Literatura y crítica

Rugby Chapel

sábado, 7 de diciembre de 2013

Rugby Chapel

—A poem by Matthew Arnold,

RUGBY CHAPEL

November 1857
Coldly, sadly descends
The autumn-evening. The field
Strewn with its dank yellow drifts
Of wither'd leaves, and the elms,
Fade into dimness apace,
Silent; —hardly a shout
From a few boys late at their play!
The lights come out in the street,
In the school-room windows; —but cold,
Solemn, unlighted, austere,
Through the gathering darkness, arise
The chapel-walls, in whose bound
Thou, my father! art laid.
There thou dost lie, in the gloom
Of the autumn evening. But ah!
That word, gloom, to my mind
Brings thee back, in the light
Of thy radiant vigour, again;
In the gloom of November we pass'd
Days not dark at thy side;
Seasons impair'd not the ray
Of thy buoyant cheefulness clear.
Such thou wast! and I stand
In the autumn evening, and think
Of bygone autumns with thee.
Fifteen years have gone round
Since thou arosest to tread,
In the summer-morning, the road
Of death, at a call unforeseen,
Sudden. For fifteen years,
We who till then in thy shade
Rested as under the boughs
Of a mighty oak, have endured
Sunshine and rain as we might,
Bare, unshaded, alone,
Lacking the shelter of thee.
O strong soul, by what shore
Tarriest thou now? For that force,
Surely, has not been left vain!
Somewhere, surely, afar,
In the sounding labour-house vast
Of being, is practised that strength,
Zealous, beneficient, firm!
Yes, in some far-shining sphere,
Conscious or not of the past,
Still thou performest the word
Of the Spirit in whom thou dost live—
Prompt, unwearied, as here!
Still thou upraisest with zeal
The humble good from the ground,
Sternly repressest the bad!
Still, like a trumpet dost rouse
Those who with half-open eyes
Tread the border-land dim
'Twixt vice and virtue; reviv'st,
Succourest!—this was thy work,
this was thy life upon earth.
What is the course of the life
Of mortal men on the earth?—
Most men eddy about
Here and there—eat and drink,
Chatter and love and hate,
Gather and squander, are raised
Aloft, are hurled in the dust,
Striving blindly, achieving
Nothing; and then they die—
Perish;—and no one asks
Who or what they have been,
More than he asks what waves,
In the moonlit solitudes mild
Of the midmost Ocean, have swell'd,
Foam'd for a moment, and gone.
And there are some, whom a thirst
Ardent, unquenchable, fires,
Not with the crowd to be spent,
Not without aim to go round,
In an eddy of purposeless dust,
Effort unmeaning and vain.
Ah yes! Some of us strive
Not without action to die
Fruitless, but something to snatch
From dull oblivion, not all
Glut the devouring grave!
We, we have chosen our path—
Path to a clear-purposed goal,
Path of advance!—but it leads
A long, steep journey, through sunk
Gorges, o'er mountains in snow.
Cheerful, with friends, we set forth—
Then, on the height, comes the storm.
Thunder crashes from rock
To rock, the cataracts reply,
Lightnings dazzle our eyes.
Roaring torrents have breach'd
The track, the stream-bed descends
In the place where the wayfarer once
Planted his footstep—the spray
Boils o'er its borders! aloft
The unseen snow-beds dislodge
Their hanging ruin; alas,
Havoc is made in our train!
Friends, who set forth at our side,
Falter, are lost in the storm.
We, we only are left!
With frowning foreheads, with lips
Sternly compresse'd, we strain on,
On—and at nightfall at last
Come to the end of our way,
To the lonely inn 'mid the rocks;
Where the gaunt and taciturn host
Stans on the threshold, the wind
Shaking his thin white hairs—
Holds his lantern to scan
Our storm-beat figures, and asks:
Whom in our party we bring?
Whom we have left in the snow?

Sadly we answer: We bring
Only ourselves! we lost
Sight of the rest in the storm.
Hardly ourselves we fought through,
Stripp'd, without friends, as we are.
Friends, companions, and train,
The avalanche swept from our side.

But thou would'st not alone
Be saved, my father! alone
Conquer and come to thy goal,
Leaving the rest in the wild.
We were weary, and we
Fearful, and we in our march
Fain tro drop down and to die.
Still thou turnedst, and still
Beckonedst the trembler, and still
Gavest the weary thy hand.

If, in the paths of the world,
Stones might have wounded thy feet,
Toil or dejection have tried
Thy spirit, of that we saw
Nothing—to us thou wast still
Cheerful, and helpful, and firm!
Therefore to thee it was given
Many to save with thyself;
And, at the end of the day,
O faithful shepherd! to come,
Bringing thy sheep in thy hand.

And through thee I believe
In the noble and great who are gone;
Pure souls honour'd and blest
By former ages, who else—
Such, so soulless, so poor,
Is the race of men whom see—
Seem'd but a dream of the heart,
Seem'd but a cry of desire.
Yes! I believe that there lived
Others like thee in the past,
Not like the men of the crowd
Who all round me to-day
Bluster or cringe, and make life
Hideous, and arid, and vile;
But souls temper'd with fire,
Fervent, heroic, and good,
Helpers and friends of mankind.

Servants of God!—or sons
Shall I not call you? because
Not as servants ye knew
Your Father's innermost mind,
His, who unwillingly sees
One of his little ones lost—
Yours is the praise, if mankind
Hath not as yet in its march
Fainted, and fallen, and died!

See! In the rocks of the world
Marches the host of mankind,
A feeble, wavering line.
Where are they tending?—A God
Marshall'd them, gave them their goal.
Ah, but the way is so long!
Years they have been in the wild!
Sore thirst plagues them, the rocks,
Rising all round, overawe;
Factions divide them, their host
Threatens to break, to dissolve.
—Ah, keep, keep them combined!
Else, of the myriads who fill
That army, not one shall arrive;
Sole they shall stray; in the rocks
Stagger for ever in vain,
Die one by one in the waste.

Then, in such hour of need
Of your fainting, dispirited race,
Ye, like angels, appear,
Radiant with ardour divine!
Beacons of hope, ye appear!
Languor is not in your heart,
Weakness is not in your word,
Weariness not on your brow.
Ye alight in our van! at your voice,
Panic, despair, flee away.
Ye move through the ranks, recall
The stragglers, refresh the outworn,
Praise, re-inspire the brave!
Order, courage, return.
Eyes rekindling, and prayers,
Follow your steps as ye go.
Ye fill up the gaps in our files,
Strengthen the wavering line,
Stablish, continue our march,
On, to the bound of the waste,
On, to the City of God.

Westward from Death

Emergent Narrativity en Philpapers

viernes, 6 de diciembre de 2013

Emergent Narrativity en Philpapers

Tengo otro artículo más en...

 

Emergent narrativity

José Angel García Landa

Abstract	This paper deals with those dimensions of narrative which define it as such (i.e. narrativity). It examines some current conceptions of narrativity, and puts forward an emergentist theory of narrativity, one which takes into account the narrative structuring effected by narratological analysis itself as a distinct cognitive activity.
Keywords	Narrativity  Narratology  Narrative  Emergence  Cognition
Categories	Aesthetic Perception in Aesthetics

As You Like It

viernes, 6 de diciembre de 2013

As You Like It (Bibliography)

As.You.Like.It by me.

The Caroline and Commonwealth Theatre

miércoles, 4 de diciembre de 2013

The Caroline and Commonwealth Theatre

Chapter 7 of the Cambridge Illustrated History of British Theatre, by Simon Trussler.

The accession of Charles I in 1625 was overshadowed by the severest outbreak of plague since 1603—ironically, the year in which his father had come to the throne. Though the disease had remained endemic, prohibitions against playing during James's reign had generally been brief: now its more severe recurrence put the very survival of the weaker companies at risk. Apart from losing their 'ordinary poet', John Fletcher, in the outbreak of 1625, the King's Men were thus alone in weathering a closure of the theatres which lasted from James's death in late March until the following December. By then Charles had transferred his own protection, ex officio as it were, to the King's —whither the leading players of his former troupe, the Prince's also found their way.

THE CAROLINE PLAYERS

As Shakespeare's near-contemporaries (and first editors) Heminges and Condell began to bow out of the company's affairs, its management fell increasingly into the hands of John Lowin—a stalwart member since 1603, whose speciality lay in bluff confidants and insidious malcontents—and a more recent arrival, John Taylor, who had taken on Burbage's 'line' of parts following the great actor's death in 1619.

Philip Henslowe had also died in 1616, and Palsgrave's Men had barely recovered from this misfortune (ending an association which went back to their Elizabethan origins under the Lord Admiral) when the fire at the Fortune in 1621 consumed their precious prompt-books. For them the plague closure proved a fatal blow,—as it did also for the Lady Elizabeth's Men, who had previously occupied Christopher Beeston's Phoenix (or Cockpit) theatre in Dury Lane. Beeston, having disbanded the company proceeded to combine its best players with Queen Anne's to form a troupe headed by Richard Perkins, probably the best-known actor of the day. For this he successfully sought the protection of Charles's bride of a few months, Queen Henrietta Maria, who at the time was enjoying a honeymoon with all loyal subjects by virtue of being French—almost a White Queen for their new White King.

Measured by the frequency of their calls to perform at court, Queen Henrietta's went on to achieve a success second only to the King's, and were the only other troupe to be honoured with a grant of royal livery. But when a later, devastating outbreak of plague kept the theatres shut for an even longer spell, from May 1636 to November 1637, Beeston threw out the company in favour of a new troupe, in part composed of children, which became known simply as "Beeston's Boys." A new Queen Henrietta's thereupon began to play at the Salisbury Court—the latest indoor playhouse, built in 1629 just to the west of the Blackfriars, between Fleet Street and the Thames.

The second Fortune had reopened in 1625 with a company which united the remnants of the Palsgrave's Men with others of the Lady Elizabeth's, to become known as the King and Queen of Bohemia's. It thus revived and combined the patronate-in-exile of the popular couple, with whose distant troubles all good protestants felt common cause, despite the unbrotherly inertia of the King. The new company does not seem to have survived beyond 1629, when its manager Richard Gunnell went over to the King's Revels—a troupe created to open the Salisbury Court, with the declared aim of training boy players for the King's Men. Beset by financial problems, this company (by then composed manily of adults) disappeared from view after the closure of 1636-37.

