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Civilization _LMA 2012

Modern Britain in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries – 2 semesters

First Semester Civilization themes:

I. The British Empire at home: economy, technology and the reforms that changed the society at home (excerpts from Dickens: Hard Times)

II. Definitions of Victorian man in Literature and the Victorian Modes of Modern Writing (Thomas Carlyle The Hero as Man of Letters) (Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre; Tennyson’s Ulysses; Arnold The Buried Life) Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles/Jude the Obscure

III. The Old and the New Liberal Education Paradigms ( Newman, Mill, Arnold, Huxley)IV. Victorian Mentality Blocks : Thomas Carlyle’s condemnation of the present: skepticism; ;

The High Church Revival of The Oxford Movement and the Popular, Puritanical Revival; agnosticism and the new cultural and aesthetic faith (– Liberalism; (Browning - Caliban Upon Setebos) (Swinburne, Hymn to Proserpine)

V. The Victorian Revivals as the source for the Cultural Campaigns and Styles in Poetry, Painting and Architecture (Ruskin and the Gothic Revival; the Pre-Raphaelite sensibility and techniques)

VI. Utopian and Fabian Socialism on the Eve of the Twentieth Century (George Bernard Shaw: Major Barbara)

Bibliography:

Primary Sources:

Excerpts from Essays: by Carlyle, The Hero as Man of Letters ; Signs of the Times; Sartor Resartus: The Everlasting Yea www.victorianweb.org.; by John Stuart Mill On Liberty: Chap III: Of Individuality, As One of the Elements of Well-Being (http://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm by John Henry Newman: The Idea of a University www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/24526; Thomas Henry Huxley: Agnosticism http://aleph0.clarku.edu/huxley/CE5/Agn.html; Oscar Wilde: The Soul of Man Under Socialism http://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/wilde-oscar/soul-man/index.htm

Poems: Tennyson’s Ulysses; Arnold The Buried Life; Browning - Caliban Upon Setebos; Swinburne, Hymn to Proserpine

Novels: Ch. Dickens: Hard Times http://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/786/pg786.html; C. Bronte: Jane Eyre http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1260/1260-h/1260-h.htm; Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles http://www.gutenberg.org/files/110/110-h/110-h.htm /Jude the Obscure http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/153 ; O. Wilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray http://www.gutenberg.org/files/844/844-h/844-h.htm;

Play: George Bernard Shaw: Major Barbara http://www.gutenberg.org/files/3790/3790-h/3790-h.htm

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Anthologies

Cartianu, Ana & Stoenescu, Stefan: Proza eseistica Victoriana (vol’s 1, 2, 3), Tipografia Universitatii Bucuresti, 1977

Stoiculescu, Mira, Constantinescu, Aurelia-Scumpa si Bottez Monica: The Victorian Age (an anthology)

Secondary Sources

Literary criticism from the site www.Victorianweb. org.

Prefaces of the Victorian novels read

Ioana Zirra, Contributions of the British Nineteenth Century – The Victorian Age – to the History of Literature and Ideas (the first volume - excerpts)

FIRST LECTURE

The Victorian Age, named after the long reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901) – is the age of the British Empire, a significant national age for Britain, which had become The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in 1801. Geopolitically speaking, the British Empire came to be in control of 1/3 of the world during the 19th century – with possessions on all the continents (Australia and New Zealand, several Islands in the Pacific West Indies, India, which began as a colony of the merchants from the East India Company and turned into a Crown possession in 1877, when Queen Victoria became Empress of India; Canada, forty times the sizes of Britain in North America; in Africa, Egypt and Nigeria to the North and South Africa at the southern tip of the continent, completely British and defeated after the Boer Wars of the century’s last decades.

