english romanticism and the oxford movement

English Literary Romanticism and the Oxford MovementAuthor(s): Michael H. BrightReviewed work(s):Source: Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 40, No. 3 (Jul. - Sep., 1979), pp. 385-404Published by: University of Pennsylvania PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2709244 .Accessed: 24/04/2012 04:33

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ENGLISH LITERARY ROMANTICISM AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT

BY MICHAEL H. BRIGHT

It has become almost a commonplace among cultural historians to regard the Oxford Movement as sharing certain aspects of Romanticism in English literature. Although such writers as Hoxie Neal Fairchild, Yngve Brilioth, and Vernon F. Storr perceive a fundamental disparity between the two, they nevertheless acknowledge that there are numerous similarities as well.1 In some cases the historian can trace the direct influences that literary Romanticism had upon the Tractarians and thereby prove the participation of the Oxford Movement in the broad current of

nineteenth-century English Romanticism. Cardinal Newman, for ex-

ample, tells us that as a boy he read the Waverley novels in bed early in the morning before arising, and in the Apologia he admits Scott's influence on his life. Keble openly acknowledged the indebtedness of his

thought and poetry to Wordsworth, and in 1844, upon the occasion of Wordsworth's visit, Thomas Thorpe, President of the Camden Society, told the assembly that Wordsworth "might be considered one of the founders of the Society."2 Recently, Stephen Prickett has extensively in-

vestigated the influence of Wordsworth and Coleridge on the Victorian attitude towards the Church.3

Despite this evidence, the influence of Romantic literature upon Victorian religion is often difficult to trace very precisely, and one must conclude therefore that the parallels between the two are owing not so much to direct and palpable influences as to the idea that both are ex-

pressions of the "spirit of the age," that is, similar linked manifestations of one intangible source. As Owen Chadwick says, "this link is easier to feel than define. Theology like literature moved from reason to feeling. But theology did not move because literature moved. They marched hand

1 Cf. Fairchild's Religious Trends in English Poetry, IV (New York, 1957); Brilioth's The Anglican Revival: Studies in the Oxford Movement (London, 1925); and Storr's The Development of English Theology in the Nineteenth Century 1800-1860 (London, 1913). Fairchild discusses the matter most thoroughly, but all agree that the central difference is between Tractarian emphasis on authority and Romantic individualism.

2 The Ecclesiologist, IV, 26, quoted in James F. White, The Cambridge Move- ment: The Ecclesiologists and the Gothic Revival (Cambridge, 1962), 28. As this quotation suggests, I am using the term Oxford Movement in a broad sense to denote not just the writing of the Tracts during the years 1833-45 but the whole revival generated by the Tracts during the years that followed.

3Romanticism and Religion: The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church (Cambridge, 1976).

385

386 MICHAEL H. BRIGHT

in hand because the human spirit yearned for new depth."4 Such a recognition, far from invalidating an examination of the correspondences between any two areas where exact influences cannot be established, convinces one instead of the existence of a time spirit that, to borrow

Shelley's phrase, "Floats though unseen among us" and allows new in-

sights into the nature and power of a source from which streams flow

separately. Several parallels join Romantic literature and the Oxford Movement

and have their origin in the real though often vague and elusive spirit of Romanticism permeating the thought of the age. A reverence for the past, a sense of nationalism, a preference for the natural and picturesque, a dedication to feeling as opposed to reason, aestheticism, and organicism are all traits that one commonly associates with Romanticism and that exist in both the literature and theology of the age. Although often noted, some of these parallels have never been thoroughly examined. But perhaps the most fundamental and important characteristic shared by both, and the one that I wish to consider first, is the emphasis upon the supernatural that arises in opposition to the mechanistic idea of the universe of the eighteenth century. We shall find two consequences: in the field of literature the role of the poet becomes exalted, even elitist, since it is only he, with the special gift of a powerful imagination, who can perceive and commune with the supernatural; secondly, the means by which the poet communicates his extraordinary insights and experiences is through symbolism since literalism is inadequate to comprehend and express the ineffable. In the field of religion, on the other hand, two similar develop- ments occur. First, as the divinely ordained minister of the newly em-

phasized mysteries of the Church, as the intermediary between the laity and God, and as one supported by the revived doctrine of Apostolic Succession, the priest reassumes the position of reverence from which he had fallen in the preceding two centuries. Secondly, the transmission of

theology depends now not as much on the sermon delivered from the

dominating three-decker pulpit of the auditory church, not as much on the word as on the symbolism of the church building, the priest's vestments, the liturgy, and the Sacraments, especially the Eucharist. These, then, are the parallels I wish to examine, beginning with a look at the

pattern as it appears in literature, where I shall cover some familiar

ground for the sake of establishing a basis for comparison. Although Arthur O. Lovejoy has proven Romanticism notoriously

difficult to define,5 there is one aspect that its varied expressions share and that many people would agree upon: the mystical and imaginative apprehension of the supernatural. It is best stated by Ernest Bernbaum:

40. Chadwick, The Victorian Church (New York, 1966), I, 174. 5 A. O. Lovejoy, "The Discrimination of Romanticism," PMLA 39 (1924),

229-53; see note 12 below.

ENGLISH ROMANTICISM AND THE OXFORD MOVEMENT 387

"The Romantics were keenly conscious of the difference between two worlds. One was the world of ideal truth, goodness, and beauty: this was eternal, infinite, and absolutely real. The other was the world of actual appearances, which to common sense was the only world, and which to the idealist was so obviously full of untruth, ignorance, evil, ugliness, and wretchedness, as to compel him to dejection or indignation."6 It is, of course, the first of these worlds that involves the supernatural and that is described in the land of Blake's Mental Traveller who "heard & saw such dreadful things/As cold Earth wanderers never knew," in Words- worth's "spots of time" and his encounters with "a mind/That feeds

upon infinity" when he climbs the Alps and Mt. Snowden in The Prelude, in Coleridge's Xanadu or the terrifying voyage of the Ancient Mariner, in

Shelley's "burning fountain" to which Adonais returns or the "secret throne" atop Mont Blanc, and in the worlds of Keats's Nightingale, Grecian Urn, and Lamia. Regarded from this point of view, Romanticism stands opposed to eighteenth-century beliefs in "materialism, mechanistic science, secularism, and 'common sense' in the baser meaning of the term."7

It would be a mistake, however, to think of the Romantic as one who

ignores the phenomenal world in his pursuit of the noumenal, or who

regards it only insofar as he wishes to escape from it, for the Romantic takes a sacramental view of the phenomenal world, seeing it as emble- matic of an ideal world. In The Prelude, Bk. 6, Wordsworth describes the natural features of an alpine chasm as

Characters of the great Apocalypse, The types and symbols of Eternity, Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.

