The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

This page intentionally left blank

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Richard Marggraf Turley

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

QRichard Marggraf Turley 2002

No paragraph of this publication may be reproduced, copied or transmitted save with written permission or in accordance with the provisions of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, or under the terms of any licence permitting limited copying issued by the Copyright Licensing Agency, 90 Tottenham Court Road, London W1T 4LP. Any person who does any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages. The author has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. First published 2002 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS and 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N. Y. 10010 Companies and representatives throughout the world PALGRAVE MACMILLAN is the global academic imprint of the Palgrave Macmillan division of St. Martin's Press, LLC and of Palgrave Macmillan Ltd. MacmillanT is a registered trademark in the United States, United Kingdom and other countries. Palgrave is a registered trademark in the European Union and other countries. ISBN 0-333-96898-0 This book is printed on paper suitable for recycling and made from fully managed and sustained forest sources. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Marggraf Turley, Richard, 1970The politics of language in Romantic literature / Richard Marggraf Turley. p.cm.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 0-333-96898-0

1. English literatureÐ19th centuryÐHistory and criticism. 2. Language and languagesÐPolitical aspectsÐGreat Britain. 3. Tennyson, Alfred, Baron, 1809±1892ÐLanguage. 4. English languageÐ19th centuryÐVariation. 5. Wordsworth, William, 1770±1850ÐLanguage. 6. Hunt, Leigh, 1784±1859Ð Language. 7. Keats, John, 1795±1821ÐLanguage. 8. Language and languages in literature. 9. RomanticismÐGreat Britain. I. Title. PR457. T87 2002 820.90 145Ðdc21

2002025148

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 11 10 09 08 07 06 05 04 03 02 Printed and bound in Great Britain by Antony Rowe Ltd, Chippenham and Eastbourne

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

All rights reserved. No reproduction, copy or transmission of this publication may be made without written permission.

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

For Leah and Nils

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

A Sangreal, an eldorado;

Word-windmills to begrapple, August,

Beguiled by those glassy nouns,

Seen through, not quite.

The light of derivation darkens . . .

Avis Akvasas Ka.

A golden fleece of phonemes,

Honied reveries of proto-meanings;

How cruel for you, August,

Who glimpsed hollow mouthings

Of Ur-conversations;

How impenetrable

This wall of decayed tropes . . .

Avis Akvasas Ka.

And yet, crazed philologist,

Could I trace your steps, and tread

Beyond the pale of these entroped forms,

Caress a word in my hand,

And praise its perfection . . .

Avis Akvasas Ka.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Schleicher

Acknowledgements

ix

Note on Texts

x

Preface

xi

Introduction

xv

1

Paradigms Lost (and Regained): Eighteenth-Century

Language Theory The origin of language Language and culture Progress or degeneration? The politics of grammar

1

4

21

23

27

2

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and the Real Language of Men `Genuine' language: the prefaces to Lyrical Ballads Knit to this his native soil Conspiracies, revolutions, confederacies A radical reform in the house of commons of literature

33

35

46

54

67

3

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology Formal crests, graceful noses and The Story of Rimini The brink of barbarism Speaking loud and bold Clarke and Shelley: defending Romantic philology Reading the leaf-fring'd legend Radical significations Still unravish'd brides Asterisk-reality

70

70

82

85

88

95

97

99

106

4

Keats, Condillac and Nathaniel Bailey Keats's virtuous philosopher (a source for `Beauty is

truth, truth beauty') Keats, Condillac and language Keats and Nathaniel Bailey

111

112

125

127

vii

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Contents

5 Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm by

English-Speaking Audiences Rask's review of Grimm's Grammatik Prichard's Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations John Mitchell Kemble and Continental philology The Anglo-Saxon controversy Misrepresentation in Wedgwood's review of Grimm Winning's Manual of Comparative Philology Donaldson's New Cratylus Neaves's review of Grimm Latham's English Language Grimm's supporters in Britain

131

135

135

138

141

146

147

149

151

152

154

6 `Mere Air-Propelling Sounds': Tennyson and the

Anxiety of Language The whited sepulchre Words ± words ± words A hint of somewhat unexprest Knowledge of their own supremacy Strawn, strewn, strown Genuine and vigorous English

156

157

162

169

172

181

183

Afterword

187

Notes

191

Bibliography

218

Index

238

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

viii Contents

Parts of Chapter 3 are revised from articles that appeared in Romanticism, 4.i (1998), 104±19, The Review of English Studies, n.s. 50 (1999), 204±7, and Neophilologus, 84 (2000), 323±7; material from Chapter 5 has appeared in Notes and Queries, n.s. 41 (1994), 310±12, and German Life and Letters, n.s. 54 (2001), 234±52. Some of the arguments from Chapter 6 were first explored in articles published in Leeds Studies in English, n.s. 28 (1997), 123±40, and Victorian Poetry, 37 (1999), 291±308. I am indebted to the editors of these journals for permission to reprint or recast work.

ix

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Acknowledgements

Unless otherwise stated, all quotations from Lyrical Ballads and Wordsworth's prefatory and appended essays are from R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (eds), Lyrical Ballads (London: Methuen, 1965). All quotations from Keats's poetry are taken from The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978). References to Keats's correspondence are to The Letters of John Keats 1814± 1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), hereafter cited as Letters. Quotations from Tennyson's poems are taken from Christopher Ricks's edition, The Poems of Tennyson, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Harlow: Longman, 1987). Unless otherwise stated, all translations from German sources are my own.

x

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Note on Texts

This book responds to a long-standing problem within Romantic studies: the view, as persistent as it is pernicious, that sees linguistic works as merely peripheral or at best tangential to Romantic literature and its concerns. It is not difficult to appreciate how this perspective has developed. Traditionally, the history of linguistic ideas and the study of literature have followed different trajectories, which rarely seem to cross. As a consequence, we have little sense of the complex ways in which works of literature and language inform each other. It is my contention, however, that a fuller picture of Romanticism begins to emerge precisely when we examine the interaction of literary culture and linguistic debates. The following chapters offer an integrated critique that seeks to collapse the methodological borders between what is often thought of as linguistic `scholarship' and literary `criticism', between the meticulous marshalling of detail on the one hand, and its interpretation on the other. This homogeneous approach allows us to see how thoroughly, and at how many different levels, poetry in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries is transformed by its encounter with philology. È diger Schreyer, `the theory of language prevailing at According to Ru any particular period will have a decisive influence on the attitude towards and the use of language of that period'.1 It is difficult to disagree with this appraisal; unless, of course, one believes that texts spring into life fully formed, independent of the forces of history. The insight on which the present volume is founded can be formulated thus: when poets write, they are immediately, unavoidably and fundamentally confronted with the texture, with the very fabric, of language. It follows, then, that for Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Keats and Tennyson, writers who lived in an age defined intellectually ± and, I shall be arguing, politically ± by its attitudes towards language, the encounter is in a very real sense likely to have proved `decisive', in Schreyer's words. All the more so, given that the authors I discuss responded to a wealth of new linguistic ideas just as, for the first time, all sides in a national debate over literary taste, propriety and cultural agency acknowledged that a poem's language was as politically significant as its `message', and in some cases was the same thing. The possibility that political structures were vulnerable to changes in literary discourse galvanized the xi

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Preface

resolve of establishment figures to resist innovations in poetic diction with all the resources at their disposal. Critics for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine and the Quarterly Review tried to persuade reading audiences of the day that the experimental diction of Romantic authors was merely jejune and idiosyncratic, instead of a logical expression of new linguistic doctrines, theories and counter-theories. The influence of this argument can still be felt in modern critiques, which frequently fail to make proper provision for the rigour and sophistication of Romanticism's engagement with philological thought, particularly where Hunt and Keats are concerned. I want to show, however, that vital features of Romantic writing in fact take form as they emerge out of wide-ranging debates over the nature of language itself. I hope that as well as being an academic study, this book possesses a modicum of relevance for present-day poets ± indeed for anyone grappling with the relationship between language and power. The ideological battles fought in the early nineteenth century over `correct' English, authorized literary register and the class-dependent right to speak out at all are still being resolved today. Moreover, the political allegiances that accompany the debate are, it seems to me, depressingly similar to those that prevailed in the time of Hunt, Keats, J. G. Lockhart, Blackwood's implacable ideologue, and the Quarterly's hatchet man, William Gifford (whom Hazlitt termed a `government automaton').2 A note about my own language: I have endeavoured to make this book as readable as possible, which means that `sites of disturbance', `signifying edges', `fissures' in meaning (an event more common in criticism that employs such terms than in the literature it claims to describe), `gendered spaces' and other showy but all too often imprecise terminology have been kept to a minimum. Where such phrases are appropriate, I have not shied away from using them; but these cases are few in number. The absence of a vogue nomenclature need not be interpreted as an absence of theoretical complexity, however; nor as indicative of inveterate resistance to theory. I hope that accessibility and readability will be taken as virtues, not weaknesses. I am grateful to those scholars and friends who, over the years, have helped lift my critical perspective: particularly Andrew Wawn, who is as generous with his time now as he was when he oversaw my thesis; Damian Walford Davies, whose friendship, erudition and cooking have all been life-savers (on many occasions simultaneously); and John Whale, who co-directed my doctoral studies with great care and diligence. Warmest thanks also to Jane Aaron, John Barnard, Peter Barry, David Fairer, Michael Franklin, Alison and Andrew Hadfield, Lesley

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

xii Preface

Johnson, Claire Jowett, Paulina Kewes, Birte Marggraf, Anne MarggrafTurley, Rory and Posy McTurk, Seamus Perry, Lyn Pykett, Francesca È rgen Rhydderch, Nicholas Roe, Krys and Dennis Turley, Diane Watt, Ju Wittenbrink and Tim Woods, who read work and/or provided muchneeded encouragement (as well as ideas, which I cheerfully `borrowed'). I also wish to acknowledge Palgrave's anonymous reader, whose suggestions proved extremely helpful at an early stage in this book's composition. It goes without saying that any remaining errors of fact or interpretation are mine. I am beholden, too, to several librarians who arranged access, often at short notice, to rare or difficult to obtain publications; I blush now when I recall certain uncharitable remarks concerning the bibliographical profession that appear in my study guide, Writing Essays: A Guide for Students in English and the Humanities (London: Routledge, 2000). In particular I would like to thank Sally Speirs and Christine Ferdinand, Assistant Librarian and Fellow Librarian respectively at Magdalen College, Oxford; the staff of the Brotherton Library, University of Leeds (especially Special Collections); and staff at the National Library of Wales and the Hugh Owen Library, University of Wales, Aberystwyth. Thanks are due to staff at the Bodleian Library and Duke Humfrey's Library (particularly Bruce Barker-Benfield). I have also benefited from the resources of Leeds City È ck UniversitaÈtsbibliothek Library, Oldenburg Landesbibliothek, Osnabru Èhe Neuzeit, Osnabru Èck. Finally, I should like to thank and the Institut Fru those unsung heroes and heroines who maintain the British Library's online OPAC services, which proved indispensable when I was putting the final touches to this book in Germany. Many thanks to Glasgow Museums (The Stirling Maxwell Collection, Pollok House), for permission to reproduce Blake's `Adam Naming the Beasts'. Also to Special Rider Music for permission to quote from Bob Dylan's lyrics. I am grateful to the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, for generous travelling expenses that enabled me to visit libraries in various far-flung (from Aberystwyth) places; and to my editors at Palgrave, Eleanor Birne, Emily Rosser and Rebecca Mashayekh, for the good humour and energy with which they have seen this project through to completion. I owe the deepest debt of all to my wife, Anne, and to my children, Leah and Nils, to whom I dedicate this book. It's only words, but, as the King says, `words are all I have . . . ' Richard Marggraf Turley Lechtingen, 2002

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Preface xiii

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

This page intentionally left blank

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Understanding the past is a little like trying to make sense of other people's conversations from a long way off. Both practices involve interpretation, and both can be perilous undertakings. This is especially true if the critic experiences a temptation (or misconstrues an invitation) to join in these historical exchanges. Stephen Greenblatt, for example, began his groundbreaking Shakespearean Negotiations with the desire to `speak with the dead'.1 My aspirations in this book are limited to overhearing the dead men and women of history speak ± `word by word, and line by line', as Tennyson puts it ± while recognizing with Tennyson that `matter-moulded forms of speech' always threaten to dissolve into `vague words' in the instant they promise revelation (In Memoriam, xcv, 33, 45±6). It is instructive to note that translated literally, `overhear' in German (uÈberhoÈren: uÈber, `over'; hoÈren, `to hear'), functions very differently from its English counterpart. The word is what language teachers call a `false friend': something that sounds as if it ought to signify similarly in different languages, but in fact doesn't. Rather than denoting the act of listening in on somebody, uÈberhoÈren signals that one has missed (heard `over' or `above') what has been said. While writing the current volume, I have become painfully aware that any attempt at historical representation is likely to involve both English and German senses of `overhear'. The argument I will be unfolding over the following chapters is that Wordsworth, Hunt, Percy Shelley, Keats and the young Tennyson, as well as several other less well-known figures like Barry Cornwall (pseudonym for Bryan Waller Procter) and Thomas Noon Talfourd, were part of a self-consciously political `project' that sought to modify literary taste by debating the nature of language. Encouraged by new philological theories that stressed the rootedness of political structures in language, Romantics believed that reforming literary idiom was the first step towards achieving political reform. The project involved Romantic writers in a series of fiery controversies, with both sides sufficiently familiar with linguistic theory to be able to draw on a range of British and Continental philologists for authority. These included Johnson, Murray, Lowth, Rousseau, Condillac, Herder, Friedrich Schlegel, Horne Tooke, Monboddo, Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm. I will be contending that so thoroughly was the Romantic imagination transxv

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Introduction

formed by its encounter with philology, which routinely addressed `ultimate' questions about the origin and constitution of language, that our conception of Romanticism is necessarily flawed without taking proper account of the relationship. The idea of a link between Romantic theories of literature, poetry of the period and contemporary linguistics is not introduced here for the first time, of course. It is virtually a cliche to say that, steeled by new confidence in the status of the northern languages (including English) relative to Latin and Greek, and encouraged by Herder's linguistic philosophy, with its emphasis on the intrinsic value of mother tongues, Romantic writers rejected neoclassical diction, syntax and prosody and began envisaging an alternative poetic language. This idiom would be plastic, malleable and supremely capable of conveying the nuances of human experience. It would free the Romantic imagination and represent a means of accessing a new kind of `genuine' poetry. The `story' has been familiar since M. H. Abrams's monumental The Mirror and the Lamp, and even earlier.2 But the dialogic complexity, fraught transmission of ideas across continents and mindsets, and epoch-defining clashes of ideology that constitute the reception of `genuine' idiom, have not been fully explored in a book-length study. Over the course of my analysis, I scrutinize a series of ideological struggles originating in opposing views of language in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. I will be gauging the degree to which the body of poetry we now call Romantic was informed by, and contributed to, these struggles. Taking into account dictionary prefaces, letters, rare pamphlets, prefaces to poems, memoirs, unpublished manuscripts, journal articles and a wide range of canonical and less familiar Romantic writing, my book charts the philological allusiveness of poetry of the period. In recent years, Romantic studies has been transformed by a series of historicist critiques. Centring largely on Keats and Wordsworth, these have drawn attention to the minute enmeshment of Romantic poetry in the politics of the age. We can differentiate broadly between two critical demeanours, which perceive texts as eliding or encoding history. Thus in Jerome McGann's hermeneutics, Keats shows readers `how they might, by entering his poetic space, step aside from the conflicts and tensions' of the period.3 For Nicholas Roe, on the other hand, Keats demonstrates poetry's `complex and subtle negotiations with history'.4 Despite their different accentuations, both historicisms have the same effect of dismantling the `aesthetic' view of Keats as `self-enclosed and ahistorical'.5 This approach carries obvious force for an investigation

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

xvi Introduction

such as mine, which seeks to reconnect Romanticism with the linguistic dynamics that I argue helped determine an important part of its character. This is not to deny outright the existence of an aesthetic (the terminus ad quem of some materialist criticism). It seems to me quite possible that a few individuals do enjoy a degree of agency outside the historical contingencies of their age. This separates someone who can write `La Belle Dame Sans Merci' ± a poem that may appear to modern readers as wilfully `self-enclosed', cosseted in a timeless world of romance fantasy ± from everybody else. Actually, `La Belle Dame Sans Merci' is not the best example to choose to push this case, since in some respects the poem is demonstrably `of its age'. To begin with, it references a vogue for ballads and pseudo-archaic poems stimulated by publications like Thomas Percy's Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1765), and supported by a burgeoning number of philological societies. Keats's poem is engaged with linguistic theory in other ways, too. I will explain what I mean. Changing attitudes towards language in Britain and on the Continent not only reshaped the relationship of Romantic writers to texts, but, as I will be demonstrating in subsequent chapters, also that of texts to Romantic writers. At the turn of the eighteenth century, we witness the evolution of a new kind of poem, one that displays an extraordinary degree of self-knowledge about its own involvement in, and inflection by, philological polemic. Such inwardly referential poems include Wordsworth's `Simon Lee' and `The Brothers', Hunt's The Story of Rimini, Keats's `Specimen of an Induction to a Poem' and `La Belle Dame Sans Merci', as well as Tennyson's `The Dell of E±' and `The Talking Oak'. These are all works, I argue, that subtly but firmly situate themselves in history by dramatizing the linguistic issues at the core of their existence as poems, works that perform the philological basis of their own ontology. In the light of this statement, I want to take a moment to look more closely at Keats. This allows for a `practical demonstration' of arguments that will be developed in more detail later in this book.

Language strange `La Belle Dame Sans Merci' is not a text that we are accustomed to thinking about in terms of language debates. Yet we do not have to look at the poem for very long to appreciate that it is `about' language in a fairly obvious sense. `Language strange', as the desolate knight-at-arms puts it at line 27:

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Introduction xvii

xviii Introduction

To be more specific, it is about the choices to be made regarding language; and where literary taste is concerned such choices are, it seems to me, invariably political. The first of these occurs in the opening line of the poem: is the hero to be a `knight-at-arms' or a more archaic and philologically interesting `wretched wight'? As it turned out, Keats was unable to decide. He utilized both options in different versions of the poem. `Wretched wight' appeared in the text published in Leigh Hunt's Indicator on 10 May 1820, while `knight-at-arms' was used in the version that appeared in Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, published in July 1820. Uncertainties about language, significant enough within the context of a single poem, evolved into serious dilemmas when Keats was forced to decide whether to continue writing in the vein of Milton, employing Latinate inversions and classical rhetoric, or to turn instead to the (for Romantic sensibilities) quintessentially `English' textures of Chapman, Spenser, Chatterton and Chaucer. The choice facing the knight in `La Belle Dame Sans Merci' is compellingly analogous to that facing philologically informed poets like Keats. Either one embraces an older, often unsettling discourse, imbued with what Romantics configured as the immediacy of a pre-Restoration idiom (at once familiar and estranged), heard in La Belle Dame's anxiety-inducing professions of love (ll. 27±8). Or else one remains within the reasonable, restricted and strictured tradition of the linguistic patriarchs ± stern prescriptivists such as Samuel Johnson and Lindley Murray, the `pale kings and princes' of the philological world. These figures issue a dire warning to the knight/poet: I saw pale kings and princes too, Pale warriors, death-pale were they all; They cried ± `La Belle Dame sans Merci Hath thee in thrall!' (ll. 37±40) In other words, the choice figured here is between `thraldom' to a set of pre-Restoration linguistic values, represented by the Lady; or to a set of hegemonizing neoclassical tenets, enforced by the repressive, reaction-

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

She found me roots of relish sweet, And honey wild, and manna dew, And sure in language strange she said ± I love thee true. (ll. 25±8)

ary and thoroughly apprehensive `pale kings and princes', embodied by Johnson and Pope. We could say that Keats's poem as a whole selfreflexively dramatizes the pull between prescriptivism and the prospect of a new, `genuine', but not unproblematic experience of language.6 Keats did not wrestle with such dilemmas alone. `La Belle Dame Sans Merci' should be seen within the context of a wider Romantic project to restore meaningful diction to poetry in the modern age (an enterprise that parallels the endeavours of philologists to reconstruct more replete forms of historical languages). Keats's acquaintance Barry Cornwall was addressing similar questions, for instance. In stanza 2 of Diego de Montilla (1820), we find a discussion of octava rima. There is more at stake than rhyme scheme alone, however: But, for the octave measure ± it should slip Like running water o'er its pebbled bed, Making sweet music, (here I own I dip In Shakespeare for a simile) and be fed Freely, and then the poet must not nip The line, nor square the sentence, nor be led By old, approv'd, poetic canons; no, But give his words the slip and let 'em go.7 Cornwall, then, rejects what he considers to be the sentence squaring and `approv'd, poetic canons' of neoclassicism presided over by Pope and Johnson, and appeals instead to the authority of an exemplary preRestoration author, Shakespeare. Taking note of such routine interventions into the politics of language as Diego de Montilla, another of my aims in this book is to illustrate Gene W. Ruoff's insight that `the genuinely revolutionary nature of English Romanticism is found in its conception of poetry itself, a conception which diverges clearly and sharply from the poetics of Neoclassicism'.8 For `poetry', we could substitute `language' since Romantic critiques of poetry typically begin with a critique of language. This new conception of poetry is sketched out in Romantic prose. We find it in philologically preoccupied essays such as Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and Aids to Reflection, Hunt's Preface to Rimini and Percy Shelley's Defence of Poetry. It is developed in essays and lectures by Hazlitt, as well as in the Preface to his Grammar. But it is also explored, self-referentially, in Romantic poetry: in works like Keats's `La Belle Dame Sans Merci' and `Specimen of an Induction to a Poem', Cornwall's Diego de Montilla and Wordsworth's `Simon Lee' ± works

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Introduction xix

that are not usually read within a philological frame of reference. The discussions about language examined in this book are audible across the span of Romantic writing, involving minor and major publications, well-known and (now) obscure figures. Kurt Mueller-Vollmer identifies a prolonged `neglect of the linguistic dimension of Romanticism in general', a neglect that has warped our conception of the Romantic period.9 The ensuing chapters offer a corrective, detailing the mutually informative interaction between theories of language and literature, retrieving the philological debates that accompanied, inflected and in a vital sense helped to form the Romantic consciousness. The introductory chapter tours the hinterland of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century linguistic theories, giving an account of key ideas and new paradigms that began to reorient the status of northern languages such as English more favourably in relation to Latin and Greek. It also examines how a broad equation between the quality of language and wider culture lodged itself in the Romantic imagination. The notion that language reflected, or in Condillac's eyes enabled, social progress was the theoretical bedrock on which Wordsworth, Hunt and Keats founded their challenges to neoclassical diction, and should thus be seen as the context within which these poets performed their contestations of the literary status quo. My principal focus in Chapter 2 is on the radical charge of Lyrical Ballads. I read individual poems as `dramatizations' of the philologically informed opposition mounted in Wordsworth's prefatory matter. By exploring ways in which Romantic poetry appears, at the level of narrative, to be conscious of its philological reflex, I extend Michael O'Neill's recent investigation into the unique degree of self-consciousness found in Romantic texts, compared to poems of other periods.10 Chapter 2 also highlights the cultural politics that soured Wordsworth's initially uneventful reception, and links the revision of even-handed critiques of Lyrical Ballads to the appearance in 1816 of Leigh Hunt's The Story of Rimini, a publication associated with radical politics and adulterous desire. Chapter 3 addresses the appeal for British Romantics of the concept of Volksstimme (`voice of the people'), as gleaned from the works of Herder, Condillac, Friedrich Schlegel and others. In addition, it inspects the attempt by reviewers to ensure that in the reception of Hunt and Keats a coherent Romantic programme of radical linguistics remained muffled by `decoy' issues such as Keats's sexual `indecency' and Hunt's `degenerate' morality. Even when these writers' linguistic challenges were addressed directly in journals like Blackwood's, the Eclectic and the Quarterly, they were typically presented as further expressions

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

xx Introduction

of onanistic self-indulgence.11 I want to contend, however, that attacks on the political and sexual personae of Romantic authors (as well as on their geographical personae as culturally insignificant `Cockneys' or `Lakers') were used by proponents of conservative ideology as a disguised form of combat against the real threat of linguistic revolution. This chapter examines, too, an echo in a Keats letter of a short phrase from a rare pamphlet by Charles Cowden Clarke defending Hunt's idiom in Rimini. The echo, I argue, represents an important, if overlooked, link between Keats and a community of `Cockney' authors who shared a radical disposition regarding language. Phrases from Clarke's pamphlet also turn up in Percy Shelley's Defence of Poetry, underlining the extent to which we are justified in speaking of a `community' of theorized linguistic resistance at this juncture. Although Keats receives attention in Chapter 3, since he is the Romantic author no critical study, so far as I am aware, has sought to associate with philological debates in any concerted sense, I devote my fourth chapter to outlining his consciousness of primary works of linguistic philosophy. Key among these was Etienne Bonnot de Condillac's An Essay on Human Knowledge (1746), translated into English in 1756 by Thomas Nugent. I remark that several commanding ideas and images from Condillac reappear dramatically in Keats's letters and verse, including `Ode on a Grecian Urn' and `Ode on Melancholy'. As a `coda' to this discussion, I consider the implicit criticisms of neoclassical attitudes towards language that Keats would have found in his copy of Nathaniel Bailey's An Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1721). Chapter 5 maps the routes by which a new, comparative study of language entered Britain from the Continent in the 1830s. I concentrate especially on the reception by English-speakers of German grammarian, Jacob Grimm. These sections investigate the impact of Grimm's work on the construction of a nationalistic, proto-Victorian vision of English. In Chapter 6, I read Tennyson as a poet wavering perilously between two philological traditions: a Coleridgean notion of language as `living'; and a bleaker sense of language as autonomous ± as `arbitrary, hollow, and insincere', in F. D. Maurice's stark formulation. I argue that Tennyson's determination to develop an inherently meaningful, more emphatic poetic diction capable of resisting arbitrariness places him squarely in the Romantic project described in earlier chapters. My emphasis throughout this book is on demonstrating that philology is not just inertly contextual to the production of Romantic literature, but part of the intellectual climate that made this production possible. I will be claiming that linguistic publications of the age,

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Introduction xxi

although often disregarded within Romantic studies, actively and occasionally spectacularly collude in the construction of Romantic texts. By mingling canonical and non-canonical material from two `disciplines' ± `Lang.' and `Lit.' ± I seek to make a whole area of literature and intellectual history available in a new conjunction, amending our understanding of Romanticism at the level of form and content.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

xxii Introduction

Paradigms Lost (and Regained): Eighteenth-Century Language Theory

This chapter explores linguistic theories and outlooks on language that informed Romanticism's challenge to established literary tenets. Rather than attempting to treat individual doctrines in exhaustive detail, my objective is to indicate contexts and environments for the emergence of a discrete set of attitudes towards language, and poetic language in particular, that we have come to regard as prototypically Romantic. The following sections are greatly indebted to earlier surveys, especially to Hans Aarsleff's pioneering investigations into historical linguistics, The Study of Language in England, 1780±1860 and From Locke to Saussure, Olivia Smith's indispensable study of neglected political dimensions to grammars and dictionaries, The Politics of Language, 1791±1819, Linda Dowling's perceptive commentary on `Romantic philology' in the opening sections of Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de SieÁcle, James C. McKusick's assured exposition of linguistic traditions in Coleridge's Philosophy of Language, and William Keach's fine essay on `Romanticism and Language' in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism. Although this chapter seeks to summarize trends and dispositions within eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century theories of language, my aim is nevertheless to `agitate' the texts I discuss, making them chemically `active', so to speak. They will then be able to interact with poems and other documents that appear later in this book. One of my principal concerns is to explore the intriguing fact that despite possessing (at one level) deeply antagonistic demeanours, Romantic and neoclassical literary values shared a crucial linguistic premise, namely, that `good' language gave rise to, and was thought to guarantee, `good' culture, of which literature was a prime expression. 1

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

1

Where Romantic authors interpreted the nexus between language and wider culture to mean that social and political reform could best, or only, be effected through linguistic reform, conservative ideology insisted that what figures like Hunt and Keats regarded as `genuine' poetic language was actually a canting, unintelligible and, more to the point, `unauthorized jargon'.1 Worse still, commentators feared, if this so-called jargon was instituted it would unleash unimaginable horrors into the literary and thus wider cultural sphere. The coupling of language with the history ± and future ± of its speakers was arguably the single most important facet of the eighteenth century's intellectual legacy. It was crucial not just for the formation of an integrated Romantic theory of poetry, but also for a Romantic theory of culture and society. Equipped with the new philosophy, a range of broadly oppositional authors embarked on a literary project that sought to institute social reforms via a reform of language. As we will see, Wordsworth's object in Lyrical Ballads was to `demolish' what Ruriko Suzuki has termed the `privileged language of the established class'.2 Similarly, a key purpose of Hunt's and Keats's experimental verse was to unsettle the linguistic conventions underpinning `high' culture that contributed to keeping (relatively) low-class, non-classically educated writers out of the literary tradition. The ferocity with which the establishment denounced this new poetics from its mouthpieces, the Quarterly Review and Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, can be explained in part by the fact that just as Romantic writers inherited the eighteenth century's understanding of language as the outward guide to the inner health of a nation, so too did conservative reviewers. For this deeply and increasingly apprehensive group of readers, the thought that the literary and political status quo might be vulnerable to rogue theories of diction was supremely disquieting. Such anxieties were by no means unique to the early nineteenth century. The possibility that language, and hence wider culture, might be decaying had already prompted cultural guardians like Dr Johnson, Lindley Murray and Robert Lowth to submit English to a process of `cultivation', `improvement', `refinement', `polishing' and `fixing' (all ideologically freighted terms from neoclassical discourses on taste). Lowth, whose A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1762) had gone through 22 editions by 1795, proclaimed that the only way for speakers of English to express themselves `with propriety' was for scholars like himself `to lay down rules'.3 The resulting `predictable' cadences and `stultified' diction (according to the rhetoric of Romantic opposition), formed the literary edifice that writers like Hunt, Keats and

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

2 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 3

The book is written, is better than The book is wrote. Wrote however may be used in poetry; at least, if we allow any authority to poets, who, in the exultation of genius, think themselves entitled to trample on grammarians.4 This remark is revealingly paradoxical. While in the Plan of A Dictionary, Johnson (1709±84) famously stated that he would use expressions from the work of `those whom we commonly stile polite writers' to authorize his definitions of words, at the same time he worries that these authors' very creativity with language might corrode the linguistic values he is most anxious to preserve.5 It is worth pointing out, however, that while Johnson exerts an enormous influence within the history of prescriptive linguistics, he did not represent the unified face of eighteenth-century lexicography. One thing that will become apparent in this chapter is that language study of the period was anything but a homogeneous discipline. In 1788, for instance, the archly conservative Gentleman's Magazine became the forum for a bitter lexicographical quarrel over the use of Latin and Greek terms in English; the brief but heated exchange underlines Tony Crowley's point that prescriptivism has histories, rather than a history.6 Controversy was provoked by Croft's announcement of his plan to revise Johnson's Dictionary. In the course of the debate, many longstanding grievances were aired. Johnson was attacked for his `hobbyhorse' of `long sounding words, derived from the Latin'.7 It was even suggested that these terms, although intended as a remedial measure, were themselves `barbarisms' that threatened to corrupt the language. One year later, in 1789, Noah Webster (1758±1843) went so far as to denounce Johnson's literary style as `an intolerable composition of Latinity, affected smoothness, scholastic accuracy and roundness of periods'.8 Several of what we might think of as peculiarly `Romantic' objections to `high' English culture and its guarantor, `refined' language, were actually prefigured by the challenges of now frequently obscure eighteenth-century compositors of school grammars, etymological dictionaries and linguistic philosophies. As well as identifying shared epistemologies, the following sections trace the solidification of attitudes

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

the young Tennyson would work so assiduously to undermine. Poetry was regarded with especial suspicion, as we can gauge from the following passage that appeared in the short Grammar prefixed to the `epitome' version of Johnson's Dictionary (1755):

4 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

towards language and literature in the eighteenth century that were to form the basis of the broad Romantic/neoclassical schism.

The origin and nature of language counts as one of the period's crucial debates ± perhaps the most crucial, since it was arguably the topic that, more than any other, engrossed experts and dilettantes alike across a range of disciplines, impacting as it did on so many different areas of thought. We find, for instance, some of the most influential concepts of language advanced by a political economist (Adam Smith), a social theorist (Jean-Jacques Rousseau), a materialist philosopher (Etienne Bonnot de Condillac) and a radical parliamentarian (John Horne Tooke), this in addition to the host of publications issuing from `bona fide' lexicographers and grammarians like Lindley Murray and Robert Lowth. If the plural nature of the problem attracted scholars from other fields such as theology, politics, philosophy, anthropology, history, evolutionary theory, economy, geology and philology, the various discourses had a tendency to get hopelessly entangled. Debates on the origin of language automatically prompted an array of other questions, not all of which existed easily or even helpfully alongside each other. Was language divinely bestowed or a human invention? Was the È hme right to insist that language began with German mystic Jakob Bo `that Tongue which Adam named all the Creatures by in Paradise'?9 Was this unified language destroyed with the Confusion of Tongues at Babel, when God demonstrated to over-aspiring mankind the direct link between language and power? These conundrums in turn summoned a series of embedded arguments, no less hotly disputed. Were nouns or verbs the first elements of grammar? Were signs random, arbitrary designations? Were they inherently unstable? In 1866, after more than a century of debates without any resolution in sight, the SocieÂte Linguistique prohibited all investigations pertaining to the origin of language.10 To begin with a few broad distinctions, neoclassicists tended to think that language had been created, or rather invented, in an imperfect state but had improved as society advanced, culminating in Latin and Greek. After this high point, near-terminal decline was assumed to have set in, affecting modern languages so catastrophically that a dictionary such as Johnson's was required to `fix' English and thus prevent further decay. Romantics, on the other hand, inclined to believe that language was most poetical at its inception and that in addition to a natural decline of

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The origin of language

its powers, English had also had to contend with the misguided attempts of grammarians after the Restoration to import job lots of Latin and Greek words, together with classical rules of grammar and literary composition. The result was the artificial and contrived idiom of Pope and Dryden, thoroughly unsuited to the production of poetry, Romantics argued. Reactionaries insisted that while the perfection of language might have been lost (or never have existed), it had also been regained once in the form of the classical tongues, and could therefore be salvaged a second time by making English as similar to Latin and Greek as possible. Romantics replied that poetic power could only be returned to English by putting as much distance between it and the classical tongues as was feasible in a hybrid language. For authors like Hunt and Keats, this meant reinstating the literary values of the last epoch in which they considered English to have been half-equal to the task of poetic expression: the period of literary creativity that had been so decisively curtailed by the Restoration. `Pre-Restoration' became a rallying cry for those who wished to assert an alternative model of literary taste. It functioned as an umbrella term, taking in such diverse authors as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Spenser. The bid to return to a prior scene of purer poetic idiom is a feature of much Romantic theorizing on language. It is, for example, mounted in Wordsworth's prefatory matter to Lyrical Ballads, Leigh Hunt's Preface to The Story of Rimini, Keats's letters whenever they address the question of language, as well as in prose by less well-known Romantic figures, such as Barry Cornwall's Preface to Dramatic Scenes (1820), where the author informs readers that his object was `to try the effect of a more natural style than that which has for a long time prevailed'.11 We should not be blinded to the political plangency of this statement by Cornwall's clearly facetious concluding paragraph: One word more. I have touched neither upon politics nor polemics: and if an occasional sentence should seem to bear on either of those subjects, it is contrary to my wish, and I disclaim the inference. (p. iv) The Romantic undertaking to `reinstate' an earlier period of literary clarity was in and of itself political, and was understood as such by reviewers, as I will be demonstrating in later chapters. These are intended to be general observations; the intellectual sources for the broad positions I have just adumbrated now need to be inspected more closely. Within a year of each other, two prominent inquiries into

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 5

origins went through the press: 1761 saw the appearance of Adam Smith's immensely influential essay, `Considerations Concerning the First Formations of Languages'; in 1762, Joseph Priestley's Course of Lectures on the Theory of Language and Universal Grammar was published.12 Both put forward theories of linguistic descent that effectively moved language from the divine sphere into a mortal realm. Smith (1723±90) envisaged language as a human invention, one that had developed according to the requirements of speakers. As life became more complex, Smith suggested, specific terms that would have characterized the first vocabulary gave way to general and abstract words. Hypothetical `radicals' such as `cave', `tree' or `fountain' would initially have referred to a particular cave, tree or fountain; only later would these have established themselves as discrete generic terms.13 Priestley (1733±1804) also looked on language as a human invention, which had arisen through the `necessity of giving names to new objects, new ideas, and new combinations of ideas' (p. 169). For both men, then, language was originally simple in construction but was thought to have become increasingly intricate, reflecting the needs of speakers. The epistemological tradition in Britain for invented language was Lockean materialism. Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) argued that words were selected on an arbitrary basis; in this schema there was no innately meaningful relationship between a `tree' and the object signified by that term. At the other end of the spectrum È hme, a self-taught theorist and visionary, whose comwe find Jakob Bo È hme plete works were translated into English between 1764 and 1781. Bo perceived an essential connection between words and the things they denoted. He went so far as to insist that the sound of a word alone embodied the most important aspects of its meaning. I want to look È hme's philosophies of language because although theoreticbriefly at Bo ally outdated when they appeared in collected form in English in the second half of the eighteenth century, and tainted by association with È hme's notion of inherently meaningful language fired the mysticism, Bo imaginations of several Romantics. With the notable exception of Blake and the possible exception of Coleridge, these authors did not indulge in systematic mysticism themselves, however, and rarely admitted È hme, openly to admiring the German. Whenever Hazlitt alludes to Bo it is almost always by way of a disapproving connection between ColerÈ hme's muddled mysticism. idge's visionary `flights underground' and Bo To be sure, Coleridge admired the German shoemaker for `dar[ing] to think for himself', but in Chapter 9 of Biographia Literaria, he also referred disparagingly to the latter's `delusions'.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

6 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

È hme's linguistic philosophy, first published in German in the Bo È hme's 1630s, turns on the idea of Adamic language: Natursprache, in Bo terminology ± the Language of Nature. At the centre of this theory lay a conviction that `the inward speaketh forth the outward' (Works, II, 52). È hme's conception of language, words could be relied on According to Bo to reveal or perform their own meanings: As the Mouth formeth the word Schuff [which signifies Created] just so was the Creation formed: for the Lips open, and the upper Gums with the Teeth touch the underlip, and the Spirit [or breath] hisseth through the Teeth: and it is thus; As the Lips [. . .] open, so hath the Matrix of the Genetrix opened itself [. . .] The hissing is the Fire, and out of the Fire [goes] the Air, as a Spirit of the Matrix. (Works, II, 53; translator's notes) The physical sound of a word, the very act of forming it with the mouth, was thus intimately bound up with signification. The doctrine was grounded in Biblical narrative: objects and concepts had originally È hme believed, `according to the spirit and form of received names, Bo everything', a precedent set for mankind by Adam, who named the animals in Eden. È hme's plastic conception of language, words were constitutive: In Bo `Now as the Spirit of Eternity hath formed and framed all things, so also the spirit of Man formeth them in his World' (Works, II, 52). Merely by speaking, man, as the `similitude' of God, re-enacted on a smaller scale the creative force of the initial linguistic act (the Word) that called everything È hme that speakers relearned to venerate their into being. It was vital for Bo mother tongues, since it was here, he explained, rather than in Latin and Greek, that the Language of Nature still lingered. Even in this belated age, words retained traces of the essential `qualities' (defined as `the Mobility, boiling, Springing, and driving of a Thing', Works, I, 23), employed by God È hme's view, to speak in one's mother tongue was at the Creation. In Bo literally to help give form to the world. In the final chapter of this book, we will see how Tennyson's struggle to comprehend the nature of language È hmean/Coleridgean perspective, whereby words oscillates between a Bo are constitutive and pregnant with symbolic meaning, and a Lockean viewpoint, whereby words signify no more than their origin in sensation: where `the spirit does but mean the breath', in Tennyson's disconsolate phrase from section 56 of In Memoriam. È hmean reflex. We Several of Coleridge's ideas on language have a Bo hear the German faintly, perhaps, in a famous passage from a letter to

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 7

8 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Is thinking impossible without arbitrary signs? & ± how far is the word `arbitrary' a misnomer? Are not words parts & germinations of the Plant? [. . .] I would endeavor to destroy the old antithesis of Words & Things, elevating, as it were, words into Things, & living Things too. (Collected Letters, I, 625±6)14 Coleridge's flirtations with constitutive language and his theory of `outer-ance', the ability of language to ```outer'' that which is innerÈ hme.15 Echoes meaning', as Nicholas Reid put it recently, also recall Bo of the concept of Natursprache can be discerned, too, in Herder's notion of Volksstimme (`voice of the people'), a discourse that `remembered' the time when a more meaningful relationship prevailed between speakers, words and things: a relationship that could yet be recovered in the modern age, Romantics believed, if language were used carefully, and with one eye open to history. The `innate' theory of language, while never entirely suppressed, came under considerable pressure from those convinced that language was a human invention, one that had developed in accordance with speakers' ever-increasing needs. American lexicographer Noah Webster held a comparable view to Adam Smith and Joseph Priestley in this respect. His Dissertations on the English Language (1789) contended that languages changed `from age to age, in proportion to improvements in Science'.16 In short, `words multiply with ideas', Webster postulated. Nations that advanced more quickly than others towards a higher state of civilization (defined, unsurprisingly, on a European model) would possess correspondingly copious languages. He suggested that `primitive' peoples would only have required five or six hundred radical words to supply their needs, which would have been used figuratively. `Civilized' nations, on the other hand, combined these radicals to form `copious and elegant languages' (Dissertations, p. 43). In this manner, poetic language ceded to refined idiom. While Webster presents speech as a human invention, he is reluctant to jettison altogether the idea that speakers enjoyed an essential relationship with their languages, where each tongue reflected the character of the nation that spoke it. Custom and convention ± the `mutual contract' of Saussurean linguistics ± supplied the place of an Adamic identification of signs and referents in establishing deep and unique links between groups of peoples and

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

William Godwin of 22 September 1800, which disputes Horne Tooke's materialist division of `Words' and `Things':

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 9

As the English have attempted every branch of science, and generally proceeded farther in their improvements than other nations, so their language is proportionally copious and expressive. (p. 60) The seeds of nationalism in this hypothesis were to break ground later in the century (a theme addressed in detail in Chapter 5). Webster's An American Dictionary of the English Language, the work for which he is chiefly remembered today, was published in 1828. The lexicographer's belief in a deep correspondence between language and wider culture is apparent from his choice of title alone, which draws a distinction between British and American English, and was intended to reflect the spirit of a newly independent America. In simple terms, Webster believed that the fledgling nation required its own national idiom to give voice to its discrete aims and aspirations. The idea that language embodied national character was widely accepted by 1828, particularly on the Continent. In an 1811 manuscript, `Zur Poesie und Literatur' (On Poetry and Literature), which È ber die Alte und Neue Literaconstituted preparation for the influential U tur, Friedrich Schlegel (1772±1829) stated: `Das Wort ist das Letzte Resultat, der Geist des Lebens, s.[eines] Kampfs und s.[einer] Entwicklung' [the word is the final result, the spirit of life, its struggle and its development].17 Schlegel was later to call language `the storehouse of tradition where it lives on from nation to nation' and the `material and spiritual connexion which joins century to century ± the common memory of the human race'.18 Earlier, the doctrine had found influential expression in Condillac's Essai of 1746, and Johann Gottfried Herder's prize-winning Abhandlung uÈber den Ursprung der Sprache, first published in 1772.19 One of Herder's central propositions was that language arose out of mankind's instinctive distinguishing faculty, which located language unequivocally in a human sphere. Like many eighteenthcentury theorists, however, Herder (1744±1803) conjectured that prior to invented language there had been a `language of nature', an original Ursprache innate to humans and animals alike, which informed the most basic emotions and which had eventually been displaced in humans by `civilized and artful language'.20 The great appeal of Herder for Romantics lay in the relationship he posited between this

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

their respective tongues. Webster's presumption that national language mirrored national culture is clear throughout the Dissertations, informing passages like the following:

instinctive, performative, pre-Babelian language of nature and the refined tongues that came afterwards. In Herder's depiction, this original primitive idiom supplied the raw materials for `civilized' languages, acting as the sap that nourished the roots of human speech. Although È hme that human language had ever been truly Adamic few agreed with Bo or constitutive (James C. McKusick convincingly argues that by `natural language' even Wordsworth understood a secondary language of convention, albeit one that preserved more meaningful relationships between words and speakers than the capricious `hieroglyphics' of neoclassical diction),21 Ursprache was a potent rallying concept for oppositional linguists and writers. Authoritative scholarly support for Condillac's and Herder's idea of a primitive idiom arrived with the `discovery' of Sanskrit. In 1786, orientalist Sir William Jones offered a radically different view of languages before Latin and Greek. Rather than depicting early tongues as barbaric stages on the way to the classical revival of language, as was usual at the time, he suggested that Sanskrit had been `more perfect' than Latin and Greek, and even conjectured that all three had `sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists'.22 The notion of Ursprache made rapid landfall in the Romantic imagination. Part of its È hme, maintained that the attraction lay in the fact that Herder, like Bo spirit (if not the letter) of this primitive idiom was still audible in modern languages. Exclamations and outbursts of powerful emotions were examples of a more meaningful discourse reaching out of the past into present-day speech; hence the centrality of such displays in Lyrical Ballads (see Chapter 2). The closer `second' languages lay in historical proximity to the pristine language of nature, the more they retained of the essence of Ursprache, and thus the more they possessed of their original national character. British Romantics seized on this narrative. Wordsworth's assertion that spoken dialect ± the language of `low and rustic life' ± contained an inner voice that was in some way closer to the truths of nature than `cultivated' language, relies heavily on the concept of Ursprache, for example. Indeed, Linda Dowling suggests that Herder's understanding of language as the `outward expression of the inner essence' of a nation was one of the principal theoretical elements within `Romantic philology'.23 The ideal Romantic conception of language saw individual words as `outing' an inner core of meaning, and a complete web of such words (whole languages) as exteriorizing the essential characteristics of a much larger group of speakers. On a more practical basis, a major allure of Ursprache was its usefulness in sidestepping neoclassical protocols. Rather than having to tolerate the `elevation' of English with

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

10 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Latin and Greek terms, Romantics now had an opportunity of appealing directly to an older, more authoritative idiom. Like Herder, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712±78) also believed that human invention ± guided crucially by instinct ± had played a major role in the formation of the first human tongue. Rousseau proposed that language had developed `naturally, according to men's needs'.24 Johnson took up this theory eagerly, giving it his own spin. Language was not only not a gift of heaven, but was `thrown together by negligence [. . .] produced by necessity and enlarged by accident'. This disparaging appraisal sanctioned lexicographical schemes to `improve' English, as well as saving scholars from the invidious position of having to explain why God's handicraft needed refining in the first place.25 In the humanistic climate of the Enlightenment, the doctrine of invented language gained rapid support. James Burnet, Lord Monboddo, contributed to the groundswell of opinion. In his six-volume Of the Origin and Progress of Language, he even managed to affront Biblical prescript further by suggesting that the first language was not the exclusive preserve of a single group of people (Adam and Eve), but had developed independently in different areas of the globe.26 The addition of polygenesis to the debate demonstrates the overlaps (later to become pronounced) between linguistics and evolutionary theory, as well as illustrating how key discussions within ethnology and sociology were first rehearsed within philology. Edward Said estimates the major achievement of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philology to have been the `final rejection' of the divine origin of language.27 It is true that the eighteenth century succeeded, by and large, in shirking Biblical precept regarding the formation of language. Scholars routinely fantasized about reconstructing the initial and unsurpassed moments of human creativity that had given rise to the first language ± a blasphemous enterprise hitherto. Nevertheless, a strong and persistent body of opinion was content for the question of linguistic origins to remain a matter for scripture, and wherever possible endeavoured to bend philological discoveries in a way that supported the Biblical narrative. This in 1809, from Sanskrit and Anglo-Saxon scholar, Sharon Turner: It is certainly highly curious to trace, as well as to observe the degree of affinity which the elder parents discover to each other. [. . .] All the languages of Europe and Asia [. . .] point to some great original tongue which has been broken to pieces, and whose fragments have been scattered round the world by the dispersion and diffusion of its

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 11

12 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Indeed, while Said's analysis has a supporting body of evidence, JeanPierre Vernant's view that `the comparative philology of the ancient languages was a quest for origins, an attempt to return to a privileged moment in time when God, man, and natural forces still lived in mutual transparency', is also valid up to a point.29 It is probably most accurate to say that adherents of invented and revealed theories of language circled each other warily throughout the eighteenth century. One thing is indisputable, though: a fascination with absolute linguistic origins had taken hold, influencing the course of philological studies well into the self-consciously objective, `scientific' era of comparative philology in the 1830s and 1840s (the subject of Chapter 5). In any account of the linguistic philosophies that contributed to Romantic discourses on language, the work of Etienne Bonnot de Condillac should not be overlooked. Hans Aarsleff is hardly exaggerating when he remarks in his peppery collection of essays, From Locke to Saussure, that a history of language study that does not ascribe a central position to Condillac will not be worth very much (p. 291). If there has been a general failure to take proper notice of Condillac within linguistics, the situation is even more lamentable in Romantic studies, where Condillac has suffered the misfortune of being occasionally alluded to, even referred to in a second-hand sort of way, but not actually read very much. (Most quotations from his work seem to have their source in one or other of Aarsleff's surveys.) This, despite strong evidence to suggest that Romantic authors, especially Keats, were greatly influenced by Condillac's work ± particularly by the seminal Essai sur l'origine des connoissances humaines (1746), available in English via Thomas Nugent's 1756 translation, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge. Nugent's rendition of Condillac was not merely a route by which the Frenchman's ideas were transmitted into Romantic philology. The English version of the Essai also supplied Keats with suggestive phrases and images that resurfaced in major poems, including `Ode on a Grecian Urn' and `Ode on Melancholy', a case Chapter 4 presents in detail. In preparation for this later discussion, I want to outline Condillac's broader position within European language debates here. Condillac belongs within the empiricist tradition of Hobbes and Locke. The first part of the Essay was conceived as a `supplement' to Locke's own Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690), and attempts to establish the material `origin of our ideas', `unfold their formation,

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

primeval population. This is the fact which the Mosaic history implies.28

and trace them to the limits which nature has prescribed'.30 Since for Condillac `the origin and progress of our ideas' depended entirely on `the manner in which we make use of signs' (Essay, p. 338), this project entailed devoting the second half of his study to the subject of language and linguistic origins. Condillac saw language as a human invention, and concurred with Locke that `signs are arbitrary the first time they are employed' (Essay, p. 298). On the face of it, this renders the linguistic philosophy expounded in the Essay incompatible with Romantic notions of language as `living' and inherently, rather than just conventionally, meaningful. It is certainly true that Condillac regarded the nexus connecting language and speakers to have been founded on convention (`custom fixes the meaning of words', Essay, p. 306), rather than on a quasi-mystical identification of `pure' speakers with uncorrupted idiom, as suggested by Wordsworth in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads. However, `custom' in Condillac's system is a more dependable notion than in Saussure's (where language is envisaged as a conventional system of signs prone to endless slippages and troublesome deferrals of meaning). Despite being tarred with the brush of materialism, Condillac's views actually accorded in certain decisive respects with those of Romantics. Most importantly, the Essay acquiesced with a central Romantic assumption that language carried the imprint of national temperament: As government influences the character of a people, so the character of a people influences that of language. [. . .] Upon the whole [. . .] it appears that every language expresses the character of the people that speak it. (Essay, pp. 284±5) Romantics would also have discovered in Nugent's translation an authority for rejecting the `classicization' of English. The progress of language and the mind, Condillac explained, was a `great deal more rapid' in languages `not formed upon the ruin of others' because these tongues retained `a character from the original' (Essay, p. 289). Clearly, the long-practised use of classical vocabulary to shore up English could not be squared with this position. By the same token, there was an equally powerful paradigm in Condillac sanctioning conservative rejections of Romantic poetry: When a language abounds with original writers of every kind, the more a person is endowed with abilities, the more difficult he thinks

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 13

it will be to surpass them. A mere equality would not be his ambition; like them he wants the pre-eminence. He therefore tries a new road. But as the style analogous to the character of the language, and to his own, hath been already used by preceding writers, he has nothing left but to deviate from analogy. Thus in order to be an original, he is obliged to contribute to the ruin of a language, which a century sooner he would have helped to improve. (Essay, pp. 296±7) In some regards, Condillac's understanding of the frequently disabling relationship between modern writers and their illustrious literary predecessors anticipates Harold Bloom's theory of influence. But Condillac's purpose is to comment less on the psychology of influence than on its consequences for literary idiom. He remarks that the endeavour to escape earlier writers, while understandable, is a pernicious act with a tendency to precipitate linguistic corruption. J. G. Lockhart's objections to Keats's innovative and idiosyncratic diction could almost be modelled on the Essay's suspicion of `original writers'. Similarly, phrases used by Condillac/Nugent to denounce the `defects' of these ambitious authors (`subtil and strained conceits', `affected antitheses', `frivolous and far-fetched expressions', `new-fangled words', the `jargon of persons whose understandings have been debauched by bad metaphysics', together with the result, `vicious taste'), bear close comparison with the imprecations hurled at Romantic figures by conservative reviewers.31 Where Condillac is a key but under-acknowledged Continental influence in Romantic philology, another of Locke's followers, the radical member of parliament for Old Sarum, John Horne Tooke, is recognized as one of the most significant and certainly the most notorious British contributor to late eighteenth-century debates on the origin and nature of language. As well as inspiring radical figures such as Leigh Hunt and William Hazlitt, Tooke was, in James C. McKusick's estimation, a `seminal influence throughout most of Coleridge's intellectual career'.32 What is more, as McKusick also points out, Coleridge came to Tooke's linguistic theories through the older man's political views (p. 38). The first volume of EPEA PTEPOENTA; or, the Diversions of Purley appeared in 1786 and was reprinted in 1798, the year of Lyrical Ballads. In Olivia Smith's judgement, this was the `point of transition from eighteenthcentury theories of language to major philosophical statements of the nineteenth, such as the Preface to Lyrical Ballads'.33 Tooke's monumental study ± both quarto volumes are five hundred pages long ± is an investigation into the `causes of language' (I, 24), and was motivated in

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

14 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

part by the author's antipathy towards the linguistic values underpinning Johnson's Dictionary and Pope's poetry. The Diversions are framed around a conversation, a narrative device that was in itself politically charged, conversation being associated by the beleaguered Pitt government with seditious activities, with threats posed by radical corresponding societies and debating clubs. In volume one, the participants in the dialogue are John Horne (H.), who added `Tooke' to his name in 1783 in honour of his friend, William Tooke (T.), owner of the estate at Purley, and Richard Beadon (B.), master of Jesus College, Cambridge. The opening exchange is rich in allusion to Tooke's ongoing involvement in political struggle. H. and T. inform their visitor of the house rules at Purley, which dictate that politics must be left behind `in their proper atmosphere, the smoke of London'. B. ripostes that Englishmen are incapable of putting off politics for more than 24 hours since they `cannot be always on horseback or at piquet' (Diversions, I, 3). He demands to know what H. and T. talk about, if not politics. At this, T. insists that there are other topics for discourse, one such being grammar. The distinction is specious, of course, as H. immediately clarifies, remarking that the comprehension of language leads to the comprehension of `civil society'. This `Romantic' line of argument is quickly expanded, and serves as one of the book's central theoretical tenets: I very early found it, or thought I found it, impossible to make many steps in the search after truth and the nature of human understanding, of good and evil, of right or wrong, without well considering the nature of language, which appeared to me to be inseparably connected to them. (Diversions, I, 12) Apart from containing clear reverberations of Condillac, the passage points up the deliberate irony in T.'s suggestion that grammar could ever be an alternative to politics; indeed, the two are always entwined in the Diversions. H. then declares that his foremost aim in studying grammar has been to guard his mind from `the imposition of words' (I, 13). The use of precise grammar to resist linguistic skulduggery and obscurity is recommended in many oppositional works, including William Cobbett's Grammar of the English Language (1819). This was written specifically to protect the labouring classes from `the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than that which we ourselves intend them to express'.34 Like Condillac's philosophy of language, Tooke's disputations emerge out of the empiricist tradition of Locke. This is apparent in stock

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 15

formulations such as `the purpose of language' is simply `to communicate our thoughts' (Diversions, I, 17). The innovation of the Diversions is rather found in Tooke's idea that parts of the language have become abbreviated over time, donning wings, as it were, to dispatch meaning as speedily as possible. Words fall into two categories: they are either essential to the transmission of meaning (nouns and verbs), and function as the signs of things or ideas; or are `merely abbreviations' (particles, conjunctions and connectives), the `signs of other words', the `artificial wings of Mercury' (Diversions, I, 27), whose purpose it is to facilitate quick discourse. In Tooke's scheme, the historical process of abbreviation and the concomitant acceleration of signification was proof that language had improved from the `rude and tedious' discourse of the `original Mother-tongue' (Diversions, I, 146±8). The most ambitious yet at the same time thoroughly `eighteenthcentury' of Tooke's objectives, was to attempt to uncover the `intrinsic' meaning of words (Diversions, II, 259), to divine their `ontological presence and uniqueness' in Tom Paulin's phrase.35 Tooke believed that if the inner nature of language could be disclosed, `the nature of human understanding, of good and evil, of right or wrong' would soon follow (Diversions, I, 12); as Hans Aarsleff points out, for Tooke `the operations of mind are really operations of language' (Study of Language, p. 51).36 Tooke was persuaded that the earliest forms of words held the key to the intrinsic meaning of modern terms ± a conviction that involved him in a number of fanciful derivations. An infamous example of his etymological methodology is his explanation of bar, which Aarsleff considers perhaps `the most fantastic of all' (p. 63): A bar in all its uses, is a defence: that by which anything is fortified, strengthened, or defended. A barn (bar-en, bar'n) is a covered inclosure, in which the grain &c. is protected or defended from the weather [. . .]. A baron is an armed, defenceful, or powerful man. A barge is a strong boat. A bargain is a confirmed, strengthened agreement [. . .]. The bark of a tree is its defence [. . .]. The bark of a dog is that by which we are defended by that animal. (Diversions, II, 182±3) Such entertaining but wayward derivations contributed to the rapid decline of Tooke's reputation. After the importation of Continental philology in the late 1820s and 1830s (the comparative Sprachwissenschaft of Rask, Bopp and Grimm), the philologist became little more than a cautionary tale to other scholars. Recently, however, a new

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

16 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

appreciation of the political resonance of the Diversions has made Tooke the focus of renewed attention. Here Olivia Smith's study is pioneering. Tooke's work richly repays scrutiny of this kind, since its political textures are directly informed by the author's own experience of radical opposition and its often catastrophic consequences. In November 1794, Tooke was tried and acquitted for High Treason, after being incarcerated without charge for seven months. Others, such as his friend Gilbert Wakefield, were even less fortunate. Wakefield was imprisoned for two years after penning a seditious pamphlet, A Reply to some parts of the Bishop of Llandaff's Address (third edition, 1798); he left jail a broken man and died shortly afterwards in 1801. In defiant mood, Tooke uses the second volume of the Diversions to berate their collective opponents. Tooke's publisher, Joseph Johnson, who had seen Wakefield's pamphlet through the press and who was to have published Lyrical Ballads,37 lost his nerve at this point, opting to leave long blanks (Smith calls them `scars') in the text where offending phrases and sentences should have appeared. There is, to be sure, something poignant about the omission of words for political reasons in a book about the political significance and history of words. If Johnson was fearful of government action in these dangerous times for liberal dissenters, Tooke was undeterred. Indeed, his radicalism is suffused through the Diversions. For instance, in addition to tracing etymologies for `right', `wrong', `justice' and `law', terms that marked rigorous contestation, Tooke includes deliberately provocative running headers such as `Rights of Man' at the beginning of the second volume, takes numerous swipes at government abuses ± including the suspension of habeas corpus ± makes references to notorious sedition trials (Diversions, I, 86±7), and incorporates pointed examples like the following, which draws on Thomas Windham's Voyage to Benin (1553), ostensibly to illustrate the word `cowring': The King is served with great state. His noblemen never look him in the face, but sit COWRING upon their buttocks, with their elbows upon their knees. (Diversions, II, 43±4) Although Tooke was frequently vilified (or else ignored) by `authorized' grammarians, his views on language exerted considerable influence among oppositional theorists. As I have already mentioned, his belief that grammatical accuracy guarded against the `imposition' of words is echoed in Cobbett's own resolve to use grammar to thwart the `ingenuity' of the government to disrupt the adversarial cadences

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 17

of non-classically educated dissenters. The Diversions also proved an inspiration to a key Romantic language theorist, Leigh Hunt, who bade `adieu to the leaden Hermes of Mr Harris' as soon as he saw Tooke's politically charged volumes.38 Hazlitt, too, acknowledged his debt to Tooke. In The Spirit of the Age (1825), he noted approvingly that Tooke had examined `the meaning of words to prevent being entrapped by them'.39 Although Hazlitt comments that Tooke's politics `were not at all revolutionary' (Complete Works, XI, 53), his approbation of Tooke's reasons for investigating language is the handshake of one radical with another. Hazlitt also praised Tooke for not `explain[ing] the obscure by the more obscure, but the difficult by the plain, the complex by the simple' (Complete Works, XI, 56), an outlook that accorded with Hazlitt's own literary maxims. Hazlitt was especially drawn to the older radical's concept of abbreviation, since it refuted Lindley Murray's insistence in the English Grammar (1795) that English was `periphrastic and literal' (an imperfection that sanctioned so-called improvements using Latin and Greek), rather than `elliptical and idiomatic'.40 Hazlitt praised Tooke's work for making room for a conception of the national tongue as genuine and resourceful. A Romantic view of language, in other words. Another major appeal of Tooke, one that influenced Hazlitt when he came to write A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue (1811), was the former's rejection of the `blindness and obstinacy' of grammarians like Murray, who, Hazlitt complained, persisted in their belief that there were `six cases in English nouns' and that English verbs had `all the moods, tenses, and persons that the Latin ones have' (Complete Works, XI, 57).41 Warming to his anti-classical theme, Hazlitt declared: This is an extraordinary stretch of blindness and obstinacy. He [Murray] very formally translates the Latin Grammar into English, (as so many had done before him) and fancies he has written an English Grammar; and divines applaud, and schoolmasters usher him into the polite world, and English scholars carry on the jest, while Horne Tooke's genuine anatomy of our native tongue is laid on the shelf. (Complete Works, XI, 57) Hazlitt ends by alluding to the political reasons for Tooke's theories of language had been ignored or discredited. The following passage points up the intimate relationship between language, grammar and political power in the early nineteenth century:

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

18 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Can it be that our politicians smell a rat in the Member for Old Sarum? That our clerisy do not relish Parson Horne? That the world at large are alarmed at acuteness and originality greater than our own? What has all this to do with the formation of the English language or with the first conditions and necessary foundation of speech itself? Is there nothing beyond the reach of prejudice and party-spirit? (Complete Works, XI, 57) If Tooke's etymological derivations were considered fantastical by many readers, most audiences, no matter how hungry they were for new theories relating to the origin of language, dismissed Alexander Murray's intricate fantasies on the first human tongue as little short of deranged. The History of the European Languages appeared posthumously in 1826, although it had been written by 1813 (before the age of comparative linguistic study in Britain largely displaced `speculative' scholarship). In the third chapter, Murray (1775±1813) introduces his theory on the `Origin of the European Languages', conjecturing that ur-European language was invented by `a single tribe in the rudest ages and state of society'.42 Such a tongue would have been `unfinished', Murray postulates. Like Smith, Priestley and Webster, he believed it would have formed new words `from necessity', or, and here Murray reveals his Romantic leanings clearly, `at the call of a fertile imagination' (History, I, 488). His account continues with an unmistakably Romantic timbre: the `primitive inventors of our parent tongue', Murray declares, would have `perceived nature in a state of change around them' and `felt their own ability to act'. He then identifies the handful of `rude syllables' that formed `the base of that medium, through which Homer, and Milton, and Newton, have delighted or illumined mankind' (History, I, 29±31). `Ag! Ag!' was `to strike with swift equal penetrating or sharp effect'; `Wag', if the motion was `less sudden, but of the same species'; `Hwag', if made `with force and a great effort': The leader of a tribe might have instructed his warriors `RA G , R A G , R A G , run, run, run', `AG ! dart your arrows; DWA G ! dash with your clubs; BA G , beat; LA G , strike down; [. . .] MA G , bruise or murder the enemy. (History, I, 488) Murray goes on to explain how conjunctions, cases and inflections would all have been formed from these original syllables, in response to speakers' needs.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 19

Although Murray's theories of linguistic origins were dilettantish and easily mocked,43 the History deserves attention in Romantic studies for two reasons. First, it combines elements of earlier debates over invented or revealed languages with the linguistic philosophy of Wordsworth and Coleridge, as we can gauge from the following (entangled) passage: [The] idea of active power infuses into language a living and intellectual principle, which gives the system of speech that kind of vivid and interesting animation so much admired in descriptive poetry, because it fills all nature with energy and life. It is true, that language, in its progress gradually loses this character, and becomes a system of signs, apparently arbitrary as to their use and ordinary application. (History, I, 491±2) This speaks from a clear Romantic viewpoint. In particular, the notion of language possessing a `living and intellectual principle' resonates with Coleridge's notion of `living' language, while the idea that active power in speech `fills all nature with energy and life' is distinctly Wordsworthian. The passage is also `Romantic' in that it contains incipient traces of anxiety concerning arbitrary language, a trepidation that became pronounced in the 1830s and 1840s. Indeed, it foreshadows a linguistics we usually think of as Saussurean in its inception. Secondly, Murray's History is significant because it serves to map the grandeur of the Romantic imagination, which was not only capable of speculating about the first human language, but over two closely argued volumes could even identify with confidence its original radical components. If Wordsworth is frustratingly (though contingently) cagey about what `the real language of men' actually looked like, Murray had no such inhibitions, cataloguing the primitive idiom from its radical syllables upwards. Murray ends his study by railing against new, classically enhanced nomenclatures for science, claiming that `ordinary words, properly chosen and applied, may be made to express any shade of thought whatever' (History, I, 494). Echoing the emphasis placed by Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Cobbett on plain-speaking, the History confirms its political allegiance with, and participation in, the Romantic project outlined in the Preface to Lyrical Ballads, and developed in the work of Hunt, Shelley, Keats and Cornwall.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

20 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 21

Language and culture

1798, the year of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads and the second edition of Tooke's Diversions, also saw the publication of Three Philological Essays, Chiefly translated from the German of John Christopher Adelung, from which the above quotation is taken. This volume constituted a bid at sketching a history of English from the Anglo-Saxons onwards.45 The narrative is illustrated with excerpts from Caedmon, Bede, Langland, Chaucer and Gower at one end, and a series of popular eighteenth-century authors including Pope at the other; what is more, it is deeply and visibly indebted to a century of intense philological scrutiny. Although Adelung's historicism is rigorously engaged in contemporary linguistic scholarship, in terms of ideological viewpoint the Philological Essays are very much a product of modes of thought prevailing earlier in the century. A broadly neoclassical schema portrays Greece and Rome as the pinnacles of literary and cultural achievement. Although these paradigmatic civilizations indubitably declined, Adelung argues, the classical heritage enabled subsequent ages to extricate themselves from barbarity. For Adelung, the history of the English language `begins with the Anglo Saxons', a `rude, untutored people' who did `not stand in need of letters, or a written language' (Philological Essays, pp. v±vi). The stirrings of `English' civilization were only to be discerned when these `barbarous' and warlike people acquired a `taste for the literature of ancient Rome' (Philological Essays, p. viii). From this point on, Adelung's treatise presents a familiar, end-oriented view of English literature, whereby each successive literary epoch brought advances in poise and polish. The neoclassical bent of Adelung's account is tangible; but despite the emphasis placed on classical literature, the Philological Essays share important epistemological roots with another publication of 1798, Lyrical Ballads. This claim requires clarification since Wordsworth's attempt to restore to modern poetry a genuine poetic idiom lost in the course of successive periods of `refinement', and the teleological thrust of Adelung's account of steady linguistic and cultural improvement, seem to be pulling in two completely different directions. Despite their different emphases, though, Wordsworth's and Adelung's respective projects have one feature in common: both are predicated on a vital link between

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

If we attempt to trace the progress of a language, we shall always find it connected with the intellectual improvement of a people; for language, in every instance, is the first object in which national civilization becomes manifest.44

language and wider culture. As we see from the quotation at the head of this section, Adelung's history perceives a relationship between language and civilization based on reciprocity, where the progress of language is always `connected with the intellectual improvement of a people' (Philological Essays, p. xxxvi).46 For Adelung, to cultivate language is to cultivate the age. The prefatory and appended essays to Lyrical Ballads, with their governing conceit of `honest' language (one that did not employ a `motley masquerade of tricks [. . .] and enigmas', Appendix, p. 316), lingering in `honest' communities (where people were `less under the action of social vanity', Preface, p. 244), belong in the same philological and epistemological context as Adelung's history. In both Wordsworth's and Adelung's projections, language ± more specifically the history of language ± is the key to culture. I'd like briefly to sketch this mutual context. As we have seen, Herder compounded the history of humanity and language, declaring that the `entire structure of language' was nothing but a `manner of growth of [man's] spirit, a history of his discoveries' (`Essay on the Origin of Language', p. 132). He added that a history of the `generations' of language would be, `with all its deviations and excurses, a charter of the humanity of language' (p. 162). This was a view endorsed by Rousseau, who identified three corresponding stages of language and society: the savage, barbaric and civilized. His notion of `civilized' discourse is more akin to that of Wordsworth than Adelung, however, since `civilized' in Rousseau's linguistic philosophy is synonymous with a historical diminution of meaning. At each historical juncture, Rousseau supposed, words begin to drift from their referents, resulting in semiotic relationships becoming arbitrary and conventional (in 1839, John William Donaldson lent this analysis the weight of the new philology: `It is [. . .] the natural process in language, as it develops itself syntactically, to destroy the fullness and significance of its individual words').47 The depiction of language as a system containing and conveying important elements of national character is a defining trait of eighteenth-century philology. We see it, for instance, in Herder's notion that individual languages embodied an essence specific to its speakers (in Dowling's words, Herder considered `individual languages as the voices of historical cultures, and language itself as Volksstimme, the outward expression of the inner essence of a nation or people', Language and Decadence, p. 15).48 Condillac's Essai sur l'origine des connaissance humaines had advanced a similar position: `every language expresses the character of the people that speak it' (Essay, p. 285). As late as 1830, on the very eve of Continental philology's arrival in Britain, William Empson, discussing

