The Optical Metaphor: Victorian Poetics and the Theory of KnowledgeAuthor(s): W. David ShawReviewed work(s):Source: Victorian Studies, Vol. 23, No. 3 (Spring, 1980), pp. 293-324Published by: Indiana University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3827337 .Accessed: 03/09/2012 08:14

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W. David Shaw

THE OPTICAL METAPHOR: VICTORIAN

POETICS AND THE THEORY OF KNOWLEDGE

REALITY HAS OFTEN BEEN INTERPRETED THROUGH THE REPORTS GIVEN BY

visual images. If poetry is mimetic - if it is a verbal structure set up beside the world that it describes - then any critical theory about poetry must analyze the dominant optical metaphors, the models of the mind as transparent window, self-reflecting mirror, telescopic lens, or refracting prism, which invariably determine our ways of seeing the world. Philosophers since Plato's time have tried to free the mind from its dependence on optical aids by positing the standard of an image-free vision of the real. But in the Victorian age, under the impact of critical and skeptical theories of knowledge, the poet, like the philosopher, comes to recognize that there is no possibility of dis- avowing the optical aid of metaphor in a defection to the real. It is not a question of eliminating metaphoric models and aids at all, but of deciding which aids to use. For, despite the retreat of the old inter- pretative models, the allegiance to hermeneutics, to the principle of interpretation itself, is strengthened.

When a Victorian epistemologist like F. H. Bradley defines the identity of a thing as the view we take of it, the credence that could no longer be given to image-free realities is transferred instead to those same realities understood to be images. The world no longer evokes a poet's image of it: the poet's changing images evoke a world. As Bradley concludes, "there is no way of qualifying the Real except by appearances," by the distorting metaphors of the observing mind, "and outside the Real there remains no space in which appearances" (in which visual images and illusions of the real) "could live."' If

'F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality: A Metaphysical Essay (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1893), p. 489.

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reality is itself a metaphor, something that impels us to place things under a perspective - to see A as B and C as D, in the depths of some stereoscopic vision - then there exists no original, independent of the mind's pictures of the real, for its copies to usurp. In such a world the optical metaphors have an extraordinary power to determine the de- mands of the poet or the epistemologist upon his world. For that world is clearly a product of his own interpretative models, a mani- festation of the same picture-making energy or power.

Behind every critical effort it is possible to discern a distinct theory of knowledge. If the poet's mind is essentially a self-reflecting mirror or kaleidoscope, then, as Francis Bacon argues, the levity of the poet's fictions will be no substitute for the burden of history. Poetry then becomes the organ, not of truth, but of mere illusion or makc- believe, what Bacon calls "feigned history."2 If, on the other hand, the poem, like the mind, is a transparent, unrefracting window, as most neo- classical mimetic theorists assert, the poet's power of invention will be relegated to a subordinate role. In an influential essay in the North British Review (August 1853), David Masson dramatizes the central conflict in Victorian poetic theory as an opposition between these two alternatives: between the idealizing epistemology of Bacon and the mimetic theories of Aristotle.3

Until the nineteenth century, most theories of poetry concede either the imaginative power of the poet or the cognitive dignity of

2 Francis Bacon, The Advancement of Learning, Bk. II, in Selected Writings of Francis Bacon, ed. Hugh G. Dick (New York: Random House, 1955), p. 244.

3 [David Masson], Review of E. S. Dallas's Poetics and Alexander Smith's Poems, North British Review, 19 (1853), 297-344. Bacon's poet creates an idealized world, but in no sense a true one. In the classical theory of Aristotle, on the other hand, the poet presents, not a more idealized world than is normally perceived but a more es- sential world - one in which the final and formal causes are more readily discernible. But in most neoclassical conceptions of poetry, based on Aristotle's doctrine of mimesis, the imagination is relegated to a subordinate role. Masson does not trace the history of such conceptions, but a word may be added here. Though a neoclassical theorist like Thomas Hobbes analyzes the compounding power of the imagination, whereby it can join two images to form a third, its power of invention is developed by Hobbes only in relation to natural philosophy, not in relation to poetry and the arts. In the epistemologies of David Hume and Adam Smith, imagination claims a more central place, as heir to the dethroned understanding, but it is far from being recog- nized as an organ of truth. When pre-Romantic critics from Bacon down to John Dryden and Joseph Addison affirm the primacy of the poet's imagination and of his power, as a result, to present an idealized world, they acquiesce in Bacon's divorce of art from truth. Addison, for example, in combining a Baconian poetics of merely "feigned history" with Hobbes's theory of the imagination's compounding power, is formulating an essentially empirical poetic. Influenced, I think, by John Locke's demonstration that the secondary qualities are a product of the perceiving mind, Addison's doctrine of the secondary imagination allows the poet more imaginative license than the neoclassical theory of Hobbes. But because the poet still "humours the imagination by mending and perfecting nature where he describes a reality," Addison's theory, like Bacon's, is fictitous in essence.

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the poet, but not both at once. Only for the great Romantic poets, for William Wordsworth and S. T. Coleridge, does every act of exis- tential perception become an act to which the perceiver contributes an essential ingredient of his own knowledge, rather in the way that a chemical element leaves its imprint on a spectrogram. Thus, even Wordsworth's simplest judgment - his observation, for example, that he "saw a crowd / A host, of golden daffodils" ("I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," 3-4)- is, in Kant's terminology, a synthetic a priori judgment. His proposition is not merely tautological, or analytic, for its predicate adds experiential knowledge that is not implicit in the subject. Yet the grammatical and human subject, the lyric "I" of Wordsworth's poem, brings to his experience of the daffodils, not simply the spatial and temporal categories that Kant insists upon, but other mental and imaginative qualities which entitle Wordsworth to call the mind "lord and master" over "outward sense" (The Prelude, XII.222). Because every existential perception celebrates the creative power of the perceiving mind - its godlike power to bring order out of chaos - the poetic activity that proceeds to refine and exalt this

power is being most imitative of the way the world is put together when it is most freely exercising its prerogative. In the language of optics, it is functioning most faithfully as a transparent window when it is operating at the same time as a refracting glass or prism.

Until the 187os, when a new interest in formalism begins to displace the preoccupation with earlier optical models, most of the challenging critical theory of the Victorian age arises in an effort to resolve the claims of Masson's two traditions. Matthew Arnold pro- pounds his influential doctrine of the "imaginative reason," J. H. Newman develops his theory of the "illative sense," Robert Browning tries to unite "fancy with fact," and John Ruskin propounds his inno- vative theory of the "naturalist ideal" - all in an effort to keep the window and the mirror, a fidelity to nature and experience, on the one hand, and a range of moral and imaginative license, on the other, in some kind of balance. In practice, however, the combination of models produces a more complicated picture than Masson's bipartite model suggests. In order to see how unexpected combinations pro- duce new theoretical strains, complicating both the poetic theory and practice of the age, I shall try to provide some compass points by which to chart our way, not just through Masson's two, but through five distinct traditions.

In what follows, each critical tradition is aligned with an his- torical antecedent and a contemporary Victorian example. Since the

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epistemological models that have traditionally exercised the most authority over theories of poetic creation are theological in origin, I have associated each theory of knowledge with a philosophical or biblical model of divine creation. But often the scope of a model's authority stems from the properties of visual perception that are pe- culiar to specific optical metaphors. Such metaphors are particularly important in mid-Victorian England, where astronomers at Cam- bridge were photographing the sun and moon and were learning to use visual images as a trace, something directly stencilled off the real, like a finger print or a death mask. For an era that played with such newly discovered optical games as the diorama, the panorama, the stereopticon, and the magic lantern, a variety of visual metaphors, ranging from the telescopic mirror to the time-lapse photograph and the kaleidoscope, help clarify the main theories of knowledge and the kind of critical theory and poetic practice that each tradition entails.

I

The first theory of knowledge, which assumes both a Platonic and an empirical form, affirms that the truth is independent of the optical instrument-the telescopic mirror or the window-through which the observer tries to view it. The product of a particular theory of knowledge that separates the simulacrum on the one side from the original and perfect copy on the other, Platonic realism depreciates the poet's images as the inferior copies of a copy; they are true in so far as they mirror something real, a sham in so far as they are no more than resemblances. As A. N. Whitehead once observed, "the worst of a gulf is . . . that it is very difficult to know what is happening on the further side of it. This has been the fate of the God of traditional theology."4 Christian realism may try to heal the rift, the sundering of the mind from its objects, by substituting for Plato's second-rate God of the world, who is a mere icon or image, a doctrine of Incar- nation, whereby the persuasive agency of God is made immanent in the world. One of the most valiant Victorian efforts to heal the rift, by using the analogy of the family and the sacraments of the church as "signs of a spiritual society" connecting "the visible with the invisible world," is F. D. Maurice's three-part treatise, The Kingdom of Christ.5 'A. N. Whitehead, "The New Reformation," Adventures of Ideas (London: Macmillan,

1933), p. 169. 5 F. D. Maurice, "Signs of a Spiritual Society," The Kingdom of Christ, pt. II, sec. vi (London: Everyman, n.d.), p. 160.

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But for realism in general, Christian as well as Platonic, God is emi- nently real, and the world and the human mind are derivatively real. God is necessary to the human mind, but the mind and its world are not necessary to God.

