- In her 1820 pamphlet poem, The Sceptic, twenty-six-year-old
Felicia Hemans attacked Lord Byron's scepticism about the afterlife
on the grounds that as a posture, it was dishonest, and as a program,
it added darkness to a world already sufficiently dark. For her pains,
she was welcomed by John Taylor Coleridge in the Quarterly Review
as an alternative to "the most dangerous writer of the present day,"
while herself remaining "always pure in thought and expression, cheerful,
affectionate, and pious."[1]
Her "dangerous" opponent went unnamed in both poem and review, but Byron's
biography and poetry were recognizable in her text. In a June 1820 letter
to John Murray, Hemans's publisher as well as his own, Byron responded
this way to The Sceptic: "Mrs. Hemans is a poet also–but
too stilted, & apostrophic–& quite wrong. Men died calmly
before the Christian era, and since, without Christianity."[2]
(Read Byron's Letter)
- As a study of Byron, Hemans, and scepticism, this hypertext aims to
lay bare the controversial and intellectual context of their debate.
It aims also to illuminate The Sceptic as a poem ("A Poem"),
for it was (and in many ways remains) an Arnoldian "darkling plain"
where Hemans and Byron did battle over doubt and faith early in the
nineteenth century and in poetries which may never again be equaled
in material success or artistic ambition.[3]
A polemic that modulates even as it daunts, The Sceptic has
remained neglected among Hemans's poems until very recently, even as
her lyrics, progress poems, dramas, and tales receive new attention.
Yet in 1984 one of the poet's most astute readers, Peter Trinder, pronounced
it "a remarkable poem in its subject and its performance."[4]
- We assemble this Hemans-Byron hypertext in the belief that a Hemans
without The Sceptic is an ambitious woman poet defanged, and
a Byron without The Sceptic is a privileged poet going unanswered
by the sex to whom he is purportedly the "most dangerous."
The Sceptic serves to anchor this "intertext" including
Byron's Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Manfred,
Hemans's "The Domestic Affections" and Tales, and
Historic Scenes, and much more. Taken together, contributors to
the hypertext suggest that Hemans and Byron contest much the same poetical-polemical
territory in history, science, philosophy, and theology. Some of us
even propose that these poets reverse roles as sceptics and believers.
I argue here that Hemans matched Byron with a scepticism of her own,
one befitting a poet who wielded the Sophists' own rhetoric of epideictic
and enthymeme.
Felicia Hemans and Lord Byron
- As the two most published poets female and male of Britain's nineteenth
century, Hemans and Byron belong in the same critical conversation.[5]
Aware of each other as competitors, acting as mutual provocateurs, they
shared subject, style, and audience during the poetry "boom"
of the late- and post-Napoleonic eras. Both were teenage prodigies in
this environment, meeting adversity at the hands of critics and reaching
for maturity in the lofty idioms of Pope and Milton, which somehow they
made into spectacularly successful poetries of their own.
- On Hemans's side, the evidence of relationship is anecdotal, documentary,
and literary. On hearing the news of his mother's prize from the Royal
Society of Literature (for Dartmoor), Arthur Hemans crowed,
"Now, I am sure Mama is a better poet than Lord Byron!" The
poet's memoirist (and sister) claims, unconvincingly, that this sentiment
did not originate with the adults of the family.[6]
Hemans was known to wear a lock of Byron's hair and to request his chosen
epitaph Implora pace for her own. She drew on him for epigraphs
more frequently than any other writer. Still, her Modern Greece
(1817) opposed him on the Elgin marbles, and however obliquely, she
attacked him and his fellow Promethean Percy Shelley in The Sceptic
(1820) and Dartmoor (1821).[7]
When Thomas Moore's moderately scandalous Letters and Journals of
Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life appeared in 1830, Hemans distanced
herself from the noble poet and wrote approvingly of Wordsworth instead.
