Anglicans -- mostly literary, some musical

Rowan Williams on 'the point of Narnia', which includes an excerpt from his new book on C. S. Lewis, The Lion's World: a Journey into the Heart of Narnia. Here's an interview with Williams: 'Why Rowan Williams loves C. S. Lewis'.

Peter Hitchens on Lewis.

Steve Donoghue reviews Daniel Swift's Shakespeare’s Common Prayers: The Book of Common Prayer and the Elizabethan Age.

From John Stubbs' review of John Drury's new biography of George Herbert: 'By then Donne was the dean of St Paul's and was finding new self-definition in a venue that demanded preaching "loose as the wind, as large as store" to fill its vast Gothic chamber. Herbert's path, on the other hand, lay towards minimalism, the quietness of retreat.'

A book by Laura Mooneyham White: Jane Austen's Anglicanism (on Google Books). Reviewed here.

'Is there an Anglican culture? Anthony Trollope and the Barchester novels.'

From a review of Hermione Lee's Penelope Fitzgerald: a Life: 'The family included Quakers, Ulster Protestants, Wesleyan Methodists, Evangelicals, Anglicans, Anglo-Catholics and one famous Catholic priest, Mgr Ronald Knox. Fond of all (or most) of them, Fitzgerald decided that schisms were pointless and that all religions were really one, but also that faith was essential for life.'

An article on Rose Macaulay: '"Oh dear, if only the Reformation had happened differently": Anglicanism, the Reformation and Dame Rose Macaulay (1881-1958)', by Judith Maltby, appears in The Church and Literature. This volume also includes 'Jesuit Pulp fiction: The Serial Novels of Antonio Bresciani in La Civiltà Cattolica' by Oliver Logan.

I haven't yet read Macaulay's Towers of Trebizond but I've found these choice quotations from it online:

Then he stopped laughing, and said in the voice one uses when a friend has been killed by a shark, "You heard about poor Charles?"

I went on musing about why it was thought better and higher to love one's country than one's county, or town, or village, or house. Perhaps because it was larger. But then it would be still better to love one's continent, and best of all to love one's planet.

"Take my camel, dear,” said my Aunt Dot, as she climbed down from this animal on her return from High Mass. The camel, a white Arabian Dhalur (single hump) from the famous herd of the Ruola tribe, had been a parting present, its saddle-bags stuffed with low-carat gold and flashy orient gems, from a rich desert tycoon who owned a Levantine hotel near Palmyra… I did not care for the camel, nor the camel for me, but, as I was staying with aunt Dot, I did what she bade me, and dragged the camel by its bridal to the shed which it shared with my little Austin and, till lately, with my aunt’s Morris, but this car had been stolen from her by some Anglican bishop from outside the Athenaeum annexe while she was dining there one evening.

I wonder who else is rambling around Turkey this spring. Seventh-day Adventists, Billy Grahamites, writers, diggers, photographers, spies, us, and now the BBC.

'Between 1991 and 1999 D.M. Greenwood produced a series of 9 ‘Ecclesiastical Whodunnits’ centred on the character of Deaconess Theodora Braithwaite. D.M. Greenwood is in fact Dr Diane M. Greenwood who, after teaching classics, took a position as what she described as a ‘low-level ecclesiastical civil servant’' in the Church of England.

Philip Hensher on the centenary of Barbara Pym's birth: 'She has her revenge: on her 100th birthday, all her books are in print, and every one is loved. We Pymmians toast her, even if we reflect as we raise our glasses, like Dulcie Mainwaring, that “there should have been wine… but she drank orange squash”.'

'Pym’s world is inhabited by an eccentric cast of winsome curates, pompous vicars and canons, enthusiastic students, vague professors, badly dressed clergy wives, aging men who live with their cranky mothers, bored civil servants, crotchety librarians, "splendid spinsters," dotty retirees, professed agnostics, titled nobility, "distressed gentlewomen" and discreet homosexual couples.'

Barbara Pym and the Sermon: 'If the sermons reported in the novels fail to satisfy her most reflective characters, a consideration of Barbara Pym’s own long-standing interest in John Henry Newman may offer insight into the kind of sermon that would have satisfied her and her creations.'

