Legacies of Romanticism

Literature, Culture, Aesthetics

Carmen Casaliggi, Paul March-Russell, Carmen Casaliggi, Paul March-Russell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136273483
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literaturkritik

This book visits the Romantic legacy that was central to the development of literature and culture from the 1830s onward. Although critical accounts have examined aspects of this long history of indebtedness, this is the first study to survey both Nineteenth and Twentieth century culture.

The authors consider the changing notion of Romanticism, looking at the diversity of its writers, the applicability of the term, and the ways in which Romanticism has been reconstituted. The chapters cover relevant historical periods and literary trends, including the Romantic Gothic, the Victorian era, and Modernism as part of a dialectical response to the Romantic legacy. Contributors also examine how Romanticism has been reconstituted within postmodern and postcolonial literature as both a reassessment of the Modernist critique and of the imperial contexts that have throughout this time-frame underpinned the Romantic legacy, bringing into focus the contemporaneity of Romanticism and its political legacy. This collection reveals the diversity and continuing relevance of the genre in new and exciting ways, offering insights into writers such as Browning, Ruskin, Pater, Wilde, Lewis, MacNeice, and Auster.

Part I Early and Mid-Victorian

DOI: 10.4324/9780203110096-2

Edward Clifford, Graves of Keats and Severn—Rome, watercolour, bodycolour, and oil on paper, 1901. 26 x 38 cm. By kind permission of the Ruskin Foundation (Ruskin Library, Lancaster University), RF 155 (Fig. 2.4, detail).

This opening section focuses upon the period 1830–1870 when Victorian imperial and technological power was at its strongest but when the inheritance of Romantic ideas was also at its most pressing. The four chapters take as their cue the interactions of art and literature, sexual and revolutionary politics, political history and political economy, and psychic trauma, in particular, by examining the functions of pictorial and aesthetic philosophy, the origins of the dramatic monologue, and the notion of the Romantic wanderer. The Victorian period emerges as a meeting point of both cross-cultural and transhistorical influences stemming from Romanticism.

In “Hazlitt as a Gateway to Nineteenth-Century Ekphrasis: The Quarrel with Reynolds Revisited”, Richard Read begins by considering the artistic legacy of William Hazlitt’s challenge to Sir Joshua Reynolds’s Neoclassical Discourses. The chapter argues that Hazlitt not only opposed Reynolds’s arguments about idealism but pioneered subjective writing that engages the reader in simultaneously apprehending nature, painting, and the coordina-tion of receptive faculties. It then proceeds to assess Reynolds’s innovative style with the aim of seeing what it owed to Romantic poetry, British and Continental philosophy, and his own portraiture, and whether it set a reactionary or liberating precedent for later uses of ekphrasis.

The theme of ekphrasis is explored further in Carmen Casaliggi’s chapter, in which she weaves together a range of textual and biographical materials to suggest a significant and abiding network of relations between Ruskin, Keats, and the Severn Circle. Inspired by Michael Baxandall’s ‘patterns of intentions’ theories, the first half of her chapter considers the impact of Keats upon a wide range of Ruskin’s works, placing particular focus on A Joy For Ever (and its Price in The Market) (1880), and demonstrates how Ruskin’s purpose to connect his ideas of art with economic and practical life had much in common with the work of his Romantic forefather. In the second half of the chapter Casaliggi explores the content of Ruskin’s lecture “The Mystery of Life and its Arts” (1868), in which—she argues—Romanticism had never died out and offers fresh insights into Ruskin’s responses to the Keatsian notion of the morality of art, its related association with political history and political economy, and its connection with existential and ontological anxieties.

The role of politics and history, which Casaliggi sees as essential to the making of Romanticism’s legacies in the Victorian period, is the theme of Porscha Fermanis’s account of the origins of the dramatic monologue, in particular, the influence of Percy Shelley’s The Cenci (1819) on Robert Browning’s The Ring and the Book (1868–69). Crucially, Fermanis considers how The Cenci provided Browning with a sustainable model on which to base his own experiments with dramatic poetry, as well as an example of how to represent sexual politics, casuistry, bad conscience, and psychological trauma in art. The basis of Fermanis’s argument lies not only in Browning’s lifelong interest in The Cenci but also in the correspondences between the form and themes of Shelley’s play and Browning’s monologues, specifically their mutual emphasis upon the self-division of the reader/spectator, the contextualisation of the dramatic mode, and the juxtaposition of the legal and ethical case.

