Essays in Criticism

Richards,, Bernard

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz020pmid: N/A

THE POPULAR VIEW OF GEORGE ELIOT is that she was a highly serious woman who wrote highly serious novels. She was at the other end of the spectrum from those ‘lady novelists’ whose works she called ‘silly’.1 Her personal life was legendary for its seriousness: people went towards her London house, The Priory, for her Sunday afternoon salons as if approaching a religious conventicle. The brooding face in the portraits intensifies the impression of seriousness, solemnity even. The best-known anecdote about her, talking to F. W. H. Myers in the Fellows’ Garden of Trinity College, Cambridge, one rainy evening, encapsulates the popular view: She, stirred somewhat beyond her wont, and taking as her text the three words which have been used so often as the inspiring trumpet-calls of men, – the words, God, Immortality, Duty, – pronounced, with terrible earnestness, how inconceivable was the first, how unbelievable the second, and yet how peremptory and absolute the third. Never, perhaps, have sterner accents affirmed the sovereignty of impersonal and unrecompensing Law. I listened, and night fell; her grave, majestic countenance turned towards me like a sibyl’s in the gloom; it was as though she withdrew from my grasp, one by one, the two scrolls of promise, and left me the third scroll only, awful with inevitable fates. And when we stood at length and parted, amid that columnar circuit of the forest-trees, beneath the last twilight of starless skies, I seemed to be gazing, like Titus at Jerusalem, on vacant seats and empty halls, – on a sanctuary with no Presence to hallow it, and heaven left lonely of a God.2 Celebrated passages from the novels reinforce the general impression that Eliot was serious and sage-like. Virginia Woolf famously said that ‘the movement of her mind was too slow and cumbersome for comedy’. In fact, there is plenty of evidence in Eliot’s fiction, essays, and letters that she had a comic sense. Not a light sense, necessarily, but a sense of humour for all that. What has blinded many readers to the comedy is that Eliot’s view of human life could be said to be tragic. She is interested in the ramifications of fate and determinism, and in macrocosmic visions of the kind imagined by Wordsworth in The Prelude, which Eliot quotes as the epigraph to book 8, chapter 59 of Daniel Deronda (1876): ‘…the widely scattered wreck sublime / Of vanished nations’.3 The comic novel suggests that society is somehow static: after a diversion, everything can be returned to more or less where it was at the beginning. In the tragic novel, everything melts beneath our feet, even the structures of society. Eliot’s characters often seem to have some freedom of choice, but at the same time they are subject to large, impersonal pressures, many of which have their origins in a history which was unfolding before they were born. She recommends stoic endurance, persistence, and day-by-day courage. She endorses a species of low-key heroism. She does not present the tragedy of sudden and violent eruption, and she does not deal with grand ritual sacrifice, but there is a religious dimension to her work which accords with the overlying structures of tragedy. However, she also challenges the grandiose dramas of classical tragedy, a challenge that can take her in the direction of subversion and comedy. The fact that she does not rely on Christian consolations intensifies the tragic sense. I have often been puzzled to explain the term ‘tragi-comedy’.4 Espousing a philosophical scheme which is tragic, or at the very least grave, does not prevent an individual from being amused or amusing on a day-to-day basis. As Dr Johnson’s friend Oliver Edwards said of his own attempts to act the philosopher, ‘cheerfulness was always breaking in’.5 Often, though, comedy has a hard job integrating itself with tragic vision, unless it is a curious form of black comedy, as in King Lear. A representative passage, bringing out central aspects of Eliot’s tone, is in The Mill on the Floss (1860): In writing the history of unfashionable families, one is apt to fall into a tone of emphasis which is very far from being the tone of good society, where principles and beliefs are not only of an extremely moderate kind, but are always presupposed, no subjects being eligible but such as can be touched with a light and graceful irony. But then, good society has its claret and its velvet-carpets, its dinner-engagements six weeks deep, its opera and its faëry ball-rooms; rides off its ennui on thoroughbred horses, lounges at the club, has to keep clear of crinoline vortices, gets its science done by Faraday, and its religion by the superior clergy who are to be met in the best houses: how should it have time or need for belief and emphasis? But good society, floated on gossamer wings of light irony, is of very expensive production; requiring nothing less than a wide and arduous national life condensed in unfragrant deafening factories, cramping itself in mines, sweating at furnaces, grinding, hammering, weaving under more or less oppression of carbonic acid – or else, spread over sheepwalks, and scattered in lonely houses and huts on the clayey or chalky corn-lands, where the rainy days look dreary. This wide national life is based entirely on emphasis – the emphasis of want, which urges it into all the activities necessary for the maintenance of good society and light irony: it spends its heavy years often in a chill, uncarpeted fashion, amidst family discord unsoftened by long corridors. Under such circumstances, there are many among its myriads of souls who have absolutely needed an emphatic belief: life in this unpleasurable shape demanding some solution even to unspeculative minds; just as you inquire into the stuffing of your couch when anything galls you there, whereas eider-down and perfect French springs excite no question.6 In a TLS essay on the centenary of Eliot’s birth, Virginia Woolf commented of this passage that ‘There is no trace of humour or insight there, but only the vindictiveness of a grudge which we feel to be personal in its origin’.7 She is not quite right. It is true, as Eliot suggests, that ‘light irony’ is not the best response to the facts of factories and furnaces, the base on which polite society is built; the expression in the passage comes under the heading of ‘heavy irony’, and there is a certain comic satisfaction as telling phrases are accumulated, ‘eider-down and perfect French springs’, etc. Social conditions are manifested not merely as abstracts, but as concrete entities, which take on a foregrounded existence. And this may be regarded as wit in action. Eliot, of course, was not unique in exposing the foundations of polite society. Henry James, staying with Monckton Milnes at Fryston in Yorkshire over Christmas 1878, contrasted the sybaritic life of a country house with a workhouse.8 In a private letter to Grace Norton shortly after his visit he was harsher: ‘Yorkshire smoke-country is very ugly and depressing, both as regards the smirched and blackened landscape and the dense and dusky population, who form a not very attractive element in that great total of labor and poverty on whose enormous base all the luxury and leisure of English country-houses are built up’.9 There is less writing for effect in this passage than in Eliot’s, and it shows the difference between public fictional utterance and private epistolary utterance. Most of Eliot’s letters are serious and earnest, but she once sent a witty note to Herbert Spencer: ‘No credit to me for my virtues as a refrigant. I owe them all to a few lumps of ice which I carried with me from that tremendous glacier of yours’.10 This is concealing some hurt. Spencer was not drawn to Eliot as a marriageable partner, not only because of her ugliness but also because ‘the wit and humour which from time to time gave signs of their presence, were not frequently displayed’.11 Later, some of Lewes’s Bohemian flippancy must have rubbed off on her. Eliot’s first fictional work, Scenes of Clerical Life (1857), is amusing from the start. Its humour belongs to a well-worn tradition stretching back into the eighteenth century. The basic principle is that relatively simple facts and observations are presented in the most elaborate and polysyllabic language possible. Why should this be comic and not merely tedious and pretentious? Because there is something comic in the fact of the gap between simple material and its representation in polysyllabic words. Polysyllabic words are, traditionally, reserved for the abstract and analytical, so that to use them on any other occasion puts an immediate distance between signified and signifier. The reader finds the fact that a simple action can be considered from a great stylistic distance comic, but, in a sense, also laughs at the author for using unnecessarily elaborate language. The mental alertness required of the reader puts him or her into a frame of mind which is closely connected to the mainspring of comedy. Here is the opening of ‘The Sad Fortunes of the Reverend Amos Barton’, describing Shepperton Church: Then inside, what dear old quaintnesses! which I began to look at with delight, even when I was so crude a member of the congregation, that my nurse found it necessary to provide for the reinforcement of my devotional patience by smuggling bread-and-butter into the sacred edifice.12 The ‘crude’ or simple item ‘bread-and-butter’ is somehow smuggled into the long-winded prose, even as it was smuggled into the church, or the ‘sacred edifice’ as Eliot insists on calling it. She continues: But the greatest triumphs of the Shepperton choir were reserved for the Sundays, when the slate announced an ANTHEM, with a dignified abstinence from particularization, both words and music lying far beyond the reach of the most ambitious amateur in the congregation: – an anthem in which the key-bugles always ran away at a great pace, while the bassoon every now and then boomed a flying shot after them. (p. 6) What we feel about the ‘dear, old, brown, crumbling, picturesque inefficiency’ of the High and Dry Tory church is that it was a long time ago, and requires a distancing style to put it at its distance. Everything about Eliot’s writing announces this effect. Everything is oblique. Nothing is direct. So one does not drink one’s tea without milk, one ‘refrains from any lacteal addition’ (p. 8), a man is not a man but ‘the human animal of the male sex’ (p. 12). An inmate of the workhouse is one Poll Fodge, ‘who, in spite of nature’s apparent safe-guards against that contingency, had contributed to the perpetuation of the Fodge characteristics in the person of a small boy’ (p. 21). In other words, she had managed to have a bastard although she was ugly as sin. Mr Fitchett ‘had an irrepressible tendency to drowsiness under spiritual instruction’ (p. 22). In other words, he fell asleep during sermons. The other source of humour in Scenes of Clerical Life is related to distance, also the prominent aspect of the style. Characters’ parochial limitations are seen, as from a great height, by the analytical author, who regards them as curios, specimens, localised grotesques, attached to very material considerations. Here is Mrs Patten: ‘“The cheese-factor used to say my cheese was al’ys to be depended on. I’ve known women … many as are in a bad way”’ (p. 11). In ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love-Story’ Lady Assher demonstrates that excessive attachment to the material is not the exclusive prerogative of lower-class persons. She is a kind of walking ‘Inquire Within’ manual, and her conversation, in the narrator’s words, goes on ‘dribbling like a leaky shower-bath’ (p. 110). She is distanced from the serious and grave narrator, and the fact that her jejune prattle occurs in a chapter opening with a plangent elegiac summary of ‘the great clockwork of nature’ (p. 104) and closing with the ‘unmoved and terrible beauty’ of moonlit Nature, makes her an immediate object of humorous contempt (p. 113). This principle is not unlike one of the mainsprings of Jane Austen’s humour, whereby a species of apartheid separates characters who have an intimate connection with the world of abstract morality from those who are inexorably trapped in the world of material contingency. The characters’ dialect distances them from the standard speech and standard spelling of the author. Again, the gap between the two generates comedy. The use of dialect for comic effect remained with Eliot for the rest of her writing career. Dialect cuts ground from beneath the feet of pretension, and in its terseness and colourfulness is often very funny. Those using dialect don’t necessarily realise that they are being funny, especially in the eyes of more sophisticated and metropolitan folk. Dialect is used to good effect in Eliot’s essay on George Cumming, when she writes that his ‘declamatory flights and historico-prophetical exercitations’ are ‘little better than “clouts o’ cauld parritch”’.13 Like many nineteenth century novelists Eliot wished fundamentally to revise traditional concepts of heroism. The story has been told many times, principally by Mario Praz in The Hero in Eclipse (1956). Such revision could take various forms. It could be a matter of simply ignoring the traditional militaristic and aggressive concepts of physically active heroism, or it could be a matter of subjecting them to a degree of ridicule. This process did not begin in the nineteenth century; it began in the eighteenth century, or even in the seventeenth, when Don Quixote’s views of chivalry are at once endorsed and undermined. As in the battle scenes of Fielding’s Tom Jones, mock-heroic flourishes in Thackeray’s novels, where there is an omnipresent impulse to cut things down to size. In Eliot’s novels mock-heroic is the source of some of her more laboured and ponderous humour. Mock-heroic tends to produce an alienating effect, distancing the civilised and literate reader from the ordinary, unlettered fictional characters. Take this example from Middlemarch (1871-2): The labourers had been driven through the gateway into their hay-field, and Fred had checked his horse, when Hiram Ford, observing himself at a safe challenging distance, turned back and shouted a defiance which he did not know to be Homeric.  ‘Yo’re a coward, yo are. Yo git off your horse, young measter, and I’ll have a round wi’ ye, I wull. Yo daredn’t come on wi’out your hoss an’ whip. I’d soon knock the breath out on ye, I would.’14 There is a kind of mock-heroic in the air when the early attraction Will Ladislaw has for Dorothea is compared to medieval courtly love: But Will wanted to talk with Dorothea alone, and was impatient of slow circumstance. However slight the terrestrial intercourse between Dante and Beatrice or Petrarch and Laura, time changes the proportion of things, and in later days it is preferable to have fewer sonnets and more conversation. (bk. 4, ch. 37, p. 353) In Middlemarch, Eliot is reviewing a bygone age, and can afford to be a little arch and superior in the light of subsequent knowledge and the broader perspectives afforded by the wisdom of hindsight. Mock-heroic effects may also be produced through literary allusion. In ‘Amos Barton’ a hot joint of meat ‘coldly furnished forth the children’s table the next day’. A phrase from the grand world of Hamlet (I. ii. 181) is suddenly transposed into the humdrum life of a provincial parish. There are other rhetorical devices which Eliot shares with comic novelists of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. One of them is syllepsis, which occurs, for instance, when a verb simultaneously operates in an abstract and a concrete sense. There is an example in Silas Marner (1861): ‘But it [Raveloe] was nestled in a snug well-wooded hollow, quite an hour’s journey on horseback from any turnpike, where it was never reached by the vibrations of the coach-horn, or of public opinion’ (in other words, the village is equally removed from the physical vibrations of the coach-horn and the figurative vibrations of opinion).15 In ‘Mr Gilfil’s Love Story’ we find: ‘in the Boeotian Knebley, men’s minds and waggons alike moved in the deepest of ruts’ (ch. 1). Here the word ‘moved’ similarly covers both the abstract operations of mind and the physical operations of vehicles. It is an essentially comic device, since areas of activity which are usually kept apart are brought into sudden collision. There is a kind of implied syllepsis in book 3, chapter 24 of Middlemarch: ‘[Mrs Garth] has been magnanimous enough to renounce all pride in teapots or children’s frilling, and had never poured any pathetic confidences into the ears of her feminine neighbours concerning Mr Garth’s want of prudence’ (p. 238). It is as if the renunciation covers both actual and figurative pouring. In Daniel Deronda Gaskin (now Gascoigne) has ‘taken orders and a diphthong’ (bk. 1, ch. 3, p. 26). There are examples in ‘Silly Novels by Silly Lady Novelists’: ‘her nose and her morals are alike free from any tendency to irregularity’, and ‘We imagine the double-refined accent and protusion of chin which are feebly represented by the italics in this lady’s sentences’.16 Again, a witty conflation of the concrete and the abstract. In chapter 11 of Felix Holt (1866) there is a witty collocation of a literal and figurative sense: ‘If any one had observed that you must draw a line somewhere, Mr Chubb would have concurred at once, and would have given permission to draw it at a radius of two miles from his own tap’.17 There’s another one of these in chapter 15, when ‘pulpits were filled, or rather made vacuous, by men whose privileged education in the ancient centres of instruction issued in twenty minutes’ formal reading of tepid exhortation’ (vol. 2, ch. 15, p. 148). The pulpits are literally filled, but they can only be figuratively vacuous. It is, however, witty to present them as valid alternatives. There’s yet another in chapter 18, when Mrs Muscat, ‘whose youth had been passed in a short-waisted boddice and tight skirt, had never been animated by the struggle for liberty’ (vol. 2, ch. 18, p. 169). Eliot contrives a witty syllepsistic union between mental and physical clothing. Another feature which often gives a humorous touch to her writing, and indeed to everyone’s, is alliteration. In her first important publication, the review (1851) of Robert Mackay’s The Progress of Intellect, there are a couple of nice examples: ‘the streets of Athens were in a state of unmacadamized muddiness’ and ‘crypts of citation and conjecture’.18 There is more of the same in ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ – as one would expect, since it is nothing other than a protracted ‘pshaw’ precipitating itself into posterity: ‘She is the ideal woman in feelings, faculties and flounces’; ‘peculiarly pointed and pungent’; ‘She is a polking polyglot, a Creuzer in crinoline’.19 The central humour in Felix Holt operates in a way similar to that of Middlemarch and of all the other novels dealing with provincial life. The narrative presence is looking back at events from a great distance in both time and space, and although it can be sympathetic and serious it can also be arch and ironical. The actors in the novel are locked into the restrictive conditions of provincialism and the narrow sectarianisms of various denominations. This severely reduces their vision of things; the narrator, by contrast, is writing in a more secular and progressive age and from a metropolitan perspective. This wide difference between points of view produces humour. The tone of many passages is shot through with the superior detachment of the narrator. A typical example is the summary of the Revd John Lingon’s conversation on the comparative flatness of all existing sport compared with cock-fighting, under which Old England had been prosperous and glorious, while, so far as he could see, it gained little by the abolition of a practice which sharpened the faculties of men, gratified the instincts of the fowl, and carried out the designs of heaven in its admirable device of spurs. (vol. 1, ch. 2, p. 30) The Dissenters come in for wry dismissiveness: who were as little moved by doctrinal zeal as their church-going neighbours, and did not feel themselves deficient in religious liberty, inasmuch as they were not hindered from occasionally slumbering in their pews, and were not obliged to go regularly to the weekly prayer-meeting. (vol. 1, ch. 3, p. 43) The narrator’s archness also glances at the lives of ‘silver fork’ persons: Even in that conservatory existence where the fair Camellia is sighed for by the noble young Pineapple, neither of them needing to care about the frost or rain outside, there is a nether apparatus of hot-water pipes liable to cool down on a strike of the gardeners or a scarcity of coal. And the lives we are about to look back upon do not belong to those conservatory species; they are rooted in the common earth, having to endure all the ordinary chances of past and present weather. As to the weather of 1832, the Zadkiel of that time had predicted that the electrical condition of the clouds in the political hemisphere would produce unusual perturbations in organic existence. (vol. 1, ch. 3, p. 45) There is a certain linguistic wit in this passage, as the hot-house species wavers indecisively between vegetable and animal, and the ‘weather’ is at once meteorological and political. (Zadkiel, incidentally, was the name assumed by Richard James Morrison, the compiler of a popular astrological almanac.) In this novel, and in others, Eliot keeps going the venerable and condescending tradition that the lower classes are somehow funny, especially in their speech, especially if accurately transcribed. This is one Dredge speaking: ‘“I’ve been aforced to give my wife a black eye to hinder her from going to the preachin’. Lors-a-massy, she thinks she knows better nor me, and I can’t make head nor tail of her talk”’ (vol. 1, ch. 11, p. 118). The chapter ends with a summing up by Dredge: ‘“It’s wriggling work [listening to political arguments] – like follering a stoat. It makes a man dry. I’d as lief hear preaching, on’y there’s nought to be got by’t”’ (vol. 1, ch. 11, p. 123). Eliot’s humour is found in some of her so-called ‘interruptions’, in which she makes a general statement in order to throw light on a particular instance: Comprehensive talkers are apt to be tiresome when we are not athirst for information, but, to be quite fair, we must admit that superior reticence is a good deal due to the lack of matter. Speech is often barren; but silence also does not necessarily brood over a full nest. Your still fowl, blinking at you without remark, may all the while be sitting on one addled nest-egg; and when it takes to cackling, will have nothing to announce but that addled delusion. (vol. 2, ch. 16, p. 156) This is an elaborate conceit, and conceits, if all their parts cohere, are often witty. Middlemarch is such a long novel that no one would expect it to be unified in tone. There are highly serious passages, but also arch and facetious ones. The distance between the narrator and the far-distant past is bound to generate a distanced attitude, often comic or bordering on comic. A typical viewpoint of this