Tact

Aesthetic Liberalism and the Essay Form in Nineteenth-Century Britain

David Russell

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781400887903
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Crítica literaria moderna

The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth. In an era when more and more people lived more closely than ever before with people they knew less and less about, tact was a new mode of feeling one's way with others in complex modern conditions. In this book, David Russell traces how the essay genre came to exemplify this sensuous new ethic and aesthetic.Russell argues that the essay form provided the resources for the performance of tact in this period and analyzes its techniques in the writings of Charles Lamb, John Stuart Mill, Matthew Arnold, George Eliot, and Walter Pater. He shows how their essays offer grounds for a claim about the relationship among art, education, and human freedom—an "aesthetic liberalism"—not encompassed by traditional political philosophy or in literary criticism. For these writers, tact is not about codes of politeness but about making an art of ordinary encounters with people and objects and evoking the fullest potential in each new encounter. Russell demonstrates how their essays serve as a model for a critical handling of the world that is open to surprises, and from which egalitarian demands for new relationships are made.Offering fresh approaches to thinking about criticism, sociability, politics, and art, Tact concludes by following a legacy of essayistic tact to the practice of British psychoanalysts like D. W. Winnicott and Marion Milner.

CHAPTER ONE

“Our Debt to Lamb”

THE ROMANTIC ESSAY AND THE EMERGENCE OF TACT

CHARLES LAMB MADE no great claims for himself. We tend to observe this minor figure, whose whimsical essays won him, according to Roy Park, the rather uninspiring status of “cultural teddy-bear in the Victorian Establishment,” only now and again, as he traces his own shy orbit around the greater Romantics.¹ And “eccentric”—with all the charm and irrelevance awarded by that label—has tended to be the way critics have defined him; Lamb has suffered an enduring trivialization as “gentle-hearted Charles,” with the effect, in the words of Denise Gigante, of “damning him to the critically irrelevant world of the benign.”² What is so unsettling about Lamb, we might wonder, that he has been so often quarantined by sentimentality? There’s a hint of some higher stakes in a scathing 1934 essay by the Cambridge critic Denys Thompson, sardonically titled “Our Debt to Lamb.” Thompson condemns Lamb’s essays for eschewing the moral legislation of the Spectator in favor of a democratic populism. For Thompson, Lamb’s aesthetic marks a shift in the essay genre from the dignified Addisonian “lay pulpit” to the (overly) familiar essay; without an elevated standpoint, the essayist becomes dangerously democratic: a close connoisseur of intimacy. For Thompson, this is too close for comfort; he admits that reading Lamb makes him want to shout “don’t breathe in my ear.”³

Thompson was right to sense a change in relation. Borrowing his title, I will examine the question of what “our debt to Lamb” might be. The answer is that Lamb reconceived the essay genre to democratic ends. He made use of the essay form to practice tact, which responds to modern social conditions by maintaining a discursively constructed social space. This space shares formal properties, and democratic aims, with a contemporaneous model of a discursive sociality: the panoptical theories of Jeremy Bentham. But they represent different approaches to the same social pressures. While Bentham proposes a totalizing methodical approach that would produce transparent and egalitarian social systems, such as his rationalized legal system, Lamb insists upon values that methods of rationalization and demystification can destroy.

Because he is the figure who throws the differences of their two approaches into highest relief, I will approach the connections between Lamb and Bentham by way of Lamb’s critique of Bentham’s most aggressive popularizer and disciple, James Mill. Lamb proposes a tactful social sensibility, a democratizing feeling one’s way among others, opposed to the Utilitarians’ democratizing transparency and privileging of method. He is concerned with the conditions of possibility for a sociability in which no party is diminished and in which multiple possible worlds or ways of life may thrive. To this end, tact proposes a less knowing form of kindness; it resists the codification of social laws and the pinning of individuals to fixed meanings. It is an ethic of the ad hoc, continually rereading and rewriting the social. Tact provides a strong basis from which to resituate Lamb within our understanding of literary history as not simply an eccentric but, at the same time, a central and originary exponent of an important modern sensibility.

In this chapter I consider Lamb’s deviation from eighteenth-century social and literary conventions, reading together Lamb’s tactful persona of Elia with his fellow essayists, and contemporaneous debates about social change. Tact is a product of the modern city: never before had so many different people lived in such close proximity to one another, in a situation that required new forms of relating to difference and a reform of established, absolutist systems of status evaluation. Lamb’s essays resist coercive claims to truth, keep meaning on the move, and preserve desire and possibility within social relations. Elia’s language makes use of the possibilities of the essay form in order to provide the conditions for a phenomenology of tactful relation, a virtual reality, or what Lamb calls “illusion”: the cultivation of a neutral and impersonal space existing between people.

