19th Century Literature

Aestheticism is the late-nineteenth-century claim that art exists for beauty, not for a moral lesson or a social use. Abrams: art is an autonomous end. The French tag is l’art pour l’art. Walter Pater’s conclusion to The Renaissance asks for intensity of sensation, a gem-like flame. Oscar Wilde is the set name. The doctrine is a revolt inside the Victorian century: Houghton’s earnestness measured a book by duty and public morals; aestheticism measures it by style. Mill’s utilitarianism judges the right act by the greatest happiness of the greatest number; the aesthete judges a canvas by how it looks.

The set book is Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890 magazine; 1891 volume). The Preface says there is no moral or immoral book, only well or badly written; all art is quite useless (quite = completely). Basil Hallward paints Dorian in a London studio. Lord Henry Wotton talks youth, sensation, the new Hedonism. Dorian wishes that the picture would age and that he would stay as he is. The wish takes. The plot is then a double: the face in the world, the face in the attic. Sibyl Vane dies after he rejects her ruined acting; a touch of cruelty enters the painted mouth. About eighteen years later he murders Basil and stabs the canvas. Servants find an old, withered man and a portrait restored. The novel proclaims the doctrine; the portrait still keeps accounts.

Pre-Raphaelitism (PRB, 1848: Rossetti, Hunt, Millais) usually still wants a sacred or moral story in exact colour; Wilde’s Preface drops that story and keeps the cult of the beautiful object. Tennyson and Hopkins argue grief, faith, or God’s pattern in a grove. Huxley’s selected snobberies are sociology of prestige. Chekhov’s The Seagull is drama; Hawthorne’s Fountain evening is a short story. The heading is therefore the Preface, the wish, and the attic portrait.

The Oxford Movement (Tractarianism) is a church movement of the 1830s. It begins in Oxford — conventionally with John Keble’s 1833 sermon on national apostasy — and gathers John Henry Newman, E. B. Pusey and the Tracts for the Times. The claim: the Church of England is apostolic, sacramental, catholic in the old sense; it is neither a department of the state nor a useful moral club. Against liberal Protestant thinning, and against a utilitarian measuring of religion by social happiness, the Tractarians restore ritual, tradition, and the authority of the early Church. Newman’s conversion to Rome in 1845 is the crisis everyone names. Houghton’s Victorian mind is religious even when it doubts; this movement is one strong religious answer, as utilitarianism and later Darwinism are others.

On this paper the poet closest to a sacramental seeing is Hopkins — convert, Jesuit, writer of inscape as God’s pattern in things. “Spring and Fall” is a lyric of a child’s grove; the Catholic-sacramental eye that finds a grove’s thisness belongs to the century’s recovered seriousness about sacrament. Arnold is the other pole: son of Thomas Arnold of Rugby, who opposed the Tractarians; “Dover Beach” is liberal-agnostic melancholy, a withdrawing sea of faith. Tennyson’s lyric 54 is a private theodicy. Wilde’s aestheticism is a late religion of beauty.

Pre-Raphaelitism begins as a painters’ brotherhood in 1848: Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, John Everett Millais, and the short-lived PRB. They reject the academic smoothness associated with Raphael’s followers — brown shadows, generalised bodies. They want brilliant colour, sharp natural detail, and often medieval or biblical subjects taken seriously. Exact looking at a leaf feeds the cult of the beautiful object that aestheticism will push further, yet the PRB still usually wants a moral or sacred story; Wilde’s Preface drops that story. Hopkins’s hunger for the inscape of a grove shares the PRB refusal of a vague general tree; his end is Jesuit. The heading therefore names 1848 and Hunt–Millais–Rossetti, then two set pages: Wilde’s beauty-cult and, by exact seeing, Hopkins.

Reference. These lines sit in Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” published in New Poems (1867), the set lyric of Unit 2. The lyric is irregular in line-length, rhymed in patches. A speaker at a window on the Dover strait addresses a beloved.

