist, it was John Ruskin” (14), but leaves the claim completely uncomplicated by reference to the pathetic fallacy. Other scholars of Victorian science and literature nod to the theory only briefly, such as Robert Hewison, Gillian Beer, and Jonathan Smith. More generally, major critics of poetry and poetics have seemed to read the pathetic fallacy chapter in isolation from the rest of Modern Painters in order to denounce it: these include I. A. Richards, J. Hillis Miller, Anthony Hecht, and ecocritic Neil Evernden. Only a few Victorian scholars have seemed to give the influential theory more sympathetic

79 diligence, such as Edward Alexander, Dinah Birch, George Landow, and recently, Sharon

Aranovsky Weltman.

For Ruskin, although only a much qualified “second order” of poets indulge or

“much delight” in pathetic fallacies, poetic images distorted by emotion remained supremely valuable insofar as they provided faithful accounts of feeling. The fallacy becomes a formula for expressing a feeling, and if it resulted from truly powerful pathos in a mind capable of maintaining sight and reason, the illusory appearance glimpsed a limit of human sight by encountering an inhuman reality beyond the power of bearing what is revealed to it. Such was the case when attempting to speculate upon the minds of birds. In Ruskin’s ornithological lectures at Oxford, Love’s Meinie, Ruskin both admits the probability of evolution and establishes his own test for membership in the human species as the sympathetic apprehension of “the volition and virtue of humanity” (25.46) in birds. Thus, Ruskin’s theory advanced critical vigilance toward the instinct to animate nature alongside a faith in the limited capacity to anthropomorphize animals. Ruskin hoped that this instinct and faith could be educated by scientific methods, spurring materialist reflection and “watching of human nature” (5.359), and directing the instinctive belief in a “living power” in nature toward moral ends. Ruskin found the instinct reliably catalyzed by, and therefore investigable through, the lives of birds.

Darwin found his anthropomorphic imagination similarly attracted.

Darwin’s Critical Anthropomorphism and Ruskin’s “Science of the Aspects”

Darwin’s anthropomorphic method directed his interest to “relations between consciousness and instinct, sentience and reason, emotion and reflection, inclination and

80 purposiveness” (Beer 243). Such interests attracted Darwin to such seemingly tedious objects of study as earthworms and barnacles, and to such intelligent agents as birds, which “were central to the explanation of his theory of sexual selection” (Smith Charles

Darwin 93). Darwin experimented with pigeons and presented finches, pheasants, grouse, and many other bird species throughout his many works as evidence for intelligent selective behaviors. He consulted with numerous ornithologists at a time when ornithological literature and drawings enjoyed unprecedented popularity (Smith 93), and found that birds served as perfect analogs for discussing features of human emotional life.

Darwin explained at the beginning of The Descent of Man, “The lowest classes will detain us for a very short time, but the higher animals, especially birds, must be treated at considerable length” (DM V.1 300). Birds used their voices, like humans, to express emotions “such as distress, fear, anger, triumph, or mere happiness” (DM V.2 51). They even engaged in enjoyable play, according to Darwin, who asked “How often do we see birds which fly easily, gliding and sailing through the air obviously for pleasure?” (DM

V.2 54). Indeed, Darwin took self-awareness, empathy, and theory of mind for granted in birds (DM V.2 51), but the degree to which he related such behaviors and capacities to human ones became the most controversial aspect of his theory.

Darwin’s most striking statement on birds, because the most anthropomorphic in its justification of analogies between birds and humans, concerns sexual selection in goldfinches. In it, he explains his distinction between human and animal cognition.

Darwin wrote that when we see “how the male goldfinch alternately displays his gold- bespangled wings, we ought not to feel too sure that the female does not attend to each detail of beauty.” For, “We can judge … of choice being exerted, only from analogy, and

81 the mental powers of birds … do not differ fundamentally from ours” (DM V.2 124).14

Because the difference between the minds of man and the “higher animals” was certainly

“one of degree and not of kind” (DM V.1 105), Darwin thought that careful analogizing was both appropriate and useful. Darwin greatly doubted that animals lacked general concepts, self-consciousness, and other higher-order thought (DM V.1 105), and birds appeared to him “to have nearly the same taste for the beautiful as we have” as evidenced by our enjoyment of their songs and our ornamental use of their feathers (DM V.2 39).

Therefore, Darwin granted lower powers of reasoning in birds while insisting, remarkably, that they also possess with mankind a compatible capability for “strong affections, acute perception, and a taste for the beautiful” (DM V.II 108). Interestingly, these last capabilities are precisely the traits Ruskin outlined as necessary for “poetic feeling” and for engaging in artistic practice when he ordered poets according to their capability to think strongly, feel strongly, and see truly.

Before leaving Darwin on this score, it is important to note that his accounts of animal intelligence, especially in The Descent of Man, relied heavily on anecdotes not always supported by strong evidence. Indeed, some of Darwin’s contemporaries found his reasoning for human-like consciousness in nonhumans a suspiciously anthropomorphic fiction.15 Darwin himself granted that he was sometimes insufficiently skeptical to avoid loss of time in his conjecture, but suggested also that his lack of

14 The first 1871 edition includes the phrase, “the mental powers of birds, if reason be excluded,” but subsequent editions remove this phrase, as I do. 15 For instance, John Morley questioned: “Why should we only find aesthetic quality in birds wonderful when it happens to coincide with our own? … There is no more positive reason for attributing aesthetic consciousness to the Argus pheasant than there is for attributing to bees geometric consciousness of the hexagonal prisms and rhombic plates of the hive...” (Darwin More Letters of Charles Darwin 324-5 note 3). 82 skepticism encouraged him to perform important experiments and observations that others eschewed.16 Of course, Darwin’s doubts about the exclusivity of human capacities and experiences eventually founded a new organizing principle for biology as well as a creative tradition of critical anthropomorphism in ethology. This method inspired George

Romanes’ Animal Intelligence (1882), with its sixty-page chapter on birds, as well as

Grant Allen’s Physiological Aesthetics (1877) and “Aesthetic Feeling in Birds” (1880).

Today, critical anthropomorphic methods explicitly inform the work of scientists like

Jane Goodall and Marc Bekoff, as well as a host of science writers synthesizing neurocognitive and observational evidence to imagine the inner lives of animals, including literary critics such as Jane Bennett, Elizabeth Grosz, and Sharon Cameron.17

Yet, there are those such as Thomas Nagel who argue that the quality of consciousness––the “what it’s like-ness” of conscious experience––is an embodied aspect of species-being that humans cannot even minimally access in other animals.

Coincidentally, Nagel famously uses the peculiar sensory apparatus of the bat for his argument, the only flying mammal, which was long thought by many cultures to be a

16 Darwin writes: “I am not very skeptical .... A good deal of skepticism in a scientific man is advisable to avoid much loss of time, but I have met with not a few men, who, I feel sure, have often thus been deterred from experiment or observations, which would have proved directly or indirectly serviceable” (Life and Letters 104). 17 See Bekoff’s The Emotional Lives of Animals 125. Jane Bennett urges artists and critics toward “careful anthropomorphization,” and remarks upon how “anthropomorphism … oddly enough, works against anthropocentrism” (Vibrant Matter 120). Sharon Cameron describes an allure of identification with animals “apparently devoid of human counterpart” that provokes cruelty to nonhuman animals as a consequence of human resistance to such identification (Cameron “Animal Sentience” 3). Elizabeth Grosz cites birdsongs in her search for the minimal conditions of “art” (Chaos, Territory, Art) and refuses to deny birds an internal sense of artistic creation like that accorded to humans (Copeland). 83 bird.18 If Ruskin had been able to read Nagel, he might have agreed that an essential mystery obtained in the lives of other creatures; however, Ruskin would probably also have viewed the moment when the mystery appeared as revelatory of an important limit to be tested and treated by art, a limit containing knowledge tied to humans’ place in nature. For, when Ruskin insisted that “you will never love art well, till you love what she mirrors better” (22.153), although he used the platonic metaphor of the mirror, he did not imply that art was a lesser reflection of matter. Instead, Ruskin saw art as a tool for increasing the wealth of life––there being “no wealth but life” (17.105)––by mirroring the mind as well as matter. Ruskin sharpened this tool through a close visual observation informed by scientific knowledge, asking the artist for deep feeling and thought as well as for “perfect cognizance” of the “organization” of natural objects that make up the mind’s storehouse of perceptions, with the end goal always to reveal some part of a real experienced world in which one struggled to live nobly with nature.19

Undoubtedly one of “the fathers of our environmental tradition” (Bate Romantic

Ecology 61; see also, Clark 16) and considered by one prominent Ruskin scholar as “the first ecologist” (Sawyer),20 Ruskin’s ethically charged scrutiny of nature and nature-art led not only to his (in)famous status as “the ultimate Victorian realist” (Levine 76), but

18 Leading ornithologist Tim Birkhead wrote The Sense of Birds (2012) as an application of Nagel’s bat question to birds, asking and attempting to answer questions such as: “What is it like, to feel a sudden urge to eat incessantly, and over a week or so become hugely obese, then fly relentlessly – pulled by some invisible force – in one direction for thousands of miles, as many tiny songbirds do twice each year?” (xi). 19 Just as the highest historical painting was based on knowledge of the workings of human form and of the human mind, “so must the highest landscape painting be based on perfect cognizance of the form, functions, and system of every organic or definitely structured existence which it has to represent” (3.135). 20 See Paul Sawyer’s Cornell Lecture, “The First Ecologist: John Ruskin and the Futures of Landscape,” 2012. Web. 84 also to a number of environmentally progressive positions, including fierce opposition to the industrial degradation of human and animal environments, pollution, the extinction of species, and possibly even climate change.21 Nevertheless, Terry Gifford articulates the widespread view that Ruskin did not always find it exceptionally easy to accept the humility of the human species, “a prerequisite of the ecological perspective” (189). My own sense is that despite Ruskin’s penchant for definite and presumptuous declaration, he tempered his supposedly “radically anthropocentric world” (Levine 75) with a strong sense that the gulf between humans and animals, our fellows “made out of the same dust,” was incomparably narrower than the gulf between humans and everything about which humans remained infinitely ignorant (5.386). Only the great artists’ humility, “a curious under-sense of powerlessness, feeling that the greatness is not in them, but through them” (5.331), moved Ruskin to criticize Romantic hubris despite the

“penetrative depth” of Wordsworth and the “exquisite finish and melodious power” of

Tennyson. Ruskin thought that humility and impersonality allowed poets to perceive something divine and fascinating in all individuals and in Nature itself from which life arose. This profound humility, fostering people who were “endlessly, foolishly, incredibly merciful” (5.331), was to be praised first, and praised further, as it extended mercy toward nonhuman nature.

Because Ruskin did not ultimately object to the veracity of evolutionary theory, only to its most reductive and totalizing version as hailed by the English public’s “scream of consent” which seemed scarcely to allow “antagonist reflection” (25.54), Ruskin accepted a familial connection to the animal world. Although Gifford’s critique seems

21 Cf. Thomas H. Ford’s “Ruskin’s Storm-Cloud: heavenly messages and pathetic fallacies in a denatured world.” 85 warranted when reading of Ruskin’s disdain for scientists deciphering “the filthy heraldries which record the relation of humanity to the ascidian and the crocodile”

(25.56), Ruskin’s objection was not to a familial relation with the animals, but with the inflation of human hubris by dint of such supposedly total knowledge. Scientists who would happily “resolve all things into atoms and numbers” (5.386) and claim absolute knowledge about what it meant to be human, to Ruskin, simply missed the best possibility for human happiness in humility before a vast and inhuman nature. To Ruskin,

Darwin’s bulldogs gnawed away at noble and reverent attitudes by aspiring to totalizing certainties instead of viewing all knowledge as a partial gift within practical limits of experience and experiment. Evolutionary theory seemed “paltry knowledge” (25.56) if, in spite of its accuracy, it extinguished sympathy toward one another and toward animals as nothing but accidental assemblages of atoms instead of “similarly-minded creatures”

(25.54). Consequently, in his lecture on swallows he complained that “the vile industries and vicious curiosities of modern science, while they have robbed the fields of England of a thousand living creatures, have not created in them one” (25.56). Thus, as an empirical alternative to positivism, Ruskin directed his energies into defining what he called the “science of the aspects” (5.387) by which the imagination suggested noble grounds for the noble emotions in Nature.

To Ruskin’s mind, the science of human aesthetics governed truths inestimably more valuable than just-so stories of “the doctrine of development,” and he felt that his aesthetics could withstand scientific rigor. He wrote that “it is as much a fact to be noted in their constitution, that [things] produce such and such an effect upon the eye or heart

… as that they are made up of certain atoms or vibrations of matter” (5.387). Moreover,

86 because aesthetic and phenomenological investigations defined perceptual possibilities useful for understanding the contours of human knowledge and experience, they seemed to Ruskin both more useful and nobler than tracing evolutionary lineages. Additionally, these methods benefitted from enforcing humility by foregrounding perceptual and experiential limits, such as when people, “strong as human creatures can be, are yet submitted to influences stronger than they, and see in a sort untruly, because what they see is inconceivably above them” (5.209). Although Ruskin often jumped to the extraction of ethical principles from natural laws, his understandings were nearly always qualified by another statement that revealed his concern for objectivity and practicality amidst his own passion for moralizing. Ruskin desired a concrete foundation for his investigation into that which is “inconceivably above” humankind that also contained the power to reflect upon, clarify, and intensify important human values and feelings. This desire led him to transfer his scrutinizing attention to the “living power” in avian forms of life.

Many years after introducing the study of the science of the aspects as the moral of landscape in Modern Painters III (1856), which occurs in the chapter that closes the argument the pathetic fallacy chapter begins, Ruskin distills his earlier thesis to state more simply and positively that the imagination of forms of life outside the human is both the ideal sensory/cognitive process for scientific investigation and the noblest pursuit of philosophy and social science. Whether real or imagined, Ruskin felt sure that the human extension of life to aspects of nature deserved serious and objective attention:

the noblest we can know is the energy which either imagines, or perceives, the existence of a living power greater than its own … the study of the relations which exist between this energy, and the resultant action of men, are as much subjects of pure science as the curve of a projectile. (22.170) 87

This passage from The Eagle’s Nest (1872), Ruskin’s most extensive meditation on the relationship between art and science, agnostically advocates studying the “energy” that causes one to “imagine” or “perceive” a “living power” greater than one’s own. The energy/instinct may be vague, but it exhibits the openness of Spinoza’s “God or Nature.”

Ruskin’s “open hypothesis” and his forward-looking “will to believe” contradict characterizations of narrow anthropocentric hubris. Ruskin’s motivation rested in his conviction that the “law of life” consisted in profound ignorance, and that even at a very high degree of visual and intellectual development one could not absolutely overcome

“false appearance” (MP III 5.387).

Therefore, Ruskin proposed a healthy reserve and a sense of human limitation both for material scientists as masters of “facts relating to matter,” and for artists as

Seers, exploring and experimenting with the effects of “forces and passions that act on or in matter” (The Eagle’s Nest 22.170).22 Although the forces and passions may result

“merely” from projections of inner thoughts, perceptions, and sensations, they were

“subjects of pure science” as much as Newtonian physics, meriting investigative pursuit not in order to extinguish so far “false” appearances, but to intelligently and emotionally orient oneself toward their many possibilities (22.170). By understanding experiences of things, perceived or imagined, one could keep them from doing harm, and could enlist them as evidence for persuading positivists that reality never completely escaped illusion.

22 Jonathan Smith notes Ruskin’s distress over John Tyndall’s language about ice crystals going “beyond the range of the senses,” demonstrating that “In Ruskin’s view, both the poet and scientist are susceptible to the pathetic fallacy, and in both cases the result is an inaccurate perception of nature” (Smith Fact and Feeling 172). In the scientist’s case, this inaccuracy is an unredeemable and logical fallacy; in poetry, value remains if it presents a new feeling for experience and contemplation. 88 However, despite Ruskin’s determination for objectivity and his denouncement of those who “enunciate moral aphorisms over every pebble they stumble against” (5.385),

Ruskin himself could not restrain his moral and activist voice from impeding upon his scientific intentions. His work on birds was originally meant to contain “the cream of forty volumes of scientific ornithology” (25.13), but ultimately contained only three lectures. Meanwhile, Love’s Meinie indulged in long moralistic digressions as Ruskin struggled to differentiate his own critical anthropomorphism from the Darwinian sensibility that was simultaneously seeking the type of vision that factored human distortion into its method of observing more or less true appearances.

“Of the Pathetic Fallacy” and Transcendent Feelings

To reiterate, for Ruskin, a fallacy refers to the “falseness in all our impressions of external things” while pathos refers to the “violent emotions” (5.205) that alter human impressions to produce this falseness. Ruskin makes it clear that the pathetic fallacy is not new or abnormal, but an effect of “landscape” (including the sights and sounds of birds mentioned often in his investigations in Modern Painters III) “on any mind”

(5.200). For Ruskin, the distorting effects of powerful emotions upon the mind are more or less noble depending on the particular qualities of the emotion, its interaction with an individual’s intelligence, genuineness, and strength of resistance to this passion. Great artists, when touched by the instinct to animate nature, do not jump to clichéd or simplistic forms that explain away the feeling in their thought and perception. Instead, they allow their imaginations to suggest what material grounds exist for their emotions; they allow the objects, events, and situations that evoke their poetical feelings to present

89 themselves in poetic forms, since such feelings usually sacrifice intensity of pathos through prosaic statement (5.368). Therefore, while Ruskin wished poets would refrain from being carried away by the distortions of emotion, he granted that such distortions were essential to representing experience, and that in the strongest intellects pathetic fallacies mark the very limits of human perception.

Ruskin thought the best poetry neither dispelled difficult realities nor deceived through its illusions, but modeled the subordination of amazement to learning something about the mind, that directed humanity “either to hard work or watching of human nature” (5.359). Ruskin champions the best poets and critics as the “dissectors, not the dreamers,” the “benefactors of the human race, and guides of human thought,” (5.359).

When raised to highest emotional pitch, poets’ encounters with the “sublime” should neither dissipate in conventional speech or dead metaphor such as “raging waves”

(5.211), nor succumb to the “habit of ineffective dreaming and moralizing over passing scenes” (5.352), nor as far as possible assimilate the unknown to the self. Instead, poets should observe human perception ascending and stalling at the threshold of the sensible.

The high purpose of pathetic fallacies lay in transmuting powerful emotions into form in order to investigate such states of mind, especially as manifested in the strongest minds.

If pathetic fallacies in poetry could both index and convey this high purpose of formalizing emotional states of mind, could they not also minimally convey something of the truths of nonhuman states of mind? To return to Ruskin’s final example from

Wordsworth’s The Excursion, the character Ellen imagines a bird in the act of imagining heaven, but Ellen also acknowledges the constraints of her human knowledge and perception. She cries:

90 that poor bird–– O, come and hear him! Thou who hast to me Been faithless, hear him;––though a lowly creature, One of God’s simple children that yet know not The Universal Parent, how he sings! As if he wished the firmament of heaven Should listen, and give back to him the voice Of his triumphant constancy and love; The proclamation that he makes, how far His darkness doth transcend our fickle light. (qtd. in MP III 5.218-219)

Glossing this passage in which a bird seems to express wishes to heaven, Ruskin states that “Ellen is quite above the slightest erring emotion. There is not the barest film of fallacy in all her thoughts” (5.219). Nevertheless, Ruskin cites the passage as an instance of the pathetic fallacy. Truly, Ellen’s suspicion of what she cannot confirm about the bird’s proclamation of “triumphant constancy and love” (5.219) presents a more or less false appearance. Ellen attempts reasonable vision amidst her bereaved emotional state, but cannot help perceiving sympathy in, and sympathetically perceiving, the lowly creature. Indeed, she is just like the other example from Wordsworth that Ruskin praises, when the apostrophizing speaker of “‘Tis Said, That Some Have Died For Love” feels a

“vague impression that a miracle might be wrought to give relief even to a less sore distress,––that nature is kind, and God is kind, and that grief is strong: it knows not well what is possible to such grief” (5.217). Ruskin paraphrases Ellen’s thoughts thus: “I know he means nothing of the kind; but it does verily seem as if” (5.219). He therefore praises Ellen’s combination of clear sight and strong feeling amidst perceptual illusion and uncertainty, but recognizes too that poets’ encounters with birds are very liable to test their sight. Ruskin thought Ellen’s encounter displayed a scene of admirable strength of pathos, intellect, and acute perception by resisting full explanation, venturing only a

91 comparative aesthetic judgment about the emotional or spiritual quality of the bird’s cries compared to her own: “The proclamation that he makes, how far / His darkness doth transcend our fickle light” (5.219). This is Ruskin’s “exquisite” pathetic fallacy about a bird.

Ruskin would require this same scrutiny and reflective perception of birds in his ornithological lectures for art students at Oxford in the early 1870s, where he expressed his own deep sympathy with the creatures. Published as Love’s Meinie in 1881, Ruskin recognized in these lectures that in order to be true to the great astonishment that the watching of birds engendered, it was a practical necessity to personify them. While humanization of birds did not actually make them angels, viewing them as such seemed the only way do justice to their natures that, paradoxically, humbled humanity and exalted the humble creature. Ruskin mused:

Remaining thus blind and careless to the true ministries of the humble creature whom God has really sent to serve us, we in our pride, thinking ourselves surrounded by the pursuivants of the sky, can yet only invest them [angels] with majesty by giving them the calm of the bird’s motion, and shade of the bird’s plume —and after all, it is well for us, if … we think that, “with angels and archangels, and all the company of Heaven, we laud and magnify His glorious name”—well for us, if our attempt be not only an insult, and His ears open rather to the inarticulate and unintended praise, of “the Swallow, twittering from her straw-built shed.” (LM 25.73)

The final line, from Gray’s Elegy, ends Ruskin’s lecture by placing the swallow’s humble twittering above humans’ anthropomorphic grafting of bird-traits onto humans to make angels, or at least locates the material source of such projections in the too often missed observances of the “humble creature whom God has really sent to serve us” (my emphasis) (25.73). Ruskin’s oblique language about God and humanity strongly suggests his ongoing pragmatic religious orientation, that so far as it is “well for us” to imagine

92 ourselves graced with the gift of life that we thankfully receive with our fellow creatures, we may consider our humble lives blessed. The swallow itself modeled this angelic form of life for Ruskin and could do so without violating laws of nature, even though Ruskin achieves his own rhetorical purposes by drawing on the metaphor existing at the greatest level of abstraction, where the “spiritual natures” of birds shade over into the ideal pitched at the level of God and/as Nature.

The Rev. Edward Young, already mentioned, had objected much earlier, in 1854, to the “undeniable” but “microscopic” truth of Ruskin’s criticism as “destructive of natural instinct,” and felt tempted “to dash the microscope to pieces” (Young Art 18).

Young thought Ruskin secularly misread the divine book of nature, while Ruskin actually wanted to push the natural-theological heuristic further by adding human aesthetic capabilities and limitations to the equation. To Ruskin, nature as divine revelation meant that the perceptual limits human nature imposed held their own meaning for interpretations of exterior things. By locating revelation partly within humans and partly within nature, moments of emotional resonance between the two, so long as one was watching closely and carefully with a good idea of what one was watching, manifested truer appearances with an undeniable and memorable force that justified belief in substantial reality, if nothing else. Ultimately, Ruskin held that even if divinity was mythology, mythology remained the only resource for meaningful emotional expression, and that either silence or bloodless numbers were the only alternatives. Ruskin instinctively felt that it was incorrect and unwise to treat nature only analytically, since the way to treat it nobly was to treat it socially, using the type of imagination one would extend toward a person, which required a thin but encompassing anthropomorphic

93 mask.23 Emotional responses to nature resulted from sympathetic illusions exhibiting greater or lesser strength of vision and intellect, and perceiving the truth of evolution required this same mythological method.

In the passage of Love’s Meinie that George Levine cites as evidence of Ruskin’s reluctant belief in evolution, Ruskin personifies a feminized artist of nature raising “dead crystallization” into animal life, and into the “sentient plume” (25.55).24 Ruskin’s natural selector in this passage is little more than a humanized aggregate of “the loves and hatreds of the now conscious creatures [that] modify their forms into parallel beauty and degradation.” Ruskin stated, “we might have anticipated by reason” that such natural selection occurred and “ought long since to have known [its truth] by observation”

(25.55-56). Disarmingly admitting the common sense of evolution, however, Ruskin dispensed with its mere truth in order to promote his strategy for proceeding with its

23 Dinah Birch argues for Ruskin’s later works as anticipating the search for a new mythology apparent in Modernist works by James Joyce and T. S. Eliot (Ruskin and Modernism 32-47). Also, see Robert Hewison on the unifying power of myth in Ruskin (“Ruskin and Science” 40-41). I include a representative passage from The Queen of the Air (1869) that demonstrates Ruskin’s enthusiastic linkages of myth and clear vision of material reality as it relates to bird life: “I must also anticipate something of what I have to say respecting the relation of the power of Athena to organic life, so far as to note that her name, Pallas, probably refers to the quivering or vibration of the air; and to its power, whether as vital force, or communicated wave, over every kind of matter, in giving it vibratory movement; first, and most intense, in the voice and throat of the bird, which is the air incarnate; and so descending through the various orders of animal life to the vibrating and semi-voluntary murmur of the insect; and, lower still, to the hiss, or quiver of the tail, of the half-lunged snake and deaf adder; all these, nevertheless, being wholly under the rule of Athena as representing either breath, or vital nervous power; and, therefore, also, in their simplicity, the––oaten pipe and pastoral song, which belong to her dominion over the asphodel meadows, and breathe on their banks of violets” (19.345). 24 Sharon Aranovsky Weltman attends to Ruskin’s claim, in The Queen of the Air written in 1869 shortly before Ruskin delivered the lectures of Love’s Meinie, that his own theories “are in nowise antagonistic to the theories which Mr. Darwin’s unwearied and unerring investigations are every day rendering more probable” (19.358n). See Weltman’s Performing the Victorian (49). The Queen of the Air also deals in a great number of images of birds. 94 knowledge. He argued that scientists who spend their time looking for lines of descent often fail to distinguish between the two species of people of utmost importance:

one, capable of loyalty and love, [who] can at least conceive spiritual natures which have no taint from their own, and leave behind them, diffused among thousands on earth, the happiness they never hoped for themselves, in the skies; and the other, capable only of avarice, hatred, and shame … (25.56-57)

Ruskin proposed reactions to birds as a sorting device for humanity, a guide toward a practical middle way between positivism and Platonism. The ability to perceive human- like “spiritual natures” and emotions, particularly happiness, in the creatures of the sky, served for Ruskin as a definite indicator of something essentially human. If pathetic fallacies or sympathetic illusions could not convey the exact feelings of birds, they could at least enlist enough of our sympathy to make humans feel the truth, and place our faith, in similar inner lives outside our own species.

The Moral of Anthropomorphic Instinct

Darwin shared Ruskin’s sympathy with the lives of animals similar to our own, but did he share the idea that poetry and its personifying figurations could engage observation, intellect, and sympathy in order to gain some purchase on animal experience, or increase human appreciation of such lives? While Darwin clearly went further than anyone before him in establishing a positive material theory for placing the animal firmly within the human, Darwin also admitted that he might not have gone far enough imaginatively or morally. Darwin modestly suggested in his autobiography that his own habits of thought came at the expense of certain faculties of imagination and appreciation. He wrote that, if he had to live his life over again, he would have made it a habit to read poetry and listen to music every day so that parts of his brain related to 95 higher aesthetic tastes, parts he was afraid had atrophied, might have been kept active.

Darwin sounds much like Ruskin when he writes

The loss of these [higher aesthetic] tastes is a loss of happiness, and may possibly be injurious to the intellect, and more probably to the moral character, by enfeebling the emotional part of our nature. (Darwin Life and Letters 50)

Darwin never stated he should have read poetry and listened to music instead of conducting his unparalleled career in biology, but that he would have attempted to cultivate higher aesthetic tastes consistent with his analytical work in order to strengthen both the intellect and emotional life. If Darwin truly believed his habits had foreclosed upon certain emotional and intellectual possibilities, he probably would have sympathized with Ruskin’s proposals to cultivate strong emotional responsiveness, intellectual development, and acute perception in the watching of both human and nonhuman nature. For Ruskin, this also meant attending to the powerful human instinct to personify things. For Darwin, this watching of human nature would have been inseparable from his own watching of animal nature. Indeed, Darwin’s pioneering of critical anthropomorphism did serve as a bridge between his biological hypotheses and

Ruskin’s aesthetic arguments.

Like Darwin, who emphasized the moral and intellectual side of aesthetic taste that he felt he had left comparatively unexplored, Ruskin felt that the proof of his aesthetic theories rested in their moral and intellectual results. Ruskin’s ideal Seer, which may be both a poet and a thinker, “does not suppose his thinking of any other importance than as it tends to work” (5.333-334). Therefore, Ruskin chose to put the instinct to animate nature to his pragmatic test by citing an exceedingly effective and moral poet as his final example of a Seer, one whose animation of nature had worked for much of

96 Western culture for millennia. In the “Sermon on the Mount,” Christ admonishes his listeners to consider the lilies of the field that “toil not.” Ruskin asks readers to observe here “precisely the delicate attribution of life which we have seen to be characteristic of the modern view of landscape” (5.385). The lesson about anthropomorphism follows, still pluralistic in its moral:

And we see in this, therefore, that the instinct which leads us thus to attribute life to the lowest forms of organic nature, does not necessarily spring from faithlessness, nor the deducing a moral out of them from an irregular and languid conscientiousness. (5.385)

While the best poets attempt to remain fixed on the “very plain and leafy fact” (5.209) of the primrose to perception, they also understand that they “cannot fathom the mystery of a single flower” (5.387). They admit ultimate ignorance and implicate their imperfect perception in constructing and maintaining their reality. This is the humbling and liberating lesson of reflection upon perceptual illusion: the eye and brain construct what they see and conceive. As Edward Alexander writes, the theory of the pathetic fallacy actually gestures toward poetry’s expression of the modern idea “that perception itself is a creative act in which we half-perceive and half-create, and that it is wrong to locate

‘science’ in the object of perception and ‘art’ in the perceiver” (510). For Ruskin, therefore, when active and enlightened by sympathy and science, the animation of nature manifests in nobler forms:

[W]hen the active life is nobly fulfilled, and the mind is then raised beyond it into clear and calm beholding of the world around us, the same tendency again manifests itself in the most sacred way: the simplest forms of nature are strangely animated by the sense of the Divine presence; the trees and flowers seem all, in a sort, children of God; and we ourselves, their fellows, made out of the same dust, and greater than they only in having a greater portion of the Divine power exerted on our frame, and all the common uses and palpably visible forms of things, become subordinate in our minds to their inner glory,—to the mysterious voices in which they talk to us about God, and the changeful and typical aspects by 97 which they witness to us of holy truth, and fill us with obedient, joyful, and thankful emotion. (5.386)

This strange animation of nature occurs in the most sacred way only when one has worked to obtain the critical faculties to resist its naïve forms and to resist scientistic dismissals of its human consequence.

Unmistakably, therefore, in the theory that has supported a view of Ruskin among literary critics, and among some environmentalists, as a hopelessly anthropocentric and anti-Darwinian “ego-clencher” (Evernden 101), Ruskin actually worked painstakingly in the opposite direction. Ruskin viewed humans as fellows of the trees and flowers, differently endowed but made out of the same dust. The theory of the pathetic fallacy is not a “diatribe” establishing a “derogatory phrase” (Miles 5), but an effort to refine and more critically express the inescapable and emotional instinct to animate and anthropomorphize nature. As Harold Bloom stated, Ruskin criticized pathetic fallacies by

Romantics “for the sake of saving the Romantic program of humanizing nature from extinction through excessive self-indulgence” (Bloom xxv), not to condemn it altogether, nor to condemn the scientific faith in a real material world to explore.

For Ruskin, who appreciated Darwin personally before he did so professionally, 25 scientific pursuits become injurious only if they inspire too much pride, and thereby

25 Cook and Wedderburn note how Charles Eliot Norton “on one occasion [in December of 1868] arranged a meeting between Ruskin and Darwin. “‘Ruskin‘s gracious courtesy,’ he says, ‘was matched by Darwin‘s charming and genial simplicity.’ Ruskin was full of questions which interested the elder naturalist by the keenness of observation and the variety of scientific attainment which they indicated, and their animated talk afforded striking illustration of the many sympathies that underlay the divergence of their points of view and of their methods of thought. The next morning Darwin rode over on horseback to say a pleasant word about Ruskin, and two days afterward Ruskin wrote, ‘Mr. Darwin was delightful’” (19.xlv).

98 restrain us at a low stage of investigation, checking impulses that allow humans both to experience, and subsequently reflect upon, emotions that are powerful, significant, and enlivening (5.386). As Ruskin eventually granted the truth of Darwin’s biology, he may, if in a generous mood, not have faulted Darwin for not attending in the same manner to cultivating high aesthetic tastes, since it was a rare gift to balance such pursuits. Scientific thought “may in certain minds be consistent with such contemplation;” Ruskin wrote,

“but only by an effort” (5.386). The argument of the theory of the pathetic fallacy, and of

Ruskin’s entire body of work, was to make this effort.

One must exercise the mind against failures of perception and fanciful flights of imagination. One can never dispense with all illusion, but one can feel illusion more keenly as a perception of human limits, and the testament of illusion to a humble place in reality. Keep the facts of science and analytical intelligence consistent with the enlivening “perception” or “imagination” of the forces, passions, and energies of a

“living power” in nature. These imperatives of Ruskin’s were as necessary for human happiness as they were for preserving, through sympathy, the lives of other creatures from human destructive power.

Ruskin challenged an era and an empire proud of its scientific, industrial, and cultural revolutions by posing the problem of human exceptionality in terms of this exceptionality’s practical effects upon human and nonhuman nature. Would the fellowship of “similarly-minded creatures” (25.54) endure in a brave new world? Would scientific humans continue to countenance the “destruction of the creatures which they professed to believe even the Most High would not see perish without pity” (25.18), or would they, perhaps with the help of more or less sympathetic illusions, begin to act as if

99 they could “conceive spiritual natures” with “no taint from their own … in the skies”

(25.56-57)?

100

Chapter 4: The History and Theory of the Pathetic Fallacy

in the Early Twentieth Century

I begin this section on the career of the pathetic fallacy in the early twentieth century by pointing to its central paradox. On one side, critics either dismissed or ignored

Ruskin’s theory. New Critics rarely mention it, except for I. A. Richards in Practical

Criticism (1929), who called it “Ruskin’s calamitous though noble mistake.” Richards thought the theory exhibited mere “literalism” and felt that Ruskin missed how “poetry may have other aims besides clear thinking and strong feeling” (204). On the other hand,

Josephine Miles – poet and author of the only book-length study of the term, The Pathetic

Fallacy in the Nineteenth Century: A Study Between Object and Emotion (1942) – claimed that since Ruskin’s coinage of the term, actual occurrences of pathetic fallacies in poetry drastically declined. She conducted a close formalist analysis that observed an over two-hundred percent drop in occurrences of “an object and an attributed emotion” in poetry from Collins and Gray to T. S. Eliot and the Imagists. Miles claimed that the pathetic fallacy’s “power” in T. S. Eliot, a possible modern representative, was “close to none at all” (1).

So which is it? Had pathetic fallacies really disappeared in major poetry, or was the theory itself a mistake? Might critics have missed or misinterpreted the importance of

Ruskin’s warning while poets took it to heart? If pathetic fallacies in poetry had really declined, could the downward trend be correlated with but not caused by Ruskin’s warning? Or, did “raging waves” and “weeping clouds” more or less continue in subtler

101 forms ever since Samuel Johnson complained of them in pastoral poetry in 1750?

(Johnson 180). If one followed Miles by taking Eliot as exemplary of the decline, what does one do with “the evening spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table;” lines that contain a “bizarre pathetic fallacy” (196) according to Charles Altieri, but that inaugurated modern poetry according to John Berryman (“With this line modern poetry begins” 270)?

This incommensurability between the seeming inadequacy of Ruskin’s theory and its seemingly profound effect upon poetic practice, leading up to and including modernist poetry, reveals an interpretive problem about what constituted a pathetic fallacy in an era of renewed formal experimentation. Richards characterized this interpretive “problem of the pathetic fallacy” as “the question whether the attribution of feelings is used as an argument and overworked” (96). To Richards, figurative language in “respectable poetry,” as he called it, “encourages attention to its literal sense up to the point, to be detected by the reader’s discretion, at which liberty can serve the aim of the poem better than fidelity to fact or strict coherence among fictions” (203). Richards assumed Ruskin’s literalist bias. Although Ruskin’s theory distinguished between ranges of poetry and kinds of figuration (fallacies of wilful fancy and pathetic fallacies), and thereby goes further than Richards appreciated, Richards’s criticism is fair so far as it recognizes the limitation that the theory applies only to poetry aiming at “clear thinking and strong feeling” (Practical Criticism 204). But critics after Richards, like Kenneth Burke, recognized that “intricate workings of the ‘pathetic fallacy’” are used by poets “not quite so metaphorically as they and we sometimes think” (Permanence and Change 272,

1936). Burke cited poetic forms, religious visions, and visual illusions that all revealed

102 how greatly “our interests shape our ‘perceptions’ of objects” even among “scientifically educated persons … who are accustomed to sober thinking” (273). Such an admission on

Burke’s part was not to claim that one could ever ultimately keep interests from interfering with perception and achieve unmediated fact, but to gain a greater consciousness that “one invents external equivalents” for “mental and emotional patterns.” For Burke, such “analogical extension” took a number of names, such as

“hallucination, sympathy, empathy, discovery, metaphor, perspective, interest, bias, pathetic fallacy, personification, synecdoche, predisposition, psychosis.” So far as these poetic processes were “assertive” by producing or creating value in the world, they were also “concerned with action.” For Burke, as for Ruskin before him, the states of mind and the emotions involved in pathetic fallacies were “profoundly ethical” (274), extending from their poetic genesis to attitudes and actions that followed from the conceptions of reality they engendered.

Keeping with the importance of the theory to literary practice, I trace the channel of influence truest to Ruskin’s theoretical spirit into the twentieth century, and it is a major channel. The term pathetic fallacy is sidelined or isolated in critical usage for many reasons, including the shifting meaning of the terms pathetic and fallacy themselves,

Ruskin’s missteps in the ordering of poets, and the dogmatic application of the theory to condemn poetry and metaphor as such; but one other important reason is that poets and critics absorbed significant Ruskinian values for poetry that T. S. Eliot codified in new terminology. The better part of this chapter, therefore, will be spent explaining as directly as possible the salient parallels between Ruskin’s poetics in Modern Painters III––which

103 “contains Ruskin’s principal achievement as a literary critic” (Bloom xxv)––and Eliot’s

“programme for the métier of poetry” (Eliot “Tradition” SE 6).

This connection between Ruskin and Eliot requires some assistance from the philosophical and critical figure who served as a bridge between the Victorian and modernist giants, T. S. Eliot’s Harvard professor, George Santayana. Eliot originally embarked on a poetic-philosophical project, shared with Santayana, of refining a theory of the imagination toward the intensification of a more self-conscious and reflective literary realism. According to Louis Menand, Eliot’s criticism presented a “minimalist theory of the imagination” that substituted “objects” for “Nature” and edited out “the transcendentalist extravagances of Romantic theories of art” (Menand 136). Eliot rejected

Romantic sentimentality and self-aggrandizement (“the egotistical sublime”) by a scrutinizing attention to inner life and to outer appearance in order to merge, at moments of great intensity, the truth of feeling with a seemingly inevitable mythical form. I show that Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy is the major precursor to this modernist theory of poetry, which described fusing strong feeling into poetic form as the result of a great and attentive intelligence transforming the poet into a medium as opposed to a personality.

Because of this lineage from Ruskin to Santayana to Eliot, those who have come closest to noticing the similarities between Ruskin and Eliot with regard to theories of poetry and the imagination have been those interpreting Eliot from a pragmatist literary critical tradition. I will therefore begin with the aesthetic critics who have hinted at the association between Ruskin and Eliot and address certain obstacles to thinking about this association, such as philosophical and religious differences between Ruskin and Eliot and

104 Eliot’s explicit condemnations of Victorian literary criticism. I then detail the relevant similarities between Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy, the science of aspects, and landscape experience, and the theories of Santayana and Eliot. In particular, the correlation between Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy and Santayana’s theory of “correlative objects” sheds new light on the formation of Eliot’s “objective correlative.” As Ruskin scholar George Landow explained, for Ruskin, “The distorting effects of emotion, once understood correctly, are not solipsistic” but rather, “by manipulating a portion of reality which both speaker and listener share, the pathetic fallacy allows one to glimpse the passions within the consciousness of another human being … . [It] allows the poet to dramatize grief and joy, communicating them far more effectively than would the simple statement that the speaker suffers from sorrow or feels joy” (383-384). This capacity of the pathetic fallacy pioneers the idea of an “interior landscape” of objects that correlate to particular emotions; in Eliot’s words, “a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked” (SE “Hamlet” 124-125). The extent of the relation between Ruskin and Eliot in this regard has never, to my knowledge, been suggested before, but can be justly observed throughout many of Eliot’s early theoretical dictums.

Moreover, Ruskin, Santayana, and Eliot also shared the belief that the best poetry remained ambitiously committed to the construction of the ideal. Santayana retained

Ruskin’s faith in the power of art to approach the ideal through imagination, both in

Ruskin’s sense of the ideal as, very simply, “not a material object, but the mental conception of a material object” (MP IV 6.165), and the ideal as the concept of “the full

105 perfection of the creature in all its functions” and the examination of “how far this perfection exists, or may exist, in nature, and, if not in nature, how it is by us discoverable or imaginable” (MP IV 6.167). This same ambition is persistently prominent in Santayana’s “The Elements and Functions of Poetry” (1900). Although it is muted in

Eliot’s early criticism and poetry, one discerns the idea’s revival in Eliot’s post- conversion poetry, as when, in “Ash-Wednesday,” he acknowledges the actuality of

“having to construct something, / Upon which to rejoice.” Therefore, the idealist and constructivist vision that retains its vitality in a profound agnosticism, from Ruskin to

Eliot, remains an important part of the purview of this chapter.

First, however, I begin making the connection to Ruskin through the 1981 revaluation of T. S. Eliot’s dissertation in “Philosophy from Kinkanja: Eliot’s

Pragmatism,” in which Walter Benn Michaels adduced Ruskin’s concept of the

“innocence of the eye” to underwrite William James’s definition of the true quality of human genius, which consisted, simply enough, in “little more than the faculty of seeing in an unhabitual way” (2:110).26 Ruskin and James assist Michaels in discussing T. S.

Eliot’s explanation of F. H. Bradley’s concept of “immediate experience.” Eliot described

Bradley’s term as “the general condition before distinctions and relations have been developed, and where as yet neither any subject or object exists” (173). Eliot found

26 The concept, famous in art education, comes from an early footnote in Ruskin’s The Elements of Drawing (1857) that states: “The perception of solid Form is entirely a matter of experience. We see nothing but flat colours; and it is only by a series of experiments that we find out that a stain of black or grey indicates the dark side of a solid substance, or that a faint hue indicates that the object in which it appears is far away. The whole technical power of painting depends on our recovery of what may be called the innocence of the eye; that is to say, of a sort of childish perception of these flat stains of colour, merely as such, without consciousness of what they signify,—as a blind man would see them if suddenly gifted with sight.” (15.27).

106 Bradley’s concept an experiential impossibility, the definition of the annihilation of experience as such. Michaels claimed that Eliot’s “practical metaphysic” applied the pragmatic method to systematic philosophy in order to broker a “middle way” that denied the utility of both Bradley’s “immediate experience” and its opposite, “complete experience” or the “Absolute.” For Eliot, after systematic philosophical expression failed to avoid falsifying itself as it neared completion, emotions and feelings and experiences remained the only usable material of thought. Therefore, according to Michaels, “only the practical” (200) remained for Eliot in the realm of the dissertation’s philosophy, and the practical required the sorting out of how emotions and feelings organized and affected interior life and thought, and how poetry could express significant emotional states.

Although Michaels mentions the correlation between Ruskin and William James, he does not concern himself with drawing out James’s citation of Ruskin in Principles of

Psychology, in which James spoke of the capacity for ingenious unhabitual seeing. James summarized Ruskin’s admission that “religious people, as a rule, care little for pictures, and that when they do care for them they generally prefer the worst ones to the best”

(Principles 2: 472). James’s agreement with Ruskin’s insight is emphatic.

Yes! in every art, in every science, there is the keen perception of certain relations being right or not, and there is the emotional flush and thrill consequent thereupon. And these are two things, not one. In the former of them it is that experts and masters are at home. The latter accompaniments are bodily commotions that they may hardly feel, but that may be experienced in their fullness by crétins and philistines in whom the critical judgment is at its lowest ebb. (2: 472)

Ruskin makes this same point in Modern Painters III while questioning “whether anyone who knows optics, however religious he may be, can feel in equal degree the pleasure or reverence which an unlettered peasant may feel at the sight of a rainbow” (5.387). Ruskin

107 lamented that there was no cure for “weariness of the imagination” in one who loses the childlike “freshness of all things” (5.369-370) through habit and routinization. As a result, Ruskin and James concluded that the scientist and the philosopher approached their tasks, at last, with less emotional rush and thrill. “Very little emotion here!” James wrote of the empirical scientist: “Emotion and cognition seem then parted even in this last retreat; and cerebral processes are almost feelingless, so far as we can judge, until they summon help from parts below” (2: 472). This summoning of parts below, creating what James called “bodily commotions,” would be an energetic role of poetry for Ruskin, who in spite of the psychological forces working against him or her, urged the poet to

“think strongly, feel strongly, and see truly.” Despite I. A. Richards’s disparagement of

Ruskin, Richards’s protégé William Empson noticed the “emotional reverberation”

(Ambiguity 40) that pathetic fallacies achieved through perceptual ambiguity, just as Eliot discussed the intelligent use of conceits and suggested that poets look not only into their hearts but into their “digestive tracts” (SE “Metaphysical Poets” 250).

