Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic: Sincere Mannerisms (review)

Jason Camlot opens this carefully researched study by invoking Oscar Wilde's assertion that "an ethical sympathy in an artist is an unpardonable mannerism of style" (1). The spirit of these words infuses the "broad purpose" of Style and the Nineteenth-Century British Critic, "to trace the gradual end of sincerity as a self-consciously cultivated mode of discourse" (2). Sincerity, for Camlot, is at once the fantasy of an escape from mere eloquence and its unwitting or deliberate simulation through recourse to the usual figurative apparatus. Wilde's provocative reduction of sentiments to mannerisms is evident in the book's paradoxical subtitle, but also conditions the wider investigative agenda, inasmuch as sincerity seems always for Camlot a species of rhetoric and always as such historically contingent.

The reader is initially alerted to the founding problem posed by "the shift from pragmatic to romantic conceptions of rhetoric in the early decades of the century" (2). Camlot argues that new emphasis on natural and original utterance made the artificial associations of eighteenth-century rhetoric unacceptable, despite its obvious applicability to the fractured realities of modern publication. The first three chapters concentrate on the "growing periodicals market," a setting that compromised the possibility of voicing "a coherent, sympathetic 'fellow'" (2). The authentic identity of the author is challenged by the whims of the market and by the practice of anonymous reviewing, but also by less circumstantial anxieties, including concerns about how "subjective agency [is] conveyed in language" (20). One may wonder whether concerns of this kind really troubled Thomas Carlyle, but revealing attention is given to J. S. Mill's practical attempts to write without losing "character." That difficulty is less resolved than it is ingeniously avoided. Camlot refers to Mill's essay on the mysterious identity of Junius Redivivus—an anonymous contributor to the Monthly Repository—in which Mill quotes a private letter sent by Carlyle. Knowing that Carlyle would read his essay and that the rest of the audience would not know the provenance of the quotation, Mill eluded the problem of a public audience by limiting it to "that of a single correspondent" (44). It is an illuminating and well-chosen instance of Camlot's thesis that "one way of dealing with the anxiety of audience . . . is to present in one's text an inside discourse that can function in the public sphere" (44).

Having considered a pragmatic counterpoise to Mill and Carlyle in John Wilson's Noctes Ambrosianae (Blackwood's Magazine, 1822–35), Camlot documents the rise of "the aesthetic critic" (73). A discussion of "the political economy of style" indicates how the growth of "new standards for a more judicious 'discipline' of criticism" compromised John Ruskin's attempt to reach an audience in the periodicals (93). Focusing on the essays of Unto this Last (1862), Camlot observes that Ruskin's style identified him with the "'adjectival' critics of this period" (93). The curious irony, exploited here to full effect, is that Ruskin always accorded primacy to truth over the rhetoric of Academicism. We may wish to consider the affront to readers dealt by the content of these essays, but Camlot's emphasis on the substantial implications of style is revealing all the same.

The argument's final phase puts debates about loanwords into the context of legislation that removed "civic naturalization . . . from a more private form of personal allegiance to a public, administrative set of procedures" (111). Theories of style that are regarded as "inclusive, welcoming influences from foreign languages" are seen as "naturalizing them so that the influences are effectively absorbed" (112). The relation of this material to sincerity seems less obvious, and one consequently has the developing sense of a survey. Moreover, the reader might expect a more rigorous consideration of the problems involved in proposing links between linguistic openness and political openness. We need something more measured than the claim that certain late-Victorian "authorities on the problem of style" are "participating in a...