The Limits of Howell’s Realism in Theory and Practice [A Modern Instance]

 

Endnotes appear in brackets.  References in parentheses refer to the original edition of Criticism and Fiction or to the Penguin edition of A Modern Instance which reproduces the 1977 University of Indiana edition.

 

     Probably the most influential American man of letters in the late nineteenth century, William Dean Howells produced not only a great deal of fiction, but abundant criticism and reviews as well, introducing American readers to a wide range of foreign authors and advocating Realism.  Since he, like many writers of polemics, was prone to overstate his case, his exposition of the concept of Realism was not wholly consistent internally, nor was its application.  An examination of the ideas in his Criticism and Fiction (1891) and of their use in his novel A Modern Instance (1882) [1] clarifies the limits of his Realism in both theory and practice. 

     Howells opens Criticism and Fiction by agreeing with an author with whom he might be thought to have little sympathy, John Addington Symonds, who notes that Bolognese painting was once highly regarded, but, Symonds says, had come to be condemned for its “emptiness and soullessness.” (1)  Objecting to the fluctuation in artistic value judgements, Symonds proposes that art should be judged by permanent criteria and prescribes that paintings should be “simple, natural, and honest” (2).  He hopes that “the scientific spirit” might make men progressively more and more conscious of the “bleibende Verhältnisse” (“enduring relationships,” what might be called general truths) implied by artistic works such that, since  everyone has comparable experience of life, any reader may readily “test the excellence” of any work.  As an opening thematic statement, albeit at second-hand, this seems more obfuscatory than revealing.

     After all, apart from the gap between Howell’s very bourgeois American concerns and Symonds’ aestheticism (not to mention his homosexual themes), Symonds’ views raise more questions than they answer.  What to do with the many works which seem to fail the stated standard, that is, to some extent to be complex, artificial, and even misleading, yet have been celebrated by readers for centuries, such as Noh drama, the poems of the Troubadours, or The Faerie Queene.  Even less of the literature and art valued in the last century could be described as “simple, natural, and honest,” adjectives that do not apply to Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, or Pablo Picasso, to pick a few names at random.  And how in the world is one to know which are the important “bleibende Verhältnisse” when vision differs so from one artist to another?  Besides, must thematic implications be the heart of every work of art?  Finally, the notion that, given the right standards, everyman will be an equally qualified critic seems as unlikely as it is pointless, though the idea seems to have convinced Howells. [2]

     Howells’ own often-quoted formula seems straightforward.  “Realism is nothing more and nothing less than the truthful treatment of material.” (73)  He quotes with approval Burke’s claim that art must be judged neither by other art nor by critics but solely by fidelity to nature (7).  Nature, though, is itself problematic.  For Howells the word is capitalized to indicate its metaphysical significance, already a suspiciously unnatural sign.  “No author is an authority except in those moments when he held his ear close to Nature’s lips and caught her very accent.” (14) 

     This insistence leads him to question conventional views of beauty.  Since in his view true art embraces the whole of the observed world, it cannot be judged by its prettiness: “The ugly delights as well as the beautiful.” (4)  He turns the tables on those (plentiful in his time) who would shrink from distasteful scenes.  “We are really a mixture of the plebeian ingredients of the whole world ; but that is not bad ; our vulgarity consists in trying to ignore ‘the worth of the vulgar,’; in believing that the superfine is better.” (81)

     The excessive gentility of the taste of his day to which he was responding is clear in the initial review of A Modern Instance in The Nation.  The critic objects to the vulgarity of Howells’ depiction of “cheap boarding-houses and restaurants, and of the internal economy of a newspaper establishment.”  Declaring “here is a collection of disagreeable people whom he would gladly forget,” he pronounces Howells characters “unpleasant individuals,” “people whom one does not care to number among his intimate associates,” “types of character from which we turn away with irritation.”  For him the novel focuses unpleasantly on “that which is ignoble.” [5]  

     Howells shared nonetheless a preference for the proper.  His characters were middle-class, not working class, and he shrank from any representation of the sordid or the really wicked.  Howells’ rhetoric identifies Realism with democracy and the great American middle class.  He quotes Daudet in support of the idea that European culture is worn-out.  “We poor fellows who work in the language of an old civilization, we may sit and chisel our little verbal felicities, only to find in the end that it is a borrowed jewel we are polishing.” (135)  In contrast America has freshness and “the large, cheerful average of health and success” (129) as well as a wholesome classlessness noted by Matthew Arnold who “found no ‘distinction’ in our life” (138).  He calls for an end to “fine literary airs” in favor of “the dialect, the language, that most Americans know -- the language of unaffected people everywhere” (104).  “The arts must become democratic,” he proclaims, “and then we shall have the expression of America in art.” (140)

     If literature is simply “the expression of life,” every man is an equally qualified critic.  Howells welcomes the advent of a “communistic” era in taste in which he says, using Burke’s authority to reinforce a view that in recent years has been associated with reader response criticism, that “the true standard of the artist is in every man’s power” (8).  To Howells Grant’s Personal Memoirs, one of the best-selling books of the nineteenth century in America, is “a great piece of literature” (90) and possesses “natural” excellence (89) specifically because it is non-literary (43).  The assumption that every simple straightforward effect must necessarily be true and beautiful is, of course, an absurdity on its face.

