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 AUTOM AT I SM AN D C R E AT I V E AC TS
IN THE AGE OF NEW PSYCHOLOGY

The late nineteenth century saw a reexamination of artistic creativ-

ity in response to questions surrounding the relation between human
beings and automata. These questions arose from findings in the “new
psychology,” physiological research that diminished the primacy of
mind and viewed human action as neurological and systemic. Con-
centrating on British and Continental culture from 1870 to 1911, this
unique study explores ways in which the idea of automatism helped
shaped ballet, art photography, literature, and professional writing.
Drawing on documents including novels and travel essays, Linda
Austin finds a link between efforts to establish standards of artistic
practice and challenges to the idea of human exceptionalism. Austin
presents each artistic discipline as an example of the same process: cre-
ation that should be intended, but involving actions that evade mental
control. This study considers how late nineteenth-century literature
and arts tackled the scientific question: Are we automata?

linda m. austin is Professor of English at Oklahoma State Univer-

sity. She has written on the connections between the fine arts, eco-
nomics, and psychology. She is the author of The Practical Ruskin
(1991) and Nostalgia in Transition (2007) as well as articles published
in such journals as English Literary History, Studies in Romanticism,
MODERNISM/modernity, Victorian Literature and Culture, and Mod-
ern Language Quarterly.
 cambr id g e s t ud ies in n in et e e n t h- c e n t u ry
literature and culture

General Editor
Gillian Beer, University of Cambridge
Editorial Board
Isobel Armstrong, Birkbeck, University of London
Kate Flint, University of Southern California
Catherine Gallagher, University of California, Berkeley
D. A. Miller, University of California, Berkeley
J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine
Daniel Pick, Birkbeck, University of London
Mary Poovey, New York University
Sally Shuttleworth, University of Oxford
Herbert Tucker, University of Virginia

Nineteenth-century British literature and culture have been rich fields for inter-
disciplinary studies. Since the turn of the twentieth century, scholars and crit-
ics have tracked the intersections and tensions between Victorian literature and
the visual arts, politics, social organization, economic life, technical innovations,
scientific thought – in short, culture in its broadest sense. In recent years, theo-
retical challenges and historiographical shifts have unsettled the assumptions of
previous scholarly synthesis and called into question the terms of older debates.
Whereas the tendency in much past literary critical interpretation was to use the
metaphor of culture as “background,” feminist, Foucauldian, and other analyses
have employed more dynamic models that raise questions of power and of circu-
lation. Such developments have reanimated the field. This series aims to accom-
modate and promote the most interesting work being undertaken on the frontiers
of the field of nineteenth-century literary studies: work which intersects fruitfully
with other fields of study such as history, or literary theory, or the history of science.
Comparative as well as interdisciplinary approaches are welcomed.

A complete list of titles published will be found at the end of the book.
 C AM BRI D G E S TU DIE S IN
N I N E T E E N T H - C E N T U RY
L I T ER ATURE A N D CU LT U R E
Automatism and Creative Acts in
the Age of New Psychology

LINDA M. AUSTIN
Oklahoma State University
 University Printing House, Cambridge cb2 8bs, United Kingdom
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It furthers the University’s mission by disseminating knowledge in the pursuit of
education, learning, and research at the highest international levels of excellence.

www.cambridge.org
Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9781108428552
doi: 10.1017/9781108552974

C Linda M. Austin 2018

This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception

and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements,
no reproduction of any part may take place without the written
permission of Cambridge University Press.
First published 2018
Printed in the United States of America by Sheridan Books, Inc.
A catalogue record for this publication is available from the British Library
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data
Names: Austin, Linda Marilyn, author.
Title: Automatism and creative acts in the age of new psychology / Linda M. Austin.
Description: New York : Cambridge University Press, 2018. | Series: Cambridge studies in
nineteenth-century literature and culture ; 111 | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: lccn 2017060814 | isbn 9781108428552 (hardback)
Subjects: LCSH: Arts, British – 19th century. | Arts, British – 20th century. | Automatism
(Art movement) – Great Britain. | Arts, European – 19th century. | Arts, European –
20th century. | Automatism (Art movement) – Europe.
Classification: lcc nx543.a97 2018 | ddc 700/.41163 – dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017060814
isbn 978-1-108-42855-2 Hardback
Cambridge University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy
of URLs for external or third-party internet websites referred to in this publication
and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain,
accurate or appropriate.
In memory of the life and work of Nancy Baxer
 Contents

List of Illustrations page viii

Acknowledgments ix

Introduction: The Nineteenth-Century Debate over Human

Automatisms 1

part i autom ata-phobia

1 J. S. Mill: Genius-Automaton 25
2 Automatic Aesthetics and the Shame of Tourism 54

pa rt i i t e c h n olog i e s of t h e autom at i c : p roc e s s

a n d m ove m e n t
3 Photography’s Automatisms 83
4 Automatic Writing and Physiologies of Creativity 127
5 The Automata Ballets 170

Notes 212
Bibliography 242
Index 258

vii
 Illustrations

1 James Cooper’s woodcut Terror, after Duchenne page 103

2 Duchenne’s photograph of Terror 104
3 Pièce Musique no. 248, from Catalogue avec Dessins, Roullet &
Decamps ca. 1878 185
4 Léopold Lambert, Jeune fille au Polichinelle cassé, 1890 203

