Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois (Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures)

With the end of the Cold War and the burgeoning of a global culture, the assumptions upon which Area Studies were based ...

Author: Daniel G. Williams

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With the end of the Cold War and the burgeoning of a global culture, the assumptions upon which Area Studies were based are being eroded. Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures promotes the study of American literatures beyond national perimeters. How are place-based identities transformed by a wider Atlantic world? To what extent has the literature of the American hemisphere always and inevitably been in dialogue with that of Europe? What forms of expression do national identity and cultural nationalism take in a transnational environment? What are the conceptual models for critical discussion of literatures in transnational contexts? e series explores the theoretical implications of comparing transatlantic literary cultures and publishes important studies of transatlantic exchange in practice. ‘In this imaginatively conceived book, Daniel Williams manages to address several of the most central and most contentious areas of contemporary literary and cultural study.’ Professor Stefan Collini, Cambridge ‘

is book breaks new theoretical ground in re-investigating four crucial figures: Arnold, Howells, Yeats, Du Bois. is unusual line-up opens up comparative material and ethnic and minoritarian perspectives, to which Williams brings an impressive theoretical sophistication.’ Professor Werner Sollors, Harvard

E D I N B U RG H S T U D I E S I N T R A N S AT L A N T I C L I T E R AT U R E S Series Editors: S

M

A

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Williams.indd 1

From Arnold to Du Bois

He was evoking ‘culture’ as a solution to the divisions within society – thereby adopting, in a very di erent context, an idea that had been influentially expressed by Matthew Arnold in the 860s. Du Bois questioned the assumed universality of this concept by asking who, ultimately, is allowed into the ‘kingdom of culture’. How does one come to speak from a position of cultural authority? is book adopts a transatlantic approach to explore these questions. It centres on four Victorian ‘men of letters’ – Matthew Arnold, William Dean Howells, W. B. Yeats and W. E. B. Du Bois – who drew on notions of ethnicity as a basis from which to assert their cultural authority. In comparative close readings of these figures, Daniel Williams addresses several key areas of contemporary literary and cultural debate. e book questions the notion of ‘the West’ as it appears and re-appears in the formulations of postcolonial theory, challenges the widespread tendency to divide nationalism into ‘civic’ and ‘ethnic’ forms, and forces its readers to reconsider what they mean when they talk about ‘culture’, ‘identity’ and ‘national literature’.

ETHNICITY AND CULTURAL AUTHORITY From Arnold to Du Bois

Edinburgh

Jacket images: Matthew Arnold, carte-de-visite by Elliott & Fry – reproduced with permission of the National Portrait Gallery, London. W. E. B. Du Bois (MS32-3 0) – reproduced with permission of Special Collections and Archives, W. E. B. Du Bois Library, University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Jacket design: Barrie Tullett

Ethnicity and Cultural Authority

Writing in  03, W. E. B. Du Bois suggested that the goal for the African-American was ‘to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture’.

0 7486 2205 5 Edinburgh University Press 22 George Square Edinburgh EH8 LF www.eup.ed.ac.uk

Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor

Daniel G. Williams

Daniel G. Williams

Susan Manning is Grierson Professor of English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Andrew Taylor is a Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh.

Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois

Edinburgh Studies in Transatlantic Literatures Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor

Daniel G. Williams

Daniel G. Williams is a Lecturer in English and Assistant Director of CREW (Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales) at the University of Wales, Swansea. He is the editor of a collection of Raymond Williams’s writings, Who Speaks for Wales? Nation, Culture and Identity (2003) and Beyond the Di erence: Welsh Literature in Comparative Contexts (2004).

2/10/05 19:15:59


EDINBURGH STUDIES IN TRANSATLANTIC LITERATURES Series Editors: Susan Manning and Andrew Taylor Titles in the series include: Transatlantic Literary Studies: A Reader Edited by Susan Manning Henry James, Oscar Wilde and Aesthetic Culture Michèle Mendelssohn Ethnicity and Cultural Authority: From Arnold to Du Bois Daniel G. Williams

Ethnicity and Cultural Authority From Arnold to Du Bois

◆ ◆ ◆

Daniel G. Williams

EDINBURGH UNIVERSITY PRESS

I Sioned – am ei chwmni, ei chefnogaeth, a’i chariad

© Daniel G. Williams, 2006 Edinburgh University Press Ltd 22 George Square, Edinburgh Typeset in 11/13 Adobe Sabon by Servis Filmsetting Ltd, Manchester and printed and bound in Great Britain by The Cromwell Press, Trowbridge, Wilts A CIP record for this book is available from the British Library ISBN 0 7486 2205 5 (hardback) The right of Daniel G. Williams to be identified as author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements Introduction: Culture, Ethnicity, Authority 1. Matthew Arnold: Culture and Ethnicity Culture: from Class to Ethnicity Celticism and Contributionism Culture, Class and Ethnicity in America Conclusion

vii 1

33 35 42 52 65

2. William Dean Howells: Realism, Ethnicity and the Nation Howells, Arnold and (Welsh-) American Culture Realism and the Nation Realism and Language Realism and Race Conclusion

72 76 88 95 103 114

3. W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism Constructing the Celt Celticism in Context The Celt in Ireland The Celt in London Conclusion

121 126 133 139 152 169

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4. W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Folk in the Kingdom of Culture 176 Washington, Howells and Du Bois 180 The Gift of Black Folk 189 Conserving Races 198 In the Kingdom of Culture? 207 Conclusion 216 Conclusion Bibliography Index

224 229 256

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Perhaps a first monograph incurs an even wider range of scholarly, practical and personal debts than is usual. It would be virtually impossible to list them all here. The editorial team at Edinburgh University Press was helpful and patient throughout the preparation process. Many academic debts of a general nature are covered in the footnotes, with some specific acknowledgements also recorded there. Certain general patterns do emerge in attempting to trace how I came to write this book, but I’m profoundly aware of the inevitable omissions involved. Early attempts at comparing literatures were encouraged by Eric Homberger at the University of East Anglia and the inspirational John Conron at Clark University, Worcester, Massachusetts. The approach adopted in this book probably began to take shape as I tacked back and forth between the departments of African-American Studies and Celtic Languages and Literatures during two years as a Frank Knox Fellow at Harvard University. My thanks go to Henry Louis Gates Jr for taking me on as a ‘special student’ in African-American Studies, to Patrick K. Ford for allowing and encouraging me to pursue my own interests, and to Tomás Ó Cathsaigh for putting me right on a number of misapprehensions about Ireland. Helen Vendler’s generous advice – in Harvard and beyond – is always greatly appreciated, as is the interest and encouragement of Marc Shell and Werner Sollors. At the other Cambridge (where I was the grateful recipient of an a.h.r.b. postgraduate award) I had the privilege of working for two terms under the guidance of the late Tony Tanner. Our discussions – ranging from William Dean Howells to Miles Dewey Davis – were

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enormously stimulating at the time, and are fondly remembered today. I will always be indebted to Tony Tanner for putting me in touch with Susan Manning whose own comparative studies of American and Scottish literatures have been an inspiration, and whose comments on my work, and support in getting it published, have been invaluable and greatly appreciated. My main academic debts are to Stefan Collini – my Ph.D. supervisor at Cambridge, and a valued friend ever since – and my colleague M. Wynn Thomas. I’m grateful to Stefan for his close, critical readings of my work, his willingness to draw my attention to (at least some) of my hackneyed formulations and unconvincing generalisations, and his warm friendship. His ability to apply his rigorous intelligence to the attacking formations of the Welsh XV, as well as to the role of the man of letters in Victorian Britain, has always been a valued bonus. Since leaving Cambridge I have had the good fortune to teach and lecture at the University of Wales, Swansea. All my colleagues in the English Department and my post-graduate students at crew (the Centre for Research into the English Literature and Language of Wales) have allowed me to feel at home while developing and cultivating interests that would seem disqualifyingly disparate elsewhere. Wynn Thomas, in particular, must feel that he knows my arguments as well as I do myself. Wynn has read and commented on much of this book, and our ongoing conversations on the literatures of Wales, nineteenth-century America, and much else are a continual source of stimulation. There are many friends who have contributed in myriad ways to the making of this book. They include Rhodri Davies, Adam Frost, Melinda Gray, Jeremy Hoffman, Macartan Humphreys, Jerry Hunter, Eric Jaffe, Mari Jones, Owen Martell, Tim Morris, Scott Newstrom, Patti Simmons, Sid Thomas, Dietlind Walkenhorst, the late Phil Williams, and Mike Wilson. I am also very grateful for the support of Philip and Eirwen Jones, my parents-in-law. The greatest debts of all are inevitably harder to quantify or express. I am profoundly indebted to my parents for their encouragement and (emotional and material) support. My father, Gareth, is the shrewdest and wittiest critic of my work. My mother, Mary, and brother, Tomos, have been unstinting in their unconditional love through both happy and difficult times. The best thing about writing this book was that I did so in the company of my wife, Sioned, and daughter, Lowri. Lowri is now two-and-a-half and our conversations are always joyous and uplifting sources of inspiration. This book

Acknowledgements

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could not have been written without Sioned. A journalist with an eye and ear for academic verbosity, she is in many ways my ideal reader. My indebtedness and love are registered in the dedication. Extracts from The Souls of Black Folk by W. E. B. Du Bois copyright © the Estate of W. E. B. Du Bois, 1903. Reproduced with the permission of Penguin Books Ltd and David Graham Du Bois. Daniel G. Williams Abertawe/Swansea December 2004

‘But I will not say that I shall profess to believe exactly as my fathers have believed. Our fathers themselves changed the horizon of their belief and learned of other races. But I think I can maintain my grandfather’s notion of separateness with communication.’ George Eliot, Daniel Deronda ‘We have at length to prove our worth to the whole world, not merely to admiring groups of our own people. We must justify our own existence. We must show, each in our own civilization, that which is universal in the heart of the unique.’ Rabindranath Tagore to W. E. B. Du Bois

Introduction: Culture, Ethnicity, Authority

In late June 1926, W. E. B. Du Bois took the podium at the annual gathering of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People in Chicago.1 In a convention dominated by speeches on political organisation and group mobility, Du Bois struck a slightly discordant note: ‘How is it that an organization like this, a group of radicals trying to bring new things into the world, a fighting organization which has come up out of the blood and dust of battle, struggling for the right of black men to be ordinary human beings – how is it that an organization of this kind can turn aside and talk about Art?’2 Du Bois’s message was that artistic achievement had a central role to play in the struggle for social equality and his words, published later that year as ‘The Criteria of Negro Art’, were to become one of the most influential cultural manifestos of what became known as the Harlem Renaissance. Having drawn a broad outline of his intended topic, Du Bois proceeded to evoke a visit to Scotland: In the high school where I studied we learned most of Scott’s ‘Lady of the Lake’ by heart. In after life once it was my privilege to see the lake. It was Sunday. It was quiet. You could glimpse the deer wandering in unbroken forests; you could hear the soft ripple of romance on the waters. Around me fell the cadence of that poetry of my youth. I fell asleep full of the enchantment of the Scottish border. A new day broke and with it came a sudden rush of excursionists. They poured upon the little pleasure boat, – men with their hats a little on one side and drooping cigars in the wet corners of their mouths; women who shared their conversation with the

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Ethnicity and Cultural Authority world. They all tried to get everywhere first. They pushed other people out of the way. They made all sorts of incoherent noises and gestures so that the quiet home folk and the visitors from other lands silently and half-wonderingly gave way before them. They struck a note not evil but wrong. They carried, perhaps, a sense of strength and accomplishment, but their hearts had no conception of the beauty which pervaded this holy place.3

He then turned to his primarily African-American audience, and asked: If you tonight suddenly should become full-fledged Americans; if your color faded, or the color line here in Chicago was miraculously forgotten; suppose, too, you became at the same time rich and powerful; – what is it that you would want? What would you immediately seek? Would you buy the most powerful of motor cars and outrace Cook County? Would you buy the most elaborate estate on the North Shore? Would you be a Rotarian or a Lion or a What-not of the very last degree? Would you wear the most striking clothes, give the richest dinners and buy the longest press notices? Even as you visualize such ideals you know in your hearts that these are not the things you really want. You realize this sooner than the average white American because, pushed aside as we have been in America, there has come to us not only a certain distaste for the tawdry and flamboyant but a vision of what the world could be if it were really a beautiful world; if we . . . lived in a world where men know, where men create, where they realize themselves and where they enjoy life. It is that sort of a world we want to create for ourselves and for all America.4

The mid-1920s had seen one of the periodic revivals of (Welsh-) American David Llewellyn Wark Griffith’s ground-breaking and virulently racist film, Birth of a Nation (1915), in which the heroic Ku Klux Klan gathers around a banner that reads ‘Scotland’. Thomas Dixon’s novel, The Clansman, on which Griffith’s film was based, also depicted white Southern resistance to Reconstruction as a manifestation of the Scotch-Irish spirit.5 In a striking reversal of the imagery of both film and novel, Du Bois made the African American, rather than the white American, a kindred spirit to the Scotsman. The African-American speaker is not only familiar with the writings of Walter Scott but is also at one with the landscape and with the ‘quiet home folk’ who are not visible until forcibly ‘pushed aside’ by the

Introduction

[3

American excursionists. A connection is made between AfricanAmerican and Scottish primitivism, with the emphasis on ‘romance’ and ‘enchantment’ striking the characteristic chords of Scott’s medievalism and the late nineteenth-century poets of the ‘Celtic twilight’. I begin with this passage as it is a striking, late manifestation of the characteristically Victorian tradition of cultural discourse that is my subject even though, in this case, dating from the 1920s. While my reference to Birth of a Nation suggests that Du Bois is, as always, responding to a pressing social context, his words embody a number of the key oppositions that typify the writings of the authors discussed in the course of this book: materialism (estates on ‘the North Shore’) v. primitivism (the ‘enchantment of the Scottish border’); industry (‘powerful motor cars’) v. nature (‘deer wandering in unbroken forests’); philistinism (‘the tawdry and flamboyant’) v. cultural appreciation (‘a conception of beauty’); the particular (‘full-fledged Americans’) v. the universal (a ‘vision of . . . the world’). One way of illustrating the Victorian resonances of Du Bois’s imagery and structure of argument is to compare his evocation of Scotland with Matthew Arnold’s evocation of Wales in the opening of his lectures, On the Study of Celtic Literature: The summer before last I spent some weeks at Llandudno, on the Welsh coast. The best lodging-houses at Llandudno look eastwards, towards Liverpool; and from that Saxon hive swarms are incessantly issuing, crossing the bay, and taking possession of the beach and the lodginghouses. Guarded by the Great and Little Orme’s Head, and alive with the Saxon invaders from Liverpool, the eastern bay is an attractive point of interest, and many visitors to Llandudno never contemplate anything else. But, putting aside the charm of the Liverpool steamboats, perhaps the view, on this side, a little dissatisfies one after a while; the horizon wants mystery, the sea wants beauty, the coast wants verdure, and has a too bare austereness and aridity. At last one turns round and looks westward. Everything is changed. Over the mouth of the Conway and its sands is the eternal softness and mild light of the west; the low line of the mystic Anglesey, and the precipitous Penmaenmawr, and the great group of Carnedd Llewelyn and Carnedd David and their brethren fading away, hill behind hill, in an aerial haze, make the horizon; between the foot of Penmaenmawr and the bending coast of Anglesey, that sea, a silver stream, disappears one knows not whither. On this side, Wales, – Wales, where the past still lives, where every place has its tradition, every name its poetry, and where the people, the genuine people, still knows this past,

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Ethnicity and Cultural Authority this tradition, this poetry, and lives with it, and clings to it; while, alas, the prosperous Saxon on the other side, the invader from Liverpool and Birkenhead has long ago forgotten his.6

The ‘rich and powerful’ Americans who encroach upon Du Bois’s Scottish idyll by pushing ‘other people out of the way,’ are mirrored by the ‘prosperous’ Saxon ‘invaders’ who take ‘possession of the beach’ in Arnold’s description. The view towards Saxon Liverpool ‘wants beauty . . . wants verdure’; it is defined by what it lacks.7 Du Bois’s Americans, similarly, are characterised by having ‘no conception of . . . beauty’. This is significant, for what the dominant groups lack can be supplied by the primitive peoples who are being ‘pushed aside’ and ‘invaded’; the Welsh are able to supply a knowledge of the past and its poetry, while the African Americans retain a ‘vision of what the world could be if it were a really beautiful world’. The Celts and African Americans, it seems, offer sources of cultural revitalisation for a materialist and philistine society. As well as sharing similar imagery and a similar structure of argument, both passages also share a characteristic tone or ‘voice’. Despite being located within the landscapes being evoked – ‘at Llandudno’ and on ‘the Scottish border’ – both speakers seem to be at some distance from the scenes and people depicted. The ‘disinterested’ tone of the cultural critic espoused by Matthew Arnold is reflected in the fact that, while he perceives the Welsh to be appealingly primitive ‘others’, he also distances himself from the Saxons who, unlike the cultured speaker, limit their blinkered view to the ‘eastern bay’ and ‘never contemplate anything else’.8 Similarly, Du Bois belongs neither to the American excursionists nor to the ‘other people’, and proceeds to address his audience with a distancing ‘you’. A significant shift occurs in the second sentence of the third paragraph, however, where the ‘you’ turns into a collective ‘us’ as Du Bois includes himself among those who have been ‘pushed aside’ in America. The voice of the cultural critic is transformed from being ethereal, above society, to being embedded within it; disinterestedness is replaced by commitment as the critic shifts from speaking from nowhere to speaking from somewhere. Contemporary discussions on the role of the social critic tend to emphasise, and generally to celebrate, the critic’s role as an ‘alienated intellectual’, an ‘outsider’, or an ‘exile’.9 The (strikingly Arnoldian) assumption is that marginality provides a stimulus to insight, that a sense of exclusion encourages an analytical detachment, that a sense

Introduction

[5

of geographical or metaphorical ‘exile’ allows the critic to address and challenge ‘the constituted and authorized power of one’s own society’.10 Stefan Collini has noted a ‘tendency to self-dramatisation among social critics whereby they represent themselves as “marginal” or, more bitterly but also self-importatly, as “excluded”’, and argues, following Michael Walzer, that it ‘may be helpful to begin by insisting that it is degrees of “insiderness” that we really need to capture in order to characterize the social critic’s role’.11 The question of position, of insiderness and ousiderness, is central to this study’s emphasis on cultural authority. Throughout the individual studies that constitute this book my aim is to explore the ways in which the authors’ textual constructions of ethnicity form a basis from which to speak ‘to’ or ‘for’ a specific group or constituency. In Du Bois’s ‘Criteria of Negro Art’ the voice of the Arnoldian critic – who seems to speak from an universalist position of disinterestedness – gives way to the committed activist; the critic shifts from speaking to his audience to speaking for his people. My intention in comparing these passages by Arnold and Du Bois is to sketch out very broadly some of the key themes of the discussion that follows. Ethnicity and Cultural Authority from Arnold to Du Bois aims to reconsider the relationship between culture and society (as influentially mapped out by Raymond Williams in the 1950s) in the light of contemporary debates on nationalism and ethnicity. I follow Benedict Anderson’s suggestion that it is ‘impossible to think about nationalism except comparatively’, and I discuss the critical and creative writings of Matthew Arnold (1822–88), William Dean Howells (1837–1920), W. B. Yeats (1865–1939) and W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) in the belief that they exhibit particularly fruitful forms of literary engagement with the keywords of this study; culture, ethnicity and authority.12 While the late Victorian era saw the increasing presence of women writers and readers, the role of the social critic was constructed as, in Carol T. Christ’s words, ‘a strenuously masculine realm’.13 Indeed, each of the figures discussed in this study thought of himself, and positioned himself, as the leading ‘man of letters’ of his respective tradition. I am less concerned with the gendered elements of their writings, however, than with the ways in which they engage in a symbolic process of creating, revising and reinforcing the ethnic distinctions existing within their societies. Dominant ideas of ethnicity emerge from a constant process of cultural struggle; they are continually challenged by residual or defeated constructions and threatened by the emergence of identities that may

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flourish in the future. The works of Arnold, Howells, Yeats and Du Bois embody these contradictions in intriguing ways. Drawing primarily on textual evidence, my goal is to isolate and analyse the various forms taken by, and uses made of, ethnic identification as manifested in the cultural criticism and creative writings of these figures. The conceptions of ‘culture’ and ‘nationhood’ that emerged during the period between 1865 and 1910 are interesting in their own right but they also continue to influence the political and cultural debates of our present time. I discuss a few texts that fall outside these parameters but these dates should give a fair indication of my interests. Late nineteenth-century debates on culture and national identity are preceded by a long and complex history that lies beyond the scope of this present study.14 The 1860s, however, saw the formation of a dominant and highly influential conception of ‘culture’ in the writings of Matthew Arnold, and my analysis is partly an enquiry into how that Arnoldian idea is adopted and revised by writers located in different national and ethnic contexts. This range of contexts is reflected in the range of literary forms in which my four figures expressed their ideas on culture and identity. Arnold writes within the context of an established British state but feels that its stability is being threatened by emergent national and class interests. His goal in the cultural and political essays that are the subject of Chapter 1 is to encourage the creation of a common national culture that reflects and reinforces the political unity of the British state. William Dean Howells also writes within the context of an established political state but feels that the American nation, as defined politically in its Constitution, is yet to declare its cultural independence from England. Howells argues that literary realism is the appropriate form in which Americans should declare their literary independence, and Chapter 2 explores the development of these ideas in Howells’s celebrated critical essays and their practical manifestations in his novels. The early Yeats, like Arnold, writes within the context of the British political state – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – but identifies with an Irish cultural nationalist movement within it. Rather than seeking, like Howells, to construct a cultural identity within a political state that is already in existence, Yeats argues that political independence can follow only from the creation of an already distinctive national culture. Chapter 3 discusses the development of these ideas in Yeats’s critical essays and explores the strategies employed in the symbolic construction of distinctive Irish and Celtic identities in the poetry and

Introduction

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prose of the 1890s and early 1900s. W. E. B. Du Bois writes within the context of an American nation whose core principles of individual autonomy, equal rights and equal opportunity have been flouted with regard to his own people. Chapter 4 considers the range of positions adopted by Du Bois in the polemical, creative and sociological writings of the 1890s and 1900s, as he attempted to formulate a cultural nationalist position that did not have independent political statehood as its goal but rather a full and equal incorporation of African Americans within the American nation state. A series of chapters that range widely in this way will inevitably tell some readers what they already know but I hope that the different contexts occupied by my four subjects allow the argument to be advanced and developed, rather than merely restated, as the discussion proceeds. My primary aim is not to disclose influence nor explore cases of intertexuality but is, rather, to explore suggestive correspondences and to identify crucial differences. I begin by attempting to define the key words that form the foundations on which the following analysis is built: culture, ethnicity and authority. CULTURE

In juxtaposing a world of steamboats, lodging-houses, powerful motor cars and elaborate estates against a world of tradition, poetry, romance and creativity, my opening quotations by Arnold and Du Bois embody very clearly the division between ‘society’ and ‘culture’ famously analysed by Raymond Williams. In Culture and Society (1958), Williams attempted to construct a tradition of – primarily English – thinkers who had addressed and meditated upon the relationship between cultural and social change. The book developed from the ‘discovery that the concept of culture, in its modern senses, came through at the time of the Industrial Revolution’.15 Williams’s argument is based on his assertion that that the idea of ‘culture’ developed as an imaginative reaction to a (rather ill-defined) process of industrialisation. The nineteenth-century critics of industrialism adopted the term ‘culture’ to denote a sense of how the spiritual life of the mind could be set in opposition to a declining social order. The more the actual social reality of industrial capitalism was seen to be debased and exploitative, the more the idea of ‘culture’ developed as a term of critique. Thus, as Williams notes, a ‘word which had indicated a process of training within a more assured society became in the nineteenth century the focus of a deeply significant response to a

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society in the throes of radical and painful change’.16 ‘Culture’ in the new industrial landscape came to mean first, the recognition of the practical separation of certain moral and intellectual activities from the driven impetus of a new kind of society; second, the emphasis of these activities as a court of human appeal, to be set over the process of practical social judgement and yet to offer itself as a mitigating and rallying alternative.17

Several critics have sought to offer more nuanced and complex readings of Victorian culture since this account, noting how Williams had recruited a ‘wide range of writers and critics . . . to speak of “culture” leaving only a few implausibly strict political economists to serve as representatives of the “society” side of the pairing’ and questioning the excessively functionalist, compensatory terms of his analysis.18 Nevertheless, as Donald Winch notes, ‘that a schism came into existence’ in the nineteenth century ‘cannot be denied’.19 While I offer several amendments to Williams’s thesis as my discussion proceeds, I adopt his idea of culture as a site of contestation and as a space where alternatives are articulated. Whereas my focus is on four central ‘men of letters’, rather than on the plethora of characters discussed by Williams, I nevertheless follow the model of Culture and Society in presenting the argument ‘not as a study of isolated thinkers’ but in terms of ‘the interconnections between them’, and I begin my discussion with the ‘pivotal figure’ of Williams’s history, Matthew Arnold.20 I depart from Williams primarily in adopting a comparative, transatlantic, approach and in reconsidering the relationship between culture and society in the light of contemporary debates on nationalism and ethnicity. The relationship between the cultural critics of the New Left and the development of American Studies on both sides of the Atlantic is itself a significant chapter in transatlantic relations, whether in the American reception of Richard Hoggart’s and Raymond Williams’s writings, or the reciprocal influence of Leo Marx’s Machine in the Garden on British cultural studies.21 The key histories of Gilded Age America, which have formed a basis for my analyses in this book, are clearly indebted to Williams’s work, whether in the form of Alan Trachtenberg’s The Incorporation of America, with its significant subtitle, ‘Culture and Society in the Gilded Age’, or T. Jackson Lears’s exploration of American responses to industrialisation in No Place of Grace. More recently, Eric Lott adapts Williams’s ideas in discussing ‘structures of racial feeling’ in

Introduction

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nineteenth-century America, while José David Saldívar makes use of Williams’s insights as ‘an ethnic Welsh borderlands novelist’ in his analysis of Chicano literature.22 The latter appropriations are interesting in that Williams is often criticised, even by sympathetic critics, for being ‘constitutively blind to the politics of race and gender, and the dynamics of imperialism.’23 In Politics and Letters Williams’s New Left Review interlocutors regretted the ‘silence’ in Culture and Society ‘on the theme and problem of the nation as such’ and observed that while ‘from your boyhood onwards, it is clear that you were always intensely aware of the nature of British imperial hegemony and oppression abroad, and the emergent colonial struggles against it . . . there is no echo of them in the book’.24 Williams agreed that this was a major omission and traced it to his own blindness in the 1950s to the significance of his own Welsh experience.25 This book attempts to place questions of nationhood and ethnicity at the heart of its discussion of culture and society, a project initiated by several other critics, perhaps most significantly Edward Said who registered his ‘considerable sympathy’ for Williams’s ‘genealogical discourse’ while regretting that ‘Culture and Society does not deal with the imperial experience at all’.26 Like Williams, and Matthew Arnold before him, Said – who invokes both figures in his resonantly titled Culture and Imperialism – is primarily interested in the ways in which his chosen subject manifests itself in canonical literature and cultural criticism. This approach has been widely criticised in recent years for leading to a focus on colonial discourse while discarding the historical conditions that such a discourse was designed to describe and control, for being based on a crude binary distinction between ‘East’ and ‘West’, and for being wholly concerned with the discursive imposition of colonial power without offering any evidence of resistance to it.27 These limitations have been widely addressed in recent writings in post-colonial studies where the problems involved in locating, representing and analysing the words of the colonised groups themselves have become an increasingly significant topic of debate and discussion.28 If post-colonial critics have become increasingly aware of the dangers of homogenising ‘the East’, they are less inclined to problematise their ideas of ‘the West’.29 The problems that arise from totalising ‘the West’ as the homogeneous hegemonic centre of power can be illustrated in Said’s discussions of Ireland in Culture and Imperialism. ‘What are some of the non-Middle Eastern materials drawn on here?’ asks Said in his introduction:

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European writing on Africa, India, parts of the Far East, Australia, and the Caribbean; these Africanist and Indianist discourses, as some of them have been called, I see as part of the general European effort to rule distant lands and peoples and, therefore, as related to Orientalist descriptions of the Islamic world, as well as to Europe’s special ways of representing the Caribbean islands, Ireland and the Far East.30

How can it be possible for Said to analyse ‘Europe’s special ways’ of ‘representing . . . Ireland’, or, later, for him to describe the movements of ‘armed resistance in places as diverse as nineteenth century Algeria, Ireland, and Indonesia’ as examples of ‘the great movement of decolonization’ that swept ‘across the Third World’?31 It seems that to place Ireland in Europe, and to see the Irish nationalist struggle as part of similar minority nationalist struggles in Europe, would disrupt the binary distinction of East versus West on which Said bases his discussions of literature and culture. If Raymond Williams’s increasing awareness of cultural developments within what Michael Hechter suggestively, if problematically, termed the ‘internal colonies’ of Britain led him to regret the omission of the national question in his analysis of Culture and Society, then a more complex engagement with the political and cultural location of Britain’s ‘Celtic’ nations may also have forced Said to move beyond the simplistic opposition of West and East, coloniser and colonised, on which many of his analyses are based. A similar critique – exposing the ways in which one half of a comparison is left relatively unproblematised – can also be mounted against some contemporary proponents of transatlantic studies. In Paul Giles’s writings (to which I am in many ways indebted) the commonplace conflation of Britain and England wouldn’t be worthy of comment except for the fact that one of the central purposes of his project is to move out of ‘self-enclosed, exceptionalist’ circles where ‘identities are valorized only with reference to themselves’.32 The subtitle of Giles’s Transatlantic Insurrections: British Culture and the Formation of American Literature 1730–1860 is significant for, while the American side of the equation is consistently problematised and pluralised, Britishness (which was also undergoing a process of ‘formation’ during the years of his study) is generally equated with Englishness throughout. Similarly, in Virtual Americas, Giles responds as follows to what he describes as Werner Sollors’s ‘linkage of the modern age of transnationalism with a re-examination of American literature and history in the light of multilingualism’:

Introduction

[ 11

Without at all seeking to deny the usefulness of these conceptual approaches to transnationalism, I prefer to resist the assumption sometimes made concomitantly, that the cultures of Britain and the United States should be symbiotically conflated into one hegemonic discourse which languages from other parts of the globe strive to decenter. This seems too simplistic; over the course of the past two hundred years the literatures of England and the United States have enjoyed mutually antagonistic as well as a mutually constitutive relationship, and to raise the specter of a transatlantic imaginary is to problematise the parameters of each national constituency.33

Again, the conflation of ‘Britain’ in the first sentence with ‘England’ in the second suggests that ‘the parameters of national constituencies’ have not been sufficiently problematised in this analysis. What is more significant, however, is that Giles reintroduces a model of centre and margin that a multilingual approach to American literature is surely intended to challenge. Kenneth Nilsen’s work on Irish Gaelic American texts, Melinda Gray’s analyses of American-published Welsh translations of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, and Jerry Hunter’s discussions of Welsh-language combatants’ responses to the American Civil War suggest that we need not necessarily travel to ‘other parts of the globe’ to encounter languages other than English. Those working on American multilingualism are not engaged in a process of decentring, but are attempting to redefine the centre itself.34 While my study is not intended as a contribution to multilingual approaches to America, it draws – especially in the chapter on Howells – on some of the insights that have emerged from that field, and seeks to problematise the cultural boundaries of national and ethnic constituencies on both sides of the Atlantic divide.35 The analysis that follows is, then, historical in approach and comparative in method. Werner Sollors who, along with Raymond Williams, is perhaps the main influence on this work, asks in his ‘Critique of Pure Pluralism’ whether ‘the very same categories on which previous exclusivism was based’ should ‘really be used as organizing concepts’ in the analysis of literature?36 Sollors considers the ‘ethnic group by group’ categorisation of American literature to be based on notions of biological descent that bring writers together who may have nothing in common with each other but the colour of their skin. He suggests that ‘an openly transethnic procedure’ may be the way ahead, a procedure that ‘can only be accomplished if the categorization of writers . . . as “members” of ethnic groups is understood to

12 ]


be a very partial, temporal and insufficient characterization at best’.37 The comparative, transatlantic, analysis that I develop in this book aims to look at the connections between literary traditions and within a single tradition of responding to cultural difference and, I hope, offers one means of substantiating the ‘transethnic approach’ advocated by Sollors. ETHNICITY

‘Ethnicity’ is a word of modern origin and was not part of the vocabulary of late Victorian Britain or America.38 I have chosen to use the term to describe the various communal, national and transnational identities that Arnold, Howells, Yeats and Du Bois adopted and developed in their writings for it allows me to avoid, and to analyse, the confusion and slippage between ‘race’ and ‘nation’ that characterised the thought of the period.39 Terry Eagleton has argued against the application of ‘ethnicity’ in Irish studies, and traces its use to the pernicious influence of a ‘radical American academia’ that describes ‘the much-vaunted “other”of Irishness in highly American terms, terms relevant to its own internal politics, with a touch of the very intellectual colonialism it is most at pains to disown’.40 I am not concerned with branding the ‘other’ as ‘ethnic’ in the following analysis, however, for I consider Howells’s Americanness and Arnold’s Englishness to be as much examples of ethnicity as Yeats’s Irishness and Du Bois’s African Americanness. I’ve adopted the term ‘ethnicity’ not to perpetuate a cultural colonialism but rather to question the assumptions of American exceptionalism. ‘Ethnicity’ is also useful in that it avoids the implicit link with a specific geographical territory signified by the terms ‘national identity’ or ‘nationality’. Rather than following the development of an idea, or tradition of thought, within a specific geographical area, a transatlantic approach necessitates a range of different formulations to account for varying degrees of attachment to an actual geographical place. In the chapter on Yeats, in particular, the use of ‘ethnicity’ allows me to pay attention to the processes of exile and migration that are often lacking in studies which limit themselves to a specific national culture. ‘Ethnicity’ in the following analysis, therefore, is used to denote a range of possible identities available to individuals and groups. The danger in using the term in this way is that several distinct forms of identification are potentially conflated, thus making it difficult to address the crucial differences between various kinds of com-

Introduction

[ 13

munal allegiances. It is, however, precisely such differences that I seek to explore and illuminate in the following discussion. In this respect I follow the suggestive writings of Stuart Hall for whom ethnicity is not a stable characteristic that can be ascribed to the actors in cultural debates, but is rather both the context and the subject of that debate: We still have a great deal of work to do to decouple ethnicity, as it functions in the dominant discourse, from its equivalence with nationalism, imperialism, racism and the state, which are the points of attachment around which distinctive British or, more accurately, English ethnicity has been constructed. . . . We are beginning to think about how to represent a non-coercive and a more diverse conception of ethnicity, to set against the embattled, hegemonic conception of ‘Englishness’ which . . . because it is hegemonic, does not really represent itself as ethnicity at all.41

My use of ‘ethnicity’ aims to substantiate this ‘more diverse conception’ of the term, and it is thus, as I noted above, no less a feature of national populations that claim an unmarked universality than of those minority groups that develop a particularistic form of identity and are therefore marked as ‘ethnic’.42 To decouple ethnicity from race is more problematic. These terms are generally separated on the grounds that the latter entails a biological concept of descent while the former denotes a non-biological, cultural form of identity. Such a distinction is difficult to maintain in practice, however, for, as we shall see in the case of Du Bois, a number of African-American intellectuals have struggled, if often unsuccessfully, to substantiate a non-biological concept of race, while a number of white ethnic groups in the United States rely on a sense of biological continuity as a basis for their sense of identity.43 Discourses of race tend, however, to be more rigidly binary than those of ethnicity for, while ethnicities may define themselves against a number of ethnic ‘others’, ‘blackness’ has been defined in relation to ‘whiteness’ in the modern period.44 Racial difference is understood as a binary relationship in a way that ethnic or national differences, which can be constructed as a global plurality of peoples or nations, are not. John Higham, however, regrets that theorists of American pluralism often exclude African Americans from their analyses, thus offering only a partial understanding of ethnic conflicts in the United States. I’m therefore inclined to follow Werner Sollors in thinking it ‘most helpful

14 ]


not to be confused by the heavily charged term “race” and to keep looking at race as one aspect of ethnicity’.45 In addressing a related problem, Walker Connor attempts to overcome the ‘terminological chaos’, that he believes characterises discussions of national and ethnic identities, by warning us against conflating the terms ‘ethnic’ and ‘national’: An ethnic group may be readily discerned by an anthropologist or other outside observer, but until the members are themselves aware of the group’s uniqueness, it is merely an ethnic group and not a nation. While an ethnic group may, therefore, be other-defined, the nation must be selfdefined.46

Such a formulation seems to beg as many questions as it answers. How many members of an ethnic group need to be ‘self-defining’ for it to become a potential nation? How does one address the sheer range of identifications within a single nation state? Are the Welsh and Scottish to be considered ethnic groups within the British context, or are they self-defined nations? Were the Irish an ethnic group in 1900 but a nation in 1922? Such questions are often answered by positing ‘ethnicity’ and ‘nationality’ as distinct chapters within a teleological narrative in which rather unsophisticated nativist forms of ethnic allegiance are seen to give way to more sophisticated forms of nationhood once national liberation has been accomplished. ‘Ethnicity’ is thus viewed as an unfortunate, but necessary, stage in an anti-colonial struggle for independent nationhood.47 Marjorie Howes usefully notes that: The problem with designating nationalism as an element in a sequential historical narrative is that it threatens to make critics too complacent about it at one stage, and unproductively impatient at its very existence at another stage when they think it has become outmoded.48

Howes offers a pertinent warning for, in the – often repetitive – analyses of nationalism offered by political theorists and historians in recent years, an atavistic, backward and reactionary cultural nationalism is contrasted with a healthy, civic, political nationalism. John Hutchinson has noted how even those theorists, who register the importance of authors, poets, historians and linguists in the task of nation building, continue to consider cultural nationalism to be a regressive force, ‘a product of intellectuals from backward societies,

Introduction

[ 15

who, when confronted by more scientifically advanced cultures, compensate for feelings of inferiority by retreating into history to claim descent from a once great civilisation’.49 The roots of this bias can be traced back to the influential and innovative 1940s’ writings of Hans Kohn whose thesis rested on a distinction between Western and Eastern nationalisms. The nationalism of ‘the West’ – England, France and the Netherlands – was original, institutional, liberal and healthy. The nationalism of the East – Germany, Central and Eastern Europe – was reactive, ethnic, racist and unhealthy.50 Writing contemporaneously with Kohn, Norbert Elias described this distinction in terms of a contrast between French ‘Zivilisation’ and German ‘Kultur’. The concept of a universal civilisation, argued Elias, appealed to the dominant classes within imperial states, such as France and Britain, while the German ‘concept of “Kultur” mirrors the self-consciousness of a nation which had constantly to seek out and constitute its boundaries anew, in a political as well as spiritual sense’.51 Kohn’s and Elias’s theses have cast a long shadow over theories of nationalism. The distinctions on which many analyses of nationalism are based can be broadly conveyed in a tabulated form as follows: Nationalism Institutional Civic Universal Western French Territorial ‘Zivilisation’

Cultural Ethnic Particular Eastern German Ancestral ‘Kultur’

My use of the term ‘ethnicity’ seeks to question the validity of analysing nationalism in terms of these binary distinctions.52 If a theoretical distinction can be made between ethnic and civic forms of nationalism, in practice these types will frequently overlap, and a given national culture will display ethnic as well as civic components in its forms of nationhood.53 Whether nations are created in the crucible of culture, or emerge through the evolution of their political institutions, it is my belief that all nationalisms are to some extent ‘cultural’ nationalisms; all nationalisms have, or seek to foster, an ‘ethnic’ dimension.

16 ]


The United Kingdom and the United States have generally been seen to engender variants of the French model of institutional, civic, nationhood. Peter Mandler has recently noted, for example, how historians in mid-Victorian England tended to make ‘the institutions – not the people – the hero of the English story’ while, in the case of the United States, Eric Hobsbawm argues that, for nineteenth-century Americans, the word ‘nation’ ‘implied national economy and its systematic fostering by the state’.54 John Breuilly has argued that the ‘ethnic conflicts associated with modern urban growth . . . remain largely separate’ from the American nation’s institutional development which has been the core component of American nationhood.55 I argue that the cultural dimension – those ‘ethnic conflicts’ dismissed by Breuilly just as they were ignored by mid-Victorian English historians (Mandler doesn’t consider Irish, Welsh or Scottish historians) – have played and continue to play a crucial role in the ways in which ‘Britain’ and ‘America’ have been constructed and imagined. This is a result of the fact that the ‘United’ Kingdom and ‘United’ States are not stable political or cultural entities. Indeed ‘Britain’, ‘America’, ‘United Kingdom’, ‘United States’ are themselves terms that are open to contention in the years between 1865 and 1910. Linda Colley argues that Great Britain ‘as it emerged in the years between the Act of Union and the accession of Queen Victoria . . . must be seen both as one relatively new nation and as three much older nations’, with a frequently changing and unstable relationship between the two.56 Whether the Welsh can be described as an ‘old nation’ is a question of considerable historical debate but there is little doubt that Henry VIII’s intention in unifying Wales and England in 1536 was to eradicate Welsh ‘sinister usages and customs’, and to make sure that no persons who ‘use the Welsh speech shall have or enjoy any manner of office or fees within this realm’.57 Political union entailed a cultural union, and this process was given further impetus by the union of the two crowns of England and Scotland in 1603, followed a century later by the Act of Union of 1707. Whereas Linda Colley refers to Britain as having been constructed of ‘three much older nations’, Ireland had also been brought firmly within the jurisdiction of the Tudor state under Henry VIII and, with the second Act of Union in 1800, a new constitutional entity – the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland – was eventually formed. According to Adrian Hastings, this placed Ireland ‘within Great Britain’ but the precise relationship between ‘Ireland’ and ‘Britain’ is a question of considerable historical, and semantic, ambiguity.58 What is certainly

Introduction

[ 17

true is that there was an emphasis on Britishness in the nineteenth century and this engendered different responses from the various inhabitants of the British Isles. The emphasis on Britishness was broadly welcomed by the Welsh who considered themselves to be the lineal descendants of the ancient Britons – a word that was still used to refer to the Welsh in the nineteenth century. They sought to take advantage of the British context to construct a highly respectable Welsh identity that could nevertheless be contrasted to Englishness.59 The Scots, similarly, welcomed Victorian Britishness for it offered a context within which they could hold on to their own identity while participating in, and benefiting from, the expansion of the Empire. Ireland is a more problematic case. Protestant Irishness could function similarly to Welshness or Scottishness during the period as a sub-identity within the Victorian Empire. For Roman Catholics, however, Irishness never became a sub-identity within a wider, essentially Protestant, Britishness for both spheres represented distinct, if not always mutually incompatible, realities.60 With respect to the English, Adrian Hastings is surely right to ‘suspect that . . . throughout this period “English” and “British” were hardly two identities; “British” was merely an additional name for a single identity’.61 Linda Colley notes similarly that the ‘English and the foreign are still all too inclined to refer to the Island of Great Britain as “England”’, but also draws our attention to the fact that ‘at no time have they ever customarily referred to an English empire. When it existed, as in retrospect, the empire has always been emphatically British.’62 Colley’s conclusion may be seen to derive from the boundaries of her study which ends with Victoria’s accession to the throne in 1837. By 1867, Matthew Arnold could celebrate the fact that ‘of the shrunken and diminished remains’ of the Celtic race, ‘all, with one insignificant exception, belongs to the English empire; we have Ireland, the Scotch Highlands, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall’.63 If the empire had ‘always been emphatically British’ before 1837, this was not the case by 1867. The political and institutional boundaries of ‘Britishness’ were not always easily distinguishable in the period under discussion, and Stefan Collini has suggested in an analysis of intellectual life in Victorian Britain that it is precisely ‘because it has been difficult to hold on to any steady definition of the nature and limits of the “political” entity that is in question, more broadly cultural images of national identity have assumed correspondingly greater importance’.64 It is the tension and conflict between different cultural images of national identity that concern me in what follows.

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The cultural dimension of nationhood is also central, for somewhat different reasons, in the case of the United States. The development of American nationalism is based on a transition from the idea of ‘New England’ to that of ‘America’. Liah Greenfeld, believing that the English were the first people to develop a sense of nationhood, argues convincingly that, for the early settlers of the seventeenth century, the idea of the nation existed before the creation of an institutional or cultural framework. ‘The English settlers came with a national identity’ argues Greenfeld, ‘it was a given’.65 The transition from a ‘New England’ to an ‘America’ was by no means a given, however, and Greenfeld argues that: This process of formation, which began abroad the motley fleet carrying Englishmen to the New World, was not completed until after the Civil War between the Union and the Confederacy. Only then was the fundamental question settled of what was to be the concrete geo-political referent of American national loyalty.66

If American independence had been secured following the signing of the Paris Treaty in 1783, and the geographical boundaries of the nation were secured following the Civil War in 1865, it was still not clear in the late nineteenth century what was distinctive about the cultural dimension of American nationhood. The period was characterised by an anxiety on the part of American intellectuals as to whether such a thing as an American ‘national character’ or ‘national culture’ existed at all.67 This anxiety was exacerbated in the years between the end of the Civil War and the beginning of the new century for, not only was a bitterly divided nation engaged in a process of post-war Reconstruction, but the population nearly doubled between 1870 and 1900, from 38,558,000 to 75,995,000.68 Immigrants represented a third of that total population increase, a development that was seen as a threat to the very idea of ‘America’.69 It may be argued, however, that the process of immigration played a crucial role in the transition from a ‘New England’ to an ‘American’ nation, and in fostering the development of a distinguishable American culture in the post-Civil War years. Immigrants travelled to America and became Americans and, as Greenfeld notes perceptively, ‘their loyalty was to the nation as a whole, which they tended to regard in much more cohesive terms than did the experienced native population’.70 Greenfeld makes this point with regard to eighteenth-century immigrants with weak national loyalties in Europe, and notes that by

Introduction

[ 19

the nineteenth century many immigrants arrived with already established national identities. Her point regarding the perception of ‘America’ seems relevant to both centuries, however, for late nineteenthcentury immigrants were travelling to an ‘America’ that they imagined as a totality whether they intended becoming Americans or hoped to preserve their already established identities in a new environment. Greenfeld’s somewhat jarring reference to ‘the experienced native population’ is problematic, however, for there were ‘experienced’ inhabitants of the United States who had been systematically excluded from the national community, notably African Americans and Native Americans. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries spokesmen for these groups attempted to raise their people’s status within society by comparing their genuine Americanness to that of the new immigrants. Native Americans began to describe themselves as ‘the real 100 per cent Americans’ and in his seminal ‘Atlanta Compromise’ speech of 1896 (discussed in Chapter 4) Booker T. Washington compared his fellow African Americans, who had ‘without strikes and labour wars, tilled the fields, cleared your forests, builded your railroads and cities’, to ‘those of foreign birth and strange tongue and habits’.71 The period between 1865 and 1910 was, then, crucial in the making of an ‘American’ national identity. As late as 1902 William Dean Howells could still speak in the following terms: Boston, the capital of that New England nation which is fast losing itself in the American nation, is no longer of its old literary primacy, and yet most of our right thinking, our high thinking, still begins there, and qualifies the thinking of the country at large.72

Howells’s description of a transition from a ‘New England nation’ to an ‘American nation’ that is still in a process of emergence illustrates Marcus Klein’s observation that ‘there has been no American culture available for mere acceptance’.73 America, however, is not exceptional in this respect. British culture, likewise, was never available for mere acceptance, and neither were the cultures of its constituent nations. In the following analysis the nations constituting the two sides of the transatlantic divide do not represent neutral frames within which an array of forces contends for power, for the ‘United States’ and ‘United Kingdom’ are both the sites and subjects of cultural contestation. In focusing on this process of cultural contention, I develop my argument in terms of a distinction between ‘contributionism’ and

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‘conservationism’.74 The two terms are not mutually incompatible but they allow me to isolate, within a varied and complex field, two divergent strains of thought that are characteristic of thinking on the question of cultural difference in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. The meaning of these terms will become clearer as the argument develops but they can be briefly defined as follows: Contributionism represents a strand of thought that conditions attitudes held towards minorities by the dominant cultural group within a nation. It depends on a hierarchical conception of ethnic difference where the lesser, minority cultures are invited to participate more fully in the accelerating industrial development of the dominant nation. The minority group is often perceived to be a source of revitalisation and regeneration for the dominant group. Contributionism is distinct from assimilationism for, whereas assimilation could be represented by the equation A + b = A, where A is the dominant and b the minority group, contributionism takes the form of A + b = Ab, where a different entity is produced by the fusion of the two groups. Conservationism is often, although not exclusively, a strategy adopted by minority cultures as a response to the force of contributionism. It resists fusion, and argues that ethnic differences are valuable; that language, custom, tradition, are modes of human communication that are worth preserving. Rather than conceiving of ethnic groups hierarchically, it is based on a pluralist commitment to unassimilable differences. I consider contributionism and conservationism to be neutral terms that cut across the false distinction between ‘good civic’ and ‘bad ethnic’ forms of identity, and foreground the processes by which ethnic identities are culturally constructed. They are not offered as improvements on Sollors’s well-known analytic dualism of ‘consent’ (the bonds of culture) and ‘descent’ (the bonds of blood) but rather offer a frame through which the construction of ethnic identities can be viewed from a different, and, one hopes, illuminatingly new, angle.75 AUTHORITY

Towards the end of Culture and Anarchy, Arnold notes that ‘the centre of movement is not in the House of Commons. It is in the fer-

Introduction

[ 21

menting mind of the nation; and his is for the next twenty years the real influence who can address himself to this.’76 Social authority, it seems, resides not in the hands of the politician but in the hands of that cultural commentator who can address himself to ‘the fermenting mind of the nation’. Arnold conceived of culture as playing an active and formative role in society. ‘Those who accuse [Arnold] of a policy of “cultivated inaction”’, argues Raymond Williams, ‘forget . . . his arguments’ and ‘his life’.77 Stefan Collini has noted the frequency with which the word ‘culture’ appears with an active verb in Arnold’s writings: culture, for instance, ‘endeavours to see and learn, and to make what it sees and learns prevail’, culture ‘conceives of perfection’ and ‘has a rough task to achieve in this country’.78 If culture is developmental in character for Arnold, it is also universal in its moral scope, directing humankind towards an appreciation of that universal ‘best self’ that stands in opposition to the ‘ordinary selves’ of everyday class and other social interests. Culture is, then, the ‘centre of movement’ for Arnold but this is a movement that, in the above quotation, is specifically located within the mind of that nation governed by the House of Commons. There is thus a tension in Arnold’s cultural criticism between an idea of culture as the ‘best self’ of a universal humanity, and an idea of culture as the active binding force of a specific common, if increasingly divided, national culture in Britain. This tension between the universal and the particular is also manifest in the three other figures discussed in this book, who also sought cultural solutions to seemingly intractable problems on the ground. Whereas the substitution of the cultural critic for the House of Commons would seem to support Francis Mulhern’s recent argument that the ‘inherent strategic impulse’ of cultural criticism ‘is to mobilise “culture” as a principle against the prevailing generality of politics in the disputed plane of social authority’, Arnold presented culture less as a substitute for politics than for a waning religion that seemed to be loosing its ability to sustain a desired social cohesion.79 He believed that ‘the special moral feature of our times’ was that ‘the “masses” are losing the Bible and its religion’.80 Having noted the waning influence of a national religion and aristocracy in Culture and Anarchy, he argued that the ideal of culture offered ‘a much wanted principle, a principle of authority to counteract the tendency to anarchy which seems to be threatening us’.81 Arnold hoped that literature (which connoted a much broader field of creative activity in the nineteenth century than it does today) would take the place of religion, an

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argument that found an eager audience among American intellectuals, especially following Arnold’s lecture tours of the 1880s. The structure of Arnold’s argument, where literature comes to play religion’s role in society, is mirrored in William Dean Howells’s thought. Howells called, for example, for ‘all the hidden things [to] be brought into the sun’ so that ‘every day be the day of judgement. If the sermon cannot any longer serve this end, let the novel do it.’82 As I shall discuss in Chapter 2, the tension between a universal cultural sphere and a particularistic national culture that we find in Arnold takes a specific form in the writings of William Dean Howells. The relation of unit to whole, state to federal union, is the very essence of Americanism, and Howells’s cultural thought can be seen to arise from the peculiar combination of a republic simultaneously exceptional and universal, ‘unique in the good fortune of its institutions and endowments, and exemplary in its power of radiation and attraction’.83 One result of the particular claims made for literature by Arnold, and for the novel by Howells, is that the role of the cultural critic becomes increasingly important as it is he – and it is invariably ‘he’ in the sphere of the Victorian man of letters – who determines which works of literature are sufficiently accomplished to play this crucial role. Arnold described the literary critic’s task as follows: Literary criticism’s most important function is to try books as to the influence which they are calculated to have upon the general culture of single nations or the world at large. Of this culture literary criticism is the appointed guardian, and on this culture all literary works may be conceived as in some way or other operating. All these works have a special professional criticism to undergo: theological works that of theologians, historical works that of historians, philosophical works that of philosophers, and in this case each kind of work is tried by a separate standard. But they have also a general literary criticism to undergo, and this tries them all, as I have said, by one standard – their effect upon general culture. Everyone is not a theologian, a historian, or a philosopher, but everyone is interested in the advance in the general culture of his nation or of mankind. A criticism, therefore, which, abandoning a thousand special questions which may be raised about any book, tries it solely in respect of its influence upon this culture, brings it thereby within the sphere of everyone’s interest.84

Literature – understood to encompass history, philosophy and religion – ‘operates’ on a culture, and it is the critic’s function to

Introduction

[ 23

analyse its effects. It is not clear in this passage, however, whether the ‘general culture of single nations’ is to be distinguished from ‘the general culture . . . of the world at large’ or whether these represent one universal cultural sphere. Is the literary critic’s primary task the development of ‘his nation’s’ culture or the culture ‘of mankind’, or can the two be equated? The ‘or’, rather than ‘and’, that separates these components within Arnold’s sentence suggests that we’re dealing with two distinct cultural fields, but the logic of the argument suggests that the national culture is an inevitable contributor to a wider global culture. The goal of the literary critic, it seems, is to identify that which is most universal in the national culture, just as it is his role to see beyond the narrow specialisms of historians, philosophers and theologians to measure their more general effect on the culture at large. Arnold’s contrast between the general perspective of the literary critic and the more specialised or partial perspectives of theologians, historians and philosophers is a good example of that ‘ability to assimilate and integrate’ that T. W. Heyck recognises as a particular characteristic of the Victorian man of letters. Heyck notes that the term ‘man of letters’ was used in the nineteenth century itself to describe a somewhat nebulous kind of writer who stood between the creative writer, the journalist and the scholar, and may be regarded as a precursor to the then absent category of the intellectual.85 Arnold, Howells, Yeats and Du Bois were all engaged in this processes of ‘assimilation and integration’ in their writings, and all four, despite their considerable differences, wrote within a tradition of literary and cultural practice that had been established in the mid-Victorian era. Each of these men of letters shared Arnold’s belief that literature could have a direct bearing on their respective national cultures despite the fact that, between 1865 and 1910, the mode of production, dissemination and publication of literature changed significantly, as did the position of the man of letters within society. Arnold and Howells may be regarded as belonging to the last generation of mid-Victorian men of letters who, while responding to wide-ranging social changes, could be confident in the relevance and influence of their cultural criticism. Both began to write in a Victorian society of limited literacy and limited enfranchisement, a society in which the man of letters could write in the knowledge that his works would be read by a number of the leading politicians and opinionsetters of his day. Arnold’s cultural authority in 1860s’ Britain was partly based on the fact that, given the small size and middle-class

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composition of the reading (and, before 1867, the voting) public, there was an awareness among writers that any major historical, literary or political work was likely to reach ‘a very large proportion of the governing elite’.86 Similar claims can be made for William Dean Howells despite the very different American context of his work. Henry May begins his celebrated analysis of The End of American Innocence by describing a party arranged by Harper’s Publishers in 1912 to celebrate Howells’s seventy-fifth birthday. Among those present were the President, William Howard Taft, the leading muckraking journalist, Ida M. Tarbell, the liberal nationalist, Herbert Croly, and a number of the period’s leading authors and poets who also listened to letters sent by Thomas Hardy and Howells’s close friend, Henry James. The front-page account of the New York Times significantly noted that ‘nearly everyone in the hall knew everyone else’.87 While this event might be invoked to suggest that the role of the man of letters had not changed significantly by 1912, I believe that May is right to present Howells’s seventy-fifth birthday party as being among the last, residual, manifestations of that closely knit intellectual community that characterised Victorian America. By 1915 Howells was writing despondently to Henry James that a ‘change has passed upon things, we can’t deny it; I could not serialize a story of mine now in any American magazine, thousands of them as there are . . . I am comparatively a dead cult with my statues cast down and the grass growing over them in the pale moonlight.’88 Social and intellectual historians have remarked in their various ways on the growing homogenisation of the intellectual élite of the mid-Victorian period, which is then seen to have been followed by the gradual fragmentation of that intellectual sphere into discrete and compartmentalised professional disciplines, with the fruits of research appearing in increasingly specialised journals. The general role of cultural leadership and moral authority performed by Arnold and Howells was being rapidly overtaken towards the end of the century by the coterie magazine and the specialist journal, and by the formation of professional disciplines within the universities on the one hand, and the rise of a popular press on the other. The late nineteenth century saw major innovations in printing technology, such as the steam-powered printing press, the electro-type presses, papermaking and book-binding machines, which led to the mass production of cheap books, journals and newspapers. The cheap newspapers of 1890s’ Britain, together with new magazines such as George Newnes’s Tit-Bits, sold in figures beyond the dreams of earlier

Introduction

[ 25

Victorian publishers.89 In America the 1880s saw the beginnings of such new journals as Cosmopolitan, The Country House Journal, McClure’s and Munsey’s Magazines. This dramatic expansion in publishing was a result of a massive growth in population in Britain and America throughout the nineteenth century. The population of England and Wales more than doubled between 1850 and 1901, a development that was mirrored in the dramatic growth of urban centres in the United States, with a continual movement of people from the country to the city and a persistent stream of immigrants (13 million between 1880 and 1914) entering America’s portals.90 The growth in the available sources of information, particularly in the print media, answered the needs created by growing physical, and in America often linguistic, distances between sections of cities, by enlarged city size and scale, and by the increasing divisions of class and ethnicity within the population.91 The new flood of reading matter, in Heyck’s words ‘represented a rival world of publishing to that of the men of letters, and it came from publishers wholly devoted to profit’.92 By the 1880s, following the electoral reforms of 1867 and 1884–5 in Britain, and the passing of the 15th Amendment guaranteeing suffrage to all male citizens of the United States in 1870, there existed organised class and ethnic interests that lay beyond that narrow public sphere in which the works of the men of letters had previously been read and discussed. Arnold described the ‘man of culture’ as being ‘in conflict with the present’ in his essays on America, and envisioned the cultured individual inhabiting a space separated from a society that he had already described in the 1860s as divided between the barbarism of the aristocracy, the vulgarity of the populace and the philistinism of the middle class.93 Howells, similarly, was to observe in an essay on ‘The Man of Letters as Man of Business’ that perhaps the man of letters ‘will never be at home anywhere in the world as long as there are masses whom he ought to consort with, and classes whom he cannot consort with’.94 Howells’s ‘classes and masses’ can be regarded as the equivalents of Arnold’s ‘philistines and populace’, and what is striking in both cases is that the idea of the man of letters as having a positive effect on society stands somewhat at odds with the vision of an alienated figure standing aloofly apart from the constituent classes of society. Class interests coexisted with emergent ethnic and gender interests so that, as the nineteenth century progressed, the Arnoldian idea of an interventionist man of letters who could speak to society in general gave way increasingly to an idea of

26 ]


the artist living in aesthetic isolation or, as Heyck puts it, ‘from a concept of a cultured minority integrated with the whole of society to one of a minority culture’.95 The Arnoldian vision of the man of letters as social leader and public moralist reached a crisis point in the late nineteenth century, for how could culture unite a heterogeneous public when, in its narrow sense, it signified works of art from which the majority of people were excluded while, in its broader anthropological sense, it represented those very identities – class, ethnic, religious, linguistic – which exposed the limitations of the ideal of cultural unity. It is perhaps significant in this respect that Raymond Williams gives little attention to the late nineteenth century in Culture and Society. It seems that he believed that it was during this ‘interregnum’ that his idea of culture as social critique was at its weakest. What Williams calls the ‘New Aesthetics’ of the period followed Walter Pater’s dictum of ‘art for art’s sake’, and Oscar Wilde’s belief that ‘art never expresses anything but itself’.96 This was not the whole story, however. W. B. Yeats, for instance, believed that literature could be a stimulant for the moral, spiritual and political regeneration of the Irish nation, and recalls in his Autobiographies that, when he raised such issues with ‘a young Irish poet’ (probably Joyce), the response was similar to what he might have been told by the aestheticist poets of the London-based Rhymers’ Club: ‘You do not talk like a poet, you talk like a man of letters.’97 In Yeats’s writings the idea of culture as individual aesthetic cultivation coexists with an idea of culture as a productive force in society, and the young poet was surely right to place him among the men of letters of an earlier period who, like Arnold and Howells, were able to move across disciplinary boundaries, seeking to apply a cultivated aesthetic sensibility to the social problems of their time. This sense of culture’s political significance was shared by W. E. B. Du Bois who, having noted that ‘the Negro Race . . . is going to be saved by its exceptional men’, went on to argue that the ‘Talented Tenth of the Negro race must be made leaders of thought and missionaries of culture among their people’.98 Since it is culture that forms the very medium for the development of an ethnic identity, it is perhaps not surprising to find the mid-Victorian idea of a socially interventionist man of letters, and the idea that ‘culture’ can function as a vehicle for social solidarity, retaining their relevance among a ‘marginalised’ or ‘colonised’ people. American writers of the period however – from Emerson and Whitman to Twain and Howells – were also engaged in what could be called a cultural nationalist

Introduction

[ 27

attempt at underlining the distinctiveness of America. Sacvan Bercovitch notes in his Rites of Assent that, whereas Raymond Williams traced the notion of culture as providing the grounds for dissent through the Romantic and Victorian periods in England to Arnold’s assertion of ‘a general humane spirit’ that is grounded in a ‘best self’, the ‘classic American writers did not perceive art or culture in quite this sense’: Rather, they tended to associate the ‘best self’ with a mythic American self, the ‘humane spirit’ with the American ‘spirit of place’, ‘human perfection’ with the ‘true American Way’, and culture itself with the mission of American democracy . . . None of them envisioned . . . an ‘aesthetic state’ beyond and apart from national ideals.99

This connection between a ‘national self’ and the idea of culture that Bercovitch identifies is not limited to the United States, however. W. B. Yeats noted in the 1890s for instance that In England amongst the best minds art and poetry are becoming every day more entirely ends in themselves, and all life is made more and more but so much fuel to feed the fire . . . When I talk to people of literary ambition here in Ireland, I find them holding that literature must be the expression of conviction, and be the garment of noble emotion and not an end in itself.100

While Yeats registers the move towards aestheticism in England, he also notes that the earlier Arnoldian idea of the man of letters as communicator of ‘noble emotion’ continues in Ireland. The example of Yeats suggests that the American tendency to equate ‘culture’ with the national community, the ‘best self’ with the ‘American self’, identified by Bercovitch is not unique to the United States and, indeed, Yeats drew on nineteenth-century American authors as sources of inspiration for the regeneration of Irish culture.101 Indeed, it could be argued that Bercovitch’s comparison between an American ‘national self’ and an English ‘best self’ simply repeats the blindness towards English forms of nationalism (clothed as ‘universalism’) that has characterised English cultural criticism for much of its history. While accepting that a simplistic equation between Arnold’s ‘culture’ and ‘Englishness’ would have to be rejected – for it is Arnold’s fundamental argument that England lacks the influence of culture – I nevertheless believe that a national identity plays a central role in the development of Arnold’s

28 ]


cultural and political writings. It is a characteristic of all four figures discussed in this book that they draw on ethnicity as a basis from which to assert their cultural authority. This, then, is a book about the ways in which ethnicity was adopted as a vehicle for developing a cultural agenda in the writings of Arnold, Howells, Yeats and Du Bois. Ethnic identities, as we shall see, were invoked as a source of alternative values to that which was perceived to be a materialist and philistine social order. It was the emergent sense of culture as being the site of oppositional and supplementary ideas to the perceived dominant values of an industrialising society that formed the context for the convergence of culture and ethnicity in the years between 1865 and 1910. In making ‘ethnicity’ central to a transatlantic analysis of culture and society, I hope to demonstrate that Yeats was representing a much wider cultural strategy when he ‘dreamed of enlarging Irish hate, till we had come to hate with a passion of patriotism what Morris and Ruskin hated’.102 NOTES

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

See Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois 1919–1963, pp. 175–6. Du Bois, Writings, p. 993. Ibid. pp. 993–4. Ibid. p. 994. On Birth of a Nation see Stokes, ‘The Endless Re-Birth’ and Steiger, Interpreting Films. Dixon, The Clansman, pp. 187–9, 342. For Du Bois’s response to the film upon its initial release see Levering Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois 1919–1963, p. 507. Arnold, Complete Prose Works III, p. 291. All quotations from Matthew Arnold’s prose writings come from R. H. Super’s edition and will be abbreviated in the remainder of the book as CPW, followed by the volume and page numbers. Christopher Harvie notes that Arnold ‘forgot that [Liverpool] with its huge Irish, Welsh and Scots communities, was the Celtic city.’ ‘Celtic Exchanges’, p. 113. On Arnoldian ‘disinterestedness’ see A. Anderson, Power, pp. 91–118. See for example, Said, Representations, p. 63. Osborne, ‘Introduction’, p. xv. Collini, ‘Speaking’, p. 427. Anderson, ‘Introduction’ in Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping, p. 2. Christ, ‘The Hero’, p. 30. For manifestations of nationalism in the literatures of Britain in the

Introduction

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42.