Yet she never expunged Byronic resonance from her text or, as criticism
shows, deleted it from her textual practice.[8]
- On Hemans's side, the evidence of relationship is anecdotal, documentary,
and literary. On hearing the news of his mother's prize from the Royal
Society of Literature (for Dartmoor), Arthur Hemans crowed,
"Now, I am sure Mama is a better poet than Lord Byron!" The
poet's memoirist (and sister) claims, unconvincingly, that this sentiment
did not originate with the adults of the family.[6]
Hemans was known to wear a lock of Byron's hair and to request his chosen
epitaph Implora pace for her own. She drew on him for epigraphs
more frequently than any other writer. Still, her Modern Greece
(1817) opposed him on the Elgin marbles, and however obliquely, she
attacked him and his fellow Promethean Percy Shelley in The Sceptic
(1820) and Dartmoor (1821).[7]
When Thomas Moore's moderately scandalous Letters and Journals of
Lord Byron: With Notices of His Life appeared in 1830, Hemans distanced
herself from the noble poet and wrote approvingly of Wordsworth instead.
Yet she never expunged Byronic resonance from her text or, as criticism
shows, deleted it from her textual practice.[8]
- On Byron's side is the evidence of letters and poems.[9]
He praised Hemans's The Restoration of the Works of Art to Italy
(1816) as "a good poem—very." In form, the Italian
canto of his Childe Harold's Pilgrimage (1818) is a progress
poem like her Restoration, one featuring Italian art work and
a sequence of female prosopopoeias. After Hemans opposed him in Modern
Greece (published anonymously but soon identified as hers) and
attacked him in The Sceptic, Byron distanced himself from her
(7 June 1820). In one breath, he disputed her convictions about the
afterlife and decried the "apostrophic" style that, now authoring
Don Juan, he believed he no longer shared with her. In letters
to their mutual publisher Murray, Byron satirized Hemans as a "feminine
He-man" and "Mrs. Hewoman."[10]
The Critical Record
- As if to follow Byron's lead, Jerome McGann and Susan Wolfson make
a shared Hemans-Byron style their point of departure in studies of Romanticism,
gender, and ideology. In The Poetics of Sensibility (1995)
McGann continued his campaign against Wordsworthian "Romantic ideology"
by joining, pincer-like, the sensibility of the 1790s, an aesthetic
of "excess," to the sentimentality of Byron, Hemans, and Landon, a poetics
of "loss."[11]
In her recent "Hemans and the Romance of Byron," Wolfson uncovers a
pattern of verbal intimacy between these poets, a volatile intertextual
"romance" compounded on Hemans's part of love and competition, resonance
and misprision.[12]
Byron may have seduced Hemans, but in Wolfson's reading Hemans's strong
(mis)prisions expose the would-be philosophical libertine as a sometime
conservative whose heroines cannot be sexually free and still live.
The work of McGann and Wolfson shows the high stakes and strong currents
(Arnoldian "turbid ebb and flow"?) in studies of Byron and Hemans today.
- Behind the notable studies of McGann and Wolfson lies a body of groundbreaking
but still unpublished writing on Byron and Hemans.[13]
Two dissertations from the mid-1990s compared the critical and cultural
reception of these poets: Dan Albergotti's "Hemans, Byron, and the Reviewers,
1807-1835" (1995) and Chad Edgar's "The Negotiations of the Romantic
Popular Poet" (1996).[14]
Byron figures on a somewhat smaller scale in my dissertation on Hemans
and the Cult of the South. The historical burdens and predatory plots
of the Cult's great genres (Italianate triumph and Oriental tale) play
a part in my 1994 conference paper on The Sceptic, "Scepticism
and its Costs: Hemans's Reading of Byron."[15]
- Another early conference paper presented here is Andrew Elfenbein's
1993 "Contesting Heterodoxy: Mrs. Hemans vs. Lord Byron."[16]
Elfenbein's paper turns on the markedly "literary" style of Hemans and
Byron, which it finds the site of an early nineteenth-century contest
between "normativity" and "heterodoxy." While for McGann the Hemans-Byron
style posed a problem in the manner of critical Marxism, for Elfenbein
questions of style find answers in normative discourse as understood
through Foucault. As Elfenbein writes, "The puzzle is how she was able
to address such a wide range of issues without being attacked as a bluestocking.
