Witcraft in 1801 and 1851, starring William Hazlitt and Marian Evans - she came to suspect him of ‘excès de raison’, and began to lose interest

The 1801 and 1851 chapters of Jonathan Rée’s Witcraft: The Invention of Philosophy in English are both built around writers I do not normally think of as philosophers, William Hazlitt in 1801 and Marian Evans in 1851.  Hazlitt, in 1801, is trying to become a painter, but his first book, The Principles of Human Action, will appear in 1805, read by almost no one except, eventually, John Keats.  Evans in 1851 was the author of one philosophical work, a translation of David Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1846 for the translation), with a translation of Feuerbach in the near future.  So, at this point, philosophers, and more importantly they were reading every important book and meeting a high proportion of the important people.  And their own stories are interesting.

Who else is in the 1801 chapter?  English philosophy has up to this point, and well past it, been hard to separate from religion, and many of the 1801 stars are dissident Protestant clergymen working on religious problems, usually some kind of idealized “rational” Christianity, with philosophical tools.  Hazlitt’s father, the Reverend William Hazlitt, is one of them, along with the genially oblivious Joseph Priestly, one of the great pedagogical hacks:

Liberal Education [which argued that education should be useful and for ordinary people] was published by Johnson in 1765, and Priestly became the mainstay of his business, supplying him with almost 100 works over the next thirty years, ranging from textbooks for use in schools, and elaborate chronological wall charts (a hugely successful innovation), to original works of natural science, politics and theology.  But whatever the topic, Priestly kept returning to [David] Hartley’s themes of necessity, association of ideas and progress toward perfection.  (219)

Yes, this is the same Priestly who discovered oxygen, invented carbonated water, and so on.  These are amazing people.  William Burke, Thomas Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft, Jeremy Bentham, Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

Coleridge introduces the era’s hot foreign craze, “’the most unintelligible Emanuel Kant’” (264, Coleridge’s words).  A number of translations of selections from Kant, along with attempts to explicate them, began to appear beginning in 1793.

Hazlitt would soon enough become one of the greatest English essayists and literary critics, but Witcraft skips all that.

The use of Marian Evans in the 1851 chapter is similar, except Rée cannot resist a joke.  The chapters are getting long – 88 pages for 1851 – and the name “George Eliot” does not appear until the last page.  I guess Rée assumes you know?  I mean, I knew.  Anyway, you do not need to know.  The novels, like Hazlitt’s essays, are all later.

In 1851, Evans for the first time published an essay, on history, progress, and religion, in the prestigious Westminster Review, and much of the chapter is about the functioning of the magazine, first as it was run by John Stuart Mill and then by others, including, for a couple of years, by George Eliot – sorry, Marian Evans, who was the “secret editor.”

Mill leads to Thomas Carlyle – “Mill was baffled too: ‘Carlylism’ was a ‘vice of style’, he said, and he ‘made little of it’” (290) – and Sartor Resartus leads to the continuing and expanding reception of Immanuel Kant, from the goldsmith Thomas Wirgman’s summary of Kant in a “map” (292, see left) to Thomas De Quincey’s frequent mockery of Kant and Kantians.  “De Quincey would never forgive the ‘disenchanter’ who infected him with cynicism when he was not yet twenty years old” (294).

Who else is here?  Tocqueville, Emerson – it is nice to read about writers who I have read myself – oh no, Herbert Spencer.  Evans, to use an anachronism, dated Spencer for a while, and it is a testament to her character that she became sick of him.  “After several more excursions, however… she came to suspect him of ‘excès de raison’, and began to lose interest” (357).

Tomorrow, William James and Ludwig Wittgenstein wrap up Witcraft.

In a much earlier (1987), much shorter book, Philosophical Tales: An Essay on Philosophy and Literature, Rée writes “It would perhaps be possible to present the history of thought as a succession of integral histories, of the stories which intellectuals have told about their place in history,” an “integral history” being what I call “Whig history,” the story of how everything leads up to right now this minute, with every side path dismissed as unimportant.  Rée’s method in Witcraft, the use of figures like Hazlitt and Evans and the arbitrary fifty-year frame, is that each chapter becomes to the extent possible its own “now,” the story, told again and again, of how the past’s philosophers were fools and lunatics but now we’re finally getting it right.  He’s been carrying this idea around for thirty years.

William Wordsworth is aptly admonished; Seamus Heaney approves; William Hazlitt does not; Dorothy Wordsworth quietly observes

Seamus Heaney’s recent article in The Hudson Review (“’Apt Admonishment’: Wordsworth As an Example”) is about the moment a poet encounters a muse. I do not believe I have ever met such a creature. He wanders through examples from Hesiod to Wordsworth to T. S. Eliot, ending with himself, and the moment he saw a photo of the Danish bog man and was inspired to write his best-known poem, “The Tollund Man.”

