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Matthew Arnold PDF

340 Pages·2014·1.94 MB·English
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1 Thesis Title: The Arnoldian Element in Yeats’s A Vision Candidate: Jaron Murphy (Merton College) Degree: D.Phil English Term: Trinity 2014 ABSTRACT In this study of the influence of Matthew Arnold on W.B. Yeats, I describe a tendency in the critical field to overlook the placement of Arnold at Phase 18, and the implications of his presence beside Yeats at Phase 17, in Yeats’s key philosophical treatise A Vision (1926, 1937). The central contribution of my thesis is to address this crucial blind spot but also the concomitant failure by critics to consider Arnold’s overall bearing on the ‘System’ itself. Chiefly through analysis of the gyres, two types of man, and lunar phases of the Great Wheel, I trace five main, interrelated aspects comprising ‘the Arnoldian element’ in A Vision: 1) Romanticism; 2) morbidity; 3) Celticism; 4) culture; and 5) the over-arching ideal of ancient Greek genius. My thesis that Arnold is paramount to Yeats’s poetical and political concerns in the treatise demonstrates how the Arnoldian element – including a covert extension of Yeats’s dialogue with Arnold in “The Celtic Element in Literature” (1897) – within its abstruse occult discourse partly but powerfully shapes: 1) the projection of Irish self-rule and unity, principally in the figure of the Daimonic Man of the ideal Phase 17 (Yeats) subversively juxtaposed with the fragmenting Emotional Man of Phase 18 (Arnold and Goethe), in a time of anarchy; and 2) the representation of a range of phasal examples (named and unnamed, encompassing both literature and sexual love). I argue that Yeats’s considerable indebtedness to Arnold 1) both spurs and troubles readings of Yeats as a poet of decolonization; 2) merits attention in the long-running ‘Orwellian’ debate over Yeats’s alleged fascism, coinciding with Yeats’s eugenics; 3) illuminates A Vision as an ‘anxiety of influence’ text in which Yeats ‘kills’ his critical fathers Arnold and J.B. Yeats; and 4) warrants Arnold’s routine inclusion among Yeats’s foremost influences like Nietzsche, Blake, Dante, and Shelley whose portrayals in A Vision are partly bound up, as I show, with Yeats’s engagement with Arnold. * * * * * 2 The Arnoldian Element in Yeats’s A Vision By Jaron Murphy Supervised by Bernard O’Donoghue 3 Contents Introduction 6 i) A Visible Blind Spot in the Critical Field: Yeats, Arnold, and A Vision 6 ii) On Familiar Terms: The Allusive Yeats and Elusive Arnold 15 Chapter One A General Survey of the Arnoldian Element in Yeats 25 i) Amid the Labyrinth in Art or Politics: Towards A Vision from Yeats’s Earliest Reviews, on Ferguson 26 ii) The Scholar-Gipsy Yeats: Cross-referencing Arnold’s Projections of Genius 70 Chapter Two Nobility in Unity: Yeats’s Recourse to Primitivism in Response to Arnold’s Celt 93 i) A Class Above: Arnold and the Yeatsian Dream of the Noble and the Beggar-Man 94 ii) Natural Aristocracy and the State from Burke through Arnold to Yeats 122 Chapter Three In Search of the Arnoldian Element in A Vision 151 i) Littleness United is Become Invincible: In-Built Anti-Philistinism in the Framework of the ‘System’ 152 ii) Dialectical Progression: Echoes of the Arnoldian Element in the Principal Symbol 161 iii) Entering the Great Wheel: The Morbid Phases 23 and 13 183 4 Chapter Four Yeats at the Ideal Phase 17 206 i) The Buried Self: How Arnold Comes Back to Haunt Kiberd’s Theory of the Gyres 207 ii) Poetical and Political Measure and Order: Qualities Shaping Yeats’s Alleged Fascism and Eugenics 226 iii) The Daimonic Man: Yeats, Dante, Shelley, and Landor, Plus Implications for the Critical Field 246 Chapter Five Sexual Love and the Writing of Poetry: Phases 18, 16, and 14 277 i) A Wounding Beyond Healing: Arnold, Goethe, Mrs Yeats, and JBY at Phase 18 277 ii) Vehemence and Self-Will: Maud Gonne and Blake at Phase 16 297 iii) Intoxication and Natural Magic: Iseult Gonne, Keats, and Wordsworth at Phase 14 305 Conclusion 319 References 323 * * * * * 5 And when we consider Arnold as a critic, no matter how often we note his errors of opinion, we cannot avoid coming to the judgment that Arnold was one of the greatest critics in English literature, or, indeed, in the literature of the world. It is never really of consequence how wrong a critic is on one point or another, or even on many points. What is of consequence is that he should, by what he says about a work of literature, induce us to look at it with a renovated curiosity, and that he should lead us to judge it not merely by the highest literary standards but also by our own sense of life. To do this, a critic must take large chances. He must unsettle old established notions and propose new ones, and this is never without its risk. We can go so far as to say that a critic who is essentially right may be most interesting and most powerful and most useful when he is wrong, that his mistakes may sometimes be the most vital part of him, for they represent his passion and commitment. – Lionel Trilling, Matthew Arnold Why should you leave the lamp Burning alone beside an open book, And trace these characters upon the sands? A style is found by sedentary toil And by the imitation