Carlyle refers to nature as "the Living Garment of God," and herein we see by the word "living" that Carlyle's Romantic view is something more than sacramental in that it considers nature not only as symbolic of God but as interfused with God. And so it is that Wordsworth tells us in "Tintern Abbey" (11. 94-102) that he has felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime Of something far more deeply interfused, Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, And the round ocean and the living air, And the blue sky, and in the mind of man: A motion and a spirit, that impels All thinking things, all objects of all thought, And rolls through all things.

6 Guide Through the Romantic Movement, 2nd ed., (New York, 1949), 304. 7 Bernbaum, 304.


What, then, Carlyle calls "Natural Supernaturalism"8 causes the poet not to ignore the material world but to attempt a reconciliation of it with the spiritual. Thus, Fairchild defines Romanticism as "an imaginative fusion of the familiar and the strange, the known and the unknown, the real and the ideal, the finite and the infinite, the material and the spiritual, the natural and the supernatural."9 Similarly, Bernbaum says that for the Romantic artist "It was the highest function of literature and art to

portray man and his world in such a way that the presence of the infinite within the finite, of the ideal within the actual, would be revealed in all its beauty."10 This "reconciliation of opposites," this fusion wrought by the imagination, is the chief aim of the Lyrical Ballads, where, as Cole-

ridge tells us in the Biographia Literaria, Wordsworth attempted to show the presence of the supernatural in the ordinary, while he himself at-

tempted the reverse by investing the supernatural with a sense of the natural.

The consequence of this dramatic change in outlook, at least as far as the artist was concerned, was that the poet, now no longer simply one who held "the mirror up to nature" but one who was singularly able to see and understand the mysteries of nature, came to hold a place of high esteem. Such elevation represents quite a turnabout in the reputation of the poet, for the art of poetry had sunk to an unprecedented nadir, to contemporary eyes at any rate, during the last half of the

eighteenth century. Cowper, through the dialogue of "A." and "B." in Table Talk (1781), comments on the state of modern poetry. "B." recalls the distant past when poetry was a sacred art allied to religion, and "A."

proceeds to make the contrast with modern poetry, which has sacrificed fire and feeling to mechanical precision:

Hence British poets, too, the priesthood shar'd, And ev'ry hallow'd druid was a bard. But no prophetic fires to me belong; I play with syllables, and sport in song.

A. At Westminster, where little poets strive To set a distich upon six and five, Where discipline helps op'ning buds of sense, And makes his pupils proud with silver pence, I was a poet too: but modern taste Is so refin'd, and delicate, and chaste, That verse, whatever fire the fancy warms, Without a creamy smoothness has no charms. Thus, all success depending on an ear, And thinking I might purchase it too dear,

8 M. H. Abrams has taken this as the subject and title of his book, Natural Supernaturalism: The Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature (New York, 1971).

9 The Romantic Quest (1931; rpt. New York, 1965), 251. 10 Guide, 304.


If sentiment were sacrific'd to sound, And truth cut short to make a period round, I judg'd a man of sense could scarce do worse Than caper in the morris-dance of verse. (11. 502-19)

Cowper considers Pope the culprit because, although he rescued poetry from the lewdness of the time of Charles II, he "made poetry a mere mechanic art."

The Romantics, however, are not primarily interested in mechanics or the merely physical aspects of the universe but are concerned with the

supernatural, ignoring Pope's warning, "presume not God to scan."

Shelley, in describing the poet in Prometheus Unbound, writes:

Nor seeks nor finds he mortal blisses, But feeds on the aereal kisses Of shapes that haunt thought's wildernesses.

In a letter to John Gisborne in 1821, Shelley comments more personally on the poet's spiritual concerns: "As to real flesh & blood, you know that I do not deal in those articles,-you might as well go to a ginshop for a leg of mutton, as expect anything human or earthly from me." In a sonnet entitled "The Poet," written by Keats's publisher, John Taylor, and formerly attributed to Keats himself, there is this description of the

poet in the sestet:

Sometimes, above the gross and palpable things Of this diurnal ball, his spirit flies On awful wing; and with its destin'd skies Holds premature and mystic communings: Till such unearthly intercourses shed A visible halo round his mortal head.

This extraordinary ability to commune with the spiritual world invests the poet not simply with the mantle of authority but, as we see in the last two lines of the poem, that of divinity as well, thus recapturing for the art the association with religion, whose breech Cowper had regretted in Table Talk. Practically all the Romantic poets speak of their calling as one that sets them apart from ordinary men and one that has a religious aura. Blake assumes the role of a bard

Who Present, Past, & Future, sees; Whose ears have heard The Holy Word That walk'd among the ancient trees....

("Introduction," Songs of Experience)

Wordsworth is seemingly more egalitarian when he says in the "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads that a poet "is a man speaking to men," but then he goes on to qualify this by saying that the poet is like other men in kind


though not degree and that he is generally superior in thought and feeling. In The Prelude he refers to "higher minds," of which his own is unmistakably one, and calls himself and Coleridge "Prophets of Nature." In a passage that recalls both Blake's "Mental Traveller" and Moses' descent from Mt. Sinai, Coleridge describes at the end of "Kubla Khan" the religious awe with which the poet might be viewed:

And all should cry, Beware! Beware! His flashing eyes, his floating hair! Weave a circle round him thrice, And close your eyes with holy dread, For he on honey-dew hath fed, And drunk the milk of Paradise.

