Selections from Alfred Tennyson

"Lotos-Eaters"

STRUCTURE/SUMMARY:

The first five stanzas (following a set pattern of ababbcbcc) provide a description of the land of the Lotos-eaters and narrate how the men become caught up: "We will return no more," they say,"Our island home / is far beyond the wave; we will no longer roam." Following the first five stanzas are the eight stanzas (irregular in rhyme, ending with a 29-line eighth stanza with triple rhymes, with the exception of the first two lines, it follows an aaa, bbb, ccc pattern) labeled as a "choric song" which is spoken from the first-person perspective of the men detained on the island. The men admit, "Dear is the memory of our wedded lives, / And dear the last embraces of our wives / And their warm tears" but convince themselves that "all hath suffer'd change" and morphed in to confusion such that they should "Let what is broken so remain." The poem ends with the slurred, soporific tones of these lines: "Surely, surely, slumber is more sweet than toil, the shore / Than labour in the deep mid-ocean, wind and wave and oar; / Oh rest ye, brother mariners, we will not wander more.

BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:

This poem was first published in 1832 and significantly revised in 1842. It is based on Book 9 of Homer's Odyssey in which the men encounter the Lotos-eaters, who feed on Lotos-flowers. Several of Odysseus's men are seduced into eating the Lotos-flowers and as a result lose their desire to return home. This poem has been read as indicating anxiety about poetic language's (and aesthetics', more broadly) capacity to lure readers away from industry toward idleness; as a critique of artists who retreated into aesthetic worlds to the exclusion of political involvement; as an allegory of alienated labor (Marxist reading), and most specifically, some have seen the Lotos-eaters as an image of the stalled movement during the passage of the Reform Act (1832).

"The Lady of Shalott"

STRUCTURE/SUMMARY:

"The Lady of Shalott" is a ballad in four parts. Metrically, the poem is generally in iambic tetrameter, usually associated with a playful, nursery rhyme-like feel. The fifth line of every stanza ends with "Camelot" and the final line (usually shorter, in trimeter) of every stanza "Shalott" (with the exception of one which reads "Sang Sir Lancelot"). 

The first part tells of the island of Shallot, and the Lady of Shalott in her tower. The second part goes through how "There she weaves by night and day" the subjects that she sees in her mirror, "Shadows of the world" including "surly village-churls, "red cloaks of market girls," "a troop of damsels glad," "an abbot on an ambling pad," "a curly shepherd-lad, and a "long-hair'd page in crimson clad." Sadly, she has no suitors, "But in her web she still delights / To weave the mirror's magic sights." The third part tells of Sir Lancelot's foray into Camelot: he bawdily alludes to Autolycus's song in The Winter's Tale singing "Tirra lirra," and immediately "She left the web, she left the loom." Once she looks directly down upon Sir Lancelot, her mirror cracks and she cries that "The curse is come upon me." The final stanza tells of her descent from the tower into a boat which she labels with her name, "The Lady of Shalott." She floats down the river and sings her last song, after which she freezes to death. The knights behold her corpse as she floats into Camelot, "but Lancelot mused a little space; / He said, 'She has a lovely face; / God in his mercy lend her grace, / The lady of Shalott." 

BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:

Like "The Lotos-eaters," "The Lady of Shalott" was published first in 1832 and then revised in 1842. It presents an episode from an Arthuriad. The poem has been seen in terms of a critique of separate spheres, the artist's relationship with the world beyond and the problematic situation wherein the artist dies if she looks upon the "real world,"or more politically specific as representing the plight of handloom weavers in the face of mechanizing society. "The Lady of Shalott's" mythic status in the Victorian era is echoed in the numerous images which artists produced of her.  

"Ulysses"

STRUCTURE/SUMMARY: 

"Ulysses" is in the form of a dramatic monologue. Essentially, Ulysses narrates in iambic pentameter how upon his return home he cannot be but restless and desirous of travel once again:

I cannot rest from travel: I will drink

Life to the lees: all times I have enjoy'd

Greatly, have suffer'd greatly, both with those

That loved me, and lone; on shore, and when 

Thro' scudding drifts the rainy Hyades

Vext the dim sea: I am become a name;

For always roaming with a hungry heart...

The first part tells of how his political domestic duties are not enough to satisfy his hunger for life experience offered by travel, and the second part tells of how he looks upon his vessel in the port and gets ready for yet another voyage.  

BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:

The form of the dramatic monologue enables an ironic distance between poet and the speaker. In this way, Ulysses's heroism is clearly suspect--critics have read his neglect of political duties as a critique of the Tory administration's indifference to reform. Ulysses's desire to go forth once again is often contrasted with the weary, belabored rhythm of lines like "To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield" (the final line) suggesting that Ulysses himself might be inadvertently articulating his own weariness and revealing his heroism in old age as rather foolhardy. 

Tennyson himself offers a reading which substantiates a sense of struggle in the poem: Tennyson remarked that the monologue was written shortly after Hallam's death in order to demonstrate the need to move on and go forward in life despite the difficulty presented by loss.


"The Coming of Arthur"
STRUCTURE/SUMMARY: This is the first poem in a twelve-poem series (in blank verse) known as Idylls of the King (published between 1856-1885). King Leodogran appeals to Arthur to help him with the beasts and the heathen hordes that have been wreaking havoc in his kingdom. Arthur deals a defeat to all of these parties, and afterwards requests Guinevere's hand in marriage, because he says, "I cannot will my will, nor work my work" until he has been joined with her. Because Arthur does not dress like a king but just like another knight, Leodogran is doubtful about his lineage and hence hesitant. Leodogran receives different accounts of his lineage from different people including his chamberlain, Arthur's emissaries, and Arthur's half sister Bellicent. Finally, Leodogran has a dream (expanded into 18 lines) that Arthur has been crowned in heaven, and so he consents to the marriage. The poem closes with Arthur refusing to offer a tribute to the old Roman lords.


BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES
The poem's insistence (through Arthur) on the need to unite with Guinevere in order for him to rule is interesting as it has yielded much criticism on gender relations in the Victorian era. Arthur says:

"Shall I not lift her from this land of beasts
Up to my throne, and side by side with me?
What happiness to reign a lonely king,
Vext--O ye stars that shudder over me,
O earth that soundest hollow under me,
Vext with waste dreams? for saving I be joined
To her that is the fairest under heaven,
I seem as nothing in the mighty world,
And cannot will my will, nor work my work
Wholly, nor make myself in mine own realm
Victor and lord. But were I joined with her,
Then might we live together as one life,
And reigning with one will in everything
Have power on this dark land to lighten it,
And power on this dead world to make it live."


Arthur's belief in the ennobling impact of marriage and the role of women as to comfort, support, and uphold men in their public duties is commonly cited as particularly Victorian, patriarchal value. As Stephen Ahern writes, "identifications of the beloved with a promise of ennobling self realizations" are repeated throughout the Idylls. Of course, throughout the work as a whole, the above belief of Arthur's will be questioned (via Guinevere's affair with Lancelot, most obviously, but as Ahern argues, also by the predominance of Guinevere's voice in the rest of the narratives). 


