MORRIS EAVES
The sister arts in British Romanticism
W H I C H first, the good news or the bad
news? In honor of optimists who test their commitments by rising above
the worst, I submit a three-part package of disheartening wisdom. W. J. T.
Mitchell on pictures and words: "The history of culture is in part the
story of a protracted struggle for dominance between pictorial and linguistic
signs, each claiming for itself certain proprietary rights on a `nature'
to which only it has access." John Barrell
on recent efforts to shelter the two arts of picturemaking
and word-making under one critical label: "'Romanticism' has never become
a well-established term in the discussion of English painting, and art
historians do not seem, on the whole, to have found the term of great
explanatory power even when applied to such obvious subjects as Turner, Palmer,
or Blake himself" And finally, the most quotable line ever written about
all relations among all arts, Susanne Langer's heartstopping
proclamation that "there are no happy marriages in art — only successful
rape."' These warnings open suitably dark themes that we would be mistaken
to bypass, because they are fundamentally true to life. Awesome combinations of
failure, difference, distance, lag, divergence, and conflict establish the
relations of texts and images in the Romantic period to such a degree that we
cannot hope to understand those relations without them. Any elevation of
spirits about the future of scholarship in "literature and the
visual arts," as it has come to be standardized in a phrase,
can only be achieved by climbing a mountainous collection of depressing
realities.
I say so outright, at some risk of
stating the obvious, because the verbal copulation of literature and the visual
arts summons likeness and comparison and positive augmentation. These are,
after all, the "sister arts," as the eighteenth
and some of the nineteenth century knew them, and were they not supposed to be
a naturally compatible pair? The pairing has had, on occasion, and especially
when the subject is Romanticism, the power to return us to nineteenth-century
dreams not of arts but of Art as the single revelation that singleminded,
multitalented creative personalities seek in complementary modes, some with a
talent for words, others for music or pictures, all epitomized by an impossibly
rare double or triple Romantic Genius such as William Blake, poet, painter,
engraver, and, it was said, a natural musician.
Given the encouragement to cross-fertilization provided by the
metaphors of Romantic aesthetics, which names "Vision" in poetry and
"Poetry" (in painting) among its highest ideals, it is unsurprising
that students working under the literature-and-visual-arts authorization have
launched searches for philosophical, theological, psychological, aesthetic, and
most recently political bases for comparing Romantic verbalizations and
visualizations. This is bound to be an attractive procedure because almost
every Romantic issue, theme, or aspect can be formulated, in some sense at some
level, in both words and pictures, and doubly attractive because the double
formulation allows us to tie great writers like Wordsworth, Coleridge, and
Shelley to great artists like William I3lake, John Constable, Samuel Palmer,
and J. M. W. Turner, not to mention the lures of a European Romanticism that
frequently extends the field of possibilities.
In studies of l3ritish Romanticism authoritative themes for
students of the sister arts have included the pictorialism
of Keats's poetry, informed and reinforced by his experience of painting and
sculpture; "nature" as a common focus of literary and pictorial
attention; the "visionary" theories of knowledge,
perception, and self, expressed and exemplified in both Roman-tic poems and
pictures; the influence of certain aesthetic categories, principally the
sublime, the picturesque, and the organic, on literature and painting alike;
and, most recently, literary and visual responses to crucial historical events
such as the French Revolution. I would deny neither the abiding importance of
these topics nor their fascination, not even the still-fertile promise of the
time-honored favorites — such overplowed fields of
comparison and contrast as the Nature verbalized in Wordsworth's poetry and
visualized in John Constable's Suffolk landscapes, the sublime of indefinity that supposedly links poet Shelley and painter
J. M. W. Turner, or the sublime of vision that makes Samuel Palmer a successor
to Blake.
The problem is that the studies
themselves have typically taken top-down approaches to subjects that need to be
researched from the bottom up to protect them from glibness and forgettability. Certainly, as Barrell
says,
attempts to explain
British wordmaking and picturemaking
with the single term "Romanticism" have met with
(occasionally entertaining, usually insipid) failure regularly, success rarely.
Although one might reasonably expect adding arts to add intellectual
excitement, the most useful lessons, even of much of the latest criticism, have
been about the artificiality and superficiality required to hide the dangerous
unreliability of flawed approaches.
The signs of stress have often been all too visible right on
the surface: at its most obvious, the uninhibited reaching across strong and
significant geographical, linguistic, cultural, and chronological borders in
search of comparisons; at its most egregious, the implicit or explicit use of
implausible, anachronistic models of intellectual association (from Delacroix,
Sand, and Chopin, through Baudelaire, Ruskin, the Impressionists, and the
Bloomsbury Group, to Stein and Picasso). Is it insignificant that Words-worth
did not learn how to look at paintings from (even) Constable, or Coleridge from
Caspar David Friedrich, but from the aristocratic amateur George Beaumont and
the American fundamentalist Washington Allston respectively, two very
conservative and yet also very different sources?
The blame for questionable procedures does not rest entirely on
the shoulders of the scholars who have adopted them. What has
been missing are the adequate histories that allow one to assess the
complexities of the cultural situation. Often the fundamental weaknesses of art
history and literary criticism, instead of cancelling each
other out, have combined to defeat heroic efforts that have tried to fly before
they could walk. In any case, at least for the foreseeable future, the best
work will continue to be about problems not solutions, and in moods to match.
In literature and the visual arts, this is a Jacobean not an Elizabethan age.
But the thrill of adventure remains. Despite a handful of
recent works that have risen considerably above the previous norm, the study of
British Romantic literature and the visual arts is a vast underexplored
critical wilderness approached by many promising but mostly untried roads. Even
the big, obvious subjects have not received sustained or sophisticated attention.
We could profitably hear much more than we have about Coleridge's
association with Washington Allston or Wordsworth's with his painter–patron
George Beaumont; about the relevance of Hazlitt's experience as a trained
portrait painter to his literary work or the influence of Benjamin Robert
1-Iaydon's ideals of history painting in the circle of the Romantic poets;
about the bizarre continuities and discontinuities of visual neoclassic-ism
that connected the elder Josiah Wedgwood with the artist and sculptor John
Flaxman and painter Benjamin West, and the literary neo-Hellenism associated
chiefly with writers of a later generation like Shelley – widely separated
phenomena joined by strong filaments.
The exception to the rule of neglect would seem to be William Blake, the object of almost
overwhelming critical efforts for the better part of this waning century. And
indeed, to learn about literature and the visual arts in the Romantic period,
one must always circle back to confront Blake as the central figure or the
central enigma. In some accounts he is not a Romantic at all but a cultural
souvenir lost in time from an earlier era of Enlightenment, and yet in other
accounts he is the futuristic prototype of "visionary" Romanticism.
He has often been made to seem the harbinger of the post-Romantic modern world,
the point at which Romanticism predicts the coming of Marx and Freud. In that
version of the story of British Romanticism Blake's
"illuminated books" in "illuminated printing" as
he called them, or his "prophecies" as they are
often called, become the prototypes of Roman-tic poetry in its most ambitious
epic reaches. Extracted from the range of his other work, these illuminated
books have frequently been treated as a master canon of Romantic artistic
ambition, unified by medium because they are (most of them) watercolored
relief-etchings; by biography because they are (more or less) the output of a
productive lifetime; and by theme and manner because they (sometimes) repeat
characters and incidents and display a (rough) pattern of evolution from the
more fragmentary efforts of the 1790s to the more comprehensive mythical
structures of Milton a Poem and
Jerusalem: The Emanation of the Giant
Albion from the years after i 800. Finally, to the extent that these
prodigiously complex structures threaten to unread
themselves into a tantalizing illegibility – which is to a very significant
extent – Blake has even gained some currency as the most eligible Romantic
liaison with the postmodern, an alliance further encouraged by the realization
that his "poems" are not just printed lines but media
events.
