Readers of Victorian culture may feel that they have a pretty good idea of what Victorian literary theory looks like. Compared to our own 'complex' theories, derived from post-structural thinkers including Derrida, Foucault, Jameson, Bhabha and Butler, the Victorians' theory seems 'simple' by comparison: evaluative and prescriptive, concerned aesthetically and morally with what literature 'should' do. Skirmishes including Robert Buchanan's assault on 'The Fleshly School of Poetry' and Dante Rossetti's response, 'The Stealthy School of Criticism', for example, are entertaining to read; they present thinly veiled personal attacks on the poet coupled with sarcastic commentary on the poetry itself. Buchanan attacks Rossetti for his sonnet 'Nuptial Sleep':

Introduction

Writing to Virginia Woolf in 1912, Lytton Strachey tried, and failed, to imagine a time when we would love the Victorians, or at least find an acceptable way of condescending to them:

The power of metaphor allows us to think of Matthew Sweet, author of Inventing the Victorians (2001), as Strachey's great-great-grandchild, affirming that

The three stages of Sweet's argument take us from equivalence ('as rich and difficult and complex and pleasurable as our own'), through influence ('shaped our lives and sensibilities'), to confluence ('inhabiting our bodies').

The Victorians witnessed a boom in the volume of affordable books, magazines and newspapers produced to satisfy the demands of the first mass reading public. Wilkie Collins described this new audience as the 'Unknown Public', the millions of readers of cheap print who were more likely to acquire their literature from the tobacconist's shop than the circulating library. Collins's surprise at discovering this audience suggests how quickly affordable print had spread to sectors of the population formerly overlooked by publishers. Nearly everyone was exposed to print of some kind during an era offering over 25,000 different journals to the growing reading public. Periodicals, not books, were the most widely read genre of the nineteenth century. The innumerable kinds of prose writing by Victorian authors extended well beyond the novel, which was just one among many forms of print favoured by Victorian readers as a way of spending their leisure time. The ephemeral publications of this period capture in their pages nearly every aspect of Victorian culture. Journalism at this time encompassed a wide range of formats, from the quarterly review to the monthly magazine to the daily newspaper. While the term 'journalism' first entered the English lexicon in the 1830s, by the end of the century it had become one of the most distinctive features of the Victorian era.

British musicality

Victorian musical life was shadowed by a troubling constant: soul searching about musicality. Britain suffered an extraordinarily vivid, widespread and long-lived reputation as a nation without musical sensibility or talent. Nietzsche complained that 'what . . . offends us about the most human Englishman is his lack of music', and Emerson bluntly pronounced that 'England has no music.' Frederick Crowest's 1881 history Phases of Musical England - despite the bravado of its title - conceded that 'we are not essentially a musical people', although he countered in characteristic Victorian fashion that 'we probably spend upon the Art and its Artists more money than any two or three other nationalities combined'. By 1914, when German sociologist Oscar Schmitz was looking for a book title that would instantly identify England in the minds of his continental readers, he chose the obvious: Das Land ohne Musik.

Scholars today understand that the fixation arose largely from Britain's failure in the early part of the century to produce an 'English Beethoven' - a frequently voiced lament - or to provide home-grown products for the wildly popular opera stage. Anxiety was heightened by Victorian confidence, mounting throughout the entire century, of Britain's superiority in virtually every other realm, whether military, industrial, imperial or literary. In retrospect, the situation was only compounded by the disciplinary practices of both history and musicology, obsessed as they have been until recently with ‘great men’.