"Tithonus"
STRUCTURE/SUMMARY:
"Tithonus" is a dramatic monologue given by Tithonus addressing Aurora over the plight of his immortality, which unfortunately does not mean eternal youth. The poem begins with a vision of the woods in the forests and men growing old. Tithonus, however, must grow old slowly in Aurora's arms. Still, he remembers when he was young and when he was young and asked her for eternal life. He now wants her to take the gift back. In the dark, Tithonus says that he has a "glimpse of that dark world where I was born," but when Aurora streaks across the skies, she does not answer his request to be mortal once again but merely sheds some tears as if suggesting that "The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts." Tithonus then recalls his youth when in love with Aurora, unsure whether the youth who loved was in fact one and the same as his aged self now. He closes the poem with a final request that she "Release [him], and restore [him] to the ground" so that he need not suffer the daily humiliation of her revealing his old and decrepit form as she rises and shines upon him. 


BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES: 

In the Greek legend, Tithonus, the son of Lamedon (king of Troy) and Strymo (daughter of the river Scamander) was taken by Eos (Aurora) as a lover. Eos asked Zeus to grant Tithonus eternal life and Zeus consented, but unfortunately, she forgot to ask for eternal youth so eventually Tithonus aged into the form of a grasshopper. In Tennyson's version, Tithonus has asked Eos for eternal life, and it is she who has granted it thoughtlessly "Like wealthy men who care not how they give." Subsequently, "the Hours," goddesses who resent Tithonus's immortality, are the ones who subject him to aging. 

Tennyson's wrote first version of this poem, "Tithon" in 1833 (eventually it was revised for publication in 1859). The poem was intended as a complement to "Ulysses"--Ulysses desires more of life, but Tithonus, who receives eternal life, finds that it is in fact better to remain mortal along with the rest of mankind.


"Godiva"
STRUCTURE/SUMMARY:
In blank verse and iambic pentameter, Tennyson retells the tail of Lady Godiva, who begs her lord the Earl to remove taxes that were too stringent upon his people. When he flippantly tells her that he would remove the tax if she were to ride naked through the town, she does so. "Clothed on with chastity," most of the townspeople stay inside and dare not look. "One low churl" chances to take a peep, but his eyes shrivel up into his head, "So the powers who wait / On noble deeds, cancell'd a sense misus'd."


BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
"Godiva" was written in 1840 after a trip to Coventry, where the "Godiva pageant" yearly took place. Tennyson's version of the Godiva myth is highly Romanticized, and interestingly, as Daniel Donoghue points out, does the work of managing to resolve certain seemingly contradictory traits. Her nakedness is clearly sexualized and heightens reader prurience, while at the same time the poem insists upon her chastity. Furthermore, the peeping "churl" is punished by God, signaling the existence of a higher order which will ensure that "moral" and "immoral" are readily distinguishable.


"Lucretius"
STRUCTURE/SUMMARY:
"Lucretius" is written also in blank verse, iambic pentameter. The poem's structure is as follows: it begins and ends with Lucilla's (Lucretius's wife) actions, but for most of the poem, we get Lucretius's speech. In the beginning, Lucilla finds her husband devoid of passion for her, and so she brews a "philtre" which supposedly had  power "To lead an errant passion home again." This mixture disorders Lucretius's faculties, and in an extended monologue, he describes having terrible dreams of a sexual and violent nature involving female domination (he dreams of being suffocated by a circle of Hetairai, Greek prostitutes, and seeing the breasts of Helen shoot forth fire and wither away a piercing sword). He continues, calling out to Venus to help him, but soon coming to the conclusion that he cannot truly be "careless" and calm unless he kills himself: he envies what he perceives to be the god-like existence where "nothing to mar the sober majesties / Of settled, sweet, Epicurean life."Believing deeply in the Epicurean philosophy that as nothing but a collection of atoms, he need not fear death for it is merely dissipation, Lucretius kills himself. The poem ends with Lucilla rushing in and shrieking that she had failed in her duty to him.


BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
That a poem entitled "Lucretius" begins with Lucilla ("Lucilla, wedded to Lucretius, found / Her master cold...) seems to offer a clue as to how to read the work. Indeed, Lucretius is "framed" by Lucilla in more ways than one--both in the structure of the poem, and by her actions. Lucretius has no idea that the how he applies his whole philosophical system and his life story here are controlled by Lucilla's philtre--little does he know that it is her action that have catapulted him into his dark philosophical musings. She is the source of his monologue, and though the poem closes with his words ("Care not thou! / Thy duty? What is duty? Fare thee well!"), they are broken words which dramatically underscore his limited understanding: fancying that he is above and beyond such moral codes as "duty," he is in fact actually undone by his own inattentiveness to his duties as a husband.


Maud: A Monodrama
STRUCTURE/SUMMARY:
The poem contains many metrical variations depending on the state of the speaker's mind. The "plot" of Maud is briefly as follows:


The poem begins with four-line stanzas in hexameter, in which the speaker tells of his father's suicide (crushing himself into a pit with a stone), his mother's death, and his general sorrow over his relatively low station in life. The tone and meter contribute to the rant-like quality of this section. When Maud, a childhood friend, returns to the Hall (where he lives), he vows not to be affected by her, telling himself that he will "bury [him]self in [him]self" because he feels that her wealthy father has been in some measure responsible for his own father's death. Soon he progresses to a slightly less vexed state of Epicurean philosophy, contending: "Be 

mine a philosopher’s life in the quiet woodland ways /

Where if I cannot be gay let a passionless peace be my lot."

Despite his best efforts, the narrator falls in love with Maud, and they meet frequently in a garden. In describing these blissful moments, the narrator lapses into a sing-songy, almost nursery-rhyme like meter:

Birds in the high Hall-garden
   When twilight was falling,
Maud, Maud, Maud, Maud,
   They were crying and calling.

The narrator, however, finds Maud's brother to be an enemy. He vows that he will bury his hate for the brother because of his love for Maud. He now even thinks that he ought to take care of himself, faltering, "If I be dear, / If I be dear to someone else." Unfortunately, at an upper-class dinner event which the narrator is not invited to, the brother discovers him in the garden and strikes him. Maud's brother is killed in the ensuing scuffle, and the narrator runs off, disordered again in his mind. 

At the end of the poem, after Maud's death, the narrator makes his final decision: to fight in the Crimean War. He gives the following justification:

Let it flame or fade, and the war roll down like a wind,
We have proved we have hearts in a cause, we are noble still,
And myself have awaked, as it seems, to the better mind;
It is better to fight for the good than to rail at the ill;
I have felt with my native land, I am one with my kind,
I embrace the purpose of God, and the doom assign’d. 

He expresses the above lines evenly and resolutely, with some metrical control and regularity of rhyme, yet such a conclusion smacks more of the fatalistic, ending after all with the "doom assign'd" despite the ostensibly  "noble" cause.


BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
Tennyson's defined his designation of the poem as a "monodrama" thus: "different phases of passion in one person to take the place of different characters." In other words, Maud is a dramatization of a single character's different states of mind, much like (as Tennyson would mention also) in the case of Hamlet. This has seemed to be misunderstood in the poem's contemporary reception: Gladstone thought the poem  "catch-penny clap trap" and Charles Kingsley thought it unmanly, both harsh critics seemingly ignoring that Tennyson the poet is separate from the speaker of the monodrama and that inconsistencies in form meant to match the subject's changing states of mind.


