On the Origins, Nature and Influence of the Buried Life of Matthew Arnold: the Buried Life in Literature, 1750-1950
On the Origins, Nature and Influence of the Buried Life of Matthew Arnold: The Buried Life in Literature, 1750-1950
Anthony Hunt BA, Dip.Ed., MA
This thesis is presented for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy of the University of Western Australia, School of Social and Cultural Studies, 2010.
There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought he may think; what a saint has felt he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. [Emerson, 1889, p.1]
______
Abstract
In this thesis an attempt is made to link together, or find common ground between, a few seemingly disparate things. Firstly, an attempt is made to link some of the critical interests or obsessions of the twentieth-century English poet and critic, Ted Hughes, to those of the twentieth- century American memoirist and critic, Paul Fussell. In particular, an attempt is made to find a link between Hughes’ work on writers such as William Shakespeare, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, T.S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen and Keith Douglas, and Fussell’s work on writers such as T.S. Eliot, Wilfred Owen, Keith Douglas and Robert Byron. Secondly, an attempt is made to link together, or find common ground between, the works of the nineteenth-century English poet and critic, Matthew Arnold, and those of the twentieth-century American poet and critic, T.S. Eliot. In particular, an attempt is made to find common ground between Arnold’s poem, “Empedocles on Etna”, and Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land”, and to link that to the critical interests of Hughes and Fussell. Arnold’s concept of the buried life, which has its basis in nineteenth-century uniformitarianism, such as that of Ralph Waldo Emerson, provides the link or common ground between these seemingly disparate things; and an understanding of this concept allows for a reading or interpretation of “Empedocles on Etna” that is not possible without that understanding. This thesis explores the concept of the buried life, then, with particular reference to its use in the works of Matthew Arnold. It also explores the concept’s origins in the literature of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-centuries, and in ancient Greek literature; its use in the literature of the mid-nineteenth-century by writers other than Arnold; and its influence on the literature of the late-nineteenth and the early to mid- twentieth-centuries. In particular, it looks at its influence on T.S. Eliot. As the concept of the buried life did not develop in isolation, and is similar to a number of other concepts from the period 1750-1950, other related concepts from that period, such as Emerson’s concept of the universal mind, Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the primal unity and Carl Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious, are discussed in this thesis, insofar as they can help to explain the origins, nature and influence of the buried life. It is argued that the buried life is a concept that, firstly, helps to explain the nature of poetic inspiration, so that it is like the old idea of the poetic Muse. However, it locates the Muse mainly within the poet’s subconscious mind, but also within what is usually buried in certain landscapes or submerged in certain seascapes. Secondly, it is argued that this concept is like a replacement for, supplement to, or alternative version of Christianity, which locates God mainly within the poet’s subconscious mind, but also within what is buried in landscapes or submerged in seascapes; and it equates God with a
type of universal consciousness. In this concept, poetry comes from a fusion of the poet’s conscious mind with their subconscious mind; or from a fusion of the poet’s mind with what is buried in certain landscapes or submerged in certain seascapes; or from a fusion of the poet’s surface life with their buried life; or from a fusion of the poet’s individual consciousness with a universal consciousness; or from a fusion of the poet with God. As the concept of the buried life has never received any extended critical consideration, at least in an Arnoldian context, the original contribution of this thesis is in its exploration of the origins of the concept; in its exploration of the nature of the concept; and in its exploration of the influence of the concept.
______
Table of Contents
Chapter One: Introduction page 1 Chapter Two: What is the Buried Life? page 20 Chapter Three: The River of “The Buried Life” page 43 Chapter Four: The Emergence and Development of Arnold’s Poetic Personality page 60 Chapter Five: Arnold, Gray and Wordsworth page 74 Chapter Six: The Surface Life and the Buried Life page 92 Chapter Seven: Arnold, Eliot and the God of the Buried Life page 124 Chapter Eight: Arnold, the Buried Life and Dionysus page 153 Chapter Nine: Arnold, the Buried Life and Empedocles page 172 Chapter Ten: Arnold, Lewis, Byron, Connolly and Stallworthy page 182 Chapter Eleven: “The Strayed Reveller” page 203 Chapter Twelve: “Empedocles on Etna” page 210
______
Acknowledgements
Many thanks to my supervisor, Kieran Dolin, who was very patient and helpful throughout a long, drawn-out process. Thanks also to Lynne and Lyall Hunt who made many very useful suggestions; and to Meredyth and Kim Crossing. Finally, thanks to Rebecca, Elyssa and Darcy Hunt for their love, support and encouragement.
Chapter One ______
Introduction
This thesis explores the concept of the buried life, with particular reference to its use in the works of the mid-nineteenth-century writer, Matthew Arnold. It also explores the concept’s origins in the literature of the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth- centuries, and in ancient Greek literature; its use in the literature of the mid-nineteenth- century by writers other than Arnold; and its influence on the literature of the late- nineteenth and the early to mid-twentieth-centuries. As the concept of the buried life did not develop in isolation, and is similar to a number of other concepts from the same period, other related concepts from the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-centuries are discussed in this thesis, insofar as they can help to explain the origins, nature and influence of the buried life. It is argued that the buried life is a concept that, firstly, helps to explain the nature of poetic inspiration, so that it is like the old idea of the poetic Muse. However, it locates the Muse mainly within the poet’s subconscious mind, but also within what is usually buried in certain landscapes or submerged in certain seascapes. Secondly, it is argued that this concept is like a version of Christianity which locates God mainly within the poet’s subconscious mind, but also within what is buried in certain landscapes or submerged in certain seascapes; and it equates God with a type of universal consciousness. In this concept, poetry comes from a fusion of the poet’s conscious mind with their subconscious mind; or from a fusion of the poet’s mind with what is buried in certain landscapes or submerged in certain seascapes; or from a fusion of the poet’s surface life with their buried life; or from a fusion of the poet’s individual consciousness with a universal consciousness; or from a fusion of the poet with God. (“Their” is used with “the poet” throughout to be gender-neutral, but also to give a sense of the poet being plural as well as singular.) As the concept of the buried life has never received any extended critical consideration, at least in an Arnoldian context, the original contribution of this thesis is in its exploration of the origins of the concept; in its exploration of the nature of the concept; and in its exploration of the influence of the concept. This thesis thus explores a very large continent of ideas; so that, of necessity, it is like a sketch map of that whole continent, indicating the locations of its most important features, rather than being like a detailed map of one feature in particular.
The Topic The concept of the buried life was important in the works of the nineteenth- century poet and critic, Matthew Arnold, yet he mentions it by name only twice in all his writings. Once is in the title of his poem, “The Buried Life”; and a second time is in the text of that poem: 1
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire For knowledge of our buried life. [“The Buried Life”, lines 45-48]
He also refers to the buried life in his poem, “Empedocles on Etna”:
To see if we will now at last be true To our only true, deep-buried selves, Being one with which we are one with the whole world. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act 2, lines 369-371]
The concept is not limited to Arnold’s works. Arnold’s friend, the poet Arthur Hugh Clough, refers to the buried life in Ambarvalia:
Excitements come, and act and speech Flow freely forth; - but no, Nor they, nor aught beside, can reach The buried world below. [Clough, 1974, pp.30-31]
T.S. Eliot mentions the buried life by name once, in his poem “Portrait of a Lady”:
‘Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the Spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful, after all.’ [Eliot, 1974, p.20]
And occasionally a critic much-influenced by Arnold, Clough or Eliot will mention the buried life by name; as does, for example, Northrop Frye in Anatomy of Criticism:
The culture of the past is not only the memory of mankind, but our own buried life, and study of it leads to a recognition scene, a discovery in which we see, not our past lives, but the total cultural form of our present life. [Frye, 2000, pp.345-346]
It does not seem like much and the buried life has received little extended critical consideration. However, Arnold, Clough, Eliot and Frye all seem to be alluding to what is, in their minds at least, a fairly coherent and substantial concept which, it is argued, resembles something like Schopenhauer’s concept of the universal will; or Emerson’s concept of the universal mind; or Nietzsche’s concept of the primal unity; or Laforgue’s concept of the universal unconscious; or James’ concept of the universal more; or Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious. In addition, as it will be shown, it is also the case that Arnold, Clough, Eliot and Frye seem to have the concept of the buried life in mind in many of their works, even when it is not mentioned or referred to directly; and many other writers, too, in the period from about 1750 to about 1950, seem to have it in mind in many of their works, even when it is not mentioned by name or referred to directly. Arnold appears to have named the concept of the buried life; and, except for 2
Eliot, he perhaps described it more clearly in his poetry than any other writer; and, except for Eliot again, he was perhaps a more effective advocate for it in prose than any other writer. So, in an investigation of the concept of the buried life, the task is, firstly, to investigate its origins and show where Arnold might have got the concept from. Secondly, the task is to describe the nature of the concept, show how it is coherent and substantial, and show how it operates in Arnold’s work. Thirdly, the task is to investigate the influence of the concept on writers after Arnold. With regard to the first of these tasks, it is argued that Arnold got the concept mainly from late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century writers associated with Romanticism, such as Gray, Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle and Emerson. However, Arnold also tried to establish ancient Greek sources for the concept, such as in the works of the PreSocratic philosopher, Empedocles. With regard to the second of these tasks, in terms of its nature, it is argued that the concept is like a myth which, firstly, operates on a private level to unleash the poet’s imagination to enable them to write poetry; and, secondly, operates on a public level as a replacement for, supplement to, or alternative version of Christianity. Very briefly, and in its most basic form, it is a myth that is like the story told in Wilfred Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”, since, it is argued, Owen’s version of that story derives from the myth. It is argued that it is a coherent and substantial concept because it was first developed, mainly by Wordsworth and Coleridge, into an elaborate philosophical scheme based on moments of brief intuitive insight. It was then further- developed by Arnold and other writers to take account of changing conditions in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. It is argued that it operates in Arnold’s work by unifying it. With regard to the third of these tasks, it is argued that the concept had a major influence on a number of English writers up until about the mid-twentieth-century; and its influence lingered on even into the late-twentieth-century in the case of a few writers like Ted Hughes and Jon Stallworthy.
The Critical Approach The concept of the buried life is never the main subject of any of Arnold’s works, nor anyone else’s, and is only ever alluded to in any work. Even “The Buried Life” itself only alludes to the concept. It is as if, as Ted Hughes thought, that:
all poetry, insofar as it moves us and connects with us, is a revealing of something that the writer doesn’t actually want to say, but desperately needs to communicate, to be delivered of. Perhaps it’s the need to keep it hidden that makes it poetic - makes it poetry. The writer daren’t actually put it into words, so it leaks out obliquely, smuggled through analogies. We think we’re writing something to amuse, but we’re actually saying something we desperately need to share. [in Wagner, 2001, pp.16-17]
This allusiveness or obliquity would appear to make it difficult to find a useful critical
3
approach to the topic. However, that is not necessarily so. The critical approach used in this thesis is based on a sort of literary uniformitarianism, somewhat akin to the geological uniformitarianism of Sir Charles Lyell or the cultural uniformitarianism of Sir James Frazer, that presupposes the unity of all things. In other words, it presupposes the existence of a unified, objective, unchanging reality behind people’s subjective perceptions of disunity and change:
Miss Nancy Ellicott smoked And danced all the modern dances; And her aunts were not quite sure how they felt about it, But they knew that it was modern.
Upon the glazen shelves kept watch Matthew and Waldo, guardians of the faith, The army of unalterable law. [Eliot, 1974, p.32]
In a way, it presupposes that, beneath superficial differences, all poets are essentially the same poet and all poems are essentially the same poem, since it presupposes that all poets and all poems essentially describe the same unified, objective, unchanging reality. Indeed, Arnold himself assumed such a literary uniformitarianism, as did many other writers in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, like Friedrich Schlegel, who wrote:
All poems of antiquity are interlinked, so that the whole is formed from the accumulation and its connections; everything interpenetrates, and one and the same spirit is expressed throughout in different ways. And thus it is truly no empty formula to say: ancient poetry is a single, indivisible, complete poem. [in Strauss, 1971, p.21]
However, Arnold, along with Emerson and Eliot, assumed such a literary uniformitarianism amongst poets and poems of modernity as well as of antiquity, and it found expression in his concept of the buried life. This critical approach derives mainly from critical thinking about Modernism, and also from the nature of the topic itself. In her book, Mastery and Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism (1994), Jewel Spears Brooker explains how this critical approach operates. Firstly, she notes how:
Traditionally, art has derived its unity in large part from the fact that it could be related to a broadly shared, often unconsciously shared, cultural abstraction. For most of the past two thousand years, that abstraction has been the Christian religion. [Brooker, 1994, p.119]
Christianity, then, according to this view, operated in art as a broadly shared cultural abstraction which explained the nature of a unified or shared consciousness that was believed to exist at the very margins of, or beyond, our ordinary, everyday, individual consciousness. It also explained how our ordinary, everyday, individual consciousness 4
was related to or alienated from this shared consciousness. There was believed to be direct evidence for the existence of this shared consciousness in the ritual of the Mass; in the visions of God, and feelings of union with the Godhead, had by exceptional people, such as the Christian mystics; and also in the quite regular contact that ordinary people were said to have had with God before the Fall, or at least in Biblical times. After their deaths, of course, all people were usually said to have the opportunity to experience this shared consciousness. Brooker then explains that:
In the early twentieth century, relating an art work to a shared cultural abstraction would have been a hoax, for as works like The Waste Land and “The Second Coming” make clear, there was no shared abstraction capable of holding Western civilization together. [Brooker, 1994, p.119]
She further explains that:
Christianity, of course, was the underlying tradition that had held things together. Its disappearance, not as an object of conscious individual belief, but as the glue holding Western civilization together, is the subject of some of the most famous poems of [last] century, including poems as diverse as Yeats’s “The Second Coming” and Eliot’s The Waste Land. [Brooker, 1994, p.168]
However, it will be argued that, even after the withdrawal of Arnold’s “Sea of Faith” [“Dover Beach”, line 21], so to speak, the concept of the buried life still operated as a “shared cultural abstraction” in a lot of art works from the nineteenth and twentieth- centuries, including “The Waste Land”; although it is true to say that there were a number of other similar concepts around at that time with which it competed or overlapped, such as Schopenhauer’s, Emerson’s, Nietzsche’s, Laforgue’s, James’ and Jung’s, mentioned above. These were all concepts to fill the ground vacated by Christianity; to proclaim that there was a unity underlying the seeming diversity of the world; and to act as a new “glue” to hold Western civilisation together; although none of them, because of their lack of popular appeal, was anywhere near as successful a “glue” as Christianity had been been. In other words, they were all concepts that proclaimed what Joan Didion called, with reference to Doris Lessing’s literary uniformitarianism, which has its basis in the fragmentary hints and guesses offered up by Sufism [Lessing, 2004, pp.254-268], “the ‘oneness’ of things that seems always to lie just past the edge of controlled conscious thought”, and which is “familiar to anyone who has ever had a high fever, or been exhausted to the point of breaking, or is just on the whole only marginally engaged in the dailiness of life” [Didion, 1993, pp.20-121]. To take William James’ concept of the universal more, at this point, as representative of them all, in The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), James’ starting point was with the disappearance of Christianity “as the glue holding Western civilization together”. He therefore began by considering, not organised religions, but religious experiences in the psychology of isolated individuals: 5
Religion, therefore, as I now ask you arbitrarily to take it, shall mean for us the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men in their solitude, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine. Since the relation may be either moral, physical, or ritual, it is evident that out of religion in the sense in which we take it, theologies, philosophies, and ecclesiastical organizations may secondarily grow. [James, 1982, p.31]
As was the case with the creators of all of these concepts, then, James began by considering individual psychological experience. He then built up, from the religious experiences in the psychology of isolated individuals, a new “shared cultural abstraction” to replace, supplement or provide an alternative version of Christianity; as the creators of those other concepts all built up from individual psychological experiences new “shared cultural abstractions” to replace, supplement or provide alternative versions of Christianity. Having done that, James’ conclusion was therefore that:
The warring gods and formulas of the various religions do indeed cancel each other, [and] there is a certain uniform deliverance in which all religions appear to meet. It consists of two parts: - 1. An uneasiness; and 2. Its solution. 1. The uneasiness, reduced to its simplest terms, is a feeling that there is something wrong about us as we naturally stand. 2. The solution is a sense that we are saved from wrongness by making proper connection with the higher powers. [James, 1982, pp.507-508]
For James, the religious experiences of all individuals shared a lot in common, in that they all fitted into a shared pattern or myth of spiritual death and rebirth, and therefore all religions also shared a lot in common. According to James, sooner-or-later the individual becomes aware that there is a “higher part” of his own nature that is in contact with “the higher powers”:
He becomes conscious that this higher part is coterminous and continuous with a MORE of the same quality, which is operative in the universe outside of him, and which he can keep in working touch with, and in a fashion get on board of and save himself when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck. [James, 1982, p.508]
It seemed to James that, in his concept of the universal more, “all the phenomena” in the religious experiences of isolated individuals were:
accurately describable in these very simple general terms. They allow for the divided self and the struggle; they involve the change of personal centre and the surrender of the lower self; they express the appearance of exteriority of the helping power and yet account for our sense of union with it; and they fully justify our feelings of security and joy. [James, 1982, p.509]
Finally, James identified his universal more with the subconscious mind; as those other 6
thinkers all identified their particular concepts with the subconscious mind:
we shall do well to seek first of all a way of describing the ‘more’, which psychologists may also recognize as real. The subconscious self is nowadays a well-accredited psychological entity; and I believe that in it we have exactly the mediating term required. Apart from all religious considerations, there is actually and literally more life in our total soul than we are at any time aware of... in [the subconscious self] many of the performances of genius seem... to have their origin; and in our study of conversion, of mystical experiences, and of prayer, we have seen how striking a part invasions from this region play in the religious life. [James, 1982, pp.511-512]
Allowing for his exclusion of the particular “gods and formulas” that distinguish Schopenhauer’s, Emerson’s, Nietzsche’s, Laforgue’s, James’ and Jung’s concepts from each other, and from Arnold’s concept of the buried life, then James gives as good a description there of the basic nature of all of these concepts, with their reliance on ideas about the subconscious, as he has of his own concept of the universal more. According to David J. Tacey, Jung, for example, believed that:
the old image of God - the one attacked by Nietzsche and debunked by Freud - had indeed ‘died’ to Western culture, but that a new image of God would be born in our midst, an image that would fulfil contemporary human needs and at the same time reveal a new and previously undisclosed or ‘unconscious’ side of the Godhead. [Tacey, 1995, p.x]
After the disappearance of Christianity “as the glue holding Western civilization together”, then, shared cultural abstractions like the universal more, the collective unconscious and the buried life would generally be located in the “unconscious” or the subconscious. The buried life thus operated in art to explain the nature of a unified or shared consciousness that was said to exist at the very margins of, or beyond, or more particularly below, our ordinary, everyday, individual consciousness. It also explained how our ordinary, everyday, individual consciousness was related to or alienated from this shared consciousness. There was believed to be direct evidence for the existence of this shared consciousness in what may be be called, after Mallarmé, the poetic ritual; in the visions of it, and feelings of union with it, had by exceptional people, such as the great Romantic poets; and also in the quite regular contact that ordinary people were said to have had with it, back in some vaguely-defined “pre-dissociation” time, before there was “something wrong about us as we naturally stand”. (After Winckelmann, this time was usually associated with an idealised ancient Greece, although the Middle Ages, too, were idealised by the Victorians.) After their deaths, of course, all people were usually said to have the opportunity to experience this shared consciousness. To return now to Brooker, after noting the disappearance of Christianity as a broadly shared cultural abstraction, she then continues by noting that in Modernist art works: 7
unity derives neither from sequence nor from abstractions shared by a culture, but from an abstraction selected by an artist and constructed collaboratively with individual readers. [Brooker, 1994, p.119]
She then cites Sir James Frazer’s The Golden Bough as the main source for this feature of Modernism, which she calls the “mythical method” [Brooker, 1994, p.119]. She notes that “Frazer does not assume the existence of a culturally shared myth or abstraction. He brings his own myth and takes special care to keep it always in his reader’s mind” [Brooker, 1994, p.119]. Frazer does, however, assume, beneath superficial differences, “the mental homogeneity of primitive mankind” [Ackermann, 1990, p.35], or “the psychic unity of mankind” [Ackermann, 1990, pp.45-46]; so he assumes that his myth, of which the “myth” of Jesus Christ forms a part, does represent something universal. As a cultural uniformitarian, Frazer was interested in what has been called the concept of the “Universal People”, which describes what all people in all cultures could be said to share in common. This concept was disregarded by twentieth-century anthropologists like Bronislaw Malinowski, who preferred to focus on the particular features of individual societies, but it has recently been revived by anthropologists like Donald Brown [Wade, 2006, pp.65-66]. Brooker then makes some general points about the “mythical method” of Modernism. She notes that in the “narrative method” of traditional fiction:
unity exists on the surface and disunity beyond the surface. Allusions embellish and enhance, but they do not support and unify the work. In the mythical method, the opposite is true. Disunity exists on the surface and unity beneath the surface. Allusions work to help generate the framework which supports and unifies the surface. Unity derives finally from the relation of the fragments to the comprehensive abstraction generated as the reader compares them to each other and to abstractions that emerge in the process of reading. [Brooker, 1994, p.120]
She also notes that in the mythical method of Modernism:
The reference point myth exists as an abstraction. It is not contained in the text, but in the mind of the artists and a reader. Artists do not bring the myth in its entirety; they bring, rather, the information needed to construct the myth. [Brooker, 1994, p.121]
Brooker’s final point is that:
The mythical method enables artists and readers to begin with fragments and generate comprehensive abstractions, to begin in isolation and end in community. And for this solution to the case of the missing abstraction, modern artists are profoundly indebted to Sir James George Frazer. [Brooker, 1994, pp.121-122]
This analysis of the mythical method is a useful starting point for a critical approach to the topic of this thesis. However, it will be argued that Arnold, through his work on the
8
buried life, deserves more equal credit with Frazer for being one of the main pioneers of the method. What it means is that, firstly, if it is right to say that the concept of the buried life is a shared cultural abstraction, then, by using the mythical method, one should be able to begin with just the few fragments from Arnold, Clough, Eliot and Frye, quoted above, and build up from them, and from other such fragments, the comprehensive, shared cultural abstraction that is the buried life. This is similar to the way that James felt that it was possible to build up, from religious experiences in the psychology of isolated individuals, a complete picture of the universal more. It is also similar to the way that Jung felt that it was possible to build up, from the fragmentary hints and guesses offered up in myths, dreams and fantasies, a complete picture of the collective unconscious. Or it is similar to the way that Arnold, with reference to the “myth” of Obermann, in his poem, “Obermann Once More”, tries to build up, in shamanistic fashion, from the “Poor fragments of a broken world” [“Obermann Once More”, line 217], which are also the fragments of the dead Jesus Christ, a complete picture of the buried life in order “to help attain/ One common wave of thought and joy/ Lifting mankind again!” [“Obermann Once More”, lines 322-324]. Secondly, if it is right to say that it is a shared cultural abstraction, then, although it may change and develop over time, the main elements of the concept of the buried life should be shared by a number of different writers over that time. Therefore, Arnold’s notion of what it was in the mid-nineteenth-century should be quite similar to what Frye’s notion of what it was in the mid-twentieth-century, although it may differ in particulars. The influence of older generations of writers upon younger generations should ensure continuity. Frye, for example, clearly thinks he is writing about essentially the same thing as was Arnold. That is why he called it the “buried life”. Thirdly, if it is right to say that it is a shared cultural abstraction, then, because it is by nature allusive, the concept of the buried life will never be contained in one work, or in the works of just one writer. Rather, a picture of it should be built up from the works of a number of different writers that will be more accurate and comprehensive than a picture built up from the works of one writer could ever be. One may allude to the works of a writer such as Stéphane Mallarmé, for example, or William James, or H.M. Tomlinson, and, to quote Brooker again, those:
Allusions work to help generate the framework which supports and unifies the surface. Unity derives finally from the relation of the fragments to the comprehensive abstraction generated as the reader compares them to each other and to abstractions that emerge in the process of reading. [Brooker, 1994, p.120]
It is, therefore, a different critical approach to one that is predicated only on the idea that “unity derives from... sequence” [Brooker, 1994, p.119]; in which, for example, Arnold reads something and therefore this happened; or someone reads something of Arnold’s and therefore that happened. (This thesis uses that approach as well, however; and it also uses an approach involving, not a close reading, but an extended reading of particular 9
texts.) Fourthly, if it is right to say that it is a shared cultural abstraction, then, because it is by nature allusive, and is never the subject of any text, and is thus not contained in any text, it should exist more between the different texts of a writer, and between the texts of different writers, than it does in any particular text. The buried life is thus like the “single” although now largely sunken “continent” [“To Marguerite - Continued”, line 16] in Arnold’s poem, “To Marguerite - Continued”; so that each text by the same or by different writers is like a relic island of that now largely submerged continent. To refer to Brooker again, in the mythical method: “Disunity exists on the surface and unity beneath the surface” [Brooker, 1994, p.210]. The critical approach to the topic of the concept of the buried life should therefore be mainly comparative, like Darwin’s approach to the study of species in the Galapagos Islands; or like James’ approach to the study of religious experiences in the psychology of isolated individuals; or like Frazer’s approach to his topic in The Golden Bough. Frazer compares his story about the ritual of the King of the Wood, which “stands out in striking isolation from the polished Italian society of the day, like a primaeval rock rising from a smooth-shaven lawn” [Frazer, 1993, p.2], to things that came before it, to things that were contemporaneous with it, and to things that came after it, to develop a complete picture of his shared cultural abstraction. The more that things are similar, he believed, and the more that things fit into a similar pattern, then the more likely it is that they are part of that shared cultural abstraction. Fifthly, if it is right to say that it is a shared cultural abstraction, then the concept of the buried life should operate in art to explain the nature of a shared consciousness said to exist at the very margins of, or beyond, or more particularly below, our ordinary, everyday, individual consciousness. It should also explain how our ordinary, everyday, individual consciousness is related to or alienated from this shared consciousness. Although artists and critics such as Arnold, Clough, Eliot and Frye are quite sure that the buried life exists, and they are quite sure that it is shared, because it hovers right at the very edge of their vision, or beyond it, in the subconscious, by its very nature they can do little more than allude to it. It could be argued, no doubt, that the passages from Arnold, Clough, Eliot and Frye, quoted above, are literary fragments that are like tiny and widely scattered islands, with no particular connection to each other. However, by considering the possibility that they are parts of a whole, and by considering other like fragments that also seem to be parts of that whole, such as those by Gray, Coleridge, Tennyson, Arnold, Hardy, Housman, Brooke, Eliot and Douglas, quoted in Chapter Two below, then there is the possibility that one can begin to map a new, although now almost completely submerged, continent. Between them, then, Brooker, Frazer and James suggest a particular methodology to be used in this thesis, although it will not be followed slavishly. (It should be noted that an unconventional methodology, resembling the methodology of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” or Frazer’s The Golden Bough, is used in this thesis simply because a more conventional methodology could not reveal anything much about the buried life.) The 10
starting point will be with the disappearance of Christianity “as the glue holding Western civilization together”. This disappearance may be an historical event, as Arnold thought, and as J. Hillis Miller thought [Miller, 1975, pp.1-16]; it may be only another myth in a long line of myths about the Fall of humankind; or it may be a projection of the shaman’s experience of visionary dismemberment and death onto the body of Western civilisation. Arnold believed that this disappearance of Christianity occurred over time between the Reformation and the the French Revolution [Honan, 1981, p.140], and thus wrote that:
when Goethe came, Europe had lost her basis of spiritual life; Goethe’s task was... to interpret human life afresh, and to supply a new spiritual basis to it. [On the Study of Celtic Literature, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.381]
Goethe’s task, then, according to Arnold, was much like the task that James set himself in The Varieties of Religious Experience; or like the task that Arnold set himself in his poetry and criticism; which was to establish, as Kenneth Allott observed, a new, “‘purified’ and undogmatic form of religion” [in Arnold, 1965, p.388], based on ideas about a collective subconscious. From that starting point, Arnold’s shared cultural abstraction of the buried life will then be built up mainly from literary fragments, as James built up his shared cultural abstraction from fragments of religious experience in the psychology of isolated individuals, and as Eliot built up his shared cultural abstraction from literary fragments in “The Waste Land”: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins” [Eliot, 1974, p.79]. These literary fragments will come from the works of Arnold; from the works of other writers associated with the concept of the buried life, such as Clough, Eliot and Frye; from the works of writers whom Arnold drew upon for his concept of the buried life, such as Empedocles, Goethe and Newman; and from the works of writers associated with other similar concepts, such as the concepts of Schopenhauer, Emerson, Nietzsche, Laforgue, James and Jung, mentioned above. Each literary fragment referred to will encompass or allude to a “spot of time”, to use Wordsworth’s terminology, or a moment of brief intuitive insight. These are moments when the writer’s individual personality merges for a fragment of time with what James called, above, “the divine”, and which he said invades the individual’s ordinary, everyday life from time-to-time from the regions of the subconscious. In Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity (1989), Charles Taylor called any such moment an “epiphany”:
There are strong continuities from the Romantic period, through the Symbolists and many strands of what was loosely called “modernism”, right up to the present day. What remains central is the notion of the work of art as issuing from or realizing an “epiphany”, to use Joyce’s word in a somewhat wider sense than his. What I want to capture with this term is just this notion of a work of art as the locus of a manifestation which brings us into the presence of something which is otherwise inaccessible, and which is of the highest moral or spiritual significance; a manifestation, moreover, which also defines or completes something, even as it
11
reveals. [Taylor, 1989, p.419]
Taylor thought of such epiphanies as being absolutely central to the making of the modern identity, and a study of the concept of the buried life leads one to concur with his judgement. It should be stressed that this methodology is deliberately unconventional. It is deliberately allusive. It is predicated upon the idea of writers like Emerson, Arnold and Eliot that all poets are essentially the same poet and all poems are essentially the same poem, since they all describe the same underlying reality. However, it will be varied occasionally by analysing the complete texts of particular works by Arnold, such as his poems, “The Buried Life”, “The Strayed Reveller” and “Empedocles on Etna”, and his essays, “Thomas Gray” and “Wordsworth”. This will be done to show how Arnold incorporates “spots of time” into his own complete narratives, and thus provides allusions to the concept of the buried life. In the last chapter of The Golden Bough, Frazer, having constructed his own shared cultural abstraction from mythical and anthropological fragments, alludes to the shared cultural abstraction that was Christianity:
The temple of the sylvan goddess has... vanished and the King of the Wood no longer stands sentinel over the Golden Bough. But Nemi’s woods are still green, and as the sunset fades above them in the west, there comes to us, borne on the swell of the wind, the sound of the church bells of Aricia ringing the Angelus. Ave Maria! Sweet and solemn they chime out from the distant town and die lingeringly away across the wide Campagnan marshes. “Le roi et mort, vive le roi! Ave Maria!” [Frazer, 1993, p714].
It is as if Frazer’s starting point was with the death of Christianity; but that, having taken the story of Jesus Christ out of history and put it back into the primitive, collective subconscious of the human race, so to speak, and placed it in context as just one myth amongst many similar ones from the ancient and modern worlds, including the myth of Empedocles, his concern is then to resurrect Christianity; or to bring to life a replacement for, supplement to, or alternative version of that religion. This thesis is not concerned with resurrecting Christianity, or with bringing to life a replacement for, supplement to, or alternative version of that religion; even though its endpoint is (via a collocation of allusions, in the manner of the last section of “The Waste Land”) with a rebuilding of the City of God. However, it was one of Arnold’s main concerns, as it was one of Eliot’s; for, having constructed his own shared cultural abstraction of the buried life, Arnold then turned his attention to the revival of a form of Christianity in works such as St. Paul and Protestantism, Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible.
The Sources A study such as this with Matthew Arnold at its centre begins with The Poems of Matthew Arnold (1965), edited by Kenneth Allott; The Complete Prose Works of 12
Matthew Arnold (1960-77), edited by R.H. Super; The Letters of Matthew Arnold (1996- 2001), edited by Cecil Y. Lang; and The Notebooks of Matthew Arnold (1952), edited by Howard Foster Lowry, Karl Young and Waldo Hilary Dunn. Next come the critical biographies of Arnold, such as Matthew Arnold (1939), by Lionel Trilling; Matthew Arnold: A Life (1981), by Park Honan; and A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold (1998), by Ian Hamilton. These come next because in this thesis the particular interest is in the intersection of Arnold’s life with his work; or in those moments when Arnold’s surface life, or his ordinary life recounted in the biographies, intersects with the buried life, or his poetic life. W.B. Yeats wrote of how:
A poet writes always of his personal life... [but] he never speaks directly as to someone at the breakfast table... he is never the bundle of accident and incoherence that sits down to breakfast; he has been reborn as an idea. [Yeats, 1976, p.255]
Yeats’ idea is that poetry comes from the poet’s personal life, but not just from their personal life. Eliot wrote of how:
the abstract conception Of private experience at its greatest intensity Becoming universal... we call ‘poetry’. [Eliot, 1974, p.230]
Eliot’s idea is that poetry comes from the poet’s personal life, again, or from their private experience, but not just from their private experience. The poet has been reborn, so to speak, as an abstract conception or an idea, which is universal, or “Divine” [Eliot, 1999, p.405]; so that poetry comes from something private or personal that is also something public or universal. As Arnold’s ideas about where his poetry came from are examined, it will be seen that his ideas were much like Yeats’ or Eliot’s, in that he thought that poetry was personal but also universal. He believed it came from a merging of the poet’s conscious personality with a type of collective unconscious which he called the buried life. For Arnold, the poet should speak with their own voice, but they should also speak with the “voice oracular” [“Written in Emerson’s Essays”, line 4] of the god of the buried life within, who is universal:
The seeds of godlike power are in us still; Gods are we, bards, saints, heroes if we will! [“Written in Emerson’s Essays”, lines 12-13]
But, for Arnold, if the poet speaks in only their own personal, private voice, having lost contact with the god within, then their voice is, like Wordsworth’s in his later, more uninspired moments, “weak as is the breaking wave” [in “Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.51]. Apart from calling it the buried life, Arnold also called this type of collective
13
unconscious “the ‘daemonic’ element” at one time:
No one has a stronger and more abiding sense than I have of the ‘daemonic’ element - as Goethe called it - which underlies and encompasses our life: but I think, as Goethe thought, that the right thing is, while conscious of this element and of all that there is inexplicable round one, to keep pushing one’s posts into the darkness, and to establish no post that is not perfectly in light, and firm. [Lang, Vol. 2, 1997, p.390]
Goethe believed that it was the poet’s “daemon”, or a mysterious and irresistable inner force personified as a god, usually Dionysus [Bloom, 1994, p.210], that merged with the poet’s personality from time-to-time and effectively wrote their greatest poems for them. “In poetry”, said Goethe:
especially in that which is unconscious, before which reason and understanding fall short, and which therefore produces effects so far surpassing all conceptions, there is always something daemonic. [in Faherty, 1992, p.174]
Arnold felt that he was able to “push his posts into the darkness” of this inner, mainly subconscious force by using what was essentially the mythical method. For Arnold, as for Goethe, and as for Ted Hughes, “developing inwardly” as a poet meant “organizing the inner world or at least searching out the patterns there and that is a mythology” [Faas, 1980, p. 204]. And Arnold, like Goethe, and like Hughes again, believed that “early Greek mythology can still present us with a working anatomy of our psychic life in a very complete and profound way” [Faas, 1980, p.32]. For Arnold, Greek myths provided a narrative framework into which the poet’s fragmentary insights, gained when their personality merged from time-to-time with the innner daemon’s, could be fitted. If a “post” fitted into the overall narrative framework of a Greek myth, then it could be said to be “perfectly in light, and firm”. Of all Arnold’s critical biographers, Honan is the most thorough and Trilling probably the most interesting, because of the latter’s concern with what may be called the “dark” side of Arnoldian liberalism, exhibited especially in works like The Liberal Imagination (1950) and Beyond Culture (1966). T.S. Eliot and Wyndham Lewis also wrote some outstanding critical-biographical essays on Arnold, such as “Arnold and Pater” (1930) and “Matthew Arnold” (1933) in Eliot’s case, and “Matthew Arnold” (1954) in Lewis’. Eliot and Lewis both gave the insights of a creative artist into the issues of Arnold’s creativity; and, like Yeats, they both wrote, by-and-large, from within the tradition of Arnold’s use of the concept of the buried life. The concept of the buried life itself, as was noted, has received little critical consideration. Little of consequence has been written about its origins, nature or influence, so that it is impossible to supply any sort of a conventional critical bibliography about the concept. In an Arnoldian context, in The Lost Pattern (1976) Raymond Forsyth observed that the “implications of ‘the buried life’” do include the “prospect of spring-time renewal with its religious overtone of resurrection at Easter” 14
[Forsyth, 1976, p.138]. However, he does not elaborate upon this observation. In an Eliotian context, in T.S. Eliot (2006) Craig Raine based his study of Eliot on the idea “that the Buried Life, the idea of the life not fully lived, is the central, animating idea of Eliot’s poetry” [Raine, 2006, p.xiii], as well as of his drama and criticism. Although he is more interested in how the concept of the buried life is used in Eliot’s works than in the nature of the concept itself; whereas I am more interested in the nature of the concept itself than in how it is used in Arnold’s works; Raine still provides a useful model for a study of Arnold based on the idea that the buried life is the “central, animating idea” of Arnold’s poetry, drama and criticism. Such comments as these by Forsyth and Raine are the only direct comments by critics on the nature of the concept of which I am aware. It may be that contemporary critical approaches, or methodologies, are inimical to a discussion of religious or spiritual dimensions in works of literature, such as those provided by the concept of the buried life, as has been argued by Jude V. Nixon [Nixon, 2004, p.11]. But that does not explain why the concept did not receive more extended critical consideration in the past. Although there is much excellent criticism of Arnold’s poetry and prose, little is of direct interest in this thesis, since the topic is tangential to the interests of most Arnoldian critics. However, The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary (1940), by C.B. Tinker and H.F. Lowry, is very useful in that it gives details on all the autobiographical aspects of Arnold’s poetry, and is a delightfully old-fashioned work of scholarship. Communications with the Future: Matthew Arnold in Dialogue (1997), by Donald D. Stone, is also of interest, in that Stone’s concern is to compare Arnold’s ideas to the ideas of later thinkers, such as Nietzsche, in order to draw out some of the implications of both Arnold’s ideas and those of the later thinkers. Certainly, some ideas in Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy (1872) are very useful in an analysis of, for example, Arnold’s picture of the ancient Greek philosopher, Empedocles, in “Empedocles on Etna”. Of general critical works on the Victorian period, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (1993), by Isobel Armstrong, is useful for its discussion of English poetical works of the 1840s and 1850s, of which the bulk of Arnold’s poetry forms a part. Works such as The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers (1963), by J. Hillis Miller, and The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century (1975), by Owen Chadwick, are are also useful for their discussion of the disappearance of Christianity “as the glue holding Western civilisation together”. But as the topic of this thesis is tangential to the interests of most Arnoldian critics, so is it tangential to the interests of most critics of Victorian literature in general. As has been noted, Arnold’s main source for his concept of the buried life was in the Romanticism of Gray, Goethe, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Carlyle and Emerson. For Gray, Arnold’s essay “Thomas Gray” (1880) and Gray’s own poem, “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” (1750), are the key sources for this thesis. For Goethe, Arnold’s essay “A French Critic on Goethe” (1878) and Goethe’s own Italian Journey (1816-17) are the key sources. For Wordsworth and Coleridge, Arnold’s essay “Wordsworth” 15
(1879); Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s poems, essays and prefaces; and Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria (1817) are the key sources. For Carlyle, early works by Carlyle such as “Characteristics” (1831) and On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841) are the key sources. For Emerson, Arnold’s essay “Emerson” (1883) (which also comments on the influence of Goethe, Newman and Carlyle on Arnold) and Emerson’s own Essays (1841) are the key sources. Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1856), by Thomas Hughes, is also interesting for its picture of the cult of the dead Dr Thomas Arnold at Rugby, which appears to be another main source for Matthew Arnold’s concept of the buried life. This cult also seems to have been the starting-point for an imperial cult of sorts, since a few of Dr Arnold’s Rugby old-boys had prominent roles in the Indian Mutiny, which was a pivotal event in nineteenth-century English imperialism. The main focus of this imperial cult soon shifted, however, from Dr Arnold to the poetical works of his son, Matthew; so that late- Victorian poets of imperialism, such as Thomas Hardy, A.E. Housman and Rudyard Kipling, were much-influenced by Matthew Arnold’s use of the concept of the buried life. Poets of World War One and its aftermath, such as Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen and T.S. Eliot, were also much-influenced by Matthew Arnold’s use of the concept; as were poets of World War Two and its aftermath, such as Keith Douglas, Ted Hughes and Jon Stallworthy. Therefore, in order to investigate the influence of Arnold’s concept on later writers, one must focus mainly upon writers such as these. To return to Arnold’s sources, Arnold also tried to establish some ancient sources for his concept of the buried life in the life and works of the ancient Greek philosopher, Empedocles; and also in the myths and cults surrounding Dionysus, and related figures such as Attis, Adonis and Orpheus, in the ancient world. Therefore, these are also key sources for this thesis. For Arnold in “Empedocles on Etna”, the trajectory of Empedocles’ career followed that of Dionysus’; so that for Arnold, Dionysus is the god of Empedocles’ buried life. Arnold wrote about Empedocles in “Empedocles on Etna” (1852), and also in essays such as “Preface to First Edition of Poems” (1853). He drew upon the surviving fragments of Empedocles’ two poems, “On Nature” and “Purifications”, for his portrait of Empedocles, and also upon associated biographical materials. Empedocles: The Extant Fragments (1981), by M.R. Wright, offers modern translations of Empedocles’ works; whilst Empedocles’ Cosmic Cycle: A Reconstruction from the Fragments and Secondary Sources (1969), by D. O’Brien, is a modern attempt to offer a complete picture of Empedocles’ philosophy, such as Arnold also attempted to supply in “Empedocles on Etna”. Frazer’s The Golden Bough (1890) is the key to understanding how Arnold used the myths and cults surrounding Dionysus, and other such gods, as a source for his concept of the buried life; whilst J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work (1987), by Robert Ackermann, details the origins of Frazer’s ideas and methodology in late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth-century thought; and The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough (1973), by John B. Vickery, discusses Frazer’s influence on twentieth-century thought. “Gods 16
and Mysteries: The Revival of Paganism and the Remaking of Mythography through the Nineteenth Century” (2006), by Margot K. Louis, examines the Romantic idea, which Arnold inherited, that the story of Dionysus was at the heart of ancient Greek culture, and in the heart of each ancient Greek, in the same way that the story of Jesus Christ is at the heart of modern European culture, and in the heart of each modern European. Works such as The Victorians and Ancient Greece (1980), by Richard Jenkins, and The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain (1981), by Frank M. Turner, offer useful background material on ideas about ancient Greece in the mid-Victorian period. Because of its use of the mythical method, and because of Arnold’s interest in especially the mythology of ancient Greece, myth criticism is important to this thesis. Perhaps the most famous passage in myth criticism is Eliot’s observation, on James Joyce’s use of the mythical method in Ulysses, that: “It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history” [Eliot, 1975, p.177]. The mythical method supposedly does this by relating what is “here and now” in contemporary history to what lies “there and then”, outside contemporary history. Or, as Carlo Ginzburg put it, all myths:
work a common theme: going into the beyond, returning from the beyond. This elementary narrative nucleus has accompanied humanity for thousands of years. The countless variations introduced by utterly different societies, based on hunting, on pasture and on agriculture, have not modified its basic structure. Why this permanence? The answer is possibly very simple. To narrate means to speak here and now with an authority that derives from having been (literally or metaphorically) there and then. In participation in the world of the living and of the dead, in the sphere of the visible and of the invisible, we have already recognized a distinctive trait of the human species. [in Atwood, 2003, pp.160-161]
For Eliot, then, Joyce’s use of the mythical method enabled him to write of what is personal with the authority of one who knows what is universal; he has been reborn, so to speak, as an idea. With myth criticism, our starting point is with Brooker’s outline of the mythical method in Mastery and Escape. Other key texts are Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy and Frazer’s The Golden Bough. The mythic dimension of “The Waste Land” (1922), by T.S. Eliot, seems to be influenced as much by Arnold as it is by Frazer, and it is also a key text. The Myth of the Magus (1948), by E.M. Butler, is, too, much-influenced by Frazer; but it also offers a useful overview of “the myth of the magus” from the earliest times, with its origins in primitive shamanism and its influence on ancient tragedy, through to its more contemporary manifestations in eighteenth-century Freemasonry and the occult revivals of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries. The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949), by Joseph Campbell, and Anatomy of Criticism (1957), by Northrop Frye, are other key texts; as are Memories, Dreams, Reflections (1961) and Man and His Symbols (1964), by Carl Jung, which offer useful summaries of Jung’s views. The Great War and Modern Memory (1975), by Paul Fussell, analyses the influence of myth upon English 17
literature in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-centuries. Fussell’s mixed feelings about the death of his father-figure in World War Two, Sergeant Edward Keith Hudson [Fussell, 1996, pp.1-8; pp.142-143], found an outlet in the myth criticism of The Great War and Modern Memory; and a parallel in Arnold’s mixed feelings about the death of his father, Dr Thomas Arnold, in 1842. “Myth and Education” (1976), by Ted Hughes, gives a picture of the influence of myth upon a modern English poet still working largely from within the tradition of the buried life. In “The Poetic Self: A Centenary Tribute to T.S. Eliot” (1992), Hughes provides a mythic interpretation of Eliot’s poetry that is the main model for the interpretation of Arnold’s poetry in this thesis. (This thesis is in fact structured, in literary-uniformitarian fashion, around the manipulation of a continuous parallel between Arnold and the Eliot of Hughes’ essay; or around a progressively closer identification of Arnold’s poetic personality with Eliot’s, and around a progressively closer identification of Hughes’ interpretation of Eliot’s “The Waste Land” with an interpretation of Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna”; so that the whole argument of this thesis leads up to a particular reading of “Empedocles on Etna”; and the aim of the thesis is not to provide definitive readings of Arnold’s poetry and criticism, but to provide readings that may be something like the Jung-influenced readings Hughes might have provided, had he ever turned his critical attention to Arnold.) Edge of the Sacred (1995), by David J. Tacey, amongst much else, explores the modern location of God and the poetic Muse in the subconscious and in certain landscapes. Beyond Modernism: Toward a New Myth Criticism (1988), by Ted R. Spivey; Myth, Truth and Literature (1989), by Colin Falck; and Myth (1997), by Laurence Coupe, are all fairly recent overviews of myth criticism. Shamanism and myth criticism seem to be closely related, in that many “have believed shamans responsible for the very creation of Greek mythology” [Flaherty, 1992, p.3], as well as for the creation of the mythologies of most other ancient cultures. In “Empedocles on Etna”, Arnold thus presents a picture of Greek mythology in the shamanistic context provided by Empedocles in the fifth-century BC. Elsewhere, Arnold described Empedocles as belonging to the poetic “family of Orpheus and Musaeus” [“Preface to First Edition of Poems”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, p.1]; and Arnold seemed to believe that he himself, as a late-Romantic poet working in the mid-nineteenth-century, operated in a shamanistic context still very much like Empedocles’. Shamanism in the Eighteenth Century (1992), by Gloria Flaherty, describes European interest in primitive shamanism in that century; and also describes Goethe’s particular interest in that same subject. Like Arnold, Goethe believed that as a poet he operated in a shamanistic context still very much like Empedocles’, and Goethe was a major influence upon Arnold. The Greeks and the Irrational (1951), by E.R. Dodds, discusses the influence of shamanism on the ancient Greeks. Shamanism (1964), by Mircea Eliade, provides an overview of the subject. The Orphic Voice (1960), by Elizabeth Sewell; Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature (1971), by Walter A. Strauss; and The Orphic Moment: Shaman to Poet-Thinker in Plato, Nietzsche and Mallarmé (1994), by Robert McGahey, interpret modern poetry in a shamanistic context. The Orphic Voice: T.S. Eliot and the 18
Mallarmean Quest for Meaning (2002), by Ake Strandberg, is quite similar to this thesis, not in terms of its subject-matter, but in terms of the nature and scope of its argument, stretching as it does from ancient shamanism to modern poetry in order to find similarities between two modern poets. Most of Ted Hughes’ essays on poets and poetry, such as his essay “The Snake in the Oak” (1993), which is about Coleridge, are informed by ideas about shamanism; and again because he worked, by-and-large, from within the tradition of Arnold’s use of the concept of the buried life, his ideas are of interest to us. Finally, in Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing (2002), by Margaret Atwood, there is a discussion of “the shamanistic role of the writer”, which “may of course be a metaphor”; but, if so, “it does seem to be one that has held a central significance for writers over a very long period of time” [Atwood, 2003, p.160].
19
Chapter Two ______
What is the Buried Life?
As a concept, the buried life is basically a metaphor, or a series of metaphors, or a mythological scheme, partly inherited and partly created by Matthew Arnold, through which he attempted to encompass some of the complexities of the human psyche and of human society. It incorporates elements of the “ritual” of that “Mystery Cult” that Jessie L. Weston believed once surrounded Jesus Christ, in which He was viewed as an equivalent for such pagan gods as Attis and Adonis, and, by extension, Empedocles; and which “ritual” Weston believed was later transformed into the “romance” of the “Grail Quest” [Coupe, 1997, pp.25-29]. Arnold used the concept extensively in both his poetry and his criticism, so in fact most of his work in both poetry and prose makes explicit or implicit use of the concept. By analysing Arnold’s use of this concept of the buried life in a range of his works, it will thus be seen that Arnold’s work as a poet and critic has a much greater unity than is usually suspected. This can require reading against the grain of the usual critical interpretations of some of Arnold’s best-known works. But what is gained is unity, so that each poem or collection of poems, or each essay or collection of essays, by Arnold can be interpreted as being a part of a single continent of ideas, rather than as a separate island. Like Laforgue’s concept of the “Unconscious”, then, which it somewhat resembles, as it resembles a number of other concepts, Arnold’s metaphor gives “a unity to everything he did, creative or critical” [Arkell, 1987, p.140]. Taking his ideas mainly from the Romantic poets themselves, and from Frye, Imre Salusinszky noted that, like Arnold or Laforgue:
All the romantic poets believed in some version of the myth that an artist’s inspiration comes not from life but from a kind of magical reservoir deep within the psyche. A corollary of this view is that inspiration comes all at once, not in dribs and drabs. So a writer can spend an entire career filling in the details of an imaginative vision that descended on him or her fully formed. Likewise, the role of the informed reader or critic is to describe or map a leading writer’s imaginative map or landscape, of which every novel or poem forms a distinct but connected territory. [Salusinszky, 2008, p.40]
Much-influenced by the Romantic poets as he was, Arnold’s metaphor or mythological scheme of the buried life is his version of the myth described by Salusinszky above; although it should be added that Arnold believed that there was only one “magical reservoir” inside all poets. One of the main roles of the critic in a thesis like this, then, is to show how his use of this metaphor or mythological scheme gives a unity to all of Arnold’s work. T.S. Eliot, however, argued that Arnold’s works display little unity of thought. He thought that Arnold “had little gift for consistency or for definition” and lacked “the 20
power of connected reasoning at any length: his flights are either short flights or circular flights” [Eliot, 1999, p.431]. Arnold’s poem, “The Buried Life”, discussed in Chapter Three, provides an example of what Eliot meant by that. In this poem, Arnold seems unable to sustain any real consistency of thought or imagery over the course of only ninety-eight lines and, despite the poem’s title, in it he does not manage to provide any clear definition of what the buried life might be. In fact, Arnold does not anywhere provide a clear definition of what the buried life might be, even though the concept was such an important one to him. It is as if Robert Graves had not written The White Goddess, or W.B. Yeats had not written A Vision, or T.S. Eliot had not been able to refer readers of “The Waste Land” to From Ritual to Romance and The Golden Bough, so that the substance of those works had to be pieced together from the clues offered in those poets’ other works. But what Arnold did do successfully was to incorporate his own weaknesses of thought into his concept of the buried life, in which surface inconsistencies serve to obscure the consistencies that supposedly lie buried below or within. In her discussion of Eliot in Mastery and Escape, already mentioned, Brooker compared the standard narrative method of structuring a literary work to the “mythical method” of Modernism, and this comparison certainly helps with an understanding of the nature of the buried life. Arnold’s work, like Eliot’s, appears to be structured according to this “mythical method”, whereby “disunity exists on the surface and unity beneath the surface”; and where the underlying “comprehensive abstraction generated” from a reading of his works is the metaphor, or mythic scheme, of the buried life [Brooker, 1994, p.120]. It is therefore interesting to consider Arnold as a proto-Modernist poet complete with a mythic scheme like Graves’, Yeats’ or Eliot’s, and this is the basic approach to Arnold and the buried life that will be taken in this thesis. There are studies which offer a theoretical framework for this sort of myth criticism, such as the works by Spivey, Falck and Coupe, mentioned in Chapter One, and Michael Bell’s Literature, Modernism and Myth (1997). Ted Hughes’ critiques of such poets as Eliot in “The Poetic Self: A Centenary Tribute to T.S. Eliot” [Hughes, 1995, pp.268-292] and Coleridge in “The Snake and the Oak” [Hughes, 1996, pp.1-97], already mentioned, and also his critique of Shakespeare in Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being [Hughes, 1993], also offer useful models for this sort of an interpretation. This is because there are strong similarities between Hughes’ approach to myth and Arnold’s, so that it offers a useful way into Arnold’s work. As a poet-critic of comparable stature to Arnold, Hughes (along with Eliot) can thus be used as a sort of alternative pathway into Arnold’s work, to help to show that use of the concept of the buried life was not something that was unique to Arnold. Hughes’ starting point, like Arnold’s, is his view that the modern poet is a seer or mystic who is “in search of some metaphysical vision of the world that could replace the Christianity of his childhood” [Feinstein, 2001, p.42]. Hughes, like Arnold, was therefore concerned to show that Christianity was a dead faith, in that it had lost its status as the only true 21
revelation of God’s Will in the Western world. Both Hughes and Arnold thus felt that the myths of Christianity needed to be reinterpreted, supplemented or replaced by other myths, for the poet to make a new belief system. For example, Arnold wrote to Henry Dunn at one time, noting that when he first read Senancour’s Obermann at the age of twenty-five, that work’s treatment of the religion of the nineteenth-century had made “an extraordinary impression” on him:
Senancour looked on the old religion of Christendom much as other enthusiasts of the French Revolution looked at it; he was, however, profoundly religious, and when the world consolidated itself again after the Revolution without a new religion, but with a patching up of the old in which he saw no permanence or sincerity, “his heart within him,” as the Psalmist says, “became desolate.” [Lang, 1996, Vol.3, p.189]
Both Hughes and Arnold were like Thomas Carlyle, then, who in Sartor Resartus (1833) had claimed that the great need of his age was to replace the “Mythus of the Christian religion with the divine spirit of that religion in a new Mythus” [in Brett, 1997, p.55]. For Hughes, as for Arnold, Christianity used to provide a threefold context for the poet’s visions. Firstly, the Christian process of prayer, meditation, penance and mortification could be used to put the poet into a psychological state in which they could see the visions that could be the subject of their poetry. Secondly, the story of the life, death and resurrection of Christ offered a mythic framework of spiritual “death” and “rebirth” that gave a structure to the poet’s visions. Each vision of the poet’s could be placed in context as one fragment in the overall structure of the story of the individual’s spiritual death and rebirth [Hughes, 1995, pp.138-139]. Thirdly, Christianity offered a means to reconcile the poet’s inner and outer worlds, as Hughes called them [Hughes, 1995, p.151]. (In Arnold’s terms, Christianity offered a means of reconciling the buried life with the poet’s surface life.) It did this because Biblical stories retold myths that were representations of our inner world and universal to human experience. If the inner and outer worlds were not reconciled, by Christianity or by something else, then the outer world could be seen by the poet to be meaningless. Hence Eliot’s comment, already quoted, on James Joyce’s mythical method in Ulysses:
Mr Joyce is pursuing a method which others must pursue after him... It is simply a way of controlling, of ordering, of giving a shape and a significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history... It is, I seriously believe, a step towards making the modern world possible for art. [Eliot, 1975, p.177]
For Eliot at that time, the myths about Ulysses utilised by Joyce to structure Ulysses reconciled the inner and outer worlds of Joyce’s protagonist in a way that gave meaning to his protagonist’s outer world of Dublin in 1904. They did this because the Homeric stories, like the Biblical stories, retold myths that were representations of our inner world and universal to human experience.
22
For Hughes, as for Arnold, Christianity made the mistake of claiming that the Biblical stories were objectively true, rather than being mythic representations of our inner world [Hughes, 1995, p.148]. For both of them, this is what caused Christianity’s demise, when its claims were discredited by science. Hughes, like Arnold, therefore tried to reinterpret, supplement, or replace Christianity’s threefold context for the poet’s visions with the aid of the eclectic and extensive range of his reading, to make a new series of canonical texts. Unity was derived as the fragments of his reading cohered, in his imagination, into a “comprehensive abstraction” generated from that reading experience. Through his readings of writers like Jung, Campbell and Eliade, amongst others, Hughes eventually took a major interest in primitive shamanism. He interpreted stories about the spiritual “death” and “rebirth” of the shaman as being the basis for much of the world’s mythology, including stories about the life, death and resurrection of Christ. For Hughes, shamanism therefore pre-dated and largely comprehended Christianity, as well as many other religions; and was itself perhaps pre-dated and largely comprehended by Sufism. This was his unity [Hughes, 1995, pp.58-59]; as it had been for Johann Gottfried Herder, for example, who, in the late-eighteenth-century, wrote of “the shamanic common denominator of all religions” [Flaherty, 1992, p.172]. Hughes traced the beginnings of the science that discredited Christianity’s claims to objective truth back to Plato. But he also used Plato’s Republic as his authority for proclaiming the primacy of myth over science, to circumvent Christianity’s problems [Hughes, 1995, p.136]. For Hughes, however, Plato drew “only a spoonful” of ideas from the world of the PreSocratic “philosopher-shamans”, like Pythagoras and Empedocles, for whom myth and science had not yet been sundered. According to Stanley Lombardo:
Men like Pythagoras, Heraclitus, Parmenides and Empedocles did not distinguish science from poetry or religious experience from philosophical understanding. They represent an older cultural type - in many ways they resemble Siberian and American Indian shamans - that disappeared in the classical period. [Lombardo, 1982, p.vii]
Lombardo mentions a theory that a Greek shamanistic tradition had contact with Asiatic shamanism in Scythia. Empedocles (about whom Arnold wrote his poem “Empedocles on Etna”) was supposedly the last representative of this tradition, so that Empedocles is “one first-hand source from which we can still form some notion of what a Greek shaman was really like” [Dodds, 1951, p.145]. According to Hughes, then:
Plato is human and familiar; he invented that careful, logical step-by-step style of investigation, in which all his great dialogues are conducted, and which almost all later philosophers developed, until it evolved finally into the scientific method itself. But his predecessors stand in a different world. By comparison they seem like mythical figures, living in myth, dreaming mythical dreams. [Hughes, 1995, p.137]
23
To go back to this shamanistic tradition which pre-dates Plato and the methods of modern science and philosophy is, then, Hughes’ way of asserting the primacy of myth, and to assert the primacy of myth is one of the key points in myth criticism, as Falck notes:
Since there is no reason to suppose that human biological nature has significantly changed during the period in which our more rational and intellectual modes of comprehension have come about, it seems likely not only that myth and mythic consciousness must lie at the origin of our subsequently more fully-articulated linguistic awareness, but also that the most important structures of our fully- articulated linguistic awareness will continue to fall within the outlines of myth and will be most satisfyingly open to “explanation” through an assimilation to mythic patterns - some at least of which we share with the mythic consciousness of the ancient world... because we do not speak in overtly mythic ways where more objective and scientific modes of description might be appropriate, this does not mean that the over-all sense which we have of the world may not continue to be deeply mythic... Beneath our objective or scientific awareness, a mythic awareness may need to persist if we are to have any sense of meaning in the world at all: the configurations within which human life can most fundamentally be understood as falling - the patterns in terms of which it can most satisfyingly be seen - may in the end need to be understood as a matter not of scientific order but of a poetic order which is inherently mythic. [Falck, 1994, pp.118-119]
Falck reiterates there the substance of Eliot’s comment on Joyce’s Ulysses. But what is important here is that, like Hughes, Arnold went back to the PreSocratic “philosopher- shamans” like Empedocles in order to assert the primacy of myth over modern science and philosophy. “Empedocles on Etna”, which is one of Arnold’s most ambitious poems, will be discussed in Chapter Twelve, but a few points about it can be mentioned here. Firstly, in that poem Arnold asserts the primacy of myth over modern science and philosophy, in the way that the myths recounted by the youthful Callicles transcend the aged Empedocles’ scientific and philosophical conundrums. Secondly, in that poem Arnold gives a picture of a shamanism pre-dating and largely comprehending Christianity, in the way that Empedocles pre-dates Jesus Christ and resembles Him in the miracles he performs, and also in the way he dies and is supposedly resurrected as a god. Thirdly, in the poem the subject matter and the quality of Callicles’ lyrics connects poetry with the practise of shamanism. For Hughes, and for Arnold, shamanism, like Christianity previously, provided a threefold context for the poet’s visions. Firstly, the shaman’s initiatory processes of prayer, meditation, penance and mortification, like the Christian’s, could be used to put the poet into a psychological state in which they could see the visions that could be the subject of their poetry. Secondly, the story of the life, death and rebirth of the shaman, like the story of the life, death and rebirth of Jesus Christ, offered a mythic framework of spiritual “death” and “rebirth” that gave a structure to the poet’s visions. Each vision of the poet’s could be placed in context as one fragment in the overall structure of the story of the individual’s spiritual death and rebirth. Thirdly, shamanism, like Christianity 24
previously, offered a means to reconcile the poet’s inner and outer worlds, as Hughes called them: “The characteristic of great works is exactly this: that in them the full presence of the inner world combines with and is reconciled to the full presence of the outer world” [Hughes, 1995, p.xi]. It did this because stories of shamanism retold myths that were representations of our inner world and universal to human experience. Since Hughes wrote as a poet rather than as an historian, it does not matter if his ideas about shamanism and the philosopher-shamans who pre-dated Plato, which form the basis of his mythic scheme, are true or false. He would not have wanted to have made the same sort of mistake he felt Christianity had made in claiming that the Biblical stories were objectively true. What matters is not if Hughes’ ideas are objectively true, but whether they work as mythic representations of our inner world. True or false, Hughes’ ideas still work as myths about the act of poetic creation, and as myths about life before the “Fall”. (Spivey notes how the “most basic function of the shaman” is to “recover momentarily in a state of ecstasy a sense of the lost paradisial condition of man”) [Spivey, 1988, p.82]. For Hughes, the poet-shaman thinks not in terms of art-for- art’s-sake, or anything like that, but in terms of a spiritual healing of himself and of his whole society, so that his inner and outer worlds can be fully reconciled, and life be returned to what it was before the “Fall”. For Arnold, similarly, the “conviction is that the humanist tradition of which [Arnold] is the expositor can enable the individual man or woman to live life more fully as well as to change the course of society.” With cultural renewal, Arnold believed, humankind would “recapture through the highest consciousness our original and unconscious Unity of Being” [Spivey, 1988, pp.132-133]. In his criticism, Hughes placed poets such as Eliot, Coleridge and Shakespeare, previously mentioned, and others including Yeats, Owen and Douglas, in the context of shamanism. He was very specific in his identification of the poet with the shaman, and wrote of the shaman’s initiatory dreams, or myths, as being the basis for the poetic imagination. Sometimes these dreams are simple, but as he wrote:
at the other extreme, the dreams are long and complicated, and dramatize in full the whole psychological transformation that any shaman, no matter how he has been initially chosen, must undergo. The central episode in this full-scale dream, just like the central episode in the rites where the transformation is effected forcibly by the tribe, is a magical death, then dismemberment, by a demon or equivalent powers, with all possible variants of boiling, burning, stripping to the bones. From this nadir, the shaman is resurrected, with new insides, a new body created for him by the spirits... And the initiation dreams, the general schema of the shamanic flight, and the figures and adventures they encounter, are not a shaman monopoly: they are, in fact, the basic experience of the poetic temperament we call ‘romantic’. In a shamanizing society, Venus and Adonis, some of Keats’s longer poems, The Wanderings of Oisin, Ash Wednesday, would all qualify their authors for the magic drum; while the actual flight lies perceptibly behind many of the best fairy tales, behind myths such as those of Orpheus and Herakles, and behind the epics of Gilgamesh and Odysseus. It is the outline, in fact, of the Heroic Quest. The shamans seem to undergo, at will and at a phenomenal intensity, and with practical results, one of the main regenerating 25
dramas of the human psyche: the fundamental poetic event. [Hughes, 1995, pp.57- 58]
For Hughes, Shakespeare was an example of a poet who was able to undergo, “at will and at phenomenal intensity”, that “fundamental poetic event” [Hughes, 1993, p.1]. Arnold’s ability to undergo that “fundamental poetic event” appears to have been fitful at best. However, as his poetry, criticism and correspondence show, Arnold thought of his poetic vocation very much in terms of the shamanic dreams or myths described by Hughes above. This identification of poetry with shamanism by Arnold will therefore be examined in this thesis. It is because of these similarities in Hughes’ and Arnold’s approach to myth, shamanism and poetry, that Hughes’ critiques of poets like Shakespeare, Coleridge and Eliot are such useful models for the interpretation of Arnold’s work. Hughes’ approach seems to work best with Eliot, however, because of Eliot’s interest in the mythical method of Modernism. For this reason, and because Arnold appears to be very like Eliot in his use of the metaphor, or mythic scheme, of the buried life, Hughes’ critique of Eliot is the most useful model of all here. In his foreword to Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, Hughes noted that he felt there was a myth that gave an “inclusive, subterranean pattern of unity” to Shakespeare’s plays. He was, however:
Well aware that almost anything can be projected into Shakespeare, nevertheless, as time passed, I could not help but become more convinced that what I had described as his myth was not entirely imported by me, but did have objective life, and in fact evolved from play to play with riveting consistency. [Hughes, 1993, p.xii]
Almost anything, no doubt, could be similarly projected into Arnold; and unless a critic repeats what Arnold said word-for-word, then they must be projecting something into him. But a reading of Arnold’s works can show that his myth of the buried life does seem to have an “objective life”, and that this myth does seem to give a “subterranean pattern of unity” to his work. In any case such a reading of Arnold has not really been attempted before. As the references to Graves, Yeats, Eliot and other poets indicate, the buried life can be interpreted as being essentially a metaphor for the sources of Arnold’s poetical creativity. In this metaphor it is always as if the poet is forever youthful and alive but also dead and buried, and thus speaking from his grave; and it should be noted that shamans could supposedly be in two places at once and also survive for long periods underground in suspended animation [McGahey, 1994, p.6]. The poet, like the shaman, therefore speaks “here and now with an authority that derives” from being also, metaphorically, “there and then” [Atwood, 2003, 160-161]. To offer a brief survey, based on literary fragments, of the history of the metaphor, there is a poet who speaks with such authority in Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, in which the poet, who is the model for both Arnold’s Strayed
26
Reveller and his Scholar-Gipsy [“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, lines 93- 112], is youthful and alive, and free to observe the daily life of the village; but he is also apparently dead and buried in his grave in the village churchyard. This is so in the poem’s “Epitaph”, but it also appears to be so even in its opening lines:
The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea, The ploughman homeward plods his weary way, And leaves the world to darkness and to me. [“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, lines 1-4]
Eliot’s “The Waste Land” opens similarly with a poet who is dead and speaking from his grave, but who is also at the same time apparently youthful and alive. (He is at the same time, too, withered and old, like Tiresias, or like the Sibyl of Cumae, or like Empedocles in Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna”. However, this aspect of “The Waste Land” will be considered elsewhere.) Gray’s intriguing “Elegy” could thus be read as the first version by any poet of “The Waste Land” in English, and it is through both Gray’s and Eliot’s use of the metaphor of the buried life that the two poems are connected. In literary- uniformitarian fashion, it could even be supposed that, beneath superficial differences, the two poets are essentially the same poet and the two poems are essentially the same poem. Arnold wrote an interesting essay on Gray, and cited him as an important influence, so we shall return to that poet, and we shall return often to Eliot. To continue a brief survey of the metaphor’s history, there is a poet similarly youthful and alive but also dead and buried in Wordsworth’s “A Poet’s Epitaph”, which will be analysed elsewhere; and in Coleridge’s “The Knight’s Tomb”, in which the poet’s state is symbolised by the dead tree and the live tree growing out of Sir Arthur O’Kellyn’s grave:
Where is the grave of Sir Arthur O’Kellyn? Where may the grave of that good man be? By the side of a spring, on the breast of Helvellyn, Under the twigs of a young birch tree! The oak that in summer was sweet to hear, And rustled its leaves in the fall of the year, And whistled and roared in the winter alone, Is gone, - and the birch in its stead is grown. [“The Knight’s Tomb”, lines 1-7]
There is a poet similarly dead but also youthful and alive, too, in Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” [“In Memoriam”, 2; 43; 116]; and in his “Maud”:
She is coming, my own, my sweet; Were it ever so airy a tread, My heart would hear her and beat, Were it earth in an earthy bed; My dust would hear her and beat, 27
Had I lain for a century dead, Would start and temble under her feet, And blossom in purple and red. [“Maud”, Part 1, XXII, 11; Part 2, V, 1]
And, too, in Arnold’s “The Scholar-Gipsy”:
And thou from earth art gone Long since, and in some quiet churchyard laid... - No, no, thou hast not felt the lapse of hours... And we imagine thee exempt from age And living as thou liv’st on Glanvil’s page, Because thou hadst - what we, alas! have not. [“The Scholar-Gipsy”, lines 137-138; 141; 158-160]
And, too, in the same poet’s “Thyrsis” and “Empedocles on Etna”, which two poems will be analysed elsewhere; and in his “Palladium”, in which the soul of the poet is represented by an idol of the dead girl, Pallas, who was also the immortal and forever youthful goddess, Athena [Calasso, 1994, pp.227-228]. There is, too, a poet dead but also youthful and alive in Hardy’s “A Singer Asleep”, and in his “Drummer Hodge”:
Yet portion of that unknown plain Will Hodge for ever be; His homely Northern breast and brain Grow to some Southern tree, And strange-eyed constellations reign His stars eternally. [“Drummer Hodge”, lines 13-18]
And in Kipling’s “A Song to Mithras”:
Mithras, God of the Sunset, low on the Western main - Thou descending immortal, immortal to rise again... Many roads Thou hast fashioned - all of them lead to the Light! Mithras, also a soldier, teach us to die aright! [“A Song to Mithras”, lines 9-10; 15-16]
And in Housman’s “Astronomy”, and in “The Immortal Part”:
‘When shall this slough of sense be cast, This dust of thoughts be laid at last, The man of flesh and soul be slain And the man of bone remain?
‘’Tis long till eve and morn are gone: Slow the endless night comes on, And late to fulness grows the birth That shall last as long as earth...
28
‘Lie down in the bed of dust; Bear the fruit that bear you must; Bring the eternal seed to light, And morn is all the same as night. [“The Immortal Part”, lines 5-8; 17- 20; 25-28]
It is as if the poet of “The Immortal Part” envies the soldier of “Astronomy” his youthful demise, or that as a young man the poet had in some sense foresuffered such a death. (Since Housman wrote very few poems that were not about “lads that will die in their glory and never be old” [A Shropshire Lad, XXIII, line 16], for good reason Percy Withers entitled his memoir of Housman A Buried Life) [Withers, 1940]. There is a poet dead but also youthful and alive, too, in Binyon’s “For the Fallen”, which will be analysed elsewhere; and in Brooke’s “The Soldier”:
If I should die, think only this of me: That there’s some corner of a foreign field That is for ever England. There shall be In that rich earth a richer dust concealed... And think, this heart, all evil shed away, A pulse in the eternal mind, no less Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given. [“The Soldier”, lines 1-4; 9-11]
And also in “The Burial of the Dead” from Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, as was noted above:
April is the cruellest month, breeding Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing Memory and desire, stirring Dull roots with spring rain. Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow, feeding A little life with dried tubers. Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee With a shower of rain. [“The Waste Land”, lines 1-9]
This poet of Eliot’s, dead but also youthful and alive, is perhaps very like the soldier- poet Rupert Brooke, whose poetic dross “was purged away”, as Eliot wrote, “in the fire of the Great Ordeal which is proving the well-spring of a Renaissance of English poetry” [Eliot, 1988, Vol.1, p.211]. Critics have detected in these lines from “The Waste Land”, above, resemblances to phrases in letters Brooke wrote to friends upon hearing the announcement of war with Germany in 1914; and also resemblances to the opening lines of Brooke’s poem “Grantchester” (1912) [Southam, 1981, pp.86-87], in which the river of the buried life flows: “Green as a dream and deep as death” [“Grantchester”, line 12]. Finally, there is, too, a poet dead but also youthful and alive in Keith Douglas’ “The Sea Bird”, which will be analysed elsewhere, and in his “Desert Flowers”:
29
I see men as trees suffering or confound the detail and the horizon. Lay the coin on my tongue and I will sing of what the others never set eyes on. [“Desert Flowers”, lines 13-16]
All of this is to say that, speaking metaphorically, the poet’s grave is the major source of Arnold’s poetical creativity, as it was, so it seems, for quite a number of other poets in the period from Gray to Douglas. (“Elegy in a Country Churchyard” was first-published in 1750 and “Desert Flowers” in 1943.) If all writing from the earliest times right up to the present day is, as Margaret Atwood surmises, a form of “negotiating with the dead”, or a form of descent into the land of the dead, to return with a story to tell [Atwood, 2003, pp.137-161], then Arnold’s concept of the buried life could be said to describe a particular form of that “negotiating”, which took place in England from about the mid- eighteenth-century through to about the mid-twentieth-century. Or, alternatively, Arnold’s concept of the buried life could be said to describe a particular, modern English version of that tradition of the pastoral elegy that, as Frye argued, ever since Theocritus has appeared as “a literary adaptation of the ritual of the Adonis lament” [Frye, 2000, p.99]. (Most of the poems quoted above are elegies.) Discussing Milton’s pastoral elegy, “Lycidas”, Frye noted that:
we see that the subject of the elegy has been identified with a god who personifies both the sun that falls into the western ocean at night and the vegetable life that dies in the autumn. In the latter aspect Lycidas is the Adonis or Tammuz whose “annual wound”, as Milton calls it elsewhere, was the subject of the ritual lament in Meditteranean religion, and has been incorporated in the pastoral elegy ever since Theocritus, as the title of Shelley’s Adonais shows more clearly. As a poet, Lycidas’s archetype is Orpheus, who also died young, in much the same role as Adonis, and was flung into the water... all of these aspects are contained within the figure of Christ, the young dying god who is eternally alive, the Word that contains all poetry... whose pastoral world sees no winter, the Sun of righteousness that never sets, whose power can raise Lycidas... out of the waves, as it redeems souls from the lower world. [Frye, 2000, p.121]
This “literary adaptation of the ritual of the Adonis lament” is in any case, as shall be shown, an important part of the wider context in which Arnold’s concept belongs. Like those other English poets from Gray to Douglas mentioned above, Arnold, then, appeared to adapt Christianity’s basic story of the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ to make his own private mythology about the birth and spiritual death and rebirth of the poet. This private mythology fulfilled his own poetical needs in a world in which, to use the imagery of “Dover Beach”, the receding tide of Christianity seemed to leave the poet lonely and stranded, and thus thrown back upon his own mythological resources. Or, to quote Honan:
Since no Christian church could reassert its authority or enforce its dogma, a psychological vacuum remained. In consequence, Arnold concluded, man lacks a deep identity; he suffers from disorientation and ennui, shifting and unsatisfying 30
feelings, shallowness of being, dissatisfaction with his own endeavours - from debilities caused by the lack of any compelling authority for the spiritual life. [Honan, 1981, p.140]
It was not a situation that Arnold felt was conducive to poetry. However, as I have begun to argue, that use of the concept of the buried life does not begin and end with Arnold, so that his mythology was not entirely private and it therefore gave him some “authority for the spiritual life”. He was probably influenced by a range of other poets in his particular use of this concept, beginning with Gray, whose “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” was “the most popular English poem for some two hundred years” [Ackroyd, 2004, pp.55-56]; and then Arnold influenced in turn a range of other poets in their for the most part increasingly martial use of it. He was thus not stranded entirely alone, and his private mythology has therefore an interesting public dimension. It would be useful to begin by investigating this public dimension to Arnold’s private mythology. Hughes’ work is again valuable here, since in his essays on Wilfred Owen, Keith Douglas and T.S. Eliot in particular, Hughes circled obsessively around the metaphor of the buried life, albeit without ever naming it, or showing any interest in Arnold, or explicating the metaphor fully. Owen, Douglas and Eliot are all poets, like Arnold, the unity of whose work depends upon their use of the concept of the buried life. In his poetic fragment “An Imperial Elegy” (1916), for example, Owen described the Western Front of World War One, the site of millions of soldiers’ deaths, as having the “appearance of a titan’s grave”, presumably Tityus’; or more particularly the appearance of a giant crucifix, with a “span” and “length” which “crossed all Europe”:
Not one corner of a foreign field But a span as wide as Europe; An appearance of a titan’s grave, And the length thereof a thousand miles, It crossed all Europe like a mystic road, Or as the Spirits’ Pathway lieth on the night. And I heard a voice crying This is the Path of Glory. [“An Imperial Elegy”, lines 1-10]
Owen alluded to Brooke’s “The Soldier” in his first line and Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” in his last to give the necessary historical context to his description; since Gray was the first poet of the buried life and, for Owen, Brooke was the last. Then, in Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922), the narrator hopes for a post-war resurrection of this buried god:
There I saw one I knew, and stopped him, crying: ‘Stetson! ‘You who were with me in the ships at Mylae! “That corpse you planted last year in your garden, ‘Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year? [“The Waste Land”, lines 69-72]
31
In these lines, written just after World War One, there is an irony in Eliot’s allusion to the Pyrrhic victories of the First Punic War. But what it is hoped will “grow” from the millions of corpses of the dead soldiers, in this case, as if they were so many gardens of Adonis, is the resurrected god. Similarly, in his poem “A God is Buried” (1940) Douglas described a nature-god youthful and alive but also dead and buried in his grave, or perhaps only sleeping for the past two thousand years, beneath what was a battlefield in World War One, the Italian Front of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and the site of millions of soldiers’ deaths:
White-limbed deity in a cavity of the safe earth, cased in, lulled by the sound of the fertile seed and sap working within layers of ground close above you, while that murderous plot gradually heals and prepares for you to evacuate your green shell, when you will youthfully stamp the new earth with divine foot. [“A God is Buried”, lines 27-36]
It is as if in these poems by Owen, Eliot and Douglas the millions of dead soldiers of World War One make up the dead fragments of a god that for some reason has not yet been resurrected. This is similar to the situation in Arnold’s “Obermann Once More” (1867), in which the old Christian world lies dead, like a dead body (although Obermann himself still flits about the place, in youthful, Scholar-Gipsy-like fashion). It is hoped that the violence of the French Revolution might cause its resurrection:
‘But slow that tide of common thought Which bathed our life, retired; Slow, slow, the old world wore to nought, And pulse by pulse expired...