kind is observable in the description of Dorothea’s first encounter with Rome: But let them conceive one more historical contrast: the gigantic broken revelations of that Imperial and Papal city thrust abruptly on the notions of a girl who had been brought up in English and Swiss Puritanism, fed on meagre Protestant histories and on art chiefly of the hand-screen sort. (bk. 2, ch. 20, p. 188) How dismissive that phrase is: ‘art chiefly of the hand-screen sort’. A typical example of the mixture of tone is audible when Lydgate comes home one day and finds Will Ladislaw and his wife singing a duet: ‘To a man galled with his harness as poor Lydgate was, it is not soothing to see two people warbling at him, as he comes in with the sense that the painful day has still pains in store’ (bk. 6, ch. 58, p. 577). There is something comic in this vision. The very phrasing announces it, even though it scenically presents the spectacle of a disintegrating marriage. Eliot wrote in a letter to Alex Main: ‘I need not tell you that my book will not present my own feeling about human life if it produces on readers whose minds are really receptive the impression of blank melancholy and despair’.20 She does not feel under particular obligation to be charitable towards provincial auctioneers, so one of them comes in for some gentle ribbing: Some saturnine, sour-blooded persons might object to be constantly insisting on the merits of all articles from boot-jacks to ‘Berghems’; but Mr Borthrop Trumbull had a kindly liquid in his veins; he was an admirer by nature, and would have liked to have the universe under his hammer, feeling that it would go at a higher figure for his recommendation. (Middlemarch, bk. 6, ch. 60, p. 591) Note the alliterative effects here in ‘kindly liquid’. The auction seems to go on for ever, and cries out for cutting in any film or television version. Eliot’s fatal attraction towards prolixity continues unabated throughout the novel. Raffles’s black suit ‘caused the prejudicial inference that he was not able to afford himself as much indulgence as he liked’ (bk. 6, ch. 60, p. 594). There must be a briefer way of saying that. The most famous comic scene in Middlemarch is Mr Brooke’s election speech in book 5, chapter 51, worthy to stand alongside Dickens’s Eatanswill Election in Pickwick Papers. I’m not sure that Eliot’s description is not better. It’s certainly better than Disraeli’s A Year at Hartlebury, or The Election (1834). Right at the beginning the narrator sets up a comic collision between the couplets of Pope which could be used, except that ‘“fallings from us, vanishings”’ intervene (p. 494). That is a quotation from Wordsworth’s serious ‘Immortality Ode’, and it is comic that it should be uttered in same breath as the Augustan poet. Once the speech begins, an effigy of Brooke himself appears, accompanied by ‘a parrot-like, Punch-voiced echo of his words’ (p. 495). Note the alliteration. As the speech progresses Mr Brooke is ‘disagreeably anointed’ with eggs (p. 497). The narrator could be sympathetic, but the temptation in the direction of comedy is too strong, and the narrative style is drawn into the fun. Often during the novel there is a trembling of the perspective, as if something really serious can have its absurd side. Mr Casaubon is seen chewing ‘the cud of erudite mistake about Cush or Chus and Mizraim’ almost simultaneously with Dorothea’s ‘sense of loneliness’, which precedes Peter Featherstone’s funeral (bk. 4, ch. 34, p. 318). No cause for laughter, one might think, but listen to this from one of the spectators, Mrs Cadwallader: ‘“Those dark, purple-faced people are an excellent foil. Dear me, they are like a set of jugs! Do look at Humphrey: one might fancy him an ugly archangel towering above them in his white surplice”’ (p. 319). Mr Brooke reminds her that funerals are serious things, to which she retorts: ‘“But I’m not taking it in that light. I can’t wear my solemnity too often, else it will go to rags”’ (p. 319). That could almost be an epigraph for Middlemarch itself. Mrs Cadwallader provides a summing-up of Casaubon for readers who have taken agin him: ‘“As to his blood, I suppose the family quartering are three cuttle-fish sable, and a commentator rampant”’ (bk. 1, ch. 6, p. 56). And, later, ‘“Somebody put a drop [of his blood] under a magnifying-glass, and it was all semicolons and parentheses”’ (bk. 1, ch. 8, p. 69). It’s not unlike the moment in Othello when Emilia addresses the Moor: ‘O gull! O dolt! / As ignorant as dirt!’ (V. ii. 175-6). Some members of the audience need a spokesperson on the stage at that moment. Perhaps there’s a bigger risk in treating Casaubon in this way, because unlike Othello’s the inner life of Casaubon is not shown to us. Daniel Deronda is remembered as a serious book, with all kinds of high-toned statements both from the narrative voice and the characters. There is a considerable seriousness about art and about personal responsibility. But there is also humour. It does not seriously threaten the stability of the central moral earnestness in the book, but it does enable us occasionally to see the characters and events from a different perspective. The full range of humour is on view: wordplay, collision of people who are ill suited to one another, fantasy, the grotesque, and sometimes the grimly sardonic and acerbic. There are even bits of comic dialect. Some of the humour emanates from the narrative voice. Gwendolen says ‘“Being acquainted with authors must give a peculiar understanding of their books: one would be able to tell then which parts were funny and which serious”’ (vol. 1, bk. 1, ch. 5, p. 39). This may well be true, but since Eliot is dead we have to rely mainly on surface evidence. It is also possible that contemporaries who knew the rather serious, social Eliot would have been surprised by some of the humorous touches in her works, and particularly in Daniel Deronda. On the very first page the narrator refers to the ‘chubby nudities’ decorating gambling casinos (vol. 1, bk. 1, ch. 1, p. 3). There is no shortage of arch observations in the novel: At home, at school, among acquaintances, she [Gwendolen] had been used to have her conscious superiority admitted; and she had moved in a society where everything, from low arithmetic to high art, is of the amateur kind politely supposed to fall short of perfection only because gentlemen and ladies are not obliged to do more than they like – otherwise they would probably give forth abler writings and show themselves more commanding artists than any of the world is at present obliged to put up with. (vol. 2, bk. 3, ch. 23, p. 244) The following is a rather facetious passage, not unique in playful Victorian approaches to history: Tannhäuser, one suspects, was a knight of ill-furnished imagination, hardly of larger discourse than a heavy Guardsman; Merlin had certainly seen his best days, and was merely repeating himself, when he fell into that hopeless captivity; and we know that Ulysses felt so manifest an ennui under similar circumstances that Calypso herself furthered his departure. There is indeed a report that he afterwards left Penelope; but since she was habitually absorbed in worsted work, and it was probably from her that Telemachus got his mean, pettifogging disposition, always anxious about the property and the daily consumption of meat, no inference can be drawn from this already dubious scandal as to the relation between companionship and constancy. (vol. 2, bk. 3, ch. 22, pp. 221-2) Eliot is aware that introducing ennui into the remote past is comically anachronistic. So far as she is concerned not even the Bible is safe from being reviewed in an irreverent manner, as when the narrator of Middlemarch speculates of Noah’s Ark: When the animals entered the Ark in pairs, one may imagine that allied species made much private remark on each other, and were tempted to think that so many forms feeding on the same store of fodder were eminently superfluous, as tending to diminish the rations. (I fear the part played by the vultures on that occasion would be too painful for art to represent, those birds being disadvantageously naked about the gullet, and apparently without rites and ceremonies.) (bk. 4, ch. 35, pp. 322-3) The scepticism Eliot harboured when translating Strauss has invaded the novel for a moment. She is arch about a civil service examination ‘which might disclose the welfare of our Indian Empire to be somehow connected with a quotable knowledge of Browne’s Pastorals’ (Daniel Deronda, vol. 1, bk. 1, ch. 6, pp. 50-1). There is a well-observed moment in ‘a perceptible outrush of imprisoned conversation’ after music concert (vol. 1, bk. 1, ch. 5, p. 44). Reporting a conversation which covers ‘the Jamaican negro’, who is ‘a beastly sort of baptist Caliban’, and ‘half-breeds’ – whom ‘the whites’, after all, ‘had to thank themselves for’, the narrator writes: ‘While this polite pea-shooting was going on, Gwendolen trifled with her jelly’ (vol. 2, bk. 4, ch. 29, pp. 303-4). More alliteration here. Sometimes she goes in for witty conceits: No one talked of Mrs Glasher now, any more than they talked of the victim in a trial for manslaughter ten years before: she was a lost vessel after whom nobody would send out an expedition of search; but Grandcourt was seen in harbour with his colours flying, registered as seaworthy as ever. (vol. 2, bk. 4, ch. 30, p. 312) As in all elaborate conceits, if all the parts cohere, a kind of wit is audible. The sang-froid coolness of aristocrats is one source of amusement: Sir Hugo Mallinger says to Daniel: ‘“Only don’t make mischief – unless you can get up a duel, and manage to shoot Grandcourt, which might be worth a little inconvenience”’ (vol. 2, bk. 4, ch. 32, p. 332). Grandcourt is described as ‘a washed-out piece of cambric’ (Mr Vandernoodt’s remark, vol. 3, bk. 5, ch. 36, p. 402). This is funny about the past, but Eliot on the whole endorses an interest in history. This concerns the gossip about Mrs Glasher: ‘Oh, there are plenty of people who knew all about it; but such stories get packed away like old letters. They interest me. I like to know the manners of my time – contemporary gossip, not antediluvian. These Dryasdust fellows get a reputation by raking up some small scandal about Semiramis or Nitocris, and then we have a thousand and one poems written upon it by all the warblers big and little. But I don’t care a straw about the faux pas of the mummies. You do, though. You are one of the historical men – more interested in a lady when she’s got a rag face and skeleton toes peeping out. Does that flatter your imagination?’ (vol. 3, bk. 5, ch. 36, pp. 403-4) Eliot can also adopt the stance of a chilly scientist, looking at human beings with an ungenerous kind of detachment: It was impossible to be jealous of Juliet Fenn, a girl as middling as mid-day market in everything but her archery and her plainness, in which last she was noticeably like her father: underhung and with receding brow resembling that of the more intelligent fishes. (Surely, considering the importance which is given to such an accident in female offspring, marriageable men … should look at themselves dispassionately in the glass, since their natural selection of a mate prettier than themselves is not certain to bar the effect of their own ugliness.) (vol. 1, bk. 2, ch. 11, p. 100) This not unlike a moment in Felix Holt when she employs a fancifully elaborate geological metaphor to describe a bygone type: But a man of Sir Maximus’s rank is like those antediluvian animals whom the system of things condemned to carry such a huge bulk that they really could not inspect their bodily apurtenance, and had no conception of their own tails: their parasites doubtless had a merry time of it, and after did extremely well when the high-bred saurian himself was ill at ease. (vol. 1, ch. 7, p. 87) We are used in our time to phrases such as ‘a political dinosaur’, so much so that they are commonplaces, but the figure must have been comparatively original in 1866, and Eliot builds it into a witty conceit. The rest of the paragraph is devoted to a detailed survey of the parasites. Again, there is a witty interchange between the concrete and the figurative. As we have seen so often, this is one of the central devices of verbal humour. Those old aristocrats were often literally bulky, but their country estates were metaphorical extensions of their bodies, so that the conceit works in both senses, even though the metaphorical is certainly the principal one here. The ‘long tail’ becomes a synecdoche for Sir Maximus, and Eliot produces it again at the end of the paragraph. Dickens, forever in the grip of a more transformative imagination, would have continued it right through the novel. The Grandcourt of Daniel Deronda is sometimes funny – in being so brusque. He describes Mr Lush as a ‘“coarse-haired kind of brute – a sort of cross between a hog and a dilettante”’ (vol. 2, ch. 27, p. 282). Gwendolen laughs at this, and since she does not like Mr Lush thinks that the uttered sentiment is proof of Grandcourt’s kindness, overlooking the fact that to express these sentiments about a fellow human being is not entirely liberal. A rather merciless novelistic eye sometimes comes into operation when describing minor characters who do not need to be fully human, as in this description of Lady Mallinger: Should her appearance be inquired after, let it be said that she had reddish blond hair (the hair of the period), a small Roman nose, rather prominent blue eyes and delicate eyelids, with a figure which her thinner friends called fat, her hands showing curves and dimples like a magnified baby’s. (vol. 2, bk. 4, ch. 28, p. 296) Not quite Dickensian, but moving in that direction. The most significant comedy in this novel is to be found in the Gwendolen plot. Many critics write about her in a highly serious way, and they concentrate on her very sad life and the way in which she has moral seriousness thrust upon her. However, in the early part of the novel a good deal of the fun originates in Gwendolen, ‘whose lively venturesomeness of talk has the effect of wit’ (vol. 2, bk. 3, ch. 24, p. 252), as in this conversation with Mrs Arrowpoint: ‘Imagination is often truer than fact,’ said Gwendolen, decisively, though she could no more have explained these glib words than if they had been Coptic or Etruscan. ‘I shall be glad to learn all about Tasso – and his madness especially. I suppose poets are always a little mad.’  ‘To be sure – “the poet’s eye in a fine frenzy rolling;” and somebody says of Marlowe –    “For that fine madness still he did maintain,    Which always should possess the poet’s brain.”’21  ‘But it was not always found out, was it?’ said Gwendolen, innocently. ‘I suppose some of them rolled their eyes in private. Mad people are often very cunning.’ (vol. 1, bk. 1, ch. 5, pp. 40-1) She does have a sense of fun, even though at this point the reader is invited by the narrator to think it is a sign of shallowness ‘[she] had over-acted her naïveté’ (vol. 1, bk. 1, ch. 5, p. 41). Do we need to be told? I think not. She is living on the surface of life. A lot of what she does is for effect – she wants to affect others, to exercise her power, and one way is to entertain and amuse them. She can act all kinds of parts – sometimes being deliberately obtuse. There is a kind of glorious irresponsibility about it all. Klesmer could be right when he says that she will never be much good on the public and professional stage, but on the private and amateur stage of country house tea-parties and dinner-parties she is a consummate little actress. She is roguish, and she has long corners to her eyes. At the time of her wedding an onlooker says her witty face makes him feel comical. ‘“What wonderful long corners she’s got to her eyes! … She makes you feel comical when she looks at you”’ (vol. 2, bk. 4, ch. 31, p. 326). There is a glorious irresponsibility about her, of the kind which when allied to beauty is irresistibly charming. It is reminiscent of the delightful irresponsibility of Jane Austen’s Elizabeth and Emma, and perhaps of Thackeray’s Becky Sharp. It all represents great elasticity of spirit. Her speech is often fascinating. Here she is on Grandcourt: ‘There is less to dislike about him than about most men. He is quiet and distingué.’ Gwendolen so far spoke with a pouting sort of gravity; but suddenly she recovered some of her mischievousness, and her face broke into a smile as she added – ‘Indeed he has all the qualities that would make a husband tolerable – battlement, veranda, stables, &c., no grins and no glass in his eye.’ (vol. 1, bk. 2, ch. 13, p. 124) This is not unlike the moment in Pride and Prejudice when Elizabeth Bennet answers her sister’s serious question: how long she has loved Mr Darcy? ‘“It has been coming on so gradually, that I hardly know when it began. But I believe I must date it from my first seeing his beautiful grounds at Pemberley”.’22 An amusing observation occurs when Gwendolen describes Miss Arrowpoint’s gold dress: ‘“Well, perhaps a little too symbolical – too much like the figure of Wealth in an allegory”.’ The narrator intrusively and unnecessarily says: ‘This speech … had rather a malicious sound, but it was not really more than a bubble of fun’ (vol. 1, bk. 1, ch. 10, p. 93). It is as if Eliot does not quite trust the reader to come to his or her own conclusions about Gwendolen on the evidence of what she says. Light speech and good turns of phrase are deployed as a weapon of flirtation: ‘“is there any one besides Captain and Mrs Torrington at Diplow? – or do you leave them tête-à-tête? I suppose he converses in cigars, and she answers with her chignon”’ (vol. 2, bk. 4, ch. 29, p. 301). But even as all of this badinage is unfolding Eliot encourages us to realise that some of the humour, especially in the courtship with Grandcourt, is shallow and evasive, and arises from a refusal to face up to the seriousness of life. It is a kind of protective mask for someone who has not many inner resources. The narrative voice tends to be arch and even acerbic. One catches a curl of the lip as she refers to the ‘Fluctuating Rouge’ of ‘the advertisements’, a phenomenon of her present world rather than a world a little time before the narrative (vol. 4, bk. 8, ch. 69, p. 742; Graham Handley does not provide a note to this in his edition – was it an actual piece of promotional jargon?). This voice, though, is more restrained and in abeyance when it comes to the Jewish side of the plot, as if too much critical wit would compromise it. Eliot had to guard against spiteful sarcasm and uncharitable irony, especially against people such as Rufus Lyon in Felix Holt, who could seem ridiculous in some lights, but sympathetic in others. She states the case at the end of chapter 16: If a cynical sprite were present, riding on one of the motes in that dusty room, he may have made himself merry at the illusions of the little minister who brought so much conscience to bear on the production of so slight an effect. I confess to smiling myself, being sceptical as to the effect or ardent appeals and nice distinctions on gentlemen who are got up, both inside and out, as candidates in the style of the period; but I never smiled at Mr Lyon’s trustful energy without falling to penitence and veneration immediately after. For what we call illusions are often, in truth, a wider vision of past and present realities – a willing movement of a man’s soul with the larger sweep of the world’s forces – a movement towards a more assured end than the chances of a single life. We see human heroism broken into units and say, this unit did little – might as well not have been. But in this way we might break up a great army into units; in this way we might break the sunlight into fragments, and think that this and the other might be cheaply parted with. Let us rather raise a monument to the soldiers whose brave hearts only kept the ranks unbroken, and met death – a monument to the faithful who were not famous, and who are precious as the continuity of the sunbeams is precious, though some of them fall unseen and on barrenness. (vol. 2, ch. 16, p. 161) The plangent, elegiac tone here is very similar to the celebrated conclusion of Middlemarch. It demonstrates that for George Eliot humour, especially of a destructive and critical kind, might appear as an occasional self-indulgence, but could never be the dominant or motivating force of a whole vision. Footnotes 1 George Eliot, ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’ (1856), in Selected Critical Writings, ed. Rosemary Ashton (Oxford, 1992), pp. 296-321. 2 Gordon S. Haight, George Eliot: A Biography (Oxford, 1968), p. 464. 3 The Clarendon Edition of the Novels of George Eliot, gen. ed. Gordon S. Haight, Daniel Deronda, ed. Graham Handley (Oxford, 1984), bk. 8, ch. 59, p. 738. Further references are given in the text. 4 Catherine Brown has a go in ‘Daniel Deronda as Tragi-Comedy’, E in C, 59 (2009), 302-23. 5 James Boswell, Boswell’s Life of Johnson, together with Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides and Johnson’s Diary of a Journey into North Wales, ed. George Birkbeck Hill, rev. L. F. Powell, 6 vols. (Oxford, 1934-50), iii. 305. 6 The Mill on the Floss, ed. Gordon S. Haight, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1980), bk. 4, ch. 3, pp. 254-5. 7 Virginia Woolf, ‘George Eliot’, Times Literary Supplement, 20 Nov. 1919, pp. 657-8. 8 Henry James, ‘The New Year in England’, The Nation, 28, 23 Jan. 1879, pp. 65-6. 9 Henry James, Letters, ed. Leon Edel, vol. ii: 1875-1883 (Cambridge, Mass., 1975), p. 209 (4 Jan. 1879). 10 The George Eliot Letters, ed. Gordon S. Haight, vol. viii: 1840-1870 (New Haven, 1978), p. 51 (8? July 1852). 11 Herbert Spencer, An Autobiography, 2 vols. (1904), i. 397. 12 George Eliot, Scenes of Clerical Life, ed. Thomas A. Noble (Oxford, 2009) pp. 5-6. Further references are given in the text. 13 [George Eliot], ‘Evangelical Teaching: Dr. Cumming’ (1855), repr. in Selected Critical Writings, pp. 138-86: 143. 14 Middlemarch: A Study of Provincial Life, ed. David Carroll, Clarendon Edition (Oxford, 1986), bk. 6, ch. 56, p. 544. Further references are given in the text. 15 George Eliot, Silas Marner: The Weaver of Raveloe, ed. Terence Cave (Oxford, 1996), pt. 1, ch. 1, p. 5. 16 ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, pp. 296, 311. 17 Felix Holt, the Radical, ed. Fred C. Thomson, Clarendon Edition (1980), vol. 1, ch. 11, p. 114. Further references are given in the text. 18 ‘R. W. Mackay’s The Progress of Intellect’, in Selected Critical Writings, pp. 18-36: 18, 20. 19 ‘Silly Novels by Lady Novelists’, pp. 297, 304, 299. 20 The George Eliot Letters, vol. v: 1869-1873 (1955), p. 262 (29 Mar. 1872). 21 These lines are from Michael Drayton’s ‘To … Mr. Reynolds of Poets and Poetry’ (1627). It is possible that Eliot knew about him principally because he, like her, was born in Nuneaton – as were Ken Loach, Mary Whitehouse, and Larry Grayson. There was an edition of Drayton’s works by J. P. Collier for the Roxburghe Club in 1856. 22 The Cambridge Edition of the Novels of Jane Austen, gen. ed. Janet Todd, Pride and Prejudice, ed. Pat Rogers (Cambridge, 2006), vol. 3, ch. 17, p. 414. © The Author(s) [2019]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Boynton,, Owen