Like In Memoriam, Maud concentrates on themes of love and loss, but next to the former poem's measured lines and stanzas, Maud seems more a dramatization of the effects of loss gone awry in an individual's mind. Whereas we get the sense that the speaker in In Memoriam reaches a certain calm and manages to transform loss into a means to reflect on human existence more broadly, the speaker in Maud ends up channeling his energy into the violence of war.


"The Ancient Sage"
STRUCTURE/SUMMARY:
The general structure of "The Ancient Sage" is a dialogue between a young man and an old sage, set in a time "a thousand summers ere the time of Christ." The old man reads the sentiments of the young from a scroll that the youth has been carrying. Thus, the poem reaches conclusions dialectically, oppositions providing the driving force for ideas.


The poem begins with the old man heading up to the hills, envisioning that "force is from the heights." The old man pauses to read from the young man's scroll, which muses on the "nameless power" that is "never seen or heard." The sage replies with an extended musing on that nameless power and suggesting the following:


For nothing worthy proving can be proven,
Nor yet disproven: wherefore thou be wise,
Cleave ever to the sunnier side of doubt,
And cling to Faith beyond the forms of Faith!


The youth further questions this nameless power, and the sage articulates that it is feeling as opposed to knowing which is "highest." When the youth then turns to talking of time, the sage returns that the "with the nameless is nor Day nor Hour," that the nameless power is eternal. The youth then seems to plunge into a bit of despair over the limitations of man under the weight of time, to which the sage replies with the following metaphor: "Who knows? or whether this earth-narrow life / Be yet but yolk, and forming in the shell."


Yet the youth continues to find existence on earth to be dark, and the sage calls attention to the possibility that this "darkness" might be inside of man's own perception/subjectivity:


My son, the world is dark with griefs and graves,
So dark that men cry out against the Heavens.Who knows but that the darkness is in man? 


The sage's solution ultimately seems to be some sort of loss of self: "But utter clearness, and thro’ loss of Self / The gain of such large life as match’d with ours / Were Sun to spark--unshadowable in words, /
Themselves but shadows of a shadow-world." In losing the "self," lived through symbols including, perhaps most importantly, words, the sage claims he sometimes reaches a sense of the nameless. The youth replies that these seem "idle gleams," and that "still the clouds remain." These are the final words of the youth, and the sage closes the poem with remarks on the futility of such "counter-terms" in "endless war" as they are so much up to one's subjective perception. At the very end, the sage turns kind of didactic, telling the youth to return to his city and understand that such things are beyond what man in his present state can comprehend. The sage encourages the youth to "think well" because to do so is to open the way for doing well and if he should continue to humbly look to his blessings, he might pass beyond the "Night and Shadow" and "see / The high-heaven dawn of more than mortal day / Strike on the Mount of Vision!"

BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
This later poem of Tennyson's (1885), was by Tennyson's own account "very personal" and supposedly indebted to his readings of Chinese philosopher Lao-Tze. It's ideas are fairly difficult and abstract--the reader feels, perhaps, as uncomprehending of the philosopher's abstractions as the youth.


Howard Fulweiler reads the turn towards the didactic moralism at the end as Tennyson's unification between "knowledge" and "virtue," terms that had generally come to be dissociated in the "modern" Victorian paradigms for life. I think this gives an important clue as to how to approach "The Ancient Sage"--in particular, Tennyson's casting his net towards ancient, and apparently non-Western philosophies in his admitted indebtness to Lao-Tze, seems to want to transcend the structures of Victorian thought. In a poem about reaching the "nameless" beyond the symbols (such as linguistic contradictions like light and dark, good and evil, or markers of passing time) by which we live and construct our "selves," Tennyson reaches across time and space to something ostensibly as remote from his own temporal and spatial framework as possible. Yet, the reference to Christ which begins the poem, and the sage's final injunction to the youth to return from whence he came signal the relevance of these contexts to the age in which Tennyson was living: it seems that Tennyson suggests this remote temporality and spatiality might help unify knowledge and virtue, and perhaps in doing so, then also revive Christianity within a modern context.


"The Palace of Art"
STRUCTURE/SUMMARY:
"The Palace of Art" consists of short, regular "abab" stanzas throughout. In the first part, the speaker/poet tells his audience, very simply: "I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house" (reminiscent of Kubla Khan's "stately pleasure dome"). There, his soul "would live alone unto herself" and "Reign...apart, a quiet King." The soul seems pleased by this, and the speaker goes on to proudly describe the many different rooms that he has constructed, "fit for every mood / And change of my still soul." Amidst these descriptions, the stanzas break out into a somewhat unsettling regularity, where each and every stanza begins with "Or" followed by whatever alternative scene of art it presents. The speaker brags that these are "Not less than truth design'd" and "Not less than life design'd."


The poem transitions into charting the soul's reaction to living in "The Palace of Art." In general, she is proud of her position: "I take possession of man's mind and deed. / I care not what the sects may brawl. / I sit as God holding no form of creed, / But contemplating all." The isolation feels powerful, and the "intellectual throne" thrilling.


After three years of living in this palace, however, "on the fourth she fell, / Like Herod, when the shout was in his ears, / Struck thro' with pangs of hell."The soul realizes that the isolation and solitude are in fact painful and it has become "A spot of dull stagnation" and nauseatingly reflexive: "Back on herself her serpent pride had curl'd." Unhappily, the soul asks the speaker/poet to make her a "cottage in the vale...where I may mourn and pray." The poem does not quite end so neatly, however -- the final stanza gives the soul telling the speaker not to destroy the palace towers, for "Perchance I may return with others there / When I have purged my guilt."


BACKGROUNDS/READINGS/CRITICAL APPROACHES:
This was another one of Tennyson's earlier poems, written first in 1833 and republished in 1842. On the most basic level, the allegorical nature of this poem seems fairly straightforward, the moral clear. As contemporaries remarked, and as Tennyson himself confirmed, the poem is about the limits of the artist in isolation, the intellectual thinker who has lost his connection to real life. A slightly more complicated allegory might be one which warns against becoming seduced by the power of the Romantic "symbol," reveling in its poetic power and forgetting, perhaps, its essential connection to the human (After all the poem begins as Coleridge's "Kubla Khan" does) and hence its limitations in aiding the poet to reach something greater.


Tennyson's dedication to Richard Chevenix Trench, who is said to have inspired this poem, indicates the limits of a purely allegorical interpretation of his poem while not denying its general validity. Tennyson wrote, in 1832: "I send you friend, a sort of allegory / (You are an artist and you will understand / Its many lesser meanings ) of a soul...." These so-called "lesser meanings," I argue, complicate the allegory in important ways. Perhaps the most obvious complication is the final stanza, in which the soul repents of her pride engendered by living in the palace of art but yet thinks that she might return. "Perchance," she says, "I may return with others there" (italics are mine). What these lines seem to reveal, then, is that the sin is not in the attempt to reach an understanding which transcends contingencies of time and human suffering, but in the apartness, solitude, and isolation through which this transcendence has been pursued. The soul's "perchance," however, seems uncertain--how does one actually transcend contingencies of time and human suffering when one is with others? Or, does the soul mean "with other souls?" Wouldn't this be the same essential sin of isolation then?