Lastly, Muireann O’Cinneide’s analysis of Frances Burney’s The Wanderer (1814) and Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847) traces the legacy of Romanticism’s engagement with revolutionary politics through the changing trope of woman as wanderer in Victorian women’s writing and interrogates the gendered dynamics of Romantic vagrancy. According to O’Cinneide, histories of revolution offer narratives of displacement which challenge essentialist concepts of selfhood as geographically and socially rooted. Moreover, she suggests that vagrancy in these novels produces moments of climatic psychic trauma, as loss of social identity exposes the wilderness at the heart of civilised society and critiques Romantic visions of nature as a site of nourishment, even as it offers a means through which Victorian women writers could articulate post-Romantic and post-revolutionary visions of a psychologically internalised world order.

1 Hazlitt as a Gateway to Nineteenth-Century Ekphrasis

Richard Read

DOI: 10.4324/9780203110096-3

Hazlitt’s quarrel with Sir Joshua Reynolds has been the subject of many theoretical analyses. ¹ A comparison of their descriptions, however, provides a more incisive view of their qualities, and introduces us by a lively contrast to the flavour of their differences. In his second “Discourse” delivered to students as President of the Royal Academy in 1769, Reynolds gives an example of what he means by the Horation doctrine of ut pictura poesis (“as is painting so is poetry”): ² This passage is more visually detailed than is usual in Reynolds’s work but even so it alludes only to Carracci’s “best works”; no single work is dwelt on. The subject matter of these works is likewise unspecified, but is preferred to Titian’s for its abstract dignity and gravity. Titian’s sunlight is “artificial” because it is unrefined from nature. Paint, like words, should be a conceptual language, so the “solemn effect” of Carracci’s twilight is not “in” the scenes, but “over” the pictures. Reynolds uses pairs of nearly synonymous words like “conceptions or sentiments”, “grave and dignified subjects”, to create the impression of classes of general ideas which point to particular instances in nature beneath and higher categories of “perfection” above in keeping with the hierarchies of both Locke and Plato. The passage is therefore not a description at all, but a piece of persuasive intellectual advice delivered in a manner consistent with the opening premise that style should be subordinate to ideas, a precept that conforms with Vasari’s dictum that: “Art in its perfection is not ostentatious; it lies hid, and works its effect, unseen”. ⁴

Stile in painting is the same as in writing, a power over materials, whether words or colours, by which conceptions or sentiments are conveyed. And in this LODOVIC CARRACHE (I mean in his best works) appears to me to approach the nearest to perfection. His unaffected breadth of light and shadow, the simplicity of colouring, which holding its proper rank, does not draw aside the least part of the attention from the subject, and the solemn effect of that twilight which seems diffused over his pictures, appear to me to correspond with grave and dignified subjects, better than the more artificial brilliancy of sunshine which enlightens the pictures of TITIAN: though TINTORET thought that TITIAN’S colouring was the model of perfection, and would correspond even with the sublime of MICHAEL ANGELO; and that if ANGELO had coloured like TITIAN, or TITIAN designed like ANGELO, the world would once have had a perfect painter. ³