viii
 Acknowledgments

The beginnings of this book are embedded in my last one and in my con-
tinuing exploration of physiological memory in an array of circumstances.
Within the first year of work, I settled on examining physiological move-
ment as a biological marker and efforts to suppress its register across aes-
thetic and artistic domains. My first venture into this area, a version of
Chapter 2, appeared as a study of tourism and caches of pleasure in English
Literary History 74 (2007): 629–73. A part of Chapter 1 was included in
the spring 2009 contents of World Picture’s issue “Happiness”; and sev-
eral years later, a relatively concise account of living and nonliving move-
ment was published in MODERNISM/modernity 23, no. 1 (2016): 65–87.
I am grateful to the anonymous readers of these journals for their part
in shaping my thoughts. I especially acknowledge Debra Rae Cohen at
MODERNISM/modernity for her clarifying editorial work and the editors
of World Picture, Brian Price and Meghan Sutherland, for support of all
sorts over the years. Thanks also to Linda Bree, of Cambridge University
Press, for her courtesy and guidance during the stages of review and to the
readers for their encouragement and advice.
Research for this book would not have been as fruitful without the
efficient staff of the Edmond Low Library and the leave time generously
granted by Oklahoma State University. I benefited, as well, from the
materials at the Jerome Robbins Dance Division of the New York Pub-
lic Library and the George Eastman Museum. I am particularly grateful to
Rachel Stuhlman and Joe Struble at the Eastman for access to materials, as
well as to Mark Osterman for conversations about historic photographic
processes and the latent image. Christian Bailly, connoisseur of Parisian
automata, and the Nouveau Musée National de Monaco (NMNM) gen-
erously allowed me to reproduce images. Romy Tirel-Marill at NMNM
offered help during phases of this project. Autumn Finley devoted months
to checking references, and Charissa Prchal of the English Department at
my home institution provided impressive technical expertise.
ix
x Acknowledgments
I extend thanks as well to my sister balletomanes, Linda Leavell and Ann
Marie Taddeo, for the pleasure of their company over the years. Finally,
to Martin Wallen, my husband and copain every weekend at the fights, I
reserve my greatest appreciation – for reading all my early drafts and believ-
ing in this project when my own belief faltered. I owe this book to his
patience and empathy.
 Introduction
The Nineteenth-Century Debate over Human Automatisms

