The Poetics of Poesis: The Making of Nineteenth-Century English Fiction

By Felicia Bonaparte

Examining novels written in nineteenth-century England and throughout most of the West, as well as philosophical essays on the conception of fictional form, Felicia Bonaparte sees the novel in this period not as the continuation of eighteenth-century "realism," as has commonly been assumed, but as a genre unto itself. Determined to address the crises in religion and philosophy that had shattered the foundations by which the past had been sustained, novelists of the nineteenth century felt they had no real alternative but to make the world anew.

Finding in the new ideas of the early German Romantics a theory precisely designed for the remaking of the world, these novelists accepted Friedrich Schlegel’s challenge to create a form that would render such a remaking possible. They spoke of their theory as poesis, etymologically "a making," to distinguish it from the mimesis associated with "realism." Its purpose, however, was not only to embody, as George Eliot put it in Middlemarch, "the idealistic in the real," giving as faithful an account of the real as observation can yield, but also to embody in that conception of the real a discussion of ideas that are its "symbolic signification," as Edward Bulwer-Lytton described it in one of his essays. It was to carry this double meaning that the nineteenth-century novelist created, Bonaparte concludes, the language of mythical symbolism that came to be the norm for this form, and she argues that it is in this doubled language that nineteenth-century fiction must be read.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Virginia Press
• Release date: Jan 11, 2016
• ISBN: 9780813937335

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University of Virginia Press

© 2015 by the Rector and Visitors of the University of Virginia

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Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

First published 2015

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Bonaparte, Felicia.

The poetics of poesis : the making of nineteenth-century English fiction / Felicia Bonaparte.

pages cm

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-8139-3732-8 (cloth : acid-free paper)—ISBN 978-0-8139-3733-5 (e-book)

1. English fiction—19th century—History and criticism. I. Title.

PR861.B596 2015

823'.809—dc23

2015004402

Cover art: Poesis, designed by William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, ca. 1880; manufactured by the Royal School of Art Needlework, London, wool and cotton, 204.0 × 103.7 cm. (National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne; purchased through the Art Foundation of Victoria with the assistance of Miss Flora MacDonald Anderson and Mrs. Ethel Elizabeth Ogilvy Lumsden, Founder Benefactors, 1992)

For Elizabeth and Jerome Hamilton Buckley,

In loving memory of dear friends

Contents

Acknowledgments

A Note on Documentation

Introduction

The Language of Nineteenth-Century Fiction

Part I. Chaos Is Come Again

Chapter 1. The Crisis in Religion

Chapter 2. The Crisis of Empiricism

Chapter 3. The Crisis in Reason

Part II. Something We Must Believe In and Do

Chapter 4. Images of Dissolution

Chapter 5. The Need to Reconceive the World

Chapter 6. The Quest for a New Religion

Part III. The Making of a New Poetic

Chapter 7. Imagination and the Ideal

Chapter 8. Art as Poesis

Chapter 9. The Idealistic in the Real

Part IV. The Inexpressible Must Be Expressed

Chapter 10. The Making of the Novel

Chapter 11. The Making of the Language of Symbols

Chapter 12. The Symbolic Language of Myth

Conclusion

The End of Poesis

Selected Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

It gives me great pleasure to acknowledge my deep gratitude to the Guggenheim Foundation and to the Bunting Institute at Harvard University for a year of thought and research that gave me the chance to begin exploring the questions that finally led to this study. I am deeply grateful as well to the City College of New York for a sabbatical leave that allowed me to pursue the possibilities and currents of thought these questions raised. And I am profoundly indebted to Dean James Watts and Dean Fred Reynolds at CCNY for their very generous help when I was ready to begin writing. Finally, I wish to thank Tom Harford, now the Dean of Students in the School of General Studies at Columbia University, for his invaluable assistance while still associated with CCNY.

In addition I want to express my most sincere appreciation to the three readers who read my manuscript for the University of Virginia Press for their many valuable suggestions as well as to everyone at the Press and everyone affiliated with it: Ellen Satrom, Colleen Romick Clark, Stephanie Lovegrove, Martin White, Martha Farlow, Raennah Mitchell, and most especially Cathie Brettschneider, who, as the Humanities Editor, offered guidance and advice in more ways than I can count.

A Note on Documentation

Because I depend on a great many works to substantiate my argument and as many to illustrate how that argument is used in particular works of literature, citations to specific texts from the primary materials would not only clutter the pages, they would be pointless in most cases, some of these works being hard to find and others so popular that few readers have the same edition of them. Only in special cases, therefore, will I include specific editions of these works in my bibliography. Otherwise, relevant information (titles and sections being referred to) will appear in the text itself. Dates (of publications generally but at times of dissemination) will be included in first references.

