Week 04.1, Carlyle, Mill, Ruskin, Arnold, Pater

General Notes on Thomas Carlyle’s Sartor Resartus

Carlyle, who often serves as a survey course’s bridge between the romantic and Victorian periods, is a difficult writer, but his insights into literature, history, and politics make his eccentric books worth considerable patience. His style is designed to forge a relationship with an increasing, and increasingly skeptical, post-romantic-era public that is not easily satisfied by time-tested formulations about anything. But Carlyle himself was a complex man who wouldn’t fit comfortably in any era—for one thing, he was raised as a strict Calvinist and kept something of the Old Testament prophet about him even after rejecting the metaphysical tenets of this austere faith. Moreover, born in the same year as John Keats, he was by nature a moody and “romantic” individual, which means that he found it necessary in arriving at his mature prose style and authorial stance to work through his own “storm and stress” tendencies before he could find out what lay on the far side of them. It seems he had to pass through Byron to arrive at the calm classicist humanism of his hero Goethe. (But Goethe, author of The Sorrows of Young Werther, had to do something like that, too.) His German Idealist Professor Teufelsdröckh is not Carlyle, of course, but at the same time, Sartor Resartus is part of Carlyle’s 1830’s project of working out a new and viable way to set himself forth as a writer and social critic. Carlyle is characteristically, if explosively, “Victorian” in his admission that art must re-establish its value anew in modern society—and, most particularly, that it cannot do so by reverting to a programmatically “romantic” set of claims about art and social cohesion. In sum, Carlyle faces a task not unlike that of the Anglo-American modernists who will write nearly a century after his time: how to take past ideas (literary forms, social philosophies, political ideals, etc.) and “make them new” to suit the present time.

In Sartor Resartus, that is what Carlyle, in creating his fictional Professor Diogenes Teufelsdröckh, is doing with regard to the “romantic” tradition to which Carlyle himself has strong intellectual and emotional ties. He cannot (and probably would not want to) play the romantic philosopher in his own person. “Dr. T” is Carlyle’s eccentric spokesman for the Idealism of the Continent and, to some extent, for the recent and increasingly defunct British Romantic movement. As you can see from reading Jane Austen’s Persuasion, Scott and Byron (along with the Lake Poets Wordsworth and Coleridge) had already come to be regarded as a “school.” And to belong to a school, of course, is to become subject to the inevitable sway of fashion and changed circumstances. Carlyle’s ironic but nonetheless respectful presentation of Dr. Teufelsdröckh’s romantic notions about self and society, then, amount to the author’s way of keeping the best in that tradition open for English consideration while admitting that he, as a modern writer, cannot return to the nineteenth century’s first few decades.

What does Carlyle think is worth preserving about the romantic tradition of thought? Well, he is not a precise philosopher like Kant or Hegel; I think it will do here to say that he finds a couple of things worth maintaining: first, the sense that what binds people together is not so much intellect as passion. But perhaps even more important to Carlyle is that romanticism, in its way religion-like, asserts the primacy of spirit over materiality and brute fact. I don’t suppose Carlyle ever truly reconciled the Weimar or “Goethean” humanist promoter of self-cultivation in himself with what has sometimes been called the “prophet of self-annihilation” and, later in life, the “worshiper of force.” But perhaps that is asking too much of him—he is most consistent in fighting by any and all means the advent of a fully materialist, and materialistic, culture in the British Isles. And Carlyle’s “romanticism,’ as he makes Teufelsdröckh illustrate dramatically in Sartor Resartus, was a necessary phase through which he had to pass if he was ever to establish an authentic new voice for his contemporaries. Romantic poses and premises were an essential part of his makeup as a writer and as a social critic.

With the phrase “social critic,” we move on to Carlyle’s mature social philosophy and stance as an historian as they appear in the 1843 text Past and Present. Writing during the Hungry 40’s, when economic instability and discontent were a powerful and threatening combination in Britain, Carlyle decries the alienation capitalism has created amongst workers and employers and, in fact, everyone in Great Britain . In an analysis of labor relations that Marx and Engels would later praise, Carlyle argues that while labor should knit humans together into a social whole, work in industrial Britain is wage-slavery, and the ideology that supports it has the people “enchanted” by its abstract and mechanical conception of human nature and society. The factory hands perform their daily labor for the capitalist, but at day’s end, they have little to show for it in either pecuniary or spiritual terms. The products of the worker’s labor (called “commodities”) enrich the capitalist at the expense of any fair distribution of what has been produced.

This state of affairs, says Carlyle, is even worse than the situation in Europe during medieval times. Back then, at least, the relationship between peasant farmers, their landowning Lords, and the Church, however oppressive and hierarchy-bound, was at least an authentic relationship. That accounts for Carlyle’s praise of feudal society—notice his references to Gurth the Swineherd and his master Cedric the Saxon (characters from Walter Scott’s Ivanhoe), who is himself an underling to the Norman Conquerors. Feudal labor relations, the idea goes, provided both lord and serf with a reciprocal sense of duty toward one another and with some sense of belonging to a stable world order. But in nineteenth-century Britain , no such responsible relationship between the classes prevails, and nothing makes a dent in the Iron Law of the Marketplace. Everywhere, Carlyle explains, one hears only the sentence, “impossible” in answer to the cries of impoverished workers, the unemployed, and those people’s dependents. The false god of riches Mammon, aided by idle aristocrats (“Game-Preserving Dukes”), greedy factory owners, machine-like workers with their demands for the cash that enslaves them, and political economy’s cant about “free trade” and “laissez-faire,” stops cold every attempt to end Britain ’s chaos.

In our chapters, “Democracy” and “Captains of Industry,” Carlyle tries to redefine what is meant by key concepts such as “freedom” and “aristocracy,” in effect recycling them so that they will turn into solutions and not perpetuate the agony of the masses as well as the rule of the ne’er-do-wells. I call Carlyle a recycler of outworn concepts and systems because it seems that his advice isn’t to do away with the flawed, yet dynamic, capitalist order and return to an earlier time. His agrarian “feudalism” is an ideal construction, not something he sets forth as a viable way of life for the present. Rather, Carlyle wants to retain the basic form of capitalist production and even to hold on to the hierarchical relationship between the working and capital-owning classes. If all goes according to plan, there will be no need for another French Revolution—the big industrialists, properly spiritualized by the remnants of Carlyle’s Calvinist belief in the saving power of order, work, and duty, will become “Captains of Industry” and take control of a threatening situation. They will become the new Norman Lords. What the workers need, thinks Carlyle, is not the vulgar, anarchic democracy for which they presently clamor; it is work under the supervision of the newly responsible employer-class. Freshly recycled and spiritualized capitalists will take on the duties of a true aristocracy. Like the original conquerors who came over with William of Normandy in 1066, they will set to work with the materials at hand and build a stable order. They will organize (not reject) production and distribution in the machine age for the benefit of workers and themselves. In sum, they will lead Britain as no other class presently in it can, and thereby provide an answer to the ‘sphinx riddle” of just relations between human beings. That is Carlyle’s answer to what we generally call the Condition of England Question.

Finally, it might be argued with justice (and was so argued by Marx and Engels) that this solution requires the great capitalists to do something that isn’t in their interest: why should they do anything but what fills their coffers with more capital to invest? In sum, it might be said that what Carlyle advocates goes against the operation of a market economy, wherein employers takes on workers for as little as they can pay them, and gets them to do as much “surplus labor” as possible to generate capital. The system itself is the most powerful disincentive to change—it benefits those who are already poised to benefit. What Carlyle is arguing against is, quite simply, the brutal fact that a “system” (economic, social, micro or macro) can function robustly for a long time even though the mass of people who make it work don’t benefit from its continuance. And there is nothing within the system itself that tells they winners they should care about this ugly fact—the will towards a moral “fix” has to come from beyond the system, at least initially.

Capitalism isn’t so much immoral as purely economic and amoral. It is entirely capable of solving the ancient problem of production, but when you assail it for not solving the equally ancient problem of distribution, it has nothing to say—that is no concern, properly speaking, of the economic system. Those who have money (congealed, abstract labor power, to borrow from Marx’s terminology) can buy all the things they want; those who have no money can starve unless someone (for religious or other extraneous moral reasons) decides to help them. That is what we call “private charity.” So long as capital keeps getting generated and commodities keep getting themselves produced and sold, the economy rolls along cheerfully—it doesn’t matter much whether one person buys 100 shirts or 100 people buy one shirt; in theory and to some extent in practice, the profits will be there for the taking. Those who are excluded from the magic circle of production, buying, and selling simply don’t count. But of course Carlyle understands that people usually do what is in their own selfish interests—especially when their utilitarian/market “philosophy” proclaims that they ought to do just that very thing. So how do you suppose he would respond to all this criticism of his suggestions? Do you find him anticipating such criticism in the chapters we may have read from Past and Present?

Page-by-Page Notes on Sartor Resartus

“The Everlasting No”

1006. “Have we not seen him disappointed…?” Such references point to the storm and stress movement in German literature, and in particular to Goethe’s book the sorrows of young Werther.immediately below, the author refers to Teufelsdröckh’s loss of faith, and then Deism comes in for criticism.

1007. “Foolish Word-monger….” Materialism and logic churn out false belief and offer false happiness. Carlyle and Teufelsdröckh oppose Jeremy Bentham’s radical utilitarian movement. Towards the bottom of the page, the narrator says that even doubt leads to God.