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz018pmid: N/A

WHY REMEMBER THE CRITIC JAMES SMITH? In the early 1930s he was an occasional contributor to F.R. Leavis's Scrutiny, and went on to teach, mostly at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, until his retirement in 1968. He died in 1972. He is spoken of little now, and a recent mention in the pages of the Times Literary Supplement remembers him only to say he is forgotten. Emma Smith, reviewing John Kerrigan’s Shakespeare’s Binding Language, nods to the place contemporary readers are most likely to stumble upon James Smith’s name: Reviewing William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity in 1931, James Smith observed that many of the analyses ‘do not seem to have any properly critical conclusion; they are interesting only as revelations of the poet’s, or of Mr Empson’s, ingenious mind’. (It was a criticism Empson was happy to quote in later editions: no-one, of course, remembers Smith.) Without that mean-spirited ‘only’, something similar might be said of Professor Kerrigan, our most dazzlingly Empsonian modern scholar.1 ‘No-one, of course, remembers Smith’, writes the other, latter, Smith; but on several occasions Empson himself remembered Smith with respect, and as late as the 1960s.2 He included Smith in the second edition of Seven Types of Ambiguity to honour as a critic who merited a response.3 The nature of Empson’s response reveals the divergence in their critical methods, but it also testifies to what is common between them: a defence of interpretation that depends on psychology and character, in so far as these can be adduced from careful reading. The practice of psychologising authors and characters has long been subject to criticism, from the secondary school teacher’s caution that a character is a part of a work’s design and demands more than quasi-biographical comment, to the theoretical ambition of the intentional fallacy. Empson, as is well known, staunchly and humorously opposed ‘The Wimsatt Law’, drawing on biography as a means of situating authors in history, and of delineating the conflicts of belief and value that animate their works.4 But the crucial word, the word that is sometimes left implicit in Empson’s arguments, is not exclusively psychological: judgement is the object of his interpretative activity, albeit not, first and foremost, in the sense that he aspires to pass judgement on a particular work. For James Smith, the refusal to do just that represented an aberration in Seven Types of Ambiguity. For Empson, though, the task of the critic is an explication of the judgements that a work contains and that could be said to sustain that work: Empson’s interpretations articulate what an author is judging within a given line or phrase (it is often several things at once), and also how that line or phrase allows us to feel that those judgements are valid, suitable to a circumstance or vantage point or functioning set of beliefs. In a late essay, Geoffrey Hill echoes and endorses the words of F. H. Bradley, asserting that the success of a poem depends on a poem’s managing to ‘get within a judgment the conditions of the judgment’.5 That phrase might characterise interpretation as Empson practises it: the critic explicates a text’s judgements and also works out how those judgements contain their own grounds. Each chapter of Seven Types of Ambiguity marks a shift in Empson’s attention: the types of ambiguity are only more logically complex in the sense that they demand, from chapter to chapter and type to type, greater ingenuity in teasing out the condition of judgement that justifies and surrounds any given verbal ambiguity. Hence the last three chapters, and last three types, look at ambiguities arising from thought-in-motion, a phrase looking ahead and behind at once; ambiguities from apparent contradictions which the reader must resolve by imagining an additional term; and ambiguities so thoroughly splitting a word’s sense that they reflect a fundamental division in an author’s mind, and the most perfect balancing of seemingly opposite truths. Empson’s account for each of these ambiguous judgements depends upon increasingly imaginative, daring accounts of what first occasioned and continues to surround the judgement, in the world as the author views it (he calls it ‘psychological’, but it is always ‘social’ and historically localised, too). The most crossword-puzzling of the readings arrive, as a consequence, early in the book; the most monumental appear late. Empson is able to write even on an author like Dryden, where verbal ambiguities are washed out of the verse, because even Dryden’s work demands that the critic interpret the conditions of judgement a text contains: ‘Dryden is not interested in the echoes and recesses of words; he uses them flatly; he is interested in the echoes and recesses of human judgment’.6 The echoes and recesses of human judgement are, ultimately, the subject of Empson’s fascination in all of his critical works, the difference consisting in the scale in which they are expressed (syntax in Seven Types of Ambiguity; plot and mode in Some Versions of Pastoral; the word in The Structure of Complex Words). For Smith, however, Empson is too keen to speculate on and fictionalise the ‘echoes and recesses of human judgment’ behind and within a work of literature. Smith notices that in the later chapters, those chapters where the emphasis is more on the background conflicts of judgement upon which a text stands, Empson turns with greater frequency to drama than to poetry. But that, thinks Smith, is a sleight of hand, since drama and poetry do not rest upon conflicts of judgement in the same way. ‘He frequently refers beyond the ambiguities of drama to those of life itself’, but such an approach is not relevant, says Smith, for poetry, where the aim of the critic is first and foremost ‘the passing of a judgment of value’.7 Smith certainly appreciates what Empson has to say about drama (‘he has almost as many good things to say about drama as he says about poetry’), but thinks he is wrong to approach poetry in the same way: Is the ambiguity referred to that of life – is it a bundle of diverse forces, bound together only by their co-existence? Or is it that of a literary device – of the allusion, conceit or pun, in one of their more or less conscious forms? If the first, Mr Empson’s thesis is wholly mistaken: for a poem is not a mere fragment of life, it is a fragment that has been detached, considered and judged by a mind. A poem is a noumenon rather than a phenomenon. If the second, then at least we can say that Mr Empson’s thesis is exaggerated.8 In response, Empson opposes Smith’s notion that ‘noumenon’ can be distinguished from ‘phenomenon’ in the case of works of art: what, he asks, of Blake’s fine poems, crossed out in the notebooks, or of Constable’s unfinished paintings, praised more than his completed works? Are these sufficiently detached to be considered ‘noumenon’? More forcefully, Empson accuses Smith of ‘overplaying his hand very seriously’ when objecting to the treatment of poets as though characters in drama, with the storms of life raging behind them: ‘If critics are not to put up some pretence of understanding the feelings of the author in hand they must condemn themselves to contempt’.9 It is somewhat surprising, then, to find Smith elsewhere writing on Measure for Measure and reconstructing the plot that he feels the play must have originally possessed, apparently without feeling constrained by speculation about Shakespeare’s first thoughts: ‘Such in rough outline is the story of the play as it will be treated in this paper. Or rather, the outline, if never possessed by, was originally intended for, a play which, to our misfortune has come down in an imperfect or mangled form’.10 And strange too, in light of his review of Ambiguity, to find Smith writing of Shakespeare’s generosity towards Shylock: Certainly usurers enjoyed little favour in Elizabethan times, and least of all amongst the Puritan preachers. But it would not seem inevitable that, on this point alone, Shakespeare should have joined forces with the Puritans. And though considerably broader spectators upon human affairs, such as Bacon and Ben Johnson [sic], continued as late as 1625 to cherish the notion that usury impeded trade, it would not seem impossible for Shakespeare, at an earlier date, to have shown himself broader still.11 It may be that Smith changed his mind. Or it may be that Smith was perfectly content following Empson’s critical principles when reading dramas. Or it may be that Smith felt these speculations to be different in kind from Empson’s: a base upon which the critic was to stand, rather than the fruit for which the critic was to reach. Whatever the case, they clearly display a willingness to speculate on psychology, to imagine an author historically, to even, in the case of Measure for Measure, to recover a noumenon from the phenomenon of the published text. Perhaps, in the end, the disagreements between the two critics fade away: both respond to an idealised noumenon (the most extreme instance of idealisation in Empson’s career being his invention of a speech for Marlowe’s Faustus12) and both seek within a text for the conditions of judgement that its judgements would seem to demand and imply. But to assume unanimity would involve concentrating upon only those points that Empson took up. He never directly addressed a pivotal phrase in Smith’s criticism: ‘Is the ambiguity referred to that of life – is it a bundle of diverse forces, bound together only by their co-existence?’ The trouble for Smith is not just Empson’s failing to distinguish between ‘noumenon’ and ‘phenomenon’ in the sense, as Empson takes it, of failing to focus on the completed, final work; the trouble is that Empson does not go far enough in his interpretative efforts. What makes a work worth studying at all, in his view, is the overarching judgment under which the competing judgements are subsumed; whether a work suspends irreconcilable parts, whether it adjudicates competing claims, or whether it declares a victor in a struggle of ideas, Smith asks that a critic make sense not only of its myriad judgements that jostle against one another, but also of the wider ground upon which a work relates all of those judgements together. For Smith, ‘noumenon’ refers to this larger relationship a work establishes between the many divergent judgements it contains. His complaint is that in Seven Types of Ambiguity Empson does not analyse texts in order to arrive at an account of that broader manifold that holds its myriad judgements in place. Given the exuberance and explosiveness of Empson’s first work, it is understandable that Smith has trouble seeing the end that Empson often suggests poets have: ‘so straddling a commotion and so broad a calm’.13 But then that phrase was introduced in response to Smith. Smith’s understanding of judgement, and his sense for how a critic ought to approach and assess judgement, likely derives from a philosophically informed (but not determined) notion of character that yields his most distinct and rewarding critical contributions. In reply to the question ‘Why remember James Smith?’ one answer lies in his appreciation of character, in the context of drama especially, as a function of judgement and will – as well (and here he approaches the position in Empson that he seems to decry in the review) as appreciating the relation of characters within a drama as a function of the author’s judgement. Though Kant lies immediately behind the jargon of the review, Smith’s greatest philosophical debt is owed, more likely, to Aristotle, and to his notion of practical reason or deliberation. That Smith would have been shaped by Aristotle is unsurprising. Empson spoke highly of his work on the philosopher, writing to I. A. Richards in November 1932: ‘I wish I could get poor James Smith to send you his thesis for a Trinity Fellowship, where he did for Aristotle very much what you have done for Mencius’.14 Though it is never stated, the assumption behind Smith’s criticism is Aristotelian in nature: people aspire to excellence, which means living well (eudaimonein), which in turn depends upon and entails getting the right grasp of various situations and acting accordingly (practical wisdom; phronimos). There is no specifying beyond this, except in light of a particular text; but that is specific enough because it allows Smith to ask the question of how a poem, when it succeeds, can be made to seem, on its own strengths, like the right assessment of the situation that it presents and contains, given whatever we know of the speaker and his or her place in the world. The manifold that binds together a poem’s myriad judgements can be understood as the goal of living an excellent life of virtue and flourishing, predicated upon the right application of predicates – a proper assessment of a situation. The relevant Aristotle can be found in the Nicomachean Ethics. That text is subject to numerous interpretations, and Smith’s own has disappeared, but the reading of it most relevant for Smith was explicitly articulated, over half a century after his accomplished thesis, by John McDowell. McDowell argues that Aristotle does not define a worthwhile goal of practical deliberation and urges us to accept the seeming circularity of the resulting position: ‘we should not try to see having the right conception of the end as separable from a capacity to read predicaments correctly – the intelligible upshot of being habituated into delighting in the sorts of action that exemplify the excellences of character’.15 Those who judge a situation aright – who ‘read predicaments correctly’ – are led to the right action in the situation; the only way to judge a situation aright is to learn how to do so. For Aristotle there is no external criterion of what counts as rightness, beyond the thumbnail rules about avoiding extremes, which will, naturally, differ from situation to situation; the application of the rules cannot be laid out in general terms. To borrow McDowell’s phrase, Smith asks that poets ‘read predicaments correctly’, with the critic’s task being to interpret both how they are reading and what predicaments they imply; Smith’s background in Aristotle would lead him, however, to suggest that no matter how complex the readings, they be aimed at acting right and living well. Their judgement of a part of a situation is subordinated to their judgement of the situation as a whole, which is comprehensible in terms of their judgement of what it means to live well, to be a good person, or a good sort of person. In short, Smith should be remembered as an Aristotelian critic, one whose version of Aristotle very much accords with that being recovered by some of the most fascinating of late twentieth and early twenty-first century philosophers: John McDowell, Jonathan Lear, Philippa Foot, Michael Thompson, Rosalind Hursthouse, and Sebastian Rödl.16 But it is hardly necessary to enjoy philosophy to savour Smith’s critical insights. Aristotelian practical deliberation collapses the distance between judgement and action, seeing the former as inherent in the latter but also in some sense as prefacing it; it is therefore unsurprising that a critic of an Aristotelian cast of mind would find special interest in the form where the judgement manifest in texts is sustained by and sustains the actions of a body in space. Smith’s distinct excellence as a critic comes in his writing on drama, and Shakespeare in particular. More surprising, at first glance, is his devotion to exploring Shakespeare’s comedies: Much Ado About Nothing, The Merchant of Venice, As You Like It, All’s Well That Ends Well, Measure for Measure, and The Winter’s Tale are all subjects of essays, as well as a longer piece on The Tempest; all of the pieces were collected after Smith’s death in Shakespearian and Other Essays, where Shakespearian covers such a quantity as would have made a monograph. But Smith’s angle of interest in the comedies is less surprising when we take seriously his Aristotelian credentials: he is interested above all in the comedies as explorations of that most Aristotelian of puzzles, incontinence of the will.17 Why do people fail to act well, even when they know they should act well? Why do some people fail to see what it is to act well, when it ought to be obvious? Why does the will double back against itself, or against the judgement? He is interested, then, in how Shakespeare’s plays present the will failing, with sometimes a character’s misjudgement and sometimes his mis-execution of a judgement (oftentimes the two are indistinguishable) responsible. The essay on Much Ado is about proper conduct’s dependence on the judgement of the society in which the judgement of the individual is exercised; the essay on As You Like It is centrally preoccupied with melancholy; the essay on The Winter’s Tale, accommodating a shadow essay on King Lear, is concerned with ‘imbecilitas humana: the folly or weakness because of which, unless men are prudent (and so few of them are), they begin to play fantastic tricks as soon as they have any authority to play with’; the essay on Baudelaire, reacting against Eliot’s view of the French poet, is concerned to discriminate among the versions of Satan in the poems, taking seriously that some represent genuine hindrances to right judgement and right action.18 One of his deepest insights into the judgement as it manifests in action, the judgement of a work of art and the judgement of the characters contained within it, emerges in his discussion of The Merchant of Venice, which he takes to be a play preoccupied with luck, as a force that might cooperate or conflict with what a character judges to be right, or else reduce the relevance of judgement in a situation entirely. At this point, he has just been explaining that Shakespeare’s version of the casket scene (a version modified in crucial respects from the sources) involves ‘not a test, but, as Morocco complained, a game of dice at which Hercules might be beaten by a weakling page’. What then ensues seems to me a stunning arc of thought: To make this assertion is not of course to assert that Bassanio is empty-headed or a weakling; still less is it to assert that, if he were, he must cease to be interesting or attractive or even lovable. Rather because than in spite of a momentary melancholy, he might remain the recognizable study of a human being. And if he does so, he provides the first piece of evidence we have come across that the Merchant of Venice, however large the part it allows to luck, preserves a significantly close contact with reality. In a fairy-tale the characters are recognizable only as ninepins, since they are set up or thrown down by the sole fiat of luck; nor does it render them a whit more real that they should be described as good or evil, since the good always end by being up and the evil by being down – if not synonymous, the terms are convertible. Human beings on the other hand are required to do what they can to set themselves up, although they often fail or succeed only in the opposite: on account either of inadequate forces at their command, or of a mismanagement of these forces, or of a thwarting by forces that are commanded by other people. If unintentional, such a thwarting can be ascribed to no sublunary agency except luck, which thus retains, in reality as in a fairy-tale, an opportunity of humiliating humanity. And there are other opportunities which it retains: even to be helped by luck is a humiliation to a creature which is offered, and has accepted, autonomy as an ideal. Human beings may succeed, and yet be evil; they may be good, and yet fail; but most often they neither succeed nor fail completely, and they are good and evil at the same time. The extent to which they are the one and the other can be determined, if at all, only by a prolonged observation of their doings, and of the doings of all with whom they come into contact, whether enemies or friends. In this way it may be feasible to discriminate, however tentatively, between intentions and performances; to press forward, however slightly, into the secret of a man’s thoughts and feelings – a secret by which, since it is a secret, we are exasperated; but which also exacts reverence, since it is the sole breeding-ground, the proper forcing-house, of acts that belong to a man. As each house sets a stamp upon the acts which are its products, the factors within it, however numerous, must be assumed to work in unison; but the factors are also various, so that the products, when distributed over space and time, set up not a unison but a harmony. And at times the harmony is so strange as, upon first hearing, to crash like a discord. For a due appreciation, it needs to be attended to with the patience of which affection alone is capable: the affection demanded by anything that is human. If a momentary melancholy sounds discordant in Bassanio – and it probably does – the reason largely is that he has hardly appeared a candidate for such affection: so far we have considered him, not so much as a human being, but rather as a fairy-tale character – a passive, or at any rate a contented, client upon luck. We have also considered him in isolation, though the friend who, like himself, yearns for the closest intimacy strives to maintain the greatest possible independence of luck. That is Portia.19 The culmination of the paragraph comes with the capacious articulation of what constitutes harmony, in both a human life and a work of art: ‘the products, when distributed over space and time, set up not a unison but a harmony. And at times the harmony is so strange as, upon first hearing, to crash like a discord. For a due appreciation it needs to be attended to with the patience of which affection alone is capable: the affection demanded by anything that is human’. Smith transcends the subject matter, Bassanio, and even the play upon which he writes, to articulate a principle of criticism that is also a principle of life: how we understand a work of art is taken to be continuous with how we understand another person. Both modes of understanding are fundamentally ethical. The berth given to luck by the plot of The Merchant of Venice, and the casket scene in particular, shakes Smith so deeply because luck represents an arbitrary, unpredictable, and sudden impingement of circumstances on intention and actions; to rely on luck is, for Smith, to abnegate one’s responsibilities in and towards the conduct of the world, but luck is oftentimes the most adequate concept with which to explain away the failures of judgement and action, when the willpower, determination, and intent are not at fault. People’s goals do not come to fruition because they, sometimes, are unlucky; but to take as a matter of course that luck is so pervasive a force as to make effort and human responsibility irrelevant would be to evade the burdens of moral argument altogether; it would be to become a piece in a fairy tale. For Bassanio to seem a fairy-tale figure is not a symptom of Shakespeare’s failure in the play, but instead an aspect of the diagnosis that the play offers: a diagnosis of the failings and damage incurred by those who set themselves up as ‘clients upon luck’. Bassanio’s ‘momentary melancholy’ represents a sudden liberation from his usual attitude. When facing the casket, he reflects with ‘cynicism’ on the possibility of making the right choice given the clues available to him; he denigrates the false value of the gold and silver in favour of the lead, so that ‘the good things of this world, which Bassanio has hitherto enjoyed to the full’ now, if only for a moment, ‘disgust him’. He chafes, as it were, against the false shows of worldly fortune upon which he usually relies. What is remarkable in Smith’s discussion of Bassanio is similarly remarkable in his analysis of all of Shakespeare’s plays: a dogged refusal to imagine Shakespeare would use anything other than full humans as parts of his design. In the minor characters and major characters, comic and tragic characters alike, Smith convincingly perceives the same intensity of intention, action, and motive; and that intensity he perceives also in the unity of the plays as a whole. ‘The melancholy binds the play together’, he writes of Merchant; and he discerns the harmonies and resolutions in the play’s movements succumbing to and resisting that melancholy, setting Antonio, with his mysterious opening complaint, the extravagant gambling of a year’s fortune, and the atmosphere of reckless abandonment that he sustains in his band of followers and friends (Bassanio among them), against the noble wilfulness of Portia and Shylock, and setting these individuals against the luck of the world’s circumstances. Those harmonies and resolutions of design are themselves inseparable from, and inappreciable except in terms of, the unified judgements of the text, the deliberation inherent in the play: By his use of fairy-tale element, Shakespeare gives to his play the shape of a comedy; by the element of reality, he raises it to a level at which a term like comedy ceases to have a meaning. He makes of it a mirror of the human struggle with what is too opaque to allow a shape, or at times anything, to be seen; too hard to allow the imposition of a shape. The struggle is the more impressive.20 Shakespeare’s struggle impresses because he fully confronts the reality of luck; the imposition of a shape on the materials of the play would not necessarily be an artistic victory over the fickle circumstances of the world that the play presents because it is in the nature of those fickle circumstances to thwart the effort of imposition. Less impressive would be a definite shape achieved at the expense of an honest apprehension of the subject matter and a claim to be exempt from the luck and accident to which the characters of the play are inescapably susceptible. When Smith speaks of ‘shape’, he refers not only to artistic unity, but to a particular measure of unity that judgement takes in literature: namely, genre. The Merchant of Venice, he is observing, does not sit comfortably within the category of comedy, and this because it does not rest easy upon the interventions of luck by which characters in comedies avoid the most serious and painful consequences of their failings. The last claim is Smith’s, emerging from his sketch of a principle by which comedy and tragedy could be distinguished: I would venture to suggest that the essential difference between comedy and tragedy may perhaps be this sort of difference: not one of kind, I mean, but of degree. As far as I can see it is possible and even probable that tragedy and comedy – Shakespearian comedy at any rate – treat of the same problems, comedy doing so (to repeat the word) less seriously. And by ‘less seriously’, I may now explain, I mean that the problems are not forced to an issue: a lucky happening, a lucky trait of character (or what for the purposes appears lucky) allowing them to be evaded. As, for example, conditions in Arden and conditions of his own temper preserve Jaques from fully realizing the nature and consequences of his scepticism: to Rosalind, to the reader, it is obvious that his interests are restricted, his vigour lessened, but he is never put to the test. Hamlet, on the other hand, in a similar spiritual state, is called upon to avenge a father, foil an uncle and govern a kingdom. And when at last chance forces him into action it is not only that he may slaughter but also that he may be slaughtered: in other words, not that in spite of his disability he may achieve his end, but that because of it he may fail. In Othello hardly an accident happens which does not lend plausibility to Iago’s deceit, so that the problem posed by human malice on the one hand, human ignorance on the other, cannot but be faced; in Much Ado there is a final accident – and a very obvious one, for its name is Dogberry – which unmasks Don John. In Lear accident of the wildest form unites with malice and with the elements to convince a human being of his imbecility; in The Winter’s Tale accident equally wild serves to hide that imbecility, if not from Leontes (who is however encouraged to forget it) at least from Florizel. In comedy the materials for tragedy are procured, in some cases heaped up; but they are not, so to speak, attended to, certainly not closely examined. And so what might have caused grief causes only a smile, or at worst a grimace.21 Smith is not generous towards his own line of thought when he rounds it out with a denigration of comedy: even granting that the materials of tragedy are not closely examined in comedy, a strength of comedy might be its sensitivity to the force and play of fortune that averts the need of such an examination. A central insight of Smith’s criticism is that comedy no less than tragedy can scrutinise practical deliberation in a world both buffeted and graced by chance and happenstance. The successful realisation of a benevolent intention will depend not only on the interference of others but on good luck. Smith implicitly advances a principle of criticism: at its most responsible, a work of art recognises the influence of luck in its presentation of human activity; a dramatic narrative may be served by luck and accident, and may even rely on luck for the advancing of its action, but that should be an occasion to examine what it means to judge and live in a world shaped by chance. Reading aright how Shakespeare reads aright how his characters fail and succeed to read aright their world, Smith is led to a judgement on the nature of deliberation, judgement, and the actions that they contain or fail to contain. One consequence of Smith’s ambition is an extraordinary patience in his critical method: to attend to what and how individuals judge, to what they face, and to what thwarts their judgement, often within the course of a single scene or even speech, requires substantial units of critical prose. He apologises, in the essay on Measure for Measure, for ‘the degree of closeness’ with which he examines Angelo’s interview of Isabella, but he defends himself on the grounds that the characters, and the forces behind them, demand the treatment: ‘Neither partner to it [the interview] is completely black or white: each is of a peculiar shade resulting from a blend of blacks and whites of differing intensity and differing extent. Isabella for example speaks not only out of mercy, whatever that may mean, but in part out of sisterly affection; in part, out of inexperience of the world, natural in one confined to the cloister; in part, out of spiritual experience, leading to humility, such as the cloister naturally provides’.22 But it is not only the complexity of the situation that intrigues Smith. The interview sustains his attention because it presents a judgement coming into focus, Isabella’s powers of practical deliberation resolving themselves, and her resolution with them, leading her to the point of action, but no further. In the scene, her judgement moves towards what is right, without her physically moving (the quotations from Shakespeare are as they appear in Smith’s essay): The greatest contrast provided by the scene however is that between, not Angelo’s earlier verses and his later, nor between any verses of his and those of Isabella, but rather between those which she begins and those which she ends by speaking. After the failure of her misjudged attempts either to secure Angelo’s complicity in defrauding the law, or to defraud both him and the law together, she would seem to pause in order to take stock of the situation as it now presents itself: So you must be the first that gives this sentence, And he, that suffers. [II. ii. 107] Then something happens. As a consequence, her eloquence opens, and verse pours from her as precipitous as previously it had been sluggish, and because of its precipitation as varied in its forms, lights and colours as it was previously dull:    O it is excellent  To have a giant’s strength, but it is tyrannous  To use it like a giant… (ibid. 108)    Could great men thunder  As Jove himself does, Jove would ne’er be quiet,  For every pelting, petty officer  Would use his heaven for thunder,  Nothing but thunder (ibid. 111) and so on. In large measure, credit would seem to be due to the passage of time. Gradually Isabella’s eyes have grown accustomed to the penumbras in which henceforth she moves, so that she no longer depends upon Lucio or anyone for seeing; and with the power of the spiritually trained, she sees further, deeper than most. But partly perhaps also, she is helped by the change in Angelo which has just been noticed: the cracking of his composure makes it to easier to see what is necessary to be seen, if her situation is not to continue intolerable. For that is how it has come to appear. In his fidelity to the law, Angelo is formally right; and yet, if Claudio succeeds in escaping death, then though she has been formally wrong – indeed, gravely so – in seeking to tamper with Angelo’s fidelity, from the beginning she must also have been materially right. This is a riddle to which a solution must be found. As her insight becomes more and more accustomed to a worldly atmosphere, and therefore less and less hampered in its operation, it does not in the end prove unequal to the task. At the very heart of Angelo it discerns something by which the riddle is explained. Like many others of her gifts and training, however, Isabella does not find herself immediately capable of expounding what she discerns. She can point to it, compare it to other things, give it therefore a name and indeed a number of names, but analysis, definition, understanding – these are only slowly achieved, and in a haphazard rather than a systematic fashion.23 ‘She can point to it, compare it to other things, give it therefore a name and indeed a number of names, but analysis, definition, understanding – these are only slowly achieved’: the words by which Smith apprehends Isabella’s evolving judgement are also the words by which his own critical enterprise can be understood, valued, and even emulated. In it can be seen much that Smith shares with Empson, above all a devotion to sounding the ‘echoes and recesses of human judgment’, for which verbal analysis is not, on its own, sufficient, requiring also the speculative leap of imagination into character. Taking on the challenge as carefully, caringly, and profoundly as he does, Smith does not deserve to be unremembered. Footnotes 1 Emma Smith, ‘Beating the Bounds’, review of Shakespeare’s Binding Language by John Kerrigan, Times Literary Supplement, 11 Aug. 2016. 2 William Empson refers to Smith, ‘who wrote well in the early volumes of Scrutiny’, in his 1966 ‘Comment on James Jensen: “The Construction of Seven Types of Ambiguity”’, first published in Modern Language Quarterly, 27 (1966), and now collected in Selected Letters of William Empson, ed. John Haffenden (Oxford, 2006), p. 426. In a letter to Christopher Ricks dated 31 Jan. 1966, Empson writes, ‘I don’t remember any review except James Smith’s’ (Selected Letters, p. 395). Empson also refers to Smith’s criticism on two occasions in Some Versions of Pastoral and once in The Structure of Complex Words (Some Versions of Pastoral (New York, 1974), pp. 80, 139-40; The Structure of Complex Words, 3rd edn. (Totowa, NJ, 1979), pp. 302-3). For a recent discussion of Smith’s criticism of Empson, see Anthony Ossa-Richardson, A History of Ambiguity (Princeton, NJ, 2019), pp. 391-3. 3 Edward M. Wilson, in his biographical note to the posthumous collection of Smith’s work, Shakespearian and Other Essays (Cambridge, 1974), observes that Empson went out of his way to send Smith the draft preface to the second edition, in which he responded to Smith’s criticism. 4 On the ‘Wimsatt Law’, see William Empson, ‘Preface’, in Using Biography (1974), pp. vii-viii. For an earlier rebuttal of Wimsatt, see William Empson, ‘Still the Strange Necessity’, in Argufying: Essays on Literature and Culture, ed. John Haffenden (1987), pp. 120-8. 5 Geoffrey Hill quotes Bradley in ‘A Postscript to Modernist Poetics’, Collected Critical Writings, ed. Kenneth Haynes (Oxford, 2008), p. 566. Bradley’s quotation originally appeared in F. H. Bradley, Essays on Truth and Reality (Oxford, 1914), p. 265. 6 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, 3rd edn. (New York, 1947), p. 199. 7 Smith, ‘On William Empson’s “Seven Types of Ambiguity”’, in Shakespearian and Other Essays, p. 340. 8 Ibid., p. 341. 9 Empson, ‘Preface to the Second Edition’, Seven Types of Ambiguity, pp. xiii-xiv. 10 Smith, ‘Measure for Measure’, in Shakespearian and Other Essays, p. 105. 11 Smith, ‘The Merchant of Venice—A Fragment’, ibid., pp. 60-1. 12 For a full account of Empson’s engagement with Faust, see John Haffenden, William Empson, vol. ii: Against the Christians (Oxford, 2006), pp. 650-5. 13 Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, p. xv. 14 Empson to I. A. Richards, Nov. 1932, in Selected Letters of William Empson, p. 49. 15 John McDowell, ‘Eudaimonism and Realism in Aristotle’s Ethics’, in The Engaged Intellect: Philosophical Essays (Cambridge, Mass., 2009), p. 50. 16 See, for instance, Phillipa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford, 2003); Michael Thompson, Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Jonathan Lear, Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation (Cambridge, Mass., 2008); Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford, 1999); Sebastian Rödl, Categories of the Temporal: An Inquiry into the Forms of the Finite Intellect, trans. Sibylle Salewski (Cambridge, Mass., 2012), and Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: An Introduction to Absolute Idealism (Cambridge, Mass., 2018), pp. 111-27. 17 Aristotle writes on incontinence of the will (though he does not have a fully developed concept of the ‘will’ in the same way as Kant) in Book VII of The Nichomachean Ethics. For a reading of Aristotle on the subject, see John McDowell, ‘Incontinence and Practical Wisdom in Aristotle’, in The Engaged Intellect, pp. 59-76. 18 Smith, ‘The Winter’s Tale’, in Shakespearian and Other Essays, p. 125; ‘Baudelaire’, ibid., pp. 301-21. 19 Smith, ‘The Merchant of Venice – A Fragment’, ibid., pp. 50-1. 20 Ibid., p. 68. 21 Smith, ‘As You Like It’, ibid., p. 9. 22 Smith, ‘Measure for Measure’, ibid., pp. 118-19. 23 Ibid. © The Author(s) [2019]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Wynn Owen,, Andrew

