T OM C LUCAS “The Spirit of Literature and the Spirit of Society”: Isaac D’Israeli, Benjamin Disraeli, and the Literary Character 1 Critical Context: Literature, Culture, Society Since the 1980s, historicist critics of Romantic literature have tended to emphasise the distinction between literature and society. As a result, the capacity of Romantic literature to initiate and contribute to cultural change has been downplayed in much historicist criticism. Before the rise of New Historicism, Raymond Williams posited the emergence of culture in the Romantic period as “a court of appeal in which real values were determined, usually in opposition to the ‘factitious’ values thrown up by the market and similar operations of society.” 1 Used in this sense, culture becomes a means of critiquing and reforming social institutions, and literature, as one of the most argumentative facets of culture, becomes key to this process. After 1980, the New Historicists challenged this view by drawing attention to the fact that Romantic writing is itself ideological. In one of the seminal works of this school, Jerome McGann argued that previous studies of Romanticism had been “dominated by a Romantic Ideology, by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations.” 2 Setting the agenda for a newly self-reflective form of historicism, McGann argued that “the past and its works should be studied by a critical mind in the full range of their pastness.” 3 Increasingly, New Historicists adopted a version of what Paul Ricœur termed “the hermeneutics of suspicion,“ reading Romantic texts in order to tease out their ideological omissions and contradictions, rather than viewing them as works of cultural criticism. 4 Though few would now challenge the basic premise of reading past works with a view to their “pastness,” the New Historicist method has implications for the cultural status of literature. Chief among these is a question of 1 Raymond Williams, Culture and Society 1780-1950 (New York: Anchor Books, 1960), 34. 2 Jerome J. McGann, The Romantic Ideology: A Critical Investigation (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1983), 1. 3 McGann 2. 4 Paul Ricœur, Freud and Philosophy: An Essay on Interpretation (New Haven: Yale UP, 1970), 356. T OM C LUCAS 226 the relative authority assigned to the critic and the text: in elevating contemporary critics above the ideology of Romantic texts, New Historicism risks undermining the potential of Romantic texts to effect cultural change, both in their own time and in the present. The didactic function of literature - which, as I shall argue, played a central role in the Romantic period - is therefore marginalised. With this, there comes a risk of reverting to what Herbert Butterfield termed the “Whig interpretation of history,” in which contemporary critics assume a position of cultural superiority over the artefacts of a past age. 5 Stephen Greenblatt, one of the founders of New Historicism, recognised this difficulty when he emphasised the need to avoid reducing art to “a self-regarding, autonomous, closed system […] opposed to social life.” 6 2 Literature as Legislation: Shelley’s “Defence of Poetry” As we interrogate the subject positions of Romantic authors, searching for the ways in which their texts distort or omit social reality, we also need to be mindful of the ways in which Romantic texts shed light on our own critical ideologies. The aim of this essay is to recover some of the cultural critical authority of Romantic texts, by showing how British writers contributed to the political debates which led up to the passing of the Reform Acts in 1832 and 1867. As its main example, the essay will consider how Isaac D’Israeli’s essay on The Literary Character was reinterpreted by his son, Benjamin Disraeli, a novelist who entered Parliament in 1837 and went on to become Prime Minister from 1874-1880. First, however, it is necessary to provide a little more context on Romantic debates about the relationship between literature and cultural change. In 1821, Percy Shelley composed “A Defence of Poetry” in order to counter his friend Thomas Love Peacock’s essay “The Four Ages of Poetry.” Peacock’s essay advanced the seriocomic argument that poetry hindered rather than helping the progress of society, and that its cultural role was therefore inflated. With typically poised irony, Peacock argued that poetry, viewed as cultural criticism, was destructive: A poet in our times is a semi-barbarian in a civilized community. He lives in the days that are past. His ideas, thoughts, feelings, associations, are all with barba- 5 For this argument, see Herbert Butterfield, The Whig Interpretation of History (London: G. Bell, 1931), passim. 6 Stephen Greenblatt, Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare, second edition (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 2005), 4. “The Spirit of Literature and the Spirit of Society” 227 rous manners, obsolete customs, and exploded superstitions. The march of his intellect is like that of a crab, backward. 7 In the “Defence” - which remained unpublished until 1840 - Shelley hit back at this claim by insisting in on the didactic function of literature. He proclaimed that the “most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is Poetry.” 8 Following this, he built up to what is perhaps the most memorable claim of the “Defence”: “Poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the World.” 9 In response to this claim, McGann argues that “the emphasis must be placed on ‘unacknowledged’ to specify the Romanticism of the idea […]. The poet’s privilege was insight and vision, the power to apprehend fundamental truths which custom and habit kept hidden from the ordinary person’s consciousness.” 10 McGann thus negates Shelley’s claim about the role of literature in propelling cultural change, focusing instead on the “poet’s privilege” and the division between art and life. In this reading, the “poet’s privilege” becomes the critic’s, as the “power to apprehend fundamental truths which custom and habit kept hidden” is transferred to the contemporary critic, employing a hermeneutics of suspicion to see through the text’s ideology. Taking a similar approach to Shelley’s claim that “man, having enslaved the elements, remains himself a slave,” 11 McGann remarks that “the great truth of Romantic ideology is that one may escape such a world through imagination and poetry.” 