The ineluctable tendency of all repeated actions, however intellectual

or artistic, to become automatic was a commonplace observation of
nineteenth-century mental science. The physiological and often experi-
mental “new psychology” of the century concentrated on such automatic
actions and, in doing so, acknowledged life in human beings, not just lower
animals, without significant or any cerebral involvement. This acknowl-
edgment laid the foundation for the new materialisms of the late twentieth
century that would further deprivilege human life and set it on a contin-
uum with nonhuman and, in some cases, nonliving processes. From 1870 to
1911, the period covered by this book, the topic of automatic functions was
not confined to scientific and philosophic circles. The idea of animating
mechanisms as the fundamental, generating force of living organic beings
infiltrated almost every aspect of literary and artistic culture, sometimes
well before or independent of its articulation in mentalist or physiologi-
cal terms. Automatism and Creative Acts traces the command of neuromo-
tor operations over areas of productive and aesthetic behavior that involve
cognition, memory, and emotion. The documents covered in the next five
chapters – which include treatises, novels, an autobiography, a libretto,
travel essays, and institutional reports – all function as semantic recoveries
of the physical and physiological automatisms that constitute the defini-
tive artistry of photography and ballet and that offer explanatory models
for less formalized creative activities, such as professional writing and aes-
thetic judgment.
The new psychology was controversial, and its presence in the fine
and imaginative arts, as well as in aesthetics, was considered especially so.
Because automatisms were negatively correlated with a Cartesian idea of
humanness based on thinking, willing, and feeling, it was the task of those
who spoke for arts and aesthetics in the nineteenth century to reaffirm the
mind’s domain over these operations during creative moments. Their theo-
ries and descriptions obviously had no isomorphic connection with taking
1
2 Introduction
a photograph, dancing, even, at times, writing – all of which are generating
processes involving systemic and often unconscious actions. Undaunted,
they worked retroactively – defending the artistic value of their produc-
tions by translating unconscious acts of creating into conscious ones. For
this reason, they usually represented the rear guard in current philosoph-
ical and scientific debates and, as Adrian Rifkin has discerned, depended
on “formulations” from art history “rich in their inertia and unresponsive-
ness to the new.”1 Automatism and Creative Acts analyzes their strategies of
resistance to the new psychology from the decentered public discourse in
which it already had an insidious presence. I begin with an examination
of the repeated exercise of individual thought described by John Stuart
Mill and then consider the role of aesthetic categories in automating dis-
plays of individual taste. From there I move on to explore the collective
and organized automatisms constituting arts or disciplines that during this
time were either moribund (ballet), emerging (art photography), or in the
midst of bifurcation (professional and creative or literary writing). Each
of these fields of activity enfolded particular controversies over automa-
tisms, and each staked its status as art, in the honorific sense, on denying
or mitigating the physiological orientation of the most contentious of the
new psychological theories. Rather than viewing ballet, photography, and
professional writing as distinct methods or cultural formations subject to
separate influences, I treat them all as creative processes whose legitimacy
depended on their being represented as intentional and attentive acts, when
all the while a significant part of their operations evaded mental control.
If the debates over human automatism had a central arena, it was in
the philosophical exchanges between those committed to mentalism – the
idea that the mind is a separate sphere – and the experimental physiologists
who often called themselves materialists because, like their seventeenth-
and eighteenth-century predecessors, they viewed matter as the funda-
ment and generator of consciousness. Their detractors often termed them
“mechanists” or “reductionists” for approaching the body as a composite
of separately functioning parts. This was not uniformly true; and indeed,
materialism and mechanism had long been interchangeable and often mis-
leading terms. As Daniel Cottom has remarked, the “overreliance on [the
term] materialism” in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries over-
looked “how the representation of machines . . . was no less a matter of
soulful bodily organs than of artificial tools and works.”2 Setting organic
against mechanistic models obscured, moreover, an important vein of late
eighteenth-century vitalism that, Peter Hanns Reill has argued, evaded the
mind–body problem by “positing the existence in living matter of active or
 Introduction 3
self-activating forces.”3 Automatism and Creative Acts sets representations of
the physiological, or mechanistic, unconscious in action amid this seem-
ingly perpetual philosophical division, which has been sustained to this
day as much by confusion as by entrenched ideas of the soul and Cartesian
assumptions about the exceptionality of human beings.
The concept of “automatism” has proved an especially unsettling link
in the tottery separations of mind and body, human and machine, not
only in the age of the new psychology, but in the current era of neuro-
science and biosystems. In the nineteenth century, the idea of “automatism”
was chiefly represented by its particular manifestation, the “automaton”:
the word has always captured a paradox, designating both a “mecha-
nism . . . that . . . appears to move spontaneously” and a “living being whose
actions are purely involuntary or mechanical.” In the latter sense, it often
appears in the texts under study here as a slur for the producer whose
hitherto creative and expressive work has degenerated through repetition,
fatigue, and inattention. In On Liberty, Mill equates the “automatons in
human form” who might at some future times execute various manual tasks
with “machinery.” In the same passage, he famously invokes the opposition
between the “machine” and “human nature.”4 But the machine was not just
a trusty metaphor enlisted by mentalists to deride and separate the regular
and automatic functions of the body from the sphere of mind. It was a
broad technological category with its own history, a history that encom-
passed various objects and, more important, different kinds of operations.
As technologies such as steam and electricity brought popular attention to
the idea of a completely automated machine, “automatism” became, in the
words of Pierre Naville, “a general operational principle,” not just a “rare
technological combination” (his emphasis), and one, therefore, applicable
to human behavior. The particular conception of an automatic, energy-
powered machine spread from industry into the sciences.5 As several stud-
ies have recently shown, the body began to be viewed as an electric machine
or motor; operations previously likened to machines were, as a result,
reconceived as thermodynamic.6 The automatisms of the operating human
being under the new psychology followed, in particular, the “same concept
of process that rules in machine technology,” observed Thorstein Veblen,
looking back in 1937 at the trajectory of nineteenth-century industrial-
ization. Speculation about the physiological unconscious, he elaborates,
borrowed from machine technology the theory of “cumulative sequence”
to understand how an operation shifts from the repetition of cause and
effect, sources and objectives, to “an unfolding process” that alters the
relation between these factors.7 Of course, as Laura Otis observes, “a
4 Introduction
cultural channel for transmitting metaphors . . . always involves movement
in both directions.” In her most recent intervention, N. Katherine Hayles
has named this interpenetration of human and technical systems “cognitive
assemblages.” Both adaptive and recursive, these systems extend what she
calls the “cognitive nonconscious” beyond human and animal life.8
And so, I shall show that the idea of cumulative sequence did not just
pass from industry to physiology. It was bound up with an abstract and
capacious conception of latency that informed views not just of the human
neuromotor system but of a nonhuman technology, that of photochemical
development. This shared concept of molecular motility led to a further
discursive breakdown of the opposition between human and technological
operation: for if physiology could function mechanically (as a kind of raw
information system, Richard Menke has observed), then photochemistry
could possess an unconscious.9 To countenance, in short, human automa-
tisms was to allow the possibility of creative mechanisms. The rubrics and
practices of the arts and aesthetics, the focus of this book, illustrate this
mutual interchange. Secondary automatisms, or habits acquired through
repetition, follow the industrial principle of cumulative sequence when
they “unfold” into the collective, recognizable, and established actions that
define individual artistry in specific fields of practice. As I shall relate, the
new discourse of art photography, the institutionalization of professional
writing, and the parodies of balletic movement all reflected the same atten-
tion to physiological automatisms that Alexander Bain, William James, and
Thomas Henry Huxley – among others – were exploring in the second half
of the century.
Moreover, as certain arts, independently of science, acquired their dis-
tinctive patterns of movement and cumulative sequences, they themselves
exhibited the power of epigenesis, a Kantian term (modeled on the theory
of Johann Friedrich Blumenbach) for the “formative impulse” in matter
and with it the capacity to change through movement.10 As Stanley Cavell
has written, “the creation of a medium [is] the creation of an automa-
tism,” so “in mastering a tradition one masters a range of automatisms
upon which the tradition maintains itself.”11 These “automatisms” exist,
he implies, independent of their operators; at the same time, they consti-
tute any discipline’s collective memory. Cavell is writing of film in partic-
ular, but his use of the word is instructive, for in this formal and psycho-
logical sense, all arts comprise “automatisms”: patterns of human thought
and movement that with repetition become defining practices, preexist-
ing and independent of any single human agent. When they alter through
use, they affirm the link Veblen found between the operating principle of
 Introduction 5
the machine and of the physiological body. They too are not just human
automatisms but creative mechanisms.
Reinstating hybridity to the nineteenth-century presentation of the
mind–body problem, Automatism and Creative Acts thus reflects a “pre-
disciplinary” world where, as Jay Clayton has observed, “the professional
characteristics of science as a discipline had not yet been codified.”12 In its
attention to the physical and physiological movements of the body during
creative activity, my book joins cultural histories by Clayton, Jessica Riskin,
Otis, and Menke, all of which orient the texts they study toward mecha-
nistic rather than organic models of human behavior while exposing the
open borders between the two. And in mining the creative possibilities of
