I am reminded here of the final passages of The Prelude (published just two years before) where Wordsworth proclaims the mind “a thousand times more beautiful than the earth / On which it dwells.” And yet, unlike Wordsworth who wants to celebrate the boundlessness of the imagination, and announce reason’s capacity to subordinate sublime nature to itself,lxii Arnold’s Empedocles finds himself finally unable to praise either the mind’s superiority or its freedom. For Empedocles, the mind’s thoughts, bearing no relation to the earth’s body, have no “parent element” to return to. This parentless status means, of course, that mind, or “thought,” must be the child of the self, which is to say, of itself. Because of the impossibility of dividing the subject from its thoughts, “mind” is figured as simultaneously the (unborn) progeny and the (mastering) mother of the self. I’ll need here to quote a lengthier passage. This is Empedocles’s final speech just before his suicidal leap:
But mind, but thought—
If these have been the master part of us—
Where will they find their parent element?
What will receive them, who will call them home?
But we shall still be in them, and they in us,
And we shall be strangers of the world,
And they will be our lords, as they are now;
And keep us prisoners of our consciousness,
And never let us clasp and feel the All
But through their forms, and modes, and stifling veils.
And we shall be unsatisfied as now;
And we shall feel the agony of thirst,
The ineffable longing for the life of life
Baffled for ever; and still thought and mind
Will hurry us with them on their homeless march,
Over the unallied unopening earth,
Over the unrecognizing sea;
(2:1, 345-361)
This strange reversal, in which what seems to be “in” us becomes instead around us, holding us within it as a prisoner, should once again be read in the context of Arnold’s conception of modernity. The modern subject becomes the unborn infant of his own thoughts precisely because of the “immense, moving, confused spectacle” before him. He cannot master thoughts, cannot achieve intellectual “deliverance,” specifically because curiosity is excited and comprehension refused. The infantile or perhaps embryonic subject, swaddled, thirsty, baffled (one thinks here of Blake) in a perpetual embrace, longs to be born; “The ineffable longing for the life of life” is the paradoxical homelessness of the fetus who, because it is always housed in a mastering other, is never at home in itself. The subject becomes entombed in the womb of thought because thought, reflecting modernity, has become too vast, multitudinous, and unwieldy to master.
I’d like to take the metaphor of pregnancy a step further in order to suggest that Arnold fails to imagine a birthing of the modern subject from its own mind precisely because he fails to imagine this mind as an “other” body. In order for the subject to be born from the maternal body of thought, which is to say, language, this body must be construed as other than the self. To recognize language’s otherness, to recognize language as both strange and estranging, is to perform the “radical distance” of self de Man discusses in his essay on irony, for to read language as simultaneously self-constituting and other is to accept an ironic distance at the center of subjectivity. The indivisible union between the subject and its thoughts which leads to Empedocles’s final unbirthing is derived out of a philosophy of language and an aesthetics that explicitly rejects language’s otherness, its capacity to make meaning, as it were, on its own, that specifically rejects, as Arnold puts it in the Preface, “the brilliant things which ar[ise] under [the poet’s] pen as he [goes] along” (Works, 1:7). But it is important to say that Arnold’s poem offers its own counter aesthetics through the voice of Callicles, the voice of the poet.
Callicles, the harp-playing boy, unlike the well-meaning Pausanias, is acutely, perhaps obsessively, attuned to the senses. Not only does he represent pure music, his speech is everywhere distracted or absorbed by the sensual. (As Harrison informs us, his name is Greek for “beauty” [Arnold, 48]). He notes the feeling of the air, the scents of herbs, the sounds of the mules’ bells. He is responsive to heat, to the cool of the shade, to the visual effects of light and shadow. And his response takes the formless form of sentences that seem never to end. In the ongoing movement of the senses there is always something new, and thus a refusal to conclude—to complete or organize a narrative line—dominates Callicles’s style. This is the opening to Callicles’s first song:
The track winds down to the clear stream,
To cross the sparkling shadows; there
The cattle love to gather, on their way
To the high mountain-pastures, and to stay,
Till the rough cow-herds drive them past,
Knee-deep in the cool ford; for ‘tis the last
Of all the woody, high, well-water’d dells
On Etna; and the beam
Of noon is broken there by chestnut-boughs
Down its steep verdant sides; the air
Is freshen’d by the leaping stream, which throws
Eternal showers of spray on the moss’d roots
Of trees, and veins of turf, and long dark shoots
Of ivy-plants, and fragrant hanging bells
Of hyacinths, and on late anemonies,
That muffle its wet banks; but glade,
And stream, and sward, and chestnut-trees,
End here; Etna Beyond, in the broad glare
Of the hot noon, without shade,
Slope behind slope, up to the peak, lies bare;
The peak, round which the white clouds play.
(1:2, 36-56)
This exhaustive twenty-one-line sentence, held together by a seemingly endless parataxis, is itself a winding track arriving into dispersal. Callicles’s final image, the playing of the clouds, moves and dissolves into space, as if to suggest the evaporation of the “clear stream” we thought was our destination. But the language in this passage is not only descriptive of visual and sensual detail, it is also constructed by and through the aural and visual experience of its words. Orthographic groupings such as “Etna,” “eternal,” and “verdant,” homophonic relationships, such as the near-rhymes of “cow herds” and “cool fords,” or “ivy plant” and “hyacinth,” as well as the plethora of internal rhyme and alliteration, seem to guide the speech more rapidly forward than does its narrative. To read this almost Swinburnian passage aloud is to get lost in aural sensation. Just as the “beam of noon” is broken into a display of light and shadow, the narrative line is disrupted here by the play of sound. Callicles is Arthur Hallam’s “poet of sensation,” and his unbound speech stands in counterpoint to Empedocles’s sermon of entrapment that follows it.
Jerome