Abstract
In this chapter, Justin A. Sider explores the relationship between anachronism and the ideal of lyric form in the poetry of Andrew Lang and the English Parnassians. Like his fellow Parnassians, Lang composed many imitations of the medieval ballade, one of the three major fixed forms of French verse. In XXXII Ballades in Blue China (1881), he offers a series of poems that meditate on the distance between their archaic forms and themes and the aesthetic contemplation of the modern reader. Equating his medieval imitations with the mass-produced chinoiserie of willow-pattern plates, Lang’s aesthetic historicism is nonetheless indifferent to the authenticity of blue china and modern ballade alike. In these poems, the failure of blue china and modern ballade to inhabit the pasts they index enables a delight in mere form, and the Parnassians’ lyric ideal emerges as an ongoing project of abstraction from historical materials.
But this lone, chipped vessel, if it fills,
Fills for you with something warm and clear.
—James Merrill, “Willowware Cup”
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Notes
- 1.
Qtd. in Marion Thain, The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism: Forms of Modernity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2016), 90.
- 2.
Ezra Pound, “Swinburne Versus His Biographers,” in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (New York: New Directions, 1954), [290–294] 290.
- 3.
James K. Robinson, “A Neglected Phase of the Aesthetic Movement: English Parnassianism,” PMLA 68, no. 4 (September 1953): 733–754.
- 4.
For a useful overview of Lang’s role as a node in late Victorian cultural “networks,” see Nathan K. Hensley, “What Is a Network (And Who Is Andrew Lang)?” RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 64 (October 2013) as well as the other excellent essays in RaVoN’s 2013 issue, “The Andrew Lang Effect: Network, Discipline, Method.”
- 5.
Julia Reid, “‘King Romance’ in Longman’s Magazine: Andrew Lang and Literary Populism,” Victorian Periodicals Review 44, no 4: [354–376] 354.
- 6.
Jonah Siegel, “Lang’s Survivals,” RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 64 (October 2013).
- 7.
On the abstractness of aesthetic form, see Nicholas Gaskill, “The Close and the Concrete: Aesthetic Formalism in Context,” New Literary History 47, no. 4 (Autumn 2016): 505–524. In a striking essay on the New Criticism and aesthetic form, Nicholas Gaskill offers one way to understand form’s figurativeness. Aesthetic form is a particular kind of abstraction, in which “the material constitution of the artwork is suppressed in favor of the ‘virtual space’ produced by the ‘elements’ of art: an abstract space (because separated from everything but appearance) that consists in its form (the mode of relation among its parts)” (518). Aesthetic form, as Gaskill explains, is distinct from logical form (like, say, the sonnet’s fourteen lines and characteristic rhyme and meter), in that the former produces abstraction without generalization; the figure aesthetic form makes is a symbol that “gives a shareable name to a particular ‘feeling’ (to use [Susanne] Langer’s word) or ‘attitude’ ([Cleanth] Brooks) that is nonetheless inarticulate apart from the poem” (517). Genre performances of Lang’s sort in XXXII Ballades complicate this distinction, as logical form is superimposed on (or incorporated within) aesthetic form.
- 8.
Murray Krieger, “Appendix: Ekphrasis and the Still Movement of Poetry; or Laokoön Revisited (1967),” in Ekphrasis: The Illusion of the Natural Sign (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1992), [263–288] 266.
- 9.
Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins, “General Introduction,” in The Lyric Theory Reader: A Critical Anthology, ed. Virginia Jackson and Yopie Prins (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2014), [1–8] 2, 5.
- 10.
Gleeson White, Ballades and Rondeaus, Chants Royal, Sestinas, Villanelles, &c. Selected, with Chapter on the Various Forms (London: Walter Scott, 1887), xxvi.
- 11.
Edmund Gosse, “A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse,” The Cornhill Magazine 36 (1877): [53–71] 53.
- 12.
Austin Dobson, “A Note on Some Foreign Forms of Verse,” in Latter-day Lyrics: Being Poems of Sentiment and Reflection by Living Writers, ed. William Davenport Adams (London: Chatto and Windus, 1878), [331–349] 333. The Parnassians are confronting a problem that Paul de Man limns with characteristic intensity (see “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism [New York: Columbia UP, 1984], 263–290). De Man teases out some irresolvable tensions in the ideology of the aesthetic: for Immanuel Kant and Friedrich Schiller, the aesthetic is a source of human freedom, yet the formalization that produces the aesthetic, as with Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater, would seem to be nothing more than mechanism—an evacuation of selfhood, individuality, freedom. The formalization that enables aesthetic education would, paradoxically, reduce that education to the dance of a marionette. “Formalization inevitably produces aesthetic effects” (272), de Man suggests, but at what cost?
- 13.
Evan Charteris, The Life and Letters Of Sir Edmund Gosse (London: William Heinemann, Ltd., 1931), 100.
- 14.
Gosse, “A Plea for Certain Exotic Forms of Verse,” 71.
- 15.
Adam Mazel, “The Age of Rhyme: The Verse Culture of Victorian Cambridge,” Nineteenth-Century Literature 72, no. 3 (December 2017): [374–401] 379.
- 16.