Context. The poem opens in calm: the sea is calm tonight; the moon lies fair; the night-air is sweet. Then the grating roar of pebbles which the waves draw back and fling — an eternal note of sadness. Sophocles heard the same ebb on the Aegean as human misery. Arnold hears the withdrawal of Faith. After the girdle image, “now I only hear / Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar.” The world that seemed a land of dreams has neither joy, nor love, nor light, nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain. Last picture: a darkling plain, confused alarms of struggle and flight, ignorant armies that clash by night. The one human stay is “Ah, love, let us be true / To one another!”

Explanation. The extract is the poem’s theological hinge. The Sea of Faith once lay round the earth like a bright girdle: a full, holding, beautiful enclosure. Now the girdle is gone; only the roar of withdrawal remains. Houghton’s Victorian doubt after science and the machine age is here in one figure. The date 1867 is after On the Origin of Species (1859); Tennyson’s lyric 54 (1850) still trusts that good is the goal of ill. Yeats’s later centre that cannot hold is a harsher night still. The form is lyric address to a beloved. The opening weather is moonlight and a calm sea; the argument is withdrawn faith, love as the last stay, and ignorant armies on a darkling plain.

Reference. These are the last two lines of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall,” written 1880, the set page for inscape, instress and sprung rhythm. A knowing adult speaks to a child, Margaret, who grieves over Goldengrove unleaving. The address is close to the poet. Hopkins marks the stress on is in the first of these lines.

Context. The lyric opens “Márgarét, áre you gríeving / Over Goldengrove unleaving?” Leaves are like the things of man; she cares with fresh thoughts. As the heart grows older it will come to such sights colder; worlds of wanwood may lie leafmeal, and she will not spare a sigh — and yet she will weep and know why. “Sorrow’s springs are the same.” Neither mouth nor mind has expressed what heart heard and ghost guessed. Then the last couplet: the blight man was born for; Margaret you mourn for. The speaker tells the child that the grief is already her own.

Explanation. Inscape: the grove’s distinctive pattern is mortality in falling gold. Instress: that pattern strikes the child before she has the word death. Sprung rhythm: counted stresses, packed slack, the name Márgarét itself sprung; the forced lift on ís. The blight is original mortality. Hopkins still reads a meaningful thisness. Arnold’s beach-lines use a different foot-law. Beside Tennyson 54, the child weeps, and the lyric offers no theodicy.

Reference. The sentence opens Aldous Huxley’s “Selected Snobberies.” The syllabus names Huxley’s On the Margin (1923) among readings; this essay is the snobbery-classification. It is Unit 3 prose: witty sociology of prestige. Wilde’s Preface claims art for art; this page sorts ranks of snobbery.

Context. After the hard first sentence — all men are snobs about something — Huxley sorts the fashions. Disease-snobbery: the adolescent who thinks it romantic to fade like Keats, and the richer sort who collect fashionable maladies and spas. Family-snobbery is in decline. Culture-snobbery still strong, wrestling with a snobbery of ignorance. Booze-snobbery, born of American Prohibition, makes drunkenness socially creditable. Modernity-snobbery is the age’s economic engine: machines overproduce, so advertising teaches us to throw away and buy again — “We are all modernity-snobs now.” Art-snobbery splits: platonic (an “interest” in art) and unplatonic (buying art as culture-symbol and wealth-symbol). Old Masters are safer than living painters. Then the humanistic point: snobbery stimulates activity; a society with plenty of snobberies is like a dog with fleas — not comatose.

Explanation. The extract is the thesis. Huxley then votes a middle: approve those snobberies that provoke better activities (culture-snobs make philistines pay a tribute to mind); detest the rest. Each hierarchy culminates in its own Pope. Belloc’s “In Praise of Ignorance” defends a humble not-knowing; that humble not-knowing is the opposite of Huxley’s snobbery of ignorance. Chesterton refuses to treat newness as a duty beside the modernity-snob. Stevenson’s walker is a day’s curve. The argument is the first sentence, the types — at least modernity, culture, and art — and the middle vote.

