Introduction: Poetic Soul-Talk and Civic Virtue

Saville, Julia F.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-52506-8_1

Julia F. Saville³

Part of the book series: Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ((PNWC))

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Abstract

The introduction theorizes a transnational republican discourse of the civic soul that emerged in Britain’s transformative decades between the Reform Acts of 1832 and 1884. Outlining the classical, Romantic, and ecclesiastical precedents on which Victorian poets drew, the introduction reveals soul’s connections to the concept of “civic virtue” and its successor, “moral character.” As a nonmaterial entity knowable only by inference, soul called for the most ingenious mediation that poetry, in particular, could provide. Through experiments with genre and prosody, reform-minded poets such as Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, Robert Browning, and Algernon Charles Swinburne, along with their transatlantic contemporary Walt Whitman, exploited language’s rich aesthetic potential to develop a poetics suitable for subtle national and transnational ethico-political debates. This poetic soul-talk allowed their readers to experience the complex emotional and spiritual effects of democracy that eluded more prosaic forms such as fiction and journalism.

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Notes

1.
Aurora Leigh, 9.874–76 (WEBB, 3:264). Unless otherwise indicated, all citations are from The Works of Elizabeth Barrett Browning (WEBB), edited by Sandra Donaldson and volume editors Rita Patteson, Marjorie Stone, and Beverly Taylor. To make identification easier for readers using alternative editions, I give the title and line numbers of the work discussed, followed in the first citation by WEBB volume and page number.
2.
Aurora Leigh, 9.882, 887–9.
3.
Important contributions include Linda Dowling’s The Vulgarization of Art (1996), Lauren Goodlad’s Victorian Literature and the Victorian State (2003), David Wayne Thomas’s Cultivating Victorians (2004), and Elaine Hadley’s Living Liberalism (2010).
4.
Here Amanda Anderson’s The Powers of Distance (2001), Christopher Keirstead’s Victorian Poetry, Europe, and the Challenge of Cosmopolitanism (2011), Tanya Agathocleous’s Urban Realism and the Cosmopolitan Imagination in the Nineteenth Century (2011), and Goodlad’s The Victorian Geopolitical Aesthetic (2015) are among the most notable.
5.
See, for example, Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Poetry (1993); Matthew Reynolds, The Realms of Verse (2001); Stephanie Kuduk Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 1789–1874 (2005); Herbert F. Tucker, Epic (2008); Mike Sanders, The Poetry of Chartism (2009); and Meredith Martin, The Rise and Fall of Meter (2012).
6.
As has become customary in recent scholarship, I use the signature “EBB” as a way of acknowledging the continuity of the poet’s greatly prized intellectual independence both as a single woman (Elizabeth Barrett Barrett) and after she married (Elizabeth Barrett Browning).
7.
See Tucker, “Hips”; and Wolfson, “Gendering the Soul” and “A Lesson in Romanticism.”
8.
Tucker, “Hips,” 159; Wolfson, “A Lesson in Romanticism,” 350. The latter is the second of two essays written by Wolfson on the gendering of soul, the first (“Gendering the Soul”) appearing in 1995 shortly before Tucker’s. Referring to it in his notes, Tucker describes the two essays as “twins separated at birth by elves of the zeitgeist” (“Hips,” 180).
9.
Historians J. G. A. Pocock (The Machiavellian Moment, 1975) and J. W. Burrow (Whigs and Liberals, 1988) theorize the significance of “virtue,” while Stefan Collini (Public Moralists, 1991) and Goodlad (Victorian Literature) offer detailed accounts of “character.” I take the term “character-talk” from Collini (“Idea,” 45 and Public Moralists, 113).
10.
Tucker, “Hips,” 167. To illustrate, John Stuart Mill confidently observes that “The truth of poetry is to paint the human soul truly: the truth of fiction is to give a true picture of life” (“Thoughts on Poetry,” 346).
