9 On Impulse: Spasmodic Epic 1850–1860 (2024)

Herbert F. Tucker

Although epic did not die with Milton, as is widely supposed, it did spend most of the eighteenth century in something like a coma and on theoretical life‐support. We saw in Chapter 1 how epic survived that century as an ideal to which homage was paid by unquestioning cultural reflex yet how, despite repeated effort on the part of heroic poets, the genre seldom flickered into creative vitality, and then only by such special licensing arrangement with the past as Macpherson was able to contrive in the Ossian books. By the turn of the nineteenth century, in contrast, the epic abstraction had put on flesh again. Vigorous if ungainly, a resurgent epicizing impulse bore down, even while it could not definitively answer, the substantial objections that self‐conscious moderns since Dryden had entertained against its viability. This impulse coursed for decades through myths inherited and homemade; orthodox scriptures and secular ones; histories national, foreign, and global; martial and marital conflict and more. And then, at around the mid‐century point our narrative now reaches, the epic impulse took a turn inwards and found a subject in impulsiveness itself.

The 1850s were the decade of epic spasmody; and this chapter will treat the flamboyant launch and critical interception of the so‐called Spasmodist movement as an episode not just appealing in its own odd way, but instructive for what its inaugural gala and buffo debacle bring out of the woodwork as more abiding properties in the generic grain. We shall consider here the long works of the principal spasmodic poets—Philip James Bailey, R. H. Horne, Alexander Smith, J. Stanyan Bigg, Sydney Dobell—together with their critical assailants W. E. Aytoun (who stopped them cold) and Matthew Arnold (who failed to do that but, in the process, debuted one of literary criticism's eminent careers). The end of the chapterwill suggest in what reputable places the spasmodic impulse found lodging after public humiliation forced it underground, and to what effect it erupted in the decade's most important epic poem, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh.

First, however, spasmody deserves a brief general introduction to twenty‐first‐century readers. They probably know it better than they think. Spasmodic poetics wrote very large certain Romantic tenets that persist among us today, involving the centrality of the self, the sanctity of the moment of heightened perception, and the totality of truth to which creative poets enjoy privileged if fitful access.1 Call it transcendentalism with its exhilarated fans in America (who adored Bailey's Festus especially), or call it spilt religion with the tight‐lipped Modernists of a century ago: Spasmodism was Romanticism in bells and whistles, tinsel and limelight, hawking in the open Victorian market a gospel to which the chief poets of the early century had given unanimous, if less indiscreet, assent. The pleasure Wordsworth took in his own spontaneously overflowing feelings and volitions, Coleridge's supping on the milk of paradise, Shelley's hierophancy of the fading coal, Keats's squirmy erotic dissolves, that being‐more‐intense which Byron tasted in creativity—and, epitomizing all these, Blake's pulsation of the artery in which the poet's work is done: what these Romantic passages had in common Victorian spasmody enlarged upon, and inevitably vulgarized. The pervasive literary‐historical myth that Romantic poetry privileged lyricism tout court here came true at last, and on an epic scale. It was programmatic Spasmodism that fully lyricized narrative, or narratized lyric, in long texts aspiring to string together the best and happiest moments of the poet's mind, and to make the result prevail with a resonance as wide as culture.2

For the poet's mind, under the spell of spasmody, was not alone. It—or the mind of a thinly veiled surrogate named Festus or Walter or Alexis or Balder—was a self‐interpreting aspect of the cosmic mind. Furthermore, because poetic genius embraced all humanity, the insights and transgressions of a protagonist who was endowed with poetic genius were ipso facto heroic. As J. Westland Marston had presciently put it in 1842,

Here in a recognizably Carlylean prose polemic, as elsewhere in verse roaring at full throttle, spasmody speaks for a Victorian human‐potential movement. Its New Age analogy between the growth of the individual mind and the actualization of universal being covers a multitude of sins by recuperating deviancy as an innovative, species‐enhancing experimentation on life. The poet‐hero exemplifies the divinity for which he quests, and at his acutest moment, which spasmodic texts replay with a wonder apparently nothing can blunt, he becomes conscious of precisely this fact, which is his freedom and also his fate.4

The spasm of affirmative self‐transcendence recapitulates in miniature the whole gamut of a cosmic history running from the Big Bang of creation to the Big Hug of no‐fault apocalypse. Internalizing the course of time in one rapturous thrill, and without benefit of clergy, the spasmodic epic replaces the chiliastic judgment and evangelical atonement of 1820s epic with nicer things like welcome and pardon, all in support of the unobstructed epiphany of self. Where there is no guilt and the only error is inhibition, time has no plotted significance beyond the steady accrual of experience as a uniform good. In this sense spasmody is literally optimistic: any time is best, since every time is better than what precedes it; and there is definitely no turning back. That is one reason why the major spasmodic epics assumed a dramatic form, in spite of their entire unsuitability for the stage. (Another reason is that dramatic form finessed what would have been substantial narrativeembarrassments attaching to grammatical person.5) As in nearly all nineteenth‐century dramaturgy, which discountenanced those old epic standbys the flashback and the prophecy, a continuously unfolding present fixed the attention of auditors, or of closeted readers, on what was passing before them in the moment, with an absorptive totality whereby the momentaneous passes over easily into the timeless.6 Even Horne's more conventionally narrated epic Orion reels full steam ahead, with only such fleeting retrospects as pass through a distinctly unreflective giant‐hero's mind between one crisis and the next.7 And if Orion's crises, like those of other spasmodic protagonists, are all pretty much the same, this too befits the uniform temporality of a supergeneric lyrical—dramatical—epical subgenre for which a crisis is a spasm is a wink in the great affirmation which is time.

Spasm is an absorbingly corporeal experience, and the actual theater of spasmodism is not the playhouse but the embodied mind. The dialogue in Bailey's Festus or Smith's A Life‐Drama seems more and more with each passing scene, or accumulating edition, a flimsy pretext for long solo arias, which the reader is to interpret in a performer's and not a theatre‐critic's sense. We are invited, that is, to root for the hero from the inside out. This invitation is reinforced by the peculiarly concrete abstraction of spasmodic imagery, which in obvious ways bespeaks a globally swelled head but conversely spans the heavens by constant reference to a human sensorium.The resulting physicalization of metaphysics tends in sum to trope the universe as a feeling, and a feeling less emotional or moral than sensory and ontological. (Again the heady optimism: attend to the somatic stimulus, and the ethical response will take care of itself.) Orientation toward sensory being has been a feature of epic since Homer; and reference to the integer of the body works overtime to validate the else‐incredible vagaries to whose indulgence spasmodical ambition lies prone. Even where criminal transgression is overtly at issue, as it is in Dobell's Balder, what is imaginatively at stake is how crime feels in its impact on the endocrine and neuromuscular systems.

It is tempting to dismiss such glandular poetics as the literary equivalent of gin: the quickest way out of Manchester, the cheapest of shortcuts to an epic totalization that ought to be harder‐won.8 But we may resist this temptation by recalling our Victorian political economy and having due regard for the fascination of what's cheap. We can then note that spasmody had a creditable role to play in the multigeneric literary history of the British nineteenth century. The movement stood framed on one side by the lyrical sensation poetics of the 1830s, which an enthusiastic Arthur Hallam identified as the early Tennyson's legacy from Shelley and Keats, and which so reasonable a creature as John Stuart Mill excitedly discussed in terms of “a condition of the whole frame” that “pervades the entire nervous system.”9 Waiting on the other side of the 1850s lay the sensation fiction that would enthrall the reading public of decades to come. If the spasmodic embodiment of a lyric agenda in a narrative form failed, it was a failure from which, as from its limited local successes, an entire range of more prudent Victorian authors learned influential lessons.

The juice‐pumping similes we discussed at the end of Chapter 8 suggest that Tennyson and Clough had learned lessons already about the integrative power of a spasmodic physicality, and about the wisdom of filling the void between self and cosmos with some third, body‐mediated term like nation or race. The hornbook they are likeliest to have learned from is Festus: A Poem (1839, 1845, et seq.).10 On its early appearance this work was admired by Tennyson, was pressed on the young Clough in the year of The Bothie by the yet younger and as yet unreconstructed Arnold, and was praised by other epoists from James Montgomery and Ebenezer Elliott to Bulwer‐Lytton and Browning. The poem fared better still in America, where Longfellow pronounced Festus miraculous and paid it the sincerest of compliments by imitation in The Golden Legend (1851). From his eminence of years even Landor, who had published Gebir at about the same age Bailey had reached when the first version of Festus came out, approvingly addressed some rhymed advice to his young successor in headstrong innovation.11 There was something for everybody in Festus; to observe as much is merely to endorse the governing principle of the poem's spasmodic design. That design was, in a word of Bailey's own coinage, omnist (“Village Feast,” 132); and as a statement of epic ambition the word can hardly be bettered. The poem takes the plot of Goethe's Faust and runs with it, traversing this world and the next, en route to its climax in the redemption of all souls: Festus, of course, but also Lucifer, who while prorogued in 1839 was welcomed into the ample final fold in 1845 and forever after. The finale of universal redemption bears out past doom's edge an ethos of plenary indulgence that pervades the many previous scenes in which it has been variously rehearsed. Not that anyone, the devil included, ever does anything very wicked: Bailey's diversitarian message is that every individual deviancy goes to enrich the diapason of God's fullness in time. Festus is a hero because he is a creature of impulse; the moment impulsively lived is mankind'sanalogue to the wholeness of history and the recurrent, instantaneous perfection of the eternal.12

Festus himself becomes increasingly clear about this as the poem unfolds; so did Festus in its successive versions. A long proem that Bailey wrote for the second edition in 1845 blithely disregards “manners, customs, forms, appearances, ∣ Laws, places, times, and countless accidents” (8). Such accidentals are irrelevant to the poet's essential task of transcending them. In the process of transcending them, to be sure, he busily inventories them; and from the first edition a wealth of social and political detail enters the poem under light satirical fire. Sub specie totalitatis the business of firm, sect, and nation is too petty and partial to survive. Even Festus' patriotic attachment to England is something to rise above, literally in his airborne tourism of everywhere, ideologically in his program of a world federation under (the monodramatic logic of spasmodism mandated no less than this) his own benevolent dictatorship: “Let each one labour for the common weal. ∣ Be every man a people in his mind,” Festus exclaims (“Gathering of Kings and Peoples,” 362). “Nations, away with them!” The fact that this slogan from Lucifer's internationalist stump‐speech precipitates a hostile uproar that only apocalypse can quell may be Bailey's one concession to epic's traditional concern with national identity. No matter: when all is made right in the “Heaven of Heavens” finale, Festus' postnationalist cult of personality carries the day.