Reference. The sentence is from Robert Louis Stevenson’s personal essay “On Walking Tours,” written 1876 and collected in Virginibus Puerisque (1881). It is Unit 3 prose. Stevenson quotes Hazlitt; the named master is Hazlitt’s On Going a Journey. The page is a personal essay of a day’s curve. Hawthorne’s Fountain evening is a short story; Huxley classifies snobs.

Context. Stevenson first says a walking tour is not mainly a better way to see landscape: the railway sees landscape vividly enough. The walker goes for “certain jolly humours” — morning hope, evening peace. Pleasure must lead on to pleasure. The overwalker who stupefies himself with miles comes to the inn with frost on his wits and misses the happiness. Then the extract: to be properly enjoyed, the tour should be gone upon alone. After it: company turns the walk into a picnic. Freedom is of the essence: your own pace, your own stops, thoughts taking colour from what you see. Hazlitt: walking and talking at once is no wit; in the country one wishes to vegetate like the country. The day has a curve: exhilaration of the start; then open-air drunkenness; bivouac at a milestone, pipe, no clock — “Not to keep hours for a lifetime is, I was going to say, to live for ever.” Night after dinner is the best hour: the pipe, the book that sounds as if you had written it, or “happy thinking” by the fire.

Explanation. Alone is the essay’s first claim; the overwalker and the evening hour are the other two. Modern haste, clocks, and projects forget that the point is to live. Next morning the parish of the infinite changes. Beside Belloc, both distrust modern haste; Stevenson’s walker empties the mind by stride, Belloc by refusing false knowledge. Beside Chesterton, another essay against hurry — here on a road, there in a life. The extract names the condition of the pleasure: solitude; company and mileage both spoil it.

Chekhov’s The Seagull (1896) is a four-act play. Act I: Treplev stages an outdoor play on Sorin’s estate; Nina as the World Soul; Arkadina mocks the form; Treplev stops the play. He loves Nina; Nina is drawn to Trigorin. Masha, in black, loves Treplev and will marry Medvedenko out of despair. Dorn almost alone takes the young play seriously. Already the pattern: art against career, mother against son, everyone loving the wrong person. It is Chekhov’s comedy that hurts.

Act II: Treplev lays a shot seagull at Nina’s feet. Trigorin notes a subject: a girl by a lake; a man destroys her as that bird was destroyed, for want of something to do. Nina hears fame. Act III: Treplev’s failed suicide, bandage, quarrel; Arkadina keeps Trigorin; Nina will follow him to Moscow. Act IV, two years later: Nina has been a poor actress, has had Trigorin’s child, the child is dead, Trigorin has gone back to Arkadina. She comes in the night, wet, calls herself a seagull, then an actress — “I am a seagull… No, that’s not it… I am an actress” — recites the old World Soul speech, and leaves. Treplev tears up his manuscripts. A shot offstage. Dorn closes the door so that Arkadina will not be told at once.

The stuffed bird on the shelf is Shamraev’s doing: the estate manager had it mounted because Trigorin once asked; Trigorin no longer remembers. The symbol is a wasted thing kept in the room. Nina has failed and still chooses the work. Treplev has talent and no faith in a form; he cannot live. The lake, the failed play, the dead bird, the notebook, and the muffled shot carry the four acts.

Dorian falls in love with Sibyl Vane, a poor actress who plays Shakespeare in a mean theatre. He loves her as Juliet, as Rosalind — as art. When she loves him, her acting dies: the painted heroines are nothing beside a real person. He rejects her in the name of ruined art. That night the portrait changes: a touch of cruelty in the mouth. Sibyl kills herself. Lord Henry converts the suicide into a romance; Basil wants repentance; Dorian locks the picture away and chooses Henry’s reading of the event. The yellow book (a poisonous French novel Henry sends) becomes the handbook of his later style.