Rev. Richard Coles, formerly of the Communards. 'Former popstar, BBC presenter and parish priest Reverend Richard Coles talks to Caspar Melville about faith, doubt and dachsunds.' 'When he applied to train for the priesthood, the church’s medical officer asked if he had taken non-prescription drugs and, if so, which ones. ‘‘I only knew their street names, and he only knew their pharmacological ones. It was a very, very long phone call.’’'

Extraordinary philosophy links

Erik Desmazieres' illustration for Borges' 'Library of Babel'

Source of above image.

From Philosopher's Zone, 'We need to talk about Hegel' -- Joe Gelonesi talks to Paul Redding about Hegel.

On John Stuart Mill's annotations of Emerson's Essays:

When Mill turned to the Essays themselves, there was a good deal of marking up in the margins – which confirms that a passage caught his attention – and frequent asides, many of them simply a damning word or two .... If ‘sense’ was present, the more heavily annotated essays suggest that Mill thought ‘nonsense’ prevailed.

On BBC Radio 4's In Our Time, Melvyn Bragg talks to David Wootton, Michael Moriarty, and Michela Massimi about Pascal.

From the same source, Mel Bragg, Stephen Mulhall, Ray Monk, and Julia Tanney on ordinary language philosophy.

Ever the Leibnizian, Borges countenanced extraordinary language philosophy:

There was also hope that the fundamental mysteries of mankind -- the origin of the Library and of time -- might be revealed. In all likelihood those profound mysteries can indeed be explained in words; if the language of the philosophers is not sufficient, then the multiform Library must surely have produced the extraordinary language that is required, together with the words and grammar of that language. (Jorge Luis Borges, 'The Library of Babel')

From the mid-1980s, an article on 'Ordinary and Extraordinary Language in Medieval Jewish and Islamic Philosophy' by L. E. Goodman. Some of the medieval Islamic philosophers influenced Ramón Llull (whose ars combinatoria was to have captured the 'interrelationships of Platonic forms'). Llull's ideas influenced Leibniz's notion of a characteristica universalis, which was essential to Lebniz's dreamed of unified and universal science. Llull, Leibniz, and Borges figure prominently in William Woof's 'Borges, Cervantes & Quine. Reconciling Existence Assumptions and Fictional Complexities in “Pierre Menard, Author of Don Quixote”', which appeared in the 1999 volume of Variaciones Borges.

On WHY? Radio, Joseph Margolis on 'The Unity of the Sciences: Is All Knowledge Connected?'

From Philosophy Bites, 'Rom Harré on the Linguistic Turn in Philosophy' and John Tasioulas on human rights.

Steven Nadler on why Spinoza was excommunicated.

Samuel Moyn on dignity in recent books by Jeremy Waldron and Michael Rosen.


The Mind Body Problem: An interview with Ned Block from Imaginal Disc on Vimeo.

Delmore and Lou

James & Alma Agee with Delmore Schwartz (1939)

Source of above photo.

Zachary Braiterman draws attention to Lou Reed's days at Syracuse University, where Reed took classes with the poet Delmore Schwartz (on whom Saul Bellow based Humboldt's Gift). A classmate, James Gorney, says Schwartz sometimes went drinking with Reed and him.

Reed loved poetry, but I didn't think he was really a poet until I read his 'O Delmore how I miss you: dreams from his teacher', a testimonial to Schwartz' influence. It was published as the Preface in New Directions' re-issue of Schwartz's In Dreams Begin Responsibilities. Here's an audio file of Reed reading from the eponymous story of the collection (the title of which was drawn from an epigraph in a volume of Yeats' poems). The story was first published in the Partisan Review in 1937. Here are Lee Smith's reflections on Reed's ode to his mentor.

Late in his life, in 2007, Reed created a scholarship at Syracuse University. He called it the Lou Reed/Delmore Schwartz Scholarship.

