by Will Durant
Even more famous was Maria Edgeworth, whose Castle Rackrent (1800) and The Absentee (1812?) gave in fictional but realistic form such powerful descriptions of Irish exploitation by English landlords that England itself was stirred to mitigate these evils. Only one woman writer of her generation surpassed her, and that woman surpassed the men as well.
III. JANE AUSTEN: 1775–1817
All her adventures were by proxy, through her pen; and even there she needed few, since she found sufficient fascination in the ordinary life of genteel, but educated and sensitive, women like herself. Her father was rector of Steventon parish in Hampshire. She was born in the parsonage, and lived there till she was twenty-six. In 1809 her brother Edward provided his mother and sisters with a home in Chawton. There she lived till her final year, varying her simple routine with visits to her brothers and a stay in London. In May, 1817, she went to Winchester for medical treatment, and there, on July 18, she died, unmarried, aged forty-one.
She gave suspense and meaning to her life by the sisterly love that warms her letters; by her subtle and slightly sardonic humor, which caught the absurdities and hidden anxieties of life, and portrayed them without bitterness; and by her enjoyment of the rural scenery and easy tempo of provincial days. She had enough of London to dislike it; she gave no fond picture of it, as a cross between dingy poverty and well-bred decay; it was a place where bored country girls came to be seduced. The finer sort of English living, she felt, was in the lower aristocracy of the countryside; in their homes family discipline and a treasured tradition generated stability and a quiet content. In those pockets of peace one seldom heard of the French Revolution, and Napoleon was too distant a bogey to take one’s mind off the more urgent business of getting a fit partner for the dance or for life. Religion had its place in those homes, but kept it, and had been pared of its terrors by a secret sophistication, such as might well flourish in a parsonage. The Industrial Revolution had not yet reached into the countryside to embitter the classes and sully scene and air. We hear Jane Austen’s authentic voice in her commiseration with Fanny Price, who had to spend some unwilling months in London:
It was sad to Fanny to lose all the pleasures of spring…. She had not known before how much the beginnings and progress of vegetation had delighted her. What animation, both of body and mind, she had derived from watching the advance of that season which cannot, in spite of its capriciousness, be unlovely, seeing its increasing beauties from the earliest flowers in the warmest divisions of her aunt’s garden, to the opening leaves of her uncle’s plantations and the glory of his woods.1
It was such an environment—a comfortable home, a fragrant garden, an evening walk with gay sisters, an encouraging word from a father who praised and peddled her manuscripts—that put into Jane Austen’s novels a fresh air of peace, health, and goodwill, and that gives to her unhurried readers a quiet satisfaction hardly to be found in any other novels. She had learned that the day itself is blessing enough.
So she wrote her six novels, and waited patiently for that unhurried public. In 1795, aged twenty, she composed the first form of Sense and Sensibility, but it did not satisfy her, and she laid it aside. In the next two years she labored over Pride and Prejudice, revised it and revised it, and sent it to a publisher, who returned it as promising no profit. In 1798–99 she put into shape Northanger Abbey; Richard Crosby bought it, but let it lie unpublished. Then came a barren interlude, disturbed by change of residence, and perhaps by discouragement. In February, 1811, she began Mansfield Park; and in November Sense and Sensibility, rewritten, reached print. Then, in her last five years, came a rich harvest: Pride and Prejudice found a publisher in 1813, Mansfield Park in 1814, Emma in 1816; and in 1817, after her death, Northanger Abbey surfaced, and soon Persuasion appeared.
Pride and Prejudice offers at the outset a bevy of five sisters, all ready and eager for marriage. Mrs. Bennet is a flighty, exclamatory soul, whose morning prayer and hourly thought are to find husbands for her brood. Mr. Bennet has learned to retire from his wordy wife to his library, where the words make no noise, and he has quite given up the problem of providing five dowries of land or pounds. He holds his home only till his death; thereafter it goes by entail to the Reverend Mr. Collins, the still unmarried parson of a nearby town. If one of those five sisters could snare that dominie!