This final stanza deliberately avoids answering such questions but it serves as an acknowledgment that even when the soul has "learned" she still desires and yearns for transcendent understanding. This desire seems as essential to the nature of the soul as its realization that it cannot be solitary and apart. While the poem offers no way of reconciling the two and definitely still critiques isolation, it doesn't suggest that one can or should simply give up on the desire for transcendence that drives the tendency towards apartness.
---  
Another complication that might yield "lesser meaning" comes out of the strange detachment of the speaker from the soul. The regularity of the stanzas, the consistency of a rather matter-of-fact tone signal this detachment. The feminine gender also tends to further distance the speaker from soul (presuming most audiences would presume speaker is male knowing the poet to be Tennyson, and that such thoughts on art and the universal are generally appropriated only to men). The clinical attitude that the speaker has towards the progress of his soul lends to the poem is in deep contrast to the fluctuating emotions often in the dramatic monologues that Tennyson wrote. While the soul in the palace of art goes through the many moods depending on what room she inhabits, the speaker is oddly stoic and without tension. I would argue he almost seems (soullessly) sterile (especially in contrast to the female soul) to a fault. Yet, but paradoxically, he creates. This paradox perhaps critiques the detachment, suggesting that creation independent of the soul might be beautiful and transcendent, but ultimately rather stillborn, stagnant.

The Return of the Soldier by Rebecca West

PUBLICATION HISTORY/BACKGROUNDS:

The Return of the Soldier is Rebecca West's first novel, published in 1918 when she was just 24 and meeting with general critical success. West had already met with some literary fame at the time--not only was she a reviewer (In 1916, she had published her first book, Henry James, which, among other things, criticized James's portrayals of women), but she also was a journalist. (Source: Robinson, LitEncyc)

SUMMARY:

The Return of the Soldier follows the lives of three women and the homecoming of the shell-shocked Chris Baldry. One of the women is his wife, Kitty, another his cousin (Jenny, the first-person narrator) who has lived with Kitty and Chris, and an old love by the name of Margaret whom Chris has not seen for fifteen years. When Chris returns, he suffers amnesia and does not recall his most recent life with Kitty and Jenny but does recall his time with Margaret, which he presents to Jenny as idyllic and representative of true love in his account to her.

The novel begins with Jenny's descriptions of the perfectly trimmed, well-manicured house and grounds of Harroweald, where Kitty, Jenny, and Chris lived before the war, and where Kitty and Jenny still live. There is something clearly generic and public in the description; Kitty herself "looked so like a girl on a magazine cover that one might find a large '7d' somewhere attached to her person," and the place was a "matter for innumerable photographs in the illustrated papers." Jenny describes how it has been the shared task of hers and Kitty's to create this perfect little world for Chris. The two women soon receive a visit from Margaret, who is described unflatteringly by Jenny as poor in looks and grossly un-aesthetic amidst the beauty that she and Kitty have created. Margaret tells them of Chris's state (which she knows from letters that he has sent to her) and the two other women give her a rather harsh reception, assuming at first that she is a fraud looking for money.

A letter from Frank Baldry, Chris's cousin, confirms the truth of Margaret's story. Chris returns, and he tries but cannot recall Kitty beyond very superficial aspects such as one might know about "a woman staying in the same hotel," as Chris puts it. One evening, after Kitty goes to bed, Jenny asks what to Chris seems real, and he tells her about Monkey Island, the site of his and Margaret's romance, and where Margaret helped her father with an Inn. We are given Chris's account of Monkey Island and his time with Margaret filtered through Jenny, though the picture seems so full of detail and vivid that it might as well have been narrated by Chris. 

On Chris's request, Jenny agrees to fetch Margaret. At Margaret's humble home, Jenny hears the story of the lovers' parting, precipitated by a seemingly minor quarrel over Chris becoming jealous seeing Margaret with an old playfellow. The quarrel was made permanent by Margaret's father's death and her need to seek employment, finally coming into contact with a wealthy family where she made contact with her future husband, the shabby William Grey (whom Jenny views as a general nonentity which Margaret protected but did not love). Before Margaret and Chris reunite, Jenny warns each of them that each will not be as young as they were, but looks and time don't turn out to matter for the lovers as they sink with relief into each others' arms, as Jenny watches from a window.

At last, one doctor Gilbert Anderson is brought to "cure" Chris. He pronounces, with a flourish of Freudian psychoanalysis, that Chris has repressed that which has been actually painful to him (his life with Kitty and Jenny) and remembered that which has been truly desirable to him. During the course of the doctor's visit, Margaret happens upon the fact that Chris and Kitty have had a child together which they lost (Margaret too has lost a young child) and suggests that a toy of the child's might recall Chris back to his "normal" life. She doesn't want to do this, at first, but in the end she succumbs to letting him know the "truth." At the end of the novel, Kitty ecstatically notes that Chris has been "cured," but as Jenny remarks, he looks "every inch a soldier" and all that means is that he will return to war.  

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
It is clearly apparent, despite her ever directly acknowledging this, that Jenny is infatuated with Chris and  is driven throughout by her desire to become intimate with him. Even Jenny's gradual acceptance of Margaret and Chris's love seems a symptom of her wanting to get closer to him; she writes that she and Margaret "kissed, not as women, but as lovers do; I think we each embraced that part of Chris the other had absorbed by her love."

Overall (as Robinson suggests) the irony of Chris's "cure" being his return to the scene of war levels cynicism at Freudian analysis which claims restore an individual to "normalcy." Such "normalcy" means a duty to a joyless marriage to a woman who seems the embodiment of all that is "false" and "superficial" and to a manhood in which he will likely die in the flooded trenches. However, the book reads as much as a foray into the (almost pathological?) desires of the unmarried, lonely first-person narrator. After all, the narration shuts out any direct access to any of the other parties; in her account, "Chris" is little more than an idealized and objectified male figure whom she desperately desires. She is obviously highly unreliable, to the point that any clear "critique" the novel levels seems highly suspect: do Chris and Margaret actually possess as saintly, pure, and idyllic of a love as the narrator suggests? Is Kitty (whom at one point the narrator admits hates her) in fact as superficially and vapidly concerned with just making things look nice (herself included, in order to spur male desire)? It seems that no "ending" would be suitable for the narrator, whether Chris is "cured" or if he remains in ignorant bliss--either way, he is as inaccessible to the narrator as he is to the reader. In the beginning, Jenny's descriptions of Harroweald's beauty are tinged with a critique of its vapidness, later, it seems a reversal when she fixates on Margaret's lack of aesthetic appeal. When she finally accepts Margaret as "generous," and almost "saintly," it seems it it also because she has felt that through her, she has gotten closer to Chris. In the end, it seems as if one of the truest statements uttered in the novel is Margaret's to Jenny: "Oh you poor girl!"

Sartor Resartus by Thomas Carlyle

PUBLICATION HISTORY/BACKGROUNDS: 

Carlyle's Sartor Resartus was published initially as eight serial parts in Fraser's Magazine (a literary magazine generally known for its Tory politics) from 1833-1834. It's success led to several limited reprints in 1834, but the first book edition was actually issued in America, in 1836. Finally, the first British book edition appeared in 1838.  

