Development of Criticism in the 19th century

Victorian literary theory, sometimes dismissed as a hinterland, is a remarkably diverse and

productive field. Of the four lines of theorizing identified by the philosopher of art Francis
Sparshott in Theory of the Arts (1982)— the classical, expressive, oracular, and purist lines—
Victorian theory has original contributions to make to all but the first. Its theological and
Hegelian alignments, as well as its later doctrine of art for art’s sake, also anticipate important
developments in twentieth-century hermeneutics and formalism.

The most important British critics of the 1830s are Thomas Carlyle (1795-1881), a
representative of the oracular line of theorizing, which venerates the poet as an involuntary
channel of communication with higher powers, and three expressive critics, Arthur Hallam
(1811- 33), W. J. Fox (1786-1864), and John Stuart Mill (1806- 73). In an influential theory of
poetic empathy, published in 1831 in The Englishman’s Magazine, Hallam praises poets of
sensation such as Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Keats, and Alfred, Lord Tennyson for their
remarkable ability to find in the “colors … sounds, and movements” of external nature the
signature of “innumerable shades of fine emotion,” which are too subtle for conceptual
language to express (850, 856). In a Westminster Review article earlier in 1831 on Tennyson’s
Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), Fox argues that the poet can best concentrate his energies by
sketching his relation to a desolate landscape or to some ruined paradise, as in Tennyson’s
“Mariana” or “Oenone.” Insisting that the sensory correlatives of feeling, like music, can
convey complexities of meaning and subtly nuanced moods for which no dictionary words
exist, Hallam is the prophet of a symbolist aesthetic later endorsed by W. B. Yeats. Fox, on the
other hand, writes as a disciple of James Mill. Just as Joseph Addison is liberated by John
Locke’s theory of the ideality of the secondary qualities, according to which sounds and colors
are truly a poem of the perceiver’s creation, so Fox is liberated by the penetrating power
conferred on the mind by the empirical psychology of James Mill’s treatise Analysis of the
Phenomena of the Human Mind, published two years earlier, in 1829. Since Fox’s poet
dramatizes each interior landscape through projection, and since Hallam’s poet internalizes
each picture, they tend to converge on common ground. Despite their different starting points,
both critics anticipate modern psychological theories of introjection and projection, and both
are agreed that poets must find in some external object the focus or medium of their truest self-
expression.

Like Fox and Hallam, John Stuart Mill also subscribes to an expressive theory of art. But he is
always ready to inhibit theory and quicken truth in pursuit of the wider premise, the more
inclusive synthesis. His earliest articles on poetry, which he published in 1833, try to vindicate
the poet against Jeremy Bentham’s charge that because poetry is fictitious and untrue, it is a
dangerous enemy of utilitarianism. The failure to see that poets use language in ways beyond
the scope of traditional description in order to express and refine emotion and to do things with
words is also the failure to which J. L. Austin draws attention when trying to extricate from
descriptive statements the kind of utterance he calls “performative”. To distinguish between
poetry and rhetoric, Mill also insists that in poetic language there is no direct address: as Oscar
Wilde observed of Walter Pater when he lectured, Mill’s poet is overheard rather than heard.
The oracle speaks in a state of rapt self-communion.
The other most innovative theorist of the 1830s, Thomas Carlyle, holds that a great poet such
as Dante Alighieri or William Shakespeare is an autonomous source of power, not reducible to
anything in the world that may stimulate him. Since only the unconscious is healthy, Carlyle
paradoxically concludes in “The Poet as Hero” that in writing allegory in The Divine Comedy
Dante, like any sincere poet, did not, in the precise sense of the phrase, know what he was
doing. Does Carlyle’s unselfconscious poet create a genuine novelty? Or does he merely
manifest some higher antecedent power of which he is unconscious? If truth lies outside of
consciousness, perhaps the answer does not matter. Because creative artists are a mystery, even
to themselves, why should they not be willing to ascribe their creation of novelty to an equally
mysterious higher source?
Carlyle also deserves to be remembered for his contribution to semiotics in his chapter on
symbols in Sartor Resartus. Anticipating Charles Sanders Peirce‘s notion of an icon and of a
sign that requires a more developed sign to interpret it, Carlyle argues that only intrinsic
symbols exhaust their subject and that they cannot be analyzed. Only extrinsic symbols can be
analyzed, and like the ritual naming by the herald at the coronation of George IV, they tend to
trivialize their subject. The life of Christ, Carlyle argues, was once authentically symbolic, and
intrinsically so, just as the original Last Supper was a symbolic performance of the utmost
daring and genius. But if we try too hard or selfconsciously to invent a rite or make our life an
allegory, it will become instead a mere piece of theater. Like David Friedrich Strauss’s notion
that myth is unconscious invention, lives that become allegories are unconsciously symbolic.
When we try to invent a symbol, like the festivals in honor of a supreme being in The French
Revolution, we discover that an authentic intrinsic symbol can never be legislated; it has to be
believed into being, by faith and civic love. The harder Carlyle tries to explain intrinsic
symbols, the less intelligible they become: all intrinsic symbols require other symbols, or what
Peirce calls “interprétants,” to explain them.