Of course, there are significant issues that cannot be raised
through Blake, who as an artist sits uncomfortably in our art histories and as
a poet was tangential to his written culture. But in major respects, having
bequeathed to posterity a stock of work that concretely and intricately
consolidates or at least splices elements of written language and graphic
design from his own hands, Blake would seem to be the Romantic
literature-and-visual-arts subject par
excellence. If that is true, as it may be, it is equally true that
Blake, even as he tempts us to put faith in the viability of these
interdisciplinary approaches, also provides
the paradigm par excellence of the array of obstacles that frustrate
the literature-and-visual-arts project.
Words
and pictures
Blake's illuminated
printing gives us an opportunity to reassess the problem that some commentators
have identified as the root of those frustrations, the vexing relation between words and images. Asking when a word is a word
or an art an art is a bit like asking when a male is male or sex is sex.
Langer's malicious claim that the intimate relations of texts and
images can only be characterized as acts of criminal violence inflicted by one
gender on another is an hysterical exaggeration of
some conventional observations: words are different from images; the difference
can be dangerous; and the most satisfactory resolution of the crisis of
relationship is no relationship. The conclusion that the
difference between texts and images is one that divides, and even threatens
conflict and dominance, may seem most powerful when the opposing parties are
located differently on the body. When words are oral and aural and
images are tactile and visual, they are perhaps as different as they ever get to be. But a closely related set
of observations — of two senses contributing,
as it were, to a single human body's task of perceiving the world — motivates
the opposite conclusion, that the difference between the two senses is
complementary.
The way to avoid
such petrified oppositions is to notice how the differences are not fixed.
They are sensitive to context — technologically sensitive, for instance. They
threaten to collapse when words are not primarily sounds but sights (see figure
11.1). The words in plate 81 of Blake's 7ernsalem are produced
by the same technology, relief etching, that produces
the pictures. Hence the distance between the two is one of the factors subject
to the producer's control, as here, where the fairly regular lines
at the top of the plate seem least like the images of human bodies in the
middle, while the words left of the central human figures seem well on their
way to becoming images: rotated ninety degrees from horizontal lines and
reversed to obstruct legibility, curved to conform to surrounding image structures
(clouds, bodies, black graphic envelope) — to yield to them, hence acknowledging
their priority at this point — and arranged on the left symmetrically opposite
the graphic elements on the right to complete the bifurcated global shape. We would be remiss to overlook the powerful
element of choice left to the reader/spectator, who may look at
these words for image-form before reading them for lexical-content — but may
not, and may even ignore one or the other altogether.
We now know that the ways Blake prepared plates
for illuminated printing depended heavily upon the technologies of
handwriting and freehand draw‑
Figure 11.1 William
Blake, Jerusalem, plate
81 (copy D), relief etching, c.
1804-20.
ing
adapted to the requirements of relief-etching.2 Without minimizing
these technical requirements or their effects — such as writing/drawing on
copper rather than paper, and writing/drawing in reverse (thus the backward
writing on plate 81, the hardest for us to read, was the only writing on that plate executed in the easiest way, conventionally
forward) — we can see that, as Blake used them, the handicrafts of
writing and drawing overlap: same hand, same surface, similar tools. So used,
they blur the differences between words and images that human physiology may
seem to reinforce. A circle on one of Blake's plates may be the
outline of an eye or the letter 0 or both — if an eye, then "drawn,"
if a letter, then "written." We generally maintain the
distinction between "writing" and "drawing"
anyway for purposes of cultural organization, as any schoolchild knows who is
waiting for "writing" class to end and "drawing"
class to begin, and regard one as indispensable basic education and the other
as play, but at that level the distinction becomes much more a matter of how we
use and value what we see than of how we make it.
In any event, the dominant
reproductive technology of Blake's time was not relief-etching. It
was letterpress printing with movable type, which, though a visual means of
reproduction, to a certain extent reinstates the difference between words and
pictures by establishing a visual context resistant to nonalphabetic
images (see figure 11.2). To
incorporate images into the alphabetic regimen of printing technology, other
media — woodcuts, engravings (or in this reproduction of pages from a modern
edition, photolithographic halftone) — had to be accommodated in roundabout
ways, leading to the rigid segregation, by medium, of pictures from texts. The
segregation did not follow directly from any difference between words and
pictures but indirectly from the particular technological means by which
movable type made the reproduction of words so efficient — leaving, as it were, images in its economic wake. We can see this
most easily by comparing letterpress printing with other reproductive
media. Engraving and photography, for example, "see"
words as images; it is as easy to engrave words on copper as to engrave pictures
and as easy to photograph the word tree as
to photograph a tree. Likewise, computer designers exploit the enormous flexibilities
of the electronic digitization that allows letters to be "written"
and "read" as pictures, and all to be
reproduced indiscriminately by pixels. The word-picture distinction does not
disappear — as long as users come to the technology wanting letters and words,
the technology will have to include that category in its modus operandi — but it seems fair to
say that "graphically‑oriented" computer environments treat
words as a special case of pictures.
Thus the segregation of two overlapping cultural categories,
words and pictures, was powerfully influenced by letterpress printing, which
made pictures hard to deal with because movable type could not reproduce them and
image-reproducing technologies like engraving were inefficient and expensive by
comparison. Letterpress printing was the dominant technology of a particular
historical moment that happens to have been Blake's moment, and the Romantic
moment. Conversely, since that time, photographic, cinematographic, and videographic technologies have given pictures a new lease
on reproductive life and hence a new hold on cultural life.
Even so, it is important not to be hypnotized by
"words" and "pictures" into imagining these
convenient names as stable, discrete categories that are promoted and demoted
in a simple reproductive ratio regulated by available technology. Rather, "audio"
and "video," "texts"
and "images," "literature"
and the "visual arts" are unstable entities
that slip and slide this way and that under the complex pressures of history,
among which are the pressures of technology. "Words"
and "pictures" are not things-inthemselves but ways of understanding things. Put
philosophical pressure on any conceivable
definition of the terms, and they yield. Even in movable type, after
all, an L or P "is" an image if seen as one,
and, indeed, type- and book-designers have made a business of seeing and
understanding type, pages, and books as two- and three-dimensional images, with
all the help from visual aesthetic categories that "design" suggests.
Social hierarchy
If the distance
between literature and the visual arts in the Romantic period is in part the
technological distance between words and pictures, that distance is both cause
and consequence: it depends on available technologies, but the availability of
technologies also depends on social and historical negotiations at many levels.
One set of such broader cause-effects involves the distribution of social
privileges and rewards. Words and images are assigned to divergent patterns of
distribution, Blake again being a usefully indicative case. Readers often
notice his marked difference from the other Romantic poets. Positively, they
may say that he is the most original or imaginative; negatively, that he seems
insane. In some respects a more satisfactory translation of these readerly reactions would be simply "he is a London engraver of the
period 1757-1827," which is very far from saying "he is
one of the six major British Romantic poets." As an engraver, his social,
intellectual, political, religious, and professional affiliations were not
(a)
She hid them in his loins; raving he ran
among the rocks,
Compelld into a shape of Moral Virtue against the Lamb.
The
invisible lovely one giving him a form according to
His
Law a form against the Lamb of God opposd to Mercy
And playing in the thunderous Loom in sweet
intoxication 8o
Filling cups of silver & crystal
with shrieks & cries, with groans And dolorous
sobs: the wine of lovers in the Wine-press of Luvah
0
sister Cambel said Gwendolen,
as their long beaming light Mingled above the Mountain(:1
what shall we (10 to keep
These awful forms in our soft bands: distracted
with trembling 85
PLATE 8i
I
have mockd those who refused cruelty & I have
admired
The cruel Warrior. I have refused to give love to Merlin the piteous.