It would be difficult to overestimate the influence of this rather unusual work (essentially, a fictional editor presents bits and pieces of a German professor's Philosophy of Clothes alongside a fragmented biography and fragmented critical remarks). Carlyle was a crucial figure for his fellow Victorians--George Eliot described him as an "oak sowing acorns." Indeed, Carlyle's influence continues beyond the Victorian era and finds echoes in the works of the late nineteenth-century Symbolists, Joyce, Woolf, and T.S. Eliot. Most famously (and most immediately), Carlyle's Sartor Resartus largely inspired American Transcendentalism: for Ralph Waldo Emerson, Sartor Resartus was his introduction to German idealism, which would become a continuing influence in Emerson's life and thought.    

Concentrating on the widespread influence of Sartor Resartus, however, should not obscure its clear indebtedness to core principles of the Romantic poets as well. In particular, form, allusion, and above all, symbol are controlling themes.    

SUMMARY:

As mentioned brief above, Sartor Resartus is a peculiar work and difficult to describe: in a nutshell, I have given that the work consists of this fictional editor (which at once seems to perhaps be Carlyle, since this editor writes that he applies to Fraser's for publication, but throughout, seems mostly a persona), who becomes fascinated with a German professor by the name of Professor Teufelsdrockh. This editor manages to make the Professor's acquaintance and secure a number of papers he has left; these two sources form the fragmented biography, which along with the editor's critical remarks, frame (or perhaps more aptly, weave throughout) Teufelsdrock's magnum opus, his Philosophy of Clothes.

Book I: The editor begins by telling his readers about his motives behind presenting the professor's work (that the work will prove some yet unforetold benefit to British readers), and also notes some of the editorial problems which he faced in handling and submitting such a disorganized work for publication. The editor also reminisces on his brief encounters with the professor, describing him as rather melancholy and serious, and only laughing once.

The editor presents excerpts from the professor's philosophy, including his sentiments on how clothes originated from a decorative rather than survival impulses. While presenting excerpts from the professor's work on aprons and an excerpt containing a fancy on the leveling of humanity that would occur if royalty were to lose all of their clothes and accoutrements of wealth, the editor is suddenly critical, thinking the professor ludicrous and crude (Yet, the editor seems caught in his own prurience when he reveals, in a list of things he wishes not to reveal, a number of such images as "Kings wrestling naked on the green," or kings "dissected" into "the same viscera, tissues, and livers" which we all share).

Book I closes with Teufelsdrockh's expansion on the metaphor of clothes: language is a garment of thought, and the body is a garment for the spirit. In a word, the "essence of all science lies in the philosophy of clothes." At the very end of the book, the editor tells of how he has received a number of promises papers from a friend of Teufelsdrockh's, the Herr Hofrath, but to his disappointment, they are not an autobiography, but a collection of his various, disorganized observations on life. The editor's hopes for stitching together a factually based, conventional biography are foiled.

Book II: Nonetheless, some tidbits of biography are recovered: a stranger delivers him in as a baby in a basket to kind foster-parents, Gretchen and Andreas Futteral. The professor muses on his own name, written on a card accompanying his basket, as kind of like clothing, to the extent that it becomes constitutive of his identity even if he was unable to discover any historical or social connections through it. Teufelsdrockh's childhood his idyllic, as he passively views the "terrestrial workshop," of which he is not yet a participant. Unfortunately, his schooling affords him little pleasure; learning is rote, mechanistic, and academic (in the bad sense of the term). His university he describes as a regulatory, unthinking system. His saving graces are a friendship with an English colleague by the name of Towgood, and "rebellion" through reading voraciously on his own. 

Soon, Teufelsrockh must seek a vocation (the editor paraphrases this tritely as the British notion of "getting under way"): he tries law, but soon finds that it is not a good fit for his idealistic temperament. He meets a girl (unnamed, but referred to poetically as Blumine), who then runs away and marries his friend Towgood for money. His heart dashed to pieces, Teufelsdrockh becomes a wanderer, as miserable, certainly, as the wandering Jew. With a somewhat ironic tone, the editor gives that his travels all over the earth must have been like the writings of the Sorrows of Werter except written on the earth by his footprints (Teufelsdrockh's romance and its aftermath are mediated all through by the editor's voice of superiority and all-knowningness about such rites of passage experienced by all young, idealistic men uninitiated in the ways of the world). 

Amidst such throes of struggle, Teufelsdrockh goes through this famous "Everlasting No" (an "indignant" and "defiant" rejection of pretty much all beliefs and all of existence), followed by his neutral stance at the "center of indifference," and finally his emergence into his "Everlasting Yea" which comes up with a new affirmation of life based not on a quest for happiness but an acceptance of "love" and "blessedness." He offers an interesting metaphor for the eradication of desire: if the denominator of a fraction which signifies one's view of what he deserves out of life is 0, then life becomes infinite. The editor, however, thinks all of this is a bit too mystical and unclear, and tells the reader that he must be patient. At the same time, however, the editor expresses some doubt about his own endeavors: could it be, that all of the "facts" of his biography are in fact symbolical, "hieroglyphic" facts and is he perhaps Teufelsdrockh's dupe?

Book III: In Book III, what is given of Teufelsdrockh's excerpts are increasingly religious and spiritual. In his section on symbols, for example, he explains how symbols generally have both intrinsic and extrinsic properties, and those who have only "extrinsic" properties are akin to blind customs which no longer possess any living meaning. Symbols with intrinsic properties, however, continue to gain meaning as they pass through human lives. Teufelsdrockh believes that such "superannuated symbols" ought to be discarded. In a word, symbols are an expansion of what he means by the "clothing" through which man experiences the world: "It is in and through symbols that man consciously or unconsciously lives, works, and has his being."  

In Teufelsdrockh's margin notes on a tract on population by Herr Hofrath, Teufelsdrockh, taking a rather anti-Malthusian stance, expresses that by fully "forming" every man, rich or poor, by educating him in the loftier concerns of existence as well the so-called practical actions of industry, population problems would "solve" themselves because such men would be able, through ingenuity, to sustain society. In a following section, Teufelsdrockh rejects a world conquered by mindless utilitarianism and laissez faire doctrine, critiquing methods of action and liberal reform in a way which would later be echoed by such different men from Dickens to Arnold. The professor thinks that despite this bleak vision of the world today, a phoenix will soon rise from the ashes of this society's old, worn-out raiments/symbols/doctirines. 

The editor pragmatically chastises Teufelsdrockh for not being more grateful to society for raising, clothing, and feeding him in order that he might be in such a position as to make such criticisms. 

The "new light" that will be the phoenix, Teufelsdrockh holds, is being cultivated in literature, specifically, that of Goethe (in contrast, the newspapers embody worn-out doctrines). Teufelsdrockh's philosophy of "natural supernaturalism" fully explores his belief in nature as a book of "celestial hieroglyphics," a full embrace of wrestling with symbols as the divine way of living. Even "space and time," the professor explains, are perceptions which are mere "thought-forms" and once one apprehends this, the significance of eternity and infinity unfolds itself. The editor approves of these articulations as his most coherent expression of his philosophy.

At the close of Sartor Resartus, the editor ends with a metaphor of how he has constructed a number of "rafts" for the British reader to jump upon in order to get to some sense of a new understanding of his own life via the exploration of Teufelsdrockh's philosophy. At the same time, the editor admits to being "infected" by Teufesldrockh's use of metaphors, he remains derisive of his "mystical" and disorganized means of expression. At the very end, the editor tells how Teufelsdrockh (referred throughout by the editor as a "sanscullotist") disappeared around the time of the "Parisian Three Days" revolution on July 26-29, 1830. "Es geht an," Teufelsdrockh is reported to have said, "It is beginning," signifying, perhaps, that he has joined in the revolution. 

