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.

We should gloat over a book - De Quincey and Stevenson make criticism personal

Thomas De Quincey, insists Pykk.  All right, all right.  “On the Knocking at the Gate in Macbeth” (1823), less than two thousand words.  Here are the first 6%:

From my boyish days I had always felt a great perplexity on one point in Macbeth.  It was this: the knocking at the gate, which succeeds to the murder of Duncan, produced to my feelings an effect for which I never could account.  The effect was, that it reflected back upon the murder a peculiar awfulness and a depth of solemnity; yet, however obstinately I endeavored with my understanding to comprehend this, for many years I never could see why it should produce such an effect.

To crush De Quincey’s masterpiece, what he is doing is trying to pin down a particularly sublime moment at the end of Act II, Scene 3, sublime in the Burkean sense, the aestheticized fear caused by “Sound and Loudness” and “Suddenness,” the titles of Sections XVII and XVIII of A Philosophical Inquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757), although De Quincey, by making a devious argument about readerly sympathy actually inverts Burke.

We are almost tricked by the immediacy of fiction into sympathy with the now-murderous Macbeths, aided by the difficulties they are having in being evil, and thus experience the sudden, inexplicable knocking at the gate as fearfully sublime with the “transfigured” Macbeths, while at the same time the knocking is a sublime relief to us in our more ordinary human capacity as non-murderers, a merciful restoration: “the human has made its reflux upon the fiendish; the pulses of life are beginning to beat again; and the re-establishment of the goings-on of the world in which we live, first makes us profoundly sensible of the awful parenthesis that had suspended them.”

Well, I don’t think my mangling of this little masterpiece was too severe.  But I have skipped the point, and the long paragraph about how De Quincey made the above argument.

… my understanding could furnish no reason why the knocking at the gate in Macbeth should produce any effect, direct or reflected.  In fact, my understanding said positively that it could not produce any effect.  But I knew better; I felt that it did; and I waited and clung to the problem until further knowledge should enable me to solve it.

“[I]t is a dream-mystery, and a dream needs someone to dream it,” writes Pykk.  Now that his essay exists as a text, I can treat it as an object composed of an argument and supporting evidence.  But the essay’s insight comes from somewhere else.

De Quincey’s essay is a little too visionary to be a good example for me.  I will close this little series, then with Robert Louis Stevenson’s “A Gossip on Romance” (1882), which begins:

In anything fit to be called by the name of reading, the process itself should be absorbing and voluptuous; we should gloat over a book, be rapt clean out of ourselves, and rise from the perusal, our mind filled with the busiest, kaleidoscopic dance of images, incapable of sleep or of continuous thought.  The words, if the book be eloquent, should run thenceforward in our ears like the noise of breakers, and the story, if it be a story, repeat itself in a thousand coloured pictures to the eye.  It was for this last pleasure that we read so closely, and loved our books so dearly, in the bright, troubled period of boyhood.

What could be more personal?  Reading, says Stevenson, is a continual attempt to recapture a childhood love.  Of course modern readers, amateur critics, and bloggers writing their personal reactions and nothing but, nosirree, want to share that love whenever they are lucky enough to find it again.  Of course they want to gloat.

Thomas De Quincey's permanent ephemera - reading 150 year old magazine articles

Wuthering Expectations seem to have been wandering away from the 19th century a bit. It's because of the upcoming* trip to Japan. I'm all kerfoozled.

Or maybe it's what I'm reading, Thomas De Quincey's bizarre, baffling Suspiria de Profundis (1845) and The English Mail-Coach (1849), nominally two sequels to his most famous work, Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (1822).

Note the dates - the sequels, such as they are, arrive more than twenty years after the original piece. During that time, De Quincey's prose, plenty odd to begin with, has become more tangled, more obscure, more strange. Childhood memoir - the death of De Qunicey's young sister from "premature expansion of the intellect" (encephalitis), or school tales about composing Latin poetry - alternate with visionary episodes describing "The Apparition of the Brocken" or the destuction by earthquake of the Jamaican town Savannah-la-Mar, Poe's "City in the Sea" in prose.

This all ties in somehow to the visions De Qunicey has under the influence of opium. The "Dream-Fugue" that ends The English Mail-Coach may or may not pull it all together.

The Confessions is a foundational work, cemented in place by Charles Baudelaire, of Decadent literature, not a place I normally spend much time. With this later writing, De Quincey is pushing into the Visionary category, beyond reason, perhaps beyond interpretation.

The oddest thing, in a way, is that these pieces, as well as Confessions, as well as basically anything by De Quincey that anyone still reads, are magazine articles. When you received your March 1845 issue of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine in the post, you would open it to find Part I of Suspiria de Profundis right up front. You can follow that with a reviews of Stephens' Book of the Farm and Lord Malmesbury's Diaries and Correspondence, an essay on "British History in the Eighteenth Century," and, you've been waiting breathlessly, I know, Part II of "German-American Romances".

It's all anonymous, except for a mediocre poem attributed to "J.D."

Most of William Hazlitt's best essays, Charles Lamb's great Elias essays, almost everything Poe wrote, healthy chunks of Emerson, Hawthorne, Carlyle, are all magazine writing, something I usually think of as ephemera. Another idea to rethink.

This might be a good place to point to praymont's attempts to improve his prose through perusal of Carlyle, Lamb, and Hazlitt. I predict success with the Hazlitt more than the others, but would love to be proven wrong. What would a contemporary Carlyle sound like? So best of luck.

* Upcoming = tomorrow.