[ 29

period immediately preceeding this present study see Trumpener, Bardic Nationalism. For earlier conceptions of identity in the American context see Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity. Williams, Culture and Society, p. v. Williams, ‘The Idea of Culture’, p. 60. Williams, Culture and Society, xviii. Collini, ‘Culture Talk’, p. 51. Winch, ‘Mr Gradgrind’, p. 263. This description comes from the New Left Review editorial team in Politics and Letters. The description of Arnold as the ‘pivotal figure’ of Williams’s history is by Mulhern, Culture/Metaculture, p. 166. See Eric Lott, Love and Theft, pp. 10–11. Lott, Love and Theft, p. 18, Saldívar, Border Matters, p. 10. Higgins, Raymond Williams, p. 170. Williams, Politics and Letters, pp. 117, 118. Ibid. pp. 118–19. Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 47, 77. For an account of these debates see Young, Colonial Desire, pp. 160–6. The most notable representative of this trend is Spivak’s ‘Can the Subaltern Speak?’ James Clifford notes that it ‘is less common today than it once was to speak of “the East,” but we still make casual reference to “the West,” “Western culture,” and so on. Even theorists of discontinuity and deconstruction such as Foucault and Derrida continue to set their analyses within and against a Western totality’ in Predicament, p. 272. More recently Neil Lazarus has argued that the ‘concept of “the West” as it is used in postcolonial theory . . . has no coherent or credible referent.’ See ‘The fetish of “the West”’, p. 44. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. xi. Ibid. p. xii. Giles, ‘Transnationalism’, p. 72. Giles, Virtual, p. 15. See Sollors, Multilingual America. Shell, American Babel. See, for instance, Manning, Fragments of Union, and M. Wynn Thomas, Transatlantic Connections. Sollors, ‘A Critique’, p. 255. Ibid. p. 256. Sollors traces the etymology of the word in some detail in the ‘Foreword’ to Theories of Ethnicity, pp. x–xii. On race and nation in Victorian discourse see Appiah and Gutmann, Color Conscious, 61–4. Also Stepan, The Idea of Race in Science. Eagleton, Crazy John, p. 325. Hall, ‘New Ethnicities’, p. 169. The ‘invented’ nature of national and ethnic identites has been widely

30 ]

43.

44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51. 52.

53.

54.

Ethnicity and Cultural Authority discussed and analysed following the publication in 1983 of Hobsbawm and Ranger (eds), The Invention of Tradition, Anderson, Imagined Communities. See also Sollors’s introduction to The Invention of Ethnicity. Indeed, Walter Benn Michaels argues that any claim to cultural distinctiveness inevitably relies on a notion of race. ‘[W]hat’s wrong with cultural identity’ notes Michaels ‘is that, without recourse to the racial identity that (in its current manifestations) it repudiates, it makes no sense’. Michaels, Our America, p. 142. Waters illustrates how different rules of definition apply for ‘white ethnic’ and ‘black’ Americans in Ethnic Options, pp. 18–19. Higham, Send These to Me, p. 208. Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, p. 39. Connor, Ethnonationalism, p. 103. Frantz Fanon views nationalism as a necessary but unfortunate stage in colonial struggles in ‘The Pitfalls of National Consciousness’ in Wretched of the Earth. Eric Hobsbawn is sceptical of the claims of both national and ethnic identites, but tends to see ethnicity as a backward and atavistic characteristic of ‘non-historic’ nations. Hobsbawm follows Friedrich Engels (and, as we shall see, Matthew Arnold) in discriminating between the smaller peoples who have no tradition of statehood, and the larger peoples who have an established state and political tradition in Nations and Nationalism. Howes, Yeats’s Nations, p. 14. Hutchinson, The Dynamics, p. 30. Hobsbawm in Nations and Nationalism and Breuilly in Nationalism and the State are particularly dismissive of cultural nationalisms. A more sympathetic account of cultural nationalism is to be found in Anderson’s Imagined Communities. Kohn, The Idea of Nationalism. Discussed in Nairn, Faces, pp. 59–63. Quoted in Kuper, Culture, p. 32. Taken from Elias, Civilizing Process. An excellent overview of contemporary theories of nationalism is Smith, Nationalism and Modernism. Brubaker offers a convincing account of the distinctions between French and German forms of nationhood in Citizenship and Nationhood. The distinction between forms of nationalism based on jus sanguinis and jus soli is reinforced by Hastings in his otherwise excellent The Construction of Nationhood , pp. 13, 34. In this respect my analysis challenges the views of anti-nationalists such as Hobsbawm, and pro-nationalists such as Nairn who bases his defence of Scottish nationalism on a rather simplistic distinction between ‘ethnic’ and ‘civic’ forms of nationalism in After Britain. Mandler, ‘“Race” and “Nation”’ in Collini et al. (eds), History, Religion and Culture, p. 236. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism, p. 29.

Introduction

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55. Breuilly, ‘Approaches to Nationalism’ in Balakrishnan (ed.), Mapping the Nation, p. 154. 56. Colley, Britons, p. 374. 57. Quoted in G. Williams, When Was Wales? p. 121. 58. Hastings, Construction of Nationhood, p. 64. 59. On Victorian Wales see P. Morgan ‘Early Victorian’, and in Welsh, H. T. Edwards, Codi’r Hen Wlad and Gw ˆ yl Gwalia. 60. On Scotland see Kidd ‘Sentiment, race and revival’, and on Ireland see Hoppen, ‘Nationalist mobilisation’. Also Hutchinson, Political History of Scotland and Foster, Modern Ireland 1600–1972. 61. Hastings, Construction of Nationhood, p. 64. 62. Colley, Britons, p. 130. 63. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, in CPW III, p. 384. 64. Collini, Public Moralists, p. 349. 65. Greenfeld, Nationalism, p. 403. 66. Ibid. p. 403. 67. Ibid. p. 442. Also on nineteenth-century American culture see Bercovitch, Rites of Assent. 68. Useful charts for population growth are supplied in Calhoun (ed.), The Gilded Age, p. 93. 69. This will be discussed further in Chapter 2. 70. Greenfeld, Nationalism, p. 434. 71. Native Americans quoted by Michaels, Our America, p. 158, fn. 91. See Hertzberg, Search for an American Indian Identity, pp. 179–236. Washington, Up from Slavery, p. 221. 72. Howells, Literature and Life, pp. 282–3. A similar passage occurs in Literary Friends and Acquaintances, p. 101. 73. Klein, Foreigners, 288. 74. I take the term ‘conservationism’ from Du Bois’s essay of 1897 on the ‘Conservation of Races’ collected in Writings, pp. 815–6. The Welsh critic, Ned Thomas, has used the term ‘contributionism’ in ‘Images of Ourselves’ and ‘Renan, Arnold, Unamuno’. 75. See Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, pp. 3–19. 76. Arnold, CPW V, p. 228. 77. Williams, Culture and Society, p. 119. 78. Quoted by Collini, Matthew Arnold, p. 85. 79. Mulhern, ‘Beyond Metaculture’, p. 86. 80. Arnold, Literature and Dogma (1873), CPW VI, p. 362. 81. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), CPW V, p. 123. 82. Quoted in Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America, p. 195. 83. P. Anderson, ‘Internationalism: A Beviary’, p. 23. 84. Arnold, ‘The Bishop and the Philosopher’ (1863), in CPW III, p. 41. 85. The reconstruction of the social position and role of the man of letters that follows draws on the following: Gross, Rise and Fall of the Man

32 ]

86. 87. 88.

89. 90.

91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96.

97. 98. 99. 100. 101. 102.

Ethnicity and Cultural Authority of Letters; Heyck, Transformation of Intellectual Life; Eagleton, Function of Criticism; Collini, Public Moralists. Heyck, Transformation, p. 36. Quoted in May, The End of American Innocence, p. 4. Howells, Selected Letters Vol. 6, p. 80. Henry May describes the waning of Howells’s reputation in The End of American Innocence, p. 7. These changes are described in Heyck, Transformation, p. 200, and Trachtenberg, Incorporation, pp. 122–3. The population of England and Wales swelled from 8,872,900 in 1801 to 40,000,000 in 1901. Heyck, Transformation, p. 199. The population of the United States swelled from 31,444, 000 in 1860 to 75, 995, 000 in 1900. Calhoun (ed.) The Gilded Age: Essays on the Origins of Modern America, p. 92. See Trachtenberg, pp. 86–100, 161–73. Heyck, p. 200. Arnold, ‘A Word About America’ (1882), CPW X, p. 5. Howells, ‘The Man of Letters as Man of Business’, in Kirk and Kirk (eds), Criticism and Fiction, pp. 308–9. Heyck, p. 190. Quoted in Raymond Williams, Culture and Society, pp. 166, 170. For the rise of slightly different aestheticist and decadent movements in America see Lears, No Place of Grace, pp. 49–50, 74–83. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 166. Foster attributes this comment to James Joyce in W. B. Yeats: A Life II, p. 178. Du Bois, ‘The Talented Tenth’ (1903) in Writings, pp. 842, 861. Bercovitch, The Rites of Assent, p. 58. Yeats, ‘Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature’ (1892), in Uncollected Prose 1, pp. 248–9. See for example, Yeats, ‘To the Editor of United Ireland’ in Collected Letters 1, pp. 339–40. Yeats, ‘Poetry and Tradition’ (1907), in Essays and Introductions, p. 248.

chapter 1

Matthew Arnold Culture and Ethnicity

The Welsh schools that I have seen are generally on the British system . . . The children in them are generally docile and quick in apprehension, to a greater degree than English children; their drawback, of course, is that they have to acquire the medium of information, as well as the information itself, while the English children possess the medium at the outset. There can, I think, be no question but that the acquirement of the English language should be more and more insisted upon by your Lordships in your relations with these schools as the one main object for which your aid is granted. Whatever encouragement individuals may think it desirable to give the preservation of the Welsh language on grounds of philological or antiquarian interest, it must always be the desire of a Government to render its dominions, as far as possible, homogeneous, and to break down barriers to the freest intercourse between the different parts of them. Sooner or later, the difference of language between Wales and England will probably be effaced, as has happened with the difference of language between Cornwall and the rest of England; as is now happening with the difference of language between Brittany and the rest of France; and they are not the true friends of the Welsh people who, from a romantic interest in their manners and traditions, would impede an event which is socially and politically so desirable for them. Matthew Arnold, HMI Report (1852)1

‘My life’, noted Matthew Arnold in 1875, ‘is not that of a man of letters but of an Inspector of Schools.’2 If this is a somewhat surprising statement coming from the figure widely regarded as the Victorian era’s leading man of letters, it usefully draws attention to the professional [ 33 ]

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context of Arnold’s writings. In discussing Arnold’s call, first expressed in his Her Majesty’s Inspectors’ report of 1852, for the eradication of Welsh as a living language, Emyr Humphreys suggests that as an agent of the state Arnold realised that he was required to go against his own nature as a poet and play the role of the Philistine, intent on the removal of any obstacles that lay in the road of uniformity, homogeneity and material progress.3

The boundary between Arnold the ‘poet’ and ‘agent of the state’, or between the ‘man of letters’ and the HMI, is not as clear-cut as Humphreys suggests, however, for the quotation from the 1852 report above engages with a number of issues that were to reappear throughout Arnold’s cultural and critical writings: the role of education in the life of the nation; the role of the government, or state, in establishing social equality; the problem of linguistic and ethnic difference; and the desire to create a ‘homogeneous’ national culture. Despite his unequivocal call for the eradication of a language and its culture, it would be too simplistic to follow current trends in dismissing Arnold’s HMI report as yet another example of his imperial arrogance.4 It is worth noting, for instance, that Arnold does not represent the children of Wales as backward or immoral, as had been the case five years earlier in the renowned Report of the Commissioners’ Inquiry into the State of Education in Wales.5 Indeed, Arnold draws attention to the fact that Welsh children are ‘quick in apprehension, to a greater degree than English children’.6 Thus, within Arnold’s HMI report, lies a tension between an intolerance of cultural difference and a genuine democratic desire to extend the benefits of an English education, and the values of English culture, throughout Britain. This tension between democratic ideals and cultural intolerance can be perceived in Arnold’s writings throughout his life. Arnold consistently sought to utilise his cultural authority, as both HMI and man of letters, to promote reconciliation: the reconciliation of classes, ethnicities, and religious sects. The vehicle he offers as a means for realising a desired social homogeneity is a ‘culture’ which transcends historically specific group interests, and which he describes in universalist and abstract terms as being ‘disinterested’, ‘impersonal’, and that appeals to, and fosters, the ‘best’ selves as opposed to the ‘ordinary’ selves of people.7 Basing his critical writings on the belief that ‘all tendencies of human nature are in themselves vital and profitable; when they are blamed, they are only to be blamed rela-

Matthew Arnold: Culture and Ethnicity

[ 35

tively, not absolutely’, Arnold’s writings are characterised by a general lack of any systematic conceptual rigour.8 Even a fairly cursory reading of Arnold’s most significant works will reveal a series of tensions and paradoxes in his writings. Perhaps the most significant of these tensions derives from two conceptions of culture in his work; on the one hand culture is a normative value, a Utopian ideal, towards which all individuals should aspire while, on the other hand, culture is an active, homogenising and stabilising force in society. The HMI report with which I begin represents an early moment in Arnold’s writings when an abstract ideal of cultural homogeneity comes face to face with the reality of distinctive linguistic communities on the ground; the ideal of a common, accessible, culture faces the reality of ethnic difference. Arnold’s report of 1852 foregrounds what John Burrow has described as ‘a dilemma in liberal culture itself’: How are you to make people aware of the tradition which can both shape their energies into something coherent and by its plurality opens to them new possibilities unless you in some sense first impose it upon them?9

The following chapter seeks to explore the relationship between culture and ethnicity in Arnold’s writings in the light of Burrow’s question. While Arnold’s essays On the Study of Celtic Literature have been the subject of considerable critical commentary in recent years, it has been less widely observed that questions relating to national and ethnic identities were a key preoccupation in Arnold’s writings from his earliest ‘England and the Italian Question’ of 1859 through to his final essays on ‘Disestablishment in Wales’ and ‘Civilisation in the United States’ in 1888.10 In exploring the relationship between culture and ethnicity in Arnold’s writings, I begin by reconstructing his conception of ‘culture’. Culture: from Class to Ethnicity Since Raymond Williams’s Culture and Society, it has been commonplace to regard Arnold as a key figure in that tradition of Victorian social critics who invoked ‘culture’ as an alternative source of values to those of a materialist, industrial, society. There is considerable evidence in Arnold’s writings to support this characterisation of his work. In the celebrated analysis of Culture and Anarchy, for instance, Arnold argues that ‘Culture looks beyond machinery, culture hates hatred, culture has one great passion, the passion for sweetness and

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light’.11 This passage makes an explicit contrast between ‘culture’ and ‘machinery’, and also – in its echoing of St Paul’s peroration on charity in his First Epistle to the Corinthians (Chapter 13) – implicitly suggests that Arnold’s culture is meant to offer a secular substitute for religious values. While the term ‘machinery’ refers not only to industrial production but also denotes a broad range of social institutions, the tone and imagery of Arnold’s analysis suggest that his idea of culture is a response to the materialist, increasingly secular, values of an industrialised society. Culture, for Arnold, is a ‘salutary friend’ who exposes ‘what an unsound habit of mind it must be which makes us talk of things like coal or iron as constituting the greatness of England’.12 Culture, he goes on, ‘dissipat[es] delusions of this kind’ by ‘fixing standards that are real’.13 Thus, in a deliberately striking reversal, Arnold makes culture, understood to be a normative ideal of ‘sweetness and light’ towards which all individuals should aspire, a more ‘real’ and material social force than the actual wealth-creating materials of coal and iron. Culture, defined further as ‘the best which has been thought and said in the world’,14 ‘begets a dissatisfaction which is of the highest possible value in stemming the common tide of men’s thoughts in a wealthy and industrial community’,15 and Arnold believes that this function is particularly important in our modern world, of which the whole civilisation is . . . mechanical and external, and tends constantly to become more so. But above all in our own country has culture a weighty part to perform, because here that mechanical character, which civilisation tends to take everywhere, is shown in the most eminent degree.16

Arnold’s culture, then, is ‘at variance with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem with us’, and can thus be seen as, in Raymond Williams’s words, a ‘mitigating and rallying alternative’ to the ‘derived impetus of a new kind of society’.17 It is important to note, however, that Arnold’s criticisms are directed not so much at the ‘industrial community’ itself as at the ‘common tide of men’s thoughts’ within such a community. Arnold states explicitly in Culture and Anarchy that culture ‘admits the necessity of the movement towards fortune-making and exaggerated industrialism’ and ‘readily allows that the future may derive benefit from it’.18 It is within the context of this argument that we may best understand Arnold’s conception of the cultural authority assumed by the man of letters in an industrial society, for


[ 37

The great men of culture are those who have had a passion for diffusing, for making prevail, for carrying from one end of society to the other, the best knowledge, the best ideas of their time; who have laboured to divest knowledge of all that was harsh, uncouth, difficult, abstract, professional, exclusive; to humanise it, to make it efficient outside the clique of the cultivated and the learned, yet still remaining the best knowledge and thought of the time, and a true source, therefore of sweetness and light.19

This passage suggests some of the deeper connections between Arnold’s notion of culture and the comments he made on the undesirability of the survival of Welsh as a living language in his HMI report of 1852. ‘Modern civilisation’ for Arnold, while producing society’s mechanical character, is also the conduit for the dissemination of culture throughout society. The Welsh language can thus be seen to represent a hindrance to the man of culture’s project of diffusing ‘the best knowledge . . . from one end of society to the other’.20 Welsh is ‘difficult’ and ‘abstract’ and represents an addition to the other ways of being inaccessible that Arnold wishes to transcend in Culture and Anarchy. In his essays On the Study of Celtic Literature Arnold reiterates his call for the eradication of Welsh as a living language, and presents his argument in the following terms: I must say I quite share the opinion of my brother Saxons as to the practical inconvenience of perpetuating the speaking of Welsh . . . Cornwall is the better for adopting English, for becoming more thoroughly one with the rest of the country. The fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogeneous, English-speaking whole, the breaking down of barriers between us, the swallowing up of separate provincial nationalities, is a consummation to which the natural course of things irresistibly tends; it is a necessity of what is called modern civilisation, and modern civilisation is a real, legitimate force; the change must come, and its accomplishment is a mere affair of time. The sooner the Welsh language disappears as an instrument of the practical, political, social life of Wales, the better; the better for England, the better for Wales itself.21

I will return to discuss the structure and significance of Arnold’s Celtic essays, but wish to focus here on the attitude towards ‘modern civilisation’ contained within this passage. If Arnold often invokes culture as an alternative source of values to industrial society, here he deems ‘modern civilisation’ to be a ‘real, legitimate force’ and the source of welcome changes in society. Culture is not opposed to

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modern civilisation, for the latter creates the context for the dissemination of the former. Arnold’s vision, as both cultural critic and HMI, is democratic in the sense that his goal is to construct a shareable, accessible, common culture in Britain that makes the ‘best knowledge and thought of the time’ relevant to all. That common culture is ultimately based, however, on the belief that society’s ‘best knowledge’ can only be disseminated through the medium of English. There is, then, a tension in Arnold’s writings between an idea of ‘culture’ as the repository of a set of universal human values that challenge the individualism of modern industrial society, and an idea of culture as dependent upon the ‘natural course of . . . modern civilisation’ for its broader dissemination.22 What is common to both positions, however, is the belief that culture functions as an active force within contemporary society. In this respect, commentators such as Terry Eagleton have been incorrect in describing Arnold as invoking a ‘traditional culture’ in order to ‘refine the oafish captains of industry’.23 Arnold’s attitude towards the Welsh and Cornish languages above suggests something of his lack of sentimentalism when it came to ‘traditional’ cultures, and Arnold’s critique of aspects of industrialism is never mounted from the position of a ‘traditional’ pre-industrial, rural Utopia.24 While Arnold does invoke ancient Greece as a model of a civilisation imbued by the influence of a human appreciation for nature and the life of the mind, he is primarily concerned with the persistence of an ideal set of Hellenistic values as a cultural force in the present, and, while he elevates Elizabethan England as a period of unsurpassed cultural achievement, it is a past that offers a model for the future, not a Utopia that has been lost for all time.25 The goal of Arnold’s social criticism is not fundamentally to subvert or reverse the direction in which his society is developing but rather to foresee, and offer solutions to, the problems that arise from the nation’s industrial development. In his essay ‘Democracy’ Arnold was already offering a clear expression of the crisis that he believed was facing Victorian English society.26 Originally conceived as a lengthy introduction to his official report on The Popular Education of France, Arnold is primarily concerned with the emerging problems of England which are discussed in relation to developments in France and, to a lesser extent, the United States. This comparitivist approach serves as a guiding principle throughout Arnold’s social criticism for, as he noted in 1865, ‘a nation is really civilised by acquiring the qualities it by nature is wanting in’.27 The central question which the essay seeks to address is presented in the following terms:


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[W]hat action may we rely to replace, for some time at any rate, the action of the aristocracy upon the people of this country, which we have seen exercise an influence in many respects elevating and beneficial, but which is rapidly, and from inevitable causes, ceasing? In other words, and to use a significant modern expression which every one understands, what influence may help us to prevent the English people from becoming, with the growth of democracy, Americanised?28

Arnold does not explain what the term ‘Americanisation’ means in this context, but assumes an understanding with his readership. He is referring to the sweeping changes occurring as a result of the social movement towards democracy as manifested in the decline of the aristocracy’s influence on the political and cultural life of the nation. This process leaves the middle class to determine the future tone of the national life, a prospect which cannot be welcomed, for the middle class in England is characterised by its narrow, uncultured and ‘philistine’ conception of what this life should be. Arnold’s conceptualisation of class divisions in England are expressed succinctly in a letter he wrote to the Welsh educationalist Hugh Owen: We in England have come to that point when the continued advance and greatness of our nation is [sic] threatened by one cause, and one cause above all. Far more than by the helplessness of an aristocracy whose day is fast coming to an end, far more than by the rawness of a lower class whose day is only just beginning, we are imperilled by what I call the Philistinism of our middle class.29

Arnold famously divided English society into aristocratic ‘barbarians’, middle class ‘philistines’, and a working class ‘populace’. He recognised that these divisions arose from social inequalities, and argued that ‘inequality materialises our upper class, vulgarises our middle class, brutalises our lower’.30 In light of these new conditions Arnold suggests in ‘Democracy’ that social homogeneity may be achieved through action by the state – ‘the representative actingpower of the nation’ and ‘the nation in its collective and corporate character’.31 The creation of a powerful state may now be salutary rather than dangerous, he argues, particularly with regard to the establishment of an elevating system of national education which was already in existence in France and Prussia. These issues were to carry a greater social and political urgency following the working-class agitations of the 1860s, culminating in

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the demonstrations in Hyde Park in 1866. These demonstrations had been called by the Reform League following the fall of the Liberal government and with it the first attempts at extending the franchise to working men.32 If these events underlined the way in which the national culture was dividing along lines of class, this was also the period of renewed Fenian activity in Ireland and North America. Arnold’s celebrated analysis of Culture and Anarchy sought to address a national culture which he perceived as being threatened by divisive class and ethnic interests. Faced with the twin threats of ‘an Irish Fenian and an English rough’, Arnold supplemented his call in ‘Democracy’ for an empowered state with the suggestion that the current philistinism of the emergent ruling class may be solved through a reliance on a small number of disinterested, classless individuals to direct the national life.33 He identifies these individuals as ‘aliens’ – ‘persons who are mainly led not by their class spirit, but by a general humane spirit’ – a minority that transcends the particularistic interests of class and nation and pursues the universal ideals of human culture.34 Natures with this bent emerge in all classes, – among the Barbarians, among the Philistines, among the Populace. And this bent always tends to take them out of their class, and to make their distinguishing characteristic not their Barbarianism or their Philistinism, but their humanity. They have, in general, a rough time of it in their lives; but they are sown more abundantly than one might think, they appear where and when one least expects it . . . they hinder the unchecked predominance of that classlife which is the affirmation of our ordinary self, and seasonably disconcert mankind in their worship of machinery.35

The classless alien’s transcendent ‘humanity’ allows him to see beyond divisive class interests. The alien’s role thus mirrors on a personal level the role of the state on a social level; both seek to foster a cohesive society based on a shared sense of a common human culture. However, if Arnold argues that ‘aliens’ exist within all classes, he is primarily concerned with the role of the philistine class in engendering a homogeneous, stable society. ‘I myself am properly a Philistine’ he notes in Culture and Anarchy, and in his essays on Celtic literature he draws attention to the ‘soul of goodness’ that exists in philistinism itself ‘and this soul of goodness I, who am often supposed to be Philistinism’s mortal enemy merely because I do not wish it to have things all its own way, cherish as much as anybody’.36 Behind


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Arnold’s invocation of a ‘transcendent’ culture, then, lies an argument for the middle class to broaden its outlook in order that its values and aspirations may appeal to the other classes in society. Arnold makes this argument explicit in The Popular Education of France: It is a serious calamity for a nation that its tone of feeling and grandeur of spirit should be lowered or dulled. But the calamity appears far more serious still when we consider that the middle class, remaining as they are now, with narrow, harsh, unintelligent, and unattractive spirit and culture, will almost certainly fail to mould or assimilate the masses below them, whose sympathies are at the present moment actually wider and more liberal than theirs. They arrive, these masses, eager to enter into possession of the world, to gain a more vivid sense of their own life and activity. In their irrepressible development, their natural educators and initiators are those immediately above them, the middle classes. If these classes cannot win their sympathy or give them their direction, society is in danger of falling into anarchy.37

Arnold was, then, a middle-class critic of the middle class. The goal of his criticism was not to question the ultimate desirability of that class adopting the aristocracy’s traditional role of political and cultural leadership, but rather to encourage the middle class to face its responsibilities. Arnold sought to expose the widespread philistinism of his class in order to prepare it for its destined position of leadership in the emergent democratic society. These related arguments for the role of a saving ‘alien’ element in fostering a social homogeneity, and for the role of the middle class in guiding society by its example, take a different form in the lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature.38 In these essays the English are encouraged to assimilate the Celts in much the same way as the members of the middle class are encouraged to assimilate the ‘masses’, for the ‘alien’ antidote to the ‘narrowness’ of English philistinism lies in the Hellenistic appreciation of nature found among the Celtic peoples; there is ‘something Greek in them’ states Arnold, ‘something humane, something (I am afraid one must add) which in the English common people is not to be found’.39 An argument for cultural homogeneity developed in terms of class in Culture and Anarchy finds its precursor in an argument developed in terms of ethnicity in the essays On the Study of Celtic Literature.

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Ethnicity and Cultural Authority Celticism and Contributionism

As I noted in the introduction, Arnold begins his study of Celtic literature with a somewhat melancholy description of attending an Eisteddfod in Llandudno where, on an ‘unfortunate’ day of ‘storms of wind, clouds of dust and an angry, dirty, sea’, he listens to the last representatives of a once proud tradition reciting verse in a language which Arnold admits he does not understand.40 Upon leaving the festival pavilion he meets an acquaintance fresh from London and the parliamentary session. In a moment, the spell of the Celtic genius was forgotten, the Philistinism of our Anglo-Saxon nature made itself felt, and my friend and I walked up and down by the roaring waves, talking not of ovates and bards, and triads and englyns, but of the sewage question, and the glories of our local self government, and the mysterious perfections of the Metropolitan Board of Works.41

The English philistine’s world of material affairs, of instrumental activity, of the ‘machinery’ of industrial society, is juxtaposed with the creative, imaginative, poetic world of the Celt. The division in Culture and Anarchy between a narrow philistinism and a humanising culture takes the form of a division between Saxons and Celts in the essays on Celtic literature where Arnold’s diagnosis is not only directed at English philistines, but at the whole national community: Now, then, is the moment for the greater delicacy and spirituality of the Celtic peoples who are blended with us, if it be but wisely directed, to make itself felt, prized and honoured. In a certain measure the children of Taliesin and Ossian have now the opportunity for renewing the famous feat of the Greeks, and conquering their conquerors. No service England can render the Celts . . . can surpass what the Celts can at this moment do for England.42

The Celts are invited to participate more fully in the development of the English nation. While the key problem facing Victorian society was expressed in terms of middle-class narrowness in Culture and Anarchy, its solution in On the Study of Celtic Literature is figured in the language of nationhood and ethnicity; ‘Philistinism’ is here replaced by ‘England’, an instrumentalist and materialist ‘England’ which is to be regenerated by an infusion of poetic Celticism.


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This essentially positive reading of Celtic culture has led many critics to overestimate the degree of Arnold’s interest in Celtic literatures. Norman Davies notes, for example, that Arnold ‘was one of the few prominent Victorians to possess an expert knowledge of Celtic literature. At different times in his career, he was Professor at Oxford of both Poetry and of Celtic Studies.’43 While Arnold ends his Celtic lectures by calling for the establishment of a ‘chair of Celtic at Oxford’ as a ‘message of peace to Ireland’, he never held that chair following its establishment in 1877. Indeed, Arnold, as he disarmingly notes in his essays, had virtually no knowledge of the Celtic languages. In the ‘Introduction’ to the Celtic essays Arnold admits the ‘provisional character’ of his remarks and, in the published version of his lectures, he includes footnotes by the Celtic scholar, Lord Strangford, that often point out errors or contradictions in Arnold’s statements on philology, ethnology and Celtic culture.44 Arnold also relied on a wide variety of sources for his examples of Celtic literature. The similarity between Arnold’s study and that of his French contemporary Ernest Renan’s La Poesie des Races Celtiques (1859) has been well established, and Frederick Faverty demonstrates that Arnold borrowed just as extensively from Henri Martin’s Histoire de France (1855–60) and E. F. Edwards’s Reserches sur les langues celtiques (1844).45 To these historical and philological sources can be added the distinction between the Gaelic culture of a feudal Highland society and the hard-headed commercial ethos of Lowland life popularised in Walter Scott’s Waverley which itself derived from the visions and fabrications of early romantics such as Gray and Macpherson.46 Arnold is, then, working within what is by the 1860s a wellestablished European interest in the exoticised Celtic peripheries, and his admission of ignorance of the Celtic languages, his inclusion of Lord Strangford’s corrections, and his reliance on the writings of others for insights and examples, suggest that the lectures were not intended as original contributions to the field of Celtic scholarship. Much has also been made of the racial basis of Arnold’s lectures. While the exposure of racial elements in Arnold’s thought was both necessary and valuable, there is a tendency, as Douglass Lorimer has recently noted, to portray Victorian intellectuals as ‘the racist other in binary opposition to our nonracist self’.47 There is no doubt that Arnold drew on the period’s philological debates regarding IndoEuropeanism, and on the arguments between the monogenists and polygenists (those who argued that humankind came from a single source, and those who argued that there were separate sources for

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distinctive races) that animated racial discourse during the Victorian era, but his reference to ‘the eternal beer, sausages, and bad tobacco’ in Germany, for example, suggests that he adopted a fairly lighthearted approach to Victorian racial debates.48 Arnold, as will become clear in the following analysis, ascribed certain characteristics to specific races but, ultimately, we should look beyond any philological, racial or antiquarian reasons for the motivations that informed Arnold’s Celtic lectures. What seemingly begins as a narrow, almost antiquarian, effort to re-evaluate the merits of a particular set of medieval manuscripts – the study of Celtic Literature – becomes, in practice, an extended exercise in defining a national culture. For, despite Arnold’s essentially positive reading of Celtic culture, his argument is designed to promote ‘the fusion of all the inhabitants of these islands into one homogenous [sic], English speaking whole’ for ‘the swallowing up of separate provincial nationalities, is a consummation to which the natural course of things inevitably tends’.49 Beneath Arnold’s reappraisals of Celtic literature and of English national identity, lies a meditation upon the status of the Celts within a process of English expansion. In order to understand Arnold’s conception of nationhood in relation to this process of English expansion, we need to turn to his first published pamphlet on ‘England and the Italian Question’ (1859).50 In this essay Arnold makes the case for the validity of Italy’s nationalist aspirations which, in 1859, led to a war against Austria with the goal of achieving Italian unification. ‘Is it true that the principle of nationality, in virtue of which the Italians claim their independence, is chimerical?’ asks Arnold, a question which ‘depends on the merits of the particular case in which the principle of nationality is invoked’.51 He is concerned with defending the status of Italy as a great nation, deserving of national unity, and, typically, develops the argument comparatively with reference to England and France, ‘who respectively represent the two greatest nationalities of modern Europe’.52 Let an Englishman or a Frenchman . . . ask himself what it is that makes him take pride in his nationality, what it is which would make it intolerable to his feelings to pass, or to see any part of his country, pass under foreign dominion. He will find that it is the sense of self-esteem generated by knowing the figure which his nation makes in history; by considering the achievements of his nation in war, government, arts, literature, or industry. It is the sense that his people, which has done such great


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things, merits to exist in freedom and dignity, and to enjoy the luxury of self respect . . . Except England and France, no country can have this feeling of self-esteem in so high a degree as Italy.53

Italy deserves to exist in a state of national independence because of her cultural, political, industrial and military successes. Here, then, is an example of a justified nationalism. Having established Italy’s right to self-determination, Arnold warns that the ‘principle of nationality’ should not always be acted upon, for It would have prevented the amalgamation of Cornwall and Wales with England, of Brittany with France. Small nationalities inevitably gravitate towards the larger nationalities in their immediate neighbourhood. Their ultimate fusion is so natural and irresistible that even the sentiment of the absorbed race ceases, with time, to struggle against it; the Cornishman and the Breton become at last, in feeling as well as in political fact, an Englishman and a Frenchman. Great nationalities refuse to be thus absorbed; their resilience from fusion is as natural and inevitable as is the gravitation of petty nationalities towards it.54

The argument could not be clearer. While France, England and Italy deserve to exist ‘in freedom and dignity’, the lesser nations of Europe are to undergo an inevitable process of ‘amalgamation’. In having a great past Italy is like England, and unlike Poland and Ireland: A Pole does not descend by becoming a Russian, or an Irishman by becoming an Englishman. But an Englishman, with his country’s history behind him, descends and deteriorates by becoming anything but an Englishman; a Frenchman, by becoming anything but a Frenchman; an Italian, by becoming anything but an Italian.55

The Italians are, at the time of writing, an amalgamated people like the Poles and the Irish. Yet, because of their history, the Italians rightfully aspire to national unity and self-determination. Arnold constructs a narrative of the Italian past that leads inevitably to nationhood. Ireland and Poland, on the other hand, cannot hope for national independence for they have no narrative that could plausibly lead to it. It seems that what informs Arnold’s argument here are two distinct concepts of nationhood; the one historical and active, the other racial and passive. Edward Said offers an useful means of theorising these two

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divergent conceptions of nationhood towards the end of Orientalism. Said’s study, as I noted in the introduction, has been widely criticised for its conflation of the various modes of cultural representation through which the non-Western world has been constructed. He does (as Bart Moore-Gilbert has noted) allow ‘for some variations between the fields of knowledge which constitute Orientalism’, however, in particular the following distinction between what he describes as ‘vision’ and ‘narrative’. Against this static system of ‘synchronic essentialism’ I have called vision because it presumes that the whole Orient can be seen panoptically, there is constant pressure. The source of pressure is narrative, in that if any Oriental detail can be shown to move, or to develop, diachrony is introduced into the system. What seemed stable – and the Orient is synonymous with stability and unchanging eternality – now appears unstable . . . Narrative, in short, introduces an opposing point of view, perspective, consciousness to the unitary web of vision; it violates the serene Apollonian fictions asserted by vision.56

Said does not develop the argument further, perhaps because the implication that ‘vision’ exists prior to, and independent of, its mediations, makes the distinction unsustainable in practice. While Said traces the tendencies to visualise and narrativise within Orientalist discourse, I would like to adopt the two terms, as a means of characterising Arnold’s two conceptions of nationhood as ‘visualised’ and ‘narrativised’. The English and the Italians possess the latter kind of nationality; it is a product of history, diachronic and subject to further change. The nationhood of the Poles, the Welsh, and the Irish is conceived of in visualised terms, demonstrating certain eternal racial characteristics, synchronic, atemporal and static. The argument is slightly modified in the essays on Celtic literature, for now visualised racial traits are to be compared with narrativised political nations. Thus, Arnold produces a Celt characterised by certain enduring visible traits. ‘The Celtic genius’ he notes has ‘sentiment as its main basis, with love of beauty, charm spirituality for its excellence . . . ineffectualness and self-will for its deficit.’57 The Celt is ‘always ready to react against despotism of fact’ is ‘sensual’ and is ‘particularly disposed to feel the spell of the feminine idiosyncrasy; he has an affinity to it; he is not far from its secret’.58 This inevitably, and crucially, makes the Celt ‘ineffectual in politics’,59 a notion which is developed further:


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. . . I know my brother Saxons, I know their strength, and I know that the Celtic genius will make nothing of trying to set up barriers against them in the world of fact and brute force, of trying to hold its own against them as a political and social counter-power, as the soul of a hostile nationality. To me there is something mournful . . . in hearing a Welshman or an Irishman make pretensions, – natural pretensions, I admit, but how hopelessly in vain! – to such a rival self-establishment . . . The bent of our time is towards science, towards knowing things as they are; so the Celt’s claims towards having his genius and its works fairly treated, as objects of scientific investigation, the Saxon can hardly reject, when these claims are urged simply on their own merits, and are not mixed up with extraneous pretensions which jeopardise them. What the French call the science des origines, the science of origins . . . is very incomplete without a thorough critical account of the Celts, and their genius, language and literature.60

The desire to observe the Celts scientifically while denying them any hope of national self-determination is made explicit. The Saxons are the agents of history, who have the power to ‘reject’ or accept the Celt’s claims to genius as they like. The relatively benevolent Arnold is prepared to accept that claim, as long as it is not part of a wider political agenda.61 He thus goes on to produce a contributionist argument in which the Celts are flattered into accepting a subsidiary position for themselves in relation to the historically emergent English. This aspect of Arnold’s argument poses a challenge to Benedict Anderson’s theory that modes of racial definition have no direct relationship with modes of defining nationality: The fact of the matter is, that nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies, while racism dreams of eternal contaminations, transmitted from the origins of time through an endless sequence of loathsome copulations: outside history.62

The two versions of nationhood – visualised and narrativised – existing within Arnold’s writings suggest, however, that racism and nationalism are not mutually exclusive for, even as he invokes the historical destiny of nations, Arnold does so against the ‘eternal’ characteristics of races.63 Nevertheless, the word ‘contaminations’ in Anderson’s analysis carries negative resonances that do not appear in Arnold’s work – indeed, Arnold sees the ‘loathsome contaminations’ as essentially positive in a process of biological and cultural amalgamation.

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Arnold notes, for instance, that the purpose of his essay is to ‘lead towards solid ground where the Celt may with legitimate satisfaction point to traces of the gifts and workings of his race’ within the life of Victorian England.64 He thus argues that, while the remaining residual members of the Celtic races are expected to abandon all political aspirations and linguistic distinctions in order to contribute fully to the expansion of the English nation, this process of racial intermingling has, in fact, been occurring for centuries. Arnold notes that, within the English people, not only are there some whose ancestors are Celtic, and some whose ancestors are Saxon, but the two lines have become literally joined through intermarriage. The character of English literature is thus not only the product of cultural fusion but it has also been produced by the joining of the essences of two races. [H]ere in our country, in historic times, long after the Celtic embryo had crystallised into the Celt proper, long after the Germanic embryo had crystallised into the German proper, there was an important contact between the two peoples; the Saxons invaded the Britons and settled themselves in the Britons’ country. Well, then, here was a contact which one might expect would leave its traces; if the Saxons got the upper hand, as we all know they did, and made our country be England and us be English, there must yet, one would think, be some trace of the Saxon having met the Briton; there must be some Celtic vein or other running through us.65

In order to offer a complete account of the elements involved in the construction of the English racial hybrid, Arnold also has to account for the presence of Norman blood in his brew of racial essences: I have got a rough, but, I hope, clear notion of these three forces, the Germanic genius, the Celtic genius, the Norman genius. The Germanic genius has steadiness as its main basis, with commonness and humdrum for its defect, fidelity to nature for its excellence. The Celtic genius, sentiment as its main basis, with love of beauty, charm and spirituality for its excellence, ineffectualness and self will for its defect. The Norman genius, talent for affairs as its main basis, with strenuousness and clear rapidity for its excellence, hardness and insolence for its defect, and now to try and trace these in the composite English genius.66

Maintaining that the true strength of the English is derived from their blending in one race the positive aspects of Teuton and Celt, he argues


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that the potential of such a hybrid cannot be achieved without selfknowledge. So long as this mixed constitution of our nature possesses us . . . we are blindly and ignorantly rolled about by the forces of our nature; . . . so soon as we have clearly discerned what they are and begun to apply to them a law of measure, control and guidance they may be made to work for our good and to carry us forward . . . Then we may use the German faithfulness to Nature to give us science, and to free us from insolence and self-will; we may use the Celtic quickness of perception to give us delicacy and to free us from hardness and Philistinism; we may use the Latin decisiveness to give us strenuous clear method, and to free us from fumbling and idling.67

The attempt here is to control the components of one’s racial heredity. Arnold accordingly attempts to trace the historical racial and linguistic origins of the English – Saxon, Celt and Norman – to their cultural manifestations in language, and proceeds by contrasting English prose as exemplified in the news pages of the London Times to the German prose of the Cologne Gazett. ‘At noon a long line of carriages extended from Pall Mall to the Peer’s entrance of the Palace of Westminster’, writes the correspondent of The Times, while the Gazett has ‘Nachdem die Vorbereitungen zu dem auf dem GürzenichSaale zu Ehren der Abgeordneten statt finden sollenden Bankette bereits vollständig getroffen worden waren, fand heute vormittag auf polizeiliche Anordnung die Schliessung sämmtlicher Zugänge zum Gürzenich statt’.68 Arnold concludes: ‘surely the mental habit of a people who express their thoughts in so very different a manner, the one rapid, the other slow, the one plain, the other embarrassed, the one trailing, the other striding, cannot be essentially the same’.69 It follows that there must be something other than common Teutonic stock, which Germans and Saxons share, that accounts for the difference. Philology is then used to reinforce the racial argument that the English people are a hybrid of Teutonism and Celticism. The Celts, in this argument, are deemed to be less an actually existing people than a historic people whose ideals persist as a cultural force within the English composite self. Stefan Collini has noted that there is an ambiguity in Arnold’s use of terms such as ‘Puritanism’, ‘Hebraism’ and ‘Hellenism’, for it is often not clear whether these terms are ‘intended to stand for some ideal-typical set of qualities’ or whether they refer to a ‘particular historical embodiment of those

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qualities’.70 This ambiguity also characterises Arnold’s use of the term ‘Celticism’ and, in this respect, his representation of the Celt shares a number of features with the representation of the Jew in his writings. Arnold makes a connection between Celts and Jews in his first Celtic lecture where he recalls that as a child ‘I was taught to think of Celt as separated by an impassable gulf from Teuton; my father, in particular, was never weary of contrasting them’71, and goes on to note that: Certainly the Jew, – the Jew of ancient times, at least, – then seemed a thousand degrees nearer than the Celt to us. Puritanism had so assimilated Bible ideas and phraseology; names like Ebenezer, and notions like that of hewing Agag in pieces, came so natural to us, that the sense of affinity between the Teutonic and the Hebrew nature was quite strong; a steady, middle-class Anglo-Saxon much more imagined himself Ehud’s cousin than Ossian’s.72

Arnold contrasts this belief of his childhood with the discoveries of Victorian ethnologists. Science, notes Arnold, ‘the science of origins’ has established the ‘true natural grouping of the human race’ and has demonstrated that ‘a Semitic unity’ is ‘separated by profound distinguishing marks from the Indo-European unity’ that is shared by both Teuton and Celt.73 Arnold’s strategy here, then, is to elevate the position of the Celts in the estimation of his Victorian readers by demonstrating that they, unlike the Jews, share a racial affinity with the English. Whereas the Celts may be assimilated into a dominant Englishness the modern spirit tends more and more to establish a sense of native diversity between our European bent and the Semitic bent, and to eliminate, even in our religion, certain elements as purely and excessively Semitic, and therefore, in right, not combinable with our European nature, not assimilable by it.74

Racial science is invoked as a means of establishing the distance between European and Jewish peoples. This argument of 1867 certainly throws a somewhat unflattering light on Arnold’s case in Culture and Anarchy a few years later for the ‘Hellenization’ of philistine attitudes that are based on a ‘Hebraic’ religious moralism, and, indeed, much has been made in recent criticism of the racial basis of Arnold’s cultural thought.75 It is worth noting, however, that Arnold’s ‘Hebraism’ in Culture and Anarchy is not dependent on any innate


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racial components – he makes no references, for instance, to the mental capacity or anatomy of Jews – but is rather a term used to refer to moral values that are traced back to Jewish laws and are sustained in the modern period by Christianity.76 In Literature and Dogma Arnold argues that the Bible should remain a central text within English culture and notes that ‘as long as the world lasts, all who want to make progress in righteousness will come to Israel for inspiration, as to the people who have the sense for righteousness most glowing and strongest’.77 This argument, however, leads Arnold into making ‘an extraordinary distinction’ with regard to the ‘Hebrew people’: In spite of all which in them and in their character is unattractive, nay, repellent, – in spite of their shortcomings even in righteousness itself and their insignificance in everything else, – this petty, unsuccessful, unnameable people, without politics, without science, without art, without charm, deserve their great place in the world’s regard, and are likely to have it more, as the world goes on, rather than less.78

Arnold, it seems, has little respect for actually existing Jews in the present but admires the ‘devout energy’ of Hebraism’s historical form in the past.79 Even as a child it is towards ‘the Jews of ancient times’, not contemporary Jews, that he felt an affinity.80 Arnold’s notion of ‘Hebraism’ thus seems to entail stripping contemporary Jewish culture of all content – ‘without politics, without science, without art’ – so that (to use the terms of my earlier analysis) the visualised, static, characteristics and values of an ancient and valuable Jewish culture of the past, become a contributory historical force within the narrativised, developmental, universal culture of the present. The structure of Arnold’s argument regarding the Jews is replicated in his treatment of the Celts. Arnold, as I’ve already noted, firmly believed that Wales should divest itself of its language, and this is an argument that he also applies to Ireland where he deems the Irish language to be ‘the badge of the beaten race, the property of the vanquished’.81 His views regarding the Celtic languages are particularly significant in the light of his stated belief that it is ‘by the forms of its language’ that ‘a nation expresses its very self’, and that ‘what a people . . . says in its language, its literature, is the great key’.82 Thus, to argue that ‘the Welshman’ should ‘speak English, and if he is an author let him write English’, is to deny the Welsh any vestiges of nationhood.83 If language, for Arnold, offers a means of accessing a people’s history, to deny them their language is to deny them a future

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as Welshmen. Thus, if Arnold was to depict modern-day Jews as lacking in any cultural attributes while the values of an historic Hebraic culture represented one necessary constituent in the creation of a unifying cultural realm, he also expected the Celts to be divested of their cultural distinctions in order that ‘Celticism’, like ‘Hebraism’, could function as an historic force contributing to a cultural ‘perfection’. Celticism, like Hebraism, is always essentially repressed within Arnold’s idea of culture; it was once alive in the past but is now sublimated in the present as part of a hybrid English culture. In Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature solutions for the problems engendered by a process of increasing democratisation – identified as ‘Americanisation’ in ‘Democracy’ – are sought in the ethnic hybridity that Arnold believes characterises the ‘English’ nation. His concept of the ‘alien’, introduced in Culture and Anarchy, carries suggestive connotations in this context, for the agents in the creation of a less philistine England were not only to be the ‘disinterested’ and classless ‘aliens’ but also the ‘sensual’, ‘feminine’ and alien Celts. If the task facing the philistines is to transform themselves in assimilating the ‘masses’, thus creating a homogeneous, classless society, the role for England among the nations is similarly to incorporate the potentially disruptive Celtic peoples into its national boundaries. The contributionist argument of On the Study of Celtic Literature, where the founding of a Celtic chair at Oxford is designed to send ‘a message of peace to Ireland’, is part of this homogenising programme.84 The drive in Arnold’s criticism is always towards reconciliation; towards creating a common cultural sphere that unites the individual religious, ethnic and class interests within society. To realise this essentially liberal vision, however, minorities within the state are expected to divest themselves of any cultural distinctions so that they may participate fully in an allegedly universalist culture. This conception of the relationship between culture and ethnicity was to form the basis for Arnold’s later writings on America. Culture, Class and Ethnicity in America By the 1880s Arnold was widely recognised as England’s leading man of letters, a position that allowed him to embark on two lecture tours of the United States in 1884 and 1886. Following a long preoccupation with questions of religion in the 1870s, these visits to the United States coincided with a renewed commitment to tackling political and social issues in his writings. While Arnold, in ‘Democracy’, had


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encouraged the English to follow the French model of statehood and democracy, by the 1880s he no longer believed that France – whose idea moved masses were now absorbed in worshipping the ‘great goddess Lubricity’ – could provide a satisfactory alternative.85 In his essay ‘Numbers’, written especially for the first American lecture tour, Arnold deploys the racial argument, developed in the lectures on Celtic literature, to explain why France could no longer be considered a suitable model for England’s social and cultural development: By taking the Frenchman who is commonly in view, – the usual type of speaking, doing, vocal, visible, Frenchman – we may say, and he will probably be not at all displeased at our saying, that the German in him has nearly died out, and the Gallo-Latin has quite got the upper hand. For us, however, this means that the chief source of seriousness and of moral ideas is failing and drying up in him, and that what remains are the sources of Gaulish salt, and quickness, and sentiment, and sociability, and sensuality, and rationality. And, of course, the play and working of these qualities is [sic] altered by their being no longer in combination with a dose of German seriousness, but left to work themselves. Left to work by themselves, they give us what we call the homme sensuel moyen, the average sensual man.86

As France degenerated into its celebration of ‘the average sensual man’, America forced itself upon Arnold’s attention with a new immediacy. As he noted in his essay on ‘Civilization in the United States’: To us . . . the future of the United States is of uncalculable importance. Already we feel their influence much, and we shall feel it more. We have a good deal to learn from them; we shall find in them, also, many things to beware of, many points in which it is to be hoped our democracy may not be like theirs.87

In the last decade of his life, Arnold drew on his characteristically comparitivist mode of analysis to bring the key political and cultural issues of the1880s – disestablishment of the Church, Irish Home Rule, the failures of Liberalism – up against American sources of inquiry. If Arnold’s homogenising vision had functioned to deny the Jews and Celts any cultural distinctions in the 1860s, his writings on American civilisation were significantly based on the assumption that ‘the people of the United States’ are ‘the English on the other side of

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the Atlantic’.88 ‘The first thing to remember’ notes Arnold in ‘A Word More About America’, ‘ is that the people over there is at bottom the same people as ourselves’, a view that he reiterates in his essay on ‘Emerson’:89 You are fifty millions mainly sprung, as we in England are mainly sprung, from that German stock which has faults indeed, – faults which have diminished the extent of its influence, diminished its power of attraction and the interest of its history, and which seems moreover just now, from all I can see and hear, to be passing through a not very happy moment, morally, in Germany proper. Yet of the German stock it is, I think, true, as my father said more than fifty years ago, that it has been a stock, ‘of the most moral races of men that the world has yet seen, with the soundest laws, the least violent passions, the fairest domestic and civil virtues’. You come, therefore, of about the best parentage which a modern nation can have.90

Despite his earlier admiration for France, and in spite of his belief that the dull Saxon should be enlivened by the vital Celtic strain, there is considerable evidence in Arnold’s later writings to support Frederic Faverty’s observation that . . . he placed his deepest trust in the ‘serious German races’. Theirs were the sterling virtues, theirs the solid, if also unhappily the stolid, qualities which the world must fall back on at last. It is because he knows them to be strong that he speaks chiefly of their weaknesses. By pointing out their defects, he will enable them to become stronger still.91

While Arnold suggests that the Americans may take considerable pride in the racial heritage which they share with the English, by underlining the common ancestry of the two nations he is ultimately denying Americans any sense of cultural exceptionalism. Whereas Arnold celebrated the mixed, hybrid nature of the English race in his lectures On the Study of Celtic Literature, his argument for the common racial background of the English and American peoples ignored the considerable ethnic diversity that characterised the United States by the time of his visits in the 1880s. As I noted in the introduction, America by this period was emerging as one of the leading nations of the capitalist world. The nation’s industrial expansion attracted the wave of ‘new immigrants’ – the southern and eastern Europeans – who entered the United States in unprecedented


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numbers in the decades after the Civil War. Before 1860 most immigrants had come from Britain, Ireland, Germany and Scandinavia: five million had arrived in the forty years between 1820 and 1860. The next forty years, however, saw fourteen million new arrivals to the United States, the vast majority of whom came from Italy and Poland, Russia, Austria, Turkey, Greece and Syria.92 The Roman Catholic or Jewish and non-English-speaking majority settled primarily in the cities of the north-east and Midwest, where they frequently took the least skilled industrial jobs and were viewed by the nativeborn and by earlier arrivals with apprehension and distrust. Their sheer numbers radically altered the ethnic composition of the nation, and their different manners and customs, modes of dress and religious observances were seen as threatening and disruptive to the dominance of Anglo-Saxon norms.93 Arnold’s argument that the United States was essentially an Anglo-Saxon nation carries considerable significance within this context of ethnic diversity, for his beliefs functioned to reinforce the threatened cultural dominance of the Anglo-Saxon race. Arnold was not blind to this ethnic diversity, however. In ‘A Word About America’, his first piece on the United States written before his visits, he quotes James Russell Lowell in noting that from ‘sturdy father to sturdy son, we have been making this continent habitable for the weaker Old World breed that has swarmed to it during the last half century’.94 ‘This may be quite true’ notes Arnold, and in his later ‘A Word More About America’ he notes that American domestic service ‘is done for them by Irish, German, Swedes, negroes’.95 This ethnic diversity is not a problem, however, for ‘. . . when the immigrant from Europe strikes root in his new home, he becomes an American’.96 John Henry Raleigh is right to list ‘the idea that the races must be conciliated to enrich one another’ as one of the ‘mutual congenialities’ between Arnold and America, and it would seem that the American ideal of what became known as the ‘melting pot’ – in which ethnic and racial differences would be dissolved into a common identity – relates closely to the contributionism that informed Arnold’s lectures on Celtic literature.97 In terms of the theory of national identity that I developed earlier, the static, visual characteristics of the ‘Irish, German, Swedes, negroes’, are seen to contribute to the dominant narrative of the essentially Anglo-Saxon American nation. These contributionist beliefs inform Arnold’s writings on the Southern States. He begins his essay on General Grant by regretting

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the lack of attention given to the Northern General’s memoirs in England, and explains this fact by noting that General Grant, the central figure of these Memoirs, is not to the English imagination the hero of the American Civil War; the hero is Lee, and of Lee the Memoirs tell us little.98

Arnold’s biographers have noted his affinity to the more ‘English’ South which he, like many other leading members of the English intelligentsia, had hoped would win the Civil War so as to humble Yankee pride.99 Arnold was no white supremacist, however. While in Richmond, Virginia, he surprised his hosts by requesting to see one of the all-black schools in the area, where he saw children who I took for granted were whites, and said – ‘So the races are educated together’. ‘No’, said the superintendent, ‘there is a law against it throughout the South: the children you see have a strain of negro blood in them and are so returned by their parents.’ I had to make a little speech to them, and in return they sang for me ‘Dare to be Daniel’ with negro energy.100

While Arnold’s reference to ‘negro energy’ suggests an acceptance of racial difference, his experience at the school leads him to state unequivocally in a letter to his sister that he is ‘astonished’ by the ‘line of demarcation between the white and the negro in the south still’.101 Arnold’s racial theory is utilised in order to describe, and is always secondary to, the cultural characteristics of nations and peoples. It is never offered as the basis for racial segregation. It is therefore logical that the existence of African Americans would not shake Arnold’s belief in the essentially Anglo-Saxon character of the United States. Indeed, by educating all races together, they would be offered access to, and potentially contribute to, the great tradition of English and European knowledge. As in his description of the amalgamation of the Celts into the bloodstream and cultural stream of the English nation, the various ethnicities of the United States would become amalgamated into an American populace defined culturally as ‘the English race in the United States’.102 Ethnicity, for Arnold, is ultimately determined by culture, not blood. If, at times, Arnold emphasises the pervasive influence of race and heredity, this strain in his thought is always tempered by his belief that a ‘community of practice is more telling than a community of origin’.103


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Thus, while the racial theories developed in the Celtic essays resurface in Arnold’s essays on America, the kinship on which he insists between the United States and England is primarily formulated in cultural terms. This formulation allows Arnold to ridicule the notion of an independent literary tradition in the United States and he, significantly, invokes the Celtic periphery in order to make his point. Therefore in literature we have ‘the American Walter Scott’, ‘the American Wordsworth’; nay, I see advertised The Primer of American Literature. Imagine the face of Philip or Alexander at hearing of a Primer of Macedonian Literature! Are we to have a Primer of Canadian Literature too, and a Primer of Australian? We are all contributories to one great literature – English Literature. The contribution of Scotland to this literature is far more serious and important than that of America has yet had time to be; yet a ‘Primer of Scotch Literature’ would be an absurdity.104

In ‘Civilisation in the United States’, Arnold couples his rejection of literary distinctiveness with a rejection of the linguistic distinctiveness that nineteenth-century Americans often claimed for themselves.105 Scotland is again invoked to underline the absurdity of American claims to cultural independence. For every English writer they have an American writer to match. And him good Americans read; the Western States are at this moment being nourished and formed, we hear, on the novels of a native author called Roe, instead of Scott and Dickens . . . Far from admitting that in literature they have as yet produced little that is important, they play at treating American literature as if it were a great independent power; they reform the spelling of the English language by the insight of their average man . . . It reminds me of a thing in Smollet’s dinner-party of authors. Seated by ‘the philosopher who is writing a most orthodox refutation of Bolingbroke, but in the meantime has just been presented to the Grand Jury as a public nuisance for having blasphemed in an alehouse on the Lord’s day’ – seated by this philosopher is ‘the Scotchman who is giving lectures on the pronunciation of the English language’.106

Culturally, then, America has no greater right to autonomy than the amalgamated Celtic periphery and, while all England’s cultural dependants contribute to that ‘one great literature – English Literature’, there is no question as to whom should set the norms of language and canon formation.

