Reflections of Revolution

Images of Romanticism

Alison Yarrington, Kelvin Everest

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9781138190580
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317278467
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Reflections of Revolution, first published in 1993, demonstrates the interdisciplinarity that had been emerging from cultural and historical studies. Taking the French Revolution as its focus, the book examines the tremendously diverse and intellectually exciting cultural reactions to the events of 1789. This title will be of interest to students of both history and literature.

1 Introduction

Alison Yarrington and Kelvin Everest

DOI: 10.4324/9781315640921-1

The essays which make up this volume are drawn from the wide range of papers delivered at a conference on ‘The French Revolution and British Culture’, organized at the University of Leicester in July 1989. The conference was conceived as a co-operative venture by the departments of English and History of Art at Leicester, and although the emphasis throughout the conference fell on cultural products and their meanings, discussion returned constantly to the great sweep of political events in France which formed the intellectual focus of the Romantic epoch in Britain.

The essays collected here offer no all-embracing or theoretically elaborated account of the relationship between political and cultural events, but they do provide a rich and varied body of commentary and reflection on the detailed interactions and shaping influences at play in the British cultural reaction to the Revolution. One obvious common quality shared by all the essays, however, is an insistence on the complexity and multiple determinations of specific cultural practices and products. The underlying and immediate historical contexts are always inescapable, for all forms of writing, and across the whole range of representational idioms, but their particular forms and effects have nevertheless to be understood primarily in the context of the precise conditions and stages of development of those cultural practices which make response and representation possible. The meanings of events and movements in France are therefore inflected and articulated for Britain in ways which are fundamental to lines of development in British culture; the meanings are effectively created by the prevailing preoccupations and intellectual heritage of the observing culture. They are not carried over in any unmediated way from the social and historical matrix of their origin in the Revolutionary situation in France itself.

These essays also clearly demonstrate a further condition of meaning for the British cultural response to the French Revolution; for just as prevailing conditions and preoccupations in British Romantic culture shape for it the meaning of its social and historical experience, so present-day interpreters of Romantic culture bring into play their own formative concerns and intellectual orientation. David Punter's essay, for example, points to the heavily mediated character of Romantic culture for the late twentieth-century critic:

It would be easy to assume that reactions to massive international events, and particularly revolutionary upheavals, can be modelled on cause and effect; a nearby monarch is executed, and certain consequences in the cultural sphere flow from that. But life is not so simple; and so events get modelled or traced onto other sources of, for example, alienation or anguish, and the products are always mixed . . . one could say that these products, mediated as they are through the pre-existence of language, are always contaminated.

And, as David Punter's own essay itself shows, the mediating pre-existence of language – which we can understand to include all the frameworks and structures which we may bring to bear on the act of interpretation – operates now to shape cultural meanings from the perspective of, for example, psychoanalysis and Kleinian child psychology.

David Punter's essay focuses in detail on aspects of Romantic cultural production which involve representation of ‘the body in fragments’, and seeks by a deployment of various sources in psychoanalysis and psychoanalytic history to explain these recurrent concerns as instances of a thwarting in the healthy development of consciousness which has large-scale social consequences. Another essay which very frankly and directly brings present-day theoretical formations to bear on Romantic culture – and with a similar effect of homogenizing Romantic cultural experience with our own present-day intellectual milieu – is Fred Botting's vivid discussion of monsters, in debate about the Revolution generally, but more particularly in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. This discussion draws freely on the work of post-structuralist theorists to expose the contradictions which are superficially concealed, but which are rather disruptively emergent, in the apparently unifying discourses of Romantic culture. ‘Monsters’, manifestly deviant and transgressive in their very conception, draw attention to the limits of normative discursive practice, and thereby define its limiting and excluding boundaries. In wry self-consciousness of its own discursive ‘monstrosity’ as an instance of critical practice, Fred Botting's essay offers a suggestive and provocative articulation of one vital element in current thinking about the nature and genesis of meaning in culture.

