Literatura y crítica

H. G. Wells, en guerra con el mundo

25/11/12

 

Un biopic de la BBC:

She Stoops to Conquer

sábado, 24 de noviembre de 2012

She Stoops to Conquer

Tom Davis's introduction to Oliver Goldsmith's play (E. Benn / Norton, 1979)
 

The Author

Oliver Goldsmith was born an Irishman, the second son of a not very affluent clergyman, probably in the village of Pallas, County Westmeath, probably in 1730. Soon afterwards the family moved to the village of Lissoy, one of the candidates for the role of Auburn in Goldmith's famous pastoral The Deserted Village. The intensity of the longing for the idealized village of the poem is mirrored by the intensity with which Goldsmith attempted to desert his own village background: as an entrant to Trinity College, Dublin (1745); in two attempts to emigrate to America; in a flight to Dublin, intending to study law in London (both in 1750-52); finally, and successfully, as a medical student at the university of Edinburgh (1752). He stayed there two years, in considerable poverty—his extravagance not being met by his only source of income, a small allowance from his uncle—before the urge to travel took him, without a degree and after what can only have been a superficial education in medicine, for a by no means grand tour of Europe. Not much is known of his travels, except for the probably rather fictitious accounts given by Goldsmith himself; he seems to have visited Flanders, France, Germany, Switzerland, and Italy, living (as he was always to do) on the edge of destitution. He survived, to emerge in London in 1756, trying one job after another to subsist. Apothecary's assistant, unsuccessful (and unqualified) physician, possibly proof-reader, certainly an usher in a boy's school.

Gradually, however, he felt his way into the literary life. In 1757 he was writing articles on a regular basis for the Monthly Review, and earning a steady and reasonable income from it; by 1762 he had established himself as a writer worth respecting, with a wide set of friends in the literary world, including Samuel Johnson, whose career had run somewhat parallel to his. Although in 1760 he was earning the comfortable salary of £100 a year for writing two articles a week for John Newbery, these being the letters of a fictitious Chinaman reporting his amusing and penetratingly naïve impressions of England, he remained constatnly in debt, his money draining away on gambling (which he was very bad at), elaborate and rather tasteless clothes, and other extravagances. In 1762 Newbery became his patron, landlord, and banker, and made him a strict allowance, to be debited against the credit earned by work done. This action explicitly acknowledged him to be the foremost journalistic talent in the stable of one of the most prominent publishers of the day, and worth the investment of a shrewd businessman. He took at this point another crucial step: he signed a contract for a Survey of Experimental Philosophy; that is, in order to make immediate money he was prepared to use the distinctive assurance and clarity of his prose style in producing compilations, translations, and other hack productions on matters of popular interest: a History of England (1764), a Roman History (1769), another History of England (1771), and the posthumously published Grecian History and History of the Earth and Animated Nature (1774). His life was to be bedevilled by debt, squandered advances, deadlines, and undone work; this is why, out of the voluminous quantity of his writings, relatively little is read now.

In 1764, however, he produced a major poem: The Traveller, or a Prospect of Society, a meditative account of his own wanderings in Europe. This piece was, remarkably, the first he had published under his own name, and it brought him fame, respect, and adulation. He was an eminent man; a founder-member, for instance, of what is still one of the most exclusive clubs in London: Dr Johnson's Club, whose membership has included most of the most eminent, witty, and talented people of their day. Reynolds (who became Goldsmith's closest friend), Sheridan, Gibbon, Burke, Fox, Garrick, Boswell, and so on for a long list.

In 1766 The Vicar of Wakefield was published. This wry, charming, and subtle tale, the Book of Job absurdly retold as comedy, whose sale had been used by Johnson to rescue the author from the bailiffs, was eventually to achieve an international fame, in spite of its authro's lack of confidence in it and its hasty and patched-on ending; but not the kind of immediate pre-eeminence and financial security that Goldsmith required.

The other route to such quick returns was through the theatre. Goldsmith's careeras a playwrigth began with the first performance of The Good Natured Man early in 1768. The death of Newbery the previous December had made the need for wealth more pressing, but this rather feeble and ungainly comedy was a disappointingly moderate success.

In the last six years of his life he produced three important works of literature. The first was the nostalgic and rather sentimental pastoral The Deserted Village (1770); it is his most famous poem, but its value has slackened as the romanticism that brought it forth has ebbed and been replaced. The last was his Retaliation, written about two months before his death and posthumously published in 1774. To my mind it is his best poem: a satire on the set of literary friends to which he belonged, remarkable, like all of his best work, for its amalgam of kindness and telling, perceptive irony. And, thirdly, a year before he died, his best work and his only other play: the unique comedy, She Stoops to Conquer.

Goldsmith wrote the play in the summer of 1771, again under the pressure of debt, again attempting to catch at the golden and instantaneous rewards of a successful play. He had great difficulty in getting it staged, largely owing to the resistance of Colam and Garrick, the managers of London's two principal theatres. They thought that the play'0s overt attack on prevailing theatrical fashions made it too much of a risk. Garrick 'bought himslef off by a poor prologue' (1) and Colman, eventually, reluctantly, put it on, at Covent Garden. The first night was at the tag-end of the season (15 March); leading actors had refused parts in it; the props and costumes were second-rate; and Colman had made no secret of his expectation that it would be damned. It was not. The first night audience was ecstatic, and audiences ever since have continued to laugh. The play has appeared in some three hundred different editions since 1773 and, since then, has been revived in the West End approximately once every three years, and alomost constantly in provincial theatres (2). It must be the most popular play outside Shakespeare.

Goldsmith, though temporarily exhilarated by its success, and the five hundred pounds that came with it, had no idea what he had created. He was soon submerged again in debt and depression, which did not leave him until his death in April 1774, This was tinged, like his life, with farce: his last act as a 'Doctor' was to poison himself, inadvertently, by persistent use of the wrong medicine. He left debts of £2,000.


Sources

Goldsmith's sources for She Stoops to Conquer were absurdly numerous. He was throughout his life an unscrupulous 'borrower' of other people's writings, and it is clear that his imagination needeed the stimulus of raw material for re-working. For instance Marivaux's Le Jeu du Amour et du Hasard (1730), besides several explicit verbal parallels, has the heroine change places with her maid in order to assess her intended husband without him knowing it. Farquhar's The Beaux' Stratagem (1707) also has a number of textual similarities, and (among other, larger, parallels) , the wooing of the barmaid Cherry by the gentleman-in-disguise Archer is strikingly similar. Ginger (3), Goldmith's latest and best biographer, thinks (wrongly, I believe) that the play was based so closely on Bickerstaffe's recent and successful opera Love in a Village (1762) as to amount to evident and obvious plagiarism. And so on; Hamlyn (She Stoops to Conquer: The Making of a Popular Success, pp. 1-54) lists (selectively) over forty sources that have been suggested for lines, scenes, incidents, characters, or the entire structure. The proliferation of sources devalues the enterprise of discovering them. None of these candidates comes very near suggesting Goldsmith's unique play.

She Stoops to Conquer was, however, and in a rather different way, dependent on other plays. It was written as an attack on an important eighteenth-century theatrical movement: that known as Sentimental Comedy. This aspect of the play is important, and has never been treated in sufficient detail.



The play

She Stoops to Conquer is outstandingly a play that has survived and cast off its context. It is extraordinarily accessible, and has been popular for this (and other) reasons for 200 years. But the prologue, dedication, and epilogues proclaim that it was written as an attack on a specific and allegedly predominant theatrical genre; and its contermporary reception gives ample support for this view. Moreover, the text of the play contains specific parodies of this genre, and while these parodies remain marvellously and independently absurd for the vast majority of readers and audiences who have never read the minor comedy of the eightteenth century that is under attack, it is worth re-locating this play in this context, if only because such a comparison leads in to a more general consideration of the play's structure and chief concerns.

The genre under attack is that of Sentimental Comedy. What does this mean? From the play and its prologues and epilogues we can gather what Goldsmith and Garrick thougth it meant, at least:

1. It is moral comedy: it tends to rejoice in moral statements or 'sentiments' (Prologue, lines 25-30).

2. It is non-naturalistic ('Faces are blocvks, in sentimental scenes') Prologue, line 24.

3. It relies upon 'high-life scenes' and titled characters (Second Rejected Epilogue, ll. 33-6).

4. It is genteel comedy, without recourse to depicting 'low' characters or situations (I.ii, 35-45).

Goldsmith's short 'Essay on the Theatre; or, a Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy' (4), which was published two monthes before She Stoops to Conquer and was clearly intended to prepare the way for that play, adds the following:

5. insipid dialogue

6. 'pathetic' scenes, in which we are invited to weep, rather than laugh.

7. 'good, and exceedingly generous' characters (p. 212).

Finally, we can add two more general characteristics that this list doesn't specify:

8. Sentimental Comedy is benevolent; its laughter is sympathetic rather than satiric, it depends on the notion that human nature is fundamentally good, or at least easily corrigible. Its villains are few, and the end of the play brings them (sometimes with alarming suddenness) to reform.

9. Finally, it is the comedy of sensibility; it rejoices in exhibiting in its characters a noble delicacy of sentiment, an emotional refinement often close to the modern pejorative use of 'sentimentality'.

This, then, is how people viewed the genre in 1773. It is easy to see these categories as a reaction against Restoration Comedy, conceived of as licentious, satiric, amoral, witty, often cruel, explicitly sexual, and, primarily, very funny. The problem, however, is that these categories do not hold as a simple binary opposition to characterize the plays of the 1760s and 1770s; on the one hand, Sentimental Comedy, on the other, Laughing Comedy, as exemplified by Goldsmith's play (5). She Stoops to Conquer, for instance, simply does not embody solely a set of oppositions to these categories. Marlow, when he is reduced to inarticulacy by talking to Kate, produces a parody of moral 'sentiments' (no. 1): for instance, 'The folly of most people is rather an object of mirth than uneasiness' (II.i, 418-19). But he is also capable of saying, as Kate is making the transition from barmaid to her own natural character,

I can never harbour a thought of seducing simplicity that trusted in my honour, or bringing ruin upon one, whose only fault was being too lovely . . .  I owe too much to the opinion of the world, too much to the authority of a father, so that—I can scarcely speak it—it affects me (IV.i, 226-9, 242-4)
 

—thus giving voice to 'sentiments' (no. 1), the pathetic (no. 6), a rather mawkish goodness and generosity (no. 7), a certain insipidity (no. 5) and artificiality (no. 2), 'benevolent' corrigibility (no. 8), and, above all, sensibility (no. 9). A number of the scenes with Hastings and Miss Neville, particularly their reform, apparently exhibit most of these characteristics. If we add to this the fact that Marlow's father is titled (no. 3) and that most of the characters are genteel, and belong to the leisured gentre (no. 4), we have (by a process of ruthlessly partial selection) found all of the 'Sentimental' characteristics in this 'Laughing' comedy.

What sense, then, can we make of the distinction? Firstly, there was inded a looser genre called Sentimental Comedy, that gave birth to a number of plays throughout the eighteenth century, though not a predominant number, and which was characterised by some or most of the eight characteristics (exceopt, curiously, the reliance on titled characters [no. 6], which Goldsmith seems to have been deceived about). Its leading exponents were Cibber, Woodfall, and Kelly; no one but specialists now reads these plays. Goldsmith was reacting against something. Secondly, while the play evinces these characteristics to some extent, it also contains reactions against them; it operates, not only by parody, but by self-parody. It is as if Goldsmith sets up an opposition within the play between sentimentalism (as defined above) and its opposites: Restoration comedy, satire, and farce. From the clash between the two he effects a synthesis, that we can identify as a comedy that both contains and transcends the limitations of these genres.

The farcical element has always hindered the appreciation and understanding of She Stoops to Conquer. Is its continued popularity solely because it is a very funny play, or is there more to it than that? Literary criticism, which is not designed to cope with humoiur, has largely ignored it (6), thus assenting to the former view. This, too, was the reaction of the play's contemporary audience. 'The audience are kept in a continual roar' said the Morning Chronicle (7); and Samuel Johnson said that he knew any 'comedy for many years, that has answered so much the great end of comedy—making an audience merry' (8). But comedy is not solely defined by laughter; if this is all, then Horace Walpole's savage comments have some force: 'Whay play makes you laugh very much, and yet is a very wretched comedy?  . . . the drift tends to no moral, no edification of any kind' (9). In other words, as the March issue of the London Magazine remarked, since 'consistency is repeatedly violated for the sake of humour . . . in lieu of comedy he has sometimes presented us with farce'. And this, in general, is the view that has prevailed ever since: enshrined in the critics' silence and the audience's laughter, the suspicion that the play is nothing but a highly successful farce.