The oldest and loveliest, Jane, has set her aim on the rich and handsome Mr. Bingley, but he seems to prefer another candidate, and Jane hardly hides her grief. Elizabeth, next in age, is proud not of her face or form but of her independent, self-reliant character; she thinks for herself, and is not to be auctioned off; she has read widely, and can handle any man in a duel of mind or wit, without being aggressively intellectual; her author frankly admires her. The third sister, Mary, is eagerly nubile, and frets over the long time her predecessors are taking in clearing her way. Lydia, the youngest, wonders why a girl has to wait for the magic formula of marriage before being allowed to explore the mysteries of sex.
The household is brightened by the news that Mr. Collins is planning to pay it a visit. He is a man proudly conscious of his sanctity, but carefully cognizant of class distinctions and material interests; in him the author presents a merciless picture of the caste subservience into which the lower Anglican ministry had fallen; the satire seems extreme, but it is as clean and thorough as a guillotine.
The young reverend comes, sees that lovely Jane is immune, and offers his hand to Elizabeth, who demoralizes the family by refusing him, loath to be imprisoned in his perfections. Mary, feeling that for the third of five sisters to be first to get a husband would be quite a trick, sets her eyes and smiles and delicate attentions upon the fated heir to the property, and charms him into asking Mr. and Mrs. Bennet for her hand.
All seems well, but Lydia, fearing senile virginity, runs off, unwed, with the dashing Mr. Wickham. The entire family is tarnished with her sin, and is shunned by nearly all the neighbors. The Reverend Mr. Collins sends a reproving word to Mr. Bennet: “The death of your daughter would have been a blessing compared with this…. Who will connect themselves with such a family?”2 Elizabeth saves all by alluring the class-prejudiced Mr. Darcy with her proud inaccessibility; he lays his millions at her feet, compels Wickham to cleanse Lydia with marriage, and, by the magic hand of the authoress as a dea ex machina, all problems are solved; even Mr. Bingley discovers that he has always loved Jane.
Mansfield Park is better built: the final solution is forecast near the outset, and is step by step prepared by almost every incident. The characters are not puppets in a plot but souls wondering their way through life, and properly illustrating the remark of Heracleitus (which should be the guide of all fiction), that “a man’s character is his fate.” The Park is the handsome domain of Sir Thomas Bertram, who is a much more solicitous father than Mr. Bennet. He too, however, makes surprising mistakes: absorbed in pursuit of wealth and honor, he lets his eldest son disintegrate morally and physically, and allows his daughter to prolong their vacation in a London society where all the morals of the countryside are the butt of humor instead of the staff of life. It is to his credit that he adopts into his family the modest and sensitive Fanny Price, the impoverished niece of his wife. His consoling pride is his younger son Edmund, who is dedicated to the Church, and is described as all that a future clergyman should be; he is an apology for Mr. Collins. It takes Edmund several hundred pages to realize that his affection for Fanny is more than brotherly love; but in its leisurely course their rising attachment is a pleasant romance in a classic tale.
For even in her studies of love Jane Austen is and was a classic—a lasting excellence and a sober mind. In an age of Udolphian mysteries and Walpolian castles she remained a realistic and rational observer of her time. Her style is as chaste as Dryden’s; her piety is as unemotional as Pope’s. Her scope is narrow, but her probe is deep. She perceives that the basic aspect of life is the conscription of the individual into the service of the race; that the cri
ses of government, the conflicts of power, even the cries for social justice are not as fundamental as the repeated, unconscious effort of youth to mature and be used and consumed. She takes both aspects—female and male —of the human mystery quietly; its ills beyond her curing, its goal beyond her ken. She never raises her voice, but we follow it willingly, so far as the rapids of life will allow; and we can be captured by her calm. Today there is hardly a village in England but has her worshipers.