Four keywords can be used to begin the economic, political and sociological description of Britain in the nineteenth century: wealth, capitalism, democracy and socialism. Wealth was produced thanks to the scientific and technological advances, which enabled Victorian man to control nature and increase the living standard of the rich, in accordance with the ideas of the classical economist Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations. Capitalism, the economy based on capital, rested on the accumulation of wealth as a sure path to progress. It was made possible by the massive scientific and technological advances of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (Zirra, vol. I, 9,10) that led to the creation of a huge, all-powerful market. The main issues of nineteenth century politics were to strengthen the free market (and the British Empire possessions essentially contributed to this) to enfranchise the men of property and turn them into mature, responsible citizens with equal rights and powers – moreover, by granting them the power to consume an increasing variety of goods. Victorian middle-class democracy, which was modern because, by comparison to Athenian democracy, it was aimed at creating a perfect middle-class establishment. Though modern democracy incorporated some of the revolutionary principles for which

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people had died in America and France in 1777 and 1789, respectively, in Britain1, it was actually carried out in peaceful confrontation, and in fact in cooperation, by the two political parties of the nineteenth century: the Conservative Party and the Liberal Party. (The following paragraphs reformulate the material available in Zirra, vol. 1,10-12)Between the two of them, they carried out the reforms which brought about the modernization of Britain: the electoral and free-market reforms, firstly, and then generally social, religious , urban and cultural reforms, for example the reforms in education. The first electoral reform, the Reform Bill2 of 1832 enfranchised male owners of property whose annual income was at least 10 pounds, the next one, of 1867, doubled the number of middle-class voters and the third, in 1884, secured the universal male enfranchisement. In 1846, a law that put an end to the British monopoly on the corn market was the repeal of the Corn Laws and by 1860, a full-fledged free market had become operative in Britain. Other reforms that modernized British society and made it resemble nowadays’ society were the Catholic Emancipation (which became effective after 1830), which gave the Catholics equal opportunities, civil rights and access to the middle-class professions (of lawyers, doctors, professors), the 1870 Education Act, which generalized literacy by making primary education compulsory and setting up English State Schools all over the Empire, the 1871 Repeal of the Test Acts. The last of these reforms gave free access to prestigious universities ( Cambridge and Oxford) to non-Anglicans and opened their way to elite careers in the establishment. The cultural campaigns conducted in the Victorian age, which we can read about at large in the essays and fictional literature preserved in anthologies, indicate that culture was regarded as one of the important levers for social emancipation and control. This leads to the paradox that the Victorian first mass age had a high-culture. It can be stated without exaggerating that the Victorian society was held together by quality press circulated in broadsheets: one magazine which carried parliamentary reports, essays, poems and fiction, for example, was read by one hundred thousand people. Apart from the gentry, after the Education Act, even the servants in the genteel households had access to the literature read at home. In the Victorian genteel households literature was originally read on Sundays, after Church, as another instrument for the generally moral education and entertainment. In general, it is fair to say that the British Liberals were keener on home reforms, as they were partisans of the little England policy. At their head was William Ewart Gladstone, four times Prime Minister (between 1868-74, 1880-85, 1885-6 and 1892-3). One famous example of the Liberal foreign policy was the campaign for putting an end to the Union between Ireland and Great Britain through the Irish Home Rule bills unsuccessfully passed (debated) in 1886 and 1893, owing to the alliance between William Ewart Gladstone, nicknamed ‘The Old Man’, and the Irish

1 ‘England’ is an incorrect way of referring to Britain, in the nineteenth century, just as today: the country’s name is the UK, the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland, in the nineteenth century, and of Great Britain and Northern Ireland in the twentieth century. The citizens are formally ‘the British’/’the British people’, and informally, the Brits. The contrast between ‘British’ and ‘English’ comes from that between politics and linguistics/literary culture, ‘British’ being politically correct, because it naturally includes the inhabitants of the kingdoms of Wales and Scotland and Ireland. People study English in Britain and abroad, in (high)school or when they are at university.2 Because a law is just a Bill while it is discussed in the British parliament and before it receives the Royal assent to become a statute, the name ‘the Reform Bill’ as retained by history indicates the serious debates preceding its adoption. This revolutionary measure turned the democratic masquerade practices and traditional political favoritism towards the modern, genuine political representation of wide masses of middle-class people. This meant the abolition of the so-called ‘rotten boroughs’, for example – fake constituencies that sent to parliament representatives of places on the map with no real population to represent.