‘And oh, we cried, that on this corse Might fall a freshening storm! Rive its dry bones, and with new force A new-sprung world inform!
‘- Down came the storm! O’er France it passed In sheets of scathing fire; All Europe felt that fiery blast, And shook as it rushed by her. [“Obermann Once More”, lines 189- 192; 197-204]
But the violence of the Revolution does not cause its resurrection, and after the Revolution has passed the world is still much as it was before, made up of the dead fragments of things that used to be the living Christian God, Jesus Christ: 32
‘“That glow of central fire is done Which with its fusing flame Knit all its parts, and kept you one - But ye, ye are the same! [“Obermann Once More”, lines 221-224]
In the works of Owen, Eliot, Douglas and Arnold, it is as if the comradeship that soldiers (or revolutionaries) feel in wartime offers a temporary, if delusive, influx of that “tide of common thought”, which are the thoughts of the living god in which all the members of a society should share. But once the war or revolution is over then that tide retreats again, the god is seen really to be dead, and everyone is left stranded again in their own separate, selfish thoughts. It is this perceived influx of the “tide of common thought” in wartime which probably explains poets’ for the most part increasingly martial use of the metaphor of the buried life in the period after Arnold and Tennyson. With its mixed metaphors involving tides, bodies and vulcanism, it seems that “Obermann Once More” offers a good example of Arnold’s apparent lack of a gift for consistency of thought. But such surface inconsistencies in Arnold’s poetry, whilst often infelicitous, and evidence of hasty composition, as Eliot noted [Eliot, 1964, p.111], are nevertheless usually reconciled at a deeper level, subsumed within the concept of the buried life. However, leaving aside the imagery of tides and vulcanism for now, the key image of the dead, Christ-like god that the above poems by Owen, Douglas and Arnold all share is rather like that myth of the god Dionysus’ suffering, death and dismemberment which Nietzsche described in The Birth of Tragedy (1872) as an allegory of the process of individuation in ancient Greek society:
In truth, however, this hero is the suffering Dionysus of the mysteries, that god experiencing in himself the agonies of individuation, the god of whom marvellous myths speak, telling the story of how he as a boy was dismembered by the Titans and is now worshipped in that state as Zagreus: which suggests that this dismemberment, the properly Dionysian suffering, is similar to a transformation into earth, wind, fire and water, and that we should regard the state of individuation as the source and original cause of suffering, as something objectionable in itself. [Nietzsche, 2000, pp.59-60]
This is the process by which Nietzsche felt the ancient Greeks first became aware of themselves as lonely and isolated individuals, rather than just as members of a society. (As an aside here, Empedocles was famously the ancient Greek philosopher whose idea it was that the world was made up of the four elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water; but these elements were also described by Plutarch as four of the things into which Dionysus was torn, according to the Orphic rites) [in Graves, 1961, p.134]. There is something like this process of Dionysian individuation, too, perhaps, in Gray’s “Elegy”, where the common life of the village goes along on its untroubled path, not disturbed at all by the death of God in the wider world, since the villagers are not aware of it, or for them God is indeed still very much alive. Gray’s poet, however, mopes about on his own and looks upon the life of the community from outside, as Arnold’s Scholar-Gipsy looks upon the 33
festal lights of “Christ-Church hall” from outside [“The Scholar-Gipsy”, line 129], and is intensely aware of himself as an individual who cannot belong to the community, since for him God is dead. His funeral procession in Gray’s poem is thus rather like the one described in Hardy’s poem, “God’s Funeral”. For Nietzsche, the Eleusinian Mysteries’ aim was to hasten the rebirth or resurrection of Dionysus. This rebirth or resurrection the initiates (or epopts) hoped would reverse that process of individuation, and thus end those feelings of loneliness and isolation which they believed accompanied it: “The hope of the epopts was directed towards a rebirth of Dionysus, a rebirth which we must begin to sense obscurely as the end of individuation” [Nietzsche, 2000, p.60]. In these poems by Owen, Eliot, Douglas and Arnold (and Gray, whose “Elegy” deals with the legacy of the English Civil War and the Puritan millenarianism of the seventeenth-century) [“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, lines 57-72] it appears that war or revolution has a similar aim. This is to hasten the rebirth or resurrection of a god, in order to end the feelings of loneliness and isolation that accompanied the death of that god and the subsequent individuation. Owen and Douglas were important to Hughes, because Owen represented to him his father’s experiences in World War One, whilst Douglas represented to him his brother’s experiences in World War Two. Both Hughes’ father and brother were initiates into a world of war that was denied to Hughes himself [Hughes, 1995, p.215]. It was a world of war described by Paul Fussell in The Great War and Modern Memory:
To Henry Williamson, those who “passed through the estranging remoteness of battle” were “not broken, but reborn,” and a similar rhetoric of Conversion dominates Ernest Parker’s recall of moving up the line for the first time: “What effect this experience would have on our lives we could not imagine, but at least it was unlikely that we should survive without some sort of inner change. Towards this transmutation of our personalities we now marched.” The personal issues at stake in infantry warfare are so momentous that it is natural to speak of “baptism by fire.” “We are still an initiate generation,” says Charles Carrington, a generation possessing “a secret that can never be communicated.” And after the initiatory rite of baptism, there is the possibility of resurrection. Returning from an apparently hopeless patrol, Blunden says, “We were received as Lazarus was.” “I had been feeling more cheerful lately,” says Sassoon, “for my friend Cromlech had risen again from the dead.” [Fussell, 1977, pp.114-115]
And it was this initiatory aspect of the world of war which would prove most attractive to poets in an era in which, as was noted, the tide of Christianity appeared to be receding. In his essay “Unfinished Business”, about Owen, Hughes thus wrote that Owen’s “readiness to give his life to Christ was to be important” [Hughes, 1995, p.42]. Before the war Owen had thought about taking holy orders, but then:
suddenly the unbelievable war was on him, mobilizing these inclinations in him, and in the name of a high, holy cause, and supplying the unique material, in the baldest reality, as nothing else could have done. [Hughes, 1995, p.43]
34
Owen found his true vocation as an officer-poet, feeling with and for his men, and then dying for them like Christ, and this is what his poems were about:
The big thing behind these few short poems that makes them resound... is Owen’s genius for immersing himself in and somehow absorbing that unprecedented experience of ghastliness, the reality of that huge mass of dumb, disillusioned, trapped, dying men. His every line is saturated with the vastness of it, a hallucinated telescope into the cluttered thick of it... and somewhere at the bottom of the carnage, the Messiah struggling to be born - ‘Christ is literally in no-man’s land. There men often hear his voice’, he wrote. [Hughes, 1995, pp.43-44]
Hughes’ phrase there about “Owen’s genius for immersing himself in and somehow absorbing that unprecedented experience of ghastliness” is reminiscent of Gray’s poet’s genius for immersing himself in the lives of humble villagers. It is also reminiscent of Eliot’s “notion of an infinitely gentle/ Infinitely suffering thing”, from “Preludes” [Eliot, 1974, p.25]. But apart from that, in this essay Hughes gives some interesting clues as to the nature of the buried life. The buried life has something to do with war; something to do with suffering, martyrdom and death; something to do with the rebirth or resurrection of a Christ-like god; and something to do with the necessity of actually experiencing all of the things one writes about. In his essay “Keith Douglas” Hughes wrote of Douglas that:
war brought his gift to maturity, or to a first maturity. In a sense, war was his ideal subject... This was the vision, the unifying generalisation that shed the meaning and urgency into all his observations and particulars... The truth of a man is the doomed man in him or his dead body. Poem after poem circles this idea, as if his mind were tethered... This sets his writing apart from that of Hemingway, with which it shares certain features. Hemingway tried to imagine the death that Douglas had foresuffered. [Hughes, 1995, p.214]
Hughes’ use of the word “foresuffered” reminds one of Gray’s poet having somehow apparently foresuffered his own death at the start of the “Elegy”. It is also reminscent of Eliot’s use of the word in “The Waste Land”: “And I Tiresias have foresuffered all” [Eliot, 1974, p.72]. But apart from that, in this essay Hughes again gives some interesting clues as to the nature of the buried life. The buried life has again something to do with war; something to do with suffering, martyrdom and death; something to do with the rebirth or resurrection of a Christ-like god; and something to do with actually experiencing all of the things one writes about. In Hughes’ essay, however, the metaphor of the buried life has also something to do with having to foresuffer a death, as if one has to have already “died” to life, or to the surface life, before one can be “reborn” as a poet out of the buried life. To be a poet, then, for such as Owen, Douglas and Eliot, means that one must first “die” to one’s surface life, as Hughes noted, as does the soldier in his baptism by fire, so that his personality can merge with that of his comrades:
35
On the negative side, this suggests that the poet’s ordinary life will be pre-empted, that sacred responsibilities will be imposed, whether he accepts them or not, and that some heavy personal cost will be exacted. [Hughes, 1995, p.284]
Or this means “dying” to one’s ordinary, everyday personality, like Jesus Christ, so that one’s personality can merge fully again with God’s. Hughes noted how this appears to have been a part of Eliot’s early experience:
Everything about Eliot’s early life suggests that in some obscure part of himself he had foresuffered the sacrificial death of that deity even before he began to write under compulsion. [Hughes, 1995, p. 284]
(By “that deity” Hughes meant some Thammuz-Dionysus-Balder-type god, such as Frazer wrote about in The Golden Bough, which coalesced, “ultimately, into the person of Christ”) [Hughes, 1995, pp.283-285]. But it also appears to have been a part of Owen’s and Douglas’ wartime experiences, and Gray’s “Elegy” suggests that he may have undergone such an experience in the mid-eighteenth-century. It is also interesting how in many of Arnold’s early poems, such as “The Strayed Reveller”, “Mycerinus” and “The Sick King in Bokhara”, there seems to be a suggestion that he had undergone a similar experience, too, in his early life. Hughes’ essays on Owen and Douglas are interesting, but his essay “The Poetic Self: A Centenary Tribute to T.S. Eliot” is particularly valuable. This is because it is a long essay about a major poet, and a lot of what Hughes had to say about Eliot seems to apply almost equally well to Arnold. In terms of a public dimension to Eliot’s poetry, in this essay Hughes wrote of how in Eliot’s lifetime:
religious institutions and rituals had ceased to be real in the old sense, and that they continued to exist only as forms of ‘make-believe’, ways of behaviour rather than of belief... the whole metaphysical universe centred on God had vanished from its place. It had evaporated, with all its meanings. This emptiness was Eliot’s starting point. What seems curious was the suddenness of it. The historical convulsions leading up to it could be or were read as either death-struggles or birth-throes, and obviously they were both. But in spite of all those clear prophecies and ominous preparations, the actual birth... came as a stupefying shock, and with anything but a whimper, when the First World War left the truth bare. It was as if only now, at this moment, mankind was finally born. [Hughes, 1995, p.269]
This “emptiness” was of particular concern to poets, or to artists of any description, since in the eighteenth-century the notion of art had been associated with God by German Idealists, so that the artist supposedly created not out of their own personality, but out of God’s [Carey, 2006, pp.8-14]. So if God did no longer exist in the external world, then it would be necessary for the poet to replace Him with something else, or to find Him somewhere else, in the subconscious, if they were to be more than just a mere versifier, a non-artist, writing only out of their own limited personality. What Hughes wrote about the disappearance of God in Eliot’s lifetime would
36
seem to be a simplification, however, of what actually occurred. This is certainly no criticism of the quality of Hughes’ insights, however, since even to Hughes his essay seemed “far too simple and impressionistic” [Hughes, 1995, p.292]. For it seems that for Arnold, as the poet of “Dover Beach” and “Obermann Once More”, the “whole metaphysical universe centred on God” had already “vanished from its place” by at least the mid-nineteenth-century. In “Obermann Once More” he had described the French Revolution as the event which “left the truth bare” [“Obermann Once More”, lines 201- 208]. (Gray’s “Elegy”, too, seems to intimate that the Civil Wars and Puritan revolution of the seventeenth-century left a “truth bare”.) So it seems very unlikely that it happened all of a sudden in Eliot’s lifetime. In “The Prelude” Wordsworth had described how in the early, optimistic days of the French Revolution “human nature” had seemed “born again” [“The Prelude”, (1850), Book 6, line 341]. But in his reflections upon the French Revolution and its aftermath in “Obermann Once More” (1867), Arnold saw there were really neither death-struggles nor birth-throes associated with that event. On one level it was as if the old religious world was merely sleeping in its grave, or in some state of suspended animation, like the Scholar-Gipsy or like Obermann, rather than being conclusively dead; and without a death, as Arnold said, there can be no rebirth [“Obermann Once More”, lines 245-256]. Thus it would seem more likely, from the evidence provided by poets like Gray, Wordsworth, Tennyson, Arnold, Hardy, Housman, Brooke and Douglas, mentioned above, that rather than being the one event which “left the truth bare”, World War One was just another in a long line of attempts, such as in the English Civil War, the French Revolution, the revolts of 1848, the Crimean War and the Boer War before it, and in the Second World War after, to hasten or provoke the rebirth of a religion, and with it the rebirth of a whole society, through the “sacrifice” of those who die in battle. Surely such a “sacrifice” must hasten or provoke something? Hence, for example, the optimism of Rupert Brooke’s “1914” sonnets:
Now God be thanked Who has matched us with His hour, And caught our youth, and wakened us from sleeping, With hands made sure, clear eye, and sharpened power, To turn, as swimmers into cleanness leaping, Glad from a world grown old and cold and weary. [“Peace”, lines 1-5]
Hence, too, Wilfred Owen’s optimism in 1917, which has already been mentioned: “Christ is literally in ‘no man’s land’. There men often hear His voice” [Owen, 1966, p.25]. But the truth laid bare in such wars or revolutions as those mentioned above was always that even the greatest “sacrifice” or slaughter can hasten or provoke nothing like the rebirth of a religion, or the rebirth of a whole society, or the rebirth of a god. Therefore, after a war or revolution has ended, the world will still be in much the same predicament that it was before it started. Eliot’s post-war “The Waste Land” (1922), with its poet simultaneously youthful and alive but also dead and buried, and speaking from his grave, or perhaps only sleeping, and at the end still awaiting the rebirth of religion 37
and of society, illustrates just such a predicament. “The Waste Land” thus has its similarities to Gray’s “Elegy”, as has been mentioned, but also to poems like Hardy’s “Drummer Hodge” or Housman’s “Astronomy”. This is the public dimension to Arnold’s concept of the buried life, then. It is used in an attempt to find an alternative or supplement to Christianity’s myth of the sacrifice of His innocent Son by God the Father on behalf of humankind, in the myth of the “sacrificial” deaths of innocent young men in battle, on behalf of their society, so that they are remembered as being dead and buried in their graves, or perhaps only sleeping, but they are also remembered as being forever youthful and alive, like young gods: “They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old” [“For the Fallen”, line 13]. Housman wrote often about such innocent young men, as in Last Poems:
I sought them far and found them, The sure, the straight, the brave, The hearts I lost my own to, The souls I could not save. They braced their belts about them, They crossed in ships the sea, They sought and found six feet of ground, And there they died for me. [Last Poems, XXXII, lines 9-16]
Since such young men died not really to help defeat tyranny, or Germany, or the Boer Republics, or Russia, as the case may be, but to help to provoke the rebirth of a religion and of their whole society, then whether the war or revolution is won or lost, there is afterwards a major sense of loss and disillusionment. This can be puzzling to historians of World War One in particular, who often cannot understand why public perceptions of the historical facts about the war, as they see them, should have been so distorted by the private “myths” of a few junior-officer poets like Owen and Sassoon. The historian Gary Sheffield, for example, was so-puzzled in his book Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities [Sheffield, 2002, pp.1-24]. However that may be, “Sohrab and Rustum”, written in the years leading up to the Crimean War, is the best example of Arnold’s use of such a myth as those later used by Owen and Sassoon. (Owen’s “Parable of the Old Man and the Young” can be read as a sort of condensed redaction of Arnold’s poem.) “Sohrab and Rustum” is about the “sacrificial” death of an innocent young man in wartime, which is presented as an alternative or supplement to Christianity. However, that poem will be discussed in more detail in Chapter Six. That is the public dimension to both Eliot’s and Arnold’s concept of the buried life, but the concept has also an interesting private dimension. To return to Hughes’ essay on Eliot, in terms of Eliot’s private mythology what interested Hughes was how Eliot:
was able to contain within himself, more fully than any of his contemporaries, none of whom invented anything like it in inclusive complexity, depth and power, the spiritual tragedy of his epoch. [Hughes, 1995, pp.273-274]
38
The “spiritual tragedy” Hughes was referring to there was the vanishing of the whole metaphysical universe centred on God, referred to above. According to Hughes, Eliot was able to do this by internalising, in his buried life, something that was like the myth of the Roman soldier-boy, Saint Sebastian; or Saint Narcissus, as Eliot eventually called him, after another Roman soldier-boy. This myth obsessed Eliot in the summer of 1914 [Gordon, 1978, pp.60-64], and for him it probably merged for a time with the “myth” of Rupert Brooke and his own private “myth” about Jean Verdenal, “mort aux Dardanelles” [Eliot, 1974, p.11]. If God was to vanish from the external world, then it seems that something very like God would have to be found in the poet’s internal world. So it was as if Saint Narcissus was dead and buried deep within Eliot’s psyche, or perhaps only sleeping, but was also forever youthful and alive, like a young god, and looking out through Eliot’s eyes, and merging with him from time to time. This myth of Saint Sebastian, or Saint Narcissus, is about an innocent young soldier whose sacrifice or martyrdom helps to provoke the rebirth of Rome as a Christian society [Hughes, 1995, pp.273-274]. Many others were obsessed by this myth, particularly in the period 1890- 1918, such as Hardy and Housman, and some of them are quoted by Fussell in his chapter “Soldier Boys” in The Great War and Modern Memory. Here is Frederick Rolfe:
A Roman soldier-boy, bound to a tree, His strong arms lifted up for sacrifice, His gracious form all stripped of earthly guise, Naked, but brave as a young lion can be, Transfixed by arrows he gains the victory. [in Fussell, 1977, p.285]
And the myth also probably informs Wilfred Owen’s entire oeuvre [Fussell, 1977, pp.286-299]. But with the possible exceptions of Owen, Rosenberg and Sassoon, and later Douglas, who had it forced upon them, amongst Eliot’s contemporaries, according to Hughes:
it is strange that, though so many other poets shared something of his awareness, no other actually embodied the vision and lived it, and articulated what that meant, as if the inescapable truths of it were inborn, as he did. [Hughes, 1995, p.270]
What is crucial there is that Hughes felt that what made Eliot such a great poet was that he actually embodied (in his buried life) the experiences of a Saint Sebastian or Saint Narcissus. This implied that Eliot suffered exactly as they had suffered in the course of their sacrifice or martyrdom, as they attempted to bring about the rebirth of a religion, and with it the rebirth of a whole society. In other words, for Hughes, Eliot actually lived the experiences he wrote about, just as much as war poets like Owen or Douglas did. Other minor poets like Rolfe perhaps wrote prettily or obsessively about the martyrdom of Saint Sebastian, and endured a martyrdom of sorts themselves, as “artists”, in terms of their poverty and sense of rejection. But such minor poets as Rolfe nevertheless shrank from fully enduring such a martyrdom as Saint Sebastian’s on behalf of their society, and 39
this is reflected in the quality of their poetry. That is Eliot’s private mythology, then. He internalised the “spiritual tragedy of his epoch” in his buried life, through the persona of his Saint Narcissus; so that the role of the poet, as Eliot saw it, was to suffer a martyrdom like Saint Sebastian’s or Saint Narcissus’ on behalf of his society, in order to hasten or provoke the rebirth of a religion, and with it the rebirth of a whole society. (And the martyrdom of a Saint Narcissus or Saint Sebastian is of course modelled upon the martyrdom of Jesus Christ Himself.) In terms of Arnold’s private mythology, what is argued is that Arnold, too, internalised the “spiritual tragedy of his epoch” in his buried life, through the persona of his Strayed Reveller, who is like Gray’s poet in the “Elegy”, as has been mentioned, and whose myth obsessed Arnold in 1847-48 and was his version of the myth of Saint Sebastian. Like Eliot, Arnold thus believed that the role of the poet was to suffer a martyrdom like Saint Sebastian’s on behalf of his society, in order to hasten or provoke the rebirth of a religion, and with it the rebirth of a whole society. What is crucial here is that Arnold felt that what made him a poet was that he actually embodied (in the buried life) the experiences of a Strayed Reveller, so that he suffered exactly as the Strayed Reveller had suffered in the course of his sacrifice or martyrdom, before he articulated those experiences in poetry. In Arnold’s poem, “The Strayed Reveller”, the Strayed Reveller’s mind has been torn into fragments by its Dionysian visions:
These things, Ulysses, The wise bards also Behold and sing. But oh, what labour! O prince, what pain! ... such a price The Gods exact for song: To become what we sing. [“The Strayed Reveller”, lines 207-211; 232- 234]
He has therefore suffered what others have suffered as their bodies were torn into fragments during the day’s Bacchanalia. It may be objected that neither Arnold nor Eliot suffered as either the Strayed Reveller or Saint Narcissus suffered, since one would think that writing poems could hardly be said to be as painful an experience as being shot full of arrows by Roman soldiers, or being torn limb from limb by Greek Bacchantes. However, in a key letter to his sister Jane, which will be discussed again elsewhere, Arnold insisted that it was the same experience:
to attain or approach perfection in the region of thought and feeling, and to unite this with perfection of form, demands not merely an effort and a labour, but an actual tearing of oneself to pieces, which one does not readily consent to... unless one can devote one’s whole life to poetry. [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, p.402]
Eliot was never so open in his correspondence as that, but his “A Note of Introduction” 40
to David Jones’ In Parenthesis (1937) is interesting:
David Jones is a representative of the same literary generation as Joyce and Pound and myself, if four men born between 1882 and 1895 can be regarded as of the same literary generation. David Jones is the youngest, and the tardiest to publish. The lives of all of us were altered by that War, but David Jones is the only one to have fought in it. [in Jones, 1963, p.viii]
Eliot seems to intimate that Jones’ experiences, recounted in In Parenthesis, are essentially the same as those experiences recounted in other key post-war Modernist texts by Eliot, Joyce or Pound, and may even be closest to their soldier-boy archetype. Jones’ experiences were of being initiated into a world of war and comradeship; then of seeing his comrades torn to pieces in battle and suffering like so many dumb Christs; and then of being badly wounded himself in the wood (Mametz Wood) of “fair Balder” and the “Golden Bough” [Jones, 1963, pp.177-178]. (Eliot had a memory of Verdenal “coming across the Luxembourg Gardens in the late afternoon, waving a branch of lilac”) [in Southam, 1981, p.37]. Jones has his advice for the stretcher-bearers:
you musn’t spill the precious fragments, for perhaps these raw bones live. [Jones, 1963, p.175]
His comrades were then subject to the farcical “resurrections” of prosthetics-makers [Jones, 1963, pp.175-176], but Jones himself was “resurrected” from his experiences as a quite considerable poet and artist. The second part of Eliot’s “Ash Wednesday” also presents the experience of spiritual death, on the path to being a poet, in terms of physical death and dismemberment. Jones alludes to these lines in his lines quoted above, and thus seems to intimate that his experiences in the war were essentially the same as Eliot’s experiences, recounted in “Ash Wednesday”:
Lady, three white leopards sat under a juniper tree In the cool of the day, having fed to satiety On my legs my heart my liver and that which had been contained In the hollow round of my skull. And God said Shall these bones live? shall these Bones live?... I who am here dissembled Proffer my deeds to oblivion, and my love To the posterity of the desert and the fruit of the gourd. [Eliot, 1974, p. 97]
(The Bible is relevant here: “a leopard shall watch over their cities: every one that goeth out thence shall be torn in pieces” [Jeremiah, v, 6]. But leopards were also an aspect of Dionysus) [Nietzsche, 2000, p.138]. There are similarities, then, between Arnold, Eliot and Jones. However, Arnold differed from Eliot, or Jones, in that he eventually shrank 41
from enduring such a sacrifice or martyrdom as the Strayed Reveller’s, time and time again, and over the period of many years, for the sake of his poetry; and the letter quoted from above gives his reasons for doing so. In summary, then, as a concept, the buried life is basically a metaphor, or a series of metaphors, or a mythological scheme, partly inherited and partly created by Matthew Arnold, through which he attempted to encompass some of the complexities of the human psyche and of human society, and which he used extensively in his careers as both a poet and a critic. It is about the perceived death of God in the external world in the seventeenth, eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, and the consequences of that death for art, the individual and society. But it is also about poets taking a Christ-like role upon themselves, by the internalisation of a Christ-figure and soldier-figure, in order to hasten or provoke the rebirth or resurrection of a religion, a society and God. (Hence, then, the reference to Weston in the opening paragraph of this chapter, since Weston believed that in the romance of the grail quest the hero also takes a Christ-like role upon themselves, in order to hasten or provoke the rebirth or resurrection of a religion, a society and God) [Coupe, 1997, pp.25-29]. The buried life deals with the feelings of loneliness and isolation, of being locked into one’s own, individual consciousness, that poets have felt was consequent upon the death of God and the retreat of that “tide of common thought”, which was the mind of God, from people’s individual minds. The buried life has also a connection to wars and revolutions since for poets, and particularly for soldier-poets, the comradeship that soldiers feel in wartime is a reminder of that “tide of common thought” which supposedly once flowed through all our minds. It is also often hoped that the “sacrifice” that soldiers make in wartime by dying for their society will help to provoke the rebirth of God, and with it the rebirth of religion and society.
42
Chapter Three ______
The River of “The Buried Life”
Although he did not originate it, Arnold appears to have been the first to give the concept of the buried life that name in his poem “The Buried Life” (1852). (B.C. Southam notes that Arnold’s poem “seems to be the source of this phrase” [Southam, 1981, p.45]; and, unless someone either proves that Arnold invented the phrase or finds an earlier source, it is not possible to be more precise than that.) Arnold had visited the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse on his honeymoon in 1851 and, given his misapprehension in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” that the Carthusian monks slept in their coffins [“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, lines 47-48], it would seem likely that the name of the metaphor is ultimately derived from monasticism or eremitism: “What dost thou in this living tomb?” [“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, line72]. Peter Ackroyd records a twelfth-century English text which describes how:
Female recluses were considered to be no longer of this world; the Mass for the Dead was celebrated before the anchorite was led in procession to her cell, whereupon all the ceremonies of the Burial Office were performed including the scattering of earth. She then lay prostrate upon her ‘bier’ before being pronounced dead to the world. [Ackroyd, 2004, p.170]
However that may be, in this chapter “The Buried Life” will be analysed in detail, since this poem deals with some important aspects of the buried life not yet discussed, such as the river of the buried life. (The river of the buried life essentially incarnates the “living tomb” of monasticism or eremitism in the form of what usually lies buried in certain landscapes, as becomes clearer when other poems of Arnold’s such as “Sohrab and Rustum” and “Empedocles on Etna” are also examined.) It is also useful to include the whole text of “The Buried Life” in this chapter, which is not something that will be done again, so that the overall pattern of Arnold’s use of the metaphor of the buried life in at least one complete poem can be examined. “The Buried Life” deals with the promise of romantic love that “two human hearts might blend/ In one” [“Isolation - To Marguerite”, lines 38-39] in a “spot of time”. This promise is a variation on the idea of “the tide of common thought” from “Obermann Once More”, discussed in Chapter Two. It may have been much in Arnold’s mind in the years preceding the poem’s publication, for at some time between 1849 and 1851 he fell in love with the unknown “Marguerite”, to whom he addressed a number of poems on the above theme, such as “Isolation - To Marguerite” and “To Marguerite - Continued”. Then he fell in love with Frances Lucy Wightman, whom he married in 1851, and “Dover Beach” was inspired by their honeymoon at Dover. “The Buried Life” overlays the complexities of thought of several of Wordsworth’s poems, such as “The River Duddon”, “Intimations of Immortality”, 43
“Tintern Abbey”, “Ecclesiastical Sonnets” and “A Poet’s Epitaph”, upon the simple life- as-a-river metaphor of Matthew Arnold’s father Thomas Arnold’s unpublished poem “How still this upland Vale!”. However, Thomas Arnold’s use of the metaphor in that poem is also likely to have been due to Wordsworth’s example, for Thomas Arnold had been much impressed by Wordsworth’s poetry when first introduced to the Lyrical Ballads by Coleridge’s nephew whilst a student at Oxford in 1811 [Copley, 2002, p.31]. He was then led to explore the Lake District, with its numerous streams flowing from the hills down to the sea, by his love of Wordsworth’s poetry, and a strong friendship developed between the Arnolds and the Wordsworths from 1834, when Thomas Arnold built a summer home for his family at Fox How in the Lake District, near Wordsworth’s home. It is therefore likely that it was mainly due to Wordsworth’s example that Thomas Arnold was inspired to write any poetry at all [Honan, 1981, p.25]. He enjoyed his summers as Wordsworth’s neighbour in the Lake District so much that he often felt little inclination to leave, at the end of summer, in pursuit of “God’s Task” for him as Headmaster of Rugby School:
I feel as if I could wish never to go out of the valley any more - but to live between Winandemere & Grasmere till my bones went to Grasmere’s churchyard, to lie under the yews which Wordsworth planted there, & to have the Rother with its deep & silent pools passing by - yet I know well that life is not given us for such dreams, & I feel no helplessness in my occupations, & no despondency though neither have I any sanguine hopes of doing good. [in Copley, 2002, p.75]
There may have been a little of the Scholar-Gipsy, then, in the father as well as in the son. Thomas Arnold imagines himself there dead and buried in a pastoral setting, and thus unharried by worldly concerns. He is therefore more poetically alive, and alive to Wordsworth’s influence. Thomas Arnold’s poem, “How still this upland Vale!”, written in 1839, foreshadows his son’s poetical career in its use of the Wordsworthian imagery of upland, plain, ocean, and the stream of life. “The Descent of the Rhone”, published in 1835 by the Wordsworthian clergyman, Richard Chevenix Trench, may have influenced the composition of both “How still this upland vale” and “The Buried Life” [O’Gorman, 2008, pp.42-44]. However, Thomas Arnold had written to his wife as early as 1828, explaining that:
There is something to me almost affecting in the striking analogy of rivers to the course of human life, and my fondness for them makes me notice it more in them than in any other objects in which it may exist equally. [in Forsyth, 1968, p.242]
So his poem reflects a long-standing interest on his part. In “Essays upon Epitaphs” Wordsworth also put his life-as-a-river metaphor into prose:
Never did a child stand by the side of a running stream, pondering within himself what power was the feeder of the perpetual current, from what never-wearied 44
sources the body of water was supplied, but he must have been inevitably propelled to follow this question by another: “Towards what abyss is it in progress? what receptacle can contain the mighty influx?” And the spirit of the answer must have been, though the word might be sea or ocean, accompanied perhaps with an image gathered from a map, or from the real object in nature - these might have been the letter, but the spirit of the answer must have been as inevitably, - a receptacle without bounds or dimensions; - nothing less than infinity. [Wordsworth, 1974, Vol.2, p.51]
Thomas Arnold’s poem explains in simple terms to the reader that life - God’s purpose - is just like a stream which flows from birth to death clearly visible to all:
How still this upland Vale! How clear, how peaceful, is this infant Stream! How blest in this untroubled Loveliness Its sparkling Waters seem!
Yonder in Distance far How gleams beneath the Light the mighty Sea! Eternal Life is there, Eternal Power, Eternal Purity.
Couldst thou at once be there, O peaceful stream! thine were a Wondrous Story: Here, to have Rest and Pleasure for thy Lot There, Rest and Glory -
Between this upland Vale And yon far Ocean, canst thou nothing see? A wide Space parts the two - and there is set God’s Task for thee -
A rich and busy Land! Wide fruitful Fields, and many a Crowded Town - Thither, O Stream, from this thy early Home God calls thee down -
Down with precipitous Fall From this thy upland Vale thou must be hurled! Chafing and restless, tossed and broken, reach That busy World -
Soon from that wild Turmoil Escaped, with fuller and with calmer Flow Lonely no more nor wandering, on thy Way I see thee go -
A straight embanked Line Confines thee, wont to trace at will erewhile Thine own free Margin; and the Haunts of Men 45
Thy spotless waves defile -
Calmly thou flowest now: Singing no more, as erst, for mere Delight: But louder harsher sounds from Morn till Eve Thy Banks affright -
So changed from what thou wast! Curbed, soiled and troubled: yet thou must not grieve Knowing their better Wisdom, who their Good Give, not receive.
Better that sullied Stream Than thy clear Waters in thy upland Vale! Better that ceaseless Din, than thy blithe Song Answering the mountain Gale.
Thy sullied Waters tell Of others’ Stains which thou hast washed away: Thy straightened Course shows that where Duty calls Thou wilt not play.
Loud is that Din of Sounds Gloomy and close the Dwellings whence they rise - For Life and Freshness to the dreariest Scenes Thy Stream supplies.
No more at Distance now, Thy mighty Ocean calls thee to his Breast - Soiled in God’s Task, there wash thy Stains away - God grants thee Rest. [in Arnold, 1965, pp.610-611]
Apart from in the overall structure of the poem, Wordsworth’s influence can be detected in individual lines, such as in the line “Lonely no more nor wandering, on thy Way”, which alludes to Wordsworth’s poem, “I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud”. Both Wordsworth’s and Thomas Arnold’s rivers of life have a likely common source in the river which “went out of Eden” in Genesis [Genesis, 2:10]. A second likely common source is in the Gospel of St. John, where Jesus says: “whosoever drinketh of the water that I shall give him shall never thirst; but the water that I shall give him shall be in him a well of water springing up into everlasting life” [St. John, 4:14]. A third likely common source is in Revelation, which provides an image of the river of life beginning and ending in God, and flowing on its way through the holy city of Jerusalem [Revelation, 21]. St. John writes:
And he said unto me, It is done. I am the Alpha and Omega, the beginning and the end. I will give unto him that is athirst of the fountain of the water of life freely... And he shewed me a pure river of water of life, clear as crystal, proceeding out of the throne of God and of the lamb. [Revelation, 21.6; 22.1]
46
Hughes points to this as a likely source for Coleridge’s river Alph in “Kubla Khan” [Hughes, 1995, pp.32-33]; and Thomas Arnold, like Wordsworth [Holmes, 1999, p.165], was well familiar with “Kubla Khan” [Honan, 1981, p.25]. But given Wordsworth’s influence, the river that Thomas Arnold had in mind for his poem is also likely to have been the Duddon, which flows to the sea from close by the Arnolds’ and the Wordsworths’ homes in the Lake District. It also flows with a like symbolic purpose to Thomas Arnold’s through Wordsworth’s sonnet sequences, “The River Duddon” and “Ecclesiastical Sonnets”. In “The River Duddon” Wordsworth wrote of how the Duddon dances in its upper reaches, “like a Bacchanal, from rock to rock/ Tossing her frantic thyrsus wide and high” [“The River Duddon”, XX, lines 13-14]. In its lower reaches it calmly prepares, like the poet, “in peace of heart, in calm of mind/ And soul, to mingle with Eternity” [“The River Duddon, XXXIII, lines 13-14]. Then, in the “Ecclesiastical Sonnets”, Wordsworth first invokes the “cloud-fed spring” of “Cerulean Duddon”, before seeking out “the source/ Of a HOLY RIVER”, which is the river of Christianity as it flows through English history [“Ecclesiastical Sonnets”, I, lines 2, 9- 10]. The valley of the river Duddon is, therefore, also the likely main setting for Matthew Arnold’s poem “Resignation”(1849). This poem is about the long walks that Thomas Arnold used to lead his family on throughout the Lake District. It uses its river setting to contrast the father’s God-given directness of purpose, as described in “How still this upland Vale!”, with the son’s own seemingly purposeless meanderings and backtrackings, or “short flights or circular flights” as Eliot characterised them. That the setting is a symbolic Duddon would explain why no critics, nor even the Arnolds themselves, could ever identify a particular walk, led by Thomas Arnold, which the poem could describe [Tinker and Lowry, 1940, pp.63-65]. This is because “Resignation” does not describe any particular walk led by Thomas Arnold. Instead it describes a walk through the symbolic landscape, the symbolic Duddon, of Thomas Arnold’s “How still this upland Vale”. In “Resignation” Thomas Arnold is described as a purposeful leader who knows exactly where he is going and sets out in a straight line from where he is now to where he wants to be:
High on a bank our leader stands, Reviews and ranks his motley bands, Makes clear our goal to every eye - The valley’s western boundary. [“Resignation”, lines 44-47]
Thomas Arnold is pictured there directing his family on the banks of a river that flows, like the Duddon, from the hills of the Lake District down into the Irish Sea, so that their journey’s end is by the sea:
But, Fausta, I remember well, That as the balmy darkness fell We bathed our hands with speechless glee, 47
That night, in the wide-glimmering sea. [“Resignation”, lines 82-85]
Possibly Thomas Arnold suppressed much in his own character in order to become the purposeful, energetic and controversial figure who inspired others, and achieved so much of what he thought of as “God’s purpose” here on earth, despite dying at the age of only forty-six. His son, too, later appeared to suppress much in his own character in order to achieve so much as a critic and School Inspector. Matthew Arnold, however, like the eponymous central figure of his later poem “The Scholar-Gipsy” (1853), describes himself in “Resignation” as having less in common with his purposeful and energetic father than with the gypsies, who yearly follow a more circuitous and meandering route which, although purposeful in reality, seems to the casual observer, and perhaps to the gypsies themselves, to lack any clear purpose:
The gipsies, whom we met below, They, too, have long roamed to and fro; They ramble, leaving, where they pass, Their fragments on the cumbered grass. And often to some kindly place Chance guides the migratory race, Where, though long wanderings intervene, They recognise a former scene. [“Resignation”, lines 108-115]
The imagery of the stream of life was common to both father and son. But whereas for Thomas Arnold the purpose and destiny of life was always clear and the stream of life never subterranean, for Matthew Arnold, after the death of his father, the stream of life was often subterranean, flowing through the subconscious, and thus largely inaccessible to ordinary consciousness. Like the gypsies, then, the individual was often carried along by the stream of life without necessarily having much of an idea of where he was going or why, although carried along by it he necessarily was, from birth to death. That is, unless one could somehow suspend the effects of time and remain forever youthful, or remain simultaneously youthful and alive but also be long dead and buried; which state would become, in “The Scholar-Gipsy”, Matthew Arnold’s poetical ideal. Thomas Arnold also admired the works of Coleridge (“with all his faults old Sam was more of a great man than anyone who has lived within the four seas in my memory”) [in Copley, 2002, p.186], and in 1846 his son Matthew was reading Coleridge’s Biographia Literaria [Arnold, 1965, pp.54-55]. In the Biographia Coleridge mentions how in the summer of 1797 he and the Wordsworths tracked several streams from their sources in the Quantocks down to their issues in the sea, as preparation for writing a poem to be called “The Brook”:
I sought for a subject that should give equal room and freedom for description, incident and impassioned reflections on men, nature and society, yet supply in itself a natural connection to the parts, and unity to the whole. Such a subject I conceived myself to have found in a stream, traced from its source in the hills among the yellow-red moss and conical glass-shaped tufts of bent, to the first 48
break or fall, where its drops become audible, and it begins to form a channel; thence to the peat and turf barn, itself built of the same dark squares as it sheltered; to the sheepfold; to the first cultivated plot of ground; to the lonely cottage and its bleak garden won from the heath; to the hamlet, the villages, the market-town, the manufactories and the sea-port. My walks, therefore, were almost daily on top of the Quantock and among its sloping coombs. [Coleridge, 1975, p.108]
Coleridge never completed such a poem, although Wordsworth did with “The River Duddon”; as did Thomas Arnold, too, with “How still this upland Vale!”. Inspired as he was by the subterranean rivers of Somerset, such as the underground River Axe at Wookey Hole, or the underground river Yeo at Cheddar Gorge, rather than by the surface streams of the Lake District, Coleridge instead wrote “Kubla Khan” in the autumn of 1797, with its subterranean river flowing down into a sunless sea. Matthew Arnold has left no particular record of having read “Kubla Khan”, although he was well aware of the quality of Coleridge’s “three or four” finest poems [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol. 9, p.43]. But whilst, like Coleridge, Matthew Arnold did not write any poems that were anything like “The River Duddon” or “How still this Upland Vale!”, he did write a number of poems of the buried life that were rather like “Kubla Khan”. In “Kubla Khan” Coleridge described how a subterranean “sacred river” is flung up “momently” to the surface, in a “spot of time”, before sinking back underground on its obscure passage to a “lifeless ocean” [“Kubla Khan”, lines 17-24]. There is a river which follows a similarly obscure and subterranean course through Matthew Arnold’s “The Buried Life”. “The Buried Life” begins with a slight variation, never made wholly distinct, upon Arnold’s more usual image of the stream of life as a largely subterranean river whose flow, like that of Coleridge’s river Alph in “Kubla Khan”, comes to the surface and is thus accessible to our ordinary consciousness only at odd moments in our lives. In this section of the poem the stream of life is like a river whose flow eddies about and appears to lack direction on the surface, but whose current nevertheless flows deep and strong below the surface, just out of reach of our ordinary consciousness:
Light flows our war of mocking words, and yet, Behold, with tears mine eyes are wet! I feel a nameless sadness o’er me roll. Yes, yes, we know that we can jest, We know, we know that we can smile! But there’s a something in this breast, To which thy light words bring no rest, And thy gay smiles no anodyne. Give me thy hand, and hush awhile, And turn those limpid eyes on mine, And let me read there, love! thy inmost soul. Alas! is even love too weak To unlock the heart, and let it speak? Are even lovers powerless to reveal To one another what indeed they feel? I knew the mass of men concealed 49
Their thoughts, for fear that if revealed They would by other men be met With blank indifference, or with blame reproved; I knew they lived and moved Tricked in disguises, alien to the rest Of men, and alien to themselves - and yet The same heart beats in every human breast! [“The Buried Life”, lines 1-23]
“The Buried Life” was published in the same year as “Empedocles on Etna”, so it would be interesting to know if Arnold had in mind Empedocles’ theory about the alternating dominance of the powers of Love and Strife in the universe [Barnes, 1987, p.42], when he wrote of “our war of mocking words”. In any case, Arnold and his friend and fellow- poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, may have discussed the metaphor of the buried life at Oxford in the 1840s, for as Honan noted [Honan, 1981, pp.100-101], in Ambarvalia (1849) Clough wrote of a “noisy band of revellers” who knock upon the door of his rooms at Oxford, and interrupt with their free-flowing carousings his deepest thoughts:
Excitements come, and act and speech Flow freely forth; - but no, Nor they, nor aught beside, can reach The buried world below. [Clough, 1974, pp.30-31]
Arnold expanded upon the imagery of a river in the line “Light flows our war of mocking words” in a fragment he included in St. Paul and Protestantism (1870):
Below the surface-stream, shallow and light Of what we say we feel - below the stream, As light, of what we think we feel - there flows With noiseless current strong, obscure and deep, The central stream of what we feel indeed. [St. Paul and Protestantism, Super, 1960-77, Vol.6, p.51]
In the section of St. Paul and Protestantism in which this fragment is quoted, Arnold was discussing St. Paul’s views on the death and resurrection of Christ. Here Arnold argues that although St. Paul no doubt believed in the literal death and resurrection of Christ, he was much more concerned with Christ’s message to his followers about the importance of them undergoing a spiritual death and rebirth. According to Arnold, it is this point about the necessity of undergoing a spiritual death and rebirth that is the “central stream” of St. Paul’s message, whilst in comparison with that, what St. Paul wrote about Christ’s literal death and resurrection is mere surface froth:
The three essential terms of Pauline theology are... dying with Christ, resurrection from the dead, growing into Christ. The order in which these terms are placed indicates... the true Pauline sense of the expression, resurrection from the dead. In Paul’s ideas the expression has no essential connexion with physical death. [St. Paul and Protestantism, Super, 1960-77, Vol.6, p. 50] 50
Arnold used the poet Goethe as an “unsuspected witness” to the “profoundness” of St. Paul’s message, for he reports that Goethe wrote: “‘Die and come to life! for so long as this is not accomplished, thou art but a troubled guest upon an earth of gloom’” [St. Paul and Protestantism, Super, 1960-77, Vol.6, pp.55-56]. It was appropriate that Arnold included the above fragment in St. Paul and Protestantism since, to weave another of our introductory literary fragments into the body of this thesis, the “implications of ‘the buried life’”, as Forsyth noted, do include the “prospect of spring-time renewal with its religious overtone of resurrection at Easter” [Forsyth, 1976, p.138]. Those implications are muted in “The Buried Life”. However, Arnold would elsewhere spell out more clearly his views on how one must first “die” to the “surface-stream” or the surface life and suffer spiritual dismemberment, before one can then be “reborn” as a poet out of the buried stream or buried life. These views on the importance of spiritual death, dismemberment and rebirth are, as has already been noted, a very important aspect of his metaphor of the buried life. It may seem odd that a poem such as “The Buried Life”, which uses the metaphor of the river of life flowing out of God and then back into God, is cast in the form of a love poem addressed to a girl or woman. But it makes sense if there is considered to be a divine aspect to that girl or woman, or if she at least provides a means of accessing what is divine. For Plato, “stirrings of love for the divine” were “excited by the longing for union with the earthly beloved” [McGahey, 1994, p.41]; whilst Clive James notes, of the beauty of girls or women, that: “All the evidence of literature, painting, sculpture and the dance suggests that men see divinity in beauty” [James, 2007, p.396]. There is plenty of evidence for that in the Romanticism of Coleridge, Keats and Tennyson, especially; and Eliot, too, would divinize aspects of such women as Emily Hale in poems like “Ash Wednesday”:
Because of the goodness of this Lady And because of her loveliness, and because She honours the Virgin in meditation, We shine with brightness. [Eliot, 1974, p.97]
Eliot, like Arnold, was also interested in the story of Dante’s Beatrice, with whom, as Arnold wrote, Dante’s “imagination could deal freely, whom he could divinize into a fit object for the spiritual longing which filled him” [“Dante and Beatrice”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.9]. For Arnold believed, like many other Victorians, that romantic love was the medium through which one could begin to apprehend the love of God and thus apprehend God’s existence. In Browning’s “Summum Bonum”, for example, it is through the love of a girl that the summum bonum, which is the love of God, can be truly apprehended. In St. Paul and Protestantism, again, Arnold wrote of how, just as St. Paul was “reborn” through knowing God, so any dullard could be “reborn” simply by falling in love, and thus know how St. Paul must have felt:
51
Of such a mysterious power and its operation some clear notion may be got by anybody who has ever had any overpowering attachment. Every one knows how being in love changes for the time a man’s spiritual atmosphere, and makes animation and buoyancy where before there was flatness and dulness. One may even say that this is the reason why being in love is so popular with the whole human race, - because it relieves in so irresistable and delightful a manner the tedium or depression of common-place human life. And not only does it change the atmosphere of our spirits, making air, light, and movement where before was stagnation and gloom, but it also sensibly and powerfully increases our faculties of action... An indolent man who shrinks back from vigorous effort only the more because he is told and knows that it is a man’s business to show energy, and that it is shameful in him if he does not, will show energy quite easily from being in love. This, I say, we learn from the analogy of the most everyday experience; - that a powerful attachment will give a man spirits and confidence which he could by no means call up or command of himself; and that in this mood he can do wonders which would not be possible to him without it. [St. Paul and Protestantism, Super, 1960-77, Vol. 6, pp.38-39]
For many Victorians, and for Arnold in particular, it was through the medium of romantic love that one could, from time to time, perceive that we were all once “parts of a single continent” [“To Marguerite - Continued”, line 16], which “continent” can be equated with God. Or, to put it another way, for Arnold the seeming unity of thoughts and feelings which still exists at odd moments between two lovers is a relic of the original unity, from which flows the river of life and which can be identified with God. He conceived that it was the poet’s task to explore that original unity which, except perhaps in the first flush of young love - which, too, must be paid for eventually - was not at all a painless task, since it required from the poet that spiritual death, dismemberment and rebirth referred to above. The philosophy of Plotinus gave Arnold another precedent for casting his poem, about the river of life flowing out of and back into God, in the form of a love poem addressed to a girl or woman. Arnold read Plotinus in 1846 [Arnold, 1965, pp.54-55], and apart from commingling the imagery of lovers and streams in the way of the poems of Coleridge, Keats, Tennyson and Arnold, Plotinus also wrote philosophically of how the feelings that unite two lovers provide a foretaste of the ecstasy to be felt by those who attain union with the “One”. This is the original, unified source of life in all its variety. With regard to attaining union with the One, Plotinus wrote that:
Those to whom this experience is unknown should make comparison with the loves of this world, considering what a precious thing it is to attain the object of one’s deepest love, and remembering that these earthly loves are mortal and hurtful, mere phantoms that pass away - unlike that real love that is our Good and the object of our quest. Our true Love is There, and we may attain union with him, sharing and truly possessing him, with no mere external and fleshly embrace. [Enneads, VI 9.ix; in Gregory, 1991, p.186]
Plotinus also wrote of how the lover may move from an appreciation of an individual’s beauty to an appreciation of the beauty of the “One”, so that an individual’s beauty is in 52
some sense divine [Enneads, I 3.i-iii; in Gregory, 1991, pp.139-141]. This seems also to be the point of the last thirteen lines of “The Buried Life”, when the love-interest is seemingly forgotten. “The Buried Life” continues:
But we, my love! - doth a like spell benumb Our hearts, our voices? must we too be dumb?
Ah! well for us, if even we, Even for a moment, can get free Our heart, and have our lips unchained; For that which seals them hath been deep-ordained!
Fate, which foresaw How frivolous a baby man would be - By what distractions he would be possessed, How he would pour himself in every strife, And well-nigh change his own identity - That it might keep from his capricious play His genuine self, and force him to obey Even in his own despite his being’s law, Bade through the deep recesses of our breast The unregarded river of our life Pursue with indiscernible flow its way; And that we should not see The buried stream, and seem to be Eddying at large in blind uncertainty, Though driving on with it eternally.
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life. A thirst to spend our fire and restless force In tracking out our true, original course; A longing to enquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us - to know Whence our lives come and where they go. And many a man in his own breast then delves, But deep enough, alas! none ever mines. And we have been on many thousand lines, And we have shown, on each, spirit and power; But hardly have we, for one little hour, Been on our own line, have we been ourselves - Hardly had skill to utter one of all The nameless feelings that course through our breast, But they course on forever unexpressed. And long we try in vain to speak and act Our hidden self, and what we say and do 53
Is eloquent, is well - but ‘tis not true! And then we will no more be racked With inward striving, and demand Of all the thousand nothings of the hour Their stupefying power; Ah yes, and they benumb us at our call! Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn, From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne As from an infinitely distant land, Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into all our day. [“The Buried Life”, lines 24-76]
In “The Buried Life” it is as if the poet has lost his connection to the river of life in the gloomy city of Thomas Arnold’s penultimate stanza. Matthew Arnold appropriately paraphrases Wordsworth’s lines from “Tintern Abbey”, “But oft, in lonely rooms, and ’mid the din/ Of towns and cities” [“Tintern Abbey”, lines 25-26], in his own lines:
But often, in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life. [“The Buried Life”, lines 45- 48]
It seems that it is in places most lacking a sense of community, such as in large cities, rather than in small villages, that a lack of a connection to the buried life is felt most keenly. Arnold’s allusion to Milton’s “unspeakable desire” from “Paradise Lost” [Book III, line 662] and reference to “the knowledge” may also indicate that Arnold made a connection between the elusive nature of the buried life and the “precipitous Fall” of his father’s sixth stanza. So again, to track the river of life back to its source would be rather like tracking the river which flows out of Eden back to its source [Genesis, 2: 7-25]. “The Buried Life” then concludes:
Only - but this is rare - When a beloved hand is laid in ours, When, jaded with the rush and glare Of the interminable hours, Our eyes can in another’s eyes read clear, When our word-deafened ear Is by the tones of a loved voice caressed - A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast, And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again. The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know. A man becomes aware of his life’s flow, And hears its winding murmur; and he sees The meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze.
And there arrives a lull in the hot race
54
Wherein he doth for ever chase That flying and elusive shadow, rest. An air of coolness plays upon his face, And an unwonted calm pervades his breast. And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose, And the sea where it goes. [“The Buried Life”, lines 77-98]
Having read the entire poem, it is immediately apparent that to Arnold the buried life was nothing more than a metaphor that he used in an attempt to describe the nature of what may also be called the soul, for he also calls this same thing an “inmost soul”; or a “heart”; or a “genuine self”; or a “hidden self”; or even “a lost pulse of feeling”. The metaphor of the buried life is the one that is used to begin and end the poem, however, and its use recurs at key points in the poem. So, although the poem appears on the surface of things to lack consistency or unity, and seems to set out “on many thousand lines”, so to speak, it is as if the river of the buried life has been serenely flowing all through the poem, although sometimes deeply buried beneath the more shallow and confused thoughts that from time to time dominate its other sections. To further explore Arnold’s metaphor, in “The Buried Life” a human life is described as being like a river beginning in some hills of which we ordinarily have no memory, and ending in a sea of which we ordinarily have no knowledge:
And then he thinks he knows The hills where his life rose And the sea where it goes. [“The Buried Life”, lines 96-98]
Or, to change metaphors, the stream of one’s life is like the “Man’s life” of Wordsworth’s “Persuasion”, from “Ecclesiastical Sonnets”. This sonnet retells the Venerable Bede’s story of a sparrow flying in at one end of a banqueting hall and out the other:
But whence it came we know not, nor behold Whither it goes. Even such, that transient Thing, The human Soul; not utterly unknown While in the Body lodged, her warm abode; But from what world She came, what woe or weal On her departure waits, no tongue hath shown; This mystery if the Stranger can reveal, His be a welcome cordially bestowed! [“Persuasion”, lines 7-14]
Arnold paraphrases Wordsworth’s lines, “But whence it came we know not, nor behold/Whither it goes”, in his lines about the human longing to clarify the “mystery” of the origin and destination of life:
A Longing to inquire Into the mystery of this heart which beats So wild, so deep in us - to know 55
Whence our lives come and where they go. [“The Buried Life”, lines 53-54]
But apart from in the detail of the comings and goings and the mystery of life, the overall structure of the “Ecclesiastical Sonnets” would also have provided a useful model for Arnold’s “The Buried Life”. This is because Wordsworth uses a range of different metaphors to describe human life and British history, such as that used in “Persuasion”. But he begins and ends his sonnet sequence, as has been noted, with references to the “Cerulean Duddon” and more especially to the “HOLY RIVER” of the history of Christianity in Britain as it flows through the ages [“Ecclesiastical Sonnets: Introduction”, line 2, 10]. References to rivers, wells and fountains also recur from time to time throughout the poem, so that in the “Ecclesiastical Sonnets” it is as if the “HOLY RIVER” has been serenely flowing all through the sequence, although sometimes obscured by a change of metaphor, as in “Persuasion”. In the Biographia Literaria Coleridge, too, had described human life as being like a river beginning in some hills of which we ordinarily have no memory, and ending in a sea of which we ordinarily have no knowledge:
The first range of hills that encircles the scanty vale of human life is the horizon for the majority of its inhabitants. On its ridges the common sun is born and departs. From them the stars rise, and touching them they vanish. By the many even this range, the natural limit and bulwark of the vale, is but imperfectly known. Its higher ascents are too often hidden by mists and clouds from uncultivated swamps which few have courage or curiosity to penetrate. To the multitude below these vapors appear, now as the dark haunts of terrific agents on which none may intrude with impunity; and now all a-glow with colours not their own, they are gazed at as the splendid palaces of happiness and power. But in all ages there have been a few who, measuring and sounding the rivers of the vale at the feet of their furthest inaccessible falls, have learnt that the sources must be far higher and far inward; a few who even in the level streams have detected elements which neither the vale itself nor the surrounding mountains contained or could supply. [Coleridge, 1975, pp.137-138]
In the Biographia Coleridge pointed to Plotinus as the source for his imagery of the river of human life with its obscure origins and destination [Coleridge, 1975, pp.138-139]; and, as has been noted, Arnold, presumably following up Coleridge’s references, read Plotinus along with the Biographia in 1846 [Arnold, 1965, pp.54-55]. Plotinus wrote of how all life begins and ends in unity:
What, then, is it? The power which generates all existence, without which the sum of things would not exist, nor would Intellect be the first and universal Life. What transcends Life is the cause of Life; for that activity of Life which is the sum of things, is not primal, but itself pours forth as if from a spring. Think of a spring, that has no further source, which gives itself entirely to rivers, yet is not exhausted by the rivers, but remains in its stillness; while the rivers issuing from it, before following their several courses, are undivided for a while, each knowing already where it will discharge its stream... And this is no wonder. Or rather, it is a wonder 56
how Life in its multiplicity came from what is not multiple; and the multiplicity would not have existed unless before multiplicity there had been a simple Principle. The source is not fragmented into the universe; for its fragmentation would destroy the whole, which could no longer come to be if there did not remain by itself, distinct from it, its source. Universally, therefore, things go back to a Unity. [Enneads III 8.x; in Gregory, 1991, pp.40-41]
For Plotinus, each person’s soul was a part of the original unity before their birth, and it would return to that original unity after their death [Enneads VI 4.xiv; I 7.iii; in Gregory, 1991, p.117; p.130]. During their life it was each person’s task to ascend to the source of the original unity and thus discover the nature of their own soul, Plotinus’ last words and the epitome of his philosophy supposedly being: “Strive to lead back the god within you to the Divine in the universe” [in Gregory, 1991, p.6]. In his poem most directly influenced by Plotinus, “In Utrumque Paratus”, Arnold therefore wrote of tracking one’s life stream, or “tracking out our true, original course” [“The Buried Life”, line 50], back to its source in the One:
If, in the silent mind of One all-pure At first imagined lay The sacred world; and by procession sure From those still deeps, in form and colour dressed, Seasons alternating, and night and day, The long-mused thought to north, south, east and west Took then its all-seen way;
O waking on a world which thus-wise springs! Whether it needs thee count Betwixt thy waking and the birth of things Ages or hours - O waking on life’s stream! By lonely pureness to the all-pure fount (only by this thou canst) the coloured dream Of life remount!
Thin, thin the pleasant human noises grow, And faint the city gleams; Rare the lone pastoral huts - marvel not thou! The solemn peaks but to the stars are known, But to the stars, and the cold lunar beams; Alone the sun rises, and alone Spring the great streams. [“In Utrumque Paratus”, lines 1-21]
“In Utrumque Paratus” has been dated to 1846 [Arnold, 1965, p.54], and although the second half of the poem does add complications, it still presents the tracking of one’s buried life to its source as rather more solitary and straighforward task than is the case in “The Buried Life”, which has been dated to 1849-52 [Arnold, 1965, p.271]. The years 1848-52 being the time when Arnold first fell in love and then married, “The Buried Life” thus introduces the complications of human relationships to the solitary task of “In
57
Utrumque Paratus”. Then in “Thyrsis” (1866), written in middle age, Arnold seemed to comment further on the simplicities of his early poetry:
And long the way appears, which seemed so short To the less practised eye of sanguine youth; And high the mountain-tops, in cloudy air, The mountain-tops where is the throne of Truth, Tops in life’s morning sun so bright and bare! [“Thyrsis”, lines 141-145]
Arnold’s signal-elm in “Thyrsis” may thus have been associated in his mind with Plotinus’ image of how life in its multiplicity stems from what is not multiple, as a tree is multiple in its branches but still it stems from a single trunk: “think of the life that permeates a great tree while its source remains, not dispersed over the whole, but firmly grounded in the root, giving the plant all its manifold life yet remaining by itself, not manifold but the source of the manifold” [Enneads III 8.x; in Gregory, 1991, pp.40-41]. Plotinus used this image as an alternative to his image of multiple rivers issuing forth from a single spring. So, in “Thyrsis”, Arnold’s point is perhaps that no matter how far he and Clough had diverged in their surface lives since Oxford, which was a considerable distance since they became estranged, by-and-large, those surface lives could still be traced back to the shared experience of the buried life, represented in the poem by the myth of “the Gipsy-Scholar” [“Thyrsis”, line 29; line 240]. In “The Buried Life” it is as if each person is usually locked into a solipsistic “surface life” of ordinary consciousness, in which they are largely dissociated from other people, and their thoughts are largely dissociated from their feelings. But then feelings of romantic love for another person can sometimes cause a “bolt” to be “shot back somewhere in our breast” [“The Buried Life”, line 84], which gives that pair of lovers a brief access to the river of the buried life that flows deep within them both, in a “spot of time”, so that in Arnold’s buried life there is an association of thoughts with feelings, and more particularly an association of thoughts with shared feelings. This is rather like T.S. Eliot’s F.H. Bradley-derived solipsism of “The Waste Land”, the only relief from which is provided by the moment of shared feelings with the “hyacinth girl”:
I have heard the key Turn in the door once and turn once only We think of the key, each in his prison Thinking of the key, each confirms a prison Only at nightfall, aethereal rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus [Eliot, 1974, p.79]
It thus seems that, according to Arnold’s metaphor, whereas every person lives a separate and isolated surface life, all people share the same buried life, so that there is only one buried life: “The same heart beats in every breast!” [“The Buried Life”, line 23]. Having continued an investigation into Arnold’s metaphor of the buried life with an analysis of “The Buried Life’, to summarise, it seems likely that Arnold’s metaphor
58
has some of its immediate origins in the poetry and thought of Thomas Arnold, and in the poetry and thought of Thomas Arnold’s poetical and philosophical heroes, Wordsworth and Coleridge. Via Coleridge, the philosophy of Plotinus also provides a more remote origin for the metaphor. This metaphor of the buried life contains within it a river flowing on an obscure, mostly subterranean course from the mountains to the sea, but also on a course out of God into the ordinary human world and then back into God again. It represents, in Jung’s words, the “invisible inner man” who has “come from” and will “return to the primordial image of wholeness, to the eternal Father” [Jung, 1995, p.365]. The metaphor of the buried life has much to do with human feelings of romantic love for another person, which are seen to be a relic of an original unity of human feelings that no longer exists, but which can be identified with the love of God. It also has much to do with ideas about the necessity of the individual undergoing a spiritual death and rebirth in order to be able to access this river of the buried life that flows deep within them, or in order to be able to access that original unity of human feelings that can be identified with the love of God.
59
Chapter Four ______
The Emergence and Development of Arnold’s Poetic Personality
In myth, Empedocles, who features in Arnold’s major poem, “Empedocles on Etna”, was a sacrificial god-king; the son of a god who died whilst at the height of his powers and fame, only to be resurrected to merge again fully with the godhead. In myth, Empedocles’ life was a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. He embodied in his own person his philosophical beliefs in a universal cycle from order to disorder and back to order again, which controlled both the lives of individuals and the course of human history. In history, Matthew Arnold was not the son of a god. However, he was the son of the formidable Dr Thomas Arnold, Headmaster of Rugby School; who died in 1842 at the age of forty-six, of a heart condition that his son inherited. He was taken by God the Father at the height of his powers and fame. As a young man, Matthew Arnold thus fully expected to die at about the same age himself, or even younger, although he in fact lived until he was sixty-six. As an historian, Thomas Arnold had ideas about how civilisations moved through a cycle of birth, death and rebirth. This was perhaps an extrapolation from his Christian beliefs (he was an Anglican minister) that an historical Jesus Christ who was the Son of God had been born, had lived and died, and had then been resurrected to rejoin His Father; and that human history as a whole would follow a similar pattern of birth, death and rebirth. After his death, old Rugbeians imagined Thomas Arnold in Heaven and on practically an equal footing with the Son of God Himself:
As our Saviour’s wounds were healed on the morning of the Resurrection, so shall his mortal disease be healed, and all that we most loved in him shall become immortal. The tone of earnestness shall be there, deepened perhaps into a more perfect beauty by a closer intercourse with the Son of man... and how will the most aspiring visions of reformation that ever filled his mind on earth be more than accomplished in that day of the restitution of all things! [in Wilson, 2003, p.278]
It therefore happens that Matthew Arnold’s family circumstances led him to have a particular, personal interest in those myths of gods dying and being reborn that so captivated the nineteenth-century imagination, as in Frazer’s The Golden Bough. This personal interest is important in the emergence of his poetic personality; it informs his entire poetic career; and is encapsulated in his use of the concept of the buried life. In Arnold’s poetry there is always a tension between the one-way history of our surface lives that always points towards death and dissipation for the individual, and the recurrences of myth that symbolise the unchanging nature of our collective buried life. In “Empedocles on Etna”, for example, this tension is represented by the contrast between Empedocles’ one-way journey up the mountain towards death and dissipation in the crater of Etna, and the recurrences of Callicles’ myths that say that in their essentials
60
Empedocles’ experiences are all things that have happened to people before and will happen again. By concentrating on retelling myths in his poetry, rather than writing about current events or his own experiences, Arnold tried to avoid being sucked into what he called the “Time Stream” of our surface lives, in which he believed he saw his friend Clough’s poetry “plunge and bellow” [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, p.126]. He thus constantly urged Clough to imitate the gods of mythology by “dying” to his surface life and being “reborn” out of his buried life, in order to write great poetry: “Marvel not that I say unto you, ye must be born again” [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, p.155]. He was alluding there to the Gospel of St. John: “Verily, verily, I say unto thee, Except a man be born again, he cannot see the kingdom of God... Marvel not that I said unto thee, Ye must be born again” [John, 3:3,7]. It is here that this study of Arnold’s concept of the buried life intersects, for a time, with more conventional Arnoldian biographical criticism. For it has been asserted, as in W.H. Auden’s sonnet, “Matthew Arnold”, and as in Hamilton’s A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold, which expands on the views expressed in that sonnet, that Matthew Arnold was involved in some sort of a psychic battle with the spirit of his dead father; and that Matthew Arnold’s poetic life was sacrificed upon the altar of his father’s values. There is probably some truth in this assertion. However, it needs to be placed in the larger context of the myth of the buried life, which, as was noted, is in its most basic form like the story told of the slaughter of the son by the father in Wilfred Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”. In his psychic battles with his dead father, then, Arnold’s surface life, or his ordinary life recounted in the biographies, intersects for a time with the buried life, or his poetic life. Matthew Arnold was born in 1822 in Laleham, by the Thames near London, as his father had a school in the village at the time. He died in Liverpool in 1888 and was buried in the churchyard at Laleham. Rivers flow through much of Arnold’s poetry and they always signal continuity and renewal: “God is simply the stream of tendency by which all things seek to fulfil the law of their being”, he wrote in St. Paul and Protestantism [St. Paul and Protestantism, Super, 1960-77, Vol.6, p.10]. Rivers symbolised for Arnold what we all have in common with God and with each other as we travel through life from birth to death, and are then perhaps reborn like a river. There is, however, another sort of imagery in Arnold’s poetry that signals discontinuity. In other words, there are elements in Arnold’s poetry which make him “anarchic, or unsafe or disconcerting”, to use a phrase of Eliot’s about Jesus Christ [in Gordon, 1978, p.70]. These elements made him separate from both God the Father and his own father, and placed him outside the bounds of formal education and of what we all have in common. He was sometimes reluctant, in other words, to “fulfil the law of [his] being”. Charlotte Bronte, for example, wrote of the young Matthew Arnold that he had inherited more of his manners from his mother than from his father [Honan, 1981, p.220]; and that he “displeases from seeming foppery... the shade of Dr Arnold seemed to [her] to frown on his young representative... Most unfortunate for him, doubtless, has been the untimely loss of his father” [in Murray, 1997, pp.112-113]. On the other hand, 61
Arnold’s brother, Tom, wrote more positively of his brother, noting that Dr Arnold’s death had been “a momentous moment for Matthew Arnold, who had lived till then... under the shadow and shelter of a great and overpowering personality, which being withdrawn, his genius was freer to develop itself in its own way. The natural bent of his mind was very different from that of his father” [in Murray, 1997, p.47]. In other words, Arnold’s poetry was largely a product of a phase of adolescent rebellion that he went through between the ages of about fifteen and thirty, and once he grew out of that phase of his life he no longer wrote much poetry. It was at Rugby that Arnold had begun to distinguish himself from his father by his seeming lack of application in his schoolwork, and also by his bad behaviour behind his father’s back whilst Dr Arnold was teaching. (He would pull faces and mock his father to amuse the other boys.) Then, at Oxford, Arnold achieved “only second class honours in consequence of his refusal to read systematically” [Arnold, 1980, p.32]. He thus disrupted what Norris called “that privileged relationship between teacher and good, receptive student”. The pattern thus disrupted was “a form of patriarchal inheritence, a situation where the father retains full powers until the son comes of age and is able to exercise reason on his own behalf” [Norris, 1987, p.30]. Arnold died after straining his heart in a fit of high spirits, leaping over a set of two-foot, nine-inch railings in Liverpool. Perhaps he had been thinking on that occasion of a similar leap he had made at Oxford over forty years before. In any case his closest friends were reminded of that famous leap, and on the occasion of his death took it to be emblematic of Arnold’s life:
he had risked his neck (and a five pound bet) to jump Wadham College’s high spiked railings, which stood at five feet three inches, between Wadham’s grass and the paved street... instead of leaping from the city street onto soft green college lawn, as others did, he went through Wadham’s gate and placed his back against the college wall. He intended to leap from greenery into the hard city - just as in life he had come from pastoral, quiet Westmorland into a hard inspectorship. [Honan, 1981, p.420]
Arnold’s famous leap was seen by his friends as symbolic of the way in which he had tried to leap clear of his father’s influence at Oxford by wasting his time with gambling, poetry, drunken revels and long, aimless walks in the countryside. However, having wasted his time at Oxford, the effect of it was only to land him deeper into his father’s educational mainstream of life. He could not face the poverty and struggle that devoting himself full-time to poetry would have entailed, and it meant that other career paths outside education were not so open to him. The course of his life seemed very early to be set; and although Arnold would be free for a short time to write poetry at Oxford and in London, before he married and became a School Inspector, no mere leap could set him free forever. As a young man, Arnold thus took certain courses of action in his life that would eventually extend the influence of his father’s work as an educator, although even upon
62
his retirement in 1886 he would say that: “Though I am a schoolmaster’s son I confess that school teaching or school inspecting is not the line of life I should naturally have chosen” [“Retirement Speech”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.11, p.374]. Elsewhere, he wrote of teaching as “that common but most perfidious refuge of men of letters” [“Maurice de Guérin”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.28]. Hence, perhaps, his frivolous leap into retirement at Liverpool in 1888. It was a repetition of his earlier leap at Oxford, and also of the leap into death and freedom of Empedocles at the end of “Empedocles on Etna”. The most famous fact about Arnold’s early life, then, is that he was the son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, who appears to have been a most genial and likeable man, although definitely a bit of a “Philistine”. Thomas Arnold was credited with establishing the tone for the great Victorian middle class public schools, although he would no doubt have taken advantage of existing trends. In the first part of the nineteenth-century the distinguishing feature of an English aristocrat was that he possessed a smattering of Latin and Greek, together with a code of behaviour seemingly derived from the example of the Spartans’ indifference to pain, love of warfare, and bullying of their subject slave-Helot population. At Rugby, Thomas Arnold provided a setting in which the sons of the upper middle classes could absorb all of that and thus be accepted into a slightly-expanded mid-nineteenth-century ruling class. (Apart from Dr Arnold himself, the bully Flashman is after all the real hero of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, as George MacDonald Fraser has shown) [Fraser, 1999]. However, Thomas Arnold combined these features of an aristocratic education with the narrow Biblical literalism, evangelicalism and earnestness that had been the distinguishing features of the dissenting English middle classes since at least the days of Cromwell, to produce an explosive new empire-conquering mix [Wilson, 2003, pp.276-279]. Historians have noted, for example, how a new spirit of evangelical Christian intolererance was one of the main provocations for the Indian Mutiny in the 1850s; for its brutal, bullying suppression by the likes of Captain William Hodson, a product of Dr Arnold’s Rugby; and for the new consolidation of English rule in India in its wake [Dalrymple, 2006, pp.9-10]. Hilary Fraser quotes from A.P. Stanley’s Life of Thomas Arnold (1844):
‘[Dr Arnold] governed the school precisely on the same principles as he would have governed a great empire,’ writes Stanley, and to the extent that a good number of his pupils went on to become colonial administrators Rugby values did indeed determine the principles according to which the British empire was governed. [Fraser with Brown, 1996, p.138]
Even though Thomas Arnold himself was aware of the latest developments in German Biblical criticism, nothing of that sort was taught at Rugby. He was not interested in diluting the power of middle class evangelicalism and literalism. Rather, he was interested in bringing it into the mainstream of English life by facilitating the establishment of as broad and manly a Church of England as possible, encompassing all but Catholics and Jews. Even though Thomas Arnold was a fine scholar and possessed a quite sophisticated intelligence, then, the code of conduct he chose to have taught at 63
Rugby was not a sophisticated one. Thomas De Quincey noted another aspect to Thomas Arnold’s interest in education:
The late Dr. Arnold of Rugby, amongst many novel ideas, which found no welcome even with his friends, insisted earnestly and often upon this - viz., that a great danger was threatening our social system in Great Britain, from the austere separation existing between our educated and our working classes, and that a more conciliatory style of intercourse between these two bisections of our social body must be established, or else - a tremendous revolution. [De Quincey, 1907, p.34]
Thomas Arnold was well-known for these views, and they would influence the views of his son, Matthew. However, he did little or nothing practical to bring about “a more conciliatory style of intercourse” between the upper and lower orders. In fact, he even closed the free lower school that had prepared poor boys from Rugby town and its surrounds for entry into Rugby School, to further enforce social segregation [Copley, 2002, pp.170-174]. This would leave room for a point-of-difference about education between Dr Arnold and Matthew Arnold. Thomas Arnold was celebrated by his son, in the poem “Rugby Chapel”, for knowing exactly where he was heading and setting out industriously and in a straight line to get there:
Eyes rekindling, and prayers, [We] follow your steps as ye go. Ye fill up the gaps in our files, Strengthen the wavering line, ’Stablish, continue our march, On, to the bound of the waste, On, to the City of God. [“Rugby Chapel”, lines 202-208]
“Rugby Chapel” was published in 1867 at the behest of Matthew Arnold’s mother. As has been said, Dr Arnold’s was not a particularly complex creed; his chosen view of a person’s journey through life from birth to death was not a particularly complex one. As Matthew Arnold wrote in a letter to his mother: “Papa... while he held a thing, he held it very hard, and without the sense some people always have that there are two sides to the question” [in Murray, 1997, p.3]. Even if other old Rugbeians placed Dr Arnold on an almost equal footing with the Son of God, or practically identified him with Jesus Christ, it is apparent that, although he was much-influenced by his father, Matthew Arnold did not. He was too aware of his father’s shortcomings. Thomas Arnold, particularly in his attacks on John Henry Newman, whom his son much-admired, was in fact in many ways a representative of what his son would label and deride as the “Philistines”: the dogmatic, unintellectual English middle classes. In his poetry Matthew Arnold would always use his father’s earnest imagery of the journey of life as an ascent up a mountain towards God, or as a descent down a river towards God. However, the difference was that in Matthew Arnold’s poetry God is 64
within, and the subconscious is thus always in control, as in the buried stream of “The Buried Life”. Despite the power of control he ascribed to this buried stream, early in his poetical career Matthew Arnold seemed to side with those who were “frivolous” and “capricious”, and appeared merely to drift along on the surface of life, much to his family’s concern - although no doubt the current of moral earnestness was still flowing deep and strong just below the surface of things. He would appear to side against his father with the more idle, less earnest, more “barbarian” aristocracy of the eighteenth and early nineteenth-centuries, whom Thomas Arnold’s middle class boys would eventually help to supplant as England’s ruling elite. At Rugby, then at Oxford, and then as a private secretary to Lord Lansdowne in London, Matthew Arnold adopted the outlook and mannerisms of an aristocrat, but of course without an income or the connections to support such affectations indefinitely: “‘The lilies of the field, they toil not neither do they spin’: that,” according to Lewis, “in a nutshell, was the master-notion of the English aristocratic philosophy” [Lewis, 1938, p.168]. It was important for the gentleman-amateur, even within Arnold’s chosen fields of poetry and criticism, to affect a code of idleness and amateurishness as a means of distinguishing himself from the more industrious classes. Arnold, like his hero Lord Byron, was anxious “not to have the inky fingers which would mark him as a writer rather than a gentleman” [Beatty, 1988, p.80]. Such a pose was difficult to maintain, however, in mid-Victorian times, in the heyday of the British Philistine, when most people in the middle classes believed that there was a purpose to everything because the purpose was God’s purpose. Therefore, when in 1851 he decided to marry the daughter of a wealthy judge, Arnold had to sacrifice most of his youthful dandyism to the middle class work ethic and accept an appointment as a School Inspector. It was also, as it happens, his first step in taking on the attitudes and responsibilities of adulthood. Although he was indifferent to the education of the working classes at the start of his career as a School Inspector, Arnold eventually came to see the extension of educational opportunities to the working classes as crucial to the success of the extension of democracy to the working classes. It was as crucial as his father’s reforms had been to the success of the extension of democracy to the middle classes, although, as was noted, Thomas Arnold had made sure that no working class boys entered Rugby by closing the free lower school that had been established to educate the poor [Wilson, 2003, p.283]. In Friendship’s Garland, Matthew Arnold therefore wrote: “I say, if the masses are to have power, let them be instructed, and don’t swamp with ignorance and unreason the education and intelligence which now bear rule amongst us” [Friendship’s Garland, Super, 1960-77, Vol.5, p.76]. It might thus be said that in his career as a School Inspector Arnold directly served the cause of working class education; as in his career as critic he directly served the cause of middle class education; and as in his career as poet and martyr he directly served the cause of a new, nineteenth-century aristocracy of intelligence. Given this capitulation to a life in education in 1851, despite his most frantic initial efforts to escape such a fate; given the nature of his career in education, which was 65
concerned mostly with the education of the new urban working classes; and also given the God-like status accorded Dr Arnold at Rugby; Matthew Arnold’s famous parody of the Puritan Trinity in his Doctrine of the Three Lord Shaftesburies, from Literature and Dogma, could also be read as a Doctrine of the Three Dr Arnolds, with Matthew Arnold cast in the role of the son:
The Son of Man came to give his life a ransom for many... In imagining a sort of supernatural [Dr Arnold], a [Dr Arnold] infinitely magnified and improved, with a race of vile offenders to deal with, whom his natural goodness would incline him to let off, only his sense of justice would not allow it; then a younger supernatural [Dr Arnold], his son, on the scale of his father and very dear to him, who might live in grandeur and splendour if he liked, but who prefers to leave his home, to go and live among the race of offenders, and be put to an ignominious death, on condition that his merits shall be counted against their demerits, and that his father’s goodness shall be restrained no longer from taking effect, but any offender shall be admitted to the benefit of it on simply pleading the satisfaction made by the son... - in an imagination, I say, such as this, there is nothing degrading. [Literature and Dogma, Super, 1960-77, Vol.6, pp.359-360]
Given the nature of his upbringing, it is likely that such notions as these were one of the original sources for Matthew Arnold’s interest in the role of the poet, in the metaphor of the buried life, as the one who suffers on behalf of all people in his society. In Auden’s “Matthew Arnold”, Arnold’s poetic gift is described as being (or living in) a “dark disordered city”, presumably a working class slum; and Matthew Arnold is given these lines to say: “I am my father’s forum and he shall be heard, / Nothing shall contradict his final holy word”. He thus “thrust his gift in prison till it died.” The sonnet could be read with more subtlety than it usually is, in the context of something like the above, so that in it there is “nothing degrading”. At Oxford, however, Matthew Arnold did manage to escape from his father’s direct influence for a time and began to read very widely and unsystematically. As Hamilton commented, at Oxford Arnold’s “new tutors were Carlyle, Emerson and Goethe, whom he had lately been reading in Carlyle’s translation. These men spoke not of serving God but of becoming Godlike. The dandy-scholar perhaps had a vocation after all” [Hamilton, 1998, pp.70-71]. Such critics as Carlyle, Emerson and Goethe were needed by Arnold to help him round out his conception of the god-like powers of the poet, and later to help him round out his portrait of the god-like Empedocles. The first poet, though, to have a direct influence on Arnold was Wordsworth. He was the poet of the French Revolution, of divine inspiration, and of the humble working man, with whom the Arnold family became quite friendly when they began taking their summer holidays at Fox How in the Lake District from 1833 onwards. Wordsworth seems to have been the main inspiration for Arnold’s poetic ambitions, and he gave him his first access to something deeper than mere aristocratic foppishness or middle class earnestness. In other words, he gave Arnold his first access to the poetic unconscious. In his poem, “The Youth of Nature”, Arnold thus wrote of Wordsworth that:
66
Hardly his voice at its best Gives us a sense of the awe, The vastness, the grandeur, the gloom Of the unlit gulph of himself. [“The Youth of Nature”, lines 99-102]
In the poem he compared Wordsworth to Tiresias, so presumably the Underworld that Wordsworth explored was somewhere within that “unlit gulph of himself” [“The Youth of Nature”, lines 28-47]. According to Faas, to younger poets of the mid-nineteenth- century like Arnold, Wordsworth was the “high Priest of the Nine! Poet, Prophet, and Sage” [Faas, 1988, p.124]. Certainly, when Arnold published his first volume of poems in 1849, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems, his friends and family wondered where the poetry could have come from. That was not the Matthew Arnold that they knew. For Arnold, the way that a poet gained access to the buried life within differed according to whether they were born into a “good” or a “bad” poetical epoch. If a poet was born into a “good” poetical epoch, then access was no particular problem. But if a poet was born into a “bad” poetical epoch where there was a dissociation between the individual’s surface life and the collective buried life, then access was far more difficult. It demanded of the poet an imitation of the sacrifice of God the Son, in that on a psychological level the poet had to submit to having their personality torn apart so that they “died” to their surface life. They then had to descend into the buried life and there be “reborn” into psychological wholeness, so that their surface life and the buried life would be fused into one. It was also important that the poet sacrifice themselves on behalf of humanity, and again in imitation of God the Son, so that through their individual “death” and “rebirth” they were attempting to bring about the “rebirth” of a whole society. In particular, it would seem that Arnold wished to end by his sacrifice on behalf of humanity that almost total, laissez-faire induced dissociation between the rich and the poor in the British Isles in the 1840s, famously described by Disraeli in his novel Sybil (1845) as “the two nations” between whom there was no meaningful contact. An unbridgeable gap was felt to exist between the rich and the poor in Britain in the mid- nineteenth-century, in the same way that, on a psychological level, an unbridgeable gap was felt to exist between the poet’s conscious and subconscious minds. Arnold felt that this dissociation was the cause of the physical torment of the poor; but he also felt that it was the cause of the mental torment felt by such sensitive members of the rich part of society as himself and his friend the poet, Clough. In 1847, for example, Arnold was working as a private secretary to the Whig cabinet minister Lord Lansdowne, whom he much-admired. He was nevertheless horrified by Lansdowne’s advocacy of a Wealth of Nations-derived policy of government inaction in Ireland, despite predictions of a million famine-related deaths in that country [Honan, 1981, pp.117-118]. The indifference of the Olympian gods to the fate of humanity in “The Strayed Reveller” or “Empedocles on Etna”, and the sufferings which the poet’s imagination compels him to take upon himself in those poems, is related as much to this particular situation as it is to 67
any other. Tolstoy had similar feelings about the situation of the poor of Russia a little later in the nineteenth-century, which found expression in What Then Must We Do?; and as Trilling noted, “To Tolstoy... Arnold meant much” [in Arnold, 1980, p.29]. The first way that Arnold found to access the river of the buried life, and thus try to bridge the gaps between the rich and the poor, and between the conscious and the subconscious minds, or to close them up, was in that way made familiar by the examples of mid-nineteenth-century poets like Tennyson and Swinburne in England, or Baudelaire and Rimbaud in France. Coleridge, however, is the archetype of such a poet and “Kubla Khan”, with its description of an underground river, his archetypal poem. In this way of accessing the buried life, the young poet deranges their senses through falling in love, or suffering from tuberculosis, or through the use of alcohol and other drugs, or in some like way, and perhaps descends into poverty. In this way they submit to having their everyday personality or surface life torn apart. (Sometimes, though, as in the case of poets like Owen or Douglas, exposure to a violent war or revolution may have a similarly deranging effect on their everyday personalities. It is certainly significant that Arnold’s best poetry was written in the years encompassing the social revolutions of 1848 and the Crimean War of 1853-1856.) The poet is fragmented in imitation of God the Son and dies to their surface life; and in some sense they even become the fragments of God the Son, the evidence for which is an outpouring of lyric poetry of exceptional quality. The problem, however, for such poets who access the buried life in this manner is that these methods only seem to work for a very few years of the poet’s life, at some time during the their late teenage years or early twenties. To use a different metaphor, the young poet is like a shooting star that breaks up into fragments that flare brilliantly upon entering the earth’s atmosphere. However, the brilliance is of extremely brief duration and is a symptom of the extinction of the poet. As Arnold wrote:
The thoughts that rain their steady glow Like stars on life’s cold sea, Which others know, or say they know, They never shone for me.
