Sailing To Byzantium: WB Yeats

By: Bijay Kant Dubey

The old order changeth, yielding place to new,
And God fulfils Himself in many ways,
Lest one good custom should corrupt the world.
Comfort thyself: what comfort is in me?
  ----Alfred Lord Tennyson in Morte d’ Arthur

Before we read the poem, there grows a desire to know, where does the poet want to go, where this Byzantium is, why does he wish to be away from here? Has he aged? What is it in Byzantium? Is it the Brindavan he is dreaming about? Is it not the spiritual quest taking him there? Perhaps the remnants of Hindu thought and mysticism have not left him behind. Did he write Meru or Byzantium first? When did he study the Upanishads? These are but the questions which appear to be relevant while determining the idea behind the writing of the poem and the accomplishment of it. Had he been to India, it would have been great, but he did not nor did the Indians then. A myth-maker, an occultist, a symbolist of the first order, Yeats is first an Irish poet then an English poet and poetry comes to him as symbolical versions of poesy so full of depth and sobriety, myth and myth-making. Written at the age of 60 or 61, the poem was done in 1926 but it appeared in The Tower in 1928. Even in a BBC talk, he referred to the shaping of his thoughts culminating in the writing of the poem, Sailing to Byzantium and it is not a poem of going to Byzantium, but to think of a new order, to dream and repose in the golden past where he with an artistic bent of mind can think of toning up with undying spirits and poetic vigour. Is it classicism or the imagery of the golden times he wants to revert back to? Why does he want to escape to just like the Keats of Ode to a Nightingale? Where does he like the Wordsworth of Strange Fits of Passion and Lost Love and A Slumber Did My Spirit Seal? Where from the Ireland of political upheavals and repercussions, turmoil and tribulation, strife and struggle to? The position is one of The Ship of Death and Shadows written by D.H.Lawrence.

Sailing To Byzantium, as a poem of rejuvenation, resurrection and transmigration with so much vigour and embellishment muted in, transports us into an old world pervaded by immortality, art and spirit. But what is it immortal? Classicism too has an end of its own. Such a thing it is in The Scholar Gypsy of Matthew Arnold.

Starting with that is no country for the old men, the poet talks of the younger generation in the thoughts and broodings of their own so deep in sensuality and pleasure as if were in one another’s arms, birds in the trees while the dying generations have nothing to say to as the lack lustre itself is picturesque of all that taking place or happening as the things of dust, clay and mortality return back to baser stuffs in due course of time which is again but a natural process.  The young have just the sensuality to talk to and repose in rather than intellectuality, good thought and idea drawing their flavour from classicism and classical times. What is it that sustains us is intellect. What it is born, begotten and living will but cease to exist one day when their time will be over. The present generations lost in the thoughts and ideas of their own have not time to think about the other men so after marking their sensuality, so much engrossed in lust, infatuation with and gratification for, the poet wants to sail and drift to Byzantium where the things age it not and the times too seemingly to be beyond the clutch of mortality and degeneration.

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick and the mortal dress is not his own so embroidered with mythology which the soul is wearing on for so long. So, what can the soul do except taking the name of the Lord and clapping the hands in His Praise or Glory? It has its own monuments of magnificence. So, where to repose in, where to gather strength, calm and composure from this tumult, clamour perturbing the soul and spirit?

Where the sages standing by the side of the Holy Fire of God? Where do they lie in watching the ceremony? Why do they consume his heart away sick with the desire of man?

Out of sight out of mind, the thing is, once gone from here; never will he be back to. But the Grecian goldsmiths make the things which appear to be everlasting and perennial, never appear to be corroding as such is their artistic beauty, craftsmanship, goldsmithery and casting.

Sailing To Byzantium

I

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song,
The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.
Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

 II

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence;
And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium. 

III

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,
And be the singing-masters of my soul.
Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity.

 IV

 Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come. 

Sailing to Byzantium as a poem is so much symbolical, artistic, mythical and spiritual at the same time we read and go through it as it corroborates the personal and individual thoughts and ideas, images and views of the poet laced with a strong symbolist approach adding depth, meaning and poetic verve to the poem and he wishing to be away from Ireland, from his bodily presence, somewhat shaken in body and strength to an artistic kingdom where death maligns it not, where the golden and classical things hold their sway over and get it not marooned for moral, spiritual and psychic restoration just like as the Hindus think of Vrindavan and the golden bird that was India in the past and so his Byzantium, the Byzantine emperors and the mosaic palaces of it and the immortal artisans, craftsmen, builders building and decorating it. The poem has a mythic base of it, historical, personal and legendary enough to sway the readers to a make-believe story to escape from the harsh realities of life and the world and here lies the distinction between the world of art and dreams and the gap in between the two when contrasted with the realities grounding in elsewhere.

Sailing to Byzantium from Yeats’ The Tower and The Ship of Death from Lawrence’s Last Poems tell a comparative tale to be taken into contrast as the idea is almost the same a shift from the present scenario, a drift from to sail away from here, but Tennyson explains it best by saying it that change is the law of Nature and the things change it here and if they not, as Arthur says it, things will not appear to be congenial. Let us take into consideration the pensive mood of Lawrence here in this poem entitled The Ship of Death where he coaxes to build the ship and to be ready for the journey to undertake. The same escapism it is there in Keats’ Ode to a Nightingale.

I

Now it is autumn and the falling fruit
and the long journey towards oblivion.

 The apples falling like great drops of dew
to bruise themselves an exit from themselves.

 And it is time to go, to bid farewell
to one’s own self, and find an exit
from the fallen self.

 II

 Have you built your ship of death, O have you?
O build your ship of death, for you will need it.

 The grim frost is at hand, when the apples will fall
thick, almost thundrous, on the hardened earth.

 And death is on the air like a smell of ashes!
Ah! can’t you smell it?

And in the bruised body, the frightened soul
finds itself shrinking, wincing from the cold
that blows upon it through the orifices.
     ---- D.H.Lawrence in The Ship of Death

 Where Byzantium? Where the emperors with palaces and mansions, where the golden birds chirping? Where the scholars holding parleys? Where Brindavan? Where Krishna flirting? Where the Vedic, Upanishadic sages chanting? Where Eliot chanting the santih mantras?

An aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick and the mortal dress needs to be changed. This can happen only if the soul can sing the song of the Lord, singing and rejoicing in His Glory. Nothing can happen without His Mercy and Grace. Here the impact of the Bhagavadgita and Adi Shankaracharya can be felt in, the immortality of the soul as discussed in the former while eternal birth and eternal death, the cycle of it in Bhajagovindam of the latter. The imagery is beautiful in the sense it is picturesque of an old man with a torn coat lying on a stick.

The holy fires of God and the sages standing and praying to, keeping them as the witness of and invoking the Celestial Spirit and the Celestial Fire he says it all. The Mystical Flames of the Mystical Fire can ordain and purge it all what it ails human flesh and spirit if sought from. But how to lift to higher domains and realms? How to be Shelleyian in spiritual illumination? If they turn into the singing masters of his soul, what it to worry?

 What does the poet mean to say it here? Why does he say to, ‘That is no country for the old men.’? The poet W.B.Yeats, though sick of ageing, times in flux with the order of things, thinks of replacement, regaining of lost vigour and strength after shifting the scenery to Byzantium and its old classical times full of myth and art symbols so golden and undying in spirit.  The young in the arms holding one another’s arms, flanking each other are submerged into the thoughts of their own. Birds in the trees, fish into the waters, all those have their heyday for some time. What it is bodily, physical and material will not last it here. None can escape the dying generations.

That is no country for old men. The young
In one another's arms, birds in the trees,
—Those dying generations—at their song, 

Whatever else see we, be that the salmon, the mackerel or anything else is but subject to meet its end. The things which beget and the animals which are born are but destined to meet their ends. The mackerel is a greenish blue sea fish while the salmon too is a ray-finned fish.

The salmon-falls, the mackerel-crowded seas,
Fish, flesh, or fowl, commend all summer long
Whatever is begotten, born, and dies.

Caught in that sensual music of bonding, affection, lust, infatuation, sympathy, relationship story, we all neglect the monuments of unageing intellect.  Lost in attachment, we forget it the reality waiting for to take us by surprise. What we must discard we fail to do it and so the younger generations lost in affection and attachment, amorous thoughts and ideas keeping their minds engaged. But mankind knows it the pathway end.

Caught in that sensual music all neglect
Monuments of unageing intellect.

 What is an aged man? To the poet, Yeats, the aged man is but a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick. The old man not with the stick, but a tattered coat lying on a stick, basking in the sun as he says in An Acre of Grass, strike us beautifully. Every tatter too is in mortal dress and the soul cannot do but sing the songs of his as there is way for redemption. Human life is also as such that the coat gets changed from time to time, life to life. The covering is as such, nothing permanent here, everything but short-lived and transitory. An aged man, a paltry thing, a tattered coat upon a stick, etc. are but images.