12 7 Thomas Love Peacock, “The Four Ages of Poetry,“ in Peacock’s Four Ages of Poetry, Shelley’s Defence of Poetry, Browning’s Essay on Shelley, ed. H.F.B. Smith (Oxford: B. Blackwell, 1921), 16. His reading of the “Defence” thus reflects his wider view that Romanticism was not so much a movement, as a cluster of beliefs which privileged poetry over history and individual genius over social reality. Yet the “Defence” contains some important lines which McGann omits from his quotation. Earlier in the same paragraph, Shelley contends that “[w]e want the creative faculty to imagine that which we know; we want the generous impulse to act that which we imagine; we want the poetry of life” (530). With this figure of anadiplosis, or rhetorical repetition, Shelley advances one of the central arguments of the “Defence”: the purpose of poetry is to convert knowledge into action. 8 Percy Bysshe Shelley, “A Defence of Poetry,“ Shelley’s Poetry and Prose, ed. Donald H. Reiman and Neil Fraistat (New York: Norton, 2002), 535. 9 Shelley 535. 10 McGann 114. 11 Shelley 530. 12 McGann 131. T OM C LUCAS 228 Shelley argues that humans can be persuaded of “moral, political and historical wisdom” (530) on a rational level, but that it requires poetry to persuade them on an emotional level into acting that which they know: The functions of the poetical faculty are two-fold; by one it creates new materials of knowledge, and power and pleasure; by the other it engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange them according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good. The cultivation of poetry is never more to be desired than at periods when, from an excess of the selfish and calculating principle, the accumulation of the materials of external life exceed the quantity of the power of assimilating them to the internal laws of human nature. (531) Rather than offering a means to “escape [the] world through imagination,” as McGann describes, Shelley claims that poetry brings about cultural change by providing people with an internal standard against which to regulate their actions. 13 In line with McGann’s argument, however, it is important to note that Shelley translates the “materials of external life” into poetic terms. Metaphorically, he suggests that the free play of “knowledge, and power and pleasure” in the mind can be regularised as the reader internalises the “rhythm and order” of poetry. In this way, the “internal laws of human nature” are figured as an underlying poetic metre against which to scan the “materials of external life.” Shelley represents the “excess” of the “selfish and calculating principle” as a kind of hypermetricality, suggesting that it may be reduced, if the reader transfers some of the “quantity” - in the sense of the metrical emphasis — back onto the “internal laws.” In this way, the act of reading poetry encourages readers to rebalance their priorities away from the “materials of external life” and towards the “internal laws of human nature.” As Raymond Williams describes, Poetry offers a system of self-government to be set over and against the government of a market society, which emphasises the “accumulation of the materials of external life.” 14 Shelley’s rhetoric remains evasive, however, when it comes to defining the import of these “internal laws of human nature.” One might argue that humans share a common set of assumptions about what comprises “the beautiful and the good.” In the Romantic period, this belief was heavily debated by thinkers like David Hume and Edmund Burke. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume posited the existence of “some internal sense or feeling, which nature has made universal in the whole species,“ but then challenged this belief on the basis that: [I]n many orders of beauty, particularly those of the finer arts, it is requisite to employ much reasoning, in order to feel the proper sentiment; and a false relish may frequently be corrected by argument and reflection. There are just grounds to conclude, that moral beauty partakes much of this latter species, and demands the as- 13 McGann 131. 14 Williams 34. “The Spirit of Literature and the Spirit of Society” 229 sistance of our intellectual faculties, in order to give it a suitable influence on the human mind. 15 Shelley’s argument in the “Defence” is that poetry guides us through the process of “argument and reflection” that enables us to perceive the higher orders of “moral beauty.” Earlier on, he argues that “[t]he great secret of morals is Love; or a going out of our own nature, and an identification of ourselves with the beautiful which exists in thought, action, or person, not our own” (531). By combining moral teaching with aesthetic pleasure, poetry encourages us to identify with and internalise new standards of beauty, and thus grants us the power, in Shelley’s words, to “act that which we imagine” (530). The question remains, however, how we define these standards of beauty and goodness. In his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, Burke drew a careful distinction between “beauty, which is a positive and powerful quality,“ and the habitual standards of “custom and use,” which he designated with the phrase “second nature.” 16 Second nature, in other words, denotes the set of aesthetic and moral standards which we internalise from our society. 17 In his ground-breaking study of Wordsworth’s poetry, James Chandler traced Wordsworth’s use of this concept and drew attention to the potential circularity of redefining social customs as part of human nature. Defined in this way, second nature becomes “not so much an identifiable fact in the world as a way of thinking that conveniently collapses certain troublesome oppositions.” 