Edward Dowden

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Shelley’s Poetical Works ed. & intro. by Edward Dowden (London: Macmillan 1913), 708pp. - viz., Intro. [xi-xxxvi; see extracts], Pref. by Mrs. Shelley to 2nd Edn. [xxxvii-xl.]; Pref. by Mrs. Shelley to the Volume of Posthumous Poems, Published in 1924 [xlii], 708 [incl. List of Shelley’s principal Writings, 676, and Index of First Lines, 705ff.]

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Criticism
John Eglinton, ‘A Lonely Irishman: Edward Dowden’, in Appreciations and Depreciations [Irish Literary Series] (Dublin: Talbot Press 1917), Chap. 3 [q.p.]; Eglinton, ‘Edward Dowden’s Letters’, in Irish Literary Portraits (London: Macmillan 1935) [chap.], pp.65-82; Herbert O. White, Edward Dowden: An Address (TCD 1943); Terence Brown, ‘Edward Dowden’, [chap. in] The Literature of Ireland (Dublin: Gill & Macmillan 1988).

See also John P. Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose of W. B. Yeats, Vol. I (London: Macmillan 1970) [Pref., pp.41-42]; Adam Putz, The Celtic Revival in Shakespeare's Wake: Appropriation and Cultural Politics in Ireland, 1867-1922 (London: Palgrave Macmillan 2013), 232pp. [covers Matthew Arnold, Edward Dowden, W. B. Yeats and Joyce].

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Commentary
W. B. Yeats (1) ‘Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson’, Dublin University Review, Nov. 1886): ‘[The professorial classes] appear at no time to have thought of the affairs of their country till they first feared for their emoluments.’ (Dublin University Review , p.941; quoted in Frayne, ed., Uncoll. Prose, Vol. I, 1970, Pref., pp.42-43.)

W. B. Yeats (2): Yeats points to Prof. Dowden in his essay, ‘Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson - II’ (in Dublin University Review, Dec. 1886), as representative of ‘the shoddy society of “West Britonism” with its ears to the ground listening for the faintest echo of English thought.’ (See Frayne, op. cit., p.104.)

W. B. Yeats (3) writes of Dublin University [Trinity College, Dublin]: ‘It might have opposed the often narrow enthusiasm of nationalism with the great intellectual passions of the world, as I think Professor Dowden would have preferred; but it chose the easier way, that brings the death of imagination and at last the death of character.’ (‘Academic Class and Agrarian Revolution’, letter to Daily Express, 11 March 1899; rep. in John Frayne, Uncollected Prose, Vol. 2, 1975, p.151.)

W. B. Yeats (4), Letter to the Express (7 Feb. 1895): ‘A very amusing proof of the unfounded nature of one of Professor Dowden’s charges against the Irish literary movement has just reached me. At the very time Professor Dowden was sending to the Press an introduction, saying that we indulged in indiscriminate praise of all things Irish, and went about “plastered with shamrocks and raving of Brian Boru”, a certain periodical was giving the hospitality of its pages to a long anonymous letter making a directly contrary charge. The writer of the letter accused some of the members of the Irish Literary Society of discouraging “worthy workers in the field”, of endeavouring to substitute the pursuit of what he called “high art” for the old, easy-going days when every patriotic writer was as good as his neighbour, and even of making allegations against the literary merits of the Young Ireland Party.’ (See John Kelly, ed., Letters, 1, 1986, p.437; cited in Edna Longley, The Living Stream, 1994, p.16.)

W. B. Yeats (5): ‘I have written at some length on the two paths which lie before us, for we have arrived at a parting of the ways. One path leads, and has already led many Irishmen, of whom Professor Dowden is a type, to obliterate all nationality from their work. The other path winds spirally upwards to a mountain-top of our own, which may be in the future the Meru to which many worshippers will turn.’ (Quoted in Hazard Adams, ‘Yeats and Antithetical Nationalism’, Yeats’s Political Identities, ed. Jonathan Allison (Michigan UP 1996), p.311; see also extract in Mark Storey, Poetry in Ireland since 1800 1988, p.130.)

W. B. Yeats (6), “List of 30 Best Irish Books” [letter] in the Daily Express (27 Feb. 1895): ‘During our recent controversy with Professor Dowden certain of my neighbours here in the West of Ireland asked me what Irish books they should read [...] Here then is my list, and I will promise you that there is no book in it that “raves of Brian Boru” or display an “intellectual brogue” more “accentuated” than the Scottish characeristics in Scott and Stevenson.’ ([Wade, ed., Letters, pp.246; see further under W. B. Yeats.)