Michaels’s essay significantly undermined what Donald Childs calls the “Second-

Hand Bradley School” of Eliot interpretation by initiating pragmatist understandings of

Eliot’s philosophy and poetry. Louis Menand follows Michaels in 1998 by claiming that

Eliot had “a much firmer claim to the pragmatist philosophical tradition than Frost or

Stein or Stevens ever did” (“Pragmatists and Poets” 367). Indeed, Eliot’s philosophy can be observed cautiously evading essentialist and absolutist commitments of systematizers like Bradley or Bergson in order to carefully mediate between strongly objectivist or subjectivist positions. Richard Shusterman likened Eliot’s philosophical position to T. E.

Hulme or Rorty in this respect, stating that Eliot grasped “a perfectly respectable form of

108 philosophy which is intentionally unsystematic but instead pragmatic or edifying” (9).

However, this element of Eliot’s philosophical and critical style hardly met with enthusiastic acceptance during his lifetime, and fell under much harsher critique after his death when the influence of new critical theories and practices waned in the face of post- structuralist and new historicist perspectives.

Some major critics found Eliot’s style offensive not only because it was frustratingly difficult, but as time wore on and Eliot’s social and religious views changed, because it seemed politically troubling and potentially dishonest.27 It has been sensitively suggested that Eliot’s “evasiveness” resulted from a startlingly skeptical intelligence turned upon itself.28 Certainly, Eliot’s capacity for change and his principled denial of a strong dichotomy between intuition and intellect birthed myths that, among some, undermined his place as a professional aesthetic critic. These myths, Shusterman argues, consisted in perceiving Eliot either as a scientistic denier of the importance of subjective response, or an insular and anti-rational formalist because his thinking was unsystematic

(insults also hurled against Ruskin). Without mentioning his “royalist” politics, Fredric

Jameson linked Eliot’s views on the “dissociation of sensibility” to nostalgic Utopianism,

27 Those typifying the “second-hand Bradley school” of interpreting Eliot, such as Ivor Winters, tend to see Eliot’s lack of commitment to a systematizing logic as evidence of his façade of “intellectualism,” or as F. R. Leavis stated of “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” “the trenchancy and vigor are illusory and the essay is notable for its ambiguities, its logical inconsequences, its pseudo-precisions, its fallaciousness, and the aplomb of its equivocations and its specious cogency” (qtd. in Freed 42-43).

28 For an excellent criticism of the view of Eliot as a pragmatist philosopher in the dissertation, see Gregory Brazeal’s “The Alleged Pragmatism of T. S. Eliot,” which does justice to the way Eliot puts his philosophy to the pragmatic test, while also preserving a great number of “philosophical faces” which turned him toward “a skepticism so unrelenting that it would eventually take as its object itself, and thereby open the way to orthodoxy and religious faith” (263). 109 wherein the “right-wing critique of capitalism that preceded Marx” (337) emerged as

Eliot’s irrational hope in a pre-lapsarian, pre-capitalist “primal unity” between subject and object. Terry Eagleton expressed a virulent form of this view by accusing Eliot of exhibiting a “contempt for the intellect” characteristic of “any right-wing irrationalist”

(Eagleton Literary Theory 40-41). Addressing the defensible accusations against Eliot,

Shusterman explained that Eliot did not deny subjective experience or the value of reason, but in fact reasoned that objectivity in matters of experience could be had only through impersonality, with “impersonal” taken to mean more than personal agreement, i.e., objectivity through consensus among a group with the same objects as referents.

Shusterman argued that Eliot subscribed to and further anchored this idea of “consensual objectivity” by emphasizing living traditions, “something firmer and steadier than agreement per se” (61). Shusterman’s argument has not softened posthumous attacks on

Eliot, but it has drawn a less essentialist and more pragmatist portrait of Eliot’s early approach to philosophy as a method of settling metaphysical disputes that would otherwise be interminable by appealing to practical consequences and continuous traditions in the practices of science, art, and religion.

For instance, Eliot understood that “‘outside’ and ‘inside’ are terms which provide unlimited opportunity for quibbling” (SE 15), and he sought to avoid the mystification that the parsing out of degrees of dualism necessarily involves. “If you have to imagine it as outside, then it is outside” (SE 15), Eliot wrote. This wry dispatching of the problem in order to progress with discussing the function of criticism, Shusterman notes, resembles

Ruskin’s complaints about German philosophy in the pathetic fallacy chapter. Long before Eliot, Ruskin issued the pragmatic challenge to the terms subject and object “most

110 vehemently” (Shusterman 51).29 Ruskin stated that the two words constituted “the most objectionable … that were ever coined by the troublesomeness of metaphysicians” (MP

III 5.202.) Although Ruskin understood the mediation of reality through the senses, he denigrated the solipsistic step that negated the reality of a material world, or hyper- subjectively called all experience into doubt. A philosopher, believing the only real truth of things is “their appearance to, or effect upon, us” could say that “everything in the world depends upon his seeing or thinking of it, and that nothing, therefore, exists, but what he sees or thinks of” (5.202). Ruskin did not read German and only knew of Kant through Carlyle and Coleridge and other English writers. He opposed the hyper- subjectivist perspective as the substance of what he knew of German transcendental idealism. However, Ruskin sought only to establish the existence of things in themselves and the consistency of human responses to this substantial reality (phenomena), even if things in themselves could never be known as they were in themselves (noumena). 30

Instead of arguing endlessly over degrees of “subness” or “obness,” Ruskin felt philosophers should submit to the practical necessity of believing that an actual reality exists through human observance of it and state clearly of matter that “It does so” or “It seems so to me” (5.203). Although Shusterman views Ruskin’s vehement rejection of

29 Shusterman quickly moves on from what he sees as Ruskin’s too simplistic and “obviously inadequate explanation” (51) of the distinction between subject and object as that between felt sensation and the power of producing that sensation––I find the comparison more apt.

30 Of course, Ruskin and Kant would have agreed on this point; what Ruskin rails against is something much more like George Berkeley’s “immaterialism” or “subjective idealism,” the strong hypothesis that matter exists only in the mind. 111 subject and object as an “obviously inadequate explanation” (51), Eliot took Ruskin’s point better than most.31

Ruskin’s caution derived from his own “strong inclination” toward metaphysics.

Ruskin stated that this inclination “would, indeed, have led me far astray long ago, if I had not learned also some use of my hands, eyes, and feet” (MP III 5.334). Ruskin, therefore, subjected his thinking to his own pragmatic test as he set his hands, eyes, and feet to work in drawing, travelling, and criticizing the art, such as Turner’s and

Wordsworth’s, that had been useful to his own life. Eliot, also, defined this as the proper work of literary criticism.32 In “The Function of Criticism” (1923), Eliot advocated “the elucidation of works of art and the correction of taste” (SE 13) as the critic’s task, and thereby compelled others to follow him in sincerely describing and explaining how certain books, essays, sentences, and men were “useful” to him (SE 14). Adhering to this task of explaining usefulness for life checked the tendency to become stalled in a metaphysical morass. Eliot had hinted toward this stance earlier in “Tradition and the

Individual Talent” as well, which proposed “to halt at the frontier of metaphysics or mysticism, and to confine itself to such practical conclusions as can be applied by the responsible person interested in poetry” (SE 11). Even so, both Ruskin and Eliot

31 In fact, Shusterman himself more or less repeats Ruskin’s admonition when he writes that although subject and object “seem too deeply entrenched to be facilely dismissed from theoretical discourse,” he argues that one can “strive to avoid them in practice, and even, by clarificatory analysis, somewhat loosen their grip of mystification in theory” (51). 32 Ruskin admits in a footnote, while criticizing Wordsworth, that of course: “I should never have attempted to write this book at all unless I had been myself strongly influenced by the sensation to which Wordsworth and other modern poets refer” (5.364 n.3). 112 eventually felt that their critical tasks could not wholly avoid metaphysics, and could not be truly sincere or ultimately useful if they pretended to do so.

Just as Ruskin recognized the paradox of the “plain and leafy fact” of the primrose’s appearance alongside the infinite ignorance in which we “cannot fathom the mystery of a single flower” (5.387), Eliot suggested “All human faculties pushed to their limits end in mysticism” (qtd. in Childs 144). To push human faculties to their limits in order to know them, and to feel their import for possibilities of life, was for both Ruskin and Eliot a task of intellect and imagination engaged in a great study. As Ruskin wrote,

“The most imaginative men study the hardest, and are the most thirsty for new knowledge” (MP III 6.288). I mentioned in Chapter Two how Ruskin thought that the best poets sustained a view of fact amidst the imaginative exhilaration of “whatever and how many soever associations and passions may be that crowd around it,” but feeling this exhilaration that was liable to overwhelm reason and factuality marked a higher stand in the ranks of being, and the moment it overwhelmed the best poets marked when poetry turned to prophecy, when metaphor grasped wildly at the unknown (MP III 5.209).

Eliot also wrote of symbolism as the “incarnation of meaning in fact” that poetry and religion shared. Like Ruskin in Modern Painters, Eliot valued the primary fact embodied in the word, made important by the meanings that could be created within and around it, and the point at which sight or expression faltered, revealing limits of human comprehension. Eliot stated in 1931 that

in poetry it is the tendency of the word to mean as much as possible. To find the word and give it the utmost meaning, in its place; to mean as many things as possible, to make it both exact and comprehensive, and really to unite the disparate and remote, to give them a fusion and a pattern with the word, surely this is the mastery at which the poet aims; and the poet is distinguished by making the word do more work than it does for other writers. Of course one can “go too 113 far” and except in directions in which we can go too far there is no interest in going at all; and only those who will risk going too far can possibly find out just how far one can go. (Complete Prose 4:367-368)

For Ruskin and for Eliot, therefore, poetry remained tied to facts of human feeling and human meaning precisely expressed, keeping the “utmost meaning, in its place…exact and comprehensive.” Eliot recognized Ruskin early on as a “master of the English language” (Complete Prose 1:540) in his descriptive power. Musing on the same topic the differing virtues of prose and poetry (the same topic that prompted Eliot’s compliment to Ruskin over a decade later) Eliot maintained that “to have the virtues of good prose is the first and minimum requirement of good poetry” (Complete Prose

4:170). If I. A. Richards found Eliot’s statements exhibiting something like Ruskin’s literalist bias, he never wrote of it. Yet Ruskin almost certainly would have agreed with

Eliot’s statement that the trouble with much eighteenth-century verse was that “it is not prosaic enough,” essentially restating the problem of pathetic fallacy as the degree to which a poet dared to “face the fact” of his or her age, and not “demand of poetry a day dream, or a metamorphosis of their own feeble desires or lusts” (Complete Prose 4:170,

173) and make poetry altogether too personal.33

These correspondences, along with brief nods to Ruskin in work on Eliot by

Michaels and Shusterman, suggest a richer resemblance between Ruskin and Eliot than

33 Eliot’s statement, in fuller context, reads: “Those who condemn or ignore en bloc the poetry of the eighteenth century on the ground that it is ‘prosaic’ are stumbling over an uncertainty of meaning of the word ‘prosaic’ to arrive at exactly the wrong conclusion. One does not need to examine a great deal of the inferior verse of the eighteenth century to realize that the trouble with it is that it is not prosaic enough. We are inclined to use ‘prosaic’ as meaning not only ‘like prose,’ but as ‘lacking poetic beauty’ – and the Oxford and every other dictionary give us warrant for such use. Only, we ought to distinguish between poetry which is like good prose, and poetry which is like bad prose. And even so, I believe more prose is bad because it is like bad poetry, than poetry is bad because it is like bad prose” (Eliot Complete Prose 4:170). 114 that typically acknowledged by critics only in the most general terms in statements like

“[Eliot was] carrying the torch lit the previous century by Arnold, John Ruskin, and other

Victorian Sages” (Coyle T. S. Eliot in Context 146). But as is probably already clear, more strongly linking Eliot to Ruskin risks reinforcing certain aspects of these two enormously influential but notoriously confounding English critics that are perhaps better dealt with separately. Although they served analogous roles as tastemakers in their respective ages, Ruskin and Eliot’s religious beliefs, for one, and their areas of cultural conservatism, for another, could do more to retard than encourage the interest of mostly liberal and secular literary critics in an age inclined to see the two as representatives of a

“high modernism” associated with white, patriarchal imperialism. In the case of Ruskin, the critique requires quite a bit of nuanced attention, since Ruskin’s Utopian ideas sparked the communalist Arts and Crafts Movement. Ruskin was the first to propose a progressive graduated income tax in England, for which he was mercilessly mocked.

Unto This Last, his radical and groundbreaking book on political economy, later helped inspire Gandhi’s revolt against English imperial rule in India. On the other hand, Eliot’s remark on the undesirability of a large number of freethinking Jews and his expression of

“Southern Agrarian” sympathies in After Strange Gods forecasted a conservative traditionalism that would recommend religious orthodoxy for its usefulness as opposed to its truth, a position that can seem either dishonest or self-deceived. My argument, demonstrating the commensurability of Eliot’s literary criticism and Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy acknowledges these difficult realities without relying on their resolution. However, a potentially more significant barrier to linking the two rests in

115 Eliot’s criticism of the mixed motives of Victorian Sages, Ruskin included, as inimical to literary professionalism.

Eliot criticized the moralizing masks of his progenitors in 1917, “Carlyle as an historian; Ruskin as an economist;” (Eliot Complete Prose 1:699), but later came to appreciate and admire Ruskin in particular. Those familiar with Eliot’s critical writings recognize that Eliot sometimes devoted himself to “debunking a good deal more of the nineteenth century than he could reasonably have expected to get along without”

(Menand Discovering Modernism 133), and the tracing of his theories to various nineteenth-century roots has kept scores of scholars busy. However, Ruskin has hardly been foremost among these sources. I argue that Eliot’s sincerest reproaches most explicitly take Arnold, Pater, and Carlyle to task over Ruskin. In Eliot’s 1916 syllabus for his “Tutorial Class in Modern English Literature” for the University of London, he selected from Stones of Venice, Modern Painters, Lectures on Art, Unto This Last, Crown of Wild Olive, and Munera Pulveris for his students and described covering “Ruskin’s greatness and limitations as a critic” and the “Unevenness and extraordinary brilliance of his writing” (Complete Prose I 480).34 Although Eliot granted later that Arnold was a

“more sympathetic prose writer” to his own generation than Carlyle or Ruskin, and even that Ruskin could appear “long-winded and peevish” (SE 383) by comparison, Eliot credited Ruskin with a “genuine sensibility” (SE 388) for art and architecture. Such praise may seem mild compared to Eliot’s much longer attention to Arnold, who enjoyed

34 Such high appreciations as “greatness” and “extraordinary brilliance,” though mixed with criticism, appear nowhere else on the syllabus except, perhaps, in the ambiguous discussion of the “Importance” of Arnold’s Essays in Criticism and the similarly neutral statement on Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the “Quality of her genius” (Complete Prose I 478-479). 116 greater influence and readership than Ruskin in the early twentieth century––in part, thanks to Eliot’s expression of enduring sympathies with him in the introduction to The

Sacred Wood and other writings. This larger readership, however, also made Arnold a more important figure for Eliot to criticize, which he did, for some of the very reasons he was a more sympathetic prose writer than Ruskin, i.e., his indulgently vague proposals for “Culture” and “sweetness and light,” and his sterner distinction between art and religion.

Indeed, focusing on Eliot’s attention to Arnold obscures his dismay at the lack of continued popular study of Ruskin. In Eliot’s 1927 essay, occasioned by the second edition of Bradley’s Ethical Studies, Eliot contrasted Bradley’s style to that of Ruskin and

Arnold. Eliot wrote that Ruskin’s works were “extremely readable in snippets even for many who take not a particle of interest in the things in which Ruskin was so passionately interested” (SE 395). Lest we should think Eliot one of those uninterested readers, he added, “Hence he survives in anthologies, while his books have fallen into undue neglect” (SE 395). Apparently, Eliot thought that Ruskin’s volumes contained valuable material being lost in the process of putting them into collections, and although Eliot never penned an essay on Ruskin, this void is not to be taken as evidence of Eliot’s opinion of Ruskin’s irrelevance, nor of Eliot’s inattentiveness to his works. In his thinking on political economy, Eliot quoted Ruskin’s Unto this Last and called him “a writer whom I greatly admire” and a greater writer and economist than Adam Smith

(Complete Prose 4:429), stating baldly that “We need another Ruskin” to frame

117 economic questions for broad ethical scrutiny as opposed to specialist mystification

(Complete Prose 4:214).35

These praises come after Eliot’s strongest criticism of Ruskin a half-decade earlier, when Eliot wrote that Ruskin “succeeded in satisfying his nature by translating everything immediately into terms of morals” (SE 388). Eliot quickly followed this critique by contrasting Ruskin’s “more literate social fury” to the “vague religious vapourings of Carlyle” (SE 388), and can easily be turned around and applied to Eliot’s own later turn to social criticism and Christian ethics. Eliot published this brief criticism of Ruskin in “Arnold and Pater” (1927) the same year that he joined the Church of

England. Eight years later in “Religion and Literature,” Eliot would write, “Literary criticism should be completed from a definite ethical and theological standpoint” (SE

343). To cite Shusterman once more

[Eliot’s] recognition of art and criticism’s inextricable embeddedness and dependence on the culture and ideology of a society, led him (as it had earlier led Arnold and Ruskin) to devote increasingly more attention to the independent study of culture and education, which issued in lengthy monographs: The Idea of a Christian Society, Notes Toward the Definition of Culture, and The Aims of Education. (6-7)

Indeed, there is an inverse relationship between Ruskin and Eliot’s religious faith and their political engagement. Arguably, Ruskin’s most mature and least moralizing works of aesthetic criticism, The Stones of Venice (1851-1853) and Modern Painters III and IV

(1856), appeared as Ruskin’s faith was wavering and before it eventually dissipated in

35 The editors of Eliot’s Complete Prose vol. 4 note that: “On 27 Jan 1932, TSE explained to Siepmann that ‘Ruskin, by the way, is a good respectable name to give credit to views which might be considered subversive when attached to other names’” (4:431)

118 1858.36 Afterward, his career as a social critic and political economist begins. Ruskin finished Modern Painters V in the same year that he published Unto This Last (1860). He followed these with similar sentiments in Munera Pulveris (1862-63) and Fors Clavigera

(1871-1884), a series of letters addressed to English workingmen that has been suggested as an influence on some of the Cantos of Ezra Pound.37 Eliot, on the other hand, seemed activated by a clear social vision only after his conversion to Anglicanism in 1927. Yet, neither Ruskin nor Eliot’s will to believe, nor their unique social commitments, can be very quickly and easily charted. Their mutual recognition of “art and criticism’s inextricable embeddedness and dependence on the culture and ideology of a society”

(Shusterman 6) figured into their view of philosophy itself as “chiefly literary criticism and conversation about life,” the view that Eliot stated was true “For me, as for

Santayana” (Eliot Letters 88). Indeed, George Santayana served as a bridge between

Ruskin’s practice of philosophy qua art criticism and Eliot’s criticism. Santayana helped to transfer Ruskin’s ideas on the ideal artist from the theory of the pathetic fallacy, on the disciplined innocence of the eye and the instinct to animate and personalize nature, and on the use of such “false appearances” to convey truths of human feeling through

“correlative objects,” into modern forms through which Eliot also absorbed them.

36 Ruskin’s faith was being shaken, famously, by the dreadful hammers of geologists as early as 1851, but his faith still passed his pragmatic test, helped by Pascal’s wager, in 1852. At that point, Ruskin entered the repose of faith described by James in his essay “The Will to Believe,” when Ruskin wrote to his father that he had resolved, at any rate, “to act as if the Bible were true; that if it were not, at all events I should be no worse off than I was before; that I would believe in Christ, and take Him for my Master in whatever I did . . . When I rose in the morning the cold and cough were gone; and – I felt a peace and spirit in me I had never known before” (10.xxxix). 37 See Davenport, Guy. Cities on Hills: A Study of I-XXX of Ezra Pound’s Cantos.Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1983. 22-30. 119 In Santayana’s earliest work, The Sense of Beauty (1896), in the section titled

“The differentia of aesthetic pleasure: its objectification,” Santayana asserts, “There is the expression of a curious but well-known psychological phenomenon, viz., the transformation of an element of sensation into the quality of a thing” (28-29). In other words, an element of sensation, such as the sense that one is being treated cruelly, can become attached to a thing as its inherent quality, such as, say, sea foam. To use Ruskin’s example from Kingsley, the element of sensation, the speaker’s grief, is transformed into the perceived cause of that grief (the foam), resulting in a transfer of cruelty to foam

“cruel, crawling foam.” Of this essential process, Santayana wrote, “The distinction between substance and quality, reality and appearance, matter and mind, has no other origin” (29) than this transformation. Santayana explicitly acknowledged this “curious but well-known psychological phenomenon” as the pathetic fallacy in Interpretations of

Poetry and Religion (158), published the year of Ruskin’s death in 1900.

When an artist casts a charm over a scene or an action for the benefit of a character with which the poet herself personally and strongly identifies, engaged in a sort of “idealisation by proxy” (158), she allows a personal sensation to become transferred to a quality of the world. “We dye the world of our own colour; by a pathetic fallacy, by a false projection of sentiment, we soak Nature with our own feeling, and then celebrate her tender sympathy with our moral being” (158). Santayana, like Ruskin, thought that “a great part of what is called poetry, although by no means the best part of it” (158), consisted in just such a “false projection of sentiment.” Also like Ruskin, Santayana is ultimately measured in his criticism of this state of mind and the poetry it produces. He understood the phenomena as both instinctual and emotional, and held that it was a rare

120 intellect that could self-consciously separate vision and feeling at such times without also diminishing pathos. As Santayana states:

This aberration, as we see in the case of Wordsworth, is not inconsistent with a high development of both the faculties which it confuses—I mean vision and feeling. On the contrary, vision and feeling, when most abundant and original, most easily present themselves in this undivided form. There would be need of a force of intellect which poets rarely possess to rationalize their inspiration without diminishing its volume: and if, as is commonly the case, the energy of the dream and the passion in them is greater than that of the reason, and they cannot attain true propriety and supreme beauty in their works, they can, nevertheless, fill them with lovely images and a fine moral spirit. (IPR 158)

Because “the energy of the dream and the passion” in poets is often greater than their

“reason,” Santayana thought that they could not attain “true propriety and supreme beauty” because they will fail to reflect upon their own “false projection of sentiment.”

Santayana granted that such false projections had virtue in that they “recall and consecrate those phases of our experience which, as useless to the understanding of material reality, we are in danger of forgetting altogether” (158). Yet, to Santayana, such projections and catching of likenesses were not often “discoveries,” visions in which one could place faith as practical or spiritual ideals, but ordinarily remitted only arbitrary identifications and fairly common experiences (159). Santayana agreed with Ruskin’s idea that “Fancy necessarily summons those [images] of mere external relationship, and therefore of unaffecting influence.” However, to Ruskin, “Imagination, by every ghost she raises, tells tales about the prison house, and therefore never loses her power over the heart, nor her unity of emotion” (MP IV 6.293). This prison house of the mind and emotion could never be escaped, but it could itself be acknowledged in ways that lessened the fanciful tendency of poets to move gradually from “mere vivid sight of reality, and witty suggestion of likeness, to a ghostly sight of what is unreal” (MP IV

121 6.293). Through imagination, which appealed to “a deep heart feeling,” a poet could faithfully and earnestly contemplate their “subject-matter” which was the felt experience of thought and emotion in the “prison house” of the mind. According to Ruskin, by

“never losing sight of [the subject-matter], nor disguising it, but depriving it of extraneous and material accidents,” the imaginative poet could begin regarding the mind in its “disembodied essence” (MP IV 6.298), its ideas and ideals, as no less a product of real experience.

Santayana’s “great function of poetry,” therefore, idealistically advocated poetry as a means of regarding experience more consciously, depriving considerations of experience of extraneous and accidental features and constructing conceptions of reality once again by appealing to something like Ruskin’s “deep heart feeling.” According to

Santayana, by “seizing hold of the reality of sensation and fancy beneath the surface of conventional ideas, and then out of that living but indefinite material to build new structures, richer, finer, fitter to the primary tendencies of our nature, truer to the ultimate possibilities of the soul,” formed the great function of poetry (IPR 161). Santayana believed that such a phenomenological “descent into the elements of our being” enabled contemplation and realization of ideals. “[W]e revert to sense only to find food for reason;” he wrote, “we destroy conventions only to construct ideals” (IPR 161). If this reversion to sensation underneath conventional ideas continually resurfaced only with confused and personal idealizations by proxy, it could be pleasing and faithful to feeling, but never substantially broaden or refashion conventionalized ideas, never construct ideals “truer to the ultimate possibilities of the soul.” In fact, the danger could become that, as poetry served as the guide of life more or less explicitly, fanciful illusions built

122 from sensational visions could corrode or inhibit more informed and enlightened ideals for living in the world by installing an over-personalized “sham system of nature.”

Santayana, therefore, brought the essential literary-critical Ruskin forward to the twentieth century and liberated Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy from its inexact phrasings and from Ruskin’s tendency toward passionate and certain judgment on every poet and thinker of his age. Still, Santayana’s naming of elements and functions of poetry present a no less ambitious naturalist idealism in reverence of imaginative faculties than

Ruskin’s. At the end of the “Elements and Functions of Poetry,” Santayana augments

Ruskin’s concept of clear “Sight” that constituted “poetry, prophecy, and religion,––all in one,” by referring to poetry’s possibilities upon a “higher plane” of “significant imagination” and “relevant fiction.”

Poetry raised to its highest power is then identical with religion grasped in its inmost truth; at their point of union both reach their utmost purity and beneficence, for then poetry loses its frivolity and ceases to demoralize, while religion surrenders its illusions and ceases to deceive. (IPR 172)

In gaining greater awareness of the mind’s deceptiveness and the constructed nature of perceived reality, poetic making discloses itself as operative in all perception and thought, and religion as a mythic ideal recognizes itself as true poetry.

Given Ruskin and Santayana’s impulse to refine emotional and spiritual feeling toward mythic ideals arrived at through close naturalist observation and imaginative contemplation, one may wonder where Eliot’s orthodoxy fits into the picture. Irving

Singer’s discussion of Santayana and Eliot’s responses to the problem of feeling and belief proposes one model for thinking about the dynamic. Singer wrote that “Like

Santayana, Eliot considered the subordination of feelings to beliefs to be the main problem of life; but whereas Santayana’s feelings were religious and his beliefs 123 naturalistic, Eliot’s feelings were naturalistic or skeptical and his beliefs religious” (21).38

Singer’s suggestion that Santayana’s naturalism expressed more religious feeling than

Eliot’s orthodoxy is well taken. For instance, Santayana attacked the positivist school of

“apathetic naturalism” with exactly the same venom that Ruskin reserved for the

“scientistic mechanists” of his own day. Santayana wrote that, by comparison with the proud certainty of the logical positivists, that “all the errors and follies of religion are worthy of indulgent sympathy, since they represent the effort, however misguided, to interpret and to use the materials of experience for moral ends, and to measure the value of reality by its relation to the ideal” (ix). Ruskin showed this indulgent sympathy before

Santayana when he stated, “the noblest we can know is the energy which either imagines, or perceives, the existence of a living power greater than its own” (22.170). Ruskin did not exclude this noble knowledge from the most scrutinizing empirical investigation to which it could be subjected; in fact, he recommended such investigation.

Harold Bloom succinctly explains Ruskin’s critical method on this score. Bloom states that “Ruskin never gave up insisting that all art, literature included, was worship, but this insistence does not make him either ‘religious’ or a ‘moral’ critic of literature. …

Ruskin’s pragmatic religion always remained a Wordsworthian ‘natural piety,’ in which aesthetic and spiritual experience were not to be distinguished from each other” (xxiii).

Notwithstanding Eliot’s skeptical feeling either being overpowered by, or as Brazeal suggests, actually instigating his religious belief (263), Eliot made statements in keeping with the view I have described in Santayana and Ruskin.

38 Singer is unfair to the vastness of Eliot’s poetic and critical work when he states that “The main thoroughfare of Eliot’s writing is one long consecration to his Christian beliefs, and the documentation of his attempt to subdue whatever sentiments or emotions might distract him from those beliefs” (21). 124 In the essay “Arnold and Pater” (1930), Eliot critiqued Arnold’s insistent and definite distinction between art and religion. “When religion is in a flourishing state, when the whole mind of society is moderately healthy and in order,” Eliot wrote, “there is an easy and natural association between religion and art. Only when religion has been partly retired and confined, when an Arnold can sternly remind us that Culture is wider than Religion, do we get ‘religious art’ and in due course ‘aesthetic religion’” (SE 390).

Indeed, the strict separation of art from religion that Eliot found distasteful in Arnold is absent in Ruskin, but not because Ruskin was any more or less confused about what constituted art or religion in culture. Rather, Arnold insisted on the kind of systematic philosophical divisions that Ruskin, and the early Eliot, refused.39 As Jessica Feldman argues in Victorian Modernism, “For all Ruskin’s lists, numbered categories, definitions, and anatomies, he is not a systematic thinker” (17), which for her is a distinction, not always or necessarily a slight. Feldman proposes that by studying the fluid connections among Ruskin’s ideas in addition to the ideas themselves, Ruskin’s rationalizing “yields” before his artistic and critical method of exploration, his “prepositional rather than propositional life” (18). “Once we acknowledge Ruskin’s confusions as his insights,”

Feldman argues, “we will recognize him for the aesthetic pragmatist and Victorian

Modernist that he was” (18). David Wayne Thomas has also detected this modernist aspect of Ruskin’s “modern vision of objectivity” as the recourse to multiple

39 Arnold found the third volume of Modern Painters “fuller than the others of true ‘aperçus’” but he objected that Ruskin’s character was, “as usual, … too febrile, irritable, and weak to allow him to possess the ordo concatenatioque veri.” Because Modern Painters III characteristically lacked the order and concatenation of truth Arnold desired, Arnold responded with “On the Modern Element in Literature” (1857), a clarion call for intellectual deliverance for the modern man contemplating “the vast multitude of facts awaiting and inviting his comprehension” (qtd. in Alexander 1973 120).

125 perspectives. In a modern pluralist environment, self-contradiction “emerges not simply as a resource for objectivity but also a sign of vitality” (Thomas 78). To modern ears, therefore, Ruskin’s statement that he felt he had not “handled a subject properly” until he contradicted himself “at least three times” would seem to make him more reliable, perhaps, rather than less (16.187). This impulse of Ruskin’s is especially apparent at the outset of Modern Painters III, the volume titled “Of Many Things,” in which Ruskin stated that he did not intend to pursue his inquiries with a method too “laboriously systematic” since “Much time is wasted by human beings, in general, on establishment of systems; and it often takes more labor to master the intricacies of an artificial connection, than to remember the separate facts which are so carefully connected” (MP III 5.18). Just as Ruskin thought that remaining vigilant and sincerely true to the “separate facts” of experience merited greater effort than their immediate systematization, T. S. Eliot declared his own independence from the artificial connections of systematic philosophy.

Eliot’s unsystematic but rigorously comparative method of aesthetic criticism is explicitly acknowledged in letters and embedded his works. For instance, he wrote in a letter to Norbert Weiner in 1915, “In a sense, of course, all philosophising is a perversion of reality: for, in a sense, no philosophic theory makes any difference to practice. It has no working by which we can test it . . . It invariably involves cramming both feet into one shoe: almost every philosophy seems to begin as a revolt of common sense against some other theory, and ends—as it becomes itself more developed and approaches completeness—by itself becoming equally preposterous—to everyone but its author”

(Letters I 87). This same letter includes the admission that one cannot avoid metaphysics, because “to draw a sharp line between metaphysics and common sense would itself be

126 metaphysics and not common sense.” To Eliot, relativism recommended not pursuing any theory to conclusion, and suggested that one “avoid complete consistency” (Letters 88).

Much later, in a letter to Paul Elmer More in 1934, Eliot wrote again, “I am not a systematic thinker, if indeed I am a thinker at all. I depend upon intuitions and perceptions” (qtd. in Margolis xv).40

I hope to now be in a position to point out that the compliment that Eliot paid to

Ruskin was significant. To have a “genuine sensibility” for certain types of art was, for

Eliot, to possess a critical rigor and genius that he valued highly. I now move on to detail the criticism of poetry in which Ruskin’s influence continued most prominently, in

Santayana and especially in Eliot’s “quadrivium” of dissociation of sensibility, impersonality, tradition, and the objective correlative, which divide the following portions of this chapter.

40 Geoffrey Williams also argues that Eliot’s only adult piece of published prose fiction, the short story “Eeldrop and Appleplex,” critiques over-rational systematizing in the character of Edith (232-233). This passage also demonstrates habituated rationalist systematization and the genius of unhabitual seeing that Ruskin, James, and Eliot espoused: “The artist is part of him a drifter, at the mercy of impressions, and another part of him allows this to happen for the sake of making use of the unhappy creature. But in Edith the division is merely the rational, the cold and detached part of the artist, itself divided. Her material, her experience that is, is already a mental product, already digested by reason. Hence Edith (I only at this moment arrive at understanding) is really the most orderly person in existence, and the most rational. Nothing ever happens to her; everything that happens is her own doing” (Complete Prose I 531). To be “the most orderly person in existence, and the most rational” is certainly no compliment to Edith, and one suspects that the author of this passage, if in sympathy with his character’s perceptions, would at times be disposed to perceive Ruskin’s disorderliness rather more favorably than Arnold’s systematizing. As Walter Benn Michaels put it, “Another way of defining genius is thus as the ability to have sensations” (171), to resist James’s “law of habit in the brain” that results in perceptual “oldfogeyism.” This conventionality is why “Nothing ever happens” to Edith. She lacks the capability to allow her experience to be anything other than a product of her own reasoning, which some would also link to Keats’s “negative capability.”

127

Dissociation of Sensibility

In “Metaphysical Poets,” Eliot reinterprets Samuel Johnson’s impeachment of

“metaphysical poetry” as that sort in which “the most heterogenous ideas are yoked by violence together” (SE 243). Eliot grants that Johnson’s disparagement applied well enough to the abuses of the style of the poetry of the age to merit criticism; nevertheless, he argued that “a degree of heterogeneity of material compelled into unity by the operation of the poet’s mind is omnipresent in poetry” (SE 243). Consequently, the complexity of syntax and metaphor that yokes dissimilar things together serves “fidelity to thought and feeling” (SE 245). At their best, Donne and his fellows were primarily engaged “in the task of trying to find the verbal equivalent for states of mind and feeling”

(SE 248). For them, Eliot argued, “thought was an experience” (SE 247) and conceits tools of combination. In order to do more than “look into their hearts and write,” as

Sydney’s muse recommended, these “explorers of the soul” (SE 249) urged poets to look into “the cerebral cortex, the nervous system, and the digestive tracts” (SE 250).

Therefore, Eliot critiqued the “dissociation of sensibility” that “set in” after the metaphysical poets, when thought seemed to him to drift away from sensibility or feeling.

To Eliot, associating thought and feeling once more in a new and complex modern moment necessitated modern poetry’s difficulty. “The poet must become more and more comprehensive,” he wrote, “more allusive, more indirect, in order to force, to dislocate if necessary, language into his meaning. … Hence, we get something which looks very much like the conceit–we get, in fact, a method curiously similar to that of the

‘metaphysical poets’” (SE 248-249). For Eliot, good poetry created “a direct sensuous 128 apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling” (SE 246), and established its truth in this way.41

Ruskin, who might appear to some as the enemy of conceits and indirections and dislocations of language as “false appearances,” actually faulted only those “poetic conceits” that lacked development. Ruskin explained how “the spirit of truth must guide us in some sort, even in our enjoyment of a fallacy” (5.208) by making sure that the

“feeling is true” (5.210). However, Ruskin understood and explained the necessity of obscurity for presenting thought and feeling in their unified form by describing the obscurities of the vision and feeling that required poetic representation in the typical

Romantic experience of landscape. He used this description to critique Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “emotion recollected in tranquility,” which was also a target of

Eliot’s. Ruskin also perceived the dissociation of sensibility in Wordsworth, who wrongly “described feeling as independent of thought” and therefore mistakenly spoke of thought “depreciatingly” (MP III 5.363).

Ruskin stated that even if a viewer of “lovely nature” sees “an excellent degree of simple beauty, addressed to the eye alone,” what often impresses the viewer most forms

“a very small portion of that visible beauty” while recalling too much practical information about the geography of the scene also subdued poetic feeling. Instead, what we are most impressed by are “the thoughts and knowledge” which the scene suggests to

41 Eliot argued that “a philosophical theory which has entered into poetry is established, for its truth or falsity in one sense ceases to matter, and its truth in another sense is proved” (SE 248). So far as a philosophical theory depended upon logical methods and mathematical proofs for its demonstration, and so far as this demonstration comes at the expense of conveying the unified experience of thought and feeling, so far is it unimportant as poetry. However, so far as the verbal formula is faithful to thought and feeling, it succeeds as poetry, and communicates the truth with which poetry is concerned, the truth of the felt thought. 129 the imagination, such as a cloud that suggests gossamer threads. These suggestions are

“so obscure that we are not conscious of them; we think we are only enjoying the visible scene; and the very men whose minds are fullest of such thoughts absolutely deny … that they owe their pleasure to anything but the eye, or that the pleasure consists in anything else than ‘Tranquillity’” (5.355-357). Ruskin argued that Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings” originating from “emotion recollected in tranquility” falsified the source of actual experience by divorcing visual aspects from any “remoter charm, by thought supplied.” For Ruskin, real “Seeing” encompassed more than perceiving visual objects and recalling the emotions they produced. Seeing involved “the power of the imagination in exalting any visible object, by gathering round it, in farther vision, all the facts properly connected with it; this being, as it were, a spiritual or second sight, multiplying the power of enjoyment according to the fulness of the vision” (5.355). Ruskin argued that the delight of Wordsworth and

Scott “so far from being without thought” was in fact “more than half made up of thought, but of thought in so curiously languid and neutralized a condition that they could not trace it. The thoughts are beaten to a powder so small that they know not what they are; they know only that in such a state they are not good for much and disdain to call them thoughts” (5.355). But these seemingly inconsequential and unsystematic thoughts were precisely those “separate facts which are so carefully connected” in imagination, and which required special care to trace and to link (MP III 5.18).

Although Eliot avoids the rhetoric of exaltation, the idea that gathering facts both visible and ideal into a conceptual unity for the purpose of precise emotional expression is evidently essential to his concept of poetry. However, Eliot was also critical of those

130 moments when conceits seemed to fail to achieve “a direct sensuous apprehension of thought, or a recreation of thought into feeling” (SE 246). Eliot’s only use of the term

“pathetic fallacy” comes in his 1933 lecture, delivered at the Johns Hopkins University, in which he revisited the theme of conceits in metaphysical poets. Still admiring the indirectness of “The Conceit in Donne and Crashaw,” Eliot compares a river’s “Pregnant banke” “swel’d up” like a pillow on which “to rest / The violet’s reclining head” in

Donne, to a tear described as a “moist spark” and a “watry Diamond” dropping from the eye of the Blessed Virgin in Crashaw. Eliot thought Crashaw’s figures much better, and it goes without saying that Donne’s is the more fallacious and seemingly personal appearance (relying on the viewer’s emotion as opposed to visual descriptiveness), as well as the more “personifying.”

Eliot is as clear as Ruskin, however, regarding a conceit which requires “a violation of the order of nature to conceive” that “It is a mistake to suppose that a simile or a metaphor is always something meant to be visible to the imagination; and even when it is meant to be visible, that all its parts are meant to be visible at once” (Complete Prose

4:731). Eliot compares the difficulties of Crashaw to the difficulty of interpreting

“Thunder and rubies up to the wheel hub” in a poem by Mallarmé to demonstrate the use of these figures to communicate some aspect of the whole poem’s meaning or impression. Eliot suggests that critics usefully take a figure of speech to pieces to find “if it can be put together again” in which case “it is alright” (CP 4:730). This putting back together of a meaning that is primarily emotive, that reaches us in ways “not distinctly traceable by the understanding,” seems to come only through the mastery of the poet whose “business” it is “to know what effect he intends to produce, and then to get it by

131 fair means or foul” (4:731). In his example of a conceit that admits the pathetic fallacy,

Eliot presents Swinburne’s “Violets that plead for pardon, / Or pine for fright,” but states that the image is “no more respectable than Donne’s violet;” and “I confess myself that I do not like this use of the pathetic fallacy” (4:732).42 Eliot admits that he “can see what Swinburne was after … a particular association of our feeling towards violets and our feeling towards small pathetic fragile human beings.” Though disapproving of

Swinburne, Eliot goes on to praise Donne’s figure of two souls as one in the compass figure of “A Valediction: forbidding mourning.” According to Eliot, Donne “is not here expounding or implying any theory of the soul in which he could be said to believe,” but creating for the sake of conveying a feeling of love. Eliot also adduces Dante’s poetic relation of the spiritual feeling of an “enamoured mind” to the form of an ascending flame, and states that in these examples, the figure “does not make intelligible an idea, but there is properly no idea until you get the figure” (4:733). In other words, the figure is the feeling, is not intelligibly separable from it. This idea connects Eliot to Ruskin, who thought that false appearances must be motivated and justified by their truthful presentation of feelings and impressions of the unintelligible, and were successful when faithful to feeling that could not be simply described. Such false appearances were different from those of confused and “cold” production by lesser poets, and they did not present a fantastic appearance in which the poet seemed, irrationally, to believe.

42 Eliot misquotes Swinburne by replacing “violets” for “snowdrops” in these lines. 132 Impersonality

The major critique the theory of the pathetic fallacy makes is that poets possessing most passionately Ruskin’s favored “landscape-instinct” were too often too personal. Ruskin’s critique aligns with those other more critical Anglo-American

Romantics, Keats and Poe. I have already briefly explained how Ruskin and Keats each point out the “egotistical sublime” in Wordsworth, but Ruskin’s “science of the aspects of things” also accords with Poe’s conception of poetry ten years earlier. Poe viewed poetry bearing “a mathematical relation to its merit … to the degree of the true poetical effect which it is capable of inducing” (Poe 641). Ruskin earnestly sought a way of rescuing this definite if not “mathematical” relation in order to remain in sympathy with a

Wordsworthian natural piety that Poe’s version simply found hysterically funny.

Nevertheless, we can see that both Ruskin and Poe aim their critique at Wordsworth and other English Romantics in their incurable penchant for importing either flat descriptions of emotions or thoughtlessly passionate figurations and personifications. For Ruskin, a key to a closer perception and expression of passionate and poetic experience came via

“the innocence of the eye,” for Eliot, “the impersonality of the artist,” for Keats,

“negative capability.”

Keats’s statement on negative capability, which has been suggested as a source for Eliot’s impersonality, bears comparison with Ruskin’s description of the “generally passive or instinctive character of right invention” (5.123) in Modern Painters III. In

1817, Keats realized the quality that forms an artist of achievement in literature and wrote in a letter

133 I mean Negative Capability, that is, when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact and reason - Coleridge, for instance, would let go by a fine isolated verisimilitude caught from the Penetralium of mystery, from being incapable of remaining content with half-knowledge. This pursued through volumes would perhaps take us no further than this, that with a great poet the sense of Beauty overcomes every other consideration, or rather obliterates all consideration. (Keats 336)

Keats did not live to pursue his idea through volumes, and Ruskin’s thirty-eight do not pursue this single idea. Yet, Ruskin described the “generally passive or instinctive character of right invention” (5.123) in art as attaining always toward a “true ideal” that great artists never feel they have attained.

To Ruskin, poetasters and pretenders would be sure to explain precisely and reasonably how they achieved their ideal. Ruskin rejected this sort of explanation of self- expression achieving a personal ideal as completely egotistical. He wrote that “a great idealist never can be egotistic. The whole of his power depends upon his losing sight and feeling of his own existence, and becoming a mere witness and mirror of truth, and a scribe of visions,—always passive in sight, passive in utterance,—lamenting continually that he cannot completely reflect nor clearly utter all he has seen—not by any means a proud state for a man to be in” (5.125). Being non-egotistical, losing sight of one’s self, becoming a mere witness, passive in sight and utterance: these describe Ruskin’s qualities of the artist of achievement. For Ruskin, such great artists and Seers shared with all other great “idealists” an instinctive humility manifesting as a “curious under-sense of powerlessness, feeling that greatness not in them, but through them” (5.331), which suggests the concept shared by Keats and Eliot of the artist as a “finely perfected medium” (Eliot SE 7). In fact, Eliot’s suggestive analogy for the artist as a medium, his

134 famous filament of platinum, bears comparison to Ruskin’s mineralogical analogies for the first order of poets in the chapter on the pathetic fallacy.

By relegating to a second order those poets who “much delight” in poor pathetic fallacies, Ruskin makes a point about poets who are more likely to describe personal emotion than to remain neutral enough to pursue the poetic feelings that more powerfully pathetic and less fallacious or fanciful conceits achieve. The second order of emotional or reflective poets “feel strongly, think weakly, and see untruly” while the first order of creative poets “feel strongly, think strongly, and see truly” (5.208). These first order poets, the creative poets, resist emotion’s overwhelming power because they contain more, they know more, their intellect has absorbed and considered more, though they feel as deeply. The second order poets are grand to feel so strongly, but

it is still a grander condition when the intellect also rises, till it is strong enough to assert its rule against, or together with, the utmost efforts of the passions; and the whole man stands in an iron glow, white hot, perhaps, but still strong, and in no wise evaporating; even if he melts, losing none of his weight. (5.208)

The analogy of a mineral, here becoming white hot to the point of melting, but losing none of its weight in evaporation, is construed as involving strength of intellect under intense heat. The suggestion about the will’s passivity as the result of a developed intellect and a wide perception and feeling (relevant for Eliot’s requirements for engagement with tradition) is soon clarified by another analogy, that of the poet as a moss-covered rock. Ruskin writes,

the difference between the great and less man is, on the whole, chiefly in this point of alterability. That is to say, the one knows too much, and perceives and feels too much of the past and future, and of all things beside and around that which immediately affects him, to be in any wise shaken by it. His mind is made up; his thoughts have an accustomed current; his ways are steadfast; it is not this or that new sight which will at once unbalance him. He is tender to impression at the surface, like a rock with deep moss upon it; but there is too much mass of him 135 to be moved. The smaller man, with the same degree of sensibility, is at once carried off his feet; he wants to do something he did not want to do before; he views all the universe in a new light through his tears; he is gay or enthusiastic, melancholy or passionate, as things come and go to him. Therefore the high creative poet might even be thought, to a great extent, impassive (as shallow people think Dante stern), receiving indeed all feelings to the full, but having a great centre of reflection and knowledge in which he stands serene, and watches the feeling, as it were, from afar off. (5.210)

Ruskin does not think great poets search for a lost childlike or savage state, but an innocence of the eye that is not truly childlike but mature, that sees and knows much but approaches matter and life yet by passively receiving and attending to new visions and intensities.