Many of the works I refer to were written in languages other than English and, although the many translations I have read over the years have surely left echoes in my memory, unless I cite a specific translator, the translation is my own.

Since I touch on a great many subjects and discuss many primary works, there is almost no end, theoretically, to relevant secondary studies. To limit the length of my bibliography, I have had to focus chiefly on the works I use specifically rather than the many studies that have informed my view of this era, of its authors, and its concerns. I am, however, profoundly grateful to many who are not listed here, and, although in this small way, want to acknowledge my debt for the knowledge and enlightenment they have provided.

Introduction

The Language of Nineteenth-Century Fiction

In a passage rarely noted in discussions of Middlemarch (1871–72), Ladislaw, a student of art, tells Dorothea, when she confesses that she has no artistic sense, that an appreciation of art is something that requires knowledge, knowledge that has to be acquired, for art, he continues, is an old language made up of many different threads, and these are often artificial. Only when these threads are recognized, when that language is deciphered, can a work of art begin to be rightly understood.

Eliot’s view is not unique. Writers of the nineteenth century often speak of the language of art. It has struck me, remarks Anna Brownell Jameson in the introductory chapter of Legends of the Monastic Orders as Represented in the Fine Arts (1850) as she writes of depictions of saints, that such pictures would make more sense if we regarded them as we do books whose meaning makes itself known to us only if we take pains to read them in the language in which they are written. It is critical to appreciate Anna Jameson’s role in this century, for it speaks to the importance of symbolic representation. Little is known of her today, and, if she is mentioned at all, it is usually in connection with John Ruskin’s remark in Praeterita: Outline of Scenes and Thoughts Perhaps Worthy of Memory in My Past Life (1885–89) that she has neither knowledge nor instinct for the understanding of painting (vol. 2, chap. 7). Ruskin is right but also wrong, for while she does not have Ruskin’s eye or his philosophical vision, she does have a substantial knowledge of medieval and Renaissance art, and recognizing the great passion in her century for these periods, she is eager to record and explain the imagery that makes their iconographic language. Her popularity—to which the sales of her many books attest, as do their repeated reprintings—helped to educate her readers in the history of painting and its many religious symbols and, in the process, helped them realize that such symbolic representation was or could be the concrete form in which ideas expressed themselves.

The subject of language is central in Middlemarch and it surfaces again when Dorothea and Casaubon, on their honeymoon in Rome, run into Ladislaw, who brings them to the studio of Adolf Naumann. Having, in his youthful enthusiasm for all forms of artistic expression, shifted from the writing of verse to the painting of canvases, Ladislaw is a student of Naumann’s and, at this point in the narrative, is designing a work in which he means to make Marlowe’s Tamburlaine stand for the world’s physical history. It is a mythical interpretation, he explains to his two charges. Casaubon, although engaged in writing his famous Key to All Mythologies, has no idea what a myth is in Eliot’s concept of that term and fails entirely in consequence to comprehend that Ladislaw is describing what the narrator, jumping in, calls symbolism. But Dorothea grasps it immediately. What a difficult kind of shorthand! she says, turning to her husband. It would require, she continues, since she takes Casaubon to be the repository of all learning, all your knowledge to be able to read it (chap. 22).

I will be turning to Eliot’s novel on many occasions for my examples. It encapsulates the age. Leo Tolstoy seems to have thought so, for a very similar scene, one perhaps inspired by Middlemarch, for Tolstoy admired Eliot’s work, is to be found in Anna Karenina when Vronsky’s friend Golenishchev brings the novel’s central couple to the studio of Mikhailov to see a painting that depicts Jesus standing before Pilate (pt. 5, chap. 11). As Mikhailov explains himself, these figures are intended to stand as symbols that make the theme of the painting, one representing the way of the world, the other suggesting the way of God. Pilate, delivering his verdict, speaks as a man of the world only, concerned with what this conflict means to the empire whose ends he serves, thinking not of right and wrong but of practical considerations. For Jesus, however, there is no choice. He can only speak for God. The circumstances facing the characters, most especially the heroine, are very different in the action, yet it is between these options that each of them is asked to choose. That choice is still available to them at this juncture in the narrative but only if they learn to read the world and themselves in the right way, which, in fact, they never do, bringing about the tragic end. This scene, moreover, is, like Eliot’s, critical not just to the theme but to Tolstoy’s artistic design. Even as it develops the argument, it is so structured, set apart beyond the necessities of the plot, to illustrate the means through which the work of art is speaking to us, a reflexive lesson, therefore, to the reader on how to read.