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:

For me, the most interesting critical question is how we are to read the relationship between Carlyle, the editor, and Teufelsdrockh. Conclusions about Carlyle's political and moral beliefs seem utterly mired in the obscurities created by such entanglements. I argue that the editor is supposed to be a stand-in for a typical British reader--generally "pragmatic" and non-mystical, but nevertheless able, on some level, to appreciate that an overly pragmatical (rather, doctrinally pragmatic) character might benefit from an infusion of spirituality. 

The consideration of metaphor provides one particular example of this nascent dualism which Carlyle envisions as part of the British subject: while rejecting metaphorical language as imprecise, the editor yet is able to acknowledge that it has "infected" his own language. In fact, metaphor (knowingly or unknowingly) is part and parcel of Sartor Resartus as a whole: the whole is a weaving or interlacing of biography, critical comments, and the cut apart text of another--in a word, Sartor Resartus itself is clothing. 

It is, however, a new sort of clothing made of hybrid cloths of British pragmatism and German idealism. The work suggests a kind of synthesis of these two spirits in order for the full-formation of the human. In this sense, Carlyle might be basically expressing what Arnold would express nearly a generation later: that the modern British subject had become too rigidly enamored with ossified notions of what constituted action, the practical, industry, and progress, and therefore the British subject needed to adopt a more critical stance at the level of ideas. For Carlyle, however, it is not so much a "critical" light but simply a spiritual light, a "new mythus" which could invigorate and revolutionize British society through the transformation of individual hearts. Symbols would then be revitalized, and the "raiments" would no longer be old, tattered, and merely extrinsic. 

Ultimately, even though there are many moments where it seems that the reader is to sympathize more with Teufelsdrockh than with the interruptive, and often square editor, I think the editor's humility and self-awareness saves him and forces the audience not to look disdainfully on him from high, but to recognize in him their own follies and limitations. The editor often questions whether or not he has been duped by Teufelsdrockh (such as when he asks whether the facts of his biography were in fact "hieroglyphics" or symbols), or when he is not sure (as in Teufelsdrockh's discussion of dandies and the Irish poor) whether the professor is being ironic or not. The editor seems open to the possibility of his own limits, and in this, he prevents himself from being cast off but rather embraced by readers as one of their own. As the editor himself gives, he felt a "mingled feeling of astonishment, gratitude, and disapproval" at professor Teufelsdrockh--though contradictory feelings are given, this really seems to be the point that opposing forces make up the fully human.  

The Critic as Artist by Oscar Wilde

PUBLICATION HISTORY:
"The Critic as Artist" was one of the essays included in Wilde's only book of criticism, Intentions (1891). Written in the three years after Matthew Arnold's death and praised by Pater, Wilde's book of criticism clearly echoes and builds upon the ideas of both men.

SUMMARY:
"The Critic as Artist" is a written dialogue between two friends, Ernest and Gilbert, in two acts. Generally, Ernest asks questions of Gilbert; thus, Gilbert seems Wilde's spokesperson for his philosophy of criticism. (Occasionally, Ernest also summarizes what Gilbert has said, proving himself a crucial tool for getting across Wilde's ideas as well).

Part I: In the first part of the dialogue (subtitled "with some remarks upon the importance of doing nothing"), Gilbert is playing the piano, and Ernest has been perusing a book. They soon get into a conversation about the use of "art-criticism," wherein Ernest asks why the artist might not be left alone. Gilbert launches into an invective against art criticism which seeks too much to explain. On a tangent inspired by his disdain for explanatory societies like the Browning Society, Gilbert praises Robert Browning as a Shakespearean writer because of his capacity to enter into so many different characters' voices. Ernest soon stops Gilbert and states that "in the best days of art there were no art-critics." Following from this question Gilbert once again offers a long answer--this time, vehemently contradicting Ernest by telling him the Greeks were in fact the best critics of all in that they embodied the "critical spirit" in their arts.

Ernest is soon convinced that Gilbert is right, and he then moves on to his next statement (this is the controlling pattern of both dialogues), that the creative faculty must be higher than the critical, to which Gilbert replies that it is the critical spirit which most crucially innovates. Gilbert believes in the power of the individual to innovate--indeed, he says that "it is not the moment that makes the man, but the man who creates the age." It is the critical spirit that "rewrites history," showing a new way of understanding life. Like Arnold, Gilbert critiques the Victorian "man of action"who is tediously self-denying and industrious: in contrast, the critic is the individual who will move the world forward through his ideas. While Arnold suggests that such ideas will then fuel correct action, Gilbert seems to go even further by casting aside action as "puppetry," and embracing entirely the mind-world of criticism as "poetry.

In elaborating on his point, Gilbert makes his statements on the "critic as artist": "the critic occupies the same relation to the work of art that he criticises as the artist does to the visible world of form and colour, or the unseen world of passion and of thought." In other words, the critic and what is traditionally understood as an artist are equivalent, and differ only in the material which inspires their works. In fact, criticism is the highest art according to Gilbert because the critic forms a creation within a creation, and hence is removed from the problems and trap of realistic representation: the "shackles of verisimilitude." Ultimately, as Pater also says, Gilbert says that the critic's subject is autobiographic in the sense that it "chronicle[s] his own impressions." Individual impressions may vary, and Gilbert announces that it completely doesn't matter if Pater's impressions of the Mona Lisa are "untrue" insofar that Pater's impressions don't truly reflect Leonardo da Vinci's intents because the primary aim of the critic, in chronicling his own impressions, is really "to see the object as in itself it really is not." This clever reversal of Arnold, of course, is not a real reversal, as Gilbert basically identifies the same kind of innovative critical spirit of Arnold's. Finally, like Pater, Gilbert closes the first part of the dialogue with his valuation of music for its formal identity and absence of subject matter.

Part II: After pausing for supper, the dialogue picks up again on the same topics (although this section is subtitled, "with some remarks upon the importance of discussing everything"). Ernest dives right in and asks Gilbert if the critic is never an interpreter, if his business is innovation and not explanation. Gilbert explains that the material of historical context is indeed relevant to a piece of art or literature, but the critic ought not to use this material in order to "treat Art as a riddling Sphinx." Instead, the critic ought to make the work of art even more mysterious, in order to multiply its impressions. He mixes in his own "personality" with the art, and the art is made "vivid and wonderful" by this "new and intense personality." Importantly, this kind of criticism keeps art of the past alive for the present day.

Gilbert then delineates an essential difference, as he sees it, between life and art. From an "artistic point of view," life is a failure, because it is sordid, messy, and ugly in its form. Art offers a way of experiencing myriad exquisite emotions without the "mess" of life. Gilbert asks, affectingly, "are there not books that can make us live more in a single hour than life can make us live in a score of shameful years?" In a word, art "can teach us how to escape from our experience, and to realize the experience of those who are greater than we are."

When Ernest begins to protest that art seems "immoral," Gilbert confirms this to be true, but says that this is essentially the point: morals come from society's code of ethics, which is limited and which tends to prevent human individuals from the important act of contemplation. For Gilbert, England needs much less the question of "what are you doing" and more the question of "what are you thinking"?