An aged man is but a paltry thing,
A tattered coat upon a stick, unless
Soul clap its hands and sing, and louder sing
For every tatter in its mortal dress,
Nor is there singing school but studying
Monuments of its own magnificence; 

That is why he has made up his mind to sail for Byzantium and has dawned at:

 And therefore I have sailed the seas and come
To the holy city of Byzantium. 

But where the pilgrims? Where the Chaurcerian pilgrims? What about the pilgrim’s progress? Is Byzantium really golden and classical? Does pain not maroon it the self? Is it free from human worries, cares and anxieties? Can it really give eternal pleasure?, is the thing of deliberation.

Here the poet speaks about the sages standing in God’s holy fire, the gold mosaic of a wall and the singing-masters of his soul. He invokes them to be his guide, the singing-masters of his soul. The perne, we mean the whirl in a gyre, the vortex, the Holy Fire, etc. are add to the phraseology of the poem which are no doubt Christian, theological and so on.

O sages standing in God's holy fire
As in the gold mosaic of a wall,
Come from the holy fire, perne in a gyre,        
And be the singing-masters of my soul. 

Here the poet speaks about the heart sick with desire and fastened to a dying animal as it knows it not what it is, how the pathway end. So, he invokes the holy sages to give him strength to be into the artifice of eternity. A man is as long as desire is and when bodily weak, desire too starts leaving him and even if he desires, he will not be able to fulfil them.

Consume my heart away; sick with desire
And fastened to a dying animal
It knows not what it is; and gather me
Into the artifice of eternity. 

The artifice of eternity here stands for something as everlasting, ever beautiful, perennial, immortal and indelible. Byzantium has been used as a myth, a motif and a symbol and the poet seeks to transport us into a make-believe artistic world fostered by classicism and golden times. Art for art’s sake or didactic purpose is the thing under our discussion. If this be, why does he ask to strike at the root of desire? Why is the heart sick of desire? If romanticism is a flight of imagination, fancy, dream, colour and their representation and classicism has always stood for intellectuality, restraint, discipline, didacticism and moral ethics. But here in it the dreams of Byzantium symbolize the journey end leading to artistic perfection.

Once out of physical form, never will one be back in that attire is the accepted truth which but we cannot deny it. But the Grecian goldsmiths make such a thing that it astonishes in giving perennial beauty and art form, a source of everlasting pleasure always after hammering gold and enamelling them. 

Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling

These are as such which will keep emperors awake and let them not sleep as for the wonder and splendour to be seen in craftsmanship bejewelling and decorating. The beauty of the golden bird is as such so beautifully crafted and made that it would never corrode easily. 

To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come. 

Sailing to Byzantium is a journey of the soul; a spiritual development of the self engrossed in materialistic pursuits going on a pilgrimage to Byzantium. It is an attempt to escape to re-invigorate and re-make oneself spiritually, morally and aesthetically; it is an explanation of immortality at the expanse of morality and to understand what it lasts for here. The historical background gives a befitting mythical pattern to the poem which tells of transmigration from here to the old ancient city of Byzantium. But what glory is extant therein? None knows it. The golden bird of the golden times singing the golden notes, a source of lasting youth and gaiety, artistic image and imagery, as cast and moulded and framed by the artists take us away from the world of mortality and transience for a make-believe shift for a solace to be thought about temporarily, a Keatsian escape taken with the nightingale’s song and he hearing the sweet notes just like as Wordsworth and Shelley heard the skylarks. But here the design is one of craftsmanship and molten gold cast and embroidered and the palace so full of perennial imagery and decoration, mechanical and artificial seemingly looking natural with the extensive miniature work golden and ornamental. Yeats has aged, but his heart has not, is the thing of deliberation, as an artist never gets old.

 

 

 

Ibsen's "A Doll's House"

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Feminism in 'A Doll's House' {LINK}

In the 19th century , the society was patriarchal, dominated by men, and women were deprived of all rights. The society was constructed and conducted in a way that women were completely dependent on men in all cultural domains- familial, religious , political, economic ,social , legal and artistic. This is the background ,in which Henrick Ibsen's play "A DOLL'S HOUSE", is written. Ibsen was inspired to write this play by a real incident that happened to his friend, Laura Petersen Kieler , a Norwegian journalist of whom he was very fond of. Ibsen created a female protagonist,Nora,who ,not only forsakes her husband and children, but also come out of traditional and conventional picture of women , breaks all the rules and restrictions of traditional and rigid society,which don't allow for the women's freedom and self-realization. This type of play was completly new at that time and female protagonist,Nora becomes the symbol and harbinger of the concept of ,"New Women" or " Modern Women". This term paper will show the situation of women in the society. It will also illustrate how "A DOLL'S HOUSE" is a feminist play, Ibsen's engagement with Feminism and the emergence of "New Women" or "Modern Women".

Although, Feminism as a literary genre came in 1960s but we can trace its origin with the publication of Mary Wallstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rigths of Women" in 1792 AD. At that time ,it was in early phase and known as the "Women's Rights Movement". This movement was for women's social equality rights in that oppressive patriarchal society. The bourgeois society was repressive and oppressive against anything which threatened its position of power. The political and spiritual liberty were kept at the background and economic freedom became the motivational forcefor an individual because in that bourgeois society, it provided a position status and once it was achieved , the imperative was to defend it. Thus a bourgeois individual becomes a defender of his status and betrayer of his own human values. Torvard Helmer , the male protagonist of the play, has accepted the premises of this type of society, unaware of the cost , he pays in human terms.

Ibsen criticizes the bourgeois society by creating the characters, who sustain in the society and revolt against it. The bourgeois family, the micro-society in perspective of bourgeois individual was dethroned by these characters from the center of the society. The status of an individual in a family reflects the position and order in the hierarchial system of society. This is why Torvard wants his supremacy in the family and his security depends on feeling superior. Ibsen saw that the bourgeois society needed some content which is a revolution of human spirit and claimed that the slogan of the French Revolution (1789) " Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity"needed a reformulation. Every one has his own part in the construction or destruction of the society. He writes-"One never stands totally without share of responsibility or guilt in bourgeois society to which one belongs"(12,402).

Ibsen always believed, the truth as individual and subjective. That's why , he lets Nora go out in the world and realize the self reassess the concepts and values of society. One can't assess the society by living in the centre of the societyrather one must delve deep into liminal and marginalized domains of society. When one is in power , one can't often evaluate it correctly. People at the margins at times better positioned to view the reality. Like in the Howthorne's novel , "The Scarlet Letter", when Hester Prynne is displaced to margin, she is able to assess the Puritan Society in a better way. Norasays in the play-" I must try to discover who is right, me or society"(283). As the play moves to its close, Nora becomes freer and truer than before and this validates her path. Ibsen's plays reveal the vices and lies of the bourgeois society. Although his plays's setting is Norwegian but the perspectives and ideas on the Vivtorian morality are so universal that they mirror the problems and pains of the whole world. This bourgeois society has problems with the phenomena like industrialisation, positivism,liberalism,secularization and political polarization and the like. The people were becoming aware of their rights and claim for them. In the play, Ibsen has depicted two kinds of women. On the one hand, Nora , who is determind to stand up as proud and independent individual, on the other hand self-secrificing Mrs Christine Linde , who finds life's meaning in the service of others. These characters evaluate the inner-self and personal lives and this evaluation of inner lives becomes the revaluation of the society ,which has kept them under oppressive rules and restrictions. And thus, Ibsen chooses the women characters to lead the fight of the revolution of human spirits under the banner of truth and freedom.

There are many scenes in the play , which are anticipated by the other Feminist writers. Nora accuses on her father and her husband of treating her like a doll. A playmate. She could not get the real experience of life and so she can't do anything in her life. It is similar to Wollstonecraft's charges against men in her book called, "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" (1792) that women are brought up to be "pleasing

At the expense of every solid virtue " as if they were "gentlel domestic brutes '. Her description of herself that she has been treated like a doll -wife ,doing tricks is an appropriate example of Margret Fuller's charge that man " wants no wife but a girl to play ball with". She realizes that she can not do anything in her life while living with Torvard and declares that she will go out alone because " I must educate myself……. It's something I must do by myself ", she is showing that there is a need for women's emancipation from the 19th century restrictive society. Telling Torvard that she doesn't know how to be a wife is reminiscent of Harriet Martineau in " On Female Education" ,where Harriet Martineau argues the need for considering women as " companion to men instead of playing things or servants". When Nora realizes that the duties to self is higher than that of a wife and mother, she is restating the basic concept of Feminism stated in Wallstonecraft's "A Vindication of the Rights of Women" that women are no less than men possess a moral and intellectual nature have not only a right but duty to develop it :" the grand end of their exertion should be to unfold their own faculties". The theme of "A Doll's House" is the subjection of women by men. Nora is deprieved of all things which she should get. She couldn't get much exposure at the father's home. At Torvard's home, she is manipulated by Torvard. She has to do what was told to do. She suppresses her own desires in fulfilling the wishes of first , her father, and then her husband. Nora says " I could never act against your wishes".