The whole poem lies in this one‐pentameter exchange—as in a dozen other epitomes that litter its yawning self‐consistency. (Indeed, to the truly omnist imagination the second cue alone will suffice to say it all.) Being, presence, togetherness: Bailey's Heaven is always here and now and for everybody.Given the vastness of abstraction in which Festus trades, the radical collective immediacy of epic spasmody could not be more utterly asserted.13

Bailey's Heaven might double as a description of his presentational format, which places the action, ever and everywhere, right in front of us, orchestrated at the dramatic‐epic pulse rate of one instant per instant.14 Under spasmodic rule “We should count time by heart‐throbs,” since “there is no past; ∣ And the future is the fiction of a fiction; ∣ The present moment is eternity” (“Market‐place” 77, 81). Space, too, proves completely fungible: scene settings like “A Large Party” and “A Drawing Room” occur in carefree alternation with “Air,” “Space,” “Anywhere,” and (the omnist's true haunt) “Everywhere.” Stage direction cannot well be less directive than this; there is a wonderfully firm recklessness to the way Bailey tosses away all external guidance. Done with the compass, done with the chart and the clock too, Festus repudiates contingency, disclaims origins (passed, significantly, is the spelling he favors for past), discounts original sin, and prefers response over responsibility, the whoosh of effusion over the reach of plot. It makes sense that a spasmodic narrative should come in fits, but Festus does so on principle. The amnesically episodic quality of the plot enacts Bailey's declaration of independence from history and the ethic of universal absolution that goes with it. “Yes! if I have sinned, I have sinned sublimely”; “How am I answerable for my heart?” (“Heaven” 205–6).

Penitence is an idea the poem is too open‐minded not to entertain for a while when the time comes. But then the time goes, too, and the poem surges on in free dilation. Such guilt as exists in Festus is not expiated, nor is error rectified; yet both in a way are healed as, superseded in the pageantry of episodes, they melt into the totality of an unconditional acceptance.15 It isas if the stain of guilt that Scott had introduced into the formula for Romantic heroism was extracted in the wringer of 1820s apocalypticism, to leave Bailey's fabric bleached of narrative design, pleasant to the touch, remarkably uniform in texture. This sense of the whole is where Festus' allegiance is due, and he scrupulously pays it, in flash after flash of noncumulative epiphanic intuition. During one uncanny episode added in the 1845 edition Festus provides what we gradually realize is a table of contents, with commentary, for the very poem he appears in, premising that “It has a plan, but no plot. Life hath none” (250). Bailey embedded this scene—captioned “Home,” as if on a gameboard—approximately where in classical epic the hero goes to generic ground zero, descending to the underworld to learn the future from ghosts of the past. Bailey's navel‐gazingly presentist version of this convention anticipates the dumbfounding candor with which his successors in spasmody would produce their own creative procedures for inspection. Laying all their cards on the table, they in effect called in the immense bet that cultural coherentism had placed on epic a century before; paying it back in the auto‐referentiality of macropoetic form, they almost broke the generic bank.

The premise that nothing should be alien to Festus licensed Bailey to give the poem everything he had, which is just what he did for over sixty years. Like his French counterpart Victor Hugo in La Légende des Siècles, and his American disciple Walt Whitman in Leaves of Grass, Bailey packed into successive versions of this baggy book whatever he could think of. In more than a hundred printings the poem grew through the indexed edition of 1864 and the newly prefaced, 52‐scene jubilee edition of 1889—the poem's jubilee, mind, not the Queen's—towards a final 1901 testament whose 40,000 lines quintupled the original. The elephantiasis of Festus imaged the enormity, not just of the author's egotism, but of the culturally constitutive individualism for which his amazing effrontery had spoken from the first. True, King Alfred was thrice as long again, but Fitchett had a tale he could stuff with chronicle and travelogue; Bailey's afflatus is nearly all of it the hot air, good and bad, of imagination. Even when Festus tears off in scene 20 of the 1889 version for a name‐dropping jag, two thousand lines long, on the joint mission of humanity's world‐historical eminences, he is thinking as hard as he can, and the writing is not effortless. As the appropriatelylong final sentence of Bailey's 1889 preface allies his poem with the “self‐evolution of Humanity as one brotherhood,” the grammar makes it impossible to unwind that world process from the process of the poem itself:

The syntactic confusion here need not have been deliberate since, bibliographically as well as thematically, Festus became over the years its own cause for celebration. Excerpts of published applause and critique that Bailey took to printing with the poem put into vivid practice the principle of growth by absorption. If ingestion was the golden rule of life, it was good enough for epic art as well; and Festus repaired itself by recruitment, not emendation. Keeping nothing back, it took nothing back either. Whatever readers disliked, Bailey reasoned, they must not have fully understood; so it was just a matter of being more explicit in the next, perennially forthcoming edition, revised and augmented by the author.

Victorian Britain witnessed better epics than Bailey's, but none so fully heralded the era's manic overdrive. Orion: An Epic Poem in Three Books (1843), also in the vanguard, took aim at the same target as Festus; but it was in every way a cheaper shot. Author Richard Henry (later Hengist) Horne disarmingly acknowledged as much by offering its first edition at a farthing a copy, in “a novel experiment upon the mind of a nation” (preface). Poets don't talk like that, press agents do; and the key to reading Orion without disappointment is to understand it as a talented hack's epic, a literary stunt hustled together as a wager not so much upon the nation's mind as on its taste, and purse. Horne bet that an epic poem pitched from the right angle would sell. (He was right, and the price climbed substantially for later editions.) His angle, shrewdly formed after observing the unstable generic scene during the preceding decade, was to balance the formal classiness of the genre with a contemporary content involving matters of vital national concern.16 And his tool was allegory: Orion bent a roughly Keatsianmythological romance plot of goddess‐love into a fable consecrating to the ideal of liberal progress the masculine energies of industrial engineering and laisser‐faire entrepreneurship.

The giant Orion—less the ancient Greek hunter here than “The Worker he, ∣ The builder‐up of things and of himself” (1.2.5–6)—drains a harbor, throws up earthworks, and performs on his Aegean isle Victorianesque wonders in wrought‐iron with the use of hydrodynamic power. Orion's ideological foil is Akinetos (“the Great Unmoved,” as his Greek name declares), a brother giant so granitic in conservatism that his counterpart Magros from Disraeli's Revolutionary Epick a decade before (Ch. 7) shows in comparison like a chatterbox. The petrification of Akinetos in the last canto may serve here to emblematize the spasmodic habit of reproducing Romantic figures, here the quasi‐geological nature Keats bestowed on his Titans in Hyperion, with a coarsening literality. Horne also embroils his giants at one point (1.2) in what sounds suspiciously like a policy debate on the Corn Laws. For the most part, though, the poet knew his trade well enough to keep the allegory vaguer than this, in pursuit of “a special design, applicable to all times, by means of antique or classical imagery and associations” (1871 preface, iv). That design is “the law of progress” (vii), “the constant advancement of mankind” (xi), which the plot illustrates—progressively, of course—through Orion's frustrated courtship of Artemis, a goddess fond but chaste; his interrupted amours with Merope, a princess ardent but politically off‐limits; and his ecstatic union with Eos, goddess of dawn and thus patroness of potentiality itself, proof divine that, as the poem's oftest‐quoted slogan puts it, “'T is always morning somewhere in the world” (3.2.43). In this triadic poem the consummation of sex solves a dialectic of opposites: even more obviously—because more allegorically—than in the marital‐metaphysical idylls Tennyson and Clough were about to publish (Ch. 8), here dream and substance, divine and human, soul and body “must melt and merge in one” (2.2.341).17

At this point Horne's plot has all it takes to motivate posterity except an incentive program, which materializes when in a final twist Orion is slain and constellated. By great Zeus's decree “His cycle moves ∣ Ascending!” (3.3.273–74) in a perennially Excelsior! vision of inspirational imperfection, as the final lines have it, “merging in the dawn,—∕ And circling onward in eternal youth” (3.3.394–95).18 That Orion's gigantic loss is humanity's gain is a lesson he himself teaches, in what for our purposes stands out as the poem's most noteworthy scene. Shortly before death, he looks out on the Aegean island of Chios and, reading in the variety of its landscape the checkered phases of his love life, finds them all tending uniformly to the promotion of good. Here is a Bildungsepos vision of progressive inclusion worthy—admittedly on farthing‐epic scale—of the omnism of Bailey; true to spasmodic form, Horne mounts on his hero's pleased self‐awareness a poetic self‐awareness to match. For as Orion's eye comes to rest on “Mount Epos” (sic) we are reminded that Chios was not just any isle but Homer's. With “prophetic thrill” we foresee the “after age” when a silver‐haired bard is to teach the epic arts to “his school, ∣ Where the boy Homer on the stony rim ∣ Sat with the rest around. Bright were his eyes” (3.2.87–94). Teach enough schoolboys Homer, and a schoolboy Homer will matriculate. The bright‐eyed pupil on whom Horne's farthing epic calls for class recitation serves here as a prosopopoeia for the long draft that projects of national education made on the canon of heroic poetry. Regarded as a public utility, and rightly so, epic lay under a tricky set of obligations that Orion exposes more clearly than any of its spasmodic congeners: the genre should stay lofty but at the same time should stay open to modern emulation and become accessible to a broadening readership.19

For a liberal like Horne, the curve of an epic's plot ought to figure as progressive both the history of the genre it joined and the evolution of humanity on which any epic worth its salt rendered a privileged, if coded, progress report. The allegorical‐mythic mode of narration that he adopted seems to have struck his 1850s Spasmodist successors as a puny alternative to Bailey's with‐it spirit of big‐stage panorama, which by preference they followed. But before turning to see how they wrought in that spirit, we might note as a defining exception one epicizing work more in Horne's line that was produced by a clergyman‐bard of parts, Charles Kingsley, at a time when his formidable energies were engaged with equal intensity in literary and educational activity. Having labored for several years in the cause of Christian Socialism as a lecturer on literature to workingmen, and as a novelist placing mutual moral uplift in the hands of middle‐ and working‐class readers alike (Yeast in 1848, Alton Locke in 1850), Kingsley turned to versify the Perseus myth in 1852. The title piece of Andromeda and Other Poems (1858) occupies no more than five hundred lines, but then they are long lines, and robust; their unrhymed dactylic hexameters bespeak in Kingsley an epic mind, as they did a few years previously in Longfellow (Evangeline, 1847) and Clough (The Bothie; see Ch. 8).20 More here than in the boys'‐book prose of his bestselling The Heroes (1856), Kingsley makes Andromeda's rescue from the sea‐beast hint broadly at wider liberations: the freeing of pleasure from taboo; the disencumbering of immortality from the curbs of fate yet, in what for this most amorous of clerics was the same stroke, of the comely body from the ascetic soul; the deliverance of clear faith in the human incarnation divine from superstition's “shapeless” and enervating mystery (58).