1008. “His heaven-written Law still stood legible and sacred there.” Quack muttering from a quack prophet—this will be a consistent theme. “Our Works are the mirror wherein the spirit first sees its natural lineaments.” Know what you can work at, says Teufelsdröckh. Work is of course a key concept in Continental philosophy, especially in Hegel and Marx. Perhaps Carlyle would agree with Oscar Wilde at least in saying that only shallow people know themselves, although Oscar Wilde would never posit work as the answer to this problem. “A feeble unit in the middle of the threatening Infinitude, I seemed to have nothing given me but eyes, whereby to discern my own wretchedness.” Teufelsdröckh is spinning his wheels on speculation not directed towards any object. He is an alienated intellectual. The steam engine universe threatens to run him down.

1009. “To me the Universe was all void of Life… it was one huge, dead, immeasurable Steam-engine, rolling on, in its dead indifference, to grind me limb from limb.” This is a key passage. Materialism and logic lead to atheism, and Teufelsdröckh wrestles with spirituality and the meaning of spiritual language. He dramatizes the problem of materialism for us, providing distance from the raw emotion of his encounter with it somewhat as Wordsworth distances us from raw emotion by means of metrical verse. As for Carlyle’s style generally, he puts us in absurd situations, confronting us with the ugliness and cynicism wrought by unbelief and by the need to survive and render intelligible new environments.

1010. Teufelsdröckh is said to confront freedom and the casting out of Byron-Devils. Notice the mockery of Parliament as well. “Despicable biped! What is the sum-total of the worst that lies before thee?” Where does defiance come from? Teufelsdröckh asserts free will to defy death; he takes up a stance against death. “The Everlasting No… pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my Being….” At this point, Teufelsdröckh confronts the threat of unintelligibility and the possibility that he has no true source. He will arrive at his spiritual rebirth by casting out “legion,” to do which requires experience, the great spiritual doctor. And this is where we come to the center of indifference. “For the fire-baptized soul, long so scathed and thunder-riven, here feels its own Freedom….” The doctor needs an object, he needs direction. He must cast away his romantic vagueness and stop reveling in his own isolation and alienation. He must work through, in both senses, this romantic defiance of his. Carlyle acknowledges the need to adopt a romantic pose to go beyond romanticism. The impulse must be redirected. His spiritual labor’s object is the casting out of Byronic devils. They must be made to depart into everlasting fire, as the gospel would say. His feeling of freedom is what he calls a Baphometic fire-baptism. Romanticism will be construed as a movement and a moment in a much larger historical and philosophical context. But at this point standing puzzled between us and Teufelsdröckh and his romantics is the editor, who is just trying to make sense of it all.

“Centre of Indifference”

1011. So Teufelsdröckh will seek experience—he will go to see the visible products of the past. But already the reader is being led to the necessary Mystery that will make life supportable. At the bottom of the page, Teufelsdröckh questions government and laws. But his point here is allied to the doctrine of natural supernaturalism—even such mundane things as governmental practice and legal codification have their source in mystery. The goal is to recover a sense of the eternal in the temporal and ephemeral, to spiritualize ordinary things.

1012. “Books. In which third truly, the last invented, lies a worth far surpassing that of the two others.” Books last and can continue to generate values. They offer us organic ties to the past. They are things woven, and retain the power to produce new thoughts, new suits of idea-clothes. Refer to John Milton’s claim that “a book is a living thing.” Then Teufelsdröckh moves on to discuss the significance of the battlefield, war.

1013-14. War, “from the very carcass of the Killer, [can] bring Life for the Living!” Teufelsdröckh offers a meditation on war and on the folly of passions about it. This page shows the influence of Hamlet’s ideas about the same subject. “Thus can the Professor, at least in lucid intervals, look away from his own sorrows….” At least he can look beyond himself now, can turn his gaze outward.

1015. “All kindreds of peoples and nations dashed together….” Teufelsdröckh wanders through the landscape, and recovers a sense of mystery in historical process by meditating on the revolution. He moves on to discuss the significance of history’s great men, Napoleon in particular. This page also shows the author coming to terms with the great upheaval stylistically.

1015-16. “Of Napoleon himself….” Napoleon is here described as an enthusiast of the very sort he criticizes Teufelsdröckh for being. Next the professor is off to the North Cape where he confronts a Russian smuggler. This passage is important for its style—Carlyle combines the sublime and the ridiculous in his representation of the northern landscape. It is a romantic symbol for regression into self-consciousness, with the ice reflecting itself to itself. But Teufelsdröckh is not allowed to remain in this place for long. The Russian smuggler brings him back to earth again, and in doing so he typifies Carlyle’s method.

1017. “How prospered the inner man of Teufelsdröckh under so much outward shifting?” It is time to cast out legion, or the Satanic school of romanticism. This will bring the professor to the Centre of Indifference. He muses much like Hamlet about humanity’s pretensions. “[W]hat is this paltry little Dog-cage of an Earth….? The professor is still isolated and apathetic; he has merely passed through his objects of exploration. It is time to apply himself directly to an object—labor is central to Carlyle as it was to Hegel and will later be to Marx. We produce ourselves and find freedom and meaning in work.

“The Everlasting Yea”

1017-18. “Temptations in the Wilderness!” And “Our Life is compassed round with Necessity; yet is the meaning of Life no other than Freedom, than Voluntary Force….” These pages prepare the way to the everlasting yea with preliminary definitions and injunctions. Here the injunction is to work in well doing. Once asserted, free will must turn itself towards work. For Carlyle, that seems to be what replaces God. But the basic point is one made by moral conservatives in many ages. Here is what Pope John Paul II said in 1979—”Nowadays it is sometimes held, though wrongly, that freedom is an end in itself, that each human being is free when he makes use of freedom as he wishes, and that this must be our aim in the lives of individuals and societies,” he wrote in 1979. “In reality, freedom is a great gift only when we know how to use it consciously for everything that is our true good.” (Redemptor Hominis, March 4, 1979.)

1018-19. “So that, for Teufelsdröckh also, there has been a ‘glorious revolution’.” The narrator or editor breaks in to end the professor’s over-reaching. Self-annihilation is announced as the first necessary accomplishment. The Professor has now achieved it.

1019-20. The editor says that in Teufelsdröckh, “there is always the strangest Dualism….” That is a good description of Carlyle’s prose style. First the professor responds to nature, and then to his fellow human beings. “Nature!—or what is Nature? Ha! Why do I not name thee God? Art not thou for ‘Living Garment of God’?” Here the editor describes Teufelsdröckh applying the metaphor of clothing to nature. And then comes an important moment: “The Universe is not dead and demoniacal….” This universe is Teufelsdröckh’s source and connection to others. Everyone is a wanderer like him, so he serves as a model.

1021. “Man’s Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness....” Carlyle uses the example of the common shoe black to illustrate the problem of desire: and the problem is that desire is infinite; it is based upon perpetual lack. I like the sentence “Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.”

1021-22. “The Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator.” If you set the denominator to zero, anything will yield infinity. On the same page, the doctor says “Close thy Byron; open thy Goethe.” Do away with excess, and devote yourself to balance and calm. The key to life is not the pursuit of happiness—renunciation is the key. Carlyle dismisses the utilitarian happiness principle. Carlyle insists that there is something “godlike” in humanity—it is not something that the pursuit of happiness will bring out. The Everlasting Yea is “Love not Pleasure; love God.” The point is to walk and work in this kind of love.

1022. What does Dr. Teufelsdröckh need to do? The answer lies in his own statement, “Wilt thou help us to embody the divine Spirit of that Religion in a new Mythus, in a new vehicle and vesture, that our Souls, otherwise too like perishing, may live?” This will be his task as a philosopher and writer. The metaphor of clothing appears in this formulation—words spin new systems of thought and institutions.

1023-24. “ America is here or nowhere.” The ideal resides within yourself. The doctor must produce a world from his own inner chaos. Carlyle reshapes the romantic conception of self so that the point is not infinite removal into isolated, alienated self-consciousness but instead to realize one’s divinity through work of whatever kind. Spirit must inform, give shape to, what the doctor calls the “condition” (by which he means material matter and circumstance). “Been no longer a Chaos, but a World, or even Worldkin. Produce! Produce!” Extra: Carlyle is trying to align or balance the self-cultivating humanist side of himself with the one that is always thundering about the need for work. Carlyle’s gospel of work sounds like promotion of self-annihilation, but a lot of Sartor Resartus is about how his eccentric German Professor develops spiritually and intellectually. He comes to realize that “ America is here or nowhere,” meaning that the Ideal (freedom, self-perfection, progress) is inside our own spirit, and we first need to understand that before we can actualize the ideal. (Romantic premise: spirit must move through matter to realize itself fully; and as Hegel would say, you only realize your individuality fully in the context of society—you can’t do it “all by yourself.”) The Everlasting Yea is to love God rather than pleasure: first put an end to stormy posing (like Byron’s Manfred on the Jungfrau mountaintop, above everything and everyone else, sublimely alone, alienated, dissatisfied), realize that your ideal or “America” is right at home, and then direct your actions to the world so you can actualize your ideal, make it real. So the task is to get priorities straight and plan to make life worth something. Carlyle is a Scottish man of letters making his way into the world of English literature and hoping to make a living. He has to work, too—only as a writer. But write what? And what good will it do? What’s the point of foisting a strange autobiography/biography like Sartor Resartus on thousands of English “blockheads”? This page is capped by a call to order and production—work.