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

22 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

translation, was articulating this paradigmatic eighteenth-century view as a self-evident truth: `The secret power of a language is frequently as undefinable as it is untransmittable. [. . .] The language of a nation becomes its atmosphere ± its own breath is in it'.49 The link between language and wider culture received coherent formulation from other eighteenth-century commentators. Those of a reactionary disposition, like Monboddo, tended to regard the relationship as a theoretical justification for issuing ominous warnings about the future of culture. The fourth volume of his Of the Origin and Progress of Language contends that `the history of language makes not an inconsiderable part in the history of man'; Monboddo adds that language mirrors the `genius and understanding' of a people (Progress of Language, IV, 170±1), which could only mean that any decline in literature ± the outward expression of `genius and understanding' ± went hand in hand with wider decay: `Is it possible, that there can be such a corruption of arts among a people, [. . .] without a degeneracy of the people?' (IV, 174). How, Monboddo demanded to know, did anyone who believed that mankind had progressed through history `reconcile their system with the universal degeneracy that we observe in the languages of all nations, whose antient language we know' (IV, 171). His conclusion was that the degeneration of language could result only in `the people, who speak the language, becoming barbarous and ignorant'. In various and often mysterious ways, the fate of a language, its literature, its speakers and their nation were felt to be interdependent at the deepest level. Should one of these four elements become precarious, the vulnerability extended to all. It was not until the new philology of Jacob Grimm and Rasmus Rask arrived in Britain in the 1830s, with its core tenet stating that language followed internal sound laws rather than mirroring the history of society, that the previous century's catenation of linguistic and cultural history began to be uncoupled ± and even then not completely. This left literature in something of a `No Man's Land'. Did poetry partake in a set of intrinsically meaningful relationships between words, thought and things; or was it meaningless, an arbitrary collection of hollow signs? This was precisely the dilemma played out self-referentially in Tennyson's early poetry, something I will be discussing in Chapter 5

Progress or degeneration? While Tooke insisted that language had as a whole improved down the ages due to the phenomenon of abbreviation, Latin and Greek represented the high point in this process:

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 23

I am strongly persuaded (and I think I have good reason to be so) that had the Greek and Latin Grammarians known and explained the nature and intrinsic value of the riches of their own language, neither would their descendants have lost any of those advantages in the corrupt and deficient state in which we, more and less, find them. For those languages which have borrowed these abbreviations, would have avoided the partiality and patchwork, as well as the corruptions and improprieties with which they now abound; and those living languages of Europe which still want these advantages wholly, would long ere this have intirely [sic] supplied their defects. (Diversions, II, 513) In fact, as Aarsleff points out, Tooke appears to have held both eighteenth-century `positions' on whether language was progressing or degenerating. In some respects, this dual outlook indicates the capricious, tricksy nature of Tooke's disputations; but it also discloses the vexed nature of the issue, as well as the level of general anxiety it induced. Uncertainty was by no means Tooke's exclusive preserve. Three years earlier, in the Preface to his English Etymology; or, A Derivative Dictionary of the English Language (1783), George William Lemon suggested that `all modern languages and particularly our own' had improved: `Who will not be candid enough to acknowledge that his native tongue has undergone a number of changes; and has preceded daily in improvement, till it has arrived at its present degree of perfection?'50 Just because classical languages declined their nouns and were not burdened with `the superabundant use of particles', Lemon objected, their advantages over English `ought not to be magnified too high, nor modern languages, our own especially, be decried too low' (Derivative Dictionary, p. iv). A nearschizophrenic perspective abruptly opens, however, Lemon asserting that the `great improvements' to which he refers are `intirely [sic] owing to the numberless words that have been adopted into it from the Greek and Roman languages' (p. ix). Classical authors are praised as `the standard of true eloquence, and the criterion of refined taste' (p. vii); their writings are said to `constitute the basis, and [. . .] the foundation of all that knowledge and learning, which can cultivate and adorn the human mind'. Lemon is so convinced of the honourable classical heritage of English that he asks, perplexed: Why then do our etymologists stop short of this great fountain, and endeavour to deduce their derivations from the muddy dialects, and impure branches of all the harsh, grating, Northern tongues, instead

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

24 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 25

In Samuel Johnson's account of linguistic history in The Plan of a Dictionary, all semantic variation since the time of Latin and Greek is summarily denounced as corruption.51 What is more, where Romantic philology sought to institute changes in the way spoken language was regarded (hence Wordsworth's efforts to collapse the distinction between the language of poetry and prose in the prefatory matter to Lyrical Ballads, and the emphasis placed by Hunt, Keats and Cornwall on idiomatic language in verse), Johnson believed that `corruptions in the living speech' was precisely how linguistic decline would first manifest itself (Plan of a Dictionary, p. 11). This rendered Johnson a powerful enemy. The lexicographer's mistrust of speech and dialect referenced an enduring myth concerning the decay of Latin. In Adam Smith's retelling of this popular narrative, Latin had fallen from its state of grace due to the overexpansion of the Roman empire. Conquered peoples far from the capital, unable or unwilling to master complex Latin declensions, had replaced them with more wieldy prepositions.52 In this way, Latin's vocabulary survived but its crowning glory, its grammar, was lost as a living structure for all time. Like Johnson, Monboddo also perceived an unmitigated record of linguistic decay after the classical age. Northern languages had been subject to a general `falling off', he explained, leaving English `not so good a language as the Saxon, nor the Saxon, or any other dialect of the Teutonick, so compleat [sic] a language as the original Gothic'; he even suspected that the principle of `degeneracy' was resident within language itself (Progress of Language, IV, 166),53 an idea that unsettled neoclassical ideals of achieving ± and, more to the point, maintaining ± a perfectly honed language. Rejecting models predicated exclusively on progress or decay, Joseph Priestley preferred rather to compare the historical narrative of language to the growth of a tree towards its full size and perfection. When the tree eventually died and decayed the resulting mulch encouraged the growth of new trees, just as the mulch of old languages helped new ones develop towards perfection. Organic metaphors were popular: they were easy to conceptualize and did not alarm readers ± at any rate, not on first sight. Dialects could be portrayed as developing like rivers from convergent streams, fast and vigorous in their early stages, slow and stately as they flattened off towards the sea, or else readers were asked to imagine languages growing from childhood to maturity. The problem

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

of tracing, following, and perusing their etymologies thro' the main course of that most noble language, the Greek? (Derivative Dictionary, p. xxxiii)

that could not be circumvented, though ± however comforting organic metaphors might have been ± was the fact that just as trees or people grew, they also experienced periods of sickness and decay, and eventually death. Organic models of history thus presented a serious challenge to those who wished to depict modern civilization as a record of continuous, linear advance towards some great teleological ideal. For Romantic theoreticians, eager to reinstate earlier conditions of language envisaged as having been uncluttered by refined rules and refined politics, there was much to be gained from painting linguistic history as the protracted enervation of language's expressive, grammatical and poetical power. To be sure, many Romantics were equally committed to presenting language as `degenerate' as their neoclassical antagonists, though for wholly different reasons. Herder was instrumental in promulgating Romantic narratives of linguistic decay. In his Abhandlung, he lamented that `emotion' in language had been displaced by `reason' and becried the fact that the `sounds of nature' had been `dispossessed by the artificial language of society'.54 In this projection, dialects progressively lose contact with their primitive elements, diverging ever further from the Ursprache's capacity to signify replete meanings. Rousseau was equally emphatic. As life became more complicated and increasingly divorced from the simplicity of nature, the character of language changed, he argued: It becomes more regular and less passionate. It substitutes ideas for feelings. It no longer speaks to the heart but to reason. [. . .] Language becomes more exact and clearer, but more prolix, duller and colder.55 The theory underpinning this position remained serviceable as late as 1836, when Richard Garnett noted that `all language becomes merely mechanical in process of time'.56 While Romantic writers generally supported this `decay' model (Percy Shelley's Defence of Poetry depends on it), its endorsement brought with it a substantial problem. If language were declining, how could Romantics justify their claim that English ± that language per se in the modern age ± was equal to producing literature that could hope to rival the golden texts of antiquity? One solution was to derive authority for linguistic experimentation from earlier epochs in English rather than classical literature ± in `purer' literary ages such as the pre-Restoration.57 Hence schemes for reforming poetic language were introduced in rhetoric stressing the intention to `restore' a primitive spirit to poetry that had already been resident in a previous condition of the language,

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

26 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 27

The politics of grammar Other notable rifts and schisms within eighteenth-century philology are to be found in the study of grammar. If debates on linguistic origins were geared towards understanding the history of language, and those on progress and degeneration towards divining the future of language, discussions on grammar aimed to settle the issue of how language was to be understood and used in the present. The year of Priestley's Lectures, 1762, also saw the appearance of James Buchanan's The British Grammar; or, an Essay in Four Parts towards Speaking and Writing the English Language Grammatically (the publisher was the influential liberal, Joseph Johnson). Although not as well-known as Priestley's Lectures, by 1779 the British Grammar had reached three editions, which suggests that it enjoyed some degree of currency in the period. Buchanan's work is conventional in many respects. It frequently employs the rhetoric of prescriptivism, and has clear-cut ideas about why `low and improper' diction should be avoided.58 But despite the fact that the British Grammar is ostensibly pitched to an elite audience of `Private young gentlemen and ladies' (subheading on title page), its democratic aim and the stress it lays on the plain-speaking virtues of English as opposed to the glitter of Latin and Greek are remarkably similar to that found in later radical grammars such as William Cobbett's.59 `The reason', Buchanan asserts, `why Youth and illiterate Persons are guilty of blameable Spelling, false Syntax, Tautologies, low and vulgar Diction' is that `they have not been taught their own Language grammatically' (British Grammar, p. xvi). His textbook is designed expressly for the purpose of helping these students `acquire a masterly and critical Knowledge of their own Language', which Buchanan lamented had been `so amazingly sacrificed for a smattering in Latin and Greek' ± languages with which students would `hold no more Correspondence than with the Chinese!' (British Grammar, p. xvii). Buchanan's eagerness to see English studied in its own right produces a no doubt strategic dedication to Queen Charlotte, who, Buchanan intones silkily, lends `fresh Lustre' to the national tongue merely by speaking it. In a deft manoeuvre, the authority of the English language

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

rather than to seek new directions through innovation ± however disingenuous this might have been in reality. Conservative reviewers insisted, predictably enough, that if any linguistic epoch was to be rescued from time's wallet, it was to be that in which classical literature had flourished.

is bracketed to that of the monarch. While Buchanan is at pains to clarify that he is no enemy of the classical languages (in the 1757 Preface to Linguae Britannicae vera pronunciatio, he contends that `the most excellent part' of English `is chiefly derived from Latin and Greek'), he is convinced that instead of learning `dead languages', young people should be acquiring `real and useful Knowledge' of their own language (British Grammar, p. xviii): Who can now introduce a Word into our Tongue either from the Greek or Latin, in which he can promise to be followed by its being more elegant, expressive, or emphatical, than that we already have? Whoever, from an awkward Ostentation of needless Learning, uses newfangled and crabbed Terms, without their being expressive of new Ideas, may deservedly obtain the Name of Pedant for his Pains. Is there one Idea expressed in any Language dead or living, of which English (the most copious Language in Europe) is not expressive? (British Grammar, p. xxvi) For Buchanan, as for Cobbett and Tooke, `the sole End of Language' is to `convey Sentiments with a proper Energy and decisive Perspicuity' (p. xxviii).60 The British Grammar belongs to a radical tradition of linguistic opposition that flourished in the middle of the eighteenth century. It was joined in 1766 by John Burn's A Practical Grammar of the English Language, in which the Several Parts of Speech are Clearly and Methodically Explained. This primer was designed for `young ladies and gentlemen' who had not been schooled in Latin and Greek. Burn hoped that these students could ± and what was more should ± be taught `to express their thoughts, as easily and as neatly as those who have been favoured with a more liberal education'.61 Again perspicuity and utility is emphasized over what Wordsworth would later term the `motley masquerade of tricks, quaintnesses, hieroglyphics, and enigmas' of classical rhetoric. Even before the liberal projects of Buchanan and Burn found their way onto school desks, alternative models of grammar had achieved wide circulation. John Brightland's A Grammar of the English Tongue (which shares not only similarity of title, but also ideological scope with Hazlitt's own grammar) reached a seventh edition in 1746. Brightland's volume was driven by a resentment of elitist bookmen who insisted on explaining English grammar using categories derived from Latin and Greek ± so-called `experts' who were `content to repeat the self-same Thing, the self-same Way, as all those have done, who have endeavour'd

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

28 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

to force our Tongue in every Thing to the Method and Form of the Latin and Greek'.62 In essence, this was Hazlitt's complaint in his portrait of Tooke in The Spirit of the Age. It was the uncritical veneration of all things classical, Brightland argued, that had led to English being inundated with Latin and Greek words. This in turn had produced a situation whereby, as Tate's poetic dedication to the Grammar put things, the national language was `stor'd with all the Seeds j Of Eloquence, but choak'd with Foreign Weeds'. The democratic sweep of Brightland's primer was intended to simplify the way grammar was taught, not only for learners from lower social classes, but also for their similarly disadvantaged instructors. Brightland assures readers that `no Teacher of any tolerable Capacity, will find any Difficulty [in his book], that may not be surmounted by a very little Application' (Grammar of the English Tongue, p. ix). Brightland's larger design is `to convey a Grammatical Knowledge of the Language we now speak, from whatever Springs and Sources descending down to us, in the most easy, familiar, and compendious Method that we could possibly find out' (p. viii). It is hard to imagine a more democratic didactics than this. But for all Brightland's egalitarianism, there is a distasteful anti-intellectual thread spun through the Grammar that extends its author's suspicion of classical linguistics to other areas of philological investigation. For instance, Brightland was wholly unable to perceive the worth of George Hickes's Grammatica Anglo-Saxonica (1711). A knowledge of Anglo-Saxon, he contended, did not assist modern learners of English in any way. Brightland spurned all study of `Obsolete Tongues, now out of Use, and containing nothing valuable' (p. viii): It is the present Tongue that is the only Object of our Consideration, as it matters not to the understanding of that, whether we know that Kine is derived from Cowin, or Swine from Sowin. (Grammar of the English Tongue, p. viii) The accent of Brightland's Grammar is squarely (if rather inflexibly) on utility, on understanding the present signifying webs of the language. It would not help, Brightland declared, if one were to inform the man one had just called a `knave' or `villain' that `these Words (some Hundreds of Years since) had a very harmless Signification' (Grammar of the English Tongue, p. viii). Etymology, the historical study of language, the investigations of Condillac, Tooke, Rousseau, Herder and Schlegel, the relationship between language and society . . . for Brightland these were mere

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 29

distractions from the real task at hand: directness of communication, `plain-speaking' in Wordsworth's and Cobbett's conception, speaking `loud and bold' in Keats's (`On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', l. 8). Whether language was progressing or decaying, revealed or invented, whether it had one seat of origin or many, was of no consequence in Brightland's practical pedagogy. At times though, Brightland's commitment to utility, his aptitude for calling a spade a spade, gets the better of him. One wonders how helpful the following ultra-materialist explanation would have been to pupils: Names express the Things themselves, that is, every Thing that is the Object of our several Senses, Reflection, and Understanding; which conveying [a] certain Idea or Image to the Mind, they want not the Help of any other Words to make us understand 'em. Thus when we hear any one say, A Man, a House, a Horse, Vice, Happiness, &c. we perfectly understand what he means. (Grammar of the English Tongue, p. 73) Oppositional grammars in the mid-eighteenth century were often cast as `mere' school primers. It becomes clear, however, that their politically engaged authors write with one eye on larger debates regarding the ownership of the national tongue, issues of taste and `refined' versus `vulgar' registers (of course, it could be argued that inculcating radical grammar in schools is about as much as any political linguist could ask for). Taken together, the contentions of Brightland, Burn and Buchanan add up to a claim for cultural agency, the selfsame bid that underlies Romantic interest in language theory. William Cobbett was the direct inheritor of the political grammars I have just examined. His Grammar of the English Language was first published in America during his 1818 political exile (the English edition appeared one year later, in 1819). It was founded on the cautionary maxim that `he who writes badly, thinks badly'.63 Cobbett's spiky intervention into grammatical polemic confronts the political consequences of what happens when the relationship between thought and grammar breaks down. Faulty grammar, Cobbett feared, allowed ambiguity to creep into political discourse. This in turn exposed speakers to the perils of manipulation and false misrepresentation. Conversely, Grammar, perfectly understood, enables us, not only to express our meaning fully and clearly, but so to express it as to enable us to defy the ingenuity of man to give to our words any other meaning than

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

30 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Paradigms Lost (and Regained) 31

As Olivia Smith elucidates, for Cobbett `correct grammar [. . .] becomes synonymous with the possibility of maintaining perfect integrity. ``Meaning'' becomes synonymous with autonomy'.65 A love of perspicuity (presumably his enthusiasm did not extend to the rhetorical term itself) led Cobbett to reject the use of classical vocabulary as a means of `elevating' English. `The only use of words', he insists, reeling off a nowfamiliar oppositional mantra, `is to cause our meaning to be clearly understood'. The best words, he added, were those `which are familiar to the ears of the greatest number of persons' (Grammar, pp. 71±2). A `foreign or uncommon word' was to be avoided if an English one in `common use' could be found instead (Grammar, p. 14). The apprehension motivating Cobbett is clear: he believed that a new political discourse was steadily solidifying, one that was wholly ± and wholly intentionally ± inaccessible to anyone who had not received the `appropriate' education that would enable them to decode it. Language, if not watched carefully, would thus be the means of creating yet another political underclass, something Cobbett was determined to prevent at all costs. Language and politics are inextricable in Cobbett's Grammar, which is best considered as an offshoot of his other radical projects such as the Political Register, his Life of Thomas Paine, History of the Regency and The Parliamentary History of England. To conclude this section, while a wide veneration of Latin and Greek helped calibrate the dominant literary values of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, we can also discern an increasingly vocal countermovement that championed native linguistic heritages. Oppositional grammars were crucial presences in this movement, and were instrumental in feeding the Romantic desire for `genuine' diction, a mode of expression that could convey what Wordsworth called the `plain humanities of nature' (Appendix to Lyrical Ballads), and nourish the culture of `plain-speaking' so important to Cobbett and Hazlitt. The emphasis such grammars placed on the value of studying English in its own right also helped parry dictums like Addison's that English against Greek was like `brick against marble'. At any rate, in his seminal 1839 essay on `The English Language', Thomas De Quincey was able to appeal to an image of the national tongue in which English was no longer shored up by fragments of Latin and Greek, but merely animated by the classical tradition. This was a crucial shift of emphasis. In De Quincey's estimation, native elements were not a cause for shame, but a reason to celebrate:

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

that which we ourselves intend them to express. This, therefore, is a science of substantial utility.64

32 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

It becomes transparent that many distinctively `Romantic' bearings on such topics as plain-speaking, Ursprache and the decay of language's poetic power did not emerge fully formed from the Romantic imagination, but relied on a range of ideas discussed and debated by scholars of the preceding age. The notion that language occupied a central position in the web of human relations and political structures comprising society was of particular importance. Drawing on Condillac, Rousseau and Herder, British Romantics acknowledged linguistic reform as the gateway to cultural reform. Indeed, by the early nineteenth century oppositional figures practically took it as read that language was the means of, as well as the theortical premise for, a range of political contestations. At the same time, conservative ideology recognized the vulnerability of its elite vision of `high' English culture to experimentation in `low' diction and literary idiom. As a consequence, its watchmen of taste were encouraged to enforce neoclassical edicts on literary decorum at every turn. In the following chapters, I will be examining the Romantic project to transform literary idiom, beginning with Wordsworth's prose and verse contributions to Lyrical Ballads, where social and linguistic politics are purposefully and ± in the light of the debates we have just explored ± inevitably entwined. I also consider the ideological imperatives that drove the response of conservative reviewers to Wordsworth's cultural critique.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Let us recognise with thankfulness that fortunate inheritance of collateral wealth, which, by inoculating our Anglo-Saxon stem with the mixed dialect of Neustria, laid open an avenue mediately through which the whole opulence of Roman, and, ultimately, of Grecian thought, play freely through the pulses of our native English.66

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and the Real Language of Men

In The Spirit of the Age (1825), Hazlitt asserts that `the political changes of the day were the model on which [Wordsworth] formed and conducted his poetical experiments' ± a view from which few modern scholars would diverge.1 In one sense Hazlitt is entirely correct in his assessment of the nature of Wordsworth's project (although he is right 27 years after the event). The `poetical experiments' derive their radical charge from their insistence on the connection between language and political and social being. Wordsworth and Coleridge make no attempt to disguise this relationship. On the contrary, rejecting the literary and linguistic values of Pope and Johnson in a bid to restore `genuine' poetry to the modern age, the 1798 Advertisement asserts an alternative logic in which class contentions and linguistic contestation are closely contingent on each other: `The majority of these poems were written [. . .] to ascertain how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure'. To be sure, from our critical vantage point the publication of Lyrical Ballads is usually seen as a defining moment in the politics of literary aesthetics and taste; yet, curiously enough, the first reviews of Lyrical Ballads were remarkably unencumbered by overt political or cultural controversy. In this chapter, I want to explore the delayed political reception of Wordsworth's linguistics. I will argue that it was not until the appearance of Leigh Hunt's controversial The Story of Rimini in 1816, a publication that drew heavily on Wordsworth's theories of language, that the politics of Lyrical Ballads became the overriding `issue' with reviewers.2 There can be no doubt that Wordsworth's and Coleridge's project to uncover a `more emphatic language' (Preface, p. 245) was recognized as inherently, intoxicatingly political by second-period Romantic writers, and as such had immediate appeal. For Leigh Hunt in 1816, and later 33

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

2

Barry Cornwall, Keats, Percy Shelley and William Hazlitt, the Advertisement together with the prefaces of 1800±2 and the `Appendix on Poetic Diction' constituted a philological and political codex authorizing their own linguistic-based resistance to established literary tenets. Reviews of these inheritors of Lyrical Ballads' radical challenge testify, moreover, that conservative critics were soon to become acutely sensitized to the political resonance of linguistic experimentation ± by attacking neoclassical theories of language and poetry, writers like Hunt and Keats were perceived to be chipping away at the values of high English culture articulated by and simultaneously producing these theories, as I outline in Chapter 3. Yet until 1816, Wordsworth seems largely to have escaped the kind of fate that overcame Hunt and Keats, whose work was rejected because it was founded on the `wrong' philosophy of language. Not all early commentators were oblivious to the politics of Wordsworth's poetry. In an 1802 Edinburgh Review essay on Southey's Thalaba, Francis Jeffrey noted that en masse the `Lake Poets' (Wordsworth, Southey and Coleridge) could `bear with crimes' but could not `reconcile themselves to punishments', and protested at their `unconquerable antipathy to prisons, gibbets, and houses of correction, as engines of oppression, and instruments of atrocious injustice'.3 Jeffrey is thinking here no doubt of Wordsworth's 1798 poem, `The Convict', where an optimistic alternative to dank incarceration is figured through natural imagery: `Poor victim! [. . .] j My care, if the arm of the mighty were mine, j Would plant thee where yet thou might'st blossom again' (ll. 45±52). Jeffrey's overblown prose registers a pressing anxiety. Prisons, gibbets and houses of correction were the repressive apparatus that controlled the `class or persons' ± Jeffrey sneered they `[could] not be called readers' ± to whom the `representation [in such poems as Wordsworth's] of vulgar manners, in vulgar language, will afford [. . .] entertainment' (pp. 67±8). Not only is Jeffrey disturbed that Wordsworth seeks to undermine a crucial (and much used) government apparatus, but, as we can see from the reference to `vulgar language', Jeffrey's apprehensions concerning Wordsworth's radical politics are edged by fears about the poet's radical linguistics. It becomes evident that for Jeffrey, philological and political transgression are one and the same thing. The thought that a publication like Lyrical Ballads, with its `vulgar language', might find or engender a new kind of audience among lower-class readers (despite Jeffrey's class-based objections to the very concept of this readership) prompted a series of heavyhanded appraisals of `Lake' productions in the Edinburgh Review. By and large, though ± at any rate until late into the second decade of the nineteenth century ± the reception of Lyrical Ballads was character-

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

34 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

ized by relatively self-contained debates over the definition of `genuine' poetry, the exact composition of the `real language of men', the propriety of using scenes or characters from `low' sections of society as legitimate subjects for poetry, and the merits of `simple' over `polite' or `refined' style. As Olivia Smith points out in her groundbreaking study, the majority of Lyrical Ballads' critics `had little objection to the poems or the nature of the experiment as they understood it'.4 The precision of Smith's analysis hinges on the qualifying `as they understood it', however, because literary reviewers were shortly to revise their understanding of the prefatory material to Lyrical Ballads. This modification was attendant on the appearance in 1816 of Leigh Hunt's scandalous (and now scandalously unread) poem on adulterous desire, The Story of Rimini, together with a manifesto-like preface that was in many ways the logical continuation of Wordsworth's own. It is my argument that while early reviewers of Lyrical Ballads sought to marginalize Wordsworth's poems and philological theories with relatively trivial, though trivializing, charges of `puerility', `silliness' or `wastefulness', after the publication of The Story of Rimini a more explicitly political register ± and a more disturbingly malevolent one, given that these were turbulent times when even habeas corpus could not be taken for granted ± is deployed against Wordsworth, his subsequent productions and retrolinearly against Lyrical Ballads itself. While Wordsworth's philological theories provided impetus for the ideological contestations of Hunt and the `Cockney' school, it was, paradoxically, Hunt who seems to have made the political inflections of Wordsworth's linguistics visible to reviewers.

`Genuine' language: the prefaces to Lyrical Ballads If the object which I have proposed to myself were adequately attained, a species of poetry would be produced, which is genuine poetry. (Preface to Lyrical Ballads) OED entry for Genuine: 1. a. Natural, not foreign or acquired, proper or peculiar to a person or thing, native. [. . .] 4. a. Having the character or origin represented; real, true, not counterfeit, unfeigned. 5. Of persons: Free from affectation or hypocrisy.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 35

As we can see from the first quotation above, Wordsworth claimed the status of genuine poet at the end of the Preface to the second, expanded edition of Lyrical Ballads (1800) He did so again in his `Essay, Supplementary to the Preface', Poems (1815), where he berated critics who were `too petulant to be passive to a genuine Poet, and too feeble to grapple with him; men who take upon them to report of the course which he holds whom they are utterly unable to accompany, ± confounded if he turn quick upon the wing, dismayed if he soar steadily ``into the region''; ± men of palsied imaginations and indurated hearts'.5 `Genuine' here is virtually commensurate with `original', signalling an authentic facility with language that cannot be imitated. But as the OED reminds us, the idea of `genuineness' also contains an embedded sense of `nativeness' ± ingenuus ± that was not lost to Wordsworth. On the contrary: Wordsworth's project to recover the `real language of men' for modern poetry, as outlined between 1798 and 1802 in the prefaces and associated essays to Lyrical Ballads, depended on a concept of native, placed idiom where `real' language might conceivably still linger ± `native', that is, to a particular class of English speakers and to a particular rustic locale. The notion of rusticality itself marks the intersection of ideas of class and place (indicating `low' speakers who lived in the country), thus doubly rooting Wordsworth's `genuine' language in specific instances of linguistic and cultural history. What I am calling `placed idiom' in Wordsworth's prefaces owes an important philological and philosophical debt to Herder's notion of Volksstimme. In the previous chapter, we saw how Herder envisaged a national Ur-idiom running through and impelling all genuine utterance ± in Linda Dowling's formulation, `the outward expression of the inner essence of a nation or people'.6 But despite imaginative traces of Herder in the Preface, Dowling is right to question the extent to which Wordsworth's rustic standard actually relies on Volk in any practical sense (p. 16). For Wordsworth (and Herder, for that matter), the idea of `the people' is conveniently polyvalent, `available' to be harnessed to causes of various kinds (it always is in times of crisis). It quickly becomes evident that the composition of Wordsworth's national voice is contingent on a particular political project, rather than on a specific body or class of people. Furthermore, several of Wordsworth's contemporaries (including Coleridge in Chapter 17 of Biographia Literaria) pointed this out. Herder's emphasis on recuperating national voice had been directed at unifying a disparate set of Germanic peoples under the banner of a common language and linguistic history.7 By contrast, Wordsworth's interest in reclaiming a `genuine' poetic voice that supposedly

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

36 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

lingered in the language of `low and rustic life' (Preface, p. 245) represented the starting point for an assault on a received set of high English literary values that in turn supported a version of high English culture inimical to Wordsworth. (In this respect, Wordsworth's use of Ursprache was actually dehegemonizing.) As portrayed in the Preface, this was an urban culture of artifice and embellishment, of `social vanity' and `false refinement' (Preface, pp. 245, 246), where men accumulated in cities and the `plain humanities of nature' had been thrust out of sight by a `motley masquerade of tricks, quaintnesses, hieroglyphics and enigmas' (Appendix, p. 316). In Lyrical Ballads' critical prose accompaniments, a theory of poetic language is advanced that attacks the linguistic foundations of this culture. Specifically, Wordsworth seeks to replace what Romantic writers were eager to depict as the insipid diction of modern poetry (characterized by the `fickle taste' of `French' neoclassicism), with a plain-speaking, intrinsically poetic, more `emphatic' and above all English idiom. The high priests of neoclassicism lurking dialectically in Wordsworth's prose are Pope and Johnson.8 Just as Pope was taken to be the epitome of the `polite' style in literature, Johnson, author of the famous Dictionary of the English Language (1755) and the theoretical Plan of a Dictionary (1747), together with Lindley Murray, was seen by Romantics as the chief legislator of establishment views of language. Indeed, by the end of the eighteenth century the literary and lexicographical values championed by Pope and Johnson constituted, in practical terms, default taste from which few reviewers diverged. In the minds of most critics, their values possessed an aura of timeless appeal, and had in fact come to define a culture of Englishness as much as the literature that was supposed to articulate these standards. For Romantic observers, of course, the bid to `fix' the English language (after `repairing' it with Latinate words) had produced a historical curiosity: a single `authorized' poetic diction that was as uniform and instantly recognizable as it was unyielding and unchanging. Grammarians and dictionary makers had succeeded, Romantics complained, in preserving a poetic language that was as outwardly dazzling, but ultimately lifeless, as insects trapped in amber. It was first and foremost Pope's and Johnson's enclosed system of poetics and lexicography, then, to which Lyrical Ballads offered a thoroughgoing critique. We should note that the argumentative texture of Wordsworth's prefaces was virtually dictated by the double grounding of neoclassicism's aesthetic in theories of poetry and language, in Pope's verse and Johnson's lexicography. Consequently, just as Pope's diction silently refers readers to Johnson's views on a `fixed' national language,9

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 37

Wordsworth's `genuine language of Poetry' draws its authority from new Continental theories of philology. These alternative ways of imagining language were outlined in works such as Herder's Abhandlung uÈber den Ursprung der Sprache (1772) and Condillac's Essai sur l'origine des connoissances humaines (1746). Similarly, where Pope and Johnson give voice to an ideal of high English culture, simultaneously supporting and supported by an elitist and reactionary ideology, Wordsworth's critical prose, emphasizing the cultural agency of `low' speakers, exerts pressure on both neoclassical cultural paradigms and the excluding logic of late eighteenth-century politics. The historical rootedness of Wordsworth's and Coleridge's philology in antiquarian, lexicographical, grammatical and philosophical debates of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the influence of Locke, Hugh Blair, William Enfield,10 Condillac,11 Heyne and Herder, as well as the reading that informed Wordsworth's and Coleridge's interest in `simple' forms of literature, ranging from Percy's Reliques (1765) to the Icelandic Edda,12 is now generally appreciated in Romantic studies.13 But despite the fact that little in the Advertisement and Preface is actually new (notwithstanding the protestations of Romantic ideology to the contrary), the two poets' departure from established taste was marked. Although the prefatory material to Lyrical Ballads is well known, it is worth refreshing our memory of Wordsworth's mission statement, since, as I argue in Chapter 3, it is a key document authorizing the linguistic, political and cultural dissent of second- and third-period Romantic writers. The Advertisement announces that Lyrical Ballads has been conceived as an `experiment' aimed at ascertaining `how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure' (p. 7). This statement alone has a range of political connotations. Paul Hamilton points out that by 1798, `experiment' had become a politically charged term `from the language used to attack supporters of the French Revolution'.14 But if anything, the word `conversation' was more problematic. Taken simply, conversation was mundane: it was the language of daily social intercourse and thus (according to neoclassical precept, though not to Wordsworth's own axioms) antithetical to `refined' poetry. Conversation was also dangerous. It was closely associated with unauthorized political discourse, with metropolitan debating clubs like the one that met in Panton Street (see David Worrall's excellent Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790±1820), with the threatening lower- and middle-class political communications that the Convention and Sedition Bills of

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

38 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

December 1795 (Pitt's `Gagging Acts') and the bills passed by Liverpool in 1817 were intended to silence.15 Government apprehension regarding conversation is further registered by the `Spy Nozy' incident of the spring of 1797, when Pitt's permanent undersecretary, John King, dispatched one of his top agents, James Walsh, to Nether Stowey to investigate the Alfoxden `gang' (Wordsworth, Coleridge and Thelwall). For all Coleridge's comedic embellishment in Chapter 10 of Biographia Literaria (Walsh is supposed to have misheard a conversation on Spinoza as a reference to his own status as a `spy' with a prominent nose), the episode was potentially serious and could have ended badly for the 27 and 25 year olds. As Kenneth Johnston explains, the report to King was made `just at the beginning of Pitt's so-called ``reign of terror'' ', at a time when the shakiness of the government and the fear of French invasion led Pitt's regime to intensify its efforts against internal dissent.16 The additional fact that Wordsworth had selected conversation from `the middle and lower classes of society' meant that his new poetic idiom possessed an especially plangent political timbre. (With publications like William Cobbett's A Grammar of the English Language, 1818, written expressly for a lower-class readership that included `Soldiers', `Sailors', `Apprentices' and `Plough-boys', the emphasis on `plain-speaking' within the culture of dissent was powerfully to threaten the establishment's ownership of the linguistic means for political disputation.)17 Next, by signalling his intent to utilize the language of the lower classes, Wordsworth was also radically redefining the sort of audiences that would be `qualified' to enjoy his work. It is true that Lyrical Ballads came with a demanding preface that might have alienated some readers. But the volume differs in an important respect from publications like Percy's Reliques or Macpherson's Ossian poems (Wordsworth despised the latter). These were printed with copious footnotes, annotations and long and minutely argued introductory treatises addressing issues of authenticity, lexicography and disputed antiquity, making quite clear that the desired audience for these `simple' works was not, primarily, a `simple' readership. By contrast, Wordsworth's Preface is a poetic manifesto ± not a scholarly essay. It deals specifically with reducing the distance between poet and reader, as well as with the issue of democratizing access to poetry, and it actively solicits a lower-class audience. In 1802, for instance, poets are instructed to use the `language of men', but are also reminded that they are writing `for men' (Preface, p. 261; my emphases).18 Finally, the concept of adapting lower- and middle-class conversation to `the purposes of poetic pleasure' constituted a further unwelcome erosion of the distinctions between `polite' and `low' diction, lower-class and educated

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 39

readers, and the exclusive rights of cultured over `uncultured' audiences to the luxury of poetic pleasure. For conservative reviewers the very idea that working-class readers (Jeffrey, we noted, regarded the designation a contradiction in terms) should extract pleasure from poetry smacked of profligacy and moral laxity.19 Even putting aside the radical quality of Wordsworth's mission statement, which seems largely to have eluded early reviewers, the politically muted response to Lyrical Ballads as a whole when it first appeared remains curious. The late 1790s was, after all, a watchful, beleaguered period of history for political radicals and liberal literati alike. Olivia Smith has vividly described the inescapably political nature of publishing in 1798, a year that witnessed the prosecution ± and incarceration ± for sedition of a `polite', classically educated (as opposed to `low', self-taught) political author, Gilbert Wakefield. In the third edition of A Reply to some parts of the Bishop of Landaff's Address (1798), Wakefield had daringly, if injudiciously, aligned himself with Burke's `swinish multitude'. This complicated matters for Wordsworth and Coleridge since Wakefield's pamphlet was published by Joseph Johnson, who had seen both poets' early volumes through the press.20 Fearing that association with Johnson would embroil them in the controversy over Wakefield, the Wordsworth/Coleridge `collective' (as government agents might have viewed them in a different age)21 opted to publish Lyrical Ballads with the relatively unknown Joseph Cottle. (One could, however, imagine that the decision to change publishers at this thorny juncture would have been conspicuous enough to prompt some critics to ask themselves what Wordsworth and Coleridge were so anxious to hide.) There were other reasons why a volume of poetry announcing itself as a linguistic `experiment' might attract unwelcome attention ± a volume, moreover, that sought to eschew showy `diction' for the `language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society' (Advertisement, p. 7). As Marjorie Levinson comments, England's entry into the war with France meant that after 1793, `intellectual experimentation and extremism [. . .] were associated, correctly, with the Revolution' and perceived as a threat to establishment values.22 With this in mind it is difficult to see how the Advertisement's exhortation that readers cease to heed `that most dreadful enemy to our pleasures', namely `our own pre-established codes of decision' (p. 7), might have been construed in any other way than as a direct and wide-ranging challenge to existing orders. The prefaces of 1800 and 1802 expanded the terms, if not the scope, of the 1798 enterprise. (Since Wordsworth was the more active partner in

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

40 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 41

The First Volume of these Poems [. . .] was published, as an experiment which, I hoped, might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quantity of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart. (Preface, p. 241) Wordsworth's project also receives new political edge, as the following extract demonstrates: The principal object then which I proposed to myself in these Poems was to make the incidents of common life interesting by tracing in them, truly though not ostentatiously, the primary laws of our nature [. . .]. Low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are under less restraint, and speak a plainer, more emphatic language; because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity and consequently may be more forcibly communicated. [. . .] The language too of these men is adopted (purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects, from all lasting and rational causes of dislike or disgust) because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived; and because, from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse, being less under the action of social vanity they convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions. Accordingly such a language arising out of repeated experiences and regular feelings is a more permanent and a far more philosophical language than that which is frequently substituted for it by Poets, who think that they are conferring honour upon themselves and their art in proportion as they separate themselves from the sympathies of men, and indulge in arbitrary and capricious habits of expression in order to furnish food for fickle tastes and fickle appetites of their own creation. (Preface, pp. 244±6)

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Lyrical Ballads after 1798 ± indeed, Coleridge began steadily to disassociate himself from its tenets ± from this point onwards I will refer to Wordsworth as the author of the Preface.) By 1800, the `language of conversation' of the `lower and middle classes of society' has been transmuted into `the real language of men':

This famous passage ties a Gordian knot between class politics and linguistic theory. Its materialist assumptions underpin claims for the priority of the language of `low and rustic life' (`because such men hourly communicate with the best objects from which the best part of language is originally derived'; my emphasis), and provide theoretical authority for the contention that membership of `polite' society excludes any possibility of speaking a `plainer, more emphatic language'. These concepts are the key to the Preface's integrated liberal project. Unfixing the authority of both God (by rejecting theories of revealed language) and the language of social privilege (by arguing that rustics have access to the best objects from which language is derived), Wordsworth opens a discursive space in which the agency of speakers, and more specifically `low' speakers in communion with nature, can be asserted. The accent placed on recovering the `essential passions of the heart' and forcibly communicating `elementary feelings' echoes familiar eighteenth-century themes from popular debates on the origin and composition of the first languages and societies, outlined in Chapter 1. In one respect, indeed, Wordsworth deploys the primitivist logic as a convenient shorthand for convincing readers of the virtues of the `real language' of men. But the imagery of rustic idyll also presents Wordsworth with further opportunity to voice radical dissent. For just as people who live a `low and rustic life' are supposed to have avoided contamination by polite diction and `arbitrary and capricious habits of expression', so too, by implication, have they escaped contamination by polite politics ± by the political order whose `fickle tastes and fickle appetites' find expression in the language of `social vanity'. As Dowling and others have pointed out, Wordsworth's sense of a pristine idiom embedded in the language of `low and rustic life' derives in part from Herder's notion of Volksstimme, an essential voice that articulates the character and spirit of a nation's (low and rustic, rather than polite and metropolitan) speakers. I'd like to return briefly to the concept of Volksstimme ± in Wordsworth's incarnation, `the real language of men' ± since for Wordsworth it is not simply a philological mythical beast with no significance beyond the realm of language. The universal qualities of this idiom serve rather as a cultural hedge against the `arbitrary and capricious habits of expression' and `fickle tastes' that pertain in the world of `social vanity'. Furthermore, Volksstimme constitutes a powerful corrective to modern ontology, one that promises a return to ancient purity and an unencumbered morality. (In one sense, Volksstimme is a redemptive idiom, always waiting to be recovered in times of political exigency, serving Herder's needs equally

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

42 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

as well as Wordsworth's.) Sure enough, Wordsworth is at pains to depict its transhistorical qualities as a panacea for contemporary ills, for `the great national events which are daily taking place, and the encreasing accumulation of men in cities' (Preface, p. 249). These modern maladies, Wordsworth feels, are corrupting people's linguistic life and thus diminishing their social and political being. (In 1818, Cobbett was to make an equation between linguistic and political reality the theoretical basis for his Grammar of the English Language.) Wordsworth's lack of specificity regarding these `great' and `daily' events hardly lessens the force of his critique of late eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century society and politics; nor are the class-based preoccupations that inform his opposition of `the real language of men' to the language of `polite' poetry and `polite' culture disguised by the fact that Wordsworth claims to be writing his prefatory material reluctantly, and only as a means of clarifying his views on poetic diction. This renders all the more striking the fact that the initial reception of Lyrical Ballads was not marked by overt political debate. Wordsworth's philological contentions, then, offered a radical critique not to `polite' or `refined' literature alone, but to the social and political institutions fostered and supported by it. As David Simpson argues, the Advertisement's rejection of the `gaudiness and inane phraseology of many modern writers' is not arbitrary, but motivated by a recognition that these are `the precise literary manifestations of the negative changes in the condition of England' (Wordsworth's Historical Imagination, p. 64). For Wordsworth, there was never any doubt that literature ± that language itself ± articulated cultural being, or, equally, that cultural being helped mould national literature. His intervention into language theory is, simultaneously, a deliberate act of cultural determination. But this notwithstanding, the catchphrase ± `real language of men' ± never really convinces. It certainly failed to persuade reviewers from the outset, as we will see. In fact, as John Ward points out, Wordsworth's project is not primarily concerned with reproducing the `real' language of men at all (any more, one might add, than Hunt's is with reconstructing the `actual language as it is spoken by men' in Rimini).23 The enterprise of Lyrical Ballads is rather predicated on defining and securing ownership of `genuine' language ± of a replete idiom that is not artificial or `embellished' ± rooted in an English rather than a French-neoclassical heritage. (Coleridge's later objections to Wordsworth's philology in Biographia Literaria, especially his claim that the `real' language of men, `purged' from its `defects', would no longer be an actual idiom, somewhat misses the point.) As is clear in `Poems on

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 43

the Naming of Places', a sequence where place(d) names are blithely overwritten, owning the means of description for Wordsworth is tantamount to owning the things described (in many ways, the poems in this series could be said to demonstrate the linguistic basis of property acquisition). The slippery nature of Wordsworth's `real' or `genuine' language is hardly surprising: Frances Ferguson has shown how the Romantic bid to `make language an object of speculation and investigation so thoroughly conflates subject with object ± and means with ends ± that the possibility of fixed objects of knowledge and fixed knowing subjects disappears'.24 Wordsworth would probably have enjoyed this irony, given that, as I have been suggesting, his linguistic theories were not contrived with the primary intention of restoring actual idioms, but rather with the aim of opening a space within discourse for a radical Romantic aesthetic that could continually protest a creatively enabling difference from neoclassical paradigms. But despite the fact that Wordsworth's politics are impeccably liberal in 1800 and 1802, the logic of the Preface is compromised in a number of places, as I want to finish this section by discussing. Anne Janowitz proposes that for Wordsworth, ballad form itself `expressed the pancultural possibility of a democratic poetry'.25 It is easy to see why one might think this to be so. Wordsworth's ballad diction is supposed to be guileless, devoid of aspirations to `trick out or elevate nature', available not just `for poets alone, but for men' (Preface, pp. 257, 261). Janowitz's statement is problematic, though, because as Mary Jacobus argues: `the traditional ballad seems to have had little direct influence on Wordsworth's experiment'.26 To be sure, the choice of Lyrical Ballads as a title invites the volume's contextualization in the popular vogue for `simple' poetry that accompanied a burgeoning interest in the idea of a native cultural heritage from the mid-eighteenth century onwards. This vogue, fostered by antiquarian and philological societies, produced fast-selling publications like John Pinkerton's Scottish Tragic Ballads (1781), Thomas Percy's Reliques (1765), Macpherson's Ossian poems, Fingal (1762) and Temora (1763), Burns' Scots poems and even Chatterton's Rowley fictions.27 But Wordsworth's understanding of ballads was, as Jacobus contends, `startlingly anti-literary', based on an ideal rather than on a close study of actual exemplars (Tradition and Experiment, p. 212). Like his model of the `real language of men', Wordsworth's conception of ballad conventions and ballad culture was first and foremost a starting point for the development of a political and literary project, rather than a bid to restore a literary genre; `genuine' poetry had less to do with the faithful imitation of ballad register or lower-class idiom than with signalling a

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

44 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

clean break with those literary values he considered most pernicious, politically and aesthetically. Imitability, after all, was in Wordsworth's view the distinguishing feature of lesser authors who were content to move well-worn counters around clearly marked boards, who produced verse in which every sun was a `reddening Phoebus', every birdsong an `amorous descant' and every phrase prefabricated in some way.28 The true poet's steady soaring into `the region' and quick turns upon the wing were not meant to be imitable. That was precisely what made them genuine. Wordsworth's scheme to democratize language and poetry harbours other vulnerabilities connected to the issue of imitation. If the `real language of men' produced poems that could be consumed, but whose creative origins could not be comprehended, and certainly not imitated, by the very class of speakers who were supposed to speak and thus guarantee that language, then it is difficult to see in what way Wordsworth's philological vision can be said to be democratic. In fact, Wordsworth's commitment to expressing himself `as other men express themselves' begins to appear contingent or even disingenuous. At best his position requires a double logic to be comprehensible that can be rendered in the troubled and troubling formula: `real poets use the real expressions of men in a way that other men and poets cannot'. Appreciating this paradox, Coleridge preferred the notion of lingua communis ± a written intellectual idiom that everyone could understand, though not everyone could employ ± over Wordsworth's more problematic conception of the `real language of men'. Janowitz is, however, alive to the `eccentricity' of Wordsworth's position, an eccentricity that causes a rift to appear `between the poet and those he represents' (Lyric and Labour, p. 47). The problem originates in the need to address two different types of audience simultaneously. On the one hand, Wordsworth appeals to his readers to judge his work by their `own feelings genuinely' (Preface, p. 270). This instinctively discriminating audience, Wordsworth proudly believes, comprises an oral culture of plebeian listeners who had only gained access to poems like `Goody Blake and Harry Gill' in the first place because of their narration as ballads. Yet a little later the ability to judge is held up as an `acquired talent, which can only be produced by thought and a long continued intercourse with the best models of composition' (Preface, p. 271). Clearly, two different standards of poetic judgement are applied to two different audiences ± in Janowitz's terms a `democratized readership' versus the `literary eÂlite of print culture' (Lyric and Labour, p. 47). This dual pull eventually destabilizes the term `genuine' itself, compromising its capacity to signal trans-historical, trans-cultural qualities (the original

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 45

basis of its appeal for Wordsworth), since the readiness of Wordsworth's elite audience of readers to feel `genuinely' is informed not by the instinctive ability to recognize true art, but by `a long continued intercourse with the best models of composition'. By the same token, his audience of listeners, with (crucially for Wordsworth's theory of language) little history of access to printed materials, have only their status as `authentic' speakers to commend their judgement and response. It is worth remembering, though, that Wordsworth is writing a poetical manifesto, not an academic treatise. Some of the tears in the logic of the prefatory matter can be explained by this fact. At times Wordsworth is clearly searching for sound bites that will arrest readers' attention; not all of these stand up to close scrutiny.

Knit to this his native soil Wordsworth's radical challenge was not confined to the philology of the prefaces; nor, in individual poems, was it restricted to the use of ballad form, `simple' diction, or even the inclusion of contentious themes such as vagrancy (`The Female Vagrant'), enclosure and loss of community (`Goody Blake, and Harry Gill'), and oblique comparisons between the crimes of prisoners and the victories of monarchs (`The Convict'). Lyrical Ballads contains a new genre of poem that, rather than attempting simply to put Wordsworth's philological axioms into poetic practice (as other poems in the volumes do in various ways), incorporates a level of metadiscourse that engages in a knowing dialogue with the linguistic theories outlined in the Preface. The contours of this new kind of poetry become visible in the last three stanzas of `Simon Lee' (1798), a notoriously inscrutable, and, I shall argue, highly self-reflexive passage: One summer-day I chanced to see This old man doing all he could About the root of an old tree, A stump of rotten wood. The mattock totter'd in his hand So vain was the endeavour That at the root of the old tree He might have worked forever. `You're overtasked, good Simon Lee, Give me your tool' to him I said;

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

90

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

46 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

And at the word right gladly he Received my proffered aid. I struck, and with a single blow The tangled root I sever'd, At which the poor old man so long And vainly had endeavoured. The tears into his eyes were brought, And thanks and praises seemed to run So fast out of his heart, I thought They never would have done. ± I've heard of hearts unkind, kind deeds With coldness still returning. Alas! The gratitude of men Has oftner left me mourning.

100

These lines have received a influential Marxist reading from David Simpson, who explains the narrator's severing of the root with an axe as Wordsworth striking through the `tangled root that separates man from man in the social as well as the physical order' (Wordsworth's Historical Imagination, p. 155). One could be forgiven for thinking Simpson's image itself tangled here, or at least trapped within its own logic, since it is by no means obvious in what sense a root can be said to separate man from man. Perhaps a more satisfying reading would be to interpret the severing of the root in philological terms as an act of cutting back to, or laying bare, a common linguistic root. (The use of `roots' and `trees' as metaphors to describe linguistic genealogy was common in the eighteenth century, as we saw in Chapter 1; Hazlitt even puns on the linguistic double meaning of `root' in The Spirit of the Age, when he remarks that in Diversions, the etymologist Tooke `strikes at the root of his subject').29 By revealing a shared linguistic heritage in the exposed root, Wordsworth is gesturing his intent to unite the diction and terminology that divides rustic speakers from roaming intellectuals, and plain-speaking from the corrupted idiom of literati. The vulnerable nature of the linguistic inheritance Wordsworth is anxious to preserve is signalled by the fact that Simon Lee is the `sole survivor' of his cultural heritage.30 Indeed, the meeting between the old huntsman and Wordsworth's narrator is in part an attempt to address Wordsworth's sense of having been `cut off from a large portion of phrases and figures of speech which from father to son have long been regarded as the common inheritance of Poets' (Preface, p. 251). Cut off, because this `common inheritance' has been destroyed by

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 47

neoclassical embellishment. By evoking language roots ± radical in both a political and linguistic sense ± Wordsworth's poem involves itself in the rhetoric of language debate, just as it articulates profound Romantic alienation. By dramatizing an encounter with a survivor of an exemplary line of cultural and linguistic inheritance, `Simon Lee' allows Wordsworth to imagine what it would be like to access a genuine, preRestoration idiom, as well as the society it supports ± an opportunity Lyrical Ballads in its entirety is anxious to exploit. The simple, unadorned ballad register of `Simon Lee' underscores Wordsworth's commitment to repairing what John Rieder has called the poet's `damaged sense of community' (Wordsworth's Counterrevolutionary Turn, p. 75). This ideal community has been injured, Wordsworth wants to suggest, through the fragmentation of poetic diction into `high' and `low' modes, a division that possesses a cultural as well as a linguistic dimension, something the Preface is keen to clarify. The split has also produced a new economy of feeling in literature where `passion' and `vivid sensation' have ceased to be collective, unifying experiences, instead becoming contingent on readers and poets being able to isolate themselves from neoclassical values. In `low and rustic' life, such isolation is conceivable: people, `from their rank in society and the sameness and narrow circle of their intercourse', are `less under the action of social vanity' and still `convey their feelings and notions in simple and unelaborated expressions' (Preface, p. 245). In the `polite' world of poets and literati, however, withdrawal from the discourse of social vanity is impossible, Wordsworth argues, which is why radical action is required if writers are to regain access to an original, `more emphatic' idiom. In `Simon Lee', the speaker's act of exposing the root performs Wordsworth's decision for a particular kind of diction and linguistic heritage. By cutting back to a common linguistic radical, by aligning himself with the `native' vocabulary and register of Simon Lee's ballad world, Wordsworth's speaker is rejecting in the same instant the classical vocabulary and `gaudiness and inane phraseology' of modern writers. It is no coincidence that at the precise point in the narrative where the root is exposed, the speaker is able to engage in a communicative act with the tearful Simon Lee (`thanks and praises seemed to run j So fast out of his heart, I thought j They never would have done', ll. 98±100). The scene's `vivid sensation' affects the fictive speaker, who is left powerfully moved by, and strangely mournful at, the old huntsman's gratitude;31 the speaker's unifying act means that the kind of feelings that in Ode: Intimations of Immortality are described as lying `too deep for tears' are ± can now be ± iterated in a way that is mutually comprehensible to both the narrator and the old huntsman.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

48 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

The last three stanzas of `Simon Lee' accentuate what I was saying earlier about Wordsworth's eagerness to restore a concept of poetic language predicated on the exchange of pleasure. Such a view finds support in Marjorie Levinson's observation that for Wordsworth, `pleasure arises from feelings of connectedness'.32 I would argue that the crucial moment of connection at the end of `Simon Lee' deserves to be seen as part of Wordsworth's economy of pleasure, since the connective gratification Levinson describes is precisely that experienced, linguistically and culturally, by the old huntsman and speaker at the close of the poem. Yet in spite of its ostensibly hopeful deÂnouement, the episode also draws a problematic into sharp focus. On the one hand, it is tempting to consider `Simon Lee' as the most trenchant poetic expression of the Preface's democratic linguistics (Rieder asserts that ` ``Simon Lee'' stands as a paradigm for all of those other [. . .] lyrical ballads that try to forge an alliance of common feeling between the middle and lower classes', Wordsworth's Counterrevolutionary Turn, p. 75). But in point of fact, even at the moment of apparent unity the old huntsman is not permitted to speak directly to Wordsworth's readership. His sentiments are instead mediated by the fictive speaker: The tears into his eyes were brought, And thanks and praises seemed to run So fast out of his heart, I thought They never would have done.

100

This, in a sense, is perfectly emblematic of a problem that all the ballads grapple with: despite the Preface's philological dexterity, Wordsworth fails, finally, to bridge the cultural and linguistic chasm that separates man from man, characters from narrators, a `low' audience from `polite' readers. The difficulties associated with restoring a common idiom in `Simon Lee' are readdressed in `The Brothers', a poem added to Lyrical Ballads in the two-volume edition of 1800. As with `Simon Lee', issues of dialogue and forceful communication in `The Brothers' cohere around linked themes of `real' language, rootedness and the experience and performance of `powerful feelings'. The poem relates the story of the mariner Leonard Ewbank, who returns to the mountain village of his youth after twelve years' absence with a `determin'd purpose to resume j The life he lived there' (ll. 67±8): that is, to revive the pastoral mode of existence he formerly enjoyed with his sibling James (`brother Shepherds on their native hills', l. 73). At the churchyard, on the margins of the village, Leonard loiters, unsettled by the new rows of graves ± all unmarked. As

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 49

the old Priest of Ennerdale explains: `In our church-yard j Is neither epitaph nor monument, j Tomb-stone nor name, only the turf we tread' (ll. 12±14). Unable to trust either to his memory or to (the lack of) language, Leonard begins to wonder if `another grave were added' ± his brother's, that is ± to the spot where the rest of his family lies buried (l. 82). James's uncertain status as either living or dead is the poem's literal `buried secret' that has to be uncovered during the course of the narrative. From this point onwards, the ballad becomes a game of semantic cat and mouse played between Leonard and the village priest, who is in no hurry to divulge his knowledge about who is alive or dead in Ennerdale. The absence of epitaphs in the churchyard ± of conventional writing of any kind ± and distance of time, renders it impossible for Leonard (though not for the inhabitants of the village) to be certain about who lies in the graves. This is a dilemma, Wordsworth suggests, that arises when one loses a sense of rootedness. Although at line 305 we are told that Leonard's soul was once `knit to [. . .] his native soil' (the link between `soul' and `soil' reverberates through Lyrical Ballads), Leonard's economic exile from the village of Ennerdale has all but dissolved the connection. What is more, the erosion of placement has resulted in something far worse than the inability of the old priest to recognize his former charge; it causes Leonard's dissociation from the `real language' of his community.33 The linguistic manifestation of this disjuncture is apparent in Leonard's inability to `read' the graves: Here's neither head nor foot-stone, plate of brass An orphan could not find his mother's grave. (ll. 171±2) The priest replies scornfully: Why there, Sir, is a thought that's new to me.

The Stone-cutters, `tis true, might beg their bread

If every English church-yard were like ours:

Yet your conclusion wanders from the truth.

We have no need of names and epitaphs,

We talk about the dead by our fire-sides. And then for our immortal part, we want

No symbols, Sir, to tell us that plain tale:

The thought of death sits easy on the man

Who has been born and dies among the mountains.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

180

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

50 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

That is, the `real language of men' spoken in Ennerdale does not rely on artful constructions ± it does not even rely on writing ± to achieve a rich signification (although the brothers' idyllic childhood has involved learning to `write, aye and speak too, as well j As many of their betters', ll. 284±5). One senses that the plain-speaking Priest of Ennerdale would be equally dismissive of neoclassicism's `motley masquerade of tricks, quaintnesses, hieroglyphics, and enigmas' as the voice of the 1802 Appendix to Lyrical Ballads. The implicit moral of `The Brothers' is that so long as people remain rooted in their native soil, they remain rooted in the `plainer, more emphatic' language of community ± Volksstimme, in other words ± and thus take part in a matrix of connectivity where genuine language and powerful feelings are a daily occurrence. `The Brothers' functions to illustrate the importance of both `authenticity' and `nativeness' in the concept of `genuine' language: should one become disconnected from this rooted culture, that person must expect to be beset by a whole series of linguistic and hermeneutic dilemmas. This has clearly occurred in Leonard's case. The community's (and especially Leonard's and James's) narrative is written in the mountain landscape ± `the great book of the world', as the priest terms it at line 270: On that tall pike, (It is the loneliest place of all these hills) There were two Springs which bubbled side by side, As if they had been made that they might be Companions for each other: ten years back, Close to those brother fountains, the huge crag Was rent with lightning ± one is dead and gone, The other, left behind, is flowing still.

140

Despite the obvious significance attached to the obliteration of one of the two springs (the phrase `brother fountains' ought rather to give the game away), the young man remains oblivious to the episode's figurative meaning. While the narrative of the poem itself engages knowingly with the philology of the Preface, Leonard Ewbank does not seem to realize he is in a poem, much less a ballad with its tradition of emphatic metaphors and symbolism. Having cut himself off from the Ennerdale community, Leonard has to rely on the priest's meandering account of the last twelve years to find out what has happened to his brother. The description of events (which constitutes an exercise not only in being led back to one's roots, but in being shown the significance of those roots) excites powerful feelings

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 51

52 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

If you weep, Sir, To hear a stranger talk about strangers, Heaven bless you when you are among your kindred! (ll. 239±41) The force of these lines depends, of course, on the irony that Leonard is no stranger; he is among his kindred, but has been misrecognized (just as he himself is still occupied with the misrecognition of the rustic signs around him). The climax of the poem occurs when the priest reveals that Leonard's brother has indeed died in the intervening years of separation. As well as producing a narrative frisson, the disclosure enables Wordsworth to raise a serious point about the nature of genuine language and the language of genuine feeling: because of its connective, web-like nature, once people cease to use this historically and culturally precarious language, its speakers (and the idiom itself) suffer as much harm as the people who become disassociated from it. After all, one could argue that it is Leonard's absence that causes the death of his brother, the physical embodiment of Ennerdale's genuine, rooted language. James pines for his sibling to such an extent that he begins to sleepwalk; during one of these episodes he falls from a mountain ledge (perhaps Wordsworth puns on the consequences of losing connection with the soil). In `Simon Lee', the vulnerability of `real' language in the modern world is underscored by the status of the old huntsman as `sole survivor' of his cultural and linguistic heritage. Similarly, in `The Brothers' Leonard and James are presented as `the last of all their race' (l. 174): following the demise of James, Leonard ± whose condition, Wordsworth implies, is that of the modern poet ± is left as the only remaining guardian of the genuine idiom Wordsworth wishes to preserve, hardly an ideal state of affairs. By the end of the poem, after several false starts, deferrals and strayings, which turn out to be integral to the process of rediscovering one's (linguistic) roots, Leonard and the old priest achieve an intensity of communication that involves a `spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings' (Preface, p. 266). As in `Simon Lee', this is figured around a display of weeping. John Turner discovers in this episode grounds for concluding that the success of `The Brothers' is `the establishment of a language

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

in Leonard. It prompts a display of emotion, not unlike the one that occurs in `Simon Lee', which finally wins the priest's approval while simultaneously signalling the possibility of Leonard's reconnection with his former community:

and poetic style able both to appreciate and to harmonize the differences' between Leonard and the Priest.34 Leonard is prevented, however, from full participation in Ennerdale's `real language of men' by an insuperable barrier: his inability to declare his true identity. The reason for, simultaneously the symptom of, this aporia is Leonard's growing sense of his own geographical estrangement (`This vale, where he had been so happy, seem'd j A place in which he could not bear to live', ll. 439±40). Leonard later opts to reveal his name in an epistle written from the nearby town of Egremont. The written word is privileged over the spoken here, always a bad sign in Wordsworth. Sure enough a second communicative disturbance can be discerned: Leonard might very well have `address'd a letter to the Priest' (l. 443), but there is no mention of it ever being sent or ever arriving. The semantic packet has an addressee but there is no record of it reaching its destination. This, in Wordsworth's view, is precisely the predicament of modern, corrupted language. By relying, finally, on inscription (whose semantic vulnerability is demonstrated repeatedly in Lyrical Ballads), Leonard re-enacts precisely the dependence that marked him as an outsider, geographically and linguistically, to the inhabitants of Ennerdale at the beginning of the poem. For all the priest's efforts to make him feel the pressure of history and community, Leonard Ewbank remains one of the `Tourists' (from whose presence the Priest begs heavenly preservation in line 1), who come to the Lake District hoping to experience `elemental feelings', but who, ultimately, cannot ever truly belong, cannot adopt ± or adapt to ± the real language of men.35 The letter confirms Leonard's uncomfortable proximity to the trivial status of one who: needs must leave the path Of the world's business, to go wild alone: His arms have a perpetual holiday, The happy man will creep about the fields Following his fancies by the hour, to bring Tears down his cheek, or solitary smiles Into his face, until the setting sun Write Fool upon his forehead. (ll. 103±10) `The Brothers' concludes not with Leonard's decision to remain in Ennerdale, but with his resolution to return to sea as a mariner, an itinerant life that is the very condition of unrootedness. Nonetheless,

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 53

for all that `Simon Lee' and `The Brothers' meditate on the gaps and aporias that open, and stay open, between rustic speakers and wellmeaning literati, the endeavour to restore emphatic language to modern poetry is a worthy one, Wordsworth insists. At any rate, faced with neoclassicism's cold semantic patterns, imported vocabulary and prefabricated figurative structures, Romantic writers are urged at least to confront the problem of how to recuperate more forceful modes of address from a native historical and cultural heritage. What is more, they are urged in a new genus of poetry that is intended not only to exemplify `genuine' language at the level of idiom, but to dramatize and explore debates underpinning the category itself. In a vital sense, `Simon Lee' and `The Brothers', like much of Wordsworth's distinguished verse, are poems about themselves, poems that brood intradiegetically on the nature of their own being.