I believe, and hope to show, that this is not so. It is easy to see why it came about. Goldsmith—and his audience—were reacting against self-consciously moral comedy, and the opposite of that is farce, which we can define as a mixture of ludicrous improbabilities and (as far as possible) a lack of moral concerns. The audience, and critics since, reacted too far, and identified the play with farce (10), but Goldsmith did not (11). The play does borrow from this genre, and continually flirts with it; its prime achievement as theatre is its energy, its pace; the action, and the laughter, never let up, and the play's timing in this respect is superb. It is the timing of good farce. But consider, for instance, the most nearly farcical moment in it, when Tony Lumpkin has persuaded his mother (soeaked up to her waist in mud) to hide at the bottom of her own garden from her own husband as a highwayman. This, we may note, is the classical stratagem of farce, much of whose comic tension iss in the tricks to get people out of the way so that the subterfuges are not brought to light. The urgent absurdity of the action hurries the audience past this in a gale of laughter, and thus it is easy to miss one crucial and rather poignant point: Mrs Hardcastle is the only unsympathetic character in the play—resolutely so, and irredeemably; she will not reform at the end. This is appropriately unsentimental; but nonetheless this absurd 'humours' character is given depth. She is prepared, with some heroism, to give up her life for her son. 'Take my money, my life, but spare that young gentleman; , spare my child' (V.ii, 113-14), she screams, and the audience laughs at the farcical release of tension as the subterfuge is discovered; thus we miss her moment of grace. The most apparently farcical moment in the play also reveals a disturbing moral ambiguity: this overpoweringly selfish and vain woman has a completely selfless love for her 'graceless varlet' of a son. Goldsmith's joke is at the expense of those who cannot perceive it.

Another way in which the play contains Sentimentalism but expands beyond it is in its attitude to 'sentiments', the sententious sayings identified with Sentimental Comedy. As we have seen, Marlow has a rather tedious tendency towards them; Hardcastle, too, is prone to such attitudes: 'I could never teach the fools of this day, that the indigent world could be clothed out of the trimmings of the vain' (I.i, 92-4) and again 'modesty seldom resides in a breast that is not enriches with nobler virtues' (I.i, 134-5). But, as we have already seen with Mrs. Hardcastle, it is important to the play's method to induce a double attitude towards its characters: neither the simplicities of farce nor the banalities of moralizing, but the reflexive subtleties of comedy. Hardcastle is a sympathetic character, as we see in the loving mutual mockery and mutual respect of his conversations with his daughter (e.g. I.i, 90-146), and his resigned affection for his appalling wife. But he is also absurdly pompous and complacent. He is punished for it by being roundly put down by Marlow, but the seeds of this comic retribution are already present in these two tendentious 'sentiments'. After all, it is his peculiar insistence on Kate waring a plain dress that furthers the illusion that his house is an inn—to his discomfort (and, by another twist, to the play's happy resolution); and his remarking that modesty necessarily involves nobler virtues becomes a resounding dramatic irony at his expense when we consider what terrible things the undeniably modest Marlow is about to say and do to him.

Even Hastings and Miss Neville are, finally, subject to this ironic double perception. They are the weakest part of the play; they only seem to come alive as foils, Hastings to Marlow, Neville to Kate, and both (their main purpose) as pawns to be shoved enthusiastically around by Tony Lumpkin; Hastings's (sentimenal) remark 'Perish the baubles! Your person is all I desire' (II.i, 345) is one of the very few unspeakable lines in the entire play. Theri sub-plot is the essence of sentimental fiction, and so is their language. Miss Neville refuses to elope, for two reasons; one is realistic: 'My spirits are so sunk with the agitations I have suffered, that I am unable to face any new danger' (V.ii, 145-7). Considering that she has undergone precisely the same torments which Lumpkin has put his mother through—which Hastings, incidentally, seems to find rather funny (V.ii, 28)—this is understandable. However, the second reason is what the audience should be paying attention to: 'No, Mr Hastings; no. Prudence once more comes to my relief, and I will obey its dictates. In the moment of passion, fortune may be despised, but it ever produces a lasting repentance' (V.ii, 154-7). This curious mixture of moralizing and prudentiality is precisely the material of Sentimental Comedy, and the unpleasantly tatctical humility is continued in their repentance speeches to the assembled elders. It is clear that Goldsmith is being (not uncharacteristically) careless about the peripheral details of his plot; one recalls his remark in his 'Comparison between Laughing and Sentimental Comedy', that the latter is 'of all others, the most easily written' (12). However, the play, almost at the last minute, redeems itself, with an extraordinary wrench. Mrs Hardcastle's comment on this is 'Pshaw, pshaw, this is all but the whining end of a modern novel' (V.iii, 129-30). The play is avowedly against the sentimentality that Hastings and Neville represent but the criticism, which specifically refers their behaviour to the literary genre, is put into the mouth of the play's only villain. Again, and this time with startling abruptness, the paly turns on itself, its apparent simplicities becoming duplicity. it is, after all, a play about disguises; every important character in it at some point tells lies. The play also disguises itself, retreating behind these masks, leading us, as Marlow is led, by lies towards a recognition of our own complacencies.

The clearest instance of this mockery of the (London, sophisticated) audience is in the scene at the Three Jolly Pigeons. The audience, like the two gentlemen down from London, is introduced to the world of pastoral, in its role as mocking mirror of the securities of the metropolis, and both find it to be a world turned upside down. The play has begun with an opposition between town and country, between Hardcastle's attack on the vanity of the town and his wife's longing for its sophistication. But underneath this conventionality there is a dissonance. Marlow is unable to recognize that Tony Lumpkin is the Squire and thus of his own class, and from this his misfortunes (and salvation) arise. But the audience too is presented with an image of itself. Fashionable comedy was genteel; its audience was predominantly middle-class; it damned that which did not correspond to its polite conception of itself with the penetrating shouted monosyllable 'low'. By this means it had caused a scene from Goldsmith's first play to be removed from the stage. On the play's first night the London audience was presented wi ththe sight of 'a low, paltry set of fellows' (I.i, 72) listening to the Squire's song, who suddenly, with marvellous inconsequentiality, start to pretend that they are a fashionable London audience: 'Oh damn anything that's low, I cannot bear it . . . the genteel thing is the genteel thing any time' (I.ii, 38-9). This in its own right was very funny, and the audience of the time, like the modern audience that has lost the specific context, is once more swept past it by laughter. But it is not farce; it is very sharp satire. No wonder George Colman, the theatre's manager, felt during the first performance that he had been sitting on a powder-barrel.

This particular opposition between 'genteel' and 'low', is a local and specific joke, another attack on what is now a dead genre, a dead audience, and their vanished complacencies; but (once more) it expands—this time through the entire play—into a perennial theme. The play is deeply concerned with the concept of social class, and examines it by a whole series of just such reversals. In this distorted pastoral world no one seems to know which class they belong to. The yokels claim with comic pomposity to be gentlemen: 'What though I am obligated to dance a bear, a man may be a gentleman for all that' (I.ii, 41-3) and Tony Lumpkin, with curious seriousness, asks them to go when Marlow and Hastings arrive: 'Gentlemen . . . they mayn't be good enough company for you' (I.ii, 70-1). Tony himself is a kind of yokel, 'a poor contemptible booby' (IV.i, 390), but his is also a member of 'one of the best families in the county' (IV.i, 193-4) and Hardcastle seems to have more in common with his clumsy servants than with his genteel guests. The joke against him is rather sharp, as he later recognizes ('And yet he might have seen something in me above a common inn-keeper' [V.i, 15-16])—for the point is that without foreknowledge his guests cannot recognize him as intrinsically a gentleman; as Hastings remarks, with cruel superciliousness, he 'forgets that he's an inn-keeper, before he has learned to be a gentleman' (II.i, 200-2). And this redounds with equal sharpness on the town 'gentlemen'; is their rudeness to Hardcastle appropriate—'gentlemanly' behaviour towards anyone, whether landlord or landowner? Are they then intrinsically getlemen? Hardcastle's mansion is indeed Liberty-Hall (13), and the results are rather unnerving.

What Goldsmith wanted from comedy was that it should 'perfectly satirical yet perfectly goodnatured' (14) at the same time. This apparently awkward blend of 'Sentimental' benevolence with 'Restoration' satire is precisely what he achieved in She Stoops to Conquer. The satire beneath the kindliness is felt but not perceived; the audience is too busy laughing.

The main way in which this is managed, apart from the kind of implicit undercutting I have tried to elucidate above, is in the curiously triadic structure of the play. There are three central characters, Lumpkin, Marlow, and Kate, and their relationship in the structure is triangular. Marlow is the manipulated focus of two plots, that of Lumpkin, which is satiric, and that of Kate, which is good-natured. Lumpkin's ruse brings out in him the Restoration rake, and Kate's the Sentimental lover. The final synthesis, the comic resolution, lies with Kate.

Let us start as the play does, with Tony Lumpkin, and with two critical comments. Kenrick, Goldsmith's enemy, was testily uncomprehending: 'The squire whom we are told to be a fool, proves the most sensible being of the piece' (15). Not quite—there is Kate Hardcastle; but the paradox is well stated. A more modern is equally bemused, in fact awestruck:

he has persistently reminded readers of such ideal creations of the comic imagination as Shakespeare's Puck. However exquisitely entertaining and flawlessly consistent, Goldsmith's booby is, one feels, not of earth. One wonders at him, as Shelley at the Skylark. (16)
 

Rather over-stated, but one knows what he means. The reference to Puck is apt. Tony Lumpkin, at once (like the play) laughed at and laughing at us, is, to begin with, the play's author. The plot is his creation; not only the subterfuge, but the liveliness and the timing are what he makes them, and the verbal energy is his language. Whenever the complicated twists of the plot (his plot) are about to founder, Lumpkin, like Puck, arrives, and whips and spurs it into action again, usually by heaping mistake upon mistake. His plot, his satire, the ambiguous Liberty-Hall, is suggested to him by the fact that the two Londoners cannot identify him as well-born, and so tell him exactly what they think of him; his revenge is that this honesty should be forced on them, to their discomfiture. Marlow tells Hardcastle just what he thinks of him. Thus Lumpkin embodies or creates all of the reversals (except Kate's) of 'genteel' and 'low' that the play contains, and his purpose is both farcical (he is a 'mere composition of tricks and mischief' [I.i, 39-40], a practical joker) and moral, an attribute in him that both Hardcastle (V.ii, 140) and Hastings (V.ii, 50) acknowledge. His paradox is therefore the play's: the moral farce. His energy is then deflected into the sub-plot (he is kept quite apart from his half-sister Kate, and never exchanges a word with her, as ife even her integrity might be vulnerable to his wit), and into wickedly inventive tormenting of his mother. His character is completely untouched by the action of the play; benevolist notions of corrigibility cannot contain him. When he gains his birthright, like Caliban, at the end, we feel obscurely that he has earned it; but unlike Caliban (whom he strongly resembles) he is unrepentant.

If Lumpkin is the play, Marlow suffers its action, and learns from it. The paradox of his character, the rake who is paralysed with shyness, can be seen quite easily in terms of literary genres (though of course it transcends these: he is curiiously archetypel). He is at the beginning incapacitated from marriage, which is the golden resolution of comedy, by the fact that he is both too bold and too shy. He cannot love because he cannot talk of love; only either the false language of seduction, of besieging the ladies, of onquest, which is that of Restoration Comedy, or else the false platitudes of Sentimental Comedy. Symbolically, the latter make him dumb. His view of sex is that it can be bought: with noticeable explicitness for the 1770s it is made clear that he visits prostitutes and (ironically) will pay for the favours of the supposed barmaid. He relies on the securities of class-distinction, power, and money; he is, as Hardcastle points out, a bully (IV.i, 176) and thus his cowardice is a natural complement.

Described in this way he seems very unpleasant; of course, and by a remarkable legerdemain, he is not He is saved by his extreme vulnerability, by his comprehensive come-uppance, and by Kate. But it is worth noting that his redemption is not complete; he never quite gets his language right. He cannot stop being literary. His serious wooing is still, as we noticed, tinged with Sentiment, and though Kate rather likes it, she has its number beautifully: He 'said some civil things of my face, talked much of his want of merit, and the greatness of mine; mentioned his heart, gave a short tragedy speech, and ended with pretended ratpure' (V., 106-9). And his last words as he stiffly unbends under her 'tormenting' are not fully redeemed: Kate is his possession, 'my little tyrant' (V.iii, 154). Nice, we may feel, that he is making an effort, but not quite right. The play's attack on the sentimentality of redemptions extends even here.