18 The passage from Shelley quoted above might be accused of collapsing several such “troublesome oppositions,“ for example those between “external life” and “internal laws” and “the beautiful and the good.” Yet Shelley’s main argument is not undermined by the claim that the “internal laws of human nature,“ like the “materials of external life,” are in fact social conventions and thus part of “second nature.” The thrust of his argument is that poetry enables individuals to internalise and act upon their chosen standards of beauty and goodness, and thus, in Hume’s terms, grants these standards a “suitable influence” over the mind. 19 15 David Hume, Enquiries Concerning Human Understanding and Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. P.H. Nidditch, third edition (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2003), 173. Poetry offers an alternative set of values to the “selfish and calculating principle” (531) and 16 Edmund Burke, Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, ed. T.O. McLoughlin, James T. Boulton, and William B. Todd, in The Writings and Speeches of Edmund Burke, gen. ed. Paul Langford and William B. Todd, 9 vols (Oxford: Clarendon Press: 1981-2015), 1: 264-5. 17 See also Burke’s ‘Speech in Reply, 24 June 1794,’ India: The Hastings Trial, 1789-1794, ed. P.J. Marshall and William B. Todd, in Burke 7: 540. 18 James Chandler, Wordsworth’s Second Nature: A Study of the Poetry and Politics (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1984), 72. 19 Hume 173. T OM C LUCAS 230 helps to render our actions consistent with our beliefs. Rather than collapsing the opposition between the requirements of “external life” and the “internal laws,“ poetry mediates between them. In Shelley’s terms, “a poet considers the vices of his contemporaries as the temporary dress in which his creations must be arrayed, and which cover without concealing the eternal proportions of their beauty” (516). Poetry is thus a veil which helps us to see through the social conventions of our second nature to a more enduring, though still social, set of values. In treating the relation between “the beautiful and the good,” Shelley appears to draw on Aristotle’s discussion of the complex relation between the kalon (the beautiful, fine, noble) and the agathon (the good) in the Nicomachean Ethics. According to Aristotle, the kalon is both an essential property and one of the aims of virtuous action. However, Gabriel Richardson Lear explains that the kalon is a more general term than the agathon, because “being kalon connotes being good (although not necessarily morally good).” 20 In the Metaphysics, Aristotle clarifies this point further by arguing that “goodness is distinct from beauty [to kalon] […] for it is always in actions that goodness is present, whereas beauty is also in immovable things” (1078a: 31-4). 21 3 D’Israeli, Coleridge, and the Role of Literature What Shelley does in the “Defence” is to show that poetry combines the principles of the kalon and the agathon, and thus emphasise that it is not an immovable thing, but rather involves the action of “assimilating” one’s experience to the “internal laws of human nature.” Specifically, poetry “engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce” rational truths on an internal and emotional level, so that it becomes harder for individuals to profess moral, political, and historical wisdom, while continuing to act according to “the selfish and calculating principle.” In this way, Shelley suggests, poetry unites the qualities of “the beautiful and the good,” by providing us with “the generous impulse to act that which we imagine” (530). The “Defence” counters Peacock’s criticisms by showing how poetry can drive cultural change: it not only provides standards of beauty and (moral) goodness as alternatives to “the selfish and calculating principle,“ but also induces feelings of love towards these standards, and thus leads us to act upon them. One of Shelley’s predecessors in championing the social role of literature was Isaac D’Israeli, the father of the future British Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli. As an essayist and biographer, D’Israeli extends his defence of litera- 20 Gabriel Richardson Lear, “Aristotle on Moral Virtue and the Fine,” Blackwell Guide to Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, ed. Richard Kraut (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006): 116-36, 117. 21 Aristotle, Metaphysics, trans. Hugh Tredennick, 2 vols. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1947), 2: 192-3. “The Spirit of Literature and the Spirit of Society” 231 ture beyond poetry to other genres, including prose and drama. In this, there is little difference between him and Shelley, since Shelley, too, credits prose with having poetic power when he assets that “[t]he distinction between poets and prose writers is a vulgar error […]. Plato was essentially a poet […]. Lord Bacon was a poet” (514). Isaac D’Israeli’s reputation has begun to revive in recent years, yet more remains to be said about how his essay on The Literary Character, published in 1795 and expanded in 1818, helped to shape Romantic ideas about the role of literature in driving cultural change. In this essay, which was read and extensively annotated by Byron in 1810-11, D’Israeli encouraged his readers to “observe the influence of authors in forming the character of men, where the solitary man of genius stamps his own on a people.” 22 Despite this remove, D’Israeli argues that writers and artists then feed the products of their cultural labour back into society, helping to shape the moral and political characters not only of individuals, but also of national and even international populations. His recurrent metaphor for this process is not that of the “stamp” quoted above, but rather one of diffusion, in which authors develop new moral and political values in private and then, as it were, pollinate the minds of their readers. In a passage which anticipates Shelley’s “Defence,“ D’Israeli declared that: In the chapter entitled “The Spirit of Literature and the Spirit of Society,” D’Israeli contended that the literary “master-spirits who create an epoch” must exist at a certain remove from society: “The founders of National Literature and Art pursued their insulated studies in the full independence of their mind and the development of their inventive faculty” (102). There is a small portion of men, who appear marked out by nature and habit, for the purpose of cultivating their thoughts in peace, and giving activity to their sentiments, by disclosing them to the people. Those who govern a nation cannot at the same time enlighten them; - authors stand between the governors and the governed […]. The