Originally published in 1987.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Originally published in 1987.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
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Overview
Originally published in 1987.
The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780691601281 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Princeton University Press |
| Publication date: | 07/14/2014 |
| Series: | Princeton Legacy Library , #481 |
| Pages: | 312 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.10(w) x 9.10(h) x 0.90(d) |
Read an Excerpt
Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle
By Linda C. Dowling
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
Copyright © 1986 Princeton University PressAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-691-06690-5
CHAPTER 1
Romantic Philology and Victorian Civilization
The spirit does but mean the breath.
— TENNYSON, In Memoriam
Even today, when Walter Pater's importance as a Victorian writer seems ever more obviously to reside in his later work, Studies in the History of the Renaissance (1873) continues to be his most famous book. The most notorious part of the book remains, of course, the "Conclusion," that unintended manifesto of a new aestheticism that was to earn Pater a reputation as cerebral hedonist and corrupter of youth. As everyone knows, Pater suppressed the "Conclusion" in the second edition of The Renaissance (1877), lest it "mislead some of those young men into whose hands it might fall." And as everyone knows, the gesture did no good at all, for the "Conclusion" continued to inflame the imaginations of certain young men through the end of the century, to the point where it has been taken as the inspiration behind the cultural movement or episode known as Decadence. Pater's The Renaissance, Oscar Wilde was to say later, "is the very flower of decadence: the last trump should have sounded the moment it was written."
On one level, it is not mistaken to see in the Pater of The Renaissance the theorist of that cultural aestheticism that was to have so great an influence in England in the later nineteenth century, for so far as the "Conclusion" represented an urgent invitation to a life of passionately charged experience, a mysterious hinting at the allure of "strange dyes, strange colours, curious odours," it was to alter the lives of a thousand undergraduates at Oxford and Cambridge and elsewhere. Yet this is an aestheticism of the cultural surface, the aestheticism of Oscar Wilde's green carnations and Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience (1881), which as an impulse was to emerge only from a submerged crisis in Victorian attitudes and assumptions. And the writer who plays a crucial role in this deeper crisis is the Pater of Marius the Epicurean, who describes the Romans of a declining empire sitting in their great amphitheater and gazing outward at a
blazing arena, covered again and again during the many hours' show, with clean sand for the absorption of certain great red patches there, by troops of white-shirted boys, for whom the good-natured audience provided a scramble of nuts and small coin, flung to them over a trellis-work of silver-gilt and amber, precious gift of Nero, while a rain of flowers and perfume fell over themselves, as they paused between the parts of their long feast upon the spectacle of animal suffering.
Even here, in Marius, it is the decadence of the surface that is likely to overwhelm our attention, for the Roman scene Pater is describing, one of indolence, luxury, and torture, would seem to embody the very matter of Decadence culturally conceived. Yet the clue to the underlying crisis of assumptions that was to generate literary Decadence in England is not what Pater is describing, but the way he is describing it: his famous style that, in its studied delays and delicate hesitations, was to lead so many contemporaries to remark that Pater wrote English as a classical language. To grasp the full implications of the remark is to understand Pater's actual role as the progenitor of literary Decadence, the first major writer of Victorian literature in its post-philological moment, seeking a fugitive victory for art by acquiescing in the pronouncement of a new linguistic science that English as a written or literary language was nothing more than an artificial dialect, a petrifaction, a dead tongue. The nature of Pater's enterprise directs us, in turn, to the origins of that Victorian crisis in a deeper intellectual crisis that had emerged, together with Lockean epistemology, nearly two centuries before.
* * *
The grave threat to orthodox religious belief and theological assumptions about the world posed by Locke's Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) was visible almost immediately; by the middle of the eighteenth century, when Locke's own reasonable Christianity had given way to the coruscating scepticism of David Hume, the crisis of belief was an open matter of philosophical controversy, and the crisis would, of course, deepen further in the following century when Pater began to write. Almost unnoticed, however, in this larger movement towards an openly-declared scepticism and materialism, unnoticed probably because Locke's Essay had concerned itself only in the most incidental way with linguistic matters, was a similar threat specifically to theological views of language. For it was the very notion of God as Logos, the idea of human language as participating in the divine intelligence or divine speech, that Locke unwittingly threatened when, in a tangential observation in Book III of the Essay, he said,
It may also lead us a little towards the Original of all our Notions and Knowledge, if we remark, how great a dependance [sic] our Words have on common sensible Ideas; and how those, which are made use of to stand for Actions and Notions quite removed from sense, have their rise from thence, and from obvious sensible Ideas are transferred to more abstruse significations, and made to stand for Ideas that come not under the cognizance of our senses; v. g. to Imagine, Apprehend, Comprehend, Adhere, Conceive, Instill, Disgust, Disturbance, Tranquillity, etc. are all Words taken from the Operations of sensible Things, and applied to certain Modes of Thinking. Spirit, in its primary signification, is Breath; Angel, Messenger: And I doubt not, but if we could trace them to their sources, we should find, in all Languages, the names, which stand for Things that fall not under our Senses, to have had their first rise from sensible Ideas.