Finding a counterbalance to Tony Lumpkin for the sencon part of the play must have been difficult. It is remarkable that it didn't prove impossible. But Kate Hardcastle is equally Shakespearian in her origins; if Lumpkin is Puck, she reminds everyone of Rosalind in As You Like It. Like Lumpkin she is 'malicious' (III.i, 279), and (rather like Marlow) she has a frank appreciation of the financial aspects of what she is: 'a girl who brings her face to market' (III.i, 242) (17). Of course, she transcends this as well: her wit, resourcefulness, and commonsense are constantly attractive. She is the only character actually and successfully in control of the Mistakes of the Night. She takes over Tony Lumpkin's satirical plot and makes it her won: an ameliorative, educational one. His comedy is destructive, mocking; hers heals, but is saved from sententiousness by her own mocking wit. She in fact appropriates all of the play's themes. She undergoes voluntarily (as no one else does) the reversal of class-roles, and does this in order to create a space for lovers to talk in that is independent of class and of the constrictions that reduce marlow to lies or silence. She tells lies, but in order to force a truth; she turns near-farce into comedy; and she unites town and country in marriage. She is the prime agent of Goldsmith's synthesis of opposed genres. The play's happy ending is hers.




Notes

(1). Horace Walpole, Letters, ed. Peter Cunningham, V (Edinburgh, 1906), 453.

(2). Information from Susan Katherine Hamlyn, She Stoops to Conquer: the Making of a Popular Success, MA (unpublished), University of Birmingham, 1975. This thesis contains the best critical work on the play that I have yet seen.

(3) John Ginger, The Notable Man  (London, 1977).

(4) Collected Works of Oliver Goldsmith, ed. Arthur Friedman, III (Oxford, 1966), 209-13.

(5) This is the traditional view, as given in such standard works as Allardyce Nicoll's History of English Drama, 1660-1900, III (Cambridge, 1952), 124-54. But recent scholars, particularly Robert D. Hume in his 'Goldsmith and Sheridan and the Supposed Revolution of "Laughing" against "Sentimental" Comedy' (in Studies in Change and Revolution, ed. Paul J. Korshin [Menston, 1972]), have severely criticized the view, even going so far as to suggest that there was no such genre as Sentimental Comedy.

(6) There are, of course, exceptions; for instance, Ginger and Hamlyn (op. cit.) have both written interestingly on the play, and there is an essay by B. Eugene McCarthy which is well worth reading (see Further Reading, p. xxix).

(7) 16 March 1773.

(8) James Boswell, Life of Johnson, ed. G. B. Hill, revised L. F. Powell, II (Oxford, 1934), 233.

(9) op. cit., pp. 453, 467.

(10) For instance, Nicoll, op. cit., p. 159.

(11) That he believed that his play had a moral (but not moralizing) function can be seen in the second rejected epilogue, lines 14-30.

(12) Friedman, op. cit., p. 213.

(13) It is worth pointing out another specifically contemporary reference behind this theme. Goldsmith (a firm Tory) was writing this play while the movement for 'Wilkes and Liberty' was approaching its final flowering, and in a letter of 7 September 1771 that describes the composition of She Stoops to Conquer, he mentions, in passing, that 'the cry of Liberty is still as loud as ever' (quoted in Arthur Lytton Sells, Oliver Goldsmith, 1974, p. 146). Marlow's servant is a Wilkesian ('Though I'm but a servant, I'm as good as another man' [IV.i, 123]). The violently populist and libertarian Wilkes riots, which repeatedly convulsed London, add a curious resonance to the play's genial but ambiguous coinage, 'Liberty-Hall'.

(14) Goldsmith, Monthly Review, May 1773.

(15) London Packet, 24 March 1773.

(16) John Harrington Smith, 'Tony Lumpkin and the Country Booby Type in Antecedent English Comedy', PMLA 58 (1943): 1049.

(17) She was actually felt at the time to be rather shocking: 'the heroine has no more modesty than Lady Bridget', commented the sentimentally inclined Horace Walpole (op. cit., p. 453).

She Stoops to Conquer (on Facebook)

James Fenimore Cooper

23/11/2012

From The Oxford Companion to American Literature:
 

William Cooper (1754-1809), father of J. F. Cooper, settled on the shores of Otsego Lake in central New York (1790) and founded the town which bears his name. At one time his land holdings aggregated more than 750,000 acres, and he prospered as a land agent. He adopted a policy of installment payments for his tenants, and kept his land free of the Anti-Rent Wars. A staunch Federalist, he was a member of Congress 1795-97, 1799-1801, and often left his magnificent home to show his prowess as a wrestler in some neighboring shanty. He died as the result of a blow struck to him by a political opponent. His son's Chronicles of Cooperstown (1838) tells of his settlement, which he himself vigorously describes in A Guide to the Wilderness (1810).

 

James Fenimore COOPER (1789-1851), was born at Burlington, N.J., the son of William Cooper, who in 1790 removed his family to Otsego Hall, a manorial estate at Cooperstown on Otsego Lake, west of Albany, N.Y. Educated at the local school and in Albany, Cooper went to Yale, from which he was dismissed (1806). During the next five years he served at sea as a foremast-hand, was a midshipman in the navy (1808-11), and left to marry and settle as a country gentleman at Mamaroneck. He moved to Cooperstown (1814), but in 1817 moved again to a farm at Scarsdale.

At 30 he was suddenly plunged into a literary career, when his wife challenged his claim that he could write a better book than the English novel he was reading to her. The result was Precaution (1820), a conventional novel of manners in genteel English society. His second book, The Spy (1821), was an immediate success and established Cooper's typical attitude towards plot and characterization, being significant for its use of the American scene as the background of a romance. In The Pioneers (1823) he began his series of Leather-Stocking Tales, but in his rapid quest for unusual subjects he turned to the sea in The Pilot (1823), intending to prove that a sailor could write a better novel than the landsman Scott had done in The Pirate (1822).

Established as a leading American author, he moved to New York City, where he founded the Bread and Cheese Club. To further his position as the outstanding American novelist, he planned to write 13 national romances, one for each of the original states, but wrote only Lionel Lincoln (1825), dealing with Revolutionary Boston. Encouraged by the success of The Pioneers and the growing interest in the clash between savagery and civilization on the frontier, he continued his history of the pioneer scout Natty Bumppo in The Last of the Mohicans (1826) and The Prairie (1827). While traveling abroad (1826-33), nominally as U.S. consul at Lyons, he published The Red Rover (1827), The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish (1829) and The Water-Witch (1830), romances about America and life on American ships. In addition, he wrote The Bravo (1831), The Heidenmauer (1832), and The Headsman (1833), a trilogy intended to dispel the glamor of feudalism and to show its decline before the rise of democratic liberalism. A Letter  . . . to General Lafayette (1831) champions republics against monarchies, and Notions of the Americans (1828) is an answer to English critics of U.S. society and government.

Upon his return, Cooper in turn was repelled by the absence of what he considered to be public and private virtue, the abuses of democracy, and the failure to perceive the best elements of the life he had conjured up in his novels. A Letter to His Countrymen (1834), petulantly expressing his conservatism, was followed by his satire, The Monikins (1835), and four volumes of Gleanings in Europe (1837-38), containing brilliant descriptions and pungent social criticism. The American Democrat (1838), a full statement of his aristocratic social ideals, was followed by Homeward Bound (1838) and Home as Found (1838), fictional statements of these themes.

During the ensuing years, the press attacked his books and personal character, and he brought suits for libel against various Whig papers, arguing his own cases so successfully that he was regularly victorious. He returned to live at Cooperstown, where his favorite companion and amanuensis for the rest of his life was his daughter Susan, whose books describe their home. Here he carried his war with the press to a war with the people concerning property rights, in which, although he was constantly vindicated, he stood alone and unpopular.

Meanwhile he wrote a scholarly History of the Navy (1839), whose simplicity and gusto were overlooked in a controversy centering on his treatment of the Battle of Lake Erie. With the publication of The Pathfinder (1840) and The Deerslayer (1841) he completed the epical Leather-Stocking series, and in a burst of creative energy wrote 16 works of fiction, a great amount of controversial literature, and some scholarly and factual works. Mercedes of Castile (1840) deals with the first voyage of Columbus; The Two Admirals (1842) is a story of the British Navy before the Revolutionary War; and Wing-and-Wing (1842) is concerned with a French privateer in the Mediterranean. Ned Meyers (1843) is the fictional biography of a former shipmate, and the Lives of Distinguished American Naval Officers (1846) supplements the History of the Navy. Wyandotté (1843) deals with the outbreak of the Revolution in New York; Le Mouchoir (1843), republished as The Autobiography of a Pocket-Handkerchief, is a short romance of New York society and class distinctions; Afloat and Ashore (1844) and its sequel Miles Wallingford (1844) seem to present a sefl-portrait of Cooper; The Crater (1848) is a Utopian social allegory; and Jack Tier (1848), The Oak Openings (1848) and The Sea Lions (1848) are all swift-moving historical romances. Cooper's last novel, The Ways of the Hour (1850), concerned with the perversions of social justice, is a forerunner of the modern mystery novel. Another late work is an unpublished comedy, Upside Down, or Philosophy in Petticoats, produced in New York. Of the novels written after 1840, the most important are those in the trilogy known as the Littlepage Manuscripts: Satanstoe (1845), The Chainbearer (1845), and The Redskins (1846), tracing the growing difficulties between propertied and propertyless classes in New York. A collection of Letters and Journals (6 vols., 1960-68), by James F. Beard gathers all known previously unpublished manuscripts.

Cooper's achievement, although uneven and the result of brilliant improvisation rather than a deeply considered artistry, was nevertheless sustained almost to the close of a hectic, crowded career. His worldwide fame attests his power of invention, for his novels have been popular principally for their variety of dramatic incidents, vivid descriptions of romantic scenes and situations, and adventurous plots. But a more sophisticated view caused a revival of interest in the mid-20th century concentrating on Cooper's novels in their creation of tension between different kinds of society, the settlement and the wilderness, and between civil law and natural rights as these suggest issues of moral and mythic import.

Works:

The Spy: A Tale of the Neutral Ground, romance by Cooper, published in 1821, and dramatized by C. P. Clinch (1822).

Harvey Binch, supposed to be a Loyalist spy but secretly in the intelligence service of General Washington, operates in the "neutral ground" of his native Westchester Country, New York, and aids his neighbors, Henry Wharton, a Loyalist who pretends to be neutral, his daughters Sarah and Frances, and a son, Captain Henry Wharton of the British army. In 1780, Washington, in his accustomed disguise as Mr. Harper, is sheltered at the Wharton home, where he is impressed by the rebel sympathies of Frances. To repay the family's hospiitality, Birch warns Captain Henry of his impending capture, but the young man, refusing to leave, is taken by a rebel force under Captain Jack Lawton. Frances appeals to her fiancé, the patriot Major Peyton Dunwoodie, but meanwhile Captain Henry escapes during a battle, only to be recaptured with Colonel Wellemere, Sara's British admirer. Birch is almost captured by Lawton, who mistakes him for a spy, but in their struggle he spares Lawton's life, a good deed repaid by Lawton when Birch is later turned over to him by the "Skinners," a band of marauding patriots. The wedding of Wellemere and Sarah is interrupted by Birch, who reveals that Wellemere is already married, and the Englishman escapes during a raid by the marauders, who destroy the Wharton home. Captain Henry is sentenced to be executed as a spy, but Birch helps him escape, and Frances, seeking them, goes to Birch's mountain retreat, where she finds "Mr. Harper" and persuades him to end the pursuit of her brother. Birch takes Captain Henry to a British ship, Frances and Dunwoodie are married, Lawton is killed in battle, and Birch, ending his service to Washington, refuses rewards, preferring to remain an itinerant peddler.



The Pioneers; or, The Sources of the Susquehanna, romance by Cooper, published in 1823. It is the fourth in plot sequence of the Leather-Stocking Tales.

During the decade after the Revolutionary War, Judge Marmaduke Temple, a retired Quaker merchant, is the leading landowner of Otsego County on the New York frontier, having acquired the estate of the Loyalist father of his friend Edward Effingham. While hunting deer he accidentally shoots Oliver Edwards, young companion of Natty Bumppo ("Leather-Stocking), a veteran frontiersman. The judge and his daughter Elizabeth befriend the young man, who becomes their overseer, although persisting in his mysterious association with Bumppo and old chief Chingachgook (John Mohegan), who is rumored to be his father. Elizabeth and her friend Louisa Grant, the rector's daughter, disdain the company of the supposed half-breed. After Bumppo is released from jail, following his arrest for shooting deer out of season, Elizabeth visits him and is trapped by a forest fire. She is saved by Edwards, but Chingachgook dies after his rescue by Bumppo. Elizabeth and Edwards now admit their love, and his identity is made known when a searching party discovers demented old Major Effingham, and it is revealed that Edwards is his grandson, that Bumppo had been an employee of his family, and that Chingachgook had adopted them into his tribe. The young couple is betrothed and given half of the judge's estate.