A torqued moral, this; yet such was the author's “muscular Christianity”: well known today in its own right, yet arguably just another case of the general, glandular‐omnist rule of the epic 1850s.21 Nor are these spasmodizingemancipations merely allegorical; they are for Kingsley, and at precisely the point where his myth‐making draws up towards epic, the vital pith of a continuous cultural history still operative in Victorian times. In a final passage we find that the goddess Athene, having blessed Perseus and Andromeda's union, and foretold their Orion‐like constellation after death, then did more and “planned new lessons for mortals” (495).22 The newest lesson epic knows is always that Homer's school remains in session: the great texts of a culture renew their function in paideia. Conning this lesson briefly in Kingsley's large‐minded tale, we grasp the whole exercise as not just mythic but mythological, in the strict sense of that term. It constitutes a liberal's myth about myth's own progress as the token, and the inspiring beacon, of collective edification reaching out of darkness towards truth. In the next decade major Victorian epoists would take note, working otherwise than Kingsley in formal respects yet working much in his mythic‐exploratory spirit.

The capacious allegories of Horne and Kingsley propose that industrial technology and the liberal arts and sciences all stem from one root with the technē of poetry. All are actuated by the can‐do spirit that has won the heart of bright‐eyed Eos, her of the reciprocating two‐stroke love‐cry “Believe—advance!” (3.2.25). The work‐in‐progress that is modern culture thrives on progressivism, which is itself an ideological work‐in‐progress among whose many factories are epic narratives of uplift, laboring alongside the other arts and manufactures to produce a new age. When Horne published a grab‐bag ofliterary criticism the year after Orion as A New Spirit of the Age (1844), the title owed less to Hazlitt's 1825 Spirit of the Age than it did to the business‐minded reforming public to whose trade wind Horne trimmed his sail (with some unacknowledged help from a dissenter's brilliant daughter named Elizabeth Barrett). His survey of contemporary literature ends with an encomium on Festus and a valedictory dedication to “a Working Man” who looks like Orion, makes out like Perseus, and sounds like an answer to Carlyle's prayers, falling in step with the poet and man of letters as a hero of his time who proves by doing: “The only artist‐work that does good in its day, or that reaches posterity, is the work of a Soul that gives form” (363, 365).23 With this heroic creed Kingsley, foe to the “shapeless,” could not have agreed more; and his “Andromeda” would add for good epic measure, in the voice of Athene exhorting heroes to get married and get to work, “Thence comes weal to a nation” (421).

Look to a poem like Orion, Horne in effect declared, for the essence of the industrious hour's “Soul that gives form.” Within a decade that soul would be giving till it hurt. When Spasmodism properly so called burst on the scene in the early 1850s, it looked a lot like what Horne had predicted. The point‐man for the movement was a bona fide young working‐class poet, Alexander Smith, who had been to school with Ebenezer Elliott, had cheered the 1848 revolutions, and had since then retrenched, along with veteran Chartists like Thomas Cooper, from electoral politics to literary and educational reform—social engineering projects that would have earned Orion's blessing. The Great Exhibition of Spasmodism was Smith's A Life‐Drama (1852), a blank‐verse closet‐drama about a poet‐hero who bestows on the public, of all things, a creation‐to‐doomsday epic poem. As this inbred theme may suggest, the poem was at once a symptom and a victim of the sprawling, celebrity‐nutrient, advertisem*nt‐driven and review‐dependent Victorian print world in which Bailey and Horne had flourished. For A Life‐Drama was an epic written virtually to critical recipe. After a talent‐scouting Glasgow columnist, the Revd George Gilfillan, introduced Smith to the world in excerpts larded with unctuous puffery, readers responded so enthusiastically that publishers were offering the young poet substantial sums for his long poem before it actually existed. In a telescoped permutation of the Ossian craze from a century before (Ch. 1)—untutored Scottish genius now replacing the romance of Celtic antiquities—Smith had to come up fast with many a gross of striking verses and a structure to dangle them from.24 He turned, of course, to the celebrated example of Festus. There he found a prefabricated rationale in Bailey's omnist analogy between the local coupling that was metaphor and the overall interlock that was cosmos, the whole being liberally laced with a self‐referentiality that did the work of structure.

In Smith's hands, however, the joint pressures of publisher's deadline and forerunner's example generated a self‐referentiality qualitatively different.25 Where Festus remained exuberantly naïve in its narcissistic inventory and display, A Life‐Drama constantly betrays its hasty pastiche composition. For one thing, Smith keeps looking over his literary‐historical shoulder: “I'd rather be the glad, bright‐leaping foam, ∣ Than the smooth sluggish sea. O let me live ∣ To love and flush and thrill—or let me die!” (6.89). There is the spasmodic creed, all right, but the allusiveness of its formulation is jarring tosay the least. Ordinarily allusion is an epic grace note, and it was one for which working‐class epoists like Smith particularly strove as a badge of learning. But the closing echo here of Wordsworth's “My Heart Leaps Up”—a double allusion, if the first three words recall “The World Is Too Much With Us”—consorts most oddly with the spasmodic claim to untutored spontaneity over which it reverberates: it is as if Smith meant to set his pulse by another man's spasm. Or again, when Smith delves into his own vein of admittedly often brilliant imagery, he cannot help flicking a glance up, mid‐gaze, to make sure the reader is watching. “Our chief joy,” the hero Walter tells his lady Violet, “Was to draw images from everything; ∣ And images lay thick upon our talk, ∣ As shells on ocean sands” (9.121). So far so good: with the simile in the last line, imagery illustrates itself. But then Violet challenges Walter to a sort of duel by tropes, and they concoct on the spot competing images for the sunset and moonrise they are watching. When he complies (pretty violently at that: “a cloven king ∣ In his own blood”), and she betters him on the moon, and he then breaks off the contest by calling her “Iconoclast!” (9.122), we surfeit quickly on the incestuous archness of what passes for spasmodic wit.26

At such a moment, and the poem teems with them, what was in Bailey and Horne spasmodic writing becomes in Smith programmatic Spasmodism. If the collection of effects that is A Life‐Drama comes to us at second hand, that may be because the calculatedness of its élan is all that Smith has to offer as a working idea of epic unity. Bailey wielded a cosmos, for better or worse, and Horne the ethos of a new world order; but Smith, whose ambition seems to have been coextensive with Gilfillan's aegis, imagines instead a poet who makes bold to imagine such things as a cosmos or a new world order. Where else, then, should Smith find his plot but in the composition and publication of an immensely popular poem, and with what better hero than “A mighty Poet whom this age shall choose ∣ To be its spokesman to all coming times” (2.24)? Scene 1 invokes as its musesPoesy and Fame; scenes 2, 7, and 12 consist mainly of disquisitions on poetry; scenes 3, 6, and 8 hinge on the recitation of poems.27 To say this is not to belittle A Life‐Drama, but to indicate what may have contributed to its remarkable if short‐lived success, the epic consistency with which it sticks to its own premise. The story is about itself, and so are a great many of the tropes that constitute it. The passages quoted above suggest how incessantly the overall design obliged Smith to draw topics from his own anxious modus operandi, the generation of imagery on demand. The nervous creation and exchange of figures recapitulate line by line the larger recursive plot. Conversely the local recursiveness of spasmodic wit may be responsible for Walter's else‐unexplained swerves into guilt during scenes 5 and 10. Disappearing as swiftly as it visits him, the hero's remorse attaches less to anything in the narrative than to the logic of self‐consciousness as such: it arises as an ethical analogue (agenbite of inwit) to the irony of pastiche whereby the image‐driven verse, starved for substance, keeps nipping the hand that feeds it.

Smith's signal example was not lost on a talented epic player whose relegation to the second string may be due to nothing more than his peculiarly infelicitous name, given the mode in which he chose very early to work: J. Stanyan Bigg. At 20 Bigg had produced in The Sea‐King: A Metrical Romance, in Six Cantos (1848) a generational throwback with affinities to Moore's erotically emollient version of the Scott romance model. But already there the complacency with which Bigg's courtship plot of Viking pirate and mermaid accommodated digressive wonders, afloat on irrepressible images of the all‐buoyant ocean, betrayed the maturing Spasmodist within. This potential was realized in 1854 with Night and the Soul, which methodically paved the trail Smith had blazed two years before. Where Smith is desperately, inventively precipitate, Bigg spasmodizes like an old smoothie. In a confidently epicizing twelve scenes he builds his plot on the self‐redemption of a poetic genius named Alexis who is bold in metaphysics, fertile in imagery, and duly tormented by a formulaic dose of conscientious doubt. Yet Alexis's sufferings never ruffle his genial tolerance of the fun that is poked at him, off and on, by an affable set of well‐wishers, nor does he ever really stray far from their social safety net. Coziest of the Spasmodists,Bigg brings Alexis home from generic angst to liberal Christian uplift and a good woman's love at the close. Call it the plush or Biedermeier side of Spasmodism, a bland homage to the spirit in which a Festus reviewer had hailed “a heap of fine things” and Tennyson had commended the “really very grand things” to be browsed up in that ur‐spasmodic warehouse.28 Knock‐offs from Bailey and Smith, the fine things that upholstered Night and the Soul constituted furniture for a middle‐class life enhanced by a taste for liberal ideas imaginatively rendered.