The answer lies in the expanding borders of femininity at the beginning
of the nineteenth century". Though Elfenbein devotes his discussion
to Hemans's more obviously "literary" The Forest Sanctuary
(1825), he lists The Sceptic as among those texts that, but
for the finesse of her normative stylistics, would've been deemed "bluestocking."
- Notwithstanding the imagery and "conditions of extremity" that Hartman
finds in The Sceptic, she follows Elfenbein in preferring the
narrative poem The Forest Sanctuary for her study of Hemans's
poetry of faith and doubt.[17]
The poet's memoirist Henry Chorley did likewise in 1836, and his description
of The Sceptic may provide the clue to this pattern: it was
"the only poem, of a purely didactic character, ever written by Mrs.
Hemans" (1: 51).[18]
In twentieth-century criticism, didacticism has, however, been
antithetical to the literary. Narrative ingredients in The
Forest Sanctuary give Elfenbein purchase on its gender politics
and religious ideology, but The Sceptic seems to offer few
such literary handles. The problem of genre appears to have left The
Sceptic; A Poem (A Poem?) at the critical starting gate.
Some fresh thoughts about gender and polemics in the early nineteenth
century might re-introduce The Sceptic and the kind of poem
it is.
Scepticism and the War of Ideas I:
- Engaged readers of Hemans find that The Sceptic stands oddly
in her work: as a long poem it belongs to her ambitious first period,
but as a religious work it has affinities with her late devotional writing.[19]
To compound the problem, Hemans's critics are accustomed to writing
about neither of these periods but rather the lyrics and dramatic monologues
of her middle period and its popular volume Records of Woman
(1828).[20]
- Critics of The Sceptic seem to agree that it is the work
of a young woman unusually well-prepared to enter public debate on a
highly charged topic and conducted in verse, but they are hard put to
account for all the poem's active ingredients together–gender,
the generation of ideas, genre. We might reopen discussion by posing
Elfenbein's question again, How was it that this poem's author escaped
being drummed out of court as a bluestocking? In 1798 the antijacobin
Reverend Polwhele lambasted the Wollstonecraftian woman who "unsex'd"
herself on "the public scene," and for twenty years his drumming out
seemed to have satisfied public opinion.[21]
As recently as 1812, Anna Barbauld's long career had been closed by
politically interested ad feminam attacks on her Eighteen
Hundred and Eleven, with John Wilson Croker decrying her presumptions
to "satire" and a "pamphlet in verse."[22]
In 1820, though, Hemans was praised publicly and fulsomely for her impeccable
comportment and lofty purpose in entering the lists against dangerous
irreligion (the Quarterly Review and Edinburgh Monthly
Review), while Lord Byron resorted to the semi-privacy of his letters
to Murray to satirize her as a "blue" for her work in The Sceptic
(BLJ 7: 158).[23]
Whether her entry was truly more acceptable, as Elfenbein suggests–or
her blue-like presumption still an issue but now less mentionable, as
Byron's half-public, half-private innuendo suggests–isn't quite
clear.[24]
- If a woman poet entering "the public scene" in poetry in 1820 could
still draw the label "blue," the results would be oppressive for both
poet and poem, for she would be caricatured and her poem rendered "didactic"
in a negative sense.[25]
What if the question we should be posing is not whether the poet is
"blue"—a matter that won't quite come clear–but rather whether
the poem is "didactic" and thus a poem of instruction? What if, contra
Chorley and almost everyone else, The Sceptic is not a "didactic"
poem?