Reed's song 'My House' was partly about Schwartz. According to that link, Reed said, 'Delmore Schwartz was my teacher and friend. He was the smartest, funniest, saddest person I'd ever met. He had a large scar on his forehead he said he got dueling with Nietzsche. I was Dedalus to his Bloom.' (I can't find the original source for that quotation.) An earlier song by the Velvet Underground, 'European Son', was dedicated to Schwartz.

Menachem Feuer has a post on the relation between Schwartz and Reed.

Schwartz studied philosophy in New York with Sidney Hook and proceeded from there to do graduate work in philosophy at Harvard. He was drawn to Harvard because ... well, because it was Harvard but also because of Alfred North Whitehead. While he didn't complete his doctorate, Schwartz received high grades at Harvard and retained a lasting admiration for Whitehead. Indeed, he prefaced one of his poems, 'Heavy Bear...', with a quotation of Whitehead.

Another of Schwartz' philosophical associates was William Barrett, who worked with Schwartz at the Partisan Review.

Hear Schwartz reading his poem 'Swift'.
 

Arthur Danto, 1929-2013

Arthur Danto's obituary and a reminiscence by one of his colleagues at The Nation.

Akeel Bilgrami remembers Danto:

Premonitions of that defection were there for us to see for some years before, when in his editorial judgements at the Journal of Philosophy and in his stray remarks he would betray a mild weariness with the way Philosophy had gone: the tedium of some of its professional protocols, the barbarous idiom of some of its writing, the lack of chivalry in some of its argumentative combat, and the routines of its reinvention of familiar and tired ideas.

Santiago Zabala on Danto:

Not only was Danto a leader within the academy as the author of classical studies on Nietzsche and aesthetics and as president of the American Philosophical Association and the American Society of Aesthetics, but he was also among the most important art critics in the world. Since 1984 he was an art critic for The Nation and Artforum and received several international awards, including the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1990, the Frank Jewett Mather Award in 1996, and the French Prix de Philosophie in 2003.

Michael Kelly's interview of Danto in 2000 at BOMB Magazine.

Update (Nov. 4): Here's Leonard Schwartz's 1-hour interview with Danto from Feb., 2007.


s
Arthur Danto: 01/17/2006 from MFA Art Crit on Vimeo.

Some Weimar links

In this 1922 photo are (from left to right): Wieland Herzfelde, Eva and George Grosz, Rudolf Schlichter, and John Heartfield.

A new collection of papers on Weimar culture from Princeton University Press: Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy. In includes an article by Frederick Beiser on the neo-Kantians. Here's the Table of Contents with abstracts for each paper.

Eileen Battersby reviews Erich Kästner's Going to the Dogs: the Story of a Moralist.

'Kurt Tucholsky -- Advocate of the dying Weimar Republic'.

Friedhelm Greis on Tucholsky. More Tucholsky: 'In Berlin, Kurt Tucholsky discovered his stage, he wrote the lyrics for revues and literary cabarets - honed, polemical texts with a shot of ribald humor. His first record appeared, a shellac treasure with the song "When the Old Motor Ticks Again." It was a massive hit.'

Entries on Tucholsky and others at Berlin: The City as Body, The City as Metaphor, which is the site for a course at Stanford University.

Avner Shapira on Irmgard Keun:

If the two novels she published in the twilight era of the Weimar Republic turned her into a literary star, then the Nazi ban led to her being forgotten for a very long time. Only near the end of her days was she rediscovered and the recipient of widespread recognition. ... "Doris may be a refreshing character - funny, charming and very human," continues [Hanan] Elstein. "But she also embodies the ignorance, systematic blindness and apathy - blinded by the materialistic plenty and the lack of political awareness that aided the rise of the Nazis in 1933."

From 2008, Ian Buruma on Fassbinder's Berlin Alexanderplatz.

Recordings of George Mosse's 1979 lectures for a course called 'European Cultural History: 1880-1920'. The lectures that begin with Lecture 23 seem to focus on Weimar.

Historical Dictionary of the Weimar Republic.
 

Links concerning Polish literature in the former Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria

Krakow is now a UNESCO City of Literature. Here's a long list of authors who lived in Krakow.