 
The Pilot,  romance by Cooper, published in 1823. The unnamed hero is supposed to represent John Paul Jones.

During the Revolutionary War, the schooner Ariel and an unnamed frigate appear off the coast of England near the residence of Colonel Howard, an expatriated South Carolina Loyalist. Lieutenants Griffith and Barnstable love Howard's two nieces, but their romances are thwarted by conflicting political views. The officers return to their shps with the mysterious "Pilot," who takes charge of the frigate. The schooner puts to sea through a channel that the frigate cannot navigate, but, during a terrible storm, the Pilot guides his ship to safety through a difficult shoal passage. The mission of the Americans is to capture prominent Englishmen, in order to force a modification of British impressment, and they decide to raid the guarded Howard residence. In the attempt, the Pilot and others are captured, but make their escape despite the precautions of villainous Christopher Dillon, a suitor of one of the girls. Dillon warns the crew of a British cutter, which is, however, defeated in battle by the Ariel. Long Tom Coffin, a daring old salt, is sent with the captured Dillon to attempt an exchange , but attempts to escape, is recaptured and taken back to the ship, which is wrecked in a strom. Only Barnstable and a few others survive. The Pilot captures the Howards, and imprisons them on the cutter. In a fierce battle with British warships, the frigate escapes through the shoal waters. Colonel Howard has been wounded, but before he dies he surrenders to the inevitability of American victory in the war, and permits the marriage of his nieces with the officers. The Pilot goes to Holland, while his ship sails for America.


Lionel Lincoln; or, The Leaguer of Boston, a romance by Cooper, published in 1825 and dramatized as The Leaguer of Boston.

Lionel Lincoln arrives at Boston (April 1775) as an officer with the British troops. On shipboard he has met an old man, "Ralph," who is actually his father, Sir Lionel, supposed to be in an English insane asylum. Another companion, whose true identity is unknown to either of them, is Job Pray, Lionel's half-wit stepbrother, who guides them to the house of his mother, Abigail. The latter is terrified at the sight of Sir Lionel. They go then to the home of Mrs Lechmere, Lionel's aunt, with whose granddaughter, Cecil Dynever, Lionel falls in love. Job serves among the Minute Men at Lexington, and, althought Lionel's father fails to convince his son of the justice of the rebel cause, Ralph saves his son's life during the battle. The young man vainly attempts to solve the mystery of their relationship, before he is called to serve at Bunker Hill. Seriously wounded, he is nursed to recovery by Cecil, and the two marry, encouraged by the strange insistence of Mrs. Lechmere, who soon dies. Finally Sir Lionel explains the various mysteries. Mrs. Lechmere, years before, had wished him to marry her daughter, but instead he had married her ward, Lionel's mother, whose death caused him to become temporarily insane. Somewhat earlier, he had assumed the character of "Ralph," during his liaison with Abigail. Mrs. Lechmere has insisted on the marriage of Cecil and Lionel in order to achieve her long cherished scheme of union between the families. The story ends with the sudden deaths of Sir Lionel, Abigail, and Job, the British evacuation of Boston, and the departure for England of Lionel and Cecil.


The Last of the Mohicans, romance by Cooper, published in 1826, is the second of the Leatherstocking Tales.

While the French and Indians besiege Fort William Henry on Lake George (1757), Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of the English commander, are on their way to join their father, accompanied by Major Duncan Heyward, Alice's fiancé, the singing teacher David Gamut, and the treacherous Indian Magua, who secretly serves the French. Magua's plan to betray the party to the Iroquois is foiled by the scout Hawkeye (Natty Bumppo) and his companions, old chief Chingachgook and his son Uncas, only survivors of the Mohican aristocracy. Escaping, Magua obtains Iroquois aid and returns to capture the girls. He promises them safety if Cora will become his squaw, but she refuses, and Hawkeye arrives to rescue them. Reaching the fort, they remain until Munro surrenders to Montcalm, who gives them a safe-conduct. When they leave they are set upon by Indians, and the sisters are captured. Hawkeye pursues them, finding Cora imprisoned in a Delaware camp and Alice in a Huron camp. Uncas is captured by the Hurons, and Heyward enters the camp in disguise, rescuess Alice, and with Uncas escapes to the Delaware camp, where they are cordially received. Old chief Tamenund, learning Uncas's identity, hails him as his destined successor. Magua then claims Cora s his rightful property, and Uncas is unable to object, but, joined by the English, leads his tribe against the Hurons. When Magua attempts to desert, Uncas follows, and tries to rescue Cora. Uncas and Cora are killed, and Hawkeye shoots Magua, who falls from a precipice to his death. The others return to civilization, except Hawkeye, who continues his frontier career.


Audiobook: The Last of the Mohicans:

 






The Prairie, romance by Cooper, published in 1827. It is the fifth in plot sequence of the Leather-Stocking Tales.

Natty Bumppo, though nearly 90 in 1804, is still competent as a frontiersman and trapper on the Western plains, clinging to his faithful hound Hector and his rifle Killdeer. He encounters an emigrant train led by surly Ishmael Bush and his rascally brother-in-law Abiram White, in whose party are also the naturalist Dr. Obed Battins; a woman captive concealed in a covered wagon; her attendant, Ellen Wade; and the bee-hunter Paul Hover, who is in love with Ellen. The old trapper barely averts an Indian raid on the train., which he then guides to a safe camp. He is joined by a young soldier, Duncan Uncas Middleton, whom he is overjoyed to recognize as a descendant of an old friend, Duncan Heyward (see Last of the Mohicans). Middleton, on an army mission, is also seeking his betrothed, Doña Inez de Certavallos, who has been kidnapped for ransom. Discovering that she is Ishamel's captive, he rescues her with the aid of the trapper. With Paul and Ellen, they leave the emigrants, only to be captured by the Sioux. Escaping, they are endangered successively by a prairie fire and a buffalo stampede, but saved by the skill of Bumppo. Recaptured by the Sioux, they are rescued by a successful Pawnee attack, but during the confusion Ishmael captures them. He accuses Bumppo of the murder of one of his men, but Abiram is found to be guilty. After his friends find safety with Middleton's soldiers, Bumppo finally yields to the weakness of his years, and dies quietly, surrounded by his Pawnee and white friends.


The Red Rover, romance by Cooper, published in 1827 and dramatized by S. H. Chapman (1828).

Lieutenant Henry Ark, on the track of the Red Rover, a notorious pirate, disguises himself as a common sailor ("Wilder") and enlists a second in command of the mysterious Dolphin. When the captain of the merchant ship Caroline is accidentally injured, Ark is sent to take his place. Both ships sails immediately from Newport, and the youthful commander's skillful seamanship disturbs the superstitious crew of the Caroline, who desert him. He is left with the two passengers, Gertrude Grayson and her governess, Mrs. Wyllys, to escape the sinking ship in a small boat, from which they are rescued by the Dolphin. Captain Heidegger (the Rover) is attracted to Mrs. Wyllys, and becomes friendly with Ark, confessing to him that he had been a seaman in the royal navy, but that his loyalty to the colonies had led him into a quarrel in which he killed an officer and escaped to become a pirate. Ark's former ship, the Dart, is now sighted, and when the Rover goes aboard her, disguised as a naval officer, he learns Ark's true identity. Returning, he is persuaded to put the women and Ark aboard the Dart. A fierce battle ensues, in which the pirate is victorious. Ark is about to be hanged, when it is revealed that he is actually Paul de Lacey, the long-lost son of Mrs. Wyllys. At this, the Rover sets his prisoners free, sends them ashore, dismisses his crew, burns his ship, and disappears. After the close of the Revolutionary War, 20 years later, he is brought, dying, to the home of De Lacey, who has married Gertrude. He discloses that he is the brother of Mrs. Wyllys, and that after ending his piracies he reformed, led a virguous life, and served honorably in the patriot cause.



The Wept of Wish-ton-Wish, romance by Cooper, published in 1829. In England it was titled The Borderers (1829) and The Heathcotes (1854). An anonymous dramatization was produced (1834) and published (1856).

In 1666 in the Connecticut settlement of Wish-ton-Wish the old colonist Mark Heathcote is threatened by Indian attacks, but he is aided by the advice and warning of the mysterious stranger Submission (the regicide Goffe) and a captive Indian lad who is especially befriended by Heathcote's daughter-in-law, Ruth. The boy disappears during an attack, taking with him her small daughter, also named Ruth. The main part of the story deals with King Philip's War, ten years later. The Heathcote settlement is attacked by Indians under Metacomet (King Philip) and Conanchet (Canonchet), the latter being the former boy captive, now grown and a chief of the Narragansett. His wife, Narra-mattah, is the kidnapped Ruth, and when the Heathcotes are captured, she and Conanchet save them from execution. A few days later, Conanchet's intervention in behalf of Submission and the Heathcotes results in his capture and execution in Philip's camp, following a chase by his old enemies, the Pequot and Mohegan, under their chief, Uncas. Narra-Mattah dies beside the body of her husband, and her mother dies soon afterward, "the wept of Wish-ton-Wish".






The Water Witch, romance by Cooper, published in 1830. Several dramatic versions, including one by R. P. Smith, were produced in 1830 and 1831.

Set in the region of New York City at the close of the 17th century, the story is a concerned with the admirable small brigantine Water Witch and its pirate captain, known as "The Skimmer of the Seas," whose romantic abduction of a beautiful heiress, Alinda de Barberie, begins the action. Pursued by the English sloop of war, the Coquette, whose commander, Captain Ludlow, is Alinda's suitor, the Water Witch manages to escape, though remaining in Lond Island Sound, until the Coquette is engaged in battle by two French ships. The Skimmer of the Seas cannot desert his fellow countrymen in time of danger, and joins forces with Ludlow, helping to destroy the enemy craft. Ludlow is doubly grateful when his fiancée is restored to him, and offers his protection to the patriotic pirate, but The Skimmer of the Seas embarks for new adventures in his own favorite, the Water Witch.


The Heidenmauer, or, The Benedictines, romance by Cooper, published in 1832.

In 16th-century Bavaria the Benedictines of the abbey of Limburg strive to maintain their temporal power in the town of Dürkheim, which they finally lose to the feudal lord Count Emich of Leiningen-Hartenburg. This theme, showing a society emerging from domination by Catholicism and superstition to secular rule and critical Protestantism, is amplified by a subplot dealing with the love and marriage of the count's forester, Berchtold Hintermayer, with Meta Frey, daughter of a leading citizen of Dürkheim. The title refers to a ruined fortress near the town, home of the hermit Baron Odo von Ritternstein, once the fiancé of Meta's mother.


The Headsman, or, The Abbaye des Vignerons, romance by Cooper, published in 1833.

During the early 18th century, Balthazar, headsman or executioner of Berne, conceals the identity of his supposed son Sigismund so that the youth may not be forced to continue the family's hereditary profession. Sigmund loves Adelheid, daughter of Baron Melchior de Willading, but, when questioned concerning his birth, he reveals his secret. Adelheid continues to love him, and it is later disclosed, when Balthazar is unjustly accused of murder, that Sigismund is actually the son of the Doge of Genoa, having been stolen as a child.




The American Democrat, or Hints on the Social and Civil Relations of the United States of America, critical work by Cooper, published in 1838.

Returning from Europe in 1835, the author was struck by "a disposition in the majority to carry out the opinions of the system to extremes, and a disposition in the minority to abandon all to the current of the day," and he writes in order to express "the voice of simple, honest and ... fearless truth" on the peculiarities of the American system in theory and practice. Following an introduction and general chapters on government and republican theories, he discusses government in the U.S., especially with regard to the doctrine of state rights. The 43 brief chapters that follow are concerned with "Distinctive American Principles," "Equality," "Liberty," "Advantages of a Democracy," "Disadvantages of a Democracy," "Prejudice," "The Private Duties of Station," ""Language," "Demagogues," "The Press, "Property," and similar subjects, all discussed from the point of view of a conservative thinker who is convinced of the value of an aristocratic system.



The Monikins, allegorical satire by Cooper, published in 1835.