Similarly, Eliot’s “suggestive analogy” for the depersonalization of art in which

“it may be said to approach the condition of science” (SE “Tradition and the Individual

Talent” 7) invites readers to consider “the action that takes place when a bit of finely filiated platinum is introduced into a chamber containing oxygen and sulphur dioxide”

(SE 7). The catalyst is present when the gases mix and the result is the formation of sulphurous acid. Eliot writes:

This combination takes place only if the platinum is present; nevertheless the newly formed acid contains no trace of platinum, and the platinum itself is apparently unaffected; has remained inert, neutral, and unchanged. The mind of the poet is the shred of platinum. It may partly or exclusively operate upon the experience of the man himself; but, the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates; the more perfectly will the mind digest and transmute the passions which are its material. (SE 7-8)

Eliot’s example was meant to illustrate that “the mind of the mature poet differs from that of the immature one not precisely in any valuation of ‘personality,’ not being necessarily more interesting, or having ‘more to say,’ but rather by being a more finely perfected medium in which special, or very varied, feelings are at liberty to enter into new

136 combinations” (SE 7). Like Ruskin’s glowing white iron that melts and weighs the same, like his rock that is impressed upon but unmoved, or like Eliot’s platinum catalyst that remains unchanged, the stable mind of the great poet undergoes intense feeling and experience but remains at once unalterable and productive. For Ruskin, it is not some sublime emotion that counts, but the action of the poet’s mind under intense influences that it watches, and thinks about, and feels as if from afar off (5.209). Eliot, similarly, writes that a comparison of the best poetry exhibits a great variety of combinations, revealing “how completely any semi-ethical criterion of ‘sublimity’ misses the mark.”

For Eliot, “it is not the ‘greatness,’ the intensity, of the emotions, the components, but the intensity of the artistic process, the pressure, so to speak, under which the fusion takes place, that counts” (SE 8).

I detect one rather apparent contradiction between the two writers on this last point, as Ruskin seems to emphasize the greatness, meaning the intensity, of the emotions contributing to the artistic process, while Eliot more distinctly emphasizes the “pressure” of the artistic process itself. However, this difficulty may be resolved by viewing the distinctive vocabularies of feeling and emotion in Ruskin and Eliot. Eliot stated that greatness or intensity of emotions do not matter in poetry, while Ruskin defined poetry as

“the suggestion, by the imagination, of noble grounds for the noble emotions” (5.28).

Similarly, Eliot takes lines from The Revenger’s Tragedy (by Tourneur or Middleton), in order to demonstrate in them “a combination of positive and negative emotions: an intensely strong attraction toward beauty and an equally intense fascination by the ugliness which is contrasted with it and which destroys it” (SE 9-10). But Eliot complicates the matter by stating that this combination gives us a “new art emotion” and

137 then that “The business of the poet is not to find new emotions, but to use the ordinary ones and, in working them up into poetry, to express feelings which are not in actual emotions at all. And emotions which he has never experienced will serve his turn as well as those familiar to him” (SE 10). Almost exactly like Ruskin before him, Eliot clarifies his point against Wordsworth’s definition of poetry. Eliot wrote that

we must believe that “emotion recollected in tranquillity” is an inexact formula. For it is neither emotion, nor recollection, nor, without distortion of meaning, tranquillity. It is a concentration, and a new thing resulting from the concentration, of a very great number of experiences which to the practical and active person would not seem to be experiences at all; it is a concentration which does not happen consciously or of deliberation. These experiences are not “recollected,” and they finally unite in an atmosphere which is “tranquil” only in that it is a passive attending upon the event. Of course this is not quite the whole story. There is a great deal, in the writing of poetry, which must be conscious and deliberate. In fact, the bad poet is usually unconscious where he ought to be conscious, and conscious where he ought to be unconscious. Both errors tend to make him “personal.” Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality. But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things. (SE 10-11)

The passive attending upon the event, combined with a concentration “of a very great number of experiences,” results in a “new thing,” i.e., poetry that is not “emotional” or

“personal,” but inventive and accompanied by an air of inevitability. Ruskin clarifies this idea of the “new art emotion” and “feelings which are not in actual emotions at all” (SE

10) in his own much earlier distinction between feeling and emotion.

Ruskin continually faults poets for simply describing emotions throughout

Modern Painters III. He states that “generally speaking, pathetic writing and careful explanation of passion are quite easy,” and that “to describe a separate emotion delicately, it is only needed that one should feel it oneself” (5.335). But when it came to

Ruskin’s feelings upon first view of “the swell of distant land against the sunset, or the

138 first low broken wall, covered with mountain moss” Ruskin wrote, “I cannot in the least describe to you the feeling; but I do not think this is my fault, nor that of the English language, for I am afraid no feeling is describable” (5.368).43 Indeed, this intense experience may be emotional, but it cannot be named by any word for the emotion. It is a feeling named as emotion, only, if it is realized afresh, perhaps for the first time, in the reader. For Eliot, this indescribable emotion expressed by art is “significant emotion” (SE

11), significant in that it signifies what Ruskin would call an emotional feeling for which, without the poem, there would be no sign. Therefore, Ruskin endeavored to find such

“significance” in the feelings of the “the pure landscape-instinct” (5.368) by reading nature poetry and viewing landscape paintings. These works contained the “significant emotion” that Ruskin and Eliot read within the long tradition of poetry and art.

Tradition

In Ruskin’s analogy of the rock, the center of reflection that allowed the poet to look upon his or her own emotions as if from afar off resulted from a superior degree of

“alterability.” The creative poet possesses this alterability, for Ruskin, because he

“knows too much, and perceives and feels too much of the past and future, and of all things beside and around that which immediately affects him, to be in any wise shaken by it” (5.210). Ruskin writes these words in the pathetic fallacy chapter, the “prefatory

43 Ruskin goes on: “If we had to explain even the sense of bodily hunger to a person who had never felt it, we should be hard put to it for words; and the joy in nature seemed to me to come of a sort of heart-hunger, satisfied with the presence of a Great and Holy Spirit” (5.368).

139 inquiry” into the effect of landscape on the mind of man that subsequently explores the animating landscape instinct in the Classical, Medieval, and Modern periods. Thus

Ruskin’s advocacy of the artist’s impersonality advocates, like Eliot’s, a rich historical sense. Certainly, however, Ruskin’s concept is decidedly more cumulative and tied to an idea of artistic progress than Eliot’s. Ruskin continually speaks of discoveries of forms, and of these forms as ultimate or vital truths, as steps forward in mastering the science of the aspects.

For instance, Ruskin gives a strikingly anthropomorphic example of such a form discovered, serendipitously, by medieval artists drawing leaves. Before presenting a botanical plate with ten leaf drawings, numbered and labeled to facilitate technical discussion of the aesthetic shift, Ruskin waxed poetic on the thirteenth-century development. He stated that the artists saw that “a leaf might always be considered as a sudden expansion of the stem that bore it; an uncontrollable expression of delight, on the part of the twig, that spring had come, shown in a fountain-like expiation of its tender green heart into the air. They saw that in this violent proclamation of its delight and liberty, whereas the twig had, until that moment, a disposition only to grow quietly forwards, it expressed its satisfaction and extreme pleasure in sunshine by springing out to right and left” (5.264). Ruskin thereby explained this aesthetic shift as one from a symbolic, recognizably stylized representation of leaf-work to a more realistic one, but he explains the more “realist” representation by reading the “expression of delight” in a leaf, or at least thought the Medieval artists read such an expression. Yet, perhaps Ruskin was not wrong to figure this difference in style as the process of minds in sympathy with and

140 simplifying the constituent forms of things in careful ways so as to observe some vital truth. Indeed, he accounts for this spirit of discovery in such a way.

When finished presenting his visual examples and demonstrating the aesthetic shift, Ruskin concludes, “These discoveries of ultimate truth are, I believe, never made philosophically, but instinctively; so that wherever we find a high abstract result of the kind, we may be almost sure it has been the work of the penetrative imagination, acting under the influence of strong affection” (5.268). Ruskin is here suggesting the history of art as a sort of laboratory of invention in which imagination and strong affection act in concert. Those who discover earnestly contemplate the natural facts and unite them “with an endeavour to simplify, for clear expression, the results of that contemplation” (5.264).

Ruskin sketches the discovery and development of forms throughout time, ultimately, to arrive at the complexities of his own time, characterized by the pathetic fallacy, which he thought full of better and worse artistic examples of the “the instinct which leads us thus to attribute life to the lowest forms of organic nature” (5.385), which was an instinct he revered but about which he admitted he could not easily extract a moral.

Eliot’s concern in “Metaphysical Poets” is to read history the other way, to find the moment of a step backward, not forward. Although Eliot’s poetic “form” is less specific than Ruskin’s leaf patterns, it is a matter of technical artistic practice. Eliot reads a more muddled and indefinite expression of feeling in Milton and Dryden than in Dante or Donne, and a cruder sensibility in Gray, Tennyson, and Browning, even if the language became more “refined.” We can observe the great difference that Ruskin and

Eliot’s location in history enforces upon their criticism (though Ruskin’s judgment of

Dante and Milton accords with Eliot’s). Ruskin attempts to deal with Wordsworth, Scott,

141 Shelley, Keats, Byron, and Tennyson in his own age, justifying that landscape-instinct which he finds culminating principally in them, but to which their poetry, too often, remained inadequate. Eliot, on the other hand, attempts to turn back, past the Victorian,

Romantic, and Augustan ages, to find the vital truth of his own time in the metaphysical poets. Nevertheless, Ruskin and Eliot’s conception of the historical sense teaching one

“what is already living” (SE 11) remains similar.

Eliot is perhaps less likely to be sanguine about these discoveries than Ruskin, whose history aims at objectivity but builds toward the crescendo of Turner. Eliot carefully states that historical “development, refinement perhaps, complication certainly, is not, from the point of view of the artist, any improvement” (SE 6). He writes that even the psychologist may not think it any more than the result of complications in economics and machinery. For Eliot, “art never improves” even if “the material of art is never quite the same” (SE 6). This description of historical “development” is not nearly so linear or definitely “progressive” as Ruskin sometimes forced his material to be, but neither is it significantly different in its attempt to conceive of all art as composing one whole of human expression that contains periodic and incremental developments and devolutions that should be noted, and that, nevertheless, accumulates. Eliot wrote that the artist must be aware that “the mind of Europe… is a mind which changes, and that this change is a development which abandons nothing en route” “What is to be insisted upon is that the poet must develop or procure the consciousness of the past and that he should continue to develop this consciousness throughout his career” (SE 6). Eliot knew that this doctrine would seem to some an excuse for antiquarian pedantry, which he responds to accordingly.

142 Ruskin also wrote that the critic “must acquaint himself with the works of all great artists, and with the temper and history of the times in which they lived” (5.26). The creative artist, meanwhile, in addition to all that has been said about the artistic process and the impersonality required of her (the receptive absorption of facts to be combined and not interpreted ahead of time as to their prettiness), must also contain “a colossal intellect” making her capable of “admirably and thoroughly” telling a story by grasping

“the entire mind of every personage concerned in it,” and knowing “precisely how they would be affected by what happens” (5.335). This truth to character rescues Scott’s

“living Scotch characters” (5.337) while “his romance and antiquarianism, his knighthood and monkery, are all false, and he knows them to be false” (5.337). For

Ruskin, to understand what is “living” is not simple historical accuracy any more than in

Eliot, for whom the historical sense results from engagement with and consciousness of

“what is already living” (SE 11).

Objective Correlative

Perhaps more than any other resemblance between Ruskin and Eliot’s aesthetic theories, the pathetic fallacy deeply informs Eliot’s “objective correlative.” It is its Janus face. The objective correlative generally names Ruskin’s view of the positive potential of pathetic fallacies. This final section devoted to Ruskin and Eliot also develops a less direct lineage from Ruskin to Eliot through the work of George Santayana.

Of all of Eliot’s critical terms, the “objective correlative” has probably always been the most popular and attracted the most scholars tracing its origin. Like Eliot’s notes to The Waste Land, Eliot’s term from “Hamlet and His Problems” (1919) has sent critics 143 on a goose chase for the holy grail of a definitive critical precedent with more or less probable suggestions including Samuel Taylor Coleridge (DiPasquale), Walter Pater

(DeLaura 426), Josiah Royce and Bertrand Russell (Shusterman 31), F. H. Bradley

(Habib 125-160, Shusterman 31), the American painter and critic Washington Allston and Friedrich Schiller (Vivas), Santayana (McElderry 179-181; Singer 21), and a variety of contemporaries such as Ford Madox Ford, Richard Aldington (Ezra Pound’s protégé),

John Gould Fletcher, and Dora Marsden (Menand 135-136). Nevertheless, as McElderry and Singer convincingly argue, Santayana’s Interpretations of Poetry and Religion

(1900) is the most probable source of Eliot’s term, which “is a virtual restatement of

Santayana’s views about ‘correlative objects’” (Singer 21). I here advance the view that

Eliot’s “objective correlative” developed under the influence of Santayana’s “correlative objects,” which in turn developed under the influence of Ruskin’s concept of the pathetic fallacy.

I have already suggested how Santayana’s recognition of the psychological phenomena of the pathetic fallacy, the soaking of nature with human feeling, usually resulted in the human celebration of Nature’s “tender sympathy with our moral being.” It will be remembered that Santayana called it a very natural illusion “not inconsistent with a high degree of development of both the faculties which it confuses,–– I mean vision and feeling” (158). However, such poetry also naturally challenges and threatens the stability of the larger apparition of reality itself, spurring man’s recognition that “only his illusions have ever given him a sense of reality, only his passions the hope and the vision peace”

(160). Thus, the pathetic fallacy precedes and paradoxically advances Santayana’s supremely important “plastic moment of the mind,” which is the “true moment of poetic

144 opportunity” that he thought was generally missed. At such times, “The strain of attention, the concentration and focusing of thought on the unfamiliar immediacy of things, usually brings about nothing but confusion. We are dazed, we are filled with a sense of unutterable things, luminous yet indistinguishable, many yet one. Instead of rising to imagination, we sink into mysticism” (160-161). One may ask, then, what would rising to imagination look like? For Santayana, it would be characterized by leaving the

“irrational poetry of sensation and impulse” as well as the common sense of convention, in order to practice the art of “assimilating phenomena, whether words, images, emotions, systems of ideas, to the deeper innate cravings of the mind” (162). Straight away in order to distinguish some of the phases of this higher function of poetry, Santayana takes up the importance of poetic landscape.

Any definition of poetry that goes beyond the tolerably formal account of meter and rhyme that heightens speech spoken “for its own sake and for its own sweetness”

(Interpretations of Poetry and Religion 153) must deal with landscape as essential to the

“higher function” of “poetic fiction” (162). Even poetic characters regarded as “the supreme triumph of the imagination” (162) always remain fragmentary, appreciated “by contrast and by sense of derivation.” Therefore, they “must live in an environment”

(163). While “visible landscape is not a proper object for poetry” (163), for Santayana, the great poet’s visible world still “wears all its colors and retains its indwelling passion and life” (162). Beyond this visible world, however, there is yet

a sort of landscape larger than the visible, which escapes the synthesis of the eye; it is present to that topographical sense by which we live in the consciousness that there is a sea, that there are mountains, that the sky is above us, even when we do not see it, and that the tribes of men, with their different degrees of blamelessness, are scattered over the broad-backed earth. (163)

145 This passage should quickly recall the sense of landscape that Ruskin presents when looking at the Alps, with its “obscure consciousness” of the sources of mountains and rivers, and appreciation of more than that “addressed to the eye alone” (MP III 5.355).

Santayana’s “topographical sense” suggests Ruskin’s instinctive but obscure landscape awareness that Wordsworth and Scott had such difficulty tracing to their poetic feelings in nature.

Ruskin and Santayana differ in that Ruskin held out hope that the visible landscape could serve as the proper object of both writing and painting (5.31), but he admitted that so far as painters had attempted to become poets in the entire sense,

“inventing the story as they painted it,” that painting seemed “only just beginning … to take its proper position beside literature” (5.127). Indeed, Ruskin makes this statement in a defense of painting’s accomplishment of poetry through, of all things, personification

(5.134). He hoped that poetic inventiveness could be transferred from poetry to visual art.44 To Santayana, the important thing is that this “topographical sense” rendered the

“cosmic landscape,” the “distinction of a poet” (164). Santayana writes that “the dignity and humanity of [a poet’s] thought––can be measured by nothing, perhaps, so well as by the diameter of the world in which he lives; if he is supreme, his vision, like Dante’s, always stretches to the stars” (164). It is into this cosmic landscape of environment and

44 “We hear it not unfrequently asserted that symbolism or personification should not be introduced in painting at all. Such assertions are in their grounds unintelligible, and in their substance absurd. Whatever is in words described as visible, may with all logical fitness be rendered so by colours, and not only is this a legitimate branch of ideal art, but I believe there is hardly any other so widely useful and instructive; and I heartily wish that every great allegory which the poets ever invented were powerfully put on canvas, and easily accessible by all men, and that our artists were perpetually exciting themselves to invent more.” (5.134)

146 history that the poet brings his characters into contact with other characters.

Santayana tells us that the subject of poetry is emotion, but no emotion is so intense as those passions evoked in society, through human contact. These passions are

“the chief basis of all interests” and the poet’s function is “to imagine occasions in which these feelings may manifest all their inward vitality” (165). For instance, the fancies, day- dreams, thrills, and adventures of a child “demand an appropriate theatre; the glorious emotions with which he bubbles over must at all hazards find or feign their correlative objects” (165). This phrase, supposed to have stuck with Eliot to become his famous

“objective correlative,” discloses the discovery of such objects as the crux of poetic achievement (“at all hazards” finding or feigning its formula for expressing emotion) through the investigation of poetic landscapes. And Santayana’s “correlative objects”–– far better found than feigned––imply exactly the problem that Eliot found in Shakespeare and that Ruskin found in Pope.

In Eliot, Hamlet’s behavior and his words seem not to fit with any particular emotion at all, and apparently, amount in the end to “the buffoonery of an emotion which can find no outlet in action” (SE 126). We are told earlier, in the famous definition, that

The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objective correlative”; in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula for that particular emotion; such that when the external facts, which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. (SE 124-125)

The problem with Hamlet, thought Eliot, is the problem of Hamlet’s madness, which is

“less than madness and more than feigned” (SE 125). I here take feigned to mean a more than counterfeit emotion in the character, though Eliot also extends the case to the artist.

In other words, the emotions necessitated by the “intractable material” of the plot require

147 something that Shakespeare cannot express with the objects, situations, or events available to him. Particularly offensive is Hamlet’s apparent levity, “his repetition of phrase, his puns, are not part of a deliberate plan of dissimulation, but a form of emotional relief” (SE 125). Hamlet cannot be terribly out of his mind, joking to himself and others in so light a manner, while simultaneously experiencing such torment and so reasonably planning his revenge. He cannot be expected to act as madly and as light- heartedly. By sense of contrast and derivation, Hamlet seems a counterfeit in his environment to Eliot, who thought that Shakespeare forced and feigned, instead of found, the material to express him.

I am not sure how often it has been noted, but many of Hamlet’s puns and phrases are personifications, such as when, to Guildenstern, he compares himself to a pipe to be played, or when he compares Rosencrantz to a sponge to be mouthed and swallowed by the king. During the mousetrap play scene, Hamlet quotes an overblown bit of personification in verse from an earlier play chock-full of pathetic fallacies. Hamlet’s line reads: “Come, the croaking Raven doth bellow for revenge.” The line’s purple source context, briefly quoted, reads:

The screeking Raven sits croking for revenge. Whole heads of beasts come bellowing for revenge. And all, yea all the world I thinke, Cries for revenge, and nothing but revenge. But to conclude, I have deserved revenge. (Bullough 339)

Whatever one thinks of Eliot’s judgment of Hamlet, the play and the character, his point that Hamlet’s taste for buffoonish wordplay demands critical comparison and judgment seems, to me, completely justified insofar as Hamlet only very questionably displays artistic “inevitability” at such moments. Hamlet is “dominated by an emotion which is

148 inexpressible, because it is in excess of the facts as they appear” (SE 125). The words coming from Hamlet’s mouth seem to be conveying emotions that should not belong to him, or that hint at something that is ultimately inexpressible. As Eliot admits, all this complexity makes Hamlet interesting, but pathologically so, not dramatically so, if one admits the difference.

Ironically, Ruskin’s attack on Pope, which demonstrates by negative example the potential of false appearances for fidelity to feeling and states of mind, has perhaps attracted Ruskin’s term “pathetic fallacy” the most censure. Because it has mistakenly seemed that Ruskin’s statement about Pope’s lines, “No poet of true imaginative power could have written the passage” (5.208), could be extended to anyone using metaphor or personification, Anthony Hecht called him a “prig” and suggested that Ruskin would belittle any poetry as such. Even Josephine Miles in The Pathetic Fallacy in the

Nineteenth Century includes the quotation in such a way as to suggest Ruskin’s gripe as drastically heightening, as opposed to qualifying and balancing, his criticism of pathetic false appearances. In reality, Ruskin hoped to show how the emotion is here put into “the mouth of the wrong passion” in Pope, and is thereby “not a pathetic fallacy at all” but the much worse crime of feigning the false appearance that would serve as the appropriate conceit for the scene, the objective correlative. Pope translates Homer’s Ulysses being terrified at the ghost of his deceased follower, Elpenor. Ulysses asks if Elpenor’s soul could “Outfly the nimble sail, and leave the lagging wind” (5.207). In Homer, Ulysses simply asks if Elpenor came faster on foot than he had in his ship. In short, Ruskin sees

Pope as having failed to restrain the use of a fallacy at a moment when no sufficient or relevant pathos was present to justify the figurative language.

149

Conclusion

Ruskin, Santayana, and Eliot all viewed dramatic and lyric poetry at its best when conveying the truth of feeling through objects observed with exacting detail, through poets’ wide knowledge and historical sense, and through thoughtful imposition of apt metaphors achieved through impersonality amidst emotional intensity. All appreciated the “simple, direct and even austere manner of speech” of Dante, and all sometimes acknowledged the “affected, tortuous and often over elaborate diction” of

“Metaphysical,” Augustan, and Romantic poets (Eliot Complete Prose 4:726). Yet, none of these sternly advocated doing away with metaphor and figuration as a means to expressing the truth of feeling. Such stricture is actually applied later by Paul de Man, who noted in “Anthropomorphism and Trope in the Lyric” (1956) that true feeling is not so deluded as its representation in metaphorical language. Grief, in de Man’s example from Baudelaire’s “Obsession,” is falsely objectified through hearts conceived as chambers of eternal mourning where old rails vibrate. True mourning, says de Man, can only allow “non-comprehension and enumerate non-anthropomorphic, non-elegaic, non- celebratory, non-lyrical, non-poetic, that is to say, prosaic, or, better, historical modes of language power” (Rhetoric 262). Now, Ruskin and Eliot understood that anthropomorphism could ultimately never be transcended, and if they sometimes used lyric tropes of anthropomorphic language as a “defensive motion of understanding” (de

Man Rhetoric 261), which seemed reprehensible to de Man, they did so only in Kenneth

Burke’s sense of necessarily forming concepts of reality to begin with. Their search for faithful “reflections” of reality necessitated selections of reality that must, in certain

150 circumstances, function as a deflection of alternative realities (Grammar 59). Eliot accepted “Mr. Santayana’s definition of ‘philosophical poetry’” as that which embodied a

“scheme of the universe” in verse, and thought that both he and Santayana favored the

“clear and the distinct; we mean a philosophy which is expressed, not one which is ineffable” (Complete Prose 4:712). Paul de Man was probably right that lyric poets hoped to preserve the “possibility of a future hermeneutics” (261) that could attain to some version of correspondence between reality and language, but not because they thought that such a correspondence existed independently, outside of human use. It is unclear what de Man fears uses of lyric will conceal, while Ruskin, Santayana, and Eliot set to work more narrowly defining potential uses and abuses by considering their practical consequences for human and earthly prosperity.

In de Man’s caricature of lyric voice as always “celebratory,” and by his admission that personification is “the master trope of poetic discourse” (Resistance to

Theory 48), de Man reveals himself, not Ruskin, as the enemy of poetry as such. The poet and the literary philosopher that de Man treats, Baudelaire and Nietzsche, and the ones I have been exploring, Ruskin, Santayana, and Eliot, “celebrated” lyric only as a form of communication that achieved effects prose often could not achieve as economically, briefly, or intensely, if at all. Lyric form attempted faithfulness to feelings that could be more evocatively and economically shown through objects in concentrated and comparative combinations than they could be prosaically described. To Ruskin, “we do not call poetry … the true utterance of a real person” (5.30), only the writer’s invention

“entering into the mind of a supposed person” (5.29), which included both dramatic and lyric poetry (Ruskin’s example is Wordsworth’s short lyric, “The Childless Father”). It is

151 de Man who faults poetry for not being prose, suggesting somehow that poetic resources meant to excite certain emotions or create experiences derive from a naïve, optimistic, or defensive posture, hiding from their “real” nature as persuasive or coercive rhetoric.

Ruskin ventured much in his description of the “power of the poet or literally of the ‘Maker’” (5.29) by attempting to move poetry toward the presentation of objects and exacting appearances instead of overflows of emotion, while also avoiding the language of scientific description and other more lifeless forms of prosaic description, and I believe his ventures found an important audience in Pound and the Imagists as well as Santayana and Eliot, though he received little by way of confessions of assistance. As a final example of how Ruskin looked forward to the “objective correlative” and the critical posture of “Tradition and the Individual Talent” and “Metaphysical Poets,” I offer this passage, also from Modern Painters III, that describes the poet’s power to excite emotions in readers:

Now this power of exciting the emotions depends of course on the richness of the imagination, and on its choice of those images which, in combination, will be most effective, or, for the particular work to be done, most fit. And it is altogether impossible for a writer not endowed with invention to conceive what tools a true poet will make use of, or in what way he will apply them, or what unexpected results he will bring out by them… Generally speaking, poetry runs into finer and more delicate details than prose; but the details are not poetical because they are more delicate, but because they are employed so as to bring out an affecting result. (MP III 5.30)

Like Ruskin, Eliot described poetry as running into a great variety of “types of combination” amalgamating experience though never possessing a single definite character, material, or tool, only the consistent result of “definite” and “significant” emotions (“Tradition and the Individual Talent” SE 6-11). In all of his criticism, despite the passing phrases I cited earlier, Eliot never acknowledged a significant debt to Ruskin.

152 Eliot did, however, acknowledge his own style of philosophy as primarily Santayanan in

1915 and again in the above remarks on Santayana’s writing on philosophical poetry in

1932. In 1915, Eliot thought that all philosophizing was “a perversion of reality” and he resolved “not to pursue any theory to a conclusion, and to avoid complete consistency” since “For me, as for Santayana, philosophy is chiefly literary criticism and conversation about life” (Eliot Letters 88).

For Santayana, this conversation about life stemmed in part from deep reading and careful thinking about Ruskin. Recent scholarship by the Spanish philosopher, Daniel

Moreno, has provided numerous examples of Santayana’s thinking on the pathetic fallacy from throughout his works, which I examine further with regard to animals in the next chapter (Moreno “La ‘ Falacia Patética en el pensamiento de Santayana” 1-10, 2001).

The Ruskin of Modern Painters III would probably not have been ready for the ways that

Santayana phrased his own criticisms of religion, in part because Santayana found so much of what he had to say in Ruskin before Ruskin would have owned it. Ruskin’s reticence in broadcasting his agnostic naturalism is perhaps why Ruskin never writes of the pathetic fallacy again after Modern Painters III, despite the term’s widespread use.

However, Wallace Stevens, perhaps Santayana’s truest poetic disciple, stated the heart of the matter very clearly, that “God is the centre of the pathetic fallacy” (Letters 444). Like

Ruskin and Santayana, however, to Stevens God was a “benign illusion” and part of the

“supreme fiction,” essential to poetry itself.

153 Chapter 5: The History and Theory of the Pathetic Fallacy

in the Late Twentieth Century to the Present

“Ambiguous Personalizing,” “Justified Illusion,”

and Ecological and Cognitive Criticism

After my discussion of the connections between the pathetic fallacy and Eliot’s early criticism, the paradox that animated the last chapter may appear less mysterious; that is, how a poetic expression whose “literal presence on every second page or so of a poet’s work” in the nineteenth-century lost all claim to dominance in the twentieth at the same time that Ruskin’s term attracted greater critique (Miles 3). Clearly, in the new century, Santayana and Eliot continued the necessary work of passing literary judgment on figurative language and false imagery, its sharpness of vision and its thoughtfulness in finding significant and faithful expressions of feeling. Although aspects of Ruskin’s moralizing, his pious earnestness, and his totalizing aesthetics, may forever cast him in the eyes of some as the fusty Victorian grandfather against which modernists rebelled as opposed to their early avant-garde avatar, I hope to have gone some of the way toward demonstrating richer affinities. Three collections of critical essays at the turn of the twenty-first century have demonstrated that the time is ripe for this type of reconsideration––Ruskin and the Dawn of the Modern (Clarendon Press Oxford, 1999),

Ruskin and the Twentieth Century: The Modernity of Ruskinism (Edizioni Mercuri 2000), and Ruskin and Modernism, Palgrave, 2001)––similarly, the Cambridge Companion to

John Ruskin appeared in 2015. In addition to reexamining Proust’s translation of

154 Ruskin’s The Bible of Amiens and Sesame and Lilies into French and the cooling of his enthusiasm, these recent critical works have connected Ruskin’s “mythical method” to the practices of Eliot, Yeats, and Joyce (Birch Ruskin and Modernism 32-47, and

Bacigalupo) and recognized Ruskin’s “emphasis on the importance of the viewer in art making the connection between juxtaposed images” as “the cornerstone of Imagism”

(Weltman ; cf. Nicholls in Ruskin and Modernism). I would add to these reconsiderations the idea that Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy was a more prominent source of modernist literary values in Santayana and Eliot than has been traditionally recognized.

In this chapter, however, I depart from the fairly exclusive examination of resemblances among Ruskin, Santayana, and Eliot, and develop a more ambiguous aspect of the theory of the pathetic fallacy as it relates to ecology and to animals. I draw this aspect of the theory in the twentieth century from Santayana’s ethological literary theory and the concept of the “justified illusion” when the pathetic fallacy is potentially not a fallacy, and I connect it to positions of modern ecological literary criticism and insights from cognitive literary studies. First, however, this continued tracing of the theory warrants some brief attention to developments in the publication and scholarship on Ruskin throughout the century.

Scholars gained access to all of Ruskin’s works in the definitive form in which they continue to be published today when George Allen Co. published the thirty-nine volume Library Editions between 1903 and 1912 under the editorship of Sir Edward Tyas

Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, who arranged, annotated, and introduced Ruskin’s vast writings. Just before Richards’s critique of the pathetic fallacy in Practical Criticism,

A. H. R. Ball, one of the first sympathetic anthologizers of Ruskin’s literary criticism,

155 introduced Ruskin as Literary Critic (1928). Ball praised Ruskin’s “mass of literary criticism” for its deep sympathy and rare dedication to understanding the words of authors, for unswerving honesty, for breadth of vision and knowledge, and for a stately writing style. Ball also recognized Ruskin’s “well-known limitations,” such as finding satisfaction in “Nothing less than definite assertion” and the mixed blessing of the faculty of passing judgment “on everything,” and Ball went about apologizing, in particular, for the theory of the pathetic fallacy (6). Ball felt that the pathetic fallacy, though “ingenious and amply illustrated,” remained “unconvincing” by having gone wrong through hasty and biased ordering of poets (22). Ball tried to rescue Ruskin’s idea by stating that the theory “goes wrong in application, but not in argument,” but he did not elaborate upon the aspects of the argument that remain worthwhile (24). Ball then rather misleadingly suggests that Ruskin “sought no place in the history of literary criticism” and that “it is superfluous to give him one” (31). Yet Ball himself cites many modern critics who did give him such a place, like Oliver Eton, George Saintsbury, and Sir Leslie Stephen, the last of whom wrote of Modern Painters, “whatever its errors, it is the only book in the language which treats to any purpose what may be called aesthetics” (qtd. in Ball 32-33).

While Ball grasped the enthusiast and practical energizer of literary study and judgment in Ruskin, he did not grasp that Ruskin also made unique contributions to literary aesthetics that found influential exponents.

Ball asserted in 1928 that Ruskin would never be “in danger of being unread”

(34), but Eliot wrote that Ruskin’s works were already victims of “undue neglect” (SE

395) through excerption (like Ball’s) a year earlier. Despite popular neglect of Ruskin’s works, and despite the endurance of Ruskinian ideas in major streams of modernist

156 criticism, it was not until 1947, according to Google’s Ngram search of digital books, that the objective correlative eclipsed pathetic fallacy in usage, and not until 1966 that Eliot’s term consistently, if modestly, edges it out of dominance. The antithetical fallacies of

Wimsatt and Beardsley, the affective fallacy and intentional fallacy, never approach the usage of either Eliot or Ruskin’s terms (see appendix for Ngram charts and a reproduction of Miles’s table). But such indices cannot adequately or exhaustively indicate informed opinions, readership, and/or critical and popular opinion. Beyond an article generally investigating the pathetic fallacy in Ancient Greece (Copley 1937), only one small volume, published by Rationalist Press, is worthy of note by sincerely attempting to do what the Rev. Young had feared Ruskin’s discussion of the pathetic fallacy would do from the beginning, which was to include Christianized natural theology in its list of products of Ruskin’s anthropomorphic instinct.

The first chapter of The Pathetic Fallacy: A Study of Christianity (1930), entitled

“The Origin of all Religions,” describes gods growing up as common as weeds in a hedgerow, serviceable fictions in “hours of perplexity.” Through pathetic fallacies, “Our amazement is soothed. All is made clear” (Powys 3). Llewelyn Powys, a journalist, novelist, and the husband of Alyse Gregory (editor of The Dial, 1924-1925), criticized

Christianity’s vaunted place in Western thought by scorning its “impotent” beliefs and directing the wise to hold their tongues in moments of deep emotion instead of

“chattering” about gods in churches. For Powys, all gods remained personal regardless of the rigidity of religious creeds, and he asked that individuals turn away from their gods and toward “the unconquerable unimplicated sun” (115). Powys took his title from

Ruskin and his use of the term demonstrates the words’ increasingly derogatory

157 connotations, though Ruskin had originally used them only rather clinically. Yet Powys never mentions Ruskin, and it is just as well. Ruskin would have loathed Powys’s sentiments far more than Santayana’s poetic naturalism. Powys’s conclusions amount to nihilism coldly consoled by poetry. Even as agnostics, Ruskin and Santayana set their own imaginations to work practically elaborating how poetry and art could effectively fulfill Keats’s role for the artist as “friend, / To sooth the cares, and lift the thoughts of man.” Yet Powys’s is the first explicit statement of the critique of theism as the result of anthropomorphism that is implicit in the theory of the pathetic fallacy, and it would not be developed as explicitly in similar terms outside of Santayana until Stewart Guthrie’s

Faces in the Clouds (1993).45

A scrupulously researched work in anthropology of religion, Guthrie’s first sentence declares that “religion may best be understood as systematic anthropomorphism: the attribution of human characteristics to nonhuman things or events” (3). Stewart

Guthrie’s cognitive theory of religion does not find the distinction between personification, anthropomorphism, or pathetic fallacy important; in fact, it finds the distinction nearly impossible. In the chapter on anthropomorphism in art, Guthrie repeats the mistaken view that I have consistently attempted to oppose, that Ruskin’s “severe” comments constitute an “attack” on the instinct to anthropomorphize. Regardless, Guthrie neatly summarizes attitudes toward personification and the pathetic fallacy among literary scholars. He writes that they often regard the trope as “unavoidable” (Hecht 25)

45 My phrasing purposefully excludes the massive body of literature surrounding the psychology of enchantment and disenchantment rehearsed in oppositions of Romanticism and Enlightenment, Arnold and Huxley, Leavis and Snow, Sokal and Social Text, etc., which, while relevant, does not depart from the same sources that I am hoping to trace for their potential in describing a poetic response to the “problem” or “potential” of the pathetic fallacy. 158 and constitutive of literature’s process of making a total human form out of nature

(Northrop Frye) while, simultaneously, regarding personification negatively so far as it seems designed and an artificial figure of speech (Guthrie 124).

Most scholars refer to personifying language, variously, as a technique, trope, metaphor, conceit, move, literary mode, or phenomenon of language or rhetoric (Guthrie

124). Guthrie recognizes that “Few scholars think personification either spontaneous or part of a broader worldview, and fewer still identify it as a form of anthropomorphism”

(124). Guthrie perhaps rightly thinks Ruskin responsible for some of the “critical disfavor” attached to personification from the mid-nineteenth century, but Ruskin, in wanting readers to notice and understand the sources and effects of the instinct to anthropomorphize, advocated an informed appreciation of poetic forms as they did or did not suggest literal interpretation and as they might faithfully convey truths of human feeling. Ruskin recognized the anthropomorphic instinct as a fact, and he developed the theory of the pathetic fallacy as a further development in investigating the phenomenon as more than mere literary trope, but as a psychological effect necessarily felt, restrained, and directed by poets wishing to avoid careless, merely personal self-expression in their poetry.

Despite Josephine Miles’s attempt at historicizing changes in phrasings of objects and emotions in poetry, Guthrie correctly pushes against Miles by arguing that “despite reports of their demise … the pathetic fallacy and personification in fact have remained vigorous throughout the twentieth century” (126). Guthrie may give less credit to Miles’s reading of the pathetic fallacies continuing in new phrasings of sense perceptions than her study warrants. Nevertheless, Guthrie is correct that personifications have always lived

159 and still live in the best poetic language. As representative twentieth century instances,

Guthrie marshals not only Eliot’s etherized evening from “Prufrock” but also the fog that

“rubs its back upon the window panes,” a boat that moves “gaily,” light that is “sad,” and a moon that “smiles.” Guthrie is here adding to a list that Kenneth Burke compiled, in A

Grammar of Motives (1945) of pathetic fallacies in Eliot that also work against Miles’s thesis.

Burke wrote that Eliot’s “yellow smoke that slides along the street,” or “the windings of the violins,” or the light that “crept up between the shutters,” are indebted to a more expansive notion of the pathetic fallacy than Miles’s rather limiting “object and attributed emotion” which resulted in her conclusion about the trope’s decline. Indeed,

Richards had begun distinguishing some of the complexity of such forms in Practical

Criticism in his discussion of “aesthetic” or “projectile adjectives” like splendid, glorious, ugly, horrid, lovely, pretty … words which really indicate not so much the nature of the object as the character of our feeling towards it” (220).46 Kenneth Burke’s emphasis on motives, however, led him to locate what he believed to be a conceptual and perceptual source of such linguistic forms in a cognitive-perceptual ambiguity. For

Burke, pathetic fallacies are “indebted to the action-motion ambiguity for much of their power as what Aristotle would call ‘actualizations’” (Burke 234). Burke grasped the type

46 Richard’s discussion of aesthetic adjectives in the appendix to Practical Criticism states that the adjectives and their abstract substantives “raise several extraordinarily interesting questions” and eventually states of the forms what others have said about the pathetic fallacy, that we may “enjoy all the advantages” that derive from the usage as projecting an inherent objective quality of beauty upon an object without letting go of the recognition of “the fact of projection,” for to do otherwise would be to fall into mystical obscurantism and/or to become “cut off from the natural sources of emotion and attitude” and would be not only “to destroy poetry but to wreck our whole emotional life” (357- 360). 160 of ambiguity upon which, according to Empson, the pathetic fallacy relies to produce its necessary “emotional reverberation” (Ambiguity 40).

Burke viewed conceptual personification as spontaneous and an instinctive part of viewing the world, a given of “the action-motion ambiguity.” This ambiguity existed in the presence of any motion or suggestion of motion by language, when the difference between agency and any impersonal movement of a thing or creature was uncertain.

Therefore, Burke defined the pathetic fallacy as

an ambiguous personalizing of impersonal events, whereby even so apparently scientific a concept as “adjustment” can refer indeterminedly to both actions and motions, as a person may “adjust himself” to a situation by deliberate effort on his part or the accommodations may be automatic, as with a thermometer’s adjustment to a change in temperature. (153)

Unlike the fallacy of wilful fancy that, Ruskin states, “involves no real expectation that it will be believed” (5.205), the pathetic fallacy formulates and actualizes belief in readers via a subtle ambiguity of action and motion in the expression, which is often quickly personalized through settling on convenient and immediate resolutions of the ambiguity.

This ambiguity of perception and expression, therefore, calls upon the reader/perceiver to analogize, and thereby to personify, the world. Then, the reader must determine to what extent the appearance has been falsely personalized and personified or not.47 Burke noted that Miles’s study limits itself to the attribution of “emotions” and “passions” to objects, elements that Miles found “most central to the ‘pathetic’” of Ruskin’s theory. But the pathetic of Ruskin’s theory is concerned with the pathos expressed in the objective formula and the pathos evoked by it, not the attribution of emotion per se. The important

47 Mark Turner made this an article of his relatively new theory of conceptual blending in 1987 when he wrote “We are people. We know a lot about ourselves. And we often make sense of other things by viewing them as people too” (Death is the Mother of Beauty 129). 161 feature of the attribution is merely that it represents “false appearances” broadly construed, though many of his examples are anthropomorphic. Ruskin’s example of

Coleridge’s dancing leaf from Christabel (“The one red leaf, the last of its clan, / That dances as often as dance it can”) is a perfect example of the pathetic fallacy that is not, as

Miles stated, “the attribution of a named emotion to an object,” but an action-motion ambiguity. Such personalizing of simple motion allows us to see that “the wheat tossed in the wind refers to motion, whereas the wheat tossed its head in the wind refers to action,” connoting agency (233). Although even here, as in Coleridge, the motion itself suggests something of an emotional state that we associate with dancing or throwing one’s hair in the wind. Why does Burke make this distinction?

Presumably with the knowledge that Ruskin’s chapter begins by attacking the use of subject and object, Burke explained that “Our approach forces us to face again the philosophic issue that arose with Cartesian dualism.” For Burke, “Many of our best naturalist philosophers seem to be drawing doctrinal sustenance from unrecognized effects of the pathetic fallacy as we have extended it to cover the action-motion ambiguity” (234). Burke followed Ruskin by sympathizing with those naturalist philosophers endlessly attempting to redeem an anthropomorphic instinct that could never be transcended. More frankly and skeptically than Ruskin, however, Burke stated the stakes of the game for those who, “Condemning materialistic reduction, … speak hopefully of a vocabulary midway between ‘mind’ and ‘body’ (or midway between the terms for the act of ‘consciousness’ and the terms for the scenic ‘conditions’ of those manifestations we call consciousness).” Burke wrote “We need not dare to say that such a vocabulary cannot be found. We need only say that, whenever it seems to be found, you

162 are admonished to be on the look-out for the covert workings of the action-motion ambiguity” (234-235). Though we may take this warning as passing judgment on

Ruskin’s own idealistic vocabulary, Burke’s phrasing involves him in the same more-or- less “moral” project of gaining awareness of the “scenic conditions of consciousness” that Ruskin proposed through his emphasis on looking, thinking, and feeling about nature in order to reflect on human nature and to guide human action.

Burke saw that attitudes are “the beginning of acts” and related the internal motivations of any organism to their “field of action, … a halfway concept between motion and action” (237), which Burke borrowed from Santayana.48 Suspended moments of discerning between action and motion in the mental field of action, between intention, motivation, and automatic activity, prepares “for the mature development of the dramatic itself.” Burke hoped that mature thinking about such things might manifest in attitudes toward judgment that keep “a flimsy vocabulary of motivation” from becoming palatable and confusing or degrading perception in a scenic field of mental and physical action

(235). In literature, Burke’s concern with “vocabularies of motivation” seems relevant to

Eliot’s difficulty in discerning Hamlet’s motive, and to Ruskin’s questioning of Pope’s figurative language. Ruskin and Eliot argue that the flimsiness of these characters derives from the author’s contrived, hypocritical, or buffoonish expression, which kept readers and watchers from possibly knowing, taking seriously, or feeling the inevitability of their characters’ feelings and motivations.

48 Burke cites this idea from Santayana, and famously develops it in his own concept of the “representative anecdote,” stating that in the vocabularies humans develop in search of faithful reflections of reality they create selections of reality that must also function as deflections of other portions of reality (59). 163 To take another example, one of I. A. Richards’ unnamed students in Practical

Criticism wrote of J. D. C. Fellows’s “The Temple” (Poem 7), in which trees worshipped and leaves rejoiced, that the pathetic fallacies feel “too blatant and insistent” (91). They seemed to this student insufficiently subtle and insufficiently ambiguous to court either interest or sympathy, causing any possibility of sustained illusion and emotional reverberation, therefore, to dissipate. Such poetry does not present and investigate ambiguity in such ways as would sharpen a sense of motivation and activity; it does not represent the “scenic conditions of consciousness” that would allow a reader to think of the mind thus conditioned and to pass any judgment about it, except perhaps that its thoughts are “morbid” or maudlin. In Ruskin’s terms, verse that delights in pathetic fallacies does not often attain to thoughtfulness, and does not guide human thought by suggesting “noble grounds for the noble emotions” that can be taken seriously, if not always literally.

