Romanticism and the Visual (Routledge Studies in Romanticism)

Romanticism and Visuality

Routledge Studies in Romanticism 1. Keats’s Boyish Imagination Richard Marggraf Turley 2. Leigh Hunt Life, Poetics, Politics Edited by Nicholas Roe 3. Leigh Hunt and the London Literary Scene A Reception History of his Major Works, 1805-1828 Michael Eberle-Sinatra 4. Tracing Women’s Romanticism Gender, History and Transcendence Kari E. Lokke 5. Metaphysical Hazlitt Bicentenary Essays Uttara Natarajan, Tom Paulin and Duncan Wu 6. Romantic Genius and the Literary Magazine Biography, Celebrity, Politics David Higgins 7. Romantic Representations of British India Edited by Michael Franklin 8. Sympathy and the State in the Romantic Era Systems, State Finance, and the Shadows of Futurity Robert Mitchell 9. Thomas De Quincey New Theoretical and Critical Directions Edited by Robert Morrison and Daniel Sanjiv Roberts

10. Romanticism and Visuality Fragments, History, Spectacle Sophie Thomas

Romanticism and Visuality Fragments, History, Spectacle

Sophie Thomas

New York London

First published 2008 by Routledge 270 Madison Ave, New York, NY 10016 Simultaneously published in the UK by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2007. “To purchase your own copy of this or any of Taylor & Francis or Routledge’s collection of thousands of eBooks please go to www.eBookstore.tandf.co.uk.” Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business. © 2008 Taylor & Francis All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark Notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Thomas, Sophie, 1963– Romanticism and visuality : fragments, history, spectacle / Sophie Thomas. p. cm. — (Routledge studies in romanticism ; 10) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-415-96118-9 (hardback : alk. paper) 1. English literature—19th century— History and criticism. 2. Art and literature—Great Britain—History—19th century. 3. Visual perception in literature. 4. Imagination in literature. 5. Aesthetics in literature. 6. Romanticism--Great Britain. I. Title. PR468.A76T47 2007 820.9'357—dc22

ISBN 0-203-93782-1 Master e-book ISBN ISBN10: 0-415-96118-1 (hbk) ISBN10: 0-203-93782-1 (ebk) ISBN13: 978-0-415-96118-9 (hbk) ISBN13: 978-0-203-93782-2 (ebk)

2007020344

For Asa and Helen

Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments List of Illustrations 1

Introduction: Regarding Visuality—From the Picturesque to the Panorama

ix xiii

1

2

‘Shadows of a Magnitude’: Keats, Fragments, and Vision

20

3

The Fragment in Ruins

40

4

Seeing Past Rome: Ruins, History, Museums

68

5

Romantic Idealism and the Interference of Sight

95

6

Making Visible: The Diorama, the Double, and the Gothic Subject

115

7

Seeing Things (“As They Are”): Coleridge, Schiller, and the Play of Semblance 136

8

Vision and Revulsion: Shelley, Medusa, and the Phantasmagoria

Notes Bibliography Index

152 177 209 221

Preface and Acknowledgments

This study addresses the interrelationship between literature and visual culture in the Romantic period, and it investigates how seeing was itself viewed, both by those involved in creating visual spectacle and by those who responded by writing about the status of the visual in literary texts. It interrogates a number of disputes over how seeing should “show itself” that are central to our understanding of Romantic literature and culture, and it assesses the importance of the invisible, of what eludes sight, to the new configurations of the visible made possible by visual technology. The late eighteenth century appears remarkable to us now for the rapid and diverse expansion of the visual field, not only in the development of visual devices and entertainments that duplicated or fabricated encounters with the visual world, but also at the theatre, in the expanding market for art exhibitions, prints, and illustrated books, and even in connection with tourism associated with the rage for picturesque scenery. Moreover, the thriving popular culture of Regency Britain, with its phantasmagorias, panoramas, and dioramas, was driven not simply by the economic potential of newly profitable modes of mass entertainment, but also by a lively interest in the aesthetic and conceptual dimensions of looking. If at this time the English became a nation of “starers” I suggest that this was because the creation and control of the visual field was part of the novelty, part of what was being made and presented as spectacular. Daguerre’s Diorama, for example, with its clever creation of visual illusions, made its manipulations of the visible part of the show; and in many other contexts that I examine, both visual and textual, the act of seeing receives special emphasis by being itself represented or dramatized. The responsiveness of Romantic writers to the expanding field of the visual is important not only for the contentious debates it has fuelled over the relative value of the imagined (the visionary) in relation to the seen (the merely visible), but for the pervasive ambivalence that inflects treatments of the visual at this time. Anxiety about seeing arguably stands in for broader anxieties, such as those regarding historical truth and knowledge, and the purpose and longevity of art. Questions mediated by visual evidence, such as aesthetic illusion, the counterfeit and the status of the real, appear to have become more pressing, and more difficult to resolve in the wake of the new visual media. This interest

x Preface and Acknowledgments in the broader problems encapsulated and re-presented by the visual was also highly productive. I argue that what is commonly thought to be the Romantic resistance to the visible reveals a generative fascination with the visual and its conceptual as well as sensory—even spectacular—possibilities. While the individual chapters of this book are necessarily selective and address a range of discrete topics, they all contribute to a network of interrelated themes: representation, memory, fragmentation, time, and historicity. These themes are related to acts of “making visible” and are implicit in the attention throughout to the border between the visible and the invisible. Nowhere though is this border more potent than in instances of fragmentation and ruin, where an object (or indeed an idea) is simultaneously absent and present, engaging the viewer with a tangible and visible limit, beyond which she or he is invited but may not pass. Chapters in the earlier part of this study focus on ruins and fragments, and their attempts to make the past, or the historical, appear in the present. From the mock-ruins of the later eighteenth century, to views of Rome in the Romantic period, to the popularity of scenes of Gothic ruin at the Diorama, the visual material of these chapters is largely physical. In other chapters however, the literary engagement with the visual is emphasized, and the subjects of these chapters range from Wordsworth and Shelley’s different modes of visual idealism, to the staging of the visual in Coleridge’s play Remorse, to the figure of the Medusa in Shelley and at the phantasmagoria, to Keats’s exploration of vision and visibility in the Hyperion fragments. This study explicitly juxtaposes fragmentation and visuality, and argues that fragmentation and ruin relate closely to the visual in articulating questions about history and temporality, and in bringing Romantic preoccupations with the past into clearer focus. Portions of this study have been published elsewhere and I am pleased to be able to include them here. Part of Chapter 3 first appeared in European Romantic Review, 14:2 (2003), as “Assembling History: Fragments and Ruins.” My thanks go to Taylor & Francis for permission to reproduce it (http://www. informaworld.com). An earlier version of Chapter 6, “Making Visible: The Diorama, the Double, and the (Gothic) Subject,” was published electronically on the University of Maryland’s Romantic Circles website (2005). Chapter 7, “Seeing Things (‘as they are’): Coleridge, Schiller, and the Play of Semblance” first appeared in Studies in Romanticism, 43:4 (2004), and I would like to thank the Trustees of Boston University for permission to revise and reprint it. Finally, I am grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to incorporate into Chapter 2 some of the material from my article on the fragment in Romanticism: An Oxford Guide (2005). This book has benefited immeasurably from the support of many, individuals and institutions alike. Research funds and study leave granted by the School of Humanities at the University of Sussex made it possible to complete this work; and I would also like to acknowledge the British Academy, from whom I received a grant to cover the cost of the illustrations. For assistance with picture research, I would like to thank Lucy Jenkins. I would also like to