automatisms and revealing parallel rhetorical tensions in science and aes-
thetics, Automatism and Creative Acts contributes to the flourishing field of
cognitive cultural studies, which often returns to earlier texts armed with
the latest findings from neuroscientific research.
I remain wary of the disembodied view of the mind that neuroscience
often presents, however. Theory of mind (ToM), for example, often views
consciousness as mental and fully volitional, passing over the issue that was
of such importance in the nineteenth century: the place of embodiment in
cognition. In neuroscience, as in the so-called mentalist arm of Victorian
psychology, the “body is reduced to its representation in the somatosensory
cortex,” according to Raymond W. Gibbs. It is “considered important only
to the extent that it provides the raw sensory input required for cognitive
computations.”13 Instead, I turn to more systemic views that obscure the
differences between bodies and machines. Critical interventions enabled
by the early work of Veblen though the mid-twentieth-century writings of
Silvan Tomkins on affect and the current theories of Hayles on degrees
of cognition help me integrate human creative processes as Victorians
described them with contemporary views of mechanical and physiolog-
ical systems. To elicit process from these descriptions, I often rely on
critical tools fashioned specifically for embodied action, a current term gen-
erally indicating the body’s sensorimotor system as the generating force
of cognition. Kinesthesia, for example, has proved a particularly valuable
instrument for historians of dance, the fine arts, and literature. The coinage
of the term kinesthesia in 1880 coincided, in fact, with much of the activ-
ity I discuss. Susan Leigh Foster defines it as a field of research “establish-
ing the existence of nerve sensors in the muscles and joints that provide
awareness of the body’s positions and movements.” Such “kinesic intelli-
gence,” writes Guillemette Bolens, enables us to read immeasurable aspects
of movement.14
6 Introduction
Yet as I recover, through kinesic intelligence, the physiological motion
that defining documents of the arts and of individual genius do not artic-
ulate, I encounter contrary tendencies – to mystify forms of creativity
and genius, for instance, or to represent them as the designs of inten-
tional minds. Indeed, notwithstanding their integration of technological
and physiological automatisms, the nineteenth-century fine arts – those
bastions of individual genius – were prestigious fields of resistance to prin-
ciples of kinesic operation. In them, the idea of embodied cognition was
often considered an oxymoron. The tendency of writers on ballet, photog-
raphy, and poetry to credit the controlling power of a thinking soul for
all expressive or mimetic acts kept vitalism safely separate from the body
and linked to a quasi or overtly religious form of idealism. In this light, the
parts of this book that coax systemic operations from defiant declarations
of intentional creation effectively reverse the hard work of those Victorians
who – to borrow a phrase from Hayles –“restag[ed]” the “cognitive noncon-
scious” in “the theater of consciousness.”15 Finally, then, Automatism and
Creative Acts does not rehistoricize the nineteenth-century arts in ways that
undermine the technophobia for which many Victorians were notorious.
On the contrary, it confirms the chronic antipathy that Clayton, Menke,
and others among my contemporaries have been eager to obscure. The
Victorian era may not yet have developed codified practices for branches
of psychology (as I relate below), but it was not quite an “age unmarked by
current disciplinary conflicts between the sciences and the humanities,” as
Tamara Ketabgian has remarked; for the controversy over human automa-
tisms was the seedbed of those conflicts.16 With my debt to these insightful
critical studies always in mind, I have tried to recapture the conversations
among artists and scientists when living being and moving machine were
still nominally oppositional but functionally collapsing. These exchanges
reveal how a tenacious theoretical divide between mentalists and physiolo-
gists became the structural weakness of sciences devoted to the mind–brain
problem. And they explain why theorists of the arts often began and ended
their treatises and manuals by declaring the special status of the signature
intellectual and artistic acts in their fields.
The theoretical instability evident in many of the texts examined in
the chapters ahead was reflected by the fluid state of research into the
unconscious at the time, which was mirrored in turn by the direction
of individual careers. As Jenny Bourne Taylor has convincingly shown,
nineteenth-century thinkers recognized several gradations of conscious-
ness.17 Among the new psychologists of Britain, William Benjamin Car-
penter gradually accepted the expanded role of neurosensory functions in
 Introduction 7
mental behavior. Bain maintained the existence of inherent faculties of
mind but used behavioral criteria to assess the mental dimension; his the-
ories adhere to the axioms of mental science while adopting the methods
of physiology.18 In its general orientation toward the unconscious, more-
over, the new psychology differed from the continental version: Théodüle
Ribot’s psychologie nouvelle was modeled on Associationism, the preeminent
mind-based psychology of the century. The operating picture of the mind
under Associationism varied from a hydrodynamic model of fluid channels
to a network of vibrating strings, but it consistently depicted an indepen-
dently functioning realm, nonetheless. Although associationists recognized
that some ideas, because of their numbers, were probably more conscious
than others, they did not pursue different terminology for them or place
them in a subterranean part of the organic territory they had mapped. And
although in theory associationist principles included feelings, as Thomas
Brown emphasized in the 1820s, in practice they almost always covered
ideas only.19 As a result, the common phrase for Associationism, the “asso-
ciation of ideas,” further secured the mind from the dispersed loci of the
senses, from affects, and from other visceral actions. Ribot invoked this
British tradition, hoping for a scientific approach to the mind independent
of philosophy.20 His own ideas were not exclusively mentalist, however, as
will become apparent later in this Introduction. From the beginning, he
admitted systemic notions of the unconscious, as did Jean-Martin Charcot
in his experiments with hypnotic suggestion.
Nevertheless, unlike the British strain of psychology, which remained
anchored in experimental physiology and thus betrayed its ties (in the
public view) to radicalism and materialism, the psychologie nouvelle was
quickly “mentalized” on the continent during the 1870s and 1880s. Wil-
helm Wundt’s Psychological Institute at the University of Leipzig housed
a laboratory intended solely for the study of consciousness and subjective
experience. In Paris, Sigmund Freud and Josef Breuer turned their atten-
tion from psychic stimuli and physiological excitation to the mind. Freud
eventually pinned his analyses on the theory of intrapsychic conflicts, and
Breuer, who had gained recognition for showing that breathing was an
automatic nervous process, began to specialize in memory therapy or the
“talking cure” while treating “Anna O.” Breuer’s shift in particular, from
physiology to psychology, encapsulates the dramatic swerve in an emerg-
ing discipline that (under Ribot and Charcot) seemed to have assumed that
mind was an epiphenomenon of brain but that came to concentrate exclu-
sively on mental conflict and the suppression of ideas. Instead of connec-
tions through vibrations, Freud perceived tension, but the idea of the mind
8 Introduction
as an associative space survived in his picture of it. So “after his own failed
experiments with mind–brain integration,” Freud “considered the quest a
kind of madness, and urged his followers to adopt psychic determinism,
in which the contribution from the brain on psychic states was considered
unknowable,” relates George Makari in his historical digests of psycho-
analysis and mentalism. Having been separated from biological causes like
heredity, the Freudian mind occupied a disciplinary limbo “between litera-
ture and neuropathology.” It was effectively metaphysical, “loosed from the
material world.”21 Thus depth psychology returned to the enclosed men-
tal world of Associationism by way of psychologie nouvelle. It became the
authoritative reference for recognizing and analyzing extraordinary psy-
chic states such as trauma and trance and an enriching critical tool in the
humanities, where it provided spatial metaphors for the unconscious.
The presence of the repressed unconscious in the fiction of the period
has been well analyzed – most recently by Jill Galvan, Anne Stiles, and Jill
Matus. Although both, following Taylor, have refrained from imposing a
developed Freudian paradigm on the Victorians, I find it useful to keep in
mind the success with which this discourse has permeated discussions of
the arts, aesthetics, and artistic processes throughout most of the twentieth
century; but I also want to remember the tangled germination I have just
outlined.22 For two categories of the unconscious emerged from the new
psychology and the psychologie nouvelle, each to anchor a different orien-
tation in the study of human thought, personality, and emotion. While
the humanities readily embraced psychoanalysis, studies of a physiologi-
cal unconscious – part of what Hayles calls the cognitive nonconscious –
remained peripheral to or absent from discussions of creativity. Unlike the
hidden or repressed unconscious, this peripheral and physiological uncon-
scious could not be mapped or compartmentalized as a concealed, sec-
ond self. Fluid – neither eidetic in the mental sense of consciousness nor
oneiric in the sense of an irrational unconscious – it resisted representation
through secondary revision (or the talking cure) in therapeutic discourses.
Until recently, it evaded the interest of literary critics for the same reason.
It was the unconscious of quotidian behavior. It fell, therefore, under the
purview of behaviorism and sciences that downplayed or obscured differ-
ences between human, animal, and particularly mechanical action. Its vari-
ous aspects are only now being explored. Reactions to the dominance of the
Freudian discourse by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in the 1970s and
1980s eventually granted physiological studies a place in cultural criticism
through biophilosophy. Continuing explorations of posthuman and tran-
shuman systems have further occluded the binaries – of mind and body, of
 Introduction 9
conscious and unconscious – that structured much Victorian promotion of
the arts, inflamed contemporary mental scientists, and helped determine
the disciplinary divides in psychology that have governed thought for more
than a century.
The debate in the second half of the nineteenth century over whether
human beings were automata – defined and dominated by neurophysio-
logical operations beyond basic autonomic ones like breathing – lies, then,
at the beginning of a theoretical trajectory that only in recent decades
has altered interventions in the humanities. This debate was diffuse and
ongoing, even among those who numbered themselves in the scientific
community. I outline its chief controversies below, some of which remain
unresolved.