of great masters. – W.B. Yeats, “Ego Dominus Tuus” 6 Introduction i) A VISIBLE BLIND SPOT IN THE CRITICAL FIELD: YEATS, ARNOLD, AND A VISION In “Yeats, Victorianism, and the 1890s” (2006), George Watson observes that although Yeats was born in 1865 “in… the high noon of the Victorian period” and “lived thirty-six of his seventy-four years” during the reign of Queen Victoria, critics tend not “to characterize Yeats as a Victorian” (2006:36). That Yeats “was irredeemably hostile to everything Victorian,” he adds, “has been an article of critical faith” (2006:36). He proceeds to demonstrate, however, that Yeats’s emphatic anti-Victorianism has obscured a number of “ways in which Yeats engaged more positively with the Victorian age into which he was born” (2006:40). He asserts: “In particular, the relation between Yeats and Matthew Arnold needs re-scrutiny” (2006:40). Convincingly, he argues that despite Yeats’s “constant attacks on Arnold’s notion of art as a criticism of life” Yeats was in fact “to conduct a covert dialogue with the most famous Victorian critic for a good part of his life” (2006:40) in more productive ways than the repeated rejection might appear to signal. Watson presents a range of correspondences and references in Yeats’s writings that confirm an Arnoldian influence, stretching from the 1880s to the last years of Yeats’s life, but he does not explicitly link Arnold to Yeats’s key philosophical treatise A Vision (published in 1926, with the revised version appearing in 1937). This is a crucial oversight afflicting not only Watson’s essay but Yeats scholarship in general. It is puzzling that despite Goethe and 7 Arnold being named as the examples of Phase 18 in the Great Wheel of A Vision (both versions), generations of Yeats biographers and critics have scarcely ventured to interrogate the incorporation of Arnold, in particular, into the ‘System’.1 In The Wisdom of Two: The Spiritual and Literary Collaboration of George and W.B. Yeats (2006), Margaret Mills Harper has offered a most considered reflection, as we will see, on Goethe in relation not to Arnold but to the medium Mrs Yeats: the original occupant of Phase 18 in the so-called Automatic Script from which Yeats compiled A Vision. Moreover, in her account of the Great Wheel (which has the virtue of encompassing, among the phasal examples, both great men and, expressly, great women), Harper overlooks Arnold at Phase 18 – which has historically been the case among the foremost biographers and critics, perhaps most notably Richard Ellmann and, more recently, R.F. Foster. Harold Bloom, aware of the ‘private’ placement of Mrs Yeats and (according to Ellmann) Yeats’s father John Butler Yeats (JBY) at Phase 18, is the sole leading critic to have attempted to explain the formal pairing of Goethe and Arnold in the treatise. His conclusion in Yeats (1970) that their location at Phase 18 signifies Yeats’s rejection of “the flight from Romanticism of these poets” (1972:256) is illuminating. However, Bloom’s brief analysis of Phase 18 is severely limited by space and scope in the course of an accelerated expository progression through the Great Wheel, and in particular by the narrow but nevertheless important track which Bloom follows, of Yeats’s Romantic sensibility. Bloom fails to appreciate, as we will see, the extraordinary complexity of the critical treatment meted out to Arnold in particular at Phase 18, in both textual and symbolical terms, in relation to the placement of Yeats himself at Phase 17. Although by no means neglected by Bloom, Arnold 1 As R.F. Foster reports, the “archetypes of the twenty-eight incarnations remain much the same” (2003:603) in the 1937 version. 8 remains little considered in relation to Yeats across Bloom’s works. This appears to be partly the result of a critical distaste for Arnold. In The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life (2011), Bloom dismisses Arnold in passing as “the most overrated of all critics, ever” (2011:152). Nor has scholarly attention been greatly exercised towards identifying, let alone exploring in depth, any Arnoldian influence on Yeats’s ‘System’ itself. A notable exception is Ronald Schuchard who, as the title of his essay “Yeats, Arnold, and the Morbidity of Modernism” (1985) suggests, is especially attuned to Yeats’s lifelong preoccupation with the ‘morbid’ in modern poetry. Schuchard links the appearance of the single term “Morbidity” (Yeats 2008:54) as a defining characteristic of Phase 13, that of Baudelaire, Dowson, and Beardsley, to Yeats’s analysis of his ill-fated associates of the 1890s in “The Tragic Generation” (1922) partly by way of Arnold’s notion of “morbid effort” (Yeats 1991:313). Although this phrase arises in Arnold’s letter to Mrs Forster dated 6 August 1858, Schuchard effectively relates both morbidity at Phase 13 in A Vision and morbid effort in “The Tragic Generation” (among other correspondences across Yeats’s oeuvre) in turn to Arnold’s seminal “Preface to First Edition of Poems” (1853) in which Arnold insists on joy and censures morbidity in modern poetry, and on that basis famously excludes his own dramatic poem “Empedocles on Etna” from the collection. Schuchard argues, as Watson similarly maintains in his essay, that Yeats’s “seemingly conflicting attitudes