Important Literary Works (1701 to the Present Day)
The Dunciad” / 603
”EPISTLE TO ARBUTHNOr, THE DUNCIAD”,
AND ”ROBINSON CRUSOE” Q. 96. Show your acquaintance with the following :• ({) Epistle 10 Arbuthnoi (Agra 1966)
(ii) The Dunciad (Gorakhpnr 1982,1985) (Punjab Sept 1956) (iii) Robinson Crusoe (Punjab 1961)
EPISTLE TO ARBUTHNOT
Introduction
Epistle to Arbuthnot is one of the best and most autobiographical poems of Alexander Pope. It was published in January 173S, less than a year before the death of Dr. Arbuthnot, once the physician to Queen Anne, whom Pope addresses. Arbuthnot was a close friend of Pope and Swift, and, like them, a member of the Tory ”Scriblerus Club.” The poem is of the nature of a patchwork. Pope himself points out in the ”Advertisement” that it was ”begun many years since, and ”drawn up by snatches, as the several occasions offer’d”, and that he had ”no thought of publishing it, till it pleas’d some Persons of Rank and Fortune to attack in a very extraordinary manner, not only my writings. ~but my Person, Morals, and Family.” These ”Persons of Rank and Fortune” were Lady Mary Wortley Montagu and Queen Caroline’s favourite, Lord Hervey, both of whom had written malicious and ungenerous things against him. It was partly to teach them a lesson that Pope came out with this poem.
But there was another factor responsible for the genesis of the poem. Arbuthnot had urged upon Pope the desirability of eschewing personal satire and of attacking vice in the multitude, without naming any individuals. He was asked by Arbuthnot to display noble disdain for corruption as the ancient satirists had shown. However, Pope was never convinced of the effectiveness- of general satire. He wrote in a letter to his friend: ”General satire in times of general vice has no force and is no punishment; people have ceased to be ashaHift! of it when so many are joined with them; and it is only by hunting one or two from the herd that examples can be made.” He made quite a few ”examples* in this poem.
The Theme and Its Development :-
In the beginning it is described how poor Pope is pestered by a swarm of poetasters desiring his patronage. This naturally works up his spleen and makes him lash them. He does not bother if they try to sting
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back. He is critical of bad poets and bad critics like Bentley and Theobald. Then comes the satiric sketch of Atticus (Addison) which makes the finest passage of the poem. It is followed by those of Bufo (perhaps Halifax) and Sporus (Lord Hervey). The Sporus passage is particularly cruel and forceful but, according to Dr. Johnson, the meanest passage in the poem. At the same time Pope defends his self-righteousness and poetic integrity. He has been kind to his enemies, but they have abused, in return,
His Father, Motiier, Body, Soul, and Muse.
Then he comes put with an encomium for his dead father. In the end he pays a touching tribute to his old mother, and with his service to her desires to
keep awhile one Parent from the Sky ! Lastly, he praises Arbuthnot and prays for his long life. Criticism :-
The poem is a work of composite nature. However, all things considered, it is, fundamentally, Pope’s apologia pro vita sua. It is
* addressed to Arbuthnot as an epistle, and in it there are markedly conversational passages which bespeak its informality, but it is a well-wrought work of art. There is much more of poetry and satire in the poem than of Arbuthnot who is remembered only in the last few lines. Regarding the central theme of the poem, R. P. C. Mutter and M. Kinkead-Weekes observe: The poem is many things, but the head at which all its streams meet is the defence of Pope’s conception of poetry, from those who malign, or misuse, or misdirect, or misconceive it.” The following lines which occur in the Atticus (Addison) portrait are among the most famous in English literature:
Damn with faint praise; assent with civil leer,
And without sneering teach the rest to sneer;
Willing to wound, and yet afraid to strike,
Just hint a fault, and hesitate dislike.
Each line comes whizzing like a poisoned dart and sinks into the target. The Sporus (Hervey) passage is scurrilous and visibly unjust but not without its peculiar, sizzling intensity which must have left a lasting wound on Hervey-
this Bug with gilded wings, This painted Child of Dirt that stinks and stings.
THE DUNCIAD Introduction :•
The Dunciod is Pope’s most serious and most powerful satire. In its final form it consisted of four books. Its first three books were
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The Dunciad” / 605
published anonymously in 1728, though in 1735 Pope acknowledged the authorship. The fourth book came out in 1742 under the title The New Dunciad. A new edition comprising all the four books was published in 1743. A significant change made in the new version was the displacement of Theobald as the hero in favour of Collcy Gibber, the then Poet Laureate. Both Theobald and Collcy Gibber-along with a thousand others-had earned the displeasure of Pope by their ungenerous and, mostly, unjust criticism of his works, his habits, his everything. Pope took the opportunity of lashing them most severely in The Dunciad–ti\e epic of the dunces both alive and defunct.
Summary :-
The ”Arugment” of the poem is given below:
Book I. The reign of Dulness is described. Bayes (i.e., Gibber) is shown debating whether he should betake himself to church, gaming, or party writing, but is carried off by the goddess and anointed king in place of Eusden, the poet laureate, who has died.
Book II. This solemnity is graced by games, in which poets, critics, and booksellers contend. There are races, with diverse accidents, in which booksellers pursue the phantom of a poet; exercises for the poets; and finally a test for the critics,, to decide whether they can hear the works of two authors read aloud without sleeping. But presently spectators, critics, and all fall fast asleep.
Book III. The king, slumbering with his head on the lap of the goddess, is transported to the Elysian shades, where, under the guidance of Elkanah Settle, he sees vision of the past and future triumphs of the empire of Dulness, how this shall extend to the theatres and the court, the arts, and the sciences.
Book IV The realization of their prophecies is described, and the subjugation of the sciences and universities to dulness, the growth of indolence, the corruption of education, and the consummation of all in the restoration of night and chaos.
Criticism :-
”For many critics,” says George Sherburn in A Literary History of England, ed. Albert C. Baugh, ”Die Dunciad is the climax of Pope’s achievement.” It is indeed one of the most famous satires written in England. As a satire it combines particularities and generalities. For instance, it lashes both Curll and bad publishers like him, Theobald and bad critics like him, Gibber and bad poets like him, and so forth. But Pope’s excessive scurrility, maliciousness, and revcngcfulness lessen, to some extent, the emotional sympathies of the reader. Pope is less
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than fair to Bentley, the greatest classical scholar England has so far produced, to Gibber who may havebeen a debauchee but who certainly was not a ”dunce,” and to so many others. Personal animus when it is let out without artistic control reduces the effectiveness of a satire. As Theobald and Bentley had found fault with Pope’s Homer and edition of Shakespeare, therefore ipso facto they are bad critics and a danger to letters and civilisation. That it is quite unreasonable an assumption needs no emphatic mention. However,when Pope is general, he is less unconvincing. According to John Butt, the general editor of Twickenham edition of Pope’s works, Pope’s satire in Tlie Dunciadis essentially directed against the levelling down of literary standards, which was a feature of his age. Literature had in the age of Pope become a marketable commodity and many hacks had taken to writing as a profession, in most cases after failing in every other. A good writer like Pope could not help hitting out at the swarm of such pen-drivers. His satire was thus the product ofprofessronal feelings, though it was also partly an expression of his genuine concern at the deterioration of literary standards. Formally considered, The Dunciad is cast in epic frame-work. We have a hero who, however, does nothing more than sleep and snore. Then, there are some mock-epic features, top, which are of the nature of a travesty of similar features in the epics of Homer and Virgil. The invocation, the description of games (Bk.H) and the performance of a sacrifice (of his own works by the hero) are some instances in point. According to R. P. C. Mutter and M. KinkeadWeekcs, ’The Dunciad…reads like a fragment of some enormous sombre epic.”
The fourth book displays Pope’s art at its best. The concluding lines are decidedly the very best. According to Cazamian ”the fourth book, in which the theme develops into a criticism, with full grounds, of intellectual education under all its aspects, is of a manifold and substantial interest.”
ROBINSON CRUSOE
Introduction
Robinson Crusoe is one of the most famous works of fiction in not only English, but world literature. It was written by Daniel Defoe and published in 1719. The outline of the work was most probably suggested to the author by the strange experiences of one Alexander Selkirk on an uninhabited island for about five years (1704-1709), which he voluntarily spent there. Numerous stories, factual and imaginary, were writ-
” Robinson Crusoe” / 607
tea by many writers regarding Alexander Selkirk’s lonely stay. Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe easily eclipsed all these stories and became tremendously popular. That popularity it has been maintaining since then. Defoe was a staggeringly copious writer. He wrote four hundred works for certain, and perhaps three hundred more. Even his poetry alone, which nobody reads today, runs to more lines than Milton’s. Yet had he died before 1719 instead of 1731 his name would have been known only to a-handful of scholars. As it is, he is, with Shakespeare and Dickens, one of the three English writers most famous throughout the world. His entire fame is due to Robinson Crusoe which overtops all the rest of his writings. Pope observes: ”Defoe wrote a vast many things, and none bad, though none excellent except this [Robinson Crusoe].” Dr. Johnson ranked it with Don Quixote and The Pilgrim’s Progress. In the words of Landor, ”Achilles and Homer will be forgotten before Crusoe and Defoe.”
The Story :-
The protagonist of the story, Robinson Crusoe, is a heady young man. In spite of the repeated warnings of his parents and even God (in the form of a terrific storm which engulfs him while he is running away from home in a ship) he takes to the life of the sea. He makes a successful commercial voyage to Guinea, but during his second voyage is captured by some Turkish pirates in whose captivity he remains for two years. Afterwards he escapes and is taken by a Portuguese ship to Brazil where he establishes a plantation, stays-for two years, and then sets out on a voyage to Guinea for capturing negroes for slaves. He gets shipwrecked and is the only survivor among the crew. He finds himself on an uninhabited island. He makes several trips from the shore to the wreck (which is yet afloat) on a raft and thus collects all the goods that he can lay his hand on. He makes a ”house” on the island and does many other things to make his life as comfortable as it can be made. Year after year glides by but there is no rescue in sight. In the twentysixth year of his stay he rescues a savage (whom he names Friday) who has been brought to the island by cannibals belonging to an antagonistic tribe. Friday is taught by Crusoe such civilised things as simple English manners and Christianity. It is only after the passage of twenty-eight years that a ship full of Englishmen lands near the island. The crew of the ship have the design of murdering the honest captain. Crusoe rescues the captain, leaves the mutineers on the island, and sets sail with, the captain and Friday. In due course the party reaches England. Criticism :-
Defoe insisted that Robinson Crusoe was a hundred per cent true story. It was not. But what is important in literature is not verity but
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verisimilitude. Defoe is a perfect master of minor cirumstantial details which seem to be coming from an untutored witness. These details are important not individually but collectively. Crusoe does very simple things on the island but these simple things are as interesting as the heroic exploits of great heroes. Many pages are devoted to describing how Crusoe made a table, a sieve, and some very unsophisticated pottery. The reader goes through these pages with breath-taking excitement. Dcfoc cannot make anybody laugh, nor does he make anybody weep, yet he can keep the reader on the tip-toe of suspense and virtually drown him in a staggering mass of unrelated and, mostly, irrclvant details which disarm the most sceptical of enquirers. Herein lies D-*fbe’s triumph.
Robinson Gusoe may be considered to be the first English novel. But if it is a novel, it is a novel of its own kind. It has character if not characters. There is no love-interest for there is no female character. There is no dialogue. There is not even much of ”action.” .Yet it has many of the essential features of a novel-unities of theme and action, and narrative which could not be bettered. According to Baker Robinson Crusoe is the first novel in the complete modern sense, although it was not offered to the world as fiction and was considerably different from the type ultimately established. With it, says the same critic, ”realistic fiction was established on granite foundations.”
THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS”,
”A TALE OF A TUB”, AND
”GULLIVER’S TRAVELS”
Q. 97. Show your acquaintance with the following :-
(i) Vie Battle oftlie Books (Punjab 1%0) (Gorakhpur 1982)
(ii) A Tale of a Tub (Agra 1963)
(Hi) Gulliver’s Travels (Punjab 1970) (Agra 1961) (Punjab 1972)
THE BATTLE OF THE BOOKS
Introduction :-
The Battle of (he Books is one of the first published works of Jonathan Swift, the greatest satirist in English literature. It is, like most of his works, a prose satire. It was published along with A Talc of a Tur and Tlie Mechanical Operation of Tlie Spirit in 1704, though it appears
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The Battle of the Boots * / 609
that Swift had written it seven years earlier when he was in the service of his patron Sir William Temple. The work was a contribution to the ”ancient-modern controversy” which was then raging in England. Sir William Temple, who in an essay had taken the side of the ancients, had been attacked by Bentley and Wotton. Swift’s primary intention was •4s-4sfend his patron and to take Bentley, Wotton, and other opponents
of his patron to task. He also reiterated Temple’s views affirming the supremacy of ancient writers over their modem counterparts. Tlie Battle of the Books is not so much a contribution to, as an adventure i i, criticism.
The Theme and Story :-
In The Battle of the Books Swift assumes the pose of an impartial ””historian ”retained by neither party”; as one, who describes a battle which was allegedly fought between the books of the ancients and the moderns stocked in St. James’ Liberary, London. The immediate cause of the battle was the skirmish between the ancients and the moderns residing on Parnassus about who should occupy the highest of its summits. The two groups of .books exchanged hot words and started preparing for a decisive battle.
Then followed a ”material” incident~the quarrel between a spider living in a corner of the Library and a bee which had unwarily got i.”»ught in the spider’s web. The two insects debated as to who was better than the other. Aesop interpreted the bee and the spider as symbols of the ancients and the moderns respectively. Before the battle got under way, Criticism, Wotton’s mother, came to the Library in the shape of a book and encouraged him and the fellow-moderns.
Then the actual battle begins. The ancients are patronised by the deity Pallas and are led by Homer, Pindar, Aristotle, etc. with Sir William Temple commanding the allies. The moderns have for their patrons, Momus and Criticism, and are led by Milton, Dryden, Hobbes, etc First, Paracelsus attacks Galen. Harvey is wounded. Aristotle shoots an arrow at Bacon who, however, escapes as the arrow fatally hits Des Cartes instead. Homer kills many, such as Gondibert (Davenant), Oenham, Wesley, Perrault, and Fontenelle. Virgil and Dryden meet to fight but Dryden calls Virgil ”father” and succeeds in cajoling him into exchanging armours with him. Lucan tries, but fails to kill Blackmore. Thereupon the two exchange gifts. Creech pursues a phantom of Horace. Pindar kills Aphra Behn and Cowley.
Towards the end comes the episode of Bentley and Wotton. Bentley is a foul-mouthed coward with a deformed body and ridiculous
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armour and weapons. He quarrels with the leaders of the moderns, and in return is rebuffed by Scaliger. The two friends go together to kill or rob some sleeping ancients in the evening. Bentlcy robe the: sleeping Phalaris of his armour, Wotton throws a javelian at Temple in an unsuccessful bid to kill him. He is pursued by Boyle. Meeting Bentley carrying Phalaris’ armour, Boyle chases him too. In the end Boyle’s lance pierces the bodies of both Bentley and Wotton, putting them to death simultaneously.