In Locke's observations, however, we still feel the force of the entirely orthodox assumption that language derives from thought. The assault on orthodoxy begins, then, in those theories of language that, employing a more radical Lockean associationism against Locke, were to invert this assumption and declare that thought derived from language. Much of the great nineteenth-century debate between the linguistic idealists and materialists, and later, between the Romantic and "scientific" philologists is in effect prefigured in the conflicts among Locke's various eighteenth-century inheritors. The materialist position, for example, finds early expression in the Abbé de Condillac's declaration in his Essai sur l'origine des connaissances humaines (1746) that "The ideas are connected with the signs, and it is only by this means, as I shall prove, that they are connected with each other." To be sure, the radical scepticism implicit in Condillac's analysis was not to take immediate shape as a new linguistic theory. It led more directly to unrestrained bouts of speculative etymologizing, especially in England, where legions of amateur philologists pursued the sort of superior parlor game that William Cowper was making fun of when he ridiculed "learn'd philologists, who chase/ A panting syllable through time and space,/ Start it at home, and hunt it in the dark,/ To Gaul, to Greece, and into Noah's ark." Nonetheless, such essentially innocent play with linguistic derivations, by emphasizing the material or even arbitrary nature of the connection between word and idea, prepared the ground for the overtly sceptical and materialist analysis that John Home Tooke was to propose at the end of the eighteenth century when, in a notorious pronouncement, he declared, "The Latin anima is in truth nothing but the breath of the body, and conversely the soul is of material origin just as is the spirit."
The emergent materialism of such eighteenth-century views in turn became the occasion of J. G. Herder's Berlin Academy prize essay On the Origin of Language, published in 1772. Paradoxically, Herder's ostensible target in this essay is not linguistic materialism as such, but that older theory of the Logos initially called into question by Lockean empiricism, and in particular those eighteenth-century theorists who were still pleading for the divine origin of language on linguistically untenable grounds. Yet Herder opposes this older theological view only because he wishes to oppose to materialist views of language his own theory of the logos, one that sees the origin of language in the human intelligence operating within the boundaries of human history. In this essentially triangular conflict among materialist, theologically orthodox, and emergently Romantic linguistic theories, Herder in effect appropriated the field position of orthodoxy and the tactics of materialism in order to establish and defend his own Romantic humanist view.
The degree to which Herder's interpretation of language represents a secularization of the orthodox belief in the Logos, reinforced at crucial points by the empirical discoveries of the linguistic materialists, becomes clearer when we examine the use Herder made of one of his predecessors, the Anglican Bishop Robert Lowth. Lowth's Lectures on the Sacred Poetry of the Hebrews (1753) became the stimulus for Herder's thinking on language, because in them Herder could see the obvious signs of an unstable logical synthesis, a failure to hold in any convincing balance two perspectives soon to reveal themselves as mutually incompatible. For Lowth's position, as an Anglican clergyman and Christian believer, is the orthodox view that Hebrew is divinely inspired, "an emanation from heaven ... the Priestess of divine truth, the Internunciate between earth and heaven." Yet in Lowth's actual treatment of Hebrew poetry, Herder was able to recognize the first dim stirrings of an idea that, through the thought of Herder himself and writers philosophically attuned to similar assumptions, would eventually issue in the radical historicism of Hegel, the idea, that is to say, of the unique individuality of a given people as it is formed by a specific time and specific circumstances. The language and poetry of the Hebrews in Lowth's account are at once the result of divine inspiration and of local conditions, with the pervasive poetic image of a flood or torrent, for example, arising from the Hebrews' experience in the mountainous topography of Palestine.
The genesis of Romantic philology in Herder's Origin is due to the boldness with which he was to expose Lowth's paradox. To Lowth, for instance, the highly metaphorical nature of Hebrew proved in an indirect way its divine inspiration; but to Herder the same metaphors derived from the historical roots of language itself, and amounted to a kind of linguistic tumult that worked against any notion of the divine origin of language ("Was God so lacking in ideas and words that he had to have recourse to that kind of confusing word usage?"). Elsewhere, Herder employs a version of the same strategy against those who had proposed an argument from linguistic design. In his Proof that the Origin of the Language of Man is Divine (Beweis, daß der Ursprung der menschlichen Sprache göttlich sey) of 1766, for instance, J. P. Süßmilch had insisted that a divine economy was obviously at work in the fact that all the sounds of all the known languages could be reduced to a mere twenty-odd letters. Herder, animated by a phonetic sense that in its keenness looks forward to the investigations of the Neogrammarians in the next century, as well as by a sense of history that leaves no room for weak theodicies, dismisses this out of hand: "There is no language whose living tones can be totally reduced to letters, let alone to twenty. All languages — one and all — bear witness to this fact" (Herder, Origin, pp. 92-93).