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If Arnold considers Roe a secondary author, he does, at various moments, register his admiration for William Dean Howells, Henry James and most significantly, Ralph Waldo Emerson.107 In his lecture on Emerson, written and presented during his first visit to the United States, Arnold notes that his subject was not a great poet, not a great writer, or a great philosopher. Having ‘cleared the ground’ he goes on to note that Emerson’s significance lies in his status as ‘the friend and aider of those who live in the spirit’.108 In this respect, Emerson ‘has lessons for both branches of our race’, and thus functions as an exemplar of the underlying racial and cultural affinities between England and America. I figure him to my mind as visible upon earth still, as still standing here by Boston Bay, or at his own Concord, in his habit as he lived, but of heightened stature and shining feature, with one hand stretched out towards the East, to our laden and labouring England; the other towards the ever-growing West, to his own dearly-loved America, – ‘great, intelligent, sensual, avaricious America’. To us he shows for guidance his lucid freedom, his cheerfulness and hope; to you his dignity, delicacy, serenity, elevation.109

In these final lines of the lecture Arnold progresses from the particular of Emerson’s Concord to his significance in the wider world of English culture. The American author stands as a Colossus bridging two nations, a powerful representative of the essential cultural unity that exists between the ‘two branches’ of the English race. This view of the essential unity between America and England breaks down, however, when Arnold turns to the political realm, which is the subject of much of his writing on the United States. America, Arnold admits, is characterised by a unique class structure and a political formation quite different from, and superior to, that in England. While he locates the roots of that political distinctiveness in the American Revolution (1775–83), Arnold also wishes to play down the revolutionary impetus and political divisiveness of that event. Let us concede . . . that chance and circumstance, as much as deliberate foresight and design, have brought the United States into their present condition, that moreover the British rule which they threw off was not the rule of oppressors and tyrants which declaimers suppose, and that the merit of the Americans was not that of oppressed men rising against


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tyrants, but rather of sensible young people getting rid of stupid and overweening guardians who misunderstood and mismanaged them.110

The relationship between England and America is here expressed in terms of ‘guardians’ and ‘young people’. Arnold underlines the fundamental connection between the two countries even in describing the event which arguably destroyed that connection. While Americans may have been lucky, notes Arnold, not to have had a well-established class structure when they gained their political independence, they are to be congratulated ‘to have forborne all attempts’ at inventing one. American uniqueness lies most significantly for Arnold in its class structure, which is described as follows: I have said somewhere or other that, whereas our society in England distributes itself into Barbarians, Philistines and Populace, America is just ourselves, with the Barbarians quite left out, and the Populace nearly. This would leave the Philistines for the great bulk of the nation; a livelier sort of Philistine than ours, and with the pressure and the false ideal of our Barbarians taken away, but left all the more to himself, and to have his full swing.111

In the American context, then, class and nation become virtually synonymous terms; ‘That which in England we call the middle class is in America virtually the nation.’112 This domination of the national space by the philistine class leads to two somewhat contradictory results in Arnold’s opinion. On the one hand, it gives rise to a banal culture which lacks the beauty and distinction necessary for an interesting civilisation. On the other hand, philistine domination gives rise to an admirably homogeneous, and politically stable, society. I shall discuss these observations in turn. As early as 1848 Arnold was already arguing that the greatest threat to the educated world was the ‘intolerable laideur of the wellfed American masses’.113 His final published essay, ‘Civilisation in the United States’, takes this threat as its subject and is a meditation upon the nature of civilisation itself. Civilisation, for Arnold, ‘is the humanisation of man in society’, the fulfilment of ‘the law of perfection’ that exists within human nature.114 And perhaps what human nature demands in civilisation, over and above all those obvious things which first occur to our thoughts – what human nature, I say, demands in civilisation, if it is to stand as a high

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and satisfying civilisation, is best described by the word interesting. Here is the extraordinary charm of the old Greek civilisation – that it is so interesting. Do not tell me only, says human nature, of the magnitude of your industry and commerce; of the beneficence of your institutions, your freedom, your equality; of the great and growing number of your churches and schools, libraries and newspapers; tell me also if your civilisation – which is the grand name you give to all this development – tell me if your civilisation is interesting.115

This evocative passage, where Arnold adopts the voice of ‘human nature’ in questioning the reader’s assumed preoccupation with material progress, introduces the key category of ‘interest’. In the light of this passage it is clear that Arnold was making a significant critique of American civilisation when, in writing to Grant Duff from Massachusetts in the summer of 1886, he noted that ‘compared with life in England’ America is ‘so uninteresting, so without savour and without depth’.116 The great sources of interest, for Arnold, are ‘distinction’ and ‘beauty’, the absence of which in America is betrayed by its restless and rootless citizenry, its art and architecture, its political leaders, and its sensationalist newspapers. This lack of ‘distinction’ and ‘beauty’ is explained by invoking race, class, and the lack of history. Then the Americans come originally, for the most part, from that great class in English society amongst whom the sense for conduct and business is much more strongly developed than the sense for beauty. If we in England were without the cathedrals, parish churches and castles of the Catholic and feudal age, and without the houses of the Elizabethan age, but had only the towns and buildings which the rise of our middle class has created in the modern age, we should be in much the same case as the Americans.117

If America is to be the emergent model of democracy, then ‘Civilisation in the United States’ suggests that the beauty and distinction which are wholly necessary in attaining ‘a renovated and perfected human society on earth’ are wholly lacking in American civilisation. The essay ‘Numbers’ (1884), which Arnold read most often on his first American tour, seeks to offer some solutions for the problems he believed were facing American culture. ‘Numbers’ develops and elaborates on several of the positions that Arnold had initially adopted in the 1860s. Its purpose was to con-


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vince its American readers that, in any society, ancient or modern, the majority of people are unreliable and that only the few, the ‘remnant’, can be expected to give sound judgement and wisdom. This is particularly the case in America, for . . . in a democratic community like this, with its newness, its magnitude, its strength, its life of business, its sheer freedom and equality, the danger is in the absence of the discipline of respect; in hardness and materialism, exaggeration and boastfulness; in a false smartness, a false audacity, a want of soul and delicacy.118

Arnold justified his rudeness in telling his readers that the majority of them lacked taste and judgement by assuring them that he had been just as blunt with his own countrymen, which indeed he had. As we saw earlier in both ‘Democracy’ and Culture and Anarchy Arnold had dismissed each of the modern English classes as a potential source of leadership, and placed his hopes for the future in a small number of classless ‘aliens’. In ‘Numbers’ the word ‘aliens’, which may have invoked the spectre of the new immigrants in an American context, was replaced by the word ‘remnant’, which was perhaps more likely to invoke the persistence of an Anglo-Saxon stock. Thus, while the lecture is not directly concerned with issues of ethnicity, there may have been deeper reasons than linguistic currency, or biblical resonance, behind Arnold’s transformation of ‘aliens’ into ‘remnant’. The word ‘numbers’ refers not only to the sum total of people that make up a democratic society, but also more specifically to the ‘remnant’ of cultivated leaders, for if ‘the majority is and must be in general unsound everywhere’, then ‘to enable the remnant to succeed, a large strengthening of its numbers is everything’. America offered Arnold the tantalising prospect of a society of such immensity that the remnant could potentially increase its numbers so that it might become ‘incomparable, all-transforming’.119 If the domination of the philistine class had lead to a civilisation devoid of beauty and distinction, a civilisation which depended on a classless and cultured remnant to solve its cultural problems, then the domination of the middle class in America had also lead to a social homogeneity which was wholly positive with regard to political organisation. The Americans, Arnold enthused, are ‘impregnably strong’ against invasion from without and their lack of class distinctions within means that they live in a society that ‘is not in danger from revolution’.120

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Not only have they not the distinction between noble and bourgeois, between aristocracy and the middle class; they have not even the distinction between bourgeois and peasant or artisan, between middle and lower class. They have nothing to create it and compel recognition of it.121

Given this lack of class distinctions the Americans are A people homogeneous, a people which had to constitute itself in a modern age, an epoch of expansion, and which has given to itself institutions entirely fitted for such an age and epoch, and which suit it perfectly – a people not in danger of war from without, not in danger of revolution from within – such is the people of the United States. The political and social problem, then, we must surely allow that they solve successfully.122

While this positive view of American political institutions is sustained throughout Arnold’s writings on America, it is particularly emphasised in his initial response to his first American visit, ‘A Word More About America’. As with the essays on Celtic literature, however, the positive view of America ultimately functions to highlight what is lacking in English social and political institutions: ‘More than half one’s interest in watching the English people of the United States comes, of course, from the bearing of what one finds there upon things at home, among us English people ourselves in these islands.’123 Again, a common racial heritage connecting the English and Americans is emphasised as the basis for comparison in other spheres. Ultimately ‘A Word About America’ is less concerned with conditions in the United States than it is with those in another country – Ireland. America offered Arnold another context within which to discuss the divisive ethnic identities of the United Kingdom. The dominant theme of ‘A Word More About America’ is that the ‘political sense’ in America is ‘sounder’ than that in England. Whereas Americans have successfully solved the political and social problem, and whereas Americans see things ‘straight’ and ‘clear’, the English are still searching for the political path that they should take. Nowhere is this English uncertainty more evident than in their policy towards Ireland, about which there is no ‘clear vision of the great, the profound changes still to be wrought before a stable and prosperous society’ could be established there.124 Arnold had shown his interest in the Irish question in his essays on Celtic literature, by editing the


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papers of Burke in 1881, and in several articles during the 1870s, most notably ‘Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism’ and ‘The Incompatibles’.125 It was, however, Gladstone’s announcement late in 1885, under pressure from the Parnellites, that he planned to offer a measure of home rule that aroused the ‘apprehensions’ which made Ireland the chief concern of Arnold’s final years. Arnold’s solution to the problem of Ireland’s potential secession from Britain is based on an analogy with the American division of state and federal powers: Is not the cure . . . found in a course like that followed in America, in having a much less numerous House of Commons, and in making over a large part of its business to local assemblies, elected, as the House of Commons itself will henceforth be elected, by household suffrage? . . . Wholes neither too large nor too small, not necessarily of equal population by any means, but with characters rendering them in themselves fairly homogeneous and coherent, are the fit units for choosing these local assemblies. Such units occur immediately to one’s mind in the provinces of Ireland, the Highland and Lowlands of Scotland, Wales north and south, groups of English counties such as present themselves in the circuits of the judges or under the names of East Anglia or the Midlands.126

The creation of provincial legislatures to control local affairs is thus seen as a means of addressing Irish grievances without creating an independent Irish state that would endanger ‘the unity of the Empire’.127 Arnold’s views on Ireland may be regarded, in terms of culture and politics, as a mirror image of his views on America. In the case of America, he recognises the nation’s political independence while denying it any sense of an independent cultural or literary tradition. In the case of Ireland he is prepared to accept the existence of an independent Celtic literary tradition in the past, while simultaneously denying the Celtic nations the potential for political independence in the present or future. In 1886 the ‘political crisis’ which he foresaw and wished to avoid was that of the breakup of Britain. Ireland has been a nation, a most unhappy one. Wales, too, and Scotland, have been nations. But politically they are now nations no longer, any one of them. This country could not have risen to its present greatness if they had been. Give them separate Parliaments, and you begin, no doubt, to make them again nations politically. But you begin also to undo what has made this country great.128

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Central to Arnold’s advocacy of regional assemblies across Britain lies a desire to break up the potential national geographies of the Celtic periphery into regions; the provinces of Ireland, north and south Wales, the highlands and lowlands of Scotland. Again, the model is the United States, with the status of Ireland within Britain compared with that of the Southern states within America. Ireland could address no stronger mandate to Parliament to give Home Rule than the Southern States addressed to the North to give them a separate Congress and a separate executive . . . If it would have been dangerous to grant a Southern Congress and a Southern executive, then it would be dangerous to grant an Irish parliament, and an executive responsible to it.129

While Arnold believes the United Sates in the post-Civil War period to have achieved a peaceful, homogeneous society, this remains an unattained goal for Britain, a goal that can be achieved only by alleviating Irish grievances thus uniting the region closer into the institutions of the British state. When Gladstone introduced his Home Rule Bill on 8 April 1886, Arnold described the action as the ‘nadir’ of liberalism, fulfilling his direst predictions about the direction in which the Liberal party was heading, and revealing Gladstone as a ‘dangerous’ minister.130 Arnold’s goal of incorporating the Irish ever closer into the structures of the British state can be considered a part of his wider cultural agenda; his desire to create a truly homogeneous, democratic culture within the islands of Great Britain. In this respect his wish to create a polity without national divisions is fundamentally related to his desire for constructing a society without class divisions. Class and national identity are intertwined throughout Arnold’s contributionist writings in this respect. ‘Inequality is our bane’ he notes, while the American ‘source of strength . . . in political and social concerns’ lies in the ‘homogeneous character of American society’.131 In his discourses on America, as in the earlier social analyses of Culture and Anarchy and On the Study of Celtic Literature, Arnold’s potentially democratic desire to achieve a common culture ultimately reaffirms the cultural, and political, authority of the dominant society. In the American context, the role of an emergent multi-ethnic and thriving working-class culture is largely ignored in the reaffirmation of the hegemonic dominance of Anglo-Saxon traditions. In ‘England’ – it is rarely Britain – the regional ethnic solidarities of the Celtic periphery


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are discounted in the attempted reconceptualisation of a homogeneous national culture. Conclusion If I have argued that Arnold’s conception of ‘culture’ was developed in response to the divisive class and ethnic interests that were fermenting within British industrial society, I am also aware of the dangers of overemphasising the extent of Arnold’s sense of alienation from that society. Arnold does not stand in such an adversarial relation to his culture as his direct criticisms of Victorian society may lead us to believe. Even at his most critical, he is appealing to a body of beliefs and values that he shares with his readers. Arnold is not a critic who attempts to subvert the social values of English society, nor to reverse the direction of its development. His goal is to reinforce and encourage the role of a broadly defined culture, and the authority of the man of letters, within the life of the nation. It would also be a mistake, however, to overemphasise Arnold’s typicality for he is profoundly uncharacteristic of his age in myriad ways: his cosmopolitan Europeanism; his desire to alleviate class and ethnic grievances through education; his attention to the literature of the Celtic peoples; his promotion of a cultural humanism as opposed to the scientific positivism of his time. Much recent writing on Arnold has not addressed the oppositional nature of his works, but has rather used him as an exemplar of all that was wrong in Victorian society.132 It seems that the very act of identifying malfunction becomes in Arnold’s writings an appeal for cohesion. Thus, to utilise the presumed homogeneity of American society as a means of denouncing the divisive methods used by the English in governing Ireland, functions as political critique while simultaneously reinforcing the English right to govern the island. To criticise the philistinism of the middle classes of England and America is also to underline the future role of this class as the leaders of democratic society. To place the cultured ‘alien’, or culturally sensitive ‘remnant’, in a position outside society from which it can critique and possibly transform current trends in the national life, is to perform a strategic manoeuvre that makes the marginal position of the alienated intellectual the very centre of that society being critiqued. Arnold’s criticism is always geared towards reconciliation, towards the creation of a common cultural sphere that unites the individual religious, ethnic and class interests within society. To realise this vision, however, ethnic minorities within the

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‘English’ nation state are expected to abandon their cultural distinctions. While Arnold was certainly atypical in making the case for the centrality of the Celtic races in the historical narrative of the English nation, there is ultimately no space for languages or literatures other than English within his conception of its culture. NOTES

1. Arnold, ‘Report for 1852’ in Sutherland (ed.), Arnold on Education, p. 23. 2. Arnold, ‘Porro Unum Est Necessarium’(1878), CPW VIII, p. 374. 3. Humphreys, Taliesin Tradition, p. 179. I would like to thank the late W. Gareth Evans for his generous assistance in locating materials on Arnold as HMI. On Arnold in Wales see W. G. Evans, ‘The Bilingual Difficulty’. 4. Robert Young makes Arnold’s cultural thought complicit with colonial practice when he notes that the ‘compulsory national education’ advocated by Arnold shared much of its rationale with ‘the spirit of colonialism’. Colonial Desire, p. 51. Edward Said notes, with no evidence to support his case, that Arnold supported General Edward Eyre’s brutal suppression of the Jamaican uprising in 1866. Culture and Imperialism, p. 157. Arnold in fact expresses his opposition to Eyre’s actions in ‘A Courteous Explanation’ (1866), CPW V, p. 35. These critiques are symptomatic of a wider tendency to treat Arnold as the embodiment of conservative Victorian values. For a lucid discussion of this phenomenon see Stefan Collini’s ‘Afterword’ to the Clarendon Paperback Edition of Matthew Arnold, pp. 125–38. 5. The report of the Education Commission of 1847 was promptly dubbed ‘Brad y Llyfrau Gleision’ / ‘The Treason of the Blue Books’, after the Treason of the Long Knives of the Saxons in the days of Vortigern. Accurate enough in its exposure of educational deficiencies in Wales, the Report moved on to attack Nonconformity, the morals of Welsh people (especially the women), and the Welsh language itself. For a brief account in English see P. Morgan, ‘From a Death to a View’, pp. 92–8. For a more detailed analysis see G. T. Roberts, Language of the Blue Books. 6. Arnold, ‘Report from 1852’, p. 23. 7. These terms come from Arnold’s celebrated essays on Culture and Anarchy (1869), CPW V, pp. 113, 145–6. 8. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), in CPW III, p. 348. 9. Burrow, ‘Introduction’ to Limits of State Action, p. xxxiv. 10. Arnold, ‘England and the Italian Question’ (1859), in CPW I, pp. 65–96. ‘Disestablishment in Wales’ (1888) and ‘Civilisation in the United States’ (1888) in CPW XI, pp. 334–9, 350–69.

Matthew Arnold: Culture and Ethnicity 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25.

26. 27. 28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

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Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), CPW V, p. 112. Arnold, CPW V, p. 97. Ibid. p. 97. Arnold, ‘Preface’ to Culture and Anarchy (1869), CPW V, p. 233. Arnold, CPW V, p. 98. Ibid. p. 95. Ibid. p. 95. Williams, Culture and Society, p. xviii. Arnold, CPW V, p. 105. Ibid. p. 113. Ibid. p. 113. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), CPW III, pp. 296–7. Ibid. pp. 296–7. Eagleton, Heathcliff, p. 302. It is interesting in this context to note that, while Arnold plays a pivotal role in Williams’s Culture and Society, he does not appear in The Country and the City. The reason, no doubt, is that the distinction between the country and city does not play a significant part in Arnold’s cultural criticism. On Arnold’s invocations of Greece see Coulling, Matthew Arnold and his Critics, pp. 62–99, and of Elizabethan England see Collini, Matthew Arnold, p. 78. Arnold, ‘Democracy’ (1861), which forms an introduction to his The Popular Education of France in CPW II, pp. 3–29. Arnold, Letters of Matthew Arnold Volume 2, p. 431. Arnold, ‘Democracy’ (1861), CPW II, pp. 15–16. Arnold quotes the letter in his ‘Introduction’ to On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), CPW III, p. 390. On Owen, see B. Davies, Hugh Owen. This useful synopsis of the position that Arnold had held from the 1860s onwards comes from ‘Equality’ (1878) in CPW VIII, p. 302. Arnold, ‘Democracy’, CPW II, pp. 26–7. See Williams, Culture and Society, pp. 126–9. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), in CPW V, p. 121. Ibid. p. 146. Ibid. pp. 145–6. Ibid. p. 144. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, CPW III, p. 348. Arnold, ‘Democracy’, CPW II, p. 26. Arnold delivered his lectures on Celtic literature at Oxford on the following dates: 6/7/1865, 7/7/65, 24/2/66, 26/5/66, and they appeared in The Cornhill Magazine between March and July 1866. They were eventually published in book form by Smith, Elder and Co. in 1867. See Murray, Life of Matthew Arnold, pp. 226–31, and Super’s notes on the lectures in CPW III, pp. 539–40.

68 ] 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45.

46. 47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61.

Ethnicity and Cultural Authority Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, in CPW III, p. 345. Ibid. pp. 294–5. Ibid. pp. 295–6. Ibid. p. 390. Davies, The Isles, p. 784. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, CPW III, p. 387. Faverty, Arnold the Ethnologist. On the influence of Renan see Bromwich, Matthew Arnold, and on Renan and Edwards see Young, Colonial Desire. For a discussion of Arnold’s Celtic lectures within a Scottish context see Chapman, Gaelic Vision. Lorimer, ‘Reconstructing Victorian Racial Discourse’, p. 187. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, CPW III, 342. On Victorian racial thought see Stepan, Idea of Race. On Arnold and race see Young, Colonial Desire, and on philology see N. Thomas, ‘Renan, Arnold and Unamuno’. Young draws attention to Arnold’s admiration for Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau, whose Essay on the Inequality of Races (1853–5) is ‘regarded as a precursor for fascist racial theory’ (Young, Colonial Desire, p. 85.) Even in the rare cases where Arnold does draw extensively on Gobineau, such as his essay on ‘A Persian Passion Play’(1871), there is little evidence of his being influenced by racial thought (See Faverty, Arnold the Ethnologist, pp. 43, 228.) Indeed, Arnold notes explicitly ‘that if the interest of the Persian passion-plays had seemed to me to lie solely in the curious evidence they afford of the workings of patriotic feeling in a conquered people, I should hardly have occupied myself with them at this length’, CPW VII, p. 34. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, CPW III, p. 296. Arnold, ‘England and the Italian Question’ (1859), CPW I, pp. 65–96. Ibid, p. 70. Ibid, p. 71. Ibid. pp. 71–2. Ibid. p. 71. Ibid. p. 73. Said, Orientalism, p. 240. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, CPW III, p. 311. Ibid. pp. 344, 345, 347. Ibid. p. 346. Ibid. p. 299. It is worth stressing the originality of Arnold’s analysis within the context of the period’s anti-Celticism. A sense of the English view of the Celts in the 1860s can be gleaned from the reviews of Arnold’s lectures that appeared in The Times and The Daily Telegraph. According to The Times,


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The Welsh language is the curse of Wales . . . An Eisteddfod is one of the most mischievous and selfish pieces of sentimentalism which could possibly be perpetrated. It is simply foolish interference with the natural progress of civilisation and prosperity . . . Not only the energy and power, but the intelligence and music of Europe have come mainly from Teutonic sources, and this glorification of everything Celtic, if it were not pedantry, would be sheer ignorance. The sooner all Welsh specialities disappear from the face of the earth the better. Quoted in Dawson and Pfordresher (eds), Arnold: Prose Writings, pp. 159–66. See also L. P. Curtis, Anglo-Saxons and Celts. 62. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 136. 63. In a revisionist account of mid-nineteenth-century British culture, Peter Mandler suggests that a ‘civilisational’ rather than ‘racial’ perspective characterised the thought of the period. The problem of his analysis is that he concentrates almost wholly on how the English conceived of England and Englishness. Arnold’s writings suggest that a civilisational view of England could happily coexist, and was even predicated upon, a racial view of the Celts. See Mandler, ‘“Race” and “Nation”’. 64. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, CPW III, p. 389. 65. Ibid. p. 336. 66. Ibid. p. 351. 67. Ibid. p. 383. 68. Ibid. p. 351. 69. Ibid. pp. 351–2. 70. Collini, Matthew Arnold, p. 79. 71. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, CPW III, 300. 72. Ibid. p. 300. 73. Ibid. pp. 300, 301. 74. Ibid. p. 301. 75. On the influence of Victorian racial thought on Arnold see Young, Colonial Desire, Appiah and Gutman, Color Conscious, Cheyette, Constructions of ‘the Jew’. 76. See, for example, Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, CPW V, pp. 165, 172. 77. Arnold, ‘Literature and Dogma’, (1873) in CPW VI, pp. 199. 78. Ibid. p. 199. 79. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, CPW V, p. 255. 80. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, CPW III, p. 300. 81. Ibid. p. 293. 82. Ibid. pp. 334, 335. 83. Ibid. p. 297. 84. Ibid. p. 386.

70 ] 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97.

98. 99. 100. 101. 102. 103. 104. 105.

106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116.

Ethnicity and Cultural Authority Arnold, ‘Numbers’ (1884), in CPW X, p. 158. Ibid. p. 157. Arnold, ‘Civilisation in the United States’ (1888), CPW XI, p. 368. Arnold, ‘A Word About America’ (1882), CPW X, p. 2. Arnold, ‘A Word More About America’ (1882), CPW X, p. 198. Arnold, ‘Emerson’ (1883), CPW X, p. 163. Faverty, Arnold the Ethnologist, p. 76. See Daniels, ‘The Immigrant Experience’. See Trachtenberg, Incorporation of America, pp. 87–8. Arnold, ‘A Word About America’, CPW X, p. 12. Arnold, ‘A Word More About America’, CPW X, 200. Ibid. 200. Raleigh, Arnold and American Culture, p. 250. This view of racial and cultural assimilation became known as the ‘melting pot’ theory. The term was not generally used in nineteenth-century America. It was popularised in 1908 in a play of that name by an English Jew, Israel Zangwill. See Sollors, Beyond Ethnicity, pp. 66–101. Arnold, ‘General Grant’ (1887), CPW XI, p. 144. See Honan, Matthew Arnold, p. 402, and Trilling, Matthew Arnold, p. 402. Arnold, Letters of Matthew Arnold Vol. 5, p. 362. Ibid. p. 362. Arnold, ‘A Word More About America’, CPW X, p. 203. Arnold, ‘A French Critic on Goethe’ (1878), CPW VIII, p. 256. Arnold, ‘General Grant’ (1887), CPW XI, p. 177. On debates regarding the distinctiveness of American English, see Nettels, Language, Race and Social Class, pp. 41–61. On language debates in the United States more generally see Shell, ‘Babel in America’. Arnold, ‘Civilisation in the United States’ (1888), CPW XI, pp. 364–5. For Arnold on Howells see ‘Emerson’(1883), CPW X, p. 180, on James, ‘A Word About America’, CPW X, p. 7. Arnold, ‘Emerson’, CPW X, p. 177. Ibid. p. 186. Arnold, ‘A Word More About America’, CPW X, p. 197. Arnold, ‘A Word About America’, CPW X, p. 7. Ibid. p. 10. Arnold, Letters of Matthew Arnold Volume 1, p. 95. Arnold, ‘Civilisation in the United States’, CPW XI, pp. 356, 357. Ibid. p. 357. Arnold, Letters of Matthew Arnold Volume 6, p. 183. Arnold expresses this view in noting the limitations of Andrew Carnegie’s book on ‘the material progress of this country’, Triumphant Democracy.

Matthew Arnold: Culture and Ethnicity 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132.

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Arnold, ‘Civilisation in the United States’, CPW XI, p. 359. Arnold, ‘Numbers’ (1884), CPW X, p. 162. Ibid. p. 164. Arnold, ‘A Word More About America’, CPW X, pp. 198, 199. Ibid. pp. 199–200. Ibid. p. 202. Ibid. p. 203. Ibid. p. 206. ‘Irish Catholicism and British Liberalism’ (1878) in CPW VIII, pp. 321–47, and ‘The Incompatibles’ (1881) collected in CPW IX, pp. 238–85. Arnold, ‘A Word More About America’, CPW X, p. 210. Ibid. p. 210. Arnold, ‘The Political Crisis’ (1886), CPW XI, p. 79. Arnold, ‘The Zenith of Conservatism’ (1886), CPW XI, pp. 132–3. Arnold, ‘The Nadir of Liberalism’ (1886), CPW XI, and ‘The Zenith of Conservatism’, CPW XI, pp. 124, 135. Arnold, ‘A Word More About America’, CPW X, pp. 213, 209. See Arac, Critical Genealogies. Said, Culture and Imperialism.

chapter 2

William Dean Howells REalism, Ethnicity and the nation

After I had gone to Hartford in response to Clemens’s telegram, Matthew Arnold arrived in Boston, and one of my family called on his, to explain why I was not at home to receive his introduction: I had gone to see Mark Twain. ‘Oh, but he doesn’t like that sort of thing, does he?’ ‘He likes Mr. Clemens very much,’ my representative answered, ‘and he thinks him one of the greatest men he ever knew.’ I was still Clemens’s guest at Hartford when Arnold came there to lecture, and one night we went to meet him at a reception. While his hand laxly held mine in greeting, I saw his eyes fixed intensely on the other side of the room. ‘Who – who in the world is that?’ I looked and said, ‘Oh, that is Mark Twain.’ I do not remember just how their instant encounter was contrived by Arnold’s wish, but I have the impression that they were not parted for long during the evening, and the next night Arnold, as if still under the glamour of that potent presence, was at Clemens’s house. I cannot say how they got on, or what they made of each other; if Clemens ever spoke of Arnold, I do not recall what he said, but Arnold had shown a sense of him from which the incredulous sniff of the polite world, now so universally exploded, had already perished. W. D. Howells, ‘My Mark Twain’ (1910)1

Matthew Arnold’s busy schedule during his first lecture tour among the ‘English on the other side of the Atlantic’ meant that he missed the ‘Dean’ of American letters, W. D. Howells, in Boston, and wrote to suggest that they should meet some time in Cobham ‘at a small hovel I have in Surrey where I have never yet succeeded in decoying Henry James’.2 On 14 November 1883 they eventually caught up [ 72 ]

William Dean Howells: Realism, Ethnicity and the Nation

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with each other and, in the context of his fond reminiscences of ‘My Mark Twain’, Howells depicts the scene as a meeting of two cultures: Arnold’s polite English world of lax handshakes and disdainful remarks encounters an American warmth and humour represented by Clemens. Yet the meeting of Howells and Arnold is itself significant for, despite their considerable differences, both were comparable figures in the cultural life of their respective nations. If Arnold criticised the immobilising materialism of the declining British aristocracy, the vulgar philistinism of the emerging middle class, and the potential anarchism of the working majority, in his desire to see the ‘sweetness and light’ of ‘culture’ as an alternative source of legitimacy and social authority, Howells responded similarly to the forces of industrialism by seeking a middle ground for the ‘man of letters’ between the crude barbarism of an increasingly volatile immigrant working class and the arrested aesthetic sensibilities of a middle class with its passions for sentimental tales and romances. In his essay ‘The Man of Letters as Man of Business’ Howells argued that the creative artist was essentially homeless in the industrialised world, belonging neither to ‘the masses’ – the wage earners – nor to the ‘classes’ – those who paid the wages and read the novelist’s work. So long as people remained divided into ‘classes and masses’, Howells believed that the artist’s social location would remain anomalous.3 Howells himself was, however, firmly and securely set within the cultural institutions of his time. As Assistant Editor of The Atlantic in Boston from 1867 to 1881, and then of Harper’s Weekly in New York, Howells was happy to accept his role as spokesman for the intelligent middle class, while, like Arnold, being fully aware and critical of that class’s shortcomings. Howells also followed Arnold in configuring the dangers of the emergent social order primarily in terms of class and ethnicity, and in emphasising the role of literature in promoting a common and stable national culture in an era of dramatic and far-reaching social changes. Alan Trachtenberg has influentially described the post-Civil War decades as the era of ‘the incorporation of America’, a period that saw the expansion of industrial capitalism across the United States following the disappearance of the frontier, the spread of a market economy into all regions of that which Robert Wiebe described as a ‘distended society’, and a fundamental shift in cultural values and perceptions as a result of these processes.4 Significantly subtitling his analysis ‘Culture and Society in the Gilded Age’, Trachtenberg follows Raymond Williams in arguing that the idea of ‘culture’ emerged in this period

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in almost direct response to the turmoil and impassable gulfs accompanying industrial incorporation – the new immigrant work force, the doom of the countryside and rise of the great city, the mechanisation of daily life, the invasion of the market place into human relations, the corruption and scandal of a political universe dominated by great wealth.5

American industrialisation, or incorporation, argues Trachtenberg ‘spawned a normative ideal of culture which served as protection against other realities’.6 While it will have been clear from the introduction that I consider Williams’s account of the emergence of an idea of ‘culture’ in opposition to the perceived materialism of an industrial society to supply a useful framework, my analysis of Arnold’s writings suggested that Williams’s account is unable to account fully for the range of positions that the period’s men of letters adopted in relation to the beliefs and values of their industrialising societies. Several contemporary historians have challenged the rather formalistic and potentially reductive reading of late Victorian America offered by Trachtenberg.7 Richard Teichgraeber suggests that the American idea of culture is unique in that it developed from a ‘distinctively American ideal of self-culture’ with its roots in Unitarianism and Emersonian Transcendentalism.8 However, the well-documented enthusiasm with which Matthew Arnold’s ideas (if not the person) were received in the United States should warn us against overemphasising the extent of American exceptionalism. Having attended Arnold’s lecture on Emerson, William Dean Howells, arguably the most influential American cultural commentator of his time, wrote to Edmund Gosse to note that We are having Matthew Arnold rather intensely. His lectures in Boston at least have been a great success. I only heard that on Emerson, which seemed to me just and good; I never was too fervid an Emersonian, liking my poetry and philosophy best without conundrums.9

Throughout his long life, Howells was primarily engaged in a process of constructing and promoting an idea of American cultural distinctiveness, yet he turned less towards Emerson and the Transcendentalists for his literary models than to the period’s French and Russian novelists, Italian dramatists and German poets.10 Just as Arnold turned to Heine, Renan, and other European sources in his attempts at enlightening the philistines of England, so Howells turned to French and Russian realism, Italian comedy and German poetry,


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as sources of inspiration for the emergence of an American literary tradition. Rather than following Teichgraeber’s suggestion that late nineteenth-century America was characterised by a distinctive ‘ideal of self-culture’, I am more inclined to follow T. Jackson Lears who, in the most detailed historical account that we have of the cultural practices and values of Gilded Age America, argues that a pervasive ‘anti-modernism’ plays a key role in ‘shaping a trans-Atlantic Victorian culture’.11 ‘Anti-modernism’ notes Lears, ‘was not simply escapism; it was ambivalent, often coexisting with enthusiasm for material progress.’12 Lears’s emphasis on the ambivalence at the heart of the period’s anti-modernism is important, for perhaps the most significant similarity between the cultural thought of Matthew Arnold and William Dean Howells lies in their ambivalent responses to the developments taking place within, what they both described as, ‘modern civilisation’. Like Arnold, Howells believed in the construction of a democratic common culture that would unite a society perceived to be dividing along lines of class and ethnicity, but sought to achieve this goal by formulating an aesthetic theory based on the homogenising and unifying force of realism. In this chapter, I proceed from a reconstruction of Howells’s cultural thought to consider the challenges posed to Howells’s aesthetic theory by the potentially divisive forces of linguistic and racial difference. Howells is a particularly significant figure in this respect, for his American cultural nationalism combines a desire to unite the diversity that he believes characterises America into a common national identity, with a commitment to underlining America’s cultural independence from England. A number of contradictions lie at the heart of Howells’s cultural thought. On the one hand, he argued, like Whitman and Twain, that the man of letters was ‘allied to the great mass of wage workers who are paid for the labour they put into the thing done’ while, on the other hand, he argued that ‘in so far as the artist is a man of the world, he is the less an artist’.13 This tension between the socially committed and aesthetically transcendent conception of the man of letters is reflected in a tension between a view that literature should be the vehicle for conserving ‘the precious difference of temperament between the races’ and a view of literature as illustrating the fact that ‘at this stage in proceedings there is no such thing as nationality in the highest literary expression; but there is a universality, a humanity, which is very much better’.14 Elsa Nettels argues that ‘much of Howells’s writings suggest an unresolved conflict between racial attitudes and democratic ideals’, a

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conflict that might also be described in terms of cultural pluralism and cultural universalism. The continuing power of Howells’s writings derives from the struggle to reconcile these tensions.15 Howells, Arnold and (Welsh-)American Culture Matthew Arnold’s ambivalent reactions towards ‘modern civilisation’ – reflected in the fact that he could describe culture as being ‘at variance with the mechanical and material civilisation in esteem with us’, while also arguing that culture ‘admits the necessity of the movement towards fortune-making and exaggerated industrialism’ – are also present in Howells’s reactions to the wide-ranging industrial developments that were transforming America in the second half of the nineteenth century.16 At the Natural Gas Jubilee in Findlay, Ohio he was amazed at the flourishing industry that had transformed farmers into millionaires and wrote excitedly to Mark Twain that I wish I could blow off a gas-well in this note, for then you would have some notion of what a gas well is. But I can’t, and so you had better come, and see what thirteen of them all going at once, are.17

On observing the great Corliss steam-engine at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 – which stood at 39 feet (12m) tall, weighed 680 tons and inspired thousands of tourists to crowd into Machinery Hall – Howells delighted in the ‘unerring intelligence’ and the ‘vast and almost silent grandeur’ of the machine, before drawing back as he realised that this ‘prodigious Afreet’ could crush its attendant engineer ‘past all resemblance of humanity’.18 Such ambivalent attitudes were also to colour his creative writings and cultural criticism. The Philadelphia Centennial Exposition was intended as a celebration of the unprecedented speed and scale of American industrialisation. When Howells was a twenty-three-year-old Ohio newspaperman working on a campaign biography of Lincoln in 1860, America produced 821,000 tons of pig iron and 13 tons of raw steel. By 1890, 9.5 million tons of pig iron and 5,000 tons of steel were being produced, with Howells firmly established as the Dean of American letters. In 1860 the United States was fourth in the world in the value of its manufactured products. New England alone had a per-capita output higher than any nation in the world by 1893, and 1894 saw America leading the world in the value of its manufactured goods.19 Edward


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Atkinson, a leading economist, gave voice to the period’s pervasive optimism when he proclaimed in 1891 that There has never been in the history of civilisation a period, or a place, or a section of the earth in which science and invention have worked such progress or have created such opportunity for material welfare as in the United States in the period since the end of the Civil War.20

T. Jackson Lears notes that such optimism ‘rang from pulpits and platforms across the nation’ in the 1880s and 1890s, and this confidence manifests itself famously in William Dean Howells’s ‘Editor’s Study’ of September 1886:21 [I]n a land where journeymen carpenters and plumbers strike for four dollars a day the sum of hunger and cold is certainly very small, and the wrong from class to class is almost inappreciable. We invite our novelists, therefore, to concern themselves with the more smiling aspects of life, which are the more American, and to seek the universal in the individual rather than the social interests. It is worth while, even at the risk of being called commonplace, to be true to our well-to-do actualities; the very passions themselves seem to be softened and modified by conditions which cannot be said to wrong any one, to cramp endeavor, or to cross lawful desire.22

In an era of increasing labour agitation Howells’s call for the ‘universal’ to be sought within the individual rather than within the divisive ‘social interests’ is reminiscent of Arnold’s call on individuals to cultivate their ‘best selves’ as opposed to the ‘ordinary selves’ represented by class, ethnic and religious interests. While certainly representing one strand of Howells’s thought, this passage has often been quoted out of context and in isolation to represent the banal Victorian optimism and the essentially conservative tenor of his writings.23 The passage appears, however, in a discussion of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment, and Howells wishes to underline the relative comfort within which American writers are allowed to live and work when compared to their Russian contemporary: ‘Whatever their deserts, very few American novelists have been led out to be shot, or finally exiled to the rigors of a winter at Duluth.’24 Howells goes on to note, in a tone that actually challenges Victorian complacency, that ‘we have death too in America’, and having recalled the brutal realities of slavery which stand as a ‘dark shadow of our shameful past’ he

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encourages Americans to read Dostoevsky for he ‘teaches . . . the duty of man to man, from which not even the Americans are emancipated’.25 If, in his remarks on Dostoevsky, the negative dimension of Howells’s social vision is largely suppressed behind a dominant tone of faith and optimism regarding the beneficence of American progress, the emphasis is reversed in a letter he wrote to his close friend Henry James two years later, in October 1888: I’m not in a very good humor with ‘America’ myself. It seems to me the most grotesquely illogical thing under the sun . . . I should hardly like to trust pen and ink with all the audacity of my social ideas; but after fifty years of optimistic content with ‘civilization’ and its ability to come out all right in the end , I now abhor it, and feel that it is coming out all wrong in the end, unless it bases itself anew on a real equality. Meantime, I wear a fur-lined overcoat, and live in all the luxury my money can buy.26

Here, as in many of Howells’s letters and editorial writings from the late 1880s onwards, the vision darkens, and even the self-deprecating final sentence represents a guilty awareness of the apparent hypocrisy of his thoughts, not a celebration of American prosperity. Howells had in fact trusted his pen with the audacity of his social ideas a year earlier in his vigorous defence of the Haymarket bombers. The 1880s witnessed almost ten thousand strikes and lockouts, with close to 700,000 workers striking in 1886 alone, the year of the ‘Great Upheaval’.27 At the heart of that year’s events were the Haymarket riots where a protest meeting had been called following the death of four strikers at the hands of police in Chicago. Things proceeded peacefully until a bomb was thrown as the crowd dispersed, killing a policeman. In the following riots seven more policemen and four civilians lost their lives. Despite the lack of any evidence police rounded up eight known anarchists and charged them with the killings. Seven men faced execution and another faced fifteen years in a state penitentiary.28 Howells, placing himself in opposition to public opinion and to the opinion of the period’s leading literary figures, played a central role in the effort to save the men; his name headed a petition for commutation of sentences, and he wrote a personal letter to the New York Tribune in an attempt at lining up all responsible forces in society to back that petition. Few were prepared to take a similar stand in the face of public emotions and, while Howells’s and other socialists’ efforts led to two death sentences being commuted to life


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terms, two of the suspected committed suicide in prison and a further four were executed. The tragic conclusion of the affair left Howells distraught at what he described as the ‘civic murder’ of innocent men.29 Thus, if Howells had suggested that American artists should emphasise the ‘smiling aspects of life’, and reiterated this view when compiling his critical writings as Criticism and Fiction in 1891, he also argued that ‘art . . . is beginning to find out that if it does not make friends with Need it must perish’.30 He accordingly recommended some unlikely candidates for consideration as ‘Christmas literature’ in the December of 1888: [Art] perceives that to take itself from the many and leave them no joy in their work, and to give itself to the few whom it can bring no joy in their idleness, is an error that kills. This has long been the burden of Ruskin’s message; and if we believe William Morris, the common people have heard him gladly, and have felt the truth of what he says. ‘They see the prophet in him rather than the fantastic rhetorician, as more superfine audiences do;’ and the men and women who do the hard work of the world have learned from him and from Morris that they have a right to pleasure in their toil, and that when justice is done them they will have it.31

If Howells was increasingly following Ruskin in his criticism of industrial society, and following Morris in attacking the joylessness of industrial labour, his approach to social issues in this excerpt is in fact closer to Arnold. Unlike Ruskin, Howells did not develop his critique of industrialism by comparing Victorian society to an idealised feudal or Christian past and, unlike Morris, he did not ally his vision of a more just society to the growth and aspirations of the working class. Rather, Howells adopts an Arnoldian approach which identifies the failures of each class; the ‘many’ engage in joyless work, while the ‘few’ live a life of joyless ‘idleness’. Howells, in calling for an art of ‘truth’, seeks to expose the fact that the victims of society are not only to be found among the poor alone, among the hungry, the houseless, the ragged; but one also finds them among the rich, cursed with the aimlessness, the satiety, the despair of wealth, wasting their lives in a fool’s paradise of shows and semblances, with nothing real but the misery that comes of insincerity and selfishness.32

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Writing within two months of the letter to Henry James in which he had sympathised with the plight of the poor while wearing his ‘furlined overcoat’, Howells identifies ‘luxury and poverty’ as ‘plagues’ that have ‘bred together in the life-blood of society’. Class divisions, whether manifested in poverty or wealth, are to be regretted for they divide society, and Howells significantly ends his Christmas thoughts by urging his readers to ‘remember’ the divided state of American society, ‘and take thought for its healing’.33 It is here that we encounter the most significant similarity between the social and cultural thought of Arnold and Howells; the goal of ‘literature’ in its broadest sense, for both men, is to encourage the ‘healing’ of social divisions, to direct their respective nations towards the creation of stable societies and homogeneous cultures. This dimension of their thought, however – the desired reconciliation of divisive social interests – also foregrounds an important difference in their cultural criticism. The cold, ‘lax’, handshake that, according to this chapter’s opening quotation, Howells shared with Arnold in Hartford should warn us against overemphasising the similarities between the two men. Sacvan Bercovitch’s observation regarding the different understanding of ‘culture’ in America and England is useful here, for a comparison of Arnold and Howells corroborates his argument that, while Arnold appealed to a ‘love of human perfection’ that was grounded in one’s ‘best self’, American writers ‘tended to associate the “best self” with a mythic American self . . . and culture itself with the mission of American democracy’.34 While Howells, like the Arnold of Culture and Anarchy and On the Study of Celtic Literature, was always concerned with alleviating the divisions within the national culture, he was also engaged in a cultural nationalist project of forging an independent American literary tradition. Arnold, reflecting a widely observed English blindness to questions of nationalism, assumed that his idea of ‘culture’ was a universal category, while ‘culture’ for Howells is primarily, self-consciously, American. Despite occasionally describing ‘American culture’ in universal terms as the fulfilment of the true qualities of humanity, Howells was primarily concerned with developing a cultural nationalist project that was predicated upon rejecting three widely held views which had been reinforced in Arnold’s writings on America: the notion that American society was not interesting owing to its lack of distinction; the belief that the people of America were no more than ‘the English race in the United States’; and the belief that American literature was part of ‘one great literature – English literature’.35


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In his ‘Editor’s Study’ of July 1888, Howells simultaneously responded to Arnold’s death and reacted to the Englishman’s recent writings on America. What troubled Howells in Arnold’s American lectures was the fact that the ‘implication of his censure was not so much that we had no literature or art, as that we had nothing that was strictly American in either’.36 In countering this view, Howells turns Arnold’s criticisms into resources for underlining the originality of American culture. He admits that ‘while we perceive that his observations of our life wanted breadth and depth and finality, we must acknowledge that in its superficial way, and as far as it went, it was mostly just’.37 Indeed, Howells suggests that Arnold’s attacks on American boastfulness, on the vulgarity of its press and the lack of historically saturated scenes and buildings in its landscape could have been taken further had he drawn attention to the facts that the relations of capital and labor in our free democracy are about as full of violence as those in any European monarchy; we have wasted the public lands which we won largely by force and fraud, and we are the prey of many vast and corrupting monopolies.38

Yet, there is one criticism, notes Howells, which ‘we should gladly accept as true’, and that is the ‘lack of distinction’ that Arnold lamented in American life: ‘If we have really got rid of distinction of the sort he seems to prize, we have made a great advance on the lines of our fundamental principles’.39 Howells transforms Arnold’s criticism of America’s lack of distinction into a compliment by arguing passionately, if somewhat illogically in an age of increasing labour agitation, that ‘the idea that we call America has realised itself so far that we already have identification rather than distinction as the fact which strikes the foreign critic’.40 The lack of cultural and political élitism is what gives the ‘idea’ called America a tangible social, and culturally independent, reality: So far from feeling cast down by Mr. Arnold’s failure to detect distinction in a nation which has produced such varied types of greatness in recent times as Lincoln, Longfellow, Grant, Emerson, John Brown, Mrs. Stowe, Hawthorne, not to name many others eminent in art and science and finance, we are disposed to a serene complacency by it.41

Howells constructs a canon of American literary and political notables in order to reinforce his argument for American exceptionalism.

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Rather than comparing American writers with their European counterparts, as Arnold ‘compared Emerson to his disadvantage with several second-rate British classics’, Howells’s goal is to persuade all artists intending greatness in any kind among us that the recognition of the fact pointed out by Mr. Arnold ought to be a source of inspiration to them, and not discouragement. We have been now some hundred years building up a state on the affirmation of the essential equality of men in their rights and duties, and whether we have been right or have been wrong the gods have taken us at our word, and have responded to us with a civilisation in which there is no distinction perceptible to the eye that loves and values it. Such beauty and such grandeur as we have is common beauty, common grandeur, or the beauty and grandeur in which the quality of solidarity so prevails that neither distinguishes itself to the disadvantage of anything else. It seems to us that these conditions invite the artist to the study and the appreciation of the common, and to the portrayal in every art of those finer and higher aspects which unite rather than sever humanity, if he would thrive in our new order of things.42

Here, as Edwin Cady has noted, Howells ‘produced an unique democratic manifesto’.43 Indeed, the key words of Howells’s social and literary criticism are to be found here; ‘rights and duties’, ‘equality’, ‘common’, ‘unity’. The challenge for the artist is to forge an American aesthetic that will truthfully represent the reality of American social equality and, by so doing, to engage in the creation of an independent literary tradition commensurate with the nation’s political independence. Despite the urgency of Howells’s tone in proclaiming the need for a national literature, he was not alone in offering such a vision of American cultural exceptionalism, and his ‘manifesto’ resonates with similar sentiments expressed by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Walt Whitman.44 In 1837 Ralph Waldo Emerson delivered his address on ‘The American Scholar’ at Harvard, in which he called on American thinkers to disassociate themselves from the culture of Europe: ‘We have listened too long to the courtly muse of Europe’. In rejecting ‘the great, the remote, the romantic’ he embraced ‘the common . . . the familiar, the low’ and envisioned a uniquely American literary and artistic tradition developing through a ‘gradual domestication of the idea of Culture’.45 By 1867, however, speaking on the theme of ‘The Progress of Culture’ to that same society, Emerson presented his argu-


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ment in more Arnoldian terms. Reacting to a new social context in which, according to Richard Hofstadter, the intelligentsia and leaders of previous decades found their values and social authority challenged by hostile forces in the shape of rapacious businessmen and a rapidly expanding immigrant working class, Emerson eloquently expressed an attitude that came to characterise Gilded Age America, and that Arnold reinforced in his American speeches; that the inheritors of New England culture and politics now represented a virtuous and cultured remnant in whose hands lay the conservation of the morality and civility of the nation.46 Emerson thus called for a ‘knighthood of virtue’, and asserted his belief in ‘the tendencies of the educated class’ who, like Arnold’s cultured ‘aliens’, represented ‘the promise of better times and greater men’.47 Despite the similarity of their calls for American cultural independence, Emerson’s call for the cultural leadership of the nation to be placed in the hands of the traditional educated élites of New England was wholly anathema to the cultural and political values of William Dean Howells. Indeed, the rise of the Ohioan Howells into his age’s leading man of letters is regarded by many American cultural historians as a sign that, in Larzer Ziff’s words, ‘the country was growing up and taking more of its tone from the West’.48 Howells recalls how, on his first visit to New England, he was ‘as proud of the West as I was of Wales’ and, if several critics have noted that Howells’s Western background represented a shift from the dominance of New England in American letters, few have commented on the ways in which his ethnic background challenged the dominant Anglo-Saxonism of New England culture.49 He begins his autobiography Years of My Youth (1916) by describing his family as follows: I was born on the 1st of March, 1837, at Martin’s Ferry, Belmont County, Ohio. My father’s name was William Cooper Howells, and my mother’s was Mary Dean; they were married six years before my birth, and I was the second child in their family of eight. On my father’s side my people were wholly Welsh, except his English grandmother, and on my mother’s side wholly German, except her Irish father . . . I can reasonably suppose that it is because of the mixture of Welsh, German and Irish in me that I feel so typically American, and that I am of the imaginative temperament which has enabled me all the conscious years of my life to see reality more iridescent and beautiful, or more lurid and terrible, than any makebelieve about reality.50

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While Howells initially mentions his English great-grandmother on his father’s side, the English element of his make-up is omitted when he summarises his ethnic background a few lines later. It would seem, then, that part of his strategy here is to invoke his Celtic and German stock, which he suggests lies at the basis of his imaginative creativity, as a means of countering the view that Americans are merely ‘the English race in the United States’.51 Howells also stresses his Welsh ancestry in his earlier autobiography, written in the third person for ‘Harper’s Young People’, A Boy’s Town (1890): His great-grandfather was a prosperous manufacturer of Welsh flannels, who had founded his industry in a pretty town called The Hay, on the river Wye, in South Wales, where the boy saw one of the mills, still making Welsh flannels, when he visited his father’s birthplace a few years ago. This great-grandfather was a Friend by Convincement, as the Quakers say; that is, he was a convert, and not a born Friend, and he had the zeal of a convert. He loved equality and fraternity . . . [H]is son, who had inherited all his radicalism, sailed with his family for Boston in 1808, when my boy’s father was a year old. From Boston he passed to one Quaker neighborhood after another, in New York, Virginia and Ohio, setting up machinery of woolen mills, and finally, after much disastrous experiment in farming, paused at the Boy’s Town, and established himself in the drug and book business: drugs and books are still sold together, I believe, in small places. He had long ceased to be a Quaker, but he remained a Friend to every righteous cause; and brought shame to his grand-son’s soul by being an abolitionist in days when it was infamy to wish the slaves set free.52

If Howells’s grandfather became a Quaker by ‘convincement’, Howells himself chose to define himself as a Welsh-American in a number of his writings. Howells’s letters and novels are peppered with references to his ancestry. His novels abound with Merediths, Bowenses, Powells, Robertses and Morgans. The socialist philosopher in The World of Chance (1893) is given the Welsh name, David Hughes, and, in A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), written at a time when Howells was being attacked for his political radicalism, the editor Fulkerson advises journalist Basil March to increase sales by targeting the novelist Bevans: ‘Go for Bevans’ novels. The popular gag is to abuse Bevans.’53 Writing to Thomas Perry in 1911, Howells noted how the then British Chancellor of the Exchequer, David Lloyd George (with whom he’d had afternoon tea in London), was typical


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of ‘us Welsh’ in having failed to fulfil his promise of acknowledging receipt of ‘my books by his own hand’, before going on to note that ‘[w]e are a dreadful lot, of a moral stature no greater than our physical. But we do whop it to the English.’54 His travels across Britain in 1911 led him to conclude that the ‘English universally hate the Welsh, perhaps because they fear them; they are really much brighter and quicker’, and while he included his vivid accounts of Aberystwyth and Llandudno in a collection entitled Seven English Cities (1909), the emphasis throughout is on the difference between Wales and England:55 It is only some six or seven hours by train from London to Aberystwyth but, if you will look at the names on a map of the Cambrian railways, when you begin the Welsh part of your journey, you will seem to be in a stranger and farther country than that of Prester John. Pwllheli, Cerrig y Drudion, Gwerful Goch, Festiniog, Bryn Eglwys, Llanidloes, Maertwro, Carnedd Fibast, Clynog Fwr, Llan-y-Mawddwy, Machynlleth, Duffws, are a few out of the hundred names in the hills or along the valleys, giving the near neighborhood of England an effect of more than mid-Asian remoteness [sic].56

The impression, as in Arnold’s Celtic essays, is one of a distinct otherness but, in recounting his experiences in Wales, Howells leads the uninitiated American traveller through the land of, what he describes as, his ‘co-racials’.57 The most revealing exposition of Howells’s ethnic background comes in the form of his ‘St David’s Day Address’, given to the Welsh Society of New York in 1895. It is worth quoting this little-known piece at length: The Welsh chief Owen Glendower, who held the English at bay for many years, no earlier than the fifteenth century, was regarded as little better than a myth by the Sassenachs of his own time, in spite of all the hard knocks he gave them . . . Such is the force of fancy among our race that the English succession of the native princes of Wales was established by the lovely Welsh supposition that the son of an English king if born in Wales, was a native prince: and the effect of this has since gone so far that it is no longer necessary for any prince of Wales to be born in his own country. Wales is the only land which can impart this virtue of nativity to an alien and it is purely by the power of her most potent fancy that she does it. She was indeed never conquered by the English, as is known

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to all but Welshmen. She was captivated by them through her fancy. But her sovereign became Welsh, instead of her becoming English . . . As for some other Welsh fancies, I confess that I like to indulge them, and I feel free to do so because they flatter my pride ethnically and not personally. I like to think of myself the son of a people whose courage is as questionless as their history is blameless: of a race wedded from the first to the love of letters whose saints were scholars and whose princes were poets; whose peaceful rivalries in love and music at the Eisteddfods are immortal memorials of a golden age, in our iron times . . . Our fancy has kept us first pure and then peaceable in all high ideals: and by force of the rarest imagination in history a certain Welshman . . . was inspired in an age of bigotry and cruelty, simply to fancy himself in another man’s place and to wish for his neighbor the same freedom he desired for himself. No one but a man of inspired fancy could have done this, and it remained for Roger Williams, so late as the seventeenth century, to imagine that principle of perfect spiritual charity, which none aforetime, holiest saint or wisest sage, had conceived of. With him, with that greatest of all possible Welshmen, a new light came into the world, and men at last perceived that freedom to worship God meant the freedom of men to worship God, each in his own way, or even not at all.58

While essentially humorous in both tone and intent (somewhat reminiscent of Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court) this passage foregrounds the terms in which Howells conceived of his own ethnic identity.59 The emphasis throughout is on ‘our race’ and ‘our people’, yet Howells is aware that he is speaking to an audience that considers itself both Welsh and American. The conception of ethnicity here is essentially identical to that developed by Arnold in his lectures on Celtic literature. The Welsh ‘Eisteddfods’ are regarded as being ‘immortal memorials of a golden age in our iron times’, and this contrast between a Welsh primitivism and AngloAmerican materialism occurs elsewhere in Howells’s writings, such as when he encounters ‘an accountant’ on a ‘railroad journey’ who argues that the Welsh are ‘the prize liars of the universe’. He was an expert accountant by profession, and his affairs took him everywhere in the three Kingdoms, and this was his settled error; for the Welsh themselves know that, if they sometimes seem prey of a lively imagination, it is the philologically noted fault of their language, which refuses to lend itself to the accurate expression of fact, but which would probably afford them terms


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for pronouncing the statement of my accountant inexact. He was perhaps a man of convictions rather than conclusions, for, though he was a bright intelligence, of unusually varied interests, there were things that had never appealed to him.60

The tone is humorous and high spirited but the characteristic division between a narrow, utilitarian, economic sphere and a primitive, imaginative, Celtic sphere – guarded here by the language barrier – informs the scene. Whereas Arnold’s contributionist argument sought to demonstrate the way in which a spiritual Welshness could become an enriching part of an emergent industrial England, Howells, in his St David’s Day speech, narrates the means by which the Welsh, ‘through their fancy’, made the conquering English princes Welsh; ‘Wales is the only land which can impart this virtue of nativity to an alien’. The Welsh incorporation of the English princes serves to mirror the American incorporation of the Welsh. Not only do the Welsh have a proud nationalist tradition that goes back to the revolts of Owain Glyndw ˆ r against the Sassenach but, in the figure of the democratic Puritan leader, Roger Williams, they are also among the most prophetic and democratic of America’s founding peoples.61 By invoking the name of Roger Williams, Howells testifies to the prevalence of the ideology of Puritan origins in nineteenth-century America as traced by Sacvan Bercovitch among others, while simultaneously suggesting that it is possible to be American and also ‘the greatest of all Welshmen’.62 Howells thus seeks to transcend the boundaries defining a distinctive Welsh ethnicity by forging a contributionist narrative in which the historical narrative of Welsh-Americans is fused with the dominant narrative of American expansion. This reconstruction of the Welsh contribution to the dominant narrative of the American nation was also extended to Howells’s discussion of other ethnic groups. Elsa Nettels draws attention to Howells’s 1909 address to the New York Society for Italian Immigrants in which he identified Italians as the most recent contributors to a process of ‘successive assimilations’ which began in New York with the Dutch who were assimilated by the English, who in turn received the Irish, and who were then themselves followed by the Germans, Slavs and Italians.63 While his work does contain references to America’s literary dependence on England, and to the essentially Anglo-Saxon nature of American culture, these are far outweighed by Howells’s defence of the integrity of American traditions.64 His own ethnic background testified to the divergent traditions involved in the

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making of an American; ‘What a great thing it is not to be an Englishman’ he noted in 1881, ‘It’s a sort of point of nobility’.65 ‘The ideal America, which is the only real America,’ he noted in 1889, ‘is not in the keeping of any one race; her destinies are too large for that custody; the English race is only one of many races with which our future rests.’66 Ethnicity is always invoked by Howells as part of a wider cultural strategy. Thus, the heterogeneity of his own ethnic background forms part of his argument that ethnically, and thus culturally, America is quite different from England. In opposition to the notion of an AngloSaxon, New-England-based ‘remnant’ to guide the cultural life of the nation, Howells argued for a culture based on the ethnic differences which made America distinctive, and which was mirrored in his own Celtic and Germanic background. The goal of his cultural and literary criticism was to encourage the artistic attempt at expressing American social diversity within an aesthetic whole. Thus, if the ‘idea that we call America’ sought to identify and homogenise, Howells was fully aware of the conflicting interests which that national idea had ceaselessly to negotiate. In addition to underlining the cultural independence of American literature, Howells was also attempting to unite the diversity of the American people into an awareness of an homogeneous national community. His contributionist strategy is similar to Arnold’s in this respect, for at the heart of his social philosophy lies a belief that the nation’s valuable differences in region, class, race and ethnicity can ultimately be reconciled within a political democracy. Like Arnold, Howells sought to foster an homogeneous democratic society through the construction of a common culture. He believed that the most appropriate way to promote such an ideal was in the form of literary realism. Realism and the Nation Realism for Howells is an art form that resolves and reconciles. The realist novel is able to hold within itself the linguistic, ethnic and class divisions within society; it is an art that is productively engaged in urging an American nation into being, and is a form of writing that resolves the conflict between the aesthetic and the material which Howells believes is upheld in romantic literature. In his first, hardhitting, ‘Editor’s Study’ for Harper’s Magazine, he announced that ‘It is well to call things by their names, even if they are spades’, and proceeded to distinguish between ‘the bad school we were all brought up


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in’ and the ‘admirable’ among the latest novels. The good novel demonstrates a disposition to regard our life without the literary glasses so long thought desirable, and to see character, not as it is in other fiction, but as it abounds outside of all fiction . . . It is what relates American fiction to the only living movement in imaginative literature, and distinguishes by a superior freshness the authenticity of this group of American novels from any . . . group of English novels, giving them the same good right to be as the like number of recent Russian novels, French novels, Spanish novels, Italian novels, Norwegian novels.67