For Shelley poets are not only "the unacknowledged legislators of the world" but also "the priests of an unapprehended inspiration, the mirrors of gigantic shadows which futurity casts upon the present .. ." (A Philo-

sophical View of Reform). Stephen Prickett has pointed out the paradox of the poet's role by

saying that it is, on the one hand, elitist since the poet is a man of genius above all others, and, on the other hand, egalitarian since his genius "gives wider sympathies with Nature, and with the ordinary world. The artist is not separated from his fellow men by his powers; he is more than ever involved with them. He is not an isolate, but a sharer of open secrets."" Thus it is that Blake and Shelley use their powers for political and social reform, and thus it is that the Ancient Mariner is compelled to share the story of his strange voyage with the Wedding Guest and numberless others. The means by which they share those secrets of the supernatural gained by imaginative powers is symbolic, for, as Coleridge says in the Biographia Literaria, "An IDEA, in the highest sense of the word, cannot be conveyed but by a symbol." To be sure, Wordsworth

says in the "Preface" to the Lyrical Ballads that he is going to avoid

poetic diction and personified abstractions in favor "of language really used by men" since "Poets do not write for Poets alone, but for men," yet he also recognizes that there are some experiences that cannot be

expressed in simple language and for which words, simple or otherwise, are just inadequate. In recounting a "spot of time" in The Prelude he tells us his sensations were such that

I should need Colours and words that are unknown to man, To paint the visionary dreariness .... (XII, 254-56)

At the end of Epipsychidion Shelley expresses an even more acute frustration with language:

11 Romanticism and Religion, 23-24.


The winged words on which my soul would pierce Into the height of Love's rare Universe, Are chains of lead around its flight of fire. (588-90)

Keats, in attempting to describe the ecstasy of his "fellowship with essence" in the "Ode on a Grecian Urn," resorts to repetition-"More happy love! more happy, happy love"-and then traps himself by the contrast with earthly love.

Faced with the impossibility of expressing the supernatural, the ecstatic, the ineffable, faced, in short, with the impossibility of conveying in words the full force of the visionary experiences created by the imagination, Romantic poets turn to the suggestive power of symbols. These alone are capable of expressing the infinite and, what is more, do so in

part because they are organically related to the things they represent. Coleridge, for example, writes in The Statesman's Manual that " a symbol ... is characterized by a translucence of the special in the individual, or of the general in the special, or of the universal in the general; above all by the translucence of the eternal through and in the temporal. It

always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible; and while it enunciates the whole, abides itself as a living part in that unity of which it is the representative." The relationship between the symbol and the

thing it signifies, then, is much like the relationship between the natural and the supernatural worlds in that both depend on a unifying act of the mind. The symbolism of Romantic poetry, so different from the much more literal verse of the eighteenth century, is important enough for Rene Wellek to see it as one of the common characteristics of Romantic literature: "All the great romantic poets are mythopoeic, are symbolists whose practice must be understood in terms of their attempt to give a total

mythic interpretation of the world to which the poet holds the key."12 Before leaving our discussion of literature we might conclude by

remarking that these facets of Romanticism were not popularly welcomed at the time. Well known are the failures of these poet-prophets to transmit their mystic visions by symbols or otherwise to their contemporaries- the general ignorance of Blake's poetry, Keats's epitaph, the condemna- tion of Lycius in "Lamia" for revealing "to common eyes these secret bowers," or Shelley's remarks that Prometheus Unbound is intended only for "the more select classes.of poetical readers" and that Epipsychidion is "for the esoteric few." The alienation of the artist from society, so pre- valent a Victorian concern, has begun, and it is worth noting in passing that those two poets who relied less upon symbolism than their fellow

writers, Wordsworth and Byron, were the most popular among their

contemporary readers.

12 "The Concept of Romanticism in Literary History," Comparative Literature, 1 (1949), 165. Cf. A. 0. Lovejoy, "On the Discrimination of Romanticism,"

Essays in the History of Ideas (Baltimore, 1948).


The renewed sense of the supernatural arose in the Church, as it had earlier in poetry, from a reaction to the secular humanism or liberalism which stipulated "that the whole realisation of the life of man was to be discovered in this world. . ."13 According to Charles Frederick Harrold, "The Oxford leaders were as acutely aware as were Coleridge and Carlyle . . . that the new secularism, founded in eighteenth-century empirical skepticism, and developed in modern materialistic industrialism, was to be the supreme enemy of man's spiritual identity."14 This battle, begun by the Romantic poets, continued by Dickens in such a novel as Hard Times, and reaching its most monumental expression in Tennyson's Idylls of the King, was no less important in theology than in literature and was waged with no less vigor by the leaders of the Oxford Movement, who had more at stake and who perhaps more acutely recognized how dire was the threat. Nor was the threat wholly external, for a secular fifth column was working insidiously within the Church itself. As R. W. Church has said, the "blot" of the eighteenth-century Church "was quiet worldliness," and it was therefore necessary to reform the Church and shore up its defenses before it could march "against the foe." The Oxford Movement, then, sought "to rouse the Church from its lethargy, and to

strengthen and purify religion, by making it deeper and more real. .. ."15 The importance of this aim to the Oxford Movement can hardly be

overestimated. Peck, for example, says that the Oxford Movement "was, in the English Church, the clearest and fullest re-affirmation of the pri- macy of the spiritual."'6 Evelyn Underhill writes that "The greatest thing which they did for their Mother Church is not to be found in the sphere of expressive ceremonial; but in the restoration of this other-worldly temper, and with it the essential link between adoration and sacrifice. The spiritual world to which they looked, and which they believed to be revealed in sacramental experience, was a world charged with mystery and awfulness; and made an unmitigated demand upon the soul.""7

At times the descriptions of the spiritual experience assume distinctly Romantic overtones. In The Baptistery, Isaac Williams places himself in a typical Romantic setting, the ruins of a church, with its "crumbling walls, half-falling tower,/Mullions and arch" disclosed by the light of the moon. He then describes the effect of the scene upon him:

Such thoughts in me a place have found 'Mid contemplations more profound, And seem to mingle with my themes

13 William George Peck, The Social Implications of the Oxford Movement

(New York, 1933), 19. 14 "The Oxford Movement: A Reconsideration," in The Reinterpretation of

Victorian Literature, ed. Joseph E. Baker (Princeton, 1950), 39. 15 The Oxford Movement: Twelve Years, 1833-1845, ed. Geoffrey Best

(Chicago, 1970), 11, 91. 16Social Implications, 4. 17 Worship (New York, 1937), 330-31.


