Romanticism and the Museum

E. Peacocke, Kenneth A. Loparo, Mo Malek

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137471437
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137471444
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

Romanticism and the Museum argues that museums were integral to Britain's understanding of itself as a nation in the wake of the French Revolution. It features Wordsworth, Scott, Edgeworth, and literary periodicals featuring Byron and Horace Smith.

1

Changing the Subject: Aesthetic Displacement, Museum Display, and the French Revolution in The Prelude

In 1883, at the fourth meeting of the Wordsworth Society, the charismatic Anglican clergyman Hardwicke Drummond Rawnsley argued for the necessity of a permanent Lake District Defence Society (LDDS) to preserve the landscape so dear to Wordsworth. Rawnsley’s advocacy was so forceful that the Wordsworth Society joined en masse; ‘in the surviving list of members [of the LDDS] the whole of the Wordsworth Society is entered as a single item’ (Gill, Wordsworth and the Victorians 258). In 1891, Dove Cottage first officially opened to visitors, effectively as one of the first of the now-common house museums which commemorate writers’ lives (Garrett 178). Two years later, Rawnsley joined forces with Octavia Hill to combat threats to the Lake District; Rawnsley, Hill, and the gifted solicitor Robert Hunter are widely considered the three founders of the National Trust. ‘Without the drive of Wordsworthians the National Trust of 1895 would not have come into being’ (Wordsworth and the Victorians 258–60).

Wordsworth believed that the Lake District constituted ‘a sort of national property’ (Guide Through the District of the Lakes 225); in the words of National Trust Chief Agent John Gaze, this faith made Wordsworth the Trust’s ‘Patron Saint’ (Gaze 9–11). As well as his devotion to the northern landscape, Wordsworth’s poetics make him a highly appropriate tutelary figure; his poetry calls on the same interpretive manoeuvres and ritual behaviours that museums demand, creating a ‘museum effect’ even in the poetry of landscape (Garrett 155, 160).

In this chapter, I want to turn to the Wordsworth of the 1790s, still identifying as a political radical, and writing in an era when museums themselves were not yet the institutions we take for granted today. As France moved from a monarchical to a republican government, it sought to change its people from subjects to citizens, and museums were integral to the often triumphalist cultural project of the Revolution. I argue that explicit engagement with a museum is at the heart of Wordsworth’s poetic corpus. I focus on The Prelude – the magnum opus that provoked Coleridge’s extravagant admiration, and that made Coleridge believe in Wordsworth’s epic as the defining poem of their age. In Book IX, Wordsworth sets off for France, and finds himself in the middle of Paris during the French Revolution – and his most intense feeling of connection with his surroundings comes from his encounter with a seventeenth-century painting that would, during the poet’s lifetime, come to be displayed in the Louvre Museum.

The concept of ‘displacement’ is crucial to Wordsworth scholarship throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Gary Harrison identifies ‘displacement’ as the primary formal means by which poetry – especially Wordsworth’s – can ‘indeed attenuate the conflicted socio-political positions on which it devolves’, even as he questions whether Wordsworth’s writings are the ‘poetry of historical denial’ to the extent that many critics believe (21–22). Alan Liu remarks on the centrality of displacement to such historicist criticism, focusing on Jerome McGann, David Simpson, and Marjorie Levinson. Eric Gidal finds an intimate link between Wordsworth’s poetics and artefacts’ displacement from their original context to become museum pieces. He focuses on Wordsworth’s later narrative poem, ‘The Egyptian Maid’, which was inspired by a Roman bust in the Townley collection within the British Museum. Gidal posits that we traverse ‘a series of aesthetic and ideological galleries’ in following the bust’s history, and that that movement, or displacement, is crucial to the mechanics of the ‘imperial drama of erotic desire and memorial haunting’ which Wordsworth creates (165–66).

Critics have traditionally read Wordsworth’s emotional connection to Le Brun’s painting and his focus on the story of ‘Vaudracour and Julia’ as a figurative displacement for his relationship with Annette Vallon. Wordsworth met Vallon in Orléans, probably in the last months of 1791; they had a daughter, Caroline; and Wordsworth was unable to offer Annette marriage, financial support, or a passage to England with him. Liu’s reading relates the figures that replace Annette to ‘the scheme of differences that divides and organizes the historical context of that culture’ (47).

