Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century (78 page)

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Authors: Laurence Lerner

Tags: #History, #Modern, #19th Century, #Social Science, #Death & Dying, #test

BOOK: Angels and Absences: Child Deaths in the Nineteenth Century
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but although metrical craftsmanship was still practised, we can detect a reluctance to show off one's skill too openly, lest it seem unfeeling. Jonson and Milton feel no such inhibition, and Milton's elegy is full of ingenious mythological conceits. A much more restrained conceit opens Jonson's epitaph on the boy actor Salomon Pavy:
Weep with me all ye that read
This little story,
And know, for whom a tear you shed,
Death's self is sorry.
5
just enough wit to give the poem distinction, without appearing to drown grief in cleverness.
Even more subtle is the delicate hint of paganism in the poem on his son:
To have so soon scaped world's and flesh's rage,
And, if no other misery, yet age?
The Christian reason it is better to die young concerns sin: that to live in this fallen world, with our fallen nature, is to be surrounded by snares, and we have seen much of this in Hemans's poetry as well as in a good deal of fiction. Jonson's poem sets out to say this, using biblical phrasing, and then, unobtrusively, shifts; after the world and the flesh should, of course, come the devil, but in his place we have a half-acknowledged diversion into a purely pagan reason for dying young: that one avoids the pain of growing old. It is not easy to imagine that effect in a Romantic or Victorian poem.
Third, this excursus gives us the opportunity to compare men's writing with women's and so return to the issue raised in earlier chapters, on the relation between texts and emotion. For it is striking, in this comparison, that the men are so much more accomplished than the womenstriking, but hardly surprising in male-dominated society. Mary Carey's groping poem does not contain any griefit insists effusively that God's will must be accepted; Anne Bradstreet's lines are completely conventional; and the truly moving statements of grief are found in Jonson, with his subtle rhythms, capturing the broken but controlled voice of the sorrowing parent. Indeed, the very technical skill of the poem becomes a sign of the emotion
 
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in its most striking and subtle line: the description of the child as "Ben Jonson his best piece of poetry." This line, telling us that he is more proud off having made the child than of making any poem, unfolds in the mind as we reflect on the different kinds of making involved. The poet deserves credit for writing well but hardly for so natural and impulsive an act as making a child, so that the line expresses a kind of humility: the deed that I deserve no credit for is my finest achievement. And the more skilfully written the poem, the more is being renounced.
Again I return to the point made in my first two chapters, that there are two ways in which we can read off emotion from texts. I have no difficulty in believing (the point was well made by Sara Coleridge) that mothers love their children more intensely than fathers (though in the case of Anne Bradstreet there is a complication: do women love their grandchildren more than men love their sons?) The fact that Jonson is a more talented poet than either of these women does not mean that he loved his son (let alone Salomon Pavy) more than Mary Carey and Anne Bradstreet loved their off-spring. A way of making this point would be to distinguish between the meaning of the poem when written, and the meaning of the act of writing it. If we hold an expression theory of poetry (if, that is, we think that skill is not enough), then we shall believe that Jonson wrote out of his own grief because he wrote so well (and, perhaps, that Milton was carrying out a literary exercise unmoved); but we have then to remind ourselves that emotionn is not enough either, and that the inferiority of Mary Carey or Anne Bradstreet as poets gives us no reason to doubt the intensity of their grief.
When Robert Graves was a student, he was informed, "a little stiffly," that the essays he wrote for his English tutor "are, shall I say, a trifle temperamental. It appears, indeed, that you prefer some authors to others."
6
The opinionatedness of Graves the student, shocking to the academic mind in 1920, became academic orthodoxy in the mid-twentieth century, under the influence of the New Criticism in America and the Scrutiny school in Britain. I argued in chapter 5 that some authors are indeed better than others but that this position cannot be defended with the ready confidence of, say, F. R. Leavis or Yvor Winters. In the first place, poetic technique at its crucial moments becomes almost untraceably subtle, and rare is the critic who can put his finger (as De Quincey did) on just what gives a poem its brilliance; and second, the hermeneutics of suspicion has alerted us to the ways in which literary judgments may contain disguised politics.
 