Thoughts light, like gleams, my spirit’s sky, But they will not remain; They light me once, they hurry by, And never come again. [“Despondency”, lines 1-8]
As a young poet, Arnold described the experiences of such a poet in “The Strayed Reveller”, in which poem the Strayed Reveller takes part in the drug-induced revels associated with the god Dionysus. He thus has some extremely vivid although fragmentary visions of the buried life. However, unless the poet devises some other means of accessing the buried life, after this first way stops working for him, then what he is left with is a fragmented and dysfunctional personality and the wreck of a poetical career. 68
Another example of such a poet was the French poet Maurice de Guérin, who was compared by Arnold to Keats:
In him, as in Keats... the temperament, the talent itself, is deeply influenced by their mysterious malady; the temperament is devouring; it uses vital power too hard and too fast, paying the penalty in long hours of unutterable exhaustion and in premature death. The intensity of Guérin’s depression is described to us by Guérin himself... Certainly it was not for Guérin’s happiness, or for Keats’s as men count happiness, to be as they were. Still the very excess and predominance of their temperament has given to the fruits of their genius a unique brilliancy and flavour. [“Maurice de Guérin”, Super, 1960-77, Vol. 3, p.32]
Guérin died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-eight and never published anything in his lifetime, although Arnold took to reciting his posthumously published “Le Centaure” to his friends in 1847-8; and it seems that Guérin was a major influence on the composition of “The Strayed Reveller” [“Maurice de Guérin”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.12]. Such young poets almost invariably adopt a dandified appearance and manner, and an aesthetic approach to literature; and the young Arnold certainly conformed to the type of the dandy. The Pre-Raphaelite sculptor Thomas Woolner, for example, noted of Arnold that he “was a regular swell, in brilliant kid gloves, glittering boots, and costume cut in most perfect fashion” [in Honan, 1981, p.295]. In England, Arnold had noted a sharp difference between an aesthetic, aristocratic foppishness and an unaesthetic, middle class earnestness that he dated back to the division between Cavaliers and Roundheads in the Civil War [“Falkland”, Super, 1960-77, Vol. 8, pp.200-201]. So, by adopting the pose of a dandy, on one level Arnold indicated his sense of alienation from the dominant “Philistine” middle class culture of his time. As the “home of lost causes” [“Preface to Essays in Criticism”, Super, Vol.3, p.290], Oxford had been a centre of dandyism since perhaps the time of the hanged, drawn and quartered Edmund Campion in the sixteenth- century; and certainly since the time of the beheaded Charles I in the seventeenth- century. Charles’ cult was so strong, indeed, at Oxford in the 1840s when Arnold was resident that the subject of Arnold’s Newdigate prize-poem, “Cromwell”, was “aimed by the Professor of Poetry, James Garbett, at Tractarianism, and specifically at the cult of Charles the Martyr in the university” [Arnold, 1965, p.13]. However, on a deeper level, the dandy’s appearance is also a visible sign of the poet’s attempts to merge their ordinary, everyday personality with the poetic personality of the god within. For physical beauty is a characteristic of God the Son, or of a youthful goddess, but is often as transitory in an individual human’s life as is the stage of being a lyric poet. For a brief moment, when their surface life merges with the buried life, the poet-dandy seems to become in the beauty of their own person an incarnation of the god of the buried life, as the god may also be briefly incarnated in the beauty of the words of their poetry. John Cowper Powys’ favourite lines from Arnold’s “Urania” [Powys, 1982, p.277] describe this brief moment of personal incarnation:
69
His eyes be like the starry lights - His voice like sounds of summer nights - In all his lovely mien let pierce The magic of the universe! [“Urania”, lines 21-24]
The dandy also often adopts a somewhat-feminised, Tiresian persona as a means of accessing deeper levels of experience; and it is true to say that Arnold adopted such a persona from time to time, and also wrote about characters who did the same:
Hast thou then lured hither, Wonderful Goddess, by thy art, The young, languid-eyed Ampelus, Iacchus’ darling - [“The Strayed Reveller”, lines76-79]
This feminised persona is thus another aspect of dandyism that was significant particularly in the late-nineteenth-century. In “The Strayed Reveller”, the Strayed Reveller himself is to Ulysses as Ampelus is to Iacchus or Dionysus, and as Dionysus is to Apollo. Once youthful beauty begins to fade, however, unless he has a magic portrait like Dorian Gray’s, the dandy is unfortunately left only with the alternatives of a spectacular early death, or a retirement to Rapallo in the manner of Max Beerbohm, at the age of thirty-eight, upon the publication of his novel about Oxford dandyism, Zuleika Dobson [Cecil, 1964, pp.303-323]; or a retirement to Putney like Swinburne; or perhaps a retirement to Littlemore at the age of forty like John Henry Newman, whose peculiar brand of shamanic dandyism had so powerfully influenced Arnold at Oxford. This influence Arnold recorded in his poem “The Voice” [Arnold, 1965, p.47], and also in his essay “Emerson” [“Emerson”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, pp.165-166]. In “Emerson” he wrote of how he seemed to hear Newman at Oxford still, saying:
“After the fever of life, after weariness and sicknesses, fightings and despondings, languor and fretfulness, struggling and failing, struggling and succeeding; after all the changes and chances of this troubled, unhealthy state, - at length comes death, at length the white throne of God, at length the beatific vision.” [“Emerson”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, p.165]
Such words must have made a seductive vision for Arnold, as a young poet at Oxford, of youthful and romantic struggles with love, tuberculosis, poverty, alcohol, drugs, and so on, followed by an early death and fame; although Newman would have intended no such thing. Arnold’s poem “Early Death and Fame” (1855) also presents this seductive vision:
Give him emotion, though pain! Let him live, let him feel: I have lived. Heap up his moments with life. Triple his pulses with fame! [“Early Death and Fame”, lines 16-19]
70
But the question is, what happens to the youthful poet if they do not die young? At one time Arnold assumed that he would die young of the same inherited heart condition that killed his father [Murray, 1997, p.46]. But when he did not do so, and retirement not being an option since he had a family to support, he then needed to find himself another career besides that of a youthful, attractive and inspired lyric poet. In any case, Arnold’s early poetry was likely to have been read and understood by only a tiny, highly-educated, upper middle class or aristocratic intellectual elite. However, by turning to prose he found that he was likely to be read and understood by that far larger middle class audience that he labelled the “Philistines”; and even, as it turns out, by Russian novelists like Tolstoy. This second, more prosaic way that Arnold found for a poet to access the river of the buried life he probably derived from the chapter on “The Hero as Man of Letters”, in Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841); and also from the examples of the lives of in particular Carlyle, Goethe and Emerson as men of letters. In On Heroes and Hero Worship, Carlyle had described the nobility of the life of a man of letters. It was a life dedicated to the good of humanity as they educated the middle class public through their articles for the periodicals, and it was a life sometimes lived in great but noble poverty. It seems that Arnold thought of the man of letters as fragmenting himself and thus deranging his senses through his piecemeal work for the periodicals; then “dying” to his surface life as he renounced hopes of worldly success; and then perhaps being “resurrected” into wholeness in the minds of his readers who, if they read all the periodicals or put together a posthumous volume of collected works, could create a unity again out of the man of letters’ fragments. In 1863 Arnold wrote facetiously of his life as a man of letters, in a letter to his sister Jane:
I shall do what I can, with the risk always before me, if I cannot charm the wild beast of Philistinism while I am trying to convert him, of being torn in pieces... and even if I succeed, of dying in a ditch or workhouse at the end of it all. [Lang, 1997, Vol. 2, p. 244]
He was being facetious because Arnold had no intention of ever being torn to pieces by the middle classes, or dying in a ditch or workhouse. His income as a man of letters, although modest, in fact only supplemented his salary as a School Inspector. It helped him to maintain an upper middle class household in Belgravia, and later at Harrow and in Surrey. However, it also helped with his self-image if he could see himself in such a noble, sacrificial light as in the letter quoted above. Viewed in this light, the profession of man of letters was a worthy one in itself, for the man of letters could be said to be sacrificing himself on behalf of all people in his society. However, for Arnold it could probably be viewed, too, as a part of a long period devoted to the “discipline of suffering”, as he awaited the “rebirth” of his lyric gift, or as he awaited Newman’s “beatific vision”. Although the man of letters could perhaps not write so intensely or accurately about the buried life as could the poet, the trade-off, for Arnold, may have been that although the pain was a more prolonged and drudging one of boredom, frustration and 71
blighted hopes, it was nowhere near as intense as that brief agony endured by the youthful lyric poet. (Marsyas’ fate in “Empedocles on Etna” describes the fate of the lyric poet.) This may have seemed an attractive ideal to Arnold as he entered his thirties, was no longer youthful and had certain responsibilities. However, what he probably found was that the life of a man of letters could in fact only be a truly fulfilling experience for someone like Charles Dickens who had undergone pain and humiliation beyond anything which Arnold ever experienced in his early life, and as intense as anything experienced by the great poets, although not necessarily self-induced; and had then achieved an enormous readership through the periodicals, so that his influence on his society was almost universal. That was something that Arnold as a man of letters, with his more limited aims, was never really willing or able to achieve. The third way that Arnold found for a poet to access the river of the buried life was to dedicate himself to the education of humanity in an even more direct way than either through the writing of poetry or prose. For, in 1849, Arnold accepted a position as an Inspector of Schools for the lower orders of society. Arnold’s job entailed inspecting a very large number of schools for lower middle class and working class pupils throughout the English Midlands and Wales; so that, as has been noted, through his careers as a poet, as a man of letters and as a School Inspector, Arnold did something for the education of all classes of English society. Arnold’s work load as a School Inspector was certainly enormous, the work itself was draining and unrewarding, and School Inspectors were not terribly admired or influential figures in Victorian society. But, again, it helped with Arnold’s self-image if he could be seen to be sacrificing himself on behalf of all in his society; and if he could view it as another part of a long period devoted to the “discipline of suffering” as he awaited the “rebirth” of his lyric gift. In his retirement speech, Arnold remembered “a lodging in Derby, with a workhouse, if I recollect right, behind and a penitentiary in front”, which indicates where he placed his life as a School Inspector in the scheme of things. He also noted in his speech that in the first year or two of his inspectorship it was “the irksomeness of my new duties that I felt most, and... this was almost insupportable” [“Retirement Speech”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.11, p.375]. Even if Arnold exaggerated its irksomeness, however, it was still a career in education markedly different from his father’s career as Headmaster of Rugby and Regius Professor of Modern History at Oxford; and Arnold, as was noted, seems to have justified these differences between his career and his father’s by casting himself in the role of God the Son sacrificing himself on behalf of humanity. In summary, then, Matthew Arnold’s family circumstances led him to take a particular, personal interest in those myths of gods dying and being reborn that so captivated the nineteenth-century imagination. His family circumstances, too, also led him to take a particular, personal interest in the role of God the Son in the Puritan Trinity; which role probably influenced his ideas about the role of the poet, in the metaphor of the buried life, as the one who suffers on behalf of all in their society. Outside his family, Carlyle, Emerson and Goethe influenced Arnold’s ideas about what the role of the man of letters should be in society. Wordsworth, though, was the 72
probably the major influence on Arnold’s ideas about the role of the poet in society. In the mid-nineteenth-century an unbridgeable gap was felt to exist between the rich and the poor in Britain, in the same way that, on a psychological level, an unbridgeable gap was felt to exist between the poet’s conscious and subconscious minds. However, Wordsworth had already written about the growth of his own poetic personality as it developed over time from the first fragmentary hints which indicated that there was something deep within “the unlit gulph of himself”, or his subconscious, or the buried life, that corresponded to, or was the same as, God or Nature, or the poorer classes [Eagleton, 1978, pp.22-23]. Wordsworth’s journey through that “gulph”, and the consequent growth of his poetic mind as his surface life merged for a time with the stuff of the buried life, is what he recorded in his poetry, and is what most-influenced Arnold. There were three parts or stages to the development of Arnold’s poetic personality; and in all three parts or stages Arnold’s self-image was of one whose sacrifice is like God the Son’s, in that it was intended to help bring about the “rebirth” of his whole society. In his career as a School Inspector Arnold directly served the cause of working class education; in his career as critic he directly served the cause of middle class education; and in his career as youthful poet and martyr he directly served the cause of a new, nineteenth-century aristocracy of intelligence. In all three parts or stages, from time to time the lyric impulse would strike him. However, as was also the case with Wordsworth, these lyric impulses became gradually briefer and more widely spaced as he grew older.
73
Chapter Five ______
Arnold, Gray and Wordsworth
Having begun to look at the origins, nature and influence of Arnold’s metaphor of the buried life; having looked closely at Arnold’s use of the metaphor in one of his major poems, “The Buried Life”; and having considered the emergence and development of Arnold’s poetic personality; it is now useful to look further into the origins of the metaphor, and to look closely at his use of the metaphor in two of his critical essays, on Gray and Wordsworth, before resuming a more comparative mode of criticism in Chapter Six. One poet whom Arnold rated very highly was Thomas Gray, and he was a major influence on Arnold’s poetry. Along with Wordsworth, he was a suitable poet for Arnold’s metaphorical approach to criticism since Gray, like Arnold himself, was a poet of the buried life. Arnold was intent on showing how Gray, although a genuine poet, had an arid and fragmented surface life and only the faintest connection with the buried life. For Arnold this was because the times Gray lived in, in the mid-eighteenth-century, were so unpoetical. So there is an interesting contrast between Arnold’s portrait of Gray and, for example, his portrait of Wordsworth, who had, according to Arnold, the good fortune to be born in the second half of the eighteenth-century. There is an interesting continuity, too, between Arnold’s portrait of Gray and his portrait of the Greek poet, Empedocles, in “Empedocles on Etna”, who lived, like Gray, in what Arnold believed to be unpoetical times. Gray was not a great poet, according to Arnold, but in Arnold’s opinion this was only because he was born at the wrong time, not because he lacked great abilities:
A man born in 1608 could profit by the larger and more poetic scope of the English spirit in the Elizabethan age; a man born in 1759 could profit by that European renewing of men’s minds of which the great historical manifestation is the French Revolution. [“Thomas Gray”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.201]
But, unfortunately for him, Gray was born in 1717 and died in 1771 so that he lived in what Arnold described as an unpoetical time, much like the Victorian age as Arnold described it in his letters to Clough, or like the age of Empedocles as presented in “Empedocles on Etna”. Arnold famously referred to the leading poets (or versifiers as he may have preferred to call them) of that unpoetic time, such as Dryden and Pope, “as classics of our prose”, whereas “Gray is our poetical classic of that literature and age”, and noted that in their time: “A fit prose was a necessity; but it was impossible that a fit prose should establish itself amongst us without some touch of frost to the imaginative life of the soul” [“The Study of Poetry”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.180]. Like many Victorians, then, Arnold had little feeling for the work of the Augustans, since he felt that their “fit prose” was a blight on the poetical soul. 74
In his essay on Gray, Arnold’s description of what he considered to be poetic times like the Elizabethan age, and unpoetic times like the Augustan, connects with his idea of the buried life being like an underground river, in that in poetic times it seems that this river flows very near to the surface, so that people’s surface lives and the buried life are very close, and poetry comes easily. It seems that in such times poets need only dig down a foot or two, so to speak, and then the poetry will come gushing out through them. In unpoetic times, however, the river sinks deep underground so that there is a dissociation between people’s surface lives and the buried life, and it becomes very difficult to write poetry. Poets must dig very deep down, so to speak, and even then only a thin trickle of poetry may come out through them, as it came out through Gray, and often the well is completely dry. But no matter what age a person is born into, to write poetry they must tap into this river, since for Arnold that is what a poet does in order to write poetry. Thus, according to Arnold, because of the time in which he was born Gray always found it extremely difficult to write poetry, whereas if he had been born in the Elizabethan or the Romantic eras he would have found it much easier, and he would thus have been a great poet. Gray’s temperament was a melancholy one, and Arnold put this down to “the sterility of his poetic talent”, by which he meant his frustration at his inability to write much poetry [“Thomas Gray”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.200]. According to Arnold, Gray was surrounded by the eighteenth-century equivalents of those ancient Sophists who plagued Empedocles in “Empedocles on Etna” [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act 1, Scene 1, lines146-153; Act 2, lines16-36], and who were interested only in the surface of life:
Gray, a born poet, fell upon an age of prose. He fell upon an age whose task was such as to call forth in general men’s powers of understanding, wit and cleverness, rather than their deepest powers of mind and soul... Gray, with the qualities of mind and soul of a genuine poet, was isolated in his century. [“Thomas Gray”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.200]
The society of the eighteenth-century wits cut Gray off from the river of the buried life, in other words, and thus from his ability to write poetry, just as Empedocles had been cut off from the same river by the society of the Sophists. But Arnold believed that Gray partially overcame that handicap through his study of Greek literature, a study that was later to help Romantic poets like Goethe, Holderlin, Shelley and Keats, and Victorian poets like Arnold and Tennyson, to tap into the river of poetry and unlock their own deepest feelings. According to Arnold, Gray:
lived with the great poets, he lived, above all, with the Greeks, through perpetually studying and enjoying them; and he caught their poetic point of view for regarding life, caught their poetic manner. The point of view and the manner are not self- sprung in him, he caught them off others; and he had not the free and abundant use of them. But whereas Addison and Pope never had the use of them, Gray had the use of them at times. He is the scantiest and frailest of classics in our poetry, but he is a classic. [“The Study of Poetry”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9. p.181]
75
Gray could successfully imitate the feelings of the great Greek poets, in other words, even when he was cut off from those feelings himself, and then there was from time to time a trickle of genuine poetry. (This in fact sounds like self-analysis from the writer of Merope and other such arid imitations of the Greeks.) What Arnold believed was that for the Greeks the river of the buried life had flowed for a time on the surface of the ground, all the way from the mountains to the sea; so that for them there had been, for a time at least, a sort of PreSocratic Eden in which there was a total integration of their surface lives with the buried life, and poetry had been very easy to write. But for Gray the river was almost entirely subterranean, and there was almost a complete dissociation between his surface life and the buried life, so that he could really only learn about the existence and pattern of the buried life through his reading of Greek literature:
Gray, a poet in the midst of the age of prose, a poet, moreover, of by no means the highest force and of scanty productiveness, nevertheless claims a place among the six chief personages of Johnson’s Lives, because it was impossible for an English poet, even in that age, who knew the Greek masters intimately, not to respond to their good influence, and to be rescued from the false poetical practice of his contemporaries. Of such avail to a nation are deep poetical instincts even in an age of prose. How much more may they be trusted to assert themselves after the age of prose has ended, and to remedy any poetical mischief done by it! [“Johnson’s Lives of the Poets”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.8, p.318]
Even though he wrote little poetry, then, and even though what he wrote was not very good, except in fragments, for Arnold, Gray was an important poet because, through his poetic fragments and his notice of the Greeks, he bequeathed to the Romantics, and then to Victorians like Arnold, a sense of how important it was to learn about the whole of the buried life from Greek literature. A story like that of Orpheus and Eurydice shows what poets like Gray could learn about the nature of the buried life from Greek literature, and apply to his own situation in the mid-eighteenth-century. In that story Orpheus was the son of Apollo and the Muse Calliope. He was given a lyre by his father and learnt to play it with such perfection that nothing could resist the charm of his music. He married Eurydice but then soon after their marriage she was bitten on the foot by a snake, a symbol of Dionysus, and died. Orpheus descended into Hades to bring her back to life, and sang and played so beautifully for Pluto and Persephone that they agreed to let Eurydice go on condition that Orpheus not look back at her until they had reached the upper world. Orpheus looked back at the last moment, however, so that Eurydice was returned to Hades. Orpheus was denied access to Hades a second time until some Thracian maidens, excited by the rites of Bacchus, or Dionysus, raised a scream to drown out his music. They then killed him with their javelins before tearing him limb from limb and casting his head and lyre into the river Hebrus, where they floated downstream still singing and playing beautifully. The Muses gathered up the fragments of his body and buried them at Libethra, where the nightingale is said to sing over his grave more sweetly than anywhere else in Greece. His shade then descended into Hades again where he was reunited with Eurydice, so that 76
now they roam the Happy Fields together for all eternity. There are many variations of the same story in Greek literature, such as in the story of Cadmus and Harmonia which was retold by Arnold in “Empedocles on Etna” [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 427-460], and each variation helps to give the reader a more complete picture of the buried life. These variations will be discussed in more detail elsewhere, but in this variation Orpheus is a young poet who died in the character of Dionysus, according to Frazer in The Golden Bough [Frazer, 1993, p.379]. To return to Gray, Arnold also noted the brilliant, although arid and fragmented, qualities of the surface of Gray’s mind. Gray was “perhaps the most learned man in Europe”, according to his friends [“Thomas Gray”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.192], and Arnold listed his interests as including almost all of the literary, historical, philosophical, political, religious, artistic and scientific knowledge of the day. In this he was again very much like Arnold’s philosophical Empedocles. The eighteenth-century qualties of Gray’s mind are revealed by the particular interest he took in Linnaeus’ schemes for the labelling of the plant and animal kingdoms bit by separate bit:
The notes in his interleaved copy of Linnaeus remained to show the extent and accuracy of his knowledge in the natural sciences, particularly in botany, zoology, and entomology. Entomologists testified that his account of English insects was more perfect than any that had then appeared. [“Thomas Gray”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.192]
In eighteeenth-century fashion, he was accustomed to consider nature as being fragmented and dead, in other words, rather than as being a living whole. (Arnold wrote elsewhere of the “magical power of poetry” to make people see the world as being unified and alive, rather than divided and dead as “Linnaeus or Cavendish or Cuvier” see it) [“Maurice de Guérin”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, pp.13-14]. For Arnold, Gray did anticipate Wordsworth’s reunification and resurrection of nature, however, in his love for the English countryside, being “the first discoverer of the beauties of nature in England”, and having “marked out the course of every picturesque journey that can be made in it” [“Thomas Gray”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.192]. But it was not a project of rebirth or resurrection that Gray could complete, so that most of his poems are about the fragmentation and death of the individual, and the fragmentation and death of nature. None of these various interests of Gray’s could distract him from his basic melancholy for long, and often their pursuit was merely an attempt to distract him from his poetic failures. According to Arnold, Gray used his reading as “a narcotic” [Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.387], and he quoted from a letter that Gray wrote at the age of twenty- one:
Low spirits are my true and faithful companions; they get up with me, go to bed with me, make journeys and returns as I do; nay, and pay visits and will even affect to be jocose and force a feeble laugh with me; but most commonly we sit alone together, and are the prettiest insipid company in the world. [“Thomas Gray”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.197] 77
These feelings of melancholy only got worse as he grew older. He knew that the only cure for his melancholy, the only way he could access his own deepest feelings, was through death, or to die to his surface life. Gray thus contemplated death as his only means of escape from the “ennui” of college-life at Cambridge [“Thomas Gray”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.198], as Empedocles contemplated death as the only means of escape from the ennui of life in Agrigentum, and he wrote to a friend whose father had died that:
He who best knows our nature (for he has made us what we are) by such afflictions recalls us from our wandering thoughts and idle merriment, from the insolence of youth and prosperity, to serious reflection, to our duty, and to himself; nor need we hasten to get rid of these impressions. Time (by appointment of the same Power) will cure the smart and in some hearts soon blot out all traces of sorrow; but such as preserve them longest (for it is left partly in our own power) do perhaps best acquiesce in the will of the chastiser. [“Thomas Gray”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.195]
The lesson that Gray tried to convey to his friend in this letter was very similar to the one that Arnold tried to impart to his readers in poems like “Mycerinus” and “The Sick King in Bokhara”, which seem to comment on his own father’s death. It is a lesson that Gray could have learnt himself from a study of Greek tragedy, where death is always a welcome release from the fragmented impressions and misguided ambitions of the surface life. That is the lesson, too, of “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, Gray’s most famous poem:
Their name, their years, spelt by the unlettered Muse, The place of fame and elegy supply; And many a holy text around she strews, That teach the rustic moralist to die. [“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, lines 81-84]
On one level Gray is perhaps explaining why he himself is an example of a “mute inglorious Milton” [“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, line 59]. It is not lack of talent that makes him so, the poem explains, but lack of opportunity through being born in the wrong place and at the wrong time. But, as has already been observed, what is more interesting about the poem is how its poet-character, who is a young aesthete like Arnold’s Strayed Reveller, or like the young Empedocles, is youthful and alive but is at the same time also apparently dead and speaking from his grave. Alive, this poet-character is fragmented like the Scholar-Gipsy by other people’s perceptions of him [“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, lines 93-116], symbolising the fragmented state of his surface life since he is cut off from the unifying power of the buried life. This brings on a state of typically Romantic melancholy:
There at the foot of yonder nodding beech,
78
That wreathes its old fantastic roots so high, His listless length at noontide would he stretch, And pore upon the brook that babbles by.
Hard by yon wood, now smiling as in scorn, Muttering his wayward fancies would he rove, Now drooping, woeful wan, like one forlorn, Or crazed with care, or crossed in hopeless love. [“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, lines 101-108]
But once dead, and thus dead to his surface life, his fragmented self is reunited in the buried life, and there is a chance that he may one day be reborn or resurrected out of the buried life. In this state poetry comes more easily, as is witnessed by “The Epitaph” upon his gravestone:
Here rests his head upon the lap of Earth A youth to Fortune and to Fame unknown. Fair science frowned not on his humble birth, And Melancholy marked him for her own.
Large was his bounty, and his soul sincere, Heaven did a recompense as largely send; He gave to Misery all he had, a tear, He gained from Heaven (‘twas all he wished) a friend.
No farther seek his merits to disclose, Or draw his frailties from their dread abode. (There they alike in trembling hope repose), The bosom of his Father and his God. [“Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, lines 117-128]
It may be that the “friend” he was seeking was some other person with whom he could share that unity of human feelings which is a relic of the original unity that can be equated with God. Or it may be that the “friend” he found was his younger poetic self from whom he had become dissociated, but with whom he can be reunited in the grave and then perhaps resurrected into wholeness like Jesus Christ. In any case it amounts to the same thing, since both types of “friends” can ultimately be equated with God. What Gray stressed in the “Elegy” was that there was a body buried in that poem, so to speak, and that the body was his own. Because of the proximity of the body the whole poem, and not just the last section, is therefore really more of an epitaph than an elegy. In other words, Gray stressed that he underwent a martyrdom equivalent to Saint Sebastian’s, or Orpheus’, in the person of his poet-character, in order to write the poem. He was thus torn to pieces and “died” in the manner of an Arnold or an Eliot, so that his body is buried in the poem, so to speak. The body buried in the poem is something that Wordsworth noted about Gray’s poetry in general and about the “Elegy” in particular, as can be seen in his “Essays upon Epitaphs”, discussed below, and also in his poem “A Poet’s Epitaph”, which comments upon the “Elegy”. In “A Poet’s Epitaph” Wordsworth 79
first presents the arid and fragmented surface lives of a series of early nineteenth-century city-types, updated versions of Gray’s rustic mid-eighteenth-century villagers:
Physician art thou? - one, all eyes, Philosopher! - a fingering slave, One that would peep and botanize Upon his mother’s grave? [“A Poet’s Epitaph”, lines 17-20]
For Wordsworth, such types will not get any benefit from what is to them the “unprofitable dust” [“A Poet’s Epitaph”, line 36] of the body within the grave, or within the poem, in the metaphor of the buried life. But then Wordsworth introduces his poet- character, who is youthful, shy and retiring like Gray’s poet-character in the “Elegy” or like Arnold’s Scholar-Gipsy:
But who is He, with modest looks, And clad in homely russet brown? He murmurs near the running brooks A music sweeter than their own.
He is retired as noontide dew, Or fountain in a noon-day grove; And you must love him, ere to you He will seem worthy of your love. [“A Poet’s Epitaph”, lines 37-44]
It is this poet-character who will benefit, in the manner of Arnold’s dullard in love, from the body within the grave, or within the poem, in the metaphor:
But he is weak; both Man and Boy, Hath been an idler in the land; Contented if he might enjoy The things which others understand.
- Come hither in thy hour of strength; Come, weak as is the breaking wave! Here stretch thy body at full length; Or build thy house upon this grave.” [“A Poet’s Epitaph”, lines 53-60]
All of this is significant because the presence or absence of the body within the poem would become a major theme of Arnold’s poetry, such as in “Sohrab and Rustum” or “Empedocles on Etna”. It is a theme he seemed to inherit from Gray and Wordsworth, and it is another important aspect of Arnold’s metaphor of the buried life. Gray’s poet-character, then, is torn apart in his surface life and his body is buried in the poem. He is then reunified in the buried life and can possibly be resurrected in the minds of the readers of his epitaph or “Elegy”. In fact “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” is a stilted mid-eighteenth-century version of the shamanic tale of dismemberment, burial and rebirth also told in Arnold’s “The Strayed Reveller”, Eliot’s “The Death of Saint Narcissus”, or Empedocles’ “Purifications”. Judging from the 80
evidence of his writings, it seems that Gray may have actually experienced the psychic dismemberment of the shaman himself to become what he sang, in Arnold’s words. But because of his almost total dissociation from the buried life, judging from his life and poetry he may not have experienced in his life the shaman’s rebirth into wholeness. Therefore, like Arnold’s Empedocles or like Arnold himself, he endured the pain of a fragmented psyche without hope that this situation would ever change. Like Empedocles’, Gray’s situation was therefore one in which, to quote from Arnold on Empedocles, “the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incidence, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done” [“Preface to Poems” (1853), Super, 1960- 77, Vol.1, pp.2-3]. His situation was “painful, not tragic” [“Preface to Poems” (1853), Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, p.3], and for this reason Arnold found writing his essay on Thomas Gray “a depressing business”:
I have on this provocation been reading up on my English 18th century again, and have spent much time over what is, after all, a depressing business. Gray is a very depressing man, himself, and it will be months before I recover from him. [Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.386]
Nevertheless, Arnold learnt a lot from Gray that he could apply to his own situation as a poet in the unpoetic times of mid-nineteenth-century England, and to Empedocles’ situation as a poet in the unpoetic times of mid-fifth-century BC Greece. Arnold got a lot more joy from Wordsworth’s life and poetry than from Gray’s. Wordsworth was a close friend to the Arnold family when Matthew Arnold was a boy and a young man, and the two poets had established a personal friendship before Wordsworth’s death in 1850 [Honan, 1981, pp.195-199]. Wordsworth even took on the role of a father-figure to Arnold after Thomas Arnold’s death, “The Venerable poet of Rydal”, noted Clough upon the occasion of Arnold’s graduation from Oxford in 1844, having “taken Matt under his special protection as a 2d classman” [in Honan, 1981, p.78]. Arnold was also greatly impressed by Wordsworth’s poetry. Eliot observed that “There is no poetry that Arnold experienced more deeply than that of Wordsworth” - “deeply”, I would suggest, because of its evocation of the buried life [Eliot, 1964, pp.110-111; pp.118-119; p.155]. Arnold wrote about Wordsworth in his essay “Wordsworth”, first published as the preface to a selection of Wordsworth’s poetry he edited in 1879. In this essay Arnold gave some indications of how and why the poetry of Wordsworth impressed him so deeply. Arnold’s aim as he explains it in his essay was to collect all the scattered poetic fragments of Wordsworth together in one volume, to make a poetic whole, so that the volume was a sort of reliquary or tomb. He then hoped that Wordsworth’s poetic self could be resurrected from it in the minds of his readers. Arnold begins his essay on Wordsworth in an elegaic mood, describing how, after Wordsworth’s death, his poetry lay undisturbed with him in his grave, “unknown” on the Continent and totally eclipsed by the success of Tennyson’s poetry in England [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, pp.36-37]. The implication is that Wordsworth’s 81
poetry needs to be resurrected, and that Arnold is the man for the job. The first reason for Wordsworth’s poetry lying dead and buried is, according to Arnold, because of the fragmented state of European society at the present time. It is a society fragmented by nationalism, so that each nation reads only its own poets in its own language, instead of adopting the “ideal of Goethe”, which was to “conceive of the whole group of civilised nations as being, for intellectual and spiritual purposes, one great confederation” [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.38]. Only with the adoption of this unified ideal, suggests Arnold, using a metaphor that identifies Wordsworth’s poetry with Wordsworth’s body, will it be recognised that Wordsworth “has left behind him a body of poetry” that places him, in the order of European poets since the Renaissance, “after Shakespeare, Moliere, Milton, Goethe, indeed, but before all the rest” [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.41]. Arnold compares this ideal of Goethe’s with the Amphictyonic League of ancient Greece, which met at the temple of Apollo at Delphi and was responsible for the organisation of the Pythian Games in honour of Apollo. The Pythian Games included a poetry-reading competition, the winner of which achieved great fame and honour: “Yes, real glory is a most serious thing, glory authenticated by the Amphictyonic Court of final appeal, definitive glory” [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.40]. The poets who entered such competitions gave voice to Apollo, or being mortal, more particularly gave voice to Dionysus, who was supposedly buried at Delphi and was regarded as “the cyclic, or dying and reborn, inner being of Apollo” [Hughes, 1993, p.373]. With this comparison Arnold implies that despite the differences of language, what modern European nations and modern European poets do share is their common heritage in ancient Greece, so that Milton, for example, is to be praised because “nothing has been ever done so entirely in the sense of the Greeks as Samson Agonistes”; and Shakespeare, who dwells now in the “Elysian Fields” [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.42], is to be praised for having given us “the most varied, the most harmonious verse which has ever sounded upon the human ear since the verse of the Greeks” [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, pp.39-40]. With this comparison of modern Europe with ancient Greece, Arnold also implies that modern European poets still, in effect, give voice to the god Dionysus, through Jesus Christ, thus partaking of his divine nature. Arnold expands upon this implication in his essay. For example, he argues that Wordsworth attains “the distinctive accent and utterance of the high and genuine poets”, and quotes from the Aeneid, VI, 662: “Quique pii vates et Phoebo digna locuti” [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.48]. What this means is that genuine poets such as Wordsworth are those “Who had not disgraced Apollo, poets of true integrity”. (In this section of Book VI of the Aeneid, which is set in the land of the dead, Virgil gives Orpheus and Musaeus as examples of such high and genuine poets. They were the divinely inspired poets of the cult of Orpheus, whom Arnold placed at the head of the school to which Empedocles, too, belonged) [“Preface to Poems” (1853), Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, p.1]. At his best, Arnold argues, “Wordsworth tells of what all seek, and tells of it at its truest and best source, and yet a source where 82
all may go and draw for it” [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.51]. He can do this because at times his words were inspired by a god, although that god was:
not always within Wordsworth’s own command. It is within no poet’s command; here is the part of the Muse, the inspiration, the God, the ‘not ourselves.’ In Wordsworth’s case, the accident, for so it may almost be called, of inspiration, is of peculiar importance. No poet, perhaps, is so evidently filled with a new and sacred energy when the inspiration is upon him; no poet, when it fails him, is so left ‘weak as is a breaking wave.’ [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.51]
Arnold quotes there from Wordsworth’s “A Poet’s Epitaph” and, as has been noted, in that poem strength comes to the poet from the grave, or from the god that dies and is reborn, or from the buried life. The god that inspired Wordsworth was, according to Arnold, a god of nature, like Dionysus: “It might seem that Nature not only gave him the matter for his poem, but wrote his poem for him” [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.52]. The whole trend of Wordsworth’s thought, which was supported by Coleridge’s critique of British empiricism in the light of German Idealism, was to consider the natural world at first fragmented and dead, killed by eighteenth-century philosophy and science; then to consider the natural world reunified and resurrected, brought back to life by the Romantic poets. Haney therefore put forward the “uncontroversial argument” that “Wordsworth’s insistence that words should be an ‘incarnation of thought’ is part of the Romantic project of animating the world, attributing a force of life to a broadly defined concept of ‘nature’” [Haney, 1993, p.5]. In the preface to the second edition of his and Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth had imagined a situation in which a poet could reverse the fragmentation of knowledge by science into such narrow disciplines remote from the interests of ordinary life as chemistry, botany, geology, and so on:
The remotest discoveries of the Chemist, the Botanist, or Mineralogist, will be as proper objects of the Poet’s art as any upon which it can be employed, if the time should ever come when these things shall be familiar to us, and the relations under which they are contemplated by the followers of these respective sciences shall be manifestly and palpably material to us as enjoying and suffering beings. If the time should ever come when what is now called science, thus familiarised to men, shall be ready to put on, as it were, a form of flesh and blood, the Poet will lend his divine spirit to aid the transfiguration, and will welcome the Being thus produced, as a dear and genuine inmate of the house of man. [Wordsworth, 1965, p.456]
It would seem that Wordsworth saw that his poetic task was to reunify the fragments of modern humankind and the modern natural world and resurrect them, and so reverse:
The tendency, too potent in itself, Of use and custom to bow down the soul Under a growing weight of vulgar sense, And substitute a universe of death For that which moves with light and life informed,
83
Actual, divine and true. [“The Prelude”, XIV, lines 157-162]
This situation described by Wordsworth above is similar to the one outlined by Arnold in “Empedocles on Etna”, where the scientist or philosopher in Empedocles fragments and so kills himself in the process of having broken the natural world down into its constituent elements of Earth, Wind, Fire and Water, having presumably “killed” the natural world too in that process:
- I alone Am dead to life and joy, therefore I read In all things my own deadness. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act 2, lines 320-322]
It is then up to the poet Callicles to reunify in the buried life, with the power of his imagination, these same elements to resurrect both Empedocles and the natural world. It seems, too, that Arnold set himself a similar task in “Wordsworth”. Despite the philosophical background to Wordsworth’s poetry, which Wordsworth and Coleridge elaborated upon in poems and prefaces such as those quoted from above, Arnold insists that Wordsworth’s:
poetry is the reality, his philosophy - so far, at least, as it may put on the form and habit of ‘a scientific system of thought,’ and the more that it puts them on, - is the illusion. [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.48]
Arnold argues that Wordsworth, perhaps like Eliot after him, adopted a philosophy to fill in the gaps for his readers between the “transitory moods” or “momentary illuminations” offered by his lyric poetry [Hough, 1991, p.320]. But for Arnold it was the brief, fragmentary, lyric epiphanies - his “spots of time” [“The Prelude”, XII, line 208] - that came first, inspired by the god, whereas the philosophy was only an uninspired, post-hoc justification and rationalisation of the fragmentary insights originally offered by the poetry. Wordsworth’s own justification for his epiphanic lyrics was that:
I have said that poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility: the emotion is contemplated till, by a species of re-action, the tranquillity gradually disappears, and an emotion, kindred to that which was before the subject of contemplation, is gradually produced, and does itself actually exist in the mind. [Wordsworth, 1965, p.460]
This then was elaborated into a grand scheme whereby every child is born a poet. But then the poetic faculties are gradually killed off or suppressed in most people, before being revived, rediscovered or reborn in the buried life by the few who become great poets:
For feeling hath to him imparted power That through the growing faculties of sense Doth like the agent of one great Mind 84
Create, creator and receiver both, Working but in alliance with the works Which it beholds. - Such, verily, is the first Poetic spirit of our human life, By uniform control of after years, In most abated or suppressed. [“The Prelude”, II, lines 255-263]
For Wordsworth, the poet, by dwelling in what Arnold called the buried life, can perform the miracle of resurrecting particular feelings that were seemingly fragmented and dead. The feelings must be fragmented and dead, however, before the poet, using the power of their imagination, can reunify and then resurrect them in order to write what Wordsworth would call poetry. But for Arnold it is Wordsworth’s brief lyric fragments that give access to the buried life and perform the miracle of resurrection, not the philosophical justification of the lyric fragments in prose or verse. He even refers to the “Ode on Intimations of Immortality”, which famously elaborates upon the idea that every child is born a poet, as “not wholly free from something declamatory” [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.54] and as having “no real solidity” [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.49]. Arnold is vehement in his rejection of Wordsworth’s philosophy, and it is not a type of rejection that really recurs in his criticism of other poets. It might be that the vehemence of Arnold’s rejection was caused by the suspicion that wherever Wordsworth’s verse becomes philosophical, what we are reading is not so much the poetry of Wordsworth as the philosophy of Coleridge, and for Arnold it was not the philosophy of Coleridge that was inspired by the god. In the 1830s Coleridge’s philosophy had been a powerful influence upon “young men of ability” at Cambridge, according to Arnold. This influence “told entirely in favour of Wordsworth’s poetry”, as they earnestly scanned his poetry for signs of a high-minded and all-encompassing philosophy. But Arnold reports that the “influence of Coleridge has waned, and Wordsworth’s poetry can no longer draw succour from this ally” [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, pp.36-37]. For Arnold this was entirely a good thing. It is a situation reminiscent of Arnold’s criticism of the sophisticated philosophical context in which he felt that the author of the Gospel of St. John had placed the simple words of Jesus Christ. In Literature and Dogma Arnold argued that:
undoubtedly the writer of the Fourth Gospel seems to have come in contact, in Asia or Egypt, with Aryan metaphysics whether from India or Greece; and to have had this advantage, whatever it amounts to, in writing his Gospel. But who, that has eyes to read, cannot see the difference between the places in his Gospel, such as the introduction, where the writer speaks in his own person, and the places where Jesus himself speaks? The moment Jesus speaks, the metaphysical apparatus falls away, the simple intuition takes its place; and wherever in the discourse of Jesus the metaphysical apparatus is intruded, it jars with the context, breaks the unity of the discourse, impairs the thought, and comes evidently from the writer, not Jesus. [Literature and Dogma, Super, 1960-77, Vol.6, p.272]
85
This is similar to Arnold’s criticism of Wordsworth’s long philosophical poems such as “The Excursion”, beloved by the “Wordsworthians”. But Arnold did not like poems such as “The Excursion” much, because he felt that Wordsworth’s true genius was revealed only in the short, intuitive lyric fragments inspired directly by his god, and not at all in the philosophical verbiage that he felt was too often their context [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, pp.48-51]. If “the Romantic project was to replace religion with an interaction between philosophy and poetry” [Haney, 1993, p.103], then Arnold only had time for the poetry. Arnold thus argued that Wordsworth’s attempts to write successfully sustained, long philosophical poems (like Arnold’s own attempts at the same genre) were failures:
The Excursion and the Prelude, his poems of greatest bulk, are by no means Wordsworth’s best work. His best work is in his shorter pieces, and many indeed are there of these which are of first-rate excellence. [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960- 77, Vol.9, p.42]
As Hough noted, long philosophical poems in the modern era “seem antiquated contraptions, divorced from the spirit of the age”, for this is the era of the short lyric fragment [Hough, 1991, pp.319-320]. These poems of Wordsworth’s of “greatest bulk” are like the “channels grand” dug by the mature poet of Arnold’s poem, “Progress of Poesy”, where despite the grandness of the poet’s conception the “sacred drops” of poetical inspiration have nevertheless “vanished out of hand” [“Progress of Poesy”, lines 5-9]. In his essay Arnold thus seems determined to reduce Wordsworth’s poetry everywhere to the briefest possible fragments, further reducing the vast bulk of Wordsworth’s published poetry to the fewest possible number of lyric fragments by noting that although “Wordsworth composed verses during a space of some sixty years... it is no exaggeration to say that within one single decade of those years, between 1798 and 1808, almost all his really first-rate work was produced” [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.42]. For Arnold, this was the only period during which a young Wordsworth was inspired by his god. Having reduced Wordworth to fragments and buried him in the grave of public indifference, Arnold then set about his task of resurrection, noting that: “To exhibit this body of Wordsworth’s best work, to clear away obstructions from around it, and to let it speak for itself, is what every lover of Wordsworth should desire” [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.44]. He is in effect trying to repay a favour by doing for Wordsworth what Wordsworth’s poetry had done for him. The object of his volume of selections from Wordsworth’s poetry is, he writes, “To disengage the poems which show his power, and to present them to the English-speaking public and to the world” [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.54]. If we take it that the argument in Arnold’s essay is a consistent one, then the voice and the power of Wordsworth’s resurrected poetry can only be those of the risen Christ or Dionysus. Arnold’s most famous observation in “Wordsworth” is that “poetry is at bottom a criticism of life”, and this too is consistent with the idea that the voice and power of 86
Wordsworth’s resurrected poetry are those of the risen Christ or Dionysus. Here is the context of that observation:
It is important, therefore, to hold fast to this: that poetry is at bottom a criticism of life; that the greatness of a poet lies in his powerful and beautiful application of ideas to life, - to the question: How to live. [“Wordsworth”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.9, p.46]
On the surface of things it seems like an insipid, almost meaningless observation to make, and so Eliot ridiculed it:
It is in his essay on Wordsworth that occurs his famous definition: ‘Poetry is at bottom a criticism of life.’ At bottom: that is a great way down; the bottom is the bottom. At the bottom of the abyss is what few ever see, and what those cannot bear to look at for long; and it is not a ‘criticism of life’. If we mean life as a whole - not that Arnold ever saw life as a whole - from top to bottom, can anything that we say of it ultimately, of that awful mystery, be called criticism? We bring back very little from our rare descents, and that is not criticism. Arnold might just as well have said that Christian worship is at bottom a criticism of the Trinity. We see better what Arnold’s words amount to when we recognise that his own poetry is decidedly critical poetry. [Eliot, 1964, p.111]
For Eliot, critics like Arnold never descended into the abyss, since he felt that only those who have experienced a spiritual death and rebirth such as Jesus Christ experienced, which is the true basis of “Christian worship”, could be said to have made such a descent. For Eliot, the phrases “critical poetry” or “poetry is at bottom a criticism of life” were probably oxymoronic, since for him the poet experienced spiritual death and rebirth, and wrote about that, whereas the critic only reads about other people’s accounts of the experience. However, Eliot probably misread what Arnold meant by “criticism”, taking it to mean a judgement about books, art, music and so on, as if poets judged life as if it were a second-hand experience. But judging from the context provided by the rest of Arnold’s prose criticism as a whole, what he probably meant by it is something like: “Poetry is basically a criticism of, or a finding fault with, the state of being alive, or of living only in the surface life rather than submitting to dying and then being reborn in the buried life.” So for example in “Wordsworth” Arnold argues that too many poets get distracted by the surface life, so that they mistake the inns along the road of life, which are the pleasant things, for the destination of life which is death [“Wordsworth”, Super 1960-77, Vol.9, pp.46-47]. In Culture and Anarchy, too, Arnold argued that the “final end and aim” of both an ancient Pagan and a modern Christian life “is that we might be partakers of the divine nature” [Culture and Anarchy, Super, 1960-77, Vol.5, p.164]. The Christian might partake of the divine nature of Jesus Christ whilst the ancient Pagan partook of the divine nature of Dionysus, but for Arnold they were essentially the same god. Arnold thus explains that for Plato, as it is for a modern Christian, life is “a learning to die” [Culture and Anarchy, Super, 1960-77, Vol.5, p.167]; and to learn to die is to learn from 87
and imitate Jesus Christ or Dionysus and to thus partake of their divine nature. “Through age after age and generation after generation,” continued Arnold, “our race, or all that part of our race which was most living and progressive, was baptized into a death”. It was only this baptism into a death that saved both the ancient Pagan and the modern Christian from a state of “self-dissatisfaction and ennui” [Culture and Anarchy, Super, 1960-77, Vol.5, pp.169-170], such as you might eventually experience in the inns of life, no matter how pleasant they be. This state of “self-dissatisfaction and ennui” is the same one that infected the ancient Empedocles or the modern Thomas Gray or Matthew Arnold. So when Eliot wrote that what Arnold provides is “not so much a criticism of Wordsworth as a testimonial of what Wordsworth had done for him” [Eliot, 1964, p.111], what it amounts to is that it was Wordsworth’s message that you must be “baptized into a death” that saved Arnold from that state of “depression and ennui”. Like Eliot and Arnold, Wordsworth believed that poets should not write about second-hand experiences. He thought that:
However exalted a notion we would wish to cherish of the character of a Poet, it is obvious, that while he describes and imitates passions, his employment is in some degree mechanical compared with the freedom and power of real and substantial action and suffering. [Wordsworth, 1965, p.453]
Like Eliot and Arnold, Wordsworth thus believed that whilst a minor poet or a critic might just describe the actions and suffering of someone else, a great poet must, like Arnold’s Strayed Reveller, actually experience those actions and that suffering themselves. To quote again from “The Strayed Reveller”:
such a price The gods exact for song: To become what we sing. [“The Strayed Reveller”, lines 232- 234]
In Arnold’s opinion Wordsworth was a great poet because he experienced all the things that he wrote about, such as the descent into the abyss. Like Gray, his body was buried in his poetry, and it could thus be resurrected by such a diligent reader as Arnold, or by diligent readers of Arnold’s anthology of Wordsworth’s poetry. Arnold’s essay, then, is like an epitaph for the deceased Wordsworth, and his volume of selections from Wordsworth’s poetry is, as has been said, like Wordsworth’s reliquary or tomb. These analogies, and thus the whole structure of his essay, Arnold could have derived from Wordsworth himself, for it has been argued that for Wordsworth all poetry was like an epitaph for the dead [Haney, 1993, p.70]. If a poet can be resurrected in the minds of their reading public, since they lie buried in their poetry, then every poem of theirs is an epitaph. So for example in “The Prelude” Wordsworth describes having:
held a volume in my hand,
88
Poor earthly casket of immortal verse, Shakespeare, or Milton, labourers divine! [“The Prelude”, Book 5, lines 163-165]
In “Essays upon Epitaphs”, too, Wordsworth included part of an epitaph for Shakespeare by Milton:
What needs my Shakespeare for his honoured bones The labour of an age in piled stones, Or that his hallowed reliques should be hid Under a star-ypointing pyramid? Dear Son of Memory, great Heir of Fame, What need’st thou such weak witness of thy name? Thou in our wonder and astonishment Hast built thyself a livelong monument, And so sepulchred, in such pomp dost lie, That kings for such a tomb would wish to die. [in Wordsworth, 1974, Vol.2, pp. 61-62]
It follows that for Wordsworth, then, a poem, like an epitaph, must be “in close connection with the bodily remains of the deceased” [Wordsworth, 1974, Vol.2, p.53], as he phrased it in “Essays upon Epitaphs”, and if there is not a body in a bit of verse or close by then it is not poetry. (Atwood, too, notes that writers must suffer, and that critics “know there’s a body buried somewhere, and they’re keen to dig it up, and then hunt you down”) [Atwood, 2003, p.97]. The later poems of Arnold, with their absent bodies, would thus not qualify for Wordsworth as poetry. Even “Empedocles on Etna”, with its uncertainty over what happens to the body of Empedocles, might fail to qualify. Wordsworth began his “Essays upon Epitaphs” with his imagery of life as a river, which was discussed in Chapter Three of this thesis. God is like the infinite and unchanging sea, wrote Wordsworth, and a person is like a finite and changing river that flows into that sea upon their death. Water is like the infinite and immortal part that flows through them. A person’s epitaph upon their tomb recreates in the minds of its readers their immortal part, their best self, so that the infinite god that was once contained within the finite body is now contained within the finite epitaph. The infinite whole must be incarnated in a finite fragment, Wordsworth noted, insisting upon the analogy of the Christian Incarnation and poetic incarnation:
The commerce between Man and his Maker cannot be carried on but by a process where much is represented in little, and the infinite Being accommodates himself to a finite capacity. In all this may be perceived the affinity between religion and poetry... between religion - whose element is infinitude, and whose ultimate trust is the supreme of things, submitting herself to circumscription, and reconciled to substitutions; and poetry - ethereal and transcendent; yet incapable to sustain her existence without sensuous incarnation. [Wordsworth, 1974, Vol.3, p.65]
So, in terms of the metaphor of the buried life, there was a fusion of the infinite God and
89
finite humankind, in the person of Jesus Christ, in the Incarnation; as there is also potentially a fusion of the god within, which is an infinite Christ-like god, and each individual, finite human in the fusion of soul and body. Then there was also a fusion of infinite God and finite language, in the words of Jesus Christ; as there is also potentially a fusion of the infinite god within and finite language in the words of the poet - in the poem. A poem, then, is part deifact and part artifact, and the strength of the poet and their language comes from their fusion with the god within. But the river must not be mistaken for the water it contains, Wordsworth insisted, or the body for the soul it contains; or in a jibe aimed at the eighteenth-century verse of Dryden and Pope, clothing for the body within:
the reader need only look into any collection of Epitaphs to be convinced that the faults predominant in the literature of every age will be as strongly reflected in the sepulchral inscriptions as anywhere... In a bulky Volume of Poetry entitled, ELEGANT EXTRACTS in Verse... I find a number of Epitaphs, in verse, of the last century; and there is scarcely one which is not thoroughly tainted by the artifices which have overrun our writings in metre since the days of Dryden and Pope... those thoughts which have the infinitude of truth, and those expressions which are not what the garb is to the body but what the body is to the soul... all these are abandoned for their opposites... If words be not (recurring to a metaphor before used) an incarnation of the thought but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had the power to consume and to alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. [Wordsworth, 1974, Vol.2, pp84-85]
Humankind can be alienated from God as the body can be alienated from the soul, or the god within, in the dissociation of people’s surface lives from the buried life. Similarly, the language of poets can become dissociated from the god within, or the buried life, so that their verses become as empty of divine meaning as their aimless surface lives. This is what Wordsworth thought had happened in the eighteenth-century. He made an exception, however, of Gray’s epitaph on a Mrs Clark [Wordsworth, 1974, Vol.2, pp.86- 87], which he thought very good. He also used lines from Gray’s “Elegy” as an epigraph for his second “Essay upon Epitaphs” [Wordsworth, 1974, Vol.2, p.63]. For Wordsworth, the body of Mrs Clark is buried in the words of her epitaph, written for her by Gray, so that her best self, her immortal part, can be resurrected from it by its readers. Then it is Gray’s body that is buried in his “Elegy” so that his best self, his immortal part which is his poetic self, can be resurrected from it in the minds of his readers. There may have been a time in Eden when there was no dissociation between God and humankind, so that there was a complete fusion of God’s thoughts and humankind’s. But since the Fall it requires some sort of a sacrifice, or a death and resurrection or rebirth, in imitation of Jesus Christ, before that fusion can be re-established on even the most temporary basis, such as in Gray’s epitaph for Mrs Clark or in his “Elegy”. For the poet this means that they must “die” like Christ each time they write a poem, for according to
90
Wordsworth: “thoughts cannot... assume an outward life without a transmutation and a fall” [Wordsworth, 1974, p.85]. In summary, having looked closely at “Thomas Gray” and “Wordsworth”, it can be seen how Arnold’s use of the the metaphor of the buried life affects the structure of his arguments about Gray and Wordsworth; but is also derived in part from Gray and Wordsworth themselves. Arnold’s use of the metaphor means that there is a continuity between between the two essays, and also a continuity with poems like “The Strayed Reveller” and “Empedocles on Etna”. In all four texts Greek literature is cited for the importance of the complete picture of the buried life which it can provide, and the picture it provides of a society in which, for a time at least, there was an almost complete integration of people’s surface lives with the buried life. In all four texts the surface life of the text’s main protagonist and his society is fragmented and dead, killed by science and philosophy or nationalism, and dissociated from the buried life. In all four texts the dead body of the poet is buried in their poetry, so to speak, so that their poetry is like their reliquary or tomb, and their poetic selves can be resurrected by diligent readers of that poetry.
91
Chapter Six ______
The Surface Life and the Buried Life
Despite its importance, the metaphor of the buried life remains curiously under- explored in Arnoldian criticism. There are, however, any number of fine critical works about Arnold, the most influential being, as was noted, Eliot’s essays, “Arnold and Pater” and “Matthew Arnold”. Frye, too, has some interesting insights into Arnold’s work, as in the passage from Anatomy of Criticism quoted in the Introduction:
the goal of historical criticism, as our metaphors about it often indicate, is a kind of self-resurrection, the vision of a valley of dry bones that takes on the flesh and blood of our own vision. The culture of the past is not only the memory of mankind, but our own buried life, and study of it leads to a recognition scene, a discovery in which we see, not our past lives, but the total cultural form of our present life. It is not only the poet but his reader who is subject to the obligation to “make it new”. [Frye, 2000, pp.345-346]
Frye offers here an interesting, if oblique, comment on Arnold’s metaphor of the buried life. He gives a sense of the whole of a culture laid out like the dead god of Arnold’s “Obermann Once More”, or Owen’s “An Imperial Elegy”. But for Frye, as for Arnold, that same god is also contained in its entirety within us, in the buried life. Also, for Frye as for Arnold, it is the reader as much as the poet or the god who is dead as well as alive; and for Frye, too, as for Arnold, it is both the reader and the poet who must try to resurrect that dead god from out of the buried life. There are a number of excellent critical biographies about Arnold, such as those by Trilling, Honan and Hamilton, already mentioned; and also Nicholas Murray’s A Life of Matthew Arnold (1996); Clinton Machann’s Matthew Arnold: A Literary Life (1998); and Linda Ray Pratt’s Matthew Arnold Revisited (2000). However, the problem for twentieth-century biographers was that no biography of Arnold was written until 1939. All of the above biographies were thus compiled from the same surviving written sources; and Arnold the writer was not at all given to self-revelation, apart from in one or two letters to his sister Jane. Those who knew him well, too, were equally discreet in the surviving written sources. From the biographer’s point of view, perhaps the greatest pity is that although the letters of Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, the poet, fellow-Rugbeian and friend of Arnold’s youth at Oxford, who died in 1861, have survived and are rather interesting, Clough’s letters to Arnold have not. As a gifted poet himself, Clough was the one who could probably have given the shrewdest insights into the development of Arnold’s poetic personality during the 1840s and 1850s. In an introduction to a selection of Arnold’s works first-published in 1949, Trilling provided a neat summary of the Arnoldian biographer’s problems:
there is little in Arnold’s life story to lend an extraneous interest to his work. He 92
expressed the wish that no biography of him be written. None has been, and perhaps none can be, for the memorials of his life, either by his own design or by that of his family, are sparse; his letters, with certain important exceptions, are not intimately revelatory; there are not many anecdotes about him in his maturity and those which do exist are pleasant but not especially pungent... He very seldom uttered an autobiographical word, for he had, and declared, the intention of hiding his life. [Arnold, 1980, pp1-2]
Arnold appears to have been rather like Eliot in the lack of interest he took in recording the details of his surface life, and also in the lengths he went to keep private the sources of his poetic creativity. For Eliot and Arnold were both poets of the buried life, Eliot even using Arnold’s phrase, as was noted, in “Portrait of a Lady” [Eliot, 1974, p.20]. So when Hughes writes of “Eliot’s concealed (and for the most part incomprehensible to him, too), inner life” [Hughes, 1995, p.285], or of how with Eliot “‘the ordinary wakeful life of the ego’ was cut off from the spirit’s search” [Hughes, 1995, p.286], he suggests a very interesting way of approaching Arnold’s metaphor of the buried life. But to understand why Hughes’ approach is so interesting, it is first necessary to go a little deeper into certain aspects of the buried life. As was noted, Eliot characterised his inner life, or his poetic personality, or his buried life, as an inner god or a Christ-figure, a beautiful adolescent who dwelt beneath the surface of his ordinary, everyday personality. (This poetic personality is like the Christ who, according to Jung, “is an examplar who dwells in every Christian as his integral personality”) [Jung, 1995, p.310]. Hughes argued that poems by Eliot, such as “The Death of Saint Narcissus”, record the adolescent appearance of this inner god as it first appeared within or beneath his ordinary, everyday personality:
I ask you to believe that the poem records the moment when, looking into the pool beneath his ordinary personality, Eliot’s poetic self caught a moment of tranced stillness, and became very precisely aware of its own peculiar nature, inheritance and fate, and found for itself this image. [Hughes, 1995, p.280]
It could be argued that this inner god fused with Eliot’s ordinary, everyday personality, but only in such moments of “tranced stillness”: the brief, ecstatic moments, or epiphanies, or Wordsworthian “spots of time”, of Romantic inspiration. These became gradually fewer and more widely spaced, however, as Eliot’s mind and body aged towards thirty, but the inner god remained forever adolescent, like Wilde’s Dorian Gray or Arnold’s Scholar-Gipsy. Eliot’s Saint Narcissus suffers an early death as he longs for complete integration with his inner god. Then poems such as “The Waste Land” and “The Hollow Men” record the process of the disintegration and death of Eliot’s ordinary, everyday personality, as he realised that his ageing mind and body had become an encumbrance to his spirit’s search, so that he too longed for such a “death”. Poems such as “Ash Wednesday”, “Journey of The Magi” and “Song for Simeon” then record a hoped for, or imminent, resurrection or rebirth out of the buried life of Eliot’s ordinary, everyday personality. Then finally, poems like “Four Quartets”
93
record the fact of that rebirth and the supposed integration or reintegration of his ordinary, everyday personality with that of the inner god, back in the surface life. With “Four Quartets”, according to Hughes:
the poetic Self and the ordinary personality, the Rose and the Fire, became one. In religious terms, the sufferings of the god and the sufferings of the ego were, as near as may be, united in a pattern of redemption. In poetic terms, his heroic, sacred drama was triumphantly completed. From dismemberment in the meaningless, he had rescued a spiritual wholeness, and reconstructed a new ground of rejoicing. [Hughes, 1995, pp.289-290]
Even in “Four Quartets”, however, despite Eliot’s philosophical framework, the poetic personality and the ordinary, everyday personality, or the buried life and our surface lives, still fuse only in brief spots of time. It is still the case, in other words, that it is only every now and then that one can experience the intersection of a “timeless moment” with the ordinary run of time:
for history is a pattern Of timeless moments. So, while the light falls On a winter’s afternoon, in a secluded chapel, History is now and England. [Eliot, 1974, p.222]
For both Eliot and Arnold, it is only these odd moments of “tranced stillness”, or fusion between our surface lives and the buried life, that are worth recording in any ordinary biographical or autobiographical sense, and they are recorded in their poetry. As was also noted, Arnold, like Eliot, seemed to characterise his buried life as an inner god or Christ-figure, a beautiful adolescent who dwelt beneath the surface of his ordinary, everyday personality. Poems of Arnold’s, such as “The Strayed Reveller”, record the adolescent appearance of this inner god. Arnold’s Strayed Reveller suffers an early death as he longs for complete integration with his inner god. Then poems such as “Empedocles on Etna” record the process of the disintegration and death of Arnold’s ordinary, everyday personality, as he realised that his ageing mind and body had become an encumbrance to his spirit’s search, so that he longed for such a “death”. Unfortunately for Arnold, however, to judge from the evidence of his poetry, his ordinary, everyday personality appears never to have undergone a resurrection or rebirth out of the buried life, so that it remained fragmented and dead, and thus buried. Arnold’s later poems such as “The Scholar-Gipsy” and “Thyrsis” can therefore be read as its elegies, like Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard”, rather than as a celebration of its rebirth and reintegration with the inner god back in the surface life. The idea of an inner god or Christ-figure, or a beautiful adolescent, lurking beneath one’s ordinary, everyday personality, may seem rather exotic. Indeed, both Eliot and Arnold did draw upon a number of different and exotic sources, apart from Christianity, for their characterisation of their inner or buried life as a Christ-like god, such as Hindu, Buddhist and ancient Greek mythology. So for example in his Notebooks,
94
Arnold quoted from a Buddhist text: “By meditating on the divine essence, let a man extinguish all qualities repugnant to God” [in apRoberts, 1983, p.107]. But their characterisation could have also drawn much from the traditions of evangelical Protestantism which surrounded them in their childhoods, although they both ultimately rejected much of evangelical thought as philistine, and avoided the crudely obvious typologies of most evangelical testimony in poetry or prose. There was thus nothing particularly new in their characterisation of their inner life as a Christ-like god, for the Protestant internalisation of Christ has been traced as far back as to Luther in the sixteenth-century (Jung even traces it back to “primitive Christianity”) [Jung, 1995, p.360]; and in an English context it has been traced back to the late seventeenth-century: George Fox preached that “Christ hath come and doth dwell in the hearts of his people” [in Keeble, 1987, pp.204-205]. In an American context, Bloom notes that: “For Emerson, genius was the god within” [Bloom, 2002, p.11]. Arnold may also have heard Newman preaching, at Oxford and Littlemore in the 1840s, on the subject of the “Indwelling”, or the presence of Christ in the soul, “the literal indwelling of God within us”, as Newman said [in Dessain, 1980, p.47], for it was one of Newman’s favourite topics for a sermon [Dessain, 1980, pp.95-96]. (According to his brother, Tom, Matthew Arnold “for a long time regularly attended” Newman’s services at St. Mary’s, Oxford, and was “powerfully attracted”. The power of this attraction was documented in Matthew Arnold’s poem “The Voice”) [in Arnold, 1965, p.47]. Newman had first been drawn to the notion of the internalisation of Christ during his period of youthful evangelicalism [Dessain, 1980, p.4], and he took the notion with him into High Anglicanism and Roman Catholicism [Dessain, 1980, p.96]. In his sermon on “The Indwelling Spirit” Newman spoke of “a real, not a figurative indwelling”, and of how this “heavenly gift is not simply called the Holy Ghost, or the Spirit of God, but the Spirit of Christ... Thus Saint Paul says, ‘God hath sent forth the Spirit of His Son into your hearts’” [Newman, 2004 (3), p.2]. In his poem “Haworth Churchyard”, too, Arnold wrote of the effect on him of Emily Bronte’s poem, “No Coward Soul is Mine”, first published in 1850. It was then thought to be her last poem [Arnold, 1965, p.395]:
-she, who sank Baffled, unknown, self-consumed; Whose too bold dying song Stirred like a clarion blast my soul. [“Haworth Churchyard”, lines 97- 100]
It was “too bold” presumably because it dismissed all organised religions as of no consequence [“No Coward Soul is Mine”, lines 9-12]. Instead, Bronte had written of her faith in the inner God:
O God within my breast, Almighty, ever-present Deity, Life - that in me has rest, 95
As I - undying Life - have power in Thee...
Though earth and man were gone, And suns and universes ceased to be, And Thou were left alone, Every Existence would exist in thee. [“No Coward Soul is Mine”, lines 5-8; 21-24]
Arnold expressed similar thoughts to Bronte’s, although a little more guardedly, in “Progress” (1852):
“Say ye: The spirit of man has found new roads, And we must leave the old faiths, and walk therein?- Leave then the Cross as ye have left carved gods, But guard the fire within...
“Children of men! the unseen Power, whose eye For ever doth accompany mankind, Hath looked on no religion scornfully That man did ever find.