The Debate
Even though the late years of the automata debates in the 1880s
coincide with the partnership of Freud and Breuer in treating hyste-
ria, as well as the founding of the Psychological Institute by Wundt,
the disagreement over whether human beings were automata chiefly
occupied British correspondents, who imported concepts from indus-
trialized machine technology rather than from the nascent continen-
tal fields of depth psychology and psychoanalysis. The reductionists in
particular looked to physics and chemistry for their models of human
behavior. In his account of the disagreements roiling Victorian psychology,
Rick Rylance has noted that the nineteenth-century physiological position
was particularly decentered because, with the exception of Bain, represen-
tatives of this field did not hold university appointments.23 Rather than
in lecture halls or laboratories, they argued with each other in the pages
of generalist periodicals like The Nineteenth Century and The Westminster
Review. Their discussions in these venues made the new psychology, even
among philosophers and scientists, a discursive rather than an institution-
ally sanctioned field of interest. In addition to Carpenter and Huxley, the
chief spokespersons for the physiological faction of the new psychology
active between 1850 and the end of the century included George Henry
Lewes, Herbert Spencer, John Tyndall, and Henry Maudsley in Britain;
and to a lesser extent Ribot in France. Often they disagreed over the bor-
ders between neurological and mental function, but even in their liveli-
est arguments they assailed the belief that soul or mind and body were
ontologically distinct, that the former lay beyond the reaches of scientific
inquiry, and that the will was the central faculty of the mind. In this way,
10 Introduction
they continued the materialist strain of the philosophical tradition, which
appropriated the earlier ideas of David Hartley and Georg Prochaska, as
well as parts of the treatises of John Locke and René Descartes that could
support a theory of systemic operation based in physiology.
The new psychology not only unseated the mind as control center of
the organism; it defined life through evidence of movement without mental
consciousness. The basic unit of this movement was the reflex. Automatism
had been connected to reflex action ever since Descartes conceived of the
body as a machine that could, without mental agency, instantly withdraw
its foot from fire. So when in his short history of the new psychology for
readers of The Contemporary Review in 1875, Carpenter called reflex action,
“the mechanism of automatic action” and the “cardinal principle” of the
new psychology, he was not presenting a new idea. He was, however, sur-
veying the recent “more scientific mode of thought” that had extended the
domain of the sensory-motor reflex over complex actions involving degrees
of sensation and awareness.24 The modern study of the reflex began, he
related, with Sir Charles Bell’s description in 1821 of the “nervous circle,”
the working term for the nerve-center, the sensory or centripetal nerve, and
the motor nerve running to the muscle. From a general acceptance of the
so-called Bell-Magendie law, research advanced with “the general recogni-
tion of the independent endowments of the Spinal Cord” by Marshall Hall
in 1833 [relying, perhaps, too heavily, on Prochaska].25 Having established
the existence of a nerve force operating without consciousness, physiolo-
gists then identified two forms of nerve tissue, the so-called white and grey
matter. White fibers conducted nerve force, and the gray or ganglionic cells
lined the spinal cord in which nerve force originated.
This distinction inspired a popular analogy between the neurophysiolog-
ical system and the electric telegraph, which Gilbert Child, in his summary
of physiological psychology for The Westminster Review of 1868, repeated:
“the grey matter resembles the battery at the station, and produces force of
a particular kind and degree, [while] the white fibres are precisely analogous
to the telegraph wires which propagate the force generated by the battery to
a distance, but produce no force themselves.”26 The distinction in function
between fibrous conductors and ganglionic centers of force offered a broad
analogy rather than a valid observation, Carpenter noted in his essay, but
the general principle remained sound, he believed. His own experiments
on insects confirmed that “every separate ganglion of the ventral cord . . . is
an independent centre of reflexion.” “Many . . . actions performed by the
agency of the spinal cord alone . . . seem so purposive as to make it diffi-
cult for those to regard them in any other light” but “to recognize the large
 Introduction 11
share which pure automatism has in the life of the animal.” The sensory
ganglia constitute the “true sensorium” and the “seat of consciousness,”
declared Child. Nerve substance is “one of the seats of vital forces” that
“produce consciousness,” wrote Shadworth Hollway Hodgson in his two-
volume Ethical Inquiry of 1870 into physiological psychology.27
These statements are significant because both Child and Hodgson were
reluctant to cede analysis of the mind wholly to the radical wing of the
new psychology headed by Tyndall and the inveterately assertive Huxley.
Tyndall’s address to the British Association for the Advancement of Sci-
ence at Norwich in 1868 and Huxley’s inflammatory lecture of 1874, “On
the Hypothesis that Animals are Automata, and its History” (published
the same year in The Fortnightly Review) provoked a debate about human
automatism that lasted through the 1890s and drew in Carpenter, Bain,
Lewes, and James, among others. The reductionists argued that the struc-
ture of sensory nerves are the same as that of motor nerves.28 When the
muscles along which motor nerves run contract, the sensory nerves change
with them. Studies of animals reveal, in addition, much that holds true for
human beings: all states of consciousness are caused by molecular changes
in brain substances. Conversely, no states of consciousness cause anything.
Mental conditions are simply symbols of changes that occur automati-
cally. Hodgson summed up the position of the physiologists as neutrally
as he could: nerve force is the “causa existendi [the existing cause]” of a
change in consciousness, but the change in consciousness is “the causa
cognoscendi [the recognized cause] . . . of nerve substance,” causes them-
selves being “atoms, molecules, and masses, in motion.”29
Carpenter had been skeptical of the idea of mental automatisms; but by
the 1870s, he acknowledged that movement in the white matter or fibrous
conductors could produce secondary automatisms, those learned ideas and
actions that through repetition become habitual. Indeed, almost no one
familiar with the principal tenets of the new psychology disputed the exis-
tence of reflexes that were involuntary yet purposive. Bain, for whom
such automatisms represented a physiological version of Associationism,
thought that the “comparison between the routine and the reflex opera-
tions” was “most just and accurate.” After enough repetitions, an action like
grasping a handle “agitates the brain almost through one solitary channel of
influence – that, namely, which suffices for stimulating certain muscles of
the arm concerned in rotatory motion. This remarkable narrowing of the
sphere of influence of a sensational or active stimulus is one of the effects of
education [comprising repetition].”30 But these routine motions could also
unfold as mental breakthroughs. Carpenter readily accepted this purposive
12 Introduction
form of the unconscious in his essay of 1875; John Stuart Mill, he noted,
conceived his System of Logic during his daily walk between home and the
office.31
The current version of such thinking links “set shifting,” or the ability
to find a new approach to a problem, with mental states of relaxation and
concurrent physical states of sidetracking activity.32 In the nineteenth cen-
tury, the actual physiological processes of creativity and the mastery of an
artistic practice provoked some resistance, however; for as Maudsley and
Ribot explained, the residua of repeated nervous movements organized
themselves through repetition (or “education”) and became progressively
unconscious. Such movements could still belong to the category of the fully
conscious memory: the acts of a skilled musician or ballet dancer were
the usual examples. Although memory, in their analysis, was implicated
in numerous acts, from the most developed and conscious to the most
involuntary, by itself “the process of registration would tend to the pro-
gressive destruction of consciousness, and would transform man into
an automaton,” Ribot declared. It was this prospect that disturbed Mill
himself, as I elaborate in Chapter 1, and provoked Carpenter to retreat
and insist that seeing without noticing is conscious, not unconscious.33
While acknowledging gradations of consciousness, he maintained a dis-
tinct breach between this state and unconsciousness.
In general, though, the physiological orientation of the new psychol-
ogy signaled, writes Rylance, “an intellectual shift from static, entity-based
accounts of the mind (the mental faculties, the phrenological brain), to
dynamic, process-based conceptions embracing the entire neurological sys-
tem and the link between organism and environment.” This new model
complicated the philosophical materialism with which many commenta-
tors, particularly hostile ones, simply aligned physiology, for it treated mat-
ter as the resisting force of muscular exertion and suggested an experience of
selfhood irreducible to a central faculty or to units in the physical world.34
Ribot, for instance, formulated a theory of memory that was not just a
physiology, but a “morphology,” “a history of transformations.” Organic
memory, he elaborates, “supposes not only a modification of nervous ele-
ments, but the formation among them of determinate associations for each
particular act, the establishment of certain dynamic affinities, which, by
repetition, become as stable as the primitive anatomical connections [his
emphasis].”35 The idea that secondary automatisms could, in physiologi-
cal terms, eventually approach the instinctive action of primary automa-
tisms underlies Huxley’s definition of memory as a mechanism in which
the “motion of any given portion of the matter of the brain excited by
 Introduction 13
the motion of a sensory nerve, leaves behind a readiness to be moved in
the same way [so that] . . . [a]nything which resuscitates the motion gives
rise to the appropriate feeling.”36 Certainly the nineteenth-century focus
on the reflex as the fundamental function of the organism inspired later
behaviorist approaches, which like Huxley’s theory dismissed of any form
of mentalism. But moderate thinkers both inside and outside scientific
circles were equally concerned with the shifting degrees of attention and
effort involved in any given stage of an action. The so-called transformation
problem plagued all of those who were attempting to trace movement that
toggled back and forth between consciousness and unconsciousness. Hodg-
son, anticipating twentieth-century paradigms of feedback loops, actually
diagrammed the neurological movement by which consciousness arises and
then at a terminal point becomes unconscious. His charting of bodily expe-
