Endnotes

1  As Patricia Rigg bluntly puts it, “it is time now to consider…the male speakers who make up the bulk of” Webster’s Dramatic Studies and Portraits (31). Perhaps it is a mistake to separate dramatic monologues featuring women and those featuring men, since texts like “Sister Annunciata” and “A Castaway” also reflect on vocation. However, the professional alienation we see in “A Preacher,” particularly as linked to the Victorian “crisis of faith,” seems to be gendered male. Such is consistent with texts like Tennyson’s “Locksley Hall” (1842), Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867), Arthur Hugh Clough’s Dipsychus (1869), and Mrs. Humphry Ward’s Robert Elsmere (1888).

2  As Frederic Harrison put it in the Westminster Review, “[biblical] facts are idealized; dogmas are transformed; creeds are discredited as human and provisional; the authority of the Church and of the Bible to establish any doctrine is discarded; the moral teaching of the Gospel remains” (163).

3  For what subscription involved, see Gibson’s The Thirty-Nine Articles of the Church of England Explained, esp. 60-64. Despite periodic adjustments in language and procedure, the most recent being the Clerical Subscription Act of 1865, requirements had remained fairly stable since the seventeenth century.

4  F.C. Cook likewise highlighted the Essayists’ false position, his annoyance unspooling in great ribbons of gentlemanly legalese: “[N]o man would be regarded with more entire sympathy and tenderness than one whose spirit might be overwrought in its struggles with storms which haunt the higher regions of intellectual life, but so long as he works, prays, teaches, administers the sacraments of the Church, or discharges the kindred and no less responsible duty of forming the character of youth under the sanction of the ministerial office, laymen presume, and would be scandalized to hear it doubted, that he holds substantially the convictions which he professed, when formally, publicly, deliberately, at a most critical moment of his life, he signed his name in token of unfeigned assent to the Articles of his Church” (180-81). For a more extensive analysis of the scandal, see Parsons’ “On Speaking Plainly: ‘Honest Doubt’ and the Ethics of Belief.” Parsons notes that the Essayists, particularly Williams and Wilson, were roundly abused for subscribing to Church doctrines in a seemingly hedging sense. Again, the affair irritated secularists perhaps more than co-religionists. Henry Sidgwick wrote that “the duty of making his position clear rests with the divergent; and if his position is not made clear, if the terms of membership are merely relaxed in the esoteric opinion of the enlightened few, if he gives other men fair reason for believing he holds opinions he does not hold, then his conduct can only be defended on the grounds on which all other religious hypocrisy can be defended” (qtd. Parsons 204).

5  The relevant chapter is titled “The Clergyman Who Subscribes for Colenso,” in reference to a companion scandal regarding the purported heresy of Bishop John Colenso and his The Pentateuch and Book of Joshua Critically Examined (1862). As the Colenso case suggests, the Essays composed only one moment in a longer struggle. Charles Kingsley’s now infamous libel on John Henry Newman, issuing in Newman’s Apologia Pro Vita Sua (1864), belongs to the same story insofar as it raised questions of clerical integrity.

6  Wrenched from context, these lines appear to express Millian relativism, or even an incipient Nietzschian perspectivalism. More likely, however, Webster is alluding to a Tennysonian situation in which, as Tennyson writes in In Memoriam, “God and Nature” are “then at strife.” Truth for Tennyson could appear multiple in that the soul speaks an immortal love at odds with the jungle law of Nature. Webster’s preacher reflects on a similar paradox, though in fact he reverses Tennyson’s logic. In “A Preacher,” it is the speaker’s inwardness that fails him, while his confidence in Christianity’s objective claims seems unshaken.

7  Rigg, who relies on Leighton’s inferences, likewise treats the preacher as a figure who is moving (or has moved) beyond Christian orthodoxy. In Rigg’s case, she erects a reading atop a rather wobbly thesis concerning Webster’s supposed Aestheticism. The preacher, in her view, is a performer who escapes his pained sense of duplicity by making “an aesthetic moment of his distress” (70). His rhetoric operates to circumvent his spiritual misgivings by recasting his priestly role in practical, earthly terms. For Rigg, such casuistry is simply pitiable since the preacher “lacks the social stature, intellectual agility, and sophisticated sophistry of [Robert Browning’s] Bishop Blougram” (70). Rigg ignores the fact that from the beginning the preacher candidly highlights performance as a significant problem — indeed, as the dilemma to be overcome. Perhaps it could be replied that in reflecting on performance he nevertheless falls back into it, but he hardly does so as some benighted näif.

8  In the nineteenth century, the obsession with clerical integrity dates back at least as far as Tractarianism and Newman’s equivocal Tract XC. What’s new here is Webster’s focus on the professional — the preacher — at work.

9  This recalls George Orwell’s well-known argument that in its decadence, a language’s clichés, “tacked together like prefabricated parts of a henhouse,” assemble themselves without thought.

10  Auerbach’s essay “Victorian Players and Sages” documents a Victorian “rage for integrity,” suspicious of any threat to a coherent identity grounded in Nature. She argues that after 1860, this conservatism had even infected the stage, which abandoned the dangerously polymorphic identity associated with traditional theater.