Among Victorian theorists, the influence of a Platonic-Christian theory of knowledge can be discerned most clearly in the writings of J. H. Newman and Coventry Patmore. In his early theoretical essay "Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle's Poetics," Newman Platonizes Aristotle.6 Because Platonic-Christian realism consigns the poet to a derivative world, one that is sundered from its divine original, New- man, like Sir Philip Sidney and Plato, calls upon the poet to imitate the divine Maker by forming a model of certain superior types. These are the forms of Sidney's golden or unfallen Edenic world, obscured by nature. Poetry is to history or biography, Newman argues, what mathematical laws in physics are to natural phenomena: poetry un- veils the archetypes, the models of many imperfect copies in the fallen world. By combining the primary idealizing impulse in Platonic poetics with a second more skeptical impulse, with a defense of the poet's obscurity as a necessary consequence of his deep emotion and ineffable subject matter, Newman arrives at a typical realist conclusion. Since the image is absolutely distinct from the object depicted, there is no way the poet can use his image-making activity as practical magic, as a way of appropriating or gaining power over anything. Only in an eschatological dream vision can the poet arrest the process of desacrali- zation that separates him irrevocably from the world of sacred times and places. But even in the apocalyptic mode of Newman's own poem "The Dream of Gerontius," the Christian realist must draw aside the veil of nature, using the mind as a telescopic mirror, before he can penetrate to an ideal vision in which the soul of Gerontius, the demons, and the angels are shown to participate in the sacred reality of the

eschatological mysteries Newman discerns. In an essay entitled "A People of a Stammering Tongue,"

Coventry Patmore combines the epistemology of a Christian realist with a different theory of knowledge, one which draws "the long bow of mysticism" - to use Whitehead's phrase (p. 169) - in order to col- lect evidences of God from the temporal world. The habit of speaking in symbols, enigmas, or parables bridges the gulf between the word 6 The essay is published in the first number of the London Review, founded in 1829, and is reprinted in J. H. Newman's Essays Critical and Historical (London: B. M. Pickering, 1871), I, 1-29. On Newman's Platonizing of Aristotle, see Alba H. Warren, English Poetic Theory, 1825-1865 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1950): "Newman's theory of poetry is Platonic and romantic, and is funda- mentally opposed to the theory of the Poetics" (p. 36).

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and the Word by making the simple, self-evident intuitions of a mystic the measure of the real. Though Patmore concedes that the language of "interjection, doxologies, parables, and aphorisms" has "no con- necting unity but that of a common heat and light," he commends it as the language of real apprehension, the natural language of what Newman calls "real" as opposed to "notional' assent.7

A Christian realist like Browning's David in "Saul" or like Pat- more's lyric celebrant in "The Child's Purchase," for whom God is unspeakably real, fears that any attempt to mirror God runs the risk of subverting His grandeur, of demoting His primacy. Yet to heal the rift between the mind and its objects, a rift by which the universe is in principle torn apart, David must focus God through the tele- scopic lens of "A Face like my face," "a Hand like this hand" (310- 311), just as Patmore must refract the Creator through an "Essential drop" (51), a "Prism whereby / Alone we see / . . . light in its triplic- ity" (79-81). A less doctrinal visionary, like Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Percivale in "The Holy Grail," presents the simultaneous appearance and withdrawal of the sacred object as a magnificent whorl of pul- sating growth and contraction. Composed of Tennyson's most congenial subjects - illusion, flux, and self-concealment - the passing of Gala- had is a palimpsest, both artful and marvelously elemental. On self- effacing sheets of light, outlines of the grail are awesomely stencilled, rising and falling like the billows of a sea, flooding heaven and earth with tides of grandeur. As an artist of northern landscapes, Tennyson, like J. M. W. Turner, finds in the aurora borealis a delirium of light that releases his most austere and ravishing visions. Liberated from any specific theological significance, controlled only by the precision and majesty of Tennyson's lyric art, the splendor of the Holy Grail, glimpsed as through a veil and strangely shimmering, seems tensed into transition, alive and luminous with frightening possibilities.

But even as Tennyson uses Percivale's splendid auroral vision of "the spiritual city and all her spires" ("The Holy Grail," 526) to make us aware of the ordinary but important sense in which an autumn night in England may become a fitting receptacle for the light and fire of heaven, his art of optic focussing clearly exalts a potential for vision - an expectation that revelation "may come tomorrow in the simplest word" (Wallace Stevens, "The Auroras of Autumn," ix.22) -

over anything the observer may actually see. To increase the Pla- tonist's compassion for reality, for the world and time, a sacramental

7Coventry Patmore, Principle in Art, Religio Poetae, and Other Essays (London: B. Bell, 1889), p. 259.

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realist like Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi must give the Word a local habitation. Fra Lippo's celebration of "The shapes of things, their colors, lights and shades, / Changes, surprises" ("Fra Lippo Lippi," 284-285) is in fact a paradisaic text. A kind of Franciscanism, to use Roland Barthes's phrase, "invites all words to perch, to flock, to fly off again" in a "marbled, iridescent" hymn of praise.8 In Gerard Man- ley Hopkins's "Pied Beauty," another Te Laudamus, a paean to God "for dappled things" (1), the Christian realist's continuous jubilation gorges him with language. Intoxicated with the sound of his alliterat- ing words, which he flings pell-mell, Hopkins uses discontinuous tags and phrases - the very excess of "Whatever is fickle, freckled," "swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim" (8-9) - to rediscover God under teeming impressions of every variety of sensory pleasure. The Christian realist teaches the Platonist a new love for the world by using a para- dise of words to bring heaven down to earth.

Gravid with the ballast of John Locke's primary qualities, a second form of realism anchors in the most solid properties of the

physical world the heady intoxication of Hopkins's Christian "reel-ist," who is always in danger, like the Platonist, of "reeling" into bliss. Unlike the "reel-ist," the Lockean empiricist looks through a trans-

parent glass or window, not on the divinity of Plato's archetypes, but on the dense, impervious sovereignty of things. Enshrined in the associationist account of mind and nature to be found in the Utili- tarian descendants of Locke and David Hartley (in James Mill's Analysis of the Phenomena of the Human Mind, in J. S. Mill's editorial notes to his father's work, and in his own System of Logic), the realist theory of knowledge, in its empirical form, posits three opera- tions. The mind receives, as through a window, preexisting data of sensation; it recognizes patterns in these received data; then it pro- ceeds to classify the patterns under general concepts.9 J. S. Mill's theory of knowledge is still based on a primary fact-gathering process of in- duction, framed on a model of truth by correspondence. But the role

given to intuition (rooted in imagination) as opposed to judgment

8 Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text, trans. Richard Miller (New York: Hill and Wang, 1975), p. 8.

9 J. S. Mill identifies these three operations when he states in his Logic: "I hear a man's voice. This would pass, in common language, for a direct perception. All, however, which is really perception, is that I hear a sound. That the sound is a voice, and that the voice of a man, are not perceptions but inferences." John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic, in Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. John M. Robson (Toronto: Uni- versity of Toronto Press, 1973), VIII, 642. By searching, in Humean terminology, for patterns of resemblance, contiguity, or cause and effect among the impressions it receives, the imagination is able to translate the raw data of perception into material suitable for the thinking faculty to treat.

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(which is channelled through memory) transforms completely the mechanistic account of Thomas Hobbes and James Mill.

If we are looking for Victorian survivals of the earlier empirical tradition, we must turn, not to J. S. Mill himself, whose criticism we shall treat later under the Baconian tradition, but to critics like G. H. Lewes, Herbert Spencer, and Leigh Hunt. Hobbes's mechanistic model, which confines the window of the poet's mind to a fading memory of sensual images, or "decaying sense," survives in Leigh Hunt's con- demnation of "fancy" for bringing together "by the will and pleasure ... images not in their nature connected."10 His distinction between "fancy" and "imagination" corresponds to Addison's distinction be- tween false and true wit. Reacting against his early infatuation with Hegelian aesthetics and influenced by Herbert Spencer's attempt in his "Philosophy of Style" to define the psychological conditions for effective expression, G. H. Lewes briefly revives a more potent optical version of the mechanistic model.

A legacy of the Cartesian criterion of truth - the clarity and distinctness of the mind's ideas - Lewes's defense of clear vision ex- plains why he insists on the superiority of Wordsworth's clear images to Edward Young's obscure ones. Without condoning the bondage to nature of an uncomposed photograph, which retains a material vestige of its subject in a way no painting can, Lewes contends that the poet's lucid mental vision, in emancipating itself from the tyranny of a snap- shot, will continually celebrate and reaffirm the sovereignty of sharply etched sensory impressions.1 What Lewes says applies to such in- delibly stamped visual images as the yew tree or the burial ship in In Memoriam, images which obsess the mourner, which cling to his memory like a nightmare he remembers. Reviving, in wholly secular terms, something like the primitive status of images, Lewes's clear and distinct ideas are magical extensions of their subject. They are a potent means of appropriating it, of gaining control over it, rather as if the poet's words were suddenly to become words of power, acquiring the properties of a talisman or magic formula.

10 Leigh Hunt, Imagination and Fancy; or Selections from the English Poets (London: Smith, Elder, 1844), p. 30. The quotation appears in an introductory essay, "An Answer to the Question 'What is Poetry?'"

1Thus, Lewes criticizes Charles Dickens for reviving images which have the vividness of photographs, which produce effects that "have the coercive force of realities, ex- cluding all control, all contradiction." Incapable of prizing as a prerogative of the mind its ability to withdraw from the tyranny of the outward eye, Dickens's animal intelligence has produced, in Lewes's view, an amalgam of "mingled verisimilitude and falsity altogether unexampled." See his "Dickens in Relation to Criticism," rpt. in G. H. Lewes, The Principles of Success in Literature, ed. T. S. Knowlson (London: W. Scott, n.d.), p. o00.