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W. B. Yeats (7), ‘Dowden, another old friend of my father’s, was our principal enemy, for academic youth admired him and all Dublin looked upon him as our one great man of letters. He did not attack us openly, and was in private friendly, but he managed by silences and evasions and indirect allusioonn to suggest that we were of no account. All his youth had been spent over books, scarcely perhaps even reading the newspapers, and, as is the way with [the] sedentary, he lost his heard with political excitement. The rise of Irish nationality meant to him, as all nationality means to the revolutionary socialist, an affront to his international ideal of progress. He could be complimentary, even enthusiastic in conversation or private letters; he would have thought himself false to Shakespeare and Goethe and above all to Wordsworth did he not discourage us when in the public eye.’ (Draft version of Autobiographies, quoted in Curtis Bradford, Yeats at Work, S. Illinois UP 1965, p.361.)

W. B. Yeats (8), ‘Modern Irish Poetry’ (1904), incls. remarks on Dowden: ‘Except some few Catholic and mystical poets and Professor Dowden in one or two poems, no Irishman living in Ireland has sung excellently of any but a theme from Irish experience, Irish history, or Irish tradition. Trinity College, which desires to be English, has been the mother of many verse writers and of few poets; and this can only be because she has set herself against the national genius, and taught her children to imitate alien styles and choose out alien themes, for it is not possible to believe that the educated Irishman alone is prosaic and uninventive. Her few poets have been awakened by the influence of the farm laborers, potato diggers, peddlers, and hedge schoolmasters of the eighteenth century, and their imitators in this, and not by a scholastic life, which, for reasons easy for all to understand and for many to forgive, has refused the ideals of Ireland, while those of England are but far-off murmurs. An enemy to all enthusiasms, because all enthusiasms seemed her enemies, she has taught her children to look neither to the world about them, nor into their own souls, where some dangerous fire might slumber. (Rep. in Justin McCarthy, ed., Irish Literature, NY 1904, Vol. III, pp.vii-xiii; p.xiii.)

W. B. Yeats (9) - Yeats wrote: ‘Professor Dowden lived in Ireland where everything has failed, and he meditated frequently upon the perfection of character which had, he thought, made England successful.’ (“The Literary Movement in Ireland”, Ideals in Ireland, p.101; cited in Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 1995, p.269.) Further, ‘The more I read the worse does the Shakespeare criticism become[,] and Dowden is about the climax of it.’ (Letters, Wade, 349; Kiberd, idem.) Note: Kiberd argues that of Yeats that ‘his was a Celtic Shakespeare who loved Richard’s doomed complexity and despised the usurper’s basely political wiles [of Bolinbroke in Richard II]’ (idem.) Kiberd goes on to argue that James Joyce shared in the dissident vision of a Celtic Shakespeare. (269ff.)

Cf. Edward Hirsch, ‘The Imaginary Irish Peasant’, PMLA, 106, 5 (Oct. 1991), pp.1116-1133: ‘Dowden was reflecting the prevailing Anglo-Irish intellectual opinion when he wrote in 1882, “I am infinitely glad that I spent my early enthusiasm on Wordsworth and Spenser and Shakespeare and not on anything Ireland ever produced.” (Letters of Edmund Dowden, ed. Elizabeth D. Dowden & Hilda M. Dowden, London: Dent 1914, pp.183-84.) It was precisely this position that Yeats set himself against.’ (Notes, p.1130; n.5.)