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz024pmid: N/A

TELLING THE STORY OF RUPERT BROOKE AND KA COX, F. T. Prince hurries things along: ‘some actors need not be called’.1 In an abridged drama of twentieth century literature, Prince would certainly merit time on stage, but a subsidiary question arises: when should he be called? Not late but early, as Geoffrey Hill wrote: Prince, in common with Pound, MacDiarmid, and early Auden, is concerned with the nature, retention and vulnerability of the public good in ways that are scarcely conceivable under the present dispensation. ‘And a good thing too!’ many will say, recalling Pound’s fascism, MacDiarmid’s hard-line Communism and perhaps Auden’s Anglo-Catholicism. The objection has significant consequences if, as I think is the case, it causes readers to prefer Prince’s Memoirs in Oxford, 1970, to his much finer Poems, 1938, on the grounds that the later volume is the more attractive because of its confessional vulnerability.2 James Wood thought the same: ‘About Prince’s later poetry there is a damp defeatism’.3 Richmond Lattimore was more tactful: ‘There are perhaps more marvelous felicities in his earlier than his later works’.4 It is in the early works that the virtues Prince attributes to Rupert Brooke are visible: ‘most brilliant, most restless, and most self-conscious’.5 The recent publication of Reading F. T. Prince, edited by Will May, offers a good moment to reassess the achievement of the poet still best known for ‘Soldiers Bathing’. Pitched from many angles, yet rightly focused on the better work, Reading F. T. Prince shows the poet to have been an admirably coherent and rigorous aesthetic thinker, an artist whose intricate technical dedication forged a deep compact with his interest in labour, physicality, vulnerability, matter and mind. The speaker of ‘The Old Age of Michelangelo’ insists, ‘I am of all men ever born / Most inclined to love persons’ (CP, p. 75).6 Natalie Pollard writes lucidly on Prince’s view of sculpture as a parallel to poetry, ‘the corporeality of “making verse”, seen as a painstaking refashioning of matter’.7 ‘Asprezza’ (from the Latin ‘asper’, meaning ‘rough’), the artistic quality of sharpness, roughness, harshness, is one expression of this. Pleasingly, though this is an etymological red herring, it looks like a privative relation to ‘sprezzatura’. Prince conceived of himself as a hard-working artisan. ‘I an artisan of fire’ (CP, p. 26). Not ‘artist’ but ‘artisan’, more clearly a working creator. To go alongside ‘asprezza’, Gareth Farmer offers another term, one that makes the labouring element still more explicit: ‘intaglio’. Far from sprezzatura’s ‘studied carelessness’, often Prince’s favoured style is an artisan’s studious carefulness. ‘Intaglio’, from the Italian ‘intagliare’, ‘to engrave’, expresses ‘a sense of workmanship, of craft, of graft and labour, all characteristics admired by Prince’, the finished work ‘inscribed with the labour of its creation’.8 The word would also have been in Prince’s mind: ‘drypoint’, the technical term in the title of Prince’s ‘Drypoints of the Hasidim’, is an intaglio technique. It is worth considering here the critical emphasis on ‘labour’ and, related, ‘difficulty’, both of which were critical shibboleths for Hill (compare ‘order’ for Eliot).9 ‘Intaglio’ may be understood as the working artisan’s response to the sprezzatura of the courtier, whose detachment predisposed earlier centuries to hear ‘labour’ as ‘laboriousness’. This is a political-critical reckoning that has been burgeoning since the surge of the artisan class in the Renaissance. Hill channelled it as justification for his style. Farmer’s emphasis on ‘intaglio’ is an intervention in this long debate and one true to the experience of reading ‘An Epistle to a Patron’: this is not leisurely sinuousness, but hard-won contortion. A modern critical mosaic emerges. The dark underbelly of courtliness has been well described recently by Greg Walker, in Writing Under Tyranny;10 and in this vein, Adam Piette reads the political freight of ‘An Epistle to a Patron’ with appreciative depth: it presents ‘the double nature of art’s gift to the world: it will sweeten but it will also powerfully imitate in order to reflect back the clanging energies of the military caste and environment’.11 Art, early Prince emphasises, should display, not conceal, its effort. Sprezzatura conceals effort, asprezza shows it. The difference between sprezzatura and asprezza is important because there have been different critical views about their place in Prince’s work: in a 1980 review for Poetry, Ben Howard praised ‘the leisured ease and elegance of [Prince’s] style’.12 ‘Not so’, says the advocate of conspicuous effort, ‘the emphasis is more clearly on asprezza’. And the asprezza is often the more conspicuous because it exists in a field of sprezzatura. Crucially, the point in emphasising Prince’s ‘asprezza’ or ‘intaglio’ is not the familiar point that hard work is the underside of sprezzatura, which conceals labour to present ease. Rather, asprezza reminds the reader of the poet’s labour. So Prince often contends, and Hill evidently agrees, that a modern poet should emphasise that skill is acquired by labour. Thus, in ‘An Epistle to a Patron’, Prince wrong-foots the over-generalising expectation that an Italianate artistry will be sprezzaturan: the architect has designed ‘civil structures of a war-like elegance … with which I declare the fact / That your nature is to vanquish’, but this elegance, which is complicated by its warlikeness anyway, has been hard won, the product of ‘slow pains’, ‘Being pressed as I am, being broken / By wealth and poverty, torn between strength and weakness’ (CP, pp. 13, 15). Sprezzatura may, as Howard might reasonably contend, exist alongside asprezza in Prince’s work, but the chief note in ‘An Epistle’ is asprezzan, the juxtaposition of the two styles weighted to convey the frailties of sprezzatura. Prince bears a courtly name, but he often deploys a non-, or even anti-, courtly style. So sprezzatura might, by an opponent, be dismissed as a political relic: it was, after all, called ‘the figure of the courtier’. The lure of sprezzatura, some would contend, is like a curse from a bygone age, calling out to the unwary modern poet. But this would be a partial characterisation of sprezzatura, and therefore an inadequate description for clear-sighted aesthetic discussion. Depending on how it is used, sprezzatura might suggest that the skilful become so through natural grace and deploy it at leisure, or that hard-won skill and the effort of art should sometimes be concealed. The former could more clearly become sprezzatura-gone-wrong, or rather sprezzatura-put-to-unethical-purposes, if used to suggest, on the basis of some being more skilful than others in some fields of endeavour, that the fundamental deservingness of human beings to receive ‘equal respect and concern’ is compromised.13 The latter is much more positive: it could be used to induce wonder at the possibilities of life and thought. Once the bad manifestations of sprezzatura and asprezza have been banished from consideration, the two look more like allies than enemies. More, they actually guard against each other’s worst excesses. While a successful poem might be all rough and no smooth, or vice versa, Prince excelled in judging, and drawing attention to, the coexistence of those qualities. Though his admiration for asprezza was clear, Prince did not think it the only way forward for anglophone poetry. He would have been aware, describing his new-world poet in ‘The Tears of a Muse in America’ as one who will ‘overpraise and underprize / And outvalue’, of the Italian compound that forms the word ‘sprezzatura’: ‘sprezzare’, ‘to despise’, is a shortening of ‘disprezzare’, which, with a negative prefix, comes from ‘prezzo’, meaning ‘price’, ‘worth’, or ‘value’. It alludes to the courtier’s contempt for conspicuous effort, or perhaps for the world itself, everything seeming so easy to such a figure (CP, p. 20). That American poet is suffused with sprezzatura, ‘Caught in that leisurely and transparent train / Of the soft ostensibility of story’, and there is a question as to whether this grace ‘is indefensibly too fine’ to be approved (CP, p. 21). ‘For / How idly miraculous / Or of what tortuous glory, / In fact this creature was / How should my mere ingenuity relate?’ (CP, p. 21).14 Jamesian in its unusual syntax and psychological enquiry, Audenesque in its knowing sympathy, this memorialises a poet, but it could be an alien’s epitaph for humanity. What is it to be human, how should it be told? Is it ‘idly miraculous’, sprezzaturan, or ‘tortuous glory’, asprezzan? As for art, is great work the product of graceful inspiration, or painstaking effort? How we think about art reflects on how we think about life. Prince approves the asprezzan for himself, but his American poet-hero is more clearly sprezzaturan. This may be because the broadly idealistic political foundation of America is, as Yeats said of Ireland, that of a country ‘The poets have imagined’ – that is to say, the English poets of the Platonic idealist strand, those who moved Hazlitt to write, ‘Poetry dwells in a perpetual utopia of its own’.15 It is a moving poem because it tweezers the mixed emotions that are likely to occur to people from what is now no longer the most influential anglophone nation when they consider those who inhabit that new superpower, with its constitution founded on eighteenth century Whiggish principles of liberty. That is the country for sprezzatura now: ‘let him, / Pleased to accomplish purposes, / Alight in loose dress from a car’ (CP, p. 12). Prince had rather a specific America in his sights: one of his early hopes, he told Eliot, was to complete James’s unfinished novel The Ivory Tower, which explores the corruptive influence of wealth. ‘Magnificence’, ‘magnificenza’ in Italian, is another term that recurs in Reading F. T. Prince, in reference to ‘the magnificent style’ practised by Della Casa, Tasso, and Milton. Farmer draws attention to the ‘two apparently simple techniques’ of the ‘magnificent style’, ‘techniques which would not look out of place in a futurist manifesto, or in any one of a number of critical commentaries on modernist poetry’: ‘breaking up the verses’ and ‘distortion of the natural word-order’ (FTP, p. 41). This may sound like ‘asprezza’, and it should: ‘S’accresce la magnificenza con l’asprezza’, Tasso wrote.16 In current use, the word ‘magnificence’ can have an off-putting resonance, grandiose and pompous. But Tasso anticipated this: magnificenza must avoid ‘gonfiezza’ (‘swollenness’), ‘vizio sì prossimo alla magnificenza’.17 So, crucially, in the phrase ‘magnificent style’, that which is being referred to as ‘magnified’ is the world, not the system of power relations that binds the observer. Tasso’s marriage of magnificenza and asprezza sends a clear message: magnificence consists in magnifying the world, not in magnifying some humans over others. (As Christopher Ricks wrote, words like ‘major’ and ‘minor’ are ‘not words which you can naturally utter of a human being’.18) One hostile to sprezzatura, perhaps drawing too strong a contrast between asprezza and sprezzatura, might assert that ‘sprezzaturan magnificence’ is a contradiction in terms, that it would involve finding the world wondrous while holding the contemptuous attitude to reality that underpins the courtier’s political pose. The case might be made that once one has posed in the sprezzaturan manner, it is not possible to induce true metaphysical wonder in the observer, only something that may, to unfortunate power-obsessed people, feel like it: admiration for worldly power structures. But this would be going too far, characterising ‘sprezzatura’ only as its failed form. Just as ‘asprezza’ can be distinguished from its overwrought cousin ‘gonfiezza’, so, for lucid aesthetic discussion, a term should be conjured to identify failed sprezzatura. Perhaps this could be, to parallel ‘gonfiezza’, ‘magrezza’ (‘thinness’). The term ‘graceful style’, for the best manifestations of sprezzatura, could be used as a counterpart to asprezza’s ‘magnificent style’. Sprezzatura is perpetually in danger, if mishandled, of seeming too careless, callous, even too self-ironising, and then it becomes ‘magrezza’, ‘indefensibly too fine’. The poet should seek to avoid what Francesco de Sanctis called ‘una sprezzatura che pare negligenza ed è invece artificio finissimo’.19 As in the case of asprezza, the aesthetic (mis)handling partly consists in the relation between the metaphysical assumptions and the chosen style. Prince was clearly aware of the dangers of mishandling both asprezza and sprezzatura, and saw that many of these dangers relied on the way in which metaphysical speculations are clothed: his Michelangelo speaks of a moment when ‘the light fades from the sky’ and he feels ‘Last torments and last light, torn hesitations / Between desire and fear, between desire and my disdain’ (CP, pp. 78-9). The metaphysics is crucial.20 Metaphysics has tended to be, as Schopenhauer writes, the prompt for philosophical curiosity, wonder first induced by the realisation that death is ever advancing on us. In The World as Will and Representation, having spoken of the terrible moment in the growth of the mind when the thinker ‘stands consciously face to face with death’, Schopenhauer writes of the centrality of metaphysics in the first fashioning of the curious outlook: Therefore with this reflection and astonishment arises the need for metaphysics that is peculiar to man alone; accordingly, he is an animal metaphysicum. … Temples and churches, pagodas and mosques, in all countries and ages, in their splendour and spaciousness, testify to man’s need for metaphysics, a need strong and ineradicable, which follows close on the physical.21 Metaphysical speculation is often the making of philosophers, the exercise of a deep-seated curiosity. It can also be the making of thoughtful artists. Organisation arising from metaphysical assumption leads to coherence, consistency, rootedness in an artist’s work. There are various options. A poet interested in Platonism might write, as Herbert and Shelley did, of a world beyond the physical. A poet interested in Kantian ideas might write verse exploring the limits of human consciousness, trying to find moving words for Kant’s ‘Copernican shift’ in epistemology: consider, say, R. S. Thomas’s ‘Green Categories’, in which the speaker ruefully mentions ‘mind’s uncertainty faced with a world / Of its own making’.22 Platonist poets, believing in an ‘anterior’ realm (as Emily Dickinson writes, ‘Love is anterior to life’), may also believe in an afterlife – but this might only be the Aristotelian afterlife, one in which the individual lives on in a very impersonal way, surviving in that which has been contributed to the realms of human knowledge during life. Such views influence aesthetic decision-making, and allow for various decisions. (It is worth noting that interest in, even agreement with, Plato’s metaphysics need not entail agreement with his totalitarian politics, and indeed might well lead on to disagreement with them.)23 Metaphysics sets many questions for aesthetics, as for other branches of philosophy, but usually there are a number of possible answers to these questions. These answers should allay the anxieties of those who question the use of metaphysics, but it is a qualm that metaphysicians have addressed independent of those answers. T. L. S. Sprigge writes, The advocate of a metaphysical theory may be asked what its use is. But when this question is posed by an anti-metaphysician it is often a Morton’s fork; if one points, say, to the implications the theory has in relation to certain ethical dilemmas, one is suspected of having manufactured it simply to underpin one’s attitude on this matter, while if one does not point to any ‘use’ one may be told one’s work is useless.24 Sprigge’s solution is to say that metaphysics allows people to ‘grasp the nature of things, as something they may want to do for its own sake, or, failing that, at least better to understand the dialectic of some great and abiding conceptual option’. Radhakrishnan also addresses this concern, writing of the importance of ‘not sacrific[ing] the mystical to the moral’, which might be updated, to discard the (perhaps discouraging) connotations of ‘mystical’, as ‘not sacrific[ing] the metaphysical to the moral’, allowing for ‘a natural profundity of soul’, a view ‘essentially life-transcending, and as a result, life-transforming’.25 In this view, rather than simply going through the motions of what they should do, the metaphysically aware are driven by a passionate understanding of the nature of things. This has not gone unobserved by writers. Auden insists that an artist must have ‘an adequate and conscious metaphysics’ in order to select details from life artfully: Art is not metaphysics any more than it is conduct, and the artist is usually unwise to insist too directly in his art upon his beliefs; but without an adequate and conscious metaphysics in the background, art’s imitation of life inevitably becomes, either a photostatic copy of the accidental details of life without pattern or significance, or a personal allegory of the artist’s individual dementia, of interest primarily to the psychologist and the historian.26 Auden goes on to quote Kafka, who decries a world in which everyone has views but no metaphysics underpinning them: The choice was put to them whether they would like to be kings or kings’ couriers. Like children, they all wanted to be couriers. So now there are a great many couriers, they post through the world and, as there are no kings left, shout to each other their meaningless and obsolete messages. They would gladly put an end to their wretched lives but they dare not because of their oath of service.27  Poets need not be metaphysicians. But metaphysics can give the poet’s work some foundations and direction. Platonist poets, for example, will tend to explore the inspiring wonder of pattern and the realm of forms. One prevalent emphasis for such poets is that purely physical explanation is ultimately insufficient. As Thomas Nagel has recently put it, ‘The world is an astonishing place, and the idea that we have in our possession the basic tools needed to understand it is no more credible now than it was in Aristotle’s day’.28 Platonism, a variety of ‘objective idealism’, is a position that continues to have sincere and well-informed defenders. Nagel writes, The view that rational intelligibility is at the root of the natural order makes me, in a broad sense, an idealist – not a subjective idealist, since it doesn’t amount to the claim that all reality is ultimately appearance – but an objective idealist in the tradition of Plato and perhaps also of certain post-Kantians, such as Schelling and Hegel, who are usually called absolute idealists. … The intelligibility of the world is no accident. Mind, in this view, is doubly related to the natural order. Nature is such as to give rise to conscious beings with minds; and it is such as to be comprehensible to such beings. Ultimately, therefore, such beings should be comprehensible to themselves. And these are fundamental features of the universe, not byproducts of contingent developments whose true explanation is given in terms that do not make reference to mind.29 So why was F. T. Prince so keen to demonstrate his preoccupation with the physical? Because, partly, he was so preoccupied with the metaphysical. And the first accusation to be levelled at a metaphysical artist is underestimation of the physical: hence the denunciations of Shelley’s style as overly abstract, vague, airy. As for the reader, some poems will be recalcitrant to the understanding of those who do not share the metaphysical outlook of the author. Hence I. A. Richards’s comment that readers should find time to contemplate metaphysical questions before embarking: Sit by the fire (with eyes shut and fingers pressed firmly upon the eyeballs) and consider with as full ‘realisation’ as possible: i. Man’s loneliness (the isolation of the human situation). ii. The facts of birth, and of death, in their inexplicable oddity. iii. The inconceivable immensity of the Universe. iv. Man’s place in the perspective of time. v. The enormity of his ignorance. not as gloomy thoughts or as targets for doctrine, but as the most incomprehensible and inexhaustible objects for meditation there are; then in the glow of their emotional reverberation pass the poem through the mind[.]30 This passage is perhaps partly a joke: the speculation need not be done immediately before reading; it might have been done years ago, or over the course of many years, or unconsciously. The point that Richards makes is that sensitive stylistic appreciation partly depends on awareness of metaphysical conundra. For one example, Prince’s emotional interest, sometimes wistful, sometimes agonised, in the difference between asprezza and sprezzatura suggests something dispositional about his approach to Platonism: there may, he speculates, be a realm beyond the physical, but whether it is something to be accessed by strenuously displayed or gracefully concealed effort is up in the air. The effort could be many things. It might be suffering, in which case the sprezzaturan approach is fitting to the brave-faced and enthusing hopeful, Wordsworth advocating ‘Despondency Corrected’ in The Excursion, and the asprezzan to the tragic chorus in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon, intoning the law that ‘wisdom comes by suffering’.31 For all their differences, it is also worth noting that sprezzatura and asprezza are not mutually exclusive: a skilful poet can conceal art in one line and hold it up for inspection it in the next. Here it is worth considering Attridge’s essay on Prince’s late syllabic poem Afterword on Rupert Brooke (1976), which includes Prince’s observation that ‘Strong rhythms are the natural vehicle for emotion or excitement’, hence his use of syllabics in writing on Brooke, because ‘lack of emphatic rhythm is a check on emotional intensity’ (FTP, p. 20). Attridge shows how Prince’s growing emotional investment in his subject (‘I found myself becoming more emotionally involved as I went on’) translates to rising musicality, the introduction of rhyme and accentual-syllabic regularity.32 There is a convincing conclusion: ‘Syllabic verse … is only as good as the poet who employs it. And Prince is very good indeed’ (FTP, p. 25). The essay is moving in its implications. As early as 1942, Prince was compared to Brooke.33 So when he wrote about Brooke later, it was personal: he was partly writing about his own views on poetry and age, perhaps thinking himself as good, or once potentially as good, or differently good. Brooke died young, but there is some sense in which Prince also died young, dying out of his magnificent style and into ordinary life, conquering his ‘fear of being “second-rate”, / Which is not far from a fear of growing older’ (CP, p. 174). Brooke had sprezzatura. Read alongside Prince’s asprezzan work, the implication is that English sprezzatura died with the First World War, a war in which aristocratic generals infamously sent many working-class soldiers to painful deaths. Prince was only 64 in 1976, with twenty-seven years of life to go, but evidently felt that the time had come for an afterword, indirectly ruminating on how the world had changed since his childhood. Inextricably linked to Prince’s Platonism, as it was linked for the seventeenth century Platonists, is a substantial technical point to be made about the use of regular polymetry. By ‘polymetry’ I do not mean precisely what Martin West meant in his work on Greek metre, discussing the verse of dramatists who ‘often swing from one type of metre into another within the limits of a strophe’.34 For English poetry, ‘polymetry’ can be, I propose, an umbrella term to describe poems that either deploy multiple accentual-syllabic line-lengths (for example hexameter, pentameter, tetrameter), or those that admit fluctuation between lines using different feet (for example anapaestic trimeter interspersed with iambic trimeter), or both at once (dactylic dimeter interspersed with iambic hexameter). There are other possibilities for this term (such as the organised changing of feet within a line, as opposed to the usual allowance of variation). It can be made more precise by the addition of qualifiers. For example, George Herbert tends to use rhyming regular accentual-syllabic polymetry.35 This opens the door to a vast number of possible stanza forms; but here I shall limit the discussion to regular accentual-syllabic polymetry. Vitally, such patterns can be varied in many ways, in keeping with the standard rules of metrical variation.36 Polymetry also complements Prince’s stylistic explorations of ‘effort’, through the oscillation of asprezza and sprezzatura, partly because it allows for differentially sharp or soft metrical shifts, partly because it is the most difficult form of poetry to write, requiring, for best results, continuous awareness of local effect and overarching pattern, and their interplay. Prince did signpost other technical breakthroughs, but he was perhaps indirect in doing so. His ‘Strambotti’, he noted, resurrected a form that had ‘not been written in English since Sir Thomas Wyatt’ – but this is a far less intricate and impressive form than his regular polymetry (CP, p. 305). Intricate polymetry was most brilliantly practised in English by, among others, Mary Sidney Herbert, George Herbert, Henry Vaughan, and Thomas Traherne.37 Accomplished twentieth century examples are limited: the best come from Hardy, Yeats, Moore (as syllabics), and a handful of others. Why should it be so unusual among the moderns? Perhaps because it is difficult to fashion good intricate repeating stanzas, perhaps because the metaphysical implication of such a practice is that there is a Platonic order structuring the world. ‘Christianity is Platonism for the “people” – has created a magnificent tension of spirit’, Nietzsche wrote.38 With the twentieth century’s declining interest in Christianity, hollowed out by dwindling belief in Platonism, its central metaphysical assumption, fewer poets would be likely to think it worthwhile to write in a highly patterned way. Nietzsche also wrote that, ‘with certain metaphysical assumptions, art has a much greater value’.39 At different points in history, changing metaphysical assumptions can explain fluctuating interest in certain styles of poetry. Three Christian Platonists, at least at some point in their lives, Prince, Auden, and Hill all wrote regular polymetry. As did Yeats, a non-Christian Platonist. It was also rife in that Plato-enthused age, the Renaissance: sometimes writing for musical accompaniment, sometimes not, Renaissance poets often wrote regular polymetry, hence Norbrook and Woudhuysen’s compendious ‘Index of Metrical and Stanzaic Forms’ in The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse.40 Romanticism, which saw a re-flourishing of polymetry after an early to mid eighteenth century lull, ‘was the greatest revival of Platonism since the Renaissance’.41 There is a widespread, but not a necessary, connection between authorial Platonism and the writing of regular polymetry. Hardy, who tended towards grim rumination on the absence of metaphysical order (see ‘Hap’: ‘If but some vengeful god would call to me / … / Then would I bear it, clench myself, and die’), wrote much regular polymetry. This tension between form and content is part of the unsettling verve of Hardy’s poetry. Evidently, the regular polymetrist need not be a Platonist to access the zone of artistic interest under discussion, the zone of writing in pattern while also thinking about pattern. Nor is positioning within this zone simply a question of being for or against pattern: the voice of a poem, even varying within the poem, could be intrigued by, enamoured of, disconcerted by, dubious of, or have any number of other responses to, pattern. These form–content correspondences and tensions present many different artistic possibilities. Stephen J. Adams, author of Poetic Designs: An Introduction to Meters, Verse Forms, and Figures of Speech and an editor of The Ezra Pound Encyclopaedia, describes ‘Soldiers Bathing’ as ‘composed in open couplets, in verse that begins with an iambic pentameter base but departs from it freely (a variety of vers libéré)’.42 This is imprecise: far from departing into freedom at intervals, ‘Soldiers Bathing’ uses such intricate and deft regular polymetry, with a few artful variations, that it feels ‘free’.43 Mary