- There is another term than "didactic" for the polemical writing evident
in The Sceptic and that is "epideictic," a performative mode
of ceremonial and generalizable praise and blame, an occasional poetry
keyed to biography and civic values, a rhetorical mode developed by
the Sophists and catalogued by Aristotle.[26]
Peter Trinder might be describing such a poem when he calls The
Sceptic "remarkable in . . . performance" and says, "The
poem must be read as a whole . . . especially because its coherent structure
is quite powerful in itself" (27). As an epideictic poem The
Sceptic would purvey ideas but also perform them and in excess.
It would be showy like Byron's English Bards and Childe
Harold, rather than restrained, like Hannah More's The Black
Slave Trade: A Poem or Strictures on Female Education.[27]
- I would submit that, as a writer of numerous occasional poems and
no (other) instructional poems, in The Sceptic Hemans is writing
an epideictic poem. By writing in epideictic's distinctively biographical
but general terms, she can catch up in her apostrophes a Byron, a Hume,
a Shelley, and all they signify and with the periphrasis of epithet
render them creatures of their own time and even handiwork: "the
young Eagle," "the cold Sceptic," "mortal!,"
"demigod!," "child of the dust!," "son of the
morning." (For whom is The Sceptic "too...apostrophic"?)
Writing in a genre that is by turns panegyric and invective, she equips
herself for the tonal complexity that Hartman and others hint at, one
that sympathizes and hectors by turns and even simultaneously. Here,
with a merciless sympathy, she apprehends Byron in flight from his Separation
Crisis:
And did all fail thee, in the hour of wrath,
When burst th' o'erwhelming vials on thy path ?
Could not the voice of Fame inspire thee then,
O spirit ! scepter'd by the sons of men,
With an Immortal's courage, to sustain
The transient agonies of earthly pain ?
- The Sceptic may not believe in God, but he sheds his faith in "Fame"
with difficulty. The fame that offers no support in life ("the
transient agonies of earthly pain") still tempts him to imagine
a glorious death on "the couch of suicide" (Go
to The Sceptic, line 282), as she depicts with merciless
farce:
A closing triumph, a majestic scene,
Where gazing nations watch the hero's mien,
As, undismay'd amidst the tears of all,
He folds his mantle, regally to fall !
(Go to The Sceptic,
line 355)
- Writing in a genre that is biographical but also occasional and civic,
she is able to deal in delicious ad hominem allusions as well
as generalized epithets. She can even offer compelling keyhole views
of the private souls at issue in a Humean science of mind:
And if, when slumber's lonely couch is prest,
The form departed be thy spirit's guest,
It bears no light from purer worlds to this;
Thy future lends not e'en a dream of bliss.
(Go to The Sceptic,
line 125)
- The epideictic writer can arraign the lordly fugitive and in the next
breath reprise the royal ode; she can turn from Byron's "cold"
posthumous life to Charlotte's warm maternal death. (Go
to The Sceptic, line 457)
- Engaged in genre, particularly civic genre, Hemans can recall other
genres of historical weight, especially the epic. Using Vergil's phrase
"Was it for this. . . .?" (spoken and echoed in The
Aeneid 4), she can remind the would-be sceptical hero that his specialized
preparations and their squandering (like Manfred's, those of a cosmic
consciousness) are charges borne communally: "Was it for this
thy still-unwearied eye / Kept vigil with the watchfires of the sky
/ . . .?" (Go to The
Sceptic, line 255). Going before her, Byron had applied this
epic tag to a woman hero, Augustina, the Maid of Saragoza: "Is
it for this the Spanish maid, , , / . . . / . . .all unsex'd the Anlace
hath espoused/ . . .?" (Childe Harold 1.54). When Hemans
applies the tag to her own Spanish woman warrior, Zayda in The Abencerrage,
the Polwhelian inflection ("all unsex'd") falls away: "Was
it for this I loved thee?" (Wolfson, Hemans, p. 128, l.
