Intellectuals and Their Rhetoric

INTELLECTUALS AND THEIR RHETORIC 89 poems may have meant to him. And it is perfectly possible that we as readers cannot recognize or find congenial the relation between Whitman's psyche and his poems. We need to find a way to connect the poet's relation to his texts to the reader's relation to them. That relation, although not necessarily parallel or complementary, is itself a complex theoretical problem. Intellectuals and Their Rhetoric PETER ALLEN Ben Knights. The Jdea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century New York and London: Cambridge University Press 1978. ix, 274. $29.50 The word clerisy has been hovering at the outer limits of the language ever since S.T. Coleridge imported it from Germany in the early nineteenth century. His Victorian admirers, such as F.O, Maurice, habitually used it (we are told) to mean 'the body of university men, artists, scientific men, and others who are capable of teaching.' But today the term is rarely used, and then pejoratively, in the sense of intellectuals as a self-perpetuating priestly caste. The infelligentsia, a word imported from Russia long after Coleridge's time, is much more common, although it too sometimes inspires distrust. Distrust of the idea behind Coleridge's word is understandable. What he had in mind was not the intelligentsia as a whole but rather the intellectuals of the Establishment, a powerful class who derive their social position from the state and its agencies. While he wished to impress upon this group his sense of their moral responsibilities to the commonwealth, in practical terms he was defending the dominant role of the established church in the national culture. Maurice's emphasis on 'university men' (at a time when the national universities were effectively closed to non-Anglicans) suggests a similar bias. Though Maurice was sympathetic to intellectuals outside the Establishment, his efforts for social harmony among intellectuals came down to persuading as many of them as possible to accept Anglican leadership. In a similarly well-meaning way Thomas Arnold proposed that the church be widened to include nearly every group calling itself Christian. Such notions might well be dismissed as attempts to justify the liberal Anglican position by dreaming out loud about the church's ideal role while ignoring the fact of its social behaviour. Even if we accept Coleridge's idea of the clerisy as that class whose function is teaching, we may wonder who society's 'teachers' are and whether they are ever sufficiently united to be described as a single class. Those teachers recognized and endowed by the state have all too often impeded new ideas and new teachers, nor have they gone unchallenged by spokesmen for movements seeking official sanction. Consider the contrast in upbringing, social attitudes, and UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLlJME XLIX, NUMBER~, FALL ~979 0042-024717911000-00&)$00,00/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS concept of education of two such representative Victorians as Matthew Arnold and T.H. Huxley. Or consider the Newman brothers, born into the class with access to the national universities, yet increasingly isolating themselves, in quite different ways, from the mainstream of intellectual life. Orconsider what diverse social worlds were frequented by George Eliot, W.M. Thackeray, and Charles Dickens. Can all these artists and thinkers be termed members of the clerisy? If, following Maurice, we visualize the intellectuals of the Establishment as central to the Victorian intelligentsia, we see that even this group is sharply divided, mainly along religious lines. On either side of this central group we find a series of intellectual countercultures. There are intellectuals who frequent the worlds of fashion, of journalism, of politics. There are Dissenting intellectuals, anxiously competing with their more privileged Anglican brethren and with each other. There are intellectuals from Scotland and other foreign places. And there is a whole spectrum of bohemian and eccentric intellectuals shading off all the way to the madhouse. Students of fiction will note that all the major novelists come from the fringes of respectability, except for Thackeray, who might however be said to have qualified himself by his sustained immersion in the disreputable roles of art student and popular journalist. The love affair between Thomas Carlyle and the...