Conspiracies, revolutions, confederacies The third section of this chapter reconstructs the debates precipitated by Wordsworth's ideas on `genuine' poetry. This particular Rezeptionsgeschichte is crucial in helping explain the fraught dialogues that accompanied the appearance of works by Hunt, Keats and the young Tennyson. Although Wordsworth's critics were initially interested in alternative versions of authentic verse, and, as Olivia Smith observes, generally approved of the notion of simplicity in poetry, a decisive shift in attitudes towards the philological underpinning of Lyrical Ballads occurred when reviewers recognized that theories of language had become synonymous with theories of culture and politics. When the tenets of 1800 and 1802 resurface in the Preface to Hunt's The Story of Rimini (1816), critiques of Lyrical Ballads submit to a distinct change of tone. The political reception of Wordsworth's volumes is backwardengineered, one might say, to suit the ideological expediencies of the present. My aim is to illustrate precisely how serious, if relatively selfcontained, debates over spoken versus written language, usage, propriety and register give way to fears of `conspiracy' and `revolution'; we will see how informed philological discussion dissolves into an exaggerated rhetoric where a whole poetics could be summarily dismissed as `unintelligible jargon'.36 To begin, Robert Southey's appraisal of his friends' volume in the Critical Review in 1798 was largely detained by quibbles concerning Coleridge's philological acumen: `We are tolerably conversant with the early English poets; and can discover no resemblance whatever, except

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

54 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

in antiquated spelling and a few obsolete words'.37 Despite Wordsworth's annoyance at the tone of Southey's review (he felt Southey should have said nothing if he could find nothing positive to say), doubts over lexicographical accuracy were voiced in some form by the majority of Lyrical Ballads' critics. For instance, the Analytical Review was distrustful of Coleridge's attempt to imitate `our ancient ballad writers' (like Southey, the Analytical fails to appreciate that Coleridge is interested in the Heynean or Herderean ideal of an ancient national voice, rather than with an accurate reconstruction of it): The `Rime of the ancyent Marinere,' a ballad in seven parts, is written professedly in imitation of the style as well as of the spirit of the ancient poets. We are not pleased with it; in our opinion it has more of the extravagance of a mad german poet, than of the simplicity of our ancient ballad writers.38 Charles Burney in the Monthly Review was no less cautious about endorsing Lyrical Ballads' philological manifesto. Keenly aware that a revised canon was at stake, one, moreover, whose institution entailed riding roughshod over the values of Pope and Johnson, Burney subjects Wordsworth's and Coleridge's distinction between authentic and artificial poetry to close scrutiny. The truth of the matter, Burney contends, is that the attempt to recapture the spirit of `our elder writers' in Lyrical Ballads had failed to transcend tasteless, not to mention unsuccessful, imitation. Indeed, in Burney's opinion the line between Wordsworth's and Coleridge's enterprise and out-and-out forgery was a very fine one indeed: Rust is a necessary quality to a counterfeit old medal: but, to give artificial rust to modern poetry, in order to render it similar to that of three or four hundred years ago, can have no better title to merit and admiration than may be claimed by any ingenious forgery.39 The uncompromising terms of this attack, with its emphasis on counterfeiting and artificiality, penetratingly engage, while they disturb, claims made by Wordsworth and Coleridge for the genuine status of their poetry. The New London Review levelled its sights at Wordsworth's notion of `genuine' poetry, unimpressed by efforts in Lyrical Ballads at redefining the linguistic and cultural frame of authentic composition. The `language of conversation, and that too of the lower classes', the reviewer asserts, has

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 55

no `claim to the honours of genuine poetry'.40 The anonymous reviewer's ire appears to stem principally from an inveterate antipathy towards ballads. Percy's Reliques is blamed for starting the fashion for `rude' poetry that had produced Lyrical Ballads. The popularity of ballads merely proved the nation's increasingly faulty taste, the critic argues, attributing the decline to a widespread confusion of `simple style' (equated with `a colloquial diction, debased by inelegance, and gross by familiarity') and `simplicity' (which by contrast is considered `facile, pure, and always elegant', p. 34). The New London's attempt at desynonymization ± in Coleridge's hands a weapon used to unpick conservative ideologies ± is underscored by a classical comparison: `The simple style has all the squalid nakedness of a B E G G A R , and simplicity, the lovely nudity of a G R A C E ' (p. 34). As well as reopening debates over the superiority of Latin and Greek to native traditions, the classical allusion here involves a disparaging reference to class centred on the figure of the beggar. The beggar's `squalid nakedness' and `colloquial diction' ± where the denigration of `colloquial' (`of or relating to conversation') again discloses conservative anxieties generated by the thought of uncircumscribed interlocution ± is presented as ridiculous alongside the `lovely nudity' of a Grace. Such references to beggars are clearly politically loaded and contradict in an important respect Olivia Smith's view that: none of the critics identifies the language of the poems with the class terms used in the Advertisement. [. . .] The experimental use of lower and middle-class language does not appear to have offended the taste or challenged the critical assumptions of most reviewers.41 I would argue that the beggar, with his `colloquial diction', maintains an uncomfortable presence in the New London Review's appraisal. Given the foregrounding of class in the 1798 Advertisement (not to mention Wordsworth's inclusion of poems such as `The Female Vagrant' and `The Old Cumberland Beggar'), the distinction between destitute beggars and splendid classical personages is unlikely to have been made arbitrarily. On the contrary, such differentiations permit the critic to ridicule Wordsworth's claims for the cultural agency of lower- and middle-class life, while representing what in 1800 Wordsworth would call the `real language of men' as impoverished alongside neoclassical semantic models. Importantly, and contra Smith's analysis, it seems natural for this reviewer to dress up (or rather undress) linguistic contention in class terms in order to disparage Wordsworth, a tactic that anticipates Z's

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

56 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

histrionic performances of class-based snobbery towards the experiments with diction of Hunt and Keats. Two essays on Lyrical Ballads that appeared in the British Critic represent more positive responses to Wordsworth's theories of language. In the first, from 1799, the reviewer notes approvingly that Wordsworth had set out to challenge `the pomp of words' in modern verse and `recall our poetry, from the fantastical excess of refinement, to simplicity and nature'.42 The second edition of Lyrical Ballads was reviewed in 1801. John Stoddart (Hazlitt's brother-in-law), remarked that where in Wordsworth's previous publications, An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches (both published in 1793), the `fire and fancy of a true poet' had been `obscured by diction, often and intentionally inflated', now Wordsworth's style had `wholly changed' to adopt `a purity of expression [. . .] which is infinitely more correspondent with true feeling than what, by the courtesy of the day, is usually called poetical language'.43 We may observe in such comments how ownership of `true' poetry and `purity of expression', while still contested, is in the process of being wrested out of neoclassical frames of reference. In other words, this is a paradigm shift in progress. Stoddart concludes that Lyrical Ballads demonstrates `what may be affected by simple language, expressive of [. . .] genuine, not artificial feelings' (p. 131). I want to return briefly to Jeffrey's Edinburgh Review critique of Southey's Thalaba (1801), since it throws interesting light on conservative perceptions of Wordsworth's own philological contentions. Jeffrey, a literary reactionary at heart, was dismayed that the `Lake' poets had aspired to usurp the authority of approved authors like Pope.44 Rejecting their vaunted poetic idiom as `vulgar' alongside the `loftiness of Milton' and the `pointed and fine propriety of Pope' (p. 69), he pronounced it `absurd to suppose, that an author should make use of the language of the vulgar, to express the sentiments of the refined' (p. 66). Jeffrey's sense of outrage produces a revealing passage in which distinctions between literary and religious orthodoxies ± and challenges to these ± are allowed to collapse: Poetry has this much, at least, in common with religion, that its standards were fixed long ago, by certain inspired writers, whose authority it is no longer lawful to call in question.45 By linking the inviolability of neoclassical literary tenets to those of religious doctrine, linguistic experimentation is constructed as a form of heresy. Such manoeuvres, which had the effect of widening the

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 57

reviewing frame of reference, anticipate the religious and moral pressure brought to bear on Hunt's and Keats's linguistic idiosyncrasies. The discussions provoked by Wordsworth's critical prose of 1798±1802 were to have a lasting influence on the poet's subsequent reception. Appraising Poems (1807) in the Eclectic Review, James Montgommery agrees that language ought to be the `master-secret' in distinguishing `true poetry', and even concedes that `the multitude of epithets that frequently render verse too heavy for endurance' in Pope and his followers ought to be restricted.46 But he denounces Wordsworth's desire to dissolve time-honoured distinctions between the language of poetry and prose: We would certainly protest against the unqualified rejection of those embellishments of diction, suited to the elevation of enthusiastic thoughts equally above ordinary discourse and ordinary capabilities, which equally distinguished Poetry from Prose, and have been sanctioned by the successful usage of Bards in every age and nation, civilized or barbarous, on which the light of Song has shed its quickening, ennobling, and ameliorating beams. (p. 36) Alluding directly to the arguments of the Preface, Montgommery adds that the `pure, sublime, and perfect conceptions of [the poet's] superior mind in its highest fervour' cannot be articulated in `the real language of men'. Quite the opposite. The `mother-tongue' of genius, Montgommery contends, is a language `which, in sound and structure, as well as in character and sentiment, exalts itself far above the models of common speech' (p. 36). Montgommery's and Wordsworth's dispositions on genuine poetry could hardly be at greater variance. Montgommery argues that `true poetry' depends for its authenticity on a language that is precisely not in common or low usage, on `a language different from and superior to ``the real language of men'' ' (p. 38). He even cites lines from `Tintern Abbey' as proof of this, attempting to turn Wordsworth's textual practice against his philology: This is no more the language, than these are the thoughts, of men in general in a state of excitement: language more exquisitely elaborate, and thoughts more patiently worked out of the very marble of the mind, we rarely meet with in any writer either of verse or prose. (p. 38)

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

58 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

It is paramount for Montgommery that the demarcation of poetry and prose be preserved. The issue is not whether or not there is such a thing as `genuine' poetry ± both men agree that there is (moreover that it has been recognizable in `every age and nation, civilized or barbarous', p. 36). But where Wordsworth insists that genuine poetry can only be recovered by shedding the embellishments of diction that preclude the communication of `elemental feelings', Montgommery believes that precisely these embellishments are necessary to elevate thought. Curiously enough, after arguing that the realms of poetry and prose should remain distinct, in a review of Wordsworth's prose work The Convention of Cintra (1809) two years later, Montgommery enthused that the pamphlet contained `more of the spirit and fire of genuine poetry, than we have found in many a cream-coloured volume of verse, designed to delight and astonish posterity'. The following passage testifies the extent to which Wordsworth obliged his readers to address thorny philological questions and vexed, often tail-chasing debates over `genuineness' (where the idea of nativeness is an important feature):47 The first thing that will strike the mind, on taking up this pamphlet, will be the Latinity of its title;48 and the second will be the English of its contents. Of the former we shall only say, that it is the title of something without a name; ± whether an address, speech, letter, or any thing else, to the people of Great Britain, the people of Great Britain must themselves determine. Of the latter, ± the English of its contents, ± we must observe, that it is so exquisitely compounded of words, idioms, and phrases, obsolete and authorized, unprecedented and vernacular, as to form altogether a style of very peculiar gait and character, resembling nothing so nearly as the blank verse of the Westmorland triumvirate of Bards [Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey]. [. . .] In these Sibylline leaves, (full of portentous and awful denunciations,) snatched from the winds, and stitched loosely together to make a pamphlet of only one day's longer life than a newspaper, there is more of the spirit and fire of genuine poetry, than we have found in many a cream-coloured volume of verse, designed to delight and astonish posterity. The language is at once splendid and obscure, vigorous yet prolix, beautiful, bewildering, and uncouth. (p. 744) As we can observe, despite Montgomery's earlier objections, the distinction between poetry and prose starts to crumble at the edges.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 59

If one thing has become clear to this point, it is that an eccentricity or capriciousness at the centre of Wordsworth's Preface not only confused critics between 1798 and 1802, but continued to unsettle readers in the years following. Reviews of Wordsworth's later volumes often read like continuations of appraisals of Lyrical Ballads. Wordsworth's theory of genuine poetry at any rate preoccupied reviewers of `Lake' productions long after the second edition of Lyrical Ballads appeared. It was the issue that tended to split those with Romantic tastes from audiences who continued to orient themselves around neoclassical literary tenets. What is more, `genuineness' remained a term whose semantic domain both sides of the debate were anxious to circumscribe and claim for themselves. To advance this case, one could instance the Critical Review's response to Wordsworth. The journal begins by conceding that Wordsworth's Poems (1807) possessed `all the enthusiasm of genuine poetry';49 but it quickly becomes clear that the reviewer's definition of `genuine' diverges substantially from Wordsworth's. In fact, the Critical summarily denounces the majority of the 1807 poems as further illustrations of Wordsworth's `false' and `enervating debauchery of taste' (p. 401). The harshness of these pronouncements stems from the critic's (accurate) presentiment that Wordsworth and his followers wanted to `direct the taste of the nation' (p. 400). In the reviewer's mind this ambition fully sanctioned a sally of uncompromising rebukes, including a reference to Wordsworth's `present diseased state' (p. 403) ± possibly the inspiration for George Felton Mathew's infamous comment on Keats's own `diseased states of feelings' in the European Review in 1815.50 Although it is unlikely that the Critical Review's use of the word `state' intentionally alludes to nationhood or to the condition of the nation, there is nevertheless a sense in which Wordsworth's diseased state of mind is thought to reflect or, most worryingly, prefigure the fate awaiting England if a rogue linguistic philosophy was permitted to exert undue pressure on established paradigms of taste. The fear that single writers, or worse still groups of like-minded writers, could influence taste at a national level is heard with increasing regularity in the early nineteenth century. In 1830, for example, the Edinburgh Review's Henry Brougham (who defended Hunt, unsuccessfully, in his libel case against the Prince Regent) savaged John Galt's Life of Lord Byron, the first instalment in Galt's planned National Library. The book would not have been noticed at all, sniped Brougham, had it not formed `the initial part of a publication calling itself National': this claim in itself, Brougham explains, `requires of us that we should guard the public taste from any chance of contamination that might arise from the circulation of such a pro-

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

60 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 61

We must [. . .] be allowed, on behalf of all the most approved principles of good taste, all the soundest canons of criticism, nay, the rules of the English language, and even of ordinary grammar, to enter our protest against the manner of writing which Mr Galt has thought fit to adopt. [. . .] He is strangely mistaken if he thinks himself of such consideration in the republic of letters, as to entitle him to make himself a dictator over language, or rather sultan of the Dictionary. His composition is often a wild mixture of absurd and incongruous images ± his language a preposterous medley of old words used in new senses, and new words coined without either the warrant of necessity, etymology, analogy, or harmony. (p. 230) Interestingly enough, it is a `republic of letters' that Brougham imagines is vulnerable to literary interlopers, rather than a monarchic realm. But the point to take is that reviewing trepidation occasioned by the national scope of Galt's project is communicated through an image of threat to existing orders. The problem, acute by 1830 but apparent even in 1807, was that ever larger readerships and an expanding print culture meant that just as the great reviews had ± or believed they had ± the power to dictate national taste, publications like Lyrical Ballads, or for that matter Poems (1807), also possessed the capacity to institute wide counter-movements in taste. In one respect, ranting reviews of Hunt, Keats and Tennyson do nothing so much as register critical discomfiture at the national level (and national ramifications) of the debate over diction and poetic language.52 Ridicule remained the weapon of choice against Wordsworth in the first phase of his reception. In 1813, Francis Jeffrey achieves an euphonious comic `hit' by pointing out that the `hero' of the Excursion was a `superannuated Peddler' whose diction was too lofty for his calling (pp. 29±30): A man who went about selling flannel and pocket-handkerchiefs in this lofty diction, would soon frighten away all his customers; and would infallibly pass either for a madman, or for some learned and affected gentleman, who, in a frolic, had taken up a character which he was peculiarly ill qualified for supporting.53

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

duction'.51 Brougham's dismissive but clearly edgy attitude towards Galt indicates how high reactionary reviewers thought the stakes were pitched in the battle over taste:

This complaint is redolent of earlier gripes that the `language of low and rustic life' was neither `low' nor `rustic'. We hear it again in William Rowe Lyall's 1815 Quarterly Review critique of the `White Doe of Rylstone' (1815). Lyall devotes half his copy to a close examination of what he regarded to be the contradictions and unresolved logic of Wordsworth's prefaces (which, we should remember, had been published over a decade earlier). Lyall argues that `if the language of low life be purified from what we should call its real defects, it will differ only in copiousness from the language of high life'.54 This observation carries evident force; but the review incorporates an even more far-reaching attack on Romantic philology. It asserts an `establishment' materialist position that vigorously denies the possibility of a core of truth at the heart of language (other than that put in place by custom), or any essential link between the history of speakers and specific idioms (the hope of reforming society through language depended on the integrity of this connection): Language, as every body knows, consists merely of arbitrary signs which stand for whatever it may have pleased custom to enact; and whatever changes may happen among them, are occasioned [. . .] by accidental associations of one sort and another. (p. 206)55 This statement directly contradicts the doctrine that language embodies national voice and is intimately bound up with the history of its speakers ± that it is `living', in Coleridge's phrase;56 it also foreshadows trenchant statements of autonomous language made fifteen years or so later by philologist friends of Tennyson, F. D. Maurice and Julius Hare, whose visions of arbitrary language were to prove so unsettling to the young poet (the topic of Chapter 6). By no means all reviews of Wordsworth's `White Doe of Rylstone' were as unfavourable as Lyall's. The British Lady's Magazine was pleased to note that a ballad based on the Rylstone story was also to be found in Percy's Reliques, a publication popular with the journal's readers. If Wordsworth's poem seemed strange to some people, it was only because the literature of England's elder bards had been neglected for so long, the reviewer insisted: `[Wordsworth] treads in a path once familiarly beaten, though long forsaken'.57 The British Review also had no qualms about pronouncing Wordsworth a `genuine poet'.58 Concurring with Wordsworth's views on diction, the reviewer proclaims: `It is encouraging to perceive that the French rules of criticism, which resembled the figure-

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

62 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

gardening in the Spectator, and which threatened to reduce all English poetry to a polished and featureless mannerism, has [sic] gradually been superseded by one more vigorous and more national' (p. 371). The emphasis placed here on `vigorous' poetic idiom and `national' linguistic textures aligns the writer with the grain of Romantic philology, while the rejection of poetry that is `balanced by rule and measure', `made up of established periphrases, conventional phrases, and traditional metaphors', and which forms `a sort of poetic cypher' or `symbolic diction', rehearses a checklist of Romanticism's pet hates regarding neoclassical compositions and contests the values and assumptions underpinning received taste (p. 371). Even after 1815, Wordsworth's philology of 1798±1802 continued to marshal strong feelings. A writer for the Edinburgh Monthly Review acknowledged the bard's `power to furnish a delicious banquet to the lovers of genuine poetry' in Peter Bell (1819) and The Waggoner (1819), but objected to the excessive `homeliness of the language' of these works.59 The Literary Chronicle pressed the charge of linguistic `homeliness' further, insisting that Peter Bell was doomed to failure `unless indeed the public taste should become so far perverted, as not to distinguish between the puerilities of some modern poets and the lofty and impassioned diction of those whose works have stood the test of ages, and who will be read with delight when Mr. Wordsworth and the Lake school will be entirely forgotten'.60 George Croly, reviewing in the Literary Gazette, was perturbed to find the epithet `genuine' all but annexed to Romantic writing. He complained that many readers not only admired the `Lake School' of poets, but `uph[e]ld their productions as the only true and genuine poetry extant'.61 Implacable, Croly insisted that Peter Bell was `sickly and absurd', `belaboured', `maudlin trash' (p. 274). No matter how vehement commentators could be in their rejection of Wordsworth's poetics between 1798 and 1815, they were, by and large, content to discuss Lyrical Ballads' philosophy of language within a dialectic space opened by Wordsworth himself. This changed after the radical editor of the Examiner, Leigh Hunt, published The Story of Rimini in 1816. At this seminal juncture, a significant shift in the ideological preoccupations of reviews and reviewers is detectable. The unapologetically seditious and recently incarcerated Hunt (released from prison at the beginning of 1815) used theories of language in his Preface that were visibly recycled from Lyrical Ballads ± and there was a sizeable difference in the minds of conservative critics between an ascetic, visionary Wordsworth and an active, cosmopolitan Hunt. The latter's notoriety as

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 63

a prominent liberal obliged reviewers to consider politics and linguistics as two sides of the same coin when assessing Hunt's work. I address this in more detail in Chapter 3. But the important thing to note here is that harsh new attitudes to non-standard theories of language and literature, enacted in response to the threat posed by Hunt, were extended backwards to Wordsworth's own pre-1816 works, notably Lyrical Ballads. Further explanation is needed to clarify this point. An appraisal in the Scourge in July 1816, ostensibly of Coleridge's `Christabel', illustrates how linguistic debates in literary journals (particularly those involving the `Lake' poets), began to move unambiguously into political fields of discourse. Before this choleric critique addresses Coleridge's `feeble' poem (Coleridge's diction is said to be `corrupt, his construction involved and ungrammatic, his verses inharmonious, and his fable at once disgusting and absurd'), a lengthy tirade is directed against Hunt's `bad taste', `miserable degradation' and the excessive sense of democratized poetic community that lead Hunt to enlist Byron, familiarly, in the foreword to Rimini (`My dear Byron, [. . .] you see what you have brought yourself to by liking my verses').62 After Hunt has been savaged in this way, attention is turned to Wordsworth's and Coleridge's linguistic experimentations, which are (re)read, with retro-chronological effect, as exercises in political agitation: Within the last few years, a conspiracy has been formed to revolutionize the whole system of English poetry; to undermine the foundations of taste and common sense, and to establish a general confederation against the authority of legitimate criticism. (p. 60) References to `conspiracy', revolution, `confederation' and the imperilled `authority of legitimate criticism' (for which we can read `legitimate authority') signal a newly politicized dimension to literary reviews of Romantic texts, largely absent from earlier criticism of the `Lake School'. We also begin to observe the phenomenon whereby Romantic texts influence each other's reception with bi-directional chronology: Wordsworth has influenced Hunt and thus appraisals of Hunt in conservative journals, and in turn Hunt's use of Wordsworth has altered the way in which Wordsworth is read by the same critics. The overriding fear in the Scourge review is that such `corrupt diction' as Wordsworth and Coleridge wished to institute was antithetical to, and more to the point endangered, `an era of highly polished civilization' (p. 62). As well as linking the health of the English language to the well-being of English

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

64 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

civilization as a whole ± a familiar standpoint of eighteenth-century philology ± the charge of corruption also reflects an association that had started to be made between morality and poetic idiom. This strategic identification was to become a central feature of reviews of Hunt and Keats, culminating in the vituperative attacks by `Z' on the `Cockney School of Poetry' a couple of years later. When the Scourge's reviewer finally moves on to `Christabel', Coleridge's claim to `the language [. . .] of genuine poetry' is dismissed out of hand, and Coleridge haughtily referred to an approved canon of Milton, Pope and Cowper (p. 63). As we have already seen, objections to Romantic redefinitions of genuine poetic idiom are frequently heard in early reviews of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and continue to be made in critiques of Hunt and Keats. But the overriding difference in the way `Lake' and `Cockney' writers are treated in this respect is that prior to Hunt's experimentation with diction, the concept of genuine poetry was debated almost exclusively on philological grounds. After the publication of The Story of Rimini, efforts to revise ideas of genuine poetry are linked by reviewers ± not incorrectly ± to wider political and cultural agendas. The Scourge's review of `Christabel' is important in this regard because it marks the point at which debates over genuine poetry become, unambiguously, debates over the politics of genuine culture. By the time the Scourge's critic addresses Coleridge's use of genuine language, discussion concerning this idiom has ceased to be primarily linguistic in character, and is now bound up with political contestations, intrigue and conspiracies against the ruling order. A memorable passage from the eighth instalment, `On the Living Poets', in Hazlitt's Lectures on the English Poets (delivered and published in 1818), confirms the worst fears of conservative periodicals regarding the relationship between experimental poetry and revolutionary politics: [The Lake] school of poetry had its origin in the French revolution, or rather in those sentiments and opinions which produced that revolution. [. . .] The change in the belles-lettres was as complete, and to many persons as startling, as the change in politics, with which it went hand in hand. There was a mighty ferment in the heads of statesmen and poets, kings and people. According to the prevailing notions, all was to be natural and new. Nothing that was established was to be tolerated. All the common-place figures of poetry, tropes, allegories, personifications, with the whole heathen mythology, were instantly discarded; a classical allusion was considered as a piece of

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 65

antiquated foppery; capital letters were no more allowed in print, than letters-patent of nobility were permitted in real life; kings and queens were dethroned from their rank and station in legitimate tragedy or epic poetry, as they were decapitated elsewhere; rhyme was looked upon as a relic of the feudal system, and regular metre was abolished along with regular government.63 Although Hazlitt is clearly enjoying himself, hypostatizing the anxieties of reviewers as much as describing an actual Romantic project, it is plain to see why The Story of Rimini encouraged reviewers to reinterpret distinctive features of Wordsworth's poetics as politically, morally and in a larger sense culturally threatening. Hunt's poem is narrated around a tale of adultery and incest, a circumstance that in itself was sufficient to set the moral sensors of the guardians of public taste quivering indignantly. If that were not enough, it was partly written in Horsemonger Lane Gaol in Surrey, where its author had been imprisoned for a libel on the Prince Regent (Hunt had referred to the future king as `a violator of his word, a libertine over head and ears in disgrace, a despiser of domestic ties, the companion of gamblers and demireps, a man who had just closed half a century without one single claim on the gratitude of his country, or the respect of posterity').64 Added to which, many conservative reviewers, for whom neoclassical values were virtually a precondition for literature, were affronted that Hunt, with little formal knowledge of Latin or Greek, had the temerity to use classical mythology and imagery as material for his experiments with diction. They were particularly dismayed that The Story of Rimini freely intermingled naiads, dryads and limniads with knights, castles and ladies. Since Hunt's Preface drew authority for many of its most pointed challenges directly from Wordsworth's philosophy of language ± evident from Hunt's commitment to describing `natural things in a language becoming them', and assertions such as `the proper language of poetry is in fact nothing different from that of real life' ± it is little wonder that the publication of The Story of Rimini was to exert such a negative influence on Wordsworth's reputation. After the review of `Christabel' in the Scourge it became commonplace to site Wordsworth's theories in the context of insurgency, threats to the realm and political upheaval. In 1819, an exasperated writer for the Eclectic Review accused Wordsworth of having `scorned all those finer rules which his predecessors have worked by', and castigated him for having `attempted to set up a new reign of taste'.65 The politicized register is used deliberately and with care: by contrasting the `finer

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

66 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 67

rules' of tradition with Wordsworth's attempt to institute a `new reign of taste', the reviewer portrays unauthorized philological contentions as the logic of revolution, usurpation and regicide.66

I'd like to end this chapter by giving an account of liberal responses to the political insinuations of the establishment's literary watchmen. Once linguistic experimentation had become a virtual synonym for political sedition, supporters of Wordsworth and Coleridge (and indeed Hunt) found themselves obliged to mimic rhetorical features of hostile reviews in order to subvert them. In 1820, a critique of Wordsworth's River Duddon in Gold's London Magazine begins in familiar enough fashion by invoking ± approvingly ± the distinction made in Hunt's Preface between `natural' (pre-Restoration) and `artificial' (neoclassical) poetry. The reviewer argues that Pope and his followers possessed `a superb array of glittering epithets', but a concomitantly `monotonous recurrence of harmony',67 producing a type of poetry that read as if it had been `beaten by the hammer [. . .] like the gold leaf in the shop of the mechanic, into a completely stagnant, and level surface of faultless chilliness'. The Lake school is lauded for adhering by contrast to the dictates of `genuine sensibility' (p. 620). Stress is laid on authenticity, which Wordsworth's poetry is thought to possess in abundance, and which alone is judged to lead to `that depth of feeling, that intuitive perception of beauty, which induces the genuine poet [. . .] to ``snatch a grace beyond the reach of art'', and bear away the palm of honor and triumph' (p. 623). But after this rather formulaic exercise in nailing colours to the mast, the reviewer inserts a different kind of passage, rich in political allusiveness: Aware of the necessity of a radical reform in the house of commons of literature, it [the Lake School] set out by its extreme and lasting opposition to anything that savoured of a mechanical process. (p. 620) Two ideas ± the need for a `radical reform' in literature, and the exigency of wider political reform ± are condensed into one doubly charged, intrareferential and highly contentious metaphor. In this manner the political vocabulary and insinuating tactics of the Scourge and other similarly perspectived periodicals is appropriated and put back to work for the liberal cause (much as we saw in Hazlitt's lecture `On the Living Poets').

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

A radical reform in the house of commons of literature

The London Magazine adopts a similar strategy. Where the Eclectic had attempted to exploit a variety of cultural and political anxieties by arguing that Wordsworth's aim was to set up a `new reign of taste', the London Magazine states, matter-of-factly, that the Lake school was indeed `in every respect [. . .] diametrically opposed to the reigning schools of the day' (p. 621). The defiant `in every respect' (my emphasis) not only acknowledges the political insinuations that vie for semantic space in the Eclectic, but makes fresh insinuations of its own. By throwing the Eclectic's vocabulary back on itself, the London Magazine ups the ante gloriously, allowing new flickers of subversion to unfix the authority of crown and government. Wordsworth's advocates did not lack the allusive sophistication of the Scourge and Eclectic. After beginning with conventional remarks on genuine poetry, a writer for the Monthly Censor in 1823 adds a powerfully, if obliquely, subversive passage. I'd like to discuss this briefly to conclude. In the passage in question, the reviewer observes that since `genuine poetry' is hardly ever appreciated in its own day, Wordsworth would have to wait for posterity to bestow proper recognition on him:68 Mr Wordsworth must content himself with foregoing present popularity, and wait calmly for the award of posterity. The puffs and praises of the floating chaff of the day, are not quite so valuable as the well-weighed, the purified, and the lasting homage of after times. He can afford to wait; for his poetry contains the seeds of immortality. Truth and nature will never become obsolete.69 The autumnal conceit (figured around floating chaff and seeds) is arresting; indeed, as I have discussed elsewhere, there is a long tradition within radical circles of using threshing and seed imagery as a means of communicating political dissention.70 For instance, Marvell debates the merits of political engagement or retreat in `The Garden' around a conceit centred on autumnal fruits; Paine ends The Rights of Man with an extended metaphor identifying political regeneration with seasonal growth; Keats disrupts the generic harmony of the `nature ode' with the figure of a gleaner in `To Autumn' (gleaning was outlawed in 1818, the year before Keats composed his ode);71 and, as Nicholas Roe argues, bosom-friends and ripening suns are invested in the poem with radical and conspiratorial overtones.72 Barry Cornwall uses autumn leaves to plot an extended allegory on the flags and liberty caps that fell at Peterloo, 16 August 1819, in his sonnet `Autumn' (first published in Leigh Hunt's Literary Pocket-Book for 1820, a publication that is packed

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

68 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

with political code); and Percy Shelley famously employs the image of leaves floating on the wind, carrying their `wingeÁd seeds' (l. 7) ± and with them the hope of future reform ± to lodge his own political protests in `Ode to the West Wind' (composed autumn 1819). With this radical heritage in mind, it is tempting to see the Monthly's reference to the `puffs and praises of the floating chaff of the day', and its comment that Wordsworth's `genuine' `English' poetry `contains the seeds of immortality', as a knowing attempt to access a radical tradition of codified dissent that would have been instantly recognizable to `right-minded' readers, but which would have dissolved into mere seasonal imagery in the wrong hands. Deciphered, then, the Monthly's critique suggests that the prevailing cultural order is `transitory' alongside the political truths contained (as `seeds of immortality') in genuine poetry such as Wordsworth's. The full political resonance of `genuine' becomes apparent in this instant.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Wordsworth, Radical Diction and Real Language 69

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

This chapter seeks to illuminate the remarkable range and diversity of second-period Romanticism's engagement with philological theory. I will be following two principal lines of investigation. One of these examines rhetorical debts and verbal parallels to disclose what we might consider `concrete' markers of the interchange between linguistic works and Romantic poetry. The second strand of argument continues my exploration into the ways that individual poems can be said to `dramatize' language debates. Common to both narratives is the emphasis placed on the communal nature of Romanticism's project to contest inherited protocols of style and expression. I will be demonstrating that a clear filament of political purpose links Wordsworth's philological contentions to Hunt's, and in turn Hunt's to Keats's. The `community' of resistance I outline in the following sections also includes figures such as Percy Shelley, Thomas Noon Talfourd and Barry Cornwall.

Formal crests, graceful noses and The Story of Rimini The early nineteenth century was a period of deep cultural crisis in which neoclassical literary values and `correct' taste met with a direct challenge from the innovative diction of vulgar `Cockney' poets, Leigh Hunt and John Keats. Conservative reviewers responded by questioning the right of these authors to mount their challenge. In October 1817, Hunt was castigated in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine by `Z' (John Gibson Lockhart, 1794±1854) as an `under-bred' man of `exquisitely bad taste', who knew `absolutely nothing of Greek' and `almost nothing of Latin'.1 Keats drew similar invective as someone who had `never read a single line [. . .] of Ovid' and knew `Homer only from Chapman'.2 70

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

3

71

I want to argue, however, that Lockhart's attempt to fashion Hunt and Keats as vulgar conspirators in a plot against high English culture deliberately cloaks other, more interesting and uniquely threatening ways in which Romanticism engages history. Beneath Blackwood's cultural rhetoric lies an important but disregarded nineteenth-century debate over poetic language in which both `Cockney' writers and conservative reviewers participated. What appears to us ± what is constructed for us by Maga ± as a moment of general cultural crisis, actually originates in a crisis focused more specifically on language.3 My aim, then, in the first sections of this chapter is to reconnect Romanticism with contemporary philological debates. In particular, I want to explore a lateRomantic `Cockney' project to recover a `genuine' voice for English literature. Leigh Hunt's poetry elicited an almost uniformly hostile response from conservative reviewers.4 An anonymous writer for the Eclectic Review quipped that some of the more unusual Cockneyisms in Foliage (1818) could only have been produced by Hunt's printer maliciously changing letters to produce a `Hunt travestie' such as `whiffling tones of rills', a `handy squirrel', and the `glib and flush' of the escaping `gush'.5 The Literary Gazette was equally vehement in its refusal to accept what it regarded as Hunt's penchant for voguish and misguided liberties with the English language: `Many of our modern writers seem to imagine that poetic genius consists in the fanciful illustration of the most trite objects; that to call a tree leafy, and a bird hoppy, and a cat purry, is genuine nature'.6 Hunt, on the other hand, believed himself to be emulating a pre-Restoration tradition of worthy English authors like William Browne, Edmund Spenser and George Chapman. These were writers whom Hunt wished to see installed as literary models in place of Pope and Johnson, and whose diction he hoped might soon be recognized as exemplary. Hunt's receptiveness to pre-Restoration diction (or in any event, his idealization of this), was encouraged by an emergent set of notions about language that Linda Dowling has called Romantic philology (Language and Decadence, pp. xiv, 14±15). These borrowed from ideas popularized by J. G. Herder, notably that each national language contains an ontological voice reflecting the spirit of its original speakers, and that every language harbours a deeply buried primitive idiom that even now animated genuine expressions of noble sentiment. Certain writers were felt to be more in tune with this `genuine' voice than others, though in Hunt's opinion it had largely ceased to be heard in English literature after the Restoration and the ascendancy of the neoclassical `French School of Poetry', with Pope at its head.7

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

Hunt's aversion to Pope began with an intense dislike of his `monotonous and cloying versification'.8 As John Whale points out, Hunt and his circle were reluctant even to dignify Pope's work with the name `poetry', conferring upon it instead the pejorative `versification', a term suggestive of sterile process, rather than creative genius.9 In December 1816, Hunt complained that Pope and other exponents of the `French School' were not `real poets' but `versifying wits, and bead-rollers of couplets'.10 The Preface to The Story of Rimini, published in February that year, castigated Pope's followers for having mistaken `mere smoothness for harmony' and for possessing ears sensible only of a `marked and uniform regularity' (Rimini, p. xiv). Although Hunt's vitriol was directed at neoclassical `versification', it served equally well for all that he thought amiss with modern diction. For Hunt, once inspiration had been sacrificed to prescription, poetry (as Pope's example confirmed to him), was left as a selfreflecting matrix of rules and conventions ± all surface with `no depth for the Romantic reader to penetrate'.11 Constructed by audiences of such readers, the polished rigidity of Augustan poetry was wholly unsuited to communicating Romanticism's `genuine' insights. The `story' of Rimini itself dramatizes some of the problems facing writers who sought to supplant inherited literary and linguistic etiquette with a rival set of values. Hunt's tale commences with Duke Guido of Polenta's announcement that his daughter Francesca should marry Prince Giovanni from neighbouring Rimini. The union is political rather than founded on genuine feelings of affection. Fearing rightly that Francesca would never consent to marriage with the unamiable prince if she met him before the ceremony, Guido suggests that Giovanni send his younger brother Paulo to marry her by proxy. This duly transpires, Paulo and Francesca complicating matters, however, by falling deeply in love. After not many twists and turns, Paulo dies in a duel with his vengeful sibling, having first asserted his moral superiority by refusing to return Giovanni's blows. The narrative structure of Hunt's poem is not terribly sophisticated, although recently claims have been made for Rimini's psychological complexity.12 What interests me primarily, though, is Hunt's representation of the brothers' characters. Where Giovanni is watchful, soldierly and politically minded, Paulo is portrayed as handsome, musical and fair-spoken. Where the pinch-nosed Giovanni spends his time hunting and practising warcraft, Paulo reads. In canto 2, Paulo is described as having been `formed in the very poetry of nature' (l. 47); this decidedly odd phrase invites a closer look. One could argue that the line actually makes more sense when the nouns are inverted, which leaves the younger brother `formed in the very nature

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

72 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

73

of poetry'. This reading offers a clue to the figurative character of Paulo's existence, his allegorical life. I will clarify what I mean. Michael Sider asserts that Rimini is `the product of an avowed radical, a person who uses the medium of language for political purposes'.13 But for Hunt, language is inherently political to begin with. We could even view the literary-minded Paulo as the corporeal focus for the alternative, politically charged idiom sketched out in the Preface to Rimini, just as the figure of Giovanni conflates neoclassical diction and the brand of reactionism that sought to reinforce it at every step. Like James and Leonard in Lyrical Ballads, Hunt's fictional siblings rehearse (with a twist of realpolitik only the experiences of the politically battlehardened Hunt could provide) linguistic arguments expounded in a prefatory essay. The disparities between Giovanni and Paulo are outlined in canto 3: Some likeness was there 'twixt the two, ± an air

At times, a cheek, a colour of the hair,

A tone, when speaking of indifferent things;

Nor, by the scale of common measurings,

Would you say more perhaps, than that the one

Was more robust, the other finelier spun;

That of the two, Giovanni was the graver,

Paulo the livelier, and the more in favour.

Some tastes there were indeed, that would prefer Giovanni's countenance as the martialler; And 'twas a soldier's truly, if an eye Ardent and cool at once, drawn-back and high, An eagle's nose, and a determined lip, Were the best marks of manly soldiership. Paulo's was fashioned in a different mould, And finer still, I think; for though 'twas bold, When boldness was required, and could put on A glowing frown as if an angel shone, Yet there was nothing in it one might call A stamp exclusive, or professional, ± No courtier's face, and yet its smile was ready, ± No scholar's, yet its look was deep and steady, ± No soldier's, for its power was all of mind, Too true for violence, and too refined. A graceful nose was his, lightsomely brought

30

40

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

Down from a forehead of clear-spirited thought;

Wisdom looked sweet and inward from his eye;

And round his mouth was sensibility: ±

50 It was a face, in short, seemed made to shew

How far the genuine flesh and blood could go, ±

A morning glass of unaffected nature, ±

Something, that baffled every pompous feature, ±

The visage of a glorious human creature.

(The Story of Rimini, III, 22±54) This passage, I submit, is closely involved in aesthetics and `taste' (l. 30), but in a manner that goes beyond merely noting the merits of Paulo's `graceful nose'. Key terms from Romantic discourses on language such as `genuine' and `unaffected' reappear intriguingly at lines 51±2, as Hunt's narrative associates itself with (while simultaneously invoking) debates on `unaffected' style and `genuine' poetry, recently given new force by Wordsworth.14 Hunt contrasts Paulo's `genuine' nature with Giovanni's courtly nous. In so doing, he rehearses the governing distinction between Romantic conceptions of a natural language of poetry capable of conveying inner essences, and a `pompous' (l. 53) neoclassical signifying system Romantics complained was content with ± and restricted to ± communicating polite surfaces using prescribed formulae. Hunt points out that some people might perceive a superficial likeness between Paulo and Giovanni (and thus between the respective literary idioms they embody). He even concedes that the two men share a certain `tone' when `speaking of indifferent things' (l. 24). `Some tastes there were indeed' that would even have preferred Giovanni's `countenance', just as many readers preferred Pope to Wordsworth or Keats. These are tastes no doubt shared by the sycophantic `courtiers' at line 42, men who are ready to smile when protocol requires it. Hunt's scornful reference to their superficiality recalls the Introduction to Nathaniel Bailey's Universal Etymological English Dictionary (Keats owned a copy of the twenty-fourth edition of 1776). In his dictionary, Bailey mocks `courtiers' for despising any words that were `common and the product of their own country' in favour of `foreign' terms that were `elegant or fine in pronunciation'.15 Hunt's attack on established literary tenets is encoded in several ways in the passage above. There is perhaps even an oblique reference to the famously ugly Pope in the description of Giovanni's `drawnback' eye and `eagle's nose' at lines 33 and 34. The identification fits in another key respect: at line 31, Giovanni is portrayed as the

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

74 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

75

`martialler' and enforcer of established ideologies in Rimini, which is precisely how Hunt perceived Pope and his influence in literary spheres. It seems to me that the depiction of Giovanni and Paulo recapitulates, figuratively, discussions about rival idioms and literary traditions conducted in Hunt's Preface. By these terms, it is hardly surprising that contemporary reviewers should have loathed Hunt's poem so thoroughly. In addition to castigating its diction, critics focused disapprobation through an uncompromising moral and political lens. Rimini was routinely dismissed as an insidious, seditious work that wilfully promoted licentious, incestuous (in that Paulo is Francesca's `brother' through marriage), and politically destabilizing desire. While Hunt considered Paulo's love for Francesca to be above reproach, the relationship was as abhorrent to the majority of reviewers as the liberal values externalized by Paulo. Indeed, for conservative commentators, Hunt's perverted morality, and that of his embodiments of linguistic theory, was the natural consequence, not to mention the natural expression, of a perverted idiom. A definite sense of being at odds with prevailing literary values is also manifest in the first lines of Keats's `Specimen of an Induction to a Poem', published in the 1817 volume: Lo! I must tell a tale of chivalry;

For large white plumes are dancing in mine eye.

Not like the formal crest of latter days:

But bending in a thousand graceful ways;

So graceful, that it seems no mortal hand,

Or e'en the touch of Archimago's wand,

Could charm them into such an attitude.

(ll. 1±7) The initially confident `Lo!' is prelude to an act of historicization ± telling a `tale of chivalry' ± in which Keats's narrative persona reaches back to an idealized medieval setting of knights, jousts and ladies' favours. The idealized nature of this medieval community is inscribed in the very first line: Keats will tell of a chivalry that is already a tale, has already been literated. In other words, he tells of a chivalry that has already been told ± by Spenser, whose `gentle spirit' (l. 56) Keats asks to accompany him along his own poetic journey. Keats, then, wishes to follow Spenser's footsteps along a path that he acknowledges has already been retrodden by `thy lov'd Libertas' (Keats's name for Hunt). This talismanic mention of Hunt unfolds a third level of repeti-

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

tion (a tale told by Spenser, retold by Hunt, and which Keats now wishes to tell again). It also establishes a rival hierarchy of writers to authorize Keats's poetics. One of these, Spenser, is a genuine pre-Restoration writer; the other, Hunt, a man whom Keats considered had successfully demonstrated (in Rimini) how the spirit of pre-Restoration diction might be appropriated for the modern age. As Rodney Stenning Edgecombe notes, Keats thought that in Rimini, Hunt had `rediscovered and restored the maniera' of pre-Restoration poetry.16 Although the `Specimen' is frequently denigrated as a very minor poem in a volume of often indifferent verse, it announces a key moment in the formation of Keats's literary taste. As signalled by its title, the poem was conceived as a blueprint for a poetic mood more fully and subtly developed in later essais in medievalizing (The Eve of St. Agnes, Isabella, `La Belle Dame Sans Merci'); it also testifies the young poet's eagerness to associate himself with the literary project announced in Hunt's Preface. It is not difficult to see a restrictive Augustan poetics in the `formal crests of latter days' (l. 3), and an ideal Romantic one in the `large white plumes' (l. 2) that dance in Keats's mind's eye. His readiness to do battle with antithetical literary values is evident in the controlling figure of the lance that governs the poem, pointing `slantingly j Athwart the morning air' (ll. 12±13), hailed by the tears of `some lady sweet' (l. 14), else `reflected, clearly, in a lake' (l. 20), or grasped in the `tremendous hand' (l. 25) of a warrior. Above all, Keats's question in this poem seems to be how to `revive the dying tones of minstrelsy, j Which linger yet about lone gothic arches' (ll. 32±3). How, that is, might Keats recover the simple yet direct tone of pre-Restoration poetry. The `Specimen' articulates Keats's anxiety that he has arrived too late in the day (to poetry, as to the joust): the wine butts are `drunk off to the lees' (l. 36), and the bright lance rests `against the fretted wall, j Beneath the shade of stately banneral' (ll. 37±8). Tellingly, it is at this point of narrative uncertainty and artistic despair that Keats invokes the guiding spirit of Spenser, and here that he declares his allegiance to Hunt's pre-Restoration aesthetic. In the Preface to Rimini, Hunt suggests how diction that has grown institutionally superficial might be repaired: With the endeavour to recur to a freer spirit of versification, I have joined one of still greater importance, ± that of having a free and idiomatic cast of language. [. . .] The proper language of poetry is in fact nothing different from that of real life, and depends for its dignity upon the strength and sentiment of what it speaks. [. . .] The

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

76 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

77

poet therefore should do as Chaucer or Shakespeare did, ± not copy what is obsolete or peculiar in either, any more than they copied from their predecessors, ± but use as much as possible an actual, existing language, ± omitting of course mere vulgarisms and fugitive phrases, which are the cant of ordinary discourse. (Rimini, pp. xv±xvi) This passage draws, of course, from Wordsworth's 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, particularly the section on `low and rustic life': Low and rustic life was generally chosen because in that situation the essential passions of the heart find a better soil in which they can attain their maturity, are less under restraint, and speak a plainer and more emphatic language; because in that situation our elementary feelings exist in a state of greater simplicity and consequently may be more accurately contemplated and more forcibly communicated. (p. 245) Laying aside Wordsworth's famous qualification of this passage for the moment, I want to foreground his accentuation of forceful communication and a `more emphatic language', as these are key characteristics of the Romantic project I am describing. In his Appendix on poetic diction, added in 1802, Wordsworth asserted: `The earliest Poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited by real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring and figurative' (p. 314). His belief that the first languages were inherently poetical, metaphorical and profoundly meaningful, incorporates a popular eighteenth-century tradition found in Rousseau, Condillac and Herder.17 Rousseau's influential Essay on the Origin of Language projected a poetic language that, in the course of history, had become: `more regular and less passionate. It substitutes ideas for feelings. It no longer speaks to the heart but to reason. [. . .] Language becomes more exact and clearer, but more prolix, duller and È nglicher die Sprache, colder'.18 Herder thought similarly: `je urspru È hle' [the closer a language desto weniger Abstraktionen, desto mehr Gefu to its origin, the less abstractions, and more feelings it has] (FruÈhe Schriften, I, 738). For Wordsworth, too, language had lost this initial figurative power. But his 1802 Appendix went further to accentuate human agency in the historical decay of language:

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

In succeeding times, Poets, and men ambitious of the fame of Poets, perceiving the influence of such language, and desirous of producing the same effect, without having the same animating passion, set themselves to a mechanical adoption of those figures of speech, and made use of them, sometimes with propriety, but much more frequently applied them to feelings and thoughts with which they had no natural connection whatsoever. (p. 314) The resulting diction was a `distorted language' (p. 314) as opposed to the `genuine language of poetry' (p. 315). Wordsworth postulated that through progressive `refinement' of this kind, an originally simple and genuine language was rendered `daily more and more corrupt, thrusting out of sight the plain humanities of nature by a motley masquerade of tricks, quaintnesses, hieroglyphics, and enigmas' (p. 316).19 In this belated perspective, Pope hovers as the high priest of the artificial style. Elsewhere, Wordsworth accused him of having `bewitched the nation by his melody, and dazzled it by his polished style'.20 To repair Pope's deleterious influence, Wordsworth envisaged a return to plain speaking, to the `language really spoken by men' (Preface, p. 254). Not everyone concurred with Wordsworth's `real language of men' any more than they did with Hunt's notion of an `actual, existing language'. In Biographia Literaria (1817), Coleridge famously objected that a rustic's language, `purified from all provincialism and grossness', would not differ greatly from the language of `any other man of common-sense, however learned or refined he may be'.21 This reiterated William Rowe Lyall's protest two years previously; reviewing Wordsworth's `The White Doe of Rylstone' for the Quarterly in 1815, Lyall declared: `If the language of low life be purified from what we should call its real defects, it will differ only in copiousness from the language of high life'.22 Hunt fared no better than Wordsworth in that journal. In May 1816, reviewer and Tory parliamentarian John Wilson Croker (1780±1857) suggested that Hunt's `actual, existing language' was really an `ungrammatical, unauthorised, chaotic jargon, such as we believe was never before spoken, much less written'.23 The proximity of `unauthorised' to `chaotic' urges the Quarterly's readership to perceive a causal link, whereby Hunt's vaunted `free and idiomatic cast of language' becomes synonymous with unusual phrases such as a `quoit-like drop' and a `clipsome waist'; synonymous, that is, with an unauthorized philology that could foster such vulgar and low expressions. In one respect, Coleridge, Lyall and Croker miss the point rather spectacularly. All three dispute what constitutes the `real' or `actual'

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

78 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

79

language of men: Croker protests that Hunt's `actual, existing language' has never been spoken by anyone. Coleridge, like Lyall, raises questions about the sort of words and phrases that belong to the `real language of men', and in Biographia suggests that for the `real' language Wordsworth meant common language, or better still, lingua communis, a communal discourse spoken nowhere in whole, but understood everywhere (Biographia Literaria, I, 210). But Wordsworth's `real language of men', like Hunt's `actual, existing language', is clearly marked as an idealized concept. This is signalled by self-conscious equivocation and qualification: in Wordsworth's case it is a rustic language, but `purified indeed from what appear to be its real defects', and in Hunt's, `an actual, existing language', but `omitting of course mere vulgarisms and fugitive phrases'. Neither Wordsworth nor Hunt needed anyone to tell them that their `real' idioms, once `purified' from defects and vulgarisms, would no longer be `actual, existing' languages. The fact that Hunt felt able to talk about actual or existing languages only months after Lyall demolished the `White Doe of Rylstone' suggests that he was not overly concerned whether or not his concept would stand up to scrutiny. On the contrary, the trope of rustic discourse was just that ± an effective means of underlining the plain and direct style that was intended to replace what Wordsworth termed the `gaudiness and inane phraseology' of neoclassical diction (Advertisement, p. 7). We might say that Wordsworth invokes the rustic, in much the same way as William Cobbett does `Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Ploughboys' in his 1818 Grammar of the English Language, as a convenient counter-image to refined neoclassical sensibilities. Cobbett's Grammar paradoxically borrowed its ideal of plain and direct speaking from those whom it intended to teach to speak plainly and directly (Cobbett's model is thus flexed back on itself). Similarly, Wordsworth appropriated the language of `low and rustic life' to produce a diction that was no longer recognizably rustic. For Wordsworth and Hunt, the project of reclaiming an appropriate diction had very little to do with identifying anything that actually existed in a particular idiolect, be it that of a rustic, ploughboy, or milkmaid. It had much more to do with the positing of a general and thoroughly ideal discourse, one that could draw on philology to bolster its claims to authenticity, but one, above all, that was conveniently empty of associations with neoclassical values. It is this ideal sense of language that lies behind Keats's identification of Thomas Chatterton as the `purest writer in the English Language'. In Keats's depiction, Chatterton has `no French idiom, or particle like

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

Chaucer ± 'tis genuine English Idiom in English words' (Letters, II, 167). This remark is problematic since, in one obvious respect, Chatterton is the least genuine of poets. As the `editor' of the so-called Rowley poems (the idea of editorship in this context is a relatively new concept, and a thoroughly philological invention), Chatterton produced/forged works purporting to derive from the pen of a fifteenth-century monk. Nevertheless, Keats praises Chatterton's idiom as genuinely English: The purest english I think ± or what ought to be the purest ± is Chatterton's ± The Language had existed long enough to be entirely uncorrupted of Chaucer's gallicisms and still the old words are used. (Letters, II, 212) Chatterton died in 1770, but when Keats refers to the language having `existed long enough', he clearly does not mean the period in which Chatterton actually wrote (the eighteenth century), but rather the fifteenth-century setting of Chatterton's bogus pre-Restoration idiom. `Genuine' English for Keats, it would seem, has more to do with an ideal that can be reconstructed in the eighteenth, or for that matter the nineteenth century, than with any authentic and specific historicity. Keats responded to a transcendental sense of poetic community lodged in the past that could be reclaimed by the modern poet ± a community that had been disguised through `refinement' by a dominant system of values. But while the pre-Restoration aroma of Chatterton's diction might have been sufficient to guarantee its appeal to Romantic readers, the desynonymization of `genuine' and `authentic' occurs in the instant that Chatterton's bogus diction is incorporated into the Romantic project. There is an additional problem: the very act of turning to the past for a model of exemplary diction implies that at a definite point in history writers were in touch with a genuine English voice. Whereas Wordsworth offered some indication as to what this ideal idiom would sound like (albeit in decidedly transhistorical social terms as the language of `low and rustic life'), Keats is less certain. Like Hunt, he is only really convinced of one thing ± that 1680 represented the cut-off point for a truly poetic language. In some respect, it was left to Lockhart to historicize Keats's linguistic challenge in London, in Cockneyism, as he had Hunt's. All `Cockney' aspirations, whether poetical, philological ± or even aeronautical ± are referred determinedly to what Maga presented as a ridiculous Hampstead provinciality. Lockhart's mock lament on the `death' of Hunt is a vivid case in point:

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

80 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

81

He died [. . .] without having been once beyond the well-fenced meadows of his microcosm. Suppose for a moment, Leigh Hunt at sea ± or on the summit of Mount Blanc! It is impossible. No. Hampstead was the only place for him. [. . .] It is true, that on one occasion Mr Hunt [. . .] talks of having gone up in a balloon ± but there is something Cockneyish even in that object with all its beauty ± and one thinks of the Aeronaut after his flight, returning to town in a post-chaise, with the shrivelled globe bundled on the roof.24 The use of Cockneyism to undermine the authenticity of Romantic experience was a popular manoeuvre. In a review of Cornwall's The Flood of Thessaly (1823), Christopher North (J. W. Wilson) remarked: There is something surely not a little absurd in the notion of a person undertaking the `Flood,' whom the slightest shower would drive under a balcony, or into a hackney-coach. I have no doubt that [Cornwall] would carry `The Deluge' in his pocket to Colburn, under an umbrella.25 In fact, Keats does appear to have been working towards a more precise sense of the source and historic period of `genuine' English. His struggle with Milton throughout 1819 suggests an ongoing endeavour to locate a definitive model of genuine English. The terms of this struggle, moreover, are recognizably those of the wider Romantic project, as is clear from Keats's invitation to John Hamilton Reynolds in 1819 to assist him in ridding Hyperion of Milton's influence: Miltonic verse cannot be written but in an artful or rather artist's humour. I wish to give myself up to other sensations. English ought to be kept up. It may be interesting to you to pick out some lines from Hyperion and put a mark X to the false beauty proceeding from art, and one k to the true voice of feeling. (Letters, II, 167) Here Keats ranges artful and artificial diction against the `true voice of feeling', convinced that instances of Miltonic diction in the first Hyperion have obscured this genuine voice and prevented his poem from speaking loud and bold. This recalls Wordsworth's Preface on how an originally expressive and figurative diction was corrupted through its artful and inappropriate application to mundane scenes. It also evokes Hunt's distinction between `artificial' and `natural' diction. Hunt deemed the latter

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

superior, since it `depends for its dignity upon the strength and sentiment of what it speaks', something it has in common with the language of `real life' (Rimini, pp. xv±xvi). These sorts of distinctions, and the very notion of `real' or `genuine' poetry, were considered mystical by Lockhart and Croker; nevertheless, as I want to suggest in the next section, they actually borrowed from a clearly defined philological tradition.

The brink of barbarism Like Wordsworth's Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Hunt's Preface to Rimini draws on a philological spirit whose epistemology can be traced in J. G. Herder's theories of language. In 1772, Herder published his prize essay for the Berlin Academy, Abhandlung uÈber den Ursprung der Sprache [Treatise on the Origin of Language]. In it, he advanced the notion of Volksstimme, a primitive national voice reflecting the concerns and needs of a language's original speakers.26 The German philosopher also underlined the intimate relationship between language and speakers: `Und was ist also die ganze Bauart der Sprache anders, als eine Entwickelungsweise seines Geistes, eine Geschichte seiner Entdeckungen!' [and what is the entire structure of language, if not a form of his [mankind's] spirit's development, a history of his discoveries!].27 The notion that even refined discourse contained a primitive inner voice unsettled neoclassical sensibilities, hinting at a dark presence in language beyond the control of the poet. The idea of ontological essence proved popular among philologists, however, coinciding as it did with the `discovery' of Sanskrit by European scholars. This mysterious tongue was not only widely believed to be older than Latin and Greek, but, as we saw in Chapter 1, Sir William Jones fancied that traces of an even more ancient idiom could be discerned behind it: The Sanskrit language, whatever be its antiquity, is of a wonderful structure; more perfect than the Greek, more copious than the Latin, and more exquisitely refined than either, yet bearing to both of them a stronger affinity, both in the roots of verbs and in the forms of grammar, than could possibly have been produced by accident; so strong indeed, that no philologer could examine them all three, without believing them to have sprung from some common source, which, perhaps, no longer exists.28 This well-known passage imbricates two elements central to Romantic philology: the challenge of Sanskrit to traditional linguistic taxonomies,

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

82 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

83

and the suggestion that a primitive idiom, or ontological essence, could still be apprehended in language. Jones's allusion to a lingering Ur-idiom had a pervasive influence on nineteenth-century linguistic theory, and encouraged Romanticism's fascination with bringing language's deeper resonances closer to the surface to allow the poet to `speak definitively' again.29 The sense that past conditions of English were closer to this mystical Ursprache, both in historical proximity and nature, is audible in a paean to William Browne, author of Britannia's Pastorals (1613), which appeared in the Retrospective Review in 1820. As its name suggests, the Retrospective was backward-looking, but selectively so. It found much to admire in pre-Restoration literature, whose earthy English textures had not yet been `refined' by the French School of Poetry. In taste the journal was anti-Augustan, and like Hunt sought to install a pantheon of `genuine' English poets such as Browne (on whom Keats drew directly in The Eve of St. Agnes) and Spenser in place of Pope and Johnson.30 Regular contributors included Thomas Noon Talfourd, a member of Hunt's circle. The Retrospective's anonymous panegyric is informative, since what is lauded in Browne is recommended as a model for modern writers. Browne is praised for his `opulence, richness, and propriety of phrase', for not having confined himself within `acknowledged and accustomed forms of speech', and most importantly for his `liberty of inverting any combination of words' in order to convey images in the most forceful manner.31 His idiosyncratic diction is read in terms of making poetry speak out forcefully, and is eagerly claimed for the Romantic project. Indeed, Browne's pre-Restoration diction is offered as an authoritative precedent valorizing the linguistic innovation (or `Cockneyism') of poets like Hunt and Keats: This peculiar freedom of expression and propriety of phrase, is by no means uncommon in many of the poets of the present day, who are, in reality, of the old school revived. In truth, that which has been termed unbounded licence, and even vulgarity in the poems of Leigh Hunt and others, is frequently neither more nor less than a free imitation of the old English masters of the art. (p. 167) By and large, in their review essays Lockhart and Croker refused to deal seriously with potentially thorny philological issues connected to the work of Hunt and Keats, preferring instead to focus on wider cultural objections to these writers' low social status and allegedly indifferent

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

education. This did not mean, however, that conservative reviewers were unaware of contemporary linguistic theories, or averse to intervening in language debates in other ways. In 1815, Friedrich Schlegel published a series of lectures on the history of ancient and modern literature, Geschichte der alten und neuen Literatur. The lectures gave powerful voice to a popular eighteenth-century view that language and larger culture were bound up with each other to the extent that any decay in the linguistic sphere (such as that initiated by vulgar writers), signalled general cultural decline: A nation whose language becomes rude and barbarous, must be on the brink of barbarism in regard to everything else. A nation which allows her language to go to ruin, is parting with the last half of her intellectual independence, and testifies her willingness to cease to exist.32 Schlegel's English translator in 1818 was none other than John Gibson Lockhart. While not exactly misrepresenting Schlegel, Lockhart's addition of the notion of a `brink' to barbarism (absent in Schlegel's original) must have struck a chord, appearing as it did at the same time as the `Cockney School of Poetry' series. Lockhart's scaremongering countervailed against a spirit of linguistic innovation which had produced Hunt's Rimini, and which, with phrases such as `handy squirrels' and `scattery light', threatened to shatter the rigid structures of Augustan diction, Johnsonian idiom and high English culture. Although the cultural anxiety audible in Lockhart's translation of Schlegel registers a different emphasis to the Blackwood's reviews, both derive from the same fear of unfamiliar literary paradigms. In his `Cockney School of Poetry' series, Lockhart implies that English literature will be corrupted by authors who have no social or cultural right to contribute to it. In the translation, he engages with a philological debate which either, as Hunt and Keats construed it, sanctioned the use of non-standard English to reinvigorate literature, or, in Lockhart's conception, threatened precisely the opposite outcome by encouraging the use of unauthorized words and phrases. Indeed, both sources of Lockhart's unease ± ill-educated authors and idiosyncratic diction ± are recorded in his dyslogistic label `Cockney', animated equally by an abhorrence of social vulgarity and the underlying fear that linguistic `corruption' would lead inexorably to the decline of wider culture. Lockhart's success in ensuring that `cultivated' taste remained disdainful of Hunt's and Keats's innovative style may be measured against the

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

84 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

85

spreading sense among reviewers that linguistic innovation threatened the cultural status quo. We can detect a new vigilance at work in policing the linguistic borders of English literature, as is already apparent in Croker's venomous review of Rimini for the Quarterly in 1816 ± a review undertaken, Croker reminds us, not because of the poem's literary merits, or lack of them, but mainly because it had been `written on certain principles, and put forth as a pattern for imitation'.33 For cardcarrying agents of conservative ideology, Cockney `principles' implied a flood tide of obscure words, dubious coinages and non-standard usage like `whiffling tones of rills' and `quoit-like' steps. By threatening the notion of refined language, such phrases also threatened the very foundations of `good' literature, `good' taste and the corollary of this, `good' culture. As I have suggested, Lockhart's dyslogistic label `Cockney' was effective in enlisting the sympathies of other reviewers who might otherwise not have objected so strongly to Hunt's and Keats's linguistic experiments. Thus we find the Scots Magazine commenting in 1817 that poets like Hunt and Keats `aim laudably enough at force and freshness, but are not so careful of the inlets of vulgarity'.34 The anonymous reviewer responds enthusiastically to `force and freshness', key ideas in Romantic philology, but we detect a presiding anxiety that the freshness of Cockney writers might constitute a vulgarity with dire consequences for culture as a whole. It is here, at the intersection of debates on the role of language within wider culture, that Lockhart manages to dodge the philological thrust of Hunt's and Keats's challenge to `correct' taste. His job of shifting the debate onto the cultural, which is of course also the moral high ground, was thorough, as attested to by a disconsolate Keats in 1819: `My name with the literary fashionables is vulgar ± I am a weaver boy to them' (Letters, II, 186).

Speaking loud and bold `On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', which John Barnard has called Keats's `first real poem', may now be placed within the context of the Romantic project I have been discussing.35 In Recollections of Writers (1878), Keats's friend and early mentor Charles Cowden Clarke recounts how one night in October 1816, he and Keats read together from George Chapman's Whole Works of Homer, True Prince of Poets (1614): `[We were] put in possession of the Homer of Chapman, and to work we went, turning to some of the ``famousest'' passages, as we had scrappily known them in Pope's version'.36 Clarke selected a shipwreck

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

86 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Then forth he came, his both knees faltering, both His strong arms hanging downe, and all with froth His cheeks and nosthrils flowing, voice and breath Spent all to use, and down he sank to Death. The seas had soakt his heart through . . . (Book V, ll. 608±12)37 Now Pope: That moment, fainting as he touch'd the shore,

He dropt his sinewy arms; his knees no more

Perform'd their office, or his weight upheld:

His swoln heart heav'd; his bloated body swell'd:

From mouth and nose the briny torrent ran;

And lost in lassitude lay all the man . . .

(Book V, ll. 580±5)38 It is not difficult to see why a Romantic reader might construe Pope's `version' as less forceful, with less genuine emotion than Chapman's. Pope favours elaborate metaphors such as the `briny torrent'; he employs Latinate vocabulary ± `lost in lassitude'; and he uses ostentatiously elevated and circumlocutionary constructions ± `his knees no more perform'd their office' ± where Chapman's `both knees faltering' is simpler and arguably more effective. Clarke's dislike of `briny torrent' recalls Wordsworth's criticism of Gray's `reddening Phoebus' in the 1800 Preface to Lyrical Ballads. There, Wordsworth rejected Gray's showy metaphor for the setting sun and performed a double-take on encountering `amorous descant' for bird-song (Preface, p. 252). In 1800, Wordsworth's emphasis, like Clarke's and Keats's in 1816, was firmly on plain speaking. According to Clarke, the morning after reading from Chapman, Keats composed his famous sonnet on hearing Homer `speak out loud and bold' for the first time (Recollections of Writers, pp. 128±31): Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold, And many goodly states and kingdoms seen; Round many western islands have I been Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.

Oft of one wide expanse had I been told

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

scene from Book V to contrast for Keats what he regarded as Chapman's simple, dignified Ulysses with Pope's refined version. First Chapman:

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

87

The stress laid by Keats on speaking connects with Hunt's thoughts on the `proper language of poetry' and the `strength and sentiment of what it speaks', with Wordsworth's preoccupation with language as it is `really spoken by men', and also engages Lockhart's distinction between the (printed) `language of Englishmen' and the `spoken jargon of Cockneys'.39 There is certainly a sense for Keats that genuine poetry will and ought to break through the restrictions of the printed medium to speak directly and forcefully to the reader. Indeed, we have already seen the importance Keats attaches to heeding the `true voice of feeling' (my emphasis) in his struggle with Milton. `On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' is concerned precisely with getting poetry to `speak out loud and bold', and may be understood within the context of a collective Romantic project to reclaim a direct, forceful poetic language. Hunt's Preface to Rimini is similarly preoccupied. Pope's Homeric texts and John Hoole's 1783 translation of Ariosto are selected for special censure. For example, Hunt warns `any reader of taste' against trusting Hoole for a `proper representation of the delightful Italian'. The problem, Hunt informs his ideal reader, lies with these writers' diction, which is characterless and without force: `Such versions, more or less, resemble bad engravings, in which all the substances, whether flesh, wood, or cloth, are made of one texture, and that a bad one' (Rimini, p. xvii). For Romantic readers, Hoole's and Pope's diction is incapable of accommodating or conveying the range of `strength and sentiment' encompassed by a genuine writer like Homer. Equally, Pope's unyielding Augustan diction presents an insuperable bar to understanding Homer `to his depths', as Keats fancied he understood Shakespeare, the central signifier of pre-Restoration authenticity (Letters, I, 239). Keats's response, guided by Clarke, is to construct Chapman's strong, earthy textures as genuinely English, as more closely attuned to the living genius of the language. For Keats, Chapman's native idiom fills out the `strength and sentiment' of Homer's ancient syllables into substantial forms that speak `loud and bold' to English readers. By approving Chapman's translation on grounds of diction, Keats's sonnet announces its involvement in the Romantic project I have been describing. `On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' is in close dialogue with Hunt's Preface to Rimini, and participates in a pre-Restoration aesthetic

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

That deep-brow'd Homer ruled as his demesne; Yet did I never breathe its pure serene Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold: (ll. 1±8)

founded on Hunt's receptiveness to contemporary philological theory. Yet in 1818, Hunt was crowned `King of Cockneys', with Keats as his neophyte, and Rimini retrospectively fashioned by Z as the archetypal `Cockney' text. Its challenging diction and eclectic use of classical vocabulary alongside newly coined words, archaisms and pseudo-archaisms was dismissed by Lockhart as a work of `extravagant pretensions' from a man virtually devoid of culture.40 Keats, too, fell foul of Lockhart's apparent cultural snobbery. But as I have illustrated, Lockhart's and Croker's accentuation of cultural issues was a means of ensuring that high English culture, not philology, remained the field on which neoclassicism would engage Romanticism. Recent materialist approaches to Hunt and Keats that seek to reconfigure these writers as part of a Cockney counterculture, risk unwittingly reinforcing Maga's and the Quarterly's insistence that the overriding problem with the new poetry was the offence it gave to cultural propriety. This assessment enabled Lockhart and Croker simply to refer one myth of Romantic naivety, in this case social and political, to another ± philological naivety ± which ignores, entirely as Lockhart intended, the theoretical sophistication and philological allusiveness of writers like Hunt and Keats. References to linguistic theory in Keats's letters and poems, and the cogent views on language that Hunt presented in his Preface to Rimini, not to mention both men's identification with the wider Romantic project of reclaiming a `genuine' poetic diction, are not isolated or self-contained events, but belong to a rich nexus of contemporary philological debate conducted in private letters, poetry, journal chapters, grammars and dictionary prefaces. An important, if disregarded way in which Romanticism confronts neoclassicism is through philological debate, pointing to a larger context of literature and language debate in the early nineteenth century that has still to be fully reconstructed.