Preface and Acknowledgments

xi

thank the editorial and production team at Routledge, for their interest in the project and for their extraordinary efficiency and helpfulness. I am most deeply indebted however to the many people who have encouraged and supported this project, from its earliest forms to its current shape, and would like particularly to thank Lucy Newlyn, Paul Hamilton, Alan Bewell, Rebecca Comay, Anne Janowitz, Nicholas Roe, Mary Jacobus, Andrew Bennett, and Luisa Calè. The best parts of this work owe much to the interdisciplinary research culture at Sussex, and I would like to express thanks and appreciation to my colleagues, some of whom have heard, read and commented on segments of this research over recent years: Vincent Quinn, Laura Marcus, Nick Royle, Lindsay Smith, Jenny Taylor, Vicky Lebeau, and Steph Newell. For their incisive reading of the entire manuscript, and a wealth of constructive advice, I owe a deep debt of thanks to Nigel Llewellyn, Christopher Rovee, and Julian Patrick. Many friends have made this work possible, in personal and often practical ways, and I would particularly like to thank Judy Hirshorn, Penny Lock and Emilia Bolin Ransom for unstinting support. My family has of course been the longest suffering, and any thanks offered here are paltry in comparison to what I have received, from my parents and siblings, from my partner and children. Asa and Helen have put up patiently with a distracted mother, and sustained me in turn with their charm, inventiveness, and humour. To Julian, for love, friendship and intellectual collaboration over many happy years, I owe everything.

List of Illustrations

Figure 1.1.

Figure 1.2.

Figure 1.3.

Figure 3.1.

Figure 3.2.

Figure 3.3.

Figure 3.4.

William Gilpin, A Picturesque View of Tintern Abbey. From Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770 (London, 1782). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

9

Claude Glass. V&A Images / Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

11

Robert Mitchell, Section of the Rotunda, Leicester Square, in which is exhibited the Panorama. Coloured aquatint from his Plans and Views in Perspective, with Descriptions of Buildings Erected in England and Scotland (London, 1801). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

15

Leptis Magna ruins, Virginia Water. Author’s photo.

41

Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Capriccio of Roman Monuments. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

45

Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Imaginary Gallery of Ancient Roman Art [Galerie de vues de la Rome Antique]. Louvre Museum, Paris. Photo RMN / © René-Gabriel Ojéda.

46

Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Design for the Ruin Room at SS Trinità dei Monti, Rome. c. 1766. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

46

xiv

List of Illustrations

Figure 3.5.

Figure 3.6.

Figure 3.7.

Figure 3.8.

Figure 3.9.

Figure 3.10.

Figure 3.11.

Figure 3.12.

Figure 3.13.

Figure 3.14.

Figure 4.1.

Robert Adam, Trompe l’oeil composition of sketches of Roman ruins, c. 1759. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

47

Richard Wilson, Ruined Arch in Kew Gardens, c. 1761–1762. The Trustees of the late Sir R. B. Ford. Photograph: John Webb.

51

Hubert Robert, Project for remodeling of the Grand Galerie of the Louvre, 1796 [Projet d’aménagement de la Grand Galerie du Louvre]. Louvre Museum, Paris. Photo RMN / © Gérard Blot / Jean Schormans.

54

Hubert Robert, Imaginary View of the Grand Galerie of the Louvre in Ruins, 1796 [Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre en ruines]. Louvre Museum, Paris. Photo RMN / © Gérard Blot / Jean Schormans.

55

Joseph Gandy, View of the Interior of the Rotunda of the Bank of England, 1978. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

56

Joseph Gandy, View of the Rotunda in Ruins, London, 1978. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

57

Dome area of the Sir John Soane Museum, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. Richard Bryant / arcaid.co.uk.

58

Joseph Gandy, View of the Monk’s Yard. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

59

George Basevi, View of the Ruins at Pitshanger, 1810. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

60

C. J. Richardson, Bird’s Eye View of Pitshanger Manor, 1832. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

61

Reclining Dionysus / Herakles. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

83

List of Illustrations Figure 4.2.

Figure 4.3.

Figure 4.4.

Figure 4.5.

Figure 4.6.

Figure 4.7.

Figure 4.8.

Figure 4.9.

Figure 4.10.

Figure 4.11.

Figure 6.1.

Figure 6.2

xv

William Chambers, Charles Townley’s House at Park Street. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

84

Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Imaginary Gallery of Modern Roman Monuments, 1759 [Galerie des vues de la Rome Moderne]. Louvre Museum, Paris. Photo RMN / © Thierry Le Mage.

86

J. M. W. Turner, The Colosseum by Moonlight, 1819. © Tate, London 2007.

87

Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Interior of the Colosseum. Veduta di Roma / Views of Rome, 1748– 1778. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

89

J. M. W. Turner, Ancient Rome; Agrippina landing with the ashes of Germanicus, 1839. © Tate, London 2007.

90

J. M. W. Turner, Modern Rome – Campo Vaccino, 1839. Private Collection on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland.

91

Samuel Palmer, A view of Ancient Rome, 1838. © Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.

91

Samuel Palmer, A view of modern Rome during carnival, 1838. © Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.

92

Arthur Ashpitel, Rome as it was, restored after Existing Remains, 1858. V&A Images / Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

92

Arthur Ashpitel, Rome as it is, from the Palatine Hill, 1859. V&A Images / Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

93

Diorama, Park Square, Regents Park: Plan of the Principal Story, 1823. Designed by A. [Auguste Charles] Pugin and built by J. Morgan.

118

J. L. M. Daguerre, double illustration of Alpine scene with chalet. Gernsheim Collection, Harry

xvi

List of Illustrations

Figure 6.3.

Figure 6.4.

Figure 6.5.

Figure 8.1.

Figure 8.2.

Figure 8.3.

Figure 8.4.

Figure 8.5.

Figure 8.6.

Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

126

J. L. M. Daguerre, double illustration of Alpine scene with chalet. Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

127

L. J. M. Daguerre, Ruins of Holyrood Chapel. © Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool.

129

Roslin Chapel. Engraving after a painting by L. J. M. Daguerre, published in The Mirror of Literature, 1826, Vol. 7, p. 129. © The British Library Board. All rights reserved (PP.5681).

131

Medusa, painted on a leather jousting shield, c. 1596–1598 (oil on canvas attached to wood) by Caravaggio, Michelangelo Merisi da (1571– 1610). © Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy / The Bridgeman Art Library.

154

Phantasmagoria Show, frontispiece to EtienneGaspard Robertson’s Mémoires récréatifs, scientifiques, et anecdotiques d’un physicien-aéronaute (Paris, 1830–1834). © The British Library Board. All rights reserved (RB.23.a.28291).

157

Medusa Head, hand-painted animated lantern slide. France, c. 1800, Collection of Laurent Mannoni. L. Mannoni, The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema (Exeter, UK: University of Exeter Press, 2000).

158

Paul de Philipsthal, 1802 Showbill. Reproduced courtesy of The Magic Lantern Society.

159

Thomas Rowlandson, The Contrast, 1792. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

163

William Dent, The French Feast of Reason, or the Cloven-Foot Triumphant, December, 1793. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

164

List of Illustrations Figure 8.7.

Figure 8.8.

xvii

Isaac Cruikshank, A Peace Offering to the Genius of Liberty and Equality, February 1794. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

165

Head of Medusa (oil on wood) by Flemish School (sixteenth century). © Galleria degli Uffizi, Florence, Italy / The Bridgeman Art Library.