Kinzie, writing in 1981, later author of A Poet’s Guide to Poetry (1999), was also imprecise: of ‘Soldiers Bathing’, she writes, ‘The structure of the elegiac couplets is complex’.44 The phrase ‘elegiac couplets’ might refer, very vaguely, to ‘couplets that are elegiac in spirit’ or, more technically specific, Latinate ‘elegiac couplets’, alternating hexameters with pentameters – but that is not the structure of ‘Soldiers Bathing’. Given the critical confusion and vagueness surrounding the structure of Prince’s most famous poem, it is surprising that there is no specific comment in Reading F. T. Prince on its formal properties: pentameters alternate with heptameters, the occasional out-of-pattern line admitted for moving variation. In full, the stresses-per-line are, with some reasonable possibility for variation according to pronunciation and elision, as follows: 575755‖57575757575757‖57575757575757575‖757575656[or 7, see note]575‖7575757575[=2;3]7575757.45 The only two lines that are definite pattern variation here are ‘And my mind towards the meaning of it strives’ and ‘But indirectly or directly a commentary’. Crucially, whenever a definite variation is introduced the 57 alternation resumes as if the interruption had not occurred. Prince was evidently wary of overusing or misusing such variations. In handwritten annotations to ‘Soldiers Bathing’, he offers a change to the line ‘With indignation and pity and despair by turns’: ‘With indignation and pity and despair and love by turns’, six stresses becoming seven.46 Prince may originally have been pronouncing ‘indignation’ with five syllables, the Renaissance pronunciation, and perhaps decided that this was too archaic. In any case, this annotation demonstrates his scrupulous desire to maintain the pattern for the reader’s ear. It is interesting to note that there are only two definite pattern variations: evidently, Prince felt that the variations should be sparse. Artful variation is used sparingly and to great effect, the luge of pattern movingly interrupted by unexpected cadences, each variation a rhythmically dramatic moment. Thus, pattern survives variation and the metaphysical proposition is that Platonic order survives our passing woes and joys. This proposition is held in intriguing juxtaposition with the contention of the final lines, which seem to assert, with the image of Christ’s blood trailing down the sky, that pain and passion are inscribed in the structure of the universe – so, though our woes and joys pass, they will return as part of the pattern. Elsewhere Prince does depart from metrical pattern ‘freely’, but not in ‘Soldiers Bathing’. Carol Rumens, selecting ‘The Book’ as a ‘poem of the week’ in the Guardian, describes the poem with verve and interest. However, the reference to its polymetry is potentially misleading: she writes of the poem’s ‘fluid three-five beat line’.47 This is inaccurate, unless ‘three-five’ is taken to mean ‘three to five’ and not ‘three alternating with five’ (so ‘three-five’ is, with this ambiguity, misleadingly vague): the stanza pattern is 3554534434455. In the third line of the third stanza, one of the two lines that vary this pattern, the enjambed opening speculates about the breaking of pattern: ‘if we could / But break the circle’. To more momentous effect, the other variation-line, the ninth, breaks the pattern in the fourth, final, stanza: ‘And see at length what can be seen’. The effect here is much more hopeful. Where the variation in the third stanza was coupled with speculative doubt, the fourth stanza’s variation is fused with sense expressing opportunity, a window flung wide, an unexpected door. More, the third-line variation of the third stanza led only to slight diminishment from the expected pentameter, whereas the ninth-line variation of the fourth stanza led to a clearly noticeable fixity, making it highly distinct from the other stanzas. There is a subtly compounded proposition in the latter effect: it is a variation from the expected, the sense correspondently bringing in the idea of possibility; in the context of the surrounding lines, however, the variation introduces fixity. It is as if to say, ‘This variation, which you find so unexpected after previous cadences, may be playing into another pattern, one unaccounted for by the previously established pattern-world of the poem’. Part of Prince’s metaphysical proposal is clear: it is in those rare moments when pattern breaks that new possibility enters. The other part is more involved: pattern-breaking is about rupture in one way, but it can produce coherence in another, or it can gesture at other patterns. It is a blend of variation and fixity that says several things at once about the nature of pattern. Comparable entanglements are explored by Wordsworth in his triumph of irregular polymetry, the ode ‘Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood’. Nor is ‘The Book’ alone: the first five poems of Soldiers Bathing are all regularly polymetrical. This is used to varying effect. The regular polymetry of ‘The Dice’ (two stanzas, running 4355554455353555, with divergences on the first and seventh lines) is an answer to the famous poem ‘Un coup de dés’, the irregular masterpiece of Mallarmé, who was much admired by Prince.48 Meanwhile, the regular polymetrical structure of ‘The Diamond’ (three stanzas, running 3555355557, with no accent-number variations) creates abrupt dramatic emphasis around its trimetric lines, such as ‘Must then all human love’ and ‘That diamond was the rock’, and a different type of emphasis on its heptametric lines, an expansiveness which, according to the sense, might be read as wistful zooming out (‘Worlds upon worlds in our two one, made one by you and me’) or forward-looking hope (‘As long as wings and waters are, how far we can and care’). Nor was this kind of polymetry absent from Poems (1938): ‘Keeper’s Wood’ is written in stanzas running 323232, rhyming abbcac, a swirling structure that, as just one feature of interest, exploits the cadence of rhyming a dimeter with a following trimeter, the second and third lines, to produce an effect of slight rhythmical expansion, which could be felt as relaxation, dilation, a broadening of horizons. Prince’s polymetrical triumph lies in mapping shifts of meaning onto subtle shifts of stress-number, understanding that, for example, the cadence of a heptameter followed by a pentameter can have different effects according to the sense being inflected (consider also the great range of expression complemented by common metre, 4343.). At Bletchley, where Prince did most of his war service, the number-crunching environment might have been fitting for the author of such intricate works.49 On the other hand, Prince once claimed, ‘I don’t like counting’, and it is quite plausible that he did not do it: often, during construction, a poet’s sense of rhythm takes over and no ‘counting’ is necessary, even for very intricate stanzas, if the stanza rhythm is fully internalised – counting may, however, be useful for critics seeking to understand the intricate workings of the poet’s art.50 Assuredly, for a fluctuation as simple as the pentameter-heptameter of ‘Soldiers Bathing’, no counting would be necessary, other than the unconscious counting of ‘felt rhythm’, familiar to musicians and other rhythmical artists.51 After all, Prince was, as Rumens rightly puts it, ‘a master of orchestration’. Prince was evidently aware of polymetry’s importance, writing, in the late poem ‘Not a Paris Review Interview’, of how, in youth, he ‘said no / To Eliot then, but found / The way to what, though not / Free verse, was freer; and so to / The breakthrough’ (CP, p. 247). His polymetry is perhaps most influenced by Yeats, who customarily used a similar range, going from pentameter to trimeter (e.g. ‘All Souls’ Night’, 5535533335, rhyming abcabcdeed), as opposed to, say, Traherne, who uses a wider range and more intricate patterning.52 His admiration for Yeats, whom he called ‘the greatest poet of the twentieth century’, and whose late-flowering Platonism is well documented, was so deep that he once journeyed to Ireland to meet the great poet.53 Prince might have further exploited the possibilities of polymetry by juxtaposing different stanzas (e.g. 54452435 alongside 62456326, either alternating or patterned; if three stanza types are used, the most intricate sequences from the Petrarchan sestet become available: abcabc, abcbca, abacbc, and so on).54 Instead, after his five regular polymetrical poems, Prince returns to monometry with ‘The Question’. At the point of this turn, the poet introduces a note of gnomic sadness, eerie resignation, the blankness of a wizard who can contrive no more spectacular spells and so relapses to his simplest: after all that regular polymetry, the voice of ‘The Question’ flatly states, ‘And done, it were as if it were not done’ (CP, p. 63). To one reading in the manner of James Wood, who called Soldiers Bathing a ‘sad failure’, it would probably seem so.55 ‘[W]ho nowadays is conscious of our sins?’, Prince asks in ‘Soldiers Bathing’ (CP, p. 56). He might plausibly have asked, ‘Who nowadays is aware of the force of careful polymetry?’ Prince’s art of introducing slight line-length variations to the established pattern, shifting a pentameter to a tetrameter or a tetrameter to a trimeter, coheres with his attitude to criticism: these are poems that invite the ‘Coleridgean wholeness’ of ‘the older, mixed methods’, wide-angle structural analysis complementing textual microscopy.56 Elizabeth Jennings described Prince as ‘not innovatory’; but, by other lights, he was highly ‘innovatory’, in the sense that he resurrected some remarkable styles that were not then the norm.57 One criticism that might reasonably be levelled at a reading style based on regular polymetry is that, if tunnel-visioned, the reader might neglect to notice local metrical variations (such as, for example, the rending spondee at the very end of Prince’s ‘Soldiers Bathing’). But the point of the ‘older, mixed methods’ is that they encompass various awarenesses. What is at the root of the decline of polymetry? Resistance to Platonism, perhaps, as I have already suggested. This was not a problem for Prince, who annotated Alka Nigam’s reference, in the thesis manuscript she sent him for edits, to ‘Prince’s spiritual kinship with Shelley and Plato’: Prince changed ‘spiritual kinship’ to ‘psychological kinship’, evidently approving the adapted sentiment.58 Marianne Moore wrote, in ‘An Ardent Platonist’, ‘to be philosophical is to be no longer mysterious’.59 Being clear about one’s philosophical views may lead to the dissipation of individual mystique but, if the views are Platonist, it opens a door to the much more inspiring condition of being a conduit for wonder at deep mysteries. Prince was indeed an ardent Platonist, but it would be mischaracterisation to call him a fanatic: as Moore wrote elsewhere, in ‘Enough’, ‘Am I a fanatic? The opposite / And where would I like to be? / Sitting under Plato’s olive-tree’, concluding that poem, quoting Ben Jonson, ‘Stand for truth, and ’tis enough’.60 Only when the world is seen not as ‘a mad weir of tigerish waters’ but as a remarkably moving pattern, perhaps, will that type of poetry resurge.61 Pattern is often, to borrow George Steiner’s phrase, ‘a gamble on transcendence’ that the artist makes.62 The wondrous tantalisations of Platonism can be tough to endure, and Prince’s decline recalls Yeats’s lines, ‘All his twenties crammed with toil; / “What then?” sang Plato’s ghost. “What then?”’.63 The answer to ‘What then?’ is perhaps the Aristotelian reply that you keep on working, turning achieved skill towards public good, which was also the answer of Goethe at the end of the second part of Faust.64 In any case, Prince’s polymetry was an aesthetic triumph. As Jennings wrote, ‘What can never be too strongly emphasised is that what is fresh or original or memorable in any way in poetry IS the music which moves through and rises from its themes and subject. In opera, Words play second fiddle to sound, but in Poetry, in a way no critic or philosopher has ever explained satisfactorily, the two move together as one’.65 The opportunities for originality and memorability are multiplied by intricacy, but this also increases the chances of falling flat. Coleridge once wrote praisingly of Philip Sidney’s tendency to prefer ‘an excellent ballad in the humblest style of poetry to twenty indifferent poems that strutted in the highest’.66 A sign of his rare skill and dedication, Prince’s most famous poem is a successful point of overlap for two intricate techniques: ‘Soldiers Bathing’ fuses polymetry and the magnificent style. Emotionally, Prince was elegiac, reflective, intricate: he could summon up a ‘complex and powerful response to a life of thwarted possibilities’; ‘emotional detachment’ could be replaced, in quick succession, by ‘something more intensely involved’; he could conjure a ‘mood of self-communing uncertainty’ that yet held ‘forcefulness’ (Attridge, FTP, pp. 22-3). Mechanisms of emotion preoccupied him: the fêted figure of ‘The Tears of a Muse in America’ is seen ‘Desiring and desiring to desire’, while the lovelorn speaker of ‘The Wind in the Tree’ recalls thinking, as a child, that a tree sighed, ‘Do I know / whether my motion makes the wind that moves me?’ (CP, pp. 20, 22). Martha Nussbaum argues that tragedy occurs ‘only to those who seek to live well’.67 Asprezza, the very atmosphere of effort, is clear evidence of having so sought, and it allows Prince’s reflections to reach the tragic pitch. One of his favoured constructions is the modal: ‘You should understand’ (‘An Epistle to a Patron’, CP, p. 13); ‘For you must know’ (‘The Old Age of Michelangelo’, CP, p. 75); ‘I should / Come back the way I would to where I would’ (‘The Inn’, CP, p. 58). It is a strange way of speaking, in ‘should’s and ‘must’s, inflectable in many ways. The tone of ‘you must know’ is irresolute: it could be the voice of confessor’s desperation or calm command, urgency or indifference. Looking back, Prince writes, ‘can I now forgive / Myself for having missed so much?’ Presumably not, hence the flat pain of the tone, but there is not much point in bearing a grudge against one’s past self. Though he had known terrible sadness in youth, he had the invincible consolations of a Platonist: Plato says that in Heaven there is  Laid up the pattern of a city Which the man who desires it sees; And he can follow its decrees  And live in justice, truth and pity. (CP, p. 139) His early poetry, not the confessional, has ‘the real nudity and harder truth / That do live on through death’ (CP, p. 171). The greatest triumph of Prince’s magnificent style is perhaps not in his own work, but in his influence on Geoffrey Hill: consider ‘Terribilis Est Locus Iste’, subtitled ‘Gauguin and the Pont-Aven School’, a brief and compelling instance of magnificence.68 Will May describes Prince as ‘the missing link between T. S. Eliot and Geoffrey Hill’ (FTP, p. 7), and perhaps it could also be said that he is a missing link between practitioners of free verse and regular polymetry: regular polymetry is, after all, much of what Geoffrey Hill ended up writing. Interviewed in 2015, he said, I’d like to see a poetry which is highly architectonic and yet sounds spontaneous, as in Yeats. There’s always this sense of massive architectural control in Yeats, but out of it burst these spontaneous, ragged phrases. That’s what poetry should be like. I want poetry still to be rather like late Yeats and early Eliot. I don’t want it to be a sort of simpering drizzle. I really do want there to be some sense of order battling anarchy within the very structure of a poem.69 Prince would have been delighted to have such an inheritor: he loved art, particularly poetry, crafting ‘the poem as an art-object’, one that ‘can somehow capture and retain, and still release, its little charge of life, like a musical-box or a drawing or a sculptor’s mobile’.70 Though he dismissed some of his critical editions as ‘mere potboilers’, his better poetry could never be accused of potboilerhood.71 His two main regions of experiment, both resurrections, the magnificent style and regular polymetry, are trailblazing triumphs. And they developed a symbiosis: polymetry is further evidence of effort, the showing of which was part of the purpose of asprezza. ‘You should understand’ – and the sentence goes on, but it could stop there. The moral of many poems by F. T. Prince may be distilled as a simple injunction to seek comprehension. We should understand his artistry better. John Ashbery, who shared Prince’s interest in free verse, though was generally uninspired by polymetry and Platonism (see Ashbery’s ‘Anticipated Stranger’, which ends, ‘God will find the pattern and break it’), considered Prince ‘one of the best twentieth-century poets’: ‘he is a poet to whom poets turn when they feel they cannot write, that is, he is a source of poetry. He is an artist’.72 More, Prince’s emphasis on aesthetic experience may be read as one facet, reinforced every time an artist demonstrates the extraordinary feelings evoked by art, of the idealist’s bastion against materialist or physicalist reductionism. The argument from aesthetic experience is part of a broader idealist argument, which might be called the argument from remarkable experience, based on ‘an assumption that certain things are so remarkable that they have to be explained as non-accidental if we are to pretend to a real understanding of the world’.73 The young Prince’s passionate trust in art recalls the words of Iris Murdoch’s Plato, in Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues: Plato. I’m very sorry, but really, you’re all so unserious about art, as if it were a sort of side issue. As if one could say there’s the navy and the silvermines and the war and the latest news about Alcibiades and this and that and then of course there’s art and – But art is – in a way it’s almost everything – you don’t see how deep art is, and how awful it is! Callistos. I think your poems are rather nice.74 Footnotes 1 F. T. Prince, Afterword on Rupert Brooke (1976), p. 12. 2 Geoffrey Hill, ‘Il Cortegiano: F. T. Prince’s Poems (1938)’, PN Review 147, 29/1 (Sept./Oct. 2002). 3 James Wood, ‘Jihad’, London Review of Books, 15/15, 5 Aug. 1993, pp. 13-14. 4 Richmond Lattimore, The Hudson Review, 32/3 (Autumn 1979), 441-54. 5 Prince, ‘Modern Poetry in England’, p. 4, quoted in Derek Attridge, ‘F. T. Prince’s Syllabics’, in Will May (ed.), Reading F. T. Prince (Liverpool, 2016), pp. 11-26: 15; hereafter FTP. 6 Quotations are from F. T. Prince, Collected Poems 1935-1992 (1993; Manchester, 2012); hereafter CP. 7 Natalie Pollard, ‘Fugitive Pieces: F. T. Prince and Sculpture’, FTP, pp. 181-210: 184. 8 Gareth Farmer, ‘The Intaglio Element in Prince’s Verse’, FTP, pp. 27-50: 29. 9 Hill was fond of quoting Yeats’s remark that ‘Difficulty is our plough’; for more, see Matthew Sperling, Visionary Philology: Geoffrey Hill and the Study of Words (Oxford, 2014), p. 50. 10 Greg Walker, Writing Under Tyranny: English Literature and the Henrician Reformation (Oxford, 2005). 11 Adam Piette, ‘“My Soldiers”: F. T. Prince and the Sweetness of Command’, FTP, pp. 153-64: 157. 12 Ben Howard, ‘Chords and Keys’, Poetry, 137/2 (Nov. 1980), 105-12. 13 Ronald Dworkin, Taking Rights Seriously (1977; 1997), p. 107. 14 An ambiguity here: ‘this creature’ could refer to the American poet-hero or to the human animal more generally. The former is more obvious from the progression of the passage, but the latter is certainly in play, and I draw on that for my reading. 15 W. B. Yeats, Collected Poems (1965), p. 368. [Hazlitt], ‘Illustrations of the Times Newspaper’, Examiner, 22 Dec. 1816, p. 802. 16 Torquato Tasso, Discorsi dell’arte poetica et in particolare del Poema Heroico (Venice, 1587), p. 27, quoted in Maggie Gunsberg, The Epic Rhetoric of Tasso: Theory and Practice (Oxford, 1998), p. 78. 17 Discorsi, p. 28, quoted ibid., p. 78. 18 Christopher Ricks, ‘Notes Away from the Definition of Minor Poetry’, Ploughshares, 4/3 (1978), 115-21. 19 Francesco de Sanctis, Storia della letteratura italiana (1958; Turin, 1996), p. 582, quoted in Federico Schneider, Pastoral Drama and Healing in Early Modern Italy (Farnham, 2010), p. 160. 20 Schopenhauer’s definition of metaphysics: ‘By metaphysics I understand all so-called knowledge that goes beyond the possibility of experience, and so beyond nature or the given phenomenal appearance of things, in order to give information about that by which, in some sense or other, this experience or nature is conditioned, or in popular language, about that which is hidden behind nature, and renders nature possible’. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation (1818), trans. E. F. J. Payne (Dover, 1958), ch. XVII, ‘On Man’s Need for Metaphysics’, p. 164. 21 Ibid., pp. 160-2. 22 R. S. Thomas, Collected Poems: 1945-1990 (1993; 2000), p. 77. 23 The post-Hegelian objective idealism of Benedetto Croce, for example, was yoked with liberalism and ‘an anti-mystical and anti-utopian Humanism’. See Cecil Sprigge, Benedetto Croce (Cambridge, 1952), p. 55. 24 T. L. S. Sprigge, The Vindication of Absolute Idealism (Edinburgh, 1983), p. xiv. 25 S. Radhakrishnan, An Idealist View of Life (1932; 1961), p. 53. 26 Auden, ‘Mimesis and Allegory’ (1940), in Prose, vol. 2, p. 87. 27 Ibid., p. 87. Also see, for an alternative translation, Kafka, Aphorisms (New York, 2015), translated by Willa and Edwin Muir and Michael Hofmann, p. 48. 28 Thomas Nagel, Mind and Cosmos: Why the Materialist Neo-Darwinian Conception of Nature Is Almost Certainly False (Oxford, 2012), p. 7. 29 Ibid., p. 17. 30 I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism, 2nd impression (1930), pp. 290-1. 31 πάθει μάθος: Aeschylus, Agamemnon, trans. Herbert Weir Smyth (Cambridge, Mass., 1926), p. 177. 32 Prince, quoted by Attridge, FTP, p. 22, from ‘Personal Notes and Queries’, unpublished autobiographical note from 1988 included in The Papers of Frank Templeton Prince, MS 328, A4131, University of Southampton Special Collections. 33 In a review by Edouard Roditi, Poetry, 60/4 (July 1942), 225, Roditi wrote, ‘the artesian waters which F. T. Prince has drawn taste … at times very much like those of Wordsworth and, at other times, like those of Rupert Brooke’. 34 Martin West, Introduction to Greek Metre (Oxford, 1987), p. 66. 35 ‘Regular polymetry’ could use long sequences of line-lengths (e.g. a repeating stanza of 53254243761263647, perhaps rhyming regularly) or short ones (e.g. 65). 36 Prince often substitutes an anapaest for an iamb. Eliot does the same in The Waste Land. It is a widespread and longstanding technique. 37 In a note to Peter Robinson, Prince compared himself to Herbert: ‘rather like Herbert, “I was entangled in the world of strife, / Before I had the power to change my life.”’ See Robinson, in ‘F. T. Prince: Truth in Style’, FTP, p. 72. 38 Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (1886; Cambridge, 2002), p. 4. 39 Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human (1878; Cambridge, 2005), Section Four: ‘From the Soul of Artists and Writers’, Aphorism 222. 40 The Penguin Book of Renaissance Verse 1509-1659, ed. David Norbrook and Henry Woudhuysen (1992; 2005), pp. 857-62. 41 Frederick Beiser, ‘Romanticism and Idealism’, in Dalia Nassar (ed.), The Relevance of Romanticism: Essays on German Romantic Philosophy (Oxford, 2014), pp. 30-45: 36. 42 Stephen J. Adams, Poetic Designs: An Introduction to Meters, Verse Forms, and Figures of Speech (Ontario, 1997; repr. 2003), p. 177. 43 ‘Vers libéré’ is not ‘vers libre’, but it is not particularly helpful to describe this as either without also stipulating the metrical oscillation. 44 Kinzie, A Poet's Guide to Poetry (Chicago, 1999). Kinzie, The American Poetry Review, vol. 10, no. 6 (November/December 1981), p. 35. 45 The fifth line of the second section is quite rough (making good use of metrical asprezza), but ‘animal’ may be read as a dactylic ending, as is much used by Byron in Don Juan, in which case this line may be scanned as 5, with a caesura after ‘Fragile and luminous’ and then ‘Poor bare’ standing in as a spondee.  For the fifth line of the third section, ‘At some sortie of the enemy an episode’, this may be read as 5: an anapaestic substitution for the opening; and ‘episode’ as a dactylic end.  The ninth line of the fourth section, ‘With indignation and pity and despair by turns’: Prince may, in the earlier version, before this line was edited, have pronounced ‘indignation’ with five syllables, the Renaissance pronunciation, which would make a seven-stress line. In any case, for the edit, he changed the line to have seven stresses, more in keeping with modern pronunciation. I think it reasonable that one well read in the literature of the Renaissance could have used the archaic pronunciation, at least in his head during poetical composition, if not out loud.  The ‘5[=2;3]’ is my notation for signifying that a mid-line break has been introduced, a technique found often in the blank verse of Wordsworth and Shakespeare. The dimeter and trimeter lines add up to the expected pentameter. My scansion here does not provide details of ambiguous pronunciations that might render line-lengths ambiguous: e.g. the word ‘gradual’ can be spoken with two syllables or three.  I am grateful to John Fuller (e-mail correspondence, 7 Jan. 2018) for discussion of the scansion here. 46 Prince’s revisions in Oscar Williams, The War Poets (1945), photographs of which were kindly sent me by Jim McCue (e-mail correspondence, 30 May 2017). 47 Carol Rumens, ‘Poem of the Week: The Book by FT Prince’, Guardian, 4 Aug. 2014, <https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2014/aug/04/poem-of-the-week-ft-prince>, accessed 26 Dec. 2017. 48 I call these ‘divergences’ rather than ‘variations’ because there are only two stanzas in ‘The Dice’: if there were three, then one stanza could be said to ‘vary’ from the other two; with two stanzas, I think it is better to say they ‘diverge’ from one another. 49 Anthony Rudolf, ‘Frank Templeton Prince’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, <https://doi.org/10.1093/ref:odnb/92685>, 5 Jan. 2012, accessed 25 Dec. 2017. 50 Prince, quoted in Agenda, 41/1-4 (2005), 96. 51 In Who’s Who, Prince listed his ‘Recreations’ as ‘Music, etc’ (1 Dec. 2007): <https://doi.org/10.1093/ww/9780199540884.013.U31485>, accessed 25 Dec. 2018. 52 Yeats, Collected Poems, pp. 256-9. 53 Rudolf, ODNB; see also F. T. Prince Interviewed by Stephen Devereux (Grahamstown, 1988), p. 6, quoted by Rudolf. 54 For a list of some of these, see John Fuller, The Sonnet (1972), p. 3. 55 Wood, ‘Jihad’. 56 ‘Coleridgean wholeness’: Michael Molan, ‘Learned Poetry: F. T. Prince, Milton, and the Scholar-Poets’, FTP, p. 86; ‘the older, mixed methods’ is from Prince, In Defence of English: An Inaugural Lecture (Southampton, 1959), p. 7, quoted by Molan, ibid., p. 87. 57 Elizabeth Jennings, ‘New Verse’, Spectator, 26 Jan. 1985, p. 28. 58 Quoted in Piette, ‘“My Soldiers”’, FTP, p. 153. 59 Rosenbach Library, Marianne Moore Collection, I:01:08. 60 Ibid., I:01:46. In two of the drafts for this poem, the word ‘opposite’ is capitalised, underscoring Moore’s view of the difference between the Platonic outlook and fanaticism. 61 Louis MacNeice, Collected Poems, ed. Peter McDonald (London, 2006; 2016), p. 171. 62 George Steiner, In Bluebeard’s Castle: Some Notes Towards the Redefinition of Culture (New Haven, 1971), p. 89. 63 Yeats, Collected Poems, p. 347. 64 See Goethe, Faust. Der Tragödie zweiter Teil in fünf Akten (1832). 65 Jennings, ‘New Verse’, p. 28. 66 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Biographia Literaria, ed. James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, 1983), p. 56. 67 ‘Interview with Martha Nussbaum’, in Bill Moyers, A World of Ideas (Garden City, NY, 1989), pp. 449-52. 68 Geoffrey Hill, Broken Hierarchies: Poems 1952-2012 (Oxford, 2013), p. 134. 69 Geoffrey Hill, ISIS interview, <http://isismagazine.org.uk/2015/04/if-i-write-about-destruction-its-because-im-terrified-of-it-an-interview-with-geoffrey-hill/>, accessed 1 May 2018. 70 Prince, in Alka Nigam, F. T. Prince: A Study of His Poetry (1983), p. ii, quoted in Todd Swift, ‘F. T. Prince’s Overlooked Lustre of Rhetorical Language’, FTP, pp. 129-52: 135; original emphasis. 71 Quoted by Rudolf, ODNB. 72 Ashbery, ‘Anticipated Stranger’, in The New Yorker, 9th October 2006, p. 36. Ashbery, ‘F. T. Prince’, PN Review 147, 29/1 (Sept./Oct. 2002). 73 Nagel, Mind and Cosmos, p. 7. 74 Iris Murdoch, Acastos: Two Platonic Dialogues (1986; Harmondsworth, 1987), p. 48. © The Author(s) [2019]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Ricks,, Christopher