See David Duff, Romanticism and the Uses of Genre (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2009), for a useful discussion of “genre memory, both invented and actual” as part of literary culture’s “self-consciousness” in the Romantic era and after (158). On the role of genre in the invention of national and literary pasts in the nineteenth century, see Meredith Martin, “‘Imperfectly Civilized’: Ballads, Nations, and Histories of Form,” ELH 82, no. 2 (Summer 2015): 345–363.
- 17.
Walter Pater, “Aesthetic Poetry,” in Selected Writings of Walter Pater, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Columbia UP, 1974), 196.
- 18.
Carolyn Williams, Transfigured World: Walter Pater’s Aesthetic Historicism (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1989), 59.
- 19.
Carolyn Williams, Gilbert and Sullivan: Gender, Genre, Parody (New York: Columbia UP, 2011), 9.
- 20.
Herbert F. Tucker, “Metaphor, Translation, and Autoekphrasis in FitzGerald’s Rubáiyát,” Victorian Poetry 46, no. 1 (Spring 2008): [69–85] 78.
- 21.
Herbert F. Tucker, “Of Monuments and Moments: Spacetime in Nineteenth-Century Poetry,” Modern Language Quarterly 58, no. 3 (September 1997): [269–297] 275.
- 22.
William F. Fredeman, ed., The Correspondence of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (Cambridge: D. S. Brewer, 2002), 1: 389.
- 23.
Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke UP, 1993), 139. Letitia Henville observes in Lang’s writing “a slippage between abstract idea and physical object” (“Andrew Lang’s ‘Literary Plagiarism’: Reading Material and the Material of Literature,” RaVoN: Romanticism and Victorianism on the Net 64 [October 2013]), which nicely limns the strange status of the ballade form—an abstraction granted a kind of texture, in Stewart’s terms, through imitation.
- 24.
For a useful discussion of the problem of modernist aesthetics, genre recognition, and the “badness” of much nineteenth-century poetry, see Naomi Levine, “Understanding Poetry Otherwise: New Criticism and Historical Poetics,” Literature Compass 17, no. 7 (July 2020).
- 25.
Susan Stewart, Crimes of Writing: Problems in the Containment of Representation (New York: Oxford UP, 1991), 74.
- 26.
Andrew Lang, Adventures Among Books (London: Longmans, Green, 1905), 36. For a thorough exploration of Lang’s relationship with aestheticism generally and with Pater in particular, see Robert Crawford, “Pater’s Renaissance, Andrew Lang, and Anthropological Romanticism,” ELH 53, no. 4 (Winter 1986): 849–79.
- 27.
Sebastian Lecourt, Cultivating Belief: Victorian Anthropology, Liberal Aesthetics, and the Secular Imagination (Oxford: Oxford UP, 2018), 166.
- 28.
Andrew Lang, “Review of Poems by Dante Gabriel Rossetti,” North British Review 53 (1870): [309–311] 310.
- 29.
For a comprehensive overview of willow pattern writing, see Patricia O’Hara, “‘The Willow Pattern That We Knew’: The Victorian Literature of Blue Willow,” Victorian Studies 36, no. 4 (Summer 1993): 421–442. As O’Hara explains, “The uncertainty surrounding the origin of the legend that was as familiar as Romeo and Juliet and as exotic as teahouses and orange blossoms made it highly adaptable to a wide variety of literary renditions” (423).
- 30.
Elizabeth Hope Chang, Britain’s Chinese Eye: Literature, Empire, and Aesthetics in Nineteenth-Century Britain (Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010), 74.
- 31.
Jonathan Freedman, Professions of Taste: Henry James, British Aestheticism, and Commodity Culture (Stanford: Stanford UP, 1992), 59. Freedman offers a sophisticated acknowledgement of (and rebuke to) the elision of aestheticism and commodity culture. The disappearance of the aesthetic object into the beholder’s appreciation presents a characteristic tension within aestheticism. As Elizabeth Hope Chang observes, “For [James Abbott McNeill] Whistler, the [china] plate itself is at once utterly inconsequential as a tangible possession and yet at the same time thoroughly indispensable as a site charting an aesthetic style of vision—and the paradox of this position is perhaps in itself the point” (Britain’s Chinese Eye, 105).
- 32.
In Parnassian poetry, as Marion Thain suggests, “we find a form of aestheticism that … demonstrates awareness of its own resonance with the commodity” (The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism, 100).
- 33.
Freedman, Professions of Taste, 29.
- 34.
Thain, The Lyric Poem and Aestheticism, 108.
- 35.
Andrew Lang, “Literary Plagiarism,” Contemporary Review 51 (June 1887): [831–840] 832.
- 36.
Henville, “Andrew Lang’s ‘Literary Plagiarism.’”
- 37.
Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt., trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken, 1968), [69–82] 76–77, 80.
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My thanks to the editors for their feedback and for shepherding this essay into print. I’m grateful to Samuel Fallon and Nan Z. Da for their conversation on this topic, and to the organizers and attendees of the Historical Poetics Symposium at Connecticut College in 2017 for their generous engagement. Poems are cited in the text by line number.
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Sider, J.A. (2023). “Of China That’s Ancient and Blue”: Andrew Lang, English Parnassus, and the Figure of Form. In: Behlman, L., Loksing Moy, O. (eds) Victorian Verse. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-29696-3_8
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