166

1

Introduction Regarding Visuality—From the Picturesque to the Panorama

In his Salon of 1767, Diderot, under the briefest of titles—“Small, Very Small Ruin”—embarks upon an extended description of a painting by Hubert Robert. These are just the first sentences of a skilful verbal sketch that takes its reader through every imaginable visual detail of the work: To the right, the sloping roof of a shed set against a wall. Beneath this shed covered with straw, barrels, some of them evidently full and on their sides, others empty and upright. Above the roof, the remainder of the wall, damaged and covered with parasitic plants. To the extreme left, at the top of this wall, a bit of a columned balustrade in ruins.1

And in this vein he continues, as though conjuring it into being himself, designating for each element its rightful place: “On the balustrade a pot of flowers.” Or: “To the extreme left, the door of a house; within the house, leaning on the lower half of the door, a woman observing the activity in the street” (201). At first sight, so to speak, a comprehensive word-picture emerges of Robert’s painting. Diderot, however, uses this instance—it is not clear whether it is the painting or his description itself that is the subject of his reflections—as an example of the problems both of describing and of understanding, or comprehending, a description. The greater the number of details, he suggests, the greater is the difference between the actual image and the one imagined by the reader: a surfeit of detail obscures rather than clarifies the image. Diderot moves from these difficulties to a meditation on the difference between seeing and imagining, suggesting that the eye and the imagination “play across the same field.” But then again, he speculates, perhaps it would be more accurate to state that “the field of the imagination is inversely proportioned to that of the eye” (202). These are important reflections, not only for their attempt to think through the relation of the visible to the imaginary, but because the audience for whom Diderot was writing did not and probably would not ever see the original artworks for themselves. His Salon commentaries were thus a substitute, a supplement, for sight, and as Thomas Crow has argued, this absence or disappearance of the object “announces”

2

Romanticism and Visuality

the modern conditions of art viewing, which remain largely dependent on memory: full comprehension of the work of art can be arrived at only, he suggests, retrospectively, after its unfolding in memory, but also in recognition of the loss of the object.2 An invisible painting of a ruin—invisible, that is, to Diderot’s imagined reader—is a potent reminder of that distance. But this small (very small) narrative points in another, though related direction: to the way the question of the visible is shaped by the invisible, and with it, brings into view the limits of what can be perceived.

I It is the central contention of this study that representations of seeing, and displays of the “invisible,” speak for an acute interest in the conceptual and epistemological as well as cultural questions thrown up by vision and the visible at the turn of the nineteenth century. This book is not concerned with optics, or with the science of vision as such.3 Rather, it investigates a variety of instances in literature and visual culture where “seeing” becomes a preoccupation that is simultaneously material and thematic. In the Romantic period, this preoccupation takes on apparently distinct forms: in a thriving visual culture that trades on (and trumps) prevailing aesthetic models, and in a literary culture that, at first sight, denigrates the visual. The former, at least, is not an entirely new development in the period, for as Peter de Bolla’s work has shown, it was in the middle years of the eighteenth century that “the culture of visuality” became visible for the first time.4 Mid-eighteenthcentury Britain was obsessed, de Bolla argues, with “visibility, spectacle, display.” And this obsession is apparent in the extraordinary array of diversions available to the eighteenth-century spectator that he catalogues: public hangings (and other spectacles of punishment), theatrical performances, art exhibitions, masquerades, fireworks, dances, fêtes champêtres, scientific demonstrations, and much more.5 From portraiture to the visual entertainments of Vauxhall Gardens, looking becomes a more conscious and culturally inflected act, with a range of new practices and forms of representation: looking itself becomes visible. At the other end of the Romantic period, in Victorian Britain, a powerful fascination with the act of seeing persists. This is the territory charted by Kate Flint’s interdisciplinary study, The Victorians and the Visual Imagination, which examines many facets of the Victorians’ attitude toward sight, from scientific advances illuminating the relationship of eye to brain, to new optical instruments and technologies of spectatorship. Flint’s interest is as much in the problem of decipherment as in practices of observation: in an awareness of the limits of vision, and the tantalizing presence of the unseen, which even inventions such as the microscope and the photograph did little to resolve.6 Flint argues that a number of prominent Victorian preoccupations—from attention to physiognomy and related detail, to modes

Introduction

3

of symbolic realism evident in the paintings of the pre-Raphaelites and in literary texts such as those of Dickens and Eliot—broach the question of the invisible as much as they evince the importance of visibility, and the perhaps more prevalent drive toward specularity. Interest in the unconscious, in mysteries of identity, in what lies buried under cities such as London: all of these suggest a potent threat implicit in the presence of the invisible.7 Not to be able to see, moreover, evokes the domains of the imagination and of memory, which Flint suggests operated on Victorian sensibilities as a powerful legacy of Romanticism. Clearly, the turn toward the invisible that animated the nineteenth century—as a cultural preoccupation and a source of anxiety—has its roots in preceding decades. These decades, spanning roughly the period 1780 to 1825, saw increased attention to the place of the invisible, in the midst of an equally strong cultural investment in all things visible. The prominence of figurative and metaphoric uses of sight in literary texts of the period argues, moreover, for an interest in acts of seeing that intersected, often producing conflicting effects, with a correspondent interest in acts of the imagination. In the Romantic period, there is a more palpable antagonism between visual display and imaginative endeavour—an antagonism, however, that is not simply negative or combative, but generative. When Romantic texts are situated alongside emerging visual media, it becomes possible to “see” the impact made by the paradigms and procedures of visual modes on the writing of the period. However, this study further contends that those visual modes were conceived in terms that emphasized, in a thematic as well as material way, the very nature and limits of visuality. Adapting a formulation from W. J. T. Mitchell’s recent study, What Do Pictures Want?, I argue that what is at stake is how seeing itself should be seen—and shown.8 Recent studies have begun to explore the significance of prominent visual modes for larger cultural debates. Gillen D’Arcy Wood, for example, in The Shock of the Real, points to a widening gulf between Romantic theories of artistic production that emphasized original genius and an idealized view of the imagination, and a burgeoning visual culture industry that traded on mass reproduction, spectacle, and simulation.9 Wood argues that when viewed in this context, much Romantic aesthetic ideology is really a reaction not, or not only, to the Enlightenment rationalism of the eighteenth century, but to the coming into being of the visual culture of modernity, with the profound and at times perplexing paradigm shifts that it produced. It was, he argues, the growing bourgeois taste for visual novelty and spectacles of the “real” that prompted the largely negative high-brow reaction to the mimetic representationalism of displays such as “Belzoni’s Tomb,” mounted at Bullock’s London Museum in 1821. This popular exhibition, after which the museum was renamed the “Egyptian Hall,” staged a lurid and sensational mock-up of tombs, statues, and sarcophagi recently excavated from the Valley of the Kings. The eye of the visitor was gratified by a thrilling and extravagant simulacrum of the real, rather than by a disinterested display