Sławomir Mrożek, a playwright and native of Krakow, died last August.

'Basia Howard writes about Tadeusz Różewicz, Poland’s most translated author, considered by many to be of the same stature as Szymborska and Milosz.' Here's Różewicz's bio and a page about one of his translated collections of poetry (They Came to See a Poet). He studied in Krakow but has spent much of his life in Wroclaw.

Tadeusz Boy-Żeleński, an M. D., critic, and satirist, spent part of his youth in Krakow. He moved to Lviv, where he was among the professors who were massacred by the Germans in July, 1941.

Gabriela Zapolska was active in the theater scene in both Krakow and Lviv. Her play The Morality of Mrs. Dulska is available in English translation.

Józef Wittlin received some of his education in Lviv. He studied philosophy and linguistics in Vienna, where he befriended Joseph Roth, whose works he would translate into Polish. Wittlin also translated Homer into Polish. He was in the Austro-Hungarian army in WWI, which was the subject matter of his only novel, Salt of the Earth (reviewed in this pdf). In his diaries, Gombrowicz identified Wittlin with 'bourgeois demonism. ... He is a bourgeois who got the bourgeois pulled out from under his feet. In this lies his demonism'. G's diary contains more remarks on Wittlin, who also tuns up in the diary of Marc Szeftel (of Pnin fame). Wittlin eventually moved to New York.

The YIVO entry on Polish Literature has a photo of Wittlin with his wife in Lviv and ends with several brief bios of other Galician Jewish authors who wrote primarily in Polish, chief among whom was Bruno Schulz.

Essays, aphorisms, facts

Vienna Court Opera, 1902

From Michael Hofmann's review of the new Franzen-Reitter-Kehlmann book of Kraus:

Can aphorism be a secure repository for a reputation? I think only by accident, and if there are no more than one or two of them. And better one than two. ... Kraus, of course, took care to write essays as well. Many of his aphorisms are taken from his essays, whose typical mode is to fog or struggle or tunnel or insinuate themselves from one aphorism to the next, sometimes three or four to the page. Just as Shakespeare seems to be full of quotations, so Kraus is full of aphorisms.

More about Franzen-Reitter-Kehlmann-Kraus.

Noel Gallagher has no time for Shakespeare, who just made stuff up. Noel Gallagher likes reading only factual stuff, so he might have time for Morrissey's brand new autobiography, a Penguin Classic. Autobiographies are factual, classical ones more so. (Then, again, Gallagher might be turned off by Morrissey's literary references.)

As someone pointed out on Facebook,  it's not true that Gallagher will ever be found in a champagne supernova or that he will never die. When he sang lyrics to the contrary, he was just making it up.

More about Morrissey's brand new classic autobiography, which is already #1 with a bullet on the UK charts.

Kraus stalked the actual-factual in cafés. Kurt Wolff on Kraus:

It was only on rare occasions that I witnessed the side of Kraus that flourished in café conversations, an activity to which he sacrificed thousands of hours--although "sacrifice" is probably the wrong word, since he clearly thrived in this atmosphere. ... The café was where he picked up a great deal of information not to be found in the newspapers, which sooner or later he could put to good use.

But then, Wolff adds, Kraus worked on this material in long hours of nocturnal hard work, like Kafka, which implies it wasn't just information that Kraus wrote. He, too, was makin' stuff up.

The Wolff quotation is from Kurt Wolff: a Portrait in Essays and Letters (1991), which the University of Chicago Press has just this month issued as a paperback. Probably the letters are factual.

Roundup of links to Austro-Hungarian outposts

'David. S. Luft’s evocative translations in Hugo von Hofmannsthal and the Austrian Idea: Selected Essays and Addresses 1906-1927 are a welcome addition to the lost literature of Central European modernism.'

From Strange Flowers: 'Trakl was born in Salzburg in 1887, his mother’s drug addiction meaning he was largely raised by a French nanny. Named Marie Boring, she was clearly anything but, introducing her young charge to poets such as Baudelaire and Rimbaud.'