     The apparent plain-spokenness in Howell’s formula for Realism, “nothing more and nothing less,” belies the elusiveness and editorial choice entailed in deciding what is “truthful” as well as what “treatment” best serves to express it.  Howells acknowledged that just recording facts will not automatically generate beauty.  In spite of his use of Keats’ well-known formula “Beauty is Truth, truth beauty (6), he plays Symonds’ wild card he had earlier introduced, the “bleibende Verhältnisse,” as a further qualification.  He specifically denies that an accumulation of data is sufficient, saying that when the writer “heaps up facts merely, maps life instead of picturing it, realism will perish, too.” (15-6)  The simple ideal of mimesis has all but vanished.

     Howells readily accepts artful alteration of nature, praising in Gogol and Balzac “the touch of exaggeration which typifies” (19), though such efforts should be discreet since “intense effects” are “cheap effects” (151).  Most essential to his project is the preservation of the traditional claim that art teaches morality.  He quotes Juan Valera in favor of art for art’s sake only in order to object by maintaining that beauty is “a divine and spiritual principle” and thus “perforce moral” (60-61).  To him “as long as men are men and women are women” ethics will always be inferred, beauty inevitably “clothes” morality and art always has either a good or bad ethical effect (83).

     Howells is no Baudelaire, so he insists on the beneficial option only.  With the close association he imagines between beauty and ethics, he believes that novels should coax a reader into being be “a helpfuler and wholesomer creature” (106).  Thus licentious French novels cannot be aesthetically successful, and in fact stories of more virtuous love are “truer to life” (150). The moral role of literature is for him critical.  “If a novel flatters the passions, and exalts them above the principles, it is poisonous” (95).  Stories without retributive justice are “deadly poison,” (95) while mere entertainment will “clog the soul” (96).

     To Howells realism, truth, and beauty are identified, a link he seems to consider a novel insight in  spite of the precedent of Plato.  Thus, for him, asking “is it true” involves “the highest morality and the highest artistry” and “this truth given, the book cannot be wicked and cannot be weak.” (99)  “No one hereafter,” he maintains, “will be able to achieve greatness who is false to humanity, either in its facts or its duties.”  “No conscientious man can now set about painting an image of life without perpetual question of the verity of his work, and without feeling bound to distinguish so clearly that no reader of his may be misled, between what is right and what is wrong.” (98) 

     Bartley Hubbard’s life is unquestionably shaped by moral considerations.  His career is a cautionary ironic American success story, from rags to riches like Horatio Alger’s popular novels which were popular when A Modern Instance was published, but Bartley, unlike Ragged Dick or Tattered Tom, had a corrupt heart and for that reason his eventual fall was as inevitable and as much a convention as their rise.  The critique of capitalism’s amoral rapacity inverts Alger’s optimistic enthusiasm about social mobility in America. [4]

     Other central concerns of the book are likewise ethical and social.  His observations about the potential for damage of newspapers governed primarily by the profit motive (as virtually all still are) and his implied acceptance of divorce in some cases may have excited topical interest, but, if so, such appeal has faded.  As a theory Howells’ Realism requires, apart from observation of lived reality, the assumption of a natural moral order uncreated by humans, embodied in a sort of Platonic form that conflates truth, beauty, and morality.  

     Though Howells opened with Symonds’ comment objecting to changing fashions in visual art, Howells in other passages enthusiastically accepted the evolution of standards.  He notes the overturning of neo-Classicism by Romanticism (15), and even speculates on some post-Realist era, though he usually depicts Realism as a climax in art’s evolution

     In practice Howell’s Realism promoted a focus on middle class characters, which is to say the group that composed the majority of his readers.  They are not only middle class, they are also generally of mixed character, neither exemplary heroes nor utter villains.  He fancies that such characters are more “real” than other varieties of humankind.  Likewise, he approvingly quotes Valdés’ condemnation  of “effectism,” by which he means seeking “vivid and violent emotions” through the means of displaying “invention and originality,” (65) preferring instead a prose style close to that of everyday educated speech.  To flaunt one’s idiosyncratic language would be to him vulgar.

     For Howells “the simple, honest, and natural grasshopper” deserves representation.  He declares that “the ideal grasshopper, the heroic grasshopper, the impassioned grasshopper, the self-devoted, adventureful, good old romantic cardboard grasshopper must die out.” (12)  This judgement fails to recognize either the array of potential expressive possibilities of the image or the fact that Howells’ “realistic” grasshopper is every bit as artificial as the alternatives.  Yet for a time Howells represented progress.  He enlarged the scope of fiction and developed further a sense of American identity which he embodied in both theory and practice.  While he did move on from prior models to occupy territory already claimed in  France by Balzac and Zola, he remained an American, man of his times whose very limitations are perhaps more instrumental than his themes in his pictures of lived experience.  He was unaware that what he did not know, what he preferred not to express, was as significant what he included.  The fact that he was unconscious of such considerations only makes them more meaningful.    

 

  

1.  In Criticism and Fiction Howells had the scope to develop the ideas he had been promoting in his “Editor’s Study” column in Harper’s Monthly.  To George Perkins A Modern Instance was Howell’s first major work of fiction.  See his “A Modern Instance: Howells' Transition to Artistic Maturity,” The New England Quarterly, Vol. 47, No. 3 (Sep., 1974).