He brings to me the Images of his Love & I reject in chastity And turn them out into the streets for Harlots to be food
To the
stern Warrior. I am become
perfect in beauty over my Warrior For Men are caught by Love: Woman is caught
by Pride That Love may only be obtaind in the
passages of Death.
Figure
11.2 (a) and (b) William Blake,,7'ernsalem, plate 81 (copy D), and corresponding
text from David V. Erdman, ed., The Complete Poetry and Prose q/. William Blake, newly rev. edn.
(b) Let us look! let us
examine! is the Cruel become an Infant Or is he still
a cruel Warrior? look Sisters, look! 0 piteous
I have destroyd Wandring Reuben who strove to bind my Will 10
I have stripd off Josephs beautiful integument for my Beloved, The Cruel-one
of Albion: to clothe him in gems of my Zone I
have named him Jehovah of I hosts. Humanity is become A
weeping Infant in ruind lovely Jerusalems
folding Cloud: In Heaven Love begets Love! but Fear is
the Parent of Earthly Love! And he who will not bend to Love must be subdud by Fear,
PLATE: 82
I
have heard Jerusalems groans; from Vala's cries & lamentations I gather our
eternal fate: Outcasts from life and love: Unless we find a way to bind these
awful Forms to our Embrace we shall perish annihilate, discoverd
our Delusions. Look I have wrought without delusion: Look! I have wept! And
given soft milk mingled together with the spirits of flocks Of
lambs and doves, mingled together in cups and dishes Of painted clay; the
mighty Hyle is become a weeping infant; Soon shall
the Spectres of the Dead follow my weaving threads.
The Twelve Daughters of Albion attentive listen in
secret shades to On
Cambridge and Oxford beaming soft uniting with Rahabs
cloud While Gwendolen spoke to Cambel
turning soft the spinning reel: Or throwing the wingd
shuttle; or drawing the cords with softest songs The golden cords of the Looms
animate beneath their touches soft,
Along the Island white, among the Druid
Temples, while Gwendolen tS Spoke to the Daughters of
Albion standing on Skiddaws top.
So
saying she took a Falshood & hid it in her left
hand:
To entice
her Sisters away to Babylon on Euphrates.
And thus she closed her left
hand and utterd her Falshood:
Forgetting that Falshood is prophetic, she hid
her hand behind her, 20
Upon her back behind her loins & thus utterd her Deceit.
I
heard Enitharmon say to Los: Let the Daughters of
Albion
Be scatterd
abroad and let the name of Albion be
forgotten:
Divide them into three; name
them Amalek Canaan & Moab:
Let Albion remain a
desolation without an inhabitant: 25
And let the Looms of Enitharmon & the
Furnaces of Los
Create Jerusalem, & Babylon & Egypt &
Moab & Amalek,
And Helle & Hesperia & Hindostan
& China & Japan.
But hide America, for a Curse
an Altar of Victims & a Holy
Place.
See Sisters Canaan is pleasant, Egypt is as the Garden of Eden: 30
Babylon is our chief desire, Moab
our bath in summer:
Let
us lead the stems of this Tree let us plant it before Jerusalem To judge
the Friend of Sinners to death without the Veil:
To
cut her off from America, to
close up her secret Ark:
And the fury of Man exhaust in War! Woman permanent
remain 35
utterly
different from the other five but very, very different. Wordsworth and Shelley
were from different places, generations, classes, and universities; but by
comparison Blake was as from a different world. I am not rescuing him from the
charge of insanity but saying that the best social vantage point from which to
view his mental condition is not the same as the one from which to view
Coleridge's. As producers Blake and Coleridge go, so go their products:
it is a heady challenge to find one social vantage point from which to view
both images and words.
Blake lived and died in a
socioeconomic network of painters and paintings, line engravers, stipple
engravers, mezzotinters, and prints. In such an
environment, dedicated to making and marketing images, words were things to
illustrate. He is the only one of the six poets to have completed an
apprenticeship (Keats cancelled his) and the only one to have spent a lifetime
doing what he learned. He is the only one except Keats without university
education and the only one to have had no formal education in the usual sense.
Instead of "education" he had "training,"
all in the visual arts — drawing lessons, apprenticeship, the
Royal Academy schools. In these respects Blake's
situation was typical of the picturemakers in
relation to the wordmakers of his time and place.
As an engraver Blake's life
ran on the lower social track of the visual arts, with the reproducers not the
producers of pictures. Whenever he painted rather than engraved, as he often
did, he was not just changing media but trying to climb a slippery social
ladder. Engravers were artisans working at a trade, while painters and
sculptors were "artists" in a newly elevated
sense. Ever anxious to preserve the social gains that painting and sculpture
had lately won as "fine" arts, the Royal
Academy, founded in 1768, regularly refused to admit engravers as equals until
the twentieth century, always on the grounds that engravers had manual skill
but lacked invention, the intellectual ability that raised artisanry
to an art and painters to poets.
In what we might call their assigned
levels of intellectual responsibility, engravers were closer to printers,
painters to poets, but even painters remained socially handicapped by the
conditions of their craft. They required a separate course of training outside
the grammar schools and universities, and they had to work in messy studios
with materials in various degrees of
wetness. British painters had only very recently exploited the logic of
specialization to set themselves above a rather undifferentiated group that
1 included
house painters, coach painters, and heraldic painters. The engravers, who
traced the origins of engraving to sculpture but usually worked for painters,
tied their social aspirations to the ascendant group by presenting themselves
as painters manques both in word (as
when they demanded admission to the Academy) and deed (as when they demanded
exhibition space with the painters, or when they themselves took up painting).
The painters' own cloudy status made them resist such claims to equality,
leaving engravers and their allies to organize separate groups to promote their
well-being, which they did repeatedly without much success.
In terms of social distance, what were the consequences? When
writer Robert Southey looked in on Blake's one-artist exhibition (at his
brother's house in 18o9-to), his "melancholy impression"
of what he saw should raise profound social as well as aesthetic questions (Blake
Records, p. 399). So should his subsequent declaration, despite a level of
disapproval close to revulsion, that "nothing but madness"
kept Blake from "being the sublimest painter" in the world —
this from a man who had earlier confessed to Haydon
that "In matters of Art I am entirely ignorant" (Blake Records, p.
399). Could he under any imaginable circumstances have thought, "Ah, here
is one of the three major Romantic poets of the first generation.
I should introduce him to my brother-in-law Coleridge and my Cumberland neighbor Wordsworth?"
Much of this distance is social and vocational and could only
be closed by the historical amnesia that time can induce over several decades.
It is of course not surprising that Blake knew none of his Romantic literary
peers. But they probably knew no other engravers either. When Bernard Barton
asked Charles Lamb about Blake in 1824, Lamb answered as vaguely about this
citizen of London as if he were in India:
"Blake is a real name, I assure you, and a most
extraordinary man, if he be still living" (Blake Records, p. 284).
He was, but Lamb was satisfied to leave the personal contact to the
ever-curious Henry Crabb Robinson, the only one of
this literary crowd ever to converse with Blake.
A very few painters, such as Henry Fuseli of Blake's
generation and Haydon of Keats's, managed
to be simultaneously middle-class literati and painters, but most chose the
comfort of a more segregated social circle. To my knowledge, no engraver of the
period, and certainly none with Blake's (not uncommon) combination
of radical religious and political opinions, offended this boundary between wordmakers and imagemakers for
any length of time. Instead, intrepid agents of the literati such as Crabb Robin-son ventured across the line to fetch exotic
anthropology from the dark side.
