Bowles 3: 'Written at Tinemouth, Northumberland, After a Tempestuous Voyage'

Here's the sonnet in modern orthography:

As slow I climb the cliff's ascending side,
Much musing on the track of terror past,
When o'er the dark wave rode the howling blast,
Pleas'd I look back, and view the tranquil tide,
That laves the pebbled shore; and now the beam
Of evening smiles on the grey battlement,
And yon forsaken tow'r that time has rent:—
The lifted oar far off with silver gleam
Is touch'd, and the hush'd billows seem to sleep!
Sooth'd by the scene, ev'n thus on sorrow's breast
A kindred stillness steals, and bids her rest;
Whilst sad airs stilly sigh along the deep,
Like melodies which mourn upon the lyre,
Wak'd by the breeze, and as they mourn, expire.

This is a poem about Tynemouth Castle and Priory. The link, there, takes you to the relevant English Heritage website. If you've never been, it's worth browsing that site a little to get a sense of the topography Bowles is describing; but if you haven't time for that, here is an image of the place's pleasing Gothic ruination:

And here is an aerial shot, to give a sense of how extensive is the cliff's ascending side.

Bowles's poem, to state the most obvious thing about it, is an example of the eighteenth-century Loco-Descriptive Picturesque. Poet climbs eminence, regards old ruin, is moved to emotional response which he communicates to the reader. Here's a relevant passage from Adam Potkay's Wordsworth's Ethics (which I'm half way through reading now, actually; very much enjoying it):

"Loco-Descriptive" is a Romantic-era phrase for a poetic genre rooted in the eighteenth-century. The Oxford English Dictionary, defining the term as "descriptive of local scenery, etc" traces it to Wordsworth's Preface to his 1815 poem. The loco-descriptive cannot be divided too strictly from more generally descriptive verse. Wordsworth's Preface categorizes the genre under the heading of "Idyllium,--descriptive either of the processes and appearances of external nature, as the Seasons of Thomson; or of characters, manners and sentiments," especially "in conjunction with the appearances of Nature" (Prose Works 3:28). As distinct from descriptive verse that renders external nature in a general, abstract, or ideal way, loco-descriptive poetry treats specifically named places or things (estates, buildings, rivers, even a few mines and caves). [Potkay, Wordsworth's Ethics (John Hopkins 2012), 15]

Potkay also quotes M H Abram's 'sharper distinction' between 18th-century loco-descriptive poetry 'which he associates with hill prospects' and the more self-consciously 'lyricized' descriptive-meditative poems he called the 'greater Romantic lyric' (that's the Immortality Ode et al). Bowles, clearly, is writing a sonnet-length version of the former type here, with a cliff prospect instead of a hill one. One more thing Potkay notes: 'although Wordsworth lent his authority to the phrase [Loco-Descriptive] it goes back further: Robert Aubin adduces the title of Daniel Walters's "Landough: a Loco-Descriptive Poem" published in 1780. The popularity of a genre with at least titular interest in actual locales is staggering: Aubin's bibliography of, as he calls it, "topographical" poetry lists roughly 3500 items, all but a few of them from the period 1700-1840.'

That's part of the context for Bowles's sonnet. More context comes from the argument critics have had about the ideological freight of this sort of poetry. For John Barrell, in his The Idea of Landscape and the Sense of Place 1730-1840 (1972), the privileged 'raised' point-of-view of the loco-descriptive piece elides more-or-less directly with the socially privileged bourgeois subject. This, for Barrell, is a self-evidently bad thing (Potkay summarises it as: 'the perspective of a detached observer who stands above a landscape , reducing it to a picturesque frame by eliminating its particularities. The superior observer of the prospect poem represents, for Barrell, the deracinated bourgeoisie that will appropriate the countryside without inhabiting it or understanding it as a locality'). I'm also reading Chris Fitter's Poetry, Space, Landscape: Toward a New Theory (Cambridge Univ. Press 1995), which advances a rather more intricate (you may prefer: 'sophisticated', 'nuanced') or the relationship between social, cultural and psycho-evolutionary determinants in the aesthetics of landscape.

In Bowles's sonnet, here, the speaker has recently undertaken a perilous journey over a tempestuous sea. The subtitle tells us so, and the poem itself makes plain his relief at having survived, and his pleasure at the now-tranquil marine prospect. The timbre of the piece, as well as the example from the earlier sonnets, invites us to read this as a generalised or symbolic way of describing the journey through 'life'. (A modern parallel that occurs to me is Barry Manilow's song: 'I made it through the rain'. Wouldn't it be cool to write a literary-critical volume comparing Bowles and Barry?) The 'life is a journey' analogy might come over as merely banal, except that the poem itself strikes a deliberately ambiguous emotional note with respect of it. The storm is behind the speaker; he is 'pleas'd [to] look back, and view the tranquil tide'. His forward prospect is of the picturesque tower; now the sea washes the beach, and hushes the boat to sleep. The susurrus hushes 'sorrow's breast' (the narrator's we assume) 'and bids her [the breast] rest.' But by the same token, the picturesque tower is forsaken, ruinous, and the poem ends with the three lines that (a) draw in a remarkably dissonant, hissing sibilance ('whilst sad airs stilly sigh along the deep') onomatopoeically inserting the sound of the surf into this sonnet. This in turn leads us to Bowles's invocation of the Eolian Harp trope -- surely amongst the most mournful, even morbid iterations of that common late-18th-century figure:

Like melodies which mourn upon the lyre,
Wak'd by the breeze, and as they mourn, expire.

There is something sad about survival, the poem seems to be saying. Making it through the rain is not necessarily a triumphant or rousing emotional state. I'd suggest that the way this particular sonnet squeezes or distorts the octave-sestet format (nine lines, then a turn to melancholy in the last three: a weirdly experimental nonet-tercet structure) works subtly to emphasise this complex of emotional reactions.

Here is another passage from Barrell's book:

The contemplation of landscape was not, then, a passive activity: it involved restructuring the landscape in the imagination, according to principles of composition that had to be learned, and were indeed learned so thoroughly that in the later eighteenth-century it became impossible for anyone with an aesthetic interest in landscape to look at the countryside without applying them, whether he knew he was doing so or not. These principles were derived from the Roman landscape-painters of the seventeenth-century. [Barrell, The Idea of Landscape, 6]

But Bowles is not applying principles of composition derived from the Roman landscape-painters of the seventeenth-century to his landscape. If the aesthetic framework for this sonnet derives from anywhere (of course it derives from many things; but looking for a primary route through) it derives from Edgar’s speech in Lear about the samphire-collector on the cliff (Act 4, scene 6):

Come on, sir; here's the place: stand still. How fearful
And dizzy 'tis, to cast one's eyes so low!
The crows and choughs that wing the midway air
Show scarce so gross as beetles: half way down
Hangs one that gathers samphire, dreadful trade!
Methinks he seems no bigger than his head:
The fishermen, that walk upon the beach,
Appear like mice; and yond tall anchoring bark,
Diminish'd to her cock; her cock, a buoy
Almost too small for sight: the murmuring surge,
That on the unnumber'd idle pebbles chafes,
Cannot be heard so high. I'll look no more;
Lest my brain turn, and the deficient sight
Topple down headlong.

There's a related, although (obviously) diluted and less extremely vertiginous, flavour to Bowle's sonnet. I think what this does is to work to unsettle the notion of privilege; to imply that the superior bourgeois subject will tend not merely enjoy his prospect (although he will do that) but also to be unnerved by it. Sitting on top of the world is proverbially a wonderful feeling; but presumably it is also a vertiginous, alarming one. You might fall!

Bowles 2, 'Languid, and sad, and slow from day to day'

Languid, and sad, and slow from day to day,
I journey on, yet pensive turn to view
(Where the rich landscape gleams with softer hue)
The streams, and vales, and hills, that steal away.
So fares it with the children of the earth;
For when life's goodly prospect opens round,
Their spirits beat to tread that fairy ground,
Where every vale sounds to the pipe of mirth.
But them, vain hope, and easy youth beguiles,
And soon a longing look, like me, they cast
Back o'er the pleasing prospect of the past:
Yet fancy points where still far onward smiles.
Some sunny spot, and her fair colouring blends,
Till cheerless on their path the night descends.


Bowles is, amongst other things, playing games with monosyllables, by way of stepping through his mournful, slow theme. The first line is 80% monosyllabic; the second 60%; the third 100%; the pattern looks as though it will repeat (line 6: 80%; line 5760%) but then it doesn't. 'Spirits' is disyllabic I suppose; although its quantity is strange -- a classical long syllable that reads more like a single stress than a trochee. The 100% monosyllable line is postponed to line 8 -- as if the poem is already slowing, lengthening, drawing out its form. Then it's

Line 9 80%
Line 10 80%
Line 11 60%
Line 12 60%
Line 13 55%
Line 14 60%

OK, so it's a disproportionately monosyllabic poem: let me not flog the point to death. I think what I'm suggesting is that there is something of a pulse, or ebb-flow, to the way the poem handles its monosylls. Languid and sad and slow. Otherwise, the blot in the sonnet to my ear is 'pipe of mirth', which strikes an artificial, conventionalised note (playing a recorder outside, no matter how perkily, no longer correlates to 'mirth' in the sense the poem needs it to; and I'm not convinced it did the 1780s either). I mind less the deliberate blurring of topographies, physical and temporal, the 'walk through the countryside' that is also somehow 'the walk through life.' I assume the idea is: we are walking eastward, whilst the sun sets behind us. The land behind us, bathed in roseate light, is our youth. There are peaks ahead where the sun still illuminates the grass. But we all know where we are going. Don't we.

Well, one place we're going (of course) is Milton. Bowles's 'goodly prospect' invokes, in this phrase directly and in many of its other details by implication, Milton's 'Scout' epic simile from Paradise Lost 3:543-551:

.....................As when a Scout
Through dark and desart wayes with peril gone
All night; at last by break of chearful dawne
Obtains the brow of some high-climbing Hill,
Which to his eye discovers unaware
The goodly prospect of some forein land
First-seen, or some renown'd Metropolis
With glistering Spires and Pinnacles adorn'd,
Which now the Rising Sun guilds with his beams.

Well that's fine, as far as it goes; and unusually rich piece of landscape-painting by the blind poet. Except that what the epic simile is actually describing is: Satan, having escaped Hell, looking down (from 'the lower stair/That scal'd by steps of Gold to Heav'n Gate')

with wonder at the sudden view
Of all this World at once

This is what Milton is comparing the Scout's wonder to; and at a second remove, we might say, what (therefore) Bowles is comparing himself to.

Such wonder seis'd, though after Heaven seen,
The Spirit maligne, but much more envy seis'd
At sight of all this World beheld so faire.
...He views in bredth, and without longer pause
Down right into the Worlds first Region throws
His flight precipitant, and windes with ease
Through the pure marble Air his oblique way
Amongst innumerable Starrs.

The point is not that we are Satanic in the strict sense; but that we share with 'the Spirit maligne' the condition of ontological exile. Like him our 'spirits beat to tread that fairy ground' (is there a hint of Miltonic angel/devil wings about that 'beat'?). Like him we will not be allowed to settle in the land we covet.

Bowles 1. 'Bereave me not of these delightful dreams'

Here's the brief biographical note on William Lisle Bowles (1762–1850) from J W Cousin's venerable A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature (1910):

He was born at King's Sutton, Northamptonshire, where his father was vicar. At the age of fourteen he entered Winchester College, the headmaster at the time being Dr Joseph Warton. In 1781, Bowles left as captain of the school, and went on to Trinity College, Oxford, where he had won a scholarship. Two years later he won the chancellors prize for Latin verse. In 1789 he published, in a very small quarto volume, Fourteen Sonnets, which were received with extraordinary favour, not only by the general public, but by such men as Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Wordsworth. The Sonnets even in form were a revival, a return to an older and purer poetic style, and by their grace of expression, melodious versification, tender tone of feeling and vivid appreciation of the life and beauty of nature, stood out in strong contrast to the elaborated commonplaces which at that time formed the bulk of English poetry. After taking his degree at Oxford, Bowles entered the church, and was appointed in 1792 as vicar of Chicklade in Wiltshire.

What I'm doing is reading Sonnets: written chiefly on picturesque spots, during a tour (1789). So here's Sonnet 1.

Bereave me not of these delightful dreams
Which charm'd my youth; or mid her gay career
Of hope, or when the faintly-paining tear
Sat sad on memory's cheek!----though loftier themes
Await the awaken'd mind, to the high prize
Of wisdom, hardly earn'd with toil and pain,
Aspiring patient; yet on life's wide plain
Cast friendless, where unheard some suffrer cries
Hourly, and oft our road is lone and long,
'Twere not a crime, should we awhile delay
Amid the sunny field; and happier they,
Who, as they wander, woo the charm of song
To cheer their path, till they forget to weep;
And the tired sense is hush'd and sinks to sleep.

Here's Bowles' short preface:

The following Trifles were chiefly suggested by some Picturesque Objects which presented themselves to the Author in a Tour to the Northern Parts of this Islands and on the Continent. They were before committed too hastily to the Press; but the favourable Reception which they experienced, has induced him to revise them, and, with the Addition of a few more, to make them less unworthy of the Publick Eye.

It having been said that these Pieces were written in Imitation of the little Poems of Mrs. Smyth, the Author hopes be may be excused adding, that many of them were written prior to Mrs. Smyth's Publication. He is conscious of their great Inferiority to those beautiful and elegant Compositions; but, such as they are, they were certainly written from his own Feelings.

So: the feeling is certainly there, if a tad too decorously restrained ('faintly-paining tear') for modern tastes, perhaps. But the first thing that strikes me about this sonnet is its Empsonian ambiguity of phrasing. 'hardly earn'd with toil and pain' presumably means 'strenuously earn'd with toil and pain', but flirts with 'barely earned'; the 'patient' of 'Aspiring patient' could be either noun or adverb (presumably it's the latter) and the 'sense' referred to in the last line ('And the tired sense is hush'd and sinks to sleep') could be the senses of the poet, or the singers on the road, or the sense contained in the song, worn out by endless repetition.

Now, I'm not sure I see that this sort of ambiguity serves the larger thrust of the poem. Indeed it's not immediately obvious what that larger thrust is. The sonnet is addressed 'To A Friend'; it is presumably that friend who is proposing to 'bereave' the speaker of his youthful dreams ('Grow up, Bowles! Concentrate on loftier matters!'). In generic sense, I guess, this is 'pastoral' as opposed to 'epic' poetry; or rural ballads as opposed to scientific and philosophical enquiry. But the same poem that starts with an imperative not to be bereaved ends with a celebration of the ways in which is is good to be bereaved -- to, in other words, be distracted from one's sadness. And the central lines around which the poem hinges -- from the implied urging of the 'friend' to abandon this youthful stuff, to the statement of its existentially analgesic worth -- happens with some lines that are just baffling. 'Unheard some suffrer cries/Hourly'; if he's unheard then how do we know he's suffering? (If a suffrer falls in the forest and nobody's is there to hear him ...). 'Oft our road is lone and long,' -- but you're not lone; you're specifically addressing this poem to a friend.

These semantic tangles seems to me expressive of a deeper uncertainty. The poem itself is genuinely being pulled in two directions: foreward into a grander future, and backwards (the old-fashioned, small-scale sonnet) into a local, rural, sentimental past.

Bowles sonnets

What I'm going to do is read Sonnets: written chiefly on picturesque spots, during a tour (1789) by William Lisle Bowles. There are twenty-one of these, and I'll take them one at a time. Starting tomorrow with Sonnet 1.

Why am I doing this? One reason: Coleridge praises these sonnets in the first chapter of the Biographia. Indeed, he does more than praise them. He allots them (alongside William Crowe's Lewesdon Hill: a Poem (1788), which I'll come to in a bit) a primary, almost a inspirational place in his own poetic education. Reading the classics of literature is good for a young poet, he says, but reading stuff by people who are still alive has a special effect. Chapter 1 of the Biographia starts with a general paragraph; then a paragraph on STC's first published collection; then three paragraphs fondly recalling a stern but effective schoolteacher who shaped and disciplined Coleridge's youthful compositional imagination. Then we get this:

From causes, which this is not the place to investigate, no models of past times, however perfect, can have the same vivid effect on the youthful mind, as the productions of contemporary genius. The Discipline, my mind had undergone, “Ne falleretur rotundo sono et versuum cursu, cincinnis et floribus; sed ut inspiceret quidnam subesset, quae, sedes, quod firmamentum, quis fundus verbis; an figures essent mera ornatura et orationis fucus; vel sanguinis e materiae ipsius corde effluentis rubor quidam nativus et incalescentia genuina;”—removed all obstacles to the appreciation of excellence in style without diminishing my delight. That I was thus prepared for the perusal of Mr. Bowles's sonnets and earlier poems, at once increased their influence, and my enthusiasm. The great works of past ages seem to a young man things of another race, in respect to which his faculties must remain passive and submiss, even as to the stars and mountains. But the writings of a contemporary, perhaps not many years older than himself, surrounded by the same circumstances, and disciplined by the same manners, possess a reality for him, and inspire an actual friendship as of a man for a man. His very admiration is the wind which fans and feeds his hope. The poems themselves assume the properties of flesh and blood. To recite, to extol, to contend for them is but the payment of a debt due to one, who exists to receive it.

The Latin is a puzzle, actually. Not in terms of what it means, which is clear enough; but in terms of where it is quoted from. It means: ‘that it was not distracted by the verse’s smooth sound and flow, nor by ornamentation, nor floweriness of expression; instead it examined the fundamentals and essences of words, to see if the figures are mere ornamentation, to check the falsity of the rhetoric; if indeed the actual meaning flows blood-red from the heart with true passion.’ Now, this passage is Coleridge’s own confection, drawing especially in its later half from medical writing: Thomas Willis’s treatise De Sanguinis Incalescentia (1672) popularised ‘incalescentia’ (it is not a word found in Classical Latin) as the standard medical term for the heat of the blood; and Johann Jakob, Bernhardin and Georg Michael Wepfer characterised a body as healthy ‘quia rubor et nativus color manet per se illaeso corde’, ‘because the redness and the native colour of the heart remains essentially unaltered [from day to day]’; [Wepfer brothers, Observationes medico-practicae, de affectibus capitis internis & externis (1727), 583]. The earlier bit of the passage appears to be STC's own.

Exactly why Coleridge's imagination should move from recollections of his school-days to a chunk of medically-inflected neo-Latin, and thence to Bowles, isn't yet clear to me. I'll think about it some more. After another paragraph, Coleridge reverts to Bowles:

I had just entered on my seventeenth year, when the sonnets of Mr. Bowles, twenty in number, and just then published in a quarto pamphlet, were first made known and presented to me, by a schoolfellow who had quitted us for the University, and who, during the whole time that he was in our first form (or in our school language a GRECIAN) had been my patron and protector. I refer to Dr. Middleton, the truly learned, and every way excellent Bishop of Calcutta ... It was a double pleasure to me, and still remains a tender recollection, that I should have received from a friend so revered the first knowledge of a poet, by whose works, year after year, I was so enthusiastically delighted and inspired. My earliest acquaintances will not have forgotten the undisciplined eagerness and impetuous zeal, with which I labored to make proselytes, not only of my companions, but of all with whom I conversed, of whatever rank, and in whatever place. As my school finances did not permit me to purchase copies, I made, within less than a year and a half, more than forty transcriptions, as the best presents I could offer to those, who had in any way won my regard. And with almost equal delight did I receive the three or four following publications of the same author.

Bowles's effect on Coleridge's development, by his own account, was salutary. In brief, Bowles saved STC from being sucked into the quicksand of Abstruse Theologico-Metaphysical Speculation.

. My obligations to Mr. Bowles were indeed important, and for radical good. At a very premature age, even before my fifteenth year, I had bewildered myself in metaphysics, and in theological controversy. Nothing else pleased me. History, and particular facts, lost all interest in my mind. Poetry (though for a school-boy of that age, I was above par in English versification, and had already produced two or three compositions which, I may venture to say, without reference to my age, were somewhat above mediocrity, and which had gained me more credit than the sound, good sense of my old master was at all pleased with) poetry itself, yea, novels and romances, became insipid to me. In my friendless wanderings on our leave-days, (for I was an orphan, and had scarcely any connections in London) highly was I delighted, if any passenger, especially if he were drest in black [he means, if he were a clergyman, and therefore versed in theology. AR], would enter into conversation with me. For I soon found the means of directing it to my favorite subjects

Of providence, fore-knowledge, will, and fate,
Fix’d fate, free will, fore-knowledge absolute,
And found no end in wandering mazes lost. [Paradise Lost, 2:559-61]

This preposterous pursuit was, beyond doubt, injurious, both to my natural powers, and to the progress of my education. It would perhaps have been destructive, had it been continued; but from this I was auspiciously withdrawn, partly indeed by an accidental introduction to an amiable family, chiefly however, by the genial influence of a style of poetry, so tender and yet so manly, so natural and real, and yet so dignified and harmonious, as the sonnets &c. of Mr. Bowles!

This, then, is what I'm going to look for, in the main, as I read Bowles's Sonnets. Their anti-metaphysical prophylactic properties.

Very Brief, One Paragraph History of European 18th-century Philosophy

18th-century philosophers thought and wrote about many things, and many of these philosophers were very clever people. That said, one debate in particular dominated their discourse: what Jerry Fodor recently called 'mind-stuff versus matter stuff':

One might hold that the world isn’t made entirely of matter ... [that] there is also a fundamentally different kind of stuff – mind-stuff, call it – and consciousness resides in that. Notoriously, however, this view has hard problems of its own. For example, if matter-stuff and mind-stuff are of fundamentally different kinds, how are causal relations between them possible? How is it possible that eating should be caused by feeling peckish or feeling peckish by not eating? For this and other reasons, mind-stuff has mostly fallen out of fashion. [LRB, Vol. 29 No. 10: 24 May 2007; page 9]

Many 18th-century thinkers were motivated by a desire, the grounds and strength of which I don't have time to speculate about here, to retain the revealed religion known as 'Christianity' as part of their way of talking about the world. This meant they had to find a place for God, and an immortal human soul, in their world-views. Descartes suggested that human beings are bodies + souls, the mind-stuff going through a magic router called 'the pineal gland' to enable it to interact with the matter-stuff. But, for reasons akin to the ones to which Fodor alludes, plenty of people weren't persuaded by that. Other philosophers (Hume, Hartley, Priestly) claimed that there was nothing but matter-stuff, and mind-stuff was just an effect of the way the matter-stuff of the brain operated, not unlike (although this isn't, of course, an analogy any of those gentlemen used) 'speed' emerges from the proper operation of a motorcycle. Hartley believed in God, and used half his most famous book presenting 'proofs' for His existence; but since his account of human beings was entirely material some people accused him of inconsistency. Priestly (who is interesting here predominantly as a disseminator and analyst of Hartley) had an ingenious theory of his own that managed to keep Christianity as 'true' without sacrificing Hartley's materialism. Berkeley approached the problem from the other side, and denied that there was anything called 'matter' -- he thought that everything is 'mind-stuff'. But not many people believed him. So there was a breach, between 'soul' and world, that haunted the thinkers of the 18th-century; and it haunted them in part because they worried that the path of truth might compel them to give up 'soul' altogether. This is one reason why Kant proved so influential: he argued, in the Pure Reason critique, that 'mind' and 'world' were not separate entities after all, because key aspects of the world (dimension, causality etc.) were actually the way the soul itself was structured. Coleridge and the second-generation Romantics he inspired took this to be a great healing of the breach. I'm not sure they were right, though.

The Survival Lottery

I hadn't come across this before (you may need to click to embiggen. You may even need to click-and-zoom to embiggen. It's the first paragraph that intrigues me):

My first thought was: Ishiguro! Except, of course, the Never Let Me Go situation is not a lottery (save in the specialised sense that it's a cosmic lottery whether we're born rich or poor, exploiter or exploited and so on). But Ishiguro's novel does, intentionally or otherwise, and presumably otherwise, pinpoint one of the problems with the original thought-experiment here. It's supposed to be a way of framing the question 'if one person's death can save four or five lives, is moral to keep that person alive?' But organ transplant will work best if young, healthy organs are transplanted. If I've signed up to this Lottery and then drunk my liver into collapse and smoked my lungs into tarry deseutude, I don't want organs transplanted from a similarly dissolute decades-of-smoking-and-drinking type, now, do I. This 'lottery' would not guarantee the optimal results. No, we need something that slants the 'donor' ticket towards the young, and the 'recipient' ticket towards the old ...

In other news: Tarry Deseutude is the name of my next band.

The Philosophical Content of Tom Stoppard's "Jumpers"

Wondering what the philosophical content of Tom Stoppard's famous philosophical play Jumpers (1972) was, I chanced upon some old issues of Philosophy: the Journal of the Royal Institute of Philosophy from the late 1970s. And here's a paper by Jonathan Bennett: 'Philosophy and Mr Stoppard' [Philosophy, 50: 192 (April 1975), 5-18].

Jumpers is a poor effort which doesn't deserve its current success. ... [It] is a mildly surrealistic farce and not a significant philosophical play ... [its philosophical content] serves the play only in a decorative and marginal manner ... it short [it] lacks structure, and lacks seriousness.

Oof! Harsh. But, wait: here's a rebuttal article by Henning Jensen, entitled 'Jonathan Bennett and Mr Stoppard' [Philosophy, 52: 200 (April 1977), 214-17].

Jonathan Bennett, in his article 'Philosophy and Mr Stoppard' [concludes] that Jumpers is a mildly surrealistic farce and not a significant philosophical play ... I agree with Bennett that Jumpers is not a significantly philosophical play ... Bennett's evaluation of these materials as thin and uninteresting is incontrovertible. The arguments are bad, there are inaccuracies in reporting philosophical positions, the whole tone is farcical, and the philosophical content is marginal rather than central to the structure of the play ... I must conclude, therefore, that although Jumpers is very witty, the weakness of its philosophical materials is such as to render it of no philosophical significance and of little worth as a play.

Not so much thesis, antithesis, synthesis, as 'thesis, thesis, yah-boo philosophic commoners'. The impression, rather, is of two philosophers ganging up to put the boot into Stoppard. That'll teach him!