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If there is to be a God in this new world of sensory objects, it is the Deist God, who created the density of an exterior world, then retired from His creation. Instead of merely pulling the right strings to activate his characters like puppets, the poet, as an absentee God, must efface himself before the imperviousness of a world that is genuinely dense but free - independent of its creator. To walk "bare- foot into reality," as Wallace Stevens puts it ("Large Red Man Read- ing," 6), a verse novelist like Browning must recover for poetry the empirical residue of ordinary experience. A vast amount of descriptive detail excites our curiosity about so arbitrary an interest as the precise taste and color of the court lady's poison in "The Laboratory," as it excites our interest in the decapitated Jew's head and the Madonna's breast in "The Bishop Orders His Tomb." Our delight in the bishop's erotic Pan, jammed in between St. Praxed and Moses, is our hallucina- tory relish of reality. It is our joy in the very touch and feel of sensu- ality, in the materiality of what once existed in baroque sculpture as a veritable conceit in stone.

In the cluttered Victorian decor of Tennyson's prologue to The Princess, as in Elizabeth Barrett Browning's full-scale "novel in verse" Aurora Leigh, the poet retrieves albums of trivia- snapshots of a dense, myopic world. By being essentially lavish of particulars, many of Tennyson's domestic idylls catch the reader in a web of minutely told circumstance. A monologue like "Caliban Upon Setebos" is an atoll built of microscopic organisms, a myriad of coursing "eft-things" (5), whose very minuteness checks the impact of the sea storms sent by Setebos. Instead of advancing the story, a vast agglomeration of trifles in The Ring and the Book confirms the mimetic contract of the poem as window by assuring the reader that this is a text about the real world. Through meticulous documentation in the court records of the seventeenth-century Roman murder trial, the poem's historical action becomes part of a system of information, fitted into schemes of classification and storage. Robert Browning's dogged accumulations redefine historical reality as itself an item for visual exhibition, an archival fragment for scrutiny and reconstruction.

II

The second theory of knowledge, which assumes both a Berke- leyan and a Baconian form, raises the ghost of philosophic idealism. Originating in the philosophy of consciousness of James Frederick

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Ferrier and culminating in the absolute idealism of its subtlest ex- ponent F. H. Bradley, the idealist tradition in Victorian thought con- tinues to exercise a profound, though now neglected, influence on both the theory and practice of Victorian poetry. In its most extreme form, idealism simply reverses the postulates of realism. Instead of affirming, with the Platonic-Christian or the Hobbesian realist, that the object of knowledge is independent of the knower, the idealist asserts that the knowing mind is independent of the world. Ferrier's philosophy of consciousness, which is the Victorian counterpart of Bishop Berkeley's subjective idealism, insists that the real is always "mecum." The ontological premise of Ferrier's idealism is also the premise of the Hindu: the axiom that the world is one because he feels it one, that the "I" is Brahman, the world-principle, the all. The reductio ad absurdum of the idealist axiom-no object without a subject, no world without a self-reflecting mirror - is emotional gnosti- cism, an epistemological faith never far removed from Sordello's creed: "I feel, am what I feel, know what I feel; / So much is truth to me" (Sordello, VI.435-436). Like some mystical souls who reject dogma to reach pure faith, Sordello forgets that intelligence can never exist in a vacuum. It requires a situation to bring it into play, to promote a possible idea to the dignity of actual thought, making truth the token of successful operation.

In his Institutes of Metaphysics, Ferrier argues that the mind's capacity for knowledge is prohibited from going below a certain limit; it cannot descend to the apprehension of less than the minimum scibile per se, which Ferrier defines as the "object plus subject."12 Ferrier believes that the gulf between the human mind and the mind of God, between epistemology and ontology, can be bridged by means of carefully constructed logical argument. But if Berkeley's "esse est percipi," or Ferrier's "the object mecum," is the inseparable unit of cognition, as Ferrier insists, how can the idealist unhinge the world from his mind?13 It occurs to some of Ferrier's fellow idealists, includ- ing Tennyson and Browning, that God and the world may be merely Ferrier's self-reflecting mind writ large. In emphatic parody of the Hebraic God's creation ex nihilo is the omnivorous mind of Ferrier's idealist not condemned to commune with ghosts, to feed on shades and

12 J. H. Ferrier, The Institutes of Metaphysics: Theory of Knowing and Being (Edin- burgh: W. Blackwood and Sons, 1854), prop. III, p. 106.

13 For a similar criticism of Ferrier, see Frederick Copleston, A History of Philosophy (New York: Doubleday, 1967), VIII, pt. I, 186: "On Ferrier's premisses it appears to follow that God Himself, as thought by me, must be object-for-a-subject, the subject being myself."

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self-reflections? Is his mind not locked within a prison-house of solip- sism, like Tennyson's self-isolated intellectual in "The Palace of Art?"

The frightening solitude of this Hebraic model is implicit in George Puttenham's Elizabethan manual, the Art of English Poesy (1589), which envisages a poet who "without travail to his . . Imagination made all the world of nought." In the nineteenth century, the threat of solipsism is never far removed from Wordsworth's utter- ances about the poet's spontaneous overflow of powerful feeling, or from Shelley's idealist metaphor of the poet as a solitary lyre, swept into music by the passing breeze. The same threat reappears in the Victorian age in John Keble's notion that poetry is "the indirect ex- pression . . . of some overpowering emotion"14 and in the essays of the Spasmodic critic, Sydney Dobell, for whom all poetry approaches the condition of dramatic performance. Dobell calls the poet's ability to transform his mind into the mind of other characters the power of "transfiguration." But it is a transfiguration that resembles a gigantic soliloquy more than it resembles a play; for the whole drama is per- formed, not on a stage, but within the private theatre of the poet's mind. The poet's mimetic gifts are of a peculiar kind, for they remain, as Dobell says, "the perfect expression of a perfect human mind" or, as David Masson says, the "phantasmagory" of a dreamer.15

To present the mind as a self-reflecting mirror, the nineteenth- century poets experiment with a remarkable new genre, the spiritual confession or monodrama. What looks at first like melodrama in the verse narratives of the Spasmodic school, or in a dramatic confession like Browning's Paracelsus or Pauline, may simply be "a convention of characterization" designed, as Robert Preyer observes, "to provide a rapid means of entry" into the poet's mind, "the real subject of the narrative."'6 Secret and eccentric, the language of Sordello, Paracelsus, and Pauline comes as close as poems can to the intimate center of speech. They compose a poetry of private language, before words stream outward, losing energy and pressure as they struggle to make contact with an alien world. Such poetry uses every safeguard of obliqueness, of reservation, of conventional flatness of secondary char- acterization, to preserve the secret knowledge and shared memories

14 John Keble, Review of John Gibson Lockhart's Life of Sir Walter Scott, British Critic and Quarterly Theological Review, 24 (1838), 426-427.

" Sydney Dobell, "The Nature of Poetry," Thoughts on Art, Philosophy, and Religion (London: Smith, Elder, 1876), p. 7. David Masson, "Theories of Poetry and a New Poet," rpt. in Essays Biographical and Critical (Cambridge: Macmillan, 1856), p. 430.

16 Robert Preyer, "Robert Browning: A Reading of the Early Narratives," ELH, 26 (1959), 536.

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of an elect group. Because the verses of Pauline seem to form among themselves an esoteric order of meaning, they can use language as a form of password, granting admission only to a select nucleus of privi- leged readers. Under the pressure of intensely compressed feeling in Sordello, grammar contracts and the normal connecting links of dis- course fall away. A product of the mind's self-reflecting mirror, such language is dense with compacted implication and seems to evolve along several grooves of grammatical possibility at once. The more plural the text becomes, the more the reader must work to share in its secrecy; the more one must labor, in the privacy of one's own reading, to restore or reconstruct it.

A second idealist tradition, found in Utilitarian critics like J. S. Mill and W. J. Fox, derives ultimately from Bacon. In order to push poetry and religion aside, Bacon divides his world in two, de- veloping a merely idealizing theory of the poetic imagination so that he may devote himself to an empirical study of the inductive sciences. Dismissing the "feigned history" of poetry as a pursuit devoid of cog- nitive dignity, Bacon is then able to pass safely from the entertain- ments of the theater into "the judicial place or palace of the mind" (Bacon, p. 247). In his earliest theory, a legacy of his Utilitarian epistemology, J. S. Mill follows Bacon in separating poetry and theology from philosophy and science: both are alternative ways of interpreting the world. In his posthumously published Essays on Re- ligion, Mill's theological model of creation is the Gnostic model, which sunders matter from spirit. The world-builder is the adversary of the true God, omnipotent but cruel, just as the sovereign of this world is the scientist, not the poet, since if we are seeking knowledge we must turn to the mind's more inductive operations: association by con- tiguity alone informs the mind about the natural occasions of its own experience.

In so inclusive and self-critical a thinker as J. S. Mill, however, it is possible to discern the outline of at least three epistemological models. Most prominent is the Baconian model, which in poetry, as in theology, divides the world in two, and which formulates a distinction between two kinds of association. We can associate our ideas emo- tionally, according to some desire of the mind, as the poet associates them, or we can group ideas, as do men of science and business, ac- cording to what Mill calls "artificial classifications . . . made for the convenience of thought and practice."17 Even in altering what is 17 J. S. Mill, "Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties," first published in 1833 and revised

in 1859; rpt. in Victorians on Literature and Art, ed. Robert L. Peters (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1961), pp. 90-91.