4

Romanticism and Visuality

of art divorced from historical context and setting, as one might encounter it at the more up-market Elgin Marbles Gallery, newly opened in the British Museum (2). It was, Wood argues, precisely in the face of widespread public fascination with mimic entertainments such as this that Coleridge emphatically dismissed “simulations of nature” as “loathsome” and “disgusting” (3); the deceptions of a copy or “Fac Simile” of the real were not only disappointing, but at an extreme, potentially “shocking.” Technologically contrived illusionism, such as that of the panorama and the diorama, revealed a complex fascination with reality effects and simulated experience that was often aligned with vulgar visual novelty. And yet this is only one side of the coin. As I argue in Chapter 7, Coleridge, in staging Remorse, displays a profound interest in the epistemological and aesthetic “play of semblance” that theatrical illusion makes possible, and embraces rather willingly the sensational new contrivances of Georgian stagecraft. The relationship of visual deception to the ethical rehabilitation of the play’s villain in Remorse is not simply a theme, but a self-conscious feature of the play’s (visual) proceedings. Much of the apparently negative reaction to mimetic representationalism, on the part not only of Coleridge but of his contemporaries, derived from a strong sense of what form aesthetic illusion, properly speaking, should take—and expressed an investment in an ideal visuality, one might say, rather than antivisuality as such. Coleridge’s apparent repudiation of the visible in the form of sensational realism is part of a wider resistance to the visible that is also explored by William Galperin, who argues in The Return of the Visible in British Romanticism that “the visible is the central and unrivalled repressed of romanticism.”10 The visible or material world is no sooner seen, he claims, than it is imaginatively appropriated—as, for example, in the poetic subjectivity dramatised by Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” that “half-perceives and half creates.” The effect of that imaginative appropriation, by which the visible becomes the Freudian “familiar thing that has undergone repression,” mandates its return, a return that can only destabilize the mind’s apparent mastery of the real. The visible is not merely absent from (or, an absence in) the aesthetic ideology of high Romanticism, but is rather that something “whose essential nothingness is both provisional and, paradoxical as it sounds, foundational” (4). The mechanisms by which Galperin shows the visible erupting or returning under pressure of resistance have been shaping forces in our understanding of the period. And yet, engagement with the visible, even in its absence, is everywhere in Romanticism, and not only as a kind of negative index or symptom. I agree that the repudiation of the visual masks a far more complex relation to visuality than first “appears,” but with one important caveat. The visual doesn’t simply return in the Romantic period like that repressed other, but is made. Its apparent basis in the “real” is one of the important things that Romantic engagements with the visual interrogate, and indeed this period may be seen as a transitional

Introduction

5

moment in which visibility as a construct achieves both cultural prominence and ideological force. The attempt to think about Romantic literature through its relation to the visual, and to dominant visual motifs, is a central feature of other studies, such as Jacqueline Labbe’s Romantic Visualities.11 The politics of the prospect view, that staple of loco-descriptive poetry, is thoroughly interrogated by Labbe for its (not always so visible) gender- and class-based presuppositions. Building on John Barrell’s work on landscape and authority in the eighteenth century, Labbe elaborates two contrasting viewing positions that reflect a “gendered dichotomy based on a culturally constructed difference in perception—in visuality” (ix). The first is that of the prospect, the eminence from which the poet surveys a landscape, and it suggests the enlarged vision and depth of understanding with which education and class underwrite a rationalist and masculinist point of view. Set against this is the occluded or partial view typical of the bower, which is the haunt of the disenfranchised, and particularly of women: the space enclosed by the landscape that can be surveyed (only) in its details, and from within. The contrast between physical location and the imaginative placement of the poetic I, or between the proprietary eye and the literary eye, shows that these are neither exclusive nor identical, and Labbe investigates the manipulation of these prominent subject positions by writers of both genders. Labbe’s study is only one example, however, of how visual paradigms can structure specific readings of Romantic texts. Anne McWhir, comparing Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to her later novel, The Last Man, suggests contrasting visual modes characteristic of each novel. For Frankenstein, the visual analogue is the portrait, “perhaps with a doubled or mirrored subject,” while the scope and content of The Last Man evokes the apocalyptic panorama of John Martin’s paintings.12 The relationship between painting, literature, and culture is taken up at length in Christopher Rovee’s Imagining the Gallery: The Social Body of British Romanticism, where he finds in visual culture, and in the “symbolic and social valences” of portraiture specifically, an “index” to the reimagining of the national community in Romantic Britain.13 Rovee investigates the shared culture of texts and portraits in the period, attending specifically to how the social body, “glimpsed partially in mass-exhibited and often mass-produced portraits, gets reimagined as an object of representation and of collective fantasy” (8). Portraiture is shown to be an important conceptual category, and a powerful metaphor, as well as a “ubiquitous form of print culture” (10). The space of the exhibition gallery becomes central to the articulation of this emergent visual, and social, paradigm, and a gage of its impact on the body politic. The full range of exhibitions, displays, and spectacles on view at the end of the eighteenth century has been documented in detail by Richard Altick’s rich compendium, The Shows of London. That looking had become, as noted above, highly mediated and self-conscious, is particularly evident in how it became itself the focus of numerous visual representations: in

6

Romanticism and Visuality

the often satiric prints of the crowded summer exhibitions at the Royal Academy, in prints of the printshop window and those crowding around to inspect the new images on display, in prints of exhibitions such as Napoleon’s carriage in Bullock’s London Museum, with its swarms of visitors obscuring the object of sight itself.14 Looking had also become the subject of well-documented controversy. If, as Edward Bulwer argued in 1831, England had become a “Staring Nation,” its population fascinated by an explosion of visual media, we know—or think we know—that a certain literary elite fastidiously distanced itself from the easy allure of the visual.15 Others however have argued for a more generative conflict between visuality and textuality, spectator and reader, particularly Luisa Calè in her work on Fuseli’s Milton Gallery.16 Beginning suggestively with Sergei Eisenstein’s work on montage culture and the archaeology of film, and what it can teach us about reading Milton visually, Calè’s approach to the literary galleries examines how the burgeoning exhibition culture of late eighteenth-century London refined the interaction between the visual and verbal, and turned, in Fuseli’s phrase, readers into spectators.17 Part of her achievement is to reassess the place of the visual in the act of reading, and to consider from an intermedial perspective the role of exhibitions in the “production, reading and adaptation of literature” (10); but the most critical point is perhaps that spectators at the literary galleries became collaborators, whose new “reading” skills were honed by the experiments and expectations of other visual entertainments. This study investigates further the potent cross-currents between popular visual culture and the discourse of the visual in literary contexts, and I contend that the division between literature’s apparent emphasis on the imagination over spectacle, often configured as a form of idealism versus materialism, is not at all clear-cut. This is especially evident in instances where the visual takes itself as its subject, and where it thus involves elements of intensification and doubling, as well as repudiation. In broader terms, the anxiety (as well as the excitement) that surrounds visual subjects, and the subject of the visible, is examined—especially when the encounter engages the border between the visible and the invisible. Here, an epistemology of vision comes into play that emphasizes the role of the imagination in structuring perception. In Chapter 6, for example, I argue that there is an intriguing correspondence between the technology of the diorama and its choice of gothic subject matter. Marina Warner has since argued, in Phantasmagoria, that the supernatural lexicon earlier employed by magic-lantern images, which cleverly connoted “the visions of the mind’s eye,” reveals “an intrinsic unexamined equivalence between the technology of illusion and supernatural phenomena.”18 From the earliest seventeenthcentury engravings of the lantern in action, the projected images commonly featured supernatural beings, leering devils, dancing skeletons, and so on, a subject matter that is carried over into the phantasmagoria, the subject of the final chapter of this study. Warner suggests that this hallucinatory