“Which has not taught weak wills how much they can, Which has not fall’n on dry hearts like rain? Which has not cried to sunk self-weary man: Thou must be born again?
“Children of men! not that your age excel In pride of life the ages of your sires; But that you too feel deeply, bear fruit well, The Friend of man desires.” [“Progress”, lines 25-28; 37-48]
Then, a little later in the century, the evangelically-minded General Gordon of Khartoum fame expressed, too, a belief in the Indwelling, and he took this belief with him into some rather more eccentric territories. He wrote to his sister at one time:
A man who knows not the secret, who has not the indwelling of God revealed to him... will not hear of there being any birth before his natural birth, in any existence except with the body he is in. The man to whom the secret (the indwelling of God) is revealed... sees he is not of this world; for when he speaks of himself he quite disregards the body his soul lives in, which is earthly. [in Strachey, 1969, pp.258-259]
Gordon’s beliefs were not in themselves highly unusual but merely, like Newman’s, of an ascetic nature. His belief in the Indwelling formed part of his asceticism. However, what is unusual is that in late-nineteenth-century England the place for a man of such ascetic beliefs was in the army and fighting on imperial battlefields. Gordon, who “died” and was “reborn” or “resurrected” in the Crimean War and the Taiping rebellion, also wrote to his sister to say:
96
I died long ago... It is difficult for the flesh to accept ‘Ye are dead, ye have naught to do with the world.’ How difficult for any one to be circumcised from the world, to be as indifferent to its pleasures, its sorrows, and its comforts as a corpse is! That is to know the resurrection. [in Ferguson, 2008, p.268]
This late-nineteenth-century imperialist obsession with dying to this world, figuratively or literally, to reveal the god within will be traced back in this thesis at least partly to the evangelically-minded Thomas Arnold’s influence at Rugby in the 1830s and 1840s. But it is also interesting to see how this obsession is nascent in the mid-century poetry of Matthew Arnold. Although there was nothing particularly new or unusual, then, in their characterisation of their inner life as a Christ-like god, what was possibly a little new or unusual in Eliot’s and Arnold’s (and Bronte’s) characterisation was their sense that Christ existed metaphorically in their inner life but not necessarily literally in the external world at all. As Arnold wrote in his sonnet, “Anti-Desperation”:
Sits there no judge in heaven, our sin to see? ‘More strictly, then, the inward judge obey! Was Christ a man like us? - Ah! let us try If we then, too, can be such men as He!’ [“Anti-Desperation”, lines 11- 14]
And as he wrote in his essay “Marcus Aurelius”: “Christianity... has to correct its apparent offers of external reward, and to say: The kingdom of God is within you” [“Marcus Aurelius”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, pp.148-149]. Or, as Hughes wrote about Eliot:
We have no problem nowadays in seeing that the God-centred metaphysical universe of the religions suffered not so much an evaporation as a translocation. It was interiorized. And translated. We live in the translation, where what had been religious and centred on God is psychological and centred on an idea of the self - albeit a self that remains a measureless if not infinite question mark. [Hughes, 1995, p.274]
However that may be, despite their lack of interest in an external God, both Eliot’s and Arnold’s characterisation still shared much in common with the standard evangelical narrative of “dying” to your old life and being “born again” in imitation of Jesus Christ. In a standard evangelical conversion narrative, though, the imitation of Jesus Christ is usually mediated through an imitation of St. Paul or such-like Biblical figures. However, such a mediation might not have suited the ambitions of the youthful poets, for as Paul Delany observed of seventeenth-century English autobiography, “To imitate Christ was an undertaking which only the deranged or the mystic could undertake in full literalness” [Delany, 1969, p.29]. For both Eliot and Arnold, however, the poet was a mystic and
97
their poetic Muse was thus ideally an unmediated Christ-like figure. In his essay on “Spinoza and the Bible”, for example, Arnold quoted the German Romantic poet Heine saying of Spinoza, “His life was a copy of the life of his divine kinsman, Jesus Christ” [“Spinoza and the Bible”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.182]. Moreover, Arnold wrote elsewhere that: “when, through identifying ourselves with Christ, we reach Christ’s righteousness, then eternal life begins for us” [St. Paul and Protestantism, Super, 1960- 77, Vol.6, p.53]. To recapitulate what has been learned so far about Arnold’s metaphor, the buried life contains within it a river flowing on an obscure, mostly subterranean course out of God into the ordinary human world and then back into God again. But it also contains within it the story of God the Son issuing from God the Father out into the ordinary human world to be fragmented in death, before a burial and a resurrection into wholeness, and then a return into God. In the metaphor of the buried life these two things are identified with each other, so that it is like a hydrological process in which God the Father is like an infinite sea. God the Son sacrifices himself, or is sacrificed by God the Father, on behalf of humanity and is fragmented in death. The fragments of him flow through the subconscious mind of each individual, no matter how humble, like separate rivers, although they are complete in themselves, and it is these fragments which constitute both Eliot’s and Arnold’s inner god. (Eliot’s Saint Narcissus thus gazes down into the face of this inner god who has risen to the surface out of the buried stream, and they merge.) Those fragments then rejoin the infinite sea, where God the Son is resurrected and reunited with God the Father. According to both Eliot and Arnold, it is the task of the poet to access the river that flows through their subconscious by imitating to at least some extent the sacrifice of God the Son. To refer again to Plotinus, one must “Strive to lead back the god within you to the Divine in the universe” [in Gregory, 1991, p.6]. Arnold’s poem, “Sohrab and Rustum”, provides an excellent illustration of this hydrological process in action. In the poem, the son Sohrab sacrifices himself in single combat, so that the father Rustum kills his son by the river Oxus. The son’s life blood flows out in separate streams upon the sand, but then the father recognises and embraces the son in death. Father and son are reunited, whilst the river, with its cargo of Sohrab’s life blood, flows through its separate channels to be reunited eventually in the Aral Sea:
But the majestic River floated on, Out of the mist and hum of that low land, Into the frosty starlight, and there mov’d, Rejoicing, through the hush’d Chorasmian waste, Under the solitary moon: he flow’d Right for the Polar Star, past Orgunje, Brimming, and bright, and large: then sands begin To hem his watery march, and dam his streams, And split his currents; that for many a league The shorn and parcell’d Oxus strains along Through beds of sand and matted rushy isles - 98
Oxus, forgetting the bright speed he had In his high mountain cradle in Pamere, A foil’d circuitous wanderer: - till at last The long’d-for dash of waves is heard, and wide His luminous home of waters opens, bright And tranquil, from whose floor the new-bath’d stars Emerge, and shine upon the Aral Sea. [“Sohrab and Rustum”, lines 876-892]
The Oxus was almost the perfect river to embody Arnold’s metaphor, for two reasons. Firstly, it marked the furthest edge of the Empire in the 1840s and 1850s, in Afghanistan, which was a place of considerable sacrifice for the English in the Afghan Wars of that time. Secondly, it descends from its source in the mountains and then fragments immediately into innumerable separate channels on the plains. The river then flows through its separate channels through hundreds of miles of desert plains before being reunited in the Aral Sea. Arnold’s friend the imperial statesman Lord Curzon’s journey to the source of the river Oxus in 1894 was largely inspired by Arnold’s poem: “With the poet, my imagination had flown eastwards and upwards to that aerial source, and had longed to pierce the secrets that were hidden behind the glaciers of the Pamirs and the snowy sentinels of the Hindu Kush” [in Rose, 2001, p.262]. Curzon was the first Englishman to journey all the way to the ice caves which were considered the Oxus’ source, and on the way he also noted “from the top of Daliz Kotal, a pass of 13 500 feet... the splendid vista of the Oxus released from its mountain confines, spreading out in countless threads over a wide watery plain” [in Rose, 2001, p.262]. The only thing the Oxus perhaps lacked for Arnold’s or Curzon’s metaphorical purposes was a measure of subterranean flow along its course, such as Coleridge found in the rivers Yeo and Axe. To further recapitulate what has been learned so far, according to Arnold, whose taste in poetry was formed by Romanticism, in “good” poetical epochs, such as the PreSocratic age in ancient Greece or the age of the Renaissance in modern Europe, the river of the subconscious flows at or very near the surface of each person’s mind. This means that there is little or no dissociation between their conscious mind and the subconscious mind, or their surface life and the buried life, or between the person and God. Because the river of the subconscious flows at or near the surface it is easy for poets to gain access to it and to write good poetry, and not much sacrifice is required. It is very easy for poets of mediocre talent to churn out lyric poetry of good quality; and poets of great talent can give a complete and objective picture of the buried life in extended poetic forms such as the epic, the tragedy and the long philosophical poem. For Arnold, Homer in ancient times and Shakespeare in modern times were excellent examples of such poets of great talent; and Sainte-Beuve referred to Firdaussi, whose Persian epic Arnold drew upon for the tale of “Sohrab and Rustum”, as “the Homer of his country” [Arnold, 1965, p.303]. Poets also have a wide popular readership in such epochs, because every one of their readers has ready access to the river, too, and can
99
easily understand what it is that the poet is trying to communicate. In fact, in such epochs there is what might be called almost a universal telepathy, which still exists amongst a tribe of gypsies in Arnold’s poem “The Scholar-Gipsy”, since the river of the subconscious to which all have access is a part of the universal mind of God, and that mind is a collective mind. Very little poetical criticism is written in these epochs, because each person can understand for themselves what the poet was trying to communicate and thus whether or not it was well communicated. They do not need a critic to do that for them. In “bad” poetical epochs, however, such as the PostSocratic one in ancient Greece, or the post-Renaissance one in modern Europe, in which both Arnold and Eliot lived, the river of the subconscious generally flows far below the surface of each person’s mind. This means that there is a dissociation between their conscious mind and the subconscious mind, or their surface life and the buried life, or between the person and God. Because the river of the subconscious flows so far below the surface it is difficult for poets to gain access to it and to write good poetry, and a very great sacrifice is required. At such times even poets of great talent can give only a very limited and subjective picture of the buried life in brief poetic forms such as the lyric fragment. For Arnold, Wordsworth and Coleridge were excellent examples of such poets of great talent, for despite their great talents he felt that only Wordsworth’s and Coleridge’s short lyrics were successful poems. Arnold, too, referred to his “Sohrab and Rustum” as only “An Episode” drawn from the extended epic of Firdaussi, for he did not feel capable of giving a picture of the buried life in any poetic form more extended than that [Arnold, 1965, p.302]. Poets also have an extremely limited readership in such epochs because few readers have any idea at all that the river even exists, and so they find it extremely difficult to understand what it is that the poet is trying to communicate. In fact in such epochs any meaningful communication between people is almost impossible, because so few people have access to the collective mind, or the universal mind of God, through the river of the buried life: “We mortal millions live alone” [“To Marguerite - Continued”, line 4]. Much poetical criticism is written in these epochs, because very few people can understand for themselves what the poet is trying to communicate and thus whether or not it was well-communicated. They need a critic to do that for them. Poets like Arnold and Eliot, or Sainte-Beuve in France, therefore turn to criticism to try to establish an audience for their poetry, or for poetry in general. So for example with Sainte-Beuve (1804-1869), Arnold noted how he produced some slim, slight and unpopular volumes of poetry, which nevertheless exhibit “the genuine Sainte-Beuve”, or his poetic self - the god within [“Sainte-Beuve”, Super, 1960-77, Vol. 11, p.113]. But the age being hostile to his poetic talent, “the critic in him grew to prevail more and more and pushed out the poet” [“Sainte-Beuve”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.11, p.107]. And yet “he always maintained that, when the “integrating molecule”, the foundation of him as a man of letters was reached, it would be found to have a poetic character” [“Sainte-Beuve”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.11, p111]. For Arnold, the “integrating molecule” of Sainte-Beuve as man of letters was that, despite living in such a “bad” poetical epoch as the nineteenth- 100
century, his “style and utterance may stand as those”, not of a bounded individual, “but of the human race” [“Sainte-Beuve”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.11, p.119]. In terms of the buried life, then, despite his times, during which the river of the buried life flowed so deeply buried and thus remote from his surface life, Arnold believed that Sainte-Beuve had at least some access to that river, or to the collective mind, or to the universal mind of God. He also believed that Sainte-Beuve managed to communicate at least something of that to his readers, in his poetry first, albeit in only brief and fragmentary form. Then for Arnold, Sainte-Beuve communicated it increasingly through his criticism, in which he attempted to negotiate the space between the surface life of the nineteenth-century and its ever more remote buried life, or between poetry and its probably mystified potential audience. Using a simile derived, via his father Thomas Arnold, from Vico [Honan, 1981, p.43], Arnold believed that human civilisations were like human individuals, in that they followed a course from birth and childhood through to adulthood and death. In “On the Modern Element in Literature” Arnold thus quoted his father’s words: “It has been said that the ‘Athens of Pericles was a vigorous man, at the summit of his bodily strength and mental energy’” [“On the Modern Element in Literature”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, p.23]. For Thomas Arnold, “ancient” history dealt with the childhood of a civilisation, whereas “modern” history dealt with its adulthood. As he wrote in his edition of Thucydides (1840-42):
We may learn also a more sensible division of history than that which is commonly adopted of ancient and modern. We shall see that there is in fact an ancient and a modern period in the history of every people: the ancient differing, and the modern in many essential points agreeing with that in which we now live. Thus the largest portion of that history which we commonly call ancient is practically modern, as it describes society in a stage analogous to that in which it now is; while, on the other hand, much of what is called modern history is practically ancient, as it relates to a state of things which has passed away... The period to which the work of Thucydides refers belongs properly to modern and not to ancient history; and it is this circumstance, over and above the great ability of the historian himself, which makes it so peculiarly deserving of our study. [in Super, 1960-77, Vol.11, p.519]
For Matthew Arnold, it seems that a “good” poetical epoch was one that was a part of the childhood of a civilisation, so that the civilisations of PreSocratic Greece, the Biblical eras or Elizabethan England could be said to have childlike qualities. So, for example, Arnold wrote of the early Christian era: “The infancy of the world was renewed, with all its sweet illusions; and on this new world the popular Christian belief could lay hold freely” [“Preface to God and the Bible”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.7, p.386]. On the other hand, a “bad” poetical epoch was one that was a part of the adulthood of a civilisation, so that the civilisations of PostSocratic Greece, the pagan Roman Empire or post- Elizabethan England could be said to have adult-like qualities. Arnold’s Empedocles, for example, once a poet but no longer so, lived in the period of transition between PreSocratic and PostSocratic Greece: “Into the feelings of a man so situated there entered 101
much that we are accustomed to consider as exclusively modern; how much, the fragments of Empedocles himself which remain to us are sufficient at least to indicate” [“Preface to First Edition of Poems” (1853), Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, p.1]. Arnold sometimes seemed to believe that he himself had been born into the adulthood of a civilisation. At other times, as in “Obermann Once More” or “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, he seemed to believe that he had been born into an extended interregnum between the death of an old English or European civilisation and the birth of a new one. (The poets Holderlin and Mallarmé held similar views) [McGahey, 1994, p.25; p.77]. He thus sometimes felt as if he were: “Wandering between two worlds, one dead,/ The other powerless to be born” [“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, lines 85-86]. Like Wordsworth, Arnold also seemed to believe that everyone is born with the potential to be a poet, in that at birth and in childhood he believed that there is little or no dissociation between each person’s surface life and the buried life. In “bad” poetical epochs, however, what generally happens is that each person’s surface life and the buried life become more and more dissociated as that person grows into adulthood. This means that models of the poetic adolescent, such as Eliot’s Saint Narcissus and Arnold’s Strayed Reveller, begin to act very strangely as the integration of the buried life with their surface life, which they had known in childhood, begins to fall apart. In such epochs it is only very few poets who manage to maintain their access to the buried life into adulthood, and even then most of those poets will lose that access as they enter their thirties. This means that, like Arnold himself, they by-and-large lose the ability to write poetry. In “The Future” Arnold therefore noted of poets of his own epoch that they could not hope to compete with, for example, the Rebekah or Moses of the Old Testament:
What girl Now reads in her bosom as clear As Rebekah read, when she sate At eve by the palm-shaded well? Who guards in her breast As deep, as pellucid a spring Of feeling, as tranquil, as sure?
What Bard, At the height of his vision, can deem Of God, of the world, of the soul, With a plainness as near, As flashing as Moses felt, When he lay in the night by his flock On the starlit Arabian waste? Can rise and obey The beck of the Spirit like him? [“The Future”, lines 34-49]
Having been lucky enough to have been born into a good poetical epoch, both Rebekah and Moses had easy access, through the river of the buried life, to the universal mind of God. This was an easy access that Arnold felt had been denied to Victorian poets such as 102
himself or to Augustan poets such as Gray. Since he felt that the river of the buried life, or the universal mind of God, had risen up into people’s surface lives and then sunk again to remote and inaccessible depths repeatedly throughout human history, Arnold drew upon ancient authors like Plotinus as well as modern authors like Sainte-Beuve to explain his conception of the world as being made up of the fragments of what was once, or what should be, a unity. So for example in his essay “Marcus Aurelius”, Arnold quoted approvingly from a translation of that ancient author’s Thoughts:
“Suppose that thou hast detached thyself from the natural unity, - for thou wast made by nature a part, but now thou hast cut thyself off, - yet here is this beautiful provision, that it is in thy power again to unite thyself. God has allowed this to no other part, - after it has been separated and cut asunder, to come together again. But consider the goodness with which he has privileged man; for he has put it in his power, when he has been separated, to return and to be reunited and to resume his place.” [in “Marcus Aurelius”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.150]
However, Arnold probably drew upon ancient authors like Marcus Aurelius only to confirm lessons he had already learnt from modern authors like Sainte-Beuve, as he drew upon Plotinus to confirm lessons already learnt from Wordsworth and Coleridge. Arnold therefore wrote of Goethe, Newman, Carlyle and Emerson, rather than Marcus Aurelius, as the four great influences on his intellectual development at Oxford in the 1840s [“Emerson”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, p.167]. All four of these writers emphasised the importance of perceiving the living unity of all things, despite the world seeming to be made up of the dead fragments of a god that has not been resurrected, such as the one that Arnold wrote of in “Obermann Once More” [“Obermann Once More”, lines 173- 248]. For Goethe, the civilisation of ancient Rome possessed a unity, only fragments of which he felt he had perceived from “gothic” modern Germany. In Italian Journey he thus wrote of his first impressions of Rome: “if I may say so, as soon as one sees with one’s own eyes the whole which one had hitherto only known in fragments and chaotically, a new life begins” [Goethe, 1970, p.129]. He was astonished to find himself in a living city, when all he had previously known of Rome had been dead fragments of it in this museum or that [Goethe, 1970, p.129]. In an image much like Arnold’s in “Obermann Once More”, or Nietzsche’s in The Birth of Tragedy, Newman wrote of how “in Christ the shattered world is reconciled and renewed”:
Christ came... to gather together in one all the elements of good dispersed throughout the world, to make them His own, to illuminate them with Himself, to reform and refashion them into Himself. He came to make a new and better beginning of all things than Adam had been, and to be a fountain-head from which all good things henceforth might flow. [Newman, 2004, p.7]
For Newman, the ancient Church also possessed a unity, only fragments of which he had 103
perceived from “schismatic” modern England. In Apologia pro Vita Sua he thus wrote of the impression made on him by St. Augustine’s verdict on the schismatics of Africa, when he first read of it in 1839. “Securus judicat orbis terrarum”, was St. Augustine’s verdict, meaning that the judgement of the whole world cannot be shaken. When Newman first read that, what he immediately thought was that the unity of the ancient Church was to be found alive and well in the Roman Catholic Church of his day: “The Church of Rome will be found right after all” [Newman, 1989, pp.218-220]. For Carlyle, the world was not made up of the dead fragments of things, which is what he felt that the philosophers of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment had made of it in modern England: “a dead thing, which some upholsterer put together!” [Carlyle, 1904, p.80]. In On Heroes and Hero Worship he thus wrote of how he felt that throughout history there have been from time to time “Universal Poets” like Shakespeare and Homer [Carlyle, 1904, p.82]. These “Universal Poets” have perceived that beneath the surface appearance of a world fragmented and dead, there lies an inner coherence that is the living God: “the inward harmony of coherence which is its soul, whereby it exists, and has a right to be, here in this world” [Carlyle, 1904, p.83]. All three of these thinkers, then, felt that at one time they had perceived the world to be made up of the dead fragments of things. But once their vision was “reborn” they then perceived that beneath its surface appearance the world was in fact a living unity, like “Pygmalion’s Galatea”, as Goethe wrote [Goethe, 1970, p.129]. This was also the case with Emerson. For Emerson, the greatest poets were those who most clearly perceived the unity of all things, and gave the clearest account of that unity in their writings. In other words, for Emerson the greatest poets were literary uniformitarians. So for example in his essay “History”, Emerson wrote of the unity of the human mind:
There is one mind common to all individual men. Every man is an inlet to the same and to all of the same. He that is once admitted to the right of reason is made a freeman of the whole estate. What Plato has thought he may think; what a saint has felt he may feel; what at any time has befallen any man, he can understand. Who hath access to this universal mind is a party to all that is or can be done, for this is the only and sovereign agent. [Emerson, 1889, p.1]
It is important to emphasise that such a concept of the living unity of the human mind lies behind much of Arnold’s work, which unity can be equated with God. So for Arnold, although each individual lives separately in their surface life of ordinary consciousness, all individuals share a common buried life:
The world but feels the present’s spell, The poet feels the past as well; Whatever men have done, might do, Whatever thought, might think it too. [“Bacchanalia; or, The New Age”, lines 65-68]
This concept of the living unity of the human mind is one that Arnold appears to have
104
got first from Emerson, and then had confirmed for him by Carlyle, Newman and Goethe. Then in his essay “The Poet”, Emerson wrote of how a great poet, such as “Orpheus, Empedocles, Heraclitus, Plato, Plutarch, Dante, Swedenborg... stands among partial men for the complete man, and apprises us not of his wealth, but of the commonwealth” [Emerson, 1889, p.82]. For Emerson, a great poet is one who opens himself up to the universal mind, for:
there is a great public power, on which he can draw, by unlocking, at all risks, his human doors, and suffering the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him: then he is caught up into the life of the Universe, his speech is thunder, his thought is law, and his words are universally intelligible as the plants and animals.” [Emerson, 1889, p.87]
For Emerson, an individual who is not a poet has no access to any part of this universal mind, whereas a minor poet has access to some parts of it, and a great poet has access to all of it and is thus “complete” rather than “partial” or fragmentary [Emerson, 1989, p.82]. Emerson’s conception of the poet was also Arnold’s (it influenced his judgement of poets like Sainte-Beuve, and of other poets, too) and Arnold thus rated Emerson so highly as a critic that he wrote: “As Wordsworth’s poetry is, in my judgement, the most important work done in verse, in our language, during the present century, so Emerson’s Essays are, I think, the most important work done in prose” [“Emerson”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, p.182]. Despite his admiration for his Essays Arnold did not think that Emerson was a poet at all [“Emerson”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, p.169]; and he did not think of himself as a great but as a minor poet, very much in the mould of a Sainte-Beuve. Hamilton took Arnold’s notes for his tragedy “Lucretius” as at least in part autobiographical:
It is a sad thing to see a man who has been frittered away piecemeal by petty distractions, and who has never done his best. But it is still sadder to see a man who has done his best, who has reached his utmost limits - and finds his work a failure, and himself far less than he had imagined himself. [in Hamilton, 1998, p.189]
Arnold was not generally given to self-revelation. But in a key letter written to his sister Jane, upon the publication of his first volume of poetry, The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems (1849), he described himself and his poetry in negative terms, not as a unity but as fragments:
Fret not yourself to make my poems square in all their parts, but like what you can my darling. The true reason why parts suit you while others do not is that my poems are fragments i.e. that I am fragments, while you are a whole; the whole effect of my poems is quite vague & indeterminate: this is their weakness: a person therefore who endeavoured to make them accord would only lose his labour: and a person who has any inward completeness can at best only like parts of them: in fact such a person stands firmly and knows what he is about while the poems stagger 105
weakly & are at their wits end. I shall do better some day I hope. Meanwhile change nothing, resign nothing that you have in deference to me or my oracles: & do not plague yourself to find a consistent meaning for these last, which in fact they do not possess through my weakness. There - I would not be so frank as that with everyone. [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, p.143]
In other words, he felt that, since he was only a minor poet, the short poems that made up The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems gave only very fragmentary impressions of the universal mind or the mind of God, or of the buried life, as compared to, say, the impressions given by Empedocles’ long philosophical poems, “On Nature” and “Purifications”. He felt, too, that those impressions were extremely uneven in quality. Arnold wrote to his mother at this time that his ambition was to write “a tragedy I have long had in my head... at present I shall leave the short poems to take their chance, only writing them when I cannot help it, & try to get on with my Tragedy, which however will not be a very quick affair” [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, p.143]. This was the tragedy “Lucretius” which Arnold never finished. But his ambition would presumably have been to give a more complete description of his protagonist’s spiritual death and rebirth, or his death to his separate and fragmented surface life of ordinary consciousness, and then his rebirth out of the collective buried life. Arnold’s problem was that in order to complete “Lucretius” he needed, in Emerson’s words, to unlock at all risks his human doors, and suffer the ethereal tides to roll and circulate through him. Or as Arnold himself phrased it, in a letter to his sister Jane, which has already been quoted, and in which he discussed his later and unsuccessful tragedy Merope with her:
to attain or approach perfection in the region of thought and feeling, and to unite this with perfection of form, demands not merely an effort and a labour, but an actual tearing of oneself to pieces, which one does not readily consent to... unless one can devote one’s whole life to poetry. [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, p.402]
In order to complete “Lucretius”, then, Arnold felt that he needed to suffer exactly as Lucretius had described suffering in the course of spiritual death and then rebirth. Or he felt he needed to suffer exactly as God the Son must suffer in the metaphor of the buried life, when He sacrifices Himself to flow through the rivers of the buried life. For to access the buried life can never be a painless process for a great poet. One needs to risk everything, and one needs to suffer greatly in both senses of the word. To quote from “The Strayed Reveller”:
These things, Ulysses, The wise bards also Behold and sing. But oh, what labour! O Prince, what pain! They too can see Tiresias; but the Gods,
106
Who give them vision, Added this law: That they should bear too His groping blindness, His dark forboding, His scorned white hairs; Bear Hera’s anger Through a life lengthened To seven ages. [“The Strayed Reveller”, lines 207-222]
But, for various reasons, Arnold shrank from suffering exactly as Lucretius had described suffering, or as God the Son must suffer in the metaphor of the buried life. He was thus condemned in his own estimation to be only a minor poet, in comparison to the truly great poets who had “foresuffered all”, to use Eliot’s phrase about Tiresias [Eliot, 1974, p.72]. For Arnold, then, as for Eliot, the concept of the buried life involved an interiorisation and a unifying in the subconscious of the old ideas of an external God and an external poetical Muse, since in his metaphor the poet must look deep within themselves, into the buried life, to find both God and the source for poetry, which is the same thing. The interiorisation of God was an extremely important project for Arnold and for others in the mid-nineteenth-century, given the general trend towards a secularisation of the European mind in the nineteenth-century, to borrow the title-phrase of Owen Chadwick’s well-known book [Chadwick, 1990]. But the interiorisation of a poetical Muse and a unifying of it with an interiorised God was a project equally important to Arnold. This was because for Arnold this interiorised God and interiorised poetical Muse stood in the same relation in the subconscious as did the external God the Father and external God the Son in more orthodox Christianity, so that for Arnold you could not have the one interiorised without the other. Because of this unification of an interiorised God and an interiorised Muse, it was a truism of twentieth-century Arnoldian criticism that Arnold the critic tried to replace religion with poetry, or with literature, or with culture, and failed rather miserably. T.S. Eliot argued thus, for example, in his influential essay “Arnold and Pater” [Eliot, 1999, pp.431-443]; and Terry Eagleton reiterated the argument in Literary Theory: An Introduction [Eagleton, 1983, pp.26-27]. But it would be far more true to say that, rather than trying to replace religion with poetry, Arnold tried to identify his ideal of what a nineteenth-century poet should be like with his ideal of what Jesus Christ should be like, through his concept of the buried life. So, for Arnold, a reading of the works of such an ideal nineteenth-century poet, or a reading the story of his life, would be rather like a reading of the Gospels. This is because an ideal poet would have such complete access to the God the Son within the buried life that there would be an almost complete fusion of their surface life with the buried life. For them, the river of the buried life would flow almost completely on the surface, so to speak, and in all important respects the pattern of the poet’s biography would follow the pattern of Christ’s biography in the Gospels. It
107
would only be in the case of such an ideal poet that the whole of the poet’s life, rather than just the odd moments of it represented by “spots of time”, would be worth recording in any ordinary biographical or autobiographical sense. The pattern would be one of spiritual death and then rebirth, where the poet would forsake the world to write, not from the perspective of their bounded self, but from the perspective of the collective mind of the human race, or the mind of God. In the Arnoldian scheme of things someone like Dostoevsky or Baudelaire, who sacrificed all chances of worldly success, embraced pain and suffering, and identified with the poor and destitute in order to devote themselves properly to what they saw as their literary pursuits, would probably come closest to his ideal of what a nineteenth-century poet should be like. So Arnold’s failure to live and write exactly as they did, and to identify as they did with their poor countrymen, as Christ had identified with the poor of Galilee and Judea, may perhaps be taken as a measure of his own failure as a poet. If it is true that Arnold did fail at something, then this is where he failed, not as a critic but as a poet. Another writer who came close to Arnold’s ideal of what a nineteenth-century poet should be like was Tolstoy, whom Arnold first met in London in 1861. The two men read each other’s books with great interest, Arnold being most impressed by Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina and Tolstoy by Arnold’s Literature and Dogma, and they influenced each other’s thought greatly [Super, 1960-77, Vol.11, pp.466-467]. In his essay on Tolstoy, Arnold wrote approvingly of that writer’s aversion to a life lived as a member of a self-conscious literary elite, totally cut off from the lives of the great mass of the people. For how can one speak out of the collective mind if one is cut off from the lives of most of the people? Accordingly, he wrote approvingly of Tolstoy’s attempts to live as Jesus Christ had lived, by giving up “rank, office and property”, going to live as an equal amongst the great mass of the people, and earning a living solely “by the labour of his own hands” [“Count Leo Tolstoi”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.11, pp.301-302]. It was as if the author Tolstoy “died” and was then fragmented by the piecemeal world of the modern industrial or agricultural labourer, subject to the ideology of liberalism. Arnold’s only criticisms of Tolstoy were, firstly, that he thought he would have been better off to keep writing rather than work as a manual labourer, for manual labourers could do without the extra competition [“Count Leo Tolstoi”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.11, pp.303- 304]. Secondly, he thought that Tolstoy’s reduction of Jesus Christ’s teachings to the “Five Commandments of Christ” was a mistake, for “Christianity is a source; no one supply of water and refreshment that comes from it can be called the sum of Christianity” [“Count Leo Tolstoi”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.11, p.302]. Arnold is usually regarded as an elitist, but although he lacked the nerve to live exactly as a Tolstoy lived, or a Baudelaire or a Dostoevsky, the basic trend of Arnold’s thought, like Tolstoy’s, was in fact radically anti-elitist. It was by applying the logic of his metaphor of the buried life to social questions that lead him to adopt his anti-elitist views. Another who came close to Arnold’s ideal of what a nineteenth-century poet should be like, although Arnold called him a “saint” rather than a “poet”, was one Samuel Augustus Barnett. In 1884 Arnold was invited by the artist G.F. Watts to deliver 108
“A Lay Sermon: On the Unveiling of a Mosaic in Whitechapel”. In this lay sermon he took the opportunity to comment on university men such as Barnett who chose to bring aestheticism to the slums of the East End and to suffer on behalf of the East End slumdwellers. The mosaic was on the facade of St. Jude’s Church in Whitechapel, whose vicar, Barnett, was famously wealthy, cultured and aesthetic. Barnett organised regular art exhibitions in the East End that would eventually find a permanent home in the Whitechapel Art Gallery, for the building of which he helped raise the funds [Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, p.542; Blunt, 1989, p.145]. Arnold began his “lay sermon” by referring to the immense spectacle provided by the conspicuous consumption of the middle and upper classes of England in the City and West End, for which, as Arnold noted, there have always been plentiful liberal apologists [“A Lay Sermon”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, pp.249-250]. He then referred to those of the middle and upper classes such as himself who have always been dissatisfied with the spectacle of life in the City and West End:
But there are two sorts of people who have always been, or generally been, dissatisfied and malcontents - the poets and the saints. It happens that I was brought up under the influence of a poet [Wordsworth] who was very much dissatisfied with the proceedings of the middle and upper classes among us, and who, indeed, called them idolatry. “Avarice and expense are idols, and these they adore.” This poet convinced me, and therefore I have spent most of my leisure time, not among the lower classes, but in preaching to the upper classes in my own feeble way, and in telling them that their idolatrous world could not stand, and that already one began to hear formidable cracks in it, and to see it beginning to sway ominously to and fro. Some there are, however, who came to the East-end, though I did not; and these are the saints - some from those classes who possess and enjoy and from the class that is aspiring to possess and enjoy. They, dissatisfied with merely living the life of those classes, came to the East-end, and such men are the true saviours of society. [“A Lay Sermon”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, pp.250-251]
Arnold then gave a few examples of such “saviours” or “saints”, before referring to Barnett “who has been here 12 years” [“A Lay Sermon”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, p.251]. According to Arnold, those of the unaesthetic, evangelical East London Mission, whom Barnett refused to join, have told the people of the East End “to be sober, patient, charitable, kind; and then they are told that after this life they will wake up in a world as little like Whitechapel as possible” [“A lay Sermon”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, p.251]. In other words, they are told to be resigned to their lot in this world, because they will be rewarded for their virtue in Heaven. Neither Arnold nor Barnett, however, was satisfied with this supernatural message. Arnold reported Jesus Christ as having given his disciples no supernatural message, but instead: “He told them that when He was gone they should find a new source of thought and feeling open itself within them” [“A Lay Sermon”, Super, 1960- 77, Vol.10, p.253]. For Arnold, though, this “new source of thought and feeling” was inaccessible until, amongst other things, “the pleasures of art have been laid open” [“A Lay Sermon”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, p.252]. For it is the poet or artist who has the 109
most complete access to the buried life. He therefore noted that:
Mr Barnett’s originality has been that, besides his labours as a parish clergyman, he has appealed to this sense of beauty, that he has desired, in the words of the tablet placed beside the mosaic, he has striven, to “make the lives of his neighbours brighter by bringing within their reach the influence of beauty.” It is with this object that he has set on foot these art exhibitions which have attracted so much attention outside the limits of the East-end, which have already given an access to art to hundreds who had none before, and which will, no doubt, produce still greater influence in the future. [“A Lay Sermon”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, p.252]
From Arnold’s perspective, it would have been ideal if Barnett had been a “poet-saint” like Tolstoy or Gerard Manley Hopkins, or like Sassoon or Owen in World War One. It would have been ideal if he had sacrificed himself on behalf of the working classes, which, “in comparison with the the great possessing and trading classes, which may be described as the fortunate classes - may be called the sacrificed classes” [“A Lay Sermon”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, p.253]. However, for Barnett to have been an aesthete-saint was probably the next best thing. Like the essays “Count Leo Tolstoi” and “A Lay Sermon”, the poem “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” deals with Arnold’s belief that the poet must suffer exactly as God the Son must suffer in the metaphor of the buried life. It also deals with Arnold’s identification of his ideal nineteenth-century poet with Jesus Christ, by comparing the lives of the monks in the monastery of the Grande Chartreuse to the lives of the the great poets of Romanticism, such as Byron, Shelley and Senancour. For Arnold, both monks and poets identified closely with Jesus Christ and His sufferings on behalf of humankind. The idea for the theme of the poem may have come from Carlyle’s On Heroes and Hero- Worship (1841), in which Carlyle put forward the idea that the old idea of “The Hero as Divinity” or “The Hero as Priest” had been supplemented or replaced by the new idea of “The Hero as Poet” or “The Hero as Man of Letters”. But the poem is mainly about Arnold’s sense of there being an almost complete dissociation between people’s surface lives in the nineteenth-century and the buried life, which situation he felt both monks and poets attempted to remedy. As Honan noted [Honan, 1981, p.239], in this poem Arnold casts himself in the role of an Orpheus crossing the River of Death on his way to the monastery. This river is a variant of the river of the buried life which Arnold would use again in “Balder Dead”, and it will be revisited in Chapter Twelve. In this variant the poet crosses the River of Death in an attempt to merge with a Christ-god and cause a revival of religion and of civilisation, and return to the surface life with a story to tell:
The autumnal evening darkens round, The wind is up, and drives the rain; While, hark! far down, with strangled sound Doth the dead Guier’s stream complain, Where that wet smoke, among the woods, Over his boiling cauldron broods. [“Stanzas from the Grande 110
Chartreuse”, lines 7-12]
Arnold had visited the Grande Chartreuse on his honeymoon in 1851, which must have been a somewhat disconcerting experience for his bride. Whilst they were there they could, like Orpheus and Eurydice, have no contact with each other, and as his wife wrote, she was “lodged in a small house not far from the monastery where I spent rather an uncomfortable time as it was bitterly cold” [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, p.216]. However, it was only a brief visit and then Arnold returned to England to take up life as a husband, a School Inspector, and only a part-time poet and man of letters. This was a rather comfortable life, very different from the austere lives of the monks. In the poem it is the Carthusians’ death to the surface life of the nineteenth- century that is the main focus of attention, since for Arnold the monks lived as he might perhaps had lived, had he the nerve. Arnold was drawn to the idea of the monks living as if they were already dead and buried; or as if they were living in the buried life. In this poem, life in the monastery therefore symbolises the buried life. Arnold was drawn to the austerity of the monks’ lives, too, and to their attempts to imitate in their own lives the life of Christ, “mystically reiterating”, as Newman once said, in each of them, “all the acts of His earthly life, His birth, consecration, fasting, temptation, conflicts, victories, sufferings, agony, passion, death, resurrection, and ascension” [Newman, 2004 (2), p.3]. For Arnold, the pattern of the monks’ lives was one of spiritual death and rebirth, whereby the monks forsook the world to see things, not from the perspective of their bounded selves, but from the perspective of the mind of God. According to C.H. Lawrence in Medieval Monasticism, a monk’s:
ultimate goal was union with God through prayer. But man’s predicament since the Fall made the journey of the soul to God a hard one. Original Sin had left man’s reason darkened and his senses in disorder. Human passions choked the life of the spirit. Thus the newness of life, of which the Gospels spoke, could only be realised in this life by the continual mortification of the natural appetites and the progressive purification of the mind. In the solitude, beyond the frontiers of human society and freed from its distractions and temptations, a man might achieve that detachment from created things that was necessary for continual prayer and that prepared him for the supreme encounter with God. [Lawrence, 1989, p.3]
To paraphrase Hughes’ view of Eliot as a poet, for the monks it was as if their ordinary lives were pre-empted, that sacred responsibilities were imposed on them, and that some heavy personal costs were exacted [Hughes, 1995, p.284]. Arnold described the monks consuming the Host, or the fragments of the body and blood of Christ (“hostia” in Latin meaning “sacrificial victim”), before being “buried” in their cowls:
Each takes, and then his visage wan Is buried in his cowl once more. The cells! - the suffering Son of Man Upon the wall - the knee-worn floor - 111
And where they sleep, that wooden bed, Which shall their coffin be, when dead!
The library, where tract and tome Not to feed priestly pride are there, To hymn the conquering march of Rome, Nor yet to amuse, as ours are! They paint of souls the inner strife, Their drops of blood, their death in life. [“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, lines 43-54]
As it happens, the monks were literally buried in their cowls after death, laid out on a plank of wood, but in the poem it is as if they are already dead and buried. Life in the monastery was perhaps not quite as bleak as Arnold described it, for his own purposes. But it is worthwhile supplementing Arnold’s description by considering how the austerity of the monks’ lifestyle and its purpose has been interpreted by another writer working within the tradition of the metaphor of the buried life. Patrick Leigh Fermor once described the austerity of life at the Cistercian monastery of La Grande Trappe. He also described the attractions, for a writer, of such a life of “poverty, humility, sacrifice, death to life” [Fermor, 2004, p.55]. Fermor wondered how the lives of the monks, “immured” as they were “in monasteries far from all contact with the world”, could be made “comprehensible to the Time-Spirit” - Arnold’s “zeitgeist” [Fermor, 2004, p.32]. The answer was by explaining the role and process of prayer and meditation in their lives:
They range from a repetition of the simple prayers, sometimes tallied by the movement of beads through the fingers, to an advanced intellectual skill in devotion and meditation; and occasionally rise to those hazardous mystical journeys of the soul which culminate, at the end of the purgative and illuminative periods, in blinding moments of union with the Godhead; experiences which the poverty of language compels the mystics who experience them to describe in the terminology of profane love: a kind of personal, face-to-face intimacy, the very inkling of which, since Donne, Quarles, Herbert, Vaughan and Traherne wrote their poems, has drained away from life in England. [Fermor, 2004, p.33]
For Fermor, as for Arnold, French monks and English poets were in pursuit of the same sense of “union with the Godhead”. If the “very inkling” of such intimacy with God “has drained away from life in England” since the seventeenth-century, however, as Fermor says, then of course it has not disappeared altogether but has drained away to the remote, subterranean and largely inaccessible river of the buried life. Like Arnold, Fermor seemed to wonder if this river might still rise to the surface of things inside a French monastery. The Cistercians, like the Carthusians, were a contemplative order founded in the eleventh-century and intent on a very strict interpretation of the Rule of St. Benedict:
Prayer for the redemption of mankind is the basis of Benedictine monasticism; and 112
in the Cistercian branch of the Benedictine family the principle of prayer has been supplemented by the idea of vicarious penance. The origins of this concept are to be found in the forty days and forty nights in the wilderness and, indeed, in the Crucifixion itself. Vicarious penance became the distinguishing spiritual exercise of the Cistercian order, and the reasons that led the monks of St. Bernard’s time to mould their monasticism into its own distinctive shape have lost, for present-day Trappists, none of their impact. The overwhelming sadness of a Trappe, therefore, is no fortuitous by-product of the Cistercian way of life but one of its vital preconditions. A Cistercian Cloister is a workshop of intercession and a bitter cactus-land of expiation for the mountains of sin which have accumulated since the Fall. A Trappist career is a long-drawn-out atonement, a protracted imitation of the Wilderness, the Passion, the Agony in the Garden, the Way of the Cross, and the final sacrifice of Golgotha. By fierce asceticism, cloistered incarceration, sleeping on straw and rising in the darkness after a few hours’ sleep, by abstinence, fasting, humiliation, the hair shirt, the scourge, the extremes of heat and cold, and the unbroken cycle of contemplation, prayer and backbreaking toil, they seek, by taking the sins of others on to their own shoulders, to lighten the burden of mankind. But, in spite of its rigours, this life of penance has certain spiritual consolations. A Cistercian writer describes them as the triple Unction of the Soul. The first unction is the lightness, the spiritual buoyancy, the experience of liberty regained by the shedding of all earthly possessions and vanities and ambitions; and by aspiring to, and sometimes achieving, a life that is free from personal sin... The second is the joy that springs from the conviction that their prayers and penances unloose upon the world a healing flood of atonement which saves the souls and lightens the guilt of mankind. The third is the belief that this life of sacrifice is dedicated to God, that it derives from love of Him, and draws the soul closer to Him. [Fermor, 2004, pp.62-63]
Life at a monastery like La Grande Trappe or La Grande Chartreuse might have suited Tolstoy very well, up to a point, for it shares with the life of Arnold’s ideal nineteenth- century poet a death to the surface life and an obsession with the buried life. The Cistercian or Carthusian monks and Arnold’s ideal poet also share the notion of suffering vicarious penance for the sins of humankind since the Fall, by imitating the Life of Christ in all its pain and suffering on behalf of humankind. Both the monks and Arnold’s ideal poet also hope that by suffering so, and “dying”, it will eventually lead to a resurrection of their spirit and thus bring them closer to God. In fact, for Arnold both the monks and the ideal poet hope that it will cause the resurrection of God. Having described the lives of the monks of La Grande Chartreuse in the “Stanzas”, Arnold then compared their lives to those of the great poets of Romanticism like Byron, Shelley and Senancour. These monks and those great poets have done vicarious penance for the sins of humankind and suffered greatly, Arnold notes, in imitation of Jesus Christ. But then he asks what effect has that had on the the wider community:
For what availed it, all the noise And outcry of the former men? Say, have their sons achieved more joys, Say, is life lighter now than then? 113
The sufferers died, they left their pain - The pangs which tortured them remain.
What helps it now, that Byron bore, With haughty scorn which mocked the smart, Through Europe to the Aetolian shore The pageant of his bleeding heart? That thousands counted every groan, And Europe made his woe her own?
What boots it, Shelley! that the breeze Carried thy lovely wail away, Musical through Italian trees Which fringe thy soft blue Spezzian bay? Inheritors of thy distress Have restless hearts one throb the less?
Or are we easier, to have read, O Obermann! the sad, stern page, Which tells us how thou hidd’st thy head From the fierce tempest of thine age In the lone brakes of Fontainbleau, Or chalets near the Alpine snow?
Ye slumber in your silent grave! The world, which for an idle day Grace to your mood of sadness gave, Long since hath flung her weeds away. The eternal trifler breaks your spell; But we - we learnt your lore too well! [“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, lines 127-156]
The answer to his question is that the vicarious penance suffered by the monks and the great poets has had little effect, except perhaps on other poets like Arnold. It does not seem to have lightened the burden of humankind at all, for the amount of woe suffered by most people in the world seems much the same. But then for other people, presumably those frivolous and wealthy, the trifles of the surface life are not informed at all by the austerities of the buried life. According to Arnold, the reason for this lack of effect is, in the case of the great poets, because they are now largely unread, and because they are unread they are dead and buried in their graves without hope of resurrection. No one much cares about their suffering anymore, since the age of revolutionary Romanticism has passed, and no one now hopes that something like the French Revolution will lead to the “rebirth” of European society. In the case of the monks, it is because Jesus Christ is now dead and buried in his grave, without hope of resurrection anymore, and God is thus remote from humankind. This means that the monks are wasting their time in prayer, meditation and suffering, for not even their most heroic efforts could now possibly resurrect Him. For
114
Arnold, the age of Christianity has passed. Arnold made his views on this subject clear in “Obermann Once More”:
‘While we believed, on earth he went, And open stood his grave. Men called from chamber, church, and tent; And Christ was by to save.
‘Now he is dead! Far hence he lies In the lorn Syrian town; And on his grave, with shining eyes, The Syrian stars look down.
‘In vain men still, with hoping new, Regard his death-place dumb, And say the stone is not yet to, And wait for words to come. [“Obermann Once More”, lines 169-180]
Housman wrote a version of these lines in the poem, “Easter Hymn” [Housman, 1994, p.157]. In the “Stanzas”, too, Arnold wrote of Christianity as a dead faith:
Not as their friend, or child, I speak! But as, on some far northern strand, Thinking on his own Gods, a Greek In pity and mournful awe might stand Before some fallen Runic stone - For both were faiths, and both are gone. [“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, lines 79-84]
At the Grande Chartreuse the monks continue their vigil over Christ’s grave, but because Christianity is a dead faith, for them word of Christ’s resurrection will never come:
‘Long since we pace this shadowed nave; We watch those yellow tapers shine, Emblems of hope over the grave, In the high altar’s depth divine; The organ carries to our ear Its accents of another sphere. [“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, lines 199-204]
By choosing life in the monastery, the monks have chosen to die to the surface life of the nineteenth-century. But for them there is no longer any hope of any rebirth or resurrection with Christ, so that they remain “dead” and “buried” in their monastery, and there can no longer be any fusion of the surface life of the nineteenth-century outside the monastery walls with the buried life of the monastery within. Nor for the monks can there be any more experience of the “triple Unction of the Soul”. They can imitate Christ’s biography up until His death, but not after that. In this poem Arnold’s conclusion, then, was that the river of the buried life no longer rose to the surface of 115
things even within the monastery, so that the “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” is like an elegy for the death of Christianity. At the end of his poem, however, Arnold presents two alternatives to the vicarious penance suffered by the monks of La Grande Chartreuse, which is no longer effective in fusing the surface life of the nineteenth-century with the buried life. One alternative is in the hunting field, where bugles inform the monks of the vicarious penance to be suffered presumably by hunted animals, torn apart in the name of sport [“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, lines 181-186]. The other alternative is in the field of war, so fondly memorialised by Housman, where passing banners inform the monks of the vicarious penance to be suffered presumably by soldiers, torn apart in the name of nationalism [“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, lines 175-180]. Those two alternatives do not interest the monks:
‘Fenced early in this cloistral round Of reverie, of shade, of prayer, How should we grow in other ground? How can we flower in foreign air? - Pass, banners, pass, and bugles, cease, And leave our desert to its peace!’ [“Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse, lines 205-210]
But novels like Siegried Sassoon’s Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928) show how these alternatives would one day be of considerable interest in the wider world. Even in 1852, with the Crimean War only a year away, and perhaps partly due to the influence of public schools like Rugby, sport and warfare had begun to have a significance in English life that they did not really have before. Having thus gone a little deeper into certain aspects of the buried life, it is now time to go back to Hughes to look again at why his approach to the metaphor of the buried life is so interesting. It will be remembered that Hughes wrote of “Eliot’s concealed (and for the most part incomprehensible to him, too) inner life”, and of how with Eliot “‘the ordinary wakeful life of the ego’ was cut off from the spirit’s search”. That Eliot and Arnold both considered the buried life to be so remote from their surface lives suggests why they were not much interested in ordinary biography or autobiography, since almost all of the details of their surface lives were irrelevant to what was going on in their poetical life, or inner life, or the buried life. Thus Eliot wrote of how what is significant in life:
is not to be found in our obituaries Or in memories draped by the beneficent spider Or under seals broken by the lean solicitor In our empty rooms. [Eliot, 1974, p.79]
It might have been found there at other times in human history, but not in the early- twentieth-century. Similarly, Arnold was so infuriated by what he thought of as his
116
friend Clough’s occasional poetry, detailing only the events of people’s surface lives in the nineteenth-century, that after reading “The Bothie of Tober-na-Vuolich” he wrote to Clough:
I have been at Oxford the last two days and hearing Sellar and the rest of that clique who know neither life nor themselves rave about your poem gave me a strong almost bitter feeling with respect to them, the age, the poem, even you. Yes I said to myself something tells me I can, if need be, at last dispense with them all, even with him: better that, than be sucked for an hour into the Time Stream in which they and he plunge and bellow. I became calm in spirit... and took up my Obermann, and refuged myself with him in his forest against your Zeit Geist. [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, p126]
Then a few months later he wrote to Clough again, stressing how any attempt such as his to write poetry about the surface life of the nineteenth-century was doomed to failure, since the age was so “unpoetical” because it was so remote from the buried life:
Reflect too, as I cannot but do here more & more, in spite of all the nonsense some people talk, how deeply unpoetical the age & all one’s surroundings are. Not unprofound, not unmoving: - but unpoetical. [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, p.131]
Such outbursts as these led eventually to Arnold’s and Clough’s estrangement. Arnold’s parents had held the view that there were two kinds of poetry, and this view seems to have impressed itself on Arnold:
The one was, for Dr and Mrs Arnold, descriptive, superficial, and occasional; but the second kind was inward, sincere, deeply felt, serious, often religious; it means what it says, as Mrs Arnold put it, and does not strive for effects. [apRoberts, 1983, pp.9-10]
Eliot, too, seems to have inherited similar views about the nature of poetry from his parents [Gordon, 1978, pp.4-6]. But essentially it was because they felt the surface life of their age to be so “unpoetical”, and because they felt that their access to their Muse within the buried life was so fugitive, since it was so remote from them, that both Eliot and Arnold went to great lengths to ignore the details of their surface lives and to keep private the sources of their poetic creativity. In any case, with regard to the latter, because the age was so “unpoetical” very few people could have understood the nature of Eliot’s or Arnold’s spiritual quest, or understood what it was they were trying to communicate in their poetry, so that there would have been little use in making public those sources. Both Arnold’s father and Eliot’s mother wrote some very earnest poems, which totally ignore the details of their surface lives in the nineteenth-century to concentrate entirely on the timeless nature of their inner lives, or on their inner drama of spiritual death and rebirth. Their views on poetry do seem to have influenced the views of their famous offspring, but their poems are not very good. What their poems lack is any sense
117
of there being “spots of time” during which there may be a momentary fusion of the surface life with the buried life, or an intersection of the ordinary run of time with a timeless moment, or a “blinding moment of union with the Godhead”, to refer again to Fermor. As has been noted, these “spots of time” are the source of both Arnold’s and Eliot’s poetical inspiration. Eliot’s “A Note on War Poetry” provides an excellent definition in verse of what he meant by a “timeless moment”:
Where is the point at which the merely individual Explosion breaks
In the path of an action merely typical To create the universal, originate a symbol Out of the impact? This is a meeting On which we attend
Of forces beyond control by experiment - Of Nature and the Spirit...
The enduring is not a substitute for the transient, Neither one for the other. But the abstract conception Of private experience at its greatest intensity Becoming universal, which we call “poetry”, May be affirmed in verse. [Eliot, 1974, pp.229-230]
According to Eliot, then, poetry seems to happen at those points where the pressure of certain public events on the individual, such as in wartime, forces the universalities of the buried life to erupt out into people’s surface lives with the force of an explosion. (It will be recalled how Wordsworth’s theory about there being “spots of time” was formulated during the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars.) Neither the surface life by itself, or the “transient”, nor the buried life by itself, or the “enduring”, is a subject for poetry, which explains the weakness of both Dr Arnold’s and Mrs Eliot’s verse, or Clough’s, in Arnold’s estimation. What is required for poetry is for at least a momentary fusion or intersection of the surface life with the buried life to occur, which the poet having experienced can thus describe. It is as if, as Fredric Jameson wrote, the “great master-narratives”, such as that of “the speculative unity of all knowledge”, have drained away from people’s individual surface lives, leaving those surface lives meaningless, by-and-large; but that the passage of those master-narratives “underground as it were”, into the buried life, has led to their “continuing but now unconscious effectivity as a way of thinking about and acting in our current situation” [in Lyotard, 1984, pp.ix-xi]. And then every now and then there is still the possibility of a momentary fusion of people’s surface lives with the buried life. Given “A Note on War Poetry”, it is not surprising to find that a good deal of Eliot’s finest poetry, such as in “The Waste Land” and in bits of “Four Quartets”, seems to have been inspired by the fusion or intersection of his surface life with the buried life under the pressure of public events during World War One and World War Two, and at 118
times between the wars. Similarly, almost all of Arnold’s finest poetry seems to have been written under the pressure of public events in the period between the revolutions of 1848 and the Crimean War of 1853-56, in that time when, as Isobel Armstrong noted, many saw the Crimean War:
as a ruthless attempt to repress social protest by deflecting attention overseas: ‘Drown the clamour with drums and fife!’ The starving poor are used as cannon fodder and resources are directed away from improving their plight into a war economy. [Armstrong, 1993, p.271]
That may have been the case. But given the widespread enthusiasm for the war, it might have also been the case that, as in World War One, the volunteer soldiers of the Crimean War genuinely felt that they were fighting to create a better life for all back in England, or for a rebirth of society. Arnold’s poetry and letters show that he took a keen interest in the revolutions of 1848 [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, pp.82-113], and his letters show that he followed the course of the Crimean War with interest. He spent a week at the Cavalry Barracks at Brighton in August, 1854, absorbing the war atmosphere, and meeting the “precious young nincompoops” who would soon be England’s war heroes. (For Keith Douglas in World War Two the same types would be brainless “Sportsmen”: “I think I am becoming a God”) [Douglas, 1979, p.110]. He read Tennyson’s Maud and Other Poems with interest upon publication in August, 1855, and he observed the public declaration of peace from the windows of the Athenaeum Club in March, 1856 [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, pp.290-333]. Also, poems of Arnold’s from this period, such as “Empedocles on Etna” (1852), with its “Maud”-like fantasies of conflict externalised and resolved, or the martial “Sohrab and Rustum” (1853), would appear to be as much about this period of war and revolution as anything by, for example, Robert Browning; and Armstrong referred to Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” (1852) as Browning’s “prophetic Crimean- war poem” [Armstrong, 1993, p.316]. Since the nineteenth-century, wars have often proved congenial for the fusion of people’s surface lives with the buried life, or for the intersection of the ordinary run of time with the timeless moment, because they provide an opportunity for the expression of a “faith parallel to denominational Christianity”, as the American sociologist Robert N. Bellah observed of a “civil religion” which emerged in the United States during the Civil War. The “theme” of this civil religion is of “death, sacrifice and rebirth” [in Inglis, 1998, pp.459-460]. Wars provide this opportunity because the death of almost any adolescent male in wartime can be interpreted as being much like the death of Jesus Christ, who offered Himself for sacrifice, or was sacrificed by His Father, on behalf of humankind. (It is interesting how soldiers always “die” for their country in a form of a vicarious penance, but they never “kill”.) Paul Fussell included some empire-building English verses on this theme, dating from the 1890s, in The Great War and Modern Memory, one of which by Rolfe has already been quoted. Here is another by John Gambril Nicholson: 119
Fair as the boy that Mary loved was he ... nor has the beauty fled From his still form with blood-stained limbs outspread. [in Fussell, 1977, p.285]
Such verses, and those of poets like A.E. Housman from the same period, have been interpreted as homoerotic, which is likely true enough [Fussell, 1977, pp.270-309]. But at a deeper level they are no more homoerotic than, say, Arnold’s “The Strayed Reveller” or Eliot’s “The Death of Saint Narcissus”. For apart from for any homoerotic reasons, the beauty of the victim in such verses has to be emphasised because in death they have fused with the beautiful adolescent god of the buried life. The death of almost any adolescent male in wartime can thus also be interpreted as a death to the surface life of that adolescent male, who has died at just the right time so far as fusion with the inner adolescent god of the buried life is concerned, since they died whilst still young and attractive enough to be taken for a god. Such deaths, and the consequent fusion of their surface lives with the buried life, or the intersection of the ordinary run of time with the timeless moment, has the effect of suspending the effects of time, so that the deceased youths remain, like Arnold’s Scholar-Gipsy, long dead and buried but also forever youthful and alive. Laurence Binyon’s “For the Fallen” (1914), which has made its way into the ceremonies of the “civil religion” of at least a few of the countries of the old British Empire, offers a good example of this peculiar suspension of the effects of time:
They shall not grow old, as we that are left grow old, Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn. At the going down of the sun and in the morning We will remember them.
They mingle not with their laughing comrades again; They sit no more at familiar tables of home; They have no lot in our labour of the day-time; They sleep beyond England’s foam.
But where our desires are and our hopes profound, Felt as a well-spring that is hidden from sight, To the innermost heart of their own land they are known As the stars are known to the night. [“For the Fallen”, lines 13-24]
The first stanza quoted here describes those killed in war as forever youthful and alive. The second stanza describes them as forever youthful and alive, no doubt, but still dead to the everyday surface life of England. Then in the third stanza Binyon introduces the river of the buried life. It is as if the river flows out of the “well-spring” of a dead body buried in the heart of England, even though the soldiers’ bodies were blown to bits or are buried overseas. (This “well-spring” is presumably the same as Eliot’s “well-spring of a Renaissance of English poetry”, mentioned in Chapter Two.) Even though they are thus 120
dead and buried, like the Scholar-Gipsy, those killed in war are still “known” to this river of the buried life in the heart of England, haunting it perhaps as a collective youthful shade, as the Scholar-Gipsy is still known to the upper reaches of the Thames near Oxford in Arnold’s poem. “For the Fallen” was written in September, 1914, and Fussell noted Binyon’s “uncanny prescience of the appropriate imagery... when the war was a mere seven weeks along” [Fussell, 1977, p.56]. But then all of the imagery of the buried life was already well-established in English poetry at that time. Given its similarities to Arnold’s work, it is difficult to imagine that such a poem as “For the Fallen” could have been written without Arnold’s example. Because of his interest in Owen and Douglas in particular, for Hughes the concept of the buried life appears to have been an important one long after it had lost its meaning for most other poets. This suggests why he was such a perceptive critic of the concept. For example, he wrote of Douglas’ poetry:
This is what I meant by the poetry being somehow the naked presence of the inmost being of the man - the innermost creature, the decisive, most truthful spirit control of his nature. The poems formulate the terms this creature comes to with his predicament - with its unpredictable jagged edges and reality. Do I suggest that this formulation was an easy business? This essence I’m failing to pin down doesn’t emerge in the drafts till the very last moment. I agree with you, the poems come from far down - from some place of final resolutions. So the documentary bent, and opportunity, and as I say motivation, provided the external means. So “Vergissmeinicht” moves from being a sharp journal entry, through psychic turmoil, to the crystalline poem - reconciling every phase of its transformation, never altogether ceasing to be documentary. [Hughes, 1995, pp.216-217]
For Hughes, the wartime experiences of both Douglas and Owen provided them with a perfect fusion of the “documentary” with the poetical; or of their surface lives with the buried life; or of their surface lives with the “inmost being of the man”. This gave their wartime surface lives a significance that, as Trilling observed, Arnold’s surface life, or his “ordinary wakeful life of the ego”, did not ordinarily possess. In Arnold’s words, both Douglas and Owen endured “an actual tearing of oneself to pieces”, or a spiritual dismemberment, death and rebirth, that they did not consent to but was forced upon them in wartime. The experience made them great poets in a way that Arnold was not except at odd moments, in the “spots of time” that formed the basis of Romantic poetical inspiration. Hughes struggled to express his vision of this aspect of Douglas’ achievement, writing for example of the poem “The Sea Bird” that it provides:
an image of his sense of his own death having somehow already happened, of himself alive being already his own death and corpse in some abnormal degree of awareness. [Hughes, 1995, p.217]
To attempt to describe this confused state is to attempt to describe the buried life. It is 121
also the confused state of, for example, the resurrected Lazarus of Browning’s “An Epistle” (1855), or the resurrected Pantheia in “Empedocles on Etna”. One of Hughes’ more cryptic observations was that “there is no limiting” the “importance” of the story of Lazarus, and he cited the case of Dostoevsky [Hughes, 1995, p.153]. What he perhaps meant was that having come back from the “dead”, as Dostoevsky did after he was threatened once with imminent execution, or as Owen did after four hellish days in no- man’s-land in January, 1917, one cannot go entirely back to being the same superficial person one was before. Having come face to face with the Godhead, so to speak, and briefly merged with Him, one brings back from death a knowledge of the universal mind of God filtered and fragmented through one’s own finite human understanding. Even in Arnold’s and Eliot’s unpoetical times, in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, having once experienced it, it was possible to record this filtered and fragmented knowledge of the universal mind of God in poetry. Douglas’ “Desert Flowers” was quoted in Chapter Two: “Lay the coin on my tongue and I will sing/ Of what the others never set eyes on” [Douglas, 1978, p.102]. In summary, Arnold was not much interested in the details of his autobiography. This was because he felt that in the mid-nineteenth-century people’s surface lives, including his own, and the buried life had become almost completely dissociated. Therefore, for a poet such as himself, the autobiographical details of his surface life were by-and-large not worth recording. Arnold felt that such a dissociation of people’s surface lives and the buried life always had to happen as civilisations (or individuals) grew old. He felt that the Christian civilisation of Europe in his time was so old that it was effectively dead, but he also felt that for some reason there had not been a rebirth or resurrection of a new civilisation out of the death of the old one. For Arnold, the outward forms of Christian civilisation may have been dead, but its inward message about the importance of “dying” to your old life and being “born again” out of the buried life was still very much alive. He got ideas about the death of the external Christian God and the birth of a new internal God from Goethe, Newman, Emerson and Carlyle, whom he read at Oxford. Emily Bronte, too, seemed to proclaim the birth of this new internal God, although her proclamation may have been a little premature. Arnold got ideas about the nature of this internal God, too, from these writers. For Arnold, the internal God the Father was like a universal mind, and the internal God the Son was like a beautiful adolescent who suffered and died to his human limitations, on behalf of humankind, in order to be resurrected or reborn into the universal mind of God the Father. This internal God the Son was also the poetic Muse, so that the poet had to suffer and “die” on behalf of humanity, and be “resurrected” or “reborn” out of the buried life, in order to write poetry. Arnold characterised civilisations as persons, or as gods, who were born, grew into maturity, then grew old and died. In old age and in death their bodies became fragmented until such time as they were reborn into a unity, and, as in Nietzsche’s Dionysian allegory, this process of fragmentation was the process of individuation in society. For Arnold, Christian monks such as those at the Grande Chartreuse used to 122
have a role in ensuring that Jesus Christ was perpetually “reborn” out of his open grave, or the buried life, through their imitation of Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection. This was much like the role of the priests of the Eleusinian mysteries in Nietzsche’s allegory. The monks also suffered and died on behalf of their society, and this vicarious penance that they did for all humankind’s sins since the Fall helped always to narrow the gap between the surface life of their society and the god of the buried life, so that they sometimes even fused momentarily. This ensured that the Christ-god who characterised Christian civilisation remained forever youthful and alive, although also forever dead and buried, so that the process of individuation was halted or delayed and Christian society also remained forever unified, more or less. But for Arnold, with the death of Christian civilisation monks were supplanted in their roles by poets, such as the great poets of Romanticism. These poets were heroic in their efforts to hasten or cause the rebirth of the god of a new civilisation out of the death of the old one, but were nevertheless unsuccessful. Because they were unsuccessful, and because later poets such as himself were also unsuccessful, Arnold saw the mid- nineteenth-century as a time of increasing individuation, so that European society was becoming increasingly fragmented, and Europeans were becoming progressively more lonely and isolated in their surface lives. However, by the 1850s Arnold seemed to feel that, in the words of “Progress”, the “spirit of man” had begun to find some new roads to walk in, and although the inward message that “Thou must be born again” was still the same, humankind was beginning to leave the old outward forms of the Christian faith behind. One of those new roads was the road to war. By the 1850s in England, and by the 1860s in America, this new road was beginning to be developed as a new civil religion of death to the surface life and rebirth or resurrection out of the buried life, and it was forecast by Arnold in poems of his of the period like “Sohrab and Rustum”. In this new civil religion soldiers were the new monks or poets who did vicarious penance for the sins of their society and suffered greatly. They “died” to their old lives and were reborn with a new sense of community later called comradeship, which was felt to reverse the process of individuation in their societies. This new civil religion was immensely attractive to English poets such as Arnold, Tennyson, Hardy, Housman, Brooke, Owen and Douglas, all mentioned previously, who worked within the tradition of the buried life. It provided the poet with “spots of time” in which the surface life and the buried life, or the documentary and the poetical, or the person and God, fused at least momentarily to provide a fit subject for poetry.
123
Chapter Seven ______
Arnold, Eliot and the God of the Buried Life
Arnold was an influential poet in the twentieth-century, but his reputation did suffer for a time because of the dismissive comments of Modernists like Eliot. Eliot defined for his age what a great poet should be like, and his conclusion was that he should be a lot like Eliot himself but not much like Arnold. However, Eliot and Arnold are so much alike as poets that we can help to establish Arnold’s importance as a poet by showing how closely he fits Eliot’s definition of what a great poet should be like. And because Eliot’s definition of what a great poet should be like is more than half-derived from Arnold himself, this definition is certainly not something just imposed upon Arnold from outside. In particular, as poets, Eliot and Arnold shared the concept of the buried life. For both men, to be a great poet meant having considerable access to the buried life. To read and interpret Arnold through Eliot is obviously only one of many possible ways to read and interpret him, but it is an extremely fruitful one for our thesis topic. It was one of “the peculiarities of literary Modernism,” wrote Harold Bloom:
in the age of Pound, Joyce, and Eliot, and of their New Critical followers, to argue that the imaginative literature of the twentieth-century had its true origins in seventeenth-century sensibility. In this polemical contention, Eliot could insist that his poetic and critical stance, or more simply his personal culture, had its sources in Lancelot Andrewes and John Donne, rather, say, than in Walter Pater and Matthew Arnold. Assertions of a remote ancestry have the special charm of escaping the immediate squalors of the family romance. We need not smile too ironically at the personal mythologies of an Eliot or a Pound when we reflect upon the even more formidable Sigmund Freud, who in Beyond the Pleasure Principle cheerfully proclaims his descent from Empedocles, safely distant at two millenia, while stubbornly denying his palpable precursor, Arthur Schopenhauer. [in Arnold, 1983, p.v]
As Bloom was in turn anxious to distance himself from Eliot’s influence [Brooker, 1994, p.208], so Eliot was particularly anxious to damn Arnold with faint praise in order to make some room as a poet and critic for himself. That he dabbled only in the shallows of art, life and scholarship is the gist of Eliot’s criticism of Arnold: “Arnold was not a man of vast or exact scholarship, and he had neither walked in hell nor been rapt to heaven... The vision of the horror and the glory was denied to Arnold, but he knew something of the boredom” [Eliot, 1964, p.104; p.106]. However, Eliot’s criticism of Victorian poets like Arnold is reminiscent of Arnold’s own attempts to distance himself from the influence of the Romantics. Arnold had similarly damned Romantic poets of his father’s generation by saying that they “did not know enough” [“The Function of Criticism at the Present Time”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.262]; and he chose, like Freud, to write about Empedocles (in “Empedocles on Etna”) rather than about one of his more “palpable
124
precursors”. Empedocles, Andrewes and Donne, named by Bloom above, can all be considered safely “pre-dissociation” writers. Eliot’s key statement on Arnold occurred right at the start of his essay, “Matthew Arnold”, where he quoted from a letter of Charles Eliot Norton’s to Leslie Stephen:
‘The rise of democracy to power in America and Europe is not, as has been hoped, to be a safeguard of peace and civilisation. It is the rise of the uncivilised, whom no school education can suffice to provide with intelligence and reason. It looks as if the world were entering upon a new stage of experience, unlike anything heretofore, in which there must be a new discipline of suffering to fit men for the new conditions.’ [in Eliot, 1964, p.103]
Norton seemed to think that the rise of liberal democracy, or of “economic enterprise, unlimited competition, and unrestrained individualism” [in Eliot, 1964, p.14], in the nineteenth-century would have effects akin to those of the sack of Rome by the Goths in the fifth-century. He thought it would be the catalyst for a new Dark Ages, to be followed by a new Renaissance in due course; although he thought that humankind would be enduring the Dark Ages for a long time to come [Eliot, 1964, p.14]. Eliot commented that although the first two sentences of the above passage could be by Arnold the third could not, for: “Arnold hardly looks ahead to a new stage of experience; and though he speaks to us of discipline, it is the discipline of culture, not the discipline of suffering” [Eliot, 1964, p.103]. Eliot’s first major criticism of Arnold is, therefore, that he had not undergone “the discipline of suffering” himself and did not recommend it to others. Eliot’s criticism is not fair, however, for although it is true that Arnold really had no particular views on the dawn of a new Dark Age, nor any particular views on the suffering that people would have to endure during that hypothetical Dark Age, he nevertheless did believe that the poet should undergo a “discipline of suffering” on behalf of the peoples of the nineteenth-century. In other words, like Baudelaire or Dostoevsky, as has been noted, Arnold believed that the nineteenth-century poet should be the Christ-like tragic scapegoat whose sufferings would redeem the people from the negative consequences of their liberal and democratic views, or of their unrestrained individualism. In other words, Arnold believed that poets should undergo a “discipline of suffering” in order to reverse the process of individuation in their society. Eliot had beliefs similar to Arnold’s about the role of the poet in society, for he wrote of the poet as “the man who suffers” [Eliot, 1999, p.18]; and described him as:
some infinitely gentle Infinitely suffering thing. [Eliot, 1974, p.25]
Arnold expressed this same belief in his sonnet on the “Austerity of Poetry”. In this poem he compared the poet to a beautiful and beautifully-dressed young lady, on show herself and at a “public show”, who secretly wears sackcloth beneath her finery, in expiation, not for her own, but for her husband’s sins: 125
Fair was the bride, and on her front did glow Youth like a star; and what to youth belong - Gay raiment, sparkling gauds, elation strong. A prop gave way! crash fell a platform! lo,
‘Mid struggling sufferers, hurt to death, she lay! Shuddering, they drew her garments off - and found A robe of sackcloth next the smooth, white skin. [“Austerity of Poetry”, lines 5-11]
Underneath the finery, then, Arnold’s poet is rather like Fermor’s monks, in that their life is dominated by “the idea of vicarious penance”. Their life, like the monks’ lives, is “a bitter cactus-land of expiation for the mountains of sin which have accumulated since the Fall” [Fermor, 2004, p.62]. Arnold’s picture, presented here and elsewhere in his poetry, of the seemingly idle, dandified and feminised poet who nevertheless contains “a hidden ground/ Of thought and austerity within” [“Austerity of Poetry”, lines 13-14], and who undergoes a “discipline of suffering” on behalf of his people, was one of the main sources of inspiration, as Eliot noted, for “the doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’” [Eliot, 1964, p.26]. Oscar Wilde’s flamboyant embrace of the appearance of dandyism and idleness, for example, and then his equally flamboyant embrace of the “discipline of suffering”, probably owes even more to Arnold than it does to Baudelaire. Wilde became aestheticism’s most famous scapegoat; but even after Wilde, on the verge of World War One, Isaac Rosenberg could still write:
The poet wanders through the night and asks questions of the stars but receives no answer. He walks through the crowds of streets, and asks himself whether he is the scapegoat to bear the sins of humanity upon himself, and to waste his life to discover the secrets of God, for all. [in Sisson, 1981, p.88]
A little earlier than Wilde, Oxford aesthetes who entered either the Anglo-Catholic or Catholic priesthoods, like Hopkins, as was noted, were famous, too, for bringing aestheticism to the slums and for suffering on behalf of the slum-dwellers. One commentator noted that this trend marked “the recovery by the Oxford movement”, a movement that much-influenced Arnold through the presence of Newman at Oxford whilst he was an undergraduate there, “of what it had lost in the university” [in Wilson, 2003, p.370]. What it had lost in the university was its connection to the life of the common people, and also its discipline of suffering. For Arnold, then, the poet is the dandy who suffers. Since, like the youthful Eliot, Arnold was very much a dandy, the “Austerity of Poetry” is in many ways self-description on Arnold’s part. Those who knew Arnold first from his appearance and manner, such as his own sister Mary, could not understand how such a seeming peacock of a man could write such austere poetry [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, pp.145-146]; whilst those who knew Arnold first from his poetry, such as Charlotte 126
Bronte, could not understand how such austere poetry could be written by such a seeming peacock of a man [Honan, 1981, pp.219-220]. Eliot, however, argued that Arnold’s exquisite exterior did not in fact hide much at all in the way of an interior life. Trapped in the surface life of the nineteenth-century as he was by his job as a School Inspector, by his marriage to the daughter of a wealthy judge, and by the expectations that went with being the son of Dr Arnold of Rugby, it seemed to Eliot that Arnold avoided the unpleasant consequences of having to explore thoroughly his interior life, but at a cost to his poetry [Eliot, 1964, p.111]. For Eliot, Baudelaire, who sacrificed himself to poetry, rather than Arnold, who did not, was the representative modern poet. Baudelaire was the man who, as Lionel Trilling phrased it:
goes down into that hell which is the historical beginning of the human soul, a beginning not outgrown but established in humanity as we know it now, preferring the reality of this hell to the blandness of the civilization that has overlaid it. [Trilling, 1966, pp.20-21]
One must thoroughly explore this hell, and only then is it “by poetry and through poetry”, as Baudelaire wrote, “that the soul catches a glimpse of the splendour beyond the grave” [in James, 1961, p.55]. Baudelaire suffered terribly, noted Eliot, so that we can be sure that he felt at least something deeply [Eliot, 1999, pp.428-429]. In his journals, however, Arnold wrote that the “misery of the present age is not in the intensity of men’s suffering - but in their incapacity to suffer, enjoy, feel at all, wholly & profoundly” [in Honan, 1983, p.126]. And in poems like “Empedocles on Etna”, on the surface of things it does seem to be merely the boredom of existence, “the blandness of civilization”, that gets to Empedocles and drives him on up the mountain, rather than anything more deep or profound:
I alone Am dead to life and joy, and therefore I read In all things my own deadness. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act II, lines 320-322]
Empedocles’ lament is that he is bored because he is left with only his thoughts, cut off from his own deepest feelings, or from the buried life. In the same way, Victorian middle-class intellectuals like Matthew Arnold often complained about suffering from an ennui, cut off as they were from the poorer classes who (it was felt) felt most deeply in their society, because they suffered most deeply. As Arnold observed: “Depression and ennui; these are the characteristics stamped on how many of the representative works of modern times!” [“On the Modern Element in Literature”, Super, Vol.1, p.32]. On the surface, it therefore seems that in a poem like “Empedocles on Etna” Arnold goes back a long way through history, into “that hell which is the historical beginning of the human soul”, to discover only a middle-class ennui at the heart of things, which can seem a bit anti-climactic. It is as if, in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, Kurtz had ventured no closer to the heart of darkness than the bored, middle- 127
class confines of some central-European spa-town; and that his last words had been something like: “Things are a little bit low-key around here, really!” instead of: “The horror! The horror!” [Conrad, 1976, p.87]. Eliot’s criticism was therefore that Arnold seemed to prefer to endure the boredom of an existence confined to the surface life of the nineteenth-century, as an alternative to exploring the deepest levels of experience, or the deepest circles of hell, in the buried life of the nineteenth-century that were the preferred abodes of Baudelaire; and that this preference affected the quality of his poetry. But then the same criticism that can be made of Arnold’s Empedocles might also be made of characters in Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, if the reader ignores the deeper levels of that poem. “The Waste Land” can be read in two ways: as a collection of satires on the shallowness and boredom of modern social life, “or as a revelation of that vanished mind of which our mind is a continuation” [Bergonzi, 1972, p.76]. Much of a life, as Eliot well knew, must be spent playing patience in one’s bedroom, enduring the boredom of the present moment and waiting for “a revelation of that vanished mind”, or a “vision of the horror and the glory” [Gordon, 1989, pp.211-212]; and there is as much evidence for its fitful presence in Arnold’s poetry as there is in Eliot’s. As Bloom observed, like Pater after him, Arnold “restores to art the epiphanies appropriated by orthodox dualisms, whether of religion or of philosophy” [in Arnold, 1983, p.vi]. These “orthodox dualisms” are those of, for example, man and God, body and soul, body and mind, the real and the ideal, the shadow and the substance, or the conscious and unconscious mind. But for Arnold all of these were subsumed in his works by his dualism of the surface life and what he called the buried life. For Arnold, the surface life was the ordinary, boring, fragmented, everyday world that most people dwell in for most of the time, such as the one that Empedocles dwells in for most of “Empedocles on Etna”. But from time to time, Arnold thought, each person receives intimations that there exists within themselves a deeper, more unified level of experience than that of the surface life; and it is this fugitive level of experience that he called the buried life. It is this fugitive level of experience that, for example, the songs of Callicles give fragmentary access to in “Empedocles on Etna”; and in “The Waste Land” Eliot’s lyric impulse gives access to this same fugitive level. The similarities between Eliot and Arnold do run deep. Both poets, for example, thought that a “dissociation of sensibility” [Eliot, 1999, pp.287-288] between people’s surface lives and the buried life had occurred in England at some time in the seventeenth- century [Drew, 1969, p.208]; and most probably in the year 1649 with the execution of Charles I. This occurrence is represented most clearly in Arnold’s poetry by “The Scholar-Gipsy”, which was drawn from a mid-seventeenth-century story by Joseph Glanvill. Both Eliot’s and Arnold’s nostalgic longing for a pre-dissociation, early- seventeenth-century unity of thought and feeling is similar to Freud’s (and Arnold’s) look back to an Empedoclean, a PreSocratic one; and Eliot’s post-dissociation definition of poetry as that which “may make us from time to time a little more aware of the deeper, unnamed feelings which form the substratum of our being, to which we rarely penetrate; for our lives are mostly a constant evasion of ourselves” [Eliot, 1964, p.155], 128
is really an echo of Arnold’s poem “The Buried Life”:
But often in the world’s most crowded streets, But often, in the din of strife, There rises an unspeakable desire After the knowledge of our buried life. [“The Buried Life”, lines 45- 48]
Eliot was also like Arnold in that he wrote of seeing through the fragmentary nature of our perceptions in our surface life to the unified reality below:
Only at nightfall, ethereal rumours Revive for a moment a broken Coriolanus... These fragments I have shored against my ruins. [“The Waste Land”, lines 416-417; line 431]
In other words, both Arnold’s and Eliot’s poetry, like that of the Romantics, and like the prose of Sigmund Freud, offers us something “deep and profound rather than elevated or sublime”, as Gabriel Pearson wrote of Arnold’s poetry [Pearson, 1969, p.231]; or theirs is a “subterranean and insistent muse”, as C.H. Sisson wrote of Eliot’s [Sisson, 1981, p.129]. Therefore, Arnold is an explorer of the depths of “that hell which is the historical beginning of the human soul”, albeit a reluctant one at times, and he is one of Modernism’s major precursors. In other words, for Arnold, as for Eliot, the source of poetry lies deep within the poet in the buried life rather than in any external source, and the poet has access to this buried life only via the fragments of it that from time to time emerge from below, up into the surface life:
Yet still, from time to time, vague and forlorn, From the soul’s subterranean depth upborne As from an infinitely distant land, Come airs, and floating echoes, and convey A melancholy into all our day. [“The Buried Life”, lines 72-76]
For both Arnold and Eliot, to write poetry thus meant having to endure the boredom of waiting patiently for access to what lay hidden in the buried life of the feelings. For Eliot, however reluctant he was to acknowledge it, Arnold “was a prophet” [Honan, 1981, p.x]. What the concept of the buried life did for both Eliot and Arnold was to provide them with what they thought of as an inner objectivity accessed through poetry to complement or replace the no longer tenable outer, theological objectivity of an external God accessed through the Bible, the concept of which Arnold ridiculed in his poem “Pis- Aller”:
“Man is blind because of sin; Revelation makes him sure. Without that, who looks within, 129
Looks in vain, for all’s obscure.”