Clarke and Shelley: defending Romantic philology Jeffrey N. Cox has recently described the interactions of a network of poets, editors, publishers, friends and dilettantes that cohered around the figure of Leigh Hunt. As Cox shows, sharing a broadly similar political perspective and a common set of literary values, the Hunt circle cultivated a mutually supportive and enabling environment in which individuals could work. The aim of the following section is to indicate precisely how this Romantic spirit of coterie ± what Damian Walford Davies has called a `culture of reticularity'41 ± actually worked in practice with regards the circle's interest in philology and philologically inflected

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

88 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

89

debate. To this end, I will be examining how a minor pamphlet written by Charles Cowden Clarke in defence of Leigh Hunt's theories of language and poetry links and informs two more notable interventions in the struggle to institute a new set of literary values ± namely Keats's sonnet `On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' and Percy Shelley's A Defence of Poetry. We will see that in terms of linguistic and cultural debate, Romantic publications communicate with, and moreover through, each other. Charles Cowden Clarke's guiding hand in the composition of `On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' is well-known, largely through Clarke's own, possibly apocryphal account in Recollections of Writers (1878). According to Clarke, on a night in October 1816, he and Keats read from George Chapman's Whole Works of Homer, True Prince of Poets (1614), tracing `some of the ``famousest'' passages' that they already knew `scrappily' from Pope's translation. The following morning, Keats is supposed to have composed his most accomplished poem to date, `On First Looking into Chapman's Homer'. I now want to extend Clarke's role in the sonnet's composition, and in the formation of his proteÂgeÂ's literary and political taste. I will show that at a formative point in Keats's brief career, the young poet was familiar with a pamphlet that has recently been attributed to Clarke, An Address to that Quarterly Reviewer who Touched upon Mr. Leigh Hunt's `Story of Rimini'.42 The Address was Clarke's anonymous intervention in a heated debate fought throughout 1816 over poetic diction. As I will demonstrate, the terms and scope of the debate were set by developments in philological theory. The principal combatants were conservative reviewer John Wilson Croker and poet and political essayist Leigh Hunt. While we cannot be certain that Keats read Clarke's Address before writing his sonnet, there is evidence to indicate that he read it at some point. The following is a passage from Clarke, attacking literary reviews and booksellers: While the soi-disant guardians of public taste, morals, and politics, arrogate a prescriptive right to all the genius, common-sense, and learning of the nation; the esprit du corps of book-sellers has established a line of circumvallation, from the pale of which the unfortunate votary of the muses in vain endeavours to escape. The former hydra-like monsters stalk the earth, enchaining in their `beastly thrall' the minds of indolent men; the latter battening on the brains of their best friends, the men of genius, like harpies, blow upon, and taint, what they do not devour. (Address, p. 19)

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

I have underlined `the minds of indolent men', because I think that Keats echoes it in a letter of early 1819. Disappointed by the reception of his work, Keats complained to his brother- and sister-in-law that the great Reviews have `enervated and made indolent mens minds ± few think for themselves' (Letters, II, 65). There is, to be sure, a considerable difference between an indolent mind and an indolent man, but this transposition is not all that surprising if, as I believe, Keats is remembering Clarke after a period of two-and-a-half years. Keats borrows the aural impact, if not the precise semantic import, of Clarke's phrase, moreover using it in the same context as Clarke to complain about the influence of reviews in shaping public taste. This echo opens a philological dimension to the Chapman's Homer sonnet, since if Keats was familiar with the Address, he would have been fully conversant with the aesthetic, political, and above all linguistic terms of the debate over appropriate diction, which I will now outline. The reviewer alluded to in the title of Clarke's pamphlet was J. W. Croker. From the pages of the Quarterly in May 1816, Croker had castigated Hunt's poem, The Story of Rimini (1816); in characteristically overheated style, he labelled its innovative diction an `ungrammatical, unauthorised, chaotic jargon': If there be one fault more eminently conspicuous and ridiculous in Mr. Hunt's work than another, it is, ± that it is full of mere vulgarisms and fugitive phrases, and that in every page the language is ± not only not the actual, existing language, but an ungrammatical, unauthorised, chaotic jargon, such as we believe was never before spoken, much less written. In what vernacular tongue, for instance, does Mr. Hunt find a lady's waist called clipsome, (p. 10) ± or the shout of a mob `enormous', (p. 9) ± or a fit, lightsome; ± or that a hero's nose is `lightsomely brought down from a forehead of clear-spirited thought', (p. 46) ± or that his back `drops' lightsomely in, (p. 20).43 It is not difficult to appreciate why Rimini elicited such a caustic response. In addition to a number of unfamiliar and idiosyncratic phrases such as `clipsome waist' and `ships coming on with scattery light', Hunt's volume, as we have seen, included an inflammatory Preface that attacked Pope and neoclassical taste, eighteenth-century translation (including Pope's Homer), and urged modern poets to eschew neoclassical in favour of pre-Restoration diction.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

90 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

91

In Hunt's opinion, modern translations were typically characterless and wholly without force. They resembled `bad engravings, in which all the substances, whether flesh, wood, or cloth, are made of one texture, and that a bad one' (Rimini, p. xvii). For Hunt, as for other Romantic readers, the influence of French neoclassical values on notions of literary correctness in England after the Restoration had instituted rigidly formulaic diction, thus eroding the ability of poetic language to signify full, replete meanings. Hunt's project in Rimini was to locate, in a preRestoration aesthetic uncorrupted by Pope and neoclassical values, a `proper language of poetry' that would `describe natural things in a language becoming them' (Rimini, pp. xv, xviii). Hunt's challenge to received taste was wholeheartedly seconded by Clarke's Address, which appeared in July or August 1816, shortly after Croker's attack.44 Clarke attributed Croker's rejection of Rimini to entrenched neoclassical literary values, founded, Clarke asserted, on `pedantic precedent, and prescriptive bigotry' (Address, p. 16). Far from `diffusing a wholesome spirit through the world of letters', Clarke complained, Reviews like the Quarterly had formed a `sanctuary of refuge for the bravos of literature; whence they issue forth muffled, and ``kill men i' the dark!'' ' (p. 20). By defending Hunt's `principles' (p. 16) against one such `bravo', Croker, Clarke contested the right of an aggressively conservative ideology to police the linguistic borders of English literature. He underlined this point by castigating the `soi-disant guardians of public taste' who assumed `the dictation and government of others' (p. 20). `On First Looking into Chapman's Homer' was published in Hunt's Examiner in December 1816. The sonnet records Keats's delight at finding in Chapman's earthy English textures a poetic diction that could `speak out loud and bold' (l. 8) to communicate the full weight of Homer's genius. Reading Chapman, Keats feels as though he is discovering Homer for the first time. The poem audaciously and precociously rejects Pope's Homer and neoclassical diction while aligning Keats with Hunt's linguistic project (and Clarke's defence of this). If, as I have argued, Keats had read the Address, then it is not unreasonable to suppose that he did so at a time when Hunt's and Clarke's influence on him was strongest ± in the weeks before writing his sonnet. As an attentive student of Hunt and the likely reader of Clarke, in the high summer and autumn of 1816 Keats would have been weighing the merits of a native, pre-Restoration diction (such as Chapman's) against those of the `French School of Poetry' with Pope at its head.45 In his Chapman's Homer sonnet, his finest poem to date, Keats enters a vigorously contested philological debate, and dramat-

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

ically announces his allegiance to the linguistic position outlined in Hunt's pre-Restoration aesthetic. By protesting against Croker's savage review of Rimini, and defending Hunt's unfamiliar diction, Clarke staged a vocal dissension from the conservative literary values underlying Croker's attack. Keats's mouthing of phrases from Clarke (where `minds of indolent men' in the pamphlet becomes `indolent mens minds' in Keats's letter) points clearly towards a community of resistance from a group of Cockney writers ± Clarke, Hunt, Keats ± who shared similar ideas about `genuine' poetic language. But as well as disclosing Keats's involvement in Romantic philology, Clarke's Address sheds new light on Percy Shelley's relationship to Cockney linguistics, since I believe that Shelley's A Defence of Poetry (1821) also owes a striking rhetorical debt to Clarke. Towards the end of the Defence, Shelley denounces the reviewing practice of condemning poetical works because of character flaws, real or imagined, that might be ascribed to their authors: Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard, that Virgil was a flatterer, that Horace was a coward, that Tasso was a madman, that Lord Bacon was a peculator, that Raphael was a libertine, that Spenser was a poet laureate. [. . .] Posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance; if their sins were as scarlet, they are now as white as snow: they have been washed in the blood of the mediator and the redeemer, Time. Observe in what a ludicrous chaos the imputations of real or fictitious crime have been confused in the contemporary calumnies against poetry and poets; consider how little is, as it appears ± or appears, as it is; look to your own motives, and judge not, lest ye be judged.46 By `the contemporary calumnies against poetry', Shelley almost certainly has in mind attacks on modern writers by Blackwood's and the Quarterly ± particularly their harsh treatment of his friend Leigh Hunt, not to mention their hostility towards his own work. Alongside this extract from the Defence, we might consider a passage from Clarke's Address, which insists that a poet's private life or personal morality is of little relevance to either the production or appraisal of poetry: In the delicate and precious exordium to your critique [. . .], when asserting that `you had never heard of Mr. Hunt's imprisonment, never

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

92 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

93

seen his paper, never heard the particulars of his offence;' you say, `fortunately, we are as little prejudiced as possible on this subject:' ± no doubt you were, and also ± as much. ± `I am not prejudiced!' from some people, is equivalent to, `I am not drunk!' from others [. . .]. But about to criticise a poem, what business have you to be prejudiced? ± suppose Mr. Hunt had retained his quondam mistress as waitingwoman to his wife; ± suppose he were a gambler, an adulterer, or a debauchee ± one or all of these characters, suppose he had been a horse-jockey who had drugged his horse, that he might be a gainer by the animal's failure; ± what would all this have to do with the merits, or demerits of his poem? (Address, p. 11) These passages bear a close resemblance. To begin with, both Shelley and Clarke are concerned with the reception of modern poetry in contemporary journals, and both make the same point when they denounce reviewers who confuse literary works with the morality of their authors. Clarke insists that public poetry and private morality are not contingent on, or even relevant to each other. Shelley adds that, in any case, hindsight often provides a flattening, relativizing perspective: `Posterity has done ample justice to the great names now referred to. Their errors have been weighed and found to have been dust in the balance' (Defence, p. 295). More specific borrowing is also in evidence. Shelley's `Let us assume that Homer was a drunkard' is powerfully reminiscent of Clarke's subjunctive rhetoric: `Suppose Mr. Hunt had retained his quondam mistress as waiting woman to his wife' (Address, p. 11). Shelley appears, moreover, to have picked up the theme of drunkenness from Clarke's quip about people who say they are not prejudiced: ` ``I am not prejudiced!'' from some people, is equivalent to, ``I am not drunk!'' from others' (Address, p. 11). The similarity between the points made by both men in the above extracts suggest that Shelley not only borrowed Clarke's style, but also shared his political and aesthetic agenda when he composed the latter sections of the Defence. This agenda throws light on a philological context to the Defence that is often overlooked, or else wrongly ascribed to the near mysticism apparent elsewhere in Shelley's great essay. I want to suggest that Shelley's polemic can be scrutinized in terms of a Romantic project that offered a coherent linguistic challenge to neoclassical taste and literary values. As much as the unusual words and phrases in The Story of Rimini like `clipsome waist', `handy squirrel' and `whiffling tones of rills', it was

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

Hunt's views on diction, set out in his inflammatory Preface, that prompted Croker's bad-tempered review of the 1816 volume. We have already seen how Hunt's Preface upbraids what he regarded as neoclassical poetry's (notably Pope's) insipid verbal textures and overly formulaic idioms. As a corrective, Hunt volunteered an experimental diction that he believed was much closer in spirit, if not in chronology, to the `genuine' poetic idiom that would have characterized the earliest human language. Hunt's idea of a muscular, more emphatic Ur-idiom, whose inner essence remained accessible to right-minded poets in the present day, found a conceptual source in Wordsworth's 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads; but it also resonated with a tradition of philology that had its epistemology in the writing on language of Condillac and Herder, and received scholarly formulation with the new philology of Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. In Hunt's (and Clarke's) opinion, the poetic immediacy of the earliest tongues finally disappeared after the Restoration with the ascendancy of `French taste'. It was through deliberate, self-conscious linguistic innovation and experimentation in Rimini that Hunt hoped to resurrect a `proper language of poetry' (Rimini, p. x). This `proper language' was, of course, dismissed out of hand by Croker, prompting Clarke to leap to defend Hunt's pre-Restoration `principles', which lent weight, if not a great deal of sophistication, to Romanticism's wider challenge of `pedantic precedent, and prescriptive bigotry' (Address, p. 16). It is with this insurgent context in mind, then, that Shelley's use of Clarke should be considered. We have established that Clarke's role in shaping Keats's thoughts on poetic diction was particularly strong in the summer of 1816 ± just after the Address was published, and just before Keats composed his Chapman's Homer sonnet in October that year. Indeed, the sonnet's emphasis on speaking out `loud and bold' may be considered a statement of allegiance to a linguistic project that sought to rediscover and reinstate a `genuine' language of poetry. Shelley, too, can be placed within this milieu of philologically informed resistance. Early on in the Defence, Shelley's fascination with the inherently poetical character of Ursprachen indicates his affiliation with Hunt, Clarke and the enterprise I have been describing, as well as revealing the influence of Herder and Condillac. His antipathy to neoclassicism's preoccupation with precept is similarly apparent: In the infancy of society every author is necessarily a poet, because language itself is poetry [. . .]. Every original language near to its

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

94 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

95

Shelley's evident familiarity with, and sympathy for, the stance taken in Clarke's Address, then, not to mention his friendship with Hunt, includes him in an intellectual and aesthetic counter-movement that ranged itself against neoclassical theories of language and poetry. The counter-canon includes Wordsworth's 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads, Coleridge's 1815 Aids to Reflection (where Coleridge enthuses about `living' language), as well as Hunt's Preface to Rimini, Clarke's Address and Keats's `On First Looking into Chapman's Homer', all from 1816, and Barry Cornwall's Dramatic Scenes (1820). Like Hunt's and Keats's relentless programme of innovative diction, Shelley's own linguistic experimentation, richly apparent throughout his oeuvre, belongs firmly within this Romantic tradition of theorized linguistic opposition. On its own, the echo of Clarke in the Defence does little more than add to our knowledge of Shelley's reading. Taken in terms of a wider early nineteenth-century debate over poetic diction, however, it helps us understand a neglected philological dimension to Romanticism's opposition of established and inherited literary paradigms.

Reading the leaf-fring'd legend In the second half of this chapter, I want to expand my discussion of the mutually illuminating conjunctions linking philological discourse and Romantic texts. In particular, I explore Keats's relationship with a radical spirit of philological inquiry that established itself in Britain in the early nineteenth century, and which began to revise the traditional genealogies that had favoured `golden age' Latin and Greek over the `barbaric' northern tongues.48 Within this context of revision, I draw into focus Keats's own efforts in `Ode on a Grecian Urn' (1819) to make sense of a classical antiquity experienced by the poet as oppressive, but nevertheless seductive. Keats's ode, I shall argue, offers a model of negotiation closely resembling that found within the new study of language. Key texts by Wordsworth, Hunt and Percy Shelley register, as we have already seen, a clear awareness of radical contemporary linguistic theory. Such publications ± including A Defence of Poetry and the prefaces to Lyrical Ballads and The Story of Rimini ± contribute to a vibrant

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem; the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age and are merely the catalogue and the form of the creations of poetry.47 (Defence, p. 279)

milieu of philologically inspired opposition to neoclassical literary values at a time when the relationship between nineteenth-century modernity and classical antiquity was in the process of being refashioned. In the discussion that follows, I wish to elaborate another interaction between literature and philology in the period, centring on a figure not usually associated with historical linguistics, and on a poem not commonly thought of as being concerned with philology. It is my contention that in Keats's struggle in `Ode on a Grecian Urn' to read the `leaf-fring'd legend' and decipher pictogramic representations of gods and men, lowing heifers and empty villages, we may observe how philological methodology began to influence the ways in which Romanticism read and made sense of the classical past. I am especially concerned to show how a rhetoric of coercion and ravishment may be discerned as a perturbed (and perturbing) presence in both works of the new philology and Keats's poem. Despite pronouncements such as Monboddo's on the matchless achievements of the classical age, not everyone agreed that modern artists and poets had little choice but to acknowledge the superiority of the classical past. The uncertainty affecting Keats in this respect is indicated by the fact that in letters written during the autumn of 1819, he dramatically `gives up' Miltonic diction, which he had come to regard as overly Latinate, in favour of the `genuine English Idiom' of Chatterton.49 Other members of the small but vocal group of advocates for modern poetry associated with Hunt's circle protested strenuously against the tyranny of antiquity.50 In 1820, ardent supporter of contemporary poetry, Thomas Noon Talfourd (born the same year as Keats), used a Retrospective Review essay entitled the `Progress of Literature' to attack the `deep-rooted opinion [. . .] that works of imagination must necessarily decline as civilization advances'.51 He insisted that there did `not appear any solid reason for believing, that the mighty works of old time occupy the whole region of poetry ± or necessarily chill the fancy of these later times by their vast and unbroken shadows' (p. 194). This opinion did not enjoy unqualified support, even among Romantic commentators. In an 1814 essay, `On Why the Arts are not Progressive', Hazlitt had argued that since genius was not mechanical, and thus not improvable through repetition, one could not talk of advance in the arts as one could in the sciences.52 While figures like Hunt incorporated innovative diction into their poetic projects, convinced that new vigour could be forcibly reinjected into English literature, Monboddo's paradigmatic views on language and culture ± that the Greeks had spoken the `finest language in the world, and excelled mankind in every other fine

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

96 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

97

art'53 ± were readily accepted by a conservative majority among the literati. For reactionaries, Dr Johnson's lexicographical dictum that all change was of itself an evil remained a patent truism. Between these conflicting positions lay an inhospitable middle ground, inhabited uneasily by those like Keats, who, while animated by an admiration for the classical aesthetic, began to feel and articulate a sense of linguistic and cultural oppression. It was the radical shifts in cultural and historical perspective that had already occurred in language study on the Continent, and which were beginning to occur in British philology, that seemed to offer Keats a `template' for contesting antiquity's influence over the present. This template, however, was to give rise to as many problems for Keats as it seemed to offer solutions.

Radical significations Keats is both drawn to the `beautiful mythology of Greece', as he professed in the published preface to Endymion (1818), yet acutely aware of its tyranny over native traditions. Several key works, including `Ode on a Grecian Urn' and both Elgin Marbles sonnets, record this ambivalence, dramatizing the struggle between early nineteenth-century modernity and the golden age. The first sonnet was written at the beginning of 1817. It chronicles Keats's effort to communicate his sense of `undescribable feud' on seeing the marbles: My spirit is too weak ± mortality Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep, And each imagined pinnacle and steep Of godlike hardship tells me I must die Like a sick eagle looking at the sky. Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep That I have not the cloudy winds to keep Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye. Such dim-conceived glories of the brain Bring round the heart an undescribable feud; So do these wonders a most dizzy pain, That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude Wasting of old Time ± with a billowy main ± A sun ± a shadow of a magnitude.

10

While Keats cannot talk directly about his disabling state of uncertainty, he attempts to bridge the painful aphasia through an act of comparison,

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

likening the feud in his heart, about which he cannot speak, to his disorientation on viewing the grandeur of Phidian's statuary, which he believes can be literated.54 But as the sonnet's grammatical structures become increasingly dislocated and break down altogether in the final lines, Keats discovers that even (or especially) here, he can do little more than record a bricolage of impressions associated with a pain that `mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude j Wasting of old Time ± with a billowy main ± j A sun ± a shadow of a magnitude' (ll. 12±14). The disruption of Keats's poetic project in the sonnet by traces of antiquity is precursor to still more intractable problems encountered in `Ode on a Grecian Urn'. The `shadow of a magnitude' Keats imagines cast across `old Time' in the first Elgin Marbles sonnet might be compared to the `vast and unbroken shadows' thrown by the `mighty works of old time' in Thomas Noon Talfourd's 1820 Retrospective Review essay (p. 194). The rhetorical similarities are such as to suggest that Talfourd was remembering Keats's poem when he wrote his essay. Talfourd, then, is communicating with, and through, the work of another figure in a community of writers preoccupied with the same dilemma: how to forge a new relationship with antiquity. The irony here, of course, is that given Keats's edgy apprehension before the marbles, any echoes of the sonnet in the Retrospective article operate precisely to undercut Talfourd's optimism about literature in the present day. At the very least, and despite Talfourd's best efforts, the article registers, like Keats's sonnet, an unresolved struggle between the classical past and modern works of the imagination. Although I am using `struggle' figuratively when I talk about modernity's endeavour to negotiate the `mighty works of old time', the literal sense of the word is not altogether inapposite. While the positivistic selfrepresentations of philology were increasingly those of a dispassionate and above all scientific study, its epistemology included a darker side, evident in the single-mindedness with which many scholars turned their attentions to reconstructing the Ursprache, the first human language, in `asterisk' or theoretical form, or, in Charles Neaves's signal image, tried to `re-mount to the common fountain-head [of language], through so many windings and obstructions'.55 Submerged in Neaves's conventional river metaphor for linguistic genealogy, is an unmistakable image of ravishment that later I will relate to Keats's efforts to comprehend his `still unravish'd' subject in `Ode on a Grecian Urn' (l. 1). Before that, I want to return to the importance of Ursprache in the early nineteenth century. Even though Grimm's Sprachwissenschaft tried to put the study of language on a more scientific footing (see Chapters

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

98 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

99

5 and 6), and even relegated the Ursprache to the impenetrable mists of pre-history, Ur-syllables proved a perennial fascination to scholars. If the veil could be lifted on this primitive language, older than Latin and Greek and thus superior in quality (new philologists were not adverse to reverting to the value-laden terms of the older study when it suited them), full signification would be returned to the world. Such linguistic recuperation would represent the ultimate trophy, not only for the nineteenth century, but for all ages. To trace words back to this dimly conceived proto-language ± to `pursue the signification now in use, through all changes, till we come to the radical signification', as the ageing but zealous convert to Grimm's method, Joseph Bosworth, fantasized ± would be to peer over the walls of Eden, regain mastery over representation, and walk for a second time in pre-lapsarian wordscapes.56 The recovery of radical significations promised nothing less than linguistic redemption: it would close the circle of history and reveal modern tongues as the culmination of human language, not its dwindled remains. The thought that Ur-meanings might yet be accessible in so `late a day' (published preface to Endymion,) was not only attractive to new philologists anxious to raise the status of English relative to Latin and Greek. In the sections that follow, I consider Keats's own strategies in `Ode on a Grecian Urn' for pursuing and recovering `radical significations' in order to resist the `tyranny' of classical literary and cultural paradigms in the modern age. In particular, I am interested in how philological assumptions, methodological contingencies and clicheÂs ± which as we have just seen were heavily freighted with the rhetoric of ravishment ± seep into Keats's own inquiry into the forms and meanings of the distant past.

Still unravish'd brides In `Ode on a Grecian Urn', Keats sets himself the task of communicating with the ghosts of classical antiquity, with faint presences that animate at the same time as they disconcert. Such a project involves what Martin Aske has described as bringing the `shadowy into distinctness' while negotiating `the problematic aspect of antiquity's restoration as a ``physical presence'' '.57 Just as `Ode on a Grecian Urn' becomes the locus for this kind of restoration in 1819, a larger enactment of Keats's dilemma was being rehearsed around the Elgin Marbles. The Elgin Marbles (the name itself points to cultural contestation) were sculpted by Phidias in the fifth century BC to adorn the Parthenon.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology

Between 1803 and 1812 they were removed from Athens by Thomas Bruce, seventh Earl of Elgin, and shipped to London for storage while questions concerning their authenticity and possible purchase for the nation were settled. For admirers like Keats's friend, Benjamin Robert Haydon, the sculptures embodied a superhuman aesthetic. Their mere presence in the dingy Park Lane shed where they were initially housed was sufficient to expose England's cultural bankruptcy and refute the notion of cultural advance. How could the arts be progressing when the marbles threw the productions of the modern age so firmly into the shade? Haydon, for one, could scarcely conceive of any improvement in the British arts that was not founded on close study of the marbles. His advocacy of the sculptures appeared (like `Ode on a Grecian Urn') in Annals of the Fine Arts in 1816, a journal committed to the nation's purchase of the Marbles: Thank God! the remains of Athens have fled for protection to England; the genius of Greece still hovers near them; may she, with her inspiring touch, give new vigour to British Art, and cause new beauties to spring from British exertions! May their essence mingle with our blood and circulate through our being.58 Concurring with Haydon's viewpoint on the Marbles, the Select Committee appointed to oversee the transaction similarly hoped that the presence of the classical artifacts in England would enable artists to `imbibe the genuine spirit of ancient excellence and transfuse it into their own compositions'.59 As Grant F. Scott emphasizes, `one of the primary reasons given for purchasing the marbles was their agreed-upon function as objects of emulation for British artists, particularly for young, hopeful poets, painters, and sculptors'.60 Yet coercion clearly masquerades as admiration in Haydon's welcoming rhetoric, especially in the disturbingly euphemistic `protection'. Whether the Marbles `fled for protection to England' or were vandalized and misappropriated by Lord Elgin, who literally chipped many out of the Parthenon, remained (and remains) a moot point. At any rate, the energetic performances of Haydon and the Select Committee did not convince everybody; certainly not an anonymous writer for the Eclectic Review who, in an essay on Leigh Hunt's Foliage (1818), drew attention to the spectre of violation lurking in Romanticism's love of cultural translation, infusion and imbibition. Notably unfriendly to Hunt's anachronistic and anachoristic use of naiads, limniads, oreads and dryads, the Eclectic's reviewer complained that:

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

100 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology 101

It is evident that as far as this commentator was concerned, Hunt had failed to restore antiquity as a `physical presence' and had made himself into a ridiculous figure by trying. Such attempts as Hunt's and Haydon's at cultural improvement are, moreover, collapsed into acts of `degrading violence'. That philology's own negotiation of antiquity and historical dialects incorporated a discourse of coercion we have already observed in Neaves. The question I wish to pose is this: how far does Keats, too, resort to `degrading violence' when trying to induce the `still unravish'd' urn to reveal itself to him clearly and distinctly as a physical presence? In `Ode on a Grecian Urn', Keats prepares an imaginative arena in which classical culture can be contemplated on his own terms, an aspiration the urn seeks to deny. By turns intrigued, enthralled and teased out of thought, Keats tries to manoeuvre the artefact into a knowable form and thus restore antiquity's corporeality; he intuits that if the ghostly classical text can be brought into sharp relief it will lose its power to unsettle. By contrast, the urn's tactics are to do everything possible (which frequently means doing nothing) to resist this process. The proposition I will be exploring is that such reifications as those for which Keats strives ± acts of bringing the `shadowy into distinctness', to borrow Aske's helpful phrase again ± are also the aim of philologists in pursuit of `radical significations'. I shall argue that a series of fascinating rhetorical and procedural filaments link Keats's investigation of the urn with both the coercive and reconstructive ± or `asterisk' ± methodology of philologists. We might begin by thinking about the cultural heritage of Keats's urn. Ian Jack has suggested that the textual artefact is a composite, assembled from `real' examples seen in the British Museum, in a four-volume edition of engravings from the MuseÂe NapoleÂon, and in publications like Thomas Kirk's Outlines from the Figures and Compositions upon the Greek, Roman, and Etruscan Vases of the Late Sir William Hamilton.62 But while Keats seems to have collected the materials necessary for fashioning his urn from various visual representations of antiquity, the corollary of such eclecticism is that the more templates accumulated, the less tangible, the less distinctly and individually present is the resulting work. The urn is literally `overwrought' in the sense of over-determined. Put simply, it has

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Those beautiful mythological personages, dissociated from the circumstances which lent them a sort of credibility, and brought out of their obscurity into broad day, suffer much the same degrading violence as the marble majesties of Greece, when torn from their climate and their pedestals, to form the unimpressive ranks of a museum.61

too many outlines. On the other hand, these feathery boundaries work precisely to dictate the interrogative character of Keats's ode, since the only way of reconstituting the urn's rigidity seems to lie in questions about the details on its relief such as `What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?' (l. 8).63 Keats's attempt at ekphrasis (literary sculpture), which as Kenneth Calhoon notes `seeks to endow the represented object with a sensuous presence in language', hardly convinces.64 By overresearching, Keats produces a confusing surfeit of lines and possible forms until he is unable even to decide whether the relief depicts `deities or mortals', or both. He confronts what Helen Vendler has called the `necessary boundaries of representational art'.65 In any event, he does not achieve the degree of presence he desires: it is not possible to work backwards from the textual urn to produce a mental image of an urn that emerges identically each time. Far from bringing the ghosts of classical culture into `distinctness', Keats only succeeds in conjuring more haunting presences: the loth maidens, a bold lover, a mysterious priest, a lowing heifer and, most disturbingly of all, a Cold Pastoral. This would not have surprised philologists like Monboddo, who never tired of pointing out the implasticity of the languages of `these later times' (Talfourd's plangent phrase), against the non-inflected purity of golden-age tongues. Only the elusive Ursprache promised a marble reification of the urn in the mere act of speaking. If Keats's ode demonstrates anything, it is the difficulty of reading (or writing) a definitive presence into antiquity. Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's narratological theory of textual survival deepens our understanding of the problem encountered by Keats in his attempt to summon classical presence. Rimmon-Kenan proposes that all texts are caught in a paradoxical situation; they `survive' by being read, yet the act of reading reduces a finite stock of words where the end of the reading process signals textual death. Texts thus endeavour to defer closure for as long as possible, eking out their existence by promising readers information that is then withheld (a form of `dying into life', to adapt Keats's phrase in The Fall of Hyperion): The text's very existence depends on maintaining the phase of the `not yet fully known or intelligible' for as long as possible. Narrative texts implicitly keep promising the reader the great prize of understanding ± later. They suggest, with varying degrees of subtlety: `the best is yet to come, don't stop reading now'.66 The urn seems to sense that once all information has been disclosed it will have no further claims upon the reader, and will effectively cease to

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

102 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

be. By remaining silent and `teasing' Keats, by refusing to yield the information necessary to bring its feathery lines into distinctness, the urn helps guarantee its own ontology, calling itself into existence by prompting such erotetic questions as `What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape' (l. 5), `To what green altar, O mysterious priest, j Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies' (ll. 32±3). `Erotetic', because these are questions for which no answers will ever be supplied, yet which, in the instant they are posed, assist the urn in achieving a degree of presence that is not contingent upon the complete surrender of its secrets. In other words, we discover something about the urn's appearance, it acquires a modicum of ghostly presence, but it never moves into full distinctness and thus avoids the textual death described by Rimmon-Kenan. This strategy is obviously inimical to Keats's own project of restoring or reconstructing the urn as a physical presence. Outmanoeuvred and confronted with determined silence, Keats brings a barrage of questions to bear on his `still unravish'd' subject in an effort to force it to yield to a modern aesthetic. The urgency with which he pursues the urn's `radical significations' (the `great prize of understanding' in Rimmon-Kenan's terms) parallels the efforts of philologists like Neaves to `re-mount to the common fountain-head' of language through all its `windings and obstructions'. As I noted earlier, there is more at stake in this last image than simply a stock linguistic river metaphor. Language was habitually gendered as feminine within nineteenth-century philological discourse. Scholars spoke eagerly and routinely of unravelling `sister' dialects in order to reach the pristine `mother' of all human languages; only a short step separates rhetoric of this kind from thinly disguised fantasies of ravishment such as Neaves's. Indeed, images of violation are to be found in grammars and lexicographical treatises throughout the period. Grimm's entire Sprachwissenschaft was predicated on disclosing the inner workings of language ± on laying bare the rules of consonant interchange, or sound laws, that governed morphological shifts between words like piscis and fish, which were in fact the same word, Grimm's method revealed. The revised first edition of the Deutsche Grammatik, published in 1822, and publications by Rask prior to that, marked the beginning of a new preoccupation with the internal spaces of language, rather than its exterior. George Curtius declared that the science of philology had a duty `to endeavour to penetrate into the innermost life of languages', and recommended that philologists should not dread to `penetrate into [language's] inner substance'.67 Bosworth's innocuous-sounding Anglo-Saxon Dictionary also contains dark and intriguing passages. The following registers,

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology 103

104 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

The doctrine of the interchange of consonants, and that of the umlaut and guna, are the two gates which lead into the sanctuary of etymology. The former opens the insight into the true nature of the consonants, the latter into that of the vowels. He, then, who has a clear view of these two doctrines, has received the consecration, and can look into the interior of the sanctuary. (Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, p. clxxi) The passage ostensibly seeks to explain how historical languages can be demystified; but this aim is at odds with the rhetoric Bosworth employs to communicate it. One might say that references to finding hidden paths that penetrate the secret `interior of the sanctuary' are calculated precisely to reinforce the sense of mystery Bosworth claims he wants to dispel. Just as philologists like Bosworth removed grammatical layers and inflectional `frills' in their efforts to `re-mount' to the fountain-head of language, Keats attempts to strip away all obstacles to understanding the `leaf-fring'd' legend haunting the urn (l. 5). Such is the intensity of his interrogation of the urn (eleven direct questions are posed in the poem's fifty lines, involving 96 of the poem's 378 words), that ravishment becomes a process not only applied to the urn, but one that Keats at some level enacts upon, or rather writes over, its surface (the urn is thus also `overwrought' in the sense of having been `overwritten' by Keats), as we observe in the disturbing scenes of `maidens loth' struggling to escape the `wild ecstasy': What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape Of deities or mortals, or of both, In Tempe or the dales of Arcady? What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy? (ll. 6±10) The rhythms and cadences of the poem become more urgent at this point as the ode starts to deconstruct itself into a baffling series of ambiguities and double meanings. Dresses are `leaf-fring'd' as well as legends; does

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

beneath two sets of metaphors (figured around language and architectural spaces), a clear and fetishistic anatomical preoccupation with the `mysterious' female body:

the verb `haunt' act upon the urn (that is, `haunt' in the sense of `encircle'), or upon the (male) onlooker (in the sense of `distract', sexually)? Amid uncertainties as these, phrases like `what maidens loth' (a variant spelling of loath: reluctant, unwilling), `what mad pursuit', and `what struggle to escape' (ll. 8±9), reacquire unsettling overtones, foregrounding the ravishment-in-process described in the ode. This is, to be sure, a visual sequence of coercion we often neglect to consider as such, due to the fact that Keats distracts our attention away from the force of his scrutiny. The sculpted scenes are conveyed through indeterminate descriptions, and the phrases I have listed are circumspectly, perhaps shamefacedly, ascribed ± in the crucial ninth line, the referents doing the pursuing and escaping have been grammatically erased. Such manoeuvres have proved effective. We often overlook the fact that the urn's relief depicts nothing less than a scene of rape; after all, the focal point of the leaf-fring'd legend is usually taken to be the immolation of a heifer. Nevertheless, a phrase like `her silken flanks with garlands drest' (l. 34), which within certain early nineteenth-century discourses teeters towards a description of feminine attire, insists on the poem's links with the imagery and politics of ravishment. As final confirmation of the slippage that has occurred between poetic and philological modes of investigation, one has only to consider the resonance between Keats's reference to the `mysterious priest' leading his victim to the `green altar' in line 32, and Bosworth's description, with all its connotations of violation, of the `sanctuary of etymology' into whose `interior' the `consecrated' student, guided by the philologist priest, may peer. Confronted, then, with a recalcitrant, possibly unknowable subject, Keats adopts paradigms of scrutiny already in place in early nineteenthcentury linguistics. Put another way, in an effort to find a suitable method for the exegesis of ancient mysteries, Keats utilizes the zetetic procedure of contemporary philology, which harbours a discourse of sexual coercion. It seems that the sense of imminent violation more or less implicit in the oddly observed `still unravish'd' and `maidens loth' may have registered with some contemporary readers. Reviewing Keats's 1820 volume, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems, in which `Ode on a Grecian Urn' made its second appearance, a critic for the Eclectic Review noted with distaste the `violence' that Keats `lays upon words and syllables'.68 The remark is not directed specifically at `Ode on a Grecian Urn' and is ostensibly concerned with diction, yet the reviewer's choice of words is telling and possibly reflects an unease with the volume as a whole that the presence of the ode would have done nothing to dispel.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology 105

How far does Keats succeed in making sense of the urn? How far, in Bosworth's terms, does he receive its consecration? For all Keats's efforts, the leaf-fring'd legend remains hieroglyphical. Isolated historically from the pastoral scene, which appears doubly cold and petrified so far from its original context, Keats cannot even be certain if the figures on the urn's relief are men or gods. He is similarly unable to decide whether the scenes depicted are located `In Tempe or the dales of Arcady' (l. 7). In short, deciphering the urn proves utterly beyond Keats. Although he intends the urn to emerge into distinctness through a dialectic process of negotiated fashioning, the ode actually degenerates into a protracted attempt at dialogue in which, disturbingly, the urn plays little or no part, and the presence of the overwhelmingly adverbial `still unravish'd' in line 1 signals Keats's early recognition that `interrogation' rather than `dialogue' is to be the poem's true starting premise. We might ask a different question, then. To what extent does the urn succeed in establishing an elusive presence, while retaining its secrets? We are told that the urn is an `unravish'd bride', a `foster-child of silence and slow time', an eloquent `Sylvan historian' (ll. 1±3). From none of these abstract, contradictory descriptions do we glean an unimpeded sense of the referent's visual contours. Our interest is aroused, however, precisely by the mistiness of such phrases. And this goes back to what I was saying about the urn successfully securing its own ontology. The first four stanzas coalesce around shadowy descriptions that emerge out of unanswered questions, the degree of shadowy presence enjoyed by the urn increasing with each (unanswered) question that Keats poses. The urn dangles the `great prize of understanding' in Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan's phrase, without submitting to the efforts of nineteenth-century modernity to know it (Biblical pun intended). By so effectively providing or prompting the conditions necessary for its existence, the urn is surely the clearest example in Keats of that which is creative, creating itself. It also becomes clear that the violence associated with the removal of the Elgin Marbles, the explication of historical languages, the unseating of Latin and Greek from linguistic hierarchies and the dynamic of the urn and the figures wrought around it are part of a larger discourse connected with the changing relationship between the early nineteenth century and classical antiquity.

Asterisk-reality Underlying Keats's questioning of the urn is an unmistakably philological anxiety that ancient meanings may no longer be recoverable,

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

106 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

that antiquity's ability to signify has somehow been eroded in a temporal gulf that offers urns as museum pieces, as objets d'art in the modern age, rather than containers used by classical Greeks. This apprehension becomes a defining feature of philology. In The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840), Tennyson's Trinity College master William Whewell considered it necessary to warn students against asking `What was the beginning?' Like Grimm, he worried that the quest for ultimate linguistic origins was damaging the claim of philology and inductive science as a whole to scientific status. In any case, Whewell intoned darkly, `the blank abyss' into which such questions are uttered `does not even return an echo'.69 The notion of linguistic erosion was a philological commonplace. In 1827, Julius Hare spoke of words being worn away in history like the wheels of carriages after a Grand Tour of Europe, until they were left, chillingly, as `mere air-propelling sounds'. In an 1833 critique of Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik in the Quarterly Review, Hensleigh Wedgwood (cousin of Charles Darwin) described how, through everyday usage, originally longer words and sentences had been `worn, until, like pebbles on the beach, they have lost every corner and distinctive mark, and hardly a vestige remains to indicate their original form'.70 This did not prevent philologists from trying to reconstruct past states of language from the eroded fragments left to them, though. Supposing that pronouns were the abbreviated remnants of longer sentences, Wedgwood proposed that in Ur-conversations, pronouns such as `he', `she' and `it' would have been spoken in full as `the man, woman, or thing, mentioned' (pp. 174±5). He turned to the `northern Gothic languages', where he found the word for `he' to be hann, which appeared to him `naturally to point to the word ``man'' as its origin' (p. 176). The word `it', he added, might have arisen out of the Gothic vaihts (AngloSaxon wiht): a thing. As Tom Shippey suggests, reconstructing past conditions of words on a theoretical or `virtual' level with the aid of morphological laws such as Lautverschiebung (`sound-shifting' ± see Chapter 5) was the principal pursuit of philologists in the nineteenth century.71 He points out that `the whole of their science conditioned them to the acceptance of what one might call ``*-'' or ``asterisk-reality'', that which no longer existed but could with 100 per cent certainty be inferred' (The Road to Middle Earth, p. 19). From the knowledge that modern English and German both change the vowel of `man' to form the plural `men' (German MaÈnner), for example, one could infer that speakers of Primitive Germanic (unrecorded) would have said *manniz, producing i-mutation.72

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology 107

108 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Avis, jasmin varna na aÅ ast, dadarka akvams, tam, vaÅgham garum vaghantam, tam, bhaÅram magham, tam, manum aÅku bharantam. Avis akvabhjams aÅ vavakat: kard aghnutai mai vidanti manum akvams agantam.

Akva

Åsas aÅ vavakant: krudhi avai, kard aghnutai vividvantsvas: manus patis varnaÅm avisaÅms karnanti svabhjam gharmam vastrum avibhjams ka varnaÅ na asti. Tat kukruvants avis agram aÅ bhugat.73 Schleicher's own translation of his fable into literal German (see footnotes) can be rendered in English as: A sheep, on which wool was not, saw horses, that pulled [a] heavy wagon, that [a] heavy load, that carried [a] human quickly. Sheep spoke [to] horses: heart becomes heavy seeing humans driving horses. Horses spoke: listen sheep, heart becomes heavy [in those] that have seen: human, master makes wool [from] sheep [into] warm clothes [for] himself and sheep is not wool. [Having] This heard, sheep turned [towards the] field.74 Arranged more idiomatically: A sheep that had been shorn saw some horses, one pulling a heavy wagon, one a heavy load, one carrying a man quickly. The sheep said to the horses: My heart is heavy at seeing how the man drives you horses. The horses replied: Listen sheep, our hearts are heavy, too, because we know that the master makes himself warm clothes from your wool, and leaves you without any for yourself. You're even worse off than us horses. Hearing this, the sheep went on its way. It is tempting to see urn-reality as a form of asterisk-reality, as Keats painfully and painstakingly endeavours to piece together a vase that has only ever existed theoretically. Here, too, the conjunctions between Romanticism's and philology's relationship with the past are as compel-

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

It was the German philologist August Schleicher who first proposed to use an asterisk as the sign of reconstructed forms. In 1868, he wrote a fable in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European, `Avis Akvasas Ka' (`[The] Sheep and [the] Horses'):

ling as they are mutually disclosing. Just as from `he', the early nineteenth-century philologist could reach `the man, woman, or thing, mentioned', Keats attempts to reconstruct the urn's meaning from its abbreviated and eroded remains. In so doing, he seeks to bridge the teasing aphasic space between the vase's original, presumably translucent meaning (to an ancient Greek), and its decontextualized, truncated and problematical meaning in 1819. Like the philologist, Keats is spurred on by thoughts of distant, half-glimpsed classical contexts ± `dim-conceived glories of the brain', as he put it in `On Seeing the Elgin Marbles' (l. 9). But as with Wedgwood's worn linguistic pebbles, only sufficient detail haunts about the urn's shape to tease the imagination and ensure that further questions are asked. We cannot clearly see or hear the revels on the urn's relief, we do not hear the piper's melodies, but encouraged (or manipulated) by the urn, we conjure up approximations of these. All of this plays directly into antiquity's hands: whatever note of apparent resolution struck by the urn's message in the penultimate line, `that is all j Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know', the knowledge Keats gains about the urn is not enough. He and his generation will be wasted by old age, whereas cold antiquity, newly and troublingly present in the nineteenth century, will not. In early 1817, Keats composed a second sonnet on the Elgin Marbles. It begins inauspiciously: `Forgive me, Haydon, that I cannot speak j Definitively on these mighty things' (ll. 1±2). A couple of lines further, Keats concedes with equal dismay: `what I want I know not where to seek' (l. 4). His failure to reach a satisfactory understanding of classical artefacts in 1817 points presciently towards the difficulties he was to face two years later with the urn, and it is undoubtedly significant that Keats was still visiting the Marbles at the time he composed `Ode on a Grecian Urn'.75 Keats does not succeed in reifying the urn verbally. It is an `unravish'd bride of quietness' at the end of the poem, just as it is in the beginning. And the baffling `resolution' at line 49 (which originates in Condillac ± see Chapter 4), cannot be considered as anything other than wilfully elusive or, at worst, a denial of the problem that governs the ode. The blank abyss described by Whewell, into which Keats utters his questions on origins, has predictably returned no echo. Just as all charms fly at the cold touch of philosophy, so too would they evaporate at the equally cold touch of philology, and that the urn will not and does not permit. As much as Hunt's Preface to The Story of Rimini or Percy Shelley's A Defence of Poetry, `Ode on a Grecian Urn' marks the intersection of philological methodology with Romanticism's desire to mediate a new

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology 109

relationship with the classical past. But although the radical shifts in cultural perspective made possible by developments in language theory seem to offer the nineteenth-century poet a means of stepping out of antiquity's `vast and unbroken shadows' ± out of history, so to speak ± this liberation is compromised by its dependence on the rhetoric of violation closely associated with philology. That the intensity of Keats's investigation of the urn ultimately unsettles poet as well as audience is apparent in Keats's inscription and simultaneous obfuscation of a narrative of ravishment on the urn's relief. It is also evident in reviewing perturbation at the `violence' Keats `lays upon words and syllables'. In so far as the ode represents an attempt at refashioning the relationship between classical and modern, the outcome proves unsatisfactory. By the end of the poem, the tensions Keats hopes to resolve have become, if anything, still more fraught and disturbing.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

110 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Keats, Condillac and Nathaniel Bailey

It is difficult, somehow, to imagine Keats being interested in such an ostensibly `un-Keatsian' pursuit as historical linguistics. Indeed, if the critical literature is to be believed, Keats had very little contact with language scholarship. There is only a single reference to the poet in Aarsleff's The Study of Language in England, 1780±1860, which cites Keats among the authors whom Tennyson and his philologist friends (the `Apostles') were reading at Trinity College in the late 1820s and early 1830s. The Cambridge Companion to Keats contains an essay by Garrett Stewart with the promising title of `Keats and Language', but this turns out to be an exercise in new critical close reading, focusing on sonority and `verbal slippage' in Lamia, rather than on Keats's familiarity with the linguistic debates of the day.1 William Keach's otherwise outstanding essay on `Romanticism and Language' in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism fails to mention Keats even once.2 When we think of philologically sophisticated poets, it would appear that Keats does not readily spring to mind. The problem is due in large part to the aesthetic Keats generates throughout his writing, but particularly in his letters where he fashions himself as an autonomous creative force, as the living illustration of his own axiom: `That which is creative must create itself' (Letters, I, 374). The poet was not immune to external influences, however, something I hope I have been able to demonstrate in the previous chapter. For a start, he was a regular reader ± if, during the `Cockney School of Poetry' attacks, a nervous one ± of those great arbiters of Britain's highbrow cultural life, the Edinburgh Review, Blackwood's and the Quarterly.3 In these and other periodicals he would have found new philological works regularly and closely appraised. Eclectic in taste, and served by contributors of stature, these journals were the London Review of Books 111

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

4

and Times Literary Supplement of their day. Essays on population theory or paper money existed easily alongside minute analyses of Sanskrit verbs and speculations on the first human language, just as in the LRB today detailed explications of colour and subjectivity sit happily next to appraisals of Ian McEwan's latest novel. Keats was also close friends with a polyglot, Richard Woodhouse (author of A Grammar of the Spanish, Portuguese, and Italian Languages, 1815), and, as we have seen, other friends such as Charles Cowden Clarke were active participants in the period's rumbustious debates on language. In addition, Keats was acquainted with no less than three language `specialists': Leigh Hunt, William Wordsworth and William Hazlitt. With publications like The Story of Rimini and Lyrical Ballads, Hunt and Wordsworth helped define the politico-linguistic contours of Romantic poetry; while Hazlitt, the author of A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue (1811), commented influentially on language throughout his career. It should, then, come as no surprise to learn that Keats's entire oeuvre bears the marks of a sustained and intense engagement with disputes over the nature of language. My aim in this chapter is to examine Keats's reading of two authors of `primary' philological texts. The first, my main topic of focus, is a seminal eighteenth-century linguistic philosopher, Etienne Bonnot de Condillac (1715±1780), whose work I believe provided Keats with a rich storehouse of ideas and images. There is no direct reference to this pivotal figure anywhere in Keats's writings; equally, there is next to no allusion to him in Keats criticism, a circumstance that warrants treating the matter here at chapter length. The second is Nathaniel Bailey, a copy of whose The New Universal Etymological English Dictionary, 7th edition (1776), was in Keats's possession. Bailey's dictionary, I argue, would have powerfully confirmed the poet's views on the merits of native versus classical traditions within poetic discourse.

Keats's virtuous philosopher (a source for `Beauty is truth, truth beauty') The works of Condillac are not mentioned in the list of books left by Keats on his death. There is, however, evidence to show that the poet was a close reader of the French philosopher and language theorist, moreover that he came across Condillac's work at some point towards the end of 1817 (possibly during a stay with his friend Benjamin Bailey at Magdalen Hall, Oxford, between 3 September and 5 October 1817),4 a period when the intellectual and philosophical texture of Keats's letters

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

112 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

assumes new complexity and confidence. Andrew Motion observes how often `it is [. . .] said that the achievement of Keats's poems lags behind the theoretical advances he makes in his letters'.5 I want to throw some light on these `advances' and suggest that several key ideas and images from Condillac make dramatic reappearances in Keats's correspondence, as well as in two of his best-known poems. The final 18 words of Keats's `Ode on a Grecian Urn' are so familiar as scarcely to need quoting: `Beauty is truth, truth beauty', ± that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know. Over the years, there have been many `explanations' of Keats's meaning here, and as many theories relating to his inspiration (ranging from Plato to the painter, Benjamin West). Hazlitt, though, is generally assumed to have been the probable source. His essay `On Imitation', from The Round Table (1817), includes the observation: `to the genuine artist, truth, nature, beauty, are almost different names for the same thing' (Complete Works, IV, 75). David Bromwich considers a passage from Hazlitt's `Letter to William Gifford', parts of which Keats had been copying out for his brother George a few weeks before composing `Ode on a Grecian Urn', an even more likely source for the chiasmus: `In seeking for truth, I sometimes found beauty' (Complete Works, IX, 30).6 Interesting as these echoes are, to my knowledge no one has remarked on a much stronger source for the lines, as well as for the philosophy that supports them, in Condillac. In 1746, Condillac published his Essai sur l'origine des connoissances humaines, which, as Hans Aarsleff points out, had until quite recently `largely been forgotten' in historical linguistics, let alone in literary studies.7 Ten years later, in 1756, the volume was translated into English by Thomas Nugent as An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge. In Chapter 10 of this translation, entitled `From whence the imagination derives those graces with which it embellishes truth', we find the following statement: Nothing is beautiful that is not true: and yet every truth is not always beautiful.8 The lines at the end of `Ode on a Grecian Urn' contain compelling parallels with this sentence (not least a chiastic structure, missing from Hazlitt). The resemblances are such as to lead one to suspect that Keats's

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Keats, Condillac and Nathaniel Bailey 113

phrase is self-consciously engaged with Condillac's Essay.9 For Condillac, the connection between beauty and truth is one way, however, not circular or mirrored as in Keats's version of the relationship. It seems to me that Keats has revised the problematical French philosopher's dictum to suit the Romantic poet's needs. I will explain what I mean. The passage of Condillac in question continues in this manner: In order to supply this defect, the imagination connects it with ideas the most proper for embellishing it, and by this reunion it forms a whole, in which we find both solidity and amusement. (Essay, p. 91) Condillac posits a transforming role for the imagination (a page earlier in Nugent's translation he remarks that the imagination `alters everything she touches'), which evidently appealed to Keats. Perhaps Keats considered that his imagination had been sufficiently successful and `transformative' in `Ode on a Grecian Urn', summoning as it does an artefact out of the shadows of antiquity into some degree of physical presence, to warrant the positive emendation of Condillac in the chiasmus at the end of the poem. The concluding lines of the ode ± `That is all j Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know' ± also seem to answer Condillac, referencing the English title of the philosopher's treatise on `human knowledge'. If Condillac is at pains to distinguish between beauty and truth, Keats insists that they are the same thing ± more to the point, that this is all one needs to know on the subject. It would appear that a sealed, self-referential aesthetics is preferable to Keats at this stage than a minute investigation into the material basis and mechanisms of human experience. There is a `source' within Keats for the final lines of the Grecian Urn ode, of course. In a letter to Benjamin Bailey dated 22 November 1817, Keats wrote: `I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination ± What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth' (Letters, I, 184).10 This letter can also be seen to bear traces of Condillac, however, since it includes all three of Condillac's key terms from Chapter 10: `imagination', `beauty' and `truth'. What is more, a few pages on from where the relevant phrase on beauty and truth occurs in Nugent's translation, Condillac ponders `the character of a man of genius' (Essay, p. 98); just before Keats records his thoughts on the `truth of the Imagination' for Bailey, he also discusses the character of `Men of Genius' (Letters, I, 184). This could simply be

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

114 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

ascribed to coincidence (the phrase was common in the period: both Hazlitt and Wordsworth use it, for example), but it could also indicate that Keats had been reading the French philosopher, in Nugent's translation, at around the time he wrote the famous letter to Bailey. In addition, the letter contains a reference to the `philosophic Mind' ± hardly surprising if Keats had recently been studying Condillac's philosophy. In the case of Condillac, super-Lockean and thus Romantic villain, there were very good reasons why one ± and why Keats in particular ± might be reluctant to confess to having read him closely. The low esteem in which Condillac and materialist philosophy as a whole was held by Romantic authors can be gauged from Coleridge's exclamation in a notebook entry from 24 March 1808: `How infra-bestial the Locks [sic], Priestleys, Hume, Condilliacs [sic] and the dehumanizing race of fashionable Metaphysicians'.11 Coleridge fired other gibes at Condillac in Biographia Literaria and Lay Sermons, both published in 1817. In addition, Wordsworth's 1809 Convention of Cintra depicted Condillac as a materialist Euro-bogeyman, whose `pellets of logic' had spread the `pestilential philosophism of France';12 Hazlitt's Lectures on English Philosophy referred to Condillac's work as `the quintessence of slender thought';13 and in essays that appeared in Hunt's Examiner in February and March 1816, Hazlitt alleged that Condillac's ideas were stolen from Locke, who was himself, Hazlitt contended, a `barefaced, deliberate, and bungling plagiarist' of Hobbes (Complete Works, XX, 69). Keats may have worried that if he drew attention to his integration in letters and poems of elements of Condillac's thought, he would lay himself open to charges of plagiarism ± third-hand plagiarism, moreover. Romantic suspicion of Condillac's philosophic system had its foundation in a wider distrust of materialism. For Hazlitt, Condillac's derivation of human experience from external sensation had the unwelcome effect of denying genius and original thought (concepts absolutely central to Romantic theories of creativity). If all thought originated in sense impressions, and if language were truly derived from objects, as Condillac taught, then `reasoning and understanding' also had to be `resolvable into the mechanism of language', something Hazlitt was unwilling to accept (Complete Works, XX, 75). It was precisely to resist the idea that poets were constrained by mechanisms of language, that Hazlitt's essay `On Poetry in General' in Lectures on the English Poets (1818) depicted the signifying webs of poetic language as inherently different to the `arbitrary and conventional' linguistic relationships that prevailed `in the ordinary construction of language' (Complete Works, V, 12±13). In this way, Hazlitt sought to secure an aesthetic in which creativity was contingent not on

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Keats, Condillac and Nathaniel Bailey 115

116 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

The imagination derives her graces from the privilege she has of borrowing whatever appears most amiable and most agreeable in the various parts of nature, in order to adorn the subject she handles. Nothing comes amiss to her; she makes every thing her own, as soon as she knows it can increase her lustre. She is like the bee that culls the treasure from the choicest flowers. (p. 89) This can be compared with two well-known passages from Keats's letters. The first of these is from 19 February 1818 (to J. H. Reynolds): Let us not therefore go hurrying about and collecting honey-bee like, buzzing here and there impatiently from a knowledge of what is to be arrived at: but let us open our leaves like a flower and be passive and receptive.15 (Letters, I, 232) The parallels are eye-catching, but extend beyond the mere duplication of words such as `bees' and `flowers'. Where Condillac conceives the imagination as a `coquette' (Essay, p. 89), attracting and persuading some by her `lively and winning air', astonishing others `by her grand and noble deportment' (Essay, p. 90), Keats conflates the image of nobility and coquettishness so that his `flower'-like mind takes `hints from every noble insect that favours us with a visit' (Letters, I, 232). Condillac's presence in the letter to Reynolds is by no means confined to the congruencies I have just outlined. Before Keats expounds his theory of literary creativity and inspiration to Reynolds, he remarks how a quiet `doze upon a Sofa' puts one in the right frame of mind to begin spinning an `airy Citadel' of thought.16 On page 84 of the Essay ± in the immediate vicinity of the passages I have been examining ± Condillac compares romances to `castles in the air', explaining that one can only lose oneself in them if the distractions of daily life have been shut out. Keats has transposed `air' from the Essay into the image of an `airy Citadel'; We should also note the similarity between a `castle in the air' and an `airy Citadel'.17

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

predetermined structures, but on a writer's ability to feel powerfully: on genius. Within this polarized intellectual climate, it is hardly surprising that Keats was wary of trumpeting his interest in Condillac.14 There is further evidence of Keats's familiarity with Condillac to be derived from the crucial tenth chapter of the Essay. Condillac writes:

By pointing out these echoes of Condillac, I am reconstructing a reading experience; I am not only suggesting that Keats has been reading the French philosopher, but suggesting ways in which he has been doing this. Keats seems to have hopped around the Essay, skipping sections, narrowing in on places of interest here and there ± particularly passages relating to the imagination in Chapter 10 and in other paragraphs within a dozen or so pages. Not surprisingly, certain words and individual phrases appear to have been more evocative than others. Keats himself provides us with the model for how he read the Essay. In the letter from 19 February, he informs Reynolds: I have an idea that a Man might pass a very pleasant life in this manner ± let him on any certain day read a certain Page of full Poesy or distilled Prose and let him wander with it, and muse upon it, and reflect from it, and bring home to it, and prophesy upon it, and dream upon it. (Letters, I, 231) In precisely this `pleasant' manner, Keats muses and reflects upon, recycles and adapts (or in some cases disguises) Condillac to suit his own concerns. At this point we should return to the second letter I alluded to earlier. On 27 October 1818, Keats wrote to Richard Woodhouse about the `poetical Character': The poetical Character [. . .] has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosop[h]er, delights the camelion Poet. (Letters, I, 386±7) Keats's notion of how the imaginative faculty operates in the compositional process bears close comparison with Condillac's. Condillac described the `character' of imagination in these terms: `Nothing comes amiss to her; she makes every thing her own, as soon as she knows it can increase her lustre' (Essay, p. 89). Was Condillac the `virtuous philosopher' Keats had in mind when he wrote to Woodhouse? As a matter of fact, Condillac does not seem to have been shocked by the Imagination's questionable morality, but the identification is nonetheless seductive. Whatever the case, the letters to Reynolds and Woodhouse both contain ideas and imagery that can be traced convincingly to a single passage on page 89 of Nugent's translation of Condillac.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Keats, Condillac and Nathaniel Bailey 117

Condillac's idea of romances as `castles in the air' throws important light, too, on Keats's `Ode on Melancholy'. Condillac points out that: `There is hardly a person, I think, that in his idle hours, has not had some revery in which he has imagined himself the hero of the romance' (Essay, p. 84). For the most part, though, he explains, romances produce only a `slight effect on the brain' due to the distractions of the everyday world of `real objects'. Under certain circumstances, this can change, however: Suppose some sudden fit of melancholy seizes our minds, so as to make us avoid the company of our best friends, and dislike everything that pleased us before; we shall then find [. . .] that our favourite romance will be the only idea that can divert us from it. The animal spirits by degrees will dig such a strong foundation to this castle, that nothing will be able to demolish it: we shall fall asleep in the building of it; we shall dream we reside in it; and in fine when the impression of the spirits shall insensibly arrive to that pitch as if we really were what we have fancied ourselves to be, upon returning to ourselves we shall take our chimeras for a reality. (Essay, pp. 84±5; my emphasis) The reference I have underlined to `some sudden fit of melancholy' seems to be echoed in `Ode on Melancholy', composed in spring 1819, which contains key terms from the above passage, most obviously in lines 11±12 (emphases mine): But when the melancholy fit shall fall Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud This is not all, however. More `Condillac' words turn up in the ode: in line 21 we have `Beauty' once again, and in line 24 a reference to sipping bees (see pages 91 and 89 of the Essay, respectively). The phrase `some sudden fit of melancholy' in the Essay, occurring as it does in a volume that also contains `Nothing is beautiful that is not true: and yet every truth is not always beautiful', forces us to consider seriously the possibility that Keats had been reading Condillac. This despite the fact that between 1809 and 1819 the Frenchman had been unequivocally denounced in publications Keats would have known and respected, such as Hazlitt's Lectures on English Philosophy, Wordsworth's Convention of Cintra and Coleridge's Biographia Literaria. Other words from the Condillac passage I have just cited seem to have been mobilizing for Keats in different contexts. `Seize' crops up in one of

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

118 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

the famous axioms we looked at earlier from the crucial letter to Bailey of 22 November 1817: `What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth'. `Dream' resurfaces a little later in the same epistle: `The Imagination may be compared to Adam's dream ± he awoke and found it truth' (Letters, I, 185). What is more, Keats's sense here closely parallels Condillac's notion of `returning to ourselves' after a romance dream and `tak[ing] our chimeras for a reality'. These echoes and parallels suggest to me that Keats picked out key ideas and images in Condillac. His reading of the Essay was creatively enabling in several other ways, too. Take the following from page 98 of Nugent's translation: When the passions throw us into violent agitations, so as to deprive us of the use of reflexion, we feel a thousand different Sensations. This is because the imagination being heated [. . .] awakes with greater or lesser force those sensations which have some relation to [. . .] our present situation. I am not concerned for the moment with the import of the passage (although with its emphasis on `sensations' over `reflexion', it could profitably be compared to Keats's declaration `O for a Life of Sensations rather than of Thoughts!' ± which also turns up in the letter to Bailey of 22 November 1817, Letters, I, 185). I am interested rather in the fact that the words `thousand different' appear directly above `imagination' in Nugent. This semantic grouping seems to have lodged in Keats's mind to produce the following comment in a letter to the poet's brother and sister-in-law, dated 14±31 October 1818: I feel more and more every day, as my imagination strengthens, that I do not live in this world alone but in a thousand worlds. (Letters, I, 403) We can be fairly confident that Keats had read the page of the Essay in question (page 98), since this is where Condillac comments on the character of `men of genius'. The letter to George and Georgiana continues thus: No sooner am I alone than shapes of epic greatness are stationed around me, and serve my Spirit the office which is equivalent to a king's body guard ± then `Tragedy, with scepter'd pall, comes sweeping by'' According to my state of mind I am with Achilles shouting in

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Keats, Condillac and Nathaniel Bailey 119

120 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

This passage corresponds intriguingly with Condillac's analysis of the effect of reading romances that we looked at earlier (the following citations in parentheses are taken from pages 84±5 of the Essay). There is an emphasis in the letter to George and Georgiana on being alone (Condillac: we `avoid the company of our best friends'), melting into the air (Condillac's `castles in the air'), losing oneself completely in the romance or epic (Condillac: `[we] will dig such a strong foundation to this castle that nothing will be able to demolish it'), and imagining oneself to be the hero (Condillac: `There is hardly a person, I think, that in his idle hours, has not had some revery in which he has imagined himself the hero of the romance'). We need not question the `authenticity' of Keats's experience; nor should we assume, necessarily, that Keats's exhilarating account of feeling the power of his imaginative faculty is itself a literary fiction, derived from Condillac and included in the letter to George and Georgiana as `proof' that he had been possessed by the spirit of poetry (although in the letter to Bailey of 22 November, Keats confesses: `I begin to suspect myself and the genuineness of my feelings', Letters, I, 186). But the range of similarities between the letter and the Essay indicates that the French philosopher had at least suggested ways in which Keats could express an increasing awareness of the growing strength of his imagination. Reading Keats in conjunction with Nugent's translation of the Essay, tracing the debts and sources of inspiration, one receives the distinct impression of reading with Keats, of looking over his shoulder, so to speak. We follow his eye to especially appealing words and phrases, watch him sit back and make mental notes before flicking the page and setting off in search of new treasures. I wish to investigate another set of examples offering further insights into Keats's reading practice, as well as affording us a rare glimpse of the poet's creative mind in operation. The letter to Bailey of 22 November 1817 is again important, and provides an opportunity for considering ways in which writers `produce' each other. In the letter, Keats works up to his famous notion of the `here after', a time when `happiness on Earth' will be `repeated in a finer tone' (Letters, I, 185). He does this via a discussion of the imagination's active role in the workings

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

the Trenches or with Theocritus in the Vales of Sicily. Or I throw my whole being into Triolus and repeating those lines, `I wander, like a lost soul upon the stygian Banks staying for waftage,' I melt into the air with a voluptuousness so delicate that I am content to be alone. (Letters, I, 403±4)

Keats, Condillac and Nathaniel Bailey 121

The simple imaginative Mind may have its rewards in the repeti[ti]on of its own silent Working coming continually on the spirit with a fine suddenness ± to compare great things with small ± have you never by being surprised with an old Melody ± in a delicious place ± by a delicious voice, fe[l]t over again your very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on your soul ± do you not remember forming to yourself the singer's face more beautiful that [for than] it was possible and yet with the elevation of the Moment you did not think so ± even then you were mounted on the Wings of Imagination so high ± that the Prototype must be here after ± that delicious face you will see ± What a time! I am continually running away from the subject ± sure this cannot be exactly the case with a complex Mind ± one that is imaginative and at the same time careful of its fruits. (Letters, I, 185±6; my emphases) This portion of the letter, it seems to me, is in part `enabled' by Chapters 2 and 3 of Condillac. The congruences may not be as immediately apparent as others I have examined to this point: words and ideas from the Essay are diffused through this section of Keats's letter, rather than positioned carefully as in the beauty/truth chiasmus in `Ode on a Grecian Urn'. It even appears likely that Keats was only peripherally interested in the earlier sections of the Essay, and did not read them as closely as the dozen or so pages we have been discussing. On the other hand, precisely this diffuseness allows us to observe how Keats worked on `productive' material when he was in a less consciously artistic mode. In the first of the pertinent extracts from the Essay, Condillac elucidates a chain of responses set in motion by the collaboration of imagination and memory: Two friends meet [. . .] who have not seen each other for a long time; the attention they give to the surprize and joy which they inwardly feel, immediately occasions those expressions of kindness with which they salute each other. They complain of their long absence; they amuse themselves with a repetition of the pleasures which they formerly enjoyed, and of the several adventures that happened to them during their separation. (Essay, p. 48; my emphases)

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

of the memory. I have underlined the terms and phrases I will be examining in detail:

122 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

If we want to revive a perception which is not familiar to us, such as the taste of a fruit of which we have eaten but once, our endeavours will terminate, generally speaking, in a kind of concussion in the fibres of the brain and of the mouth. [. . .] When a perception is familiar to us, the fibres of the brain accustomed to yield to the solicitations of the objects, are more ready to comply with our desires. Sometimes our ideas are revived without any concurrence on our part, and present themselves with such vivacity, that we are mislead by them [. . .]. These irregularities probably are owing to the near relation there is between those movements which are the physical cause of the imagination, and those which cause the perception of the object when present. These passages contain a number of what might be thought of as `transferable' words. By this, I mean terms that are moved from one textual environment to another, often with their original meaning intact. These include `surprize', `repetition' (a key concept in the Keats letter in question), and `time' from extract one, and `fruit' and `imagination' from extract two. All of these words appear in the letter to Bailey in much the same sense as they do in the Essay. Transferred words are often the first things that alert us to the possibility that an author has borrowed from, or been influenced by, a precursor, or else that one text has simply seeped into another. Images and ideas can also be moved between works, of course, but the difference here is that there is more scope to alter particular elements or remake them in some way (always assuming that one author is not simply plagiarizing another). The degree of transformation can be extremely revealing, indicating both the frequently nebulous nature of influence and the creative temperament of the transforming mind. For instance, Condillac and Keats both `situate' the points they wish to make in the anecdote of a surprise encounter; but where Condillac imagines a surprise meeting between friends, Keats conceives something rather less corporeal or tangible, namely an old melody that surprises the hearer. Condillac's use of the taste of fruit to illustrate his discussion represents another productive constellation of words and ideas that is altered in transit from Essay to letter. Keats splits the image into its component parts, abstracting the `taste' of the fruit from the fruit's corporeal essence. Both components get used, though.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

The second excerpt occurs a few pages earlier. In it, a distinction is drawn between the ways in which familiar and unfamiliar perceptions are recollected (again, emphases are mine):

The latter appears (employed metaphorically now) in Keats's reference to a mind that is `careful of its fruits', while the former governs a quirky, synaesthetic passage where `places', `voices' and `faces' are described as `delicious'. We could say that Condillac's rather earth-bound passage, at least in Nugent's leaden phrasing, is changed by a poet who really does seem to be `mounted on the Wings of Imagination', as Keats puts it in his letter. Just as `surprize' in the first Condillac passage, and the notion that ideas can be revived `without any concurrence on our part' in the second extract, prove highly suggestive for Keats, helping to produce `have you never [been] surprised with an old Melody[?]', and `a fine suddenness', Condillac's intimation of the imagination's creative power appears, at some level of consciousness, to have affected the young poet profoundly. Condillac proposes that on occasion ideas are revived in the mind with `such vivacity, that we are mislead by them'. In Keats's letter, this is transformed into a passage that describes how the imagination can induce one to remember the face of a singer as `more beautiful [than] it was possible'. The original idea from Condillac ± being surprised by meeting an old friend ± is reconfigured into surprise at hearing an old melody and a meditation on the singer's face. Condillac's ideas are not merely transposed into Keats's letters. On the contrary, we observe how a creative mind like Keats's transforms and reuses its material, not so much disguising sources as giving them new life. Keats epitomizes Condillac's own definition of the imaginative faculty as `borrowing whatever appears most amiable and most agreeable [. . .], in order to adorn the subject she handles. Nothing comes amiss to her; she makes every thing her own' (Essay, p. 89). The result is that Keats's letter to Bailey leaves a greater impression on us than Nugent's translation of the relevant passages from Condillac. Where Condillac's philosophy in its English incarnation presents an often unwieldy, inflexible sequence of ideas and images, the letter is dynamic, idiosyncratic, inquisitive and mercurial. It is equally apparent, however, that Keats is `enabled' by the French philosopher and his English translator, spurred on by especially productive phrases, transferable words, newly opened avenues of thought, different frames of focus and a wealth of ideas that activate and actuate the poetic mind. The present section has revealed the diversity of ways in which writers borrow from, revise, allude to and recycle each other's work; but it also discloses the unquantifiable nature of poetic genius, the magical `something' that occurs in the process of transferring words and ideas from one page to another, the alchemical reaction that can transmute a somewhat

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Keats, Condillac and Nathaniel Bailey 123

ponderous formulation like Nugent's `Nothing is beautiful that is not true: and yet every truth is not always beautiful' into finely spun gold at the end of `Ode on a Grecian Urn'. Tracing allusions permits us to watch the poetic mind at work, but cannot in the end explain its workings. If Keats was acquainted with Nugent's translation of Condillac as I am contending, then the implications for Keats scholarship are considerable. For a start, Condillac, heavily influenced by Locke's materialism, is usually thought of as being opposed to Romantic thinking in every way. Certainly Wordsworth, Coleridge and Hazlitt seem to have held this view, at least publicly. The idea that Condillac was the catalyst for Keats's remarkable (and hitherto unexplained) intellectual and philosophical development at the end of 1817, that he provided the young poet with several key concepts concerning the Imagination, and that he was even, via Nugent, the source for a number of plangent words and phrases in Keats's letters and poems, including key lines from `Ode on a Grecian Urn' and `Ode on Melancholy', might seem spectacular ± unpalatable, even. We would certainly need to rethink our understanding of Keats and the poetic imagination as well as his philosophy of life ± also his linguistic views, since the second half of Condillac's Essay is devoted to investigating the origin and nature of language. I believe the echoes and allusions I have identified are compelling. But the temptation to think that Keats can be `explained' through Condillac should be resisted. There is little to be gained from denigrating Keats's extraordinary advances in the letters and poems. Nonetheless, towards the end of 1817, the point at which I think Keats probably first encountered An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, his letters suddenly increase in philosophical complexity, intellectual dexterity and general inquisitiveness, and are filled with references to theories of the imagination and other ideas adapted from the Essay.18 To be sure, Condillac does not write Keats's correspondence or poems for him, but he at least assists the poet in completing a `regular stepping of the Imagination towards a Truth' or two (Letters, I, 218). Condillac's influence on Keats is most apparent in correspondence to Bailey of 22 November 1817, Reynolds, 19 February 1818, Woodhouse, 27 October 1818, and George and Georgiana Keats, 14±31 October 1818; also in `Ode on a Grecian Urn' and `Ode on Melancholy' (both composed spring 1819). Unless Keats's memory of individual passages was extraordinarily vivid, this indicates to me that Keats may have had access to a copy of Nugent's translation throughout this period, which would speak against his having enjoyed a short but intense time with the volume at Magdalen. The question that remains, of course, is whose copy did he read? This may yet come to

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

124 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

light. But for the moment we can say with reasonable confidence that a little over a dozen pages from the Essay provided Keats with a rich storehouse of images that he drew on over 18 months or so, lending point and definition to some of the best-known and intellectually pivotal passages in his letters, as well as two of his most famous poems. Nugent's translation of the `virtuous philosopher' is an important and hitherto overlooked context in the development of Keats's creative mind; it is also one that will almost certainly repay further investigation.