Criticism :-
The Battle of the Books is zjoie d’esprit (a thing of high spirits) and betrays the-hand of an cbullfcnt youth such as Swift was when be wrote it. As criticism it has very little value, but as a comic satire, it has much. The only passage where some constructive criticism is made is the bee and the spider episode which is also, incidentally, the most delightful part of the work. The whole work is of the nature of an allegory and the bee and the spider episode is, in the words of Edmund Gosse, meant for ”illustrating allegory by still subtler allegory.”
The framework of The Battle of the Books is mock-heroic In it Swift adopts the epic style and the conventional devices sanctified by Homer and Virgil. The ”action? in the main, is a heroic one and a fit subject for an epic. The marshalling of the armies, the description of the leading heroes, the hand-to-hand combats, the conference of the gods, and other supernatural elements-ail these are reminiscent of the works of Homer and Virgil, and are couched in a style which is pre-eminently mock heroic. Very delightful are the mock-epic similes used at the end in the description of the adventures of Wotton and Bentley ending in their death. Swift is, of course, much less than fair to Temple’s, and by implication, his own, antagonists; but we must remember that he is not a historian but a satirist.
ATALEOFATUB Introduction :-
A Tale of a Tub and Gulliver’s Travels are the two most important works of Jonathan Swift, the greatest English satirist. A Tale of a Tub was composed sometime around 16% when he was in the service of Sir William Temple at Moor Park, Farnham, Surrey. It was published, however, only in 1704, in one volume with his two other works, namely, The Battle of the Books and The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit, Swift was much impressed by his own achievement in writing A
”A Tale of a Tub” /611
Tale of a Tub. In his old years on reading this work, he exclaimed in Shavian style : ”What a genius I had when I wrote that book !” And indeed, A Tale of a Tub is a remarkable book in many ways. The Theme and Story :-
*^0cg» *.»^A Tale of a Tub, as Swift himself informs the reader in the prolegomena, was intended to be a satire ”on the numerous and gross corruptions in religion and learning.” By the corruptions of religion he entirely meant the corruptions of the Roman Catholic Church and dissenters. Swift himself was a strict follower of the Church of England and was, naturally, critical of the ”corruptions”, of the other churches. By the ”corruptions” in learning he meant the corruptions of modern learning and writers,as opposed to the rectitude of ancient writers and
• ^^~.. learning. It may be pointed out that now and then the satire in A Tale
I of a Tub rises above both religious and literary fields and assumes the form of an attack on general human failings. Section IX of the book, which is one of the most provocative passages in English satiric literature, is concerned with neither the corruptions of religion nor those of learning but general human unreason which is subtly suggested to be a form of ”madness”. Happiness is defined as ”the serene and peaceful state of being a tool among knaves.” In A Tale of a Tub the tale proper is interpolated with a bewildering variety of digressions dealing with numerous subjects-.including digressions. The tale is an allegorical history of Christianity right from the days of Christ down to the rise of the various dissenting groups in Europe, the tale proper is employed by Swift for his satire on the corruptions of the church; and in the digressions he hits out at the corruptions of learning. In the allegorical story the most important P-T, characters are an old man and his three sons. The old man in the tale is Jesus Christ, and the three sons are Peter, Martin, and Jack who, respectively, stand of Roman Catholicism, Protestantism, and Dissent Before his death the old man (Christ) gives his sons as legacy’three coats (the Christian religion) directing them not to make any changes in them. But the sons disobey his instructions. Martin and Jack break with Peter and then Jack parts company with Martin. These separa-
„ tions allegorise the Reformation and the rise of the dissenting groups.
Swift bitterly attacks the pomp and hypocrisy of the Roman Catholics and the pretensions and enthusiasm of the Puritans. He celebrates, as he himself says the Church of England ”as the best in doctrine and discipline.”
In the digression Swift derides modern writers whom he represents as shallow, dishonest, mercenary, and pretentious. He is particularly severe on carping critics whom he ironically calls ”true critics”. His satire is couched in the vehicle of irony, as while condemning modern
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writers he himself writes in the person of one of them who is out, apparently, to defend them. Out of the moderns Swift singles out Bentley, Wotton and Dryden-’our great Dryden”for special punishment.
A word now about the title. It is, says Swift, a practice with mariners to throw an empty tub into the sea whenever their ship is going to be attacked by a monster. The tub diverts the attention of the monster who attacks it instead of the ship. The ”monster” here is Hobbes’s Leviathan and the ship is the ship of church and state. The tub is A Tale of a Tub itself which will occupy the attention of saboteurs,so much so that they will spare the church and the state for some time at least.
Criticism :-
That A Tale of a Tub is * supremely brilliant satire, has been accepted by all. Swift was a young man when he composed this work. That is why it is brimful of youthful gusto and heady imagination which we find missing from his later and severer satire. Here and there he is certainly gross and even irreverent, for which he was taken to task by his contemporaries. His defence was that he was an inexperienced young man when he wrote the work. He acknowledged that ”there are several youthful sallies, which from the grave and the wise may deserve & rebuke” and that ”he gave a liberty to his pen which might not suit maturer years and graver characters.*
The sprawling structure of the Tale has been ascribed to various factors. According to a critic, the confusion of the structure of the Tale is intended to reflect the confusion of modern learning. Another critic says that both the religious and literary satire, in fact, are ultimately, a collective satire on the gnostic heresy. A third critic has tried to show that the ”unity of A Tale of a Tub is the unity of ”the point of view” (of Henry James’s conception). And so on.
GULLIVER’S TRAVELS Introduction :-
Gulliver’s Travels is the best-known work of Jonathan Swift, the greatest of English prose satirists. It was published first in 1726 though Swift had been working on it since 1720. Apparently the book is a narrative of travels, but it is, in its essense, a powerful indictment of man, his body, his activities, his everything. The Story :-
Samuel Gulliver is a surgeon on a merchant ship. He makes voyage to four imaginary countries. The book is divided into four parts each
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of which concerns the experience of Gulliver in one of the four countries. In each part Swift takes occasion to ventilate his dissatisfaction at man’s activities. His satire culminates in the last book which is a terrible indictment of man.
First Gulliver is made to narrate his experiences in Lilliput whose
• ^inhabitants are about six inches tall. Their majestic king is ”taller by almost the breadth of my nail than any of his court, which alone is enough to strike an awe into the beholders.’ The Liliputians and their activities are made to look contemptible. Their senseless political dissensions and domestic feuds are laughed at They quarrel over such issues as whether an egg should be broken at the bigger or the smaller end and whether high heels should be worn or low. By implication the
..’ party spirit and religious dissension prevailing in contemporary. England are satirised.
Then Gu’liver visits Borbdingnag, the country of the giants. A Lilliputian is to Gulliver exactly what he himself is to a Borbdingnagian. The giants look at Gulliver as a very contemptible creature in spite of his pride on being a Civilised Englishman in contrast to the roughhewn but simple and honest giants. Gulliver earns the following ”tribute” from the king of Borbdingnag, after he has descanted on the glory of his race and nation. ”By what I have gathered from your own relation…! cannot but conclude the bulk of your natives to be the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.” Swift must have fully agreed with the King!
The third part is the weakest in design and interest. It describes Gulliver’ visit to the island of Lamputa and Legado which are inhabited by philosophers and scientists many of whom love only two things in life-music and mathematics. Gulliver describes the fantastic experiments being made there. Swift was always critical of airy projectors and experimenters, and did not share the enthusiasm of the people tike Addison for ”the new philosophy.”
The fourth part is the deepest and darkest of all. In it is described the land of the Houyhnhnms and Yahoos. The former are rational and civilised horses and the unreasonable and bestial Yahoos are human beings, foul in body and mind.
Criticism :•
Gulliver’s Travels is, without doubt, a very powerful and very delightful satire on ”That animal called man.* Swift mA Tale of a Titb had promised to write, with other books, a work tntidsd X Panes*** upon-the World, Is Gulliver’s Travels that promised* ”panrgyrk? ? ”^’
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fourth part of Gulliver’s Travels has provoked an endless controversy among twentieth-century critics who are certainly more perceptive than the unthinking Thackeray who regarded Swift as a Yahoo shrieking imprecations against humanity. It has now been unanimously recognized that the Houyhnhnms are not Swift’s ideal, as was once thought, nor are the Yahoos the exact representations of men. As F. R. Leav» v (to offer an instance) points out, the Houyhnhnms ”may have all the reason, but the Yahoos have all the life.” Further, he observes: The dean skin of the Houyhnhnms, in short, is stretched over a void.” Swift’s ideal man is nearer the Houyhnhnm than the Yahoo, but he is not the Houyhnhnm.
The irony of Gulliver’s Travels is so deep that, in spite of being such a disturbing satire, it has been a favourite gift-book for children. Rudyard Kipling once said that Swift ”ignited a volcano to light a child ~” to bed.” All children from nine to ninety years of age can enjoy Gulliver’s Travels.
”JOSEPH ANDREWS; TRISTRAM SHANDY,”
AND ”RESSELAS”
Q. 9Jf. Show your acquaintance with the following :•
(i). Joseph Andrews (Gorakhpur’90) (Punjab 1972)
(ii) Tristram Shandy (Punjab 1960)
(iii) Rasselas (Punjab Sep. 1956).
JOSEPH ANDREWS
Introduction :-
Joseph Andrews is the classic example of a work of art which started as a parody and ended as an excellent work in its own right, independent of its initial design. It was the first novel of Henry Fielding and was published in 1742, two years after Richardson’s Pamela, or Virtue Rewa/ded-the work Fielding intended to parody for its prudential morality and niminy-piminy sentimentalism. Richardson in his novel had related how a rustic lady’s maid (Pamela) won a dissolute noble for husband by her calculating virtue. In Joseph Andrews Fielding intended in the beginning to show how a young man named Joseph Andrews (who is represented as Pamela’s own brother) saves his virginity from the undesirable advances o* his mistress Lady Booby (who is the aunt of the dissolute noble of Richardson’s novel)
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The Story :-
Lady Booby, a beautiful rich widow, attempts the virtue of her servant Joseph Andrews who is also coveted by Mrs. Slipslop, the lady’s maid of honour. As Joseph does not submit, he is dismissed from _=it* .service. He sets out for the village where his fiancee Fanny is living. He is waylaid by robbers who leave him unconscious, and is carried to a <nearby inn where he meets the Quixote-like Parson Adams. The two friends set out together after Joseph’s recovery. They encounter many || funny adventures on the way, including-several fights in the wayside
i| inns. In the end, all the important characters, namely, Lady Booby,
|| Parson Adams, Joseph Andrews, Fanny, and Mrs. Slipslop are shown
together at the parish of Lady Booby’s country-seat. Lady Booby is full
• .**- Of malice an(j feelings of revenge against Joseph, but the timely arrival of Pamela (Joseph’s sister) and her husband Squire Boody (Mr. B. of Pamela) save the situation for him. Pamela is shown conducting herself with an appropriate quantity of modesty and prudence (but is also chidden by Parson Adams for laughing in the church !). It is discovered that Joseph is not Pamela’s brother at all, but the son of Mr. Wilson, an affuent man of a high rank. Anyway, Joseph is married to Fanny, and everything ends happily.
Criticism :•
As may have become apparent from the outline of the story given above, Fielding does not sustain for long his intention of parodying Richarson’s/feme/a. In the beginning his intention is abundantly clear: he seems to be laughing in his sleeve at Richardson and his virtuous
^., maidservant. The main object which diverted Fielding’s intention is,
evidently, the attractive figure of Parson Adams whom we meet for the first time in Chapter III. By Chapter IX he clearly establishes himself as theitalhero of the noveLand runs away with it. Parson Adams does not have a counterpart in />ame/aTbutr-h’e cannot be treated as an excrescence on Fielding’s burlesque design. He is, in fact, the central character in the novel and its most attractive and immortalising feature.
~~- He is, in the words of Louis Bredvold ”one of the most living, lovable, comical bundles of wisdom and simplicity in all literature.” In the words of Edmund Gosse, ”Parson Abraham Adams, alone, would be a contribution to English lettes.” Along with Parson Adams there are many ludicrous characters like Mrs. Slipslop, the Tow-wouses, Parson Trulliber, and Peter Pounce-all of whom provide plenty of laughter.
In the preface to Joseph Andrews, Fielding asserted that he was starting with this work a new literary genre. He ’id not use the word
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’novel’ at all, but called it ”a comic epic in prose.” He examined his work in its various relations (o comedy, serious romance, and burlesque. He contended lhal il contained all the important epic elements-fable, action, characters, sentiment, and diction. An epic has to be serious, and Joseph Andrews differed from it in this respect bccausejpjU<~ ~ ***^- _ the predominance in il of comic elements-All comedy arises, in Fielding’s words, from hypocrisy and vanity. ”Vanity affects false characters in order to purchase applause; hypocrisy endeavours to conceal vices under an appearance of their opposite virtues in order to avoid censure.” Most of the characters in Joseph Andrews arc vain or hypocritical and hence good sources of comedy.
Fielding works on a very crowded canvas, and the variety of his ^ . ^,_ ,^__ characters is, indeed, ”epic.” Basically he is a realist, though here ant there he oversteps the bounds of reality and indulges in caricature. Mrs Slipslop and Beau Diddapcr arc, evidently, caricatures rather thar. realistic portraits. Ncvcrthcss,/0«p/j Andrews, as the rest of Fielding’s novels, has a documentary value as a picture of the life and manners of the mid-eighteenth century. Fielding’s humour is his most valuable |k
asset as a novelist. It sometimes becomes satiric but seldom caustic. HI
TRISTRAM SHANDY B
Introduction :- HI
Tristram Shandy or Tlie Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Bi
Gent, is one of most famous novels of the eighteenth century. It is also B|
the most important work of Laurence Sterne (1713-68). Initially it was IP
brought out in nine volumes between 1760 and 1767. The first two -|-
volumes came in 1760, vols. iii to vi in 1761-62, vols. vii and vui in 1765 and the last volume in 1767. Nominally Tristram Shandy is a novel, but if it is a novel it is one of its own kind without successors and without predecessors. It is huge deposit of the whims and freaks of the author. As Cross points out, ”it was a sad day for English fiction when a writer of genius came to look upon the novel as the repository for the crotchets of a lifetime.” ”””””””
The Story and General Plan :•
Sterne’s whims and freaks are apparent when we examme the design and pattern of his novel. Take the very title of the novel to start with. It reads The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Cent. However, contrary to legitimate expectations, Sterne does not tell us much about Tristram .Shandy, supposedly the hero of the novel. We have to wait till the third book for the very birth of the hero who is put into
”Tristram Shandy” / 617
breeches only in the sixth and is then whisked away from the story without any fuss. The novel is about anything except the life and opinions of Tristram Shandy! In fact, there are very few incidents, and no story in the ordinary sense of the word at all. Compton-Rickelt observes in this connexion: ”Incident is non-existent in Sterne’s fiction; ^fhere is neither chronology nor progression. His novels are one long parenthesis~a colossal aside to the reader.” His method of writing is almost crazy. A critic remarks : ”He tempers with his pagination, and abounds in dashes, asterisks, index-hands, and ’and so forths’ : he leaves entire chapters for the imagination of the reader to reconstruct, and then unexpectedly returns to these blanks^ filling them in himself: he writes a sentence and calls it a chapte’r; or begins a chapter, breaks off suddenly, and starts it anew; and of one of his volumes he plots the curve, showing twisting’*, retrogressions, and plungings. Nothing was left for Sterne’s imitators but to write their words upside down.” Sterne’s crazy procedure isjndecd, too much for some sensitive readers.