The relationship the husband and wife is not based on companionship. Torvard sees himself as the epitome of the traditional 19th century husband who has complete right over his wife. In the forgery incident , Nora neither sees forgery as shame nor to defame Torvard but she does it for love. Torvard ,who has the pride of being man, considers owing anything to anybody as humiliating and painful even to his own wife he doesn't consider her as his equal. She has illusions that her marital life is happy but she has to face the reality. For this ,she decides to break the illusions and go to the world of truth and reality, and to realize herself and her values.Ibsen in his letter dated 3 January 1880, comments on the situation"The moment , she leaves her home , is the momenther life to begin…… In the play , there is big grown up child, Nora,who has to go out into the life to discover herself " . Nora's development can be seen as she is forced to give up the hope of 'miracle' that her husband will take the resposibility for her every action but Torvard is the slave of society, incapable of breaking the conventions. When Nora finds that,there is no way for 'miracle' to happen now, she decides to be true to herself. She stands against the traditional and conventional picture of women and becomes one of the Ibsen"s most liberated characters. Nora's becoming of a liberated is not objective but subjective. She becomes her own , able to take her decesions independently . the other female character, Mrs Linde opposes by not being the representative of early moments of Feminism, but through a wise and loving heart. Mrs linde experiences the 'miracle' which Nora dreamed. When she becomes ready to give up the troublesome life and marry Krogstag, she experiences the 'miracle' , the sense of fulfillment. She says-"How different to work for,to live for , for a home to build'. On the other hand , Nora sees her sense of fulfillment when she leaves her husband, children and home and being self-dependent.

Ibsen's engagement with Feminism can be viewed from the speech for the workingmen in Trondheimin1885, he was very much concerned with "future state of workers and women" in the changing social condition of Europe. He said that he is very mainly concerned with human being in general. In his speech , he made at a bonquet given in his honour by the NorwegianWomen's Rights League on 26 May 1898, he said-

"I am not a member of Women's Rights League I have been more a poet and less a social philosopher. I am not even clear as to just what this women's rights movement really is. To me it has seemed a problem of humanity in general."

He was right in saying that he is concerned with whole humanity because women are also first and foremost human beings. In "A Doll's House" , Nora says-"I am first and foremost a human being." He also advocated for the recruitment of women as librarian, the right to vote and supported the petition of separate property right for married women. He was also in contact with three powerful female personalities- Suzannah Thoresen,his wife, Magdaline thoresen,his wife's stepmother and Comilla Collect, the first significant feminist personalty.

The Philosophy of Thomas Hardy

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Hardy: An Artist and Not a Philosopher

Hardy was an artist and not a philosopher. He repeatedly affirmed that the ‘Views’ expressed in his novels were not his convictions or beliefs; they were simply “impressions” of the moment. His writings were all, ‘mood dictated’, merely, ‘explorations of reality’, and so it would be wrong to expect any systematised philosophy of life. But when certain impressions persist and are constantly repeated in the creative works, diaries and letters, of a writer, the readers may be pardoned, if they take them to be his convictions. Moreover, Hardy is so often passing from particular facts to life in general that we may safely take some of his views to be his philosophy of life.

Suffering: A Universal

In Hardy’s considered view, all life is suffering. Man suffers from the moment of his birth upto his death. Happiness is only occasional, it is never the general rule. As he says in “Vie Mayor of Casterbridge’, “Happiness is but an occasional episode in a general drama of pain”. There is none who gets more than he deserves but there are many who get much less than what they deserve. Not only man suffers, but all nature suffers. Suffering is writ large on the face of nature. A ruthless, brutal struggle for existence is waged everywhere in nature. All nature is red in tooth and claw and life lives upon life. Thus all life, including human life, is subject to this law of suffering and none can escape the operation of this law.

Imperfections of the First Cause: Human Suffering

But what is the cause of this universal suffering of man and nature alike. In Hardy’s view the real cause is the, “imperfection of the laws that may be in force on high.” Thus human suffering is the result of the imperfections of the First Cause, the power that caused or created this sorry scheme of things. He rejects the orthodox Christian belief that this power is benevolent, all merciful, omnipotent and omniscient. He cannot reconcile the fact of universal, undeserved suffering with the omnipotence and benevolence of God or the First Cause. He indignantly asks, “What makes suffering and evil, necessary to its omnipotence ?” He regards this power as blind, indifferent, if not actually hostile, and unconscious and immoral. He uses ‘it’ and not ‘He’ for this power. This power has no sense of right or wrong, love or hate. In this blind, unconscious, impersonal working, it does not, and cannot, take into account human wishes and aspirations. Hence its working often causes men .much pain and suffering.

Nature as Instrument of the First Cause

This power manifests itself in a number of ways. Sometimes, it expresses itself through some force of Nature. Usually Nature in Hardy remains indifferent to, and unconscious of, the suffering of Hardy’s character. For example, Tess’ suffering goes unheeded in Nature. She is violated in the lap of Nature, but all Nature remains unconcerned and indifferent. But sometimes, Nature seems to work against the characters of Hardy, or we, in our sympathy for them, feel nature to be hostile. The Return of the Native is a tragedy of character and environment; Egdon Heath plays a prominent part in the novel and is largely responsible for the tragedy. In the Mayor of Casterbridge, the very stars seem to be hostile to Henchard. The fair organised by him, with such generosity and care, is ruined by untimely unexpected rain. The vagaries of weather ruin him financially and make him a bankrupt. Bad weather had been foretold and on that basis he made reckless purchases. But the weather cleared and he had to sell at far lower prices. Then quite unaccountably the weather changed again. There was rain and hail and Henchard was a financial wreck. Nature, thus, seems to be the instrument of some hostile power working against Henchard. It is in this sense that Nature is fate in Hardy’s novels.

The Irony of Circumstance or Life

Sometimes, the ruling power on high expresses itself through the irony of circumstance. By irony of circumstance, Hardy simply means that in this ill-conceived scheme of things the contrary always happens. We except one thing and get its exact opposite. This results in much undeserved suffering. Right things never happen at the right time : they happen either not at all, or too late, when their happening brings nothing but misery and suffering in their train. The heroines of Hardy, like Tess and Eustacia, as well as his male characters, like Clym, Henchard, Angel, Alec are all the victims of the irony of circumstance. The wrong man comes first, and when the right man comes it is too late. Thus Tess remained a vague, fleeting impression to Angel Clare, till she had been violated by Alec, and it was too late for them to live happily together.

Elizabeth-Jane consents to take up Henchard’s name, and then he suddenly discovers that she was not his daughter : “77ie mockery (irony) was, that he should have no sooner taught a girl to claim the shelter of his paternity than he discovered her to have no kinship with him. This ironical sequence of things angered him like an impish trick from a fellow-creature. Like Prester John’s his table had been spread, and infernal harpies had snatched up the food.”

He had planned and schemed for months to have Jane as his daughter and now the fruition of the whole scheme was such, “dust and ashes” in his mouth.

Elizabeth-Jane, too, is the victim of this very irony of fate, for, “Continually it had happened that what she had desired had not been granted her, and that what had been granted her she had not desired.”

In fact, Hardy’s characters in general, and not in one or two novels alone, are the victims of this irony. Their intentions and aspirations are constantly frustrated, as if some hostile power were working against them.

The Role of Chance and Fate

There is a great difference between chance and irony of circumstance. Chance is entirely unexpected or accidental and has no relation either to character or to the course of action, while the essence of irony of fate or circumstance is its opposition to the whishes or merits of a particular character. Chance may sometimes work in favour of a particular character, but in Hardy’s works it always operates against them, for it is caused by the same indifferent, even hostile, First Cause. Thus Chance is another agent chosen by the Supreme to express itself. Chance or accident plays an important part in life and so in the novels of Hardy. The unexpected and the undesired always happens. Thus Tess suffers because the letter she had written to Angel on the eve of their marriage never reaches him. By chance it slips beneath the carpet and is not found. Many such accidents or chance events also happen in 77ie Mayor of Casterbridge. The coming of Farfrae in Casterbridge just at the time when Henchard was being taken to task for the sale of bad wheat, the sudden arrival of Newson in Casterbridge for the second time, the entirely unexpected appearance of the old furmity-seller in Casterbridge to drive the last nail in Henchard’s coffin, etc., are a few of the chance events that create the impression that Hardy believed in the operation of fatal forces hovering all around us and driving us to our doom. Chance or accident is thus an essential element in Hardy’s philosophy of life.

Love: A Potent Cause of Suffering

Love is another force which causes suffering in the world of Thomas Hardy. The women-folk, specially, are its chosen victims. As we are told in Tess, the cruel cause of things has hardened them with the powerful sex-instinct which they have never desired nor welcomed, and as a result of which they have to writh feverishly and pass sleepless nights. Love causes untold suffering to Elizabeth-Jane, to Tess, to Eustacia, to Bathsheba and to all other female characters of Hardy.

Human Freedom of Action: Its Limitations

Character may be destiny in Shakespeare, but it is certainly not so in Hardy’s world-view. In Hardy’s philosophy, character is responsible for suffering only to a limited extent. Inherited traits and inborn instincts determine the actions of a person to a very great extent. Even if he wishes, he cannot act against them. Moreover, Hardy agrees with Schopenheur in believing that, “a person can do what lie wills, but he cannot will what he wills.” Thus man is not a free agent and is not responsible for his actions to any great extent. He has only a very limited freedom of action.