George [“AE”] Russell: Dowden reviewed George Russell’s Homeward, Songs by the Way, in Illustrated London News, 105, 2885 (4 August 1894), p.142, and was answered in a private letter by Russell replying in particular to the parting remarks about his references to Brahma which Dowden appears to have styled ‘cheap Theosophy of the East’ - causing Russell to demur especially at the term ‘cheap’ in this connection. (See Alan Denson, ed., Letters from AE, London: Abelard Schuman 1961, p.10-11.) Denson’s biographical note on Dowden calls him ‘In scholarship, a prodigy.’ (Ibid., p.10.) Incls. refs. to a letter to W. J. Magee [Eglinton] in Edmund Dowden’s Letters (Dent 1914), giving his opinion of Russell’s The Earth Breath (4 Nov. 1897), and Herbert O. White, Edward Dowden: An Address (TCD 1943). In a following letter (13 Aug. 1894; Denson, op. cit., pp.12-15), Russell begins ‘I find all you say wise, but still I am unable to make use of it. The choice of symbolism and a method of thinking is a matter of temperament. I can only owork within a little space at present; while I see with you quite clearly that the truest mystical spirit will and must finally unite itself with exact observation of fact and mastery of details: still I think that facts and details with many of us hardly subserve the purposes of soul. [...]’ (Ibid., p.12.) He also appends a new poem, “In the Womb” [‘Still reasts the heavy share on the dark soil ... The ploughboy to the morning lifts his eyes ... How in her womb the Mighty Mother moulds /The infant spirit for eternity’], later published in Irish Thesophist (15 Jan. 1895), in the American edition of Homeward (NY: Mosher 1895), and in The Earth Breath (London 1897); see Denson’s note, p.14.

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John Butler Yeats (Letter to W. B. Yeats, 6 April, 1913): ‘I see that Edward Dowden is dead; among his own family and small circle of friends it will be an event of very great importance. Weak health caused him early to withdrawn from this world and this was increased by his mystical doctrines, and so his writing was without actuality, or rather monotonous. A sharp and incessant concussion is necessary to release the fire in the flint. In these days in Ireland he’d have written poetry. (J. H. Hone, ed., Letters, 1944; Faber Edn., intro. John McGahern, 1993, p.112); further, ‘[…] Mahaffy’s statement that Dowden did not work very hard in his professorship was one of those things that endear Mahaffy to all his friends and contemporaries …. Another reason made Dowden a recluse from art as well as from the world; he was with his present wife extraordinarily happy. … Personality is born out of pain. It is the fire shut up in the flint.’ (pp.112-13.)

George Russell [AE] characterised the literary ‘way’ of which Dowden was the ‘type’ as being the decision ‘to obliterate all nationality from their work’. (See ‘Nationality and Cosmopolitanism in Literature’, in Literary Ideals in Ireland, ed. John Eglinton, 1899; rep. Mark Story, Poetry and Ireland since 1800, A Source Book, 1988; quoted in Christopher Corr, UU PhD Diss., 1996).

Ernest A. Boyd, Ireland’s Literary Renaissance (Dublin: Maunsel 1916) The study of mysticism was the common factor which brought together the younger writers, W. B. Yeats, Charles Johnston, John Eglinton, Charles Weekes and George W. Russell (A.E.), to mention only some of the names which have since come into prominence in Irish literature. By an irony of history, the late Professor Dowden seems to have given the impulse to the Theosophical Movement in Dublin. During the greater part of his life he was either hostile or indifferent to the literature which was being created about him, and not until recognition had come to it from abroad did Dowden permit himself to admire what his own literary eminence should have helped him to foster. Indirectly, however, he was responsible for the creation of a society of various talents whose importance in the history of the Revival cannot be exaggerated. It was at Dowden’s house that W. B. Yeats heard the discussion of A. P. Sinnett’s Esoteric Buddhism and The Occult World which induced him to read these two books, and to recommend them to his school-friend, Charles Johnston. p213; see full copy in Library > “Critical Classics” - as attached.

John Eglinton characterised Dowden’s cosmopolitan mind as ‘probably the first point touched by anything new in the world of ideas outside Ireland.’ (E. A. Boyd, Appreciations and Depreciations, Dublin 1918, p.152; quoted in Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland, 1995, p.159.)

Note: In Irish Literary Portraits (Macmillan 1925) Eglinton speaks of a relationship between Dowden and a student at Alexandra [Girls’] Schools in his later years but without naming her: ‘An ardent friendship, supplemented by an intimate correspondence, sprang up between the pair, and about the year we have mentioned, 1872, Dowden had fully realised that she was essential to him. This “Platonic” relationship was entirely independent of his family life, which was a happy one. The situation can best be understood in the light of the idealism of Robert Browning, which reigned over it. Browning clearly taught that in every man’s life there is one chance of salvation, through a woman. I never could quite make out the practical application of this doctrine, in such passages as the epilogue to The Statue and the Bust; but he would not have been the great Victorian that he was if he had repudiated convention or the ordinances of society, and the lover carried on the tide of emotion to poetic production would be for Browning the perfect example of ‘emancipation through passion’. This Dowden appears to have believed might be his own case, during a brief period of exaltation, in which he more than once thought of sacrificing everything for poetry.’ (p.70.)