More true than life such holy dreams;- I deem in them more truth to lie Than all man's cold philosophy.'8

The passage is Romantic not only in its setting, but also in the idea that the unseen world of the imagination represents a higher reality than the experiential world of reason. This notion is most succinctly put by Shelley in Prometheus Unbound when he says that the poet can create "Forms more real than living man,/Nurslings of immortality!" One is reminded even more, however, of the opposition between imagination and reason embodied in Keats's question in "Lamia," "Do not all charms fly/At the mere touch of cold philosophy?" The opposition to reason as a means to truth is consistently found in Newman's writings, and in Keble we find it stated in terms reminiscent of both Williams and Keats: "Clearness and

symmetry of doctrine are a dear purchase, when Christian truth and duty must be impaired for their sake. After all, a fragment of the true Temple is worth all the palaces of modern philosophical theology."'9 Many readers of "Kubla Khan" would have little difficulty in agreeing.

More often, however, these descriptions are put in peculiarly religious terms, wherein one sees that the way to spiritual truth is not the imagination, as it is with the poets, but instead Christian faith. Now there may be

actually little difference between the two, but in practice we find that the Tractarians quite naturally prefer the religious term. Whether precisely synonymous or not, they are very much alike in that both are faculties for the apprehension of a higher or divine truth and both are con- trasted with the lower organs of sense and reason. Pusey writes that "Faith is instead of eyes. By faith we see Him who to our eyes of sense is unseen.... Faith is a divine power. They are mere bodily powers, these

eyes which shall soon decay, which tell us that the things around us are. Faith is the eye of the soul, which God has given us, to behold Himself."20 One is reminded of Wordsworth's assertion in The Prelude that the

imagination, which is "truly from the Deity," allows the poet "To hold fit converse with the spiritual world," and of Keats's command to the pipes on the Grecian Urn to play "Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,/ Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone." Newman writes that "And as Reason, with its great conclusions, is confessedly a higher instrument than Sense with its secure premisses, so.Faith rises above Reason in its subject-matter ...." On another occasion he says that "a Faith which generously ap- prehends Eternal Truth, though at times it degenerates into superstition [as with Madeline in "The Eve of St. Agnes"], is far better than that cold

18 Excerpted in Owen Chadwick ed., The Mind of the Oxford Movement

(Stanford, Cal., 1960), 69. I have used this compendium for most of the quota- tions from the Tractarians because of its convenience and accessibility.

19 Sermons Academical and Occasional in Chadwick, Mind. 121. 20 Parochial Sermons in Chadwick, Mind, 108-09.


sceptical, critical tone of mind, which has no inward sense of an over- ruling ever-present Providence, no desire to approach its God...."21

It would be easy to consider this religious quest for God, as it is easy to consider the Romantic quest for the ideal, one that ignores or

repudiates the empirical world, and it would be just as wrong. It would be easy because of Newman's quasi-monastic community at Littlemore, because of the creation of Anglican religious orders beginning at mid- century, because of Pusey's description of monastic institutions as "a refuge from the weariness and vanities of the world, and a means of

higher perfection to individuals .. ."22 This quest for a refuge has its

counterpart in literature with Keats's attempt to escape from "The weariness, the fever, and the fret" of this world, and later on with isola- tionist themes in Tennyson and Arnold. It would be easy to understand these remarks by Pusey as dualistic: "The less we live for things outward, the stronger burns our inward life. The more we live amid the distrac- tions of the world, the less vivid is the life of the soul. The more we live to things unseen, the less hold will this world of sense have over us."23 But it would be a mistake to regard the Tractarians in this way, for they were no more dualistic than Browning's Fra Lippo Lippi, who repudiates the Manicheism of his prior. One must remember, after all, that although Christianity insists upon the subservience of the body to the soul, insists

upon the sovereignty of the spirit, it is ultimately committed to the reconciliation of the human and divine, and that the Incarnation, the act by which this reconciliation is made possible, is an intimate and organic fusion of these two disparate elements. Accordingly, Isaac Williams in The Baptistery says of the aesthetic aspects of worship:

These are allied to sense, but soul and sense Must both alike find wing and rise to Heaven; Both soul and body took the Son of man, Both soul and body must in Him serve God.24

In a passage that approaches quite closely the Romantic attitude towards nature, Keble discusses the intimate relationship of nature and God: "Religion is like a magic wand; once that wand touches a part of Nature, a new and heavenly light is cast upon it. Thereby we perceive that the analogies and pleasant images [of poetry] are not the meaningless sport or fancy of a clever mind, but are true evidences of Nature's voice-in

21 Sermons, chiefly on the Theory of Religious Belief, preached before the University of Oxford in Chadwick, Mind, 84, 88-89.

22 From a letter to the Archbishop of Canterbury in 1842, quoted in W. J. Sparrow Simpson, The History of the Anglo-Catholic Revival from 1845 (London, 1932), 231.