If in Bigg's hands Spasmodism was converted to Christianity, we find the reverse in Thomas Hawkins's contemporary The Christiad (1853; no relation to Henry Kirke White's 1806 epic fragment of the same name). Here a Christian epic converted to Spasmodism. Literally a rewriting of the poet's decade‐old Wars of Jehovah at which we glanced in the previous chapter, the new poem came before the public shorn of John Martin's “eleven highly finished engravings” of apocalyptic scenery from circa 1844, and fortified instead at regular intervals with booster shots of a metapoetic rhetoric that was designed to inoculate the poem against incredulity. In other words, the poem as rewritten expressed with f*ckless, winsome naïveté the spasmodic spirit of the age. Hell‐bent as he had all along been on astonishing the reader and damning the expense, Hawkins laved the contests of Lucifer and (this poet's special anthropomorphic brainchild) Chaos with a superheroic bathos that anticipated his twentieth‐century successors in the comic‐book trade. Now and then the parade of marvels is relieved by a freshly composed passage that brazenly concedes the implausibility of what has just transpired. “All images are useless, metaphors ∣ Are childish in this supernatural page” (1.37); unless the “exacting Muse” can “sublime and open ∣ Incredulous ears,” “ridicule will cover this attempt ∣ To bring the actions of the gods within ∣ The narrow comprehension of a page” (6.230–31).29

The poet thus agrees in advance with the reader's judgment that, where “Exhausted language faileth” (9.449), the result must be “bombast” (6.245). The truculence with which Hawkins dares us to credit the incredible reflects, no doubt, such adverse reactions as The Wars of Jehovah provoked in the interim; but the daredevil self‐referentiality of the newly written passages just quoted on metaphor, language, and the printed page makes the updated Christiad, in its “dread extremity spasmodic” (6.213), quite consistent with what Smith's A Life‐Drama was attempting at the same time. A decade later Smith would publish Edwin of Deira (1861), a highly traditional historical epic about Christianity and kingship that proved as stillborn as A Life‐Drama had been galvanically lively (Ch. 10). What Smith's two long works have in common is systematic self‐consistency; and the very difference between them shows in hindsight—like the transparently inept effort Hawkins made to bring his spent 1840s epic up to 1850s speed—how deliberate a stunt the made‐to‐order poetic of Spasmodism was.

Not so the notorious companion epic of 1854, Balder: Part the First by Sydney Dobell, a poem that was unfortunately made risible then by the same undefended seriousness of purpose that makes it interesting now. An educated intellectual and aspiring theorist of literature and society, Dobell took up Spasmodism in deadly earnest as a program for living that was rooted in a philosophy of subjective idealism.30 “Balderism” was the coinage his preface offered, whether in immodest or jocular mood, as a name forthis philosophy. The offer has had no takers, but we can see now that Spasmodism is what it was, and Spasmodism charged with resentful political animus into the bargain. Once again the hero is a poet, and the reader of this chapter will already have guessed this poet's favorite genre. Apostrophizing the manuscript of his “early planned, ∣ Long meditate, and slowly‐written epic,” Balder muses, “Almost I seem to turn my life in thee” (3.239–42).

It is not just that Balder's masterwork has taken him years to write; he means, with Wordsworth in the recently published Prelude, that the philosophy it communicates entails a fusion of epic with autobiography: “The hand that writes is part of what is writ.”31 Within a fully rigorous presentation of subjectivism, the presence of the subject becomes not optional but, as Balder says of his opus, “the necessary element ∣ Of that which doth preserve me” (3.261–62). Moreover, subjective genius faithfully recorded is also for Dobell an epoch's authentic representation; the integrative conduct of a scrupulously examined life models the order of the world, “a multiform ∣ Supreme event, the single continent of all.” “As God contains the world I will contain ∣ Mankind, and in the solvent of my soul ∣ The peopled and unpeopled ages” (24.307–8). Although this recalls the transactional liberalism of Sordello (“include ∣ The multitude,” “the multitude turn you”; see Ch. 7), Dobell has no more interest than Bailey did in Browning's radically open model of give‐and‐take. The epic chamber of Spasmodism is ultimately sealed, however roomy, and its authority flows from the top down in the name of the individual genius who incarnates human totality.

So seriously does Balder take this epic duty to “be the King of men” (3.28) that he is tormented by its collision with another aspect of spasmodic omnism: the still potent idea of the epic as encyclopedia. In its function as a compendium of cultural essentials the epic poem does not of course say everything, but it must leave the impression that if it had to it could. It was Dobell's distinction among Spasmodists to see that this encyclopedic imperative collides head‐on with another article of Spasmodism's reconstructed Romantic ideology: perspectival individualism. If truth is validated only by the candor of its provenance in the person who shapes it, it is also thereby limited to that person's circle of subjective experience. While this circle is almost infinitely expandable by the enfranchised Spasmodist imagination, there remains one limiting case that, to Dobell's creditas an intellectual, gives his Balder no peace. This is the life‐culminating experience that no autobiographer can narrate, the experience of death (scene 16).32 The poet's frustrated wrestling with this conundrum engenders the kinkiest of several plot devices in the poem: an increasingly heavy flirtation with the idea of murdering his nearest and dearest. His baby daughter dies some time shortly before or after scene 17, apparently of natural causes although remorse over her burial induces some ambiguously infanticidal imagery (18.81–82).33 In any case Balder eventually returns, with scenes 37 and following, to the thought of snuffing out his miserably depressed spouse. Man and wife being one flesh, if he can die vicariously in Amy, Balder can in effect survive death to write the forbidden experience up and thereby crown his magnum opus.

This macabre plan was left hanging with the forty‐second and last scene of the published Balder: Part the First. Dobell promised to avert it in a sequel, making a restored Amy the vessel for fresh redemption all around, Festus‐style. There are a variety of reasons why Dobell never wrote the projected two parts of this sequel, but one of them must be that he could not think his way, out from the impasse his convictions had engendered in part one, into what he wanted to believe instead. Indeed, the skepticism of Balder tends all the other way, until by scene 37 Balder's obsessively minute description of his return home from a day outdoors, his passage through the rooms of the house, and his discovery of Death as a denizen of the bedroom where Amy is sleeping seems to allegorize the resistance not just of death to narrative representation, but also of life in its homeliest details, with which language can never fully catch up. Petty failures, little rhetorical deaths, lie in ambush for the scrupulous poet at every turn of his autobiographical path toward thegreat indescribable of his own mortal end. As a result each passing scene sharpens Balder's sense of the obstacles to epic completeness and erodes the early confidence his manuscript once inspired. The hand that was “part of what is writ” becomes a lost organ, “a living hand rent from its trunk ∣ In the black vortex” (2.196–97, 260). Coming to resemble rather than regenerate the “Society” it bespeaks, “consorted to no end” (30.141), Balder's promised epic deteriorates until its power at the last is merely promissory, a long theoretical bet on posterity: “shalt perhaps revive,” “Mayst leap forth,” “in a light unrisen shalt be called ∣ A microcosm” (42.42–56).

For quite respectable reasons, then, Dobell was convinced both that the epic of the mid‐nineteenth century must take the form of an experimental autobiography, and that such a project was doomed to failure by contradictions internal to its own epistemology. Accordingly he staged those contradictions, using monodramatic form to display a spasmodic impulsiveness much like his predecessors', while at the same time exposing Spasmodism as a system at odds with itself. This is why the thrill of 1850s spasmody in Balder feels most of the time like cramp instead. The important labor of the poem was largely negative with respect to its literary genre, and something of the same kind was true of its political critique too. For the pretensions of bluff objectivity Dobell clearly had little patience: if Spasmodist subjectivism meant anything it meant that every perspective was somebody's, and that a commanding view was more than metaphorically entangled with political relations of power and subordination. When Balder takes aim at tyranny (scene 9) and war (scenes 7 and 23), it is with a lively sense of the imposture that a single vision can practice on a people—and did practice, at just this time, with such events as the crowning of Napoleon III and the waging of the Crimean War (which called forth public lyrics of protest from Dobell and Smith together in the 1855 volume Sonnets on the War).

Alas, the terms of Spasmodism furnished no other remedy for official imposture on this scale than the fantasized imposition of a different single vision, namely the poet's. A case in point was soon furnished by the imminently repentant Chartist Ernest Jones. In 1857 Jones published The Revolt of Hindostan; or, The New World, a poem of fourteen hundred lines written around 1850, if accrued legend be trusted, in the then‐imprisoned poet's blood on the blank pages of a prayer‐book with a moulted feather and a broom straw, and then by a swift revision updated in light of the Indian Revolt. Probably sincere in its vituperation but not thereby worthy of its titular Shelleyan original, this couplet screed inveighs at will against capitaland empire across history and the globe, under cover of a counter‐narrative marching in lockstep from autocracy through oligarchical then bourgeois capitalism into the destined rule of labor. In default of a genuinely pluralist concept of internationalism, the poem's vantage on world affairs is no less imperially monocular than the system of oppression it decries.34 The paradoxical despotism of such a poetic stance as Jones's—or Bailey's, we may add in longer retrospect—is something that Dobell seems to have subjected in Balder, after his fashion, to critique. Spasmodic politics evidently came down to a choice between the new boss and the old, the tyranny of monomaniacal genius on one hand or of traditional, collectively deluded hero‐worship on the other. An intolerable choice, and certainly in Dobell's case an alienating one. Festus had finessed it by preempting conflict in ever more extravagant gestures of euphoric inclusion, but Dobell did not shrink from publicizing it as a crisis in mid‐century culture.