Rather than focus on the displacement of Annette and Caroline Vallon in The Prelude, I will examine the meaning of the displacement of The Penitent Magdalene from the Carmelite convent to the walls of the Louvre. My reading of The Prelude goes to the roots of the museum effect in Wordsworth’s writing; I look at Wordsworth’s most overt poetic engagement with the idea of displacement, and the space that that engagement created for political reverberation in his work. Although, as Liu writes, Wordsworth’s aesthetic is decidedly in opposition to the Baroque, I will demonstrate how the aesthetics of the canvas are present in surprising ways in Wordsworth’s apprehension of the French Revolution. This episode is only the peak of a series of museal images which have led up to this moment, and which will continue on the narrator’s return to England.

In Paris, The Prelude’s narrator ‘visit[s] / In haste each spot of . . . fame’, including the Pantheon, and witnesses knots of ‘hissing Factionists with ardent eyes’ swarming over Paris while ‘the Revolutionary Power / Toss[es] like a ship at anchor, rocked by storms’ (42–57). As a ‘relic’ of historic change, the narrator picks up a ‘stone’ from the ‘rubbish’ that is left in the Bastille’s sunny courtyard – the space where the French Revolution began in 1789. However, none of the narrator’s sightseeing really satisfies him. He feels that he is only wearing ‘the guise’ of ‘an enthusiast’, and is ‘affecting more emotion’ than he felt. Despite his genuine feeling that he is ‘glad’, (he does not think ‘living man . . . could . . . be otherwise’), he feels obliged to confess: ‘I looked for something which I could not find’ (63–71). And then he finds it:

A single picture merely, hunted out

Among other sights, the Magdalene of Le Brun,

A beauty exquisitely wrought, fair face

And rueful, with its ever flowing tears. (1805 76–79)

This painting ‘move[s]’ and ‘delight[s]’ the narrator more than anything he has yet seen in Revolutionary Paris. Wordsworth seems to be making a conspicuous turn away from the political and toward the aesthetic. Forgetting the fervour of the French Revolution, he praises for its beauty a mid-seventeenth-century image; Figure 1.1 shows this dynamic, emotionally charged artwork.

Figure 1.1 The Penitent Magdalene. By Charles Le Brun. Painted c. 1650. © Musée du Louvre and RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

Charles Le Brun epitomizes Establishment artists; he was the arbiter of taste under Louis XIV and a founder of the academic school of French painting. The art historian and curator Louis Marchesano credits Le Brun with making Louis XIV into the ‘resplendent subject matter and the primary focus of the fine arts’ in seventeenth-century France (1). Under Louis’s strong monarchical government, Le Brun held lucrative and influential posts, such as the Presidency of the Académie Royale and the running of the Gobelin tapestry factories, which he ‘transformed’ into ‘the most important center of tapestry production in Europe’ (Marchesano 12). His The Penitent Magdalene hung in a Carmelite convent, among the mementos of aristocratic patrons, in a setting which Le Brun had largely designed. Alexandre Lenoir, one of the most successful museum curators under the French Revolution, urged the visitors to his Musée des Monuments Français to turn toward medieval and Renaissance works, and away from the ‘pernicious system’ of academic classicism that came in ‘towards the conclusion of the 17th century’ – a system which Le Brun both helped to shape and was himself shaped by (Monthly Review 459–61). Wordsworth’s narrator’s admiration for The Penitent Magdalene seems especially charged with the possibility that the poet is reversing all his principles, because Le Brun’s aesthetics, as well as his politics, seem antithetical to Wordsworth’s. The Prelude is intent on introspection as a form of historical exegesis – understanding the French Revolution through understanding the narrator’s French experience. French critics, such as Françoise Bardon, use Le Brun’s painting to epitomize a Baroque school that subordinates introspection to drama, meditation to striking gesture. By 1792, the clergy and monastic orders were under attack by the Revolution. Given the history, location, and aesthetic of this painting, when Wordsworth’s narrator steps off the streets and into the coolness of the cloisters to admire the Magdalene, his gesture initially appears as the ultimate rejection of the Revolution, and a way of evading the history in the making all around him.