461).[28]
- The Sceptic's sort of verse–personalized, risk-taking,
hubristic, issue-calling–is even less commonly associated with
women writers than didactic verse.[29]
Here in the epideictic lies the presumption of a young woman going up
against the leading male writer of the day: a woman matching her own
presumption with the (auto)biographical hubris of one for whom "the
world" itself ranks as a disappointed lover or, if it's lucky,
a fair foe (Childe Harold 3.113-14). A young woman can only
gain energy from matching this match, which her cat-call ("Was
it for this. . .?) has already made a matter of gender reversal
(Byron's Augustina, her own Zayda). Here is a poetry of (auto)biographical
occasion in which youthful crushes (Byron's for Edleston, perhaps Hemans's
for Byron) can be the serious stuff of poetry, a bio-poetry after all
of time and temporality, of youth and death rather than instruction
and orthodoxy. It is epideictic poetry, I submit, that accommodates
and accounts for the hubristic heights and unsounded depths of an intertext
made up of Childe Harold, Manfred, "The Abencerrage,"
The Sceptic and more. It is epideictic poetry that Hemans practices
in poems contemporaneous with The Sceptic–her royal odes–and
Stanzas to the Memory of the Late King would be republished with
The Sceptic; it is epideictic poetry that hyperlinks The
Sceptic with Childe Harold 4 when both make a late turn to elegy
in saluting Princess Charlotte.[30]
- It is epideictic poetry in its panegyric mode that
accounts for The Sceptic's epigraph from a funeral oration
by seventeenth-century French cleric Bossuet–specifically, his
oration for a Princess endangered by a libertine and sceptical culture.
We note that Hemans does not cite from the more didactic work
of Bossuet, which was notable for having brought about the (fleeting)
conversion of Hemans's favorite sceptic historian, Edward Gibbon, to
Catholicism. (Go
to Commentary on The Sceptic's Epigraph.) It is epideictic
poetry in its invective mode that accounts for the negative excess in
the poem and its notes compounded of an Old Testament God and the Apocalypse
(Go to The
Sceptic, "Notes"). These negative energies strain
containment in "normativity"; they are what drive the poem's
polemic, make up Hemans's own version of scepticism, and make
her polemic a "war of ideas" that takes no prisoners and spills
over into a new era (Go
to "Dover Beach"):
And we are here as on a darkling plain
Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,
Where ignorant armies clash by night.
- In her very attraction to Byron she is brought closer to him and his
"antiphilosophical" scepticism whose method might be described
as "negative dialectics."[31]
But how account for those readers of Hemans who have credited The
Sceptic with not only instruction but consolation?
- Students of Hemans will recall a letter from Hannah More in which,
given Hemans's achievement in Modern Greece of "just views"
and "delicate perceptions," More anticipates "no small
pleasure" and, she hopes, "benefit" from The Sceptic
(Hughes 34, Wolfson, Hemans 533). Any response she had after
reading the poem was not, to my knowledge, recorded. Like other critics
of Hemans, More searches for the logos of orthodoxy but lingers over
its supplement literature. Harriet Hughes offers testimonials from two
other readers of The Sceptic who might match More in piety.