At the same time, Herder's concentration on the sounds of living speech here is no matter of mere polemical convenience, something beginning and ending in a response to Süßmilch's argument concerning the divine economy of the written alphabet. For Herder saw in the reality of living speech nothing less than the basis of a new metaphysics of the logos, and in his argument now we discover the origins of that valorization of speech over writing that was to survive as the controlling impulse not only of Romantic philology but of the scientific or comparative philology of the next century. The argument begins, specifically, as an argument about Hebrew, which earlier writers had declared to be the Adamic tongue, and which most obviously exposes the radical deficiency of Süßmilch's argument that the written alphabet perfectly — and hence providentially — contains all the sounds of spoken language. For in the traditional Hebrew alphabet, of course, it is only the consonants that are written, and Herder argues that this is so because Hebrew vowels, the very embodiment of the living tongue, could not be captured by written marks: "Their pronounciation was so alive and finely articulated, their breath so spiritual and etherlike [geistig und ätherisch] that it evaporated and eluded containment in letters" (Herder, Origin, pp. 94-95).
Even in an argument as specific as this, one purporting to account only for the orthographic conventions of a single ancient language, it is possible to glimpse the outlines of an emergent metaphysics. For Hebrew is a dead language not least because it is mummified in the transcription of its consonantal structure merely: "what dead language can be called to life? The more alive a language is — the less one has thought of reducing it to letters, the more spontaneously it rises to the full unsorted sounds of nature" (Herder, Origin, p. 93). And the self-sounding Hebrew vowels that have eluded transcription are "alive" for Herder because they are coincident with the exhalations of the human breath, arising invisibly, without consonantal friction or gutteral stop, from the inmost recesses of the human being. Thus the living breath becomes in Herder's account of language what animates the dead letters of the written language by bestowing upon them "the spirit of life" (Herder, Origin, p. 95).
At just this point, however, Herder's theory encounters the obstacle that always lies in wait for idealist accounts of language, for in identifying language with breath he has granted the derivation of the conceptual from the material, the utter dependence of mind or thought on the brute reality of sound itself. The boldness of Herder's solution may explain why his Origin of Language was to have so powerful a subsequent influence; language, he argued, is consequent neither upon reason nor materiality in their pure states, but instead arises from the distinguishing mark [Merkmal] that reflection [Besonnenheit]simultaneously perceives and bestows upon a sensuous image amid that "vast ocean of sensations which permeates [man's soul] through all the channels of the senses." Thus does reflection have the power to "single out one wave, arrest it, concentrate [the soul's] attention on it ... so that he will know that this object is this and not another" (Herder, Origin, pp. 115-16). Thus does language at a stroke become coincident with thought:
The sound of bleating perceived by a human soul as the distinguishing mark of the sheep became, by virtue of this reflection, the name of the sheep, even if his tongue had never tried to stammer it. He recognized the sheep by its bleating: This was a conceived sign through which the soul clearly remembered an idea — and what is that other than a word? And what is the entire human language other than a collection of such words? ... Language has been invented! (Herder, Origin, pp. 117-18)
In positing such an origin for language, however, Herder has really invented something else, namely Romantic philology. Snatched from God in a Promethean gesture, language has been relocated within the soul of man, where it still however breathes the spirit of an immaterial intelligence. This is at once a theory of language and of man, of human culture and of human history, of everything that might be summed up in the notion of Romantic philology. Even now, Herder's great and eloquent delight in man as a creature of language seems irresistible: "Unity and coherence! Proportion and order! A whole! A system! A creature of reflection and language, of the power to reflect and to create language!" (Herder, Origin, p. 147). This is the view of language, first enunciated in the Origin of Language, that would become so powerful an influence in the nineteenth century. Yet as the phrase "a creature of language" may be seen to imply, the relation between man and language in Herder's account contains an ominous possibility. If language makes man, so language remade can unmake man:
If anyone, after all these observations, were still ready to deny man's being destined to be a creature of language, he first would have to turn from being an observer of nature into being its destroyer! Would have to break into dissonance all the harmonies shown; lay waste the whole splendid structure of human forces, corrupt his sensuousness, and sense instead of nature's masterpiece a creature full of wants and lacunae, full of weaknesses and convulsions! (Herder, Origin, p. 147)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Language and Decadence in the Victorian Fin de Siècle by Linda C. Dowling. Copyright © 1986 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Table of Contents
- FrontMatter, pg. i
- Table of Contents, pg. vii
- Preface, pg. ix
- I. Romantic Philology and Victorian Civilization, pg. 3
- II. The Decay of Literature, pg. 46
- III. The Fatal Book, pg. 104
- IV. Disembodied Voices, pg. 175
- V. Yeats and the Book of the People, pg. 244
- Index, pg. 285