23 Sermons during the season from Advent to Whitsuntide in Chadwick, Mind, 211.

24 In Chadwick, Mind, ibid., 189.


truth, of Him who created Nature."25 Finally, there is proof of the Trac- tarian concern with this world in Peck's observation that "one of the chief effects of the Oxford Movement was to impose upon the English Church the task of recovering for itself a real field of action in Society."26 This evangelicalism, or "outreach" as it is often called nowadays, more than anything else dispels the mistaken impression that Victorian churchmen cloistered themselves within the secure and comfortable confines of

university chambers, monastic communities, or Gothic churches, con-

templating the divine and forgetting "this strange disease of modern life." Just as the renewed sense of the supernatural had regained for the

poet a pre-eminence long before lost, so did the parallel phenomenon in

religion increase the respect and reverence with which the priest was held, and just as the Romantic view of the modern poet as inspired singer represented a dramatic reversal of Cowper's view that he is a mechanical drudge, so did the Victorian belief in the high seriousness of the priest's calling present a sharp contrast to the relaxed worldliness of

many eighteenth-century clerics. Although Goldsmith has left us com-

plimentary accounts of the parish priest in The Vicar of Wakefield and The Deserted Village, R. W. Church comes closer to describing the typical eighteenth-century priest when he says that "He was often much, very much, to the society round him."27 A passage in George Crabbe's The

Village describes the very type that Church had in mind:

A jovial youth, who thinks his Sunday's task As much as God or man can fairly ask; The rest he gives to loves and labours light, To fields the morning, and to feasts the night; None better skill'd the noisy pack to guide, To urge their chase, to cheer them or to chide; A sportsman keen, he shoots through half the day, And, skill'd at whist, devotes the night to play. (I, 306-13)

A simple desire to reform such worldly ways was not, however, the only, or indeed the chief, source of the importance and seriousness now attached to the priesthood, for in addition a new aura of solemnity and reverence surrounded the priest because of the recently revived and emphasized doctrine of Apostolic Succession. This doctrine, in turn, derived from a fear of Erastianism, first declared in Keble's "National Apostasy" sermon in 1833, which Newman regarded as the commencement of the Oxford Movement. Although the Church and State had been joined in the figure of the monarch since the Reformation, there was no need to fear Erastianism because of the doctrinal implications of "the divine right of kings." Nor, after the seventeenth century when the Stuarts had

25 Praelectiones Academicae, ibid., Mind, 70. 26 Social Implications, 235. 27 The Oxford Movement, 11.


foundered on the resistance to this idea and when the effective power had shifted from the monarch to Parliament was there need to fear the domination of the Church by the State because the Test and Corporation Acts insured that all members of Parliament were communicants of the

Anglican Church. When, however, the Test and Corporation Acts were

repealed in 1828 there was no longer a guarantee that Parliamentary control of the Church was in the hands of Anglicans, indeed even Chris- tians, and when to this repeal were added the Roman Catholic Emancipa- tion Act of 1829, the Reform Bill of 1832, and the aboltion of ten Irish

Bishoprics in 1833, there was great alarm within the Church about the

high-handed and unsympathetic treatment accorded it by Parliament. As a result of all this, the Oxford leaders turned to the doctrine of Apostolic Succession to establish for themselves and their Church an authority older and more puissant than that of the State, and one that empowered them to reject the interferences of an apostate Parliament. Tract 86 alludes to

Henry VIII's claim to be Head of the Church as "preposterous," and others involved with the Movement, by referring to "the Catholic Church in England" instead of "the English Church," sought to establish an

authority beyond the reach of Parliament. Apostolic Succession came to be of such importance that Storr regards it as the most important tenet of all: "the essence of Tractarianism lies in this doctrine of succession.

Episcopacy is held up as not merely of the bene esse of a Church, but as

something without which there can be no Church at all."28 The emphasis on the doctrine enhanced the status of the clergy by

providing them with an authority derived not from any secular power but from the divine charge granted St. Peter by Christ himself. But the doctrine goes even further in elevating the priest's role, for, having its source also in the visitation of the Holy Ghost to the Apostles at Pente- cost, it proposes the transmission of the Holy Ghost to all who stand in the apostolic line. Thus it is that when the bishop lays his hands on the head of the priest during ordination, the Book of Common Prayer re-

quires that he say, "Receive the Holy Ghost for the Office and Work of a Priest in the Church of God, now committed unto thee by the Im-

position of our hands." Not only, then, authority, but an intimate association with divinity gave the priest an exalted position even as it had given the poet a similar place.

Besides a reaction to the laxity of eighteenth-century practices and a new sense of the importance of Apostolic Succession, there was yet a third force, one closer to the literary, that created respect for the priest's calling. Once the sense of mystery had been restored to religion, it followed that church services should turn from an emphasis on instruction to an emphasis on worship and that, in turn, the laity should be excluded to a large degree from participation in the liturgy which now became the

28 Development of English Theology, 260.


primary responsibility of the clergy and choir. This change in attitude is particularly evident in the ecclesiologists who "are anxious that the church services should create a certain atmosphere and make an impression on the minds of the people by the mysterious and by what appeals to a great deal more than man's understanding. Their aim is not so much that the services should be a corporate offering of priest and people but that they should be offered by clergy and a choir in such a way as to call out from the people an attitude of awe and adoration."29 The change in attitude brought about a further separation of clergy and laity, and although the awe and adoration are directed towards the mysterious, it would be difficult for the priest, chief officiator at these mysteries, not to share in the aggrandizing effects of this reverence.

The importance of the priest was literally visible in the restored and new churches, which physically separated the clergy from the laity. In the eighteenth century the proper place of the minister was either behind or beside the communion table, which had been moved forward to increase the participation of the congregation in the service. The chancel had fallen into disuse and the minister stood near the people "so that even at the cost of some dignity and propriety they could see what was happening and follow the service."30 Now, however, the chancel was restored to use, stone altars were built, rebuilt, or put again to use at the east end of the chancel in the sanctuary, and the priest took his place in the chancel. He now stands between the people and the altar, suggesting, perhaps, his nearness to God and emphasizing his role as intermediary. Since the chancel is raised, usually three steps, he is elevated above the people. Finally, the chancel screen, so dear to the ecclesiologists, presents an even more visible barrier. John Mason Neale and Benjamin Webb, founders of the Camden Society and staunch advocates of a division between the nave and chancel by the roodscreen, comment that "The wor- shipers who are to assemble in our church are not all on equality. There are some who are endowed with high privileges as being those conse- crated to the immediate service of the sanctuary. In early times so real a thing was the distinction between the clergy and the laity, that the Church being divided into these two classes, the material edifice displayed a like division: and the nave and chancel preach to posterity the sacred- ness of Holy Orders, and the mutual duties arising from the relation in which the flock stand to their shepherds."31 The call for the restoration of the screen is repeated over and again in The Ecclesiologist, where one encounters such remarks as, "It is almost useless for us to repeat for the

29 G. W. O. Addleshaw and Frederick Etchells, The Architectural Setting of Anglican Worship (London, 1948), 209. 30 Ibid., 203.

