Nature and the Victorian Imagination.by U. C. Knoepflmacher; G. B. Tennyson

Nature and the Victorian Imagination. by U. C. Knoepflmacher; G. B. TennysonReview by: Asa BriggsNineteenth-Century Fiction, Vol. 34, No. 1 (Jun., 1979), pp. 104-107Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2933610 .

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104 Nineteenth-Century Fiction

If his scholarship is never debatable, certain of Cave's judgments are. Moore's first novel, A Modern Lovter (1883), may hold much interest for his future career, but it is really quite a bad book. There is more going on in The Brook Kerith (1916), as Cave certainly shows, than one had at first thought, and it is now less easy to dismiss Moore's version of the Christ story as pale, attenuated, or impertinent-though one had wanted to on first reading. And even on rereading, Moore's last novel, Aphrodite in Aulis (1930), remains insipid stuff. It is common to make writers we're interested in better than they are, a sort of proprietary propaganda.

What this book lacks in tone is something of Moore's own imaginative daring. It doesn't plod, but it is a little too respectful and respect- able. Moore could be and frequently was a silly, meretricious, and prurient writer. He was also a great craftsman and a wonderfully intui- tive artist. If he never lost his French desire to e'pater his readers, he also never stopped changing, and there is delight to be found in his growth and in his candid contradictions. His books are not always as good as Cave says they are, but this is a very good book about them.

CHARLES BURKHART Temple University

U. C. KNOEPFLMACHER AND G. B. TENNYSON, eds., Nature and the Vic- torian Imagination. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1977. Pp. xxiii + 519. $25.00.

More than two hundred quotations in the Oxford Book of Quotations include the word "nature," and some of the most memorable of them, like "nature red in tooth and claw," are culled from nineteenth-century writers. Yet after reading this interesting collection of essays, it is a twentieth-century quotation from T. S. Eliot, not listed by Oxford, "that strange abstraction, 'Nature,'" which lingers in the mind along with another uncited quotation from J. S. Mill, "Nature is a collective name for everything which is." Certainly the word "Nature" was used in so many different senses in different contexts and at different times in the nineteenth century (as before) that it is not in the least strange that Eliot conceived of it (in 1936, at least) as "a strange abstraction." Even at the beginning of the nineteenth century, when hope was ex- pressed that the imagination of the poet and the man of science might fuse, there was an immense gap between the Nature of natural theology and the sense of nature as elemental power. And already by then engineers, who felt that power, were talking of "taming Nature" or even of "conquering" or "dominating" it.

Not surprisingly, the characters who dominate these essays are Words- worth and Ruskin, with Darwin, Huxley, and Tennyson not far behind:



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relatively few novelists-with the exception of Hardy-are discussed at length. "Victorian fiction typically lives at low altitudes," George Levine writes at the beginning of his essay "High and Low: Ruskin and the Novelists," an essay which touches lightly on Scott, George Eliot, Dickens, and the Brontes. "It finds it difficult to breathe the air of the terrifying reaches of Shelley's Mont Blanc, or even of Wordsworth's Snowden.... Ice forms above; rivers flow below." The Victorian novel "found its metaphors not in wild and extreme Nature but by the glow- ing hearth and in the cultivated fields" (p. 137). Levine might have added that "every valley shall be exalted," for, like George H. Ford in his neat essay on "Felicitous Space: The Cottage Controversy," Levine notes the attractions to novelists of the green valleys complete with old cottages, rosebushes, and hollyhocks. Ford is right to locate mid- Victorian daydreams here (p. 29) and Victorian and post-Victorian nightmares in a blackened green countryside, which provided no escape from the city. He cites the opening chapter of Lawrence's The Rainbow (1915), and the rainbow is the title of one of the most stimulating essays in this book, by George P. Landow, which starts with a discussion of a painting by Atkinson Grimshaw, The Seal of the Covenant, and goes on to discuss interpretations of rainbows as signs. Landow does not mention any novelist, includinog Lawrence, although he quotes the re- markable statement by Ruskin, "I much question whether any one who knows optics, however religious he may be, can feel an equal pleasure or reverence which an unlettered peasant may feel at the sight of a rainbow" (p. 357).

U. C. Knoepflmacher notes how Ruskin criticized Wordsworth's fictions along with those of Dickens and George Eliot in Fiction, Fair and Foul (1880-81). Yet Ruskin did not and could not dispense with Wordsworth. This is a good essay which, like many of the other essays, notably Andrew Griffin's "The Interior Garden and John Stuart Mill," relates different writers' attitudes to nature to the development of the self-above all to the Wordsworthian double consciousness of an adult self, invoking and reassessing earlier experience through revisitations of lost scenes. He compares a passage near the end of Great Expectations with the opening of The Mill on the Floss. Both Eliot and Dickens were aware that the invocation and reassessment could involve shocks if nature itself, the revisited scene, had changed even more than their characters had changed. Indeed, it was the awareness of the imperma- nence of much of nature as an expression of Mill's "everything which is" which ran through much nineteenth-century writing. There was nothing new in this awareness. What was new at the beginning of the period covered in this book was the Wordsworthian and post-Words- worthian sense of relationship, which it was difficult to express through pictures (the theme of many of the most interesting essays), between child, man, and nature; and what was newly realized or at least newly phrased during the last part of the period was the fact that "nature"



106 Nineteenth-Century Fiction

had i(ts multiple uses boith as social escape and as propaganda. What Malcolm Bradbury has called "an appreciation of the English countryside,as a piopular taste" and all the diverting twentieth-century myths that went with it receive relatively little attention in this biook.