Many critics over the years—George P. Landow, Barry Qualls, Lynda McNeil, Harish Raizada, Edwin M. Eigner, Sheryl Craig, Frema Ila Goody, Jean Brooks, Charles Feidelson Jr., William M. Burgan, Chris Brooks, and Brian Swann, to name just a handful—have noted, in larger and smaller areas in the fiction of this period, departures from verisimilitude, ways in which a part of a narrative, a layer, a character, an image, was designed for some other end. Their work has been crucially significant not only in the understanding it has made possible of the novels on which they have specifically commented but in raising foundational questions about our concept of the genre as it was practiced in this century. And yet it has, with few exceptions, been universally assumed that realism was and was meant to be the norm of the nineteenth-century novel. I put realism in quotation marks to distinguish the idea of a particular form of fiction that comes with its own theoretic viewpoint and its own philosophic base from the ordinary word whose only intention is to say that something seems to be true to life, whatever might be meant by those words. Ian Watt’s title The Rise of the Novel was clearly chosen to suggest not only that the English novel evolved through most of the eighteenth century to create what we call realism but that, having begun its rise, realism would continue in the centuries that followed to become the dominant paradigm. This is so much what M. H. Abrams holds to be nineteenth-century fiction that, taking a shortcut through its complexities in his Glossary of Literary Terms, he defines realism by calling it the form of the fiction of this age. The very idea of the genre has struck us as realistic by nature. How else could it differ from other narratives like the epic, ballad, romance? Mikhail Bakhtin goes as far as to say, in his The Epic and the Novel: Towards a Methodology for the Study of the Novel, that the novel is not and should not be poetic.

So strong a grip has this idea had on the mind of the twentieth century and still, on the whole, on the twenty-first, that all too often when something disputes the hypothesis of realism, it is rarely seen as a challenge to the hypothesis itself but as an error in the artist’s execution of his purpose. Thus, in Realism, Representation, and the Arts in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Alison Ruth Byerly notes that nineteenth-century narratives habitually represent visual arts in ways that threaten realism but does not conclude that we might need therefore to reexamine our premises, only that, on the contrary, those who were writing such narratives did not realize that they were putting realism at risk. It is on this basis that F. R. Leavis suggested in The Great Tradition that what he called the Jewish half of George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda (1876) should be entirely done away with so as to produce the novel he felt Eliot really had in mind. And whenever it has become overwhelmingly obvious that some individual work cannot be cataloged under realism, it has been unceremoniously moved to a totally different period. Noting unrealistic elements in the novels of Thomas Hardy and citing Hardy’s own opinion, reported by Florence Emily Hardy, that ‘realism’ is not art (The Early Life, chap. 18), rather than redefining the form to accommodate this fact and the century itself to accommodate this idea—for if it happens in this century it is surely an idea that has its foundations in its thought—Peter Widdowson plucks Hardy out of the Victorian period to relocate him in the postmodern.

It goes without saying that realism is a term beleaguered by difficulties, many of which must have been obvious, despite the doubts of later readers, to Erich Auerbach himself in his seminal Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature and which have been, in recent years, commented on increasingly, as in Gunter Gebauer’s and Christoph Wulf’s Mimesis: Culture-Society-Art. But however it is defined, this is neither the primary end nor the chief form of this century’s fiction. The view that the nineteenth-century novel was and wished to be realistic has less to do with the form of that fiction and far more with our own assumptions. We tend to read backward, from the perspective of our own conclusions and premises, instead of forward and in the currents that were shaping this century’s thought. And prone, for much of the twentieth century, to think in realistic terms, and disinclined, in a current that started as early as the eighteenth century (though interrupted in the nineteenth), toward the symbolic and the mythical, we often see not what is there but what we are prepared to look for: the social and psychological questions that we tend to focus on and the characters and events in which we are primarily interested. To contemporary minds, myth has had little appeal, in any case. To many it has seemed regressive, anti-modern, opposed to progress, and not only because we associate it with a form of thought in antiquity, but because we usually think of it as something that does not refer to real things, to those social, economic, political, and psychological facts we take to be the forces that actually shape life and events. This is Mary Cicora’s premise in Mythology as Metaphor, a work that in consequence concludes that Richard Wagner was a reactionary, although we know from all he wrote, said, and did that he was not, the very opposite in fact, taking such an active part in the Dresden Revolution of 1849 that he had to flee the country to avoid being arrested, a warrant having been issued to seize him.

