The Thesis that I shall maintain in this essay is suggestive rather than probative. The poetry of both Arnold and Hardy is in a state of critical flux at the present time, interest in the former just beginning to emerge from a long period of critical drabness, and acclaim for the latter finally beginning to erase the autobiographical and ideological structures in which it has been too long imprisoned. Thus our critical premises about both their poetic canons are simply too volatile and variable to admit of critical conclusiveness. Moreover, Hardy was both the least imitative and the most cryptically allusive of poets, and even when he rewrote an earlier poet's work, in the sense that “While Drawing in a Churchyard” is a rewriting of “A slumber did my spirit seal,” the attachment ot the original was extremely delicate and the fiction, idiom, and angle of vision of the new rendering distinctly idiosyncratic.

A consciously modern critic, in a review of 14 May 1920 in the Athenaeum, recommended that for the twentieth century poet “the natural evolution would be to proceed in the direction indicated by Browning; to distil the dramatic essences, if we can, and infuse them into some other liquor.” Since, in this critic's eyes, Browning “invented the dramatic monologue,” a form responsive to the demands of the English dramatic tradition, Browning's poetry was taken as indicating a direction which modern poets should follow. And, later in the review, the critic implied that Browning's work on “a kind of dramatic form” prepared the reading public to respond to the works of the dramatic poets who follow – himself included. The critic was T. S. Eliot.

Henry James declared in “The Novel in The Ring and the Book” that he had long thought of the twelve-book poem as an unsuccessful novel of the “so-called historical sort.” He thought that the manner of its production “tragically spoiled” and “smothered” Browning's intention in writing his novel-in-verse. James identifies that intention as the desire to present a “study of the manners and conditions from which our own have … issued.” James's desire for the structure to build a coherent love story around Pompilia and Caponsacchi blinded him to the processive nature of Browning's study of how art represents the manners and conditions from which our own have issued. What James laments as “the great loose and uncontrolled composition” and the “great heavy-hanging cluster of related but unresolved parts” actually constitutes rather than spoils the novelistic force of The Ring and the Book if we define the novel in Mikhail Bakhtin's manner as a revolutionary process rather than as a fixed generic form.

The “deeply felt” quality of Walter Pater's essay on Winckelmann indicates the depth of affinity between these two men. Young Pater shared Winckelmann's religious scepticism, his intense commitment to rationality, and his absorption in the study of art. As well, both shared an erotic temperament and wrote especially for young men. Winckelmann had shown that an explicit homoeroticism might play a key role in cultural interpretation. His writing helped Pater in his effort to counter the Matthew Arnold of “Pagan and Mediaeval Religious Sentiment.” Already in March 1864, when Arnold delivered this lecture at Oxford, he was reacting against the second-generation Pre-Raphaelites. At least such a reaction explains his harsh treatment of Heine as a latter-day pagan. Although only a year earlier Arnold had delivered a sympathetic and well-informed lecture on Heine, he now put him in the position of aesthete and ignored important elements of his thought. Walter Pater may well have been one of Arnold's auditors at this time (DeLaura, p. 203). If so, the occasion was prophetic because Heine's position as characterized by Arnold resembles that which Pater would take in 1867 in his second published essay, “Winckelmann” (DeLaura, p. 201). Pater realized as much, hence took steps to subvert the position that Arnold took in his lecture. He supplemented Arnold's view of Greek culture in the time of Sophocles with Winckelmann's playful and sensuous ideal of androgynous beauty in the succeeding age of Praxiteles. Pater reinterpreted Arnold's ideal of the imaginative reason in an erotic light. Arnold's negative treatment of Heine extended to the “peace” between “body and soul” that Heine had prophesied (p. 227). Pater corrected this bias in Arnold and argued instead the importance of the body as a crux of value in a contemporary ideal of culture.