“But a German may drink beer; indeed, he should drink it as a true son of Germania, since Tacitus mentions specifically German cerevisia.” (Heinrich Heine, Über Ludwig Börne. Eine Denkschrift. 1840) / The Germania waspraised as a libellus aureus ('golden booklet') upon its rediscovery in the fifteenth century. Following centuries saw it compared to the 'dawn' of German history, a gift of a 'benign fairy' and 'a bible'. After the collapse of the National Socialist (NS) regime, however, from the vantage of hindsight, Arnaldo Momigliano gave it high priority among 'the hundred most dangerous books ever written', and added that it was 'fortunately' not his task to speak about its influence. The influence of Tacitus' Germania spans 450 years, starting with German humanists in the sixteenth century and ending with the NS downfall in 1945. Germany as a nation-state began to exist with the declaration of the German Empire in 1871. Before then, in the absence of political unity, a common past, culture and language were called upon to substantiate the German nation. But such a cultural nation has proved elusive too: the people within the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nationlived mostly in their communities with their regional traditions and local dialects and quite unaware of 'Germany'. 'What is German history?' is therefore a difficult question.

Rainer Maria Rilke (1875-1926) is one the leading poets of European modernism, comparable in importance and influence with American-born T. S. Eliot and the French poet Paul Valéry. Arguably the greatest German poet of the twentieth century, his influence nevertheless extends far beyond poetry and far beyond Germany. His work has been important in philosophy, religion and the visual arts. Despite being famously 'difficult', his work continues to attract new readerships and is regularly translated and re-translated, into Japanese, Chinese and Arabic as well as the European languages.

He features regularly as a source or an inspiration in a variety of creative literatures from across the world and has motivated a host of visual artists; he has often been set to music (classical and rock) and is a staple of television and Hollywood film. Today he even enjoys a reception as a guru of queer studies and New Age thinking. The fact is that Rilke developed tropes of style and attitude that have proved essential for the cultural life of the twentieth century and beyond. To speak of Rilke is to speak of world literature. It is almost impossible to grasp the key elements in the development of modern culture without reference to him.

“Opus adgredior opimum casibus, atrox proeliis, discors seditionibus, ipsa etiam pace saeuum” (H. 1.2.1) / “I am entering on a work rich in disasters, ferocious in its wars, ripped apart by civil strife, savage even in peace” / Tacitus frames his histories as an account of catastrophic and historic change at home and abroad. In both the Histories, the extant books of which cover the civil wars of 69, and the Annals, which recount the history of the Julio-Claudian emperors, he anatomises the consolidation of and struggle for imperial power and the consequences of Empire for Romans and the peoples they conquered. This grim history offered obvious analogies with the fraught political and social issues of Europe in the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, when the uneasy peace achieved after the First World War degenerated into economic collapse, social upheaval, the rise of totalitarianism and the cataclysm of the Second World War. The conflagration of Rome, the Pisonian conspiracy and the persecution of the Christians, the paranoia and murderous struggle for power within the Julio-Claudian house, Rome's relentless push for Empire, pitting the imperial might of Rome against freedom-loving but savage natives - these Tacitean motifs provided powerful material for writers of the twentieth century. This essay examines three novelists who based their historical fiction on the works of Tacitus: Robert Graves, Naomi Mitchison and Lion Feuchtwanger.

When Pliny the Younger wrote to his friend Titinius Capito explaining his current reluctance to follow in the footsteps of his formidable uncle Pliny the Elder and write a historical work, one reason for his hesitation stands out sharply (Ep. 5.8.12): “tu tamen iam nunc cogita quae potissimum tempora aggrediamur. uetera et scripta aliis? parata inquisitio, sed onerosa collatio. intacta et noua? graues offensae, leuis gratia. / However, be considering already now what time period in particular I should tackle. Olden times which others have written about? The material is at hand, but collating it will be hard work. Recent times untouched [by others]? There is huge potential to offend, but little chance to please.” / Pliny eloquently encapsulates here the Scylla and Charybdis confronting any historian considering appropriate subject matter for his projected work. When Tacitus contemplated his first foray into the genre of history after publishing his so-called minor works, he too faced difficult choices about the chronological boundaries of his historical narrative.