More from Strange Flowers: Alfred Kubin took 'anti-industrialist visionary ideologies' and 'stretch[ed] them ad absurdum'. Kubin's entry at the Weird Fiction Review.

Abstract for an article by Genese Grill: 'Robert Musil’s 1937 address «Über die Dummheit» ['On Stupidity'] navigated a challenging subject in a treacherous climate for free speech and simultaneously affirmed Musil’s conception of the necessary symbiosis of aesthetics and ethics. This paper argues for a reading of the address and its preparatory notes wherein Musil’s gendered «Stupidity» (Die Dummheit) represents the ethical role of the artist, as poetic, non-conscripted voice – and, thus, of Musil himself – in a period of totalitarian brutality.'

Wera Ouckama-Knoop (1900-1919)

Source of above photo. Wera Ouckama-Knoop was a dancer who died young. Rilke, a friend of her parents, dedicated his Sonnets to Orpheus to her.

Adam Kirsch on a new translation of Hilda Spiel's biography of Fanny von Arnstein: 'It soon becomes clear, however, that Fanny von Arnstein is more the occasion for Spiel’s book than its subject. That subject is really the experience of the Jews during the German Enlightenment—say, between 1776, when the 18-year-old Fanny moved from her native Prussia to Austria, and 1814, the year of Napoleon’s downfall, when her house became one of the most glamorous meeting-places during the Congress of Vienna.'

From the publisher's site for the von Arnstein biography: 'Soon Fanny hosted an ever more splendid salon which attracted the leading figures of her day, including Madame de Staël, the Duke of Wellington, Lord Nelson, his lover Lady Hamilton and the young Arthur Schopenhauer.'

From Weird Fiction Review, Larry Nolen on Bruno Schulz: 'The dissolution of states at the end of World War I can be discerned in symbolic form, as the old order has collapsed and something new and chaotic has emerged to take its place.  Yeats in “Easter, 1916” might have proclaimed that a “terrible beauty is born,” but for Schulz there is more the sense of monstrosities being birthed.' From the same site, John Curran Davis' translation of Schulz's 'The Sanatorium at the Sign of the Hourglass'.

From Jacob Mikanowski's 2012 piece on Schulz in the LA Review of Books: 'The fiction of Bruno Schulz is alive with dead things. His stories all take place in the narrow landscape of his childhood: the small, provincial town of Drohobycz in what was then the Austro-Hungarian Empire.'

Gregor von Rezzori on his roots (from a 1988 interview in Bomb Magazine): 'I was born in Bukovina, Rumania. Before Rumania went into the war it was given to the Russians so I was already more or less a Russian although I still had a Rumanian passport and was living in Vienna at that time. When Bohemia was taken by the Russians I went to our ambassador in Berlin, who was a friend of the family, and I said, “What shall I do, what am I supposed to do?” He said, “Well, you are supposed to go home and find a new identity because you don’t exist."'

Rezzori (as Sir Roderick Crawford) with Johanna von Koczian in Bezaubernde Arabella (1959)

Source of above image. Rezzori's filmography at IMDb.

From Gregg Morris' review of Rezzori's Orient-Express: 'Rezzori is one of those unfashionable intellects whose rootlessness lead him to universalism rather than rancor. Though he now resides in Tuscany, he has published most of his work in German. During the Second World Was he was a broadcaster for British radio and parts of what is perhaps his best-known work, Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, he composed in English.'

From last year's item (by Lorna Scott Fox) on Rezzori in The Nation: 'Von Rezzori’s father was an Italo-Austrian nobleman, proficient in chemistry and the arts, with a sinecure in Bukovina, where after 1919, when the region passed to Romania, he pretended to uphold a teetering bastion of civilization but really stayed on for the hunting.'

Scott Walters on the English translation of Count Miklós Bánffy's Transylvanian Trilogy: 'Translator Patrick Thursfield, in his preface to the Arcadia edition, recounts learning about them by chance from his neighbor in Tangiers, Bánffy’s daughter Katalin Bánffy-Jelin, who had begun an English translation consisting of loosely bound pages partially mangled by her cat. A collaboration began, and the resulting publication, with a foreword by Patrick Leigh Fermor, won the 2002 Oxford-Weidenfeld prize.'