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz021pmid: N/A

BENT UPON ‘Reading The Waste Land with the #MeToo Generation’, Professor Megan Quigley printed – and promptly reprinted – her criticisms of The Poems of T. S. Eliot (ed. Ricks and McCue). With Spring 2019 came Time Present (The Newsletter of the International T. S. Eliot Society), and on 4 March 2019, Modernism/modernity. Dr Quigley could not imagine, editorially imagine, what the Eliot editors must have been thinking of when – spendthrifts everywhere else – they neglected to pay due attention to ‘It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said’ (The Waste Land [II] 159). Having ‘looked up “pills”’, the criticizer ‘was shocked to see practically nothing’ by way of annotation. True, ‘The editors note that “before the age of the Pill, dangerous remedies were available under the counter” and add “Partridge gives ‘bring it away’ as 20th-century slang for ‘effect an abortion’”’. But … By what principle of editing does ‘chitter chatter’ or ‘fishermen’ or ‘Metropole’ or ‘automatic hand’ receive extensive and arguably excessive annotation but ‘pill’ merit virtually none? Editing shows our values and our history – what we think is important for scholars to know and for students to learn. What does it mean when ‘pills’ means almost nothing? ‘By what principle of editing does…?’ is set to whet an accusation, not ask a question, and it never intended to stay for an answer. (Though an answer is insinuated: None that would not be reprehensible.) The same is true of ‘What does it mean when “pills” means almost nothing?’ This, too, does not stay for an answer, again preferring to insinuate one, along the lines of just don’t get it. Particularly if the editors pre-date the #MeToo Generation (with, in this case, a dead-white-male attended upon by moribund-white-males to boot). Editors such as these cannot but have a cast of mind that has invested – the terms are Dr Quigley’s – ‘in perpetuating certain traditionalist structures of power’. Told that his or her annotation falls short, fails to supply what is needed, a charged editor might wish to learn what further annotation was in the criticizer’s mind as manifestly of service to explaining or illuminating something about line [II] 159 of The Waste Land. But this was no time to deign. Clearly the editors of The Poems had not met #MeToo Generation responsibilities. This was of course only to be expected, even while constituting a dereliction that ‘shocked’ Dr Quigley. It is no less a dereliction when a criticizer deplores the insufficiency of other people’s work (with the help of such slip-slidings as ‘virtually none’1 and ‘practically nothing’ and ‘almost nothing’) while neglecting to identify or specify a something. Whereupon, blank as to what it was that Jim McCue and I had failed to supply (failed even to see the need for, unreconstructed in our traditionalist structures of power), the present defendant set about putting his mind to wondering what, for the plaintiff, would perhaps have valuably supplemented those two matters that fell so lamentably and self-evidently short. Two candidates did come to mind. The first would be a record of the creative process itself, the profound patience by which the final form of the line was arrived at. It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. For the line evolved, compellingly and as though compelledly, from ‘It’s that medicine I took, in order to …’, through ‘… stuff I took to …’ (Vivien Eliot’s, this, with ‘stuff’ struck through), to be finally rounded off with the everyday horror of ‘them pills’ (Vivien Eliot’s, again, ‘pills’). So, not Eliot’s line alone but his wife’s line, too. The two of them brought it off, they truly did, in the other sense, the triumphantly positive sense – to succeed in doing something genuinely difficult – of a phrase that within the line itself is so dark. (Meaning Death.) With there being, at one stage of husband and wife thinking it through, and feeling it through, and hearing and seeing it through, no saying ‘she said’, and at another stage, rather than ‘she said’, ‘she says’.2 (All of this alongside the acknowledgement, throughout the edition, to the second Mrs Eliot, Valerie Eliot, as the helpmeet to our comprehending the manuscript of The Waste Land.) Editors who supply a succinct and entire record of such a line, from embryo to birth, are providing something of constitutive pertinence. And of permanence. Which is why the edition included just such a full and precise record. Our annotation does then abstain (duly, we believe) from critical appreciation or exegesis of the kinds that are not best suited to the setting, the conventions, and the essentially informative format, of an edition. Biography, literary history, critical analysis, close reading, the history of ideas and of the arts: each of these does of course abut – and this, porously – any editorial enterprise, but each of those studies is distinguishable from (while not simply distinct from) an edition’s respon-sibilities. ‘Editing’, announces Dr Quigley, ‘shows our values and our history – what we think is important for scholars to know and for students to learn.’ Clearly, by completely ignoring within her denigration (‘practically nothing’) the edition’s detailed provision of the textual facts she makes it clear that she thinks it of no importance whether scholars know and students learn such things. Either from an ingenuous lack of scholarly curiosity or from a disingenuous rhetorical move, her current objection to the edition slights – altogether ignores – the history of the line itself, a history that is left actively unrecorded by her (unread or unremarked or unremembered?); more, is even de-recorded, under erasure when a Time Present criticizer is speaking for the #MeToo Generation. But there the textual record was and is: The Poems of T. S. Eliot, ii. 384, there being at the foot of each page the exact cross-references between the poem, the Commentary, the Textual History, and, in this case, the Editorial Composite of the drafts, so that singularly little care would have had to be taken by even the most perfunctory riffler. It is time to turn to a further candidate for annotatory inclusion – all right, not still a candidate since of course the edition includes it, unbeknownst apparently to Dr Quigley. Drawing attention now to its presence might be prompted by the professor’s remarkable admission in Modernism/modernity that ‘The first time I heard The Waste Land called an “abortion poem” I thought I had misheard my student’. (Could it be – these things do happen – that a student had read the poem more alertly, or more recently, than had the professor?) Couldn’t believe her ears? An experience of the poem would have had to be lavishly inattentive if it failed to hear that the poem itself tragically can’t help turning to abortion as incarnating its excruciation: You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique. (And her only thirty-one.) I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face, It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. (She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.) The chemist said it would be all right, but I’ve never been the  same. You are a proper fool, I said. Well, if Albert won’t leave you alone, there it is, I said, What you get married for if you don’t want children? Eliot’s poetry and prose were haunted for much of his life (specifically in publications of 1920, 1922, 1929, 1932, and 1953) by an abortion poem that had imagined a haunting: Isbrand’s Song, from Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Death’s Jest-Book III. iii. Squats on a toad-stool under a tree  A bodiless childfull of life in the gloom, Crying with frog voice, ‘What shall I be? Poor unborn ghost, for my mother killed me  Scarcely alive in her wicked womb. What shall I be?’ A note of ours to ‘It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said’, a note completely ignored by Dr Quigley, quotes in full those six lines of Beddoes. True, registering that there is such a note would have asked that a little trouble be taken, and would require the ability to notice that on many occasions the commentary includes line-numbered notes of which the span necessarily pertains to more than one moment in (say) The Waste Land. (Dr Quigley assures her readers that she is ‘familiar with’ our ‘controversially generous annotations’; well, not very familiar, it would seem.) So while the deplored notes to the single line [II] 159 appear on page 639, the note adducing Isbrand’s Song appears on page 635, at [II] 131, 159-60. This span was specified because the Song’s repeated ‘What shall I be?’ went to the making of the cry earlier in this section of The Waste Land, ‘What shall I do?’3 Our note is explicitly to ‘What shall I do? · · · It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said. / (She’s had five already, and nearly died of young George.)’, and it gives these six opening lines of the Song, pointing out that Eliot quoted its second and third lines in The Three Voices of Poetry (1953). The hope was that there might be readers who, having bothered to read the note, would wish to see and hear further. The Three Voices of Poetry listens to the ‘frog voice’ as it imagines the embryonic growth, into birth, of a poet’s imagination: What [asked Gottfried Benn] does the writer of such a poem, ‘addressed to no one,’ start with? There is first, he says, an inert embryo or ‘creative germ’ (ein dumpfer schöpferischer Keim) and, on the other hand, the Language, the resources of the words at the poet’s command. He has something germinating in him for which he must find words; but he cannot know what words he wants until he has found the words; he cannot identify this embryo until it has been transformed into an arrangement of the right words in the right order. When you have the words for it, the ‘thing’ for which the words had to be found has disappeared, replaced by a poem. What you start from is nothing so definite as an emotion, in any ordinary sense; it is still more certainly not an idea; it is – to adapt two lines of Beddoes to a different meaning – a      bodiless childful of life in the gloom   Crying with frog voice, ‘what shall I be?’ For the poet ‘is oppressed by a burden which he must bring to birth in order to obtain relief’.4 To criticize the critic, the criticizer, in order to obtain relief. And yet perhaps editors ought on occasion – accused of not having supplied a needful note, or of having supplied a needless one – to say what they had in mind. So here goes. Q. By what principle of editing does ‘chitter chatter’ receive extensive and arguably excessive annotation but ‘pill’ merit virtually none? A. There is no note on ‘chitter chatter’. There is a note to [III] 262: a clatter and a chatter from within. Tennyson: “Clamour and rumble, and ringing and clatter · · · And then to hear a dead man chatter”, Maud II [v] 251-7. Emily Brontë: “I distinguished a chatter of tongues, and a clatter of culinary utensils, deep within”, Wuthering Heights ch. 1 (William Harmon, 1976a). [Wuthering Heights – and its being heard by Eliot – might have been expected to be of interest to the #MeToo Generation.] * * * Q. By what principle of editing does ‘fishermen’ receive extensive and arguably excessive annotation but ‘pill’ merit virtually none? A. There is no note on ‘fishermen’. There is a note to [III] 263: Where fishmen lounge at noon.  fishmen: OED “fishman” (b): “a fish hawker”. The erroneous “fishermen” has repeatedly crept into TSE’s text. It appeared in Penguin 2nd and 3rd impressions (1951, 1952) and again in the 1954 Faber edition derived from Penguin (spotted by J. M. Blackwood, whose letter of 8 Sept 1954 is annotated by TSE “Noted & passed to printer”.) In John Hayward’s copy of the 1954 ed., TSE marked the mistake as “a bad coquille” (= misprint / oyster shell, Fr.); later impressions were corrected. The error reappeared in 1974 (later corrected). Also [III] 263: Where fishmen lounge at noon: TSE approved James B. Connolly’s accounts: “They are true narratives: most of them can – or could a few years ago – be learnt by word of mouth from the men between trips, as they lounged at the corner of Main Street and Duncan Street in Gloucester”, Fishermen of the Banks (1928). [The Publishers’ Preface, by Eliot, unsigned.] * * * Q. By what principle of editing does ‘automatic hand’ receive extensive and arguably excessive annotation but ‘pill’ merit virtually none? A. [III] 255 with automatic hand: (i) William James: “automatic hand-movements, twitching, etc., had occurred, but having no familiarity with automatic phenomena, Mr P. thought they were mere ‘nervousness,’ and discouraged them”, A Case of Automatic Drawing in Popular Science Monthly Jan 1904. Bradley: “What are called (by a metaphor, and no more than a metaphor) ‘automatic’ acts may be produced by compulsion · · · may the deed still be ‘automatic’, in the sense of not proceeding from the conscious will?” Ethical Studies Essay I. And (ii) OED “automatic” 2a: “Applied esp. to machinery and its movements, which produce results otherwise done by hand”. Popular Science Monthly May 1920: “An automatic hand of metal reaches down into the ground and clutches the beets”. Symons 111 (on Laforgue): “He thinks intensely about life, seeing what is automatic, pathetically ludicrous in it, almost as one might who has no part in the comedy.” TSE: “the hand · · · automatic”, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 38. Are the editors obliged to justify their belief that this commentary is of some service to Eliot’s phrase, ‘with automatic hand’? That William James and F. H. Bradley and Arthur Symons and Jules Laforgue mattered profoundly to Eliot is securely established, but are all the saturations fully known, and were these particular ones already at hand, in mind? The filament to ‘twitching’ and ‘nervousness’, from William James. The ties from what has just happened sexually to the typist and her conscious will (HerToo), to Bradley’s phrasing: ‘acts may be produced by compulsion · · · may the deed still be “automatic”, in the sense of not proceeding from the conscious will?’ The fact that it is 1920 (The Waste Land, 1922) that the OED cites for the application of ‘automatic’ to machinery, as against by hand. Eliot’s lifelong creation of new poetic life by returning to the vitals of an earlier poem (The Waste Land, ‘automatic hand’ / ‘the hand · · · automatic’, Rhapsody on a Windy Night 38). Was none of this of the slightest moment to Dr Quigley, was none of it news to her (‘Literature is news that stays news’)? * * * Q. By what principle of editing does ‘Metropole’ receive extensive and arguably excessive annotation but ‘pill’ merit virtually none? A. Here are the lines that arrive at the Metropole:  C.i.f. London: documents at sight,  Asked me in demotic French  To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel  Followed by a weekend at the Metropole. [III] 211-14 documents · · · demotic French · · · Metropole: Francis Jammes: “Tu écrivais: ‘La Métropole | n’en a pas de pareille.’ Et tu disais: ‘Ma vie | m’a rendu comme un vrai créole’” [You wrote “The Métropole has no parallel.” And you said: “My life has turned me into a real creole”], Tu écrivais 18-20 (1889). French · · · Metropole: Baedeker’s Great Britain has this hotel head the Brighton list, as the most expensive, and on two occasions observes the acute accent. To luncheon at the Cannon Street Hotel | Followed by a weekend at the Metropole: Gilbert Frankau: “Friday lunches at the Ritz | Prelude a week-end at the Metropole”, One of Us (1912) 113. a weekend at the Metropole:Hayward: One of the principal hotels-de-grand-luxe on the sea-front at Brighton, much frequented by wealthy business men for pleasure-jaunts. It is not what is called a ‘Family Hotel’! (It is desirable not to make any comment which could be construed as libellous.) The Metropole is notorious for its raffish clientèle, cf. the Music-Hall song, made famous by George Robey: –   Now Henry VIII was a wag in his day   He had several wives and was very gay   He founded The Metropole, Brighton, they say · · ·   Really! Yes, would you believe it! (TSE to [his translator] Pierre Leyris, [26 Oct] 1947, on the proofs of Poèmes: “I call your attention also to some matter about the Hotel Metropole, which John [Hayward] has deleted: it was never intended for publication but for your own guidance, and I should certainly not wish it to be included.”) In St. Louis, the Metropole Hotel, built 1912, was known to cater for prostitutes until 1920 (St. Louis Post-Dispatch 26 Nov 1972; Charles T. Dougherty, Yeats Eliot Review June 1982). Do the editors really need now to identify this commentary’s several raisons d’être, the teeming suggestive affiliations to Eliot’s art and life? To recent French poetry; to what is creole; to Baedeker (despite the absence of Burbank); to Georgian light verse; to Eliot’s lifting such lines for his own ends; to the localities that accommodated a Metropole or Métropole within their all-too-real cities; to the deeply inward assistance furnished yet once more by Eliot’s most thorough friend and collaborative commentator, John Hayward; to the Music-Hall; to Eliot’s co-operation with his translator into French? There is something positively perverse about speaking on behalf of the #MeToo Generation while finding nothing of value in Hayward’s well-informed ‘guidance’ towards Henry VIII, those ‘several wives’ of his, and the business men’s pleasure-jaunts: ‘It is not what is called a “Family Hotel”!’ Pleasure-jaunts that were pain for women, the suffering prostitutes and the long-suffering wives. Might not #MeToo be expected to care about the world of the dirty weekend, of adulteries real or feigned (as grounds for divorce), of brutally exploitative prostitution? Including back in St. Louis, for our edition’s commentary would now need to add details from the deeply humane and grimly cogent account by Frances Dickey of the syphilitic red-light district, the brothels that more and more encroached upon the Eliot residence when he was a boy.5 Editing, whatever else it may take (imagination, for instance, and conscience, and intellectual curiosity), entails the taking of trouble. Essays in Criticism has been able to offer its readers the responsibly argued, editorially informed, and imaginatively substantiated work of, for instance, Kathryn Sutherland on Jane Austen (April 2018), of Lucy Newlyn on the Wordsworths (January 2016), and of Clare Bucknell on Dryden and Charles Churchill (July 2016). Contributors to the present series on ‘The Editorial Imagination’ have naturally differed, on occasion, as to matters of principle and practice, but the mark that they and their editions have enduringly made is necessarily founded upon their having taken trouble. This, whether it be Edward Mendelson, ‘Authorship, Intimacy, and an Editorial Question about Auden’ (July 2018), or Peter McDonald, ‘Editing Yeats: The Widening Gyre’ (October 2018), or Stephen Gill, ‘Wordsworth and His Editors’ (January 2019). So let me too have rhetorical recourse to an announcement of being ‘shocked’, and say that I am shocked that anyone assumes the right to disparage a work of editing without taking any trouble whatsoever – the trouble, for instance, of just checking ‘chitter chatter’, itself malicious chitter chatter when there is no such note. A. E. Housman had a severe side. (Leave it to Larkin to say ‘Then again, he seems to have been a very nice man’.) Doing one’s duty did not amount to a virtue: I did not praise Bechert’s accuracy, because accuracy is a duty and not a virtue; but if I could have foreseen the shameful carelessness of Breiter and van Wageningen I should have said with emphasis, as I do now, that he was very accurate indeed.6 For a present-day instance of a scholar who is very accurate indeed, the Eliot world has Jayme Stayer, ‘Of Commas and Facts: Editing Volume 5 of The Complete Prose’.7 For shameful carelessness, ‘Reading The Waste Land with the #MeToo Generation’. What Housman said about judging conjectural emendations should be applied to the judging of all the undertakings that comprise an edition: It surprises me that so many people should feel themselves qualified to weigh conjectures in their balance and to pronounce them good or bad, probable or improbable. Judging an emendation requires in some measure the same qualities as emendation itself, and the requirement is formidable. To read attentively, think correctly, omit no relevant consideration, and repress self-will, are not ordinary accomplishments; yet an emendator needs much besides: just literary perception, congenial intimacy with the author, experience which must have been won by study, and mother wit which he must have brought from his mother’s womb.8 Footnotes 1 Textual variant: Time Present, ‘virtually none’; Modernism/modernity, ‘practically none’. Study questions: What purpose was served by this re-wording, and which of the adverbs appeared first? Elsewhere within Dr Quigley’s strictures, what is ‘nearly silences’ trying to say (and making sure that it does not say)? Could the repeated word ‘stifle’ itself be employed in order to stifle? Such editions ‘stifle the conversations students are eager to have’, for the editing ‘stifles much of the vibrancy’ of Eliot. Can ‘vibrancy’ still be trusted to work its old magic when wielded in two consecutive sentences? Is the criticizer offering a scrupulous caveat – as against being adroitly circumspect – in adducing the edition’s ‘arguably excessive annotation’ while declining to argue? (Likewise the bolt-hole, ‘controversially generous annotations’, left at that.) 2 Dr Quigley: ‘The headnote to The Waste Land section ends on a paean to Pound and cites the laborious work of Valerie Eliot in preserving the drafts but, as so often before, nearly silences the other collaborator in the composition of the poem, Vivien’. The headnote adduces Vivien Eliot on ten occasions; the Commentary, twenty-six occasions; and the Textual History, more than fifty occasions, with (in both Commentary and Textual History) the fullest possible detailed account of her collaboration in the composition of the poem. Jim McCue’s investigation of this, and of other aspects of Vivien’s compositions, figures within the edition as McCue 2016, and subsequently in his ‘Vivien Eliot in the Words of TSE’ (Review of English Studies, Feb. 2017; advance access, 31 July 2016): forty pages describing what can be gleaned from the Bodley scrapbooks about her role and writings. 3 The Song went also to the making of Gerontion 8-9, and of the opening to both Difficulties of a Statesman (Grover Smith’s finding, as we acknowledge), and Animula. Beddoes figures repeatedly in The Waste Land and elsewhere in Eliot; for Ezra Pound’s marginal annotation (‘Beddoes’), and for his Canto LXXX on Eliot and Beddoes, see The Poems of T. S. Eliot, i. 633. Also i. 531, Eliot’s letter to John Lehmann, 10 Apr. 1945: ‘Beddoes, of course, I know very well’. 4 On Poetry and Poets (1957), pp. 97-8. 5 Frances Dickey with Bradford Barnhardt, ‘“My Madness Singing”: The Specter of Syphilis in Prufrock and Other Observations’, The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, 2 (2018), 3-24. 6 On his editing of Manilius; Housman, Collected Poems and Selected Prose, ed. Ricks (1988), p. 386. 7 A scholar scrupulous in acknowledging the contingencies that will always preclude perfection: ‘By the time this recurring problem asserted itself as something to be noted it was too late to do anything about appearances of the problem in earlier volumes’: The T. S. Eliot Studies Annual, 2 (2018), p. 125. 8 Collected Poems and Selected Prose, p. 393. © The Author(s) [2019]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Everett,, Barbara

