THE BRIEF FLORUIT OF THE "SPASMODIC" POETS FOLLOWED CLOSELY ONE OF I nineteenth-century British radicalisms most signal defeats--the ejection of the 1848 People's Charter. Spasmodic poems also "consistently [took] as their subject a young poet's struggle to write the poem that would make him famous" (1)--a conspicuous underlying theme of Wordsworth's Prelude (1850), as well as the first edition of Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass (1855). Such personal and collective struggles in fact provided signature-themes for hundreds of English and Scottish working-class and humble life poets of the era, who penned Shelleyan "dream visions," declaimed in the voice of rustic prophets, and focused their aspirations on the tenuous outlines of a more democratic culture to come. Melodrama and popular stage productions were also quintessential mid-Victorian working-class genres, (2) and political relevance may be found in contemporary critical tendencies to attack the Spasmodic poets for their melodramatic and declamatory extravagance.
Sydney Dobell, Alexander Smith, Gerald Massey, and Ebenezer Jones, in particular, were working- or lower-middle class in their origins and education, and several of these poets had contributed to the democratic fervor which culminated in the People's Charter of 1848. Under the penname "Bandiera," for example, Massey had written revolutionary verses, and Jones's pamphlet on Land Monopoly (1849) anticipated arguments made famous by Henry George in Progress and Poverty two decades later. (3) Smith followed with interest the actions of Chartism's Scottish wing, and Dobell's first poem, The Roman (1850), celebrated an imaginary hero of Italian independence after the manner of Browning's Sordello and Bulwer-Lytton's Rienzi.
Confronted with critical disregard of their work by social/literary "superiors," working- and lower-middle-class poets faced certain recurrent dilemmas in their attempts to frame individual and collective identities. If they retreated into "proper" sentiments which "befitted" their station, who would notice them? But if they seemed more assertive, topical, or sensuous, they inevitably affronted the sensibilities of influential middle- and upper-class critics. And if they dared to appropriate dramatic or sensational modes accepted in works of more respectable writers (such as Joanna Baillie in Plays of the Passions, Robert Browning in Dramatic Romances and Lyrics, or Matthew Arnold in Empedocles on Etna) they could expect damning autobiographical readings and ad hominem scorn from critics who contemned their authorial projections as well as their obstinate resistence to the critical instruction of their betters.
In this essay I will consider such nuances of social class in the "Spasmodic" controversy, (4) and focus primarily on opposing critics W. E. Aytoun and George Gilfillan, and the effects of the controversy on Sydney Dobell, "home-schooled" author of The Roman (1850) and Balder (1854); and Alexander Smith, a modestly educated pattern designer who published A Life-Drama (1853), City Poems (1857), and Edwin of Deira (1861). (5) I will also review briefly some of the ways in which critical savaging of the "Spasmodics" influenced canonical and semi-canonical poets such as Tennyson, the Brownings, and William Morris, and constrained the reception of other attempts at generic and stylistic innovation in the third quarter of the century.
Aytoun
William Edmondstoune Aytoun (1813-1865) was the only son of a wealthy Edinburgh family. His mother, a distant relative of Walter Scott, was a fierce Jacobite and lover of old Scottish lore, and his father was a successful lawyer of intellectual tastes and Whig political sympathies. (6) Private tutors prepared the bookish and intelligent boy for the newly established Edinburgh Academy, after which he attended Edinburgh University. A staunch Anglican, he eventually abandoned his parents' apparent politics to become a lifelong Tory. In view of his later role, it is interesting that Aytoun's first published work was a collection of utopian romantic poetry. He dedicated Poland, Homer, and Other Poems (1832), published by his family when he was nineteen, to the local exile Prince Czartorysk, and included in it expressions of support for Polish independence, as well as appeals for a utopian future and an elegy for Shelley. (7)
After graduation Aytoun briefly practiced law in his father's firm, and began a dual career as a successful criminal lawyer and part-time author. He wrote verses and reviews for Blackwood's and polemical prose works such as The Drummond Schism Examined and Exposed (1842), in which he asserted that "if every one is to be allowed to follow out his own whims and crotchets in defiance of constituted authority and written law there is an end of the Church.... IT]he proposition is so self-evident, that I cannot conceive how any person endowed with the ordinary faculty of reasoning can question it, or evade it, except by side winds and high-flown phrases, which sound well but signify nothing." (8)