The irony of aestheticism is already visible. He wanted a girl who was a work of art; when she became a woman who loved, he called that a bad performance. The portrait, not the Preface, now keeps the moral. Hawthorne’s friends showed their vice in the room; Dorian hides his in the attic and walks beautiful. Sibyl is the first death the doctrine costs. James Vane, her brother, will hunt Dorian later and die by accident at a shooting party.

“All art is quite useless” meant completely useless; the plot then refuses to stay useless. The first stain is this night: the theatre, the ruined performance, the cruel mouth, the suicide, Henry’s conversion of grief into style. The wish and the Preface come before Sibyl; Basil’s murder comes after.

Gita Press Gorakhpur 2014 numbers the set span. Just before doha 5: fire-sealed friendship, Sita’s dropped cloth, Rama heavy with thought. Doha 5: Rama, ocean of grace, asks — Sugriva, why do you live in the forest? Chaupais 5(1–7), running toward doha 6, are Sugriva’s history. Bali and he were brothers. Mayavi hid in a cave; Sugriva sealed it, thinking Bali dead; ministers forced the crown on him; Bali returned, beat him, took his all and his wife. A curse keeps Bali from Rishyamuka, yet fear stays. Doha 6: Rama will kill Bali with one arrow; even if Bali ran to Brahma or Rudra, his life would not be saved. The knot is political and personal: stolen wife, forced kingship, a vow of one shaft.

The first fifteen chaupais after doha 6 are the moral core. Those who are not pained by a friend’s pain — to look at them is heavy sin. One’s own sorrow should be dust; a friend’s sorrow, Meru. A friend turns one from the wrong path, shows virtue, hides fault, gives and takes without suspicion, always does good according to his strength, and in calamity loves a hundredfold — that, say the scriptures, is a saint’s friend. Four thorns: a stupid servant, a miser king, a bad woman, a deceitful friend. Sugriva then shows Dundubhi’s bones and the palms; Rama fells them without effort; faith that Bali can be killed is born. For a moment knowledge rises: wealth and family hinder Rama-bhakti; enemy and friend are maya. The span cuts at chaupai 15, as that vairagya speech begins — before the walk to the duel.

The true-friend list, the four thorns, Dundubhi as a test of strength, and Sugriva’s first turning from kingship toward bhajan are the set. Form is Awadhi chaupai closed by a doha. On the Gita Press page, 5(1–7) means the seven chaupais after doha 5. Earlier dohas (Hanuman’s recognition, the fire-witness) are context; later dohas (the chest-arrow, the hunter charge) belong to the next numbered span. Sugriva’s tale is katha. Rama here is sagun: bow, vow, a friend’s grief.

Mahamati Prannath (1618–1694) was born at Jamnagar in Kathiawar (Gujarat) and taught in western India and later Bundelkhand (Panna). His verses were sung; Kirantan is that sung book. The larger corpus (Kulzam Swaroop) gathers Veda and Quran and other books toward one claim: the soul’s home is the Supreme, the Limitless, beyond even the usual heavens of the learned, and the religions are roads if they wake that soul. Arora’s 1994 English, Kirantan: The Divine Symphony of Mahamati Prannath, is the set rendering. The eight headings are the set span.

The eight are a path. Know thyself — the work is inward: who is the soul, whose is the body. The World is a strange show and The world is a play of mind — the bazaar, the court, the sects are a spectacle and a mental play; bondage is imagination’s. To the seekers of Truth and To the seekers of Limitless — two addresses to those who have already left display; truth is not a school-label; the Limitless is the goal named in Prannath’s paramdham teaching. O my Soul — the singer turns from crowd to the companion within. I want to ask the learned — pandit and priest are questioned: your reading has not ended the soul’s exile. The souls of the Limitless — the company of those who belong to that home.

“O my Soul” sounds like a bhakti pad, but the beloved is the unform Limitless. Beside Tulsidas: Rama is sagun, with bow, vow, and a friend’s grief; Prannath’s Limitless is the end of shows. Beside Vivekananda: work without attachment is a yoga of action in the world; these titles stress waking from the show. Arora’s eight titles in order, and that contrast with sagun Rama, are the note.