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz023pmid: N/A

Biography (i) the biographer’s own After years of the Usual accidents and Mistakes, he based his Life’s story on them, Calling it Hamlet, or The Ancient Mariner. (ii) of Shakespeare With what generous Gifts the poet has kept all That matters of his Own and real life From the creative powers Of biographers. (iii) of Henry James Difficult not to Feel throughout the loving and Capable Life of The Novelist its Subject’s desperate struggle To get out of it. (iv) of another writer At last the ageing Author wrote a few notes on How it had all been, So tersely opaque (Though well phrased) that most readers Thought it pure fiction. Large Animals (i) Lacking mirrors, he Has no qualm about his own Appearance, which is (After all) grandly Cubic, even to eyes not Hippopotamic. (ii) She moves heavily But quietly, not willing To harm underfoot: It is thus that the Mountain comes to Mahomet, By intelligence. (iii) The gentleness, and That immense neck, make it seem Always about to Fly: compromising, Pausing, sighting tree-tops and Happily browsing. (iv) Surprise is of the Essence: that the sleeper could Overtake with ease Of muscled power Any reflective perhaps Predisposed victim. (v)    Unforgettably    Singing-sighing, this is too    Much: not a creature    But an island, a    Myth, a hall high-timbered where    A prophet once lived. Architecture (With debts and gratitude to B. Bryson) (i) Vanderbilt mansions On Fifth Avenue began Being demolished In thirty years, were All gone in sixty. They don’t Last, millionaires. (ii) Palladio built Thirty villas: seventeen Still stand, of which one (Villa Ragona) Has never been found. Houses Are dreams at their best. © The Author(s) [2019]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Tobin, J J, M

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz022pmid: N/A

These are two books, one using the modern economic methodology of cold hard monetary facts, and one recalling happily the useful, concrete work of literary scholars, a few unfortunately somewhat forgotten. One tells us more about the man, and the other concentrates on the work. Both are valuable additions to one’s Shakespearean library. The same man who was to save and increase his money and property in London and Stratford was a dramatic craftsman equally economical, preferring to alter and expand upon materials given to him in the literary sources that lie behind all his compositions rather than to create from experience alone. He is the chief counter-example to Polonius’s admonition, ‘neither a borrower nor a lender be’ – Shakespeare is a world-class literary borrower, but one who reshapes and transforms the borrowed materials. Indeed, these prudent transformations into his scripts allowed him to have some of the money that went into his real-estate purchases over the years. In Shakespeare’s Money, Ronald Bearman traces these financial dealings and their significance in terms of gaining increased social status. When James Burbage built his theatre in 1576, he was not primarily as interested in the idea of the dignity of man or the entertaining of fellow Londoners as he was in the making of money. When his son Richard and his son’s friend and partner William Shakespeare, and their fellow shareholders, were performing their scripts, they were counting the house above all else. The theatre was an essential part of the entertainment industry, and for some it was especially lucrative. If a man was an actor, he made a little bit of money; if a playwright, a little more: perhaps seven pounds in the 1590s, increasing to twice that by the early seventeenth century provided he was merely a co-author; if a shareholder in the company that put on the play, a very great deal more; and if a householder in the building in which the plays were performed, more still. Shakespeare was all four, and as we read his scripts, we should remember that the artist was also a businessman, interested in the box office as much as or more than hard-to-imagine immortality. The forerunner of the multiplex, the Elizabethan theatre was a collaborative, secular church in which the congregation/audience focused on the service before them while Shakespeare and his fellows focused on both the service and the collection plate. Robert Bearman analyses in great detail what Shakespeare was able to do with the daily offerings. The book is especially illuminating on the often-discussed acquisition of the Shakespeare coat of arms in 1596. The goal was designed to satisfy John Shakespeare’s desire to receive gentle status then, as he would have but five years to live, while also making amends for William’s having spoiled his own dignity by his early and ‘imprudent marriage’ in November 1582 to a woman several years his senior, without social status and pregnant, thereby turning the 18-year-old William into a family man without financial stability and without a career. All this vulnerability occurred at a time when John Shakespeare’s financial difficulties from his dubious dealings in the wool business were having a devastating effect upon his ambitions and his once secure status. Bearman regularly acknowledges where there is an absence of evidence, as in the dearth of material regarding the Chamberlain’s Men, for which there are ‘no surviving accounts … not even a record of the number of performances given or the size of the playhouse in which they initially performed. Nevertheless, from patchy records relating to other companies', there are estimates for the Chamberlain’s Men. In demonstrating Shakespeare’s only moderate social standing, coat of arms and all, by reference to the marriages of the poet’s daughters as hardly impressive, Bearman assumes that the matches were only financially predicated, with no possibility of affection as a determining motive. For example, later, when Shakespeare could have chosen his son-in-law, Dr John Hall, as a trustee, he didn’t. The standing of the spouses of the daughters suggests that, in the marriage market of Stratford, other families were stronger competitors by having more wealth than Shakespeare. There are helpful footnotes as, for example, one beneficial to those who have enjoyed a reception in the garden of New Place: ‘Contrary to popular belief, not more than half, and possibly less, of the Great Garden now attached to New Place was ever owned by Shakespeare’. Bearman is careful to describe a William Shakespeare who, unlike his father, ‘never overreached himself’ but instead provided a quite secure existence for his family and himself, a prudent, cautious, and alert gentleman of dignity in his home town, but not an especially wealthy member of the gentry. In the absence of much documentary evidence of the exact wealth of Stratford members of the middle class, there is yet another way to determine with some probability the relative wealth and status of these men: that is, by studying their wills and the bequests contained therein. Due acknowledgement of E. A. J. Honigmann and earlier scholars is given. Of great interest is the discussion of Shakespeare’s withdrawal from further investments in the latter part of his life and around the time of his withdrawal from the theatre. In those days, a man in his late forties would not have retired voluntarily, but for whatever reason(s), there is no reference in his will to his shares in the Globe and Blackfriars theatres. Speculation suggests that changes of fashion, illness, or tiredness (physical or professional) had led to the decline in the number of plays composed, from 1605 onwards. When the Globe burned down in June 1613 with the consequent obligation of the shareholders to rebuild the edifice, Shakespeare may have decided to turn in his own shares to satisfy this obligation. This is, of course, speculation, admittedly so, but it is plausible and it does derive in part from the useful information in his will, the second-best device available to the interpreter absent overt contracts. Some errors by previous researchers/scholars include, perhaps most importantly, that the arc of Shakespeare’s financial success rose steadily throughout his life when in fact in the last part of his dramatic career there are clear signs of a reduction in his income and a consequent limitation on his capacity to purchase and invest in land. An expression of Bearman's that is puzzling comes in the statement that the steward of the Stratford-Upon-Avon Corporation ‘“looked out” a survey of the manor of old Stratford’. The analysis of Shakespeare’s attitude towards the Welcombe enclosures concludes with no certitude beyond Shakespeare’s care in protecting his own property, whatever the success or failure of the enclosure movement. The appeal to a number of documents, including diaries and interlinear additions to contracts, still requires speculation as to the nature of responses by Shakespeare to information given to him by Thomas Greene in private communications. (Greene was in the awkward position of being both steward of the Stratford-Upon-Avon Corporation (an opponent of enclosure) and himself a supporter of the movement.) Similarly useful is the investigation into Southampton’s patronage and his likely role not only as the dedicatee of Venus and Adonis and The Rape of Lucrece but also as the Young Man in the sonnets. We earlier saw Bearman’s skill in puncturing long-held, if speculative, beliefs in his treatment of the unsupported validity of John Shakespeare’s Spiritual Testament (in Shakespeare Survey for 2003). Here, he shows the limits of Southampton’s value as a generous patron and the extreme unlikelihood that the earl gave Shakespeare as much as a thousand pounds with which to purchase a share in the Lord Chamberlain’s Company and otherwise helped set him up in London life. A good balance to those comments by Bearman regarding the relationship between Southampton and Shakespeare is John Klause’s Shakespeare, the Earl, and the Jesuit (2008). Bearman suggests that, whatever the amount of money given by Southampton to Shakespeare for the two long poems of 1593 and 1594, the poet might have received some funding from Richard Field, the printer of both works, and his fellow townsman: ‘In any event, whatever the relationship between the two men in 1593-4, there is no evidence that it was perpetuated’. Bearman is a strict constructionist as to evidence, but even he might consider the counter-evidence of some continuing relationship as represented by Sonnet 107, thought by many scholars to refer to Southampton’s release from imprisonment in the early 1600s. Some numbers that provide useful detail include seven pounds, the going rate for a playscript: ‘perhaps negotiated upwards if the company thought of it as high commercial value, but which would also fall, if, as later proved the case it was written in collaboration’. There is no number that we can apply to any of the plays copied out for the benefit of those who liked their Shakespeare as a literary dramatist (as shown by Lukas Erne in Shakespeare as Literary Dramatist). The seven pounds had doubled by the time of Shakespeare’s death. Two hundred pounds was the amount that he would receive yearly as a sharer/householder. Bearman draws attention to Douglas Bruster’s ‘Shakespeare the Stationer’ in Marta Straznicky’s collection Shakespeare’s Stationers: Studies in Cultural Biography (2013), which gives some useful figures: Fifty pounds. The annual salary of a sharer in the Chamberlain’s Men. Bearman is strong on contextualising; for example, he tells us that the sum of fifty pounds was ‘more than twice that of the annual salary of Stratford’s school master, or Stratford’s vicar’. Five pounds. The tax assessment for Shakespeare’s goods when he resided in St Helen’s, Bishopsgate Ward, in London. This sum was levied twice, in 1596 and 1598, and Shakespeare did not pay in either case, perhaps because he had left the ward. Bearman, again providing context, tells us how many of Shakespeare’s neighbours were assessed for more than he was, and how many for less. Ten pounds – twenty pounds. The fee paid to Dethick, Garter King of Arms, the official who in somewhat dubious circumstances granted to the Shakespeare family their coat of arms. One hundred and twenty pounds. The estimated purchase price of New Place, the second largest house in Stratford, a purchase made within a year of receipt of the coat of arms in October 1596. Thirty pounds. Richard Quiney, representing the Stratford Corporation on business in London, asked for Shakespeare’s help in January 1598 in gaining a loan. Three hundred and twenty pounds. The cost to Shakespeare of the purchase of 107 acres of land in 1602, shortly after the death of his father. Four hundred and thirty-five pounds. The estimated annual amount of money received by the eight sharers in the Chamberlain’s Men. Dr Johnson comes to mind: ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote, except for money’. We may all feel that’s not the case for Shakespeare, but Bearman makes a persuasive argument about the central role financial considerations played in the life of the Elizabethan theatre. The book is fascinating in its detail. Once we have the economic foundation laid for Shakespeare’s work, we can beneficially turn to Cedric Watts’s excellent Shakespeare: A Hand, for a skilful overview of the playwright’s works. It can’t be easy to create a readable and useful handbook. Perhaps that’s why so many handbooks require several contributors. Watts has managed to do it alone. Each play is given background information, chiefly major sources, and quotes from the writings of critics from Dr Johnson onward, including Harley Granville-Barker and, mirabile dictu, A. J. A. Waldock. Each item has Watts’s own interpretation of problems in the play, often with a charming allusion or two to current cultural features. There is a very helpful bibliography of suggested further reading. Watts is well aware of the existence of a variety of recent and current theories, but limits himself to references to titles of representative books, concerned primarily as he is to keep alive valued works that have shaped his own life with Shakespeare. He does discuss as well some once recent but now fashion-faded approaches. This is not the handbook to go to for current theories of interpretation. On the plus side of the approach of this text is the single attractive voice of the scholar, critic, and teacher, a man who has immersed himself in what once were standard approaches, for example Christian humanism, for or against. He draws upon the work of once familiar names, familiar to Shakespeareans of the age of the author. And a great pleasure it is for readers to hear again the names of those giants and academic heroes now largely forgotten by all but the most conservative of current readers. Indeed, this handbook will be found most useful by the alert beginner and most pleasurable and useful by those ‘common readers’ and those teachers and scholars of roughly the same generation as our author, men and women possibly as Johnsonian as Watts: we ‘more frequently require to be reminded than informed’. This book beautifully combines both aspects of the admonition. Among the valuable discussions of individual plays, there is, from Richard III, a particularly clear description of the relative claims on the English throne by Richard of Gloucester and Henry, earl of Richmond. This summary of alleged motives initially gives some comfort to the friends of the White Rose but also suggests that Richmond is more likely innocent of the murder of the little princes. Then there is a conclusion noting the non-historical changes and outright inventions made by Shakespeare. Watts draws upon the observations of Herschel Baker, Stephen Greenblatt, and John Jowett, the last of whom notes that some characters were introduced into the play largely to flatter their descendants who were part of the aristocratic patronage of the Elizabethan theatrical world. Then Watts adds a bonne bouche of a list of other characters in still other plays who were likely allusions to dignitaries of Shakespeare’s time. At the end of the canon, the author pleasantly cannot resist keeping alive the venerable observation that ‘the Tempest has a resonantly retrospective, autobiographical quality’, finding in Prospero a version of Shakespeare. Of course, nowadays we merely deny that we make this parallel, even as, with a bit of preterition, we do exactly that. Watts is also very good on the definition of the category called the ‘problem play’, as originally understood by the once very well-known scholar Ernst Schanzer and then expanded by others to include several more plays and then finally others exploding the limits of the genre to include any and all of Shakespeare’s works. The handbook is especially helpful on A Midsummer Night’s Dream, drawing on the author’s own experience of having seen Peter Brook’s celebrated production in 1970 (a good year for Watts as a theatre-goer with his also having seen the Olivier-directed Love’s Labour’s Lost). He couples references to the theatre with discussion of sources, although Bottom’s synaesthetically garbled reference to 1 Corinthians 2: 9-10 should be accompanied by comment on Erasmus’s use of the same passage at the end of one of Shakespeare’s known sources, The Praise of Folly. And is the moon a ‘planet’? Watt’s interweaving of his own interpretations of key passages in the plays with sources, classic commentators, and recent criticism is done most felicitously. The references to productions of plays he has seen keep alive now venerable but once hugely influential moments in performance history. Thematic comments on the many layers of source material are elegantly and clearly delineated. His personal enthusiasms in comments describing passages, whole plays, and poems distinguish this book from the many helpful handbooks for students of Shakespeare, whether beginners or veterans. This book has the charm and persuasiveness of a natural teacher steeped in all things Shakespearean. This is not to say that the vade mecum is perfect. There are some flaws in the section devoted to rhetorical terms, mostly of Greek origin, such as anaphora and asyndeton. One is pleased to see the happily distinguished, often confounded pair, metonymy and synecdoche, but we look in vain when we come across litotes to find its related but distinguishable partner, meiosis. Most important, there are some items that are not illustrated by an example from the canon at all, or are merely cited by play, act, scene, and line number without illustration. It is probably a good thing to have a student do the work of opening the play itself in order to find the illustration, but if so, why not be consistent by providing all the terms with specific reference to Shakespeare and not just some, and then the citations themselves for further study? This handbook has already been revised in three editions in the same year. It deserves still another to remove the few minor blemishes in its overall excellence. Perhaps, then, Watts could expand on the definition of zeugma and show his awareness of recent-ish lyrics such as Alanis Morissette’s ‘he held his breath and the door for me’ from ‘Head Over Feet’. I’d like also under the term ‘symbolic structure’ the addition of the useful rival critical phrase ‘the fallacy of imitative form’. I’m still wondering about the apparent neologism of ‘janiformity’, defined as large-scale paradoxicality, itself a neologism. We must forgive him these neologisms. Watts is aware of the danger to the learning process by the too frequent use of these terms. If criticism is ultimately the making clear what is dark, then the use of these technical terms is too often an instance of ignotum per ignotius. Accordingly, as a good teacher, he follows this section with a comforting section entitled ‘How Useful Is This Technical Stuff?’ This handbook deserves to be read in parts beyond Britain and accordingly, some words, such as ‘duff’, could helpfully be glossed. In the overview of Lear, Watts is able to interweave a helpful series of quotations from a disparate set of critics, from Samuel Johnson to both Groucho and Karl Marx, E. E. Stoll, David Lodge, G. I. Duthie, and Peter Brook, each of whom may need a footnote or gloss for today’s beginning students. Beginners will be helped. Mature students will learn still more. And veteran Shakespeareans will find insights new to them, and if they are still teaching, incorporate those most illuminating. There are sometimes quite moving anecdotes, such as the one Watts provides us with in his conclusion to The Winter’s Tale. These two volumes provide bookends for Shakespeare’s life and work. If you read them, you will learn more about many things that matter than you knew before you discovered them. © The Author(s) [2019]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)