Nay, look closer into man! Tell me, can you find indeed Nothing sure, no moral plan Clear-prescribed, without your creed?
“No, I nothing can perceive; Without that, all’s dark for men. That, or nothing, I believe.” - For God’s sake, believe it then! [“Pis-Aller”, lines 1-12]
Eliot, too, wrote of the “inner voice” and quoted from John Middleton Murry, who in turn had paraphrased John Henry Newman:
‘If they (the English writer, divine, statesman) dig deep enough in their pursuit of self-knowledge - a piece of mining done not with the intellect alone, but with the whole man - they will come upon a self that is universal... The man who truly interrogates himself will ultimately hear the voice of God’. [in Eliot, 1999, pp.27- 28]
The question Eliot raised about this passage of Murry’s is: how does one know that this inner voice is the objective voice of God and not just some private eccentric voice? Both Eliot and Arnold raised this question, and both of them then pointed to the external authority of the Church, and such-like institutions, as an antidote to the anarchy of “doing as one likes” at the prompting of one’s inner voice. Eliot even quoted this famous phrase of Arnold’s from Culture and Anarchy [Eliot, 1999, p.27]. But, as it had been for Newman, for both Arnold and Eliot it was the inner voice that had precedence. More importantly, both Eliot and Arnold pointed to what they thought of as an inner literary objectivity or a poetical tradition which flows through certain poets like the river of Arnold’s buried life in “The Buried Life”; or like the river in Gray’s “Progress of Poesy”. In “Four Quartets” Eliot wrote of how: “The river is within us” [Eliot, 1974, p.205]. Elsewhere, Eliot wrote of how: “The poet must be very conscious of the main current” of poetical tradition, “which does not at all flow invariably through the most distinguished reputations.” This river of poetical tradition which flows through certain poets in the buried life provides those poets with an inner objectivity, a public mind, that the poet “learns in time to be much more important than his own private mind” [Eliot, 1999, p.16]. By reading other poets’ works it is thus possible to confirm that one’s own inner objectivity is truly objective. For Eliot, and also for Arnold, this public mind is not just a river of poetical tradition, but is also simultaneously a living thing - a god. Eliot therefore supported “the conception of poetry”, or of the poetical tradition, “as a living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written” [Eliot, 1999, p.17]. For Eliot, and again for Arnold, the only problem for the poet is that, in order to access this river of poetical tradition, or this public mind, or this “living whole”, he himself must be dead, or at least dead to his surface life; so that what happens to him “is a continual surrender of 130
himself as he is at the moment to something which is more valuable. The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” [Eliot, 1999, p.17]. What you have in both Eliot and Arnold, then, is a scheme that is something like the following. Firstly, the poetical tradition as a whole not only speaks for but is actually like God the Father; but it is also like an infinite sea. This poetical tradition then sacrifices itself on behalf of humanity like God the Son, and is fragmented and killed. Those fragments flow like rivers through the buried life of every person back to the infinite sea, where they are reunited and are resurrected as God the Father. Finally, to access the poetical tradition flowing through them in the buried life, the individual poet must imitate the sacrifice of God the Son in “dying” to their surface life and being resurrected as Eliot’s “living whole of all the poetry that has ever been written”. This scheme might seem a bit peculiar when set out like that. But, in fact, apart from the imagery of seas and rivers, which Arnold derived mostly from Wordsworth, and Eliot probably derived mostly from Victorian poets like Arnold, it is not a scheme that differs very much from, for example, those underpinning the rituals of Orphism or Christianity. Indeed, both Eliot and Arnold complicate their basic scheme with imagery drawn from both of those sources. The imagery of the seas and rivers is also to be found present in such ancient cults as that of the god Adonis in Syria, in which Adonis was said to be slain annually at a sanctuary on Mount Lebanon, where his mangled body was buried. The river Adonis would then run red with his blood down to the sea at Byblos, a city said to have been both founded by the father of Adonis and sacred to the father of the gods. According to Frazer:
Every year, in the belief of his worshippers, Adonis was wounded to death on the mountains, and every year the face of nature itself was dyed with his sacred blood. So year by year the Syrian damsels lamented his untimely fate, while the red anemone, his flower, bloomed among the cedars of Lebanon, and the river ran red to the sea, fringing the winding shores of the blue Meditteranean, whenever the wind set inshore, with a sinuous band of crimson. [Frazer, 1993, p.329]
The cult of Adonis in its various guises was very widespread in the ancient world, and in the ancient authors, as Arnold knew, and as his extensive discussion of Theocritus’ treatment of the cult of Adonis in his essay on “Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment” shows [Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, pp.216-223]. The scheme also does not seem quite so peculiar when clothed in poetic form, as in Arnold’s poem, “Sohrab and Rustum”, already discussed, or in Eliot’s poem, “The Waste Land”. In “The Waste Land”, God the Father and God the Son are identified with the sea and with the river Thames. God the Son has been slain in the first section of the poem. This God the Son, or the poet or soldier-poet who imitates His sacrifice, then describes how he has flowed back down through the Thames to the sea at Margate Sands, the fragmentation of people’s surface lives in post-dissociation London symbolising the fragmentation of his body, or vice-versa. At Margate Sands he waits for
131
a reunification with God the Father and a resurrection which has not as yet come, and may never come:
‘Do You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember Nothing?’ I remember Those are pearls that were his eyes. ‘Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?’ [“The Waste Land”, lines 121-126]
Margate, probably quite unlike ancient Byblos in most respects, nevertheless has its resemblances to it in Eliot’s poem. Beneath the surface differences, then, it can be seen that poems like Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum” and Eliot’s “The Waste Land” have strong similarities to each other because of the use they make of the concept of the buried life. The scheme of both “Sohrab and Rustum” and “The Waste Land” bears a strong resemblance, too, to certain aspects of The Golden Bough. Eliot acknowledged his debt to Frazer in his “Notes on The Waste Land” [Eliot, 1974, p.80], which was a major one, so that to read and interpret Arnold through Eliot means that one must also read and interpret him through Frazer. However, Eliot might well have acknowledged an equal and overlapping debt to Arnold. For, in poems like “Sohrab and Rustum” and “Empedocles on Etna”, Arnold certainly prefigured a part of Frazer’s achievement and would have been one of the mid-Victorian sources of that achievement. As John B. Vickery noted in The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough, there were those in the mid- nineteenth-century who:
could find in Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum” and “Balder Dead” mythical beings capable of preserving cultural and moral coherence by acting as surrogates for the deity whose literal existence could no longer be entertained. [Vickery, 1973, p.30]
Frazer’s key achievement was perhaps to recognise that the nineteenth-century’s “death of God” was even more about the death of God the Son than it was about the death of God the Father; so that The Golden Bough, like “Sohrab and Rustum” and “Balder Dead”, presents the reader with variations on the story of the death of the Son of God. Further to that, having being influenced by Frazer, Eliot argued that a study of Greek literature, by which he meant especially Greek tragedy, was a study of the deepest levels of the modern mind, or of the buried life:
‘The study of Greek is in part a study of our own mind... What analytic psychology attempts to do for the individual mind, the study of history - including language and literature - does for the collective mind’. [in Brooker, 1994, p.13]
Eliot thus thought that to reconnect with the buried life through a study of Greek literature would be a healing or cathartic experience for the modern European mind. 132
Arnold had similar thoughts to that, expressed, for example, in “Empedocles on Etna”, in which poem Callicles attempts to sooth and heal the mind of the “modern” Empedocles with his tragic tales from the Greek myths. As Eliot referred approvingly to Frazer, so Arnold quoted approvingly from Goethe on the bracing effects of the Greeks’ tragic view of life on a modern sensibility: “From Homer... I every day learn more clearly... that in our life here above ground we have, properly speaking, to enact Hell” [On Translating Homer, Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, p.102]. Eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-century students of Greek literature, like Goethe, Arnold and Eliot, thought that the epics of Homer and the tragedies of Sophocles provided a picture of a time in which the bland surface of life, or “our life here above ground”, was more fully integrated with the tragic buried life, so that the surface and the depths of the human personality were at that time more fully integrated. At that time, the river of the buried life flowed on the surface of the ground, so to speak, or very close to it. But, like Nietzsche, both Eliot and Arnold appeared to argue that a “dissociation of sensibility”; or a dissociation between the surface and the depths of the human personality; or between the conscious and unconscious parts of the human mind; or between human thought and feeling; or between the surface life and the buried life; had occurred at the end of the PreSocratic age of Greek literature, at the time of Empedocles, and that this dissociation was analogous to one that had occurred in the seventeenth- century in England. To recapitulate, Arnold’s buried life is something that he thought all people shared in common, which is to say that there is only one buried life for all people. However, he thought that in post-dissociation times each person lives as an individual in their own separate surface life, so that this is one major way in which the surface of life is fragmented. Poetry, then, for Arnold should not be an expression of the poet’s individual thoughts or feelings but only an expression of the collective buried life. The picture of the buried life provided by a poet in times when each person’s surface life and the collective buried life are fully integrated is easy for the poet’s every reader to understand, for every reader knows just as much about the buried life as does the poet, which is everything. But when there has been a dissociation between each person’s surface life and the buried life, poetry becomes much more difficult to understand. This is because poets themselves can probably only provide to their readers a fragmentary vision of the buried life; and then most of the poet’s readers probably have no idea that such a thing as the buried life even exists, so that any mention of the buried life is going to make no sense to them at all. So, for example, in “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’”, Arnold described how very few individuals in the nineteenth-century could comprehend the discipline of suffering endured by poets of the buried life:
Yet, through the hum of torrent lone, And brooding mountain-bee, There sobs I know not what ground-tone Of human agony. 133
Is it for this, because the sound Is fraught with human pain, That Obermann! the world around So little loves thy strain?
Some secrets may the poet tell, For the world loves new ways; To tell too deep ones is not well - It knows not what he says. [“Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’”, lines 33-44]
It is these “deep” secrets of the buried life that are the ones that “the world” in post- dissociation times does not understand. It is therefore at times when each person’s surface life becomes dissociated from the buried life that the dualisms of criticism or philosophy are needed to negotiate the gap that has emerged for all people between their surface lives and the buried life; and in “Empedocles on Etna” Arnold used the character of Empedocles to illustrate this point. Arnold’s Empedocles began his career as a poet, but as his surface life gradually became dissociated from the buried life he became next a poet-philosopher, and then just a philosopher. Empedocles’ career thus mirrors that of Arnold, who began his career as a poet, before becoming a poet-critic, and then just a critic as the buried life receded further and yet further away from his surface life. To further recapitulate, before moving deeper into the concept of the buried life, Arnold thought that there were two inter-related ways in which people could become dissociated from the buried life. Firstly, he thought that children’s surface lives were more closely integrated with the buried life than the surface lives of adults, so that people tended to become more dissociated from the buried life as they grew older: “We are plunged at birth into a boundless sea,” Arnold noted, “crystal clear, where all may be seen, as the eye gets accustomed to the watery medium... but we are agitated and alarmed and by our struggles trouble the transparent medium” [in Honan, 1981, p.86]. Arnold therefore saw it as the task of the poet to recapture the vision of childhood, in the face of indifference or hostility on the part of the adult world: “You must plunge yourself down to the depths of the sea of intuition... all other men are trying as far as lies in them to keep you at the barren surface” [in Honan, 1981, p.88]. In fact, Arnold felt that the poet must as an adult undergo a sort of “rebirth” into childhood. For example, he wrote of the poet Senancour, that you having: “Heard accents of the eternal tongue”, out of the buried life, you: “Listened, and felt thyself grown young!” [“Stanzas in Memory of the Author of Obermann”, lines 125; 127]. In the same letter to Clough in which he had urged him to be “born again” [Lang, Vol.1, p.155], Arnold bemoaned all the distractions of the surface life, to which he felt they must both die if they were to devote themselves properly to poetry:
My dearest Clough these are damned times - everything is against one - the height to which knowledge is come, the spread of luxury, our physical enervation, the absence of great natures, the unavoidable contact with millions of small ones, 134
newspapers, cities, light profligate friends, moral desperadoes like Carlyle, our own selves, and the sickening consciousness of our difficulties... When I come to town I will have a real effort at managing myself as to newspapers & the talk of the day. Why the devil do I read about Ld. Grey’s sending convicts to the Cape, & excite myself thereby, when I can thereby produce no possible good. But public opinion consists in a multitude of such excitements. [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, pp.156- 157]
It was when Arnold felt that Clough had involved himself too much in poetry of the surface life that the two started to become estranged. To recapitulate a little further, the second way that Arnold felt people could become alienated from the buried life was by being born into the adulthood of a civilisation. He thought that individual civilisations went through the same stages of birth, childhood, adulthood and death as did individual people, so that if a poet was born into the childhood of a civilisation they would find it much easier to write poetry than they would if they were born into its adulthood. Arnold thought that the old European civilisation that had been reborn with the Renaissance, and had come to second adulthood with the “dissociation of sensibility” of the seventeenth-century, had then died with the French Revolution of 1789. But he felt that a new civilisation had for some reason not been immediately born to take the place of the old one, perhaps because no comparable revolution had occurred in England, and also because the aims of the French Revolution had been perverted by Napoleon and the like. Eliot was never a Viconian like the Arnolds, son and father; and as with age he became more of an orthodox Christian the only rebirths he really took an interest in were the orthodox Christian ones. Nevertheless, poems by Eliot like “Gerontion” and “The Waste Land” do seem to make more sense when placed in the context of historical schemes like Arnold’s where ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny, so to speak. Like “Empedocles on Etna”, both of those poems were written when the poet was about thirty, and they can be read as being about the end of poetical youth, the onset of prosaic middle age, and the necessity for the poet to undergo a “rebirth” into childhood if he is to continue as a poet. And again like “Empedocles on Etna”, or like the “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, the poems can also be read as being about how it is necessary for an old civilisation to to die, and then for a new one be born, if poetry is to again be written with any ease. In any case, Eliot did have strong views on how poetry was an expression of the collective buried life, and more easily written in ages “younger” than his own. For he observed of pre-critical and pre-philosophical, or pre-adult, poetry that it is “the expression of the mind of a whole people”:
The art of the Middle Ages generally is corporate and social; the sculpture, for example, as it is found on the great cathedrals... In the Middle Ages there is a natural likeness to the Greek conditions... Greek poetry in many respects is mediaeval... What is true of the major changes in the form of poetry is, I think, true also of the change from a pre-critical to a critical age. It is true of the change from
135
a pre-philosophical to a philosophical age... The important moment for the appearance of criticism seems to be the time when poetry ceases to be the expression of the mind of a whole people. [Eliot, 1964, pp.21-22]
Because of his interest in poetry that is “the expression of the mind of a whole people”, Eliot’s criticism, like Arnold’s, is often about how it is important for the poet to ignore or suppress their individuality in order to write about what all people share in common. For Eliot, the poet is like Campbell’s “hero” in the suppression of their individuality:
The hero... is the man or woman who has been able to battle past his personal and local historical limitations to the generally valid, normally human forms. Such a one’s visions, ideas, and inspirations come pristine from the primary springs of human life and thought. Hence they are eloquent, not of the present, disintegrating society and psyche, but of the unquenched source through which society is reborn. The hero has died as a modern man; but as eternal man - perfected, unspecific, universal man - he has been reborn. His... task... is to return then to us, transfigured, and teach the lesson he has learned of life renewed. [Campbell, 2008, pp. 14-15]
Eliot thus wrote in his first important critical statement, on “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, that:
We dwell with satisfaction upon the poet’s difference from his predecessors, especially his immediate predecessors; we endeavour to find something that can be isolated in order to be enjoyed. Whereas if we approach a poet without this prejudice we shall often find that not only the best, but the most individual parts of his work may be those in which the dead poets, his ancestors, assert their immortality most vigorously. [Eliot, 1999, p.14]
In other words, for Eliot the details of the surface life of the individual do not matter to the poet. Then in his first important critical statement, his Preface to his Poems of 1853, Arnold wrote that:
The Poet, then, has in the first place to select an excellent action; and what actions are the most excellent? Those, certainly, which most powerfully appeal to the great primary human affections: to those elementary feelings which subsist permanently in the race, and which are independent of time. These feelings are permanent and the same; that which interests them is permanent and the same also... The outward man of Oedipus or Macbeth, the houses in which they lived, the ceremonies of their courts, he cannot accurately figure to himself; but neither do they essentially concern him. His business is with their inward man. [“Preface to Poems 1853”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, pp.4-5]
For Arnold, in other words, below the accidents of individuality, then, and an individual’s perceptions, in their buried life both living and dead poets share the important things in common. For Arnold, and for at least the young Eliot of “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, the authority that was once transmitted through the representatives of the 136
Church or State is now transmitted chiefly through the representatives of Poetry, because they are the only ones who can now claim access to the buried life. This is because both living and dead poets are, in essence, already dead and buried: “The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality” [Eliot, 1999, p.17]. What the critic must therefore do is to make sure that readers know that this particular poet, about whom they are writing, is “dead”: “No poet, no artist of any art, has his complete meaning alone... You... must set him, for contrast and comparison, among the dead” [Eliot, 1999, p.15]. Eliot, then, is concerned to differentiate himself from Arnold, as he is concerned to differentiate himself from all other poets; but he also knows that in the buried life all poets are really one and the same. In other words, he argues that beneath the fragmentated perceptions imposed by the differing circumstances of their surface lives, all poets who have “died” can observe the underlying unity. Arnold made this same point when he had the poet of “Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’” address the dead “Obermann” thus:
Too fast we live, too much are tried, Too harassed, to attain Wordsworth’s sweet calm, or Goethe’s wide And luminous view to gain.
And then we turn, thou sadder sage, To thee! we feel thy spell! - The hopeless tangle of our age, Thou too hast scanned it well!
Immoveable thou sittest, still As death, composed to bear! Thy head is clear, thy feeling chill, And icy thy despair.
Yes, as the son of Thetis said, I hear thee saying now: Greater by far than thou are dead; Strive not! die also thou!
Ah! two desires toss about The poet’s feverish blood. One drives him to the world without, And one to solitude.
The glow, he cries, the thrill of life, Where, where do these abound? Not in the world, not in the strife Of men shall they be found.
He who hath watched. not shared, the strife, Knows how the day hath gone. He only lives with the world’s life, 137
Who hath renounced his own. [“Stanzas in Memory of the Author of ‘Obermann’”, lines 76-104]
In the poem, “Obermann” is literally dead, but having “renounced” his life he is also symbolically “dead” to the fragmented surface life of the nineteenth-century; so that he dwells both in his grave and in the buried life, seeing things clearly and awaiting his moment for rebirth. The concept of the buried life, then, is an extremely important one in Arnold’s poetry, and trying to gain full access to the buried life is what he spent much of his poetic career attempting to do. The concept of the buried life has also been an important one for later poets, as has been noted, so that it is not a part of one of the by-ways of literature. As Arnold himself wrote in 1869: “My poems represent, on the whole, the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century” [Lang, 1996, Vol.2, p.347]; and it was mainly through his concept of the buried life that those poems did manage to represent that “main movement of mind” from the Romantics’ optimistic view that both God and Nature were whole and alive, or would become so again in the very near future, to the Victorians’ more pessimistic view that both God and Nature were divided and dead and would remain so for the forseeable future. Arnold’s concept of the buried life was resurrected, too, as was noted, by later poets. So for example in Thomas Hardy’s poem “The Darkling Thrush”, first published in 1901, both God and Nature are described as an Orpheus dead, fragmented and buried, whilst:
The tangled bine-stems scored the sky Like strings of broken lyres. [“The Darkling Thrush”, lines 5-6]
And:
The land’s sharp features seemed to be The century’s corpse outleant. [“The Darkling Thrush”, lines 9- 10]
Meanwhile, a singing thrush provides a moment of brief lyric illumination, giving hope that although:
The ancient pulse of germ and birth Was shrunken hard and dry, [“The Darkling Thrush”, lines 13-14] at some time in the future, but not soon, both God and Nature may, like Obermann, rise from their grave, or from the buried life, and live again. The more one investigates Arnold’s concept of the buried life, the more it becomes apparent that such a poem as Hardy’s “The Darkling Thrush”, which comments on the main “movement of mind” in the nineteenth-century, could not have been written without the example of Arnold. It 138
thus shows how influential was Arnold’s concept of the buried life. Eliot’s “Portrait of a Lady”, too, begins with the resurrection of Chopin’s soul “only among friends/some two or three,” before describing the waste of a life and the fragmenting of a consciousness in the trivial social round of the surface life: “You let it flow from you, you let it flow”. This then leads to the direct reference to the buried life:
Yet with these April sunsets, that somehow recall My buried life, and Paris in the Spring, I feel immeasurably at peace, and find the world To be wonderful and youthful after all. [“Portrait of a Lady”, lines 52- 55]
“Portrait of a Lady” documents a spring, a summer and an autumn, before it ends with an imagined death in winter, which is where the poem had also begun, implying that there may be another resurrection at hand to accompany yet another seasonal round. “The Burial of the Dead”, the opening section of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, is also set in springtime and, as has been noted, is written from the perspective of one who is already dead, or perhaps “dead” to the surface life:
Winter kept us warm, covering Earth in forgetful snow. [“The Waste Land”, lines 5-6]
It also describes an alienating, trivial social round and then the round of the four seasons of the year, before concluding with imagery of a river in a London winter:
Under the brown fog of a winter dawn, A crowd flowed over London bridge, so many, I had not thought that death had undone so many. [“The Waste Land”, lines 61-63]
Living entirely in their surface lives as they do, these people are “dead” to their buried life. (They are also, in another context, a crowd of dead soldiers returning from World War One. However, that will be discussed elsewhere.) But in this section of the poem a resurrection of one’s buried consciousness is possibly at hand:
‘That corpse you planted last year in your garden, Has it begun to sprout? Will it bloom this year?’ [“The Waste Land”, lines 71-72]
“The Burial of the Dead”, then, like “Portrait of a Lady”, documents a spring, a summer and an autumn, before it ends with an imagined death and dismemberment in winter, which is where the poem had also begun, implying that there is yet another resurrection at hand to accompany yet another seasonal round. Judging from Eliot’s poetry, and from Arnold’s, and to dig a little deeper into the scheme of the buried life, it seems that the concept of the buried life involves the fragmentation of consciousness, symbolised by a division of the body into fragments and 139
a consequent death and burial, followed by a possible resurrection into wholeness when one is reunited with one’s buried life. As Eliot’s Prufrock puts it, “There will be a time to murder and create” [“The Love Song of J.Alfred Prufrock”, line 28], by which he means that there will be a time to “murder” the fragmented self of his surface life, and then a time to “create”, or to be born again as a newly reintegrated self out of the buried life. It also involves imagery of the seasons, with winter symbolising death and spring symbolising new life; so that to “murder” and “create” means also to participate in the ritual murder, fragmentation and then rebirth of a god whose life-cycle is tied to the seasons, like Adonis, Jesus Christ or Dionysus, and whose rebirth is a symbol of the possibility of one’s own spiritual rebirth. Finally, it involves imagery of life flowing like a river from birth to death. As Graham Hough wrote of “The Waste Land”, on the surface of that poem there are only brief lyric moments of “illumination”, but there are also “larger unities not visible on the surface or present in any readily analysable structure. They are given by a slow underground process of psychic development, often only discernable in retrospect” [Hough, 1991, p.320]; and this “underground process” is what takes place in the buried life. When we look in more depth, later, at poems of Arnold’s such as “Empedocles on Etna”, it will be seen that Arnold’s concept of the buried life is very much the same as Eliot’s; and that the concept of the buried life fulfils the same function, described above, in the work of both poets. Because Eliot’s and Arnold’s buried life is the same, or very similar, Eliot can give us a clear picture of what Arnold’s buried life would actually look like. In his essay on Eliot, as was noted, Hughes offered Eliot’s early poem “The Death of Saint Narcissus” as a picture of Eliot’s “poetic personality... beneath his ordinary personality” [Hughes, 1995, p.280]; or as a picture of his buried life:
The Death of Saint Narcissus Come under the shadow of this gray rock - Come in under the shadow of this gray rock, And I will show you something different from either Your shadow sprawling over the sand at daybreak, or Your shadow leaping behind the fire against the red rock: I will show you his bloody cloth and limbs And the gray shadow on his lips.
He walked once between the sea and the high cliffs When the wind made him aware of his limbs smoothly passing each other And of his arms crossed over his breast. When he walked over the meadows He was stifled and soothed by his own rhythm. By the river His eyes were aware of the pointed corners of his eyes And his hands aware of the pointed tips of his fingers.
140
Struck down by such knowledge He could not live men’s ways, but became a dancer before God. If he walked in city streets He seemed to tread on faces, convulsive thighs and knees. So he came out under the rock.
First he was sure that he had been a tree, Twisting its branches among each other And tangling its roots among each other.
Then he knew that he had been a fish With slippery white belly held tight in his own fingers Writhing in his own clutch, his ancient beauty Caught fast in the pink tips of his new beauty.
Then he had been a young girl Caught in the woods by a drunken old man Knowing at the end the taste of his own whiteness The horror of his own smoothness, And he felt drunken and old.
So he became a dancer to God. Because his flesh was in love with the burning arrows He danced on the hot sand Until the arrows came. As he embraced them his white skin surrendered itself to the redness of blood, and satisfied him. Now he is green, dry and stained With the shadow in his mouth. [in Hughes, 1995, pp.278-279]
A.D. Moody notes that “The Waste Land” describes “an Orphic passage through the dead world leading to a recovery of the poet’s inward self” [Moody, 1979, p.129]; and this is the “inward self” to which he refers. Eliot’s Saint Narcissus is like Arnold’s Strayed Reveller in that he is a young aesthete who intuits a God-given unity beneath his fragmentary perceptions of the world; and he realises that he must suffer and then pay with his life for that intuition, before waiting for rebirth. Even more specifically, and because the resemblance is so close it would seem likely to be deliberate, Eliot’s Saint Narcissus is like the PreSocratic sage Empedocles, whom Arnold wrote about in “Empedocles on Etna”. Eliot’s Saint Narcissus was apparently a tree, a fish and a girl before he assumed his current form; whilst in his poem, “Purifications”, from the fifth- century BC, Empedocles wrote: “For before now I have been at some time boy and girl, bush, bird, and a mute fish in the sea” [Wright, 1981, p.275]. Such fragments of Empedocles’ poetry as the one quoted above have been described as “the one first-hand source from which we can still form some notion of what a Greek shaman was like [Dodds, 1951, p.145]; and that Empedocles was one of the last representatives of such a shamanistic tradition seems to have been one of the main reasons why Arnold was attracted to his story. For, like Eliot, Arnold was attracted 141
to stories about “the traditional shaman’s crucial experience of visionary dismemberment” and divine reassembly [Hughes, 1995, p.284]. Just as much as Eliot’s Saint Narcissus, Arnold’s Empedocles, or at least his younger self, is, in the words of Hughes, a “doomed, epicene, immortal exquisite, dancing his archaic Aphrodisian/Dionysian role in the tree of nerves, [anticipating] the greater part of Western spiritual developments till they coalesce, ultimately, into the person of Christ” [Hughes, 1995, p.285]. In his essay on Eliot, Hughes looked at what is meant by a “subterranean muse”, or the “buried life”, from a different perspective, as he tried to put Eliot’s “poetic personality... beneath his ordinary personality” into some sort of an historical context. Hughes noted that:
First of all, I need to recruit the traditional idea of the poetic Self - that other voice which in the earliest times came to the poet as a god, took possession of him, delivered the poem, then left him. Or it came as the Muse, after the poet’s prayers for her favour... This familiar concept is worth a closer look. The qualifications of the poetic Self (apart from its inspiration) were: that it lived its own life separate from and for the most part hidden from the poet’s ordinary personality; that it was not under his control, either in when it came and went or in what it said; and that it was supernatural. In ways that were sometimes less explicit than others, it emerged from and was merged with a metaphysical Universe centred on God. [Hughes, 1995, pp.268-269]
From about the seventeenth-century onwards, however, according to Hughes, with the gradual decline of the influence of traditional religion, and certainly by the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries [Faas, 1988, pp. 88-89], this external god or muse that entered the poet from outside to inspire him became interiorised in the subconscious; and this seems to be a part of what both Eliot and Arnold meant by the “buried life”. Arnold compared his internal, subconscious muse, as was noted, to Goethe’s internal “daemon” [Lang, 1996, Vol.2, p.390]. But Wordsworth appears to have been the main influence in his development of this aspect of his concept of the buried life. In “The Prelude”, Wordsworth wrote about the circumstances of the growth of his poetic personality, as it developed over time from the first fragmentary hints or “spots of time” which indicated to him that there was something hidden deep within himself that corresponded to, or was the same as, God or Nature. Wordsworth was one of the first poets to take himself, or the growth of his own poetic personality, as his major subject [Bloom, 1994, pp.239-240]. Hence, in one of his poems about Wordsworth, “The Youth of Nature”, Arnold has Nature tell the reader that: “The clearest, the best” of “your bards”, like Wordsworth, are those “who have read/ Most in themselves” [“The Youth of Nature”, lines 103-105]. Hence, too, in Arnold’s sonnet “Shakespeare”, the playwright is described as “cloud-capped and mysterious to man, and partly submerged in a sea of the unconscious, and so perhaps mysterious to himself” [Honan, 1981, p.77]. In other words, in his interior Shakespeare is infinite, like God or Nature. Frazer and then Freud would later systematise access to this subconscious self 142
and try to demystify it, through what Eliot would call the “mythical method” [Eliot, 1975, p.177]. But for Arnold there were no critics of such stature as those to help him negotiate the mid-nineteenth-century’s post-dissociation gap between people’s surface lives and the buried life. However, Carlyle had at least thought about these issues in the first half of the nineteenth-century, and he proclaimed, in On Heroes and Hero Worship (1841), the presence of “God” within the subconscious self of the contemporary man of letters:
There are genuine Men of Letters, and not genuine; as in every kind there is a genuine and a spurious. If Hero be taken to mean genuine, then I say the Hero as Man of Letters will be found discharging a function for us which is ever honourable, ever the highest; and was once well known to be the highest. He is uttering-forth, in such a way as he has, the inspired soul of him; all that a man, in any case can do.... The Hero is he who lives in the inward sphere of things, in the True, Divine and Eternal, which exists always, unseen to most, under the Temporary; Trivial... Intrinsically it is the same function which the old generations named a man Prophet, Priest, Divinity for doing; which all manner of Heroes, by speech or by act, are sent into the world to do. [Carlyle, 1904, pp.156-157]
For Carlyle, Goethe was the epitome of the man of letters “as an intermediary between the two worlds of the Ideal and the Real, the Divine and the Human” [Le Quesne, 1993, p.17]. With regard to “The Hero of Man of Letters”, Carlyle wrote of how the economic pressure of having to find a buyer for his works bedevils a man of letters like Arnold and stops him from producing his best work; and for Carlyle it is in fact this economic pressure that distinguishes the “Man of Letters” from the “Poet” [Carlyle, 1904, pp.155- 156]. With regard to “The Hero as Poet”, Carlyle’s examples were Dante and Shakespeare, and using the imagery of death, dismemberment and resurrection, he wrote of how: “We are all poets when we read a poem well... every one embodies it better or worse” [Carlyle, 1904, p.82]. Dante “lies dismembered, scattered asunder” [Carlyle, 1904, p.115] through the Italian political disunity of his day, and readers of Shakespeare may be so widely scattered as to be “from Parramatta, from New York” [Carlyle, 1904, p.114]. But because they have readers, and because their bodies lie buried in their poetry, to read their poems is to resurrect them into wholeness again. For Carlyle, something similar, presumably, would also have applied to the nineteenth-century man of letters. Arnold echoed Carlyle’s judgement on the importance of the man of letters in his early poem “Written in Emerson’s Essays”, already quoted, in which Carlyle’s friend Emerson appears as a “Hero as Man of Letters”:
A voice oracular hath peal’d today, Today a hero’s banner is unfurl’d... The seeds of godlike power are in us still: Gods are we, Bards, Saints, Heroes, if we will.- [“Written in Emerson’s Essays”, lines 3-4; lines 12-13]
But, beyond noting that the man of letters had to traverse the waste land that was the 143
post-dissociation eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries [Carlyle, 1904, pp.171-172], Carlyle had no particular ideas about how one might gain access to the “inspired soul” within, or how one might recognise it as “genuine” when one had found it. Carlyle was a major influence on Arnold and his friends whilst he was a student at Oxford, but that influence waned as Arnold matured and Carlyle’s views became increasingly reactionary. Arnold’s friend and fellow-poet, Arthur Hugh Clough, thus said of Carlyle (to Emerson) that he “has led us all out into the desert, and he has left us there” [in Honan, 1981, p.142]. Carlyle’s work could not give Arnold the means to access the deepest levels of his poetic self, or to reconcile his ordinary self with his poetic self, in the way that, for example, the works of Frazer, Freud and Jung would do for poets of a later generation [Faas, 1988, p.131]. As A.L. Le Quesne noted:
Carlyle derived a conviction of the fundamental importance of the hidden depths in human nature, accessible... above all through the use of symbols... in his best work of the 1830s... the central theme is the superiority of the unconscious element in man to the conscious... Carlyle can be felt groping intuitively for concepts of the subconscious mind and the mass unconscious that have had to wait for the twentieth century for their development. [Le Quesne, 1993, pp.32-33]
However, according to Le Quesne, by the 1840s Carlyle began to feel the strain of being constantly torn apart by the creative forces emerging from his subconscious too much to bear, so he renounced access to those forces. His politics then became increasingly reactionary as he identified the destructive “mob” of the lower orders with the destructive power of the subconscious [Le Quesne, 1993, pp.90-91]. (This was an identification which Arnold was also later to make, to some extent, in Culture and Anarchy.) But because those concepts of “the subconscious mind and the mass unconscious” had thus to wait for the twentieth-century for development, Arnold could not have used Carlyle to help him to structure a poem, or to help him to elucidate it, in the same way that Eliot used Frazer in “The Waste Land” and in his “Notes on The Waste Land”. In the end, however, according to Hughes, although this was after Arnold’s time, and a little after Eliot’s, the transition from external to internal god or muse was an easy one. According to Hughes:
nothing disrupted the basic arrangements. The translation [by Freud] was first class. An ordinary ego still has to sleep and wake with some other more or less articulate personality hidden inside it, or behind it or beneath it, who carries on, just as before, living its own outlandish life, and who turns out, in fact, to be very like the old poetic self: secularized, privatized, maybe only rarely poetic, but recognizably the same autonomous, mostly incommunicado, keeper of the dreams. Psychoanalysis simply re-drafted the co-tenancy contract in the new language... this doppelganger, though it might remain much of the time incognito, will always be dominant, with its hands, one way or another, on the controls; it will always possess superior knowledge about what is happening and will happen to the creature in which it dwells; and, more important, and reintroducing with a bang the
144
heady higher gyroscope of a sacred creation, it may represent and may even contain, in its vital and so to speak genetic nucleus, the true self, the self at the source, that inmost core of the individual, which the Upanishads call the divine self, the most inaccessible thing of all. [Hughes, 1995, pp.274-275]
Like Arnold and Eliot, both Freud and Frazer used Greek mythology to negotiate the transition from an external to an internal “God”, and to systemise access to this internal “God”. This was perhaps because a dogmatic insistence on the continued existence of an external God was still a feature of both Christianity and Judaism in the nineteenth- century, whereas no one insisted on the continued existence of external Greek gods. However, it was a dogmatic insistence that (in Christianity) Arnold also did his best to undermine, as the title of his book Literature and Dogma indicates. Arnold, along with many other writers of the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, seemed to believe that Jesus was not wholly “unique”. He believed that it was a myth that he was the Son of God, and he also believed that there was more than just one such myth that mattered. As Lionel Trilling noted:
Anyone who thinks about modern literature in a systematic way takes for granted the great part played in it by myth, and especially by those examples of myth which tell about gods dying and being reborn - the imagination of death and rebirth, reiterated in the ancient world in innumerable variations that are yet always the same, captivated the literary mind at the very moment when, as all accounts of the modern world agree, the most massive and compelling of all stories of the resurrection had lost much of its hold upon the world. [Trilling, 1966, p.14]
By 1922 Ezra Pound could thus state that he considered Ovid’s Metamorphoses, which documents the deaths and rebirths of a diverse range of Dionysian or Christ-like gods, “a sacred book, and the Hebrew scriptures the record of a barbarian tribe, full of evil” [in Gordon, 1977, p.69]. The myth of Empedocles being the son of a god who died and was reborn, and who resurrected others, was one which in a small way began to challenge the dominance of the myth of Jesus in the nineteenth-century, and this is probably the key thing to keep in mind as we read “Empedocles on Etna”. In “Empedocles on Etna”, Empedocles attempts to negotiate this transition from external to internal inspiration, as the old gods will no longer speak through him; and by the end of the poem he is seeing life as a test:
To see if we will now at last be true To our only true, deep-buried selves, Being one with which we are one with the whole world. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act II, lines 370-372]
By leaping into the crater of Etna Empedocles attempts to connect with what is literally subterranean, and symbolically he attempts to reconnect with what is metaphorically subterranean within himself. For Empedocles this reconnection is supposedly an occasion of great joy (“My soul glows to meet you”) [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act II, line
145
412]; as it is also in the work of Freud, according to Hughes:
psychoanalysis re-established, as its first principle, the ancient and formerly divine first law of psychodynamics, which states: any communication with that other personality, especially when it does incorporate some form of the true self, is healing, and redeems the suffering of life, and releases joy. In this respect, at least, the new and desacralized world has ended up very close to the most archaic and spiritualized, where poetry from the true source was acknowledged to be divine because it heals, and redeems the sufferings of life, and releases joy. As if it secreted, in some drug-like essence, the ungainsayable reassurance of the Creator himself. [Hughes, 1995, p.275]
Empedocles’ supposed joy at this reconnection contradicts Arnold’s assertion, in his preface to the Poems of 1853, that Empedocles’ situation was one in which there was no joy to be found [“Preface to Poems 1853”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, pp.2-3]. However, before he could experience that supposed joy in the crater, Empedocles had to traverse the spiritual waste land that was represented by the barren cone of Etna; and this hardly joyous traverse does occupy the vast bulk of Arnold’s poem. As Bloom noted of nineteenth-century poets and men of letters, like Arnold:
The God Word that came to the nineteenth-century prophets mixed perception and sensation into a new kind of sensibility, one that is still with us today... this sensibility emphasizes a continuum haunted by intimations of mortality punctuated by brief bursts of radiance-privileged moments in which a peculiar vividness gives the illusion of redeeming life. [in Arnold, 1983, p.vi]
Being a nineteenth-century poem, in the bulk of “Empedocles on Etna” boredom and despair do thus overshadow the joy, in Bloom-like fashion; and there is also the problem of Empedocles’ missing body. For if Eliot’s first major criticism of Arnold was that he had not undergone “the discipline of suffering”, then his second, inter-related major criticism of Arnold was that, because he had not undergone that “discipline of suffering” and thus died to his surface life, his body was not buried in his poems. In “Four Quartets” Eliot wrote of an Empedoclean or Bloom-like mix of brief epiphanies, long hours of boredom, the discipline of suffering and the Incarnation:
to apprehend The point of intersection of the timeless With time, is an occupation for the saint - ... a lifetime’s death in love, Ardour and selflessness and self-surrender. For most of us, there is only the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, The distraction fit, lost in a shaft of sunlight, The wild thyme unseen... These are only hints and guesses, Hints followed by guesses; and the rest Is prayer, observance, discipline, thought and action.
146
The hint half guessed, the gift half understood, is Incarnation. [Eliot, 1974, p.213]
Eliot meant two things there by “Incarnation”. One thing he meant is that it is only in those brief moments when our ordinary, everyday surface life and the buried life merge that we become - for that brief moment - an “Incarnation” of the god of the buried life. It is a fusion of infinite god within and finite human. However, it is only when we “die” to our surface lives through the discipline of suffering, so that we are reborn out of the buried life, that they may fuse for a more extended period of time. The second thing he meant is that if those moments are recorded in language, and written down, then, just as there was a fusion of infinite God and finite language in the words of Jesus Christ, so there is also potentially a fusion of the infinite god within and finite language in the words of the poet - in the poem. However, again, it is only when we “die” to our surface lives through the discipline of suffering, so that we are reborn out of the buried life, that they may merge or fuse for a more extended period of time than that which is recorded, for example, in a brief, youthful lyric fragment. The poet must die to their surface life, so that their body is buried in the poem. The diligent reader then resurrects that body, or causes its rebirth, fused this time with the infinite god within in an “Incarnation”. Eliot’s question would therefore be: did Arnold die to his surface life whilst writing “Empedocles on Etna”, which is his most ambitious poem, so that his body is buried in the poem and can be resurrected by the diligent reader? The evidence which the poem provides to answer such a question is equivocal. In the stories about Empedocles that Arnold drew upon, he supposedly just disappears into the crater, with even a whiff of charlatanry about the whole thing, so that we do not know for sure that he has sacrificed himself. He may have just hidden somewhere. There is no dead body to point to as proof that he has sacrificed himself; and then, again in the stories, he is not resurrected into wholeness in front of witnesses as a guarantee that what he has to say about the importance of connecting with the buried life is true. In Carlyle’s terms, there remains the suspicion that he might not have been a “genuine Man of Letters” at all. In terms of Eliot’s and Arnold’s concept of the buried life, it certainly seems that it is necessary for there to be a dead body that is fragmented and “buried” inside the psyche, or inside a poem, which is to be then resurrected into wholeness; and if the body is not there then it is not possible for there to be a release of that healing and joy that accompanies the resurrection into wholeness. As was noted, Hughes believed that Eliot had undergone the experience of dying to his surface life:
Everything about Eliot’s early life suggests that in some obscure part of himself he had foresuffered the sacrificial death of that deity even before he began to write under compulsion. This event, which was so much of his theme, and which lies so visibly among the roots of his poetry, can be seen as the spontaneous occurrence, in extraordinarily vivid and literal form, within him of that universal phenomenon, the traditional shaman’s crucial initiatory experience of visionary dismemberment... After the sacrificial death, for Eliot, came the years of mourning. But before the end came rebirth. [Hughes, 1995, p.284] 147
And the necessity of that dead body being there is a point that Arnold also insists upon over and over again in his poetry and prose. But Eliot felt that Arnold had not experienced this death, so that there could be no dead body awaiting resurrection buried in any of Arnold’s poems. Eliot thus felt that a suspicion of charlatanry hangs over Arnold, just as it hangs over Arnold’s Empedocles. Eliot in fact thought that a suspicion of charlatanry hung over the entirety of that genteel, non-religious, Anglo-American nineteenth-century humanism of which, for him, Arnold was a key representative. This was because he felt that a humanist’s education did not prepare him to undergo the shaman’s visionary death and dismemberment, and rebirth, in the way that, for example, a Christian mystic’s education sometimes did. Eliot wrote that:
Humanism has much to say of Discipline and Order and Control; and I have parroted these terms myself. I found no discipline in humanism; only a little intellectual discipline from a little study of philosophy. But the difficult discipline is the discipline and training of emotion; this the modern world has great need of; so great need that it hardly understands what the word means; and this I have found is only attainable through dogmatic religion... There is much chatter about mysticism: for the modern world the word means some spattering indulgence of emotion, instead of the most terrible concentration and askesis. But it takes perhaps a lifetime merely to realize that men like the forest sages, and the desert sages, and finally the Victorines and John of the Cross and (in his fashion) Ignatius really mean what they say. Only those have the right to talk of discipline who have looked into the Abyss. The need of the modern world is the discipline and training of the emotions; which neither the intellectual training of philosophy or science, nor the wisdom of humanism, nor the negative instruction of psychology can give. [Eliot, 1982, pp.32-33]
Eliot thus argued that Arnold could not understand the experiences of the shamanic Empedocles, and thus could not write a great, non-academic poem about him, because his humanist education precluded him from experiencing what someone like Empedocles had experienced. If anything would qualify as the nineteenth-century’s “The Waste Land” then it is Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna” [Drew, 1969, p.218]. But Eliot wrote of it that:
Arnold’s poetry has little technical interest. It is academic poetry in the best sense; the best fruit which can issue from the promise shown by the prize-poem. When he is not simply being himself, he is most at ease in a master’s gown: Empedocles on Etna is one of the finest academic poems ever written. [Eliot, 1964, p.105]
Faint praise. Eliot was concerned to show that Matthew Arnold was in the thrall of his famous headmaster-father, and thus an “academic”. He was concerned to show that he was not a poet occupied with a search for the buried life, but someone preoccupied with the surface life of the nineteenth-century: “Arnold was not Dryden or Johnson; he was an Inspector of Schools and he became Professor of Poetry. He was an educator” [Eliot, 148
1964, p.110]. And in “Empedocles on Etna” Empedocles does indeed impart some advice to his pupil, Pausanius, although that is only in a part of the poem. In his essay, “Matthew Arnold”, Eliot really echoed Swinburne’s criticism of 1865, when the earlier poet had described Arnold’s Merope (1858) as “the still-born child of an essentially academic imagination... the clothes are well enough but where has the body gone?” [in Faas, 1988, p.123]. Swinburne, in turn, perhaps echoed the substance of Carlyle’s observation in On Heroes and Hero Worship that:
the Art of Writing is the most miraculous of all things that man has devised... the Books of Greece! There Greece, to every thinker, still very literally lives; can be called-up again into life... Do not books still accomplish Miracles. [Carlyle, 1904, p.161]
It seems that for Eliot the miracle of resurrection cannot occur in a work of Arnold’s like “Empedocles on Etna”, and it seems that for Swinburne the miracle of resurrection cannot occur in a work of Arnold’s like Merope, because they believe that there was no body buried in those works in the first place. In a letter to his sister Jane, already quoted in part, in which he discussed Merope with her, Arnold indicated that he was aware that no miracle of resurrection could occur in that work; and that he was well-aware that the dead-body-to-be-resurrected that was missing from that poem was his own. He began by saying that if the “general public” would read and appreciate his poems, then:
I should gain the stimulus necessary to enable me to produce my best - all that I have in me, whatever that may be - to produce which is no light matter... People do not understand what a temptation there is, if you cannot bear anything not very good... to transfer your operations to a region where form is everything. Perfection of a certain kind may there be attained, or at least approached, without knocking yourself to pieces, but to attain or approach perfection in the region of thought and feeling, and to unite this with perfection of form, demands not merely an effort and a labour, but an actual tearing of oneself to pieces, which one does not readily consent to... unless one can devote one’s whole life to poetry...It is only in the best poetical epochs (such as the Elizabethan) that you can descend into yourself and produce the best of your thought and feeling naturally, and without an overwhelming and in some degree morbid effort. [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, p.402]
By the time he came to write Merope, in other words, Arnold was no longer prepared to sacrifice himself and descend into the tomb of the buried life, only to be resurrected in the minds of his poetry-reading public, in the manner described by Eliot in his essay “The Three Voices of Poetry”. The phrase “rest in peace” is Eliot’s crucial one:
The final handing over, so to speak, of the poem to an unknown audience, for what the audience will make of it, seems to me the consumation of the process begun in solitude and without thought of the audience... Let the author, at this point, rest in peace. [Eliot, 1957, pp.99-100]
149
Arnold was no longer prepared to sacrifice himself in the service of poetry because, like Carlyle before him, he was finding the strain too much to bear; and also because at that time Arnold did not have a sufficient poetry-reading public. To quote Bloom again on Arnold: “The test for prophecy finally is canonization; the books that return from the dead certify themselves as inescapable, and so as a vital part of the truth” [in Arnold, 1983, p.vii]. As the son of Dr Arnold and as a man married to the daughter of a wealthy Tory judge, Arnold wanted to be and needed to be successful in this world. He could not afford to entirely die to this world, only to be resurrected (possibly) in the next when some future reader might fully understand the enormity of what he had done. His Empedocles, too, makes such a compromise with the world; and so perhaps Empedocles’ charlatanry disguises the fact that he can no longer perform the miracle of returning from the dead or of resurrecting others. By the time of Merope, then, Arnold no longer felt that his body was in his poems. But Arnold did feel that his body was there in the earlier poems, and this is what Eliot is concerned with denying. It is as if, say, Eliot had been concerned to show that Arnold’s Scholar-Gipsy was not a scholar and a gypsy at all, but only a scholar who had spent his entire life at Oxford in thrall to other men’s books; a character, like Swinburne’s tutor and friend Benjamin Jowett, whom many have liked to think could think but not necessarily feel deeply [Faber, 1957, pp.83-100]. Eliot almost took such an academic path himself just before World War One when he took steps to establish a career as an academic philosopher, as an educator; and according to Sisson: “there is little doubt that had [Eliot] continued with his “academic philosophizing” he would have left his real springs untapped” [Sisson, 1981, p.128]. Perhaps like Arnold, who was elected a bachelor-Fellow of Oriel College in 1844 but resigned his fellowship when he got married, Eliot avoided that trap for at least a time by getting married, and thus avoiding the life of an unmarried don: “The careless reader” of “The Waste Land” “was apt to think that erudition impersonal. In fact, Eliot was able to make poetry out of From Ritual to Romance because his own sexual preoccupations give life to the world of fertility and legend” [Sisson, 1981, p.133]. As it was perhaps for Arnold, to be married was perhaps for Eliot, too, at first, a necessary part of his journey towards being “dead”. This was because it required a fuller engagement with the world in order to earn a living; it harried and divided his consciousness; and it required a sacrifice. In Greek myth, marriage and sacrifice are thus inextricably linked [Calasso, 1994, pp.106-107], as in the key myth of the marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia that Arnold made use of in “Empedocles on Etna”. For both Eliot and Arnold, feelings of romantic love were the main source of the lyric inspiration of youth; the main source of the feeling that “two human hearts might blend/ In one” [“Isolation - To Marguerite”, lines 38-39]. For Eliot, there were moments of youthful lyric impulse, inspired by his wife or Emily Hale, recorded in poems like “La Figlia Che Piange” and “The Waste Land”. But then there was a long period devoted to “the discipline of suffering” before the lyric impulse could be “reborn” in a more extended form, inspired by his new wife or Emily Hale again, in “Ash Wednesday”, 150
“Four Quartets” and “A Dedication to My Wife”. Similarly for Arnold, there were moments of youthful lyric impulse, inspired by his wife or “Marguerite”. Then there was a long period devoted to “the discipline of suffering”; but, unfortunately for him, his lyric impulse was never really “reborn”. In “Dover Beach”, which was inspired by the Arnolds’ honeymoon visit to Dover in 1851 [Arnold, 1965, pp.239-240], the opening lines record a moment of youthful lyric impulse: “Come to the window, sweet is the night air!” [“Dover Beach”, line 6]. But then the sea of romantic love retreats from them, as the “Sea of Faith” [“Dover Beach”, line 21], since it is a relic of the same “Sea”. (As it is, too, in “Ash Wednesday”) [Eliot, 1974, p.105]. What then lies before the married couple is not the “land of dreams” [“Dover Beach”, line 31] of wedded bliss, but a long period devoted to “the discipline of suffering”. Arnold’s allusion to Adam and Eve’s expulsion from Eden, in his echoing of Milton’s line, in Paradise Lost, about there being “neither joy nor love” [Paradise Lost, Book 4, line 509] in his line about there being “neither joy, nor love, nor light” [“Dover Beach”, line 33], reinforces this theme: “Yet happy pair; enjoy, till I return,/ Short pleasures, for long woes are to succeed” [Paradise Lost, Book 4, lines 534-535]. The “ignorant armies” on the “darkling plain” of middle age in “Dover Beach” [“Dover Beach”, lines 35-37] may thus be identified with the “hooded hordes swarming/ Over endless plains” in “The Waste Land” [Eliot, 1974, p.77]. Hardy’s version of “Dover Beach” in “The Discovery” is just about right [Fussell, 1977, pp.68-69]. “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, too, was inspired by a honeymoon visit of the Arnolds’ [Arnold, 1965, p.285]; and that poem, like “Dover Beach”, is also about long periods devoted to “the discipline of suffering”. “The Austerity of Poetry”, already discussed, is also about a newly-married couple and “the discipline of suffering”. Then in Arnold’s version of the myth of Cadmus and Harmonia, in “Empedocles on Etna”, the young couple have their moment of youthful lyric inspiration when all the gods came to their wedding, and at the “banquet all the Muses sang” [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act 1, Scene 2, line 451]. But then the “billow of calamity” [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act 1, Scene 2, line 445] overwhelms them, in a long period devoted to “the discipline of suffering”, before the lyric impulse is finally “reborn” in a more extended form. Cadmus and Harmonia are “reborn” as a pair of snakes who “stray/ For ever through the glens” [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 459-460] of Illyria together in eternal bliss, although such an experience may have been denied to Arnold himself. In summary, then, as poets, Eliot and Arnold share the concept of the buried life. Eliot got the concept mainly from the Victorians and Arnold from the Romantics, although they were both anxious to claim more remote, pre-dissociation precursors for their use of the concept. Both poets believed that an inner literary objectivity, which was the poetical tradition, flowed through the buried life, and that this replaced the no longer tenable outer objectivity of an external God accessed through the Bible. Both poets believed that one needed to be “dead” to one’s surface life in order to access this inner literary objectivity, which meant that one needed to be “dead” to one’s own individual personality. For since there is only one buried life for all people, to be a poet is not a 151
matter of expressing one’s individuality. Both poets believed that as the river of the buried life sunk ever-deeper below people’s surface lives, in post-dissociation times, an ever-deeper level of sacrifice was required from the poet. Only by such a level of sacrifice could they hope to truly “die” to their surface lives and thus have access the inner literary objectivity of the buried life. Again, because there is only one buried life for all people, both Eliot and Arnold believed that the poet must take on the burden of this “discipline of suffering”, or sacrifice, not on their own behalf, but on behalf of all post-dissociation humankind. The aim of the poet was to reverse the post-dissociation process of individuation, so that people’s surface lives and the buried life would again be one. Eliot’s poem “The Death of St. Narcissus” gives a good picture of what both Eliot’s and Arnold’s poetic personality of the buried life looks like, beneath the ordinary, everyday personality of their surface lives. Arnold’s poems “The Strayed Reveller” and “Empedocles on Etna” give us a picture of this same poetic personality. Eliot asked of Arnold, did he undergo “the discipline of suffering” and “die” to his surface life, so that his body is buried in his poems and may be resurrected by the diligent reader? Eliot’s answer was that, no, Arnold did not do so, so that his body is not buried in his poems. He felt that Arnold had been too caught up in the surface life of the nineteenth-century to devote himself properly to poetry. His criticism was that Arnold seemed to prefer to endure the boredom of an academic existence confined to the surface life of the nineteenth-century, as an alternative to exploring the deepest levels of experience, or the deepest circles of hell, in the buried life of the nineteenth-century that were the preferred abodes of Baudelaire; and that this preference affected the quality of his poetry. This was perhaps true of Arnold later in his career, when he had become Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and more of an academic critic than a poet, as his self- analysis at the time when he published Merope shows. However, in his early poetry Arnold seems to have devoted himself to the poetry of the buried life with probably as much fervor as Eliot, and with considerable success. The lyrics of Callicles in “Empedocles on Etna”, for example, or the lyric poem, “Dover Beach”, are major achievements, and hard-won.
152
Chapter Eight ______
Arnold, the Buried Life and Dionysus
In this chapter the aim is to establish an identification of Jesus Christ with Dionysus as the god of the buried life, in the same way that the god of Arnold’s buried life was identified with the god of Eliot’s in the previous chapter. This identification of Jesus Christ with Dionysus will then be used to further establish a parallel between what was felt to be the death and dismemberment of the Greek god with the rise of scientific rationalism in the fifth-century BC, and what was felt to be the death and dismemberment of the Christian god with the rise of scientific rationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries AD. It will then be argued that Greek tragedy was established at just a slight remove from the rituals of the Dionysian Mysteries, as scientific rationalism intruded, in the same way that modern tragedy was established at just a slight remove from (to use Weston’s terminology) the rituals of the “Mysteries” of Jesus Christ, as scientific rationalism intruded. Given Eliot’s indebtedness to Weston for “not only the title, but the plan and a good deal of the incidental symbolism” [Eliot, 1974, p.80] of “The Waste Land”, a parallel can then be established, in the following chapters, between the tragedy of Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna”, set in the fifth-century BC, and the tragedy of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, set in the twentieth-century AD. In a search for suitable origins for his concept of the buried life, Arnold, like Eliot after him, partly projected his metaphor back onto the classical world, and partly derived that metaphor from it. Arnold believed that in the mid-nineteenth-century the English middle classes were still in the grip of a puritan literalism, reading the Bible as dogma rather than literature. So, for Arnold, the literary texts of the classical world were useful in that he could read stories about the death and resurrection of gods like Dionysus as metaphors for spiritual death and rebirth, or as myths that were representations of our inner world and universal to human experience; rather than reading the Biblical texts as histories of the literal death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. Arnold believed that the ancient Greeks were almost unique in the complete integration they had at times achieved between their outer and inner worlds, or between their surface lives and the buried life. He also believed that this complete integration was the reason for what was seen as an untroubled serenity in their lives and as supreme achievement in their arts. For someone like Arnold, who was well-aware that he was no supreme artist, and who “had no real serenity, only an impeccable demeanour” [Eliot, 1964, p.119], as Eliot put it, the ancient Greeks thus offered an attractive ideal. However, just as Arnold only had access to the buried life through the tiny fragments of it that from time to time appeared in his surface life, so there were a number of factors that made it possible for him to access this integrated ancient Greek culture only through the few remaining fragments of it that survived to appear in the surface life of the nineteenth- century. 153
The first of these factors had to do with the often fragmentary nature of the cultural artifacts that had survived since the days of ancient Greece. The whole of the culture which, because of the integration Arnold believed the ancient Greeks had achieved, was also the whole of the buried life, could thus be accessed only through the fragments of it that appeared in the surface life of the nineteenth-century. Nevertheless, Arnold felt that it would be possible to “resurrect” the whole of the culture from these few remaining fragments. So, for example, Arnold urged Clough at one time to almost literally “resurrect” some early Greek poets and philosophers, known only from the briefest of surviving literary fragments:
With respect to literary employment much may be said - I will mention one or two things. 1. An edition of the Greek lyric poets before Sophocles, that should be readable. It should be in English and drenched in flesh and blood - each poet’s remains should be preceded by his life... it should be simply narrated under what circumstances we get each fragment... in what context the fragments come etc... 3. A judicious translation of Diog. Laertius, leaving out the trash, and taking away the dry compilatory character of the lives - making them living biographies as far as they go. [Lang, 1996 Vol.1, pp.237-238]
Arnold’s language here seems to indicate that he believed as much in a “physical resurrection” as a “spiritual resurrection” of these PreSophoclean poets and PreSocratic philosophers that could occur in the minds of the readers of a text, provided that a body had been buried in that text in the first place. It is as if the words were like their authors’ physical remains. In such a way, too, as he recommended to Clough, would Arnold try to piece together the “flesh and blood” of Empedocles from his surviving poetical and biographical fragments, and then “resurrect” him to make a “living biography” in “Empedocles on Etna”. Having “been much studying the remains of the early Greek religious philosophers”, Arnold wrote, he “desired to gather up and draw out as a whole the hints which [Empedocles’] remains offered” [Lang, Vol.3, p.189]. The second of these factors had to do with what was perceived in the nineteenth- century to be a “dissociation of sensibility”, or a division between people’s surface lives and the buried life, that had opened up in ancient Greek culture at some time in the fifth- century BC. The PreSocratic unity of thought and feeling in ancient Greek culture was thought to have been fragmented by the division, for the first time, of philosophy and history from poetry and mythology, or “logos” from “mythos” as Coupe has it [Coupe, 1997, pp.103-105]. The perception was that with this “dissociation of sensibility” the individual was left alone for the first time with his own thoughts, cut off from the fellow- feeling represented by the collective buried life. In “Empedocles on Etna” Arnold placed his Empedocles at the exact moment of this “dissociation”, after which moment the ancient Greeks were perceived as being no longer so serene and no longer so consistently capable of supreme artistic achievement. The Roman poet Lucretius, who drew upon the Greek philosophy of Epicurus, from the fourth-century BC [Lucretius, 1994, pp.x-xxv], was also of interest to Arnold because of the post-dissociation lack of serenity he seemed 154
to attribute to the ancient Romans. The third of these factors had its origins in a belief of the first Ionian philosophers, which was transmitted through Pythagoras and Parmenides to Empedocles, and was also transmitted through Plato and Aristotle to the likes of Matthew Arnold in the nineteenth-century. This belief was that although our perceptions of the surface of life are often fragmentary and subjective, it is nevertheless through these fragmentary, subjective perceptions that we can gain access to the unified, objective, unchanging reality that lies beneath or behind the surface of life: “As time went on, almost everything” in [ancient Greek] philosophy “became subordinated to the ‘problem of change’ - of explaining the ‘transitory flux’ of experience in terms of the ‘unchanging realities’ that lay behind it” [Toulmin and Goodfield, 1965, p.40]. (This “problem of change” would be Empedocles’ major concern in his long philosophical monologue in “Empedocles on Etna”) [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 77-426]. The poet Louis MacNeice, who like Arnold studied Greats at Oxford, thus noted that ever since Jowett in the nineteenth-century, Oxford philosophy, heavily influenced by Plato, had been almost wholly concerned with what were considered to be the unchanging realities that lay behind the transient flux of our perceptions of the world. Like Arnold, MacNeice “wanted the world to be One, the incarnation of an absolute idea” [MacNeice, 1982, p.124]. But like Arnold, too, MacNeice was also fascinated by the transient flux of our perceptions: “The drunkenness of things being various”, as he phrased it [in Dougall, 1998, pp.178-179]. MacNeice’s motto at Oxford, he reported, was “Up Dionysus!” [MacNeice, 1982, p.110]. The fourth of these factors had to do with the way that PreSocratic philosophers such as Pythagoras and Empedocles hinted that they had special access to an occult knowledge derived from the East; some union of thought and feeling that has since been lost to the surface of life except in the tiniest of fragments, and of which they had rediscovered the whole. These hints became important to poets like Arnold or Baudelaire in the nineteenth-century, because, as Hough noted, for the most part such poets, attracted to occultism:
have refused the great public mythologies of our time, and have evolved rival myths of their own, some grandiose and comprehensive, some esoteric and private, but none with any status in the world of organized scientific and historical knowledge by which the world conducts its business... Because all these endeavours stand aside from the pragmatic activity of their age they tend to move towards abandoned areas of knowledge, unrecognized sources of enlightenment - in short towards some sort of occultism... It is claimed that poetry gives access to forgotten wisdom or a secret doctrine. Sometimes this is seen as an actual system of archaic knowledge, the wisdom of the East or a long-deserted historical road. Sometimes it is reduced to a psychologicism - the esoteric sources are and always have been in the interior life. The most powerful and persistent claim is that poetry itself is a kind of magic, the poet not only a seer but a magus, bringing into existence what he has seen in dreams. [Hough, 1991, pp.318-319]
155
Arnold’s Empedocles thus belongs to an obscure “pre-dissociation” tradition, outside the mainstream of philosophy and science, in just the same way that Arnold’s Scholar-Gipsy does, too. In “Empedocles on Etna” Arnold thus looked to the remote past for a reintegration of the modern psyche and of modern society, for reasons that many of his more earnest contemporaries, such as Clough, found puzzling and obscure. The fifth of these factors had to do with the perceived place of the story of the god Dionysus at the heart of ancient Greek culture, in the same way that the story of Jesus Christ was perceived to be at the heart of modern European culture. (By “Dionysus” we mean to group together, as Frazer did, a host of very similar gods from the ancient world, such as Adonis, Attis, Osiris and Dionysus [Frazer, 1993, pp.324- 392], into “the myth and ritual of the Dying God” [Vickery, 1973, p.39]. Frazer believed that Jesus Christ should also be grouped with these same gods) [Coupe, 1997, p.25]. By his death and resurrection Dionysus, or gods like him, supposedly enabled the reintegration of the Many of people’s surface lives in ancient Greece with the One of the buried life, through his Mystery cult, in the same way that the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ supposedly enabled the reintegration of the Many of people’s surface lives with the One of the buried life in modern Europe, perhaps through the Mass. As Arnold wrote:
Whoever identifies himself with Christ, identifies himself with Christ’s idea of the solidarity of men. The whole race is conceived as one body, having to die and rise with Christ, and forming by the joint action of its regenerate members the mystical body of Christ. [St. Paul and Protestantism, Super, 1960-77, Vol. 6, p.49]
But, as was noted, the story of Dionysus was useful to Arnold in ways that the story of Jesus Christ was not, in that it was regarded as literature and was thus not subject to the dogmas of English puritanism. Symbolically speaking, it was felt that to be able to piece together Dionysus and resurrect him, or to re-enact Dionysus’ journey from disintegration and death to reintegration and resurrection, was to be able to piece together ancient Greek culture and resurrect it. So it was a task like this one that Arnold set himself in “Empedocles in Etna”. Margot K. Louis has recently analysed this Romantic perception, inherited by Arnold, and by Hughes, that the story of the god Dionysus was at the heart of ancient Greek culture. (Hughes wrote that the “Mysteries were regarded... as the living source of the spiritual life in the Greece of the period of the great tragedies and for long after”) [Hughes, 1993, p.449]. She notes how since the eighteenth-century the Mysteries have been associated with the “One” of monotheism, and seen to be more truly religious, whereas the Olympian gods have been associated with the “Many” of polytheism, and seen to be less truly religious [Louis, 2007, p.2]. She notes how for Coleridge the Mysteries specifically counteracted the polytheism of the Olympian theology, and “dimly conveyed religious truths” that he, as a Christian, felt obliged to say had been more clearly conveyed by the Hebrew prophets [Louis, 2007, p.3]. For Coleridge, the Mysteries dealt with the One of imagination, whereas the Olympians were products of 156
the Many of fancy [Louis, 2007, p.13]. Louis also notes that one of Coleridge’s German sources, Creuzer (whom Arnold also read at Oxford in the 1840s) [Honan, 1981, p.94], wrote of how the Greek mythology of the Olympians was “a childish, uncomprehending plagiarism of Eastern wisdom. The revelations of divine unity, attained in India... were degraded by the Greeks’ polytheistic exuberance”, so that only in “the ancient Mystery religions was the true spiritual impulse retained”. For Creuzer, “all things flow from God and must return to him” [Louis, 2007, p.4]. Louis further notes that in the nineteenth-century the Many of the Olympian gods was seen, in Nietzschean fashion, as the product of the “tendency to indivdualize”, or the process of individuation, whilst the One of the Mysteries was seen to suggest the “universality of deity”. The process of individuation was seen to break down the bonds of human sympathy between people, and it was felt that these could only be restored by the sacrifice of Dionysus, or a god like him, in the Mysteries [Louis, 2007, p.5]. Louis thus notes that:
In “The Strayed Reveller” (1849), Matthew Arnold also presented Olympians who see the world’s pain without sympathy; against their indifference he sets the gods of the Mysteries and especially the vision of “The desired, the divine, / Beloved Iacchus” (279-80). Again in Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna (1852), while Typho groans under the mountain, Zeus relaxes in “awful pleasure bland”, and “the soothed gods smile” (2.67, 81); ignoring the Maenads’ appeals, young Apollo serenely waits as the knife is whetted for the flaying of Marsyas:
But he turned his beauteous face Haughtily another way, From the grassy sun-warmed place Where in proud repose he lay, With one arm over his head, Watching how the whetting sped. (2. 159-64) [Louis, 2007, pp.8-9]
Marsyas, who represents Dionysus here, lost a musical contest to Apollo and was hung from a tree and flayed alive; so that, according to Ovid, and figuratively like the poet of Arnold’s buried life, he was: “all one raw wound. Blood flowed everywhere, his nerves were exposed, unprotected, his veins pulsed with no skin to cover them.” But then after his death, again according to Ovid (and figuratively like the poet of Arnold’s buried life again), he was resurrected as a river gushing forth from underground springs: “From its source the water goes rushing down to the sea, hemmed in by sloping banks. It is the clearest river in Phrygia, and bears the name of Marsyas” [Ovid, 1955, pp.157-158]. In the nineteenth-century, then, poets and scholars working within the tradition of Romanticism were interested in reconstructing from the surviving literary or archaeological fragments what they saw as the “classical spirit” or the “soul of classicism”, which they identified with Greece rather than with the Rome of their forefathers. Perhaps inspired by new approaches to Homeric criticism and Biblical criticism, both of which were mainly concerned with deconstructing their texts into what were now perceived to be their constituent literary fragments; or with reconstructing the 157
“inner spirit” of their texts from what were now perceived to be the surviving archaeological and literary fragments; or with obsessively tracing parallels between Homer and the Bible [Turner, 1981, p.83; pp.154-170]; such poets and scholars, as has been noted, often identified Dionysus with Jesus Christ to establish a parallel between what was felt to be the death and dismemberment of the Greek god with the rise of scientific rationalism in the fifth-century BC, and what was felt to be the death and dismemberment of the Christian god with the rise of scientific rationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries AD [Stone, 1997, pp.81-103; McGahey, 1994, p.53; p.58]. Their bodies fragmented in death, it was nevertheless felt by some that the spirit or soul of these gods could be reconstructed through the inspired or diligent efforts of poets and scholars, and the body eventually resurrected. By inspired or diligent spade- work one could thus hope to piece together from the fragments of ancient Greek civilisation that remain to us the unity of its buried life concealed within, and by doing so also perhaps help to reconnect what was felt to be the fragmented surface life of the nineteenth-century with what was felt to be a more unified buried life concealed somewhere deep within. It may be because he worked within this tradition that, for example, Frazer achieved such fame and influence. For at the end of the nineteenth- century he gathered together all the threads of the century’s classical scholarship, and pieced together in The Golden Bough a composite picture of Dionysus, assembled from innumerable fragments of stories and customs gathered from around the world, to reveal “the ‘gloomy side’ of Dionysian worship... in all its splendid terror” [Turner, 1981, p.119]. In Greek mythology Apollo and Dionysus are both sons of Zeus. But, as Roberto Calasso notes, “Apollo is to Zeus what Zeus had been to Kronos” [Calasso, 1994, p.77]; and in some myths it is as if Zeus has been succeeded so that Apollo takes on the role of the father and Dionysus that of the son. In other myths it is as if Zeus is the father, Apollo is the son and Dionysus is Apollo’s inner nature. According to Frazer, one version of the myth of Dionysus is about how Zeus visited Persephone in the form of a serpent, and she bore him Dionysus. Then soon after he was born Dionysus mounted the throne of his father Zeus. But he did not occupy the throne for long, for in the form of a bull he was soon cut to pieces by the murderous knives of his enemies, the Titans, “who rushed upon him, cut him limb from limb, boiled his body with various herbs, and ate it” [Frazer, 1993, p.388]. Frazer considered it very noteworthy that in his infancy Dionysus occupied for a short time the throne of his father Zeus, since this points “to a custom of temporarily investing the king’s son with the royal dignity as a preliminary to sacrificing him instead of his father” [Frazer, 1993, p.389]. This slaying of the son provides a particular link between the myth of Dionysus and the myth of the buried life. According to some versions of the myth of Dionysus, the severed limbs of Dionysus were pieced together, at the command of Zeus, by Apollo, who buried them on Parnassus. The grave of Dionysus was shown in the Delphic temple beside a golden statue of Apollo; and in winter, whilst Apollo was absent, Dionysus was worshipped 158
there in his place [McGahey, 1994, p.11]. According to other versions of the myth, Dionysus’ mother pieced together his mangled limbs and made him young again. In other versions again, he was torn to pieces at Thebes and buried there. In still others, it is said that shortly after his burial he rose from the dead and ascended to heaven. The ancient Greeks certainly took comfort from these stories, in much the same way that modern Christians may take comfort from the story of the Resurrection of Jesus Christ, for Plutarch, “writing to console his wife on the death of their infant daughter, comforts her with the thought of the immortality of the soul as taught by tradition and revealed in the mysteries of Dionysus” [Frazer, 1993, p.389]. Frazer thought that the legends of the deaths of Pentheus and Lycurgus, two kings who are said to have been torn to pieces, the one by Bacchanals, the other by horses, for their opposition to the rites of Dionysus, may be “distorted reminiscences of a custom of sacrificing divine kings in the character of Dionysus and of dispersing the fragments of their broken bodies over the fields for the purpose of fertilising them.” He thought that it was “probably no mere coincidence that Dionysus himself is said to have been torn in pieces at Thebes, the very place where according to legend the same fate befell King Pentheus at the hands of the frenzied votaries of the vine-god” [Frazer, 1993, p.392]. The story of Dionysus has a number of similarities to the story of Jesus Christ, and it was because of the identification of Jesus Christ with Dionysus that, for Arnold as for many others in the nineteenth-century [Turner, 1981, pp.124-125], the “soul of classicism” was to be found in the ancient Mystery religions that worshipped gods like Attis, Dionysus, Osiris or Adonis, dealt with by Frazer; and a study of these religions hinted at what was lacking especially in the post-dissociation scientific and Protestant cultures of modern England or Germany. From the seventeenth-century, secret (mostly Protestant) societies like those of the Freemasons had sprung up to supply this lack, as E.M. Butler observed in The Myth of the Magus:
They seized and held the imagination of men chiefly by virtue of their ritual mysteries which claimed prehistoric sanction... What the Freemasons declared about themselves is substantially true of all secret societies, “... the royal art has, like the ancient mysteries, no other aim than the knowledge of nature, where all are born, die, and regenerate themselves.” And the three grades representing generation, putrefaction and regeneration are the age-old features in primitive kingship rites, so that the myth of the magus was once more being enacted in its traditional form. [Butler, 1993, p.179]
As Empedocles in ancient times was associated simultaneously with the birth of philosophy and science and with the survival of the older mystery religions, so the Freemasons were associated simultaneously with the birth of modern philosophy and science, by their role in the establishment of the Royal Society [Lomas, 2002, pp.1-437], and with a supposed complementary revival of the ancient mystery religions. There is even the tale assocated with Masonry of the magician and architect of Solomon’s
159
Temple, Hiram, being murdered for his secrets, then being torn into fragments and buried, like Dionysus, before being resurrected into wholeness to be the Grand Master of the Freemasons [Butler, 1993, p.180]. These societies claimed to have pieced together from the surviving fragments the whole of the ancient mystery religions; and they hoped by this process to be able to overcome the negative effects of what was felt to be the death and dismemberment of Jesus Christ caused by the rise of their philosophy and science. Then being secretive, they in turn doled out only the most fragmentary hints of what they purported to know about this whole, except perhaps to the very highest order of initiates, who had the means to piece together the whole from the fragments. For them, as for Arnold, it was the fragment that gave access to the whole. In his essay on “Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment” (1864) Arnold turned his attention to the issue of what was most lacking in the scientific, Protestant cultures of modern England and Germany, and he also established a parallel between Adonis and Jesus Christ. (Or Dionysus and Jesus Christ. Even Plutarch noted that: “It is said that the beautiful Adonis is none other than Dionysus”) [in Thubron, 1987, p.178]. In this essay Arnold finds his metaphor of the buried life in both “Idyll XV” by Theocritus and “Canticle of the Sun” by St. Francis. It is a metaphor about the birth, death and rebirth of both Adonis and Jesus Christ; of them both dying to the surface life and then being reborn out of the buried life, to reintegrate people’s surface lives with the buried life and redeem post-dissociation humankind. Arnold thus locates both Theocritus and St. Francis in post-dissociation times. However, his Theocritus appears to dwell more in his surface life, or the “transient”, dissociated from the buried life; whilst his St. Francis appears to dwell more in the buried life, or the “enduring”, dissociated from his surface life. In this essay Arnold again notes that the integrated culture of pre-dissociation Greece is his ideal:
there is a century of Greek life, - the century preceding the Peloponnesian war, from about the year 530 to the year 430 BC, - in which poetry made, it seems to me, the noblest, the most successful effort she has ever made as the priestess of the imaginative reason, of the element by which the modern spirit, if it would live right, has chiefly to live. Of this effort... the four great names are Simonides, Pindar, Aeschylus, Sophocles. [“Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment”, Super, 1960-77, Vol. 3, pp.230-231]
There is a link between these “four great names”, in that Simonides and Pindar wrote dithyrambs, choric hymns celebrating Dionysus, which evolved from shamanism [McGahey, 1994, p.8], and out of which the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles in turn evolved [Levi, 1985, pp.150-151]. Tragedy thus began to evolve from about 534 BC when the poet Thespis first added an actor separate from the tragic chorus: “Thespis stood apart from the Chorus and announced, ‘I am the God Dionysus’” [Kelly, 2006, p.38]. (That date may therefore be said to mark the beginning of the process of the dissociation of sensibility in ancient Greece, or the beginning of Nietzsche’s process of individuation.) Dismissing the Olympian gods [“Pagan and Medieval Religious
160
Sentiment”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.215], Arnold instead locates the soul of ancient Greek culture in the cult of Adonis who, like Dionysus or like Jesus Christ, died and was resurrected. Adonis was torn apart by a wild boar and resurrected in the form of the anemone flower, whilst there was also a river Adonis in Lebanon:
‘Beloved Adonis, alone of the demigods (so men say) thou art permitted to visit both us and Acheron... Dear to us hast thou been at this coming, dear to us shalt thou be when thou comest again.’ [in “Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.221]
Arnold reconstructs the whole meaning of this cult from the fragments of it presented in a tale by Theocritus (in his “Idyll XV”), from the post-dissociation third-century BC. Appropriately for its time, this idyll is more concerned with people’s shallow surface lives than with the cult of Adonis, dealing as it does with two shallow, gossipping women who are residents of fashionable Alexandria, and who are getting themselves ready to go to the festival of Adonis. The poem is thus by-and-large “descriptive, superficial and occasional”, rather than “inward, sincere, and deeply felt, serious, often religious”, as Dr and Mrs Arnold may have wished it [apRoberts, 1983, pp.9-10]. However, Arnold delves below the tale’s shallow surface. “Symbolically treated,” writes Arnold:
as the thoughtful man might treat it, as the Greek mysteries undoubtedly treated it, this story [of Adonis] was capable of a noble and touching application, and could lead the soul to elevating and consoling thoughts. Adonis was the sun in his summer and in his winter course, in his time of triumph still moving towards his defeat, in his time of defeat still returning towards his triumph. Thus he became an emblem of the power of life and the bloom of beauty, hastening inevitably towards diminution and decay, yet in that very decay finding “Hope, and a renovation without end.” [“Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.222]
Arnold was apparently thinking here of Apollo as god of the sun in its aspect of unchanging constancy, and Adonis as god of the sun in its inconstant aspect, seasonally dying and being reborn [Turner, 1981, p.112]. (This provides the link with St. Francis’ “Canticle of the Sun”.) Even in its degraded form, the cult of Adonis is seen by Arnold to add a little spiritual depth to the shallow, post-dissociation lives of these two fashionable women, since its poetry and rituals provide them with at least some sort of a connection to the buried life. It helps to redeem the time, like the cult of Hiram for the Masons in the eighteenth-century. But if Theocritus’ aim had been to reintegrate the Many of people’s surface lives in third-century BC Alexandria with the One of the buried life, even momentarily, through the reintegration and resurrection of Adonis in his poem, then in Arnold’s judgement he probably just failed in that attempt. However, if Frye is correct, Theocritus nevertheless initiated that tradition of the pastoral elegy mentioned in Chapter Two. This is the tradition that, ever since Theocritus, has appeared as “a literary adaptation of the ritual of the Adonis lament” [Frye, 2000, p.99]. 161
Having lamented that at its best Catholicism served needs that Protestantism cannot [“Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, pp.212-215], Arnold then turns from Theocritus’ “Idyll XV” to St. Francis’ “Canticle of the Sun”. Arnold locates the soul of modern European culture in the religion of Jesus Christ who, like Adonis, died and was resurrected. Appropriately for its time, in an age of monastic revival, this canticle is more concerned with the buried life of Christ than with the detail of people’s surface lives in thirteenth-century Assisi. The poem is thus more “inward, sincere, and deeply felt, serious, often religious”, than it is “descriptive, superficial and occasional”, almost as Dr and Mrs Arnold may have wished it [apRoberts, 1983, pp.9- 10]. However, because of St. Francis’ interest in the natural world (unusual for his time), Arnold still finds in the “Canticle” more of a fusion of the stuff of people’s surface lives with the buried life than in the “Idyll” of Theocritus, although St. Francis’ lack of art and otherworldly focus makes the fusion less than perfect. St. Francis writes of the “Many” of the surface life issuing from the “One” of God, signified by the sun:
Praised be my Lord God with all his creatures; and specially our brother the sun, who brings us the day, and who brings us the light; fair is he, and shining with a very great splendour: O Lord, he signifies to us thee! [in “Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.224]
St. Francis then praises Empedocles’ four elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water [in “Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, pp.224-225], signifying the “Many” of the surface life, before writing of the buried life:
Praised be my Lord for our sister, the death of the body, from whom no man escapeth. Woe to him who died in mortal sin! Blessed are they who are found walking by thy most holy will, for the second death shall have no power to do them harm. [in “Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.225]
Arnold was probably thinking here of God the Father as god of the sun in its aspect of unchanging constancy, and of God the Son as god of the sun in its inconstant aspect, seasonly dying and being reborn, to establish his parallel between Adonis and Jesus Christ. In Arnold’s reading of the “Canticle”, the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ in the poem brings about an almost complete reintegration of the Many of people’s surface lives with the One of the buried life. For Arnold, it was this almost-fusion of people’s surface lives with the buried life, represented in the “Canticle”, which “made the fortune of Christianity”:
its gladness, not its sorrow; not its assigning the spiritual world to Christ, and the material world to the devil, but its drawing from the spiritual world a source of joy so abundant than it ran over on the material world and transformed it. [“Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.230]
162
Therefore, if St. Francis’ aim had been to reintegrate the One of the buried life with the Many of people’s surface lives in thirteenth-century Assisi, through the reintegration and resurrection of Jesus Christ in his poem, then in Arnold’s judgement he probably almost succeeded in that attempt. However, for Arnold this almost-fusion, which survived in monasteries like that of the Grande Chartreuse (established during the monastic revival of the twelfth and thirteenth-centuries, at the time of St.Francis) until fairly recent times, vanished with “the strong return towards the rule of the senses and understanding... in the eighteenth century” [“Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p. 226]. Too great a gap then opened up between people’s surface lives and the buried life for a mere survival of medieval monasticism to overcome it. As Arnold noted in his essay “Heinrich Heine”(1863):
the sense of want of correspondence between the forms of modern Europe and its spirit, between the new wine of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, and the old bottles of the eleventh and twelfth centuries... almost every one now perceives. [“Heinrich Heine”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.109]
For Arnold, Heine is like the Theocritus of this new post-dissociation age, writing poetry of the surface life that is much like Theocritus’ [“Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, pp.226-227]. But having praised St. Francis, Arnold then goes on to stress that even with him the fusion of “the life of the senses and understanding”, or the surface life, with “the life of the heart and imagination”, or buried life, is not as perfect as it was in Greece in the fifth-century BC [“Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.226-227]. Presumably thinking of St. Francis’ lines, quoted above, about those who have already “died” spiritually to their surface lives and thus walk “by thy most holy will”, Arnold then quotes the chorus in Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex:
“Oh! that my lot may lead me in the path of holy innocence of word and deed, the path which august laws ordain, laws that in the highest empyrean had their birth, of which Heaven is the father alone, neither did the race of mortal men beget them, nor shall oblivion ever put them to sleep. The power of God is mighty in them, and groweth not old.” [in “Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.231].