Finally, I draw a comparison with a similar cultivation of a virtual space in social relations in the work of Jeremy Bentham. I identify what is tactful in Benthamism but also explain, in contradistinction to him, a central component of the essayistic style of tact: its relation to the idea of progress. Lamb critiques the temporal assumptions of liberal progressivism, by which the present is understood in terms of its contribution to the future, and difference in terms of the future perfect, or what it will have been. The Essays of Elia reject this assumption by opposing the form of the essay to the narrative progress of the novel. In the process, Lamb uses the essay to propose a kind of aesthetic liberalism, which provides an alternative to a liberalism that would attain shared principles by means of rational consensus. This aesthetic liberalism offers the alternative of an essayistic tact to the model of subjectification through internalized laws and the totalizing regimes of power familiar to our present conceptions of nineteenth-century liberal society, from Michel Foucault’s influential reading of Bentham to D. A. Miller’s famous conjunction of the novel and the police.

Living by Essay

Lamb’s evasion of a social code, and his subtle proposition of an essayistic life, produces the tact of his response to his times. From Denys Thompson’s Leavisite perspective, this evasion is irresponsible, even ethically lax. Lamb’s perverse reticence means that he “never … requires his reader to re-orientate himself.”⁴ It is an important observation. A too-direct requirement to “reorientate” was the basis of Lamb’s private criticism of Wordsworth’s “Old Cumberland Beggar.” In a letter to Wordsworth of 1801, Lamb opined, “it appears to me a fault in the Beggar, that the instructions conveyed in it are too direct and like a lecture: they don’t slide into the mind of the reader while he is imagining no such matter.—An intelligent reader finds a sort of insult in being told, I will teach you how to think on this subject.”⁵

In protesting the “too direct” and advocating the “slide into the mind of the reader,” Lamb articulates an essential element of what would become his Elian mode. Through his persona, Elia, Lamb would develop a technique of modulation in tone and voice, and in closeness and distance to others. He playfully suggested just how essential such evasiveness is to Elia’s character when he added his own wry preface to his 1833 collected Last Essays of Elia. The preface is an obituary of his persona, “by a friend of the late Elia.” A hint at literary explication, at how the reader ought to approach the Essays, is found in its final paragraph, which narrates the event that sent Elia to his grave:

Discoursing with him latterly … he expressed a pettishness, which I thought unworthy of him. In our walks about his suburban retreat … some children belonging to a school of industry had met us, and bowed and curtseyed, as he thought, in an especial manner to him. “They take me for a visiting governor,” he muttered earnestly. He had a horror, which he carried to a foible, of looking like anything important or parochial. He thought that he approached nearer to that stamp daily. He had a general aversion from being treated like a grave or respectable character, and kept a wary eye upon the advances of age that should so entitle him. He did not conform to the march of time, but was dragged along in the procession. His manners lagged behind his years. He was too much of the boy-man. The toga virilis never sate gracefully on his shoulders…. These were weaknesses; but such as they were, they are a key to explicate some of his writings.⁶

A hint is contained in this “key,” should the reader let it slide into mind. If Elia’s essays always disclaim the moralizing standpoint, or fixed point of authority in a scale of values, the question raised here is what it might mean to attain one, and why anyone would want to: Lamb punningly suggests that advancing to the “grave” might be just that. Elia’s ill-fitting toga virilis gestures to a recurring theme of the essays: their exploration of the gap between role or stance and the identity of the actor in all forms of sociability, and the sense of the possibilities of a dramatic virtuality in ordinary interactions. (What also recurs is just how vulnerable this gap is to being stripped away). The toga is worn, but not too well: the story suggests Elia’s defining refusal to assume completely any role, particularly an authoritative one; he rejects the “decent drapery,” the moral wardrobe, of Burkean status hierarchy.⁷

Elia’s transitional position as a “boy-man” is not quite a Romantic celebration of the authenticity of childhood; nor is it a wish to remain irresponsible, eternally a feckless youth (Romantic essayists were often disparaged on these grounds).⁸ It is a protest about the common ideals of “grave” adulthood to which the young are dragged in the name of educational progress. The consummately evasive Elia is mortified before he dies, finally transfixed in an unwanted social position. His ironic humor fails him. He is made “pettish,” found to be muttering his protests too “earnestly.”

Lamb’s imagined obituary hints that if we don’t dismiss Elia as someone who ought to grow up, we might instead take him seriously as a critic of established ideals of social value and comportment. The Essays of Elia are a response to the ever more urgent questions of social status and behavior in an increasingly dense and diverse urban society. The early decades of the nineteenth century in Britain experienced the profoundly unsettling effects of the emergence of modern metropolitan life.⁹ Georg Simmel, the nineteenthcentury sociologist of urban modernity, provides a useful insight into the phenomenology of this change with his concept of “strangeness.”¹⁰ In urban space, a great many people are crowded together with people of uncertain origin, status and, intention. Established codes for reading other people become less and less useful as urbanization increases; the city becomes a place of intense unknowing. For Simmel, individuals must respond to the “synthesis of nearness and distance which constitutes the formal position of the stranger.”¹¹ He notes that one response to the overstimulating strangeness of the city is a rationalistic mode that flattens qualitative distinction to a single scale of (monetary) value. He calls this the rise of the “matter-of-fact attitude.” This attitude of relation assumes knowledge of others in order to evade interest in them; it is the response of the defensively blasé.