After the criticism of Titian, the argument appears to digress and qual-ify itself. Tintoretto, a more ancient and venerable artist than Reynolds himself, preferred Titian’s colouring to all other. Reynolds modestly bows out of his own opinions to place his students in more distinguished hands. The introduction of Tintoretto’s opinions, capping his own, is a shrewd rhetorical strategy. Its self-effacement is strictly analogous to Carracci’s worthy concealment of skill, but takes the argument on to a higher plane by introducing the qualities of Titian’s and Michelangelo’s works, and hence demonstrating the need for students to accept the authority of the great artists of the past, so that his own authority is enhanced by defer-ence to them. He leaves room for improvement, however. If Carracci’s decorous union of style and subject were ever to be perfected, it would entail the combination of Titian’s colour and Michelangelo’s design. As it is, the work of all these artists is too specialised to satisfy the highest criterion: “perfection”. But because Reynolds believed that English art, newly institutionalised at his own Royal Academy, was rudimentary in comparison to the highest achievements of the Italian Renaissance, the slightly eager pace towards the end, where the possibility of perfection is contemplated, is offset by a concluding note of pessimism_ “the world would once have had a perfect painter” (my emphasis). The final phrases espouse tradition in a further way, for they are themselves a cliché of literary theory which Reynolds’s friend Samuel Johnson had used in The Idler of 9 June 1759 to satirise Dick Minim, the “Critick”: “Denham and Waller he held the first reformers of English Numbers, and thought that if Waller could have obtained the strength of Denham, or Denham the sweetness of Waller, there had been nothing wanting to complete a Poet”. ⁵ Reynolds therefore keeps his opening analogy between literature and painting in view and shows that precedent is the basis of painting and writing alike. ⁶

Reynolds’s ideas on painting are set out with persuasive clarity and gentlemanly discretion. Escaping always from the particular to the general, he holds subjects, images, and words together and apart in a relationship of ideal, inorganic unity. We enter a wholly different world of criticism in Hazlitt’s ekphrases of Richard Wilson’s Apollo and the Seasons and Phaeton from a review entitled “Wilson’s Landscapes, at the British Institution” (1814) (see Figure 1.1).

Figure 1.1 Richard Wilson, Apollo and the Seasons, oil on canvas, exh. 1779. 100.1 x 125.7 cm. ©Fitzwilliam Museum, University of Cambridge, UK. The Bridgeman Art Library.

Features of this passage are relevant to my entire discussion of Hazlitt, so I quote it at length: An intense, extended description of two paintings finally emerges with a dig at Reynolds’s theory of abstraction. Reynolds never devoted so many words to a single picture, let alone to a mere landscape. Not that ekphrasis was new. Hermogenes observed that Yet if Hazlitt is reanimating an ancient mode of rhetoric, his provision of so much sensuously apprehended detail would have undermined the process of abstraction that in Reynolds’s view gives art its status as a conceptual language. In this Hazlitt held that Reynolds failed to observe a distinction crucial to the modern age: the “details and peculiarities of nature are only inconsistent with abstract ideas, and not with general or aggregate effects” (HW, XVIII, 77). Reynolds’s writing seemed vacuous to Hazlitt: “A tabula rasa, a verbal definition, the bare name, must be better than the most striking description, or representation—the argument of a poem better than the poem itself,—or the catalogue of a picture than the original work” (HW, XVIII, 78–79). And so in his description of these paintings Hazlitt suspends the distinction between art and nature to evoke a series of parallel processes. Although Lessing had claimed that a picture can only represent static scenes, here in Apollo we perceive the trees growing, the stones mouldering, the day rising, and, in Phaeton, the evening sun streaming and the stream stealing through a landscape that has been “baked”. At the same time objects break down into finer detail as they absorb our attention: “the retiring lake, broken still more by the hazy shadows” (my emphasis). This is of course the result of the artist’s as well as the spectator’s observation, for the processes of nature are conveyed only through painterly means. We notice, therefore, a subtle combination of vocabularies from nature and painting (the “tone” and “outline” of the “hills”, the “graceful form” of the “lake”) whereby our awareness of the painting and the landscape alter-nates and merges. The description refers sometimes to particular objects in the landscape—“dark stone figure” and “thick foliage”—and sometimes to the material properties of the paint: “radiance” is only “solid” when painted. There is certainly no attempt to keep subject, image, and description apart, for Hazlitt is relishing the “brilliancy of sunshine” that Reynolds condemned as “artificial”. Sometimes Hazlitt creates an identity between natural process and technique with extraordinary economy. The “trees turning to a mellower brown” in the background of Titian’s Diana and Actaeon (HW, X, 32) refers simultaneously to the movement of our eyes across the canvas, gradations of colour thereon, and the changing seasons. So too, “the deep incision and dragging of his pencil, like a harrow over the ground” (HW, VIII, 319) identifies Rembrandt’s rough style with the fields he draws.

Ekphrasis i...