After Richards, Miles, and Burke, critical interest in Ruskin and Victorianism resurged in the 1960’s at the same time that New Critical formalism and structuralist dominance in American universities waned. John Rosenberg’s new anthology of

Ruskin’s writings, The Genius of John Ruskin (UVA Press, 1964), Harold Bloom’s The

Literary Criticism of John Ruskin (Da Capo, 1965) (an updating of A. H. R. Ball’s anthology), and the second edition of Miles’s The Pathetic Fallacy in the Nineteenth

Century (Octagon, 1965), were followed by Bernard Dick’s interest in “Ancient Pastoral and the Pathetic Fallacy” (1968), Edward Alexander’s “Ruskin and Science” (1969),

Patricia Ball’s The Science of the Aspects (Athlone 1971), and George Landow’s The

Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton 1971). This renaissance of

164 Ruskin studies considered the theory of the pathetic fallacy more justly across a wider number of critics than any generation that had come before it, understanding Ruskin to be writing a phenomenology of reading and perceiving and not a strict Johnsonian attack on a trope.

For instance, George Landow was one of the first to argue for a more positive assessment of the pathetic fallacy as a tool of interior landscape and as a formula for quickly and powerfully conveying feeling and emotion in poetry. Landow felt that the pathetic fallacy had been misunderstood, that “distorting effects of emotion” manipulated

“a portion of reality which both speaker and listener share,” so that “the pathetic fallacy allows one to glimpse the passions within the consciousness of another human being.”

Landow cogently described Ruskin’s thought that, when presented by the creative poet,

“The distortions of the pathetic fallacy function like the voice inflections which a speaker gives to a common, shared language: they permit something to be communicated which it would be difficult to state ‘directly.’ The pathetic fallacy, then, allows the poet to dramatize grief and joy, communicating them far more effectively than would the simple statement that the speaker suffers from sorrow or feels joy” (383-384).49 Although

Landow does not comment on the idea that Ruskin critiqued such forms or influenced the progression of subsequent poetry away from careless uses of pathetic fallacies as feigned

49 Landow develops this idea better than any of his contemporaries, and I include one other quote to demonstrate the character of his argument: “The truth conveyed by the pathetic fallacy is phenomenological truth, the truth of experience, the truth as it appears to the experiencing subject. In particular, these emotional distortions of exterior reality much resemble the Ruskinian notion of imaginatively depicted landscape. The higher mode of landscape, we remember, presents not the topographical facts of a scene but the impression which its trees and rocks, sky and water made upon the great, imaginative painter” (384).

165 poetic intensity or failures of further thinking, he does remark upon how Ruskin’s emphasis on intensity sympathized with Romantic theories of lyric. Yet, Landow observed, too, how Ruskin departed from Poe and Baudelaire’s elevation of the lyric mode through “his desire to avoid the dangers of a limiting subjectivity, his wish to escape the limited moment of an instant,” leading him to prefer the more “objective” forms of the epic and dramatic (386).

For the most part, Landow’s important revaluation and clarification of Ruskin’s theories remained focused on the important task of interpreting Ruskin’s theories in the context of English landscape painting before and during the period of the writing of

Modern Painters and The Stones of Venice. Landow did not put Ruskin’s theories into dialogue with twentieth-century poetic practices and critical or theoretical developments, like Miles’s earlier 1942 study. Miles’s new preface for the 1965 edition of her work, however, continued to note what she viewed as the lack of pathetic fallacies (defined as objects and attributed emotions) in Thom Gunn, Anne Sexton, and A. R. Ammons, and she made the first murmur of disappointment in the twentieth century that “simple attribution” of emotion had seemingly been replaced by “complex implication,” resulting in there no longer appearing to be a “major modern vocabulary of feeling” (vii-ix). I am not sure what Miles means by this statement about modern poetry, except that feeling had actually gone out of modern poetry, which would be to argue that poetry has ceased to be poetry, which I do not think she argues. Perhaps Ruskin provided a complicated and distant enough precursor on which to foist some blame for the “objectivity” of the modernists in the mid-nineteen-sixties, who had perhaps seemed to nullify or subdue the grander feelings of an earlier age’s metaphors.

166 For instance, in 1971, Patricia Ball (unlike Landow) fell into the trap of thinking that Ruskin belittled “the whole concept of metaphor as well as the import of self- research” (The Science of Aspects 80), but she too attempted to reinvigorate thinking about the concept. Ball stated that “we have to think more positively about the pathetic fallacy than is customary now; as a phrase and as an idea, it is out of fashion and absent from current critical vocabularies. But a study of it reveals it to be a key symptom of the century’s imaginative movements” (Ball 2). Indeed, despite this brief renaissance, the term remains largely out of fashion, and late twentieth-century attention to Ruskin’s

(proto)modernism generally avoids the issue.

The major revaluation by Landow, and Harold Bloom’s reissue of Ruskin’s literary criticism during the sixties and seventies, remained largely isolated from larger debates about the future of literary criticism and the canonization of literary theory, with the notable exception of J. Hillis Miller. Miller wrote his attack on Ruskin and the pathetic fallacy under the influence of Paul de Man in the nineteen-eighties. Paul de Man had previously used Baudelaire and Yeats to undermine the dramatic situation of lyric as that of simulated or represented voice at all. Because the medium of poetry was the written word, argued de Man, its writing separated language from any true “speaker” or intentional author, and its intention was forever lost in the process of transcription.

Written transcription rendered novels and poems as texts like any other and their characters and representations of objects, situations, and events were all radically indeterminable and self-deconstructive. For de Man, words could not reliably function as formulas for expressing anything precise or “significant” that could not be taken for something else, rendering all texts radically indeterminable. From this premise, it

167 followed that poets employed anthropomorphic trope in a personal process of blind violence, yoking arbitrarily different signs in order to satisfy a frantic need to domesticate the universe through emblem, an effort that de Man thought Yeats eventually abandoned by writing “The Circus Animal’s Desertion” and essentially giving up poetry (through a poem) (de Man Rhetoric of Romanticism 238).

J. Hillis Miller attended to Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy in 1983 and recognized, like Harold Bloom before him, that Ruskin was a phenomenologist developing a “reader response or viewer response theory” to literature and art as it related to the instinct to animate and anthropomorphize nature. However, Miller attacks Ruskin’s theory for being too objective, for being “resolutely antagonist to any relativism or subjectivism, to any theory which says, ‘It all depends on how you look at it’” (400).

Miller’s criticism of Ruskin’s overreaching and definite pronouncements over matters of taste has a great deal of merit. However, Miller’s own investment in pursuing language as primary and prior to thought becomes apparent when critiquing Ruskin as a person who,

“like most people, will go to great lengths to hide from himself the power of language over thought, feeling and perception” (407). Miller here departs from dealing with

Ruskin’s actual insights about “false appearances,” the pathetic fallacy, and the use of metaphor more generally. Miller wished Ruskin had just referred to the psychological instinct and emotional experience in question by its embodiment in a rhetorical figure, prosopopoeia (using a “persona” or “mask,” i.e., personification). Miller saw Ruskin’s choice of a different terminology as motivated by a “clear need for obfuscation” (401) in order to veil from himself the naïveté of his view of “truth,” supposed by Miller to mean

“the exact correspondence between what is in the mind and what is literally out there as

168 fact” (405). To Miller’s deconstructive eye, Ruskin’s ideas may be easily undermined because they remain “implicitly challenged by his own criteria for truthful seeing and saying” (405). Miller faults Ruskin for couching his distinctions “not at all in terms of language but in terms of perception distorted or not distorted by feeling, as though language did not do more than express or copy the state of mind of the poet or non-poet who uses it” (404). Ruskin, however, attempted to describe the difficulty poets had in using language to accomplish expressions of states of mind because language could, in fact, be used in so many ways. To retain a singular purpose and achieve the desired effect did not mean that “language itself” was limited to literal description, but that a certain work was limited to a certain number of more plausible interpretations with more probable effects, and could by no means be described as a simple copy of a state mind.

One way of examining Ruskin in relation to Miller and the poststructuralists would be to consider him in relation to the aesthetic critics I have already suggested took notice of Ruskin as a proto-pragmatist literary figure. Steven Knapp and Walter Benn

Michaels published “Against Theory” (1982) the year after Michaels’s article on Eliot’s dissertation. Knapp and Michaels intensified the debate over the ascendency and entrenchment of “theory” that had been animated by concerns over intention for interpretation, and over the possibility of interpretation itself. The issue had seemed to be whether certain objective theories of art could serve as a means of guaranteeing the

“objectivity and validity of interpretations” or whether, in the case of much post- structuralist practice, theory could serve as a means of denying “the possibility of correct interpretation” (Against Theory 11). Knapp and Michaels promoted philosophical and linguistic grounds upon which investigations of literary aesthetics could continue without

169 having to deny that literary texts existed as artfully constructed objects with intended meanings and effects. By challenging those who celebrated the inability of academic routines to fix upon objectively valid interpretations of art works, Knapp and Michaels contended with a nihilistic version of the subjective idealism Ruskin deprecated in the pathetic fallacy chapter. Ruskin’s rivals possessed “a hearty desire for mystification” in thinking that “everything in the world depends upon his seeing or thinking of it, and that nothing, therefore, exists, but what he sees or thinks of” (5.202)––the strong version of

Derrida’s Il n’y a pas de hors-texte. Attending to Knapp and Michaels’s discussion of the sea miraculously writing Wordsworth’s “A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal” reveals some of the same points as Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy chapter, including the inconsequentiality of arguing for or against intention which will always simply result, despite claims to “a guide to valid interpretation,” in “a description of what everyone always does” (18).

Although Ruskin certainly claimed at times to have happened upon or held out hope for objective guides to artistic practices and effects (like Eliot in “Tradition and the

Individual Talent”), he speaks somewhat less to issues of exacting interpretation and usually tempered such hopes with qualifications and continuums of appreciation that could go on indefinitely over volumes. Nevertheless, Ruskin primarily prescribed a method of speaking and writing about interpretations of art and nature that would first and foremost remain “intelligible to your other creatures,” and that spoke of the effects of nature and of art by stating that “It does so” or “It seems so to me” (5.203).

In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the linguistic work of George Lakoff and Mark

Johnson on metaphor had percolated into literary studies to suggest a new vocabulary that did not promise a guide to “valid interpretation” but did offer a more objective study of

170 and vocabulary for metaphor and its literary uses. Mark Turner introduced models for literary criticism in Reading Minds (1991) that promised greater consonance with emergent practices in cognitive science and cognitive linguistics. Turner attempted to ground literary studies in the study of rhetoric newly-informed by the “complex operations of projection, binding, linking, blending, and integration over multiple

[conceptual] spaces” (Literary Mind 57) in the brain, an idea that matured into his theory of cognitive metaphor known as “conceptual blending.” Although he does not engage with Ruskin’s theories, Turner’s criticism promises a way of thinking about Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy that accords with modern cognitive neuroscience by conceiving of all ordinary meaning as “parabolic,” i.e., of the nature of a parable. An early example from

The Literary Mind deals with action and motion in the same manner as Burke, and like

Burke, draws from Aristotle, but this time, from On the Soul. Turner writes that

This abstract concept of the soul is created by parabolic projection. We know the small spatial story in which an actor moves a physical object; we project this story onto the story of the movement of the body. The object projects to the body and the actor projects to the soul. In this way, parable creates the concept of the soul. (21)

By Turner’s account, all knowledge is literary in that it deals with projections and parables. However, instead of taking the contingency of reality upon its construction in the brain as a new sort of philosophical metaphysical foundation (i.e., instead of concluding that nothing exists but the deluded self trapped inside an arbitrary text),

Turner finds in the brain and the embodied human experience of reality an enabling and adaptive organic process of creative evolution. This cognitive process, through innovation and serendipity, happens upon useful truths through invented stories extrapolated from ever simpler or more complex experiences, and developed by the

171 literary mind through spatial narratives. In fact, such invented stories are indispensible to everyday life. For Turner, language developed from the cognitive mechanisms capable of blending objects, events, actions, movements, etc., into more complex mental concepts within an imagined spatial landscape. In other words, stories came before language,

“Parable preceded grammar” (141).

Therefore, Turner explains things that the language of physics, for example, has particular difficulty describing convincingly, like the behavior of human and nonhuman animals. By describing parables as invented stories that humans use for recognizing, say,

“an animate agent performing an intentional act,” Turner avoids a behaviorist and scientistic representation of the world that “leaves out agency, motive, intentionality, and a range of structure that is part of the conceptual equipment of everyone, including physicists” (14). Recognition of animation and intention occurs across species in

“prototypical actors––human beings and many animals” (20). By an act of projection, humans can identify with animals. As Turner explains,

We can perceive their movements but we cannot perceive their sensations. We must infer their sensations by analogy with ourselves: they appear to move in reaction to sensations just as we would. We recoil when startled; we track visual stimulus; we turn from an unpleasant smell. They appear to do the same things. We see the cat jump backward in surprise or move when it recognizes a bird, and we infer their sensations from their self-movements. This is already parable. (21)

What Turner is describing here is not only, therefore, his argument for the origin of ideas and concepts, of language and grammar, in the inventive capacity of the imagination.

Turner is also explaining this precondition for blending in a form of social cognition, akin to what I have described as the practice of critical anthropomorphism. Turner later describes these processes forming a functional idea of “I” and an idea of “you.”

Appearances resulting from an idea of an “I” or “You” may not in fact be “true,” 172 meaning accurate in the sense of corresponding to an interior life of sensation in “live” or dead matter. However, insofar as such projections partake in social cognition, the conception and treatment of an object as animate and intentional creates appearances that can be true to social feelings directed toward those objects, finding expression through the animating metaphors of literary art.

Allow me now to approach the modern treatment of the pathetic fallacy through one last angle I began working with in the Darwin chapter. Developing alongside scientific insights into human cognitive and linguistic development are two related disciplines relevant to my tracing of Ruskin’s theory of the pathetic fallacy and its contemporary consequence in the sciences of ecology and ethology. First, ecological awareness accelerated after World War II and grew into its modern form in the late 1960s and 1970s. Environmental activism largely filtered into literary criticism through an initiative, in the 1990s, to develop a properly ecological criticism concerned with literary representations of the environment. While recognizing Ruskin as a forerunner of ecological consciousness, the theory of the pathetic fallacy in ecocritical circles remains a lightning rod for accusations of anthropocentrism, summed up by Niel Everndon’s view

(using the example of personifying whooping cranes) that “the pathetic fallacy is a fallacy only to the ego-clencher” (Evernden 101), which betrays at least this ecocritics’ thinking of the “pathetic fallacy” as a fallacy in the sense of a logical fallacy instead of

Ruskin’s more neutral sense of a “false appearance.” Similarly, New Age environmental advocates like Mervyn Sprung misread both terms in statements like, “It is the ‘pathetic fallacy’ that can be seen as pathetic in its fallaciousness” and “It is a fallacy, truly pathetic, to hold that such qualities [of experience, of majesty, of solemnity] belong only

173 to my mind, not to the tree” (30). Ruskin would sympathize with these authors’ ecological and artistic aims, and even with their reverence for something “sacred” in the idea of nature’s life; however, he would not only be horrified by their use of his term but question whether they could even recognize that “foam is not cruel, neither does it crawl”

(5.205). I would venture to say that Ruskin would have appreciated the critique of such ideas by Walter Benn Michaels, who links such deep-ecological and animist positions to postructuralist interpretations of language.

Citing the ecophilosopher David Abram’s interpretation of an angular rock as a type of meaningful gesture, Michaels writes that such thinking attempts to take postructuralist interpretations of language one step further. In de Man’s discussion of the

“Marion” episode in Rousseau, de Man does not allow that sounds intended as a word might mean “whatever (more or less complicated thing) Rousseau meant,” but instead must be taken “as meaning nothing––as a rock instead of a speech act” (The Shape of the

Signifier 118). For Michaels, therefore, in deconstruction and deep ecology both, it is the commitment to the materiality of the signifier (to the primacy of the mark) that makes the world into a text” for Derrida, or as Michaels cites Abram, “language is as much a property of the … landscape as of the humans who dwell” in it (126). Michaels’s own deeply ironic and mediating rhetoric palpably revels in this sort of linking of extremes, and he conveniently conflates Derrida and Abram with very little nuance, which they both deserve. Returning to Ruskin, however, it is possible to view Ruskin as contradictory when he insists that “the foam is not cruel” but also writes of moments when “the trees and flowers seem all, in a sort, children of God; and we …become subordinate in our minds to their inner glory,—to the mysterious voices in which they

174 talk to us about God” (5.385-386). But Ruskin’s statements of Life writ large, like this latter one, almost all remain on the level of seeming while being no less enthusiastic for the enlivened vision of nature they offer. Ruskin does not, as Michaels writes of Donna

Haraway or David Abram, “turn the antifoundationalist denial that the world is an object into the deep-ecological claim that the world is a subject” (121), but attempts a rhetorical navigation of the two in the attempt to preserve the landscape experience he valued as aesthetically life-giving, inspiring a care for nonhuman nature, which brings me to the next point.

Ethologists, unsatisfied with behaviorist vocabularies for describing animal behaviors (influenced by John B. Watson and B. F. Skinner), slowly began to challenge the reigning wisdom about avoiding all hints of anthropomorphic projection in their writing and practice. The psychology that had grown out of animal behaviorism in the early part of the twentieth century held that speculation about internal states of mind, and any hypothesis that relied upon introspection and analogy with human behavior instead of purely visual and data-driven observation should be discounted. Behaviorist theories influenced I. A. Richards, who slighted Ruskin’s theory, and Joshua Gang has recently explained how Cleanth Brooks’s Well Wrought-Urn and Wimsatt and Beardsley’s

“intentional fallacy” and “affective fallacy” perpetuated Richards’s behaviorist influence in poetic formalism by deemphasizing both intent and aesthetic response in works intended to manifest aesthetic effects in readers (Gang “Behaviorism and the Beginnings of Close Reading” 1-3). Analogously, a large part of what had always animated evolutionary ethology, from Darwin’s acknowledged liberality in analogizing the inner lives of creatures with his own interior experience, was the marriage of “intuitive insight

175 with systematic data collection” (de Waal 39). Frans de Waal described this marriage, laid out by Konrad Lorenz in The Foundations of Ethology (1981), as “both the challenge and the joy of the study of animal behavior,” with Lorenz even suggesting that one could not “effectively investigate an animal that one didn’t love. Because our intuitive understanding of animals is based on human emotions and a sense of connection with animals” (de Waal 39). Criticizing the “conditioned anti-anthropomorphism” advanced by holdover behaviorist scientists still resisting the naming of mental states in animals with words used for humans, de Waal and many other animal behaviorists today generally recognize that generating experimentally testable hypotheses is impossible without varying degrees of anthropomorphic projection (Goodrich and Allen 147-150,

2007).

It would seem, therefore, that the requirements for appreciating ecopoetic capturing of animals and for ethologically evaluating animal behavior draw upon similar forms of “biocentric” (Bekoff) or “critical” (Burghardt) anthropomorphism, which

“stresses taking the animals’ point of view rather than dismissing it” and “can be used to formulate hypotheses for acceptable scientific research” (Horowitz and Bekoff 30).

Ethologists like Konrad Lorenz, Jane Goodall, and Marc Bekoff require themselves to admit certain intuitions of likeness, treating the appearance of intentionality, emotion, and conscious thought as evidence of mental activities more or less analogous to possibilities observable in human cognition, so far as such intuitions lead to testable hypotheses and experiments. Interestingly, I. A. Richards’s defense against a colleague’s accusation that his title, “When Does a Poem Know When It Is Finished?” “committed” the pathetic fallacy runs along these lines. Richards wrote that his title didn’t “attribute anything to

176 poems that they do not fully have” and that poems were, in fact, “living, feeling, knowing beings in their own right; the so-called metaphor that treats a poem as organic is not a metaphor, but a literal description” (Poetries and Sciences 108). For Richards, all poetry represented human “behavior” or “activity” by realistically modeling and thereby presenting an appearance requesting to be related to as one relates to a person.

This defense by Richards, in itself a sympathetic illusion (considering a poem as a living organism), begs the question as to when a sympathetic illusion is truly justified.

When is a pathetic fallacy true to feeling, and when is it more than a technology for causing emotional reverberations? At what point could a pathetic fallacy really become critical anthropomorphism, with knowledge at the end of it that was not only the knowledge of the feeling self, but also knowledge of feeling outside itself?

As I argued in the chapter on Ruskin and Darwin, critical anthropomorphism was used to great effect by Darwin during Ruskin’s time. My primary point of investigation at that point regarded Ruskin’s example of Wordsworth’s bird in The Excursion, which

Ruskin called “perfect” and “exquisite.” There was an essential but unknowable otherness to the bird that necessitated projection in order to be perceived, but that ultimately resisted the transcendental logic applied to it by humans. This relation between the pathetic fallacy and critical anthropomorphism only became explicit in Santayana’s discussion of “justified illusion,” his 1923 version of “critical anthropomorphism.” As one recent scholar has pointed out, though without mentioning either the pathetic fallacy

177 or the passages I am about to examine, Santayana developed a very ethological literary theory.50

In the first volume of The Life of Reason (1923), Santayana describes the pathetic fallacy in more detail than anywhere else in his extensive writings. Its sixth chapter, entitled “Discovery of Fellow Minds,” proposes to outline how the pathetic fallacy is

“normal yet ordinarily fallacious.” “The pathetic fallacy is … what originally peoples the imagined world” (91) and “A sense for alien thought is accordingly at its inception a complete illusion. The thought is one’s own, it is associated with an image moving in space, and is uncritically supposed to be a hidden part of that image, a metaphysical signification attached to its motion and actually existing behind the scenes in the form of an unheard soliloquy” (91). Although this description really gives nothing new besides

Ruskin’s instinct to animate nature and Burke’s action-motion ambiguity, its new words for the feeling of the pathetic fallacy strike a different tone of actual apprehension outside the self as well in “A sense for alien thought” (91).

Santayana then makes a somewhat striking point that he thinks, nevertheless, will not surprise anyone who has “studied life and nature to any purpose” (92). Santayana argues that the “primary habit of producing widespread illusions may in certain cases become the source of rational knowledge” (92). For instance,

There is evidently one case in which the pathetic fallacy is not fallacious, the case in which the object observed happens to be an animal similar to the observer and similarly affected, as for instance when a flock or herd are swayed by panic fear. (92)

50 See Daniel Pinkas’s “Santayana’s <>, Animal Pragmatism, and the Moral Status of Animals” limbo Núm. 31 (2011): 9-28. 178 Santayana believed that the human attribution of the emotion of fear to a fleeing sheep would be, at that moment, not fallacious, but true, and he extends the comparison to humans reading each other’s faces, stating that “Their aspect thus becomes the recognised expression for the feeling which really accompanies it” (92).

Whenever, then, feeling is attributed to an animal similar to the percipient and similarly employed the attribution is mutual and correct. Contagion and imitation are great causes of feeling, but in so far as they are its causes and set the pathetic fallacy to work they forestall and correct what is fallacious in that fallacy and turn it into a vehicle of true and, as it were, miraculous insight. (92)

Lest humans should become too proud of this “primary habit” or capacity for “imaginary self-transcendence,” something similar to what Mark Turner calls conceptual blending and “the origin of ideas,” we should know that Santayana believed that the progress of significant knowledge proceeds only by chance, that “a rash pretension to grasp an independent reality and to know the unknowable, may find itself accidentally rewarded”

(93). Yet, Santayana asserts, so far as similarities of habit and constitution between animals and humans diverge, understanding deteriorates into “false imputations and absurd myths.” In the case of animals, mutual understanding attributed to animals usually results in a “grotesque compound of Aesop and physiology” (94). Nevertheless, a

“justified illusion, an irrational pretension by chance fulfilled, a chance shot hitting the mark,” occasionally reveals to private intuition the “inner and unattainable core of other beings” (94) and in such cases the pathetic fallacy is not, to Santayana, a fallacy (92).

Santayana believed that this “miracle of insight,” enabled by the pathetic fallacy, expanded social life beyond the human species. Our common society extends to “similar beings living similar lives … enabled by the contagion of their common habits and arts to attribute to one another, each out of his own experience, what the other actually endures”

179 (97). So while Santayana understood that an analogy between actions and bodies must be tested in order to determine the validity of the inference, he held that the more primary source of analogy “is not inference at all but direct emotion and the pathetic fallacy” (98).

Moreover, in order to communicate a “fresh thought” to one who has never had it before, a speaker must so “dominate” the mind of an auditor by the “instrumentalities he brings to bear upon it that he compels that mind to reproduce his experience” (97). In other words, by reproducing the objects, events, and situations of a character or a landscape a speaker may so manipulate images as to, in so seemingly involuntary and natural a manner as to warrant comparison with contagion, reproduce the experience in the reader.

In narrow enough circumstances, therefore, a pathetic fallacy turns out to be true not just to human feeling, but to animal feeling returned to perceptual freshness. These feelings enable our emotional and sensual discovery of what is clear enough to perceive, the existence of other minds in human and nonhuman animals. Although the pathetic fallacy is subject to abuse, Santayana himself humorously noted,

I for one (though other philosophers are less fortunate) can perceive clearly that when animals react upon things in certain ways these things appear to them in certain forms; and the fact that they appear does not seem to me (so simple am I) to militate against their substantial existence. (Santayana SAF 211).

Indeed, Santayana stated much earlier that “Nothing is more natural or more congruous with all the analogies of experience than that animals should feel and think” (The Life of

Reason 205). Santayana took the inner lives of animals for granted as a belief attested to by the more or less “irrational persuasion or prompting of life” since all experiential data formed into belief could not be proved: “Belief in the existence of anything, including myself, is some thing radically incapable of proof” (SAF 211). Therefore, Santayana contributed significantly to a form of philosophical “critical anthropomorphism” that

180 applied to all of reality and to animals, by explaining the psychological phenomenon of the pathetic fallacy and the subsequent investigation of the resulting analogy.

Relating Santayana’s thoughts on imagining and appreciating the lives of animals to modern animal philosophy, Daniel Pinkas’s work on Santayana’s “literary ethology” suggests that Santayana anticipates and/or provides a helpful supplement to Cora

Diamond’s recent and cogent responses to the decades-long dominance of incompatible but convergent models of thinking about the status of animals, the utilitarianism of Peter

Singer and the animal-rights-based model of Tom Regan. These models both contribute to what Phillip McReynolds calls “the extension model of moral understanding.” While there is nothing intrinsically objectionable to the desire to extend moral consideration to animals for Diamond, she critiques the obtuseness and shallowness of appealing to a

“because” that guarantees moral consideration, viz., arguing from the “marks and features” of creatures in order to explain and justify differences in treatment. Diamond believes that the rationalist animal-rights position or utilitarian position emphasize and appeal to “a philosophical or moral problem apparently in the vicinity” of treating animals with moral consideration, and that the ensuing arguments actually serve to deflect the necessary imagination and sympathy required for action. Describing the character of Elizabeth Costello in J. M. Coetzee’s The Lives of Animals, Diamond admires how Costello “sees our reliance on argumentation as a way we may make unavailable to ourselves our own sense of what it is to be a living animal. And she sees poetry, rather than philosophy, as having the capacity to return us to such a sense of what animal life is” (Diamond 8-9, 2003). Instead of such a return to a sense of what animal life is, instead of animals bearing in human minds the affective stamp of moral

181 community, for Diamond the rationalist philosophical discussion of animal rights results simply in the “awful and unshakeable callousness and unrelentingness with which we most often confront the nonhuman world” (Diamond 334, 1978), and deflects imaginative appreciations necessitated by the difficulties of reality, as opposed to inspiring them.

In Pinkas’s article, “Santayana’s ‘Literary Ethology,’ Animal Pragmatism, and the

Moral Status of Animals” (2011), he also usefully pulls from the edited collection,

Animal Pragmatism (2004). It considers the possibility of a pragmatic stance toward ethical consideration of animals never explicitly addressed (except problematically by

John Dewey, who objected to regulating animal testing), but implied in much of the classical pragmatists’ Darwinian approach to philosophy and aesthetics. For instance,

Charles Sanders Pierce wrote that

I know very well that my dog’s musical feelings are quite similar to mine though they agitate him more than they do me. He has the same emotions of affection as I, though they are far more moving in his case. You would never persuade me that my horse and I do not sympathize, or that the canary bird that takes such delight in joking with me does not feel with me and I with him; and this instinctive confidence of mine that it is so, is to my mind evidence that it really is so (Peirce 314).

In this case, recognizing the difference between appearance and reality, Peirce trusts his own “sense for alien thought,” his sense of feeling with the other and being felt with.

Similarly, at the end of the “Stream of Thought” chapter in Principles of Psychology,

William James exclaims

Other minds, other worlds from the same monotonous and inexpressive chaos! My world is but one in a million alike embedded, alike real to those who abstract them. How different must be the worlds in the consciousness of ant, cuttle-fish, or crab! (Principles 1:289)

182 Pinkas very keenly links this passage from Principles of Psychology to James’s essay,

“On a Certain Blindness in Human Beings,” which defines and addresses the incapacity to understand, comprehend, and appreciate “the feelings of creatures and people different from ourselves” and expresses the idea of “the stupidity and injustice of our opinions, so far as they deal with the significance of alien lives” (Pragmatism 267). While James does not undertake a treatise on moral consideration of animals in this essay, his first example is a fox-terrier at the side of a reader, wondering what strange disease has afflicted the master staring for hours each day at a simple papery object instead of playing. Pinkas cites James’s animal ethic as residing in the essay’s conclusion which asks what all his considerations and conclusions about human blindness amount to. James wrote,

It absolutely forbids us to be forward in pronouncing on the meaninglessness of forms of existence other than our own; and it commands us to tolerate, respect, and indulge those whom we see harmlessly interested and happy in their own ways, however unintelligible these may be to us. Hands off: neither the whole of truth nor the whole of good is revealed to any single observer. (Pragmatism 284)

James’s plea for tolerance, respect, and indulgence of “forms of existence other than our own” does not distinguish between human and animal forms of existence.

Santayana, more explicitly, believed “profoundly in the animality of mind” and repeated that “The spirit that actually breathes in man is an animal spirit, transitive like the material endeavors which it expresses; it has a material station and accidental point of view, and a fevered preference for an alternative issue over another” (SAF 125). By appreciating forms of existence different from ours, we gain awareness of their conditions of happiness and point of view and we learn by direct emotion and pathetic fallacy the contours of our own “accidental” points of view and preferences, shaped through evolutionary timescales and through lifespans and no less real for their

183 contingency and existence in ideas.

An emergent pragmatic animal ethics, therefore, has at its heart the “justified illusion” of animal life (including human life) born of the pathetic fallacy. However, so far as those critics and theorists interested in pursuing animals, nonhuman life, and new materialisms through literature have been concerned, Ruskin’s discussion of the pathetic fallacy has been completely ignored. Ruskin’s discerning attempt to name and outline the actions of the instinct to anthropomorphize and to criticize some of its artistic expressions while lauding others has relegated discussions of his theory and its influence to a rejected category of “anthropocentric” criticism. Most of the statements of the new-materialists, posthumanists, object oriented ontologists, and others invested in the “nonhuman turn” in contemporary criticism acknowledge their unavoidable anthropomorphism, but they do not always explicitly define the cognitive or psychological dynamic involved in their

“speculative” realisms. As a result, their appreciations of forms of existence different from humans occasionally mystify the issue by conflating realms of being that it was

Santayana’s special care to distinguish.

Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter (2010), one of the most applauded works of recent years by ecologically-oriented critics, makes a highly abstract argument for the vitality of matter, “the capacity of things – edibles, commodities, storms, metals – not only to impede or block the will and designs of humans, but also to act as quasi-agents or forces with trajectories, propensities, or tendencies of their own” (viii). Bennett is comfortable stating that she will “emphasize, even over-emphasize, the agentic contributions of nonhuman forces … in an attempt to counter the narcissistic reflex of human language and thought. We need to cultivate a bit of anthropomorphism––the idea that human

184 agency has some echoes in nonhuman nature––to counter the narcissism of humans in charge of the world” (xvi). The strength of Bennett’s exciting “political ecology of things” reminds readers that humans tend to think narrowly about the nonhuman world as a repository of recalcitrant resources instead of a stage for more-than-human activities that affect our (conscious or unconscious) behavior. Bennett’s highly philosophical and discursive book, however, sometimes risks conflating ontological realms, fiddling with terms like “quasi-agents” and “agentic” and holding up only very general signposts toward the enactment of the political ecology its title ostensibly promises. With regard to anthropomorphism, however, Bennett’s book has been an influential statement without ever mentioning the theory of the pathetic fallacy.51

Bennett’s discussion of anthropomorphism, which “decouples” anthropomorphism and anthropocentrism, has sanctioned others taking the “nonhuman turn” to “willingly risk the accusation of anthropomorphism” in pursuit of “the qualitative and subjective in animal life” (Massumi What Animals Teach Us about Politics 2).

Bennett recommends, specifically, that we allow ourselves “to anthropomorphize, to relax into resemblances discerned across ontological divides,” and states that “if a green materialism requires of us a more refined sensitivity to the outside-that-is-inside-too, then

51 Bennett states later in notes to the 2015 essay “Systems and Things” that she does not think “notions of ‘pathetic fallacy’ and ‘prosopopoeia’ are right for my project” because, according to her, each “assumes or insinuates that only humans (or God) can indeed engage in transmissions across bodies” and “remain closely aligned with Kant’s categorical distinction between life and matter” (The Nonhuman Turn 237). I would argue that “prosopopoeia” is a specifically rhetorical term with its own rich history that should nevertheless interest those practicing Bennett’s political ecology. The pathetic fallacy, however, seems to me to be suited to the type of vital or vibrant materialism that Ruskin practiced in the 1850s and afterward, making visible the same problematic dynamics of human and nonhuman affinity that Bennett seeks to elucidate if not overcome. 185 maybe a bit of anthropomorphizing will prove valuable” (120). Similarly, Timothy

Morton must begin Hyperobjects (2013) by stating that “it is not possible for me not to anthropomorphize, since I am human” but that “I am not totally stuck ‘inside’ some casket-like space of humanness” (23). Bennett’s language reveals that anthropomorphism feels instinctual, automatic, and natural, and is only restrained by more critical faculties.

Still, we do not know just how far “relaxing” into resemblances across ontological divides will cultivate this more “refined sensitivity.” Bennett preaches to a choir of materialist academics doing science studies and literary criticism, but one wonders how an ethologist would take her point, and some would say that recent work in “plant neurobiology” relaxes too far into ontological resemblances by positing objects in plants that they do not to our knowledge possess, namely, neurons. Others will point to the

“Gaia hypothesis” as a similar case in which the metaphor of earth as organism was transferred into a theory part-scientific, part-activist, but only able to be taken seriously in its literal sense by non-scientists.

The work of theorists like Jane Bennett, Graham Harman, Timothy Morton, Cary

Wolfe, and others, may be considered in Ian Bogost’s terms as cumulatively attempting an “alien phenomenology.” Their troubling of the “anthro-” of anthropomorphism insists that “we have never been human,” that the category of human necessarily includes much that is not human, materials and processes that include atoms, DNA, symbiotic eukaryotic cells and micro-biomes, metabolic and respiratory processes, and cognitive capacities. While Mark Turner’s brand of literary criticism productively emphasizes and focuses on what is distinctive about cognitively modern humans and explores historical human uses of these distinctive capacities, the ecological sympathies of the “post-human”

186 or “trans-human” theorists emphasize the reliance of these capacities upon the nonhuman.

Nevertheless, they recognize also that their realisms are speculative; they are aesthetic frames. Bogost conceives of “alien phenomenology” as “metaphorism,” a process of

“capturing the metaphorical relation between objects by characterizing their perceptions through imperfect, speculative rendition” (Bogost 99).

The ontological project of the speculative realists, therefore, remains phenomenological and metaphorical; it remains the aesthetic and poetic project of the maker. Bogost’s analogy is with carpentry––with what Hugh Crawford calls “working like an idiot” within the “gentle tragedy” of carpentry––whereby,

in doing what we cannot, we nevertheless must strive to make something. With enough effort and practice and attention, we can make things that are not just sufficient but also beautiful. (Bogost 99)

Similarly, poetry that attempts what it cannot hope to do, that attempts to realize the unknowable what-its-likeness of nonhuman consciousness, can through effort and intelligence and attention make poems that not only express an aspect of nonhuman consciousness sufficiently meaningful to inspire calling animals our social partners worthy of moral consideration, it can also make the strange, alien world of nonhuman life beautiful to us. “In the end even poetic power will forsake a discredited falsehood” writes

Santayana about the refinement of the pathetic fallacy through criticism. “[T]he poet himself will soon prefer to describe nature in natural terms and to represent human emotions in their pathetic humility, not extended beyond their actual sphere nor fantastically uprooted from their necessary soil and occasions. He will sing the power of nature over the soul, the joys of the soul in the bosom of nature, the beauty visible in things, and the steady march of natural processes, so rich in momentous incidents and

187 collocations. The precision of such a picture will accentuate its majesty, … while its pathos and dramatic interest will be redoubled by its truth” (The Life of Reason I 91-92).

This exceptionally Ruskinian sentiment for natural poetic beauty is, as Santayana previously suggested, exceptionally applicable to animals, and, I argue, to birds.

Birds are suited to this discussion not only because they are visibly beautiful in their plumage and flight, but because they have most demonstrably seemed to possess human-like aesthetic capabilities and sensibilities that are increasingly confirmed not only by field observation and experimental study but by neurological imaging––they have a world of their own not completely unlike our own inner world. Moreover, they are creative. Seeking the minimal conditions of art, Elizabeth Grosz is drawn time and again to birds and birdsong for examples of organisms composing their tune within the parameters of possibility of their sensory organs and experience, their Umwelt. Grosz uses the term, sometimes translated as life-world, by the biosemiotician Jakob von

Uexküll, who according to Grosz supposed that “the music of nature is not composed by living organisms, a kind of anthropomorphic projection onto animals of a uniquely human form of creativity; rather, it is the Umwelten, highly specifically divided up milieu fragments that play the organism” (43). However, for Uexküll and for Grosz, existing within this milieu is not a “determinant in the elaboration of the qualities of the organism, which emerge randomly; rather its milieu is an ongoing provocation to the organism to utilize its randomly emergent qualities maximally” (44). In other words, what Uexküll wants to emphasize is the opposite of the deterministic behaviorist nightmare of Adorno that “something frightening lurks in the song of birds precisely because it is not a song

188 but obeys the spell in which it is enmeshed” (Aesthetic Theory 91).52 Within whatever biologically reductive or deterministic explanation that will always be available as a descriptive option, there remains the mastery of the organism over its tune in time.

As Grosz states, the organism “is not an effect or product of its environment, but is a master of its Umwelt, through which it can occupy and be part of an environment”

(Grosz 44). Birds sing to attract mates and to warn of predators, but they also experiment with sounds from the time they are young, mimicking and testing and improvising.

Darwin shares an anecdote that demonstrates that when a particular bird has mastered its singing to a high point of development, other birds will silently and interestedly listen to the song (qtd. in Grosz 38). Grosz emphasizes the deeply erotic nature of artistic production as linked to its role in sexual selection in organisms. Organisms extract from the cosmic forces of climate, geography, and temporality what they need to survive, but also, more than they need. They extract

colors, sounds, shapes–qualities that only emerge as such to the extent that they can be extracted or abstracted from the objects in which they are found and taken from this excess to become pleasurable and intensifying qualities that can be used to adorn both territory and body. Territory and body only emerge as such to the extent that such qualities can be extracted. There is only earth rather than territory until qualities are let loose in the world. Qualities and territory coexist, and thus both are the condition for sexual selection and for art making—or perhaps for the art of sexual selection and equally the sexuality of art production. (102)

Qualities emerge at high points of development by those creative poets possessed of what

Ruskin called the “landscape instinct,” those who animate even the lowest forms of organic nature not by mistaking them for something not part of the actual landscape, but

52 Timothy Morton writes, “The copying of nature . . . is the domination of nature––but also, in a dialectical twist, a condition of being spellbound by its dominating quality” (Morton EWN 152). 189 by preserving and consecrating the lived experience of learning and improvising with qualities and appearances, both fantastically imaginative and realistically quotidian.

Through forms that give sensation life and transform the sensations of the past into possibilities for the future, artists pull from the natural landscape in mastering their own interior “cosmic landscape” and they transform it into “significant emotion” felt by those who attend.

Birds mimic and eventually become aware of mimicry as a form of meaning- making with qualities that, in themselves, impress and improve the mood of a song. One day, we may know better if birds pursue the mood of a song to discover the right combination, the auditory objects that correlate to the emotions that will self-consciously reflect the achievement of their desires––or, maybe extending to them this practice requires what we expect from our own artists: good faith. At the very least, birds and their literary presentations have the potential to present an opaque evolutionary mirror in which to catch a glimpse of the most dimly understood but most highly prized aspects of human mentality: language, imagination, emotion, consciousness, and desire. That these prized aspects, enabling art and thought, are made up of direct emotion and the pathetic fallacy reveals something overlooked and contemporary about Ruskin’s theory and its unrealized vitality for today’s literary criticism, philosophy, ecology, and cognitive science.

190

Poetry

191

Chapter 6: The Missing of Minds in Matthew Arnold’s “Poor Matthias!”

Although he makes no specific mention of evolutionary theories in Culture and

Anarchy (1869), Matthew Arnold opposed the “animality” that he believed bred disorder in human relations.53 More sincerely and more quickly than Ruskin, Arnold was persuaded by Darwinian accounts of the origins of species, but Arnold also worried about treating humans “as if they had been shuffled into their places by a lucky accident” (CA

23). Arnold would repeat this sentiment over a decade later in his famous response to T.

H. Huxley that the “invincible desire” to relate Darwin’s proposition––that our ancestor was “a hairy quadruped furnished with a tail and pointed ears, probably arboreal in his habits”––to “the sense in us for conduct, and to the sense in us for beauty” could not be met by “men of science” (Literature and Science, 1882). In Culture and Anarchy, Arnold described poetry as poised to overtake religion’s promise of consummating human visions of perfectibility in distinction to animalistic “faults.”54 But in his poetry, which was more reflective and less certain than his prose, nature and nonhuman creatures escape the generalizations characterizing his arguments for perfectibility through culture.

53 E.g.: “Religion says: The kingdom of God is within you; and culture, in like manner, places human perfection in an internal condition, in the growth and predominance of our humanity proper, as distinguished from our animality.” Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, 62. 54 The full passage reads: “[T]he idea of beauty and of a human nature perfect on all sides, which is the dominant idea of poetry, is a true and invaluable idea, though it has not yet had the success that the idea of conquering the obvious faults of our animality, and of a human nature perfect on the moral side,––which is the dominant idea of religion,––has been enabled to have; and it is destined, adding to itself the religious idea of a devout energy, to transform and govern the other” (67). 192 Arnold pronounced the works of great men as the fittest themes for poetry, but particularly as he contemplated his own mortality toward the end of his life, Arnold chose to write elegies for his pets.55 Among these is “Poor Matthias!” which reflects upon

Arnold’s thoughts and emotions on the death of a canary.56

The presentation of bird life in “Poor Matthias!” avoids both the Romanticized emblem of imagination characteristic of the Romantics but also departs from Arnold’s own earlier Classical style like that of “Philomena.” Arnold’s earlier intimation of a naturalistic view of animal life in “Dover Beach” famously depicted a world that “Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, / Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain”

(Poems 242) and signaled the type of modern alienation and religious crisis that distinguished Arnold from his Romantic predecessors. However, “Poor Matthias!” also avoids the more threatening images of birds that would recall the landscape of “Dover

Beach,” images such as Tennyson’s “Nature, red in tooth and claw,” or Hardy’s symbol of the martyred hope of poetry against the modern world: “An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small, / In blast-beruffled plume, / Had chosen thus to fling his soul / Upon the growing gloom” (Hardy 495). Instead, Arnold’s elegy is as tortured a gesture but more thoughtful about the conditions of consciousness separating the bird and the human self.

The personal poem displays an informed and keen vision amidst grief and fear of death,

55 In his 1853 “Preface” Arnold writes: “What are the eternal objects of poetry, among all nations and at all times? They are actions; human actions; possessing an inherent interest in themselves, and which are to be communicated in an interesting manner by the art of the poet.” Matthew Arnold, Poems of Matthew Arnold, 593. 56 The other two “pet poems” concern dogs. Neither “Geist’s Grave” nor “Kaiser Dead,” however, contain the same intense inquiry and pathos concerning other minds as Arnold’s bird poem. For more on Arnold’s “Animal Elegies” see Shannon N. Gilstrap, “Of Pets and People: Matthew Arnold's Pet Elegies and Jules Michelet's the People.” 193 the effort to both feel and to restrain emotion that threatened to overwhelm sense that

Ruskin would have appreciated.

As with Arnold’s compromise in Literature and Dogma between those who would throw out the Bible with the bathwater and those who would continue to read it literally, Arnold sought a middle way in science between (1) the strict anti- anthropomorphic view some had attributed to Ruskin’s theory, and (2) the Darwinian impulse to overestimate the humanity of birds. What Arnold anticipates and pioneers in

“Poor Matthias!” and what makes the poem one of Arnold’s most interesting but least attended poems, is its “critical anthropomorphism” imagining or perceiving an avian

“theory of mind.” 57 Arnold admitted the closer and more intimate contact of dogs and cats and their more evidently human-like emotional expression when compared to birds, but he is gripped by the sense that “Birds, companions more unknown / Live beside us, but alone; / Finding not, do all they can, / Passage from their souls to man” (Poems 559).

The inaccessibility of avian thoughts via the same human deployment of a theory of mind that suffices when interacting with domestic dogs and cats spurred Arnold’s curiosity as well as the sympathy and grief which he works into verse:

57 I use “Theory of Mind” (ToM) advisedly here to signify “the ability of an individual to make inferences about what others may be thinking or feeling and to predict what they may do in a given situation based on those inferences” (Schlinger 435). The extremely popular term––first introduced by Premack and Woodruff in their article in Behavioral and Brain Sciences, “Does the chimpanzee have a ‘theory of mind’?” (1978)––is a contested one within psychology and the cognitive neurosciences as regards (1) its relation to cognitively atypical persons, as in Simon Baron-Cohen’s work on autism and “mindblindness” (Baron-Cohen 174-183) and those contesting it, like Ralph James Savarese’s discussions of neurotypicality and tropes of personification (Savarese 74-92), and (2) as regards the existence of ToM as an adapted “special-purpose mechanism” as opposed to an application of the cognitively modern human capability for “advanced blending” in developing an “idea of you” (Turner The Origin of Ideas 52). For the most part, I avoid the term in this dissertation in favor more delicately tracing the formation of ideas of conscious others. 194 Yet, poor bird, thy tiny corse Moves me, somehow, to remorse; Something haunts my conscience, brings Sad, compunctious visitings.