Nor, too, do the varieties of imaginative expression of the sense of "the practical conquest of Nature." The six essays on science in this collection, some of them highly stimulating, leave out technology and concentrate on "systems of knowledge." We miss, therefore, much di- rectly relevant prose from the first leader in Engineering (1866) to Smiles's Lives of the Engineers, some obliquely relevant poetry (see J. Warburg's Industrial Muse), and an interesting range of relevant pic- torial material. Curiously, too, there are only two brief references to the scientists' periodical, Nature, founded in 1869, although one of the references is highly pertinent-T. H. Huxley's declaration in the opening number that the progress of science was "the progress of that fashioning by Nature of a picture of herself, in the mind of man" (p. 195). Accord- ing to this view, it was in the mind of man, not in the physical environ- ment, that the clues to Victorian change were to be discovered. For this reason alone the changing relationship between sciences and technology is worth far fuller consideration.

There is one subversive essay in the book, by J. Hillis Miller, who argues that "for many of the most important Victorian writers, in spite of their apparent interest in observing Nature and in reproducing it exactly, Nature is not the primary interest." Nature provided a set of metaphors rather than a moral or a social preoccupation: the real interest was "a concern for subjectivity" (p. 440). Once again we are back to the landscapes of the mind. Though Miller starts with Browning, he quickly moves on to George Eliot, Henry James, and most boldly, Wuthering Heights. At first sight, he has much on his side-"My love for Linton is like the foliage in the woods"-yet it is difficult to reduce the role of nature in this novel to a major resource of figurative writing, and so to reduce it in Hardy is to leave out much of the most interesting interplay in late nineteenth-century thought and feeling. The readers certainly get left out. So, too, do the interesting links and diver- gences between literature and the visual arts which provide some of the best writing in this book.

Hillis Miller ends with a manifesto (p. 451), which should be com- pared with a magnificent probing generalization by E. H. Gombrich which forms the motto of Landow's essay (p. 341). It may be right, as Hillis Miller says, not "to take the mimetic referentiality of literature for granted" in its study, but should we leave it out altogether so that the study of literature "becomes once more philology, rhetoric, an in- vestigation of the epistemology of tropes"? Such an exclusive approach would have prevented the appearance of this admirable interdisciplinary volume and robbed Us of many insights. There were Victorian moments, too, when "mimetic referentiality" looks paramount. The memorial



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cross to Ruskin was deliberately made to form part of "the natural scene" on his advice that "whenever the conduct or writings of any individual have been directed or inspired by Nature, Nature should be entrusted with their monument."

ASA BRIGGS Worcester College, Oxford

GEOFFREY TILLOTSON, A View of Victorian Literature. Oxford: Claren- don Press, 1978. Pp. x + 396. ?6.95. $15.95.

As Kathleen Tillotson explains, and as readers of Nineteenth-Century Fiction may know already, this book was originally planned as the first of two volumes on the mid-nineteenth century (1832-80) for the Oxford History of English Literature; but the author's death in 1969 left it "too incomplete for the series," and his widow was asked to prepare the work for independent publication. This change required some large omis- sions and much abridgment. The present introduction and the first chapter, on "Earnestness," were salvaged from the original introduction. These lead into chapters on Garlyle, Dickens, Thackeray, Char- lotte and Emily Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, Trollope, Tennyson, and Browning. A chapter on Newman was regretfully omitted; one on Ruskin was apparently not written. The later authors of the period were intended for the second volume. Minor authors are cited inciden- tally but are not discussed. "All parts of the present book are published for the first time," and everything in the text "is Geoffrey Tillotson's wmtiing" except linking sentences needed to bridge gaps.

Literary history, to fulfill its purpose, must record much information and opinion that are commonplace to experts, for whom it is not written and for whom it may be flat and dull. Geoffrey Tillotson, whatever his degree of critical orthodoxy, does no)t hew to the convenitional line. The first two sections (54 pages) do depict, with unfamiliar as well as familiar evidence, an age almost as disturbed and stormy as our own (for mainly different reasons), an age, too, which had more earnest and eloquent preachers of individual and social righteousness, including the novelists, than we seem to have. These two chapters might be sal- utary if they were read, as they won't be, by the many people who can still use "Victorian" as an epithet connoting smug hypocrisy and kin- dred vices, from which our age is so happily free.

The chapters on the individual novelists (who are the concern of this review) are not objective historical surveys which in some fashion cover everything; rather, they are general essays in appreciation, though they do touch some influences and cite early critical opinions. The substance comes from the author's intimacy with the works and the period, and his judgments, orthodox or unorthodox, are animated by personal feeling and conviction. So far as the book is in the beaten track, orthodoxy



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Nature and the Victorian Imagination.by U. C. Knoepflmacher; G. B. Tennyson