2.  See below for Howells’ notion of the coming “communistic” era of taste.

3.  As it happens, Alger, like Howells, wrote a biography of Abraham Lincoln.

4.  Howells was a progressive, though no radical.  Apart from supporting Lincoln’s presidential campaign, he defended those arrested for Haymarket “riot” and was active in the Anti-Imperialist Society.  He was a Christian socialist at a time when many, among them William Dwight Porter Bliss, Henry James Sr., and  William Henry Channing, found capitalism inconsistent with the gospel. 

5.  Atlantic Monthly, November1882.  This and similar attacks are detailed in Herbert Edwards, “Howells and the Controversy over Realism in American Fiction,” American Literature Vol. 3, No. 3 (Nov., 1931).   

The Rather Abstract Charm of Diderot’s La Réligieuse

 

     Diderot’s La Réligieuse is scarcely a novel at all.  Apart from the apparent accident of its composition and an elaborate metafictional apparatus, the book focuses less on action and events or on constructing credible characters than on the insistent repetition of the central figure’s suffering.  The image of Suzanne as a “damsel in distress” [1] is, in fact, the center of the story’s content.  Virtually every page is filled with her helpless laments and the whole work is presented as her appeal for a rescuer. 

     In this use of the image of a helpless woman, in need of a man’s intervention, Diderot was highly conventional, though he was innovative, even radical, in other ways.  The spectacle of a defenseless woman, threatened, often sexually, by a villain occurs universally.  The motif, one of the most widespread in world culture, appears in myths like those of Andromeda and Sita and in many heroines of the Yuan drama, through Scheherazade and European fairy tales such as “Snow White” and “Rapunzel,” to nineteenth century American melodrama, modern Bollywood movies, and bdsm pornography.

     In the last paragraph of her story, Suzanne summarizes her entire manuscript saying “je m'étais montrée à chaque ligne aussi malheureuse à la vérité que je l'étais (“I had shown myself in every line as unhappy as I was”).  Given such a simple and unchanging protagonist, Diderot might have concentrated on description (of which there is very little) or style (generally straightforward) or on theme.

     Diderot’s view of the Roman Catholic Church and, indeed, of Christianity might suggest that last alternative.  The fact is that prior to fictional treatments of the topic of convent life often had very little to do with the spiritual growth for which religious houses were created.  A good deal of the genre is rather overheated.  Often the nunnery was represented as an impediment to lovers, as in the Abbé Prévost’s Manon Lescaut, or the Lettres portugaises of the Vicomte de Guilleragues.  Risqué tales also proliferated concerning this female world forbidden to men’s eyes, including Vénus dans le cloître, attributed to Jean Barrin and Le Portier des Chartreux attributed to Gervais de La Touche. 

     In La Réligieuse Diderot does not attack the church as a whole despite his hostility to Roman Catholicism.  Suzanne is a devoted believer who has no specific objection to the prayers and rituals she is expected to perform.  Her only protest, and presumably her author’s, is against the forced imposition of religious vows.  The depictions of one viciously sadistic Mother Superior and another, consumed by predatory homosexual desire (and unstable to boot) are balanced by the first, a generous-hearted mystic who seems really to belong in a convent.    

     Forced vocations were a reality; indeed, Diderot’s sister had died at twenty-eight in an Ursuline convent in which she had been placed due to her mental health, and the author had himself been confined in a Carmelite monastery at the age of thirty at the orders of his own father who wished to prevent his son’s marriage to Anne-Antoinette Champion.  The cloister walls held him scarcely a month, but the experience may well have provided him with memories that sharpen his account of Suzanne’s suffering. 

     However, neither that slender theme and nor the generous helpings of pathos, highly seasoned as it is with sex and violence, provides the book’s principal interest.  In recent years the text has gained increasing recognition for its conceptual and metafictional elements, what might be called a sort of proto-postmodernism (if the term is not too barbarous). [2]

     Even a simplified outline of the levels of fabulation in La Réligieuse can be dizzying.  The events of the plot are discernible only through multiple layers of refraction, distortion, irony, and deceit.  The text is presented, as were many early novels, as factual, a genuine series of letters, documents of lived experience, though from the start the fact of their publication throws that appearance in doubt.  Still, the narrator is, as she often reminds the reader, a perfect ingenue who says she writes “sans talent et sans art, avec la naïveté d'un enfant de mon âge et la franchise de mon caractère” (“without talent and without art, with the naivety of a girl of my age and with the frankness of my character”).  Her unworldliness is only perhaps too perfect, as she strains credulity when she cannot recognize lesbian love-making though it seems that both she and the Mother Superior reach orgasm.  

     Furthermore, this modesty topos is a highly conventional formula, recognized for millennia by rhetoricians.  Since Suzanne’s pleas are meant to be persuasive, to move the heart of her correspondent, and win his aid, they are appropriately rhetorical, though the use of such familiar devices may cast a wash of uncertainty over the story’s veracity. 

     The tension between reality and representation that inevitably accompanies fiction is, in the case of La Réligieuse, dramatically heightened by the peculiar circumstances of the book’s creation.  Suzanne’s heart-felt appeals are directed to the Marquis de Croisemare, a real person and a friend of Diderot’s.  Thus the “novel” breaks out of the page and into lived experience.  The letters were originally composed as part of an elaborate hoax to bring the Marquis to Paris, since he had several years before sought to intervene in the case of a certain Marguerite Delamarre who had been involuntarily confined in a convent.  The plan failed -- though the Marquis was taken in and responded with sympathy and offers of help, he asked his correspondent to his estate instead of coming to Paris. 