Histories
Across
this social divide emerged distinct histories in the service of disparate
issues. The separated lives of word and image took numerous forms, virtually
all of which reinforced a hierarchy that put writers in the superior position.
That was true both in a very general sense – this was a culture in which words
were granted various kinds of superiority over pictures – and in a more
particular sense, such that, while British poets were cast as world-class
competitors for poetic fame, the painters were cast as latecomers of
undemonstrated merit. The abiding question on the literary side was whether the
writers could become the worthy inheritors of a relatively recent but highly
esteemed history of British accomplishment by reaching the mark set by past
successes. The question on the visual side was whether the artists could
overcome a history of British failure and neglect.
By the generation of Wordsworth and
Coleridge the literary gold standards were Shakespeare and Milton, though one
could extend and deepen the history, and enlarge the stock of poetic
possibilities, by adding primitives such as Chaucer and the ancient bards of Scotland.
Shakespeare's plays were taken as a demonstration that the British
could compete for literary laurels with the greatest of any period or nation,
and Milton's
poems proved that Shakespeare's success had been only one
manifestation of a British way with words that deserved a place in the history
of European letters beginning with Homer. Some literary critics have emphasized
the anxiety induced in British poets by this daunting history. An intimidating
question for late-arriving poets like Wordsworth and Keats was whether they had
any hope of becoming anything larger than a footnote. Then there was the
question of sufficiency – whether the plethora of great poems from Homer to Milton had left room for
any more – and the potentially devastating "modern"
question addressed by Peacock's Four Ages of Poetry and
Shelley's Defence ofPoetry – whether the course of history was
eliminating the function of poetry. But as they studied intently the
competition across generations and nations, British writers virtually ignored
the possibility for competition across arts. They wasted none of their anxiety
on the painters and musicians to whom we look whenever we are tempted to
broaden Romanticism to take in Constable's landscapes and Beethoven's
symphonies.
On the other side, the producers of
British imagery found themselves in an historical predicament marked not by
what they had had but by what they had lacked. Shakespeare's visual
counterpart was stunningly absent. For decades Continental critics –
Montesquieu, Du Bos, Winckelmann, and others – had
pointed to the uneven distribution of verbal and visual accomplishments in
Britain and attributed it to fixed conditions of climate (cold) and temperament
(calculating) that produced good merchants but bad pictures. The most
mercantile of the visual genres was portrait painting, and naturally the
British had done best in that.
For British artists the legal tender
was not British but Italian, and the touchstones were
Raphael and Michelangelo, which did not increase the allure of Joshua Reynolds
and Thomas Gainsborough, not to mention William Hogarth. By comparison with
the rich, layered literary culture to which writers like Dryden, Pope, and
Swift had (various kinds of) access, the culture of British imagery was meager
indeed. After all, while Shakespeare was
vying for position in a pack of fiercely competitive native writers,
"British painting" would have been only a laughable
contradiction in terms. The court painter to Henry VIII was the German Hans IIolbein the Younger (c. 1497-1543), who settled in England for the
last few years of his life, and the painter to Charles I, one of the most avid
and ambitious art collectors ever, was the Flemish Anthony van Dyck (1599–1641). When Virginia Woolf inquired
as to the whereabouts of Shakespeare's sister, it did not occur to her that she
might have been an Elizabethan painter.
Hence painters and their cultural allies spent much of their
intellectual capital defending themselves against charges of chronic
inferiority, putting their belated arrival in the best light, and designing
remedial programs for themselves and their spectators. These polemical,
critical, and instructional bids for status began as early as the late
seventeenth century, perhaps with William Aglionby's
translation of some of Vasari's Lives of
the Painters into English (1685); continued in the early eighteenth century
with Jonathan Richardson's extensive efforts to outline – in The
Theory of Painting (1715), Essay on the Art of Criticism, and The
Science of a Connoisseur (1719) – a theory of painting suited to the
British situation, including instructions for becoming a proper judge of
painting; and then entered a far more programatic phase of development with the establishment of the
Royal Academy in 1768 (see figure 11.3), just in time to run parallel
with the two generations of British Romantic writers who are the main concern
of this volume. As its noisy critics
proclaimed, the Royal
Academy was never a
disinterested body. In a state-sponsored institution it consolidated
aesthetic, pedagogical, and commercial
initiatives to improve the lot of British painters (especially of its
self-selected membership). It contacted the public most effectively at its
annual exhibitions, where potential customers could see in a single visit the
current work of British painters, thus giving weight and substance to the
notion that there indeed existed a British
School of Painting.
Writers were not perceived to need anything comparable to the economic
development plan that made the Royal Academy
seem so necessary and so late in arriving on the shores of Britain.
Although in our
retrospective eyes the period from Reynolds and Gainsborough through Flaxman,
Blake, Constable, Turner, and Palmer may
appear
to have been a great age of British art, throughout the last quarter of the
eighteenth century and well into the nineteenth, inferiority, failure, and neglect remain the prime generative topics of
British art writing, spawning a standard gloomy vocabulary of urgencies,
inquiries, trials, perils, and crises that keeps the rhetorical temperature
high: "The present moment is considered by artists as teeming with the
crisis...of the destiny of their Art in England," proclaims Prince Hoare
on p. 21 I of his Inquiry into
the Requisite Cultivation and Present State of theArts
of Design in England (1806),
refurbishing a title already employed a quarter of a century earlier in James
Barry's Inquiry into the Real and
Imaginary Obstructions to the Acquisition of theArts
in England (1775) and dusted off yet again nearly a quarter of a
century later in Benjamin Robert Haydon's Some Enquiry into the Causes Which Have Obstructed
the Advance of Historical Painting for the Last Seventy Years in England (1829).
They reported a history of "obstructions"
— the Reformation, the Civil War, occupation
by an army of foreign artists — that had unnaturally blocked the course
of a natural "advance" that would have occurred
in Britain as it had in other European nations, especially Italy and France.
Most of the proposed remedies involved notions of "cultivation"
and "acquisition" through public and professional education:
systematic training in theory and practice to educate the artists, exhibitions
to educate the artists and the audience, and official support for public
projects to "encourage" (employ) British artists and make their work
as visible as the work of artists in other countries. The kind of art most
congenial to such proposals is an international one that can be measured by
rational standards such as those laid out in the most formidable of British art
theories of the period, Joshua Reynolds's fifteen Discourses on Art delivered at the Royal Academy
from 1769 to 1790. This standard does not appeal to British uniqueness:
although it may accept British history or British landscape as content, it does
so on equal terms with any other national history or geography. All local
content competes on an international market by moving beyond locality and
singularity, by generalizing its particulars and by delivering that generalization
in internationally sanctioned techniques and forms. To "acquire"
that standard repertory of content, form, and technique, most painters spent at
least months and preferably years in Italy copying
from the verified (foreign) old masters. To gauge meaningfully the
possibilities for literature and the visual arts in Romantic Britain, one must
study the calculus of differences between the academy-less education of native
poetic genius that Wordsworth and Keats designed to elevate themselves to
positions in the British literary record, and the programatic
training, in the service of internationalism and eclecticism, by which British
artists aimed to move their art into the European mainstream.