Dobell possessed reasoned and important convictions about matters strongly pertinent to the work of epic in Britain around 1850, together with the nerve to dramatize them in a critically conscientious form. What he unhappily lacked was anything like common sense about how this should be done. It would be relieving to suppose that Balder's thirteen consecutive exclamations of “Ah!”(scene 38) and his sitting “silent for two hours by the window” (stage direction, scene 41) were coups de théâtre épique anticipating Alfred Jarry if not Bertold Brecht. But there is scant reason to read them as anything but Sydney Dobell's earnest, ludicrously wrong guesses at how to make suffering and ennui wring a reader's heart. This is certainly how William Edmondstoune Aytoun read them when he set about one of the most effective parody campaigns ever waged. At one stroke Firmilian, or The Student of Badajoz: A Spasmodic Tragedy (1854) froze in its woozy tracks the movement that its subtitle branded into Victorian literary history.35Planning his contraceptive strike with at least as much thoroughness as we may suppose lay behind the poems he targeted, Aytoun mimicked their techniques so faithfully that they emerged as just that, techniques, rather than the ingenuous effusions they pretended to be.

He went first after Smith's critical patron Gilfillan, by publishing in Blackwood's Magazine for May 1854 a review, copious in extracts by even Victorian standards, of a purported new book by one “T. Percy Jones.”36 When this salvo aroused widespread curiosity, Aytoun changed Gilfillan's hat for Smith's. He obliged the public by creating his own counterpart to A Life‐Drama, and by the same hasty method as Smith's at that: Aytoun strung out extracts and filled in gaps until he had put a new 2000‐line dramatic poem into the hands of the public before the end of the year. A most plausible preface condemns Spasmodism by defending it. Appealing to literary precedent and principles of reader response, Aytoun∕Jones says in favor of genius and excitement and depth, and in extenuation of indecorum and fragmentation and lapse, pretty much what might have been said by the movement's defenders—and indeed was said, a matter of weeks later, by Dobell in the preface he concurrently composed for the second edition of Balder, neither author having seen the other's work beforehand.37

Firmilian is no more consecutive or rewarding to summarize than the works it burlesques, but it does have the advantage of a more physically energetic protagonist. To itemize only the greatest hits, the inevitable eponymous poet Firmilian trashes his copy of Aristotle (a drag on imagination), dynamites a cathedral, practices homicide for its imaginative benefits, sets up a sexual ménage à quatre, and throws a rival poet over a parapet to crush a Gilfillanish critic who has just finished beseeching Apollo to send the world a bard “unsoiled ∣ By coarse conventionalities of rule” (scene 10). Conventionalities of rule, of course, are exactly what this parody was written to support, as was virtually everything Aytoun wrote. As we sawbriefly in Chapter 8, he belonged to the proud Tory constabulary of Swift and Pope, Gifford and Frere, whose mock‐epics broke literary rules in order to refresh a reader's thankful esteem for them—and for the social rules to which they corresponded. The rules for poetry have been so often broken, molten, and recast since Aytoun's day that his example provides invaluable testimony that once upon a time Spasmodism was felt as a force for cultural subversion that really did need to be reckoned with. What seems to us merely out in left field looked to the Victorian conservative like a flank of the left wing: the premium that Spasmodist poetry placed in theory on subjective power, and exemplified in the rolling fluency of its creative practice, bespoke cultural values whose linkage to Chartist and other demands for a voice, or to sexual and other kinds of emancipation, Aytoun never doubted for an instant.38

He paid a subtler homage to the power of Spasmodism in his parody's local texture. It was comparatively easy to ridicule Balder and A Life‐Drama for want of structure; but sustaining mock‐Spasmodism for scores of lines at a stretch was something else again, since at the level of versification and imagery the parodist had to meet his antagonists where they were strongest. Compounding the problem was the ever‐present proclivity of Spasmodist writing towards a bathos—Smith constantly skirts it, Dobell will without notice pitch into it headlong—that defies parody. What resulted in Firmilian was the production of whole passages that remain indistinguishable in movement and verve from their despised originals. For example:

Manfully storming the enemy's prime redoubt—the spasm itself—what was Aytoun to do in this delectable passage but confess in his own despite that spasmodic abandon was having its way with him? In the same month that brought the first installments of Firmilian to public light Aytoun wrote to no less an intimate than Theodore Martin, his “Bon Gaultier” collaborator in 1840s ballad parody, how “very curious” it felt to dabble in spasmody, and“how very closely some of the passages approximate to good poetry.”39 What apparently had not happened with his balladry burlesques did happen here, and it spooked Aytoun like a visit from his better genius. It promoted him, for once in his life, into the exquisite upper circle of satire, where Dryden and Byron had shed their agendas and lived the double life of their victims; where the dummy possessed the ventriloquist and made him, like Balaam, chant a glory not his own. The fitful but authentic Muse that haunted Spasmodism gave Aytoun his finest hour; and the authentic homage she extorted played a critical role in the effectiveness of an attack that was at last so generously comprehensive that it left nothing to say. Readers of Aytoun's next and last long poem, the 1856 historical romance Bothwell, have suspected him in that high‐minded work of plagiarizing Firmilian, plucking out its most promising bits for rehabilitation in a sober, respectable home. If so, the theft was fruitless: the Muse proved fickle, the thrill was gone.40

A critic now much better known than Aytoun, though much less noted at the time, spoke out in prose and verse to much the same purpose as his. Writing in defense of epic law and order, Matthew Arnold prefaced his 1853 Poems with a manifesto whose pretext was the suppression of a long dramatic poem, Empedocles on Etna, that his better critical judgment had outgrown, but whose occasion was his revulsion at Spasmodist poetry and its apologists. These latter included his best poetic friend Clough, who had just reviewed Smith's A Life‐Drama appreciatively and to whom, as was noted above, a younger and less fastidious Arnold had recommended Bailey's Festus just a few years before.41 Along with the essays he proceeded to write On Translating Homer (1861), Arnold's preface of 1853 has transcended its occasion and attained visible magnitude in the lesser critical constellation that is post‐Romantic neoclassicism. Its preference of what isancient, impersonal, and well‐built to what is modern, idiosyncratic, and expressive needs no rehearsal here beyond Arnold's own summary of a set of theses Le Bossu (see Ch. 1) would have approved: “the all‐importance of the choice of a subject; the necessity of accurate construction; and the subordinate character of expression.”42

What does deserve emphasis is how tied to its 1850s occasion this well‐worn argument was. Like others who police “boundaries and wholesome regulative laws” (“Preface,” 671), Arnold cultivated a sense of the literary law that owed its shape to the crimes that had come before his jurisdiction; his judicial opinion and remedy breathe the same air as Spasmodism, and reflect the same polarized light. For all its chaste reserve, there is something a little obsessive about the abundance of detail in which Arnold expresses the shortcomings of expressivity, detail, and abundance; and an exasperated note of epic‐culturalist excess creeps into the supplementary preface he subjoined in 1854, denouncing “the great vice of our intellect, manifesting itself in our incredible vagaries in literature, in art, in religion, in morals: namely, that it is fantastic, and wants sanity” (673). Further, the honors in which Arnold dresses his ostensibly self‐denying aesthetic draw regularly on an affective lexicon of heightened stimulus and response: “the effect produced” by observing the rules of sound structure will be “enjoyment,” nay “delight,” because a long poem will be “more intense” with the rules than without them, more “pregnant and interesting.” As with Aytoun in the throes of parody, Arnoldian neoclassicism begins to look less like an alternative to Spasmodism than like an alternate route to the same 1850s destination: sensation intensified by art. In this regard it is curious to hear Arnold lauding the benefits of a classical education, in what is a direct hit at the autodidact Smith and scene 2 of A Life‐Drama—the educated elite “do not talk of their mission, nor of interpreting their age, nor of the coming poet; all this, they know, is the mere delirium of vanity” (669)—and to remember, hearing this, that within ten years Arnold's talk as a Professor of Poetry (1857) and functioning critic (1864) will be of little else.

Meanwhile, it remained for him, like Smith and Aytoun, to reinforce precept with example and, having suppressed one faulty kind of poetry, toshow what deserved to take its place. This he did with “Sohrab and Rustum” (1853) and “Balder Dead” (1855), each initially subtitled “An Episode” and thus enrolled in the classic‐torso subgenre with which we have seen poets since the 1790s placing epic ideas before the public like so many pilots for television series. As there is no record of Arnold's going further than either of these blank‐verse demonstration pieces into the Persian or the Norse epic it might have formed part of, presumably each demonstration was complete in itself. By and large to students of Arnold's poetry the two episodes have demonstrated the viability of an epic manner that, while admittedly more academic than bardic in its drapery and carriage, does subordinate a workable style to a traditionary action of noble scope and inspiriting grandeur.43 To students of Victorian epic, though, the two episodes will demonstrate something else, which has to do with Arnold's peculiar fondness for the heroic simile. Across several long runs of “Sohrab and Rustum,” in particular, similes so impede the tale as to take it over: they become a sort of alibi for narrative, a diversion into textual pleasures taken lefthandedly by the way. The unmistakable contemporary counterpart to digressive indulgence of this kind was none other than the self‐delighting impulsiveness of Spasmodism, where the favorite trope was simile and the grounding premise a running analogy between poetic assimilation and the attractive force that held the universe together.44 It is as if Arnold's imagination, averse to his theory or mistrusting its emotional effectiveness in practice, conducted a shy traffic in contraband with the very sources that his theory repudiated. Seeking refuge in strongly troped exercises of a passion that lies outside his classically sculpted action, he nurses along in “Sohrab” a subliminal feeling that finally surfaces to flood with melodrama the narrative climax of a father's stricken recognition of the son he has unknowingly slain.45

“Balder Dead”—admonished perhaps by inauspicious conjunction with Dobell's poem—weans itself away from such contraband, and as a result nearly perishes of sangfroid. “Enough of tears,” Odin tells the gods as soon as their beloved Balder has died, invoking as cold comfort the “doom” of “fate”: “Weep him an hour, but what can grief avail?” (1.18–27). Against the divine decorum of this severe reality principle no character very successfully rebels, nor does simile offer any such culture of the feelings as nourished “Sohrab and Rustum.” The poem catches fire only when Balder's funeral barge does, in the one ritual outlet for mourning that Odin's regime prescribes: eloquently hungry, tongues of flame “licked ∣ The summit of the pile, the dead, the mast ∣ And ate the shrivelling sails; but still the ship ∣ Drove on, ablaze above her hull with fire” (3.189–91). This uniquely strong imagery would not be out of place in Dobell's Balder, and that was reason enough for Arnold to impound it within an officially designated crematory precinct. Unfortunately, the antispasmodic hygiene that confines mourning to one set hour, and imaginative release to one descriptive verse paragraph, deprives the tale of something its own logic requires: the credible rendition of an heroic love. The poem tells us again and again how well Balder was loved by all who knew him; but this remains hearsay, the rumor of an emotion which the poem's stoic discipline forbids it to render substantially.46 All too evidently the love Balder inspired has vanished with him from the epic world Arnold steeled himself to imagine. It is grimly fitting that in the final scene a sidekick god named Hermod should feel a cordial impulse to break divine ranks and follow Balder into Hell no matter what—and that he then should successfully resist it. “A power he could not break withheld” (3.558): the self‐denyingly terminality of that phrase, alas, speaks volumes of the poetry Arnold would not write.