Keats, Condillac and language What implications would familiarity with Condillac have for Keats's views on language? What would Keats have found in part two of the Essay? To begin with, Condillac's condemnation of the `subtil and strained conceits' of language that comprised `vicious' taste (Essay, p. 297) would have resonated with Keats's own views about the failings of neoclassical protocols. So, too, would remarks like the following: The style of all languages was originally poetical, because it began with depicting the most sensible images of our ideas. [. . .] But in proportion as languages became more copious, the mode of speaking by action was abolished by degrees, the voice admitted of less variety and tone, the relish for figures and metaphors [. . .] insensibly diminished. (Essay, pp. 228±9) Condillac's concept of historical depoeticization could well have inflected Keats's belief in the need to restore `genuine' poetry to modern literature. It offers further explanation why Thomas Chatterton's diction was so important to Keats. In a letter to J. H. Reynolds dated 21 September 1819, Keats asserted that Chatterton had composed in `genuine English Idiom'; the author of the Rowley poems had, however, long been exposed as a `forger'. (Chatterton's attempts at fabricating oldsounding verse were always meant to be `penetrable', of course, since this permitted, indeed invited, readers to distinguish Chatterton's original genius from the pastiche designed to showcase it; as Claude Rawson has recently argued, Chatterton's `forgery proved the genius of the fiction, since if the material had been genuine Chatterton's achievement would merely have been that of a lucky antiquarian find'.)19 In his next breath, Keats rejects `Miltonic verse' with its `inversions' and `artful [. . .] humour' as the antithesis of genuine idiom (Letters, II, 167). A letter to

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Keats, Condillac and Nathaniel Bailey 125

his brother and sister-in-law, written at around the same time, contrasts Milton's `greek and latin inversions and intonations' with the `native music' of Chatterton (Letters, II, 212). We saw in Chapter 2 that the embedded sense of `native' within `genuine' was crucial for Romantic theories of taste. Other Romantics, too, may have found this part of Condillac's Essay suggestive. The passage cited above compares interestingly with sections from Shelley's Defence of Poetry (`Every original language near to its source is in itself the chaos of a cyclic poem; the copiousness of lexicography and the distinctions of grammar are the works of a later age'),20 and with the 1802 Appendix to Lyrical Ballads (`The earliest Poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited from real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring, and figurative'). In the Preface to the 1802 edition, Wordsworth had described poetic language as `variegated, and alive with metaphors and figures' (Preface, p. 255). In the Appendix, he explained that this `genuine language of poetry', through the `progress of refinement', had become `daily more and more corrupt' (Appendix, pp. 315±16). It is true that the idea of `original' languages being more poetical and figurative than their modern counterparts, which were supposed to have become increasingly deformed and defigured as they had grown more `copious', was part of the intellectual vernacular: the Romantic reinvention of the concept need not be ascribed to familiarity with Condillac. In spite of this fact, though, there are enough verbal echoes of Condillac in the passages from Shelley and Wordsworth just quoted to lead one to suspect that these authors also found much to interest them in Nugent's translation.21 Of equal appeal to Keats and like-minded writers would have been Condillac's identification of a linguistic basis for the improvement of mankind. According to Condillac, social perfection could only be achieved in tandem with linguistic perfection: good language led to good thoughts, and the intellect (expressed through language) developed in close relationship with human society. Wordsworth's prose accompaniments to Lyrical Ballads can be understood as an attempt to set this virtuous progression in motion again, after the influence of neoclassical taste on poetic discourse had created a language of privilege and laid the foundation for an undemocratic, tricksy and obfuscating social logic. Wordsworth's intervention, like Keats's, was entirely sanctioned by Condillac, who insisted that responsibility for implementing linguistic reform lay with `eminent writers':

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

126 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Keats, Condillac and Nathaniel Bailey 127

It was a two-way process, however. Without good language there could be no good writers: It is demonstrable that there can be no such thing as a superior genius, till the language of a nation has been considerably improved. (Essay, p. 290) By these terms, authors are obliged to involve themselves in the reform of a language before they can instigate changes in social and political structures using that language. At the beginning of 1817, to the considerable vexation of his guardian, Mr Abbey, Keats dedicated himself to writing. This meant abandoning a career in medicine, although he had already passed the requisite examinations that would have allowed him to go on to practise as an apothecary, physician or surgeon. If Condillac was right, though, `eminent writers' and apothecaries performed a similar task. One ministered to the physical health of a people, the other to the health of their language. By the terms of Romantic philology, if a nation's language was in good condition, so too were its people and their social institutions.

Keats and Nathaniel Bailey Among the books Charles Brown listed as having been owned or borrowed by Keats, we find the seventh edition of Nathaniel Bailey's The New Universal Etymological English Dictionary (1776). This constituted an enlargement on Bailey's `old' Universal Etymological English Dictionary (which none the less remained in print alongside the newer volume). The preface emphasizes the linguistic `occupation', `oppression' and `suppression' suffered by the first speakers of the `British Tongue, [. . .] originally the native Language of the Country', at the hands of Roman, Saxon, Danish and Norman invaders. But its brief history of English is merely an echo of a longer, more overtly radical `Account' given in the `old' preface, to which Bailey eagerly refers readers at the end of his `new' preface. I'd like to turn to this `Account' now, since the pointed decision to elect Bailey's lexicography over more conservative projects such as Johnson's involves Keats, however obliquely, in its oppositional politics.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Though the character of languages is originally formed from that of the people, yet it is not perfected without the assistance of eminent writers. (Essay, p. 286)

The strength of Bailey's dictionaries lies in their derivation of English words from a range of cognate languages, including `ancient British', Saxon, Danish and Norman. Bailey's work thus depends on the revival of interest in historical conditions of English, more specifically on the philological advances that facilitated the retrieval of these earlier episodes in the formation of the national tongue. Furthermore, Bailey's fascination with words is as politically edged as Condillac's, as the `old' preface demonstrates: Words are those channels, by which the knowledge of things are conveyed to our understandings: And therefore, upon a right apprehension of them depends the rectitude of our notions; and in order to form our judgements right, they must be understood in their proper meaning.22 Bailey perceives a direct conduit connecting the `right apprehension' of words and the `rectitude of our notions'. That is, we only think correctly if we employ words correctly and `in their proper meaning', something that can only be achieved with an historical, etymological awareness of English. As the reader of Bailey, then, Keats is unlikely to have used words capriciously, or without a sense of their philological `depth'. One of the reasons, indeed, underlying his rejection of Milton's idiom in favour of Chatterton's `old words' is the freedom of the latter from what Keats called `gallicisms' (Letters, II, 212); the basis of this preference in etymology should not escape our notice. I'd like to look more closely at the politics of Bailey's first dictionary, since this focus of attention sheds some light on Keats's own politicized view of language and linguistic history. I want to contend that for all its popularity, Bailey's dictionary is less of a `standard' work than at first appears. Bailey, to be sure, is conventional enough when he claims that the influence of classical vocabulary on English has been beneficial. `By transplanting foreign words into our native soil, and new forming them', he observes on the fifth side of his unpaginated introduction, English has `enriched' itself. So much so, that it has become the most `copious and significant language in Europe, if not the world'. But while Bailey gratefully acknowledges the presence of classical traditions within English, he also takes pride in `native' features of the language. This is the same pride audible in Keats's key decision to privilege Chatterton's `native music' over Milton's `greek and latin inversions and intonations' (Letters, II, 212). We should not rush over this section of the introduction to the Universal Etymological English Dictionary. It is easy

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

128 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

to miss the import of Bailey's remark about English `new forming' its `foreign words'. But on closer inspection it becomes apparent that Bailey is not so much emphasizing that English has benefited from imported elements as pointing out that these new elements have been adapted to the existing structures of the language. English, that is, has not allowed itself to be commandeered by external forces, even if its population of speakers, at various points in their history, had. A page or so earlier, Bailey even refers to outside linguistic influences as a series of `mutations' English had `suffered'. This opens a rather different kind of narrative on the supposedly `enriching' history of multiple traditions within the national tongue. The resilience of English is repeatedly stressed, particularly its ability to disrupt the incursions of Roman imperial power together with its most potent cultural weapon, Latin: So tenacious were our forefathers of their native language, that it overgrew the Roman. Bailey depicts the history of the national language as a catalogue of glorious defeats (where conquerors `endeavoured to yoke the English under their tongue') and defiance (where speakers of the `British language' took refuge in the Welsh mountains). In the light of these chroniclings, Bailey's later claim that English has benefited from its eclectic past seems, then, at the very least, ambiguous. Despite the Universal Etymological English Dictionary's outward appearance as a monument of neoclassical lexicography, the book is in many respects a rebel publication. In it, neoclassical dogma is continually undercut by attitudes towards language that will shortly crystallize as `Romantic'. Consider Bailey's explanation of why the character of English has changed so radically over the years: If a tongue be once esteemed more learned, from thence the learned commonly borrow Technical words, or words of art; as in Physick, Philosophy, Mathematicks, and others, from the Greek. If it be esteemed more elegant or fine in pronunciation, then courtiers, who are apt to dislike any thing that is common, and the product of their own country, and to delight in what is foreign, borrow a great many words of complaisance and address. (Page three) As Keats knew only too well, the literary world was full of the kind of `courtiers' Bailey describes. The sentiments communicated in the above

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Keats, Condillac and Nathaniel Bailey 129

passage, present in truncated form in the preface to the New Universal Etymological English Dictionary, are prototypical of those we have seen displayed in philological tussles fought by Wordsworth, Hazlitt and Hunt. When the linguistic allegiances displayed by Bailey are borne in mind, it comes as no surprise to learn that Keats chose his lexicography over that of Johnson. His work not only attempts to raise awareness of English's historical past by recovering the native roots of the language; it also ± and this is especially interesting, given Keats's receptiveness to concepts such as `bold' discourse and the `real language of men' ± accentuates the value of `common' expressions over those that are merely `elegant or fine in pronunciation'. In Bailey's work, Keats would have found a scholarly resource that, read carefully, conveyed authority on the radical linguistic hypotheses of Hunt and Wordsworth. The preceding chapters have outlined different types of Romantic engagement with philological theories between 1798 and 1821. The range and intensity of these encounters helped determine the contours of first- and second-generation Romantic writing. In fact, it is difficult to find a text from this period that has not been touched in some way by controversies over language. Many of the rendezvous I have studied were conducted in a spirit of optimism. The vital connection thought to link the social and the linguistic encouraged Romantic authors to believe that political reform could be achieved `simply' by reforming poetic language. Yet less than two decades after the death of Keats, with the advent of Jacob Grimm's and Rasmus Rask's new Germanic philology, a paradigm shift had occurred in the way in which language was conceived. The shift brought with it a revised set of linguistic issues, and in the main they tended to be darker than those preoccupying the Romantic community I have explored. In place of confident schemes to `restore' more meaningful modes of discourse, poets such as the young Alfred Tennyson were obliged to confront the possibility that all discourse ± classical and native, ancient and modern, `high' and `low', poetry and prose ± was essentially meaningless. The altogether bleaker relationships between literature and philology that took shape in the 1820s and 1830s are the focus of my final two chapters.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

130 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm by English-Speaking Audiences

A period of barely more than ten years proved seminal for the systematic, `scientific' study of language in Britain. During this time, a series of British works founded upon Jacob Grimm's Sprachwissenschaft were published, including James Cowles Prichard's The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations (1831), William Balfour Winning's A Manual of Comparative Philology (1838), John William Donaldson's The New Cratylus (1839) and Robert Gordon Latham's The English Language (1841). Grimm's seminal Deutsche Grammatik was reviewed by Hensleigh Wedgwood for the Quarterly Review in 1833 and by Charles Neaves for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in 1840. Also in 1833, Tennyson's friend John Mitchell Kemble published a commanding article, `On English Prñterites', based on Grimm's principles.1 In addition, between 1834 and 1836, Kemble championed Grimm (1785±1863) in what Raymond A. Wiley has labelled the `Anglo-Saxon Controversy', a heated debate fought in the Gentleman's Magazine over issues arising from the collision of the imported philology with a sceptical and openly hostile British scholarship. By the end of the decade, then, Continental philology and the theories of Jacob Grimm were firmly established in Britain. The publications and debates I have listed constitute the `inlets' through which Grimm's pioneering ideas flowed into British scholarly and popular consciousness. This chapter delineates their common themes and key idiosyncrasies, as well as drawing into clear focus the nationalistic uses to which Grimm and his theories were put.2 In particular, we will see how `nativeness' in the idea of `genuine' idiom, crucial in Wordsworth's linguistic outlook, becomes part of an aggressively nationalistic demeanour towards language and its history. I am interested in determining why, and 131

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

5

in what ways, the German grammarian's theories permeated Britishspeaking consciousness at this precise historical juncture. I want to relate Grimm to a fundamental shift that occurred in popular and scholarly perceptions of language in Britain in the 1830s and early 1840s, when the status of English ± a fundamental Romantic dilemma ± changed unambiguously from that of poor cousin to Latin and Greek, to equal sibling with the classical tongues. Grimm's major insight was into the historical interchange of consonants between cognate terms in different languages (Lautverschiebung). He observed that strict sequences prevailed: following the series p, f, b(v), one could work backwards from terms like Old High German fuoz, through to Sanskrit padas, and even beyond, pausing only to reconstruct Gothic foÃtus along the way. Yet acceptance of Grimm's `objective' theory of `sound laws' was by no means a foregone conclusion. Numerous British researchers, uncomfortable about advances in foreign scholarship and particularly mistrustful of Germans, resisted new investigative paradigms from the Continent. Walter Scott may have been baffled as to `what opportunities that very abstract pursuit [the study of antiquity and historical languages] can possibly afford for the use of violent language or party spleen',3 but the prickles and antagonisms between proponents of the old and new schools can in fact be accounted for quite readily ± as can the eventual triumph of Grimm's ideas. To begin with, theories of history amounted to ways of asserting ownership over ± or at least of negotiating an agreeable relationship with ± the past. Few wanted a German to determine this for them, particularly given that by the 1830s, the study of language and linguistic history had become powerfully intertwined with the early nineteenth century's sense of itself. (The connection between language and larger culture had been authoritatively stated by Condillac, Rousseau, Herder and Friedrich Schlegel.) Alarmists feared that unauthorized uses of language would have disastrous repercussions in wider cultural spheres. For confirmation that language indexed national worth, one had only to look from Latin and Greek, traditionally deemed paradigmatic languages, to the unsurpassed and ± in the eyes of many ± unsurpassable cultures to which they had given voice. A range of philologists and theorists, including figures as intellectually disparate as Coleridge and Lockhart, insisted (though for very different reasons), that language was everything, the very foundation of cultural life. But if, as James C. McKusick concludes, Coleridge saw language as a `vehicle of cultural progress', commentators such as Lockhart believed that unless it were rigorously policed in all its popular and elite manifestations, language

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

132 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

was rather a potential instrument of cultural erosion.4 Moreover, while Latin and Greek might have given voice to `golden age' cultures, classical civilizations had not endured, no matter how superlative they had been. What chance, then, had English customs and values, supported by the English language, which most experts judged inferior to the classical tongues, of casting distant shadows into posterity? These conundrums and antagonisms may have been thoroughly vexed, but they were at least well rehearsed. All sides knew where they stood on the matter. Either language was the most direct route towards improving society, or it was the probable means of destroying it. Either innovative diction was introduced wherever possible, or one did one's level best to ensure that experimental verse was firmly excluded from the literary tradition. Should the available paradigms for thinking about language alter, however; should the doctrine of Logos (whereby God guaranteed the meanings of words), be abandoned in favour of a new theory that presented all linguistic relationships as determined within language itself, as Grimm's work implied; should mutual contracts between speakers no longer be recognized as certifying the bonds between signifiers and signifieds ± then all bets were off. The ground rules for the comprehension of language would have altered fundamentally. And if there were no vital links between language and larger culture, then claims for Britain's cultural excellence in the 1830s based on the merits of English, as well as the claims of those who saw a theoretical basis for reforming society through a reform of language, were equally imperilled. Although Horne Tooke's influence within British philology is often cited as the overriding reason for why it took so long for Grimm's theories to percolate into this country, when we consider just how much hinged on Grimm's Sprachwissenschaft it is little wonder that the German's reception in Britain was delayed for over a decade. But while it was radically innovative, profoundly unsettling and a work of foreign scholarship to boot, Grimm's Grammatik had one important quality to recommend it to British scholars. Read in a certain way, it seemed to offer a means of navigating the impasse of traditional linguistic genealogies that had favoured Latin and Greek over English. The following passage is key in this respect: Ein hochd. wort mit p, das im goth. b, im lat. f zeigt, ist in diesen drei sprachen urverwandt, jede besitzt es unerborgt; faÈnden wir aber f in einem hochd., b in einem goth., p in einem lat. wort, so waÈre die verwandtschaft widersinnig, unerachtet abstract genau dieselben buchstabverhaÈltnisse vorliegen.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm 133

[A High German word with p, which in Gothic shows a b, and in Latin an f, is originally related in these three languages, each possessing it unborrowed; but if we found an f in a High German word, b in Gothic, and p in Latin, then the relationship would be absurd, even considering that in the abstract exactly the same letters are present.]5 In Grimm's relational schema, words such as `piscis' and `fish' were revealed as, to all extents and purposes, identical. Latin could not be a `better' language than English, and thus Roman culture no better than its British counterpart. Strictly speaking, by elucidating a system within language that regulated and governed change between words in cognate tongues, Grimm effectively renders all equations between national language and national culture meaningless. But, as I will be exploring in this chapter, Grimm's work was primarily read or `produced' in Britain in a way that allowed for the dismantling of myths of Latin and Greek as linguistic patriarchs, while simultaneously adhering to the terms of the older, pre-morphological study in order to reappraise northern tongues such as English more favourably. This re-evaluation was to culminate in Thomas Watts's nationalistic vision of a world `circled by the accents of Shakespeare and Milton'.6 Philology in Britain at this juncture had a barely hidden, definite political purpose. A duplicitous approach to linguistic and cultural theory is detectable in the Deutsche Grammatik È gen lateinische und itself: as Grimm commented irately: `Wohl mo È he ihrer sprachbildung selbst die faÈhiggriech. grammatiker auf der ho È ndung in anspruch zu keit deutscher sprache, aÈhnliche feinheit und ru nehmen, bezweifeln' [`Perhaps Latin and Greek grammarians, from the height of their language expertise, may doubt the capability of German to claim similar finesse and completeness (to the classical languages)]' (Deutsche Grammatik, I, vi). One of the aims of Grimm's grammatical project, especially attractive to his supporters in Britain, was to prove that northern languages had a right to make that claim. In the sections that follow, I outline the political reception of Grimm, illustrating the extent to which his Grammatik, or rather the ideas encased in this largely untranslated volume, became both the yardstick against which old conceptions of language were tested, and a marker of new and (initially) more positive attitudes towards the English language. Despite the manoeuvring, political manipulation and airing of personal grievances that characterized the reception of Grimm in Britain, the event took place against a growing recognition that the unequal relationship between `belated', self-loathing modernity and a paradigmatic but irretrievable

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

134 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm 135

`golden age' was something that not only had to change, but was in the process of changing.

The first full-length review of the Grammatik available to English readers appeared in 1830, and was anything but favourable. The author was the disgruntled Dane, Rasmus Rask (1787±1832), who saw Grimm as a more successful rival.7 Appraising general advances in the study of `ancient languages and remnants of literature', Rask's first priority was to outline the importance of his own work.8 He refers to himself in the third person to relate how in 1811: `Professor Rask compiled his ``Icelandic Grammar,'' [. . .] which appears to have given a fresh impulse to these studies even in Germany' (p. 493). This publication, he records, was followed by `a very curious treatise by Mr. Rask, ``On the origin of the ancient Scandinavian or Icelandic tongue,'' in which he [Rask] traces the affinity of that most remarkable idiom to the other European languages, especially to the Latin and Greek' (p. 494).9 The Danish grammarian adds archly that `shortly after, a very laborious work of this kind appeared in Germany, viz. the first edition of the first volume of the German grammar [. . .] compiled by the learned Dr. Jacob Grimm' (p. 494). Despite the complimentary `laborious', Rask's review is clearly detained by the issue of chronological precedence. There was good reason for Rask's petulance. The Dane formulated a coherent, if not complete, system of rules concerning the transition of letters between languages a number of years before Grimm, but notwithstanding the relatively rapid translation into English of two of Rask's own philological publications, history overwhelmingly favoured the German. In the nineteenth century, Rask's work was usually relegated to a footnote on `Grimm's Law', if mentioned at all. Although Rask was the first scholar to review Grimm, he makes no direct allusion to sound laws other than to assert his own precedence in comparing northern dialects with Latin and Greek. One year later, however, a work that drew deeply on the innovations of Continental philology was published in Britain; what was more, it made detailed, reverential references to Grimm's theories of consonant interchange.

Prichard's Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations James Cowles Prichard (1786±1848) dedicated his Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations (1831) jointly to British philologist, William Conybeare,

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Rask's review of Grimm's Grammatik

and to Jacob Grimm.10 The Eastern Origin is first and foremost a work of ethnology. Prichard keeps the historical relationship between languages and their speakers in sharp focus, envisaging the volume in its entirety as a supplement to his popular Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (1813). The Eastern Origin is, however, also informed throughout by a close reading of the Deutsche Grammatik, in particular the dozen or so pages in the revised first volume of 1822 that expound Grimm's theory of consonant interchange, or Lautverschiebung. In terms of methodology, Prichard's textbook set the tone for later Grimm-influenced British works. The introduction underlines the importance of close observation in studying languages ± this was the guiding tenet of empirical investigation. It also emphasizes the relevance of language study for wider researches into the history of the human race, seamlessly enlisting Continental philology into what is essentially a continuation of an eighteenth-century project to elaborate human history in terms of the linguistic past. But above all, Prichard's book is significant because it is one of the earliest publications in English in which the precepts of the Deutsche Grammatik are clearly audible.11 As such, the scope of Prichard's debt to Grimm may usefully be delineated here. Prichard begins by asserting a theory of mono-genesis, proposing that the original primitive seat of the European races lay `between the chain of Caucasus and the southern extremities of the Uralian mountains'. He is convinced that all Indo-European languages were connected (Grimm is his authority), and sees this relationship, in turn, as evidence for the historical affiliations of races and peoples long since separated. Prichard presents Latin, Greek and Sanskrit as `branches of one stem', and argues that the Celtic dialects also belong in this Indo-European family tree (Eastern Origin, pp. 17±18). With the methodological strictures of Grimm's new philology uppermost in his mind, Prichard attempts to prove affiliation by comparing internal structure and corresponding grammatical forms, rather than relying on external similarities of form, as was the usual practice hitherto. Grimm's theory of sound-shifting is offered by Prichard as indisputable evidence that the Indo-European language tree grew from a `common original'. The changes that had subsequently taken place between individual branches had occurred, moreover, `according to certain rules, and not by a merely accidental variation or corruption' (Eastern Origin, p. 36). Prichard's book, then, displays early recognition by a British philologist of Grimm's insights into predictable rules governing linguistic morphology through history. Equally importantly, it uses Grimm to explode the

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

136 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

popular notion that change within language was unprincipled and capricious, a key anxiety for those who worried that linguistic change (`change' usually being interpreted as `decline'), was mirrored by corresponding modulations in wider culture. Furthermore, as Arno Beyer points out, Prichard is the first British philologist to apply Grimm's terms `strong' and `weak' to verb forms.12 Prichard ventriloquizes Grimm's opinion that strong verbs are older than weak ones in the `Teutonic dialects' ± that they are `in fact the genuine and primitive method by which the German nations distinguished the times and modes of action and of passion in the use of verbs' (p. 99). He adds: The preterite of the strongly inflected conjugation, says Dr. Grimm, `must be observed as a chief beauty of our language, as a character intimately connected with its antiquity and its whole constitution'. (Eastern Origin, pp. 145±6) Conversely, weak conjugations comprise `all foreign words which have been adopted into the vocabulary of the Teutonic nations' (p. 99). This is a significant development. On the one hand, Prichard's depiction of more recent weak conjugations as inferior to older forms demonstrates that eighteenth-century notions of historical decay (affecting language and speakers equally) remained embedded in the new philology, despite the fact that Lautverschiebung emphasized a non-qualitative dimension to language. But on the other, the preference of strong over weak verbs marked a sea-change in attitudes towards the native English heritage. In his popular A Short Introduction to English Grammar (1778), Robert Lowth had expressed his contempt for strong verbs, convinced that this unruly, non-classical resource harboured `defective' verbs which are not only for the most part Irregular, but are also wanting in some parts. They are in general words of most frequent and vulgar use; in which Custom is apt to get the better of Analogy.13 By contrast, Prichard's opposition of a `genuine' tradition of native verbs against more recent infiltrators feeds increasingly `patriotic' views of language. Indeed, not for the first ± or last ± time, grammar is harnessed to the politics of nationalism. This unsavoury aspect of language study featured prominently in the rise of new philology in this country, as I will be discussing; and nowhere is this so apparent as in the revision of English's status within linguistic hierarchies.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm 137

138 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

John Mitchell Kemble (1807±57), brother of actress Fanny Kemble, was educated at Cambridge, where along with Alfred Tennyson he was a member of the `Apostles' undergraduate debating society.14 As well as the future Poet Laureate, he also counted Germanophiles Richard Chenevix Trench (an influential advocate of Grimm in the 1850s) and Frederick Denison Maurice among his closest friends. His character was volatile and impulsive. As a measure of just how hot-headed Kemble could be, in 1830 he sailed to Gibraltar to take part in the doomed attempt to assist General Torrijos against Ferdinand VII of Spain, a venture that cost several British participants their lives. Kemble was lucky to escape back to England. A formidable scholar, he was frustrated in his philological career due largely to his bellicose nature and readiness to disparage anyone ± friend or foe ± whom he imagined to have injured him. In any event, his belligerent disposition won him few friends among the Oxford-based philological establishment. Kemble's support of Grimm commenced with an 1832 article in the Foreign Quarterly Review.15 This essay, as Raymond Wiley notes, displays an `intimate familiarity' with the Deutsche Grammatik.16 Kemble alludes to laws of consonant interchange and provides several examples of sound-shifting based on Grimm's own tables.17 Yet despite his role as the German's chief promoter in Britain, the salutary effect of Kemble's support is questionable. A series of tirades on the shortcomings of British methodology prejudiced philologists against the new (for English speakers) study of language, and Kemble's insistence that foreign scholarship was superior to British research was hardly the best way to introduce English-speakers to Germanic philology. Added to which, Kemble's fullest exposition of the Deutsche Grammatik, a 51-page review prepared for the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1833, was not published because the editors deemed the piece overly, and possibly selfgratifyingly, technical. (Grimm himself put the article's rejection down to its partiality towards a German.)18 In 1833, Kemble's most important published essay in support of Grimm, `On English Prñterites', appeared in the Philological Museum.19 It is a shorter, more accessible piece than the review manqueÂ; but its lofty tone cannot be supposed to have kindled many Oxford fires in favour of Kemble's German mentor. It is evident, however, that at a very early stage Kemble recognized the revolutionary impact the Deutsche Grammatik would have on the historical study of language in Britain. For example, discussing affinities between verb forms in `Teutonic' grammar, Kemble

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

John Mitchell Kemble and Continental philology

hoped that `the thought may occur to some readers, that much which they have looked upon as arbitrary and irregular, appeared so to them, only because they had not learnt to cast their eyes over a sufficiently extensive circle of facts' (`On English Prñterites', p. 373). This was a key point of methodology that Robert Gordon Latham still felt the need to underline almost a decade later in 1841. Kemble's article is certainly extraordinary in terms of foresight and erudition; but its importance has possibly been overestimated in one area. Hans Aarsleff claims that `On English Prñterites' was `the first exposition in English of Grimm's analysis of the forms of the verb in Germanic', a view accepted by both Linda Dowling and James C. McKusick.20 Yet in Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations, a publication that pre-dates Kemble's article by almost two years, Prichard already acknowledges the important light thrown on the Teutonic languages by Grimm's research, and abstracts `some of the results of his [Grimm's] inquiries which relate to the inflections of verbs in the oldest of these languages' (p. 240). Precedence should be accorded to Prichard in this respect. Kemble's name can be added to the list of philologists who harnessed Grimm's ideas on strong and weak conjugations to nationalistic agendas. Kemble contended that strong verbs, formed by an internal change of vowel, represented the true English inheritance. Foreign verbs were invariably imported into English weak, he insisted, and while strong verbs could become weak, no weak verb ever became strong (`On English Prñterites', pp. 385, 386±7). Thus, he concluded, strong verbs could not be of foreign origin. Kemble's views were pitched even more starkly by R. G. Latham in 1841: `All the Strong Verbs are of Saxon origin. None are Classical. [. . .] No new word is ever, upon its importation, inflected according to the Strong Conjugation. It is always Weak'.21 This sustained frame of focus gives us a good idea of how the desire to reassess the status of English in relation to the classical languages remained uppermost in the minds of new philologists ± even though, strictly speaking, Lautverschiebung actually de-emphasized the relationship between the quality of language and that of culture as a whole, since it showed that consonant interchange was regulated from an autonomous dimension within language itself. Kemble's allegiances concerning the Latin and Greek `problem' become clear, however, in the following remark to Grimm: `I cannot regret those changes which formed the tongue in which Shakespeare & Milton wrote, and which Alfred Tennyson writes: only I am myself careful to use an English word whenever I justly can, in preference to a French or Latin one'.22

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm 139

Many of Kemble's attitudes towards language are distinctly Romantic in character. Although he was an uncompromising modernizer, his interest in philology was often directed at reclaiming the past rather than reforming the future. This is evident in the sadness underlying in his sense that philological curiosities such as fairy tales were being destroyed by technological advance. Whereas improved rail networks offered a lever with which Kemble hoped to induce a visit from Grimm, they also threatened to erode the very things both men held dear: `The MaÈrchen [fairy tales] are at home in our Western districts, and have been for ages. But the railroad & the schoolmaster are sweeping away customs and superstitions which would fill a chapter of the Deutsche Mythologie'.23 The belief that language embodied quintessential aspects of historical nationhood (a key idea behind the Mythologie), was enduring. Many saw philological investigation as a means of recuperating lost periods in the history of languages, and thus their speakers. As Tony Crowley explains: Language seemed to offer a direct link to the past since it was through language that history spoke most effectively. For the nation of course such a conversation with the past was crucial since it lent a sense of continuity and coherence to the national history.24 Perhaps the greatest claim that was (or could be) made for philology was that it would ultimately enable language to be recovered in its pristine condition, its `radical signification', as Bosworth termed it.25 This was a deeply seated Romantic desire. Kemble welcomed the new era of `comparative etymology', confident that it would `rescue the records of the past, and in them only find a justification and a reason for the present'.26 He fantasized that the new investigative mode would disclose nothing less than each transition passed through by every member of the Indo-European family of languages. It might appear to us contradictory that Continental methodology, which seemed to indicate the absence of connection between the history of language and speakers, should be used to prove the mutual contingency of language and human action; nonetheless, in the same breath as praising sound laws, Kemble states unequivocally that `the history of a language is [. . .] bound up with the history of the land' (p. 3n). Such eighteenth-century views of language were even dusted off by Grimm himself in his 1851 È ber den Ursprung der Sprache (`On the Origin of Language'), lecture, U where he affirmed: `our language is also our history'.27 As Aarsleff points out, it is no coincidence that two of the most popular early

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

140 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

nineteenth-century proselytizers of philology, J. C. Prichard and R. G. Latham, also wrote widely on ethnography.28 In Aarsleff's opinion, this `seems to have been the chief end of their studies' (p. 208). Two things become clear about the way in which new philology was deployed in its first years in Britain. Sound laws were initially a source of fascination and triumph since they offered an opportunity of dispensing with oppressive notions of Latin and Greek as paradigmatic languages (and, more importantly, of discrediting the equally unwelcome idea that their speakers had produced correspondingly superior cultures). But it was quickly recognized that, in suitably revised form ± one that presented English as the culmination of past states of language, not their dwindled remains ± linguistic hierarchies were not necessarily a bad thing. If English was now demonstrably an excellent language rather than a poor cousin of the classical tongues, the tenacious equation between the quality of language and culture could be turned to Britain's favour and used to underpin a nascent programme of national expansion.

The Anglo-Saxon controversy The next stage in Grimm's reception by English speakers involved testing the willingness of `old-school' British scholars to concede priority to Continental methodology. The crucial shift in terms of intellectual paradigms occurred in the mid-1830s with the `Anglo-Saxon Controversy', where Kemble featured prominently. The Controversy was fought in the Gentleman's Magazine between 1833 and 1835 and marked a watershed in historical linguistics. By the end of the dispute, there was little doubt that Kemble (and through Kemble, Grimm), had been victorious ± although, as far as his own career was concerned, Kemble won all the battles but ended up losing the war. The participants in the controversy were ostensibly preoccupied with character fonts, dictionary formats and interpretations of manuscripts; but a general awareness that a foreign method of study was poised to supersede traditional British scholarship contributed greatly to the heightened pitch of debate. Discussion was initiated by a letter from Joseph Bosworth in March 1833, announcing the imminent publication of his Anglo-Saxon Dictionary. Prospective readers were informed that the Dictionary would be comparative, and would include an English index to enable users to find corresponding Anglo-Saxon words for any modern term. Added to which, Bosworth promised, cognate words in other Gothic dialects

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm 141

would also be given to allow etymological derivations and original meanings to be ascertained.29 Despite these assurances, Kemble entertained little hope for the Dictionary, as he confided to Grimm by letter. The following month Kemble reviewed Benjamin Thorpe's translation of Cñdmon in the Gentleman's Magazine.30 While he praises his friend (who had translated Rask's Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue in 1830), Kemble uses the opportunity to berate British scholarship in general, warning that the attempts of `a few laborious Englishmen' to `call back the feelings of the Teutonic nations to a reverential survey of the past' had been `outstripped, in every direction, by our Continental brethren' (p. 329). In a thinly veiled attack on Bosworth, Kemble expresses astonishment that the Germans and Danes, who had little or no access to the manuscripts `languishing' in British libraries, had managed to produce better Anglo-Saxon editions than English scholars. He taunts AngloSaxonists with the thought that Rask and Grimm had been able to correct their faulty texts without ever having seen the originals. Kemble also derides those who persisted in printing obscure characters thought to be Anglo-Saxon, reminding readers that Rask and Grimm had long since swapped to Roman fonts, having established that only ‡ and D were genuinely Anglo-Saxon (p. 330). The storm broke a year later with Kemble's second review of Thorpe. Kemble again commends the older scholar for his `strict and philological method', reiterating that apart from Thorpe's work, only `the most incompetent ignorance has hitherto been witnessed'.31 He suggests that Thorpe would even please Grimm and `some others of our learned German brethren' (p. 393); but crowing allusions to superior foreign authorities was the last thing most British scholars wanted to hear. A notorious rebuke from Kemble proved to be the last straw for his adversaries: Had it not been for the industry of Danes and Germans, and those who drew from the well-heads of their learning, we might still be where we were, with idle texts, idle grammars, idle dictionaries, and the consequences of all these ± idle and ignorant scholars. (p. 392) Reaction was swiftly forthcoming. A letter signed `IJ', dated Oxford, 20 July, declares that Kemble's review `evidently emanates from a mere tyro'.32 A second letter-writer, `TW', supports what appeared to be an Oxonian counter-attack by appealing to the editor's taste: `Your mind [. . .] is too well informed, and your feelings too alive to the real worth of

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

142 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Old England, to be carried away by the fine-spun theories of a few German Literati'.33 As we can see, anti-German sentiments were overt from the beginning of the controversy. Raymond Wiley identifies `TW' with Thomas Wright (1810±77), one of Kemble's former students.34 Hans Aarsleff considers this identification `out of the question', contending that Wright studied Anglo-Saxon at Kemble's encouragement and was the author of a letter signed `MN' written the following month in defence of the German school.35 Aarsleff, however, appears not to note the numerous points in Kemble's correspondence with Grimm where Kemble voices dissatisfaction with Wright, whom he regarded as a `little blackguard'.36 By the summer of 1835, Kemble was convinced that his erstwhile student had rifled through his private papers during an absence in Germany.37 The trail is, it is true, obscured since `TW' comments that Bosworth had ransacked `our archives at the Bodleian' (p. 260). Thomas Wright was affiliated to Cambridge, not Oxford. A `clue', which appears to have gone unnoticed, is contained in a second `TW' letter, dated 6 September 1834, again signed from Oxford.38 This follow-up attack on the `tyro' ironically appropriates Kemble's own words from an earlier letter of April 1834;39 but it also intersperses extracts from Kemble's unpublished 1833 review of the Deutsche Grammatik (without acknowledging this). The lines `TW' uses are taken from the first page of Kemble's rejected review: Etymology, like every other bent of the mind, must be inborn. Poeta nascitur, non fit [. . .]. Very few persons will consequently be found either capable of pursuing etymological inquiries, or justified in doing so. This reappears as: Your critic asserts, `Etymology must be inborn; Poeta nascitur, non fit. Very few persons will consequently be found either capable of pursuing etymological inquiries, or justified in doing so. (p. 363) Only a few copies of the unpublished review ever existed, and these circulated solely among Kemble's friends ± at least, among those whom Kemble thought were his friends. Thomas Wright, still in his confidence in 1834, would not have lacked opportunity to read the review while at Cambridge (unaware it would be rejected), a fact that strengthens Wiley's case for identifying Wright with `TW'. Further proof is to be found in the

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm 143

Grimm-Kemble correspondence. In July 1835 Kemble suggests that the whole idea of Oxford scholars heading the counter-attack was a red herring ± originating, moreover, in his own camp at Cambridge.40 The Cambridge man T[homas] W[right]'s habit of signing his letters from Oxford would certainly be in keeping with this strategy of obfuscation and deception ± although one wonders why, if the intention was to deceive Kemble, Wright should have signed his own initials. If `TW' really was Thomas Wright,41 a student for whom Kemble `gratuitously gave up several hours of the day for nearly three years',42 then Kemble was poorly repaid in the Gentleman's Magazine. He had to endure a series of attacks that relied more on personal slurs and nationalistic ideology than philology. For instance, `TW' castigates Kemble for being `so dependent upon the leading strings of Danes and Germans, that he ventures not a step without them' (p. 260). In response to Kemble's progressive views on text transcription, `TW' protests at the use of foreign-looking diacritical marks to indicate Anglo-Saxon vowel length, a practice Kemble had employed in `On English Prñterites' and in his 1833 edition of Beowulf. What seems to have exercised Kemble's erstwhile student above all is the fact that this system had been borrowed from Kemble's German mentors. What, `TW' demands, was wrong with `plain honest English, and the still plainer Saxon?' Not all correspondents in the controversy adopted such a confrontational tone, and some at least were broadly supportive of Kemble. In October 1834, `MN' requests that opponents examine the `German' system before condemning it.43 A second letter in the same month, signed `B', makes a plea for `truth, and not the predominance of a party'.44 `TW' was implacable, however, accusing Kemble of being a `would-be AngloSaxon Professor'.45 `KN' (Frederic Madden), entered the debate in November 1834 with a letter entitled `On the Progress of Anglo-Saxon Literature in England'.46 Madden, keeper of manuscripts at the British Museum, deems Kemble's sledgehammer tactics deplorable but concedes that the young man's scholarly method was superior to that of the `Old School of Saxonists', which `did not study the language on those sound principles of grammar and analogy, which have recently been pointed out to us by the Northern philologists' (a reference to Rask and Grimm).47 A second, rather more antagonistic letter from Madden, appeared in December 1834, purporting to be a commentary on the numerous errors in the glossary to Benjamin Thorpe's Analecta Anglo-Saxon. In fact, it is a thinly concealed attack on Kemble and his supporters, as becomes clear in the final paragraph where Madden warns that `a mere knowledge of Saxon is

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

144 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

not sufficient to ensure an editor of LaZamon from occasional mistakes, whatever Mr. Kemble may think to the contrary.'48 If Kemble was the victim of a conspiracy intended to convince him that his assailants were Oxonians then the ruse was successful, provoking Kemble into a furious tirade directed at Oxford scholars that he later had cause to regret. In December 1834, the Gentleman's Magazine carried a letter entitled `Oxford Professors of Anglo-Saxon';49 this was Kemble's heavy-handed reply to Wright's criticisms of Beowulf.50 An incensed Kemble berates academic standards at Oxford, excoriating in particular the work of the recently deceased John Conybeare, head of the `modern Oxford school of Anglo-Saxon' (p. 602): `These things may do at Oxford, È ttingen, at Munich, or at Cambridge' (p. 603). but they will not do at Go He provoked a quick reaction from `TW', dated Oxford, 13 January, protesting at Kemble's willingness to malign a dead man, especially one who had been `a scholar, gentleman, and Christian' (unlike Kemble, `TW' implies): there was an abundance of living academics better able to defend themselves, Kemble's former student points out ominously.51 Despite the dark tones, this letter is decidedly weak in comparison to Kemble's. When a final blast from Kemble appeared in July 1835, the outcome of the controversy was in no doubt.52 Expounding his system of vowel accentuation, which he was pleased to announce accorded with the opinions of the `profoundest philologists in Europe' (p. 26), Kemble displays a thorough knowledge of Jacob Grimm's work. In answer to those who complained that marks of accentuation were not found in manuscript sources, Kemble asserts that not only did they exist, but they were absolutely crucial in distinguishing separate meanings in words that otherwise appeared to be identical. He insists that the marks found over many vowels in the manuscripts `correspond accurately to the relations borne by these vowels to one another in all Teutonic languages' (p. 27), and points to the Deutsche Grammatik as his authority, demanding that his `idle and ignorant' antagonists `give up the point as hopeless' or else `study the Teutonic tongues, en masse' (p. 27). Whatever his success in promoting Grimm's work, from this point onwards Kemble consistently failed to win university and government appointments. That his work continued to be highly regarded, if grudgingly so, is evinced by a critique in July 1835 of Fox's edition of King Alfred's Boethius. The reviewer praises Kemble's edition of Beowulf (which had been dedicated to Grimm) as an example of recent commendable publications.53 This was an implicit seal of approval for Grimm's philology, even if Kemble did not feel the benefit by association in his own career.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm 145

146 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Hensleigh Wedgwood (1803±91) reviewed Grimm for the Quarterly Review in 1833. I want to look at a passage from the review that contains a quiet mistranslation of a potentially troubling section of the Grammatik, since the revision, I argue, is perpetrated in order to aid Grimm's acceptance by British scholars. If we suppose these classes of consonants to have a natural tendency to change their aspirates into medials, medials into tenues, and tenues into aspirates, in passing from an older to a newer dialect, the old High German will be one step farther advanced than the Gothic in the order of these changes, and the Gothic one step farther than the Latin, Greek, and Sanscrit; the latter languages thus bearing exactly the same relation to the Gothic that the Gothic bears to the old High German.54 This expounds the principles of Lautverschiebung and consonantal interchange for English-reading audiences. `Advanced' has been italicized here because it appears to represent an aberration from Grimm's original German, the source of the passage. For gesunken (`sunk'), Wedgwood has substituted `advanced'. Grimm's version has a rather different emphasis: Genau wie das alth. in allen drei graden von der goth. ordnung eine stufe abwaÈrts gesunken ist, war bereits das goth. selbst eine stufe von der lateinischen (griech. indischen) herabgewichen. Das goth. verhaÈlt sich zum lat. gerade wie das alth. zum goth. [just as the Old High German has sunk one step downwards from the Gothic in all three grades, Gothic itself had already deviated down one step from the Latin (Greek, Sanskrit). The Gothic relates to Latin just as the Old High German does to Gothic.]55 Wedgwood, cousin and philological instructor of Charles Darwin, was an early and influential reviewer of Grimm in this country. Apparently anxious to challenge claims that the English language was in decline, Wedgwood departs from an otherwise faithful summary of Grimm's theories to distort a key passage of the Grammatik. So blatant a mistranslation can hardly have been accidental. Why did Wedgwood consider this alteration necessary? The proximity of `sinking' to notions of decay and decline would in itself have rendered the term unattractive to

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Misrepresentation in Wedgwood's review of Grimm

British philologists in the progress-oriented 1830s. It is possible, however, that a more urgent factor lay behind Wedgwood's verbal rearrangement. Nineteenth-century philologists inherited the previous century's willingness to measure the worth of national culture by the supposed quality of national language. For Britain in the 1830s, the suggestion that English might be in any way sinking from earlier languages, was anathema: if the English language was in decline, then so too was the English high culture to which it gave expression. Prior to the identification of laws regulating Lautverschiebung, there had been little means of charting linguistic change in history without recourse to value-laden terms such as progress and degeneration.56 Given the characteristic eighteenth-century view of classical Latin and Greek as the pinnacles from which human language subsequently decayed, change was inevitably regarded with suspicion. Such value-driven philology fostered pessimism concerning the future of the English language. Appropriately presented, Grimm's law addressed these problems, stating that as language was simply a system of sound, subject to internal rules, it could neither decline nor improve. In these terms, change was simply change ± non-qualitative and divorced from teleological ends. Grimm's other supporters in Britain realized that the Deutsche Grammatik, or at least the section containing what became known as Grimm's Law, enabled philologists to modify the pessimistic view of language as a phenomenon always tending towards decay. Hensleigh Wedgwood ventured further, however. His rewording of Grimm leaves the German grammarian appearing to depict sound-change patterns, not as devoid of value, but as indicative of progress. In so doing, Wedgwood enabled the new philology in Britain to remain as value-based as the old, only now in terms favourable to the English language. Anticipating the role that sound laws could play against doctrines of decline, Wedgwood was prepared to mistranslate Grimm in order to project his theories in a more favourable light. Although no more than a fraction of the Deutsche Grammatik has ever appeared in English, Grimm's work, often in distorted form, enjoyed an audience in Britain from a relatively early stage in the history of comparative philology. In no small measure this is due to Hensleigh Wedgwood and his sleight of translator's hand.

Winning's Manual of Comparative Philology Like the majority of his peers, William Balfour Winning believed that `the investigation of the words of a language leads to important results concerning the history of the people who speak it'.57 In A Manual of

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm 147

Comparative Philology (1838), Winning was also keenly aware of the significance of Lautverschiebung, which, in an early use of the term, he labels `Grimm's law' (p. 110). But perhaps the most remarkable feature of Winning's volume is its determination to buck trends and use comparative philology to support Biblical accounts of the origin of language. Winning is conventional enough in his view that the original IndoEuropean language is hidden from scholarly methodology: modern languages are depicted as `sisters, whose parent, and the manner of whose generation, we believe we cannot know, but the manner of whose actual being we are permitted to examine and describe' (Manual, pp. 50±1). But when it comes to the eighteenth-century debate over invented or revealed language, Winning's approach is rather idiosyncratic: The various phenomena, which are offered to our consideration by Comparative Philology, in a manner compel us to assume some supernatural agency to account for the existing diversity of languages. (Manual, p. 284) After this statement, he asserts the veracity of the Biblical narrative of Babel and the subsequent confusion of tongues. Winning utterly rejects the arguments of `trifling philosophers' that `language itself is a human invention' (Manual, p. 287); and in response to the notion that invented language made a `gradual progress' from the `unmeaning sounds of the savage to the eloquent articulation of civilized man', Winning declares `this gratuitous assumption is directly opposed to the express declaration of Scripture, that Adam was created with the perfect use of all his faculties, and among the rest, that of speech'. He adds: Theorists talk of the invention of words by savages, as if it were one of the easiest matters in the world. We beg to ask whether they invent any new words (that is, original words) now-a-days? and if not, when the process ceased ± and why? (Manual, p. 289) The objective of Winning's volume is to counterbalance new philology's `dread of admitting any agency not human' in the processes that shaped the first language. Acknowledging that the concept of Logos had largely been superseded, Winning urges that a space for God be reopened in scholarly disputations over language.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

148 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm 149

John William Donaldson's New Cratylus (1839) attests to the steady percolation of the tenets of Continental philology into British scholarship. As Donaldson (1811±61), contemporary of Tennyson at Trinity College, Cambridge, observes: `If we may judge from the papers which occasionally appear in our leading periodicals, comparative philology has at length taken root in this country although it is not yet so widely diffused as it ought to be' (p. 35). The New Cratylus is significant in the reception of the Deutsche Grammatik because its author was a classical scholar, whose allegiance to the Greek language ± its prestige now under threat from Grimm's sound laws ± is palpable. Donaldson, however, praises Grimm's laws of consonant interchange as `one of the most fruitful discoveries ever made in the province of language' (pp. 131±2). With the help of these guiding rules he hopes the new investigative methodology will revitalize the study of classical language and literature: I have attempted to place the Greek scholarship of this country on a somewhat higher footing, by rendering the resources of a more comprehensive philology available for the improvement of the grammar and lexicography of the Greek language, and for the interpretation of the authors who have written in it. (New Cratylus, p. v) Despite Donaldson's admiration of sound laws, the qualitative index connecting language and wider culture remains intact in the New Cratylus. Hence the explicit link made between speech and intellect, and in a wider sense between speech and `civilisation': Language in general always receives its last touches of completeness in the individual; for the same dialect it varies with the education and reflecting powers of the individual, for the same family of languages it varies according to the education and reflecting habits of the particular tribe, in other words, according to the degree of civilisation. (New Cratylus, p. 49) It is no coincidence that just as the status of English is, with Grimm's help, being so radically revised, eighteenth-century conceptions of a qualitative link between language and culture are reasserted ± this time

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Donaldson's New Cratylus

in more favourable form ± even though the idea of such an index ran contrary to the theory of Lautverschiebung, taken to its logical end. Views like Donaldson's conveniently buttressed the idea that British culture, supported by the linguistic edifice of English, deserved to be `bestowed' upon inhabitants of the expanding empire, whose own languages (and by the terms of the equation, cultures as a whole), were pronounced `barbaric' or `degraded' solely on the basis that they were unintelligible to most English speakers. These imperial ideologies feed into even the most seemingly anodyne of Donaldson's pronouncements (for instance his conviction that the best method of tracing the `history and migrations of the early inhabitants of the world' is to study their languages, New Cratylus, p. 11). Not surprisingly, Donaldson was alive to the nationalistic expediencies offered by Grimm's opinion on `strong' and `weak' verb forms: Grimm divides the verb in all the German dialects into two great classes or conjugations distinguished by the form of the preterite; the first he calls the strong conjugation; it forms the preterite from the root without the addition of any foreign element: the second he terms the weak conjugation; it forms its preterite by the insertion of the lingual d (in old High German t) between the root and personending. Now it appears that the strong form is the original one in all the German dialects, for all derivative verbs are conjugated according to the weak form, the roots which form the basis of the language are confined to the strong verbs, and though a strong verb may in the course of time degenerate into a weak one the converse never takes place. (New Cratylus, pp. 518±19) The use of `foreign element' to denote suffixation and `degeneration' to describe the change from strong to weak forms, gives a fair indication of the imperial politics in which Donaldson's book colludes. In other ways, too, Donaldson promotes a distinctly nationalistic vision. His aim to extend philological authority to Britain's cultural expansion by reconciling classical and Germanic philology produces distasteful passages where Latin and Greek are presented as a `key to the greatest treasure which the mind of man has collected, ± the recorded wisdom of the Caucasian race' (New Cratylus, p. 11), and where the `gift' of speech is said to be enjoyed by all human beings ranging `from the broad-browed European, who speculates upon the high things of heaven, to his woolly-haired brother, who leads a thoughtless life in the plains of

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

150 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Africa' (New Cratylus, p. 48). From here, of course, it is a very short step to the chilling pronouncements of Ernst Haeckel, who judged that African peoples were at the `lowest stages of human linguistic development' in accordance with their status as the `lowest race of men'.58 The New Cratylus is significant in Grimm's reception because it tacitly acknowledges that classical philology can only be rescued from the threat of spreading neglect by incorporating into it advances made in Germanic philology. An important stage in the progress of the new methodology in Britain is signposted by Donaldson's admission that Latin and Greek can no longer uphold their claims to linguistic patriarchy, and by his subsequent modification of inherited linguistic taxonomies. Latin and Greek, Donaldson suggests, should properly be seen as `aged sisters' rather than patriarchs or matriarchs of `our own mother tongue'. Sketching a new role for classical scholarship, he insists that knowledge of Latin and Greek will `open the way to an easy and speedy acquirement of every one of the Indo-Germanic languages'. But while Donaldson forced classical philology to address new standards of scholarship, his true loyalties are evident in the fact that he dedicated his book to his old Greek professor, George Long, rather than to Grimm.

Neaves's review of Grimm In 1840, six years after Wedgwood's critique of Grimm, Charles Neaves (1800±76) reviewed the Deutsche Grammatik for Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine. He begins on a despondent note: We despair of seeing, even after many years, an English translation of the Teutonic Grammar. The number of scholars in England who can estimate and master its details may perhaps be increasing, but must still be inconsiderable.59 His prose becomes more animated, however, once attention is turned to the laws of sound-shifting. Grimm's theories of the `different changes which [letters] undergo' are praised as `one of the most important and elaborate portions' of the Grammatik (p. 202), and Neaves demands that all scholars familiarize themselves with Grimm's `singular and mysterious law of transition' (p. 211). In a review of Bopp's Vocalismus a year later, Neaves enthused that `laws of language' rescue `a very noble domain of natural knowledge from the reign of chaos and caprice'.60 Like Kemble, Prichard and Donaldson, Neaves is also detained by Grimm's concept of strong and weak verbs, and a similar nationalistic

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm 151

`message' emerges. Neaves explains that while the addition of a suffix is the most convenient way of forming verbs, this process has lodged `every strange and foreign guest'. An internal change of vowel, on the other hand, permits `none but natural and home-born words'. Pleased by the possibilities Grimm's work presented for reappraising the status of English, and clearly excited by the prospect that linguists might finally understand the historical mutability of language, Neaves lauds the comparative method to his readers: Not only [is it] impossible scientifically to understand any modern Teutonic language without a knowledge of its more ancient form, but [it is] equally impossible to know thoroughly the character of any one branch of the common stock without a reference to the corresponding features of its sister shoots. (`Grimm's Teutonic Grammar', pp. 204±5) It is curious, then, that not even the seminal revised first volume of the Deutsche Grammatik was translated into English at this transitional period in the history of philology. By contrast, Franz Bopp's Comparative Grammar was translated by Edward Backhouse Eastwick between 1845 and 1853, and Rasmus Rask's Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue was translated in 1830 by Benjamin Thorpe; in addition, Rask's Grammar of the Icelandic or Old Norse Tongue was translated by George Dasent in 1843. Nevertheless, as we have seen, despite the absence of a translation, Grimm's Grammatik was by no means unknown in Britain at this time. On the contrary, its radical methodology permeated English publications thoroughly. After 1840, no major linguistic study could ignore Grimm or the Continental method. In fact, the German's absence in translation served a certain expediency, since in this way his research could be made to say whatever was required of it. In slippery manoeuvres such as Hensleigh Wedgwood's, or tacit acknowledgements such as Donaldson makes concerning the new relationship between English and the classical languages, serviceable extracts were translated, modified for an English audience and passed into the wider investigative effort.

Latham's English Language Robert Gordon Latham (1812±88) saw his role in the reception of Grimm as one of reassessment. His central purpose was to locate areas where British scholars could usefully contribute to future research, and he

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

152 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

refused to accept that philology had been colonized solely by German linguists. While he recognized Grimm as a giant in the field, he insisted: `It must not be thought that all has been done for the English Language, and that it has been done by a foreigner. [. . .] Much still remains, whereof the greater part can be done by an Englishman' (English Language, pp. vii±viii). Latham's book is a general survey, as becomes apparent when the principles aligning `l' to the consonant series `k' are blandly, and without further explanation, said to lie `deep in Comparative Philology' (p. 108). Indeed, by Latham's own profession the book was intended to be `suggestive of principles, rather than exhaustive of detail' (p. 349). With this in mind, it is significant that so much space is accorded to Grimm. Like Kemble and Wedgwood, Latham reprints a series of tables from the Deutsche Grammatik illustrating the phenomenon of Lautverschiebung. For Latham, sound laws brought a welcome sheen of precision to the study of etymology by establishing the `regularity of certain changes, which to the generality seem capricious' (p. 194). In line with other British promoters of Continental philology, Latham chooses to modify ± without dismantling ± linguistic genealogies that had previously favoured Latin and Greek. Mixing metaphors with impunity, he separates languages into tribes, stocks, branches and divisions, proposing that Anglo-Saxon and Modern English were `languages of the low Germanic division of the Teutonic branch of the Gothic stock of the Indo-European tribe' (p. 41). The connection between English, Latin and Greek is now clearly of secondary importance to Latham, who is fascinated by the idea of a wholly northern tradition. In fact his demarcation of language groups contributed to a heated debate over neologism that had been sparked a year earlier by the publication of William Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1840). In a section entitled `Aphorisms Concerning the Science of Language', Whewell (1794±1866) had advocated the generation of new scientific vocabulary through combining and fusing modern and classical words.61 This horrified Latham, who believed two distinct linguistic traditions within English should be maintained: `A Gothic element (in the AngloSaxon), and a Classical element (in the Anglo-Norman, Latin and Greek)'. Latham argues that the presence of two such clearly defined forces in English ought to prohibit the hybridization that occurred by adding a `Saxon termination to a Norman word, or vice versaÃ' (English Language, p. 69). Whewell, on the other hand, believed that the only way to supply the increasing demands of chemistry, geology and biology for new terms was to turn to the classical languages. Latin and Greek, he

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm 153

insisted, yielded phrases otherwise impossible to attain using `native' words within the strictures of English grammar. For instance, by adapting English vocabulary, `bent-back' or `broken' could possibly be employed to describe optical rays, rather than `reflected' or `refracted' ± but how could one speak of angles of `reflection' or `refraction', or of the `Refractive Indices'? (Philosophy, II, 538±9). Angles of `bent-backness' certainly did not appeal to Whewell. For Whewell, classical vocabulary was a treasure chest from which to supply an impoverished native idiom, whose ability to form new words had been severely impaired with the loss of inflection. Latham saw things quite differently. He despised the very flexibility that permitted the addition of an English suffix to a Greek or Latin stem, and regarded the resulting hybrids as corruptions. Although it has no pretensions beyond offering a general survey of linguistic study, Latham's English Language is unimpeachably contemporary with respect to advances in philological study. It makes lengthy reference to Grimm and is at pains to reflect philology's revision of English's status rather than to bemoan any neglect of the classical languages.

Grimm's supporters in Britain My discussion of philologists, their reviews, books and treatises, is intended to indicate ways in which Grimm and his Grammatik were culturally produced in Britain, first as a `solution' to oppressive linguistic genealogies that favoured Latin and Greek, and secondly as a means of supporting an ideological regime that was steadily gearing up for empire. Britain's imperial pretensions go some way to explaining the nationalistic emphasis of many English expositions of Grimm's theories. In terms of individual contributions, Kemble's confrontational stance initially created resentment against the German grammarian. Nevertheless, Kemble more than any of Grimm's advocates demanded and set new standards of scholarship. Other supporters such as Latham took a considered view: they credited Grimm and his colleagues with real achievements, but emphasized that these luminaries had by no means exhausted the field of study. Prichard's enthusiasm, and prominent reviews by Wedgwood and Neaves in the most influential journals of the day, all helped attract wider interest to the Deutsche Grammatik, disseminating developments in comparative study to growing and newly discriminating English-reading audiences. The support of Donaldson, a renowned classicist, also assisted in securing the German

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

154 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

grammarian's acceptance in this country. Apart from short sections, Grimm's major philological work was not translated into English; key ideas, however, were extracted, `edited' for an English readership and widely circulated. By 1841, there was no question of serious opposition. Even the most flamboyant inheritors of the new philology of the 1830s, È ller, were obliged to use Grimm as a springboard for such as Max Mu their own work.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm 155

`Mere Air-Propelling Sounds': Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language

For if words are not T H I N G S , they are L I V I N G P O W E R S , by which the things of most importance to mankind are actuated, combined, and humanized.1 Many expressions, once apt and emphatic, have been so rubbed and worn away by long usage, that they retain as little substance as the skeletons of wheels which have made the grand tour of the Continent. [. . .] Words gradually lose their character, and, from being the tokens and exponents of thoughts, become mere air-propelling sounds.2 Alfred Tennyson was one of the most philologically aware poets of his age, a fact that has only recently begun to receive the attention it deserves, with a groundbreaking study by Donald S. Hair, and illuminating work by Isobel Armstrong.3 The philological richness of Tennyson's poetry should not appear remarkable. Tennyson was a member of the `Apostles' undergraduate debating society at Trinity College, Cambridge, together with men who were to become popular and influential philologists, including John Mitchell Kemble, Richard Chenevix Trench and Frederick Denison Maurice.4 Added to which Julius Hare, co-author of Guesses at Truth, a volume suffused with language theory, was his tutor and William Whewell, who included philology in his general survey of inductive sciences, was the master of Trinity.5 Kemble, we have already seen, was instrumental in encouraging the migration from the Continent in the 1830s of a radically new study of language. Grounded in the work of German grammarian Jacob Grimm, its method 156

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

6

was rigorously empirical, and above all `scientific'. Yet for Tennyson, writing in the midst of exciting and often conflicting views of language, exposure to linguistic philosophy had a profoundly disorienting effect. In the first part of this chapter, I want to explore Tennyson's predicament of being caught intellectually between a Coleridgean view of language, in which words were mystically `living' and replete with significance, and more bleakly materialist views, in which `mattermoulded forms of speech' (In Memoriam, xcv, 46) threatened to degenerate into what Julius Hare termed `mere air-propelling sounds'.6

The whited sepulchre By the end of the eighteenth century it was a critical orthodoxy that language, and especially literature, offered a guide to or even guaranteed culture as a whole. Monboddo's statement of this relationship used alarming rhetoric to declare the impossibility of a `corruption of arts among a people' without a corresponding `degeneracy of the people'.7 Lockhart followed suit in 1818 with a translation of Friedrich Schlegel's lectures on ancient and modern literature that stressed that barbarism awaited any nation unwilling to police its language properly. Coleridge, too, accepted the centrality of language to human experience: in Aids to Reflection (1825), he suggested that words `actuated, combined, and humanized' the `things of most importance to mankind'. In 1827, Julius Hare's brother Augustus referred to languages as the `barometers of national thought and character' (Guesses at Truth, I, 216). A similar perspective informs an 1830 Edinburgh Review article on translation by William Empson. Adopting a broadly Coleridgean stance, Empson asserted that language enters into an essential relationship with its speakers. Although the bare concept of a word can generally be adequately conveyed by its equivalent in other languages, something `indefinable' ± `national character' (Volksstimme, in Herder's version of this narrative) ± clings about native terms, defying translation.8 In 1839, J. W. Donaldson, who attended Trinity with Tennyson, cited Wilhelm von Humboldt to present the argument in the baldest possible manner: `Language is the outward appearance of the intellect of nations: their language is their intellect and their intellect their language: we cannot sufficiently identify the two'.9 By these terms, `ill health' affecting the national idiom could only presage the decline of the nation as a whole. What if English really was decaying, as a host of literary critics seemed to think? Instead of supporting Britain in its bid for global dominance, unauthorized poets might be fostering an anti-version of civilization in

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 157

which a dwindled race stumbled through history, mumbling inarticulately towards some dark and ignominious end. Far from being about to embark on a glorious epoch, modern society might simply mark another stage in a protracted historical decline that had begun with mankind's expulsion from Eden, and had been irrevocably confirmed in the Fall of Rome. Matters were not helped by the paradigm of an earlier `golden age' of human civilization. It was not simply the evidence of antique grandeur suggested by broken columns, armless statues and marble heifers lowing at the skies that so burdened the early nineteenth-century imagination. The linguistic edifices of classical Greece and Rome cast perhaps the longest shadows. Latin and Greek were widely regarded as having attained a purity unmatched by any subsequent tongue. Yet Latin had died, and Rome had fallen. Was English really as good as Latin? If not, then what hope was there for the future of the civilization to which it gave expression? Thomas Carlyle was alert to the fragility of modernity's claim upon progress. In 1831, he articulated his age's double reflex in stark terms: `How much among us might be likened to a whited sepulchre; outwardly all pomp and strength; but inwardly full of horror and despair and dead-men's bones'.10 This dual vision is nowhere more apparent than in nineteenth-century attitudes towards language as the assured agent of both progress and decline. A route out of the intellectual cul-de-sac involved addressing the terms of modernity's relationship with antiquity. One could remain animated by an admiration for the classical aesthetic, but reject vigorously the idea of meek subservience to the hegemony exercised by the `twin tyrants' (as George Webbe Dasent, translator of Rask, termed Latin and Greek). We saw in Chapter 5 how this `solution', one with which Keats experimented, received a boost from the Continental philology of Rask, Bopp and in particular Grimm. His Deutsche Grammatik, revised in 1822 to incorporate a theory of consonant shifting, prompted a sea-change in the study of language in Britain when its tenets finally began to reach this country in the 1830s, largely through the enthusiastic efforts of a group of Cambridge students, Tennyson's circle of friends, no less. The `new' elements in Grimm's method incorporated a theory of Lautverschiebung (`sound-shifting'), the cornerstone of the historical method. As Monboddo and Rask had done before him, if less systematically, Grimm discerned patterns governing the historical interchange of consonants between cognate words in different languages. Terms like Latin pater, Gothic fadar, and German vater could be seen as one and the same word whose morphological structure had changed through the ages in

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

158 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

accordance with uniform and predictable internal rules.11 Grimm's `discovery' showed that the transition of letters was not a sign of decay, or even dependent on the success or failure of culture: it was merely sound following the strictures of inviolable laws of nature. The implications were far-reaching. Linguistic agency could no longer be assumed to reside in the realm of speakers (irrespective of whether language had been revealed or invented), but in completely impersonal systems of sound. This logic laid the conceptual groundwork for the structural linguistics of Saussure. Despite anti-German sentiments in British scholarship, sound laws were accepted in this country because they dispensed with the idea of modern words as the degraded remnants of ancient tongues, presenting them instead as simply different forms of older vocabulary. Latin and Greek could now be portrayed, not as austere and unforgiving patriarchs of English, but as siblings. Philologists began to adopt a less diffident attitude towards English's classical components, as teleological, end-stopped history once again seemed a possibility: Through what countless channels must any one root have passed which the Teutonic nations possess in common with the Greek and Latin! At what period did the streams diverge? Through what regions of barbarism or corruption have the rivulets since flowed in their respective courses, before again meeting in a composite language like the English [. . .]? If the primitive affinity of language can [. . .] be discovered, the study must be fitted to our nature, and must serve a noble and pious purpose.12 Thus Blackwood's reviewer, Charles Neaves. Yet even here, in the act of strategically appropriating serviceable elements of new philology, the qualitative assumptions of the old study have not been fully suppressed. There is still a clear preoccupation with linguistic decay and its accompanying `regions of barbarism or corruption', even though Grimm asserted that such terms were meaningless when applied to linguistic history. In dispensing with the `classical problem', the notion of a qualitative dimension within language should have vanished, too. But while this is certainly true in theory, scholars proved reluctant to relinquish their long-held belief that language provided a guide to the vicissitudes of human history. A curious perspective on language opened in the 1830s and 1840s, in which English was presented as newly worthy of study, unburdened by unfavourable classical comparison, but within a context

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 159

160 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Our native tongue is nearly, if not altogether, the noblest language that human wisdom, or let us rather say Divine goodness, has ever instituted for the use of man. It is as nobly descended as it is happily composed. It is initiated by many links of connexion to the richest and fairest forms of speech in other ages and nations; and it ought to be a primary object of interest among us to study, in all their expressions, its affinities to those sources of copiousness and beauty which have made it what it is. Our social and political position, and our national history, lead to the same result. We are the mixed descendants of some of the most brave, virtuous, and cultivated of the Teutonic tribes.13 An especially appealing feature of new philology was the scientific rigour it brought to bear on the elusive proto-idiom, the ancient language glimpsed by Sir William Jones decades earlier in his famous `Third Anniversary Discourse, on the Hindus' (1786). Indeed, the wonderful new methodology seemed to offer a means of recovering even the primitive Ursprache, the first tongue, the archetypal embodiment of È hme's `Language of Nature' ± a Coleridge's `living' language and Bo discourse in which every word rang and every syllable told. Its reconstruction in the modern age would return logocentric truth to the centre of an ever more alienating society, whose disjunctures were captured so poignantly in poems like Wordsworth's `Simon Lee'. Continental philology, converts like Joseph Bosworth believed, might yet allow scholars to peep over the walls of Eden and hear Adam and Eve converse. A major consequence of Continental philology in the first half of the nineteenth century was to elevate the status of English, allowing the national language to be enlisted into Britain's programme of cultural expansion. In spite of certain anomalies ± such as the ascendant methodology proving unable wholly to dislodge eighteenth-century doctrines of corruptible language ± it seemed that philology would play its part in delivering English and `Englishness' into all corners of the globe, a world `circled by the accents of Shakespeare and Milton' as Thomas Watts fantasized in 1850.14 Yet the fact that the close relationship assumed to exist between language and culture remained largely intact at some deep level of consciousness, notwithstanding the advent of

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

that was still value-laden. In spite of flaws in the logic of the argument, British scholars embraced the opportunity of using new philology to revise estimations of English, and looked forward to the prospect of engaging antiquity on new terms. Neaves again:

sound laws, meant that dreams of empire founded on the excellence of English were potentially vulnerable to linguistic `decay'. As Linda Dowling adroitly demonstrates, the future success of high English culture had been pinned on a theory of language that was dangerously unstable. For the gambit to work, English had to be seen to be beyond reproach, which entailed the constant monitoring, refining and sanctioning of linguistic usage (the Oxford English Dictionary grew out of precisely such an undertaking). New literature would have to be scrutinized, just as it had been in Hunt's and Keats's day. There was work yet for the guardians of taste in journals like Blackwood's and the Quarterly. The relevance of this for a philologically sophisticated and linguistically inventive poet like Tennyson should be clear, especially in the light of the treatment doled out to earlier experimental writers such as Hunt and Keats. Later in this chapter, we will see how critics colluded to nullify Tennyson's challenge to established models of literary idiom. To this juncture my portrayal of early nineteenth-century philology, with all its contradictions, competing theories and tensions, can be considered as representing one side of a linguistic philosophy characterized by its belief in language as a living entity, inextricably bound up, albeit nebulously, with human existence. Such a view informed an important aspect of Tennyson's understanding of language. The reverse of this outlook depicted language as blindly autonomous, inherently meaningless and utterly detached from the human sphere. What is more, it formed the other half of Tennyson's linguistic comprehension. Although British philologists did their best to utilize positive aspects of sound laws while ignoring less palatable elements, once Grimm had presented the notion of language as a phenomenon following impersonal rules, divorced from teleology, his theories began to bring their own problems, raising a `spectre of autonomous language' as Dowling has suggested.15 Ultimately, sound laws ± which had cheerfully been listed among `the most fruitful discoveries ever made in the province of language' ± were merely to confirm Victorian cultural pessimism (The New Cratylus, p. 132). Grimm's `spectre' struck at the heart of the Victorian ideal of progress. If, as the Deutsche Grammatik seemed to indicate, though not wholly consistently, language had severed itself from any meaningful symbiosis with the history of mankind, then language had surely forfeited any claim to meaningfulness itself. Many Romantically inclined figures were forced to entertain seriously the possibility that language was arbitrary after all, just as Locke, Condillac and a whole tradition of materialist scholarship had insisted.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 161

In 1838, Tennyson's friend Frederick Denison Maurice declared his horror of autonomous language. Like Tennyson, Maurice wished he could celebrate with Coleridge the `living, germinating power' of individual words;16 but he was haunted by the thought that linguistic terms were only the `arbitrary signs of ideas', that language was itself `arbitrary, hollow, and insincere' (The Friendship of Books, pp. 33±60). Tennyson's tutor, Julius Hare, suggested half-heartedly that in its pristine condition language contained `very little that is arbitrary in it', owing its origin to `an instinct actuating a whole people', and expressing `what is common to them all' (Guesses At Truth, I, 308). Yet this Coleridgean ideal is swiftly undercut by anxiety that the decay of signification was only too evident within even brief periods of history. In the course of the last century, Hare laments, `a sort of English has been prevalent [. . .] in which the sentences have a meaning, but the words have little or none. [. . .] Hardly a word is used for which half a dozen synonyms might not have stood equally well'.17 Tennyson's dual conception of language as `living' in the Coleridgean sense, and comprised of `mere air-propelling sounds' in Julius Hare's signal image, can be sited within the paradigmatic challenge to language theory offered by Grimm's philology in the 1830s. Indeed, the poet's uncertainty entirely reflects the character of language study at this time, which harboured contradictions and illogicalities that barely managed to exist alongside each other. Like his `Apostle' peers, Tennyson agonized over the spaghetti of linguistic ideas he encountered at Cambridge. He wrestled with rival ideas of words as either dimly conceived but profoundly meaningful, linked to a divine central signifier; or as eroded, abbreviated remnants of once-meaningful Ur-words, as hollow signs. The poetry Tennyson wrote around this formative period, although often disregarded as juvenilia, bears the marks of precisely these intellectual dilemmas. To my knowledge, the compositions of the late 1820s and early 1830s have not been examined with this focus of attention, an oversight I seek to remedy in the following sections.