Stephen Gwynn : In Irish Literature and Drama (London 1936), writes: ‘of the old Protestant stock among the business community of Cork City, was by tradition and conviction a strong Unionist; nevertheless ... a rallying point for the new literary movement’. (p.117.)

Richard Ellmann, Yeats: The Man and the Masks (1948) writes that ‘Dowden advised Aubrey de Vere not to write on Irish subjects: ‘As a fact, whether it ought to be so or not, the choice of an Irish mythical, or early historical, subject confines the full enjoyment of the poem to a little circle.’ (Letter to De Vere, Aug. 22, 1873; in letters of Edward Dowden and His Correspondents, Dent, 1914, p.68; Ellmann, p.48.) Note also that Ellmann quotes extensively from Yeats ‘hot-headed’ attack on Dowden: ‘[...] It is a question whether the most distinguished of our critics, Professor Dowden, would not only have more consulted the interests of his country, but more also, in the long run, his own dignity and reputation, which are dear to all Irishmen, if he had devoted some of those elaborate pages when he has spent on the much bewritten George Eliot, to a man like the subject of this article ... [&c.]’ (‘The Poetry of Sir Samuel Ferguson’, in Dublin University Review, II, Nov. 1886, pp.923-41; Ellmann, pp.48-49.) See also references to Dowden as friend and correspondent of John Butler Yeats, in Ellmann, op. cit. (1948), p.12ff.

James Joyce (1): Dowden is mentioned several times in the Library scene of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) [“Scylla and Charybdis” - chap. 9] as a student of Shakepeare, the ;doctor” and the owner of Highfield House. He is also among the sources of Shakespeare lore quoted in that chapter, including his diction that ‘life ran high in those days¦ in allusion to Shakespeare’s apparent love of boys.

High Dowden?: Cf. remarks in Hugh Kenner, Ulysses (rev. edn. London 1987) identifying the sources of the above remark as the opening of Dowden’s Shakespeare for School Children (1877) which begins: ‘In the closing years of the sixteenth century the life of England ran high.’ (Kenner, op. cit., p.113.)

James Joyce (2): In 1903 Joyce sought support from Dowden for post at National Library of Ireland who found the the young man ‘extraordinary [and] quite unsuitable’. (Quoted in Richard Ellmann, James Joyce [1959] 1965, p.145; citing information of John Eglinton.)

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John P. Frayne, ed., Uncollected Prose of W. B. Yeats, Vol. I (London: Macmillan 1970), Pref., pp.41-42; remarks that Yeat admits near hero-worship of Dowden during adolescence in his Autobiographies, calling him his ‘sage’ (‘Reveries’); Dowden supported Wanderings of Oisin; later accused Dowden of permitting English critics to treat Ferguson with contumely; notes that Dowden praised Conary in a private letter (rep. Lady Ferguson’s Sir Samuel Ferguson in the Ireland of his Day, 1896, Vol. II, pp.270-71), but did not use his prestige to spread Ferguson’s fame; Frayne writes, ‘For an intellectual like Dowden, the pressures to praise all things Irish were irrelevant, and the nationalistic clamo[u]r of young writers such as Yests may have antagonised him against a native Irish literature.’ (p.42.)

Frank Tuohy, Yeats (1976), comments include Mahaffy’s, reported by Yeats, ‘Dowden has been here for thirty years and hasn’t done a pennyworth of good to anyone. Literature is not a subject for tuition.’ (p.39; with further remarks on Yeats’s attack on Dowden.)

A. N. Jeffares, W. B. Yeats, A New Biography (1988), Yeats’s portrait of Dowden in Reveries over Childhood and Youth 1915) was ‘kind of Aunt Sally representing the whole of Dublin’s ascendancy establishment ... He had t picture him as unreal in order to contrast with the real image of O’Leary. The result was a decidedly one-sided and ungracious view of Dowden.’

Terence Brown, [‘Edward Dowden’,] in The Literature of Ireland (1988): ‘Throughout his career there seemed something verging on the neurotic in his commitment to a universal and therefore sanitised and severe version of literary culture over against the offensive demands of the local, with all the risks involved in parochialism and misjudgement.’ (p.43).