Their ingenuous reactions seem less interesting, somehow, than the poet's
own studied responses. In a letter to one grief-stricken friend who
found consolation in The Sceptic, Hemans sounds more the writer
sceptical of her own effects–second-guessing her
rhetoric, fishing about for compliments–than the ministrant serene
in her faith:
Perhaps, when your mind is sufficiently composed, you will
inform me which were the passages distinguished by the approbation
of that pure and pious mind: they will be far more highly valued by
me than anything I have ever written. (Hughes 34)
- To date, the critic who has studied Hemans most searchingly as a consolatory
writer is Michael Williamson, in "Impure Affections: Felicia Hemans's
Elegiac Poetry and Contaminated Grief." His conclusion, that her
work is profoundly anti-consolatory and given instead to an excess of
negativity, would disappoint More. For Williamson, Hemans "redirects
our attention away from dramas of elegiac transformation and inheritance
and toward often unsuccessful dramas of survival."[32]
In readings of ten elegiac poems from throughout Hemans's career, Williamson
finds depicted not the augmentation but "the waste of women's psychic
and imaginative energy in a world tainted by male death" (19):
in short, "a darkling plain." Barbara Taylor and I explore
similar readings of Hemans's youthful "The Domestic Affections"
in connection with The Sceptic. As in elegy, so in epideictic:
Hemans's polemics against "The Sceptic" and her own expressions
of radical doubt form a package that is simply too self-critical and
self-confounding to be recuperated to "didacticism" or a "normative
femininity." And all the same, the poetry might after all be consoling
or at least bracing for those who can be assuaged by the fairly strong
tonic. As a polemical and specifically epideictic poem of praise and
blame, then, The Sceptic offers a level of critical purchase
that is not merely potential but actual and continuously so.
- But moving now from gender and genre to the generation of ideas in
The Sceptic, I look again for collaboration to Barbara Taylor,
whose close readings abide by the "particularities" of a Marilyn
Butler rather than the broad epistemes of a Foucault. In completing
my own offering on scepticism as a rhetorical-poetical "war of
ideas," I turn to the close grappling between Byron and Hemans
over the enthymeme, or rhetorical syllogism, which like the epideictic
is a legacy of the classical Sophism.[33]
Scepticism and the War of Ideas II: Believers and Sceptics
- As we would expect from two such passionate writers as Hemans and
Byron, the ideas at issue here are not cool, colorless counters but
elements in a cruel logic all too recognizable as human destiny[34].
Both poets are historical rather than ontological thinkers; for them
ideas form and deform themselves in bodies and blood. Appropriately,
it is neither deity nor creed in the first instance
that is subject to their debate over scepticism but rather the afterlife;
for a deity can serve principally, as he does in The Sceptic,
to guarantee an afterlife, and a creed to guarantee a deity.
- In this light Childe Harold's Pilgrimage Canto 2, stanzas
3-9 (Go to Childe
Harold's Pilgrimage ~Canto 2), becomes a key passage. Set on
the Acropolis these stanzas perform a typically Byronic swerve, in this
case from invective to elegy. Tracing history as a palimpsest of religion,
Byron decries the way religions extort the sacrifice of this life for
the promise of another afterwards; he welcomes the civilization obtained
by Socratic scepticism; then, stunningly, he concedes that scepticism
will be betrayed and religion served in the grieving lover's heart.
As part of the debate over scepticism portrayed by Taylor, this passage
attracted "extraordinary interest" on publication (Edgar 76,
82-87). It is framed by further generic and tonal work of great interest,
for stanzas 1-2 offer an epic invocation to Athena and stanzas 10-15
a meditation on the Parthenon and invective against Lord Elgin.
- In this scene of Athenian democracy violated, Byron depicts the parade
of "creeds" for whom a "victim bleeds" (st. 3-6)
before unveiling Socrates's wise scepticism about those creeds:
Well didst thou speak, Athena's wisest son!
'All that we know is, nothing can be known.'
(st. 7)
- We do not rest here, for the section moves on to the individual's
desire to believe against all scepticism of "sophist" and
"Sadducee" that "there be / A land of souls beyond that
sable shore" (st. 7-8). The section concludes with an elegiac stanza
(9, keyed to Edleston) that underwrites both our concern for the generically
young male victim who "bleeds" under the "creeds"
in stanza 3 and our desire that such victims live eternally
as only those same creeds can promise. This poetic confounding, part
and parcel of Byron's epideictic verse, resonates in Hemans's verse
as well. In The Sceptic, hope of an afterlife appears early
as a promise of light—one that graces our stay on however rocky
an earth (Go to The Sceptic,
line 27)—but later it shades into a (dark, insubstantial) shadow
cast by "the Rock of Ages" (Go
to The Sceptic, line 338). While Byron belies scepticism
with faith, Hemans belies faith with scepticism, and neither reversal
rests there.
