Longer Views (13 page)

But that's because the relentlessly repeated experience of a crowd of strangers was itself historically new, and had to be imaginatively explored—a crowd that the other giant of nineteenth-century opera, Verdi, gave voice to again and again in his works, and that Wagner felt—hopelessly, desperately, stridently—should be only his audience and given as little voice as possible in his music dramas, which were, after all, relentlessly about the individual, the heroic, the will.

Those wise and willful Victorians had a remarkably clear view of the job education had to do in their new, mysterious city, in promoting the values of tolerance, acquiescence, and obedience (the three coming together under the name of responsibility) among the working classes
who went each day into the dark Satanic mills, either in the inner city or or on the outskirts—since religion was (in the age where sexuality seemed to extend from Krafft-Ebing at one end to Jack the Ripper at the other) clearly no longer effective.

In 1850, the year of Wordsworth's death (on April 23rd, the traditional date of Shakespeare's birth), twenty-seven-year-old Matthew Arnold stood looking out a window in the moonlight at the full, calm tide of Dover Beach (with or without a young woman, we are not sure). Four years before (while, in America, Poe was busy reinventing the unities in his defence of “The Raven”), Arnold had been to France to visit with George Sand herself, a guest at her Nohant estate. Now she was the French revolutionary government's Minister of Culture. With their smashing of the old order and the undermining of all traditional relationships between God and man, mediated by a king, republican revolutions had raged on the continent for half a decade now, and would go on raging. That night in 1850 the English cliffs glimmered vastly, out in the water. (“—on the French coast, the light / Gleams and is gone . . .”) Arnold stood listening to “the grating roar / Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling, / At their return, up the high strand, / Begin, and cease, and then again begin . . .” After a sestet's musing on the perfect civilization of Greece, Arnold's thoughts returned to the problems of the present:

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth's shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furl'd.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night-wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Swept with its confused alarms, the darkling plain where ignorant armies clashed was a nightmare Arnold feared lay under the dream the English could still see the world as, a world “so various, so beautiful, so new”—a nightmare that was already manifest in France and Germany, a nightmare that was uneasily feared for England herself.

This was his great poem, “Dover Beach.”

Seventeen years later in 1867, as his last lecture as Professor of Poetry at Oxford, Arnold delivered what was to become the first chapter of his book
Culture and Anarchy
(1869)—and in it, it is all there. The study of Latin and Greek had promoted the necessary civilized values in the
upper middle classes. But it was quite another thing to make Latin and Greek the basis of mass education for the proletariat.

Why not use imaginative works, in a language the masses already spoke, to accomplish for the working classes what disciplines such as philology and the “Greats” had done for their rulers? And thus educational crusaders fought to make English literature an academic discipline. Here is Professor George Gordon—among the first professors of English Literature at Oxford—in his inaugural lecture just on the near side of the Great War (as quoted by Terry Eagleton in his
Literary Theory: An Introduction):

England is sick, and . . . English literature must save it. The Church (as I understand) having failed, and social remedies being slow, English Literature has now a triple function: still, I suppose, to delight and instruct us, but also, and above all, to save our souls and heal the State.

No doubt when, within hailing distance of World War I, Professor Gordon made his statement, “healing the State” meant making sure there was no workers' revolution—since Arnold's Sea of Faith was generally acknowledged by now to have dried wholly up.

Most of us here are, today, more or less the products of that Edwardian discovery, English Literature.

Paradoxically, one of the most important people in its establishment as an academic discipline was a brilliant and erudite Frenchman, Hippolyte Adolphe Taine, whose
Histoire de la littérature anglaise
was announced in Paris in 1856, was published there in 1863, and was followed by a supplementary volume on modern authors in 1867—modern meaning Dickens and Thackeray for the novel, Macauley, Carlyle, and John Stuart Mill for criticism, philosophy, and history, and Tennyson for poetry. It is certainly the work we turn to today in order to find what was by 1900 considered the most intelligent European view on any of its topics.

That French invention,
La Littérature anglaise
—or English literature—came across the Channel in the last third of the nineteenth century along with what we traditionally call “British spelling,” which was not British at all but rather “provincial” England's attempt to Frankify its language, leaving the old Saxonate forms such as “labor,” “color,” “honor,” and “theater,” the spellings that appear in the manuscripts (as well as the first editions) of Dickens and George Eliot, to even more provincial America.

What does Taine have to say on such a notorious figure as Lord Byron, with whom he closes the main portion of his
Histoire?

I have reserved for the last the greatest and most English of these artists; he is so great and so English that from him alone we shall learn more truths of his country and his age than from all the rest together.

Byron, the most English of English artists. . .? Was Taine ignorant of the most un-English scandal of the sometimes handsome, sometimes obese, social and literary lion's “incestuous” affair with his half-sister Augusta, of his atrocious treatment of his mathematician wife Annabella, and of his most un-English flight from England during the last eight years of his life? No, it too is there in Taine. Rather, what constituted nobility, grandeur, and greatness of spirit—national spirit—for Taine in particular and Europe in general was far richer and more complex than the stereotyped prejudices such notions become in most of our minds once we pass World War II. After all, as Byron embodied the spirit of England more than any other English writer, the woman who embodied the spirit of France, if not that of Europe, was a woman who was believed by most of the public to smoke cigars and appear in public in men's clothing—which, indeed, on a number of occasions in her younger days George Sand actually did.