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merely successive in experience, the second method of association must still observe principles of spatial and temporal connection. The poet, on the other hand, associating synchronously rather than suc- cessively, brings into a single web of sense ideas that are similar, linked not by temporal or spatial bonds but by bonds of emotion. Mill's distinction, which can trace its venerable ancestry back to Aristotle, becomes the basis of Roman Jakobson's influential distinction between the metaphoric and metonymic poles of writing, between association by similarity and association by contiguity.s1

Two other models of the mind - one teleological and the other Hobbesian - play crucial roles in Mill's poetic theories. When analyz- ing the teleology of art in the sixth book of his System of Logic, Mill affirms that poetry, as one branch of art (which includes ethics and politics), "proposes to itself an end to be attained, defines the end, and hands it over to the science" (Mill, Logic, p. 944). In illuminating general principles, the magic lantern of the poet's mind casts its beam into a kingdom of ends or final causes. No longer the antithesis of science but its necessary counterpart, poetry, like the other arts, is now perceived to be at fault only in denouncing science and wishing to be omnivorous. Neither principle, the poetic or the scientific, can be allowed to monopolize life's values.19 Still a third theory of knowledge, a legacy of Hobbesian empiricism, survives in Mill's poetic theories. For even when Mill is formulating a Baconian poetic theory, he claims that the poet's function is to describe, not the lion, but the emotions it evokes (Mill, "Thoughts on Poetry," p. 82). Mill is unwilling to eliminate the lion altogether because he is reluctant to surrender the truth claims of poetry. Stubbornly retaining a cor-

respondence theory of truth in his use of the representational verb "describe," Mill continues to hover between a Baconian model of the

poem as self-reflecting mirror and a Hobbesian model of the poem as transparent glass or window. He partly reconciles these models by developing a theory of affective memory, based on a model of the mind as an obscure or darkened glass. Mill suggests that a poet's intuitive (as opposed to judgmental) form of inference may still be

18 Roman Jakobson, "Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Linguistic Distur- bances," in Fundamentals of Language, ed. Roman Jakobson and Morris Halle ('S-Gravenhage: Mouton, 1956), p. 58.

19 In Mill's 1833 essays, "the poetry of culture" and of "a naturally poetic temperament" are opposed. But in his London Review article of 1835, the poet-philosopher, be- cause he combines two virtues, is naturally to be preferred to the mere poet. Mill's ability to criticize and enlarge his premises about poetry gives to these essays a delightful and exhilarating life. For what distinguishes, not merely dialectic, but intelligence itself from mere observing is the power of revising and synthesizing thought, which Mill displays to an eminent degree.

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confirmed by judgment if the emotions he associates, even though corresponding to no events in present time, were in fact evoked by past events, obscured in memory, which a commemorative poem like In Memoriam or The Prelude may suddenly restore to life.

No such ambivalence among Baconian, Hobbesian, and teleo- logical models persists in Mill's fellow Utilitarian, W. J. Fox, for whom the empiricist's window on nature becomes a mirror on the soul. Fox's poet is praised as a scientist of the mind, for whom art is less a magic lantern than a microscope, an optical instrument that allows a master psychologist like Tennyson to dissect the most intricate recesses of mania or obsession.20 Whenever Tennyson seems to be opening a window on a landscape or a scene, he is training a microscope on a mind obsessed or diseased, turning a setting like the vale of Ida in "Oenone" or Mariana's deserted cottage into a region of the soul.

Similar dualisms of fact and imaginative sense of fact persist in the theories of G. H. Lewes, Alexander Smith, and their American contemporary A. B. Johnson. "The difference between a rationalist and a poet," says Lewes, "is that the imaginative mind sees images where ordinary minds see nothing but signs" (Lewes, p. 34). Ra- tionalists who dwell among the forms of logic are inclined to reject as crude and unthinkable everything not fully expressible in their logical signs. But Lewes's semantic distinction between the language of signs and the language of images is an attempt, not to denigrate the latter, but to show that the two are cognitively distinct. As M. H. Abrams has shown, a similar distinction in Alexander Smith's important article "The Philosophy of Poetry," published in Blackwood's Magazine (December 1835), anticipates the poetic theory of I. A. Richards, which is grounded, like Mill's, on the opposition between the referential and emotive uses of words.21

Among Lewes's and Mill's contemporaries, the theorist who ap- plies a Baconian theory of knowledge most rigorously to the language of science and art is the American philosopher Alexander Bryan Johnson. In A Treatise of Language, Johnson anticipates C. L. Steven- son's distinction between the emotive and descriptive uses of words in

20 Thus for poems like "Supposed Confessions" and "Mariana," Fox praises Tennyson's ability to "obtain entrance into a mind as he would make his way into a landscape; he climbs the pineal gland as if it were a hill in the centre of the scene." W. J. Fox, Review of Tennyson, Poems, Chiefly Lyrical (1830), Westminster Review, 14 (1831); rpt. in Isobel Armstrong, Victorian Scrutinies: Reviews of Poetry, 1830- 1870 (London: Athlone Press, 1972), p. 76.

2 M. H. Abrams, "The Semantics of Expressive Language: Alexander Smith," The Mirror and the Lamp (New York: Oxford University Press, 1953), pp. 148-155, especially p. 151.

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moral discourse.22 Anticipating Rudolf Carnap and A. J. Ayer, Johnson relegates the language of metaphysics, poetry, and religion to the grammatical domain of exclamation and interjection. Only science, which uses a declarative sentence type, is cognitive. Johnson locates the language of morals and education, whose grammatical mood is imperative or interrogative and whose function is neither cognitive nor expressive but practical, midway between art and science. Like J. S. Mill and Alexander Smith, A. B. Johnson is the Victorian ancestor of a host of logical positivists in the twentieth century, all of whom propose to solve the central problems of philosophy by distinguishing rigorously between the mind's epistemological instruments - especially between the self-reflecting mirror of an emotive use of words and the transparent window of a referential use. When not reducing one to the other, logical positivists are all agreed that between the psychic microscope of a wholly secularized theory of man's word and the

telescopic lens of a Platonic-Christian theory of God's Word some tension must always exist, until the actual and the possible meet at

infinity. The Victorian poetry that most memorably perpetuates the

sundering of meaning into two exhaustive modes of discourse, emotive and referential, is a poetry of lyric escape like the proem of "The Lotos-Eaters" or the lyric effusions of the hedonist in "The Ancient Sage." Both uses of emotive language put the referential discourse of their antagonists - Ulysses and the Sage -within recantatory brackets. Even when Victorian poems of debate alternate between emotive and referential meanings, as in the debate waged between

Fancy and Reason in La Saisiaz or between the idealist and the skep- tic in "The Two Voices," both voices are internalized. Instead of

opening a window on the world, each poem uses a microscope - what Arnold calls a "dialogue of the mind with itself" - to probe the recesses of the poet's soul. Either the mind tries to be omnivorous, devouring the glass of nature, or else nature tries to eclipse the mind. In order to

oppose the dominant descriptive model of the scientist, based on a pri- mary fact-gathering process of induction, poetry must keep recreating expressive forms of language. But it must do so without reverting to the

private discourse of the lotos-eaters, whose words and grammar are swathed in hedonistic reverie until the material reference of their

language is all but lost. For, as Tennyson knows, to drop the world in

2 Alexander B. Johnson, A Treatise of Language, ed. David Rynin (1836; rpt. ed., Berkeley: University of California Press, 1947).

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order to grasp reality is to commit exquisite suicide: it is to exhale one's spirit in a void.

In an effort to unify their sensibility, to prove that the poet, like the scientist, can continue to assimilate the richness of experience, Vic- torian poets experiment with many variations of the pure lyric genres. In a host of mask lyrics, monodramas, and dramatic monologues, the major poets attempt a radical revision of their own geography of self. It is by assuming the actor's mask that Tennyson and Browning come to know Ulysses and Fra Lippo, and it is in these roles that they also discover themselves. Through the empathic role-playing of a "trans- migrating Vishnu," to use W. J. Fox's metaphor, Tennyson and Brown- ing seek the answer to a question: is the poet's free-wheeling projection into nature and other people capable of evolving a true identity, a union of fact and imaginative sense of fact, of referential and emotive meanings? In the great monologues, perhaps; but in proclaiming the role-player's freedom and sovereignty, too often these dramatic genres perpetuate the rift they seek to heal. Instead of finding a true self whose unity is dynamic, Browning is obsessed by the fear that his masks have made him a huckster, a street vendor of empty identities. Thus in his longest poem, The Ring and the Book, role-playing takes the form of a concerted carnival. In showing how the lawyers' role- playing pushes the masquerade to the limit, reviving the buffoonery of history, Browning tries to exorcise the great carnival of his monologues. Because role-playing now bars access to the actual intensities of life, Browning finds he must finally cast aside the masks of St. George and Christ, recovering a naked self, an essential "R.B.," beyond all the roles he has assumed. The poet who hopes to unify his or her world - who hopes to be led by the noble self-confidence of the rationalist to that ultimate goal of thought where science is found to be a poetry that succeeds, an intuition that guesses the principle of experience - must join together in logical wedlock description and creation, "what is" and "what ought to be." He or she must come to embrace a different epistemology and a different generic form.