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uncrowned king, Charles Stuart Parnell. The Conservative Party was imperially minded, the partisan of the Bigger England policy, of wars and the investment policies implicit in them. The head of the Conservative Party was William Ewart Gladstone, in office as Prime Minister for one year in 1868 and between 1874-1880. He was also Queen Victoria’s friend, an elegant dandy and a writer. In his 1845 novel Sybil, or the two Nations (available on the portal of the Project Gutenberg on the net, in electronic form for anyone who may wish to read it), he introduced the idea that the rich and the poor were two separate British nations.

This point is proved by the last keyword announced at the beginning of the lecture: socialism. Throughout the nineteenth century, the lower classes were almost completely neglected by the leaders of the Victorian establishment and the non-interventionist state3. Among the few reforms which regarded the poor in Early Victorianism was the1834 Poor Law Amendment, which created the workhouses, which resembled prisons more than asylums and in which were gathered (confined) the begging, underfed and overworked poor from the streets. The Factory Acts passed between 1833 and 1878, though, eliminated child labour and gross overworking. Moreover, there was no chance for substantially extending any modernization reforms to the people who were not represented in parliament as proved by the Chartist Movement. Between 1836 and 1854, several petitions or Charts drafted in perfect ignorance of the legal forms with which Parliament operated. Although they were endorsed by millions of signatures of people who gathered in long street-demonstrations (the 1840 Chart, for example was signed by over three million three hundred people), they were not taken into consideration by parliament because of their formal aspect and the civil rights claimed in them were not granted. The first general strike took place in Britain in 1842 and Trade Unionism became a steady movement between the 1860s and 1870s. No wonder, then, that the end of the nineteenth century saw the rise of two brands of socialism: radical or utopian socialism (which envisaged the complete abolition of property as a source of justice for a perfect modern age and as the only way for regenerating a society that reduced its people to mere mechanisms at the mercy of entrepreneurs) and Fabian (or moderate) socialism. The rise of socialism proved the limitations and actual injustice of modern, capitalistic and very partial democracy. It demonstrated that the material criteria for the general, average “greatest happiness of the greatest numbers” (as advocated by Jeremy Bentham at the end of the eighteenth century needed to be completed with virtues that the mercantile, capitalist world-order could not rise to. The failure of communism to right the wrongs of capitalism one century after the Victorian age, however, demonstrates the shortcomings of any modern utopia, be it capitalist or socialist. This is why the slow-pace, rational reformism which the Fabian socialists advocated and tried to implement in Britain seems to have more chances of success in principle because, though being moderate , pragmatic and corporatist in spirit, it does not destroy existing structures of social, economic and political life but tries to correct evils gradually while retaining the overall frames.

3 The non-interventionist state was a state committed to the principle of laissez-faire which bequeathed the political prerogative of the state to the entrepreneurial class (the capitalists) and allowed the invisible hand of the market, i.e., free competition, to rule undisturbed.

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Lecture II

Definitions of Victorian man in Literature and the Victorian Modes of Modern Writing: Thomas Carlyle - The Hero as Man of Letters. Victorian Proto-Feminism in Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre. Tennyson’s Ulysses; Matthew Arnold The Buried Life. Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urbervilles/Jude the Obscure

A. Models of Victorian Humanism - Overview 1. The Model of Puritanical modesty: inspired by man’s return to God and the ethical teachings of

the Bible ( After the model of the lower-class Protestants – the Puritans, whose individualism was based on virtues such as humility and activism (self-denial dictated by lucrative ambition and a sense of perfection ; industriousness. Although the aim of the 17th century Puritans and of their later followers was to attain moral perfection in the eyes of God, the side-effect of their perfectionism and lucrative spirit was the achievement of material wealth and material progress, too which led to the development of capitalism – see Max Weber’s The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism – German edition 1904, made famous in the English translation by Talcott Parsons in 1930 and its 1993 Romanian translation, by Ihor Lemnij, Etica protestanta si spiritual capitalismului , Bucuresti: Humanitas.) In nineteenth century Britain, Thomas Carlyle paradoxically commended the Puritanical ethos, as will be seen below, while he despised the material concerns and progress of the modern, industrialized ages, as was seen in the previous lecture and the quotation from the essay4 Signs of the Times (p. 4 in Proza eseistica Victoriana I, in his vituperations against the Age of Mechanism)