By the time he became professor of rhetoric and belles lettres at Edinburgh University in 1845, Aytoun's colleague James Lorimer characterized his social views as follows:
If any man forgot his position, whether that position was acquired
or inherited ... his endurance was at an end. Other ... faults of
this class ... seemed to offend his very bodily organs, and ... he
fled from [them] or thrust [them] from him as if [they] had been
an outrage on his person.... [I]t naturally followed that he
attached a very high value to social organization, to the existence
... of the various classes into which society is arranged, ... and
... the traditional rules by which these distinctions are
maintained. (9)
In his reviews for Blackwood's, (10) Aytoun reprehended much of the literature of his age for its "far-fetched metaphors and comparisons," "mystical forms of speech," unfortunate penchant for contemporary subjects and regrettable departures from the "safe, familiar, and yet ample range of recognized Saxon metres." Indeed,
we may consider it almost as a certainty that every leading
principle of art has been weighed and sifted by our
predecessors; and that most of the theories, which are paraded
as discoveries, were deliberately examined by them, and were
rejected because they were false or impracticable. (11)
Aytoun also found a friendly environment at Blackwood's for his growing interest in the parodic genre of mock-review, of which the journal had published several prior examples. He prepared the ground for his most famous essay in the genre with an attack on the "Spasmodic School"'s alleged laxity of morals in a Blackwood's article in May 1854, (12) in which he asserted that "it is full time that the prurient and indecent tone which has liberally manifested itself in the writings of the young spasmodic poets should be checked." (13)
Indirectly here, and more directly in Firmilian, Aytoun had also begun to focus much of his indignation on his critical antagonist George Gilfillan's advocacy of such "prurience." Gilfillan was a prominent reviewer by this point for Blackwood's more liberal and less prestigious rival the Eclectic Review, which challenged the traditional cultural hegemony of Edinburgh from its industrial competitor Glasgow. (14) As Richard Cronin has observed,
Glasgow, where Smith lived and worked and Gilfillan and Bailey
attended university, [was] the city with which Spasmodic poetry
[was] most closely associated, and ... defined ... by its distance
from Edinburgh, Scotland's cultural capital.... Aytoun's attack ...
was motivated by the belief that Gilfillan, Smith and Dobell were
ill-educated and presumptuous interlopers into cultural precincts
that ought to be reserved to their social superiors. (p. 295)
Confessional differences strengthened this animus, and such differences were closely correlated in Scotland with class. In his introduction to "The Execution of Montrose," the Anglican Aytoun had characterized the Scottish Covenanters--a group sacred to many for their deaths at the hand of government troops as they sought to worship in their fields and homes--as "a party venal in principle, pusillanimous in action, and more than dastardly in their revenge." (15) In return, Gilfillan, a minister of the United Presbyterian Church, had characterized such attacks as the work of "a vulgar volunteer in a bad cause." (16)
Whatever the controversy's antecedents, Aytoun clearly aimed his remarks against Gilfillan in his alleged role as an abettor of Alexander Smith:
Alexander Smith possesses abilities which, if rightly directed,
cannot fail to make him eminent as a poet. The real danger to
which he is exposed arises from the superlative commendation
lavished upon him by men, who in the present deluge of cheap
literature, have been let loose upon the public as critics....
On the one hand, it is a pity ... to allow a likely lad to be
fly-blown and spoiled by the buzzing bluebottles of literature;
on the other, it is impossible to avoid seeing that the mischief
has been so far done, that any remedy likely to be effectual must
cause serious pain. (17)
Moreover, all of Aytoun's principal victims--Sydney Yendys (Dobell's pen name), Alexander Smith, J. Stanyan Bigg, and Gerald Massey--appeared in Gilfillan's "A Cluster of New Poets" in the Third Gallery of Literary Portraits (1854). Aytoun was particularly displeased by Gilfillan's favorable reception of Dobell's The Roman, as well as his praise of Smith's Life-Drama in "A New Poet in Glasgow," published in the Critic two years earlier.