The birth of an heir to the throne led in 1631 to the creation of a new company of Prince Charles's Men, which also played briefly at the Salisbury Court. But Prince Charles's were later to be found either at the Fortune or at the Red Bull, the surviving outdoor theatres beyond the northern City boundaries, where they alternated with a company of doubtful provenance known as the Red Bull-King's Men. Since the Globe was now the only theatre remaining on Bankside, the addition of the Salisbury Court to the Blackfriars and the Phoenix meant that there were now as many 'private' indoor theatres as there were outdoor playhouses—though the seating capacity of the 'public' theatres was of course far larger, since the indoor houses played to a self-limiting, wealthier clientele.

(Illust.): Richard Perkins (c. 1585-1650) was the first Flamineo in Webster's The White Devil at the Red Bull in 1612, and was singled out for praise by the author for his 'well-approved industry', which 'did crown both the beginning and the end'. Perkins had joined Worcester's (alter Queen Anne's) Men in 1601, and after the death of Thomas ('Tu quoque') Greene in 1612 became their leading player. From 1625 he was with the new company of Queen's Men at the Phoenix, where his friend Heywood commended his performance as Barabas in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta.



THE CAROLINE AUDIENCE

The received wisdom that a once-homogenous Elizabethan audience became fragmented during the Jacobean period when the supposed elite defected to the private playhouses has, however, recently been disputed—one scholar actually contending that few of the 'unprivileged' even of Elizabethan London could have afforded either the time or money to visit a theatre. ye, apart form requiring the 'privileged' to be almost fanatically frequent in their theatregoing, this view would make foolhardy the practice of the King's Men, after their move to the Blackfriars, of returning to the much larger Globe for the summer—when the legal profession was on vacation and most of fashionable society out of town. And, so far as the Caroline period is concerned, it also discounts derisive contemporary references to 'the meaner sort of people' said to attend the remaining outdoor playhouses.

What little we know of the repertoire of the public theatres does suggest an audience not only less upmarket but apparently less up-to-date—one which still relished the devils of Faustus, the battles of Tamburlaine, or the Machiavellian intrigues of The Jew of Malta, along with the easygoing certainties of the old chronicles, while also approving plays which portrayed the tribulations and triumphs of merchants and apprentices. The handful of new plays which have come down to us from these theatres also suggests their audiences' predilection for works of 'low life and roguery among brothels and prisons', as the theatre historian Martin Butler puts it, or even such a 'full-blown adventure packed with spectacle, devilry, and magic' as The Seven Champions of Christendom by John Kirke (c. 1638).

We should beware of taking at face value the glib dismissals of these theatres from contemporary writers who were, in truth, less concerned about their old-fashioned tastes than their new-fangled politics. As broadsides and pamphlets increasingly provided their own kind of outlets for popular discontents, the popular theatre—whose capacity for survival proved formidable—began to give these a dramatic focus. But the public playhouses, although the protests they voiced were the most radical, wer not alone in offering a theatrical critique of the government—especially after 1629, when Charles began his ill-fated eleven-year experiment in personal rule, and the theatre became one of the many public forms for an opposition that was now, perforce, extra-parliamentary.

THEATRICALS AT COURT

To the ever-more-politicized theatre of the decade or so before the Civil Wars we shall return later in the present chapter. But the government, of course, already had its own theatrical mouthpiece, in London's 'third theatre'—that of Charles's court. When his father's Banqueting Hall in Whitehall had burned down in 1619, Inigo Jones was ready with plans for a new building within three months, and by 1622 this was in regular use. However, the installation of Rubens's ceiling panels in 1635 necessitated a change of venue to a temporary hall of similar size next door, lest the masterpiece be damaged by smoke from the thousands of torches and candles required for the masking. Mainly for visiting professionals, Jones also built, in 1629-30, the 'Cockpit at Court', which is illustrated and described [here:]

(Illust.): Reconstruction of the Cockpit in Court by Richard Leacroft, from the extant plans of Inigo Jones. Built in 1629-30 (and so-called to distinguish it from Beeston's theatre in Drury Lane), this was better suited than Jones's new Banqueting House to the twenty or so plays brought to court each year by the professional companies. Here, the King sat enthroned on a miniature stage of his own, directly facing the actors—the seating plan ensuring that no spectator could entirely turn his back on the royal presence.

Queen Henrietta Maria soon became the dominant influence over royal theatricals. At first, her great love was for pastoral—that curious idealization of supposed rustic innocence, of which Fletcher's The Faithful Shepherdess (c. 1608) had been a pioneering example in the English drama. For her first Christmas at court she outraged convention by requiring the ladies-in-waiting (who customarily combined their decorative presence with decorous silence) to take on speaking roles in the French pastoral L'Arténice—even persuading them into beards for the male parts.

In 1632 the Queen hired Joseph Taylor from the King's Men to rehearse her amateur cast (and herself) in another pastoral, The Shepherd's Paradise, which took some seven hours to perform. Taylor was rewarded with £100, which was more than generous for a common player, while the total of £2,500 given to the courtly author, Walter Montague, appears the more astonishing set against the fee of £10 for the outright sale of the play to one of professional companies.

A few years earlier, in 1629, there had been great public outrage when a visiting French company, which included actresses, had tried to play a season at the Blackfriars, and it was probably this occasion which the Puritan lawyer William Prynne had in mind when he attacked 'women actors, notorious whores' in his anti-theatrical pamphlet Histrio-Mastix, the Player's Scourge—which, however, was published just ten days before the performance of Montague's play during the New Year celebrations of 1633. Prynne was savagely punished for his supposed libelling of the Queen, even to the painful indignity of losing his ears: and the Inns of Court, to which Prynne had belonged until debarred for his crime, made recompense by mounting James Shirley's shrovetide masque The Triumph of Peace, processing to stage it at Whitehall, and later in the City, in the presence of the King and Queen.

With the ageing Ben Jonson out of favour, and no longer demonstrating and defending the literary potential of the masque, this became an ever more spectacular affair as Charles's reign progressed. Inigo Jones was now able to subdue the ambitions of more compliant dramatists to the whims of his scenographic genius—as he was still doing on the very eve of the Civil Wars, when Sir William Davenan'ts Salmacida Spolia (1640)  paid its elaborate allegorical compliment to an all-wise King and a prudent, pregnant Queen for averting, through their 'secret power', the threats of 'Discord, a malicious Fury' and her malignant spirits.

(llustr.): Designs by Inigo Jones for the final masque of Charles's reign, Davenant's Salmacida Spolia (1640). This opens by acknowledging that the King has to 'live and goven in a sullen age'—but soon Concord and the Good Genius of Great Britain appear, to acclaim one whose 'secret wisdom' will outlast 'those storms the people's giddy fury raise.' It was during this last chorus that the pregnant Queen and her ladies descended from the 'huge cloud of variuos colours' here illlustrated, costumed 'in Amazonian habits of carnation, embroidered with silver, with plumed helms'.

(Illustr.): Portrait by Van Dyck of Inigo Jones (1573-1652). Appointed to the household of James I's young heir apparent, Prince Henry, in 1604, within a year Jones was using perspective scenery for the first time in the English court theatre. He introduced the proscenium arch to 'frame' his stage pictures, used elaborate continental devices for the transformation of scenes—and even experimented with colored lighting, using candles ranged behind tinted glass. When, in 1619, he designed the Banqueting House in Whitehall, he had installed sophisticated devices for the raising and lowering of scenery. After the last of his many quarrels with Jonson over precedence, in 1631, he overawed other masque writers, and was approaching seventy when he produced his last designs, for Salmacida Spolia (...). He died in poverty during the Commonwealth. 

Literary critics have tended to bemoan the triumph of decoration in the Caroline masque. Aganst this, it is argued that the masque was only now discovering itself as essentially a visual and musical medium—which, incidentally but crucially, was formative to the development of English scenography. Yet it must finally be conceded that the form came to mirror and even to encourage Charles's increasing detachment from political and social realities. If the pastoral prettified an actually discontented countryside, the masque became a substitute instead of a symbol for the King's relationship with his people—in both cases, theatricality as wish-fulfilment.

Among the other 'cavalier dramatists' of Charles's court were Sir John Suckling, Sir John Denham, adn Sir William Berkeley, whose The Lost Lady, staged in 1637, celebrated the ideal of platonic love which the Queen had for some years been cultivating—a convenient cover for her political intrigues, which demanded the unswerving devotion of courtly male 'servants' without threatening the sanctity of her marriage with the King (which, in ironic contrast with his father's and his son's, remained a model of domestic harmony). Jonson had both imitated and parodied the dramatic possibilities of the emergent neoplatonic cult in one of his last plays, The New Inn (1629): unsurprisingly, it was a flop, for few beyond the charmed and self-deceiving circles of the court could make even satirical connections between the convolutions of courtly role-playing and the harsh actualitites of life in an increasingly discontented kingdom.

Although the King's Men dutifully took a number of plays by the cavalier dramatists from the court to the public stage of the Blackfriars, it is significant that these never seem to have survived the transfer for long—through the costumes that came with them were no doubt gratefully recycled by the tire-man. Indeed, in the two-way traffic between court and theatre, only Davenant proved equally competent and successful in both. In the single year of 1634, for instance, he was anticipating eponymously in The Wits the favourite character types of Restoration comedy and in Love and Honour the heroic abstractions of its tragedy, and within another twelvemonth he had produced an old-style Jonsonian comedy, News from Plymouth, for the Globe, while accomodating the niceties of neoplatonism in The Temple of Love—one of the several court masques in which he submitted to the twin disciplines of allegory and Inigo Jones. But in other respects, as we shall see later, he was very much his own man.



THE PROFESSIONAL PLAYWRIGHTS

Among the professional dramatists who had learned their craft in the Jacobean theatre, Philip Massinger—who took over as regular dramatist for the King's Men following Fletcher's death—and his close contemporary John Ford were competent and prolific writers, whose skill lay in their ability to sense and give dramatic shape to the uncertainties of the new reign. As Charles's absolutist ambitions became clearer, 'opposition' began to imply independence not just of means but of ends—not only rejection of a monarch's advisors, but repudiation of the actions of the King himself. The average citizen was beginning to recognize that the patterns of court behaviour and morality were not necessarily either the best or even the most convenient: and the 'accepted order' began to appear neither very acceptable nor even (which to the middle classes was more threatening) capable of maintaining an appearance of social stability.

If Massinger's line of tragi-comedy was less fluent and easygoing than Fletcher's, this was, then, because the self-consciousness to which some critics have objected derived from an uncertainty of values which was entirely characteristic of the age. The alleged prurience of the incest theme in Ford's best-remembered work, 'Tis Pity She's a Whore (c. 1632) reflects a similar sense that new rules mught be needed for new situations: 'unnatural' love may only lead to self-destruction within the constraints of tragedy, but here it is allowed to speak for itself, and threatens to transcend generic as well as moral boundaries.