Ernest then asks what the function of the critical spirit is, and Gilbert gives an exceedingly Arnoldian answer (complete with a quote from Arnold) that it perfects culture, and through the workings of the critical spirit on culture, we reach "the best that is known and thought in the world."Like Arnold, Gilbert critiques Puritan, middle-class ethics of sentimental philanthropy, advocating instead for a "sympathy with thought" which locates itself in the realm of ideas, and the realm of artistic temperament. In other words, as Pater suggests, Gilbert suggests a kind of intellectual, temperamental kinship through the ages.

Near the final part of the two men's dialogue, Gilbert rejects Ernest's premises that art is fair, rational, or sincere, as these are the terms of a moralistic and narrow universe. The aesthetic universe with which Gilbert concerns himself, however, is not one that doesn't care about life or society: rather, it seeks to reform society through instilling the critical spirit in each and every one of its members. "Art is out of the reach of morals, for her eyes are fixed upon eternal truths." This might be realized through an education which encourages the self-consciously critical spirit, first through such avenues as an appreciation for the decorative arts, which attunes an individual to form (rather than subject matter). Attention to forms prevents the "tedious realism" which tends to stultify innovative thought. Gilbert proclaims that it is the mission of the aesthetic movement to "lure people to contemplate," to think innovative thoughts and not to try to copy the world. Idealistically, Gilbert believes that "Intellectual criticism will bind Europe together in bonds far closer than those that can be forged by the shopman or sentimentalist," respectively, the capitalist or the philanthropist (see above).

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
Gilbert's closing paean to form immediately begs the question of form in Wilde's piece. Taking Wilde on the terms of his own game, the dialogue impresses the absence of an authorial didactic voice, perhaps then allowing the ideas to kind of float more freely and independently. I argue that this absence renders the ideas more palatable, and furthermore, encourages readers to get away from the question of authorial intent which bogs down the innovative spirit of critical response.

Additionally, I suggest that the dialogue models how one acquires and maintains a critical spirit. While the dialogue is skewed clearly in favor of Gilbert's ideas, Ernest's quick understanding, and his capacity to quickly summarize what Gilbert has said, and ability to ask productive questions make him an apt model for what is meant by independent learning. Ernest is earnest, and he is bright, and I think the work suggests that we are to emulate him. He does not merely accept Gilbert's word, but he allows himself the room to ask questions, and requires Gilbert to spend time elaborating. When Ernest summarizes Gilberts ideas, he essentially "tries them on" for himself, but then quickly moves to his next question. This is the very spirit which Gilbert describes: one need not be consistent, but in order to truly realize the truth of oneself, one must try on different modes of thought, checking them all the while with the material of one's own heart (this is, I argue, the most "Millian" moment of Wilde's essay--it mirrors Mill's contention that we arrive closest to truth by first gaining the ability to ventriloquize the thoughts of others).

The Renaissance by Walter Pater

PUBLICATION HISTORY: Pater's The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry is a collection of critical essays first published together as a volume in 1873, originally titled Studies in the History of the Renaissance. The title change came after Pater's friend Frances Strong Pattison remarked that the title was "misleading" since the works are clearly not concerned with history as it was normally defined. Instead, as the summary below will show, Pater's Renaissance traces the existence of a certain temperament that is more primary than any temporal or spatial (historical) contingencies.

The various essays included in The Renaissance were first published in a variety of periodicals. Pater's "Winckelmann" (1867) appeared in the Westminster Review. "Leonardo da Vinci" (1869), "Sandro Botticelli" (1870), and "Michelangelo" (1871), and "The School of Giorgione" (1877, thus included in the second edition of The Renaissance only) were originally published in the Fornightly Review. Finally, Pater's conclusion, which became infamous because it was (mis)understood as advocacy for hedonism, drew material from the final paragraphs of a William Morris essay originally published in the Westminster Review. The publication of The Renaissance provoked strong reactions--it came to be regarded sharply by both critics and religious contingents as a kind of public apostasy (an important exception was John Morley, editor at the Fortnightly). For the most part, though this indubitably contributed to the strong public response, the male to male love which Pater points to tended not to be acknowledged publically by Victorian audiences.

SUMMARY:
Preface: According to Pater, the role of (aesthetic) critic was to "distinguish, to analyse, separate from its adjuncts, the virtue by which a [work of art] produce[s]this special impression of beauty or pleasure, to indicate what the source of that impression is, and under what conditions it is experienced." This is what he seeks to do in his collection of essays, which explore works of art and poetry spanning a historical period of over 500 years (the work is bracketed by explorations of what he sees as the spirit of the Renaissance from the 12th-century and the 18th-century).

Two Early French Stories: Pater makes the case that there were elements of what he considers to be the spirit of the Renaissance much before the traditionally understood Renaissance in fifteenth-century Italy. He cites two early 12th-century French stories as examples, Amis and Amile (the story of deep, male friendship and love, in which Amile is willing to slay his own children to cure Amis's leprosy) and Nicolette and Aucassin (the love story of a Saracen slave girl and the son of a Count).

Pico della Mirandola: Pater singles out Pico as a 15th-century Italian who sought to reconcile Christian and Pagan traditions. Pater particularly admires him for his non-historical/non-intellectual approach of making "Plato and Homer...speak agreeably to Moses." He evinces the spirit of looking for some kind of "diviner signification" than the temporally or spatially specific. Pater says it is not important that he was scientifically wrong about many things (for example, he thought the earth at the center of universe) but values him for his humanist spirit his passion for seeing the world as full of spiritual signification." For Pater, Pico was unmatched in his belief in "the spirit of order and beauty."  In a word, Pico represents how "Renaissance of the fifteenth century was...great rather by what it designed or aspired to do, than by what it actually achieved."

Sandro Botticelli: Botticelli, generally known in Pater's time as a minor artist, embodied for Pater an "undercurrent of original sentiment" which was distinct from the dramatic passion of Giotto's (Generally Pater was critical of dramatic, spectatorial passion and a proponent for an internally motivated passion). Pater describes Botticelli's aesthetic as containing something of exile and loss, as well as struggle (for example, Botticelli's paintings of those who struggle in Dante's Divine Comedy between heaven and hell).  "Sympathy for humanity in its uncertain condition" is what Botticelli captures.

Luca Della Robbia: Luca represents the "intense and individualized expression" of Tuscan 15th-century sculptors, shared by greats like Michelangelo. At the same time, Luca also manages to adhere to a sense of Hellenic "breadth, generality, universality."  For Pater, Luca's work in low relief particularly enabled this "middle-way" between individuality and universality, the form's incompletion relieving a sense of the "hard realism" which tended to inhere in Greek sculpture.

The poetry of Michelangelo: Pater mainly characterizes Michelangelo as someone who unites the seemingly paradoxical attributes of "strength and sweetness." Most of his disciples, he argues, are men that tend to recognize only his "strength" and not his "sweetness." Characteristic of Michelangelo is also a kind of "incompleteness, which...trusts to the spectator to complete the half emergent form." The "sweetness" comes in part from a humanistic preoccupation with creation of man (Michelangelo doesn't take forms of nature as subjects). Pater re-reads Michelangelo's poetry/sonnets as not really about Vittoria Collona, as is traditionally thought, but as the "disappointment" of affection that may yet "charm." Finally, within Michelangelo's aesthetic is a willful consideration of serious topics like death, often yielding a serious and dignified sentiment of pity (as embodied by his "Pieta"). Pater views the "Pieta" as not an expression primarily of religious sorrow, but an aesthetic one in which a mother struggles with physical reality of "the stiff limbs and colourless lips" of her son.