Howells’s argument here is informed by his cultural nationalism for, in the period that was the heyday of the English realist novel, Howells argues that to embrace realism – the art that views character ‘as it abounds outside of all fiction’ – is to embrace a distinctly European, as opposed to English, tradition. He proceeds to argue that realism is an art particularly appropriate to the American scene, for the goal of the American artist in the late nineteenth century is to ‘widen the bounds of sympathy’ by revealing the conditions of a particular society so that readers, perceiving the likeness to themselves in others, may be ‘humbled and strengthened with a sense of their fraternity’.68 He repeatedly envisions American writers as a great partnership together ‘striving to make each part of the country and each phase of our civilization known to all other parts’.69 In this respect Howells equated the aims of realism with the aims of democracy: ‘Democracy in literature . . . wishes to know and to tell the truth, confident that consolation and delight are there.’70 Political democracy and literary realism are united in Howells’s aesthetic theory. Howells’s attempt to make the realist novel a source of cultural authority can be regarded as one of many responses to what Jackson Lears has identified as a general fear of ‘unreality’ and ‘weightlessness’ at the heart of middle-class life in late nineteenth-century America. Lears argues that ‘this sense of unreality – manifest physically in the increase in nervous disorders – stems from the breakdown of traditional sources of cultural authority – the community, the home, the church, – which had once guaranteed an optimistic belief in the harmony of moral and material progress’.71 In Howells’s novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, Bromfield Corey argues in an Arnoldian vein that ‘[a]ll civilisation comes through literature now, especially in our country. Once we were softened, if not polished, by

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religion; but I suspect that the pulpit counts for much less now in civilising.’72 While Corey is not a spokesperson for Howells’s own views in the novel, it seems that for the author himself the contemporary dislocation of cultural authority had led to a situation in which the novel could become a source of cultural and moral authority. In his ‘Editor’s Study’ of April 1887 Howells approvingly quotes Vernon Lee in noting that ‘The modern human being has been largely fashioned by those who have written about him, and most of all by the novelist.’73 Modernity here is defined by fiction which, by forming ‘the whole intellectual life of such immense numbers of people’, has the power to shape and revise the values of society.74 Behind Howells’s conception of the realist novelist as an active participant in the creation and consolidation of the values and beliefs of late nineteenth-century America, there lies a persistent contradiction. For, while the realist novelist attempts to view and depict human behaviour, he also seeks to engender a sense of fraternity between individuals in society. In representing what exists beyond the text, the realist, as Richard Brodhead has noted, ‘is always actually engaging, by his own covert admission, in an act of fabrication’ and in a use of fiction’s power to make real what it cannot find outside itself in the real world.75 There is thus a contradiction within Howells’s definition of realism between the passive realist narrator, who simply observes contemporary life, and the interventionist novelist, who seeks to educate and to inform his readers. This is a significant contradiction, for it relates Howells’s realist practice to his cultural nationalism. The contradictions within realism mirror the contradictions of nationalist ideology itself ; a desired ‘reality’ or ‘nation’ is at once potentially in existence, and yet needs to be constructed; it is present and absent simultaneously, caught in a perpetual tension between actual and ideal. The question of how best to represent a continually transforming social reality is always related in Howells’s writings to the question of how best to portray the American nation. This relation between realism and nationhood is foregrounded in the scene at Bromfield Corey’s dinner party in The Rise of Silas Lapham. Corey muses that the ‘abundance – the superabundance – of heroism’ evident during the American Civil War seems to have vanished from the national life and may not occur again until a new conflict arises.76 ‘Till it comes’ the Reverend Mr Sewell replies, ‘we must content ourselves with the everyday generosities and sacrifices. They make up in quantity what they lack in quality, perhaps.’77 ‘They’re


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not so picturesque,’ Corey complains, ‘[y]ou can paint a man dying for his country, but you can’t express on canvas a man fulfilling the duties of a good citizen.’78 This conversation is juxtaposed against Silas Lapham’s account of his war-time friendship with Jim Millon. Millon had sacrificed his life for his friend, by taking a Confederate bullet shot at Lapham. Having been distinctly uneasy and out of place for much of the dinner party, Lapham is grateful for the chance to tell his own story while the others listen with interest. As he comes to the end of his tale, Lapham becomes light headed and looks for a drink to clear his head. He ignores the bottle of mineral water offered to him by Bellingham and grabs the Madeira wine, thus reminding the reader that alcohol has been the catalyst for his tale. Howells deflates the story by linking it to Lapham’s inebriation, which becomes increasingly, and painfully, obvious to Corey and his guests. John Crowley has noted that the reason for Howells’s undercutting becomes clear later in the novel when Lapham risks even his marriage to provide for Millon’s wife and daughter. ‘I want to live for poor Molly and Zerrilla,’ Millon had cried on the day of his death, and Lapham vows to honour that sentiment by supporting his friend’s family. Lapham continues his financial assistance to Millon’s wife and daughter even when this threatens the stability of his own marriage. Thus, Howells contrasts the war-time heroics of Millon to the everyday heroism of Lapham. Whereas the inebriated Lapham portrayed a ‘man dying for his country’ at the dinner party, Howells the novelist depicts a man ‘fulfilling the duties of a good citizen’. Lapham’s romantic tale is juxtaposed against his social deed, and it seems that Lapham’s actions as a citizen are meant to make more of an impression than his status as a Civil War combatant. One goal of Howells’s realism here is to suggest that ‘dying for one’s country’ is neither the only, nor necessarily the best, measure of heroism. Neither is it necessarily the most aesthetically convincing means of depicting the nation. In Indian Summer (1886), written concurrently with The Rise of Silas Lapham and set in Italy where he lived as an American consul during the Civil War, Howells considers the problems of depicting the nation from another viewpoint: that of the American expatriate.79 The novel depicts Theodore Colville, a middle-aged Western American journalist, returning to Florence, a city which he connects with his youth. There he meets with an American acquaintance from those earlier days, Mrs Bowen, and her young ward, Imogene Graham. The plot, in which Colville initially falls in love with Imogene before realising his future lies with his contemporary, Mrs

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Bowen, forms a frame in which the novelist meditates upon the condition of middle age and the loss of youth: ‘I heard just such singing before I fell asleep the night after that party at Madame Uccelli’s, and it filled me with fury.’ ‘Why should it do that?’ ‘I don’t know. It seemed like voices from our youth – Lina.’ She had no resentment of his use of her name in the tone with which he asked: ‘Did you hate that so much?’ ‘No; the loss of it.’ They both fetched a deep breath.80

If the focus is primarily on the personal experiences of the main characters throughout, there are moments when the narrator draws back from the personal to the general. At such moments, the personal experience of a lost youthfulness and encroaching middle age is seen to reflect the historical development of the characters’ native America. Having initially left his country in ‘disgust’ and ‘disappointment’, the sojourn in Florence makes Colville increasingly aware of the cultural maturity, and the increasing bonds of democratic nationhood among Americans. It interested him to find that some geographical distinctions which are fading at home had quite disappeared in Florence. When he was there before, people from quite small towns in the East had made pretty Lina Ridgely and her friend feel the disadvantage of having come from the Western side of an imaginary line; he had himself been at the pains always to let people know, at the American watering-places where he spent his vacations, that though presently from Des Vaches, Indiana, he was really born in Rhode Island; but in Florence it was not at all necessary. He found in Mrs. Bowen’s house people from Denver, Chicago, St. Louis, Boston, New York, and Baltimore, all meeting as of apparently the same civilisation . . . The time had been when the fact that Miss Graham came from Buffalo would have gone far to class her with the animal from which her native city had taken its name; but now it made no difference, unless it was a difference in her favour.81

Colville is here observing the positive cultural ramifications of the dwindling of New England dominance on the national culture, and the rise of the West that Howells had done so much to foster. The connection between a dwindling cultural authority in the East, and the


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increasing ethnic diversity of the United States as the nation matures, is made explicit in the words of the minister, Mr Waters. No, I shall never go back to New England. New England? New Ireland – New Canada! Half the farms in Haddam are in the hands of our Irish friends, and the labour on the rest is half done by French Canadians. That is all right and well. New England must come to me here, by way of the great middle West and the Pacific coast. Colville smiled at the Emersonian touch, but he said gravely, ‘I can never quite reconcile myself to the thought of dying out of my own country.’82

If Colville idealises his past youth in the novel’s dominant narrative, Waters idealises an age of American innocence now passed. If his occupation itself suggests the waning of dominant values, his insistence in talking of New England is indicative of a mentality in which the north-eastern States represent the nation. Colville’s response is indicative of his own emerging romantic nationalism and, as is so typical of the modern expatriate experience, the period abroad makes him realise the emotional ties to his homeland. The novel’s personal and national narratives are ultimately intertwined. At the personal level, while Colville cannot recapture a lost youth in the object of his male fantasies, Imogene, he finds happiness, and hope for the future, with the civilised Mrs Bowen. The novel’s narrative of nationhood progresses similarly, for Colville’s failure to recapture his youthfulness in Florence makes him wonder: What did he care for the Italians of today, or the history of the Florentines as expressed in their architectural monuments? It was the problems of the vast, tumultuous American life, which he had turned his back on, that really concerned him . . . He was no longer young, that was true; but with an ache of old regret he felt that he had not yet lived his life, that his was a baffled destiny, an arrested fate.83

The romances of youth, and idealisations of the past, are thus to be rejected. The role of the journalist Colville, as for the American realist novelist, is to face the present reality of the nation, for there lies his destiny. Given the novel’s narrative logic, it is perhaps not surprising that Howells declared that ‘I shall hardly venture abroad again in fiction’ having completed Indian Summer.84 If it was possible to project a

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cogent ‘idea called America’ while portraying the lives of an expatriate colony in Florence, the challenge Howells posed himself in the novels from the late 1880s onwards was to portray an American imagined community from within. In the growing American cities, the realist novelist was faced with the task of creating a unity from an increasing ethnic, class and linguistic heterogeneity. What most impresses the Bostonian Marches when they arrive in New York in A Hazard of New Fortunes, for instance, is the city’s ‘quality of foreigness’.85 In the streets they see ‘Italian faces, French faces, Spanish faces’, and the frequenters of Maroni’s restaurant, a meeting place for the novel’s various characters, are ‘of all nationalities and religions’.86 In the earlier novel, The Rise of Silas Lapham, Lapham exclaims that he does not recognise faces despite riding the same boat from Boston to Nahant for seven years. The town is full of ‘strangers’, and he expresses his frustration at being unable to interpret the faces he sees: ‘The astonishing thing to me’, he states, ‘is not what the face tells, but what it don’t tell.’87 He concludes, however, that not being able to read the inner life from the surface appearance may have its advantages because his life would also be open to interpretations that ‘would take a man out of his own hands’.88 The narrator at this point interrupts to contradict Lapham, and claims that The greater part of the crowd on board – and, of course, the boat was crowded – looked as if they might not only be easily but safely known. There was little style and no distinction among them; they were people who were going down to the beach for the fun of it . . . In face they were commonplace, with nothing but the American poetry of vivid purpose to light them up, where they did not wholly lack fire. But they were nearly all shrewd and friendly-looking, with an apparent readiness for the humorous intimacy native to us all.89

Amy Kaplan suggests that, while Lapham finds the crowd to be inscrutable and prefers to remain distanced from it to protect his private self, ‘the realist finds the crowd is in fact an open book’ that demonstrates an ‘American poetry of vivid purpose’ that is easily and safely known. Thus, rather than riding in conflict with the crowd, the omniscient narrator adopts a position above it and thus details the common people as familiar and unthreatening.90 Whereas contemporary post-structuralist critiques of realism conceive of the form as reflecting and reinforcing social divisions in its ‘hierarchy of discourses’ controlled from above by the authoritarian voice of the


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omniscient narrator, Howells’s narrator in this scene seeks to dissolve the distance between people and reveal the underlying unity of Americans as they contribute to a national life that is ‘native to us all’.91 There were limitations, however, to Howells’s faith in the power of realism to promote brotherhood and a democratic national identity; limitations that became apparent when his theory of realism was applied to an increasingly heterogeneous society. While the realist narrator’s ‘loyalty to environment’ may ideally foster a sense of unity and human kinship, it may equally reinforce social difference and economic inequality. If Howells’s novels sought to construct a vision of a social whole, there are moments in his work where this goal of national and social reconciliation proves elusive. In the analyses that follow I look at the strains placed upon Howells’s contributionist nationalism when faced with the social realities of linguistic and racial difference. Realism and Language In his first ‘Editor’s Study’ for Harper’s Monthly in January 1886, Howells reaffirmed his belief that, despite their diversity, the American people were united. Although America was decentralised, comprising many regions, dialects and ethnicities, Howells believed that there existed a national spirit and character distinguishing Americans from other nationalities.92 His cultural nationalist project led Howells to argue that, if Americans attempted to conform to British usage in their language, ‘we shall be priggish and artificial’.93 American writers should strive to write ‘good American English – the only kind of English that Americans can be expected to write ‘like natives’.94 In the novel A Fearful Responsibility, when the American Lily Mayhew visits an American family in Venice, the narrator notes that ‘Now it was only English they spoke, but that American variety of the language of which I hope we shall grow less and less ashamed’.95 Unlike figures such as Joseph Fitzgerald, who urged the readers of Harper’s Magazine to treat foreign loanwords as ‘aliens, and to agitate for an exclusion act against them’, Howells felt no need to establish a British pedigree for American words and idioms, and encouraged the growth of a distinctively American English.96 ‘The English language is primarily in the mouths of living men,’ he noted, ‘it has no transmissible life but what comes thence, and there we must seek it if we would say anything clearly or stoutly to our own generation.’97 Yet, if language was

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to be a source of American particularity, language difference, in fiction even more than in life, creates the reader’s impression of a character’s culture and distinguishes him or her from persons of a different culture. This tension between language’s paradoxical role as a source of unity and of diversity is particularly foregrounded in Howells’s espousal and use of dialect. Dialect, for Howells, indicated a ‘wider diffusion of the impulse to get the whole of American life into our fiction’, and functioned to revitalise ‘our inherited English’ in the creation of a distinctively American English.98 In accordance with Howells’s realist convictions, dialect furthered the goal of introducing peoples of different classes and backgrounds into American fiction. He thus encouraged the representation of social groups formerly neglected or idealised in literary representation: the mountain folk of Mary Murfee; the New England villagers of Mary Wilkins Freeman; Hamlin Garland’s midwestern farmers; Crane’s prostitutes; and Abraham Cahan’s immigrant workers. While Howells believed that dialect freed these authors and characters from the ‘conventional and artificial guise of fancy and tradition’, however, it also foregrounded the problems inherent in the project of constructing a common culture in a society characterised by ethnic and language differences.99 Howells’s apparently democratic aspiration in fostering the use of dialect and encouraging the representation of ethnic diversity may be seen as part of an attempt at forging an Anglophone American literary tradition in a period of considerable linguistic diversity in which the vast majority of immigrant groups published, or were in the process of producing, their own newspapers and literary works.100 The case of Abraham Cahan is instructive in this respect. Impatient at the string of rejections that he received from Englishlanguage editors for his novel of Jewish immigrant life, Yekl, Cahan published the novel in Yiddish. Howells, who encouraged Cahan and believed that his book was an important contribution to American literature, was initially distressed but then smiled and observed ‘It means that the book hasn’t been published’.101 When the novel finally did appear in English in 1896, Howells wrote a glowing review in which he argued that the key question raised by Cahan’s novel of American life was ‘What will be the final language spoken by the New Yorker?’ We shall always write and print a sort of literary English, I suppose, but with a mixture of races the spoken tongue may be a thing composite and


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strange beyond our present knowledge. Mr. Abraham Cahan, in his ‘Yekl, A Story of the New York Ghetto’ is full of indirect suggestions upon this point. Perhaps we shall have a New York jargon which shall be to English what the native Yiddish of his characters is to Hebrew, and it will be interlarded with Russian, Polish and German words, as their present jargon is with English vocables and with American slang.102

While Aviva Taubenfeld suggests that ‘Howells seems threatened . . . by the language of Cahan’s characters’, it seems to me that Howells views the various possibilities of language change fairly dispassionately.103 What is significant here is that Howells talks in terms of the fusion of the different languages into one, not in terms of the coexistence of various linguistic communities, or of a multilingual polity. Howells’s observation, that a book published in Yiddish was, in effect, invisible to the American public, makes explicit that English is the American norm, a view which is then reiterated by the fact that the ‘Russian, Polish and German words’ are to be ‘interlarded’ with the dominant English vocabulary. The various languages of America are seen to fuse with, and contribute to, a dominant English in creating a unique American language. Howells’s view of the fusion of linguistic differences into a dominant American English is similar to Arnold’s argument that ultimately the Celtic languages should give way to the English language, as the imaginative creativity of the Celts merges with the political practicality of the Saxons. Howells’s and Arnold’s responses to linguistic difference are not identical, however, as can be illustrated in their responses to Welsh. Whereas Arnold follows his description of a day in Llandudno with the argument that ‘the sooner the Welsh language disappears . . . the better’, Howells – visiting the same town forty years later – buys a phrase book, seeks further information about Welsh-language poetry, opens his account with a digression on pronunciation, and refers to the English as the ‘Saesneg’ throughout thus reflecting his attempt at identifying with his native ‘co-racials’.104 In a concluding overview of his views of Britain, however, Howells expresses his doubts as to the value of preserving a ‘minority’ language.105 [W]hether it is well for the Welsh to cling so strongly to their ancient speech is doubted by many Welshmen. These hold that it cramps and dwarfs the national genius; but in the mean time in Ireland the national genius, long enlarged to our universal English, offers the strange spectacle of an endeavour to climb back in its Gaelic shell.106

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While the doubts in the first sentence are being asked by the Welshmen themselves rather than by Howells, there is little doubt as to where he stands when he goes on to invoke the universalism of ‘our’ English in contrast to the ‘Gaelic shell’. Thus, despite Howells’s view of Welsh as an imaginative and anti-materialist language, and despite his interest in its literature, he ultimately repeats his views regarding the Yiddish of Abraham Cahan in seeing little value in the preservation of linguistic difference. The question of language difference foregrounds the contradictions within the cultural contributionism espoused by both Arnold and Howells. They both shared a democratic desire to make culture available to all individuals within the geographical space of the nation, but the culture that they had in mind was conceived exclusively on a model in which only certain kinds of expression – expressed in English in the case of Britain and America – were able to register as culture at all. Concerns over linguistic differences take a fictional form in Howells’s remarkable novel of New York, A Hazard of New Fortunes (1889), where an anxiety regarding linguistic diversity manifests itself powerfully in the novel’s language and in its narrative development. The novel’s final sentence – in which Basil March answers a question from his wife regarding an acquaintance they have just encountered on a busy New York street – offers a useful place to begin discussing the significance of language in the book’s multilayered depiction of urban life. March’s reply that ‘We must trust that look of hers’ seems a throwaway line yet is, in fact, an important final statement of the novel’s formal and thematic issues.107 The attempt to portray the confusing ethnic, class and linguistic diversity of New York posed a new challenge to Howells’s realist practice, and the issue for much of the novel is how best to view the city: from which point of view can urban life best be depicted. It is a question that is raised from the outset as the Marches’ search for a new home allows them to see a number of the city’s various neighbourhoods. Faced with scenes of poverty, Isabel March reacts by denying its existence: I’m beginning to feel crazy . . . I don’t believe there’s any real suffering – not real suffering – among those people; that is, it would be suffering from our point of view, but they’ve been used to it all their lives and they don’t feel their discomfort so much.108

‘Suffering’ is thus a question of ‘point of view’. While her own middleclass point of view effaces the social reality of poverty, it also deletes


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any conflicting perspective. The threat of class antagonism is diffused as the poor do not actually see their poverty. The narrative, however, immediately undermines Isabel’s distinction between ‘real’ and ‘unreal’ suffering through the sudden appearance of a ‘decently dressed person’ rummaging through a garbage heap. They observe this well-dressed man ‘pick up a bit of cracker from the pavement and cram it into his mouth’ and are ‘fascinated by the sight’, for the man’s actions contradict their expectations of him. Then March said, ‘I must go after him,’ and left his wife standing. ‘Are you in want – hungry?’ he asked the man. The man said he could not speak English, monsieur. March asked his question in French. The man shrugged a pitiful, desperate shrug, ‘Mais, monsieur –’ March put a coin in his hand, and then suddenly the man’s face twisted up, he caught the hand of his alms-giver in both of his, and clung to it. ‘Monsieur! monsieur!’ he gasped, and the tears rained down his face.109

While the man’s actions contradict his appearance, his observable characteristics hide the fact that he speaks no English. Poverty and linguistic difference are thus related in this scene, for they are both aspects which the realist emphasis on observation cannot necessarily detect.110 Indeed, the problem of invisible, and thus unknowable, language difference is central to the unfolding of the novel’s dramatic action. The trail of events that leads to the climatic labour riot, in which the idealist Conrad and the German socialist Lindau are killed, is set in motion by an argument that takes place between Lindau and the capitalist newspaper owner, Dryfoos. Dryfoos owns the journal, Every Other Week, around which the events of the novel take place and, as an act of goodwill, he invites all those who work for the journal to his house for a dinner party. Lindau, who translates for the magazine and lives among the poor out of conviction, is clearly made uncomfortable by the lavish meal set before him, and even more so by Dryfoos’s expressed anti-unionism. The German socialist and linguist engages in a fiery debate with his host but grumbles his most caustic and personal comments in German to his friend, Basil March. Following the meal, Dryfoos calls for Lindau’s dismissal from the journal’s staff, a somewhat excessive response to a night of impassioned debate. Later, when Lindau is clubbed at the hands of the police, Dryfoos turns to March to explain his actions following the dinner party of a few weeks earlier:

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‘I don’t know . . . as you quite understood what made me the maddest. I didn’t tell him I could talk Dutch, because I can’t keep it up with a regular German; but my father was Pennsylvany Dutch, and I could understand what he was saying to you about me. I know I had no business to understand it, after I let him think I couldn’t; but I did, and I didn’t like very well to have a man callin’ me a traitor and a tyrant at my own table . . .’ March was moved . . . ‘Mr. Dryfoos, I didn’t know that you understood Lindau’s German, or I shouldn’t have allowed him – he wouldn’t have allowed himself – to go on. He wouldn’t have knowingly abused his position of guest to censure you, no matter how much he condemned you.’111

Despite Dryfoos’s ability to understand Lindau, language operates as a divisive instrument, as a social force which divides rather than unites people. Howells suggests the difficulties of creating a homogeneous culture in a nation characterised by linguistic diversity. In depicting language as a divisive force that cannot be detected through observation, Howells also betrays an awareness of the limitations of his own realist practice. In A Hazard of New Fortunes, Howells depicts a New York that is ‘a perfect Babel of strange tongues’.112 In no other novel does Howells characterise so many of his central characters with various distinctive habits of speech. They include: the editor Fulkerson, with his slang and elliptical speech patterns; the artist Beaton, who speaks English with ‘quick staccato impulses, so as to give the effect of epigrammatic and sententious French’; a southern colonel and his daughter from ‘Charlottesboag’; a nouveau riche family of Dutch extraction whose uncultivated daughters offer examples of lower-class colloquialisms; and Lindau who is represented by his thick German accent. These are the diversity of middle-class characters on whom Howells centres his depiction of the city. He offers a fictional representation of urban life by constructing, to adopt Raymond Williams’s terminology, a ‘known’ community of characters belonging to the author’s own middle class, who get to know each through the social networks related to Dryfoos’s journal. While this is the community on which the novel is centred, the ‘knowable’ community – those aspects of society of which the author and his fictional characters are not a part, yet of which they are aware – is wider.113 The variety of speech patterns of the middle-class characters at the novel’s centre is mirrored in the ethnic and linguistic diversity of the working classes on its margins, whom March encounters on the elevated railroad:

William Dean Howells: Realism, Ethnicity and the Nation [ 101 He went over to Third Avenue and took the Elevated down to Chatham Square. He found the variety of people in the car as unfailingly entertaining as ever. He rather preferred the east side to the west side lines, because they offered more nationalities, conditions and characters to his inspection . . . Now and then he had found himself in a car mostly filled with Neapolitans from the constructions far up the line, where he had read how they are worked and fed and housed like beasts; and listening to the jargon of their unintelligible dialect, he had occasion for pensive question within himself as to what notion these poor animals formed of a free republic from their experience of life under its conditions . . . March never entered a car without encountering some interesting shape of shabby adversity, which was almost always adversity of foreign birth. New York is still popularly supposed to be in the control of the Irish, but March noticed in these east side travels of his what must strike every observer returning to the city after a prolonged absence: the numerical subordination of the dominant race. If they do not out-vote them, the people of Germanic, of Slavonic, of Pelasgic, of Mongolian stock outnumber the prepotent Celts; and March seldom found his speculation centred upon one of these. The small eyes, the high cheeks, the broad noses, the puff lips, the bare, cue-filleted skulls, of Russians, Poles, Czechs, Chinese; the furtive glitter of Italians; the cold quiet of Scandinavians – fire under ice – were aspects that he identified, and that gave him abundant suggestion for the personal histories he constructed, and for the more public-spirited reveries in which he dealt with the future economy of our heterogeneous commonwealth.114

The passage gains momentum like the train in which March rides, culminating in the final rapid listing of ethnicities and their racial traits. There is a subtle change of point of view as the passage proceeds. We begin with the narrative firmly focused through March’s viewpoint, with the first three sentences beginning with a foregrounded ‘he’. The authorial voice gradually distances itself from March, however, to tell us that these views were typical of his trips in the cars, and then moves into a more documentary mode, listing and observing the various ethnic groups that constitute New York society. We are therefore made complicit in this act of ‘seeing’ before we return to March’s own contemplations on this powerfully depicted ‘heterogeneous commonwealth’. March travels the railways to gather materials for a series of articles he writes each week on New York life. Like the realist novelist as defined by Howells, his goal as a journalist is to depict Americans to

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each other, drawing attention to life as lived by the ‘other half’, and increasing the sense of national fraternity. The scene above significantly appears, however, when he’s on his way to visit his old German instructor, Lindau. Lindau is a socialist who fought with the revolutionists in Berlin in 1848 and then emigrated to the United States where he lost an arm fighting for the Union army in the Civil War. He attacks the evils of capitalism and cries out against the oppression of the working class in a German dialect in which every consonant is rendered. When March asks him why he lives in poverty among the ethnic communities of Mott Street he answers: I tidn’t gome here begause I was too boor to life anywhere else . . . I foundt I was begoming a lidtle too moch of an aristograt. I hadt a room oap in Creenvidge Willage, among dose pig pugs over on the west side, and I foundt . . . that I was beginning to forget the boor!115

Critics have generally agreed that Lindau is the character most seriously compromised by his dialect, and that this was a deliberate strategy of Howells’s to create a distance between the author and his revolutionary socialist character. While Howells certainly did not agree with Lindau’s belief in violence as a means of social progress, it should be remembered that the novel was partly a response to the Haymarket bombings of 1886. If Howells’s own political radicalisation may have been influential in his portrayal of Lindau, his own ethnic background should also be considered in discussing his characterisation of the German socialist. In Years of My Youth, Howells ‘fondly’ remembers his grandmother who ‘spoke with a strong German accent’, and studied ‘her Luther Bible, for she never read English’.116 While the rendition of Lindau’s vernacular may seem a compromising and distancing strategy for Howells’s readers, given his increasing socialist sympathies, his espousal of dialect in fiction, and his own German ancestry, he may well have intended Lindau to be a far more sympathetically portrayed character than critics have supposed. Indeed, the passage where Lindau explains the basis of his beliefs is introduced with his suggesting ‘let us speak German’, thus allowing Howells to render the central tenets of his political philosophy in standard English: Do you think I knowingly gave my hand to save this oligarchy of traders and tricksters, the aristocracy of railroad wreckers and stock gamblers and mine slave drivers and mill serf owners? No; I gave it to the slave;

William Dean Howells: Realism, Ethnicity and the Nation [ 103 the slave – Ha! Ha! Ha! – whom I helped to unshackle to the common liberty of hunger and cold.117

Despite having fought in the Civil War, Lindau refers to America as ‘your gountry’ when he first meets March, before going on to ask ‘What gountry hass a poor man got, Mr. Marge?’118 Lindau shares Howells’s belief in the ideal of justice and brotherhood but he believes that these values have been betrayed in America. ‘What iss Amerigan?’ he significantly asks in an argument with Fulkerson Dere iss no Ameriga any more! You start here free and brafe, and you glaim for efery man de right to life, liperty, and de bursuit of habbiness. And where haf you endedt? No man that vorks vith his handts among you hass the liperty to bursue his habbiness.119

In having Lindau recite the Declaration of Independence, the fundamental text of American national history, in his German accent, Howells foregrounds Lindau’s role in the text as a figure who subverts the meanings of fundamental concepts such as ‘freedom’, ‘liberty’, ‘the Civil War’ and ‘America’. Lindau dies at the end of the novel from a severe beating that he receives at the hands of the police, the representatives of the state. It seems that the dominant ‘idea we call America’ has no place for his kind.120 Lindau’s German dialect ultimately functions to question one of the fundamental assumptions underlying Howells’s realism and contributionism: the belief that all Americans speak a common language. Realism and Race One of the more unusual aspects of Benedict Anderson’s widely discussed and referenced account of nationalism, Imagined Communities, is that he gives language a determining role in the formation of national identity. ‘[F]rom the start’, notes Anderson, ‘the nation was conceived in language, not in blood.’121 In his more recent, The Spectre of Comparisons, Anderson offers an useful synopsis of his thesis on nationalism and its relationship to literary production: Both nation and novel were spawned by the simultaneity made possible by clock-derived, man-made ‘homogeneous, empty time,’ and thereafter of Society understood as a bounded intrahistorical entity. All this opened the way for human beings to imagine large, cross-generation, sharply

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delimited communities, composed of people mostly unknown to one another; and to understand these communities as gliding endlessly towards a limitless future. The novelty of the novel as a literary form lay in its capacity to represent synchronically this bounded, intrahistorical society-with-a-future.122

Realism, as defined by Howells, relates closely to Anderson’s theory of nationalism, for the Howellsian realist novel seeks to represent within its pages a contained diversity analogous to the sameness-indifference that serves as one of Anderson’s criteria for imagining the nation. Realism also emerges concurrently with the rise of the popular press, which Anderson also considers a mode of invoking a national community. The newspaper, notes Anderson, is ‘merely an “extreme form” of the book, a book sold on a colossal scale’.123 Its significance, for Anderson, lies in the fact that we know that a newspaper will be consumed within a certain range of time, within a certain geographical space. The significance of this mass ceremony – Hegel observed that newspapers serve modern man as a substitute for morning prayers – is paradoxical. It is performed in silent privacy, in the lair of the skull. Yet each communicant is well aware that the ceremony he performs is being replicated simultaneously by thousands (or millions) of others of whose existence he is confident, yet of whose identity he has not the slightest notion.124

By the second half of the nineteenth century the telegraph was already allowing on-the-scene correspondents to report from the battlefields of the American Civil War, and the invention of the telephone, typewriter, mechanical typesetter and photo-engraving machines enhanced the capacity for the rapid gathering and dissemination of news. The new urban daily newspapers, notes Alan Trachtenberg, ‘invented a language of mass intelligibility’ and, in the words of the contemporary commentator, Robert Park, offered ‘a window looking out into the larger world outside the narrow circle of the immigrant community’.125 There is therefore some significance in the fact that The Rise of Silas Lapham begins with the journalist, Bartley Hubbard, interviewing Lapham for his ‘Solid Men of Boston’ series, and that the events of A Hazard of New Fortunes evolve around the setting up of the biweekly magazine Every Other Week (Howells’s humorous Americanisation of the British Fortnightly Review) which offers the

William Dean Howells: Realism, Ethnicity and the Nation [ 105 only point of intersection for the various characters in the novel. ‘It’s so very nice,’ notes Margaret Vance, referring to the magazine, ‘it makes you feel as if you did have a country after all,’ and the narrator underlines the relationship between the popular press and the imagined national community in noting that Fulkerson ‘said the thing was a new departure in magazines; it amounted to something in literature as radical as the American Revolution in politics: it was the idea of self-government in the arts . . .’126 Yet if the emergent print media can engender a greater sense of national communion, Howells also suggests in his novels that there are limitations in the press’s ability, and in the ability of his own realist practice, of engendering a sense of imagined nationhood. In A Modern Instance (1882), for example, an honourable newspaper editor, named Ricker, complains about the rise of sensationalistic journalism as follows: I have doubted a good while whether a drunken Irishman who breaks his wife’s head, or a child who falls into a tub of hot water, has really established a claim on the public interest. Why should I be told by telegraph how three negroes died on the gallows in North Carolina? Why should an accurate correspondent inform me of the elopement of a married man with his maidservant in East Machias? Why should I sup on all the horrors of a railroad accident, and have the bleeding fragments hashed up for me at breakfast?127

The reports of violence against women and African Americans, of the plight of the Irish working class, of child neglect and disasters, lead not to an increased sense of social awareness and justice for Ricker but become, as Kenneth Warren has noted, indistinguishable intrusions that spoil his breakfast.128 Ricker’s words suggest that Benedict Anderson’s related arguments that ‘the nation was conceived in language not in blood’ and that ‘nationalism thinks in terms of historical destinies while racism dreams of eternal contaminations’ overlook the centrality of race in imagining nations.129 Reading a newspaper does not lead to an increased sense of national solidarity for Ricker, for he feels no connection with those of other races – the Irish and negroes – whose troubles are depicted in the press. Race is thus fundamentally related to his conception of the nation for, like language difference, it sets up a boundary between those who do and those who do not belong to the national community. If Ricker’s words call for a revision of Anderson’s thesis, they also pose a challenge to Howells’s theory of the novel, for the

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existence of racial differences poses a fundamental problem for the realist novelist who seeks to depict a culturally unified national community. It is therefore perhaps somewhat surprising that, throughout his long career, Howells understood and described the world in racial terms. He also, however, consistently expressed a sceptical awareness of the limitations of late Victorian racial discourse. ‘Nothing is so individual in any man as the peculiar blend of characteristics which he has inherited from his racial ancestries’ he argues at the beginning of an essay on the ‘English Character’.130 He then proceeds to undermine the brash confidence of this opening assertion by noting: The Englishman, who leaves the stamp of the most distinct personality upon others, is the most mixed, the most various, the most relative of all men. He is not English except as he is Welsh, Dutch and Norman, with ‘a little Latin and less Greek’ from his earliest visitors and invaders. This conception of him will indefinitely simplify the study of his nature if it is made in the spirit of the frank superficiality which I propose to myself. After the most careful scrutiny which I shall be able to give him, he will remain, for every future American, the Contradiction, the anomaly, the mystery which I expect to leave him.131

Like Arnold, Howells constructs a hybrid English character while suggesting that race offers a very limited means of accounting for human behaviour. Racial characteristics are often brought to bear when describing characters in Howells’s writings, however, from his observation that the rogues that served him in Llandudno were ‘half English’ while the ‘gentle creature who served our table was wholly Welsh’, to his descriptions of major literary figures, such as Henry James, whose ‘race is Irish on his father’s side and Scotch on his Mother’s to which mingled strains the generalizer may attribute, if he likes, that union of vivid expression and dispassionate analysis which has characterised his work from the first’.132 Howells’s emphasis on ‘blending’, ‘mixing’ and ‘mingling’ in the above descriptions strikes the characteristic chords of what I’ve been describing as ethnic contributionism, and perhaps the most arresting description of character in these terms occurs in the chapter on the African-American domestic cook, Mrs Johnson, in Suburban Sketches.133 The chapter begins with a general description of Charlesbridge, a Boston suburb where a contrast can be discerned between the ‘aggressive and impudent squalor’ of the Irish (who are

William Dean Howells: Realism, Ethnicity and the Nation [ 107 invariably described in highly prejudicial terms by Howells) and the African Americans who try to assume something of our colder race’s demeanour, but even the passer on the horse-car can see that it is not native with them, and is better pleased when they forget us, and ungenteelly laugh in encountering friends, letting their white teeth glitter through the generous lips that open to their ears.134

Despite the racial stereotyping, the African Americans gain from the contrast with the Irish, and Howells proceeds from here to his portrayal of Mrs Johnson who is characterised by a ‘child-like simplicity’, ‘barbaric laughter’ and ‘lawless eye’ that betray ‘how slightly her New England birth and breeding covered her ancestral traits, and bridged the gulf of a thousand years of civilisation that lay between her race and ours’.135 These traits are not to be considered negatively for, in accordance with a contributionist narrative, the alleged primitive characteristics of the African-American cook – coupled with ‘a sylvan wildness mixed with that of the desert in her veins’ for ‘her grandfather was an Indian’ – supply a warmth that is lacking from the dominant culture: ‘We were conscious of something warmer in this old soul than in ourselves, and something wilder, and we chose to think it the tropic and untracked forest.’136 A similar response can be discerned in Howells’s reactions to the writings of Paul Laurence Dunbar. Howells reviewed Majors and Minors, the African-American poet’s second volume of poetry, and wrote an introduction to his next collection, Lyrics of Lowly Life. Such was Howells’s influence at the time that his full-page review and introduction transformed the obscure twenty-three-year-old elevator operator into a nationally known literary figure.137 Dunbar’s poetry was valuable for Howells, not only for its depiction of African Americans – ‘humorously’, ‘tenderly’ and ‘above all faithfully’ – but also for its revelation of a mind and art in Dunbar which showed that his race could ‘no longer be held wholly uncivilised’.138 Howells praised Dunbar’s dialect poems in particular and elaborated on their significance by noting that I do not think one can read his negro pieces without feeling that they are of like impulse and inspiration with the work of Burns when he was most Burns, when he was most Scotch, when he was most peasant.139

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This brings into focus a significant difference between Arnold and Howells as literary critics. For Arnold, Burns’s use of the ‘world of Scotch drink, Scotch religion, and Scotch manners’ counted aesthetically ‘against the poet, not for him’.140 The reasons for this may be gleaned from Arnold’s reactions to Whitman whose primary ‘demerit’ was that ‘he is so unlike anyone else’: No one can afford in literature to trade merely on his own bottom and to take no account of what the other ages and nations have acquired: a great original literature America will never get in this way, and her intellect must inevitably consent to come, in a considerable measure, into the European movement.141

For Howells, on the other hand, Dunbar’s poetry is valuable in so far is it gives expression to a distinctive experience, and the comparison with the ‘Scotch . . . peasant’ Burns emphasises the primitive basis of that distinctiveness. Yet, the publication of Majors and Minors represented to Howells a ‘human event’ not merely because Dunbar’s poetry revealed ‘the simple sensuous, joyous nature of his race’ but also because it expressed a common ground of feeling between black and white. While Howells could value cultural difference – ‘There is a precious difference of temperament between the races which it would be a great pity to lose’ – he sees the highest value of Dunbar’s work in the fact that it offers ‘evidence of the essential unity of the human race, which does not think or feel black in one and white in another, but humanly in all’.142 There is thus a tension in Howells’s response to Dunbar between an emphasis on cultural difference and a desire to envisage culture in universalist terms that transcend race. Howells’s vision of a common humanity is not, however, race neutral: I have sometimes fancied that perhaps the negroes thought black and felt black; that they were racially so utterly alien and distinct from ourselves that there never could be common ground between us . . . But this little book has given me pause in my speculation. Here, in the artistic effect at least, is white thinking and white feeling in a black man, and perhaps the human unity, and not the race unity, is the precious thing, the divine thing, after all.143

Howells’s contributionism thus sought to reconcile the seemingly contradictory principles of unity and diversity in national life. While Dunbar’s poetry is particularly valued for the insights it gives into

William Dean Howells: Realism, Ethnicity and the Nation [ 109 African-American life, its ultimate success lies in its contribution to ‘white thinking and white feeling’. Dunbar’s ability to ‘think white’, like Cahan’s ability to write English, allows him a place in the American literary tradition. The strategy is similar to that in which Arnold sought to make Celtic literature a part of the English tradition, for ‘Whiteness’ for Howells, like ‘Englishness’ for Arnold, is the standard by which ‘human unity’ is defined. The tension between universal and pluralist conceptions of culture, as it relates to race, takes a fictional form in Howells’s novel An Imperative Duty. The novel begins in Boston where Dr Olney, a ‘nerve specialist’ who has just returned from a period of living in Europe, is called to minister to Mrs Meredith, a lady also just returned from Italy where they had previously met socially. With her is her niece, Rhoda Aldgate, a bright and beautiful girl, who again stirs Olney’s interest. The characters – a young woman, her guardian and a middle-aged professional man – mirror those in Indian Summer but they are now transplanted from Florence to Boston. Edwin Cady has noted that, ever since The Rise of Silas Lapham – which begins with Bartley Hubbard, the unprincipled journalist of A Modern Instance, interviewing Silas – Howells had repeatedly ‘toyed with the audience of his faithful readers by reintroducing characters from the past’.144 While none of the characters of An Imperative Duty has appeared elsewhere by name, the relationships between them are remarkably similar to those in Indian Summer. A further connection between the two novels is suggested by the fact that the female guardians in each are given distinctively Welsh surnames: Bowen and Meredith. While critics have unanimously discussed these characters as representing the Anglo-Saxon remnant in America, Howells, drawing on his own heredity, may be suggesting that the processes of assimilation with which his novel is concerned preceded the current period of mass immigration of Irish and others from Europe, and African Americans from the southern states. If Indian Summer discussed the problems of American national identity from the external viewpoint of the expatriate, An Imperative Duty offers a discussion on the same topic within the boundaries of the American nation. Homi Bhabha, in discussing contemporary trends in post-colonial theory, advocates a shift of perspective from the relationships between nations that are assumed to be culturally homogeneous, to the relationships between the various ethnic groups existing within all nation states; a shift from the ‘problem of “other people”’, to the ‘question of the people-as-one’.145 This is precisely the shift that

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Howells engineers between Indian Summer and An Imperative Duty for, while Indian Summer was primarily concerned with the external definition of America from Europe, An Imperative Duty turns to the internal racial difference, the problem of envisioning the ‘people as one’, that constitutes American nationhood. When Olney is called to treat Mrs Meredith’s illness, he realises that her sickness is of a mental rather than a physical nature, and he eventually gets her to reveal the cause of her shattered nerves; Rhoda, who has lived with her since infancy, is of ‘negro descent’.146 Mrs Meredith has kept the secret of Rhoda’s one-sixteenth black ancestry to herself but now feels a duty to let her know, for Rhoda is about to marry a wealthy minister whom Mrs Meredith cannot bear to injure. This is the ‘minor issue’ of ‘morbid conscientiousness’ from which, Edwin Cady believes, Howells ‘mistakenly named the book’.147 Yet the ‘duty’ of the book’s title refers to more than Mrs Meredith’s need to inform Rhoda of her racial background. Upon hearing the news, Rhoda heads out to walk the streets of Boston in a state of ‘double consciousness’ which is manifested in her oscillation between identification with the ‘blackness from which she had sprung’ and rejection from ‘the repulsive visages of frog-like ugliness’.148 She attempts to regain control over her consciousness by channelling her chaotic emotions into a sense of obligation. Resolving to give up her suitor, she decides that it is her duty to go south and assist the African-American community and anyone who may be left of her mother’s family. Olney himself, upon hearing the news of Rhoda’s black ancestry, is initially thrown into a ‘turmoil of emotion’; His disgust was profound and pervasive, and it did not fail, first of all, to involve the poor child herself. He found himself personally disliking the notion of her having negro blood in her veins; before he felt pity he felt repulsion: his own race instinct expressed itself in merciless rejection of her beauty, her innocence, her helplessness because of her race. The impulse had to have its course; and then he mastered it, with abiding compassion, and a sort of tender indignation.149

So he manages to control his initial ‘race instinct’ and finds Rhoda to be increasingly attractive primarily due to her ‘servile and savage origin’.150 To win her hand in marriage, Olney must convince Rhoda that her intention to sacrifice her life, because of an abstract sense of obligation to her black relations in the South, is the stuff of romantic fiction and in no way represents a rational response to her predica-

William Dean Howells: Realism, Ethnicity and the Nation [ 111 ment. He answers her question ‘Oughtn’t I to go down there and help them; try to educate them, and elevate them?’ as follows: The way to elevate them is to elevate us, to begin with. It will be an easy matter to deal with those simple-hearted folks after we’ve got into the right way ourselves. No, if you must give your life to the improvement of any particular race, give it to mine. Begin with me.151

This contributionist argument has been implicit since the novel’s opening scene. When Dr Olney surveys the ‘social spectacle’ of Boston for the first time in many years, he notices that he finds the African Americans to be ‘altogether agreeable’; indeed, in ‘their cloth gaiters, their light trousers, their neatly buttoned cutaway coats, their harmonious scarfs and their silk hats’, they offer a welcome contrast to the ‘meanness and dulness’ of the city’s streets and the ‘pale and pasty’ complexion of the ‘proletarian types’ who are mainly Irish.152 As in Howells’s depiction of Charlesbridge in Suburban Sketches, the African Americans in An Imperative Duty gain by the presence of the Irish. Whereas Irish waiters crowd so closely that he can feel their breath on his premature bald spot, the African-American waiters exercise a welcome restraint, clothing their need for custom in a ‘smiling courtesy’ and ‘childish simple-heartedness’ that appear to Olney ‘graceful and winning’.153 Unlike the ‘thin and crooked’ second-generation Irish, and the nervously anxious whites, black Bostonians strike Olney as ‘the only people left who have any heart for life here’.154 Their willingness to live separately in ‘their own neighborhoods, their own churches . . . their own resorts’ seems, as Henry Wonham has noted, to guarantee African Americans a measure of emotional health amid the chronically anxious, ‘over-civilized’, white population.155 Jackson Lears uses the term ‘over-civilization’ to describe a state of anxiety which he believes characterised late nineteenth-century America: To many critics, late-nineteenth-century American culture revealed ‘a lowering of the mental nerve’ among the urban bourgeoisie. The typical respectable American was now, according to Henry Childs Merwin, ‘a creature whose springs of action are, in greater or less degree, paralyzed or perverted by the undue predominance of the intellect’ . . . Even among those just coming of age, late Victorian sexual and social propriety seemed to stifle every genuine impulse and emotion. The spread of respectability impressed William Dean Howells, who admitted wryly in

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1889 that ‘people now call a spade an agricultural implement . . .’ Toward the end of the century, other critics began scorning such prim decency as the morality of ‘a weak and sniveling race’. ‘Everyone’ said a Forum contributor, ‘is afraid to let himself go, to offend the conventions, or to raise a sneer.’ The buttoned-up, humorless urban bourgeoisie became a stock figure of cultural criticism.156

Lears notes that middle-class Americans of the fin de siècle sought to combat their sense of ‘over-civilization’ by emulating ‘Oriental people, the inhabitants of the tropics, and the colored peoples generally’ whom they commonly believed knew how to relax and could thus help in alleviating excesses of ‘moral and intellectual strenuosity’.157 Henry Adams, for instance, found Samoans to be invigoratingly ‘spontaneous, healthy, free from our idiotic cant about work’, and psychologist William James took the ‘heathen’ consciousness to be a model of the healthy minded state.158 Thus, while Olney in An Imperative Duty walks the streets of Boston in a state of ‘anxiety’, in a New England where ‘nervous diseases most abounded’ and in which ‘shrill-nerved women’ such as Mrs Meredith are to be found in abundance, the African Americans’ healthy lack of sophistication offers a counterforce to the dominant culture’s anxious gentility.159 It is therefore significant that it is while Olney is mixing Mrs Meredith’s medicine that he muses on the therapeutic role that African Americans may play within American society. ‘Ice-water will do,’ said Olney. He began to drop the medicine from the bottle into the spoon, which he then poured into the glass of water she brought him. ‘I believe’, he said, stirring it, ‘that if the negroes ever have their turn – and if the meek are to inherit the earth they must come to it – we shall have a civilisation of such sweetness and good-will as the world has never known yet. Perhaps we shall have to wait their turn for any real Christian civilisation.’160

The gradual addition of drops of medicine into the water symbolically represents the gradual merging of African Americans with the dominant society that the novel depicts. The romanticised picture of African-American ‘sweetness and goodwill’ is similar to Arnold’s earlier romanticisation of the Celts. If Arnold thought that the Celts were now in a position to repeat the ‘famous feat of the Greeks’ in ‘conquering their conquerors’, then the African Americans are similarly viewed by Olney as a group who, when they ‘have their turn’,

William Dean Howells: Realism, Ethnicity and the Nation [ 113 can supply the dominant culture with what it is lacking.161 While Arnold believed that an infusion of ‘Celtic magic’ would ‘soften’ the philistinism of the English middle class, Howells suggests that American society could profit from a more general infusion of African-American blood. An Imperative Duty promotes the contributionism that I have been tracing in the writings of Arnold and Howells, and formed a significant strain in late nineteenth-century meditations on ethnicity. There is, of course, considerable danger in assuming a direct correlation between the views of a fictional character and those of the author. Indeed, Howells wrote to his sister Aurelia complaining of how the novel’s opening scenes in Boston led to an ‘Irish howl against me . . . They cannot see that it is not I who felt and said what Olney did.’ 162 If, however, whiteness was the measure of ‘human unity’ for Howells in his introduction to Dunbar’s poetry, then Olney’s suggestion that Rhoda contribute her energies to save ‘my’ race is wholly in keeping with Howells’s social philosophy. An Imperative Duty may be read as a contributionist narrative where a primitive blackness is appropriated as a counterforce to white ‘over-civilization’ and anxiety. If Rhoda is the individual character who discovers her mixed ancestry, Howells is also concerned with making the broader point that ‘all strains are now so crossed and intertangled that there is no definite and unbroken direction any more in any of us’.163 Thus, just as Arnold argued simultaneously for the amalgamation of actually existing Celts into an expanding ‘English empire’ and for the English to recognise the Celtic element within their composite selves, Howells argues for the amalgamation of distinctive races in America while also suggesting that all Americans are already ethnic hybrids. The novel develops narratively from Olney’s early observations of ethnic differences among Anglo-Americans, African Americans and Irish Americans, into a final vision of racial intermingling. Yet, the marriage of Olney and Rhoda does not represent the blissful resolution of romantic fiction. The lovers find no more than ‘a common share of happiness’ in their life together, and it seems that the success of their interracial marriage depends on emigration to Italy, where Rhoda ‘is thought to look so very Italian that you would really take her for an Italian’.164 Thus, even while utilising realism as the form in which a contemporary social ethic may be formulated, Howells retains a certain scepticism toward his own project. While the fusion of races into a dominant ‘whiteness’ is offered as a practical solution to the existence of racial divisions within the nation, Olney and Rhoda can

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feel truly comfortable only in exile from America. It seems that realism, in its goal of invoking and reinforcing a truly homogeneous nation, is ultimately unable to encompass the problems of racial difference into its larger form. Conclusion Howells’s conception of realism can be seen to be the literary manifestation of an idea of ‘culture’ that he shared with Matthew Arnold. In responding to Arnold’s remarks that America lacked distinction, Howells argued that this was, in fact, a positive aspect of American civilisation, for it encouraged the artist to the study and the appreciation of the common, and to the portrayal in every art of those finer and higher aspects which unite rather than sever mankind, if he would thrive in our new order of things.165

Despite their apparent disagreement, Howells’s emphasis on those ‘aspects that unite . . . mankind’ is, in fact, common to the cultural thought of both men. Just as Arnold’s ‘culture’ appealed to the ‘best selves’ of individuals within society, so ‘realism’ for Howells sought to ‘charm their minds and win their hearts’ in ‘a mission to their higher selves’.166 Howells’s ‘realism’ shares with Arnold’s ‘culture’ a concern with recognising the valuable diversity within society while simultaneously controlling social tensions and conflict within a coherent, shared, common ground. This contributionist ideal is often compromised when Howells’s realist theory is put into practice, however, for ethnic differences based on language and race frequently prove inassimilable within his texts: the German-speaking Lindau dies in the knowledge that his socialist ideals and aspirations cannot be realised in America, and Dr Olney’s interracial marriage to Rhoda can be consummated only in Italy. If the realist novel seeks to reflect the discordant diversity which characterises an industrialising society only to encompass these divisive interests within its generously inclusive form, then the depiction of ethnic differences in Howells’s novels portrays the ultimate failure of this desired reconciliation.

William Dean Howells: Realism, Ethnicity and the Nation [ 115 NOTES

1. Howells, Literary Friends, p. 273. 2. Arnold, Letters Vol. 5, p. 344. 3. Howells, ‘The Man of Letters as Man of Business’ (1902) in Criticism and Fiction, pp. 308–9. 4. Trachtenberg, The Incorporation of America. Wiebe, The Search for Order, p. 11. 5. Trachtenberg, p. 144. 6. Ibid. p. 144. 7. See, for example, Perry, Intellectual Life in America, and Kett, The Pursuit of Knowledge under Difficulties. 8. Taechgraeber III, ‘“Culture” in Industrializing America’. 9. Howells, Selected Letters Vol. 3, p. 85. 10. W. D. Howells as Critic offers an excellent collection of Howells’s literary writings. 11. Lears, No Place of Grace, p. xiv. 12. Ibid. p. xiii. 13. On Twain and labourers see Krauth, Twain and Company, pp. 1–2. On Whitman see Thomas, Lunar Light, pp. 16–18. Howells, Criticism and Fiction, p. 308. 14. Howells, ‘Paul Laurence Dunbar Announced’, W. D. Howells as Critic, p. 254. Quoted in Cowley, The Dean, p. 68. 15. Nettels, Language, Race, and Social Class, p. 104. 16. Arnold, Culture and Anarchy (1869), CPW V, pp. 95, 105. 17. Clemens, Twain–Howells Letters, pp. 593–4. 18. Quoted in Trachtenberg, Incorporation, p. 47. On the Centennial Exposition see Lears, p. 8. On the Corliss Machine see Kasson, Civilizing the Machine, p. 164. Howells’s reactions to industrialism may be useful compared to those of Henry Adams in ‘The Dynamo and the Virgin’, Education, pp. 379–90. 19. Figures from Trachtenberg, Incorporation, p. 52. Also Wiebe, Search for Order and Kirkland, Industry Comes of Age. 20. Quoted in Schlesinger, The Political and Social Growth, p. 42. 21. Lears, No Place, p. 7. 22. Howells, Selected Literary Criticism Vol. 2, pp. 35–6. 23. This was particularly the case in the 1920s – see Brooks, The Ordeal of Mark Twain, p. 77. Mencken, A Book of Prefaces, p. 218 . Leslie Fiedler was equally dismissive in his influential Love and Death in the American Novel, p. 258. 24. Howells, Selected Literary Criticism Vol. 2, p. 35. 25. Ibid. p. 36. 26. Howells, Selected Letters Vol. 3, p. 231. 27. Trachtenberg, Incorporation, p. 89.

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28. Zinn, A People’s History, p. 266. Garlin, William Dean Howells and the Haymarket Era. 29. Howells, Selected Letters Vol. 3, p. 207. For a lucid account of Howells’s steady march toward radicalism in the years before 1894 see Hough, Quiet Rebel. 30. Howells, Selected Literary Criticism Vol. 2, p. 105. 31. Ibid. p. 106. 32. Ibid. p. 106. 33. Ibid. p. 107. 34. Bercovitch, Rites of Assent, p. 58. 35. Arnold, ‘A Word More About America’ (1885), CPW X, p. 203, and ‘General Grant’ (1887), CPW XI, p. 177. 36. Howells, Selected Literary Criticism Vol. 2, p. 99. 37. Ibid. p. 94. 38. Ibid. p. 95. 39. Ibid. p. 95. 40. Ibid. p. 96. 41. Ibid. pp. 95–6. 42. Ibid. pp. 98–9. 43. Cady, The Realist at War, p. 22. 44. See Emerson, ‘American Scholar’ in Collected Works. On the cultural nationalism of Whitman see Thomas, ‘Walt Whitman and Risorgimento Nationalism’. 45. Ralph Waldo Emerson, ‘The American Scholar’ (1837), Collected Works, pp. 69, 67, 65. 46. Hofstadter, The Age of Reform, pp. 131–73. 47. Emerson, ‘The Progress of Culture’ (1867) in Letters and Social Aims, p. 150. See Trachtenberg’s discussion in Incorporation, pp. 155–6. 48. Ziff, The American 1890s, p. 25. 49. Howells, Literary Friends and Acquaintances, p. 28. 50. Howells, Years of My Youth, pp. 3–4. 51. Arnold, ‘A Word More About America’ (1885), CPW X, p. 203. 52. Howells, Boy’s Town, p. 10. Howells’s account is corroborated in his father’s autobiography, Recollections of Life in Ohio: From 1813 to 1840, where William Cooper Howells also foregrounds the Welsh ethnicity that was to be found on both sides of the family: ‘My mother’s name was Anne Thomas. She was a native of Pont-y-Pool, in Monmouthshire, and her family were Welsh, though educated in English and speaking both languages, as was common on the border.’ W. C. Howells, Recollections, pp. 1–3. 53. Howells, Hazard, p. 158. 54. Howells, Selected Letters Vol. 5, p. 359. 55. Ibid. p. 362. 56. Howells, Seven English Cities, p. 139.

William Dean Howells: Realism, Ethnicity and the Nation [ 117 57. Ibid. p. 142. 58. Howells, ‘St. David’s Day Address’, pp. 106–9. The Cambrian was a Welsh-American Journal published in English between the years 1880 and 1919. I am grateful to Eirug Davies of Cambridge, MA and Llanon for drawing my attention to this piece. 59. Mark Twain’s Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889), in which Hank Morgan, a nineteenth-century practical and utilitarianminded mechanic wakes up in sixth-century Britain – may be seen to replicate this contrast. As well as mounting a critique of Gilded Age values, Twain also has nineteenth-century English culture in his sights as the novel is also an attack on Tennysonian Arthurianism and British Monarchism. Twain is thus less concerned with comparing an antimaterialist Celticism with capitalist Yankeedom than he is with suggesting that, to quote Howells’s review of the novel, ‘the noble of Arthur’s day, who battened on the blood and sweat of his bondmen, is one in essence with the capitalist of Mr. Harrison’s day who grows rich on the labour of his underpaid wagemen’. Howells as Critic, p. 174. 60. Howells, Seven English Cities, p. 180 61. On Roger Williams and Welsh America see D. Williams, ‘The Welsh Atlantic’, p. 399 fn. 17. 62. Bercovitch, The Puritan Origins of the American Self. 63. Howells, ‘Our Italian Assimilators’. Quoted in Nettels, Language, Race and Social Class, p. 58. 64. In his ‘Editor’s Study’ of November 1891 Howells reiterates Arnold’s view that Americans are ‘the well known Anglo-Saxon race, affected and modified by the infusion of other strains, but not essentially changed by these’ and ‘Their literature so far as they have produced any is American English’. Howells expresses these views, which contradict a number of his previous assertions, within the context of an argument calling on Americans to create a ‘national literature’ that is not yet in existence. Selected Literary Criticism Vol. 2, p. 189. 65. Howells, Selected Letters Vol. 2, p. 292. 66. Quoted in Nettels, Language, Race, and Social Class, p. 58. 67. Quoted in Cady, The Realist at War, p. 12. 68. Howells, Selected Literary Criticism Vol. 2, p. 62. Howells’s views of realism share a number of similarities with those of George Eliot. See Frank Christianson, ‘Philanthropic Fiction’. 69. Ibid. p. 66. 70. Ibid. p. 62. 71. This is Amy Kaplan’s lucid reconstruction of Lears’s argument in Social Construction, 19–20. See Lears, No Place of Grace, pp. 4–58. 72. Howells, The Rise of Silas Lapham, p. 118. 73. W. D. Howells, Selected Literary Criticism Vol. 2, p. 43. 74. Ibid. p. 44.

118 ] 75. 76. 77. 78. 79.

80. 81. 82. 83. 84. 85. 86. 87. 88. 89. 90. 91. 92. 93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98. 99. 100.

101. 102. 103. 104.

105.


Brodhead, School of Hawthorne, p. 102. Howells, Silas Lapham, p. 200. Ibid. pp. 201–2 Ibid. p. 202. I am drawing here on J. W. Crowley’s discussion in The Black Heart’s Truth, pp. 62–3. That Howells was in Italy during the Civil War years may partly explain his emphasis on Lapham’s civilian actions in the present as opposed to his wartime heroics in the past. Howells, Indian Summer, p. 261. Ibid. pp. 50–1. Ibid. p. 124. Ibid. p. 65. Quoted by Woodress, ‘William Dean Howells’, p. 285. Howells, Hazard, p. 264. Ibid. pp. 44, 68. Howells, Silas Lapham, p. 79. Ibid. p. 80. I am drawing here on Kaplan’s analysis in Social Construction, p. 40. Ibid. p. 80. Kaplan, Social Construction, p. 41. See, for example, Chapter 1 in MacCabe, James Joyce. Howells, Selected Literary Criticism Vol. 2, p. 4. Ibid. p. 4. Quoted in Elsa Nettels, Language, Race and Social Class, p. 47. Howells, A Fearful Responsibility, p. 23. Quoted in North, The Dialect of Modernism, p. 17. Quoted in Nettels, Language, Race and Social Class, p. 23. Howells, Selected Literary Criticism Vol. 2, p. 220. Ibid. pp. 60–7. A sense of the sheer range of American literatures written in languages other than English can be gleaned from the essays collected in Sollors (ed.), Multilingual America, and Shell (ed.), American Babel. Quoted in Chametzky, ‘Regional Literature’, p. 390. Howells, ‘New York Low Life in Fiction’ (1896) in Selected Literary Criticism Vol. 2, p. 277. Taubenfeld, ‘Only an “L” ’, p. 154. ‘Saesneg’ denotes the English language, rather than the people, which would be ‘Saeson’. Howells’s attempt at adopting a native perspective actually serves to underline his distance from it. Seven English Cities, p. 142. According to the 1901 census, 49.9 per cent of the Welsh spoke Welsh. The number is likely to have been considerably higher given the stigma attached to a ‘backward’ language. See Jenkins and Williams (eds), Eu Hiaith, p. 1.

William Dean Howells: Realism, Ethnicity and the Nation [ 119 106. 107. 108. 109. 110. 111. 112. 113. 114. 115. 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125.

126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135.

136. 137.