The Seinfeld Quotation in Full: “Whoso belongs only to his own age, and reverences only its gilt Popinjays or soot-smeared Mumbojumbos, must needs die with it: though he have been crowned seven times in the Capitol, or seventy-and-seven times, and Rumour have blown his praises to all the four winds, deafening every ear therewith,—it avails not; there was nothing universal, nothing eternal, in him; he must fade away, even as the Popinjay-gildings and Scarecrow-apparel, which he could not see through. The great man does, in good truth, belong to his own age; nay more so than any other man; being properly the synopsis and epitome of such an age with its interests and influences: but belongs likewise to all ages, otherwise he is not great.” Thomas Carlyle. “Biography” from Critical and Miscellaneous Essays. 91. (Google Books) {George Costanza’s pretentious new girlfriend Patrice quotes only the first line or so, whether accurately or in adapted form I don’t recall. Season 3 (1991), Episode 2, “The Truth.”}

Notes on John Stuart Mill’s Autobiography

1071. “From the winter of 1821, when I first read Bentham, and especially from the commencement of the Westminster Review, I had what might truly be called an object in life; to be a reformer of the world. My conception of my own happiness was entirely identified with this object.” In the beginning, Mill pursued a vague, general object—reform, the happiness of others. In the midst of his depression, the following question occurs to him: “Suppose that all your objects in life were realized; that all the changes in institutions and opinions which you are looking forward to could be completely effected at this very instant: would this be a great joy and happiness to you?” And of course the answer is no. The negation here is similar to the effect of Carlyle’s steam-engine universe rolling through Dr. Teufelsdröckh’s inner being. Mill says that he had nothing left to live for when he heard his own version of the “Everlasting No,” and he must have felt that he had lived as an automaton. His foundation for personal happiness was only an abstraction; it was what Francis Bacon would call a philosophical cobweb, and what anyone not in the thrall of Benthamism might well consider a utopian vision based on a mechanical view of human nature.

1072. “My course of study had led me to believe that all mental and moral feelings and qualities, whether of a good or of a bad kind, were the results of association; that we love one thing, and hate another... through the clinging of pleasurable or painful ideas to those things, from the effect of education or of experience.” James Mill had taught his son that the goal of education was “to form the strongest possible associations of the salutary class; associations of pleasure with all things beneficial to the great whole, and of pain with all things hurtful to it.” James Mill followed a scientific model of the individual, and utilitarian education presupposes that character develops along the lines of mechanical association. If you identify your personal happiness with the general good, the idea goes, so long as you are working towards the general good you will be happy. But this plan leads to nothing better than middle-class conformity. It is not the way lasting human connections are made, and instead requires a shallow, flattened notion of human happiness and individuality.

1073. “Analytic habits may thus even strengthen the associations between causes and effects, means and ends, but tend altogether to weaken those which are, to speak familiarly, a mere matter of feeling.” It was not so much what Mill read but how he was taught to read it. The word “analysis” can mean “freeing up” the object of study, but that is not usually how we understand the term. The ordinary understanding is closer to the one Wordsworth condemns—”We murder to dissect.” The young John Stuart Mill seems to have been a victim of what T. S. Eliot (in an essay on the metaphysical poets) calls “dissociation of sensibility.” Helping others is not a bad object, but you must first determine the grounds of human connection—they are organic, not mechanical. You cannot superimpose upon the natural passions a scientific utopian scheme and expect anything but misery to result.

1074. “I was reading, accidentally, Marmontel’s Mémoires, and came to the passage which relates his father’s death, the distressed position of the family, and the sudden inspiration by which he, then a mere boy, felt and made them feel that he would be everything to them....” Spontaneous emotion proves to be the key to Mill’s recovery. He describes a Wordsworthian moment in the form of an accidental encounter with a literary text, an autobiographical text written by Marmontel. This accidental encounter escapes Bentham’s and James Mill’s scheme concerning the formation of salutary associations. So the example is a rebuke of straightforward Benthamite utilitarianism—the young Marmontel made a key emotional bond with others, forgetting himself for the moment. What we find described is not a mechanical “I ought” but a genuine outpouring of sympathy. Mill says that after reading this passage, he never again reached the depths of depression he formerly experienced.

1074-75. “Ask yourself whether you are happy, and you cease to be so. The only chance is to treat, not happiness, but some end external to it, as the purpose of life. Let your self-consciousness, your scrutiny, your self-interrogation exhaust themselves on that; and if otherwise fortunately circumstanced you will inhale happiness with the air you breathe, without dwelling on it or thinking about it...” happiness is still important here, but it is not to be directly pursued. The point is to stop analyzing happiness and start working on something you find meaningful for its own sake. It is best not to think of everything you say and do in light of ultimate purposes or end-states of consciousness. Mill has learned to ask Walter Pater’s question—”what is this activity or thing or person to me?” It is not good enough to pursue some abstract notion of the general good and to claim that you are achieving an equally abstract kind of happiness by doing so; the activity must be meaningful to you personally prior to the attachment of any such abstract notion. Mill has not rejected the idea that happiness flows from activity, but it makes all the difference in the world whether that activity is do-gooding or intrinsically and intimately valuable to the individual pursuing it. For example, if I have an inclination to tinker with computers, building them from scratch and solving whatever problems come up as I do so, I may by such means become happy, at least for a while. The same goes for things like reading a Jane Austen novel—you don’t sit down to read thinking, “my goal in reading this book is to be happy.” If you did, you would become morbidly prone to checking your emotional state every other sentence to register your level of happiness or unhappiness. This kind of obsession resembles both heavy Puritan examination of the state of one’s soul and the associational theory of happiness promoted by Mill’s father and his tutor Jeremy Bentham. It is best to allow your consciousness to be directed towards an object other than your own interior states.

This is profoundly good advice, but if we want to criticize it, we might say that it is an evasion of romantic troubles concerning the problem of desire. It is this problem that caused Carlyle to reject happiness altogether in favor of self-annihilation leading to meaningfulness, awe, and collective belonging. Don’t we invariably reflect back upon our states of consciousness, whether we mean to or not? And if we cannot avoid doing so, the kind of happiness Mill describes will not satisfy us for long—human beings even get tired of being happy after a while. In any case, on the same page Mill emphasizes the need for balancing the sway of our faculties. Feelings and intellection are both important: “I had now learnt by experience that the passive susceptibilities needed to be cultivated as well as the active capacities... The maintenance of a due balance among the faculties now seemed to me of primary importance.” A many-sided personality needs many-sided experiences to develop and be free. Feeling is not mechanical, not associational. The self is not an isolated atom but rather an organic construct. Happiness comes from pursuing intrinsically meaningful activities and from allowing “passive susceptibilities” to operate freely. By this term, I believe Mill means self-culture, the patient development of our individual potential until we achieve a balanced, harmonious sense of who we are and what we are about.

Further reflection: Mill is right to say that if you have to ask whether you’re happy, you won’t be happy for long or perhaps even at all. But saying this doesn’t mean we won’t do it: isn’t it almost impossible not to assess your experiences even as you undergo them? Ideally, I suppose, we would be able to shut off the flow of annoying self-consciousness-tending thoughts. That’s what most meditative techniques seem to be designed to help us do. Imagine walking along a beautiful, deserted beach—the ideal would be just to let nature draw you outside of yourself, all your self-consciousness evaporating with the salt spray and disappearing into the wet sand, the sound of the ocean replacing your thoughts. But something always brings us back to ourselves: that’s the romantic dilemma, and I don’t see that there’s anything but the briefest respite from it. Even so, Mill is surely right that obsessing about your own happiness right here and now is destructive and counter-productive. Happiness isn’t a permanent condition, and it evaporates when you try to treat it as a solid. “Meaningfulness” is perhaps less fleeting, but even that isn’t exactly guaranteed. Buddhists seem wise in their praise of self-surrender: shut down the self to the extent of time and the degree possible, and the world opens up to you: they’re after clarity, sharp awareness without the constant burden of self-referentiality and personal concern. As the Hindu god Krishna would say, redefine the little-s self to embrace the big-s Self, and quit trying to own the consequences of your actions. I think Mill the reformer has come round to that very insight: he still thinks it’s good to help other people, but not simply to make himself a happier man while he’s doing it. That kind of philanthropy is essentially selfish: as Jesus says, “whosoever will save his life shall lose it” (Luke 9:24, King James Bible).

1076. Mill reiterates the point he made earlier about basic utilitarianism’s unbalanced, mechanical view of human nature—simply rendering people “free and in a state of physical comfort” and removing all hardships from life really would not make a community happy. Then he goes on to discuss Wordsworth’s significance for him: “This state of my thoughts and feelings made the fact of my reading Wordsworth for the first time (in the autumn of 1828), an important event in my life.”

1077. “What made Wordsworth’s poems a medicine for my state of mind, was that they expressed, not mere outward beauty, but states of feeling, and of thought colored by feeling, under the excitement of beauty. They seemed to be the very culture of the feelings, which I was in quest of. In them I seemed to draw from a source of inward joy, of sympathetic and imaginative pleasure, which could be shared in by all human beings; which had no connection with struggle or imperfection, but would be made richer by every improvement in the physical or social condition of mankind.” Wordsworth teaches John Stuart Mill the true sources of happiness, and shows him the value of contemplation, of “wise passiveness” as a corrective for the analytic habit, which in modern times has reached the level of an obsession. And since Mill supposes there are a great many people out there like him, Wordsworth need not be considered the greatest of all England’s poets to be the poet modern English readers stand most in need of reading. Mill says that without having yet read Carlyle, he adopted the anti-self-consciousness philosophy. And of course he literally “closes his Byron” and opens his Wordsworth. So Wordsworth is his Goethe, the man who makes it possible to see that intellect and emotion can co-exist in a balanced individual, one capable of both self-cultivation and genuine desire to reform the world. Wordsworth’s view of human nature is holistic, not at all one-sided as later authors sometimes claim: he has nothing against action, but understands that unless it’s carried out by full human beings, it won’t achieve what it should. At least, that’s how the practical Mill reads him.

