Martin Meisel. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1983. Pp. xix + 471*

Joseph Viscomi

 

Realizations brings quickly to mind two comments from Biographia Literaria XVII. First, that "the educated man chiefly seeks to discover and express those connections of things, or those relative bearings of fact to fact, from which some more or less general law is deducible." Second, that the perception of pictures in nature has preconditions, for "if the changes, forms, and incidents of nature are to prove a sufficient stimulant" and not "pictures to the blind, and music to the deaf," then, like Wordsworth and unlike the Welsh mountaineer, the viewer must be educated in the language which makes such perception—and effects—possible. [1]

As a theatre historian well versed in fiction, painting, graphic art, and English, German, and French art history, Meisel is just such a man. In the five sections of part I, he examines the technical and theoretical problems of representation in painting, theatre, illustration, narrative, and the art of effect; these facts, or, as he calls them, "Coordinates," he demonstrates in the fourteen sections of part II, aptly entitled "Conjunctions," to intersect in varying degrees in works by Wilkie, Martin, Turner, Bryon, Ainsworth, Dickens, Holman Hunt, Madox Ford, W.P. Frith, and Henry Irving. Though Meisel begins with Diderot's theatre criticism and the early stage productions of Hogarth's progresses, discussed as much as influences as foils, his primary concern is with the nineteenth century, from David Wilkie's coming to London in 1805 to Henry Irving's departure from the Lyceum Theatre in 1902. These events "bracket a distinctive set of relations between narrative and picture" in which he discerns "the foundation of a [period] style" (3).

In each of his analyses, Meisel is concerned with how pictures were made and read. The title refers to the concrete perceptual form given a literary text, the "move from mind's eye to body's eye," as "when words became picture, or picture became dramatic tableau" (30). Realization "meant both literal re-creation and translation into a more real, that is more vivid, visual, physically present medium," with the effect depending on the "apparent literalness and faithfulness of the translation, as well as the material increment" (30). The effect, of course, also depended on artists and audiences sharing the same cultural matrices that made recasting pictures with actors and props an acknowledged stage effect. By examining the techniques and conventions by which pictures on boards and between boards were embodied on the boards, Meisel not only offers new readings of productions, novels, and paintings, but moves back from material to mind, illuminating a way of perceiving and representing reality that differed from the ways of the ages before and after it.

Discussions of structural matrices and cultural schemata aside, the effect of a tableau, like a scene in nature, depended first and foremost on the image being recognized as "an imitation of art" (438). Unlike the landscape realized in a Claude glass, however, the scene in the theatre had to be recognized by an entire audience, not just an astute few. Meisel illuminates the connection between the technical advances in graphic reproduction, advances like steel engraving, wood engraving, and lithography, all of which produced high quality impressions quickly and in vast numbers, and mass recognition. The theatre was thus freed to move from an allusive to a specific pictorialism, with tableaux no longer of traditional emblems, like Motherhood or Justice, but of contemporary works that had "achieved enough current success to have been engraved, displayed in print-shop windows, discussed and illustrated in periodicals, and sometimes pirated" (93).[2]

The advances in mechanical reproduction that made the nineteenth century a print culture not only made possible the specificity of theatrical allusion, but contributed to the idea that a translation could function as a version of the original, rather than an imitation or copy once removed. Indeed, of the 220 illustrations in Realizations, most are of engravings rather than the original paintings, not just because these were the versions most widely known, but also because, as Dickens notes, engravings suggested the "delicacy, finish, and refinement, as belonging to the original" (xvii). This is a sentiment much removed from the eighteenth century; Jonathan Richardson, for example, believed a print was the mere "echo" of "an original," which was itself "the echo of the voice of nature." Meisel admits that genre, form, and style are not fully transferable, existing integrally with medium and mode, and can influence but not become one with a sister art, and that the tension between two versions marks the "limits of convertibility" (98). Yet he argues that the realization, or "conversion," was not experienced platonically, not as something secondary and necessarily distorted by the new medium and codes, but as a valid recreation. He argues persuasively that the "audience marvels at how 'real' a painting can be made to seem in another, actually living medium; more real than it could have been in the first place ... the seeming truth of the imitation will be primary" (93). The awareness of the machinery and materiality of the theatre only contributed to the immediacy of the event, while the specificity of allusion transformed realizations into "illustration, the direct extension of an existing text and an authenticating and clarifying reinforcement" (97)