A different perspective entirely is provided by other essays in the collection, which work in a distinct British tradition of closely detailed analysis of art and ideas in their social and historical contexts, where these contexts are assumed as a relatively stable and accessible object of knowledge, and are also seen as integral to a continuing development of national culture and political interests. Nigel Leask adopts this approach in his study of Coleridge's early scheme of a ‘Pantisocracy’ to be established on the banks of an ideally envisaged river in rural North America. By careful attention to questions of intellectual history and cultural context, Nigel Leask traces the origins, development and significant subsequent mutations of some important early political ideas of Wordsworth and Coleridge, and provides an illuminating perspective in particular on their relation to the influential formulations of the ‘Preface’ to the Lyrical Ballads. In a more narrowly focused but none the less suggestive discussion, William Ruddick surveys the potent and pervasive tree symbolism of the Revolutionary period, and notes some hidden political resonances in the language of natural description. A larger context, and one that was of important and direct concern to the Romantic culture itself, was that of ‘Sensibility’. Chris Jones analyses this complex amalgam of political, stylistic and emotional components, and discriminates carefully amongst its cultural forebears and affiliations, and in particular its association by the 1790s with French principles. The radical dimension of Sensibility, as a polemical counter in both radical and conservative texts, is brought out very clearly, to illuminate the density of encoded political implication and reference of so much British writing in the immediate aftermath of the early phases of the French Revolution.

Gavin Edwards's essay on Crabbe also seeks to uncover some of the covert literary forms taken by the ‘war of ideas’ in Britain in the revolutionary period, a war between ‘polarized sets of moral and political principles’ which pervaded social and intellectual life to an extraordinary extent. Crabbe's ostensibly domestic narrative Tales of 1812 are shown to involve, whether consciously or not, a constant slippage between disorder in the household and in the State. The two realms are linked implicitly by metaphor, but Gavin Edwards argues beyond this observation to demonstrate the indirect and displaced manner by which revolutionary revaluations of experience could be negotiated by British writers at the level of kindred and local-domestic economic relationships.

As the emphasis in most of these essays would indicate, the impact of the French Revolution on British culture was first registered in the last decade of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless the reactions, for example, of first generation Romantic poets, became part of an intellectual development with major importance for those of the second generation such as Shelley and Byron; so that the apostasy of their literary forerunners itself became a part of the Revolutionary impact, and helped to shape and alter its meanings for a new generation. This process, of constant refinement in focus, becomes a central line of development in Britain throughout the nineteenth century. The Revolution is constantly reappraised, but in ways which continually take also on board the successive phases and modes of reception which intervene between the evanescent historical event, and the new contemporary moment of interpretation. Angus Easson's intriguing account of Dickens and Carlyle explores just one complex but also representative instance of the constant replenishment and modification of the meanings of the French Revolution in nineteenth-century intellectual life.

As recently as 1757 and Hume's essay, ‘Of the standard of taste’ it was possible for profound aesthetic comment to be attempted on the basis that the principles of taste were ‘universal, and nearly, if not entirely, the same in all men’ (Hume 1965: 17). Art had a goal in view and so artists deployed finite (and teachable) means to attain it, even if it was all but impossible to demonstrate the validity of superior skills. When lecturing in the Royal Academy, Reynolds felt that ‘the internal fabrick of our minds’ as well as ‘the external form of our bodies’ was ‘nearly uniform’. Due to this ‘general similitude’ which ran ‘through the whole race of mankind’, high art was capable of definition and transmission (Discourse VII, delivered 1776, Wark 1959: 131). The French Revolution signalled the decay of such Enlightenment optimism and proclaimed an alternative hope: that there were new things to be said that were not reducible to matters of disembodied form, but rather to the symbolic imagination and more personal myth-making. Note the distance from Reynolds and even the radicalism of Hume in Delacroix's Journal entry of 27 March 1824, where he describes the ‘interesting discussion at Leblond's about the genius of outstanding men’: ‘Dufresne said something very sensible, that what made a man really noteworthy was a completely personal and unique vision. . . . Therefore great souls can be bound by no rules: these can only be of use to people whose sole talent is acquired’ (Delacroix 1932: I, 64). Burke found the Revolution, as has often been recognized, a tragicomedy, as if the more accepted generic traits of life (and of Royal Academy imprimatur) were flouted by history: ‘Everything seems out of nature in this strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled together with all sorts of follies’ (Burke 1790: 92).