As I hope to show in due course, the concept of myth in the nineteenth century was something altogether different from what we take it to be today. No one thought it regressive then. On the contrary, it was the means of reconceiving a shattered world. What was regressive to those who embraced it was allowing empiricism to set limits to human thought.

And in art it was with empiricism that realism was synonymous. The Schlegel brothers, Friedrich especially—and this is the brother I shall mean when I use the surname alone—feared that the habit of reading realism, a form he attacks particularly as it had developed in England, would make it impossible for readers to comprehend the kind of literature he was urging his age to create. Schlegel’s views are of special importance. It would be an obvious exaggeration to suggest that a single mind could shape the thought of a whole century. Yet it is tempting to make this claim on behalf of Friedrich Schlegel who, at the age of twenty-six, founded, with his brother August Wilhelm, the seminal journal the Athenaeum (1798–1800), on whose pages are to be found most of the essential ideas we see developing in this era and whose influence was felt in most nations in the West, from Russia through Europe and into America, across what we might want to call, if we wanted to map these ideas, the broad as well as the long nineteenth century. His name belongs with Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Freud, and a number of others who, either because they were the first to speak for the vision of their age, providing for it a name and a logic, or because they conceived that vision, were the arbiters of their times. As Robert Lomas calls Nikola Tesla the man who invented the twentieth century, Schlegel might well be considered the man who invented the nineteenth.

In her Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry, Isobel Armstrong suggests that the language of English poetry rests in this period on the legacy bequeathed to the age by the English Romantics. But certain aspects of this language, as well as many of the grounds on which the whole of it relies, come ultimately from ideas first conceived by the German Romantics, and these ideas—especially as they have been explored in such remarkable studies as Ernst Behler’s German Romantic Literary Theory (one of the most exceptional works written on this, or any, subject, and one to which I am deeply indebted), Oskar Walzel’s German Romanticism, Hans Eichner’s Friedrich Schlegel, René Wellek’s Confrontations, M. H. Abrams’s The Mirror and the Lamp as well as Natural Supernaturalism, and James Engell’s The Creative Imagination—were as critical in this century to the novel as to poetry. And here I should stress what I hope will be implicitly clear throughout this study, that what became the English novel was, in one way or another, the essence of the fictional form to which, through most of the nineteenth century and for many well beyond despite some notable exceptions, a good deal of the West was committed, so that English as I use it is an adjective intended to suggest a national tie but far more an artistic concept.

It is, however, patently obvious that this Romantic idea of fiction is entirely incompatible not by any means with the real but with the philosophic grounds that are the basis of realism. In his review of Wilhelm Meister (1795–96), included in 1798 in volume 1 of the Athenaeum, Schlegel fears that the fiction written in England in the eighteenth century has made realism so popular throughout most of the Western world that readers have been taught to look for meaning in the social level, in the persons and the incidents, even in works not conceived in its idiom, so that they often miss the ideas that these works are designed to embody as their true and ultimate end.

The eye, writes Carlyle in Past and Present (1843), addressing himself to this same problem, sees only through the lens it brings. I shall often be turning to Carlyle to cite examples of what the century was thinking not because he says it better and with a clearer understanding of the grounds of his opinions, although he certainly does that, but because he is typical. Some would argue that he is typical chiefly of the Germanic perspective, which is undoubtedly the case, but he is also characteristic of the perspective of his time, since the age itself is Germanic, and partly so because of Carlyle. Eliot was right when, in Thomas Carlyle (1855), the essay in which she paid tribute to him, she wrote that it was an idle question to ask whether his books will be read a century hence: if they were all burnt as the grandest of Suttees on his funeral pile, it would be only like cutting down an oak after its acorns have sown a forest.

Writers of the nineteenth century never tire of reminding us of the importance of allowing the writer to speak to us in his own tongue. It is not only the privilege, remarks Bulwer of an artist in his Note to the Present Edition of Devereaux (1852)—and Bulwer is so representative of the period that G. K. Chesterton was convinced in The Victorian Age in Literature (1913) that we could not have the Victorian Age without him (chap. 2)—but his duty to place the spectator in that point of view from which he needs to consider the canvas. And the nineteenth-century novelist rarely places us in realism. When Eliot opens Felix Holt by re-creating Dante’s descent into the depth of the Inferno, she is obviously not telling us that this is the setting of her tale. Rather, she is introducing us, and tells us so as this passage ends, to a narrative for which Dante’s poem is the parable.