However, Le Brun’s Magdalene is one of three female figures exemplifying the positive power of the French Revolution, as critics Ronald Paulson, Alan Liu, and Mary Jacobus concur. The second is a ‘hunger-bitten girl’ whom the narrator, in company with his great friend Beaupuis (a portrait of Wordsworth’s real-life friend Beaupuy), ‘chanced . . . to meet’ near Orléans (1805 IX 510–13; 1850 509–12). Alan Liu identifies her as ‘a secular version of the weeping Magdalene’ (375), another abject female yearning for deliverance from a corrupt world. Richard Gravil emphasizes the hunger-bitten girl’s abjection: ‘The girl is employed . . . as a mobile object to which a heifer can be conveniently tethered, an emblem of the utmost human degradation’ (131). Ronald Paulson, too, believes that the ‘degradation of the woman’ in The Prelude here reaches its nadir (262). The nameless hunger-bitten girl epitomizes not only the iniquities attendant on the ancien régime in France, but also the disruptive power of such sights. The narrator’s glimpse of her is, according to Gravil, ‘the most striking “form”’ in Book IX, which enables the poet to articulate his ‘most positive enunciation of a political manifesto’ (131).

The last movement in Book IX of the 1805 Prelude is a lengthy description of a long-ago blighted romance (638). Like the conservative Edmund Burke and the progressive Helen Maria Williams, Wordsworth uses the story of a star-crossed couple to express a political view of the regime under which they suffer. For Burke, the unfortunate couple are the French Royal Family themselves (232–38), persecuted by Revolutionaries, while Williams recounted the trials of the du Fossé family under the ancien régime (123–94; ‘Williams’). Wordsworth’s Vaudracour and Julia fall in love in a ‘small town’ in the ‘heart of France’ (560–64). The aristocratic Vaudracour’s parents object that Julia is insufficiently high-born. To put a stop to their affair, Vaudracour’s ‘father threw out threats that by a mandate / Bearing the private signet of the state’, his son ‘should be baffled of his mad intent’ to marry Julia (665–67). The ‘mandate’ to which Wordsworth refers is a lettre de cachet – that is, a warrant for imprisonment without trial at the monarch’s pleasure. Vaudracour’s father mobilizes the legal system of pre-Revolutionary France to maintain his genealogical integrity. In fact, the legendary storming of the Bastille was partly in response to the number of prisoners thought to be held within its walls under lettres de cachet; the stone which the narrator picked up at the site of the Bastille is still weighing in the poet’s pocket. After a series of arrests and escapes, Vaudracour spends some anxious time with his beloved Julia. Her fate evokes Le Brun’s Magdalene:

Julia, yet without the name of wife,

Carried about her for a secret grief

The promise of a mother. (607–09)

Like the Biblical Mary Magdalene, Julia has ‘shame’ attached to her sexually transgressive conduct. And like Le Brun’s canvas, Julia is taken to a convent, and ‘there immured’ (612, 839). The immense uprush of emotion that Wordsworth tied to The Penitent Magdalene is transferred to Julia, who is a loveable and harmless victim of pre- Revolutionary legal oppression. What initially seemed to be The Prelude’s turn to the aesthetic and away from the political now emerges as a strategy to reinforce the poet’s empathy with those who will benefit from the Revolution.

Wordsworth cut the tragic story of Julia and Vaudracour from The Prelude after 1805, and published it separately, as Julia and Vaudracour in 1820. The 1850 Prelude alludes only quickly to them; as a concomitant of this brevity, Wordsworth is very clear and succinct in distilling the message of their story.

. . . enamoured youth was driven,

By public power abased, to fatal crime,

Nature’s rebellion against monstrous law;

. . . between heart and heart, oppression thrust

Her mandates. (569–73)

This is part of the Prelude’s strong protest (in 1805 and in 1850) against ‘institutes . . . that legalized exclusion’ and that preferred ‘empty pomp’ to ‘the people having a strong hand / In making their own laws’ (520–33). Naturally, the narrator focuses first on governance that would eradicate abject poverty and on legal institutions that would prevent incarceration without trial. But there is another form of public institution which this Book of The Prelude evokes, and that is the public museum.