Notes on John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice

Ruskin, a mid-Victorian sage-writer, says that England’s current course in economics and empire parallels the fall of Venice when that city entered its decadent Renaissance phase during the Quattrocento: soulless perfection in architecture and art, lewdness in morals, shamelessness in pursuit of monetary wealth. At base, pride goes before a fall: we are fallen enough already, and there’s no need to keep repeating our arrogant rebelliousness and claim autonomy from God, argues Ruskin. He is a disciple of Carlyle, another conservative prophet raging in the wilderness, offering at one time threats, at another salvation. He is a moralist who interprets architectural history and technique as an embodiment of a given culture’s moral status. He treats paintings and social forms in much the same way, reading them as expressions of a society’s spiritual health or morbidity.

In Stones, Ruskin demonstrates that Gothic feudalism encouraged workers to express their individual spirit in a way that did honor to the Church. Labor is central to fallen human beings. The way back to a right appreciation of God is mediation, accommodation, humility, and striving that doesn’t try to rival God as our creator and source. So the critic and consumer must interpret the products of labor with their expressive quality in mind. Critics and consumers must grasp the need for striving worthy of redemption, labor directed heavenward. Why does Ruskin favor architecture in particular? Buildings are works of art that we experience, live in, gather in. And Gothic workers were building cathedrals, which are communal expressions of humility before God, so they resist the urge to rebuild the Tower of Babel of Genesis, for which God confounded the builders’ speech.

The “moral elements” of Gothic are as follows: savageness, changefulness, naturalism, grotesqueness, rigidity, and redundance. With regard to the builders, these categories translate to savageness, love of change, love of nature, disturbed imagination, obstinacy, and generosity. Gothic architecture expresses the workers’ mental tendencies, and the result of their work—often cathedrals—was intended to be a dwelling-place for and offering to God. A church (the visible or assembled body of the faithful) is, after all, an expression of human aspirations to connect with the divine, and a locus of spiritual community.

1324. “And when that fallen roman, in the utmost importance of his luxury, and insolence of his guilt, became the model for the imitation of civilized europe, at the close of the so-called Dark ages, the word Gothic became a term of unmitigated contempt. . . .” A consumer is an interpreter, a critic (on this point, see also Unto This Last), but the insolent, prideful, complacent Renaissance patron, insists Ruskin, wanted and saw only soulless perfection, and what had been a serious kind of grotesqueness became merely obscene because that’s what the corrupt patrons wanted. Genuine grotesque art flows from the labor of a spirit in tension, confronting the shocks and extreme contradictions in life—death and terror, the fantastic, the ludicrous. Mere obscenity is cynical and materialistic, by contrast.

1326-27. Ruskin elaborates on servile, constitutional, and revolutionary forms of art. Of the first, the principal types are “the Greek, Ninevite, and Egyptian.” Greek architectural style achieves a balance, calm, rest, and self-sufficiency, but with respect to the workers who made the buildings, says Ruskin, “The Greek gave to the lower workman no subject which he could not perfectly execute.” But with constitutional ornament, he writes, things are otherwise: in the “Christian system of ornament, this slavery is done away with altogether; christianity having recognized, in small things as well as great, the individual value of every soul” (1327). The essence of it is striving. As for revolutionary ornament, its makers and consumers are selfish, fixated on trivial things done to material perfection. An eye fixed on this kind of ornament is debased—as Blake would say, “a fool sees not the same tree that a wise man sees.” Priorities here are turned upside down, and buildings are not offerings to God but monuments to the artist’s or patron’s ego. In this sense, Ruskin construes the Renaissance as a second fall in which people deployed mere technical skill and science to try to overcome the effects of the original fall in Eden, and of course he sees England going down the same path, in search of a false capitalist utopia.

1327. “[I]t is, perhaps, the principal admirableness of the Gothic schools of architecture, that they thus receive the results of the labor of inferior minds, and out of fragments full of imperfection, and betraying that imperfection in every touch, indulgently raise up a stately and unaccusable whole.” But neither Renaissance patrons nor modern English consumers can accept this scheme, says Ruskin, and they can’t appreciate the fact that “the best things shall be seldomest seen in their best form” or that “the finer the nature, the more flaws it will show through the clearness of it.”

1328. As always in Ruskin, there’s a stark moral decision to make regarding the status of labor, that activity so central to human life and value: “you are put to stern choice in this matter. You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both.” There is no happy medium, no easy accommodation to make, when it comes to honoring the spiritual well-being of laborers or getting the most materially “perfect” work from them. What is imperfect, flawed, incomplete, is exactly what links the thing made to infinity. In both Romantic poetics and Christian theology, the fragment is greater than the limited whole because it indicates striving, progress, aspiration to a higher and even infinite state of spirituality. But Ruskin’s Christian framework is hardly Byronic—it emphasizes not an autonomous attempt at self-transcendence but instead promotes a kind of aspiration that begins with the frank acknowledgement of the individual’s own limitations and imperfections. The body and its material works are finite; art and architecture are of value only insofar as they express the soul’s attempt to break free of materiality while still accepting that it cannot entirely do so. When Ruskin mentions clouds in connection with labor, as he does when he writes of the worker’s efforts, “we know the height of it only, when we see the clouds settling upon him” (1328), we should remember that in his analysis of Turner’s atmospheric paintings, clouds at once veil and bear the sun’s radiance. Clouds need to be read as semi-translucent markers of the boundary between the finite and infinity.

1329. “[E]xamine once more those ugly goblins, and formless monsters . . . but do not mock at them, for they are signs of the life and liberty of every workman, who struck the stone . . . .” With respect to the present day, he says, “It is not that men are ill fed, but that they have no pleasure in the work by which they make their bread.” The dignity of labor is as central to Ruskin as labor in general was to his predecessor Carlyle. And like Carlyle, Ruskin is no great promoter of democratic change: in characterizing liberty, he makes much the same point that Carlyle did, only in a gentler fashion: one day, he says, “men will see that to obey another man, to labour for him, yield reverence to him or to his place, is not slavery. It is often the best kind of liberty.” Ruskin advocates a rank-based yet egalitarian society, one that (like the Christian Church) values the strivings and aspirations of each imperfect believer, one that acknowledges the gap between the human and the divine but treats it in a hopeful way.

1330. “We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilized invention of the division of labor, only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided, but the men.” The division of labor, of course, is a central tenet of capitalist production, one enunciated by Adam Smith in his 1776 book, The Wealth of Nations. Smith explains this principle in a positive manner that suggests how it has the potential to end millennia of human misery: humanity has never found it easy to keep body and soul together; the ancient problem was that of production: many people simply didn’t get enough to eat, or have enough possessions to make life more or less tolerable, never mind pleasant and full of opportunities for upward mobility. But the vast increases in production made possible by trade and increased volume of production made it possible to conceive of a time when poverty and want would be no more—this is a vital point to understand about Adam Smith’s argument in favor of capitalism; he was not a soulless proponent of material accumulation but a moral philosopher who wanted the new mode and means of production to help people harness selfish individual desires for the good of the wider community. And when the market works, I suppose that’s exactly what it does: the capitalist earns a good profit, and gives us the things we need and want.

But Ruskin is dealing with the phenomenon that Marx calls “alienated labor”: the undeniable fact that under nineteenth-century production methods, many workers found little meaning in their work but instead experienced it as essentially dehumanizing and isolating. They were producing a world of riches in which they themselves had miserably little share, and which cost them any chance to become something more than they already were or to make meaningful connections with their fellow laborers. Marx’s term “the fetishism of the commodity” (whereby it is things that matter and have vital relations, not the people who make them with their own minds and hands—the worker is reduced to a thing, while the thing is treated as if it were a living being), applies to virtually everything done in a consumer society. Smith himself points out that we might one day pay people to do specialized kinds of thinking for us, just as we would pay someone to repair our shoes or furniture. So in this way alienation and fragmentation is the law of life under capitalism. Ruskin opposes the entire system for that reason, though of course his solution is radically different from Marx’s, which puts its faith in the revolutionary potential of the industrial proletariat or working class.

1331-32. “The old Venice glass was muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut, if at all. And the old Venetian was justly proud of it” (1332). What is Ruskin’s answer to the inherent problem of capitalist production? Well, he offers a moral prescription, a consumer’s list of things to consider before buying anything: imitation and exact finish are not to be sought for their own sake, while “invention” is to be rewarded at every turn, wherever possible. His main example is that of Venetian glass, which is of course both strikingly beautiful, all the more so because of its imperfections. Mass-manufactured glass can’t compete with it for quality or beauty. One must accept the simultaneous existence of both poorly executed and well executed Venetian glass; if we want the best of it, we have to accept that quality will vary from one piece to the next. We could name a variety of similar products—indeed, the whole “Crafts” movement in England and America is premised on this model of the moral consumer who has the welfare of the worker in view: things made by hand and produced with care are favored, while merely utilitarian items are generally discouraged because they not only dishonor laborers but also lead to a world that is ugly and unpleasant to live in. And today’s advocates of buying organic produce make a similar argument: fair trade organic coffees, locally grown organic produce, and other such goods are becoming more popular, at least for those who can afford them.