Sir John Goldencalf meets Noah Poke, a Yankee sea captain, in Paris, where they become acquainted with four monkeys who have been traveling in Europ: Dr. Reasono, Lord Chatterino, Lady Chatterissa, and Mistress Vigilance Lynx. The Knight and the captain, after being enlightened concerning the superior institutions of these "Monikins," accompany them to their homeland in the polar regions. Sir John visits the countries of Leaphigh (England), whose society is founded upon a rigid system of castes and a false social hierarchy; Leapthrough (France), which he considers unprincipled, erratic, and selfish; and Leaplow (the U.S.), where the leveling tendency of democratic politics has destroyed virtue and distinction. Leaplow isgj governed according to a National Allegory (the Constitution), by a Great Sachem (President), Riddles (senators), a Legion (representatives), and Supreme Arbitrators (Supreme Court). The system operates by the institution of contrasting parties, "Perpendicular" and "Horizontal," sometimes supplemented by a third group, "Tangents." These parties are led by the Godlikes, who bow to the dominant commercial interests, allowing society to become "the great moral eclipse," in which "the great moral postulate of principle" is overshadowed by "the great immoral postulate known as interest," and public opinion is manipulated by scheming demagogues and a powerful press. When Sir John returns to England, he marries his patient fiancée, Anna Etherington, while Captain Poke returns to Connecticut.




The Bravo, romance by Cooper, was published in 1831 and dramatized by R. P. Smith in 1837.

In Venice of the Renaissance, Jacopo Fontoni, to win freedom for his unjustly imprisoned father, pretends to be a "bravo" or hired assassin for the Senate, but he actually works against it by aiding the Neapolitan Don Camillo Monforte to win the hand of Violetta Tiepolo, the senators' wealthy ward, whose frotune they want to retain by marriage to a Venetian. When unrest follows the lovers' escape and the death of Jacopo's friend Antonio, Jacopo is falsely accused of murder and is executed at the behest of the Senate.



Homeward Bound; or, The Chase, novel by Cooper, published in 1838. Home as Found is a sequel.

Edward and John Effingham, New York landowners, with Edward's daughter Eve, have spent several years in Europe, and now sail for home on the American packet Montauk, commanded by Captain Truck. Their fellow passengers include the vulgar American, Steadfast Dodge; foppish Sir George Templemore; Mr. Sharp, a handsome young English aristocrat; and Mr. Blunt, an American adventurer, who falls in love with Eve. The Montauk encounters many hazards during the voyage: a port officer attempts to arrest a steerage passenger and is ordered off the ship; it is chased by the English war sloop Foam; in order to escape, Captain Truck heads for the tBay of Biscay and is caught in a storm; anchored for reparis on the Afican coast, it is attacked by Arab raiders, who are beaten off. Finally crossing the ocean, the packet arrives off Sandy Hook, only to find the waiting Foam, whose captain recognizes Mr. Sharp as the real Templemore and explains that his mission ahs been to arrest the imposter, a fleeing defaulter. Mr. Blunt reveals that he is actually Paul Powis, and is learned that John Effingham is his long-lost father.



Home as Found, novel by Cooper, published in 1838 as a sequel to Homeward Bound. In it, Cooper satirizes his neighbours at Cooperstown, and, as a result of the controversies and libel suits which followed, he was himself satirized in an anonymous novel, The Effinghams; or, Home as I Found It (1842).

After their return from Europe, the Effinghams open their house in New York City, where they participate in many social affairs, during whose course their young relative Grace Van Cortland is wooed by Sir George Templemore. After Grace and Sir George go to England to be married, the Effinghams go to their estate at Templeton, a small upstate community, where they are joined by Paul Powis, John Effingham's newly found son, who is the suitor of his cousin Eve. Mlle Viefville, Eve's vivacious maid, marries Aristabulus Bragg, the village lawyer and an inveterate "booster," while other Tempelton citizens are depicted as hypocritical demagogues or foolish democrats. Paul gives up his life of travel and adventure to marry Eve, and the Effinghams settle down to their duties as landowners and civic leaders.


The Pathfinder, or The Inland Sea, romance by Cooper, published in 1840 as the third in plot sequence of the Leatherstocking Tales.

In 1759, Mabel Dunham is on her way to join her father at the British fort at Oswego, Lake Ontario, acompanied by her uncle, Charles Cap; Arrowhead, a Tuscarora Indian; his wife, Dew-in-June; Pathfinder, the scout aged about 40; the Mohican chief Chingachgook; and Jasper Western, a young sailor called Eau-douce by the French. Arrowhead and his wife disappear during skirmishes with the Iroquois, but the others reach Oswego. Then Dunham, Cap, Pathfinder, Mabel, and Lieutenant Muir, who wants to marry her, sail on Jasper's Scud to relieve a post in the Thousand Islands. Jasper's loyalty is suspected and he is returned to Oswego. While Dunham and his men are off destroying French supply boats, the rest are warned by Dew-in-June of an Iroquois attack to be led by Arrowhead. Cap and Muir are seized, Dunham is badly wounded, and Mabel, who defends the blockhouse, promises to wed Pathfinder if he protects her father. After Jasper and Chingachgook rout the Iroquois, Jasper is arrested by Muir as a traitor. Muir is proved the only guilty one and is killed by Arrowhead. Dunham dies, hoping Mabel and Pathfinder will marry, but Jasper has won Mabel's love.



The Deerslayer, romance by Cooper, published in 1841. An anonymous dramatization was produced the same year. The romance is the first in plot sequence of the Leather-Stocking Tales.

At Lake Otsego, during the 1740s, early in the French and Indian Wars, lives the trapper Thomas Hutter, with his daughters Judith and Hetty. The frontiersmen, giant Hurry Harry and Natty Bumppo, known as Deerslayer among the Delaware Indians, help Hutter to resist an Iroquois attack adn return to his log fortress. There Deerslayer is joined by his friend, the Mohican chief Chingachbook, and they attempt to ransom Hutter and Hurry Harry, who have bben captured. Feeble-minded Hetty slips away to the Iroquois camp, where she is unharmed because of the Indians' veneration for the demented, and before her return she sees her father and Harry, as well as Chingachgook's bride Hist, also a captive. The trapper and Harry are released, but Deerslayer, who helps his friend rescue Hist, is captured, and Hutter is later killed. Judith, who discovers that she and Hetty are not Hutter's children but are actually of noble birth, tells Deerslayer, when he is released on parole, that she loves him. She tries to prevent his return to the Iroquois, but he keeps his word, returns, and is about to be tortured. Judith appears, delaying the executioners until Chingachgook arrives with a troop of British soldiers. Hetty is killed, and Judith disappears. Although Deerslayer later learns that Judith married one of the titled British officers, he always treasures romantic memories of the affair.



Wing-and-Wing, romance by Cooper, published in 1842.

On the island of Elba, at the height of the Napoleonic empire, lives Ghita Caraccioli, granddaughter of the Neapolitan admiral and beloved of the French privateer Raoul Yverne. Raoul's ship is the Wing-and-Wing, a lugger carrying British colors but actually preying on British shipping. The romantic privateer visits Ghita, who refuses to marry him unless he becomes a Catholic and gives up his occupation. He is nearly trapped by the arrival of an English frigate, the Proserpine, but with the aid of his lieutenant, Ithuel Bolt, a Yankee soldier of fortune, he manages to reach his ship. The Proserpine pursues the Wing-and-Wing for several exciting days, but by his daring and superior seamanship the privateer escapes. The notorious execution of Admiral Caraccioli by order of Lord Nelson takes place at Naples, and Ghita, present for a last interview with her grandfather, is joined by Raoul in disguise. Attempting to take her and her uncle to their home, Raoul and Ithuel are apprehended. Ithuel is released on the condition that he serve again in the British navy, but Raoul is sentenced to death. A delay is granted, for the unjust Caraccioli execution has had an unfortunate effect on the people, and Ithael and Ghita help Raoul to escape. They regain the Wing-and-Wing, but the ship is soon wrecked on a dangerous reef. The British attack, and Raoul is fatally wounded, but Ithuel helps Ghita to escape.



Ned Meyers, biography of a former shipmate, cast as a novel by Cooper, and published in 1843.



Afloat and Ashore, romance by Cooper (1844). Miles Wallingford is a sequel.

Miles and Grace Wallingford, orphaned children of a Revolutionary naval officer, are raised on their Hudson River estate by the Rev. Mr. Hardinge, with his children Rupert and Lucy. Miles and Lucy have already fallen in love when the two boys run away to New York, accompanied by the black slave Neb. They sign on the John, a ship bound for the Indies, which is commanded by Captain Robbins, a friend of Miles's father. Miles and Neb become favorites of the mate, Mr. Marble. In the Strit of Sunda the John escapes capture by Malay pirates, but is afterward wrecked off Madagacar. The survivors reach the isle of Bourbon and ship home on the Tigris, but Robbins dies during hte voyage. Rupert and Miles reach new York in time to deny reports of their death, and Rupert enters a lawyer's office. Miles ships under Mr. Marble as third mate of the Crisis, enlisting Neb as a seaman. After various adventures, they reach England and sail for the Pacific. They engage in trade on the South American coast, have their ship stolen by the crew of a wrecked French privateer, rebuild the privateer, retake the Crisis, and sail for China. When he returns to America after this voyage, Miles becomes master of his own ship, the Dawn.


Miles Wallingford, romance by Cooper, published in 1844 as a sequel to Afloat and Ashore.

Believing his childhood sweetheart, Lucy Hardinge, loves another man, Miles decides to remain a bachelor, makes a compact with a cousin to will their property to one another, and with his friends Marble and Neb, a black, sets sail in his ship, the Dawn, to Hamburg. Anxious to reach Hamburg to pay off a mortgage on his estate, he is harried when his ship is seized first by the British for carrying French goods, then by the French, and, after a second escape, is wrecked. Taken aboard a British warship, Miles is imprisoned and his friends pressed into service. Escaping to New York, Miles finds his cousin is dead and his estate seized by a distant relative, Daggett, who has Miles jailed for debt. Lucy, though plagued by the problem of her spendthrift brother Rupert, provides bail for Miles. Once freed, Miles dispossesses Daggett and marries Lucy.



Satanstoe, novel by Cooper, published in 1845 as the first of the Littlepage Manuscripts.

Cornelius ("Corny") Littlepage is reared as an 18th-century country gentleman on the family estate Satanstoe, in Westchester County, New York, guided by his grandfather, Captain Hugh Littlepage, and Mr. Worden, an English parson. With his friends, Dick Follock, descendant of a Dutch family, and Jason Newcome, the shrewd Yankee schoolmaster, he visits New York City, whose aspect and wayss are described, with views of the theater and the black festival of "Pinkster." Corny falls in love with Dirck's cousin, Anneke Mordaunt, a belle whose other suitors include Dirck and Major Bulstrode. The fathers of Dirck and Corny send the young men with Jason and Mr. Worden to Albany to survey large grants of land where they plan to settle tenant farmers. The Mordaunts are there for like reasons, and all are befriended by Guert Ten Eyck, a young "buck'" of the town, who loves Anneke's companion, Mary Wallace. Bulstrode is also present as the troops prepare for battles in the French and Indian War. Guert and Corny go to Mooseridge, the Littlepage lands, where their work is interrupted by the war. Susquesus, an Onondaga scout, guides them to the troops at Ticonderoga. After the British defeat there, they go to Ravensnest, the Mordaunt estate, where they fight off an Indian attack in which Guert is mortally wounded. At the end Anneke and Corny wed.



The Chainbearer, novel by Cooper, published in 1845 as the second part of his Littlepage Manuscripts.

Mordaunt, son of Cornelius Littlepage and heir to his New York estates, is educated at Princeton, and in the last year of the Revolutionary War is an ensign in the company of the bluff Dutch surveyor Andries Coejemans, called Chainbearer, who later goes to Ravensnest and Mooseridge, the Littlepage frontier estates, as chief surveyor. There Mordanut joins him, and falls in love with his niece Dus Malbone. Mordaunt and the Indian guide Susquesus are captured while spying on Aaron Thousandacres, a surly squatter who has been plundering the timber at Ravensnest. Sussquesus escapes to summon Chainbearer, who comes to parley with Thousandacres. The Squatter demands that Dus marry his son, and when the indignant uncle refuses there is analtercation in which he is killed. Thousandacres is killed by a posse while resisting arrest, and members of the Littlepage family arrive in time to learn of the betrothal of Mordaunt and Dus.



The Redskins, or, Indian and Injin, novel by Cooper, published in 1846 as the third of the Littlepage Manuscripts, dealing with the Anti-Rent War.

Much of the land in New York state is held by absentee landlords, in the manner of feudal estates, and during the 1840s there is a popular anti-rent uprising. Bands of agitators, armed and disguised as "Injins," intimidate wealthy families and raid their property. Hugh Littlepage and his uncle Roger visit their estate, Ravensnest, to investigate the activities of the redskins. Hugh becomes engaged to Mary Warren, daughter of the local rector, although Seneca Newcombe, an unscrupulous lawyer, attempts to arrange a match between Hugh and his daughter Opportunity. Hugh and Roger have been disguised as German peddlers, but they reveal themselves to the family after they are recognized by the faithful old Indian Susquesus and the black servant Jaap. A band of anti-renters arrives in "Injin" disguise and is contrasted unfavorably with a group of Western Indians who come to confer with Susquesus. Hugh, aided by Mary and the real Indians, discovers and foils the arson plot of Newcombe and the anti-renters. The sheriff disperses the raiders, and, when Ravensnest is finally made safe again, Hugh and Mary are married.