Words ± words ± words18 Julius Hare's terror of words and phrases being ground down until barely able to signify anything at all is echoed by Hensleigh Wedgwood in his 1833 review of Grimm's Grammatik for the Quarterly Review. Wedgwood dismissed the notion that pronouns such as `he', `she' or `it' were arbitrary assignations, asserting instead that they were the abbreviated forms of longer sentences, namely `the man, woman, or thing, mentioned':19

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

162 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Like the organic remains of the material world, these particles were formed of the most striking portions of the sentences which they represent, while the more perishable parts have mouldered away. In some respects the fossil remains have met with a more fortunate destiny than these relics of the immaterial world, for, while the former have for the most part been preserved by the protecting soil in which they were embedded, so that a skilful anatomist has little difficulty in deciding to what portion of the skeleton of living animals they correspond, the latter, from their everyday and universal use, have been worn, until, like pebbles on the beach, they have lost every corner and distinctive mark, and hardly a vestige remains to indicate their original form. (p. 175) This passage appears to be engaged with Tooke's Diversions of Purley, though Wedgwood does not state so explicitly. Where Tooke considered historical abbreviation to be the mark of progress in language, in 1833 the phenomenon is depicted as a mulchy process in which `perishable parts' of words `moulder away'. While Tooke's vision of abbreviation is dynamic and positive, centring on the idea of `winged words' that accelerate the `dispatch' of meaning so it can keep pace with thought, Wedgwood's descriptions of abbreviated language ± as either decomposing organic material or eroded pebbles on a beach ± are static and supremely disconcerting. The thought that words and phrases could be so worn away as to leave `hardly a vestige' of their original form certainly disturbed Tennyson. He feared that by losing their corners and distinctive marks, words were also losing their originally replete meaning (or meaning altogether). Tennyson responded to this threat by shoring recovered fragments of the linguistic past against future ruin, collating a self-consciously poetic vocabulary from an early stage in his career, as J. F. A. Pyre notes.20 Tennyson's son's Memoir corroborates that in 1831 Arthur Hallam was busy `culling for Alfred poetic words like ``foreÂstall'' '.21 Tennyson's apprehension that modern terms conveyed only a limited idea of things is evident in his attitude towards letter writing. Selfconfessedly no great practitioner of the art, he protested by way of explanation that letters were a poor medium of communication, that bare `words often prov[ed] a bar of hindrance instead of a bond of union'.22 Tennyson's closest friend Arthur Hallam, struck by the discrepancy between Emily Tennyson's vibrant physical presence and the shadowy idea of her conveyed in a letter, was even more emphatic:

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 163

164 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

This last phrase ± `the great, deplorable, alas irremediable loss' ± is especially plangent. It recalls the 1831 review of Tennyson's poems, where Hallam lamented the passing of the `first raciness and juvenile vigour of literature', `gone, never to return'.24 The idea of irretrievable loss was deeply embedded in Tennyson's linguistic consciousness. It informs a letter to Emily Sellwood from 1840 recording a deeply affecting visit to Shakespeare's reputed birthroom. Tennyson records being moved by the sight of innumerable visitors' names written on every available surface; he explains that he added his own name to a table as an act of `homage' (just as Keats had done when he visited the house with Benjamin Bailey in 1817).25 Inscribing `Tennyson' into this hallowed locale is intended to fix the significance of the poet's experience there, but also to fix the significance of the poet. In so far as Shakespeare's birthroom has become a three-dimensioned text, Tennyson's act of self-interjection is prefigured in several early poems. `The Talking Oak' (published in 1842, but composed around 1837), relates the tale of a suitor who carves his lady's name onto an oak tree, and returns the following day to learn how his gesture was received: But tell me, did she read the name I carved with many vows When last with throbbing heart I came To rest beneath thy boughs? (ll. 153±6) The tree answers: `O yes, she wandered round and round These knotted knees of mine, And found, and kissed the name she found, And sweetly murmured thine. `A teardrop trembled from its source, And down my surface crept. My sense of touch is something course, But I believe she wept'. (ll. 157±64)

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Oh it is sad to think how little a letter gives one! Yours today is all precious sweetness; yet it tells but a few moments of your life, a few thoughts of your mind, and it contains no looks, no tones ± that is the great, deplorable, alas irremediable loss.23

The suitor senses the vulnerability of his `vows', of utterance itself, to the vagaries of arbitrary language. By cutting his lady's name into the living bark of the tree, he hopes to ascribe physical presence to it (and thus also to his vows). Once inscribed, the word is able to communicate meaning through the lineaments of its physical contours: it is `read' by the woman's lips at line 159. The name itself feels, inasmuch as it is part of a tree with a `sense of touch' (l. 163). Finally, the carved sign is brought into direct contact with its referent in the instant the lady kisses the figuration of her own name. The suitor ± and here Tennyson can also be considered as a suitor (to language) ± practically overloads the word with significatory possibilities in the hope that it, and his vows, might resist the effects of erosion. Perhaps Tennyson's Coleridgean optimism regarding living language in this poem is punningly signalled in the lady's name, `Olivia', with its phonetic incorporation of `live'. Elsewhere in the poem a variant form is used, `Olive'. This is a virtual injunction to remain ± `O live!' Tennyson's bid in `The Talking Oak' to endow words with corporeal presence gives rise to a tactile language where pleasure is arbitrated through, or even displaced onto, the tree: `Her kisses were so close and kind, That, trust me on my word, Hard wood that I am, and wrinkled rind, But yet my sap was stirred: And even into my inmost ring A pleasure I discerned. (ll. 169±74) The oak is both tree of language and life in these extraordinary stanzas, which move towards what we might term an erotics of enhanced signification. Of course, in Tennyson's positive conception of linguistic philosophy, where language is comprised of `living powers' that `actuate' human history, the dual identification is entirely appropriate. `The Talking Oak' has pivotal significance within Tennyson's linguistics. In a very immediate fashion the poem is `about' words, since it is predicated on the circumstance that the oak is capable of speech. The ability to trust to one's word (l. 170) ± to trust to words per se ± also seems to be a central concern. Above all, the poem is preoccupied with how words can be made to retain their meaning: how that is one might fix, inscribe or ascribe meanings to words. But despite the outward success of

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 165

Tennyson's ploy in `The Talking Oak', the fact that the poet labours to etch a second level of inscription into his verse (poetry is already inscribed language), confirms the vexed nature of the problem. If Tennyson presents a generally positive view of language in `The Talking Oak', he had been less optimistic in `The Dell of E±', one of his earliest works (published in 1827, but not reprinted by the poet). In this text, Tennyson agonizes over the vulnerability of language ± even that which is inscribed ± to forces of erosion, drawing parallels with the susceptibility of rural idylls to the onward march of industrialization. (Within Romantic discourse, `genuine' language is often associated with pristine nature and primitive society under threat from `improvement'.) The poetic landscape, even the name of which is about to be eroded to a single letter, `E', is initially marked by countless names carved into the trunk of `each old hollow willow-tree', trees that like the Talking Oak become texts: How pleasant was the ever-varying light Beneath that emerald coverture of boughs! How often, at the approach of dewy night, Have those tall pine-trees heard the lovers vows! How many a name was carved upon the trunk Of each old hollow willow-tree, that stooped To lave its branches in the brook, and drunk Its freshening dew! (ll. 15±22)26 This is an opulent prefigurement of Tennyson's strategy in `The Talking Oak', where we find the same governing rhyme of boughs/vows. But when the narrator of `The Dell of E±' revisits the scene after `Long years have past' (l. 29), things have changed. The willows have all been felled to make way for waterwheels and mills, and on the single pine tree that does remain standing, the names have been `erased': Long years had past, and there again I came, But man's rude hand had sorely scathed the dell; And though the cloud-capt mountains, still the same, Upreared each heaven-invading pinnacle;

Yet were the charms of that lone valley fled,

And the grey-winding of the stream was gone; The brook, once murmuring o'er its pebbly bed, Now deeply ± straightly ± noiselessly went on.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

166 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Slow turned the sluggish wheel beneath its force,

Where clattering mills disturbed the solitude:

Where was the prattling of its former course?

Its shelving, sedgy sides y-crowned with wood? The willow trunks were felled, the names erased From one broad shattered pine, which still its station graced. (ll. 29±42) Not only have the names on the trees been removed: all language has been eradicated from the pastoral idyll. Even the `murmuring' and `prattling' of the brook, the `plainings of the pensive dove' (l. 46), and the `whispering' forest (l. 53) have been silenced. It is difficult to think of two poems as self-reflexively ± and differently ± focused on the problem of language as `The Talking Oak' and `The Dell of E±'. However, as works that explore counter-forces of inherent meaning and meaninglessness (inscribed signification and its opposite, erosion), both are entirely `of their age'. The 1820s and 1830s were transitional decades in which Romantic ideals of genuine poetic idiom were under threat from proto-Victorian visions of autonomous language. This dichotomy had already been addressed in unnerving terms by Wordsworth two decades earlier in 1810, in his third `Essay upon Epitaphs'. There he envisaged language as not only possibly arbitrary, but as an `external power' (my emphasis), noiselessly and autonomously at work `to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, to dissolve': Words are too awful an instrument for good and evil to be trifled with: they hold above all other external powers a dominion over thought. If words be not [. . .] an incarnation of the thought, but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on. Language, if it do not uphold, and feed, and leave in quiet, like the power of gravitation or the air we breathe, is a counter-spirit, unremittingly and noiselessly at work to derange, to subvert, to lay waste, to vitiate, and to dissolve.27 For Romantic sensibilities ± which Tennyson possessed in large measure but struggled to retain ± the idea of autonomous language was even more disturbing than arbitrary discourse. Gone now was any consoling thought that mutual contracts between speakers might supply the lack

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 167

of natural connection between the human and the linguistic. Autonomous language followed its own logic, adhered to its own rules. `Mariana in the South', I would suggest, is a poem specifically preoccupied with the dislocation of language from realms of human contingency. I'd like to focus on a passage new to Poems (1842), probably added by 1835, in which Mariana discovers that the drab reality of her appearance no longer accords with her portrayal in `old letters': And, rising, from her bosom drew Old letters, breathing of her worth, For `Love', they said, `must needs be true, To what is loveliest upon earth'. An image seemed to pass the door, To look at her with slight, and say `But now thy beauty flows away, So be alone for evermore'. (ll. 61±8) The words uttered by the `image' at Mariana's door contradict those recorded in the `old letters'. On a simple level, they avow that Mariana was once beautiful, but is no longer so. A further complication disturbs this stanza, however, rooted in a tension that exists not simply between two discrepant descriptions, but between modes of description ± between the `breathing' syllables of the letters, with their reassuring corporeality, and the `image' of language, which only seems to pass the door and speak (l. 65). It is tempting to read this encounter as a theoretical struggle. On the one side, we have living language (`Old letters, breathing of her worth', l. 62; my emphasis), asserting that Mariana is beautiful; on the other, the image or spectre of autonomous language insisting that there is no correlation between language and the underlying reality it attempts ± or appears to attempt ± to describe. There is yet another dimension to the dilemma. Correspondence between the old inscriptions in the letter and Mariana's appearance has deteriorated as the poem's eponymous focalizer has aged, and (within the text's internal aesthetics) lost her youthful beauty. That is to say, meaning has succumbed to a gradual erosion over time; in these stanzas, Tennyson appears to concur with the gloomy linguistic prognosis of Wedgwood and Hare. The relationship between `words' and `things', always problematic for Tennyson, can break down not simply because of the inherent precariousness of words, but also because `things' tend to drift away from them in a temporal world. In each case, words are exposed as air-propelling

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

168 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 169

sounds: seductive, with a semblance of permanence, but ultimately `arbitrary, hollow, and insincere', as Maurice feared.

The death in 1833 of Tennyson's closest friend Arthur Hallam brought a key linguistic predicament to the forefront of the poet's artistic consciousness. `Early Spring' and `Whispers', both composed around 1833 but unpublished by Tennyson, contain passages suggesting that the young poet was growing ever more sceptical of language's capacity to represent things real or imagined. Indeed, in several poems written during this difficult period Tennyson concludes that permutations, tones and shades lying beyond the reach of normal language are necessary if he is to articulate his distress. These shades would constitute a poetic vocabulary of distinctions too fine to be marked by words in their present eroded condition, a series of terms hidden between words. Tennyson suspected that in order to answer the demands of everyday usage, language had evolved a vocabulary that was conveniently over-inclusive: `gross to make plain', in his memorable phrase. Language, that is, cast a wide net but permitted minute distinctions to slip through. In bleaker moments, Tennyson wondered if even the most specific terms were capable of distinguishing anything that did not stand out in an obvious way from the elusive `hints of things' in nature. This fear is voiced in `Early Spring':28 Ah! lightest words are lead, Gross to make plain Myriads of hints of things That orb and wane, Before a gnat's quick wings Beat once again. (ll. 31±6) Increasingly in the dark days of 1833, it is the `myriads of hints of things' that become important in Tennyson's struggle to express his sense of loss for Arthur Hallam and negotiate the obstacles to writing great poetry imposed by the medium itself. As he puts it simply, in the modern age `Words may not tell, j Faint, fragile sympathies j In sound and smell!' (ll. 40±2). The world in `Early Spring' is `termless' (l. 44); it is unnamed, not merely `boundless' as Ricks glosses this word (Poems of Tennyson, I, 539n). Unnamed, Tennyson despairs, because many of the fine details of human experience have not been, and can no longer be, catalogued in language.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

A hint of somewhat unexprest

`O termless field': the apostrophic `O' accentuates a linguistic emptiness that extends endlessly as far as the poet is concerned. Worldly experience for Tennyson is a plethora of sensations and timbres, only `in part revealed' (l. 48); only a portion of its complexity can be distinguished semantically. `Early Spring' ends with `tears of wonder' to fill the `void of speech'.29 `Whispers' elaborates the theme of ineffability: Like some wise artist, Nature gives, Through all her works, to each that lives A hint of somewhat unexprest (ll. 6±8) These lines ruminate on the problem of how to access a poetic language equipped to communicate the `unexprest', and possibly inexpressible. The narrator hears tantalizing whispers that seem to offer the desired vocabulary, but laments that these tones rise and fall away `where'er I move'. This anticipates Ulysses' own consciousness of the fact that the margin of his untravelled world fades `for ever and for ever when I move' (`Ulysses', ll. 20±1). The breathy exhalations that promise full articulation always remain just on the edge of audibility.30 This frustratingly out-of-reach discourse signifies `Something of pain ± of bliss ± of Love, j But what, were hard to say' (ll. 11±12), leaving the poet once again with nothing but `air-propelling sounds'. Tennyson's intimation that modern language is inadequate to his needs inflects a number of phrases that, although on first sight formulaic, point towards anxieties arising out of the poet's sustained engagement with linguistic theories. Even such apparently routine statements as `She was more fair than words can say' or `Who may express thee EleaÈnore?' have a particular resonance for Tennyson.31 In `Break, Break, Break', a text that explicitly addresses the breakdown of meaning, we observe how formulaic expressions acquire new intensity for the poet. Aporia is once again the agony on which the poem is founded: And I would that my tongue could utter The thoughts that arise in me (ll. 3±4) For all that the above lines on the death of Arthur Hallam seem conventional, they possess a significance for the bereaved poet that far exceeds the mechanical, gesturing as they do towards a serious breach in

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

170 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Tennyson's faith regarding language.32 When Hallam was still alive, Tennyson proclaimed that `either lived in either's mind and speech' (my emphasis).33 Now that Hallam is dead, Tennyson is dismayed to discover that even words fail him. `Break, Break, Break' thus records Tennyson's fear that he is losing his friend twice ± once physically, and again linguistically. Elsewhere, faced with the inability of words to give full expression to thought, Tennyson decides that it is better not to speak at all. In `To J[ames]. S[pedding].', he breaks off the attempt to console his friend on the death of a brother, concluding that silence is preferable to hollow words: `Words weaker than your grief would make j Grief more' (ll. 65±6). The poems I have considered to this point explore related linguistic predicaments that Tennyson is still trying to resolve in In Memoriam. The following stanzas are from section 5: I sometimes hold it half a sin To put in words the grief I feel; For words, like Nature, half reveal And half conceal the Soul within. But, for the unquiet heart and brain, A use in measured language lies; The sad mechanic exercise, Like dull narcotics, numbing pain. In words, like weeds, I'll wrap me o'er, Like coarsest clothes against the cold: But that large grief which these enfold Is given in outline and no more.34 This short but theoretically dense passage describes the pull of two competing conceptions of language: one in which words seem to offer a dependable representation of experience; the other in which they are revealed as hollow and misleading. The stanzas constitute a masterful condensation of the linguistic disputations Tennyson would have heard conducted at a rarefied level for the period by Maurice, Trench and Julius Hare. By his own account someone who preferred to listen to debates rather than contribute to them, Tennyson worked on linguistic dilemmas through his poetry. Apprentice pieces composed at this time such as `The Dell of E±' test various viewpoints before the mature philological emphasis of In Memoriam can emerge. Indeed, it

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 171

could be argued that In Memoriam achieved its present form only because of the existence of this earlier body of writing. It should now be apparent why Tennyson's anxieties concerning language in minor and more accomplished works alike need to be read in the context of the age that produced them. Recent studies, notably Sinfield's, inappropriately apply a post-Saussurean hermeneutics and critical apparatus to poems that more vocally rehearse contemporary philological debates of the late 1820s and early 1830s. The problem is compounded by the fact that language study of this period is often presented in positivistic terms ± as being merely `on the way towards' modern linguistics ± a complaint made three decades ago by Hans Aarsleff in his pioneering work The Study of Language in England, 1780± 1860.35 Early nineteenth-century philology has ceased to have relevance both in modern criticism and, perversely enough, in its own historical juncture. Through a form of backward revision, historical texts such as Tennyson's are severed from their native environments and cease to speak to us in their original tones. If the discrete historicity of Tennysonian texts is to be redeemed, attention needs to be paid towards recuperating their contemporary dialogues with an age obsessed by the nature and character of language.

Knowledge of their own supremacy In 1841, a Latin extract from Alfred Tennyson's `ênone' appeared in Arundines Cami, together with other classical versions of popular English poems.36 Translated by George William Lyttelton, the extract is 42 lines in length and was printed on the same page as a wonderfully dead-pan `Humtius Dumtius'. In keeping with the rest of the volume, Tennyson's `original' text from Poems (1832) appears alongside the Latin. I have added quotation marks to `original', since Lyttelton makes several unannounced grammatical and orthographical changes to Tennyson's English. Indeed, despite the interest inherent to a Latin `ênone', my discussion is concerned with Lyttelton's revision of Tennyson's English. I want to suggest that his unsolicited editing, which seems to have escaped the attention of recent scholars, may be seen as part of a wider tendency by Victorian audiences to standardize the poet's work. The remainder of this chapter explores the silent revision of Tennyson, and seeks to place the phenomenon in its nineteenth-century context of heated philological and cultural debate The innovative diction of Tennyson's early poetry, in particular his penchant for unusual compounds and idiosyncratic hyphenation,

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

172 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

provoked consternation among those who construed non-standard English as a threat to the national language. In 1832, a critic for the Literary Gazette despaired at the preponderance in Tennyson's work of constructions like `full-sailed' and `grapethickened', complaining that `such compounds enter in such prolific abundance into Mr. Tennyson's versification, that a small dictionary might be published of them'.37 So profoundly disquieting was Tennyson's innovative diction that reviewers, editors and translators like Lyttelton were not averse to altering his work. When Henry Hart Milman (1791±1868), former professor of poetry at Oxford, reviewed Arundines Cami in the Quarterly Review in 1842, he singled out Lyttelton's contribution to the volume. But while he found the Latin `ênone' commendable, he was equally interested in the `improvements' Lyttelton had made to Tennyson's English. On the very eve of the publication of Poems (1842), Milman remarked that `ênone' did not lend itself to Latin hexameters, and suggested that the poem's `faults' were proportional to the number of changes necessary to facilitate its translation into a `golden age' tongue: The translator [Lyttelton] has caught very happily the wild and fanciful tone of Mr. Tennyson's poem, and quietly dropped its affectations. He has not, perhaps, quite subdued it to classical purity; it still reads considerably below the Virgilian age. [. . .] Mr. Tennyson [. . .], however, might study with advantage how much his language must be filtered, and its exuberance strained off, before it can be transfused into classical verse.38 In having `quietly dropped' Tennyson's affectations, Lyttelton actually made no less than thirty significant departures from the text of Poems (1832), as well as numerous lesser changes in punctuation. The extent of the revisions prompted Milman's dry comment that, leaving aside the Latin `ênone', as far as the English one was concerned his article `must be considered, indeed, as quoting Lord Lyttleton [sic], not Mr. Tennyson' (p. 445).39 Modification of Tennyson's poem did not end with Lyttelton. Milman reprinted both Lyttelton's English and Latin `versions' of `ênone' in the Quarterly, but added a further eight unauthorized changes to Tennyson's English, distinct from Lyttelton's own.40 Between them, then, the two men made a total of 38 alterations within a 42-line extract. This excludes minor changes in punctuation, a clear misprint in the first edition of Arundines Cami (1841) and a possible misprint in Milman's Quarterly article (see note 43 below). Lyttelton was an admirer of

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 173

Tennyson, and had been tutored at Cambridge by the poet's Trinity College friend, William Henry Brookfield; by contrast, Milman ± at this juncture at least ± was a merciless detractor. Yet both men revised `ênone' in similar ways. Both `filtered' the poet's language, to use Milman's euphemism (p. 445), as they saw appropriate. When the three texts of `ênone' are read alongside each other, Lyttelton's and Milman's alterations can be clearly discerned. First Tennyson's `version' from Poems (1832), ll. 44±85: `O mother Ida, manyfountained Ida, Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die. Aloft the mountain lawn was dewydark, And dewydark aloft the mountain pine; Beautiful Paris, evilhearted Paris, Leading a jetblack goat whitehorned, whitehooved, Came up from reedy Simois all alone. `O mother Ida, hearken ere I die. I sate alone: the goldensandalled morn Rosehued the scornful hills: I sate alone With downdropt eyes: whitebreasted like a star Fronting the dawn he came: a leopard skin From his white shoulder drooped: his sunny hair Clustered about his temples like a God's: And his cheek brightened, as the foambow brightens When the wind blows the foam; and I called out, ``Welcome Apollo, welcome home Apollo, Apollo, my Apollo, loved Apollo''. `Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die. He, mildly smiling, in his milkwhite palm Close-held a golden apple, lightningbright With changeful flashes, dropt with dew of Heaven Ambrosially smelling. From his lip, Curved crimson, the fullflowing river of speech Came down upon my heart. ` ``My own ênone, Beautifulbrowed ênone, mine own soul, Behold this fruit, whose gleaming rind ingrav'n `For the most fair', in aftertime may breed Deep evilwilledness of heaven and sere Heartburning toward hallowed Ilion; And all the colour of my afterlife

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

50

60

70

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

174 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Will be the shadow of today. Today Here and Pallas and the floating grace Of laughterloving Aphrodite meet In manyfolded Ida to receive This meed of beauty, she to whom my hand Award the palm. Within the green hillside, Under yon whispering tuft of oldest pine, Is an ingoing grotto, strown with spar And ivymatted at the mouth, wherein Thou unbeholden may'st behold, unheard Hear all, and see thy Paris judge of Gods'' '.

80

This can be compared with Lyttelton's revised version of the above, as it appears in the first edition of Arundines Cami (1841). I have italicized major differences: O Mother Ida, many-fountained Ida, Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die. Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy dark And dewy dark aloft the mountain pine; Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris, Leading a jet-black goat, white-horned, white-hooved, Came up from reedy Simois all alone. O mother Ida, hearken ere I die. I sate alone: the golden-sandalled morn Rose-hued the scornful hills: I sate alone With down-dropt eyes: white-breasted41 like a star Fronting the dawn he came: a leopard skin From his white shoulder drooped: his sunny hair Clustered about his temples like a god's: And his cheek brightened, as the foam-bow brightens When the wind blows the foam: and I called out ± `Welcome Apollo, welcome home Apollo, Apollo, my Apollo, loved Apollo'. Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die. He, mildy42 smiling, in his milk-white palm Close-held a golden apple, lightning bright With changeful flashes, dropt with dew of heaven Ambrosially smelling. From his lip, Curved crimson, the full-flowing river of speech Came down upon my heart.

50

60

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 175

176 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

70

80

Now Milman's `reprint' of Lyttelton's text in the Quarterly Review (March 1842); further revisions are italicized: `O mother Ida, many-fountained Ida,

Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

Aloft the mountain-pine43 was dewy dark,

And dewy dark aloft the mountain pine;

Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris,

Leading a jet-black goat, white horned, white hooved,

Came up from reedy Simois all alone. `O mother Ida, hearken ere I die:

I sate alone: the golden-sandalled morn

Rose-hued the scornful hills: I sate alone

With down-dropt eyes; white-breasted, like a star

Fronting the dawn he came: a leopard skin

From his white shoulder drooped: his sunny hair

Clustered about his temples like a god's;

And his cheek brightened, as the foam-bow brightens

When the wind blows the foam, and I called out,

``Welcome, Apollo; welcome home, Apollo: Apollo, my Apollo, loved Apollo''.

`Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

50

60

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

`My own ênone Beautiful-browed ênone, mine own soul, Behold this fruit, whose gleaming rind engraven ``For the most fair'', in aftertimes may breed Deep evil-willedness of heaven and sere Heart-burning toward hallowed Ilion; And all the colour of my after-life Will be the shadow of to-day. To-day Here and Pallas and the floating grace Of laughter-loving Aphrodite meet In many-folded Ida to receive This meed of beauty, she to whom my hand Award the palm. Within the green hill-side, Under yon whispering tuft of oldest pine, Is an in-going grotto, strawn with spar And ivymatted at the mouth, wherein Thou unbeholden mayst behold, unheard Hear all, and see thy Paris judge of gods'.

He, mildly smiling, in his milk-white palm Close held a golden apple, lightning bright With changeful flashes, dropt with dew of heaven, Ambrosially smelling. From his lip Curved crimson, the full-flowing river of speech Came down upon my heart. `My own ênone, Beautiful-browed ênone, mine own soul, Behold this fruit, whose gleaming rind engraven, ``For the most fair'', in aftertimes may breed Deep evil-willedness of heaven, and sere Heart-burning toward hallowed Ilion; And all the colour of my after life Will be the shadow of to-day. To-day Here and Pallas, and the floating grace Of laughter-loving Aphrodite, meet In many-folded Ida, to receive This meed of beauty, she to whom my hand Awards the palm. Within the green hill-side, Under yon whispering tuft of oldest pine, Is an in-going grotto, strewn with spar, And ivy-matted at the mouth, wherein Thou unbeholden mayest behold, unheard Hear all, and see thy Paris judge of gods'.

70

80

The overwhelming tendency is for Lyttelton and Milman to hyphenate Tennyson's unhyphenated compounds of 1832, or split them into two words. For instance, Lyttelton gives many-fountained for manyfountained (l. 44); golden-sandalled for goldensandalled (l. 52); Rose-hued for Rosehued (l. 53); down-dropt for downdropt (l. 54); white-breasted for whitebreasted (l. 54); lightning bright for lightningbright (l. 64); and many-folded for manyfolded (l. 78). Similarly, Milman gives white horned for whitehorned (l. 49); white hooved for whitehooved (l. 49); close held for close-held (l. 64); after life for afterlife (l. 74); and ivy-matted for ivymatted (l. 83). Where Lyttelton and Milman disagree, it is usually due to the former's preference for hyphenation where the latter opts to form two distinct words from a compounded term; but these differences notwithstanding, both men firmly reject Tennyson's idiosyncrasy of joining words together without hyphens. It is not difficult to see why Tennyson's early diction generated anxieties among conservative readers, or to appreciate why their neoclassical

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 177

sensibilities were so severely affronted by the poet's seeming contempt for the restraint and poise of Johnsonian English. Tennyson's linguistic experiments in the 1830s, encouraged by philologist friends at Trinity College such as John Mitchell Kemble, display a rich and vibrantly challenging inventiveness. Yet, to a certain sort of reader, radical diction and the erosion of high English culture were two sides of the same coin. Indeed, as Linda Dowling has argued persuasively, the issue of nonstandard English acquired an unmistakable exigency by the early nineteenth century, since in the minds of many reviewers the quality of the national idiom was inseparable from that of national culture as a whole.44 We saw in Chapter 3 that the interiorization of this virtual equation had been assisted by an alarming reading in 1818 of Friedrich Schlegel by Milman's Oxford friend and editor of the Quarterly Review, John Gibson Lockhart: `A nation whose language becomes rude and barbarous, must be on the brink of barbarism in regard to everything else'.45 The idea that language mirrored culture as a totality gained broad currency in the early nineteenth century. In his popular Guesses at Truth (1827), Augustus Hare presented languages as the `barometers' of national thought and character, and Cambridge Apostle and influential philologist John William Donaldson saw language as the `outward appearance of the intellect of nations'. In this climate, it is unremarkable that Tennyson's stylistic idiosyncrasies, notably his love of unhyphenated parasynthetic terms such as whitehorned and whitehooved, were considered sufficiently offensive and deleterious to the health of the English language and wider culture to sanction blatant tamperings with the text of `ênone'. The normalization of Tennyson's diction was a strategy adopted by defenders of a `fixed' high English idiom. The fact that `correction' often took place surreptitiously suggests that either reviewers were so steeped in patterns of literary correctness that they unconsciously reinterpreted elements of non-standard writing into modes more immediately recognizable, or else the most effective, because most subtle, method of combating unsettling linguistic elements was for guardians of public taste simply to correct them silently and unilaterally, confident in the `knowledge of their own supremacy' in these matters.46 That Milman, for one, was alive to the role reviews and reviewers might play in the defence of traditional values is evident in a letter to John Taylor Coleridge of 3 December 1822 in which he expressed his conviction of `the very high national importance of a work [the Quarterly Review] which has so entirely the public ear, and which may do more for sound taste, sound principle, and sound opinions, both political and religious, than any work or journal extant'.47

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

178 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

The episode I have described was not the first in which Tennyson's work had been silently revised in the Quarterly ± the poet suffered similar indignity ten years earlier when John Wilson Croker reviewed Poems (1832). This critique is well known for its withering attack on Tennyson's `affectations'. ênone's repeated lament, `Dear mother Ida, hearken ere I die', is pilloried in the following manner: After such reiterated assurances that she was about to die on the spot, it appears that ênone thought better of it, and the poem concludes with her taking the wiser course of going to town to consult her swain's sister, Cassandra ± whose advice, we presume, prevailed upon her to live, as we can, from other sources, assure our readers she did to a good old age.48 Yet in sharp contrast to this open attack, Croker's systematic emendation of Tennyson's unhyphenated compounds takes place silently. The review commences with a clear misreading. Attacking the lines `It was the deep midnoon: one silvery cloud j Had lost his way between the piney hills' (Poems [1832], ll. 87±8), Croker prints `among' for `between', and `pined' for `piney'. Consistent though with his programmatic revision of compounds, Croker gives `mid noon' where Tennyson had written `midnoon'. In this respect, Croker prefigures Lyttelton and Milman and indeed provides a model for both these men's revision of the poet. In the passages singled out by Croker for specific criticism, we discover the following departures from Poems (1832): lily flower violet-eyed for lilyflower, violeteyed (l. 91); tree tops for treetops (l. 98); Full-eyeÁd Here for FulleyeÁd Here (l. 106); O'er-thwarted for O'erthwarted (l. 137); brazenheaded for brazenheaded (l. 137); ocean-born for oceanborn (l. 173); newbathed for newbathed (l. 174); evening star for eveningstar (l. 199); mountain shepherd for mountain-shepherd (l. 201); quick-falling for quickfalling (l. 203). As is well-known, in 1842 Tennyson altered entire passages in order to avoid contentious elements altogether, or else adopted Croker's (and Lyttelton's and Milman's) changes.49 In one respect it is little short of remarkable that Croker resists drawing attention to his revisions, since he neglects an obvious source of merriment in Tennyson's linguistic peculiarities. As I have suggested, however, Croker's apparent restraint is not without reason. Tennyson, for one, recognized the susceptibility of his text to quiet subversion, noting the changes made to `ênone' in the Quarterly with extreme displeasure. Writing to John Wilson (Christopher North), whom he mistakenly believed to be responsible for the review, Tennyson feigned disbelief at

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 179

Wilson's authorship: `I do not believe it; for I could not recognise one spark of genius or a single touch of true humour or good feeling. Moreover the man misprints me, which is worse than lying' (Tennyson Letters, I, 110). This accusation was picked up by Joyce Green in 1951, in her influential article on Tennyson's poetic development between 1832 and 1842.50 However, Green interprets Tennyson's outburst as an `appeal for fair and consistent standards' of reviewing (p. 676), which surely misses the point, since the emphasis of Tennyson's complaint falls full square upon the critic's unauthorized alteration of his work. That Green should be unreceptive to the issue of silent revision is hardly surprising, given that she herself misprints individual words from Poems (1832). An appendix to her article, supposedly detailing elements from the 1832 volume that attracted review censure, lists `violet eyed' and `lily flower' where in 1832 Tennyson printed these words together as unhyphenated compounds (p. 694). Green also claims that `overwandering ivy and pine' caused reviewers of Poems (1832) difficulties, when in fact Tennyson wrote `overwandering ivy and vine' [my italics]. Curiously enough, Milman also had a predilection for pine (see note 43 above). Croker's cloak-and-dagger tactics towards Tennyson's compounds appear all the more manipulative alongside his open attack on accented -ed endings. The first line of `The Hesperides' ± `The north wind fall'n, in the new-starreÁd night' ± prompted the following passage: Here we must pause to observe a new species of metabole with which Mr. Tennyson has enriched our language. He suppresses the E in fallen, where it is usually written and where it must be pronounced, and transfers it to the word new-starreÁd, where it would not be pronounced if he did not take due care to superfix a grave accent. This use of the grave accent is, as our readers may already have perceived, so habitual with Mr. Tennyson, and is so obvious an improvement, that we really wonder how the language has hitherto done without it. We are tempted to suggest, that if analogy to the accented languages is to be thought of, it is rather the acute (Â) than the grave (Á) which should be employed upon such occasions; but [. . .] as Mr. Tennyson is the inventor of the system, we shall bow with respect to whatever his final determination may be. (pp. 89±90) Croker ironically professes his readiness to `bow with respect' to whatever Tennyson should choose to print; yet even here he quietly alters the opening line of `The Hesperides' to make two words out of Tennyson's

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

180 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 181

`Northwind', and hyphenates `newstarreÁd'. Seeming to attack a single aspect of Tennyson's diction, accented -ed terminations, Croker actually chips away insidiously at another.

To return to Arundines Cami, Lyttelton made three rather more problematical changes unconnected to the issue of contested hyphenation: engraven for ingrav'n (l. 70), aftertimes for aftertime (l. 71), and strawn for strown (l. 82).51 The first two are accepted by Milman, who, however, prefers strewn where Tennyson had printed strown and Lyttelton strawn. The first two changes can possibly be related to the wide critical dislike of affected archaisms ± `aftertime' might have appeared too obviously pseudo-archaic where the context demanded the plural form, and `ingraven' was sufficiently obsolete by the nineteenth century for Tennyson's use of the word to be rejected as factitious, probably causing uncertainty on that ground alone. From an early stage, critics were split over the issue of Tennyson's penchant for archaisms and pseudo archaisms. Where Arthur Hallam praised his friend's `happy seizure of the antique spirit',52 others, such as an anonymous writer for the Spectator, were far from convinced: Now, without absolutely condemning the use of an obsolete term now and then ± granting even that it may occasionally give point to an expression ± we think that nothing can be more absurd than that piebald dialect in which every fourth or fifth word is of a form and sound that have not passed without question for the last hundred and fifty years.53 Even the generally supportive editor of the Monthly Repository, William Johnson Fox, warned that while archaic words allowed a `quaint and rich character' to be imparted to Tennyson's poetry, this was achieved `at the hazard of the charge of affectation'.54 Two years earlier, reviewing Poems, Chiefly Lyrical in 1831, Fox had protested against Tennyson's `irregularities of measure, and the use of antiquated words and obsolete pronunciation'. There was, he admonished, nothing to be gained `by a song's being studded with words which to most readers may require a glossary'.55 Tennyson's enthusiasm for archaic or pseudo-archaic terms may be ascribed in part to his enduring admiration for John Keats's neologisms and inventive `medievalism'. But his interest in old forms of words was

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Strawn, strewn, strown

also strengthened, made urgent even, by his Trinity College tutor Julius Hare's chilling vision of language worn down through usage. The prospect of eroded language prompted Tennyson to collect `poetic words' (Memoir, I, 82). By accumulating unusual, archaic and emphatically `meaningful' words, he hoped to retain clarity and vigour in what he perceived as the increasingly jaded wordscapes of his age. It is puzzling, though, why Lyttelton or Milman should have considered strawn or strewn less archaic, or in any other way less offensive than Tennyson's strown. If the archaic and dialectal strong form provoked objections in itself, then we might expect strown to have been replaced with either strawed or the normative strewed. Since strown is not in a rhyming position this would have been permissible. As matters stand, it is difficult to interpret Lyttelton's and Milman's changes as anything other than presumptuously pedantic. Whatever the case, the matter indicates their uncertainty on this point, where elsewhere they are predominantly in accordance, confirming the peculiar challenge presented by Tennyson's language. It is unlikely that Tennyson was capricious where the question of strong verb forms was concerned. A seemingly innocuous line in the `Morte d'Arthur' provides a way into Tennyson's participation in a hotly contested philological debate: The cock crew loud; as at that time of year The lusty bird takes every hour for dawn. (ll. 282±3; my emphasis) As anyone who was interested in philology in the 1830s would have known, and as Tennyson, close friend of John Mitchell Kemble, would almost certainly have known, a strenuously contested linguistic debate lay behind the question of whether the cock crowed or crew.56 In 1833, Kemble's field-commanding article `On English Prñterites', based on the tenets of Jacob Grimm, appeared in the Philological Museum, edited by fellow Cambridge Apostle, Julius Hare. In it Kemble states a forceful nationalistic case for privileging strong inflexions over weak ones.57 His review of Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik in the same year also drew attention to this matter.58 Examining verb declensions, Kemble referred to the `remarkably absurd practice' of the preceding century, which, perceiving certain forms to be irregular, and assuming irregularity to be wrong, inundated the English language with new weak preterites and participles. Kemble noted with relief that these had not prevailed, but recalled that:

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

182 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

We had then such pleasant formations as springed for sprang, hanged for hung; the wind blew and the cock crew no longer, ± they now blowed and crowed. In short, these masters and doctors, though grammarians and lexicographers, knowed a thing or two less than they ought. (p. 38) Two years earlier in 1831, James Cowles Prichard had called strong verbs `the genuine and primitive method by which the German nations distinguished the times and modes of action and of passion in the use of verbs'.59 Nevertheless, despite using crew in `Morte d'Arthur' in 1832, Tennyson ignored Apostolic precept when it suited him. In `Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue', written around 1837, Tennyson depicted a cock that `crow'd lustier late and early' (l. 126).60 Perhaps he considered the weak form of the verb ironically appropriate to the `low' tone of the speaker's monologue, a lowness signalled by the inclusion of the poem's place of composition ± the Cock Tavern ± beneath its title.61

Genuine and vigorous English It is generally accepted that Tennyson began work revising Poems (1832) shortly after its publication. A letter to his friend James Spedding in 1835 suggests that `ênone' had been substantially revised by that date, all but excluding the possibility that either Lyttelton or Milman influenced Tennyson's own revisions. In fact, Tennyson's focus for revision (like Lyttelton's and Milman's) had probably been determined by earlier attacks, such as Croker's, on idiosyncratic hyphenation and factitious words.62 Whatever the case, Tennyson's revisions of 1842 included seven of Lyttelton's and/or Milman's 38 emendations; in addition, passages that had hitherto contained disputed words (notably ll. 71±85) were radically altered to expunge contentious elements altogether. In passages new to 1842, compounds such as full-faced and light-foot that would almost certainly have been unhyphenated in 1832, were now hyphenated or printed as two words.63 The following is the relevant passage from Poems (1842), ll. 44±88, where Tennyson's sea-change regarding hyphenation is immediately apparent: `O mother Ida, many-fountain'd Ida,

Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die.

I waited underneath the dawning hills.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 183

184 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

50

60

70

80

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy-dark,

And dewy-dark aloft the mountain pine:

Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris,

Leading a jet-black goat white-horned, white-hooved, Came up from reedy Simois all alone.

`O mother Ida, harken ere I die. Far-off the torrent call'd me from the cleft: Far-up the solitary morning smote The streaks of virgin snow. With down-dropt eyes I sat alone: white-breasted like a star Fronting the dawn he moved: a leopard skin Droop'd from his shoulder, but his sunny hair Cluster'd about his temples like a God's: And his cheek brighten'd as the foam-bow brightens When the wind blows the foam, and all my heart Went forth to embrace him coming ere he came. `Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. He smiled, and opening out his milk-white palm Disclosed a fruit of pure Hesperian gold, That smelt ambrosially, and while I look'd And listen'd, the full-flowing river of speech Came down upon my heart. ` ``My own ênone, Beautiful-brow'd ênone, my own soul, Behold this fruit, whose gleaming rind ingrav'n `For the most fair', would seem to award it thine, As lovelier than whatever Oread haunt The knolls of Ida, loveliest in all grace Of movement, and the charm of married brows''. `Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. He prest64 the blossom of his lips to mine, And added, ``This was cast upon the board, When all the full-faced presence of the Gods Ranged in the halls of Peleus; whereupon Rose feud, with question unto whom 'twere due: But light-foot Iris brought it yester-eve, Delivering that to me, by common voice Elected umpire, Here comes to-day Pallas and Aphrodite, claiming each This meed of fairest. Thou, within the cave Behind yon whispering tuft of oldest pine,

Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 185

Tennyson's capitulation met with general if not unequivocal approbation. One reviewer, in all probability Francis Garden, was glad to see Tennyson's mannerisms `nearly all disappeared', particularly the poet's `passion for compound words', and announced that Poems (1842) displayed `on the whole [. . .] genuine and vigorous English'.65 However, in the second edition of Arundines Cami in 1843, Lyttelton insisted on two further changes to Tennyson's amended hyphenation, as well as rejecting most of his newly introduced -'d endings.66 He also objected to Tennyson's retention of ingrav'n from 1832; but whereas in 1841 Lyttelton had substituted engraven, in 1843 he objected not to the initial i, but to the elision of the penultimate e:67 O Mother Ida, many-fountained Ida, Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. I waited underneath the dawning hills, Aloft the mountain lawn was dewy-dark, And dewy-dark aloft the mountain-pine; Beautiful Paris, evil-hearted Paris, Leading a jet-black goat, white-horned, white-hooved, Came up from reedy Simois all alone. [. . .] Dear mother Ida, harken ere I die. He smiled, and opening out his milk-white palm, Disclos'd a fruit of pure Hesperian gold, That smelt ambrosially, and while I looked And listened, the full-flowing river of speech Came down upon my heart. `My own ênone, Beautiful brow'd ênone, my own soul, Behold this fruit, whose gleaming rind ingraven `For the most fair', would seem to award it thine, As lovelier than whatever Oread haunt The knolls of Ida, loveliest in all grace Of movement, and the charm of married brows'.

50

65

70

Lyttelton is not wholly consistent: where generally he rejects Tennyson's use of -'d as a regular verb ending, inexplicably he alters Tennyson's disclosed to disclos'd (l. 65). He accepts -'d in the parasynthetic beautiful brow'd (l. 69), although he removes Tennyson's hyphen, yet rejects it in

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Mayst well behold them unbeheld, unheard

Hear all, and see thy Paris judge of Gods'' '.

many-fountained (l. 44). The voiced -ed in looked (l. 66) is conceivably favoured over look'd as a metrical consideration, assuming that Lyttelton read ambrosially as three syllables. Four would be more appropriate, however, as this would maintain the iambic mood of the two lines on either side.68 In view of the clear linguistic lines drawn in the sand by Tennyson's reviewers, Donald S. Hair's recent call in Tennyson's Language to read the poet with greater attention to the enormous interest in language study in the 1830s deserves reiterating. This interest was, after all, largely due to the encouragement given to Germanic philology in Britain by members of the Cambridge Apostles, who included Tennyson's closest Trinity College friends: John Mitchell Kemble, Arthur Hallam, Richard Chenevix Trench and Frederick Denison Maurice. Added to which, Julius Hare, co-author of Guesses at Truth, was Tennyson's tutor, and William Whewell, who would write influentially on philology, was his Trinity master.69 Indeed, it would have been difficult for Tennyson to have avoided encountering the rapid and exciting developments in philology at this time.70 As Patrick Greig Scott suggests, Tennyson would have expected a `linguistic awareness' from his readers, an awareness that is as relevant today as it was in the 1830s.71 At a time when language was thought to mirror culture as a whole, the early nineteenth century witnessed a series of far-reaching battles fought over issues of literary taste and linguistic propriety. While Britain was busy building imperial edifices on linguistic foundations, the relationship between conservative reviewers and `radical' writers has rarely been more animated. This section has focused on a comparatively minor point, unhyphenated compounds, in a relatively minor work, `ênone'.72 I hope, though, that the revision of Tennyson's work may now be seen in the context of wider, more profoundly unsettling issues surrounding the challenge of non-standard writing at this time. While it is hardly to be supposed that word-division alone, however idiosyncratic, signalled cultural apocalypse to even the most conservative of Tennyson's readers, unhyphenated compounds were suggestive of processive views of language change that disturbed defenders of a fixed English idiom. Taken together with `Cockney' neologisms, factitious usages, neo-archaisms, unfamiliar orthography and innovative diction, Tennyson's early linguistic experiments were supremely unnerving. As we have seen, they elicited a draconian response from editors and reviewers that was no less violent, or effective, for being silent.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

186 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

How pure at heart and sound in head, With what divine affections bold Should be the man whose thoughts would hold An hour's communion with the dead. (In Memoriam, xciii) I began the introduction to this book by questioning the wisdom of attempting to speak with the dead. My reservations did not derive from fears of spectral visitations. On the contrary, while writing this study I would have welcomed the manifestation of a `visual shade' or two; they might have been able to clarify points in my argument where I had become stuck. My doubts were rather grounded in practicalities, in the suspicion that Tennyson was correct to conclude: `In vain shalt thou, or any, call j The spirits from their golden day' (In Memoriam, xciii). If I haven't been engaged in actual `communion' with the dead, though, I have spent many hours eavesdropping on their conversations, on the exchanges still audible to us in words and phrases that echo and reverberate ± albeit faintly at times ± from one text to another. Thus we hear Condillac in Keats's letters and odes, Wordsworth in Hunt's Preface to Rimini, Coleridge and Julius Hare in Tennyson's early poems. The present volume has not simply endeavoured to trace influence between individual figures, however. It has looked at the early nineteenth century with both eyes open to the continuities, alliances and associations ± political and literary ± that existed between groups of authors. In this manner it extends Jeffrey N. Cox's magisterial investigation of a `Cockney' community of writers, to argue that Wordsworth, Leigh Hunt, Keats, Percy Shelley and Tennyson deserve to be considered as part of an ongoing project to effect political change through 187

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Afterword

a reform of poetic language. As we have seen, the attempt to uncouple the designation `genuine' from inherited modes of poetic discourse included Wordsworth's positing of a democratic, rustic alternative to elite, metropolitan `hieroglyphics', Hunt's insistence on the authority of the `actual, existing language', Keats's subversion of `polite' diction with `Cockney jargon' and Tennyson's challenge to the grammar and orthography of poetry. Contestations such as these belong within a wider framework of oppositional politics, and draw on a mutual epistemology of eighteenth-century philological debates. Philology and the history of linguistic ideas has not been fashionable for many years, despite the fact that Tom Shippey's The Road to Middle Earth (second edition, 1992), has demonstrated how much fun one can have with both. In the light of Shippey's book, the idea of reading Tolkien without taking due note of his background in philological scholarship appears ludicrous. Yet we persist in reading authors like Keats, and even Tennyson (Donald S. Hair's work is a notable exception here), as if they didn't produce their work in the middle of paradigmatic shifts in the way language itself was conceived. Moreover, the dust that coats the `philological approach' in the modern critical imagination has helped those who would see `language' (together with linguists) edged out of literary studies in universities. It is not even that `Lang.' has simply ceded to `Lit.' in the curriculum. Both `Lang.' and `Lit.' have been ± or, at the very least, are being ± displaced in favour of a curious form of critical practice that seems to produce little that is concrete, other than the concreteness of knowing that everything is relative. I am not `against theory'. Far from it: the present book has a clear and declared theoretical reflex. But I am sceptical of theory that cuts its anchors with both language and literature to float in a realm of `play' ± theory that seeks to persuade us that defamiliarization, diffeÂrance and dissolved subjects are more important to understanding authors like Keats and Tennyson than the issues that actually seem to have been crucial to these figures themselves. The fact remains that philology was one of the most significant forums of thought in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, possibly the most significant. It embraced a number of salient issues ± some of which were receiving cogent formulation for the first time ± relating to the nature and knowability of discourse, the historical interchange between language and society, the relationship between language and power, together with questions concerning agency and autonomy in language. It also produced satellite debates over censorship, literary propriety, education and the role of editors and reviewers in the political world. With this in mind, it should

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

188 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

not seem at all surprising that Romantic figures determined to make theories of language the bedrock of their challenge to establishment literary and (thus) political values. It would have been odd if they had not. As I have argued, too, while Romantics saw philology as a science of great utility and sought to make their position on language the basis for confrontations of various kinds, hostile commentators, who shared the eighteenth-century belief that linguistic change reverberated within wider culture, chose to interpret `odd'-looking poems as the harbingers of general decline. Reviewers were quick to recognize that new attitudes towards language could not simply, or adequately, be ascribed to the idiosyncrasies of individual authors, but were indicative of processive change. In response, cultural adjudicators such as Lockhart and Croker, the `soi-disant guardians of public taste, morals, and politics', determined to prevent at any cost language becoming the battleground on which conservative ideology was to engage Romanticism. They decided that experimental writers like Hunt and Keats were (or could be made to appear) more vulnerable to gibes about their social background and sexual conduct than to assaults on their linguistic philosophies. Points of pressure were typically marked by the introduction of `decoy' arguments. These included spats fought over Hunt's meagre education, Barry Cornwall's `corniness', Keats's low birth, immaturity or prurience, and Tennyson's Cockneyism (a totemistic charge that, earlier experience had shown, removed the need for serious debate about diction). The effectiveness of these stratagems is attested to by the fact that philological dimensions to Romantic works are frequently no longer visible; indeed, the connection between philology and Romanticism per se now seems strained and fanciful, although I have sought to remedy that here. It is a singular circumstance that modern criticism spends so much time investigating Keats's efforts to transcend his class origins, or Hunt's political tutelage of Keats ± debates originally set in motion by Lockhart ± when the equally, or possibly more, illuminating philological character of Hunt's and Keats's radical critique of established values, or the influence of Hunt's linguistics on the reception of Wordsworth, are underexplored. At the same time, therefore, as drawing attention to Romanticism's philological reflex, I have endeavoured to unweave the ideological webs woven by conservative reviewers around Romantic publications. I would like to conclude by reiterating my broad argument. I have suggested that the range and heat of the issues, attendant disputations and controversies within philology helped determine the character of

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Afterword 189

Romantic literature, as well as deciding the tenor of its reception. In so far as this is both my conclusion and initial premise, my book responds to a broadly materialist understanding of literary history. By the same token, I have attempted to retain a space in my analysis for the possibility of creative autonomy, for an aesthetic that operates in, but which is separate from, history. Materialist perspectives are extremely useful in exposing meshes of connectivity between authors, texts and contexts, but they cannot, ultimately, disclose all the ways in which a work like `La Belle Dame Sans Merci' or `Ode on a Grecian Urn' comes into being. My final position would be to insist that these and other Romantic texts are intimately detained by contemporary language debates, but are not limited to, or circumscribed by, that frame of reference alone. That said, if we continue disregarding the conduits of thought linking Romantic authors to the philological debates of the day, we ignore a vital element in the production of Romantic literature. To treat eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philology as something that did not happen to Romantic figures is to risk losing sight of one of the major contexts in the development of Romanticism as an intellectual, aesthetic and political movement.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

190 The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature

Preface 1. `The Language of Nature: Inquiries into a Concept of Eighteenth-Century British Linguistics', in Progress in Linguistic Historiography, ed. Konrad Koerner, Studies in the History of Linguistics, 20 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1980), pp. 155±73, at p. 155. 2. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1830±4), IX, 24.

Introduction 1. See Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988), p. 2. 2. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). 3. Jerome K. McGann, `Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism', Modern Language Notes, 94 (May, 1979), 988±1032, at p. 1017. 4. Nicholas Roe, (ed.) Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), p. 195. 5. Michael J. Sider, The Dialogic Keats: Time and History in the Major Poems (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), p. 6. 6. `La Belle Dame Sans Merci' explores the psychological swirls and eddies associated with Keats's efforts to choose a poetic idiom. Since the poem is concerned with dramatizing a defining moment of prior crisis, it does not arrive at any resolutions (as opposed to `On first looking into Chapman's Homer', which is discussed in Chapter 3). The knight-at-arms loiters indecisively in the last stanza, as he does in the first. Nevertheless, the ballad's ploy of using pre-Restoration verbal patterns rather than neoclassical `diction' testifies that the linguistic dictums of the `pale kings and princes', the prose essayists and eighteenth-century mandarins of taste, have been rejected. Anne Mellor is therefore wrong to conclude that `La Belle Dame Sans Merci' reveals Keats's `psychological need to ally himself with his male peers'. The poem is about precisely the opposite: the difficult process of deciding for the `language strange' that is linked with the Lady. See Anne Mellor, `Keats and the Complexities of Gender', in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 223. 7. A Sicilian Story, with Diego de Montilla and Other Poems (London: Ollier, 1820). 8. `Wordsworth on Language: Towards a Radical Poetics for English Romanticism', Wordsworth Circle, 3 (1972), 204±11, at p. 204. 9. See `Language Theory and the Art of Understanding', in The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 5, Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 166. 191

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Notes

10. See Michael O'Neill, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Clarendon, 1997) 11. On 3 November 1817, Keats informed Benjamin Bailey: `There has been a flaming attack on Hunt [ . . .] I never read anything so virulent ± accusing him of the greatest Crimes ± dep[r]eciating his Wife his Poetry ± his Habits ± his company, his Conversation' (Letters, I, 179±80). Keats is referring to the first instalment in the `Cockney School of Poetry' reviews in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine.

Chapter 1 Paradigms Lost (and Regained): EighteenthCentury Language Theory 1. John Wilson Croker, `The Story of Rimini, A Poem', Quarterly Review, 14 (1816), 473±81, at p. 477. 2. `The idea of ``the real language of men'' in the 1800 ``Preface'' to Lyrical Ballads; or Enfield's idea of language derived from Condillac', Romanticism on the Net, 11 (1998) [10.4.2001] http://users.ox.ac.uk/scat0385/real.html. 3. A Short Introduction to English Grammar: with Classical Notes, new edn, corrected (London: Dodsley, 1778), p. x. 4. Dictionary of the English Language; in which the Words are deduced from their Originals, Explained in their different meanings, and authorized by the names of the writers in whose works they are found, abstracted from Folio edn (London: Tegg, 1813), p. 16. 5. The Plan of a Dictionary (1747), repr. in English Linguistics 1500±1800, 223, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar, 1968), p. 4. 6. Proper English? Readings in Language, History and Cultural Identity (London: Routledge, 1991), p. 3. 7. Letter signed `ABD', Gentleman's Magazine, 58, i (1788), 7±8, at p. 7. 8. Dissertations on the English Language (1789), repr. in English Linguistics 1500± 1800, 54, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar, 1967), p. 32; hereafter Dissertations. 9. The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Theosopher, to which is prefixed the Life of the Author, with Figures Illustrating his Principles, ed. William Law, 4 vols (London: Richardson, 1764±81); hereafter cited as Works. 10. See Aarsleff, From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 290±1. 11. Dramatic Scenes and Marcian Colonna (1819), repr. in Romantic Context, Poetry, Significant Minor Poetry 1789±1830, ed. Donald Reiman (London: Garland, 1978), p. iii. 12. Adam Smith, `Considerations Concerning the First Formations of Languages and the Different Genius of Original and Compounded Languages' (1761), repr. in J. Ralph Lindgren, The Early Writings of Adam Smith (New York: Kelley, 1967); Joseph Priestley, A Course of Lectures on the Theory of Language and Universal Grammar (1762), repr. in English Linguistics 1500±1800, 235, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar, 1970). 13. In a letter to Josiah Wedgwood, Coleridge makes a similar point that the `fate' of words was to signify first particular, then general meanings, Collected

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

192 Notes

14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30. 31.

Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956±71), II, 697. Hereafter Collected Letters. The process was reversible, however. Coleridge clarifies that in exceptional circumstances, a general term could be `confined to some one particular again, & so forth'. Coleridge urged for a similar modification of Horne Tooke's views in his Preface to Aids to Reflection (1825), a book that sought to `direct the reader's attention to the value of the Science of Words, their uses and abuse [. . .] and the incalculable advantages attached to the habit of using them appropriately', Aids to Reflection and the Confessions of an Inquiring Spirit (London: Bell, 1913), p. xvi. Coleridge argued that instead of `winged' words, Tooke should have said `living Words', p. xvii. È hme's absence from Reid's closely argued essay is disapIn this respect, Bo pointing; see `Coleridge, Language, and Imagination', Romanticism on the Net, 22 (2001) [9.10.2001] http://users.ox.ac.uk/scat0385/22reid.html. Dissertations, p. 29. Friedrich Schlegel: Kritische Ausgabe Seiner Werke, 20 vols (Paderborn: Ferdinand È ningh, 1958±91), XVII, 268. Scho The Philosophy of Life, and Philosophy of Language, in a Course of Lectures, trans. A. J. W. Morrison (London: Bohn, 1847), p. 407. It was published in English as Treatise upon the Origin of Language (1827). In Aarsleff's estimation, Condillac was equally pivotal in providing `the philosophical foundation of the concept of the Volksgeist with its emphasis on the culture-bound quality of national languages', From Locke to Saussure, p. 31. `Essay on the Origin of Language', trans. Alexander Gode, in Two Essays on the Origin of Language, eds John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966), p. 88. Coleridge's Philosophy of Language (London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 117. Winfred P. Lehmann (ed.), A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Historical IndoEuropean Linguistics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), p. 15. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de SieÁcle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. xiv. `Essay on the Origin of Languages which Treats of Melody and Musical Imitation', trans. John H. Moran, in Two Essays on the Origin of Language, p. 72. The Plan of a Dictionary, p. 17. Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols (1773±92); repr. in English Linguistics 1500±1800, 48, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar, 1967), I, 490. Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991), p. 135. Sharon Turner, `Grammars of the Sanscrita Language', Quarterly Review, 1 (1809), 53±69, at p. 68. Foreword to Maurice Olender, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992), p. x. An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, being a Supplement to Mr. Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, trans. Thomas Nugent (London: Nourse, 1756), p. 6. Essay, p. 297.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Notes 193

32. Coleridge's Philosophy of Language, p. 39. 33. The Politics of Language, p. 118. 34. A Grammar of the English Language, in a Series of Letters, etc, 2nd edn (London: Dolby, 1819), p. 14. 35. The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), p. 250. 36. This theoretical component is a further link connecting Tooke to Condillac, who asserted that `The origin and the progress of our ideas intirely depends on the manner in which we make use of signs', Essay, p. 338. 37. Wordsworth and Coleridge shied away from their former publisher, afraid that association with him would attract unwelcome government attention. Although Johnson did not see Lyrical Ballads through the press in 1798, in that year he published the second edition of the first volume of Tooke's Diversions, as well as Thomas Malthus's An Essay on the Principle of Population. 38. Leigh Hunt's Political and Occasional Essays, p. 140. Hunt is referring to James Harris's Hermes; or, a Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Language and Universal Grammar (1751) 39. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1830±4), XI, 55. Hereafter Complete Works. 40. See The Day-Star of Liberty, p. 249. 41. This was also the tenor of Hazlitt's complaint against previous grammars in his Preface to A New and Improved Grammar of the English Tongue (1811). There Hazlitt rejected `the common method of teaching English grammar by transferring the artificial rules of other languages to our own', Complete Works, II, 5. 42. History of the European Languages, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Constable, 1823), I, 28. Hereafter History. 43. See, for instance, James Browne's merciless review of Murray, `Origin and Affinities of Languages', Edinburgh Review, 51 (1830), 529±64. In A Manual of Comparative Philology (1838), William Balfour Winning remarked that the `treatise of Professor Murray on the European languages, though it displays extensive knowledge and diligent research, is scarcely mentioned without ridicule', p. 9. 44. Three Philological Essays, Chiefly translated from the German of John Christopher Adelung, trans. A. F. M. Willich (London: Longman, 1798), p. xxxvi. Hereafter Philological Essays. 45. In so far as Adelung's volume charts the history of literature ± if only as a means of illustrating the history of language ± David Perkins is wrong to state that the `first complete history of English literature [. . .] was by Robert Chambers in 1837', Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 5, Romanticism, ed. Marshall Brown (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 339. The trust Perkins appears to store in the idea of a `complete' history is, in any case, as misplaced as that informing the decision of the editors of the Cambridge History of Literary Criticism to advertise their account of Western literary criticism as `comprehensive'. 46. In Adelung's schema, like Condillac's, authors are held responsible for cultivating national language. 47. The New Cratylus; or, Contributions Towards a More Accurate Knowledge of the Greek Language (Cambridge: Deighton, 1839), p. 64.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

194 Notes

48. Also see Dowling, p. xiv; and Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780± 1860, 2nd rev. edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), pp. 148±53. 49. `Lord Leveson Gower's Poems and Translations', Edinburgh Review, 52 (1830), 231±61, at pp. 247±8. James Browne expressed a comparable opinion just three months earlier in the same journal when he proposed that language was the `reflected image [. . .] of the thoughts and feelings of those who use it', and that it was coloured by the `influence of local position, physical constitution, mode of life, laws, manners, usages, religion, and foreign intercourse', Edinburgh Review, 51 (1830), 535. In 1815, Francis Cohen and William Gifford asserted a similar view ± but one emphasizing how language influenced modes of life and manners, rather than the other way around, as in Browne: `The cast of our thoughts, notions, and ideas, is [. . .] dependent on the character of the language in which they are presented'. So much so, Cohen and Gifford suggested, that when modern authors write in Latin, the language `Romanizes' the scene; `Dunlop's History of Fiction', Quarterly Review, 13 (1815), 384±408, at p. 392. Standpoints like these persisted long into the `scientific' age of language study in Britain. In 1858, George Webbe Dasent asserted that `the history of a race is, in fact, the history of its language, and can be nothing else', Popular Tales from the Norse, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1859), p. xxi. 50. English Etymology; or, a Derivative Dictionary of the English Language (London: Robinson, 1783), p. iii. Hereafter Derivative Dictionary. 51. The Plan of a Dictionary, p. 11. The Dictionary itself was envisaged first and foremost as a written standard, a linguistic monument that would be impervious to change and would actually stave off semantic instability. See Tony Crowley, `Bakhtin and the History of the Language', in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, ed. Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), pp. 68±90, at p. 79. 52. The Early Writings of Adam Smith, p. 249. Richard Garnett endorsed this view, asserting that in linguistic matters, people `seldom fail to corrupt what they do not altogether understand', Quarterly Review, 57 (1836), 96. Such pronouncements lent credence to the notion of Latin and Greek as incomparably excellent languages, whose speakers were correspondingly superior. 53. It becomes clear that in Monboddo's title, `progress' is used with the sense of `history of' rather than `advance'. 54. Two Essays on the Origin of Language, p. 97. 55. Ibid., p. 16. 56. Quarterly Review, 57 (1836), 96. 57. In one respect, of course, the tactic of privileging previous ages ± even those lying in English rather than classical literary history ± was dangerous. It risked reinforcing the suspicion that in its current state, as employed by current writers, the national language was woefully impoverished. 58. The British Grammar; or, an Essay in Four Parts towards Speaking and Writing the English Language Grammatically, 3rd edn (London: Johnson, 1779), p. xv. Hereafter British Grammar. 59. Buchanan was a reformer in other respects. Keenly aware that disparity in education had a distinct gender basis, he declared:

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Notes 195

196 Notes

60. The comprehensiveness of Buchanan's typographically cramped Grammar evidently overwhelmed one reader (presumably a school child), whose annotations in the National Library of Wales's copy become increasingly idiosyncratic. On page 102 there is a meticulous attempt at reproducing freehand the Roman typeface used in Buchanan's heading, `A Table of all the Pronouns'. At various points thereafter, variants on `Supper Dinner Breakfast' have been copied into rare empty spaces in the text, suggesting that if nothing else reading the British Grammar enabled one to work up a decent appetite. 61. A Practical Grammar of the English Language, in which the Several Parts of Speech are Clearly and Methodically Explained (Glasgow: McLean, 1766), p. xiii. 62. A Grammar of the English Tongue: with the Arts of Logick, Rhetorick, Poetry, &c., Illustrated with Useful Notes; Giving the Grounds and Reasons of Grammar in General, 7th edn (London: Lintot, 1746), p. v. 63. A Grammar of the English Language, in a Series of Letters: Intended for the Use of Schools and of Young Persons in General; but more Especially for the Use of Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Plough-boys. To Which are Added Six Lessons, intended to Prevent Statesmen from Using False Grammar, and from Writing in an Awkward Manner, 9th edn (London: W. Cobbett, 1833), unpaginated, letter xxiv. The six lessons from which the above quotation is taken were added in the edition of 1823. 64. A Grammar of the English Language, p. 14. 65. The Politics of Language, 1791±1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 248. 66. `The English Language', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 45 (1839), 455±62, at p. 457.

Chapter 2 Wordsworth, Radical Diction and the Real Language of Men 1. `Mr. Wordsworth', in The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: Dent, 1830±4), XI, 87. Hereafter Complete Works. Twentiethcentury critics, in different ways, have generally endorsed Hazlitt's sense of the radicalism of Lyrical Ballads. For Helen Darbishire, writing in 1950, Lyrical Ballads marked `a revolution in poetry', The Poet Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950), p. 35. Still more recently, Paul Hamilton describes the volume as exploring the `ambiguous effect of literature's power to internalize and transform a society's view of itself', Wordsworth (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986), p. 41. In John Rieder's words, the Preface to Lyrical Ballads `convenes poet and audience in a radically democratic scene', Wordsworth's Counterrevolutionary Turn: Community, Virtue, and Vision in the 1790s (London: Associated University Presses, 1997), p. 17.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

It is greatly to be lamented that the Fair Sex have been in general so shamefully neglected with regard to a proper English Education. Many of them, by the unthinking Part of the Males, are considered and treated rather as Dolls, than as intelligent social Beings. (British Grammar, p. xxx)

2. This book departs in an important respect from David Simpson, who asserts that `Wordsworth's ``democratic'' successors, Keats, Shelley and Byron' did not understand the `linguistic premise' of Wordsworth's poetics; moreover, that `only his enemies, in their enduring campaign on behalf of decorum, seemed to have glimpsed the truly radical potential in the poet's faith in the real language of men', Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (London: Methuen, 1987), p. 107. On the contrary, I suggest ± will be demonstrating in subsequent chapters ± that these `democratic' successors, especially Hunt, fully grasped the radical nature of Wordsworth's philological project and incorporated it as a key component of their own linguistic contestations. 3. Edinburgh Review, 1 (1802), 63±83, at p. 71. 4. The Politics of Language, 1791±1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 208. 5. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), III, 66. Hereafter cited as Prose Works. 6. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de SieÁcle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. xiv. 7. This was a nationalistic enterprise that the Grimm brothers were to continue with the Kinder- und HausmaÈrchen (1812±15) and the monumental Deutsches WoÈrterbuch (begun 1854). For the various nationalistic agendas served by the MaÈrchen, see John M. Ellis, One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Michael Baron develops an illuminating discussion of Herder's influence on Wordsworth in Language and Relationship in Wordsworth's Writing (London: Longman, 1995), pp. 15±16, 130±3. 8. In 1798, two different versions of Johnson's Dictionary, one with a `correct standard of pronunciation' and `historical account of the author's life', and the other containing `an alphabetical account of the heathen deities', went into their eighth and ninth editions respectively. 9. In turn, Johnson's Dictionary used examples from `the words and phrases [. . .] found in the works of those whom we commonly stile [sic] polite writers', notably Pope, to fix the language. See Plan of a Dictionary (1747), repr. in English Linguistics 1500±1800, 223, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar, 1968), p. 4. 10. For Enfield's influence on Wordsworth and Coleridge, see Ruriko Suzuki, `The idea of ``the real language of men'' in the 1800 ``Preface'' to Lyrical Ballads; or Enfield's idea of language derived from Condillac', Romanticism on the Net, 11 (1998) [10.4.2001] http://users.ox.ac.uk/scat0385/real.html. 11. See Hans Aarsleff, `Wordsworth, Language, and Romanticism', Essays in Criticism, 30 (1980), 215±26. 12. See Andrew Wawn, The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000), p. 45. As Wawn points out, the records of the Bristol Library Society show that Wordsworth and Coleridge borrowed the Society's copy of the Edda (1787) on more than one occasion (p. 57). The publisher of Lyrical Ballads, Joseph Cottle, was also a keen northernist and the author of Alfred, which reached a third edition in 1816.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Notes 197

13. At any rate, as Scott McEathron puts it, `in recent years we have become increasingly wary of Wordsworth's passionate and vigorous declarations of originality', `Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant Poetry', Nineteenth-Century Literature, 54 (1999), 1±26, at p. 1. 14. Wordsworth, p. 43. From establishment perspectives, the Revolution had been an `experiment' in rearranging human society with feckless disregard for consequences and victims. 15. For Worrall's account of the Panton Street Debating Club, see Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790±1820 (London: Harvester Press, 1992), pp. 35±41. 16. See Kenneth R. Johnston, The Hidden Wordsworth, 2nd edn (London: Pimlico, 2000), p. 384. 17. Wordsworth's notion of plain-speaking and the idea of a `plainer, more emphatic language' is closely associated with the idea of honest, low- or middle-class life and work ± whether this involved ploughing or sailing for Cobbett, or peddling for Hazlitt. In his essay `On Familiar Style' in Table Talk (1822), Hazlitt proclaims: `As an author I endeavour to employ plain words and popular modes of construction, as were I a chapman and dealer, I should common weights and measures', Complete Works, VIII, 244. 18. Identification with one's subject (as with one's reader), might be considered the apogee of a democratic project. The precarious nature of Wordsworth's claims to identify with the feelings of his poetic characters is, however, ultimately acknowledged by Wordsworth himself. In 1802, he writes: It will be the wish of the Poet to bring his feelings near to those of the persons whose feelings he describes, nay, for short spaces of time perhaps, to let himself slip into an entire delusion, and even confound and identify his own feelings with theirs; modifying only the language which is suggested to him, by a consideration that he describes for a particular purpose, that of giving pleasure. (Preface, p. 256).