Andrew Cusack on Bánffy, 'The Tolstoy of Transylvania'. The 2010 entry on Bánffy at Neglected Books. From Max Egremont's 2013 review in the Wall Street Journal: 'Bánffy died destitute in Soviet-dominated Budapest in 1950. His life is a grim parable of central Europe's 20th century.'

Hilde Spiel & Thomas Bernhard  (1988)

 The source of the above photo has a translation of Spiel's impressions of her friendship with Bernhard.

A note on Jay Kirk's new article 'Bartók’s Monster' (in the Oct. issue of Harpers), which is about the Transylvanian roots of some of Bartók’s music: 'The tiny, teetotaling Bartók took his recording machine—the monster—across the sheep trails and into village courtyards of Maramureş and Székely Land, where he would “suck the songs” from the peasant fiddlers. He was entranced by the "indeterminate content structure” of the music. “Like Rumpelstiltskin,” writes Kirk, “he hurried back to Budapest to spin the bales of itchy straw into chaotic threads of Lydian gold.”'

'In Erwin Schrödinger and the Quantum Revolution, biographer John Gribbin follows the thread through the Austrian physicist’s fascinating, often eyebrow-raising life alongside scientific milestones.'

'Erich Wolfgang Korngold, born on 29 May, 1897 in Brno as the younger son of fierce Neue Presse music critic Julius Korngold, was a Wunderkind and shooting star of the declining Austro-Hungarian Monarchy. ... He left for Hollywood, to write first for Max Reinhardt and then under contract for Warner Brothers, a true musical “Romantic”, who is credited with creating the Hollywood sound.'

Popper, Middlemarch, and Phrenology

A couple of years ago, I noted an interesting passage in George Eliot's Middlemarch. In it, Eliot seemed to anticipate the Popperian insight that a truly scientific theory must be falsifiable. I've learned from NewApps that Victor Gijsbers has also noticed the Popperian theme in that passage. The passage, again, runs as follows:

But Mr. Casaubon’s theory of the elements which made the seed of all tradition was not likely to bruise itself unawares against discoveries: it floated among flexible conjectures no more solid than those etymologies which seemed strong because of likeness in sound until it was shown that likeness in sound made them impossible: it was a method of interpretation which was not tested by the necessity of forming anything which had sharper collisions than an elaborate notion of Gog and Magog: it was as free from interruption as a plan for threading the stars together. (George Eliot, Middlemarch, ch. 48)

Mr. Gijsbers' post got me wondering about the provenance of this idea.

Other nineteenth-century theorists stressed the importance of trying to falsify our beliefs in our quest for truth. In an article in the Monist in 1982, Susan Haack identified this theme in C. S. Peirce's work (and pointed out differences between Peirce's and Popper's views), and others take William Stanley Jevons to have emphasized  the importance of attempts at falsification in our belief-forming regimen.

I doubt that Eliot was influenced by either of these theorists. Peirce's work was published too late to have influenced Eliot and it looks like Jevons and Eliot developed their thinking independently of each other. (Update [Sept. 23]: Eric Schliesser asked why I don't think that Jevons influenced Eliot on this matter. Eliot published Middlemarch in 1871-2, but Jevons' statement on the importance of seeking a theory's falsification ['objections' and 'discordance'] appeared in his Principles of Science, which was published in 1874.)

Eliot was influenced by Auguste Comte's positivism, but Comte doesn't seem to have recognized falsifiability as a hallmark of good epistemology (let alone of specifically scientific theory). Nonetheless, the Comtean background is relevant. Comte endorsed phrenology, which was ridiculed as a quack pseudo-science. It looks like some of phrenology's nineteenth-century critics were put off by the phrenologists' capacity to dispense with any and all seemingly recalcitrant bits of behavioral evidence by means of arbitrary stipulations. My source for this claim is G. N. Cantor ('The Edinburgh Phrenology Debate: 1803-1828', Annals of Science 32 [1975]: 195-218, see esp. 212 and 213).