The visual arts of the Revolutionary/Romantic period may be representational, but, if the iconoclasm of the sans-culottes runs parallel with artistic innovation, then an analysis of these sets of images demands a painstaking contextualization, where a faith in the transmissible and familiar items of established academic discourse is bound to be shaken. Hence it is perhaps only possible to appreciate the full significance of the private symbolism of William Blake, for example, by undertaking a study such as David Bindman's ‘ “My own mind is my own church”: Blake, Paine and the French Revolution’, which opens the images up to overdetermined historical influences, the writings of Thomas Paine in particular.

Bindman examines the problematic question of Blake's responses to events in France: the military expansionism of the Girondin government, Robespierre's ‘Republic of Virtue’ and his cult of L’Etre suprême. The execution of the French royal family which evoked such widespread revulsion in Britain, left Blake seemingly unmoved. Blake adopted contradictory responses of abhorrence and admiration to Paine's writings during the period 1791–8, as evidenced by his pencil annotations of 1798 to Bishop Watson's An Apology for the Bible in a Series of Letters addressed to Thomas Paine (1796), a paradox in his responses to the French Revolution which is the focus for Bindman's essay. Taking as his starting point the letterpress volume The French Revolution (1791) and the well-established genre of the Bastille poem, Bindman charts the nature of Blake's radicalism during this period using a revealing selection of the texts and designs. He argues that in America (1793) the debates between Urizen and Ore ‘are conducted in terms of the Burke-Paine controversy’; thus Burke's sense of the French Revolution as a ‘Promethean aberration’ which transgressed the natural order is parodied in the Albion Angel's initial reply to Ore. Specifically Bindman sees Blake responding to the Painean analysis of the relationship between power and religion and the process of distortion of the Christian message through the ‘veil’ of ceremonial in plates 5 and 10 of Europe (1794). Despite these close correlations between image and texts the essential dichotomy between Paine's and Blake's understanding of the role of rational principles within revolution and post-revolutionary states remains distinct.

The call for a new range of individualistic rights demands new visual codes, but even Blake was effectively ‘gagged’ during the period following 1793 as a consequence of his need to maintain a professional status as an artist and engraver and the continuing support of radical Whigs such as Joseph Johnson and Henry Fuseli. A thorough account of the period must therefore include areas where idealism fails and more pragmatic concerns intrude. Blake, for example, was in every sense a marginal figure within the art establishment of the day with a limited audience for his work. Placed against his situation were those British artists whose aspirations and output made them more part of the mainstream of high art as channelled through the Royal Academy. Both those who promoted the interests of this institution, itself under Royal patronage, and those who were protected by it were thus, necessarily, in rivalry with their counterparts in France. One example of how a lack of individual political sensitivity at a time of widespread paranoia about republican sympathizers could cut short a promising career in this most publicly prestigious area of art practice – history painting – is the case of the Anglo-Irish artist, James Barry. Initially nurtured by the Royal Academy during the brilliant early years of his career (his ‘genius’ was later acknowledged by Blake in his ‘Annotations’ [1808] to Reynolds's Discourses), he was appointed Professor of Painting there in 1782. Barry's subsequent loss of office and expulsion from the Academy in 1799 was undoubtedly the result of intemperate behaviour towards his colleagues, but it must also be seen as equally due to his radical political sympathies, as William Vaughan argues in his essay ‘ “David's Brickdust” and the rise of the British School’. His role as ‘traitor’ to the institution of the Academy had become part of a mythology signified simply by reference to his name. This eponymous betrayal stigmatized his work during the first half of the nineteenth century; an example of the myth overmastering the man. An instance of this usage is provided by the aspirant history painter Benjamin Robert Haydon (in conversation with Martin Arthur Shee) in July 1826 who claimed that he was ‘heaped with calumnies, anonymous letters, had everything put upon [his] shoulders, was accused of envy and hatred, called a Barry . . .’ (Haydon 1963: 3, 117). Haydon's tenacious pursuit of art at its highest level, which, whilst a student at the Royal Academy had been fuelled by the teachings of Fuseli, was never to be rewarded by public recognition commensurate with his ambition or effort. The possible advantages for history painters which might have accrued from war (as they had in France) with a demand for works to express and promote national pride never materialized, but then the ground for such State patronage to flourish was already virtually barren (take for example the failure of the Academy's pre-war scheme of 1773 for the decoration of the interior of St Paul's Cathedral with history painting). The recipients of government patronage of the arts during the French wars were the sculptors who were commissioned to produce a series of national monuments to the British officers who died in the conflict. Thus St Paul's became the site of a hall of fame which celebrated the fine art of sculpture rather than that of history painting. Alternative, ‘Utopian’ schemes to stimulate the patronage of history painting through an appeal to patriotic pride similarly failed to attract support from the State or the public. John Opie's proposal for a Temple of Naval Virtue modelled upon the Pantheon in Rome to be internally decorated with scenes from British naval history was first promoted in 1799 and was later to form the basis for Haydon's own proposals for a Nelson monument for Trafalgar Square in 1839. More extraordinary still was the scheme promoted by Major John Cartwright for the Heironauticon, designs for which were exhibited in London during 1800 and which again included history painting alongside sculpture as part of a vast architectural complex to celebrate British naval victory. This lack of State sponsorship for history painting at a time when it was flourishing in France was a continuing source of anger and irritation for British artists. The identification of an emergent national school which had been promoted under the aegis of the first President of the Royal Academy, Sir Joshua Reynolds, meant that British artists were therefore necessarily antagonistic towards and resentful of the highly successful and more established French Academy. This was to become particularly acute at a time when the two countries were at war. Central to this antipathetical attitude to French history painting was hostility towards its chief protagonist during the Revolutionary and Napoleonic years, Jacques-Louis David.