Since the Renaissance, the British had the reputation of being a literary, but assuredly not a visual, nation. Thus the sudden flourishing of visual art in Victorian Britain could seem an astonishing development. Certainly the French thought so, when they encountered the fine arts of Great Britain at the Exposition Universelle held in Paris in 1855. This was the first of the great international exhibitions to make a feature of fine art (the Great Exhibition of 1851, for which the Crystal Palace was built in Hyde Park, excluded painting). 'An English painting is as modern as a novel by Balzac', wrote Théophile Gautier, who began his two-volume collection of reprinted press notices with ten chapters on artists of the British school, among them Mulready, Landseer, Grant, Millais, Hunt, Egg, Frost, Hook, Webster, Leslie - 'the truly original talents, the incontestable glories of England' - names strange to the French in 1855. And when Baudelaire reviewed the Paris Salon four years later, he began by lamenting the absence of the British, again listing the strange names: Leslie, the two Hunts, Maclise, Millais, Chalon, Grant, Hook, Paton, Cattermole. Some rumour had led Baudelaire to hope for a sight of 'these devotees of the imagination and of exotic colour, . . . these favourites of the fantastic muse; but alas', the British did not appear, and Baudelaire addresses them in disappointment: 'Were you so badly received then the first time . . . and do you consider us unworthy of understanding you?'

'I can imagine no knowledge more blessed than this: that one must become a beginner.' The question of how to begin preoccupied Rilke throughout his writing life. A beginner was never something he just was, he had to become it: 'recover the initial innocence, come back to the place of naivety', he wrote in 1920. It is probably true to say that Rilke began as a poet too easily, and that as he became a better poet he found it harder and harder to begin. At the same time he understood his work itself as a process of becoming and self-realisation. In Paris in 1902, confronted with the hostile diversity of the city and the immense focus of Rodin, he realised he would have to start all over again. He did, but could never have done it without the many beginnings he had already made, which even at that point, and much more so if we include everything written before the first volume of New Poems in 1907, make up a body of work that can only be bracketed off as 'early' because of the importance of what followed.

Rilke's earliest verse, from Lives and Songs (1894) to To Celebrate Myself (1899), is not much read, and has suffered not just from the great shadow thrown by the later works but simply from there being so much of it. Though many contemporaries had trouble freeing themselves from the fin de siècle inheritance, it is hard to find another poet who not only wrote but published so prolifically before producing major work.

In the year 17 the Cheruscan chief Arminius, revered as a founding figure by Germans of later ages and commemorated in the nineteenth century by massive monuments in the Teutoburg Forest and Minnesota, was engaged in exchanging insults with his rival, Maroboduus. This, at least, is what we are told by Tacitus, who says that Arminius called Maroboduus 'a fugitive and inexperienced in battle, one who had been protected by his lair in Hercynia . . . and was a betrayer of his fatherland and a satellite of the Roman emperor' (A. 2.45.3): “fugacem Maroboduum appellans, proeliorum expertem, Hercyniae latebris defensum, . . . proditorem patriae, satellitem Caesaris.” Although Tacitus has told us earlier that Arminius had formerly been a soldier in the Roman army and could speak Latin (2.10.3), it seems unlikely that a German warrior would be so familiar with Virgil's Georgics that he was able to describe Maroboduus in the same terms as Virgil had used to describe a skulking snake (3.544-5 'frustra defensa latebris | uipera', 'the viper vainly protected by its lair'). Of course verisimilitude is not to be expected from the speeches of barbarians portrayed in Latin historical texts: when a chief of the Britons says 'where they make a desert, they call it peace' (Agr. 30.5 'ubi solitudinem faciunt, pacem appellant'), he alludes to a speech in Book 8 of Livy, an allusion no doubt undetected by the majority of the modern politicians whose repetition of Tacitus' statement has turned it into one of the most high-profile quotations of the age.

The idea of the Victorian home

In her 1928 fantasy novel Orlando, Virginia Woolf offered a parodic version of the cultural shift from the eighteenth to the nineteenth century:

Woolf foregrounds those elements of Victorian domestic culture that her own generation found so repugnant: the clutter and kitsch, the obsession with objects and cosiness. There is also an implied objection to the femininity of this new domestic space - to the muffins and coffee that replace the ale and beef of the eighteenth century.