31 Introductory essay to William Durandus, The Symbolism of Churches and Church Ornaments: A Translation of the First Book of the Rationale Divinorum Officiorum (London, 1893), lvi-lvii.


thousandth time, that we consider the screen the proper separation between the clerks and the laity."32

Thus physically separated from the congregation by his place in the chancel and also by the rich and elaborate vestments that were coming into use, and authoritatively and spiritually separated by the doctrine of Apostolic Succession and the new attitude towards worship, the Victorian priest found his role even more acutely paradoxical than did the poet, for it was his specific duty, as it was not necessarily the poet's, to minister to the people. This duty, assumed by the priest upon ordination, was taken lightly by such priests as Crabbe described in The Village and by some in the Victorian age too if one calls to mind Holman Hunt's painting, The Hireling Shepherd, but the concern of the Victorian churchman for social problems and particularly for the plight of the poor suggests that he accepted his duty willingly and succeeded in adjusting to his difficult and paradoxical role.

The means by which these shepherds attempted to reach and instruct their flocks was the use of symbolism, even as it was the vehicle for the divine truths of the Romantic poets. Perhaps no aspect of the mid- and late-Victorian Church is so visibly and forcefully striking as is its insis- tence on the symbolic importance of vestments, the Sacraments, the liturgy, church furnishings, the church building itself, in short all those things designated by contemporaries as "Ritualism." Historians are quick to point out that the Tractarians were uninterested in the forms of worship. Newman was indifferent, and Pusey, who is reported to have asked once "Do tell us what a cope is," repudiated the synonymous use of Puseyism and ritualism: "I am in this strange position that my name is a byword for that with which I never had any sympathy, that which the writers of the Tracts, with whom in early days I was associated, always deprecated-any innovations in the way of conducting the service, anything of ritualism or especially any revival of disused vestments."33 Ritualism, then, was the child of the Camden Society and of such men as John Jebb, Thomas Hook, and John Rouse Bloxam rather than of the Tractarians, but it was nevertheless, as I shall show, the natural result of Tractarian beliefs.

Many writers regard ritualism as an aesthetic reaction against the slovenly and irreverent habits of worship prevailing well into the nineteenth century, and there is ample evidence that the services provided much to react against. Gladstone recalled that at the turn of the century "the actual state of things, as to worship, was bad beyond all parallel known to me in experience or reading. Taking together the expulsion of the poor and labouring classes (especially from the town churches),

32IX (1848), 148, quoted in White, 102. 33 The question about the cope is quoted without a source in Horton Davies,

Worship and Theology in England, III (Princeton, 1961), 244. The longer passage is from Liddon's biography of Pusey and quoted by White, 20.


the mutilations and blockages of the fabrics, the baldness of the service, the elaborate horrors of the so-called music, with the jargon of parts con- trived to exhibit the powers of every village roarer, and to prevent all congregational singing; and above all, the coldness and indifference of the lounging or sleeping congregations, our services were probably without a parallel in the world for their debasement."34 Thomas Lowe, Dean of Exeter, reported in 1842 that "we may now see in most of our rural Churches a rabble of boors and boys seated on the very steps and rails of the altar, and the altar itself used to place their hats on," and John Mason Neale in that same year witnessed a luncheon tray brought to the squire during the reading of the Ten Commandments and, later, "a church warden get up on the altar to open the east window."35

While it is no doubt true that the indignation expressed in these and other reports derives from outraged aesthetic sensibilities, and while it is no doubt true that ritualism arose from the general aesthetic movement in the century as well as other sources such as a return to the medieval Church, it is no less true than these statements disclose a revulsion at holy things desecrated and that ritualism accompanied the increased reverence and awe with which the Victorians approached their worship. But ritual does not only inculcate a worshipful attitude; it also symbolic- ally expresses dogma, and there are some who believe this to be the main reason for the revival of ceremony in the English Church. Storr, for example, writes that "Ritual is dogma translated into symbolism and outward form. ... The intimate connection between dogma and ritual is sometimes denied, but the history of the ritualistic movement proves that the desire for ritual was determined by a dogmatic interest. Had there been no sacramental dogma, there would have been far less passion aroused over ritual matters."36 White agrees: "Certainly the basic inclina- tion of Ritualism was dogmatic and not artistic."37 That many Victorian churchmen stress the didactic function of ritual over the aesthetic sup- ports these opinions. Here, too, one begins to perceive the parallel with literature, for even as the Romantic poets turned to symbolism as a more efficacious and appropriate way of expressing visionary truths out of frustration with the inadequacy of literal meanings, so did the ritualists turn to ceremony and form to express divine truths and mysteries beyond the capacity of mere words. For example, in The Baptistery Isaac Williams justifies religious symbols by arguing:

For objects pleading through the visual sense Are stronger than discourses to the ear, More powerfully they reach and move the soul.38

34 "The Church of England and Ritualism," Contemporary Review, 24 (Oct. 1874), rpt. in Gleanings of Past Years (London, 1879), VI, 119.

35 Both comments are quoted in White, 4. 36 Development of English Theology, 268-69. 37 Cambridge Movement, 204. 38 In Chadwick, Mind, 188.