David's direct political engagement in the Revolution and his role as regicide was seen by British artists to have tainted his art and to have worked directly against the moral and aesthetic ‘universal’ purity of the artist's mission as defined within the Discourses. Taking as his starting point the reaction to Benjamin Robert Haydon in 1841 to the possible ‘contagion’ of foreign schools upon national art, Vaughan elucidates the development of the British school and the role of history painting within it. Whilst Haydon's xenophobic responses to the revolutionary art of David were made at a time when the immediate threat of ‘infection’ in High Art came from the contemporary German history painters rather than the artists of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France, he nevertheless saw both as stemming from the same aberrant root. Vaughan examines the reservations which British artists had about David's art recognizing that this defensive reaction may actually have had a formative effect upon the development of artistic practice in Britain. The varying responses of artists such as Barry, West, Opie, Flaxman and Turner are contextualized in this way.

What emerges most clearly is the significant difference between what we might now take as the expression of Revolutionary principles in France and how they were heard in Britain. The last two essays in this collection are concerned with the wider structures that specific revolutionary acts engendered. Mitchell's essay ‘Spectacular fears and popular arts: a view from the nineteenth century’ is concerned with the resilience of the Marat- Corday myth within nineteenth-century histories of the French Revolution. This is traced through an investigation into the complex interplay between popular art-forms – such as James Gillray's political prints – with literary histories and the elevated language of history painting found in the dramatic displays of Madame Tussaud's waxworks museum and the Musée Gréven. In these deliberately blood-curdling public spectacles the keynote is a superficial historical veracity, politically coded, in which Marat and Corday became polarized as symbols of good...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half-Title Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table Of Contents
• Acknowledgements
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Parts of the body/parts of speech: some instances of dismemberment and healing
• 3 3 Reflections of excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution and monstrosity
• 4 Pantisocracy and the politics of the ‘Preface’ to Lyrical Ballads
• 5 Liberty trees and loyal oaks: emblematic presences in some English poems of the French Revolutionary period
• 6 Radical sensibility in the 1790s
• 7 Crabbe's regicide households
• 8 From terror to terror: Dickens, Carlyle and cannibalism
• 9 ‘My own mind is my own church’: Blake, Paine and the French Revolution
• 10 ‘David's Brickdust’ and the rise of the British school
• 11 Spectacular fears and popular arts: a view from the nineteenth century
• 12 Breaking the code: interpreting French Revolutionary iconoclasm
• Index