Cantor attributes the objection to Francis Jeffrey and to P. M. Roget.  Jefffrey's critique appeared in a book review in an 1826 issue of the Edinburgh Review, (v. 44 [Sept 1826]: 253-318). According to Jeffrey,

It is quite plain ... that these admissions ...reduce this whole 'science of observation,' to a series of mere evasions and gratuitous suppositions. We produce, for example, a person whose whole conduct indicates great Benevolence, but who happens to have a very small bump in the place where the organ of that propensity is said to be situated. Is not this a proof of the fallacy of the system? Oh no—by no means. The individual has had the good luck to be trained up among very benevolent people, and has had his small original stock prodigiously increased by their precepts and example, aided perhaps' by his own large endowment of the faculty of Imitation!—or, his organ of benevolence has perhaps been excited to a diseased activity by some internal inflammation,—or at all events, as he has Love of Approbation and Cautiousness very large, nothing is so probable as that his apparent benevolence is merely put on, to gain the good opinion of the world, or to secure some advantage to himself!  We next produce another person with an enormous bump of Benevolence on his forehead; and, offering to prove that he is, notwithstanding, notoriously cruel, oppressive, and uncharitable, we ask, again, how this is to be reconciled with the truth of the system? O, nothing in the world so easy! First of all, he has probably had no training in the paths of benevolence, and the field, though naturally fertile, has therefore been actually barren; But besides, you have only to look, and you will most probably find the organs of Combativeness, and Destructiveness, and Acquisitiveness, still larger than that of Benevolence. These, of course, make him quarrelsome, and cruel, and avaricious: and how then can his poor benevolence find means to display itself? (Francis Jeffrey, Edinburgh Review 44 [1826]: 298-299)

Jeffrey concluded that 'the phrenological theory, though absolutely incapable of any clear or satisfactory proof, abounds in those equivocations and means of retreat, by which it may often escape from. direct refutation'. (Ibid.)

As Cantor says, the response of critics like Jeffrey and Roget

resembles Popper's reaction to Adler's theory a century later. In his Encyclopaedia Britannica article P. M. Roget noted the difficulty of falsifying phrenology since its proponents employed ad hoc assumptions which covered all contingencies. (Cantor,  213)

George Eliot had endorsed phrenology but later came to see its limitations. By the 1860's, she was poking fun at the theory in Felix Holt: the Radical (1866). As T. R. Wright has pointed out, Eliot's ridicule plays upon phrenology's apparent immunity to falsification. ('From Bumps to Morals: The Phrenological Background to George Eliot's Moral Framework', The Review of English Studies, New Series 33 [1982]: 34-46)  In Chapter 5 of Felix Holt, the eponymous character echoes Jeffrey's above objection:

A phrenologist at Glasgow told me I had large veneration; another man there, who knew me, laughed out and said I was the most blasphemous iconoclast living. 'That,' says my phrenologist, 'is because of his large ideality, which prevents him from finding anything perfect enough to be venerated.' (Felix Holt, ch. 5)

In addition to the critique of phrenology, another possible influence on Eliot's thinking was the methodological work of Claude Bernard. In 1865, Bernard published his Introduction to the Study of Experimental Medicine, the first part of which was devoted to methodological considerations. Bernard's reflections occupied Eliot and her partner, G. H. Lewes, in the 1870's while Eliot was writing Middlemarch and Lewes was working on his multi-volume Problems of Life and Mind (which was completed by Eliot after Lewes' death). I don't know much about Bernard's methodology, but at least one philosopher, Jean-François Malherbe, finds close parallels between it and Popper's views.

So, Eliot's remark about 'Mr. Casaubon's theory of the elements' places Casaubon's theory in the same pseudo-scientific wastebasket as phrenology. Scientists, for Eliot, are better advised to follow the example of Lydgate, who 'was enamored of that arduous invention which is the very eyes of research, provisionally framing its object and correcting it to more and more exact relation.' (Middlemarch, ch. 45)

Dark Arcadias

Henry Fuseli 'Titania's Awakening' (1785)

Three of these five BBC broadcasts on 'Dark Arcadias' may still be played. 

