Two Woeful Victorians

REVIEWS TWO WOEFUL VICTORIANS' Violet Paget concluded her first book of historical reconstructions by explaining why she had chosen the "lumber-room" of an eighteenth-century Italy to deal with rather than the decidedly more fashionable historical enthusiasm of those years: the renaissance for her, however, was suspiciously distant, with its personalities "calm effigies ... wholly different from ourselves." The figures she preferred were still to be felt, still more nearly accessible to an attentive and sympathetic imagination. And they had a graceful pathos, a sense of arriving too late after one of history's climaxes. With some twentiethcentury foreshortening of historical perspective, John Addington Symonds and ('Vernon Lee" could almost be considered as existing emotionally and intellectually in a similar attic of history. As the high Victorian years cohere and establish a recognizable historical configuration for themselves-at least to our increasingly extended hindsight- figures such as these two signal the passing of this last historical era just prior to our own. Their works and their lives, for these involve each other most intimately, seem a fulfilment of the dilemma anticipated in Arnold's melancholy verses, a wandering behveen two worlds. The world of Ruskin, Carlyle, Mill was their immediate past, already establishing its eminence; to it, Symonds and Violet Paget serve as an extended footnote, one that does not precisely carry into the next age and yet is, in a sense, readily accessible to it. A good part of this accessibility must probably lie in the pathos of the two figures. The combined impression of homelessness and of an ineradicable alienation from the mores of the day- religious or sexual or even social in Violet Paget's case-is certainly a forlorn one. This feeling of exile, the sense of psychic dislocation present in their writing may have once disturbed their reading publics. But, as if in historical redress, these very qualities may serve to make their otherwise remote books more nearly sympathetic . This is particularly the impression one receives with Symonds. For the chief triumph of Mrs. Grosskurth's excellent study of Symonds' life would seem to be to save him despite himself- perhaps, more precisely, to preserve him from his writings and their often tedious prolixity, their all too frequent lack of distinction. In his own time, Symonds all but achieved the reputation towards which he worked so compulsively; by the time of his death, he was a sage of sorts, had impressed his history, his quasi-philosophical opinions, perhaps even his <1'phyllis Grosskurth, John Addington Symonds: A Biography. London: Longmans, Green & Co. Ltd. 1964. Pp. x, 370. $10.00. Peter Gunn, Vernon Lee: Violet Paget, 1856-1 935. Oxford University Press. 1964. Pp. xi, 244. $5.25. Volume xxxv, Number 2, January, 1966 208 OREST RUDZIK critical capacities upon the serious reading public of his day. His carefully adjusted verse-with genders changed in the erotic poems-allowed him the rank of a respectable minor poet; his connections in the literary and more widely intellectual worlds were exhaustive. And he had Venice and the Alps as stimulus and therapy in turn. But the biography allows for the first time our seeing of the quality of Symonds' life. In Mrs. Grosskurth's skilful and sensitive use of what Symonds came to consider his major work, his apologia to his world and to himself, one discovers not simply the Victorian sexual case-study. The Memoir over which Symonds took so much care was to have been his most significant statement, the tragedy of his life; and it is this that finally gives us the significance that he can legitimately claim, that illuminates his life and its work. As Mrs. Grosskurth states at several points, Symonds' critical abilities were of no particular distinctionj his constant search was only to discover sense and sincerity. The question of artistic means was always a decidedly secondary consideration, a matter of rhetoric decently adapted to secure a properly elevating impression. Clough's religiOUS questionings in verse, Zola's cycle of novels, Whitman's poetic outbursts-all these Symonds finds he can place by considering "art in its highest manifestation as a mode of utterance for what is spiritual in man, as a language for communicating the ideal world of thought and feeling in sensible form"; with this he dismisses Pater's attempt to establish music as the architectonic art, at least in its successful absorption of any given content into formal effects. For Symonds this was a dangerous doctrine, a way to aesthetic selfindulgence . Unfortunately, the ideal he does offer is so very undistinguished, at least in its public dress. Perhaps in his very sensitivity and fear of exposure he went too far to accommodate the freedom of his opinion to the pietistic free-thought acceptable to the age of Huxley: The time might come, indeed may not be distant, when lines like those ... from the poem composed [by Wordsworth1 at Tintem Abbey should be sung in hours of worship by congregations for whom the "cosmic emotion" is a reality and a religion. This sophistication of Arnold's dictum that poetry is to .criticize life is perhaps even further from Arnold, even at his worst, than the refutation of Pater is from Pater's intended though vaguely expressed critical position. It is not a very rigorous pursuit to discover the poverty of Symonds' critical ideas or even the relative absence of informing premiseS generally. In offering his final opinions on the Renaissance, its origins, its powers, its essence (that quality so much sought by the nineteenth-century historian), Symonds finds it intellectually economical to recapitulate at length his earliest pronouncement on the subject that was to be, perhaps, the major public work of his life: "What I wrote in my early youth [twenty years earlier at Oxford] returns to my memory now; and I do not seem able, after thirty years of searching, to yield a better account of the aetiology of the Renrussance than I did then." But if the "aetiology" of this complex historical and cultural phenomenon remained unchanged for Symonds, so also did, more significantly, its essential expression, its most desirable IIformula/' to use Pater's term. What Symonds TWO WOEFUL VICTORIANS 209 found in that age was what he lacked in his own, what he was