The course is titled 19th Century Literature; Unit 1’s official movements are Victorian. Dates follow Victoria’s reign, split into Early (1837–1851), Middle (1851–1870) and Late (1870–1901). Hawthorne’s American short story and Chekhov’s Russian play (1896) are nineteenth-century in date. Yeats (1919) is prescribed; the date is after Victoria’s reign.

The Victorian Age is Victoria’s reign. Houghton’s middle-decade earnestness is work, duty, home, public morals, and a growing doubt. The Industrial Revolution, Ashton’s core about 1760–1830, is the ground, not a sixth poetic school: factory, railway, city labour, the 1851 Exhibition. Set weather: lotos-rest against toil; lyric 7’s bald street; Dover’s darkling plain. Victorian poetry in Armstrong is public speech under pressure — laureate and doubter, mask, elegy, culture against machinery. Tennyson’s “The Lotos-Eaters” and In Memoriam 7 and 54; Browning’s “My Last Duchess”; Arnold’s “Dover Beach”; Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall.” Yeats is the paper’s last, already modern, contrast: the centre cannot hold. “Dover Beach” has a sea, yet it is a lyric of withdrawn faith, not a Romantic nature ode.

The Victorian novel is the age’s central prose: serial, class, money, marriage, conscience, a narrator who judges. The set novel is Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, a late-Victorian aesthetic inversion: the Preface denies a moral book; the portrait hides the punishment in the attic. It is the exhibit of aestheticism and also of its cost. Aestheticism, in Abrams, is art for beauty, not for use: l’art pour l’art, Pater’s gem-like flame, Wilde’s “all art is quite useless.” It is a revolt inside the same century. Pre-Raphaelitism (PRB, 1848: Rossetti, Hunt, Millais) still usually wants a moral or sacred story in exact colour; Wilde drops the sermon and keeps the cult of the beautiful object. No Rossetti lyric is prescribed. Hopkins’s exact eye shares the refusal of a vague general tree; his end is Jesuit, not brotherhood painting.

The Oxford Movement (Keble 1833, Newman, Pusey, the Tracts) restores an apostolic, sacramental church against a useful moral club. Hopkins’s inscape is the literary neighbour; Arnold’s withdrawing Sea of Faith is the opposed shore. Utilitarianism, Mill after Bentham, judges the right act by the greatest happiness of the greatest number, with higher and lower pleasures. Lotos-rest and Wilde’s useless art are the set collisions. Darwinism is the 1859 shock of natural selection. Lyric 54 (1850) may be reread beside evolution; it does not quote the Origin. “Dover Beach” (1867) lives in the post-Origin air. Biology is distinct from later social Darwinism. The five literary terms sit on the same pages: aestheticism–Wilde; dramatic monologue–Browning; short story–Hawthorne; inscape, instress, sprung rhythm–Hopkins.

The map is therefore this. Ground: Industrial Revolution. Climate: Victorian Age, three decades. Voices: Tennyson, Browning, Arnold, Hopkins as Victorian poetry; Wilde as the novel of aesthetic revolt; Hawthorne as the short story, not the Victorian novel; Chekhov as drama; Yeats as 1919. Church and science: Oxford Movement, utilitarianism, Darwinism. Looking: Pre-Raphaelitism feeding, then differing from, aestheticism. Each heading is defined and then tied to one prescribed text.

Unit 2 sets five poets, each with a distinct form. Tennyson, Hopkins, Arnold and Browning belong to the Victorian climate; Yeats’s lyric is 1919, prescribed here as a late hinge. Dramatic monologue, inscape, instress, sprung rhythm and aestheticism are Unit 1 terms that these pages illustrate. The five voices keep distinct forms.