The Oak Openings, or, The Bee-Hunter, romance by Cooper, published in 1848.

In Michigan, at the opening of the War of 1812, the bee-hunter Benjamin Boden, called Le Bourdon ("The Drone"), is joined at his "Honey Castle") (Château au Miel) by the drunken settler Gershom Waring, and the Indians Elksfoot and Pigeonswing. He learns that the British have captured the fort at Mackinaw, and the Pigeonswing ia  U.S. army messenger, while Elksfoot is a British spy. On his way with Waring to the latter's home, Boden finds the corpse of Elksfoot, who has been scalped by Pigeonswing. At Waring's home, he meets the settler's wife and his attractive sister Margery, and wins their gratitude by destroying Waring's supply of liquor. Just before the arrival of a band of pro-British Potawatami, they abandon the cabin. After rescuiing Pigeonswing, they are joined by Parson Amen and the American corporal Flint, both bound for Mackinaw in the company of a renegade Indian, Onoah, or Scalping Pete. At Boden's 'Castle', they are surrounded by the Potstwatami, with whom Pete pretends to parley while actually plotting the massacre of the whites. He is friendly to Boden, however, and urges him to marry Margery, so that the two may escape. They do marry, and afterward Amen and Flint are killed, but, with the aid of Pigeonswing and the repentant Pete, the other whites escape.

Sir Walter Scott

An Overview of American Literature

jueves, 22 de noviembre de 2012

An Overview of American Literature

Links to the website of the Norton Anthology of American Literature:

Before 1820:

(Overview)

 

 
Stories of the Beginning of the World
Native American Trickster Tales
Hannah Dustan
Christopher Columbus (1451-1506)
Álvar (o Álvaro) Núñez Cabeza de Vaca (c. 1490–1558)
Thomas Harriot (1560-1621)
Samuel De Champlain (c. 1570-1635)
Thomas Morton (c. 1579-1647)
John Smith (1580-1631)
William Bradford (1590-1657)
John Winthrop (1588-1649)
Roger Williams (c. 1603-1683)
Anne Bradstreet (c. 1612-1672)
Mary Rowlandson (c. 1636-1711)
Edward Taylor (c. 1642-1729)
Cotton Mather (1663-1728)
Jonathan Edwards (1703-1758)
Benjamin Franklin (1706-1790)
Samson Occom (1723-1792)
J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur (1735-1813)
John Adams (1735-1826) and Abigail Adams (1744-1818)
Thomas Paine (1737-1809)
Thomas Jefferson (1743-1826)
Olaudah Equiano (1745?-1797)
Judith Sargent Murray (1751-1820) and Hannah Webster Foster (1762-1837)
Phillis Wheatley (c. 1753-1784)
Royall Tyler (1757-1826)

A ver, ¿y Brockden Brown? ¿No es más importante que Samson Occom? Hasta William Hill Brown, si nos ponemos.


1820-1865:

(Overview)
 

Washington Irving (1783-1859)
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
Catherine Maria Sedgwick (1789–1851)
William Cullen Bryant (1794-1878)
William Apess (1798-1839)
Lydia Maria Child (1802–1880)
Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-1882)
Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807-1882)
John Greenleaf Whittier (1807-1892)
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
Abraham Lincoln (1809-1865)
Margaret Fuller (1810-1850)
Harriet Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)
Fanny Fern (1811–1872) and Elizabeth Drew Stoddard (1823–1902)
Harriet Jacobs (c. 1813-1897)
Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862)
Frederick Douglass (1818-1895)
Walt Whitman (1819-1892)
Herman Melville (1819-1891)
Emily Dickinson (1830-1886)

—¿Y William Prescott? Ah, que eso ya no  es literatura.


1865-1914:

(Overview)
 

Native American Chants and Songs
Charlot (c. 1831-1900)
Mark Twain (Samuel L. Clemens) (1835-1910)
Maria Amparo Ruiz de Burton (1835-1895)
William Dean Howells (1837-1920)
Constance Fenimore Woolson ( 1840-1894)
Ambrose Bierce (1842-1914?)
Sarah Winnemucca (1844-1891) and Zitkala Sa (1876-1938)
Sarah Orne Jewett (1849-1909)
Kate Chopin (1850-1904)
Booker T. Washington (1856?-1915)
Charles W. Chesnutt (1858-1932)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman (1860-1935) and Theodore Dreiser (1871-1945)
Bret Harte (1836-1902) and Mary Austin (1868-1934)
W. E. B. Du Bois (1868-1963)
James Weldon Johnson (1871-1938) and Paul Lawrence Dunbar (1872-1906)
Jack London (1876-1916)

Es una selección curiosa, esta que incluye a Sara Winnemucca y Zitkala Sa pero no a Stephen Crane. Habrá que completarla. O reducirla, si no.

1914-1945:

(Overview)
 

Black Elk (1863-1950)
Edwin Arlington Robinson (1869-1935)
Willa Cather (1873-1947)
Amy Lowell (1874-1925)
Robert Frost (1874-1963)
Susan Glaspell (1876-1882)
Carl Sandburg (1878-1967)
Wallace Stevens (1879-1955)
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963)
H. D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961)
Marianne Moore (1887-1972)
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
Eugene O’Neill (1888-1953)
Raymond Chandler (1888-1965)
Claude McKay (1889-1948)
Katherine Anne Porter (1890-1980)
Zora Neale Hurston (1891-1960)
Nella Larsen (1891-1964)
Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950)
E. E. Cummings (1894-1962)
Jean Toomer (1894-1967)
F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940)
William Faulkner (1897-1962)
Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)
Hart Crane (1899-1932)
Thomas Wolfe (1900-1938) and Richard Wright (1908-1960)
Sterling Brown (1901-1989) and Langston Hughes (1902-1967)
Carlos Bulosan (b. 1911)

Curioso que no aparezca Vladimir Nabokov, tan estadounidense al menos como Black Elk, y más literato. Debe ser por lo de mudarse a Suiza, a donde no fue Black Elk.

American literature from 1945

(Overview)

Prose 1945-

Eudora Welty (b. 1909)
Tennessee Williams (1911-1983)
John Cheever (1912-1982)
Ralph Ellison (1914-1994)
Saul Bellow (b. 1915)
Grace Paley (b. 1922)
Jack Kerouac (1922-1969)
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
Flannery O’Connor (1925-1964)
Ursula K. Le Guin (b. 1929)
Donald Barthelme (b. 1931)
Toni Morrison (b. 1931)
John Updike (b. 1932)
Thomas Pynchon (b. 1937)
Raymond Carver (b. 1938)
Toni Cade Bambara (1939-1995)
Maxine Hong Kingston (b. 1940)
Gloria Anzaldúa (b. 1942)
Alice Walker (b. 1944)
Annie Dillard (b. 1945)
David Mamet (b. 1947) and Sam Shepard (b. 1943)
Leslie Marmon Silko (b. 1948)
Art Spiegelman (b. 1948)
Louise Erdrich (b. 1954) and Sherman Alexie (b. 1966)
Richard Powers (b. 1957)
Jhumpa Lahiri (b. 1967)


Curioso, también, que no aparezca Philip Roth, ni Jerzy Kosinski, ni Paul Auster...  En fin, selecciones del Reader’s Digest, que es lo que es la literatura.


Poetry 1945-

Robert Penn Warren (1905-1989)
Theodore Roethke (1908-1963)
Charles Olson (1910-1970)
Elizabeth Bishop (1911-1979)
Robert Hayden (1913-1980)
Randall Jarrell (1914-1965)
John Berryman (1914-1972)
Robert Lowell (1917-1977)
Richard Wilbur (b. 1921)
Denise Levertov (1923-1997)
A. R. Ammons (1926-2001)
James Merrill (1926-1995)
Robert Creeley (b. 1926)
Allen Ginsberg (1926-1997)
Galway Kinnell (b. 1927)
John Ashbery (b. 1927)
Anne Sexton (1928-1974)
Adrienne Rich (b. 1929)
Gary Snyder (b. 1930)
Sylvia Plath (1932-1963)
Michael S. Harper (b. 1938)
Simon J. Ortiz (b. 1941)
Billy Collins (b. 1941)
Louise Glück (b. 1943) and Cathy Song (b. 1955)
Joy Harjo (b. 1951)
Rita Dove (b. 1952)
Li-Young Lee (b. 1957)

Me podían haber puesto a David Foster Wallace, o a Danielewski, o a alguno de estos jóvenes genios à la mode, Jonathan Franzen, o Foer. O a Stephen King o George R. R. Martin, por qué no, que la gente los lee más que a Li-Young Lee. Cada cual pone a quien estima oportuno.

American Passages

 

The plot of Volpone

martes, 20 de noviembre de 2012

The plot of VOLPONE

From The Oxford Companion to English Literature: 
 

Volpone, or The Fox, a comedy by Jonson, performed by the King's Men in 1605-6, printed 1607.
Volpone, a rich Venetian without children, feigns that he is dying, in order to draw gifts from his would-be heirs. Mosca, his parasite and confederate, persuades each of these in turn that he is to be the heir, and thus extracts costly presents from them. One of them, Corvino, even attempts to sacrifice his wife to Volpone in hope of the inheritance. Finally Volpone overreaches himself. To enjoy the discomfiture of the vultures who are awaiting his death, he makes over his property by will to Mosca and pretends to be dead. Mosca takes advantage of the situation to blackmail Volpone, but rather than be thus defeated Volpone chooses to reveal all to the authorities. They direct that Volpone shall be cast in irons until he is as infirm as he pretended to be, Mosca whipped and confined to the galleys, Corvino made parade in ass's ears, and his wife be returned to her family with a trebled dowry. A secondary plot involves Sir Politic Would-be, an English traveller who has absurd schemes for improving trade and curing diseases, and his Lady, a loquacious, hectoring pedant. Sir Politic is chastened when Peregrine, a wiser English traveller, pretends to have him arrested for treason. The names of the principal characters, Volpone (the fox), Mosca (the fly), Voltore (the vulture), Corbaccio (the crow), Corvino (the raven), indicate their roles and natures.

—oOo— 
 

This plot is summarised by Jonson himself in an acrostic poem at the start of the play:

                 The argument
 
V olpone, childless, rich, feigns sicks, despairs,
O ffers his state to hopes of several heirs,
L ies languishing: his parasite receives
P resents of all, assures, deludes; then weaves
O ther cross plots, which ope themselves, are told.
N ewe tricks for safety are sought; they thrive: when bold,
E ach tempts the other again, and all are sold.

 

—oOo—

A film version from the 1940s—in French, unfortunately. And a video of the epilogue.

Ben Jonson

Oscar Wilde

martes, 20 de noviembre de 2012

Oscar Wilde

From The Short Oxford Companion to English Literature:

 
Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (1854-1900), studied at Trinity College, Dublin, then at Magdalen College, Oxford, where in 1878 he won the Newdigate Prize for his poem ’Ravenna’. His flamboyant aestheticism attracted attention, much of it hostile; he proclaimed himself a disciple of Pater and the cult of ’Art for Art’s sake’ mocked in Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience (1881). Wilde undertook a lecture tour of the United States in 1882, after the publication of his first volume of verse, Poems (1881). In 1884 he married, and in 1888 pubished a volume of fairy-stories, The Happy Prince and other tales, written for his sons. In 1891 followed Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime, and other stories and his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray, a Gothic melodrama. Wilde claimed in his preface, ’There is no such thing as a moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all’. He published A House of Pomegranates (1891), fairy-stories; and The Duchess of Padua (1891), a dull verse tragedy. He achieved theatrical success with his comedies Lady Windermere’s Fan (1892); A Woman of No Importance (1893), An Ideal Husband (1895); and his masterpiece The Importance of Being Earnest (1895). Salomé (now known chiefly for Richard Strauss’s opera), written in French, was refused a licence, but performed in Paris in 1896 and published in 1894 in an English translation by Lord Alfred Douglas with illustrations by Beardsley. Lord Alfred’s father, the marquess of Queensberry, disapproved of his son’s friendship with Wilde and publicly insulted the playwright. This started a chain of events which led to Wilde’s imprisonment for homosexual offences in 1895. He was declared bankrupt while in prison and wrote a letter of bitter reproach to Lord Alfred, published in part in 1905 as De Profundis. He was released in 1897 and went to France where he wrote The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), inspired by his prison experience. In exile he adopted the name Sebastian Melmoth, after the romance by Maturin. He died in Paris. His other writings include critical dialogues (’The Decay of Lying’ and ’The Critic as Artist’, 1891) and The Soul of Man under Socialism, a plea for individualism and artistic freedom, first published in the Fortnightly Review in 1891.