R. F. Foster, ‘Protestant Magic: W. B. Yeats and the Spell of Irish History’ [1990], rep. in Jonathan Allison, ed., Yeats’s Political Identities (Michigan UP 1996): ‘Yeats’s relationship to Trinity continued highly charged. He did not attend the college (where his father and grandfather had won prizes) for a [95] number of rather disingenuously expressed reasons. He continued to rail against the Trinity establishment, sometimes referring to it as ’the middle class’. In a carefully recorded dream, he visualized ‘a certain portentous professor of Trinity’ as a lap-dog set to guard the gates of hell.’ Most of all, he assailed one emblematic figure with Oedipal passion: the Professor of English Literature, his father’s friend Edward Dowden. Dowden, whom Yeats took as the personification of Protestant Dublin, had been an early supporter of his poetry. In later life Yeats felt somewhat guilty about all this, and wrote nervously to his father that he had treated Dowden rather unfairly as ’a little unreal, a specious moral image ... [a symbol] for the whole structure of Dublin, Lord Chancellors and all the rest’. (1915-16; in Letters, ed. Wade, 1954, pp.603-04.) [...] In 1910 and again in 1913 he was canvassed (not very enthusiastically) for the succession to Dowden’s chair, and found himself very interested. So was his father, who fantasized happily about Yeats walking in the front gate of Trinity in such august circumstances. Yeats never became a Trinity professor. But here too, by about 1913, a wheel had come full circle and a reconciliation with a tribal tradition had been made.’ (p.96.) Foster goes on to discuss the positive influence of Dowden as the introducer of Shelley, whose biography he read in draft to Yeats and his father [JBY]. Note: It was Dowden’s account of Shelley’s experiments with demoniac invocation that later inspired George Russell and W. B. Yeats to attempt the same in the mid-1880s (Ibid., p.226.)

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Declan Kiberd, Inventing Ireland: The Literature of the Modern Nation (London: Jonathan Cape 1995), “Writing Ireland, Reading England” [Chap. 15] characterises Dowden as ‘leader of the efficiency-worshipping literary critics of the Victorian age’ (… &c.; ibid., pp.269ff.) ‘There was, necessarily, a thinly-veiled aggressiveness about such readings of the national condition, rooted in a pivotal sense of hurt and grievance. But that mood soon passed as intellectuals began to notice, with interest and surprise, the equally deforming effects of imperialism on the sponsors themselves. Edward Dowden had written that the pervasive idea of The Tempest was that “the true freedom of man consists in service” whereas to a lout like Caliban “service is slavery” (‘The Serenity of the Tempest’, in D. J. Palmer, ed., The Tempest: A Selection of Critical Essays, 1968, p.75). As a Victorian exponent of evolution, Dowden had pronounced himself a scientific gradualist and, therefore, an enemy of the French Revolution: “no true reformation was ever sudden”, he opined (‘The Scientific Movement and Literature’, Studies in English Literatures, London 1878, p.114). [Cont.]

Declan Kiberd (Inventing Ireland (1995) - cont.: ‘There spoke a nervous Anglo-Irishman of the later nineteenth century, the offspring of a family of landlords in a nation convulsed by the Land War and by the rise of a native intelligentsia, who could only read such interpretations of The Tempest with amused contempt.’ (p.273). See also the earlier remarks: ‘The provincial’s inability to imagine a second self [...] was a failure of th republican imagination, for which style was always a conscious relation between a past and a putative self. Edward Dowden, the Professor of English at Trinity College, Dublin, was just such a provincial, unable to shape a metropolitan but none the less Irish style, for he employed on himself the received categories of English thought. Failing self-conquest, he became an easy prey to cultural conquest by others and so he refused to trust his own nature while writing on Shakespeare.’ (p.121.)

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Quotations

‘Hopes and Fears for Literature’, Fortnightly Review, vol. CCLXVI (Feb. 1889): ‘Obviously where there is a diversity of tongues the principles of nationality cannot fail to assert itself in literature. But we may feel surprise when within the bounds of a single people, and within the area possessed by one common language, the literary claims of contending nationalities are raised. Shall we in these islands of ours, who ‘speak the tongue that Shakespeare spake’, nurse the dream of our separate streams of literature, or shall we have our pride and our joy in one noble river broadened and deepened by various affluent waters?’ (p.173.) [Cont.]