Howells, Seven English Cities, p. 155. Howells, Hazard, p. 449. Ibid. p. 56. Ibid. p. 57. This scene seems to have been based on an event experienced by Howells. See Selected Letters Vol. 3, p. 238. Howells, Hazard, p. 404–5. Ibid. p. 132. Williams, Country and the City, pp. 165–80. Howells, Hazard, p. 161. Ibid. pp. 168–9. Howells, Years of My Youth, p. 4. Howells, Hazard, p. 171. Ibid. p. 80. Ibid. p. 285. Howells refers to the ‘idea we call America’ in his ‘Editor’s Study’ on Arnold in Selected Literary Criticism Vol. 2, p. 96. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 149. Anderson, Spectre of Comparisons, p. 334. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 34. Ibid. p. 35. Quoted in Trachtenberg, Incorporation, p. 124. Trachtenberg offers an useful analysis of the revolution in American journalism that occurred in the last thirty years of the nineteenth century, pp. 121–30. Howells, Hazard, pp. 219, 188. Howells, Modern Instance, p. 265. Warren, Black and White, p. 63. Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 149. Howells, Seven English Cities, p. 159. Ibid. p. 159. Howells, Seven English Cities, p. 141. ‘Henry James Jr.’ (1882) in Anesko, Letters, Fictions, Lives, p. 229. Howells, Suburban Sketches, pp. 11–34. Ibid. p. 19. Ibid. pp. 21, 22. It is worth noting within the context of a discussion of Howells and race that in 1910 he became a founder member of the National Association for the Advancement of Coloured People. See Cady, Realist at War, p. 161. Howells, Suburban Sketches, pp. 21, 29. Howells’s review of Majors and Minors and his introduction to Lyrics of Lowly Life appear in Cady’s collection, W. D. Howells as Critic, pp. 243–55. The Harper’s Weekly review does not appear in the Selected Literary Criticism Vol. 2, which does include the Introduction to Lyrics, pp. 279–81. Howells was also to prove a significant promoter

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138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146. 147. 148. 149. 150. 151. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162. 163. 164. 165. 166.


of the work of Charles Chesnutt. See Andrews, ‘William Dean Howells and Charles W. Chesnutt’. Howells, W. D. Howells as Critic, p. 250. Ibid. p. 245. Arnold, ‘The Study of Poetry’ (1881), CPW IX, p. 182. Arnold, ‘Letter to W. D. O’Connor’, Letters of Matthew Arnold Vol. 3, p. 73. Howells, Howells as Critic, p. 254. Ibid. p. 251. Cady, Realist at War, p. 167. Bhabha, Location of Culture, p. 150. Howells, Imperative, p. 31. Cady, Realist at War, p. 156. Howells, Imperative, pp. 60, 63, 64. Ibid. p. 31. Ibid. pp. 31, 90. Ibid. pp. 96–7. Ibid. pp. 6, 7, 3, 4. Ibid. p. 5. Ibid. pp. 4, 19. Ibid. p. 6. Wonham, ‘Howells, Du Bois’, p. 129. Lears, No Place of Grace, pp. 47–8. Ibid. p. 52. Adams is quoted in Lears, p. 274. James, The Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 80. Howells, Imperative, pp. 10, 89. Ibid. p. 21. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), CPW, III 390. Quoted in Cady, The Realist at War, p. 158. Howells, Imperative, p. 101. Ibid. pp. 100, 101. Howells, Selected Literary Criticism Vol. 2, p. 99. Howells, Selected Literary Criticism Vol. 3, p. 222.

chapter 3

W. B. Yeats celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism

No one wants to fall out with Davis’s comprehensive idea of the Irish People as a composite race drawn from various sources and professing any creed they like, nor would an attempt to rake up racial prejudices be tolerated by anyone. We are proud of Grattan, Flood, Tone, Emmet and all the rest who dreamt and worked for an independent country, even though they had no conception of an Irish nation; but it is necessary that they should be put in their place, and that place is not on top as the only beacon lights to succeeding generations. The foundation of Ireland is the Gael, and the Gael must be the element that absorbs. D. P. Moran, The Philosophy of Irish Ireland (1905)1

D. P Moran’s argument mirrors the contributionist views espoused by Matthew Arnold and William Dean Howells. While Arnold argued for the amalgamation of the Celtic peoples into a dominant English nation, and William Dean Howells desired the fusion of his nation’s ethnic and linguistic differences into a common American identity, Moran conceives of an Ireland in which the nation’s racial and cultural diversity is absorbed into a dominant Gaelic culture. R. F. Foster considers Moran’s statement that ‘the Gael must be the element that absorbs’ a ‘chilling dictum’.2 When one considers, however, that this passage was written at a time when such views of ethnic contributionism were widely entertained, a time when the Gael was generally feared and ridiculed in the British press, and when Irish speakers had no access to education in their own language, Moran’s dictum may be less chilling than first impressions might suggest.3 Despite his outright rejection of ‘racial prejudice’ above, Moran is widely regarded as [ 121 ]

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being the leading spokesman for the more reactionary vein of the Irish cultural revival, as one who sought to construct an exclusivist Irish identity based on Roman Catholicism and the Irish language. Moran’s key contribution as editor of the nationalist newspaper The Leader, however, was to challenge the view that ‘politics was the begin-all and end-all of Irish nationality’.4 The Irish, argued Moran, had created a self-perpetuating tradition of their continuing fight against the English, and had lost sight of the very things for which they fought – the native language, dances, music, and the traditional games that constituted a distinctive culture. He observed the irony of the fact that his fellow Irish ‘threw over Irish civilization whilst they professed – and professed in perfect good faith – to fight for Irish nationality’.5 Moran’s call for his own conception of Irishness, based on Gaelic culture, to be placed ‘on top’ of the nation’s cultural hierarchy represents a move from politics to culture as the location of the nationalist struggle, and supports W. B. Yeats’s view that ‘when Parnell fell from power’ a ‘disillusioned and embittered Ireland’ turned from parliamentary politics to the realm of culture as an outlet for its frustrated nationalism.6 This influential reading of the 1890s has come under considerable scrutiny in recent years. R. F. Foster rejects Yeats’s reading of the period, and notes the range of activities pursued by the Irish Parliamentary Party and the United Irish League throughout the 1890s, the attempts at passing a second Home Rule Bill in 1893, and the more significant reform of local government in 1898, which entrenched the influence of nationalists on county councils.7 John S. Kelly notes, however, that while there was indeed a shift from the highly politicised and anti-cultural 1880s to the more literary 1890s, the motivation for that development was itself political – the attempt to define through literature an independent Irish identity.8 The range of specifically Irish cultural institutions established in the decade supports this view, ranging from the ‘Irish Literary Society’ founded by Yeats and T. W. Rolleston in 1891, the ‘National Literary Society’ by Yeats and John O’Leary in 1892, ‘Conradh na Gaeilge / The Gaelic League’ in 1893, and the various collaborations constituting the Irish dramatic movement beginning in the last three years of the century.9 Perhaps the main criticism of the Yeatsian view, then, is that it entails a limiting, parliamentarian, view of politics and an uncharacteristically apolitical conception of culture. It is significant, however, that this division between politics and culture within Yeats’s account of the 1890s reflects a tension that existed between these spheres of activity during that decade.

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 123 Yeats was fully aware of the apparent contradiction between his activities as a leading figure among the aesthetes and decadents of the London-based ‘Rhymers’ Club’, and his role as a leading nationalist poet in Ireland. He noted in his Autobiographies that, when he raised social and philosophical issues with his fellow Rhymers, they were likely to berate him for not talking ‘like a poet’ but as a ‘man of letters’, and a letter to Alice Milligan in 1894 suggests that if this was how Yeats was perceived by the Rhymers it was also how he thought of himself.10 My experience of Ireland, during the last three years, has changed my views very greatly, and now I feel that the work of an Irish man of letters must be not so much to awaken or quicken or preserve the national idea among the mass of the people but to convert the educated classes to it on the one hand to the best of his ability, and on the other – and this is the more important – to fight for moderation, dignity, and the rights of the intellect among his fellow nationalists. Ireland is terribly demoralized in all things – in her scholourship [sic], in her criticism, in her politics, in her social life. She will never be greatly better until she govern herself but she will be greatly worse unless there arise protesting spirits.11

The cultural programme that Yeats recommends here is somewhat similar to that espoused by Matthew Arnold in Culture and Anarchy. Having identified the members of his own middle class as the future leaders within the emergent social order, Arnold sought to encourage them to adopt a less philistine attitude to life while also advocating the creation of a group of classless ‘aliens’ to direct the national life by their moral example. Yeats believes that nationalism is to be the key political force of the future and therefore encourages his fellow nationalists towards a greater ‘moderation’ and ‘dignity’, while also underlining the role played by the ‘educated classes’ within the life of the nation. Unlike Arnold, however, who sought in his cultural writings to reinforce the stability of a political state that he felt was being increasingly challenged along lines of class and ethnicity, Yeats attempted to give a culturally identifiable voice to a nation that had no political autonomy. ‘Ireland’ did not exist as an independent political entity in the 1890s and it is therefore not surprising that Yeats, as ‘man of letters’ or as aestheticist poet, did not maintain a consistent, unequivocal, position with regard to the Irish national question. He continually moved back and forth between Dublin and London throughout the decade, and his allegiances and support ranged from

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the Unionist arguments of Horace Plunkett, to the Fenian nationalism of John B. O’Reilly’s journal The Boston Pilot.12 Marjorie Howes has sought to unravel the various ‘nationalisms’ that Yeats adopted during the course of his life by ‘focusing on nationality rather than nationalism’.13 In contrast to several contemporary critics who consider Yeats a poet of ‘decolonisation’ and thus posit a uniform Irish nationalism against an equally generalised British colonialism, ‘nationality’, for Howes, is not perceived to be a monolithic construct but is rather the location for contesting forces and voices.14 Yet, despite the refreshing complexity that Howes brings to the analysis of nationality in Yeats’s writings, her reading of the 1890s is compromised by the fact that she follows the vast majority of Yeats scholars in equating ‘Celtic’ with ‘Irish’. This equation of the two terms was generally not the practice among the nationalists, unionists, ethnographers and philologists of the late nineteenth century, and leads to misunderstandings in the field of contemporary criticism. A revealing example occurs when Howes discusses Yeats’s equation of Celticism and femininity in his 1897 review of the writings of the Scottish author, Fiona Macleod (to whom I shall return). Howes notes that Yeats considered Macleod to be ‘as representatively Irish as he had found Sir Samuel Ferguson’, yet what Yeats actually states is that Macleod’s tales were recognised by the inhabitants of the Aran Islands for they are ‘the most purely Celtic peasants in Ireland’.15 ‘The truth’, he notes, is that Macleod ‘like all who have Celtic minds and have learnt to trust them, has in her hands the keys of those gates of the primeval world.’16 The emphasis here is on Celticism, not Irishness, for, while Yeats notes that ‘the Irish and Highland Gael are one race’, Macleod could not be ‘representatively Irish’, as Howes argues, for ‘she’ is a Scot. Yeats’s writings are not informed by Irish nationalism here, but by Pan-Celticism. While this is a minor slip on Howes’s part, it is indicative of current trends in Irish studies where Wales and Scotland are almost wholly ignored in discussions of the Irish question. Irish studies has been enriched in recent years by the application of post-colonial theory in the comparativist writings of David Lloyd and Declan Kiberd, yet these critics seem curiously reluctant to look for comparisons closer to home.17 Similarly, while Edna Longley suggests in the introduction to her revisionist polemic The Living Stream that ‘Robert Crawford’s Devolving English Literature, with its Scottish perspectives on canonical matters, seems more relevant to Ireland than does Lloyd’s application of the post-colonial pastry cutter,’18 she

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 125 fails to mention Scotland again in the remainder of her book. Roy Foster, the doyen of Irish revisionist historians, consciously notes that his Paddy and Mr Punch is a discussion of ‘Connections in Irish and English History’, thus wholly omitting the complex relationships between the unionist and nationalist traditions within Ireland and those of Wales and Scotland, which are part of the very construction and constitution of that ‘English’ history. Similarly, Stephen Regan, in locating Yeats within the ‘cultural politics’ of the 1890s, notes that he is addressing ‘the intense political and cultural friction between two nations at a critical point in modern history’.19 It seems that Irish studies, whether in its nationalist, revisionist or post-nationalist phases, has a problem in incorporating the concept of Britain – in its more subtle definition as the complex ‘history of four nations’, not as synonym for England – into its analyses.20 It is therefore not surprising to find an external commentator on Irish affairs offering the following analysis of the Irish situation. True, the physical, geographical connections are closer between England and Ireland than between England and India, or between France and Algeria or Senegal. But the imperial relationship is there in all cases. Irish people can never be English any more than Cambodians or Algerians can be French. This it seems to me was always the case in every colonial relationship, because it is the first principle that a clear-cut and absolute hierarchical distinction should remain constant between ruler and ruled, whether or not the latter is white.21

Yet things are never as ‘clear-cut’ as Edward Said seems to think in the context of the British Isles for, if the Irish (contra Arnold) could not become English, then they could, at least potentially, become British. They were certainly perceived as being so in those countries that they were actively colonising, with their Welsh, Scottish and English counterparts, in the name of the ‘British Empire’. In this chapter, I seek to explore the relationship between culture and ethnicity within Yeats’s idea of ‘the Celt’. The discussion’s primary focus is on the 1890s and early 1900s, and my goal is to consider the role played by Yeats’s Celticism within the political and cultural debates of that period.22 It was mainly through his attempts to write and rewrite Celticism that the early Yeats, as Marjorie Howes notes, ‘addressed one of the questions that would preoccupy him throughout his career, the question of Irish national identity and its relationship to the production of literature’.23 An adequate account

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of that Celticism calls for an approach that looks, not at the ‘intense political and cultural friction between two nations’, but at the complex interrelationships between culture and ethnicity within the four nations of the, variously perceived, British Isles.24 Constructing the Celt If D. P. Moran’s Philosophy of Irish Ireland was based on the assimilative capacity of the dominant Gael, he considered the idea of the Celt to be ‘one of the most glaring frauds that the credulous Irish people have ever swallowed’.25 Looking back at the late nineteenth century in 1905, Moran noted that it was a period in which We were all on the lookout for someone to think for us, for we had given up that habit with our language. Matthew Arnold happily came along just in the nick of time, and in a much quoted essay suggested, among other things, that one of the characteristics of Celtic poetry was ‘natural magic’ . . . Then yet another Irish make-believe was born, and it was christened ‘The Celtic Note,’ Mr. W. B.Yeats standing sponsor for it. The ‘Celtic Renaissance’ was another name invented about this time, and we were asked to pride ourselves on the influence we had exerted on English literature.26

The ‘Celt’, for Moran, was either a deliberate strategy developed by members of the Protestant Ascendancy to reinforce their position within the Irish cultural revival, or the self-serving fantasy of rootless, cosmopolitan intellectuals who sought to divert the native Irish away from the practical reconstruction of their society. He, like many others, associated the Celtic movement with Yeats who, he noted, ‘lacked every attribute of genius but perseverance’.27 Moran’s polemic forced a counter-response from Yeats who wrote a letter to The Leader in 1900 noting that: You have been misled, doubtless, by reading what some indiscreet friend or careless opponent has written, into supposing that I have ever used the phrases ‘Celtic note’ and ‘Celtic Renaissance’ except as a quotation from others, if even then, or that I have quoted Matthew Arnold’s essay on Celtic literature ‘on a hundred platforms’ or elsewhere in support of the ideas behind these phrases . . . I have avoided ‘Celtic note’ and ‘Celtic renaissance’ partly because the journalist has laid his ugly hands upon them, and all I have said or written about Matthew Arnold since I was a

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 127 boy is an essay in ‘Cosmopolis’, in which I have argued that the characteristics he has called Celtic, mark all races just in so far as they preserve the qualities of the early races of the world.28

As early as his essay on ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ (1897), Yeats sought to ‘restate’ Arnold’s views on the Celts, only to conclude that ‘I do not think any of us who write about Ireland have built any argument upon them’.29 These unequivocal denials of an Arnoldian influence, however, sit uneasily beside Yeats’s attempts at defining the unique characteristics of Celtic culture in the 1890s. Yeats argued, for instance, that the Irish cultural revival was ‘the revolt of the soul against the intellect’30 and, in an article on Ernest Rhys’s Welsh Ballads, he noted that ‘were it not for one or two delicate and musical translations in “The Study of Celtic Literature”, Welsh poetry would not even be a great name to most of us’.31 Even when anxiously rejecting Arnold’s observations on Celticism, Yeats’s critique is little more than a subtle change of emphasis, as opposed to the wholesale revision of Arnold’s views that the polemical thrust of Yeats’s own argument may lead us to expect. In ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’ Yeats notes that When Matthew Arnold wrote, it was not easy to know as much as we know now of folk-song and folk-belief, and I do not think he understood that our ‘natural magic’ is but the ancient worship of Nature and that troubled ecstasy before her, that certainty of all beautiful places being haunted, which it brought into men’s minds.32

If ‘Matthew Arnold quotes the lamentations of Llywarch Hen as a type of the Celtic melancholy’, Yeats’s greater knowledge of folk culture leads him to ‘quote it as a type of the primitive melancholy’.33 While the replacement of ‘Celtic’ with ‘primitive’ – which is the central purpose of Yeats’s essay – places Irish literature within a wider international context, the argument is ultimately little more than a subtle amendment to Arnold’s analysis. Where Arnold explains the ‘turn for natural magic’ by invoking the ‘Celtic strain’ in English literature, Yeats offers the following corrective: I will put this differently and say that literature dwindles to a mere chronicle of circumstance, or passionless fantasies, and passionless meditations, unless it is constantly flooded with the passions and beliefs of ancient times, and that of all the fountains of the passions and beliefs of

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ancient times in Europe, the Slavonic, the Finnish, the Scandinavian and the Celtic, the Celtic alone has been for centuries close to the main river of European literature. It has again and again brought ‘the vivifying spirit’ ‘of excess’ into the arts of Europe.34

It is difficult to see how this analysis modifies Arnold’s argument in any way. Indeed, it is not difficult to imagine this passage appearing in Arnold’s Celtic essays. Arnold himself noted that the Celtic contribution to English philistinism derived from the fact that ‘there is something Greek in them’, and spoke of the Celtic peoples as a ‘primitive race’.35 His earlier analysis of the absorption of ancient minority cultures into the emergent nation states of Europe made connections between the Irish absorption into England, the Breton absorption into France and the Polish absorption into Russia.36 Yeats also follows Arnold in making intensity of passion, pagan belief and imaginative excess the cornerstones of his characterisation of the Celts: It is hardly an exaggeration to say that the spiritual history of the world has been the history of conquered races. Those learned in the traditions of many lands, understand that it is almost always some defeated or perhaps dwindling tribe hidden among the hills or in the forests, that is most famous for the understanding of charms and the reading of dreams, and the seeing of visions. And has not our Christianity come to us from defeated and captive Judea? The influence of the Celt, too, has been a spiritual influence, and men are beginning to understand how great it has been . . . Until our day the Celt has dreamed but half dreams of Europe, while others have written them, but today he is beginning to write his own dreams . . . The bulk of the poets of modern Ireland has been so exclusively political, or so exclusively national, in a political sense, that it has hardly busied itself like the poets of Wales and Brittany with the spiritual part of life, but now we have several poets who are speaking with what I think is the truest voice of the Celt.37

In this review of ‘Three Irish Poets’ Yeats follows Arnold in finding his manifestations of that Celticism which unites the poets of Ireland with those of Wales and Brittany, not in the rational fields of politics or science but in the spiritual realm of art. He also, significantly, repeats Arnold’s view that it is the Celts’ ‘conquered’ status that gives them their insights into ‘charms’, ‘dreams’ and ‘visions’. It is this conception of the ‘conquered’ Celts as a visionary people

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 129 that informs Yeats’s early epic poem The Wanderings of Oisin of 1889. Essentially consisting of a dialogue between St Patrick and the Celtic warrior Oisin on the conflict between an ancient pagan order and the Christianity that takes its place, Oisin’s words, which constitute most of the poem, are spoken from a position of defeat. Oisin, when the poem begins, is an old man who remembers the time when his army was defeated ‘On Gavra’s green’.38 Having spent three hundred years in the netherworld, he returns to find his pagan, Celtic Ireland Christianised and populated by ‘. . . a small and feeble populace stooping with mattock and spade’.39 Oisin realises that old Ireland is dead and gone when he hears an old man say that ‘the gods a long time are dead’.40 Celtic Ireland has been conquered by Christianity in the present, just as Oisin’s men were beaten in battle in the past, and the note of defeat is struck from the opening stanza where Oisin describes the exhausted remains of his once proud army: patrick Oisin, tell me the famous story Why thou outlivest, blind and hoary, The bad old days. Thou wert, men sing, Trapped of an amorous demon thing. oisin ’Tis sad remembering, sick with years, The swift innumerable spears, The long-haired warriors, the spread feast; And love, in the hours when youth has ceased: Yet will I make all plain for thee. We rode in sorrow, with strong hounds three, Bran, Sgeolan, and Lomair, On a morning misty and mild and fair. The mist-drops hung on the fragrant trees, And in the blossoms hung the bees. We rode in sadness above Lough Laen, For our best were dead on Gavra’s green.41

The exotic themes and cadences of Yeats’s Celticism are set from the outset. Oisin is ‘sick with years’, rides ‘with sorrow’ and ‘in sadness’, and a dominant sense of loss, of exhaustion, of narratives coming to an end, is sustained throughout the poem. Just as Arnold, in turning west towards Anglesey in the opening scenes of his Celtic lectures,

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portrayed a Celtic twilight as a symbol of the inevitable assimilation of the Celtic peoples into an English nation, Yeats describes the lips of the maiden Niamh as ‘a sunset / A stormy sunset on doomed ships’, and references to periods of time are dominated by evening and night, with Oisin recalling ‘a hundred years / At evening on the glimmering sands’ as he faces the eradication of a Celtic civilisation. At the poem’s close, St Patrick seeks to persuade the pagan Oisin to convert to Christianity or face the damnation visited upon his fellow warriors. patrick On the red flaming stones without refuge the limbs of the Fenians are tost; No live man goes thither, and no man may war with the strong spirits wage; But weep thou, and wear thou the flags with thy knees, for thy soul that is lost, For thy youth without peace, and thy years with the demons, and the godless fires of thine age. oisin Ah me! to be old without succour, a show unto children, a stain, Without laughter, a coughing, alone with remembrance and fear, All emptied of purple hours as a beggar’s cloak in the rain, As a grass seed crushed by a pebble, as an owl sucked under weir. I will pray no more with the smooth stones: when life in my body has ceased – For lonely to move ‘mong the soft eyes of best ones a sad thing were – I will go to the house of the Fenians, be they flames or feast, To Fin, Colte, and Conan, and Bran, Sgeolan, Lomair.42

Oisin’s final defiant statement subverts the poem’s general sense of longing for a lost, idealised past. It is surely significant, as R. F. Foster notes, that, whereas P. W. Joyce, in his popular version of Oisin in Tirnanogue of 1879, had referred to Oisin’s warriors as the ‘Fena’, Yeats deliberately uses the term ‘Fenian’, thus invoking the violent independence movement of the 1860s.43 Oisin’s final, defiant call to his fellow Fenians suggests that Yeats’s adoption of the tenets of Arnoldian Celticism need not necessarily entail a subscription to Arnold’s political unionism. Indeed, the Arnoldian basis of Yeats’s ‘Celt’ has been regarded as

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 131 an example of the way in which a colonised author appropriates the stereotypes ascribed to his people by an imperial power and turns them into positive attributes.44 Robert Welch talks of Yeats ‘completely transforming’ Arnold’s ‘intellectual strategy’, and Edward Said makes a similar point in broader terms when discussing Yeats as a poet of ‘decolonisation’.45 Yet, in looking at Yeats’s response to Arnold, what we note is that nothing is inverted, nothing is transformed. The reason for this lies, interestingly, not in Yeats’s own writings – where the positive appropriation of Celtic spirituality and imagination fits the colonial model – but in the surprisingly positive evaluation of the Celtic temperament offered by Arnold himself. John Kelleher’s observation that Yeats transformed ‘every weakness that Arnold deplored in the Celt’ into ‘characteristic strengths’ – an observation that fits the kind of argument now popular in post-colonial studies – is simply not true.46 Arnold did not ‘deplore’ the Celt’s ‘natural magic’, ‘femininity’ and ‘imagination’ as weaknesses, but considered them important and complementary contributions to the Anglo-Saxon and Norman tendencies within the English type. ‘All tendencies of human nature are in themselves vital and profitable; when they are blamed, they are to be blamed relatively, not absolutely’ notes Arnold.47 In attempting to explain how an Irish cultural nationalist could base his cultural thought on the imperial Celticism of an English Unionist, we need to return briefly to the inconsistencies within Arnold’s own argument. R. F. Foster notes perceptively that Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature, despite arguing for bringing Celtic culture fully into the political and cultural system of England, ‘reinforced an interpretation of Celticism that strengthened irreconcilable ideas of separatism’.48 Yeats’s use of Arnold’s ideas as the basis for Irish cultural independence derives, as Foster implies, from a tension embedded within Arnold’s argument itself. As was noted earlier, Arnold’s Celtic essays are based on a contributionist argument in which the philistinism of the English middle classes can be alleviated only by accessing the Celtic strain within the English hybrid character. This argument for the control of one’s racial constituents, however, is developed in terms of distinctive racial characteristics. This leads to a tension in the argument that is foregrounded towards the conclusion of the final lecture: . . . I have been labouring to show [that], in the spiritual frame of us English ourselves, a Celtic fibre, little as we may have ever thought of tracing it, lives and works. Aliens in speech, in religion, in blood! said

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Lord Lyndhurst; the philologists have set him right about the speech, the physiologists about the blood; and perhaps, taking religion in the wide but true sense of our whole spiritual activity, those who have followed what I have been saying here will think that the Celt is not so wholly alien to us in religion. But, at any rate, let us consider that of the shrunken and diminished remains of this great primitive race, all, with one insignificant exception, belongs to the English empire; only Brittany is not ours; we have Ireland, the Scotch Highlands, Wales, the Isle of Man, Cornwall. They are part of ourselves, we are deeply interested in knowing them, they are deeply interested in being known by us.49

This final attempt at synthesis foregrounds the contradictions within Arnold’s argument that I discussed in Chapter 1. For not only is there a ‘Celtic fibre’ within the English composite self, this ‘great primitive race’ also continues to reside on the western and northern peripheries of the British Isles. These ‘diminished remains’ have no active role to play within the ‘English empire’; ‘we are deeply interested in knowing them, they are deeply interested in being known by us’. Rather than ‘interested in knowing us’ the active verbs refer only to the English, with the static, visualised, Celtic residue welcoming the scholarly interest of the English ethnographer and philologist. Yet, the very existence of a ‘diminished remnant’ with its own racial characteristics as defined by Arnold, implies the possibility of separation. Marjorie Howes expresses the problem eloquently when she notes that ‘The dialectic between hybridity as the elimination of difference and hybridity as the intermingling of distinct entities was central to the period’s racial theory’.50 Arnold’s essays, as I noted in the introduction, begin with the author standing on the coast of North Wales observing the ‘Saxon hive’ that ‘swarms’ across the bay from Liverpool to Wales, where the past still lives, where every place has its tradition, every name its poetry, and where the people, the genuine people, still know this past, this tradition, this poetry, and lives with it, and clings to it . . .51

To invoke the notion of a ‘genuine people’ who resist the influence of the ‘Saxon swarm’ seems already to undercut the contributionist argument. Furthermore, the very logic of Arnold’s cultural theory, where an élite of cultured ‘aliens,’ or educated ‘remnant’, have the potential to transform the cultural values of society offers a useful model for the Celtic nationalist. If the ‘Celtic residue’ has the poten-

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 133 tial to reinvigorate English cultural life, then it is a small step for an emergent nationalism to adopt this argument as a basis for making the case that the ‘genuine people’ of Wales have the potential to lead their nation to cultural and political self-determination. The argument can thus go in two directions. While Arnold sought to produce a version of the Celtic peoples where their cultural uniqueness and values prescribed their inevitable political erasure, Yeats adopted this version of Celticism as the basis for cultural and political separatism. Celticism in Context The two streams within Arnold’s analysis – an explicit contributionism and an implicit (and unintentional) separatism – were replicated within what Ann Saddlemeyer has called the ‘Cult of Pan-Celticism in the Nineties’.52 In challenging the tendency to use ‘Celtic’ and ‘Irish’ as synonymous terms, Saddlemeyer notes evidence of ‘an allegiance broader than their own island’ among Irish nationalists.53 There is considerable evidence in Yeats’s own writings that he was aware of the broader resonances of the term ‘Celtic’. In June 1896, for example, he was writing animatedly about the need to further ‘the mutual understanding and sympathy of the Scotch, Welsh and Irish Celts’,54 and the original manifesto for what came to be called the Irish Literary Theatre was originally drafted under the title ‘The Celtic Theatre’ and was signed ‘for provisional committee’ by Yeats. Yeats’s reference to ‘Celtic and Irish’ plays in that document would seem to suggest a difference in meaning between the two terms. We propose to have performed in Dublin in the spring of every year certain Celtic and Irish plays, which whatever be their degree of excellence, will be written with a high ambition; and to make a beginning next spring, with two plays, a play of modern Ireland and in prose by Mr. Edward Martyn & a play of legendary Ireland & in verse by Mr. W. B. Yeats. We expect to follow them with plays by Mr. George Moore, Mr. Standish O’Grady, Miss Fiona MacCleod [sic] & others in other years; & so to build up a Celtic & Irish dramatic school.55

While Lady Gregory explained in her biography that the ‘Celtic’ was included for the Scot Fiona Macleod (to whom I shall return), Yeats also referred to himself as ‘the Celt’ in his article on ‘The Irish National Literary Society’ (1892), and his most nationalistic writings of the decade, for the Irish-American journal The Boston Pilot, were

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written under the heading ‘The Celt in London’, which briefly changed to ‘The Celt in Ireland’ following his return home in the summer of 1891.56 Yeats’s persistent adoption of a ‘Celtic’ persona throughout the 1890s calls for further explanation, particularly in relation to the concept of ethnicity that Celticism entails. ‘Celtic’ cannot be simply equated with ‘Irish’ in 1890s’ Ireland, and the term relates to a wider historical, as well as cultural, context. The rise of a Celtic consciousness during the 1890s was partly related to the emergence of Home Rule movements of varying significance in Ireland, Wales and Scotland. If the rise of a Fenian nationalist independence movement in the 1860s stimulated Arnold into writing his Celtic essays, it also led Liberal politicians, especially Gladstone, to consider conciliatory measures on the ‘Irish question’. Disestablishment of the Anglican Church in Ireland in 1869, the Land Act of 1870 and an abortive educational reform in 1873 were all conceived of as means of demonstrating to the Irish that Westminster was responsive to their political demands. These reforms were not enough, however, to hinder the rise of a powerful Home Rule movement and, with an acute agricultural depression lasting from the 1870s to the mid-1890s, and the rise of Parnell as a charismatic leader of the Home Rule Party, British politics faced a major constitutional crisis.57 Gladstone responded by supporting Home Rule for Ireland, a decision that split the Liberal party into Unionist and Gladstonian factions. This constitutional crisis led Matthew Arnold back to a consideration of the Celtic nations in the last two years of his life. In an article on ‘Disestablishment in Wales’ (1888) he couldn’t contain his astonishment that ‘Gladstone talks now constantly of the “national spirit” of Ireland’, and regretted the fact that a British Prime Minister felt that he was able to ‘talk with satisfaction of the persistence, in such a country, of rival and disintegrating nationalities, to encourage them, to promise them help in establishing themselves more fully!’58 In responding to the crisis of 1886, in which the defeat of Gladstone’s Home Rule Bill led to the collapse of the Liberal government and introduced twenty years of almost permanent Conservative rule, Arnold was to note significantly that Ireland has been a nation, a most unhappy one. Wales, too, and Scotland, have been nations. But politically they are now nations no longer, any one of them. This country could not have risen to its present greatness if they had been. Give them separate Parliaments, and you begin, no doubt,

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 135 to make them again nations politically. But you begin also to undo what made this country great.59

If Arnold perceived the dangerous precedent that Home Rule for Ireland could potentially set for the other Celtic nations, then so too did politicians within those nations themselves. Indeed, events in Ireland were to have a profound effect on the politics of Scotland and Wales. Disestablishment of the Church became a key issue in Scotland and in Wales during these years and both experienced land campaigns. Rosebery, who took over as Prime Minister for a year following Gladstone’s retirement in 1894, claimed in 1895 that he was in favour of Home Rule for all the nations of Britain.60 The policy of ‘Home Rule All Round’ had been aired by Chamberlain in 1886, and Rosebery followed in advocating the policy as a means of removing the Irish question from its position at the top of the political agenda. Irish nationalism contained a strongly republican element which was lacking in Scotland and in Wales; thus, to place the question of Home Rule within a wider ‘Celtic’ context was to marginalise those who thought in terms of total independence. This policy was to have contradictory results, however, for, while somewhat diluting the uniqueness of Irish grievances, it also gave credibility to the small group of nationalists who, in 1886, formed the Home Rule Association in Scotland, and the more vibrant group of Liberal nationalists who joined with others to form the Cymru Fydd/Young Wales movement again, significantly, in 1886.61 Christopher Harvie notes, in discussing this period, that ‘Scottish Home Rule bobbed about in the slipstream of the Irish’62, and Kenneth Morgan underlines the importance of Irish developments in Wales: Perhaps the main impact of Ireland on Wales lay in its impact on British party politics. In splitting the Liberal party and making it – and Gladstone in particular – more responsive to the Celtic fringe, Irish Home Rulers made the Welsh question a political reality. The ‘Welsh national revolt’ began, not in Meirioneth, but in County Mayo.63

While the Irish, as Conor Cruise O’Brien has observed, regarded Home Rule as a barely tolerable compromise, the Scots were happy to see it as a welcome extension, if not an essential development, of the devolution of powers represented by the founding of the Scottish Office in 1885. One strand of Scottish Home Rulery found expression

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when the Scottish Liberal Association voted for home rule in 1888, while another strand was developing in the Highlands where crofters, pitted against their landlords (and against the army in Skye) in the land wars, found political expression with the founding of the Highland Land League and the Crofters’ Party.64 Scottish grievances were less acute, and less widely spread, than their Irish equivalents, however, and, as Christopher Harvie notes, ‘there was no Scottish Parnell’.65 Wales did have its Parnell in the shape of David Lloyd George. An active campaigner for the disestablishment of the Church in Wales, Lloyd George was also a founder member of Cymru Fydd which mustered considerable support as it began to establish branches throughout the length and breadth of Wales between 1894 and 1896. Lloyd George believed that the aim of uniting the Welsh organisation of the Liberal Party with that of Cymru Fydd would be easily achieved, but an acrimonious meeting in Newport in 1896 brought an end to that, potentially fruitful, alliance. Robert Bird, a native of Bristol and Chairman of the Cardiff Liberal Association noted that ‘There are from Swansea to Newport, thousands upon thousands of Englishmen, as true Liberals as yourselves . . . who will never submit to the domination of Welsh ideas’.66 Lloyd George’s rhetorical question in Y Faner (The Banner) summed up the feelings of those who’d failed to carry the vote: A yw lliaws y genedl Gymreig yn mynd i gymryd eu harglwyddiaethu gan glymblaid o gyfalafwyr Saesneg sydd yn dyfod i Gymru, nid i ddyrchafu’r bobl, ond i wneud eu ffortiwn? [Are the majority of Welsh people going to be dominated by a coalition of English capitalists who have come to Wales not to benefit the people but to make their fortune?]67

The meeting in Newport proved to be a fatal blow to Cymru Fydd and, although further meetings were held in 1897 and 1898, the movement was over before the turn of the century. The late 1880s and 1890s, then, were times when, despite considerable historical, social and cultural differences, the national questions in Ireland, Wales and Scotland had a simultaneous impact on the political life of Britain. In the cultural sphere this took the form of an emergent Pan-Celticism and, if Wales and Scotland generally followed Ireland in politics, the cultural influence travelled both ways. Scottish Gaelic books were frequently reviewed in Irish jour-

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 137 nals, aided by the similarities between the two languages, and Welsh cultural events were widely reported in the Gaelic press.68 The Welsh Eisteddfod was admired by cultural revivalists in Scotland and in Ireland. The Scots established their equivalent festival, the Mod (Assembly), in 1892 and, if it was difficult in 1892 to imagine any Irish organisation capable of arranging such an institution, that changed with the birth of Conradh na Gaeilge (The Gaelic League) in 1893. By 1897 the Oireachtas had been born, and the editor of the journal Irisleabhar na Gaedhilge (The Gaelic Journal) paid tribute to the inspiration of the Welsh Eisteddfod: ‘We hope to see the Oireachtas, in course of time, do for Irish what the Eisteddfod has done for Welsh’.69 In his prize-winning essay for the Oireachtas on ‘An Múnadh Bheireann Breatain, .i. Muintear Bhreathanach, d’Éireannachaibh i dTaobh le a dTeangaidh Dhúthchais do Choimeád Beó’ (What Wales can teach Ireland as to the Preservation of Celtic Speech), Peadar mac Fhionnlaoich confessed that ‘Ni’l aon nidh bhaineas le teangaidh do choimeád beó nach dtigh le Breathnachaibh mhúnadh d’Éireannchaibh, óir chongbhaigheadar siadsan a dteanga beó agus ní mór ná go bhfuil ar dteanga-ne caillte againn’ (‘There is nothing related to keeping the language alive that the Welsh can’t teach the Irish, for they have kept the language alive and we have well nigh lost ours’).70 While not all Gaelic nationalists were as interested in pan-Celtic connections, such articles and essays suggest, as Philip O’Leary has noted, ‘a widespread acceptance of the fact that for the time being at least the Irish would be the pupils and not the teachers in any Celtic renaissance’.71 This pragmatic awareness of similar objectives and shared obstacles – that which O’Leary calls ‘lower case pan-celticism’ – was challenged in the late 1890s by an acrimonious row within the Gaelic movement regarding its relations to an emergent Pan-Celtic movement.72 The Celtic Association was formed in 1899 with the purpose of organising joint festivals and gatherings of representatives in the fields of Celtic scholarship, literature, the arts and music. In Ireland its chief advocate was the unlikely Bernard Edward Barnaby Fitzpatrick, or Lord Castletown, one of the country’s wealthiest landowners, a fluent Irish speaker, and staunch Unionist.73 Ruth Dudley Edwards suggests that Pan-Celticism was identified with the Protestant Ascendancy and aristocracy, and was held in considerable suspicion by nationalists in general and the Gaelic League in particular.74 The movement did, however, have considerable support among influential figures within The Gaelic League, such as Patrick Pearse,

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who visited the Eisteddfod on its behalf in 1899, and Douglas Hyde. Indeed, Fainne an Lae (Dawn, lit. ‘the rise of day’), the official organ of the Gaelic League, was Pan-Celtic in its sympathies, committing its allegiance to a vision of ‘Celtia’ in its edition of 6 January 1899: ‘Celtia’ or ‘Keltia’ is the name adopted at Cardiff last year for the aggregate territory of the Five Celtic Nations, i.e., those nationalities whose surviving, or rather reviving, national language belongs to the Celtic family of Indo-European languages. That definition leaves the question of blood-relationship, of historical connection, of racial purity, and of political status altogether on one side. ‘Celtia’ has an actual existence in the hearts of those who speak and love their Celtic language, and are in sympathy with the parallel efforts of their kinsfolk across the sea . . . The five nations are linked together, however far apart may lie their political or religious tendencies.75

While language is the basis for a common Celticism here, linguistic and racial definitions often become confused in the writings of the period, and those who opposed the Pan-Celtic idea noted that the ‘innate racial sympathy’ that united ‘Celtia’ was a fabrication for, with the exception of Scots Gaelic, the other Celtic languages were unintelligible to Irish speakers.76 Ruth Dudley Edwards and R. F. Foster reconstruct the Pan-Celtic debates of this period in terms of the Gaelic League’s cultural extremism frustrating the more cosmopolitan and enlightened activities of the Pan-Celticists.77 Discussing ‘panmovements’ in general, however, Hannah Arendt identified the rise of modern European racism with the ‘decline of the European nationstate’ and the rise of movements that sought to transcend ‘the narrow bounds of a national community’ by asserting the primacy of ‘a folk community that would remain a political factor even if its members were dispersed all over the earth’.78 Indeed, Pan-Celticism was perceived by many to entail a dangerously racial definition of identity, as opposed to a linguistic definition which was seen to transcend divisions of race and religion. An anonymous Gaelic Leaguer commented in 1907 that: We are not Pan-Celts ourselves – and for this reason. We are working for the building up of the Irish nation – a nation which will be an Irish Ireland rather than a Celtic Ireland – a nation in which the Irish-born Celt and Saxon, the Irish-born Dane and the Irish-born Norman, shall live together as brothers. The Irishman of Saxon or Norman or Danish blood

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 139 is of vastly more importance to the Gaelic League than the man of Celtic origin who belongs to any other nation. Our objects are national, not (in the narrow sense of the word) racial.79

These debates, which were ultimately concerned with the very basis of Irish identity, were to reverberate throughout the 1890s and 1900s in Ireland. The actual Pan-Celtic picture was far more complicated than Edwards, Foster or Arendt suggest for, if Pan-Celticism represented a dangerously racial definition of identity for some, it offered a model of a multinational movement for others, thus providing a space in which support for the Irish language could be expressed without that inevitably entailing a commitment to the goals of Irish nationalism. It is interesting to note that Yeats’s attempts at forging an Irish literature in the English language were treated with contempt by many Pan-Celticists and anti-Celticists. The anti-Celtic Moran noted in the inaugural edition of The Leader, for example, that ‘we deny the possible existence of such a thing as an Irish literature in the English language’, while the Pan-Celticist Patrick Pearse believed Yeats to be ‘a mere Irish poet of the third or fourth rank, and as such he is harmless. But when he attempts to run an ‘Irish’ Literary Theatre it is time for him to be crushed.’80 Yeats’s adoption of a Celtic identity did not, then, align him with any particular nationalist group or movement. His Celticism was one of many, often mutually contradictory, forms of nationalism at work in late nineteenth-century Ireland. It is only when Yeats’s views are contrasted with the various collective identities at work in late nineteenth-century Ireland that the particular form of his nationalism can come into focus. The Celt in Ireland Within the context of competing voices, ideologies and movements described above, Yeats’s self-fashioned ‘Celticism’ functioned as a means for him to locate himself as man of letters within, between and beyond the factions – Catholic/Protestant, Gaelic/English, Unionist/Nationalist – that divided Irish society. Yeats followed the Pan-Celticists in locating his cultural nationalism within a Celtic past as a means of bypassing the religious divisions of the present. His stated desire was to direct Irish history away from the ‘nets of wrong and right’ and thus transcend ‘the mystery play of devils and angels which we call our national history’.81 It is by now a common place to

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note that any discussion of Yeats’s early nationalism must account for the role of his own background as a member of a marginalised and displaced Protestant middle class, and this carries added significance in discussing the motivations for his adoption of a Celtic persona in his works.82 By 1865, the year of his birth, a survey showed that Catholics possessed five out of twelve judgeships in the Irish supreme court; the three great Irish railway lines were under their control as was the administrative power in the banks. Behind the changing balance of power lay the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829, and the Disestablishment and Land crusades and the Home Rule battles of 1886 and 1893 discussed earlier.83 The once-ascendant Protestant minority, constituting about 12 per cent of the population, ‘were potentially in eclipse by the year 1865’ notes R. F. Foster, and given this historical context, and the fact that a number of the literary revival’s key figures were Protestant, it is difficult not to follow Seamus Deane in reading the Irish Literary Revival as ‘the spiritual heroics of a fading class’ within the context of an emergent, predominantly Roman Catholic, nation.84 Given this social context, Yeats’s Celticism can be read as both a politically and culturally motivated strategy for transcending religious divisions in an attempt at establishing a meaningful position from which an Irish Protestant man of letters could speak. This adoption of a ‘Celtic’ identity was not an inevitable position for Protestant nationalists to take at this time, however. Motivated by similar concerns as Yeats – the waning of the Protestant influence within a Catholic nation, and the rise of an Irish nationalism based in Catholicism – Douglas Hyde, a Protestant and firm supporter of the Pan-Celtic movement, invoked the Gaelic language as a terrain on which a conception of Irish nationhood that transcended the divisions of class, religion and race could be built. Hyde’s ‘On the Necessity of De-Anglicizing the Irish People’, a presidential address delivered to the National Literary Society in 1892, called for the re-establishment of Gaelic as a national language as part of the general Gaelicising of Irish culture in the spheres of sport, literature and clothing, and of a wider rejection of English models in all walks of Irish life.85 It is this curious certainty that come what may Irishmen will continue to resist English rule, even though it should be for their good, which prevents many of our nation from becoming Unionists on the spot. It is a fact, and we must face it as a fact, that although they adopt English habits and copy England in every way, the great bulk of Irishmen and

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 141 Irishwomen over the whole world are known to be filled with a dull, everabiding animosity against her, and – right or wrong – to grieve when she prospers, and joy when she is hurt. Such movements as Young Irelanders, Fenianism, Land Leagueism and Parliamentary obstruction seem always to gain their sympathy and support. It is just because there appears no earthly chance of their becoming good members of the Empire that I urge that they should not remain in the anomalous position they are in, but since they absolutely refuse to become the one thing, that they become the other; cultivate what they have rejected, and build up an Irish nation on Irish lines.86

The possibility of assimilation with the English, as advocated by Arnold, is here offered as a potential solution to the Irish question, only to be rejected. Given that history has demonstrated that the Irish simply cannot become English, they should respond by cultivating their Irishness. Cultural nationalism precedes, and does not even necessarily entail, political nationalism for Hyde who, at the opening and close of his speech, insisted that his vision was as applicable to Protestants as to Catholics, to Unionists as to Nationalists. As in the writings of Moran and Yeats, culture is the site of the significant nationalist struggle for Hyde for, without an identifiably Irish cultural identity, the political struggle for self-determination is meaningless. Hyde set an example by learning the Irish language himself, and his translations of Irish poems into English represented an important part of the emergence of a cultural revival. While Yeats and Hyde were engaged in a radical revolt against the Young Ireland tradition of didactic nationalist verse inaugurated by Thomas Moore and Thomas Davis, however, their views on the future development of Irish literature were revealingly at odds.87 Hyde was prepared to support Anglo-Irish literature only as a half-way house to the total Gaelicisation of Irish literature. A literature in English saturated with the imagery and narratives of the Gaelic tradition, such as his own translations of Love Songs of Connaught (1893), would make the idea of Ireland interesting and valuable to the Irish, leading them to reclaim their heritage and explore the great native literary traditions that still existed.88 Yeats, while backing attempts to support the Irish language, did not see Anglo-Irish literature as a step in the Gaelicisation of Ireland, but believed that a distinctively Irish literature in English would be the most valuable force in forging a new national consciousness. The main thrust of Yeats’s cultural nationalist agenda in the 1890s was clearly expressed in his

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response to Hyde’s lecture which appeared in the United Irishman in December 1892. Yeats followed Hyde in fearing that ‘the Gaelic language will soon no more be heard, except here and there in remote villages, and on the wind-beaten shores of Connaught’.89 Given this reality, ‘is there, then, no hope for the de-Anglicizing of our people?’, he asked. Can we not build up a national tradition, a national literature, which shall be none the less Irish in spirit from being English in language? Can we not keep the continuity of the nation’s life, not by trying to do what Dr. Hyde has practically pronounced impossible, but by translating or retelling in English, which shall have an indefinable Irish quality of rhythm and style, all that is best of the ancient literature? Can we not write and persuade others to write histories and romances of the great Gaelic men of the past, from the son of Nessa to Owen Roe, until there has been made a golden bridge between the old and the new?90

This debate between Yeats and Hyde amounts to a meditation on the construction of national identity, and the bases on which a national culture should be built. When asked by a delegation of Indian writers some years later, why he did not write in Irish, Yeats responded that No man can think or write with music and vigour except in his mother tongue . . . I could no more have written in Gaelic than can those Indians write in English. Gaelic is my native language, but it is not my mother tongue.91

The final sentence here gestures towards a generously bilingual concept of nationhood, while simultaneously suggesting the awkward coexistence of two languages within the same national space. ‘If one says a National Literature must be in the language of the country’, Yeats noted in 1904, there are many difficulties. Should it be written in the language that one’s country does speak or the language it ought to speak? . . . Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman are national writers of America, although the one had his first acceptance in France and the other in England and Ireland.92

Yeats raises a question here that has been discussed more recently by the American cultural critic, Walter Benn Michaels. Michaels argues that contemporary discussions of culture and multiculturalism are

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 143 still based on the racial categories that they seek to reject. He states that . . . insofar as our culture remains nothing more than what we do and believe, it is impotently descriptive. The fact, in other words, that something belongs to our culture, cannot count as a motive for our doing it since, if it does belong to our culture we are already doing it, and if we don’t do it (if we’ve stopped or haven’t yet started doing it) it doesn’t belong to our culture . . . It is only if we think that our culture is not whatever beliefs and practices we actually happen to have but is instead the beliefs and practices that should properly go with the kind of people we happen to be that the fact of something belonging to our culture can count as a reason for doing it. But to think this is to appeal to something that must be beyond culture and that cannot be derived from culture precisely because our sense of which culture is properly ours must be derived from it. This has been the function of race . . . The modern concept of culture is not, in other words, a critique of racism; it is a form of racism.93

Hyde, in arguing for the de-Anglicisation of Ireland and the revival of Gaelic, can be seen to entertain a notion of culture that is based on an idea of what Irish people should be doing (speaking Irish) because of the kind of people they are, as opposed to what they are doing (speaking English). For Hyde, Irishness and Irish national identity would be lost if the language were to die. Yeats’s response does not so much argue that nothing would be lost if Gaelic was to vanish – he supported attempts at language revival – but that Irish identity would not be lost; it would simply continue in another medium.94 ‘When we remember the majesty of Cuchulain and the beauty of sorrowing Deirdre’ he noted in 1892 ‘we should not forget that it is that majesty and that beauty which are immortal, and not the perishing tongue that first told of them.’95 Nevertheless, neither Hyde nor Yeats seems to base his idea of national culture on a notion of race. The national question is not much of a concern for the American contemporary critic, Benn Michaels, who is writing from within a politically independent nation state. In seeking to give a cultural voice to a nation that is not yet in existence, Hyde and Yeats seek less a racial basis for their concept of culture, than a cultural basis (that seeks, in its emphasis on a ‘what people do’ in a geographical space, to transcend the equally divisive forces of race, class and religion) for their concept of the nation. In his attempt at constructing a distinctively Irish culture in

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another nation’s language, Yeats often turned to American authors as a source of inspiration. A few years after Matthew Arnold had argued that the very idea of an American Literature was ridiculous, Yeats turned to the American literary tradition as the basis for his own brand of cultural nationalism: America, with no past to speak of, a mere parvenu among the nations, is creating a national literature which in its most characteristic products differs almost as much from English literature as does the literature of France. Walt Whitman, Thoreau, Bret Harte, and Cable, to name no more, are very American, and yet America was once an English colony. It should be more easy for us, who have in us that wild Celtic blood, the most un-English of all things under heaven, to make such a literature. If we fail it shall not be because we lack the materials, but because we lack the power to use them.96

Both Whitman and Thoreau were often invoked by Yeats as examples of national artists, but Bret Harte and George Cable are more interesting references in that they were both ‘local-color’ writers, encouraged by William Dean Howells to use the themes and vernacular of their native California and New Orleans respectively in order to underline the authenticity, and American distinctiveness, of their works.97 Many of Yeats’s poems of the 1890s also made use of the vernacular, Irish place-names, and Gaelic-influenced sentence structures in conveying a sense of Irish distinctiveness in English. The popular ballad is a form that reappears in Yeats’s collections of poetry throughout the 1890s, from The Wanderings of Oisin and other Poems of 1889 to the Wind Among the Reeds of 1899. Characterised by simple rhymes – say / day, dear / clear – and a tendency towards sentimentalism, these early experiments in folk poetry, such as ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee’, are suggestive of the vision of the national community that informs Yeats’s Celticism. Come round me, little childer; There, don’t fling stones at me Because I mutter as I go; But pity Moll Magee. My man was a poor fisher With shore lines in the say; My work was saltin’ herrings The whole of the long day.

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 145 And sometimes from the saltin’ shed I scarce could drag my feet, Under the blessed moonlight, Along the pebbly street. I’d always been but weakly, And my baby was just born; A neighbour minded her by day, I minded her till morn. I lay upon my baby; Ye little children dear, I looked on my cold baby When the morn grew frosty and clear. A weary woman sleeps so hard! My man grew red and pale, And gave me money, and bade me go To my own place, Kinsale. [. . .] Pilin’ the wood or pilin’ the turf, Or going to the well, I’m thinking of my baby And keenin’ to mysel’. And sometimes I am sure she knows When, openin’ wide his door, God lights the stars, His candles, And looks upon the poor. So now, ye little childer, Ye won’t fling stones at me; But gather with your shinin’ looks And pity Moll Magee.98

There is a considerable awareness of the sound and visual appearance of stanza and rhyme in this tale of the peasant woman thrown out of her house for accidentally killing her baby. The use of the vernacular is obvious enough in the use of colloquialisms such as ‘childer’, ‘saltin’’ and the Irish vernacular ‘say’ for sea. The simple rhyme scheme is also wholly appropriate for the emotions communicated. Yet, despite the apparent simplicity, the poem, like the finest

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ballads, communicates considerable feeling. The opening stanza itself is masterfully constructed, for the initial affection suggested by ‘little childer’ is immediately undercut by the fact that these children are actually throwing stones at the narrator. Rather than gathering the children around her to tell them a story, Moll merely mutters to herself, thus suggesting the mental burden that she carries; a burden that the poem will reveal. The poem sustains a steady rhythm throughout, until it is partially disrupted by the penultimate line of the penultimate stanza where the comma creates a pause, thus isolating the words, ‘His candles’. If this isolation conveys the isolation of stars in the night sky, it also communicates a sense of her own isolation and the hopeful desperation of her turn to religion. This stanza leads us from the harsh reality of Moll’s life to the transcendence of religion, before returning to Moll’s wish in the present that her appeal to Irish religiousness may alleviate the hardship that she endures at the hands of the children. Yet if the poem enacts Moll’s plea for forgiveness, there is a sense in which the poem is generated by the suffering that Moll has endured; that the ballad can exist only because of the drama of her story. The ballad may thus be seen as an embodiment of Yeats’s belief that ‘the recent revival of Irish literature is very largely a folk-lore revival, an awakening of interest in the wisdom and ways of the poor, and in the poems and legends handed down among the cabins’.99 It is Moll Magee’s poverty and pain that produce the cultural value of her ballad. It would seem that, if Yeats’s Celticism is to be communicated via the English language, it is also predicated upon an idealisation of the Irish peasant, the source of ancient folk wisdom and tradition. Peter Kuch has argued that there is a shift in Yeats’s poetry and criticism from the Celticism of the 1890s to an emphasis on an Irish identity based upon the traditional divisions between peasant and aristocrat in the 1900s.100 While Kuch is right to identify a dwindling in the emphasis on a Celtic identity in the 1900s, the Celticism of the 1890s was itself founded on a conception of society divided into the peasants, who are the source of folklore and traditions, and a benevolent aristocracy of poets who are the preservers of those traditions. Yeats’s concept of the aristocracy has much in common with Arnold’s notion of the cultured ‘aliens’. Yeats’s aristocracy comprises those members of society with the necessary disinterestedness to perceive and preserve what is most valuable in the national culture, and who thus set the dominant cultural values of society. Thus, in a figure like Moll Magee, he constructs a version of the Celtic peasant whose

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 147 distinguishing characteristics ultimately undermine any hopes for the political empowerment of the peasantry. As I noted earlier, Yeats wrote to Alice Milligan in 1894 arguing that ‘. . . the work of an Irish man of letters must be not so much to awaken or quicken or preserve the national idea among the mass of the people but to convert the educated classes to it . . .’101 and, two years later, having stated that ‘being no democrat in intellectual things, and altogether persuaded that elaborate beauty has never come but from the mind of a deliberate artist writing at leisure and in peace’, he offered the theory that ‘civilized’ or ‘progressive communities’ began when a race of superior intellectual power compelled or persuaded a race of lesser intellectual power to feed it and house it, in return for the religion and science which it had thus found the leisure to make, and to pass on from generation to generation in ever growing complexity. This contest, the contest of subtlety against force, the subtlety often of a very few against the force of a multitude, gradually changed from a contest between men of different races to a compact between men of different classes, and so created the modern world.102

It was this philosophy that Yeats took with him on his first visit to the United States in 1903. If Yeats considered American literature a model of what could be achieved in Ireland, he felt that American society itself had been corrupted by the ‘degradation of industry’.103 This, he believed, was the result of the nation’s lack of an aristocracy that could stem the tide of industrial development, but he noted that ‘as your aristocracy grows the passion for beautiful things will grow. In the growth of that aristocracy lies your hope.’104 It is significant that Yeats’s responses to the United States are virtually a mirror image of Matthew Arnold’s responses. Whereas Arnold, despite his reservations, thought that the Americans should be congratulated on the political level for not having created class stratifications within their society, Yeats believes that the nation’s future lies in the growth of an aristocracy, and, where Arnold considered American literature a branch of English literature, Yeats admires American cultural independence.105 These differences in the two men’s responses to the United States help draw our attention to the divergences in their conceptions of culture, and how they relate to their ideas of ethnicity. Whereas Arnold was primarily concerned with the future stability of an industrialising imperial nation, Yeats seeks to draw on the values and traditions of the past as a bulwark against the industrial modernisation

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that is threatening traditional class structures and the native traditions of Ireland. While Arnold’s contributionism is informed by an anxiety about future developments, there is no longing for a lost past in his work. His goal is to encourage the emergence of an England that assimilates differences of class and ethnicity in the construction of a common national culture. Yeats’s Celticism seeks to achieve a similar goal to Arnold’s cultural theory. He wishes to construct an inclusive idea of nationhood but, unlike Arnold, his desired common Irish culture is predicated upon the conservation of the class structures and peasant traditions of an imagined Celtic past. Yeats’s conservationist invocation of a Celtic inheritance that predates the religious divisions of Protestantism and Roman Catholicism functioned, like Arnold’s ‘culture’ and Howells’s ‘realism’, as a vehicle for encouraging a sense of cultural homogeneity and national unity. For Yeats’s Celticism to be successful as a vehicle for social cohesion, it had not only to transcend religious differences but also to be cleansed of any leanings towards race. Thus, if the concept of the ‘Celt’ emerged with the ethnological theories of the Victorian era, Yeats attempted to strip it of these racial bases in constructing a purely cultural identity.106 An example of this process can be found in his discussion of the plays of George Moore and Edward Martyn in 1900: Mr. Moore and Mr. Martyn have put into their plays several eloquent things about the Celtic race, and certainly, if one were to claim that there is something in sacred races, and that the Celt is one of them, and to found one’s claims on Mr. Nutt’s pamphlets alone, one would not lack arguments. I am myself, however, more inclined to agree with Renan and to set store by a certain native tradition of thought that is passed on in the conversations of father and son, and in the institutions of life, and in literature, and in the examples of history.107

Ethnicity is thus not a matter of racial heredity, but of cultural inheritance, passed on ‘in the conversations of father and son’. While Yeats was striving to unite the various factions within Irish civil society, he was fully aware of the difficulties of this task in an ethnically and culturally plural nation. In paying tribute to the earlier cultural nationalism of Thomas Davis (1814–45), Yeats selected those elements of the Young Irelander’s creed that related to his current purposes, noting in particular that, for Davis, ‘nationality was not to be a thing of race or creed, every man born here belonged to the nation’.108

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 149 The way in which this civic nationalism informed Yeats’s developing cultural nationalism is suggested in a letter he wrote as part of one his many 1890s’ debates with Edward Dowden, Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin. The argument concerned Dowden’s and Yeats’s respective choices of ‘thirty best Irish books’.109 Dowden had revised Yeats’s original list on the basis that Irish literature ‘must be based on the old Celtic legends, must come from the Celtic people of the country, must have the basis and inspiration of race and racial tradition and must not and cannot be divorced from the philosophy and influences of the Catholic religion’.110 Yeats broadly accepted Dowden’s definition with the crucial modification that ‘this Ireland is not wholly Celtic any more than England is wholly Saxon, or wholly Catholic any more that England is wholly Protestant’. Irish literature, for Yeats, was to be defined by content more than by race or religion: [Professor Dowden’s definition] covers every definition on my list. Are not ‘Beside the Fire’, ‘The Coming of Cuchullin’ and ‘Fin and his Companions’, ‘based on the old Celtic literature and legends?’ . . . On the other hand, does his definition cover a single one of the books selected from Ussher and Swift and Berkeley, which he desired us to consider our national literature? He named none but admirable books, certainly, but ‘Gulliver’s Travells’ and ‘Tristram Shandy’ will be substitutes for the books I have named only when the books of Hume are considered Scotch literature in the same sense as the books of Burns and Barrie, or when the writings of Welshmen like Mr. George Meredith and Mr. William Morris are thought as full of the spirit of Wales as the triads of Taliesin.111

This letter is one of many ‘remorseless and enthusiastic’ articles, letters and reviews that Yeats wrote in the early 1890s in an attempt at providing the Irish with an ‘imaginative tradition in Irish literature’, a ‘national literature that made Ireland beautiful in the memory’.112 In avoiding all references to racial and religious divisions in his writings, and in comparing the Irish situation with that of Wales and Scotland, Yeats offered his own understanding of Irish literature as part of a broader Celtic tradition that would transcend political factions and encourage a sense of national unity. Opposed to Unionism, but also ‘dread[ing] some wild Fenian movement’, Yeats’s Celticism was a manifestation of the ‘imaginative tradition’ that he espoused, an ethnic identity that sought to be above the divisions of party, race and religious divisions.113 Much of the poetry of this period is engaged in exploring the possibility of such a position.