Introduction

7

subject matter, overdetermined by the “icasms” of the mind’s eye, informs the paradox of “darkness visible” that the technology of the lantern itself illuminates. In a broader sense, however, the visual technologies of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries are “projections” of a view of the visible that is at once self-exploring and self-constituting. This fit, to put it crudely, between form and content is captured as effectively by the appearance of the Medusa at the phantasmagoria as in an ekphrastic poem. The self-reflexive paradigm out of which visuality is generated in the Romantic period can be extended to include subjects treated by many of the chapters of this study: in the way, for example, that a painting inhabits the theatre for Coleridge, illuminating anxieties about dramatic illusion, or in how ruins become the image of invisible history in Rome, or how vision becomes the content of the visibly sculptural for Keats. In all these instances, there is a formative dialogue between the media and the material, the theorization and the fabrication of the visible. This would confirm the argument that seeing, or vision, is culturally constructed, and therefore caught up in the history of the mediation of the visual—in practices of display and spectatorship, and in the epistemologies of both seeing and being seen (Mitchell, 337). An important part of this history for this study, however, is related to how visual and literary culture in the period engages with what is inherently imaginative, and with what borders on the invisible. And more pointedly, with how the epistemology of the invisible functions as a secret counterpart to the visible, structuring it, conditioning it, even doubling it. For this reason, ruins and fragments occupy an important place in the first part of this study: they configure—visibly—a relationship between something present and something either out of sight or lost to view, and engage the imagination in supplementary ways. The next chapter, on Keats’s fragmentary Hyperion poems, functions to articulate and develop the connection between visuality and fragmentation. I would like to use the balance of this introductory chapter, however, to elaborate two different “visualizations” of sight that were popular at the end of the eighteenth century. The founding premises and viewing practices associated with the picturesque and the popular spectacle of the panorama relate explicitly to what might be called “sight-specific” viewing: both are instances of seeing that presuppose a representation of seeing. In the case of the picturesque, the standards of art dictate the “view” of the natural world, whereas in the panorama, the inverse holds true. Yet both represent the site of sight, so to speak, and both popularized viewing in a way that elicited, in literary circles, the resistance to the visible noted above.

II Much of this study investigates either directly or indirectly what one might call the Romantic textualization of the image, or of the imaginary. In a

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preliminary way, this question can be explored through a consideration of how the picture (recalling, for a moment, Diderot’s “small ruin”) conditions its verbal representation. The familiar premise of ut pictura poesis—as a painting, so also a poem—underwent a decisive modification in the eighteenth century, by which the evidence of direct visual perception came increasingly to condition aesthetic norms. The painter’s picture became, it has been argued, a paradigm for the “aesthetic intuition” that poetry achieves through words, and by which it produces “an illusion for the ‘eye of the soul,’ the imagination or ‘Einbildungskraft,’ which was tantamount to actual seeing.”19 This verbal image, moreover, was said to be more powerful than the visual image in its capacity to stimulate the imagination; nevertheless, the imagination’s representations were explicitly shaped by visualist criteria. In the privileged case of nature, privileged, that is, as the ideal content for an unmediated act of aesthetic intuition, a fascinating paradox emerges: while the aesthetics of illusionism strove toward an unmediated representation of the world, the view of nature it beheld was already, in any case, an image. This image of nature, as Schneider suggests, “offered itself to the spectator who, by claiming to be caught unawares by it, turned it into a hidden spectacle for his surprised eyes.”20 This paradox may also be understood as a circular relationship between the inner and the outer image, where there is not only a telling reciprocity, but a form of doubling, in cases where one becomes the subject of the other. Conventions of viewing as they evolved in eighteenth-century Britain tended to oscillate between a focus on nature and on art; and indeed the infection of one by the other is apparent in the increasing importance of nature as a subject for poetry and painting, and in the viewing of the landscape according to criteria drawn from painting and/or poetry. The actual act of seeing is readily metamorphosed, and metaphorised, into an act of imaginative and ideological significance: and thus it is that the natural world figures prominently in discussions of aesthetics throughout the eighteenth century and into the Romantic period. What exactly does the appreciation of natural beauty entail? According to Adorno, “For it, nature is exclusively appearance, never the stuff of labour and the reproduction of life, let alone the substratum of science. Like the experience of art, the aesthetic experience of nature is that of images.”21 Natural and artistic beauty are, in this way, “bound up”—as are shifting modes of perception. Scenery that had once evoked disgust (such as mountain scenery22) or even no reaction at all, becomes a source of delight in the eighteenth century, and Adorno links this to the technological domination of nature that occurs at the same time. The development of the theory of the sublime, which sought out at first hand the experience of the immensity and infinitude of nature, speaks volumes for this shifting view, but so, more pointedly, does the theory of the picturesque, which Wordsworth was to denounce in The Prelude as “a strong infection of the age.”23 Theories of the picturesque, in general, mediated between the more established aesthetic categories of the sublime and the beautiful, making a place for things that did not fit easily in either: the picturesque offered a new language

Introduction

9

for different kinds of sights, while emphasizing different standards for looking. The picturesque called for variety and contrast, and emphasized the effects of light and shade, the introduction of novelty, and a style of execution that was broad and free (see Figure 1.1). In his essay on picturesque beauty, William Gilpin argued that the picturesque perspective is on the whole broad and sweeping: “The province of the picturesque eye is to survey nature; not to anatomize matter. It throws its glances around in the broad-cast stile. It comprehends an extensive tract at each sweep. It examines parts, but never descends to particles.”24 Under the picturesque look, a “view” may be effectively defined as “the ‘portrait’ of a site, copied directly from nature.”25 Nature is translated or reconstructed pictorially: picturesque objects are not, Gilpin argues, those that please naturally (which are merely beautiful), but those containing a particular quality capable of illustration through painting (Gilpin, 3). Rough and rugged textures were to be preferred to the conventional beauty of smooth lines and classical structures; and thus, the objects of nature over those of art. In the theory of the picturesque, Adorno’s noted mediation of nature by art reaches its height. This was already, in fact, a feature of the alteration in taste that had transformed country estates over the course of the eighteenth century. The lines of this argument are familiar, beginning with eighteenth-century landowners whose sons embarked on the Grand Tour, bringing back paintings by Claude and Poussin from their continental travels, and with them, new ways of looking at landscapes. These were brought to bear upon their own estates, creating entirely new prospects along the

Figure 1.1. William Gilpin, A Picturesque View of Tintern Abbey. From Observations on the River Wye, and Several Parts of South Wales, &c. Relative Chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; Made in the Summer of the Year 1770 (London, 1782). Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection.

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lines of classical models.26 It is reductive perhaps, but not far from the mark, to argue that the so-called discovery of scenery, the evolution of the English idea of landscape, derives from the imitation of seventeenth-century Italian and Dutch painting. Indeed, there is an amusing moment in Tom Stoppard’s play Arcadia when a character asserts that “English landscape was invented by gardeners imitating foreign painters who were evoking classical authors. The whole thing was brought home in the luggage from the grand tour.”27 Paradoxically, the eighteenth-century landscape garden comes to epitomize the “arrangement of the scene of nature,” made to look most “‘like herself,’” but at the same time, to appear as a spontaneous presentation or offering to the human onlooker.28 The most surprising and natural-seeming vista is thus likely to be the most mediated, offering a dramatic simulation of nature. Along with the fashion for the picturesque came the phenomenon of the picturesque tour, for the picturesque not only transformed the home estate but led to the seeking out of (so-called) unspoiled nature in its own habitat. After war was declared against France in 1793, the domestic tour, of necessity, replaced the Grand Tour, particularly in scenic areas of Britain such as the Lake District, the Scottish Highlands, North Wales, and the Wye Valley. Domestic tourism was encouraged also by the newly popular guidebooks, such as Thomas West’s A Guide to the Lakes, where the convention of viewing a scene from a particular spot or station was established.29 Tourists re-created (visually, and at times perhaps slavishly) the experience represented and recommended by the text. Romantics writers, by contrast, are generally claimed to have been more drawn to the poetics of the sublime, and they were often scathing about the picturesque, largely because of its inherently imitative practices. The picturesque reflected aesthetic principles derived from a particular practice of painting, and depended on constraining visual criteria that were antithetical to the imaginative representation of experience. Interestingly though, the publication from which Wordsworth benefited most financially was not a volume of poems, but his Guide to the Lakes—a text accompanied in its first edition by a series of picturesque landscape engravings by the Reverend Joseph Wilkinson. The visual criteria that informed the picturesque included various framing devices and, most interestingly, the Claude glass. Named after Claude Lorrain, the seventeenth-century landscape painter, the Claude glass was a slightly convex black- or sepia-tinted mirror (Figure 1.2).30 Both tourists and artists used the Claude glass to reflect a landscape view, such that tonal values and gradations in light and shade became visible, with the result that the scene resembled a Claude painting. Gilpin recommended the use of the glass, on the grounds that it would give an object “a soft, mellow tinge like the colouring of that Master.”31 Moreover, distracting details and imperfections would be eliminated, while the mirror conferred on the whole an idealized and universal quality. This was thought to be helpful because of deficits in the physiology of vision: we cannot, Gilpin maintained, grasp