     Diderot continued to work on the letters over the next ten years.  In 1770 Friedrich Melchior, Baron von Grimm, included the book in his handwritten journal Correspondance littéraire, a periodical of tiny but influential circulation, along with the Marquis’ actual replies.  Diderot continued to work on the manuscript, modifying it as well as adding a “Préface-annexe” explaining the circumstances of its composition and altering some passages by Grimm and the Marquis.  (This “preface” was printed at the end of the text, a detail that puts the reader just a bit more off balance.)

     Finally, in 1796 the book was published in a generally available edition which proved so popular that it ran through fourteen printings by the turn of the nineteenth century.  By this time the Revolution had first outlawed lifelong religious vows and then attempted to suppress the church altogether.  La Réligieuse was associated in this revolutionary period not only with unorthodox religious views, but also with pioneering avant-garde artistic technique.  Diderot’s interest in interrogating the ideal of mimesis is evident in the very title of his story “Ceci n’est pas un conte” (“This is not a Story”).

     The book’s most radical characteristics points toward such new directions as performance art, metafiction, and collaborative composition.  The circumstances of its creation and its resulting form question the very bases of mimetic fiction, rendering the subject unstable and ambiguous and in that way La Réligieuse anticipates late twentieth-century trends at a time when much of European culture had not even yet engaged with realism. 

 

 

 

1.  The phrase is in fact used by Richardson in The History of Sir Charles Grandison but such threatened and oppressed women regularly appear in his other novels as well, as well as in the Gothic novels of the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

2.  Consideration of Diderot, often centering on Jacques le fataliste et son maître or on “Ceci n’est pas un conte” occurs regularly in discussions of metafiction.  See, for example, Gamal Abdel-Fattah, Postmodern Literature and its Background, Marie-Laure Ryan, “Postmodernism and the Doctrine of Panfictionality,” Narrative, Vol. 5, No. 2 (May, 1997), Malin Strømberg, What Makes Fiction “Meta”? A comparative study of literary self-reflexivity from Sterne to Winterson, and Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narrative: The Metafictional Paradox.  Diderot’s metafictional role is also reflected in his appearance in Malcolm Bradbury’s To the Hermitage. 

The Primacy of Poetry in Sidney’s Defence

     The crisis in the prestige of poetry that occasioned Sir Philip Sidney’s The Defence of Poesie [1] is far more evident in contemporary society, Timely though his theme may be, his concept of poetry is an obstacle for modern readers’ sympathetic reception of his essay. To him a part of the grandeur of poetry is that the word may be stretched to embrace all work of imagination. His emphasis on art’s role in fostering morality, quite out-of-place for many modern readers, further raises the barrier. Though the author adopted the pose, fashionable in his day, of pitying “the evill luck” that might bring a reader “to read this inck-wasting toy of mine,” his essay contains an original and persuasive theory of verbal art featuring a sophisticated understanding of mimesis that goes beyond the ideas inherited from Plato and Aristotle to anticipate elements of semiotic theory.
     Sidney’s essay opens with a lament for the decline in poetry’s position. “Poetrie,” he complains “from almost the highest estimation of learning, is falne to be the laughing stocke of children.” Today poetry is generally ignored. Sidney’s own practice indicates that in his day, poetry retained sufficient cachet to be a required skill for courtiers, whereas today poetry has fallen further yet to the extent that competence in the art, even as a consumer and even among the educated, is rare today. [2] A poet-politician would in modern American society be a freak.
     Sidney describes accurately the paramount position of poetry in traditional societies. For him the ancient Greeks provide the most convincing evidence. He says that they considered poetry “above all names of learning.” In part this prestige is associated with the idea of poetic inspiration and poets’ “prophetic” role, but it also assumes an obsolete broad definition of poetry. To Sidney and to the ancients, poetry could mean all imaginative intellectual work, including not only prose works and philosophy but science as well. From poetry, he says, “other learnings have taken their beginnings.” Thus for him, not only is Homer a poet, so are Heliodorus the author of a prose romance, Herodotus the historian, and Manilius the astronomer.
     Sidney, however, distinguishes poetry from other forms of knowledge which have external objects, claiming that poetry is “directed to the highest end of the mistress-knowledge, by the Greeks called archetektonikē.” For Aristotle the coordinating “master art” is politics, because it orders the affairs of humans with artful design setting out social organization and ethical imperatives with the aim of the good of all. [3] Sidney, however, names the poet as “moderator” of “the school of learning.”
     Thus poetry holds the executive function overseeing all sorts of learning of which “the finall end is, to lead and draw us to as high a perfection, as our degenerate soules made worse by their clay-lodgings, can be capable of.” To Sidney both producing and consuming intellectual and artistic work make a person at once more human and more divine, more excellent in general, and certainly more moral.
     An authoritative reference work quotes Northrup Frye’s devastating judgement on literature’s ethical value. “Any attempt to align [art] with morality, otherwise called bowdlerizing, is intolerably vulgar” [4] though the same source calls the relevance of ethics to literary criticism the issue “with the most sustained written tradition” in all of literary history. [5] Sidney would have thought he was expressing a simple and generally accepted commonplace when he defined poetry by moral parameters, saying “that faining notable images of vertues, vices, or what els, with that delightfull teaching, which must be the right describing note to know a Poet by.”
     Indeed, the encouragement of morality can sound like the principal role of art.