toward Arnold have obscured the fact that Arnold’s [1853] Preface was to become Yeats’s primary critical touchstone for evaluating modern poetry” (1985:89). He perceives – though perhaps in too reductive a way, ignoring the interrelation of the preface and Arnold’s Celticism, for instance, as well as wider nineteenth-century discourses on morbidity – that “for the whole of Yeats’s career Arnold was not only an abiding and informing sage but the 9 critical master of his fifty-year struggle with the morbid temperament of his age” (1985:89). Puzzlingly, however, Schuchard does not carry his insights into the Arnoldian complexion of morbidity at Phase 13 any further in regard to the rest of the treatise. As we will see, his recognition of Yeats’s Arnoldian influence on Synge in viewing morbidity as an undesirable strain in modern literature could also be instructively related to A Vision. Crucially, Schuchard also ignores the presence of Arnold, with Goethe, at Phase 18. It is even more puzzling, then, and chiefly provides the impetus for my thesis on the Arnoldian element in A Vision, that linkage of Arnold to the treatise also falls by the wayside in the chapter “The Last Aisling – A Vision” in Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (1995) by Declan Kiberd, the other notable exception to the general critical neglect of Arnold’s bearing on A Vision. Kiberd’s account of A Vision – specifically, as the chapter title indicates – is predicated upon, and yet has the curious quality of treating rather obliquely and briefly, the notion of an Arnoldian Celticist input to the treatise. According to Kiberd, A Vision “deliberately refers the Irish reader back to the aisling or vision-poem, practised by the fallen bards like Ó Rathaille to whom Yeats was increasingly attracted” (1996:318). It is from the aisling tradition, he argues, “that Yeats appears to have drawn his framework for A Vision. That the spéirbhean should in this particular instance have been his own English wife must have tickled his sceptical imagination: but Mrs. Yeats proved a wonderful medium” (1996:318). Kiberd’s speculative alignment of the primary and antithetical gyres with his own appellations of “Anglo” and “Celtic” respectively, and his argument that A Vision is “a Celtic constitution not solely for Ireland but for all the world, after the rough beast has come again” (1996:319), are also buttressed in part by the insight that Yeats had in his essay 10 “on Matthew Arnold and the Celtic element in literature… endorsed the basic outlines of the Celticist analysis, but for the word ‘Celtic’ had repeatedly substituted the word ‘ancient’” (1996:318). Therefore, Kiberd says, “[a]s early as 1897” Yeats had been “expanding the meanings of ‘Celtic’ to global dimensions, sensing that the ancient was due for a return” (1996:318).2 “For that reason, as well as for its roots in aisling tradition,” he argues, “it makes sense to read A Vision as a kind of Celtic constitution, first published in 1925, at a juncture when the new Irish state, of which Yeats was by then a senator, was seeking to codify its own laws and customs” (1996:318).3 Oddly, however, this is the only explicit mention of Arnold throughout Kiberd’s chapter on A Vision. Kiberd proceeds to foreground the placement of Walt Whitman at Phase 6 in the Great Wheel – and overlooks entirely the placement of Arnold. This intriguing blind spot in regard to the significance of Arnold’s presence at Phase 18, even on the part of critics who do stress the importance of Arnold for Yeats, is compounded by the two volumes of George Mills Harper’s The Making of Yeats’s A Vision: A Study of the Automatic Script (1987): when and by whom, exactly, Arnold was selected and approved as an example of Phase 18 is not recorded. Goethe’s appearance, however, can be traced to a key preliminary list of examples dated June 1918, which also includes Mrs Yeats. Harper’s study is the most authoritative account of the Script available to Yeats scholars, but within the veritable avalanche of individuals considered as phasal examples during the creative process and those ultimately named in A Vision, Arnold is scarcely referred to. The odd impression is that Arnold rather suddenly appears from nowhere alongside Goethe as the only other example of Phase 18 in A Vision. Nor is the mystery cleared up by the four volumes of 2 Yeats’s “The Celtic Element in Literature” is dated 1897 in Essays and Introductions (1961). However, as the editors Warwick Gould, John Kelly, and Deirdre Toomey explain in The Collected Letters of W.B. Yeats Volume II: 1896-1900 (1997), the essay “did not appear [in Cosmopolis] until June 1898” (1997:154). 3 In W.B. Yeats: A Life – II. The Arch-Poet 1915-1939 (2003), R.F. Foster determines that A Vision was “dated 1925 (though published in 1926)” (2003:282). The revised version was published in, and dated, 1937.

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issues and implications arising from Yeats's recourse to primitivism in response to Arnold's portrait of .. primitivism in response to Arnold's Celt, as well as Yeats's allied approach to class, unity, and the to awaken or quicken or preserve the national idea among the mass of the people but to c
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