So Massinger and Ford, familiarly believed to represent a drama in its decadence, may alternatively be understood as theatricalizing their own astonishment at the world they were opening up. If their tragedies and tragi-comedies remain second-rate, as charged by the influential poet-critic T. S. Eliot, it is because the dilemmas they pose are not easily accomodated within the formulaic patterns of those genres—whereas their comedies remain alive (if largely ignored) because here the form gives bewilderment to its own comedic dignity and slightly subversive triumph. Thus, Massinger's best-known work in the genre, A New Way to Pay Old Debts (1825) juxtaposes the conventional expectations of city comedy with the actual sympathies aroused for 'country' values—while The City Madam (1632) is as much a 'problem play' as a comedy proper, its resolution no less ambiguous than that of Measure for Measure. As with so much Caroline drama, one's response depends on whether one feels that the dramatist is purposefully  posing the problem, or compounding it by evasion of the moral issues.

We look separately [below] at the social comedies of James Shirley and Richard Brome—whose usual theatre, the Salisbury Court, played host on occasion to companies otherwise to be found outdoors. Indeed, we find in its repertoire fewer plays calculated to appeal to courtly tastes than we might expect: and it was here in 1635 that Nathaniel Richards's Messalina reached the stage—a play that could be and was interpreted as downright puritanical in its critique of courtly extravagance and the self-indulgence of the rich. Audiences in the Phoenix, too, must have enjoyed the affirmation of mercantile and yeoman values to be found in the plays of Beeston's old colleague, the still prolific Thomas Heywood, who wrote regularly for Queen Henrietta's in the early 1630s.

THEATRE IN THE PROTESTANT CAUSE

Heywood achieved a modest success at court with Love's Mistress in 1634, and, perhaps, in consequence, went on to spend two years with the King's Men, collaborating with Brome on the topical piece The Late Lancashire Witches and the lost but significantly titled The Apprentice's Prize. However, after the plague closure of 1636-37 Heywood seems to have written no more for the stage, though his prose output from then until his death in 1641 shows if anything a final flowering rather than any diminution of his prodigious energies. As titles of pamphlets such as The Black Box of Rome Opened and The Jesuits Taken in Their Own Net suggest, the stalwart old Elizabethan may have decided that pamphleteering was a better way of supporting the opposition. Not all dramatists felt that way, however, and in the course of the 1630s the theatre became increasingly responsive to the concerns of those who were critical of Charles's authoritarian rule.

Among extant plays of that decade, Henry Glapthorne's Albertus Wallenstein thus glorified the protestant cause in its struggles abroad, while an anonymous piece, The Valiant Scot, found an historical analogy for the presbyterian church's defiance of Charles's attempts to impose an Anglican liturgy in Scotland. And the titles of many among the numerous lost plays, particularly from the remaining public theatres—Dekker's Gustavus, King of Sweden, Heywood and Brome's The Wars of the Low Countries, the anonymous Play of the Netherlands—suggest that clear (if sometimes historically analogous) connections were made with current events.

For a few years before the close of 1642, it seemed almost as though the theatre was conspiring to offend the authorities. In 1639 the Red Bull company at the Fortune had been fined and some of its actors imprisoned for performing 'a new old play', now lost, called The Cardinal's Conspiracy, which was said to ridicule the Church—and they proceeded to compound their offence with a revival of The Valiant Scot. Later in the same year Prince Charles's Men were brought before the Privy Council when The Whore New Vamped, an attack on custom-farming, was claimed to have 'reflected upon the present government'. Then, in the following spring, Beeston's Boys at the Salisbury Court staged Brome's unlicensed The Court Beggar, perceived by Charles as an attack upon his expedition into Scotland. The actors, defying a royal command to cease playing, were eventually slapped into prison—along with their manager William Beeston,who had only just inherited the threatre on his father's death in 1638. The trusted Davenant was installed, unsuccessfully and briefly, as manager in his place.

The man responsible for Beeston's imprisonment was the Lord Chamberlain, the Earl of Pembroke—co-dedicatee with his brother of the First Folio of Shakespeare's plays. Symptomatically of the shifting loyalties of the times, Permbroke was himself dismissed in the following year for negotiating and recommending to Charles unacceptable peace terms with the Scots, and for subsequently supporting the impeachment of Strafford. The historian Margot Heinemann actually supects Pembroke of complicity in Christopher Beeston's ousting of Queen Henrietta's Men, and identifies numerous other 'opposition' plays in the repertoire of his 'Boys'.

Even at the respectable Blackfriars, that cautious career-dramatist Shirley can scarcely have been unconscious of the parallels with Laud's downfall in his tragedy The Cardinal of 1641—while in the same year and at the same theatre Jonson's last patron, the Duke of Newcastle, dared in The Variety not only to satirize courtiers but even to parody that last resort of Caroline self-deception, the court masque. By this time, not only were such plays alluding directly or indirectly to the current situation, but ever more explicit dramatic dialogues were appearing in profusion in pamphlet form.

Few of these, perhaps, were intended for performance, but Richard Overton's A New Play Called Canterbury His Change of Diet (1641), does bear marks of having reached the stage: thus, an engraving in the published text, [reproduced alongside], not only depicts Archbishop Laud in company with a mocking stage clown, but imprisons him in a 'property' cage such as revivals of Tamburlaine would have left ready to hand. The 'play' has been aptly compared with the French proto-absurdist Alfred Jarry's Ubu Roi for its blend of broad but biting satire and surreal slapstick (part of the 'diet' that Laud is forced to change is his taste for human ears, poor Prynne's having proved an addictive morsel).

(Illustration:) "A new PLAY called CANTERBURIE His Change of Diet. Which sheweth variety of wit and mirth: privately acted neire the Palace-yard at Westminster. In th' 1st the Bishop of Canterbury having variety of dainties, is not satisfied till he be fed with tippets of mens eares. In th' 2  Act, he hat his nose held to the Grinde-stone. In th' 3 Act, he is put into a birdCage with the Confessor. In th'4 Act, the Jester tells the King the Story. Printed Anno Domini, 1641."

Title page of a pamphlet-play by the puritan satirist Richard Overton, A New Play Called Canterbury His Change of Diet (1641). The woodcut shows the third act, in which the impeached Archbishop Laud and a Jesuit priest are brought on in a 'great bird cage together, and a fool standing by, and laughing at them'. Although the piece is thought by some not to have been intended for the stage, its very brevity suggests its possible use as a jig. Such properties as are required would have been readily available—the cage, for example, from the ever-popular Tamburlaine.

Despite the political confusion—to some extent because of it, in view of the loosening of the censorship it entailed—the season of 1641-42 looked propitious for the theatre. Brome was at the height of his powers as a truly exciting and innovative dramatist, and, although Massinger was recently dead, Shirley was back in London and in harness for the King's Men. Most important of all, the theatre seemed set to exploit its recently discovered potential as an agent for change, not merely a mirror of its causes and effects. Had Charles been reconciled to the political compromise for which all but his extremest opponents were working, it seems at least possible that, so far from dwindling into decadence, the later Caroline theatre would have survived its necessary unshackling from past glories to emerge with a renewed and vigorous sense of purpose.

Social playwrights of the Caroline Theatre:  The critic Margot Heinemann has usefully reminded us that the Mermaid collections which, from their first appearance in the late 1890s until the 1960s, remained the most accessible editions of 'the best plays of the old dramatists' for the average actor, teacher, or student, were at the time revolutionary in their editors' preference for plays which dealt frankly with sexual and emotional relationships. But the 'old Mermaids' often misrepresented a dramatist's full range, overlooking work which illuminated social or political themes—themes which, in the case of Caroline writers, tended better to suit the tight, 'well-made' plot construction of which James Shirley was perhaps the pre-eminent exponent.

Shirley began his theatrical career in 1625 as 'ordinary poet' for Queen Henrietta's Men at the Phoenix, worked in a similar capacity for the first permanent playhouse in Dublin during and after the plague of 1636-37, then returned to London after the death of Massinger in 1640 to fill the same role for the King's Men—a thoroughgoing professional, steadily productive and in continuous employment. Like Davenant, Shirley tends to look forwards rather than back, anticipating the Restoration in distilling the social 'manners' of his times into comedic form—and also, like Massinger, contrasting the values of 'the town' with those of 'the court' and 'the country', investigating and exploiting all these modes of behaviour with a typically Caroline sense of polite shock that there should be alternatives in such matters. 

At his best, as in The Example (1634), Shirley creates a chiaroscuro of local color within the framework of a confessedly mechanical plot. In two plays of 1632, The Ball and Hyde Park, the very titles reflect his discovery and exploration of new venues for social (and dramatic) mingling, away from the conventional confines of City and Whitehall. He writes of a leisured society at ease with itself, but aware of the tensions between classes and sexes, of shifting allegiances—and of the threat to leisure itself as the mark of a gentleman. 

Shirley's steady output averaged two plays a year—and when the reformed company of Queen Henrietta's Men went to the Salisbury Court in 1637, and Richard Brome took over as 'ordinary poet', we know from a lawsuit over his contract that this appears to have been a standard contractual expectation. Brome was less able to sustain such a pace—hence the necessity for the lawsuit—but his output, if less prolific than Shirley's, was in many ways more interesting, and intensely and consistently social in its range. In part for this reason, no doubt, Brome was not even accorded the passing immortality of a Mermaid edition, and his work remains extremely difficult to come by.

Brome was fond of directing satirical jibes not only at the cavalier playwrights and their tricksy staging techniques, but at the political system which the court, in the absence of a parliament, was increasingly assumed to represent. He blended the skill of his olf master Jonson in the depiction of everyday London life with the softer realism of a Dekker, the love of intrigue of a Middleton—and, less expectedly, the capacity of a Shakespeare for showing characters changed by their experiences. Yet his works, so far from seeming derivative, are a higly personal synthesis of their elements—as of others which foreshadow trends instead of following them.

The multiple levels of action in A Jovial Crew (1641) thus anticipate Pirandello in their creation of a complex sense of theatrical illusion—even to the imaginary author who reveals himself at the end. And the therapeutic playacting in The Antipodes (1638) amounts to a seventeenth-century variation upon psychodrama, set in a topsy-turvy world of inverted behaviour. Here, beggars are courtiers, usurers give charity, and ladies learn parrot-fashion—from parrots. Not only does Brome display zestful ingenuity in these carnivalesque inversions, but the juggling of moral values in his anti-London has the purposeful ambiguity of Swift's Gulliver stranded in Lilliput or Brobdingnag.