Ways for the Amelioration of Human Lot

(1) Tact: But within these limits he can do much. If he is rash, hot-headed and obstinate, like Henchard, or Eustacia, he can bring about his own downfall. On the contrary, if he is wise and tactful, like Elizabeth Jane, or Thomasin, he can make much of his limited opportunities. Anyhow, it is his duty to adjust himself to his environment. He must not exult when fortune smiles upon him for at best it is only a short interlude, and may be followed by sudden and devastating misfortunes. And at such times, he must remember, like Elizabeth-Jane, that there are many others who have not got what they deserved or desired.

(2) The Rustic Philosophy of Resignation: Man must be resigned to his lot. It is useless to complain, for no complains can reform this ill-conceived scheme of things. It is equally futile to pit overselves against the inexorable, pitiless laws that govern our destiny, for if we do so we are sure to be pounded to atoms. We must learn the lesson of resignation, and we can do so only from primitive communities living in the lap of nature. The Wessex rustics when confronted with overwhelming misfortunes are never frustrated. They merely exclaim, ‘it was to be’, and go about the daily business of their life with renewed courage. Hardy is all admiration for such heroic souls, and prefers a simple life in their midst to an artificial life in a big city.

(3) Social Reform and Loving-Kindness: But this does not mean that in Hardy’s view man should make no attempts to ameliorate his lot. Hardy distinguishes between the natural and the social environment. While man can do nothing to change the natural environment, and must submit passively to it, he can do much to change his social environment through wise social reforms. Marriage laws, for example, should be liberalised in favour of the weaker sex. Unfortunate women, like Tess, who are more sinned against than sinning, should be accepted by society. No stigma should attach to them, for they are essentially pure. A spirit of “loving-kindness” should pervade all human relations and then all would be well. Life is suffering, but man should not increase its misery by this cruelty to his fellow-men, to women, and to the lower creatures.

Conclusion : Hardy’s Humanism

Such is Hardy’s philosophy of life. It is certainly a gloomy one, for he regards life as suffering and man as a puppet in the hands of Destiny. But it cannot be called pessimistic, for pessimism implies negation of life, a wish not to have been born at all. It is only in his last novel, Jude the Obscure, that some cynism enters and Hardy becomes pessimistic. Otherwise, Hardy is a humanist, a poet who wants man to turn from nature to his own kind, for,

“There at least discourse trills around,

There at least smiles abound,

There sametime are found,

Life-Loyalties.”

Poems of Wystan Hugh Auden

Wystan Hugh Auden

WH Auden has two identities. He is, many would argue, the greatest English lyric poet of the 20th century. He is also, few would deny, a top-ranked American lyric poet of a rather different, more reflective character. Auden is, in one of his many parts, a religious poet, concerned as much with the human spirit as John Donne or Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The 1930s were, as he memorably put it, ‘The Age of Anxiety’ and ‘a low dishonest decade.’ Along with the so-called ‘gang’ – Spender, Christopher Isherwood and himself at the centre – he spent time in pre-Nazi Germany, cultivating personal and literary freedoms. He travelled obsessively to scenes of war, notably Spain and China. War would be, in his term, ‘the climate of his time’.  

‘Musée des Beaux Arts’

Ekphrasis poetry is a vivid, often dramatic, and verbal description of a visual work or art or scene, either real or imagined, which is produced as a rhetorical exercise by the poet. Having based on Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting, ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ is not, in itself, a difficult poem, but it is baffling, if one does not know where it is coming from. The ‘Musee’ herein is the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, in Brussels.

In the Fall of Icarus, there are no seething crowds here. The painting is a parable on human aspiration. Icarus, ambitiously, flew too near the sun and plunged into the sea and was drowned after the wax holding his wings together melted. If looked carefully, one can see “the white legs disappearing into the green water.” They are dwarfed by the horse’s rump. Most visitors to the Museum miss the detail which gives the poem its title.

The poem explains “how everything turns away quite leisurely from the disaster.” Earth abides: the ploughman ploughs. Trading vessels go about their commercial business. Life goes on. The death of an unlucky aviator is of no more importance than the fall of a sparrow. Mankind deludes itself if it thinks otherwise. The poem is explaining the notorious eccentricallity of the world at the fall of Icarus, an event that was given high importance by the poets of the past—but for the modern man “it was not an important failure” and this is how it has lost its value and charm altogether, may be due to materialism.

The poem is an exquisitely written sermon, advocating stoicism, and does not mean anything without the pictures—and it is completely dependent on things outside itself.

The poem has no rhyme scheme – it’s a stream of unstructured consciousness.

The critic John Fuller argues that this was in Auden’s mind when he took the first line of ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ away from the syntax of ordinary speech: ‘About suffering they were never wrong…’ rather than, say, ‘The Old Masters were never wrong’.[ W. H. Auden: A Commentary (London: Faber, 1998), p. 266.]

Importantly, though, like Auden’s ‘The Shield of Achilles’ (1952), ‘Musée des Beaux Arts’ is a poem, rather than a painting, and cannot present a variety of scenes together at the same time, backgrounded or foregrounded: it unfolds rhythmically in time, with long lines that hide tight argumentation behind its deceptively conversational tone.

'The Shield of Achilles'

'The Shield of Achilles', be warned, is Auden’s most terrible poem – terrible because it is hopeless. It is a powerful rejection of war-related violence.

War which threatened to destroy civilisation was the background to Auden’s life–from the Great War of 1914–1918, through WW2, to the cold war, with its imminent threat of planetary extinction within four minutes from the launch of the rockets. The first H-bombs, weapons of awesome destructive power, were exploded a few months before Auden published the poem.

20th-century war bore no resemblance to the heroic conflict chronicled in the oldest, greatest poem we have – Homer’s The Iliad – the story of the Trojan War. Auden had been sent, by the US military authorities to examine damage in post-war Germany. What he saw left an indelible mark on him. Equally as terrible as the actual destruction was the wasteland which modern war left: there are few more chilling lines in the whole of English verse than the stanza beginning ‘A ragged urchin.’

Some understanding of the mythological framework of the poem is necessary. Thetis, the mother of the great Greek warrior Achilles had the armourer Haphaestus forge, and ornament, a shield for her son to protect him in battle. Emblazoned on it were all the things a ‘good war’ is fought for. See the stanzas beginning ‘She looked over his shoulder.’ But what, in the age of Auschwitz, Dresden, Hiroshima, would be etched on the shield? The poem gives a grim answer.

In the poem, Auden questions the validity of traditional notions of honour and fair war in an age in which war has become mechanised and impersonal. The poem references Homer’s The Iliad, in which Thetis, mother of the warrior Achilles, asks Hephaestus to forge a shield. Achilles’ shield is beautifully engraved with scenes representing war and peace, work and leisure. In his poem, Auden re-imagines how the shield of a modern Achilles would look in the modern age, when the rules of war and the role of the hero have been rewritten. The poem explores the complex relationship between art and war, and the ethical problems that the representation of violence for aesthetic purposes entails.

The poets, as said by PB Shelley, ‘are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.’ No poet of the 20th century fulfilled that role better than Auden.

In this second lecture on W.H. Auden, the relationship between art and suffering is considered in Auden’s treatment of Brueghel’s “Fall of Icarus” in the poem “Musée des Beaux Arts.” Auden’s reflections on the place of art in society are explored in the elegies “In Memory of W.B. Yeats.”

Tess of the D’Urbervilles: Hardy

Hardy, Tess of the D’Urbervilles, 1891

A poor British girl finds herself seduced and abandoned by a handsome social climber then attempts to find happiness in marriage to a modest farmer. Her past catches up with her with tragic results in this period.

Violent incidents of sexual desire in Alec, an exploitative upper class man, inaugurates Tess’s ‘fall’ that was followed by premature death newborn baby, unsuccessful marriage with Angel that leaves her the mercy of the antagonist. Eventually, it she was sentenced to death by hanging for the vengeful murder of her antagonist. A savage irony is reflected by the words, “Justice had done, and the president of immortals, in Aeschylean phrase, had ended his sport with Tess.”

Tess of the D'urbervilles is an epic tale telling the tragic life of Tess Durbeyfield and her disasters in love, her tear-wrenching experiences with death and her painstaking efforts to grow into a 'proper' woman.

The book is written in very traditional and, at times, hard to understand English.

The character of Tess, a girl-woman betrayed by the callousness of religion, by social convention and by the men who exploit her, is so lushly drawn, so sympathetically conveyed, that it is almost impossible not to feel crushed by the unfairness of life as she experiences it.

Tess starts out as an emblem of innocence, a pretty country girl who delights in dancing on the village green. Yet the world conspires against her. Seduced by a duplicitous older man, her virtue is destroyed when she bears his child and her future life is shaped by a continual suffering for crimes that are not her own.

In Tess’s case, she stabs Alec d’Urberville, the architect of her downfall.