Tennyson, Poet Laureate from 1850, gives three set pages. “The Lotos-Eaters” (1832/42) opens in Spenserian stanzas: always-afternoon, veils of thinnest lawn (fine cloth, not grass), a weary oar; then a choric song of eight sections whose oath is to lie reclined like gods, careless of mankind. Utilitarianism collides here: useful labour against blessed rest. The form is a chorus after a narrator lands them. In Memoriam lyric 7 is three ABBA tetrameter quatrains at Hallam’s dark house in the long unlovely street — urban grief, bald (bare, treeless) drizzle, a hand that cannot be clasped. Lyric 54 is five quatrains of willed theodicy: “Oh yet we trust that somehow good / Will be the final goal of ill,” then “Behold, we know not anything,” then the infant crying in the night. The lyrics are 1850, nine years before Origin of Species. After 1859 the age reread “taints of blood”; the lyric does not quote Darwin. The set pages are lyrics 7 and 54.

Browning’s “My Last Duchess” (1842) is the set dramatic monologue: one speaker who is not the poet, one silent envoy of a Count, a revealing moment, a character who gives himself away. Stoop is the keyword; then “I gave commands; / Then all smiles stopped together”; last owned rarity, Neptune taming a sea-horse. We hear connoisseurship; we infer murder and collection. Arnold’s “Dover Beach” (1867) is irregular lyric address to a beloved, not sprung rhythm: the Sea of Faith once a bright girdle; now a melancholy, long, withdrawing roar; love the last stay; ignorant armies on a darkling plain. It is the set post-Origin spiritual lyric. Hopkins’s “Spring and Fall” (1880) owns inscape (the grove’s thisness as mortality), instress (the blow on the child before the word death), and sprung rhythm (counted stresses, packed slack, Márgarét, the lift on ís). Last couplet: it is Margaret you mourn for. Arnold’s beach-lines use a different foot-law; Hopkins still reads a meaningful thisness, not blind selection.

Yeats’s “The Second Coming” is the paper’s late hinge. Two verse paragraphs, largely loose pentameter. A gyre is a widening spiral of history; the falcon cannot hear the falconer; things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed. Spiritus Mundi is the world’s store of images: lion body, head of a man, a rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem — not a gentle Christ. Beside Arnold, the armies are no longer only ignorant; the centre itself fails. Beside Tennyson 54, there is no infant crying for light — there is a beast being born. It is a vision. The date 1919 is after the First World War and during the Irish troubles.

The map of the unit is therefore six pages and six forms: choric rest (Lotos: Spenserian plus chorus); street-grief and willed trust (In Memoriam 7 and 54: ABBA elegy); ironic power (Duchess: enjambed pentameter couplets); faith withdrawing (Dover: irregular lyric); sacramental mortality (Spring and Fall: sprung lyric); apocalypse after empire’s war (Second Coming: visionary lyric). Victorian poetry as a heading centres Tennyson, Browning, Arnold and Hopkins; poetry on this paper includes all five, with Yeats named as 1919. Each page illustrates a Unit 1 term where it fits: utilitarianism against lotos-rest; dramatic monologue in the Duke’s room; lyric 54 and Dover beside the 1859 date; inscape, instress and sprung rhythm on Margaret’s grove. Aestheticism belongs with Wilde’s novel.

The official prose is one short story and four essays. Nathaniel Hawthorne, “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment.” Robert Louis Stevenson, “On Walking Tours” (Virginibus Puerisque, 1881). Aldous Huxley, “Selected Snobberies.” Hilaire Belloc, “In Praise of Ignorance.” G. K. Chesterton, “On the Pleasures of No Longer Being Very Young” (All Is Grist). Hawthorne is the short story; Stevenson, Huxley, Belloc and Chesterton are essays. Hawthorne is American nineteenth-century fiction. Huxley, Belloc and Chesterton sit after Victoria; they belong here by the syllabus names story and essay.