- In Byron's passage, believers and sceptics are historically specific
and temperamentally passionate: "'Twas Jove's—'tis Mahomet's—";
"The Sadducee / And sophists, madly vain of dubious lore"
(st. 3, 8).(Go to
Childe Harold's Pilgrimage) The individual caught in the
midst of the debate is flesh and blood, a "Poor child of Doubt
and Death, whose hope is built on reeds" (st. 3). This "child"'s
hopes and fears are less for himself than for "thou!–whose
love and life together fled"; "thou" whom he may never
meet again, "thou" whom "'twere bliss enough to know
thy spirit blest!" (st. 9). As elsewhere in Canto 2, here the occasion
for elegy is young male loveliness dead betimes: "Thou art gone,
thou lov'd and lovely one, / Whom youth and youth's affection bound
to me" (st. 95). "Doubt and Death" are matters of passion
and occasion, not of bloodless epistemology and ontology.[35]
So the issues play themselves out in Hemans, as both writers show themselves
sceptical about scepticism.
- Arguments pursued in these poems take the form of "enthymemes,"
curtal syllogisms, which like the epideictic mode are a legacy of the
Sophists. As Jeffrey Walker describes it, the enthymeme works from "a
network of oppositions" toward a "passional identification"
worthy of its root meaning, thymos as heart. In Aristotle's
words, it is "'the body of persuasion."'[36]
As Walker points out, the enthymeme emerges in relationship to "opportunity"
or "occasion"; arriving at identification in the moment. It
may seem but a partial syllogism, one that leaps to conclusions; but
hinging as it does on the body–on biography in history, an audience's
material investment in its own destiny–the enthymeme invokes its
missing premise of "necessity." When J. T. Coleridge said
of Hemans's argument in The Sceptic that it "is one of
irresistible force. . simply resting the truth of religion on the necessity
of it; on the utter misery and helplessness of man without it,"
he is reading the poem enthymemically. Trinder's perception that Hemans
offers an argument for "the necessity of deism" (27) is of
the same order, while revealing more of her critique of orthodoxy.
- As certainly for Hemans as for Byron, this debate
about scepticism is an argument about history carried out in
history. Elsewhere Hemans reveals her interest in Gibbon's sceptical
historiography.[37]
(Go to
Commentary on The Sceptic's Epigraph.) Sceptical discussions
of The Sceptic historian Barthold Niebuhr appear in her letters
and the books of her beloved son Charles, who revels in Niebuhr's convincing
representation of a legend in which he, Niebuhr, did not believe. This
is the legend of Numa, Rome's pacific second king, and his muse-consort
Egeria. In a nice counterpoint to Hemans's epithets for Byron, Maria
Jane Jewsbury gave her the literary name "Egeria." (Go to
Commentary on The Sceptic's Epigraph.) That Hemans often linked
her interest in doubt and belief to pre-Christian legend rather than
Christian dogma is, however, a subject for another day.[38]
- What's important to note at all points in the Hemans-Byron debate
(or collusion?) over scepticism is that matters of belief are not doxa
but sanctions, sanctions in the historical, material form of human sacrifice
(the bleeding victims of Childe Harold 2, of Dartmoor)
and its assuaging (the pacific rites of Numa and Egeria, the faith in
Edleston as a "spirit blest"). What's at stake are young bodies
subject to war and to love (war's marriage system), and both systems
affect both poets, given the bisexual manhood of Byron and the regiment-ridden
womanhood of Hemans (lest we forget her separation from Captain Hemans
in 1818). For both poets, religion should keep an unbloodied altar (Go
to Childe Harold's Pilgrimage); for Hemans, religion should
offer sanctuary–enough so on earth, that we can believe so in
heaven; with a reverse argument actually the weaker. (Read
the note "Then ye shall appoint you cities").
