Victorian metaphors for poetry.

Gibson, Mary Ellis

W. David Shaw. The Lucid Veil: Poetic Truth in the Victorian Age. Madison, Wisconsin: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1987. 311 pp.

Taking his title from Tennyson's In Memoriam, David Shaw focuses his examination of Victorian poetics and philosophy on a series of epistemological metaphors. Shaw's work in his influential studies of Tennyson's Style and Browning's Dialectical Temper gives him a detailed and allusive command of the standard Victorian poetic canon. In this more comprehensive study, Shaw discusses various Victorian metaphors for poetry beginning with poetry as a mirror of nature. This understanding of poetry, Shaw argues, quickly gave way to metaphors likening poetry first to a darkening glass, then to a lucid veil through which some higher reality is glimpsed. In the mid to late Victorian period poetry was characterized as a lucid veil concealing at least as much as it reveals, and finally as a "kaleidoscope of presentational forms."

In his examination of these and other metaphors, Shaw groups critical, philosophical and poetic texts, reading them against each other, sometimes to trace influences, more often to suggest analogous approaches to questions of language, knowledge, and art. As the dominant metaphor of the study suggests, Shaw is most keenly interested in poetry's transcendent claims. He explores in Victorian poetics the aspiration toward spiritual truth that Tennyson even in his deepest doubt believed to be "behind the veil, behind the veil." Shaw declares at the outset a certain sympathy with an idealist tradition in Victorian aesthetics deeply influenced by Hegel and represented in its culmination by F. H. Bradley.

Like many of the poets he discusses, Shaw himself sees poetry as the most significant compensation for Bradley's sense of loss, his feeling that "the sensuous curtain is a deception and a cheat" (46). Shaw quotes Bradley's view of scientific explanation, atomic theory in particular, as a dance of "bloodless categories" that cannot "make that Whole which commands our devotion" (46). Shaw's effort is to show how Victorian poetics makes possible an understanding of poetry as a means of evoking some Bradleyan "Whole." This, it seems to me, is the crucial subtext of Shaw's analysis. Through analyzing Victorian poetics Shaw would argue that poetry and the criticism of poetry can "continue science or philosophy by other means. This is why poetry can illuminate the mysterious trouble spots of knowledge" (284).

Poetry, Shaw argues, is knowledge, and specifically it is a knowledge of transcendence. Having reflected initially on literature and science in Victorian Britain and having noted that scientists like John Tyndall, T. H. Huxley, and Karl Pearson recognized the fictional or poetic character of scientific language, Shaw argues at last for an "immanent teleology" which is good poetry but "bad science." Implicitly Shaw enrolls himself as a descendant of Matthew Arnold in defending the centrality of poetry to liberal education and to the spiritual needs of modern society. His search for transcendent meaning in poetry leads Shaw to argue further that "there can be no interpretation of physical nature, because physical objects are never an experience as such. They are always the mere objects of experience. In order to be an object of poetic knowledge, natural events must be viewed as the actions of some spirit or god immanent in nature" (283). For Shaw, then, both poetry and its criticism is a hermeneutic by definition theological.

In this definition of poetry and its critical interpretation Shaw defies even while recognizing the dramatically skeptical bent of much contemporary criticism. The skeptical positionings of post-structuralism enter almost exclusively in Shaw's treatment of Victorian agnosticism, particularly in his discussion of Pater's "deconstructed Platonism."

The Lucid Veil, then, has more in common with the history of ideas and with theological hermeneutics than with post-structuralism or with overtly social or political criticism. Shaw finds his critical affinities in speech-act theory (poetry as a version of Austin's "performative"), rather than seeking for social, historical, and economic explanations of and corollaries to Victorian poetics. His focus, correspondingly, is on poems which deal explicitly with religious questions rather than with poetry that is more overtly political or topical. Shaw emphasizes poems by Robert Browning, Tennyson, Keble, Christina Rossetti rather than those by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (whose poems are not mentioned), Meredith, or the host of writers of popular and topical poetry in the period. While no one would wish a book that does so much to do everything, one could speculate on how a decline of mimetic metaphors for poetry relates to the triumph of mimesis in the high Victorian novel and to the creation of such blurred genres as the verse novel. Tracing these relationships would add a further dimension to Shaw's interesting discussion of "blurred genres." Trenchantly characterizing The Ring and the Book as a "newspaper epic" and the Idylls of the King as destroying to the "point of contradiction" its generic category, Shaw defines these poems as assaults on the unsayable, on indeterminacy itself. Looking beyond this blurring to the mimetic tradition in prose might help explain the radical inclusiveness as well as what Shaw calls the "unconsummated symbols" of modernist poems and their Victorian precursors.