A Study in Scarlet (1887) highlights this problem by turning it into a literal puzzle when Scotland Yard and Sherlock Holmes, making his debut appearance here, disagree on how to read the one and only clue they have to an especially gruesome murder: the letters RACHE scrawled across an old yellow wall. The Inspector from Scotland Yard assumes these letters were meant to spell Rachel, through which the victim had intended to identify his murderer, but he is having a hard time finding a Rachel the victim knew. Sherlock Holmes, however, points out that while this may be how it appears when the letters are read in English, in German they spell the word for Revenge (chap. 3). Which one is right is a critical question: one points to a possible suspect, the other points rather to a motive. Clearly, Arthur Conan Doyle is stressing the fact that detective work is not just a matter of finding clues but of interpreting them correctly, and that correct interpretation hinges on the detective’s ability to recognize and read their language.

One of the reasons it has been so easy to assume this realism is that nineteenth-century novelists were themselves, as one of their ends, concerned with representing the real, and I use this term to refer to empirical reality, as novelists often did themselves. It was a critical part of their fiction. The empiricism that spurred rapid advances not only in science but in its underlying notion that a faithful observation of phenomenal reality and the hypotheses based on it would produce a knowledge and truth that could explain the empirical world had obvious implications to literature. The seventeenth chapter of Adam Bede (1859), one of innumerable essays, often on the subject of art, we find included in fictional narratives, incorporates this point in part. But the real was never more than half the fiction in this century. Writing in 1863 in On Certain Principles of Art in Works of Imagination in his volume Caxtoniana: A Series of Essays on Life, Literature, and Manners, Bulwer calls the characteristic form of fiction of his time the novel of the double plot. It is a work designed to satisfy, in its literal narrative, the popular interest in character and incident, but one carrying in its interior a symbolical signification that bears the meaning of the work. To read the one without the other is not only to overlook a large part of every novel but often to miss the point of the whole and therefore to misread its parts.

Bulwer is right, as we shall see. And the symbols of which he speaks, while there is always a large number created by individual writers and even for individual works turn out to be a public stockpile, one not even unique to fiction or to literature or to art, but the language of the age, of the nineteenth-century mind. As Bulwer’s Margrave in A Strange Story (1861–62) believes that it is the language of symbol that is the universal language (chap. 50), so this symbolism was for most simply the language in which they thought.

By speaking of a single idiom that cuts across the entire century, I do not mean to erase the distinction between the Romantics and the Victorians, between one decade and the next, between one writer and another. A. O. Lovejoy has rightly noted in his chapter on Romanticism in Essays in the History of Ideas that anyone looking to the details of particular components is sure to find dissimilarities so important as to make him cautious about generalizations. The Romantic and the Victorian are, moreover, among those periods that demand to be differentiated in a large number of ways, as Kiely, Kelly, and others have argued. The novel itself in these two periods changes in many ways and visibly. I will pause on some of these changes but, precisely as J. Hillis Miller writes in his study of Charles Dickens that what he hopes to identify is not the particular character of any one specific work but the spirit that persists through them all as part of the vision that inspires Dickens throughout, however that may evolve with time, so do we, I will suggest here, find a conceptual core in this century that, whatever use is made of its ideas at different times and by different individuals, remains at the heart of its fiction.

Although it constantly grows and changes, much as any language does, as its speakers add, subtract, learn from each other, and address the many changes of their time, there is, again as in most languages, a nucleus and a continuity that allows us to recognize it as a single evolving tongue. In some sense it is thus in place in its very earliest fiction and at the very end of the age. Virtually without exception (although in different concentrations and with different ends in view), every novelist draws on this language. This does not, however, mean that everyone is in agreement, any more than any group speaking English, French, or German can be assumed to be in agreement simply because they share a language. Some foundational ideas are, it is true, encoded in languages, developing as languages do within specific conceptual worlds. As realism entails empiricism and all that follows in its wake, this language that speaks in mythical symbolism makes it possible to refer to realities that lie beyond mere atoms and molecules, to a universe of ideas that are not bound to matter and fact. What this language does not do is require those who use it to wed themselves to a point of view. Some use it to agree with its premises, some to disagree or reject them, some in earnest, some ironically. Some even argue specifically against the continued use of this language. But what is striking is that all, even those who want to supplant it, as Hardy does in The Well-Beloved (1892, 1897), to which I will turn in the final chapter, feel they must make their case in its idiom.

This language is complex and extensive, as it obviously had to be to serve such an encompassing purpose for so many and so long. It has a substantial vocabulary. Every vital idea and concern, every condition and circumstance that occupied the nineteenth century can be and often is figured in it, and the images that encapsulate large and difficult ideas often engender subsidiary images which sometimes in turn engender others, so that its lexicon of symbols not only is inclusive and vast but offers, to continue the parallel to the forms of natural languages, etymologies and root systems. Further, because its symbols are seldom used one at a time but are generally connected each to many of the others, this language needs and has a syntax through which images are related to make phrases and sentences, assertions, denials, conditions, questions. And if I can invoke this term in its broadest possible sense, it has an intricate grammar as well, in the logic that ties together all of these parts in a single argument that constitutes the grounding structure of a manner of thought and speech.