- Hemans and Byron are institutional rather than theological writers,
and they write as though at the mercy of their and their audience's
dispensations. While these (Christianity; Roman state religion; the
same?) would displace vengeance and bloody sacrifice, they do so only
to renew and even institutionalize them.[39]
Hemans may urge The Sceptic to "Call
thou on Him" when the "lightning" of vengeance flies–"Fly
to the City of thy Refuge, fly!"–but the refuge offered has
been designed by Levites for a Slayer and it brings him surely to trial.
(Go to The
Sceptic, note 5) Such is the unbloodied altar and such our
earthly sanctuary: "Is earth still Eden?" she has asked The
Sceptic, "Is all so cloudless and so calm below / That we
seek no fairer scenes than life can show?" (l. 23-24).
Heaven mirrors the scene at the City of our Refuge, however, for the
Father remains the Avenger stopped at the gates and the Son is still
the "still small" Hope of acquittal (Go
to The Sceptic, line 53 and line
344) once inside that city :
If Hope's retreat hath been, through all the past,
The shadow by the Rock of Ages cast,
Father, forsake us not !—
and so heaven mirrors earth, its Avenger and
its Hope.
Scepticism and the War of Ideas III: Scepticism
and the Post-War
- The Hemans-Byron poetic war of ideas couldn't end with Waterloo. For
both, the earthly institutions of wartime and postwar Britain remained
at issue: for Hemans, the prisons, schools, and temples; for Byron,
the theater, legislature, courts; for both, the press. Hemans re-engineered
benevolence in the company of women and men, as Marlon Ross portrayed
in his 1989 The Contours of Masculine Desire. Byron sought
to free young men from the rack of battle, altar, and factory
frame and for a stage where (patriarchal) tragedy offered almost
a loophole of cultural change and sexual difference.
- Byron and Hemans could look back to Enlightenment thinkers, a Gibbon
or Hume, Voltaire or Rousseau, for models of scepticism–and they
did. But to be a sceptic in the years 1815-1820 was to be something
a good deal less neutral and magisterial than an Enlightenment depiction
would have it. With the French Revolution, Enlightenment scepticism
had licensed the destruction of foundational institutions; in its encounter
with history, Enlightenment scepticism could offer no opposition to
unprincipled conquest; it could offer only (pace Anne Hartman) the unaccountable
benevolence that bemused Britain's sceptical philosopher David Hume.
Thus is confected Wordsworth's portrait of the Sceptic or Solitary in
his 1814 The Excursion, and it is not one to inspire (Go
to Book II of The Excursion). Whether Wordworth's dazed and
quixotic figure served to caution the age is hard to tell; Hemans read
The Excursion and admired its "religious" passages
in which "the poet speaks of departed friends" (perhaps in
Book I? Hughes 38).
- Certainly The Excursion's post-Revolutionary combination
of complacency and malaise galled Percy Shelley, a member of this generation
for whom "la guerre n'est pas finie."[40]
For this atheist, and his sceptical post-war colleague Byron, the work
of scepticism was far from over, given the unreformed institutions at
home and collusion with reactionary powers abroad. Hemans shared a passionate
temperament with Byron and, needing the same surcease, adopted his plea,
Implora pace.[41]
The Sceptic she loved and feared was not the bemused Hume or
the dazed Wordsworthian Solitary but the passionate Byron or even Shelley
who dared pick up Napoleon's Promethean mantle and restage the Titanic
as the New.
- In commenting on Hemans's The Sceptic as an engagement with
Byron, I have recurred to the very interested debate between these most
popular male and female poets, one appearing before the press in 1820
as a Christian Tory, the other as a radical sceptic. This debate, because
it is interested, runs much deeper than partisanship, lending its cross-currents
to the women and men who believe in and doubt the institutions that
simultaneously destroy them and sustain them.
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