One good to emerge from the bloodshed of 1789–94 is the opening of the Louvre to the public. In August 1793, the Louvre Palace welcomed artists into its painting, drawing, and sculpture collections, and admitted all members of the general public on weekends; it charged no admission and asked for no credentials. Figure 1.2 shows Hubert Robert’s possibly idealized vision of the new Louvre and its interiors; entitled La Grande Galerie, vers 1795, it shows spectators and copyists gazing on the paintings hung on sunlit walls. In the 1790s, the opportunity for moments of aesthetic rapture, such as Wordsworth experienced in front of The Penitent Magdalene, became available to every citizen of France. Indeed, Le Brun’s canvas itself was moved to the walls of the Louvre Museum during the 1790s. Wordsworth, in the 1850 Prelude, wrote that ‘however potent’ revolutionary politics are, they ‘appear . . . to recompense the traveller’s pains / Less’ than transcendent experiences triggered by works of art (74–77). But this direct political activity, which Wordsworth ostensibly casts as second-best, actually promotes such transports by breaking down the doors between the public and the public museum.

Figure 1.2 La Grande Galerie du Louvre, about 1795. By Hubert Robert. Painted 1794–96. © Musée du Louvre and RMN-Grand Palais / Art Resource, NY.

The 1850 Prelude sets up an explicit opposition between London’s easily accessible book-stalls and the ‘luxurious pomp’ of ‘all the nicely-guarded shows of art’ (30–31); it evokes the era when art was more ‘guarded’ from a universal public, before the Romantic era’s rich visual culture included public museums. To see an original painting, William Hazlitt writes, ‘is as if there were but one copy of a book in the world, locked up in some curious casket’ (Picture Galleries 4). Hazlitt’s image of ‘lock[ing]’ away dovetails with Wordsworth’s of ‘guard[ing]’ artwork. In Hazlitt’s view, being ‘permitted . . . by some special favour . . . to . . . peruse’ a painting magnifies the experience, so that it ‘leave[s]’ a painfully strong impression (4). Hazlitt’s meditation on access to art opens his essay on the Angerstein Collection; the collection forms the nucleus of Britain’s National Gallery, one of the institutions that freed British art collections from their caskets and made them available to all. As Wordsworth’s very earliest readers knew, and as his Victorian readers knew, the establishment of the Musée Central de l’Art in the Palais du Louvre was about to unlock the visual arts for the French – and, indirectly, to transform British art viewing as well.

The Prelude’s first introduction of the concept of a museum is through a complex metaphor that plays out over several books. In Wordsworth’s ‘after-meditation’, his time at Cambridge was:

. . . roving, as through a cabinet

Or wide museum (thronged with fishes, gems,

Birds, crocodiles, shells) where little can be seen

Well understood, or naturally endeared,

Yet still does every step bring something forth

That quickens, pleases, stings . . . (1805 III 648, 652–57)

Richard Altick points out that museum fatigue was a ‘novel affliction of urban life’ at ‘the end of the [eighteenth] century’, and that Wordsworth was among its first chroniclers (33). In the Victorian era, museums became far more accessible to the public, so museum fatigue was a more common and more easily recognized phenomenon. The 1850 edition of The Prelude predates the Crystal Palace Exhibition by only a year; in this final edition, Wordsworth compresses the vehicle of his metaphor into two lines, describing ‘a wide museum from whose stores / A casual rarity is singled out’ before the attention wanders (620–21).

Wordsworth’s initial feeling toward the ancient university was aw...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Chapter: 1 Changing the Subject: Aesthetic Displacement, Museum Display, and the French Revolution in The Prelude
• Chapter: 2 Facing History: Galleries and Portraits in Waverley’s Historiography
• Chapter: 3 Reframing the National Imagination in Maria Edgeworth’s Harrington
• Chapter: 4 Carving Out the Public Sphere: Romantic Literary Periodicals and the Elgin Marbles
• Epilogue
• Bibliography
• Index