“For these indeed do meerly make to imitate, and imitate both to delight & teach, and delight to move men to take that goodnesse in hand, which without delight they would flie as from a stranger; and teach to make them know that goodnesse whereunto they are moved: which being the noblest scope to which ever any learning was directed, yet want there not idle tongues to bark at them.”


     The proposition that literature fosters good behavior is not only uncongenial to modern critical thinking in theory; it is hardly supported by the irregular reputations of not a few poets or the simmering gossip in certain university English departments. [6]
     Sidney’s lofty principles were in part partisan, of course. He was writing in reply to Stephen Gosson's The Schoole of Abuse. Yet he seems to undercut his own claims about poetry’s ennobling effects with the opening in which he cites Pugliano‘s verbal praise of horsemanship as his model. [7] This inspiration may seem to trivialize poetry, reducing it to the status of a long list of other courtly accomplishments, but such a judgement is anachronistically anti-feudal. While the association seems to moderns to put poetry on a par with ruffled collars and the like, to Sidney (under the tutelage of Castiglione) the aristocrat sought to exemplify genuine excellence in every way. Just as a Victorian author implies a socio-aesthetic standard in calling ethical behavior “gentlemanly,” or, more simply, “manly,” to an Elizabethan high birth was associated with high-mindedness.
     Poetry is not, however, for Sidney purely didactic, a “medicine of cherries” in his phrase. Ironically, in part due to his being borne aloft by his Renaissance neo-Platonism, Sidney overcame the reductive identification of art with imitation that led Plato to belittle poetry as “an imitation of an imitation.” Declaring “Now for the poet, he nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth,” Sidney discards any simple notion of mimesis, suggesting a more sophisticated semiosis, a refracted reality centered in the poet’s imagination which is, in fact, distinct from the world itself though always linked to it.
     In this way he finds Xenophon’s literary picture of Cyrus, a historical figure, while not “wholly imaginative” to be “another nature,” an original creation resembling divine creation. Deviations from perceived reality are no deficiency but rather poetry’s particular glory. Because of such non-imitative elements, the artist’s work is enabled to be “either better then nature bringeth foorth, or quite a new, formes such as never were in nature.” Escaping “the narrow warrant of her [Nature’s] gifts,” the poet is capable of “freely raunging within the Zodiack of his owne wit.”
     For Sidney, though, this increase in verbal power comes not from the generalizing of all Cyruses into a Platonic form of Cyrus, but in particularity of the artist’s design. “Let but Sophocles bring you Ajax on a stage, killing and whipping sheep and oxen, thinking them the army of Greeks, with their chieftains Agamemnon and Menelaus, and tell me if you have not a more familiar insight into anger, than finding in the schoolmen his genus and difference.”
     While not contradicting the mimetic principle he inherited, Sidney is careful to expand it for his own analysis. “Poesie therefore, is an Art of Imitation: for so Aristotle termeth it in the word mimesis, that is to say, a representing, counterfeiting, or figuring forth to speake Metaphorically.” Immediately after affirming his authority, he introduces new terms that suggest his view of poetry conceived in the poet’s imagination. A “re-presentation” goes beyond a “presentation,” a “counterfeit” is etymologically, something made “in opposition” to a model, and, most significantly, “to speake Metaphorically” is quite different from speaking literally. This non-imitative shift moves the poet’s image from realism to something greater. For Sidney, poetry is man’s distinctive capacity, the activity in which he displays his divinity more than in any other.
     The value of metaphor is that it can offer rich and precise objective correlatives for experiences, conveying them with far more information than other forms of discourse. One way in which poetry is distinguished from other forms of discourse is by its affective component. Poets are “Fathers in learning” generally, but they are alone in possessing “hart-ravishing knowledge.” While non-aesthetic texts usually allow scant expression of emotion, poetry often foregrounds feelings, and to Sidney, “moving is of a higher degree than teaching.”
     Sidney rejoins Aristotle in asserting poetry’s privilege over history, imagination over facts, metaphorical meaning over literal. The potential of poetry arises in the first place from the ability of the author to construct a work that reflects, not the appearance of things, but their meaning, their significance, including the associated emotions. This total picture untethered to observed facts corresponds to the true greater reality of human experience which includes not only subtle shades of insight that might escape the gross terms of literalism, but also allows the inclusion of self-reflection, ambivalence, contradiction, tension, and mystery as well as that unique variety of pleasure called beauty.




1. So-called in Posonby’s authorized first edition (1595). It had been titled An Apologie for Poetrie in Olney’s earlier printing. While I shall use the title Sidney apparently preferred, I recognize the advantage of Olney’s title because of its distinction from Shelley’s equally celebrated A Defence of Poetry.

2. Even in academic departments the study of relatively recent fiction has, to a unprecedented extent, displaced poetry.

3. Nicomachean Ethics I.2.

4. Frye was, of course, a devout Christian. Note how even his denunciation of morality’s claims on art is cast in aesthetic terms. The comment occurs in Fearful Symmetry, p. 121 in the Collected Works edition.

5. “Ethics and Criticism” in The New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics.

6. It is likely true that literary critics and scholars are more righteous in that they are inclined to the left politically, but this is not likely due to their specific training, but rather is characteristic of all educated people.