2. The cultural idealistic model : it was a high-mimetic5/exemplary model of culture understood as the endeavour to imitate heroes in the present. The series/cycles of heroism transmitted (communicated) by culture to the modern ages were defined by Carlyle al which envisaged the revival of based on the revival of the heroic Thomas Carlyle’s lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840)

3. Models put in circulation by literary realism

a. The early Victorian model of high-mimetic/ exemplary realism – the female version: Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre ( 1847)- admiration/ maturing plot (Bildungsroman; novel of adolescence) – the making of virtue and its perfection in stages becoming. The stages in Jane Eyre are marked by places (social milieu) where she lives, which represent stages of virtuous acquisition or victories she scores in becoming a model human being: at Gateshead, she manifests her sense of justice because she is kept out of the “gate”(i.e., the household in which she is an outsider) and becomes headstrong (obstinate) in response to her relatives abuses (she is likeable, angry child) ; at Lowood School she learns the

4 See the Modes of Modern Writing part of the lecture for the place of the essay in the chart of the literary genres and for its importance in the Victorian Age.5 The term ‘High-mimetic’ is derived by traditional stylistics from Aristotle’s classifications in Poetics and refers to art’s noble imitation, in high registers, of life. Its synonym is ‘elevated’ and translates in Romanian as “ modul mimetic superior” (see the Romanian version, by Domnica & Mihai Spariosu, of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism)

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virtue of deliberate humility and tolerance from Miss Temple and Helen Burns6; at Thornfield Hall, the genteel middle-class manor which lacks a mistress but acquires in Jane Eyre more than a governess for the orphaned girl Adèle and a housekeeper, like Mrs. Fairfax. Jane’s radiant maturity and sweetness wins over everybody – including the master, Mr. Edward Rochester, who falls in love with Jane and proposes to her, although he was already married and his crazy wife, Bertha Mason was locked up in the attic at Thornfield Hall. Jane manages to avoid the thorns of temptation, without becoming the wrong mistress at Thornfield Hall and runs away, preserving her virtue, her balance and self-respect. After crossing a kind of desert, like that of the Biblical people led by Moses to the land of Canaan7, Jane survives by arriving at Moor House, another genteel household, more balanced than Thornfield Hall. What Jane achieves here is discretion (discernama^nt): she rejects another man’s proposal that did not suit her: Saint John Rivers’s. Jane realizes that without loving each other, their marriage and departure to another life as Christians missionaries was a form of noble self-deceit. After all her dearly paid victories, Jane Eyre is rewarded with a happy life in marriage to Edward Rochester at Ferndean Manor, at the book’s end.

b. The early Victorian model of low-mimetic (self-divided/critical) realism debated in the dramatic monologue by Lord Alfred Tennyson Ulysses (1842) – a conflict of public/private mentalities solved in favour of subjective desire ( typified by Ulysses as a Romantic man of aspiration)

c. The mid-Victorian model of Philistine 8 (skeptical and mildly sentimental) realism Matthew Arnold: The Buried Life (1852) – the critical patronizing view of man – as a (frivolous) baby

d. The late Victorian ironic 9 model of pessimistic (harsh, dejected) realism : Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urberville (1891) (the female version) Jude the Obscure (the male version) (1895)

Tess, the pure woman undone by ill-luck and society: The exceptional maiden of the novel’s title and subtitle retains her exemplary Puritanical profile throughout the book and serves as a standard of condemnation for modern society and humanity as a whole, because two men, who do not resemble each other in their moral profile, social or cultural background and deeds, in the least both end up forcing the feminine protagonist to become a kind of sacrificial Victim of their wrong behaviour.