*****

Still, beneath their feather'd breast, Stirs a history unexpress'd. Wishes there, and feelings strong, Incommunicably throng; What they want, we cannot guess, Fail to track their deep distress-- Dull look on when death is nigh, Note no change, and let them die. (Poems 559-560)

Arnold plainly states his remorse in these lines by highlighting the drama of two consciousnesses sharing commonality but unsure of communion.58 He cannot imagine the incommunicable pain of the bird without guilt and regret. And yet, like Coleridge in “The

Nightingale,”59 Arnold chastises himself for his subjective attributions of human-like or even superhuman powers to birds, feeling the potential fallaciousness of his thinking in his passionate emotional state. He probably had no choice but to let the bird die, but he cannot help but feel heartless for doing nothing. Arnold’s mind does not stop looking for sympathy with the bird after its death, however, and he eventually discovers something about human nature though contemplating the bird. At this point, Arnold swears off his former favoring of Classical and mythological figures for poetic subjects. He references

58 Arnold recalls and rejects avian imagery in Greek myth (birds being “born the first of things”) and in their Romantic associations in their ability to predict the weather and the seasons with their miraculous comings and goings and “unworldly” songs, giving proof of “primal powers, / Of a prescience more than ours––” (Poems 558). 59 In “The Nightingale,” Coleridge chastises a hearer of the bird who “filled all things with himself, / And made all gentle sounds tell back the tale / Of his own sorrow.” Coleridge later reverses the fallacy in stating that Nature’s “sweet voices,” are “always full of love / And joyance” (Coleridge 244-246). 195 Aristophanes’ satirical play The Birds, in which birds were born the first of things, and then writes:

No, away with tales like these Stol'n from Aristophanes! Does it, if we miss your mind, Prove us so remote in kind? Birds! we but repeat on you What amongst ourselves we do. Somewhat more or somewhat less, 'Tis the same unskilfulness. What you feel, escapes our ken–– Know we more our fellow men? (Poems 561)

In these crucial lines, Arnold recognizes and authorizes what many would consider a false equivalency between human and animal cognition. What Arnold discovered with the fresh power granted to his poem by the conceptual lens of the bird, is that the everyday recognition of another person as a live creature with a stable self-identity capable of homologous ways of thinking is, in fact, a rather astounding bit of skill, or relative “unskilfullness,” as the case may be. In Ruskin’s terms, the “natural and just state of the human mind” delivering “the ordinary, proper, and true appearances of things to us” (5.204) has here plainly asked a question that reveals an unknown and unknowable but compellingly true appearance about animals. Arnold does not break down into wild and confused metaphors and is strongly emotional without his expression and thought becoming overwhelmed by his emotion. Instead, Arnold’s strong feeling, strong thinking, and strong sight allow for the expression, as far as possible, of just how remarkable, valuable, and imaginative a cognitive feat a theory of mind is, and just how limited. It is

“the same unskilfulness” (Poems 561) of veritable emotional and affective attribution that divides, misconducts, and very often destroys the potential of human-avian as well as human-human encounters. 196 While reading “Poor Matthias!” we might recall the stanza from Arnold’s

“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” that finds the speaker restless and forlorn,

“Wandering between two worlds, one dead, / the other powerless to be born” (Poems

288-289). Lionel Trilling writes of these lines that between these two worlds lies “the wasteland of a Nature that is blind, dying, phantom, empty, a Nature undivine that can no longer give laws or direction.” Trilling suggests that Arnold expresses in this poem his grappling with the idea that “Without a God, fundamentally separated from Nature, there is nothing to bind man to the universe, scarcely anything to bind him to life, strangely enough, little even to bind him to his fellow-man” (109).60 What Arnold eventually finds to bind him to his fellow man, bird, life, and the world––the great discovery of “Poor

Matthias!”––is sympathy for the experience of misery and isolation experienced by the more than human world. It is just this minimal capability of experience that Jeremy

Bentham recognized nearly a century before which generated his utilitarian concept of the ethical responsibility humans bear toward animals. He stated that “The question is not, Can they reason? nor, Can they talk? but, Can they suffer?”

Arnold explicates this inter-human/inter-species bond of suffering further by emphasizing that the suffering of Matthias as he died is analogous to human misery that goes unheralded, a matter of attention, appreciation, and interpretation that implies ethical conundrums over empathy and fairness: “Human suffering at our side, / Ah, like yours is

60 Trilling comes to a similar conclusion with regard to this theme of the unifying power of misery in Arnold when writing of his adaptation of myths of Nature from Wordsworth in “To a Gypsy Child by the Sea-Shore.” Arnold conveys the sense, Trilling Writes, that “it is not man’s joy but his misery that is the mark of his dignity and divinity; man may live by the myth of his own tragedy. ‘The greatness of man is great in that he knows himself to be miserable,’ said Pascal. ‘A tree does not know itself to be miserable. It is then being miserable to know oneself to be miserable; but it is also being great to know that one is miserable’” (95). Arnold feels acutely that Matthias shares in this greatness. 197 undescried! / Human longings, human fears, / Miss our eyes and miss our ears” (561).

While Arnold tries to imagine how Matthias lived––perhaps happily, pouring out his melodies to human audiences and companions who rewarded him handsomely––Arnold must finally admit ignorance as to whether Matthias enjoyed his caged life. He writes the poem, therefore, not only to satisfy an intellectual curiosity about the exact quality of

Matthias’s moments of happiness or misery, but also to satisfy the remorse that haunts his own conscience. In effect, Arnold seeks to communicate not just across the impenetrable barrier of species-language, but retroactively across the impenetrable barrier of death, in order to thank Matthias for the joy and the moral lesson he now sees that the bird provided.

––Fare thee well, companion dear! Fare for ever well, nor fear, Tiny though thou art, to stray Down the uncompanion'd way! We without thee, little friend, Many years have not to spend; What are left, will hardly be Better than we spent with thee. (Poems 562)

Arnold died three years after he published “Poor Matthias!” While writing it, he was reminded of his two sons and their dogs, mentioned in the poem, who preceded

Arnold to his grave: “Hands had stroked them, which are cold, / Now for years, in churchyard mould” (562). While the traditional aabb rhyme-scheme and the subject of the pet canary run counter to Arnold’s earlier and austere poetics, I would, with Shannon

Gilstrap, argue against viewing the animal elegies flippantly as “the hard-to-swallow, final productions of one of the Victorian era’s greatest and most anthologized poetic voices” (Gilstrap). Though written in a light, tight trochaic tetrameter, “Poor Matthias!” is saturated with death and the sense of time’s running out. It recurrently emphasizes 198 through the image of the dead canary both the difficulty and the pathos involved with suffering aging bodies, and the limited powers of empathy and understanding that humans more-or-less share with many other sentient forms of life. Indeed, the poem bitterly suggests that Matthias offered a comforting ministry to Arnold in his later years.

Although Matthias lived beside him but alone, and though they might have missed each others’ minds, they shared a type of companionship that, for Arnold, was devoid of human counterpart, but that powerfully suggested to him something of the nature of human relations. In his later years, and in his poetry, therefore, Arnold may have viewed animals less as a threat to or a liability of animality within humanity. Instead, he may have viewed animals as potential possessors of significant aspects of human consciousness that deserved his respect, and that justified his belief. For Arnold, the fine and functioning sympathetic illusion of full inner lives in others may have been recognized as something animals might share, “the sense in us for conduct, and … for beauty.” While Darwinian biologists were making such claims, Arnold had shown himself to be skeptical. Nevertheless, even while he was also skeptical of his own projection during his time of grief (wary of the pathetic fallacy), his keen perception and thinking allowed him to avoid sentimentality in his projection onto the bird, and convey a real sense of loss and kinship with a canary that cried out to be heard.

199

Chapter 7: Nested Fallacies: The Pathos of the Mockingbird in Whitman’s

“Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking”

Walt Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” presents a pathetic fallacy within a pathetic fallacy. Firstly, the boy Whitman, in an ecstasy of sympathy, attributes humanlike thought to a mockingbird by “translating” bird speech into human speech. Secondly, the bird, distraught at the loss of its mate, attributes characteristics of a living creature to the wind, the land, and the sea through apostrophes, and even perceives the “false appearance” of his lost mate’s shape in the dark patches of the moon. In short, the sympathetic boy projects a humanlike state of mind onto the bird, and the bird, in a state of mind in which “reason is unhinged by grief” (5.205), also perceives falsely because of its violent emotions.61 In the case of the attribution of emotions to the bird, the boy’s state of intense sympathy at the loss of the mockingbird’s mate is genuinely reflected by the false appearance of a bird speaking in human language, so that the fallacy is faithful to the boy’s feeling. However, the pathetic fallacy of the bird, its false projection of life to the landscape as a result of violent grief, presents a problem with no immediate or proximate resolution. One must either interpret the bird’s state of mind as entirely the boy’s invention, or as more or less faithful to the bird’s actual feeling. To simplistically phrase the problem as a question: is a bird capable of a pathetic fallacy?

61 Because these false appearances occur within the dramatic frame of the poet’s “reminiscence,” they would not for Ruskin signify a “morbid state of mind” or “a weak one” on the part of the poet. For Ruskin, a pathetic fallacy on the part of a dramatic character may be exquisite and exten from “the genuineness of emotion” (5.218) that implies “some degree of weakness in the character” (5.218) that may, yet, be sympathetic and unavoidable. 200 This difficulty has hardly registered as a problem to many fine readers of “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,” who have appreciated the poem’s expression of intense sympathy with a bird as one of Whitman’s finest poetic accomplishments. Leo Spitzer, who found the poem “ranking with, and sometimes excelling, the great parallel poems of world literature” (236) stated, “The manner in which Whitman has ‘translated,’ … the song of the mockingbird into words deserves boundless admiration.” Spitzer goes on, “I know of no other poem in which we find such a heart-rending impersonation of a bird by a poet, such a welding of bird’s voice and human word, such an empathy for the joy and pain expressed by nature’s singers” (242). A skeptic of this view, however, would state that this “heart-rending impersonation” is yet another example of Whitman’s bald egotism as he places human emotions in the figure of a bird, and then sympathizes with his own projection, boasting that he “of all men” knows its meanings. From this point of view, Whitman does not weld bird voice and human word, but substitutes human word for bird voice. However, this critique merely recognizes that a measure of projection occurs in developing any idea of another form of subjectivity, so that while it is fundamentally unavoidable, it would iconoclastically restrict any attempt. In fact, I argue that the emotional power of the impersonation derives in no small part from the plausibility of a bird’s capability for false appearances resulting from its violent emotions, for pathetic fallacies. In other words, the idea that a bird’s perception can be distorted by its emotion, as a human’s often is, allows for the same type of communication of the truth of an interior world through the pathetic fallacy that poets and dramatists employ when representing human characters, and with a minimal level of anthropomorphism.

201 The mockingbird’s distorted view of the world in “Out of the Cradle Endlessly

Rocking” powerfully conveys the grieving state of mind of a creature with a wider variety of emotions of “more striking” intensity than mammals (Huxley 110), but with lower powers of reasoning to, in theory, inhibit the pathetic fallacy than humans, perhaps even making their distorted emotional perceptions both more permissible and more powerfully pathetic. Moreover, within the overall movement of the poem, this apprehension of the distorted emotional perception of a bird is as important an aspect of the boy’s poetic awakening as the apprehension of the meaning of death for life, though I am not aware that this idea has ever been suggested just this way. Indeed, the awakened sense of the reality of death comes as a result of the poet’s ability, in ecstasy, to hear the whispered words of the sea, which he personifies as an “old crone rocking the cradle”

(281). Therefore, as much as the bird calls out to the elements as if they were alive and able to help him with the absence and loneliness and death he faces, the new-formed poet must also animate his thoughts and feelings and form them into figures of the natural world capable of speaking and reverberating within him in response.

If one were not already prepared for this type of “opening of ego boundaries”

(Hutchinson 126) from the poet of Song of Myself, “Out of the Cradle” primes readers for thinking of the “uniter of here and hereafter” as one who becomes one with the landscape and the bird he calls “brother” (275). In a long one-sentence proem, readers prepare to hear the bird through the emotionally charged consciousness of the boy, who in the figure of the poet remembers coming “Up from the mystic play of shadows twining and twisting

/ as if they were alive,” (275). The proem frames the tale to be told as a reminiscence of encountering “that yellow half-moon late-risen and swollen as / if with tears” (275) and

202 “the word stronger and more delicious than any” revealed as death in the poem’s last part. Then, the reminiscence begins.

On the “Fifth-month” shore of Paumanok, “Two feather’d guests from Alabama” enjoy the warmth of the sun. A “curious boy” has been “Cautiously peering, absorbing, translating” every day, close enough to see the “four light-green eggs spotted with brown” in their nest, but “never too close, never / disturbing them,” (276).62 Then, the italicized bird speech begins.

Shine! shine! shine! Pour down your warmth, great sun! While we bask, we two together. (276)

The repetitions of the first three words begin a bird-mimicry motif that recurs throughout the translations. More importantly, the imperatives begin the motif of apostrophes to elements of the landscape on the part of the he-bird. In this first translation of bird speech and thought, however, the apostrophe is not necessarily a pathetic fallacy. One need not interpret the birds as speaking to the sun with the belief that it hears them, but may view the command to “Shine!” as a poetic expression of the bird’s thankfulness, happiness, and contentment. However, after the she-bird fails to return to the nest, and the he-bird begins to sing over the “hoarse” surging of the sea, the apostrophes are pitched at a higher level of emotional seriousness, taking the form of requests for assistance in returning the lost she-bird:

Blow! blow! blow!

62 In 1946, Florence MacDermid Chace found that “‘Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking,’ … portrays the habits of a pair of mockingbirds analogous to that in Birds of Long Island” which includes descriptions of the eggs as “four to six in number” and “light green, spotted with brown,” and finds the “charming melody” of the birds “blended with the subdued voice of the ocean” and “rendering the scene enchanting beyond the power of description” (MacDermid Chace 93-94). 203 Blow up sea-winds along Paumanok’s shore; I wait and I wait till you blow my mate to me. (276)

With these lines the passionate mockingbird begins his more distraught singing, and it becomes clear that the he-bird sees either its mate or a potential assistant in all that surrounds him.

During this singing, the boy sits and listens tearfully, treasuring every note and presuming to catch the meanings of the creature. The speaker feels himself a brother to the bird and conceives of himself “following” the bird, either following him through his sympathetic tears or by his translations during the night, unseen, overhearing, and

“blending” himself with the shadows. I quote the full translation here to show how thoroughly the bird’s emotion tinges all it sees. From the pitiful illusion of the shape of the she-bird in the low-hanging moon (conveying the overwhelming desire for a miraculous recovery of his lost love), to the frustrated command that the “husky-nois’d sea” be quiet for a moment (so that he can catch his lost mate’s faint response above the sounds of the surf), the bird’s perception and state of mind are completely overwhelmed by powerful emotion. The translator vividly portrays the bird’s state of mind as every bit as “unhinged by grief” as a human’s might be in similar circumstances. It is important, also, to remember that the apprehension of this state of mind and its projections are what awaken the boy’s own poetic career. The bird cries:

Soothe! soothe! soothe! Close on its wave soothes the wave behind, And again another behind embracing and lapping, every one close, But my love soothes not me, not me.

Low hangs the moon, it rose late, It is lagging--O I think it is heavy with love, with love.

204 O madly the sea pushes upon the land, With love, with love.

O night! do I not see my love fluttering out among the breakers? What is that little black thing I see there in the white?

Loud! loud! loud! Loud I call to you, my love! High and clear I shoot my voice over the waves, Surely you must know who is here, is here, You must know who I am, my love.

Low-hanging moon! What is that dusky spot in your brown yellow? O it is the shape, the shape of my mate! O moon do not keep her from me any longer.

Land! land! O land! Whichever way I turn, o I think you could give me my mate back again if you only would, For I am almost sure I see her dimly whichever way I look.

O rising stars! Perhaps the one I want so much will rise, will rise with some of you.

O throat! o trembling throat! Sound clearer through the atmosphere! Pierce the woods, the earth, Somewhere listening to catch you must be the one I want.

Shake out carols! Solitary here, the night’s carols! Carols of lonesome love! death’s carols! Carols under that lagging, yellow, waning moon! O under that moon where she droops almost down into the sea! O reckless despairing carols.

But soft! sink low! Soft! let me just murmur, And do you wait a moment you husky-nois’d sea, For somewhere I believe I heard my mate responding to me, So faint, I must be still, be still to listen, But not altogether still, for then she might not come immediately to me. 205

Hither my love! Here I am! here! With this just-sustain’d note I announce myself to you, This gentle call is for you my love, for you.

Do not be decoy’d elsewhere, That is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice, That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray, Those are the shadows of leaves. (277-279)

Like Ruskin’s example from Kingsley, of the man who perceives the sea foam as “cruel” for drowning his beloved, Whitman’s mockingbird perceives the moon and the land as cruel for keeping his beloved from him, demanding of the moon “do not keep her from me any longer” and of the land “I think you could give me my mate / back again if you only would” (278). Similarly, “madly the sea pushes upon the land, / With love, with love” (277) is not Ruskin’s disdain for “raging waves,” but is exactly the type of emotional distortion that Ruskin seeks to highlight as true or false according to the

“genuineness of emotion from which it springs” (5.218). These very powerfully pathetic false appearances reveal the depth of the bird’s feeling for his beloved, and his panic- stricken state of mind causes all of nature to appear falsely.

As the bird recovers from the shock of his loss, he adopts a more reasoned perception that does not project his own emotions onto the landscape. He no longer feels so intensely the pangs of loneliness in the embracing and lapping waves, nor does he project his own weighty feelings upon the lagging moon heavy with love. His grief is no longer an excited and anguished grief, but a despondent one. Indeed, the bird seems to reflect on his own false emotional perceptions in order to caution his mate against them, still hoping she may find her way back to him.

206 Do not be decoy’d elsewhere, That is the whistle of the wind, it is not my voice, That is the fluttering, the fluttering of the spray, Those are the shadows of leaves. (279)

Recovering his reason, the bird concentrates on seeing the true appearances of things from the illusions, as these will prove the practical guides for conducting his mate’s retrieval. He therefore calls to her directly again, “Hither my love! / Here I am! here! / With this just-sustain’d note I announce myself to you, / This gentle call is for you my love, for you” (279). However, as his hope dies the mockingbird sinks into a somewhat more excited grief once again, and the apostrophes return alongside prosaic statements that Ruskin would probably consider the true blemishes of the poem. While the poem’s pathetic fallacies powerfully convey the violent emotional state of mind genuinely warranted by the bird’s catastrophe, the mere description of emotion that ends the translation describes the feeling rather flatly.

O darkness! o in vain! o I am very sick and sorrowful.

O brown halo in the sky near the moon, drooping upon the sea! O troubled reflection in the sea! O throat! o throbbing heart! And I singing uselessly, uselessly all the night.

o past! o happy life! o songs of joy! In the air, in the woods, over fields, Loved! loved! loved! loved! loved! But my mate no more, no more with me! We two together no more. (279)

The line, “o I am very sick and sorrowful” is the particularly dry expression, but accurate perhaps in that it registers a return to a more acute awareness of self and a more orderly state of mind. The apostrophes in these lines, notably, merely call out to the 207 elements; they no longer implore their assistance. The bird learns to accept a fact, and goes about doing so without the same emotional distortion. He must merely state it mournfully, “my mate no more, no more with me! / We two together no more” (279).

However, the occurrence that separated him from his mate is never stated directly, leaving the boy to finish the song himself with “The word final, superior to all” (280).

Typically, the “hints” and the “clew” that the bird gives to the boy are taken to be the new knowledge and meanings gleaned from the bird’s pathetic song, encapsulated in

“the low and delicious word death” (280). Undoubtedly, the force of the boy’s sympathy with the mockingbird’s grief unmistakably points to this more profoundly felt understanding of mortality as the experience that awakens the boy’s poetic self, and teaches him for the first time the “use” of his tongue, which is to sing of the “thousand warbling echoes” that he feels started to life within him, “never to die” (280). Indeed, so powerfully has this communiqué from the animal world to Whitman’s soul affected him, and so supernaturally has it appeared, that he can hardly believe it has come from a natural being. “Demon or bird! (said the boy’s soul,) / Is it indeed toward your mate you sing? or is it really to me?” (280). This unreasonable suspicion, this rupture in the natural order of things, starts within him “reverberations” that he will never be able to escape.

Indeed, it starts within him a more generalized and abstract pathetic fallacy, that looks beyond his projections of human emotion onto the bird, which had been “Taking all hints” from the bird “to use them, but swiftly leaping beyond them,” (275), and he adopts from the bird’s calling out to the elements its method of projecting emotion and agency onto nature. In short order, therefore, the sea begins to whisper to Whitman, and is the true whisperer of death. “O give me the clew! (it lurks in the night here somewhere,)” the

208 boy Whitman cries, “O if I am to have so much, let me have more!” (280). In hearing the bird sing to him, he wishes more of the world to speak, and in seeking finds the message of the world and the personification to embody that message for him: “the old crone rocking the cradle” (281).

So, readers may well “suspend disbelief” in the false appearance of a bird speaking in human language in order to place their “poetic faith” in mockingbird language, with the irony firmly in mind that the mockingbird is one bird that has actually been known to speak in human language. The plausibility of the bird’s emotionally overwhelmed perception projecting its mate and potential agents of aid in all it saw provided the boy with the “hints” and the “clew” that he needs to begin his own poetic career. The bird’s projections awaken the boy to the world by suggesting that thought and emotion and the material world participate in a significant colloquy, and that the use of the tongue is to animate these inhuman characters and make them significant through the fundamentally lyric trope of personification.

I close this brief discussion of Whitman’s famous poem with a brief remark by

Whitman’s close friend and literary champion, John Burroughs. Burroughs became the most respected scientific naturalist and ornithologist of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. In 1903, Burroughs became involved in arbitrating what has come to be known as the “nature fakers” controversy when he published the article in

Atlantic Monthly titled “Real and Sham Natural History.” Burroughs sought to check the sentimentalizing anthropomorphic projections of nature writers who were meeting a public demand for “animal story-books” (298) by recording as fact all manner of fantastic

“stories of animal intelligence and cunning” (301). Burroughs wrote that fact and fiction

209 were very “deftly blended” in the works of Ernest Thompson Seton, the very popular author of Wild Animals I have Known (1898) and a founder of the Boy Scouts of

America. In particular, Burroughs found Seton’s true accounts of “dogs, wolves, foxes, rabbits, mustangs, crows,” to be like those that “no other person in the world has ever known” (“Real and Sham” 301). The weaving together of entertaining tales of animal life seemed to Burroughs to approach the problem of the inner lives of animals from the desire to entertain humans, as opposed to be true to human perception of animals. In

Burroughs earlier work, entitled Birds and Poets (1877), Burroughs argued that only poets possessed the temperament for representing this type of truth. “The poets are the best natural historians,” he wrote, “only you must know how to read them” (18).

Burroughs thought “It might almost be said that the birds are all birds of the poets and of no one else, because it is only the poetical temperament that fully responds to them”

(3).63 After this statement, Burroughs cited a number of poems attempting to represent the lives of birds that he divided by species and discusses. Of the mockingbird, “Our nightingale” which “no doubt excels the Old World bird in the variety and compass of its powers,” Burroughs cited only two works, a sonnet by the Southern poet Richard Henry

Wilde (“To the Mockingbird”) and Whitman’s “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking.”

Even in Birds and Poets, a peculiar work of ornithology and poetic criticism,

Burroughs’s late concern for real natural history in literature is apparent. Although he spends the last chapters of his book defending Whitman’s style and person from critical

63 He continues, “So true is this, that all the great ornithologists––original namers and biographers of the birds––have been poets in deed if not in word. Audubon is a notable case in point, who, if he had not the tongue or the pen of the poet, certainly had the eye and ear and heart –– “the fluid and attaching character” –– and the singleness of purpose, the enthusiasm, the unworldliness, the love, that characterize the true and divine race of bards” (3). 210 and popular misjudgment, calling him “the strongest poetic pulse that has yet beaten in

America, or perhaps in modern times” (v), Burroughs does not release Whitman from this standard. He is quick to state that Whitman’s “treatment of the [mocking]bird is entirely ideal and eminently characteristic. That is to say, it is altogether poetical and not at all ornithological” (12). However, this acknowledgment does not mean that Whitman does not possess that “poetical temperament” that fully responds to birds. For, as Burroughs goes on to state, “yet it contains a rendering or free translation of a bird-song –– the nocturne of the mockingbird, singing and calling through the night for its lost mate –– that I consider quite unmatched in our literature” (12-13). Burroughs then goes on to quote four pages of the poem’s “translating.” My point in referencing Burroughs is merely to state that the man who became known as the arbiter of sentimentality in nature writing, the separator of fact from fiction, while he recognized that Whitman’s

“translating” did not constitute anything like an ornithological “transcribing,” recognized truths in Whitman’s treatment that he thought unparalleled elsewhere. The irony or profundity is that a large portion of the truth that Whitman recorded consists in the propensity for emotion to distort real nature––a propensity that birds and humans, apparently, share.

211 Chapter 8: Prosopopoeia and Overheard Bird Speech: Theories of Animal Lyric in

G. M. Hopkins and J. S. Mill

The translation of bird speech in Whitman falls under the categorization of prosopopoeia, a literary and rhetorical device that presents a false appearance by definition. A rhetorical figure dating from antiquity signifying “invented” or “simulated” speech, prosopopoeia occurs when “An animal or an inanimate object is represented as having human attributes and addressed or made to speak as if it were human” (Lanham

“Prosopopoeia”). Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetic experiment with presenting the sense of a bird’s mind through its voice is enhanced by his attempt to also capture something of the sound and rhythm of birdsong. In order to grasp the extent of his ambition, however, one must also understand something of Hopkins’s metaphysical view of Nature. Hopkins combined Platonic philosophy and Christian theology with aesthetic values of close visual attention to Nature that he drew from Ruskin; Hopkins attempted to synthesize these views with the works of Hermann Helmholz and other major scientists of his day.

To Hopkins, all of nature behaved according to ideal harmonies (like the classical idea of the “music of the spheres”) that symbolized created and meaningful patterns of fixity and constancy throughout the material world. These fixed forms or patterns became discoverable by humans, according to Hopkins, through attention to other created forms, and could ideally be sensed and recreated in the metrics and harmonies of poetic speech and music. Hopkins’s metaphysical theory motivates a poetic aspiration to obliterate the distinction between matter and form, a condition of musical perfection toward which,

Walter Pater wrote, all other arts both aspire to and fail to achieve. Hopkins, too, fails at

212 this doomed ambition; however, Hopkins’s bird poetry, and “The Woodlark” in particular, attempts the achievement by simulating an avian voice, which Hopkins conceived to be nearer to a “primary,” pre-lapsarian form of life when compared to humans. Similarly, Hopkins dramatizes lyric poetry as overheard speech in “The

Woodlark.” In giving such lyric voice to a bird, Hopkins presents a model of avian personhood. In short, Hopkins’s poem stages J. S. Mill’s famous definition of poetry in order to imaginatively model the interior life of a bird through its voice. In fact,

Hopkins’s imaginative, sympathetic ethos corresponds to Mill’s political-philosophical statements on the necessity of sympathy with animals.

To begin, however, it is important to establish the fascination with and close attention to birds evident in the most beloved poems of the most productive period of

Gerard Manley Hopkins’s poetic career (1876-1880). In “God’s Grandeur,” the final words “bright wings” imagine the Holy Spirit “brooding” bird-like over the faceless deep. In “As Kingfishers Catch Fire,” and in the finches’ wings of “Pied Beauty” and the thrush of “Spring,” references to birds signify beautiful instances of God’s lavishing of love on the world. “The Caged Skylark” and “Peace” use extended avian conceits to signify the caged soul of man or the anthropomorphized and avi-morphized spirit of peace. In “The Windhover,” a sparrowhawk performs technical feats of flight which deeply affect the heart of the watcher: “My heart in hiding / Stirred for a bird!––The achieve of, the mastery of the thing!” (Major Works 132).64 Such avian imagery in

64 There are precursors to each of these uses of avian imagery early in Hopkins’s oeuvre, from fragments containing the close observation of a peacock (“The Peacock’s eye” 25), to the conception, or “personification,” of Love in bird-form (“Love Preparing to Fly” 25), to the suggestion of tuning oneself to the key of birdsong and harmonizing with it (“Or else their cooings” 29). Completed lyrics like the devotional poem that begins, “Let 213 Hopkins varies from Romantic and religious symbolization to more realistic attempts to view just what seemed so special about the actual creature he sought to represent.

For instance, Patricia Ball ties Hopkins’s “The Windhover” to a reflection on the flight of a sparrowhawk (Accipiter nisus) written and published by John Ruskin two years before Hopkins’s poem. Ball argued that Ruskin’s vivid prose account set a standard for

Hopkins, whose poetic task became “to intensify the experience, not to improve upon the prose witness” (139). Ball thought that Hopkins executed his descriptive lines on the sparrowhawk “with an instinct for the freedom won only through fine control which echoes that of the bird itself” (139-140), and goes so far as to state that the richness of

Hopkins’s descriptiveness “depends absolutely on Ruskin’s precept” of “singular veracity to the object which it has to represent” as well as “the verbal pioneering of Modern

Painters” (140). Indeed, Ruskin’s energizing of a precise observation of nature and his coupling of imaginative artistic practice and aesthetic and scientific knowledge all profoundly shaped Hopkins’s poetry. Ball states that Hopkins profited from Ruskin’s struggle with Romanticism, with which he was not in sympathy, while remaining himself

“in spirit with his Romantic predecessors” (132). Ball even wrote that “Hopkins becomes himself partially because Ruskin first created his world for him and gave him eyes to see it” (136). Hopkins’s world was seen, and heard, with scrupulous attention, and he recorded his observances in journals that are also full of notes on birds.

Hopkins attended to the appearance, behavior, and calls of birds in order to ascertain clues to their inner life and his journals note birdcalls, especially, for their

me be to Thee as the circling bird,” (75), or “The Nightingale” which replaces the tale of woe associated with that bird to the tale of a sinking ship (79-80), or “Ecquis binas” which finds the poet longing for wings, also exhibit Hopkins’s avian affinity. 214 musical traits. Hopkins wrote of cuckoos “calling and answering to each other, and the calls not being equally timed and they overlapped, making the triple cuckoo and crossed”

(“18 May 1866” JP 137). He wrote later that year of “The cuckoo singing on one side, on the other from the ground and unseen the wood-lark, as I suppose, most sweetly with a song of which the structure is more definite than the skylark’s and gives the link with that of the rest of birds” (“3 June 1866” JP 138). After hearing a cuckoo in the early Spring of

1869, Hopkins noted in June that “The cuckoo has changed his tune: the two notes can scarcely be told apart, that is their pitch is almost the same” and in July “Heard the cuckoo––very tuneless and wild sound” (JP 191).65 On an 1871 trip to Sauley Abbey,

Hopkins recorded an experiment among the monks in which he took part, which informed his sense of avian cognition. Hopkins explained that the monks “Mesmerized a duck with chalk lines drawn from her beak sometimes level and sometimes forwards on a black table.” Hopkins thought that the monks’ explanation for why the bird stayed with its head flat upon the table was inadequate. The monks stated that the duck retained in its mind “the abiding offscape of the hand grasping her neck” and fancied she was still being held down, and deduced that this sense of being held down she associated with the line of chalk. Indeed, Hopkins conceded that “This duck lifted her head at once when I put it down on the table without chalk,” but Hopkins allowed that the duck need not associate the chalk with the hand holding it down to exhibit this response. Instead, Hopkins suggested that the duck maintained an aesthetic fascination with the chalk. For Hopkins,

65 Hopkins writes a short poem of cuckoos entitled “Repeat that, repeat” in which “the whole landscape flushes on a sudden at a sound” (MW 144). Hopkins’s journals also remark upon the unseasonable migration of swallows, the form of a heron’s flight, the viewing of domesticated hawks, peafowl, and pigeons, and the predatory practices of hawks, owls and other birds. He records how a wren flew into his room one night, leaving feathers that he later enclosed in a letter, and other observations of birds. 215 it was “most likely the fascinating instress of the straight white stroke” (JP 207) that kept the duck mesmerized.66 In the same year, Hopkins encountered a parrot that, “Among other clever things . . . says when wasps come near her ‘Get along’, ruffling her feathers with excitement. When I pull out a handkerchief she makes a noise of blowing the nose”

(JP 215). Hopkins did not state that mere conditioning and dumb repetition accounted for the bird’s words, nor did he state that he believed the bird actually assigned meaning to

“Get along.” However, in 1874, when Hopkins viewed “a vast multitude of starlings making an unspeakable jangle,” he described their settling in trees and gathering back up into the sky like a cloud. At this sight and sound, Hopkins readily attributed emotional feeling and communication to the multitude, stating, “I thought they must be full of enthusiasm and delight hearing their cries and stirring and cheering one another” (JP

261).67 Just three days after this encounter, Hopkins records “two beautiful swans, as white as they should be, restlessly steering and ‘canting’ in the water and following us along the shore: one of them several times, as if for vexation, caught and gnawed at the stone quay of the sluice under me” (JP 262). From such observations of birds, Hopkins reached a point at which he evidently desired to contrast the lives of birds he had been observing with human lives.

It remains an open question whether, had Ruskin been able to read Hopkins’s poems, unpublished until 1918, he would have found their musicality and prosopopoeia more fanciful than true. Undoubtedly, Hopkins’s natural piety and the precise natural

66 Probability of Hopkins’s being correct and or his opinion being formed by scientists of the period. Pavlov was not yet experimenting on the conditioning of dogs at this time, and it may be that the Cistercian monks he met at Sawley Abbey were independently realizing something Pavlov would develop years later, and which Hopkins denied. 67 Hopkins’s response differs drastically here from his walking companion, Wm. Splaine, who “wanted a gun: then ‘there it would rain meat’ he said” (JP 261). 216 detail of his poetry would have gratified Ruskin, as would the analogy between bird lives and human ones, and even, potentially and at times, reference to bird lives as superior. In particular, Ruskin and Hopkins both seemed to view birds as exhibiting traits with which to refute the perceived triviality of evolutionary explanations of life. Ruskin and Hopkins perceived that evolutionary theory relinquished the idea of a species fulfilling an ideal purpose or reaching a culmination of possibility. Hopkins’s mythopoetic statement of his own view on this subject can be witnessed in his poem, “The Sea and the Skylark.”

In “The Sea and the Skylark,” Hopkins could be described as engaging in an act of cosmic echolocation in which the sounds of the landscape, of sea and of bird, echo around the speaker, who gains more than a mere topographical physical sense from the sounds, but a metaphysical or cosmic sense of that spiritual or emotional harmony to which he feels attuned. The opening quatrain of the traditional Petrarchan sonnet begins with the speaker hearing two sounds. The sound of the sea to the right of the speaker seems so ancient and enduring as to suggest timelessness and permanence:

On ear and ear two noises too old to end Trench––right, the tide that ramps against the shore; With a flood or a fall, low lull-off or all roar, Frequenting there while moon shall wear and wend. (Major Works 131)

Equally timeless and permanent, the sound of the lark comes from the left in the next quatrain:

Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend, His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour, And pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend. (MW 131)

The pun on “wear and wend” sets the ear in the process of fixing a place and time in which one hears and relates to such sounds. But within this effort at location, all is in

217 motion around the speaker, affected by the motions and relations of unseen forces such as wind and sound waves and the gravitational pull of the moon. The agent of changing tide, the moon is implicated both mythically and scientifically with the instinctive migration of birds, the electro-magnetic basis of which Hopkins would have read about as it was then being developed in the 1870s by Michael Faraday and James Clerk-Maxwell.68

The finishing tercets of the sonnet introduce the poem’s turn by contrasting the established and timeless sounds of sea and skylark with those of humanity’s degraded and declining moment.

How these two shame this shallow and frail town! How ring right out our sordid turbid time, Being pure! We, life’s pride and cared-for crown,

Have lost that cheer and charm of earth’s past prime: Our make and making break, are breaking, down To man’s last dust, drain fast towards man’s first slime. (MW 131)

This image of human degradation uses rhyme to reinforce the decline. It follows crown with down (two words that both have avian connotations and definitions), and follows prime with slime (contrasting created form with “primordial soup,” so to speak). The internal rhymes of the penultimate line, also, create a soundscape of deterioration. The noun make––meaning an original model––is repeated as the continuous verb making, which being broken changes into a different word, break, which is also turned into its continuous verb form breaking, until the last word does not even continue the assonance of the “ay” sound:

68 In “The Handsome Heart” Hopkins analogizes the unselfish and sensitive innocence of a young boy, swinging to like a compass needle toward the gracious answer he gives to the question of what he desires. The rapturous verse that follow celebrate this magnetic instinct in man as in bird: “Áh whát the heart is! | Like carriers let fly–– / Doff darkness : homing nature | nature knows the rest–– / Heart to its own fine function | wild and self- instressed, / Falls as lights as, life-long, | schooled to what and why.” (MW 145). 218 Our máke and máking bréak, are bréaking, dówn (Major Works 131)

This ordered assonance not only emphasizes the impossibility of replication or change without declension or diminution, but also grammatically refers to our make as the prime of the previous line, which looks to its fate in this line with the expectant punctuation of the colon. Moreover, in a mathematical lexicon, prime numbers––integers divisible only by one and themselves––exist as absolute wholes of a sort, immune to further division.

Such is humanity in perfect form in Eden, suggests Hopkins, before the institution of the

“shallow and frail town” (Major Works 131) in place of the garden. The only sentient being to have retained this primary, mathematical, physical instinct for purity in

Hopkins’s poem is the skylark.

Gillian Beer writes that Hopkins “was both fascinated by and resistant to evolution wherever he found it” (254), and his strategy of resistance built upon the naturalist aesthetics he drew from Ruskin. Hopkins set to work on poetically expressing his own poetic-metaphysical-evolutionary theory, which scholars find expressed in

Hopkins’s short, 1867 essay “The Probable Future of Metaphysics.” Plotkin argues that this essay displays Hopkins’s “Poetics of Transcendence” which contrasts with the analogical “book of nature” view associated with the classically Romantic paradigm at work in Wordsworth and Tractarian poetry. Plotkin writes that, for Hopkins, natural things were not symbols pointing to the designer’s hand but were incarnations and instances of a divine Absolute that was both one with and directing material nature.

Plotkin emphasizes acoustics as the branch of science from which Hopkins drew his theory of absolutes. As we have already seen from “The Sea and the Skylark,” gravitational physics and magnetism, thermodynamics, mathematics, and acoustics all

219 lent novelty and interest to Hopkins’s poetry. Nevertheless, the example of acoustics and the specificity of Hopkins’s thoughts on sound in “The Probable Future of Metaphysics” present the best clues to understanding how Hopkins conceived of the consistency in branches of knowledge, religious and scientific.

In his essay, Hopkins asked readers to imagine that all of Nature consisted of a single, infinitely long vibrating string and the infinitely variable sound waves it makes.

These sound waves varied according to pitch at any given time and would be represented best, musically, by the chromatic scale, which admits variance across gradients arbitrarily recognized by the ear as fixed “notes.” This is Hopkins’s thought-picture of the conception of nature held by the secular, materialist science of his day as represented, according to Beer’s analysis, by contemporaneous developments in acoustics by

Hermann Helmholtz (Beer Open Fields 242-272). As Hopkins explains:

To the prevalent philosophy and science nature is a string all the differences in which are really chromatic but at certain places in it has become accidentally fixed, and the series of fixed points becomes an arbitrary scale. (JP 120)

Hopkins counters this view that the organization of nature is fundamentally arbitrary and its laws purely accidental by drawing out the differences between acoustics and what humans recognize as music. Hopkins suggests that mathematical fixity may be arbitrary and neutral as a language to describe reality, but that the actual material reality contains vibrations that are not subjectively fixed but inherent in the laws of nature. By this logic,

Hopkins is able to use an objective aspect of musical sensibility to question the arbitrariness of nature, since,

in musical strings, the roots of chords . . . are mathematically fixed and give a standard by which to fix all the notes of the appropriate scale: when points between these are sounded, the ear is annoyed by a solecism, or to analyse deeper,

220 the mind cannot grasp the notes of the scale and the intermediate sound in one conception. (JP 120)

Hopkins’s example describes how certain sounds just seem objectively wrong to the human mind, and he takes for granted that musical tastes for harmony are standard. For

Hopkins, the scientific and metaphysical answer was not that relative conditions of the universe had somehow arbitrarily fixed objective standards in this corner of it, or that limitations upon human sense abilities arbitrated standards that only seemed fixed from the standpoint of humans with common sensory organs. Rather, for Hopkins the ability to describe harmonic acoustic phenomena scientifically and mathematically (component frequencies of oscillations or waves acting in different directions that are together equivalent to a given vector), and the ability to hear the “annoying” departure from the standard, signified a more than arbitrary correlation between nature and human sense. As with Ruskin’s science of the visual aspects of things, which he likened to the documented melancholy-inducing effects of minor scales, Hopkins’s science of acoustics implied a correlation between human kind and nature. However, Hopkins went further than Ruskin in arguing for more than the imagination’s “suggestion” of natural grounds for “noble emotions.” Hopkins’s theory relied on a primary Maker in that the ear is annoyed by a mistake of sound that is also a mistake of meaning, a solecism.

From the Greek word soloikos,69 meaning “speaking incorrectly,” solecism in

English usage not only signifies the passive, objective sense of “incorrect behavior” (as a scientist might speak of the behavior of atoms or waves), but also, more usually and more precisely, as a spoken or written mistake in grammar. Taken at once in both senses,

69 As a teacher of Greek and Latin and a tireless student of etymology, Hopkins would have been aware of this root. 221 Hopkins implies some grade of intention, and therefore meaning, to the fixity of notes and chords. By this implication, Hopkins introduces a natural phenomenon that he views as unaccountable to materialist wave theory and for which he proposes a Platonic solution:

There are certain forms which have a great hold on the mind or are always reappearing and seem imperishable, such as the designs of Greek vases and lyres, the cone upon Indian shawls, the honeysuckle moulding, the fleur-de-lys, while every day we see designs which do not live and are at once forgotten and these things are inexplicable on the theory of pure chromaticism or continuity - the forms have in some sense or other an absolute existence. (JP 120)

Hopkins’s poems, therefore, attempt to dispense with the arbitrary in search of the absolute existence of imperishable forms. They pursue attunement to this form by experimenting with what is both measurable and meaningful in poetry, with sound and sense that attested to a natural standard of order. Specifically, Hopkins’s poems display an awareness of mathematical fixity and scale through foregrounded effects of sound, meter, and rhyme; and yet, Hopkins avowedly pursued the most natural rhythms of speech that could carry his sense. To speak of a poem being “natural” as a sound wave is natural is not, for Hopkins, to confuse intentional speech with the physical principles at work in pure, mathematical, acoustic performance. But, to purify and unite sound and sense by putting sense to sound in accordance with a fixed and sacred standard of Nature, this unity of matter and form would be at once the most sacred and scientific art.

Interestingly, Hopkins’s Oxford teacher and friend, Walter Pater, whom Hopkins had often heard speaking against Christianity, famously expressed a somewhat similar sentiment in secular terms. Pater wrote “All art constantly aspires towards the condition of music. For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant 222 effort of art to obliterate it” (Pater 140).70 Hopkins’s ambition is precisely to obliterate this distinction between matter and form, and Hopkins thought that accomplishing this seemingly impossible task would be an artistic, scientific, and theological victory. Such form would not be, as for Pater, an object affording an exceptional experience for its own sake. Instead, it would demonstrate that an “imperishable form” with an “absolute existence” had once again been discovered, and therefore, that divine standards existed in

Nature. The meanings humans perceive in Nature could then disclose themselves as intentional, designed by that Being which panentheistically interfuses nature with life, something like Ruskin’s “Living Power” But in order to even attempt this poetic ambition, Hopkins would require a voice that would seem at once supremely natural and removed from the artificiality of a human voice that could no longer serve as vox natura.

Of all his bird poems, “The Woodlark” most strenuously strains toward achieving this ambition through birdsong. While the description of a bird and its song in “The Sea and the Skylark” expresses Hopkins’s idea of the bird’s primal and sacred “score,” it only names and does not attempt Hopkins’ higher ambition for his poetry. For this ambition,

Hopkins must ventriloquize a bird. However, since Hopkins never finished the poem, he perhaps realized the difficulty of his ambition to fully attune to the rhythms, sounds, and meanings of a bird in a way that could demonstrate all he hoped it might to humans, i.e., the absolute existence of fixed laws of natural harmony through poetic form.

70 If one read Pater’s “School of Giorgione” with birds in mind, one sees why one collection of “the words of birds” makes the claim that “Walter Pater nearly said, ‘All art constantly aspires to the condition of birdsong’” (Bevis aaaaw to zzzzzd viii). 223 The first strophe sets up the poem’s situation in which a bird is overheard. The unseen bird says something, somewhere, to some other, or to itself.71 The poem begins with these sounds in italicized onomatopoetic speech, without human translation, and followed by the questions and thoughts of the speaker:

Teevo, cheevo, cheevio, chee: O where, what can thát be? Weedio-weedio: there again! So tiny a trickle of sóng-strain; And all round not to be found For brier, bough, furrow, or gréen ground Before or behind or far or at hand Either left either right Anywhere in the súnlight. Well, after all! Ah but hark— ‘I am the little wóodlark. (MW 122)

In these first eleven lines the human speaker emphasizes the dislocated, disembodied sound that seems nowhere and everywhere simultaneously, “all round not to be found”

(MW 122). As in “The Sea and the Skylark,” a celestial body participates, this time in a medium of particles and waves––“Anywhere in the sunlight” (MW 122)––and confuses sight and sound, confuses when and where the speaker may be able to locate the sound, its maker, and himself in relation. The human speaker exclaims that he listens, and the woodlark, in quoted, un-italicized English language in the last line of the strophe, first definitely proclaims its species, as if the call triggers recognition and confirms for the speaker the bird’s make, its form.