Hawthorne’s tale is one sitting, one room, one test. Four aged friends drink Fountain-water: Mr Medbourne, ruined in speculation; Colonel Killigrew, worn by pleasure; Mr Gascoigne, a ruined politician; Widow Wycherly, once a beauty. A fifty-five-year rose, the doctor’s dead fiancée’s, blooms and withers with them; they smash the vase; they would drink again. Short-story method: limited cast, one device, a close that turns the knife. Wilde’s portrait hides vice while the face stays young; these four show vice as soon as they are young. The set page is this tale. Stevenson’s walker goes not for landscape the railway cannot see, but for jolly humours: alone, not the overwalker, the evening’s repletion, Hazlitt as master, no clock, “happy thinking.” It is a personal essay of a day’s curve, not a plotted event.

Huxley classifies: all men are snobs about something — disease, family, culture, booze, modernity, art (platonic and unplatonic). Modernity-snobbery is the economic engine of throw-away and buy-again. He votes a middle: approve snobberies that provoke better activities; philistines paying tribute to mind; detest the rest. A society with snobberies is a dog with fleas, not comatose. The syllabus names On the Margin; this essay is the snobbery-classification. It is sociology of prestige; Wilde’s Preface claims art for art.

Belloc’s paradox: Erasmus praised Folly; he praises Ignorance — not stupidity, not illiteracy, but the specialist’s sliver treated as the world, and the health of “I do not know.” Chesterton defends maturity against the cult of youth: the young cannot taste “new” without an “old”; the proverb becomes usable when experience has paid; pleasure is perspective, not decline. Beside Huxley’s modernity-snob, Chesterton refuses newness as a duty. Beside Stevenson, all three later essays distrust haste — stride, print, fashion. Chekhov’s The Seagull is drama; Wilde’s Dorian Gray is the novel.

The map of the unit is therefore five machines. Story: Hawthorne’s smashed vase and the refusal to learn. Essay of the body and the day: Stevenson. Essay of types: Huxley. Essays of paradox: Belloc’s Erasmus hook and Chesterton’s earned proverb. Dr Heidegger has not drunk; as soon as the four are old they plan a pilgrimage to Florida. The short story is that Fountain evening. The essay may be one of the four, or the four together as a climate against snobbery, haste, and the cult of youth: rose, road, snob-list, Erasmus, proverb.

Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890 magazine; 1891 volume) is the one set novel on this paper. Unit 1 named aestheticism: art for beauty, not for a moral use; l’art pour l’art; Pater’s gem-like flame; the Preface’s sentences — no moral or immoral book, only well or badly written; all art is quite useless (quite = completely). Unit 4 walks the cost. “Art for art’s sake” is the doctrine; the wish, Sibyl, Basil, and the stabbed canvas are the plot that tests it. Chekhov’s shot is offstage and social; Wilde’s knife is in the attic.

Basil Hallward paints Dorian in a London studio. Lord Henry Wotton talks youth, sensation, the new Hedonism. He is not the narrator and not Wilde in a simple way; he is the tempter whose epigrams Dorian lives. Dorian looks at the finished portrait and wishes that the picture would age and that he would stay as he is. The wish takes. From here the plot is a double: the face in the world, the face in the attic. Victorian earnestness (Houghton) would educate a young man through work and marriage. This novel educates him through a studio, a garden, and a poisonous book Lord Henry later sends. The Preface and the wish are the first room.

Dorian falls in love with Sibyl Vane, a poor actress who plays Shakespeare in a mean theatre. He loves her as Juliet, as Rosalind — as art. When she loves him, her acting dies. He rejects her in the name of ruined art. That night the portrait changes: a touch of cruelty in the mouth. Sibyl kills herself. Lord Henry converts the suicide into a romance; Basil wants repentance; Dorian locks the picture away and chooses Henry’s reading. The yellow book becomes the handbook of his later style. The irony of the doctrine is already visible: he wanted a girl who was a work of art; when she became a woman who loved, he called that a bad performance. The portrait, not the Preface, now keeps the moral. Hawthorne’s friends showed vice in the room; Dorian hides his in the attic and walks beautiful.