19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

Aside from the caveat on modified language, which occurs in various guises throughout the Preface, the phrase `entire delusion' undercuts Wordsworth's pretensions to a community of feeling, as well as disrupting the transference of pleasure that lies at the basis of his poetics, an exchange Lucy Newlyn has recently called Wordsworth's `erotics of reading'. See Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 106. Edinburgh Review, 1 (1802), 71. Johnson had also published works by other problematic literati such as Godwin, Horne Tooke, Blake and Wollstonecraft. Dual authorship was not common in the eighteenth century, and in itself may have smacked of `assembly'. Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), p. 20. See Wordsworth's Language of Men (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984), pp. 4±5. Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 7.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

198 Notes

25. Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), p. 33. 26. Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth's `Lyrical Ballads' (1798) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), p. 211. 27. As Ayumi Mizukoshi suggests, the `rediscovery of the native cultural heritage was in steady progress throughout the last half of the eighteenth century'; `The Cockney Politics of Gender ± the Cases of Hunt and Keats', Romanticism on the Net, 14 (1999) [9.4.2001] http://users.ox.ac.uk/scat0385/cockneygender.html. 28. Preface, p. 252. The quotations are from Gray's `Sonnet on the Death of Richard West' (1742), and are used by Wordsworth to illustrate the defects of `elaborate' or `elevated' diction. Although this idiom was routinely described as `polite' or `refined' by its detractors, the terms are somewhat misleading since it could be argued that no one spoke like this, polite or otherwise. In a sense, this is Wordsworth's point in the Appendix when he denounces poets' `tricks, quaintnesses, hieroglyphics and enigmas' (p. 316). 29. Complete Works, XI, 54. 30. Fiona Stafford traces `last-man' figures in literature in her excellent study, The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). 31. It is not entirely clear why man's gratitude should leave the speaker mourning. Frederick Garber is right to surmise that the poem `complicates itself quite beautifully' in the final four lines, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Encounter (London: University of Illinois Press, 1971), p. 104. 32. Wordsworth's Great Period Poems, p. 61. 33. Leonard's surname, `Ewbank', lays further emphasis on the brothers' connection to place, to the land. Wordsworth puns on this link with the soil in lines 316±17: `Leonard Ewbank was come home again, j From the great Gavel, down by Leeza's Banks'. The name of the mountain, which includes a dialect form, `Gavel', is glossed by Wordsworth (`so called I imagine, from its resemblance to the Gable end of a house', p. 146), reinforcing the passage's concern with individual (dis)placement and communal belonging. Those who live near the great Gavel presumably need no annotations to disclose the word's meaning. 34. Wordsworth: Play and Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press ± now Palgrave Macmillan, 1986), pp. 207±8. 35. As James A. Butler points out, the priest's disparaging reference to `tourists' ± together with another negative occurrence of the term in the manuscript poem `On seeing some Tourists of the Lakes' (composed late July 1800) ± indicates that Wordsworth is `anxious about his own Lake District ``tourist'' experiences'; see `Tourist or Native Son: Wordsworth's Homecomings of 1799±1800', Nineteenth-Century Literature, 51 (1996), 1±15, at pp. 1±2. 36. Literary Gazette, 30 March 1822, 191±2, at p. 191. 37. Critical Review, 24 (1798), 197±204, at p. 200. 38. Analytical Review, 28 (1798), 583±7, at p. 583. 39. Monthly Review, 2nd series, 29 (1799), 202±10, at p. 203. Burney's image of the counterfeit medal seems to have worried Wordsworth, forcing him to think hard about forgery as a literary act. In his 1815 `Essay, Supplementary to the Preface', he discusses Macpherson's Ossian poems and Chatterton's Rowley fabrications, using Burney's medal as a central figure. Such works, Wordsworth

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Notes 199

40. 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50.

51. 52.

points out, successfully demonstrated that `few critics were able to distinguish between a real ancient medal and a counterfeit of modern manufacture'. He concludes that forgeries were `worthless' nevertheless; Prose Works, III, 78. There is a nervousness (`few critics [are] able to distinguish') underlying these pronouncements, possibly indicating Wordsworth's unease over the status of his own appropriation of the form and spirit of `our elder writers'. New London Review, 1 (1799), 33±5, at p. 33. The Politics of Language, 1791±1819, pp. 208±9. British Critic, 14 (1799), 364±9, at pp. 364, 365. Hazlitt addresses `unmeaning pomp' in literature in his essay `On Familiar Style', Complete Works, VIII, 242. The best way of avoiding pomp, Hazlitt advises, is to attend to the `true idiom of the language'. He borrows from Wordsworth to explain that `to write a genuine familiar or truly English style, is to write as any one would speak in common conversation, who had a thorough command and choice of words, or who could discourse with ease, force, and perspicuity, setting aside all pedantic and oratorical flourishes', Complete Works, VIII, 242. `The reason why I object to Dr. Johnson's style', Hazlitt continues, is that `he uses none but ``tall, opaque words'', taken from the ``first row of the rubric'': ± words with the greatest number of syllables, or Latin phrases with merely English terminations', Complete Works, VIII, p. 243. British Critic, 17 (1801), 125±31, at p. 125. In 1807, Jeffrey reiterated his objections in equally strong terms, referring to Wordsworth's `open violation of the established laws of poetry', Edinburgh Review, 11 (1807), 214±31, at p. 231. Edinburgh Review, 1 (1802), 63±83, at p. 63. Eclectic Review, 4 (1808), 35±43, at pp. 36±7. Eclectic Review, 5 (1809), 744±50, at p. 744. Montgommery is alluding to the pamphlet's full title, which is long, rhetorical, and contains several embedded clauses. Critical Review, 3rd series, 11 (1807), 399±403, at p. 400. There is, moreover, a crucial difference between `genuine poetry' and the `enthusiasms' of genuine poetry. Robert Morrison terms such modes of critical register the `language of extremity': see `Blackwood's Berserker: John Wilson and the Language of Extremity', Romanticism on the Net, 20 (2000) [15.9.2001] http://users.ox. ac.uk/scat0385/20morrison.html. `Galt's Life of Lord Byron', Edinburgh Review, 52 (October, 1830), 228±30, at p. 230. The heightened pitch of exchange not only provoked a number of dark allusions to `satisfaction' between antagonistic reviewers and poets (Hunt, for instance, challenged `Z' to a duel), but actually resulted in the death of the editor of Baldwin's London Magazine, John Scott. In February 1821, urged on by Sir Walter Scott, Jonathan Christie fought the ill-fated editor over an attack in the London Magazine on Christie's friend, John Gibson Lockhart (rightly held responsible in liberal circles for Z's `Cockney School of Poetry' reviews in Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine). For a detailed account of events, in particular Sir Walter Scott's bloodthirsty role, see Duncan Wu, `John Scott's Death and Lamb's ``Imperfect Sympathies'' ', The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 114 (2001), 38±50.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

200 Notes

53. Edinburgh Review, 24 (1813), 1±30, at p. 30. 54. Quarterly Review, 14 (1815), 201±25, at p. 205. 55. This is a mixture of Locke/Condillac. Condillac argues, for instance, that `signs are arbitrary the first time they are employed', and adds that `custom fixes the meaning of words' (Essay, pp. 298, 306). Lyall's point was partially prefigured by a critic for the Satirist in 1807, who complained that Wordsworth adhered to his theory `as if language were not entirely factitious and arbitrary; as if men of all ranks and situations were not creatures of habit; as if the expressions of the meanest individuals were not the result of the education which they receive, while those of the higher orders are rendered natural by long usage to the well-informed and accomplished part of mankind', Satirist, 1 (1807), 188±91, at p. 189. At the same time as the privilege of polite society is naturalized, Wordsworth's theory of the `real language of men' is undermined by the refutation of any essential connectedness between words and social history. The reviewer concludes that Wordsworth only displays `genuine talent' when he forgets his system and consults his feelings (an observation that militates somewhat against previous comments on linguistic arbitrariness and human agency in language). 56. The transformative possibilities offered by this equation were a source of hope for Romantics, who believed that a reformed poetic language could be an instrument for social reform, and a source of dismay for establishment figures, who believed essentially the same. 57. British Lady's Magazine, 2 (1815), 33±7, at p. 33. 58. British Review, 6 (1815), 370±7, at p. 371. 59. Edinburgh Monthly Review, 2 (1819), 654±61, at pp. 654, 655. 60. Literary Chronicle, 29 May 1819, 20±1, at p. 21. 61. Literary Gazette, 1 May 1819, 273±5, at p. 273. 62. The Story of Rimini, a Poem (London: Murray, 1816) p. v. The passage is slightly misquoted in the Scourge and Satirist, 12 (1816), 60±72, at pp. 62, 60. 63. Complete Works, V, 161±2. 64. For more on Hunt's colourful spell in prison, see Greg Kucich, ` ``The Wit in the Dungeon'': Leigh Hunt and the Insolent Politics of Cockney Coteries', European Romantic Review, `Special Issue: 1798 and Its Implications', 10 (1999), 242±53. 65. Eclectic Review, n.s. 12 (1819), 74. 66. Even apparently favourable mentions of Wordsworth's linguistic philosophy after 1816 ± in his first `Cockney School of Poetry' review (1817), Lockhart declared that Wordsworth's `great charm' consisted of his `dignified purity of thought' and `patriarchal simplicity of feeling' (Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 2, 1817, p. 40) ± are not, properly speaking, anomalies within the reviewing phenomenon I have been describing. As Jeffrey N. Cox suggests, concerted efforts to `recover' Wordsworth's reputation are predicated on making newly available a set of abusive critical terms that had been used with great effect on the `Lake' School of Poetry: `If Wordsworth had been accused of offering emotionally immature poetry, of being childish, babyish, a ransacker of plebeian nurseries, he is now seen as embodying a ``patriarchal simplicity of feeling'' so that Hunt, Johnny Keats and Corny Webb can be infantilized. [. . .] And if the Lakers had been repeatedly taken to task for adopting a mode of linguistic experimentation that broke with the canons

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Notes 201

67. 68. 69. 70. 71. 72.

of poetry, Z. [Lockhart] in his later attack upon Keats would proclaim Wordsworth not only the ``purest'' and ``loftiest'' but also ``the most classical'' of living English poets so that he can be contrasted with Hunt, ``the meanest, the filthiest, and the most vulgar of Cockney poetasters'' ', Jeffrey N. Cox, `Leigh Hunt's Cockney School: The Lakers' ``Other'' ', Romanticism On the Net, 14 (1999) [10.4.2001] http://users.ox.ac.uk/scat0385/huntlakers.html. London Magazine (Gold's), 1 (1820), 617±27, at p. 620. For a full and nuanced investigation into Romantic `after-life', see Andrew Bennett, Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Monthly Censor, 2 (1823), 324±35, at p. 335. See my essay, `John Keats, Barry Cornwall, and Leigh Hunt's Literary PocketBook', Romanticism, 7.ii (2002). See Andrew Bennett, `The Politics of Gleaning in Keats's ``Ode to a Nightingale'' and ``To Autumn''', Keats-Shelley Journal, 34 (1990), 34±8. See John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997).

Chapter 3 The `Cockney School' and Romantic Philology 1. `Z' [J. G. Lockhart], `The Cockney School of Poetry, No. I', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 2 (1817), 38±41, at pp. 38, 40. 2. `On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. IV', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 3 (1818), 519±24, at pp. 521±2. 3. For the insight that cultural crisis frequently emerges out of linguistic crisis, I am indebted to Linda Dowling's deeply original study Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de SieÁcle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. xi. 4. In the Preface to his collected works of 1832, Hunt points out that criticisms directed at Rimini were not motivated by a dislike of odd phrases alone: `For I was a writer of politics as well as verses, and the former [. . .] were as illegal as the sallies of phraseology', The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt (London: Moxon, 1832), p. xvi. Hunt makes an explicit link between, and in a sense acknowledges the conspiracy of, philology and politics. 5. `Hunt's Foliage', Eclectic Review, 2nd series, 10 (1818), 484±93, at p. 490. 6. [George Croly?], Literary Gazette, 4 April 1818, 210±12, at pp. 210±11. 7. `The French School of Poetry' was Hunt's contemptuous term for Pope and his followers: see `Young Poets', Examiner, 1 Dec. 1816, 761±2, at p. 761; also see Hunt's Preface to The Story of Rimini, A Poem (London: Murray, 1816), pp. xiii±xiv. 8. The Feast of the Poets (London: Cawthorn, 1814), p. 31. 9. John Whale, `Romantic Attacks: Pope and the Spirit of Language', in Pope: New Contexts, ed. David Fairer (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1990), p. 154. 10. Examiner, 1 Dec. 1816, p. 761. 11. `Romantic Attacks: Pope and the Spirit of Language', p. 154. 12. Thomas Goggans, `Deferred Desire and the Management of Tone in Leigh Hunt's The Story of Rimini', Keats-Shelley Journal, 50 (2001), 84±99. Michael Eberle-Sinatra calls Rimini one of Hunt's `most important poems', see `From

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

202 Notes

13. 14.

15. 16. 17.

18.

19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

Dante to the Romantics: The Reception History of Leigh Hunt's The Story of Rimini', The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 116 (2001), 120±43, at p. 120. Michael J. Sider, The Dialogic Keats: Time and History in the Major Poems (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998), p. 50. Hunt returns these terms into the wider discussion where they can be reused. Keats possibly transposes `bold' (which, as I show in my main discussion, has a linguistic charge), from line 37 of Rimini into his 1816 sonnet on Chapman's Homer. The sonnet, as I consider later in this chapter, culminates in the election of an emphatic pre-Restoration idiom capable of speaking `loud and bold', over inherited literary protocols. An Universal Etymological English Dictionary; Comprehending the Derivation of the Generality of Words in the English Tongue, either Ancient or Modern, 24th edn (1721; London: Ware, 1776), page three of unpaginated introduction. `On First Looking into Chapman's Musaeus: A Note on Possible Influence', Keats-Shelley Journal, 43 (1994), 27±34, at p. 34. `Denn was war diese erste Sprache als eine Sammlung von Elementen der È rterbuch der Seele' [what was this first language if not a Poesie? [. . .] Ein Wo collection of elements of poetry [. . .] A dictionary of the soul']; Herder, Abhandlung uÈber den Ursprung der Sprache [Treatise on the Origin of Language] (1772), in Johann Gottfried Herder: FruÈhe Schriften 1764±1772, ed. Ulrich Gaier, 10 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985), I, 740. `Chapter on the Origin of Languages which Treats of Melody and Musical Imitation', trans. John H. Moran, in Two Chapters on the Origin of Language, eds John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966), p. 16. This view was supported by one of the most prominent philologists of the day, Franz Bopp. In 1816, Bopp suggested that a comparison of Greek, Latin, German and Persian would reveal the `gradual and graded destruction' of the original `simple speech organism', and the `striving to replace it by mechanical combinations', A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics, ed. and trans. Winfred P. Lehmann (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), p. 43. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), III, 72. Biographia Literaria; or, Biographical Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, 2 vols (1817), eds James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Routledge, 1983), II, 52. Quarterly Review, 14 (1815), 201±25, at p. 205. `Leigh Hunt's Rimini', Quarterly Review, 14 (1816), 473±81, at p. 477. The issue, dated January, actually appeared in May 1816. `On the Cockney School of Poetry, No. VI', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 6 (1819), 70±6, at p. 74. `Noctes Ambrosianae', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 14 (1823), 491. See Dowling, Language and Decadence, p. 15. Also see Hans Aarsleff, The Study of Language in England, 1780±1860, 2nd rev. edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), pp. 144, 147±8. FruÈhe Schriften, I, 737. Hans Aarsleff suggests that for Herder, `language was so intimately bound up with the nature of man that the two were altogether inseparable', The Study of Language in England, 1780±1860, pp. 148±9.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Notes 203

28. Third Anniversary Discourse, On the Hindus' (1786); reprinted in A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics, p. 15 29. The words in quotation marks are from Keats's sonnet, `To B. R. Haydon, with a Sonnet Written on Seeing the Elgin Marbles' (l. 2). 30. See Claude Lee Finney, The Evolution of Keats's Poetry, 2 vols in 1 (1936; New York: Russell & Russell, 1963), pp. 554±5. Most noticeably, Keats borrowed imagery from Browne's Britannia's Pastorals (1613), Bk 1, song 5, ll. 807ff, for the scene where Madeline disrobes before the concealed Porphyro. 31. [Anon.], `William Browne's Pastorals', Retrospective Review, 2, i (1820), 149±85, at p. 167. 32. Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern, trans. John Gibson Lockhart, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1818), II, 58. 33. Quarterly Review, 14 (1816), 474. 34. `Keats's Poems', Scots Magazine, n.s. 2, i (1817), 254±7, at p. 256. 35. John Barnard, John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987), p. 1. 36. Charles and Mary Cowden Clarke, Recollections of Writers (London: Samson Low, 1878), pp. 129. 37. Chapman's Homer, ed. Allardyce Nicoll, 2 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957). 38. The Odyssey of Homer, ed. Maynard Mack, Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 10 vols (London: Methuen, 1967). 39. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 3 (1818), 521. 40. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 2 (1817), 38. 41. See Presences that Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Culture and Literature of the 1790s, forthcoming, University of Wales Press. 42. An Address to that Quarterly Reviewer who Touched upon Mr. Leigh Hunt's `Story of Rimini' (London: Jennings, 1816). Clarke's authorship of this pamphlet is established by John Barnard in `Charles Cowden Clarke and the Leigh Hunt Circle 1812±1818', Romanticism, 3.i (1997), 66±90. 43. `Leigh Hunt's Rimini', Quarterly Review, 14 (1816), 473±81, at 477 [Issue appeared in May 1816]. 44. On 10 July 1816, Hunt wrote to encourage Clarke to publish his pamphlet (this previously unpublished letter is printed in Barnard, `Charles Cowden Clarke and the Leigh Hunt Circle 1812±1818'). The other outside date of publication is clarified by a short notice of the Address, signed `H', which appeared in the August issue of the Theatrical Inquisitor: see `An Address in [sic] the Quarterly Reviewer who touched on [sic] Mr. Leigh Hunt's Story of Rimini', Theatrical Inquisitor and Monthly Mirror, 9 (1816), 119±22. 45. This is Hunt's contemptuous term for Pope and his followers: see his pugnacious essay, `Young Poets', Examiner, 1 Dec. 1816, 761±2, at p. 761; also see his Preface to Rimini, pp. xiii±xiv. 46. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley's Prose: Or The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), pp. 295±6. 47. This has an immediate source in the Appendix to Lyrical Ballads: `The earliest Poets of all nations generally wrote from passion excited from real events; they wrote naturally, and as men: feeling powerfully as they did, their language was daring, and figurative', p. 314. È ttingen, 48. See Jacob Grimm, Deutsche Grammatik, 1819; 2nd rev. edn 4 vols (Go 1822±37), esp. vol. II (1822); also Rasmus Rask, Angelsaksisk Sproglaere

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

204 Notes

49.

50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65. 66.

tilligemed en kort Laesebog (Stockholm, 1817), and Undersùgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse (Copenhagen, 1818). See his correspondence with J. H. Reynolds, dated 21 September 1819, and George and Georgiana Keats, dated 17±27 September 1819; Letters, II, 167, 212. That Chatterton's `medieval' diction was, in one sense, thoroughly bogus is not the overriding issue for Keats, who is fascinated by the idea of a poetic idiom that has loosened its ties with Latin and Greek rather than being detained by matters of historical authenticity. Jeffrey N. Cox has recently explored this mutually supportive network of poets, essayists, editors and dilettantes in his admirable study, Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Thomas Noon Talfourd, `Wallace's Prospects of Mankind, &c. and on the Progress of Literature', Retrospective Review, 2, i (1820), 185±206, at p. 194. See `On Why the Arts are not Progressive', Complete Works, XVIII, 6±7. James Burnet, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols (1773±92), repr. in English Linguistics 1500±1800, no. 48, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar Press, 1967), IV, 167. There is possibly a traditional neo-Alexandrianism about Keats's insistence that he cannot speak of lofty things: even private, Romantic topics, if they are Greek, may present themselves as too prestigious for a modern poet. Charles Neaves, `Franz Bopp's Vocalismus', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 49 (1841), 199±213, at p. 201. Interestingly enough, in Grimm's own opinion the Ursprache lay in pre-history, and was thus impervious to his historical method. Joseph Bosworth, A Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language (London: Longman, 1838), p. clxxi. Martin Aske, Keats and Hellenism: An Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), p. 7. Benjamin Robert Haydon, `Elgin Marbles', Annals of the Fine Arts, 1 (1816), 285. Annals of the Fine Arts, 1 (1817), 354. Grant F. Scott, `Beautiful Ruins: The Elgin Marbles Sonnet in its Historical and Generic Contexts', Keats-Shelley Journal, 39 (1990), 123±50, at p. 132. `Hunt's Foliage', Eclectic Review n.s. 2, 10 (1818), 484±93, at pp. 488±9. In 1830 William Empson insisted that removing classical works from their original contexts in this way was analagous to leading them brutally `in chains to grace an English triumph'; see `Lord Leveson Gower's Poems and Translations', Edinburgh Review, 52 (1830), 231±61, at p. 248. For books in which Keats might have seen engravings of urns, see Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1967), pp. 216±17. The problem of indistinctness seems to be confined to Keats's efforts at ekphrasis, since the sketch of the Sosibios Vase attributed to Keats has remarkably, one could even say obsessively, well-defined outlines (see Jack, plate xxx). Kenneth S. Calhoon, `The Urn and the Lamp: Disinterest and the Aesthetic È rike and Keats', Studies in Romanticism, 26 (1987), 3±25, at p. 21. Object in Mo Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983). Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Routledge, 1983), p. 125.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Notes 205

67. Georg Curtius, The Results of Comparative Grammar in Reference to Classical Scholarship, trans. F. H. Trithen (Oxford: Macpherson, 1851), pp. 8, 29. The original German appeared in 1845. 68. Joseph Conder [?], Eclectic Review, 14 (1820), 158±171, at p. 170. 69. William Whewell, The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded upon their History, 2 vols (1840); 2nd edn, 1847, repr. in The Sources of Science, 41 (London: Cass, 1967), I, 701. Dennis Taylor identifies a `paradox' at the heart of nineteenth-century philology: `while the importance of origins for ultimate understanding was asserted, the possibility of recovering ultimate origins was denied', `Victorian Philology and Victorian Poetry', Victorian Newsletter, 53 (1978), 13±16, at p. 11. 70. `Grimm on the Indo-European Languages', Quarterly Review, 50 (1833), 169± 89, at p. 175. 71. See Tom Shippey, The Road to Middle-Earth, 2nd edn (London: Grafton, 1992), p. 18. 72. Otto Jespersen emphasizes the purely theoretical nature of reconstructed terms: `If etymological dictionaries give as the origin of F. meÂnage (OF. maisnage) a Latin form *mansionaticum, the etymology may be correct, although such a Latin word may never at any time have been uttered'; see Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (London: Allen & Unwin, 1922), p. 83. 73. Reprinted in Jespersen, Language, pp. 81±2. 74. I am grateful to Anne Marggraf-Turley for her assistance in translating Schleicher's original German (which follows), as reprinted in Jespersen (Language, p. 82): [Ein] schaf, [auf] welchem wolle nicht war (ein geschorenes schaf) sah rosse, das [einen] schweren wagen fahrend, das [eine] grosse last, das [einen] menschen schnell tragend. [Das] schaf sprach [zu den] rossen: [Das] herz wird beengt [in] mir (es thut mir herzlich leid), sehend [den] menschen [die] rosse treibend. È re schaf, [das] herz wird beengt [in den] gesehen[Die] rosse sprachen: Ho habenden (es thut uns herzleich leid, da wir wissen): [der] mensch, [der] È r] sich und herr macht [die] wolle [der] schafe [zu einem] warmen kleide [fu [den] schafen ist nicht wolle (die schafe aber haben keine wolle mehr, sie werden geschoren; es geht ihnen noch schlechter als den rossen). È rt habend bog (entwich) [das] schaf [auf das] feld (es machte Dies geho sich aus dem stabe). 75. Walter Jackson Bate, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), p. 510.

Chapter 4

Keats, Condillac and Nathaniel Bailey

1. Garrett Stewart, `Keats and Language', The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), pp. 135±51, at p. 141. 2. The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), pp. 95±119.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

206 Notes

3. See Letters, I, 374, 393±4; II, 65, 200. 4. There is no copy of Condillac in either Magdalen Hall or College libraries. It should be remembered, however, that many records, catalogues and volumes were consumed in the fire of 1823 that destroyed the hall and led to the founding of Hertford College. 5. Keats (London: Faber & Faber, 1997), p. 210. 6. See David Bromwich, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983), p. 399. 7. From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press), p. 147. 8. An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, being a Supplement to Mr. Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, trans. Thomas Nugent (London: Nourse, 1756), p. 91. Hereafter Essay. 9. The lines preceding the chiasmus are: `Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe j Than ours, a friend to man'. They resonate intriguingly with the translator's Preface to the Essay, where Nugent comments that Condillac `shews himself a friend to truth' (p. viii). 10. A letter from Richard Woodhouse to Keats, dated 21 October 1818, also contains a variation on this key coupling. After talking about the poetic `Imagination' (cancelled to `fancy'), Woodhouse says: `It is true that in this age, the mass are not of soul to conceive of themselves or even to apprehend when presented to them, the truly & simply beautiful of poetry', Letters, I, 381. 11. The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 3 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957±), III, 3281. 12. The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), I, 332. 13. The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London and Toronto: Dent, 1830±4), II, 160; hereafter Complete Works. Condillac occurs in a list of problematic materialist thinkers that included Berkeley, Hartley, Hume, Priestley and Horne Tooke, Complete Works, XX, 69. 14. Hans Aarsleff, Condillac's chief modern-day advocate, argues that so much of Herder's thought on the origin of language and the concept of Volksstimme only appears original because of Condillac's long neglect in the history of ideas, From Locke to Saussure, p. 150. 15. Keats claims in the letter to have been `led into these thoughts [. . .] by the beauty of the morning operating on a sense of Idleness ± I have not read any Books'. This assertion of creative autonomy seeks perhaps to obscure the true source of his debt. 16. `It appears to me that almost any Man may like the Spider spin from his own inwards his own airy Citadel', Letters, I, 231. Keats evidently thought that his `free' system of philosophy ± which Condillac confessed did not necessitate reaching (irritably?) after fact, but relied on readers drawing on their own experiences (see pp. 47, 168, 299) ± was easily imitable. 17. The distinctive term `Citadel', possibly suggested by Condillac's castles in the air, also makes an appearance in `Ode on a Grecian Urn' (l. 36). The composition of the ode seems to be tied to Condillac's Essay in a number of ways. 18. In early 1818, Keats suddenly decided to embark on a walking tour of the north, an event which took place between June and August of that year, and

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Notes 207

19. 20. 21.

22.

the Continent (which was never realized), in order to `rub off' some of his prejudices and gain experience of the world. Can it be any coincidence that on page 97 of the Essay ± within the section of the work Keats seems to have read most attentively ± Condillac remarks that `good taste is generally the portion of people who have seen the world'? `Unparodying and Forgery: The Augustan Chatterton', in Nick Groom (ed.), Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (London: Macmillan ± now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999), p. 30. Percy Bysshe Shelley, A Defence of Poetry, in Shelley's Prose: Or The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark (London: Fourth Estate, 1988), p. 279. Echoing Aarsleff, William Keach judges that `The preface to Lyrical Ballads (1800), for all its claims to be signalling a new departure in poetic practice rooted in a new conception of poetry's authentic linguistic base, bears the stamp of Lockean and Condillacian principles'; see `Romanticism and Language' in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, p. 107. An Universal Etymological English Dictionary, 24 edn (1721; London: Ware, 1776), unpaginated. The quoted passage occurs on the first page of Bailey's introduction.

Chapter 5 Nationalism and the Reception of Jacob Grimm by English-Speaking Audiences 1. Philological Museum, 2 (1833), 373±88. 2. Raymond A. Wiley has published a short account of John Mitchell Kemble's support of Grimm; see `Grimm's Grammar Gains Ground in England, 1832± 1852', in The Grimm Brothers and the Germanic Past, ed. Elmer H. Antonsen, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 54 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), pp. 33±42. To my knowledge, however, there has been no comprehensive discussion of the other main figures in the importation of Grimm's philology into British linguistics. 3. `Ancient History of Scotland', Quarterly Review, 41 (1829), 120±62, at p. 131. 4. Coleridge's Philosophy of Language (London: Yale University Press, 1986), p. 150. È ttingen: Dieterichsche Buch5. Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd rev. edn, 4 vols (Go handlung, 1822±37), I, 588. (All references to the first volume are to the revised second edition of 1822.) 6. `On the Probable Future Position of the English Language', Proceedings of the Philological Society, 4 (1848±50), 207±14, at p. 212. 7. As T. L. Markey notes, a correspondence between Rask and Grimm commenced in 1811, but terminated shortly after Grimm's harsh review of Rask's Frisisk Sproglaere in 1825. 8. Foreign Review and Continental Miscellany, 5 (1830), 493±500, at p. 493. 9. Rask refers here to his prize-winning essay, published as Undersùgelse om det gamle Nordiske eller Islandske Sprogs Oprindelse (1818). 10. James Cowles Prichard, The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations Proved by a Comparison of their Dialects with the Sanscrit, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic Languages (London: Arch, 1831). Hereafter Eastern Origin. 11. See Arno Beyer, Deutsche EinfluÈsse auf die englische Sprachwissenschaft im 19. Èppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 324 (Go

Èppingen: kuemJahrhundert, Go merle, 1981), p. 95.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

208 Notes

12. With reference to Prichard's account of Grimm on inflections, Beyer notes that: `In diesem Zusammenhang finden die Begriffe ``starke'' und ``schwache'' Konjugation in ihren englischen Entsprechungen ``strong'' and ``weak'' zum ersten Male Eingang in die englische Sprachwissenschaft' [in this context, the terms `strong' and `weak' conjugations appear in English linguistics for the first time]; Deutsche EinfluÈsse, p. 92. 13. Robert Lowth, A Short Introduction to English Grammar: with Classical Notes, new edition, corrected (London: Dodsley, 1778), p. 105. 14. Tennyson composed a dedicatory sonnet, `To J. M. K', in the belief that Kemble was about to embark upon a career in the church. Kemble did not in the end take this step. 15. Review of Ernst JaÈkel's Der germanische Ursprung der lateinischen Sprache, und des roÈmischen Volkes, Foreign Quarterly Review, 10 (1832), 365±411. 16. `Grimm's Grammar', p. 34. Also see John Mitchell Kemble and Jakob Grimm: A Correspondence 1832±1852 (Leiden: Brill, 1971), p. 7. Hereafter Correspondence. 17. See Deutsche Grammatik, I, 580±92. 18. Letter to Kemble, 26 April 1834, in Correspondence, p. 59. See also Wiley, `Grimm's Grammar', p. 35. 19. `On English Prñterites', Philological Museum, 2 (1833), 373±88. 20. The Study of Language in England, 1780±1860, 2nd rev. edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. 220. See Linda Dowling, Language and Decadence, p. 55, and James C. McKusick, ` ``Living Words'': Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Genesis of the OED', Modern Philology, 90 (1992±3), 1±45, at p. 10. 21. The English Language (London: Taylor & Watson, 1841), p. 309. 22. Letter to Grimm, March 1852, Correspondence, p. 311. Taken from what is È ber den Ursprung possibly Kemble's last letter to Grimm, this passage refers to U der Sprache (1851), which Kemble had just read. 23. Correspondence, p. 268. 24. Tony Crowley, `That Obscure Object of Desire: A Science of Language', in Ideologies of Language, eds John E. Joseph and Talbot J. Taylor (London: Routledge, 1990), pp. 27±50, at p. 39. 25. A Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language (London: Longman, 1838), p. clxxi. 26. `John Mitchell Kemble's review of Jakob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik', ed. Raymond A. Wiley, in Old English Newsletter, Subsidia, 6 (Binghamton, 1981), p. 3. 27. On the Origin of Language [1851] trans. Raymond A. Wiley (Leiden, 1984), p. 20. Grimm delivered his lecture before the Berlin Academy of Science on 9 January 1851. 28. Prichard published Researches into the Physical History of Man (1813); Latham published The Natural History of the Varieties of Man (1850) and The Ethnology of the British Colonies and Dependencies (1851). 29. Letter dated Rotterdam, 28 February, Gentleman's Magazine, 103, i (1833), 207. 30. Gentleman's Magazine, 103, i (1833), 329±31. 31. `Analecta Anglo-Saxonica', Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 1 (1834), 391±3, at p. 391. 32. Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 2 (1834), 140. Wiley identifies `IJ' as James Ingram; see `Grimm's Grammar', p. 37.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Notes 209

33. Letter dated 2 August, signed `TW', Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 2 (1834), 259± 60, at p. 259. 34. `Grimm's Grammar', p. 37. 35. Study of Language in England, p. 197n. Wiley considers the author of this letter to be unidentified; `Grimm's Grammar Gains Ground in England', p. 37. 36. Letter to Grimm, 1 August 1837, Correspondence, p. 150. 37. Letter to Grimm, July 1835, Correspondence, p. 112; see also letter to Grimm, June 1837, pp. 140±1. 38. Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 2 (1834), 362±3. 39. A precedent for using Kemble's own words against him was established in the 2 August 1834 letter from `TW'. 40. Correspondence, p. 108; also see his letter to Grimm of 10 May 1835, pp. 100±1. 41. It seems that Kemble had reached this conclusion by 1837; cf. `Grimm's Grammar', p. 42n. He was, however, evidently still uncertain regarding the identity of `TW' in a letter of 15 November 1834 in the Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 2 (1834), 601±5, at p. 605. 42. Letter to Grimm, July 1842, Correspondence, p. 233. 43. Letter dated 1 September 1834, Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 2 (1834), 362. 44. Letter dated 5 September, Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 2 (1834), 363±4, at p. 363. Wiley identifies `B' as Joseph Bosworth; see `Grimm's Grammar Gains Ground in England', p. 38. He misquotes this passage, however, as: `Truth, and not the predominance of part' (p. 38). 45. Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 2 (1834), 363. 46. Study of Language in England, p. 199. 47. `On the Progress of Anglo-Saxon Literature in England', letter dated 15 October, Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 2 (1834), 483±6, at p. 483. 48. Letter dated 6 November, Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 2 (1834), 591±4, at p. 594. 49. Kemble, `Oxford Professors of Anglo-Saxon', letter of 15 November, Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 2 (1834), 601±5. 50. Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 2 (1834), 362±3. 51. T[homas] W[right], letter dated 13 January, Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 3 (1835), 167±8, at p. 167. 52. Letter dated 12 June, Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 4 (1835), 26±30. 53. Review of Samuel Fox's edition of King Alfred's Boethius, Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 4 (1835), 49±51, at p. 49. 54. Hensleigh Wedgwood, `Grimm on the Indo-European Languages', Quarterly Review, 50 (1833), 169±89, at pp. 170±1. Emphasis mine. 55. Deutsche Grammatik, I, 584. In recent years, there has been similar moderation in translation of Grimm's emphasis on decline in this passage. In Winfred P. Lehmann (ed. and trans.), A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967), the obsolete word herabgewichen is translated as `deviated' (p. 51), which fails to register the idea of `descending' contained in herab. Whereas Grimm makes a clear distinction between herabweichen (`to deviate down', see Grimm above), and abweichen (simply `to deviate', see Grimm, I, 580), in Lehmann's Reader both are incorrectly equated with the English `to deviate' (see Lehmann, pp. 48, 51).

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

210 Notes

56. Arguably Monboddo had provided the essential principles of consonantal interchange long before Grimm; see James Burnet, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols, Edinburgh (1772±92), repr. in English Linguistics 1500± 1800, 48, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar, 1967), I, 487±8. 57. A Manual of Comparative Philology, in which the Affinity of the Indo-European Languages is Illustrated, and Applied to the Primeval History of Europe, Italy, and Rome (London: Rivington, 1838), p. 11. Hereafter Manual. È ber den 58. From Haeckel's preface to Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel Bleek, U Ursprung der Sprache, trans. Thomas Davidson (1869), repr. in Linguistics and Evolutionary: Three Essays, ed. Konrad Koerner (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1983), p. vi. 59. `Grimm's Teutonic Grammar', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 47 (1840), 200± 16, at p. 201. 60. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 49 (1841), 199±213, at p. 213. 61. The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded upon their History, 2 vols (1840); 2nd edn, 1847, repr. in The Sources of Science, 41 (London: Cass, 1967), II, 479± 569.

Chapter 6 `Mere Air-Propelling Sounds': Tennyson and the Anxiety of Language 1. Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character on the Several Grounds of Prudence, Morality, and Religion (1825); 2nd edn (1831), ed. John Beer, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969±), IX (1993), p. 10. 2. Augustus William Hare and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers, 2 vols (1827): 1st series, 3rd edn; 2nd series, 2nd edn (London: Taylor & Watson, 1847±8), II, 282. 3. See Hair, Tennyson's Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991), and Armstrong, Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Brighton: Harvester, 1982). 4. Trench's popular The Study of Words (1851) went through 22 editions during Tennyson's lifetime. 5. See the section `Aphorisms Concerning the Language of Science' in Whewell's popular The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded upon their History, 2 vols (1840); 2nd edn, 1847, repr. in The Sources of Science, 41 (London: Cass, 1967), II, 479±569. Hereafter Philosophy. 6. A. Dwight Culler comments: `It is not certain that Tennyson ever read Guesses at Truth, but as Julius Hare was his tutor at Trinity College in the years immediately following its publication, it is very likely that he was acquainted with it', The Poetry of Tennyson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977), p. 158. The influence of Aids to Reflection on Tennyson is less easily ascertained because Hallam Tennyson records that his father did not admire Coleridge's prose, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1897), I, 50. Hereafter cited as Memoir. See also Culler, p. 265, note 15. James C. McKusick asserts, however, that `Alfred Tennyson, who attended Trinity College at the height of Coleridge's reputation there, was deeply committed to a Coleridgean aesthetic', ` ``Living Words'': Samuel

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Notes 211

7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19. 20. 21.

Taylor Coleridge and the Genesis of the OED', Modern Philology 90 (1992±3), 1±45, at p. 21. Similarly, Peter Allen suggests that Coleridge was chief among the Apostles' `idols', The Cambridge Apostles: The Early Years (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978), p. 81. James Burnet, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols (1773±92), repr. in English Linguistics 1500±1800, no. 48, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar Press, 1967), IV, 174. `Progress' in Monboddo's title signals movement through history rather than `improvement', as the above quotation shows. `Lord Leveson Gower's Poems and Translations', Edinburgh Review, 52 (1830), 231±61, at pp. 247±8. James Browne expressed a comparable opinion three months earlier in the same journal, proposing that language was the `reflected image [. . .] of the thoughts and feelings of those who use it', coloured by the `influence of local position, physical constitution, mode of life, laws, manners, usages, religion, and foreign intercourse', Edinburgh Review, 51 (1830), 535. Earlier still, Francis Cohen and the editor of the Quarterly, William Gifford, made similar noises (with a slightly different emphasis): `the cast of our thoughts, notions, and ideas, is [. . .] dependent on the character of the language in which they are presented', `Dunlop's History of Fiction', Quarterly Review, 13 (1815), 384±408, at p. 392. The New Cratylus; or, Contributions Towards a More Accurate Knowledge of the Greek Language (Cambridge: Deighton, 1839), p. 43. `Characteristics', The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. H. D. Traill, 30 vols (London: Chapman & Hall, 1899), XXVIII, 1±43, at p. 20. È ttingen: Dieterichsche BuchDeutsche Grammatik, 2nd rev. edn, 4 vols (Go handlung, 1822±37), I, 588. Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 49 (1841), 199±213, at p. 213. `Grimm's Teutonic Grammar', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 47 (1840), 200±16, at p. 216. `On the Probable Future Position of the English Language', Proceedings of the Philological Society, 4 (1848±50), 207±14, at p. 212. Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de SieÁcle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. xii. From an 1838 lecture, reprinted in The Friendship of Books and Other Lectures, ed. Thomas Hughes (London: Macmillan, 1874), pp. 33±60, at p. 53. Guesses At Truth, I, 315. In similar vein, Tennyson's Cambridge friend R. C. Trench declared in a letter of 1834 to W. B. Donne that: `I am becoming every day more conscious of the imperfect machinery of words, more weary of word-fighting, more willing to say, with the clown, that words are become so false I am loth to prove reasons by them', Richard Chenevix Trench Archbishop: Letters and Memorials, ed. Maria Trench, 2 vols (London: Paul, 1888), I, 160. Christopher North [John Wilson], `Tennyson's Poems', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 31 (1832), 730. Hensleigh Wedgwood, `Grimm on the Indo-European Languages', Quarterly Review, 50 (1833), 169±89, at pp. 174±5. The Formation of Tennyson's Style: A Study, Primarily, of the Versification of the Early Poems (Madison, WI: n. pub., 1921), p. 225. Memoir, I, 82. Hallam Tennyson comments that his father `revived many fine old words which had fallen into disuse: and I heard him regret that he had never employed the word ``yarely'' ', Memoir, II, 133.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

212 Notes

22. Letter to Emily Sellwood, July 1839 [?], The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, eds Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982± 90), I, 173. Hereafter Tennyson Letters. 23. Letter to Emily Tennyson, 7 April 1832, in The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam, ed. Jack Kolb (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981), p. 546. See also Eric Griffiths, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989), p. 101. 24. `On Some of the Characteristics of Modern Poetry', first published in the Englishman's Magazine, 1 (1831), 616±28; repr. in The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter, Modern Language Association of America, General Series, 15 (New York: Modern Language Association of America, and London: Oxford University Press, 1943), p. 189 25. Letter to Emily Sellwood, c. 8 June 1840; Tennyson Letters, I, 182. For an account of Keats's visit, see Andrew Motion, Keats (London: Faber & Faber, 1998), pp. 193±4. 26. Tennyson seems to be remembering lines from Keats's Endymion (1818): A homeward fever parches up my tongue ±

O let me slake it at the running springs!

[...]

Dost thou now lave thy feet and ankles white?

O think how sweet to me the freshening sluice!

(Endymion, II, 319±26) Three elements from this passage ± the poetic verb `lave', the distinctive adjective `freshening' and the idea of drinking ± reappear suggestively in `The Dell of E±'. For a fuller discussion of Endymion, see my essay `Strange Longings: Keats and Feet', forthcoming in Studies in Romanticism; also see my book-length study, Keats's Boyish Imagination, forthcoming with Routledge. 27. W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser (eds), The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974), II, 84±5. The essays on epitaphs develop arguments and themes set out in the prose accompaniments to Lyrical Ballads. Verse epitaphs of the eighteenth century, Wordsworth proclaims, are `thoroughly tainted by the artifices' that had `overrun our writings in metre since the days of Pope and Dryden'. In place of `energy, stillness, grandeur, tenderness, those thoughts which have the infinitude of truth, and those expressions which are not what the garb is to the body but what the body is to the soul [. . .] ± all these are abandoned for their opposites', Prose Works, II, 84. 28. This poem was not published in its 1833 manuscript form; a much revised version was, however, printed in 1883. `A Dream of Fair Women', written 1831±2, published 1832, also addresses the failure of even the most artfully selected words to represent experience faithfully: [. . .] all words, though cull'd with choicest art,

Failing to give the bitter of the sweet,

Wither beneath the palate

(ll. 285±6)

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Notes 213

29. It is perhaps significant that none of the lines quoted above from the unpublished `Early Spring' of 1833 remained in the greatly altered version of 1883 (Poems, III, 103). 30. Alan Sinfield points out that `Everytime [Ulysses] arrives he brings the centre with him, and the margin has thus to move on', Alfred Tennyson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), p. 53. Like the narrator of `Whispers', then, Ulysses is `always [. . .] seeking that which is just beyond reach', p. 40. An interesting take on the theme of whispers promising but not delivering meaning is provided by Bob Dylan in his recent set of recordings, Love and Theft (2001). The following is from `Lonesome Day Blues': Last night the wind was whispering, I was trying to make out what it was, Last night the wind was whispering something, I was trying to make out what it was, Yeah, I tell myself something's coming, but it never does. 31. `The Beggar Maid' (l. 2), written in 1833 and published in 1842; `EleaÈnore' (l. 68), published in 1832. In this poem Tennyson expanded the motif of linguistic fallibility: How may full-sail'd verse express, How may measured words adore The full flowing harmony Of thy swan-like stateliness, EleaÈnore? (ll. 44±8) 32. See, however, Section 5 of In Memoriam, where `the sad mechanic exercise' of formulaic language is said to perform the service of `dull narcotics' in `numbing pain' after bereavement. 33. `As when with downcast eyes' (l. 14), written in 1832. 34. With its image of `wearing' words like vestments, Section 5 of In Memoriam hails Wordsworth's third `Essay upon Epitaphs': `If words be not [. . .] an incarnation of the thought, but only a clothing for it, then surely will they prove an ill gift; such a one as those poisoned vestments, read of in the stories of superstitious times, which had power to consume and alienate from his right mind the victim who put them on', Prose Works, II, 85. 35. The Study of Language in England, 1780±1860, 2nd rev. edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), p. vi. Elsewhere, Aarsleff suggests that historical linguistics has perpetuated the idea that before the second decade of the nineteenth century `all language study [. . .] was irrelevant or prescientific, to be treated, if at all, [. . .] as a series of fumbling anticipations of what progress had at last bought into the light of day', From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982), p. 5. See also Tony Crowley, The Politics of Discourse: The Standard Language Question in British Cultural Debates (London: Macmillan Education, 1989), p. 14. 36. Arundines Cami; sive, Musarum Cantabrigiensium Lusus Canori, ed. Henry Drury (Cambridge: Deighton, 1841). A second revised edition appeared in 1843.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

214 Notes

37. William Jerdan[?], Literary Gazette, 8 Dec. 1832, 772±4, at p. 773. The words in question are from `EleaÈnore' (ll. 44, 36), and are inaccurately quoted. In Poems (1832) Tennyson printed `full-sail'd' and `Grape-thicken'd'. It is lamentable that modern editors, including Ricks, have continued the practice of changing Tennyson's -'d endings to -ed. By `modernizing' Tennyson, we lose insights into the debates of an age whose poets and reviewers alike were remarkably philologically informed. 38. Henry Hart Milman, `Arundines Cami', Quarterly Review, 69 (1842), 440±71, at pp. 445±6. 39. Edgar Finley Shannon makes brief reference to the Quarterly article on Arundines Cami, and notes Milman's quip about wanting to be considered as quoting Lyttelton rather than Tennyson; he does not, however, detail Lyttelton's unauthorized revisions, nor, equally importantly, Milman's own alterations; see Tennyson and the Reviewers: A Study of His Literary Reputation and of the Influence of the Critics upon His Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952), p. 28. Similarly, whereas J. F. A. Pyre's early study meticulously records Tennyson's arguably concessive response to critical disapprobation of `ênone', it does not attend to the issue of silent revision; see The Formation of Tennyson's Style. 40. Five of these changes affect words already singled out by Lyttelton. Two of Milman's alterations are distinct both from Poems (1832) and the first edition of Arundines Cami (1841): Milman gives close held, and ivy-matted where both Tennyson and Lyttelton printed close-held and ivymatted. 41. Tennyson's own uncertainty is evinced by the Huntington MS, where he wrote `white-breasted'; see The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Harlow: Longman, 1987), I, 423n. 42. This is a clear misprint on Lyttelton's part. 43. This appears to be a misprint by Milman for Tennyson's (and Lyttelton's) `mountain lawn'. It is unclear, though, why Milman should have hyphenated the first `mountain-pine' (l. 46) and not the second (l. 47). 44. See Language and Decadence, pp. 31, 50, 85. Dowling's stimulating study shows how moments of cultural crisis frequently emerge out of moments of linguistic crisis. 45. Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern, trans. John Gibson Lockhart, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1818), I, 58. Lockhart's rendering of Schlegel is purposefully alarming, as can be gauged from Schlegel's slightly more restrained tone: `Eine Nation, deren Sprache verwildert oder in einem rohen Zustande erhalten wird, muû selbst barbarisch und roh werden' [a nation whose language becomes uncivilized or is kept in an uncouth condition, must itself become barbaric and uncouth]; Geschichte der alten und neuen È ningh, 1961), Literatur (1815), ed. Hans Eichner (Munich: Ferdinand Scho 238. Lockhart's main departure from Schlegel is the introduction of the notion of a `brink' to barbarism, which made the reception of Tennyson's challenging diction all the more fraught. 46. `ênone', l. 131, Poems (1842). 47. Cited in Arthur Milman, Henry Hart Milman, D. D., Dean of St. Paul's: A Biographical Sketch (London: Murray, 1900), p. 78. 48. J. W. Croker, `Poems by Alfred Tennyson', Quarterly Review, 49 (1833), 81±96, at p. 89.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Notes 215

49. The exception to this is `O'erthwarted' (l. 137), which Tennyson left as 1832. 50. `Tennyson's Development During the ``Ten Years' Silence'' (1832±1842)', PMLA, 66 (1951), 662±97. 51. `Strown' occurs in Shelley's `Stanzas Written in Dejection', l. 11. 52. See T. H. V. Motter, The Writings of Arthur Hallam, p. 194. 53. `Lyric Poetry', Spectator, 21 August 1830, 637±9, at pp. 637±8. 54. `Tennyson's Poems', Monthly Repository, n.s. 7 (1833), 30±41, at p. 33. 55. `Tennyson's Poems', Westminster Review, 14 (1831), 210±24, at p. 223. 56. Tennyson composed a sonnet to his `iron-worded' Cambridge friend, published in Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830). 57. See `On English Prñterites', 385±7. 58. This review was set up for print in the Foreign Quarterly Review in 1833, but not published. Tennyson may have seen it though, because, as Dickins observes, Kemble `had a few copies struck off while it was in type', `John Mitchell Kemble and Old English Scholarship', Proceedings of the British Academy, 25 (1939), 51±84, at p. 59. Kemble was certainly in the habit of sending other examples of his work to Tennyson: see Hallam Tennyson's Memoir, I, 129. Also, as Scott points out, in 1833 Tennyson had expressed interest in Kemble's maverick philological lectures at Cambridge: see Memoir, I, 131, and Scott, ` ``Flowering in A Lonely Word'': Tennyson and the Victorian Study of Language', Victorian Poetry, 18 (1980), 371±81, at p. 373. It is safe to assume that Tennyson was thoroughly aware of the issues surrounding strong and weak preterites. 59. The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations (Oxford: Arch, 1831), p. 99. 60. Poems (1842); my emphasis. 61. It seems that Tennyson, in his early work at least, was receptive to such views of strong verbs held by Prichard, Kemble and Donaldson ± who had in turn received them through Jacob Grimm's work. For instance, in the 1830s Tennyson favoured, though not exclusively so, the use of clomb over climbed. In `The Dell of E±' Tennyson wrote of `those dark groves that clomb the mountain high' (l. 11). This form also occurs in a note to `The Palace of Art' (1832): Hither, when all the deep unsounded skies Shuddered with silent stars, she clomb, And as with optic glasses her keen eyes Pierced through the mystic dome (Poems, I, 450n; my emphasis) Clomb appears, too, in the 1832 version of `The Lotos-Eaters': `Up-clomb the shadowy pine above the woven copse' (l. 18), and was retained by Tennyson in 1842. Other occurrences of the word, however, did not survive the editing process. `The Dell of E±' was not reprinted after 1827, and the note to `The Palace of Art' did not appear in the 1842 volumes. In Tennyson's stringent process of revision, words likely to provoke critical disapprobation, even though they were philologically commendable, were liable to be rejected. 62. The influence of literary reviews on Tennyson's revision of his early work has been much discussed, notably by E. F. Shannon and Joyce Green. In his pioneering work Tennyson and the Reviewers, Shannon contended that harsh

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

216 Notes

63.

64.

65. 66.

67. 68.

69.

70.

71. 72.

critiques affected the poet inordinately, while in response Joyce Green viewed Tennyson's use of unhyphenated compounds as a `youthful affectation which he would in any case have outgrown'; `Tennyson's Development During the ``Ten Years' Silence'' ', 679. Interestingly enough, in 1842 none other than Leigh Hunt objected to Tennyson's hyphens (also to his `dots, his seÈers, low-lieths, and Eleanoras, and the intensifications of his prefix a-aweary, amany, anear'); `The Modern School of Poetry: Poems by Alfred Tennyson', Church of England Quarterly Review, 12 (1842), 361±76, in Leigh Hunt's Literary Criticism, eds Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956), p. 509. Hunt does not, however, `disown' Tennyson from the Romantic project this book has described, bestowing on him the title of `genuine poet', though one `less naturally and thoroughly given to poetry, in its essence' than Keats (p. 526). One might have expected Tennyson's reviewers to have objected to his use of -t endings, since Tennyson had self-consciously adopted them from Julius Hare, editor of the short-lived Philological Museum. Hare's use of the termination, along with other idiosyncrasies, had been hotly debated. `Poetry of the Year 1842', Christian Remembrancer, 4 (1842), 42±58, at p. 46. Where Tennyson printed Beautiful-brow'd (l. 69) in 1842, corresponding with Lyttelton's and Milman's alteration of 1841, in 1843 Lyttelton favoured Beautiful brow'd instead. Where Tennyson had printed mountain pine in 1832 without provoking objections from Lyttelton in 1841, in 1843 the latter wanted mountain-pine. In 1841, Lyttelton printed engraven. With regard to metre, Tennyson wondered whether his early omission of hyphens in compounded words might have provoked Coleridge's comment that he had begun to write verses `without very well understanding what metre is'. Tennyson suggested that Coleridge `may have read Glen-river in ``above the loud Glenriver,'' and tendril-twine in mantled with flowering ``tendriltwine'' dactylically; because I had an absurd antipathy to hyphens, and put two words together as one word'; Memoir, I, 50 (and note). See the section `Aphorisms Concerning the Language of Science' in The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded upon their History, II, 479±569. Whewell was a founding member of the Philological Society of London, formed in 1842, which began work on what was eventually to become the Oxford English Dictionary. Other founding members included Hensleigh Wedgwood and Julius Hare; see Aarsleff, The Study of Language, pp. 214±15. Patrick Greig Scott points out that `from his early years as a Cambridge undergraduate, Tennyson was personally acquainted with some of the leading philologists of his age', ` ``Flowering in a Lonely Word'': Tennyson and the Victorian Study of Language', 372. James C. McKusick asserts that `through his Cambridge education, Tennyson [. . .] acquired a close familiarity with the new philology', ` ``Living Words'': Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Genesis of the OED', 21. ` ``Flowering in a Lonely Word'': Tennyson and the Victorian Study of Language', 371. One reviewer, however, considered `ênone' superior to `Ulysses'; signed J. J., `Tennyson's Poems', Christian Teacher, n.s. 4 (1842), 414±23, at p. 419.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Notes 217

Due to considerations of space, I have not included periodical reviews of Romantic poetry in this bibliography. Full references are given in the notes to individual chapters.

Primary Sources Adelung, Johann Christoph, Three Philological Essays, Chiefly translated from the German of John Christopher Adelung, trans. A. F. M. Willich (London: Longman, 1798). ÐÐ , Mithridates; oder, Allgemeine Sprachenkunde mit dem Vater Unser als Sprachprobe in bey nahe f uÈnfhundert Sprachen und Mundarten, 4 vols (Berlin: In der Vossischen Buchhandlung, 1806±17). Allen, Francis, A Complete English Dictionary: Containing an Explanation of all the Words made use of in the Common Occurrences of Life or in the Several Arts and Sciences (London: Wilson, 1765). Bailey, Nathaniel, An Universal Etymological English Dictionary; Comprehending the Derivation of the Generality of Words in the English Tongue, either Ancient or Modern (1721), 24th edn (London: Ware, 1776). Blake, William, Complete Writings, ed. Geoffrey Keynes (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1959). ÐÐ , The Letters of William Blake with Related Documents, ed. Geoffrey Keynes, 3rd edn (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980). Bleek, Wilhelm Heinrich Immanuel, `On the Origin of Language', ed. Ernst Haeckel, trans. Thomas Davidson (1869), repr. in Linguistics and Evolutionary: Three Essays, ed. Konrad Koerner (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1983). È hme, Jakob, The Works of Jacob Behmen, the Teutonic Theosopher, to which is Bo prefixed the Life of the Author, with Figures Illustrating his Principles, ed. William Law, 4 vols (London: Richardson, 1764±81). Bopp, Franz, Vocalismus; oder, sprachvergleichende Kritiken uÈber J. Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik und Graff's althochdeutschen Sprachschatz mit BegruÈndung einer neuen Theorie des Ablauts (Berlin: In der Nicolaischen Buchhandlung, 1836). ÐÐ , A Comparative Grammar of the Sanscrit, Zend, Greek, Latin, Lithuanian, Gothic, German, and Sclavonic Languages, trans. Edward Backhouse Eastwick, 3 vols (London, 1845±53; repr. in Documenta Semiotica, series 1, Zurich and New York, 1985). Bosworth, Joseph, A Dictionary of the Anglo-Saxon Language (London: Longman, 1838). ÐÐ , The Essentials of Anglo-Saxon Grammar, with an Outline of Professor Rask and Grimm's Systems (London: Longman, 1841). Boyd, William, The History of Literature; or, The Progress of Language, Writing, and Letters, from the Earliest Ages of Antiquity, to the Present Time; with a View of the State of Science, and the Fine Arts, 4 vols (London: Longman, 1843±6). 218

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Bibliography

Brightland, John, A Grammar of the English Tongue: with the Arts of Logick, Rhetorick, Poetry, &c., Illustrated with Useful Notes; Giving the Grounds and Reasons of Grammar in General, 7th edn (London: Lintot, 1746). Browne, William, Britannia's Pastorals (London: Norton, 1613). ÐÐ , Britannia's Pastorals: A Third Book, ed. T. Crofton Croker, Early English Poetry, Ballads, and Popular Literature of the Middle Ages Edited from Original Manuscripts and Scarce Publications, 30 (London: Percy Society, 1852). Buchanan, James, The British Grammar; or, an Essay in Four Parts towards Speaking and Writing the English Language Grammatically, 3rd edn (London: Johnson, 1779). Bulwer, Edward, England and the English (1833; repr. London: Routledge, 1874). Burn, John, A Practical Grammar of the English Language, in which the Several Parts of Speech are Clearly and Methodically Explained (Glasgow: McLean, 1766). Burnet, James, Of the Origin and Progress of Language, 6 vols (1772±92), repr. in English Linguistics 1500±1800, 48, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar, 1967). Carlyle, Thomas, The Works of Thomas Carlyle, ed. H. D. Traill, 30 vols (London: Chapman & Hall, 1896±9). Chapman, George, Chapman's Homer, ed. Allardyce Nicoll, 2 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957). Chatterton, Thomas, Poems, Supposed to have been Written at Bristol, by Thomas Rowley, and Others, in the Fifteenth Century (London: Payne, 1777). ÐÐ , The Complete Works of Thomas Chatterton, ed. Donald S. Taylor, 2 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). Clarke, Charles Cowden, An Address to that Quarterly Reviewer who Touched upon Mr. Leigh Hunt's `Story of Rimini' (London: Jennings, 1816). Cobbett, William, A Grammar of the English Language, in a Series of Letters: Intended for the Use of Schools and of Young Persons in General; but more Especially for the Use of Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Plough-boys, 2nd edn (London: Dolby, 1819). ÐÐ , Advice to Young Men, and (Incidentally) to Young Women, in the Middle and Higher Ranks of Life (London: W. Cobbett, 1829). ÐÐ , A Grammar of the English Language, in a Series of Letters: Intended for the Use of Schools and of Young Persons in General; but more Especially for the Use of Soldiers, Sailors, Apprentices, and Plough-boys. To Which are Added Six Lessons, Intended to Prevent Statesmen from Using False Grammar, and from Writing in an Awkward Manner, 9th edn (London: W. Cobbett, 1833). ÐÐ , A History of the Last Hundred Days of English Freedom (1817), ed. J. L. Hammond (London: Allen & Unwin, 1921), repr. from Selections from Cobbett's Political Works, eds John M. Cobbett and James P. Cobbett, 6 vols (1835). ÐÐ , Rural Rides, ed. George Woodcock (1830; repr. Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1967). ÐÐ , Letters of William Cobbett, ed. Gerald Duff, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Romantic Reassessment, 35 (Salzburg: UniversitaÈt Salzburg, 1974). Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, The Collected Letters of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. E. L. Griggs, 6 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1956±71). ÐÐ , The Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn, 4 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1957±). ÐÐ , The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1969±).

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Bibliography 219

ÐÐ , Biographia Literaria; or, Sketches of My Literary Life and Opinions, 2 vols (1817), eds James Engell and W. Jackson Bate (Princeton, NJ: Routledge, 1983). Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, An Essay on the Origin of Human Knowledge, being a Supplement to Mr. Locke's Essay on the Human Understanding, trans. Thomas Nugent (London: Nourse, 1756). Cornwall, Barry [Bryan Waller Procter], A Sicilian Story, with Diego de Montilla and Other Poems (London: Ollier, 1820). ÐÐ , Dramatic Scenes and Marcian Colonna (1819), repr. in Romantic Context, Poetry, Significant Minor Poetry 1789±1830, ed. Donald Reiman (London: Garland, 1978). Curtius, Georg, The Results of Comparative Grammar in Reference to Classical Scholarship, trans. F. H. Trithen (Oxford: Macpherson, 1851). Darwin, Charles, The Origin of Species (1859), ed. John W. Burrow (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). Dasent, George Webbe, Popular Tales from the Norse, 2nd edn (Edinburgh, 1859). De Quincey, Thomas, Selected Essays on Rhetoric, ed. Frederick Burwick (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1967). Donaldson, John William, The New Cratylus; or, Contributions Towards a More Accurate Knowledge of the Greek Language (Cambridge: Deighton, 1839). Drury, Henry (ed.), Arundines Cami; sive, Musarum Cantabrigiensium Lusus Canori (Cambridge: Deighton, 1841). ÐÐ , Arundines Cami; sive, Musarum Cantabrigiensium Lusus Canori, 2nd edn (Cambridge: Deighton, 1843). Fox, W. J., Lectures Addressed Chiefly to the Working Classes, 4 vols (London: Fox, 1845±9). È ttingen: DieterGrimm, Jacob, Deutsche Grammatik, 2nd rev. edn, 4 vols (Go ichsche Buchhandlung, 1822±37). ÐÐ , On the Origin of Language, trans. Raymond A. Wiley (1851; repr. Leiden: Brill, 1984). Hallam, Arthur, The Writings of Arthur Hallam, ed. T. H. Vail Motter, The Modern Language Association of America, General Series, 15 (London: Oxford University Press, 1943). ÐÐ , The Letters of Arthur Henry Hallam, ed. Jack Kolb (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1981). Hare, Augustus William and Julius Charles Hare, Guesses at Truth by Two Brothers, 2 vols (1827): 1st series, 3rd edn; 2nd series, 2nd edn (London: Taylor and Watson, 1847±8). Hare, Julius Charles, `On English Orthography', Philological Museum, 1 (1832), 640±78. Harris, James, Hermes; or, A Philosophical Inquiry Concerning Universal Grammar (1751), 7th edn (London: Collingwood, 1825). Haydon, Benjamin Robert, Autobiography of Benjamin Robert Haydon (1853); ed. Edmund Blunden (London: Milford, 1927). Hazlitt, William, The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe, 21 vols (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1830±4). Herder, Johann Gottfried, `Essay on the Origin of Language', trans. Alexander Gode, in Two Essays on the Origin of Language, eds John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966).

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

220 Bibliography

ÐÐ , Johann Gottfried Herder: FruÈhe Schriften 1764±1772, ed. Ulrich Gaier, 10 vols (Frankfurt am Main: Deutscher Klassiker Verlag, 1985). Herschel, John, `Whewell on Inductive Sciences', Quarterly Review, 68 (1841), 177±238. Horne Tooke, John, EPEA PTEPOENTA; or, the Diversions of Purley, 2nd edn, 2 vols (London: Johnson, 1798±1805). Howitt, William, Homes and Haunts of the Most Eminent British Poets, 2 vols (London: Bentley, 1847). È ber die Kawi-Sprache auf der Insel Java, nebst einer Humboldt, Wilhelm von, U Einleitung uÈber die Verschiedenheit des menschlichen Sprachbaues und ihren Einfluss È niglichen auf die geistige Entwickelung des Menschengeschlechts, 3 vols (Berlin: Ko Akademie, 1836±9). Hunt, Leigh, The Feast of the Poets (London: Cawthorn, 1814). ÐÐ , The Story of Rimini: A Poem (London: John Murray, 1816). ÐÐ , The Literary Pocket-Book; or, Companion for the Lover of Nature and Art (London, 1819). ÐÐ , The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt (London: Moxon, 1832). ÐÐ , Leigh Hunt's Literary Criticism, eds Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1956). ÐÐ , Leigh Hunt's Political and Occasional Essays, eds Lawrence Huston Houtchens and Carolyn Washburn Houtchens (New York: Columbia University Press, 1962). ÐÐ , Leigh Hunt: A Life in Letters: Together with Some Correspondence of William Hazlitt, ed. Eleanor M. Gates (Essex, CT: Falls River, 1999). Johnson, Samuel, The Plan of a Dictionary (1747), repr. in English Linguistics 1500± 1800, 223, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar, 1968). ÐÐ , A Dictionary of the English language: in which the Words are deduced from their originals, and illustrated in their different significations by examples from the best writers; to which are prefixed, A history of the language, and an English grammar (London: Knapton, 1755). ÐÐ , A Dictionary of the English Language; in which the Words are deduced from their originals, explained in their different meanings, and authorized by the names of the writers in whose works they are found, abstracted from Folio edn (London: Tegg, 1812). Keats, John, The Poems of John Keats, ed. Jack Stillinger (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1978). ÐÐ , John Keats: The Complete Poems, ed. John Barnard, 3rd edn (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1988). ÐÐ , The Letters of John Keats 1814±1821, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958). ÐÐ , The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers, 1816±1879, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). ÐÐ , The Keats Circle: Letters and Papers and More Letters and Papers of the Keats Circle, ed. Hyder Edward Rollins, 2nd edn, 2 vols (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). Kemble, John Mitchell, `On English Prñterites', Philological Museum, 2 (1833), 373±88 ÐÐ , `John Mitchell Kemble's Review of Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik' (1833), ed. Raymond A. Wiley, Old English Newsletter, Subsidia, 6 (Binghampton, NY, 1981).