It is often the case in a novel that a large number of images are so distributed in a narrative as to carry its ideas as they develop through its theme. In such cases, any image will take a reader through the argument. The image of the horse, for instance, a simple one among many others (bodies of water and weaving are two), takes us through the length of Middlemarch, pinpointing the central themes and the roles of the central characters. From Dorothea’s love of riding but decision to renounce it in a puritanical spirit that demonstrates a religious soul that can lead to some excess but will always choose the ideal; to Rosamond, who is often found attired in her riding habit and prominently displaying her crop, significantly called her whip in the novel to suggest a Darwinian nature that, whoever ends up losing, assures us Rosamond will win, winning being in fact her surname, Vincy, from vincere, Latin for conquer; to her brother, who gambles on horses, a venture in which he always loses, only, however, to redeem himself when he rushes in to defend a cluster of men attacked by wagoners because they were working on the railroad, often called the iron horse, and so proves that he understands the good the railroad will bring to England when it binds its parts together into a single unified nation; on to Lydgate, who is sure Mammon will never put a bit in his mouth and yet ends, having tied himself to Rosamond not Dorothea, the rose of the world not the gift of God, so shackled to Mammon that he is forced to give up his research and settle in a lucrative practice that will enable him to meet Rosamond’s worldly aspirations; and concluding with Ladislaw, the modern embodiment of Ladislaus, the king of Hungary who became the saint of the ideals of chivalry, from the French for horse, cheval, and who, identified with Pegasus, the mythic horse whose hoof produced, striking the earth, the fountain of poetry, is the poet of the novel, a poet in the Shelleyan sense (and indeed he is called a Shelley) and never more so than when he becomes, literalizing the ringing words at the end of Shelley’s essay A Defence of Poetry (published in 1840 but written some twenty years earlier), an actual legislator of the world, a member of the English Parliament whose vote in favor of the Reform Bill will help England, which is now in the middle of its march, forward into historical progress.

It is, or it should be, no surprise that symbolism came to be the language of nineteenth-century thought. Looking at this language carefully and understanding both its nature and the basis on which it was built, we can see that it was forged out of, as well as to address, that clash of ideas that marked the century, in particular those ideas that made the great crises of its age. These were the crises that inspired the Schlegel brothers and their circle to find ways to reconceive what they saw as a shattered world. England was distressed by them too. In them and in their myriad consequences they saw the forces that had created not only the world they inhabited but the entire modern age, from its beginnings, which they charted, to its future, which they foresaw. All other questions—social, political, economic, scientific, demographic, technological, psychological, and historical, along with all other concrete matters demanding attention in this age—were by no means unimportant. But these were understood to be manifestations of these crises. Of the two schools of philosophy John Stuart Mill in his Autobiography (1873) calls Intuition and Experience (sec. 7), namely idealism and empiricism, most of the time the nineteenth century chose Intuition as its ground. As John Theodore Merz remarks in his impressive four-volume study A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century (1904–12)—impressive and extremely enlightening as to the views of the nineteenth century since Merz is still a part of this era, having been born in 1840, but looking at it as a historian writing near the century’s end—they shared his own Hegelian view that thought was in some form or other at the root of everything (vol. 4, pt. 2, chap. 7). And they agreed with Mill’s conclusion that whichever they chose of the two, Intuition or Experience, was not an academic matter, not mere abstract speculation. It had far-reaching practical consequences and lay at the very foundation of all the greatest differences of practical opinion (sec. 7). What we believe is what we think, what we think is how we act, how we act is what we accomplish. Thus ideas make the world. Concluding The French Revolution, A History (1837), Thomas Carlyle appeals to the reader: Hast thou considered, he inquires, how Thought is stronger than Artillery-parks, . . . writes and unwrites Acts of Parliament, removes mountains, models the World like soft clay? (chap. 3.7.7). Later, the formula would be reversed. In the wake of Marx and Freud, both the carriers of ideas anchored largely in David Hume, the twentieth century and twenty-first came to believe that most ideas do not create the conditions we live in but are rather the products of them, our conceptions of truth and falsehood, good and evil, right and wrong being in large measure determined by social, political, economic as well as psychological forces. The ideas that came to be associated with both these figures had already made an appearance early in the nineteenth century, these figures being themselves of this era: Freud born in 1856, barely past the century’s midpoint, and Marx even earlier, in 1818, and living in London through most of the years in which he wrote and published his works. Many in England were aware, whether or not they knew their names, of the ideas attached to them, for these had long been in the air before they were written on their pages. There is, however, a very good reason that Marx and Freud are seen as thinkers belonging to the twentieth century. The nineteenth had a different vision of how reality was constructed. Speaking of the violent changes in England in the 1830s, Sidonia, thus, in Benjamin Disraeli’s Coningsby; or, The New Generation, written in 1844, before the Communist Manifesto (1848) and long before Das Kapital (1868), says, as though he were answering Marx, that he thinks there is no error so vulgar as to believe that revolutions are occasioned by economical causes. The cause was religious not physical (chap. 13), ideas rather than conditions.