About eighteen years pass. Dorian does not age. Rumours of corruption gather; he is still received because the face is innocent. He shows Basil the portrait. Basil begs him to pray. Dorian murders Basil and has the chemist Alan Campbell destroy the body. James Vane, Sibyl’s brother, hunts him and dies by accident at a shooting party. The last night Dorian resolves to be good, tests the portrait, finds a look of cunning added to the rest, and stabs the painted canvas. The servants find an old, withered man they hardly know, and a portrait of their master as they had last seen him, exquisite. The double is reversed at the cost of a life.

So the novel both proclaims aestheticism and cannot quite escape a moral fable: the soul, or the picture, keeps accounts. Pre-Raphaelitism still usually wants a sacred story in the frame; Wilde’s Preface drops that story and keeps the cult of the beautiful object; the attic then restores a hidden sermon. The long answer walks the Preface, the wish, Sibyl, Basil, and the knife.

Unit 5 sets three voices. Tulsidas, Ramcharitmanas, Kishkindha Kand, Gita Press Gorakhpur 2014: couplet 5 (chaupais 1–7), 6 (1–15), 7 (1–4), 8 (1–5), 9 (1–2). Mahamati Prannath: eight English titles from Raj Kumar Arora, Kirantan (1994) — Know thyself; The World is a strange show; To the seekers of Truth; To the seekers of Limitless; O my Soul; I want to ask the learned; The world is a play of mind; The souls of the Limitless. Swami Vivekananda, Karma Yoga, Chapter III “The Secret of Work,” Complete Works Vol. I. Arora’s English is the set rendering of Prannath. Tulsidas is close reading of the named doha-span.

Kishkindha is the fourth stair of the Ramcharitmanas: Rama and Lakshmana, searching for Sita, meet Hanuman on Rishyamuka, then Sugriva. Just before doha 5: fire-sealed friendship, Sita’s dropped cloth, Rama heavy with thought. Doha 5 asks why Sugriva lives in the forest. 5(1–7) is Sugriva’s Bali-Mayavi tale; doha 6 vows one arrow. 6(1–15) is the moral core: a friend’s sorrow is Meru; the true-friend list; four thorns; Dundubhi as a test of strength; the start of Sugriva’s vairagya. 7(1–4) after Tara and doha 7: pride, blow, flight. Doha 8: the chest-arrow. 8(1–5): hunter charge; the next breath names enemy versus dear. 9(1–2): Rama’s hand on Bali’s head, the offer of a deathless body. The numbered cut is the stop. Rama here is sagun: bow, vow, a monkey-king’s grief. Form is Awadhi chaupai closed by a doha. Bali speaks inside katha.

Prannath (1618–1694), Jamnagar then Bundelkhand, sings Kirantan; Kulzam Swaroop gathers Veda and Quran toward the Limitless, the soul’s home beyond the learned heavens. The eight titles are a path: know the self; the world as strange show and as play of mind; seekers of Truth then of the Limitless; O my Soul; ask the learned; souls of that home. Empty rite and sect-pride are the saint’s weather. “O my Soul” sounds like a pad; the beloved is the unform Limitless, not Kishkindha’s Rama. The set English is Arora’s eight titles.

Vivekananda’s chapter ranks help (spiritual knowledge, then intellect, then food that returns). The Gita’s command is to work incessantly, unattached, so that action does not bind the soul. Hospitals will not end misery until character changes. Ignorance is the mother of evil. Samskara is the mark a wave leaves on the lake of mind; character is the sum of such impressions. Work like a master; give, expect nothing; the mongoose at the Pandavas’ sacrifice proves that advertised royal charity cannot match a poor household’s last flour. The ideal householder is as hard as the ideal sannyasin. Beside Tulsidas, Rama’s work is dharma attached in love, not slave-work. Beside Prannath, the world here is a field of karma, not only a show to wake from.

The map of the unit is therefore three pages. Tulsidas: sagun katha, friendship, true friend, hidden arrow, grace’s hand. Prannath: wake from show and mind-play toward the Limitless (Arora’s eight). Vivekananda: rank of help, non-attachment, character, mongoose.