Markets
The
formulation of the crisis-ridden narratives of British art in the eighteenth
and early-nineteenth century cannot be understood as a merely historical
activity. It was an exercise in self understanding and self-justification,
certainly, but it was, and perhaps was more significantly, also an element in a
marketing strategy. The dissimilar histories of British literature and visual
arts were, among other things, responses to dissimilar markets. The literary market was broader, more settled and mature, but also more
parochial and less innovative. The art market was immature,
and very much in flux. It had international aspirations, not simply because the
British art market was small – although it was – but because images promise
more portability than words. On the market, British painters and their
commercial allies often display the mentality of the oppressed, sometimes self-defeatingly compliant and/or stubborn and inclined to copy
the standards of others rather than to create their own, at other times
devilishly clever, inventive, and
resourceful in finding ways to show and sell their work (see figure 11.4). For British writers of the period,
the familiar four-way
Figure
11.4 Francesco Bartolozzi, engraved ticket of
admission to the 1791 exhibition of Copley's Siege of Gibraltar (facsimile of
ticket by unidentified artist).
alliance of author, publisher, printer, and bookseller, though
it could be adjusted to suit the situation, was firmly established as the
dominant commercial arrangement and relatively well integrated with the
educational institutions that served as the training ground for writers. In the
visual arts the mechanisms of training, production, and marketing were far less
sure and successful, and far more open to, as well as desperately in need of, innovation. This engraved ticket of admission
illustrates a marketing concept with which several painters had great
success. Exploring the boundary that painting shared with the theatre, the raree show, and other spectacles for public amusement, it
called for the public display of a huge history painting with contemporary
interest – here John Singleton Copley's Siege
of Gibraltar, a patriotic
spectacle that drew thousands of visitors to a tent in Green Park
in 1791. Profit came from the price of admission and the sale of
subscriptions to a forthcoming engraving (often with a key to the faces in the
painting). Throughout the period (and well beyond), other painters with a knack
for history painting as spectacle, most memorably John Martin (1789–1854), continued to exploit the
effects of sheer immensity. Like his predecessors, he understood the advantage
of marketing a single image in multiple formats. With a bit of modification,
Martin's large images were easily converted to stage sets. Reduced,
they could be turned into prints and sold as private souvenirs of the
stupendous public originals, either separately or as illustrations to the text
that had provided the occasion for the painting to begin with.
Marketing brings us back to some fundamental influences on
the circulation of words and images in this period. The market for words is
dominated by the commodity in its second-order, reproduced rather than
produced, form – newspapers, magazines, and books rather than manuscripts. But
in images the market is still dominated by the art object, the first-order, the
produced, form of the commodity – the watercolor, the painting – even as
efforts were being made to find cheaper, more efficient modes of reproduction.
Old-line "great-man" patronage, which rested
largely on the production of unique art objects, remained more influential in
painting than in literature, both in fact – as Benjamin West was patronized by
George III for several good years in West's prime – but perhaps even more
significantly in the artists' polemics: they dwelled on the dearth
of aristocratic and state patronage (contrasted to the supposed abundance of
"opportunity" and "encouragement" in foreign
climes) even to the point of distraction from the primary business at hand.
And indeed there emerged new ventures that did not depend
upon traditional patronage, such as Josiah Wedgwood's heavy investment in
neoclassicism – not, of course, the neoclassicism that literary historians
associate with
Dryden,
Pope, and Swift, but a late-eighteenth-century visual fashion with no
significant stylistic counterpart in the mainstream of British Romantic writing
of that period. (The neo-Hellenism of the younger generation of Romantic
writers is a good deal later and very differently formulated.)
In employing artist and sculptor John Flaxman to create spare and elegant
neoclassical designs for his pottery, Wedgwood cleverly capitalized on the
commercial advantages of an international style. It was radically simple and
adaptable, it leveraged the prestige and authority of the Greek-centered (and
anti-British) histories of art developed by Continental critics such as Winckelmann, and hence it traveled extraordinarily well
(see figure 11.5). In such a project as Wedgwood's copy of
the Portland
(or Barbarini) vase – here engraved by Blake for
Wedgwood's friend Erasmus Darwin's Economy of Vegetation (1791) – we can glimpse something of the
complex intersection and divergence of literary and visual cultures that a term
such as "neoclassicism" can cover. Wedgwood's immensely successful merchandizing of visual
neoclassicism through Flaxman's designs for Wedgwood ware is one interesting strand; it was Flaxman who first urged
Wedgwood to come to London to see the Portland vase. The double
appropriation of neoclassicism by reactionary and radical politics is another;
the radical side is represented here by the implicit proximity of the radical
intellectuals Darwin,
Wedgwood, Priestley, et al., but the circle of evidence stretches much further,
from George III's employment of Benjamin West
to the Revolution's employment of Jacques-Louis David. The British literary
background is quite different: there "neoclassic"
is conventionally treated as the opposite of "Romantic" and calls to
mind Dryden and Pope, not Wordsworth. And yet one only has to name the Elgin (Parthenon) marbles
for which painter Benjamin Haydon lobbied so
intensely, Keatsian Grecian urns, Shelleyan
grecophilia, and Byron's sponsorship of Dryden and
Pope to see that the mutual infiltration of visual and literary neoclassicisms
is one of the most tantalizing, least exhausted sister-arts topics in all of
British Romanticism.
Far more often than they collaborated with potters and other
artisans, however, visual artists attempted to join forces with writers.
Earlier I made the point that the technological basis of word-production and
image-production caused a lack of coordination that made intimate relations
difficult. It also had serious consequences in marketing. The relative
efficiency of letterpress printing and the inefficiency of engraving defeated
one of the most promising marketing gambits
of the era – the attempt to tie the fortunes of British images to the
prestige of British words. This is clearest in the 179os, in British imagemaking the
decade of the "gallery," a marketing experiment
constructed from more or less familiar components.
"Alderman" John Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery, conceived in the mid-178os and opened with great fanfare in 1789, was the most important of several
gallery projects of the decade, including Macklin's Poets' Gallery, inaugurated
in 1788 and followed by Macklin's Bible project in 1790, pain-ter Henry Fuseli's Milton Gallery the same year, and
Bowyer's Historic Gallery in 1792. (Only Fuseli's Milton Gallery
was to consist of paintings by a single artist.) Boydell's
was the most elaborately planned of these ventures in artistic opportunity
based on commercial speculation rather than aristocratic patronage and thought
perhaps to be particularly well suited to the British genius for trade. Indeed,
just before the opening of the Gallery and three months before the fall of the
Bastille, a crowd of dignitaries including Edmund Burke, Joshua Reynolds, and
the Prince of Wales toasted Boydell as the
"Commercial Maecenas" (after the Roman patron of Horace and Virgil),
"an English tradesman, who patronizes the art better than the Grand Monarque of France."'
The marketing nucleus of his project was simple and entirely
conventional: exhibit a painting (one
either commissioned for the purpose, or one to which the reproduction
rights have been purchased) and take orders ("subscriptions")
for engraved prints of the painting, with the printseller
stationed at the commercial intersection of painter, engraver, and customer. In
the 17705 and 8os Boydell
had built Britain's
most successful printselling business by effectively
applying this formula to popular paintings. In the 1790s he elaborated it into the logic of a multidimensional
"gallery" in several ways, as follows.
He sold a theme instead of a single painting, thus multiplying
both the number of related products available to the consumer (in the familiar
commercial form of a "set" or "series"),
and he sold in multiple formats to attract buyers with a range of disposable
income. He chose a theme that could sell
British images by selling Shakespeare, that is, by standing them on the
strong shoulders of British literature. He increased his international
opportunities by choosing the British wordsmith with the best international
reputation – Italy had Jesus
and the saints for their paintings, Britain had Shakespeare – and
adding to his difficult language images that would increase his legibility, as
it were, even to foreign consumers. At the same time, cautious not to allow the
words to seem a mere excuse for the pictures, Boydell
projected the most authoritative edition of Shakespeare ever.