Jude, the failed man of letters: Although he is a man of aspiration, as uncommon in his milieu (environment) as Ulysses (in Tennyson’s poem), Jude Fawley’s failure to become a man of letters is blamed upon the circumstances in Thomas Hardy’s naturalistic novel. Ill-starred Jude falls because and for women that he cannot be matched with, because Hardy believes in the incompatibility of modern human beings10. Society, with its oppressive conventions, man’s individual unconscious and the general incompatibilities between the aspirations and deeds of human beings cooperate in undoing Hardy’s characters. The instinctual pathology responsible for many of Hardy’s characters failures

6 See the exchange between Jane Eyre and Helen Burns in the Section with illustrations from the literary texts7 For further associations with the Biblical text as a source of inspiration in the interpretation of Charlotte Brontë’s novel, see Ioana Zirra, Contributions of the Nineteenth Century – the Victorian Age - to the History of Literature and Ideas, vol. I, Bucuresti: Editura Universitati – the lecture on Jane Eyre.8 “Philistine” is a Biblical term applied by Matthew Arnold to the Victorian middle-classes for whom he believed there was hope of perfection through culture, see the essays of Culture and Anarchy (1869).9 The meaning of ‘ironic’ points to the inferior position of man regarded as a victim of circumstances and life, as explained by Northrop Frye, in the Anatomy of Criticism, the first page of the First Essay.10 In the first volume of Contributions….the lecture on Thomas Hardy explains at length the conflicting cultural phases and orders of nature to which Hardy’s characters belong.

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make them qualify as modern neurotics. Hardy’s model is, therefore, that of modern psychoanalysable man.

Models of Victorian Humanism 1. THE MODEL OF PURITANICAL MODESTY:

Man’s Unhappiness, as I construe, comes of his Greatness; it is because there is an Infinite in him, which with all his cunning he cannot quite bury under the Finite. Will the whole Finance Ministers and Upholsterers and Confectioners of modern Europe undertake, in joint-stock company, to make one Shoeblack HAPPY? They cannot accomplish it, above an hour or two: for the Shoeblack also has a Soul quite other than his Stomach; and would require, if you consider it, for his permanent satisfaction and saturation, simply this allotment, no more, and no less: God’s infinite Universe altogether to himself, therein to enjoy infinitely, and fill every wish as fast as it rose. Oceans of Hochheimer, a Throat like that of Ophiuchus: speak not of them; to the infinite Shoeblack they are as nothing. No sooner is your ocean filled, than he grumbles that it might have been of better vintage. Try him with half of a Universe, of an Omnipotence, he sets to quarrelling with the proprietor of the other half, and declares himself the most maltreated of men. — Always there is a black spot in our sunshine: it is even, as I said, the Shadow of Ourselves.

“But the whim we have of Happiness is somewhat thus. By certain valuations, and averages, of our own striking, we come upon some sort of average terrestrial lot; this we fancy belongs to us by nature, and of indefeasible right. It is simple payment of our wages, of our deserts; requires neither thanks nor complaint; only such overplus as there may be do we account Happiness; any deficit again is Misery. Now consider that we have the valuation of our own deserts ourselves, and what a fund of Self-conceit there is in each of us, — do you wonder that the balance should so often dip the wrong way, and many a Blockhead cry: See

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there, what a payment; was ever worthy gentleman so used! — I tell thee, Blockhead, it all comes of thy Vanity; of what thou fanciest those same deserts of thine to be. Fancy that thou deservest to be hanged (as is most likely), thou wilt feel it happiness to be only shot: fancy that thou deservest to be hanged in a hair-halter, it will be a luxury to die in hemp.

“So true is it, what I then said, that the Fraction of Life can be increased in value not so much by increasing your Numerator as by lessening your Denominator. Nay, unless my Algebra deceive me, Unityitself divided by Zero will give Infinity. Make thy claim of wages a zero, then; thou hast the world under thy feet. Well did the Wisest of our time write: ‘It is only with Renunciation (Entsagen) that Life, properly speaking, can be said to begin.’