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What was described a generation ago as the making of value judgments is now referred to as the establishing of a canon. The task is the same, but the shift in terminology indicates a shift in how it is conceived. Making a value judgment is done by the individual for him- or herself; it implies open-minded reading, followed by unconstrained judgment. A canon, however, is established for others, by means of authority: it assumes a group with cultural power, who legislate. It shifts attention away from the individual act of judgment to the social, even political, situation served by (and governing) that act. So whereas the skeptic thought, a generation ago, that value judgments in literature were unreliable because they were simply rationalizations of individual prejudice, today's skeptic mistrusts them as rationalizations of ideology. A modern Graves would be told by his tutor not that he was temperamental but that he was naive.
And now I add a further complication, the difficulty of disentangling literary judgments not only from ideology but also from history, of distinguishing between (to use E. D. Hirsch's terminology) interpretation and criticism. For I do not know how far the discussion I have just been conducting has been an attempt to recover ways of thinking and feeling that belong to the seventeenth century and how far it has been about what these poems can say to us today. The distinction is clear in theory, almost impossible to sustain in practice.
There is another distinction I must briefly return to. The discussion of religion in the first two chapters was about its function in providing consolation. That it serves this function cannot, I think, be denied, and I regard Freud's little essay, "The Future of an Illusion," as containing a masterly insight. Though I doubt if many Christians accept Freud's position, it would be perfectly logical for them to do so: if religious ideas are "illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind," it is always possible to maintain that God endowed humanity with these wishes so that we would discover his existence. Freud is scathing about those who reduce God to an "insubstantial shadow" and ''persist in calling 'deeply religious' a person who confesses to a sense of man's insignificance and impotence in the face of the universe," and claims that "he who humbly acquiesces in the insignificant part man plays is irreligious in the truest sense of the word." Freud's contrast between the religious and the truly irreligious may, however, be little more than a verbal distinction, for the God of many mystics (as I briefly suggested in chapter 2)
is
an insubstantial
 
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shadow, and the religion of many modern Christians could be described as a sense of man's insignificance. Are these so very different? Both may be felt as a spiritual experience. I have therefore written this discussion from a strictly agnostic standpoint, declining to discuss the existence of God or the truth or falsehood of Christianity, and I have discussed only the social and emotional function of religion for the bereaved. Furthermore, the disrespectful terminology I have occasionally usedthe duck-rabbit, the smile on the Cheshire cattestify to my belief that discussions of this kind are better if they shake free of too much respect; but respect is not the same as reverence, and such stylistic disrespect is quite compatible with a reverence for religious experienceor a belief in God.
* * *
I would like to give the last word to a grieving parentto John Todd, at the bedside of his daughter Martha, aged sixteen months:
I go to her bedside and gaze, and hear her short groans, as long as I can stay, and then go away to weep. I know we ought not to refuse to give this dear one, this sweet child, back to her Maker and Father: she must be better off than with us; but oh! the agony of breaking the heart-strings.
or to Anne Grant, who lost a son of four years, and wrote:
It was my first affliction; and consolation was distressing to me, because I knew how little any one but a suffering parent can enter into that distress where a child, too young to interest any but those about him, is taken away from the evil to come.
7
Both these parents are on the edge of refusing consolation, the edge which (as we saw in chapter 1) Margaret Oliphant stepped over. If our story is to end not with attempts at consolation but with the grief that consolation cannot always reach, then the last word should go to those who cannot make use of it, the stricken mothers who retreated into silence and even despair: Mary Wordsworth and Mary Shelley.
A book about the words that deal with grief should respect silence; and in telling the story of child deaths, real and fictitious, I have sometimes felt that in the face of material so powerful and moving it was unnecessary to

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