Keble, in passages that draw very closely together the literary and religious uses of symbolism, similarly indicates the propriety of symbols for religious truth. In Tract 89 he writes, "There is . . . the studied preference of poetical forms of thought and language, as the channel of supernatural knowledge to mankind. Poetry, traced as high up as we can go, may almost seem to be God's gift from the beginning, vouchsafed to us for this very purpose: at any rate, the fact is unquestionable, that it was the ordained vehicle of revelation, until God Himself was made mani- fest in the flesh." In Praelectiones Academicae he says that prose, by which he means literal speech, is inadequate for religious and poetical subjects: "Both Religion and Poetry struggle to express thoughts and feelings beyond the power of prose to describe; and this common weak- ness leads them to use alike the world of nature and sensation. ... In short, Poetry affords to Religion its store of symbols and metaphors; Religion gives them back to Poetry, but sparkling in their new light, (so to say) more sacraments than symbols."39 Nothing, however, testifies so forcefully to this change of attitude about how God might be most effectively made known as the rearrangement of church interiors, where- by the towering and domineering pulpit was removed from its central position to the side, the high pews that obstructed the view were demol- ished, and the altar, whereupon occurred the symbolic re-enactment of the Incarnation, was restored to its elevated place in the sanctuary and became once again the focal point of the congregation. The word had been usurped by the symbol and the reasonable had made way for the mysterious.

In addition to their origin, the literary and religious symbols shared another similarity, which was that both were considered organically related to the things they represented. As we have seen, Coleridge believed that a symbol "always partakes of the reality which it renders intelligible", the Tractarians, according to Storr, regarded the entire Church as symbolical in this sense: "in place of a theory of the Church as the accredited organ for the transmission of divine truth, was set up a theory of the Church as an extension of the Incarnation, and the channel through which the living Christ works His age-long work of redemption."40 It is chiefly, though, in the Sacraments, or sacred symbols, that one sees this notion most frequently. Newman writes that "Christ shines through the Sacraments, as through transparent bodies, without impediment. He is the

Light and Life of the Church, acting through it, dispensing of his fulness, knitting and compacting together every part of it; and these its Mysteries are not mere outward signs, but (as it were) effluences of grace develop- ing themselves in external forms, as Angels might do when they appeared

39 Ibid., 68, 70. This statement recalls Hegel's view that philosophy, religion, and poetry express the same truths in different ways.

40 Development of English Theology, 261.


to men."41 Of all the Sacraments, Communion was the most important, and it is in the doctrine of the Real Presence that one can see most clearly this interfusion. Newman says, "He who is at the right hand of God, manifests Himself in that Holy Sacrament as really and fully as if He were visibly there."42 And not only is there the fusion of the symbol and the divine, but, because of this fusion, there is the union between the divine and the one who partakes of the symbol. Thus, Pusey writes that "this Divine Sacrament has, as its immediate and proper end, union with Him who hath taken our manhood into God, and the infusion into us of His Spirit and life and immortality, making us one with His glorified Humanity, as He is One in the Godhead with the Father. . ."43 So it is that the symbol carries one far beyond the power of words by not only revealing God but also by achieving a union with Him.

Much of what I have been trying to say about the use of symbols in both poetry and religion has already been said by Paul Tillich in Theology of Culture. There he states that the main purpose of symbolism is "the

opening up of levels of reality which otherwise are hidden and cannot be grasped in any other way. Every symbol opens up a level of reality for which non-symbolic speaking is inadequate." Furthermore, the difference between symbols and signs is that although both point to something be-

yond themselves, "signs do not participate in any way in the reality and

power of that to which they point," whereas symbols do. Religious symbols, then, open up a level of reality, which is the Holy, and "participate in the holiness of the Holy. .. ."44 In light of such a view as that, held by the Tractarians and ritualists alike, we must recognize that there was a high seriousness and purpose behind the revival of these "mere forms" and that they were far more than the vain and trivial trappings of pro-Catholic medievalists, as the attacks in Punch would have us believe.

Ritualism and ecclesiology completely revolutionized Anglican wor-

ship and left behind the most visible and perhaps most lasting effects of the Movement. Most of those features we commonly associate with

Anglican worship and assume to be part of the unbroken Catholic tradition were in fact reintroduced by the Victorians into a worship service that was practically indistinguishable from those of the Dissenters. The eighteenth-century auditory church was little different from a nonconformist chapel or, for that matter, a Georgian ballroom.45 The pulpit was in a central position and a communion table, not an altar, was used. The minister wore a simple black cassock instead of elaborate Eucharistic vestments and was not accustomed to calling himself "Father" or even

41 Parochial Sermons in Chadwick, Mind, 191. 42 Ibid., 197. 43 Nine Sermons preached before the University of Oxford in Chadwick,

Mind, 199-200. 44 Tillich, op. cit., New York (1959), 56, 54, 59. 45 Addleshaw and Etchells, Architectual Setting, 206.


"priest." The Sacrament of Holy Communion was ordinarily celebrated only four times a year-at Christmas, Easter, Pentecost, and after har- vest, and even then it was not always well attended as we see by the fact that there were only six communicants at St. Paul's on Easter 1800.46 The language of the liturgy was simpler too, for instead of offering Com- munion to the people with the words "Behold the Lamb of God," the celebrant said something like "Come forward, dear people." Popular hymns were not included in the service, and, in this respect at least, the Anglican service was even less appealing than the nonconformist. All this changed. The ecclesiologists emphasized the symbolic nature of the church building itself. Neale and Webb stated in their preface to Durandus that "Sacramentality is that characteristic which so strikingly distinguishes ancient ecclesiastical architecture from our own" and "architecture is an emblem of the invisible abstract, no less than Holy Baptism and the Lord's Supper."47 Such beliefs lie behind their attempt to restore and build anew Gothic churches, which were so much more symbolic than the neo-classic ones. These churches are symbolic in a very broad sense in that the verticality of Gothic draws one's eyes up into the empyrean even as Shelley's Skylark rises upwards and upwards into the infinity of

space. But the buildings' symbolism is more specific than that. Ideally, they should be cruciform and pointing eastward. The inside is divided into three parts: the nave (the ship that carries us), representing the Church Militant or the Church in this world; the chancel, separated from the nave by three steps up (the Trinity) and the cross upon the screen (death), representing the Church Expectant (the Intermediate State roughly comparable to the Roman Catholic Purgatory); and the sanctu-

ary with the altar, representing the Church Triumphant or Heaven. In fact, practically all features of the church came to have symbolical value. The baptismal font, formerly placed at the front of the building so that all could see, was removed to the rear because it is by baptism that one enters the Church. The font is octagonal since eight represents eternity, the quincunx is on the altar to symbolize the five wounds of Christ, and the lectern is supported by an eagle, the sign of St. John. The celebrant's vestments, their signs, and their colors all have symbolic value. The alb is purity and the stoll is the yoke assumed by the priest. The conduct of the service, particularly Holy Communion, now celebrated much more

frequently, was made more elaborate and formal by candles, acolytes, in- cense, and choirs.

