Aspects of Analogy: The Changing Role of the Sister Arts Tradition in Victorian Criticism

Abstract

ASPECTS OF ANALOGY: THE CHANGING ROLE OF THE SISTER ARTS TRADITION IN VICTORIAN CRITICISM* L . M . F I N D L A Y University of Saskatchewan For the Greeks the term avakoyia (equality of ratios or proportions) origi­ nated in mathematics before rapidly enriching the vocabularies of other disci­ plines.1 The concept of analogy has served well in the general deliberations of men, while preserving a special utility for the logician, the linguist, and the natural historian. Analogy does not by its very presence guarantee a visionary revelation of design; even Mr Sludge the Medium can argue "by all analogic likelihood." Yet it has been central to many a breakthrough and has proved an effective aid to the transmitter of new or rediscovered truths. Analogy is too massive a topic to consider here in its entirety. I propose to deal with only a few of its aspects, namely those relating to the Sister Arts tradition: the tradition that affirms or assumes the essential kinship of literature with music, painting, sculpture, and architecture, and sanctions the use of inter-art analogies by those who would discuss, formally or informally, indi­ vidual products of the artistic imagination.2 This tradition is venerable, originating in remote antiquity. However, it is no less responsive to shifts in aesthetic taste than more recent additions to the poet's arsenal and the critic's armoury. The focus here will be mainly on the latter, in order to show that changes in the interpretation and application of the idea of the Sister Arts bear sensitive, resilient witness to the fact that language used by critics, traditions which they invoke, assumptions and authorizations those traditions furnish, all contribute to - and are in turn modified by - developments such as those from Augustan to Romantic or Romantic to Victorian.3 During the period 1830-70 literary critics and theorists had continuing recourse to analogies with the other arts, thereby encouraging the notion of the intertranslatability of literature and its sisters. At first this idea was greeted as amiably as an old friend, or simply taken for granted. (It had all been said before by Simonides and Horace, while Lessing had pointed out the pitfalls.) However, the comfortable consensus on this issue did not remain long unchallenged. On the one hand it was threatened by cultural activists like Ruskin and Arnold in their quest for aesthetic remedies for contemporary social and spiritual malaise; and on the other by cultural exclusivists like the aesthetes (notably Swinburne and Pater) who viewed the idea of the Sister Arts as grounds for the insulation of E n g l i s h S t u d i e s i n C a n a d a , h i , 1, Spring 1977 52 art against the chaos of contemporary experience through a process of quasiincestuous intertranslation. For the former, harmonious relations among the arts could no longer be so easily assumed (Pythagorean fashion) as part of a wider harmony, but had instead to provide a basis for the restoration of cosmos; for the latter, the palace of art could hope to withstand the legions of Philistia only if music, literature, and the visual arts showed ever greater compatibility and solidarity. The use of analogy in criticism during this period sheds light on the complex problems underlying the transition from that brave faith in inclu­ siveness typified by Romantic Universalpoesie - albeit an ironic faith in the case of a Byron or Friedrich Schlegel - to the initial constraints endured by the Victorian apostles of culture and the fastidious selectivity of the aesthetes. The largest proportion of writing about the arts in the first half of the nineteenth century was by men of letters about literature. They also provided much of the comment on music and the visual arts, often without any expert knowledge of either field. It is not surprising then that a survey of early Victorian artistic theory, while revealing some difference of opinion regarding the ranking of the arts, does suggest the general dominance of the word (especially the word in the lyric poem) over the image and the note.4As we shall see, practical criticism reflects a similar situation, with overall support for...