The Wordsworth example supplies the title of the piece – “Apt Admonishment.” The poet of “Resolution and Independence” (see yesterday’s post) has met an elderly leech gatherer, a garrulous fellow. Here’s the key moment of the poem:

The old man still stood talking at my side,
But now his voice to me was like a stream
Scarce heard, nor word from word could I divide;
And the whole body of the man did seem
Like one whom I had met with in a dream,
Or like a man from some far region sent
To give me human strength by apt admonishment.

This is strange stuff. The moment becomes dream-like; the old man’s words blend together and are “scarce heard”. Not a good listener, this Wordsworth. Then there’s the final simile: “like a man from some far region sent \ To give me human strength by apt admonishment”.

Oh, now I see, that’s what he’s like. No, I don’t see it. What is that sort of man like, from a far region sent? Sent by whom? Why? Yes, to aptly admonish Wordsworth, but why would anyone send a man to do such a thing? Why wouldn’t a local man do? In fact, a local man seems to have done the job all right. As Heaney says, the muse has appeared to Wordsworth.

William Hazlitt took every opportunity he had, and invented others, to make his single insightful point about William Wordsworth (an ex-friend), that Wordsworth was a poet of pure ego. The descriptions of nature, the peasants, were all a screen. “Resolution and Independence” shows what Hazlitt meant. The leech gatherer may exist in the actual world, but to the poet he’s not quite real. He’s an instrument for Wordsworth to explore himself.

Hazlitt thought he was making a devastating criticism. Today, we are more likely to say that the turn inward is the whole point of Wordsworth’s project, his great innovation. Still, compare William’s poem to my favorite line about this encounter from his sister Dorothy’s journal: “He said leeches were very scarce partly owing to this dry season, but many years they have been scarce.” And then add in the “godly books”, and the sailor son. A world opens up there, a world outside of Dorothy Wordsworth.

Maybe this is a hint as to why I mostly like Dorothy’s writing over her brother’s, excepting “Michael” and a few other poems. And I haven’t even brought up the daffodils – see Dorothy’s Wikipedia entry for the appalling results of that comparison.

Seamus Heaney’s piece is in the Spring 2008 Hudson Review (PDF).

Apologia for Appeciationism

We must be as precise as possible. Most novels and poems and essays are failures. Some are honest hackwork, some are the work of con artists, most are just the best the writer could do.

Of the remaining books, most have value in the context of their time, but will eventually be forgotten. Nobody reads Nabokov or Fulmerford anymore.

I don't spend much time with contemporary books. Most of my reading is amongst the tried and tested. The classics and the semi-classics. I like almost all of it. I appreciate the rest. My aversions* are few. On the one hand, it means I'm reading in the right places. On the other hand, it suggests a lack of independent judgment, an overdone respect for authority. What if I like everything because I am told I should? This is the side of Appreciationism that worries me.

The more positive side: some humility in the face of history is a virtue. I have trouble with Stendhal. He's puzzling, he's difficult. Is the intelligent response to dismiss him as worthless? What, am I a bored 12 year old? So I focus my attention, I read some people who are smarter than me (critics, scholars), I slow down a little. I still don't like Stendhal, but I've gotten a much better sense of what he does, and why writers and readers have found it valuable. I sent out a distress signal regarding Hawthorne last year - just writing the post actually seemed to help in that case, helped me read more carefully.

"Like" - there's part of the problem. I like a book, I don't like it. Who cares? As an Appreciationist, even I don't care. My curiosity about the variety and history of creativity is what I cultivate now, and I'm not sure that knowing what a book is and how it works doesn't sometimes provide almost as much pleasure as its actual contents.

Appreciationism has a long history in English criticism. William Hazlitt is my model. One of his best essays is called "On the Pleasures of Hating," but open the Lectures on the English Poets (1818), or the Lectures on the English Comic Writers (1819, the man gave a lot of lectures) and see what he actually does. He describes a play, for example, reads a passage, and then says he thinks this line or that line is especially good, this character or that is especially well drawn. He points, and says "Look, isn't that good." This is not deep stuff.

Charles Lamb is not so different. Neither is John Dryden. Neither is Dr. Johnson, Our Greatest Critic, a lot of the time - throughout The Lives of the Poets for example (the Preface to Shakespeare is more complicated). The criticism of Coleridge may be Appreciationist, or not. I don't understand a word of it. To push the tour of English criticism forward a little, Matthew Arnold and T. S. Eliot are definitely not Appreciationists. They don't just want to Understand, but to Interpret. I have enough trouble understanding.

Anyway, when a litblogger does nothing more than post a poem, or a passage from a novel, it's an act of Appreciationist criticism - not deep, but criticism none the less, like Hazlitt. "Look at this. Isn't this something?"**

Thus ends Egomania Week at Wuthering Expectations. Next week, some actual books.


* I love this word, common in Restoration comedies. "You mean to say you don't admire Sir Fopling Foppington?" "Fy, fy, he is my aversion."

** Here's a recent mention of appreciation, by a Spanish professor at the University of Kansas, which I may have entirely failed to understand, and which seems to identify it with "prescribing an attitude of silent awe." My impression is that Appreciationists are a noisy and enthusiastic bunch. Remember, we like everything! We'll talk your dang ear off. Silent awe!