11.
Mee, Conversable Worlds, 15, 25, 32.
12.
Gregory Tate, The Poet’s Mind, 8. Tate refers to the soul with respect, acknowledging that “the word continued to surface in Victorian writing about psychology” (8), but he shows no interest in the vital ethico-political work performed by poetic soul-talk during midcentury debates about democratic reform. Tate’s best-known predecessor is perhaps Ekbert Faas (Retreat into the Mind, 1988).
13.
Recent examples of such scholarship include Charles LaPorte’s Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (2011), Kirstie Blair’s Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (2012), and Karen Dieleman’s Religious Imaginaries (2012).
14.
Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 147.
15.
“The Runaway Slave at Pilgrim’s Point,” ll. 38–9 (WEBB, 1:422). Bold typeface, here and elsewhere in this book, is my addition. It is used to indicate rhythmic stress.
16.
“Duty, that’s to say complying,” ll. 29–30 (Clough Poems, 43). Unless otherwise indicated, all Clough citations and line numbers are from Clough: Selected Poems, edited by Joseph P. Phelan, chosen for its excellent scholarly notes and commentary and its ready availability. Clough’s “Duty, that’s to say complying” is discussed in detail in Chapter 3.
17.
Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society, ll. 2091–2, 834–5 (PB, 4:565, 504). Unless otherwise noted, citations of Browning’s poetry are from The Poems of Browning (PB), edited by John Woolford, Daniel Karlin, and Joseph Phelan, chosen for its detailed annotation of historical and biographical contexts. References to titles and line numbers in this edition are followed in the first citation by PB volume and page numbers. PB is complete up to 1871. Citations of Browning poems published after that date are from Robert Browning: The Poems, edited by Pettigrew and Collins.
18.
See, for instance, Brantlinger, Spirit; Reynolds, Realms; Viscusi, “‘Englishman in Italy’”; Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry.
19.
Avery, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, 10, 28.
20.
T. Connolly, “Swinburne’s Theory”; Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry.
21.
Prochaska, The Republic of Britain, xvi; Harvie, The Lights of Liberalism, 19; Goodlad, “Liberalism and Literature,” 104–5.
22.
For a deeply informed, masterful summary of the convergence of diverse strains of European political thought that contributed to nineteenth-century British republicanism, see Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 2–5.
23.
Frank Prochaska has described three varieties of republicanism—classical, theoretical, and pure—according to their perspectives on the monarchy (Republic of Britain, xvi–xvii). Classical republicans emphasized independent civic virtue and tolerated monarchs who were public spirited but whose powers were limited by a mixed constitution. Theoretical republicans, while holding the ideal of an end to monarchy, nonetheless saw little practical gain in pursuing it directly. Pure republicans, in the tradition of Thomas Paine, were explicitly anti-monarchist and called for an end to the throne.
24.
Goldsmith, “Liberty,” 210–11.
25.
For an explanation of the difference between Locke’s “possessive individualism” and “character” with its civic republican genealogy, exemplified in Mill, see Goodlad, “Character Worth Speaking Of,” 12–20. My own synopsis is drawn chiefly from Pocock, “Myth”; and Rahe, Against Throne and Altar.
26.
Pocock, “Myth,” 16. In the eighteenth century, “property” in the form of freehold land was the most effective warrant of civic virtue, but movable property served too; however, a “new kind of property” referring to government stock and tokens of credit was considered the antithesis of virtue, since it depended on public credit and speculation (Pocock, “Myth,” 14–15).
27.
Rahe, Against Throne and Altar, 333–4.
28.
Pocock, Machiavellian, 398.
29.
Pocock, Machiavellian, 397.
30.
Rahe, Against Throne and Altar, 101.
31.