On the home front he sold
the crisis of British art by appealing to national shame and pride,
hammering on the familiar themes of British art history – obstructed
aspirations, chronic neglect, unsympathetic criticism from the Continent, etc.:
In this progress of the fine Arts, though
Foreigners have allowed our lately acquired
superiority of Engraving,...yet they have said with
some severity...that the abilities of
our best Artists are chiefly employed in painting Portraits...While the noblest part of the Art — HISTORICAL PAINTING — is
much neglected. To obviate this
national Reflection was, as I have already hinted, the principal cause
of the present undertaking.4
Boydell exploited the stock opposition between portrait painting – associated
with commerce, the gratification of personal vanity, and the low aims of English art – and history painting by designing a
project that could produce, at one level, history paintings,
theoretically the highest and most celebrated but practically the most expensive
and most neglected genre, but sell them, at another level, through the popular
medium of book illustration, which was, with
portraiture, one of the two mature areas of the British market. The
Shakespeare Gallery would thus display history paintings but sell book
illustrations.
Boydell embodied in himself the
promise of "this progress in the fine Arts." Claiming that
his previous projects had won international recognition for the slighted English School of Engraving, he would now turn his attention
to the English School of Painting. The number of
painters and engravers he could involve allowed him to speak as the collective
voice of the English
School and to sell his
project as a public service rather than a private speculation. Hence he decorated and furnished the Shakespeare Gallery as
a mock-public institution, complete with dignified facade and
commissioned sculpture in Pall Mall,
entirely apart from his own printshop in Cheapside (sec figure 11.6). As the Royal Academy lent reality to the British School in
one way, Boydell's Shakespeare Gallery attempted to
lend it reality in another, by presenting itself architecturally in
quasi-institutional form – and indeed, after the Boydell
lottery in 1805, the Gallery building
was immediately taken over by the new British Institution, which built a
collection and sponsored thematically organized exhibitions and competitions.
To the extent that its activities overlapped the Academy's, it was a
competitor, despite its own declarations to the contrary. Cultivating the role
of public benefactor, Boydell
declared that he would eventually give the Gallery to the nation.
After
more than a decade, Boydell's exciting
venture reached the begin‑
Figure 11.6 S. Rawle, View of the Shakespeare Gallery, etched
frontispiece to the European Magazine vol.
46, 1804.
ning of the end by 1800, the year of the second edition of
Wordsworth and Coleridge's Lyrical
Ballads – the end of an era for the visual arts, the beginning of
one for literature. In maximizingAhe
economic-advantages-of his project to so many groups, Boydell
necessarily maximized the areas in which failure could occur and the span of
time over which it might occur. Ile died in December 1804, and the next month,
January i8o5, with Parliament's permission, the Gallery and all its contents
were sold off by lottery, a total commercial failure. (None of the other
gallery projects fared any better.) Boydell publicly
blamed the French Revolution and Jacobin politics for vandalizing, as he said,
his markets. No doubt there was something to that, and certainly the advantages
of art as an international commodity had turned into temporary disadvantages
during the Revolution and its aftermath.
But
the Achilles' heel of the Shakespeare Gallery lay in the rift
between its images and its words. Boydell had
to allow the slowest component in the technological mix, the engraved
reproductions, to set the pace for the whole. The more he tried to speed up the
copying by using efficient methods, such as "dotting"
(stipple engraving), the more his project took on the look of a cheap
commercial job and retreated from its claim to being a dignified exercise in
national artistic prestige. But the slowness of more prestigious "line"
engraving was legendary. Fancy line engravings could take years – to the
despair of painters who pinned their hopes on the sale of reproductions. In
earlier years and simpler circumstances, most famously in publishing the print of West's Death of Wolfe, Boydell had exploited line engraving as well as anyone could (see
figure 11.7). Behind both painting and
engraving lie strong workshop traditions of dividing labor among a master and
assistants, unlike anything in the customary production of poems and novels.
The only reason Woollett's engraving took merely five years was that assistants did the preliminary work; if Woollett had engraved the Wolfe from start to finish, West and Boydell
might have waited much longer. As it was, the very profitable engraving boosted
the reputations of all three men considerably. For Boydell
it was an important step along the way to the Shakespeare Gallery. But on a far
larger scale and in a had market, Boydell
simply could not coordinate the key elements of his project. It spun out of
control and fell into the abyss between literature and the visual arts.
The Shakespeare Gallery building in
Pall Mall was quickly refurbished and reopened in a matter of months as the new
British Institution, a self-proclaimed
supplement to the Royal
Academy in the durable
crisis of British picturemaking. A new wave of
lament and analysis began: "the Arts of Design in England...are
declared to be in danger of perishing for ever. They
stand therefore on the brink of splendour or
annihilation; they plead before a profoundly reflecting nation; they
demand a trial."5 Immediately Boydell
began to acquire his mythical status as a merchant-hern_vanquished_by French radicals – following
the familiar narrative of achievement thwarted by foreign intervention – and the last quarter of the eighteenth century
began to be seen nostalgically as an era of superlative promise.
Engraver John Landseer was stopped from lecturing on the history of British
engraving when it became clear that he was going to blame its problems on Boydell. New cries for government support went up, old
proposals for public art projects were dusted off and new ones put forward,
usually in the familiar language of inferiority, announcing projects that
promise to "save every true Englishman the painful feeling of being
surpassed by our active rival France."6
In his Inquiry of 18o6 – the year after the Boydell
lottery, but also the year after a rousing demonstration of British naval power at Trafalgar –
Prince Hoare in a letter to the True
Briton called for reconsideration of a Royal Academy scheme that
painter John Opie had first presented in 1800: the
Gallery of British Honour, a great circular naval monument modeled on the "Pantheon
at Rome." Large pieces of sculpture – Neptune
paying homage to Britannia, a statue of George III – would set the mytho-political tone, while in a series of compartments
around the circle statues of naval heroes would alternate with paintings of
victories. The monument would inculcate patriotism with a visceral sublimity,
giving "pleasure" through the "terror and admiration"
of "Britain's
thunder" – "fire, water, wind, and smoke, mingled in
terrific confusion": "In the midst, British valour
triumphantly bearing down all opposition, accompanied by humanity...ready to succour the vanquished foe!"7
The Gallery of British
Honour was no isolated proposal but one episode in
the continuing effort to locate the polite arts advantageously in the economy,
and more particularly in the effort to create viable formats for public art
education, government patronage, and commercial display, three aims that had always been closely linked in the
history of efforts to establish a British School. The direction changed
somewhat, swerving away from Enlightenment-style internationalism and
eclecticism. In these years British art tried hitching its fortunes to the
British lion of military adventure, Nei‑
son, Wellington, and all that, with exhibitions
organized on military and imperial themes, and government-sponsored contests to
commemorate the new heroes of empire (see figure 11.8). The French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars strengthened
the motivation to find artistic work in patriotic, nationalistic,
militaristic, and imperialistic subjects. In 1799 John Flax-man
entered a competition to design a naval monument to commemorate British
victories over the French (Blake engraved Flaxman's designs), and Gillray half-parodied, half-entered the competition himself
with the design reproduced here. There were numerous other ideas developed at
the inter-section of artistic opportunity and affairs of empire. Flaxman
designed a Trafalgar vase and a statue of Nelson. Prince Hoare revived John Opie's proposal for a Gallery of British Honour in 18o6, while others urged that St. Paul's Cathedral be turned
into the British Pantheon. Such programs pro-vide a context for understanding
such widely separated events as Blake's paintings of Nelson and Pitt
(exhibited 1809–1o), his 1809 proposal
for a "portable Fresco" – "I could divide Westminster
Hall, or the walls of any other great Building, into compartments and ornament
them with Frescos, which would be removable at pleasure"
(Poetry and Prose, p. 527) – and Benjamin Haydon's
proposal to have British artists decorate the Houses of Parliament, rebuilt
after the fire of 1834, with scenes from British history. The notion that the
prosperity of the Italian and French Schools of Painting had rested substantially on a
kind of state "encouragement" that had been
missing in Britain is a key
theme in the discourse of the British
School from at least the
176os, when a group of painters promoted, unsuccessfully, the idea of having
British artists decorate Westminster Abbey. Such revealing events as the
government's purchase of the Parthenon frieze sculptures – the
"Elgin Marbles" – in 1816, for which Benjamin Haydon campaigned so strongly, and the founding of the
National Gallery (housed in a building, constructed 1832–8, that it shared for
thirty years with the Royal Academy), to which George Beaumont donated his
important picture collection, were all promoted in large part through the stock
discourse of the British School, adjusted to exploit the newly felt privileges
and obligations of an imperial power.