There’s reason to be sympathetic towards Ruskin’s insistence that buying something can be a moral or an immoral act. Proponents of the market philosophy are always insisting that capitalist economics is the appropriate system for lovers of liberty and individual autonomy, yet at times one hears them insisting also that the model of the rational consumer is absolute: people will always follow the law of competition, buying what they need and want on the basis of a certain cost/quality ratio: i.e. they will do what nets them the most good stuff at the lowest possible price. But that is a kind of determinism: what if I want to buy a zero-emissions car even though it costs more, because I think it’s simply the right thing to do and I have sufficient funds to do so? Am I an automaton who can’t make such choices, or am I a free agent who might just make a financial sacrifice to derive both tangible and intangible benefits from my ethical purchase? Or what if I choose not to buy products tested on animals even if they cost more or it takes a bit of effort to find out which products are “cruelty free”? And so forth. It is possible to make such choices, at least some of the time. So Ruskin’s idea is not so far out of the practical orbit that we should discount it as absurd. But at the same time, it’s possible to level a serious criticism: it’s hard to see how to get an entire society to make such choices so frequently as to make more than a token difference in what gets produced. Most people probably don’t have enough money to buy organic avocados or a car that costs an extra 5,000 dollars but runs clean. Perhaps the best solution here is some measure of governmental incentive, mixed with market initiative: on their own, huge companies that benefit from the status quo aren’t likely to make changes in production that threaten to undercut their profits.

1333-34. Ruskin says that there are two reasons why the demand for perfection in art is wrong. The first is “that no great man ever stops working till he has reached his point of failure,” and the second is that “imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change.” His emblem for the latter point is the foxglove blossom (digitalis purpurea, a beautiful flowering plant used today in the making of an important drug for heart attack victims). This blossom, writes Ruskin, is “a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom” and is, therefore, “a type of the life of this world.” We are always passing from one state to another. The law of fallen life is change, imperfection, striving. Christian teleology implies a purposeful movement from decay (the fallen past) to a redemptive future (the foxglove’s “bud”). To sum up in Ruskin’s words, “All things are literally better, lovelier, and more beloved for the imperfections which have been divinely appointed, that the law of human life may be Effort, and the law of human judgment, Mercy.”

Additional Notes on John Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice

In The Stones of Venice (1851-53), Ruskin makes an historical parallel between the British and Venetian Empires: as the Italian city-state fell, so will England, if it does not heed the warning set before it. Ruskin goes on to set forth the conditions for what he sees as the biblically proportioned fall of the great city. In this narrative, the Italian Renaissance plays the role of Satan to an earlier, organically and spiritually sound period of feudal society and Gothic architecture.

Ruskin’s spiritualized view of architecture demands that we consider Gothic religious structures with regard to their common function: that of serving as material gathering places for the faithful. A church is a place for spiritual communion and propitiation of an offended god, and the labor that brings it into being must comply with these purposes. In Ruskin’s Christian and romanticist tradition, building a church is an expressive act. The humility that characterizes the medieval workman’s and foreman’s manner of expression, Ruskin, always the amateur naturalist, illustrates by way of the foxglove blossom, digitalis purpurea. This plant is always in transition, and therein lies its emblematic value:

Imperfection is in some sort essential to all that we know of life. It is the sign of life in a mortal body, that is to say, of a state of progress and change. Nothing that lives is, or can be, rigidly perfect; part of it is decaying, part nascent. The foxglove blossom,—a third part bud, a third part past, a third part in full bloom,—is a type of the life of this world. 1

In contrast to Gothic architecture’s recognition of the Fall and the divine plan for redemption, Ruskin sets the devilish pride of the Continental Renaissance and the dead perfection of modern industrial Europe. Gothic building, based upon the system of “Constitutional Ornament,” liberated the workman’s powers. In this system, says Ruskin, “the executive inferior power is, to a certain point, emancipated and independent, having a will of its own, yet confessing its inferiority and rendering obedience to higher powers” (Stones,Works 10, 188).By contrast, modern scientific building, the accomplice of liberal capitalism, devotes itself to stamping out any last spark of Gothic spirituality and individualism. Both the Renaissance and the modern era, explains Ruskin, are to be condemned for their adherence to the system of “Revolutionary ornament, in which no executive inferiority is admitted at all” (Stones,Works 10, 189). The Renaissance provides the paradigm for the modern fall, but we must examine the latter first because Ruskin himself ultimately leaves it behind, choosing instead to locate the solution to England’s problems largely in the feudal past.

We might, of course, go directly to the later works on political economy for a full discussion concerning the problems of modern economics and industrialism. Yet, Ruskin states his basic moral position on these matters so forcefully in The Stones of Venice that there is no need to abandon that work. When Ruskin characterizes the Renaissance method of ornament in architecture as “Revolutionary,” he means to castigate a chaotic, prideful system of production. He denounces modern architecture and the relation it enjoins between worker and employer. Nineteenth-century building, he believes, mimics an already deceitful, corrupt Renaissance imitation of classical integrity. The modern architect is even more apt to make a slave of his workmen than were the overseers of Assyria or the Greeks, the latter of which “gave to the lower workman no subject which he could not perfectly execute” (Stones,Works 10, 189). The source of the modern system’s intense brutality, again, lies in the nineteenth century’s base, auto-referential, anti-expressive pursuit of machine perfection. Ruskin’s is perhaps the grandest of Victorian broadsides aimed at the Industrial Era’s notion of progress.

The Christian-tinged romanticism of Ruskin’s work as a whole shows in his constant emphasis upon the dignity of imperfection. The body and its works are finite, but the spirit is not. Architecture, though it may appear to the undiscerning eye to be a finished thing, is valuable to Ruskin only in so far as it expresses the soul’s poignant striving to break free of the material limitations that hem it in. The perfection that is achieved by the conjoining of human labor and machine indicates no more than spiritual complacency. The fragmentary or imperfect production is greater than the whole, for it indicates the progress of spirit, not matter. Ruskin’s vision is Romantic, expressive, though the desire for self-transcendence is here tempered by Christian humility. As in art the favored Turner’s clouds at once veil and reveal the sun’s divine radiance, so in manufacture the glass of Venice, “muddy, inaccurate in all its forms, and clumsily cut” (Stones,Works 10, 199), reveals the more strikingly the inventive, expressive power of the one who shaped it. But the well-turned steel and wood of the modern house or church, according to Ruskin, expresses only the vicious class divisions that make its production possible.

The choice Ruskin forces upon those whom Carlyle called England’s Captains of Industry is a harsh one. The working-class artisan cannot be two things at once: “You must either make a tool of the creature, or a man of him. You cannot make both” (Stones,Works 10, 192).The target of such criticisms, evidently, is political economy’s most winning argument—division of labor. For this diabolically correct theory, Ruskin reserves his deepest eloquence and contempt:

We have much studied and much perfected, of late, the great civilised invention of the division of labour; only we give it a false name. It is not, truly speaking, the labour that is divided; but the men:—Divided into mere segments of men—broken into small fragments and crumbs of life; so that all the little piece of intelligence that is left in a man is not enough to make a pin, or a nail, but exhausts itself in making the point of a pin, or the head of a nail. Now it is a good and desirable thing, truly, to make many pins in a day; but if we could only see with what crystal sand their points were polished,—sand of human soul, much to be magnified before it can be discerned for what it is,—we should think there might be some loss in it also (Stones,Works 10, 196).

There is no need to dishonor Ruskin’s moralizing to see its limitations. Perhaps no author, short of Carlyle and the sublimely sarcastic Marx, has written so finely about the inhumanity of capitalist production. The image Ruskin creates of the modern answer to the Venetian glass-worker, with his “hands vibrating with a perpetual and exquisitely timed palsy, and the beads [of glass] dropping beneath their vibration like hail,” is unforgettable (Stones,Works 10, 197). 2 Still, his attempt to trace in stone the faults of empire and industry amount to a call for reversion to nearly feudal social and economic relations. The partial nature of Ruskin’s ideas about improving Britain may be gauged from the caustic reaction of more thoroughgoing radicals, chiefly Marx. Though Ruskin shares with Marx (and Hegel) the belief that labor is an essential source of human value and dignity, the revolutionary scorns English cultural criticism’s brand of reform along with the anti-industrialist efforts of fellow Continentals. Here is the way Marx analyses the historical causality of “socialist” yearnings in the tradition of which the middle-class, wealthy Ruskin belongs. The text is The Communist Manifesto, 1848, published just half a decade or so before The Stones of Venice:

Owing to their historical position, it became the vocation of the aristocracies of France and England to write pamphlets against modern bourgeois society. In the French revolution of July 1830, and in the English reform agitation, these aristocracies again succumbed to the hateful upstart. Thenceforth, a serious political struggle was altogether out of the question. A literary battle alone remained possible. . . .

In order to arouse sympathy, the aristocracy was obliged to lose sight, apparently, of its own interests, and to formulate its indictment against the bourgeoisie in the interest of the exploited working class alone. Thus the aristocracy took its revenge by singing lampoons against its new master, and whispering in his ears sinister prophecies of coming catastrophe.