Introduction

11

simultaneously both the foreground and the background of a scene, or, both particular objects and an overall effect. The convex mirror, meanwhile, made it possible for the eye to examine “the general effect, the forms of the objects, and the beauty of the tints, in one complex view,” and to “survey the whole under one focus.”32 Claude mirrors (and glasses, about which more below) became popular optical accessories, but the mirror in particular has features that are highly suggestive in light of the interest in the relation of the visible to the invisible that I argue is central to debates and anxieties about the visual in the Romantic period. First, the mirror is a species of a black convex mirror, known as the “black mirror” not only for the colour of its backing (in the case of glass mirrors), or the compound from which it was made (in the case of polished coal or obsidian), but for its uses in black magic and necromancy. The deceptiveness of the convex mirror led to its long associations with the devil and with witchcraft, as Arnaud Maillet notes in his fascinating account of the Claude glass in the eighteenth century, but more precisely, the black mirror was used to make the visible and the invisible trade places: in the dark glassy surface, the normally visible world would recede into shadows, while out of the shadows emerged—it was claimed—the souls of the dead, who were conjured into view no matter where they were hidden. 33 Interest in the black mirror and its disturbing properties extends back to antiquity, from whence we have Pliny’s recorded response to a piece of polished obsidian: “This stone is very dark in colour and sometimes translucent, but has a cloudier appearance than glass, so that when it is used for mirrors attached to walls it reflects shadows rather than images.”34 As shadows and shades were associated with the dead and with absence, the mirror participates in a perceptual enigma. At a limit, visible images become the images of the invisible, as the normal properties of mirrors are inverted.35 In order to use the Claude mirror to the end advocated by the theorists of the picturesque, to concentrate and transform the features of a view that would otherwise escape the eye, the person looking into the mirror would

Figure 1.2. Claude Glass. V&A Images / Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

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no longer be looking at the landscape directly, but would in fact have turned away, which itself reverses the relationship between the visible and the invisible. The Claude mirror, however, is distinct from other kinds of “Claude glasses,” which are really tinted lenses through which one did look directly at a landscape. Differently coloured lenses filtered the light to create novel effects. For example, a yellow or “sunrise” glass cast a “reddish twilight” over a scene at noon, “‘without the obscuration of the morning mist’”; blueor grey-tinted glass would cast a distinctly lunar light over the same midday prospect.36 What this meant for tourists passing briefly by was the ability to transcend or even compress time: to experience diurnal or even seasonal effects all at once, or in rapid succession. The field of the visual could thus be manipulated in a manner that anticipated the effects created by the technology of the diorama. It also meant that the amateur or walker could “discover directly and accurately what a painter would have produced” (141), thus apparently usurping, mechanically, the artist’s function, or democratizing it. Clearly painting, or the search for painterly effects, conditioned how landscape could be viewed, rather than the reverse, in which nature would be taken as the model for art. The “picture” in picturesque has potentially self-consuming implications, and perhaps this, along with the diversity of simulated visual experience made possible with Claude mirrors and glasses, contributed to the increasing vagueness of the category “picturesque” by the early nineteenth century, and its decreasing popularity. The fall from favour of the Claude mirror, along with the prevailing regime of the picturesque, had much to do with a renewed emphasis, such as Constable’s, on observing and rendering colour and light in as natural a way as possible. Ruskin explicitly disparaged the mirror for its lack of differentiation in effect (all colours and tones were “universally polluted with black”), and because it counteracted the fundamental “innocence of the eye”: the artist, ideally, “must paint like a blind man who has suddenly recovered his sight.”37 This would seem to echo Shelley’s view of the poet, discussed at more length here in Chapter 5, as one who must “strip away the veils of familiarity” that impede clear-sightedness in a conceptual sense too. One must, by this logic, be surprised into seeing things as they are, and understand them in their proper relations. Conventionalizing apparatuses of viewing, thus, can have blinding effects. Moreover, some aspects of the Claude mirror would seem to belong to the geometrical optical model of the camera obscura, which Jonathan Crary argues was supplanted, in the nineteenth century, by a subjective model of vision located more precisely in the body of the observer.38 The latter portion of the period of this study witnessed, in Crary’s terms, a shift toward the observation of vision as itself an object of knowledge, and more specifically, a moment “when the visible escapes from the timeless order of the camera obscura and becomes lodged in another apparatus, within the unstable physiology and temporality of the human body” (70). The passage from Ruskin noted above, dating from the 1850s, represents for Crary the articulation of a new kind of observer,

Introduction

13

one capable of a sort of “primal opticality,” a “purified subjective vision” (95)—one who, finally, can really see. This ideal is pushed to its limit in Ruskin’s claim, in Modern Painters, that “hundreds of people can talk for one who can think, but thousands can think for one who can see. To see clearly is poetry, prophecy and religion—all in one.”39 My argument in this study, however, that vision is a function of construction, that the visible is made, would no doubt complicate Crary’s paradigmatic relocation of the image from object to subject (the increasing subjectivization of vision, in any case, was well under way before the midnineteenth century). Nevertheless, reaction to the lens, both positive and, later, negative, underscores an evolving interest in what one might refer to as the site of sight. It also points to a tension in Romantic aesthetic ideology between the seen and the unseen, and more specifically, to how the unseen abides within, even animates, the seen. One of the more intriguing aspects of the Claude mirror is how, as an optical gadget in the service of creating picturesque views, it nevertheless spoke to the imagination, and even became its metaphor. For although the mirror would seem to reflect the world mechanically, it is also said to transpose rather than reproduce the real; it does not merely copy the visible, but rather idealizes it, which is intriguingly contrary to Hazlitt’s characterizations of Claude’s paintings as “perfect abstractions of the visible images of things,” and therefore lacking in imagination.40 Coleridge explicitly associated the mirror with the imagination in a remarkable passage in a letter to George Dyer in 1795. Musing on the negative effects of the city, he asserts that in the country, by contrast, “all around us smile Good and Beauty—and the Images of this divine kalokagathón are miniaturized on the mind of the beholder, as a Landscape on a Convex Mirror.”41 Coleridge, here, would also seem to have Hartley’s theory of associationism in mind, which sought to articulate the mechanism by which the physical or material world impressed itself upon the human subject (along with the subsequent psychological organization of these sensory impressions)—or, to put it differently, the impression of the visible upon the invisible reaches of the mind. The metaphor of the mirror applies or extends even more pointedly though to the agency of the imagination, and thus to the generative matrix of poetry. As Wordsworth claimed in the 1802 preface to Lyrical Ballads, one aim of the poems in that collaborative collection was to throw over “incidents and situations from common life . . . a certain colouring of imagination.”42 Elsewhere, Wordsworth called the imagination “that intellectual lens through the medium of which the poetical observer sees the objects of his observation, modified in both form and colour.”43 The point was a species of visual surprise, but one that revealed the truth or essence of nature that remained otherwise imperceptible. Wordsworth’s widely shared antipathy to the picturesque drew— paradoxically, perhaps, in light of the more imaginative implications of the Claude glass indicated above—from its status as a “mimic” art that left little room for the agency of the imagination. In Book Eleven of The