Others of Brome's plays touch more closely on the immediacies of an actual London where civil war was now imminent—but, almost to the end, not in the least expected. Charles himself saw Brome's The Court Beggar (1640) as a satire on his recent, disastrous Scottish campaign, and the play's depiction of foolish and corrupt courtier makes its own none-too-implicit comment upon the whole panoply of a personal government now in terminal decay.

As it was, the theatres were ordered to be closed immediately after the outbreak of hostilities in August 1642—'while these sad causes and sad times of humiliation do continue'. As this phrasing suggests, it is unlikely that more than a temporary closure—expected by the players to times of plague and during periods of royal mourning—was intended. Often claimed to be the long awaited revenge of rabid puritans, the closure was more probably the precautionary move of a still-moderate parliament concerned to secure the support of the respectable bourgeoisie, and worried by the new role of the public theatres as a mouthpiece for the people—thus potentially encouraging what would have been perceived as mob-rule.

Whatever the cause of the edict, its effect was the cessation of authorized playing for eighteen years. Very soon, this began to create problems for the members of what was now a well-organized profession, heavy with obligations to hirelings and landlords—a plight unavailingly described in a pamphlet of 1643 entitled The Actors' Remonstrance. As another, more satisfied source declared: 'They have beaten them out of their Cockpit, baited them at the Bull, and overthrown their Fortune"—and, it might have added, spun their Globe out of orbit, for its occupants, as befitted King's Men, had early volunteered for Charles's service, and by 1644 their old outdoor theatre had been demolished. In the following year the actors evidently found discretion the better part of loyalty, and threw themselves on the mercy of parliament: they were awarded their back pay, but given no hope for their future.

Yet playacting, despite its loss of legal sanction, did not altogether disappear. The Fortune was raided several times on account of illicit playing,and William Beeston was evidently active at the Salisbury Court at least until 1647, when soldiers broke up a performance of Beaumont and Fletcher's A King and No King. How many move such surreptitious occasions went undetected, and so unrecorded, we have no means of knowing—though the lull between the First and Second Civil Wars in 1647-48 evidently saw a more widespread resurgence of theatrical activity, necessitating a new ordinance to put it down. Eventually, this led to the demolition or wrecking of the interior of all the old playhouses—except, apparently and inexplicably, the Red Bull, which, despite the regular intervention of the authorities, seems to have kept going intermittently almost until the Restoration.

Printed plays, closet dramas, and drolls. One expedient available to dispossessed actors and poets was to publish their plays—which, of course, they could now do free from fear of poaching by their rivals. The clause in Brome's contract that he should not publish his work without his company's consent appears to have been a standard one: thus, typically, none of the plays written by Shirley for the King's Men between 1640 and 1642 was published during those years, but all were brought into print in 1653. And it was presumably to alleviate the hardships of the King's Men that in 1647 they published a folio of plays attributed (with varying accuracy) to the marketable partnership of Beaumont and Fletcher—only the third time, following Jonson and Shakespeare, that writers had been so honoured. Ironically and fruitlessly, the volume was dedicated to the Earl of Pembroke, now firm for the parliamentary cause.

 Numerous 'closet' dramas also found their way into print. Some, like those of the amiably eccentric Duchess of Newcastle, would have been unlikely ever to reach the stage—but others, such as those by Thomas Killigrew (whose long theatrical career began as a dramatist under Charles I), were published only as an unsatisfactory alternative to performance. However, one work which remained unpublished until after the Restoration was The Wits, a collection of brief and usually farcical pieces often taken from longer plays—as was Bottom the Weaver from A Midsummer Night's Dream. Such 'drolls' had come into their own during the interregnum, for they required only a clear space in a tavern or a fit-up stage hastily erected in a public place, and so were much less readily purt down than regular plays. 

The popularity of these pieces may have been in part responsible for the style and flavour of the propagandist playlets which continued to appear either in pamphlet form or in the newspapers or 'mercurys' that in the 1640s had begun to find a ready audience. Often reading like uptated versions of the political moralities of a century earlier,  these were probably written by authors who could also turn their hands to broadside ballads and chapbooks. Whether or not they were performed, outlets for them became severely restricted when unlicensed printing was suppressed in 1649, and only drolls on such age-old themes as sexual gulling and knock-about roguery survived. Although only briefly surfacing within the 'official' culture during this period of political and social ferment, the drolls derived from a popular tradition which predated the interregnum as surely as it was to survive it.

Ironically, the performing art which eventually achieved an official seal of approval under Cromwell's protectorate was aristocratic rather then popular in its origins. Music had always been more acceptable to the puritan mind than the drama, and masques were still occasionally performed—Shirley's Cupid and Death, for example, before the Portuguese ambassador in 1653, and Thomas Jordan's Fancy's Festivals in 1657. Then, in 1657, William Davenant—who, following two years of imprisonment as an active royalist, was seeking to revive his fortunes through his old profession—because the leading and most successful exponent of a new kind of music drama when, in his own home, he staged the so-called First Day's Entertainment at Rutland House.

This served as a dry-run for what turned out to be the first part of his The Siege of Rhodes—usually dignified as the earliest English opera, wihch it accidentally was, since it differed from the masque in that its dialogue was sung throughout. Inigo Jones's pupil, collaborator, and successor John Webb designed the scenery for Davenant's stage in a style which in everything except its domesticated scale anticipated that of the Restoration—as also did the presence of a woman among the amateur cast.

That Davenant was not especially aiming at an operatic format, but at any performing mode which might overcome official objections to the spoken drama, is suggested by his next piece, The Cruelty of the Spaniards in Peru, for which in 1658 he actually obtained authority to refurbish the old Phoenix theatre. This contained juggling, acrobatic, dramatic monologues, and even tight-rope walking within what was in effect a compilation bill—but which won approval by making its political points in conformity, with the anti-Spanish policy of the government. Eventually, by the time Davenant came to write The Second Part of the Siege of Rhodes in 1659, Cromwell was dead, General Monk about to make his move, and a Restoration expected: so Davenant simply reverted to the more traditional dramatic format of his past and many of his future successes.

Throughout the interregnum, there had been prominent support for reopening of the theatres on reformed lines—most notably from the poet and parliamentary supporter John Milton, who even drew up a list of appropriate biblical and historical themes. These would have carried suitable moral messages, sweetened with a few scenes of spectacle and even mild titillation, but were essentially modelled along the neocassical lines he himself later employed for Samson Agonistes (1671). The composer Richard Flecknoe, too, wrote his closet Love's Dominion (1654) as a 'pattern for the reformed stage', which he tactfully proposed as 'an humble coadjutor of the pulpit'.

In the event, of course, 'reform' as it was understood by the returning monarch had to do not with the theatre's moral probity but with putting into effect the continental innovations which had impressed him in exile. As early as 1639, the ubiquitous Davenant had been projecting a scheme for a lavish new playhouse, where 'scenes', previouly only utilized for court performances, might be set—and Charles himself, his reformist and sexual zeal neatly coinciding, was anxious that 'the evil and scandal' of boys appearing in 'the habits of women' should be remedied by the employment of actresses. And so, as the critic John Dennis was later to recall, 'They altered at once the whole face of the stage by introducing scenes and women'.

The Theatre of the Restoration

Samuel Richardson

martes, 3 de diciembre de 2013

Samuel Richardson

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature, ed. Margaret Drabble.

Richarson, Samuel (1689-1761), the son of a joiner, born near Derby, where his parents lived briefly before returning to London. Little is known of his boyhood, but because of his father's comparative poverty he appears to have received (in his own words) 'only common School-learning'. The tradition that he attended either Merchant Taylors' or *Christ's Hospital cannot be substantiated. As a boy he read widely, told stories to his friends, and by the age of 13 was employed writing letters for young lovers. In 1706 he was apprenticed to a printer (as his father could not afford to enter him to the Church), and in 1715 he was admitted a freeman of the *Stationers' Company. He set up in business on his own in 1721, in which year he married Martha Wilde, the daughter of his former master. All his working life he was extremely industrious, and his business prospered and expanded steadily. Like all printers of his time, he combined printing and publishing, producing books, journals, advertisement posters, and much miscellaneous work. In 1723 he took over the printing of an influential Tory journal, the True Briton, and by 1727 was sufficiently established in his profession to be appointed renter warden of the Stationers' Company. In the 1720s and early 1730s he suffered the early deaths of all his six children, and in 1731 that of his wife. He attributed the nervous disorders of his later life to the shock of these deaths. In 1733 he married Elizabeth Leake, the daughter of a fellow printer, and four of the daughters of their marriages survived. In the same year he published his The Apprentice's Vade Mecum, a book of advice on morals and conduct. In 1738 he purchased in Fulham a weekend 'country' house, which he always referred to as 'North End' , and which later became famous for his readings and literary parties. He published in 1739 his own version, pointedly moral, of Aesop's Fables, and more importantly, he began Pamela.

Inspiration for the novel initially came from a series of 'familiar letters' which fellow printers had encouraged him to write on the problems and concerns of everyday life. While these eventually grew into Pamela, they were also published separately as Letters . . . to and for Particular Friends (1741). Pamela was written in two months, between November 1739 and January 1740, and was published later that year, to very considerable acclaim. The morality and realism of the work were particularly praised, as Richardson had hoped. However, complaints of its impropriety persuaded him to revise his second edition considerably. The work had a great vogue abroad, and was soon adapted for the stage in France. Imitations and forged 'continuations' persuaded Richardson to go on with the story, and volumes iii and iv (Pamela II) were published in 1741. In that year, there appeared a stinging parody called An Apology for the Life of Mrs *Shamela Andrews, which Richardson believed to be by Fielding (as it almost certainly was) and which he never forgave. Fielding's *Joseph Andrews, which begins as a parody of Pamela, was published in 1742 but did not affect the popularity of Pamela II.

Richardson's business continued to prosper, although his health was beginning to cause him great concern, and he extended his publications in religion, history, biography, and literature. In 1733 he had begun printing for the House of Commons and in 1742 he secured the lucrative post of printer of its journals. His circle of friends had by now vastly increased, and included many admiring young ladies, known as his 'songbirds' or 'honorary daughters'.