In this way arose Feudal Socialism: Half lamentation, half lampoon; half echo of the past, half menace of the future; at times, by its bitter, witty, and incisive criticism, striking the bourgeoisie to the very heart’s core, but always ludicrous in its effect through total incapacity to comprehend the march of modern history. 3

In Ruskin’s case, the way to ahistoricism lies in his rhetorically effective displacement of modern English sins onto corrupt Italian practices. We may see the guilty narrative in Ruskin’s sections of The Stones of Venice, “The Ducal Palace” (Vol. 2, Ch. 8) and “Grotesque Renaissance” (Vol. 3, Ch. 3). Having explained earlier that “the two principal causes of natural decline in any school are over-luxuriance and over-refinement” (Stones,Works 11, 6), Ruskin goes on to trace with perhaps too much precision the date of the first corrupting influences upon Venice’s Gothic style. The trained eye, he writes, need only look for the date on “the steps of the choir of the Church of St. John and Paul.” On the left the viewer will see the tomb of Doge Marco Cornaro, dated 1367, while on the right will appear the sepulchre of Doge Michele Morosini, dated 1382. By the latter year, the corruption has become unmistakable: Morosini’s tomb is “voluptuous, and over-wrought” (Stones,Works 11, 13-14). What is the cause of such decadence, and what lesson will Ruskin draw for England from the fall of Venice?

To answer these questions, we must examine Ruskin’s commentary in “Grotesque Renaissance” on the role of play and jesting in architecture and, more generally, in the life of a people. The central element in the Gothic that flowered in medieval Venice and even more abundantly elsewhere in Italy, says Ruskin, is a noble form of the grotesque. “The true grotesque,” he explains, is “the expression of the repose or play of a serious mind,” and the false consists in “the full exertion of a frivolous one” (Stones,Works 11, 170). The true grotesque commands our attention in the best of Gothic architecture—its energetically redundant foliage, its gargoyles and other ornamentation full of appreciation of the two passions Ruskin says govern humanity: “love of God, and the fear of sin, and of its companion—Death” (Stones,Works 11, 163).The false type is the effect in art of the fourth era of the Renaissance, and confronts us with nothing but the “sneering mockery” that comes from “delight in the contemplation of bestial vice” (Stones,Works 11, 145).

This latter form of the grotesque, argues Ruskin, glowers at spectators from the sole Renaissance landmark reminding them of the once populous Piazza of Santa Maria Formosa, site of the medieval Feast of the Maries. This landmark, consisting of “A head,—huge, inhuman, and monstrous,—leering in bestial degradation, too foul to be either pictured or described,” typifies the “evil spirit to which Venice was abandoned in the fourth period of her decline” (Stones,Works 11, 145). There are those who play wisely, necessarily, inordinately, and not at all, according to Ruskin, and the foul landmark was surely made by workmen who labored during the reign of the third in this company.

The healthier grotesque ornamentation of the Gothic period was made by workers who, lacking the refinement and leisure to repose wisely, yet played in a sufficiently healthy manner to return to their architectural labor. Even while they toiled, these “inferior workmen” were allowed to some extent to employ their creative energies and fancy, stamping thereby their “character” and “satire” upon the work they did (Stones,Works 11, 157). The later, unhealthy form of grotesque ornament comes of labor designed to express mechanically nothing but the self-indulgence and pleasure-seeking of the great citizens who commissioned the building. This labor is done at the behest of those who are idle, who neither think nor work but who, thanks to circumstances, are able “to make amusement the object of their existence” (Stones,Works 11, 154). A special subcategory of such types in Ruskin’s almost Dantean scheme consists in those who treat sacred and vital things irreverently.

These latter categories—idleness and irreverence—Ruskin takes as typical faults of Venice in its final Renaissance decline. Base workers can make nothing but base things, expressing by them the baseness of those who have set them on. It was a long, painful process, this decline of Venice into labyrinthine sensualism. Ruskin traces the beginning of the end not only to the tomb of Doge Michele Morosini, 1382, but, as he reminds us at the end of “Grotesque Renaissance,” in more fully historical terms to the passing of Doge Tomaso Mocenigo in 1423. This is made plain in the first volume of Stones:

I date the commencement of the Fall of Venice from the death of Carlo Zeno, 8 th May 1418; the visible commencement from that of another of her noblest and wisest children, the Doge Tomaso Mocenigo, who expired five years later. The reign of Foscari followed, gloomy with pestilence and war; a war in which large acquisitions of territory were made by subtle or fortunate policy in Lombardy, and disgrace, significant as irreparable, sustained in the battles on the Po at Cremona, and in the marshes of Caravaggio (Stones,Works 9, 21).

Venice’s fall, beginning with the death of the noble Mocenigo and the rise of Francesco Foscari, Ruskin traces in the changes to the Ducal Palace adjoining St. Mark’s. The city’s general intention to remodel its Gothic architectural treasure survived Mocenigo, but for once the patriot was wrong. Ruskin laments of the Doge that “in his zeal for the honour of future Venice, he had forgotten what was due to the Venice of long ago” (Stones,Works 10, 352).With great precision, Ruskin describes the first sign of moral and architectural decay:

I said that the new Council Chamber, at the time when Mocenigo brought forward his measure, had never yet been used. It was in the year 1422 that the decree passed to rebuild the palace: Mocenigo died in the following year, and Francesco Foscari was elected in his room. The Great Council Chamber was used for the first time on the day when Foscari entered the Senate as Doge,—the 3 rd of April, 1423, according to the Caroldo Chronicle; the 23 rd, which is probably correct, by an anonymous MS., No. 60, in the Correr Museum;—and, the following year, on the 27 th of March, the first hammer was lifted up against the old palace of Ziani.

That hammer stroke was the first act of the period properly called the “Renaissance.” It was the knell of the architecture of Venice,—and of Venice herself (Stones,Works 10, 351-52).

The moral for England appears strongly in the peroration to “Grotesque Renaissance.” When Mocenigo died in 1423 and Foscari took his place as ruler, Ruskin points out, “Sifesteggio dalla citta uno anno intero,” or “the city kept festival for a whole year” (Stones,Works 11, 195).From thence, the way to moral perdition and defeat at the hands of the Turks was straight:

Venice had in her childhood sown, in tears, the harvest she was to reap in rejoicing. She now sowed in laughter the seeds of death.

Thenceforward, year after year, the nation drank with deeper thirst from the fountains of forbidden pleasure, and dug for springs, hitherto unknown, in the dark places of the earth. In the ingenuity of indulgence, in the varieties of vanity, Venice surpassed the cities of Christendom, as of old she had surpassed them in fortitude and devotion; and as once the powers of Europe stood before her judgment-seat, to receive the decisions of her justice, so now the youth of Europe assembled in the halls of her luxury, to learn from her the arts of delight (Stones,Works 11, 195).

The author’s adherence to Christian teleology shines through this and every other page of The Stones of Venice, and in this early masterwork, Ruskin seems still to have kept firmly to the evangelical faith of his parents. Even when he lost that faith and turned from criticism of art to chastisement of politicians and factory owners, the same Christian framework governs his writing. The moral earnestness that informs Ruskin’s ability to hear in a Renaissance laborer’s hammer the knell of Venetian piety, we shall find informing as well the schemes Ruskin later proposes to solve modern England’s social problems. The prophet’s indignation and the art critic’s lament modulate into the feudalist’s call for a stratified society based upon recognition of the dignity of labor. In Unto This Last (1860), Ruskin proposes to set England back on the right road by dividing its classes into the medieval functions of Soldier, Pastor, Physician, Lawyer, and Merchant, for which latter officer the workmen will employ their skills and imagination. In essence, Ruskin’s scheme for reform is every bit as hierarchical as that of Carlyle, except that the latter does not propose to do away with the Industrial Revolution altogether.

Ruskin’s entire narrative about the Good Gothic and the Bad Renaissance exempts the author and his readers from confronting what Marx would call the entirely new status and potential of the industrial proletariat. This new class faces the bourgeoisie with the fundamental contradictions of its own system of production and social organization, but Ruskin would put away the workmen’s anger with patriarchal supervision. In Ruskin, then, what seems to be material history is fancy made visible and audible by the great writer’s skill. The hammer blows against the Ducal Palace, the hideousness of the late-Renaissance gargoyle, and the image of the year-long celebration of Foscari’s ascension to power articulate a moral abstraction.

Ruskin’s twin battery of aesthetics and paternal socialism, further analysis would only underscore, are designed to invest perception and work, respectively, with purposive order in the face of social and moral chaos. Ruskin displaces the reification, mechanization, and desacramentalization going on with Tayloresque efficiency in Britain to Renaissance Italy and its increasingly corrupt artists, the fall of which then becomes a cautionary tale for the present. The specific program for reform that follows The Stones of Venice in Unto This Last and other such works, displacing present woes to an immoral past, sets forth as savior the anachronistic vision of a happily stratified England.

1. John Ruskin, The Stones of Venice, The Works of John Ruskin, vol. 10, eds. E.T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn (1851-53; London: George Allen, 1904), 203-04.

2. Ruskin, Stones,Works Volume 10, 197.

3. Karl Marx and Frederick (Friedrich) Engels, The Communist Manifesto, English translation (1848; 1949; reprint, New York: International Publishers, 1983), 32.