Story centered about the rape scene—although the scene the since is typically metaphorical in its reticence—‘the coarse appropriates the finer thus’—it speaks volumes about Victorian anxieties relating to sex.

Tess isn’t simply a woman at the mercy of men, society, and nature; she’s also at the mercy of her own passions.

She isn’t a protagonist; she is merely a hapless, frail creature, buffeted by circumstances. is strictly a victim of men and social conventions. It is rather like being locked in. side a poem by Theocritus.

Time passes; characters meet and part; people are shaped by their destiny, or by the forces of the society which surrounds them. Tess, in other words, deals in a most convincing and authoritative manner with those large and general emotions which were once the province of the novel but now no longer are.

Tess, in the process, discloses the tragic destiny of a woman who cannot live and work in conventional society 'my youth, my simplicity and the strangeness of my situation', as she puts it but who is nevertheless blessed by the natural world. The film is about 'false relations' of every kind not simply the successful mercantile family who have adopted the name of 'D'Urbeville', but false relations within society and the people who make it up. The first half of the film is filled with natural sounds; the second with artificial and industrial ones, announcing a change in English life which complements the tragedy of Tess's own. It is not a simple theme.

Tess is nature's child she remains on the outside while the landowners remain within their houses, the priests in their churches; but nature itself can be barren and cruel, and it can also be conquered or destroyed. Like love itself, that love to which Tess tries to cling, it is a blessed state but not necessarily a permanent or even a beneficial one. In a queer way, however, Tess remains in control of her life she may seem like a field of wheat being slowly processed by machinery, but she is both field and machine within herself. She chooses her destiny, and ferociously pursues it: 'Once a victim, always victim'.

All the major novelists like Dickens, Eliot, Thackerey, remains faithful to the society and described social life in their novel; but Hardy’s novel do not fit into the realistic mode. His novel are expression of personal philosophy rather then rendition expression of an outer society. Hardy’s pessimistic outlook, his belief in fate and chance, and other philosophic impression impinge on and disturb the traditional accepted structure of the novel.

Tess’s tragedy is not logical outcome of events. The narrative does not have any cause-and-effect relationship. The events take place as they were pre-determined. Within the novel, Tess is doubly fixed: first as a woman and second within Hardy’s philosophy, Right from the very beginning, Hardy seems to be aware of Tess’s fate.

Hard Times: Dickens

Utilitarianism, Fact and Fancy

Hard Times, a Victorian novel by Charles Dickens, is the most famous attack on Bentham’s alleged antipathy to imagination called Utilitarian gloom, or Gradgrindian Education. The famous caricature of Benthamite rationality is Gradgrind who asserts that—“now, what I want is, Facts.” At the very early, it is stated, for example, that “Teach these boys and girls nothing but facts.”

From parliament to Coketown to the Gradgrind family, England is affiliated by an obsession with means and ends that has cast out the pleasuers of imagination and smile human affection. As a result, the imaginative or aesthetic subjects are absent from the curriculum, and higher emphasis is laid upon analysis, deduction and mathematics:

“No little Gradgrind had ever seen a face in the moon; it was up in the moon before it could speak distinctly. No little Gradgrind had ever learnt the silly jingle, Twinkle, twinkle, little star; how I wonder what you are!”

Gradgrind’s own son Tom revolts against his upbringing, and becomes a gambler and a thief. While, Louisa, his daughter, becomes emotionally stunted, virtually soulless: both as a young child, and as an unhappily married woman. Bitzer, who adheres to Gradgrind’s teachings, becomes an uncompassionate egotist. Sissy, the circus performer’s daughter, does badly at school, failing to remember the many facts she is taught, but is genuinely virtuous and fulfilled.

If fact is represented by Gradgrind, then Fancy, the opposite of Fact, is epitomised by the grotesque community of Sleary’s circus, the last vestige of a world held together by bonds of mutual affection and respect. Sleary, who is reckoned a fool by both Gradgrind and Bounderby, understands the need of amusement to escape from everyday drudgery. Utilitarianism links future of sympathy to a more thoroughgoing alienation, which is suspicious of any form of mental life—not obviously ‘useful.’

After all, the maximisation of pleasure was the central aim of utilitarian ethics.

Industrialization

When Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were establishing their social critique, Charles Dickens took up the cause of ordinary working class in Hard Times (1854), which is surely “the harshest of his stories” as mentioned by GK Chesterton in Appreciations and Criticisms (1911). Though there was an ample precedent in the eighteenth century fiction for the social dynamics, yet an industrial order, to adapt Carlyle phrase, was ‘unexampled’ in this novel.

Following by-now conventional gesture of the “social problem” novel, it focused on the inner struggle of a single working class character, Stephen Blackpool—a weaver by profession. He was not only caught between the warring claims of labour and capital, but also mistreated by aptly named industrialist Joseph Bounderby. Later, he was wrongly accused of theft, exiled by the trade union, made redundant, and finally falls down an old mine shaft only to dies a disrespected death. His stoic forbearance is summed up in his feeble conclusion as “a muddle.”

The grave situation of workers which were depicted by Dickens were, in the words of Walter Allen, an unsurpassed “critique of industrial society,” which was later superseded by works of DH Lawrence. Though the novelist remained unsuccessful in projecting the correct and comprehends the politics of the time—which forced Thomas Macaulay to brand it a product of “sullen socialism,”—yet was able to find good words from John Ruskin, George Orwell, and FR Leavis.

While the narrator urge his middle class readers to appreciate that the workers were “gravely, deeply, faithfully in earnest” and “through their very delusions, showed great qualities” in fact the memorized union organisers received almost much voices as. Slackbridge’s trade unionism has played more “symbolic” role than a “realist’ function, as mentioned by David Lodge in Working with Structuralism (1981). It is why perhaps George Bernard Shaw was saddened by Dickens’ inaccurate depiction of “trade unionism.” And Yet, as brutal and as unjust as conditions were, and however accurate Gaskell and Dickens were in reflecting these problems, in reality the new industrial system proved to be hugely successful in terms of their overall contribution to the Victorian economy and the way that they sealed Britain’s reputation around the world.

Victorian literature dealt with the industrial epoch in a range of ‘industrial novels,’ which were often called ‘social problem’ or ‘condition of England novels.’

As a sub-genre, the industrial novel peaks during 1840s and 1850s, and then goes into decline after the 1860s. Titles includes Frances Trollope’s The Life and Adventures of Michael Armstrong: The Factory boy (1839); Charles Kingsley’s Alton Locke (1844); Benjamin Disraeli’s two novels Coningsby (1844) and Sybil, or the Two Nations (1846); Elizabeth Gaskell’s Mary Barton (1848); Charlotte Bronte’s Shirley (1849); Charles Dickens’ Hard Times, and George Eliot’s Felix Holt: The Radical (1849). Although Industrial strife is also reflected in the work of Victorian women poets such as Caroline Norton and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.

In this world of moral and emotional bankruptcy, ambition has curdled into mechanical routine, emotional numbness, and brute domination.

In Memoriam: Tennyson

15 September, 1833 was the day when Alfred Tennyson was widowed by the death of Arthur Henry Hallam. This friend's death was an appalling emotional blow that soon becomes the subject of one of the most popular elegies of English literature. Congenitally prone to melancholia, Tennyson was so overwhelmed by the death of his friend that it became a driving force to compose In Memoriam. Written under the sense of loss, it combines the expression of a deeply personal experience of intense male friendship and mourning with discussions of public concerns, including major debates of the day about science and religion. In just 133 sections, close to 700 stanzas, and about 3,000 lines, Tennyson attempts through his personal grief to discover the meaning of life.

The poem begins with expressions of sorrow and grief, followed by the poet’s recollection of a happy past spent with the individual he is now mourning. Eventually, the poet’s attitude shifts from grief to resignation that widely harboured corrupt ambitions in the age of materialism—well reflected by Wordsworth in “The World is too Much With Us.” Finally, in the climax, he realized that his friend is not lost forever, but survives in another higher form, and this consolation closes the poem with a celebration of transcendent survival.

Elegy

The elegy applies individual bereavement to grapple with broader questions of faith, meaning and nature. Generally, an elegy is a poem of mourning, lamenting and death that roughly dates back to Ovid. From the seventeenth century, the term began to be limited to its most common present usage: a formal and sustained lament in verse for the death of a particular person, usually ending in a consolation. Tennyson provides a complex persona in this elegy, as he represents not only personal but universal pain.

Victorian Compromise

Extraordinarily encyclopaedic, the poem reflects political and philosophical question of the day in natural way, instead of satirical, biblical, physical or even metaphysical. These questions were the most fundamental in the era of Queen Victorian, an era often loosely termed as the Victorian Compromise. Lawrence Friedman, who coined the term, referred it a time of great contrasts in moralism and vice, philanthropy and greediness, wealth and poverty, sex and purity and alike. If there was compromise in democracy and aristocracy in political arena, then in the field of religion and science too, a satisfying compromise was affected. In voicing these doubts and in phrasing the inevitable compromise, Tennyson found and endeavored passionately to fulfil his appointed mission.