During the writing of *Clarissa, which was probably begun in 1744, he endlessly asked his friends for comment and advice, and read passages aloud to them in his 'grotto' (or summer house) at Norht End. The first two volumes of Clarissa appeared in 1747 and were very favourably received. After heavy revision, and determined efforts to prune, a further five volumes appeared in 1748. Correspondents and the circle of friends continued to grow and now included the *Bluestocking ladies Mrs *Delany, Mrs *Carter, and later Mrs *Chapone. Clarissa was an undoubted success but there were complaints about both its length and its indecency, and it was not reprinted as often as Pamela. However, it also became very popular abroad and was translated into French, Dutch, and German.

Urged by friends, Richardson began thinking, in about 1750, of the portrayal of a 'Good Man'. He asked for the views of his extensive acquaintance and began experimenting with the 'letters' of Harriet, who was to become one of the heroines of his next novels. His illnesses and general malaise, which appear to have included a form of Parkinson's disease, increased steadily but he persevered strenuously both with his business and his writing. His authors in the 1750s included Charlotte *Lennox, Sarah *Fielding, Edward *Young and George *Lyttelton. He had now become friendly with Dr *Johnson, to whose *Rambler he contributed in 1750 and whom he helped with money in 1751. In 1752 Johnson (together with many of Richardson's other friends) read the draft of Sir Charles *Grandison, and Richardson printed the fourth volume of the Rambler. In 1753 he travelled to Bath and Cheltenham, which was as far as he had ever gone, and in 1753-4 he published the seven volumes of Sir Charles Grandison. The book sold well and rapidly became fashionable, but was assailed in various critical pamphlets for length, tedium, and doubtful morality.

In 1754-5 Richardson was master of the Stationers' Company. He published in 1755 A Collection of the Moral and Instructive Sentiments . . . in the Histories of Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison, a book which he considered contained the pith of all his work.  In the same year Dr Johnson published the Dictionary, which contained 97 citations from Clarissa. In 1756  Richardson was asked by *Blackstone for adevice on the reform of the *Oxford University Press. Towards the end of his life Richarson wrote a few 'letters' to, from, and about Mrs Beaumont, a minor character from Sir Charles Grandison, who had been someone of mysterious importance in his early life. He continued to revise his novels heavily, and remained active in his business until his death.

Richarson is generally agreed to be one of the chief founders of the modern novel. All his novels were *epistolary, a form he took from earlier works in English and French, which he appreciated for its immediacy ('writing to the moment' as he called it), and which he reaised to a level not attained by any of his predecessors. The 'letters', of which his novels consist, contain many long transcriptions of conversations, and the kinship with drama seems very strong. He was acutely aware of the problems of prolixity ('Length, is my principle Disgust') and worked hard to prune his original drafts, but his interest in minute analysis led inevitably to an expansive style.

A selection of his letters (6 vols, 1804) was edited by Mrs *Barbauld: see also Selected Letters of Samuel Richardson, ed. J. Carroll (1964). There is a life by T. C. D. Eaves and B. D. Kimpel (1971); see also M. Kinkead-Weekes, Samuel Richardson, Dramatic Novelist (1973); M. A. Doody, A Natural Passion (1974). 






Clarissa: or The History of a Young Lady, an *epistolary novel by S. *Richardson, published 1748 (for 1747)-1749, in eight volumes. About one-third of the work (which is in all over a million words) consists of the letters of Clarissa and Lovelace, mainly written to Anna Howe and John Belford respectively, but there are over 20 correspondents in all, displaying many points of view and variations in style. 


Lovelace, a handsome, dashing rake, is courting Arabella Harlowe, the elder sister of Clarissa. The Harlowes are an acquisitive, ambitious, 'narrow-souled' family, and when Lovelace transfers his affections to Clarissa they decide he is not good enough and that Clarissa must marry the welathy but ugly Solmes, whom she detests. When she refuses she is locked up and humiliated. Lovelace, cleverly representing himself as her deliverer, plays on her fears, convinces her that he is forwarding her reconciliation with her family, and persuades her to escape under his protection to London. There he establishes her in a superior brothel, which she at first supposes to be respectable lodgings. She unwaveringly resists his advances and he, enraged by her intransigence, is also attracted by it and finds his love and respect for her increase. Her emotions are likewise deeply confused; she is fascinated by his charm and wit, but distrusts him and refuses his eventual proposals of marriage. In his growing insistence, Lovelace overreaches himself, interfering with her letters, deceiving her over a supposed emissary from her family, violently assalulting her, and cunningly ensnaring her after he escapes. As she unhappily but stubbornly resists, he becomes more obsessive in his determination to conquer, and makes an attempt to rape her. He claims to believe that her resistance is no more than prudery and that, once subdued, she will turn to him: 'Is not this  the hour of trial—And in her, of the trial of the virtue of her whole Sex, so long premeditated, so long threatened? —Whether her frost be frost indeed? Whether her virtue be principle?' (vol. V, Letter 31). To Clarissa chastity represents identity, and the climax of her tragedy comes when Lovelace, abetted by the women of the house, drugs and rapes her, an event he reports in one of the shortest letters of the work: 'And now, Belford, I can go no farther. The affair is over. Clarissa lives.' (Vol. V, Letter 32). 


Slowly Clarissa loses grip of her reason, and Lovelace realizess that he has lost the very dominance he had hoped to establish. Cut off from family, friends, and even correspondence, Clarissa eventually escapes, only to find herself trapped in a debtor's prison. She is rescued by Belford, who looks after her with affectionate care. Lovelace is overwhelmed by remorse. Clarissa recovers her sanity, but almost ceases to write, and her long decline and Christian preparation for death are reported largely in lettters by Belford. After her death her cousin, Colonel Morden, kills Lovelace in a duel. Because of its great length, the novel has been more admired than read, but it has always been held in high critical esteem; the characters of the protagonists are developed with great sutblety, and the irresolvable nature of their conflict takes on an emblematic and tragic quality unique for its author and its period.

Bibliografía sobre Samuel Richardson

Transcendentalism

martes, 3 de diciembre de 2013

Transcendentalism

From The Oxford Companion to American Literature, by Hart and Leininger.

Transcendentalism,  a philosophic and literary movement that flourished in New England, particularly at Concord (c. 1836-60), as a reaction against 18th-century rationalism, the skeptical philosophy of Locke, and the confining religious orthodoxy of New England Calvinism. This romantic, idealistic, mystical, and individualistic belief was more a cast of thought than a systematic philosophy. It was eclectic in nature and had many sources. Its qualities may be discerned in Jonathan Edwards's belief in "a Divine and Supernatural Light, immediately imparted to the soul by the spirit of God," and the idealism of Channing, whose Unitarianism was a religious predecessor of this belief in an indwelling God and intuitive thought. It was also a manifestation of the general humanitarian trend of 19th-century thought. The name, as well as many of the ideas, was derived from Kant's Critique of Practical Reason (1788), in which he declares, "I call all knowledge transcendental which is concerned, not with objects, but with our mode of knowing objects so far as this is possible a priori." From other German philosophers, such as Jacobi, Fichte, Schleiermacher, Schelling, and Herder, it received impulses toward mysticism and toward practical action as an expression of the will. Through Goethe, Richter, Novalis, and other literary figures, the philosophy was more easily communicated to American authors, and, at second remove, the doctrines of German transcendentalism were reflected in the poetry and criticism of such English authors as Coleridge, Carlyle, and Wordsworth. In addition, the New England Transcendentalist belief was shaped by the ideas of Plato, Plotinus, and such English neo-Platonists as Cudworth and More, as well as by certain aspects of the teachings of Confucius, the Mohammedan Sufis, the writers of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad-Gita, the Buddhists, the eclectic idealist Victor Cousin, the Hebrew and Greek scriptural authors, Thomas à Kempis, Pascal, and Swedenborg.

Although the very spirit of Transcendentalism permitted contradiction, and its eclectic sourdes made for diverse concepts, in its larger outlines the belief had as its fundamental base a monism holding to the unity of the world and God and the immanence of God in the world. Because of this indwelling of divinity, everything in the world is a microcosm containing within itself all the laws and meaning of existence. Likewise, the soul of each individual is identical with the soul of the world, and latently contains all that the world contains. Man may fulfill his divine potentialities either through a rapt mystical state, in which the divine is infused into the human, or through coming into contact with the truth, beauty, and goodness embodied in nature and originating in the Over-Soul. Thus occurs the doctrine of correspondence between the tangible world and the human mind, and the identity of moral and physical laws. Through belief in the divine authority of the soul's intuitions and impulses, based on this identification of the individual soul with God, there developed the doctrine of self-reliance and individualism, the disregard of external authority, tradition, and logical demonstration, and the absolute optimism of the movement.

These primary beliefs varied greatly as they were interpreted in the writings of differnt authors, although the most important literay expression of transcendental thought is considered to lie in Thoreau's Walden* and in such works of Emerson as Nature,* The American Scholar,* the Divinity School Address,* "The Over-Soul,"* "Self-Reliance,"* and "Compensation."* Other members of the informal Transcendental Club* whose prose and poetry expresses similar ideas, included Alcott, Margaret Fuller, the younger W. E. Channing, Ripley, Jones Very, C. P. Cranch, J. F. Clarke, Theodore Parker, Brownson, Elizabeth Peabody, and W. H. Channing. Since there was no formal association, many writers of the time, such as Hawthorne and Julia Ward Howe, were on the fringe of the steadfast believers, and in one way or another the beliefs affected many not usually associated with the movement, including Lowell, Longfellow, Bryant, Whittier, Melville, and Whitman. So far as the movement had a certain voice, The Dial* (1840-44) may be considered its organ, and, although it necessarily remained on an idealistic plane, it was instrumental in the formation of such social experiments as Brook Farm* and Fruitlands.*

Henry David Thoreau

La literatura norteamericana hasta 1800

lunes, 2 de diciembre de 2013

La literatura norteamericana hasta 1800

—según la Historia Universal de la Literatura de Léon Thoorens (1977):

Un eterno comenzar de nuevo

Los norteamericanos exterminaron a los pueblos pieles rojas, compraron un proletariado negro y después de alcanzar prosperidad y poder, intentaron restañar las heridas que sangraban. En realidad, los Estados Unidos han actuado como todas las demás potencias mundiales, pero más tarde. Los demás pueblos, en un pasado que se aleja también, han conquistado, exterminado y esclavizado, y lo consiguieron hasta que elaboraron una moral y un humanismo de alcance universal. América era moral antes de ser poderosa e incluso antes de existir, y en ello acaso radica el fundamento secreto de su orgullo agresivo, de su informe xenofobia, de su generosidad y de su grandeza. Todos los pueblos comentan y juzgan más o menos su destino, pero la autocrítica americana es más violenta, más absoluta y más sincera. Permanece encrespada, desde hace dos siglos, sobre la misma tensión, el mismo diálogo contradictorio, idéntica desilusión y la misma negación al fracaso.