The first three volumes of Tristram Shandy are concerned with the circumstances attending the hero’s birth. There are plethoric digressions too. The long awaited preface comes only after the third volume ! A unique procedure indeed ! In the fourth volume is given the story, or that leasf beginning of the story, of the learned Slawkenbergius. It also includes the description of christening ceremony of the hero. In the fifth volume is given Corporal Trim’s discourse on morality. The sixth volume contains the episode of Le Fevre and the very interesting dialogue between the elder Mr. and Mrs. Shandy on the important subject of the breeching of Tristram Shandy. The next two volumes throw the main ”story” into the background and give an account of the author’s travels in France and the story of the imaginary king of Bohemia. The last volume contains the accounts of the amours of Uncle Toby and the widow Wadmafl.
It is clear from the outline of the book given above how chaotic a mess it is. It is probable that if Sterne had continued living he would have added many more volumes to the work, for his action was without the beginning, the middle, and the end ! ’
Criticism :•
We have twice used the epithet ”crazy” in connexion with Tristram Shandy. But Sterne wrote crazily with a purpose. Cross observes : ”Undoubtedly there is method in this madness. Sterne was not a careless or hasty writer; he selected and presented his material with
618/A History of English Literature
infinite pains.” No doubt, the plot is of the barest minimum ; but the interest of the book lies not in its plot, but elsewhere-especially in its numerous characters who are created by Sterne witR as great a psychological insight as Richardson and Fielding displayed in creating theirs. Walter Shandy, Corporal Trim, Mrs. Shandy, Qr. Slop, aOiJL*^ above all, ”my U nclc Toby” are some of the immortals of English fiction. Sterne manifests a wonderful awareness of the niceties of characterisation. Uncle Toby is by far his most memorable character. In some respects he resembles Fielding’s Parson Adams. He has the same purity of conscience and simplicity of character hidden behind the same grotesque exterior.
Sterne’s ”Shandian” humour and his peculiarly suggestive pathos and sentimentalism have been observed. ”Everything,” says ComptonRickett, ”is done by the art of insidious suggestion : he never cries, he merely flutters his eyelids; never laughs, merely sniggers.” Sterne’s contribution to the English novel is summed up by the same critic as follows: ”Richardson had given sentimentality, Fielding humour, Smollett liveliness; Sterne blends humour and sentiment in a way peculiarly his own, and although structurally he defies every convention of the novel, yet develops still further the art of characterisation.”
Mention may also be made of some modern interpretations of Tristram Shandy as a precursor of ”the stream of consciousness” novel. Let us here quote Louis I. Bredvold : ”His [Sterne’s] contribution to the art of the novel is his delicate depiction of the caprices of human nature, and his deliberate ordering of them so as to interpret them in the continuity of the whole personality, or in the modern phrase, *in the stream of consciousness’. He is always ready to indulge himselfin leisurely description of the flotsam and jetsam floating on the surface of that stream.”
RASSELAS Introduction :•
The History ofRasseias Prince of Abyssinia, or only Rasselas (as it was known after the seventeenth edition onward) is a didactic romance written by Dr. Johnson. When Johnson wrote it he was in a very gloomy mood caused by the then recent death of his mother. It is reported that he wrote Rasselas in order to be able to defray expenses of her funeral and to pay her debts. His penury in spite of his recognised literary excellence also contributed towards his despondency and pessimism which find an apt expression in this book. Rasselas appeared in April
1159. Dr. Johnson received just a hundred pounds as remuneration.
. JfSf
”Rasselas’ / 619
The Theme and Story :•
Rasselas cannot boast of a well-organised plot, or even any important events or an interesting action. The narrative is the simplest imaginable. The location is Middle East; but those who approach it with the expectation of finding a thrilling and exotic atmosphere and ”’ breath-taking adventures, warlike or amorous, as in ihc Arabian Nigltts, will be disappointed. In fact, the book has no ”atmosphere” at all. Johnson does not at all bother about the descriptions of the environment in which his characters move. The scenes could easily be transported to another country.
So there is neither action, nor atmosphere, nor any appreciable characterisation. What does Rasselas have then? It has an instructive aim which is driven home with the help of the conventional machinery of the novel. There is a strong clement of allegory in the story on whose thin stem are grafted a number of philosophical dissertations centring round the theme of happiness and the human incapacity to achieve it. Rasselas is son of the emperor of Abyssinia (modern, Ethiopia). He lives in ”the soft vicissitudes of pleasure and repose” in the ”happy valley.” He is cloyed by the joys available to him and escapes to Egypt in search of new experiences. He is accompanied by his sister Nekayah and an old and. experienced philosopher, Imlac-mostly a spokesman for Dr. Johnson himself. In Egypt they make a vast study of the ways of life, are involved in some very insignificant incidents, and then decide to return to Abyssinia. At the end of their journey they learn that ”human life is everywhere a state in which much is to be endured, and little to be enjoyed.”
Criticism :-
This lesson’of unrelieved pessimism and despair was the same as Johnson gave in Tlie Rambler and his poem The Minify of Human Wishes. Johnson was extremely opposed to the facile optimism of Pope and Leibniz and seems even to have been sceptical of the hope Christianity holds forth for man. He was bent upon teaching those ”who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy, and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope.” It is customary to compare Rasselas with Voltaire’s Candida which appeared three weeks before it. Johnson himself observed: ”If they had not been published so closely’one after the other, it would have been in vain to deny that the scheme of that which came latest was taken from the other.” But the resemblance between the two does not go very far. Voltaire is witty, ebullient, and frankly cynical and atheistic, whereas Johnson is extremely thoughtful
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and grave. ”The two works,” says George Sherbura,” are only superficially parallel.” Johnson as opposed to Voltaire is deeply religious. His despair is the despair of an otherwise profound Christian momentarily touched by a deep sorrow. However, Johnson in his philosophical set-up was normally prone to melancholy and despair. He was always ready to put the snaffle into the mouth of effervescent enthusiasts. His~~~~~ advice to Boswell on the eve of his marriage was: ”Now that you are about to be married, do not expect more of life than life can give.” In Rasselas he. even denies,what P-ayamian calls, ”invincible utilitarian optimism on which the English conception of duty is built up.”
Dr. Johnson’s style has been variously commented upon. In Rasselas there certainly are some passages in his elephantine manner. His style is dignified and grave and thus eminently suited to the subject and the purpose for which it is used. There are also some dim sparks of occasional humour. Rasselas enjoyed exceeding popularity and was reprinted eight times during his lifetime; but very few persons read it today, as it is ”too heavy.”
”LYRICAL BALLADS” ,”THE PRELUDE,” ”PROMETHEUS UNBOUND”,
AND ”ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS”,
Q. 99. Show your acquaintance with the following :• (i) Lyrical Ballads, (Punjab 1970) (Punjab 1961) (Agra 1962) (ii) The Prelude (Gorakhpur 1982) (Punjab 1960) (Agra 1966) (Hi) Prometheus Unbound (Punjab 1960) (Agra 1957)
(iv) English Bards and Scotch Reviewers (Agra 1960) (Agra 1966)
LYRICAL BALLADS
Introduction :-
Lyrical Ballads was an epoch-making collection of poems in the history of English literature. It was, as it were, the Magna Carta of the Romantic Movement in England. Too custorrfary it is to date the Romantic Movement from the year of its publication–1798. The twenty-three poems the first edition contained were the work of Wordsworth and Coleridge-Wordsworth’s contribution being nineteen and Coleridge’s four (later increased to five). The second edition
”Lyric Ballads” / 621
appeared in 1800 and also carried Wordsworth’s famous preface setting forth his conception of the true nature of poetry, criticism, and other allied topics. A third edition appeared in 1802. The Contents :-
’’»**’• With Lyrical Ballads Wordsworth and Coleridge appeared as the true pioneers of the Romantic Revival in England. But they approached the romantic territory from different directions. Coleridge in his Bioffvphia Uteraria tells us rf?: it was agreed that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural or at least romantic…Mr. Wordsworth, .on the other hand, was to propose to himself as his object, to give the charm of novelty to things of everyday.” Coleridge’s most important poem in this collection was the famous one entitled The Ancient Mariner-one of the exquisite products of the romantic spirit. It is a ballad with such characters as the ancient mariner himself and Death and Life in Death. They are ’ definitely ”romantic” and ”supernatural”. So are the chief incidents in the poem. What distinguishes the poem, however, is not its supernatural atomosphcre, characters, and incidents, but Coleridge’s treatment of them. His treatment is artistic, psychological, and delicate, and gives to the supernatural a kind of verisimilitude which creates what Coleridge himself calls ”that willing suspension of disbelief for the moment which constitutes poetic faith.” Whereas Coleridge ”naturalised” the supernatural, Wordsworth ”supernaturalised” the natural. He scratched the dull film of familarity off the surface of common and ”natural” objects, and bathed them in the romanticising light of his own imagination. Lyrical Ballads contained such poems by Wordsworth as Goody Blake and Harry Gill and Sinison Lee the Old Huntsman. What distinguished these poems is the effort made through them to break fresh ground in the realm of poetry both as regards subject-matter and style. As such, he revolted vigorously against the artificial poetry of his predecessors, which was couched in a highly mannered and conventional style. As he put it in the brief ”Advertisement”appended to the first edition, his view was that the materials of poetry can be found ”in every subject which can interest the human mind.” He also desired through these poems ”to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to fhe purposes of poetic pleasure.” The most outstanding poem of the 1798 collection is Tintem Abbey in which Wordsworth gives the story of the development of his attitude to nature-front the unthinking animal pleasure of childhood through the wild passion of adolescence to the mystic enlightenment of his mature years when he hears in nature the ”still sad music of humanity.”
4
622 / A History of English Literature
The most outstanding feature of the second edition (1800) was the addition not of some very outstanding poems but that of the ”Preface” in which Wordsworth forwarded his poetic manifesto and discussed the true nature of poetry and its concomitants such as the very controversial ”poetic diction”. Criticism :- ’”**’
t
As we have already said, Lyrical Ballads was a milestone in the histoiy of English literature. But it is of interest to point out that it was very coldly received by Wordsworth’s contemporaries who were, by and large, unwilling to welcome innovations. The hostility of the critics was intensified by the Preface to the second edition in which Wordsworth tried to justify his fundamental ideas as a poet. Later, however, the wave of adverse criticism petered out and Wordsworth was hailed by most romantic poets as their ”guru”. Palgrave expresses a representative opinion when he says that Lyrical Ballads ’’was a trumpet that heralded the dawn of a new era by making the prophecy that poetry, an unlimited and unlimitable art, could not and should not be fettered by narrow bounds of artificial conventions.”
THE PRELUDE
Introduction :-
TJie Prelude is an autobiographical poem in fourteen books written by Wordsworth between 1799 and 1805, but published only in 1850, some days after his death. In between 1805 and 1850 Wordsworth went on making changes in it. In his preface to The Excursion he explains the purpose and design of the poem. He tell us that The Prelude was in fact intended to be a part- a preliminary part~of a very comprehensive poem, The Recluse, which, of course, he could not complete.
The Design and Outline :-
l~he Prelude is, as we have said, an autobiography; but it is not an external, but an internal, autobiography. As the subtitle shows, it is the record of The Growth of a Poet’s Mind. As Lowell puts it, Wordsworth was the ”historian of Wordsworthshire.” Raleigh observes : ”In this psychological account of the growth of his own mind, and the most significant of the influences that shaped it, he has done the biographer’s work once and for all.” To summarise the theme of the poem we may say that Wordsworth traces his progress from a poetic Paganism to a philosophic Pantheism, leading to the love of Man, and culminating again in the love of Nature.
Books I and II describe the formative influence of Nature on the gradually unfolding mind of the child. He remembers that
The Prelude’/’623-
The earth
And common face of Nature spoke to me Rememberablt things.
Book III deals with his stay at Cambridge where he realised that he was going to become ”a dedicated spirit” and a high priest of Nature. Book -rV deals with his poetic consecration. After that there is a pause in the narrative while he reviews in Book V his early debt to literature. In Books VI and VII the thread is retaken and extended to another focal point in his career-the awakening of his passionate interest in Man. In Book VIII he gives a philosophic retrospect of the whole period of preparation. Book IX deals with the French Revolution and Wordsworth’s stay in France, his enthusiasm for emancipation’ and assocation with Beaupuy who, as has been said, ”found Wordsworth a bewildered foreigner and left him a confirmed revolutionist, one must almost say, a French republican.” Wordsworth was indeed thrilled by the Revolution. Witness:
Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,
But to be young was very heaven.
The Reign of Terror and the beginning of Anglo-French hostilities dashed Wordsworth’s high hopes to the ground. He left France and his French mistress behind and sought in his native country some refuge in the dry intellectualism of Godwin’s philosophy. Book X records the destruction of Wordsworth’s faith in the arrival of a new dawn. The subsequent books describe the reconciliation, his gradual recovery from despair and gloom, and rebuilding of hopes for Man upon a sounder basis, and ultimately his initiation into the poetic heritage. Criticism :•
The Prelude is a complete and aesthetically satisfying poem even though it was initially conceived by Wordsworth as a part of 77ie Recluse, ”a philosophical poem containing views of Man, Nature, and Society…having for its principal subject the sensations, and opinions of a poet living in retirement.” TJie Prelude is the only poem of its kind in the whole range of English literature. Wordsworth himself admitted that ”it was a thing unprecedented in literary history that a man should talk so much about himself.” However, it was a poem ”in which,” to quote David Daiches, ”Wordsworth could most fully and adequately exploit his gift for the ’egotistical sublime.11
TJie Prelude is couched .in blank verse which is effective, however, only in patches. When Wordsworth recollects in tranquillity the moments of his excitement while he was face to face with Nature, his verse glows with a rare meditative energy, but as often it falls into bathos and
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prosaic verbiage which earned for him Byron’s appcllaiion-Ahc prince of dullness.”