people are a vast body, of which men of genius are the eyes and the hands; and the public mind is the creation of the philosophical writer; these are axioms as demonstrable as any in Euclid, and as sure in their operation, as any principle in mechanics. (351-2) D’Israeli’s claim that “authors stand between the governors and the governed” closely resembles Shelley’s claim that “[p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” The fact that D’Israeli’s essay on The Literary Character went through five editions in his lifetime, the fourth of which was dedicated to the Poet Laureate, Robert Southey, shows the influence of his 22 Isaac D’Israeli, The Literary Character, Illustrated by the History of Men of Genius, Drawn from their Own Feelings and Confessions (London: John Murray, 1818), iv, 355. T OM C LUCAS 232 own work on shaping what he calls “the public mind.” 23 Though not his own coinage, the concept of the public mind was central to D’Israeli’s work, since it suggested that the character of large groups of people could by shaped by the gradual acceptance of a shared set of cultural values. Adapting Benedict Anderson’s term, we might refer to these bodies of readers not as imagined but as imaginative communities: groups which hang together loosely and across political borders because of their shared determination to “act that which [they] imagine.” This complex concept has two interlinking facets: firstly, it denotes the process by which authors “awaken all the knowledge which lies buried in the sleep of nations” (359) to develop a cultural canon of beliefs and values; secondly, it denotes authors’ individual contributions to this canon, whereby “the single thought of a man of genius […] has sometimes changed the dispositions of a people, and even of an age” (352). 24 Marshall Brown coined the phrase “horizontal ethics” to describe cultural values which “go beyond borders, traveling to other countries and other spheres, if not physically, then psychically.” 25 D’Israeli drew on a similar notion of dissemination when he declared that “these literary characters now constitute an important body, diffused over enlightened Europe, connected by the secret links of congenial pursuits, and combining often insensibly to themselves in the same common labours” (3). Here, the phrase “literary characters” refers not only to writers, but also to their readers, whose characters are shaped by what they read: in short, it encompasses all writers and readers who respect the values conveyed by literary texts. According to D’Israeli, these “literary characters” form a body politic governed by a shared set of “internal laws,“ 26 23 Martin Spevack, Curiosities Revisited: The Works of Isaac D’Israeli (Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2007), 103-4. which travel beyond historical, political, and geographical borders. Three years later, Shelley developed the same idea when he referred to the “great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world” (522). Shelley and D’Israeli shared the idea of an unbroken tradition of world literature forming a vast community of readers and writers with a common set of humanistic values. By promoting this idea, they attempted to elevate the status of literature from being an 24 Shelley 530. See Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 2006), 6: “the members of even the smallest national will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.” 25 Marshall Brown, “Transcendental Ethics, Vertical Ethics, and Horizontal Ethics,” Ethics in Culture: The Dissemination of Values through Literature and Other Media, ed. Astrid Erll, Herbert Grabes, and Ansgar Nünning (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 2008): 51-72, 53. 26 Shelley 531. “The Spirit of Literature and the Spirit of Society” 233 imaginative endeavour towards becoming a sophisticated and vitally active organ of government. As well as anticipating Shelley’s “Defence,“ D’Israeli’s image of “literary characters” as “an important body, diffused over enlightened Europe” bears a striking resemblance to Coleridge’s later concept of the “clerisy.” Coleridge first expounded this concept in his essay On the Constitution of the Church and State, published in 1829. In this work, Coleridge advanced a similar argument to D’Israeli, claiming that “we must be men in order to be citizens” and that among those involved in governing the church and the state “a certain smaller number were to remain at the fountain-heads of the humanities.” 27 This latter and far more numerous body were to be distributed throughout the country, so as not to leave even the smallest integral part or division without a resident guide, guardian, and instructor; the objects and final intention of the whole order being these — to preserve the stores, to guard the treasures, of past civilization, and thus to bind the present with the past; to perfect and add to the same, and thus to connect the present with the future; but especially to diffuse through the whole community, and to every native entitled to its laws and rights, that quantity and quality of knowledge which was indispensable both for the understanding of those rights, and for the performance of the duties correspondent. (43-4) He proceeded to posit a whole order of individuals — the “National Clerisy” — whose role was to oversee “national education, the nisus formativus of the body politic, the shaping and informing spirit” (46-8). Coleridge continued: Compared to D’Israeli, Coleridge expands the membership of this order from “literary characters” to include “all the so called liberal arts and sciences,” (46) yet its cultural role and method of operation remain similar. Like D’Israeli, Coleridge emphasises that cultural values “diffuse” through society. Behind this metaphor lies an assumption about the agency through which cultural values spread. Where Shelley claims that poetry “engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce” (531) standards of beauty and goodness, Coleridge figures the humanities as “fountain-heads” - sources from which people come voluntarily to drink. Both authors suggest that literature governs through encouraging individuals to admire and emulate its values, rather than through top-down enforcement. Like D’Israeli, Coleridge uses the body politic as a convenient metaphor to describe the differentiation of social roles without positing a strict social hierarchy. Where D’Israeli maintained that “the people are a vast body, of which men of genius are the eyes and the hands” (352), Coleridge claims that the clerisy will cooperate with the other organs of the body politic in its role 27 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, On the Constitution of the Church and State, ed. J. Colmer, in The Collected Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, gen. ed. Kathleen Coburn, 16 vols in 34 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1976), 10: 43. T OM C LUCAS 234 as “guide, guardian, and instructor.” Following McGann, one might argue that Coleridge assigns the clerisy special “insight and vision” to “apprehend fundamental truths […] kept hidden from the ordinary person’s consciousness.” 