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‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland’ is a poem in which a desire to engage with life as it exists on the ground is continually undercut by the impulse to dream and imagine an alternative existence. The opening and closing stanzas read as follows: He stood among a crowd at Drumahair; His heart hung all upon a silken dress, And he had known at last some tenderness, Before earth took him to her stony care; But when a man poured fish into a pile, It seemed they raised their little silver heads, And sang what gold morning or evening sheds Upon a woven world-forgotten isle Where people love beside the ravelled seas; That time can never mar a lover’s vows Under that woven changeless roof of boughs: The singing shook him out of his new ease. [. . .] He slept under the hill of Lugnagall; And might have known at last unhaunted sleep Under that cold and vapour-turbaned steep, Now that the earth had taken man and all: Did not the worms that spired about his bones Proclaim with that unwearied, reedy cry That God had laid His fingers on the sky, That from those fingers glittering summer runs Upon the dancer by the dreamless wave. Why should those lovers that no lovers miss Dream, until God burn Nature with a kiss? The man has found no comfort in the grave.114

The poem is made up of four stanzas in total, each beginning with an Irish place-name, thus locating the reader within a specific locality. A. N. Jeffares notes that all the places referred to in the poem are in the north-west of Ireland, in or around County Sligo.115 The places play a functional role in the poem itself, for the dreamer follows the advice of the ‘lug worms’ in stanza two, to seek a ‘gentle race’ of dreamers ‘somewhere to the north or west or south’. Thus, in each stanza, the dreamer respectively travels to Drumahair to the east of Sligo, Lissadell to the west, Scanavin to the south, Lugnagall to the

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 151 north. It is this sense of intimacy with the landscape of County Sligo in particular, and of Ireland in general, that leads Edward Said to argue that Yeats is a poet of ‘decolonization’. ‘One of the first tasks of cultural resistance’ argues Said ‘was to reclaim, rename and reinhabit the land.’116 Yet, as W. J. McCormack warns us, ‘we underestimate the subtle reservations of Yeats’s poetic perception if we mistake the possibility of intimacy for the thing itself, if we mistake the accessibility of those place names on the map for the integration of a poet in a known and comprehensive culture’.117 Indeed, ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland’ dramatises the continual frustration, the continual inability, of man to become intimate and comfortable in a place or within a community. The poem begins with the protagonist standing, significantly, in a crowd, and feeling comfortable in the company of his love who is metonymically represented by her silken dress. This moment of personal and communal ‘tenderness’ is immediately disrupted, however, by the pile of singing fish who remind him that time will inevitably ‘mar a lover’s vows’ on earth, in contrast to a faeryland where his tenderness could continue to exist forever. Each stanza shares this basic narrative pattern where the dreamer gains a degree of earthly happiness before being reminded of how things could be better in a faeryland. The poetic unity attained by this consistent narrative development is reinforced by the poem’s symbolic development, where the adjectives ‘silver’ and ‘gold’, used to describe the fish and the imaginary morning in the first stanza, reappear as golden and silver skies in the second, the gold of day in the third and the ‘glittering summer’ of the fourth. These metals and colours are invoked in each case with reference to the faeryland, and their repetition invokes a sense of precious, paradisal perfection. It has been argued that the poem defines a movement ‘away from the things of this world to the things of the spirit’, yet this ignores the fact that the golden faeryland has a distinctly dark edge.118 The faeryland in each case is introduced at a time when the protagonist is happy with his lot in the world, and the dreamer’s imaginary worlds are not stimulated by exalted images of divine inspiration but have their origins in an increasingly unpleasant list, degenerating from a pile of dead fish to the song of a muddy lugworm, from a knot of grass to the worms that devour the protagonist’s dead body. The poem does not, then, praise the beauty of one world and lament the inadequacies of another. Rather, it expresses the tension that ensues when an unearthly beauty lures the individual from the possibility of a peaceful and fulfilling life among his own

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kind. The poem warns of the frustrations of continually seeking to imagine a better world when happiness is perfectly achievable in the one that exists. This tension between the real and the imaginary can be seen to embody some of the enabling tensions animating Yeats’s poetic practice and political beliefs in the 1890s; the tension between a rooted nationalism and a mobile cosmopolitanism, between his desire as a man of letters in the Arnoldian mould to engage with and influence the cultural life of his nation, and his commitment to an aestheticist poetic practice that venerates a transcendent realm beyond the ‘impurities’ of everyday life. Yeats’s Celticism can be seen to have developed as a strategy for creating a whole out of these divergent tensions, of achieving that elusive ‘unity of being’ for which his totalising mind sought. Yeats’s Celtic Ireland, informed as it was by a vision of the harmonious coexistence of a benevolent aristocracy and a Celtic peasantry, could be achieved only by dissolving the boundary between the Anglo-Irish and the Catholic majority. This entailed either a radical modification of Anglo-Irish identity and a revision of the role of the Anglo-Irish within the national life of Ireland, or a fundamental reformulation of the bases of Irish nationalism and thus the Irish nation itself. While Yeats recoiled increasingly into his imagined Anglo-Irish aristocratic community in later years, the goal of his Celticism in 1890s’ Ireland was to reimagine and reconstruct the nation itself by invoking a pagan, pre-Christian past in which the people – whatever their language, religion, class or race – could be refashioned as Celts. The Celt in London Yeats’s Celticism can, then, be regarded as an aesthetic construct which sought to reconcile in the realm of art that which remained unreconcilable in the realm of politics. While in later years Yeats was to argue that ‘the dream of my early manhood, that a modern nation can return to a Unity of Culture, is false’, the goal of his 1890s’ Celticism was to achieve in art the elusive ‘Unity of Culture’ that seemed unattainable in a fractured society.119 Seamus Deane suggests that this desire to conceive of Ireland as a totality was shared by many writers of the period, and that the ability to think of the nation in such terms was enabled by the position of exile adopted by many Irish authors at the turn of the century. Deane notes that in inhabiting the metropolitan centres of Europe these writers attempted to create

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 153 what I have been saying had not been within the horizon of Irish writing as a possibility – the position of distance, the standard precondition for a version of the aesthetic that could, in its withdrawal from the actual, find some means by which the actual could be totalized into a narrative patterned to make typicality consistently prevail over the miscellaneous.120

The entry of literary émigrés into modern English culture has been widely documented. From James and Wilde, to Pound and Eliot, the high literary ground is seen to have been appropriated by those who offer, in Terry Eagleton’s words, ‘a bracing combination of empathy and estrangement: the outsider casts a critical eye on his new-found culture . . . and can bring a relativising or totalising viewpoint to bear on it’.121 Joyce’s use of exile is well known, yet Yeats’s artistic and political use of his own position of exile in the 1890s has been less widely analysed. R. F. Foster, in meticulously tracing the poet’s movements between Ireland and England throughout the 1890s, makes it clear that London was as important a base for Yeats’s cultural nationalist initiatives as was Dublin.122 His periods in London certainly played an important role in the development of Yeats’s Celticism. In Yeats’s early novel, John Sherman (1891), the main character defends the life of his native village, Ballah, in the following terms: In your big towns a man finds his minority and knows nothing outside its border. He knows only the people like himself. But here one chats with the whole world in a day’s walk, for every man one meets is a class.123

Yeats demonstrates an awareness here of the dangers that minorities pose for the construction of common national cultures. He shares with Arnold and Howells an awareness that, once a minority forms around a common grievance, the goal of constructing a common culture is threatened. Whereas London breaks up into minorities, each one only able to pursue its own specific interests, Ballah is too small for the existence of classes, except insofar as each individual constitutes his or her own. It is significant, however, that such an insight can be gained only from having experienced life in a city. John Sherman deals with the tensions that derive from the juxtaposition of a sense of rootedness against the temptations of life in the metropolis. It is the experience of exile that leads the main character, Sherman, to idealise and long for his home town.

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Delayed by a crush in the Strand, he heard a faint trickling of water near by; it came from a shop window where a little water-jet balanced a wooden ball upon its point. The sound suggested a cataract with a long Gaelic name, that leaped crying in the Gate of the Winds at Ballah . . . It made him remember an old day-dream of his. The source of the river that passed his garden at home was a certain wood-bordered and islanded lake, whither in childhood he had often gone blackberry gathering. At the further end was a little islet called Innisfree . . . Often when life and its difficulties had seemed to him like the lessons of some elder boy given to a younger by mistake, it had seemed good to dream of going away to that islet and building a wooden hut there and burning a few years out, rowing to and fro, fishing, or lying on the island slopes by day, and listening at night to the ripple of the water and the quivering of the bushes – full always of unknown creatures – and going out at morning to see the island’s edge marked by the feet of birds.124

Yeats recounts a similar scene when discussing the gestation of his poem ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’ – written about the same time as John Sherman – in his own autobiography. In that poem, where the poet recoils from the ‘roadway’ and the ‘pavements grey’ and resolves to ‘live alone’, it becomes apparent that longing is a product of exile. This yearning for a rural past is implicitly patriotic, for Sherman lives in a London in which even his fiancée refers to him as ‘my savage’ because of his Irishness, and the iconography of the ‘island of Innisfree’ itself suggests a yearning for Ireland in the English context. Yeats made the case that his novel was a distinctively ‘Irish’ work in a letter to Katherine Tynan: I studied my characters in Ireland and described a typical Irish feeling in Sherman’s devotion to Ballah. A West of Ireland feeling I might almost say for like that of Allingham for Ballyshannon it is local rather than national. Sherman belonged like Allingham to the small gentry who in the West at any rate love their native places without perhaps loving Ireland . . . I claim for this and other reasons that Sherman is as much an Irish novel as anything by Banim or Griffin.125

Yeats’s awareness of the wide range of communal identities available to individuals is made manifest here in the fact that, even in defending his work as being characteristically ‘Irish’, he seems to undercut his own argument in stressing the local or regional basis of his characters’ allegiances. Indeed, in the scene that dramatises Sherman’s

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 155 love for his native town, his feelings are characterised as being ‘Celtic’ rather than ‘Irish’: As he went through the streets his heart went out to every familiar place and sight: the rows of tumble-down thatched cottages; the slated roofs of the shops; the women selling gooseberries; the river bridge; the high walls of the garden where it was said the gardener used to see the ghost of a former owner in the shape of a rabbit; the street corner no child would pass at nightfall for fear of the headless soldier; the deserted flourstore; the wharves covered with grass. All these he watched with Celtic devotion, the devotion carried to the ends of the world by the Celtic exiles, and since old time surrounding their journeyings with rumour of plaintive songs.126

To read either the novel John Sherman or the poem ‘Lake Isle of Inisfree’ in terms of a simplistic comparison between an Irish rural society contrasted to the alienations of an urban, English society is to simplify the tensions between different sorts of allegiances that Yeats’s works embody and explore.127 The longing in ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, for instance, is not for the close, face-to-face, community of Ireland, but for a life of Thoreauvian isolation in a hut on the water. I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree, And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made: Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee, And live alone in the bee-loud glade.128

Michael North has noted that the freedom sought in the poem is a freedom from having to interact with other people and it thus communicates a sense of individualism more than nationalism.129 The lengthier form of the novel allows for a wider range of positions to be explored. George Russell recalls how the ‘imagination’ of the early Yeats was ‘dominated by his own myth of a duality of self’, and this is a myth that Yeats successfully exploits in John Sherman.130 Through the dominant antithesis between two characters, Sherman and Howard, Yeats expresses the turmoil he had experienced in moving to London, and explores the inherent contradictions of enjoying the artistic and personal potential of life in London while remaining committed to the nationalist struggle at home. The novel does not construct a contrast between a provincial nationalism and an urban cosmopolitanism, but rather explores a range of positions from the

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provincial to the national to the international. As a Protestant in Ireland, and an Irishman in England, these are all positions for which Yeats has some sympathy during these years, and the Celticism that is stressed when Sherman returns home in the novel may be perceived as a means of encompassing these diverse forms of allegiance; of uniting the cosmopolitan and national sympathies that constitute what Peter Kuch refers to as Yeats’s ‘bifurcated’ self.131 This sense of division, of bifurcation, is typical of what has been generally, if problematically, described in post-colonial theory as the movement of writers from the periphery into the metropolitan centre. Edward Said refers to this movement from the ‘margin’ to the ‘center’ as a ‘voyage in’ which results in the erasure of ‘the separations and exclusions of “divide and rule’’’ as ‘surprising new configurations spring up’.132 While the foregoing analysis underlines the limitations of viewing the relationship between Ireland and England as a simple case of ‘divide and rule’, perhaps one of the earliest examples of the ‘surprising configurations’ that Said describes is the emergence of a Celtic movement in 1890s’ London. Grant Allen, at the beginning of the decade, commented in the pages of the Fortnightly Review that The return wave of Celtic influence over Teutonic or Teutonised England has brought with it many strange things, good, bad and indifferent . . . It has brought with it Home Rule, Land Nationalisation, Socialism, Radicalism, the Reverend Hugh Price Hughes, the Tithes War, the Crofter Question, the Plan of Campaign. It has brought fresh forces into political life – the eloquent young Irishman, the perfervid Highland Scot, the enthusiastic Welshman, the hard-headed Cornish miner: Methodism, Catholicism, the Eisteddfod, the parish priest; New Tipperary, the Hebrides, the Scotland Division of Liverpool; Conybeare, Cunninghame Graham, Michael Davitt, Holyoake; Co-operation, the Dockers, The Star, the Fabians . . . Anybody who looks over any great list of names in any of the leading modern movements in England – from the London County Council to the Lectures at South Place – will see in a moment that the New Radicalism is essentially a Celtic product. The Celt in Britain, like Mr Burne Jones’s enchanted princess, has lain silent for ages in an enforced long sleep; but the spirit of the century, pushing aside the weeds and briars of privilege and caste, has set free the sleeper at last.133

Allen’s description of the rise of Celticism as a ‘return wave’ resonates with Said’s notion of ‘the voyage in’ and, while writers from Scotland, Wales and Ireland had certainly lived and written in London in the

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 157 past, Allen’s article, in giving the impression that London literary and political life is dominated by a Celtic influence, communicates a new sense of a common ‘Celtic’ agenda – what Holbrook Jackson was later to call in his 1913 overview of the 1890s, ‘The Discovery of the Celt’.134 Raymond Williams offers a basis for discussing this phenomenon in the chapter entitled ‘Formations’ in his curious, but often suggestive, book Culture (1981). Williams begins by discussing guilds, professions, clubs and movements, and then proceeds to the more complex issues of schools, factions and dissident groups. All these, he states, ‘relate to developments within a single national social order’.135 In the twentieth century, however, new international formations have emerged and these have tended to be perceived as radical – as, indeed, Grant Allen perceived the Celts to be a radical influence – within the metropolitan centre. Contributors to the various avantgarde artistic formations, notes Williams, were often ‘immigrants to such a metropolis, not only from outlying regions but from other and smaller national cultures, now seen as culturally provincial in relation to the metropolis’.136 Williams is primarily concerned with mapping the emergence of literary modernism, and his ideas have a particular relevance to the early manifestation of these trends in 1890s’ London where ‘the sociology of metropolitan encounters’ did indeed foster the kinds of associations between immigrants and mainstream formations that created ‘especially favourable supportive conditions for dissident groups’.137 No one was to take more advantage of such ‘supportive conditions’ than W. B. Yeats. Throughout the 1890s, before and after the fall of Parnell, Yeats was active in forming various literary groups as a means of pooling resources in the formation of various cultural movements, and in developing a readership for his own work. Among the nationalist and occult groups with which Yeats was involved, if not actively leading, during the 1890s were the ‘Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn’, the ‘Irish Literary Society’, the ‘National Literary Society’, the ‘Celtic Order of Mysteries’ and the ‘Irish National Dramatic Company’. In an article of 1892, Yeats seemed to suggest that the tendency to form into groups was indeed a characteristic of the Celtic peoples. Describing England as ‘a land of literary Ishmaels’, Yeats remarked that ‘it is only among the sociable Celtic nations that men draw nearer each other when they want to think and dream and work’.138 In December 1891 he wrote that he was ‘busy getting up a London Irish Literary Society – to be a branch ultimately of Young

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Ireland League’.139 The new body, known as the ‘Irish Literary Society, London’ was formally founded in May 1892 and, in an article provocatively titled ‘The Irish Intellectual Capital: Where Is It?’, Yeats outlined his conception of the society’s objectives. Ireland has no lack of talent, but that talent is flung broadcast over the world, and turned to any rather than Irish purposes. Until it has been gathered together again and applied to the needs of Ireland it will never do anything great in literature . . . Let it be the work of the literary societies to teach to the writers on the one hand, and to the readers on the other, that there is no nationality without literature, no literature without nationality.140

In writing an agenda for an Irish society based in London, Yeats reveals an awareness of the importance of central metropolitan ‘formations’, as theorised by Raymond Williams, in furthering his cultural nationalist agenda within a context in which capitalism has internationalised culture and ‘flung’ the Irish people ‘broadcast over the world’. The various movements in which Yeats was involved often crossfertilised one another, creating a circle of poets and intellectuals among whom to discuss work and ideas. When, in 1894, W. P. Ryan, a former member of the Southwark Club, published a history of the literary revival, he revealed that a good number of the Irish Literary Society were drawn from that group of decadent poets known as ‘The Rhymers’ Club’. In addition to Rolleston, Yeats, Dr. Todhunter, Lionel Johnson, the ‘Rhymers’ Club’ gave the Society some promising poets . . . Amongst them was G. A. Greene . . . Victor Plarr and A. C. Hillier were also attracted from the little Parnassus of the ‘Rhymers’, and mean, I hope, to ‘hammer the ringing rhyme’ on a Celtic anvil henceforward.141

Yeats and Ernest Rhys – the Welshman ‘whose mind runs in the direction of schools’ – founded the Rhymers’ Club in 1890.142 Famously preserved as ‘The Tragic Generation’ in Yeats’s Autobiographies, the club was described by Victor Plarr as a ‘rediscovered and reconstituted’ grouping of Dublin poets in London.143 The Rhymers’, however, had wider Celtic affiliations described amusingly, and scathingly, by Edgar Jepson who occasionally attended meetings:

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 159 They were all very Celtic too, for it was the days of the Celtic Fringe. John Todhunter, as you will gather from his name, was a Celt; and Plarr, whose father was Alsatian, was a Celt; and Johnson, again the Celtic name, was a Celt – at one time he assumed a brogue and addressed me as ‘me dearr’; and Mr. Symons, a Dravidian Welshman, was a Celt; and Dowson, who was probably of as pure Norman London descent as you could find, was inclined to believe that there was a Celtic strain in him, and Yeats, who was plainly a Firblog, was the most Celtic of all, and they all declared that there was a Celtic Renaissance.144

This Celticism did not necessarily entail a commitment to nationalist politics, however; indeed the poetry of the ‘Rhymers’’ collected in the two Books of the Rhymers’ Club is generally characterised by a rejection of politics, a rejection of realist and naturalist tendencies in literature, and the espousal of a doctrine of ‘art for art’s sake’ derived from Walter Pater and soon to be given a fuller expression by the Rhymer Arthur Symons in his The Symbolist Movement in Literature (1899).145 Yeats recalled in his Autobiographies that: I saw – now ashamed that I saw ‘like a man of letters’; now exasperated as the indifference of these poets to the fashion of their own river-bed – that Swinburne in one way, Browning in another, and Tennyson in a third, had filled their work with what I called ‘impurities’, curiosities about politics, science, about history, about religion; and that we must create once more the pure work.146

Seamus Deane usefully regards the ‘Celtic Renaissance’ as ‘a regional variation on aestheticism’, a view reinforced by the fact that one of Yeats’s most characteristically aestheticist poems, in its emphasis on transcendence from earthly concerns into the realm of art, ‘Into the Twilight’, initially appeared in 1893 under the title ‘The Celtic Twilight’.147 Out-worn heart, in a time out-worn, Come clear of the nets of wrong and right; Laugh, heart, again in the grey twilight, Sigh, heart, again in the dew of the morn.

While there is nothing overtly ‘Celtic’ about this opening verse, the emphasis on emotion, on the sense of decline and world-weariness, strikes the characteristic tones of the Celtic Renaissance and suggests

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that many of the techniques and imagery of late nineteenth-century poetry were easily compatible with the ‘Celtic note’ that Yeats encouraged writers to aim for in their works. Indeed, in his 1898 review of Ernest Rhys’s Welsh Ballads, Yeats considers the rise of an aestheticism of ‘dreams and passions’ to be connected to the ‘sudden importance’ accorded to the Celtic nations: The movement that found a typical expression in the consolations of ‘In Memoriam’ . . . and found its explanation when Matthew Arnold called art a criticism of life, has been followed by a movement that has found a typical expression in the contentment of ‘The Well at the World’s End’, in the ecstasy of ‘Parsifal’ . . . and might find its explanation in the saying of William Blake that art is a labour to bring again the golden age. The old movement was scientific and sought to interpret the world, and the new movement is religious, and seeks to bring into the world dreams and passions, which the poet can but believe to have been born before the world, and for a longer day than the world’s day . . . Because a great portion of the legends of Europe, and almost all of the legends associated with the scenery of these islands, are Celtic, this movement has given the Celtic countries a sudden importance, and awakened some of them to a sudden activity.148

Yeats, in referring here to the ‘importance’ now bestowed on the Celtic nations is reinforcing the view propounded by Grant Allen in 1891, and is also clearly writing for, and from, a London-based, metropolitan perspective. London proved to be an important setting, not only for the emergence of the poetic societies such as the Rhymers’ Club, but also for the development of the Pan-Celtic consciousness that influenced Yeats’s writing throughout the 1890s. Yeats’s close associations with the Welshman Ernest Rhys, and Scot, Fiona Macleod (the female pseudonym of the author and critic, William Sharp), proved that the Celtic message had spread to the other Celtic nations, thus fostering the ‘mutual understanding and sympathy of the Scotch, Welsh and Irish Celts’ that was, he noted in 1896, ‘a matter I have myself much at heart’.149 Yeats had met Ernest Rhys as early as May 1887 at one of William Morris’s Sunday gatherings. Born in London and brought up there and in the predominantly Welsh-speaking town of Carmarthen, Rhys was a mining engineer before becoming editor of the Camelot Classics series for Walter Scott, and editor of the influential Everyman series. Yeats recalls in Autobiographies that

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 161 I had said soon after the publication of The Wanderings of Oisin, to the editor of a series of shilling reprints, who had set me to compile tales of the Irish faeries, ‘I am growing jealous of other poets and we will all grow jealous of each other unless we know each other and so feel a share in each other’s triumph’. He was a Welshman, lately a mining engineer, Ernest Rhys, a writer of Welsh translations and original poems, that have often moved me greatly though I can think of no one else who has read them . . . Between us we founded The Rhymers’ Club which for some years was to meet in an upper room with a sanded floor in an ancient eating-house in Fleet Street called the Cheshire Cheese.150

William Sharp, the leading voice of the Celtic revival in Scotland under his female pseudonym, Fiona Macleod, while not an official member of the Rhymers’ Club, was an occasional visitor to their gatherings and a friend of many of its members, including Rhys and Yeats. During the 1890s, Sharp and Yeats collaborated on a series of scholarly articles on Celtic subjects for Warner’s Library, and were involved in forming a Celtic Library of English translations of Gaelic texts.151 Rhys and Sharp are important figures in the development of Yeats’s 1890s’ Pan-Celticism, and all three read, reviewed and responded to one another’s works throughout the period. Rhys and Sharp adopted Celtic personae that were largely based on Arnoldian criteria although they were less reluctant than their contemporary to acknowledge Arnold’s influence. In his memoirs, J. H. Dent records that every new inclusion to Rhys’s ‘Everyman’ series was discussed, weighed and, at times, fought over but some titles among the first hundred betray the main editor’s Welsh interests: Lady Charlotte Guest’s translation of the Mabinogion; George Borrow’s 1850s’ travelogue, Wild Wales; and Arnold’s On the Study of Celtic Literature, republished in 1910 with an introduction by Rhys himself.152 Rhys notes in his introduction that while Arnold ‘appears confused by the thickets of Welsh and Irish philology . . . his account, after forty years and more of research by later explorers, is still a highly stimulating one to read’.153 In a similar vein, Sharp, in his introduction to Lyra Celtica, a comprehensive anthology of ancient and modern poetry from the Celtic countries published in 1896 (by the Edinburgh-based promoter of a Celtic Renaissance, Patrick Geddes) notes that Arnold, writing ‘with the true instinct of genius’, is ‘the most sympathetic and penetrating critic of the Celtic imagination’.154 Whereas Yeats developed Arnold’s descriptions of Celtic uniqueness into an argument for the

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preservation of Irish cultural difference, Rhys and Sharp follow the contributionist logic of Arnold’s argument in seeing the Celtic peoples’ ultimate fulfilment within a British context. Sharp’s Celticism was deeply anti-nationalist, as his conclusion to the introduction of Lyra Celtica suggests: No, it is no ‘disastrous end’: whether the Celtic peoples be slowly perishing or are spreading innumerable fibres of life towards richer and fuller, if less national and distinctive existence . . . For the genius of the Celtic race stands out now with averted torch and the light of it is a glory before the eyes, and the flame of it is blown into the hearts of the mightier conquering people. The Celt falls, but his spirit rises in the heart and the brain of the Anglo-Celtic peoples, with whom are the destinies of the generations to come.155

Rhys was more ambivalent about following Arnold’s argument to the point where Celtic national distinctiveness would be eradicated for, as he noted in his revealingly titled autobiography, Wales England Wed: Yeats’s imagination of Ireland set me wondering whether I could not give Wales, country of the Druids and the Mabinogion, her new deliverance. But I was complicated in ways he was not. A Londoner born as well as a Welshman in exile, I suffered from the mixed sympathies that are bound to affect a man of mixed race.156

This explanation of cultural schizophrenia seems unconvincing when we consider Yeats’s own feelings of cultural duality discussed earlier. Indeed Rhys’s view of himself as a ‘man of mixed race’, and Yeats’s concept of the bifurcated self is a common theme in the literature of the period, from Stevenson’s Jekyll and Hyde doppelgänger, to the tension between the poles of the civilised and primitive worlds in Conrad’s novels, to the notion of African-American ‘double consciousness’ explored in the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois (discussed in Chapter 4). This dualism took a particularly dramatic form in the case of William Sharp who, in writing his novels of Highland life under the pseudonym Fiona Macleod, reinforced Arnold’s view of the Celts as a feminine race. If Rhys’s autobiographical invocation of his complex national allegiances does not wholly convince as an explanation for his lukewarm nationalism, it is interesting to note that the nationalist or unionist positions informing Yeats’s, Rhys’s and Sharp’s

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 163 Celticisms reflect the strength of the political nationalist movements in their respective countries. Writing from Scotland where home rule was primarily the concern of a grouping within the Liberal Party and had largely failed to fire the interest of the people, Sharp’s Celtic contributionism reflected the unionist views of the majority. The creation of his female alter ego, the Celtic recluse, Fiona Macleod, can be considered a means for Sharp, the well-travelled cosmopolitan, to enter the Celtic debates of the period in the spirit of ‘disinterestedness’ so valued by Matthew Arnold. While Macleod’s novels were regarded by Yeats as part of the Celtic movement, and ‘she’ was invited to write plays for the Abbey Theatre, Sharp consistently used his alter ego to reject emphatically any association with a nationalist movement. Writing as Fiona Macleod in an article called ‘Celtic’, he pressed for a Celtic movement ‘that is not partisan, but content to participate in the English tradition’.157 That Arnoldian argument was again repeated in the article ‘Prelude’ where the tenor and method of argumentation follow Arnold’s example, but Macleod significantly emphasises that she is speaking from a non-English perspective: I am not English, and have not the English mind or the English temper, and in many things do not share the English ideals; and to possess these would mean to relinquish my own heritage. But why should I be irreconcilably hostile to that mind and that temper and those ideals? Why should I not do my utmost to understand, sympathise, fall into line with them so far as may be, since we all have a common bond and a common destiny? To that mind and that temper and those ideals do we not owe some of the noblest achievements of the human race, some of the lordliest conquests over the instincts and forces of barbarism, some of the loveliest and most deathless things of the spirit and the imagination?158

Macleod’s writing underlines the centrality of Arnold’s example in the development of nineteenth-century Celticism, and also alerts us to the complexity of a British identity that cannot be wished away, nor simply equated with Englishness.159 This can also be said of Ernest Rhys, though he had a much greater sympathy with the home-rule movement in Wales. Indeed, Rhys contributed to the nationalist journal Young Wales in 1895, and invited Yeats to accompany him to ‘Cymru Fydd’ meetings in London.160 Nevertheless, given that the most radical wing of the ‘Cymru Fydd’ movement desired no more that greater autonomy within the British

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Empire, Rhys’s Celticism was fundamentally connected to an idea of Britain, with his poems idealising a generalised and romanticised Celtic past that would appeal to a London readership. Typical of much of his work is the following ‘On a Harp Playing in a London Fog’ which begins: What Ariel, far astray, with silver wing Upborne with airy music, silver-sweet, Haunts here the London street? – And from the fog, with harping string on string, Laughs in the ear, and spurs the lagging feet, While Caliban-like, London sulks, though all the stars should sing.161

The image of the ‘laughing’ Celtic harp offering a much needed source of revitalisation for a foggy imperial city reconstitutes the Arnoldian relationship between an idealised Celtic periphery and a ‘sulking’ English centre. This structure of feeling forms the subject matter for many of the poems that Rhys collected as Welsh Ballads in 1898. In ‘The Envoi’, the poet’s position of exile is made explicit as he invokes his ‘kind fellow countrymen’ who walk ‘the motley streets below St Pauls’ while dreaming of the Falling waters and the grass Which grows along the meadows of the Dee, Of serpent Towy, Teivy, Usk or Wye, – That yet some echo of old tender tunes, Old sorrowing hymns, in the sweet mother tongue, Some sound of footsteps in the village street, Or western wind, such as in London once Made Owain Myvyr weep, may reach your hearts, As rhyme on rhyme goes by?

The tone and content are representative of the poetry of the 1890s, and there is little to distinguish Rhys’s work from the kinds of poems collected in anthologies such as the Book of the Rhymers’ Club and Lyra Celtica. Rhys’s and Sharp’s writings can broadly be regarded as examples of what Seamus Deane has called, in the Irish context, ‘literary unionism’, and their reactions to Yeats’s poetry reinforce this point.162 For Rhys, the significance of Yeats’s work was that it was ‘surcharged with imagination and . . . Celtic glamour’163, and while Macleod also stressed that Yeats is a poet who can ‘see and dream in

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 165 a reality so vivid that it is called imagination’,164 the true significance of his work was that he is ‘too wise, too clear-sighted, too poetic, in fact, to aim at being Irish . . . at the expense of being English in the high and best sense of the word’.165 That Sharp could consider Yeats a fellow worker in the field of anti-nationalist Celticism supports Seamus Deane’s observation that Yeats’s compositions were regarded by a British readership as ‘essentially picturesque manifestations of the Irish sensibility’.166 This should guard us against considering Yeats’s works of this period as simplistically anti-colonial, and Yeats’s close relationship with Rhys and Sharp also suggests something of the inherent contradictions of a cultural nationalism that has its artistic roots in aestheticism. In his 1898 defence of symbolist poetry, ‘The Autumn of the Body’, Yeats was arguing that the tide of ‘popular literature’ was on the ebb and that the tide of ‘aesthetic literature’ was rising; Browning and Tennyson, for example, were yielding to Rosetti and Bridges. ‘The new poets’ noted Yeats, putting aside Kipling for his lack of ‘seriousness’, ‘speak out of some personal or spiritual passion in words and types and metaphors that draw one’s imagination as far as possible from the complexities of modern life and thought.’167 Yet, while one can see how a fin de siècle symbolism may be compatible with the generally apolitical, unionist Celticism of Rhys and Sharp/Macleod, based as it was on Arnold’s conception of the English assimilation of Celtic characteristics, it is more difficult to see how an apolitical poetic practice was compatible with the direct group-building and propagandising activities associated with Yeats’s cultural nationalism. This curious conjunction is crucial in attempting to explain the relationship between culture and ethnicity in Yeats’s early writings. Yeats, as I noted earlier, was aware of the apparent contradiction between his activities with the decadents of the Rhymers’ Club and his adopted role as nationalist poet. In his article ‘Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature’ he attempted to balance his association with decadents in England with his role as the founder of a reinvigorated literary tradition in Ireland.168 While Yeats believed that Rhymers such as Ernest Dowson and Arthur Symons were primarily interested in poetic form to the exclusion of ‘impurities’ such as nationality and politics, he felt that Irish poetry had been characterised by a didactic nationalism that paid no attention to literary form. Yeats’s attempt was thus to combine these two traditions. He developed his argument by comparing the English and Irish situations:

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When I come over here from London or cross over to London I am always struck afresh by the difference between the cultivated people in England and the cultivated people – alas! too few – here in Ireland. They could not differ more if they were divided from each other by a half score of centuries. I am thinking especially of the men of my own age, though not entirely of them. In England amongst the best minds art and poetry are becoming every day more entirely ends in themselves, and all life is made more and more but so much fuel to feed the fire . . . When I talk to people of literary ambition here in Ireland, I find them holding that literature must be the expression of conviction, and be the garment of noble emotion and not an end in itself . . . Can we but learn a little of the [English artists’] skill, and a little of their devotion to form, a little of their hatred of the commonplace and banal, we may make all these restless energies of ours alike the inspiration and the theme of a new and wonderful literature.169

Yeats’s poetics of the late 1890s is thus simultaneously aestheticist and nationalist: aestheticist in that he wishes to emphasise the formal autonomy of the art work, nationalist in that he seeks to utilise that formal mastery to create a distinctive and innovative national tradition. If one source of Yeats’s fusion of the aesthete and the nationalist can be traced to his poetic practice, aestheticism and nationalism are also connected within his cultural politics. Aestheticism and nationalism, as Stephen Regan has noted, converge in a profound hostility to the materialism of English industrial society.170 In 1900 Yeats asked a question that had also been posed in slightly different forms by Matthew Arnold and William Dean Howells: How can the arts overcome the slow dying of men’s hearts that we call the progress of the world, and lay their hands upon men’s heart-strings again, without becoming the garment of religion as in old times?171

Yeats’s construction of a Celtic identity can be regarded as one attempt at answering this question. The Celticism of the 1890s was forged in opposition to that very philistine, commercial urban England, the emergent problems of which Arnold had sought to foresee and to ameliorate. Arnold did not wholly share Yeats’s antiindustrialism, but rather invoked ‘culture’ as a means of fostering a sense of national community in the face of the social divisions of class and ethnicity that were the result of an industrialising and modernis-

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 167 ing society. Thus, whereas Arnold and his like had viewed any hope for national self-determination within the Celtic nations as a ‘futile revolt against the despotism of fact’, Yeats viewed the national struggle as a ‘necessary revolt against a political and moral materialism’.172 Yeats adopted Arnold’s Celticism in regarding the struggle for Irish cultural and political independence as ‘the revolt of the soul against the intellect’, but considered that cultural revolt in nationalist terms.173 For Yeats, the roots of Irish national distinctiveness are to be found in the nation’s relatively underdeveloped economy which has held back the tide of the philistine materialism that Arnold believed was threatening English culture. ‘I am going to talk a little philosophy’, warns Yeats at the beginning of his lecture on ‘Nationality and Literature’: If I was addressing an English audience I would not venture to even use the word philosophy, for it is only the Celt who cares much for ideas which have no immediate practical bearing. At least Matthew Arnold has said so, and I think he is right, for the flood-gates of materialism are only half-open among us as yet here in Ireland; perhaps the new age may close them before the tide is quite upon us.174

Thus, if Ireland was small enough to make the construction of an empowering common culture feasible, the nation was also in a unique position among nations in that it was home to ‘the last folk tradition of Western Europe’ not to have been destroyed by the forces of industrialisation. As I noted in the introduction, Yeats ‘dreamed of enlarging Irish hate, till we had come to hate with a passion of patriotism what Morris and Ruskin hated’.175 Thus, while Yeats drew on a characteristically Victorian mode of criticism, he utilised the anti-industrialism that he’d adopted from Morris as a basis for his cultural nationalism. Throughout this period, Yeats’s imagined Ireland is consistently invoked in opposition to an industrial England. We who are struggling to keep alive Irish civilization and drive out this new English civilization are really striving to keep alive the old poetry of the world; and I think it is much the same wherever you find a national movement in any small country – you will find there an old picturesque conception of life; conception of a life that made refinement before any of the multitude struggling thought [sic] of that modern, utilitarian, commercial civilization which has been organized by a few great nations. No,

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the national movements are not detached outbreaks of race pride. They are part of a great war, of a war of the past and the future, of a noble past that tries to keep itself unchanged, hoping, perhaps vainly, the deluge will begin some day to fall, that the dove will some day return bringing with it a green bough.176

The conservationist element in Yeats’s writing is apparent here. Irish civilisation is not seen as the source of reinvigoration, but as the source of preservation against the onset of a ‘new’ English civilisation – industrial, materialist and utilitarian. We Irish do not desire, like the English, to build up a nation where there shall be a very rich class, and a very poor class . . . I think the best ideal for our people, an ideal generally accepted among us, is that Ireland is going to become a country where, if there are a few rich, there shall be nobody very poor. Wherever men have tried to imagine a perfect life, they have imagined a place where men plough and sow and reap, not a place where there are great wheels turning and great chimneys vomiting smoke. Ireland will always be a place where men plough and sow and reap.177

The fact that the onset of modernity was leading to the increasing social dislocation of Yeats’s own embattled class – the Anglo-Irish Ascendancy – provides an historical source for his anti-industrialism, while the ideas of English anti-industrial thinkers, such a Ruskin and Morris, offer an intellectual source for the development of Yeats’s ideas. These sources combine in his Celticism. ‘The intellect of Ireland is romantic and spiritual rather than scientific and analytical’ he noted, and the country was thus being systematically violated by the imposition of alien modes of thought: ‘An imitation of the habits of thought, the character, the manners, the opinions – and these never at their best – of an alien people was preventing the national character taking its own natural form . . .’178 Whereas Arnold portrayed the Celts as a vanishing race, Yeats asked whether, at a time when life and art in the West seemed to be exhausted and the ‘scientific movement’ was ‘ebbing’, might not Ireland, where it had ‘never been in flood at all’, ‘be the first to reverse’ the downward cycle and, by making the world ‘look upon all with new eyesight’, become a ‘chosen race, one of the pillars that uphold the world’.179 Despite his adoption of the Celtic ‘love of beauty’, ‘charm’, ‘magic’ and ‘spirituality’ from Arnold’s analysis where these traits were viewed as the residual char-

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 169 acteristics of a dying culture, Yeats believed that a reinvigorated, and anti-modernist Celtic Ireland had an important role to play in world history. Yeats thus inserted the concept of historical motion, of narrative, of national destiny, into the visualised, static conceptualisation of the Celt developed by Arnold. Conclusion Yeats’s Celticism had its aesthetic bases in Arnold’s Celtic essays and in London literary decadence, its political roots in a Ruskinian anti-industrialism and in the Irish nationalist tradition. In his Autobiographies, Yeats reminisces about his fellow poets in the Rhymers’ Club, and notes that ‘the dream of my early manhood, that a modern nation can return to a Unity of Culture, is false; though it may be we can achieve it for some small circle of men and women, and there leave it till the moon bring round its century’.180 While the later Yeats believes that the construction of a ‘unity of culture’ – of reconciling the religious, political, class and ethnic divisions within society in an aesthetic realm – is impossible to achieve in either art or politics, this was the task that the younger poet set himself in the 1890s. Yeats’s adoption of a Celtic persona can be seen as an attempt to unite the range of his 1890s’ allegiances, while also creating a cultural space in which he could develop, and from which he could promulgate, his vision of Ireland. While the ‘Celt in Ireland’ sought to utilise Celticism as a basis on which to construct a cultural nationalist agenda that was neither discriminatory nor chauvinistic, the ‘Celt in London’ used the imperial metropolis as a site in which groups could be formed, movements begun, ideas widely disseminated and discussed, and a common Irish culture imagined. NOTES

1. Moran, Philosophy of Irish Ireland, pp. 36–7. 2. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, p. 277. 3. In a contemporary argument that resonates with Moran’s views, Ned Thomas notes that what is often meant by ‘tolerance’ in English language discourse is the acceptance of a number of background cultures and languages within a society which has English as a foreground language – ‘or to be plain, the dominant language’ (or, to adopt Moran’s terms ‘the element that absorbs’). Welsh speakers, notes Thomas, like other European minorities, claim an historic space in which their

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4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20.

21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27.


culture can be a foreground culture, allowing people of different backgrounds to participate. To espouse such a view is often to be branded ‘racist’ in contemporary Britain. In Ned Thomas, ‘Parallels and Paradigms’, p. 325. Moran, Philosophy, p. 98. Moran, Philosophy, p. 96. See Kiberd, Inventing, p. 156. Yeats, ‘The Irish Dramatic Movement’ (1923) in Autobiographies, p. 559. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, pp. 263–4. Kelly, ‘Fall of Parnell’, pp. 1–23. See Kelly’s ‘Fall of Parnell’ and Marcus, Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance, pp. 61–129. Yeats, ‘The Trembling of the Veil’ (1923) in Autobiographies, p. 166. Yeats, Collected Letters Vol. I, p. 399. Yeats’s movements and allegiances are traced in detail by Foster, W. B.Yeats I. Howes, Yeats’s Nations, p. 5. Howes’s excellent study has influenced my thinking on Yeats and Celticism. An influential example of this trend has been Said’s discussion of Yeats as a poet of ‘decolonization’ in Deane, (ed.) Nationalism, Colonialism and Literature, pp. 69–95. This analysis reappears in Said’s Culture and Imperialism, pp. 265–88. Yeats, Uncollected Prose II, p. 43. Ibid. p. 43. Kiberd, Inventing. David Lloyd, Anomalous. Edna Longley, Living Stream, p. 31. Regan, ‘W. B. Yeats and Irish Cultural Politics’, p. 67. For models of a ‘four-nations’ approach to British history see H. Kearney, The British Isles and Samuel, ‘British Dimensions’. The notion of a ‘post-nationalist’ phase in Irish historiography comes from R. Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland. Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 275. This was a period that Yeats continued to return to in his autobiographical writings, and which continued to influence his life and thought. Speaking at the Oxford Union in 1921 he evoked the late nineteenth century: ‘Gladstone! Salisbury! Asquith! They were Victorians. I am a Victorian. They knew the meaning of the words “Truth” and “honour” and “Justice”. But you do not know the meaning of them.’ Quoted in Foster, W. B. Yeats II, p. 188. Howes, Yeats’s Nations, p. 25. Regan, ‘W. B. Yeats and Irish Cultural Politics’, p. 67. Moran, Philosophy of Irish Ireland, p. 22. Ibid. p. 104. Ibid. p. 102.

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 171 28. 29. 30. 31.

32. 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

Yeats, Collected Letters Vol. 2, p. 568. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 174. Yeats, Collected Letters Vol. I, p. 303. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. II, p. 92. John Kelleher notes Yeats’s reliance on Arnold’s essays as a source for quotations from Celtic writings in ‘Matthew Arnold and the Celtic Revival’, pp. 204–5. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, pp. 175–6. Ibid. p. 183. Ibid. p. 185. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature (1867), CPW III, pp. 296, 384. Matthew Arnold, ‘England and the Italian Question’ (1859), CPW I, 73. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. II, pp. 70–1. Yeats, The Wanderings of Oisin and Other Poems, p. 2. This analysis is based on the original published version of the poem which Yeats continued to revise and rewrite throughout his life. Ibid. p. 47. Ibid. p. 49. Ibid. pp. 1–2. Ibid. p. 52. Foster, W. B. Yeats I, p. 84. For an account of this appropriation of colonialist stereotypes see Loomba, Colonialism / Post-Colonialism, pp. 212–15. The negritude poets in 1930s’ Paris, for instance, based their writing on Leopold Sengor’s declaration that ‘I feel therefore I am’; a statement which simultaneously adopted the racist view of the unthinking African, while also making an opposition to the Western emphasis on thought the basis for an insurrectionary philosophy. On the limits of this strategy see Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World, pp. 127–39. Kiberd makes the connection between Celticism and Negritude in ‘White Skins, Black Masks?’. Welch, ‘Introduction’, p. xxiii. Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 265–88. Kelleher, ‘Matthew Arnold and the Celtic Revival’, p. 205. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, CPW III, p. 348. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, p. 9. Arnold, CPW III, p. 384. Howes, Yeats’s Nations, p. 21. Arnold, CPW III, p. 291. Saddlemeyer, ‘The Cult of the Celt’, p. 19. Ibid. p. 19. Yeats, Collected Letters of W. B. Yeats, Vol. II, p. 37. The manifesto is reproduced in Foster, W. B. Yeats I, p. 184.

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56. On Lady Gregory’s comments see Saddlemeyer, ‘The Cult of the Celt: Pan-Celticism’, p. 19. Yeats’s writings for The Boston Pilot are collected in Letters to the New Island. 57. Accounts of this period are offered by Lyons, Ireland since the Famine and Foster, Modern Ireland. 58. Arnold, ‘Disestablishment in Wales’ (1888) CPW XI, p. 347. 59. Arnold, ‘The Political Crisis’ (1886) CPW XI. p. 78. 60. A useful account of this period is offered by Matthew, ‘The Liberal Age’. 61. On Scotland see Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism. On Wales see Morgan, Wales in British Politics. 62. Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism, p. 17. 63. Morgan, ‘Radicalism and Nationalism’, p. 197. 64. See Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism, pp. 15–20, and Marr, Battle for Scotland, pp. 50–63. 65. Harvie, Scotland and Nationalism, p. 18. 66. Quoted in Davies, Hanes Cymru, p. 466. 67. Quoted in ibid. p. 466. 68. O’Leary, Prose Literature, p. 376. 69. Quoted in ibid. p. 377. 70. Quoted in O’Leary, ‘Children of the Same Mother’, pp. 101, 120. 71. O’Leary, Prose Literature, p. 375. 72. Ibid. p. 377. 73. See Löffler, Book of Mad Celts, p. 20. 74. For reconstructions of the Pan-Celtic debates of the time see O’Leary, The Prose Literature, pp. 378–99. Edwards, Patrick Pearse, pp. 31–8. Foster, The Irish Story, p. 99. Hutchinson, Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, pp. 180–4. Ellis, Celtic Dawn, pp. 61–80. 75. Quoted in O’Leary, Prose Literature of the Gaelic Revival, p. 378. 76. Ibid. p. 379. 77. Edwards, Patrick Pearse, pp. 31–8. Foster, Irish Story, p. 99. 78. Arendt, Origins of Totalitarianism, p. 232. This is discussed by Michaels who notes erroneously that there ‘were no plausible parallel “pan-movements” in Britain’, Our America, p. 102. On the connections between Pan-Celticism and other pan-movements see Löffler, ‘Agweddau’. 79. Quoted by O’Leary, ‘Children of the Same Mother’, p. 109. 80. Quoted in O’Leary, Prose Literature, p. 283. Pearse is quoted by Edwards, Patrick Pearse, p. 31. 81. Yeats, Mythologies, p. 141. Uncollected Prose Vol. I, p. 388. 82. See, for instance, Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch. O’Brien, ‘Passion and Cunning’. 83. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, p. 215. 84. Foster, Paddy and Mr Punch, p. 215. Deane, ‘Heroic Styles’, pp. 47–8.

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 173 85. Kiberd suggestively considers Hyde’s lecture as being ‘analogous to Ralph Waldo Emerson’s epoch- making address on “The American Scholar”’ that I discussed in the previous chapter, in Inventing, p. 138. 86. Hyde, ‘The Necessity for De-Anglicizing Ireland’, p. 527. 87. On Yeats’s response to the Young Irelanders see Hutchinson, Dynamics of Cultural Nationalism, p. 163. 88. Ironically, Yeats believed that Hyde’s translations were an important contribution to the development of an Irish literature in English. See Meir, Ballads and Songs, pp. 58–64. 89. Yeats, Collected Letters Vol. I, p. 338. 90. Ibid. p. 338. 91. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 520. 92. Quoted by Kiberd in Inventing, p. 164. 93. Michaels, ‘Race into Culture’, p. 60. 94. Yeats spoke in support of the language movement in Ireland at the PanCeltic Congress of 1900, for example. See Foster, W. B. Yeats I, p. 247. 95. Yeats, Collected Letters Vol. I, p. 340. 96. Ibid. p. 339. 97. Howells, Howells as Critic, pp. 231–42. 98. Yeats, ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee’, Crossways (1889) in Collected Poems, pp. 23–4. 99. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. I, p. 326. 100. Kuch, Yeats and AE, pp. 128– 30. 101. Yeats, Collected Letters Vol. I, p. 399. 102. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. I, p. 410. 103. Quoted in Foster, W. B. Yeats I, p. 310. 104. Ibid. 310. This and the preceding quotation were transcribed by a journalist who attended an impromptu lecture that Yeats gave at the University of Chicago in January 1904. 105. I discuss Arnold’s responses to the United States in Chapter 1. 106. A racialised view of the world would become increasingly apparent in Yeats’s writings from the late 1910s onwards. 107. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. II, p. 202. 108. Quoted from the draft of a tribute to Thomas Davis by Elizabeth Cullingford in Yeats, Ireland and Fascism, p. 8. 109. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. I, p. 351. 110. Dowden is quoted by Yeats in ibid. p. 352. 111. Ibid. 352. For a fuller account of Yeats’s debates with Dowden see Marcus, Yeats and the Beginning of the Irish Renaissance, pp. 104–21. 112. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 256. Autobiographies, p. 102. 113. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 362. 114. Yeats, ‘The Man who Dreamed of Faeryland,’ The Rose (1893) in Collected Poems, pp. 43–5. 115. Jeffares, New Commentary, pp. 34–5.

174 ] 116. 117. 118. 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129. 130. 131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

144. 145. 146. 147.

148. 149. 150. 151.


Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 273. McCormack, Ascendancy and Tradition, p. 295. Untrecker, Reader’s Guide, p. 82. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 295. Deane, Strange Country, p. 110. Eagleton, Heathcliff, p. 252. Foster, W. B. Yeats I, Chapters 2–9. Yeats, John Sherman, p. 9. Ibid. p. 57. Yeats, Collected Letters Vol. I, p. 275. Yeats, John Sherman, p. 42. One example of such an approach is Kinahan, Yeats, Folklore and Occultism, p. 189. Yeats, ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, The Rose (1893) in Collected Poems, p. 39. North, Political Aesthetic, pp. 22–5. Russell, Song and its Fountains, pp. 9–11. Kuch, Yeats and AE p. 43. Said, Culture and Imperialism, pp. 294–5. Quoted in Jackson, The 1890s, p. 179. Ibid. p. 178. R. Williams, Culture, p. 83. Ibid. p. 84. Ibid. p. 84. Yeats, Letters to the New Island, p. 57. Yeats, Collected Letters Vol. I, p. 278. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. I, p. 224. Quoted by Beckson, ‘Yeats and the Rhymers’ Club’, p. 20. Yeats, Collected Letters Vol. I, p. 128. Quoted by Beckson, ‘Yeats and the Rhymers’ Club’, p. 24. Further analyses of the Rhymers’ can be found in Gardner, Yeats and the Rhymers’ Club and ‘The Rhymers’ Club Reviews’. Alford, The Rhymers’ Club. Nelson, The Early Nineties. Jepson, Memories, p. 237. Book of the Rhymers’ Club. Second Book of the Rhymers’ Club. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 167. Deane, Field Day Anthology Vol. II, p. 720. The transition from ‘The Celtic Twilight’ to ‘Into the Twilight’ is noted by Thornton in Decadent Dilemma, p. 169. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. II, p. 91. Yeats, Collected Letters Vol. II, p. 37. Yeats, Autobiographies, pp. 164–5. On Rhys see Roberts, Ernest Rhys and Conran, Cost of Strangeness, pp. 1–20. Alaya, William Sharp, p. 68.

W. B. Yeats: Celticism, Aestheticism and Nationalism [ 175 Dent, The House of Dent. See Roberts, Ernest Rhys, p. 21. Rhys, ‘Introduction’ to On the Study of Celtic Literature, p. vii. Sharp, ‘Introduction’ to Lyra Celtica, p. xliii. Ibid. p. li. Rhys, Wales England Wed, p. 104. Macleod, Winged Destiny, p. 200. Ibid. p. 177. Sharp also responded to the United States in contributionist terms, noting that the American nation ‘is new in its amalgam, just as England was new when Pict, Celt, Frisian, Angle, Jute, Norseman, Dane and Norman all mingled their tributary strains in one national river of race’. Quoted in Alaya, William Sharp, p. 93. Sharp met William Dean Howells in the United States. Howells had written a scathing attack on Sharp’s ‘neo-romanticism’ in 1889. ‘Romanticism belonged to a disappointed and bewildered age’ noted Howells, ‘which turned its face from the future, and dreamed out a faery realm in the past; and we cannot have its spirit back because this is the age of hopeful striving . . .’ W. D. Howells as Critic, p. 158. Cady, the editor of W. D. Howells as Critic, incorrectly identifies Sharp as an American author, p. 484. 160. Yeats, Collected Letters Vol. II, p. 77. 161. Rhys, A London Rose, p. 14. 162. Deane, ‘Heroic Styles’, p. 50. 163. Rhys, review in Jeffares, (ed.), Yeats: Critical Heritage, p. 94. 164. Macleod, in Yeats: Critical Heritage, p. 117. 165. Sharp, Lyra Celtica, p. 399. 166. Deane, ‘Heroic Styles’, p. 49. 167. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 191. 168. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. I, pp. 247–50. 169. Ibid. pp. 248, 249, 250. 170. Regan, ‘W. B. Yeats and Irish Cultural Politics’, p. 71. 171. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, pp. 162–3. 172. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. II, p. 91. 173. Yeats, Collected Letters Vol. I, p. 303. 174. Yeats, Uncollected Prose Vol. I, p. 268. 175. Yeats, Essays and Introductions, p. 248. 176. Quoted by Elizabeth Cullingford in Yeats, Ireland and Fascism, p. 11. 177. Ibid. p. 25. 178. Yeats, Memoirs, p. 84. 179. Yeats, Explorations, p. 197. ‘Introduction’ to Oxford Book of Modern Verse, p. xiii. Essays and Introductions, pp. 287, 210. 180. Yeats, Autobiographies, p. 295. 152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159.

chapter 4

W. E. B. Du Bois Black folk in the kingdom of culture

Our greatest danger is that in the great leap from slavery to freedom we may overlook the fact that the masses of us are to live by the production of our hands, and to fail to keep in mind that we shall prosper in proportion as we learn to dignify and glorify common labor and put brains and skill into the common occupations of life; shall prosper in proportion as we learn to draw the line between the superficial and the substantial, the ornamental gewgaws of life and the useful. No race can prosper till it learns that there is as much dignity in tilling a field as in writing a poem. Booker T. Washington, ‘The Atlanta Exposition Address’ (1895)1

The period from 1880 to 1915 has been described as ‘the age of Booker T. Washington’ by historians of black America.2 Born into slavery, Washington became a leading African-American spokesperson and educationalist renowned for advocating a shift in black thought from an emphasis on political enfranchisement to economic development, from social integration to agricultural self-sufficiency. In his September 1895 speech to the ‘Cotton States and International Exposition’ in Atlanta, Washington argued that, given that a third of the South’s population was African American, any ‘enterprise seeking the material, civil and moral welfare’ of the region could not disregard their interests. He suggested that African Americans should shun the temptation to head north for employment – ‘Cast down your buckets where you are’ – and contribute to the capitalist economic expansion of the Southern States. In Washington’s opinion, the emphasis on political equality during the post-Civil War years had led to a situation where a Congressional seat ‘was more sought after than [ 176 ]

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real estate or industrial skill’.3 Washington noted that this had been a costly mistake for African Americans before proceeding to make an historical concession: In all things that are purely social we can be as separate as the fingers, yet one as the hand in all things essential to mutual progress . . . The wisest among my race understand that the agitation of questions of social equality is the extremest folly.4

What became known later as the ‘Atlanta Compromise’ involved the sidelining of political struggle for desegregation for an emphasis on the development of independent economic, educational and social institutions that would serve the needs of African Americans within the rapidly industrialising ‘New South’. Washington’s ‘Atlanta Compromise’ speech was reproduced in full in his celebrated autobiography of 1901, Up From Slavery. It was followed in the autobiography by excerpts from newspaper editorials and letters from the likes of President Grover Cleveland testifying to the universal acclaim with which the speech was received by the opinion-setters of white America.5 Among the more notable reviews that Washington’s autobiography received was that by America’s leading man of letters, William Dean Howells, who, in a review entitled ‘An Exemplary Citizen’, noted that: By precept and by practice he [Washington] counsels, not a base submission to the Southern whites, but a manly fortitude in bearing the wrongs that cannot now be righted, and a patient faith in the final kindliness and ultimate justice of the Anglo-Americans, with whom and by whom the Afro-Americans must live.6

The route towards a ‘reconciling of the Anglo-American and AfroAmerican’, argues Howells, is to follow Washington’s ‘subtle statesmanship’: What strikes you, first and last, in Mr Washington is his constant common sense. He has lived heroic poetry, and he can, therefore, afford to talk simple prose. Simple prose it is, but of sterling worth, and such as it is a pleasure to listen to as long as he chooses to talk. It is interfused with the sweet, brave humour which qualifies his writing, and which enables him, like Dunbar, to place himself outside his race, when he wishes to see it as others see it, and to report its exterior effect from his interior knowledge.7

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Washington’s ‘subtle statesmanship’ is exemplified by the ‘simple prose’ that was also a characteristic of Howellsian realism. The reference to Dunbar also resonates with my previous discussion of Howells’s writings for, if Dunbar’s poems were a manifestation of ‘white thinking and white feeling in a black man’ for Howells, then Washington is also to be commended for his ability to cross the ‘colour line’.8 It is Washington’s ability to ‘place himself outside his race’, to observe the African-American community from a white point of view, that allows for the ‘constant common sense’ of his argument and which contributes to the ‘conservative . . . temper of his mind’.9 The positive tone and tenor of Howells’s review were mirrored and replicated throughout the columns of liberal American journals, but a distinctively different note was struck in the 16 July issue of The Dial. ‘Mr Washington came with a clear simple programme’, noted William Edward Burghardt Du Bois, ‘at a time when the nation was a little ashamed of having bestowed so much sentiment on Negroes and was concentrating its energies on Dollars.’10 Du Bois considered Washington’s elevation of industry and economics over the arts and cultural creativity as evidence that the black educator had ‘learned so thoroughly the speech and thought of triumphant commercialism and the ideals of material prosperity that he pictures as the height of absurdity a black boy studying a French grammar in the midst of weeds and dirt’.11 Du Bois responded to Washington’s autobiography by emphasising the importance of liberal education, the centrality of black political enfranchisement, and the role of black authors and artists in the progress of the race. His argument with Washington was primarily conducted in terms of their divergent conceptions of culture: of what values and aspirations should inform the lives of African Americans. Thus, Raymond Williams’s distinction between ‘culture and society’ in nineteenth-century intellectual history takes the form of the ‘familiar historical set piece Washington versus Du Bois’ in AfricanAmerican studies.12 However familiar some of the material might be, even a general survey of criticism reveals that W. E. B. Du Bois’s vast corpus has left a very confusing legacy. August Meier is representative of a significant number of critics in regarding Du Bois as ‘striving and groping toward a cultural nationalism’ based on ‘the notion of innate racial differences’.13 Harold Cruse, on the other hand, influentially identified Du Bois as being primarily a member of the integrationist strain


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in African-American thought.14 Each of these apparently contradictory readings can be supported by quotations from Du Bois’s own writings.15 This range of positions adopted by Du Bois in his cultural and political thought is mirrored in the plurality of forms in which he wrote, and the range of his political and cultural activities. The struggle for a distinctive voice, the struggle for authority, in his writings take place simultaneously with a struggle to find a suitable form within which to capture the African-American experience. This is most obviously and famously the case in The Souls of Black Folk (1903) – which consists of sociological analyses, philosophical meditations, musical scores and fiction – but an experimentation with form and approach is characteristic of Du Bois’s writings throughout the period under discussion.16 In 1896–7 alone he introduced his vision of African-American ‘double-consciousness’ in his impressionistic article on ‘The Strivings of Negro People’; he developed a racial philosophy of history and cultural leadership in ‘The Conservation of Races’; and he evoked a common, Europe-centred, culture that seemed to transcend racial difference in ‘The Art and Art Galleries of Modern Europe’.17 The year 1898 saw the publication of his groundbreaking positivist sociological study of The Philadelphia Negro and, during the course of the following decade, he completed what is arguably his most successful novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), founded and edited two magazines (Moon and Horizon), wrote many articles, reviews and poems for African-American journals, and published a biography of the leading white abolitionist, John Brown (1909).18 Faced with this range of writings, critics have tended to foreground a single strain within Du Bois’s thought as being authentically Du Boisian while neglecting those elements that seem to contradict their theses.19 My attempt in what follows, however, is to address the contradictions by analysing the contributionist and conservationist strains that coexisted uneasily in Du Bois’s ideas of race and ethnicity between 1895 and 1910. The following analysis attempts not only to shed light on unexplored aspects of his work but also to extend my analysis of the interrelationships between culture and ethnicity in new directions. Matthew Arnold sought in his cultural writings to reinforce the stability of a political state that was being increasingly challenged along lines of class and ethnicity. William Dean Howells sought to give an independent cultural expression to a politically independent nation that perceived itself to be culturally dependent on English models. W. B. Yeats, on the other hand, perceived himself to be part of a

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cultural nationalist movement that sought to give artistic expression to a nation that did not yet exist politically. Du Bois offers a different case again, for here is a writer who follows the cultural nationalism of Yeats in seeking to give a voice to a disenfranchised people, but whose nationalism has no clear geographical dimension, and thus no clear, determinate, political goal. The writings of Du Bois emerge from the tensions that result from a simultaneous desire for political equality in America and the retention of black cultural difference; from a simultaneous commitment to an idea of culture that transcends ethnic divisions in the construction of a common American identity, and to an idea of culture as the vehicle for conserving the valuable distinctiveness of African-American traditions. Washington, Howells and Du Bois To juxtapose Howells’s and Du Bois’s reviews of Booker T. Washington’s Up From Slavery is not only to foreground Du Bois’s divergence from the general acceptance of Washington’s social philosophy but is also to contrast two revealingly divergent conceptualisations of Black culture and minority-group leadership. In the novel An Imperative Duty (discussed in Chapter 2) and in his review of Up From Slavery, Howells bases his reading of African-American culture on an essentialist belief that certain traits are shared by all members of the race. The Anglo-American of the South may be, and often has been, an extremist, but the Afro-American, so far as he has made himself eminent, is not. Perhaps, it is his unfailing sense of humor that saves him from extremism. At any rate, cool patience is not more characteristic of Mr Washington that of Mr Dunbar or Mr Chesnutt or of Frederick Douglass himself . . . This calm is apparently characteristic of the best of the race, and in certain aspects it is of the highest and most consoling promise. It enables them to use reason and the nimbler weapons of irony, and saves them from bitterness.20

Thus, being an Afro-American entails behaving in a certain manner and demonstrating specific traits – an ‘unfailing sense of humour’ and ‘cool patience’ – that are shared by ‘the best’ members of the race. To believe in a black essence of this kind is also to believe that any black individual can be taken as a representative of the collectivity, and thus Howells entertains a vision of the group leader as accurately repre-


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senting the perspectives and aspirations of that organic community from which Washington is seen to have risen. A note of doubt enters Howells’s argument at this point, however, for he fears that Washington’s words may conceal more than they reveal. What if, asks Howells the problem of the colored race . . . be more complex than we have thought it. What if upon some large scale they should be subtler than we have supposed? What if their amiability should veil a sense of our absurdities, and there should be in our polite inferiors the potentiality of something like contempt for us?21

This revealing passage is again based on the notion of an ‘authentic’ black experience, but one that is now being ‘veiled’ behind Washington’s mask of reconciliation. Howells’s meditation on the way the white world perceives African Americans does not lead to a revision of his essentialist belief in an authentic black character but, rather, leads to a concern as to whether that character is as ‘cool’ and ‘patient’ as it seems.22 Despite these reservations, Howells retains his belief that African Americans constitute a homogeneous cultural group that can be spoken for with one voice: ‘Mr. Washington’s way’ notes Howells ‘seems, at present, the only way for his race’.23 Whereas Howells views Washington as being the single representative voice of his people, Du Bois represents Washington as being one of many contesting voices within the African-American community. The means by which groups select their leaders, notes Du Bois, is ‘at once the most elementary and the nicest problem of social growth’, and in the case of an ‘imprisoned group’ he identifies three main courses that a leader may adopt: [A] feeling of revolt and revenge; an attempt to adjust all thought and action to the will of the greater group; or, finally, a determined attempt at self-development, self-realization, in spite of environing discouragements and prejudice.24

Washington is seen to evince the second response for his social philosophy ‘represents in Negro thought the old attitude of adjustment to environment, emphasizing the economic phase’.25 However, ‘two other strong currents of feeling, descended from the past, still oppose him’:

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One is the thought of a small but not unimportant group, unfortunate in their choice of spokesman, but nevertheless of much weight, who represent the old ideas of revolt and revenge, and see in migration alone an outlet for the Negro people. The second attitude is that of the large and important group represented by Dunbar, Tanner, Chesnutt, Miller and the Grimkes, who, without any single definite program, and with complex aims, seek nevertheless that self-development and self-realization in all lines of human endeavor which they believe will eventually place the Negro beside the other races. 26

Given Washington’s elevation of industrial education over the arts, there is an implicit critique in the fact that three of the actual leaders named by Du Bois are major African-American artists of their day – the poet Dunbar, the novelist Chesnutt and the painter Henry O. Tanner. This implicit critique was made explicit when Du Bois revised his review for inclusion as a chapter in The Souls of Black Folk. His chapter ‘Of Booker T. Washington and Others’ has been described as the ‘polemical centrepiece’ of the book as Du Bois notes that in an age of unusual economic development . . . Mr Washington’s program naturally takes an economic cast, becoming a gospel of work and money to such an extent as apparently to completely overshadow the higher aims of life.27

Culture, in The Souls of Black Folk, stands as a corrective to American economistic philistinism and, in adopting the Arnoldian gospel to his own situation, Du Bois describes the ‘freedom for expansion and self-development’ through education in European high culture as central to the advancement of African Americans, for it offers a ‘boon and guerdon for what they lose on earth for being black’.28 This, by now familiar, structure of argument is most apparent in Du Bois’s chapter ‘Of the Wings of Atalanta’. It begins with a description of Atlanta that bears a close resemblance to English novelists’ depictions of industrial towns:29 I have seen her in the morning, when the first flush of day had half-roused her; she lay gray and still on the crimson soil of Georgia; then the blue smoke began to curl from her chimneys, the tinkle of bell and scream of whistle broke the silence, the rattle and roar of busy life slowly gathered


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and swelled, until the seething whirl of the city seemed a strange thing in a sleepy land.30

This characteristic evocation of a cacophonous (‘scream’, ‘tinkle’, ‘rattle’, ‘roar’) industrial activity disrupting the placidity of the natural world forms the basis for a social critique: Atlanta must not lead the South to dream of material prosperity as the touchstone of all success; already the fatal might of this idea is beginning to spread . . . For every social ill the panacea of Wealth has been urged, – wealth to overthrow the remains of the slave feudalism; wealth to raise the ‘cracker’ Third Estate; wealth to employ the black serfs, and the prospect of wealth to keep them working; wealth as the end and aim of politics, and as the legal tender for law and order; and, finally, instead of Truth, Beauty, and Goodness, wealth as the ideal of the Public School.31

Within this industrial world of materialism and wealth, ‘Truth, Beauty and Goodness’ are preserved within the walls of Atlanta University, represented as a beacon on the hill: The hundred hills of Atlanta are now all crowned with factories. On one, toward the west, the setting sun throws three buildings in bold relief against the sky . . . Not at Oxford or at Leipsic, not at Yale or Columbia, is there an air of higher resolve or more unfettered striving; the determination to realize for men, both black and white, the broadest possibilities of life, to seek the better and the best, to spread with their own hands the Gospel of Sacrifice, – all this is the burden of their talk and dream. Here, amid a wide desert of caste and proscription, amid the heart-hurting slights and jars and vagaries of a deep race-dislike, lies this green oasis, where hot anger cools, and the bitterness of disappointment is sweetened by the springs and breezes of Parnassus . . .32

These distinctions between culture and society, beauty and materialism, suggest that Du Bois’s ideas belong within the mainstream of Anglo-American Victorian cultural criticism. The crucial difference in this instance is that Du Bois applies his critique to African-American life. What troubles Du Bois in his chapter on Atlanta are the social and cultural consequences that would result ‘if the Negro people be wooed from a strife for righteousness, from a love of knowing, to regard dollars as the be-all and end-all of life’.33 While fearing for the future, the phrasing of the question makes it clear that, in the present,

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Du Bois views the African American – just as Yeats viewed the Celt – as a counter-force of righteousness and knowing to a society dominated by the dollar. This conceptualisation of the African-American experience in late nineteenth century America informs Du Bois’s adoption and adaptation of the Arnoldian ideal of ‘culture’, and forms the context for his meditations on the relationship between culture and ethnicity. His life between 1885 and 1910 – first as a student at the Universities of Fisk, Berlin and Harvard, then as a teacher at Wilberforce University in Ohio, and the Universities of Pennsylvania and Atlanta – coincided with what Arnold Rampersad describes as ‘the most repressive era in the history of the free black’, and the historian Rayford Logan describes as the ‘nadir’ of black history in the United States.34 The nation legally abandoned the fundamental principles of Reconstruction in the Plessy v. Ferguson trial of 1896, which held that ‘separate but equal’ facilities were constitutionally valid, and, throughout the decade, measures were taken across the Southern States to limit the ability of African Americans to participate in political and cultural activities.35 John David Smith has documented how Slavery’s new apologists filled scholarly monographs and journals, popular magazines and newspapers, with a historical rationale for the contemporary repression of blacks – mob terror, lynching, segregation, disenfranchisement.36

Du Bois notes in his autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, that 1892, which saw 235 African Americans murdered, was the high tide of lynchings in America but the violence continued throughout the decade.37 From 1896 to 1903, at least 730 Blacks were reported lynched but the first anti-lynching bill, introduced in 1900 by black Congressman George H. White, failed to get beyond the committee stage.38 Such developments were to have an effect on the lives of Du Bois and his family, living in Atlanta. Atlanta had followed many other cities in imposing Jim Crow restrictions in public accommodations, and the ‘Separate Park Law’ of 1905 restricted African Americans from public parks.39 The 22 September 1906 saw the outbreak of three days of looting, lynching and murder in Atlanta. Du Bois was out of town at the time of the riot but, uncertain of the safety of his wife and daughter, returned by train. On the journey he vented his emotions in the powerful poem, ‘A Litany of Atlanta’, which takes the form of increasingly desperate and intense pleas to a silent God.