IV. WILLIAM BLAKE: 1757–1827
Born eighteen years before her, enduring ten years after her, William Blake spanned the transition to Romanticism; he lived on mystery, rejected science, doubted God, worshiped Christ, transformed the Bible, emulated the Prophets, and called for a utopia of earthbound saints.
He was the son of a London hosier. At the age of four he was frightened by seeing God looking at him through a window. A little later he saw angels fluttering in a tree, and the Prophet Ezekiel wandering in a field.3 Perhaps because his imagination mingled lawlessly with his sensations, he was sent to no school till the age of ten; and then it was to a drawing school in the Strand. At fifteen he began a seven-year apprenticeship to the engraver James Basire. He read much, including such romantic lore as Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry and Macpherson’s “Ossian.” He himself wrote verses, and illustrated them. At twenty-two he was accepted as a student of engraving at the Royal Academy, but he rebeled against Reynolds’ classical injunctions; later he lamented that he had “spent the vigor” of his “Youth and Genius under the incubus of Sir Joshua and his Gang of cunning Hired Knaves.”4 Despite them he developed his own imaginative style of drawing, and was able to support himself with his watercolors and engravings.
He was not strongly sexual; he once expressed the hope that “sex would vanish and cease to be.”5 Nevertheless, aged twenty-five, he married Catherine Boucher. He often tried her with his tantrums and wearied her with his visions; but she recognized his genius, and cared for him faithfully to his end. He had no known children, but loved to play with those of his friends. In 1783 John Flaxman and the Reverend A. S. Mathews paid for the private printing of Blake’s early verses; these Poetical Sketches, when reprinted in 1868, shared in the belated expansion of his fame. Some of them, like the rhymeless rhapsody “To the Evening Star,” raised an original note in English poetry.6
Like any feeling soul, he resented England’s concentrated wealth and festering poverty. He joined Tom Paine, Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, and other radicals grouped around the publisher Joseph Johnson; together they drank the strong wine of the French Enlightenment, and sang of justice and equality. His appearance befitted a spirit allergic to any imposed order. He was short and broad, with a “noble countenance full of expression and animation. His hair was of a yellow brown, and curled with the utmost crispness and luxuriance; his locks, instead of falling down, stood up like a curling flame, and looked at a distance like radiations, which, with his fiery eye and expansive forehead, his dignified and cheerful physiognomy, must have made his appearance truly prepossessing.”7
In 1784 he opened up a print shop on Broad Street. He took in, as assistant, his young brother Robert. It was a happy relationship, for each was devoted to the other; but Robert was consumptive, and his death in 1787 deepened a somber strain in William’s mood, and the mystic element in his thought. He was convinced that he had seen Robert’s soul, at the moment of death, rise through the ceiling, “clapping its hands for joy.”8 To Robert’s ghost he attributed a method of engraving both text and illustration upon one plate. Nearly all of Blake’s books were so engraved, and were sold for prices ranging from a few shillings to ten guineas. Hence his audience was narrowly limited during his life.
In 1789 he issued his first masterpiece, nineteen little Songs of Innocence. Apparently he meant, by “innocence,” the pre-pubetic period in which the pleasantest legends that had gathered about Christ were happily believed, brightening and guiding growth; however, Blake was thirty-two when the poems appeared, and we sense in them that experience is already mourning the death of innocence. We must recall his famous lines, that we may contrast them with lines addressed to a tiger five years later.
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Gave thee life and bid thee feed
By the stream and o’er the mead;
Gave thee clothing of delight,
Softest clothing, woolly, bright;
Little Lamb, who made thee?
Dost thou know who made thee?
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee,
Little Lamb, I’ll tell thee;
He is calléd by thy name
For he calls himself a Lamb;
He is meek and he is mild;
He became a little child;
I a child and thou a lamb,
We are calléd by his name.
Little Lamb, God bless thee.
Little Lamb, God bless thee.