A volume of letters, ed. R. Hart-Davis, appeared in 1962.

_________

 From  Andrew Sanders’s The Short Oxford History of English Literature:  
 

Oscar Wilde (1854-1900) was a Dubliner distinguished by both his class and his education. He was also the son of a romantically inclined mother who dabbled in nationalist verse. Wilde himself only ever flirted fancifully with what was, in the 1880s, the particularly vexed and pressing question of Irish Home Rule. Having left Dublin to study at Oxford, he seems thereafter to have aspired to shine in England and, as far s was possible, to be the central figure in a fashionable metropolitan coterie of artists, writers, and wits. He also acted out the parts of a London socialite and of an amusingly provocative social critic. Underlying all Wilde’s life and work (he readily acknowledged there was an intimate relationship between the two) there were, however, both a seriousness and an acute, but amused, awareness that he was acting. Wilde’s homosexuality, both covertly and overtly expressed in what he wrote during the 1890s, might at first have seemed little more than a gesture to an imported French décadence; after the terrible fall marked by his trial and imprisonment (a fall which in some ways he seems to have deliberately courted), the alienating bias of his art became manifest. The contrived style of much of his prose, the excessive elaboration of his poetry, and the aphoristic and paradoxical wit of his plays, are all subversive. They do more than reject mid-victorian values in life and art in the name of aestheticism; they defiantly provoke a response to difference.

Amid a welter of affectation, Wilde’s essays suggest that he could, when it suited him, be a perceptive, rather than simply a naughty critic. He always questions institutions, moral imperatives, and social clichés; he rarely suffers fools gladly. From the refinedly outrageious lectures he gave to Colorado miners in the early 1880s (kitted out in velvet knee-breeches) to the calculatedly annoying challenges to conventional literary morality publicly expressed during his first trial, Wilde enjoyed his chosen roles as an aesthete and an iconoclast. His Platonic dialogue, The Decay of Lying (1889) and the two parts of The Critic as Artist (1890) suggest something of the aphoristic dialogue of his later comedies (though his plays would rarely allow an authoritative voice to be so pointedly interrupted, or occasionally qualified, by a convenient stooge). The inspirer of these dialogues may have been Plato, but the sentiments are Pater’s and the lexical virtuosity is characteristically Wilde’s. He offers the kind of criticism which delights in snaring butterflies rather than breaking them on wheels. He can be memorably cruel ([Mrs Humphry Ward’s] Robert Elsmere is squashed by the observation that it is Arnold’s Literature and Dogma ’with the literature left out’) and an initially flattering suggestion can be cleverly turned on its head (’Meredith is a prose Browning, and so is Browning’). Wilde’s central arguments are, however, derived from an awareness that art is far more than a mere imitation of nature. ’A Truth in Art’, he remarks in The Truth of Masks (1891), ’is that whose contradictory is also true’. In The Decay of Lying there is also a recurrent plesaure in insisting that ’the telling of beautiful untrue things is the proper aim of Art’. Wilde’s longest and most provocatively serious essay, The Soul of Man under Socialism (1891), does not argue primarily for a new social order or for a redistribution of property, but for a larger and expanding idea of freedom, a liberation from drudgery and the rule of machines. The future achievement of a socialist order offers the prospect of what Wilde candidly sums up elsewhere as ’enjoyment’.

Wilde’s delight in provocation, and his exploration of alternative moral perspectives, mark his most important work of fiction, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890). The novel’s Preface presents a series of attitudinizing aphorisms about art and literature which end with the bald statement: ’All art is quite useless’. The narrative that follows is a melodramatic, Faustian demonstration of the notion that art and morality are quite divorced. It is, nevertheless, a text riven by internal contradictions and qualifications. Aestheticism is both damned and dangerously upheld; hedonism both indulged and disdained. Dorian Gray is a tragedy of sorts with the subtext of a morality play; its self-destructive, darkly sinning central character is at once a desperate suicide and a martyr. Wilde’s stage tragedies have less interest and far less flair. His first play, Vera: or, The Nihilists (1880) suggests a pretty minimal mastery of theatre technique and an even thinner grasp of the Russian political realities which it attempts to dramatize. His blank-verse drama, The Duchess of Padua (written in Paris in 1883), never even reached the stage, while A Florentine Tragedy, begun in 1894 when Wilde as at the height of his powers, remained unfinished until 1897. Quite the most powerful and influential of his tragedies, Salome, was written in French and translated into English in 1894 by Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas. The play, which draws on the Bible account of the death of John the Baptist and on Flaubert’s story Herodias, was not produced in England until 1931 (a victim both of its outrageous treatment of Bible history and of its author’s reputation). The striking, overwrought imagery of Salome, and its shocking juxtapositions of repulsion and sexual desire, of death and orgasm, were particularly powerfully transformed in the German version which became the libretto of Richard Strauss’s revolutionary opera of 1915.

Wilde’s comedies of the 1890s have a far surer place in the theatre. The Importance of Being Earnest (1895) has indeed been accorded an unchallenged canonical status which is witnessed by its probably being the most quoted play in the English language after Hamlet. Lady Windermere’s Fan: A Play about a Good Woman (1892) was Wilde’s first supreme success on the London stage. It has distinct parallels with its comic successor, A Woman of No Importance (1893), in that it centres on the discovery of a dire secret and is at its most animated and conspicuously Wildean in the witty speeches of a dandified male aristocrat. Both plays have a noticeable feminist bias in that they stress the innate strength of their central female characters, a strength which draws on, and finally masters, a certain puritanism. In April 1895, at the time of Wilde’s arrest, charged with illegal homosexual practices, both the carefully plotted An Ideal Husband (1895) and its successor The Importance of Being Earnest were playing to large London audiences. As the scandal developed, first Wilde’s name was removed from the hoardings outside the theatres, then the runs of both plays were abruptly terminated. The real achivement of these plays lies neither in their temporary notoriety, nor teally in their polished and anti-sentimental artifices, but in their undercurrents of boredom, disillusion, alienation and, occasionally, real feeling. In both, despite their delightful evocations of flippancy and snobbery, and despite their abrupt shifts in attitudes and judgements, Wilde triumphed in capturing a fluid, intensely funny, mood of ’irresponsibility’ which challenges all pretension except that of the artifice of the plays themselves.

Hegel on Wilde

H.G. Wells

lunes, 19 de noviembre de 2012

H. G. Wells

From The Short Oxford Companion to English Literature:
 

H(erbert) George Wells (1866-1946), the son of an unsuccessful small tradesman, was appreniced to a draper in early life, a period reflected in several of his novels. For some years, in poor health, he struggled as a teacher, studying and writing articles in his spare time. In 1903 he joined the Fabian Society, but was soon at odds with it, his sponsor G. B. Shaw, and Sidney and Beatrice Webb. His literary output was vast and extremely varied. As a novelist he is perhaps best remembered for his scientific romances, among the earliest products of the new genre of science fiction. The first, The Time Machine (1895), is a social allegory set in the year 802701, describing a society divided into two classes, the subterranean workers, called Morlocks, and the decadent Eloi. This was followed by The Wonderful Visit (1895), The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898, a powerful and apocalyptic vision of the world invaded by Martians), When the Sleeper Wakes (1899), The First Men in the Moon (1901), Men Like Gods (1923) and others. Another group of novels evokes in comic and realistic style the lower-middle class world of his youth. Love and Mr Lewisham (1900) tells the story of a struggling teacher; Kipps (1905) that of an aspiring draper's assistant; The History of Mr Polly (1920) recounts the adventures of an inefficient shopkeeper who liberates himself by burning down his own shop and bolting for freedom, which he discovers as man-of-all-work at the Potwell Inn.

Among his other novels, Ann Veronica (1909) is a feminist tract about a girl who defies her father and conventional morality by running away with the man she loves. Tono-Bungay (1909) is a picture of English society in dissolution, and of the advent of a new class of rich, embodied in Uncle Ponderevo, an entrepreneur intent on peddling a worthless patent medicine. The Country of the Blind, and other Stories (1911), his fifth collection of short stories, contains the memorable 'The Door in the Wall'. The New Machiavelli (1911), about a politician involved in a sexual scandal, was seen to mark a decline in his creative power, evident in later novels, which include Mr Britling Sees It Through (1916) and The World of William Clissold (1926). He continued to reach a huge audience, with his massive The Outline of History (1920) and its shorter offspring A Short History of the World (1922), and with many works of scientific and political speculation (including The Shape of Things to Come, 1933); the dark pessimism of his last prediction, Mind at the End of Its Tether (1945) may be seen in the context of his own ill health and the course of the Second World War.


His Experiment in Autobiography (1934) is a striking portrait of himself, his contemporaries (including Arnold Bennett, Gissing, and the Fabians) and their times.

From The Edwardian Novel, by Andrew Sanders (The Short Oxford History of English Literature): 
 

In the mainstream English fiction of the early 1900s the religious doubts of the preceding twenty years, and the reaction against Victorian repression and social or famillial oppression, are gradually marginalized. There remained a pervasive desire to articulate the unsaid and to give voice to formerly silent social groups—to women above all—and also to the often conventional, generally ignored petty bourgeoisie. The common man (and woman) briefly moved to centre stage before being ushered off again according to the élitist tastes of the Modernists. Although 'Modernist' writing, which has its roots in the early 1900s, looked to formal experiment, to verbal pyrotechnics, to synchronic play, and to the extraordinary in character and expression, more traditional writers, most notably Arnold Bennett and H. G. Wells, developed existing lines of story-telling and diachronic movememnt in order to delineate the 'ordinary'. To Arnold Bennett, writing in his disappointingly unadventurous study The Author's Craft (1914), the mind of the ideal novelist should be 'permeated and controlled by common sense'. This 'common sense' precluded a break with a received view of character and with the supposed stability of the narrative form. For both Bennett and Wells the acceptance of literary convention brought considerable popular and financial success (Bennet's The Card of 1911, for example, sold fifteen thousand copies within three years of publication). It also later entailed the overshadowing of their reputations by the canonical acceptance of the work of those of their younger contemporaries whose self-propagandizing had established 'Modernist' principles as the leading ideas of the new age.

As H. G. Wells generously acknowledged through the narrator of his The New Machiavelli (1911), there were hordes of men in 'the modern industrial world' who had 'raised themselves up from the general mass of untrained, uncultured poorish people in a hard industrious selfish struggle', but it was only in Arnold Bennett's novels that he had ever found a picture of them. These self-made, self-admiring small capitalists were now of a different breed from Dickens's Rouncewells and Gaskell's Thorntons, but they were generally despised by writers who rejected their enterprise, their vulgarity, and their belief in the virtue of work and reward. Bennett (1867-1931) is not habitually a fictional delineator of financial success, but he can be a meticulous analyst of the motives behind thrift, solidity, hard work, and public virtue. In this his models were, ironically enough, the great French anti-bourgeois writers Flaubert, Maupassant, and Zola rather than Dickens or Gaskell. His own affection for France and the French tradition gave him, as the Parisian episodes in The Old Wives' Tale suggest, a usefully detached perspective on his own birthplace, and the real focuso of his fiction, the five drab towns of the Staffordshire Potteries.

Bennet's work oscillates interestingly between the poles of an insistent provinciality and domesticity and a taste for the exotic and the peregrinatory. Many of his novels either describe, or merely contain, a hotel, that temporary centre of a wanderer's life, that home-from-home that is never home. An overwritten early work, Grand Babylon Hotel (1902), and a late documentary novel, Imperial Palace (1930), indicate something of the continuing force of his fascination, but the sections of The Old Wives' Tale dealing with Sophia Scales's Paris Pension and wihth the two sisters' sojourn at Buxtion serve to ramify the idea of the hotel as a no man's land of comfort, tidiness, and impersonality. Bennett's finest fiction works through the establishment of contrasts, between situation and aspiration, between enclosure and flight, between endurance and escape, between security and insecurity. The sequence of three novels set in the Five Towns, Clayhanger (1910), Hilda Lessways (1911), and These Twain (1916), are haunted by Darius Clayhanger's memories of the humiliation of the workhouse and by his son Edwin's attempts to escape from the cloying world of his father's respectable business. Bennett's masterpiece, The Old Wives' Tale (1908), traces the divergent fortunes of two sisters from the mid- to the late nineteenth century against the backgrounds of a slowly and unwillingly changing English industrial town and the turbulent Paris of the 1860s and 1870s. The small and provincial are counterbalanced by the metropolitan and the sophisticated, and generations conflict, converge, divide, and die. Bennett intricately relates his characters to the shaping topography, geography, class, and culture that surrounds them, but he always brings them back to acquired habit, the parochiality, and to plod. Similar qualities, exposed in a drab London setting, distinguish Riceyman Steps (1923). This post-First World War novel recalls physical and spiritual loss and wounding, but it centres on the limited ambitions and perceptions of a suburban bookseller, his wife, and his barely literate servant. The narrowness of the world Bennett describes is silently contrasted with that of the dusty and unopened books on the shelves of a shop whose contents are finally dispersed. Throughout the book the arbitrariness of commercial value is suggested (even down to a possessive attachment to the shop's dust) but its final pages allow for a questioning of literary value, of words on the page and the act of reading them. Without being a classic 'Modernist' text Riceyman Steps unobtrusively suggests many of the central experimental ideas of contemporary Modernism.

