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 McGann characterizes Callicles’s lyrics as “a surface of untroubled beauty, an apparition of comfort,” and claims that Callicles “exhibits the limitations of a purely aesthetic approach to poetry in circumstances which are shadowed by social and psychic emergencies.” lxiii While I am in agreement with McGann that in the drama of the poem Callicles’s lyric is revealed to be inadequate to the task of saving (or birthing) modernity, I am suggesting that in the figure of Callicles Arnold offers the reader an example of a modern subject who revels in, rather than seeks to master, the overwhelming spectacle of fragmented experience. In the figure of Callicles, Arnold (perhaps unwittingly) offers an alternative to his vision of the modern subject as a helpless fetus trapped within the maternal “mind.” In chapter two we will investigate the implications of this version of modernity for both poetics and politics as it arises in the poetry of Dante Rossetti. Here it suffices to say that while Arnold figures this pastoral wanderer as something of a relic, an idealized romantic figure whose free access to feeling and sensation are unattainable for the very modern Empedocles, other Victorian writers, from Arthur Hallam to Walter Pater and Rossetti, will name the experience of fleeting and fractured sensation as a definitive, and perhaps welcomed, aspect of modernity.
Furthermore, it must be noted that Callicles is not only a figure for aesthetic pleasure or sensory attunement. He is also a figure for the anarchy of desire. When asked by Pausanias to explain his presence on Etna he answers:
The night was hot, and the feast past its prime; so we slipped out,
Some of us, to the portico to breathe—
Peisianax, thou know’st, drinks late; and then,
As I was lifting my soil’d garland off,
I saw the mules and litter in the court.
(1:1, 37-41)
This narrative of