PROMETHEUS UNBOUND
Introduction :-
PromeUieus Unbound is one of the major works of Shelley. It is a– lyrical drama in four acts, and was first published in 1820. As in numerous others of his works, Shelley showed himself in it as a champion of love and liberty, and as a thorough optimist. The impact of the French Revolution is to be seen quite obviously in this work. However, Shelley’s revolutionism goes too far and has nothing to do with mundane politics. The Theme and Outline :-
In name Prometheus Unbound is a drama but there is (if a distinction may be made between the two) more of poetry than drama in it. Shelley adopts and redesigns Aeschylus’ tragedy PromeUieus Bound. Aeschylus represents Prometheus as a great benefactor of humanity who steals Tire from heaven and brings it to earth for the use of man. His act annoys Jupiter, the president of gods, who chains him to a rock in Mount Caucasus where a vulture is made to peck perpetually at his liver which is renewed daily. From this excruciating torture Prometheus is ultimately delivered by Hercules.
In Shelley’s drama, Prometheus, like all the rest of the characters, has an allegorical significance. He stands for humanity. Jupiter is a symbol of cruelty, oppression, and evil. Demogorgon (the ultimate Power, Necessity, or Eternity) ultimately drives Jupiter from his throne and liberates Prometheus, at which happy event the moon and Mother Earth sing joyously. Prometheus is united, after his release, with Asia (the spirit of love in nature). Thus the ultimate significance of the play is its gospel of hope and optimism. It is believed by Shelley that evil and repression cannot live long as they are bound to be replaced by the joyous spirit of love and liberty. Criticism :•
In Prometheus Unbound Shelley set forth before him a theme very, and always, dear to his heart. As Mary Shelley tells us, ”the subject he loved best to dwell on was the image of One warring with the Evil Principle, oppressed not only by it, but by all-even the gods, who were deluded into considering evil as a necessary portion of humanity.” Eat Shelley was confident of the ultimate elimination of evil pet sonified by kings, priests, and other such oppressors and charlatans. \nPrometheus Unbound, after the final happy event, the reign of love follows when Thrones, altars, judgement-seat’s, and prisons
t»
V
V <
s
J
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers’ / 625
becomes relics of the past and Man becomes
Sceptreless,freetunciraunscnbedfbutman,
Equal, unctassed, tribeless, and nationless.
Exempt from awe, worship, degree, the long .
Over himself; just, gentle, wise, but man. *’ The vast and elemental setting of the play was entirely to Shelley’s taste. Leigh Hunt refers to the ”sublime cosmopolitics” of the work. As Ian Jack observes, ”Prometheus is involved in drama which is rather metaphysical than political.” According to a critic, it is ”not only Shelley’s highest poetic achievement but his most powerful statement of his moral philosophy.” However, it has to be admitted’that there are quite a few ambiguities and obscurities in the work. Shelley’s conception of and attitude to God and Christ, for example, are not at aU clear. Anyway, the poetic merit of Prometheus Unbound cannot be.denied.
ENGLISH BARDS AND SCOTCH REVIEWERS
Introduction :-
English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is a satire in heroic couplets written by Byron. It was directed against Jeffreys, editor of Edinburgh Review, who had attacked very severely and uncharitably Byron’s poetical work Hours of Idleness. Jeffreys wrote about Byron in the issue of •Edinburgh Review dated January 1808: ”His effusions are spread over a dead flat, and can no more get above or below the level, than if they were so much stagnant water”. And he wrote things even more galling about ”the Old English Baron” who was then not yet twenty years old.
The Theme and Content :-
Byron retaliated in March 1809 with English Bards and Scotch Reviewers. Alluding obviously to Keats, he wrote that ”a savage review is hemlock to a sucking author” but, he added, ”the one on me…knocked me down-but I got up again.” He ”got up”, indeeo^and flung his satire into the teeth of his detractors-who were not just a few.
Byron not only pungently attacked Jeffreys and Edinburgh Review but all the poets and poetasters with whom he had personal or literary differences. He praised Milton, Dryden and Pope, and (surprisingly) complained that the time at which he was writing was an age of ”the decline of English poetry.” He condemned outright the poets of the Lake District (Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Southey) and their tribe, like Bowels, whom he dismissed as
The maudlin prince of mournful sonneteers,
i r’’
L*
626 / A History of English Literature
Wordsworth’s views on poetic diction were wittily condemned and he
was referred to as one
Who both by precept and example, shows That prose is verse, and verse is merely prose.
Criticism :-
All satire is of the nature of distorted judgement. English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is no exception. It is idle to blame the young Byron for the fallaciousness of his judgements on contemporary poets and critics. Byron himself acknowledged later that at the time of writing this satire he was ”very young and very angry.” It was at his own express desire that the publication of the work was stopped after the fourth edition. He himself realised the untenability of many of his rash verdicts which he had once flung about with reckless abandon.
The work is vastly inferior to the verse satire of Pope whom Byron imitated and praised. But it is unfair to compare the twenty-year old Byron with Pope at the height of his powers. His heroic couplets, to quote David Daiches, were ”modelled on Pope’s satiric verse but far less cunningly wrought and carried on by a negligent energy which later Byron was to learn to harness more effectively.” The heroic couplet is nothing if it does not have pre-eminently the qualities of both preciseness and conciseness. Byron’s peculiar strength as a satirist (in Don Juan particularly) lay in his digressiveness and expatiativeness. On the whole English Bards and Scotch Reviewers is an immature, undiscriminating work of a satirist who has not yet found himself.
”IN MEMORIAM”, THE PRINCESS” AND
”MAUD”
Q. 100 Show your acquaintance with the following :- (i) In Memoriam (Agra 1965)
(ii) The Princess (Punjab 1959)
(Ui) Maud (Punjab 1958)
IN MEMORIAM
Introduction :-
In Memoriam is one of the major poems ofTennyson and was occasioned by the death of the poet’s dearest friend, Arthur H. Hallam, in 1833. Hallam was a blooming scholar who was cut down in the flower of youth. In Memoriam was, evidently, written in patches, over a length of seventeen years during which Tennyson went on
fact
”In Memoriam” / 627
chiselling and polishing i., As it should be, the poem is elegiac in tone and complexion, but it goes beyond being an elegy to become an authentic representation of not only the poet’s personal thought or ”philosophy but he thought and philosophy of his age. Theme and Structure :-
Oftfe..-«»-
In Memoriam is, by no means, an organically constructed work. In fact, it consists of some one hundred and thirty small ”elegies” or lyrics arranged in a string. The structure is thus segmental rather than organic. It is easy to believe that these constituent lyrics could be reoriented without doing much violence to the sense of structure. Of course, all the lyrics are about the same-subject-the’death of Hallam and the moods which it induces in the poet from time to time (over a period of seventeen years). But the moods have a kaleidoscopic variety. Hallam’s death may be compared to a string, and the lyrics which give expression to the moods induced by it, to various beads . The string passes through every bead, but the order of the beads could be changed. The various lyrics of the poem, structurally speaking, are like the sonnets of a Elizabethan ”sonnet sequence.” Such sonnets had mutual unity, but shifting their mutual order could not do much injury to the ”structure” of the sequence. We can entirely agree with Hugh Walker who observes : ”The separate sections are, like the sonnets, independent poems as well as parts of one great poem : and it would be affectation to pretend that none could be omitted without leaving an appreciable gap.”
And yet the poem has an inner principle of unity. It traces to put ii simply, the career of a distressed soul. The career is from intense and stunned grief to introspective self-examination and contemplation of the wider issues of life and death, the purpose of life and the higher powers that be, leading to an optimistic bestowal of faith on the God of Love rather than on the gloomy Darwinian theory of evolution.1 The struggle between doubt and faith which was a feature of the Victorian age, finds expression quite insistently in the course of the poem. Witness:
I falter where I firmly trod.
And falling with my weiglit of care
Upon the great world’s altar-stairs
Darwin’s Origin of,he Specie* came only in 1859 but years’before, ”Darwinsim” was m the air, consequent on the publication of some geological treatises, especially the one by Robert Chambers.
1
;rw«3 Wi’&ilJ.
628 / A History of English Literature
That slope tliro’ darkness up to God. I stretch lame hands of faith, and grope, And gather dust and chaff, and call To what I feel is Lord of all, And faintly trust the larger hope.
But all these agonising queries ultimately deliquesce into a rather smue and unthinking but nonetheless^ triumphant, assertion of an unqualified faith in God, giving the poem a ”happy ending.” Tennyson finds it easy to trust that ”somehow good will be the final goal of ill”. Now this is facile optimism. Browning is also an optimist; but he does examine the nature of evil in all its subtleties before coming to a similar conclusion. Tennyson’s optimism and his expression of faith in God made the poem tremendously popular among the Victorians. It provided many agitated minds a spiritual anodyne. Queen Victoria, ’ too, treasured In Memoriam, and once told Tennyson that next to the Bible his poem was to her the greatest source of comfort.
Criticism :-
Thus the poem is not just a personal elegy recording the grief of the poet at the death of his dearest friend. For one thing, only about one half of its three thousand lines concern themselves with Haliam. The poem is rather a compendium of Victorian philosophy and a mirror of contemporary thinking. Science, patriotism, religion, and a hundred more themes of particular interest to the age of Tennyson find a place in it.
The poem is also remarkable for Tennyson’s ”scientific” treatment of Nature. He knows and analyses the least of her objects and the most fleeting of her moods with an astounding dexterity, and relates it to his own grief. In this context we may direct the attention of the reader to the stanzas portraying the calm of Nature, starting:
Calm is the mom without a sound, . ^
Calm as to suit a calmer grief ,
And only thro’ the faded leaf
Tlie chestnut pattering to the ground.
’i he poem is written in quatrains using octosyllabic lines with the rhyme-scheme a b b a. It was by no means a new measure, for Ben Jonson and Herbert had already employed it. But, an excellent mclricist as he was, Tennyson made it something unique. The lines usually follow the iambic movement (which by its slowness is eminently suitable as an elegiac measure), though some variations are also admilted when variations in the poet’s mood demand them.
1. Italics mine.
”TThePrincGJ|J/629
THE PRINCESS
Introduction :-
Tlie Princess, A Medley (1847) is one of the major poems of Tennyson. It treats the question of female rights-political and educational. This question was exercising the minds of the Victorian
* mlclligentsia in the middle of the nineteenth century. Tennyson, in what Samuel C. Chew calls a ”gentlemanly” way, has expressed his own views on the qucstion–if he may be claimed to have any definite views at all. Regarding this particular question, Tennyson is both confused and confusing. In the age of Tennyson had arisen a rather vociferous .sect of crusaders for female emancipation. The claims that they made for the female sex were largely grounded on and encouraged by the Benthamite Utilitarianism as well as Comte’s philosophical doctrines. Without committing himself to either of the two contending sides, Tennyson gave his own interpretation of the question. The issue is, of course, not reasoned out directly but through an apparently medieval talc concerning the career of one Princess Ida. Tlie Story :-
. The story as summed up by a critic is as follows :
”A prince has been betrothed in childhood to Princess Ida, daughter of the neighbouring King Gama. But the princess becomes a devotee of the rights of women, abjures marriage, and founds a university to promote her ideal. The prince and two companions Cyril and Florian gain admission to the university in the guise of girl students/They are detected by the two tutors, the amiable Lady Psyche, Florian’s sister,and the sour duenna, Lady Blanche, who from different motives are induced temporarily to conceal their knowledge. The deceit is, however, presently detected by Princess Ida, but not before the Prince has had occasion to save her from drowning. This.howcvcr, docs not avail to shake her determination, and the three comrades are in peril of their lives when the arrival of the prince’s father with his army is announced. To decide the matter, a combat is arranged between fifty warriors led by the prince, fifty led by king Cama’s mighty son Arak. The latter are victorious, and the three comrades are laid wounded on the field. What neither force nor wooing could effect is now achieved by womanly pity. The university is turned into a hospital, the wounded are kindly tended and the princess’s heart is won ” Criticism :•
The poem is, indeed; a propaganda piece. A woman is advised to
I
630 / A History of English Literature
•**
Let her make herself her own,
To give or keep, to live and learn and be
All that not harms distinctive womanhood:
For woman is not undevelopt man.
Sweet, Love were slain; his dearest bond is this
Not like to like, but like in difference.
The speaker, of course, is not the poet himself but the prince who tells his own story front the beginning to the end. At another place we are told that Nature has ordained
Man fortlie field and woman for the hearth.
Man for the sword and for the needle she,
Man to command and woman to obey:
All else confusion.
But, on the whole, the ”message” of the poem is not clear in details. As Hugh Walker points out, ”the great defect of the poem is that it is in every respect half-hearted. Mr. Facing-both-ways was not more divided in mind as to his choice of the road to heaven or the road to hell than is Tennyson in Tlie Princess… This too is the rr on why the poem hovers midway between jest and earnest. The author has not quite made up his mind about anything.” Tennyson had no wit or humour. Otherwise he could have made much of them because of the inherent irony in the application of modern ideas to medieval setting. The most attractive feature of Tne Princess for the reader of today is the two lyrics in blank verse (Tears, Ideal Tears and Come down, O Maid) and the six intercalary songs which were added by Tennyson in the subsequent edition of the poem.
The poem employs blank verse which has all the attractive features of Tennyson’s usually perfect style.
MAUD
Introduction :-
Maud (1855) is one of the major poems of Tennyson, and in Hugh Walker’s words, is of all his longer poems/’the least satisfactory.” What is lacking is any set principle of unity except that of the personality of ”the peevish, querulous, scolding hero.” Tennyson called the poem”a Monodrama,” but, like The Princess, it could well be called ”a Medley.” A monodrama is an extension of a dramatic monologue. It is the hero
”Maud”/631
of the poem who himself speaks from the beginning to the end, tracing his gloomy career and thus revealing the varying states of his morbid and, largely.repulsive mind. If Tennyson intended the poem to be ,a psychological study, he has not succeeded.
_The Story :-
Nor is the poem successful as a story. The narrator, a man of unbalanced and morbid temperament, first talks about the death of his father, perhaps caused by himself after he had lost his all in speculation. The narrator’s family was ruined and the father of his beloved Maud became the new lord in his father’s stead. The hero continued making love to Maud in spite of the opposition of her brother and the rivarly of a ”new-made lord.’’ He succeeded in winning the love of Maud and killed her brother in an encounter. But he himself (led abroad to see his hopes coming to naught. Madness followed. But in the end he came forward to defend his country in the Crimean War then just commenced.
Criticism :-
All this is fantastic as a ”story”. But the poem rises here and there to a convincing excellence. Many ingredients go into the making of the poem. For instance, social criticism, the criticism of the evolutionary tendencies, and the glorification of war. Darwin published his epochmaking work Tlie Origin of the Species four years after the publication of Maud but as in In Memoriam Tennyson already is here foreshadowing the evolutionary theory. * A monstrous eft was of old the Lord and Master of Earth, vittl For him did his high sun flame, and his river billowing ran And he felt himself in his force to be Nature’s crowning race. , As nine months go to the shaping of an infant ripe for his birth, So many a million of ages have gone to the making of man : He now isfirstjbut is he the last ? is he not too base ? Tennyson comes near Kingsley, Ruskin, Mill and Carlyle in his reference to social evils. He is aware of the poor,
hovett’d and hustled together, each sex, like swine ; and society, in which
onfy the ledger lives, and only not all men, lie. He is aware of the wide-scale adulteration practised in England. Chalk and alum and plaster are sold to the poor for bread. And the spirit of murder works in the very means of life. He knows that
Tlie churchmen fain would kill their church, As the churches, have tdlt’d their Christ.