III

The third theory of knowledge, which entertains a doctrine of qualified or relative realism and to this end combines selected ele- ments of the first two traditions, derives ultimately from the critical rationalism of Kant. It assumes both a skeptical and a constructive

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form, depending on which optical model- the analogical mirror or the refracting glass - it uses. In its skeptical version, critical rationalism posits the existence of supersensible truths. Under certain conditions these truths would become knowable and known. But as Augustine affirms of an ineffable Creator, in this life our knowledge remains partial and shadowy. Truth can be mirrored only by analogy, glimpsed as "through a glass darkly," per speculum in aenigmate, as Augustine says. According to Kant, the eternal verities of the pure reason - the existence of God, for example, and the immortality of the soul - are

possible facts of experience related to the purpose of our present moral knowledge. Incapable of being brought into focus through the tele-

scopic lens of Platonic rationalism, or through the transparent window of the realist, they give rise to a skeptical, agnostic tradition within Victorian thought.

For British Kantians like Sir William Hamilton and H. L. Mansel, man's window on an unknowable God becomes an ever

darkening glass. The poetic counterparts of such ideas as God and

immortality are those representations of the imagination which, ac-

cording to Kant, occasion "much thought without, however, any defi- nite thought."23 Because no concept can ever be adequate to an aes- thetic idea or to an idea of the pure reason, the supersensible truths of poetry, which mirror by analogy a possible world of purposive mean-

ings, can never be completely compassed or made intelligible by language. But, being less remote than God, the poet's constructions form a bridge or causeway, spanning the gulf that spreads between the concepts of the understanding, on the near side of nature, and the

supersensible ideas of the pure reason - those beacons of purpose which continue to draw the mind from a farther shore.

What Kant calls an "aesthetic idea," and what the Victorian theorist David Masson calls a "fictitious" or "ideal concrete," is a result of the poet's ability to spread his imagination "over a number of kindred representations, over sensory attributes" which, in Kant's words, "arouse more thought than can be expressed in a concept de- termined by words" (Kant, p. 428). Thus Tennyson's comparison of the orgiastic music in "The Vision of Sin" to a nightingale, which is followed by a sparkle, a circle, and the colors in a rainbow, allows the poet to expose in sharply etched detail a nerve-dissolving sensa- tion which would otherwise be hardly describable at all. Just as Arthur

23Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, pt. I, sec. 49, trans. J. H. Bernard, in Kant Selections, ed. T. M. Greene (New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1929), p. 426.

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Hallam praises the poet of sensation for making such comparisons the signature of fine emotions, "too subtle and too rapid to admit of corresponding phrases," so Masson praises the poet's power to express ineffable states by clustering over "with . . . parasitic fancies" the stem of his original thought.24 In impressionistically sketching the hedonistic energy of his vision, Tennyson finds that with the aid of such fancies he can express more, and think with greater clarity and power, than when he is writing more discursively in his poetry of debate.

In giving a sensory shape to "the Ideas of invisible beings, the kingdom of the blessed, hell, eternity, creation" - to use some of Kant's own examples - the visionary poet of "The Dream of Gerontius," or of such nightmare landscapes as Childe Roland's wasteland and James Thomson's City of Dreadful Night, is not simply submitting the shows of things to the desires of the mind. Like Bacon's poet, he is remolding nature, but always in accordance with analogical laws - with the laws of Ruskin's Imagination Contemplative - and always "in accordance with principles which occupy," in Kant's system, "a higher place in Reason" (Kant, p. 426). In presenting a supernatural vision, or an ineffable shade of emotion, through an analogical mirror, the poet of eschatalogical or of nightmare vision in restoring to the understanding an abundance of undeveloped material to which the mind paid too little attention when trying to formulate its original concepts. The poet's "intellectual secretion of fictitious circumstance," to borrow Masson's phrase ("Theories of Poetry," p. 435), is not necessarily superior to other forms of intellectual operation, but is epistemologi- cally distinct. The idiosyncratic twists and turns and jumps of the visionary poet in presenting a phantasmagoria of events quicken the mind; as Kant observes, they add "much ineffable thought."

Though Kant's model confers on the poet an importance which is inconceivable in the idealizing tradition of Bacon, it grants him only a very precarious foothold on the heights of supersensible truth, on those towering "cliffs of fall" he seeks in vain to scale. For a more constructive model - one which views the mind, not as an analogical mirror, but as a refracting glass or prism - we must turn to a different region of Kant's epistemological map. Ironically, it is not when re- flecting on art in the strict sense but when enunciating a theory of

24 Arthur Hallam, "On Some of the Characteristics of Modem Poetry," Englishman's Magazine (August 1831); rpt. in Victorian Poetry and Poetics, ed. Walter E. Hough- ton and G. Robert Stange, 2d ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1968), p. 856. David Masson, "Prose and Verse in De Quincey," British Quarterly Review (July 1854), rpt. in Essays Biographical and Critical, p. 462.

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knowledge that Kant charts the way for a more constructive appraisal of the human imagination - for an account in which the poet, no less than the scientist, can finally accede to grace. Instead of subordinating the poet's intuitions to the concepts of the scientist, as he does in the Critique of Judgment, the treatise devoted specifically to art, Kant now realizes that sense impressions do not enter the mind as ideas of sensation, or as ideas of imagination, until the mind gives them form. This form is not identical with the form which understanding gives to ideas of sensation, for it is much simpler, more intuitive. Implicit in Kant's insistence that the mind must first convert a crude sensation into an imagination before the interpretive work of thought can begin is an important insight into how the imagination, far from passively mir- roring sensation, is able to function as a refracting glass or prism -

dominating the brute violence of its world.25 As Coleridge and such Victorian disciples of Kant and Coleridge as T. H. Green and F. D. Maurice realize, the primary imagination, as "the prime agent and the living power" of all human perception, must first fashion the solid strength of each sensum before it can be placed firmly in its context by the interpretive work of thought.

The theological model of creation behind this new theory of perception is Plotinus's basic figure of divine emanation. Combining Plato's optical metaphor of the mind as a reflector with Plotinus's archetype of the projector, Coventry Patmore envisages the new bi- lateral transaction between the mind and an external object as the passage of light through a refracting glass or prism ("The Child's Purchase," 79-81). Perception is an active partnership of "taking," "making," and "giving." Since the mind is a "creator and receiver both, / Working but in alliance with the works / Which it beholds" (The Prelude, II.258-260), the spectra it creates are at once a product of its refracting glass and an altered form of the light that it transmits. By converting impressions of sense into ideas of imagination, the poet simply enlarges and refines the capacity of every human mind to

25 And yet Benedetto Croce argues, with some justice, I think, that Kant fails to de- velop this insight with sufficient rigor: "The characterizing or qualifying imagination which is aesthetic activity ought to have occupied in the Critique of Pure Reason," Croce says, "the pages devoted to the discussion of space and time, which would thus have constituted a real Transcendental Aesthetic, a real prologue to the transcen- dental Logic." Benedetto Croce, Aesthetic, trans. D. Ainslie (New York: Noonday Press, 1909), p. 279. Kant may fail to analyze the process by which the mind trans- forms its sense impressions into ideas of imagination before it can use them as data for thought. He may also fail to show how this activity of consciousness, as refined by the poet, makes art a cognitive act. But there is nevertheless implicit in Kant's transcendental aesthetic a crucial recognition that without imagination there would be no terms for the intellect to apprehend or relate.

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dominate its sensations. All nineteenth-century theories of imagination which try to establish the commerce of the poet's mind with nature as a true and lawful marriage, as a genuine giving-and-taking, are in- debted to Kant's revolutionary new model of perception.

Among the Victorian theorists who struggle to maintain the union of matching and making, description and creation, implicit in Kant's model of perception, are John Ruskin, in his restless pursuit of a "naturalist ideal," and Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater, in their eloquent defense of what both call "imaginative reason." Equally zealous in their efforts to combine the models of the mind as reflector and projector are Aubrey de Vere, Arthur Hallam, and Robert Brown- ing, all of whom seek to accommodate the claims of reception and em- anation in two distinct kinds of poetry.26 For E. S. Dallas's dramatic poet, as for Browning's "Maker-see," poetry is a performance, a making or a doing, rather than a passive transmitting.27 The intense labor enacted in a performative rite like "Abt Vogler" or "Saul" can penetrate to the visions that are at the heart of nature, constituting its articulate form, only if the celebrants are prepared to work at the height of their intellectual energy and imaginative power. What links the cele- brant in "Hurrahing in Harvest" with Abt Vogler and Saul is a shared perception that work is necessary if the human imagination, over- coming the elusiveness of all visions that attend on any labor of per- ception, is to participate at last in Hopkins's momentous feat of lifting the world, of "half" hurling "earth for him off under his feet" ("Hur- rahing in Harvest," 14). At such moments, the more boldly the poet can celebrate the power of his imagination to light up the world, to celebrate the mind's sovereignty over nature, the more faithfully he can imitate the mind's formation of synthetic a priori judgments. Be- cause the mind is a prism, it is not just a receptor of light but a pro- jector of spectra, each bearing the imprint of the refracting substance. Such a mind can at last reconcile the conflicting claims of nature and imagination. It can adjudicate the claims of matching and making, joining in logical wedlock the descriptive categories by means of which

26 Thus, Arthur Hallam seeks a dual allegiance to "sensation" and "reflection" ("On Some of the Characteristics of Modem Poetry," rpt. in Victorian Poetry and Poetics, p. 850); Browning tries to combine truths of fact and "truths of force" in a new fellowship (The Ring and the Book, Bk. I) and envisages a combination of sub- jective and objective poetry in his "Essay on Shelley"; and Aubrey de Vere, con- trasting "two chief schools of English poetry," insists that "the highest poetry rests upon a right adjustment of contending claims" (Essays Chiefly on Poetry, [London: Macmillan, 1887], II, 98).