And new, perhaps Romantic, theories
and histories of painting begin to appear with revised hopes based on new
themes amalgamating nationalism with
individualism. Hazlitt, for instance, writes strongly for the genius of the
individual painter and against the Royal
Academy exhibitions and
training programs that, he said, diffuse taste and skill without improving
them.' The
older history of art in
Britain,
emphasizing its successes in emulating eclectic international styles
through painters such as Joshua Reynolds, begins to give way gradually to
claims for the unique national genius of British painting. In Allan
Cunningham's-Lives of the-Most —Emtitcit British Fainters, Reynolds's role as father of
the British School is downplayed in favor of
"the truly English and intrepid spirit of Gainsborough," whose
paintings have a national look.' In this historical
climate Hogarth, previously vulnerable to criticism for a lack of skill and for
isolation from Continental traditions, begins to emerge as the previously
suppressed first term of an emphatically British
British art. Sometimes, as in the
theorizing of John Constable, the old claims for the poetic nature of painting
give way to scientific claims for painting as an applied optics that would
accord better with Britain's reputation for native scientific and
technical aptitude: "In such an age as this, painting should be
understood, not...considered
only as a poetic aspiration, but as a pursuit, legitimate, scientific, and mechanical."10
The institutional
embrace
I have stressed how little traffic there was between Blake and
the other poets at the core of British Romanticism. The only work any of the
Romantic poets knew of Blake's was the Songs
of Innocence and of Experience, which Coleridge and
Wordsworth read because an acquaintance who owned a copy wanted to know what
they thought. Although both were apparently alerted in advance that they were
reading the poems of a probable lunatic, they responded favorably, if
condescendingly. As poetry experts, both treated the (illuminated) Songs chiefly as occasions for reading
not spectatorship, but in any case sought out no more of the work of this
strange outsider. Though Blake read some Wordsworth and addressed his final
illuminated book, The Death of Abel (1822), to Byron the author of Cain, if Byron, Shelley, or Keats ever
heard of Blake at all they left no record of it.
Yet today, in the house of British
literature, we are called upon to recognize that Blake "is"
a "poet," one of the usually six "major"
poets of this particular national branch of Romanticism. Meanwhile, one of the
most interesting facts about the history of visual art that Blake joined is how
small a part he has played in it, and what great resistance his work has faced,
"an anomaly in the history of painting even though he is now
rightly seen as a central figure in poetic history." Given the sociointellectual distance between Blake and his literary
peers, how is it that we have crossed that distance to rehouse
this artist-engraver with these poets? The most important answer, for relations
between literature and the visual arts, involves the key issue of specialized
institutional memories. The tendency toward specialization is, verging on
paradox, very often accompanied by the tendency toward imperialism by which
everything, including the messages from other institutions, gets
translated into the terms of the institutional discourse. Usually this
translation seems innocent enough: as a falling apple may be consulted for its physical interest by a
physicist, so a poet (like Coleridge, like Blake) may be consulted for
philosophical, psychological, or theological interest by philosophers,
psychologists, or theologians. An argument over Blake's cultural
location may seem idle, then, unless we remember that the messages sent from
that location may take editorial form.
Wrote Henry Crabb
Robinson of Blake in his diary: "And of' his poetical & pictorial
genius there is no doubt I believe in the minds of judges – Wordsworth &
Lamb like his poems & the Aders his paintings"
(Blake Records, p. 313n). This segregation has typified efforts to
send, retrieve, and evaluate Blake's work. Earlier, in discussing
the word- and image-content of Jerusalem, I emphasized the powerful element of
choice left to the reader–spectator when it comes to favoring words or imagery.
This choice may be made at the level of the choosing individual but also at the
level of institutions. It emerges prominently in the history of' Blake's
reputation, which is the most interesting institutional history among the
Romantic "poets" largely because it involves a startling
conversion across institutional borders. '
Blake invested his life's work in
two separate institutions, but far more heavily in the visual than the verbal, and he made his investments from the cultural location of the
visual. This double investment paid off, I should add, but only posthumously,
over the long term through the actions of what we sometimes call posterity.
During his life and for several decades afterward, the double investment
provoked a kind of cultural confusion that had to be waited out and sorted
through. As his contemporary audience was dominated by spectators rather than
readers, and as he died a minor visual artist working in a minor art,
surrounded by other artists, his vocational position was, understandably, taken
for granted. Frederick Tatham, faced with the task of selling the only copy of Jerusalem that Blake ever colored (copy E, the "Mellon"
copy), advertised it the best way he knew how, as a set of "Expressive"
and "sublime" prints looking for an
appreciative buyer. He perceived
the
words and pictures of Jerusalem not as a complementary pairing but as an "heterogeneous"
embarrassment, "lofty" images drowning in a sea of "ridiculous"
words. He discouraged reading and recommended looking because he assumed that the
lookers would be his buyers.
Blake was never, as
is sometimes thought, forgotten as an artist. But the key to his
twentieth-century reputation is his change of cultural venue. That begins
during his lifetime, with the anthologization of a
few of the Songs without
designs in printed collections, but the elements to make the change on a
significant scale do not come together until the later decades of the century,
when Swinburne, for instance, defines Blake as a poet whose images are perhaps
useful optical bait for novices but dispensable accessories for serious
readers. As Blake becomes something of a late-century fashion, projects to
publish expensive facsimiles that can recall his work in illuminated printing as illuminated printing affects a small
circle of the well heeled and visually
committed. But the kind of argument with which William Michael Rossetti
reacted against a facsimile of Jerusalem published
in 1877, that the handwritten script of the illuminated books impedes
understanding, was the dominant one: "the publication in
ordinary book-form, without designs, and without any attempt at facsimile of
text, of the Jerusalem and the other Prophetic Books,
is highly to be desired. Difficult under any circumstances, it would be a good deal less difficult to read
these works in an edition of that kind, with clear print, reasonable
division of lines, and the like aids to business-like perusal."12
This is a strong rationale for printing Jerusalem – and for reading it. Hence the events to watch were happening not in
the graphic-arts workshops but on the printing press, where Blake was being
reprinted as a poet of poems translated into the clarity of readable type.
The twentieth
century has experienced Blake primarily in such institutional translation. His
poetic reputation mounted swiftly and steadily as his sponsors piled up useful
connections between Blake and twentieth-century writing – Blake and the
modernists, Blake and the Beats, Blake and the critical theory of Northrop Frye.
He often served as a wild card to be added to any hand, always more quotable
than readable. His images, while not forgotten, were lifted clear of their
context in the visual arts of his time and relegated to the secondary place of
essential afterthought, the je-ne-sais-quoi factor that gives poets the tantalizing aura of
hermeneutic promise by making them seem larger than the reader's
experience of them. Meanwhile, the other Blake, the art-historical one, has
lived quite a separate, and a far quieter, institutional life as an odd-man-out
who makes an occasional appearance in histories of the graphic arts whose
reproductive function is largely ignored, and in histories of painting as they
pass through something resembling a Romantic period, or at least moment.