Perhaps still finer is the next poem, “The Little Black Boy,” in which a Negro child wonders why God has darkened his skin, and dreams of the time when black child and white child will play together without the shadow of color crossing their games. And, two poems later, “The Chimney Sweeper” imagines an angel coming down to free all chimneysweeps from the coat of soot in which they work and sleep. “Holy Thursday” ends with a warning: “Then cherish pity, lest you drive an angel from your door.”
Five years passed: the years in which the French Revolution exploded, burned brightly with idealism (1791), and then turned into massacre and terror (1792–94). In 1789, according to one report, Blake publicly wore the red cap of revolution, and joined Paine in attacking the Established Church. Excited to confusion, he broke out of the ballad form into “prophecies” echoing Jeremiah and Hosea, ominous proclamations to a sinful world. These are not recommended reading to those who resent manufactured obscurity, but we note in passing that in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (a satire of Swedenborg) Blake equates these realms with innocence and experience. Some of the “Proverbs from Hell” suggest a temporarily vegetarian-Whitmanic-Freudian-Nietzschean radicalism:
All wholesome food is caught without a net or a trap….
The most sublime act is to set another before you….
The pride of the peacock is the glory of God…. The nakedness of women is the work of God….
Sooner murder an infant in its cradle than nurse unacted desires….
God only Acts and Is, in existing beings or Men….
All deities reside in the human breast….
The worship of God is, Honoring his gifts in other men,… and loving the greatest man best. Those who envy or calumniate great men hate God, for there is no other God.
In Songs of Experience (1794) the poet countered his Songs of Innocence with odes of doubts and condemnation.
Tyger, Tyger, burning bright
In the forests of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?…
And what shoulder, and what art,
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?
And when thy heart began to beat,
What dread hands and what dread feet?…
When the stars threw down their spears
And watered heaven with their tears,
Did he smile his work to see?
Did he who made the Lamb make thee?
Whereas in Songs of Innocence “A Little Boy Lost” is rescued by God and brought back rejoicing to his home, a corresponding “song of experience” tells of a boy burned by the priests for acknowledging that he has no religious faith. In Innocence “Holy Thursday” described St. Paul’s Cathedral as crowded with happy children singing hymns; “Holy Thursday,” in Experience, asks:
Is this a holy thing to see
In a rich and fruitful land,
Babes reduced to misery,
Fed with cold and usurous hand?
Is that trembling cry a song
?
Can it be a song of joy?
And so many children poor?
It is a land of poverty.
Against such evils revolution no longer seemed a valid cure; for “The iron hand crushed the Tyrant’s head, And became a Tyrant in his stead.”9 Disappointed with violent revolt, Blake sought solace in his residual religious belief. He now distrusted science as the handmaid of materialism, the tool of the clever against the innocent, of power against simplicity. “Art is the Tree of Life, Science the Tree of Death; God is Jesus.”10
After 1818 Blake wrote little poetry, found few readers, and supported himself by his art. At times, in his sixties, he was so poor that he had to engrave advertisements for Wedgwood pottery. In 1819 he found a saving patron in John Linnell, who commissioned him to illustrate the Book of Job and Dante’s Divine Comedy. He was working on this final task when death came to him (1827). No stone marked his grave, but, a full century later, a tablet was erected on the spot; and in 1957 a bronze bust by Sir Jacob Epstein was placed in Westminster Abbey.
At his death the transition to Romanticism was complete. It had begun timidly, in the very heyday of classicism, with Thomson’s Seasons (1730), Collins’ Odes (1747), Richardson’s Clarissa Harlowe (1747), Gray’s Elegy (1751), Rousseau’s Julie, ou La Nouvelle Héloïse (1761), Macpherson’s Fingal (1762), Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764), Percy’s Reliques of Ancient English Poetry (1768), Scottish and German ballads, Chatterton’s remarkable forgeries (1769), Goethe’s Werther (1774). In truth there had been romantics in every age, in every home, in every lass and youth; classicism was a precarious structure of rule and restraint overlaid upon impulses and passions running like liquid fire in the blood.