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He is sick of peace and with a patriotic fervour welcomes
War with a thousand battles, and shaking a hundred thrones. In spite of Hugh Walker’s approval of Tennyson’s view we should say with Samuel C. Chew that ”the advocacy of war as a remedy for these ills is both unreasonable and shocking.”
The charm of the poem lies in fact in its metrical excellence. ”The form,” says Chew,”has kept the matter alive; the prosody is a triumph of the adaptation of various metres to various moods.” Last but not least are several of Tennyson’s best love lyrics which are contained in the poem. ”I have led her home” and ”Come into the garden, Maud’’ are some examples.
FITZGERALD’S
”RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM;’ ”THE SCHOLAR GIPSY;1 AND ”THE BLESSED DAMOZEL”
Q. 101. Show your acquaintance with the following :- (i) Fitzgerald’s Rubaiyatof Omar Khayyam (Punjab 1961) (ii) TJie Scholar Gipsy (Punjab 1957)
(IU) The Blessed Damozel (Agra 1966)
FITZGERALD’S’’RUBAIYAT OF OMAR KHAYYAM ”
Introduction :-
FitzGerald’s The Rubaiyatof Omar Khayyam was a verse translation of the ”rubaiyat” of the eleventh and twelfth-century Persian poet. ”Rubaiyat” is the Persian plural of ”rubai”, that is, a quatrain with the first, second, and fourth lines rhyming together. The first version was published anonymously in 1859 and contained some 75 quatrains. They were modified and enlarged for the edition, of 1868 (110 quatrains) and further modified and reduced in number for the subsequent editions of 1872 and 1879. For eight or nine years after its publication the work did not attract attention, but then it was ”discovered” and eulogised by many readers and critics. Since then it has been enjoying a steady popularity.
The Theme and ”Philosophy” :-
Omar Khayyam had arranged his quatrains in alphabetical succession. Each ”rubai” by its nature is” an almost independent unit contain-
FitzGerald.’s ”Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam” / 633
ing a fully rounded idea .FitzGerald shuffled the order of the original and introduced in the verse some sort of continuity which makes them look like somewhat linked parts of an expansive pattern embodying a definite point of view if not a ”philosophy of life.”
This point of view is plainly Epicurean-sceptic. Omar KhayyamFitzGerald is a downright fatalist acutely alive to the evanescence of time and all the good things of life. Witness :
The moving finger writes; and, having writ,
Moves on.-nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
What then is to be done ? Omar FitzGerald’s answer is dear-eat, drink and be merry. Wine, verse^and women are the things to be sougth after. The following is the best-known quatrain of the nineteenth century:
Here with a Loaf of Bread beneath the Bough,
A Flask of wine, a Book of ’verse-and thou
Beside me singing in the wildemess-
And wilderness is Paradise enow. Omar’s cry is:
Ah, fill the Cup:- what boots it to repeat
How Time is slipping underneath our Feet,
Unborn TO-MORROW and dead YESTERDA Y,
Why fret about them if TODAY be sweet!
Omar merrily dismisses all reason or reflection which stands in the way of his sensual indulgence:
You know, my Friends, how long since in my House
For anew marriage I did make Carouse:
Divorced barren Reason from my Bedt
And took the Daughter of the Vine to Spouse. Omar Khayyam in his frank scepticism was sometimes grossly insolent towards God.FitzGeraldsupprcssed some quatrains which he found too saucy. The following quatrain which was, however, published was on the lips of Hardy when he lay. dying in his eighty-eigth year:
Oh Thou, who Man of baser Earth didst make,
And who with Eden didst devise the Snake,
For all the Sins wherewith the Face of Man
Is blacken’d, Man’s Forgiveness give-and take ! Criticism :-
FitzGerald’s work is steeped in the spirit of hedonism and scepticism. It influenced to some extent the thought (at least, the
634 /A History of English Literature
”poetic” thought) of nineteenth-century England. ”The Rubaiyat”, says Samuel Chew,”helped to shape the melancholy hedonism and moral incertitude of late nineteenth-century England.” Housman was particularly influenced by the work. In his Shropshire Lad we meet with the Omar-like observation:
Malt does more than Milton can To justify Cod’s ways to man.
The Victorian age is well known for its smug complacency and its repressive social taboos. Even then FitzGerald s work was heralded as a new message by some distinctive groups of people. As Louis Untermeyer puts it, ”the carefree quatrains of the eleventh-century Persian were used as-a challenge by the nineteenth-century undergraduates, repeated by rebellious lovers, and flung out as a credo by the men and women who were growing restless if not yet insurrectionary.”
The quatrain employed by FitzGerald was later adopted by a number of poets, including Swinburne. Even then, in the history of English prosody it continues to be called ” FitzGerald stanza.” FitzGerald has wonderfully succeeded in capturing the Oriental luxuriousness as well as wit and melancholy in his quatrains. His lines are usually iambic pentameters.
. THE SCHOLAR GIPSY
Introduction :-
The Scholar Gipsy is an important poetic work of Matthew Arnold. It was first published in 1853. It is based on the legend told by Joseph Glanville in his book The lenity of Dogmatising. Glanville tells of a poor lad who joined the University of Oxford, but was obliged to give up his studies on account of poverty He joined a band of gipsies after bidding good-bye to all sophist! – itc’d civilisation. He learnt their arts and came to know that contrary to j,jpular belief, they were no impostors. Once he happened to meet some of his erstwhile class-fellows and told them that he intended ” to leave their company and give the world an account of what he had learned.”
Matthew Arnok > obvious job was not just to poetise the old legend, but to use it as ”a criticism of life.”
Theme and Plan :•
The poem reserves itself into two well-defined parts as follows: I. The poet paints the open countryside in the evening. In a pastoral vein he addresses a shepherd:
4/The Scholar Gipsy” / 635
Go, for they call you, shepherd from the hill; Go, shepherd, and untie the wattled cotes, No longer leave~thy wistful flock unfed; Not let thy bawling fellows rack their throats, Nor the cropp’d herbage shoot another head. The poet has before him Glanville’s book Tlie Vanity of Dogmatising containing the story of the poor scholar of yore who joined a gipsy band after being forced to give up his studies at Oxford owing to poverty. The poet then describes the encounters of various villagers with the spirit of the scholar who still haunts the countryside two hundred years after his death. ’
//. But what-I dream I Two hundred years are flown ,2-
Since first thy story ran through Oxford halls, i *
”. And the grave Glanvil did the tale inscribe ••**’
Tliat thoit wert wander’dfrom the studious watts To learn strange arts, and join a gipsy tribe.
The lines mark a break in the pattern and lead on to the next part. In this Matthew Arnold compares the strife-torn and doubt-shaken world of his own times with that of the past, and spiritual disturbance and ill-health of the modern man with the repose and tranquillity of the old scholar. The rest of the poem is a long wail. Witness/for illustration: Thou waitest for the spark from heaven land we, Vague half-believers of our casual creeds, *ft Wlio never deeply felt, nor clearly will’d, Wliosc insight never has borne fruit in deeds, Wliose weak resolves never have been falfiVd.; For whom each year we see Breeds new beginnings, disappointments new; Wlto hesitate and falter life away, And lose to-morrow the ground won to-dayAh ! do not we, wanderer ! await it too ? And again:
O bom in days when wits were fresh and dear, And life ran gaily as the sparkling Thames; Before this strange disease of modem life, With its sick hurry, its divided aims, Its heads o’ertax’d, its palsicJ hearts, was rife…
636 / A History of English Literature
Criticism :-
This poem, like most other Arnold poems, is a ”criticism of life”– and a very hard criticism at that. Modern life is for Arnold ”a strange disease.” There is some resemblance between this poem and Keats’s Tq a Nightingale. Both Keats and Arnold are critical of life. Keats is also sick of what he calls ”the weariness, the fever, and the fret” of life. Just as for Keats the nightingale is unaware of the miseries of human life today, similarly for Arnold the scholar signifies an extra-terrestrial peace and tranquillity. ”In both these poems,” says a critic/’speak the voice of a man crushed beneath the burden of life.”
The poem is also remarkable for its pastoral note and its delicate evocation of the scenes of the countryside. The poem is in stanzas of ten lines each, rhyming a b cbcad eed. With the exception of the sixth line (six syllables) all the lines are decasyllabic. The movement is almost invariably iambic and eminently suited to the elegiac note sought to be struck by the poet.
• >*i
THE BLESSED DAMOZEL
Introduction :-
The Blessed Damozel is the most famous and the most charcteristic work of Dante Gabriel Rossetti who initiated the Pre-Rephaelite Movement in English painting and poetry. The poem was first published in 1850 in The Germ, a periodical paper which the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood started for propagating their views, but which could not go beyond four numbers. The poem is important for being representative of the Pre-Raphaelite school of poetry. It has both the strength an<T the weakness of that school.’
. Theme and Plan :-
The ”blessed damozel” is a young girl waiting in heaven for the arrival of her lover who is yet alive and a denizen of the earth. In the first part of the poem, she is represented as very anxiously looking at the earth and wishing for her lover to arrive. She is living in the castle of God situated much above even the sun. The bars of the castle are made of gold. The very first stanza of the poem draws a sensuous picture of the girl:
The blessed damozel leaned out
From the gold bar of Heaven;
Her eyes were deeper than the depth .. Of waters stilled at even;
She had three lilies in her hand,
And the stars in her hair were seven.
Elsewhere also Rossetti excels in g*ving picturesque details. The girl leans on the gold bar for long
”The Blessed Damozel” / 637
Until her bosom must have made The bar she leaned on warm, And the lilies lay as if asleep Along her bended arm.
In the second part of the poem (the poem is not formally divided into the two parts) we find the blessed damozel thinking about the pleasures in heaven which she will enjoy in the company of her lover after he has joined her in heaven:
”There wilt I ask of Christ the Lord Thus much for him and me :- Onfy to live as once on earth With Love,-onfy to be, As then awhile, for ever now Together, I and he,”
In the end she is grief-stricken at the time her lover is taking to join her~in spite of her prayers. The poem ends again with a picturesque description:
(I saw her smile). But soon their Path Was vague in distant spheres; And then she cast her arms along Jlie golden barriers,. And laid her face between her hands, And wept (I heard her tears). • .
The interchange of sensory functions is <lu’te characteristic of Rossetti. He can see silence, for instance, and hear ”her tears.”
Criticism :-
The most characteristic feature of the poem is its richness in sensuous details. Rossetti was a painter as well as a poet, and as a poet he thought, as Compton-Rickett puts it,”in pigments.” The superabundance of pictorial details is thus quite explicable. What is also of particular importance in this poem is Rossetti’s daring attempt to represent cosmic objects in vivid line and colour. He succeeds a great deal, mainly through his disarming,childlike naivete. ”77?e Blessed Damozer, says A. Hamilton Thompson,”is without a counterpart in English poetry.” It combines metaphysical imagination with the pictorial, creating quite impressive results.
\t
638 /A History of English Literature
”ATLANTA IN CALYDON”, ”HARD TIMES”
AND
”VANITY FAIR”
Q. 102- Show your acquaintance with the following: •*”
(i) Atlanta in Cafydon (Punjab Sept. 1976)
(Punjab 1968) (Agra 1957)
(Punjab 1960) (Agra 1960) (Punjab 1972)
(ii) Hard Times (Punjab Sept 1966)
(u\) Vanity Fair (Agra 1957) (Agra 1960) (Agra 1972)
ATLANTA IN CALYDON Introduction- :-
Atlanta in Cafydon is the first important work of Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837-1907), usually considered as a Pre-Raphaelite poet. It is a tragedy combining features of the ancient Greek tragedy and those of the romantic drama Atlanta in Cafydon is indeed a remarkable achievement, and, to quote Hugh Walker, it was”the greatest in the classical form since Samson Agonistes” With its publication in 1865 Swinburne-whom Hugh Walker describes as ”the spoilt child of the Pre-Raphaelite group, at once its prodigy and its embarrassment”– came to be recognised as one of the major poets of his age.
The Story :•
Atlanta in Cafydon is, according to a critic,”a distinguished attempt to give in English verse the essential form and spirit of Greek drama.” In its story and such formal features as the chorus, the play follows the lead of ancient Greeks.
Swinburne borrows the story from a Greek legend which is partly alluded to in Aeschylus and Euripides, Ovid and Apollodorus. It concerns chiefly Atlanta, the beautiful woman and huntress who in her childhood was suckled by a she-bear. Althea, the queen of Calydon, her son Meleager, and her two brothers Toxeus and Plcxiphus, are the other major characters of the play. A wild boar of prodigious power enters Calydon and starts ravaging its territory. Nobody is able to kill it till Atlanta comes and with a dart manages to do so. Meleager gives the head of the Calydonian boar as a trophy to the maiden Atlanta and also falls in love with her. But his uncles grow jealous of her. Meleager kills them. When Althea comes to learn of her brothers’ murder (while she is going to the temple for thanksgiving) she grows furious against her son. She has with her a brand the burning of which would kill Meleager. So she throws it into th fire. Meleager dies, certainly, but Althea also does not survive him long.
”Hard Times”/63?
Criticism :-
We have referred to Milton’s Samson Agonistes as a precedent of Atlanta in Cafydon. But it must be noted that whereas Milton’s tragedy is close to the ancient drama both in spirit and treatment, Swinburne’s attempt is classical only in content, its spirit and treatment are romantic. The play is a remarkable achievement as it has all the merits of romanticism without its defects, to which the Pre-Raphaelites are usually very prone.
In the play we find as many as six episodes and five main choruses. In this respect Atlanta in Calydon is less compact than the ancient Greek drama. But this expansion of the structural design is well utilised by Swinburne for accommodating various lyrical utterances which arc put in the mouths of the choruses. In fact these lyrical gems are the most orient part of the whole play. As Hugh Walker puts it, ”the choruses proclaim the advent of a lyrical poet of the first rank.” SwinburnePunlike most of the Pre Raphaelites, was not a painter; but he was a musician. Like an excellent maestro he uses words which with their wonderful cadences create the most fulsome, nevertheless delicate, music. He varies the metre and rhyme-patterns from time to time. Thus his music is varied, not monotonous.
According to a critic,”the theme of Atlanta in Calydon is a complaint against human destiny, against the cruelty of the gods who mingle pain with pleasure, permit no happiness to be unalloyed with sorrow, no life to be unabridged by death.” This idea trickles in again and again, as for instance in the words of a chorus given below:
Before the beginning of years
There came to the making of man Time, with a gift of tears,
Grief with a glass that ran; Pleasure with pain for leaven ;
Summer, with flowers that fell.
But Swinburne does not give evidence of quietly accepting the injustice of the gods who, pcrhaps,”kill us for their sport.” We rather find in him a kind of restlessness which often takes the colourpf defiance. In this respect also he breaks away from the eminently fatalistic philosophy of Greek tragedy.
