A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES ROMANTIC IRONY IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE Clyde de L. Ryals Romantic irony has been associated with certain English literary works of both the Romantic period and the twentieth century, but inyl World ofPossibilities, Clyde de L. Ryals demonstrates that it also informs the literature of the Victorian period. Ryals's ground-breaking study shows how romantic irony characterizes works, in various genres, by Carlyle, Thackeray, Browning, Arnold, Dickens, Tennyson, and Pater. Taking as its point of departure Friedrich SchlegeFs observations on romantic irony as "an image of the age, A World of Possibilities explores how the Victorians' irony is not an eighteenth-century irony of nega­ tive absurdity: it is not subsumed by either the normative irony or the epistcmological irony espoused by the two chief contempo­ rary theorists of literary irony. Ryals claims that while Wayne C. Booth reconstructs and Paul de Man deconstructs, Victorian roman­ tic irony docs both. Where deconstruc­ tionists insist on the death of meaning and reconstructionists maintain that meaning is fixed and final, Victorian romantic ironists are less concerned with meaning than with the possibility of meaning. Although it may ultimately elude defini­ tion, Victorian romantic irony nevertheless has certain defining characteristics. Ryals examines how it is formally a mixture of styles, modes, and genres; how it avoids closure and determinate meaning as it deconstructs the invented world that it pre­ tends to offer, reflexivcly mirroring its author and itself; how it displays the oppressiveness of materiality as it presents characters con­ ceiving of themselves as dramatis personae; how it is distrustful of its own linguistic medium and invites the constructive par­ ticipation of the reader; and how it is perme­ ated by a sense of play, as it permits the Studies in Victorian Life and Literature A WORLD OF POSSIBILITIES ROMANTIC IRONY IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE Clyde de L. Ryals Ohio State University Press Columbus Copyright © 1990 by the Ohio State University Press. All rights reserved. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Ryals, Clyde de L., 1928­ A world of possibilities : romantic irony in Victorian literature / Clyde de L. Ryals. p. cm. - (Studies in Victorian life and literature) Includes bibliographical references. ISBN 0-8142-0522-4 (alk. paper) 1. English literature—19th century—History and criticism. 2. Romanticism—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Irony in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PR468.R65R94 1990 820.9'18'09034—dc20 90-35593 CIP The paper in this book meets the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Committee on Production Guidelines for Book Longevity of the Council on Library Resources. Printed in the U.S.A. 987654321 For HSR Superlative actors! how noble the play, how splendid your costume, how lofty your role! St. Hildegard of Bingen (trans. Barbara Newman) CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ix INTRODUCTION A N IMAGE OF THE AGE 1 1 Carlyle's The French Revolution A "True Fiction'' 17 2 Vanity Fair Transcendental Buffoonery 34 3 Levity's Rainbow The Way of Browning's "Christmas-Eve" 48 4 The Chameleon Personality Arnold's Poetry 60 5 The "Mononymity" of Bleak House 76 6 "The Old Order Changeth" Idylls of the King 94 viii Contents 7 The Heracliteanism of Marius the Epicurean 114 AFTERWORD BEING TRUE AT THE VERGE 131 LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS 135 NOTES 137 INDEX 157 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Portions of this book have been previously published. Most of chapter 1 appeared in ELH (Winter 1987-88); parts of chapter 3 in Studies in Browning and His Circle (1986) and the Journal of Narrative Literature (Winter 1987); most of chapter 4 in Vic­ torian Poetry (Spring-Summer 1988); parts of chapter 6 in the Tennyson Research Bulletin (1990); and most of chapter 7 in Nineteenth-Century Literature (September 1988). I thank the edi­ tors of these journals for their kind permission to reprint this material. In addition, portions of the book were delivered as lectures: at West Virginia University (October 1985); the Conference on Narrative Poetics, Ohio State University (April 1986); the Univer­ sity of Miinster (May 1987); the Modern Language Association in New Orleans (December 1988); and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (May 1989). I am grateful to my hosts on these occasions. I should like especially to thank John Stasny of West Virginia University and Kurt Tetzeli von Rosador of the University of Miinster for their generous hospitality when 1 appeared at their universities. IX INTRODUCTION An Image of the Age After forty years of revolutions and revolutionary wars it had become apparent at the beginning of the Victorian period that the