Subtextual spasm is isolated and quelled in Arnold's austere epyllia only by the drastic expedient of inducing anaesthesia and paralysis. This syndrome so nearly inverts the spasmodic one—where fertile, free‐style spontaneity wings it on a trope and a prayer—that we may infer beneath both the spasmodic and the neoclassical complaint a disorder more basic. Both sides were playing an all‐or‐nothing game: both succumbed to a blinding drivethat identified self‐assertion with the invalidation of rivalry and led ultimately to a program of exterminating the competition in the literary equivalent of genocide. Each party laid claim to the value of totality by denying that totality might be compassed in any other way: omnivorous sensibility on one side, and finished classic planning on the other, agreed on their mutual exclusion—and on nothing else. This insistent incompatibility heralded a new situation for epic circa 1850, of which the subjectivist premise of Spasmodism had been an early expression. Hitherto epic wholeness had been taken to mirror the given coherence of reality; now, however, it seemed a property less intrinsic to the world than imaginatively postulated and derived. Wholeness was becoming a question for demonstration requiring proof, and proven differently depending on the differing assumptions, or subject positions, from which proof began.

The situation superficially resembles what we found in Chapter 7 with the forensic or parliamentary epic of the first Reform decade, only now the old 1830s spirit of openness and compromise has given way to a hardening of position. (One sign of this difference between 1830s and 1850s epic is the attenuation of dialogue within the latter, perhaps most canonically familiar from Arnold's Empedocles, where dialogue withers before our eyes and the final act is pure soliloquy with lyric accompaniment.) Overall, and in retrospect, this new development seems a shrill harbinger of the imperial consolidation that was increasingly to govern British life during the second half of the century. Where a perspective implied a cosmos, and the articulation of an epic text constituted a public bid to grasp that cosmos—totalize and so possess it—there must ensue a competitive rush for comprehension in which the Reform habits of diplomatic recognition and negotiation among perspectives were dismissed as so much distracting, and to that extent debilitating, waste of motion. That world view would prevail which first established its construct as the world, period. In such a contest, to acknowledge the existence of rival perspectives ipso facto weakened one's position; to concede their validity, on any terms not overcome by assimilation to one's own, was lethal.

What lay at stake, now as always in the history of the genre, was the question of worldview: how to monopolize Weltanschauung by getting a corner on totality.47 There is something inherently paradoxical about such acoup, yet in truth it has never been far from our story in this book; we have seen it emerge with force in Romantic epic nationalism (Ch. 3) and in the sectarian apocalyptics of the 1820s (Ch. 6). It attained maximum ramification, however, in the mid‐century climate that fostered on every hand what we now call the ideology of “separate spheres”—a phrase apt to the clamorously incommensurable and mutually exclusive spheric totalities of which epic writing from the 1850s leaves so distinct a record. It was separate‐spheres ideology that created and supported such diverse phenomena as mid‐Victorian gender identities; the relations between work and leisure, public and domestic life, science and religion, commerce and aesthetics; and increasingly, at the horizon of these figurative hemispheres, the partition and control of the globe under rampant imperialism.48 It may be improper to bring all this heavy historical artillery to bear on a handful of not very successful poems. But their authors would not have thought so, Aytoun and Arnold included; and the very disparity that spasmody highlights between poetic ambition and achievement makes the essential point in another way. Within the history of epic, Spasmodism's antinomian monomania, and the conservative reaction against it, signaled a newly exclusionary intolerance exercised in the name of spheric comprehensiveness—not confessedly of sect or nation but of wholeness as such, a preemptive value conditioning all posterior acts of evaluation.

The poetic results of this development were often discouraging, sometimes appalling. As Chapter 10 will show, in order to break its splintering grip and reaffirm a broader generic foundation the major Victorian epoists of the 1860s would throw onto the cultural category of myth all the weight it would bear. In the meantime, once Aytoun had fatally pricked the Spasmodist bubble the later 1850s witnessed a proliferation of what might be called, with a due sense of the paradox the term involves, specialty epics. The book market promoted this development with translations catering to ajuvenile readership: Kingsley's sample from the Odyssey and other classic tales done up for children (The Heroes, 1856) and H. H. Milman's from the Mahabharata (Nalopákhyánam, 1850, rev. edn. 1860) brought to new refinement a literary brokerage that presented ancient totalities in a modern, customized format. This idea, which had already attracted Macaulay in the Lays of Ancient Rome and now beckoned to Arnold from Persia and the North, would only gather momentum as the decade of the Crystal Palace ushered in Britain's most fervently museological era. The specialty epic took another step in the same direction: typically written in first‐person monodramatic form, this kind of poem centered on an individual who spins a world that not only contains him or her but, by generic imperative, claims to articulate the structure of reality as apprehended by the entire class of persons to which he or she belongs.

From an unapologetically eccentric standpoint, poems of this sub‐epic kind elaborate a heterocosm that, being self‐sufficient yet also markedly abnormal, solicits in the reader a species of sympathetic patronage whose ultimate object is support of the cultural norm with reference to which their eccentricity is gauged. We find the pattern humbly set in the “Passages from a Boy's Epic” that The Leader ran serially for several months in 1852. “'Twas a boy's epic and a boy's mistake” (545), confesses the anonymous author; yet when his parade of declamations reaches the young god Bacchus it becomes clear that minority has its own privileges: “dying men” while inferior to immortals know in love a “large passion” foreclosed to their divine superiors, since “starry looks ∣ May not flush high, nor deathless pulses throb ∣ With the sweet fire that burns in lowlier blood” (977). This is in little the (Keatsian) rationale and practice of Spasmodism, and its presence in a nameless boy's epic shows where the spasmodic impulse would hide out after the debacle of Firmilian. It would go underground, there to fertilize a poetry imputed to a congeries of underlings that included children and women, ethnical and national outlanders, deviants and criminals. From America the throb of Longfellow's widely circulated Song of Hiawatha (1855) was ennobled through a double primitivist displacement: Native American matter, basketed in verse woven from the orally persistent parallelism of the Finnish epic Kalevala. Beginning that same year, the self‐made primitive Walt Whitman drew increasing notice for the spontaneous‐me cadences in Leaves of Grass. Democratizing idiosyncrasy, Whitman's free verse came out and named itself what Spasmodism had been all along, a Song of Myself.

It was also in 1855 that Alfred Austin, who will be with us off and on for several chapters to come, published anonymously at the age of 19 Randolph: A Poem in Two Cantos.49 The irregularly rhymed tetrameters of Austin's patchy, stormy narrative captured the mood of the hour—a protean quarry of which this most narrowly ambitious careerist of his poetic generation seldom lost sight. Just now the mood of the hour was spasmodically feelingful alienation, centered by Austin in a culturally displaced Polish noble who enlists to fight in Napoleon's grand army, being reft of his homeland (partitioned), estranged from his sweetheart Berenice (politically radicalized, and anglophile into the bargain), and betrayed by his best friend Hubert (gone over to the Russians). Crazed by battle and nearly dead with hunger and cold, Randolph crosses from the nadir of canto 1 into canto 2 and the nursing care of Berenice, who has given up politics for religion's sake—a change that lays out with unusual frankness one side of the spasmodic legacy. The other side of course is the heroism of sensation, in which Randolph may be claimed as the most literal sob story of its decade. For fifteen pages the young protagonist's tears fall in a paroxysm of remorse over the love he threw away, in a crying jag that sluices the awkward transition to his final hours when, a still remarkably lachrymose old monk‐penitent (2.95), he learns that his abbot‐confessor of many years has been none other than Hubert, the intimate whom his boyhood rejected. That Randolph has never once in all this time lifted his veiled and dewy eyes the “kindly weeping” reader can well believe (2.105), so inward is this work's emotional orientation and so consistent its spastic registration of the isolated body's relation to the historical world, in the form of a sequence of glandular symptoms.

Later a still less accomplished poetic adolescent, Irish‐born teenager Kinahan Cornwallis, effected a shotgun marriage from Down Under between sentimentalist effusion and spasmodic intensity in the thirteen books of Yarra Yarra; or, The Wandering Aborigine (1858). Cornwallis sends his Australian outcast up and down the continents, a witness to the Crimean War (book 3), prophet of electronics and interplanetary travel (book 8), suitor to Creole lass and Englishwoman (books 9 and 13). Where anticolonial tirade adjoins the thrills of top‐speed global tourism, and exultant rendition of military carnage consorts with expressions of utopian pacifism,all that holds the farrago together is spasmodic transiency at its briskest: “We pulsed each fleeting moment quickly by” (13.206). Betting that an expatriate Aborigine of untutored mind and unjaded senses might function as a sort of human camera rendering up uncensored to the modern world its phenomenal form and ideological pressure, Cornwallis confected in Yarra Yarra a rough triumph of reverse ethnography. And the crown of Yarra Yarra's sentimental education is his mastery of the contemporary dialect of the Western tribe, a spasmodic magniloquence he seems to have learned from Smith and Bigg: “Each picture of the past doth o'er me gleam ∣ In panoramic beauty far along ∣ Down the deep vista of time's boundless shade” (13.207).