To say that these crises and their consequences and questions concerning how to address them were the chief topic of the period is, in one sense, absurdly reductive. But these crises, we must remember, were not only fundamental to the premises of the age, not only touched in their consequences every area of existence, they were the zeitgeist of the period, essential to its basic thought. Writing in and about the century in The Age and Its Architects: Ten Chapters on the English People in Relation to the Times (1852), Edwin Paxton Hood explains in his very opening pages how he thinks ideas work to shape the idiom of an age: The whole mind of the world receives the impression of the new idea, the new faith; it imprints itself upon domestic institutions; it infuses itself into literature; it remoulds and reconstructs political forms and frames; the religious life itself is touched, and in some measure controlled by it. It is not always easy to discover when the new age is born; it is not easy to tell when the old age expires; it is perhaps wrong in philosophy to attempt to cut off any period of time from its preceding and subsequent times by distinct lines; but it is most easy to discern a new position.

We have not perhaps sufficiently thought of nineteenth-century England as a nation of ideas, but David Thomson is certainly right when he insists, in his excellent study England in the Nineteenth Century: 1815–1914 (written for a general audience but grounded in solid scholarly judgment) that ideas in this century were its most important commodity. Even more than its leadership in the industrial revolution, and therefore in many material ways that were to create the modern era, England’s ability to absorb ideas from around the world and particularly from Europe, and to generate them itself, made it an intellectual center as much as a technological one (p. 28).

The ideas that make the world make the world of art as well. As Robert Motherwell once suggested in a remark to the New York Times (June 19, 1977), every "intelligent painter carries the whole culture of modern painting in his head. It is his real subject, of which anything he paints is both a homage and a critique, and everything he says a gloss. If this is true even for artists who carry their cultures unawares and only implicitly in their work, as Motherwell believes it is, it is profoundly more true of the novelist writing in the nineteenth century who, with very rare exceptions and exceptions only in part, picks up his pen precisely because he has set out to explore these ideas. The very concept of art in this century entails a philosophic purpose. Art, as John Holloway suggests, speculates and makes arguments, genuine philosophic arguments. John Morley, a figure of some importance in the thought of the nineteenth century, seems perhaps a little naive but he does not mean it naively when, expressing the view of his era, he remarks in his study Byron (1870) that art is only the transformation into ideal and imaginative shapes of a predominant system and philosophy of life."

Morley is using the word ideal to mean, as it usually does in this century, not necessarily something perfect but as the adjective of idea, a mental conception, as Ruskin explains it in Modern Painters (1843–60), as opposed to something material. Yet sometimes it does mean perfect as well, and it is not always clear what a particular user intends. This, moreover, is only one of many difficulties that arise in the language of the century with regard to things ideal. The vocabulary of terms that refer to things conceptual can be confusing and misleading when a term is tied to one meaning, fancy, for instance, as we shall see, distinguished by Coleridge from imagination but often meant as imagination in several writers including Dickens. In addition, to us especially, trained as our ears are to think in terms more empirical than not, there are a number of words that seem—words such as transcendent, noumenal, immaterial, and infinite—vague and fuzzy, with no referent, but which were to the nineteenth century as specific and meaningful as technical terms have become to us.