La historia de la literatura norteamericana acaso sea la de esta autocrítica; podría titularse "Avatares de un mesianismo", y como epígrafe: "Matar al profeta es una manera de reducirlo a silencio, pero no sirve para nada si el silencio es peor." De Thoreau a Miller, los profetas lapidados, maldecidos, expulsados y renegados se suceden sin interrupción, pero sus voces resuenan y retumban y Almérica, cansada de seguir tapándose los oídos, acabna por escucharles y quererles.

Los padres peregrinos, huyendo de una Europa anquilosada por el odio, se proponen salvar lo mejor de ella, es decir, los valores humanos y nobles procedentes de Palestina, de Grecia, de Roma, de Irlanda, de Londres y de París —en diversas épocas— y desarrollarlos en una tierra virgen en torno a una Nueva Jerusalén: acabaron construyendo Nueva York. Reconociendo en ella a Babel y a Sodoma, algunos puritanos supervivientes se refugian en los bosques como en el caso de Thoreau, cazan leones en África si se llaman Hemingway o se dedican al erotismo con tentaciones esotéricas como en el caso de Miller. El antiguo narrador Fenimore Cooper llora ante el último mohicano, cantando al último representante de una libertad destruida en nombre de otra libertad. Escritores blancos se tuestan la piel para vivir como los negros, y luego denuncian el escándalo. Saul Bellow se pregunta por qué un país erigido en su mayor parte sobre la base sólida de la ciencia, de la técnica, del arte y de la fe de los judíos, continúa considerando al judío como un extranjero. Otros preguntan dónde está el Arca de la Alianza y la antigua energía. "Nos hemos dormido —dice Dos Passos— y debemos volver a ponernos en camino para encontrar de nuevo el espíritu y el dinamismo creador de los pioneros" [Añado: Y lo mismo dice Martin Luther King en 1960, y lo mismo dice Obama invocando su capital simbólico más de 40 años después — JAGL]

John F. Kennedy, el malogrado presidente, hablaba de una Nueva Frontera, y su hermano intentó ponerla en práctica. Después del asesinato de ambos, el cortejo de los rebeldes crece sordamente y los poetas de protesta empiezan a gritar. De las novelas y poemas de los grandes intelectuales de gafas sin montura, como de las de los cultos vagabundos de la vida bohemia, de los infinitos seriales de la televisión y de las películas de dibujos animados, se desprenden las mismas e ingenuas preguntas: ¿Por qué existe el mal en el mundo; por qué nuestra verdad no es la vuestra, por qué nuestra fuerza no os da miedo; por qué no existe el amor?

Al principio de esta obra se han intentado bosquejar el espquema histórico del comienzo de una explosión hacia el Oeste. Todas las flechas convergerán un día sobre el Atlántico. El país norteamericano es la isla de Robinsón después del naufragio, donde todo debía comenzar de nuevo, pero donde, en realidad, todo continúa: el Nuevo Mundo es menos nuevo de lo que creían, y por ello el estallido presitigioso de la literatura norteamericana, a partir de 1850, constituye con el de la rusa, casi contemporáneo, el fenómeno más importante de la historia de la moderna literatura universal.

El silencio colonial

Ninguna colonia produce literatura original; generalmente se limita a proporcionar cuadros exóticos a los novelistas de evasión y a los apóstoles del imperialismo, y en más raras ocasiones induce a algunas personalidades excepcionales a que acudan a la metrópoli a expresarse. Realizada cualquier colonización, transcurre bastante tiempo hasta que el trauma de la independencia sea superdo.

Esta constante se verifica también en América. Hasta finales del siglo XVIII, aparecen algunos notables escritores, pero ello no constituye en modo alguno una literatura. Los intelectuales, y muy especialmente los del Sur, nadando en dinero y en ocio, permanecen anclados en la literatura inglesa y, si se deciden a escribir, la imitan servilmente. Entre la Declaración de la Independencia y la publicación de las primeras obras con auténtica originalidad transcurre medio siglo como mínimo.

Los señoriales hidalgos del sur se deleitan con los Tottel's Miscellany, con los isabelinos y las colecciones de epigramas, mientras que los puritanos del norte prohíben la difusión de las obras de Milton, a quien acusan de impiedad; sin embargo, serán los puritanos los primeros que lograrán crear el armazón de una incipiente vida intelectual. En 1638, dieciocho años después de la llegada del Mayflower, fundan en Harvard un colegio que adquirió rápidamente categoría de universidad y, en 1647, gracias a una disposición de la magistratura de Massachusetts, se creó una escuela de estudios primarios en cada municipio de cincuenta familias y una de estudios de enseñanza media en cada municipio de cien familias, "para que los conocimientos humanos no queden sepultados en las tumbas de nuestros antepasados".

El cine y algunas novelas históricas modernas han cargado las tintas de modo abusivo al trazar el retrato del antiguo puritano; éste padeció, sin duda, la férula de pastores vigilantes y a menudo feroces hasta la crueldad y el oscurantismo, y que tal vez consideraban que lo único necesario para el hombre era la virtud y que todo corazón carnal debía estar sometido a ella; pero también eran hombres, con necesidades humanas. Hubo ciertamente caza de brujas, aberraciones místicas, terrorismos religiosos que engendraron abominables hipocresías, pero todo esto era lo peor que ofrecía Europa, y de ello procuraron los puritanos desprenderse, conservando, en cambio, lo mejor: la ciencia, las letras, e incluso los poemas, canciones y bailes de la "alegre Inglaterra." En 1639 se inauguraba una imprenta en Nueva Inglaterra, y el primer libro salido de sus prensas, el Bay Psalm Book, tuo el honor de una imitación fraudulenta en Londres.

Apenas se cita y aun de memoria a los primeros escritores neo-ingleses: Roger Williams (1604-1684), autor de una obra de éxito titulada El bautismo no hace al cristiano (1645), y John Eliot (1605-1690), que publicó un gran Tratado sobre el Estado Cristiano (1656). Sería interesante conocer mejor a Anne Bradstreet (1613-1672) y a su contemporáneo el juez Samuel Seewall, de datos biográficos casi desconocidos. Anne Bradstreet, nacida en Northampton (Inglaterra), era esposa de un pastor de Boston, madre de ocho hijos, un poco filósofa y algo más teóloga y poetisa. Su obra La décima musa comprende: "una descripción de los cuatro elementos, las constituciones, las edades del hombre, las estaciones del año, el resumen de las cuatro monarquías —asiria, persa, griega y romana— y un diálogo entre la antigua y la nueva Inglaterra con respecto a las diferencias surgidas recientemente", además de su mejor poema, Contemplations, y otros poemas sobre la familia y el marido de la autora. El juez Seewall parece haber sido un personaje más pintoresco todavía, que escribía su diario al estilo de Pepys, aunque en más noble estilo, en el que alude a sus tres matrimonios y a sus peripecias. Gracias a este diario podemos enterarnos de que en Nueva Inglaterra los pretendientes se hacían el amor dedicándose nada menos que libros piadosos.

FUNDADORES Y ADELANTADOS

Franklin y los comienzos de la Independencia

En el siglo XVIII domina todavía la literatura religiosa. Cotton Mather (1663-1728), profesor, inspector de enseñanza y pastor, es un puritano ortodoxo, valga la expresión, que aparece vivamente interesado en los procesos de brujería, en particular los que se desarrollaron en Salem. Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758), pastor también y discípulo de Locke, lanza un movimiento religioso llamado "El Gran Despertar", cuya doctrina es una modalidad de pietismo calvinista, apareciendo en él la primera manifestación de este misticismo empírico y pragmático, netamente romántico por lo demás, que caracteriza toda una vertiente de la vida religiosa norteamericana, y del que hallaremos notorias manifestaciones más elaboradas en Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman y William James.

A este mezquino inventario de dos siglos hay que añadir todavía al genial, simpático y al propio tiempo aburrido Benjamin Franklin (1707-1790). Hijo de artesanos, autodidacta e incluso tipo de "hombre que se hace a sí mismo", impresor, periodista, editor de la Gaceta de Pensilvania y de un Almanaque ilustrado, inventor del pararrayos, del calorífero, moralista, filósofo, meteorólogo, embajador y agente de "relaciones públicas" de su país en Francia, el enciclopédico Franklin anticipa lo mejor y lo peor del norteamericano futuro, y quizá lo permanente en este tipo humano. Es preciso leer sus memorias, desgraciadamente —o afortunadamente, según se considere— interrumpidas hacia 1757, y si es posible su colección de Ensayos, que agrupa sus principales artículos. Y olvidar, por un momento, que fue un gran hombre de ciencia.

Franklin es puritano y ateo a la vez, inagotable prodigador de consejos, temible inventor de recetas, desbordante de generosidad, de buena voluntad, aunque al propio tiempo rebosante de orgullo, con una ingenuidad con leves ribetes de hipocresía, capaz de concebir grandes pensamientos que rápidamente se abaten a ras de suelo.

Formula las veinticuatro normas de un club del "Mejoramiento Mutuo", que se convertirá más tarde en la Sociedad Filosófica Americana, y se supone fundadamente que tales normas nunca fueron puestas en práctica, pues, a fuerza de observarlas con rigor
al instruirse, formarse o aprovecharse de las buenas ocasiones, los miembros se hubieran convertido en inquisidores y soplones. En sus consejos de conducta a un joven negociante, po ejemplo, todo lo resume en "el tiempo es oro". Justifica los salarios bajos e incluso la miseria de la clase pobre, en nombre de un pretendido beneficio general. Para dormir bien —dice— debe comerse poco, airear la habitación y tener la conciencia tranquila. Para hacer fortuna, objetivo de la existencia humana, es preciso ahorrar dinero, tiempo y energías, y usarlo todo con eficiencia; conviene recoger también los alfileres que se encuentran en el suelo y granjearse amigos, que sean buenos y útiles.

Por otra parte, "Ricardo el Buenazo", como a él le gustaba llamarse, también alude a la dignidad y al deber de ayudar a los países subndesarrollados, en términos definitivos, aunque englobados en un humor pesado y un moralismo mojigato como todo cuanto escribe. Benjamin Franklin parece una mezcla de Homais y Bournisien juntos y parece también iniciar un manantial cuyo curso se desarrolla a través del Dale Carnegie de Cómo tener amigos, el "Rearme moral", las espectaculares Ligas y Sociedades modernas norteamericanas y como ciertas comisiones de encuesta del Senado.