The work of H(erbert) G(eorge) Wells (1866-1946) has many parallels with that of the shop-keeping world of Bennett, but it has a far more evident political edge and a sometimes perversely 'scientific' programme. Wells is one of the few English writers to be well read in modern science and in the scientific method; he was also ambiguously persuaded both of the advantages of a socialistically and scientifically planned future and of the inherently anti-humanist bent of certain aspects of scientific progress. His science-fiction novels, The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr Moreau (1896), and The War of the Worlds (1898), still function as alarmist prophecies a century after their first publication. The Island of Dr Moreau is a chilling, almost Swiftian, fable of vivisection and genetic engineering. Moreau, a tyrannical exile on a pacific island, is also a post-Darwnist Frankenstein, torturing and metamorphizing animals in his 'House of Pain' only to be destroyed as his horrid creations rever to their brutal types.

Wells's English social fiction contrasts starkly with such fantasies though even here science and men of science have leading roles. In Tono Bungay (1909) that role is divided between two Ponderevos: the small-town apothecary uncle who makes a fortune out of spurious water-tonic, and the expermintal nephew ho re-establishes the lost family fortune by building battleships. Wells's socialismm, a wayward, belligerent, and questioning socialism, also runs through his most demanding stories. In Tono Bungay the narrator moves between three Englands: the defunct, privileged world of the country house, the narrow perspectives of the draper's shop, and the heady exhilaration of market capitalism and invention. All three are found wanting, but he remains unpersuaded by an English brand of socialism which 'has always been a little bit too human, too set about with personalities and foolishness'. There is an individualism about Wells's arguments and the characters who mouth them whch matches that of his sometime firend and Fabian socialist colleague, Shaw. In Kipps: The Story of a Simple Soul (1905) the critique of capital is more emphatic, and the socialist characters more sympathetic and influential, but the nation and the society observed in the book are seen as ruled by Stupidity 'like the leaden goddess of the Dunciad, like some fat, proud flunkey, like pride, like indoence, like all that is darkening and heavy and obstructive in life'. It is a stupidity which, it seems, no ideals can pierce. Even in the generally optimistic The History of Mr Polly (1910) the muddling nature of English society can be avoided only when the narrative endorses a fantasy of escape into a rural idyll. Wells's last major novel, before he retreated into writing the popular histories and digests of science with which he entertained his readers for thirty years, is The New Machiavelli of 1911. It is in part a personal testament, written from the point of view of a pragmatic Member of Parliament, as well as a perceptive account of parliamentary life in the early years of the twentieth century.  Like Ann Veronica (1909) the book is forthright in its discussion of marriage and of women's rights, describing, very much from a male perspective, a 'gradual discovery of sex as a thing collectively portentous that I have to mingle with my statecraft if my picture is to be true'. It also contains sops for the supporters of women's suffrage, forcibly stating a case for the ceasing of 'this coddling and browbeating of women' and for the 'free and fearless' participation of women in the collective purpose of mankind'.  (...)


 

Things to Come

Gerard Manley Hopkins

lunes, 19 de noviembre de 2012

Gerard Manley Hopkins

From The Short Oxford Companion to English Literature: 
 

Hopkins, Gerard Manley (1844-89). In 1863 he went to Balliol College, Oxford, where he wrote much poetry, including 'Heaven-Haven' and 'The Habit of Perfection'. He came under the influence of the Oxford Movement and Newman, and in 1866 was received into the Roman Catholic Church. In 1868 he resolved to become a Jesuit and symbolically burned his poems, though he sent some copies to his friend Bridges for safekeeping. He was professor of rhetoric at Roehampton 1873-4, then studied theology at St Beuno's in North Wales (1874-77), where he also learned Welsh.

A new phase of creativity began in 1876. Inspired by the loss of the Deutschland in December 1875, which had among its passengers five Franciscan nuns exiled for their faith, Hopkins wrote his most ambitious poems, 'The Wreck of the Deutschland'. In 1877 he composed some of his best-known poems, including 'The Windhover' and 'Pied Beauty'. After ordination he was sent to Chesterfield, then London, then Oxford, where he wrote 'Henry Purcell'. Work in various industrial parishes followed, including an exhausting spell in Liverpool (1880-1) where he was oppressed by a sense of his own failure as a preacher.

In 1884 he was appointed to the chair of Greek and Latin at University College, Dublin. There he became ill and deeply depressed, and wrote (mainly in 1885) a number of 'Dark Sonnets', powerfully expressing his sense of exile and frustration; these include 'Carrion Comfort' and 'No worst, there is none'. He also managed to produce in these last years less desperate poems, including 'Harry Ploughman' and 'That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire'. He died of typhoid.

Apart from work in anthologies (including Poets . . . of the Century, 1893, and Bridges's own The Spirit of Man, 1916), nothing was published until 1918, when Bridges produced his Poems; Bridges had judged the public not ready to receive Hopkins's 'oddity', but initial bewilderment was followed by steadily rising admiration. His poems, letters, and journals reflect his sense of vocation (sometimes conflicting) as priest and poet, his technical interest in prosody, and his search for a unifying sacramental view of creation. His concepts of 'inscape', 'instress' and 'sprung rhythm' have given rise to a large body of aesthetic theory. By 'inscape' he seems to have meant 'the individual or essential quality of the thing'; 'instress' refers to the energy which sustains an inscape, and flows into the mind of the observer. Both words were coined by Hopkins. 'Sprung rhythm' he considered less an innovation than a return to the rhythms of speech and of earlier forms of verse. But the great (though delayed) impact of Hopkins's work may be seen less in terms of technical innovation than as a renewal of poetic energy, seriousness, and originality, after a period marked by much undistinguished and derivative verse.

  
Sprung rhythm  (or 'abrupt rhythm'), a term invented by G. M. Hopkins to describe his own idiosyncratic poetic metre, as opposed to normal 'running' rhythm, the regular alternation of stressed and unstressed syllables. Hopkins maintained that sprung rhythm existed, unrecognized, in Old English poetry and in Shakespeare, Dryden, and Milton (notably in Samson Agonistes). It is distinguished by a metrical foot consisting of a varying number of syllables. The extra, 'slack' syllables added to the established patterns are called 'outriders' or 'hangers'. Hopkins demonstrated the natural occurrence of this rhythm in English by pointing out that many nursery rhymes employed it, e.g.


Díng, Dóng, Béll,

Pússy's in the wéll

He felt strongly that poetry should be read aloud, but seems to have felt that the words themselves were not enough to suggest the intended rhythms, and frequently added various diacritical markings. Some critics have suggested that sprung rhythm is not a poetic metre at all, properly speaking, merely Hopkins's attempt to force his own personal rhythm into an existing pattern, or recognizable variation of one, and that his sprung rhythm is in fact closer to some kinds of free verse or polyphonic prose.

From Andrew Sanders,
Short Oxford History of English Literature
("High Victorian Literature"):

To Dickens and other Victorian progressives, the assertiveness of the Oxford Movement and the magnetism of the revived Roman Church seemed to be dangerous examples of 'Ecclesiastical Dandyism', an undoing of national history and a self-indulgent withdrawal from more urgent concerns. The career of Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89) might certainly have suggested the impropriety of such a withdrawal had the nature of his twin vocations to the Jesuit priesthood and to poetry been more widely known to his contemporaries. His converstion to Roman Catholicism at Oxford, and his decision to enter the Society of Jesus in 1868, efectively cut him off from the mainstream of contemporary English life. The failure of his Jesuit superiors to recognize and encourage his idiosyncratic poetic talent also severed him from the body of prospective readers to which he most earnestly sought to appeal. He burned much of his early work on his ordination and took up poetry again only in 1875 with the startingly radical 'The Wreck of the Deutschland', a poem which the editor of the Jesuit periodical, The Month, decided that he 'dared not print'. No representative edition of Hopkins's poetry appeared until 1918.

Hopkins was fortunate in the poet-friends with whom he corresponded, Richard Watson Dixon and Robert Bridges (1844-1930), the latter his literary executor and editor. These non-Jesuit correspondents were the recipients of the theories that he attempted to articulate and of the often extraordinary poems that were developed in relation to these experimental ideas. After 1918 his work found the wide receptive audience which it had earlier been denied, but Hopkins's experiments, like the culture from which they emerge, remain essentially of the nineteenth century. As his Journals reveal, he observed nature in painstaking detail, patiently examining flowers and leaves, intently noting the effects of light and shade, and delighting in gradations of texture and colour. Given the stringency of his Jesuit surroundings, his immediate culture may have been of aesthetic deprivation, but his habits of observation and recording had been long acquired. His attention to the exactness of things is indeed akin to that of the Pre-Raphaelite painters (if not to Pre-Raphaelite poetry) and his methods of analysis indicate a scrupulous Ruskinian apprenticeship. Hopkins's intellectual disciplines certainly benefited from his study of theology, and in particular from his somewhat eccentric (given the prejudices of his teachers) pleasure in the thought of the thirteenth-century philosopher Duns Scotus ('who of all men most sways my spirits to peace'). His poetry may have been far too idiosyncratic to appeal to the somewhat saccharine tastes of his contemporary co-religionists, but his structures derive from highly disciplined and often traditional ways of thinking, seeing, translating, and writing.

Most of Hopkins's surviving poems are distinctly God-centred. His is a God who resolves contradictions as the fount of all that is and as the Creator who draws all the Strands of Creation back to himself. Created nature is in itself immensely precious, for the glory and wonder of God is implicit in it. In 'Pied Beauty' Hopkins celebrates harmonized oppositions, dapples and 'all things counter, original, spare, strange' because they express the energy and vitality of the visible world, a world held together by a divine force that constantly regenerates it. Undoing, desolation, and the 'problem of pain' are however never eliminated from his most searching poems. At times it is humankind which mars the integrity of beauty by unfeelingly trampling 'the growing green', by felling the 'especial' sweetness of a line of poplars, or by caging skylarks, but Hopkins is never simply or naïvely 'green'. His poems also explore the presence of violence in the realm of the parahuman. Despite the wonder of it, the windhover's ecstatic swoop is none the less predatorial, breaking lines and straining words as it falls.

I caught this morning morning's minion, king-
  dom of daylights dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing

In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
  As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend; the hurl and gliding
  Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird,—the achieve of, the mastery of the thing.

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
   Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

  No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-beak embers, ah my dear,
  Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermillion.

The windhover's beauty is 'brute', yet its 'brutality' is of the essence of its animal perfection. Hopkins's poem gasps at the wonder of a creature whose free movement and concentrated strength stir an awesome sense of the presence of the Creator-Redeemer (its subtitle directs it 'To Christ our Lord'). Elsewhere in his work, most notably in the complex theological framework of 'The Wreck of the Deutschland' and the parallel poem 'The Loss of the Eurydice', Hopkins ponders the mystery of human suffering by forging parallels with a paradoxical Christ, the Man of Sorrows, and the Suffering Servant who is, at the same time, the Divine Judge and the Merciful Redeemer. He pulls dissolution into resolution by seeing patterns, not simply in the seasons or in the forms of nature, but also in religious imagery, in the observances of the Christian calendar, and in the ultimate meaning of the universe. The very intricacy of his verse is an attempt to express and recvord something of the multifariousness of the visible and aural world. The very 'difficulty' and the contortion of his poetry, its intellectual leaps and its violent 'metaphysical' yoking together of images, offer a momentary statis and a fusion of divergent insights and impressions. Hopkins found order where other Victorians saw anarchy; he recognized purpose where many of his contemporaries begain to despair over what they presumed was an increasingly meaningless fragmentation. Even in his dark, straining, disappointing, despairing last sonnets ('No worst, there is none', 'To seem the stranger lies my lot', I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day', 'Patience, hard thing!', 'My own heart let me have more pity on') there still remains the conviction that somehow a barely comprehended God comprehends all things.

The Fates of Men