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Each passage of pleading is punctuated by a chorus line from an imagined congregation, and this call-and-response pattern leads to a semi-blasphemous climax:40 Sit no longer blind, Lord God, deaf to our prayer and dumb to our dumb suffering. Surely Thou too are not white, O Lord, a pale, bloodless, heartless thing? Ah! Christ of all the Pities! 41

Rather than representing a dialogue with God, the poem enacts a process of debate and struggle within the poet himself, as Du Bois’s own religious upbringing and Victorian belief in human progress face the reality of a racial pogrom. This questioning of his society’s fundamental values is mirrored in the rejection of the Washingtonian philosophy of industrial self-reliance: Behold this maimed and broken thing; dear God it was a humble black man who toiled and sweat to save a bit from the pittance paid him. They told him Work and Rise. He worked. Did this man sin? Yet . . . this man lieth maimed and murdered, his wife naked to shame, his children, to poverty and evil. Hear us, O heavenly Father! 42

The implicit conclusion to be drawn from this stanza is that the Atlanta Compromise speech of 1895 is related to the riot of 1906, that black leaders have betrayed their people. Indeed, even before the events of September 1906, Du Bois had expanded his 1901 analysis of Washington’s leadership into the scathing attack of the Washingtonian philosophy that appeared in The Souls of Black Folk: . . . in our own land, the reaction from the sentiment of war time has given impetus to race-prejudice against Negroes, and Mr. Washington withdraws many of the high demands of Negroes as men and American citizens . . . Mr Washington distinctly asks that black people give up, at least for the present, three things, – First, political power, Second, insistence on civil rights, Third, higher education of Negro youth, – and concentrate all their energies on industrial education, the accumulation of wealth, and the conciliation of the South. This policy has been

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courageously and insistently advocated for over fifteen years, and has been triumphant for perhaps ten years. As a result of this tender of the palm-branch, what has been the return? In these years there have occurred: 1. The disfranchisement of the Negro. 2. The legal creation of a distinct status of civil inferiority for the Negro. 3. The steady withdrawal of aid from institutions for the higher training of the Negro. These movements are not, to be sure, direct results of Mr Washington’s teachings; but his propaganda has, without a shadow of doubt, helped their speedier accomplishment.43

Having rejected Washington’s philosophy of black advancement through industrial and agricultural education in such unequivocal terms – indeed, having made that very philosophy complicit with black cultural and political disenfranchisement – Du Bois’s challenge was to forge an alternative route towards empowerment, and to carve out a position for himself as an alternative leader of the AfricanAmerican community. Du Bois based his challenge to Washington on a fundamental reconceptualisation of what it meant to be Black in America. Washington argued that African Americans should become full participators within America’s expanding economy. For Du Bois, this belief underlined Washington’s ‘singleness of vision and thorough oneness with his age’ and disqualified him from being an effective spokesperson for the African-American community.44 Du Bois, defining African-American culture in terms of its inherent opposition to the dominant values of the age, portrayed African Americans as living behind a ‘veil’ that divided the black and white worlds. The worlds within and without the Veil of Color are changing, and changing rapidly, but not at the same rate, not in the same way; and this must produce a peculiar wrenching of the soul, a peculiar sense of doubt and bewilderment. Such a double life, with double thoughts, double duties, and double social classes, must give rise to double words and double ideals, and tempt the mind to pretence or to revolt, to hypocrisy or to radicalism.45

Thus, whereas Washington’s beliefs make him a man ‘at one’ with his age, African Americans as a whole are specifically not ‘at one’ with


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developments in the wider society. This results in the ‘doubleness’ which is the famous reiterated trope that unites the diverse philosophical, sociological, autobiographical, historical and fictional chapters in The Souls of Black Folk. The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with a second-sight in this American world – a world that yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at oneself through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels this two-ness – an American, a Negro; two Souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.46

This attempt at offering a partly psychological, partly cultural, account of African-American identity results in considerable ambiguity. For while ‘double consciousness’, this living within a veil, is negative in that it ‘yields no true self-consciousness’, it is also positive in that the African American is ‘gifted with a second sight’. Critics have debated the intellectual lineage of Du Bois’s famous concept exhaustively, noting that it appears in Emerson’s essay ‘Fate’, in Goethe, and in writers as diverse as Whittier, Wordsworth, George Eliot and William James.47 Kenneth Warren strikes a note of caution, however, when he notes that Henry James’s use of the phrase ‘double consciousness’ testifies only to the ‘teasing repetition’ of this term during the period, and Shamoon Zamir argues more forcefully that ‘to note that both Hegel and James have some idea of a divided self tells us nothing about their respective theories, and even less about Du Bois’s relation to these theories’.48 While registering Warren’s and Zamir’s reservations, it is nevertheless revealing to note in the context of this present study that, when Rhoda Aldgate hears of her black ancestry in William Dean Howells’s An Imperative Duty her reactions are described as follows: The emotions, densely pressing upon each other, the dramatizations that took place as simultaneously and unsuccessively as the events of a dream, gave her a new measure of time; she compassed the experience of years in the seconds these sensations outnumbered . . . The tears gushed into her eyes, and all the bitterness of her trial returned upon her, with a

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pressure of lead on her brain. In the double consciousness of trouble she was fully aware of everything about her as she was of the world of misery within her; and she knew that this had so far shown itself without that some of the passers were noticing her.49

Howells uses the term ‘double consciousness’ in a tale of racial intermingling and, like Du Bois, suggests that the experience of double consciousness results in an altered sense of time. In a November 1913 article in The Crisis, entitled ‘Howells and Black Folk’, Du Bois recalled the impression made upon him by Howells’s novel: In the composite picture which William Dean Howells, as his life work, has painted of America he has not hesitated to be truthful and to include the most significant thing in the land – the black man. With lies and twistings most Americans seek to ignore the mighty and portentous shadow of ten growing millions, or, if it insists on darkening the landscape, to label it as joke or crime. But Howells in his ‘Imperative Duty,’ faced our national foolishness and shuffling and evasion. Here was a white girl engaged to a white man who discovers herself ‘black’. The problem looms before her as tremendous, awful. The world wavers. She peers beyond the Veil and shudders and then – tells her story frankly, marries her man, and goes her way as thousands of others have done and are doing.50

In my earlier discussion of An Imperative Duty I argued that Howells’s contributionist narrative is based on presenting Rhoda’s black ancestry as a positive counter-force to Dr Olney’s lack of vitality and dissatisfaction with American culture. Howells does not suggest that Rhoda’s anxious ‘double consciousness’ is typical of African Americans – indeed, the peripheral black characters in the novel are depicted as ‘childish’, ‘grateful’ and ‘winning’ – but is the specific reaction of, in Du Bois’s words, a ‘white girl who discovers herself to be black’.51 While it is unlikely that Du Bois adopted his terminology directly from Howells, it is revealing that, in his appropriation of ‘double consciousness’ as being the defining quality of the African-American character, Du Bois inverts the logic of Howells’s contributionist narrative. Rather than seeing the absorption of blackness as a cure to the philistinism and ‘over-civilization’ of white America, Du Bois – in a move reminiscent of Yeats’s appropriation of Arnold’s primitivist Celticism – takes the notion of double conscious-


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ness and makes it the basis for black cultural difference. Yet, while Yeats could appropriate Arnold’s descriptions of Celtic character as being natural, spiritual and mystical as a means of underlining the fundamental difference between Irish and English cultures, Du Bois’s ‘double consciousness’ is not only a mark of cultural difference but also serves as a reminder of the troubling tensions involved in the effort to forge a separate black cultural identity within the context of a wider nation state in which its citizens define themselves as American. Here, then, is the dilemma, and it is a puzzling one, I admit. No Negro who has given earnest thought to the situation of his people in America has failed, at some time in life, to find himself at these cross-roads; has failed to ask himself at some time: What, after all, am I? Am I an American or am I a Negro? Can I be both? Or is it my duty to cease to be a Negro as soon as possible and be an American? If I strive as a Negro, am I not perpetuating the very cleft that threatens and separates Black and White America? Is not my only practical aim the subduction of all that is Negro in me to the American? Does my black blood place upon me any more obligation to assert my nationality than German, Irish or Italian blood would?52

These are the tensions that Du Bois sought to address in his writings between 1895 and 1910. The passage contains two differing conceptions of culture which coexist uneasily in Du Bois’s thought: a conception of culture as the sphere where national and ethnic differences can be reconciled; and a conception of culture in which racial and ethnic differences are preserved. ‘How far’ Du Bois asked while a student in Germany in the 1890s, ‘can love for my oppressed race accord with love for the oppressing country?’53 The contradictions of Du Bois’s thought arise from the two forms of ethnic allegiance inscribed within this question. The Gift of Black Folk If the basis for Matthew Arnold’s contributionist argument was his belief that ‘there must be some Celtic vein . . . running through’ the English, there are also moments in Du Bois’s writings where black culture is presented as already being a central component of the American national culture.54 ‘We are that people whose subtle sense of song has given America its only American music, its only American

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fairy tales’ he wrote in 1897,55 and, in The Souls of Black Folk in 1903, the Negro contribution to the national culture is represented as ‘a gift’ to the ‘spiritual heritage’ of the American nation. Little of beauty has America given the world save the rude grandeur God himself stamped on her bosom; the human spirit in this new world has expressed itself in vigour and ingenuity rather than in beauty. And so by fateful chance the Negro folk-song – the rhythmic cry of the slave – stands today not simply as the sole American music, but as the most beautiful expression of human experience born this side of the seas. It has been neglected, it has been, and is, despised, and above all it has been persistently mistaken and misunderstood; but notwithstanding it still remains as the singular spiritual heritage of the nation and the greatest gift of the Negro people.56

The ‘nation’ in this passage refers unequivocally to America, with the Negro folk-song functioning as a fundamental element within the national culture. Whereas Arnold invoked the Celtic strain within the English composite self as a means of underlining his argument that the future of the Celtic peoples lay in their absorption into a dominant Englishness, Du Bois, writing from a position of marginality, underlines his people’s centrality to the historical narrative of the nation in order to counter discriminatory and segregationist practices. ‘[T]here are today no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes’ states Du Bois, ‘there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave’.57 He begins his 1909 biography of John Brown by noting how The mystic spell of Africa is and ever was over all America. It has guided her hardest work, inspired her finest literature, and sung her sweetest songs. Her greatest destiny – unsensed and despised though it be – is to give back to the first of continents the gifts which Africa of old gave to America’s fathers’ fathers.58

While Du Bois traces the English, Welsh and Dutch strains within John Brown’s ancestry in the course of the biography, the key to an understanding of the white abolitionist’s motivations, he suggests in the opening chapter, is that he was part of a world-wide revolt against the exploitation of peoples of African descent. In depicting an ‘African spell’ as being a fundamental component of America, Du


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Bois challenges the prevalent equation of ‘American’ with ‘whiteness’. This reading of American history, however, poses a potential challenge to Du Bois’s own view of ‘double-consciousness’ as the mark of African-American uniqueness for, if ‘white’ and ‘America’ are not synonymous terms, then whites should potentially have as much of a double identity as their black compatriots. It is, however, the social reality of discrimination that marks the distinctive difference between the two groups. Double consciousness arises from the African American’s contradictory and marginal position in a racially structured society. In discussing the impact of racism on Du Bois’s writings, it is worth recalling that, as a New Englander with an education from Berlin and Harvard, Du Bois was in some ways closer to the dominant American culture of his time than was the Ohioan, William Dean Howells. It is thus significant, as Keith Byerman has noted, that the first example of racism that we encounter in The Souls of Black Folk is not an atrocity perpetrated in the South, but is rather a schoolyard incident which is recalled as follows: I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England . . . In a wee schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards – ten cents a package – and exchange. The exchange was merry, till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card, – refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their world by a vast veil.59

Du Bois’s first encounter with racism involves a white girl’s rejection of the black boy’s visiting-card. The young Du Bois’s shock at the refusal of his gift allies him with the values of his New England society, for the refusal of his visiting-card shatters the veneer of gentility embodied within the children’s imitation of a social custom. The girl, it is noted, is a ‘newcomer’, thus placing the source of racism outside Du Bois’s New England community and thus safeguarding the values of his own upbringing and his adherence to them.60 The contributionist strain in Du Bois’s writings presents African-American life as less an experience of alienation bred by cultural difference, and more a sense of cultural disenfranchisement as America fails to recognise the African element within its own constitution, and thus fails to live up to its own democratic ideals. The ‘Negro idea’, notes Du Bois at another moment where the contributionist strain of his thought is foregrounded, should be

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realised ‘not in opposition or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideal of the American Republic, in order that some day on American soil two world-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack’.61 The tension that I traced in Matthew Arnold’s writings between the idea of a ‘Celtic fibre’, that was already an amalgamated part of the English composite self, and the awareness that a ‘diminished remnant’ of Celtic peoples continued to exist on the Western peripheries of the ‘English empire’, is mirrored in the writings of Du Bois.62 For, in his revision of American history, Du Bois presents the African contribution as being an already amalgamated element within the American nation of the past, while also arguing that this is a contribution that is still being made by the African-American community in the present. The structure of Du Bois’s argument also resembles Arnold’s Celtic essays in that the contribution of African Americans to the national culture is defined in stereotypically primitivist terms: The Negro has already been pointed out many times as a religious animal, – a being of that deep emotional nature which turns instinctively toward the supernatural. Endowed with a rich tropical imagination and a keen, delicate appreciation of Nature, the transplanted African lived in a world animate with gods and devils, elves and witches . . .63

Just as Arnold believed that a dominant English philistinism would be tempered by a Celtic genius which had ‘sentiment as its main basis, with love of beauty, charm, spirituality for its excellence’, Du Bois presents the African American as having an ‘innate love of harmony and beauty’, as characterised by a ‘simple faith and reverence’, and, crucially, as being ‘the harbinger of that black to-morrow which is yet destined to soften the whiteness of the Teutonic today’.64 This primitivist strain remained an element in Du Bois’s thought into the 1920s, where he noted in his The Gift of Black Folk that Above and beyond all that we have mentioned, perhaps least tangible but just as true, is the peculiar spiritual quality which the Negro has injected into American life and civilisation. It is hard to define or characterise it – a certain spiritual joyousness; a sensuous, tropical love of life, in vivid contrast to the cool and cautious New England reason; a slow and dreamful conception of the universe, a drawling and slurring of speech, an intense sensitiveness to spiritual values – all these things and others like them, tell of the imprint of Africa on Europe in America.65


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The qualities listed here are in accordance with the stereotypes of black Americans held by the dominant culture. If Howells’s Dr Olney observes in An Imperative Duty that African Americans are characterised by their ‘childish simple-heartedness’, and believes them to be ‘the only people left who have any heart for life here’, Du Bois underlines the Negro’s ‘spiritual joyousness’ and ‘sensuous, tropical love of life’.66 Du Bois’s analysis cannot, as Keith Byerman notes, ‘accommodate the highly rational New Englander who wrote the words’.67 It seems that in appropriating these terms of racial difference, Du Bois wishes to underline a sharp distinction between European and African cultures, while simultaneously distinguishing these two earlier distinctive forms of culture from the hybrid culture of an emergent America. In the final sentence of the above quotation, America is the product of a fusion of Africa and Europe in much the way that Arnold’s English nation was the result of fusing Anglo-Saxon, Norman and Celtic races. Indeed, there are moments in Du Bois’s writings where he seems to accept Victorian ethnology’s belief in a hierarchical division of races according to their cultural characteristics. There are several examples in The Souls of Black Folk where Du Bois refers to the underdevelopment of ‘the Negro race’. He refers, for instance, to their ‘credulous race-childhood’, and he lists blacks among the ‘world’s underdeveloped peoples’ in need of economic and cultural uplift.68 There is, then, a contradiction in Du Bois’s thought between a desire to underline the valuable, indeed fundamental, contribution that African Americans have made to American civilisation, and a desire to foreground the primitivism of the black character and its culture. This contradiction may be explained if we turn to Du Bois’s notion of race leadership, for to underline the valuable primitivism of black folk is also to begin to carve out a role for the educated African-American man of letters as a keeper and interpreter of a distinctive black culture, and as the sophisticated leader of the uneducated and underdeveloped masses. ‘The Negro race is going to be saved by its exceptional men’ stated Du Bois at the beginning his lecture on ‘The Talented Tenth’ (1903), where he defined his programme of race leadership in opposition to Booker T. Washington’s espousal of industrial education as a means for African-American advancement.69 If we make money the object of man-training, we shall develop moneymakers but not necessarily men. Men we shall have only as we make

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manhood the object of the work of the schools – intelligence, broad sympathy, knowledge of the world that was and is, and of the relation of man to it – this is the curriculum of that Higher Education which must underlie true life.70

This argument for the role of a ‘talented tenth’ of group leaders sheds light on Du Bois’s valorisation of black primitivism, and black masculinity.71 Just as Yeats sought to maintain the social significance of his class by conjoining the Anglo-Irish with peasant Ireland as two communities distinguished by their anti-materialism, Du Bois conjoins his notion of a ‘talented tenth’ of black intellectual leaders with an idealisation of a pre-industrial and primitive folk. As in Yeats’s writings, there is no doubt in Du Bois’s mind as to who is to set the terms of cultural advancement: Who are to-day guiding the work of the Negro people? The ‘exceptions’ of course . . . A saving remnant continually survives and persists, continually aspires, continually shows itself in thrift and ability and character. Exceptional it is to be sure, but this is its chiefest promise; it shows the capability of Negro blood, the promise of black men . . . Can the masses of the Negro people be in any possible way more quickly raised than by the effort and example of the aristocracy of talent and character? Was there ever a nation on God’s fair earth civilised from the bottom upward? Never; it is, ever was and ever will be from the top downward that culture filters.72

Du Bois’s description of his talented tenth as a ‘saving remnant’ and as an ‘aristocracy of talent and character’, has much in common with Arnold’s ‘disinterested aliens’ of Culture and Anarchy, and particularly with the ‘cultured remnant’ of his American lectures. Arnold had argued that the ‘highly-instructed few, and not the scantilyinstructed many, will ever be the organ to the human race of knowledge and truth’ and, just as Arnold sought to develop a role for the educated man of letters between the philistine arrogance of the middle classes and the potential anarchy of the working class, Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, invokes the danger of civil unrest in making his case for fostering a class of black leaders.73 [N]o secure civilisation can be built in the South with the Negro as an ignorant, turbulent proletariat. Suppose we seek to remedy this by making them labourers and nothing more: they are not fools, they have tasted of


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the Tree of Life, and they will not cease to think, will not cease attempting to read the riddle of the world. By taking away their best equipped teachers and leaders and slamming the door of opportunity in the faces of their bolder and brighter minds, will you make them satisfied with their lot? or will you not rather transfer their leading from the hands of men taught to think to the hands of untrained demagogues? . . . [A]s the black third of the land grows in thrift and skill, unless skilfully guided in its larger philosophy, it must more and more brood over the red past and the creeping, crooked present, until it grasps a gospel of revolt and revenge and throws its new-found energies athwart the current of advance.74

This charged paragraph draws on the fact that, as well as being a decade of increasing racial bigotry, the 1890s was a period of considerable political unrest in the United States. The middle years of the decade saw the onset of a severe depression which was the catalyst for a series of major strikes, notably the Homestead strike of 1892, which broke the organising efforts of the iron and steel workers, and the Pullman strike of 1894 in Chicago, which saw scores of striking workers murdered as federal troops were called in and the American Railway Union, led by Eugene V. Debs, was broken.75 If the members of Arnold’s ‘remnant’ function as humanising agents in a world characterised by aristocratic barbarity, middle-class philistinism and working-class anarchy, and if Yeats’s ‘aristocracy’ functions as mediators between the natural, if unrefined and directionless, spirituality of the folk and an emergent nationalist movement, then Du Bois’s ‘talented tenth’ functions as cultured social leaders located between the hatred and contempt of the white supremacist majority and the primitivism and potential militancy of the black urban and agrarian masses.76 If the strident, biblical tenor of Du Bois’s essays communicates a sense of confidence in the truth of his social prognosis, a more ambivalent tone enters when he attempts to present his arguments in fictional form. Published in 1911, but written between 1904 and 1910, Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece, explores the tensions that derive from a belief in the social and cultural uplift of the race, and the desire to preserve a black anti-materialist primitivism. Ostensibly, the novel is an example of the naturalism practised by Du Bois’s contemporaries, Jack London and Frank Norris, where characters are invariably overpowered by vast, uncontrollable social forces. Indeed, Du Bois described his novel as ‘an economic study of some merit’.77 The tale, however, centres on the romantic relationship

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between Blessed Alwyn, a poor farm-boy who seeks an education and becomes a representative of the talented tenth, and Zora, a ‘heathen hoyden’ who is brought up by her witch-mother, Elspeth, to satisfy the lust of the plantation owners in the heart of a southern swamp.78 As the tale develops, we witness the transformation of Zora into a respectable heroine, and a leader of her people, under the tutelage of Blessed and the Yankee schoolteacher, Mrs Smith – a representative of ‘the older New England’ values of honesty and determination.79 When the novel opens, however, Zora is ‘a child of the swamp’, a girl of ‘twelve wayward, untrained years’ who is the mouthpiece for the primitivist strain in Du Bois’s thought.80 Zora speaks of white power early in the novel in the following terms: They don’t really rule; they just thinks they rule. They just got things, – heavy, dead things. We black folks is got the spirit. We’se lighter and cunninger; we fly right through them; we go and come again just as we wants to.81

If there’s an element of youthful optimism in Zora’s words here, her argument reappears as a central theme throughout the novel. The ephemeral nature of white power and the sterility of the civilisation that the whites have created are represented symbolically in their ‘grey eyes’ and ‘bloodless lips’, in the ‘metallic sound’ of their laughter which is unlike the ‘soft, rollicking laughter of black men’, and narratively in the birth of Mary Taylor’s stillborn child.82 Capitalism, represented by the Northerners’ control of the cotton industry, symbolises the highest form of destructive self-interest in the novel, and Zora’s impulsive anti-materialism stands as a counter to such values. When Zora is accused of stealing a hairpin from Miss Taylor, one of the teachers at the school, the dialogue develops as follows: ‘Zora, don’t deny that you took my pin from the desk this afternoon,’ the teacher commanded severely . . . Zora appeared to be unimpressed with the heinousness of her fault. ‘Did you make that pin?’ she [Zora] asked. ‘No, but it is mine.’ ‘Why is it yours?’ ‘Because it was given to me.’ ‘But you don’t need it; you’ve got four other prettier ones – I counted.’ ‘That makes no difference.’ ‘Yes it does – folks ain’t got no right to things they don’t need.’83


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Bles ultimately intervenes, and later educates Zora in the ways of civilised society. ‘Well, Zora, I don’t want you ever to tell another lie, or ever to take anything that doesn’t belong to you.’ She looked at him silently with the shadow of something like terror far back in the depths of her eyes.84

Critics have surely been correct in noting the autobiographical basis for Du Bois’s characterisation of Blessed who is hard working, intelligent and committed to the uplift of his race. There is a sense, however, as the ‘terror far back in the depths’ of Zora’s eyes suggests, that his influence on Zora is not wholly positive; that the grafting of a ‘New England consciousness on a tropical heart’ is experienced as a loss of Zora’s free spirit.85 There are times in The Quest of the Silver Fleece when Du Bois is reinforcing the view that we encountered in Howells’s An Imperative Duty that, in a world of philistine materialism, African Americans are ‘the only people left who have any heart for life here’.86 A key stage in Zora’s process of acculturation involves her moving to New York to work as a maid for the wealthy, but disillusioned, Mrs Vanderpool. Much of their dialogue together foregrounds the implicit contributionsim of Du Bois’s social thought. ‘What is the world like?’ asked Zora. Mrs Vanderpool smiled. ‘Oh, I meant great active cities and buildings, myriads of people and wonderful sights.’ – ‘Yes, but back of it all, what is it really? What does it look like?’ – ‘Heavens child! Don’t ask. Really, it isn’t worth while peering back of things. One is sure to be disappointed.’ – ‘Then what’s the use of seeing the world?’ – ‘Why, one must live; and why not be happy’ answered Mrs Vanderpool, amused, baffled, spurred for the time being from her chronic ennui. ‘Are you happy?’ retorted Zora, looking her over carefully, from silken stockings to garden hat. Mrs Vanderpool laid aside her little mockery and met the situation bravely. ‘No’, she replied simply. Her eyes grew old and tired. Involuntarily Zora’s hand crept out protectingly and lay a moment over the white jewelled fingers . . . Mrs Vanderpool’s eyes became dim, ‘I need you, Zora,’ she said . . . ‘Yes, and you need me; we need each other. In the world lies opportunity, and I will help you.’87

Just as Howells’s Mrs Meredith is a representative of the ‘nervous women’ who reside in Boston’s wealthy Back Bay area ‘where nervous

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suffering . . . must mainly abide’ in An Imperative Duty, so Mrs Vanderpool is described as suffering from a feeling of ‘chronic ennui’.88 And just as Dr Olney persuades Rhoda not to go and work for the ‘uplift of her race’ in the South by stating that ‘if you must give your life to the improvement of any particular race, give it to mine’, Mrs Vanderpool realises her dependence on Zora – ‘I need you Zora’.89 In Du Bois’s contributionist vision, whites realise their deficiencies and, in recognising the role that the African-American spirit can play in an ‘over-civilized’ America, they alter their racist behaviour and values.90 Thus, in the scene between Zora and Mrs Vanderpool, Du Bois prepares us for the novel’s conclusion where Mrs Vanderpool contributes her considerable wealth to save Mrs Smith’s Southern African-American school from financial ruin. In The Quest of the Silver Fleece, Du Bois utilises the novel form as a context in which to explore the contradictions within his racial and social thought. His description of the novel as ‘an economic study of some merit’ is revealing in this respect for, while the novel contains a clear anti-materialist, anti-capitalist message within its economic narrative, this plays a secondary role to a racial narrative which, while being far more prominent, is also more ambiguous and resists being reduced to a single interpretation. What we encounter in Du Bois’s novel is the coexistence of an Arnoldian/Howellsian contributionist narrative depicting the role of the primitive African American as a source of reinvigoration for the dominant society, with a Yeatsian transformation of that primitivism into the basis for a cultural nationalist narrative of racial preservation and uplift. The Quest of the Silver Fleece suggests that, while black underdevelopment and spirituality may predicate the race’s absorption into the dominant society, Du Bois is also aware that this primitivism can equally form the basis for a conservationist philosophy of difference. Conserving Races Du Bois’s contributionism suggests that African-American spirituality and primitivism prescribe the race’s ultimate absorption into a hybrid American culture in which ‘two world races . . . give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack’.91 There is, however, a second, stronger, strain in Du Bois’s writings that adopts and adapts those stereotypical notions of blackness in making the case for cultural and political separatism. In his poems Du Bois portrays Africa as


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the source of the black American’s cultural uniqueness. ‘A Day In Africa’ (1908) begins as follows: I rose to sense the incense of the hills, The royal sun sent crimsoned heralds to the dawn She glowed beneath her bridal veil of mist – I felt her heart swell while the king Paused on the world’s rough edge, And thousand birds did pour their little hearts To maddened melody.92

The symbolic representation of the African landscape as a woman, the ‘incense’ and ‘veil of mist’ all strike the characteristic notes of late nineteenth-century aestheticist poetry. Indeed, the fact that a number of the chapter epigraphs in The Souls of Black Folk are taken from the poems of ‘Celtic’ aesthetes such as Fiona Macleod (Chapter X) and Arthur Symons (Chapter I), testifies to Du Bois’s acquaintance with aestheticist poetry. While critics tend to view Du Bois’s epigraphs as having been taken from the established European canon of his time, neither Macleod (discussed in the previous chapter) nor Symons had been around for long enough to be canonised and were, in fact, Du Bois’s contemporaries.93 As in the writings of the ‘Rhymers’ Club’, Du Bois often juxtaposes a feminised, unspoilt, primitivist landscape with the urban landscapes of the industrialised West. The structure of his poem on ‘The Burden of Black Women’ (1907) is based on the contrast between The White World’s vermin and filth: All the dirt of London, All the scum of New York

and the Dark daughter of the lotus leaves that watch the Southern sea, Wan spirit of a prisoned soul a-panting to be free.94

The ‘dark dughter’ is placed within a stereotypically primitivist setting of lotus leaves and Southern sea, with modern civilisation represented as a prison in which her ‘soul’ strives for expression. Before dismissing Du Bois’s primitivist images of African Americans as merely the adoption of white stereotypes, it is important to register

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the lack of positive images of blacks within the literature and popular culture of the late nineteenth century. Henry Louis Gates Jr has convincingly argued that the years from 1895 to 1925 are ‘the crux of the period of black intellectual reconstruction’, and Du Bois played a central role in that cultural nationalist project of constructing a positive image of the self-confident ‘New-Negro’.95 Du Bois’s image of the Negro in both his creative and critical writings is informed by his belief that African-American culture stands in opposition to the dominant cultural values of a materialist society. African Americans, he notes, are the source of a ‘simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars’.96 In this respect Du Bois shares with the other figures discussed in this study an idea of ‘culture’ as the vehicle for the critique of industrial society. Du Bois also follows Yeats in equating ‘culture’ with his own ethnic culture, and thus his writing also contains the Yeatsian convergence of aestheticist poetry and nationalist politics in its hostility to an industrial and utilitarian society Du Bois is widely considered to be a central figure in the development of black nationalist thought. Wilson Jeremiah Moses describes him as a member of the last generation of African-American thinkers who ‘conceived of black nationalism in European terms’; and Robert Stepto, in a similar vein, argues that Du Bois attempted in The Souls of Black Folk ‘to impose what is, in effect, a national identity upon Afro-America’.97 Du Bois’s period of education in Berlin (1892–94) coincided with the rise of Pan-Germanism and a resurgent German nationalism.98 ‘Bismarck was my hero’ he noted in his first autobiography, Dusk of Dawn, when referring to the late 1880s, for he ‘had made a nation out of a mass of bickering peoples’ and, in a letter of 1890, he referred to himself as a ‘young Negro who is building a nation’.99 It is striking that, despite the fact that black American nationalism had no obvious geographical dimension, Du Bois followed a tradition of nineteenth-century African-American thinkers in conceiving of his people as a ‘nation’.100 In The Souls of Black Folk, Du Bois locates the geographical centre of his African-American ‘nation’ within the ‘Black Belt’ of the Southern States. ‘Not only is Georgia . . . the geographical focus of our Negro population’ states Du Bois, ‘but in many other respects, both now and yesterday, the Negro problems have seemed to be centered in this State.’101 This is a land where one can ride ‘ten miles’ without seeing ‘a white face’.102 Du Bois offers an image of economic impoverishment where the old houses of plantation owners have been abandoned, leaving small pockets of black folk who try to earn a living on the land. The state’s


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‘crimson soil’ invokes the bloody heritage of slavery as much as it is an objective description of the earth, and it is perhaps revealing that the only white faces that do appear in this historically saturated landscape of a ‘black nation’ are those of landowning Jews. ‘The Jew is the heir of the slave baron in Dougherty’ notes Du Bois as a distinct note of the period’s prevalent anti-Semitism enters his prose. ‘Only a Yankee or a Jew’ he goes on ‘could squeeze more blood from debtcursed tenants.’103 While the majority of the characters that Du Bois meets are important sources of oral history – men who’ve seen ‘niggers drop dead in the furrow, but they were kicked aside’104 – others are representatives of the profound racial divisions within American society which Du Bois’s own anti-Semitism inadvertently foregrounds. Du Bois recounts the words of ‘one big red-eyed black’ who stated: Let a white man touch me, and he dies; I don’t boast this, – I don’t say it around loud, or before the children, – but I mean it. I’ve seen them whip my father and my old mother in them cotton-rows till the blood ran; by –’ and we passed on.105

The dash that interrupts the man’s speech here can be seen to reinforce the nationalist narrative that Du Bois develops in the chapter, for his account of the atrocities committed under slavery is part of a common history that Du Bois, as an African American, shares with the Southern black folk. He can ‘pass on’ because these are tales which he has heard repeated many times during his travels in the South; they are part of the bloody past upon which his notion of a ‘black nation’ is based. If Du Bois bases his African-American nation on an imagined geographical space and on a common history, he also invokes the notion of cultural continuities that connect Africa to America. In attempting to forge a link between black Americans and their African roots, it is to the non-discursive, aural components of the black experience that Du Bois turns. He thus recollects an African song that has been handed down through his family as follows: My grandfather’s grandmother was seized by an evil Dutch trader two centuries ago; and coming to the valleys of the Hudson and Housatonic, black, little, and lithe, she shivered and shrank in the harsh north winds, looked longingly at the hills, and often crooned a heathen melody to the child between her knees thus:

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Do bana coba, gene me, gene me! Do bana coba, gene me, gene me! Ben d’nuli, nuli, nuli, nuli, ben d’le. The child sang it to his children and they to their children’s children, and so two hundred years it has travelled down to us and we sing it to our children, knowing as little as our fathers what its words may mean, but knowing well the meaning of its music.106

If the song and its remembrance represent a linguistic connection to the past, the fact that the words aren’t understood underlines the tenuousness of that connection.107 While there is a sense here of a cultural bond that transcends the ravages of slavery, thus creating a continuous narrative from Africa to America, the impenetrability of the words, for both author and reader, foregrounds the fundamentally fractured, untotalisable nature of African-American history. The nationalist narrative is, in effect, being undermined as it is being made. Indeed, as Anthony Appiah has argued, Du Bois, in conceptualising his idea of a ‘black nation’ based on a common history and culture, often undercuts his own claims as to its socio-historical basis. Appiah accepts that Du Bois struggled to offer a cultural, rather than biological, basis for group identity, but argues that the very ideas of ‘common strivings’ and of a shared experience already entail a biological notion of the group. ‘[S]haring a common group history’ notes Appiah cannot be a criterion for being members of the same group, for we would have to be able to identify the group in order to identify its history. Someone in the fourteenth century could share a common history with me through our membership in an historically extended race only if something accounts for his or her membership in the race in the fourteenth century and for mine in the twentieth. That something cannot, on pain of circularity, be the history of the race.108

Appiah is surely right to detect a strain of biological racialism in Du Bois’s writings, but there is a tendency (as with Arnold) to overemphasise this aspect of his thought.109 Du Bois, like Arnold in his Celtic essays, invokes an idea of race that is part of the social discourse of his time, as a means for advancing a cultural and political argument.110 Just as Arnold’s main concern was to offer a cultural argument for the continued political existence of Ireland as part of the ‘English empire’, Du Bois seeks to offer a cultural basis for the toler-


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ant coexistence of black and white communities in a racially structured society. He seems to be ultimately as little interested in ‘scientific’ issues of racial definition and taxonomy as was Arnold, and shows no consistency in his listings of the world’s races. In ‘The Conservation of Races’ Du Bois imagines ‘eight distinctly different races’ on the ‘world’s stage’: They are, the Slavs of Eastern Europe, the Teutons of middle Europe, the English of Great Britain and America, the Romance nations of Southern and Western Europe, the Negroes of Africa, the Hindoos of central Asia and the Mongolians of Eastern Asia.111

In The Souls of Black Folk, on the other hand, the African American is a ‘sort of seventh son’ following ‘the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian’.112 Du Bois offers a different list again in his conclusion to The Philadelphia Negro where a charged political message underpins his listing of races: [W]e grant full citizenship in World Commonwealth to the ‘AngloSaxon’ (whatever that may mean), the Teuton and the Latin; then with just a shade of reluctance we extend it to the Celt and Slav. We half deny it to the yellow races of Asia, admit the brown Indians to an ante-room only on the strength of an undeniable past; but with the Negroes of Africa we come to a full stop, and in its heart the civilised world with one accord denies that these come within the pale of nineteenth-century Humanity.113

If race is used to justify human disenfranchisement then, in the hands of Du Bois, it is recast as a vehicle for African-American advancement. ‘Race’ for Du Bois offers a basis for developing a conservationist argument that values the distinctiveness of black culture, and for placing the predicament of African Americans on the world stage at a time of increasing lynchings and segregation. Walter Benn Michaels, following Appiah, describes Du Bois as attempting to ‘save the idea of racial identity by redescribing it as historical identity’, yet the idea of race hardly needed ‘saving’ in 1890s’ America; it was a central component in the way that society was structured and part of Du Bois’s everyday reality.114 ‘Race is a cultural, sometimes a historical fact’ noted Du Bois some years later, ‘the black man is a person who must ride “Jim Crow” in Georgia’.115

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This attempt at formulating a non-biological concept of ‘race’ was first initiated in Du Bois’s essay of 1897 ‘The Conservation of Races’.116 The essay was originally presented to an audience of black leaders who had gathered in Washington on 5 March 1897 to form the American Negro Academy, an organisation that sought to undertake ‘the civilisation of the Negro race in the United States, by the scientific processes of literature, art and philosophy’.117 Du Bois offered his listeners two possible futures for African Americans in the United States: ‘Have we in America a distinct mission as a race – a distinct sphere of action and an opportunity for race development, or is selfobliteration the highest end to which Negro blood dare aspire’.118 His lecture was based on the rejection of the latter option and a call for the conservation of racial distinctiveness against the pressure to amalgamate with the dominant society. The destiny of the American Negro, Du Bois insisted, was ‘not absorption by the white Americans . . . not a servile imitation of Anglo-Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow Negro ideals’.119 The idea of ‘Negro ideals’ as a basis for black cultural difference is inevitably an elusive concept, and Du Bois does little to elaborate on the notion in his speech. Indeed, Du Bois’s writings during this period can be read as a continual attempt at formulating a coherent basis for the idea of African-American cultural distinctiveness. While noting that ‘race’ is a vague concept in science – ‘the [scientific] criteria of race are most exasperatingly intermingled. Color does not agree with texture of hair, nor . . . with breadth of the head’ – Du Bois argues that it ‘is clearly defined to the eye of the Historian or Sociologist’ and that therefore it is ‘the central thought of all history’.120 He does not ground his idea of race in biology but rather foresees trends in contemporary theory in regarding race to be the ‘invention of human progress’.121 Race exists for Du Bois because it is an historical and social reality. ‘If we carefully consider what race prejudice really is’, he states we find it, historically, to be nothing but the friction between different groups of people; it is the difference in aim, in feeling, in ideals of two different races; if, now, this difference exists touching territory, laws, language or even religion, it is manifest that these people cannot live in the same territory without fatal collision; but if, on the other hand, there is substantial agreement in laws, language and religion; if there is a satisfactory adjustment of economic life, then there is no reason why, in the same country and on the same street, two or three great national ideals


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might not thrive and develop, that men of different races might not strive together for their race ideals as well, perhaps even better, than in isolation.122

Having established that language, religion, law, birth and citizenship are characteristics that many races can share within the nation, it is difficult to see what Du Bois has left on which to base a distinctive African-American identity. It seems that he is essentially making a distinction between the economic and cultural spheres here; politically and economically, blacks are American but, beyond that, lies that cultural realm, the realm of ‘national ideals’ and national history, of race strivings and ‘race ideas’. Thus, rather than being a nationalist call for political separatism, Du Bois’s vision is of political unity but cultural difference. ‘The whole process which has brought about these race differentiations has been a growth’ he notes, ‘and the great characteristic of this growth has been the differentiation of spiritual and mental differences between great races of mankind and the integration of physical differences.’123 If Du Bois’s theory of American citizenship requires the separation of culture from economics, then his historical narrative requires the separation of culture from biology. The age of nomadic tribes of closely related individuals represents the maximum of physical differences . . . As the families came together to form cities, the physical differences lessened, purity of blood was replaced by the requirement of domicile, and all who lived within the city bounds became gradually to be regarded as members of the group . . . When at last cities began to coalesce into nations there was another breaking down of barriers which separated groups of men. The larger and broader differences of color, hair and physical proportions were not by any means ignored, but myriads of minor differences disappeared, and the sociological and historical races of men began to approximate the present division of races as indicated by physical researches. At the same time the spiritual and physical differences of race groups which constituted the nations became deep and decisive.124

Du Bois narrates a progress from tribe to city to nation, but uses the word ‘race’ flexibly to designate each type of communal identity. In this respect, his concept of race is closer to the contemporary use of ‘ethnicity’ in that he attempts to dissociate the term from its biological moorings. Du Bois goes on to argue that, whereas in the distant past it would have been possible to identify the English and

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Germans as tribal groups, the English are now to be distinguished culturally by their commitment to ‘constitutional liberty’, the Germans for ‘science and philosophy’.125 Thus, what Du Bois refers to as the ‘racial’ characteristics of nations are grounded not in static, unchanging biological characteristics but in continually evolving and developing cultural practices. Thus, whereas Arnold conceived of residual ‘races’ as demonstrating a set of eternal, distinctive characteristics – the ‘sensual’ and ‘feminine’ Celts – that would be assimilated into the hybrid cultures of emerging ‘nations’, Du Bois conceives of ‘race’ as being an active, evolving force in history.126 The ‘nation’, for Du Bois, is only the most recent manifestation of a culturally defined sense of ‘race’, and he proceeds in the 1890s to imagine forms of identity that look beyond the boundaries of the nation state. In ‘The Conservation of Races’ he argued that the advance guard of the Negro people – the 8,000,000 people of Negro blood in the United States of America – must soon come to realise that if they are to take their just place in the van of Pan-Negroism, then their destiny is not absorption by the white Americans. That if in America it is to be proven for the first time in the modern world that not only Negroes are capable of evolving individual men like Toussaint the Saviour, but are a nation stored with wonderful possibilities of culture, then their destiny is not a servile imitation of Anglo-Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow Negro ideals.127

Du Bois begins here to formulate a diasporic consciousness that transcends national boundaries. His notion of Pan-Negroism was given a concrete manifestation in 1900 when the first Pan-African conference, called by the Trinidadian barrister, H. Sylvester Williams, was held in London.128 It was at that conference that Du Bois famously noted that the ‘problem of the twentieth century is the problem of the colour line’, before going on to suggest that the solution to that problem lay in the admission of the disinherited of the earth into the world of ‘culture’:129 In any case, the modern world must needs remember that in this age, when the ends of the world are being brought so near together, the millions of black men in Africa, America and the Islands of the Sea, not to speak of the brown and yellow myriads elsewhere, are bound to have a great influence upon the world in the future, by reason of sheer numbers


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and physical contact. If now the world of culture bends itself towards giving Negroes and other dark men the largest and broadest opportunity for education and self-development, then this contact and influence is bound to have a beneficial effect upon the world and hasten human progress. But if, by reason of carelessness, prejudice, greed and injustice, the black world is to be exploited and ravished and degraded, the results must be deplorable, if not fatal – not simply to them, but to the high ideals of justice, freedom and culture which a thousand years of Christian civilization have held before Europe.130

This passage is significant for it underlines the fact that the black nationalist and Pan-Africanist strains in Du Bois’s thought were largely conceived in cultural terms, on an Arnoldian programme of offering the ‘broadest opportunity for education and self-development’ to the African-American masses, and to the African diaspora. Adolph Reed is thus incorrect when he argues that Pan-Africanism initially appears in Du Bois’s writings ‘in relation to his proposals for decolonisation in Africa’ for Du Bois conceives of Pan-Africanism in the above quotation less as a vehicle for decolonisation than as a means of persuading the leaders of Europe – representatives of the ‘world of culture’ – to bend down to assist in the uplift of their fellow human beings.131 ‘Race’ and ‘nation’ are always invoked in Du Bois’s writings as part of a wider cultural and political strategy. Molefi Asante has argued persuasively that what ‘Du Bois intended, when one examines the perspective of his work, was a statement about culture, not about race’.132 Thus, if Du Bois’s Pan-Africanism is partly based on an idea of racial heredity, it also, as the above quotation suggests, appeals to human values that transcend racial divisions – ‘the high ideals of justice, freedom and culture’. In the Kingdom of Culture? The contributionist and conservationist strains within Du Bois’s racial thought cannot be reconciled, nor simply wished away. Double sighted and double conscious, the African-American man of letters seeks neither to reject America nor to be absorbed into it: The history of the American Negro is the history of . . . this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge his double self into a better and truer self. In this merging he wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. He would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the

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world and Africa. He would not bleach his Negro soul in a flood of white Americanism, for he knows that Negro blood has a message for the world. He simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be both a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by his fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in his face. This, then, is the end of his striving: to be a co-worker in the kingdom of culture . . .133

To suggest that being ‘a co-worker in the kingdom of culture’ is the ultimate ‘end’ of Negro strivings is to regard the cultural sphere as the realm in which social divisions may eventually be reconciled. Yet, the difficulty of imagining a merging of the Negro and American that does not result in the disappearance, or ‘self-obliteration’, of blackness into Americaness becomes apparent in the contradiction between the contributionist and conservationist strains that I’ve been tracing in Du Bois’s writings.134 An attempted visualised representation of a merging that respects cultural difference occurs at the opening of each of the chapters in The Souls of Black Folk, where a few notated bars of a Negro Spiritual are juxtaposed with an American, British or European poem (along with one quotation from the Bible). While Schiller, Byron, Lowell and Mrs Browning are represented, Du Bois’s selection of poems also testifies to fin de siècle tastes in his inclusion of Edward Fitzgerald’s Omar Khayyam and (as I noted earlier) poems by the Celtic aesthetes, Arthur Symons and Fiona Macleod. Whereas the poets are identified by name, and the poems themselves designed to appeal to the values and tastes of his readers, the bars of African-American spirituals are not identified but exist simply as unadorned bars of notation on the page. These two forms of epigraph that introduce each chapter have been read as representations of black and white cultural strivings and, in their juxtaposition, gesture towards a cultural community that transcends race and colour.135 Rather than seeking transcendence, however, Du Bois is seeking to expand the notion of American culture. Indeed, as he regarded black folk-songs as being the ‘sole American music’, the poems and musical excerpts introducing each chapter in Souls may be seen to represent the cultural inheritance of all Americans.136 This argument is reiterated in the novel The Quest of the Silver Fleece where Zora’s exposure to the Western literary tradition is not represented as the collision of divergent traditions but rather as the rightful reappropriation of an inheritance that she has been unjustly denied.