7. Sidney’s Defence is itself cast in the most classical form of an oration. A detailed description of his debt to Quintilian and Cicero appeared in Kenneth O. Myrick’s Sir Philip Sidney as a Literary Craftsman. A more recent study is John Webster’s “Oration and Method in Sidney's ‘Apology’: A Contemporary's Account,” Modern Philology 79.1 (Aug., 1981), 1-15.

Coleridge’s Dialectic of Art

Unattributed quotations are from Coleridge’s essay “On Poesy or Art.”


     Art has been variously conceived as entirely self-justifying, as a tool for the cultivation of a more refined sensibility, as a source of specific truths leading to greater insight or ethical standards, and as pure pleasure, either through the contemplation of aesthetic forms or through the experience of emotion. Coleridge in his essay “On Poesy or Art” proposes several of these possibilities, but then proceeds to outline a dialectic view of art’s potential that goes beyond art for art’s sake, delight, and instruction, which aims in fact at nothing less than enlightenment. [1] His theory, while striking, is muddled, in particular by the intrusion of religious doctrines suggested not by his topic but by the norms of his day.
     Coleridge uses the term “poesy” to refer to all the arts, not just verse or literature. Without considering the complicating cases of music or the abstract elements of plastic art, he accepts, though only as a starting point, the traditional definition of art as imitation. For him no simple imitation, regardless of how perfect it might be, could suffice for art. In fact he concludes that the failures of imitation are in a sense more significant than its successes.
     A pure mimesis in Coleridge’s terminology, adapted most directly from Spinoza, [2] would be natura naturata, “nature natured,” the creation considered as a passive finished product. He contrasts this inferior product to true art, natura naturans, “nature naturing.” This expression well summarizes Coleridge’s view of the role of art, but his usage allows no simple paraphrase.
     Art for him “is the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man” since it “humanizes” nature “infusing the thoughts and passions of man into everything.” “It avails itself of the forms of nature to recall, to express, and to modify the thoughts and feelings of the mind.” What is added, then, to nature itself is the maker’s affect and inferences so that the art object registers not the external in itself, but always refracted through the consciousness of the poet or painter. As “Frost at Midnight” makes clear, nature is for Coleridge altogether passive in this communion with the individual. [3]
     Yet the artist does not merely represent the data of the world as lived experience, inspirited by human desire and intuition. The chaos of sense data is ordered to be beautiful and, as the cosmos becomes more patterned, significant, and intelligible, beauty, value, truth, and meaning arise. “While it recalls the sights and sounds that had accompanied the occasions of the original passions, poetry impregnates them with an interest not their own by means of the passions, and yet tempers the passion by the calming power which all distinct images exert on the human soul.”
     The relation was sufficiently distinctive for Coleridge to generate the neologism eisemplasy (or esemplasy) and to revive the rare coadunation. [4] Throughout the essay the point is repeated in various forms. Art “is the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man.” “In every work of art there is a reconcilement of the external with the internal.” “This unity in multeity I have elsewhere stated as the principle of beauty.” “The mystery of genius in the fine arts” is “to make the external internal, the internal external, to make nature thought, and thought nature.”
     Since the two individuals, the creator and the consumer of art actively seek to make sense of the phenomenological world, while they employ images recorded by their perception, which provide the raw material and the occasion for their, still their conclusions are their own. Preferring a divine origin for his impressions, Wordsworth had maintained in “Intimations of Immortality” following older Platonic and neo-Platonic writers, that one’s highest wisdom, one’s connection to the cosmos, is originally inborn. Coleridge maintains the same access to a prenatal Truth for his own insights. “I seem rather to be seeking, as it were, asking, a symbolical language for something within me, that already and forever exists, than observing anything new.” [5] The use of the word “asking” reveals the author’s awareness that this inborn wisdom of surpassing importance is based on his desire rather than any evidence.
     That “something within” is neither more nor less than the mystical correspondence, amounting almost to identity, between inner and outer, idem et alter, psyche and world, mortal and divine. Pursuit of that goal requires that the passions, rather than being suppressed, be cultivated. Only through the individual consciousness can the greater be accessed. Rather than striving to reproduce a second-rate reality (as Plato had it) the artist in fact delineates the gap or difference between what one might very nearly call the atman and the Atman. Paradoxically, according to Coleridge’s schema, it is by spotlighting the very limitations of humanity’s perceptive organs and the insufficiency of the mind as it tries to grasp the nut of reality that the individual may solve the dilemma of dualities and mend the divided consciousness.
     The element of order may be clear in the aesthetic object, while the events of everyday life may seem to proceed chaotically or randomly. Art makes the order of the cosmos perceptible. “Hence nature itself would give us the impression of a work of art, if we could see the thought which is present at once in the whole and in every part; and a work of art will be just in proportion as it adequately conveys the thought, and rich in proportion to the variety of parts which it holds in unity.” [6]
     Art operates, then, through difference and dialectic, playing what is seen without against what is felt within. “Philosophically we understand that in all imitation two elements must coexist, and not only coexist, but must be perceived as coexisting. These two constituent elements are likeness and unlikeness, or sameness and difference, and in all genuine creations of art there must be a union of these disparates.” This relation is inevitable since, when Coleridge says, “the primary art is writing,” he does not mean to privilege verbal art over others. What he means by “writing” is sign-making. Coleridge recognizes the gap between signifier and signified that is present in all representations of reality, though it is obvious in the difference between inked words on a paper page representing certain sounds and the objects to which these symbols correspond.