But Sand was the writer of over a hundred volumes; she was the great friend of Balzac's and confidante of Flaubert's; she was a correspondent of Manzoni, Gutzkow, and of the anarchist Bakúnin—Gutzkow one of the greater thorns in Wagner's side at the Dresden Opera house, and Bakúnin Wagner's most radical friend during the Dresden Uprising of 1849; Sand was the European champion of Stowe's
Uncle Tom's Cabin;
and she was inspiration to Dostoyevski, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, and George Eliot, among her immediate contemporaries. Among her immediate successors, Proust loved her pastoral novels and Henry James wrote ten review-essays praising her art. “. . . [S]uch a colossal nature in every way . . .” wrote Barrett to Browning in the summer of 1845, a year before her fervent admirer the young Arnold visited Nohant. But was that nature conceived then as something personal? I think not. For she was often called “The Spirit of Europe.”

To get some idea of the awe in which a people and a nation could hold its national artists in the nineteenth century, read the description of Victor Hugo's 1885 state funeral (two years after the death of Wagner), which opens Roger Shattuck's study,
The Banquet Years
. The great writer's remains stood for four days in an immense urn beneath the Arc de Triomphe, guarded by children in togas, endless brass bands, dignitaries, speeches, crowds, while, apparently, some of the frenzied populace balled in the bushes, yards away in the underbrush flanking the Champs Elysées (then a public bridle path), in hopes of producing,
or so they said when apprehended, their own little immortal. The point is not that today we have no artists of such stature. Rather it is that the particular social configuration, vouchsafed in the public psyche, the conception of the nation's greatest artist as the greatest of its civil servants, equal to its greatest generals and its grandest industrial tycoons, is simply no longer there. That, today, is no longer
what
the artist
is
. Even a Spielberg, Lucas, or Coppola—the distribution conduit of twenty to fifty million dollars with each new film, which then brings in a hundred-million-plus and feeds a gallery of images into the general cultural consciousness, images that may persist for years—is still not socially revered in the same manner and mode.

It is tempting to speculate on the machinery of such fame. In material terms, the greatest factor was doubtless the size of the literate population: in 1814, after a series of moody, speculative and narrative poems (
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage
[1812],
The Giaour
[1813],
The Bride of Abydos
[1813]) had catapulted him to astonishing literary fame, Lord Byron's narrative poem
The Corsair, A Tale
went on sale and sold ten thousand copies on the first day of publication, with lines outside London's bookstores waiting hours for the doors to open. But the entire literate population of England at that time was slightly
under
five hundred thousand! The book went on to sell over a hundred thousand copies in the next year or so of its initial life. Ten thousand copies on the first day of publication would be an impressive first-day sale for a best-selling novel in America today. Such a book might well go on to sell a million or two million copies, in a literate field that is currently over fifty times the size of England's in 1814. But Byron's sales are even more impressive when we restate the Byron phenomenon in relative terms: Byron's work was purchased by two per cent of the entire English reading population on the first day of sales and, in the first year, went on to be owned by almost twenty per cent of that population. For a book—be it a poem or otherwise—to achieve comparable success in the United States now, it would have to sell half a million on its first day and twenty-five million over the next year.

It is not that poetry will not sell in such figures today.

Books
today simply do not sell at such figures:
Gone with the Wind
, during the whole of its phenomenal success since publication in 1936, has sold perhaps twelve million copies; in its first year, it sold no more than a million and a half.

This is the material situation against which observations such as, “Well, back then there was no radio, television, or film to compete with Byron (or Goethe, or Sand, or Hugo) . . .”—or even the more astute observation that, because
The Corsair
was not quite two thousand lines long, it could be sold at considerably less money than the novels of Jane
Austen, Sir Walter Scott, Charlotte Brontë, and William Makepeace Thackeray (who were successful novelists in the surrounding years)—become simply banal. The whole field against which such fame was constituted was so different from the contemporary that such statements do far more to mystify than they do to explain.

Goethe was, of course, the first artist to become such an international celebrity. But that celebrity was very much a function of cities and of the increased communication they fostered.

In this light, the fame of any serious artist is wholly a social construct. Keeping that in mind, we can ask: What sort of men and women were granted this celebrity? Certainly they tended to be titanic producers. At the same time, they tended to be very serious men and women about their art—and equally serious about their critiques of society. All of them were associated with some antisocial incident or action, frequently highly salacious, that tended to become a point of ethical debate around which any number of social arguments raged, so that they were figures of sexual rebellion and sexual desire. Byron loved his sister and was rumored to carry a great and melancholy curse—about as close as those days could come to admitting his bisexuality. Sand had appeared in public in men's clothing and smoked cigars in her youth, and had left her legal husband, first to live with the poet Alfred de Musset, then with the Polish musician Chopin; Wagner lived in sin with Cosima (Liszt's daughter and von Bülow's wife). Goethe before and Hugo later had long and notorious affairs with . . . actresses! In the field in which their fame was constituted, this combination of massive work, high seriousness, and scandal was a terribly effective configuration. Needless to say, in a field differently constituted—such as the contemporary one—fame must work, both materially and psychologically, differently; and the conscious or unconscious efforts of the media to make these nineteenth-century parameters function to produce fame today is one of our greatest current comedies. In the end, it was not that such artists achieved mass fame to a degree that does not happen today. Rather, they achieved their relatively greater proportional fame before there was, in today's terms, any mass audience at all.

The Corsair
was a romantic, exotic, foreign tale—as distant from the bourgeois life of middle-class London as a poem might be. But Byron was the most English of English artists because
The Corsair
begins,

O'er the glad waters of the dark blue sea,

Our thoughts as boundless and our souls as free,

Far as the breeze can bear, the billows foam,

Survey our empire, and behold our home!