The reality of things, as he contemplates the life of prehistoric monsters, is of unthinking violence, and the struggle for the “survival of the fittest” long before the term was coined. He recounts dreams, idle thoughts on his walks, glimpses of nature, as well as the common experiences of bereavement – the sudden, awful remembrance that the beloved is no longer there.

Evolution

Since Einstein developed his theory of relativity, and Rutherford and Bohr revolutionised physics, the picture of world has radically changed. Yet no poet, in any European language, has really explored the implications of all this for the way in which one view the world. Tennyson, by contrast, was immediately alive to the imaginative implications of the revolution in the study of geology at the beginning of the 19th century.

In the central lyrics of 55 and 56, Tennyson considers the theory of natural selection long before Darwin made it famous in On the Origin of Species (1859). According to this theory, certain species, be they plant or animal, prove to be better adapted to their environment, and so survive at the expense of other species, here described as types. Tennyson considers Nature to be “so careful of the type ... So careless of the single life” (55, stanza 2), reflecting on the impersonal, amoral processes of the natural world. It was perhaps the theory of natural selection that began the process of unbelief, as GK Chesterton observed, “atheism was the religion of the suburbs.”

While he was writing this poem, Charles Lyell had published Principles of Geology (1830-1833), which undermined the biblical creation story—some time later, Robert Chambers came with his early evolutionary tract, Vestiges of the Natural History of Creation (1844). Lyell used fossil evidence to show that the present state of the earth is the result of natural forces – wind, water erosion, sedimentation over long periods of time. Tennyson’s lyrics (55 and 56) offer a response to Lyell, the founding father of modern Geology. He made a case for the extinction of species after species, throughout the earth’s history, as species found themselves unable to cope with changing physical conditions. In section 56, even that faint hope is crushed as Nature is personified as, famously, “red in tooth and claw.” The savage voice of Nature avers that thousands of species have been wiped out; the Holy Spirit is reduced to mere “breath,” and man to ‘desert dust’. Tennyson’s poem masterfully brings these concerns together in a poem that was an apt favourite of a grief-stricken queen, and continues to speak to our senses of loss, doubt and hope today. It is arrested nicely in the lines

Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

This wanton waste of potential life offers an allegorical expression of the waste of potential in the early death of Hallam.

The poem is also a deeply philosophical reflection on religion, science, and the promise of immortality. Tennyson was deeply troubled by the proliferation of scientific knowledge about the origins of life and human progress. The author insisted that we hold fast to our faith in a higher power in spite of our inability to prove God’s existence: “Believing where we cannot prove.”

Conclusion

In Memoriam is sometimes thought of, by those who have not read it, as a cosy, or sentimental work. It is the reverse. Although it is so firmly located in the time and place in which it was written, it is absolutely of relevance today. Tennyson replaces the doctrine of the immortality of soul with the immortality of mankind through evolution—thereby achieving a synthesis between his profound religious faith and the new scientific ideas. It can be read as a kind of mourning monument in verse, a species of poetic therapy.

In a series of lyrics, written piecemeal over a number of years, Tennyson confronted not merely his personal bereavement, in the loss of his friend, but the collective bereavement felt by all thinking people of that generation as they said farewell to the religious certainties of the past. Originally, the poet was moving forward, but, in reality, the obsession of friendship with Hallam forced him to look backward.

Hallam is remembered not as the poet of eleven poems, but only as the subject of Tennyson’s poem—this is how he was immortalized in the graveyard of poetic history for forever. It seems and perhaps rightly too that in search of Hallam, the poet is wandering like Ulysses “to strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

What the robust, sharp lyrics of In Memoriam teach readers is that the false certainties of evangelical Christianity are as arid as the shrill negativism of the materialist outlook. Truth comes to us mediated by human love. That message Tennyson found from experience, as well as from his frequent rereading of Dante. Simply, it is like Dante’s The Divine Comedy that starts at Hell and takes its readers to the Heaven.

Macaulay's "Minute on Education"

Source: http://www.mssu.edu/projectsouthasia/history/primarydocs/education/Macaulay001.htm 

or
http://www.columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pritchett/00generallinks/macaulay/txt_minute_education_1835.html

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Minute by T.B. Macaulay, (Feb 2, 1835) 

 

As it seems to be the opinion of some of the gentlemen who compose the Committee of Public Instruction that the course which they have hitherto pursued was strictly prescribed by the British Parliament in 1813 and as, if that opinion be correct, a legislative act will be necessary to warrant a change, I have thought it right to refrain from taking any part in the preparation of the adverse statements which are.now before us, and to reserve what I had to say on the subject till it should come before me as a Member of the Council of India.

It does not appear to me that the Act of Parliament can by any art of contraction be made to bear the meaning which has been assigned to it. It contains nothing about the particular languages or sciences which are to be studied. A sum is set apart "for the revival and promotion of literature, and the encouragement of the learned natives of India, and for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories." It is argued, or rather taken for granted, that by literature the Parliament can have meant only Arabic and Sanscrit literature; that they never would have given the honourable appellation of "a learned native" to a native who was familiar with the poetry of Milton, the metaphysics of Locke, and the physics of Newton; but that they meant to designate by that name only such persons as might have studied in the sacred books of the Hindoos all the uses of cusa-grass, and all the mysteries of absorption into the Deity. This does not appear to be a very satisfactory interpretation. To take a parallel case: Suppose that the Pacha of Egypt, a country once superior in knowledge to the nations of Europe, but now sunk far below them, were to appropriate a sum for the purpose "of reviving and promoting literature, and encouraging learned natives of Egypt," would any body infer that he meant the youth of his Pachalik to give years to the study of hieroglyphics, to search into all the doctrines disguised under the fable of Osiris, and to ascertain with all possible accuracy the ritual with which cats and onions were anciently adored? Would he be justly charged with inconsistency if, instead of employing his young subjects in deciphering obelisks, he were to order them to be instructed in the English and French languages, and in all the sciences to which those languages are the chief keys?

The words on which the supporters of the old system rely do not bear them out, and other words follow which seem to be quite decisive on the other side. This lakh of rupees is set apart not only for "reviving literature in India," the phrase on which their whole interpretation is founded, but also "for the introduction and promotion of a knowledge of the sciences among the inhabitants of the British territories"-- words which are alone sufficient to authorize all the changes for which I contend.

If the Council agree in my construction no legislative act will be necessary. If they differ from me, I will propose a short act rescinding that I clause of the Charter of 1813 from which the difficulty arises.

The argument which I have been considering affects only the form of proceeding. But the admirers of the oriental system of education have used another argument, which, if we admit it to be valid, is decisive against all change. They conceive that the public faith is pledged to the present system, and that to alter the appropriation of any of the funds which have hitherto been spent in encouraging the study of Arabic and Sanscrit would be downright spoliation. It is not easy to understand by what process of reasoning they can have arrived at this conclusion. The grants which are made from the public purse for the encouragement of literature differ in no respect from the grants which are made from the same purse for other objects of real or supposed utility. We found a sanitarium on a spot which we suppose to be healthy. Do we thereby pledge ourselves to keep a sanitarium there if the result should not answer our expectations? We commence the erection of a pier. Is it a violation of the public faith to stop the works, if we afterwards see reason to believe that the building will be useless? The rights of property are undoubtedly sacred. But nothing endangers those rights so much as the practice, now unhappily too common, of attributing them to things to which they do not belong. Those who would impart to abuses the sanctity of property are in truth imparting to the institution of property the unpopularity and the fragility of abuses. If the Government has given to any person a formal assurance-- nay, if the Government has excited in any person's mind a reasonable expectation-- that he shall receive a certain income as a teacher or a learner of Sanscrit or Arabic, I would respect that person's pecuniary interests. I would rather err on the side of liberality to individuals than suffer the public faith to be called in question. But to talk of a Government pledging itself to teach certain languages and certain sciences, though those languages may become useless, though those sciences may be exploded, seems to me quite unmeaning. There is not a single word in any public instrument from which it can be inferred that the Indian Government ever intended to give any pledge on this subject, or ever considered the destination of these funds as unalterably fixed. But, had it been otherwise, I should have denied the competence of our predecessors to bind us by any pledge on such a subject. Suppose that a Government had in the last century enacted in the most solemn manner that all its subjects should, to the end of time, be inoculated for the small-pox, would that Government be bound to persist in the practice after Jenner's discovery? These promises of which nobody claims the performance, and from which nobody can grant a release, these vested rights which vest in nobody, this property without proprietors, this robbery which makes nobody poorer, may be comprehended by persons of higher faculties than mine. I consider this plea merely as a set form of words, regularly used both in England and in India, in defence of every abuse for which no other plea can be set up.

I hold this lakh of rupees to be quite at the disposal of the Governor-General in Council for the purpose of promoting learning in India in any way which may be thought most advisable. I hold his Lordship to be quite as free to direct that it shall no longer be employed in encouraging Arabic and Sanscrit, as he is to direct that the reward for killing tigers in Mysore shall be diminished, or that no more public money shall be expended on the chaunting at the cathedral.