2. THE MODEL OF CULTURAL IDEALISM - Thomas Carlyle’s lectures On Heroes, Hero-Worship and the Heroic in History (1840)

- the heroic/high-mimetic/exemplary cultural model: the Man of Letters (lecture V)- Hero-Gods, Prophets, Poets, Priests are forms of Heroism that belong to the old ages, make their

appearance in the remotest times; some of them have ceased to be possible long since, and cannot any more show themselves in this world. The Hero as Man of Letters, again, of which class we are to speak to-day, is altogether a product of these new ages; and so long as the wondrous art of Writing, or of Ready-writing which we call Printing, subsists, he may be expected to continue, as one of the main forms of Heroism for all future ages. He is, in various respects, a very singular phenomenon…..

- this same Man-of-Letters Hero must be regarded as our most important modern person. He, such as he may be, is the soul of all. What he teaches, the whole world will do and make. 

a Great Soul living apart in that anomalous manner; endeavoring to speak forth the inspiration that was in him by Printed Books, and find place and subsistence by what the world would please to give him for doing that…. ruling (for this is what he does), from his grave, after death, whole nations and generations who would, or would not, give him bread while living

Examples of Men of Letters: Goethe, Rousseau, Dr. Johnson – men of the eighteenth century

The Eighteenth was a Sceptical Century; in which little word there is a whole Pandora's Box of miseries. Scepticism means not intellectual Doubt alone, but moral Doubt; all sorts of infidelity, insincerity, spiritual paralysis. Perhaps, in few centuries that one could specify since the world began, was a life of Heroism more difficult for a man. That was not an age of Faith, — an age of Heroes! The very possibility of Heroism had been, as it were, formally abnegated in the minds of all. Heroism was gone forever; Triviality, Formulism and Commonplace were come forever. 

Johnson’s portrait:

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Johnson's youth was poor, isolated, hopeless, very miserable. Indeed, it does not seem possible that, in any the favorablest outward circumstances, Johnson's life could have been other than a painful one. (he lived in a garret and had worn-out shoes)

A hard-struggling, weary-hearted man, or "scholar" as he calls himself, trying hard to get some honest livelihood in the world, not to starve, but to live — without stealing! A noble unconsciousness is in him. He does not "engrave Truth on his watch-seal;" no, but he stands by truth, speaks by it, works and lives by it. 

The highest Gospel he preached we may describe as a kind of Moral Prudence: "in a world where much is to be done, and little is to be known," see how you will do it! A thing well worth preaching. "A world where much is to be done, and little is to be known:" do not sink yourselves in boundless bottomless abysses of Doubt, of wretched god-forgetting Unbelief; — you were miserable then, powerless, mad: how could you do or work at all? 

3. THE MODELS OF LITERARY REALISM

High-mimetic/ exemplary realism – the female version: Charlotte Bronte: Jane Eyre ( 1847)- admiration/ maturing plot – the making of virtue and its perfection – staged becoming – her victories at Gateshead; Lowood School; Thornfield Hall; Moor House; Ferndean Manor

Dramatic (divided/critical) realism: Lord Alfred Tennyson: Ulysses (1842) – conflict of public/private mentalities; focus on subjective desire

Philistine (naïve, skeptical and sentimental) realism: Matthew Arnold: The Buried Life (1852) – critical patronizing view of man – as a baby

Pessimistic (harsh, dejected) realism: Thomas Hardy: Tess of the D’Urberville (1891) (the female version) Jude the Obscure (the male version) (1895)

Quotations

JANE EYRE

Jane Eyre a sensitive child, with a keen sense of justice and harsh judgments about other spoilt children:

Accustomed to John Reed’s abuse, I never had an idea of replying to it; my care was how to endure the blow which would certainly follow the insult.

“What were you doing behind the curtain?” he asked.

“I was reading.”

“Show the book.”

I returned to the window and fetched it thence.

“You have no business to take our books; you are a dependent, mama says; you have no money; your father left you none; you ought to beg, and not to live here with

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gentlemen’s children like us, and eat the same meals we do, and wear clothes at our mama’s expense.  Now, I’ll teach you to rummage my bookshelves: for they are mine; all the house belongs to me, or will do in a few years.  Go and stand by the door, out of the way of the mirror and the windows.”