27 See E. S. Dallas, Poetics: An Essay on Poetry (London: Smith, Elder, 1852), p. 255; and Browning, Sordello, III.864-868.

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events in nature are forever being stabilized and ordered by the physical sciences, and the claims of the moral and metaphysical cate- gories by means of which God and human nature are traditionally interpreted.

IV

The problem left unsolved by the third theory of knowledge is how imaginative truth can be universal as well as individual: how can it be valid at the moment no poet or recreative observer is veri- fying its validity? The fourth theory of knowledge tries to answer this question by reinstating a doctrine of purpose. Unlike the trans- cendent purposes of the Platonic-Christian theory, a theory which turns the mind into a telescopic mirror, the purposes of this fourth tradition are now made immanent in nature. A doctrine of immanent purpose may adopt the stereoscopic vision of neo-Hegelians like F. H. Bradley, who in superimposing diverse pictures sees the real im- manent in all its appearances, endowed with a newly acquired solidity and depth. Or it may draw upon evolutionary theory to tem- poralize its vision, to proclaim a form of immanent teleology that is realized over intervals of time, like the speeded-up pictures of objects in time-lapse photography.

The first and more conservative alternative sometimes assumes a theological form: a doctrine of sacramental immanence. In a poet like Hopkins, the fourth theory of knowledge even revives the ana- logical methods of medieval theology. Through a four-term analogy of proper proportionality, which superimposes pictures of "the just man" and his "graces" and of Christ and "the features of men's faces" ("As kingfishers catch fire," 9-10, 12, 14), Hopkins can use a stereo-

scopic vision of Christ-man to dramatize the multitude of planes on which the analogy between divine and human grace, through the pivotal power of God's immanence, may operate. In the same sonnet, a phrase like "God's eye" becomes a hinge word on which Hopkins's analogy can be made to turn, producing a near chiasmus that adum- brates the mysterious symmetry between two mysterious entities, God and man: "Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is" (11).

Theological forms of immanent teleology appear as well in the theoretical writings of E. S. Dallas and Coventry Patmore. According to Dallas, the highest form of sacramental immanence is realized in Christian art by a dramatic artist who, in drawing near to God, "is

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transformed into the Divine likeness" (Dallas, p. 256). Patmore enun- ciates a similar theory in his essay "Religio Poetae": the poet of sacra- mental nature, in reviving the polysemous meanings familiar to Dante and Spenser, is characterized by alertness of vision, by a faculty of spiritual insight that "enables him to detect in external nature the likenesses and echoes of spiritual realities" (Patmore, p. 221). De- signed to elucidate the modes of real apprehension accessible to the celebrant of a spiritualized nature in such lyrics of ritual praise as Browning's "Saul," Hopkins's sonnet "Hurrahing in Harvest," or Pat- more's own masterpiece "The Child's Purchase," these sacramental theories of poetry are carefully distinguished by Patmore, in his essay on "Christianity an Experimental Science," from Bacon's merely idealiz- ing theory of art. In a statement that once again illustrates a thesis of this essay - the dependence of poetic theory on epistemological models - Patmore contends that Bacon's philosophy "was even baser than his political career, and it did not deal with 'things,' which are the objects of Wisdom, but with phenomena, which are only hints and corroborations of realities discovered by that which is philosophy in- deed" (Patmore, p. 254).

Though occasionally inspired by theological models, a less doc- trinaire form of immanence can be found in Ruskin, Arnold, and Sydney Dobell. When Dallas praises Ruskin's Modern Painters as the best exposition of "the theology of art" (Dallas, p. 251), he is praising Ruskin for trying to combine classical and Christian models of im- manent form. For Aristotle's theory of imitation, presupposing as it does a metaphysical model of immanent teleology, a model in which the final and formal causes are immanent in the material cause, allows Ruskin to maintain that the Greeks, no less than Dante, strove to em- body the ideal, to incarnate the divine, to realize what Ruskin calls "the naturalist ideal." According to Ruskin, the artist's penetrative imagination, by superimposing pictures of the particular and the gen- eral, the concrete and the universal, captures not an idealized or an abstracted but an essential version of the world. The optical analogy is neither the self-reflecting mirror of Romantic tradition nor the transparent window of neoclassicism, but rather the simultaneous perspectives of a stereoscope.

A similar power of multiple vision informs Arnold's endorsement of simultaneous energy and restraint in art, contributing to the in- tense compression he finds in Dante and Milton, the masters of the "grand style severe." At its most elliptical, stereoscopic vision is abridged to simple juxtaposition. Instead of saying "A is B" we say

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"A, B." The power of such stereoscopic pictures resides in their ability to retain their own individuality, even as the analogies of proper pro- portion (Browning's Caponsacchi is to Pompilia as Perseus is to Andromeda as St. George is to the dragon's victim as Christ is to his bride the Church) are abbreviated into metaphor, into the total identi- fication of myth: Caponsacchi is Perseus-St. George-Christ.

In the critical theory of Sydney Dobell, as in the absolute idealism of F. H. Bradley, stereoscopic vision, as the most radical form of metaphor ("A is B is C is D"), produces a system of symbolic correspondences. Dobell's "perfect human poem" is the ideal synec- doche, a "congruous passage in that Poem of the Universe," and "a word in the eternal utterance of the One Almightly Poet" (Dobell, p. 65), in whom everything is potentially identical with everything else. In such a world, where the stereoscopic form of vision may be

"hypothetically applied to anything," as Northrop Frye observes of the

anagogic meanings of Revelation,28 all nature is contained within a single form, like F. H. Bradley's absolute. Such a containing form is a concrete universal: unlike Plato's archetypes, it does not sit apart from the world, but descends into phenomena and is immanent in all their appearances. To create a concrete universal the poet may employ the mythical method of Tennyson's "Demeter and Persephone" or Browning's The Ring and the Book, whose main characters expand into archetypes by unconsciously fulfilling destinies laid out for them in classical and biblical myth. Thus Caponsacchi is both Browning and Perseus, both Christ and St. George; just as Persephone's return is both reunion with her mother and a seasonal change, both a pagan renewal and a promise of Christian resurrection. Such total mythic identity of A and B and of C and D is not uniformity, but a unity-in- difference. It embodies the poet's multilayered vision of an analogical world in which objects can be identified with each other according to a system of symbolic correspondences without losing the signature of their own distinctive forms.

In order to understand Victorian myth and the concept of an organizing archetype, the literary historian must turn, I think, not to the researches into myth of George Grote, Max Muller, Benjamin Jowett, or the anthropologist Edward Tylor, but to the Higher Critics and the Victorian neo-Hegelians. To grasp what Northrop Frye has called the "anagogic" phase of myth, the historian must grasp what such idealist philosophers as Edward Caird and F. H. Bradley, follow-

28 Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1957), P. 124.

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ing Hegel, mean by the "concrete universal": a metaphoric identifi- cation of A and B while each A and B retains its individual form. For Victorian poets like Hopkins and Christina Rossetti, the concrete uni- versal assumes the form of sacramental correspondences between na- ture and grace. But for Browning in The Ring and the Book, it becomes a mythical method, something to be reinvented and recovered. In exploring the recovery of a mythical method, it is important to dis- tinguish between the presentation of a stable mythical identity, such as that possessed by Tennyson's Demeter or by George Meredith's Skiageneia in "The Day of the Daughter of Hades," and a more evolutionary method, such as the myth of cosmic change fashioned by Meredith in "The Woods of Westermain."

Like a stereoscopic toy that transforms two objects or plates into a single, three-dimensional scene, any model of sacramental im- manence is essentially static. In order to rotate the pictures, till the' stationary objects begin to move as in a kineoscope or a time-lapse photograph, the hierarchical model of a static scala natura must be made dynamic. As the book of nature is turned into moving pictures by flicking the pages, a temporal, evolutionary model allows us to envisage what the individual consciousness will in time become. But there is no short cut to the final page of history. No matter how fast we flick the pages - till figures begin to jump and objects move - the mind that hopes to compass the sum of the evolutionary drama, what Hegel calls "Objective Mind," must pass through every intervening stage. According to the Hegelian theory of knowledge, the final page of the book is simply the mind itself in the dynamic act of realizing itself - not spatially, as in the fixed sacramental model of immanent form - but temporally, through progressive change and evolution.

In Victorian thought, a theory of purposive evolution is ex- pounded most voluminously in the scientific writings of Samuel Butler. The theory's theological equivalent is the Stoic neo-Platonic model of a generative soul in nature. Verging at times on pantheism, this theo- logical model informs the radical, monistic side of Coleridge's thought most immediately indebted to F. W. J. Schelling. As D. G. James has shown, it appears to influence Coleridge's teaching that genius must act on the feeling that body is but a striving to become mind - that it is mind in its essence.29 The doctrine of a purposive soul in

29 In Scepticism and Poetry (London: Allen and Unwin, 1937), D. G. James discerns a turning point in Coleridge's intellectual life: his rejection of Schelling's development of Kant's thought, "a development Coleridge was later to call a materialism" (p. 200), and his acceptance of a Christian development of Kant's thought, "such as he was in fact to supply" (p. 200).

