The crowd of strangers was a wall of mystery. News from its far side was available only through the papers, which reported from a world of melodrama, where upstanding fathers and husbands could be beset by calamities, so that in a single year’s time they would turn into drunkards, thieves, murderers, rapists or suicides; where chaste and filial maidens could be disappointed in love so that they fell into a swoon or bad company or prostitution or tuberculosis or death overnight; or where the most dissolute and depraved of criminals might be touched by grace, whereupon they would be transformed, in a moment, into bona fide saints (if only one could get those transitions right between those autonomous/malleable subject states) — whereas on our side, the evil were stigmatized before their births by the misdeeds of their families and the good were equally well-marked; where nothing ever happened and transition itself was impossible, save that purely economic shift in monetary status — up or down — that always presupposed some violent bodily wrenching away from the endlessly stagnant social reality to begin it.
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:
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.