And he concludes: “Let St. Francis... beat that!” [in “Pagan and Medieval Religious Sentiment”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.3, p.231]. So it is apparent that Arnold did not believe that St. Francis had even matched Sophocles, let alone beaten him. Arnold’s point in “Pagan and Medievel Religious Sentiment” seems to be that Adonis and Jesus Christ are to all intents and purposes the same god, and that the cults or religions that surround them are both based on the metaphor or mythic scheme of the buried life. The process of the death and rebirth of this god, whatever its name, should therefore act to fuse the Many of people’s surface lives with the One of the buried life.
163
Arnold finds more of a fusion of people’s surface lives with the buried life, however, in St. Francis’ medieval Catholicism than he does in Theocritus’ paganism of the third- century BC or in Heine’s modern Protestantism. (Heine was a convert to Lutheranism.) But he still finds the most perfect fusion of all in the PreSophoclean and Sophoclean poetry and drama from the period 530-430 BC. Further, Arnold’s quote from Oedipus Rex seems to suggest that in tragedy he thought he found at least something of the substance of the ancient mystery religions in the form of public theatre. Even if St. Francis could not quite “beat” Sophocles, in Arnold’s estimation, one might still expect Jesus Christ Himself to be able to match it with the PreSocratics; and this proves to be the case in Arnold’s work. It has been said previously how Arnold internalised Christianity, so that his internal God the Father was like a universal mind and his internal God the Son was like a beautiful adolescent who suffered and died to his human limitations, on behalf of humankind, in order to be resurrected or reborn as a part of the universal mind of God the Father, and also to bring about the rebirth of religion and with it the rebirth of a whole society. For Arnold, Jesus Christ was not the subject of a virgin birth, or anything like that. But what He did have was complete access to this internal God the Son within the buried life, so that there was a complete fusion of His surface life with the buried life. For Him, the river of the buried life flowed completely on the surface, so to speak, so that the whole of His life, rather than just the odd moments of it represented by “spots of time”, was worth recording in an ordinary biographical sense. He was not the Son of God, then, in the sense of Christian dogma, but He was the perfect poet, in the sense of Arnold’s “Strayed Reveller”, so that the events of His surface life and events of His spiritual life were fused into one:
such a price The Gods exact for song: To become what we sing. [“The Strayed Reveller”, lines 232-234]
Or, to paraphrase Hughes on Eliot, with Jesus Christ the sufferings of the inner god and the sufferings of the ego were completely united in a pattern of redemption [Hughes, 1995, pp.289-290]. (Arnold would have also looked for this same pattern in ancient tragedy, with tragic heroes like Oedipus.) However, Arnold believed that this pattern of redemption, or pattern of spiritual death and rebirth, which Christ spoke of and was also the pattern of His life, was fragmented in the Bible by the incomprehension of His biographers and explicators. The pattern was therefore accessible only through the fragments of it which happened to survive in the Bible. In his essay “A Psychological Parallel” (1876), which he thought of as his final word on Christianity [Super, 1960-77, Vol.8, pp.406-407], Arnold would therefore try to reconstruct (or resurrect) what he felt to be the “real meaning” of Jesus Christ’s message to the world from these fragments preserved in the Bible, as he had also attempted to reconstruct (or resurrect) the “real meaning” of the cult of Adonis from the fragments of it preserved in Theocritus’ “Idyll XV”. Not surprisingly, this “real meaning” of Arnold’s has to do with this pattern of redemption, and nothing else; it has 164
only to do with the necessity of “dying” to your surface life and being “reborn” out of the buried life:
The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand! Change the inner man and believe the good news! He that believeth hath eternal life. He that heareth my word, and believeth him that sent me, hath eternal life, and cometh not into judgement, but hath passed from death to life. Verily, verily, I say unto you, The hour cometh and now is, when the dead shall hear the voice of the Son of God, and they that shall hear shall live... For whoever will save his life shall lose it; but whosoever shall lose his life for my sake and the sake of the good news, the same shall save it.... Therefore doth my Father love me, because I lay down my life that I may take it again... The Son of man came not to be served but to serve, and to give His life a ransom for many. I am the resurrection and the life; he that believeth in me, though he die, shall live; and he that liveth and believeth in me shall never die... behold, the kingdom of God is within you! [“A Psychological Parallel”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.8, pp.143-145]
This was one way of attempting to reconstruct or resurrect the One of the “real meaning” of Jesus Christ’s message to the world, from the Many of its fragments in the Bible. It was a way which Arnold also pursued in such books as St. Paul and Protestantism (1870), Literature and Dogma (1873) and God and the Bible (1875). But, for Arnold, to resurrect only the “real meaning” of Jesus Christ’s message to the world would never have been enough. Arnold always seemed to believe as much in a “physical resurrection” as a “spiritual resurrection” of Jesus Christ that could occur in the minds of the readers of His texts, provided that His body had been buried in those texts in the first place. And since for Arnold Jesus Christ was like the perfect poet, His body had to be buried in His words and could thus be resurrected by such a diligent reader as Arnold. After all, even in the Church of England’s Thirty-Nine Articles it is said: “The Son, which is the Word of the Father... truly suffered, was crucified, dead and buried”; then “did truly rise again from death, and took again his body, with flesh, bones, and all things appertaining to the perfection of Man’s nature” [from “Articles of Religion”, II & IV]. So, in one sense, in his works of Biblical criticism Arnold tried to do for Jesus Christ what he also tried to do for Wordsworth, or what he urged Clough to try to do with the PreSocratics, in that having reduced Him to fragments and buried Him, he then attempted His resurrection. Like many in the nineteenth-century, Arnold felt that to be able to piece together Dionysus and resurrect him, or to re-enact Dionysus’ journey from disintegration and death to reintegration and resurrection, was to be able to piece together ancient Greek culture and resurrect it. Similarly, Arnold felt that to be able to piece together Jesus Christ and resurrect Him, as in the above example, or alternatively to re-enact His journey from disintegration and death to reintegration and resurrection, was to be able to piece together modern European culture and resurrect it. So the other way of attempting to reconstruct or resurrect the One of the “real meaning” of Jesus Christ’s message to the world from the Many of its fragments, and to thus resurrect His body, was through the re-enactment of Christ’s journey in the Mass. Arnold’s lament that the rituals of 165
Catholicism served needs that Protestantism cannot thus seems to be a lament for the absence of the Catholic Mass in Protestantism, where the Flesh and Blood of Christ is supposedly physically rather than merely symbolically present. (In the Thirty-Nine Articles, again, it is reported that: “The Body of Christ is given, taken, and eaten, in the Supper”, but “only after an heavenly and spiritual manner”; and that: “Transubstantiation... in the Supper of the Lord, cannot be proved by holy Writ”) [from “Articles of Religion”, XXVII]. By turning now to Stéphane Mallarmé, a number of elements in Arnold’s work can be here drawn together. In his essay “Catholicism” (1895), Mallarmé, like Arnold, wrote of medieval Catholicism as an outworn creed [Brooker, 1994, p.31]. He thus imagined the Mass as being recast in the future as an “Ideal Drama” [in Brooker, 1994, p.33], bearing perhaps the same relation to the old idea of the Mass as Greek tragedy bore to the rituals of the cult of Dionysus, out of which it was born: “Greek tragic drama had many elements of ritual and was performed only at festivals of Dionysus” [Levi, 1985, p.150]. From Arnold’s perspective, or Mallarmé’s, Greek tragedy was not exactly ritual in that, as Peter Levi put it, “something like scientific rationalism” begins to intrude [Levi, 1985, p.177]. Or as Frye put it, tragedy leads up to an “epiphany” of scientific law, “of that which is and must be”; so that: “It can hardly be an accident that the two great developments of tragic drama, in fifth-century Athens and seventeenth-century Europe, were contemporary with the rise of Ionian and Renaissance science” [Frye, 2000, p.208]. Greek tragedy dealt with individuals who are human but also represent Dionysus. As Nietzsche wrote:
According to an incontrovertible tradition, the suffering of Dionysus was the sole subject of the earliest form of Greek tragedy and for a long time there was no other available stage hero than Dionysus himself. And we may maintain with equal assurance that up to the time of Euripides Dionysus remained the tragic hero, and that all the famous figures of the Greek stage, Prometheus, Oedipus, and so on, are only masks of that original hero Dionysus. [Nietzsche, 2000, p.59]
These individuals represent Dionysus as the cyclic, or dying and reborn, inner being of Apollo, as they “die” to their surface lives, or individual wills, in the drama, and are “reborn” out of the buried life as a part of the collective will or universal mind of Apollo. The thoughts of this collective will or universal mind, which are about scientific law, are expressed through the chorus, as in the example from Oedipus Rex quoted by Arnold above. This process symbolically reintegrates the Many of people’s surface lives with the One of the Buried life, and thus could be said to act symbolically to halt or reverse for a time the process of individuation in Greek society. The Catholic Mass, although it is ritual, is similar to tragedy in that it re-enacts the sacrificial death and rebirth of Jesus Christ, who is both human and divine, as He dies to His surface life and is reborn out of the buried life, reintegrated into the universal mind of God. Although it is concerned with spiritual resurrection, the re-enactment in the Mass also focuses on physical resurrection in terms of the Real Presence, the broken
166
Body and spilt Blood of Christ, and the Resurrection of Christ’s Body. For Mallarmé, it is this actual, physical re-enactment of Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection which gives meaning to the Mass [Brooker, 1994, p.36]. As with tragedy, this re-enactment is communal rather than solitary, symbolically reintegrating the Many of people’s surface lives with the One of the buried life, so that it could also be said to act symbolically to halt or reverse for a time the process of individuation in modern European society. Mallarmé’s “Ideal Drama”, then, should presumably be at just a slight remove from the ritual of the Catholic Mass, as scientific rationalism intrudes, in the same way that Greek tragedy is at just a slight remove from the ritual of the Mysteries. (At one time Aeschylus was charged with revealing a little too much of the Mysteries on stage, and had to seek refuge in the temple of Dionysus) [Kelly, 2006, p.42]. Mallarmé may have had Nietzsche’s discussion of a Dionysian Wagner, in The Birth of Tragedy, in mind as a possible model for this Ideal Drama, which provides a link with ancient Greece [Brooker, 1994, p.32]. However, both Mallarmé and Arnold were condemned to the occultism of a private mythology, despite their best efforts at propaganda; and the closest things to Mallarmé’s “Ideal Drama” that exist today are perhaps the public ceremonies commemorating those who died in the wars of the twentieth-century. Mallarmé’s Ideal Drama would need to deal, not directly with Jesus Christ Himself, as does the Mass, but with individuals who are human but also represent Jesus Christ. For these individuals, the river of the buried life would flow on the surface for an extended period of time, so to speak, which is represented in the Ideal Drama; so that an extended period of their lives, rather than just odd moments of it represented by “spots of time”, would be worth recording in an ordinary biographical sense. This extended period of time could be represented not just in lyric poetry, but also in a more extended form like tragedy. To paraphrase Hughes on Eliot again, with these individuals the sufferings of the inner god and the sufferings of the ego would be completely united, for a time, in the Ideal Drama in a pattern of redemption. The question is whose actual, physical suffering, death and resurrection would give meaning to this Ideal Drama, or to the fragments of it represented in lyric poetry, in the way that Jesus Christ’s suffering, death and resurrection gives meaning to the Mass. Mallarmé’s answer, like Arnold’s in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse”, when he wrote of the sufferings of Byron, Shelley and Senancour, is that it is the poet’s actual, physical suffering, death and resurrection that give meaning to this Ideal Drama:
In Mallarmé’s aesthetic, writing a poem is analogous to Christ’s Passion, and reading a poem to the ceremony of the Mass. The first, which features the poet, is essentially lonely and culminates in death. The second, which features primarily the audience, is essentially communal and culminates in rebirth... he writes about the suffering a poet must undergo in order to write a great work; and he confesses, “I died, and have risen from the dead with the key to the jewelled treasure of my last spiritual casket”... he writes that in order to purify poetry and link a poem to the “idea of the Universe,” he has endured indescribable nights of horror, culminating in death... as Golgotha was preceded by Gethsemane, Mallarmé insists that the death of the poet is preceded by agonie, a severe anguish preparing him for 167
the sacrificial act that will redeem the text from nothingness... But death is followed by resurrection, for the poet is resurrected in the reader’s communion service... The god resurrected in this ceremony is the poet who sacrificed himself in the creation of the poetic text. [Brooker, 1994, pp.34-35]
The poet’s task, as both Mallarmé and Arnold see it, is to re-enact Christ’s journey on behalf of their society, in order to stave off the entropy of individuation for a little while and redeem, for at least a time, our post-Edenic world. As poets, both Mallarmé and Arnold, by their re-enactment, thus hoped to to reconnect what was felt to be the fragmented surface life of the nineteenth-century with what was felt to be a more unified buried life concealed somewhere deep within. In other words, they wanted to make a living unity out of the dead fragments of a god not yet resurrected. Atwood described a similar process at work in the visual arts, where, as something like scientific rationalism intruded, the gods died and gradually withdrew from images of themselves to make them just art. But then in the nineteenth-century artists tried to bring the gods back, to make their images “Art”:
Long ago, we are told, images were worshipped as gods, and were thought to have the power of gods... Then images became representations of gods - icons, sacred in what they pointed to, not sacred as what they were in themselves. Then they became allegorical - the images alluded to or figured forth a set of ideas or relationships or entities not presented as themselves, but by stand-ins, as it were. Then art shifted its attention, and became descriptive of the natural world, a world in which God was not visible as such but was inferred as the original fabricator, thought to be lurking somewhere in the past or behind the Newtonian scenery. Then even this assumption faded. A landscape was a landsape, a cow was a cow: they might point towards states of mind and feeling, but the mind and feeling were human. The Divine Presence had withdrawn. But in the West, as religion lost helium in society at large, the Real Presence crept back into the realm of art. Throughout the nineteenth century, the perception of the artist’s role shifted: by the end of it, he or she was to serve this mystic entity - Art with a capital A - by assisting in the creation of a sacred space, as contained within the borders of the work of art itself... The artist was to be its priest, bringing Real Presence into being as the Roman Catholic priest was thought to bring the Real Presence of God into present time and place in the celebration of the Mass. [Atwood, 2003, pp.53-54]
Elsewhere, Atwood explains how it is through their re-enactment of the gods’ death, descent into the Underworld and resurrection or return that the artist, like the priest, brings the Real Presence back into being, and makes again a living unity of the gods [Atwood, 2003, pp.137-161]. For Arnold, at least, the main model for how to make this living unity happen was in Greek tragedy from the fifth-century BC, although he had only a few fragments of the tragedy from that era to work from. This was because only seven of Aeschylus’ eighty plays survive; only seven of Sophocles’ one hundred and twenty; and only eighteen of Euripides’ ninety plays. From Arnold’s perspective, those ancient tragedians
168
had the benefit of working in a good poetic era, only just post-Edenic, when the river of the buried life flowed only just below the surface; so that they had to dig down only a foot or two, so to speak, and then the poetry came gushing out through them into scores of tragedies of extraordinary quality. Because the river flowed so near the surface it was easy for poets to gain access to it and write good poetry, and not much sacrifice was required. Or it was as if the inner god Dionysus still lurked only just below the surface of the individual poet or actor, so that it was still easy for them to merge with this inner Dionysus for extended periods of time. Arnold was always trying to write a tragedy on the Greek model, in place of his lyric fragments, but working in a bad poetic era as he felt he did he found it extraordinarily difficult. His “Lucretius” was never completed and remained a mess of dead fragments; his “Empedocles on Etna” was not quite successful in that there is uncertainty as to whether Empedocles’ body is buried in the text, so that his resurrection is problematical; and his “Merope” remains dead or inert. One of Arnold’s key statements on the nature of the poet’s task, as he saw it, came in the first lecture he gave as the Oxford Professor of Poetry in 1857, “On the Modern Element in Literature”. In this lecture he compared the complexity of Athenian life in the fifth-century BC to the complexity of life in nineteenth-century England. According to Arnold, as was also the case in Athens in the fifth-century BC, such a complex spectacle as nineteenth-century England presents the poet with what seems at first to be a mass of unconnected fragments:
the present age exhibits to the individual man who contemplates it the spectacle of a vast multitude of facts awaiting and inviting his comprehension... [An intellectual deliverance] begins when our mind begins to enter into possession of the general ideas which are the law of this vast multitude of facts. It is perfect when we have acquired that harmonious acquiescence of mind which we feel in contemplating a grand spectacle that is intelligible to us; when we have lost that impatient irritation of mind which we feel in presence of an immense, moving, confused spectacle which, while it perpetually excites our curiosity, perpetually baffles our comprehension. [“On the Modern Element in Literature”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, p.20]
The problem for the poet was to find “the true point of view from which to contemplate this spectacle” [“On the Modern Element in Literature”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, p.20]. For twentieth-century English poets like Eliot, that “true point of view” was provided by Frazer’s The Golden Bough “which... influenced [his] generation profoundly” [Eliot, 1974, p.80]. What Frazer did was to use the myth of Dionysus as a metaphor for the division of modern man, after the “death of god”, by science into a mass of seemingly unconnected fragments. But he also tried to show, in cultural-uniformitarian fashion, that all these seemingly unconnected fragments, gathered together by scientists from around the world, are really fragments of the one god Dionysus, whether they be labelled “Dionysus”, “Adonis”, “Jesus Christ”, “Balder” or even “Empedocles”. He then intimated that Dionysus’ rebirth or resurrection into wholeness, and by implication modern man’s rebirth or resurrection into wholeness, will follow his death and division 169
as surely as spring follows winter: “Le roi et mort, vive le roi!” [Frazer, 1993, p.714]. Frazer therefore provided an argument that could be used to show that the fragments of the modern world are not irreversibly sundered; and Arnold’s use of the myth of Empedocles in “Empedocles on Etna”, for example, can be interpreted as one variation on Frazer’s myth of Dionysus. Although they had classical scholars such as Arnold’s Oxford friend F. Max Muller, who were beginning the task that Frazer would complete, and also Biblical scholars like D.F. Strauss and Ernest Renan, who were doing similar things for Jesus Christ, Arnold’s generation did not really have anyone like Frazer to draw upon. This may be one reason why their age was from Arnold’s point of view so unpoetical. Therefore, Arnold pointed to the ancient Greek tragedians of the fifth-century BC, such as Aeschylus and Sophocles, as models for what the nineteenth-century required to provide a true point of view of the spectacle of its fragmented self [“On the Modern Element in Literature”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, p.31]. It seemed that these tragedians had used the myth of Dionysus as a metaphor for the division, by science and philosophy, of fifth-century BC humankind, after the “death of god”, into a mass of seemingly unconnected fragments; but then they also pointed to the possibility of a new unity through the god’s rebirth or resurrection. Building upon the ideas of his nineteenth-century artistic and philosophical predecessors, it has been seen how in The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche explained how, in his opinion, this is what these tragedians had done with the myth of Dionysus [Nietzsche, 2000, pp.59-60]. Being fragments himself Arnold never really seemed able to fully imagine the rebirth of Dionysus, either in poetry or prose. But in his preface to Merope, the play which was Arnold’s main attempt to write a tragedy in the manner of Aeschylus or Sophocles, Arnold does note firstly that the sufferings of Dionysus were the original and probably the only real subject of Greek tragedy: “A chorus... moving around the altar of Bacchus, sang the adventures of the god” [“Preface to Merope”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, p.56]. Secondly, he notes the the gradual introduction by tragedians of individual characters, isolated from an original chorus, who could symbolise both individuation and Dionysus’ fragmentation: “To this band Thespis joined an actor... Aeschylus added a second actor... Sophocles added a third” [“Preface to Merope”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, p.56]. Thirdly, he notes that the death of the individual characters presaged their descent into the buried life and reunification with the original chorus, and thus (eventually) also Dionysus’ rebirth into wholeness: “Long dialogues... took place between the leaders of the chorus and one of the actors upon the stage, their burden being a lamentation for the dead” [“Preface to Merope”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, p.57]. The chorus must therefore have the last word, as Callicles has the last word in “Empedocles on Etna”. This is the key to understanding Arnold’s use of the tragic form in such poems as “Empedocles on Etna”. Nietzsche noted that the dismemberment of Dionysus, “the properly Dionysian suffering, is similar to a transformation into earth, wind, fire, and water,” these being Empedocles’ four elements, “and that we should regard the state of individuation as the source and original cause of suffering, as something objectionable in 170
itself” [Nietzsche, 2000, pp.59-60]. In its essentials “Empedocles on Etna” is rather similar to, for example, Theocritus’ “Idyll XV”. Or it is similar to an article in a Woman’s Day magazine that might describe how a public celebrity like Elizabeth Taylor was torn apart by her inner demons and descended into a private drug-addiction or weight-gain spiral hell; only to then “die” to that old private disintegrated self and be “reborn” as a newly reintegrated public self, symbolically reunited with her community in the form of a chorus of the members of an Alcoholics Anonymous or Weight Watchers meeting and the readers of Woman’s Day. In summary, then, for Arnold, Dionysus and Jesus Christ were both gods of the buried life. He located stories about the death and resurrection of Dionysus at the heart of ancient Greek culture, as he located stories about the death and resurrection of Jesus Christ at the heart of modern European culture. He read those stories as metaphors for spiritual death and rebirth, or as myths that were representations of our inner world and universal to human experience; and stories about Dionysus were particularly useful to him because in the mid-nineteenth-century the English middle classes still read stories about Jesus Christ with a puritan literalism. For Arnold, the mythic death and resurrection of both gods helped to reunify the Many of the post-Edenic, fragmented surface lives of their societies with the One of the buried life, so that a complete integration of people’s surface lives and the buried life, or of their outer and inner worlds, could be restored, at least for a time. However, for Arnold both gods were now accessible only through the dead fragments of them which constitute the Many of our surface lives, as in the dead fragments of Jesus Christ in “Obermann Once More”. For Arnold, Dionysus had been reduced to dead fragments by the process of individuation and the rise of scientific rationalism in the fifth-century BC, whilst Jesus Christ had similarly been reduced to dead fragments by the process of individuation and the rise of scientific rationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries AD. Dionysus and Jesus Christ were, then, for Arnold, gods who suffered and died, and were reborn or resurrected, in order to bring about a rebirth of religion, and with it a rebirth of their whole societies. For a long time, their deaths and rebirths were constantly re-enacted in the rituals of the Dionysian Mysteries or the Catholic Mass, so that they were constantly being reborn or resurrected out of those rituals. But then as a gap opened up between people’s surface lives and the buried life, caused by individuation and scientific rationalism, it meant that the rituals were no longer so effective. It then fell upon poets such as Aeschylus and Sophocles in ancient times, or Arnold or Mallarmé in modern, in forms such as the tragedy and the lyric, to imitate Dionysus’ or Christ’s sacrifice in order to continue to reintegrate people’s surface lives with the buried life. For Arnold, then, the modern poet had to think in terms of a spiritual healing of himself and his whole society, so that his inner and outer worlds could be fully reconciled, and life be returned to what it was before the “Fall”.
171
Chapter Nine ______
Arnold, the Buried Life and Empedocles
Tribal shamans typically undergo an initiating ritual or dream whereby they suffer a “death” and “dismemberment”, during the course of which they may be in a trance for several days appearing to be dead; and it is believed that during this time they in fact journey to the land of the dead. This is followed by a “resurrection” and a return to the land of the living, after which they often display magical powers of some sort, such as being able to heal the sick or resurrect the dead, or perform clairvoyant or telepathic acts. This display of magical powers is usually intermingled with jokes and tricks that entertain the tribe, but might cause some to dismiss the initiate-shaman as a charlatan. They then begin a course of study under a master-shaman that might last for several years, before they qualify as a master-shaman themselves [Hughes, 1995, pp.57- 58]. A look at Empedocles’ life and thought clearly shows that he belongs to to such a shamanistic tradition as this. However, the shamanistic ritual or dream described above is not an experience that is necessarily confined only to the initiate-shamans of certain modern central Asian or North American tribes, or to the initiate-shamans of certain ancient Greek tribes of Empedocles’ day or Homer’s. It was seen how it has been argued that this shamanistic ritual or dream is, “in fact, the basic experience of the poetic temperament we call “romantic”” [Hughes, 1995, p.58]. So, for example, for Rilke in Sonnets to Orpheus “the Underworld journey” of the shaman is “simply a precondition of being a poet”, as Atwood observes:
The poet - for whom Orpheus is the exemplary model - is the one who can bring knowledge held by the Underworld back to the land of the living, and who can then give us, the readers, the benefit of this knowledge. [Atwood, 2003, p.155]
Therefore, it was Empedocles’ perceived similarity to Romantic poets like Goethe or Wordsworth that probably stimulated Arnold’s interest in him. What Arnold describes as “Wordsworth’s healing power” [“Memorial Verses”, line 63], for example, was that poet’s ability to heal the damaged psyche of such a modern individual as John Stuart Mill, or even Arnold himself, by reconnecting the fragments of their surface life with the unity of the buried life - the “buried life” being, as can be seen especially in poems like “Empedocles on Etna” or “Balder Dead”, to a considerable extent Arnold’s name for the shaman’s initiatory ritual or dream of death and dismemberment, followed by a resurrection. In his preface to his Poems of 1853 Arnold outlined what it was that he had tried to do in “Empedocles on Etna”:
I intended to delineate the feelings of one of the last of the Greek religious 172
philosophers, one of the family of Orpheus and Musaeus, having survived his fellows, living on into a time when the habits of Greek thought and feeling had begun fast to change, character to dwindle, the influence of the Sophists to prevail. Into the feelings of a man so situated there entered much that we are accustomed to consider as exclusively modern; how much, the fragments of Empedocles himself which remain to us are sufficient at least to indicate... the dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced; modern problems have presented themselves; we hear already the doubts, we witness the discouragement, of Hamlet and of Faust. [“Preface to Poems” (1853), Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, p.1]
For Arnold, then, Empedocles exhibited “modern” feelings; for although he was “one of the last of the Greek religious philosophers”, of “the family of Orpheus and Musaeus”, he was eventually cut off from the help previously provided to each individual by the Orphic religion to explain and overcome the feelings of loneliness and isolation that are suffered by the “modern” individual. In other words, in Arnold’s view Empedocles was cut off from the buried life as it was represented by Orphism. Empedocles’ later view of the world was thus only a partial and fragmentary one, of his surface life only, and he himself was thus reduced to fragments. Arnold’s ambiguous phrase, “the fragments of Empedocles himself which remain to us”, used above, is an interesting one, implying that Arnold was at least as interested in the fragments of Empedocles’ life story that have survived as he was in the fragments of Empedocles’ poetry that have also survived. In fact, the phrase, “the fragments of Empedocles himself”, seems to imply that fragments of Empedocles’ actual body may have survived, buried in the ancient biographical and poetical texts (the same texts he urged Clough to edit and translate); and that Empedocles’ body may thus be able to be reassembled and resurrected in a shamanistic fashion by such a diligent reader as Arnold. With regard to Arnold’s phrase about the religion “of the family of Orpheus and Musaeus”, as has been noted, Orphism was a shamanistic religion that taught that Dionysus had been born from the coupling of Zeus and Persephone, but then the evil Titans tore Dionysus to pieces and ate him. In one version of the myth humans are descended from the evil Titans, but also contain a divine soul which is a part of Dionysus that the Titans ate. This part longs to be reassembled with the other parts of Dionysus. The soul is condemned to repeated reincarnations in various plant and animal forms until such time as adherence to the Orphics’ initiatory and purifactory rites enables it to escape from the tomb of the body, and it then becomes a part of that whole which will be the resurrected Dionysus. Empedocles adapted this Orphic myth by stating that imprisoned within each person there was a “daimone” that was a fragment of Love longing to be reunited with the other fragments of Love imprisoned within other people [O’Brien, 1969, p.325]. The Orphics’ myth of Dionysus seems to deal with the same feelings of individual isolation and loneliness, and also of attraction and love, that Arnold dealt with in poems like “The Buried Life” and “Empedocles on Etna”. Their myth, and those poems of Arnold’s, accounts for the feeling that humankind’s isolation within a circle of
173
individual consciousness is only a recent phenomenon; and it also accounts for the feeling that this phenomenon can be overcome at some time in the future with the reassembly from his fragments and then the resurrection of Dionysus, whose dismemberment symbolises the agonies of individuation. For Arnold, to resurrect Empedocles by his readings of the ancient texts was thus to reverse symbolically this process of individuation that was the affliction of the ancient world, and seemed also to be the affliction of the modern world. Within the context of Orphism, there is thus hope that an individual’s feelings of isolation and loneliness may be overcome at some time in the future. But without the context of Orphism, or some such religion, there is little or no hope that an individual’s feelings will ever change, and suicide can seem to be the only escape. However, it seems most likely that, although with his conscious mind and in his surface life Arnold’s Empedocles is no longer of the “family of Orpheus”, and he thus suffers from “modern” feelings of isolation and despair, in his subconscious mind and in the buried life he is still a part of that “family”. His situation is therefore like that of the modern characters in Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, for example, who consciously live with feelings of isolation and despair, but who nevertheless unconsciously re-enact the ancient myths of Dionysus and like-gods. Although they are not aware of it, their situation is therefore like Empedocles’ in that it is tragic, so that, like “Empedocles on Etna”, “The Waste Land” is best-classified as a tragedy, insofar as it deals with the death and imminent resurrection of Dionysus or a like-god. Arnold clearly saw a similarity between Empedocles’ situation as “the last of the Greek religious philosophers” and his own situation of having to deal with what he felt to be the ebbing tide of Christianity in England in the mid-nineteenth-century. He felt that he was cut off from the help previously provided to each individual by the Christian religion to explain and overcome the feelings of loneliness and isolation suffered by the modern individual, as Empedocles had been cut off from the help provided by the Orphic religion. It has been noted how Arnold lamented that the rituals of Catholicism served needs that Protestantism could not, and it was seen from the context of that lament that Arnold had in mind there the rituals of the Catholic Mass. As in Orphism, in the Mass the process of individuation is reversed by the consumption by individual worshippers of what are supposedly actual fragments of a Dionysian-god’s body, so that with the eventual reassembly of those fragments and the resurrection of the god the lonely individual will cease to exist. So, if Arnold wished to replace religion with poetry, as has often been argued [eg. Collini, 1993, pp.307-308], then this replacement would require that the ritual of reading a poem by a number of individual readers would replace the ritual of the Mass - with the idea that language is the incarnation of meaning taken to be the same as the Christian idea of the Word becoming Flesh [Haney, 1993, p.114]. In Lucretius’ De Rerum Natura Arnold read about how Empedocles fitted into the Orphic tradition:
Empedocles of Acragas, born in the three-cornered confines of that Isle... [where] 174
the rumbling of Etna’s flames is a warning that it is rallying its wrath that once again its force may spew out fires bursting in a torrent from its throat, to bring its flashing flames back up to the sky... the songs that took shape in his divine breast proclaim in ringing tones such glorious discoveries that he scarcely seems a scion of mortal stock. Empedocles and those lesser men of whom we have spoken above, who rank far and away below him, have certainly made many excellent and divine discoveries and uttered oracles from the inner sanctuary of their hearts with more sanctity and far surer reason than those the Delphic prophetess pronounces, drugged by the laurel fumes, from Apollo’s tripod. [Lucretius, 1994, pp.27-28]
Arnold then read more about Empedocles in Diogenes Laertius’ Lives of the Philosophers, before turning to the extant fragments of the poems that Empedocles himself wrote. Here are some of Arnold’s notes on his research for “Empedocles on Etna”:
Connected with the Pythagoreans. - Tho: rich, liberal in his politics: &, shortly after his father’s death the aristocratical party intriguing considerably he struck such blows as the condemnation of the Clerk of the Council & his entertainer, the dissolution of the Council of 1000. He is said to have declined an offer of the tyranny... his manners were proud & imposing: he swam in a swelling consciousness of his superiority - “rejoice my brother nobles,” he says: “I come among you an immortal God, a mortal no longer:” - he wore purple & a golden circlet &c. continually, a severe countenance, long waving hair, and a train of servants followed him in his solemn rounds: the people stupidly admired him, both for his wealth & grandeur, & as a necromancer... a woman called Panthea, who had lain in a trance at Agrigentum 30 (or 7) days, he restored... In the end of his life character had begun to dwindle and the influence of the Sophists to extend itself among the Greeks. He is one of the last of the Orpheuslike religious philosophers. [in Tinker and Lowry, 1940, pp.289-90]
There were a few things about Empedocles, then, that interested Arnold. One thing was that he was a radical aristocratic poet and dandy, a bit like a Byron or a Shelley, interested in the overthrow of the rule of an aristocratic oligarchy in Agrigentum, so that he was exiled from his native-city. A second thing that interested Arnold was Empedocles’ connection with the Orphism of the Pythagoreans, and the fact that his claims to be a god identified him with Dionysus himself. He was also supposedly something of a miracle-worker, and was said to be able to communicate with the dead. It was also said he that could raise people from the dead, rather like Jesus Christ. It was noted in Chapter Two how poet-shamans should think not in terms of art- for-art’s-sake, or anything like that, but in terms of a spiritual healing of themselves and of their whole society, so that their inner and outer worlds can be fully reconciled, and life be returned to what it was before the “Fall”. Thus, for Arnold at least, it would have appeared that Empedocles’ aim in his attempted political revolution would have been to hasten the rebirth or resurrection of Dionysus, in order to end the feelings of loneliness and isolation that accompanied the death of that god and the subsequent individuation. It would have been as if the comradeship that revolutionaries feel for each other, and for
175
others in their society, during a period of revolution offered a temporary, if delusive, influx of that “tide of common thought”, which are the thoughts of the living god in which all the members of a society should share. But once the period of revolution was over then for Empedocles that tide would have retreated again, the god would have been seen really to be dead, and everyone would have been left stranded again in their own separate, selfish thoughts. For Arnold, Empedocles should then have taken on the full burden of the poet-shaman, and attempted not by political means but through his own suffering, sacrificial death and then rebirth, to bring about the “rebirth” of his whole society. In this he should have been rather like Jesus Christ, again, who once hopes of a political revolution against Roman rule in Judea and Galilee had failed, proclaimed, it has been said, the virtues of an inner revolution instead, and then sacrificed Himself on behalf of his society [Romer, 1993, p.173]. In any case, whatever be the facts about Empedocles, what is written by and about him offers some interesting parallels to the story of Jesus Christ; and it also happens to fit in well with Arnold’s concept of the role of the poet in the concept of the buried life, which is why Arnold chose to write about him. Although nothing is known for certain about Empedocles, he was probably born in about 490 BC in the Greek colony of Acragas or Agrigentum (now Agrigento) in southern Italy and probably died in about 430 BC. He was said to have been the author of two poems of which fragments have survived, “On Nature”, as has been mentioned, and also “Purifications”, although some scholars think that the two poems are in fact one. He probably wrote some other poems as well which have not survived. There are one hundred and fifty three surviving fragments of “On Nature” and “Purifications”, about four hundred and fifty lines worth, which apparently comprises less than one per cent of the poems’ original length. In Empedocles’ poetry, Arnold found much to support his feelings that there is an underlying unity beneath our fragmentary perceptions of the world, and that the way to perceive this underlying unity is through these fragments. Arnold’s intuitions, like Empedocles’, were that if you submit to being torn apart by your fragmentary perceptions of the world and thus die to your individuality, then you may descend into the buried life to be there made whole again and then be resurrected. Although only these very short fragments of Empedocles’ poetry survive, Arnold nevertheless felt that through these short fragments he could reconstruct the whole meaning of Empedocles’ poems. He also felt that although only the most fragmentary stories about Empedocles’ life and work have survived, he could nevertheless reconstruct from these fragments the whole of that life and work. This was because Arnold believed that history in its essentials repeats itself; so that the life, thought and poetry of a fifth-century BC sage like Empedocles would be much like the life, thought and “poetry” of a Jesus Christ; or like the life, thought and poetry of a modern sage like, for example, Goethe. All would fit into the pattern of the shaman’s initiatory ritual or dream. Therefore, knowledge about one of them could be used to fill in the gaps in the knowledge about the others. With regard to Empedocles’ poetry, in “On Nature” Empedocles set forth his 176
philosophical ideas about what the world is like, how it got to be that way, and how we perceive it. Judging from the fragments that survive of it, “On Nature” described how the world is made up of elements called Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. Under the influence of a power called Strife these elements are pulled apart from each other into the tiniest possible fragments of things, and when this has occurred this state is called the Many. However, the poem also describes how under the influence of a power called Love these fragments of things will all eventually be reunited, and this state is called the One. Love is identified by Empedocles with Aphrodite, so that it seems to be very much like the romantic love of the Victorians. These two states of the Many and the One alternate throughout time, in a “great year” somewhat akin to Lyell’s “great year” of geological time [Lyell, Vol.1, 1990, pp.121-123], as at first the power of Strife and then the power of Love becomes dominant in the world. Empedocles’ philosophy of the interchange of the Many and the One combines ideas from the earlier philosophers, Parmenides, who believed only in an unchanging One, and Heraclitus, who believed only in the changing Many. Parmenides argued that the semblance of change in the world was only an illusion, whereas Heraclitus argued that the semblance of permanence in the world was only an illusion [Warner, 1958, pp.25-32]. Empedocles’ philosophy of the Many and the One also finds an analogy in the belief of the Delphic priesthood that Dionysus was the cyclic, or dying and reborn, inner being of the unchanging Apollo [Hughes, 1993, p.373]. Empedocles appears to have believed that at the moment he was writing his poems the power of Strife was becoming dominant in the world, so that entropy was increasing and things were falling apart. (Arnold might have held similar beliefs about the world, given the formulation of the second law of thermodynamics in the mid- nineteenth-century.) He found evidence of the fact that Strife was becoming dominant in the world in the sequence of the human body being firstly born out of Love, and then secondly being fragmented by Strife in death. For if Love was becoming dominant in the world then that sequence of birth being followed by death would be reversed, so that you would see individuals being resurrected from their graves. An individual’s feelings of love for another person, and their feelings of happiness and of connection with them, he saw as indications that the universal power called Love is working through them; whilst an individual’s feelings of hate for another person, and their feelings of sadness and of separation from them, he saw as indications that the universal power of Strife is also working through them. That an individual might feel that at some time in the past all people “were parts of a single continent”, to use Arnold’s phrase, Empedocles saw as a reminder that at some time in the past Love was more dominant in the world than it is now. The One is like the buried life in that it is a concept that explains that there is an objective unity to the world that underlies our subjective impressions of disunity. But, as is also the case with Arnold’s concept of the buried life, Empedocles believed that his concept of the One was inaccessible to most people except through the most fragmentary of hints as to its existence [O’Brien, 1969, pp.1-3]. Empedocles thus argued that humankind, mostly devoted to Strife, usually perceives only fragments of the One, writing that: 177
The powers spread over the body are constricted, and many afflictions burst in and dull their meditations. After observing a small part of life in their lifetime, subject to a swift death they are borne up and waft away like smoke; they are convinced only of that which each has experienced as they are driven in all directions, yet all boast of finding the whole. These things are not so to be seen or heard by men or grasped with mind. But you now, since you have come aside to this place, will learn within the reach of human understanding. [Wright, 1981, p.155]
In “Purifications” Empedocles then describes how he has become a god, after working his way up the scale of creation through reincarnations as various plants, animals and humans; so that he eventually overcame the limitations imposed by his senses to perceive the One, and was thus able to tell other people about it:
My friends who live in the great town of the tawny Acragas, on the city’s citadel, who care for good deeds (havens of kindness for strangers, men ignorant of misfortune), greetings! I tell you I travel up and down as an immortal god, mortal no longer, honoured by all as it seems, crowned with ribbons and fresh garlands. [Wright, 1981, p.264]
He also describes some miracles, such as prophesying the future and healing the sick, that he performed as evidence that he was a god, and gives some indications about how others might follow his path:
You will learn remedies for ills and help against old age, since for you alone shall I accomplish all these things... After black rain you will bring dry weather in season for men, and too after summer dryness you will bring tree-nourishing showers (which live in air), and you will lead from Hades the life-force of a dead man. [Wright, 1981, p.261]
As a god, Empedocles has overcome the limitations of human perception to see the One as it really is, and thus can describe it in “On Nature”. Empedocles also claimed how heroes such as himself “come among men on earth as prophets, minstrels, physicians, and leaders, and from these they arise as gods, highest in honour” [Wright, 1981, p.291]; whilst, to make a connection with nineteenth-century thought, in On Heroes and Hero Worship Carlyle wrote of the Hero as first a Divinity, then a Prophet, then a Poet, then a Priest, then a Man of Letters, and then a King (meaning Cromwell and Napoleon, heroes of the modern democratic revolutionary spirit through which, according to Carlyle, they inherited the old divine right of kings) [Carlyle, 1904, pp.197-245]. Each of these types was a hero for Carlyle because of the access they had access to a divine wisdom. (Carlyle’s thesis is perhaps seen to best advantage in John Buchan’s novel The Path of the King (1921), in which the divine soul-stuff, the divine right of kings, passes through a series of reincarnations to emerge finally in that hero of the modern American democratic revolutionary spirit, Abraham Lincoln) [Buchan, 1925]. Being well- acquainted with Carlyle’s work as he was, for Arnold, Empedocles’ claims to an access to a divine wisdom through a series of incarnations or reincarnations would have 178
provided another link between ancient Greece and modern England. Such is Empedocles’ poetry. With regard to his life, Empedocles is described by Diogenes Laertius as having been born into the Acragan aristocracy at a time when their political power was being usurped by tyrants, and he is thus said to have courted popularity with the common people by appearing as a champion of equality, democracy and individual freedom. As such he is of a type familar to classical historians, since tyranny, or the rule of an individual aristocrat who betrayed the interests of his own class by appealing directly to the people for support, was a common phenomenon in the Greek world of the sixth and fifth-centuries BC. Tyranny emerged when the economic power of the old aristocracy, based on land, was being undermined by new wealth based on trade, and because of this there is a parallel to the decline of the ancient Greek aristocracies in the decline of the European aristocracies in the nineteenth-century. Carlyle, again, wrote of how the anarchy and chaos of each individual’s behaviour in a modern political revolution finds a focus in the execution of a King of England or France; and then a new order in the reincarnation of the divine spirit in a “tyrant” like Cromwell or a Napoleon. Therefore, the divine spirit that was once fragmented amongst a mob of individuals in the manner of a Dionysus, descends into the buried life with the death of the old king, who is the scapegoat for all that has gone wrong with the state. Then it is united again in one man, a tyrant or dictator, who symbolises what all of the individuals in the state have in common [Carlyle, 1904, pp.197-245]. For some reason, though, Empedocles is said to have refused the kingship when it was offered to him, and he went into exile instead:
Aristotle too declares him to have been a champion of freedom and averse to rule of every kind, seeing that... he declined the kingship when it was offered to him, obviously because he preferred a frugal life. [Diogenes Laertius, 1925, pp.377- 379]
So, as was previously noted, he seems to share something in common with the Romantic poets, Byron and Shelley, in that he combined an interest in radical politics with a literary life in exile. Thus he could be said to initiate that tendency of poets such as Byron, Shelley and Arnold to stand just slightly aside from liberal democracy, and certainly aside from tyranny, and take partial-refuge in a self-created aristocracy of the intellect that finds its most extreme expression in the European aestheticism of the late- nineteenth-century. Empedocles also shared something in common with especially Byron in his self-consciously patrician manner, his long hair and his extravagant dress. In other words, as a young man Empedocles appears to have been a bit of a Byronic dandy; a young man who flaunted his membership of a new intellectual aristocracy by exhibiting in extreme form that conduct which Arnold admired, imitated and labelled “Barbarian” [Culture and Anarchy, Super, 1960-77, Vol.5, pp.140-142]. In summary, then, for Arnold, Empedocles is a type of shaman because he claimed to have undergone the journey to and from the Underworld that is the basis of the shaman’s initiating ritual or dream. This was of particular interest to Arnold because the same initiating ritual or dream is the basis of the Romantics’ poetic temperament. For 179
Arnold, Empedocles’ journeys to and from the Underworld were originally undertaken within the context of Orphism, so that the god Dionysus could be perpetually reborn out of his open grave. But with the dissociation of sensibility in Greek culture at some time in the fifth-century BC, Dionysus was seen to be really dead, no longer to be reborn, and the Greeks were then subject to “modern” feelings of loneliness and isolation. Empedocles had a theory about how the powers of Love and Strife are alternately dominant in the universe. The dominance of Strife lead to the state known as the Many, when things were broken down into separate elements known as Earth, Wind, Fire and Water. The dominance of Love lead to the state known as the One, when all these elements were combined. Empedocles thought that he was living at a time when Strife was becoming dominant, so that things were falling apart and becoming separate. For Arnold, this was a theory that accounted for those “modern” feelings of isolation and loneliness with which his Empedocles is eventually afflicted. Empedocles had claimed to know all that he did because he said he had undergone a series of reincarnations, with the divine soul-stuff which was the fragment of Dionysus within him gradually becoming dominant in his personality, so that eventually his personality completely merged with that of the inner god’s. However, with the death of Dionysus, no longer to be reborn, after the dissociation of sensibility, the inner god deserted him and so even Empedocles was left feeling lonely and isolated. His attempts to reverse the flow of entropy in the world then left him looking like nothing more than a foolish charlatan. For Arnold, Empedocles would then have tried to force the rebirth of Dionysus through taking part in an attempted popular revolution in Acragas. It would have firstly been as if the comradeship that revolutionaries feel for each other, and for others in their society, during a period of revolution offered a temporary, if delusive, influx of that “tide of common thought”, which are the thoughts of the living god in which all the members of a society should share. Then secondly, it would have been as if the anarchy and chaos of each individual’s behaviour in a modern political revolution found a new order in the reincarnation of the divine spirit of Dionysus in Empedocles, when he was offered the sacred kingship. Therefore, the divine spirit that was once fragmented amongst a mob of individuals in the manner of a Dionysus, should have descended into the buried life with the death of the old king, who was the scapegoat for all that has gone wrong with the state. Then it should have been united again in one man, Empedocles, who symbolised what all of the individuals in the state have in common. However, for some reason Empedocles refused the kingship when it was offered to him. For Arnold, this would have been akin to a Byron or Shelley, or even a Wordsworth, standing slightly aside from radical politics to create an internal private revolution instead of supporting an external public one. As an alternative to public revolution, such poets allow themselves to be symbolically torn apart in shamanistic fashion and to die in the service of poetry, hoping then to descend into the buried life, there to be made whole and then be resurrected as an embodiment of the divine spirit, and of the unity of the state. That was all very well; but then, for Arnold, Empedocles, having tired of continually tearing himself to pieces, or having shirked the experience 180
entirely, turned, like Arnold himself, from poetry to an association with people like the Sophists. He was thus open to accusations of charlatanry, since there was the suspicion that his body was no longer in his words, or never had been.
181
Chapter Ten ______
Arnold, Lewis, Byron, Connolly and Stallworthy
The works of a number of writers much-influenced, directly or indirectly, by Arnold’s concept of the buried life, such as Wilfred Owen, Keith Douglas and Ted Hughes, have already been analysed in this thesis. Other writers much-influenced by Arnold’s concept include Wyndham Lewis, Robert Byron, Cyril Connolly and Jon Stallworthy. Lewis served in World War One and believed that “no greater poetry was ever written than the concluding song of Callicles in Empedocles on Etna” [Lewis, 1989, p.375]. Byron died in World War Two and once described “Sohrab and Rustum” as that “celebrated English poem from the sacred pen of Matthew Arnold” [Byron, 1981, p.244]. Connolly wrote about the buried life in The Unquiet Grave, first-published during World War Two. Stallworthy served in the British Army in the 1950s; and, whilst at Rugby in the 1940s, he was “impressed to discover, in the Chapel, a marble memorial to Matthew Arnold”, alongside memorials to Landor, Clough and Brooke. Each poet “was commemorated by a quotation from one of his poems, and each quotation spoke of Death” [Stallworthy, 1998, p.70]. The first aim of this chapter, then, is to complement the chapter on the origins of Arnold’s concept of the buried life in the works of Gray and Wordsworth by providing a chapter dealing with the influence of Arnold’s concept in the works of Lewis, Byron, Connolly and Stallworthy. The second aim of this chapter is to further-establish a link or common ground between an interpretation of Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna” and Hughes’ interpretation of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. Both Arnold’s poem and Eliot’s can be interpreted as being like those poems by Housman, such as Last Poems XXXII and XXXVII, in which an aged man both envies and identifies with a soldier-boy who died young to save him, amongst others of their society at home. This soldier-boy is the poet’s Muse but also a Christ-figure; and if, as Raine says, the concept of the buried life incorporates “the idea of a life not fully lived” [Raine, 2006, p.xiii], then, amongst other things, it means the poet regrets not having “fully lived” as the soldier-boy lived.
Wyndham Lewis Wyndham Lewis is in some ways a better critic of Arnold than even Eliot because, unlike most Modernists, for some reason he took his spleen out on his contemporaries rather than on the Victorians. He could thus be generous in acknowledging the debts the Modernists owed to Victorians such as Arnold; although he was as ungenerous in acknowledging Eliot’s achievements as a poet and critic as Eliot was ungenerous in acknowledging Arnold’s. Lewis also attended Rugby School, the Arnolds’ old school, at a time when, as he wrote: “What Public Schools were for was to turn out a stupid but well-behaved executive class to run the Empire Kipling crowed and 182
crooned about” [Lewis, 1984, pp.118-119]. He was therefore well-placed to understand how Matthew Arnold was both similar to and different from his father, Dr Arnold. Finally, as less of an American, and having served in the British Army in World War One, he was perhaps better-placed than Eliot to understand some of Arnold’s concerns with imperialism and the English class-system. Lewis’ main criticism of Arnold occurs in his review, “Matthew Arnold”, of an 800-page edition of Arnold’s poetry and prose published in 1954. This review of Lewis’ is rather like Hughes’ essay on Eliot, “The Poetic Self”, in that it explains why a poet and critic of a previous generation was so very important to him. In his review, Lewis notes that, even given 800 pages, the impression gained of Arnold from the volumes of this edition is of a “mutilated” and “fragmentary” figure. “It is the prose which suffers most”, notes Lewis, for a certain brevity has been paid for by “sacrificing half the text of prose masterpieces” [Lewis, 1989, p.372]. Having established through his metaphors that Arnold the writer has been torn into fragments as a sacrificial victim, and that the time is not yet right for his reassembly and resurrection in the minds of his readers (although Lewis will do his best to bring him back to the land of the living), Lewis then makes a distinction between the Arnolds, father and son:
[Dr Arnold’s] most improbable feat was to have such a son as Matthew... [Matthew] Arnold... was not one of those Englishmen dazzled by the French Revolution: indeed, looking back upon that event, he sided with Burke... Politically, he was to the right of his famous father - but only so to conform with the dandy... Apparently the way he wore his side whiskers marked him out as a young man inclined to the elegancies. [Lewis, 1989, pp.372-373]
For Lewis, Matthew Arnold was a dandified, slightly feminised and shamanic or Tiresian opponent of the confident, liberal, progressive spirit of the surface life of the Victorian Age. Like Baudelaire, Matthew Arnold’s main interest was in “l’éternel supériorité du Dandy” [in Connolly, 1961, p.42]. As Connolly observed, what the dandy “will not be is a Fighter or a Helper” in any practical sort of a way [Connolly, 1961, p.42]. But this is only because the dandy believes that your popular leader of any revolution is in fact a charlatan. As an “artist”, or as the dandy who suffers, they would much rather try to embody the divine spirit within themselves, or within a work of art, and by their sacrifice attempt to redeem the whole of their society. Arnold’s “Lay Sermon”, already discussed in another context, shows what is meant by that. The “Lay Sermon” is mostly about those, like the aesthetic clergyman, Samuel Augustus Barnett, who brought art to the East End of London from the West End in the nineteenth-century. They did so in an attempt to heal on an imaginative level the breach between the “two nations” as they existed in England at that time, and thus prepare the way for an English revolution of sorts. In the “Lay Sermon” Arnold says that, having been brought up under Wordsworth’s influence, he is sure that a revolution will occur in England, and that he supports its aims:
183
People are always tempted to ask when they entertain ideals of this kind, “Will the change come soon; will the renovation be in our own time?” There are seasons, and this in which we live is perhaps one of them, when the crackings which we hear, and the swayings and rockings which we see, and the signs and warnings on every side seem to say that the change cannot be very far off. But we must remember at the same time how short our time here is. We must remember what the philosopher so well says - that men always are impatient, and for precipitating things. We must remember what contradiction the course of events perpetually offers to such an ideal as that of the Kingdom of God. We must remember the delays and the deferments which it is certain to meet with. We must remember the obstacles perpetually opposed, not only by the selfish among mankind, but also “by the fears of the brave and the follies of the wise.” Let us therefore beware of expecting that any renovation upon which we have set our hearts will come immediately, but let us also be thankful to be reminded that whether it comes late or soon the Prince of this world is judged, and that the renovation will surely come sooner or later. [“A Lay Sermon”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, p.254]
Arnold was, it thus seems, on the side of what he called the “sacrificed classes” in what he thought of as the coming revolution against the rule of what he called the “fortunate classes” [“A Lay Sermon”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, p.253]. However, he concluded his “Lay Sermon” by quoting from Wordsworth’s sonnet addressed to the English painter, “To B.R. Haydon”, which privileges “Creative Art” over the coming revolution:
High is our calling, Friend! - Creative Art (Whether the instrument of words she use, Or pencil pregnant with ethereal hues) Demands the service of a mind and heart, Though sensitive, yet, in their weakest part, Heroically fashioned - to infuse Faith in the whispers of the lonely Muse, While the whole world seems adverse to desert, And oh! when Nature sinks, as oft she may, Through long-lived pressure of obscure distress, Still to be strenuous for the bright reward, And in the soul admit of no decay, Brook no continuance of weak-mindedness - Great is the glory, for the strife is hard! [“To B.R. Haydon”, lines 1-14]
This quotation was appropriate to the occasion, in that the occasion of Arnold’s “lay Sermon” was the unveiling of G.F. Watts’ mosaic on the facade of St. Jude’s Church in the East End. People would no doubt have been saying things like, “What’s the use of this mosaic? It doesn’t really help the people of Whitechapel at all. The money could have been better spent on religious tracts or on food and shelter for the poor,” and so on. But Arnold’s point here was, firstly, about how the “sacrificed classes” should not have to listen to an evangelical’s message about how they must wait for a post-death Heaven for their reward. For, as has been noted previously, Arnold says that Jesus Christ’s real message to his disciples was not about such a Heaven, but that, after His sacrifice, “when He was gone they should find a new source of thought and feeling within them” [“A Lay 184
Sermon”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, p.253]. For Arnold, the “Kingdom of God” is thus not in a post-death Heaven, but within. Secondly, Arnold’s point is about how the “sacrificed classes” should also not have to listen to a revolutionary’s message about how they must wait for a post-revolution Heaven for their reward. For the artist’s or poet’s real message to those who view or read their works is not about such a Heaven, but that, after the artist’s or poet’s “sacrifice”, they should find a new source of thought and feeling within themselves. The “Kingdom of God” is thus not in some post-revolution Heaven, but again within. For Arnold, it is therefore the “sacrifice” by the artist or poet, or dandy, rather than the evangelicals’ or the revolutionaries’ seemingly more practical helping or fighting, which truly paves the way for an English revolution [“A Lay Sermon”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.10, p.253]. Watts’ mosaic therefore has its purpose. Arnold, then, as a dandy, was partly out of step with what he liked to call the “zeitgeist” [Honan, 1981, p.43]; or at least he was partly in step with something deeper than mere liberalism. He was a man who, like Barnett, went at least a little way into the hell of the East End of London; and although he eventually drew back from offering himself up for sacrifice, at the end of that pathway he would find a sacrificial victim like Socrates, whose ground-idea, according to Arnold, was “the insufficiency of the liberal programme for salvation” [“Curtius’ History of Greece (IV)”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.5, p.287]. This was a pathway that would eventually be explored a little more thoroughly by Frazer, Freud and Eliot at the end of the nineteenth-century and at the beginning of the twentieth. However, Arnold was certainly a precursor of that more thorough exploration. Such, for Lewis, was Arnold as a social critic. For Lewis, Arnold was to the right of his famous father, who was a liberal; but, as was noted, “only so to conform with the dandy” [Lewis, 1989, p.373]. Having considered Arnold’s social criticism, Lewis next considers Arnold’s poetry, noting that, as a poet: “Matthew Arnold is in a class apart... no greater poetry was ever written than the concluding song of Callicles in Empedocles on Etna”. This is an extraordinary judgement since, technically-speaking, that song is not very good. (The reasons for this judgement will be examined in Chapter Twelve. One suspects that it may be in part displaced praise, since Lewis was not prepared to praise “The Waste Land”.) However, Lewis does then qualify it somewhat: “One could not, alas, say as much for the entire poem, though Empedocles on Etna has everywhere lines of great beauty” [Lewis, 1989, p.375]. From a twenty-first-century perspective, it is perhaps just a pity that Arnold did not have someone like Ezra Pound to assist him with the editing of “Empedocles on Etna”. For, from our post-“Waste Land” perspective, there is a lot in the poem that might have been better left out. Being fragments himself, as he wrote, Arnold might have been wiser not to attempt to write a poem that, on the surface at least, was more than just a string of fragmentary impressions. Although he was drudging away as an Inspector of Schools whilst writing “Empedocles on Etna”, as Eliot was drudging away as a banker whilst writing “The Waste Land”, Lewis notes that Arnold certainly did not spare himself - any more than did Eliot - an exploration of the poetic depths. Lewis thus quotes from that letter of 185
Arnold’s to his sister Jane: “To produce my best, to attain or approach perfection in the region of thought or feeling, and to unite this with perfection of form, demands not merely an effort and a labour but an actual tearing of oneself to pieces” [in Lewis, 1989, p.376]. This was Arnold’s version of Goethe’s observation that he had it in him to produce “half a dozen more good tragedies: but to produce these he says: I must have been sehr zerrison” [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, p.402], meaning torn to pieces psychologically. Or it was Arnold’s version of Rimbaud’s later observation that “the poet has to be a seer, to make himself a seer. He makes himself a seer by a long, immense and systematic derangment of all the senses” [in Nicholl, 1998, p.26]. (For Rimbaud, the poet does this in order “to give free expression to the collective soul (‘l’ame universelle’) in which he immerses himself”) [Faas, 1980, p.39]. Initially, Arnold’s dreary job, like Eliot’s, seemed for Lewis not a way of avoiding this “tearing of oneself to pieces”, or a sop to his father’s values, but another necessary part of the process. As it was for Eliot, so it was also perhaps for Arnold a way of trying to access the “buried life”, or the “true poetic self” within [Hughes, 1995, p.284]. In conclusion, Lewis was “sure that Arnold is a much greater poet than is dreamed of by the posterity that inherits this little publicized, very intelligent giant. The ‘Dandy Isaiah’, as Meredith calls him”, Lewis placed very high among the nineteenth-century prophets [Lewis, 1989, p.377]. (George Meredith called him that presumably because, for Isaiah, who is quoted by Eliot in “The Waste Land” [“The Waste Land”, lines 25; 173; 425], the “servant” is like Arnold’s poet in that he is a scapegoat who takes upon himself punishment for the sins of others in wartime, and dies for the good of all) [Isaiah, 42; 49; 50; 53]. One reason why Lewis perhaps rated Arnold so highly was because he saw a resemblance between Arnold and the great Russian novelists of the nineteenth-century, such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky; of whom at least Tolstoy was directly influenced by Arnold, and who in turn influenced Lewis profoundly. For Lewis, those nineteenth- century Russian novelists utilised the traditions of Russian shamanism to create an art of tremendous power that attempted to heal on an imaginative level the breach between the “two nations” as they existed in Russia at that time, and thus prepared the way for the Russian Revolution [Lewis, 1984, pp.156-160]. As Lewis wrote: “The great Russian novelists of the nineteenth century prepared the way for the Soviet Revolution” [Lewis, 1989, p.220]. What Lewis meant by that is not that Tolstoy and Dostoevsky prepared the way for the Stalinist terror, and so on; but that, by allowing themselves to be torn to pieces psychically in the process of writing their great novels, they attempted to contain the violence later unleashed by the Russian Revolution within themselves, and within their novels, and resolve it artistically. So, on a bathetic level, it would be like saying that G.F. Watts prepared the way for the English Welfare State. On a more serious level, Wallace Stevens made a similar point to Lewis’ about the containment of violence within works of literature:
In a talk at Princeton University in 1942, when the world was aflame, Wallace Stevens reflected on the fact that the 20th century had become ‘so violent’,
186
physically and spiritually. He defined poetry succinctly as ‘a violence from within that protects us from a violence without. It is the imagination pushing back against the pressure of reality. It seems, in the last analysis, to have something to do with our self-preservation; and that, no doubt, is why the expression of poetry, the sound of its words, helps us to live our lives.’ [Parini, 2008, p.9]
It would seem that the psychic battles of the shamanic Empedocles in “Empedocles on Etna” were read by Lewis as an attempt by Arnold to undertake an imaginative healing process, such as that undertaken by Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, and also by Isaiah in Biblical times, in an English context. This would be why he rated the poem so highly. It was an attempt also undertaken in various formats by the other nineteenth-century English “prophets” such as Carlyle, Ruskin and Morris, and no doubt by English artists like Watts as well, as Sassoon noted in Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man [Sassoon, 1972, p.48], but perhaps not quite so successfully. Another reason why Lewis perhaps rated Arnold so highly was because he saw a resemblance between Arnold and those artists and writers, such as himself and Eliot, and members of the Ballets Russes like Nijinsky, who, just before World War One, seemed intent on allowing themselves to be torn to pieces psychically in the process of creating their art, in an attempt to contain the violence later unleashed by the war within themselves, and within their art, and so resolve it artistically [Eksteins, 1989, pp.9-54]. As Lewis wrote:
the months preceding the declaration of war were full of sound and fury, and... all the artists and men of letters had gone into action before the bank-clerks were clapped into khaki and despatched to the land of Flanders Poppies to do their bit. [Lewis, 1982, p.35]
For Lewis, the artists’ and writers’ attempts to contain that violence were unsuccessful; and, those attempts having failed, many of the artists and writers then hurried off to be soldier-boys, in the sense of that term previously discussed. These artists and writers included Lewis himself and his acquaintances, T.E. Hulme and Henri Gaudier-Brzeska, later memorialised by Ezra Pound in “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” and “Cantos”. But, according to Lewis, their sacrifice of themselves in the war achieved little or nothing, and certainly did not bring about any sort of a rebirth of religion or of their society:
Before the ‘Great War’ of 1914-1918 was over it altered the face of our civilization. It left the European nations impoverished, shell-shocked, discouraged and unsettled... And the great social changes which with such uncouth and wasteful violence started to get themselves born, in that tragical atmosphere, extinguished the arts which were to be their expression, and which had been their heralds. [Lewis, 1982, pp.258-259]
It hardly seems likely that World War One “extinguished the arts” which were to be the “expression” of “great social changes”, since many of the major works of Modernism, which had its origins in the period just before the war, were created after the war in the
187
period 1919-1925. However, some artists had great difficulties in their postwar attempts to contain the violence unleashed by the war within themselves and resolve it artistically. (It was as if, as Jung suggested, “the war, which in the outer world had taken place some years before, was not yet over, but was continuing to be fought within the psyche”) [Jung, 1995, p.229]. Nijinsky was one who was driven mad in the attempt:
‘Now I will dance you the war,’ he announced, ‘with its suffering, with its destruction, with its death.’ In his diary of those days he identified himself, as Nietzsche had done in his last utterances before the complete darkness of his madness enveloped him, with God. [Eksteins, 1989, p.273]
Eliot did not go mad, but he did tear himself to pieces psychically, as Arnold had done in the 1850s. He went to see the Ballets Russes perform Stravinsky’s Le Sacre du Printemps in 1921, which provided his connection to Russian shamanism, as Arnold found a connection to ancient Greek shamanism in the works of Empedocles. Then he had a nervous breakdown and wrote “The Waste Land” [Gordon, 1978, pp.107-108]. And, as Hughes wrote, in the superlative or hyperbolic fashion of Lewis on “Empedocles on Etna”: “where are the nineteen pages” in world poetry “to stand beside The Waste Land?” [Hughes, 1995, p.291]. The events of World War One at least provoked the Russian Revolution, whereas, although England was certainly changed by the War, those events provoked no such revolution in England. (Arnold Toynbee was one of many who, before the War, hoped that a “big war with Germany... may do for us what the Revolution did for France”) [in McNeill, 1989, p.32]. Therefore, at least according to Hughes [Hughes, 1995, pp.70-72], who can take us beyond Lewis here, despite the best efforts of Eliot in “The Waste Land”, in many ways England still exists in a state of a dissociated sensibility, or of a divided consciousness, or of an extended interregnum, that Arnold found it in, in his “Lay Sermon” of the mid-nineteenth-century. Hughes’ analysis of the English poetry of World War One suggests that an interesting way to interpret Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna” is, to recapitulate some points from a previous chapter, as a sort of national psychic drama much like Tennyson’s “Maud”, dealing with the failed Chartist “revolution” of 1848, which Arnold observed at first hand in London; the dominance of liberal ideology in the politics of the 1840s and 1850s; and the events leading up to the Crimean War of 1853-1856. To further recapitulate, “Empedocles on Etna” and “Sohrab and Rustum”, Arnold’s two poems which seem to have most to do with the events of the Crimean War, were written in the years between 1848 and England’s declaration of war against Russia in 1854. But they read convincingly as Arnold’s prophetic Crimean War poems, in the same way that, as was noted, Armstrong reads Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came” as his “prophetic Crimean- war poem” [Armstrong, 1993, p.316]. To recapitulate just a little further, almost all of Arnold’s finest poetry seems to have been written under the pressure of public events in the period between the revolutions of 1848 and the Crimean War of 1853-56, in that time when, to quote again 188
from Armstrong, many saw the Crimean War “as a ruthless attempt to repress social protest by deflecting attention overseas” [Armstrong, 1993, p.271]. That may have been the case. But given the widespread enthusiasm for the war, it might have also been the case that, as in World War One, the volunteer soldiers of the Crimean War genuinely (if misguidely) felt that they were fighting to create a better life for all back in England, or for a rebirth of society. In such an interpretation of “Empedocles on Etna” as this, the songs of Callicles would represent a world that the concept of “France” represented for the poets of World War One:
The First World War goes on getting stronger - our number one national ghost. It’s still everywhere, molesting everybody. It’s still politically alive, too, in an underground way. On those battlefields the main English social issues surfaced and showed their true colours. An English social revolution was fought out in the trenches. The poetry of the war certainly suggests this. Sassoon’s and Owen’s poems were shaped and directed by ideas that were ultimately revolutionary in a political sense... For four years, France was like England’s dream world, a previously unguessed fantasy dimension, where the social oppressions and corruptions slipped into nightmare gear. Men had to act out the roles and undergo the extremes normally suffered only by dream shadows, but under just the same kind of sleep. If the poetry has one guiding theme it is: ‘Wake up, we are what is really happening’. Or, perhaps: ‘This is what you are doing to us’. The next step, logical but unimaginable, would have been a rising of the ranks... But France remained a dream-world, where everything could be suffered but no decision put into effect. In so far as the decisions made there have still not been put into effect, we are possessed by that dream, and find a special relevance in the poetry. [Hughes, 1995, p.70]
Hughes makes a point there, about World War One being a diversion overseas of English revolutionary feeling, that is like Armstrong’s point, above, about the Crimean War. But Yeats was probably the first critic to make a particular connection between “Empedocles on Etna” and the poetry of World War One, when he wrote, in his introduction to his Oxford Book of Modern Verse, of the poems of Owen and Sassoon that:
I have rejected these poems for the same reason that made Arnold withdraw his Empedocles on Etna from circulation; passive suffering is not a theme for poetry. In all the great tragedies, tragedy is a joy to the man who dies; in Greece the tragic chorus danced. [Yeats, 1976, p.234]
As an Irishman, Yeats seems to have have had little time for the deflection of English revolutionary energies overseas. However, in the songs of Callicles in “Empedocles on Etna” it is Achilles, Cadmus, Typho and Marsyas who physically “undergo the extremes normally suffered by dream shadows”; whilst Zeus and Apollo maintain the aloof detachment from their sufferings of one of Sassoon’s caricature World War One generals. Such a reading as this of “Empedocles on Etna” would explain why Lewis, as a
189
veteran of World War One, rated it so very highly. Such a reading of the poem would also explain why on one level the drama of that poem could never be satisfactorily resolved by Arnold. For it could not have been resolved without a successful political revolution in England and a rebirth of English society as a whole, rather than just by a rebirth of Empedocles. It is Arnold’s use of the metaphor of the buried life in “Empedocles on Etna” which allows it to function as his “prophetic Crimean-war poem”, or prophetic World War One poem, despite there being little direct mention of warfare in the poem; in the same way that it is Eliot’s use of the metaphor of the buried life in “The Waste Land” which allows it to function as his post-World War One poem, despite there being little direct mention of warfare in that poem. It has been noted how critics like Hough and Brooker have tried to explain how this metaphor operates; and Michael Roberts, too, made an interesting attempt to explain its operation. In his book on T.E. Hulme, who was killed in World War One, Roberts included a chapter about what he saw as “the tragic view” of life, which for him contradicted the “no longer tenable... sentimental optimism of liberal pacificism, and the whole utopian faith in automatic progress”. Such views, he felt, had been rather prevalent in England in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth- centuries, before World War One [Roberts, 1982, p.231]. Writing then of poetry, and in particular of Arnold’s poem, “The Scholar-Gipsy”, which in his opinion expressed this “tragic view”, Roberts noted that there is a “familiar kind of imaginative poetry” in which:
the whole poem is an extended metaphor for something that is never mentioned explicitly; and in the similes and metaphors that impress us most we often feel that both of the things compared really stand for something else that is not even mentioned. Although the poet seems to speak only of concrete and sensuous things, his words apply to the nature of the world, or to the intrinsic limitations of thought and feeling. He says that one thing is like another; but the simile is not imaginative unless it draws attention to qualities that belong to something quite different. A = B (=C) is the typical statement of this kind, and in the middle of what seemed to be a straightforward statement about As and Bs the reader suddenly feels that something more far-reaching has been said. [Roberts, 1982, pp.237-238]
Although Roberts was not at all specific about it, it is possible for us to be specific about the nature of this “extended metaphor”. For it was in fact Arnold’s use of his “extended metaphor” of the buried life which allowed him to achieve this effect of expressing the “tragic view” of life, whilst oftentimes apparently writing about something else entirely different. Lewis’ high opinion of “Empedocles on Etna” has already been noted. However, through its use of the metaphor of the buried life, even a poem of Arnold’s as seemingly non-martial, on the surface of things, as “The Scholar-Gipsy” can so affect an old soldier like the critic, Paul Fussell, that, as he recalled in his memoir Doing Battle, he had to stop quoting from it in front of his classes because it always made him cry [Fussell, 190
1996, p.296]. Such opinions and reactions as Lewis’ and Fussell’s are certainly worth pondering. “The Scholar-Gipsy” expresses a tragic view of life because, as Frye noted, as a pastoral elegy, whatever its ostensible subject matter, it is also about the death of Adonis; or the death of Dionysus; or the death of Jesus Christ; or, by extension, the death of Jesus Christ’s late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century proxy, the Roman soldier- boy, Saint Sebastian. In “The Scholar-Gipsy” Arnold writes from the perspective of one who has not died young, but has lived to grow old and disillusioned, like Fussell (or like the narrator of “The Waste Land” who partly identifies with the plight of the Sibyl of Cumae) [Eliot, 1974, p.61], so that the poem offers a lesson in dying. How much better it is, says the poet, to have died young like Saint Sebastian, or like the Scholar-Gipsy:
For early didst thou leave the world, with powers Fresh, undiverted to the world without, Firm to their mark, not spent on other things; Free from the sick fatigue, the languid doubt, Which much to have tried, in much been baffled, brings. O life unlike ours! [“The Scholar-Gipsy”, lines 161-167]
The Scholar-Gipsy wanders forever through a countryside much like the imagined English Arcadia of Housman’s “A Shropshire Lad”, so popular with the British during World War One [Fussell, 1977, p.282]. He is dead, certainly, and in his grave, but also forever youthful and alive. “The Scholar Gipsy” is thus very like Binyon’s “For the Fallen”, and it expresses a “tragic view” of life. This is why it made Fussell cry. In summary, then, for Arnold and for Lewis, it is the “sacrifice” by the artist, poet, dandy or soldier-boy which truly paves the way for an English revolution. The soldier-boy, like the artist, poet or dandy, even if he fights on far-flung imperial battlefields, tries to embody the divine spirit of an Adonis, a Dionysus or a Jesus Christ within themselves; so that by their sacrifice they attempt to cause a rebirth of religion and thus redeem the whole of their society. It is perhaps something like this that is the “idea” which, as Conrad wrote, “redeems” late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century imperialism, as in the works of Housman: “something you can set up, and bow down before, and offer sacrifice to” [Conrad, 1976, p.13].