HARD TIMES
Introduction :-
Hard Times, one of the famous novels of Charles Dickens, was first published in 1853. It is ”a novl with a purpose” , Dickens’ purpose being to attack the utilitarian philosophy and the so-called political
f
640 /A History of English Literature ’
economy and their practical application. With this novel Dickens entered the rank of the social critics of the Victorian age. The Story :-
The summary of the novel as given by Harvey is as follows: ”Thomas Gradgrind, a citizen of Coketown, an industrial centreis an ’eminently practical man’ who believes in facts and statistics and nothing else, and brings up his children Louisa and young Tom, accordingly, ruthlessly repressing the imaginative and spiritual sides of their nature.’He marries Louisa to Josiah Bounderby, a manufacturer, humbug and curmudgeon, thirty years older than herself. Lousia consents partly from the indifference and cynicism engendered by her father’s treatment, partly from a desire to help her brother, who is employed by Bounderby and who is the only person she loves. James Harthouse, a young politician without heart or principles, comes to Cocktown, is thrown into contact with her, and taking advantage of her unhappy life with Bounderby, attempts to seduce her. The better side of her nature is awakened by this experience and at the crisis she flees for protection to her father, who in turn is awakened by the folly of his system. He shelters her from Bounderby and the couple are permanently separated. But further trouble is in store for Gradgrind. His son, young Tom, has robbed the bank of his employer, and though he contrives for a time to throw the suspicion on a blameless artisan, Stephen Blackpool, Is finally detected and hustled out of the country.” Criticism :-
Hard Times^as, we have said above,is a novel with a purpose. In this • novel Dickens- writes as one, to quote F. R. Leavis, ”possessed by a comprehensive vision, one in which the inhumanities of Victorian civilization are seen as fostered and sanctioned by a hard philosophy, the aggressive formulation of an inhuman spirit.” Dickens dedicated this novel to Carlyle quite appropriately. Carlyle was himself a moralist as well as a prophet who favoured all literature to be didactic. He took Scott to task for the alleged lack of any serious purpose in his novels. It is reasonable to believe that Dickens himself was influenced considerably by Carlyle’s views and his Hard Times at least part’y owed its genesis to this influence. It is appropriate here to remark that some other novelists of Dickens’ age were also writing novels of purpose. Among them may be mentioned Kingsley (Hypatia), Newman (Calttsla and Loss and Gain), and Charles Reade (// is rfevertoo Late to Mend and Hard Cash). Of course, we have to make very important exceptions like the Bronte sisters and even Thackeray.
”Vanity Fair” ^641’
Dickens’ aim in the novel was, fundamentally speaking, to rouse the moral consciousness of his reader. The definite objects of the serious attack in the novel were the political economy of the age as enunciated by Ricardo, Mill, Maltbus, and their ilk, and die practical application of the principles of so-called science to the working of industry. Mr. ^ Gradgrind is a representative of the school of these political economists. He is .not inherently wicked or callous, but his practical; utilitarian, and materialistic philosophy completely desensitised him. He is so engrossed in statistics and other practical calculations that he loses his humanity to a considerable extent. Bounderby represents the unscrupulous industrialists of Dickens’ age, who applied to industry the theories of the political economists- with disastrous results for the poor workers. Such principles as that of laissez-faire, such laws as Ricardo’s iron law of wages and many other pontifical utterances of the political economists, with corresponding governmental inaction, emboldened the industrialists of the time to meet out inhuman treat ._> rnent to their workers. Ruskin was the most important man of letters ’who raised a powerful voice against this barbarous exploitation. Dickens does likewise. The marriage of GradgrindV daughter with Bounderby signifies the marriage of convenience between the theories of the political economists and the actual working of industry run by such sharks as Bounderby.
As Hugh Walker puts it, Dickens’ ”natural tendency was towards excess. His characters are either too good or too bad. In this novel whereas Bounderby’s callousness and greed are painted in colours too dark to be consistent with reality, Blackpool’s good qualities are too strongly highlighted. ”Samuel C Chew rightly objects to the lack of realism of ”the almost saintly patience of Dickens’ working man anel working girl. ” Even Ruskin, who-praised the work, was not so happy with the representation of Bounderby as ”a dramatic monster” and that of Stephen Blackpool as ”a dramatic perfection.”
Apart from the major characters mentioned above in the summary of the novel we have some well-delineated minor characters-Sleary, the proprietor of a circus ;Jupe, a performer in his troupe; and Cissy, . Jupe’s daughter.
Introduction :-
VANITY FAIR
n<7^^ of Thackeray’s
~~~^*^«
642 / A History of English Literature
asjiugh Walker also points out, it is ”one of the most interesting novels of the nineteenth century.” With this novel Thackeray emerged as a great painter and critic of the middle class society of his age. The action of the novel is placed in and around the period of the Napoleonic wars culminating in the Battle of Waterloo fought in 1815. It means Thakeray goes a generation backwards. But,as Samuel C. Chew puts it, ”essentially this is a novel of contemporary life.* The shifting of dates has little significance and perhaps betrays Thackeray’s timidness.
The Story :•
The novel has no well-organised plot; nor perhaps does it have any perceptible pattern. Thackeray tries to narrate the parallel careers of
/two friends-Amelia Sedley, daughter of Mr. Sedley a rich London merchant, and Rebecca (Becky) Sharp, the poor daughter of a goodfor-nothing French opera-<lancer and a penniless artist. After leaving Miss Pinkerton’s Academy both come out in the open world. Amelia’s brother Jos, the ex-collector of Boglely Walla, (in India)/alls in love
with Becky, but Becky becomes the governess of Sir Pitt Cray/ley’s children and makes herself popular with everybody in the household, including Sir Pitt* his son Rawdon Crawley, and Sir Pitt’s rich unmarried sister, the elderly Miss Crawley. After his wife’s death Sir Pitt proposes to Becky, only to discover that she already has been secretly married to Rawdon! He and Miss Crawley are angry and the latter disinherits Rawdon who has been the apple of her eye.
Meanwhile Amelia’s father •becomes a bankrupt as a result of speculation. Her marriage with George Osborne, a military officer, is cancelled by his father. But George marries her and is disinherited by his father. But soon after, George is killed in action at Waterloo. Dobbin,George’s friend, starts wooing Amelia, but she goes on worshipping the portrait of her dead husband. She gives birth to a son who is also named George.
Becky goes on prospering and becomes very popular in high society. She also gives birth to a son for whom, however, she simply does not bother. One day she is caught by her husband in a compromising situation with an old libertine, Lord Steyne. Then follows the permanent estrangement between Rawdon and Becky. Becky goes about visiting foreign spas, and leads a reckless, rudderless life of pleasure. Jos is still after her and is perhaps poisoned by her to death to leave for her a sizable fortune. Dobbin goes on wooing the poor, miserable Amelia. Becky paves the way for their marriage by disclosing that before his death George Osborne has been wooing her and writing
. love-letters.
– •/•-
”Unto this Last” / 643
Critcism :-
Vanity Fair is an authentic social document. About this point there is no conflict of opinions. But about Thackeray’s attitude towards life there are various views. Some charge him with cynicism, some with scntimcntalism, and still some others label him as an apostle of mediocrity. Thackeray was in fact, from first to last, a very indecisive man. He could be everything by turns. On the whole, however, the picture of life as he draws in Vanity Fair is far from bright and cheerful. The last words of the novel truly sum up Thackeray’s view of life as it appears in this work:
”Ah! Vanilas Vanitatum \ Which of us is happy in the world ? Which of us has his desire ? or, having it, is satisfied ?-*•
For one thing,Thackeray associates virtue with foolishness or stolidity and insipidness, and vice with brilliance and attractiveness. Becky attracts us much more than Amelia who is, to say the least, a bore. Dobbin is also too vapid.
Becky Sharp-one of the immortals of English-is the focus of all interest in the novel. For the subtitle of the novel Thackeray proposed the words ”a novel without a hero.” A hero Vanity Fair does not have. But a heroine is there-and she cannot be the humdrum Amelia, but the subtle vixen Becky Sharp.
The novel is very rich in humour and irony. It also has some well-handled scenes like the proposal made to Becky by Sir Pitt Crawley immediately after the death of his wife (whose body lies coffined in another room), and the scene where Rawdon finds his wife in an incriminating situation with that old debauchee, Lord Styne. But one indefensible feature of the novel is Thackeray’s own frequent appearance on the scene to talk about what his characters are doing, or just expatiate gratuitously on kings and cabbages.
^
”UNTO THIS LAST”, ”WUTHERING HEIGHTS;1
AND ”THE MILL ON THE FLOSS”
Q. 103 Show your acquaintance with the following :- W Unto Otis Last (Agra 1965) (Agra 1958)
(ii) WitheringHeigfits (Rohilkhand 1989) (Agra 1963)
644 /A History of English Literature
(\\\) The Mill on the Floss (Agra 1966) (Agra 1959) (Punjab 1972)
»
UNTO THIS LAST
• Introduction :-
Unto This Last is the most important of those works of John Ruskin which deal with economics. It consists of four essays’ which initially appeared serially in Comhill Magazine in 1860. But on account of the unorthodox views they embodied, Thackeray the editor was compelled to ask Ruskin to stop sending in any further instalment after the fourth. The plea that Thackeray made was that these essays ”were too deeply tainted with socialistic heresy to conciliate subscribers.” All these four essays, along with the ”Preface”’ were first published in book form hi
1862.
The Theme and Plan :-
In the ”Preface” Ruskin asserts that these essays are ”the best, that is to say the truest, rightest worded, and most serviceable thing I have ever.written.” The gist of these essays is to give ”a logical definition of WEALTH.” He proposes some reformative measures for the government. The four essays are entitled as under:
(i) ”The Roots of Honour” « (ii) ’The \feins of Wealth”
(iii) ”Qui Judicatis Terrain”
(iv) ”Ad Valorem”
In the first essay he attacks the very premises of the so-called political economy. Man, according to him, is not motivated by monetary considerations alone; ”social affectiods” also play an* important part. Ruskin exhorts merchants to trade honourably even at the cost of money. In ”The Veins of Wealth” he points out that what is called political economy, in fact, is only mercantile economy. The real value of wealth depends not on its exchange value but on the moral issues involved in it* accumulation. Inequality of wealth is all right, provided it is justly established. Every economic question ”merges itself ultimately in the great question of justice.” All real wealth should be able to produce ”as many as possible full-breathed, bright-eyed and happyhearted human creatures.” In ”Qui Judicatis Terrain,” again, Ruskin lays stress on justice. He favours free trade and scoffs at Malthus1 theory of population. He categorically declares :’There is not yet, nor will yet for ages be, any real over-population in the world.” In ”Ad Valorem” he gives his own defintkras of value and wealth. Wealth, according to
v> ”Unto this Last” / 645
him, is’the possession of the valuable by the valiant.” A thing is valuable if it ”avails towards life.” At another place he announces : ”There is no wealth but life… that country i* the richest which nourishes the greatest number of noble and happy human-beings…” He condemns self-interest and materialism which are the bases of modem political economy (which he calls ”the bastard science,” and ”the science of darkness”)
Criticism :-
Considered with respect to the consensus of Victorian economic thought, Ruskin’s views in Unto This Last were scandalisingly radical, and that explains Thackeray’s request to Ruskin not to send in more instalments. What distinguished Ruskin-for better or worse-from other economists is that he is both an inspired prophet and a calculating economist. His place is with people like Carlyle rather than with the humdrum bread-and-butter economists.
Whether Ruskin is entitled to discuss economics or not has since his own day been an open question. Our view is that by knowledge he is, though by temperament he is not In this work he displays a vast and dear knowledge of the political economy whose tenets he has come forward to demolish. Sometimes he does talk like a sentimentaiist-as when he asks merchants to be honest even at some loss, or when he advises industrialists to cultivate a paternal attitude towards their employees-but quite often he displays a rare dialectical skill. His attack on the very premises of political economy is quite telling. He objects to the conception of the ”economic man” as he would to that of a man without any skeleton at all.
In Unto This Last, as elsewhere, Ruskin insists on projecting human values into the’’disnud science” of political economy. Well docs Compton-Rickett point out that Ruskin’s basic object was ” to humanise economics.” He denounces the love of money as something contrary to the basic priciplcs of Christianity; and very often goes back to the Bibfe to elicit support for his views. The last words of the last essay have a pronounced pulpit twang. Like an ancient prophet he exclaims: ”Raise the veil boldly; face tine light.”
As he says in the ”Preface,” the primary object of his papers has been to give ”a logical definition of wealth.” Wealth, as we have mentioned under the preceding sub-head, Ruskin measures in terms of human values. There also his effort to humanise economics is very obvious. It was this tendency which made Gandhi a devotee of Ruskin, aad particularly, Unto This Last Gandhi used to read (and admire) this book ever so often.
646 / A History of English Literature
Unto This Last cannot legitimately be dismissed as”thc beautiful vapouring of an aesthete.” That Ruskin had very concrete ideas is easily proved by the fact that some of the proposals he made in the ”Preface” have since become a fait accompli-even in such underdeveloped countries as India. Here are the proposals he made :
(i) Training school at government cost should be established to give training to youth in hygiene, some vocation, and the ”habits of gentleness and justice.”
(ii) Government should run some industries for turning out consumer goods and may also enter into competition with private enterprise.
(iii) Unemployment benefits.
(iv) For the old and destitute comfortable homes should be provided.
WUTHERING HEIGHTS
Introduction :•
Wuthcring Heights is the only novel of Emily Bronte (1818-48), one of the famous Bronte sisters (often calfaf’the stormy sisterhood”)~the other two being Charlotte and Anne. Though Emily was a poet as well, she is remembered only as a novelist. Withering Heiglits first appeared in 1847 and at once attracted the notice of every discerning reader. In the whole rage of English fiction Wuthering Heights is the only novel of its kind. Its passion and imaginative fcrce have made it the recipient of much enthusiastic laudation.
The Story :-
Strong, almost elemental, passions breathe across the length and breadth of this novel. ”Wuthering Heights” is the name of the farm house owned by the Earnshaws. The main characters of the novel are Mr. and Mrs. Earnshaw and their children, Catherine and Hindlcy. Four miles away from Wuthering Heights live the Lintons with their children. Edaar and Isabella. Things start happening with the arrival of a destitute boy picked up by the elder Mr. Earnshaw from a Liverpool street. The boy is named Heathciiff and is brought up in the Earnshaw family like one of its members. Heathciiff s passionate and wild nature finds its complement in Catherine, and as he grows up he falls fiercely in love with her. But Catherine’s brother Hindley dislikes extremely Heathciiff ’s wooing of her, and after the death of his father starts maltreating and .humiliating him. One day Heathciiff overhears
”Wul hcring Heights” / 647
Catherine saying that her marrying him would degrade her. He quietly slips away from Wuthering Heights to collect some fortune and escape further humiliation. He returns after three years a very prosperous man and is welcomed by even Hindlcy who is now a married man with a son named Harclon. Hcalhcliff finds Catherine as wife of Edgar Linton, a colourless character. He is now bent upon fierce revenge and the destruction of both the familics-lhc Earnshaws and the Linlons.
