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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 December 2020
The notion that the meaning of an idea is inseparable from its history is reflected in the way that Carlyle, Arnold, and Ruskin took recourse to historical categories of thought in their creations of meaning. Sartor Resartus, Culture and Anarchy, portions of The Stones of Venice, and the later volumes of Modern Painters are analyzed to suggest that the distinctive feature of the Victorian mind is not to be found in any of its diverse contents but rather in the way that history is made to function as a formal property of thought. Indeed, whereas Enlightenment and Romantic writers were inclined to locate the ground of intelligibility in forms of transcendence, the Victorians were forced by their sense of the historicity of things to derive their meanings from the world of processes and events, sequences and developments.
1 Essays on Ethics, Religion, and Society, ed. John M. Robson, Vol. x of The Collected Works of John Stuart Mill (Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1969), p. 119.
2 The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, trans. Fritz C. A. Koelln and James P. Pettegrove (Boston: Beacon, 1955), p. ix.
3 This distinction originates in Aristotle but receives its most important modern formulation from Wilhelm Dilthey, particularly in his distinction between the natural and the cultural sciences. See esp. his “Der Aufbau der Geschictlichen Welt in den Geisteswissenschaften” (1910), in Gesammelte Schriften (Leipzig: B. G. Teubner, 1927), vii, 79–188. See also Robert Stover's discussion of the natural and historical orders of intelligibility in The Nature of Historical Thinking (Chapel Hill: Univ. of North Carolina Press, 1967), esp. pp. 3–53, 147–60. For a discussion of historical thinking in the context of 19th-century historicism, see Maurice Mandelbaum, History, Man, and Reason: A Study in Nineteenth Century Thought (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 41–138.
4 An Essay on the Development of Christian Doctrine (London: Toovey, 1846), pp. 30–43.
5 The problem of fixing the origin of any intellectual phenomenon is always rich in controversy. The masterwork in this case is Friedrich Meinecke's Entstehung des Historismus(Munich, 1959), trans. J. E. Anderson as Historism: The Rise of a New Historical Outlook (New York: Herder & Herder, 1972), which seeks “to show how the historical world was set free from the rigidity into which it had fallen through Natural Law, pragmatism, and the intellectualism of the Enlightenment” (p. 492). For Meinecke, the crucial figures in the establishment of this “historical world” are Herder and Goethe, but for the claims of the Enlightenment against later writers, see Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment, pp. 197–233. For an account of the development of the historical habit of mind in early 19th-century England, see Duncan Forbes, The Liberal Anglican Idea of History (Cambridge, Eng.: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1952), in which “true historical understanding” is identified with “the Vichian or Romantic philosophy of mind” (p. 143). One could perhaps forestall controversy somewhat by speaking of the origin of historical thinking in terms of the traditional models for the conception of time: Cyclical, Millennial (or Biblical), Rationalist, and Historical. In the first, time is figured according to patterns of repetition or eternal recurrence, such that events of history have no meaning or reality except in relation to cosmogenic or archetypal systems; in the second, time appears as a history governed by Providence and carried forward by events of an awful or supernatural nature: Creation, Fall, Revelations, Incarnation, Redemption, Apocalypse, Second Coming; in the third, time is conceived as a progressive enlightenment and a movement toward an earthly paradise; and, last, time is process, change, development, or regression, from which there can be no leap into transcendence because there is no reality apart from that which makes its appearance as an event within history. At a certain level of theoretical interest, or to designate certain cultural emphases, these models can be distributed along a plane of historical periods, as though the whole of history could be conceived as a movement toward consciousness of historicity. It remains the case, however, that when individual writers are taken into account—Thucydides, Joachim of Flora, Vico, Marx, Yeats—such a distribution becomes subject to innumerable qualifications, until at last one is forced to admit that these models have validity chiefly as regulative and heuristic concepts, and that they should serve as points of departure for more detailed investigations. A more severe, more harassing master could thus perversely maintain that the origin of historical thinking, like the origin of language, is an indeterminate or phantom event, a postulate of discourse, and that historical thinking, like speech itself, is something of which man has always, in some manner, been capable.