riences collapsed the contrast between stasis and motion more than a cen-
tury before Brian Massumi rejected “positionality” to follow the “modes
by which realities pass into each other.”37 But without the technology to
monitor brain waves, Hodgson had to admit ignorance of crucial details:
what “precisely it is which takes place at this point, where consciousness or
feeling arises in nerve substance, is perhaps the most secret of all the secrets
of science.”
The photographers Henry Peach Robinson and Peter Henry Emerson
were similarly preoccupied with what Eduard von Hartmann (author of a
popular and much revised text on the unconscious dating from the 1860s)
called the “threshold,” the point at which conscious thoughts became
unconscious, and vice versa.38 It was in the interest of art photography,
I argue in Chapter 3, to situate the threshold as late in the creative pro-
cess as possible in order to characterize it as intentional and, therefore,
volitional despite its twin bases in machine and chemical technology. For
to their dismay, the physiology of memory accepted by many new psy-
chologists like Spencer had turned the will into a developed reflex.39 In
his review of Descartes’s hypothesis of animal automation, Huxley with-
drew volition from the chain of causation of action and treated it as a mere
causa cognoscendi of neuromotor movement. If living beings have anything
approximating the most conscious form of will, he states, it cannot be any-
thing more than a “concomitant of the molecular changes in the brain
which form part of the series involved in the production of motion.” On
the contrary, Carpenter averred the distinction between human beings and
animals. Animals may be thinking automata, acting through secondary
automatisms by the same processes that operate in human beings, he
argued in his essay of 1875, but they possess no will that functioned outside
14 Introduction
cerebral automation to control and regulate ideas and feelings. In human
beings, secondary automatisms are “put into action by a conscious inten-
tion,” not by a stimulus.40
The will was Carpenter’s “final barrier against [human] automatism,”
observes M. Norton Wise. Because it preserved a space of freedom, even
for the thinking human automaton, many others besides him argued for
its independence from cerebral automation. James likewise rejected Hux-
ley’s description of human beings as “conscious automata” on the basis
of their ability to make “autonomous decisions” from reason. In “Are We
Automata?” (1879), he cited instances in which human beings select actions
based on past experience; in these cases, their memories run counter to
automatic tendencies.41 Child agreed, but further widened the gap between
human and animal automatism: although a theory of secondary automa-
tisms explains the creativity of persons such as Coleridge and Mozart,
“whose power of determination and application was the feeblest,” he
admitted, the ordinary human cerebrum in a state of direct consciousness
resists physiological intervention. Adding an explicit metaphysical dimen-
sion to the inquiry, Carpenter declared that “if we are led by physiological
evidence to recognize in the Cerebrum a power of directing and control-
ling the automatism of the axial cord, I do not see on what ground we
are to reject the testimony of direct consciousness, that the automatism of
the Cerebrum is itself directed and controlled by some higher power.”42
The last vaguely worded phrase preserved the idea of divine inspiration in
the scientific discussion. As I show in Chapter 4, the idea of an outside
control of seemingly automatic action, which had long held a figurative
presence in the concept of literary genius, assumed a literal form in spiri-
tualist circles.
The notion that physiology could not account for all phenomena of
consciousness was warmly embraced by many contemporary science writ-
ers eager to distance themselves from the latest outbreak of radical mate-
rialism. To Child, Huxley and his allies were simply reiterating Berkeley’s
theory that “matter, and the perception of matter, cannot be divided in
thought.” Believing that physiology had undergone great advances in the
past decades but could go no further in exploring the mind, von Hartmann
advocated a separate branch of inquiry for metaphysical states of conscious-
ness.43 Accepting life without consciousness did not mean accepting that all
human functions were governed by nerve substances or that there could be
a physiology of the mind. Until about 1870, “it was orthodox to maintain
that the highest level of the brain, the cerebrum, was an entirely different
structure from the rest of the nervous system,” according to the historian
 Introduction 15
Roger Smith. In fact as late as 1899, St. George Mivart, assessing the new
psychology in The Nineteenth Century, declared soul and body to be “utterly
diverse substances.”44
Huxley was disdainful. Mental states were “parallel phenomena” of
brain states. The mind and the brain did not require a different scientific
approach because mind could not act on matter. That would involve a
transfer of force; and since mind was immaterial, how could energy come
from nothing?45 Huxley did believe that the mind’s existence was a logical
inference; he was not a thorough materialist in this respect. He was contest-
ing not only the intransigent vitalists – who thought, notes Minsoo Kang,
that the machine-body analogy worked “but only up to a point [his empha-
sis],” losing its efficacy when applied to “essential matters as sensitivity and
vitality” – but a trend in physiology to displace the mind/body dichotomy
onto the functions of the gray and white matter. To imagine the first as the
place of origination and the second as the substance of conduction effec-
tively divided the neurological system into an engine and a mechanism.46
Not surprisingly, the figure of the engine invited metaphysical treatments.
Those who maintained the guiding existence of some external force over
secondary automatisms often exploited the invisible process of electricity to
uphold their views. “[E]lectricity is almost as metaphysical as ever mind was
supposed to be,” wrote Robert Chambers in 1844. Consequently, “mental
action may be imponderable, intangible, and yet a real existence, and ruled
by the Eternal.” More than fifty years later, Mivart argued for the possibil-
ity of the survival of bodily death based on “immaterial energy, or soul,
which . . . shows itself, revealing . . . the essential nature of the individual”
regardless of the state of the body.47 To Huxley on the contrary, the mech-
anism had absorbed the engine.
Many of the disagreements over human automatism stemmed from and
stayed suspended in the words and phrases chosen to convey neuromo-
tor movement. As Otis has shown, the analogies comparing living and
technological networks may have structured the scientific understanding
of neuroscience and penetrated some popular impressions of the body, but
they did not settle disputes about how electricity or the body actually func-
tioned.48 In his study of key contributors to the new psychology, Rylance
stresses the tendency of science writers to fluctuate between literal and fig-
urative explanations of processes that eluded classification. To cite an ele-
mentary instance: Huxley’s characterization of Descartes as a physiologist
was incorrect, according to Carpenter, because it was based on the philoso-
pher’s use of sentire, a word covering too wide a range of conscious states
from the most reflective to the distracted. The problems with language
16 Introduction
were not confined to those entailed in translation. Figures of speech and
analogies borrowed from mechanics did not communicate the function of
internal systems. The mixed analogy I mentioned above between the white
“telegraph” and the gray “engine,” a mixture of physics and mechanics,
ossified into fact, despite inconclusive experimental evidence. And “force,”
which originated in classical mechanics, drew the bewilderment and con-
tempt of physicists when Bain and Spencer used it to replace “will.”49 It
was not just that physiologists had yet to develop additional terms to cap-
ture their experimental findings or convey them to the public, although the
playwright and committed materialist John Davidson voiced this problem
when, while discussing his idea of the universe as a series of chemical com-
binations, admitted that he used the words “mind” and “soul,” only because
there was “as yet no language” for what he wanted to say; existing scientific
terminology was vacuous and misleading.50 Hodgson’s explanation of the
“change” in consciousness (also cited above) as “molecular motion” carries
scientific panache even though, as Carpenter sniffed, writing about system
movement in terms of molecules was a “fashionable mode of expressing a
change of whose nature we really know nothing whatever.”51 As the per-
sistent questions over the timing of the threshold disclose, contributors
to the written discourse could not formulate process-based relationships
between organic systems. In a sweeping example, Lewes denounced the
entire mind–body framework as an “analytical fiction”; he proposed replac-
ing it with accounts organized around the contrast between “surface-deep,”
a dichotomy that caught on, to be sure, although it did not in the end
conjure the extensive systemic action he wanted to capture. Even though
most contributors to the new psychology conceded that consciousness was,
as Bain argued, “a state of energetic activity” in which change and differ-
ence register, they frequently lapsed into prevailing dualisms, often accus-
ing each other of doing so.52
The rhetorical opposition between an abstract and controlling mind
and a neuromotor unconscious continually reasserted itself, then, and not
only in the often internecine tensions of the new psychology; it struc-
tured the territorial model of depth psychology. Although the Freudian
topography of the psyche accounted for movement between consciousness
and unconsciousness, for example, it abstracted the physiological dimen-
sion into drives and cathexes and left neuromotor functions for clini-
cians to pursue. This fracture in modern science encouraged the idea –
held, as I have shown, by some of the new psychologists – that the mind
should be investigated by methods devised solely for its operations. Or
it insidiously reappeared in the physiological model in the guise of the
separation between the engine and the conduit. And in the face of the new
 Introduction 17
psychology’s failure to articulate a general theory of systemic movement,
the binary also reigned, at least nominally, in the arts, specifically in
the written documents meant to establish distinctive philosophies of and
approaches to practice. The persistence of the divide in the organism,
however phrased, has proved useful, some rightly concede, as a rhetor-
ical principle of “logical formalization.”53 Such formalization requires
privileging one of the terms, of course. Those writers dedicated to formaliz-
ing artistic practices generally characterized them as expressive acts requir-
ing conscious intention rather than skills enlisting secondary automatisms.
Even photography and balletic movement, the arts most affected by mech-
anistic movement (in the forms of automatic technologies and kinesic
intelligence), were portrayed as forms of expressiveness traceable to the
mind.