The rest of the poem after the break is the woodlark’s “song-strain” translated into human words. These lines are executed, as Ball wrote of “The Windhover,” “with an

71 Editors of Hopkins’s Major Works link the situation of “The Woodlark” to Hopkins’s journal entry of 3 June 1866 (JP 138), quoted earlier in this chapter, referring to a heard but unseen woodlark. 224 instinct for the freedom won only through fine control which echoes that of the bird itself” (139-140). The musical strain of the bird is etymologically tied to both a musical strain and Hopkins’s sense of the instress as a sort of instinctual, in-built animation or effort in the organism. Moreover, as a form of inquiry into the mind and as a metaphysical exploration, Hopkins was concerned with poetry somewhat more as phonology than semiology. For Hopkins, poetry consisted of “speech only employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape’s sake” (Journals and Papers 289), for which birdsong, as a series of spoken phonemes for which no meaning could be readily observed, offered a natural example. James I. Wimsatt argues that Hopkins’s answer to the “old question of what constitutes poetry” is precisely “the poetical as constituted by speech sound” (4). In a thorough and attentive reading of Hopkins’s “Poetry and Verse,”

Wimsatt quotes Hopkins to demonstrate his point:

Poetry is speech framed for contemplation of the mind by the way of hearing or speech framed to be heard for its own sake and interest even over and above its interest in meaning. (JP 289)

However, although Hopkins is careful to stress that meaning in poetry is only “an element necessary to support and employ the shape which is contemplated for its own sake,” nevertheless, “Some matter and meaning is essential to it” (JP 289). Hopkins does not write nonsense verse or pure poetry, in other words, which he thought was not poetry.

Wimsatt’s reading of Hopkins’s theory as “the poetical as constituted by speech sound” de-emphasizes this point.

While the medium of poetry may not necessarily require that it be a medium of semantic meaning, in that it is merely speech-sound that strikes one bodily, Hopkins admitted that the meanings of poetry as a “composition” are tied to poetry’s virtue,

225 though not its definition. Hopkins’s final sentence in “Poetry and Verse” actually posits an alternate definition of poetry that would divorce it from pure verse defined as “speech wholly or partially repeating the same figure of sound” (JP 289). Hopkins wrote:

But if poetry is the virtue of its own kind of composition then all verse even composed for its own interest’s sake is not poetry. (JP 290)

As I understand Hopkins at the end of this essay, the conditionality of the above passage is not an ironic gesture but the recognition that there must be something to separate his ideal of poetry from speech sound. This ideal poetry is the virtue of its meaning, is what makes poetry “high or low.” In poetry that contains words, therefore, the words’ meanings enter into the meaning that is “necessary to support and employ the shape which is contemplated for its own sake” (JP 289). This contemplation, whether of the meaning of wordless music or of the meanings of spoken-language taken, also, as speech- sound, nevertheless add or detracts from their virtue in demonstrating what must be contemplated for its own sake, which for Hopkins, as for Ruskin, was its “truth” to something fixed in nature that depended on human nature for its detection.

“The Woodlark” presents a good opportunity to listen to Hopkins’s theories at work through the musical voicing of a bird in meaningful human language. Hopkins’s method in “The Woodlark” is to remain descriptively true to his sense of the bird’s instinctual joy in the world, his imagination of the ecstatic sweetness of life experienced from the air, and his sense of the woodlark’s inner bursts of feeling for flight from off the landscape’s varied flowers and trees. Also, Hopkins attempts to mimic the woodlark’s song and so compresses language and syntax, foregrounding auditory effects in a stream of avian consciousness, that the sense of words largely fades to the background. From the

226 earlier quoted situation, when the speaker hears the unseen bird, the poem continues in the bird’s now-translated voice:

‘I am the little woodlark.

To-day the sky is two and two With white strokes and strains of the blue

Round a ring, around a ring And while I sail (must listen) I sing

The skylark is my cousin and he Is known to men more than me

...when the cry within Says Go on then I go on Till the longing is less and the good gone

But down drop, if it says Stop, To the all-a-leaf of the tréetop And after that off the bough

I ám so véry, O só very glad That I dó think there is not to be had ... (MW 122)

These short stanzas represent the instinctual movement of the bird in its flights and perchings, its spontaneous passing observance and navigation of the forest environment.72

In sailing through the wood, the lark follows its internal impulse represented as a voice:

“the cry within.” These short stanzas are mostly written in rapid, easily enunciated monosyllables that mimic the rapid notes of the lark. Similarly, the morphological repetition, the variations of internal and end rhymes, and the prominent assonance, alliteration, and stress, all foreground the lines as a vocal performance. They also recall

“Teevo, cheevo, cheevio, chee,” the patterning established by the poem’s first

72 William James would later compare the movement of the human “stream of consciousness” to the flights and perchings of a bird in Principles of Psychology I. See note no.93 in the Eliot chapter for the full quote from James. 227 untranslated lines of bird speech, which set the standard for the repetitive but fluid shifting of the bird’s language.

The sense of the words describes the surroundings that would be prominent aspects of the bird’s consciousness shifting from one detail and thought to the next, and as they shift they trace a synthesis with the environment with emotional content: identification of self, the color of the sky, the recognition of the self’s physical activity, the thought of others, the return to self and to the urge to fly, and then to the seemingly inexpressible depth of gladness. I say inexpressible because of the suggestive ellipses occurring after the unfinished thought that there “is not to be had…” It is difficult to tell exactly how Hopkins might have altered these lines in final revision. Nevertheless, the effect as it stands is to suggest that there is no gladness to be had greater than that which the bird enjoys, its spontaneous life in nature. But the emotion is registered and then restrained at the last moment so as not to overstate the emotion, but to deliver its details, signaling a Ruskinian awareness of edifying limits on this type of simple statement of emotion over objective rendering.

The next stanza delivers a mad rush of details, all drawn from the natural environment experienced from the bird’s-eye view as it sails through the forest and over a field. Even for the characteristically backgrounded sense of Hopkins’s musical poetry, these speedy lines strain understanding and present a moment when the meaning of the words seem immediate aspects of the bird’s attention, and in their compact sounds and syntax an almost different language altogether. As the poem ends, it returns to more traditional poetic bird mimicry in onomatopoetic repetitions of “sweet.”

The blue wheat-acre is underneath 228 And the braided ear breaks out of the sheath, The ear in milk, lush the sash, And crush-silk poppies aflash, The blood-gush blade-gash Flame-rash rudred Bud shelling or broad-shed Tatter-tassel-tangled and dingle-a-dangled Dandy-hung dainty head.

And down ... the furrow dry Sunspurge and oxeye And laced-leaved lovely Foam-tuft fumitory

Through the velvety wind V-winged To the nest’s nook I balance and buoy With a sweet joy of a sweet joy, Sweet, of a sweet, of a sweet joy Of a sweet—a sweet—sweet—joy.’ (MW 122-123)

The playfulness of this voicing of the woodlark is as evident as the intense pressure under which the sense and syntax is put by the sound. To call this language sprung rhythm, which Hopkins stated was “the native and natural rhythm of speech, the least forced, the most rhetorical and emphatic of all possible rhythms” (MW 228), is something of a stretch, unless one adds that it attains to an avian rather than a human naturalness.

“The Woodlark” (1876), in its incomplete state of composition, perhaps reflects the impossibility of its ever being “finished” in its rendering of bird-sense, since it will always be basically false by attempting truthfulness to something that is too difficult to truly imagine or express. Hopkins can no more obliterate the distinction between matter and form and achieve pure musicality in poetry through ventriloquizing a bird than he can through a human voice. But if “The Woodlark” predictably fails in terms of Pater’s unattainable goal for arts that are not music, by attempting to imagine the possibilities of

229 the foreign language of the overheard woodlark, the poem and Hopkins’s theories become more interesting according to another Victorian theory of lyric, that of John

Stuart Mill.

According to Mill’s theory, poetry is overheard speech not oriented toward an audience. All lyric, according to Mill, therefore operates as prosopopoeia in the sense of its representing a “simulated” voice. Oren Izenberg has recently proposed that “When we describe a poem as having a ‘speaker,’ or as giving ‘voice’ to a person, we are not assuming anything about what a person is. Rather, we are taking the artifice of voice in the poem to offer something like a model or a theory of the person, or even a pedagogy of personhood” (2). In offering a model or theory of the person, personification enacts an abstraction, or as Izenberg would have it, an account of a “minimal universal” of personhood.73 But Izenberg insists that poems that “yield [minimally universal] accounts of personhood” also “demand that our concepts of personhood identify something real,” something that would become “an important site for the articulation of a new humanism”

(Being Numerous 4). But how can an artificial voice give us a model for a real person?

Working toward an answer, Michael Clune asks in response to Izenberg, “Whose voice do I hear when I read a poem to myself?” (Nonsite.org 2011). Clune’s answer, and

73 As Izenberg states, “But what is the alternative—in poetry, for personhood—to style and to perceptibility, to appearance and phenomenology? Against a poetics of poems that enters deeply into the texture of the experience of persons (whether as representation of that experience or occasion for it), the poets I will describe here seek ways to make their poetic thinking yield accounts of personhood that are at once minimal—placing as few restrictions as possible upon the legitimate forms a person can take—and universal— tolerating no exemptions or exclusions. Finally, they will also demand that our concepts of personhood identify something real: not political fictions we could come to inhabit together, or pragmatic ways of speaking we might come to share, but a ground on which the idea of a “we” might stand. This poetry, I argue, is an important site for the articulation of a new humanism: it seeks a reconstructive response to the great crises of social agreement and recognition in the twentieth century.” (Izenberg 4) 230 his addition to Izenberg’s theory of a poetics of personhood, comes through Mill’s theory of the lyric as overheard speech. Clune argues that:

[T]o overhear speech is to be invited to participate in a subjectivity that does not depend on my recognition, is not sustained by it, and does not mark or acknowledge the border between us. . . . Thus the form of the lyric seems to instantiate a kind of subjectivity free of the limits of recognition. This formal freedom can then be given a wide range of contents, making it a flexible vehicle for imagining and indeed exemplifying new models of personhood.74 (Clune “The Tank” Nonsite.org)

Clune writes in a mode concerned with the American postwar situation during which the ethical imperative to “redistribute” wealth was displaced by the imperative to “recognize” identity (citing Nancy Fraser), and he finds in Mill’s theory a compelling disposal of others’ recognition as a necessity for grounding personhood. Clune is sympathetic to the poetic ambition that Izenberg outlines, which is to find a “ground upon which the idea of

‘we’ might stand” (4). However, Clune emphasizes that what is real about the workings of lyric poetry is not necessarily the “minimal universal” of personhood that Paul

Grimstad suggests is merely another term for “sentience.” Rather, the poem’s performance or modeling of personhood exists in the reader’s experience of overhearing while reading, an experience that is real but also (or real in that it is also) imagined:

Lyric’s capacity to remake personhood is thus founded on the reader’s experience—the experience of overhearing. But note: this experience is fictional. We do not actually overhear anyone. We are actually reading an artfully composed artifact, and we know this. But we pretend we overhear, and our experience of the poem is framed by this pretense. . . . Lyric form is the scaffold of this imaginary experience, the spinal column of the virtual reader who, overhearing another’s thoughts, participates in a kind of subjectivity otherwise unreachable. (Clune “The Tank” Nonsite.org)75

74 Clune cites Allen Grossman’s notion that in reading a poem one discovers a “previously unknown possibility” of one’s own voice (qtd. in Clune “The Tank” Nonsite.org). 75 I am the second to notice a resonance between Clune’s writings and the attempt to access animal life. In Matt Margini’s review of Clune’s Gamelife, a memoir focalized 231

In “The Woodlark,” the otherwise unreachable subjectivity Hopkins asks us to consider, the one that ostensibly still offers a ground for an idea of a “we,” is very noticeably not human but avian, and a subjectivity incapable of reading poems. This

“sentience” or subjectivity could not conceivably offer or receive recognition of subjectivity in any recognized human sense, but asks readers to consider the extent to which we are alienated from animal consciousness. The artifice of the poem is fanciful in that it does not even approach credulity as a recording of actual birdsong, and may not even rank among Hopkins’s best vocal performances. Nevertheless, while this experiment in overheard nonhuman subjectivity produces a feeble imitation of bird sound, it invents complex articulations of potentially bird-like meanings and motivations that attempt to mimic the sounds and stresses of birdsong. “The Woodlark” records movements of the avian mind that invite the refining questions of an ethologist.

Hopkins’s poetic attempt at presenting birdsong that means for humans (not for other birds) who would overhear it inspires this critical form of sympathetic imagination that necessarily involves anthropomorphic projection. Indeed, this artfully composed artifact foregrounds its artifice, but does so in an attempt to model the personhood it perceives in a bird: its thoughts, sensations, and emotions. One feels that Hopkins believes in the

through 1980s videogames, Margini states that “In 1980, only a few years after the dawn of videogames, John Berger darkly observed that the pet is an animal stripped of its beguiling alterity, made into a narcissistic prosthesis. And yet, even in its familiarity, it ‘offers its owner a mirror to a part’—a part of the self—‘that is otherwise never reflected.’ Gamelife reveals that videogames, in their companionship, do much the same. But the part is opaque, and its mirror is opacity” (“How to Write About Videogames”). Berger’s fear of the pet as narcissistic prosthesis parallels Ruskin’s fear of the pathetic fallacy. 232 images he presents in “The Woodlark” as offering a kind of subjectivity unreachable by any other means than by this lyric listening in and poetic modeling of avian personhood.

The performance of poetic speech in lyric poetry that Hopkins creates, and that

Mill describes, may be rhetorically classified as “prosopopoetic,” a simulation of the speech of one who is not physically present. But in Hopkins’s context, the aim of the speech is not persuasive as part of a calculated argument, but aims to produce something along the lines of a realistic model for its own consideration. As Clune and Izenberg describe, such lyric works may function as models for personhood. Mill’s explanation for this peculiarly non-rhetorical aspect of poetic speech is its appearance of being spoken by one with a peculiar and utter unconsciousness of a listener:

[I]f we may be excused the antithesis, we should say that eloquence is heard; poetry is overheard. Eloquence supposes an audience. The peculiarity of poetry appears to us to lie in the poet’s utter unconsciousness of a listener. Poetry is feeling confessing itself to itself in moments of solitude, and embodying itself in symbols which are the nearest possible representations of the feeling in the exact shape in which it exists in the poet’s mind. Eloquence is feeling pouring itself out to other minds, courting their sympathy, or endeavoring to influence their belief, or move them to passion or to action. (Mill Complete Works I 348)

For Mill, the model of personhood that poetry presents is not coercive or meant as an address. As Izenberg’s position makes clear, poetry is partially able to avoid the supposed awareness of an audience evident in rhetorical eloquence by appearing in the “nature of soliloquy.” The “model of personhood” approach to Mill’s theory only minimally relies upon fidelity to a normal, plausibly real model of a “person” since the speculative nature of the fictional form makes it such a “flexible vehicle for imagining and indeed exemplifying new models of personhood” (Clune “The Tank” Nonsite.org). Izenberg could not suggest that lyric poetry could function as “an important site for the articulation of a new humanism” without such a flexibly imaginative aspect. What is interesting in 233 the context of Hopkins’s bird poem and Mill’s poetic theories that may also serve political theory and ethical philosophy, therefore, is the degree to which lyric poetry could also serve as an important site for the articulation of a broader humanism or theory of “personhood” that includes other forms of sentient life.

As a developer of Jeremy Bentham’s utilitarian philosophy, Mill’s clearest statement on the animal estate comes in a defense of Bentham from the attacks of

William Whewell. Bentham’s doctrine held that the important question with regard to animal rights was not if they could reason or speak but if they could suffer. Whewell, one the other hand, saw the utilitarian principle of greatest happiness for the greatest number necessarily leading to the conclusion that animals must be included as persons under the law, which struck Whewell as patently absurd, since we are bound to others by our common humanity and the augmentation of human pleasures, whereas “We have no such tie to animals” (qtd. in Mill CW X 186). Rebutting this view, Mill links Whewell’s view to similar justifications for the exclusion of Africans, serfs, and women from the obligations of the privileged. Mill states that if it is a necessary conclusion that these should be included as ethical agents in utilitarian philosophy, than animals should be included as well. In a little remarked and unprecedented wagering of Mill’s entire philosophical position, he wrote:

We are perfectly willing to stake the whole question on this one issue. Granted that any practice causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man; is that practice moral or immoral? And if, exactly in proportion as human beings raise their heads out of the slough of selfishness, they do not with one voice answer “immoral,” let the morality of the principle of utility be for ever condemned. (Mill CW X 187)

Mill’s strong claim in this passage is that a moral obligation to animals is not only consistent with, but also essential to, utilitarian philosophy, and he argued that legal 234 protection be extended to animals. Indeed, this view is being proposed today by some who wish to reconsider the value of the medieval practice of prosecuting animals for crimes, which would necessitate providing them with legal counsel and due process, and thereby provide recourse for investigating the conditioned violence in animals by human guardians either out of intention, cruelty, or negligence.76 But if the purpose of prosopopoeia in a rhetorical or juridical context is to present the speech of another in order to narrate a sequence of events, or to position one’s own argument with or against such an account in order to persuade a jury, what is the purpose of prosopopoeia in lyric poetry, not oriented toward an audience? Mill’s answer on this question, found in his autobiography, is one that he actually defined against the founder of his philosophy.

In departing from Bentham on the value of poetry, Mill defined his position against one very similar to the severest requirements for truth’s dominion in art that

Ruskin has sometimes been accused of making in the theory of the pathetic fallacy. But it was Bentham, not Ruskin, who actually held the literalist bias that kept him from appreciating the possibilities of poetry for “educating the feelings.” As Mill wrote, “It is, or was, part of the popular notion of Benthamites, that they are enemies of poetry…

[Bentham] used to say that ‘all poetry is misrepresentation’: but in the sense in which he said it, the same might have been said of all impressive speech; of all representation or inculcation more oratorical in its character than a sum in arithmetic” (Mill CW I 115).

Mill said that he never held this view, per se, but that “the correct statement would be, not that I disliked poetry, but that I was theoretically indifferent to it. I disliked any sentiments in poetry which I should have disliked in prose; and that included a great deal.

76 See Jen Girgen’s “The Historical and Contemporary Prosecution and Punishment of Animals,” 2003. 235 And I was wholly blind to its place in human culture, as a means of educating the feelings” (Mill CW I 115). Indeed, the most violent reactions against the pathetic fallacy have been against the attitude that Mill here associates with Bentham’s attitude. To deprive the poet of metaphor and other devices of “misrepresentation” is to reduce language to lifeless and seemingly trivial formulas and facts.

Recent theories of conceptual metaphor confirm the intuition of many poets that to deprive humans of metaphor, however, would be to deprive them of concepts and of thinking as such. When Mill accepted poetry’s “proper place, among the prime necessities of human well-being, to the internal culture of the individual,” he wrote that

“The cultivation of the feelings became one of the cardinal points in my ethical and philosophical creed. And my thoughts and inclinations turned in an increasing degree towards whatever seemed capable of being instrumental to that object.” Mill recognized poetic soliloquizing, creating models of speech with that overheard quality, as a “means” toward the end of “educating the feelings” (Mill CW I 115). Mill began to credit things he had heard or read about “the importance of poetry and art as instruments of human culture” (Mill CW I 147). One of the principal instruments educating and cultivating

Mill’s feelings came in the form of William Wordsworth.

Mill wrote that by the means of Wordsworth’s poetry, he “seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings” (Mill CW I 150). It is not too far a jump to think, therefore, that poetry could assist in raising humans from “the slough of selfishness” that would keep them from calling any practice that “causes more pain to animals than it gives pleasure to man” immoral (Mill CW X 187). Hopkins’s staging of the overheard bird and his

236 attempts to capture its subjectivity and inward animations radicalizes this “sympathetic and imaginative” potential of poetry by calling upon the reader to feel “inward joy” in the bird’s thoughts and feelings. As an ecological and theological vision, Hopkins’s view of the possibilities of poetry extended even beyond this “utilitarian” and “instrumental” function.

Hopkins believed in an incarnational view of God infusing all things, participating in the sustaining self-sufficiency of Christ and shaping all to His will. From this view, all things were connected and sustained through God, and Hopkins explained this connection in physical terms, via acoustics and rhyme. As J. Hillis Miller describes Hopkins’s theory, “ If metaphor is rhyme the chiming of natural objects can be extended indefinitely. All unlike things are in something alike. ... Anything can be metaphorically compared to anything else, and, if this is the case, then all things rhyme” (Miller

Disappearance of God 297-298). This “bewildering multiplicity” (Miller 298) may be precisely the kind of mathematical sublimity that one might get lost in, and is perhaps what Mill guards against when he states that he did not “turn recreant to intellectual culture” while maintaining that intellectual culture had consequences which required correction “by joining other kinds of cultivation with it. The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to be of primary importance” (Mill CW I 147).

Part of this other kind of cultivation came in the concrete images of poetry, which as overheard language was overheard “not merely in the language of words, but in all other language, and to intersect the whole domain of art,” including, “for example, music” and even landscape painting (Mill CW I 350-351). By making poems that Hopkins viewed as musical portraits of nature in their music, and imagery, and meaning framed as overheard

237 speech outside the human, Hopkins becomes a somewhat unlikely exponent of Mill’s poetic theories.

In many ways, of course, Mill and Hopkins were extremely different. Their worldviews and individual taste for balancing outward activity and the cultivation of the inward individual used different means toward different ends. Mill’s prolific and outspoken role as the public pillar of secular utilitarian philosophy attracted the strong condemnation of J. H. Newman and the idealist Oxford school of philosophers and theologians to whom Hopkins, an outwardly soft-spoken and retiring Jesuit priest, owed much. Nevertheless, Hopkins’s poetry demonstrates the painstaking application of intelligence to the development of poetry that could animate the nonhuman world by representing things in ways that educated the feelings through modeling the mind.

Hopkins felt sure that sticking close to his materials in nature and to his study of science could not possibly lead to conflict with his own religious belief. For Mill, the business of poetry was to “act upon the emotions” and was necessarily a fiction, as his outlook was resolutely and deeply one of scientific materialism. Nevertheless, through animal life, which Mill fought to include as worthy of moral consideration in his philosophy, and in which Hopkins found a natural object whose translation could testify to the joyful meaning he intuited in the world, they each discovered the potential of lyric to animate feeling across personal boundaries, across species boundaries, and across time. Like the starlings “stirring and cheering one another” (JP 261), Hopkins thought that poetry could stir and cheer the joy to be found in the animal life that humans shared with nonhuman animals, and that this joy could move from one species to another as from one generation

238 to another, like the lark’s song that “goes on . . . through all time, without ever losing its first freshness” (Poems 108).

239

Chapter 9: Impersonal Impersonations: The Birds of The Waste Land,

“Landscapes,” and Four Quartets

Introduction

Categories like “bird lover” and “landscape poet” probably do not spring to mind when thinking of T. S. Eliot. If searching for animal associations with “Old Tom,” the whimsical felines of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) seem the exceptional but more likely candidates. Similarly, the critic who criticized Georgian poetry for preoccupation with vague trivialities of the English countryside is widely recognized as a poet of objectivity, erudition, and the metropolitan (Complete Prose I 573-577). Yet, as early as 1917 while critiquing his countryside-poet predecessors, Eliot revealed the course of his own development as a landscape critic of Ruskinian cast. Eliot criticized poets “of morbidly keen sensibilities but weak” becoming absorbed in a natural object “to the exclusion of the original association which made it significant.” According to Eliot,

“a poet of imaginative or reflective power more than emotional power” would, to the benefit of the poetry, endow the object with “ghostly or moralistic meaning” (Complete

Prose I 574).77 Without referencing Ruskin in these “Reflections on Contemporary

Poetry,” Eliot explores the same dichotomy, with the same vocabulary, that Ruskin used to steer a middle way between “Coleridgean subjectivism and lifeless reportage”

77 Ruskin included associationist theories of aesthetics as part of his “science of the aspects” and Eliot here reproduces Ruskin’s distinction between the emotional poet or plain descriptive writer and the imaginative or creative poet. The use of the terms “morbid” and “weak” are also reminiscent of Ruskin’s criticism and his emphasis on “the moral of landscape.” 240 (Alexander “Ruskin and Science” 510) in the theory of the pathetic fallacy. Eliot searched for powerful poetic expressions of reciprocity between human and landscape that steered between Wordsworth’s “ill-apprehended” philosophy and the Georgians’

“lapses of rhetoric” Complete Prose I 574).78 Engaged in developing modern expressions of landscape worthy of the genuine road of poetry, not a “legitimate bypath,” Eliot began to explore a method he pursued throughout his career, the merging of the speech of poetic personas with the voices of the landscape itself, particularly birds. In this chapter, I claim that the bird speech in The Waste Land, “Landscapes,” and Four Quartets indicate Eliot’s struggle with developing an ever less personal style of presenting psychological landscapes, a struggle that becomes more explicable when viewed through the lens of

Ruskin’s criticism of the pathetic fallacy and the artist’s maintenance of reason and perception amidst strong emotions.

I have chosen to focus on the birds of these three “landscape” poems from out of over thirty species of birds in Eliot’s corpus and “several instances of unspecified beaks, wings, and anonymous flights” (Thormählen 56).79 Beginning with The Waste Land

(1922), fragments of bird speech in a bricolage loosely unify to express the disillusioned despair and hopelessness of the abstracted person of Tiresias. In “Landscapes” (1933-

1935), Eliot’s mention of the mockingbird and the ironic performance of bird mimicry point to a struggle with the impossibility of representing a depersonalized landscape. In

Four Quartets (1936-1942), a radically impersonal style is counterbalanced by the words

78 Using Ruskin’s same foil, Eliot thought that Wordsworth fell back on abstractions but remained free of rhetoric by maintaining a “complete innocence of other emotions than those in which he specialized” (575). 79 Eliot engaged with poetic songbirds as early as “the sparrows in the gutters” (CPP 13) of “The Preludes” (1910-11), which portend many of Eliot’s birds and animals appearing as his poems’ “threatening angels” (Northrop Frye T. S. Eliot 56). 241 that emerge from the “deception of the thrush” as Eliot deepened his experiment with the ambiguities and possibilities of avian speech in poetry. Eliot struggled to keep personal passions from imposing themselves upon the passive landscape while also using landscape imagery to generate “emotional reverberation” (Empson 40). The thrush in

Four Quartets eventually blurs the distinction between its own and a human voice, and its ghostly moral emerges in its simple refrain of “Quick now, here, now, always–” spoken in the first section of “Burnt Norton” and repeated in the last section of “Little

Gidding.” Ostensibly spoken by the bird, the avian figure is arguably more embodied than any human figure in the poem, and in a register more tonally substantial than even the “compound ghost” of “East Coker” to which, Sharon Cameron writes, “In Four

Quartets, all understandings of the representation of a person must make reference”

(154). The prominence of this animal personhood and its moral voice alongside the words of Julian of Norwich represents Eliot’s unification of Christian mysticism with the experiential through the figure of a bird that acts in an eternal present. Through his career-long struggle with personality in poetry and his use of birds within his psychological landscapes, Eliot ultimately develops the thrush of Four Quartets as an embodiment of a faith in reality and of meaningful activity in the landscape akin to

George Santayana’s notion of “animal faith,” the confidence in substantial reality and the capability for significant and meaningful emotional experience as a necessary supplement to skepticism as form of belief.

By way of introduction to Eliot’s thinking on birds in poetry and on poetic landscapes, I begin in the middle, after Eliot’s sensibility for natural landscape manifested more markedly in “Ash-Wednesday” (1930) and his “pervasive” and “sharp

242 sensitivity to the natural world” (Scofield 13) grew more conspicuous. In a 1930 review in The New Statesman, the English aesthete Brian Howard praised “Ash-Wednesday” for pointing the way forward for modern nature poets. Howard thought Eliot’s poetry reinstated serious thinking about “what poetry really was” as opposed to thinking that the poet’s function was “to ‘get into a state’ about nightingales.” When the guns had stopped and the nightingales could be heard again, wrote Howard, the Georgians more or less continued in a mistake inherited from the Romantics by allowing poetry its “way of deciding about the nightingale situation, and then leaving it” (Howard 270). To Howard,

Eliot’s poetry suggested that “One must begin again … to think about the nightingale. To begin with, what is it? The poet who asks himself this question at once becomes, unlike

Keats, a metaphysical poet” (271). Beginning to think about what poetry was, according to Howard, meant coupling abstract reflection on the nature of reality with close attention to nature. Metaphysical poetry meant caring not only about whatever frenzied thoughts the nightingale could inspire, but actually suspending hasty decisions about “the nightingale situation.”

Eliot had already addressed Keats’s nightingale prior to Howard’s review, but with somewhat different emphasis. In “Tradition and the Individual Talent” (1919), Eliot stated that “The ode of Keats contains a number of feelings which have nothing particular to do with the nightingale, but which the nightingale, partly, perhaps, because of its attractive name, and partly because of its reputation, served to bring together” (SE 9).

Eliot’s point was that “the difference between art and the event is always absolute;” (SE

9), the “transmutation of emotion” expected of poetry involves complex combinations and fusions of elements that do not technically correspond one-to-one to the situations

243 and events of life. Therefore, the Eliot of 1919 might have been expected to correct

Howard’s later statements by suggesting that thinking overmuch about the nightingale and its situation was actually beside the point. Insofar as the nightingale enters into a combination capable of transmuting emotion or of bringing several feelings together, it is important for poetry. Insofar as one thinks overmuch about the unknowable “thing as it is in itself,” about a knowledge of the nightingale outside of experience, one engages in metaphysics that is a distraction from poetry.

However, Eliot’s brusque 1930 response to Howard’s “interesting remarks” approaches the question differently by objecting, of all things, to Howard’s ornithological illustration. Eliot’s objection is remarkable because Howard overwhelmingly endorsed

Eliot’s ascendancy in English letters. Although Howard pitied that it took an American to bring it on, he thought Eliot’s “limited, but definite, metaphysical revival” was “long overdue” and portrayed Eliot taking young poets by the lapel, and showing them––who were “yawningly replacing the bird baths” and confusing “a partiality for bird-songs with an apprehension of Nature”––that “the poetic transcription of nature is all the better, occasionally, for a thought or two about the nature of reality” (271). However, Howard had not considered the poetic inheritance of bird signification as Eliot had.

Howard characterized the Georgian poets as mere “mockingbirds” of the

Romantics, as imitators implicated in silencing the true “nightingale” innovators now reemerging thanks to Eliot’s balancing of poetic transcription and philosophical reflection. Two weeks later, Eliot’s note in The New Statesman protested Howard’s disparagement of mockingbirds. Although he issued his statement not as a poet, but as

244 “an amateur ornithologist,” Eliot made a larger point about poetic creation through his correction.

I write as an amateur ornithologist, to protest against Mr. Howard’s use of the mockingbird as an illustration. Mr. Howard, no doubt deluded by the name of this unfortunate bird (who is also doubly maligned by his scientific style of mimus polyglottos) seems to think that the mockingbird does nothing but mock. I dare say I have listened to more mockingbirds than he has; and my own observation is supported by the great authority of Dr. Frank Chapman, who writes “in my experience many mockingbirds have no notes besides their own, and good mockers are exceptional.” I have less knowledge of nightingales, except for their literary associations which are useful; but I am ready to affirm that a fine mocking-bird in his own pure-song is at least the nightingale’s equal. Dr. Chapman also says that the mockingbird “is a good citizen, and courting rather than shunning public life, shows an evident interest in the affairs of the day.” I will add only a few words by another authority, Dr. R.W. Shufeldt, which I do not however quote as a specimen of prose style:

“I believe were he successfully introduced into those countries where the Nightingale flourishes, that princely performer might some day wince as he was obliged to listen to his own most powerful strains poured forth with all their native purity by this king of feathered mockers.” (Complete Prose IV 209)

In this brief response, Eliot does much more than soften Howard’s blow to Georgian poets by suggesting that “good mockers are exceptional” and “good citizens.”80 Eliot asserts that mockingbirds can attain a greatness surpassing the nightingale. Indeed, he finds the nightingale “useful” in its literary associations, but the reigning Anglophone poet of the age admits no knowledge of its “pure song.” In effect, Eliot quietly installed the American mockingbird as the preferred model of the poet, rejecting Howard’s nationalist slight and reminding readers of his statement on the creative process in The

Sacred Wood (1921). One of the surest tests of a poet, Eliot stated, is the way in which he

80 Eliot sympathized with and appreciated the Georgian’s efforts to avoid the “rhetorical, the abstract, and the moralizing” (Complete Prose I 573) in Victorian poetry, acknowledging such aims as “legitimate” in the Georgians. He later wrote a very favorable tribute to one of their number in “To Walter de la Mare.” 245 or she borrows: “Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different”

(“Phillip Massinger” SE 182). Indeed, many of his contemporaries perceived Eliot as having single-handedly revived England’s own most powerful strains by locating the mainstream of English poetry in the conceits of the metaphysical poets, and he poured forth these and other major strains in his own highly allusive, formally inventive, but deeply traditional poetry. Leonard Woolf, for one, phrased Eliot’s achievement in the tradition in terms of birds, praising how Eliot “made his nightingales sing” so that “The dirty ears and liquid siftings are now as essential a part of the nightingale’s song as the magic casements, the perilous seas, the verdurous glooms, and the winding mossy ways”

(TSE: The Critical Heritage 213-215). It is important, therefore, to consider the full import of Eliot’s adoption of the mockingbird as poetic emblem over the nightingale.

The mockingbird illustrates the operation of the individual talent within and upon tradition through its absorptive activity within its environment, its collections from the chorus of nature. Only by knowing the songs of others does Mimus polyglottos shape its song into something better or different, becoming significant by suppressing personal notes that are merely its own. Its ambient song contains and transforms inputs: the best are neither those that “have no notes besides their own,” nor those that do “nothing but mock” (Complete Prose IV 209), but those that steal and make something better or different from their takings. By sounding external sources (mockingbirds are known to mimic human words and the sounds of other birds and animals, insects, and even noises made by objects and machines) they marshal interior resources, and create something exceptional from out of the landscape. As Kenneth Kramer describes Eliot’s poetic

246 accomplishment in Four Quartets, Eliot discovered “how timeless moments––of redeeming reciprocity, of graced consciousness––shine through physical landscapes and release the poet from temporal enchainments” (xiii). In my view, it is no coincidence that the initial section and closing section of Four Quartets features the speech of birds to express this redeeming reciprocity in the timeless moment.

Eliot seems to have realized that even if “nothing particular to do with the nightingale” brought together the number of feelings Keats expressed in his ode, something general to do with birds, their cognitive and emotional capacities, granted them an important place within the poetic effort to discover redemption and reciprocity shining through physical landscapes. Specifically, the lives of birds provided a sufficiently ambiguous analog of human experience to ignite a keener interest in landscapes and to consider possibilities for living within them. Looking at birds and their unreflective confidence in the substantial reality of the world alongside their strong emotional feeling seemed to temper human skepticism about our inevitable emotional projections onto landscapes. Eliot had long wrestled with his own suspicion over the personality of projections of reality. In the words of Walter Benn Michaels, Eliot had recognized that “to acknowledge the conventionality of our own account of the real is to acknowledge its contingency without undermining its validity, its power over us” (149).

Nevertheless, Eliot’s psychological landscapes strenuously avoid and even agonize over such personality of vision in the attempt to develop, in Ruskinian terms, a sacred manifestation of the landscape-instinct, to strangely animate the world and make it speak in such a way that an ennobling vision could be more than individual, but widely shared.

247 The idea of the mockingbird’s ambient music, in particular, held Eliot’s attention.

By literally instrumentalizing or orchestrating surrounding sounds by “going around” (Fr. ambire), ambient music repeats patterns, just as the psychological landscapes of Four

Quartets are highly patterned and sequenced. Moreover, as opposed to an objective rendering of a physical environment, ambient music aims to create or enhance an

“atmosphere” with accompanying and accumulating moods. As Marshall McLuhan noted, Eliot built upon innovations by the French Symbolists in order to master the creation of the “psychological landscape” or le paysage intérieur. Poets like Baudelaire,

Laforgue, and Rimbaud experimented with rendering an internal or metaphysical vision by the manipulation of experience through objects and scenes “without the extraneous aids of rhetoric or logical reflection and statement” (239). McLuhan stated

This landscape, by means of discontinuity, which was first developed in picturesque painting, effected the apposition of widely diverse objects as a means of establishing what Mr Eliot has called ‘an objective correlative’ for a state of mind. (McLuhan 144)

That is to say, the objective correlative (which works by manipulating “objects,”

“situations,” and “events”) relies upon memories, experiences, perceptions, and sensations formed through real-world interactions within visual/spatial environments.

Santayana, from whose “correlative objects” Eliot drew his theory, referred to this precondition for poetic functioning as the poet’s possession of a fine “topographical sense.” However, a large part of this sense had not only to do with visual, but with auditory awareness, as with Eliot’s discussion of an “auditory imagination” which he felt was largely responsible for poetry’s capacity to “communicate before it is understood”

248 (“Dante” SE 200).81 By going around and collecting the sounds of a place or a country for a song, the poem had the possibility of sounding not only the voice of the individual poet and his own narrow psychological landscape, but also, at least, a minimally shared sense of the landscape itself, and at most, a deeply shared sense of emotional response to a landscape.

McLuhan’s notion that symbolic, inner, or psychological landscape techniques first appeared in picturesque painting is provocative and well aware of Ruskin’s part in developing theorizing the technique in England, even if its poetic effects manifested most powerfully in French poetry.82 As I suggest, given Santayana and Eliot’s reading of

Ruskin, the preeminent critic of landscape painting in Victorian England, Eliot’s psychological landscape and theory of the objective correlative echoes John Ruskin’s description of the “landscape instinct.” The mystical moments of Four Quartets, as

81 On the “auditory imagination” in poetry see Eliot’s “Milton I” in On Poetry and Poets 161-162. 82 McLuhan does not cite the Lectures on Art (1840) by the American landscape artist, Washington Allston, as a source for his observation, though it has been suggested that Eliot borrowed his own “objective correlative” from this document, where the term first appears. Regardless, McLuhan’s observations deserve more treatment than I have time to give them here. See pages 154-155 of “Tennyson and Picturesque Poetry” for more on the development of interior landscape from Ruskin to Eliot, and especially the following essay, “The Aesthetic Moment in Landscape Poetry.” Here McLuhan quotes a passage from Modern Painters that “brings all these matters into focus” and that he thinks it is “not hard to suppose” (159) Arthur Rimbaud studying carefully before beginning Illuminations: “A fine grotesque is the expression, in a moment, by a series of symbols thrown together in bold and fearless connection, of truths which it would have taken a long time to express in any verbal way, and of which the connection is left for the beholder to work out for himself; the gaps, left or overleaped by the haste of the imagination, forming the grotesque character” (MP III 5.132). Ruskin then uses a poetic example from Spencer to examine its compressed symbolical or allegorical method of setting forth “an otherwise less expressible truth” (5.132) and even “truths which nothing else could convey” (5.133). This discussion occurs just before Ruskin advocates more use of personification in painting.

249 described by Kramer, correspond to Ruskin’s descriptions of the sacred manifestation of this instinct, in which “the simplest forms of nature are strangely animated by the sense of Divine presence,” and we see the “inner glory” of trees and flowers and things, and hear “the mysterious voices in which they speak to us about God … and fill us with obedient, joyful, and thankful emotion” (5.386). Four Quartets is always being called an echo chamber of sorts, in which mysterious voices speak without source, but that in their reverberations suggest the spirit of the timeless place one has entered. In order to present images of this timelessness and reciprocity in a manner that reverberated emotionally between landscape and reader, Eliot needed to create a voice in and of nature sufficiently separated from humanity so as to be part of landscape, but sufficiently emotional to

“echo” human experience.83 Eliot was already convinced that birds offered voices with which he could merge his own poetic speech to produce strong emotional reverberations in The Waste Land. Just afterward, Eliot’s close friend Julian Huxley, the preeminent biologist and ornithologist in Britain at the time, gave further reason for Eliot to be convinced of the suitability of birds for this task.

In 1923, Huxley published Essays of a Biologist (1923), a book that strongly defended the attribution of emotions to animals in biology, analogizing the practice to the attribution of emotions to other humans. Huxley wrote in his essay on “bird-mind” that the case was especially strong for attributing the “combination of emotion with reason that we attribute to a soul” to birds (10). Huxley argued that birds obliged humans to

83 For a very general but informative explanation of the “high modernism” of Modern Painters and Ruskin’s defense of an aesthetic that is “strained, but not broken,” and one that I think transfers well from discussions of modernist visual art to modernist poetry, see Jonathon Jones’s 2003 piece in The Guardian on “The First Truly Modern Row About Modern Art” on the Ruskin-Whistler case. 250 think less of the brain than of the soul in our dealing with them: “‘Pas de cerveau – que de l’âme.’ Those especially who have studied birds will subscribe to this. The variety of their emotions is greater, their intensity more striking, than in four-footed beasts” (110).

Huxley’s descriptions of the immutability of some counterproductive avian behaviors, which he unflinchingly refers to as stupidity in some species, did not detract from his conviction that birds’ emotional lives were “richly and finely expressed” (111). He recounted numerous anecdotes from his observations that illustrate the “emotional furnishing” of “that strange thing we call a bird’s mind” (112). Huxley, who was also a practicing poet, began his chapter with quotes from Blake, Wordsworth, and W. H.

Hudson, and included one of his own verses, a Petrarchan sonnet, at the beginning of his chapter. Huxley’s “The Birds” suggests that those “with deeper more inward sight” see birds as “part of that one Life which streams / Slow on, towards more mind” and

“unburdened with regrets, or dreams, / Or thought. A winged emotion of the sky, /

The birds through an eternal Present fly” (Huxley 106). Eliot, too, represented the eternal present of birds not by describing them, as Huxley does, as part of the abstraction of the

“one Life.” Instead, he made the sense of this one life clearer, in Four Quartets, through repetitions of statements of life’s paradoxical boundedness and unboundedness, and by merging his own song with that of the birds themselves.

Eliot worked throughout his career to avoid the clichéd projection of human cares and thoughts onto birds, and refrained from any extended attempt at ventriloquizing the bird in human language. In fact, he developed three techniques for incorporating bird speech into his poetry: brevity, plausibility of utterance, and impersonality. First, Eliot limited personified speech to a very brief “translation” that avoided interpretation.

251 Second and relatedly, Eliot preserved the plausibility of the phrase’s utterance by the bird as a human capturing of the bird’s sound while maintaining ambiguity as to its meaning and grammatical status as address, cry, question, song, proclamation, etc. Third, by disarticulating voice from an individual speaker, and subsequently casting doubt on the species of the speaker, Eliot preserved the important ambiguity of whether an avian or human speaker was being heard. This ambiguity compelled thinking about what could or could not be shared among the interior lives of humans and animals, and led to the idea that “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality” (CPP 118), which presents itself in this fundamentally ambiguous and chaotic form. This strategy of using ambiguities of bird speech for communicating the desire for a different relationship with reality is present even in the symbolic birds of The Waste Land, in which the speaker finally longs to give up the realities of cruel April and histories like the nightingale’s and live as the swallow.

The Waste Land

In “A Game of Chess,” Eliot famously reworks the Classical myth of Philomela, citing Ovid as his source. In Metamorphoses, King Tereus imprisons Philomela, rapes her, and cuts out her tongue to prevent her from revealing her abuser. Tereus is husband to Philomela’s sister, Procne. Procne is later transformed by the gods into a nightingale,

Philomela into a swallow, and Tereus into a hoopoe. Since antiquity, the nightingale’s song has been taken as a beautiful lament often misattributed to Philomela herself, not to

252 Procne.84 Eliot’s cited sources for the myth, Ovid and Pervigilium Veneris, suggest that

Eliot maintained the original attribution of the nightingale’s song to Procne, but Eliot invests the nightingale’s “inviolable voice” with only the most ambiguous of sounds that are concerned with the violent act of the myth itself, not its singer. The lines, “still she cried, and still the world pursues, / ‘Jug, Jug’ to dirty ears” (CPP 40), reproduce a common onomatopoetic mimicking of the sounds of sexual intercourse (B. C. Southam

66). The inescapable suggestion perverts the nightingale’s “mournful song” by casting it as an automatic and traumatic retelling determined not by Philomel’s emotion, but by

Tereus’s crime, which is tragically heard only by “dirty ears” with snickers of juvenile amusement. For, “listening to the nightingale” had become “a euphemism which in a cruder age has been replaced by a four-letter word” according to Beryl Rowland, who cites a drinking song commonly sung by “English ex-undergraduates” that employs the euphemism and also suggests yet another potential source for Eliot’s “O O O O that

Shakespeherean rag–” as well.85 For Eliot, the real perversion is to pursue the excitement of the thought of sex, or the idea of a beautifully melancholic song, without attending to the vicious truth of the cry, the rape it names and the verities of human lust, violence, and

84 Later, male Romantics contested the motif of mournful song in order to interpret the nightingale as the immortal voice of Nature toward which the poet aspires. Conspicuously, Mary Robinson’s “Ode to the Nightingale” (1791) and Charlotte Smith’s “Sonnet VII: On the Departure of the Nightingale” (1797) retain the melancholic strain amidst the revisions of Wordsworth, Coleridge, Shelley, and Keats. Matthew Arnold’s “Philomena” returned to the traditional melancholic tradition, but interprets Philomela as the nightingale, while Christina Rossetti’s “When I am dead, my dearest” acknowledges the tradition but distinguishes the natural song from its mournful association with an appropriately placed “as if” (“I shall not hear the nightingale / Sing on, as if in pain”). 85 Beryl calls the form of the song a demande d’amour, and traces the shifting symbolism of the nightingale up to the point where the sounds of the lyrics would very clearly suggest the moaning of lovers. The song goes: “Hear the fond tale / Of the sweet nightingale / As she sings in the valley / Be-low! O-O-O! O-O-O! O-O-O! / As she sings in the valley below!” (Birds With Human Souls 105-106) 253 pleasure in malice to which it testifies. The Waste Land seems to suggest that the true import of Philomel’s “inviolable” song would elicit a more sympathetic reaction in ears

“worthy to hear.” Yet, instead of recalling the endless train of sexual abuses carried out by humans up to the unsettling scenes of the poem itself, the ambiguous bird speech initiates a motif of an ancient misunderstanding between the sexes that the poem’s defeated and depressive tone absorbs.