The inclusion of Russian episodes in Randolph and Yarra Yarra reflects the coincidence of the spasmodic culture wars with Britain's most conspicuous mid‐century military effort, the Crimean War of 1853–56. This coincidence makes the anonymous 1855 appearance of Thulia Susannah Henderson's Olga; or Russia in the Tenth Century: An Historical Poem both predictable in principle and anomalous in practice. With an historicist austerity comparable to Arnold's in the likewise distantly topical “Sohrab and Rustum” (the Eastern Question, displaced), and with something too of Cornwallis's tourism, the poet focuses her ten books of squared‐off blank verse on things in their faraway, still half Scythian tenth‐centuriness. Henderson pays lip service to today with a prefatory reference to the Crimean conflict, an avowal that the tsarina of the title (a Christian convert who worked in her rude day as an “advocate for peace,” iv–vi) was essentially a protestant avant la lettre, and one exceptionally dogged stretch of semi‐delirious prophecy in which Olga from her deathbed beholds the train of tsars who are to succeed her, right through Catherine the Great, the burning of Moscow to spite Napoleon, and at last a lurid glimpse of troops bivouacked by the Black Sea (book 9). Between these early and late concessions to contemporary relevance Henderson pursues the task she really has at heart. This is to set, against a background of sometimes literally Byzantine political intrigue including Olga's courtship by the Emperor Constantine Porphyrogenitus, and the slow, nonviolent supplanting of a pagan by a Christian dispensation of “moral more than outward force” (5.151), the strenuous enumeration of details drawn from daily life in old Kiev.

Fashions in heraldry and jewels (book 4), funeral rites and bills of fare for feasting (book 5), decorated Easter egg exchange (book 2), winter laundry done through holes in the ice (book 6) diversify the scene for their ownsake—and, refreshingly, not for the spasmody they might have been parlayed into. In place of the muse, Henderson enrolls the epic poets as so many historians in one “ponderous tome” and invokes poetry itself to her aid, which while it may savor of spasmodism is actually anything but. “I nerve my soul to strike its varied notes” (1.2): were this the Dobell line it looks like, it would summon an entourage of images making that nerve and that stroke matters of physical excitation. Such embodiment finds no place in Olga, surely in part because the heroine is a grandmother over 70 years old—a literary development exceedingly rare in its century whatever the narrative medium, and one altogether unique among the poems this book treats. Another reason has to do with gender: the dignity with which Olga dispenses justice in the royal courts (book 7) and generally holds her fractious royal family together required Henderson to practice a womanly poetics rather of the sensible than of sensibility. In their mass the many objects the poem inventories tether the poem to ordinary realities, a prudent regard for which undergirds the tsarina's ethic of Christian temperance. If the result of such conceptual boldness was aesthetically meager, Olga nonetheless marked a respectable stage in women's verse narrative, re‐feminizing an heroic sovereign whom a leading authority had expressly praised for her “masculine qualifications.”50 Henderson's was an example Barrett Browning would surpass just a few years later when Aurora Leigh wed, to Olga's feminine respect for the things of life in their multiplex discreteness, what lay beyond Henderson's range of daring: a fully sensuous feminism of the incarnate self.

The same “historical” genre with which Olga was affiliated had been claimed shortly before by Nicholas Michell, though his Spirits of the Past: An Historical Poem (1853) had actually been a quite different sort of work. This compilation of four dozen stanzaic prosopographies—brief lives gathered into three books of “Scripture Characters,” “Military Heroes,” and “Celebrated Women”—on one hand spelled out most explicitly the tendency to fragmentation that would characterize the immediate aftermath of Spasmodism. But in another sense it was a poem twenty years ahead of its time, since, as we shall see, shortly after Michell issued Spirits in a third edition of 1867 an eclectically anthological spirit would dominate the production of long British poems, bending them in an epic direction by habitual referenceto a progressivist plot of civilized triumph. To this plot Michell in the 1850s lacked access; and without something like it his portrait collection could not “lay claim to the honours of an Epic composition, for the Epic demands one continuous narrative” (Preface, v). For connection between incidents the poet relied instead on “desultory reflections,” and the nervous energy of these betrays his kinship with the spasmody of the moment. Thus Michell's first episodic transition, from Cain's career to Moses', exults that “Mind can follow time's far‐sweeping track, ∣ Ploughed through creation,” with “no bar—no bourne—no resting‐place” unless it be “time's verge—the final hour of doom!” (1.1.18). At the last the historian‐poet celebrates his time travel as if it were a species of spasmody: “that deep rapture which devours ∣ The ardent heart, half frenzy though it seem, ∣ Holding its fancied commune with the dead” (3.3.325)

It was at this same time, but on unimpeachably British grounds and with consummate skill, that the new poet laureate Tennyson outfitted himself to work the underground vein of ardent rapture from which Spasmodism had tapped out its bangles and gauds. Critics assailed Maud (1855) mistakenly on many accounts, but when they called it spasmodic they were dead right. Maud was not an epic; yet it did, like the outlandish poems just enumerated, thump the tom‐tom in different tempi all keyed to a body's pulse. This body moreover was a microcosm of realities beyond itself, not only suffusing the landscape (“so warmly ran my blood ∣ And sweetly, on and on ∣ Calming itself to the long‐wished‐for end, ∣ Full to the banks,” 1.18.601–03) but even spanning the planet in a long heartbeat (“Blush from West to East, ∣ Blush from East to West, ∣ Till the West is East,” 1.17.591–94). With civil strife on its mind and imperial war on its conscience, Tennyson's most personal, most driven poem loosed over the Victorian rooftops a barbaric if not downright psychopathic yawp:

The indecorum of this sensationally accomplished spasmody is aggravated by its emanating, not from the eccentricities of Hiawatha or Yarra Yarra, but from the very citadel of breeding, a English gentleman's country estate.

The shrewdest commentary on all such 1850s crypto‐Spasmodist activity came from a poet who had every reason to observe it with interest. Robert Browning, having given his all in Sordello and gotten nothing in return, would wait till the late 1860s to hazard an epic comeback. In the interval, however, he had brought to great refinement the dramatic monologue, a short‐ to mid‐range genre that in form resembled the swollen lyric monodramas he now saw his contemporaries taking to epic lengths, but that included the dimension of ironic self‐critique they crowded out.51 Browning applied the analytic powers of the monologue to a diagnosis of the contemporary epic condition in “‘Transcendentalism: A Poem in Twelve Books’” (1855). Barely fifty lines long, it impersonates an elder poet advising a younger against, as it were, turning into Matthew Arnold; that is, against devoting verse to the exposition of “naked thoughts” (3) instead of “images and melody” (17). Rather than propose “subtler meanings of what roses say,” the true poet is he who provides by imaginative alchemy “the sudden rose herself,” conjured spasmodically into existence with the “venting” of “a brace of rhymes” (36–40).

Yet the elder poet conspicuously fails to take his own advice. The way he sticks to prosaic discourse, and conjures only by proxy, introduces a complex irony focused much less on the Transcendentalism of the junior would‐be epoist he lectures than on the odd crook in his own posture.52 On analysis the speaker's position proves to be a lower‐case, ad hoc transcendentalism of distinctively modern stripe, which wants at once to talk upan elementally felt wholeness and talk down to it. Thus the liberal Browning spotlights both the conservative and the caustic sides to the patronizing of literature as Aytoun and Arnold practiced it at mid‐century. Follow the inverted commas: flushing out into the open the invisible air‐quotes whereby epicizing Victorians hoped to transcend modern circ*mstances while they of course disclaimed any ambition to “transcend” them, the irony of Browning's quote‐buffered faux‐epic title tells against most of the writers this chapter has discussed. Exposing the hidden affinity between two apparent incompatibles—an omnism that sees it all and a criticism that doubts it—Browning here probes a central Victorian ambivalence about the subjective grounds of assurance.

In preparing this exquisite miniature Browning might reflect, a little ruefully, on the introversively genius‐centered narratives with which his own career had begun two decades earlier: the rhapsodic Pauline (1833) and especially the proto‐spasmodic closet‐drama Paracelsus (1835). More to the point, he had the advantage of working alongside—because he was married to—the author of the most accomplished new epic of the mid‐century.53 Elizabeth Barrett Browning had been observing the poetic scene for years, and with a circ*mspection that matched her husband's. This vigilance let her make Aurora Leigh (1856), among other things, a compendium of nineteenth‐century epic modes. Having served apprenticeship in Romantic martial nationalism as early as 1820 with The Battle of Marathon (Ch. 6), and invoked its fierce spirit again in the recent Casa Guidi Windows (1851), Barrett Browning skirted that mode here, but in a circuit that rounded up nearly all of its successors.

The long final scene of Aurora Leigh concludes, like many an 1820s epic, with a vision of the New Jerusalem out of Revelation (9.939–64), having begun with the extended apocalyptic image of a city drowned beneath the opening heavens (8.28–61). That scene and the corresponding second book comprise balanced debates in which Aurora and Romney Leigh touch on various condition‐of‐England issues that update a leading epic device fromthe Reform era (Ch. 7); the second half of the central book 5 reports on a glittering soirée aswirl with themes and viewpoints more topical still. As a Bildungsepos the poem details and comments incisively on more than one educational curriculum: Romney's and Marian Erle's in passing, but chiefly Aurora's, for whom the learning curve leads through the English countryside to London, Paris, and back to her native Florence, in general acknowledgment of the tradition of heroic quest romance, and with a smart nod to the 1840s export—import trade we discussed in Chapter 8. Such sampling and incorporation of generic conventions especially suit the poem's status as a Kunstlerepos, in which capacity it gleams with nuggets of literary and aesthetic theory, pivots on an ars poetica several hundred lines long in which the contemporary viability of epic is a leading issue (5.139–222), and casts a shrewd eye here and there on what the volatile book trade portended for the Victorian poet's calling.