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nature is a strong influence, too, among the Victorian neo-Hegelians, particularly in the philosophy of immanence enunciated by Edward Caird.30

The same evolutionary model reappears in F. H. Bradley's Spinozistic doctrine that all "limited transparencies" - to use his own optical analogy- finally disappear, absorbed into "an all-embracing clearness," devoured like clouds before the sun.31 But to prevent the sun from collapsing into a viewless unity, into a void that may reopen the yawning chasm in Spinoza's system, Bradley incorporates into his evolutionary model the Hegelian doctrine of degrees of truth. Instead of sundering mind from matter (the dualistic fate of our first two theories of knowledge), Bradley proclaims that the only road to the absolute lies through history and the world. But as the pageant of history is speeded up, we discover, not the Hegelian "slaughter- bench of history," but the outlines of a hierarchical system - the es- calator of Tennyson's "great world's altar-stairs / That slope through darkness up to God" (In Memoriam, LV.15-16).

As we might expect, the influence of a Hegelian theory of

knowledge on poetic theory is most apparent in Hegel's own Lectures on Aesthetics. Its chief legacy to such Victorian theorists as the early G. H. Lewes, E. S. Dallas, and, much later, the idealist critic W. P. Ker is an evolutionary approach to the theory of genres. This approach sometimes entails as its corollary the idea that at the end of the evo-

lutionary process, its task accomplished, art will eventually transform itself into dialectic. The Victorian theorist most directly influenced

by Hegel's evolutionary model is the young G. H. Lewes. In a review of Hegel's posthumously published Lectures on Aesthetics, written for the British and Foreign Review in 1842, Hegel's ardent disciple avers that "four years' constant study" of the master's Lectures "has only served the more to impress [him] with its depth and usefulness." Hegel's exaltation of the third or Romantic-Christian phase of art stands behind Lewes's testimony that all poetry is "the beautiful phasis of a religious idea." The highest reaches of poetry are clouded in ob-

30 Especially in Caird's two-volume study, The Evolution of Religion (New York: Mac- millan, 1893). See also his brother John Caird's Introduction to the Philosophy of Religion (Glasgow: J. Maclehose, 1904).

31 Quoted by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison in a review of F. H. Bradley's Appearance and Reality in the Contemporary Review, 66 (1894), 714-715. The metaphor of the windowframe and the transparent glass is Bradley's; Pringle-Pattison uses the simile of "the white light of the UNICA SUBSTANTIA" devouring all determinations 'like clouds before the sun" (p. 713).

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scure analogies: it remains for philosophy alone to consummate these symbols, to render them univocal and clear.

Though less explicit, the influence of Hegel is most pervasive in the generic theories of a later Victorian critic, E. S. Dallas. His dis- tinction in Poetics: An Essay on Poetry (1852) among primitive lyric, classical epic, and Romantic dramatic forms is an original de- velopment of Hegel's distinction among a primitive symbolical, an intermediate classical, and a culminating Romantic phase of art. Like Hegel, Dallas believes that the highest phase is the third, the Ro- mantic dramatic phase, which offers a uniquely Christian form of art. The sacramental rites of a Christian poet demand, not the "historical faith" of an epic chronicler, but the "saving faith" of a celebrant who invents his own interpretative models, and who appropriates the truth, as in a truly dramatic "reception of the Gospel." Among the Victorian neo-Hegelians, the Hegelian model is particularly prominent in the aesthetic writings of W. P. Ker, a contributor to the volume of Essays in Philosophical Criticism published in 1883 by Andrew Seth [Pringle- Pattison] and R. B. Haldane. Ker's essay on "The Philosophy of Art" affirms the Hegelian theory that in the art of Christianity, as opposed to Greek art, "there is no need, no possibility that the image should accurately represent the reality. They are incommensurate from the first." Poetry's effort is "doomed to fail." Because "it is in the unseen and the spiritual that the chief beauty" (or, as Hegel would say, the chief sublimity) "dwells, inexpressible by art," Ker concludes, with Lewes and Hegel, that even at its most exalted, in its Romantic- Christian phase, art "is not the highest mode in which thought reveals itself."32

The fateful rift between "the image" and "reality," between the poet's word and its referent, is apparent in the evolutionary poetry of Browning and Meredith. In struggling to envisage a generative soul in nature, both poets find there is no way to name the soul without making it secondary. Even as the primal force of this soul fights its way through the restraining weight of the mineral, vegetable, and ani- mal worlds at the climax of Paracelsus, Browning seems always to bend his words away: respect for the primacy of the world soul forces Browning to bypass its description. The way to preserve the priority of the generative soul is not to have it named. Instead, it is deflected through a whole cycle of speeded-up verbal snapshots and through detours of simile: "like a dancing psaltress," "Like a smile striving

32 Andrew Seth [Pringle-Pattison] and R. B. Haldane, Essays in Philosophical Criticism (1883; rpt. ed., New York: B. Franklin, 1971), pp. 185, 178.

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with a wrinkled face" (Paracelsus, V.656-670). We must glimpse the world soul through the gaps between words, through the elliptical syntax that drops its connectives, speeding up the description as in time-lapse photography.

The surprise is that Browning's asyndetic style can set such a breathless view of things to such compelling music. The sense of an energy freed from nature mounts in the insistent march of verbs: it is concentrated in the motions of the heaving "centre-fire," passing from one animated object to another, as the molten ore:

. .. bursts up among the rocks, Winds into the stone's heart, outbranches bright In hidden mines, spots barren river-beds, Crumbles into fine sand where sunbeams bask.

(V.655-658).

The quoted lines, which bring to a climax a headlong rush of alliterat- ing sounds, are characteristic of a kind of dynamism in nature, of an energy that is more irrepressible because of the boisterous b's. For a moment sound takes over, or rather the effervescent b bubbles again, like the erupting lava of the volatile "young volcanoes . .. , cyclops- like, / Staring together with their eyes on flame" (V.662-663).

As "the earth changes like a human face" (V.654), Paracelsus rapidly turns the pages of nature's book, using its pictures to illustrate a text. The reader knows that everything Paracelsus says about nature is a figurative exemplum, a text for Browning's sermon about purposive evolution, about "the consummation of this scheme" of things in "man" (V.683): we are in the presence of a veritable book of instruc- tion. And yet, strange to say, the generative soul, in all its irrepressible passion and primacy, is just what is left out of Browning's text. Because Paracelsus is unwilling to submit to constraints, to the ponderous "stone," "mines," and "barren . . . beds" of the inanimate world, he seizes opportunities for advance, for human appropriations of nature, by acts of impulse, extravagance, and passionate preference. But his instinctive appropriation of an animate principle in nature is con- tinually being curbed by a sobering awareness that the primal energy can be neither named nor tamed by words. The daemonic energy can be defined precisely as the gap which exists between language and its referents: the generative soul itself continues to enjoy the primacy of the unnamed. All the challenge lies in trying to suggest a purposive energy in things, a spirit that eludes the poet's grasp and will not quite formulate. One might add that in any neo-Hegelian aesthetic, the priority of the real is exactly what eludes every poetic performance,

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since (as Ker and Lewes both aver) the referent and its sign are "in- commensurate from the first."

V

After 1870, the rise of a formalist tradition, founded upon a theory of symbolic fictions in the philosophy of science and religion, treats the images of the artist as material realities in their own right. Instead of likening these images to shadows, to the mere copies of an original, formalism becomes a potent means for turning the tables on reality - for turning it into a shadow. The disappearance of dimen- sions of depth (the spatial depth of a stereopticon and the temporal depth of a time-lapse photograph) brings into being a new region of copresence, which resembles the merely two-dimensional surface of kaleidoscopes. Like fragments of colored glass, the sensory images of many Pre-Raphaelite poems de-Platonize our understanding of reality. They make it less plausible to reflect upon experience according to the distinction between signs and their referents. By purifying the stunning Christian imagery of its theological content, a poem like "The Blessed Damozel" turns its sensory fragments into rich, mys- terious deposits, left in the wake of whatever emitted them, like photo- graphic images. Brought into a single realm of proximity, D. G. Ros- setti's erotic and religious fragments are what they are: paint on his canvas. As in Tennyson's "The Hesperides," such a poet tries to do with sensory objects what metaphor does with verbal comparison. He or she must trust objects enough to be a poet of sensation who abolishes the distinction between copies and originals. Because the sensory fragments no longer "mean" anything in the sense of referring beyond themselves to an original, they are a means both of appropriating reality and of making it obsolete.

An important influence on the ascendancy of formalism is the revival of scholarly interest in Plato, especially at Oxford.33 A theo- logical model for formalist theories of knowledge is Plato's theory of divine Forms. For Plato's divine eros, inciting the soul towards at-

33 The renewal of Platonic studies at Oxford is associated in particular with the name of Benjamin Jowett, who became a fellow of Balliol College in 1838 and occupied the chair of Greek from 1855 to 1893. He translated Plato's Dialogues and con- tributed to a revival of interest in Greek thought during the course of his long teaching career. T. H. Green and Edward Caird, both prominent in the idealist movement, were at one time Jowett's pupils. Pater's Plato arnd Platonism (1893) and his post- humously published Greek Studies (1895) mark the terminus ad quem of the revival.