I did so, not at first aware what was his intention; but when I saw him lift and poise the book and stand in act to hurl it, I instinctively started aside with a cry of alarm: not soon enough, however; the volume was flung, it hit me, and I fell, striking my head against the door and cutting it.  The cut bled, the pain was sharp: my terror had passed its climax; other feelings succeeded.

“Wicked and cruel boy!” I said.  “You are like a murderer—you are like a slave-driver—you are like the Roman emperors!”

I had read Goldsmith’s History of Rome, and had formed my opinion of Nero, Caligula, &c.  Also I had drawn parallels in silence, which I never thought thus to have declared aloud.

Jane’s perfecting encounter with Miss Temple and Helen Burns at Lowood School (ch 6) VIRTUE

“Miss Temple is full of goodness; it pains her to be severe to any one, even the worst in the school: she sees my errors, and tells me of them gently; and, if I do anything worthy of praise, she gives me my meed liberally.  One strong proof of my wretchedly defective nature is, that even her expostulations, so mild, so rational, have not influence to cure me of my faults; and even her praise, though I value it most highly, cannot stimulate me to continued care and foresight.”

“That is curious,” said I, “it is so easy to be careful.”

…………………………

“And when Miss Temple teaches you, do your thoughts wander then?”

“No, certainly, not often; because Miss Temple has generally something to say which is newer than my own reflections; her language is singularly agreeable to me, and the information she communicates is often just what I wished to gain.”

“Well, then, with Miss Temple you are good?”

“Yes, in a passive way: I make no effort; I follow as inclination guides me.  There is no merit in such goodness.”

“A great deal: you are good to those who are good to you.  It is all I ever desire to be.  If people were always kind and obedient to those who are cruel and unjust, the wicked people would have it all their own way: they would never feel afraid, and so they would never alter, but would grow worse and worse.  When we are struck at without a

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reason, we should strike back again very hard; I am sure we should—so hard as to teach the person who struck us never to do it again.”

“You will change your mind, I hope, when you grow older: as yet you are but a little untaught girl.”

ULYSSES (by Tennyson)

- Public domesticity versus infinity in individual aspirations- It little profits that an idle king, 

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,Match'd with an aged wife, I mete and doleUnequal laws unto a savage race,That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

- I am a part of all that I have met;- Yet all experience is an arch wherethrough

Gleams that untravelled world, whose margin fades.- For ever and for ever when I move.

How dull it is to pause, to make an end,To rust unburnished, not to shine in use!As though to breathe were life. 

This is my son, mine own Telemachus,To whom I leave the sceptre and the isle — Well-loved of me, discerning to fulfilThis labour, by slow prudence to make mildA rugged people, and through soft degreesSubdue them to the useful and the good.Most blameless is he, centred in the sphereOf common duties, decent not to failIn offices of tenderness, and payMeet adoration to my household gods,When I am gone. He works his work, I mine.

THE BURIED LIFE (by Matthew Arnold)

- Arnold’s lament for the individual caught in the snares of public existence – man’s sadness and his soul

I feel a nameless sadness o'er me roll.Yes, yes, we know that we can jest,We know, we know that we can smile!But there's a something in this breast,To which thy light words bring no rest,And thy gay smiles no anodyne.

- The mass of men (social man)I knew the mass of men conceal'dTheir thoughts, for fear that if reveal'dThey would by other men be met

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With blank indifference, or with blame reproved;I knew they lived and moved                                     20Trick'd in disguises, alien to the restOf men, and alien to themselves--and yetThe same heart beats in every human breast!

- Arnoldian/Philistine Paternalism

Fate, which foresaw                                                    30How frivolous a baby man would be--By what distractions he would be possess'd,How he would pour himself in every strife,And well-nigh change his own identity--That it might keep from his capricious playHis genuine self, and force him to obeyEven in his own despite his being's law,Bade through the deep recesses of our breastThe unregarded river of our lifePursue with indiscernible flow its way;                        40And that we should not seeThe buried stream, and seem to be Eddying at large in blind uncertainty,Though driving on with it eternally.