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Prelude (1805 version), titled “Imagination, how Impaired and Restored,” Wordsworth claims that his maturation as a poet involved overcoming a superficial dependence on the senses, particularly sight, and makes explicit his struggles with the picturesque. Although he states that he never fell fully under the sway of that “strong infection of the age,” he reproaches himself with attending too much to the aesthetic appearances of nature, to transient visible effects, “craving combinations of new forms, / New pleasure, wider empire for the sight” (11.191–92).44 Of this state, in which the imagination is by implication “impaired,” Wordsworth claims that the eye—“the most despotic of our senses”—had mastered his heart and held his mind “In absolute dominion” (171–75). Distracted by the visible, by the “meager novelties / Of colour and proportion,” he finds himself to be “to the moods / Of Nature, and the spirit of the place, / Less sensible” (160–63). However, it is nature, finally, that is said to “thwart / This tyranny” of the bodily eye, and to rouse the “inner faculties” (178–79, 194). By freeing all the senses to “counteract each other,” nature effects the restoration of the imagination (impaired not only by the misleading superficialities of the picturesque, it must be noted, but by the woeful and disorienting spectacles of the French Revolution recounted in the previous book), and redirects the poet’s attention to something largely invisible. Wordsworth’s “visual” apprenticeship is properly the subject of Chapter 5, but it is worth noting here because his dismissal of the picturesque and its associated viewing practices is close to his response to the panorama, and because of the particular ambivalence about the visible that it introduces. In an earlier book of The Prelude, Book Seven, in which Wordsworth offers an account of his time in London, the spectacles of the great metropolis are encountered and recorded in all their dizzying manifestations. Along with London’s imposing physical sights, such as St. Paul’s, Wordsworth attends—perhaps more closely—to outdoor spectacles that both attract and repel: the boisterous cosmopolitan throng, the ritual parades of the fashionable, traveling musicians and hawkers, “raree shows,” and popular theatrical entertainments at Sadler’s Wells, which among “giants and dwarfs, / Clowns, conjurors, posture-masters, harlequins” (7.294–95) included the intriguing performance of Jack-the-Giant Killer, and his “invisibility” act.45 Wordsworth’s lines on Bartholomew Fair, to which Charles Lamb took him in 1802, similarly catalogue the diverse elements of that “parliament of monsters”—from acrobats and ventriloquists to waxworks, clockworks, albinos, the learned pig, and other “freaks of Nature” (7.649–95). Nearly fifty lines are needed to convey the experience of the anarchic spectacle, “a hell for eyes and ears,” which thoroughly stupefies “the whole creative powers of man” (7.659–69, 655). The shows “within doors” also receive their due: “birds and beasts / Of every nature, and strange plants convened / From every clime” (1850; 7.230–32). And following on from them, “mimic” sights such as the panorama, “ . . . that ape / The absolute presence of reality, / Expressing as in a mirror sea and land” (1805; 7.248–50).

Introduction

15

The panorama, to which Wordsworth refers directly in these last lines, was the invention of an Irish painter, Robert Barker, who referred to it in his 1787 patent as “Nature à Coup d’Oeil”—nature at a glance, or view at a glance.46 Its principal innovation and novelty was that it presented, in a painting, a full 360-degree view of its subject: it aimed to offer an “all embracing view,” and simulate the experience of being “on the very spot.” The panorama required a purpose-built space, and Barker opened a permanent building for his exhibitions in 1793—a Rotunda in Leicester Square, which stayed open for seventy years. Details of the patent, which set out the basic blueprint for panoramas throughout the nineteenth century—in both general principles and technical approach—stipulated a circular building lit from the top, with a central viewing area, normally entered from below, so as not to impede the effect of the illusion (see Figure 1.3). The most popular subjects of the panoramas of Barker and his competitors were imposing landscapes, such as the Alps; cities of particular cultural or historic note, often associated with the Grand Tour, such as Rome, Pompeii, Athens, and Constantinople; and important contemporary events, particularly wars, where battles and naval scenes fed nationalist interest. A good example of the latter was Barker’s inaugural Leicester Square panorama, View of the Fleet at Spithead, which simulated the sense of being at sea by disguising the viewing platform as the deck of a frigate.47

Figure 1.3. Robert Mitchell, Section of the Rotunda, Leicester Square, in which is exhibited the Panorama. Coloured aquatint from his Plans and Views in Perspective, with Descriptions of Buildings Erected in England and Scotland (London, 1801). © The Trustees of the British Museum.

16 Romanticism and Visuality One of the more intriguing aspects of the panorama was that unlike the picturesque, where the view, particularly with the help of the Claude mirror, was carefully delineated and focused, it lacked a visible framing device. The impulse to fool the eye into thinking the image it perceives is “real” is an old one, but the problem with most images of the real (apparent in many otherwise successful trompe l’oeil paintings) is the inevitable boundary, the frame, which isolates what it shows, and reveals it as only part of a total object, a restricted fragment of a larger visual field. At the panorama, the viewing platforms were constructed in such a way as to conceal any visual borders or frames, not only around the circular interior walls where the precise location of the painted surface was obscured by the illusion of depth of field, but also at the level of floor and ceiling. Extending out from below the viewing area, there would be a painted or constructed foreground, sometimes including three-dimensional objects, while above, sky disappeared behind the upper canopy or roof of the viewing area. At the top of the rotunda, a velum, or umbrella-like roof, concealed a large skylight that lit the painting with diffuse natural light, which appeared to emanate naturally from the view. The strength of the illusion depended on other factors too. Apart from a nearly mechanical fidelity to documentary detail, the creators took steps to dissociate viewers from external reference points, and to induce disorientation in a degree that would heighten their receptivity to the illusion. Visitors, to that end, would enter through winding stairways and/or dark passageways, which, by dilating the pupils, would also augment the first impression upon entering the lit viewing area. But viewers experienced disorientation and visual disturbance for other reasons, which also enhanced the power of the illusion. One, for example, was the difference between the represented distance of the painted scene and the relative proximity to the viewer of the painted wall. Another was the sheer profusion of visual detail, which surrounded the viewer completely, and undermined any stable viewpoint—though this surfeit, and the inherently excessive nature of the illusion, was the very thing that made the panorama so sensational. Hence Wordsworth’s depiction of the panorama as engaging in a form of aesthetic imitation “fondly made in plain / Confession of man’s weakness and his loves” (7.254–55). Man’s pleasure in mimetic visual displays, his appetite for mere sensation, is exploited by the panorama painter and his “greedy pencil,” which takes in “A whole horizon on all sides,” and plants us . . . upon some lofty pinnacle Or in a ship on waters, with a world Of life and lifelike mockery to east, To west, beneath, behind us, and before[.] (7.258–64)

Wordsworth’s lines capture the mixture of entrancement and deception that made the panorama so appealing, and fed the debate about its legitimacy as