But strangeness also produces responses that challenge this affective flattening and call for the appreciation of ever finer modes of differentiation. The impersonal space of strangeness “enters even the most intimate relationships” in the modern city. It is “full of dangerous possibilities,” which “thrust themselves between us, like shadows.” This shadowy middle space of possibility, of appreciation, is what the Elian sensibility keeps in play, and defends against colonization by universal codes of status or the matter-of-fact attitude.

It is a familiar notion that the Romantic period experienced a “crisis of sociability”; but what might this mean to someone living it?¹² To come to grips with this question, it is worth looking again at a famous controversy about social valuation. There was something new about the famous 1817 attack by “Z” on the “Cockney School” in Blackwoods Magazine: not in terms of its prescriptions (literature should defer to social and moral codes), but in the histrionic intensity of its style. Z’s outrage is leveled not only against a new form of poetics but also against their links to forms of sociability, forms that seemed to confound established scales of value and codes of behavior. The shrill fury of Z (or John Gibson Lockhart) is directed not only at notorious poets like Leigh Hunt but at some strange contiguity of Hunt’s sensibility (as demonstrated in his Story of Rimini) with the gentilities of the lower middle classes:

One feels the same disgust at the idea of opening Rimini, that impresses itself on the mind of a man of fashion, when he is invited to enter, for a second time, the gilded drawing-room of a little mincing boarding school mistress, who would fain have an At Home in her house. Everything is pretence, affectation, finery and gaudiness. The beaux are attorneys’ apprentices … and clerks of genius: the belles are faded fan twinkling spinsters, prurient vulgar misses from school and enormous citizens’ wives.¹³

Lockhart’s “mistress” stands metonymically for changing practices of sociability—encompassing social forms from lyric to tea parties. Lockhart’s rage reflects a time in which the rules of what the social historian Harold Perkin called the “old society”—that required people to produce the kinds of signification that matched their station in the social hierarchy—came to be felt untenable.¹⁴ By the old rules, a casual visual appraisal is thus sufficient to effectively “place” someone. Terry Eagleton has summarized the “cultural politics” of this situation with reference to the eighteenth-century essay and the novel: “as in the fiction of Richardson or Austen, stray empirical details can prove morally momentous: it is in the crook of the finger or the cut of a waistcoat that virtuous or vicious dispositions may be disclosed.” On this basis, Eagleton explains, Addison was able to promote a “programme” of correct sensibility, by which his and Steele’s “cultural authority ran all the way from the reform of dress to homilies against duelling, from modes of polite address to eulogies of commerce.”¹⁵ Should someone produce the wrong signs, a qualified reader may intervene to correct the error.

By the early nineteenth century, there were simply too many styles on offer. In 1819, William Hazlitt had rounded on his Tory critics, insisting that “[w]hen you say that an author cannot write common sense or English, you mean that he does not believe in the doctrine of divine right.”¹⁶ Raymond Williams has observed that “one of the marks of a conservative society is that it regards style as an absolute.” And Williams notes that this absolute, while never fully abandoned, is increasingly “set aside” in literary prose from the Romantic period as it became impossible to insist on a single approved code.¹⁷

The Romantic essay appeared at a time when social rulebooks—the system of imperatives put forward by a thriving production of the “conduct book” genre—became obsolete. Admittedly, it may seem unlikely that Lamb could be responding to the work of authors like Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, who were separated from him by over a century. But William St. Clair has shown that Addison and Steele’s essays and eighteenth-century conduct books formed a significant part of the “old canon” of out-of-copyright texts that were most accessible to the common reader in the Romantic period. The older works were supplemented by an early-nineteenth-century boom in newly composed conduct books that sought to preserve deference and order in a time of social instability.¹⁸ St. Clair points out that “much of the prose literature of the Romantic period can be read against the foil of the conduct books, a presence always felt even when not referred to explicitly”¹⁹ This is particularly true of the periodical essay, which as St. Clair’s statistics demonstrate, was accessible to the same markets of readers as conduct books.

The values of conduct literature were traditional, rural, and hierarchical. Elia challen...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: An Art of Handling
• Chapter 1: “Our Debt to Lamb”: The Romantic Essay and the Emergence of Tact
• Chapter 2: Aesthetic Liberalism: John Stuart Mill as Essayist
• Chapter 3: Teaching Tact: Matthew Arnold and the Function of Criticism
• Chapter 4: The Grounds of Tact: George Eliot’s Rage
• Chapter 5: Relief Work: Walter Pater’s Tact
• Chapter 6: Tact in Psychoanalysis: Marion Milner
• Notes
• Index