- Modern man’s longing for authenticityBut often, in the world's most crowded streets,But often, in the din of strife,There rises an unspeakable desireAfter the knowledge of our buried life;A thirst to spend our fire and restless forceIn tracking out our true, original course;                        50A longing to inquireInto the mystery of this heart which beatsSo wild, so deep in us--to knowWhence our lives come and where they go.………………..And long we try in vain to speak and actOur hidden self, and what we say and doIs eloquent, is well--but 'tis not true!

- The few, exceptional moments of authenticity –the equivalent of the moments of graceOnly--but this is rare-……….When our world-deafen'd earIs by the tones of a loved voice caress'd--A bolt is shot back somewhere in our breast,And a lost pulse of feeling stirs again.The eye sinks inward, and the heart lies plain,And what we mean, we say, and what we would, we know.A man becomes aware of his life's flow,And hears its winding murmur; and he seesThe meadows where it glides, the sun, the breeze

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TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLE- Lucidity and the sense of man’s loss in a doomed universe (ch 4) ; all the events with longstanding effects

happen when the character is, as it were in a trance, always made dumb and suffers from ill luck.

"Did you say the stars were worlds, Tess?"

"Yes."

"All like ours?"

"I don't know; but I think so. They sometimes seem to be like the apples on our stubbard-tree. Most of them splendid and sound—a few blighted."

"Which do we live on—a splendid one or a blighted one?"

"A blighted one."

"'Tis very unlucky that we didn't pitch on a sound one, when there were so many more of 'em!"

"Yes."

"Is it like that really, Tess?" said Abraham, turning to her much impressed, on reconsideration of this rare information. "How would it have been if we had pitched on a sound one?"

"Well, father wouldn't have coughed and creeped about as he does, and wouldn't have got too tipsy to go on this journey; and mother wouldn't have been always washing, and never getting finished."

"And you would have been a rich lady ready-made, and not have had to be made rich by marrying a gentleman?"

JUDE THE OBSCUREA man of aspiration with a clearer target: Christminster (ch 3 - the beginning and the end)

He ascended the ladder to have one more look at the point the men had designated, and perched himself on the highest rung, overlying the tiles. He might not be able to come so far as this for many days. Perhaps if he prayed, the wish to see

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Christminster might be forwarded. People said that, if you prayed, things sometimes came to you, even though they sometimes did not. He had read in a tract that a man who had begun to build a church, and had no money to finish it, knelt down and prayed, and the money came in by the next post. Another man tried the same experiment, and the money did not come; but he found afterwards that the breeches he knelt in were made by a wicked Jew. This was not discouraging, and turning on the ladder Jude knelt on the third rung, where, resting against those above it, he prayed that the mist might rise.

He then seated himself again, and waited. In the course of ten or fifteen minutes the thinning mist dissolved altogether from the northern horizon, as it had already done elsewhere, and about a quarter of an hour before the time of sunset the westward clouds parted, the sun's position being partially uncovered, and the beams streaming out in visible lines between two bars of slaty cloud. The boy immediately looked back in the old direction.

Some way within the limits of the stretch of landscape, points of light like the topaz gleamed. The air increased in transparency with the lapse of minutes, till the topaz points showed themselves to be the vanes, windows, wet roof slates, and other shining spots upon the spires, domes, freestone-work, and varied outlines that were faintly revealed. It was Christminster, unquestionably; either directly seen, or miraged in the peculiar atmosphere.

The spectator gazed on and on till the windows and vanes lost their shine, going out almost suddenly like extinguished candles. The vague city became veiled in mist. Turning to the

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west, he saw that the sun had disappeared. The foreground of the scene had grown funereally dark, and near objects put on the hues and shapes of chimaeras.

….

"It is a city of light," he said to himself.

"The tree of knowledge grows there," he added a few steps further on.

"It is a place that teachers of men spring from and go to."

"It is what you may call a castle, manned by scholarship and religion."

After this figure he was silent a long while, till he added:

"It would just suit me."