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She gossiped with old Herodotus across the earth to the black and blameless Ethiopians; she saw the sculptured glories of Phidias marbled amid the splendour of the swamp; she listened to Demosthenes and walked the Appian Way with Cornelia – while all New York streamed beneath her window. She saw the drunken Goths reel upon Rome and heard the careless Negroes yodle [sic] as they galloped to Toomsville. Paris, she knew, – wonderful, haunting Paris: the Paris of Clovis, and St Louis; of Louis the Great, and Napoleon III; of Balzac, and her own Dumas. She tasted the mud and comfort of thick old London, and the while wept with Jeremiah and sang with Deborah, Semiramis, and Atala. Mary of Scotland and Joan of Arc held her dark hands in theirs, and Kings lifted up their scepters. She walked on worlds, and worlds of worlds, and heard there in her little room the tread of armies, the paeans of victory, the breaking of hearts, and the music of the spheres.137

The connection between Zora and Western culture is reinforced by the representation of Alexander Dumas as ‘her own’ because of his African forbears, and in the description of a London that is characterised by its ‘mud and comfort’ which leads us symbolically back to Zora’s own native swamp. Du Bois is less concerned with issues of cultural difference here than he is with cultural disenfranchisement. Zora is not exposed to a wholly alien tradition of thought and expression, but is given access to a world of learning which she is already able to value and appreciate. The passages of poetry and music that introduce each chapter in Souls may thus be seen to represent the two cultural traditions claimed by Du Bois himself. His mastery of the Western tradition is evinced in the carefully constructed essays, tales and analyses that constitute Souls, and his identification with the spirituals is the subject of the final chapter ‘Of the Sorrow Songs’ where Du Bois recollects his earliest exposure to African-American music: ‘Ever since I was a child these songs have stirred me strangely. They came out of the south unknown to me, one by one, and yet at once I knew them as of me and of mine.’138 As in the perceived connection with Africa via his grandmother’s indecipherable song discussed earlier, Du Bois’s appropriation of the ‘Sorrow Songs’ as ‘his own’ is again a leap of faith; the invention of a personal tradition as opposed to a sense of unshakeable rootedness.139 Du Bois foregrounds the element of choice involved in the appropriation of a cultural tradition; it is he who ultimately makes the connections between the spirituals and the poems by standing as a third voice that unites the black and the white

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traditions. Culture, in Souls, offers a potential means of healing the divisions between black and white: I sit with Shakespeare and he winces not. Across the colour line I move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls. From out the caves of evening that swing between the strong limbed earth and the racery of the stars, I summon Aristotle and Aurelius and what soul I will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. So, wed with Truth, I dwell above the Veil. Is this the life you grudge us, O knightly America? Is this the life you long to change into the dull red hideousness of Georgia? Are you afraid lest peering from this high Pisgah, between Philistine and Amalekite, we sight the Promised Land?140

As in Zora’s encounter with the Western tradition above, Du Bois does not present his summoning of Aristotle and Aurelius as the appropriation of a foreign tradition, but rather as the invocation of a tradition that is rightfully his through a common humanity. Culture, for Du Bois, as represented by the spirituals and poems, is not dependent on economic conditions for its emergence – for black culture rose from slavery – nor is it merely a reflection of a social reality. Culture is, rather, the crucible in which alternative social identities can be forged – their means of production as much as mode of expression. In its juxtaposition of the African-American (the sorrow songs), American (Whittier, Lowell) and European (Symmons, Schiller, Aristotle) traditions, and of musical, autobiographical, sociological and poetic forms, The Souls of Black Folk is an attempt at urging a culturally pluralist and tolerant America into being. Yet, the invocation of ‘the dull red hideousness of Georgia’ in the above quotation reminds the reader of a social sphere that resists the constitution of a cultural realm which rejects racial segregation. Eric Sundquist has identified each notated spiritual by tracing it back to J. B. T. Marsh’s Story of the Jubilee Singers and their Songs (1872) and Thomas Fenner’s Hampton and Its Students (1874).141 It may, however, have been a deliberate strategy on Du Bois’s part not to identify his musical quotations and to represent the African-American tradition simply in the form of unadorned musical notation. Western notation is simply not flexible enough to capture the subtleties of black music, and there is a sense in which Du Bois is foregrounding the non-discursive, indecipherable dimension of African-American culture. Thus, as well as suggesting a connection between the Western


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and African traditions, the juxtaposition of the blunt black and white epigraphs may also represent an irreconcilable difference. Sundquist perceptively notes that ‘these “African” songs remain functionally at odds with the “Western” belletristic epigraphs with which each is matched, coiled in a kind of anarchic symbiosis until the sorrow songs finally prevail in the last chapter’.142 Yet, while the final chapter ends on an optimistic note with the children ‘singing in the sunshine’ representing the reserves of strength and determination harboured in the black musical tradition, the penultimate chapter – ‘Of the Coming of John’ – offers a starkly different vision.143 It is revealing that, in the only fictional narrative in Souls, Du Bois undercuts the book’s dominant narrative of the incorporation of the African-American community within an American ‘kingdom of culture’. It would seem that the short-story form allows Du Bois a space in which to express the more pessimistic undercurrent within his cultural thought. The key scene in ‘Of the Coming of John’ occurs in a New York Opera House, a symbol of Western culture. John Jones, a black native of Altamaha who leaves home to gain a college degree and is thus a representative of Du Bois’s ‘talented tenth’, follows a white couple into the Opera House for a performance of Wagner’s Lohengrin. The Northern woman teases her Southern escort by suggesting that he shouldn’t ‘lynch the colored gentleman simply because he’s in your way’, to which her escort replies that race relations in the South have been grossly misrepresented – ‘Why, I remember my closest playfellow in boyhood was a little Negro named after me. . .’144 Once inside the auditorium John finds himself enthralled by ‘the delicate beauty of the hall, the faint perfume, the moving myriad of men, the rich clothing and low hum of talking’.145 When the orchestra begins to play, the music ‘lingered and swept through every muscle of his frame’, until he suffers the indignity of being asked to leave the hall following a complaint from the Southerner who discovers that ‘the colored gentleman’ is occupying the adjacent seat.146 The irony of the scene lies in the fact that John Jones was the Southern gentleman’s boyhood friend. The tale is built around the experiences of two Johns – the black John Jones, and the white John Henderson. The town of Altamaha thus contains two Johns when the story begins but ‘it was singular that few thought of two Johns – for the black folk thought of one John, and he was black; and the white folk thought of another and he was white. And neither world thought the other world’s thoughts, save with a vague unrest.’147 In terms of both tone and structure, Du Bois’s tale of two childhood friends torn

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apart by the ‘color line’ which divides them has much in common with Yeats’s early novella, John Sherman (1891), discussed in the previous chapter. Yeats’s tale is based on the antithesis between John Sherman, who retains a love for his native Ballah, and William Howard, who is a lover of cities and a man of the world. Similarly, white John in Du Bois’s tale is bored with ‘this God-forgotten town’ which consists of ‘nothing but mud and Negroes’, while John Jones feels a commitment to serve his people.148 As I noted in the previous chapter, John Sherman in Yeats’s novel is reminded of his home town when he hears the trickle of water coming from a shop window: It made him remember an old day-dream of his. The source of the river that passed his garden at home was a certain wood-bordered and islanded lake, whither in childhood he had often gone blackberry gathering . . . [I]t had seemed good to dream of going away to that islet and building a wooden hut there and burning a few years out, rowing to and fro, fishing . . . listening at night to the ripple of the water and the quivering of the bushes – full always of unknown creatures – and going out at morning to see the island’s edge marked by the feet of birds.149

Sherman’s memories of home in the urban context of London are mirrored in John Jones’s reverie which is stimulated by Wagner’s music in New York. When at last a soft sorrow crept across the violins, there came to him the vision of a far-off home, the great eyes of his sister, and the dark drawn face of his mother. And his heart sank below the waters, even as the seasand sinks by the shores of Altamaha, only to be lifted aloft again with the last ethereal wail of the swan that quivered and faded away into the sky.150

Both passages seem to communicate the same tone of longing, of idealising a lost childhood, with the passage of time symbolised in the lapping of water against the shore. The swan’s wail in Du Bois and the bushes in Yeats are ‘quivering’ – a verb which suggest an oscillation between two states of consciousness, between the present and the past, which the passages seek to represent. While I am not suggesting that there’s a direct influence here, both tales are informed by a similar structure of feeling which is derived from the minority writer’s simultaneous attraction to the cosmopolitan sophistication of European high culture and to the life of the rural, primitive, unsophisticated


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‘folk’.151 The dominant antithesis between John Sherman and William Howard allows Yeats to explore the tensions that he had endured within himself in moving to London, and to express the inherent contradictions of enjoying the artistic and personal potential of life in London while remaining committed to a national struggle at home. Similarly, Du Bois’s own position as an educated New Englander in the South and a black American in the North is mirrored in John’s forced alienation from New York high culture, and the sense of alienation that he encounters when he returns home following his ejection from the Opera House. In returning home to Altamaha, John turns to the Baptist Church that he attended as a child as the site where he may present his vision of racial uplift to the masses. He speaks ‘slowly and methodically . . . of the rise of charity and popular education’ and goes on to sketch ‘in vague outline the new Industrial School that might rise among these pines’: . . . he spoke in detail of the charitable and philanthropic work that might be organised, of money that might be saved for banks and business. Finally he urged unity and deprecated especially religious and denominational bickering. ‘To-day,’ he said, with a smile, ‘the world cares little whether a man be Baptist or Methodist, or indeed a churchman at all, so long as he is good and true . . . Let’s leave all that littleness, and look higher.152

John’s words amount to the philosophy of the Talented Tenth as expounded by Du Bois, but his words are met with a total silence by the congregation. Eventually a church elder gets to his feet, and the following description conveys the religious fervour, bordering on the irrational, that Du Bois identified with the agrarian masses: Then at last a low suppressed snarl came from the Amen corner, and an old man arose, walked over the seats, and climbed straight up into the pulpit. He was wrinkled and black, with scant gray and tufted hair; his voice and hands shook with palsy; but on his face lay the intense rapt look of the religious fanatic. He seized the Bible with his rough, huge hands; twice he raised it inarticulate, and then fairly burst into words with rude and awful eloquence. He quivered, swayed and bent; then rose aloft in perfect majesty, till the people moaned and wept, wailed and shouted, and a wild shrieking arose from the corners where all the pentup feeling of the hour gathered itself and rushed into the air. John never

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knew clearly what the old man said; he only felt himself held up to scorn and scathing denunciation for trampling on the true Religion, and he realized with amazement that all unknowingly he had put rough, rude hands on something their little world held sacred.153

A significant transformation occurs in the course of this passage. Whereas initially it is the lay preacher who is described as a ‘fanatic’, with ‘rough, huge hands’ and speaks with an ‘awful eloquence’, the force of his words on John leads to the realisation that he has put his own ‘rough, rude hands’ on these people’s religious values. The passage thus enacts its own sense of double consciousness as John slowly comes to see things through the eyes of the congregation and witnesses himself being ‘held up to scorn’. John’s own sense of distance from the black folk’s culture is reflected in the fact Du Bois’s short story seems to be narrated from the perspective of a university lecturer, and is mirrored in the sense of alienation that Du Bois himself expresses when commenting – from a position of sociological distance – on black religious practices in his chapter ‘Of the Faith of the Fathers’. Following an invocation of the ‘quiet and subdued’ church services of his native Berkshire, Du Bois is alarmed by a ‘sort of suppressed terror’ that hangs in the air of the Southern revival meeting, ‘a pythian madness, a demoniac possession’ that ‘lent terrible reality to song and word’.154 The intensity of the experience, the ‘scene of human passion such as I had never conceived before’, forces him back to the relative security of the Northern visitor’s viewpoint which the narrator shares with the majority of his readers.155 Those who have not thus witnessed the frenzy of a Negro revival in the untouched backwoods of the South can but dimly realize the religious feeling of the slave; as described, such scenes appear grotesque and funny, but as seen are awful.156

Whether perceived as ‘grotesque and funny’ or ‘awful’, Du Bois’s alternative adjectives underline the observer’s distance from the activities and cultural values of the observed. The distance between the educated saviour of his people and the folk themselves is thus powerfully invoked. In the opening chapter of Souls, Du Bois describes this sense of distance that he shares with his character John Jones as the problem of the ‘would-be black savant’ who is confronted with ‘the paradox that the knowledge his people needed was a twice-told tale to his white


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neighbours, while the knowledge which would teach the white world was Greek to his own flesh and blood’.157 In ‘Of the Coming of John’, John Jones literally learns Greek, leading him to ponder ‘long over every new Greek word’ and to wonder ‘why this meant that and why it couldn’t mean something else, and how it must have felt to think all things in Greek’.158 This awareness of linguistic relativity, of the arbitrary relationship between words and objects, leads John into a parallel meditation on the arbitrary nature of American society, and into an awareness of the ‘oppressions’ on which that society is built: He grew slowly to feel almost for the first time the Veil that lay between him and the white world; he first noticed now the oppression that had not seemed oppression before, differences that erstwhile seemed natural, restraints and slights that in his boyhood days had gone unnoticed or been greeted with a laugh.159

John’s education exposes him to the subtle forms of racism on which American society is constructed; thus, when he returns home to his native Altamaha, there is a sense in which the rejection of his ideas by the town’s black folk derives from their awareness that he challenges their very understanding of reality. While John Sherman in Yeats’s tale of that title can settle back, if somewhat ambivalently, into the community of his native Ballah, John Jones’s education leaves him without a community to which he can truly belong, without a constituency that he can represent. The tale ends with John Jones killing his white double in order to save his sister’s honour. Following the murder, as he awaits the white lynch mob, his mind turns back to the music at the Opera House, to Wagner’s Lohengrin which is also a tale in which a brother acts to save his sister’s honour. With an effort he roused himself, bent forward, and looked steadily down the pathway, softly humming the ‘Song of the Bride’, – ‘Freudig geführt, ziehet dahin.’160

The reproduction of the German words represents a linguistic rupture in the English text and simultaneously functions as a symbol of John’s justified cultural aspirations, and his sense of distance from the language and customs of his native community. The respective conclusions of the two final chapters of The Souls of Black Folk suggest that there are two levels at which Du Bois’s concept

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of double consciousness operates. In ‘Of The Sorrow Songs’, a cultural merging of the African and American selves is attempted which suggests that traditional black religious and folk music is a constitutive part of American culture. Thus, the desired merging of the ‘double self into a better and truer self’ is seen to be achieved within the ‘kingdom of culture’.161 This version of double consciousness is quite specifically cultural, and is based on the distinct, but not incompatible, traditions of Africa and Europe that Du Bois sees merging in his own life, and in America. There is, however, another version of double consciousness which is the result of a racially structured society. If the merging of the African and the American is possible within the cultural realm, Du Bois suggests in ‘Of The Coming of John’ that a double consciousness that is the result of American racism – represented in the black and white Johns – can have no such reconciled resolution. Many of the contradictions in Du Bois’s writing between 1895 and 1910 derive from his attempt at synthesising the cultural and social forms of segregation for, in oscillating between the cultural and social forms of racism in his writing, Du Bois attempted to make the latter a part of a more general cultural duality. ‘Of the Coming of John’ dramatises the failure of this strategy for, thrown out of the Opera House, John Jones finds himself alienated from his own community, and despised by the whites who eventually hound him to his death. Conclusion Much of Du Bois’s social and cultural thought is characterised by contradiction. He introduces a vision of cultural pluralism in his writings, while also valuing the contribution that primitive cultures can make to a civilisation that he largely conceptualises in terms of Western universalism. If Du Bois first expressed his ambivalent reactions towards modernity in reacting to Booker T. Washington’s demotion of art and liberal education as irrelevant for industrial expansion and financial accumulation, he nevertheless ascribed to a teleological model of history and believed that his ‘Talented Tenth’ of race leaders would hasten full black participation in the progress of American society. As late as 1913, he believed that it was still possible ‘to make Negroes essentially Americans with American ideals and instincts’, but regretted that this possibility was slipping away as ‘white carelessness and impudence’ were welding ten million African Americans ‘into one great self-conscious and self-acting mass’.162 My discussion ends in 1910, with Du Bois having recently given up his University


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post in order to commit himself to the development of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. In 1934 he resigned his membership of the integrationist NAACP in order to argue the case for voluntary segregation, a shift in thought that was already implicit in the conclusion to ‘Of the Coming Of John’ and is consistent with his vision of cultural conservationism in ‘The Conservation of Races’. If the idea of the nation, as Benedict Anderson has argued, is an aesthetic or cultural construction, the community implied by these terms is never wholly imaginary. What gives the idea of ‘race’ or ‘nation’ its unity for Du Bois, is ultimately not some biological essence but the negative fact of being held down and discriminated against as a people. It is the fact of racism, as much as nationalism or separatism, that makes the idea of race something more than a fictive entity for Du Bois, that makes the conservation and celebration of a despised cultural identity a necessity. If a normative conception of culture can function as a Utopian realm where the antitheses of Du Bois’s thought can be reconciled, then in its socially institutionalised form – represented by the Opera House in ‘The Coming of John’ – culture can also function to reinforce the harshest and most blatant manifestations of racism. NOTES

1. Washington, Up From Slavery, p. 220. 2. For example, Meier, Negro Thought and Andrews, ‘William Dean Howells and Charles W. Chesnutt’. 3. Washington, Up from Slavery, pp. 222–3. 4. Ibid. pp. 222–3. 5. Ibid. pp. 227–37. 6. Howells, ‘An Exemplary Citizen’, p. 197. 7. Ibid. p. 194. 8. Howells, ‘Paul Laurence Dunbar Announced’ (1896) in W. D. Howells as Critic, p. 251. 9. Howells, ‘An Exemplary Citizen’, p. 195. 10. Du Bois, ‘The Evolution of Negro Leadership’, p. 176. 11. Ibid. p. 177. 12. Posnock’s phrase in Color and Culture, p. 36. 13. Meier, Along the Color Line, p. 267. For a similar argument see Brotz’s ‘Introduction’, Negro Social and Political Thought. 14. Cruse, Crisis of the Negro. This is also Higham’s argument in Send These to Me.

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15. For a discussion of Du Bois’s ‘selective advocacy of seperatism’ see Moses, Afrotopia, pp. 136–7. 16. Du Bois, Souls, p. 398. 17. Du Bois, ‘The Conservation of Races’ in Writings, pp. 815–26. ‘The Strivings of Negro People’ was reprinted as ‘Of Our Spiritual Strivings’ and constituted the first chapter of The Souls of Black Folk (1903). ‘The Art and Art Galleries of Europe’ in Against Racism, pp. 33–43. 18. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro. John Brown. The Quest of the Silver Fleece. 19. This is true of the studies by Meier, Brotz and Higham mentioned above. Marable portrays Du Bois as a ‘Black Radical Democrat’ and thus tends to ignore or downplay his early élitism and later admiration of Stalin in W. E. B. Du Bois. 20. Howells, ‘An Exemplary Citizen’, p. 195. 21. Ibid. p. 196. 22. This had been the subject of Paul Laurence Dunbar’s poem of 1895 ‘We Wear The Mask’ which Howells would have read in reviewing Dunbar’s Majors and Minors. See Gates et al. (eds), Norton Anthology of African-American Literature, p. 896. 23. Howells, ‘An Exemplary Citizen’, p. 196. 24. Du Bois, ‘The Evolution of Negro Leadership’, p. 175. 25. Ibid. p. 177. 26. Ibid. pp. 178–9. 27. Lewis describes the chapter as the ‘polemical centrepiece’ in W. E. B. Du Bois 1868–1919, p. 278. Du Bois, Souls, p. 398. 28. Du Bois, Souls, p. 428. 29. See R. Williams, ‘The Welsh Industrial Novel’, pp. 95–8. 30. Du Bois, Souls, p. 415. 31. Ibid. p. 417. 32. Ibid. pp. 419–20. 33. Ibid. p. 419. 34. Rampersad, Art and Imagination, p. 15. Logan, The Negro in American Life and Thought reprinted as The Betrayal of the Negro. 35. The year 1898, for instance, saw the introduction of a ‘grandfather clause’ in Louisiana which saw the number of blacks registered to vote in the state plummet from 130,344 in 1896 to 5,320 in 1900, and Georgia saw the institutionalisation of the ‘white primary’ in which only whites could vote in Democratic primary contests. See Gates Jr and West, The Future of the Race, p. 127. Also Rampersad pp. 15–16, and Zinn, People’s History, pp. 192–205. 36. Smith, Old Creed, pp. 10, 286. 37. Du Bois, Dusk, p. 593. 38. See Gates Jr and West, The Future of the Race, 127. 39. See Marable, W. E. B. Du Bois, pp. 30–1.

W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Folk in the Kingdom of Culture 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47.

48. 49. 50.

51. 52. 53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

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Du Bois, ‘A Litany of Atlanta’ (1906), in Creative Writings, pp. 7–9. Ibid. pp. 8–9. Ibid. p. 8. Du Bois, Souls, pp. 398–9. Ibid. p. 393. Ibid. p. 502. Ibid. p. 364. On Du Bois and Emerson see Bremen, ‘Du Bois, Emerson and the “Fate” of Black Folk’. For a general discussion of the uses of ‘double consciousness’ see Bruce ‘W. E. B. Du Bois and the Idea of Double Consciousness’. Warren, Black and White Strangers, p. 12. Zamir, W. E. B. Du Bois, p. 154. Howells, An Imperative Duty, p. 60. Du Bois, ‘Howells and Black Folk’ (1913), in Writings p. 1147. Wonham has noted the affinity between Howells’s and Du Bois’s conceptions of double consciousness in his article ‘Howells, Du Bois and the Effect of “Common-Sense”’, although perhaps he overstates the case for a direct influence based on the fact that William James wrote highly of An Imperative Duty during Du Bois’s period as his student at Harvard. There is no evidence that Du Bois had read the novel before 1897 when he introduced the notion of ‘double consciousness’ in his article on ‘The Strivings of Negro People’. Du Bois does, however, mention An Imperative Duty in a twelve-page pamphlet published by Atlanta University in 1901, entitled ‘A Select Bibliography of the American Negro for General Readers’, reprinted in Aptheker (ed.), Pamphlets and Leaflets by W. E. B. Du Bois, p. 34. Howells, Imperative Duty, p. 5. Du Bois, Writings, p. 1147. Du Bois, ‘The Conservation of Races’ (1897), Writings, p. 821. Quoted in Lewis, W. E. B. Du Bois 1868–1919, p. 136. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, CPW III, p. 336. Du Bois, ‘The Conservation of Races,’ Writings, p. 822. Du Bois, Souls, pp. 536–7. Ibid. p. 370. Du Bois, John Brown, p. 1. Byerman, Seizing the Word, 13–14. Du Bois, Souls, p. 364. For an account of the significance of this scene in terms of gender see Carby, Race Men, p. 31. Du Bois, Souls, p. 370. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, CPW III, p. 384. Du Bois, Souls, p. 499. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, CPW III, p. 311. Du Bois, Souls, pp. 366, 370, 822. Du Bois, Gift of Black Folk, p. 320.

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66. Howells, Imperative Duty, p. 5. 67. Byerman, Seizing the Word, p. 88. 68. Du Bois, Souls, pp. 369, 475. Cornel West counts eighteen references to backwardness in Souls, American Evasion, p. 143. 69. Du Bois, ‘The Talented Tenth’ in Writings, p. 842. 70. Ibid. p. 842. 71. On the gender implications of Du Bois’s writings see Carby, Race Men. 72. Du Bois, ‘The Talented Tenth’, Writings, pp. 846–7. 73. Arnold, ‘The Bishop and the Philosopher’ (1863) in CPW III, pp. 43–4. 74. Du Bois, Souls, pp. 435–6. 75. See Chapter 11 of Zinn’s People’s History for an account of the period’s working-class unrest. 76. West compares Arnold and Du Bois in ‘Black Strivings’, p. 67. 77. Du Bois, Dusk, p. 751. 78. Du Bois, Quest of the Silver Fleece, p. 44. 79. Ibid. p. 28. 80. Ibid. p. 44. 81. Ibid. p. 46. 82. Ibid. pp. 113, 96. 83. Ibid. p. 79. 84. Ibid. p. 94. 85. Ibid. p. 265. 86. Howells, Imperative Duty, p. 19. 87. Du Bois, Quest, pp. 224–5. 88. Howells, An Imperative Duty, p. 10. 89. Ibid. pp. 96–7. 90. ‘Over-civilisation’ is T. Jackson Lears’s term to characterise cultural attitudes between 1880 and 1920 in No Place of Grace. I discuss this in Chapter 2. 91. Du Bois, Souls, p. 370. 92. Du Bois, ‘A Day in Africa’ (1908) in Creative Writings, p. 17. 93. Gilroy refers to the epigraphs as ‘drawn from the canon of European literature’, Black Atlantic, p. 125. 94. Du Bois, ‘The Burden of Black Women’ (1907), in Creative Writings, p. 12. 95. Gates Jr, ‘The Trope of a New Negro’, pp. 129–55. 96. Du Bois, Souls, p. 370. 97. Moses, The Golden Age, p. 133. Stepto, From Behind the Veil, p. 77. 98. Gilroy gestures at the significance of Du Bois’s period in Germany in Black Atlantic, pp. 111–17. The most detailed and illuminating discussions of this period in Du Bois’s life are Lemke, ‘Berlin and Boundaries’ and Barkin, ‘Berlin Days’. 99. Du Bois, Dusk, p. 577. Du Bois, Correspondence of Du Bois Vol. I, p. 7.


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100. Moses traces the idea of African-American nationhood in The Golden Age of Black Nationalism. While the modern notion of the ‘nation’ as a politically organised grouping was firmly established by the late nineteenth century, an older conception of ‘nation’ as designating a racial group was still in common usage. See Raymond Williams’s entry on ‘Nationalism’ in Keywords, p. 213. 101. Du Bois, Souls, p. 440. 102. Ibid. p. 444. 103. Ibid. pp. 450, 451. Du Bois deleted all references to Jews by the 1953 edition, noting that ‘What, of course, I meant to condemn was exploitation of black labor and that it was in this county and at that time in part a matter of immigrant Jews, was incidental and not essential. My inner sympathy with Jewish people was expressed better in the last paragraph on page 520. But this illustrates how easily one slips into unconscious condemnation of a whole group.’ Quoted in Writings, p. 1307. 104. Ibid. pp. 448. 105. Ibid. p. 452. 106. Ibid. pp. 538–9. This passage appears with a notated melody in Souls. 107. Eric Sundquist notes in To Wake the Nations that ‘the words of the song as Du Bois transliterates them appear to be neither in any language of the Bantu group nor in any other known African language’, p. 528. 108. Appiah, In My Father’s House, p. 32. 109. It is worth taking heed of Douglas Lorimer’s warning that we should avoid ‘colonizing the Victorians’. He argues that in contemporary accounts ‘the Victorians have come to stand for the racist Other in binary opposition to our implicit nonracist Self’. Lorimer, ‘Reconstructing Victorian Racial Discourse’, p. 187. 110. Appiah’s essay ‘The Uncompleted Argument’, which appears in Gates Jr (ed.), Writing, ‘Race’ and Difference and in Appiah’s In my Father’s House, has generated a considerable secondary literature. See Bell et al. (eds), Du Bois on Race and Culture. 111. Du Bois, ‘The Conservation of Races’ (1897), Writings, pp. 817–18. 112. Du Bois, Souls, p. 364. 113. Du Bois, The Philadelphia Negro, p. 387. 114. Michaels, Our America, p. 176 fn. 223. 115. Du Bois, Dusk, p. 666. 116. Du Bois, ‘The Conservation of Races’ in Writings, pp. 815–26. 117. Crummell, ‘Civilization, The Primal Need of the Race’ (1897), quoted by Wilson Jeremiah Moses, The Golden Age, p. 73. On the history of the American Negro Academy see Alfred O. Moss Jr, The American Negro Academy. 118. Du Bois, ‘The Conservation of Races’, Writings, p. 821.

222 ] 119. 120. 121. 122. 123. 124. 125. 126. 127. 128. 129.

130.

131. 132. 133. 134. 135. 136. 137. 138. 139.

140. 141. 142. 143. 144. 145. 146.


Ibid. p. 820. Ibid. pp. 816, 817. Ibid. p. 817. Ibid. pp. 821–2. Ibid. pp. 818–19. Ibid. p. 819. Ibid. p. 819. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, CPW III, pp, 345, 347. Howells, Imperative Duty, p. 5. Du Bois, ‘The Conservation of Races,’ Writings, p. 820 . See Chapter 3 for an account of the first Pan-Celtic conference, also held in 1900, in Dublin. Du Bois, ‘To the Nations of the World’, Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Non-Periodical Literature, p. 11. Du Bois was to use this line to open and close the second chapter, ‘Of the Dawn of Freedom’ in Souls, pp. 372, 391. Du Bois, ‘To the Nations of the World’, Writings by W. E. B. Du Bois in Non-Periodical Literature, p. 11. Also quoted in Geiss, The PanAfrican Movement, p. 191. On Pan-Africanism see Manning Marable’s article ‘The Pan-Africansim of W. E. B. Du Bois’ in Bell et al. (eds), W. E. B. Du Bois On Race and Culture, pp. 193–218. Adolph Reed, W. E. B. Du Bois, p. 79. Asante, The Afrocentric Idea, p. 122. Du Bois, Souls, p. 365. Du Bois, ‘The Conservation of Races,’ Writings, p. 821. See, for instance, Rampersad, Art and Imagination, p. 71. Du Bois, Souls, pp. 536–7. Du Bois, Quest, pp. 251–2. Du Bois, Souls, p. 536. Levering Lewis notes that Rayford Whittigan Logan was always annoyed by Du Bois’s insistence that he had ‘chosen’ to embrace his racial identity only at Fisk. Lewis notes that Du Bois, in a pattern that is mirrored by many minority nationalist leaders, wanted to believe that he ‘was a Negro not because he had to be – was born immutably among them – but because he had embraced the qualities of that splendid race and the moral superiority of its cause’. Du Bois: Biography of a Race, p. 72. Du Bois, Souls, p. 438. Sundquist, To Wake the Nations, pp. 471, 492. Ibid. p. 468. Du Bois, Souls, p. 546. Ibid. p. 526. Ibid. p. 526. Ibid. pp. 526–7.

W. E. B. Du Bois: Black Folk in the Kingdom of Culture 147. 148. 149. 150. 151.

152. 153. 154. 155. 156. 157. 158. 159. 160. 161. 162.

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Ibid. p. 526. Ibid. p. 532. Yeats, John Sherman, p. 57. Du Bois, Souls, p. 527. Sundquist draws some parallels between Du Bois and Yeats in To Wake, pp. 574–6. Du Bois’s references to Ireland and Irish nationalism are clearly relevant to my study, but become far more prevalent in the late 1910s and into the 1920s. During the period discussed here (up to 1910), among those who wrote to Du Bois expressing an admiration of The Souls of Black Folk was the Irish statesman and agricultural reformer, who had connections with Yeats, Horace Plunkett. See The Correspondence of Du Bois, Vol. 1, pp. 116–17. Following the 1916 uprising, Du Bois argued that ‘the white slums of Dublin represent more bitter depths of human degradation than the black slums of Charleston and New Orleans, and where human oppression exists, there the sympathy of all black hearts must go. The recent Irish revolt may have been foolish, but would to God some of us had sense enough to be fools,’ Crisis (August 1916) pp. 166–7. Quoted in Moses, Golden Age, p. 225. I attempted a comparative analysis of the Irish and Harlem Renaissances in ‘Modernism and Cultural Nationalism in the Irish and Harlem Renaissances’, Unpublished MA thesis, Department of Celtic Languages and Literatures, Harvard University, 1997. Plans to develop this into a possible publication were abandoned with the appearance of Mishkin’s study, The Harlem and Irish Renaissances. Du Bois, Souls, pp. 529–30. Ibid. p. 530. Ibid. p. 493. Ibid. p. 494. I am drawing here on Zamir’s excellent essay ‘The Sorrow Songs’, pp. 158–9. Du Bois, Souls, p. 494. Ibid. pp. 365–6. Ibid. p. 524. Ibid. p. 525. Ibid. p. 535. Ibid. p. 365. Quoted in Rampersad, Art and Imagination, p. 146. From The Crisis No.7 (December 1913), p. 84.

CONCLUSION

The idea of culture formulated by Matthew Arnold emerged from a nineteenth century tradition of thought that began to separate the aesthetic and intellectual activities of men from the material and economic developments of an industrialising society. As the nineteenth century progressed, culture, in Raymond Williams’s words, became ‘a court of human appeal, to be set over the processes of practical social judgement . . . as a mitigating and rallying alternative’.1 It is this idea of culture as being a source of oppositional and supplementary ideas to the perceived dominant values of an industrial society that led to the particular form that the convergence of culture and ethnicity took in the years between 1865 and 1910. Thus, the value of ‘the greater delicacy and spirituality of the Celtic peoples’ for Arnold was that it proved to be a counterbalance to the hard-headed materialism of English philistine society.2 Similarly, William Dean Howells detected in the ‘childish simple-heartedness’ of African Americans a source of regeneration for an ‘over-civilized’ United States.3 These conceptions of Celtic and African-American uniqueness became influential within those groups themselves. W. B. Yeats followed Arnold in considering the Irish a ‘conquered race’ with a particular insight into ‘charms, dreams and visions’, and W. E. B. Du Bois believed that African Americans were ‘the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars’.4 While Arnold and Howells argued in their contributionist writings that the cultural primitivism of the Celts and African Americans prescribed their amalgamation into the dominant English and American national cultures, that primitivist distinctiveness was adopted by Yeats and Du Bois to form the basis for conser[ 224 ]

Conclusion

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vationist ethnic movements that challenged the very idea of common national cultures in the United Kingdom and the United States. Against an overemphasis on a single form of identity, the imaginative and critical writings of Arnold, Howells, Yeats and Du Bois are characterised by an inevitable ambiguity in the relationship between culture and ethnicity, and offer a space in which a diversity of communal identities – regional, national, international – are explored. The dominant tendency in the writings of Arnold and Howells, however, is to consider the particular cultural characteristics of England and America as being the attributes of a wider universal human culture. It is thus inevitable, in their view, that minorities within those nations should lose their linguistic and cultural distinctions as they contribute to the development and enrichment of that common culture. In its juxtaposition of the argument for cultural distinctiveness that we find in the writings of Yeats and Du Bois with Arnold’s and Howells’s commitment to a universal human culture, this book could be regarded as contributing to the ‘critique of universalism’ that has been a recent rallying cry for many involved in the fields of Irish, African-American and post-colonial studies.5 I hope to have demonstrated in the course of my analysis, however, that these four men of letters cannot be divided in quite such simplistic terms. I agree with Ross Posnock that to study the men of letters of the late nineteenth century ‘is to recover a cosmopolitan universalism that has been held under suspicion during the reign of postmodernism’, and in this brief conclusion I shall identify some problems with that ‘critique of universalism’ as it is currently practised, and locate my own work within this wider field of debate.6 Contemporary critiques of universalism often confuse two rather different issues. Firstly, there is the critique of the ways in which European or Anglo-American particularisms pose as universals. This type of criticism often takes the form of an historicist exposure of the European pretensions that have been linked to various forms of colonialism, and represents a significant strand within contemporary cultural studies. This critique of a ‘false’ universalism must be distinguished, however, from the critique of what we might term ‘philosophical universalism’; that is, the belief, often associated with post-modernist theory, that notions of truth, logic and reason cannot be held independently from specific cultures or specific ‘discursive communities’.7 This second form of critique leads to an uncritical elevation of the particular and culturally specific and leaves no intellectual basis from which to attack racist or xenophobic practices. It is a

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form of extreme relativism that can lead to a situation where inhumane practices are defended in the name of ‘cultural difference’. These two forms of anti-universalism are often equated in contemporary cultural theory; it is crucial that we maintain a theoretical distinction between them.8 This book does occasionally contribute, albeit guardedly, to the first kind of critique. I illustrate, for instance, how Arnold and Howells consider internal cultural differences within the British Isles and America to be primitive hindrances to their nations’ progress, and I suggest that the writings of Yeats and Du Bois can be read as responses to this drive towards cultural homogeneity. I hope, however, that, in foregrounding the shared ideas and values informing the writings of these four figures, to have avoided the danger of too simplistically dividing them into ‘dominant’ v. ‘minority’, ‘metropolitan’ v. ‘marginal’, writers. Such distinctions are particularly unhelpful when we consider that both ‘minority’ writers – the AngloIrish Protestant Yeats and the Harvard-educated New Englander Du Bois – belonged in significant ways to the dominant cultural spheres of their societies, while the ‘metropolitan’ Arnold and Howells were leading critics of the limitations of their respective societies, not simplistic spokespersons for an oppressive ‘hegemonic discourse’. Thus, rather than constructing my argument on a distinction between the false universalism of Arnold and Howells and the ethnic particularism of Yeats and Du Bois, I have been as concerned with the strains of thought that reappear in their diverse writings as I have been with the divergent trajectories in which their cultural thought developed. The preceding analysis also poses a more fundamental challenge to the assumptions that inform the second kind of anti-universalism. By concluding my analysis with the writings of W. E. B. Du Bois, I hope to have suggested that the narrative of cultural diversity and the narrative of political justice, while related, are ultimately distinct. Du Bois’s writings suggest that the basis for political equality lies in the invocation of a universal realm of common human rights, a realm that can be imagined culturally in 1900s’ America only as a place where the black writer can ‘sit with Shakespeare’ and comfortably ‘move arm in arm with Balzac and Dumas’.9 Du Bois’s writings expose the limitations of the post-modernist denunciation of each claim to universalism as ‘false’. The post-modern tendency has been to unmask the ways in which a claim to universalism privileges some particular experience while repressing and excluding all others. The analyses of individual writers in this thesis suggest, however, that the

Conclusion

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exclusions that are invariably involved in the creation of a ‘democratic’ polity or in the development of an idea of ‘universal’ human rights are never wholly fixed, for the invocation of ‘universalism’ can function as the basis for questioning such exclusions: ‘if you base your idea of democracy on an idea of human equality’, it may be asked, ‘why are we – blacks, gays, women, etc. – excluded?’ In Du Bois’s desire to foster a ‘higher and broader and more varied human culture’ we face a fundamental paradox at the heart of the contemporary ‘critique of universalism’; for, while racist and sexist attitudes have been perpetuated historically in the name of a bogus ‘universalism’ – the imperial notion that our language, beliefs and customs are ‘universal’ and therefore superior to all others – an appeal to universalist beliefs has nevertheless formed the most powerful challenge to racist and sexist practices.10 Thus, when we expose the hidden biases and exclusions of a false universalism, we do so within an intellectual terrain made possible by the very notion of a genuine universalism. Michael Cronin has insightfully described the ‘double bind’ faced by the minority writer who is ‘forced to choose between the false universality of a world culture promised by more hegemonic varieties of globalization and the romanticism of the particular’.11 The choice is a false one, for the profoundest critique of questionable ‘universalist’ beliefs is not mounted from a position of an extra-universal or preuniversal particularism, but rather derives from, and addresses, a tension that is inherent within the idea of universality itself. Universality, notes Slavoj Zˇ izˇek, is ‘unaccomplished in its very notion’; it is an ideal that is never realised, and its exclusions return to seek recognition and representation in a continual process of questioning and renegotiation.12 Thus, if Matthew Arnold and William Dean Howells can be criticised for assuming that their particular conceptions of ‘culture’ represent a universal culture towards which all peripheral, withering cultures inevitably contribute, it must be noted that their writings also contain the resources for the renegotiation of that conception of ‘culture’ that we witness in the writings of W. B. Yeats and W. E. B. Du Bois. I have therefore deliberately avoided adopting an approach that uses the ethnic particularisms of Yeats and Du Bois as a stick with which to beat the false imperialist universalisms of Arnold and Howells, for all four writers contend with a tension in their writings between an idea of culture as the sphere in which universal human values are expressed, and an idea of culture as the vehicle for the expression and development of particular ethnic identities. In each

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case – and this again is a tension that can be traced to Arnold – culture is simultaneously an ideal realm of universal values towards which all individuals should aspire, and the imperfect historical process – riven by ethnic, linguistic and class interests – which labours towards that, ultimately elusive, end. NOTES

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8.

9. 10. 11. 12.

Williams, Culture and Society, p. xviii. Arnold, On the Study of Celtic Literature, CPW III, p. 390. Howells, Imperative Duty, p. 5. Yeats, Uncollected Prose, Vol. 2, p. 70. Du Bois, Souls, p. 370. For an account of the implications of such critiques in the Irish, AfricanAmerican and post-colonial contexts see, respectively, Kearney, Postnationalist Ireland, C. West, ‘Decentering Europe’ in Prophetic Thought, pp. 119–42. Bhabha, Location of Culture, pp. 171–97. Posnock, Color and Culture, p. 21. For a wide-ranging debate on these issues see Butler, Laclau and Zizek, Contingency, Hegemony, Universality. Neil Lazarus discusses the ways in which prominent figures in the field of post-colonialism ‘condemn as naïve or, worse, tacitly authoritarian, any commitment to universalism, metanarrative, social emancipation, revolution’, in Nationalism and Cultural Practice, p. 9. Du Bois, Souls, p. 438. Du Bois, Writings, p. 1064. Cronin, ‘Global Questions’, p. 197. Zizek in Butler et al., Contingency, Hegemony, Universality, p. 102.

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index

Abbey Theatre, Dublin, 163 Acts of Union see Union, Acts of Adams, Henry, 112 aestheticism, 2, 3, 4, 26, 27, 159, 165–6, 199, 200, 208 Africa, 198–9, 201–2 African-Americans, 1–3, 19, 56, 110–11, 176–217 Arnold, 56 Atlanta riots, 184–5 Du Bois, 178–87, 192–3, 199–200 Howells, 106–9 romanticisation of, 112–13 Algeria, 10 Allen, Grant, 156–7, 160 American Civil War (1861–5), 18, 56, 90–1, 104 American English, 95–6 American literature, 57–8, 77, 144, 147 African-American, 178, 182 cultural independence, 87 dialect, 96–7, 102–3 Howells on, 80, 81–2 realism, 88–94 American Revolution (1775–83), 58 American Studies, 8 Americanisation, 39, 52 anarchy, 78, 194, 195 ancient Greece, 38, 41, 49, 60, 128 Anderson, Benedict, 5, 6, 47, 103, 105, 217 Anglo-Saxons, 54, 55, 56, 61, 65, 83, 87, 109 anti-modernism, 75 anti-Semitism, 201 Appiah, Anthony, 202 Arendt, Hannah, 138 aristocracy, 41, 137 Arnold’s ‘barbarians’ concept of, 25, 39, 40, 59 Yeats’s concept of, 146–7, 152, 195

Aristotle, 210 Arnold, Matthew, 5, 6, 8, 9, 17, 123, 163, 166–7, 179, 188–9, 224–8 ‘aliens’ role, 40, 41, 52, 61, 65, 77, 80, 123, 132, 194, 195 on America, 52–65, 80–1, 82 Celticism, 129–30, 165, 192 contributionism, 189 cultural authority, 23–4, 34, 36 culture and, 25–6, 27, 38, 80, 148, 184, 227 ‘healing’ social divisions with literature, 80 as HMI, 33–4, 35, 37 on Home Rule, 63–4, 134–5 as literary critic, 22–3, 108 racial element of, 43–4, 53–7, 202, 203, 206 reception of ideas in America, 74 ‘remnant’ replacing ‘aliens’, 61, 65 response from Yeats, 130–1 works by: ‘Civilization in the United States’, 53, 57, 59–60; Culture and Anarchy, 20–2, 35–7, 40, 41, 42, 50–1, 52, 61, 194; ‘Democracy’, 38–9, 40, 52–3, 61; ‘Disestablishment in Wales’, 134; ‘Emerson’, 58; ‘England and the Italian Question’, 44–5; Literature and Dogma, 51; ‘Numbers’, 53, 60–1; The Popular Education of France, 41; On the Study of Celtic Literature, 3–4, 35, 37, 41–4, 46–52, 131–2, 161; ‘A World More About America’, 54, 55, 62 Asante, Molefi, 207 assimilationism, 20, 23, 41, 50, 52, 55, 87, 109, 126, 130, 141, 165 Atkinson, Edward, 77 Atlanta, 182–3, 184–5 Atlanta Compromise see Washington, Booker T. The Atlantic, 73 Austria, 44, 55 authority, 5, 20–8, 34, 89–90, 92–3

[ 256 ]

Index Balzac, Honoré de, 209, 210, 226 Barrie, James Matthew, 149 beauty, 2, 3, 4, 60, 183, 190, 192 Bercovitch, Sacvan, 27, 80, 87 Berkeley, George, 149 Bhabha, Homi, 109 The Bible, 51 Bird, Robert, 136 Birth of a Nation (1915), 2, 3 Bismarck, Otto von, 200 Blake, William, 160 Borrow, George, Wild Wales, 161 The Boston Pilot, 124, 133 Breuilly, John, 16 Bridges, Robert, 165 Britain, 11, 55, 63–4, 125; see also England; Scotland; Wales British cultural studies, 8 British Empire, 17, 125 Britishness, 10–11, 17, 163 Brittany, 33, 45, 128, 132 Brodhead, Richard, 90 Brown, John, 81, 179 Browning, Elizabeth Barrett, 208 Browning, Robert, 159, 165 Burke, Edmund, 63 Burne Jones, Edward, 156 Burns, Robert, 107, 108 Burrow, John, 35 Byerman, Keith, 191, 193 Byron, Lord George, 208 Cable, George, 144 Cady, Edwin, 82, 110 Cahan, Abraham, 96–7, 109 capitalism, 7, 73, 158, 176, 196 Castletown, Bernard Edward Barnaby Fitzpatrick, Lord, 137 Catholic Emancipation Act (1829), 140 Celtic Association, 137 Celtic literature, 62–3, 109 Celtic Renaissance, 126, 159–60 Celticism, 53, 66, 190, 199, 206 Arnold and, 41–4, 46–50, 51–2, 126, 127, 128, 131–3, 168, 169 Yeats and, 124, 126–33, 139, 141–2, 143–52, 153–69 Chamberlain, Joseph, 135 Christ, Carol T., 5 Christianity, 51, 129 civilisation, 37–8, 53, 59–60, 89–90, 114 class division, 39–40, 80, 99, 168 Clemens, Samuel see Twain, Mark Cleveland, President Grover, 177 Clifford, James, 29n Colley, Linda, 16, 17 Collini, Stefan, 5, 17, 21, 49 colonialism, 225 Connor, Walker, 14 Conrad, Joseph, 162 conservationism, 20, 148, 168, 179, 203–7, 217

[ 257

Conservative Party, 134 contributionism, 19–20, 47, 51, 64 Arnold, 87, 131–3, 148, 189 Du Bois, 179, 191–2, 197–8, 208 Howells, 87, 88–114 Moran, 121–2 Sharp, 163 Southern States of America, 55–6 Cornish language, 38 Cornwall, 33, 37, 45, 132, 156 corporatism, 73–4 County Sligo, Ireland, 150–1 Crawford, Robert, Devolving English Literature, 124 crofters, 156 Croly, Herbert, 24 Cronin, Michael, 227 Cruse, Harold, 178–9 cultural authority, 20–8, 34, 89–90, 92–3 culture, 5, 6, 7–12 African-American, 180–1, 186–93, 203–4 American, 27, 60–1, 73–5, 79–99, 189–90, 208–9 Arnold, 21, 35–41, 38, 52, 80 British, 19 Celticism, 41–52 Du Bois, 188–90, 200 ethnicity, 26, 27–8, 52–65, 87, 148, 165, 184, 224–5 homogeneous, 34, 35, 37, 41, 44, 64–5, 80, 88, 100, 109, 148, 181 industrialism and, 7–8, 73–4, 176, 178, 182, 185, 186, 193 linguistic difference and, 98 nationalism and, 15,123, 140–69, 180 universalism, 38, 75, 80, 108–11, 225, 227–8 Cymru Fydd (Young Wales) movement, 135, 136, 163 Davies, Norman, 43 Davis, Thomas, 141, 148 Deane, Seamus, 140, 152–3, 159, 164, 165 Debs, Eugene V., 195 decolonisation, 10, 124, 131, 151 democracy, 38–9, 52, 89 Dent, J. H., 161 devolution, 63–4, 134–5 The Dial, 178 dialect, 96–7, 102–3, 107–8, 144–7 disenfranchisement, 176, 180, 185–6, 203, 209 disestablishment, 134, 135, 136, 140 Dixon, Thomas, The Clansman, 2 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, Crime and Punishment, 77–8 Dowden, Edward, 149 Dowson, Ernest, 159, 165 Du Bois, W. E. B., 1–3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 13, 23, 162, 224–8 cultural authority, 26 ‘double-consciousness’ concept, 162, 179, 187–9, 191, 214–16 first encounter with racism, 191

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Du Bois, W. E. B. (continued ) idea of ‘culture’, 200, 227 leadership, 193–8, 216 primitivist images of African Americans, 192–3, 199–200 race, 202–7 rejection of Washington’s philosophy, 178, 180, 181–9, 193, 216 works by: ‘The Art and Art Galleries of Modern Europe’, 179; ‘The Burden of Black Women’, 199; ‘The Conservation of Races’, 179, 204; Dusk of Dawn, 184, 200; The Gift of Black Folk, 192; ‘Howells and Black Folk’, 188; John Brown, 179, 190–1; ‘A Litany of Atlanta’, 184–5; The Philadelphia Negro, 179, 203; The Quest of the Silver Fleece, 179, 195–8, 208–9; The Souls of Black Folk, 179, 182–3, 185, 190, 191, 193, 194–5, 199, 200–1, 203, 208, 210; ‘Of the Coming of John’ chapter, 211–16, 217; ‘The Strivings of Negro People’, 179; ‘The Talented Tenth’, 193–4; ‘To the Nations of the World’, 206–7 Duff, Grant, 60 Dumas, Alexander, 209, 210, 226 Dunbar, Paul Laurence, 107–9, 177–8, 182 Eagleton, Terry, 12, 38, 153 education, 33, 34, 39, 41, 56, 134, 184, 193–4 Edwards, E. F., Reserches sur les langues celtiques, 43 Edwards, Ruth Dudley, 138 Elias, Norbert, 15 Eliot, George, 153, 187 Elizabethan England, 38, 60 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 26, 58, 74, 81, 82–3, 187 Engels, Friedrich, 30n England, 15, 27 aestheticism, 166 Americanisation of, 38 class division in, 39–40 hybridity, 48–9, 52, 54, 106, 131–2 Irish policy, 62–3, 134 national pride, 44–5 population growth in, 25 English language, 95–6 English literature, 47, 57, 80, 89, 127–8 English people, 17, 53–4, 56–8, 62, 205–6 Englishness, 10–11, 13, 27, 163 escapism, 75 ethnicity, 5–6, 8, 9, 12–20, 113, 205 culture and, 26, 27–8, 52–65, 87, 148, 165, 184, 224–5 nationality and, 14–15 and race, 13–14; see also Celticism ethnology, 50 Europeanism, 65 ‘Everyman’ series, 160, 161 exile, 4–5, 12, 153, 162 expatriates, 91–2, 93–4, 109, 153, 156–8, 162 Eyre, General Edward, 66n

Fanon, Frantz, 30n Faverty, Frederick, 43, 54 Fenianism, 40, 124, 130, 134, 141 Fenner, Thomas, 219 Ferguson, Sir Samuel, 124 Fitzgerald, Edward, 208 Fitzgerald, Joseph, 95 Fortnightly Review, 104, 156 Foster, R. F., 121, 122, 125, 130, 131, 138, 140, 153 France, 15, 16, 33, 38, 39, 41, 44–5, 53, 54 franchise, 40 French realism, 74 Gaelic culture, 43, 121, 124, 136–7, 140–2 Gaelic League, 137–9 Gates Jr, Henry Louis, 200 Geddes, Patrick, 161 gender politics, 9 Germans and Germany, 15, 47, 49, 53, 54, 55, 74, 200, 205–6 Giles, Paul, 10–11 Gladstone, William Ewart, 63, 64, 134 Glyndw ˆ r, Owain (Owen Glendower), 85, 87 Gobineau, Joseph Arthur, Comte de, 68n Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 187 Gosse, Edmund, 74 Grant, General, 55–6 Gray, Melinda, 11, 43 Greece, 55 Greene, G. A., 158 Greenfeld, Liah, 18 Gregory, Lady, 133 Griffith, D. W., 2 Grimké, Angelina and Sarah, 182 Guest, Lady Charlotte, 161 Hall, Stuart, 13 Hardy, Thomas, 24 Harper’s Magazine, 73, 88, 95 Harper’s Publishers, 24 Harte, Bret, 144 Harvie, Christopher, 135, 136 Hastings, Adrian, 16, 17 Hawthorne, Nathaniel, 81 Haymarket riots, Chicago (1886), 78 Hebraism, 49, 50–1, 52 Hechter, Michael, 10 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 104, 187 Heine, Heinrich, 74 Henry VIII, King, 16 heredity, 56, 207 heroism, 90–1 Heyck, T. W., 23, 25, 26 Higham, John, 13–14 Hillier, A. C., 158 Hobsbawm, Eric, 16, 30n Hofstadter, Richard, 82 Hoggart, Richard, 8 Home Rule movements, 53, 64, 122, 134–6, 140, 156, 163 House of Commons, 20, 21, 63

Index Howells, William Dean, 5, 6, 19, 22, 23, 26, 72–114, 166, 179, 191, 224–8 Arnold’s admiration for, 58 on class division, 79–80 ‘double consciousness’ concept, 187–8 and Haymarket bombers, 78–9 on industrialism, 76–9 language, 95–103 literary criticism, 96–7, 107–8, 177–8, 180–1 on the ‘man of letters’, 25 Matthew Arnold meeting, 72–3 and race, 104–14 realism, 74–5, 88–95, 88–114, 148, 178 seventy-fifth birthday party, 24 on Sharp’s neo-romanticism, 175n sources of inspiration for, 74–5 use of dialect, 96–7, 102–3, 144 Welsh ancestry of, 83–7, 109 works by: A Boy’s Town, 84; Criticism and Fiction, 79; ‘Editor’s Study’, 77, 81, 88–9, 90, 95; A Fearful Responsibility, 95; A Hazard of New Fortunes, 94, 98–103, 104–5; An Imperative Duty, 109–11, 180, 187–8, 193, 197–8; Indian Summer, 91–3, 109–10; The Rise of Silas Lapham, 89–91, 94, 104, 109; ‘St David’s Day Address’, 85–6, 87; Seven English Cities, 85; Suburban Sketches, 106–7, 111; The World of Chance, 84; Years of My Youth, 83–4, 102 Howes, Marjorie, 14, 124, 125, 132 Hughes, Rev. Hugh Price, 156 human nature, 34–5, 40, 59–60, 131 human rights, 226–7 humanism, 65 Hume, David, 149 Humphreys, Emyr, 34 Hunter, Jerry, 11 Hutchinson, John, 14 Hyde, Douglas, 138, 140–1, 142, 143 identity, 5–6, 17–20, 26, 110–11, 138–9, 148, 202 immigrants and immigration, 12, 18–19, 25, 54–5, 61, 73, 83, 87, 96, 109, 157 imperialism, 9, 17, 125 individualism, 155 Indonesia, 10 industrial action, 77, 78–9, 81, 195 industrialism, 2, 3, 35–6, 38, 40, 42, 147–8, 166–7, 168 culture and, 7–8, 73–4, 176, 178, 182, 185, 186, 193 United States, 54, 76–7, 176 insiders, 2, 3–4, 5 intellectuals, 14–15, 22, 23–4, 24 Ireland, 9–10, 16, 17, 27, 45, 51, 52, 136 Du Bois on, 223n English policy in, 62–3, 134 Fenianism, 40, 124, 130, 134, 141 Gaelic culture, 11, 121–2 nationhood, 46

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Pan-Celticism, 136–7, 138–9 waning of Protestant ascendancy in, 140 Yeats’s imagined, 167–8 Irish immigrants, 55, 106–7, 111 Irish language, 51, 141, 149 Irish Literary Society, 157–8 Irish Literary Theatre, 133, 139, 157 Irish literature, 139, 141, 149, 165–6 Irish Parliamentary Party, 122 Irish studies, 12, 124–4 Isle of Man, 132 Italy and Italians, 44–5, 55, 74, 91–2, 93–4, 113 Jackson, Holbrook, 157 James, Henry, 24, 58, 72, 78, 106, 153, 187 James, William, 112, 187 Jeffares, A. N., 150 Jepson, Edgar, 158–9 Jews, 50–1, 52, 53, 55, 96–7, 201 ‘Jim Crow’ restrictions, 184 Johnson, Lionel, 158, 159 Joyce, James, 153 Joyce, P. W., 130 Kelleher, John, 131 Kelly, John S., 122 Kiberd, Declan, 124 Kipling, Rudyard, 165 Klein, Marcus, 19 Kohn, Hans, 15 Ku Klux Klan, 2 Kuch, Peter, 146, 156 Land League, 141 land nationalisation, 156 language, 95–103, 138, 140–4, 216 English, 95–6 Irish, 51, 141, 149 Welsh, 11, 33–4, 37, 38, 42, 51, 86–7, 97 Yiddish, 96–7 Lazarus, Neil, 29 n The Leader, 122, 126–7, 139 leadership, 180–2, 193–8, 216 Lears, T. Jackson, 8, 75, 77, 89, 111–12 Lee, Vernon, 90 Liberal Party, 134, 136, 163 liberalism, 53, 64 Lincoln, Abraham, 81 literary criticism, 22 literature, 73, 74 Arnold’s view of religion and, 21–2 Celtic, 62–3, 109 dualism in, 162 émigré authors, 153, 156–8, 162 English, 47, 57, 80, 89, 127–8 Irish, 139, 141, 149, 165–6 Scottish, 107–8, 124, 133, 149, 160, 161–5 use of vernacular, 96–7, 102–3, 107–8, 144–7 Welsh, 127, 149, 158, 160–1; see also American literature; poetry

260 ]


Lloyd, David, 124 Lloyd George, David, 84–5, 136 Logan, Rayford Whittigan, 184, 222n London, Jack, 195 Longfellow, Henry Wadsworth, 81 Longley, Edna, The Living Stream, 124–5 Lorimer, Douglass, 43 Lott, Eric, 8–9 Lowell, James Russell, 55, 208, 210 lynchings, 184, 203 McCormack, W. J., 151 Macleod, Fiona see Sharp, William Macpherson, James, 43 magazines, 24–5, 73, 104–5 ‘man of letters’, 22, 23–4, 25, 26, 27, 36–7, 65 Arnold, 52, 194 Howells, 73, 75, 83 Yeats, 123, 147, 152, 159 Mandler, Peter, 16, 69n marginality, 4–5, 190 Marsh, J. B. T., 219 Martin, Henri, Histoire de France, 43 Martyn, Edward, 133, 148 Marx, Leo, Machine in the Garden, 8 materialism, 2, 3, 35–6, 42, 61, 73, 86–7, 166–7, 168, 178, 183, 197, 224 May, Henry, 24 Meier, August, 178 Meredith, George, 149 Merwin, Henry Childs, 111 Michaels, Walter Benn, 30n, 142–3, 203 middle class, 52, 60 American, 59, 60, 61, 65, 89, 111–12 philistinism of, 25, 39, 40, 59, 65, 113, 131, 194, 195 social leadership role, 41, 123 speech patterns, 100 Milligan, Alice, 123, 147 Moore, George, 133, 148 Moore, Thomas, 141 Moran, D. P., 121–2, 126, 139 Morgan, Kenneth, 135 Morris, William, 28, 79, 149, 160, 167 Moses, Wilson Jeremiah, 200 Mulhern, Francis, 21 multilingualism, 10–11 music, 209, 210–11, 216 NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People), 1, 217 national identity, 12, 17–20, 27–8, 55, 103, 105 nationalism, 5, 8, 15, 16, 80, 217 aestheticism and, 166 black, 200–7 civic, 15, 148–9 culture and, 123, 140–69, 180 ethnicity and, 14–15 German, 200 Irish, 10, 27 language and, 140–4

literary production and, 103–4 racism and, 47, 105 Western and Eastern, 15 nationhood, 6, 9, 42, 44–7, 88–95 Native Americans, 19 naturalism, 195 nature, 1, 3, 38, 41, 127 Netherlands, 15 Nettels, Elsa, 75, 87 New Aesthetics, 26 New England culture, 83, 92–3, 112, 191 New Left Review, 9 New York, 96–7 A Hazard of New Fortunes, 94, 98–103, 104–5 Society for Italian Immigrants, 87 Welsh Society, 85 New York Tribune, 78 newspapers, 24–5, 49, 60, 78, 104, 105 Nilsen, Kenneth, 11 Normans, 47, 49 Norris, Frank, 195 North, Michael, 155 nostalgia, 130, 154 O’Brien, Conor Cruise, 135 O’Grady, Standish, 133 O’Leary, John, 122 O’Leary, Philip, 137 O’Reilly, John B., 124 Orientalism, 46 outsiders, 1–5 Owen, Hugh, 39 paganism, 129, 152 Pan-African movement, 206–7 Pan-Celtic movement, 136–9, 140, 160, 161 Pan-Negroism, 206–7 Park, Robert, 104 Parnell, Charles, 122, 134 Parnellites, 63 Pater, Walter, 26, 159 patriotism, 28, 91, 154, 167 Pearse, Patrick, 137–8, 139 Perry, Thomas, 84 philistinism, 1–2, 3, 4, 42, 128, 166, 167, 188, 197, 224 middle class, 25, 39, 40, 52, 59, 65, 113, 131, 194, 195 United States, 59, 182 philology, 43, 49–50, 132, 161 Plarr, Victor, 158, 159 Plunkett, Horace, 124 Poe, Edgar Allan, 142 poetry, 107–9 aesthetic, 199, 200, 208 Du Bois, 184–5 Dunbar, 178 German, 74 Rhys, 164 Welsh, 127 Yeats, 129–30, 144–7, 149–52, 154, 159, 165

Index Poland, 45, 46, 55 politics, 21, 58–65, 62–3, 122–6 popular press, 24, 104, 105 population growth, 25 Posnock, Ross, 225 post-colonial theory, 124, 156 post-modernism, 226 Pound, Ezra, 153 primitivism, 1–2, 3, 4, 86, 113, 127, 128 black, 192, 193, 194, 195, 198, 199, 224 Celtic, 224 Protestantism, 17, 137, 140, 148 Prussia, 39 Puritanism, 49, 50, 87 Quakers, 84 race Arnold and, 43–4, 53–7, 202, 203, 206 Du Bois and, 202–7 ethnicity and, 13–14 Howells’s realism and, 103–14 segregation, 56, 184 Raymond Williams and, 9 Yeats and, 143 racism, 47, 138, 143, 191, 215, 216, 217, 226–7 Raleigh, John Henry, 55 Rampersad, Arnold, 184 realism, 74–5, 178 and language, 95–103 and nationhood, 88–95 and race, 103–14 Reed, Adolph, 207 Reform League, 40 Regan, Stephen, 125, 166 religion, 21–2, 131–2, 185, 213–14; see also individual religions Renan, Ernest, 43, 74, 148 The Rhymers’ Club, 26, 158–9, 160, 161, 165, 169 Rhys, Ernest, 158, 162, 163–4 ‘On a Harp Playing in a London Fog’, 164 Welsh Ballads, 127, 160–1, 164 Roe, Owen, 57, 58, 142 Rolleston, T. W., 122, 158 Roman Catholicism, 17, 55, 122, 140, 148, 149 romanticism, 1–2, 3, 42–3, 112–13, 164, 175n Rosebery, Earl of, 135 Rossetti, Dante Gabriel, 165 Ruskin, John, 28, 79, 167 Russell, George, 155 Russia, 55 Russian realism, 74 Ryan, W. P., 158 Saddlemeyer, Ann, 133 Said, Edward, 66n, 125 Culture and Imperialism, 9–10 Orientalism, 46 on Yeats, 131, 151

[ 261

Saldívar, José David, 9 Samoans, 112 Saxons, 47, 49 Schiller, Johann, 208, 210 Scotland, 1–3, 4, 16, 43, 57, 63–4, 124–5 ethnic group or nation, 14 Highlands, 132, 136, 156, 162 Home Rule movement, 134, 135–6, 163 literature, 107–8, 124, 133, 149, 160, 161–5 Pan-Celticism, 136–7 Victorian Britishness and, 17 Scott, Sir Walter, 160 ‘Lady of the Lake’, 1, 2, 3 Waverley, 43 segregation, 203, 210, 211–12, 216, 217 Sengor, Leopold, 171n sensationalist journalism, 105 separatism, 133, 198, 205, 217 sexism, 227 Shakespeare, William, 210, 226 Sharp, William (Fiona Macleod), 124, 133, 160, 161–5, 199, 208 slavery, 77–8, 84, 176, 184, 201–2 Smith, John David, 184 Smollet, Tobias, 57 social criticism, 4–5, 35, 38–41, 183 social homogeneity, 39, 40–1, 52, 59, 61–2, 64 socialism, 156 Sollors, Werner, 10, 11–12, 20 spirituals, 209, 210–11, 216 Stevenson, Robert Louis, 162 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 11, 81 Strangford, Lord, 43 Sundquist, Eric, 210, 211 Swift, Jonathan, 149 Swinburne, Algernon Charles, 159 Symons, Arthur, 159, 165, 199, 208, 210 Syria, 55 Taft, William Howard, 24 Tanner, Henry O., 182 Tarbell, Ida M., 24 Taubenfeld, Aviva, 97 technology, 24, 104 Teichgraeber, Richard, 74, 75 Tennyson, Alfred Lord, 159, 165 Teutonism, 48, 49, 50, 156 Thomas, Ned, 169n Thoreau, Henry David, 144, 155 The Times, 49, 69n Todhunter, John, 158, 159 Toussaint, Pierre, 206 Trachtenberg, Alan, 8, 73–4, 104 transcendentalism, 40, 74 Turkey, 55 Twain, Mark, 26, 72, 75, 76, 86, 117n Tynan, Katherine, 154 Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Stowe), 11 Union, Acts of (1603, 1707, 1800), 16 Unionism, 124, 125, 134, 137, 140 Unitarianism, 74

262 ]


United Irish League, 122 United Irishman, 142 United Kingdom, 16, 19; see also Britain United States, 39 civilisation in, 53–4, 114 culture in, 27, 60–1, 73–5, 79–88, 189–90, 208–9 1890s political unrest, 195 ethnic diversity, 54–5, 56, 87–8, 93, 94, 101, 113 exceptionalism, 12, 22, 54, 57, 59, 74, 81 Fenianism, 40 industrialism, 54, 76–7, 176 intellectuals, 22, 24 multilingualism, 10–11, 95–103 nationhood, 16, 18 philistinism, 59, 182 publishing expansion in, 25 racial violence in, 184–5 social class, 58–62, 147 Southern States, 176–7, 184, 200–1, 213–15 urban growth in, 25; see also AfricanAmericans; American literature universalism, 2, 3, 27, 38, 75, 80, 108–11, 225–7 universities, 24 utilitarianism, 168 Wales, 3–4, 16, 42, 45, 51, 63–4, 128, 132, 156 Britishness and, 17 ethnic group or nation, 14 Home Rule movement, 134, 135, 136, 163 Howells and, 84–7 language, 11, 33–4, 37, 38, 42, 51, 86–7, 97 literature, 127, 149, 158, 160–1 nationhood, 46 Pan-Celticism, 136–7 population growth, 25 Walzer, Michael, 5 Warren, Kenneth, 105, 187 Washington, Booker T., 185 ‘Atlanta Compromise’ speech, 19, 176–7, 185–6, 193, 216 Up from Slavery, 177–8, 180–2 Welch, Robert, 131 Welsh Society of New York, 85 Whitman, Walt, 26, 75, 82, 108, 142, 144

Whittier, John Greenleaf, 187, 210 Wiebe, Robert, 73 Wilde, Oscar, 26, 153 Williams, H. Sylvester, 206 Williams, Raymond, 5, 7–9, 10, 11, 21, 26, 27, 36, 73, 100, 157, 158, 224 Williams, Roger, 86, 87 Winch, Donald, 8 Wonham, Henry, 111 Wordsworth, William, 187 working class, 64, 79, 194, 195 American, 77, 78, 83 political agitation, 39–40 ‘populace’, 25, 39, 59 Yeats, W. B., 5, 6, 23, 121–69, 122, 179–80, 188–9, 200, 224–8 anti-industrialism of, 167–8, 169 aristocracy, 146–7, 152, 195 Celticism, 124, 126–33, 139, 141–2, 143–52, 153–69 culture and, 26, 27, 28, 155–6, 162, 227 ethnicity, 12 nationalism and, 123–4 periods in London, 153–69 responses to United States, 147 review of Ernest Rhys’s Welsh Ballads, 160 works by: Autobiographies, 123, 158, 159, 160–1, 169; ‘The Autumn of the Body’, 165; ‘The Ballad of Moll Magee’, 144–7; ‘The Celt in London’, 134; ‘The Celtic Element in Literature’, 127; ‘Hopes and Fears for Irish Literature’, 165–6; ‘Into the Twilight’, 159; ‘The Irish National Literary Society’, 133; John Sherman, 153–6, 212–13, 215; ‘The Lake Isle of Innisfree’, 154, 155; ‘The Man Who Dreamed of Faeryland’, 150–2; ‘Three Irish Poets’, 128; The Wanderings of Oisin, 129–30, 161 Yiddish, 96–7 Young, Robert, 66n Young Irelanders, 141 Young Wales (nationalist journal), 163 Zamir, Shamoon, 187 Ziff, Larzer, 83 Zˇizˇek, Slavoj, 227

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