Clarkson,, Oliver

doi: 10.1093/escrit/cgz019pmid: N/A

Susan Wolfson’s new book is about ‘spectral linguistic agencies, both on the field of Romantic writing and, reflexively, for our reading of the field’. Ghosts do not slot very easily into New Historicism’s prized category of ‘truths of immediate history’, and so any book which celebrates ‘apparitional presences’ naturally runs the risk of vindicating the theory that ‘the ideology represented through Romantic works is a fortiori seen as a body of illusions’ (Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology, 1983). There are remarks throughout Romantic Shades and Shadows that might seem to play into McGann’s story about Romanticism’s uncritical absorption in its own self-representations. ‘For Wordsworth, a mental specter can even usurp a material presence’, and that looks suspiciously like a mind-made distraction from socio-historical reality. But it is a distinguishing characteristic of phantoms and ghosts that you cannot assuredly say whether they are really there or not – they induce an ‘undetermined sense / Of unknown modes of being’. ‘Strange byways of writing, haunted recalls and recognitions, phantasms of a future, spectral pressures on shapes of composition: there are ghosts in these goings-on.’ Wolfson shows with great flair that it is possible to write in the shadow of McGann and Derrida without succumbing to their reductiveness. Wolfson welcomes us to England in 1819: ‘A long war; economic devastation; abused workers; a horrific climate crisis; floods; massive starvation; an indifferent elite; the emergence of working-class consciousness and violent repressions; calls for law and order; liberals in despair; oppositional journalists arrested, tried, fined, imprisoned’. ‘What’s a poet to do?’ Contemplating with horror England’s misfortunes from Italy, Shelley has recourse to a stunned shadow-language. Because negative prefixes can effect a stifling of positive suggestiveness through an act of verbal tyranny, they feature appositely in his verse and prose whenever he despairs over the bitter ingredients of Regency despotism: impeded cultivation (untilled, unrest, unpaid), muted protestation (untold, unspeakable, unrepresented), action without sympathy (unrepealed, unjust, unvalued), oppression without change (unequal, unavoidable, unreformed). But Shelley’s politicised un- also holds the power to negativise negative words into Herculean states of liberation and fortitude – unbound, unshaken – even while those words show symptoms of lasting damage (unshaken bracing itself for another tremor). Wolfson reminds us that he is especially fond of those un- adjectives, belonging to the same species as unclaimed and unmarried, which license revolutionary non-events to glint in the light of consummation, not as ideology but as ‘phantoms of the future’, as living hopes. Such words underpin the sibylline pronouncements of A Defence of Poetry (‘the before unapprehended relations of things’, ‘unacknowledged legislators’) and the beautiful idealisms of Prometheus Unbound (the ‘loftiest star of unascended Heaven’). Unacknowledged, for now, and unascended, as of yet: possible impossibilities. ‘The universal Being’, wrote Shelley in his Essay on Christianity, ‘can only be described or defined by negatives which deny his subjection to the laws of all inferior existences’. Although Shelley’s ‘subject in this sentence is negative theology, the logic of political hope is here, too’, and Wolfson’s fine account of The Mask of Anarchy tracks this through Shelley’s dreamworld manifesto for bloodless resistance in the wake of Peterloo, where the elusive Shape is imagined as rousing ‘Men of England, heirs of Glory, / Heroes of unwritten story’. ‘Unwritten’ but ‘not unwriteable’ and ‘not unimaginable’: ‘In the world unknown / Sleeps a voice unspoken’ (Prometheus Unbound, 2.1.190-1). And ‘as if’ does similar work in The Mask by conjuring as vision the unreached and not unreachable utopia of conjecture: ‘As if their own indignant Earth … As if her heart had cried aloud’. For Wolfson, this is ‘the shadow-grammar of unwritten story: a phantom-screen to illuminate the not impossible’. The efficacy of shadow-grammar has to do with its covert diplomacy, with its not unwillingness to compromise with those immediate threats it believes to be undeserving of compromise. Shelley tried ‘to make hope conceivable in poetry, drafting the unwritten story, again and again, in the illumining of a tempestuous day’. It is to the alluring vitality of phantom-futurity that Wolfson attends in her chapter on Byron, too. Why, following Byron’s death in 1824, did writers and artists choose to imagine his ghost either as questioning whether it is a ghost, or as encountering another ghost of Byron more ghostly than itself? As Wolfson shows, Byron spent a lot of his life manufacturing a meta-aura of ghostliness about himself – by posing like a ghost (as ‘Hamlet redivivus’), by behaving like a ghost (he was not seen in England after 1816), by writing about ghosts (‘Grim reader! did you ever see a ghost?’), by giving his voice up to ghost-writers (such as Junius), and, although a less deliberate act, by dying, which gave Byron’s ‘company of ghosts’ a new lease of life-in-death. Given that, as Wolfson observes, we tend to think of a ghost as an apparition of a once-living person, Byron complicates a dialectical ‘now this, now that’ by enabling the ‘spectral and the determinate’ to coexist, and by running that transformation backwards: here the ineluctable proliferation of textual and biographical ghosts culminates in the weighty phenomenon of Byronism, alongside which the real Byron might seem only to represent a pre-existent shade. But as interested as Wolfson is in Byron’s heterogeneous ‘ghost story’ (a term possibly coined by Coleridge), one of her eyes always remains focused on the complementary ghostwork which goes on in verse. We are reminded just how good Byron is when studying a deathliness which twitches with signs of life: ‘And the pale smile of Beauties in the grave, / The charms of other days, in starlight gleams / Glimmer on high; their buried locks still wave / Along the canvas; their eyes glance like dreams / On ours’. Interinanimating the animate and inanimate, gleams ‘shimmers between’ noun and verb, then comes ‘still-life on a canvas’ (ongoing or gone?), and then ‘glance like dreams / On ours’: on our eyes or on our dreams? Ghostwork occurs in rhyme, syntax, and rhythm, and even – as Wolfson demonstrates earlier in the book – in a name like ‘William Wordsworth’. For a long time critics have enjoyed incorporating bits of Wordsworth’s name into titles like ‘Words, Wish, Worth: Wordsworth’ (Geoffrey Hartman) and Wordsworth and the Worth of Words (Hugh Sykes Davies), but I cannot think of anybody who has set out to scrutinise Wordsworth’s handling of ‘worth’ and ‘words’ as they appertain to his name, as Wolfson does here in her revelatory chapter on ‘Shades of Will + Words + Worth: What’s in a Name?’ Before worrying about what’s in a name we are bound to wonder whether the name is there to worry about: ‘“This”, said he, / “Is something of more worth”; and, at the word / Stretched forth the shell’. Those lines from the ‘Dream of the Arab’ episode of The Prelude caught Wolfson’s eye one day and inspired the ‘adventure’ of her chapter: ‘worth … word’: ‘The syllables of the waking name Wordsworth, in the lawless forgery of a dream-machine’. I had not noticed this before and I find it hard to unnotice now. Is it punning? Well, not quite – not ‘proactively punning’, at least, like Shakespeare with ‘will’ or Donne with ‘done’, but rather an imprint of ‘uncanny self-naming’, a spectral punning which ‘directs us deep into language itself as a theater of the unconscious’ – a theatre in which the words ‘will’, ‘words’, and ‘worth’ recognise themselves in their half-oblivious creator. Wolfson’s examples are numerous (‘Encouragement, and energy, and will, / Expressing liveliest thoughts in lively words’), and The Prelude offers especially fertile ground for ‘convergences of name-syllables’. Since Wordsworth never thought of himself as ‘Will’, I am not sure why will, as one ‘discrete’ syllable-element of William, matters so much more than am (with which Wolfson deals only briskly). And we might think that Wolfson pushes things when she claims that the phrase ‘Words follow words’ spreads syllables ‘for self-recognition’. (A poet called Anderson would run amok.) But Wolfson is at once admirably honest about the fact that some of her readings might look at first like ‘overplus’ of her ‘ready eye’ and confident that, in ‘retrospect’, her examples have the look of uncanny ‘inevitability’ – and she is right: by the end of this chapter you feel as though your mind might have been tuned in to ‘a shadow-text of strange figurings’ you had no idea existed at the beginning of the chapter. Of course, a book which promotes a way of reading which attends to shades of signification ‘that are apparitional’ is always going to be cleverly self-legitimising when talking about things which may or may not be there, but Wolfson is on to something, and to read this chapter is to feel uplifted by a critic who writes bravely on a hunch. A name such as Wordsworth registers at once a distinguishing singularity and a levelling commonalty: so although you cannot imagine that poet being called anything else, many Wordsworths existed before Wordsworth and many have existed since him, and countless other people have existed with names like Wandsworth or Woolworth or Wadsworth. For those of us with a small circle of friends, the normalness of our name rarely presents much of a problem in life, but the case must be different for somebody who is hoping to be among the poets, where ‘to be among’ necessarily entails both standing alongside and standing out. Possibly Yeats was always a little bit miffed, as Wolfson surmises playfully, about the fact that one of the most celebrated poets in history happened to be called Keats: not rhyming with Yeats, even to the Irish ear, but haunting Yeats as an eye-rhyme. Still, Yeats could sound suspiciously like Keats: ‘a flight into fairyland from the real world, and a summons to that flight’ is how Keatsian Yeats (Wolfson’s tricksy name) described the typical manoeuvre of his own poems to Katharine Tynan in 1888. Hovering within that description is the high poetry of ‘Ode to a Nightingale’, from the ‘faery lands forlorn’ to the self-summoning flight of imagination (‘Away! Away!’), even though Yeats apparently was unwilling to hear the echoes of Keats in himself; and Yeats only raised the matter of flightiness in the hope of exorcising the old Romantic ways from his modern practice altogether: for this represented ‘not the poetry of insight and knowledge, but of longing and complaint – the cry of the heart against necessity’, a bad habit. In turn, Yeats wanted ‘to alter that and write poetry of insight and knowledge’. A fair ambition; but much less fair were the unsavoury things Yeats had to say about Keats’s class, including the claim, hardly accurate, that Keats was ‘born with that thirst for luxury common to many at the outsetting of the Romantic Movement … It drove him to imaginary delights; ignorant, poor, and in poor health, and not perfectly well-bred, he knew himself driven from tangible luxury’. This Keats is nothing but a fiction, an apparent ‘antitype’, as Wolfson says, to ‘Modern’ Yeats, and an antitype, ironically, to the Keats who wrote so insightfully and knowledgeably about the ‘arc of disenchantment’ which reroutes the imagination’s voyages to eternity. Yeats could be thinking only of the poet who says ‘Beauty is truth’ (which Yeats might have read as ‘Beauty is “truth”’ – as might we, but with an appreciation for an irony of Keats’s own making rather than one smoked out at his expense) while suppressing the poet who disquietingly declaims the urn’s ‘Cold Pastoral!’ In the course of her chapter on ‘Yeats’s Latent Keats / Keats’s Latent Yeats’ – for my money, the very best in the book – Wolfson explicates the various ways in which Yeats represses ‘the intellectual, even skeptical pressure in Keats’s figurings’, and how, by repressing that pressure, he reawakens it in the form of ‘latent identifications’ with Keats’s ponderings of the limits of transcendence, confused and confusing temporalities, the entrancing circularity of trance, ‘pre-posthumous’ self-elegising, and his resolve finally to suffer through, and to find beauty within, the ‘messy complexities of human life’. Yeats talked some rubbish about Keats, and Wolfson does not seek to exculpate his snobbery, but she shows very persuasively that his ‘poetry knows better’: ‘Why should they think that they are forever young?’, wonders the distressed old woman in Yeats’s ‘Her Vision in the Wood’ (A Woman Young and Old, VIII), conjuring the question which Keats left to loom over his stanza as a ghost: ‘More happy love! … For ever panting, and for ever young’ (‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’). In the case of Keatsian Yeats, influence is couched in a language of unmitigated resistance, genuine or feigned obliviousness, or latent sympathy, by which the imagination welcomes back, in secrecy, a force it has sought to repress. But what of a wilful allusion which discloses only one side of its own dividedness? It was in January 1798 that William Hazlitt walked ten miles in the mud to the Unitarian chapel in Shrewsbury to hear a preacher-cum-saviour whose resplendent words bestowed upon him the very gift of expressiveness. In the spellbound, spellbinding prose of My First Acquaintance with Poets (1823), Hazlitt revivifies the mystical panache with which Coleridge ‘launched into his subject, like an eagle dallying with the wind’: I had no notion then that I should ever be able to express my admiration to others in motley imagery or quaint allusion, till the light of his genius shone into my soul, like the sun’s rays glittering in the puddles of the road. I was at that time dumb, inarticulate, helpless, like a worm by the way-side, crushed, bleeding, lifeless; but now … my ideas float on winged words, and as they expand their plumes, catch the golden light of other years. ‘Still catching the glow of first acquaintance’ (as Wolfson says), Hazlitt’s ‘winged words’ absorb the eagle-like brio of Coleridge’s performance while floating in the slipstream of Shelley’s Homeric echo in Epipsychidion (1821): ‘The winged words on which my soul would pierce / Into the height of Love’s rare Universe’. Anyone familiar with Shelley’s lines would have got from the phrase ‘winged words’ a sinking feeling engendered by the awful shadow of an unseen verb. For the next lines read: ‘Are chains of lead around its flight of fire – / I pant, I sink, I tremble, I expire!’ There, with that remarkable way he has of bending hammy rhetoric into achieved eloquence, Shelley completes a trajectory of flight and fall consonant with the tragic arc which Hazlitt discerned in the life of his own sunken angel: for by 1823 Coleridge had renegaded from the revolutionary renegades, yielded to an ‘instability of purpose’, and surrendered direly to the stranglehold of opium. ‘What is become of all this mighty heap of hope, of thought, of learning, and humanity?’, Hazlitt would soon ask – his floating words now trembling – in The Spirit of the Age (1825): ‘It has ended in swallowing doses of oblivion’. But the beauty of Hazlitt’s retrenched allusions in My First Acquaintance derives from the poise with which they hold at bay that impending oblivion, at once personal and political, by bathing Coleridge in a golden light which only flickers with premonitions of a darkness not yet visible. Wolfson shows how Hazlitt ‘conjures first affections in the shades of elegy, memory’s phantasm’. ‘It was love at first sound.’ But then Hazlitt’s ‘love for Coleridge had gone on the rocks’. As those turns of phrase attest, Wolfson is a serious critic who can be very witty. At one point in the book she speaks of Edgar Allan’s ‘Poe-prints’. And while attending to that bizarre moment in Book IV of The Prelude when Wordsworth admits to having mistaken the ‘breath-like sound’ of some rustling leaves for the panting of a dog, Wolfson asks whether it is ‘inspiration, ghost-gust, or everyday doggy life’, well aware that Wordsworth never would have used the word doggy, lovingly attached though he was to the Dove Cottage family dog, Pepper. Like dogs, ghosts can come back to bite you. Wolfson recounts how Thomas Carlyle, who was trying to charm Jane Welsh, managed to get his hands on one of Byron’s letters, which he sent to her as a gift. It ‘sealed the deal on his courtship’, Wolfson confirms happily, but Welsh’s passions at first did not flow in precisely the right direction: ‘This, then, was his handwriting! his whose image had haunted my imagination for years and years … I kissed the seal with a fervour which would have graced the most passionate lover’. So Byron, cold in his grave, becomes ‘a hot rival romance’. Throughout this book Wolfson is attuned to the unignorable fact that ghostspeak invariably teeters on the brink of farce (Byron: ‘When suddenly he heard, or thought so, nigh, / A supernatural agent – or a mouse’): after all, even the word ‘ghost’ brings to mind someone dressed in a white sheet with eyes cut in it as much as it does any kind of genuine phantasmic presence (if such a thing can be genuine). But the fun Wolfson finds in her subject and which she brings to her criticism makes frustrating those moments in which she makes things difficult. ‘A shade whose present words are the matter is an Author-function for what has been written, without a display of the historical author. This is left to smoke, or ghost – and so as signature and as mode, is the antithesis of name-invested Byronism.’ I take that to be saying that Byron’s manner of allowing ‘celestial smoke’ to lay claim to his own words is curiously at odds with the Byron-centric brand of Byronism with which we are all familiar. Glossing what happens in the boat-stealing episode of The Prelude, Wolfson writes: ‘as the line of rowing lengthens into the lake, the right-triangle hypotenuse shifts, and forms not visible on the foreshortened shorescape now rise on a vertical axis into the boy’s sightline’. But for each frustrating moment in Romantic Shades and Shadows, Wolfson’s criticism bequeaths to us myriad exegeses which glimmer with eloquence and insight: when Wordsworth says ‘call it solitude / Or blank desertion’ it is ‘not just a reach for words but a call to the shapes of these present words’; Hazlitt’s ‘prose verges on poetry … and on the scrim of Wordsworth’s Great Ode it is poised for elegy, not for lost youth, but for the loss of Wordsworth’; Shelley ‘hails a genre for the horizon of imagination’; Byron traces ‘life shading into a ghost, without a breath, without a motion, without a pulse, but with an awful sheen of presence in the material world’; Yeats’s ‘Song of Wandering Aengus’ is a ‘phenomenal song, inflamed by its very poetry’; Keats’s ‘enchanted imagination is haunted by what reflective thinking is moved to resign’. How supremely quotable Wolfson is. From beginning to end, Romantic Shades and Shadows is engrossing, challenging, and deeply rewarding, one of the very best books published on Romantic poetry this decade. It will haunt us all. © The Author(s) [2019]. Published by Oxford University Press; all rights reserved. This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)