For instance, within “A Game of Chess,” “‘Jug, Jug’ to dirty ears” precedes the scene of the man and woman who speak at cross purposes about what they will do, and who end up playing a game of chess and pressing lidless eyes, “waiting for a knock upon the door.” This domestic scene gives way to Lil’s friends in the public house discussing the return of Albert, her husband the serviceman who cannot bear the sight of his antique- looking wife, an unhappy mother of five children at the age of thirty-one. These scenes lead into the advantages taken by “the young man carbuncular” in “The Fire Sermon,” who engages a typist in caresses “unreproved, if undesired” (CPP 44). To strengthen the sense of the bird’s song with this type of miscommunication and baldly selfish and licentious behavior, nightingale singing occurs early on in “The Fire Sermon” as well, the section associated most strongly with the androgynous figure of Tiresias who has, like the typist and the young man, “foresuffered” and “enacted” all.

Critics of The Waste Land rarely note that in the myth, Athena gave Tiresias the power to understand the language of birds in recompense for blinding him after he had seen her bathing. Therefore, when the bird sings again, there is the lingering sense that the words have hidden meanings that a loiterer behind the poem understands, even if the personages of the poem and the readers do not. Dubious by their association with

254 Sweeney, Mrs. Porter and her daughter become associated, through one French line, with children’s voices singing in a heavenly dome (the line is from Verlaine’s treatment of the

Arthurian legend of Parsifal about resisting sexual appetites in the search for the Holy

Grail).86 As if Mrs. Porter and her daughter were birds trapped inside the dome, unable to fly away to freedom, their cry fuses with Philomel’s version of what love looks like:

Twit twit twit Jug jug jug jug jug jug So rudely forc’d. Tereu (CPP 43)

This unlovely nonhuman voice does not invite or seduce like the mermaids of “Prufrock,” nor does it pleasantly or poetically sadden, as it had been used to do. Instead, it brings readers closer than any poem had yet attempted to Philomel’s sufferings, rudely recalling sexual violence and the violence of a cut tongue unable to speak human words. However, its words retain human sense. It accuses and teases with twit. In repetitions of jug it reproduces swallowing sounds, swallowing that is, perhaps, “rudely forc’d” in the manner of a rapist. Jug also signifies a container of liquids, recalling both the fear of death by water and its opposite, a dangerously unquenchable thirst. In Tereu, there is the nearly written name of the rapist, Tereus (and the similarity with Tiresias), and finally, the pun on “to rue” and “true.”

These nightingale sounds, indecipherable to all but Tiresias––the “most important personage in the poem” according to Eliot, in whom “man and woman meet” (TWL 23)–– distinctively rework a famed tradition in and of themselves; but Eliot does not leave these

86 Et O ces voix d’enfants, chantant dans la coupole! (CPP 43) is the line translated as “And O these children’s voices, singing in the dome.” Mrs. Porter and her daughter may be, and certainly recall, the nightingales that sing around the convent of the sacred heart in “Sweeney Among the Nightingales.” 255 sounds to speak for the birds. Instead, the nightingale yields to the sounds of other birds in the poem’s last section. “What the Thunder Said” introduces a hermit thrush’s “Drip drop drip drop drop drop drop” and the cock’s “Co co rico co co rico” (another reminder of betrayal, in St. Peter’s denial of Christ). The hermit-thrush’s “water-dripping song,” which Eliot states he heard in Quebec and thought “justly celebrated” (CPP 54), retains the poem’s association of birdsong with water, and also keeps with the more general motif of sounds emanating from the landscape throughout the poem, in which grass sings, thunder speaks, and fires sermonize. But with the introduction of the hermit thrush’s song, the already uncertain status of these sounds, and of their speaker, is called into further question by the phenomenon of nonhuman ventriloquism. Are any of the voices in this poem real? Could they be the sounds of the landscape but also, or perhaps instead, their feigning or mocking like the hermit-thrush’s water-dripping song? The hermit- thrush therefore introduces more uncertainty into the silences and the dramatic shifts of the poem’s fragments as they confound any narrative sense. However, in the reading structured by images of birds that I am presenting, The Waste Land gains some closure at the end of the final section, “What the Thunder Said.” The last line with an explicit connection to birdsong here gestures toward the desire of the poem’s elusive speaker:

Quando fiam uti chelidon–O swallow swallow” (TWL 19)

The Latin translates, “When shall I be as the swallow” (TWL 19). This line, taken from the anonymous fourth-century Pervigilium Veneris, comes from a speaker who reveals her- or himself at the end of that poem as an observer of Diane, the nymphs, and the

“merry birds” pairing in the grove, but who is not a participant in their celebration of

256 spring and of the love that season and the land betides.87 In the ancient text, the sorrowful unheeded apostrophe to “spring’s own bird” expresses a sentiment similar to that of the

The Waste Land. In Eliot’s poem, April and the awakening of sexual life eventually only reminds one of a loveless world in which stories like Philomel’s are endlessly rehearsed in more or less banal and sordid scenes. To swallow it all is to suffer and to enact all, like

Tiresias, and to accept the inevitability of misunderstanding and suffering without resistance, like the typist’s unreproving but undesiring acceptance of the young man. The final acceptance at the end of the poem, therefore, accepts the end of life as the cessation of a cycle of suffering and the only peace. However, it does not do so without first registering the desire to be free of such burdens of human life, a condition of freedom exemplified by the swallow.

Formally, therefore, the birds of The Waste Land invite interpretation in relation to Tiresias as a structuring consciousness who both shapes and interprets the poem’s psychological landscape. The poem’s nightingales convey the emotions imagined in the horrific myth of Philomel more truly than any poetic nightingale before them, and incomparably more than the long tradition of sources upon which they explicitly draw.88

87 Blackwoods’ 1843 translation of 1843 of Pervigilium Veneris reads:

And Philomel is vocal now, Perch'd upon a poplar-bough. ………………………………… She sings, but I must silent be:— When will the spring-tide come for me? When, like the swallow, spring's own bird, Shall my faint twittering notes be heard? (“The Vigil of Venus” 717)

88 I have mentioned Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Pervigilium Veneris, and a few Romantic treatments. See Harold Bloom’s connection of these lines with John Lyly’s “Alexander and Campaspe” (1564) and Richard Barnfield’s “An Ode” (1598). 257 However, if we take the final lines longing to be like the swallow as in some sense attributable to the Tiresias-like loiterer behind the poem’s fragments, then we witness an important recovery of traditional expressions of personal and Romantic desire to be like the birds. The bird speech in The Waste Land yields to the only consciousness able to understand their speech, and it expresses the feeling of this consciousness that the swallow does not share in its sorrows. However, the poem contains no Romantic vox natura and no ecstatic flights of creative imagination, only ghostly echoes in a register of resignation, defeat, and hope beyond despair. As voices of the landscape, therefore, the birds in The Waste Land provide no voice with which to feel redemptive connection, and the land remains “waste land.” The land’s character is determined by the consciousness observing it and echoes only those feelings and emotions of its viewer’s alienated and overwhelmed consciousness. As a stylistic experiment of monumental proportions that, like Four Quartets, carves out what Sharon Cameron calls incomparable “spaces of

‘intensity’” (179), The Waste Land remains a landscape significantly determined by the distortions of an overriding personal emotion even in its denial of a singular lyric persona.

“Landscapes”

The five-poem sequence titled “Landscapes,” written between 1933 and 1935, rarely attracts critical attention, even though its poems, “New Hampshire,” “Virginia,”

“Usk,” “Rannoch, by Glencoe,” and “Cape Ann” are recognized as forming a prelude to

Four Quartets. The three American poems Eliot composed during his trip to America to deliver the Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard in 1933, during which time he also

258 delivered the lectures at the University of Virginia that would be published as After

Strange Gods. This return to America, Eliot’s first since 1914, reconnected him to the landscapes and birds of his childhood. In an address reprinted as “The Influence of

Landscape Upon the Poet” (1959) in acceptance of the Emerson-Thoreau Medal for

Achievement in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Eliot remembered being a “small boy who was a devoted bird watcher” (356), and his first trip back to America came at a time when he was thinking about his native birds and “real” birds in poetry. In January of 1930, before the November exchange in The New

Statesmen, Eliot had written Julian Bell (Virginia Woolf’s nephew) that he enjoyed his poem “Chaffinches.” Eliot wrote, “I like your birds very much. They are real birds, to begin with; and I have spent a great deal of time myself in bird study – though in another country” (Letters V 7). In 1935, after he had finished writing “Landscapes” and begun

“Burnt Norton,” Eliot was still thinking about birds. Writing his friend and fellow poet

Ralph Hodgson, Eliot reiterated his conviction that “a good mockingbird can beat the nightingale all holler if you discount the fact of the latter having the advantage of the stage all to himself and people feeling sentimental at that time of night” (Complete Prose

IV 210). These convictions, informing “Landscapes,” were also shaped by Eliot’s reading of Frank M. Chapman’s Handbook of Birds of Eastern Northern America, the source of his response to Howard’s 1930 review (including the Shufeldt quotation) and of his notes on the hermit thrush in The Waste Land.

Chapman’s volume evidently had lasting appeal for Eliot (he received it from his mother as a childhood birthday present), since he reread its mockingbird entry for his rebuttal to Howard’s review. In this entry, Chapman called the mockingbird “our national

259 song-bird” (377) and acknowledged that “It is customary to consider the Mockingbird a musician possessed of marvelous technique, but with comparatively little depth of feeling,” rumored to “create intense admiration without reaching the soul” (377). But

Chapman argued that if one listened “when the world is hushed … if his song does not thrill you then consider yourself deaf to Nature’s voices” (377). Eliot’s own poetry sometimes attracted the criticism that his admirably fine technique lacked feeling.

Interestingly, in “Virginia,” Eliot set the stage for his own mockingbird by hushing the world to an extreme stillness in order to ask if, indeed, the mockingbird moved the soul.

But at a time when Eliot, himself, was considering abandoning lyric poetry and feeling tortured by the waning sanity of the wife he left once and for all in England, Eliot’s hope for hearing the mockingbird, or his own poetic voice, had also dissipated.89

The first six lines of “Virginia” economically link movement with stasis, heat with cold, sound with silence. The poem begins by attributing a will to a red river

(probably the Rivanna near the University of Virginia) in order to express the mood conveyed by its slow massive surge:

Red river, red river Slow flow heat is silence No will is still as a river

The repetition of “red river” and the incredibly slow pace of mostly monosyllables conveys the sluggishness of the visually almost still warm water without any suggestion of “babbling” or other sounds. As if hearkening to the Heraclitean axiom, “no man ever

89 In 1953, Eliot reflected on the genesis of Four Quartets to say that he remembered “feeling I’d written myself out just before The Rock was commissioned.” As opposed to poetry for the stage, he wrote, “I thought pure unapplied poetry was in the past for me” before “Burnt Norton” grew out of fragments discarded from the play Murder in the Cathedral (Eliot, qtd. in Bergonzi T. S. Eliot Four Quartets: A Casebook 23). 260 steps in the same river twice,” the next three lines extend the axiom’s application to the experience of the landscape as a whole through the sound of a bird. Into the silent landscape, the speaker silently asks a question to himself or to the landscape.

Still, will heat move Only through the mocking-bird Heard once?

This question reveals the importance of the mockingbird’s song to introduce life into the world of the sluggish impersonal river, but it also implicitly asks what it means to hear a mockingbird once. Firstly, the speaker’s question seems to register the desire for the landscape to yield more satisfaction to the listener/viewer who is irritated at having heard a mockingbird that will not sing again. Secondly, the fact that it was a mockingbird suggests that the possibility of meaning and feeling has been cruelly suggested and withdrawn. Without reproducibility, one cannot interpret a song or sounds that do not plainly mean in one’s language, especially when hearing a mockingbird once is to be unsure if one has heard a mockingbird at all, since a mockingbird’s song may be the recitation of the calls of many other birds. Moreover, the heat that moves through the mockingbird may be the heat of the mockingbird’s very life, or the metaphorical heat of poetic creation, or the sexual heat of pro-creation as part of a mating song. It may also be the heat that stirs in the human listener’s heart and mind, who longs to be “stirred by a bird” (to quote from Hopkins). The speaker in “Virginia” scans the landscape for anything to awaken him from the torpid feeling to which he and the land seem destined.

Ultimately unmoved, the speaker sadly observes the land’s refusal to yield any poetry.

Without a second mockingbird call, no pattern is established and the hypostasized land remains subject only to the still will of the river. Without personality patterning and

261 creatively forming the reality, personal feeling is almost wholly deflected. Almost deflected because the land itself still exhibits an agitated will that reflects the speaker’s agitation, as if the land were calling for some kind of song. In its soulless Heraclitean flux, the land exists in expectation:

Still hills Wait. Gates wait. Purple trees, White trees, wait, wait, Delay, decay. Living, living, Never moving. Ever moving

The same sluggish rhythm of these short enjambed lines in mono- and di-syllables move the poem along only slightly faster than before. The repetitions and slight variations on words convey stasis in a living state. Writing that these objects “wait” both suspends a sense of volition and potentially attributes will to the inactivity of the landscape. This suggestion of will introduces sympathy and subtle identification with the hills, trees, and gates. Acted upon by time, the immovable but always moving world is of a still will, like the river and the listener, that are all waiting for that slight change between life and death in the brief time that delays decay.

This attribution of a “still will” to the river and of “waiting” to the landscape qualifies as a type of pathetic fallacy in that the listener seeks reciprocity with a landscape and finds his own passive emotions and feelings reflected in the still will of

“Virginia.” The listener finds his own mood within the landscape not in Ruskin’s

Romantic sense of ecstatic union of violent emotion but in contemplative union in recognition of the lack of any real emotional remittance from the landscape. The speaker is less overwhelmed by emotion than evacuated of feeling. To Eliot’s credit (from

Ruskin’s point of view), Eliot’s grasping at meaning in this poem derives from close

262 observation and deep reflection, not impulsive anthropomorphism. In fact, it is from this intensity of thought and feeling seemingly mirrored by the surrounding stillness, which does not seem to impute any characteristics to the landscape that it does not already possess, that the poem accords with Ruskin’s approbation of a more “delicate attribution of life” than the examples of the pathetic fallacy he critiques. Ruskin found these attributions not only permissible in poetry but “sacred,” his own example being one of a similarly inactive natural object in Christ’s direction to look at the lilies of the field that

“toil not” (5.385). In “Virginia,” however, the landscape is not divine but devoid of emotion, receiving nothing, changing nothing. The poem’s close reinforces the monotony:

Ever moving Iron thoughts came with me And go with me: Red river, river, river. (CPP 94)

The speaker’s “Iron thoughts” neither change nor change the landscape. No moral or ghostly meaning is produced. The living death of nature registers alongside the “Iron thoughts” that remain unheated by the mockingbird’s song, or anything else in the perceptive field. The poem emphasizes the failure of reciprocity with landscape by returning to its droning first line in its last: “Red river, river, river.”

Prefiguring many of the themes and images of Four Quartets, “Landscapes” struggles with the possibility of poetry as a motivation and a meaningful activity, which turns out to be a struggle with the development of a symbolic landscape that expresses significant emotion without becoming over-personal. For, how does one discover, in

Kramer’s terms, “timeless moments––of redeeming reciprocity, of graced consciousness–

263 –[that] shine through physical landscapes and release the poet from temporal enchainments” (xiii) that also resist the pathetic fallacy? How does one resist projections of feeling onto nature while using imaginative representations of landscape to convey emotion? Eliot had worked toward a preliminary answer while working on “Landscapes” in the lectures that became After Strange Gods.

In the third lecture delivered at the University of Virginia in 1933, Eliot criticized the pathetic fallacy in Thomas Hardy, though without using Ruskin’s terminology. Eliot said that Hardy’s model of “self-expression” was “self-absorption” and led him to “make a great deal of landscape; for landscape is a passive creature which lends itself to an author’s mood. Landscape is fitted too for the purposes of an author who is interested not at all in men’s minds, but only in their emotions” (ASG 55). Sounding reminiscent of

Ruskin’s category of the first order of poets, who by comparison to weaker men are able to “think strongly, feel strongly, and see truly,” Eliot presented his theory that “strong passion is only interesting or significant in strong men;” and Eliot’s critique of “those who abandon themselves without resistance to excitements which tend to deprive them of reason, become merely instruments of feeling” and accordingly “lose their humanity”

(ASG 55). Finally, Eliot suggests that “unless there is moral resistance and conflict there is no meaning” and he goes on to disparage, with a measure of moral indignation that rivals anything in Modern Painters, the majority of people who are capable “neither of strong emotion nor of strong resistance,” and incline always to “passion for its own sake.” As a result, according to Eliot, there is always “a note of falsity in Hardy’s novels” because “he will leave nothing to nature, but will always be giving one last turn of the screw himself,” and that turn, often enough, with motives Eliot found suspicious (ASG

264 55-56). “Landscapes” can be read as a sequence consumed by this problem of how much to leave to nature when representing the moral resistance and conflict with strong emotion, with “Virginia” standing as a crisis point coming after the first poem, “New

Hampshire.”

“New Hampshire” shows none of the crippling self-awareness of “Virginia,” but introduces “Children’s voices in the orchard,” where “Black wing, brown wing, hover over” (CPP 93) and children play in leaves. The poem closes in a playful rhythmic and rhymed weaving together of the images it introduces: “Golden head, black wing, / Cling, swing, / Spring, sing, / Swing up into the apple tree” (CPP 93). Later, “Burnt Norton” shows a similar bird leading us into “our first world,” into a garden where “leaves were full of children, / Hidden excitedly, containing laughter” (CPP 118). In “New

Hampshire,” the cumulative effect is largely one of bittersweet remembrance of time past and youth lost, but also, of childhood joy preserved in memory.

In the most recent linkage of “Landscapes” to Four Quartets, Margaret Greaves suggests that “Landscapes” moves from the first three poems that explore “how prominently the passions and moods of the self can express themselves on the religious quest,” to the last two, which “show a near-resignation of self to larger patterns of history” (135). Greaves believes this movement foreshadows Four Quartets by moving from exploration, beginning with “Burnt Norton,” to complete self-surrender in “A condition of complete simplicity / (Costing not less than everything)” at the close of

“Little Gidding.” Though in agreement with Greaves, I emphasize the particularized movement of “Landscapes” from exploration and crisis to ambiguous resignation in the final poem, “Cape Ann.” This resignation is by no means compatible with the self-

265 surrender of “Little Gidding.” Rather, its significance lies in the struggle of “Landscapes” to resist emotional projection onto nature in the progression of the religious quest. “New

Hampshire” suggests something like the “first world” of blissfully naïve childlike play in the landscape, which transitions to the stultifying stillness of the unyielding land, fruitlessly expecting poetic projection or “heat” to move through the mockingbird in

“Virginia.” “Usk” recovers aspirations of movement toward a spiritual horizon through tradition and solitary landscape meditation (“Seek only there / Where the grey light meets the green air / The hermit’s chapel and the pilgrim’s prayer” [CPP 94]), which then yields to the impersonal and utter desolation of a violent history of human pride where

“the crow starves” and the self no longer matters in “Rannoch, by Glencoe.” “Cape Ann,” which closes the sequence, is more ambiguous in its final resignation of the self than has been recognized, and its resolutions require closer attention.

“Cape Ann,” the only bird catalog in Eliot’s works, recalls the sweetness of “New

Hampshire” and its hovering birds, though the breakneck pace and commotion is far more manic than the earlier poem’s swaying rhythms. The mimicry, also, asks us to ponder if we now hear the mockingbird of “Virginia” for the first time, making the heat move through a flurry of activity:

O quick quick quick, quick hear the song-sparrow, Swamp-sparrow, fox-sparrow, vesper-sparrow At dawn and dusk. Follow the dance Of the goldfinch at noon. Leave to chance The Blackburnian warbler, the shy one. Hail With shrill whistle the note of the quail, the bob-white Dodging by bay-bush. Follow the feet Of the walker, the water-thrush. Follow the flight Of the dancing arrow, the purple martin. Greet In silence the bullbat. All are delectable. Sweet sweet sweet

266 These “delectable” birds, coming after the desolation of “Usk,” are cloyingly sweet to the point of parody, but they also offer a relief from the starving crow and the “Listlessness of ancient war” (CPP 94) in “Rannoch, by Glencoe.” Yet, the mimicry and the speaker’s commands to hear, follow, leave, hail, and greet all assault the ear and draw the eye quickly here and there.

Whereas “New Hampshire” ended with whimsical swinging and eventual release,

“Cape Ann” toys with a similarly Hopkinsian musicality only to interrupt it strongly with a foreign voice delivering a new and stronger command:

But resign this land at the end, resign it. To its true owner, the tough one, the sea gull. The palaver is finished. (CPP 95).90

These lines dramatically stall the music and turn the poem’s sound and sense to close

“Landscapes” as a whole. The ending is in one sense definitive, and in another sense, completely open. What does Eliot mean by palaver and to what does the word refer?

What is important about the palaver being “finished?”

Beyond the plain meaning of palaver as profuse or idle talk, the word has an important and varied etymology that was well known by Eliot. The Portuguese palavra meaning “word, speech, or talk” derived from the Latin parabola indicating comparison, which shares a root with parable, parley, and the French parler, “to speak.” The OED,

90 Christopher Ricks points out that after its first publication, Eliot added a space between the last line of “Cape Ann” and the rest of the poem, which introduced a “pause for reflection and for acknowledgment, before the finality of ‘finished’” but also, “the separation-off of anything to do with ‘palaver’ from all the other sounds, the bird-sounds that have been sounded in the poem and the verse sounds themselves, the delight in obvious rhymes and unmisgiving assonances and alliterations” (Decisions and Revisions 90). I am not sure if I understand Ricks correctly, but if he means that the palaver does not refer to the speech of the birds, and that the inserted space suggests this, I cannot think of to what else it may refer. 267 however, cites another primary and probable source in an African pidgin where the word

“appears to have been used by Portuguese traders on the west coast of Africa for conversing with the local inhabitants” and was subsequently adopted by English sailors from whom it passed into popular English use. Various meanings from this root include usage of palaver as the word for “a dispute, quarrel, or misunderstanding; a matter for arbitration” and “Trouble, difficulty; bother, ‘hassle’” as in “fighting-palaver” or “war- palaver.” Native Africans used the word as a form of “parley,” in which important topics would be settled with traders in a “palaver court,” under a “palaver-tree,” and with the

“palaver-man,” a colonial official responsible for trade or negotiation with local people”

(“palaver” OED). There is every reason to believe that Eliot was familiar with these meanings. As Christopher Ricks has pointed out, Eliot had written of the “Portuguese” fisherman working on the coast of New England in the original headnote to “The Dry

Salvages” and in his preface to Edgar Ansel Mowrer’s This American World (Ricks 90).

Just as the rhyming of “Salvages” with “assuages” places that poem in the New England of Eliot’s youth, the use of “palaver” in “Cape Ann” places it in the familiar sea-faring culture of the Northeast coast where it would have been used in at least some of these various senses.

So what sort of palaver are the birds making with each other, or with the sea gull, to which they must resign their land? Is Eliot providing an animal fable or parable of some sort through this poem? Analogized to European colonial history, the birds could be

Africans resigning their lives and/or land to tough invaders. Given the political situation in Europe in 1933, there is the possibility that Hitler’s end of democratic rule in March of that year put Germany’s new dictator in the place of “the tough one” who silences social

268 talk and takes the land in Eliot’s poem.91 Analogized to poetry, however, the birds could be seen as Romantic nightingales cheering themselves with sweet sounds. They could represent the “twittering world” spoken of in “Burnt Norton,” poets producing pure poetry or sound poetry that “East Coker” tells us “does not matter” and that, without the strength of thought and meaningful moral resistance spoken of in After Strange Gods, were too weak and too passionate about their personal desires to be significant. From this vantage point, the toughness of the gull would be a virtue for the poet, a resistance to the indulgent “delectable” sweetness, to the cliché and the easy escape of reasoning away realities (as the bird states in “Burnt Norton,” “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality” [CPP 118]).

By the palaver being “finished,” either fulfilled and/or finally ceased, the poem allows for a sense of colloquy coming to an end, an arbitration completed. Christ’s last words echo in the last line, casting “the tough one” in a sacrificial role. The sea gull refuses the cheerfulness of sweet sounds in order to attempt the tougher task of using words to express things for which there are no words, what “East Coker” calls “a raid on the inarticulate” that constitutes in every attempt “a wholy new start, and a different kind of failure” (CPP 128). Just as Christ’s “It is finished” declared God’s gift of forgiveness to have taken place for all time in the singular event, the world after the sea gull is one in which no further parley/palaver takes place. The ultimate sacrifice/surrender is accomplished, but the strong insertion of the gull that violently silences the music of the

91 This possibility becomes more plausible when compared to Eliot’s language of resignation in closing the second section of Coriolan, “Difficulties of a Statesman.” In this poem, the speaker expresses a longing to escape the useless bureaucratic committees for the company of small creatures that “chirp thinly through the dust, through the night.” The speaker commands the stultifying self-important statesman in the final line to “Resign Resign Resign” (CPP 89). 269 birds hardly presents the gull as a peaceful and reconciling Christ-figure. The sea-bird is not a dove or an eagle, birds with traditionally Christian and salvific associations, but one who forsakes the land and seems not to have provided a way to salvation, or for any type of creative or imaginative life to continue. Instead, the “true owner” of the land to whom all must resign is not a social bird but an anchorite who speaks not in songs but in cries, and a scavenger that consumes all.

“Cape Ann” turns out not to be the unequivocal and hoped-for second song of the mockingbird, but the end of singing and of discussion. To project Eliot onto the sea gull for a moment, it is worth asking whether Eliot’s own resolve, in writing “Cape Ann,” was to resign poetry as such, and to be finished with the endless internal palaver over the psychological landscapes he had attempted to paint, or, whether he resolved to resign from the type of poetry that had not resisted the personal element enough, a resolution that led to the pioneering impersonality of Four Quartets. Even without this biographical postulate, if “Landscapes” is taken as a prelude to Eliot’s late masterpiece, it introduces the themes of resignation of self and of reciprocity with landscape distinctly through the images and songs of birds. The last words of “Landscapes” suspend bird mimicry in search of a fuller inhabitation of the mockingbird principle, an impossible state in which the speech seems neither personal (one’s own notes merely) nor a mere infertile copying.

Truly ending the palaver of idle and meaningless talk required a moral resolution to resist indulgence in passion when arbitrating between poet and world. But Eliot’s struggle with poetic landscapes did not end, thankfully, with resignation of poetry to the gull, but in

“the deception of the thrush” and Eliot’s most radical fusion of human and avian voices.

270 “Burnt Norton” and “Little Gidding”

Section I of “Burnt Norton” opens Four Quartets by blurring the distinction between avian and human speakers. This ambiguity about whether and at what time a bird or a human speaks occurs as but one aspect of the monumental impersonality of Four

Quartets. According to Sharon Cameron, the four poems relentlessly pursue the

“estrangement of voice from its constitutive capacities (sometimes language, always presumptively sound)” and a parallel “dissociation of voice from any individual source to which it could be attributed” (145). These techniques, amounting to a strenuous

“disarticulation of any kind of entity” in Four Quartets, are what Cameron calls their

“most radical discovery” (149), ensuring that “no voice is closed off to another” (151).92

It is my special care to delineate the contribution of birds to this disarticulation of entity, which includes their exceptionality as comparatively coherent and prominent embodied entities, anchoring the poem’s effort to discover meaningful reciprocity with landscape.

My reading gently pushes against the example that Cameron finds most in tension with her argument for the radical and “incarnated impersonality” that dissociates voices from speakers in Four Quartets. Cameron understands the “compound ghost” of “Little

Gidding” II as “paradoxically the most fully embodied figure in the poem” and therefore the figure to which, “In Four Quartets, all understandings of the representation of a person must make reference” (154). Cameron argues that this compound ghost “vividly consolidates and makes manifest the eroded distinctions between the living and the dead that are staged throughout Four Quartets” (154), and I would hasten to add that the most

92 As Cameron puts it, “the poem strips identity from experience, so that what is represented is experience that is particularized without being particularized as someone’s” (149). 271 fully embodied nonhuman figure in the poem is the thrush introduced in “Burnt Norton” that recurs at the end of “Little Gidding.” The voice and activity of the thrush as poetic guide embraces the embodied experience of time in a landscape in “Burnt Norton,” leading to a more full-throated acceptance of landscape experience through emotional attachment, memory, and history in “Little Gidding.” By staging this acceptance through the life of a bird, the poems of Four Quartets at least partly resolve the incompatibility

Cameron finds in the conflict between the intellectualized “experiential” and “doctrinal” registers of the poems, in that the words of the bird naturalize the poem’s doctrinal elements as outgrowths of a necessary and fundamental faith in experience of the material world itself, the bird’s expression of what Santayana called “animal faith.”

Four Quartets remains ambiguous about when bird speech and human speech begins or ends in “Burnt Norton” by means of punctuation, by pronoun delay and ambiguity, and by meter and line breaks. When the bird first speaks, we are told more directly than at any time in Four Quartets, other than the encounter with the “compound ghost,” that an entity is speaking. We are told that the bird actually says the words it speaks:

Other echoes Inhabit the garden. Shall we follow? Quick, said the bird, find them, find them, Round the corner. Through the first gate, Into our first world, shall we follow The deception of the thrush? Into our first world.

Although someone must be saying “said the bird,” we do not know who this person is and the lack of quotation marks keeps speech from being clearly defined. The end punctuation does not necessarily provide answers either. With quotes, it might read:

“Quick,” said the bird, “find them, find them, 272 Round the corner.”

But readers must supply these quotation marks, and would only place them in this way retrospectively, since the delayed introduction of the second we leads one to believe, despite the period after corner, that “Through the first gate / Into our first world” still represents the spoken directions of the bird, which allows for the at least temporary suggestion that the bird is enfolded into the our of “our first world.” This suggestion is all it takes for the same ambiguity to be present in the echo, even after the naming of “the deception of the thrush” separates it from the we, since the sentence fragment, being even less attributable to a speaker, states that the bird has been followed: “Into our first world.”

In short, the bird seems more substantially present and possessing of this world into which it calls, directs, or signals “us,” its presumptive followers as readers; but what do its directions mean?

“Quick” is a call to action/attention that also signifies the precondition of the capability for action and attention: life. Its archaic form, the Germanic quik, signifies

“alive” or “living,” (from the Latin vivus and the ancient Greek βίος “bios” for “life”).

From “Quick,” the bird immediately directs toward others, “find them, find them.”

Santayana defines his notion of animal faith as “an expression of hunger, pursuit, shock, or fear” directed upon things, and it therefore inspires or assumes “the existence of self- developing beings, independent of knowledge, but capable of being affected by action”

(SAF 214). Santayana describes how, in children, such animal faith manifests impartially, and the spirit is “carried away by the joy of doing or seeing anything” (214) with little self-consciousness and great absorption. This faith is revealed in “Burnt Norton” as we enter “our first world” toward the “children, / Hidden excitedly, containing laughter”

273 (CPP 118). Readers understand that one cannot truly reenter this irrecoverable state, yet the state seems to be preserved to a greater extent in the bird that deceives one into entertaining a poetic reentry.

This “first world” has been traditionally understood in terms of Bradleyan

“immediate experience,” described in Eliot’s dissertation as “the general condition before distinctions and relations have been developed, and where as yet neither any subject or object exists” (Complete Prose I 243). Eliot discusses this concept as a non-conscious, undifferentiated state of unity, when “consciousness and its object are one” and from which, through experience, concepts of subject and object develop. Once differentiated, these incommensurable but interdependent categories cannot be reconciled, even if “the original unity – the ‘neutral entity’– though transcended, remains, and is never analysed away” (Complete Prose I 255). Donald Childs claims that this human sense of a prior or

“original unity” is the origin of “faith in the ultimate oneness of reality” and is “the essence of metaphysics” in Eliot’s dissertation. Though we recognize it as “a matter of faith” to which we subscribe, “we cannot escape our faith” (Childs 148). What

Santayana’s concept of animal faith explains that Bradley’s concept of “immediate experience” does not, in my admittedly limited view, is the reason for skepticism about subject and object categories in the first place. “Our first world” in the poem is evidently not the annihilation of all awareness of subject and object of Bradley’s “immediate experience,” but is seemingly free of the cares, regrets, reflections, and doubts that at one time or another begin to impinge upon sensitive human intellection.

If conceiving of skepticism and animal faith as locked in struggle, the “first world” into which the thrush leads is not one in which subject and object do not exist, but

274 one in which skepticism over the delineation of subject and object does not exist, or is so far suspended by being solidly established. As a rule, animal faith would tend toward naïve reality and fend off the skeptical view that reality is more or less one’s own account. Animal faith tends not to worry that its own thoughts about the real world are perspectival and the accidents of a personal point of view. However, for Santayana, other human and nonhuman animals play an important role in introducing more skepticism into this state of belief. Because humans become convinced that other creatures possess other worlds to which we have no access, the contingency of our personal concepts of reality are disclosed to us. By observation of others’ conscious activity and experiences of miscommunication and misunderstanding, other human and nonhuman animals signal to us our own solipsism, and upon this realization a rational and moral awareness quickly intervenes and calls human creatures to be more skeptical of the realities of others and of one’s own assumptions about the world.

This skeptical impulse is inimical to animal faith and may even be taken to an extreme if it undermines conviction in any shared sense of a substantial reality. Santayana describes the moral reasoning process after skepticism has been introduced by the recognition of solipsism:

Justice and charity will then seem to lie in rescinding this illegitimate pre- eminence of one’s own body: and it may come to be an ideal of the spirit, not only to extend its view over all time and all existence, but to exchange its accidental point of view for every other, and adopt every insight and every interest: an effort which, by a curious irony, might end in abolishing all interests and all views. Such moral enlightenment is dangerous to animal life, and incidentally to the animal faith on which the recognition of existing things hangs in the first place. (SAF 215)

In other words, an extreme of this form of skepticism would rationally lead to an extreme impersonality that would attempt the ideal of extension of point to view to every point of 275 view in place of its own. The irony, Santayana argues, is that the complete evacuation of any individual point of view can only annihilate the capacity for views at all.

Santayana’s words on skepticism and animal faith resonate with major impulses in Four Quartets as Eliot goes about disarticulating voice from any entity by extending a disembodied view over all time and all existence, melding every possible perspective and insight and interest into voices inseparable from one another. But Eliot’s particular

“sublimation of animal faith” in this process of “rescinding this illegitimate preeminence of one’s own body” is not naïve about its processes and motivations, for it had already struggled with the “curious irony” of the results of such a demanding and expansive spiritual ideal in “Landscapes.” Eliot had already presented the unyielding landscape of

“Virginia” and the unsatisfactory resignation of “Cape Ann” as glimpses of the abolishment of individual interests and views. Four Quartets, therefore, worked toward a more satisfactory surrender than the earlier sequence by a “purification of the motive, / In the ground of our beseeching” (CPP 143), a more communal seeking guided by the instincts of “our first world,” a shared sense of animal life. By not asking if we shall follow the thrush merely, but by inserting “the deception of” the thrush, Eliot voices his own skepticism about the adequacy of his use of the bird as emblem of this first world of animal faith. In other words, he acknowledges that the words interpolated to the bird do not actually represent any bird’s actual thoughts, but imagined human meanings, and

Eliot thereby insures against interpretations of misplaced idealism in the false appearance of a bird’s humanlike speech, of a naïve pathetic fallacy. Eliot emphasizes that the thrush’s world is not our own, but that it possesses a world like our own in some ways, and perhaps, different in ways that may be more or less desirable. The collective ground

276 of beseeching in Four Quartets, therefore, discovers a more substantial reality by virtue of “consensual objectivity” and emphasis on living human traditions, “something firmer and steadier than agreement per se” (Shusterman 61), but grounds these motives and this beseeching within the first world of embodied animal existence.

One need only read to the next passage of bird speech in “Burnt Norton” to connect this idea of confidence in the solidity of the world amidst the skepticism- inspiring conviction of other “self-developing beings” and the dream-like illusions of waking life to the faith of the thrush in Four Quartets. After the bird calls “in response to

/ The unheard music hidden in the shrubbery” (CPP 118) and “we” experience the mystical illusion of the lotos rising in the watery surface of a dry pool, a cloud passes and the pool is emptied of the vague “they,” usually taken to be ghostly children, reflected behind the figures looking into the pool. Afterward, the second attribution of speech occurs:

Go, said the bird, for the leaves were full of children, Hidden excitedly, containing laughter. Go, go, go, said the bird: human kind Cannot bear very much reality. (CPP 118)

By stating that human kind is unable to bear very much reality, the bird suggests that humans are unable to “endure” or “suffer” any very solid conviction in their own thoughts and perceptions, are unable to “sustain” or “support” their reality in an ideal fashion suited to their natures, in a fashion that does not produce unnecessary anxieties as byproducts. Before “the use of memory: / For liberation” in “Little Gidding” (CPP 142), there is this fear of and turning away from the vision in the pool of “Burnt Norton,” the memory of former dreams, dreams of what might have been, and dreams inclined always

277 to distort and animate landscapes to reflect and satisfy human moods and desires, like children one will never have.

Santayana remarked upon this inclination to shape and animate nature in terms of the pathetic fallacy in 1900 in the chapter from which Eliot drew his theory of the

“objective correlative.” Santayana wrote that “We dye the world of our own colour; by a pathetic fallacy, by a false projection of sentiment, we soak Nature with our own feeling, and then celebrate her tender sympathy with our moral being” (Interpretations 158). In

1923, however, Santayana elaborated more specifically upon the bind that this instinct establishes in humans who attribute mind to human and non-human others, even when the instinct is “courteous and even humble” and recognizing the “parity” of others with the self.

Nevertheless, when I consider the inevitable egotism that presides over the understanding of mind in others, I fear that I am no less likely to sin through insensibility to the actual life of nature, because my tight little organs cannot vibrate to alien harmonies, than I am to sin through a childish anthropomorphism which makes not only beasts but even the clouds and the gods discourse like myself. (SAF 247)

Santayana, therefore, is as alive to the difficulty of moralizing over the matter of animation in nature as Ruskin.93 Yet, having renounced “the pedantic demand that poetry should be prose” and allowing that “myth may do the life of nature less injustice than would the only alternative … which is silence” (SAF 248), Santayana recognizes the necessity of a great degree faith in what are recognized as myths. He recalls Eliot’s struggle in “Virginia” to both perceive the land as it is and to resist the egotism of

93 When the seer seems to have lost sight of the self, Ruskin writes, moralizing over the phenomena becomes “difficult beyond all other points of our inquiry, since precisely the same sentiments may arise in different minds from totally opposite causes” (MP III 5.361). 278 personal myth, and suggests like Eliot that such a struggle could finish only in silence.

This idea is discernable in the descent out of sense in Section III of “Burnt Norton” and in the mockery of personal and anthropocentric animations of nature that end in silence and stillness in Section IV. Here, in the absence of the sun, the speaker asks, “Will the sunflower turn to us, will the clematis / Stray down, bend to us; tendril and spray / Clutch and cling?” (121). The obvious answer, that such thinking is egotistical anthropocentrism, humiliates human pride and self-importance, but the only thing that makes this answer obvious is the sense that one may trust the construction of reality that one recognizes as one’s own account.

Santayana’s consolation for having to believe in myth, for reconciling himself to life’s “inevitable egotism” is simply to go deeper and apply the same destabilizing skepticism about the minds of others to the self once again. Santayana asked, for instance, “How much do I know about my own animation? How much is too fluid to be caught in the sieve of memory, and to be officially assimilated in verbal soliloquy?” (SAF

248). This deepening of the problem discloses a compelling insight for Santayana, that

“when I conceive what I have felt, I have never really felt just that before. My report is an honest myth” (SAF 248). This insight is in some ways similar to Ruskin’s belief that the pathetic fallacy could be pardoned when it remained faithful to feeling. It is a fallacy that, unlike the fallacy of wilful fancy that has no expectation that it will be believed, engages interest and curiosity and wagers faith. Accordingly, Ruskin’s spectrum for appreciating the pathetic fallacy, saying that it is powerful insofar as it is pathetic and feeble insofar as it is fallacious, can be extended to describe how confidence in substantial reality is balanced with skepticism, since one must trust one’s passions in order to motivate life

279 while also maintaining as good a grip on the facts as possible. This essential importance of experience and perception in spatial environments serves as the ground of honest myths and deeply inform Eliot’s Four Quartets even amidst its borrowings from

Christian orthodoxy, so that the two need not be in conflict.

Sharon Cameron has argued otherwise, stating that by the poem’s end, the

“frictive relation between the experiential and the doctrinal” is relinquished by virtue of the strength of readerly absorption within the experiential register (176). For Cameron as for other readers who find the Christian references at the close of “Little Gidding” to be heavy-handed and a blemish, Eliot’s doctrine exhibits a “didacticism [that] is foreign to a voice which has rehearsed positions and inhabited understandings that are heuristic, albeit without reference to an individual’s sense of things” (175-176). Cameron argues that

“Eliot seems not to credit how thoroughly truths represented as no one’s truths have been internalized as experienced” throughout the poem, and that this internalization obviates the need to “authenticate” experiential truths in the supplementary register of

“orthodoxy” (178). Cameron acknowledges that Eliot, in his orthodoxy, would have found her claim appalling, but views the frictive relationship between the experiential and doctrinal registers being resolved in the poem in favor of the experiential register. For

Cameron, the deep internalizations of koan-like contradictions cannot be neatly consolidated within the orthodox container into which she sees Eliot attempting to fit them. However, without disputing Cameron’s eloquent explanation of how the poem’s paradoxes undermine an unbending conception of Christian orthodoxy in the poem, I grant a greater place to Eliot’s having overcome nihilism and utter skepticism by means other than the dogmatism she reads in the poem’s Christian references by claiming that

280 the poem ultimately exhibits confidence in substantial reality cohering through the recurrent speech of the thrush.

The close of “Little Gidding” need not be read as a personal retreat into didacticism and doctrinal allusions out of keeping with the poem’s impersonality; rather, its repetition of “Quick now, here, now, always–” from “Burnt Norton” is the only distinctive and attributable voice of the final section that has been embodied earlier in the poem. By virtue of its tonal prominence as a voiced refrain spoken by a particular entity, the refrain emphasizes the substantiality of the lived present of animal life in nature amidst the contingency of all the abstract and contradictory philosophical explorations of the self, others, and the world. The bird’s speech as the eighth-to-last line of “Little

Gidding” joins the words of Julian of Norwich that “all manner of things shall be well” and asks readers, therefore, to broaden their notion of orthodoxy to include mysticism and even to be founded upon what Santayana referred to as “animal faith”; that is, the instinctive positing of substance and solidity and other self-developing beings as existing

“out there” and being affected by the self’s actions (SAF 214). While impersonal, self- reflective skepticism may seem to guard against the egotistical affirmation of a naïve and solipsistic reality, such skepticism may deaden “animal faith.” Eliot presents the image of maintaining this faith in the thrush’s speech piercing the stream of human consciousness, which has dipped in and out of disembodied entities in building to this climax at the end of “Little Gidding.”

To quote from one other figure whom Santayana and Eliot knew and read well to enliven this subject, William James analogized the movements of human interior experience to an ever-flowing “stream of consciousness.” He explained this stream’s

281 dynamics by employing a second analogy, likening the movement of the stream to the

“alternation of flights and perchings” (1:243) of a bird.94 Employing James’s analogy a number of times, John Dewey extended it to the operation of the artistic expression of the

“live creature” in Art as Experience. Dewey wrote that in our experience of creating or experiencing an artwork, as in all experience:

The flights and perchings are intimately connected with one another; they are not so many unrelated lightings succeeded by a number of unrelated hoppings. Each resting place in experience is an undergoing in which is absorbed and taken home the consequences of prior doing and, unless the doing is that of utter caprice or sheer routine, each doing carries in itself meaning that has been extracted and conserved … If we move too rapidly, we get away from the base of supplies––of accrued meanings––and the experience is flustered, thin, and confused. If we dawdle too long after having extracted a net value, experience perishes of inanition. (58)

The carving out of “spaces of ‘intensity’” (Cameron 179) in Four Quartets follow from the early image of the songbird as guide, leading one through a garden inhabited by echoes of memory and contemplations of “prior doing” that the reader must confront and absorb in order to extract and conserve their meaning, or else relinquish it by moving away from Dewey’s “base of supplies” and toward “an abstraction / Remaining a perpetual possibility / Only in a world of speculation” (“Burnt Norton” CPP 117).

Such moving away constitutes retreat from a reality that humans cannot bear or sustain.

Yet, Dewey would have us recognize that these experiences need not be thought of as uniquely human in their basic form and application.

94 James continues in Principles of Psychology (1918): “The rhythm of language expresses this, where every thought is expressed in a sentence, and every sentence closed by a period. The resting-places are usually occupied by sensorial imaginations of some sort, whose peculiarity is that they can be held before the mind for an indefinite time, and contemplated without changing; the places of flight are filled with thoughts of relations, static or dynamic, that for the most part obtain between the matters contemplated in the periods of comparative rest” (243). 282 According to Dewey, even in complicated modernist poetry like Eliot’s, effects are “determined by the essential conditions of life” in birds and beasts that share the same

“basic vital functions” and make “the same basal adjustments” in order “to continue the process of living” (Dewey 12). This minimal recognition of an essential human and nonhuman “parity” (Santayana SAF 247) allows for reflective comfort when the transcendental logic of human imagination reaches its most abstract and unstable proportions, when skepticism is in danger of overwhelming animal faith, overwhelming the instinctive will to perform life’s “basic vital functions” and make its “basal adjustments” to substantial reality. In Eliot’s words, the birds reassure and remind us that we are live creatures inhabiting a present within a solid place and that in spite of the accumulated knowledge and regret and worry the present moment is all we ever experience, we are “Quick, now, here, now, always–” and would do well to hasten to remember it in times of confusion, and take comfort that in spite of our doubts and confusions and fears, things will be well.