unable to force himself to in his own: "The first and leading note of it is the reassertion of the individual in his rights to think and feel, to shape his conduct according to the dictates of his reason. The resurgence of personality in the realm of thought lies at the root of the whole matter" ( Symonds' italics). It is with such a Hformula" rather than with intellectual preconceptions or conclusions to aid him that Symonds worked-to construct not so much historical structures ( though the enormous accumulation of detail in course prOvided a valuable degree of historical recovery) as imaginative mansions for himself. What Mrs. Grosskurth's book so effectively establishes is the context-the motives, the methods, the consequences-to Symonds' effort at such an imaginative emancipation. That he could not free himself more truly, either in personal or artistic terms, prevents the sadness of his life from rising above frustrated pathos. The achieving of the satisfactory biographical unity, the effective relating of events and works so that both give the reader the full significance of the life examined, presents severe problems, and this can be seen in Mr. Gunn's biography of Violet Paget. For all the admirable thoroughness of his exposition of "Vernon Lee's" writings and of his chronicling of the events of Violet Paget's life, the two remain irksomely distinct not ideally related, the one to the other, so as to provide a final, fuller understanding of the author's significance. Whatever this ultimate assessment may be, it will have to rcst on more than a calendar of friends and residences or a catalogue of intellectual opinions or psychologically explicable allegories. To a point, Violet Paget's life offers a remarkable parallel to Symonds' increasing loneliness and sense of isolation, all the more intensified by her long survival past the turn of the century. It is all the more interesting, then, to notice where and how any significant variation occurs, to try to discover, in other words, whether the dilemma Symonds and Violet Paget both faced could be other than destructive . On coming back to her first book some twenty-five years later, she recognized how her Italy of the eighteenth-century was largely a mirror, ODe with a mass of erudition and sensibility to serve as a frame, but very much seU-reRecting. But by that time these "sins of the imagination" and her youthful certainty of the "objective historical reality" were nostalgically far back in the past-as far and as hannless as what she realized had been significant SOUIces of her Renaissance fancies: Some of the intensest romance of Italy was taught me less by the real places overseas, as by Pater's books, their perfume brought home, slowly distilled.... It was in the dining room in Bradmore Road, hung with photographs and r.e-Raphaelite f,ictures, that Novara, which I have never seen became such a place 0 enchantment. (Novara . .. yes-Novara, there was such good bread at Novara. And sweet singing in the cathedral," said Mr. Pater in deep dreaminess. But it was also in following Pater that she found a way beyond the fanciful, a method of extending the critical awareness. 210 OREST RUDZIK Symonds saw in Pater a challenge and almost, it seems at times, an affront; "Vernon LeeI' took him for a master, initially one of sentiment. But the critical method of both Symonds and Paget has dose affinities with the Paterian method, at least in its most wide-spread formulation : The aesthetic critic, then, regards all the objects with which he has to do ... as powers or forces producing pleasurable sensations, each of a more or less peculiar or unique kind. This inHuence he feels, and wishes to explain, by analysing ana reducing it to its elements. For Symonds these elements remained largely elements of his own consciousness , whether direct expressions of his own desires aI, on more public occasions, prudently assumed masks of idealistic propriety. In the critical reactions of 'Vernon Lee/' however, there was more of a development in the direction that Pater had intended. These "elements" that the work of art comprehended (and it is unfortunate that the work could often and misleadingly be a personality, a tamer Dorian Gray) were essentially formal, were the style that gave a work of art its legitimate and unique existence, its aesthetic expression. For IVernon Lee" such expression could be conceptualized in two ways: the technical construct of the work and the psychological effect this structure of art exercises. By exploring these two facets of art, she hoped eventually to provide the groundwork of a scientific aesthetic. To know the convention and the technique, to have the data of the effects of these, would then be to possess the knowledge of art-or at least to know finally and irrevocably the work before one. This is not to suggest that in the series of essays and books in which Violet Paget examined and elaborated these notions all the earlier ambiguities and self-absorption are removed. There was, too, the complication of her isolation, both intellectual and geographical, perhaps even psychological, from so much of the thought and critical speculation of the day; and this could, and did, lead to a tendency to the doctrinaire, to an idea absorbed too unreBectingly, too totally, pursued too single-mindedly. But the close preoccupation with technique and even the less fruitful tabulation of varying psychological reactions of the spectator or listener, did provide the one necessary freedom that criticism and art so badly needed in the last years of the nineteenth century, freedom from the artist himself. Although Oscar Wilde saw his fate as an artist-and as a very unhappy man-as being tragic and chose to use a martyr's name for a very public pseudonym, he was unduly Hebraic in picking Sebastian. Narcissus would have been closer to the truth and the Hellenic ideal at the same time. It was this attitude that ensured the dead-end of what is commonly labelled Ilaestheticism." Symonds offers a striking case of just such a phenomenon at a far deeper level than is usually considered when the attitude is discussed, historically or critically. ''Vernon Lee" is similarly more than Violet Paget in a Gladstone collar, with her incredible brother's name; she is, perhaps, more an indication of critical possibilities that were emerging with the last Romantics. (OUEST RUDZIK) ...