In Book vii of The Prelude Wordsworth chronicles the months he lived in London and concludes with two images for the modern city. Following his feeling that “The face of every one / That passes by me is a mystery,” he sees a blind beggar with his life's history on a card around his neck; this is followed by the spectacle of Bartholomew's Fair. The poet's response to these experiences of urban mystery and multitudinousness is well-known:

O Blank confusion! true epitome

Of what the mighty City is herself

To thousands upon thousands of her sons

Living amid the same perpetual whirl

Of trivial objects, melted and reduced

To one identity, by differences

That have no law, no meaning, and no end -

(Book VII, 11. 722–28)

Browning's modernism has most often been seen as originating in his use of the dramatic monologue. Blending traditional poetic genres and emphasizing powerfully realized psychological states, the monologues have been described as a source of literary technique in authors as diverse as Conrad, Pound, Eliot, and Joyce. This strain of criticism suggests that Browning's sense of character is his primary strength and that it combines with his dramatic ability to place a fictional consciousness in accurately circumscribed historical time. These arguments leave one essential question unanswered – “to what extent is Browning sympathizing with his characters and to what extent is he passing judgment on them from some objective viewpoint outside the poem?” This question has become an increasingly important focus of critical discussion in recent years. The notion of sympathy is affirmed by defenders of Browning's moral relativism, while the idea of an absolute standard is advanced by those who defend his ability to identify with characters with whom he is actually in disagreement.

In 1913 Ezra Pound vowed “to sweep out the last century the way Attila swept across Europe.” From our present standpoint, we can recognize in such a remark, not only the familiar antipathy toward things Victorian, but the impulse, everywhere apparent in the early modernist movement, to lay claim to historical autonomy, to suppress origins, to revise history in the light of present inclinations. A remark of Nietzsche's is apposite: “We try to give ourselves a new past from which we should have liked to descend instead of the past from which we actually descended.” But Europe, after all, survived Attila, and the Victorians have survived Pound to enjoy, we may imagine, the satisfactions of neglected precendents returned to claim priority. Now it remains for us to continue the long task of restoring connection where the moderns saw rupture. This essay will approach the problem of literary transition in Conrad's The Nigger of the “Narcissus”, a work which provides the greatest challenge to those who live by fixed period categories, and which appears to fall as happily within the early modern as the late Victorian. And it is no easy matter to determine whether it lies closer to the spirit of Carlyle or Ford Madox Ford, closer to Samuel Smiles or Mister Kurtz. It raises, I hope to show, the problem of Victorian modernism in austere form, and I will attempt to measure those austerities by taking Culture and Anarchy as my touchstone.

“The said poem is quite finished,” Browning wrote to his publisher, George Smith, on 22 April 1875, “– is on so very modern a subject that it concerns last Whitsuntide – and English country life, – and moreover means to be abundantly passionate and pathetic: I did it with a will in two months exactly: it is some 3,500 lines in length, and, in fact, is a tragedy in a new style. What do you say to this?”

The poet – speaker of Book 1 of The Ring and the Book believed that the first two monologues of his grand poem balanced one another. In his preview of the monologues, he writes that Half-Rome and Other Half-Rome are equally unsuccessful in their efforts to find the truth of the murder story. The speakers possess an “opposite feel” for the truth, but each achieves a “like swerve, like unsuccess” (I.883–84). Although Other Half-Rome succeeds in being on the right side of the issue, Browning as poet-speaker considers his defense of Pompilia to be the result only of luck or a “fancy-fit.” This “fancy-fit” is a mood which inclines the speaker to choose Pompilia as it might incline him to choose between two runners in a race according to the colors of their scarves (1.885–92). Browning sets this speech by a Bernini fountain, one where Triton blows water through a conch: “Puffs up steel sleet which breaks to diamond dust” (1.900). The poet may have intended this setting to suggest the way in which he views the language and imagery that Other Half-Rome uses to tell his story. The speaker's mixture of Christian and classical mythology and his concern for the painterly qualities of Pompilia's deathbed scene do suggest an aesthetic temperament. The poet may have considered the speech of such a man to be “diamond dust” signifying nothing. In any case, the poet-speaker of Book 1 concludes his description of Other Half-Rome by saying, with apparent sarcasm, that to this speaker Pompilia “seemed a saint and martyr both” (1.909). This assessment of Other Half-Rome has been the subject of disagreement among commentators on the poem.