Notes on Matthew Arnold

“The Buried Life”

This poem brilliantly analyzes what Arnold posits as a universal need to look within, to trace the operations of our inner being and to express them in a language commensurate with that inner life. In other words, Arnold is writing about the very stuff of romantic expressivism. The first few stanzas make it clear that the poet is unable in the present instance to make the connection with another he later posits as being necessary to the insight he seeks. In spite of that, the poem is one of Arnold’s more optimistic efforts. A power he simply describes as “Fate” (30), has kept “The unregarded river of our life” from plain view to protect us from our own destructive frivolity, but this river of authentic being flows on nonetheless. The poet explains that no individual, looking only within, can truly gain access to the inner springs of life and thought. Acting on our own, we cannot know from whence we have come or where we are going; we cannot grasp the purpose of our lives. And we cannot, it almost goes without saying, express a purpose we are unable to apprehend. From lines 55-66, the speaker suggests that most of what we do is a kind of self-deception—what we do and say, that is, conceals far more than it reveals about what we really are inside. Society demands no less of a charade. Even so, the speaker is not downcast: there are those rare moments when the voice, the gaze, or the touch of a beloved person gives us access to our being in all its authenticity. Arnold casts the result of this rarity in Wordsworthian terms: “The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain, / And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know” (86-87). So it is possible on rare occasion, and with the help of another, really to look within and to express what we see there. Especially for a gloomy poet like Arnold, that is a cheerful thought, and it bears comparison to Wordsworth’s lines from “Tintern Abbey,” “with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things” (47-49). It is possible to achieve an epiphany of the self and to express the insight flowing from it. What is captured is not something static but rather dynamic and flowing, as the poem’s persistent river metaphor indicates. Some may find a note of hesitancy in the poem’s final lines, “And then he thinks he knows / The hills where his life rose, / And the sea where it goes” (96-98). But I don’t think the word “knows” connotes doubt in this case; the conjectural seeker may or may not know the last word about his origins or destination, but that seems less important than the knowledge of his present self the poem says can, in fact, be attained. We should not expect from Matthew Arnold a brash statement such as John Donne’s “She is all States, and all Princes, I; / Nothing else is.” What we get, instead, is a sort of quiet, wistful optimism in the midst of so many melancholy and contemplative utterances by this earnest mid-Victorian.

“ Dover Beach”

The poem opens with the description of a beautiful natural scene, a seascape. Apparently it is a clear night in patches because the speaker can see the nightlights of France across the English Channel . And he catches something eternal about humanity in the effects of natural process—Sophocles, the poet says, heard the same sound attentively long ago, the sound of pebbles tossing back and forth in the surf with the tide and the waves. (In the play referenced—Antigone—the Chorus speaks of something much harsher—the low moan that accompanies gale force winds as they beat against the seashore, a sound compared to the ruin and devastation of Thebes’s royal house thanks to the anger of the gods.) what our speaker hears is the melancholy retreat of simple religious faith, a retreat that leaves Western civilization all but naked. It is evident that Matthew Arnold does not draw the same sustenance from nature that Wordsworth, a poet he much admires, was able to draw. Both the natural and human world before him in prospect are described as beautiful illusions—sights that seem to promise certitude and intelligibility, a sense that there is meaning out there, that there is “a place for us.” But the speaker is unable to put his faith in anything he sees or hears. He remains disillusioned, I think, even though he tries to cheer himself and his lover with the injunction, “let us be true / To one another!” The world remains hostile, dreary, and violent. It makes no sense in itself, and the knowledge that we can at least temporarily make a genuine human connection with someone else, and thereby create the meaning we seek, does not satisfy the speaker. This poem might be described as what Meyer Abrams would call a Greater Romantic Lyric—it begins in meditation, goes on to analyze a spiritual problem, and attempts to offer an emotional resolution. The tenuousness of that resolution gives the poem its distinctive Arnoldian quality. The couple remain isolated from the world, withdrawn from the violence and confusion surrounding them. Religion no longer offers solace in such a situation, at least not for this particular Victorian couple.

General Notes on Matthew Arnold

Matthew Arnold actively resists what John Stuart Mill the Utilitarian philosopher had called the “hostile and dreaded censorship” of middle-class ascendancy: the smug self-satisfaction exhibited by average English citizens in their own unexamined views and values. Arnold insists that we need to promote culture and criticism as a means of combating such censorious mediocrity. He counsels intellectuals and thoughtful people generally to step away from politics and social controversy, wherein ideas are bought, sold, and bandied about with more concern for their effects on the balance of power than for their inherent truth. Ideas, Arnold says, should be examined in a “disinterested” manner—that is, in a calm and reasonably objective way, with no regard for one’s own personal biases or for the biases of the social and political groups that may claim one’s allegiance. Arnold’s emphasis is that of a man imbued with the “dare to know” ethos of the Enlightenment as well as with a classical drive towards self-development and self-perfection. Against the increasingly powerful middle-class utilitarian notion that life is all about chasing after pleasure and material comfort, Arnold asserts (as did J. S. Mill himself) that “doing as one likes” is hardly an adequate description of life’s goal; it is of great consequence what things give us pleasure, and the sources we should favor, he thinks, will come to us by way of sound education and self-cultivation, without which we are brutes. Many have pointed out Arnold’s flaws as a thinker—his fondness for repeating himself, his reliance on certain privileged cultural texts (often Greek classics) as irreducible “touchstones” of excellence, and even a certain strain of ivory-tower elitism. But Arnold surely deserves respect for his persistent support of Enlightenment integrity. We seldom seem to realize how fragile our humanity is—a quick scan of the daily papers, with their relentless recountings of twenty-first century brutality, ignorance, intolerance and persecution worthy of the Dark Ages, should convince any rational person that our best tendencies and highest potential must be constantly encouraged and guarded, not taken for granted and left at the mercy of “time and chance.” The Victorians were sometimes too willing to believe in facile assurances about the progress of humanity, but Arnold’s writings show him to be remarkably self-reflective about the pitfalls of such assumptions. At times, what Arnold calls “culture” seems little short of a miracle, given the conditions within which it must develop.

Finally, Arnold addresses some very modern problems—first, the status of art and culture in relation to economic and class arrangements. We find in him both a strong instance of what’s sometimes called the paradox of Anglo-American humanism: while he insists on the great value of humanistic study, he feels compelled to divorce that study from the immediate flow of worldly affairs. As Milton might say, “they also serve who only stand and wait”—and who only “read, study, and observe.” Or to state the dilemma more crudely, culture and criticism can only help us by not promising to help us, at least for the present. The paradox consists in defending the arts and criticism while simultaneously rejecting the suggestion that they should be immediately useful on a broad social scale. Second, Arnold offers a worthwhile examination of the relationship between art and criticism—a concern of much interest to theoreticians today.

Preface To Poems (1853)

Overview: Evidently, Matthew Arnold believes that the romantics, as some wag said about Thomas Carlyle, “led us into the wilderness and left us there.” Arnold seeks a balance between poetic form and expression; art should be oriented towards action, he believes, and it should not wallow in Hamlet-like, self-centered anguish or luxuriate in fine phrases and images. That kind of self-indulgence, he believes, has been the tendency since the early modern period. Shakespeare is wonderful, but Matthew Arnold doesn’t advocate taking him as your model if you want to be a writer. Modernity is a threat since it leads us away from what is permanent in us, and away from a unified sensibility and coherent outlook. The Greeks, according to Arnold, are the best artistic models because they can help us fight modernity’s worst aspects: its threat of incoherence and its predilection for the part over the whole, its penchant for selfishness over what benefits the individual most genuinely and serves the community as well. The Greeks offer clarity, rigor, simplicity, and a balanced perspective on life. Like so many Victorian sages and culture critics, Arnold reasserts humanity’s need for some principle of excellence by which to think and live.

1375. “The dialogue of the mind with itself has commenced,” says Arnold . This dialogue cannot be wished away, but he is concerned about its negative effects on consciousness. Complexity is part of modern life, and the question is how to deal with it. Arnold declares himself against any representation that is, as he says, “vaguely conceived and loosely drawn.” We demand accuracy and precision in art; we demand that it should “add to our knowledge.” Or at least, that is what Arnold says we should demand of it; only if this is done, he implies, will it do what it really ought: “inspirit and rejoice the reader.” As always, Arnold draws much from German enlightenment and romantic authors—his descriptions, as he makes clear, are derived from Friedrich von Schiller, a great disciple of Immanuel Kant. The passage he cites is followed by The claim that the best art facilitates the free play of all the mind’s powers: “Der höchste Genuß aber ist die Freiheit des Gemüthes in dem lebendigen Spiel aller seiner Kräfte.”

Unfortunately, in his view, this sort of spirit-expanding free play is exactly what much modern art does not encourage. Instead, modern poetry gives us representations “in which the suffering finds no vent in action; in which a continuous state of mental distress is prolonged, unrelieved by incident, hope, or resistance; in which there is everything to be endured, nothing to be done.” This sort of artistic representation is not tragic in the high classical sense; it is not uplifting but is, he says, merely “painful.” The bottom line is that art should not give in to or merely reflect a particular era’s worst tendencies; it should challenge them, and generate a counter-balancing effect.