In May 1854, Aytoun published his mock review of Firmilian by "T. Percy Jones," which derided the new poets' alleged Shelleyan extravagance ("Percy"), as well as their homely origins ("Jones"): "It is, of course, utterly extravagant; but so are the whole of the writings of the poets of the Spasmodic school; and, in the eyes of a considerable body of modern critics, extravagance is regarded as a proof of extraordinary genius.... They are simply writing nonsense-verses. (18)
Firmilian's most effective stroke may have been its mock-preface, in which "T. Percy" postured in arrogant terms quite foreign to the tone of Dobell's prefatory remarks on his intentions, and afortiori to the unassuming public persona of Smith, whose Life-Drama bore no preface whatsover. Aytoun/"Jones'"s preface effectively created a kind of spasmody in drag, (19) as "T. Percy"'s remarks argued the case for "negative capability":
I have been accused of extravagance, principally, I presume, on
account of the moral obliquity of the character of Firmilian. To
that I reply ... that many of the characters drawn by the magic
pencil of Shakespeare are shaded as deep, or even deeper, than
Firmilian. Set my hero beside Iago, Richard III., or the two
Macbeths, and I venture to say that he will not look dark in
comparison.... If the extravagance is held to lie in the
conceptions and handling of my subject, then I assert fearlessly
that the same charge may be preferred with greater reason against
Goethe's masterpiece, the Faust.... If I am told that the character
of Firmilian is not only extravagant, but utterly without a parallel
in nature, I shall request my critic to revise his opinion after he
has perused the histories of Mesdames de Brinvilliers and Laffarge,
and of the Borgias. (pp. viii-x) (20)
Perhaps Aytoun's condemnation in working-class poets of the "extravagances" he apparently accepted in "great authors" was simply another in a long line of claims that quod licet jovi non licet bovi?
Be that as it may, the completed parody Firmilian: or, The Student of Badajoz. A Spasmodic Tragedy appeared in July 1854. Loosely based on the plots of Faust and of Balder, its mass-murderer protagonist struggles to emulate the hero of his own drama-in-progress, Cain, as he "blows up" cathedrals, temples, and mosques alike (salutary warnings of the dire consequences of doctrinal laxity). Aytoun's attack on Gilfillan appeared in his caricature of "Apollodorus" (a pen name assigned to Gilfillan by one of his editors, Thomas Aird), who is accompanied by a Smith-parody in the form of a costermonger named "Sancho." The former is a kind of literary-critical groupie in search of potential poetic "stars" (an allusion to Gilfillan's interest in astronomy): (21)
"I watch them, as the watcher on the brook
Sees the young salmon wrestling from its egg,
And revels in its future bright career." (p. 99)
"Sancho," the Smith-figure, sings of leeks and the barnyard, and examples of "Sancho"'s prosodic skills include the following:
"The old sow grunts as the acorns fall,
The winds blow heavy, the little pigs squeak
One for the litter, and three for the teat."
When Gilfillan/Apollodorus hears Smith/Sancho's refrain, and hails him as a poet of nature, the latter remembers his true (commercial) calling:
Here's the primest cauliflower, though I say it, in all Badajoz.
Set it up at a distance of some ten yards, and I'll forfeit my
ass if it does not look bigger than the Alcayde's wig. Or would
these radishes suit your turn? There's nothing like your radish
for cooling the blood and purging distempered humours. (p. 101)
When Apollodorus/Gilfillan then casts his eyes heavenward in search of more enduring inspiration, the falling body of another rhymer named Haverillo crushes him to death.
I find it hard to see much more than class-antagonism, jejune snobbery, and a sort of displaced self-loathing in this oddly grotesque cartoon. Correlatively, any characterization of it as the "critical parody of the century" would say more about "parody," "criticism," and "the century" than it would about the poetry of the period, or the variously gifted people who endeavored to write it.
Gilfillan
George Gilfillan (1813-1878), a minister of the United Presbyterian Church in Dundee, Scotland, struggled throughout his life against the constraints imposed on him by his role as a minister in one of Britain's more hidebound denominations. (22) Born the youngest of eleven children of Rachel and Samuel Gilfillan, the latter a dissenting "Secessionist" minister in a mixed Gaelic/English congregation in Comrie, Perthshire, on the edge of the Highlands, (23) he had little formal schooling, but read all the literature available to him, including the poetry of Wordsworth, Burns, and especially Byron.
By his own account, Gilfillan "lost in one day my father and my childhood" when he was thirteen (Watson and Watson, p. 18), but nonetheless set out on foot two weeks later for the University of Glasgow, too poor to afford any other conveyance. In his autobiographical The History of a Man (1856) he remembered Saturdays spent in bed reading Shakespeare, unable to buy fuel and huddling under covers to keep warm (p. 52). In his four years at the university he met the poet Thomas Campbell and discovered Thomas Chalmers' Astronomical Discourses, which fostered a lifelong interest in astronomy. A fervent admirer of Shelley and Godwin, he also abandoned his belief in the Calvinist doctrines of his youth when