What it portended most recently, of course, was Spasmodism, and Barrett Browning's appropriation of that movement's unruly energies was integral to the success of her masterpiece.54 Bravely and cannily exploiting spasmody for the platform it offered women's poetry, she harnessed its authentic power to an epic design that went beyond anything accomplished by the line of poets from Bailey to Dobell. Aurora Leigh sports an eponymous title like Festus and Balder; like them it maximizes intensity by keeping its action flush with the writer‐protagonist's consciousness; and like them it strives for an extremity of textual presence by grafting, as will be seen in a moment, something like a spasmodic closet‐drama format onto the first‐person narrative lately published in Wordsworth's Prelude and a bumper crop of recent novels (e.g. Jane Eyre, David Copperfield, Alton Locke). Finally, like the spasmodic epics Aurora Leigh is awash in the juices of an inexhaustibly fluent imagery. Shudder, pulsation, outburst, and spasm are the tropes of creative power here; and in the best 1850s tradition they serve Barrett Browning as a somatic epic machinery connecting sensation to purpose, “flesh” to the “sacrament of souls” (5.15–16), “physics” to a “larger metaphysics”(6.206–7). The mountains, “panting from their full deep hearts,” sympathize by “mutual touch ∣ Electric”—and synaptic enjambment for good measure (1.623–24). Thevery galaxies drip with planetary “lymph” (5.3) as God, “intense, profuse—still throwing up ∣ The golden spray of multitudinous worlds,” churns on in “proof and outflow of spontaneous life” (3.753–57).

The great hydraulic heart of all this surge, for Barrett Browning as for Alexander Smith, is poetic imagination. In a text already lubricated with analogies it is still striking to find the first heroic simile saved for Aurora's life‐saving discovery of the poets:

Settled convention whelmed by undercurrents invisible but felt: the plot of this simile is the plot of the poem; and we hail in it the basic program of Spasmodism. This program—positing, then overcoming, a primary schism between arbitrary regulation and victorious sovereign impulse—Barrett Browning reinforces on every page, not just by imagery but by the pump of the verse as it oversplashes set prosodic limits, “The rhythmic turbulence ∣ Of blood and brain swept outward upon words” (1.897–98).55 “I felt ∣ My heart's life throbbing in my verse” (3.338–39), says Aurora, and she means it; when push comes to shove, during Aurora's closest brush with despair she prays that God will “stop his ears to what I said, ∣ And only listen to the run and beat ∣ Of this poor, passionate, helpless blood” (7.1269–71).

By such means Aurora Leigh made the preponderantly masculine program of Spasmodist poetics into a feminist charter, and thereby endowed it withmore cultural‐political traction than it had hitherto possessed.56 Wholeheartedly embracing the embodied intuition that was Spasmodism, Barrett Browning converted its transcendental alienation into the force for political change that Smith and Dobell had (ineffectually) desired and Aytoun (effectually) reprehended. She advanced a woman's claim to epic spokesmanship by so grounding the tropes and tones of spasmody in female physicality as to make the movement appear to have been, in its deepest fiber, feminine all along. This ground, in turn, provided practical leverage with which to promote for public recognition the rights of women, and with them the wrongs of the poor and the shame of oppression, up to and including that of the Italian people with whose political welfare Barrett Browning was throughout the 1850s passionately engaged.57 The plot is a sequence of melodramatic flareups, and what flares up at each local climax is a combustible mix of sharply felt injustices whose smoldering produces the air of generalized ardor that fills the intervals of narrative between. The poem's peak experiences are all eroticized—Aurora's long‐deferred union with Romney, of course (9.714–24, 833–42), but also the passion she has learned from her parents (1.17–19, 87–89) and the bond she witnesses between Marian and her nursling son (6.566–81)—and this eroticism is preserved against the sublimation it routinely incurred in male spasmodic hands by the unconventionality (what disgruntled reviewers deemed the scandal) of Aurora's sex. Because Barrett Browning did not enjoy Bailey's omnist luxury of forgetting gender, she made sure her reader would not forget it either.

The neediness of bodily desire in Aurora Leigh also whets the edge of story, in what may be the poem's finest stroke of diegetic invention: the temporal procession of its narrative standpoint. Early in book 3 Aurorabreaks off her autobiographical retrospect, in order to describe the present scene in which she is writing, dismissing her maidservant, burning the midnight oil to answer the day's mail, and so on. This arresting interlude brings Aurora Leigh as close as narrative can well come to the real‐time present of Spasmodist closet‐drama and its affinities with radically bardic presentation values. The approximation is finally futile: even on‐the‐spot reportage has to lag behind the fact it reports, as Dobell's Balder despairingly found, and as Aurora's only semi‐performative “I have to write” (3.26) and “I bear on my broken tale” (3.156) more gamely acknowledge. Still, her interruption of the narrative here paves the way for later, more striking developments to which only a written epic mode permits access. For when at 5.579 Aurora again catches herself in the act of composition, the scene has shifted to a date manifestly later than the one recorded in book 3; we realize that the the fixed omniscience of the memoirist has yielded to the stepwise nomadism of a diary. And the point of view thus mobilized keeps on moving: books 6 and 7 describe events that must postdate the temporal vantage that ends book 5; the last two books then seem a further fresh departure, and the very late metanarrative admission “I have written day by day, ∣ With somewhat even writing” (9.725–26) validates the diaristic understanding that has opened to our view four books previously.58

That earlier moment was the crucially unbalancing one, and Barrett Browning placed it with care at the balance point of a nine‐book epic divided along nearly Homeric lines of nested symmetry. Books 1–2 and 8–9 focus the larger issue of education in a faceoff between Aurora and Romney, books 3–4 and 6–7 make Marian's hard‐luck flashbacks the occasion for a widened social scope, and book 5 splits down the middle to consider Aurora's writing life first in theory and then in practical context.59 At the epicenter of this three‐ring circus is where Barrett Browning detonates her narrative charge, deliberately shattering the convention of fixed perspective that apparently governed the first half of the poem, and that decidedlysecured the extempore platform of many an oral bard and spontaneous omnist before her. Simulated seriality calls writing to witness against its own spasmodical—bardic pretension. Putting a fresh twist on the improvisatrice tradition going back through L.E.L. to Staël's Corinne, E.B.B. turns to account the actual conditions of Victorian print culture on which spasmodic writers both depended and turned their backs. For the forward motion of Aurora's point of view mobilizes an ongoing critique of the obsolescent certitudes that at any given moment she has impulsively, confidently sworn by. The advancing narrative design presents our heroine as not just an intuitive spasmodic but a repeatedly fallible one. Aurora is doomed by one of her leading tendencies—liberal openness of mind—to submit to periodic humiliation another of her leading tendencies—glib peremptory judgment. Her high‐handed way of taking others down a peg (not sparing that intimate other her own younger self) is in turn taken down a peg each time the narrative ascends to a new retrospect and shows up the self‐righteousness of her condemnation of Marian (book 6), her eager misprision of Lady Waldemar and her risible failure to apprehend Romney's final situation (book 9).

Not for nothing has Aurora devoted her youth to “counterfeiting epics, shrill with trumps ∣ A babe might blow between two straining cheeks ∣ Of bubbled rose, to make his mother laugh” (1.990–91).60 Both the initial impulse to compass a totality and the subsequent impulse—call it, here, matronizing—to condescend to that false first effort bespeak one and the same characteristic, Aurora's control‐freak need to occupy a commanding vantage. It is this need, which actuates most of her pervasive rhetorical irony at virtually everybody's expense, that the migrant narrative viewpoint of the poem subjects in turn to structural irony, of a sort to which the hom*ogeneity of spasmodic verse permitted little if any access.61 In hindsight Aurorakeeps discovering herself, as Romney discovers her self‐crowned with ivy at the start of book 2, in an embarrassing state of precocity whose token is premature finish: “credulous of completion,” she says with a smile at her own smiles at twenty, “There I held ∣ The whole creation in my little cup” (2.5–6). Condemning Aurora to repeat this shamefaced moment several times over, Barrett Browning superimposes a blush on a spasm. Her diaristic apparatus of fits and starts tempers the appetite for totality which was both the glory of Spasmodism and its chief liability to derision.

For jumping to conclusions was what Spasmodists did best, in the inspired guesswork of their imagery, and also in the spastic congestion that afflicted their plots. If it was Dobell who first grasped this as a handicap, it was Barrett Browning who best figured out what to make of it. Book 6 of Aurora Leigh ostentatiously hinges on Aurora's habit of leaping first and asking questions later, when she mounts the stilts of Victorian sexual propriety to blame the raped and unwed mother Marian for her own victimization. It takes all Marian's aggrieved eloquence to establish that Aurora has herself been victimized, as the dupe of rumors and, worse, of the system of conventional prejudice that has made those rumors plausible. With great persistence book 6 pursues the truth to its hiding place in conventional rhetoric and the dead metaphors of social cliché, enforcing the galling lesson that Aurora's faux pas results from her very facility with words. She has mistaken the big picture now, just as she counterfeited epics in her youth, and for much the same reason.

Indeed, she will do it again until the poem's eleventh hour, which leaves her for once, pace the hyperkinetic articulateness of her own spasmodic fluency, at a loss for words. Amid the prickly dialogue of books 8–9, blind to Romney's blindness and his love, misreading his heart and her own, she pens at last an escape clause that opens her poem out from a double generic cul‐de‐sac. Just at the big clinch of an epically deferred, quintessentially spasmodic “Embrace, that was convulsion” (9.721), Aurora for all her poethood proves incapable of producing Romney's declaration of love so as to “write it down here like the rest” (9.729). Thrice in the space of fifteen lines the crowning words fail her, and with this defeat of her glibness the fatal totalitarian dream of Spasmodism breaks down too. The unwelcome news out of Don Juan and Sordello about the corruption of language, which stymied Dobell's effort, here becomes with a new twist Barrett Browning's gospel. Sealed not with a kiss but with “deep, deep, shuddering breaths, which meant beyond ∣ Whatever could be told by word or kiss” (9.723–24), Aurora Leigh found away to mean beyond the automatized holism towards which epic at mid‐century tended, and also beyond that alternative generic trap of total articulation, the marriage‐plot sprung by nearly every Victorian novel. The poem figures itself in the end as an open marriage of genres, much as Aurora Leigh (one name, maiden and married) gives herself away, at an altar of her own devising, in bridal guise of the New Jerusalem, wearing like a bouquet in the poem's last lines the stones that are her colors, the beams of opening dawn.62

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