One of the most original critical theorists of the late 1830s and the 1840s is John Keble (1792-
1866). Though a psychological and expressive critic, Keble continues to honor the classical
precept that literature is mimetic, or an imitation of nature, long after that doctrine has ceased
to deserve his theoretical respect. Few passages in Victorian criticism are more revealing than
the one in which Keble casually equates Aristotelian imitation with his own antithetical
expressive doctrines. “It would seem,” Keble says in an 1838 review of John Gibson Lockhart’s
Memoirs of the Life of Sir Walter Scott, “that the analogical applications of the word ‘poetry’
coincide well enough with Aristotle’s notion of it, as consisting chiefly in Imitation or
Expression” (435). Yet in his Praelectiones Academicae (1832-41), better known in its English
translation as Oxford Lectures on Poetry, as well as in his review of Scott, Keble argues,
contrary to Aristotle, that all epic and dramatic genres are displacements of the poet’s lyric
impulse. Thus Virgil’s epic the Aeneid is said to disguise a pastoral yearning, indulged most
directly in the Georgies. Fed by unconscious sources, “Virgil’s master passion” for pastoral
celebration is so artfully veiled in his epic poem that it is preserved by being disguised, by not
being named directly. Keble’s originality consists in his taking a familiar theological doctrine,
the Tractarian theory of reserve, and transplanting it to the psychology of poetic composition,
where it anticipates Freudian theories of displacement.

In other essays, however, Keble asserts that great poetry exists only as a fallout from religion.
In tract 89 of Tracts for the Times, “On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the
Church” (1840), Keble argues as a brilliantly conservative critic, insisting that the unity of
Scripture is the expressive evidence of divine power. By “mysticism” Keble means the
typological interpretation of Scripture that allows a reader to discern a resemblance between
Old Testament types and their New Testament antitypes. As God’s grammar or code, biblical
typology is more than a mere set of “poetical associations” chosen at will by individual
interpreters. But this is not to say that hermeneutics properly conceived and practiced is a
univocal decoding of God’s meaning. Because every figural analogy merely approximates, like
any analogy, the unnameable essence of what it tries to name, Keble uses his doctrine of reserve
to keep intact the mystery of indefinition.

Benjamin Jowett’s influential essay “On the Interpretation of Scripture” (i860) develops a far
more liberal theory of biblical interpretation than Keble’s. Asserting that readers should be able
to recover a biblical author’s original intentions and the effects the meaning had on the “hearers
or readers who first received it,” Jowett (1817- 93) assails as anachronistic and dangerous the
typological methods of biblical interpretation revived by Keble and Newman. But Jowett’s
appeal for unprejudiced reading, however plain and straightforward, assumes a zero degree of
literacy that is illusory in theory and unattainable in critical practice. The real problem with
Jowett’s hermeneutics is its attempt to assess an author’s original intention. As twentieth-
century critics of the “intentional fallacy” have argued, an intention that has not already been
realized and made accessible to an intelligent reader can never in practice be recovered. In what
sense, then, can it qualify as an intention at all? If Jowett wants to call an unrealized intention
an intention, he is free to do so. But it seems to be of doubtful authority and of no interpretive
use.

The 1850s mark the emergence of Matthew Arnold‘s early criticism, which staunchly opposes
the dominantly expressive criticism of contemporaries such as David Masson and Sydney
Dobell. One twentiethcentury critic, R. G. Cox, argues that Arnold’s neoclassical criticism is
simply the best-known example of an anti-Romantic “minority tradition” running through the
first half of the Victorian period. More recently, Antony H. Harrison has tried to elucidate the
“literary politics” surrounding Arnold’s preface to his Poems of 1853, which endorses an
overtly Aristotelian theory of poetry that consistently misreads Aristotle by substituting an
inward, psychological action for an outward, dramatic one. Arnold (1822-88) is covertly
attacking his rival, Alexander Smith, a member of the so-called Spasmodic school of Byronic
and Shelleyian imitators, and is trying to purge from his own poetry, partly for political reasons,
all traces of Spasmodic influence. Arnold’s conservative aesthetic must be seen as a response
to the political radicalism of the Spasmodic poets and, like his essays on the Romantic poets,
to his own complex and changing reactions to the cockney Keats.