28 Yet Coleridge’s model of didacticism is more subtle than this would imply. Both Coleridge and D’Israeli may be said to postulate a cultural contract, which forms part of the larger social contract discussed by writers like Locke, Rousseau, and Hume. In his Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, Hume used the examples of “affection to virtue” and “detestation of vice” to argue for the existence of a “public affection,” through which “the interests of society are not, even on their own account, entirely indifferent to us” and “everything, which contributes to the happiness of society, recommends itself directly to your approbation and good-will.” 29 The cultural contract proposed by D’Israeli and Coleridge partakes of this public affection, which helps the individual relate to the idea of the society in which they live. Rather than a social contract between the governors and the governed, or in which the individual consents to be governed by the general will, this cultural contract involves a bond of admiration or love which the individual feels for the shared set of cultural achievements, which Coleridge terms the “treasures” of “past civilization.” In this way, Coleridge figures the clerisy not as governors, but rather as benefactors, bestowing the “stores” of literature to those who wish to receive them. Like D’Israeli, Coleridge proposes that “authors stand between the governors and the governed,” 30 Ronald Shusterman has drawn attention to the complexities of this image of diffusion, pointing out that “it involves an effort towards harmony rather than mere obedience”: “learning means forging together in the smithies of our interrelated souls the continuously re-created conscience of our race.” diffusing cultural values by inspiring love and veneration. 31 28 McGann 114. Yet Coleridge was aware that for the clerisy to work, it would need to encourage people to feel like stakeholders within their culture. Early in his essay On the Constitution of the Church and State, he observed that “no man who has ever listened to labourers […] discussing the injustice of the present rate of wages, and the iniquity of their being paid in part out of the parish poor-rates, will doubt for a moment that they are fully possessed by the idea” of a social contract (17). Both Coleridge’s and D’Israeli’s ideas about the diffusion of culture played an important role in shaping British debates about politics and education during the first half of the nineteenth century. In particular, a number of novelists engaged with their ideas and put them imagi- 29 Hume 219. 30 Isaac D’Israeli 351. 31 Ronald Shusterman, “Agrammaticality, Silence and the Diffusion of Values: The Holiday of Language,“ Ethics in Culture 73-86, 84. “The Spirit of Literature and the Spirit of Society” 235 natively into practice within the fictional (or semi-fictional) communities described in their novels. By doing so, they revealed further tensions in the image of diffusion as the dominant metaphor for cultural change. One of the most important roles played by the so-called “condition of England” novels written in the 1830s and ’40s was to show that the metaphor of the diffusion of ethics and culture — even when deployed “horizontally,” as described by Marshall Brown — had to be supplemented with other models. 4 Sybil and the Metaphors of Cultural Change Benjamin Disraeli’s novel Sybil, or The Two Nations, published in 1845, represents the author’s attempt to give a narrative form to the arguments about literature and cultural change discussed in the previous section. In the novel, Disraeli recounts the history of the Chartist movement, which aimed to secure the vote for working men, in the fictional town of Mowbray in the years 1837-1844. As the book’s subtitle suggests, Disraeli argues that the rich and the poor in Britain form “[t]wo nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy” (65). Both within the story, and through the novel’s reception, Disraeli attempted to show how literature could mediate in this political conflict and bridge the cultural gulf between Britain’s social classes. Disraeli was a strong advocate of his father’s idea that literature helps to shape the public mind, and published a seven-volume edition of The Works of Isaac Disraeli in 1859. In the biographical notice “On the Life and Writings of Mr. Disraeli” with which he prefaced this edition, the now prominent politician claimed that before his father’s time “the Literary Character had never been fairly placed before the world,” adding that “in the analysis and record of its power, he vindicated the right position of authors in the social scale. They stand between the governors and the governed, he impresses on us in the closing pages of his greatest work.” 32 Here, Benjamin Disraeli singles out his father’s work on The Literary Character for praise, and echoes its central argument about the potential of literature to mediate in the process of government. Disraeli revealed the influence of this idea on his own political philosophy throughout his novels. Early in Sybil, he questions the “beneficial influence” of the 1832 Reform Act, asking: “Has it elevated the tone of the public mind? Has it cultured the popular sensibilities to noble and ennobling ends? ” 33 32 Benjamin Disraeli, “On the Life and Writings of Mr. Disraeli. By His Son,” Isaac D’Israeli on Books: Pre-Victorian Essays on the History of Literature, ed. Marvin Spevack (London: The British Library, 2004), xxxii-xxxiii. This is one of the many instances on which Disraeli uses his father’s concept of the “public mind” and echoes his belief that “the public mind is 33 Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil: Or, The Two Nations, ed. Sheila M. Smith (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008), 30. T OM C LUCAS 236 the creation of the philosophical writer.” 