The effect of painting on plays was so direct and pervasive that productions, if not quite extensions, were by contemporary critics thought of as collaborations: ". . . Mind has whispered to mind. The pencil becomes a pen, and this drama is the illustrative letter-press which ought for the future to accompany the picture" (Atlas 7 [1832]: 143). The drama reviewed is Douglas Jerrold's The Rent Day (1832), whose first act begins and ends with tableaux vivants ("animated realization") of David Wilkie's "The Rent Day" (1807) and "The Distraining for Rent" (1815). The metaphor for translation (pencil to pen) reveals the extent to which the pictorial dramaturgy had taken hold. In contrast to Lamb—who found Boydell guilty of "confin[ing] the illimitable," and performances of Shakespeare "to embody and realize conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape," a "juvenile pleasure" for which we pay "dearly ... all our life after" (3o)—the Victorian reviewer welcomed the move from sketch to more finished drawing, one necessarily given more time and attention and whose lines are more determined, clear, and distinct. The mind listening is not only privileged, but also has the last word, the cost of which, as Lamb knew, was a mental or material image irrevocably altered. The theatre not only appropriates images in the popular mind, but when generated by narrative paintings necessarily offers an interpretation that "accompanies the picture."

The relation between original and recreation becomes more problematic when the collaboration becomes more deliberate, as between novelist and illustrator and illustrated-novel and playwright. Illustrations, Meisel states, are to novels what realizations of paintings are to theatrical productions: both stop the flow of the story and "epitomize" the situation. The relation between movement and moment, or "kinesis" and "stasis," are structurally similar, and the meaning of the scene or interpersonal relations is crystallized, revealed in a moment of stasis. A dramatization of an illustrated novel is structured as much by images as text when the visual moments realized are those already frozen as illustrations, in which case the illustrator has some right to claim co-authorship of the story. This is, at any rate, what Cruickshank claimed in regards to Harrison Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard, but not Dickens's Oliver Twist, which he also illustrated and which was dramatized by many of the same playwrights, and appeared in the same theatres. According to Meisel, Cruickshank's lack of modesty was well deserved. All versions of Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard "are faithful to the pictures, and rather free with the text. They rely on the pictures for effect, but even more for authenticity, as a realization of the novel" (271). This priority of image over word was determined in large part by the Sheppard illustrations having been themselves influenced by stage techniques. The procession from Old Bailey to Tyburn, for example, was executed as a sequence of pictures and translated as a diorama (a long moving backdrop), which was a kind of spectacle quite popular in the exhibition halls of London that influenced its form. The diorama was occasionally stopped and individual illustrations of the strip represented as tableau. Meisel finds that the priority given word or image in a dramatization is analogous to that in the novel, which means that stage productions can reflect the diverse ways apparently similar kinds of fiction were originally read.

Making images and ideas distinct is the theatre's great strength and weakness. In a chapter entitled "The Material Sublime," Meisel contrasts the painting styles of John Martin and Turner, which used light in dramatic but diametrically opposed ways. Both artists were much influenced by scene painters, especially de Loutherbourgh and his Eidophusicon (1781), with Turner in turn influencing the "transformation scenes" of William Beverley, a type of back-drop painting used in the pantomimes and fairy plays of Planche in which different scenes are painted on the front and back of canvas and dissolve one into the other as the light source is changed from front to back, creating a grand metamorphosis, "the spectacle of form in flux" (185). Martin used light and color to emphasize the grandeur of material form and dizzying perspective; large paintings, like the "Fall of Ninevah" (realized at the end of Byron's Sardanapalus [1834]), were used to suggest the diminution of ego and to effect the apocalyptic. Turner, on the other hand, used light and color to dissolve material and perspective; without distinct lines there is no differentiation, and thus the notion of single identity is destroyed. Consequently, Turner was used for paradisal scenes to effect a sense of union between perceiver and perceived. His "Golden Bough" (1837) was used as the backdrop in Kean's productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act II, scene I: A Wood Near Athens. Moonlight; 1856). In what is one of the book's most fascinating though least developed sets of analogies, Meisel suggests that these pictorial styles are similar to the linguistic styles of Byron and Shelley. Meisel makes a convincing case that Manfred, Byron's seemingly unactable metaphysical drama, was inherently pictorial and "realizable through material illusion" (170), while Prometheus Unbound, even with Turner as a pictorial analogue, was not translatable because forms and figures continually dematerialize, rather than transform. Productions of Manfred, which were "the embodiment of the sublime as spectacle" (178), shed light on contextual borrowings. Martin's engraved illustrations to Milton's Paradise Lost were realized and transformed; "Satan Presiding at the Infernal Council," for example, became "The Hall of Arimanes—Arimanes on his Throne, a Globe of Fire, surrounded by the Spirits."