Posteriores a Franklin, y participando en parte de su espíritu, pueden ser citados también los grandes teóricos de la Independencia y de la libertad: Thomas Paine (1737-1809), autor de los Derechos del Hombre (1791) y del Siglo de la Razón (1794); William Ellery  Channing (1780-1842), autor del Exterminador cristiano (1826); y Daniel Webster (1782-1852), padre de la Unión, cuyos discursos, publicados en 1903, amalgaman asimismo la generosidad y el conformismo hipócrita; y John Trumbull (1750-1831), poeta satírico, autor del Progreso de la estupidez (1772), sabrosa caricatura de la pedagogía pedantesca de aquel tiempo.

Sin embargo, todo ello no constituía una auténtica literatura. Los norteamericanos lo sabían y, por otra parte, también públicamente se decía lo mismo, sin ningún miramiento.

Se necesitan escritores

Un crítico del Edinburgh Review, llamado Sydney Smith, que mantuvo polémicas con algunos grandes escritores románticos, escribía en el número de diciembre de 1818: "¿Para qué necesitan los norteamericanos cultivar una literatura, si en su propia lengua pueden aprovecharse de nuestro sentido común, dnuestra ciencia y nuestro genio, y una simple travesía de seis semanas mantiene un seguro contacto? Praderas, barcos de vapor y fábricas de harina: éstos serán los únicos elementos naturales que se ofrecerán a sus miradas durante los siglos venideros. Más tarde, cuando hayan lelgado al océano Pacífico, sin duda se sentirán tentados de nuevo por el teatro, las epopeyas, la lírica y todas las elegantes y viejas consolaciones de un pueblo maduro que ha domado la tierra salvaje y decide dedicarse al reposo y a un ocio sugestivo y encantador."

Conviene fijarse en algunas frases de esta declaración, y ello dispensará de prolongar comentarios que desbordarían el marco de la literatura norteamericana. Tal era la doctrina y la filosofía que los románticos europeos atacaban con encono. Desacorde con la vida europea, lo era mucho más todavía en América; sin embargo, los intelectuales, educados en su mayor parte en la literatura europea, se adherían naturalmente a ella.

Con esta perspectiva deben ser considerados los textos que se citan a continuación. Charles Brockden Brown, al que volveremos a mencionar, escribía en 1800, en su efímero Monthly Magazine:

"Tenemos entre nosotros muchos sastres, carpinteros e incluso abogados; pero ¿tenemos un solo escritor, uno sólo?"

Chateaubriand anota en sus Memorias de ultratumba, con fecha de 1822, y con el texto revisado en 1846:

"La literatura que se cultiva en América no es una literatura independiente y propiamente dicha, sino aplicada a los diversos usos de la sociedad: una literatura de obreros, de marinos y de campesinos."

Por último, Tocqueville, en su obra genial De la democracia en América, que conviene leer para comprender la literatura americana, anota en 1881:

"Les gustan los libros adquiridos sin esfuerzo, que puedan leerse pronto, que no necesiten conocimientos eruditos para ser comprendidos. Piden bellezas fáciles y que puedan ser disfrutadas al instante; prefieren lo imprevisto y la novedad. Acostumbrados a una existencia práctica, impugnada, monótona, necesitan emociones nuevas, de súbito esplendor, verdades o errores brillantes, que les atraigan inmediatamente y las introduzcan de pronto e incluso con violencia en el mismo centro del tema."

Textos que ponen de relieve las abstenciones y las necesidades de un público.

Adelantados de las letras

El primero en intentar responder a estas necesidades fue Charles Brockden Brown (1771-1810). En 1793 abandonó sus estudios de Derecho para vivir de la pluma y publicó algunas novelas. El hombre en su casa (1798), Wieland (1798), Arthur Merwyn (1799) y Ormond (1799), inspiradas en Maturin y Radcliffe, que obtuvieron éxito apreciable incluso en Europa. Sin embargo, Brown abandonó las letras decepcionado por no haber sabido escribir las novelas norteamericanas que soñara y también por considerar la literatura como una afición que debe abandonarse si no se triunfa de una manera absoluta y brillante. Luego se dedicó a los negocios.

No obstante, había iniciado la apertura hacia nuevas posibilidades y fueron novelistas, sobre todo, quienes le imitarion. La más ilustre fue Suzanna Rowson (1762-1824), autora de un libro de gran éxito titulado Charlotte Temple, a Tale of Truth (1810), libro que no puede hallarse hoy en parte alguna, aunque pueden leerse obras de otras autoras como Stephens, Carroll o Andrews, que explotan la misma temática. Estas voluminosas novelas sensibleras y melindrosas, generosas y soporíferas, carecen de valor literario alguno, pero no dejan de tener cierta significación. Sobre temas tradicionales —hijos perdidos, herencias robadas, hijas violadas—, orquestados sobre consabidos arquetipos tales como la joven pura, el pobre honrado y el joven rico y libertino, estos autores, que hacen abstracción de todos sus precursores literarios, por principio o por ignorancia, solian sumirse ingenuamente en una realidad más o menos vivida, si bien transformada por un resignado conformismo.

En el transformo del complejo relato que Stephens cuenta en Opulencia y Miseria, surge Nueva York con su puerto, sus barrios, sus hoteles ya cosmopolitas, su aristocracia del dinero, sus ambiciones de inmensa y devoradora codicia y sus infelices oprimidos; como también la oposición a cualquier injusticia, la firme voluntad de que la virtud sea recompensada e incluso sus manifestaciones de indignación ante las incoherencias de la vida y de los seres humanos, y de desesperación ante la inmensa tarea que se les ofrece a las personas de buena voluntad.

Todo ello no constituía tampoco una literatura, porque América no tenía todavía alma. Un moralista declaró que no la tendría hasta que llegase el momento que se decidiera a "sumirse en los abismos del mal y del dolor."


La marcha hacia el Oeste

El Tratado de Versalles de 1783 doblaba la extensión territorial de la Unión. En poco más de medio siglo, la nueva nación se extendería a través del continente hasta el Pacífico y empujaría al máximo la frontera mexicana. Todos los métodos de adquisición y anexión de territorios fueron utilizados: la pura y simple conquista, la compra más o menos abusiva, la ocupacion de hecho, la coacción, la guerra y el exterminio de indígenas autóctonos. Para percatarse del fenómeno, conviene situarlo sobre un mapa, y recordar que el rectángulo bloqueado por los dos grandes océanos mide aproximadamente [4.500] kilómetros de largo por [2000] de ancho. Visto desde los estados originales de la costa atlántica, ya organizados, con ciudades, campos y tallleres, el Oeste aparecía como una inmensidad abierta y de atrayente vértigo. La expansión se dirige hacia él, organizada a base de compañías, oficinas, exploradores y guías, organizadores, creadores, parásitos.

En la Antigüedad, griegos, romanos, francos y mongoles avanzaban bastante al azar; pero en América, aunque los individuos improvisen y cada compañía actúe exclusivamente en interés de los suyos, una lógica de carácter superior le proporciona a este movimiento humano una coherencia y una continuidad asombrosas, y crea también una comunidad en las responsabilidades que casi nadi rehuye.

El emigrante procede de Inglaterra o de Irlanda, y muy pronto en grandes oleadas, de los demás países europeos, y acto seguido es atrapado por el siniestro engranaje de la fiebre del oro o de la adquisición de una gran fortuna y de la pasión conquistadora. Llegan aventureros ávidos de emociones fuertes, de dinero o de poder, y también familias honradas, campesinos o artesanos, eternos oprimidos que huyen de la miseria, la intolerancia y del odio racista. Como el viejo Johnson, jamás han tenido en sus manos un fusil, ni se han enfrentado con el desierto, pero después de haber vagado algún tiempo por el litoral y haber respirado el aire de libertad, de activismo, de la increíble hazaña al alcance de la mano, que estimula energías, en las ciudades-hongo, se sumergen en lo desconocido, alimentando con sus ilusiones personales el sueño de una nación en marcha. Cómplices quizá inconscientes del exterminio del indígena, y de la explotación humana en el Sur, importador de la esclavizada carne de ébano.

Las novelas de las praderas y el cine han tratado, hasta vulgarizarlo y aniquilarlo, este tema heroico: el carromato ambulante, los viajeros vestidos a la europea, las mujeres que adquieren de repente costumbres absurdas; y ante ellos el indio piel roja perfilándose hierático en la cima de una colina; jinetes con extraño vestuario y armados hasta los dientes, levantando una nube de polvo; el fuego de un campamento en medio de un claro del bosque; aulllidos de animales desconocidos; el sueño de una tierra prodigiosamente fértil; el desaliento del débil; el recurso al ron, al juego y al mito del oro que se recoge a montones... Y en el trasfondo de esta América en movimiento, sublime y criminal a la vez, inconsciente y heroica, se afirma y consolida la América sedentaria, la cabeza de puente de la emigración, puritana y hacendosa, superindividualista y comunitaria, compartida entre la Biblia y el libro de ingresos en caja, humilde y orgullosa, feliz y herida en el alma, confiada y desesperada.

En este paisaje humano contradictorio y atormentado deben situarse las necesidades y los gustos definidos anteriormente, a los que responderá, entre 1820 y 1860, la primera oleada de "escritores fundadores". Resumiendo en esquema este extraordinario estallido, podemos anotar la primera publicación de los diez mejores escritores, incluyendo al primer historiador de la Unión:

1819 Libro de ensayos, de W. Irving.
1823 Los pioneros, de F. Cooper.
1827 Poemas, de E. Poe.
1834 Historia de los Estados Unidos, de Bancroft
1836 Naturaleza, de Emerson
1840 Baladas, de Longfellow
1846 Typee, de Melville
1849 Una semana en los ríos, de Thoreau
1850 La letra escarlata, de Hawthorne
1851 La cabaña del tío Tom, de Beecher-Stowe
1855 Hojas de hierba, de Whitman

Estas obras no aparecen en pleno desierto, pues la vida intelectual es mucho más animada de lo que podría creerse, en Nueva Inglaterra principalmente. Desde mediados del siglo XVII existen importantes librerías, imprentas, periódicos semanales y compañías de teatro ambulantes; estas últimas, en el Sur exclusivamente, pues el puritanismo nordista juzgaba que "la afición al teatro no significa otra cosa que la pérdida de este tesoro inestimable que es el alma inmortal."