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Bibliography 221

ÐÐ , Review of Benjamin Thorpe's Cñdmon, Gentleman's Magazine, 103, i (1833), 329±31. ÐÐ , `Analecta Anglo-Saxonica, &c', Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 1 (1834), 391±3. ÐÐ , `Oxford Professors of Anglo-Saxon', Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 2 (1834), 601±5. ÐÐ , `Mr. Kemble on Anglo-Saxon Accents', Gentleman's Magazine, n.s. 4 (1835), 26±30. Charles Kingsley: His Letters and Memories of His Life, ed. F. E. Kingsley, 4th edn, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1894). Latham, Robert Gordon, The English Language (London: Taylor & Watson, 1841). Lemon, George William, English Etymology; or, a Derivative Dictionary of the English Language (London: Robinson, 1783). Lowth, Robert, A Short Introduction to English Grammar: with Classical Notes, new edition (London: Dodsley, 1778). Lyttelton, George William and William Ewart Gladstone, Translations, 2nd edn (London: Quaritch, 1863). Macaulay, Thomas Babington, `Southey's Colloquies on Society', Edinburgh Review, 50 (1830), 528±65. Macpherson, James, The Poems of Ossian, The Son of Fingal, to which are Prefixed, Dissertations on the Era and Poems of Ossian, 2 vols (Glasgow: Cadell & Davies, 1799). ÐÐ , The Poems of Ossian, Containing Dr Blair's Three Celebrated Critical Dissertations; and a Preliminary Discourse, 2 vols (London: Lackington, 1806). Malthus, Thomas Robert, An Essay on the Principle of Population as it Affects the Future Improvements of Society, with Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers (London: Johnson, 1798). Maurice, Frederick Denison, The Friendship of Books and Other Lectures, ed. Thomas Hughes (London: Macmillan, 1874). Mill, John Stuart, Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, eds F. E. L. Priestley et al., 33 vols (Toronto and Buffalo: University of Toronto Press, 1963±77). Milman, Henry Hart, `Arundines Cami', Quarterly Review 69 (March, 1842), 440±71. È ller, F. Max, `Comparative Philology', Edinburgh Review, 94 (1851), 297±339. Mu ÐÐ , Lectures on the Science of Language, 2nd series (London: Longman, 1864). Murray, Alexander, History of the European Languages, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Constable, 1823). Murray, Lindley, English Grammar Adapted to the Different Classes of Learners (1795), repr. in English Linguistics 1500±1800, 106, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar, 1968). Neaves, Charles, `Grimm's Teutonic Grammar', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 47 (1840), 200±16. ÐÐ , `Bopp's Vocalismus', Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, 49 (1841), 199±213. Percy, Thomas, Reliques of Ancient English Poetry: Consisting of Old Heroic Ballads, Songs, and Other Pieces of our Earlier Poets; Together with Some Few of Later Date, 3 vols (1765; repr. Leipzig: Tauchnitz, 1866). Pope, Alexander, The Odyssey of Homer, ed. Maynard Mack, Twickenham Edition of the Poems of Alexander Pope, 10 vols (London: Methuen, 1967). ÐÐ , The Poems of Alexander Pope, ed. John Butt (London: Methuen, 1968). Prichard, James Cowles, The Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations Proved by a Comparison of their Dialects with the Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, and Teutonic Languages,

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

222 Bibliography

Forming a Supplement to Researches into the Physical History of Mankind (London: Arch, 1831). Priestley, Joseph, A Course of Lectures on the Theory of Language and Universal Grammar (1762), repr. in English Linguistics 1500±1800, 235, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar, 1970). Rask, Rasmus, A Grammar of the Icelandic or Old Norse Tongue, trans. George Webbe Dasent (1843), repr. ed. T. L. Markey, Amsterdam Classics in Linguistics, 2 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1976). ÐÐ , Review of Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Grammatik, Foreign Review and Continental Miscellany, 5 (1830), 493±500. Reiman, Donald H., The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers, 9 vols (London: Garland, 1972). Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, `Essay on the Origin of Languages', trans. John H. Moran, in Two Essays on the Origin of Language, eds John H. Moran and Alexander Gode (Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press, 1966). Schlegel, Fridrich, Lectures on the History of Literature, Ancient and Modern, trans. John Gibson Lockhart, 2 vols (Edinburgh: Blackwood, 1818). ÐÐ , Friedrich Schlegel: Kritische Ausgabe Seiner Werke, 20 vols (Paderborn: FerdiÈ ningh, 1958±91). nand Scho Schleicher, August, Darwinism Tested by the Science of Language (1863; trans. Alex V. W. Bikkers, 1869), repr. in Linguistics and Evolutionary: Three Essays, ed. Konrad Koerner (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1983). ÐÐ , `On the Significance of Language for the Natural History of Man' (1865), trans. J. Peter Maher in Linguistics and Evolutionary: Three Essays, ed. Konrad Koerner (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1983). Scott, Walter, `Ellis's Specimens of Early English Poetry', Edinburgh Review, 4 (1804), 151±63. Shelley, Percy Bysshe, The Complete Poetical Works, ed. Thomas Hutchinson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1912). ÐÐ , Shelley's Critical Prose, ed. Bruce R. McElderry (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1967). ÐÐ , Shelley's Prose: Or The Trumpet of Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clarke (London: Fourth Estate, 1988). Smith, Adam, `Considerations Concerning the First Formations of Languages and the Different Genius of Original and Uncompounded Languages' (1761), repr. in J. Ralph Lindgren, The Early Writings of Adam Smith (New York: Kelley, 1967). Sweet, Henry, An Anglo-Saxon Reader in Prose and Verse with Grammar, Metre, Notes and Glossary, 8th rev. edn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908). ÐÐ , Sweet's Anglo-Saxon Primer, 9th edn, rev. by Norman Davis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1953). Talfourd, Thomas Noon, `Defence of Young Poets against the Denunciations of the Edinburgh Review', New Review, 3 (1814), 345±50. ÐÐ , `Wallace's Prospects of Mankind and on the Progress of Literature', Retrospective Review, 2, i (1820), 185±206. Tennyson, Alfred, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. Christopher Ricks, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Harlow: Longman, 1987). ÐÐ , The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, eds Cecil Y. Lang and Edgar F. Shannon, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982±90).

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Bibliography 223

Tennyson, Hallam, Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son, 2 vols (London: Macmillan, 1897). ÐÐ (ed.), Tennyson and his Friends (London: Macmillan, 1911). Trench, Richard Chenevix, On the Study of Words, 14th edn (London: Macmillan, 1851). ÐÐ , English Past and Present (London: Macmillan, 1855). ÐÐ , Richard Chenevix Trench Archbishop: Letters and Memorials, ed. Maria Trench, 2 vols (London: Kegan Paul, 1888). Watts, Thomas, `On the Probable Future Position of the English Language', Proceedings of the Philological Society, 4 (1848±50), 207±14. Weber, Henry, Tales of the East: Comprising the Most Popular Romances of Oriental Origin; and the Best Imitations by European Authors: With New Translations, and Additional Tales, Never Before Published, to which is Prefixed an Introductory Dissertation, Containing an Account of Each Work, and of its Author, or Translator, 3 vols (Edinburgh: Ballantyne, 1812). Webster, Noah, Dissertations on the English Language: With Notes, Historical and Critical. To Which is Added, by Way of Appendix, an Essay on a Reformed Mode of Spelling, With Dr Franklin's Arguments on that Subject (1789), repr. in English Linguistics 1500±1800, 54, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar, 1967). Wedgwood, Hensleigh, `Grimm on the Indo-European Languages', Quarterly Review, 50 (1833), 169±89. Whewell, William, The History of the Inductive Sciences from the Earliest to the Present Time, 3 vols (London: Parker, 1837). ÐÐ , The Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences Founded upon their History, 2 vols (1840); 2nd edn, 1847, repr. in The Sources of Science, 41 (London: Cass, 1967). Winning, W. B., A Manual of Comparative Philology, in which the Affinity of the IndoEuropean Languages is Illustrated, and Applied to the Primeval History of Europe, Italy, and Rome (London: Rivington, 1838). Wordsworth, William and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads, eds R. L. Brett and A. R. Jones (London: Methuen, 1965). ÐÐ , The Prose Works of William Wordsworth, eds W. J. B. Owen and Jane Worthington Smyser, 3 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974). ÐÐ , William Wordsworth: The Oxford Authors, ed. Stephen Gill (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987). Wright, Joseph, The English Dialect Dictionary, being the Complete Vocabulary of All Dialect Words Still in Use, or Known to have been in Use During the Last Two Hundred Years, 6 vols (London: Frowde, 1898±1905). ÐÐ , Grammar of the Gothic Language (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1917). Young, Thomas `Adelung's General History of Languages', Quarterly Review, 10 (1813), 250±92.

Secondary Sources Aarsleff, Hans, `Wordsworth, Language, and Romanticism', Essays in Criticism, 30 (1980), 215±26. ÐÐ , From Locke to Saussure: Essays on the Study of Language and Intellectual History (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1982).

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

224 Bibliography

ÐÐ , Hans, The Study of Language in England, 1780±1860, 2nd rev. edn (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983). Abrams, M. H., The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1953). Ackerman, Robert W. and Gretchen P. Ackerman, Frederic Madden: A Biographical Sketch and Bibliography (New York and London: Garland, 1979). Andresen, Julie T., `From Condillac to Condorcet: The Algebra of History', in Progress in Linguistic Historiography, ed. Konrad Koerner, Studies in the History of Linguistics, 20 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1980), 187±97. Antonsen, Elmer H. (ed.), The Grimm Brothers and the Germanic Past, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 54 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990). Armour, Richard Willard, Barry Cornwall: A Biography of Bryan Waller Procter, with a Selected Collection of Hitherto Unpublished Letters (Boston: Meador, 1935). Armstrong, Isobel, Victorian Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry 1830±1870 (London: Athlone Press, 1972). ÐÐ , Language as Living Form in Nineteenth-Century Poetry (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982). ÐÐ , Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics (London: Routledge, 1993). Ashton, Rosemary, The German Idea: Four English Writers and the Reception of German Thought 1800±1860 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1980). Ashworth, E. S., `The Scholastic Background to Locke's Theory of Language', in Progress in Linguistic Historiography, ed. Konrad Koerner, Studies in the History of Linguistics, 20 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1980), 59±68. Aske, Martin, Keats and Hellenism: An Essay (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985). Attridge, Derek, Geoff Bennington and Robert Young (eds), Post-Structuralism and the Question of History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). Austin, Frances, The Language of Wordsworth and Coleridge (London: Macmillan, 1989). Baer, Marc, `The Memory of the Middle Ages: From History of Culture to Cultural History', Studies in Medievalism, 4 (1992). Baker, Jeffrey, John Keats and Symbolism (New York: Harvester Press, 1986). Barnard, John, John Keats (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). ÐÐ , `Keats's ``Robin Hood'', John Hamilton Reynolds, and the ``Old Poets'' ', Proceedings of the British Academy, 75 (1989), 181±200. ÐÐ , `Keats's Belle Dame and the Sexual Politics of Leigh Hunt's Indicator', Romanticism, 1, i (1995), 34±49. ÐÐ , `Charles Cowden Clarke's ``Cockney'' Commonplace Book', in Keats and History, ed. Nicholas Roe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). ÐÐ , `Charles Cowden Clarke and the Leigh Hunt Circle 1812±1818', Romanticism, 3, i (1997), 66±90. Baron, Michael, Language and Relationship in Wordsworth's Writing (London: Longman, 1995). Barrell, John, Poetry, Language and Politics (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1986). Barthes, Roland, Mythologies, trans. Annette Lavers (London: Paladin, 1973). ÐÐ , Writing Degree Zero & Elements of Semiology, trans. Annette Lavers and Colin Smith (London: Jonathan Cape, 1984). Bate, Walter Jackson, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963).

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Bibliography 225

ÐÐ , The Burden of the Past and the English Poet (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1970). Batten, Charles L., Pleasurable Instruction: Form and Convention in EighteenthCentury Travel Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978). Baugh, Albert C. and Thomas Cable, A History of the English Language, 3rd rev. edn (London: Routledge, 1978). Baum, Paull F., Tennyson: Sixty Years After (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1948). Beer, Gillian, `Darwin and the Growth of Language Theory', in Nature Transfigured: Science and Literature 1700±1900, eds John Christy and Sally Shuttleworth (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 152±70. Beer, John, Romantic Influences: Contemporary ± Victorian ± Modern (Basingstoke: Macmillan ± now Palgrave Macmillan, 1993). Benjamin, Walter, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968). ÐÐ , The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (London: Verso, 1977). ÐÐ , One Way Street and Other Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and Kingsley Shorter (London: NLB, 1979). Bennett, Andrew, `The Politics of Gleaning in Keats's ``Ode to a Nightingale'' and ``To Autumn'' ', Keats-Shelley Journal, 34 (1990), 34±8. ÐÐ , Keats, Narrative and Audience: The Posthumous Life of Writing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994). ÐÐ , Romantic Poets and the Culture of Posterity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Bewell, Alan J., `The Political Implications of Keats's Classicist Aesthetics', Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), 220±9. Beyer, Arno, Deutsche EinfluÈsse auf die englische Sprachwissenschaft im 19. JahrhunÈppinger Arbeiten zur Germanistik, 324 (Go Èppingen: Kuemmerle, 1981). dert, Go Blackstone, Bernard, The Consecrated Urn: An Interpretation of Keats in Terms of Growth and Form (London: Longman, 1959). Bloom, Harold (ed.), Modern Critical Views: Wordsworth (New York: Chelsea House, 1985). Blunden, Edmund (ed.), Shelley and Keats as they Struck their Contemporaries (London: Beaumont, 1925). ÐÐ , Keats's Publisher: A Memoir of John Taylor, 1781±1864 (London: Jonathan Cape, 1936). Bottum, Joseph, `The Logic of Decay', Philosophy and Literature, 18 (April, 1994), 91±104. Bowler, Peter J., The Invention of Progress: The Victorians and the Past (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). Breunig, Charles, The Age of Revolution and Reaction, 1789±1850, 2nd edn (New York: Norton, 1977). Brinkley, Robert and Keith Hanley (eds), Romantic Revisions (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Brisman, Leslie, Romantic Origins (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1978). Bromwich, David, Hazlitt: The Mind of a Critic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). ÐÐ , `Keats's Radicalism', Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), 197±210.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

226 Bibliography

Brookfield, Francis M., The Cambridge `Apostles' (London: Pitman, 1906). Brooks, Cleanth, The Well Wrought Urn: Studies in the Structure of Poetry (London: Dobson, 1960). Brown, Charles Armitage, Life of John Keats, eds Dorothy Hyde Bodurtha and Willard Bissell Pope (London: Oxford University Press, 1937). Brown, Marshall (ed.), The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism, vol. 5, Romanticism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Buckley, Jerome Hamilton, Tennyson: The Growth of a Poet (London: Oxford University Press, 1960). Burrow, J. W., `The Uses of Philology in Victorian England', in Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson Clark, ed. Robert Robson (London: Bell, 1967), 180±204. Burwick, Frederick, The Haunted Eye: Perception and the Grotesque in English and German Romanticism (Heidelberg: UniversitaÈtsverlag, 1987). Bush, Douglas, Science and English Poetry: A Historical Sketch, 1590±1950, rev. edn (London: Oxford University Press, 1967). Butler, James A., `Tourist or Native Son: Wordsworth's Homecomings of 1799± 1800', Nineteenth-Century Literature, 51 (1996), 1±15. Calhoon, Kenneth S., `The Urn and the Lamp: Disinterest and the Aesthetic È rike and Keats', Studies in Romanticism, 26 (1987), 3±25. Object in Mo Campbell, Nancie, Tennyson in Lincoln: A Catalogue of the Collections in the Research Centre, 2 vols (Lincoln: Tennyson Society, 1971±3). Chamberlin, Edward J. and Sander L. Gilman (eds), Degeneration: The Dark Side of Progress (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985). Chambers, R. W. and F. Norman, `Alexander Hamilton and the Beginnings of Comparative Philology', in Studies in English Philology: A Miscellany in Honor of Frederick Klaeber, eds Kemp Malone and Martin B. Rund (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1929), 457±66. Chapman, Raymond, The Sense of the Past in Victorian Literature (London: Croom Helm, 1986). Chaudhuri, Nirad C., Scholar Extraordinary: The Life of Professor the Rt Honourable Friedrich Max MuÈller, P.C. (New Delhi: Orient, 1974). Chilcott, Tim, A Publisher and his Circle: The Life and Works of John Taylor, Keats's Publisher (London: Routledge, 1972). Clancey, Richard W., Wordsworth's Classical Undersong: Education, Rhetoric and Poetic Truth (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Clive, John, Scotch Reviewers: The Edinburgh Review, 1802±15 (London: Faber & Faber, 1957). Cloyd, E. L., James Burnett ± Lord Monboddo (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972). Coetsem, Frans van, `Rasmus Rask and Jacob Grimm: Their Relationship in the Investigation of Germanic Vocalism', Scandinavian Studies, 34 (1962), 183±94. ÐÐ , `Grimm's Law: A Reappraisal of Grimm's Formulation from a Present-Day Perspective', in The Grimm Brothers and the Germanic Past, ed. Elmer H. Antonsen, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 54 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), 43±59. Collinge, N. E., The Laws of Indo-European, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 35 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1985). Colloms, Brenda, Charles Kingsley: The Lion of Eversley (London: Constable, 1975). Cook, Brian, The Elgin Marbles (London: British Museum, 1984).

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Bibliography 227

Copley, Stephen and John Whale (eds), Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780±1832 (London: Routledge, 1992). Cox, Jeffrey N., Poetry and Politics in the Cockney School: Keats, Shelley, Hunt and Their Circle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). ÐÐ , `Leigh Hunt's Cockney School: The Lakers' ``Other'' ', Romanticism On the Net, 14 (1999) [10.4.2001] http://users.ox.ac.uk/scat0385/huntlakers.html Crisman, William, `A Dramatic Voice in Keats's Elgin Marbles Sonnets', Studies in Romanticism, 26 (1987), 490±508. Cronin, Richard, `Goethe, the Apostles, and Tennyson's Supposed Confessions', Philological Quarterly , 72 (1993), 337±56. ÐÐ (ed.), 1798: The Year of Lyrical Ballads (Basingstoke: Macmillan ± now Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). Crowley, Tony, The Politics of Discourse: The Standard Language Question in British Cultural Debates (Basingstoke: Macmillan ± now Palgrave Macmillan, 1989). ÐÐ , `Bakhtin and the History of the Language', in Bakhtin and Cultural Theory, eds Ken Hirschkop and David Shepherd (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1989), 68±90. ÐÐ , `That Obscure Object of Desire: A Science of Language', in Ideologies of Language, eds John E. Joseph and Talbot J. Taylor (London: Routledge, 1990), 27±50. ÐÐ , Proper English? Readings in Language, History and Cultural Identity (London: Routledge, 1991). Culler, A. Dwight, The Poetry of Tennyson (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977). ÐÐ , The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1985). Dale, Peter Allan, The Victorian Critic and the Idea of History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1977). Darbishire, Helen, The Poet Wordsworth (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1950). D'Avanzo, Mario, Keats's Metaphors for the Poetic Imagination (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1967). Desmond, Adrian and James Moore, Darwin (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1992). Dickins, Bruce, `John Mitchell Kemble and Old English Scholarship', Proceedings of the British Academy, 25 (1939), 51±84. Douglas, Janet, The Life and Selections from the Correspondence of William Whewell, D. D. Late Master of Trinity College Cambridge (London, 1881). Dowling, Linda, `Victorian Oxford and the Science of Language', Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 97 (1982), 160±78. ÐÐ , `Roman Decadence and Victorian Historiography', in Victorian Studies, 28 (1985), 573±607. ÐÐ , Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de SieÁcle (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1986). ÐÐ , Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994). Duff, Gerald, William Cobbett and the Politics of Earth, Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Romantic Reassessment, 24 (Salzburg: UniversitaÈt Salzburg, 1972). Eberle-Sinatra, Michael, `From Dante to the Romantics: The Reception History of Leigh Hunt's The Story of Rimini', The Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 116 (2001), 120±43.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

228 Bibliography

Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning, `On First Looking into Chapman's Musaeus: A Note on Possible Influence', Keats-Shelley Journal, 43 (1994), 27±34. Ellis, John M., One Fairy Story Too Many: The Brothers Grimm and Their Tales (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983). Evert, Walter H., Aesthetic and Myth in the Poetry of Keats (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1965). Fairer, David (ed.), Pope: New Contexts (London: Harvester Press, 1990). ÐÐ , `Thomas Warton, Thomas Gray, and the Recovery of the Past', in Thomas Gray: Contemporary Essays, eds W. B. Hutchings and William Ruddick (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993), 146±69. Ferguson, Frances, Wordsworth: Language as Counter-Spirit (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1977). Finney, Claude Lee, The Evolution of Keats's Poetry, 2 vols in 1 (1936; New York: Russell & Russell, 1963). Fisher, Philip, `A Museum with One Work Inside: Keats and the Finality of Art', Keats-Shelley Journal, 33 (1984), 85±102. FitzGerald, Edward, Letters of Edward FitzGerald, ed. J. M. Cohen (London: Centaur, 1960). Fletcher, J. E., `An Unrecorded Collection in Australia of 19th Century Writings on Indo-European Philology', Journal of the Australasian Universities Language and Literature Association, 33 (1970), 77±87. Foucault, Michel, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Routledge, 1970). ÐÐ , The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (London: Routledge, 1972). Garber, Frederick, Wordsworth and the Poetry of Encounter (London: University of Illinois Press, 1971). Gilmartin, Kevin, Print Politics: The Press and Radical Opposition in Early NineteenthCentury England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). Gittings, Robert, John Keats (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). Glendening, John, `Keats's Tour of Scotland: Burns and the Anxiety of Hero Worship', Keats-Shelley Journal, 41 (1992), 76±99. Goggans, Thomas, `Deferred Desire and the Management of Tone in Leigh Hunt's The Story of Rimini', Keats-Shelley Journal, 50 (2001), 84±99. Gould, Cecil, Trophy of Conquest: The MuseÂe NapoleÂon and the Creation of the Louvre (London: Faber & Faber, 1965). Greenbie, Marjorie, Wordsworth's Theory of Poetic Diction (London: Milford, 1917). Greenblatt, Stephen, Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England (Oxford: Clarendon, 1988). Griffiths, Eric, The Printed Voice of Victorian Poetry (Oxford: Clarendon, 1989). Groom, Nick (ed.), Thomas Chatterton and Romantic Culture (Basingstoke: Macmillan ± now Palgrave Macmillan, 1999). Hair, Donald S., Tennyson's Language (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1991). Hamilton, Paul, Wordsworth (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1986). Hanley, Keith, `Wordsworth's Revolution in Poetic Language', Romanticism on the Net, 9 (1998) [26.4.2001] http://users.ox.ac.uk/scat0385/revolutionLB.html. Harding, Anthony John, `Speech, Silence, and the Self-doubting Interpreter in Keats's Poetry', Keats-Shelley Journal, 35 (1986), 83±103.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Bibliography 229

Harris, Daniel A., Tennyson and Personification: The Rhetoric of `Tithonus' (Michigan: UMI Research, 1986). Harris, R. W., Romanticism and the Social Order 1780±1830 (London: Blandford, 1969). Hayden, John O., Romantic Reviewers 1802±1824 (London: Routledge, 1969). Hirschfield, Lisa, `Between Memory and History: Wordsworth's Excursion', Romanticism on the Net, 16 (1999) [26.4.2001] http://users.ox.ac.uk/scat0385/ memory.html. Hixson, Jerome C. and Patrick Scott, `Tennyson's Books', Tennyson Research Bulletin, 2, v (1976), 190±8. Hoeveler, Diane Long, `Decapitating Romance: Class, Fetish, and Ideology in Keats's Isabella', Nineteenth-Century Literature, 49 (December 1994), 321±38. Hofkosh, Sonia, Sexual Politics and the Romantic Author (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Holmes, Richard, Shelley: The Pursuit (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987). ÐÐ , Coleridge: Early Visions (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1990). ÐÐ , Coleridge: Darker Visions (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1998). ÐÐ , Sidetracks (London: HarperCollins, 2000). Hughes, Linda K., `From ``Tithon'' to ``Tithonus'': Tennyson as Mourner and Monologist', Philological Quarterly, 58 (1979), 82±9. Hughes-Hallett, Penelope, The Immortal Dinner (London: Viking, 2000). Hymes, Dell H., Essays in the History of Linguistic Anthropology, Studies in the History of Linguistics, 25 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1983). Jack, Ian, Keats and the Mirror of Art (Oxford: Clarendon, 1967). Jacobus, Mary, Tradition and Experiment in Wordsworth's `Lyrical Ballads' (1798) (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976). Jankowsky, Kurt R., The Neogrammarians: A Re-evaluation of their Place in the Development of Linguistic Science (The Hague: Mouton, 1972). Janowitz, Anne, Lyric and Labour in the Romantic Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). Jenkyns, Richard, The Victorians and Ancient Greece (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980). Jespersen, Otto, Progress in Language with Special Reference to English (1894; repr. London: Sonnenschein, 1909). ÐÐ , Language: Its Nature, Development and Origin (London: Allen & Unwin, 1922). Johnston, Kenneth R., The Hidden Wordsworth, 2nd edn (London: Pimlico, 2000). Jones, James Land, Adam's Dream: Mythic Consciousness in Keats and Yeats (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 1975). Jones, Richard Foster, The Triumph of the English Language: A Survey of Opinions Concerning the Vernacular from the Introduction of Printing to the Restoration (London: Stanford University Press, 1953). Jonson, Ben, The English Grammar (1640), repr. in English Linguistics 1500±1800, 349, ed. R. C. Alston (Menston: Scolar, 1972). Joukovsky, Nicholas A., `Peacock's Sir Oran Haut-ton: Byron's Bear or Shelley's Ape?', Keats-Shelley Journal, 29 (1980), 173±90. Kaiser, David Aram, Romanticism, Aesthetics, and Nationalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999). Keach, William, `Cockney Couplets: Keats and the Politics of Style', Studies in Romanticism, 25 (1986), 182±96.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

230 Bibliography

ÐÐ , `Romanticism and Language' in The Cambridge Companion to British Romanticism, ed. Stuart Curren (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). Kelley, Philip and Ronald Hudson (eds), The Brownings' Correspondence, 12 vols (Winfield: Wedgestone Press, 1984±94). Kent, David A., `On the Third Stanza of Keats's ``Ode on a Grecian Urn'' ', KeatsShelley Journal, 36 (1987), 20±5. Kinsley, James (ed.), The Oxford Book of Ballads (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1969). Klancher, Jon P., The Making of English Reading Audiences, 1790±1832 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1987). Knights, Ben, The Idea of the Clerisy in the Nineteenth Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1978). Koch, June, `Politics in Keats's Poetry', Journal of English and German Philology, 70 (1972), 491±501. Koerner, Konrad (ed.), Progress in Linguistic Historiography, Studies in the History of Linguistics, 20 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1980). ÐÐ , `On the Historical Roots of the Philology/Linguistics Controversy', in Papers from the 5th International Conference on Historical Linguistics, ed. Anders Ahlqvist, Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 21 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1982), 404±13. ÐÐ , Linguistics and Evolutionary: Three Essays (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1983). ÐÐ , Practicing Linguistic Historiography: Selected Essays, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 50 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1989). ÐÐ , `Jacob Grimm's Position in the Development of Linguistics as a Science', in The Grimm Brothers and the Germanic Past, ed. Elmer H. Antonsen, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 54 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), 7±23. Kucich, Greg, ` ``The Wit in the Dungeon'': Leigh Hunt and the Insolent Politics of Cockney Coteries', European Romantic Review, `Special Issue: 1798 and its Implications', 10 (1999), 242±53. Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1962). Landar, Herbert, Language and Culture (New York: Oxford University Press, 1966). Leask, Nigel, British Romantic Writers and the East: Anxieties of Empire (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992). Lehmann, Winfred P. (ed.), A Reader in Nineteenth-Century Historical Indo-European Linguistics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1967). ÐÐ , Historical Linguistics: An Introduction, 2nd edn (New York: Holt, 1973). Leopold, Joan, `Darwin on Expression and the Origin of Language', in History and Historiography of Linguistics, eds Hans-Joseph Niederehe and Konrad Koerner, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 51 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), 633±45. Levinson, Marjorie, Wordsworth's Great Period Poems: Four Essays (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986). ÐÐ , Keats's Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Blackwell, 1988). ÐÐ et al. (eds), Rethinking Historicism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1989). Lindgren, J. Ralph, The Early Writings of Adam Smith (New York: Kelley, 1967). Little, Judy, Keats as a Narrative Poet: A Test of Invention (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975). Lounsbury, Thomas R., The Life and Times of Tennyson from 1809 to 1850 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1915).

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Bibliography 231

Lowes, John Livingston, `Keats, Diodorus Siculus, and Rabelais', Modern Philology, 34 (1937), 295±304. McEathron, Scott, `Wordsworth, Lyrical Ballads, and the Problem of Peasant Poetry', Nineteenth-Century Literature, 54 (1999), 1±26. McGann, Jerome J., `Keats and the Historical Method in Literary Criticism', Modern Language Notes, 94 (1979), 988±1032. ÐÐ , The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1983). ÐÐ , `Rethinking Romanticism', ELH: A Publication of the Stuart and Tudor Club of the Johns Hopkins University, 59 (1992), 735±54. McKay, Kenneth, Many Glancing Colours: An Essay in Reading Tennyson, 1809±1850 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). McKusick, James C., Coleridge's Philosophy of Language (London: Yale University Press, 1986). ÐÐ , ` ``Living Words'': Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the Genesis of the OED', Modern Philology, 90 (1992±3), 1±45. McLane, Maureen N., Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). ÐÐ , `Ballads and Bards: British Romantic Orality', Modern Philology, 98 (2001), 423±43. Marggraf Turley, Richard, `Full-Grown Lambs: Keats, Immaturity and ``To Autumn'' ', Romanticism on the Net (November 2002). ÐÐ , `John Keats, Barry Cornwall and Leigh Hunt's Literary Pocket-Book, Romanticism, 7, ii (2002). Mellor, Anne, `Keats and the Complexities of Gender', in The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001). Miall, David S. `Locating Wordsworth: ``Tintern Abbey'' and the Community with Nature', Romanticism on the Net, 20 (2000) [15.9.2001] http://users.ox.ac.uk/ scat0385/20miall.html. Milroy, James, The Language of Gerard Manley Hopkins (London: Deutsch, 1977). Mizukoshi, Ayumi, `The Cockney Politics of Gender ± the Cases of Hunt and Keats', Romanticism on the Net, 14 (1999) [9.4.2001] http://users.ox.ac.uk/ scat0385/cockneygender.html. ÐÐ , Keats, Hunt and the Aesthetics of Pleasure (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2001). Morell, Charles [James Ridley], The Tales of the Genii; or, The Delightful Lessons of Horam, the Son of Asmar. Faithfully Translated from the Persian Manuscript; and Compared with the French and Spanish Editions (1764; repr. in The Novelist's Magazine, 3, 1791). Morishima, Michio, Ricardo's Economics: A General Equilibrium Theory of Distribution and Growth (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Morrison, Robert, `Blackwood's Berserker: John Wilson and the Language of Extremity', Romanticism on the Net, 20 (2000) [15.9.2001] http://users.ox.ac.uk/ scat0385/20morrison.html Motion, Andrew, Keats (London: Faber & Faber, 1997). Muir, Kenneth (ed.), John Keats: A Reassessment (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1959).

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

232 Bibliography

Murray, Katherine Maud Elisabeth, Caught in the Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary (New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press, 1977). Murry, John Middleton, Keats and Shakespeare: A Study of Keats' Poetic Life from 1816±1820 (London: Oxford University Press, 1925). Nerlich, Brigitte, Semantic Theories in Europe 1830±1930: From Etymology to Contextuality, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 59 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1992). Newlyn, Lucy, Reading, Writing, and Romanticism: The Anxiety of Reception (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). Niederehe, Hans-Josef and Konrad Koerner (eds), History and Historiography of Linguistics, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 51, 2 vols (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990). Nielsen, Hans Frede, `Jacob Grimm and the ``German'' Dialects', in The Grimm Brothers and the Germanic Past, ed. Elmer H. Antonsen, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 54 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), 25±32. Olender, Maurice, The Languages of Paradise: Race, Religion, and Philology in the Nineteenth Century, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992). O'Neill, Michael, Romanticism and the Self-Conscious Poem (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). O'Rell, Diogenes, `On the Symmetries of a Grecian Urn', Mathematical Gazette, 77 (1993), 269. O'Rourke, James, `Persona and Voice in the ``Ode on a Grecian Urn'' ', Studies in Romanticism, 26 (1987), 27±48. Orwell, George, Selected Essays (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1957). Paulin, Tom, The Day-Star of Liberty: William Hazlitt's Radical Style (London: Faber & Faber, 1998). Pedersen, Holger, The Discovery of Language: Linguistic Science in the Nineteenth Century (1931); trans. John Webster Spargo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1962). Perkins, Lisa Heiserman, `Keats's Mere Speculations', Keats-Shelley Journal, 43 (1994), 56±74. Peterfreund, Stuart, `The Truth about ``Beauty'' and ``Truth,'': Keats's ``Ode on a Grecian Urn,'' Milton, Shakespeare, and the Uses of Paradox', Keats-Shelley Journal, 35 (1986), 62±82. Phinney, A. W., `Keats in the Museum: Between Aesthetics and History', Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 90 (1991), 208±29. Pick, Daniel, Faces of Degeneration: A European Disorder, c.1848±c.1918 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989). Pollard, David, The Poetry of Keats: Language & Experience (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984). Preyer, Robert O., `The Language of Discovery: William Whewell and George Eliot', Browning Institute Studies, 16 (1988), 123±52. Prickett, Stephen (ed.), The Romantics (London: Methuen, 1981). Punter, David, The Romantic Unconscious: A Study in Narcissism and Patriarchy (New York: Harvester Press, 1989).

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Bibliography 233

Pyre, J. F. A., The Formation of Tennyson's Style: A Study, Primarily, of the Versification of the Early Poems, University of Wisconsin Studies in Language and Literature, 12 (Madison, WI, 1921). Redpath, Theodore, The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion 1807±1824: Poetry of Byron, Shelley, and Keats as Seen by their Contemporary Critics (London: Harrap, 1973). Reid, Nicholas, `Coleridge, Language, and Imagination', Romanticism on the Net, 22 (2001) [9.10.2001] http://users.ox.ac.uk/scat0385/22reid.html Reiman, Donald H. (ed.), The Romantics Reviewed: Contemporary Reviews of British Romantic Writers, 9 vols (New York: Garland, 1972). Richardson, Peter, `The Consolation of Philology', Modern Philology 92 (August, 1994), 1±13. Ricks, Christopher, Tennyson (London: Macmillan, 1972). ÐÐ , Essays in Appreciation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998). Ridley, M. R., Keats' Craftsmanship: A Study in Poetic Development (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933). Rieder, John, Wordsworth's Counterrevolutionary Turn: Community, Virtue, and Vision in the 1790s (London: Associated University Presses, 1997). Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, Narrative Fiction: Contemporary Poetics (London: Routledge, 1983). Robson, Robert (ed.), Ideas and Institutions of Victorian Britain: Essays in Honour of George Kitson Clark (London: Bell, 1967). Roe, Nicholas, Wordsworth and Coleridge: The Radical Years (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988). ÐÐ (ed.) Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). ÐÐ , John Keats and the Culture of Dissent (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997). Rosso, G. A. and Daniel P. Watkins (eds), Spirits of Fire: English Romantic Writers and Contemporary Historical Methods (London: Associated University Presses, 1990). Ruoff, Gene W., `Wordsworth on Language: Towards a Radical Poetics for English Romanticism', Wordsworth Circle, 3 (1972), 204±11. Ruthven, K. K., `Keats and Dea Moneta', Studies in Romanticism, 15 (1976), 445±59. Said, Edward W., Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1991). Sambrook, James, William Cobbett (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1973). Scheffer, John D., `The Idea of Decline in Literature and the Fine Arts in Eighteenth-Century England', Modern Philology, 34 (1936±7), 155±78. È diger, `Of General Terms: On Language and Mind in 18th-Century Schreyer, Ru Linguistic Theory', in History and Historiography of Linguistics, eds Hans-Joseph Niederehe and Konrad Koerner, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 51 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), 399±414. ÐÐ , `The Language of Nature: Inquiries into a Concept of Eighteenth-Century British Linguistics', in Progress in Linguistic Historiography, ed. Konrad Koerner, Studies in the History of Linguistics, 20 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1980), 155±73. Schweizer, Karl W. and John W. Osborne, Cobbett in his Times (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1990). Scott, Grant F., `Beautiful Ruins: The Elgin Marbles Sonnet in Its Historical and Generic Contexts', Keats-Shelley Journal, 39 (1990), 123±50. È rer, and the Politics of Form', Studies in ÐÐ , `The Muse in Chains: Keats, Du English Literature 1500±1900, 34 (1994), 771±93.

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

234 Bibliography

Scott, Patrick Greig, ` ``Flowering in A Lonely Word'': Tennyson and the Victorian Study of Language', Victorian Poetry, 18 (1980), 371±81. Shannon, Edgar Finley, `Tennyson and the Reviewers, 1830±1842', Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 58 (1943), 181±94. ÐÐ , Tennyson and the Reviewers: A Study of his Literary Reputation and of the Influence of the Critics upon his Poetry 1827±51 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1952). Shattock, Joanne, Politics and Reviewers: The Edinburgh and the Quarterly in the Early Victorian Age (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1989). Shaw, W. David, `Tennyson's ``Tithonus'' and the Problem of Mortality', Philological Quarterly, 52 (1973), 274±85. ÐÐ , Tennyson's Style (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1976). Shippey, T. A., The Road to Middle Earth, 2nd edn (London: Grafton, 1992). ÐÐ , J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century (London: HarperCollins, 2000). Sider, Michael J., The Dialogic Keats: Time and History in the Major Poems (Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1998). Silverman, Kaja, The Subject of Semiotics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). Simpson, David, Irony and Authority in Romantic Poetry (Basingstoke: Macmillan ± now Palgrave Macmillan 1979). ÐÐ , Wordsworth's Historical Imagination: The Poetry of Displacement (London: Methuen, 1987). Sinfield, Alan, The Language of Tennyson's `In Memoriam' (Oxford: Blackwell, 1971). ÐÐ , Alfred Tennyson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986). Smith, Olivia, The Politics of Language, 1791±1819 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984). Sperry, Stuart M., Keats the Poet (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1973). Stabler, Jane, Burke to Byron; Barbauld to Baillie (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001). Stafford, Fiona J., The Last of the Race: The Growth of a Myth from Milton to Darwin (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994). Starn, Randolph, `Meaning-Levels in the Theme of Historical Decline', History and Theory, 14 (1975), 1±31. Steiner, George, Language and Silence: Essays 1958±1966 (London: Faber & Faber, 1967). ÐÐ , After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation (London: Oxford University Press, 1975). Steinman, Lisa M., Masters of Repetition: Poetry, Culture, and Work in Thomson, Wordsworth, Shelley, and Emerson (Basingstoke: Macmillan ± now Palgrave Macmillan, 1998). Stewart, Garrett, `Keats and Language', The Cambridge Companion to Keats, ed. Susan Wolfson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 135±51. Stillinger, Jack, The Hoodwinking of Madeline and Other Essays on Keats's Poems (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1971). ÐÐ (ed.), Keats's Odes: A Collection of Critical Essays (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1968). Stockoe, Frank Woodyr, German Influence in the English Romantic Period, 1788± 1818 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1926).

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Bibliography 235

Storey, Mark, The Problem of Poetry in the Romantic Period (Basingstoke: Macmillan ± now Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). Story, Patrick, `A Neglected Cockney School Parody of Hazlitt and Hunt', KeatsShelley Journal, 29 (1980), 191±202. Strang, Barbara M. H., A History of English (London: Methuen, 1970). Suzuki, Ruriko, `The idea of ``the real language of men'' in the 1800 ``Preface'' to Lyrical Ballads; or Enfield's idea of language derived from Condillac', Romanticism on the Net, 11 (1998) [10.4.2001] http://users.ox.ac.uk/scat0385/real. html Taylor, Dennis, `Victorian Philology and Victorian Poetry', The Victorian Newsletter, 53 (1978), 13±16. Taylor, Donald S., Thomas Chatterton's Art: Experiments in Imagined History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1978). Taylor, Richard C., `James Harrison, The Novelist's Magazine, and the Early Canonizing of the English Novel', Studies in English Literature 1500±1900, 33 (1993), 629±43. Teich, Nathaniel, `Evaluating Wordsworth's Revolution: Romantic Reviewers and Changing Taste', Papers on Language and Literature, 11 (1975), 206±23. Tennyson, Hallam (ed.), Studies in Tennyson (Basingstoke: Macmillan ± now Palgrave Macmillan, 1981). Thompson, E. P., The Making of the English Working Class (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1968). Thorpe, Clarence Dewitt, `Keats's Interest in Politics and World Affairs', Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, 46 (1931), 1228±5. Ting, Nai-Tung, `Chatterton and Keats: A Re-examination', Keats-Shelley Journal, 30 (1981), 100±17. Tombo, Rudolf, Ossian in Germany: Bibliography, General Survey, Ossian's Influence upon Klopstock and the Bards, Columbia University Germanic Studies, I, ii (New York: Gottlieb, 1901). Tsiapera, MaÂria, `Organic Metaphor in Early 19th-Century Linguistics', in History and Historiography of Linguistics, eds Hans-Joseph Niederehe and Konrad Koerner, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 51 (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 1990), 577±87. Turner, John, Wordsworth: Play and Politics (New York: St. Martin's Press now Palgrave Macmillan, 1986). Veeser, H. Aram (ed.), The New Historicism (New York: Routledge, 1989). Vendler, Helen, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1983). Walford Davies, Damian, Presences that Disturb: Models of Romantic Identity in the Culture and Literature of the 1790s. Forthcoming, University of Wales Press. Ward, John, Wordsworth's Language of Men (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1984). Wasserman, Earl R., The Finer Tone: Keats' Major Poems (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1953). Watkins, Daniel P., Keats's Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989). Wawn, Andrew, The Anglo Man: ‡orleifur Repp, Philology and Nineteenth-Century Britain, Studia Islandica, 49 (ReykjavõÂk: BoÂkau tgaÂfa Menningarsjo ds, 1991). ÐÐ , The Vikings and the Victorians: Inventing the Old North in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Cambridge: Brewer, 2000).

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

236 Bibliography

Whale, John, `Romantic Attacks: Pope and the Spirit of Language', in Pope: New Contexts, ed. David Fairer (London: Harvester Press, 1990), 153±68. ÐÐ , `Sacred Objects and the Sublime Ruins of Art', in Beyond Romanticism: New Approaches to Texts and Contexts 1780±1832, eds Stephen Copley and John Whale (London: Routledge, 1992), 218±36. ÐÐ , John, Imagination Under Pressure, 1789±1832: Aesthetics, Politics and Utility (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000). Wheatley, Kim, `Paranoid Politics: Shelley and the Quarterly Review', Romantic Circles Praxis Series, Romanticism and Conspiracy (August 1997) http://www. rc.umd.edu/praxis/conspiracy/wheatley/kim2.html. Whitney, Lois, Primitivism and the Idea of Progress in English Popular Literature of the Eighteenth Century (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1934). Whorf, Benjamin Lee, Language, Thought, and Reality: Selected Writings of Benjamin Lee Whorf, ed. John B. Carroll (New York: Technology Press of Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1956). Wiley, Raymond A. (ed. and trans.), John Mitchell Kemble and Jakob Grimm: A Correspondence 1832±1852 (Leiden: Brill, 1971). ÐÐ , `Grimm's Grammar Gains Ground in England, 1832±1852', in The Grimm Brothers and the Germanic Past, ed. Elmer H. Antonsen, Studies in the History of the Language Sciences, 54 (Amsterdam, Benjamins, 1990), 33±42. Williams, Raymond, Culture and Society: Coleridge to Orwell (London: Hogarth Press, 1958). ÐÐ , Cobbett (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1983). ÐÐ , Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society, 2nd rev. edn (London: Fontana, 1983). Wilson, William A., `Victorian Philology and the Anxiety of Language in Tennyson's In Memoriam', Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 30 (1988), 28±48. Woodring, Carl, Politics in English Romantic Poetry (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970). Worrall, David, Radical Culture: Discourse, Resistance and Surveillance, 1790±1820 (London: Harvester Press, 1992). Wu, Duncan, `John Scott's Death and Lamb's ``Imperfect Sympathies'' ', Charles Lamb Bulletin, n.s. 114 (2001), 38±50. Wylie, Ian, Young Coleridge and the Philosophers of Nature (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). Zak, William F., `To Try that Long Preserved Virginity: Psyche's Bliss and the Teasing Limits of the Grecian Urn', Keats-Shelley Journal, 31 (1982), 82±104. Zipes, Jack, The Brothers Grimm: From Enchanted Forests to the Modern World (New York: Routledge, 1988).

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Bibliography 237

Aarsleff, Hans, 1, 12, 16, 24, 111, 113,

139, 140±1, 143, 172

Abbey, Richard, 127

Abrams, M. H., xvi

Adamic language

Èhme

see Jakob Bo

Addison, Joseph, 31

Adelung, J. C.

Three Philological Essays, 21±2

Analytical Review, 55

Anglo-Saxon Controversy, 131, 141±5

Annals of the Fine Arts, 100

Anthropology, 4

anti-German sentiments, 159

see also Anglo-Saxon Controversy

Armstrong, Isobel, 156

asterisk-reality, 106±9

`authentic' poetry, 55, 58, 67, 87

see also genuine poetry

autumnal imagery, political dimension

to, 68±9

Bailey, Benjamin, 112, 114±15, 119,

120±3, 124, 192 n.11

Bailey, Nathaniel

An Universal Etymological Dictionary,

xxi, 74, 112, 127±30

ballads, xvii, 44, 51, 55, 56

Barnard, John, 85

Beadon, Richard, 15

Beyer, Arno, 137

Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, xx, 2,

151

see also John Gibson Lockhart

Blair, Hugh, 38

Blake, William, 6

Èhme, Jakob, 4, 6±7, 10, 160

Bo

Bopp, Franz, 16, 203 n.19

Comparative Grammar, 152

Vocalismus, 151

Bosworth, Joseph, 99, 105±6, 143, 160

Anglo-Saxon Dictionary, 103±4, 140,

141±2

Brightland, John

and anti-intellectualism, 29

A Grammar of the English Tongue,

28±30: and Hazlitt, 28

British Critic, 57

British Lady's Magazine, 62

British Review, 62±3

Bromwich, David, 113

Brookfield, William Henry, 174

Brougham, Henry, 60±1

Browne, William, 71, 83

Bruce, Thomas (Lord Elgin), 100

Buchanan, James

Linguae Britannicae, 28

The British Grammar, 27±8

Burn, John

Practical Grammar, 28

Burnet, James

and linguistic decline, 25

and sound laws, 158, 211 n.56

Of the Origin and Progress of

Language, xv, 11, 23, 96,

102, 157

Burney, Charles, 55

Burns, Robert, 44

Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 64

Cñdmon, 142

Calhoon, Kenneth, 102

Cambridge `Apostles', 156, 162

Carlyle, Thomas, 158

Chapman, George, xviii, 70, 71, 87

translation of Homer, 85±6, 89

Chatterton, Thomas, xviii, 44, 96, 128

and forgery, 79±80, 125

Chaucer, Geoffrey, xviii, 5

Clarke, Charles Cowden, 112

An Address, xxi, 89±95: date of

publication established,

204 n.44

Recollection of Writers, 85±6, 89

class, xii, 2, 27±8, 29, 31, 57

see also Wordsworth

238

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Index

classical culture, 21, 96±7, 133, 134, 158

Cobbett, William

A Grammar of the English Language,

15, 17±18, 30±1, 39, 43, 79

see also perspicuity, plain-speaking

`Cockney' School of Poetry, xxi, 35, 65,

70, 84±5, 111

Cockneyism, 80±1

Coleridge, John Taylor, 178

Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 7±8, 41

È hme, 6, 7±8

and Bo on Condillac, 115

and Godwin, 8

lingua communis, 45, 79

`living' language, xxi, 20, 62, 157,

160, 162

`Spy Nozy' incident, 39

Aids to Reflection, xix, 95, 157,

193 n.14, 211 n.6

Biographia Literaria, xix, 6, 36, 39, 79,

115

`Christabel', 64±5, 66

Lay Sermons, 115

`Rime of the Ancyent Marinere', 55

community of writers, 70, 187±8: see

also Hunt (coterie)

Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de, xv, xx,

4, 109, 187

influence on Shelley, 94, 126

influence on Wordsworth, 126

and Lockean materialism, 115±16,

124

and `Ode on a Grecian Urn', 113±14,

121, 124, 207 n.9, 207 n.17

and `Ode on Melancholy', 118, 124

theories of language, 125±8

An Essay on Human Knowledge, xxi, 9,

12±14, 22, 38, 112±28

conversation, political dimensions to,

15, 38±9, 55

Conybeare, William, 135, 145

Cornwall, Barry (pseudonym of Bryan

Waller Procter), xv, 25, 189

`Autumn', 68

Diego de Montilla, xix

Flood of Thessaly, 81

Preface to Dramatic Scenes, 5, 95

coterie see Leigh Hunt

Cottle, Joseph, 40

Cowper, William, 65

Cox, Jeffrey N., 88, 187

Critical Review, 54, 60

critical theory, xii, 188

Croker, John Wilson, 82, 83

attack on `ênone', 178±9

attack on The Story of Rimini, 78±9,

85, 90

see also Charles Cowden Clarke (An

Address)

Croly, George, p. 63

Crowley, Tony, 3, 140

Curtius, George, 103

Darwin, Charles, 146

Dasent, George Webbe, 152, 158,

195 n.49

De Quincey, Thomas, 31±2

debating clubs, 38

diction, xii, 2, 27, 31, 70, 71, 73, 91,

133, 189

see also Hunt, Keats, Tennyson,

Wordsworth

Donaldson, John William

The New Cratylus, 22, 131, 149±51,

154, 157

Dowling, Linda, 1, 10, 36, 42, 71, 139,

160, 161, 178

`dramatizations' of philological theory,

xvii, xx, xix, 70: see also self-

conscious poetry

Dryden, John, 5

dual authorship, 40, 198 n.21

duelling, 200 n.52

Dylan, Bob, 214 n.30

Eastwick, Edward Backhouse, 152

Eberle-Sinatra, Michael, 202 n.12

Eclectic Review, xx, 66±7, 69

review of Foliage, 71, 100±1

review of Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of

St. Agnes, and Other Poems, 106

review of Poems (1807), 58±9

Edgecombe, Rodney Stenning, 76

Edinburgh Monthly Review, 63

Edinburgh Review, 34, 111

review of Life of Lord Byron, 60±1 review of Thalaba, 57

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Index 239

Elgin Marbles, 99±101, 106

see also Keats (Elgin Marbles

sonnets)

emphatic language, 33, 37, 48, 51, 54,

87 Empson, William, 22±3, 157

Enfield, William, 38

English

changing status of, xvi, xx, 27±8, 31,

95, 99, 132, 137, 139, 141, 147,

149, 151±2, 158±60

`correct' English, xii

`genuine' English, 80±1, 87

neoclassical refinement of, 2

etymology, 29

see also Horne Tooke, Keats

European Review, 60

Examiner, 91

fairy tales, 140

Ferguson, Francis, 44

Foreign Quarterly Review, 138, 143

Fox, William Johnson, 181

French Revolution, 38, 40

`French' School of Poetry,

72, 91

`Gagging' Acts, 38±9

Galt, John, 60±1

Garden, Francis, 185

Garnett, Richard, 26

Gentleman's Magazine, 3

see also Anglo-Saxon Controversy

`genuine' poetry, xvi, xix, 21, 31, 65±6,

67±9, 71, 87, 94, 131

see also Wordsworth

Gifford, William, xii, 113

Godwin, William, 8

Gold's London Magazine, 67

grammar, politics of, 27±31

Gray, Thomas, 86

Green, Joyce, 180

Greenblatt, Stephen, xv

Grimm, Jacob, xv, xxi, 16, 23, 94, 98,

130, 142, 154, 156

delayed reception, 133

sound laws, 103, 107, 132, 133±4,

136, 141, 147, 149, 150, 151,

153, 158

Deutsche Grammatik, 131, 145, 161:

mistranslated, 146±7, 210 n.55;

only partially translated, 147,

152, 155; reviewed, see under

Kemble, Neaves, Rask,

Wedgwood; see also sound

laws, above

Deutsche Mythologie, 140

È ber den Ursprung der Sprache, 140

U

see also verb forms

habeas corpus, 17, 35

Haeckel, Ernst, 151

Hair, Donald S., 156, 186, 188

Hallam, Arthur, 163±4, 169±71

Hamilton, Paul, 38

Hare, Augustus, 157

Hare, Julius, 62, 107, 156, 182

Guesses at Truth, 156, 157, 162

Haydon, Benjamin Robert, 100

Hazlitt, William, xii

Èhme, 6

on Bo

on Coleridge, 6

on Condillac, 115

on Horne Tooke: see The Spirit of the

Age below

on Johnson, 200 n.42

and mechanisms of language, 115

on Wordsworth, 33

A New and Improved Grammar of the

English Tongue, xix, 112,

194 n.41

Lectures on English Philosophy, 115,

118

Lectures on the English Poets, 65±6,

115

`Letter to William Gifford', 113

`On Why the Arts are not

Progressive', 96

Table Talk, 198 n.17

The Round Table, 133

The Spirit of the Age, 18±19, 29,

33, 47

see also plain-speaking

Herder, Johann Gottfried, xv, xvi, 10,

55, 71, 77

influence on Shelley, 94

and Volksstimme, xx, 8, 22, 36, 42±3,

82, 157

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

240 Index

Abhandlung uÈber den Ursprung der Sprache, 9, 22, 26, 38, 82, 94 Heyne, C. G., 38, 55 Hickes, George Grammatica Anglo-Saxonica, 29 `high' vs `low' culture, 32, 34, 38±9, 48, 71, 84, 88 Hobbes, Thomas, 12, 115 Hoole, John, 87 Horne Tooke, xv, 4, 8, 133 concept of abbreviation, 16, 163: compare Hensleigh Wedgwood decline of language, 24 etymology, 16 influence of, 17±18 Diversions of Purley, 14±19, 23±4 Humtius Dumtius, 172 Hunt, Leigh, xv, 18, 34, 57, 64, 75, 161 coterie, 88 `death' of Hunt, 80±1 and diction: see Preface to Rimini below and Hampstead, 80 as `King of Cockneys', 88 and imprisonment, 63, 66 and poetic language, 2, 94 and Pope, 72 and Preface to Lyrical Ballads, 33, 35, 63, 66, 77 tutelage of Keats, 189 Preface to Rimini, 5, 72, 75, 76±7, 81±2, 87±8, 94, 95, 108 Examiner, 115, 202 n.7, 204 n.45 Foliage, 71, 100±1 Indicator, xviii Literary Pocket-Book, 68±9 The Story of Rimini, xvii, xix, xx, xxi, 33, 35, 43, 66, 72±5: as archetypal Cockney text, 88; and classical mythology, 66; plot summary, 72 see also Wordsworth (influence of Hunt on his reception) Icelandic Edda, 38 imperialism, 150, 154, 160, 186 industrialization, 166 influence, literary, 13±14, 122±4 inscription, 165±6

Jacobus, Mary, 44 Jack, Ian, 101 Janowitz, Anne, 44±5 jargon in criticism, xii in poetry, 2, 14, 54, 78, 87, 90, 188 Jeffrey, Francis, 34, 57, 61 Johnson, Joseph, 17, 27, 40 Johnson, Samuel, xv, xviii-xix, 2, 33, 37±8, 55, 71 and spoken language, 31 A Dictionary of the English Language, 3: and affixed Grammar, 3 The Plan of a Dictionary, 3, 11, 25 Johnston, Kenneth, 39 Jones, Sir William, 10, 82, 160 Keach, William, 1, 11 Keats, John, xv, xvi, xx, 5, 12, 34, 161, 164, 181 and classical antiquity, 95±7 and diction, 57, 81, 95 and etymology, 128 and imagination, 114, 117 and indecency, xx and language, 2, 5, 79±80 list of books left at his death, 112, 127 and Magdalen Hall, 112±13, 124, 207 n.4 and medicine, 127 and medievalism, 76, 181 as `neophyte' of Hunt, 88 on the poetical character, 117 Sosibios Vase, 205 n.63 and synaesthesia, 123 walking tour of the north, 207 n.18 and Condillac, Benjamin Bailey, Nathaniel Bailey, Chatterton, Cowden Clarke, Milton: see under individual authors Elgin Marbles sonnets, 97±8, 99±101, 109 Endymion, 213 n.26: published preface to, 97, 99 Hyperion, 81 Isabella, 76 `La Belle Dame Sans Merci', xvii-xix, 76, 190, 191 n.6

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Index 241

Keats, John ± continued

Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St Agnes,

and Other Poems, xviii: and

violence, 105

`Ode on a Grecian Urn', xxi, 95, 98,

99±110, 113, 190: deconstructs

itself, 104±5; and ekphrasis, 102;

interrogation in, 104;

philological methodology in,

101, 105; and ravishment,

104±5; and silence, 103; source

for `beauty is truth, truth

beauty', 113; urn as

overdetermined, 101; see also

Condillac

`Ode on Melancholy', xxi: see also

Condillac

`On First Looking into Chapman's

Homer', 85±7, 89±92, 95:

philological dimension to, 90

`Specimen of an Induction to a

Poem', xvii, xix, 75±6

The Eve of St Agnes, 76

The Fall of Hyperion, 102

`To Autumn', 68±9

Keats, George and Georgiana, 90,

119±20, 124

Kemble, John Mitchell, 154

correspondence with Grimm, 140,

144

edition of Beowulf, 144, 145

and Tennyson, 156

`On English Prñterites', 131, 138±9,

144, 182±3 rejected review of Deutsche

Grammatik for Foreign Quarterly

Review, 138, 143

see also Anglo-Saxon Controversy

Kirk, Thomas, 101

`Lake' School of Poetry, xxi, 34, 63,

64, 68

`lang.' and `lit.', xi, xx, xxii, 188

language

arbitrary language, xxi, 6, 13, 20, 23,

62, 115, 161±2

autonomous language, 161,

167±8

constitutive language, 7±8, 10

and creativity, 3

and culture, xx, 1±2, 8±9, 13, 15,

21±3, 32, 33, 43, 54, 64±5, 85,

126, 132, 147, 149, 157,

195 n.49

`emphatic' language, 33, 42, 77, 94:

see also Keats (`On First Looking

into Chapman's Homer')

gendered feminine, 103

linguistic reform seen as means of

political reform, xv, 2, 130,

187±8, 189, 201 n.56

`natural' (Adamic) language, 4, 6±7, È hme

8, 9, 10: see also Jakob Bo ontological essence in, 82±3

organic metaphors for, 47, 103, 163:

see also Joseph Priestley origin of language, xvi, 4±20, 42,

107: human invention vs divine

revelation, 6, 8, 11±12, 13, 19,

42, 148±9

poetic language, 4, 8, 61, 77, 94±9,

126

and politics, xi, xv

principle of degeneracy within, 25

`second' languages, 10

spoken language, 10, 31, 54, 87

Latham, Robert Gordon

The English Language, 131, 139, 140,

152±4

Latin and Greek, 4, 7, 24, 27±9, 56, 66,

95, 106, 132±3, 150, 154

classical vocabulary in English, 3, 5,

10±11, 13, 20, 24, 28, 29, 31, 37,

48, 153±4

Latin grammar in English, 18, 28±9

as `twin tyrants', 158

see also English

Lemon, George William Derivative Dictionary, 24±5

Levinson, Marjorie, 40, 49

lexicography, 3, 11, 55

Literary Chronicle, 63

Literary Gazette

on Hunt, 71

review of Peter Bell, 63

review of Poems (1832), 173

literature and history, xi, xvi, xvii, 21±3

Locke, John, 7, 13

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

242 Index

Lockean tradition, 15: see also

Condillac

Essay Concerning Human

Understanding, 6, 12

Lockhart, John Gibson (`Z'), xii, 14,

56±7, 64, 82, 83, 132

obfuscates philological

sophistication of Romantics, 71,

85, 88, 189

on Hunt, 70, 80±1, 192 n.11

on Keats, 70±1

translation of F. Schlegel, 84, 157,

178

London Magazine, 68

London Review of Books, 111±12

Long, George, 151

Lowth, Robert, xv, 4

A Short Introduction to English Grammar, 2, 137

Lyall, William Rowe, 62, 78

Lyttelton, George William

Arundines Cami, 172±7, 181±3, 185

see also Tennyson (`ênone')

Macpherson, James, 39, 44, 125

Maddern, Frederic, 144±5

Marggraf-Turley, Anne, 206 n.74

Marvell, Andrew, 68

materialism, xvii, 6, 12±13, 30, 62, 115

Matthew, George Felton, 60

Maurice, Frederick Denison, xxi, 62,

138, 156, 169

Friendship of Books, 162

McEathron, Scott, 198 n.13

McEwan, Ian, 112

McGann, Jerome, xvi

McKusick, James C., 1, 10, 14, 132, 139

Mellor, Anne, 191 n.6

Milman, Henry Hart

on Tennyson, 173±8, 180, 181±3

see also Tennyson (`ênone')

Milton, John, xviii, 57, 65, 81, 96,

125±6, 128, 134

Monboddo, Lord

see James Burnet

Montgommery, James, 58±9

Monthly Censor, 68±9

Monthly Repository, 181

Monthly Review, 55

Motion, Andrew, 113

Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt, xx

Èller, Max, 155

Mu

Murray, Alexander

and Coleridge, 20

and Wordsworth, 20

History of the European Languages,

19±20

Murray, Lindley, xv, xviii, 2, 4

English Grammar, 18

nationalism, xxi, 131, 132, 137, 139,

150, 151±2, 154, 197 n.7

Neaves, Charles, 98, 101, 103

review of Deutsche Grammatik, 131,

151±2, 154, 159

neoclassicism, xvi, xx, 34, 37±8, 44, 54,

57, 60, 62±3, 67, 88

linguistic tenets, 4±5

Romantic attacks on, 70, 72, 74, 94±5

see also `French' School of Poetry,

prescriptivism, taste,

compare pre-Restoration,

Romanticism New London Review, 55±6 Newlyn, Lucy, 198 n.18 North, Christopher see John Wilson Nugent, Thomas see Condillac, An Essay on Human Knowledge O'Neill, Michael, xx

Oxford English Dictionary, 161

Paine, Thomas, 68

paper money, 112

Paulin, Tom, 16

Percy, Thomas, xvii, 38, 39, 44, 56, 62

perspicuity, 28, 31

see also plain-speaking

Peterloo massacre, 68

Philological Museum, 138, 182

philology, xv, xvi, xvii, xix, xx, xxi, 4,

78, 85, 88, 89, 95±6, 188±90

comparative philology, 12, 148, 153:

remains value-based, 99, 147,

160

Continental philology, 16, 131

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Index 243

philology ± continued

philological sophistication of

Romantics obscured: see John

Gibson Lockhart

political dimension to, 134

Romantic philology, 10, 62, 63, 71, 82

and violence, 98, 101, 103±4, 110

see also asterisk-reality

Pinkerton, John, 44

Pitt, William, 15, 39

plagiarism, 115, 122

plain-speaking, 18, 20, 27, 30, 31, 32,

37, 39, 42, 47, 51, 86, 200 n.42

Plato, 113

poetry vs versification,72

Pope, Alexander, xix, 5, 33, 37±8, 55,

57, 71±2, 74

translation of Homer, 85±7, 89, 91

population theory, 112

pre-Restoration, xviii, 5, 26, 67, 71, 75,

76, 80

see also authenticity in poetry,

diction, genuine poetry

compare neoclassicism

prescriptivism, xviii-xix, 3, 27

Prichard, James Cowles

Eastern Origin of the Celtic Nations,

131, 135±7, 140, 154

Priestley, Joseph, 8, 19

A Course of Lectures, 6, 25±6

primitivism, 42

Prince Regent, 66

print culture, 61

progress and degeneration, 23±7, 96,

161

of culture, 2, 21, 25

of language, 2, 4±5, 21±22, 24±7, 32,

91, 126, 146±7, 157±8

propriety, 88

Pyre, J. F. A., 163

Quarterly Review, xx, 2, 62, 88, 92,

111, 131

on Hunt: see Croker

on Tennyson: see Milman, Croker

review of `White Doe of Rylstone', 78

racism, 150±1

Rask, Rasmus, xv, 16, 23, 94, 103, 130

Grammar of the Anglo-Saxon Tongue,

142, 152

Grammar of the Icelandic or Old Norse

Tongue, 152

review of Deutsche Grammatik, 135

sound laws, 135, 158

Rawson, Claude, 125

Reid, Nicholas, 8

Restoration, 5, 91

Retrospective Review, 83, 96

see also Thomas Noon Talfourd

Reynolds, John Hamilton, 81, 116±17,

124

Ricks, Christopher, 169

Rieder, John, 48, 49

Rimmon-Kenan, Shlomith, 102±3, 106

Roe, Nicholas, xvi, 68

Romanticism, xx, xxii

and classical antiquity, 96, 109±10

linguistic tenets, 4±5

and originality, 115

transformed by encounter with

philology, xv-xvi, 188±90

compare neoclassicism

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, xv, 4

`Essay on the Origin of Languages',

11, 22, 26, 77

Ruoff, Gene W., xix

Said, Edward, 11

Sanskrit, 10, 82, 112

see also Sir William Jones

Saussure, Ferdinand de, 8, 13, 20

Schlegel, Friedrich, xv, xx

Geschichte der Alten und Neuen

Literatur, 84

È ber die Alte und Neue Literatur, 9

U

`Zur Poesie und Literatur', 9

Schleicher, August, 108

Scots Magazine, 85

Scott, Grant F., 100

Scott, Patrick Greig, 186

Scott, Sir Walter, 132

Scourge, 64±5, 67

self-conscious poetry, xx, 46±9, 49±54,

72±5, 167

see also `dramatizations' of

philological theory

Sellwood, Emily, 164

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

244 Index

Shakespeare, William, xix, 5, 87, 134 birthroom as three-dimensioned text, 164 Shelley, Percy, xv and Clarke's An Address, 92±5 Defence of Poetry, xix, xxi, 26: philological context to, 93, 109 `Ode to the West Wind', 69 see also Condillac Shannon, E. F., 216 n.62 Shippey, Tom, 107, 188 simplicity, 56±7 Simpson, David, 43, 47 Sinfield, Alan, 172 Smith, Adam, 4, 8, 19, 25 `Considerations Concerning the First Formation of Languages', 6 Smith, Olivia, 1, 14, 17, 31, 35, 40, 54, 56 SocieÂte Linguistique, 4 `sole survivor', 47, 52 Southey, Robert, 54±5 Thalaba, 57 Spedding, James, 171, 183 Spenser, Edmund, xviii, 5, 71, 75±6 Stewart, Garrett, 111 Stoddart, John, 57 Suzuki, Ruriko, 2 Talfourd, Thomas Noon, xv, 83, 96, 98 taste, xv, xviii, 37, 56, 60±1, 66, 68, 70, 74, 85, 87, 90, 93, 94 Taylor, Dennis, 206 n.69 teleology, 21, 26, 147, 159, 161 Tennyson, Alfred, 3, 130, 156 and Cockneyism, 189 and diction, 172±3 and Endymion, 213 n.26 fear of linguistic erosion, 163, 166: see also `The Dell of E±', `The Talking Oak' below hyphenation, 217 ns.63, 68: see also `ênone' below love of old words, 163, 181, 212 n.21 silent standardization of his work: see `ênone' below strong verbs, 181±3, 216 n.61 views on language, 161: inadequacy of language, 169

`A Dream of Fair Women', 213 n.28 `Break, Break, Break', 170±1 `Early Spring', 169±70 `EleaÈnore', 170, 214 n.31

In Memoriam, xv, 7, 171±2, 187,

214 nn.32, 34 `Mariana in the South', 168±9 `Morte d'Arthur', 182 `ênone', 172±86 `The Dell of E±', xvii, 166±7, 171, 216 n.61 `The Lotos-Eaters', 216 n.61 `The Palace of Art', 216 n.61 `The Talking Oak', xvii, 164±66: and Coleridge's theories of language, xxi

`To J[ames]. S[pedding].', 171

`Ulysses', 170

`Whispers', 170

`Will Waterproof's Lyrical

Monologue', 183 Tennyson, Emily, 163 Tennyson, Hallam Alfred Lord Tennyson: A Memoir by his Son, 163 Theatrical Inquisitor, 204 n.44 Thelwall, John, 39 Thorpe, Benjamin, 142, 144 Times Literary Supplement, 112 Tooke, William, 15 Tower of Babel, 4, 148 `transferable' words, 122 translation, 23, 90±1 Trench, Richard Chenevix, 138 and Tennyson, 156 Turner, John, 52±3 Turner, Sharon, 11±12 Ursprache, 9, 10, 26, 31, 37, 83, 94, 98±9, 102, 160 Vendler, Helen, 102 verb forms (`strong' vs `weak'), 137, 139: see also nationalism, Tennyson (strong verbs) Vernant, Jean-Pierre, 12 Wakefield, Gilbert, 17, 40 Walford Davies, Damian, 88

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

Index 245

Ward, John, 43

Watts, Thomas, 134, 160

Wawn, Andrew, 197 n.12

Webster, Noah, 3, 19

An American Dictionary of the English

Language, 9

Dissertations on the English Language,

8±9

Wedgwood, Hensleigh, 131, 154

concept of abbreviation/linguistic

erosion, 107, 109, 162±3:

compare Horne Tooke

review of Deutsche Grammatik, 146±7

West, Benjamin, 113

Whale, John, 72

Whewell, William, 156

The Philosophy of the Inductive

Sciences, 107, 109, 153

Wiley, Raymond, 143

Wilson, John, 81, 179

Windham, Thomas, 17

Winning, William Balfour

A Manual of Comparative Philology,

131, 147±8

Woodhouse, Richard, 112, 117, 124

Wordsworth, William, xv, xvi, xx, 10,

112, 131

and class, 33±4, 36, 38, 39, 40, 44±5,

55±6

on Condillac, 115

and diction, 57, 61, 63, 79: see also

Appendix to Lyrical Ballads

below

and distinction between poetry and

prose, 25, 59

and forgery, 55, 199 n.39

and `genuine' poetry, 33, 35±6, 43,

44±5, 51±2, 58±9, 60, 63

and imitability, 36, 45

influence of Hunt on reception of,

xx, 33, 35, 54, 63±7

and materialism, 42, 115

and `placed' idiom, 36, 50±1

and Pope, 78

`real language of men', 35, 43±4, 45,

50±1, 56, 58, 78, 130, 201 n.55

Advertisement to Lyrical Ballads, 33,

38, 40, 43, 79

An Evening Walk, 57

Appendix to Lyrical Ballads, 34, 77±8,

126

Convention of Cintra, 59, 115, 118

Descriptive Sketches, 57

`Essay, Supplementary to the

Preface', 36

Essays on Epitaphs, 167

Lyrical Ballads, xx, 2, 10, 34±5, 43,

54±69: political charge of, 33;

`soul'/`soil' connection in, 50

Ode: Intimations of Immortality, 48

`Old Cumberland Beggar', 56

Peter Bell, 63

Poems (1807), 60, 61

`Poems on the Naming of Places',

43±4

Preface to Lyrical Ballads, xix, 5, 22,

37, 41, 44, 49, 95, 126:

contradictions in, 46, 62;

influence on future reviews of

Wordsworth, 60; as poetic

manifesto, not scholarly essay,

39; quasi-mystical, 13; see also

Hunt

River Duddon, 67

`Simon Lee', xvii, xix, 46±9, 160: and

pleasure, 49

`The Brothers', xvii, 49±54, 73: and

written language, 50, 53

`The Convict', 34

`The Female Vagrant', 56

The Excursion, 61

The Waggoner, 63

`Tintern Abbey', 58

`White Doe of Rylstone', 62,

78±9

see also ballads, Condillac

Worral, David, 38

Wright, Thomas, 143±45

see also Anglo-Saxon Controversy

`Z' see J. G. Lockhart

10.1057/9780230511842 - The Politics of Language in Romantic Literature, Richard Marggraf Turley

Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Universitetsbiblioteket i Tromso - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-18

246 Index