      The novelty of Coleridge’s rhetoric lies in his insistence on denying strict mimesis. “Art would or should be the abridgment of nature. Now the fullness of nature is without character, as water is purest when without taste, smell, or color; but this is the highest, the apex only—it is not the whole. The object of art is to give the whole ad hominem; hence each step of nature hath its ideal, and hence the possibility of a climax up to the perfect form of a harmonized chaos.” For him the highest revelation would be clear as water or air, empty as a void. By including human desire one muddies but thereby enriches the water, churning up ideas images, attitudes, fears, and hopes that would resolve into nothingness from the eternal viewpoint.
     Coleridge belies the pellucid nature of Reality which he correctly notes must lack all attributes through his prejudice in favor of a moral order. Art he claims not only resolves the multifarious elements of the observed world into a single coherent system, it also “stamps them into unity in the mould of a moral idea.” The skeptic might wonder from whence arose this morality, but for Coleridge “the fundamental principle of all this is undoubtedly the horror of falsehood and the love of truth inherent in the human breast.” For him the contemplation of beauty involves the processing of “images, totalized and fitted to the limits of the human mind, [so] as to elicit from, and to superinduce upon, the forms themselves the moral reflections to which they approximate.”
     The idea that the moral sense is entangled with the idea of beauty is, like Coleridge’s Christianity as a whole, a matter of faith. (Within the churches, this is, of course an orthodox position.) For him, “to the idea of life victory or strife is necessary; as virtue consists not simply in the absence of vices, but in the overcoming of them. So it is in beauty.” The moral element is not, however, in reality essential to every case of the dialectic of art. Just as life is struggle, drama requires conflict, and we become ourselves through work and struggle, learning through suffering, art, too is generated in conflict but morality may or may not play a role.
     At times Coleridge defines the tension required for art in a formal, structural way that seems quite independent of ethics. “The sight of what is subordinated and conquered heightens the strength and the pleasure; and this should be exhibited by the artist either inclusively in his figure, or else out of it, and beside it to act by way of supplement and contrast.”
     Apart from the miraculous appearance of morality in the soul and the art, Coleridge’s theory is limited by its reductiveness. There may be countless ways for the work to imply the sort of denial of duality that for Coleridge constitutes a window into profundity, but the result is always much the same. While this may be quite true, it views all great art as essentially similar and all themes as one. Particularities of form or image may play a role in this omnipresent idea, but their specific implications are lost in taking the grandest view, which, though it may not be wrong, necessarily ignores all the others.
     Coleridge was motivated by his sense of mortality, poignantly suggested by the dramatically eloquent closing passage on the unavoidable physical decline of the individual. “And with a view to this, remark the seeming identity of body and mind in infants, and thence the loveliness of the former; the commencing separation in boyhood, and the struggle of equilibrium in youth: thence onward the body is first simply indifferent; then demanding the translucency of the mind not to be worse than indifferent; and finally all that presents the body as body becoming almost of an excremental nature.“ The use of the word “excremental,” when speaking of the flesh, sounds almost monk-like.
     He devised an escape route from this inevitable decay of the flesh in the pursuit of beauty. The faith that art can vault the spirit into the empyrean provided an alternative to nihilism that bolstered Coleridge’s troubled Christianity. Yet he sought to root this doctrine in Plato rather than Christ. “The life which is in us is in them likewise; and that to know is to resemble, when we speak of objects out of ourselves, even as within ourselves to learn is, according to Plato, only to recollect.”
     A personal god is necessary if one is to see intelligence and intentionality in nature as he did. Man’s creativity and god’s are much the same for him. “The wisdom in nature is distinguished from that in man by the co-instantaneity of the plan and the execution.” God is equally required for his belief in some sort of inborn conscience. Though he roamed about the heights of German philosophy and flirted with atheism before conducting an affair with Unitarianism, he settled down with a sort of liberal Anglicanism. He often preferred to sound Platonic as in this passage. “What is beauty? It is, in the abstract, the unity of the manifold, the coalescence of the diverse; in the concrete, it is the union of the shapely (formosum) with the vital.” Never quite comfortable with conventional religion, yet unable to do without it, Christianity often appears as here as an implicit subtext.
     Coleridge’s essay claims that the knowledge one gains from art is not dependent on the specific data used in a picture or poem, or even in the new perspective that understanding another’s vision can bring. For him the principal value of the beautiful is that it can resolve contradictions and thus bring a person to enlightenment through realizing the identity of inward and outward, divine and human. He means something very close to the Vedantic “Tat tvam asi” though the concept exists in a number of traditions. This is the bold portion of his thesis. These provocative speculations on art’s power to effect a dramatic alteration of consciousness are weakened by his wish to cling to an anthropomorphic deity who like an artist designed the universe and instilled in humanity a conscience. Through his own polemics with himself, through the contradictions he felt in his own life and thought, through mental wandering, he proposed an aesthetic that can enrich our own semi-blinded blundering in the direction of what seems to be truth.






1. The influence of German philosophy on these thoughts has been, it seems, more studied than the thoughts themselves. My intention here is to consider only Coleridge’s assertions, ignoring sources and influences, though Schelling’s lectures on The Philosophy of Art before and certain recent strains of postmodernism after are clearly related.

