Aaron Kramer
Dedicating Heroic Imagination to his students was, of course, a most gracious act on the part of the author, but utterly in keeping, since it was to us, after all, that he had dedicated—through a shining life-span—his energies and his genius.
At the time, however, we hardly realized the uniqueness of our situation, assuming that every campus must have at least one Frederic Ewen. As for me, it was only later that the blessed subversiveness of my five Ewen semesters grew clear. America’s English departments had long since fallen under the sway of the New Criticism—a tyranny from which they have even now not quite shaken loose. Cleanth Brooks, high priest of that sect, had made it his life’s crusade “to stress the poem rather than the poet”:
So long as the emphasis is on the poet’s personality rather than on his craftsmanship, on his sincerity rather than on his solution of an artistic problem, on the intensity of his emotions or his commitment to a cause rather than on the structure of meanings that he has realized in the poem, there is not likely to be much “close reading” as we now know it—though there may be a minute and even pedantic searching of his letters or autobiography.
Others subsequently trained me, and mostly I trained myself, in the areas of “craftsmanship, … solution of an artistic problem, … the structure of meanings,” which are, of course, indispensable for a poet and a teacher of poetry. But if that had to be my total focus, as Cleanth Brooks and his apostles decreed, I would long ago have fled the sterile parishes of their aestheticist worship. More than anything else, the lessons of Frederic Ewen were vivifying; not only did he give life to every literary work by making it leap from the context of the author’s epoch and personal situation, but—most remarkable of all—he made us forget we were in a classroom, exploring curricular materials. Whatever we studied, no matter its place or time of origin, spoke to our own turbulent place and time, illuminated our own developing young lives, and helped us live. What we received was a “close reading” of the human condition.
Opening the first volume in 1984 was like stepping into our professor’s room again and, half a century later, renewing the grand experience of our youth, when each day’s lecture whetted the appetite for more. Shakespeare said as much of Cleopatra: “she makes hungry Where most she satisfies.”
In reviewing “this massive work and nearly unparalleled erudition,” Lothar Kahn describes precisely the nature of our master’s teaching, which into his eighties had lost none of its purity and vigor:
Ewen moves with remarkable facility from one national culture to another, from one genre to the next, one distinctive personality to a different one that was equally distinctive: tomes of vast scholarship often manage—without effort—to be quite dull. It appears that, just as effortlessly, Prof. Ewen has produced an extremely lively, colorful, even exciting account that is truly scholarship at its best.
And D.D. Murdoch, in his review, accurately characterizes the Ewen approach:
It is not statistical social science; it is narrative history with an emphasis on the personal lives and contributions of individual men and women of literary, artistic, and musical genius … Although essentially a “history of the spirit,” the narrative documents the artists’ involvement in social movements and their awareness of revolutionary economic and political developments … The book is written in a very personal style, with enthusiasm for its subject … The reader receives a sense of the ferment of the times.
Unswervingly defiant of the New Critics, Ewen had declared in an eloquent prologue what readers should expect: a “close reading” not so much of the poem as of its epoch. “This is a time when national genius transcends national boundaries, and spirits communicate across vast distances, affecting or being affected by those of other lands.” His “close reading” was “concerned with the fruits of the interaction of the public ‘collective consciousness’ with the creative consciousness of the individual, the private creator.”
The same two-fold synergy continues to be demonstrated in the period covered by the present volume, A Half-Century of Greatness, and it is cause for celebration that this astounding segment should at last be made available. Focused on the social and philosophic upsurges leading to 1848, and the bloody rage with which embattled tyranny crushed, city by city, every last spark of republicanism and revolution, the present book brings to thrilling, often appalling, life the episodes of that unprecedented time with the force of an epic poem. Thanks to both his sympathetic personal insights and his superb documentation, the outstanding figures of that moment move dynamically through Ewen’s pages fully dimensionalized, liberated from the dull footnote entries of yellowing textbooks.
Everywhere fascinating bits of information leap out at the reader: John Stuart Mill accidentally throwing out as waste paper the manuscript of Carlyle’s French Revolution … Dickens, in French, responding ecstatically to the February 1848 upheaval that he would henceforth write only in French … Wagner’s second opera, Das Liebesverbot, inspired by Measure For Measure … The fiery battle-hymn “Il Canto degli Italiani,” by Goffredo Mameli (who died in the defense of republican Rome), galvanizing Garibaldi—another of his hymns, “Suona la Tromba,” set to music by Verdi … Lord George Gordon, leader of the infamous 1780 anti-Catholic riots, later converted to Orthodox Judaism and dying in jail as Israel bar Abraham Gordon … and on and on …
Embedded throughout are memorable scenes, unearthed by an indefatigable scholar from diaries, letters, news reports, memoirs: For four June days the leaderless insurrectionists man their barricades against an overwhelming force under Cavaignac … George Sand publicly denounces her country when it crushes the Parisian masses desperate for work and bread … Auguste Blanqui, on trial for “incendiary republicanism,” turns accuser of his judges, like Dimitrov a century later … Turgenev recalls his history professor, Gogol, grotesque and pathetic in the classroom … Vissarion Belinsky excoriates Gogol, formerly his idol, for betraying his genius and his ideals; the letter, though unpublishable at the time, is memorized by hundreds … The Petrashevsky group are lined up before a firing-squad; at the last moment their death sentence is commuted; Grigoriev goes insane, Dostoevsky is reborn … A letter to the Duke of Wellington from Cork’s magistrate Nicholas Cummins during the potato famine, describes his visit to Skibbereen, a town of corpses and living corpses … Taras Shevchenko, forbidden to write or sketch in his Siberian exile, smuggles into his boots bits of notepapers soon to blossom into splendid poems … The Hunted Mikhail Bakunin suddenly materializes after Wagner’s dress rehearsal of Beethoven’s Ninth and declares: Should all music go up in flame in the coming world conflagration, this symphony must at all costs be preserved … Petöfi at twenty-six sends a love-letter to his wife, asking her to wean their baby quickly and surprise him; two days later he dies a hero as 4,200 Hungarians face 18,000 crack Tsarist troops … Defiantly, Viennese journalists Julius Becker and Herman Jellinek face Metternich’s firing squad, along with Robert Blum, a beloved deputy in Frankfort’s parliament, whose last letter to his wife lists the keepsakes each child is to have.