Robert Byron The English writer, Robert Byron, was a second-generation Modernist much- influenced by Arnold and Eliot. In 1936 he was living in Peking with Harold Acton, recovering from heavy bouts of depression and influenza, and making plans to begin work on a comprehensive history of World War One. But on February 6th he mentioned the travel book he was writing, which would become The Road to Oxiana (1937):
I think it is mostly funny - there is very little else, in fact, except an occasional landscape - but I am noticing a few buildings, as I don’t like the Peter Fleming kind of thing, which deliberately avoids anything of interest... I have been reading lots of war books and the conviction is growing on me that I must write that 191
History of the War and do it soon... I am also developing a new and more concise style. [Butler, 1991, p.268]
He was thinking deeply about the World War One, then, but also trying to write something quick, saleable and amusing about his travels through the Middle East in 1933-1934. By April 18th, however, his travel book had fully absorbed his attention:
the result of being absorbed in my book - which I am beginning to think will be... well never mind, but the thing is that it has developed a form - and I feel about it now like a sculptor who has been hewing away at a bit of marble and suddenly sees it come to life... I thought - indeed I intended - when I started that it should be just a little bit of patter - but it is being born with real labour, and the greater part of that labour is keeping it all light and economical. [Butler, 1991, pp.274-275]
Byron never wrote “that History of the War”, since by using Arnold’s and Eliot’s metaphor of the buried life he found a way to say everything he wanted to say about the war in his travel book, whilst leaving the subject of the war almost entirely out and thus “keeping it all light and economical”. To paraphrase Michael Roberts, Byron’s whole travel book is an extended metaphor for something that is hardly mentioned explicitly; and in the similes and metaphors that impress us most we often feel that both of the things compared really stand for that something else hardly mentioned. In The Road to Oxiana, Byron’s journey through the Middle East is also a journey through the landscapes of the Underworld; the landscapes of World War One; the landscapes of Eliot’s post-war “Waste Land”; and the landscapes of such poems of Arnold’s as “The Strayed Reveller, “The Sick King in Bokhara” and especially “Sohrab and Rustum”. In fact, Byron conflates Eliot’s “The Waste Land” with Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum” in the same way that Lewis seems to conflate “The Waste Land” with Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna”. The Road to Oxiana is thus like Arnold’s “Obermann Once More”, for example, or Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, in that it records the sense of disillusionment that exists after a war or a revolution has ended and it is realised that not even the greatest sacrifice or slaughter can hasten or provoke the rebirth of a religion, or the rebirth of a whole society, or the rebirth of a god. Its title itself a homage to Arnold, The Road to Oxiana begins in Venice. There, amongst the flotsam of post-war tourism, the flotsam of the surface life, Byron goes in “a gondola to San Rocco, where Tintoretto’s Crucifixion took my breath away; I had forgotten it” [Byron, 1981, p.21]. Byron thus makes it clear that he is a pilgrim of sorts, in search of the buried life, rather than merely an aimless tourist. At the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, however, Byron felt that although to pretend to detachment was supercilious, to pretend to reverence was hypocritical [Byron, 1981, p.32]. For him, Christ’s grave was no longer “open” in the sense, once again, that Matthew Arnold described it as no longer “open” in “Obermann Once More”. However, Christ’s sacrifice once gave human life a meaning and purpose absent, in Byron’s view, from the lives of modern Europeans [Byron, 1981, pp.21-22]. Byron then travels by bus across the desert from Syria to Iraq. Iraq, like Flanders 192
during the war, was a land of “mud, unending mud. As we neared Baghdad the desolation increased” [Byron, 1981, p.46]. Byron carefully prepares his readers for his war imagery with a story about wounded men having their eyes pecked out by vultures during the Boer War [Byron, 1981, p.54]; with an allegory about Germany and England during World War One [Byron, 1981, p.54]; and with a story about the “frightful stench” of a massacre near Mosul “which reminded the older [British] officers of the War” [Byron, 1981, p.55]. Then, in Iran, Byron visits the site of a new “cenotaph” built to mark the approximate site of the poet Firdaussi’s grave, and to commemorate the thousandth anniversary of his birth [Byron, 1981, pp.85-86]. Firdaussi was of course the poet from whom Arnold had derived the story of “Sohrab and Rustum”; whilst the word “cenotaph” had only recently been introduced into common usage in England by Edwin Lutyens, for his Cenotaph in Whitehall [Brown, 1997, pp.170-171]. For Eliot, the absent bodies in Arnold’s later poems, such as “Sohrab and Rustum”, were a problem. However, for Byron, the “corpseless” [Booth, 1996, pp.21-49] nature of the British civilian-experience of World War One (soldiers’ bodies were not shipped home for burial, and many soldiers had no known grave) gave poems like “Sohrab and Rustum” a new, post-war significance. As Allyson Booth observes:
a category of artifacts generated by corpselessness were those invented by artists and architects - the modernist fiction and the war memorials that pointed towards corpses buried elsewhere, providing proxies for those bodies that were simultaneously absent and present, physically gone but stunningly felt in psychological and emotional terms. [Booth, 1996, p.33]
A cenotaph is of course a memorial to someone whose body is absent; and if the millions of dead soldiers of World War One make up the body of the dead Jesus Christ, as in Owen’s “Imperial Elegy”, then it points to the absent body at the heart of Western civilisation. In Iran, Byron also visits the Gumbad-i-Kabus, a medieval funerary tower built for a central Asian king, like the one in Arnold’s “The Sick King in Bokhara”; or like the one in Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum”:
And thou must lay me in that lovely earth, And heap a stately mound above my bones, And plant a far-seen pillar over all. That so the passing horseman on the waste May see my tomb a great way off, and cry: Sohrab, the mighty Rustum’s son, lies there, Whom his great father did in ignorance kill! And I be not forgotten in my grave. [“Sohrab and Rustum”, lines 787- 794]
The king’s body being now absent, for Byron the Gumbad-i-Kabus is in effect a cenotaph. He approaches it in springtime, across a bright-green steppe thick with wild flowers [Byron, 1981, pp.196-197]. It is like the gardens of Adonis grown large, such as 193
you often find in pastoral elegies; and it is also like the Scythian steppe in “The Strayed Reveller” [“The Strayed Reveller”, lines 162-180]. Or it is like the landscape of Douglas’ “A God is Buried”, previously discussed, with its nature-god youthful and alive but also dead and buried in his grave, and not yet resurrected; and made up of the millions of dead soldier-boys of World War One. Byron mentions “the War” [Byron, 1981, p.198], and then describes the tower in the midst of this steppe thus:
A tapering cylinder of café-au-lait brick springs from a round plinth to a pointed grey-green roof, which swallows it up like a candle extinguisher. The diameter at the plinth is fifty feet; the total height about a hundred and fifty. Up the cylinder, between plinth and roof, rush ten triangular buttresses, which cut across two narrow garters of Kufic text, one at the top underneath the cornice, one at the bottom over the black entrance. The bricks are long and thin, and as sharp as when they left the kiln, thus dividing the shadow from the sunshine of each buttress with knife-like precision. As the butresses recede from the direction of the sun, the shadows extend on the curving wall of the cylinder between them, so that the bands of light and shade, varying in width, attain an extraordinary momentum. It is the opposition of this vertical momentum to the lateral embrace of the Kufic rings that gives the building its character, a character unlike anything else in architecture. [Byron, 1981, p.198]
“Springs”; “swallows”; “rush”; “cut”; “dividing the shadow from the sunshine”; “recede from the direction of the sun”; “extraordinary”. Byron’s language here could also be used to describe an attack across no-man’s-land, at dusk or dawn, on the Western Front in World War One. It is rather like a passage Fussell quotes, in The Great War and Modern Memory, from Christopher Isherwood’s Lions and Shadows (1938): “down by the river, where there was a gap in the garden wall, the meadow had flowed through like a tide, in wave after wave of poppies” [in Fussell, 1977, p.111]. Fussell’s comment on this passage is that: “Striking here is the application to domestic description of metaphors associated during the war with infantry attacks: gap, tide, wave” [Fussell, 1977, p.111]. So whatever the true merits of the Gumbad-i-Kabus as architecture, and whatever the true appearance of the surrounding steppes, it serves Byron’s purposes admirably in evoking both Arnold’s poetry and the War. In Afghanistan, Byron describes the plain of Balkh as stricken. It is like the post- war Venice he has left behind; or it is like the drought-stricken land of Arnold’s “The Sick King in Bokhara”; or it is like the post-war landscape of “What the Thunder said” in Eliot’s “The Waste Land”. Byron writes:
After Ackcha, the colour of the landscape changed from lead to aluminium, pallid and deathly, as if the sun had been sucking away its gaiety for thousands and thousands of years... Sometimes we saw a field of barley; it was ripe, and Turcomans, naked to the waist, were reaping it with sickles. But it was not brown or gold, telling of Ceres, of plenty. It seemed to have turned prematurely white, like the hair of a madman - to have lost its nourishment. [Byron, 1981, pp.238-239]
Again, whatever the true appearance of the plain of Balkh, it serves Byron’s purpose by 194
acting as a metaphor, taken from The Golden Bough, for that post-war feeling of disillusionment, already noted, that sets in once it has been realised that even the greatest sacrifice or slaughter can hasten or provoke nothing like the rebirth of a religion, or the rebirth of a whole society, or the rebirth of a god; and that after a war or revolution has ended, the world will still be in much the same predicament that it was before it started. However, Byron’s main ambition in Afghanistan was to visit Arnold’s river Oxus, or the river of the buried life, as he informs an Afghan government minister:
In undertaking this journey from England to Afghan Turkestan... our capital object was to behold, with our own eyes, the waters of the Amu Darya, famed in history and romance as the river Oxus, and the theme of a celebrated English poem from the sacred pen of Matthew Arnold. [Byron, 1981, p.244]
But it was not to be; and although the passage underlines just how important Arnold was to him, for Byron the Oxus remained nothing more than a mirage seen shimmering in the furthest distance. At the furthest points of his journey through the Underworld, the landscapes of World War One and “The Waste Land” what he found, then, was a river, a cenotaph and “the sacred pen of Matthew Arnold”. Byron then travels back through British India to New Delhi, completing his journey through the Middle East by “standing beneath Lutyens’ memorial arch” [Byron, 1981, pp.275-276] to the Indian dead of World War One, all buried elsewhere, and gazing up the King’s Way at Lutyens’ Viceroy’s Palace. Perhaps the Indians’ sacrifice will one day give human life a new meaning and purpose absent, in Byron’s view, from the lives of modern Europeans and modern, occidentalised Indians. The palace itself is an astonishing Buddhist-Edwardian-Baroque evocation of the idea of sacred kingship; or of the City of God; and although it seems out of place at the present time, and its inhabitants unworthy of the sacrifice that has been made, for Byron it points to the possibility of a new fusion of people’s surface lives with the buried life, and of a rebirth of European civilisation, at some time in the future [Byron, 1931, pp.1-30]. In summary, then, Byron’s use of Arnold’s and Eliot’s metaphor of the buried life in The Road to Oxiana enabled him to say what he wanted to say about England’s experiences in World War One, whilst hardly mentioning the war at all; in the same way that Eliot used the metaphor to say what he wanted to say about England’s experiences in World War One in “The Waste Land”, whilst hardly mentioning the war at all. Byron thus had a very high opinion of Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum”, which uses the metaphor of the buried life, probably for the same reasons that Lewis had a very high opinion of Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna”, which also uses that metaphor.
Cyril Connolly Cyril Connolly was of the same literary generation as Robert Byron and, like Byron, he was much-influenced by Arnold and Eliot. Like Eliot, Connolly believed that Arnold differed from Rimbaud or Baudelaire in that he felt that Arnold was too “hamstrung by respectability” to attain “his full dimensions” as a writer [Connolly, 1961, 195
p.120]. However, unlike Eliot, Connolly believed himself to be similarly hamstrung, so that he saw himself as a critic rather than as a creative writer. He saw himself as being trapped in the surface life of the twentieth-century, and thus cut off from the buried life, in the same way that Arnold had seen himself as being trapped in the surface life of the nineteenth-century. The ennui from which Arnold’s Empedocles suffers, trapped in the surface life of the fifth-century BC, finds an analogy in the angst of Connolly’s alter-ego, Palinurus, in The Unquiet Grave (1944), written during World War Two. For Connolly, as for Arnold, “the true function of the writer is to produce a masterpiece”; and every piece of Sophistry, every “excursion into journalism, broadcasting, propaganda... will be doomed to disappointment” [Connolly, 1967, p.19]. This is because he knows that every such excursion condemns him as nothing more than a charlatan. Connolly is the well- respected editor of Horizon, as Empedocles is well-respected by the Sophists. Yet he knows that if he is not, in shamanistic fashion, trying to bring about the spiritual healing of himself and of his whole society by producing a masterpiece, then as his contribution to the war effort he “might as well be peeling potatoes” [Connolly, 1967, p.19]. Connolly is, however, not quite capable of producing a masterpiece, since he shrinks from suffering as others have suffered, and are suffering, on behalf of his society:
He would like to have written Les Fleurs du Mal or the Saison en Enfer without being Rimbaud or Baudelaire, that is without undergoing their mental suffering and without being diseased and poor. [Connolly, 1967, p.21]
Like Arnold, he deals with the promise of romantic love that “two human hearts might blend/ In one”. But, as the title of The Unquiet Grave indicates, he knows the only true way to a masterpiece, and to the “One”, is through his grave. He must die to his surface life and be reborn out of the buried life with a story to tell. His body would then be in his words, like Keith Douglas’, or like Baudelaire’s or Rimbaud’s; or, more particularly, like Eliot’s in “The Waste Land”. Gavin Ewart once described The Unquiet Grave as the 1940s’ “Waste Land”; or as “the Great Missing War Poem of World War Two... out of his lost love, lost youth... [Connolly] built an elegaic poem of great beauty and power” [in Fisher, 1996, p.240]. As an elegy, then, whatever its ostensible subject matter, The Unquiet Grave is, like “The Waste Land”, or like “Empedocles on Etna”, also about the death of Adonis; or the death of Dionysus; or the death of Jesus Christ; or, by extension, the death of Jesus Christ’s late-nineteenth and early-twentieth-century proxy, the Roman soldier-boy, Saint Sebastian. Connolly was aware that:
there was an art to quotation and that it was possible - as demonstrated by T.S. Eliot in The Waste Land and Thomas Gray in numerous poems - to form an altogether different whole from the sum of diverse borrowed components. [Fisher, 1996, p.240]
However, having “lost touch with his sub-conscious self” [Connolly, 1967, p.14], 196
Connolly’s psyche, like Empedocles’, is fragmented by the fragmented surface life of his society. There is thus the suspicion that The Unquiet Grave is just fragments of reading: “merely an anthology, a collection of extracts chosen with ‘outremer’ snobbery and masquerading as a book” [Connolly, 1967, p.11], and not World War Two’s “The Waste Land” at all. There is thus also the suspicion that Connolly himself, like Empedocles, is little better than a charlatan. The Unquiet Grave is about a journey to and from the Underworld, but has the writer shrunk from fully undertaking that journey himself? In the Aeneid, Palinurus fell overboard on Aeneas’ voyage from Africa to Italy, or perhaps he lost his nerve. He thus did not accompany Aeneas on his journey to and from the Underworld. His body hacked to pieces by the swords of “barbarous natives” [Lewis, 1966, p.295], Palinurus lies somewhere in fragments and unburied. His shade must therefore wait by the banks of the river Cocytus, suffering from dreadful angst, for a hundred years before Charon will let him cross to the Underworld. Such is the type of punishment meted out to charlatans. Palinurus’ situation is much like Empedocles’ in “Empedocles on Etna”, as Arnold described it. It is one in which, as will be recalled:
the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done. In such situations there is inevitably something morbid, in the description of them something monotonous. When they occur in actual life, they are painful, not tragic; the representation of them in poetry is painful also. [“Preface to Poems (1853)”, Super, 1960-77, Vol.1, pp.2-3]
It is only if his fragments are gathered together and he is properly buried in the poem that Charon will let Palinurus cross sooner, so that he may purify his soul and, as Empedocles hopes:
see if we will at last be true To our only true deep-buried selves, Being one with which we are one with the whole world. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act 2, lines 370-372]
So it is only if he is properly buried - if his body is in his words - that he can eventually join those other souls waiting by the river Lethe for a chance to be reborn [Lewis, 1966, p.309]. In summary, then, Connolly’s use of Eliot’s and Arnold’s metaphor of the buried life in The Unquiet Grave enabled him to say what he wanted to say about his and England’s experiences in World War Two, whilst hardly mentioning the war at all; in the same way that Eliot used the metaphor to say what he wanted to say about his and England’s experiences in World War One in “The Waste Land”, whilst hardly mentioning the war at all. However, in some ways The Unquiet Grave, because of its charlatan-element, cut off as Connolly felt he was from the buried life, is more like the 1940s’ “Empedocles on Etna” than it is like that decade’s “Waste Land”.
197
Jon Stallworthy As has been noted, although he did not originate it Arnold’s use of his concept of the buried life appears to have influenced a number of other English writers, particularly in the period from about 1850 to about 1950. This period coincided with the heyday of British imperialism. A number of fine poets who were not jingoists, or not always so, by using the metaphor of the buried life nevertheless found their best or only subject on imperial battlefields. These were poets like Hardy, Kipling, Housman, Sassoon, Rosenberg, Owen and Douglas. Even after World War Two the metaphor’s influence still lingered on for a while, as the Empire lingered on; and although in his mature work he was more influenced by the anti-imperialism of W.B. Yeats [Stallworthy, 1998, pp.199-229], in his juvenilia the poet Jon Stallworthy was much-influenced by the metaphor. Stallworthy is particularly interesting because, like Lewis, he attended Rugby, and he points to Tom Hughes’ portrait of Dr Arnold’s Rugby in Tom Brown’s Schooldays as the main source for the co-option by imperialism of the metaphor of the buried life. In the 1940s and 1950s Stallworthy received a Rugby and Oxford education, as Arnold had before him in the 1830s and 1840s. At Oxford in the late 1950s, after having served two years in the army in Nigeria, Stallworthy was given to reciting long passages of Arnold’s “Sohrab and Rustum” and Douglas’ “Oxford” to his friends whilst punting on the Cherwell [Stallworthy, 1998, pp.164-165]. Stallworthy later realised how many poems in his preparatory school anthology that he memorised to recite later at Oxford, such as “Sohrab and Rustum” and Kipling’s “A Song to Mithras”, had “offered lessons in dying” [Stallworthy, 1998, p.47]; as the epitaphs on the gravestones in Gray’s “Elegy in a Country Churchyard” had offered lessons in dying [“Elegy in a Country Churchyard, lines 81-84]. And no book than that anthology, he felt, had “ever given me more pleasure or, I believe, more profit” [Stallworthy, 1998, p.44]. At Rugby, in his first attempt at a prize poem, Stallworthy had followed an Arnoldian river from its source, “recognizably a spring on Shotover”, down to its issue in the sea:
I looked across the plains of fantasy, Back to the blue hills of the rising sun, Where Youth’s small spring of cloudless ecstasy Breaks from the cool sands of oblivion. [Stallworthy, 1998, p.94]
For his second attempt at a prize poem he chose the subject of “Rugby Chapel”, which was about two Rugby poets commemorated in the chapel, Matthew Arnold and Rupert Brooke. Here is a representative sample:
This, some will leave with others that have gone Arrayed in honour to the far unknown; As he whose ageless features yet live on, Their light imparted to enduring stone: And though at last all here be overthrown, 198
Time shall not conquer nor the years subdue His gifted utterance, who sleeps alone Where Skyros olives murmur the night through And clouds blow high in heavens of Aegean blue. [Stallworthy, 1998, p.109]
The two key elements of Arnold’s metaphor of the buried life are thus present in Stallworthy’s juvenilia from the early 1950s. These are, firstly, the river of life; and secondly, a poet who is dead but also simultaneously youthful and alive, as is Rupert Brooke in Stallworthy’s poem above. Rupert Brooke offered a valuable “lesson in dying” to those of his generation, and Stallworthy traced this imperialist obsession with lessons in dying back to Matthew Arnold’s father Dr Thomas Arnold’s influence at Rugby in the 1830s and 1840s; or at least to the portrait of Dr Arnold in Thomas Hughes’ Tom Brown’s Schooldays (1856) [Stallworthy, 1998, pp.68-69]. Chapter One of Tom Brown’s Schooldays introduces that book’s main theme, which is about how life at a public school like Rugby is an excellent preparation for a life to be spent on imperial battlefields. The chapter gives an overview of the history of British warfare from the Romans through to the Crimean War of the 1850s, stressing the continuity of British belligerence: “And up the heights came the Saxons, as they did at the Alma” [Hughes, 1971, p.20]. Along the river Alma in the Crimean War the British Army had not resorted to anything so low as tactics to win the day, but instead had charged straight up the glacis into intense gunfire, thus taking heavy and unnecessary casualties, so as to capture the heights from the Russians, and impress observers with their sang-froid in the face of death [Woodham-Smith, 1958, pp.184- 191]. The plot of Hughes’ novel then gets under way and the first sermon Tom Brown hears from the Doctor introduces him to Rugby’s martial ethos. He recalls:
The oak pulpit standing out by itself above the School seats. The tall gallant form, the kindling eye, the voice, now soft as the low notes of a flute, now clear and stirring as the call of the light infantry bugle. [Hughes, 1971, p.115]
Such was the Doctor’s voice; and his message, week after week, was that life is:
a battlefield ordained from of old, where there are no spectators, but the youngest must take his side, and the stakes are life and death. And he who roused this consciousness in them, showed them at the same time, by every word he spoke in the pulpit, and by his whole daily life, how that battle was to be fought; and stood there before them their fellow-soldier and the captain of their band. The true sort of captain too for a boy’s army, one who had no misgivings and gave no uncertain word of command, and, let who would yield or make truce, would fight the fight out (so every boy felt) to the last gasp and the last drop of blood. [Hughes, 1971, pp.116-117]
This was the atmosphere in which Matthew Arnold was also raised, and for a time he was concerned with trying to convince others that his poems were just as rousing as his 199
father’s sermons had been. So for example in 1853 he wrote to Arthur Hugh Clough:
I am glad you like the Gipsy Scholar - but what does it do for you? Homer animates - Shakespeare animates - in its poor way I think Sohrab & Rustum animates - the Gipsy Scholar at best awakens a pleasing melancholy. But this is not what we want... what they want is something to animate and ennoble them - not merely to add zest to their melancholy or grace to their dreams. - I believe a feeling of this kind is the basis of my nature - and of my poetics. [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, p282]
Lewis noted how Thomas Arnold “was responsible for two such contradictory symbols of his energies” as his own son, the poet, and the brutally animated William Hodson, of Hodson’s Horse fame, who terrorised the populace, had sepoys burnt alive, murdered three captive Indian princes and eventually got himself killed helping to suppress the Indian Mutiny [Lewis, 1989, p.373]. Hodson was one who could certainly be relied upon to fight the fight out to the last gasp and the last drop of blood, so to speak. But there was a little bit of Hodson in Matthew Arnold as well. However, to return to the plot of Tom Brown’s Schooldays, having Tom’s class construe passages from The Iliad dealing with the speeches of the women over the body of Hector, slain in battle, leads to suitably martial thoughts:
After all, what would life be without fighting, I should like to know? From the cradle to the grave, fighting, rightly understood, is the business, the real, highest, honestest business of every son of man. Every one who is worth his salt has his enemies, who must be beaten, be they evil thoughts and habits in himself, or spiritual wickedness in high places, or Russians, or Border-ruffians, or Bill, Tom, or Harry, who will not let him live his life in quiet till he has thrashed them. [Hughes, 1971, p.218]
Whilst Tom is busy drawing dogs’ heads in his notebook another boy is moved to tears by the lines dealing with Helen’s lamentations over the dead Hector, described by Hughes as “the most touching thing in Homer, perhaps in all profane poetry put together” [Hughes, 1971, pp.220-221]. But Tom, too, in his own way, certainly finds Homer “animating”. For construing these passages leads him into the biggest and most important fight of his school career; and it leads Hughes himself into some suitably manly reflections [Hughes, 1971, pp.217-232]. When he is about to leave Rugby, Tom reflects upon the future career in the military of one of his classmates, Harry East. Dr Arnold has taught East much that will help him to become a fine army officer:
‘Bye-the-bye, have you heard from him?’ ‘Yes, I had a letter in February, just before he started for India to join his regiment.’ ‘He will make a capital officer.’ ‘Aye, won’t he!’ said Tom, brightening: ‘no fellow could handle boys better, and I suppose soldiers are very like boys. And he’ll never tell them to go where he won’t
200
go himself. No mistake about that - a braver fellow never walked.’ ‘His year in the sixth will have taught him a good deal that will be useful to him now.’ [Hughes, 1971, p.276]
Dr Arnold has also taught Tom much that is useful, even though he is to go up to Oxford rather than into the army. However, it is only as Tom is about to leave Rugby that he finally realises that the Doctor is omniscient, like God:
It was a new light to him to find, that besides teaching the sixth, and governing and guiding the whole school, editing classics, and writing histories, the great Head- master had found time in those busy years to watch over the career, even of him, Tom Brown, and his particular friends - and, no doubt, of fifty other boys at the same time; and all this without taking the least credit to himself, or seeming to know, or let anyone else know, that he ever though particularly of any boy at all. [Hughes, 1971, p.280]
This realisation of Tom’s makes the Doctor’s victory over the boy complete:
However, the Doctor’s victory was complete from that moment over Tom Brown at any rate. He gave way at all points, and the enemy marched right over him, cavalry, infantry, and artillery, the land transport corps, and the camp followers. It had taken eight long years to do it, but now it was done thoroughly, and there wasn’t a corner of him left which didn’t believe in the Doctor... And so, after... sorrowful adieus to his tutor, from whom he received two beautifully-bound volumes of the Doctor’s Sermons, as a parting present, he marched down to the School-house, a hero-worshipper, who would have satisfied the soul of a Thomas Carlyle himself. [Hughes, 1971, p.280]
His realisation of the Doctor’s omniscience has hit him with the force of a divine revelation; and indeed it seems that there is some confusion in Tom’s mind between God in His Heaven and the Doctor in his study, which Hughes elucidates even more thoroughly in his novel’s conclusion [Hughes, 1971, pp.282-288]. Thomas Arnold died in the prime of his life in 1842 and was buried beneath the altar in Rugby Chapel; so that the boys in chapel seem to worship the memory of the Doctor, who is God’s earthly representative, so to speak, just as much as they worship God. In the last chapter of Hughes’ novel Tom Brown makes a pilgrimage to Dr Arnold’s grave: “All that was left of him whom he had honoured, was lying cold and still under the chapel floor” [Hughes, 1971, p.286]. Hughes appears to draw upon Emerson’s ideas about the universal mind, and Carlyle’s ideas about hero-worship, to express Tom’s feelings about the dead Doctor; and, as has been noted, these were also to be key sources for Matthew Arnold’s metaphor of the buried life. Like Matthew Arnold, too, Hughes stresses how important are human relationships as a revelation of the buried life:
Here let us leave him - where better could we leave him, than at the altar, before which he had first caught a glimpse of the glory of his birthright, and felt the drawing of the bond which links all living souls together in one brotherhood - at the grave beneath the altar of him, who had opened his eyes to see that glory, and 201
softened his heart till it could feel that bond. And let us not be hard on him, if at that moment his soul is fuller of the tomb and him who lies there, than of the altar and Him of who it speaks. Such stages have to be gone through, I believe, by all young and brave souls, who must win their way through hero-worship, to the worship of Him who is the king and Lord of heroes. For it is only through our mysterious human relationships, through the love and tenderness and purity of mothers, and sisters, and wives, through the strength and courage and wisdom of fathers, and brothers, and teachers, that we can come to the knowledge of Him, in whom alone the love, and the tenderness, and the purity, and the strength, and the courage, and the wisdom of all these dwell for ever and ever in perfect fulness. [Hughes, 1971, p.288]
The Doctor seems to mediate between God and humankind there in a way more usually ascribed to Jesus Christ. Through the imperialist ethos bequeathed to Rugby by his own influence as headmaster; and through the influence of Hughes’ portrait of him in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, which diffused that influence through to dozens of public schools, and even through to boys who did receive the benefit of a public school education; although Dr Arnold himself was long dead his ability to inspire others from the grave was still very much alive up until about the 1950s, as Stallworthy shows. This meant that his grave was still “open” up until the 1950s, in the sense that, as has been noted, Matthew Arnold described Jesus Christ’s grave as once “open” in “Obermann Once More” [“Obermann Once More”, lines 161-172]. By the accident, then, of having died at the height of his powers Dr Arnold could be presented, in Tom Brown’s Schooldays, as an embodiment of the metaphor of the buried life, and the first inspiration behind an imperial cult of sorts. His having been buried beneath the altar in Rugby Chapel identified him, in the eyes of impressionable Rugbeians like Tom Brown, with the Son of God; so that in “Rugby Chapel” Matthew Arnold could speak of Dr Arnold not merely as a “servant” of God, but as a “son” who knew his “Father’s innermost mind”, and who died on behalf of the rest of humankind, so that he could be held up as a model for others to follow [“Rugby Chapel”, lines 162- 170]. His death thus offered a lesson in dying, although Matthew Arnold himself eventually found the edifying deathbed scene in A.P. Stanley’s Life of Dr Arnold a little hard to take [Honan, 1981, p.62]. In summary, then, Arnold’s metaphor of the buried life was an important influence on Stallworthy’s poetic juvenilia, written in the early 1950s in the last days of the British Empire. However, Arnold’s metaphor was a much less important influence on Stallworthy’s mature poetry, written by-and-large after the demise of that empire, when Yeats’ anti-imperialism became much more important to him. Through his references to Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Stallworthy also indicates that Thomas Arnold had an important role to play in the co-option of the metaphor of the buried life by British imperialism.
202
Chapter Eleven ______
“The Strayed Reveller”
In the next two chapters, two of Arnold’s major poems, “The Strayed Reveller” and “Empedocles on Etna”, will be analysed, by applying what has been learnt about the concept of the buried life in the previous chapters. Other, later poems such as “Balder Dead” may give a more complete picture of the river of the buried life; or of the shamanic journey to and from the subconscious mind; or to and from the land of the dead. But what those later poems lack is any sense of there being “spots of time” during which there may be a momentary fusion of the surface life with the buried life, or an intersection of the ordinary run of time with a timeless moment, or a “blinding moment of union with the Godhead” [Fermor, 2004, p.33]. The main similarity between “The Strayed Reveller” and “Empedocles on Etna” is that they are both about journeys through the subconscious, the land of the dead and the buried life: as Jung noted, “the unconscious corresponds to the mythic land of the dead” [Jung, 1995, p.216]. Only fragments of these journeys are revealed to both the Strayed Reveller and Empedocles in “spots of time”, but from these fragments the overall nature of the journeys can be inferred. The main difference between the two poems is that the Strayed Reveller is young, and his is the youthful Greek civilisation of the Homeric period; whereas Empedocles is old, and his is the aged Greek civilisation of the PostSocratic period. The Strayed Reveller represents the youthful and attractive lyric poet who merges with the inner god of the buried life, or the inner Dionysus, in the manner of Arnold’s “Urania”, as he “dies” to his surface life and is “reborn” out of the buried life to merge again with Apollo. His recurrent “deaths” and “rebirths” in the character of Dionysus help to keep Apollo and the world young. Empedocles is aged, like the aged narrator of “Gerontion” or “The Waste Land”. He is no longer a youthful and attractive lyric poet who can merge from time to time with the inner Dionysus. He is like an Apollo whose surface life has grown remote from the buried life, so that the inner Dionysus can no longer merge with him and, consequently, both he and the world have grown old. It seems that an enormous sacrifice, such as that associated with the French Revolution in Arnold’s “Obermann Once More”, or with World War One in Brooke’s “Peace”, is required to make both him and the world young again. However, it is not certain that even the most enormous sacrifice will achieve that aim if other conditions are not right, so it may be that after such an enormous sacrifice the world will still be in the same predicament that it was before. In The Hero with a Thousand Faces Campbell wrote that:
schism in the soul, schism in the body social, will not be resolved by any scheme of return to the good old days (archaism), or by programs guaranteed to render an
203
ideal projected future (futurism), or even by the most realistic, hardheaded work to weld together again the deteriorating elements. Only birth can conquer death - the birth, not of the old thing again, but of something new. Within the soul, within the body social, there must be - if we are to experience long survival - a continuous “recurrence of birth” (palingenesia) to nullify the unremitting recurrences of death... Peace then is a snare; war is a snare; change is a snare; permanence a snare. When our day is come for the victory of death, death closes in; there is nothing we can do, except be crucified - and resurrected; dismembered totally, and then reborn. [Campbell, 2008, pp.11-12]
In his description of the fate of his “hero”, which is to be “dismembered totally, and then reborn”, Campbell forecasts for us the fate of Arnold’s Empedocles.
“The Strayed Reveller” Although The Strayed Reveller and Other Poems (1849) contains a number of pieces of juvenilia which reveal no particular talent, it also contains a number of quite interesting pieces in which the nature of Arnold’s poetic imagination begins to be revealed or engaged for the first time. In these poems, such as “Quiet Work”, “Mycerinus” and “The Sick King in Bokhara”, Arnold begins to write about various aspects of the concept of the buried life in a reasonably effective, if didactic, manner. Then in “The Strayed Reveller” itself, although much of the poem is contextual-dross, in the songs of the Strayed Reveller it is as if Arnold’s ordinary, everyday personality suddenly merges for the first time, in a series of epiphanies, with the poetic personality from out of the buried life. So it is as if Arnold actually sees the Strayed Reveller’s visions in his mind’s eye for a few moments and then writes them down. Or it is as if the poetic personality, or the inner god, takes control of the pen in Arnold’s hand for a few moments to write down those songs; so it seems that all that Arnold’s ordinary, everyday personality had to do, then, was to provide some sort of a poetic-context in which to place those more inspired lines. It appears that the Strayed Reveller uses alcohol to disorder his senses enough to unleash his imagination in the poem (“Thou lovest it, then, my wine?”) [“The Strayed Reveller”, line 54]; alcohol apparently having the same effect on his imagination (and perhaps Arnold’s) as it had on William James’:
Sobriety diminishes, discriminates, and says no; drunkeness expands, unites, and says yes... It brings its votary from the chill periphery of things to the radiant core. It makes him for the moment one with truth... The drunken consciousness is one bit of the mystic consciousness, and our total opinion of it must find its place in our opinion of that larger whole. [James, 1982, p.387]
The character of the Strayed Reveller, which is that of a young exquisite and devotee of that god of the vine, Dionysus, is, as has been noted, also that of Eliot’s Saint Narcissus. (As Dionysus is the god of Empedocles’, so he is also the god of the Strayed Reveller’s buried life.) Warren D. Anderson comments that bits of the poem “are a new heaven and a new earth. Only once, in certain of the lyrics of Callicles”, in “Empedocles on Etna”, 204
“will Arnold again rise thus to a sheer awareness of life, to a truly classical summing-up of passion resolved” [Anderson, 1965, p.28]. What Anderson knows, and what he is trying to say, is that bits of “The Strayed Reveller”, like bits of “Empedocles on Etna”, are very good indeed. However, even though bits of “The Strayed Reveller” are very good, in the poem Arnold still shows himself to be only a minor poet, according to Emerson’s definition, since he gives only very fragmentary impressions of the universal mind or the mind of God, or of the buried life. In his fragments of observations, in “The Strayed Reveller”, on Tiresias “Revolving inly/The doom of Thebes”; on the Centaurs “In the upper glens/Of Pelion”; on the Indian “Drifting, knife in hand”; on the Scythian “On the wide Stepp”; on the Merchants “On the broad, clay-laden/Lone Chorasmian stream”; and on the Heroes “sitting in the dark ship”; Arnold appears to have given us almost one hundred and fifty lines of very fine poetry which are fragments of a whole. But that whole is still almost completely inexplicable or invisible to us. It is known that Arnold took some of his images from Alexander Burnes’ Travels into Bokhara, Shelley’s “Alastor” and Maurice de Guérin’s “Le Centaure”; and it is likely that the poem also owes something to Goethe’s lyrics and to Milton’s Comus. However, no-one has ever attempted to trace the subterranean connections between each of Arnold’s observations in “The Strayed Reveller” in the manner, say, of John Livingstone Lowe’s or Ted Hughes’ efforts to do that sort of a thing with Coleridge’s poetry (in Lowe’s The Road to Xanadu and Hughes’ “The Snake in the Oak”). Probably the connections were invisible even to Arnold himself: “my poems are fragments”, as he wrote to his sister in 1849, “i.e., that I am fragments” [Lang, 1996, Vol.1, p.143]. Like Coleridge in “Kubla Khan”, then, in “The Strayed Reveller” Arnold presents the reader with the fragments of a whole, or fragments of “the mystic consciousness”, glimpsed by a young lyric poet in a state of rapturous intoxication; and also like Coleridge, Arnold then spent much of the rest of his career trying, and mostly failing, to present a more complete picture of that whole in the form of an extended epic poem or work of prose philosophy. One explanation for the Strayed Reveller’s visions is that they give disordered impressions of the river of the buried life as it flows from mountains in some vaguely central Asian location, through plains and cities, and down to the sea; and in poems like “The Buried Life” and “Sohrab and Rustum” Arnold would later provide less vivid but more ordered impressions of this river. A second explanation for the Strayed Reveller’s visions is related to ideas about British imperialism and the externalisation of conflict in the nineteeth-century, in that (to a certain extent) those visions follow Jason’s and the other Heroes’ journey, in the time just before the Trojan Wars, and on one of the ancient Greeks’ first colonising enterprises, from Mount Pelion to the East and then home via Circe’s island and the Happy Islands of the Underworld, with only the Golden Bough to guide them:
They see the Heroes Sitting in the dark ship
205
On the foamless, long-heaving, Violet sea, At sunset nearing The Happy Isles. [“The Strayed Reveller”, lines 201-206]
Jason’s usurping uncle, King Pelias, had sent Jason on his journey to the East in search of the Golden Fleece, hoping thus to externalise and resolve the conflict between the two of them over the kingship of Iolcos. (Arnold would return to this tale of the usurping “uncle” in his tragedy, Merope, so it was an important one to him.) According to Frazer, the tale of the Golden Fleece is a Greek version of the Biblical story of Abraham’s near- sacrifice of his eldest son, Isaac [Frazer, 1993, pp.290-293], so that this Greek tale of conflict externalised finds a parallel in poems like Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”; and it may have had a particular resonance for the English in the mid- nineteenth-century, when so many were leaving unresolved conflicts behind them in England and going abroad to fight in wars or serve in the colonies. Pelias hoped that Jason would die abroad, or at least never return. However, upon his return home from the Underworld, and on Medea’s advice, Pelias was killed, dismembered and stuck in a pot with magic herbs, presumably to be eaten, so that, according to Charles Kingsley:
“Medea’s cauldron” is a proverb still, by which we mean times of war and change, when the world has become old and feeble, and grows young again through bitter pains. [Kingsley, 1906, p.170]
It will be recalled how this was once Dionysus’ fate, too, when he briefly occupied the throne of his father, Zeus, but was then cut to pieces by the murderous knives of his enemies, the Titans, “who rushed upon him, cut him limb from limb, boiled his body with various herbs, and ate it” [Frazer, 1993, p.388]. Jason then became King of Iolcos in his uncle’s stead, no doubt to the benefit of his kingdom, as it would have been “reborn” or “resurrected” with Jason (there were, however, to be no such vengeful returns in English history in the nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, as Hughes noted) [Hughes, 1995, p.70]; so that, again in Frazer’s words again: “Le roi et mort, vive le roi!” [Frazer, 1993, p.714]. The slightly later tale of Ulysses’ journey to the East to take part in the Trojan Wars can also be read as a tale of conflict externalised, although in Ulysses’ case it was the father who travelled abroad. It is appropriate, then, that in Arnold’s poem the Strayed Reveller meets Ulysses on Circe’s island, since Ulysses undertook a journey, via the Underworld, much like Jason’s on his return voyage from Troy. (Medea was Circe’s daughter and they were both death-goddesses, so that, for Hughes, Medea and Circe were like that “Woman”, the “Night-mare Life-in-Death” of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” [“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”, lines 185-194]; and, also for Hughes, Jason’s and Ulysses’ adventures were closely related in that they both follow the same general schema of the Ancient Mariner’s shamanic flight) [Hughes, 1993,
206
pp.434-437]. However, upon Ulysses’ return to his kingdom of Ithaca he refused to die, so that he killed all those who would be king in his stead. According to Graves:
in the late thirteenth century BC a sacred king of Ithaca, Cronos’s representative, refused to die at the end of his term of office. This would explain why he killed all the suitors for his wife Penelope’s hand, after disguising himself in dirt and rags during the usual temporary abdication. [Graves, 1961, p.418]
It has been noted how Frazer explained that such stories as this point “to a custom of temporarily investing the king’s son”, or his proxy, “with the royal dignity as a preliminary to sacrificing him instead of his father” [Frazer, 1993, p.389], since:
no one could so well represent the king in his divine character as his son, who might be supposed to share the divine afflatus of his father. No one, therefore, could so appropriately die for the king and, through him, for the whole people, as the king’s son. [Frazer, 1993, pp.289-290]
In Arnold’s poem this does not bode well for the Strayed Reveller, since Ulysses, as the consort of Circe, is clearly still in his prime. As his mind has been torn into fragments of visions by alcohol, so the Strayed Reveller’s body will soon be torn into fragments by Bacchantes. Eventually, though, as in the case of Pelias, and as in Tennyson’s “Ulysses” (1842), with the ageing process it must eventually be the father’s turn. A third explanation for the Strayed Reveller’s visions is that the dismembered god, Dionysus, the Reveller’s “belov’d Iacchus” [“The Strayed Reveller”, line 281], has inspired him with visions of that god’s journey from Thebes to the East and back again. In one myth, Dionysus was supposedly born in Thebes, out of Semele; and after journeying to the East he returns to Thebes to wreak havoc in Euripides’ The Bacchae: “[Dionysus] travelled first to the sun-smitten Persian plains,/The walled cities of Bactria, the harsh Median country” [Euripides, 1972, p.192]. According to Arnold, Guérin composed his poem “Le Centaure”, and then “under the same inspiration he composed a Bacchante, which is lost, and which was meant by him to form part of a prose poem on the adventures of Bacchus in India” [“Maurice de Guérin”, Super, 1960-77, Vol. 3, pp.35-36]. Guérin is therefore likely to be the main external source of inspiration for this aspect of Arnold’s poem. In another version of that myth, which formed part of the Orphic Mysteries, Dionysus was first torn to pieces by the Titans but was then resurrected by his grandmother, Rhea. He then journeyed to the East, perhaps revisiting the lands of his origin and gathering up ancient wisdom, before descending to the Underworld to resurrect his dead mother and spouse, Persephone, into eternal life. His followers would roam about the countryside under the influence of some intoxicant, tearing animals or people to pieces and boasting afterwards that they had travelled to India and back with their god. They would have been, however, necessarily rather incoherent in telling others of what they had seen. Such seems to be one of the main versions of the myth of Dionysus of which “The Strayed Reveller” offers some vivid fragments. 207
It has been noted how, for Coleridge, the Mysteries dealt with the One of imagination, whereas the Olympians were products of the Many of fancy [Louis, 2007, p.13]; and how for one of Coleridge’s German sources, Creuzer, whom Arnold also read, the Greek mythology of the Olympians was “a childish, uncomprehending plagiarism of Eastern wisdom. The revelations of divine unity, attained in India... were degraded by the Greeks’ polytheistic exuberance”, so that only in “the ancient Mystery religions was the true spiritual impulse retained” [Louis, 2007, p.4]. Dionysus’ journey to the East thus offers a symbolic reintegration of the Many of polytheism in ancient Greece with the One of monotheism; and also a symbolic reintegration of the Many of people’s surface lives in ancient Greece with the One of the buried life. One of the main themes of Arnold’s poem is that the Strayed Reveller is a young man who has had no particular experience; and yet, inspired by the god as he is, he has fragments of visions which exceed anything that the far more experienced Ulysses, the father-figure with whom he converses and who will soon be visiting the Underworld himself under instruction from Circe, could conjure up. Peter Levi thus noted that although Arnold never visited central Asia, “there are some lines in... ‘The Strayed Reveller’ that give a clearer, sharper, more accurate sense of what central Asia is like than any other sentences in the English language” [Levi, 1984, p.14]. Inspired by the “god” of his poetic personality, then, the young Arnold apparently just read a travel book or two and then imagined the place much more vividly than anyone who has ever actually been there has described it. (Arnold wrote at a time when, according to Mark Cocker, the “dark places in the Western psyche found their most fitting correlative in the eerie wind-tormented uplands of Central Asia” [Cocker, 1992, p.216]; so that central Asia, because of its remoteness and inaccessibility, and because of the sacrifices required to get there, represented the geography of the subconscious or of the Underworld.) At this stage of his life Arnold thus seems to have had a lot in common with the Coleridge of especially “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and “Kubla Khan”, although it would be true to say that he had not quite Coleridge’s genius for transforming mundane sources into extraordinary poetry [Lowe, 1978, pp.3-397]. That youthful vision will always penetrate deeper into the heart of things than the accumulated wisdom of middle-age is, then, is one of the main themes of “The Strayed Reveller”, written by a young man. However, another main theme is that the price that the poet or visionary pays for seeing what Dionysus has seen is that he must also be torn into fragments, like Dionysus:
These things, Ulysses, The wise Bards also Behold and sing. But oh!, what labour! O Prince, what pain! ...such a price
208
The Gods exact for song; To become what we sing. [“The Strayed Reveller”, lines 207-211; lines 232-234]
In other words, to achieve the visions the poet must tear himself apart psychologically, in the hope that he will one day be resurrected into wholeness like Dionysus; as the Strayed Reveller will soon be torn apart physically by Bacchantes, as Ulysses’ proxy and in the hope that he will one day be resurrected into wholeness like Dionysus. (Nietzsche wrote that “the lyric poet... himself becomes his images”, or visions, “which are objectified versions of himself”) [in McGahey, 1994, p.57]. This theme would be expanded upon by Arnold in “Empedocles on Etna”, in which Empedocles is a sacrificial god-king from the world of The Golden Bough as well as a poet. Empedocles, like the Strayed Reveller, is exalted by the gods above common mortals. However, his position as a sacrificial god- king, according to both Frazer and Freud, “also makes his existence a torment and an intolerable burden and reduces him to a bondage far worse than that of his subjects” [Byatt, 1993, p.126]. Arnold thus shared things in common with Coleridge, too, in terms of the “intolerable” price he felt he would eventually pay for his few moments of youthful vision. In summary, then, under the influence of alcohol the Strayed Reveller sees visions of three different aspects of the buried life. The first of these is a vision of the river of the buried life as it flows from an original divine unity amongst mountains in some central Asian location and then down to that same original divine unity in the sea. The second is a vision of Jason and the Argonauts’ shamanic journey from an original divine unity to the East and then back home again via the Underworld to restore that same original divine unity in Iolcos. The third is a vision of Dionysus’ journey from an original divine unity to the East and then back home again via the Underworld to restore that same original divine unity in Thebes. The Strayed Reveller believes he has seen these visions “Without pain, without labour” [“The Strayed Reveller”, line 274]. However, he will soon undertake that same journey to the Underworld of which he has seen visions, and he will thus be torn to pieces and pay for those visions with his life.
209
Chapter Twelve ______
“Empedocles on Etna”
Introduction Arnold’s second volume of poetry, Empedocles on Etna and Other Poems, was published in 1852. Apart from the title poem, it contained such notable poems as “The Buried Life”, “A Summer Night” and “To Marguerite - Continued”. These poems, along with a number of others in the collection, dealt with the subjects of courtship, love and marriage; subjects which much concerned Arnold at that time since he had got married in 1851. Arnold is more assured here than in his first volume in writing didactic poems, like those three mentioned above, about various aspects of the metaphor of the buried life. Then in “Empedocles on Etna” itself, although much of the poem is contextual-dross (as in “The Strayed Reveller” previously), in the songs of Callicles it is again as if Arnold’s ordinary, everyday personality suddenly merges, in a series of epiphanies, with the poetic personality from out of the buried life. So it is as if Arnold actually sees Callicles’ visions in his mind’s eye for a few moments and then writes them down. Or it is again as if the poetic personality, or the inner god, takes control of the pen in Arnold’s hand for a few moments; so it seems that all that Arnold’s ordinary, everyday personality had to do, then, was to again provide some sort of a poetic-context in which to place these more inspired lines. Arnold’s “prose outline and summary of the poem he wanted to create” [Tinker and Lowry, 1940, p.291] has survived. He wrote of Empedocles that:
He sees things as they are - the world as it is - God as he is: in their stern simplicity. The task is a severe and mind-tasking one: to know the mysteries which are communicated to others by fragments, in parables. But he started towards it in hope: his first glimpses of it filled him with joy: he had friends who shared his hope & joy & communicated to him theirs: even now he does not deny that the sight is capable of affording rapture & the purest peace... Before he becomes the victim of depression & overtension of mind, to the utter deadness to joy, grandeur, spirit, and animated life, he desires to die; to be reunited with the universe, before by exaggerating his human side he has become utterly estranged from it. [in Tinker and Lowry, 1940, pp.291-2]
Arnold’s aims for “Empedocles on Etna” were quite ambitious, then, for he intended to do more in that poem than communicate only in the Dionysian “fragments” or “parables” of “The Strayed Reveller”. His intentions were, in fact, to try to fill in quite a few more of the details of the sort of Romantic imaginative vision of the unity of all things described, for example, by Salusinszky in Chapter Two or Emerson in Chapter Six. However, Arnold found that a considerable sacrifice was required to achieve that imaginative vision; so that, as Empedocles’ ageing body has become an encumbrance to 210
his spirit’s search, in the poem he “desires to die”. It was noted how for Emerson, as for Arnold, a great poet like Empedocles is one who achieves a vision of the unity of all things by opening himself up totally to the universal mind, so that he has access to all of that mind and is thus “complete” rather than “partial” or fragmentary [Emerson, 1989, p.82]. In “Empedocles on Etna”, then, Arnold’s aims were to describe the process by which a great poet can open himself up to the universal mind, which is through spiritual death and rebirth or resurrection; and to describe, if not the whole of it, at least rather more of the contents of that universal mind than he had done previously. Arnold located Emerson’s universal mind in the subconscious, so that to achieve a vision of the unity of all things he believed that a great poet had to “die” to his surface life and open himself up to the buried life, or the subconscious mind, and be true:
To our only true, deep-buried selves, Being one with which we are one with the whole world. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act 2, lines 369-371]
In “Empedocles on Etna” the universal mind, or the buried life, is represented by the vast, subterranean sea of lava of Plutonism that erupts into Empedocles’ surface life in “spots of time” through the volcanoes of Magna Graecia. It is also represented by the world of Greek mythology that insinuates itself, from below, into Empedocles’ consciousness in “spots of time” through the songs of Callicles. Whereas the sea of lava is formless, except where it is given bodily form by Typho, the world of Greek mythology has a pattern; and, as has been noted, for Arnold, “developing inwardly” as a poet meant “organizing the inner world or at least searching out the patterns there and that is a mythology” [Faas, 1980, p. 204]. He believed that “early Greek mythology can still present us with a working anatomy of our psychic life in a very complete and profound way” [Faas, 1980, p.32]; and that Greek myths provided a narrative framework into which the poet’s fragmentary insights, gained when their personality merged from time-to-time with the inner daemon’s of the buried life, could be fitted. (McGahey notes that central to the shamanic tradition “is the effort of poetry and philosophy to reunite and refind their ground in myth [McGahey, 1994, pp.51-52]; and, given Empedocles’ fame as both a poet and a philosopher, that seems to well-describe what happens in “Empedocles on Etna”.) In “Empedocles on Etna”, then, Empedocles can be true to his “deep-buried” self if the pattern of events in his surface life conforms to the mythic, daemonic patterns in Callicles’ songs of the buried life, which are all about death and rebirth or resurrection. Despite Arnold’s aims, “Empedocles on Etna” was still structured in rather a similar way to “The Strayed Reveller”, with the character Callicles presenting the reader with a series of fragments of observations, or “parables”, in much the same way as the Strayed Reveller had done in the earlier poem; although each of Callicles’ fragments is longer than any of the Strayed Reveller’s. (Callicles may be said to present a “series of demonstrations” of “the buried life” [Raine, 2006, p.75], to use a phrase Raine uses to 211
describe the structure of “The Waste Land”.) These fragments of observations on the myths of Chiron and Achilles; Cadmus and Harmonia; Typho and Zeus; Marsyas and Apollo; and Apollo and the Muses; again seem to be fragments of a whole which is still almost completely inexplicable or invisible to us. There are specific resemblances between each myth and the one before or after it in the poem; and also between each myth and the life-story of Empedocles as it is presented in the poem. (The basic situation presented in each mythic fragment resembles that of Pelias and Jason in the Greek myth, or that of Abraham and Isaac in Owen’s “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”.) But again, no one has ever really attempted to trace the subterranean connections between Callicles’ fragments of observations in the way of a Lowe or a Hughes with Coleridge. As in the earlier poem, too, it is the young man of no particular experience, the youthful poet Callicles, who sees deeper into the heart of things, through his fragments of observations, than does the more experienced philosopher and once-poet, Empedocles, since Empedocles is now almost “utterly estranged” from the buried life. Arnold modelled Callicles’ songs on the lyrics of Pindar, the Boeotian poet who wrote odes in honour of the victors of Olympia and other such games throughout Greece, and who was a near-contemporary of Empedocles. Apart from providing Arnold with a source for the metres and subject matter for the majority of Callicles’ songs, Pindar was also of interest to Arnold because, like Empedocles, he considered that the god Apollo spoke through him and from time to time inspired his poetry [Bowra, 1967, p.29]. As Maurice Bowra noted, Pindar’s main theme was an Arnoldian or Eliotian one about how the surface life of humankind is mainly a humdrum affair of no consequence, as is the surface life of Empedocles in Arnold’s poem; but that every now and then there is a moment in the surface life when what is divine breaks through:
Pindar’s guiding and central theme is the part of experience in which human beings are exalted or illumined by a divine force... For much of their time men lead a shadowy and unsubstantial existence, but when the gods send a divine brightness all is well with them... the poet’s task is to catch and keep the fleeting divine moment and to reveal to men what really matters in their busy bustling lives. [in Pindar, 1969, pp.xvi-xvii]
In each of his odes Pindar juxtaposed a myth about the gods with a tale about the victory of a man in an athletic contest, or some such thing, in order to highlight a moment that was divine in the otherwise ordinary journey through life of that man from birth to death. In Modernist terms, he might thus be regarded as an early exponent of the mythical method. Similarly, in “Empedocles on Etna” Arnold juxtaposed a series of myths about the gods with the story of Empedocles’ journey through life from birth to death. This was in order to highlight the moments that were seemingly divine in Empedocles’ life, when his surface life fused momentarily with the buried life, so to speak. These moments of fusion become far fewer, however, as Empedocles ages, so that by the end of his life his surface life of ordinary consciousness is almost totally cut off from the buried life, although unconsciously he is probably still re-enacting the stuff of Callicles’ myths.
212
Some comments by critics influenced by Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious can help with points to do with an interpretation of certain aspects of Arnold’s poem; to which interpretation, which is based on Hughes’ interpretation of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, the whole argument of the thesis has led. The first of these points is about what the crater of Etna could be said to represent in the poem, apart from it representing, in general terms, a point of access to the universal mind or the buried life. To put some comments by the Jungian critic, David J. Tacey, into a broader cultural context, with the disappearance of Christianity as the glue holding Western civilisation together it could be argued that, in the works of Arnold, as in the works of Romantic, Victorian and Modernist poets generally, “spirit appeared to die but was actually forced into a descent or nekyia into the lower realm”, or into the subconscious, “where it was engaged in an incarnational movement toward nature” [Tacey, 1995, pp.201-202]. Therefore, with this descent, “spirit” became incarnated in the subconscious and in what lies buried in certain landscapes or submerged in certain seascapes, like a dead body buried or one only sleeping. Places where this “spirit” came to the surface in “spots of time” then acted as “mythopoetic openings to the underworld” [Tacey, 1995, p.31]. Examples of places where this “spirit” came to the surface in the eighteenth and nineteenth-centuries would include locations in central Asia; but they would also include places like Frazer’s crater lake of Nemi in The Golden Bough and Arnold’s crater of Etna in “Empedocles on Etna”. However, it was found that a sacrifice was required to access the “spots of time” represented by these places; as in the murderous sacrifices associated with Nemi by Frazer in The Golden Bough [Frazer, 1993, pp.1-9]; and as in Empedocles’ sacrifice in Arnold’s poem. In “Empedocles on Etna” the crater of Etna is, therefore, “a site of involuntary sacrifice to the archaic depths of chthonic nature” [Tacey, 1995, p.202]; as it is also in eighteenth and nineteenth-century works by, for example, Sir William Hamilton, Goethe, Friedrich Holderlin, Coleridge, Newman, Sir Charles Lyell, Ernest Renan and Charles Montagu Doughty; although those works lie outside the scope of this thesis. In eighteenth and nineteenth-century literature about southern Italy, or Magna Graecia, by writers such as those named above, and in twentieth-century literature about Greece itself, according to Cocker:
The standard divisions between interior and external worlds begin to blur, and physical, immanent landscapes are revealed as simply veils of illusion, demanding penetration... Greece offers you... the discovery of yourself... Possibly there is something in the Greek air and light, in its wine-dark seas and myth-darkened mountains, that points the way to deeper experiences. [Cocker, 1992, pp.206-207]
This is another way of saying that, in the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth-centuries, “spirit” became incarnated in the subconscious and in what lies buried in certain landscapes or submerged in certain seascapes, as much in Greece as in central Asia. Greece, like central Asia, represented for writers like Arnold and Eliot, as has been noted, the deepest levels of the human mind, or the buried life. It was largely 213
inaccessible to eighteenth and nineteenth-century poets and literary travellers (Byron went to Greece but sacrificed himself there) [Longford, 1978, pp.167-214]; so that they tended to read into the landscape of Magna Graecia, which includes Mt Etna, what twentieth-century poets and literary travellers, like Lawrence Durrell and Henry Miller, would later read into the landscape of Greece itself. In “Empedocles on Etna”, then, the crater of Etna could be said to represent or give access to the otherwise inaccessible landscape of Greece, inasmuch as “spirit” or myth has been incarnated in the Greek landscape; or inasmuch as the Greek landscape represents, like the remote and largely inaccessible landscape of central Asia, the geography of the subconscious or of the land of the dead. In Arnold’s poem, that otherwise inaccessible Greek landscape erupts into Empedocles’ surface life in “spots of time”, causing momentary fusions of his surface life with the buried life, but only in response to Empedocles’ self-sacrificial impulses. This is similar to the way that the Greek landscape erupts into the poet’s English surface life in Arnold’s “Philomela” (1853) in response to the sacrifice of the son by the father in the myth of Itylus and Tereus, recalled by the nightingale’s song; and it is similar, too, to the way that the Greek landscape erupts into the poet’s English surface life in Eliot’s “Sweeney Among the Nightingales” (1917), and in the second and third sections of “The Waste Land” [Eliot, 1974, p.66; p.71], in response to the sacrifice of the son by the father in that same myth, also recalled by the nightingale’s song. It is also similar to the way that the central Asian landscape erupts into the poet’s English surface life in the last section of “The Waste Land”, causing a momentary fusion of his surface life with the buried life, but only in response to his self-sacrificial impulses [Eliot, 1974, pp.76-79]. By his sacrifice the poet should then be reborn or resurrected out of the buried life to create a new fusion of his surface life, and of his people’s surface lives, with the buried life. However, as in “Empedocles on Etna”, such a rebirth or resurrection does not actually take place in “The Waste Land”. The second of these points to do with an interpretation of certain aspects of “Empedocles on Etna” is about why Callicles’ myths in that poem are all so violent, and what this violence has to do with Empedocles’ feelings of alienation from the buried life. Vincent Brome notes how Jung had a “theory in which the widespread neurosis harassing modern man might be seen as the result of alienation from the myth-creating substratum of the mind” [Brome, 1980, p.164], or from the unconscious. According to Don Cupitt, Jung:
always stressed how violent is the confrontation with the unconscious, and how painful is the requirement that the little self must die to allow the greater Self to be realised. [Cupitt, 1985, p.75]
Given the similarities between Jung’s concept of the collective unconscious and Arnold’s concept of the buried life, already noted, it could be argued that this violent confrontation of Jung’s is paralleled by the violent confrontations of Callicles’ myths in Arnold’s poem, which lead up to Empedocles’ suicide, or to the death of his Dionysian “little self” 214
so that his Apollonian “greater Self”, or the universal mind, can be realised. Also, according to Cupitt, Jung believed that, as an heir to the Romantics and as a modern shaman-figure, the “neurosis” which harassed him and caused his mental breakdown around the period of World War One had “a constructive and even a public significance... His own inner storm ran parallel to the great political upheavals going on around him in Europe” [Cupitt, 1985, p.74]. In other words, Jung tried to contain within himself the violence unleashed by his whole society’s “alienation from the myth-creating substratum of the mind”, or from the collective unconscious, and attempted to resolve it artistically; so that when he asked himself what any of that had to do with science, he came to the conclusion: “It is art” [in Brome, 1980, p.165; Jung, 1995, p.210]. As he is also a shaman-figure, then, it could be argued that Empedocles’ “inner storm” in “Empedocles on Etna” runs parallel to “the great political upheavals” going in in Europe in the mid-nineteenth-century, and in ancient Greece in the fifth-century BC; and that those upheavals result from those societies’ “alienation from the myth-making substratum of the mind”, or from the buried life. It could also be argued that this alienation of Empedocles’ needs to be resolved, not scientifically or philosophically, but artistically in the myths of Callicles. The third of these points is about the effect of Empedocles’ feelings of alienation from the buried life on the form or structure of “Empedocles on Etna”. Influenced by Jung, Ted Hughes had a theory that:
The deeper understanding, the instinctive prompting, of ritual drama recognizes, presumably, that a human being is only half alive if their life on the realistic, outer plane does not have the full assent and co-operation of their life on the mythic plane. The whole business of art, which even at its most naturalistic is some kind of an attempt at ‘ritualization’, is to reopen negotiations with the mythic plane. The artistic problem is to objectify the mythic plane satisfactorily - so that it produces those benefits of therapeutic catharsis, social bonding and psychological renewal - without becoming unintelligible, and without spoiling the audience for adaptive, practical life on the realistic plane. The human problem is that life evolves at different speeds on the two planes. Only where the two planes are synchronized can there be fully effective ritual drama. This obtains in static societies, before they enter the historical torrent. And it obtains in those societies where the mythic plane itself tilts and pours down the historical cataract, as in religious revolutions. The society then seems to be changing very fast, but it is still controlled by the mythic plane. When evolution on the outer, realistic plane wrenches a society away from its allegiance to the mythic plane there is a psychological explosion - ritual drama goes into convulsions: as in fifth-century BC Athens and Elizabethan/Jacobean England. Once the dissociation is complete, and the mythic plane makes demands which the individual life on the realistic plane refuses to meet, ritual drama becomes difficult. Perhaps this is another way of describing what Eliot called the ‘dissociation of sensibility’ that occurred, according to the testimony of art and literature, in seventeenth-century England. After that, ritual art, in any medium, becomes more and more fragmentary, experimental, provisional, primitive, as it searches deeper and deeper into the primordial levels of the psyche for any scraps of mythic experience that still might be shared, and that might still produce a trickle of the old benefits. [Hughes, 1993, pp.106-107] 215
This can be seen to accord with the Arnoldian theory that in good poetical epochs, such as in Elizabethan/Jacobean England, it is easy for poets to gain access to the river of the buried life and give a complete and objective picture of it in forms such as tragedy; whereas in bad poetical epochs, such as in Augustan or Victorian England, it is hard for poets to gain access to the river of the buried life so that they can only give fragmentary and subjective pictures of it in forms such as the lyric fragment. Hughes’ theory can be used to place “Empedocles on Etna” on a tragic continuum somewhere between, say, “Hamlet” and “The Waste Land”. Since Dionysus is the god of Empedocles’ buried life, “Empedocles on Etna” is clearly a tragedy; it deals with an individual who is human but also represents Dionysus as the cyclic, or dying and reborn, inner being of Apollo, as he “dies” to his surface life, or individual will, in the drama, and is “reborn” out of the buried life as a part of the collective will or universal mind of Apollo. And yet, even though it is cast in dramatic form, it is not easily recognisable as a tragedy in the same way that the inert Merope is easily recognisable. After the intrusion of nearly three hundred years of “something like scientific rationalism” [Levi, 1985, p.177] since the Reformation, which Arnold believed marked the beginning of the disappearance of Christianity as the glue holding Western civilisation together, in “Empedocles on Etna” the gap, or “dissociation of sensibility”, between Empedocles and Dionysus (or Jesus Christ); or between Empedocles’ life on the “realistic, outer plane” and his life on the Calliclean “mythic plane”; or between Empedocles’ surface life and the buried life, is immense; and, in terms of Hughes’ theory, the effect of that is that the form or structure of “Empedocles on Etna” is that of an extremely fragmented or attenuated tragedy. It is, in effect, little more than a series of brief epiphanies or lyric fragments strung together. In terms of Hughes’ theory, Arnold’s poem is thus much closer in form or structure, as well as in time, to Eliot’s “The Waste Land” than it is to Shakespeare’s Hamlet; although thematically it still shares much in common with more conventional tragedies like Hamlet or Oedipus Rex. This Hamlet to “The Waste Land” continuum could be extended a little further to include another even more fragmented or attenuated tragedy, Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1966), which nevertheless also still shares much in common thematically with more conventional tragedies like Hamlet or Oedipus Rex. This novel’s main protagonist, Oedipa Maas, is like the Empedocles of Arnold’s “Empedocles on Etna” in that, to paraphrase Hughes, she is only half alive, as her life on the realistic, outer plane in California in the mid-1960s does not have the full assent and co-operation of her life on the mythic plane. Like Empedocles, Oedipa searches deeper and deeper into the primordial levels of her psyche (via a sacrifice at a crater lake in southern Italy much like Frazer’s lake of Nemi) [Pynchon, 1979, pp.41-42] for any scraps of mythic experience that might still be shared, and that might still produce a trickle of the old benefits. Pynchon indicates his structural debt to “The Waste Land” by beginning his novel with a death “back in the spring” [Pynchon, 1979, p.5] in “San Narciso” [Pynchon, 1979, pp. 14-15], where Oedipa has her first epiphany [Pynchon, 1979, p.15]; and 216
including the acronym “WASTE” in the novel [Pynchon, 1979, p.34]. He emphasises the point that his novel, although it is unlike a conventional tragedy in terms of its structure, is nevertheless a tragedy by using the name “Oedipa” for his main protagonist and including a synopsis of the plot of a (fictional) more conventional, pre-dissociation, early-seventeenth-century tragedy, The Courier’s Tragedy, in his novel [Pynchon, 1979, pp.43-44]; as Arnold included synopses of the material for several conventional tragedies in the songs of Callicles in “Empedocles on Etna”. The plot of The Courier’s Tragedy is about a usurping “uncle” and it shares much in common with the plot of Arnold’s Merope, or with the plots of Hamlet and Oedipus Rex. (Or with the plot of “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”.) In The Courier’s Tragedy, the king’s son, Niccolo, is to be blown into fragments out of a cannon:
Out in a bloody rain to feed our fields Amid the Maenad roar of nitre’s song And sulphur’s cantus firmus. [Pynchon, 1979, p.44]
In Greek mythology the Maenads tore Dionysus to shreds; whilst, as has been noted, Frazer wrote of how in ancient Greece there was “a custom of sacrificing divine kings”, or more particularly their sons in their place, “in the character of Dionysus and of dispersing their bodies over the fields for the purpose of fertilizing them” [Frazer, 1993, p.392]. As Dionysus is, then, the god of Oedipa Maas’s buried life, The Crying of Lot 49 is a tragedy; and as The Crying of Lot 49 is to The Courier’s Tragedy, so “Empedocles on Etna” is to the songs of Callicles or to Merope.