2. The expression was originally used by the medieval Scholastics. For Spinoza nature is substantially equivalent to god (Deus sive Natura). See Ethic, Proposition 29, scholium to Part I.

3. Even in the first published text, Coleridge calls the idea that nature is actively “giving” its sympathy to the individual an “idle thought.” In his later revision he is more insistent yet that “the idling Spirit” seeking “an echo or a mirror” of itself is making “a toy of Thought.”

4. The first was his own coining, the second, though rare, is recorded by the OED since 1558. Esemplasy was a translation of Schelling’s own neologism “Ineinsbildung.”

5. Notebooks ii.2546

6. This quantitative stress at the end, which makes the artist sound like a juggler trying to keep a large number of objects in the air at once, is misplaced.

A Note on Dryden and "Dramatick Poesy"

     One of the most significant attempts to pursue literary theory between Sidney and Peacock, Dryden’s Essay of Dramatick Poesy provides a thoughtful, if not systematic, account of neo-classical ideas. The frame of Dryden’s dialogue describes the party of four discussing literature while on a pleasure excursion as the British battle the Dutch at the mouth of the Thames. This dramatic situation not only emphasizes the provisional character of the “essay” form emphasizing relativism, dynamic truth, and a social nexus; it also introduces the patriotic motif that will be significant to Neander’s value judgments.
     Dryden’s fundamental error is his acceptance from his classical antecedents of the notion that art is imitation. He links his literary values to this unconvincing basic concept. Now even in common sense terms there would be little point in seeking to imitate a reality which is itself fully manifest always. Were art mimesis alone, it would never have taken such a central role in human culture. Plato would have been quite right in maintaining that art could only be second-rate were the imitation of lived reality its goal. He might have thought, though, that just as his form or idea of a chair or of love is related to, but not identical with, the chair in my living room, a chair or an affection represented in art will be similarly different from their kin in lived experience, though art’s image is richer in information. Whereas Plato’s “ideas” are simply generalizations, though weighted in the end with the burden of ultimate reality, art’s images suggest at once an individual object and the sum of its occurrences in the reader’s experience, as well as a host of implied, allusive, and symbolic associations.
     The representation of art not as imitation (a mirror in Abrams’ terms) but as creation (a lamp) is a Romantic one. As most of our assumptions remain Romantic today, Dryden’s ideas will find little sympathy from the modern reader. The very idea of “decorum,” which he assumes, has hardly survived into our time in which attempts to violate decorum are part of the stock in trade of the off-Broadway theater. As he finds the French style, so admired by Lisideius, “icy” with the beauty of a “statue” not a play (as though a statue could not be moving), we suspect that Dryden may have the same intuitive reactions as we, though he is bound to express them in terms acceptable to his theory. This assumption is strengthened by Dryden’s insightful analysis of The Silent Woman and his preference for Shakespeare over the more academic Jonson in contrast to many of his generation.
     Yet he then uses this same measure of faithfulness to nature and realism to justify what seem to us moderns as assertively artificial conventions. The notion of the “unities” figures prominently in the discussion, though the author is aware that its strict observance is based neither on Classical precept nor example. Indeed, he finds the French playwrights often violating the rules. What will strike the contemporary reader as odd is that to Dryden, the unities are good because they enhance verisimilitude: one place need not change into another, nor need time be manipulated. The very conventions that would seem to signal a highly conventionalized, unrealistic style are for him the opposite. Now, of course, no one could mistake the doings of actors on a stage for anything other than “fictional,” and the same is true a fortiori for words on a page. Neither competes with lived experience. The observer evaluates each in entirely different terms. When plays or poems are composed according to rule or convention, the first bit of information the consumer receives from the rule is in fact the work’s artificiality, its fictional character.
     Lisideius’ definition of drama, later adopted in shorter form by Neander is “a just and lively Image of Humane Nature, representing its Passions and Humours, and the Changes of Fortune to which it is subject; for the Delight and Instruction of Mankind.” Yet Dryden knows no likelier source for pleasure than plausibility, as though we do not also find entertainment in the unexpected, the wholly fantastic, in formal patterns and a host of other sources. While discussing the propriety of fights and “tumult” on stage, Neander sensibly comments that, if he can accept that the figures before him are kings and princes, he can equally accept that they strike blows in earnest, not to mention the supernatural pagan deities in Corneille. Where, then, is the boundary of the suspension of disbelief?
     Just as there is an inevitable relation but no direct correspondence between the literary description and the thing described, there can be no point before unintelligibility at which the gap between the two is too large.
     Dryden does no better with the other Horatian end of poetry: instruction. In his reductive view, this involves setting out the morally, perhaps in the end religiously, proper behavior for the benefit of the reader. His faith in the standard of imitation blinds him to any notion of art’s unique ability to investigate contradictions, ambiguities, ambivalences, and the unknown.
     Yet, in spite of our dissent from his conclusions, he has in this dialogue created a memorable scene in which the cultivated idlers toss ideas between them on a lazy afternoon, leaving sea battles to others, however satisfying one’s own nation’s victory may be. What better use for the human consciousness? And surely Britain’s rule on the waters must have seemed to reinforce the claims of her poets. One may regret the erosion of ancient authority whose decline has been more rapid than that of the British Navy in the years since Dryden, but perhaps critics have approached a bit closer to the grand and chryselephantine image of the muse herself in the sancta sanctorum of the reader’s mind.