The pictorial theatre was an extension of the romantic's belief in the concrete and particular; as Blake said, mental deities do not exist unembodied. But there is a point when scenes are rendered so distinct that despite their detailed realism—or, rather, because of it—the image moves back to the ideal and abstract. Such are the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, who rejected the aesthetics of effect (especially the theatrical grouping of figures), and with it many of the tricks of their own trade, like the manipulations of light and shade, atmosphere and perspective. Meisel analyzes a few early paintings by Millais and Hunt (particularly the former's "A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew's Day. . ."[1852]) and the productions in which they were realized. He succeeds in showing that the pictures are more dramatic than previously thought, particularly those which capture a moment of inner change, but not necessarily effective as paintings. The PreRaphaelite technique of painting thin layers of oil paint on a wet white ground, in simulation of fresco, produced intensely bright and pure colors, but also necessitated working up one small part of the design at a time, which allowed them their "analytic, even microscopic attention to the particularity of things" (351-52). But accuracy was at the expense of immediacy, and detail at the expense of composition. All areas are tied not to one another but to the model; consequently, all areas tend to be equally detailed, which may be objectively and scientifically true, but not perceptually true for any viewer outside a dream state. Whistler well understood where such love of detail and technique would lead. On the back of an artist in St Marco's Square, who had been working on a painting in the PreRaphaelite manner for six years, he pinned the sign: "I am totally blind."

Realizations is a beautiful book, though not in the sense of the elegant coffee-table book it superficially resembles; no illustration is in color, few are full page, and most are of dark engravings rather than oil paintings. Yet, with illustrations reproduced with excellent half-tone screens on heavy-weight off-white paper and on the same page as text, and labels and footnotes in three-inch margins, it is both distinctive and attractive. If anything, the elimination of the usual flipping about stresses the encyclopediac over the argumentative nature of the book, reinforcing its resemblance to Richard Altick's The Shows of London. True, both are studies in the history of popular culture, with Altick doing for "exhibitions" (public nontheatrical entertainments) what Meisel does for "realizations." Exhibitions, Altick says, gave "practical realization to Bacon's advocacy of things over words as instruments of knowledge" (I). Stripped of any pretense of instruction, the same is true of realizations, with the emotive power of pictures privileged over text. But Meisel has not written a history of productions; the intimidating amount of old and new detail in each analysis, from reviews, reports, letters, playbills, and stage directions, some of which at first seems superfluous, are facts whose connections are slowly exposed to reveal a dominant pattern of creation and expectation shared by artist and audience. Realizations is a slow-moving, interdisciplinary book of great importance to literary theorists concerned with narrative and the generative power of images, as well as to historians of theatre, painting, novel, and Victorian culture.

No, if Realizations has a counterpart, it is not the equally detailed Shows of London, but "What is Poetry?" (1833), a brief essay by John Stuart Mill. Mill declared that the "faculty of the poet and that of the novelist are . . . distinct," with "no natural connection," and that poetry, which is not limited to words but occurs in every medium, is concerned with the "inward man," and narrative with "outward things ... actions and events," with the former of interest to literate adults, and the latter to children and the child-like. He does admit that narrative and poetry can be combined in drama, but adds: "even there, the two elements are perfectly distinguishable." Meisel does not mention the essay, but Realizations is, nonetheless, its brilliant complement, in the sense of counterargument, thoroughly demonstrating that the tension between a "detailed and documented rendering of reality" (13) and an expression of "inward signification" (the term is Bulwer Lytton's), was resolved in the theatre, in "what was surely the most paradoxical of aesthetic enterprises, the Realization of the Ideal" (13). Realizations punctuated the narrative by compressing within one static moment the drama of the scene; like Pygmalion's Galatea, paintings and illustrations were "brought to life," but like the Grecian Urn, they were frozen in and out of time. The audience's reliance on arrested images to narrate and reveal character and theme, on the nonmoving remove, however, was abundantly compensated by an intense clarity of vision—and a blurring of the distinction between original and copy, ideal and real, literate and illiterate.