6 The quotation is from Coleridge's “Frost at Midnight,” in The Complete Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (Oxford: Clarendon, 1912), i, 242, 11. 59–60. The view of Romanticism expressed here emphasizes (but does not, I think, exaggerate) the importance of the bardic posture in Romantic literature. See M. H. Abrams' characterization of this posture in “English Romanticism: The Spirit of the Age,” in Romanticism Reconsidered, ed. Northrop Frye (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1963), pp. 45–46: “the Romantic Bard is one ‘who present, past, and future sees’ ; so that in dealing with current affairs his procedure is often panoramic, his stage cosmic, his agents quasi-mythological, and his logic of events apocalyptic. Typically, this mode of Romantic vision fuses history, politics, philosophy, and religion into one grand design, by asserting Providence—or some form of natural teleology—to operate in the seeming chaos of human history so as to effect from present evil a greater good; and through the mid-1790's the French Revolution functions as the symptom or early stage of the abrupt culmination of this design, from which will emerge a new man on a new earth which is restored Paradise.” One would not want to define Romanticism purely in terms of this figure of the Romantic Bard—see, e.g., Robert Langbaum's conception of Romanticism as a “doctrine of experience,” in The Poetry of Experience: The Dramatic Monologue in Modern Literary Tradition (New York: Norton, 1954), pp. 9–37—but the opposition between transcendence and historicity that such a figure implies remains an important and even decisive concept in determining the crucial differences between Romantic and Victorian habits of mind. The idea of history among the major Romantic writers is discussed by Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York: Norton, 1971), pp. 32–65. See esp. pp. 64–65: “at the formative period of their lives, major Romantic poets—including Wordsworth, Blake, Southey, Coleridge, and later, after his own fashion, Shelley—shared this hope in the French Revolution as the portent of universal felicity, as did Hôlderlin and other young radicals in Germany. Though these writers soon lost confidence in a millennium brought about by means of violent revolution, they did not abandon the form of their earlier vision. In many important philosophers and poets, Romantic thinking and imagination remained apocalyptic thinking and imagination, though with varied changes in explicit content.”
7 Sartor Resartus, ed. Charles Frederick Harrold (New York: Odyssey, 1937), p. 34.
8 Apologia pro Vita Sua, ed. David DeLaura (New York: Norton, 1968), p. 11.
9 See G. B. Tennyson, Sartor Called Resartus: The Genesis, Structure, and Style of Thomas Carlyle's First Major Work (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1965), p. 85; and Gerry H. Brookes, The Rhetorical Form of Carlyle's Sartor Resartus (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1972), pp. 89–90.
10 Carlyle and the Idea of the Modern (New Haven : Yale Univ. Press, 1968), p. 91.
11 Letters of Matthew Arnold to Arthur Hugh Clough, ed. Howard Foster (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1932), p. 128.
12 In The Complete Prose Works of Matthew Arnold, ed. R. H. Super, v (Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press, 1965), 137. Further references to Arnold's works are to this edition.
13 Ohmann, “A Linguistic Appraisal of Victorian Style,” in The Art of Victorian Prose, ed. William Madden and George Levine (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1968), pp. 289–313.
14 Williams, Culture and Society, 1780–1950 (New York: Harper, 1958), pp. 125–27.
15 Culture and Society, p. 127. Williams' debunking of Arnold brings to mind Frederic Harrison's “Culture: A Dialogue” (Fortnightly Review, Nov. 1867), a satirical rejoinder to “Sweetness and Light,” which Arnold had published in July of that year. Harrison's piece is reprinted in The Choice of Books and Other Literary Pieces (London : Macmillan, 1925), pp. 97–118. Like Harrison, Williams seems to be speaking only of “Sweetness and Light,” not of the whole of Culture and Anarchy. Harrison, at least, went to the heart of the issue: “explain to me,” the adversary of culture is made to ask, “how this perfection, this harmonious expression of all the powers which make the beauty and worth of human nature (to adopt your own words), how, in short, this same sweetness and light is to be attained.” The advocate's reply: “I suppose it comes.” (pp. 100–01). Arnold composed the subsequent chapters of Culture and Anarchy to counter Harrison, and the point is that he had finally to take recourse to history in order to answer the critical question of how the idea of culture can be realized.
16 The “greatest thing a human soul ever does in the world,” Ruskin wrote in Modern Painters HI, “is to see something and to tell what it saw in a plain way.” “Of Modern Landscape,” in The Works of John Ruskin, ed. E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols. (London: G. Allen, 1902–12), v, 333. All further references to Ruskin's works will be to this edition, cited by volume and page.