nineteenth century was to be characterized as a period of change. It was in fact the one subject on which even the most contentious persons could agree. Writing on "The Spirit of the Age" in 1831, John Stuart Mill described his as "an age of change," "the con­ viction [being] already not far from universal, that the times are pregnant with change.' Elaborating on Mill's observation in the last decade of the century, Walter Pater noted that "the entire modern theory" of change had become "a commonplace."1 In sum, the idea of change informed all vital thought of the Victorian age: for example, the philosophy of T. H. Green and F. H. Bradley, the geology of Charles Lyell and William Chambers, the biology of Charles Darwin and T. H. Huxley, the theology of clergymen so diverse as John Henry Newman and Benjamin Jowett, and, in a very radical way, the literary efforts of the best writers of the time. During the early part of the period, commentators spoke of it as "an age of transition,' from a time of certainty and accepted values to a time of which one knew not what. As Carlyle observed in Sartor Resartus, the Old Mythus had disappeared and the New Mythus had not been revealed. For many the recognition that 1 Introduction theirs was an age of transition was a fearful thing. "We live in an age of visible transition,' Edward Bulwer Lytton wrote in his appraisal of the spirit of the age in 1833. "To me such epochs appear the times of greatest unhappiness to our species.' "It is an awful moment," Frederick Robertson said a few years later, "when the soul begins to feel the nothingness of many of the traditionary opinions which have been received with implicit con­ fidence, and in that horrible insecurity begins also to doubt whether there be any thing to believe at all."2 Where many were made anxious by change, others were of a different disposition. Writing to his future wife in 1846, Robert Browning said: "The cant is, that 'an age of transition' is the melancholy thing to contemplate and delineate—whereas the worst things of all to look back on are times of comparative standing still, rounded in their impotent completeness."3 Still others could be of two minds in contemplating their age. In "Locksley Hall" Alfred Tennyson viewed the time moving in exhilarating fashion "down the ringing grooves of change," whereas in "Locksley Hall Sixty Years After" he saw retrogression as the inevitable concomitant of progress. If it is a time when "nothing is fixed, nothing is appointed,' the liberal congregational theologian James Baldwin Brown said, one must adopt an attitude of skepticism about all things. "We are growing more sceptical in the proper sense of the word," wrote Henry Sidgwick: we suspend our judgement much more than our predeces­ sors . : we see that there are many sides to many questions: the opinions that we do hold we hold more at arm's length: we can imagine how they appear to others, and can conceive ourselves not holding them. We are . gaining in impartiality and comprehensiveness of sympathy. This was entirely proper, according to the scientist John Tyndall, for "there are periods when the judgement ought to remain in Introduction suspense, the data on which a decision might be based being absent."4 If there were certainties few or none, at least there was a world of possibilities. Suspended judgment dictated by the perception that various and even contradictory views might be alike true—this was the posture that the thinking individual was forced to assume in a world of change; and basically, as philosophers and literary critics came to understand, it was an ironic stance. The historian and ecclesiastic Connop Thirlwall observed this in 1833 when ad­ dressing himself to a kind of irony dependent not upon local effects but made identical with a cosmic view. Noting that in the Antigone Sophocles impartially presented two equal and opposite points of view, he remarked that irony may reside in the attitude of an impartial observer or, more precisely, in the situation observed: There is always a slight cast of irony in the grave, calm, respectful attention impartially bestowed by an intelligent judge on two contending parties, who are pleading their causes before him with all the earnestness of deep conviction, and of excited feeling. What makes the contrast interesting is, that the right and the truth lie on neither side exclusively: that there is no fraudulent purpose, no gross imbecility of intellect, on either: but both have plausible claims and specious reasons to alledge, though each is too much blinded by prejudice or passion to do justice to the views of his adversary. For there the irony lies not in the demeanor of the judge, but is deeply seated in the case itself, which seems to favour each of the litigants, but really eludes them both. The most interesting conflicts are not, Thirlwall says, those in which one side is obviously right, as when good is pitted against evil.