Analysis It is interesting to look at the overall pattern of Empedocles’ life-story, as it is presented in “Empedocles on Etna”, before looking at some aspects of the poem in more detail. This overall pattern follows the course of the river of the buried life; or it could be said to follow the basic pattern of the shamanic flight; or of tragedy; or of “The Waste Land”; or of Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave; consisting as it does of “an initiation, a descent into hell, a purification and cure” [Connolly, 1967, p.12]. In the poem, Empedocles’ life-story begins on the fertile lower slopes of Etna, amongst the streams now haunted by Callicles. He then descends to a brazen city of the plain, namely Agrigentum, where he is proclaimed a god-king by his people. But he rejects that role, and then as he ages the streams of the buried life dry up for him and he suffers a “dark night of the soul”, so to speak, or he undergoes the “discipline of suffering”. His consciousness becomes fragmented, he loses touch with the buried life, and he thus loses touch with what is godlike within himself. Not having suffered a spectacular early death like the Strayed Reveller, and having no magic portrait, he needs to find another career besides that of a youthful, attractive and inspired lyric poet, so that he becomes a philosopher-charlatan. His life-story becomes more history than myth as the gods withdraw. In exile, and with his hopes of a political or spiritual revolution left unfulfilled, Empedocles then re-ascends Etna to traverse the infertile regions of its upper 217
slopes, symbolising his traverse of the “dark night of the soul”, or of the “discipline of suffering”. Finally, he leaps into the sea of lava within Etna’s crater. This sea of lava within the crater leads down to a vast, subterranean sea of lava connecting Etna to Stromboli and the other volcanoes of southern Italy, which are “Etna’s Liparean sister- fires” [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act Two, line 313]; and it perhaps represents a harder- won truth, a harder-won connection to the god within, or to the buried life, than do the facile and delightful streams of youth. (It will be recalled how for Plotinus it was each person’s task in life to ascend to the source of the primal unity and thus discover the true nature of their own soul: “Strive to lead back the god within you to the Divine in the universe”) [in Gregory, 1991, p.6]. By his sacrifice Empedocles should then be reborn or resurrected out of the buried life to create a new fusion of his surface life, and of his people’s surface lives, with the buried life. However, as was noted, such a rebirth or resurrection does not actually take place in “Empedocles on Etna”. To look at Arnold’s poem now in detail, in “Empedocles on Etna” there are three main characters. There is the aged Empedocles; there is his pupil, the middle-aged physician Pausanius; and there is a harp-player, the youth Callicles. This aged Empedocles, like the aged narrator of “The Waste Land”, resembles Jung’s aged father, the Lutheran pastor with Doubts, whom Jung characterised as “a sufferer stricken with an Amfortas wound, a ‘fisher king’ whose wound would not heal” [Jung, 1995, p.241]; and who “had literally lived right up to his death the suffering prefigured and promised by Christ, without ever becoming aware that this was a consequence of the imitatio Christi” [Jung, 1995, p.242]. Empedocles, however, lives the suffering prefigured and promised by Dionysus. Act One, Scene One is set on the lower slopes of Etna, in the forested regions, symbolising the fertile creativity of youth; and it corresponds to Connolly’s “initiation” in The Unquiet Grave, in which, for Palinurus: “Something is badly wrong; he has lost touch with his sub-conscious self, the well is obstructed” [Connolly, 1967, p.14]. Pausanius and Callicles discuss Empedocles’ recent gloom and despair. Empedocles once used to stride about Agrigentum with:
His flowing locks and gold-encircled brow And kingly gait. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene One, lines 60-61]
But now he has been banished from the city. Really, he should have killed the king and become king in his stead; or, in exile, he should have suffered the fate of an imperial soldier-boy; or, as a poet, he should have died in the service of poetry, hoping to descend into the buried life; there to merge with the god of the buried life and be made whole, and then be resurrected as an embodiment of the divine spirit, and of the unity and continuing good health of the city state. However, none of these things happened and Pausanius thus discourses on “the swelling evil of this time” [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene One, line 113] spent in the Waste Land. Pausanius and Callicles should probably be discussing the possibilities of such deaths and resurrections as these. But 218
Pausanius is there because he wishes to discuss with Empedocles his supposed resurrection of a woman named Pantheia:
Thou hast heard all men speaking of Pantheia, The woman who at Agrigentum lay Thirty long days in a cold trance of death, And whom Empedocles called back to life. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene One, lines 108-111]
Once upon a time Empedocles would no doubt have had no trouble in (metaphorically) visiting the Underworld to resurrect the dead; as Orpheus and Musaeus had supposedly done literally before him; and as Dionysus had also done. (In an Orphic interpretation of Arnold’s poem, much would need to be made of a connection between Pantheia and Eurydice.) This is to say that Empedocles would have had no trouble in reversing the psychic fragmentation of an individual, through his access to the buried life, and then “resurrecting” them out of it. But in this case Callicles objects that this “’twas no miracle!” [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene One, line134] and notes that:
Empedocles would say so, did he deign; But still he lets the people, whom he scorns, Gape and cry wizard at him, if they list. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene One, lines 137-139]
Pausanius believes that Empedocles is still capable of the miraculous, whilst Callicles thinks that he has lately been playing the role of an ageing charlatan. Whereas the youthful Callicles can metaphorically resurrect the dead in his poetical fragments, it is not so certain that the aged Empedocles, deserted by the inner god, can do so any longer. His powers seem to be fading, he seems to be on a one-way journey up the mountain towards fragmentation and death, and in the good fashion of The Golden Bough it is time for his demise and rebirth, or for his replacement by someone younger and more vigorous. However, what Pausanius and Callicles are agreed on is that Empedocles needs distracting from his recent gloom. So Callicles says he will sing to Empedocles from the vantage-point of his creatively fertile youth, singing to him of the myths of the buried life, and thus try to lift that gloom. Act One, Scene Two begins on the “highest skirts of the woody region of Etna”, before moving out onto the barren upper slopes around the crater that symbolise old age; and it corresponds to Connolly’s “descent into hell” in The Unquiet Grave, in which Palinurus “continues his downward rush towards the notion of suicide” in “the worst period of the nightmare journey” [Connolly, 1967, p.15]. (What is a little confusing is that Empedocles’ “descent into hell” corresponds with his Plotinus-inspired ascent of Etna.) In Arnold’s poem, gentians perform a similar function to the Golden Bough of Virgil’s Aeneid or Frazer’s The Golden Bough; or to the gentians in D.H. Lawrence’s “Bavarian Gentians” [Lawrence, 1977, p.697]; or to the gentians in Arnold’s “Obermann Once More [“Obermann Once More”, lines 21-24]; in that they signpost the way to the 219
Underworld:
See how the giant spires of yellow bloom Of the sun-loving gentian, in the heat, Are shining on those naked slopes like flame! [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene Two, lines 4-6]
Pausanius questions Empedocles about how he brought Pantheia back from the dead, but Empedocles ignores him:
Pausanius Instruct me of Pantheia’s story, Master, As I have pray’d thee. Empedocles That? and to what end? [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene Two, lines 20-21]
He is probably tired of playing the charlatan and having his message about the importance of undergoing a spiritual “death” and “rebirth” being taken quite so literally all the time. Instead, Empedocles listens to Callicles sing of the master-pupil relationship between the aged centaur Chiron and the young Achilles on the slopes of Mount Pelion, in the days before the Trojan Wars [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene Two, lines 57-76]. Arnold’s use of this myth was no doubt mainly due to him having learnt-by-heart Guérin’s “Le Centaure”, although the myth also appears in a number of Pindar’s odes. The pattern of this myth, like the pattern of all of Callicles’ myths in “Empedocles on Etna”, seems to point to the overall pattern of Empedocles’ river-of-the-buried-life life- story as it is presented in the poem; albeit without ever fusing or even intersecting with it in any way, since the youthful part of Empedocles’ life that may have fused from time- to-time with that myth is over. This myth of Chiron and Achilles, like all of Callicles’ myths, basically reiterates Goethe’s maxim: “‘Die and come to life! for so long as this is not accomplished, thou art but a troubled guest upon an earth of gloom’” [in St. Paul and Protestantism, Super, 1960-77, Vol.6, pp.55-56]. Achilles chose a short and glorious life, dying youthfully in battle overseas like the archetypal soldier-boy, rather than a long and less glorious one like Empedocles’ or Arnold’s, or Eliot’s for that matter. It was a choice that Empedocles could have made; and Arnold, too, could have made it, since his brother William chose to enlist in the army of the East India Company; and in fact all of Callicles’ songs outline choices Arnold either could have or did make. With the aid of Chiron, Achilles’ father Peleus had wrestled with the goddess Thetis as she turned successively into Earth, Air, Fire and Water, amongst other things, before Peleus won the wrestling match and they married. (It was a battle with the Many of the elements that Empedocles was later to lose.) Apart from the marriage of Cadmus and Harmonia, Peleus’ and Thetis’ was the only marriage in Greek mythology between a
220
mortal and a goddess; and it perhaps symbolises the ideal fusion of an individual’s conscious mind with their subconscious mind; or of the individual’s conscious mind with the universal mind of God, located in the subconscious. All the Olympian gods took part in the wedding feast. However, at the feast Eris threw in the apple of discord, which led to the Trojan Wars and the gradual withdrawal of the gods from the lives of humankind; so that a gap then opened up between people’s conscious and their subconscious minds; between history and myth; and between the surface lives of mortals and the buried life. It is analogous to the gap that Arnold felt opened up between people’s surface lives and the buried life in the post-Reformation world, with the disappearance of Christianity as the glue holding Western civilisation together; as is best-illustrated by Arnold’s post- wedding poem, “Dover Beach”. Achilles was the seventh son of Peleus and Thetis. All the previous sons having been murdered by their parents, by the time of Achilles it was presumably the aged Peleus’ turn to die. However, prompted by Chiron’s tales about the exploits of his father, and choosing to externalise his kingdom’s internal conflicts like Jason before him, Achilles chose to leave the high mountain springs of Pelion to achieve fame in the wars of the surface life, on the far plains of Troy:
He told him of the Gods, the stars, The tides; - and then of mortal wars, And of the life which heroes lead Before they reach the Elysian place And rest in the immortal mead; And all the wisdom of his race. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene Two, lines 71-76]
Achilles should really have murdered his father; instead, his father effectively had him murdered on a distant battlefield. After his death, Achilles either paid for his seeking after fame in the surface life, and his dissociation from the buried life, with the torment of an after-life in Hades; or he was reunited with his buried life and resurrected into everlasting bliss in a Binyonesque Elysium. The nature of his fate depends on which myth about Achilles that you read. Given the “descent into hell” context of this section of Arnold’s poem, whereas Callicles pictures Achilles in the Elysian Fields, Empedocles probably thinks of the Achilles of the Odyssey who dies and descends into gloomy Hades, and then wishes to but does not come back to life. It seems that, in Arnold’s poem, there is something not quite right about dying for your country in a place like Troy. Similarly, after his suicide in “Empedocles on Etna”, Empedocles is either going to pay for his seeking after fame in the surface life, and his dissociation from the buried life, with everlasting torment; or he will be reunited with his buried life and be resurrected to live in everlasting bliss. Arnold leaves those two options open for Empedocles at the conclusion of his poem. After listening to this myth, Empedocles then sings a long, didactic, but one- dimensional master-to-pupil song to Pausanius. Like his reading of the myth of Chiron
221
and Achilles which precedes it, Empedocles’ song seems to deny the possibility of rebirth or resurrection; and it is more important as an articulation of Empedocles’ feelings during his and his society’s “descent into hell”, in a period when Strife is becoming increasingly dominant, than as an exposition of his philosophy as a whole. The message of this song is that what we perceive of the world are only its Dionysian fragments, because we ourselves are only Dionysian fragments:
The out-spread world to span A cord the Gods first slung, And then the soul of man There, like a mirror, hung, And bade the winds through space impel the gusty toy.
Hither and thither spins The wind-borne, mirroring soul, A thousand glimpses wins, And never sees a whole; Looks once, and drives elsewhere, and leaves its last employ. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene Two, lines 77-86]
Empedocles tells Pausanius that there is nothing that anybody, not even Empedocles himself, can do about that. We are fragments and there will be no resurrection into wholeness in the forseeable future. We must simply endure the fragmentation. The song also assumes that the gods are dead, and that they themselves have been fragmented, so that humankind must now look within themselves for inspiration:
Once read thy own breast right, And thou hast done with fears; Man gets no other light, Search he a thousand years. Sink in thyself! there ask what ails thee, at that shrine! [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene Two, lines 142-146]
You must look into the buried life, says Empedocles, although he does not explain to Pausanius the process of how that might be done. The god-like arrogance of the Romantics’ attempt to force a reunification of the fragments of the external world is not the answer, Empedocles continues, for none of us truly have god-like powers:
We mortals are no kings For each of whom to sway A new-made world up-springs, Meant merely for his play; No, we are strangers here; the world is from of old. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene Two, lines177-181]
You may be young, Empedocles is saying, but the world is old and exhausted and decayed into fragments. The Romantics possessed the arrogance of youth, but the fading 222
of youth is as inevitable and irreversible as the fading of the world:
Again. - Our youthful blood Claims rapture as its right; The world, a rolling flood Of newness and delight, Draws in the enamour’d gazer to its shining breast;
Pleasure, to our hot grasp, Gives flowers after flowers; With passionate warmth we clasp Hand after hand in ours; Now do we soon perceive how fast our youth is spent.
At once our eyes grow clear! We see, in blank dismay, Year posting after year, Sense after sense decay; Our shivering heart is mined by secret discontent. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene Two, lines 352-366]
As is the case with Empedocles, the powers of the old god-king must fade and he and his world becomes fragments. But if we cannot sustain the god-like visions of youth, then could we achieve a god-like vision more cautiously through a scientific or philosophical accumulation of knowledge; patiently assembling a whole out of what are at first perceived to be mere fragments? This, too, is not so, argues Empedocles:
But still, as we proceed The mass swells more and more Of volumes yet to read, Of secrets yet to explore. Our hair grows grey, our eyes are dimm’d, our heat is tam’d:
We rest our faculties, And thus address the Gods: ‘True science if there is, It stays in your abodes! Man’s measure cannot mete the immeasurable All. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene Two, lines 332-341]
It is only with the god-king’s death, descent into the buried life and resurrection that he and his world can be made whole again. There is no other way. All of this message of Empedocles’ to Pausanius is gloomy; as gloomy in its way as Byron’s poem about the heat-death of the universe, “Darkness”. But still at the end of the song Empedocles advocates to Pausanius that he adopt a cheerfully stoic attitude to life:
I say: Fear not! Life still Leaves human effort scope.
223
But, since, life teems with ill, Nurse no extravagant hope; Because thou must not dream, thou need’st not then despair! [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene Two, lines 422-426]
However, it seems unlikely that anyone could find anything cheerful or useful in Empedocles’ song, because, by avoiding Pausanius’ questions about Pantheia’s supposed resurrection, Empedocles has avoided saying anything cheerful or useful at all. Still, Empedocles hopes that from this lesson “the good, learned, friendly quiet man” Pausanius may learn to “bravelier front his life” [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act Two, lines 8-9], even though the lesson is obviously not adequate for Empedocles himself since he eventually commits suicide. Callicles replies to it, and contradicts its message, with his song about the complex myth of Cadmus and Harmonia, and Empedocles knows that it is time for him to die - and to possibly be reborn [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act One, Scene Two, lines 471-478]. The section of Arnold’s poem beginning with the myth of Cadmus and Harmonia corresponds to the “purification” section of Connolly’s The Unquiet Grave, which introduces, for Palinurus, “the first ray of hope” [Connolly, 1967, p.15]; and although there are still many thoughts of death and disintegration, it is when thoughts of rebirth or resurrection become a little more prominent in “Empedocles on Etna”. Cadmus and Achilles are both, in terms of the metaphor of the buried life, like archetypal soldier- boys. However, Cadmus, who did not die young, and introduced writing to Greece and compromised with the world, is also like the archetypal civil servant and man of letters. Arnold’s two main sources for his retelling of the myth of Cadmus and Harmonia were Pindar and Ovid. Pindar was his main source for the part of the myth dealing with the marriage feast of Cadmus and Harmonia and its aftermath; and Ovid his main source for the part of the myth dealing with Cadmus and Harmonia’s transformation into snakes at the end of their lives. To deal with Pindar first, in “Pythian III” Pindar quoted a proverb, “With every blessing God gives a pair of curses” [Pindar, 1969, p.98], before illustrating the proverb with the lives of Cadmus and Peleus:
Untroubled life. Neither Peleus had, the son of Aiakos, Nor godlike Kadmos. These two, they say, had the utmost bliss of men: They heard the Muses Singing, with gold in their hair, On that mountain and in seven-gated Thebes (When one Married soft-eyed Harmonia, and one Thetis, Wise Nereus’ golden child)
And with both the Gods feasted. They saw those Kings, The sons of Kronos, sitting on golden thrones, 224
And took their marriage gifts. [Pindar, 1969, p.98]
This resemblance between Peleus’ and Cadmus’ lives, noted by Pindar, provides the link between Callicles’ first and second songs in “Empedocles on Etna”. (The songs are all linked because they are all visions of the one thing, which is the buried life.) Pindar notes how both Cadmus and Peleus paid for their intimacy with the gods at their wedding feasts with a lifetime of torment, which for Arnold was also the fate of the poet who got too close to the gods, as he had outlined previously in “The Strayed Reveller”. What is new in “Empedocles on Etna”, however, is the focus on the lifetime of torment of the married poet, after the initial bliss of contact with divinity; so that for Arnold marriage and the writing of his most significant poems like “Empedocles on Etna” and “Dover Beach” in the early 1850s were inter-related events, in the same way that for Eliot marriage and the writing of his most significant poems like “The Waste Land” and “Gerontion” in the early 1920s were inter-related events. Marrying the daughter of a wealthy Tory judge, as he chose to do, and going to live in Belgravia, and living the life expected of someone in his social position, Arnold may have known a little of how Cadmus felt when he married a goddess and allowed himself to be used by the rulers of Olympus. To deal now with Ovid, in Metamorphoses Ovid told of how Cadmus was transformed into a snake after his lifetime of torment, and after having slain a “holy snake” [Ovid, 1955, p.118], to be joined in that state by his wife Harmonia:
his wife stroked the glistening neck of the crested snake, and suddenly there were two of them, gliding along with coils intertwined, till they disappeared into the shelter of a neighbouring grove. [Ovid, 1955, p.119]
According to Ovid, Cadmus and Harmonia “found great consolation for the loss of their human shape in their grandson”, Dionysus, “who had conquered India, and was there worshipped as a god” [Ovid, 1955, p.119]. To look now more closely at the story of Cadmus, he was traditionally credited with having introduced writing into Greece from Phoenicia, after travelling to Greece, at the request of his father, in pursuit of his abducted sister, Europa. Any potential conflicts over the kingship in Phoenicia were resolved by the son, once again, not murdering his father but leaving his home-kingdom and travelling overseas. For Herodotus, this abduction of Cadmus’ sister marked the beginning of history and the start of the end of the age of myth, since it eventually led to those Trojan Wars in which Achilles participated. (In myth, Europa was abducted by Zeus in the form of a bull. But for Herodotus, Europa was abducted, historically-speaking, not by Zeus, but merely by some Greeks who “put into the Phoenician port of Tyre and carried off the king’s daughter Europa”) [Herodotus, 1972, pp.41-42]. Like Achilles, Cadmus chose to forsake the integrated world of myth to seek fame in the historical affairs of the surface life, which he did with his founding of Thebes, although he suffered a terrible price for his fame. Because of the story of Cadmus, in Greece the beginning of the end of the age of myth, 225
or the beginning of the process by which the gods gradually withdrew from the affairs of humankind, and the introduction of writing are traditionally seen as simultaneous events [Herodotus, 1972, pp.41-42]. In writing, the flow of speech could be said to be reduced to fragments in the letters of the alphabet, so that what happened in the past is written down and fixed, rather than being passed down orally and embroidered into poetry or mythology. The old gods of the Mysteries are torn into fragments represented by the letters of the alphabet, and they therefore die without hope of resurrection. No longer is the pattern of the birth, death and rebirth of the gods imposed on history, so that history now becomes nothing more than a one-way journey from birth to death. After the Trojan Wars and the subsequent collapse of Mycenean civilisation, writing was forgotten for the many centuries of the Dark Ages of Greece, until it was reintroduced from Phoenicia traditionally in 776 BC. After its reintroduction writing had little impact on Greek culture for several centuries, so that even in the fifth-century BC a poet like Empedocles would recite his poems orally but not write them down. However, during Empedocles’ lifetime, or just after, in the PostSocratic period, writing would have the enormous impact documented in Platonic dialogues such as the “Phaedrus”, so that there is a significant connection there between the myths of Cadmus and Empedocles. After arriving in Greece, in myth Cadmus helped Zeus to defeat the snake-headed Titan, Typho, and they confined him beneath Etna. Cadmus tricked Typho into a musical competition which Cadmus was bound to win, since Apollo had revealed to Cadmus, and to him alone, “the just music” [Calasso, 1994, p.379]. After that, Cadmus slew a huge serpent, Ovid’s “holy snake”, that was coiled about the spring which was the source of the river Asopus. Snakes were identified as an aspect of Dionysus in Greek mythology, because they disappear underground, shed their skins and are periodically “reborn”; and they were also identified with the ever-renewing, sometimes subterranean courses of rivers, with their eyes in a mountain spring and their tails in the ocean. Rivers, then, were by extension also considered to be an aspect of Dionysus. At the place where he slew the serpent Cadmus established the city of Thebes, as Apollo had slain the serpent Pytho at the site of the Castalian Spring on Mt Parnassus and established there the sanctuary of Delphi. Cadmus then married Harmonia, daughter of Ares and Aphrodite, or of Strife and Love, to use Empedocles’ terminology. All the Olympian gods came to their wedding feast, but after the feast those gods began their gradual withdrawal from the affairs of humankind, so that Strife started to dominate. Cadmus achieved great worldly success early in his career, but later both he and his family were overwhemed by the calamities outlined in the Theban cycle of tragedies; as Arnold felt he was later overwhelmed by the daily grind of his work as a civil servant and man of letters, and by the tragedy of the early deaths of two of his sons, Thomas and Basil. Cadmus and Harmonia:
...had stayed long enough to see, In Thebes, the billow of calamity
226
Over their own dear children rolled, Curse upon curse, pang upon pang, For years, they sitting helpless in their home, A grey old man and woman. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act 1, Scene 2, lines 444-449]
Their daughter Semele was in one myth the mother of Dionysus; that god having presumably died as he periodically did, so that he was reborn this time through her. She was consumed by flames in the experience and reduced to fragments. Cadmus’ other children were all physically torn apart at various times and places, like Dionysus; and Cadmus, like Empedocles, was mentally torn apart by his experiences in the surface life. As his physical and mental powers decayed, that cruel god of timeless perfection, Apollo, deserted him; so that, again like Peleus, Cadmus was deposed as the ruler of his city-state. (He was succeeded by one of his grandsons, Pentheus.) In The Bacchae Euripides thus pictured Cadmus as a feeble and tottering old man who, along with Tiresias, had become a worshipper of Dionysus as the cyclic, or dying and reborn, inner being of Apollo. Pentheus was torn into fragments by his own mother and other bacchantes on the mountains outside Thebes, suffering a similar fate to Pelius who was torn apart by his own daughters. However, the gods supposedly took pity on Cadmus and his wife at the end, so that in their exile from Thebes they were removed from history and reborn or resurrected in the form of serpents into the timeless world of myth and of the buried life:
And there, they say, two bright and aged snakes, Who once were Cadmus and Harmonia, Bask in the glens or on the warm sea-shore, In breathless quiet, after all their ills... Placed safely in changed forms, the pair Wholly forget their first sad life, and home, And all that Theban woe, and stray For ever through the glens, placid and dumb. [“Empedocles on Etna” Act 1, Scene 2, lines 435-438; 457-460]
Although it is qualified by “they say”, Callicles’ retelling of the myth of Cadmus and Harmonia’s Dionysian reintegration of their surface lives with the buried life, and of their “rebirth”, basically contradicts Empedocles’ message to Pausanius that life is but a one-way journey towards dissipation and death. In Act Two of “Empedocles on Etna”, Empedocles sends Pausanius away and advances to the barren summit of Etna, his only accompaniment the voice of Callicles rising from far below. (A. Dwight Culler opines that Arnold must have read Lyell on the various regions of Etna [Lyell, 1990, Vol.1, pp.361-362], and if so he would have been well-aware of Lyell’s geological uniformitarianism [Culler, 1966, p.157]. For Arnold, the poet recurs in the same way that, in the “great year” of geological time, the ichthyosaur recurs for Lyell [Lyell, 1990, Vol.1, p.123; Gould, 1988, pp.98-104]; or in the same way that the region of “the olive, lemon and prickly pear” [Lyell, 1990, Vol. 2, 227
p.174] recurs for Lyell upon Etna.) Callicles interrupts Empedocles’ thoughts in two places, with songs about the myth of Typho and Zeus [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act Two, lines 37-88] and the myth of Marsyas and Apollo [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act Two, lines 121-190]. With Callicles’ song about the myth of Typho and Zeus, the fairly smooth progression in “Empedocles on Etna” from “initiation”, to “descent into hell”, to “purification”, to “cure” is seemingly stalled or disrupted. The message of this myth seems to contradict the message of the myth of Cadmus and Harmonia, in that it seems to suggest that without a political revolution at home, and a closure of the gap between the “two nations”, to use Disraeli’s phrase, there can be no rebirth or resurrection either for the individual or for society. Arnold used Pindar’s “Pythian I” as the main source for his retelling of this myth, adapting to his own purpose Pindar’s theme that Apollonian song and music provide relief from the stresses and strains of everyday life, to everyone except the rebel, Typho, buried beneath Etna by Zeus:
And things that Zeus loves not Hear the voice of the maids of Pieria: they shudder On earth and in the furious sea. And he is afraid who lies in the horrors of Hell, The Gods’ enemy, Typhos the hundred-headed, Nursed once in the famed Cilician Cave. But now above Kyma the foam-fronting heights, And the land of Sicily, lie Heavily on his shaggy chest. The Pillar of Heaven holds him fast, White Aitna, which all year round Suckles its biting snows. [Pindar, 1969, pp.131-132]
Typho is afraid to hear the Muses sing because he had been defeated by “the just music” which Cadmus had learnt from Apollo, master of the Muses; so it is this that provides the link between Callicles’ myth of Typho and Zeus and his previous myth about Cadmus and Harmonia. In the myth of Typho and Zeus, since Apollo will not do it, Typho rebels against Zeus, and the other gods of Olympus, and succeeds in overthrowing him; as Zeus had previously rebelled against Cronus and succeeded in overthrowing him; and as Cronus had in turn rebelled against Uranus and succeeded in overthrowing him. However, Cadmus chose to help Zeus to defeat Typho and thus regain his throne; as Arnold chose to help the ruling oligarchy into which he married. Typho was confined by Zeus deep within Etna. However, although he is buried he is not dead, nor even sleeping, so that he can only suffer a seemingly endless torment, and there can be no release of the healing and joy that accompanies a resurrection into wholeness. In other words, Typho lives in a world like the France of World War One in which, to quote Hughes again, “the social oppressions and corruptions” have “slipped into nightmare gear”, and “where
228
everything” can “be suffered but nothing put into effect” [Hughes, 1995, p.70]. So there Typho lurks, still plotting murder; his displeasure still from time to time erupting to the surface:
Wherefore dost thou groan so loud? Wherefore do thy nostrils flash, Through the dark night suddenly, Typho, such red jets of flame? Is thy tortured heart still proud? Is thy fire-scathed arm still rash? Still alert thy stone-crushed frame? Doth thy fierce soul still deplore Thine ancient rout by the Cilician hills, And that cursed treachery on the Mount of Gore? [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act 2, lines 45-54]
Typho is eternally unreconciled to his defeat by Zeus, because in this song of Callicles’ the Olympians are shallow gods of the fragmented surface of life; and, given Empedocles’ revolutionary background, they also seem to represent the ruling classes in England in the mid-nineteenth-century. (In ancient Greece, the Olympians were gods of the “nobler classes”; whereas Dionysus, who was consumed by the Titans, was a “god of the common folk”) [McGahey, 1994, p.14]. What probably needed to happen in the conflict between Typho and the Olympian gods was not for Zeus to be victorious, with Cadmus’ help, but for the Olympian gods to “die” to their surface lives by being murdered by Typho, as Pentheus is murdered by the followers of Dionysus in The Bacchae; and then for those gods to be reunited with Typho in the buried life before being reborn into wholeness as a single Zeus/Typho god, who can symbolise an end to the dissociation between the conscious and subconscious parts of the human mind; or between people’s fragmented surface lives and the buried life; or between the likes of Lord Lansdowne in the nineteenth-century and those who plotted to overthrow the ruling oligarchy to which he belonged. Such a fate had previously befallen Zeus’ or Apollo’s son, Dionysus, as has been noted, who sometimes took the form of a serpent himself and who had been killed, torn apart and eaten by the Titans before being resurrected by his grandmother, Rhea, to merge again with Apollo. But with the ageing process eventually it must be the father’s turn to die. Typho, then, is like a Dionysus who, because he refuses to die, cannot be reborn. His fate also recalls that of his fellow-Titan, Prometheus, who was chained up and endlessly tortured by Zeus, because he knew the identity of the son of Zeus - Apollo - who was destined to usurp his father. Empedocles thus draws from Callicles’ song the moral:
He fables, yet speaks truth! The brave, impetuous heart yields everywhere To the subtle, contriving head; Great qualities are trodden down, 229
And littleness united Is become invincible. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act 2, lines 89-94]
In the victory of Zeus over Typho in Callicles’ song, the fragmented conscious mind therefore suppresses the subconscious mind dwelling in the buried life, represented by Typho, but it is at the cost of psychic health. That cost is not paid by Zeus, who lives in a world seemingly without consequences, but it is paid by Cadmus, who came to Zeus’ aid in Typho’s rebellion. As Callicles had noted in his previous song, with his victory over the serpent of Ares and his founding of Thebes, Cadmus achieved great worldly success, before losing everything in the cycle of the Theban tragedies. However, Cadmus learnt a lesson from the discipline of suffering imposed upon him, and in The Bacchae he is pictured, along with Tiresias, as a Yeats-like worshipper of the violent and irrational forces that Dionysus sets loose from the subconscious to beset his grandson Pentheus’ rational Thebes. After their deaths he and Harmonia were therefore probably reborn as serpents, symbolising the end of the dissociation between the conscious and subconscious parts of their minds, or between their surface lives and the buried life. When Empedocles commits suicide by jumping into the crater of Etna at the end of “Empedocles on Etna”, he thus not only wishes to reconnect with the buried life as it is symbolised by the sea of subterranean lava to which Etna gives access, but also as it is symbolised by Typho. It would seem that for Arnold the task of being born again by reconnecting with the buried life was thus not something to be undertaken lightly, for it meant unleashing the subconscious mind to “murder” the fragmented surface life, before one could descend into the buried life and then be reborn again into psychic health. As was noted, Empedocles attempted to lead a political revolution in Agrigentum but it failed and he went into exile instead. Empedocles should then, in terms of the logic of the buried life, have taken on the full burden of the poet-shaman and attempted, not by political means, but through his own suffering, sacrificial death and then rebirth or resurrection, in imitation of god the son or Dionysus, to bring about the “rebirth” of his whole society. However, since Empedocles is not a youthful poet in “Empedocles on Etna”, and well past his prime, it is apparent that, after his failed political revolution, rather than suffer the brief but extremely intense agony endured by the youthful lyric poet, or suffer the endless torment of a Typho, he chose, like Arnold, or like Connolly, to shirk that agony to compromise with the Sophists and other charlatans and become a man of letters, so to speak. This meant that Empedocles suffered the prolonged and drudging pain of boredom, frustration and blighted hopes that is the lot of the man of letters, rather than anything briefer and more intense; or longer and more intense; and it is certainly this sort of pain that he is depicted as suffering from in “Empedocles on Etna”. The myth of Marsyas and Apollo, which follows that of Typho and Zeus, describes the intense agony that is supposed to be endured by the poet-shaman or the youthful lyric poet. The idea of Apollo’s “just music” provides the link between this myth and the previous myth of Typho and Zeus; and this myth shows how “just” is that
230
music. For Arnold, then, the myth of Marsyas and Apollo encompassed his ideas about how the youthful poet, or the “son”, must suffer terribly at the hands of the “father” in order to access the buried life, like a Baudelaire, Rimbaud or Mallarmé; but it also encompassed his ideas about how the buried life can be represented both as a slain god and as a river. Ovid’s version of the myth, already quoted in part, is one that Arnold would no doubt have read:
When the story-teller, whoever he was, had related the disaster which befell the Lycians, another man remembered the tale of the satyr whom Apollo punished, after having defeated him in a competition on the reed-pipes, the instrument Minerva invented. ‘Help!’ Marsyas clamoured. ‘Why are you stripping me from myself? Never again, I promise! Playing a pipe is not worth this!’ But in spite of his cries the skin was torn off the whole surface of his body: it was all one raw wound. Blood flowed everywhere, his nerves were exposed, unprotected, his veins pulsed with no skin to cover them. It was possible to count his throbbing organs, and the chambers of the lungs, clearly visible within his breast. Then the woodland gods, the fauns who haunt the countryside, mourned for him; his brother satyrs too, and Olympus, dear to him even then, and the nymphs, and all who pasture woolly sheep or horned cattle in these mountains. The fertile earth grew wet with tears, and when it was sodden, received the falling drops into itself, and drank them into its deepest veins. Then from these tears, it created a spring which it sent gushing forth into the open air. From its source the water goes rushing down into the sea, hemmed in by sloping banks. It is the clearest river in Phrygia, and bears the name of Marsyas. [Ovid, 1955, pp.157-158]
After flowing through underground caverns the river Marsyas eventually joins the river Maeander and then flows to the sea. Frazer thought that the story of Marsyas represented in mythic form the fate of the priests of the god Attis in Phrygia, whom he believed were originally sacrificed on an annual basis in imitation of the death and rebirth of the god [Frazer, 1993, p.354]. Attis was connected to Dionysus in that he was very similar to Dionysus in the nature of his death and rebirth, and also in that Dionysus supposedly had a role in his birth [Avi-Yonah and Shatzman, 1976, p.87]. Callicles’ story of Marsyas and Apollo is, like all of Callicles’ stories, a synopsis of the plot of a tragedy, then, in that Marsyas is an individual who represents Dionysus as the cyclic, or dying and reborn, inner being of Apollo, as he dies to his surface life, or individual will, and is reborn out of the buried life as a part of the collective will or universal mind of Apollo. After listening to this story of Marsyas’ fate, and gazing into the abyss of intense pain and suffering he knows he should have suffered but instead shirked, Empedocles then gazes into the crater of Etna and contemplates his imminent death and the fragmentation of his aged body into its constituent elements. This section of the poem corresponds to Connolly’s “cure” section of “The Unquiet Grave”, which supposedly (and eventually) “brings Eden up from the dark world of the sub-conscious where it has been festering into the daylight of art” [Connolly, 1967, p.16]; and which Connolly regarded as both the “key to the songs” and the “nature-cure” [Connolly, 1967, p.15]. (As Empedocles has already journeyed through hell, the occasion of his death should be 231
simultaneously the occasion of his rebirth or resurrection.) Empedocles’ mind has already been fragmented, so that the fragmentation of his body will be welcomed as the necessary prelude to his reconnection with nature, and with the myths of the buried life, and to his rebirth into wholeness:
Thou canst not live with men nor with thyself - O sage! O sage! - Take then the one way left; And turn thee to the elements, thy friends, Thy well-tried friends, thy willing ministers, And say: Ye helpers, hear Empedocles, Who asks this final service at your hands! Before the sophist-brood hath overlaid The last spark of man’s consciousness with words - Ere quite the being of man, ere quite the world Be disarray’d of their divinity - Before the soul lose all her solemn joys, And awe be dead, and hope impossible, And the soul’s deep eternal night come on - Receive me, quench me, take me home! [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act Two, lines 25-36]
Arnold seems to be commenting there on the withdrawal of the “Sea of Faith” in the fifth-century BC and in his own critical and unpoetical century. By this stage Empedocles is disgusted by his own charlatanry, which is the consequence of that withdrawal:
- Lie there, ye ensigns Of my unloved preeminence In an age like this! Among a people of children Who throng’d me in their cities, Who worshipp’d me in their houses, And ask’d, not wisdom, But drugs to charm with, But spells to mutter - All the fool’s-armoury of magic! [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act Two, lines 108-118]
For the age of genuine miracles and of genuine poetry is past; as it seemed to be, too, in the mid-nineteenth-century in England, which was the heyday of the mesmerists and the “Yankee spirit rappers”, and of the school of poets despised by Arnold and labelled the “Spasmodics” [Christiansen, 2001, pp.130-158]; and Empedocles has had to move with the times. There are hints of what has been lost in the sea of clouds and in the Tyrrhenian Sea surrounding Etna, which in turn hints at the presence of the subterranean sea of lava, symbolising the buried life, with which Empedocles wishes to reconnect:
- the sea of cloud, That heaves its white and billowy vapours up 232
To moat this isle of ashes from the world, Lives; and that other fainter sea, far down, O’er whose lit floor a road of moonbeams leads To Etna’s Liparean sister-fires. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act Two, lines 308-313]
Down there in the buried life Empedocles feels he might be reborn:
To the elements it came from Everything will return - Our bodies to earth, Our blood to water, Heat to fire, Breath to air. They were well born, they will be well entomb’d... And we might gladly share the fruitful stir Down in our mother earth’s miraculous womb. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act Two, lines 331-340]
For just a brief moment - for it is the briefest of epiphanies - Empedocles feels that he might reconnect with his buried life and so be reborn into wholeness, and he chooses that moment to leap into the crater to reconnect with nature, and with the world of Greek mythology, and thus to die:
Is it but for a moment? - Ah, boil up, ye vapours! Leap and roar, thou sea of fire! My soul glows to meet you. Ere it flag, ere the mists Of despondency and gloom Rush over it again, Receive me, save me! [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act Two, lines 409- 416]
Callicles then concludes the poem with his song about Apollo and the Muses. Before looking at Callicles’ concluding song, it is worthwhile summarising the events of the poem so far. In the poem, Empedocles journeys through the land of the dead, the subconscious or the buried life, confronting myths representative of the buried life. In the first myth, Achilles is an empire-minded soldier-boy who travels overseas to a war in order to resolve tensions over the succession to the kingship at home. He journeys from an original divine unity in Thessaly and then perhaps journeys back to restore that same divine unity, following the path ordained by his inner Dionysus, but it is not certain that this is so. The evidence is equivocal. He may have resolved nothing, in which case he has not restored the divine unity and the world is still a mess of fragments. In the second myth, Cadmus is an empire-minded soldier-boy, civil servant and man of letters who travels overseas in an attempt to resolve tensions over the succession to the kingship at home. He journeys from an original divine unity in Phoenicia and then 233
probably journeys back to restore that same divine unity, following the path ordained by his inner Dionysus, but it is not certain that this is so. The evidence is equivocal. He may have resolved nothing, in which case he has not restored the divine unity and the world is still a mess of fragments. In Empedocles’ long stoic song, he describes the world’s journey through time from an original divine unity; but in this song the world makes no journey back to that same divine unity: “Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold” [“The Second Coming”, line 3]. In this song the world is like a clock, subject to the second law of thermodynamics, winding down and falling apart. In the third myth, Typho is a rebel who tries to overthrow Zeus in the home- country in an attempt to resolve tensions over the succession to the kingship. Zeus should have been succeeded by his son Apollo, but it has not happened; and even if it did happen it seems unlikely that the succession would resolve tensions between a remote oligarchy and a seething proletariat. Typho journeys from an original divine unity, following the path ordained by his inner Dionysus; but because he refuses to die he cannot be reborn and therefore society cannot be reborn with him; so that he does not journey back to restore the same divine unity. He has thus resolved nothing, so that the world is still a mess of fragments. In the fourth myth, Marsyas is the poet who takes the burdens of society upon himself in an attempt to resolve tensions over the succession to the kingship outlined in the third myth. He journeys from an original divine unity in Phrygia and then perhaps journeys back, via the river Marsyas, to restore that same divine unity, following the path ordained by his inner Dionysus; but it is not certain that this is so. The evidence is again equivocal. He may have resolved nothing, in which case he has not restored the divine unity and the world is still a mess of fragments. Marsyas suffers and dies, and is probably reborn, but it seems unlikely that this has done anything to narrow the gap between the remote Apollo - who is god the son - and the millions of the working classes at home. If Zeus is like God the Father in Arnold’s Doctrine of the Three Lord Shaftesburies, then Apollo is nothing like God the Son; and Marsyas’ sufferings have done nothing to soften Apollo’s heart. In “Empedocles on Etna”, then, all the unresolved social tensions in mid- Victorian England that fueled revolutionary feelings at home and empire-building abroad, and would soon find an outlet in the Crimean War, are on display. Empedocles leaps - and it is like Brooke’s leap out of unresolved social tensions in 1914 and into war: “as swimmers into cleannness leaping” [“Peace”, line 4]. Like the characters in Callicles’ myths, Empedocles journeys from an original divine unity and then perhaps journeys back (via the crater of Etna) to restore that same divine unity, following the path ordained by his inner Dionysus, but it is not certain that this is so. The evidence is again equivocal. He may have resolved nothing, in which case he has not restored the divine unity and the world is still a mess of fragments. What seems most likely is that, as with Watts’ mosaic in “A Lay Sermon”, Empedocles’ leap into the crater presages a unity or resolution achieved on an artistic rather than on any social or political level: “It is art”. 234
To return now to Callicles’ concluding song about Apollo and the Muses, as this song is effectively Empedocles’ epitaph, and the “key to the songs”, it should really be sung over Empedocles’ grave, as “The Epitaph” in Gray’s “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” should really be sung over its poet’s grave, in close proximity to his bodily remains. However, it is not certain that this is so, and it may be that it is sung over a cenotaph. If it is sung over a cenotaph, and if the missing fragments of Empedocles’ body, representing as they do the fragments of ancient Greek society, make up the body of the dead Dionysus, then that cenotaph points to the absent body at the heart of both ancient Greek and modern Western civilisation. Such a cenotaph would therefore be rather like that of Palinurus in The Unquiet Grave, which Connolly imagines as being nowhere near Palinurus’ missing body and located instead at the mouth of a river of the buried life in an ideal landscape, somewhere on the coast of France [Connolly, 1967, pp.155-156]. It will be recalled how the buried life contains within it a river flowing on an obscure, mostly subterranean course out of God into the ordinary human world and then back into God again. However, it also contains within it the story of God the Son issuing from God the Father out into the ordinary human world to be fragmented in death, before a burial and a resurrection into wholeness, and then a return into God the Father. In the metaphor of the buried life these two things are identified with each other, so that it is like a hydrological process in which God the Father is like an infinite sea. God the Son sacrifices himself, or is sacrificed by God the Father, on behalf of humanity and is fragmented in death. The fragments of him flow through the subconscious mind of each individual, such as Empedocles, like separate rivers, although they are complete in themselves, and it is these fragments which constitute the inner god. Those fragments then rejoin the infinite sea, where God the Son is resurrected and reunited with God the Father. According to Arnold, it is the task of a poet like Empedocles to access the river that flows through their subconscious mind by imitating to at least some extent the sacrifice of God the Son; and it is this process that is supposedly represented in “Empedocles on Etna” as a whole, and is supposedly epitomised in Callicles’ concluding song. However, as the mention of cenotaphs indicates, it is not certain that that is so. In Callicles’ song Empedocles has supposedly died to his surface life and descended into the buried life, and into the world of myth, to merge with the river of the buried life and with Dionysus, who is his inner god and the god of the buried life. He is then supposedly reborn out of the buried life as the river of the buried life and as Dionysus, to merge again with the sea and with the universal mind of Apollo. In the tragedy of “Empedocles on Etna”, then, Empedocles supposedly represents Dionysus as the cyclic, or dying and reborn, inner being of Apollo, as he “dies” to his surface life, or individual will, in the drama, and is “reborn” out of the buried life as a part of the collective will or universal mind of Apollo. This process should symbolically reintegrate the Many of the ancient Greeks’ surface lives with the One of the buried life, provided Empedocles’ body is buried in the tragedy; and it should thus act symbolically to halt or reverse for a time the process of individuation in ancient Greek society. 235
In ancient times, after his “death” and “rebirth”, Empedocles was in fact accepted by his followers as a reincarnation of Apollo [Graves, 1961, p.69]; and in one story a servant reported that:
in the middle of the night he heard an exceedingly loud voice calling Empedocles. Then he got up and beheld a light in the heavens and a glitter of lamps, nothing else... Pausanius... bade them take no further trouble, for things beyond expectation had happened to [Empedocles], and it was their duty to sacrifice to him since he was now a god. [Diogenes Laertius, 1925, p.383]
Other more sceptical observers, however, reported that:
when [Empedocles] got up, he set out on his way to Etna; then, when he had reached it, he plunged into the fiery craters and disappeared, his intention being to confirm the report that he had become a god. Afterwards the truth was known, because one of his slippers was thrown up in the flames; it had been his custom to wear slippers of bronze. [Diogenes Laertius, 1925, pp.383-384]
Empedocles was accused by yet other observers of having shrunk from undertaking the journey to the Underworld, like Palinurus, so that they say he only hid in a cave for several months and then claimed on his reappearance to have returned from Hades. Therefore, due to the absence of his dead body in all of these stories, as in the story of “Empedocles on Etna”, there is more than a hint of Palinurian charlatanry that lingers around Empedocles’ reputation, as it lingers around Arnold’s. In any case, whatever the truth of the matter, when he “dies” at the end of “Empedocles on Etna” and his body is fragmented into the four elements of Earth, Wind, Fire and Water, even if he does not merge with the god Arnold has Empedocles imitate the death of Dionysus. He is then imagined as leaving behind him the Typhoean torments associated with Etna and being whisked off to be reborn out of the Hippocrene Fountain on Mt Helicon in Greece as the river of the buried life, and out of Dionysus’ grave on nearby Mt Parnassus as the cyclic, or dying and reborn, inner being of Apollo:
Through the black, rushing smoke-bursts, Thick breaks the red-flame; All Etna heaves fiercely Her forest-clothed frame.
Not here, O Apollo! Are haunts meet for thee. But, where Helicon breaks down In cliff to the sea.
Where the moon-silvered inlets Send far their light voice Up the still vale of Thisbe O speed, and rejoice! [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act Two, lines 417-428]
236
In ancient times Mt Helicon was sacred to Dionysus, and its Hippocrene Fountain was famed as the source of the river of poetical inspiration; whilst Dionysus’ body was supposedly buried on Mt Parnassus, so that the grave of Dionysus was shown in the Delphic temple beside a statue of Apollo. Arnold then has Apollo and the Muses travel on to Mt Olympus:
They bathe on this mountain, In the spring by their road; Then on to Olympus, Their endless abode. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act Two, lines 453-456]
In myth, Dionysus is dead and buried in his grave; but after his rebirth or resurrection he was also accepted by the other gods into the Olympian pantheon as the youthful inner being of Apollo. However, Mt Olympus is also the source of the river Helicon, which gave its name to Mt Helicon, and which rises out of a spring on Olympus’ slopes. Empedocles is thus also supposedly reborn or resurrected as the river Helicon which flows down from Olympus and, after travelling underground for three miles, enters the Aegean Sea. It therefore offers, like the river Marsyas, or like Coleridge’s river Alph, an almost perfect represention of the course of the river of the buried life. At the end of the song, Arnold has Callicles sing of how the subjective vision of a Dionysus can somehow be contained within the remote objectivity of an Apollo:
- Whose praise do they mention? Of what is it told? - What will be for ever; What was from of old.
First hymn they the Father Of all things; and then, The rest of immortals, The action of men.
The day in his hotness, The strife with the palm; The night in her silence, The stars in their calm. [“Empedocles on Etna”, Act Two, lines 457- 468]
But if there is really no one’s body buried in Callicles’ song, or in “Empedocles on Etna” as a whole, then Empedocles cannot have been reborn as the youthful inner being of Apollo, and nothing has really been resolved. If an attempt is now made to read Callicles’ song as Wyndham Lewis may have read it, to try to understand why he rated it as equal to the greatest poetry ever written, and to try to understand how “Empedocles on Etna” was interpreted in the late- nineteenth and early-twentieth-centuries, in terms of the Gray-to-Douglas context provided by the concept of the buried life, it may be that the Etna of its first stanza 237
represented to Lewis the France of World War One. An English soldier-poet has supposedly sacrificed himself, or been sacrificed in the fashion of “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”, in France on behalf of his society and been torn apart physically and psychically by artillery shells, so that there is nothing left of his body to find and he is reduced to the elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. (In terms of the context provided by Callicles’ other songs, this soldier-poet is best thought of as having been, like Edward Thomas, before the war both a bit of a poet and a poverty-stricken, married man of letters.) He leaves behind him the Typhoean torments endured by the British Army in France, and is imagined as being whisked off to England as the cyclic, or dying and reborn, inner being of a remote, Apollonian figure like General Haig. He is then “buried” in, and also haunts as a youthful shade, the Arnoldian-cum-Binyonesque, Anglo-Grecian elegaic landscape of “The Scholar-Gipsy”, “Thyrsis” and “For the Fallen”, located in the countryside surrounding Oxford. (Ideally, he would be “buried” in the Jarn Mound at Boar’s Hill, created by Sir Arthur Evans as an empty tomb, and as a monument to rebirth or resurrection and to Arnold’s poetry) [Powell, 1984, pp.45-46]. As the river Thames, he will later flow out of Arnold-Binyon Country, through the landscape of Arnold’s “Philomela”, and the postwar London landcape of Eliot’s “The Waste Land”, and down to the sea. He sings of how the subjective vision of a Sassoon or an Owen can somehow be contained within the remote objectivity of a Haig [Fussell, 1977, p.26]; as the youthful soldier Raleigh, blown to bits in France in World War One, to sounds of gunfire reminiscent of the “grating roar” of the pebbles in Arnold’s “Dover Beach”, is imagined as being somehow contained within the remote objectivity of Haig’s communiqués, which act as the chorus of a tragedy in the novel, Journey’s End [Sherriff and Bartlett, 1930, pp.284-286]. And yet, given the “corpseless” nature of the British experience in World War One, it may be that his body is not really in the song at all and nothing has really been resolved. If an attempt is then made to read “The Waste Land” as Ted Hughes may have read it, to try to understand why he rated it as equal to the greatest poetry ever written, and to try to flesh out the plot of what is, it has been argued, like “Empedocles on Etna”, an extremely fragmented or attenuated tragedy, then it would seem that in that poem an English soldier-boy, who is rather like Rupert Brooke, and who represents Eliot’s inner god, or the god of the buried life, has supposedly sacrificed himself, or been sacrificed in the fashion of “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”, in France or at Gallipoli on behalf of his society. (In this reading “The Waste Land” is like a merging of Brooke’s “The Soldier” with Binyon’s “For the Fallen” and writ large.) He has been torn apart physically and psychically by shellfire, so that there is nothing left of his body to find and he is reduced, in Dionysian fashion, to the elements of Earth, Air, Fire and Water. He leaves behind him the Typhoean torments endured by the British Army overseas, and is imagined as being whisked off to England as the cyclic, or dying and reborn, inner being of a remote, Apollonian figure rather like Eliot himself, or like Housman, in his persona of the aged critic and polymathic man of letters. He is then buried in, and also haunts as a youthful shade, the Arnoldian-cum-Binyonesque, Anglo-Grecian elegaic 238
landscape of “The Scholar-Gipsy”, “Thyrsis” and “For the Fallen”, located in the countryside surrounding Oxford. As the river Thames, he will later flow out of Arnold- Binyon Country, through the postwar London landcape of “The Waste Land”, and past Margate to the open sea. He sings of how the subjective vision of a soldier-boy, or of Eliot’s Saint Narcissus, can somehow be contained within the remote objectivity of Eliot’s critical persona, which acts as the chorus of the tragedy; and yet, given the “corpseless” nature of the British experience of World War One, it may be that his body is not really in the poem at all and nothing has really been resolved. Such a reading of “The Waste Land” would mean a rearrangement of its fragments and allusions into a new pattern of cohesion, accounting for some of its seeming anomalies, and based on the logic of the concept of the buried life, so that it could be seen to closely resemble, like “Empedocles on Etna”, almost any poem by Housman; or Tennyson’s “In Memoriam” (1850) [Raine, 2006, p.75]; or Nerval’s “”El Desdichado” (1853-55) [Eliot, 1974, p.79]. But that would be a subject for another thesis.
Conclusion In summary, then, in both “Empedocles on Etna” and “The Waste Land”, as in Arnold’s “Obermann Once More”, an attempt has been made, through an enormous sacrifice, to revive the dead fragments of religion and of European civilisation, which are also the fragments of the dead Jesus Christ, or Dionysus, in order to cause a resurrection or rebirth of the god, the religion and the civilisation. (In “The Waste Land”, as was noted, that sacrifice is associated with World War One; whereas in “Empedocles on Etna” it is associated with the French Revolution and with the events of 1848; and it will soon be associated with the Crimean War.) Those attempts at revival having failed, in both poems it is then up to the poet to undertake a solitary, hazardous, shamanic journey into the land of the dead, or the subconscious, or the buried life. It is like the journey undertaken, for example, by Hermod in Arnold’s “Balder Dead”; by A.E. Housman in “Crossing alone the nighted ferry”; by Robert Byron in The Road to Oxiana; or by Keith Douglas in “Desert Flowers”. The poet must, in the words of Nerval, “have crossed the Acheron” [“El Desdichado”, line 12], in order to make contact with the millions of dead soldiers or revolutionaries who also make up the fragments of the body of the dead god. The millions of the dead, and the dead god, are encapsulated by the inner soldier-boy, a Saint Narcissus or a Rupert Brooke; so that by contacting this inner soldier-boy, and waking him from his death-like sleep, and merging with him, at least for the brief moment represented by a “spot of time”, and then journeying back across the Acheron to the surface life, the poet hopes to be able to cause a resurrection or rebirth of the god, the religion and European civilisation. However, this journey back and forth across the Acheron is a very difficult one for the poet to undertake. It is particularly difficult for the poets of “Empedocles on Etna” and “The Waste Land”, since in both poems the poet has grown old, “as we that are left grow old” [“For the Fallen”, line 13], and become something of a charlatan or 239
man of letters. The gap between their surface life and the buried life is a large one to negotiate, and there is thus a suspicion that, having failed to negotiate it, the poet or man of letters merely tries to conjure up visions of the journey from other people’s writings. In other words, there is a suspicion that they try to piece the journey together from the dead fragments of other people’s “spots of time”, or epiphanies, rather than undertaking the journey themselves. (They are like the “base-wallahs” in the literature of the World Wars.) If the fragments of other people’s writings to which the poems allude, which also represent the fragments of the dead civilisation and the fragments of the dead god, remain dead or inert on the page when they are read, then it would seem likely that the poets’ bodies are not buried in the texts and the journey has not been undertaken. This journey across the Acheron is like the journey across the Thames, via London Bridge, in “The Waste Land” [Eliot, 1974, p.65]; or it is like the journey across the Oxus in The Road to Oxiana; or it is like the journey across the river Guier in “Stanzas from the Grande Chartreuse” [“Stanzas from the Grand Chartreuse”, line 10]; or it is like the journey across “Giall’s stream” [“Balder Dead”, line 148] in “Balder Dead”; or it is like the journey across the Thames in H.M. Tomlinson’s Tidemarks (1924), which leads all the way, via the Moluccas (which is Tomlinson’s central Asia), to the land of the dead, the subconscious or the buried life. It is a journey undertaken only by “poets with messages from a world not this or from no world at all” [Tomlinson, 1928, p.14]; and in Tidemarks such poets hope to return back across the Thames from the Underworld, via Charing Cross Bridge, with the millions of the dead of World War One into the surface life; to rebuild there, like Frazer in The Golden Bough, or like Arnold in “Rugby Chapel”, and also in St. Paul and Protestantism, Literature and Dogma and God and the Bible, “the City of God” [“Rugby Chapel”, line 208; Tomlinson, 1928, p.318]. To conclude, if all writing from the earliest times right up to the present day is, as Margaret Atwood surmises, a form of “negotiating with the dead”, or a form of descent into the land of the dead, to return with a story to tell [Atwood, 2003, pp.137-161]; then Arnold’s concept of the buried life can be seen to describe a particular form of “negotiating”, similar to other forms of “negotiating” which took place elsewhere, but also with its own peculiar features, which took place in England in the period 1750-1950.
240
______
BIBLIOGRAPHY
ACKERMANN, Robert, J.G. Frazer: His Life and Work, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 (1987) ACKROYD, Peter, Albion: The Origins of the English Imagination, London: Vintage, 2004 (2002) ALLOTT, Kenneth, “Matthew Arnold’s Reading Lists in Three Early Diaries”, in Victorian Studies 2 (1959), pp.254-266 ANDERSON, Warren D., Matthew Arnold and the Classical Tradition, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965 APROBERTS, Ruth, Arnold and God, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983 ARKELL, David, Looking for Laforgue, Manchester: Carcanet, 1987 (1979) ARMSTRONG, Isobel, Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics, New York: Routledge, 1993 ARNOLD, Matthew, The Notebooks of Matthew Arnold, edited by Howard Foster Lowry, Karl Young and Waldo Hilary Dunn, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1952 ARNOLD, Matthew, The Poems of Matthew Arnold, edited by Kenneth Allott, London: Longman, 1965 ARNOLD, Matthew, The Portable Matthew Arnold, edited by Lionel Trilling, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1980 (1949) ARNOLD, Matthew, The Religion Of Poetry, edited by Harold Bloom, New York: Chelsea House, 1983 (1972) ATWOOD, Margaret, Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing, London: Virago, 2003 (2002) AVI-YONAH, Michael, and SHATZMAN, Israel, Illustrated Encyclopaedia of the Classical World, Jerusalem: Jerusalem Publishing House, 1976 BARNES, Jonathon (ed.), Early Greek Philosophy, London: Penguin, 1987 BEATTY, Bernard, “Empedocles and Byron Once More”, in Matthew Arnold 1988: A Centennial Review, edited by Miriam Allott, London: John Murray, 1988, pp.80-95 BELL, Michael, Literature, Modernism and Myth, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997 BERGONZI, Bernard, T.S. Eliot, London: Macmillan, 1972 BLOOM, Harold, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1994 BLOOM, Harold, Genius; A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds, London: HarperCollins, 2002 BLUNT, Wilfred, England’s Michelangelo: A Biography of George Frederic Watts, OM, RA, London: Columbus Books, 1989 (1975) BOOTH, Allyson, Postcards from the Trenches: Negotiating the Space between Modernism and the First World War, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996 BOWRA, C.M., Ancient Greek Literature, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967 BRETT, R.L., Faith and Doubt: Religion and Secularisation in Literature from Wordsworth to Larkin, Cambridge; James Clarke & Co., 1997 BROME, Vincent, Jung: Man and Myth, London: Paladin, 1980 (1978) BROOKE, Rupert, The Complete Poems, London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1942 (1932) BROOKER, Jewel Spears, Mastery and Escape: T.S. Eliot and the Dialectic of Modernism, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994 BROWN, Jane, Lutyens and the Edwardians: An English Architect and His Clients,
241
London: Penguin, 1997 (1996) BUCHAN, John, The Path of the King, London: Thomas Nelson, 1925 (1921) BUTLER, E.M., The Myth of the Magus, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993 (1948) BUTLER, Lucy (ed.), Robert Byron: Letters Home, London: John Murray, 1991 BYATT, A.S., Passions of the Mind: Selected Writings, London: Vintage, 1993 (1991) BYRON, Robert, “New Delhi”, in The Architectural Review, Vol. LXIX, January, 1931, pp.1-30 BYRON, Robert, The Road to Oxiana, London: Picador, 1981 (1937) CALASSO, Roberto, The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony, London: Vintage, 1994 (1988) CAMPBELL, Joseph, The Hero with a Thousand Faces, Novato, California: New World Library, 2008 (1949) CAREY, John, What Good Are the Arts?, London: Faber, 2006 (2005) CARLYLE, Thomas, On Heroes, Hero-Worship, and the Heroic in History, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1904 (1841) CECIL, David, Max: A Biography, London: Constable, 1964 CHADWICK, Owen, The Secularization of the European Mind in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990 (1975) CHRISTIANSEN, Rupert, The Visitors: Culture Shock in Nineteenth-Century Britain, London: Random House, 2001 (2000) CLOUGH, Arthur Hugh, The Poems of Arthur Hugh Clough, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974 COCKER, Mark, Loneliness and Time: The Story of British Travel Writing, New York: Random House, 1992 COLERIDGE, Samuel Taylor, Biographia Literaria: or Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, London: J.M. Dent, 1975 (1817) COLLINI, Stefan, “Arnold”, in Victorian Thinkers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993 (1988), pp.197-326 CONNOLLY, Cyril, Enemies of Promise, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1961 (1949) CONNOLLY, Cyril, The Unquiet Grave: A Word Cycle by Palinurus, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967 (1944) CONRAD, Joseph, Heart of Darkness and Typhoon, London: Pan, 1976 COPLEY, Terence, Black Tom: Arnold of Rugby: The Myth and the Man, London: Continuum, 2002 COUPE, Laurence, Myth, London: Routledge, 1997 CULLER, A. Dwight, Imaginative Reason: The Poetry of Matthew Arnold, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1966 CUPITT, Don, The Sea of Faith: Christianity in Change, London: British Broadcasting Corporation, 1985 (1984) DALRYMPLE, William, The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty, Delhi, 1857, London: Bloomsbury, 2007 (2006) DELANY, Paul, British Autobiography in the Seventeenth Century, London: Routledge, 1969 DE QUINCEY, Thomas, The Confessions of an English Opium-Eater, London: J.M. Dent, 1907 (1856) DESSAIN, C.S., John Henry Newman, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980 (1966) DIDION, Joan, The White Album, London: HarperCollins, 1993 (1979) DIOGENES LAERTIUS, Lives of Eminent Philosophers, Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press; London: Heinemann, 1925 DODDS, E.R., The Greeks and the Irrational, Berkeley: University of California Press, 242
1951 DODDS, E.R., The Ancient Concept of Progress and Other Essays on Greek Literature and Belief, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1973 DOUGLAS, Keith, The Complete Poems of Keith Douglas, edited by Desmond Graham, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 DREW, Philip, “Matthew Arnold and the Passage of Time”, in The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations, edited by Isobel Armstrong, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, pp.199-224 EAGLETON, Terry, Criticism and Ideology: A Study in Marxist Literary Theory, London: Verso, 1978 (1976) EAGLETON, Terry, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983 EKSTEINS, Modris, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age, London: Bantam Press, 1989 ELIADE, Mircea, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1964 ELIOT, T.S., On Poetry and Poets, London: Faber, 1957 ELIOT, T.S., The Use of Poetry and the Use of Criticism, London: Faber, 1964 (1933) ELIOT, T.S., Collected Poems: 1909-1962, London: Faber, 1974 (1963) ELIOT, T.S., Selected Prose of T.S. Eliot, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975 ELIOT, T.S., The Idea of a Christian Society and Other Writings, London: Faber, 1982 (1939) ELIOT, T.S., The Letters of T.S. Eliot, Volume 1, edited by Valerie Eliot, New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1988 ELIOT, T.S., Selected Essays, London: Faber, 1999 (1951) EMERSON, Ralph Waldo, Essays, Boston: Houghton, Mifflin & Co., 1889 EURIPIDES, The Bacchae and Other Plays, translated by Philip Vellacott, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 FAAS, Ekbert, Ted Hughes: The Unaccomodated Universe, Santa Barbara: Black Sparrow Press, 1980 FAAS, Ekbert, Retreat into the Mind: Victorian Poetry and the Rise of Psychiatry, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988 FABER, Geoffrey, Jowett: A Portrait with Background, London: Faber, 1957 FALCK, Colin, Myth, Truth and Literature: Towards a True Post-Modernism, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994 (1989) FEINSTEIN, Elaine, Ted Hughes: The Life of a Poet, London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson, 2001 FERGUSON, Niall, Empire: How Britain Made the Modern World, London: Penguin, 2008 (2003) FERMOR, Patrick Leigh, A Time to Keep Silence, London: John Murray, 2004 (1957) FISHER, Clive, Cyril Connolly: The Life and Times of England’s Most Controversial Literary Critic, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996 (1995) FLAHERTY, Gloria, Shamanism in the Eighteenth Century, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992 FORSYTH, R.A., “‘The Buried Life’ - The Contrasting Views of Arnold and Clough in the Context of Dr. Arnold’s Historiography”, in Journal of Literary History, Vol.35 (1968), pp., 241-244 FORSYTH, R.A., The Lost Pattern: Essays on the Emergent City Sensibility in Victorian England, Nedlands: University of Western Australia Press, 1976 FRASER, George MacDonald, Flashman, London: HarperCollins, 1999 (1969) FRASER, Hilary, with BROWN, Daniel, English Prose of the Nineteenth Century, London: Addison Wesley Longman, 1996 243
FRAZER, Sir James, The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions, 1993 (1922) FRYE, Northrop, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000 (1957) FUSSELL, Paul, The Great War and Modern Memory, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977 (1975) FUSSELL, Paul, Abroad: British Literary Travelling Between the Wars, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982 (1980) FUSSELL, Paul, Doing Battle: The Making of a Skeptic, Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1996 GOETHE, Johann Wolfgang von, Italian Journey, translated by W.H. Auden and Elizabeth Mayer, Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1970 (1962) GORDON, Lyndall, Eliot’s Early Years, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978 (1977) GORDON, Lyndall, Eliot’s New Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 (1988) GOULD, Stephen Jay, Time’s Arrow, Time’s Cycle: Myth and Metaphor in the Discovery of Geological Time, London: Penguin, 1988 (1987) GRAVES, Robert, The White Goddess: An Historical Grammar of Poetical Myth, London: Faber, 1961 GREGORY, John, The Neoplatonists, London: Kyle Cathie, 1991 HAMILTON, Ian, A Gift Imprisoned: The Poetic Life of Matthew Arnold, London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 1998 HANEY, David P., William Wordsworth and the Hermeneutics of Incarnation, University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993 HERODOTUS, The Histories, translated by Aubrey de Selincourt, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 (1954) HOLMES, Richard, Coleridge: Early Visions, London: Flamingo, 1999 (1989) HONAN, Park, Matthew Arnold: A Life, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981 HOUGH, Graham, “The Modernist Lyric”, in Modernism: A Guide to European Literature 1890-1930, edited by Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane, London: Penguin, 1991 (1976), pp.312-322 HOUSMAN, A.E., The Works of A.E. Housman, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1994 HUGHES, Ted, Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, London: Faber, 1993 (1992) HUGHES, Ted, Winter Pollen: Occasional Prose, edited by William Scammell, New York: Picador, 1995 HUGHES, Ted (ed.), A Choice of Coleridge’s Verse, London: Faber, 1996 HUGHES, Thomas, Tom Brown’s Schooldays, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1971 (1856) INGLIS, K.S., Sacred Places: War Memorials in the Australian Landscape, Melbourne: Melbourne University Press, 1999 (1998) JAMES, Clive, The Meaning of Recognition: New Essays 2001-2005, London: Picador, 2005 JAMES, Clive, Cultural Amnesia: Notes in the Margin of My Time, London: Picador, 2007 JAMES, David Gwilym, Matthew Arnold and the Decline of English Romanticism, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1961 JAMES, William, The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature, London: Penguin, 1982 (1902) JENKINS, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980 JONES, David, In Parenthesis, London: Faber, 1963 (1937) JUNG, Carl, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, translated by Richard and Clara Winston, 244
London: HarperCollins, 1995 (1961) JUNG, Carl (ed.), Man and His Symbols, London: Aldus Books, 1964 KEEBLE, N.H., The Literary Culture of Nonconformity in Later Seventeenth-Century England, Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press, 1987 KELLY, Stuart, The Book of Lost Books, London: Penguin, 2006 (2005) KINGSLEY, Charles, The Heroes, London: J.M. Dent, 1906 (1856) KIPLING, Rudyard, The Works of Rudyard Kipling, Ware, Hertfordshire: Wordsworth, 1994 LANG, Cecil Y., The Letters of Matthew Arnold, Vols 1-6, Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996-2001 LAWRENCE, C.H., Medieval Monasticism: Forms of Religious Life in Western Europe in the Middle Ages, London: Longman, 1989 (1984) LAWRENCE, D.H., The Complete Poems of D.H. Lawrence, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977 (1964) LE QUESNE, A.L., “Carlyle”, in Victorian Thinkers, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993, pp.9-101 LESSING, Doris, Time Bites: Views and Reviews, New York: HarperCollins, 2004 LEVI, Peter, The Light Garden of the Angel King: Journeys in Afghanistan, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1984 (1972) LEVI, Peter, The Pelican History of Greek Literature, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 LEWIS, C. Day, The Eclogues, Georgics and Aeneid of Virgil, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1966 LEWIS, Wyndham, The Mysterious Mr Bull, London: Robert Hale, 1938 LEWIS, Wyndham, Blasting and Bombadiering, London: John Calder, 1982 (1937) LEWIS, Wyndham, Rude Assignment: An Intellectual Autobiography, Santa Rosa, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1984 LEWIS, Wyndham, Creatures of Habit and Creatures of Change: Essays on Art, Literature and Society 1914-1956, Santa Rosa, California: Black Sparrow Press, 1989 LOMAS, Robert, The Invisible College: The Royal Society, Freemasonry and the Birth of Modern Science, London: Hodder Headline, 2002 LOMBARDO, Stanley, Parmenides and Empedocles: The Fragments in Verse Translation, San Francisco: Grey Fox Press, 1982 LONGFORD, Elizabeth, Byron, London: Hutchinson, 1978 (1976) LOUIS, Margot K., “Gods and Mysteries: The Revival of Paganism and the Remaking of Mythography through the Nineteenth Century”, Literature Online, http://lion.chadwyck.co.uk.ezproxy, 2007 LOWE, John Livingston, The Road to Xanadu: A Study in the Ways of the Imagination, London: Picador, 1978 (1927) LUCRETIUS, On the Nature of the Universe, translated by R.E. Latham, London: Penguin, 1994 (1951) LYELL, Sir Charles, Principles of Geology, Vols 1-3, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990-1991 (1830-1833) LYOTARD, Jean-Francois, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984 MACHANN, Clinton, Matthew Arnold: A Literary Life, London: Macmillan, 1998 MACNEICE, Louis, The Strings are False: An Unfinished Autobiography, London: Faber, 1982 (1965) MCGAHEY, Robert, The Orphic Moment: Shaman to Poet-Thinker in Plato, Nietzsche and Mallarmé, Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994 McNEILL, William H., Arnold Toynbee: A Life, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989 MILLER, J. Hillis, The Disappearance of God: Five Nineteenth-Century Writers, 245
Cambridge: Harvard University press, 1975 (1963) MOODY, A.D., Thomas Stearns Eliot: Poet, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1979 MURRAY, Nicholas, A Life of Matthew Arnold, London: Hodder and Stoughton, 1997 (1996) NEWMAN, John Henry, Apologia Pro Vita Sua, New York: Doubleday, 1989 (1864) NEWMAN, John Henry, “Lectures on Justification: Lecture 8: Righteousness Viewed as a Gift and as a Quality”, National Institute for Newman Studies, www.newmanreader.org/works/justification/lectures8.html, 2004 NEWMAN, John Henry, “Parochial and Plain Sermons: Volume 6: Sermon 1, National Institute for Newman Studies, www.newman reader.org/works/parochial/volume6/sermon1/.html, 2004 (2) NEWMAN, John Henry, “Parochial and Plain Sermons: Volume 2: Sermon 19: The Indwelling Spirit”, National Institute for Newman Studies, www.newmanreader.org/works/parochial/volume2/sermon19.html, 2004 (3) NICHOLL, Charles, Somebody Else: Arthur Rimbaud in Africa: 1880-91, London: Vintage, 1998 (1997) NIETZSCHE, Friedrich, The Birth of Tragedy: Out of the Spirit of Music, translated by Douglas Smith, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000 (1872) NIXON, Jude V. (ed.), Victorian Religious Discourse: New Directions in Criticism, New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004 NORRIS, Christoper, Derrida, London: Fontana, 1987 O’BRIEN, D., Empedocles’ Cosmic Cycle: A Reconstruction from the Fragments and Secondary Sources, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969 O’GORMAN, Francis, “Matthew Arnold’s “The Buried Life”, in American Notes and Queries, Vol.21, No. 1, Winter 2008, pp.42-44 OVID, Metamorphoses, translated by Mary M. Innes, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1955 OWEN, Wilfred, The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Edmund Blunden, London: Chatto & Windus, 1966 OWEN, Wilfred, The Poems of Wilfred Owen, edited by Jon Stallworthy, London: Hogarth, 1985 PARINI, Jay, “Truly, Madly, Deeply”, in the Weekend Australian Review, July 19-20, 2008, pp.8-9 PEARSON, Gabriel, “The Importance of Arnold’s Merope”, in The Major Victorian Poets: Reconsiderations, edited by Isobel Armstrong, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969, pp.225-252 PHILOSTRATUS, The Lives of the Sophists, London: Heinemann, 1922 PINDAR, The Odes, translated by Maurice Bowra, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969 POWELL, Dilys, The Villa Ariadne, Athens: Efstathiadis group, 1984 (1973) POWYS, John Cowper, Autobiography, London: Picador, 1982 (1934) PRATT, Linda Ray, Matthew Arnold Revisited, New York: Twayne Publishers, 2000 PYNCHON, Thomas, The Crying of Lot 49, London: Picador, 1979 (1966) PYNCHON, Thomas, Slow Learner: Early Stories, London: Picador, 1985 (1984) RAINE, Craig, T.S. Eliot, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006 ROBERTS, Michael, T.E. Hulme, Manchester: Carcanet, 1982 (1938) ROMER, John, Testament: The Bible and History, New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1993 (1988) ROSE, Kenneth, Superior Person: A Portrait of Curzon in Late Victorian England, London: Phoenix Press, 2001 (1969) SALUSINSZKY, Imre, “Koch’s Expanding Universe”, in The Weekend Australian Review, February 2-3, 2008, p.40 246
SASSOON, Siegfried, The Complete Memoirs of George Sherston, London: Faber, 1972 (1937) SEWELL, Elizabeth, The Orphic Voice, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960 SHEFFIELD, Gary, Forgotten Victory: The First World War: Myths and Realities, London: Review, 2002 (2001) SHERRIFF, R.C., and BARTLETT, Vernon, Journey’s End: A Novel, London: Gollancz, 1930 SISSON, C.H., English Poetry 1900-1950: An Assessment, London: Methuen, 1981 (1971) SOUTHAM, B.C., A Student’s Guide to the Selected Poems of T.S. Eliot, London: Faber, 1981 (1968) SPIVEY, Ted R., Beyond Modernism: Toward a New Myth Criticism, Lanham, Maryland: University Press of America, 1988 STALLWORTHY, Jon, Singing School: The Making of a Poet, London: John Murray, 1998 STONE, Donald D., Communications with the Future: Matthew Arnold in Dialogue, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997 STRACHEY, Lytton, Eminent Victorians, San Diego: Harcourt, 1969 (1918) STRANDBERG, Ake, The Orphic Voice: T.S. Eliot and the Mallarmean Quest for Meaning, Uppsala: Uppsala University, 2002 STRAUSS, Walter E., Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971 SUPER, R.H., The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1960-77 SWEETING, Michael, “Hughes and Shamanism”, in The Achievement of Ted Hughes, edited by Keith Sagar, Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983, pp.70-89 TACEY, David J., Edge of the Sacred: Transformation in Australia, East Melbourne: HarperCollins, 1995 TAYLOR, Charles, Sources of the Self: The Making of Modern Identity, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1989 TENNYSON, Alfred, Tennyson’s Poetry, edited by Robert W. Hill, Jr., New York: Norton, 1971 THUBRON, Colin, The Hills of Adonis: A Journey in Lebanon, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987 (1968) TINKER, C.B., and LOWRY, H.F., The Poetry of Matthew Arnold: A Commentary, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1940 TOMLINSON, H.M., Tidemarks: Some Records of a Journey to the Beaches of the Moluccas and the Forest of Malaya, in 1923, London: Cassell, 1928 (1924) TOULMIN, Stephen, and GOODFIELD, June, The Discovery of Time, London: Hutchinson, 1965 TRILLING, Lionel, Matthew Arnold, New York: Columbia University Press, 1949 (1939) TRILLING, Lionel, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society, New York: Viking, 1950 TRILLING, Lionel, Beyond Culture: Essays on Literature and Learning, London: Secker & Warburg, 1966 TURNER, Frank M., The Greek Heritage in Victorian Britain, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981 VICKERY, John B., The Literary Impact of the Golden Bough, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973 WADE, Nicholas, Before the Dawn: Recovering the Lost History of Our Ancestors, 247
London: Penguin, 2006 WAGNER, Erica, Ariel’s Gift: A Commentary on Birthday Letters by Ted Hughes, London: Faber, 2001 (2000) WARNER, Rex, The Greek Philosophers, New York: Mentor, 1958 WILSON, A.N., The Victorians, London: Random House, 2003 (2002) WITHERS, Percy, A Buried Life: Personal Recollections of A.E. Housman, London: Jonathon Cape, 1940 WOODHAM-SMITH, Cecil, The Reason Why, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958 (1953) WORDSWORTH, William, Selected Poems and Prefaces, edited by Jack Stillinger, Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1965 WORDSWORTH, William, The Prelude: A Parallel Text, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1972 (1971) WORDSWORTH, William, The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, edited by W.J.B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1974 WORDSWORTH, William, The Poems, Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1977 WRIGHT, M.R., Empedocles: The Extant Fragments, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1981 YEATS, W.B., Selected Criticism, edited by A. Norman Jeffares, London: Pan, 1976 (1964) YEATS, W.B., A Vision, London: Macmillan, 1981 (1937)
248