Shaw is at his best in his discussion of Victorian agnosticism. He observes of Clough, for example, that he "keeps running away from what he seems to be running toward. He even tries to run away from his knowledge that he is running away" (141). Of Arnold as a religious thinker, Shaw is perhaps more critical. But he astutely sees in Arnold's struggle with language and with faith "the loneliness of the quester who seeks univocal discourse with God, or at least the grace of analogical understanding, but who is left in the end only with blank counters and extrinsic signs" (143). Shaw puts his finger on the difficulties of poems like "The Buried Life" and "Rugby Chapel," identifying their problems in Arnold's desire to "pass prematurely from metaphor to exegesis" (143). Arnold cannot achieve allegory, discover religious typology, or be content with "unconsummated symbols." Shaw sees Arnold as caught between the desire for an authoritative grounded language and a conviction that any such philosophical or theological ground may be an "ungrounded fiction."

Shaw's discussion of typology and of allegory also contributes significantly to our understanding of Victorian poetics. He reads together Coleridge's definitions of allegorical and tautegorical discourse with Ruskin's definition of the "Imagination Contemplative" and Tennyson's practice in the Idylls of the King. Shaw concludes that in the Idylls Tennyson uses allegory to subvert allegory, and he draws significant distinctions between Victorian and Renaissance allegories. This sort of subversion--the subversion of unconsummated, possibly even empty symbols--is also characteristic of the temporal and syntactical shifts in poetry by Robert Browning, Meredith, and Hopkins. The Imagination Contemplative yields incomplete allegory and it "recognizes that only the indigence of language makes ... presentational symbolism necessary" (179).

The inventiveness of such combinations, their fruitfulness for enriching our understanding of the complexities of Victorian poetics is the great virtue of Shaw's undertaking in this volume. The occasional problems of Shaw's method grow from these virtues. Shaw sometimes seems compelled to make arguments of influence rather than remaining content with analogies and comparisons. He persuasively argues that Robert Browning may have been influenced by Schleiermacher via Strauss's Life of Jesus; one feels it more difficult to show that Browning was influenced by Kantian ideas he may have encountered in Carlyle's Life of Schiller. More problematic is the occasional elision of argument by analogy into argument for influence. In discussing E. S. Dallas's Poetics (1852), for example, Shaw moves in a single paragraph from a discussion of Dallas and Hegel's Lectures on Aesthetics to the statement that "when he speaks of dramatic art as a religious, Romantic form, embodying hope and the impulse to worship, Dallas is thinking, not of Shakespeare or Greek drama, but of Browning's dramatic monologues and of lyrics of 'saving faith' written by intensely personal devotional poets like Christina Rossetti" (253). While this sort of statement does not imply that Dallas was thinking explicitly of Rossetti, it engenders a kind of chronological confusion. Rossetti's first publicly printed volume was not published until ten years after Dallas's Poetics, and Browning's most popular monologues appeared in Men and Women three years after Dallas's essay. This blurring of questions of influence, however, is merely the prelude to an interesting reading of two poems by Rossetti and of Browning's "A Death in the Desert." Shaw's readings of poems and his identification of connections between poetic and philosophical texts are the reader's rewards in The Lucid Veil. But even for the reader steeped in the period, Shaw's necessarily condensed discussions and his elaborate and multiple divisions of chapters may lead to intellectual vertigo. Such risks are, I suspect, unavoidable in any thorough treatment of so complex a subject.

Despite the complexities of its undertaking The Lucid Veil offers much to the patient reader, not least its discussion of Hegel's place in Victorian poetics and its treatment of relatively overlooked thinkers like H. L. Mansel and Benjamin Jowett. Though it has the scope of a book like Abram's The Mirror and the Lamp to which Shaw compares his work, The Lucid Veil is really more finely focused than encyclopedic. It has its own interest as an essay on the disappearance and persistence of God in Victorian poetics.

Mary Ellis Gibson

University of North

Carolina at Greensboro