34 The novel revolves around a love plot between the aristocratic Charles Egremont and the eponymous heroine, Sybil Gerard, a working-class woman whose father Walter and family friend Stephen Morley are leaders in the Chartist movement. Unbeknownst to the Gerards, Walter himself stands to inherit a large estate, and the revelation of this fact at the end of the novel ultimately enables the marriage between Sybil and Charles. Because of this revelation and the resulting plot twist, many critics have regarded the novel as being socially conservative. Chris R. Vanden Bossche, for example, recently argued that “Sybil represents a working class that ultimately relinquishes its claims for a role in governance and accepts the benign rule of a single aristocrat.” Set in the fictional town of Mowbray at the height of the Chartist movement, Sybil depicts the failure of traditional methods of governing church and state, emphasising instead the vital role which men and women of letters — Isaac D’Israeli’s “literary characters” or Coleridge’s “clerisy” — play in holding the town’s politically-riven community together. 35 One might thus interpret Egremont as a more politicised version of Isaac D’Israeli’s “master-spirits,” (102) exercising cultural authority over a culturally and politically disenfranchised woman, yet there is a strong case for arguing that the political message of this novel does not depend upon its resolution in the marriage of Sybil and Egremont. Sybil is indeed awed by “the voice of a noble” (291) when she reads of how Egremont upheld the Chartist cause in Parliament, yet the spread of cultural values in Mowbray is by no means as hierarchical as Vanden Bossche implies. Instead, Disraeli employs a whole spectrum of metaphors to show how writing — in the form of novels and newspapers, but also of Chartist periodicals and broadsides — allows cultural values to circulate through society, many times travelling against the traditional social hierarchy and model of top-down cultural diffusion. Disraeli brings not only Egremont, but also his own readers into contact with the ideas of Chartist luminaries like Sybil, Walter Gerard, and Stephen Morley. In this way, he imagines a new, more inclusive model of the clerisy, which includes working people alongside Coleridge’s “sages and professors.” 36 Initially, the conversation between the social classes in Sybil is enabled by the fact that Egremont disguises his aristocracy. During the first half of the At the same time, Disraeli supplements his father’s metaphor of cultural diffusion with a more active model of the conversation of culture, in which the workers in Mowbray speak back and educate the aristocrats living among them. 34 D’Israeli 352. 35 Chris R. Vanden Bossche, Reform Acts: Chartism, Social Agency, and the Victorian Novel, 1832-1867 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), 90. 36 Coleridge 46. “The Spirit of Literature and the Spirit of Society” 237 novel, he assumes the identity of “Mr. Franklin,” (136) telling Walter Gerard that he is “a reporter” and justifying his visit to Mowbray on the grounds that “they want information in London as to the real state of the country” (135). In narrative terms, this encapsulates Egremont’s role: as a novelistic device, his function is to convey information and cultural values between the interests of land and labour, both within the novel and beyond it - to Disraeli’s readers. Egremont’s choice of the name “Franklin” is significant for two reasons. Firstly, Disraeli’s father made an example of how Benjamin Franklin’s characteristics had “imprinted themselves on his Americans,“ claiming that “loftier feelings could not elevate a man of genius, who became the founder of a trading people, retaining the habits of a journeyman printer” (355-6). Secondly, Coleridge had drawn attention to the mediatory role played by the class of “Franklins” within British society. Coleridge argued that the “possessors of land” were “subdivided into two classes,“ adding that the “lower of the two ranks,” namely “the Franklins, will, in their political sympathies, draw more nearly to the antagonist order” of labourers and manufacturers “than the first rank” (26-7). This pattern is played out in Disraeli’s novel, in which Egremont’s elder brother Lord Marney remains completely impervious to the needs of workers, while his own movements open up a channel of communication between the interests of land and labour. Crucially, Egremont does not arrive in Mowbray as the purveyor of a predetermined set of cultural values. Disraeli introduces him by claiming that “although he had been at a public school and a university, he in fact knew nothing” (34-5). Egremont himself acknowledges this during the novel, as he gives Walter, Stephen, and especially Sybil the credit for shaping his own moral character. After he first meets her among the ruins of Marney Abbey, Egremont recognises that Sybil embodies the cultural values of a lost age. Disraeli uses free indirect discourse to recount how Egremont asks himself: “Who was this girl, unlike all the women whom he had yet encountered, who spoke with such sweet seriousness of things of such vast import, but which had never crossed his mind, and with a kind of mournful majesty bewailed the degradation of her race? ” (131). Certainly, owing to his gender and social class, Egremont possesses the balance of power when he later confesses his love to Sybil. Critics like Vanden Bossche are right to draw attention to the fact that Sybil’s cultural “majesty” over Egremont is an illusion which he sustains. 