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tainment, truth itself becomes a formal principle. Pater's formalist dictum that "all art constantly aspires towards the condition of music," and Wilde's doctrine that "art never expresses anything but itself," are anticipated by some of the Higher Critics of the Bible.34 They come to view all literature, like the Bible, as a self-contained verbal system: the credence that could no longer be given to historical references in the Bible is now to be given to realities that have not, in Arnold's famous phrase, "materialized" themselves "in the fact, in the supposed fact," which is now construed to be an image, an illusion.35

Comparable developments in the Victorian philosophy of sci- ence also encourage thinkers to look anew at the formal qualities of art. With a disarming candor, T. H. Huxley confides that all scientific ideas are symbolic fictions. In "The Progress of Science," Huxley re- pudiates all realist theories of knowledge by redefining scientific hypotheses, "not as ideal truths, the real entities of an intelligible world behind phenomena, but as a symbolical language."36 Like R. G. Boscovich, who views matter not as extension but as mathematical points serving as centers of "forces," or like the physicist James Clerk Maxwell, who replaces the solidity of matter with fields of force, with purely formal patterns in space, Huxley concedes that "all our inter- pretations of natural fact are more or less imperfect and symbolic."37

If F. H. Bradley's doctrine of an Absolute, beyond the instability of appearances, provides a philosophic defense of immanent teleology (our fourth theory of knowledge), his skeptical treatment of the phe- nomenal world itself provides an equally potent model for formalism. All appearances, Bradley argues, are relational, and the relational is unreal. Most epistemologies grant primacy to the object signified. They treat the relational forms that signify as mere notations, as a mere

system of signs which must be interpreted in order to arrive at truth. But if Bradley is right, and there exists only an unreal network of

4 Walter Pater, "The School of Giorgione," The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry (1873), rpt. in Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Signet Classics, 1974), p. 55. Oscar Wilde, "The Decay of Lying," in Literary Criticism of Oscar Wilde, ed. Stanley Weintraub (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1968), p. 194.

35 Appearing at the beginning of Arnold's essay "The Study of Poetry," the statement is a revision of a passage from Arnold's introduction to a work called The Hundred Greatest Men (1879). See Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1961), p. 306.

36 T. H. Huxley, "The Progress of Science" (1887), in Thomas Henry Huxley: Selections from the Essays, ed. Alburey Castell (Northbrook, Illinois: Crofts Classics, 1948), p. 58.

37 T. H. Huxley, "Science and Culture" (1880), in Huxley: Selections, p. 49. Huxley's reference to Boscovich and Clerk Maxwell appears in a footnote in "The Progress of Science," p. 56.

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differential relations with nothing at the center, then there survives no privileged concept or ideology that allows the interpreter to remain outside the play of forms. By altering and displacing the center of truth during the analysis of the formal system itself, Bradley prepares the way in the influential first book of his Appearance and Reality (1893) for Jacques Derrida's notion of a "systeme decentre." Like Pater, whose eloquent nominalism disintegrates the stability of the mind no less than the stability of nature, Bradley, in his skeptical moments, turns the world into a flux of relations. He provides an epistemological model of Ferdinand de Saussure's linguistic system, according to which there is only a network of infinite relations without a center, "only differences with no positive terms."38

The purely formal, nominalist theory of knowledge is not in- fluential during the early and mid-Victorian periods. But before the final quarter of the nineteenth century there begins to emerge, even among critics like Arnold, the notion that poets and critics are pri- marily concerned, not with deciphering truths that lie outside of language and its play of forms, but rather with the free play of form itself. By the phrase "criticism of life," Arnold means the "disinter- ested love of a free play of the mind on all subjects, for its own sake."39 Arnold's readers have not sufficiently realized, I think, how close to Kant's sense of the term "criticism" Arnold's own use remains.40 Arnold admires a skeptical, open intelligence, one that can unmask as fictions or as mere postulates of the practical reason, truths about God and immortality which most philosophers, less critical and disinterested than Kant, accept in a fiercely partisan or dogmatic way. Just as Arnold pronounces religion to be morality tempered with emotion, so his definition of poetry as "criticism of life" may be interpreted, in the Kantian sense, as an exposure of the merely fictive status of the truths which poets and theorists have traditionally dreamed of de- ciphering outside the realm of art and its signs.

The free exploration of a world of styles and forms - which have no truth, no ideological primacy, but which are offered for dis- interested and active interpretation, as a surrogate for theological and

38Ferdinand de Saussure, Cours de linguistique generale (Paris: Payot, 1969): "dans la langue il n'y a que des differences sans termes positifs" (p. 166).

39 Matthew Arnold, "The Function of Criticism," in Poetry and Criticism of Matthew Arnold, p. 245.

40 For a helpful summary of Arnold's familiarity with German idealist thought, see Park Honan, "Fox How and the Continent: Matthew Arnold's Path to the European Sentimental School and 'La Passion R6flechissante,'" Victorian Poetry, 16 (1978), 58, 61.

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other modes of dogma- is already evident in Arnold's remarkably influential essay "The Study of Poetry." Here criticism becomes the exercise of that very quality of disinterested inquiry which Arnold extols in Culture and Anarchy. The critic now accepts his free, creative function. He glories in the active force of words, in the power of Arnold's poet of "natural magic" to evoke a world of self-created forms. Such a critic can joyfully proceed to examine the medium of poetry without looking anxiously back, in a spirit of nostalgic guilt, to older mimetic codes which radically limit the play of forms by setting up a verbal structure beside the facts it describes and calling that structure true only if it seems to provide a satisfactory correspondence or picture.

It is a short step from the free, inquiring, critical side of Arnold to the eloquent skepticism of Pater, Swinburne, and Arthur Symons. The flux of sensations that extinguishes the light of the mind, and re- lentlessly dissolves the stable forms of nature, impels Pater, in order to avert total self-destruction, to take refuge in art. Before the light of sense goes out, Pater must aspire "to bum always with [a] hard, gemlike flame." In the absence of any other ultimate meanings in his world, to "maintain this ecstacy," which becomes his measure of "success in life," opens an unbounded space for the free play of forms.41 Without striving to stretch apprehension into literal truth, the skeptic can take solace from the formal play, since the effort to fix and stabilize the world has proved a vain ambition. Verbal structures cease to be the form of things at all, for not only is their perspective created by an observer but also their very character. The more Pater's critic, like his poet, transforms things in seeing them, the more he seems, through some occult trick of optics, to revive the impression or image, the

unique item of ecstasy, in some particular of his own chosen style. Salvation lies in turning things into forms of one's own sensibility: it lies in liberating the critic's (no less than the poet's) medium.

The cognitive skepticism that accompanies the dissolution of all other truth has an unforeseen result on the theory of poetry. In late Victorian and twentieth-century formalism, its chief value lies in an increased critical activity, in the heightened zeal with which poetics examines its own postulates. It means, too, that in the poetry of Victorian aesthetes and Symbolists, the formal elements of art are continually exceeding what they signify. Thus in Swinburne's lines:

41 Walter Pater, Conclusion to The Renaissance, in Selected Writings, p. 60. On the Lockean epistemology implicit in this passage, see William E. Buckler, "Marius the Epicurean: Beyond Victorianism," Victorian Poetry, 16 (1978), 148-149, 154, 164- 165.

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"Wan waves and wet winds labour, / Weak ships and spirits steer" ("The Garden of Proserpine," 19-20), the formal excess of the verbal music, the lure of the sibilant s sounds and the tremor of the w's, do not so much describe as suggest or evoke a picture as ominous and mysterious as a seascape by Turner, but much more abstract. A luxurious but strident art is already detaching itself from everything but its own medium. Synaesthesia and alliteration offer themselves as a surplus, as a formal excess, which engenders a play of largely formal signification.

In Symbolist poems like "The Hesperides" and "Childe Roland," discontinuity is no longer a strange and incongruous aberration from a confident knowledge about the world which the poet and his readers share. By cutting away the narrative links, allowing a generalized asyndeton to perforate discourse, the Symbolist poet removes all coherent referents. The dismantling of narrative releases unarrested irony: it becomes a means of keeping the reader within a symbolic system, granting maximum scope to the play of formal elements - often to mere hints, symbols, and echoes. The Symbolists' disconti- nuities, their use of multiple syntax, synaesthesia, and anders-streben, are all endorsed and catalogued by Arthur Symons. With the same overwhelming pathos that Pater conveys, Symons acknowledges that "it is with a kind of terror that we wake up, every now and then, to the whole knowledge of our ignorance."42 The void in nature is some- thing that art alone can moderate. The final uncertainty remains. But art helps domesticate the mystery, taming the terror into new decorum - not by acting as a self-reflecting mirror or as a window on the void, but by serving as something to divert the eye, to amuse it with its many-colored glass, its kaleidoscope of ever changing shapes and forms.43

Victoria College, University of Toronto

42Arthur Symons, The Symbolist Movement in Literature (New York: Dutton, 1919), P. 325.

43 Readers may wish to consult two complementary essays. Though not specifically con- cerned with poetic theory and epistemology, a fine analysis of optical models in Vic- torian poetry can be found in Gerhard Joseph's essay, "Victorian Frames: The Win- dows and Mirrors of Browning, Arnold, and Tennyson," Victorian Poetry, 16 (1978), 70-87. In a supplementary essay, "Mimesis as Invention: Four Interpretative Models in Victorian Poetry," forthcoming in New Literary History, I try to apply the theories of knowledge and poetry analyzed in this essay to selected Victorian poems.

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