We now come to the gist of the matter. We have a fund to be employed as Government shall direct for the intellectual improvement of the people of this country. The simple question is, what is the most useful way of employing it?

All parties seem to be agreed on one point, that the dialects commonly spoken among the natives of this part of India contain neither literary nor scientific information, and are moreover so poor and rude that, until they are enriched from some other quarter, it will not be easy to translate any valuable work into them.  It seems to be admitted on all sides, that the intellectual improvement of those classes of the people who have the means of pursuing higher studies can at present be affected only by means of some language not vernacular amongst them.

What then shall that language be? One-half of the committee maintain that it should be the English. The other half strongly recommend the Arabic and Sanscrit. The whole question seems to me to be-- which language is the best worth knowing?

I have no knowledge of either Sanscrit or Arabic. But I have done what I could to form a correct estimate of their value. I have read translations of the most celebrated Arabic and Sanscrit works. I have conversed, both here and at home, with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues. I am quite ready to take the oriental learning at the valuation of the orientalists themselves. I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia. The intrinsic superiority of the Western literature is indeed fully admitted by those members of the committee who support the oriental plan of education.

It will hardly be disputed, I suppose, that the department of literature in which the Eastern writers stand highest is poetry. And I certainly never met with any orientalist who ventured to maintain that the Arabic and Sanscrit poetry could be compared to that of the great European nations. But when we pass from works of imagination to works in which facts are recorded and general principles investigated, the superiority of the Europeans becomes absolutely immeasurable. It is, I believe, no exaggeration to say that all the historical information which has been collected from all the books written in the Sanscrit language is less valuable than what may be found in the most paltry abridgments used at preparatory schools in England. In every branch of physical or moral philosophy, the relative position of the two nations is nearly the same.

How then stands the case? We have to educate a people who cannot at present be educated by means of their mother-tongue. We must teach them some foreign language. The claims of our own language it is hardly necessary to recapitulate. It stands pre-eminent even among the languages of the West. It abounds with works of imagination not inferior to the noblest which Greece has bequeathed to us, --with models of every species of eloquence, --with historical composition, which, considered merely as narratives, have seldom been surpassed, and which, considered as vehicles of ethical and political instruction, have never been equaled-- with just and lively representations of human life and human nature, --with the most profound speculations on metaphysics, morals, government, jurisprudence, trade, --with full and correct information respecting every experimental science which tends to preserve the health, to increase the comfort, or to expand the intellect of man. Whoever knows that language has ready access to all the vast intellectual wealth which all the wisest nations of the earth have created and hoarded in the course of ninety generations. It may safely be said that the literature now extant in that language is of greater value than all the literature which three hundred years ago was extant in all the languages of the world together. Nor is this all. In India, English is the language spoken by the ruling class. It is spoken by the higher class of natives at the seats of Government. It is likely to become the language of commerce throughout the seas of the East. It is the language of two great European communities which are rising, the one in the south of Africa, the other in Australia, --communities which are every year becoming more important and more closely connected with our Indian empire. Whether we look at the intrinsic value of our literature, or at the particular situation of this country, we shall see the strongest reason to think that, of all foreign tongues, the English tongue is that which would be the most useful to our native subjects.

The question now before us is simply whether, when it is in our power to teach this language, we shall teach languages in which, by universal confession, there are no books on any subject which deserve to be compared to our own, whether, when we can teach European science, we shall teach systems which, by universal confession, wherever they differ from those of Europe differ for the worse, and whether, when we can patronize sound philosophy and true history, we shall countenance, at the public expense, medical doctrines which would disgrace an English farrier, astronomy which would move laughter in girls at an English boarding school, history abounding with kings thirty feet high and reigns thirty thousand years long, and geography made of seas of treacle and seas of butter.

We are not without experience to guide us. History furnishes several analogous cases, and they all teach the same lesson. There are, in modern times, to go no further, two memorable instances of a great impulse given to the mind of a whole society, of prejudices overthrown, of knowledge diffused, of taste purified, of arts and sciences planted in countries which had recently been ignorant and barbarous.

The first instance to which I refer is the great revival of letters among the Western nations at the close of the fifteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. At that time almost everything that was worth reading was contained in the writings of the ancient Greeks and Romans. Had our ancestors acted as the Committee of Public Instruction has hitherto noted, had they neglected the language of Thucydides and Plato, and the language of Cicero and Tacitus, had they confined their attention to the old dialects of our own island, had they printed nothing and taught nothing at the universities but chronicles in Anglo-Saxon and romances in Norman French, --would England ever have been what she now is? What the Greek and Latin were to the contemporaries of More and Ascham, our tongue is to the people of India. The literature of England is now more valuable than that of classical antiquity. I doubt whether the Sanscrit literature be as valuable as that of our Saxon and Norman progenitors. In some departments-- in history for example-- I am certain that it is much less so.

Another instance may be said to be still before our eyes. Within the last hundred and twenty years, a nation which had previously been in a state as barbarous as that in which our ancestors were before the Crusades has gradually emerged from the ignorance in which it was sunk, and has taken its place among civilized communities. I speak of Russia. There is now in that country a large educated class abounding with persons fit to serve the State in the highest functions, and in nowise inferior to the most accomplished men who adorn the best circles of Paris and London. There is reason to hope that this vast empire which, in the time of our grandfathers, was probably behind the Punjab, may in the time of our grandchildren, be pressing close on France and Britain in the career of improvement. And how was this change effected? Not by flattering national prejudices; not by feeding the mind of the young Muscovite with the old women's stories which his rude fathers had believed; not by filling his head with lying legends about St. Nicholas; not by encouraging him to study the great question, whether the world was or not created on the 13th of September; not by calling him "a learned native" when he had mastered all these points of knowledge; but by teaching him those foreign languages in which the greatest mass of information had been laid up, and thus putting all that information within his reach. The languages of western Europe civilised Russia. I cannot doubt that they will do for the Hindoo what they have done for the Tartar.

And what are the arguments against that course which seems to be alike recommended by theory and by experience? It is said that we ought to secure the co-operation of the native public, and that we can do this only by teaching Sanscrit and Arabic.

I can by no means admit that, when a nation of high intellectual attainments undertakes to superintend the education of a nation comparatively ignorant, the learners are absolutely to prescribe the course which is to be taken by the teachers. It is not necessary however to say anything on this subject. For it is proved by unanswerable evidence, that we are not at present securing the co-operation of the natives. It would be bad enough to consult their intellectual taste at the expense of their intellectual health. But we are consulting neither. We are withholding from them the learning which is palatable to them. We are forcing on them the mock learning which they nauseate.

This is proved by the fact that we are forced to pay our Arabic and Sanscrit students while those who learn English are willing to pay us. All the declamations in the world about the love and reverence of the natives for their sacred dialects will never, in the mind of any impartial person, outweigh this undisputed fact, that we cannot find in all our vast empire a single student who will let us teach him those dialects, unless we will pay him.

I have now before me the accounts of the Mudrassa for one month, the month of December, 1833. The Arabic students appear to have been seventy-seven in number. All receive stipends from the public. The whole amount paid to them is above 500 rupees a month. On the other side of the account stands the following item:

        Deduct amount realized from the out-students of English for the months of May, June, and July last-- 103 rupees.

I have been told that it is merely from want of local experience that I am surprised at these phenomena, and that it is not the fashion for students in India to study at their own charges. This only confirms me in my opinions. Nothing is more certain than that it never can in any part of the world be necessary to pay men for doing what they think pleasant or profitable. India is no exception to this rule. The people of India do not require to be paid for eating rice when they are hungry, or for wearing woollen cloth in the cold season. To come nearer to the case before us: --The children who learn their letters and a little elementary arithmetic from the village schoolmaster are not paid by him. He is paid for teaching them. Why then is it necessary to pay people to learn Sanscrit and Arabic? Evidently because it is universally felt that the Sanscrit and Arabic are languages the knowledge of which does not compensate for the trouble of acquiring them. On all such subjects the state of the market is the detective test.

Other evidence is not wanting, if other evidence were required. A petition was presented last year to the committee by several ex-students of the Sanscrit College. The petitioners stated that they had studied in the college ten or twelve years, that they had made themselves acquainted with Hindoo literature and science, that they had received certificates of proficiency. And what is the fruit of all this? "Notwithstanding such testimonials," they say, "we have but little prospect of bettering our condition without the kind assistance of your honourable committee, the indifference with which we are generally looked upon by our countrymen leaving no hope of encouragement and assistance from them." They therefore beg that they may be recommended to the Governor-General for places under the Government-- not places of high dignity or emolument, but such as may just enable them to exist. "We want means," they say, "for a decent living, and for our progressive improvement, which, however, we cannot obtain without the assistance of Government, by whom we have been educated and maintained from childhood." They conclude by representing very pathetically that they are sure that it was never the intention of Government, after behaving so liberally to them during their education, to abandon them to destitution and neglect.