A mediados del siglo XVIII, principalmente bajo la influencia del Spectator de Addison y Steele, la actividad literaria aumenta todavía más y los semanarios llevan a cabo una apertura a la literatura europea. Por ejemplo, La ópera del mendigo aparece publicda por entregas; algunas compañías teatrales representan por doquier repertorio inglés, aunque también llevan a escena, circunstancialmente, a oscuros comediantes neo-ingleses. Pese a que escasean los escritores originales, innumerables publicistas dan a la luz pública artículos, libelos y cartas abiertas sobre todos los temas, en hojas sueltas o en los periódicos, que se multiplican a un ritmo significativo. En 1800 pueden contarse 200 de eyos, 375 en 1810, y 1200 aproximadamente en 1835.

Esta última fecha señala el momento decisivo del período 1820-1860. Los territorios anexionados—los dos tercios de los Estados Unidos actuales—están ya ocupados o al menos virtualmente dominados. América se percata de que empieza a tener ya una historia, y algunos se ufanan de elo, interpretándola a su manera. Este aislacionismo previo carece de fundamentos todavía. Al tropezar con nuevos obstáculos, al plantearse nuevos desafíos geográficos y humanos, el ovimiento de expansión se exacerba, hacia 1845, hasta adquirir un cariz neto y lucidamente imperialista. Por otra parte aparece una filosofía trascendentalista que sucederá a un puritanismo ya trasnochado. Antes de los colosos de las letras —Melville, Thoreau y Twain— destacan algunos aristócratas y románticos que siguen una moda. 
 

Washington Irving (Ruland & Bradbury)

Washington Irving (Ruland and Bradbury)

lunes, 2 de diciembre de 2013

Washington Irving (Ruland & Bradbury)

From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History of American Literature, by Richard Ruland and Malcolm Bradbury (1991)

The quest for a native American novel progressed slowly. It moved from Philadelphia to other Eastern seaboard cities as Boston, Charleston and New York developed mercantile classes with intellectual asd artistic as well as economic and political aspirations. The Knickerbocker scene which had nourished the essay and poetry turned as well to the fictional forms, and found its voice in Washington Irving. The Golsmithian essays Irving wrote with Paulding as the Salmagundi papers established him as a New York wit, but his reputation was made with his "comic history of the city," A History of New York . . . by Diedrich Knickerbocker (1809), a work of mock-learning and literary parody much admired for its technical skill and wit by Scott, Byron and Coleridge. Irving's prose was neoclassical, but his sensibility half-Romantic. He was drawn by Scott and Campbell, excelled in inventing comic personae and yet had an appreciative sense of the melancholic and picturesque. His style was a search for a balanced voice that would let him be both American and European, let him comically report his own age yet reach for the "legends" of the past. A youthful Grand Tour through Europe educated him in Romantic sensations; and it was to Europe he returned, after the War of 1812, in an attempt to heal the widening political and literary breach, establish himself in the literary profession and resolve the manifest problems of the American writer.

In 1815 he sailed for Liverpool, settling in Britain first in an attempt to rescue the family business, then to try to live by writing in the world of the English Romantics. Scott received him generously, and at Abbotsford he read the German Romantic folktale writers. The British too were looking back to the Romantic past, as industrialism thrived during the peace that followed Napoleon's defeat at Waterloo. As the Battle of the Quarterlies raged, British magazines mocked American aspirations for an independent literature: "in the four quarters of the globe, who reads an American book?" demanded Sydney Smith. But almost single-handedly, Irving seized the moment and reversed the condescension with the essays, sketches and stories of The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-1820), Bracebridge Hall (1822) and Tales of a Traveller (1824), which appealed enormously to British and American audiences alike. Irving cast himself as a romantic traveler who makes his sketches, essays and vignettes, or collects his fables, as he passes from place to place, observing the picturesque and the historical, the ivy-covered ruin, the falling tower, the "mouldering pile." In Romantic fashion, he polarized the activities of the imagination, dividing them between Europe and America. Europe was the past, the poetic, the timeless, the mythical; indeed in a sense it was living Romanticism, a depository of the antique, the exotic, the traditional, "storied association." America was the present, rushing, potential, time-bound, political, it was in a state of literary promise, with its prodigious but still unwritten and unfelt grandeur of prairie, river, mountain and forest. In the center is Geoffrey Crayon, the traveler-painter hunting each nook and cranny that calls forth a sensation and a sketch, turning Europe's romanticism back on itself by giving European and American readers alike the history they were beginning to crave in an age of rising industrialism and entrepreneurship.

Irving was the American writer as ambassadorial expatriate. In May 1815, he began a seventeen-year Europan residence that would take him over the landscape of the new Romanticism in Britain, France, Germany and Spain and establish fresh links between American writing and European tradition. His response to this romanticism was half accepting, half ironic, but it led him toward a historical mythology of American life. In Volney's Ruins, translated by Thomas Jefferson and Joel Barlow in 1802 as a radical text, the French writer had associated moldering civilization with political decline. Irving associated it with art itself; the Europe he pains is a timeless human past, stable and engaging, a picturesque paradise rooted in custom and peasant ways and scarcely tourched by modern industrialism or expansion. His essays recognize political antagonism and social change but emphasize the need for the imagination as an aid to reconciliation, "looking at things poetically rather than politically." We can sense an element of evasion in this, and he himself admitted this was a "light" Romanticism, not much more than "magic moonshine." But America needed a legendary past, and he went on to collect it from many European sources, working deliberately to construct a new sense of world landscape for the American imagination. He gathered folktales from the Germany of Tieck and Jean Paul (J. P. F. Richter); in Spain, in addition to writing Legends of the Alhambra (1832), he rewrote the Columbus legend, thereby providing another triangulation for American experience. The influential American historians of the time—Prescott, Ticknor, Everett—were cosmopolitanizing themselves in the same way, turning to Europe to give the United States a significant history. Irving likewise defined a set of references that would relate the European Romantic past to a fresh American present, providing an imaginative geography that would shape much later American  writing, as well as much American tourism.

Most of Irving's writing was about Europe—as if this had become the required material for the American artist seeking to recover the Romantic past from whence art sprang—but he did set a few tales, now his most famous, in the United States. "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," both in the Sketch-Book, have become classics of American folklore. They were in fact conscious endeavors to transport elements of the European folk tradition to American soil and are adaptations of German folktales, transposed to a "timeless" European part of America, the Dutch-American villages of the Hudson River Valley, the heart of the American picturesque. He sets them there, as he says in his own voice in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," because

population, manners and customs remain fixed; while the great torrent of migration and improvement, which is making such incessant changes in other parts of this restless country, sweeps by them unobserved. They are like those little nooks of still water which border a rapid stream, where we may see the straw and bubble riding quietly at anchor, or slowly revolving in their mimic harbor, undisturbed by the rush of the passing current.

 It is this ahistorical and apolitical sleepiness that, to Irving,  offers the possibility of legend, a view he shared with the German Romantics he imitated. Even so, the "passing current" does enter the stories. Rip Van Winkle steps out of society into twenty years of timelessness when, in the Catskill Mountains, he meets the ghostly drunken revelers from Henry Hudson's crew who lull him into a long slumber with a flagon of magic wine. His sleep takes him through the greatest American change of all, the Revolution; and when he returns to his village its old sleepiness has gone, replaced by disputation, politics and historical motion. But Irving's theme is not political; what the Revolution frees Rip from is "petticoat government," for his shrewish wife has died. Like Irving himself, Rip can now become a legend-maker, telling tales of the world before the war, transmuting history into myth. Rip makes legends; Ichabod Crane, in "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," becomes their victim. This classic Yankee entrepreneur chases a rich heiress and her prosperous farm but is, ironically, cheated into seeing a ghost and losing his fortune through the belief in magic he has drawn from "Cotton Mather's history of New England witchcraft."

For an America without a written folk tradition, Irving provided essential material, the stuff of much future tall tale; here were stout Dutch burghers, backwoodsmen, Yankee peddlers, henpecked males and their garrulous wives, male dreams of freedom and space. His tales—he planned one novel but never wrote it—were his main contribution, a durable invigoration of the Romantic and the popular tradition of American fictional writing. But it was European distance that had added glow to his materials, as he found when, in 1832, he came back to America, a fêted author with a great European reputation, to face contemporary American history in the changed world of Jacksonian, westward expansion and commercial specualtion. In this world the eastward Grand Tour was being replaced by a Western one which led not to civilized but to natural wonders, an American scene being written in many literary languages. William Bartram's influential Travels (1791) had explored American landscape as romantic grandeur. Timothy Dwight's Travels in New England and New York, 1769-1815 (1821-22) had seen nature as the field of improvement and subjected the regrettable prevalence of forest to the standards of clearing and cultivation. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark had, in their record of an adventurous continental exploration, Journals (1814), added new language of description and scientific report. John James Audubon was giving an extraordinary narrative and visual record of the birds and animals of the continent. And so this America was now available to Irving's touring, his sentimental associationism, his sense of the sublime.

This native landscape became the theme of his later books, his "Westerns": A Tour of the Prairies (1835), Astoria (1836) and The Adventures of Captain Bonneville, U.S.A. (1837). The first is his Geoffrey Crayon tour to the "untrodden" frontier where the Indians were being driven from their homelands, but the book simply reveals how hard it was to render the West and the prairies—"For shich the speech of England has no name," Bryant had written—in the language of the European Grand Tour. Indians romantically became Arabs and gypsies, the unwritten mountains European Gothic cathedrals, and though the North American Review parised Irving for "turning these poor barbarous steppes into classical land," they remain, for Irving, in a state of curious vacancy. Something of the reason for this is apparent in the other two books, which were commissioned works. This nature is not innocent, but space for entrepreneurship, and Irving was never interested in the paradoxes and contradictions, the present troubles of history. Astoria really celebrates New York commercial intervention and the development of the West in its account of John Jacob Astor's monopolizing of the fur trade in the Pacific Northwest, and Captain Bonneville is the similar story of the famous soldier-explorer staking claims to American lands. These are minor works, and Irving seemed to know it, returning to Europe again as minister and ambassador in high government posts and doubting the durability of his talent. What these late works show is the difficulty faced by those seeking the tone and shape of American narrative in the opening world of American nature, exploration and mercantilism. They reveal the West not only as a social and political but as a linguistic and literary frontier.

It was a quite different writer who was to take on those social and narrative implications most directly and thereby point the direction of American fictional maturity. (...)

James Fenimore Cooper