Goodlad, “Moral Character,” 131.
32.
Goodlad, Victorian Literature, 24–5.
33.
Goodlad, “Moral Character,” 130, 131.
34.
Tucker, “Hips,” 167.
35.
Bentham’s theory, which he unfolded in various passages scattered through his oeuvre, was only belatedly recognized in the twentieth century, when assembled and edited by C. K. Ogden (1932). The latter suggests the dates given as the period during which most of the theory was developed (xxvi).
36.
Bentham, quoted in Stone, “Dickens,” 127.
37.
Reed, From Soul to Mind, 2–3.
38.
Bentham, quoted in Ogden, Bentham’s Theory, 8.
39.
Bentham, quoted in Ogden, Bentham’s Theory, 9n1.
40.
Bentham, quoted in Ogden, Bentham’s Theory, 12.
41.
Bentham, quoted in Ogden, Bentham’s Theory, 13.
42.
Bentham, quoted in Ogden, Bentham’s Theory, 15–16.
43.
Bentham, quoted in Ogden, Bentham’s Theory, 17.
44.
Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 150.
45.
Armstrong, Victorian Poetry, 146.
46.
Tucker, “Hips,” 167, 168.
47.
Tucker, “Hips,” 167.
48.
Tucker, “Hips,” 168.
49.
Browning, The Ring and the Book, 10.373.
50.
Socrates in Plato, Phaedo, 64c.
51.
Like EBB, Browning was acutely aware of the impossibility of representing this soul-essence and delighted in putting this favorite phrase (“whole and sole”) in the mouths of prevaricators and self-deceivers. See, for instance, “Bishop Blougram’s Apology” (PB, 3:58); “Mr. Sludge, the Medium” (PB, 4:909); and Prince Hohenstiel-Schwangau, Saviour of Society, l. 1259 (PB, 4:525).
52.
Richard Jenkyns discusses the appropriation of The Republic by both conservatives and radicals, although its title and innovations were especially attractive to the latter. He cites, for instance, the manufacturer Mr. Thornton in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South as an illustration: “‘I can fancy a republic the most perfect form of government,’ says Thornton…and Hale answers, ‘We will read Plato’s Republic as soon as we have finished Homer’” (Jenkyns, Victorians and Ancient Greece, 244). Other obvious instances of prose writers who drew from Plato’s view of a just republic are John Ruskin in Unto This Last (1862) and Walter Pater in Plato and Platonism (1892).
53.
In her early works, it is the Plato of The Republic, book 10 whom Barrett Browning indicts when, for instance, she refers to “Ungrateful Plato” in An Essay on Mind (l. 926; WEBB, 4:105); however, by the time she writes “Wine of Cyprus” (1844), she appears to have modified this view and he is “my Plato, the divine one” (l. 97; WEBB, 2:200, 204n20).
54.
Maynard, Browning’s Youth, 234.
55.
Clough Correspondence, 1:91.
56.
Plato, Republic, 444d.
57.
For a fuller account of the variations and development in Plato’s conceptions of soul, see Martin and Barresi, Rise and Fall of Soul and Self, 12–21.
58.
Plato, Republic, 440b.
59.
Plato, Republic, 443d.
60.
Plato, Republic, 433d.
61.
Aurora Leigh, 2.479–81.
62.
As R. E. Allen points out, “the right” in Plato is not extrinsic to the good but is itself constitutive of goodness and happiness (Republic, xxvi).
63.
Martin and Barresi, Rise and Fall of Soul and Self, 21.
64.
Aristotle, De Anima, 402a7. This conception persists unchallenged until Descartes’s seventeenth-century displacement of soul with mind (L. mens, mentis), whose defining action is thinking (Martin and Barresi, Rise and Fall of Soul and Self, 126–7).
65.
Aristotle, De Anima, 403a19, 25.
66.
Aristotle, De Anima, 403a10, 407b25.
67.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1102a22.
68.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1102b16–17.
69.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103a16–17.
70.
Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1103b1.
71.
Goodlad, for instance, argues that “Much as Aristotle had written that ‘moral virtue arises from habit’…so Mill insisted that the ‘mental and moral, like the muscular powers, are improved only by being used’” (“Moral Character,” 134).
72.
Aristotle, De Anima, 402a10.
73.
Aristotle, De Anima, 403b32, 405a22, 25.
74.
Goetz and Taliaferro, Brief History, 105.
75.