The chapters of this book draw several cultural trends, which by them-
selves have received full attention elsewhere, into the orbit of the automa-
ton debates. These include the popular understanding of genius in the late
nineteenth century, concurrent changes in theories of memory, the for-
mal acknowledgment of a professional class of writers, the disenchantment
with classical ballet, the struggle among photographers for artistic status,
and the scientific alignments of spiritualism and surrealism. All crossed and
recrossed the fracture lines of modern science caused by the mind–body
problem. Part I, comprising the first two chapters of this book, presents
stark cases of automata-phobia, the shame and fear it generated, and the
displays of human exceptionality – intellectual and aesthetic – that it pro-
voked and shaped. As both discussions illustrate, pitting human behavior
against mechanical operation was the initial rhetorical move in a dynamic
and diffused struggle to enunciate the worth of aesthetic, artistic, and intel-
lectual practices that necessarily engaged human automatisms. Chapter 1
analyzes the operation of John Stuart Mill’s renowned genius in light of
accusations that it worked mechanically. My central text is the Autobiog-
raphy, both in its published form (1873) and its early draft from the 1850s.
Through it, I identify both the physiological operations of memory that
provoked the charge that Mill was an automaton and the demonstrations
of emotion that he believed would effectively repudiate such a slur. His
text never quite dispels the unflattering suspicion that he thinks like an
automaton, I argue, because both his reputation as a programmed prodigy
and his famous account of his “mental crisis” feature unconscious functions
of questionable neurophysiological province that would tend, in the eyes of
many contemporaries, to confirm his image as a machine. Moving beyond
this significant, individual case, Chapter 2 similarly depicts the efforts of
Another random document with
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 [Listen] [MusicXML]