We have more readily recognized a genuine interest in ideas in the era’s non-fiction prose, since it seems by its very nature more a medium of discussion, and even in the era’s poetry. But seeing itself as, and actually being, the genre that spoke for the age most centrally, fiction could hardly do any less. Holloway is right again when, in The Victorian Sage, he speaks of these novelists—facing a world of outmoded creeds and feeling the need to assume the role of the prophet and the sage—as every bit as well equipped as the discursive essayist to mediate a view of life, the difference being that, instead of the illustrative examples found in historical prose and essays, the novel is illustrative of ideas through its characters and incidents and often even through its rhetoric (pp. 2, 12–13). Nineteenth-century novelists tell us precisely the same thing on the pages of their fictions. Charles Reade, for instance, expresses only derision and contempt for those who advise the would-be novelist to look into his heart for his subject. Including, in the novel’s sixth chapter, another of the essays on art we find in nineteenth-century fiction, he repeats this advice with disdain in The Cloister and the Hearth; or, Maid, Wife, and Widow; A Matter-of-Fact Romance (1861): ‘Look into your own heart and write!’ said Herr Cant; and earth’s cuckoos echoed the cry. Look into the Rhine where it is deepest, and the Thames where it is thickest, and paint the bottom. Lower a bucket into a well of self-deception, and what comes up must be immortal truth, mustn’t it? Now, in the first place, no son of Adam ever reads his own heart at all, except by the habit acquired, and the light gained, from some years’ perusal of other hearts; and even then, with his acquired sagacity and reflected light, he can but spell and decipher his own heart, not read it fluently.

One of the reasons this essay is typical of the many we find incorporated in the nineteenth-century novel is that, commenting on its own making, it engages us in a discussion of the form and content of art. Such essays have often seemed to us clumsy and intrusive interruptions in the progress of a narrative, yet nothing is more convincing proof that the novel’s ultimate end is not just the characters and the action but the ideas these convey than the fact that shifts of this kind that take us from narrative to discourse are not disturbances at all but integral parts of the purpose, another way to make the point that is being made throughout. The same is true of the prefaces so many novelists write in this century—under many different names: Preface, Prologue, Prelude, and the like, sometimes under no name at all, merely as opening paragraphs before the novel turns to the action—not as introductions merely but as parts of the novels themselves. Bulwer can hardly write without one. In A Strange Story, for example, we open on a disquisition on the subject of materialism, metaphysics, and the occult so as to be prepared philosophically for a narrative in which these make both the theme and the action.

This notion that art must be philosophic and philosophic in certain ways is the fundamental premise of this century’s view of fiction. That English novelists of this century worked with a conscious position on art has not generally been our assumption. Henry James, by birth of this era but too modern to grasp its language—or at least to admit to grasping it, for he did seem to understand Eliot’s symbolism in Daniel Deronda well enough to recognize its Diana imagery, as in Gwendolen’s love of archery, and much of its purpose as well, and to use it for his heroine in his Portrait of a Lady (1881), even to naming her Isabel Archer—called the nineteenth-century novel in the Preface to The Tragic Muse (1908), only several novels by name but the lot by implication, merely a loose and baggy monster. It is on this basis he concludes that Victorians had no art of fiction, no sense of what a novel was, no theoretical sense of the form. Prior to Walter Besant’s lecture at the Royal Institution in April of 1884, the English novel had seemed to him "not what the French call discutable": it had no air of having a theory, a conviction, a consciousness of itself . . . the expression of an artistic faith. It was naïf.

Although he chooses the word artistic, what James is speaking of is an aesthetic, the kind that was commonly found in France, an idea, as we shall see, that was grounded in empiricism, one that in consequence, regardless of how distant from its root and how wide a compass it claimed, remained tethered to the senses. Devoted to empiricism from the moment they read John Locke, a prey to the sensationalism of Condillac and his school, as Benedetto Croce writes in his Aesthetics as the Science of Expression and General Linguistic (1902), the French had developed a concept of art that came to be in the nineteenth century not only different from that of England but wholly antithetical to it. Strictly speaking, then, it is true, England did not have an aesthetic, not because it was naïf, nor, as Walter M. Kendrick has it in his Balzac and British Realism: Mid-Victorian Theories of the Novel, because it was too moralistic, too Francophobic, to appreciate the ideas of the French, but, for the simplest of all reasons, which is that it did not want one. What it did have was a poetic, a concept of art, as I hope to demonstrate, that encompassed the whole of the universe in its definition of art and understood the end of art to be the creation of a new world. This is by far the favored concept in writings on art in England and Germany and much of the United States, and while it is called by many names, even on occasion aesthetics, it is always tied to poesis, a word that, from the Greek for making, is pivotal to the very foundations in which this notion of art is grounded. Those accustomed to the French have often failed, as did Henry James, to recognize that the German and English is a concept of art as well, just as Voltaire failed to recognize Shakespeare, because he did not choose to comply with the Aristotelian principles so dear to the hearts of the great French dramatists, as a genius in his own right. But, as Johann Gottfried Herder points out in his remarkable study of Shakespeare (1773), the only right way to estimate Shakespeare is to allow him to create dramatic forms that suit his ideas. English fiction too had ideas, and, in a conception