Wolfson, “A Lesson in Romanticism,” 349.
76.
Genesis 2:7.
77.
Coleridge, Biographia, 13.304.
78.
Coleridge, Biographia, 14.15–16; emphasis is Coleridge’s.
79.
Fox, “Coleridge,” 5.
80.
Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations of Immortality,” l. 110, Major Works, 300.
81.
Wolfson, “A Lesson in Romanticism,” 355; Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations,” ll. 108–9, Major Works, 300.
82.
Wordsworth, “Ode: Intimations,” ll. 58–61, Major Works, 299.
83.
Wordsworth, “Tintern Abbey,” ll. 42, 47, 96–7; Major Works, 132, 134.
84.
Keats, Selected Letters, 290.
85.
Keats, Selected Letters, 291.
86.
Tucker, “Hips,” 174. As we shall see, Keats was a much-discussed figure in the mid- to late 1840s (see, for instance, Clough Correspondence, 1:178; and BC, 11:120–1). At this time, Edward Moxon published The Poetical Works of John Keats (1846), and Richard Monckton Milnes edited his Life, Letters, and Literary Remains (1848), to which Clough contributed a letter in his possession.
87.
Shelley, “Epipsychidion,” ll. 373–4, 378, 380.
88.
Coviello, “Whitman’s Children,” 78.
89.
Aurora Leigh, 9.888–9.
90.
Weiner, Republican Politics and English Poetry, 7–8.
91.
Elizabeth Helsinger notes the “generous and generative” character of Victorian song poetry in particular, its “performances…largely experienced and imagined as social occasions” (Poetry and the Thought of Song, 51).
92.
The Italian improvisatore was familiar in England through Byron’s allusions in Beppo (1817) and Don Juan (1819–24), Germaine de Stael’s Corinne (1807), and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Improvisatore (1845)—the last two particular favorites of Barrett Browning’s (BC, 3:25, 10:170). Indeed, her last poem, “The North and the South” (1861), was written for Andersen shortly after he visited her in May 1861. See LTA, 2:534; and WEBB, 5:113–15.
93.
Marjorie Perloff reminds us that “poetry (the word comes from the Greek poiesis, making or creation: in Medieval Latin, poetria means the art of verbal creation) inherently involves the structuring of sound” (“Sound of Poetry,” 749).
94.
Griffiths, Printed Voice, 60.
95.
Griffiths, Printed Voice, 66.
96.
Armstrong, “Meter and Meaning,” 31–2. She draws on Henri Lefebvre’s Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time, and Everyday Life for this concept of “polyrhythmia.”
97.
Griffiths, Printed Voice, 70.
98.
D. Taylor, Hardy’s Metres (1988); Prins, “Victorian Meters” (2000); M. Martin, Rise and Fall of Meter (2012).
99.
Phelan, Music of Verse, 4. In her refinement on this discussion, Helsinger emphasizes the melodic texture of sound patterning—the “rhyme, alliteration, and assonance” that, she argues, are as prominent as meter in these poetic experiments (Poetry and the Thought of Song, 7).
100.
Jarvis, “Musical Thinking,” 57.
101.
Jarvis, “Musical Thinking,” 59.
102.
Jarvis, “Musical Thinking,” 61.
103.
Jarvis, “Musical Thinking,” 61–2.
104.
Jarvis, “Musical Thinking,” 64.
105.
Jarvis, “Musical Thinking,” 69–70.
106.
Armstrong, “Hegel,” 125.
107.
Armstrong, “Meter and Meaning,” 26.
108.
Armstrong, “Meter and Meaning,” 32.
109.
Jarvis, “Musical Thinking,” 69.
110.
Jarvis, “Musical Thinking,” 69.
111.
Phelan, Music of Verse, 18.
112.
M. Martin, Rise and Fall of Meter, 42–7.
113.
Phelan, Music of Verse, 3.
114.
Phelan, Music of Verse, 5.
115.
Jarvis, “Musical Thinking,” 61.
116.
Phelan, Music of Verse, 5.
117.
Williams, Composition, 57, quoted in Phelan, Music of Verse, 18.
118.
Phelan, Music of Verse, 29.
119.
Phelan, Music of Verse, 30.
120.
“The Soul’s Expression,” WEBB, 2:61–2.

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References: Chapter 1: Introduction

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Saville, J.F. (2017). Introduction: Poetic Soul-Talk and Civic Virtue. In: Victorian Soul-Talk. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52506-8_1

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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-52506-8_1
Published: 30 April 2017
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