He succeeds in ruining Hindley by enticing him to a life of dissipation. In gambling Hindlcy loses everything, including Wuthering Heights to Hcalhcliff and is reduced to utter poverty. Catherine still has some fascination for her old lover, and her mind is violently lorn by a psychological conflict. She dies after giving birth to a baby daughter Cathy. But Heathciiff goes ahead in his pursuit of ferocious revenge. He marries Edgar’s sister Isabella, not because of love but of rcvengcfulncss. He takes pleasure in maltreating her even though he gets a son by her. After Hindlc/s ruination he and his son Hareton arc completely under his power. Ho treats them as serfs, just as he himself was once treated by Hindlcy.’ But he fs’nol placated yet. He forces Cathy to marry his very ugly and chronically ill son. But his son is dead before long, and Cathy and Harclon start loving each other most passionately, thus frustrating Hcathcliff’s designs to capture the property of both the Earnshaw and the Lintons. He feels quite upset and enervated, and feels as if Catherine were calling him from her grave. Everything starts reminding him of his old love. He accepts her call and dies without completing the process of his fierce revenge. He leaves behind Cathy and Hercton united with each other and with calm returning to Wuthering Heights and the surrounding Yorkshire moors.
Criticism :-
From the outline of the plot it must have been understood what a fierce drama of love, hate, and revenge Wutliering Heigiits is ! In the hands of a lesser artist the whole thing would have looked but a cheap melodrama of the ”blood and thunder” type, but Emily Bronte’s imaginative power and vicarious passions sustain the novel at a much. higher plane. It is really strange that a young, shy, introspective consumptive girl, always repressed by her puritanic parents during her . adolescent years, could come out with such a blazing saga of elemental passions. She may well be contrasted with an earlier female novelist, Jane Austen, who was an anachronism in the age of romanticism which exalted passion and imagination. Emily Bronte (like Charlotte) was an anachronism in the age of Victorian soriery and distrust cf passion and imagination.
648 / A History of English Literature
HcathclifPs passion, hatred and consuming desire for revenge arc altogether primitive and elemental. A critic well compares Edgar to a bear, Cathy to a hare, and Hcathcliff to a wolf. Hcalhcliff indeed comes like a fury from Hades, blood-thirsty and implacablcJD. G. Rossctti was constrained to say: ”The action is laid in hell, only it seems places and people have English names there.. ” It is Emily Bronte’s ”poetry” which saves these characters from falling into sheer absurdity.
Emily Bronte also succeeds well in delineating the landscape of the Yorkshire moors where she was born and where she lived. The moors around Wuthering Heights really provide an excellent background for the fierce drama of love, hate, and revenge. They arc primitive, uncultivated, and defiant; and these epithets may with justice be applied to Heathcliff himself.
THE MILL ON THE FLOSS Introduction :-
Vie Mill on the Floss is one of the major novels of George Eliot (1819-1880). It was first published in 1860. Of all (he novels of George Eliot it is the most autobiographic. The heroine of the novel can, with some justice, be identified with George Eliot herself.
The Story :-
”The Mill on the Floss” refers to a fictitious mill (Dorlcote Mill) situated on the river Floss. The owner of the Mill is Mr. Tu’liver who is simple but proud and obstinate. He has a son Tom and a daughter Maggie. The brother and the sister have altogether opposite tempers. Tom is narrow-minded, self-righteous, and overbearing-particularly towards Maggie. Maggie is a girl of refined sensibility in love with art and poetry. In fact, it is the clash of these tempers which leads to unhaipptness and the ultimate tragedy. Maggie always finds herself to be out of tune with her family and her environment, and its consciousness makes her all the more miserable. She feels attracted towards Philip Wakem. a deformed young man who shares her temper and interests. But Philip Wakcm’s father is hated by the elder Mr. Tulliver and his hatred is intensified when he becomes bankrupt in the event of some litigation in which this gentleman appears as a lawyer on the opposite side. Tulliver’s bankruptcy hastens bis death. Tom discovers Maggie’s attachment to Philip Wakem and tries to dissr *de her from her course. Maggie acquiesces in the authority <jf her brother. Nevertheless, the hearts of the brother and the sister are separated for good.
The Mill on the Floss” / 649
After her father’s death Maggie leaves the Mill to pay a visit to her cousin Lucy Deane at St. Ogg’s. Lucy is going to marry a very fashionable, cultured, handsome, young man Stephen Guest. In spite of all her principles, her conscience, and her attachment to Philip, Maggie falls a ’victim to the charms of Stephen. In the course of a boating expedition she finds herself in a very compromising situation with him. When Tom comes to know about all this he turns her out of the house and even at St. Ogg’s she suffers social boycott for her grave misdemeanour. The sensitive girl suffers acute mental anguish at being rejected by everybody except perhaps Philip and Lucy. But the whole thing comes to an unexpected finish when a great storm envelops the town and floods the Mill. Forgetting everything, Maggie goes to rescue her brother Tom. The terrified Tom has a glimpse of self-knowledge’, and there is reconciliation between Maggie and him. However, the joy of reunion is quite evanescent as their boat is overwhelmed by the swirling waters of the flood which sweep away both of them: >
Criticism :-
As has already been pointed out, the novel is quite autobiographic in nature. In many ways Maggie Tulliver is a representation of George Eliot herself. Both of them arc women of keen, refined and artistic sensibility. Again, both are presented with the problem of a moral choice; and both choose perhaps the worng thing. Maggie falls quite unexpectedly for Stephen Guest as George Eliot herself had fallen for Lewes. George Eliot lived with Lewes as his wife without marriage even when Lewes’ wife was alive. This considerably scandalised the touchy Victorians, and George Eliot, a sensitive woman, suffered a lot of mental agony. The same is the case with Maggie who suffers much after her irremediable invplvement with Guest whom Leslie Stephen describes as ”a mere hairdresser’s block” and Swinburne calls a dog for whom horsewhipping would be too lenient a punishment. It was surprisingly immature on the part of Maggie to succumb.to such-a man. Walter Allen considers it a flaw in the novel. As he puts it, ”George Eliot lets herself.and her heroine , down very badly. She spoils her novel…” Another very obvious flaw of the novel is it unconvincing melodramatic ending which has nothing to do with the implications of Maggie’s moral choice or us consequences, direct or indirect.
Nevertheless, The Mill on the Floss is a great novel. Its greatness is mainly due to the intimate and sensitive study of the delicate psyche of Maggie Tulliver who can be indentified with George Eliot herself. Thus the novel is, in the words of Lionel Stevenson, ” a truthful unveiling of the author’s inmost feeling.” But finding too.much of herself in Maggie, George Eliot grows somewhat uncritical of her.
650/ A History of English Literature
”APPRECIATIONS’Y’JUDE THE OBSCURE,’ AND ”EREWHON”
Q. 104. Show your acquaintance with the following :• (i) Appreciations (Punjab 1958)
(ii) hide ihc Obscure (Punjab 1960) (Agra 1964)
(iii>£/w/ie»/i • (Punjab 1959) (Punjab 1961) (Agra 1961)
(Agra 1966)
APPRECIATIONS
Introduction :•
Appreciations is a collection of critical essays first published in
1889. The writer of this work was the historian and critic Walter Horatio Pater (1839-1894). Chronologically Pater was the third great critic of the nineteenth century, the two before him being Coleridge and Matthew Arnold.
The Theme and Plan :•
Appreciations is a collection of six critical essays. Except the first which deals with ”style” these essays deal with a great English writer each. These writers are:
(i) Charles Lamb
(ii) Wordsworth
(iii) Coleridge
(iv) Sir Thomas Browne
(v) Rossetti.
Pater himself was a romantic and subjective critic, and, very characteristically, he chose writers of the same kind for his critical appreciation. He particularly excels in the treatment of writers like Sir Thomas Browne and Coleridge who, like him. were given to introspection and self-analysis. In his appreciation of a writer Pater does not follow constantly the same set plan. His method varies from writer to writer. Biographical details are thrown here and there with his critical impressions (which are all too personal) of the writer concerned.
His essay ”Of Style? as would he expected, deals with style, fater emphasises the need for adhering to the inner troth of the moment
Appreciations/ 651
rather than any ingenious external devices for an effective style. He refuses to believe in the differentiation between form and matter. He is for their complete fusion. The highest of arts, according to him, is music, for in music the’form and the matter are’indistinguishable. He likes that literature which is near music in this respect. In conclusion Pater makes a distinction, according to David Daiches, ”somewhat surprisingly,” between good art and great art. The greatness of art depends also on”the quality of the matter it informs or controls.” It is on this, on ”its compass, its variety, its alliance to great ends, or the depth of the note of revolt, or the largeness of hope in it, that the greatness of literary art depends.” ”But,” says Daiches, ”the theme is not fully worked out.” .
Criticism :-
”In his practical criticism,” observes D’aiches,”his concern is to lay his finger on the essential element in the mind or sensibility of the writer.” Wordsworth, for instance/’subdues man to the level of nature; and gives him thereby a certain breadth and coolness and solemnity.” Similarly, Coleridge is described as ”a true flower of the ennui.” And soon.
As a literary critic, Pater belongs to the impressionistic school of Hazlitt, though he is much subtler and consistent (and, therefore, reliable) than Hazlitt What Pater gives us is not well-formulated principles but strings of his impressions about the writer or the literary work he is dealing with. As Cazamian puts it on well in A History of English Literature ( Legouis and Cazamian), Pater’s appreciations are really ”recreations, the substance of which is, we feel, drawn from himself.” But in spite of the fact that Pater’s criticism is pre-eminently impressionistic, we often find in it a certain depth when the impression becomes equivalent to a moment of mystical intuition. Further, Pater’s impressions are valuable as they are buttressed by his delicate sense of beauty in all its manifestation. Moody and Lovett observe in this context: ”Although Pater’s criticism is frankly impressionistic in that he is satisfied to record his own reaction to works of art, his delicate sensitiveness to beauty in all forms makes these studies both subtly penetrating and illuminating.”
Finally, a word about Pater’s style in Appreciations. Pater himself seems to follow the principles of style which he has laid down in his essay about style. The end of style, according to him, is beauty of expression, which, however, is not so easy of attainment. For achieving it .the writer should choose every word and cadence with a world-of . care so that his language reproduces the right mood at any given moment.- Commenting upon the mutual conformity of Pater’s theory
652 / A History of English Literature
and practice, Cornpton-Rickctt points out: ”No man more conscientiously tried to put into practice his precepts than he. No essayist has been more sensitive to the colour and gradation of shades in words than he ;and there is an amazing delicacy and subtlety in the critical nuances by which he endeavoured to actualise for the reader the object of his criticism.”
JUOE THE OBSCURE
Introduction :•
Jude the Obscure is Hardy’s last novel. It was reprinted in revised form from Harper’s Magazine in the 1895 edition of his works. Most of Hardy’s novels are tragedies, and Jude the Obscure is the most oppressive and sombre of all. The story, in Hardy’s own words/is ”of a deadly war waged with old Apostolic desperation between flesh and spirit.” The Story :•
The arena of this deadly war is the soul of a poor South Wcsscx villager named Jude Fawley. Jude’s desire was to become prominent in the field of learning, and*evcn to become a priest, but Fate willed him to remain bbscure and lead a most miserable life ending in a pathetic death.
Jude was a young stone-mason of the village named Mcrrygrecn situated in South Wessex. His ambition was to become a scholar at Christminster. But that was not to be. He was ensnared by a dangerously voluptuous village girl named Arabella Donn who tricked him into a marriage, thus keeping him at his village for some time. But Jude realised before long that Arabella was a coarse and vulgar girl, notwithstanding her provocative charms. He came to know from his aunt that his cousin, Sue Bridehead, lived at Christminster. Jude was meanwhile deserted by Arabella and he felt free to go to Christminster, the place of his dreams. He was struck by the intelligence and quiet beauty of his cousin and promptly fell in love with her. But his love came to naught when she married an old, repulsive schoolmaster, Phillostson. Jude continued hovering around her, however. But then he went back to Merrygreen.
Sue soon got fed up with Phillotson and flew into the arms of Jude. Phillotson divorced her, and Jude divorced Arabella. Sue and Jude started living as wife and man without any regular marriage ceremony. She, indeed, had very unorthodox views. But the two lovers had to face public disdain and ostracizatio’.. They were driven from place to place
j ”Jude the Obscure*/653.
and lived in uUer poverty. They had two children of their own and a third of Arabella’s with them. Still another was on way. One day Arabella’s child hanged the other two and then also himself. Sue, shocked to the extreme, gave birth to a dead baby.
Sue was now feeling repentant. She left J ude and went back to live with Phillotson, her ”real” husband. Jude started feeling most miserable and completely lost. He took to drinking heavily to forget his miseries. In a drunken spell he was inveigled back by Arabella into marriage. His health was fast deteriorating, his lungs failing. He expressed his wish to meet Site for the last time; But Arabella would have none of it. Jude, however, travelled in torrential rain to meet her. T.u lovers had the last meeting. But later Jude learned that Sue would go on living with Phillotson. It shattered him completely and he died in an excruciating agony of spirit. He remained, from beginning to end, an ”obscure” man. V i
Criticism :• 4
Jude the Obscure, without doubt, is the gloomiest of all Hardy novels. The unrelieved sombreness of atmosphere was too much for his contemporaries-as it is for many of us today. The novel came in an age when Victorianism was fast crumbling, and when the typical Victorian priggishness and hoity-toity morality had become things of the past. But even in that age Hardy’s pessimism and moral unorthodoxy were too much to be tolerated. It was the excessively harsh criticism Hardy had to face which, compelled him to lay down his pen as a novelist and to give the rest of his life to the writing of poetry only.
Hardy believed, in the presence of a malignant power which is sometimes indifferent’to human beings and sometimes actively bent upon frustrating their plans and ruining them. His novels like Tess, Vie Mayor of Casterbridge, and Jude the Obscure are only practical illustrations of his pet theory. Not only do their stories embody a pessimistic philosophy of life, but what is worse, Hardy’s own commentary goes a step ahead to intensify the resultant gloom.
Let us now turn to the novel and see what Hardy’s contemporaries found in it so shocking and unbearable. The murder episode involving the three children is one such incident. Father Time (Arabella’s son) comes to believe what Sue tells him-that children should not be brought into the world. When Sue and Jude are absent, he takes^a rope and first hangs the two children and then hangs himself. Is not it shocking ? Another point which scandalised Hardy’s contemporaries was the living of Jude and Sue ai man and wife without a proper marriage, with Hardy’s implicit support of it. It was thought that
J
654 / A History of English Literature
Hardy was out to undermine the social and domestic structure altogether. Thirdly. Hardy’s indulgence in excessively sensual details was too much for Victorian standards. Arabella’ Don «s indeed zfemme fatale and is described by Hardy himself as a ”mere animal.” He goes too far in describing her heady animalism ~ for example, in his refercncc to the ”fact” that she could (or, perhaps, she did) hatch chickens out of eggs by keeping them for a time in her bosom !