These changes met with as much opposition as had parallel ones in literature. In fact, the reception of these innovations was as vehemently hostile and certainly more generally hostile than any other proposed by the Victorian Church, for if the average communicant knew and cared

nothing about Erastianism, Higher Criticism, or Darwinism, he did know

46 Davies, Worship and Theology, III, 58. 47 pp. xxvii, 1.


and care about an order of worship that he feared tended more and more to Rome. Punch taunted "Rome, Rome, sweet sweet Rome,/ For all us Tractarians, there's no place like Rome," and with some justification since 446 people who might be broadly termed Tractarians joined the Roman Catholic Church between 1840 and 1899.48 The Queen expressed her displeasure with ritualism in her characteristically emphatic manner in a letter to Dean Stanley in 1873: "She thinks a complete Reformation is what we want. But if that is impossible, the archbishop should have the power given him, by Parliament, to stop all these ritualistic practices, dressings, bowings, etc., and everything of that kind, and above all, all attempts at confession."49 Ruskin's invective against the meretricious beguilements of the Roman Church helps to explain the Anglican dis- trust of ornament and ceremony in their own Church: "But of all these fatuities, the basest is the being lured into the Romanist Church by the glitter of it, like larks into a trap by broken glass; to be blown into a change of religion by the whine of an organ-pipe; stitched into a new creed by gold threads on priests' petticoats; jangled into a change of con- science by the chimes of a belfry. I know nothing in the shape of error so dark as this, no imbecility so absolute, no treachery so contemptible."50 Much more reasonable is Gladstone's fear "that the beauty of the edifice, the furniture, and the service, though their purpose be to carry the mind forward, may induce it to rest upon those objects themselves."51 This fear is not so much of Roman Catholicism in general as it is of what most

Anglicans considered Roman idolatry, and it is echoed in Dean Hook's comment, "I am afraid that many in their zeal for the Church forget Christ .. ."; and in Tennyson's description of Pellam's chapel as a place where "he scarce could spy the Christ for Saints."52

Whatever the reason for the opposition to ritual, the resistance was formidable. Punch ridiculed the Puseyites mercilessly; the Church As- sociation, formed in 1865 to suppress ritualism, succeeded in having four priests imprisoned between 1871 and 1882; and, most shocking, there were riots at St. George-in-the-East, London, in 1859 and 1860 that are unparalleled in Church history for their violence and mayhem. For all this, ritualism survived, and the Anglican service today bears

ample testimony to the success of the Camden Society, its journal The Ecclesiologist, the English Church Union, and the many individuals who

persevered in the face of derision and contempt. My topic has been an arbitrarily limited one, and the reader should

remember that there were other parallels between Romantic literature

48 Mr. Punch's History of Modern England, ed. Charles L. Graves (New York, n.d.), I, 103. Davies, Worship and Theology, IV, 117.

49 Quoted in Chadwick, Victorian Church, II, 321.

50Appendix 12, The Stones of Venice (London, 1907), I, 340. 51 Gleanings, VI, 129. 52 Quoted in Gladstone, Gleanings, VI, 108. "Balin and Balan," Idylls of the

King.


and the Victorian Church. I have already mentioned some of these, among them such things as medievalism, aestheticism, and opposition to materialism, especially in the form of biological and geological science. But many of these, although latent in Romantic poetry, do not become active literary concerns till the Victorian age. Also, one should remember that the parallels I have selected to examine are not confined to poetry and religion in that they could probably be discerned as easily in painting, say, and, to a more limited extent perhaps, in such an area as history where the emphasis on the hero more or less corresponds to the importance given to the poet and priest. I have neglected these matters not because they lack significance, but because of the simple limitation of space and because the parallels I have chosen are particularly interesting for the similar causal relationships that operate in both areas. That is, to repeat, in literature and religion there is an increased awareness of the mystical and supernatural element in the universe. This awareness, in turn, produces two results: first, the poet or priest who has access to this element is elevated to a pre-eminence above those who are denied immediate participation in this realm, and, second, the mystical is expressed and comprehended only in symbolical terms. They are interesting, further, because they are similar in their individual complexities. The religious and poetic views of the world unite both the natural and the supernatural, the priest and the poet are elitist and egalitarian, and the literary symbol and religious sacrament are both the sign and thing.

Both these areas of interest, the causal relationship and the complexities, are more convincing than simple parallels of a time spirit permeating and molding the physical appearances of an age. No amount of direct influence could bring about, I think, such profound and complex similarities. One conclusion, then, that we might draw from this parallel is that seeds of the same ideological species, although planted in different soils, grow into plants of a like nature. A second conclusion is that literature, in the nineteenth century at least, seems to respond more readily and with greater sensitivity to this time spirit than does religion. Perhaps it does so because it is not encumbered with the slow and intractable machinery of an institution, or because it never fully abandons its mime- tic origins, or because it is less avowedly dedicated to permanence than the Church. Whatever the reason, it is clear that poetry responded first both to the Romantic temper and then to those currents of thought that rendered Romanticism untenable. The Anglican Church, on the other hand, was slower in responding to Romanticism and is only just now beginning to react to the modern world by revising the doctrines and

practices established by the Victorians. What, in short, we have been considering has disappeared, for the most part long ago, from poetry, but it lingers yet, almost unchanged, in the Church.

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