The strange passage of Blake from the visual to the verbal
column has distorted some of the most heroic attempts to understand him. I lis cultural location having been misplotted, all sorts of misunderstandings have followed
from using a bad map. It is not that Blake's Chaucer (the subject of an essay motivated by the need to explain a painting
and an engraving on display and for sale, and by debates about the
quality of British art) and Coleridge's Chaucer (the subject of notes and
lectures on the history of British literature) cannot be studied together for
mutual advantage. They must be studied together. Blake and Coleridge were not
speaking from hermetically sealed cultural compartments, but from very
different positions to think "Chaucer." The
problem is too fundamental to be solved by characterizing Blake as an
aberration, because in many fundamental ways he was not. The difficulties he presents for students of
literature and the visual arts are typical rather than anomalous,
whether the subject is Chaucer, neoclassical style, theories of artistic
harmony, production practices, commercial arrangements, politics, or religion.
Some dancing lessons
for the sister arts
The confidence
necessary to advance literature-and-visual-arts projects may be eroded by the
suspicion that all attempts to find firm footing are doomed from both sides:
from the certainty that words and pictures are sometimes so different that they
cannot be fruitfully combined, either for presentation (as art) or discussion
(as criticism), and from the certainty that words and pictures are sometimes so
much alike that they cannot be told apart. I see this as a political and
historical question like those encountered in studying nation-states, where the
welter of crossed and conflicted and discontinuous identities can make nonsense
of any firm notion of what it means to be "German" or
`Italian" without some very exact specifications. For, despite
all the obvious encouragements, like Blake's illuminated books, for attempting the broader view promised by literature and
the visual arts, unfortunately it has to be regularly confessed that
"We know how to connect English and French literature more precisely than
we do English literature and English painting"13 – or, for that
matter, more precisely than we know how to connect just about any
"literature" with any "painting," even when both are expressions of the same brain and hand on the same
surface. After all, words and pictures have been separated by some of
the deepest chasms, spanned by some of the least reliable bridges, in Western
culture, the very ones from which Coleridge warned of the "despotism
of the eye" (Biographia Literaria, I, 107), Byron declared repeatedly how
little he knew or cared about painting, "of all the arts...the most artificial
& unnatural — & that by which the nonsense of mankind is the most
imposed upon" (Letters and journals,
v, 213), and the old
Wordsworth, in his sonnet on "Illustrated Books and
Newspapers" (1846, Works, iv, 75), agitated gloomily over
the visual fixations of a younger
generation neglecting its books — "Must eyes be all in all, the tongue and ear
/ Nothing?" — a theme sounded many times since.
Only hopeless optimists would dream of being able to study literature and the
visual arts, or texts and images as we now more often say, together without
risking the consequences of studying over thin air.
We began on the side of the optimist
facing bad news. In the background looms a joke about the optimist who thinks
this is the best of all possible worlds and the pessimist who agrees. How to
avoid giving the pessimist the final say? If we start by acknowledging that "poetry"
and "painting" name two specialized activities carried out
under the aegis of specialized cultural institutions and understood in the tailored
terms of specialized languages, and that specialization has the indispensable
virtue of focusing the attention, we can
nonetheless end by acknowledging as well that, because focus on one
thing is always achieved at the price of distraction from others, the only kind
of study that can ever do any subject justice has to be dialectical,
alternating between moments of focused and unfocused attention, aspiring toward
higher levels of augmented and integrated attention.
When we study literature and the visual
arts, then, we look for points of contact, intersections, and even homologies,
but always in a context of contrasts and differences, with an appreciation of
the difficulties and an assessment of the complexities of the situation.
Furthermore, the study of literature and the visual arts will not be much more
satisfying than it now generally is until it more often enlarges its purview to
take in the histories of institutions, including the histories of crafts,
technologies, and social groupings. That would give us new hope of profitably
reopening the books on some of the vast
subjects — neoclassicism, the sublime, the picturesque — that have been
severely stunted by a too exclusive attention to words or pictures.
Earlier I remarked that many studies
of literature and the visual arts produce
results that can be, and have been, largely ignored outside the small
circle of scholars who do this sort of thing for a living. That is provocative
but simplistic because the neglect is not altogether just. It, too, is partly
the product of the very cultural divisions that keep texts and images apart,
repeated in this instance in the institutions charged with remembering, studying,
and teaching them. The only thing that gives us a prayer of ever capturing
an augmented Romanticism that could deal fully, which is to say sympathetically
but critically, with Blake, with Coleridge and Washington Allston, Wordsworth
and George Beaumont, Keats and Benjamin Haydon, not
to mention Wordsworth and John Constable or Shelley and J. M. W. Turner, is the
ability to entertain painfully in the mind at once two incompatible
propositions: the separability of words and pictures
had pro-found consequences in the Romantic period and has them now and the inseparability of words and
pictures had profound consequences in the Romantic period and has them now. (Which is not to suggest that the relation of words to images in the
Romantic period was what it is now or meant
what it does now.) The minute
one begins to slip into a one-way logic toward uncritical synaesthesias, organicisms, and global villages or, the other way, toward hypercritical ruptures and
discontinuities, the game, at least for the student of literature and the visual arts, is up. Unfathomable
abysses and transcendent unities are both mysteries, hence both
intolerable to critical intellects. What we
want are not unplumbable depths or heights but
bridges. They acknowledge the abyss,
offer views of it, and give us somewhere to go. The only way to extract
any critical energy from a deadening claim like Suzanne Langer's is to allow
and resist it. Against her quote Truffaut: "Neither with you, nor without
you" (The Woman Next Door, La femme d'd cote).
1 Mitchell, Iconologj: Image, Text, Ideology (University of
Chicago Press, 1986), p.. 43; Barrell,
The Political Theory ofPainting
from Reynolds to Hazlitt: "The Body of the Public" (New Haven and London: Yale
University Press, 1986), p. 223; Langer, "Deceptive Analogies:
Specious and Real Relationships among the Arts," Problems of Art (New York: Scribner's,
1957), p. 86.
2 Robert
N. Essick, William
Blake, Printmaker (Princeton University Press, r98o), and Joseph 1'iscomi,Blake and the Idea
of 'the Book (Princeton University Press, 1992).
3 Quoted
in Edmund Burke, The Correspondence of
Edmund Burke, ed. I-Iolden Furber (Cambridge University Press), v, 465.
4 Preface to the 1789 catalogue of the first exhibition in
the Shakespeare Gallery, quoted in Sven H. A. Bruntjen,
John Bopdell
1719–1804: A Study of Art Patronage and Publishing in Georgian London (New
York and London: Garland, 1985), p. 71.
5
Hoare, Inquiry
into the Requisite Cultivation and Present
State o/theArts
of Design in England (London, 1866), p. 263.
6 The
Examiner, May 13, 18io, 304; quoted in John Gage, "An
Early Exhibition and the Politics of British Printmaking, i800—i812," Print
Quarterly 6 (1989): 134.
7 Hoare,
Inquiry, pp. 47, 50—1
8 "Enquiry Whether the Fine Arts Are Promoted
by Academies and Public Institutions," in James Northcote, The Life
of Titian; with Anecdotes of the Distinguished Persons of His Time (London, 1830), u,
370—83 (appendix 8).
9 The Lives of the Most Eminent British
Painters, Sculptors, and Architects (London, 183o-46), t (1830): 356.
10 John Constable's Discourses, comp. and annot. R. B. Beckett (Ipswich: Suffolk Records Society,
1970), p. 69.
11 In
Harold Bloom, rev. of Martin Butlin, The Paintings and Drawings of IVilliao
Blake, in the New York Times
Book Review, January 3, 1982, p. 4.
12 Quoted in R.W. Peattie,
"William Michael Rossetti's Aldine Edition of Blake,"
Blake/An Il ustrated Quarterly 12 (1978): 7.
13 Mitchell, Iconology, p. 44.