1. The Holly and the Ivy

Now both are full well grown;
Of all the trees that spring in wood
The Holly bears the crown;
The Holly bears a blossom
As white as lily flower,
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ,
To be our sweet Saviour,
To be our sweet Saviour.

2. The Holly bears a berry

As red as any blood;
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
To do poor sinners good.
The Holly bears a prickle
As sharp as any thorn;
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
On Christmas day in the morn,
On Christmas day in the morn.

3. The Holly bears a bark

As bitter as any gall;
And Mary bore sweet Jesus Christ
For to redeem us all.
The Holly and the Ivy
Now both are full well grown;
Of all the trees that spring in wood
The Holly bears the crown,
The Holly bears the crown.
A Virgin Most Pure
 1.

A VIRGIN most pure, as the Prophet foretold,

Should bring forth a Saviour, which now we behold.
To be our Redeemer from death, hell, and sin,
Which Adam’s transgression had wrappèd us in.
Rejoice and be merry, cast sorrow aside,
Christ Jesus, our Saviour, was born on this tide.

2.

In Bethlehem city, in Jury it was

When Joseph and Mary together did pass
All for to be taxed with many one more,
For Cæsar commanded the same should be so.
Rejoice and be merry, etc.

3.

But when they had entered the city so far,

A number of people so mighty was there
That Joseph and Mary, whose substance was small,
Could get in the city no lodging at all.
Rejoice and be merry, etc.

4.

Then they were constrained in a stable to lie,

Where oxen and asses they used to tie;
Their lodging so simple they held it no scorn,
But against the next morning our Saviour was born.
Rejoice and be merry, set sorrow aside,
Christ Jesus, our Saviour, was born on this tide.

5.

The King of all Glory to the world being brought,

Small store of fine linen to wrap Him was bought;
When Mary had swaddled her young Son so sweet,
Within an ox-manger she laid Him to sleep.
Rejoice and be merry, etc.

6.

Then God sent an angel from Heaven so high

To certain poor shepherds in fields as they lie,
And bade them no longer in sorrow to stay
Because that our Saviour was born on this day.
Rejoice and be merry, etc.

7.

Then presently after, the shepherds did spy

A number of angels appear in the sky,
Who joyfully talked and sweetly did sing
“To God be all glory, our Heavenly King.”
Rejoice and be merry, etc.

8.

Three certain wise princes, they thought it most meet

To lay their rich offerings at our Saviour’s feet;
Then the shepherds consented, and to Bethlehem did go
And when they came thither, they found it was so.
Rejoice and be merry, etc.
[Listen] [MusicXML]
The Wassail Song
PART I.
 [Listen] [MusicXML]

1. Here we come a-wassailing

Among the leaves so green;
Here we come a-wand’ring,
So plainly to be seen.
Chorus
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too!
And God bless you, and send you a happy New Year,
And God send you a happy New Year!

2. Our wassail cup is made

Of the rosemary tree,
And so is your beer
Of the best barley.
Love and joy, etc.

3. We are not daily beggars

That beg from door to door,
But we are neighbours’ children
Whom you have seen before.
Love and joy, etc.

4. Good master and good mistress,

As you sit by the fire
Pray think of us poor children
A-wandering in the mire.
Love and joy, etc.
The Wassail Song
PART II.
 [Listen] [MusicXML]

5. We have a little purse,

It is made of rabbit skin,
We want a little sixpence
To line it well within.
Chorus.
Love and joy come to you,
And to you your wassail too!
And God bless you, and send you a happy New Year,
And God send you a happy New Year!

6. Call up the Butler of this house

Put on his golden ring;
Let him bring us a glass of beer
And the better we shall sing.
Love and joy, etc.

7. Bring us out a table

And spread it with a cloth;
Bring us out a mouldy cheese,
And some of your Christmas loaf.
Love and joy, etc.

8. God bless the Master of this house,

Likewise the Mistress too;
And all the little children
That round the table go.
Love and joy, etc.
The Boar’s Head Carol
 [Listen] [MusicXML]

1.

The boar’s head in hand bear I,

Bedeck’d with bays and rosemary,
And I pray you, my masters, be merry
Quot estis in convivio.
Chorus.
Caput apri defero.
Reddons laudes Domino.

2.

The boar’s head as I understand

Is the bravest dish in all the land;
When thus bedecked with a gay garland
Let us servire cantico.
Caput apri defero
Reddons laudes Domino.

3.

Our steward hath provided this

In honour of the King of Bliss,
Which on this day to be served is
In regimensi atrio.
Caput apri defero
Reddons laudes Domino.