11  I’ve rephrased Webster’s original lines, which in the original were phrased negatively: “It [rhetorically manufactured faith] is not natural. It does not root/ Silently in the dark, as God’s seeds root,/ Then day by day move upward in the light” (139-41).

12  The most haunting thing, perhaps, is how close the preacher comes to real faith. “I know thee, Lord, what I should see/ If I could see thee as some can on earth,/ But I do not see thee,” and “I know thee, Lord,/ What loving thee is like, as if I loved,/ But I cannot love thee” (96-100). Theologically, the speaker “knows” God, which suggests more than the ability to recite his attributes, as detailed in the creeds. It implies an ability to figure God to himself in a more intimate way. But there is a great gulf between even the richest figuration and love. Adding to the cruelty is the hint of a poststructuralist commonplace: that theology’s sign system, rich though it is, actually serves to block access to the Referent. As he puts it later, “there I stand/ In face with it and know it. Not for me;/ Because I know it, cannot trust it;/ It is not natural” (137-40).

13  In Lionel Trilling’s landmark study, he distinguished between sincerity as a publically-oriented virtue and the romantic cult of authenticity, historically deriving from Rousseau and Wordsworth (Sincerity and Authenticity.) But in this clergyman’s case, compromised authenticity — an obstructed “sentiment of being” — automatically short-circuits sincerity, that is, his relationship to his public. Perhaps this is because the preacher’s responsibility isn’t just to communicate truth, but to embody it. In F.D. Maurice’s phrase, the minister should become “a witness of Christ’s presence” (120).

14  I’m thinking of poems like Tennyson’s In Memoriam, Arnold’s “Dover Beach” and “The Scholar Gipsy,” and Clough’s Dipsychus.

15  Of course, it’s long been understood that, as Glennis Byron puts it, “by placing the speaking self in context,” the dramatic monologues of Tennyson and Browning, “expose the illusory nature of the autonomous and unified Romantic subject” (3). Critics agree that to an unusual degree the dramatic monologue as a form reflects on its own discursive materials. See for example Byron (5) and Cronin (28).Works CitedAltholz, Josef L. “Early Periodical Responses to Essays and Reviews.” Victorian Periodicals Review 19 (1986): 50-56.Armstrong, Isobel. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics and Politics. London: Routledge, 1993.Auerbach, Nina. “Victorian Players and Sages.” The Performance of Power: Theatrical Discourse and Politics. Ed. Sue-Ellen Case and Janelle Reinhelt. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1991. 183-98.Byron, Glennis. Dramatic Monologue. London: Routledge, 2003.Cronin, Richard. Reading Victorian Poetry. Oxford: Blackwell, 2012.Davis, Philip. Why Victorian Literature Still Matters. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008.Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.Ellison, Robert H. The Victorian Pulpit: Spoken and Written Sermons in Nineteenth-Century Britain. London: Associated University Presses, 1998.Evans, A.B. “Preachers and Preaching: The Pulpit and the Press.” The Church and the World: Essays on Questions of the Day in 1867. Ed. Orby Shipley. London: Longmans, Green, Reader, and Dyer, 1867.Fletcher, Robert P. “‘Convent Thoughts’: Augusta Webster and the Body Politics of the Victorian Cloister.” Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (2003): 295-313.Carlyle, Thomas. Sartor Resartus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987.Goffman, Erving. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. New York: Doubleday, 1959.Harrison, Frederic. “Neo-Christianity.” The Westminster Review (American Edition) 146 (Oct. 1860): 157-77.Herbert, George. The Complete English Works. The Country Parson, His Character, and Rule of Holy Life. New York: Everyman’s Library, 1995.Leighton, Angela. Victorian Women Poets: Writing Against the Heart. New York: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1992.Maurice, F.D. The Kingdom of Christ; or Hints on the Principles, Ordinances and Constitution of the Catholic Church in letters to a Member of the Society of Friends, Vol. 2. London: James Clarke & Co., 1959, 1842.May, Trevor. The Victorian Clergyman. Princes Risborough, Buckinghamshire: Shire Publications, 2006.Mill, John Stuart. “Thoughts on Poetry and Its Varieties.” Part 1. The Crayon 7 (April 1860): 93-97.Morris, Pam. Imagining Inclusive Society. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2004.Orwell, George. “Politics and the English Language.” All Art if Propaganda: Critical Essays. Boston: Mariner, 2009.Perkin, Harold. The Rise of Professional Society: England since 1880. London: Routledge, 1989.Rigg, Patricia. Julia Augusta Webster: Victorian Aestheticism and the Woman Writer. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2009.Shea, Victor and William Whitla, eds. Essays and Reviews: The 1860 Text and Its Readings. Charlottesville: U P of Virginia, 2000.Spurgeon, Charles. Lectures to My Students. Grand Rapids, Zondervan, 1954.Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1971.Trollope, Anthony. Clergymen of the Church of England. [1866] London: The Trollope Society, 1998.Webster, Augusta. “A Preacher.” Portraits and Other Poems. Ed. Christine Sutphin. Petersborough: Broadview Press, 2000. 257-64.

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