The reader who supposed himself well-versed in Robert Owen, the Chartist Movement, Hegelianism, Utilitarianism, Saint-Simonianism, Comte, Proudhon, Michelet, Herzen, etc., will come to know them truly, defined both in themselves and in their time. Harriet Taylor, hitherto mentioned as John Stuart Mill’s already married companion and finally his wife, receives the long-overdue prominence she merits, not only for her emotional and psychological support, but for her profound influence on Mill’s thinking and work.
Illuminating chapters are devoted to such titanic pioneers as Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, Ludwig Feuerbach, David Friedrich Strauss, Marx, Engels, and Wagner, whose lives and personalities are projected as spellbindingly as in a great novel, and whose works are explicated with immense sympathy and care, highlighted by beautifully chosen excerpts. The towering influence of Feuerbach and Strauss on such contemporaries as the youthful Marx and Engels, leads us to reconsider their masterpieces— The Essence of Christianity and The Life of Jesus—both of which a young George Eliot felt impelled to translate. Was it not to Feuerbach that Wagner dedicated his own most important philosophic work, publicly acknowledging his debt?
Judiciously selected passages of poetry, not dissected but dramatically offered—in their originals and in translation—bringing us close to the throbbing souls of Petöfi and Shevchenko, making it clear how these men, heirs of Shelley and Robert Burns, earned their status as the national poets of Hungary and Ukraine. Germany’s revolutionary voices of the 1830s and 1840s—Büchner, Herwegh, Freiligrath, and Heine, among others less well known but finally given their due in this volume—are also heard at full force. For me, whose life began with the thunderous sonorities of Rienzi, perhaps the most spectacular discovery was “The Revolution,” which Ewen calls Wagner’s manifesto, an anonymously published 1849 prose-poem inspired by Bakunin.
As for the fiction, Ewen offers a feast of insightful commentary and sensitively chosen passages that unfold the essence of Gogol, Dickens, and early Dostoevsky— masterfully relating each story, each novel to its author and his epoch.
To relive the grand aspirations that culminated in 1848, and to share in their swift defeat, is a shattering experience for the reader. But Ewen lets us know that Hegel’s dialectics were at work: thesis and antithesis inexorably leading to synthesis, destined to bring new struggles, even victories. If 1848 spelled the end of Romanticism, out of the ashes leaped Realism, its child. As for humanity’s craving to be free, could it be stamped out by the hired boots of a Tsar, a Metternich, any more than Zeus could vanquish the flame of Prometheus?
A century later, when Senator McCarthy led a similar effort—temporarily successful—to suppress ideas, I ended each poetry reading with Whitman’s “Europe: The 72nd and 73rd Years of These States,” explaining 1848–49 as if I really knew those years and understood the huge throngs that hailed Kossuth in city after American city, thousands decked in the suddenly prevalent Kossuth hat. Only now, after absorbing the exhilaration and agony of these pages, do I fully comprehend the golden lines I memorized as a boy:
Meanwhile corpses lie in new-made graves, bloody corpses of young men,
The rope of the gibbet hangs heavily, the bullets of princes are flying, the creatures of power laugh aloud,
And all these things bear fruit, and they are good.
Those corpses of young men,
Those martyrs that hang from the gibbets, those hearts pierc’d by the gray lead,
Cold and motionless as they seem live elsewhere with unslaughter’d vitality.
They live in other men O kings!
They live in brothers again ready to defy you,
They were purified by death, they were taught and exalted.
Not a grave of the murder’d for freedom but grows seed for freedom, in its turn to bear seed,
Which the winds carry afar and re-sow, and the rains and the snows nourish.
Not a disembodied spirit can the weapons of tyrants let loose,
But it stalks invisibly over the earth, whispering counseling, cautioning.
Liberty, let others despair of you—I never despair of you.
Is the house shut? Is the master away?
Nevertheless, be ready, be not weary of watching,
He will soon return, his messengers come anon.