37 37 Vanden Bossche 95. Nonetheless, Disraeli depicts other ways in which the Gerards do exert a strong influence on Egremont’s mind. For example, Disraeli describes his surprise when he first enters Walter’s cottage and encounters Stephen Morley’s collection of books: “Egremont read the titles of works which he only knew by fame, but which treated of the loftiest and most subtle questions of social and political philosophy” (133-4). Here, the T OM C LUCAS 238 stewardship of Coleridge’s “fountain-heads of the humanities” is called into question, 38 Throughout the novel, Egremont repeatedly experiences a countercurrent of culture which works against the top-down model of diffusion described by Coleridge and Isaac D’Israeli. In a striking passage, Disraeli the novelist claims that: as Disraeli suggests that Morley has an intimate knowledge of the contents of great works which Egremont “only knew by fame.” There are tumults of the mind, when, like the great convulsions of nature, all seems anarchy and returning to chaos, yet often, in those moments of vast disturbance, as in the material strife itself, some new principle of order, or some new impulse of conduct, develops itself, and controls, and regulates, and brings to an harmonious consequence, passions and elements which seemed only to threaten despair and subversion. So it was with Egremont. (246) Egremont experiences this “tumult of the mind” upon hearing Sybil profess her belief that the “gulf” between their social classes is “utterly impassable” (246). In his Reflections on the Revolution in France, Burke had figured the French Revolution as a reversion to a Hobbesian state of nature, claiming that: “Every thing seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies, in viewing this monstrous tragi-comic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind.” 39 Disraeli figures Egremont’s initial experience of class conflict in similar terms, but argues that unlike the political revolution which led to the Napoleonic wars, Egremont’s inner reform will give rise, successfully, to a “new principle of order.” Disraeli internalises the contemporary language of revolution and political reform to describe the emergence of a “new impulse of conduct” in Egremont’s mind. The experience which he undergoes resembles Shelley’s account of the operation of the “poetical faculty,” in which poetry “engenders in the mind a desire to reproduce and arrange [the materials of knowledge, and power and pleasure] according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good.” 40 Two further examples of the Chartist clerisy in Disraeli’s novel may be found in the characters of Stephen Morley and Walter Gerard. Morley is the As a result, Egremont realises that he has to make a choice: either he has to modify both his own and Sybil’s attitudes towards the class system, or he has to renounce his love for her. In this case, it is Sybil’s speech, rather than writing, which works this change in Egremont’s thinking, yet the effect is still to halt and then reverse the didactic flow of cultural values from the aristocratic to the working class. 38 Coleridge 43. 39 Edmund Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France, ed. L.G. Mitchell and William B. Todd, in Burke 8: 60. 40 Shelley 531. “The Spirit of Literature and the Spirit of Society” 239 editor of the local newspaper, the Mowbray Phalanx, and a champion of “moral force.” 41 When Gerard first introduces Morley to Egremont, he claims that “the world will hear of him yet, though he was only a workman, and the son of a workman. He has not been at your schools and your colleges, but he can write his mother tongue, as Shakespeare and Cobbett wrote it; and you must do that, if you wish to influence the people” (134). The equation of Shakespeare and Cobbett shows Disraeli continuing to develop his father’s ideas, by levelling and broadening out the membership of group of “literary characters” who act as “master-spirits” of the age. Despite the fact that Sybil ultimately chooses Egremont over Morley, the editor of the Mowbray Phalanx nonetheless plays a vital role in setting the cultural agenda of the novel. When they first meet in the ruins of Marney Abbey, it is Morley who explains the novel’s subtitle by informing Egremont that Britain comprises “[t]wo nations; between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thoughts, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets; who are formed by a different breeding, are fed by a different food, are ordered by different manners, and are not governed by the same laws” (65-6). With this nested figure of anaphora (“who are […] who are […] are […] are”) and the careful switch from “whom” to “who,“ Disraeli portrays Morley as a refined orator, claiming that he possessed “one of those voices that instantly arrest attention” (64). Since Sybil has imbibed Morley’s vision of the two nations, Egremont is forced to confront, understand, and address the Chartist vision of Britain’s culture before he can win Sybil’s hand. As in the passage from Shelley’s “Defence” quotated above, Egremont is forced to negotiate between the “materials of external life exceed” and the “internal laws of human nature,“ 42 A similar point may be made for Walter Gerard, who rivals Isaac D’Israeli’s “master-spirits” through his espousal of direct action over moral force. which unite him with Sybil. In this way, the downward diffusion of cultural values from the aristocracy is interrupted by the arguments between Sybil and Egremont, both of whom take and give ground in order to arrive at an understanding of their common humanity. 43 His air, his figure, his position were alike commanding, and at the sight of him a loud and spontaneous cheer burst from the assembled thousands. It was the sight of one who was, after all, the most popular leader of the people that had ever fig- Gerard’s most impressive moment comes when he appears on top of Trafford’s factory, attempting to dissuade the violent mob from sacking the works of the one sympathetic manufacturer in the region. Disraeli claims that: 41 Benjamin Disraeli, Sybil, 356. 42 Shelley 531. 43 Isaac D’Israeli 102. T OM C LUCAS 240 ured in these parts, whose eloquence charmed and commanded, whose disinterestedness was acknowledged, whose sufferings had created sympathy, whose courage, manly bearing, and famous feats of strength were a source to them of pride. There was not a Mowbray man whose heart did not throb with emotion, and whose memory did not recall the orations from the Druid’s altar and the famous meetings on the moor. “Gerard for ever! ” was the universal shout. (396) With this image of Gerard as “the most popular leader of the people […] whose eloquence charmed and commanded,“ Disraeli continues to transform his father’s arguments about literature and cultural change. Within the popular culture of Mowbray, Gerard performs the same function as Isaac D’Israeli’s men of genius, who “stamp” their “character […] on a people” by inspiring admiration and veneration. 