With Santayana as with Heraclitus, and as with others in Eliot’s pantheon of philosopher-poets, the way up is the way down. We recognize and can be skeptical of the propensity to humanize nature, rendering one capable of doing no more than reporting honest myths, like the perception of a bird’s meaning. These reports are myths because they remain encrusted with personal elements of emotion, perception, and desire.

Nevertheless, Santayana reflected that “by an indirect approach” one can see “good reason for believing that some sort of animation (not at all such animation as my fancy attributes to it at first) pervades the organic world: because my psyche is animate;” (SAF

249-250). That is, being animated like other animals, and being made of the same

283 substances organized by the same actions of time upon matter, suggests to us “all the substance of nature is ready to think, if circumstances allow by presenting something to think about, and creating the appropriate organ” (SAF 250). The contours of this unity in animation, however, are inconceivable unless they can be made recognizable in others as feelings, which is why Santayana finds “gesture or poetry” a better index to feeling than description. For Santayana, “in order to communicate thought it is necessary to impose it” (251) through literary creation, it is necessary to recommence Eliot’s raid on the inarticulate even when profound skepticism and confusion tempt one to remain silent.

284 Chapter 10: Other Voices: Extending the Method

In this dissertation, I chose to narrowly focus on a few major poets from after

Ruskin’s coinage of the pathetic fallacy. The works of these writers exhibited a more than superficial interest in the observation of birds themselves, and in the case of Arnold,

Hopkins, and Eliot, the writers themselves were more or less directly influenced by

Ruskin’s theories. My aim was to demonstrate how such different poets as Whitman,

Arnold, Hopkins, and Eliot all wrote from an informed and close perception of birds coupled with strong emotional feelings. Therefore, these authors confronted how their emotion distorted their vision, and made choices about how to present their more or less personal emotional states of mind in poetry. These included their responses to appearances of birds as creatures with analogous cognitive processes and sensorial apparatuses, and therefore with the potential for analogous aesthetic sensibilities, analogous capacities for personifying other creatures, natural objects, and forces, and analogous or even superior emotional lives. I showed how intuitions about birds by poets corresponded with scientific theories from Charles Darwin to Julian Huxley to Tim

Birkhead, and how in Eliot in particular, critical self-reflection about degrees of personal projection in poetic practice became a struggle of paramount importance. Nevertheless, while these poets represent a certain type of ambition to embody or attain to the condition of birdsong in poetry (or, in the case of Arnold, to state the condition of cognitive similarity that conducts our relationships with other humans and nonhuman animals), these poets are neither the only nor necessarily the richest poets available for the poetic exploration of avian consciousness I describe.

285 In this chapter, I point to other poems that admit of my treatment of the pathetic fallacy and avian life. For the most part, I do not discuss post-romantic poems attempting to capture aspects of birds that occur before or concurrently with Ruskin’s coinage of the pathetic fallacy, mostly in order to avoid an infinite historical regress into the vast tradition of bird-poetry. Poe’s “The Raven,” Baudelaire’s “L’Albatros” and “Voyage to

Cythera,” Dickinson’s “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers –”, and the birds of Sir Walter

Scott, Tennyson, Burns, the Brownings, or George Meredith, may be felt as an absence as a result. Paul Lawrence Dunbar’s “Sympathy” is an especially relevant poem whose speaker relates to the bird in the cage more directly and powerfully than Arnold, stating that he knows “what the caged bird feels,” why he beats his wings, and “why the caged bird sings” (from whence Maya Angelou). However, maintaining a forward gaze toward the modernists stays consistent with my suggestion throughout this dissertation that

Ruskin was, in many respects, a “Victorian Modernist” (Feldman) before modernism.

Major modernist poets whose work I could easily have included in more detail than they receive here include Wallace Stevens, Robinson Jeffers, Robert Frost, and Marianne

Moore in “He ‘Digesteth Harde Yron,’” and any number of other interesting bird poems from the period, such as W. H. Auden’s “Bird-Language,” D. H. Lawrence’s “Humming-

Bird,” Robert Penn Warren’s “Evening Hawk” and Audubon: A Vision, or Randall

Jarrell’s “The Mockingbird.” In the postwar period, I find that Elizabeth Bishop, Sylvia

Plath, Ted Hughes, A. R. Ammons, W. S. Merwin, and Jorie Graham are particularly rich in examples, but by no means in a class by themselves, as even the most cursory search for poems about birds reveals. Therefore, I will not indefinitely point out examples, but mention some of the poets and works I have found rewarding. I end this chapter by

286 considering the works of three contemporary poets whose works anticipate my study in that they explicitly reference the pathetic fallacy with regard to birds, Forrest Gander’s

“The Movements of Yellow-Rumped Thornbills: Twittering Machines” (2012), Marie

Ponsot’s “Pathetic Fallacies Are Bad Science But” (2002), and Beverly Bie Brahic’s “On the Pathetic Fallacy” (2012).

In one sense, this study would rightly end with a detailed account of the images of birds in the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Discounting T. S. Eliot’s dogma of homogeneity as a cultural standard, his somber poetic temperament, and his philosophical sophistication, Eliot remains the main modernist exponent of moralistic but pragmatic

Ruskinian aesthetic criticism. But although Eliot absorbed some of his Ruskin through

Santayana and felt Ruskin’s struggle against personality most acutely, it is Stevens who most embodies the Santayanan tradition of willful faith in the power of a demystified but not disillusioned imagination. Stevens’s poem, “Not Ideas About The Thing But The

Thing In Itself,” provides a perfect example involving the song of a bird.

In this poem, the transfer of an element of sensation into the quality of a thing occurs with an acknowledgment of confusion in the moments between dreaming and waking. The poem clarifies the potentially confusing scene so as to register the sense of a higher truth that does not interfere with the speaker’s hold upon the physical world.

Stevens presents “a scrawny cry from outside” that “Seemed like a sound in his mind.”

The speaker questions the source of the “bird’s cry, at daylight or before,” and feels that

“It would have been outside” and not merely imagined. The phrasing suggests that it is only reason and past experience that leads him to believe the sound was produced from outside himself. “It would have been outside,” as in, ‘it must have come from outside.’

287 The speaker concludes, therefore, that the sound was not “from the vast ventriloquism /

Of sleep’s faded papier-maché . . . ” Yet, an undifferentiating, dream-like mode of perception continues throughout the experience of the morning, and transfers the sounds and qualities of birdsong to the vision of the sun.

That scrawny cry–it was A chorister whose c preceded the choir. It was part of the colossal sun,

Surrounded by its choral rings, Still far away. It was like A new knowledge of reality. (Collected Poems 534)

Stevens’s being surprised by reality, his awakening to the newly vivid, substantial existence outside the mind from out of dreaming consciousness, registers this awakened reality by grafting the cries of the bird to the sun. Moreover, “its choral rings” refers to the encircling cries of the birds and to the appearance of the sun itself, since choral has a near-homophone in coronal (as in corona ring: concentric circles of diffracted light around a celestial orb). This synesthetic image presents the internal landscape of one who gains something “like / A new knowledge of reality” (Collected Poems 534) from an illusion that is, nevertheless, recognized as an illusion. The speaker’s perception of the unity of the birds and the sun is faithful to his feeling of a new reality even though he is never deceived that the sun is not “Still far away,” and the knowledge is only “like” a new knowledge. As a result, the poem carries with it a feeling that such moments very convincingly seem like a new knowledge of reality, and do in fact contain new knowledge, insofar as they awaken one to the world and to the observation of the mind

(as Ruskin put it, as they direct toward the watching of human nature).

288 This example is perhaps the best in Stevens’s oeuvre for my purposes in that, through the title “Not Ideas About The Thing But The Thing In Itself,” and through the confusion over birdsong, the poem frames and undermines the fundamental epistemological and ontological debate over phenomenon and noumenon. The “thing in itself” taken to be the bird is clearly demonstrated as something outside the self, substantial, and real in nature; however, the experience in the mind is no less viscerally real, and in being “like” a new knowledge of reality, reveals that there is no end to discovering and experiencing and encountering new aspects of things, making the unknowable “thing in itself” not only unthreatening, but like a “savage source” of vital exploration. Moreover, this enigmatic existence and blending of qualities of things and appearances never unmoors Stevens’s essential faith in material reality, including the reality of avian consciousness and intelligence. As sure as he knew “lucid, inescapable rhythms,” he wrote in “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird,” “I know, too, / That the blackbird is involved / In what I know” (Collected Poems 94). This involvement of the birds also appears in “Sunday Morning” in a vision of earthly paradise.

Focalized through a female speaker sitting at home in her peignoir, enjoying coffee and oranges and thinking that she is not at mass, the woman expresses dissatisfaction with imagined and fantastical worlds. Instead, she looks for things that give her contentment apart from these.

She says, “I am content when wakened birds, Before they fly, test the reality Of misty fields, with their sweet questionings; But when the birds are gone, and their warm fields Return no more, where, then, is paradise?” (Collected Poems 68)

289 One implication of these lines may be that the birds stand for the poet. The birds, like the poets, test reality with their calls, and send out images and ideas into the world that return aspects of the world fresh to awareness, and often return it warmly. As Santayana wrote of the pathetic fallacy, “We dye the world of our own colour; by a pathetic fallacy, by a false projection of sentiment, we soak Nature with our own feeling, and then celebrate her tender sympathy with our moral being” (158). Nevertheless, the birds here are not mere stand-ins for poets, but actual birds that make calls in preparation for the days activities. The warm fields are actual fields, and when they “return” no more, as in when the fields no longer return their calls and when the fields “remit” no more of the birds and their songs to human ears, earthly paradise is diminished for both.

Stevens never gives up on the actual world in spite of his celebrations of the imagination and the real. It is “the remembrance of awakened birds” that endures “As

April’s green endures” and “not any haunt of prophecy, / Nor any old chimera of the grave,” (Collected Poems 68). J. Hillis Miller suggests that “Sunday Morning,” therefore, is an expression of a “humanism” that is based on man’s knowledge, as Stevens stated, that “the final belief is to believe in a fiction, which you know to be a fiction, there being nothing else’” (Poets of Reality 222). Miller draws this idea not from “Sunday Morning,” however, but from a line in “Esthétique Du Mal” about being “wholly human.” But this line comes at the end of a stanza that begins “Softly let all true sympathizers come /

Without the inventions of sorrow or the sob, / Beyond invention” (CP 317). This stanza locates “Within what we permit, / Within the actual, the warm, the near, / So great a unity” and calls for the further permission of closeness to “minutiae” and “golden forms,”

“the flower and fire of the festivals” “Before we were wholly human and knew

290 ourselves” (CP 317). Being “wholly human” with perfect self-knowledge, therefore, actually restricts true sympathizing with the actual by keeping it at a distance. The lines from “Sunday Morning” recounting the birds’ sweet questionings actually reveal

Stevens’s vision as more than merely humanistic. They suggest that the bird is also involved in doubting and believing and acting upon beliefs they know are fictions in their self-same need to “test reality.”

How deep is this involvement with the birds? To what extent and to what end can humans relate to their sounds and movements? “Sunday Morning” ends

And, in the isolation of the sky, At evening, casual flocks of pigeons make Ambiguous undulations as they sink, Downward to darkness, on extended wings. (Collected Poems 70)

This graceful image of descent, involving “undulations” that ambiguously point to and postpone inevitable darkness, gesture toward a potentially profound human affinity with birds in a shared knowledge of mortality. Sinking down to darkness at the end of day, accepting beauty framed by mortality, accepts that “Death is the mother of beauty.”

Could birds possibly, also, confront this idea?

A 2012 study published in Animal Behaviour suggests that it is not beyond the realm of possibility, since in addition to self-awareness some birds, such as scrub-jays, also possess the instinct to call other birds to the site of a dead bird. The authors of

“Western scrub-jay funerals: cacophonous aggregations in response to dead conspecifics” speculate that the birds wish to publicly share the knowledge that the bird has died and that foraging in the area of the dead bird returns to baseline levels only after forty-eight hours. Whether motivated by fear, grief, or practical avoidance of potential predators,

291 these responses show at least some birds who unequivocally recognize death in another and adapt their conduct and relation to the landscape accordingly. As a related irony hovering around this famous closing image in Stevens, I would note that Poetry published “Sunday Morning” in 1915, the year after the last passenger pigeon died in captivity in a Cincinnati zoo (see the Epilogue for a discussion of Sarah Gridley’s consideration of this closing image in “An Author’s Note.”)

These mentions of Stevens’s birds do not scratch the surface of the avian imagery in his other major poems, like the “hoobla-hoo” and “Bethou me!” of “Notes Toward a

Supreme Fiction” (CP 383, 394), which find Stevens mimicking birds in human language in ways that attempt to do justice to their spirit, since Stevens expressed dissatisfaction with this unreflective voicing of nature his earlier poem “Less and Less Human, O

Savage Spirit,” in which he wrote that “It is the human that demands his speech / From beasts or from the incommunicable mass” (CP 328). In this earlier poem, Stevens implores, “If there must be a god in the house,” let him be “any stick of the mass / Of which we are too distantly a part” (CP 328). Stevens also wrote an avian evolution poem,

“On an Old Horn,” which begins “The bird kept saying that birds had once been men, /

Or were to be, animals with men’s eyes, / Men fat as feathers, misers counting breaths, /

Women of a melancholy one could sing” (CP 230).95 “The Domination of Black” is a poem in which the ambiguous cries of peacocks, either crying out in cheerful solidarity in the hemlocks or fearfully against the oncoming darkness, enter the speaker’s mind as a remembrance. The memory presents options for his own reaction to the darkness that he

95 Stevens wrote, “I particularly like [On An Old Horn]” among those mentioned by his friend, Hi Simons, to whom he wrote, “Man sees reflections of himself in nature. Suppose we start all over again; we start as birds, say, and see reflections of ourselves in man …” (Letters of Wallace Stevens 402-404) 292 cannot quite discern how or if to follow. In “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven,”

Stevens famously writes that “The poem is the cry of its occasion,” which hearkens to his other bird cries, such as the late short lyric, “Of Mere Being.”

In this poem’s fantastic image of interior life, Stevens presents an avian form as the last remainder of being once the mind has been fully evacuated of thought, and even, of humanity. Seeing himself not as a human set apart from other animals by reason, and happier as a result, the poem somewhat primitively (and less mechanistically, as in Yeats) speculates upon a basal soul or source without thought, intention, or personality. The poem reads:

The palm at the end of the mind, Beyond the last thought, rises In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird Sings in the palm, without human meaning, Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason That makes us happy or unhappy. The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space. The wind moves slowly in the branches. The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

In this poem, Stevens points to an inhuman source within the human that exists without need of either thought or reason, but that sits and sings in branches as the wind moves, receptive to its occasions for expression. Stevens creates his stripped down emblem for imagination “at the end of the mind / Beyond the last thought” (Opus Posthumous 141) as a far retreated creature completely foreign to the speaker himself, in no way principally or distinctively human, but explicitly avian. 293 By way of transition from Stevens, I return momentarily to the birds testing reality with their calls across the fields in “Sunday Morning,” and how their disappearing diminishes paradise. This image draws my mind to Frost’s “The Oven Bird.” Frost describes this bird taking stock of late summer, and writes, “The question that he frames in all but words, / Is what to make of a diminished thing” (Frost 120). This poem perhaps draws its bird’s judgmental character from transcriptions of the ovenbird’s song, often recorded as teacher-teacher or preacher-preacher. Like Frost’s “The Wood-Pile” from this dissertation’s introduction, in which Frost self-consciously speculates upon the thoughts of a bird, “The Oven-Bird,” too, projects a bird’s thoughts as it assesses the landscape after the season’s culmination, and readers must wonder if it is the speaker, or the bird, or both, feeling the diminution. “Never Again Would Birds’ Song Be The

Same” speculates on strains of Eve’s Edenic voice becoming absorbed into the songs of birds, and “A Minor Bird” expresses the occasional desire, and the regret of desiring, to silence any (bird or poet’s) song. The final poem that I will mention by Frost in this regard is “The Need of Being Versed In Country Things,” in which the speaker hears the calls of birds as they fly in and out of the windows of a ruined farmhouse, “Their murmur more like the sigh we sigh / From too much dwelling on what has been” (Frost 242).

Frost mistrusts this apparent likeness between human and avian “sighs.” Becoming skeptical, the speaker states that the scene actually held much promise for the birds, against all human evidence of misery in its appearance: “For them there was really nothing sad. / But though they rejoiced in the nest they kept, / One had to be versed in country things / Not to believe the phoebes wept” (242). Frost’s restrained projection

294 demonstrates an awareness of differences in species perception and priorities while recording the strong human inclination to perceive the scene as pitifully sad.

Stevens and Frost each record both the ambiguity and the affective power of bird vocalizations. However, Stevens’s occasionally more inhumanist poems, expressing his sadness at the projections of gods that separate humans from “the mass / Of which we are too distantly a part” (CP 328), may sound slightly more reminiscent of the poetic stylings of Robinson Jeffers. Jeffers’s sobering oratorical and rhetorical style starkly contrasts with the euphonious and usually delicately or decadently abstract Stevens and with the sly subtlety of Frost. Registering the feeling of separation from the mass of nonhuman reality, Jeffers asks brusquely “Then what is the answer?” in his ambitiously titled, “The

Answer.” He then answers himself sternly, “Not to be deluded by dreams.” “[T]he greatest beauty” Jeffers writes “is / Organic wholeness, the wholeness of life and things, the divine beauty of / the universe” and he instructs if not demands, “Love that, not man /

Apart from that” (Selected Poetry 522). As a lyric strategy for representing this holistic beauty with man restored within it, as a part not apart from nature, Jeffers embarked upon a “revalidation of the pathetic fallacy” (Hart Robinson Jeffers and the Biology of

Consciousness 27-28). George Hart points out that Jeffers defended his rhetorical use of the pathetic fallacy, in that “The feeling of deep earnestness and nobility in natural objects and in the universe: --these are human qualities, not mineral or vegetable, but it seems to me I would not impute them into the objects unless there were something in not- man that corresponds to these qualities in man” (qtd. in Hart 146; cited as Collected

Letters 2: 815). Hart finds an Emersonian doctrine of correspondence underwriting this view in Jeffers, but the view might be said to be as close to Ruskin’s theory of poetry as

295 “the suggestion by the imagination of noble grounds for the noble emotions,” and to

Ruskin’s science of the aspects as the science of the calculable effects of matter “upon the eye or heart” of human kind.

The important thing to remember with Jeffers, therefore, is that whatever illusions human kind had inherited or to which it was liable, contact with nature that inspired

“deep earnestness and nobility” pragmatically justified the pathetic fallacy and kept it from participating in delusions ungrounded in the “divine beauty of the universe.”

Ruskin’s fierce passion echoes in Jeffers’s strong convictions on this point, and often

Jeffers represents this divine beauty in the universe as mediated through the consciousness of birds of prey that he viewed as less dream-deluded than humans. Jeffers thought that a hurt hawk could better perceive the “intemperate and savage” “wild god of the world,” which the hawk remembered, but that comfortable and communal humans had forgotten (“Hurt Hawks” 165). Jeffers also proposed “Rock and Hawk” as emblems of qualities toward which humans should strive instead of the “cross” or the “hive.”

Jeffers found that “Fierce consciousness joined with final / Disinterestedness;” and “the falcon’s / Realist eyes and act / Married to the massive / / Mysticism of stone,” shaped a classical and heroic confidence in the material world and the practical tasks of living, fostering a state of mind “Which failure cannot cast down / Nor success make proud”

(502). These and many others of Jeffers’s poems use avian imagery to compare and imagine human and nonhuman souls. He even envisions birds avi-morphizing gods in their own image in Cawdor, making Jeffers a fascinating and sometimes unsettling (in his inhumanism verging upon anti-humanism) subject for study in this vein.

296 Like Jeffers, Ted Hughes’s vast body of animal poems feature countless birds, including crows and grotesque birds of prey in works like The Hawk in the Rain (1957),

Crow (1970), and Cave Birds (1978). Hughes theorizes his method of “capturing animals” in poetry in Poetry in the Making (1967), in which he states that he has no doubt that many of his animal poems are an extension of his childhood practice of catching small animals to observe them and imagine their lives. He wrote, “the poem is a new species of creature, a new specimen of the life outside your own” (17). Additionally,

Hughes stated that he began writing poems at the time that his attitude toward animals changed, around the age of fifteen, when his catching of animals seemed to him to be

“disturbing their lives.” At this point, he explained, “I began to look at them, you see, from their own point of view” (16). In other words, poetry coincided with skepticism over the merely personal view and an increase in imaginative sympathy. Hughes’s avian captures can be seen in such famous examples as the poem “Hawk Roosting,” which interprets the concentration of the fierce hunter along the lines of Jeffers’s “fierce consciousness.” Hughes’s hawk sits at the top of the wood with eyes closed:

Inaction, no falsifying dream Between my hooked head and hooked feet: Or in sleep rehearse perfect kills and eat” (Collected Poems 68).

Opposed to this imagining of the fierce hunter, and in the vein of sympathy with a helpless bird, “Swifts” recounts the appearance, every year, of the swifts in May, and the common event of “a first-fling nearly-flying / Misfit flopped into our yard.” These poor pathetic young birds are unable to fly, and Hughes captures the movements of their

“groggily somersaulting” forms as they try to get airborne “Like a broken toy.” After a toss from Hughes, and a crash into the raspberries, and “fiery hospital hours / In a

297 kitchen” trying to save the bird, Hughes fails, and his “Little Apollo” dies (Hughes CP

315).

Sylvia Plath also found birds sympathetic and charged with poetic potential, but recorded how this potential to interrupt mundane states of mind was not always or satisfactorily realized, and that this failure sometimes had unsettling results. In

“Pheasant,” Plath addresses a hunter (presumably Ted Hughes) in defense of a pheasant’s life as it wandered through their back yard. “I am not mystical: it isn’t / As if I thought it had a spirit” she writes, “It is simply in its element” (Plath 191). This instinctual existence in its element gives the pheasant “a kingliness, a right” (191), in Plath’s view.

As she passes the bird, Plath feels that she trespasses upon it “stupidly” (191). Wanting to give the bird distance for its sake, she also gains an aesthetic distance for herself and feels like a voyeur. She does not believe the bird possesses a “spirit” in the same way that she or the hunter possesses a spirit, so that Plath’s imagining disavows outright humanizing.

Instead, it evokes Nagel’s “what-its-likeness” of conscious experience and Jakob von

Uexküll’s corollary concept of the species umvelt, the mediated life-world. Plath’s pheasant possesses qualitative awareness that carries with it an implicit ethical or political quandary concerning the use of force against its possessor.

The case of Plath’s “Black Rook in Rainy Weather” is different in that the bird is a more common one, the commonness of which is foregrounded. Plath delays and gently ridicules the usual poetic vivacity of birds in this poem as a product of human interpolation and pure chance. The rook is introduced in the second line and the poet states that she does not expect “a miracle / Or an accident / / To set the sight on fire / In my eye” (57). The poem ultimately withholds this miracle, registered so often in bird

298 poetry. Plath begins her poem in a state of skepticism over personal projections that enliven perception, in a state skeptical of pathetic fallacies. However, she admits that in looking outside she, too, desires “Occasionally, some backtalk / From the mute sky” (57).

The rook rather modestly grants “A brief respite from fear / Of total neutrality” (57), in that the live creature in the “dull, ruinous landscape” “can so shine / As to seize my senses, haul / My eyelids up,” but it does not provide one of those miraculous,

“spasmodic / Tricks of radiance” (57). At the end of the poem, “The wait’s begun again,

/ The long wait for the angel, / For that rare, random descent” (57) that has not, this time, in the rook’s rearranging of feathers, found any shuttle, musical or otherwise, in the form of a bird. In Ruskin’s terms, the pathetic fallacy has been avoided, but the sacred landscape experience has also been withheld.

Outside of this sort of sensual and speculative capturing of interior animal life and its effects upon humans in poetry, poets have also more directly stated perceived truths of avian and animal interiority in their poetry. A particularly strong example, akin to

Arnold’s epiphany concerning the unskillfulness with which humans appreciate the cares and fears of others in “Poor Matthias!,” is A. R. Ammons’s reflection on language and animal life in Garbage (1993). Ammons defined words as merely “a specialization on sound / making a kind of language” (49), and attempts to moderate human pride in this skill by stating,

… but there are many

not just languages but kinds of language: the bluejay’s extensive vocabulary signals states

of feeling or being––alarm, exasperation, feeding, idleness––and the signal systems

299 lay out the states for the safety of sharing by others, alerting to danger, even sharing

food sources … ” (50).

After this brief definition, Ammons parses out the differences and similitudes between human and nonhuman language in order to confidently declare that even if “we are nearly

/ alone in words” “we are not alone in language” since “words do for us what other / languages do for others” (50). Exasperated by having to make this case so strenuously,

Ammons gives in to didacticism that is paradoxically refreshing:

have some respect for other speakers of being and for god’s sake drop all this crap about words,

singularity, and dominion: it is so boring,” (50).

Ammons then produces his own anecdotal evidence for birds as other speakers of being by recounting how he can tell the weather before he gets out of bed by the voices of the birds. He writes “I know some of their ‘words’/ because I know, share with them, their states / / of being and feeling” (51). As an example of this kind of sharing, he provides the image of a robin tugging up worms from the ground and relates it to his admiring of the thighbone of a chicken. Ammons ends the section with these words: “our language is something to write home about: / / but it is not the world: grooming does for / baboons most of what words do for us” (52). The provocative statement questions the consequentiality and singularity of human higher-order thought and symbolic communication, even of poetry. However, it also asserts that humans should not lose sight of language functioning as an expression of care for one another and for animals, and that language can also, with precise vision and careful thinking, expresses something of their alien worlds.

300 The critical audience for poetry attempting expressions of the lives of animals includes a large and growing number of self-titled “ecocritics” like John Elder, Terry

Gifford, Jonathan Bate, Lawrence Buell, Ursula Heise, Ann Fisher-Wirth, and John

Shoptaw, as well as many younger poets and writers like Forrest Gander, Joshua Corey, and Karla Armbruster. Shoptaw, in a 2016 essay “Why Ecopoetry?” generally represents the broad sense among ecocritics that being both environmental and environmentalist defines an ecopoem. Shoptaw defines ecopoetry as “nature poetry that has designs on us, that imagines changing the ways we think, feel about, and live and act in the world.” For

Shoptaw, ecopoems are not “environmental” in some ambient or technical or formal sense (as he finds both Timothy Morton and Angus Fletcher arguing), but must also be environmental in theme and content. Good ecopoets, Shoptaw writes, do not naïvely think that “nature” can be “served uncooked on the literal page,” but they must also believe that nature is really “out there,” and that ecopoems should remain sincerely

“tethered” to nature.

One can be more or less accepting of Shoptaw’s somewhat prescriptive program for ecopoetry, as it seemingly flirts with a requirement for rhetorical eloquence in having

“designs on us,” its audience, as opposed to preserving a faithfulness to a voice of consciousness unaware of audience. Of course, any artfully crafted poem designed to be intelligible will appear to have designs on its readers, but will perhaps also attempt to avoid persuading its readers to think and act differently, and focus on providing an experience that informs their relationship to the world, and therefore, its ecological state.

Viewed generously, however, Shoptaw’s program for ecopoetry as poetry that believes nature is really “out there” and that attempts to remain sincerely “tethered” to it directly

301 corresponds to Ruskin’s ideas for a close attention to nature in poetry, one that dismisses immaterialist skepticism, and that is not “naive about matters of perception and poetic representation” (Shoptaw) but aware of relationships between nature and culture, and between language and perception.

Yet, Shoptaw follows most other ecocritics in missing the opportunity to signal

Ruskin’s development of this idea by repeating the traditional ecocritical disparagement of Ruskin’s theories, conceiving of the theory of the pathetic fallacy as opposed to, not aligned with, the modern call for a more critical anthropomorphism by Jane Bennett and others.96 Shoptaw writes,

While it may be fanciful to describe goats as sarcastic or clouds as weeping, the prohibition against anthropomorphism and its offshoot, John Ruskin’s pathetic fallacy, strikes me as arbitrary. To empathize beyond humankind, ecopoets must be ready to commit the pathetic fallacy and to be charged with anthropomorphism. (“Why Ecopoetry?”)

After this dismissal of Ruskin, Shoptaw considers “Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking” to ask, “can birds really grieve? Isn’t such a belief an unscientific, sentimental projection?” Shoptaw answers with reference to Birkhead’s ornithology that it is not a fanciful projection. However, Shoptaw never recognizes that Whitman, whom he sees as electrically “charged with anthropomorphism,” limits his anthropomorphism to the more or less plausible outcries of a grieving bird for the very reason that this projection is more reasonable than others. Shoptaw ignores that Ruskin’s theory responded to Romantic poetry that may have been altogether too “charged with anthropomorphism” and at too abstract or personal or arbitrary a level to remain “tethered” to a “real world” for any representational purpose, shading over into aestheticism and “l’art pour l’art.” Shoptaw,

96 See my discussion of Everndon and McDowell and the works of Bennett and others in the Twentieth Century History and Theory Chapter. 302 therefore, characteristically exemplifies the modern commitment of ecopoets and ecocritics to Ruskinian values while thinking that they oppose Ruskin and his most

(in)famous theory.

A few contemporary poets, however, may anticipate my point by their use of

Ruskin’s term, suggesting some of what I have been arguing about Ruskin’s theory. One of them comes in Shoptaw’s source for his own discussion of ecological poetics. Shoptaw quotes from the first chapter of Forrest Gander’s Redstart: An Ecological Poetics (2012) in order to show support for its preferences. Less interested in so-called “nature poetry” in which all of an amorphous “Nature” features as a theme, Gander is interested in

“poetry that investigates––both thematically and formally––the relationship between nature and culture, language and perception” (2). He notices that we humans cannot ever

“extricate ourselves” from metaphorizing nature, but suggests that perhaps, given facts about the disappearance of earthly habitats and species, that “poetic literacy will be deepened through environmental literacy” (2-3). In other words, Gander hopes that poets understanding the earth’s changing ecology and the difficulties these changes pose to human and nonhuman life will, by virtue of their knowledge and literacy and experience, make ecological realities felt through poetry, and perhaps productively unsettle readers into a different and perhaps more ecological awareness.

Interestingly, in the last chapter of Redstart, “The Movements of Yellow-Rumped

Thornbills; Twittering Machines,” Gander briefly cites the theory of the pathetic fallacy.

Listening for years to the tiny birds singing in concert and discerning in their loud cries

“a deeply informed dialogics,” Gander states that he has “timed an entire book of poetry by their movements” (65). He writes that he regularly observes and absorbs the songs and

303 movements of the birds, and he states of the experience: “in the spirit of a positive pathetic fallacy, I bend this to my poetics because it bends my poetics to itself” (66).

Gander recognizes how the mutual constitution of self and environment always distorts or

“bends” his poetics, but he recognizes the distortion as genuine and authentic in that he continues to think deeply, feel strongly, and watch (and listen) closely. This is Ruskin’s

“positive” pathetic fallacy, in which by keeping eyes “fixed firmly on the pure fact”

Gander can know more surely that the feeling that he invests in the scene of the Yellow-

Rumped Thornbills is perhaps less impetuous and personal, but a “true” one.

At least two other contemporary poets have expressed similar ideas in the terms of the pathetic fallacy in poems, and both by referencing birds. Beverly Bie Brahic’s “On the Pathetic Fallacy” (2012) suggests the limits of human vision into animal minds that

Nagel, and Ruskin before him, and countless others in-between, outlined. But Brahic’s poem dramatizes this limit, and makes readers feel its impenetrability, through the common event of a bird flying into a glass surface. The poem locates a human viewer, inside, viewing the bird with the type of scientific and sympathetic eye that Ruskin would desire. The first stanza reads:

A bird bangs your window—no tender lamb, no Corinna, just you with your feet up, Reader, reading, and a sheet of glass between you, the tree and the carport’s tarpaper roof. It’s a real bird (now you hunt for its name): it’s a genus something species something, it’s not some despair of your own masquerading as a bird. Bigger than a sparrow, with a black hood. Beak dipped in egg yolk. Body two-tone, like a ’50s Chevrolet—here it is, Reader, you found it! Junco hyemlis (16 cm [61⁄4 in] long). 304

The first stanza of the poem asserts that no personalizing of the bird occurs, and the

“reader” within the poem interprets the bird according to its objective scientific categories, almost as if it were in a museum display case. (Note: the reader may still metaphorize elements of the bird––“Beak dipped / in egg yolk” and “like a ‘50s

Chevrolet”––without admitting the pathetic fallacy). It is a real bird, not mythological or symbolic or in any way “masquerading” as a human interior state. The reader then consults the scientific literature, excitedly finds the bird’s name and dimensions, but also retains an “innocent eye” as to the bird’s actual look and movements, revealing that the scientific description cannot contain all that the creature presents for live observation.

From the first and second line, Brahic toys with the actual reader’s sense of being inside or outside of the poem. The use of the second-person pronouns “your” and “you” unites the reader reading the bird book within the poem and the reader of the self-same poem. The actual poem is imagined as holding the same relation to “you,” its live reader, that the bird book holds to the reader within the poem. In another turn of the screw,

Brahic’s poem becomes the bird itself, which is looked at through a flat mediating surface, and the first two lines suggest that the reader may put her- or himself in place of the bird: “A bird bangs your window—no tender lamb, / no Corinna, just you” (106).

Locating the human self as distinct from bird in the poem is not too difficult, but difficult enough at first to register the liminality. The exultant statement, “you found it!” at the end of the first stanza establishes the strong difference and recognition, but it is also ironic in that the reader’s greatest excitement comes not from the sight of the actual bird but from finding the bird’s genus and species in the book. This finding and naming

305 allows for a definitive accomplishment on the part of the proud reader, but it does not bring the reader closer to the actual bird.

In the poem’s second and final stanza, a barrage of questions demonstrate the insufficiency of the bird book for accessing the life of the bird, and the reader does not seem to know how to go on exploring the connection. Stuck in a curious skepticism about really knowing the bird, the poem cannot creatively reach toward answers.

Why does this “Junco hyemlis” (if that’s its name) keep thrashing at the pane? Another bird, a bird it doesn’t know is a double of itself? Reflection, rival, or a mate, another junco on a winter branch of the birch tree at your window, near the carport roof? Wave your arms, Reader, shout! No good. You’re trapped behind glass, in a box, in far away repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat repeat re- why should it ever stop? (Brahic 106)

The reader of the bird book, the reader of the poem, the viewer of the bird, the bird itself, all seem to be of one body finding connection impossible, all just “thrashing at the pane.”

Inverting the reader’s position once again, the reader seems as if they could be on either side of the glass display case, “trapped / behind glass, in a box,” observing the bird or being observed by it. Moreover, any attempt by the reader to understand the bird outside or pass into its head only mimics the bird’s attempts to pass through the glass and into the reader’s interior world. The facts by themselves are just “No good.”

The most obvious critique of restricting the pathetic fallacy in this poem, dramatized by the monotonous and fruitless repetition of repeat, comments on the theory as a restriction on imagination. If imagination is restricted by attention to Ruskin’s pure

306 fact, then the invisible world of thoughts and motivations and emotions will never be revealed, and the worlds that exist in other creatures will never be even minimally accessed. The final question, “why should it ever stop?” pictures the bird and the human endlessly thrashing in the attempt to know the other’s world. However, the theory of the pathetic fallacy would not have restricted imagination “tethered” to what could be very closely observed in the bird, that did not take leave of all representational obligation and began freely speculating on the most abstract place of the bird in an anthropomorphized

Nature. In short, Ruskin would have been as frustrated as Brahic seems to be at the lack of an informed imaginative attempt at perceiving the “spiritual nature” of the bird, and I cannot help imagining him opening the window to better see the “dim image and gleam of humanity” that he saw “in every animal’s eye” and which he felt made a claim upon humans to recognize “the fellowship of the creature, if not of the soul” (14.174).

A poem that registers this fellowship through the emotional reverberation of imaginative sympathy with the bird is Marie Ponsot’s, “Pathetic Fallacies Are Bad

Science But.” Ponsot’s poem is occasional, “On reading Suzanne K. Langer’s Mind,” and

Langer provides the narrative that provokes the speaker’s pathetic fallacy. The opening line of Ponsot’s poem, “If leaf-trash chokes the stream-bed,” toys with readers alerted to pathetic fallacies from the poem’s title, but the trash’s choking of a stream-bed is simply figurative language, a beautiful fallacy of wilful fancy. Ponsot’s poem generally endorses

Ruskin’s way of seeing nature.

To see clear, resist the drag of images. Take nature as it is, not Dame nor Kind. Act in events; touch what you name. Abhor easy obverts of natural metaphor. Let human speech breathe out its best poor bridges from mind to world, mind to self, mind to mind. (Ponsot) 307 The speaker advocates in these lines not a lesser sympathy with the world, but a greater degree of intimate knowledge and experience of the world as a way toward an enlightened sympathy, self-consciously and attentively constructing “its best poor bridges.” Touching what you name makes sure that the thing is not solely determined by the “easy obverts of natural metaphor” or tired notions of Nature as a feminized and dominated “Dame” or some other facile variation on “mother nature.”

Ponsot seems to be saying, wade into the waves if you would like to know their

“raging,” and breathe out your verbal bridge once such experience and knowledge has been absorbed. Resist habitual forms of expression that deflect reality as opposed to intensifying one’s vision. However, Ponsot makes an exception for a quicker sympathy when reading of a bird’s emotions when a hawk snatched its mate from its nest. The next stanza begins,

Yet, I admit the event of the wood thrush: In a footnote Langer (her book rapids-clean like the spring-water aired over sleeked rock) says she witnessed an August bird in shock when a hawk snatched its mate. It perched, rushed notes fluting two life-quotas in one flood, its lungs pushing its voice, flushing the keen calls, pumped out as the heart pumps blood, not in twilight or warning but noon & wrong, its old notes whistled too fast but accurate.

I read this drenched in bird-panic, its spine- fusing loss all song, all loss; that loss mine awash in unanswered unanswered song. And I cannot claim we are not desolate. (Ponsot)

Ponsot’s sympathetic projection, her sense that she felt the “bird-panic” of “spine- / fusing loss,” seems to bridge human and avian minds and is the pathetic fallacy that is the exception (“Yet, I admit the event of the woodthrush”) to her otherwise impersonal view. 308 The descriptive account of the songbird’s vocal response has made the loss her own,

“drenching” Ponsot with panic and loss. For the most steely-eyed empiricist, which

Ruskin was not, the sympathy still produces only a false appearance. Who can really know what the bird felt? How can one say its notes were “fluting two life-quotas”? The ambiguous and negative statement of the last line calls upon the reader to decide. Who will be included in we? Is the statement “I cannot claim we are not desolate” a recognition that humans are all locked inside our own thick walls of personality, and that our perceptions of beauty and feeling in nature are always sentimental projections? Or, is it a statement of profound solidarity with other beings who experience similar desolations? What does it mean for the way we treat other creatures if our sympathy eventually convinces us that they are a meaningful part of us?

309 Epilogue

There are only half as many songbirds alive today as there were fifty years ago

(Stutchbury 4). The worrisome decline in numbers of birds, creatures that perform vital ecological functions for humans like pest control, seed dispersal, and pollination, include the great poetic songbirds. Nightingale populations are reported as down ninety-three percent from 1967 to 2007 according to the British Trust for Ornithology, and mockingbird populations down eighteen percent from 1967 to 2007 according to the

Audubon Society. Still, these declines are merely a blip in what scientists refer to as the planet’s sixth mass extinction event (Kolbert 3). This “event” may well turn out to be as bad or worse than the last one, brought on by a collision with a comet, that wiped out the bird’s ancestors, the dinosaurs, sixty-five million years ago. This time, however, the event is the result of human activity. Habitat destruction, over hunting, and the effects of global climate change and pollution are bringing us closer each year to Rachel Carson’s

“Silent Spring,” the title of which she altered from Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” which served as the epigraph to her environmentalist jeremiad: “The sedge has wither’d from the lake, / And no birds sing.” To more explicitly connect the investigations of this dissertation to the ecological crisis humans, birds, and other earthly creatures face, I offer two last poems.

Mark Jarman’s “Chimney Swifts” expresses the linguistic issue of birdsong very plainly, “They speak their language, and we listen / In our own” (Jarman 108). However, our language need not separate our mutual sense of the health of the world. Jarman records how he relates to the return of the swifts each year.

310 To watch for them, to become expectant, To need their spring arrival, To know the kink from craning back the neck During the warm, late afternoons of April, Is part of the enchantment,

Is to believe they feel it, too, and act. (Jarman 108)

Just as the birds feel something akin to our expectation of spring, they also feel the strangeness of changing weather patterns and the loss of habitat. Humans feel it too, and humans must act, knowing that it is within their power to do so. For too long, action has been stifled for a great number of reasons, including what Ann Fisher-Wirth and Laura-

Gray Street call a “profound failure of imagination” since “What we humans disregard, what we fail to know and grasp, is easy to destroy: a mountaintop, a coral reef, a forest, a human community” (The Ecopoetry Anthology xxvii). Poetry, by returning us to “the world of our senses,” may help shake humans out of habits that are making our planet uninhabitable.

Theodore Roethke imagined birds on a Sunday morning singing songs that enriched their earthly paradise. However, like Stevens’s woman in “Sunday Morning” who asks “when the birds are gone” “where, then, is paradise?” (Collected Poems 68),

Roethke also registers something like the Ovenbird’s sense of a “diminished thing” in his traditional catalogue. In “All Morning,” Roethke writes,

It is neither spring nor summer: it is Always. With towhees, finches, chickadees, California quail, wood doves, With wrens, sparrows, juncos, cedar waxwings, flickers, With Baltimore orioles, Michigan bobolinks, And those birds forever dead, The passenger pigeon, the great auk, the Carolina paroquet, All birds remembered, O never forgotten. All in my yard, of a perpetual Sunday, 311 All morning! All morning! (Roethke)

Finally, the poet Sarah Gridley writes in an author’s note that “An author (Latin auctor) is the orphaned love child of two creatures: a character actor and an auk” referring to the extinct bird of that name. Also writing with “Sunday Morning” in mind, as well as Stevens’s “The Dove in the Belly,” Gridley finds it strange that “the word

‘author’ can be both a noun and a transitive verb. It comes from the Latin augere, to increase, originate, promote. Stevens is the author of casual flocks of pigeons. Stevens authored ambiguous undulations.” Frustrated by interpretations like those of Northrop

Frye, who read Stevens’s “The Dove in the Belly” not as a poem about a man and a tempestuous bird but as an anima myth, Gridley wants to see the bird stand for the bird sometimes. But Gridley is not naïve about language. She knows, like Stevens, that seeing and representing value outside one’s self depends upon a response from the inner world, from an interior imagining imbued with feeling. But as an author that is also an animal, and as one who would increase or promote the animals one writes about, the mediations of language and the failure to preserve other animals or perceive ourselves in them puts one in an awkward position, especially when the creatures are disappearing or gone.

Gridley asks, “Why have animals always had to stand for something? Does that include us?” Contemplating standing for something with regard to animals, Gridley tells us that

“The word awkward, not related to author, actor, or auk, comes from the Old Norse afugr ‘turned the wrong way’ + -ward” (Gridley “An Author’s Note”)

It feels awkward in America today to read poetry and to write about birds, and it feels awkward to bring up again and again the powerful connections that people have felt, and the lengths to which they have gone, to try to capture and convey a portion of that 312 feeling and intuition of a life in nonhuman creatures, especially when so much human life goes un-respected and unacknowledged. Looking at all of the wrong turns, and at all of the struggling and disappearing creatures, human and nonhuman, I cannot claim we are not all desolate. Yet, perhaps by informing our best imaginative projections with ecological knowledge and experience, and by touching and seeing what we name, then we will feel it, too, and act.

313

Appendix

Figure 1 “Ngram of Pathetic Fallacy and Objective Correlative, 1850-2008” Google Ngram Search. 2 December 2015. The noticeable spike in pathetic fallacy in 1942 clearly results from Miles’s study that necessarily mentions the term copiously.

Figure 2 “Ngram of Pathetic Fallacy, Objective Correlative, Affective Fallacy, and Intentional Fallacy” Google Ngram Search. 2 December 2015 314 TABLE OF FREQUENCIES

AMOUNT OF PATHETIC FALLACY IN THE WORK OF TWENTY-FOUR POETS (See text, pp-190-191, for explanation; see Bibliography, pp. 299-300, for works indicated.)

Poet Pathetic Fallacy in Average number of lines number of lines in which one pathetic fallacy occurs Collins 30/1550 52 Gray 20/1100 55 Beattie 20/1100 55 Cowper 100/5200 52 Burns 50/2000 40 Darwin 80/2450 31 Blake 50/1000 20 Wordsworth 80/4900 61 Scott 25/3000 120 Byron 15/950 63 Shelley 60/3170 53 Keats 75/3470 46

Average: 54

Tennyson 130/11,100 85 Browning 10/2880 288 Rossetti 40/4570 114 Morris 35/3670 105 Swinburne 25/1540 62 Hopkins 10/1350 135 Meredith 23/2300 100 Housman 10/1350 135 Imagist Poets 20/1200 60 Pure Poetry 60/2000 33 Poetry (the magazine) 7/660 94 Eliot 5/1370 274

Average: 124 Table 1 “Reproduction of Josephine Miles’s ‘Table of Frequencies’” The decline of the pathetic fallacy by over 200% from Collins through Keats to Tennyson through Eliot only reads instances of the pathetic fallacy as an object and an attributed emotion. As Burke implies, Miles’s study is likely to discount the many suggestively anthropomorphic personifications in subtler linguistic forms, like Richards’s “projectile adjectives,” and others actuated by Burke’s “action-motion ambiguity.”

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