I have been used to see petitions to Government for compensation. All those petitions, even the most unreasonable of them, proceeded on the supposition that some loss had been sustained, that some wrong had been inflicted. These are surely the first petitioners who ever demanded compensation for having been educated gratis, for having been supported by the public during twelve years, and then sent forth into the world well furnished with literature and science. They represent their education as an injury which gives them a claim on the Government for redress, as an injury for which the stipends paid to them during the infliction were a very inadequate compensation. And I doubt not that they are in the right. They have wasted the best years of life in learning what procures for them neither bread nor respect. Surely we might with advantage have saved the cost of making these persons useless and miserable. Surely, men may be brought up to be burdens to the public and objects of contempt to their neighbours at a somewhat smaller charge to the State. But such is our policy. We do not even stand neuter in the contest between truth and falsehood. We are not content to leave the natives to the influence of their own hereditary prejudices. To the natural difficulties which obstruct the progress of sound science in the East, we add great difficulties of our own making. Bounties and premiums, such as ought not to be given even for the propagation of truth, we lavish on false texts and false philosophy.

By acting thus we create the very evil which we fear. We are making that opposition which we do not find. What we spend on the Arabic and Sanscrit Colleges is not merely a dead loss to the cause of truth. It is bounty-money paid to raise up champions of error. It goes to form a nest not merely of helpless placehunters but of bigots prompted alike by passion and by interest to raise a cry against every useful scheme of education. If there should be any opposition among the natives to the change which I recommend, that opposition will be the effect of our own system. It will be headed by persons supported by our stipends and trained in our colleges. The longer we persevere in our present course, the more formidable will that opposition be. It will be every year reinforced by recruits whom we are paying. From the native society, left to itself, we have no difficulties to apprehend. All the murmuring will come from that oriental interest which we have, by artificial means, called into being and nursed into strength.

There is yet another fact which is alone sufficient to prove that the feeling of the native public, when left to itself, is not such as the supporters of the old system represent it to be. The committee have thought fit to lay out above a lakh of rupees in printing Arabic and Sanscrit books. Those books find no purchasers. It is very rarely that a single copy is disposed of. Twenty-three thousand volumes, most of them folios and quartos, fill the libraries or rather the lumber-rooms of this body. The committee contrive to get rid of some portion of their vast stock of oriental literature by giving books away. But they cannot give so fast as they print. About twenty thousand rupees a year are spent in adding fresh masses of waste paper to a hoard which, one should think, is already sufficiently ample. During the last three years about sixty thousand rupees have been expended in this manner. The sale of Arabic and Sanscrit books during those three years has not yielded quite one thousand rupees. In the meantime, the School Book Society is selling seven or eight thousand English volumes every year, and not only pays the expenses of printing but realizes a profit of twenty per cent. on its outlay.

The fact that the Hindoo law is to be learned chiefly from Sanscrit books, and the Mahometan law from Arabic books, has been much insisted on, but seems not to bear at all on the question. We are commanded by Parliament to ascertain and digest the laws of India. The assistance of a Law Commission has been given to us for that purpose. As soon as the Code is promulgated the Shasters and the Hedaya will be useless to a moonsiff or a Sudder Ameen. I hope and trust that, before the boys who are now entering at the Mudrassa and the Sanscrit College have completed their studies, this great work will be finished. It would be manifestly absurd to educate the rising generation with a view to a state of things which we mean to alter before they reach manhood.

But there is yet another argument which seems even more untenable. It is said that the Sanscrit and the Arabic are the languages in which the sacred books of a hundred millions of people are written, and that they are on that account entitled to peculiar encouragement. Assuredly it is the duty of the British Government in India to be not only tolerant but neutral on all religious questions. But to encourage the study of a literature, admitted to be of small intrinsic value, only because that literature inculcated the most serious errors on the most important subjects, is a course hardly reconcilable with reason, with morality, or even with that very neutrality which ought, as we all agree, to be sacredly preserved. It is confined that a language is barren of useful knowledge. We are to teach it because it is fruitful of monstrous superstitions. We are to teach false history, false astronomy, false medicine, because we find them in company with a false religion. We abstain, and I trust shall always abstain, from giving any public encouragement to those who are engaged in the work of converting the natives to Christianity. And while we act thus, can we reasonably or decently bribe men, out of the revenues of the State, to waste their youth in learning how they are to purify themselves after touching an ass or what texts of the Vedas they are to repeat to expiate the crime of killing a goat?

It is taken for granted by the advocates of oriental learning that no native of this country can possibly attain more than a mere smattering of English. They do not attempt to prove this. But they perpetually insinuate it. They designate the education which their opponents recommend as a mere spelling-book education. They assume it as undeniable that the question is between a profound knowledge of Hindoo and Arabian literature and science on the one side, and superficial knowledge of the rudiments of English on the other. This is not merely an assumption, but an assumption contrary to all reason and experience. We know that foreigners of all nations do learn our language sufficiently to have access to all the most abstruse knowledge which it contains sufficiently to relish even the more delicate graces of our most idiomatic writers. There are in this very town natives who are quite competent to discuss political or scientific questions with fluency and precision in the English language. I have heard the very question on which I am now writing discussed by native gentlemen with a liberality and an intelligence which would do credit to any member of the Committee of Public Instruction. Indeed it is unusual to find, even in the literary circles of the Continent, any foreigner who can express himself in English with so much facility and correctness as we find in many Hindoos. Nobody, I suppose, will contend that English is so difficult to a Hindoo as Greek to an Englishman. Yet an intelligent English youth, in a much smaller number of years than our unfortunate pupils pass at the Sanscrit College, becomes able to read, to enjoy, and even to imitate not unhappily the compositions of the best Greek authors. Less than half the time which enables an English youth to read Herodotus and Sophocles ought to enable a Hindoo to read Hume and Milton.

To sum up what I have said. I think it clear that we are not fettered by the Act of Parliament of 1813, that we are not fettered by any pledge expressed or implied, that we are free to employ our funds as we choose, that we ought to employ them in teaching what is best worth knowing, that English is better worth knowing than Sanscrit or Arabic, that the natives are desirous to be taught English, and are not desirous to be taught Sanscrit or Arabic, that neither as the languages of law nor as the languages of religion have the Sanscrit and Arabic any peculiar claim to our encouragement, that it is possible to make natives of this country thoroughly good English scholars, and that to this end our efforts ought to be directed.

In one point I fully agree with the gentlemen to whose general views I am opposed. I feel with them that it is impossible for us, with our limited means, to attempt to educate the body of the people. We must at present do our best to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern,  --a class of persons Indian in blood and colour, but English in tastes, in opinions, in morals and in intellect. To that class we may leave it to refine the vernacular dialects of the country, to enrich those dialects with terms of science borrowed from the Western nomenclature, and to render them by degrees fit vehicles for conveying knowledge to the great mass of the population.

I would strictly respect all existing interests. I would deal even generously with all individuals who have had fair reason to expect a pecuniary provision. But I would strike at the root of the bad system which has hitherto been fostered by us. I would at once stop the printing of Arabic and Sanscrit books. I would abolish the Mudrassa and the Sanscrit College at Calcutta. Benares is the great seat of Brahminical learning; Delhi of Arabic learning. If we retain the Sanscrit College at Bonares and the Mahometan College at Delhi we do enough and much more than enough in my opinion, for the Eastern languages. If the Benares and Delhi Colleges should be retained, I would at least recommend that no stipends shall be given to any students who may hereafter repair thither, but that the people shall be left to make their own choice between the rival systems of education without being bribed by us to learn what they have no desire to know. The funds which would thus be placed at our disposal would enable us to give larger encouragement to the Hindoo College at Calcutta, and establish in the principal cities throughout the Presidencies of Fort William and Agra schools in which the English language might be well and thoroughly taught.

If the decision of His Lordship in Council should be such as I anticipate, I shall enter on the performance of my duties with the greatest zeal and alacrity. If, on the other hand, it be the opinion of the Government that the present system ought to remain unchanged, I beg that I may be permitted to retire from the chair of the Committee. I feel that I could not be of the smallest use there. I feel also that I should be lending my countenance to what I firmly believe to be a mere delusion. I believe that the present system tends not to accelerate the progress of truth but to delay the natural death of expiring errors. I conceive that we have at present no right to the respectable name of a Board of Public Instruction. We are a Board for wasting the public money, for printing books which are of less value than the paper on which they are printed was while it was blank-- for giving artificial encouragement to absurd history, absurd metaphysics, absurd physics, absurd theology-- for raising up a breed of scholars who find their scholarship an incumbrance and blemish, who live on the public while they are receiving their education, and whose education is so utterly useless to them that, when they have received it, they must either starve or live on the public all the rest of their lives. Entertaining these opinions, I am naturally desirous to decline all share in the responsibility of a body which, unless it alters its whole mode of proceedings, I must consider, not merely as useless, but as positively noxious.

    T[homas] B[abington] MACAULAY

     2nd February 1835.

     I give my entire concurrence to the sentiments expressed in this Minute.

     W[illiam] C[avendish] BENTINCK. 

 

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From: Bureau of Education. Selections from Educational Records, Part I (1781-1839).  Edited by H. Sharp.  Calcutta: Superintendent, Government Printing, 1920. Reprint. Delhi: National Archives of India, 1965, 107-117.

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