44 5 Conclusion: Historicising the Concept of Literature Throughout Sybil, Benjamin Disraeli shows that what is at stake is not the top-down diffusion of a single, national culture, as his father and Coleridge had suggested, but rather a series of entanglements and negotiations between various competing accounts of which cultural values should remain foremost in the “public mind.” Furthermore, Gerard’s example shows that where the dominant culture is at fault, it can be corrected by the conduct of the oppressed. Although Disraeli mounts an original argument for the importance of Chartist culture, he subscribes wholeheartedly to the argument advanced by his father, Shelley, and Coleridge that literature can act as a powerful force for cultural change. Disraeli forces his readers to confront an impasse between cultural values within British society in the 1830s and ’40s. As an author, he situates himself, exactly as his father had suggested, “between the governors and the governed.” 45 In this way, Disraeli’s novel can be seen to support Shelley’s claim that “[p]oets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” 46 McGann argued that “the emphasis must be placed on ‘unacknowledged’ to specify the Romanticism of the idea,“ yet this essay has shown how Romantic ideas about the cultural status of literature fed directly into debates about political reform in the 1830s and ’40s. 47 44 Isaac D’Israeli 355. Here, it is important to remember that Shelley’s “Defence” was first published by his sister, Mary, in 1840, just five years before the publication of Sybil. This fact appears to bear out Isaac D’Israeli’s claim that the thought “which has sometimes changed the dispositions of a people, and even of an age, is slowly matured in meditation” (352). Cultural change often takes place over the course of one or more 45 Isaac D’Israeli 351. 46 Shelley 535. 47 McGann 114. “The Spirit of Literature and the Spirit of Society” 241 generations: to observe the influence of Romantic claims about the role of literature in driving this change, we must look a little later, to British culture in the early Victorian period. Though Isaac D’Israeli’s ideas about the societal importance of literature were not fully realised until the 1830s and ’40s, the fact that they were realised during his lifetime suggests that these ideas were not as far removed from “the ordinary person’s consciousness” as McGann suggests. 48 The example of the Disraelis shows that the legislative role of literature was not only “acknowledged,” but also made the subject of imaginative experimentation by nineteenth-century writers and their readers. To understand the cultural status of literature in the Romantic period, it is necessary to take a middle ground, partially suspending the hermeneutic of suspicion without succumbing to an “uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own selfrepresentations.” 49 The language of Romantic texts needs to be interrogated, but without revoking their authority as works of cultural criticism and reducing art to “a self-regarding, autonomous, closed system […] opposed to social life.” 50 In this way, it is possible to historicise claims for the cultural status of literature made in a past age, when the didactic function of literature was held in higher esteem than it is now. As evidence of this claim, one might cite Helen Small’s recent recognition that advocates of the humanities now tend to ‘esche[w] the language of moralism’ and demonstrate ‘a care not to be seen to assert that the activities of the humanities are necessarily ethically driven.’ 51 This essay has argued that Sybil built on the arguments of Shelley, Coleridge, and Isaac D’Israeli to examine the ways in which cultural values travel through society. Benjamin Disraeli replaced the metaphor of top-down diffusion with a more complex network of “tumults in the mind” (246), which captures the political power play between competing sets of cultural values. Raymond Williams later sketched a similar method in Marxism and Literature, when he proposed a “Sociology of Culture” and wrote of the need for “studies of different types of institution and formation in cultural production and distribution, and in the linking of these within whole social material processes.” For writers like Shelley, Coleridge, and the Disraelis, this would have been an alien claim. Therefore, in the process of historicising Romantic and early Victorian literature, it is valuable to reconsider what the original readers of these works thought literature was capable of doing. 52 48 McGann 114. In suggesting this, Williams implicitly returned to Shelley’s “Defence,“ and the claim that the “poetical faculty […] engenders in the 49 McGann 1. 50 Greenblatt 4. 51 Helen Small, The Value of the Humanities (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2013), 144-5. 52 Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1977), 138. T OM C LUCAS 242 mind a desire to reproduce and arrange [the materials of knowledge, and power and pleasure] according to a certain rhythm and order which may be called the beautiful and the good.” 53 Disraeli’s novel also draws on Shelley’s conviction that literature can transform society by encouraging its readers to emulate and act upon a shared set of values, thus creating a cultural contract between an international and trans-historical body of writers and readers. At the same time, Disraeli develops this argument by revealing the ways in which these cultural values are constructed by inequalities in what Shelley calls “the materials of external life” (531). Sybil revises Romantic arguments about the social importance of literature to show that the “fountain-heads of the humanities” do not belong solely to the aristocracy or a middle-class clerisy, but are the common property of the whole population. 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