1376-77. Arnold insists that “The date of an action… signifies nothing.” There is no reason why we cannot derive as much pleasure and enlightenment from ancient works of art as from modern ones. This is no different from what many critics have said in their own way. Samuel Johnson, after all, wrote that the best art consists in “just representations of general nature” that have been highly esteemed for long periods of time, and he insisted that a painter should not “streak the leaves of the tulip” but should rather provide us with a general, universally recognizable representation. And Percy Bysshe Shelley, of course, writes in his “Defense Of Poetry” that poets write from a perspective beyond particular places or historical epochs. So the claim that art should deliver to us something of universal and eternal significance is nothing new. Arnold is asserting his neoclassical bent here: he derives from Aristotle’s Poetics the notion that literary art should be about “action,” about the construction of plot and story. Emotional expression is secondary to this imperative. As usual, Arnold is in dialogue with William Wordsworth, whose poetry he much admires but whose poetics he does not always agree with. We recall that Wordsworth, in his Preface to Lyrical Ballads, said that expression was the prime consideration and that action should simply be made to suit the expression. For Wordsworth, poetry is mainly an expressive vehicle; for Arnold , such a prescription is liable to result in morbid, unbalanced poetry. Somewhat like Thomas Carlyle, Arnold is telling us, “Close thy Byron, open thy Goethe.” As for the moderns in comparison with the ancients, Arnold writes that “with us, attention is fixed mainly on the value of the separate thoughts and images which occur in the treatment of an action. They regarded the whole; we regard the parts. With them, the action predominated over the expression of it; with us, the expression predominates over the action.” It is action, not expression, that delivers to us a sense of an intelligible cosmos. Arnold is therefore very interested in the formal qualities and integrity of a given poem; he emphasizes craftsmanship over intensity of expression.

1378-79. At this point in his argument, Arnold offers some rather harsh words about his fellow critics. He says that they not only allow unhealthy practices, they promote “false aims.” Such critics, he says, are mostly interested in “detached expressions,” and are quite an interested in demanding a sense of the whole in any particular poem. They treat poetry like what we would call “sound bites.” But to treat words and indeed entire works of art this way is to divorce language or whatever medium we are dealing with from the realm of action. While Matthew Arnold is a great believer in the integrity and autonomy of art, he does not promote the idea that the composition of a literary work should amount to navel-gazing on the part of the artist. We do not, he insists, or rather we should not, favor a kind of art that amounts to “A true allegory of the state of one’s own mind.”

Also on this page, Arnold returns to the idea that a young writer must find suitable models. This advice obviously rejects the romantic idea that we can more or less dismiss our predecessors if we find them uncongenial and create something almost from nothing. What Arnold describes is not so much “the anxiety of influence” that, as Harold Bloom would say, caused romantic poets to struggle mightily against the overwhelming influence of John Milton. Rather, Arnold is pointing out that the sheer “multitude of voices counseling different things” threatens modern authors with a profound sense of incoherence when they most need clarity and balance. This is a prominent strain in Arnold’s thinking on art and culture more generally, and even on politics. I think we can understand him without too much trouble because we live in a time with an even larger “marketplace of ideas” from which we may choose. So many ideas, many of them utterly incompatible—how is one to choose amongst them? To use a contemporary phrase, Arnold suggests that modern humanity is beset by “information overload.”

1380-81. But what about Shakespeare as a model? Why not make the greatest of English literary artists our model? Well, Shakespeare’s gift of “abundant… and ingenious expression” may be remarkable, but it is not what we need. In Arnold’s view, Shakespeare was a bit too much in love with beautiful language and fine expression, so much so that it sometimes leads him away from sound construction and concentration on the actions with which his plays are concerned. Criticism on Shakespeare is punctuated by such gentle barbs—Ben Jonson essentially said he wished Shakespeare had had a good editor, that the man had “blotted out” more lines than he did. And Samuel Johnson lamented that the Bard was too fond of silly quibbles, too willing to let semi-obscene puns and the like mar the dignity and moral tenor of his dramas. I think what Arnold is getting at is that Shakespeare was a man of unparalleled artistry and genius who could give us both a complete action and fineness and intensity of expression, but when the other artists attempt to imitate his methods, the results fall short of the original’s mark. (By way of example, he mentions John Keats’s “Isabella, or the Pot of Basil.” It is a poem full of beautiful lines, Arnold suggests, but what is it really about?) Even so, I wouldn’t deny that Arnold is offering a pointed criticism: he says explicitly that Shakespeare’s “gift of expression… rather even leads him astray, degenerating sometimes into a fondness for curiosity of expression….” If this fondness proceeds too far, by implication, we will end up with a work of art that is more eccentric than universal in its appeal. He caps this argument with Guizot’s delicious quip that “Shakespeare appears in his language to have tried all styles except that of simplicity.” If we admire and emulate what is least worthy of such attention in Shakespeare, his art may please us, but it may not improve us or give us a holistic view of life; it may not contribute to our development as whole human beings.

1382-83. Most of all, Arnold recommends the classics, for their “unity and profoundness of moral impression.” Furthermore, he writes of the “steadying and composing effect upon . . . [the] judgment, not of literary works only, but of men and events in general” (1382) that stems from reading classical literature. Perhaps that’s partly why Alexander Pope said Virgil found that “to study Homer was to study Nature.” Arnold’s argument isn’t a diatribe against the modern world; he admits that “The present age makes great claims upon us” and that his classicists “wish neither to applaud nor to revile their age; they wish to know what it is, what it can give them, and whether this is what they want.” He concludes with the thought that progress is a threat mainly if it ignores what is best and most permanent about humanity; the “touchstone” of human nature must be retained amidst the Heraclitean flux of the modern world. His exhortation to fellow poets and readers is that they ought to “transmit to [future generations] the practice of poetry, with its boundaries and wholesome regulative laws,” even if his own generation is comprised mainly of dilettanti who find themselves unable to equal the ancients in their artistic brilliance or their power of thought and feeling. The argument he makes is paradoxical in that what he describes as permanent and natural in us seems to be threatened with extinction by the forces of modernity. As so often, we find a cultural critic dealing with the dilemma posed by the disjunction between broad social imperatives and individual needs and aspirations, and not finding any easy answers. But in his view, ancient art at least gives us some sense of the tranquility, nobility, and excellence of which we are capable.

Page-by-Page Notes on Walter Pater

“Conclusion” to Studies in the History of the Renaissance

1511-12. “To regard all things and principles of things as inconstant modes or fashions has more and more become the tendency of modern thought.” Today’s scientific tendency is only a variation of a thought available to the ancients—Heraclitus, for example, one of whose fragmentary sayings Pater quotes as a prefix to his Conclusion to The Renaissance. And there is a way to deal with this tendency towards relativism: as Oscar Wilde, Pater’s onetime student at Oxford, might say, the only way to conquer a temptation is to give in to it. That is what Pater’s rhetoric in the Conclusion to The Renaissance does. Pater embraces the modern sense of impermanence, and tries to turn it into a healthy force rather than an excuse for paralysis or apathy. Pater’s impressionism has some affinity with the quick eye and hand of Baudelaire’s Constantine Guys, whose goal is to capture what is truly beautiful from the passing shows of things. As for Pater’s analysis of the “inward world of thought and feeling” (1511) until we can hardly resist his claim that each person’s thoughts and feelings are permanently walled off from those of all others (absolute solipsism), this isn’t necessarily a call to egotism or selfishness.

Instead, Pater grinds down our sense of personal identity until what remains is a process, which he describes as “that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves” (1512). In thus promoting a kind of modernity that begins to sound like praise for the Heraclitean flux, the aim isn’t intellectual or emotional comfort. Neither is there an injunction to collective solidarity and enterprise (no Carlylean moral blathering here, and no capitalist paeans to material progress) nor to Matthew Arnold’s quest for calm and repose.

1512-13. “The service of philosophy, of speculative culture, towards the human spirit is to rouse, to startle it to a life of constant and eager observation.” We need not worry about the past or the future because the fleeting present-becoming-past is all we have. (I recall reading a while back that our sense of “now” lasts about five seconds, and then whatever we are or were experiencing slips into the past. That sounds about right to me.) The aim is to distill the purity of the moment in the moment and to experience that purity as intensely as possible. This intensity is perfection; it is what makes us come alive, and Pater might even say nothing else really matters. Solidity and permanence are the vain delusions of most individuals and of mankind generally. To use a Baconian phrase, they are the “idols” of the entire species. Pater writes that “our failure is to form habits: for, after all, habit is relative to a stereotyped world, and meantime it is only the roughness of the eye that makes any two persons, things, situations, seem alike” (1512). Denaturalization (as in Romantic theory that would have us “cleanse the doors of perception” and “strip away the film of familiarity”) and concentration (as in Zen meditation) are Pater’s watchwords: he counsels an emptying of the self until the mind’s “narrow chamber” can register a multitude of impressions without the barriers erected by personal habit and cultural conventionality, thereby achieving maximum intensity of experience. Paterian hedonism isn’t so much about pleasure in the vulgar sense as about purity, clarity of perception, intensity, aliveness. His use of the term hedonism is genuinely Greek, not Utilitarian (as in Bentham’s famous remark about “pushpin being as good as poetry”). Pater says that art is the best thing to engage with, but he also says that any register of experience may serve the purpose. He advocates a certain temperament and orientation towards life.

On 1513, Pater’s invocation of Rousseau’s Confessions (with its call to “intellectual excitement”) rejects morality of either the Utilitarian or the religious strain, replacing it with a passionate regard for pure art: “Only be sure it is passion—that it does yield you this fruit of a quickened, multiplied consciousness. Of such wisdom, the poetic passion, the desire of beauty, the love of art for its own sake, has most.” It isn’t difficult to understand why some Victorians found the Conclusion subversive: how could a great many young people fail to translate Pater’s suggestions into their own less refined program of active experience? Is it possible for a modern person to follow Pater’s Greek prescription for “success in life”? That is what Dorian Gray tries to do, and those of us who have read Wilde’s novel know how badly that experiment turns out. This is not to condemn Pater in the manner of a Victorian moralist; it is to point out that the Paterian doctrine is dependent upon its audience’s capacities for refined perception and sensibilities and that such qualities are not always to be found in the cultural environment within which Pater is writing his books.