David Masson (1822-1907), the reviewer whom Arnold misquotes in his 1853 preface and the
author of important critical pieces collected in Essays Biographical and Critical (1856), draws
attention to distinctive Spasmodic features of language that help distinguish poetical ideas from
scientific ones. Masson repeats Immanuel Kant’s teaching that whereas scientific
understanding translates sensory facts into concepts, the poet’s imagination is effective, not in
duplicating nature, but in creating a second and stronger nature. It replaces the open-ended
orderliness of nature with an orderliness that is closed, repeatable, and intensive. Masson’s
arresting word for this process is the imagination’s capacity to “secrete” fictitious
circumstance.

The most ambitious work of literary theory to appear in the 1860s is E. S. Dallas’s monumental
two-volume study, The Gay Science (1866). Arguing that only the paradox of unconscious
thought can explain the difference between the imagination of a Homer and the genius of an
Aristotle, Dallas (1822-79) claims that both are automatic but only the former is an involuntary
or unconscious process. Dallas believes there are two tests the critic can conduct to determine
whether the poet’s mind has indeed been operating imaginatively “in the dusk of
unconsciousness” . A poet who has been composing imaginatively (i.e., in an involuntary or
unconscious manner) will discern resemblances rather than differences. And that poet will also
“assert the resemblance of wholes to wholes” . Dallas’s theory of the unconscious has important
antecedents in German criticism, especially in F. W.J. Schelling. But in Victorian Britain the
idea of unconscious and automatic mental processes, though applied by Carlyle in his essay
“Characteristics” to mental health in general, does not assume a crucial role until Dallas offers
what he takes to be a new theory of imagination, that “Proteus of the mind,” which has been
identified with all the human faculties—memory, passion, reason—and which has proved as a
result “the despair of metaphysics” .

The last three decades of the nineteenth century mark the ascendancy of a far-reaching Hegelian
legacy in Victorian criticism, one that is already discernible, as we have seen, in Dallas’s theory
of genres. Among major critics, Walter Pater (1839-94) shows Hegel’s influence most clearly.
Pater manages to formalize Hegel in subtler but no less radical ways than he manages to
formalize Plato in Plato and Platonism (1893). In the most Hegelian of his critical writings, the
essay on J. J. Winckelmann (1867), Pater draws upon Hegel’s theory of a symbolic, a classical,
and a romantic cycle of art, each phase aligned with a particular art form. “As the mind itself
has had an historical development,” Pater observes, “one form of art, by the very limitations of
its material, may be more adequate than another for the expression of any one phase of that
development” (1:210). Few pronouncements could be more Hegelian. And yet there is nothing
in Pater’s statement to rule out a relativism quite alien to Hegel’s theory of progressive aesthetic
change. Unlike Hegel, who sees in the progress of the arts a secure evolution toward an eventual
victory of Absolute Spirit, when art will perfect itself by turning into dialectic, Pater sees a
progressive attenuation of spirit. He actually reverses Hegel’s strategy. Instead of freeing a
spiritual content from a material form, which is the process Hegel analyzes, Pater praises art
for freeing a highly refined and attenuated form from the bondage of any impure content or
contaminating message. Pater keeps altering the teleological drift of Hegel’s aesthetic doctrines
by assimilating life to art, subordinating the spiritual content of Romantic art to the subtleties
and refinements of the art form itself.

The second possibility is the one preferred by Oscar Wilde (1856-1900), who allows art to
occupy a spiritual territory segregated from the everyday world. The claim of purist art to be
holier or more sacred than other activities is not supported by any moral or metaphysical claim.
Indeed the artist as such is said to have no “ethical sympathies” (230). Purist art has its priest,
rite, church, and congregation but no god. It is endotelic, never merely a means to some external
end. The absence of teleology is even celebrated as a virtue: “All art is quite useless,” Wilde
says in the preface to The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). Its value is its very pointlessness.
Like later formalists, Wilde knows at first hand how a despotic moral or theological
consciousness can inhibit the creative faculties. To defend the poet against a censorious
superego, Wilde revels in the paradox that the “morality of art” consists wholly “in the perfect
use of an imperfect medium.” “An ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism
of style”.

Wilde’s celebration of art’s inutility and reduced ambition remains, however, a Victorian
aberration. Unlike the pursuit of virtue or a liberal education, the pursuit of literary theory in
Victorian Britain is seldom regarded as its own reward. It is not the autonomous study that
specialists labouring in a more Alexandrian age have tried to make it. To understand Victorian
literary theory, we must study it in the context of nineteenth-century hermeneutics, for
example, or philosophies of history, science, and religion. As G. B. Tennyson says in Victorian
Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (1981), these disciplines do not “grow in alien soils.”
In the Victorian period, “they are branches of the same tree”.