Chapter 5 of John F. Lynen's 1960 book on Robert Frost's pastoral art. (A review of Lynen's book.)

'The Dark Pastorals of Robert Frost and Hayden Carruth'.

In his The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell documented the strange appearance of the pastoral form in several works (esp. trauma narratives) by WWI British vets. The use of the pastoral mode seems strange in connection with such a catastrophic event, or it does if we think of the pastoral form as being all sweetness and light (bucolic, idyllic, etc.).

(Henry Fuseli [aka Johann Heinrich Füssli] had a more complicated vision ...)

Fuseli 'Titania & Bottom' (c. 1790)

Fussell focused on Edmund Blunden, who closed Undertones of War with his self-portrayal as 'a harmless young shepherd in a soldier's coat'. While Fussell didn't discuss Robert Graves' work in this connection, other critics have spoken of Graves' 'darker Arcadia' (which was supposedly more complex and archaic than Blunden's). In music, Ralph Vaughan Williams was prompted to write his 3rd symphony, 'A Pastoral Symphony', by his WWI experiences in France, and Williams' unfinished cello concerto from the 1940's was completed by David Matthews and named 'The Dark Pastoral'.

Of course, as Fussell notes, the pastoral is not all sweetness and light. Its history is much more complex and nuanced than that. From Erwin Panofsky's article 'Et in Arcadia Ego', Fussell had learned of a tendency by some artists to include a memento mori amid Arcadia's bucolic setting. Panofsky identified this motif in paintings by Poussin and Guercino, both of whom planted a death's head in the garden.

The Arcadian Shepherds (c. 1618) by Guercino

More about this painting, which is the modern source of the line 'et in Arcadia ego.' If you expand Guercino's above artwork, you can see the Latin phrase imprinted under the skull. Poussin created two paintings with that same Latin title.

In his paper, Panofsky wrote,

At the very moment when this new Arcadia was created [by Virgil], a dissonance made itself felt between its preternatural perfection and the fundamental limitations of human nature as such: even in Arcadia there existed the two fundamental tragedies of human life, inextricably connected with one another: frustrated love and death. ('Et in Arcadia Ego', in Philosophy & History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer, ed. R. Klibansky and H. J. Paton [Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1936], pp. 227-8)

Panofsky excavated the correct translation of 'et in Arcadia ego'. Many had taken it for a bit of nostalgia from the grave; they thought it was spoken by a deceased person and meant 'I, too, was in Arcadia'. Panofsky argued (Ibid., p. 232), partly by reference to Guercino's above painting, that the line should be attributed to death itself (e.g., to a death's head) and means 'even in Arcadia, there (am) I'.

Fussell says that this morbid association with Arcadia was more influential among English authors. Signs of it appear in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited, the first section of which is entitled 'Et in Arcadia Ego'. Waugh has the phrase etched into a skull that one of the characters keeps in a bowl of roses in his room at Oxford. The phrase adorns a gravestone in an illustration by Aubrey Beardsley. More recently, it featured in Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia.

On a related note, here's a 2012 dissertation by Andreas Schardt about an English tradition of mixing the pastoral with the gothic: Gothic Pastoral: Terrible Idylls in Late Nineteenth- and Twentieth-Century Literature. From the 'Abstract':

'The Gothic and the pastoral have mostly been regarded as entirely antithetical modes so far. However, there are numerous texts in English literature where an overlap between both forms can be observed. Authors like H.G. Wells, Bram Stoker, H.P. Lovecraft or William Golding, for instance, employ depictions of an idyllic nature or the motif of the Golden Age as typical of the pastoral in combination with Gothic features like the insistence on a barbaric past of superstition and anarchy threatening an enlightened present.' (Emphasis added)

Schardt's dissertation includes material about the graveyard poets, one of whom (Edward Young) wrote Night Thoughts, which was read by Blunden during WWI.

Sir John Everett Millais,'Ophelia' 1852

Here's a cd called Dark Pastoral: Songs and Poetry From World War One. And here's 'Dark Pastoral' by Matthews and Vaughan Williams: