Humanities for Humanity's Sake 2: 
the Other Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure: Creativity, Innovation and Critique in the Arts

 

One of the box-office hits of 1989 that has remained relatively popular among video renters is Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, an American buddy saga that may be at least as good an indicator of the state of Western culture in the ’nineties as Easy Rider (1971) was in the ’seventies. Set in the town of San Dimas, California, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure concerns two callow young men–Ted Theodore Logan and Bill S. Preston, Esquire–who must pass a history assignment in order to remain in high school, avoid enrolment in a military academy, and continue playing in their garage band, which is wishfully named “Wild Stallion.” Since, in their own words, the sum total of their knowledge of history is that “the world has great history...the world is full of history,” their rescue is no mean feat and, indeed, accomplished only through the intervention of a deus ex machina named Rufus who arrives in the nick of time in a telephone booth from a future society that has improbably developed around Bill and Ted’s execrable music and the foundational propositions encapsulated in their two oft-repeated mottoes: “Be excellent to each other” and “Party on, dudes!” With the help of Rufus and his time machine, Bill and Ted visit several historical eras, bringing back with them an array of “important figures” such as Socrates, Napoleon, Freud, Billy the Kid, and Abraham Lincoln to enliven their oral report, which, of course, is a spectacular success. En route to the report, all the historical figures show themselves to be utterly enthralled by the malls, water slides, aerobics classes, consumer goods, and young people that they encounter in San Dimas, and at the movie’s climax Lincoln not only thanks Bill and Ted for bringing him on such an “excellent adventure,” but also endorses the tenets of their caring yet hedonistic philosophy. The movie ends with Rufus explaining that a future society will be founded on the music of “Wild Stallion” because it will bring the “universe into harmony” and is “excellent for dancing.”

Now there are many things to admire in Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, not least its youthful iconoclasm and its insistence on mutual kindliness, but there is also much that is dismaying and even disturbing, most especially its use of both the past and the future to validate the near-mindlessness of a consumer and entertainment culture whose defining architectural structures are the shopping mall, the amusement park, and the gymnasium. Far from giving the audience of their report in the gym and the movie theatre, a fresh, let alone a critical, perspective on the present, Bill and Ted’s “1988 World Tour of Some of the Greatest People that Ever Lived” merely reinforces the obsessions and values of the present and, indeed, sanctions the view expressed by another presenter (a football player, as it happens) that in history “everything is different, yet the same.” In the “all-inclusive nowness”¹ of Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, the past is not a foreign country that careful, sensitive, and dedicated students and scholars painstakingly attempt to understand both for its own sake and for the sake of the light that it may shed on the present and future, but a benighted realm whose inhabitants were never able to ogle, guzzle, and, of course, purchase the products of American consumer culture. In the year of the dismantlement of the Berlin Wall, Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure proclaimed in its own amusing way both the end of history and the death of the humanities as traditionally understood and practiced: the decade in which “excellent” became a cliché had arrived,² and was no sooner underway than the word “excellence” and its cognates were appropriated and invested with alchemical properties by university administrators keen to give their frequently leaden and lacklustre institutions and programmes at least the appearance of being golden.  

Almost needless to say, the vision of the past as a primitive anticipation of the enlightened present and glorious future that undergirds Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is neither new nor entirely despicable, but a version of the Whig view of history whose fundamental belief in social progress and human perfectibility can be comforting and encouraging, though surely not, after a century of politically driven mass murder on an unprecedented and almost unimaginable scale, quite so convincing or compelling as it once may have been. But the excellent adventure and historical perspective of the Bill and Ted to whom I would now like to direct attention seem to me to embody a much broader, richer, and more appealing way of thinking about historical developments and the relation of humanistic studies to history than those assumed by the antics of Ted Theodore Logan and Bill S. Preston, Esquire. No reader of this journal (the Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies)–or, indeed, anybody who has thought at any length and in some detail about the sources of current representations of the pre-Modern era in everything from feminist history and the heritage industry to Past Times catalogues and the New Age movement– will be surprised to learn that the Bill and Ted to whom I refer are William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones, the leaders of the second group of Pre-Raphaelites who gathered in and around Oxford University in the mid-to-late eighteen fifties and whose work, far from being a celebration of contemporaneous culture, served as an agent of its transformation. As this essay will try to show, several aspects of the activities and achievements of Morris, Burne-Jones, and other members of their “Set” signalize the Oxford group of Pre-Raphaelites as a figurative “studium”³–a richly instructive site (study) in the edifice of the humanities to which an interest in the Arts provides access and to which humanists (and others) may repair in order to remember or discover the many benefits and values of humanistic studies.      

Before venturing into the Pre-Raphaelite studium, two general points about our other Bill and Ted need to be made. The first is that Morris, Burne-Jones, and their friends were both like and unlike a great many undergraduates in Canadian universities today–like in there appetite for fun, for members of the opposite sex, for travel to exotic places (in the summer of 1855 three of them travelled through northern France) and unlike in their appetite for reading, discussing, and inwardly digesting works of history and literature as formidable as Henry Hart Milman’s History of Latin Christianity (1854-55), Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley novels (1814-31), and Robert Browning’s Men and Women (1855) (which Morris reviewed during his final term at university). The second point is that to a great extent Oxford failed them, for like Adam Smith, Edward Gibbon, and Robert Southey in earlier⁴ generations and like countless generations of students since, they found university life “languid and indifferent,” the public lectures devoted to the imparting of “knowledge” rather than the cultivation of “wisdom,” and the system as a whole narrowly “instrument[al]” and directed towards the production of “professional m[e]n” (Burne-Jones 1: 71-84). The preliminary lessons that the attitude and experience of Morris and Burne-Jones have to offer for today’s humanities students and faculty are surely too obvious to require more than minimal comment: enthusiastic students and inspiring faculty are crucial to the energetic and energizing survival of the humanities at colleges and universities in the twenty-first century. 

Perhaps the greatest advantage that Morris and Burne-Jones secured for themselves during their years at Oxford was an inspirational teacher in the form of Dante Gabriel Rossetti, the most charismatic member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and an heir to the creative iconoclasm of Blake as well as to the spiritual realism of Dante, both of which had of course fed into the P.R.B.’s rebellious flight from Victorian artistic conventions towards what they saw as the greater authenticity of pre-Renaissance art. Rossetti’s capacity to motivate receptive people wrung from Burne-Jones one of the most moving descriptions ever written of an inspired and inspiring teacher:   

Towards other men’s ideas he was decidedly the most generous man I ever knew.  No one so threw himself into what other men did–it was part of his enormous imagination....He taught me to have no fear or shame of my own ideas, to design perpetually, to seek no popularity, to be altogether myself–and this not in any words I can remember, but in the tenor of his conversation always and in the spirit of everything he said....So what I chiefly gained from him was not to be afraid of myself, but to do the thing I liked most....He never harangued or persuaded, but had a gift of saying things authoritatively and not as the Scribes. (1: 137, 149) 

In addition to the self-confidence to which this passage so eloquently attests, Rossetti gave Morris and Burne-Jones four great gifts that are arguably as important to the prosperity of the humanities today as they were to the activities and achievements of the second group of Pre-Raphaelites nearly a century and a half ago.   

The first of these was a passionate belief that in any artistic or critical work of enduring value all the human faculties–senses and emotions as well as thoughts and skills–must be brought into play by both the creator and the audience. Looking around him at Victorian culture in the years surrounding the Great Exhibition of 1851, Rossetti rejected the notion that progress can be measured merely in terms of material abundance and technical skill, and, as a corrective, confronted his society with the intense spirituality, religious feeling, and creative integrity–the fullness of human experience–that he found in Dante, Giotto, Cavalcanti, Cimabue, and other poets and painters who worked in the period before art became a “soulless self-reflection of...skill” (Works 99). To him, engagement with a work of painting or poetry was a kind of reverie or waking dream in which we are at once our rational, emotional, and spiritual selves and active participants in another’s (or an other’s) similarly complex experiences. Such reveries, he thought and felt, can connect individuals one to another, and produce in each of us a set of experiences that are at once different and common–a series of personal yet collective ways of thinking about the past, the present, and the future. This is one of the foundational messages of “Hand and Soul,” the artistic-manifesto-cum-prose-poem that Rossetti published in the first number of The Germ (January 1850), the little magazine whose innumerable successors include all the graduate and undergraduate “zines” in which the creative and critical talents of Arts students and faculty still find expression. “Be not nice to seek out division, but possess thy love in sufficiency...for the heart must believe first,” Rossetti’s fictional hero is told by his soul, for when you do what you find in your “heart to do...it shall be well done” (30-31). Such advice should be on the wall of every guidance counsellor in every school, college, and university in the Western world.

The second of Rossetti’s great gifts to Morris and Burne-Jones was a democratic conception of creative talent and ability whereby the capacity to acquire artistic skills and make new things is not limited to an élite but present in everyone. It was this conception that motivated Rossetti (and with him John Ruskin) to teach Art at the London Working Men’s College, where Burne-Jones, who had made up his mind to become a painter while on vacation with Morris in northern France in the summer of 1855 (see Burne-Jones 1:115), travelled from Oxford to meet him in January of the following year. It was this conception that by then had enabled Rossetti’s fiancée Elizabeth Siddal to discover and exercise her gifts as a poet and painter and that in the ensuing decade would encourage Morris and Burne-Jones to unleash an astonishing variety of talents and skills, from poetry (Morris) and painting (Burne-Jones) to furniture, wallpaper, tapestry, stained glass, and, of course, typeface and book design. It was this conception and its results that led eventually to the foundation in April 1861 of Morris, Marshall, Faulkner and Company, the partnership of “artsies” and “techies” (Marshall was a surveyor, Faulkner a mathematician) whose methods and products would give rise to the Arts and Crafts Movement that changed the appearance and practices of two continents in the decades surrounding the turn of the twentieth century. What had begun as a rejection of post-Renaissance individualism and technicism became a working exemplar of medieval integration and interdependence that was “innovative...commercial” (Marsh 236), and an object lesson for politicians and entrepreneurs everywhere on the impossibility of predicting where, when, and how creativity and productivity will emerge, thrive, and spawn progeny. Who knows, but that the next revolution in some area of taste or design or production is not even now taking shape in the Arts faculty of some college or university in Canada or elsewhere.

None of the achievements and results of Morris, Burne-Jones, and “the Firm” as it came to be called would have been possible without the third of Rossetti’s great gifts to them: the belief that to be worthwhile, effective, and enduring all creative work must rest firmly on a foundation of what he called “FUNDAMENTAL BRAINWORK” (qtd. in Caine 249)–not the sort of bright ideas that are termed “brain waves” when they occur to an individual and the products of “brain storming” when they occur to a group, but basic, hard work of a sort that is familiar to all scholars and researchers in any discipline. It was on the basis of the sort of “fundamental brainwork” that students and scholars in the humanities undertake when they embark on a research paper that the Pre-Raphaelites and their associates built their understanding and depictions of the Middle Ages. Here is Ford Madox Brown in late November and early December 1847 after deciding to paint Wycliffe Reading his Translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt in the Presence of Chaucer and Gower (1848):   

30th...went...to...the [British] Museum [Reading Room] for consulting authorities...saw [John Lewis’s An Account of Dr. Wiclif (1728)], [and] [Robert] Southey’s Book of the Church (1824)....  

1st...to the Museum, read [William] Godwin’s [Life of Geoffrey Chaucer, Including Memories of John Gaunt (1803)]  

2nd Made a drawing of an gothic alphabet[,] read [J. Saunders’ Cabinet Pictures of English Life: Chaucer (1845)  

3rd...went to the Museum. Finish[ed] the alphabet [and] consulted [A.W.N.] Pugin on furniture [Gothic Furniture in the Style of the 15^th Century (1835)]. (Brown 17-18)

In the ensuing years, the search for new literary subjects and a fresh poetic vocabulary (what he called “stunning words for poetry” [Letters 1:55]) took Rossetti repeatedly to the British Museum Reading Room and–to cite just one instance of his research methodology–to the comparative study of at least two versions of the Gesta Romanorum that yielded “The Staff and Scrip,” the chivalric romance that he first published in the 1856 number of Morris’s Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.⁵ A similar reliance on “fundamental brainwork” characterizes the work of the second group of Pre-Raphaelites: for example, several of Burne-Jones’s drawings and designs for paintings, murals, and stained glass of the ’fifties, ’sixties, and ’seventies are based on Camille Bonnard’s Costumes des XIII, XIV et XV siècles, extraits des monuments les plus authentiques de pienture et de sculpture avec un texte historique et descriptif (1829-30) (see Yamaguchi 24-25) and the poems and tales on medieval subjects that Morris published in The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, The Defence of Guenevere and Other Poems (1858), and elsewhere continue to astonish for the scholarly precision upon which their imaginative historicism is firmly based. When Matthew Barrett, the sometime President of the Bank of Montreal, told the Canadian Club in Toronto in November 1996 that a student of the Canterbury Tales is more employable in the financial world than the product of accountancy training he was thinking primarily of the transferability of analytical skills (see Galt), but the example of the Pre-Raphaelites surely indicates that such skills belong to a larger set that includes research, scholarship, creativity, and innovation.

The fourth and last of Rossetti’s great gifts to Morris and Burne-Jones was his strengthening and sharpening of the critical attitude to Victorian culture that had led them before meeting him to found a semi-monastic community that would undertake a “crusade and Holy Warfare against the age” (Burne-Jones 1:84). Such a critical attitude and its underlying assumption that society’s values should be interrogated and, if found wanting, changed for the better is conspicuously absent from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, but it is almost everywhere evident in the work of Rossetti, Morris, and Burne-Jones, and, very clearly, provided the motive force behind the imaginative historicism that took them to the Middle Ages–to Malory’s Morte d’Arthur and Froissart’s Chronicles–in search of the sources and a cure for the malaise that they, Carlyle, Ruskin, and others saw around them in Victorian England. It was on the basis of a critical attitude that issued in imaginative historicism that Morris and Burne-Jones were able to achieve what Rossetti called “‘an inner standing-point,’” a “medieval and unmodern” perspective (W.M. Rossetti 661), that enabled them to stand at least partially and temporarily outside their own time and place–to make cultural differentiations, to articulate social critiques, and to envision things as other and otherwise than they are. For them, as for Rossetti, the “all-inclusive nowness” that found expression in the Crystal Palace was a goad to the creation of a capaciously diachronic now in which the present could be re-valued, re-formed, and re-directed rather than merely validated by the past. Today such immeasurably important and (even economically) valuable capabilities and possibilities are increasingly under threat as humanists are being more and more encouraged by governments and granting agencies to forsake the cultural and social travel to which their disciplines conduce in favour of activities whose fine-sounding terminology of “interdisciplinarity,” “technoculture,” “media studies,” and “the knowledge economy” should not be allowed to conceal the dangers of allowing the sort of curiosity-driven scholarship that can lead to transformative critique to be sacrificed on the altar of bureaucratic logic and government policy. Nor do the dangers inherent in these developments lie merely (or even) in the disappearance of the humanities as traditionally understood. Much more important is the threatened disappearance in the universities especially but also in society at large of humanistic outsiders, people with “inner standing-point[s]” who are capable of interrogating, provoking, and enriching society from any perspective that can be envisaged, or should be, in a free society. On this issue of a desirable diversity of perspectives as a necessary counterbalance to every society’s tendency to encourage conformity to a single set of norms, the Pre-Raphaelites are again instructive, for the critical attitudes of Morris, Burne-Jones and Rossetti himself took them each in very different directions in the mid-to-late Victorian period: Morris to the utopian socialism of A Dream of John Ball (1888), News from Nowhere (1891), and other works; Burne-Jones to the reclusive medievalism that prompted him to name his studio “Avalon,” and Rossetti to the “fleshly” and esoteric literary and artistic compositions that so troubled the likes of James Buchanan, and which have come to be recognized as precursors and exemplars of the aesthetic and symboliste manners in which lie the roots (not to say “the germ”) of Modernism.⁶

In the context of these radically differing versions of social critique, the case of the enfant terrible of the second group of Pre-Raphaelites–Swinburne–warrants special attention.  A classical scholar who made major and influential contributions to criticism on a variety of authors from Chapman, Marlowe, and other Elizabethan and Jacobean dramatists to Blake, Baudelaire, and the Bröntes, Swinburne began his career with two relatively tame and unthreatening works in the imaginative-historical vein (The Queen Mother, Rosamund [1860], and Atalanta in Calydon [1865]), but thereafter embarked on a decade of confronting Victorian readers with the moral, religious, and sexual problems that he saw as a product of the Judeo-Christian tradition. In its seeming blasphemy and its vigorous treatment of such themes as lesbianism and masochism, his Poems and Ballads (1866) prompted one Grundean critic, John Morley, to suggest that he was “so firmly and avowedly fixed in an attitude of revolt against the current notions of decency and dignity and social duty” that to ask him to change would be pointless, and to speculate that he was “either the vindictive and scornful apostle of a crushing iron-shod despair, or else...the libidinous laureate of a pack of satyrs” (22, 29). In his response to Morley’s attack on “Anactoria,” a monologue spoken by the Greek poet Sappho, Swinburne defended himself in terms that testify to the validity of attempting, as all humanists must, to render responsibly the ideas and attitudes of people of different races, genders, classes, and times. “I have striven to cast my spirit into the mould of [Sappho’s], to express and represent not the poem but the poet,” he wrote, 

Here and there [in the poem]...I have rendered into English the very words of Sappho. I have tried also to work into words of my own some expression of their effect: to bear witness how, more than any other’s, her verses strike and sting the memory in lonely places, or at sea, among all loftier sights and sounds–how they seem akin to fire and air, being themselves ‘all air and fire’... (Prose Works 6: 359)   

In drawing this essay to a close, I would like to look briefly at two of the many things for which William Morris is remembered today. The first is “The Defence of Guenevere” itself, a poem that is so much more than one legendary woman’s defence of her own integrity that it can almost be construed as a defense of humanity in all its intellectual, physical, and spiritual richness and uncertainty. Quintessentially human in her desire to “experience the full play of all things” that D.H. Lawrence saw as the source of “the wholeness of a man, the wholeness of a woman, man live, and live woman” (198), Morris’s Guenevere is a creation of imaginative empathy who holds her accusers at bay by regaling them with stories, confronting them with aesthetic conundrums, calling into question the validity of their moral assumptions, and, most famously, impressing upon them the difficulties attendant upon every act of interpretation and choice. “Listen,” she says, “suppose your time were come to die, /And you were quite alone and very weak...Suppose a hush should come, then some one speak”:   

“One of these cloths is heaven, and one is hell,

Now choose one cloth for ever; which they be,

I will not tell you, you must somehow tell

“Of your own strength and mightiness; here, see!”

Yea, yea...and you ope your eyes,

At foot of your familiar bed to see

A great God's angel standing, with such dyes,

Not known on earth, on his great wings, and hands

Held out two ways, light from the inner skies

Showing him well, and making his commands

Seem to be God's commands; moreover, too,

Holding within his hands the cloths on wands;

And one of these strange choosing cloths was blue,

Wavy and long, and one cut short and red;

No man could tell the better of the two.

After a shivering half-hour you said:

“God help! heaven’s colour, the blue;” and he said: “hell.”

Perhaps you then would roll upon your bed,

And cry to all good men that you loved well,

“Ah Christ! if only I had known, known, known.”

(Collected Works 1: 2-3)

If this sounds like an excerpt from a humanities lecture, the reasons are not far to seek: in addition to focusing on a moment of interpretation and choice, it involves cultural conventions, epistemological assumptions, rhetorical structures, speech acts, and eschatological verities, all within a public performance that is itself not unlike a lecture. It has a visual equivalent in Sir Launcelot’s Vision of the Sanc Graal (1857),⁷ Rossetti’s contribution to the ill-fated frescoes that he inspired “the Set” to propose to the Oxford Union Debating Society, where it is Guenevere herself who embodies the interpretative problem. What is to be made of the fact that she stands between Launcelot and his vision holding out the apple of temptation but in the posture of Christ on the Cross? Is she a temptress or a redemptress? Is Launcelot destined for heaven or hell? It would appear that England’s future politicians, professionals, and entrepreneurs were expected to leave the hall of the Oxford Union Debating Society inspired by high ideals, warned of pitfalls, puzzled, thoughtful–no mean goals for a kind of visual lecture on medieval legend and moral philosophy. Very likely, “The Defence of Guenevere” was intended to have similar effects, for as Morris had written in his review of Browning’s Men and Women in the March 1856 number of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine, “it does not often help poems much to solve them”: no more can their “turns of thought...[be] done in prose...[than] colour in a great picture...be rendered by a coloured woodcut” (Collected Works 1: 340-41).   

The second of Morris’s accomplishments that I would like to mention by way of conclusion is The Society for Protection of Ancient Buildings (1877) and, more specifically, his definition of what makes a “building...worth protecting,” for this seems to me not only to apply to several aspects of the complex edifice of the humanities, but also to indicate why and by whom that edifice should be preserved. “[A] building...worth protecting,” wrote Morris, is “anything which can be looked on as artistic, picturesque, historical, antique, or substantial: any work, in short, over which educated, artistic people would think it worthwhile to argue...” (“The Society’s Manifesto” 7). “[E]ducated, artistic people” arguing about “worthwhile” things that are in need of “protection”: it is by no means a full account of the activities and aims of the humanities, but it is a good place to end, and begin.  

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Notes 

A very slightly different version of this paper was delivered on February 8, 2001 as the Special Public Lecture on the inaugural Humanities Day sponsored by the Humanities Research Group at  the University of Windsor, Windsor, Canada. My thanks to Jacqueline Murray and Kathleen McCrone for inviting me to give the Lecture and to the staff and students at the University of Windsor, particularly Rosemary Halford, who made the experience so pleasurable and rewarding. This article was originally published in The Journal of Pre-Raphaelite Studies, 10 (Spring 2001): 43-57.

1.		This is the “myopi[c]” condition that Marshall McLuhan diagnoses in “young lives” that have been heavily exposed to “TV’s mosaic image” (355). See also Harold A. Innis’s observation in Changing Concepts of Time that “[t]he overwhelming pressure of mechanization evident in the newspaper and the magazine has led to the creation of vast monopolies of communication” whose “entrenched positions involve a continuous, systematic, ruthless destruction of elements of permanence essential to cultural activity. The emphasis on change is the only permanent characteristic” (15).  [back]
2.		See Bill Readings on the discourse of excellence in The University in Ruins 12-14, 21-43, and elsewhere. Readings observes that Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure is “an interesting attempt to understand the impossibility of historical thought once knowledge has...become commodified as information” (53).  [back]
3.		This term is used with an awareness of John Henry Newman’s (Mediaeval Latin) definition of the university as a “Studium Generale, or ‘School of Universal Learning’” (Rise and Progress of Universities 6) and with a sense of its (Classical Latin) constellations of meanings (“assiduity,” “eagerness,” “fondness,” “zeal”; “attachment,” “devotion”).  [back]
4.		See Smith 2: 284, Gibbon, 29-31, and Southey 3: 85.  [back]
5.		See Bentley, “‘The Staff and Scrip’” for a further discussion of the syncretic aspects and conceptual underpinnings of the poem. See also Burne-Jones 1:110, 130 for intimations that The Germ was one of the ancestors of The Oxford and Cambridge Magazine.  [back]
6.		See Bentley “From Allegory to Indeterminacy,” and McGann, passim. [back]
7.		In his review of Men and Women, Morris draws attention to emphasis on “love for love’s sake,” commenting that “if that is not obtained, disappointment comes, falling-off, misery” and adding “[p]ray Christ some of us attain to it before we die” (Collected Works  1: 340-41).  [back]

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–––. Works. Ed. William M. Rossetti. London: Ellis, 1911.