EREWHON
Introduction :•
Erewhon is a satirical romance written by Samuel Butler (1835-
1902) and first published in 1872. It can be classed with the Utopian romances of the kind of Sir Thomas More’s Utopia and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. The whole of the work is concerned with the people of an imaginary country. The name of the country is ”Erewhon,” which is an anagram of ”Nowhere”. ”Utopia” in Greek also means ”Nowhere” (On = not; topos = a place). The book is an ironical satire on much that Victorianism signified. The Story :-
Erewhon is a country situated beyond insurmountable mountains which the protagonist-traveller is somehow able to cross. Erewhon perhaps stands for New Zealand where Samuel Butler had lived for some years. Almost the whole of the book describes with obvious irony (he habits and customs of the Ercwhonians. These people are ”of a physical beauty which was simply amazing.” But many of their ways of life are equally ”amazing.” For instance, consider their attitude to crime, provcrty, and disease. Crime for them is something not to be punished but. something to condole and cure. On the other hand, poverty, disease, and ugliness are considered ”crimes” fit to be severely punished. An embezzlement is considered a matter for condolence and curative treatment, whereas pulmonary consumption is considered a foul crime which calls forth deterrent punishment. The ”criminals” are sent for correction to a professional class called the
1 ”straightenes”-”a class of men trained in soul-craft.” Butler himself believed in the Greek principle of the golden mean, and the Ercwhonians like him are critical of unalloyed virtue as well as of unalloyed vice. They hold that ”unalloyed virtue is not a thing to be immoderately indulged in”, ”urge that there is much pseudo-virtue going about,” and that those men ”are best who are not remarkable cither for vice or virtue.”
Butler’s heterodoxy finds a most provocative expression in the chapter on The Musical Banks* of Erewhon. It is a stinging satire on
The Wasteland”/655
all ecclesiastical institutions. These musical banks issue a currency which everybody flaunts but nobody values. That is exactly the case with the religious principles which are displayed but not valued. In the chapter on the ”Birth Formulate” the satire is directed against parental tyranny which had social sanction in the Victorian age.
By far the best ideas are contained in the three chapters on machines. Erewhonians find, to their terror, that machines are slowly but surely becoming their masters instead of remaining their slaves. Before it is too late, they decide to destroy all their machines made during the last two hundred and seventy-one years (which period is agreed upon after much wrangling). The scheme is implemented and much destruction follows.
The narrator gets sick of Erewhon. He makes a balloon and, with an Erewhonian lady whom he loves, he manages to escape to his own country.
Criticism :•
Erewhon is a novel of ideas. Butler was a profound thinker and a learned man, though he had (and displays in this novel) a very poor narrative ability. Erewhon bristles with ideas which have significance for us even today. Butler’s attitude is provocatively irreverent, but what he has to say is valuable and interesting. According to Cohipton-Rickett, ”as a satirical critic of modern life he must always be reckoned among the more potent influences of his generation.” The account of the society of Erwhonians, according to Moody and Lovctt, ”offers the cleverest satire on modern civilization since Gulliver’s Travels’ Butler seems to have considerably influenced some modern writers the most outstanding of whom is George Bernard Shaw.
However, Erewhon is’unlikely ever to become a ”popular” book. It is heavy reading, indeed.
”THE WASTE LAND”, ”MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL,”
AND ”SONS AND LOVERS”
Q. 105 Show your acquaintance with the following :- (i) Vie Waste Land (Agra 1960) (Agra 1964).
(ii) Murder in the Cathedral (Agra 1965) (Gorakhpur 19X9)
(Rohilkhand 1989)
656 /A History of English Literature
(VA) Sons and Lovers (Agra 1965)
THE WASTELAND
Introduction :•
The Waste Land by T. S. Elk* is as important a work in the history of twentieth-century poetry as Lyrical Ballads was in the history of the nineteenth. This epoch-making poem first appeared in The Dial and won that magazine’s poetry award for the year, after which it was published in book form in 1922. When this poem came, the ”Poetic Renascence,” which had started in 1912 had already become decadent and the Imagists like Hilda Doolittie and Aldington had come and gone with the vogue they had initiated. The Waste Land succeeded in creating a sensation and was hailed as the first example of modernistic poetry. Before the publication of The Waste Land Eliot had published two small volumes of poems in 1917 and 1920, but he had been able to attract very little attention. The Waste Land, however, established him once and for all as the greatest modern English poet- the position which he held unchallenged till hu death in 1965.
The Theme and Plan :•
The Waste Land is at once a profoundly moving and an equally distressing poem. In a word, T. S. Eliot has tried to paint the sterility and disturbance of the modern world.-That the poem came just a few years after the termination of the First World War explains to some extent its deep pessimism. A year or two after the war was over, people were quite happy, but then in the following years they were completely disillusioned in all respects. Elation gave place to depression. Thus Eliot in his poem not only expresses his own mood, but the mood of the entire age around 1922.
It is not difficult to sense Eliot’s meaning and the mood which is predominant in him. But his expression is a hard nut to crack. The poem is extremely rich in recondite symbolism and obscure references to ancient literature, mythology, history, and what not. The chief symbolism, however, is not difficult to understand. Water and drought represent, respectively, life or rebirth, and death. The legend of the Fisher King in the Arthurian cycle is employed by T. S. Eliot. The earth is parched for want of water, and fertility will not come to it till the Holy Grail is found. This is simple enough and is capable of precise explanation. But many other symbols are hard to follow. Eliot seems to have understood the limitations of the reader. That is why to a poem of four
”Murder in the Curthedral*/657
hundred and thirty lines he attached as many as eleven pages of notes. Even then, these notes are considered insufficient. Perhaps rightly did many of Eliot’s contemporaries charge him with wilful obscurity.
The poem progresses rather abruptly through five movement as follows:
(i) The Burial of the Dead”;
(ii)”A Game of Chess”;
(iii) The Fire Sermon”;
Civ) ”Death by Water”; and
(v) ”What the Thunder Said*
The unifying link among these five movements is the figure of Tiresias who appears throughout. However, the better principle of unity is not that of a character but of the mood, which finds little change from the beginning to the end. The mood is not only of pessimistic despair, but of terror. The gloomy resignation of the earlier poems of Eliot has in The Waste Land been hardened and combined with terror. Towards the end, indeed, the thunder promises rain, but there is no rain.
Criticism :-
The complexity of the. poem can be imagined by the fact that its four hundred and thirty lines have prompted almost as many books or studies which have offered to enlighten the reader about the real meaning of the poem-and that in spite of the fact that Eliot himself rather exhaustively annotated it f But in spite of the many difficulties it presents, The Waste Land is rewarding reading as it expresses the spirit of the age. Moreover, it has to be credited with being the first modernistic poem of the symbolist-metaphysical kind which was emulated by many poets who considered T. S. Eliot as their poetic guru. To sum up with a critic now : The poem b an enormously complex one, making great demands upon the reader, yet the importance of its theme and the brilliance of its technique give it rank as one of the most significant literary works of our time.”
MURDER IN THE CATHEDRAL
Murder in the Cathedral is the most important of T.S. Eliot’s poetic plays. It was written for the Canterbury Festival, June, 1936. It was TS. Eliot’s plays like this which promoted the vogue of poetic play in
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England and excited the emulation of such writers in the field as Auden, Stephen Spender, ana Christopher Fry.
The play is built around the episode of the murder of St. Thomas a Becket, Archbishop of Canterbury, at the behest of the then king of England. St. Thomas a Becket (1118-70) was for some time the Chancellor of the realm having been appointed in that capacity by Henry II, the king of England. However, differences arose between him and the king on the question of the authority of the church. Thomas Becket was removed from Chancellorship and exiled. After seven years of wandering in the Continent he returned to England and a reconciliation between him and the king was effected. But this peace was not destined to last long, as some hasty words by the king led four knights to start from London to Canterbury. The knights put the Archibshopd to death right inside the cathedral. St. Thomas met his death valiantly, i on December 29, 1170. He was canonized in 1173, and his shrine a became a popular place of pilgrimage. Even Henry II himself came to H do penance there. 4
This is the historical account of the career and death of the great saint which T. S. Eliot employed for Murder in the Cathedral This play is both historical and religious as it treats the death of a holy man who has since become a historical figure as well as a religious martyr. Eliot’s treatment is fairly independent and quite impartial. He treats St. Thomas more as a human being than as an ethereal saint having nothing to do with mundane realities. St. Thomas is a somewhat • complex personality. He is a man of conviction who despite numerous temptations holds his head high- and welcomes death with a daring nonchalance which would have been e: ied by a Spartan of yore.
The Story :-
Eliot represents in the beginning many women of Canterbury flocking to the cathedral in anticipation of the arrival of St. Thomas a Becket from years of exile in France. A herald announces that St. Thomas is coming. But he fails to tell whether there has been a reconciliation between the Archbishop and the king. St. Thomas arrives and tells his priests and other people present of the difficulties which he has all along encountered, for all the bishops and barons (who side with the king) have taken a vow to murder him. His enemies are now impatient to pounce upon him. St. Thomas faces four tempters. He agrees with the fourth that human life is ephemeral and should be’ sacrificed for the sake of one’s principles. Whatever doubts and uncer-
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(aintics are there in his mind are now resolved, and he makes up his mind to die rather than to yield and thus commit a sin against religion.
Early one Chris’tmas morning St. Thomas preaches a sermon on peace. He emphasizes the need and importance of peace-spiritual peace, not the peace of the barons with the king or the peace of England with other countries.
Four knights soon afterwards enter the cathedral and try to kill St. Thomas who is saved by the timely interposition of priests. The knights forward many charges aginst St. Thomas-his ignoble birth, his treachery to the king, and so on. They ask him to leave the country. St. Thomas answers all their charges firmly. But his words are of no avail, as the knights fall upon him and put him to death. After the knights have left, the priests and laymen start mourning for the martyr.
Criticism :-
Most of the play is in verse. Here Eliot’s verse has a force and ringing quality that we mosly find absent in much of his characteristic poetry which is thickly symbolical and esoteric. There is no obscurity in Murder in the Cathedral. Eliot has employed the ancient device of chorus very effectively. He handles his verse wonderfully and evokes every mood with its help.
The historical importance of Murder in (lie Cathedral is very great, because it was plays like this which encouraged and even caused what Allardyce Nicoll calls the ”imaginative Renascence” in the twentieth century and nurtured the vogue of poetic drama in the teeth of the serious opposition of votaries of the realistic school. Bamber Gascoigne observes in Twentieth Century Drama : ”It is the highest tribute to a poetic drama to say as one can of Murder in the Cathedral, that it is both intensely dramatic and inconceivable in prose.” In other words, verse is used by Eliot in this play not as an ornamental device but as the unavoidable and indispensaole medium.
SONS AND LOVERS
Introduction :-
Sons and Lovers is one* of the major novels of D. H. Lawrence. Some critics are inclined to consider it his best. Thus Samuel C. Chew in A Literary History of England, edited by Albert C. Baugh, observes that it ”remains his greatest book.” More recent critical opinion, towed
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by F. R. Leavis, however, is inclined to place Sons and Lowers below Women in Love-and rightly so. It appeared first in 1913, before Lawrence had read Freud. But even then his interest in the unconscious and psychoanalysis is apparent from the book.
The Story :•
The story of the novel is strongly autobiographical, and the hero Paul Morel is a representation of Lawrence himself. Lawrence tries to show how the excessive affection of a mother so overwhelms a family of boys that on growing up they cannot love, but lust and thus remain unadjusted to the normalities of life.
Paul Morel is a son of Walter Morel, a collier who is a drunkard and on no good terms with his puritanic wife Gertrude. Paul has two brothers, William and Arthur, and a sister, Annie. Between his father and mother there has grown a permanent rupture and his mother now overwhelms her children with excessive affection. William goes to London from his home town to get a better job. There he falls fatally ill. After his death Paul’s mother turns to him with still greater affection. When he is sixteen he starts taking interest in a girl of fifteen named Miriam. He joins a stocking mill and goes on meeting Miriam who starts loving him passionately. But Paul cannot muster the courage to touch her.
Paul and Miriam get into their twenties. Through Miriam Paul meets Clara Dawes, five years his senior. Clara is living apart from her husband, Baxter Dawes, without any regular divorce. For long Paul’s mother has been urging him to give up his interest in Miriam. Even though he likes her now he makes bold to tell her that he will not like to marry her. He suggests Clara to divorce her husband and marry him instead. But she refuses, even when she gives herself up to him. Annie and Arthur get married and Paul’s mother becomes more and more dependent upon him. Paid is also a good painter and wins numerous prizes in exhibitions. He wants to go abroad but he cannot leave his mother.
Clara cannot satisfy him so he again turns to Miriam. When Miriam lets Paul have his own way with her, his passion is savage and ruthless. Nevertheless, his mind goes on getting torn between his love of Clara and Miriam.
One day it is discovered that Paul’s mother is suffering from an advanced stage of cancer which is sure to kill her. Paul is terrified at the impending calamity and turns to Clara for consolation. His mother
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is admitted to a hospital where one day he finds Clara’s husband recovering from an attack of typhoid fever. He patches up the difference between Clara and her husband who now start living together. His mother’s pain is intolerable for Paul. So he gives her an overdose of morphine which puts a permanent end td’her agony. She dies, and he feels completely lost. He bids good-bye to Miriam and wants to join his mother in the next world. But then he realises that even when he remains alive, his mother will always be with him. This thought inculcates in him a new courage and he sets about the task of starting his life afresh.
Criticism :-
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It is said that in Lawrence’s novels it is not plots but the ideas which matter. It is particularly true of this novel. Lawrence examines the effects of the overwhelming affection of a mother on the maturer years of her son. The novel is quite autobiographical as Paul Morel is a fictional version of Lawrence himself. He is in a class with such figures as Lilly of Aaron’s Rod, Somers of Kangaroo, Kate of The Plumed Serpent, and Bhrkin of Women in Love. All of them are identical with Lawrence himself, and they come in handy as exponents of the fiercely individualistic views of the novelist However, the distinction of Paul Morel is that though through his career Lawrence presents his own career as a young man, he is not just Lawrence’s mouthpiece.
Sons and Lovers is also, however, like other Lawrence novels a ”novel of ideas”. It shows how the strong personality of an overbearing and possessive, although kind and solicitous, mother umbraculates the psyche of her sons so that they cannot grow normally and become good lovers. Lawrence’s own sexual inadequacy is dearly perceptible in Paul MoreTs erotic instability and his frustrating shilly-shallying with Miriam who stands for Lawrence’s first sweet-heart Jessie Chambers. Lawrence’s psychological knowledge is indeed impeccable, even when at the time of writing this novel he was unacquainted with the work of Freud. Sons and Lovers is the earliest and also the best of Freudian novels in the English language as it illustrates to a nicety Freud’s theories of the Oedipal complex and mother fixation. It is true both to a life (Lawrence’s) and to life.