Leonardo da Vinci: For Pater, Leonardo is fascinating for the "enigmatical" in his work. Pater narrates different life stages of Leonardo from his apprenticeship to Verocchio, a period of discontentment in which he embarked upon a frenzied study of nature, to his recommendation to Ludovico Sforza in 1483. The fruit of Leonardo's discontentment and desire for knowing how nature (broadly defined, including man) worked, was a "curiosity often in conflict with the desire of beauty, but generating, in union with it, a type of subtle and curious grace." In his landscape paintings, Leonardo looked for the "bizarre" and also did the same with human personality. For example his type of female beauty was often "nervous, electric, faint" and "clairvoyant." The Mona Lisa has "something sinister in it" and though based on a specific Florentine, Pater compares her to a kind of vampire, who has "is older than the rocks among with she sits" and who rather uncannily contains all of human history.

The School of Giorgione: Pater begins with observations on how different arts (art, music, poetry) express via different sensory apparatuses and so they are not equivalent. Aesthetic criticism seeks, in part, to explain such distinctions. One of Pater's most famous theses is that "all art aspires toward the condition of music" because in music, form and matter are least distinct (matter being the subject, or content). Lyric poetry approaches closer to music than other forms of poetry. Pater's "Giorgionesque" (not attributable, necessarily, to Giorgione the man) encompasses the spirit which approaches this kind of identity of form and matter, through its focus on the decorative (colors, lines, sensory details). Pater further describes the "Giorgionesque" as having "tact in selecting such matter as lends itself most readily and entirely to pictorial form." Subjects often include people playing music, listening to something (either in music, in nature, or in poetry), and also pictures which unite landscape and persons.

Joachim du Bellay: Bellay, a literary from the 16th-century French Renaissance, was one who provided a "softening" touch to the hardened, Rabelaisian aesthetic of his contemporaries.  Bellay focused on form, trying to "ennoble the French language, to give it lustre" and to argue that contemporary French culture could be just as refined as classical culture. Bellay's aesthetic is representative of an age which "threw a large part of its energy into the work of decoration."

Winckelmann: This is the longest of the essays in The Renaissance and probably most completely reveals Pater's deep-seated Hellenism. In Protestant, eighteenth-century Germany, Winckelmann became interested in the "Hellenic ideal," finding in it, a more free way of living. Though Winckelmann never made it to Greece, Pater argues for affiliations of spirit rather than of nation: it is perfectly plausible that an individual growing up poor in Protestant Germany might feel a kinship with the artists of antiquity. This is an affinity of temperament, and it is with this kind of affinity that Pater concerns himself in his "history." Central to this Hellenic ideal were male-to-male love, as well as male beauty; Pater's extended musings on this topic is often drawn upon now to speak to Pater's gay sensibilties. Pater gives the interesting history of Winckelmann being murdered before getting a chance to meet Goethe on his return to Germany, but stresses that Goethe is to have been influenced by the Hellenic ideal via Winckelmann (again, affinities of temperament are available without physical meeting).

In delineating the Hellenic ideal, Pater describes "man at unity with himself, with his physical nature, with the outward world," something evident particularly in Greek sculpture which possesses a sensuousness that is not ashamed of itself as a Christian, ascetic might imagine. It is also not weighted down by worldly details that might be apparent from painting (the eyes are blank, the hair is like drapery). In a word, the human form is abstracted from the grossness of everyday life but yet intensely physical in an idealized way. 

The essay ends with Pater saying that the modern world can't have this kind of sculpture but instead needs poetry which he understands as "all literary production which attains the power of giving pleasure by its form, as distinct from its matter. Only in this varied literary form can art command that width, variety, delicacy of resoruces, which will enable it to deal with the conditions of modern life." According to Pater, freedom in modern life is only available through such channelsm and Pater singles out Goethe as one who tries to wrestle with whether the Hellenic ideal of unity, "blitheness and repose" might be brought to the modern world (I think, by the way, this "blitheness and repose" might be something like Bataille's notion of being in water like water).

Conclusion: Pater's conclusion was to become infamous because people thought it might be a call for hedonism. In it, he describes life as a bunch of forces coalescing for a moment, and so thoughts too should have the same existence. Life and thoughts contribute to a "strange perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves," and experiences become subordinated to "impressions" that they make within the mind. Freedom inheres in the individual mind reigning supreme while controlling its impressions. Like Arnold, Pater believes in avoiding the trap of stale orthodoxy, and this is why this "strange perpetual weaving and unweaving" is necessary (and besides, natural, as his imagery of all of life and nature as forces coalescing suggests).

CRITICAL APPROACH/ANALYSIS:
I rather like Pater's original title, because it signals his writing an alternate history--one based on aesthetic temperament as he so explicitly gives throughout his essays. It isn't misleading, then, but illuminating. Pater seeks to stand in place of traditional, scholarly understandings of an artist as constitutive of his biographical realities and sociocultural contexts. As Pater remarks in his chapter on Giorgione, he has no use for the scholars who would argue about whether or not any given painting is “authentic” or not—the point is that he is tracing a certain temperament or passion which he associates with the notion of a Renaissance. (Where Pater’s notions--and also Arnold--seem paradoxical is that he does in fact associate the “Renaissance” spirit with specific historical periods, antiquity, and also 15th-century Italy as somehow particularly productive of this temperament. Thus while writing against scholarly cultural or biographical histories, he acknowledges the effect of such histories on the production of this artistic spirit which he values).

In writing this kind of history of temperamental affiliation, Pater, like Matthew Arnold, envisions the existence of an ideal which stands apart from (or perhaps, takes root deeper than) historical contingencies like social, political, or religious identification. For both, Hellenism is a cornerstone of this ideal, though Pater calls the ideal art and Arnold "culture." Inhering in both Paterian and Arnoldian philosophy is a kind of dream of equality (and relatedly, of freedom) via this apartness from such historical contingencies. Hadley's critique of Arnold, that this kind of dream of equality and freedom is in fact contingent on the culturally specific language of liberalism might then also apply to Pater. Additionally, inhering in both is the notion of universality--the faith that there exists an aesthetic ideal or cultural ideal that is "the best" and which may be agreed upon, which might seem immediately suspect to our modern doubt that such claims can be made.

Wilde’s “Critic as Artist” offers a complementary framework for thinking about Pater’s work as alternate history. In acting as the aesthetic critic, Pater is himself the artist, making known the Renaissance ideal to modern audiences through the literary form of criticism. As Pater himself remarks in his chapter on Winckelmann, such art forms as sculpture don’t quite work anymore, because they can’t account for the “conflicting claims,” “entangled interest” and “distracted…sorrows” of a modern age. Pater’s criticism is an attempt at art in the modern era, which requires variety and reflexivity, but which nevertheless reaches towards the unity, “bliteness and repose” associated with the Hellenistic spirit.