17 A good instance of this characteristic attitude is to be found in Sesame and Lilies (1865), in which Ruskin instructs us as to how we should read a literary text. The text in this case is from Milton's Lycidas, and after a close scrutiny of a passage Ruskin writes: “We have got something out of the lines, I think, and much more is yet to be found in them; but we have done enough by way of example of the kind of word-by-word examination of your author which is rightly called ‘reading’ ; watching every accent and expression, and putting ourselves always in the author's place, annihilating our own personality, and seeking to enter into his” (xviii, 75; italics mine).
18 The Darkening Glass: A Portrait of Raskin's Genius (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1960), p. 22.
19 Even Ruskin's conception of the “universal Gothic” is historically contingent. What he calls “the perfect type Gothic” exists only as a critical extrapolation from a great many variables, and Ruskin takes care to identify it as such. “Gothicness” is entirely relative to individual cathedrals and has no meaning beyond the European Middle Ages. See The Stones of Venice iii (x, 181).
20 See George P. Landow, The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 389–90. In Landow's view, “Ruskin conceives the greatest artists as prophets captured by vision,” but this matter requires important qualifications. Landow's book (a magisterial study) focuses in good measure upon Modern Painters ii, in which Ruskin develops his theories of beauty and imagination, and accordingly Landow emphasizes too strongly the idea of the artist as a transcendent seer. By the time of Modern Painters iii, Ruskin had considerably modified—and in important respects abandoned—this view by elaborating a theory of art grounded upon a description of the Purist, Naturalist, and Sensualist “schools” of art. For Ruskin, the Naturalist artist is distinctive (and normative) insofar as he is an “immanent” seer who achieves the universal through the mediation of his own time and place: “Thus Tintoret and Shakespeare paint, both of them, simply Venetian and English nature as they saw it in their time, down to the root ; and it does for all time” (v, 128).
21 he Darkening Glass, p. 86. More precise comparisons might be made between Ruskin and the so-called counter-relativists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Georg Simmel (1858–1915), Heinrich Rickert (1863–1936), Max Scheler (1874–1928), and Ernst Troeltsch (1865–1923), who believed, in Maurice Mandelbaum's words, that “the complete nature of a historical account is determined by values.” See Mandelbaum, The Problem of Historical Knowledge: An Answer to Relativism (New York: Liveright, 1938), p. 120. Ruskin had little of what could be called a philosophical understanding of history, but a good deal of Ruskin's work during the 1850's discloses a number of presuppositions that these writers would later develop into coherent principles. I would argue, for example, that Ruskin would have shared Simmel's belief that “the category of meaningfulness [is] the ultimate category of historical understanding.” As Mandelbaum says, in Simmel's view “the whole nature of the knowing activity is to bring intelligibility into the formless and hence unintelligible realm of mere experience. And historical understanding, which is by nature the apprehension of the development of psychical content, must proceed by selecting its material on the basis of the meaningfulness of that development as a whole. A history such as the history of European painting would therefore be so constructed as to show the significance of each aspect of the European spirit for the development of that spirit itself” (p. 111). I think that this describes in a general way the intellectual design of The Stones of Venice.
22 See The Stones of Venice ii (x, 215–39).
23 The Prelude; or, Growth of a Poet's Mind, ed. Ernest de Selincourt (Oxford: Clarendon, 1926), p. 74, Bk. ii, 1. 309, p. 207, Bk. vi, 1. 639.
24 See Modern Painters v, “The Stem”: “It is the knowledge of the mode in which such change may take place which forms the true natural history of trees;—or, more accurately, their moral history. An animal is born with so many limbs, and a head of such a shape. That is, strictly speaking, not its history, but one fact of its history: a fact of which no other account can be given than that it was so appointed. But a tree is born without a head. It has got to make its own head. It is born like a little family from which a great nation is to spring; and at a certain time, under peculiar circumstances, this nation, every individual of which remains the same in nature and temper, yet gives itself a new political constitution, and sends out branch colonies, which enforce forms of law and life entirely different from those of the parent state. That is the history of the state. It is also the history of a tree” (vii, 73).
25 “Mont Blanc,” 11. 96–97. Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson and G. M. Matthews (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1970), p. 534.