Introduction

17

an art form. It was, certainly, an ephemeral art: the canvases were rapidly produced by teams of painters who, though largely anonymous, were also highly skilled technicians, adept at perspective and proportion. At the end of an exhibition, the canvases would be rolled up, transported elsewhere, or left to slowly disintegrate—or burn—in a warehouse. Significantly, few examples remain intact (Bernard Comment’s study of the panorama lists the twenty-eight that remain on view), and much of what we know about them has been itself reconstructed from sketches and plans, and from contemporary descriptions and reviews. Moreover, the panorama was contrived for commercial exploitation; it necessitated an array of technological interventions, and thus depended on means and deceptions that were “alien” to the art of painting.48 Panorama producers, however, packaged their work as innovative. When Barker opened his first panorama in Edinburgh, he portrayed himself as “not just the inventor of an ingenious amusement, but as a radical artistic innovator who had swept aside the conventions of landscape painting.” He billed his picture as an “‘IMPROVEMENT ON PAINTING, Which relieves that sublime Art from a Restraint it has ever laboured under.’”49 Its radical use of perspective and optics made it an important contributor to the tradition of illusionist perspective painting. While response from the art establishment was mixed and often negative, the panorama had a clear impact on mainstream art, most evident in the larger scale of some paintings, such as John Martin’s vast canvases with their apocalyptic subjects, and in the increased attention to subtle effects of light and atmosphere—indeed, to “freshness” of vision.50 The panorama stood, then, at an interesting crossing of high art and popular culture, and offered mass entertainment of a notably precinematic kind. The panorama became a hugely popular phenomenon, and after its initial vogue died out in the 1820s, a revival of interest took place internationally in the 1870s and 1880s. It gained ground with a growing middle-class audience not only for its entertainment value, but also for its educational and documentary possibilities. Panoramic representations of faraway places were sometimes touted, half-seriously, as a substitute for the trouble and expense of travel abroad; faraway scenes could be appealing because they were exotic, unfamiliar, and out of reach of most of the audience (such as Cairo, Constantinople, Jerusalem), but sometimes the appeal, in the case of some Italian sites such as Rome, Pompeii, and the Bay of Naples, was that viewers had visited these places and could revive their travels in memory, while commenting, no doubt, on the accuracy of the representation. Scenes of current or recent important events—Barker’s Battle of Waterloo was a major success of this kind—served nationalist interest while offering educational exposure. In short, the panorama was a source of visual information for a general public that was increasingly eager to acquire it; the panorama made it possible to see things that were otherwise out of sight. Books and newspapers, it must be remembered, were for different reasons expensive, and reached a relatively narrow audience; until the Illustrated London

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News was launched in 1842, and until periodicals that could include photographs emerged later in the century, the panorama served a purpose not really duplicated elsewhere.51 It offered, Scott Wilcox suggests, a “surrogate reality, against which other representations, either verbal or pictorial, could be weighed” (40). What impact, finally, did the panorama have on early nineteenth-century sensibilities? Certainly the panorama became, along with memory, an important mode of structuring visual experience and regulating its representations. It became a way of seeing one’s environment, evident in instances where writers, such as Southey and Scott, use the paradigm of panoramic viewing to represent a scene.52 In this, it recalls the effect of the picturesque, and the ideals of Claudian composition, on the viewing practices (and descriptive paradigms) of the earlier eighteenth century. The panorama, Wilcox notes, “was originally an attempt to bring painting closer to the actual nature of seeing than it had ever been before” (41); the picturesque, by contrast, had aimed to bring the observation of the visual world into line with the possibilities of painting. The one, on this evidence, is the inverse of the other: a view concentrated in a convex lens is replaced by a view expanded to cover a concave, circular wall.53 The outside is brought indoors and projected in an internal reconfiguration of the relationship of eye, lens, and landscape. A pastoral, rural art, moreover, gives way to the art of the city, of an urbanized view of things.54 Bernard Comment suggests that the picturesque may be viewed as a prefiguration of the panorama, largely because of its overturning of classical regularity and perfection as a prominent aesthetic model, its consideration of the viewer within the landscape (who at the panorama is placed literally in the middle), and its emphasis on variety and unpredictability, on sensitivity to an apparently natural model. Both, certainly, had their accompanying guidebooks and their appointed viewing stations. The panorama, in turn, reflected interest in other forms of circular vision, such as panopticism, with its extension to include the gaze from above.55 It is not the case though that the panorama offers a closer or more perfect encounter with the real, for if the Claude glass is, as Maillet has argued, a supplement (in Derrida’s double sense) to vision, in that it both supports and supplants the eye, the same combination of prosthesis and surplus informs the logic of the panorama so that it too is supplementary, rather than complementary—if not to vision, then to the visible.56 I have juxtaposed the picturesque and the panorama not so much to argue that one marks a kind of progress upon the other, but to show that they are both (if in different, and perhaps even inverse ways) engaged in a similar undertaking: the representation of the visible, using strategies and devices that foreground both of these terms and explore their limits, their point of disappearance into the invisible territory beyond the “frame.” Both the picturesque and the panorama are self-consciously involved in the act, in acts, of making visible. Their success in this clearly generated

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resistance, and fuelled debate about aesthetic illusion and the function of the imagination. But the place of the imagination is vexed indeed: precisely where it appears to have been banished, it turns out to have a central place. The picturesque is not simply, when examined closely, about the duplication of the real, for as Gilpin argued, the picturesque must engage the imagination as well as the eye of the spectator. More intriguingly, the difference between the “real” and the “representation” in picturesque views gives rise to another possibility: rather than simply asserting the strict regime of the picture, in which landscape and picture directly mirror each other, Gilpin’s theory of the picturesque seems to have sought out something different and potentially strange. Some element of this is perhaps apparent in Gilpin’s description of the experience of using the convex mirror while traveling in a chaise: the rapid succession of pictures “gliding before the eye” are “like the visions of the imagination; or the brilliant landscapes of a dream.”57 This startling sense of strangeness, while linked to the unfamiliar disturbances of “moving” pictures, is also a function of what de Bolla refers to as an imaginative relation to the phenomenology of viewing landscapes; and in developing an alternative visual aesthetics, it has the effect of constructing “a phantasmic relation to the real” (de Bolla, 119). It is precisely through this ghostly phantom of the real that the invisible may be seen to appear within the more insistent field of the visible, or that the invisible “clings” to the visible, as Novalis has put it. The ambivalent relation of the real to the imaginary similarly structures the prominent Romantic motif to which we turn next, the fragment, where what is absent—thus invisible—haunts and conditions what is present, either to the eye or to the understanding. The fragment, much like the attention to the visual in literature of the Romantic period, figures forth the distance between desire and actuality, between the discontinuous temporalities of present and past, and between the visible and the visualizable, in imaginative or conceptual terms.

2

‘Shadows of a Magnitude’ Keats, Fragments, and Vision

All that is visible clings to the invisible. That which can be heard to that which cannot—that which can be felt to that which cannot. Perhaps the thinkable to the unthinkable. Novalis, On Goethe1

This chapter elaborates the connection between the two main threads of this study—fragmentation and visuality—and will begin with a consideration of the importance of the fragment, and fragmentariness, for the Romantic period by sketching out some of its key historical, literary, and theoretical features. The second part of the chapter considers at length, as an extended example, the relationship of fragmentation to visuality in Keats’s unfinished Hyperion poems, focusing on the status of the visual in The Fall of Hyperion and its importance for the poem’s fragmentariness as well as its purchase on questions of historicity. Fragments occupy an important place in the overall conception of this study because they mark the place where seeing becomes, for various reasons, impossible: either because the full object is no longer available for viewing (or reading), or because it never has and could never have been. The whole inhabits the fragment in the way the invisible haunts the visible, and in the process makes visible the poet’s desire—to grasp and convey the past, to see it into the future. History, memory, temporality: these are all important factors in the way fragmentation informs visuality in Keats’s poems, and underscore the poet’s anxiety about the value and the ultimate fate of his enterprise.

I At its most basic, the term “fragment” indicates “a broken off, detached, or incomplete part . . . a part remaining when the rest is lost or destroyed.” Its secondary definition in the Oxford English Dictionary points to its familiar habitations: “an extant portion of a written work which as a whole is lost; a portion of work left uncompleted by its author; a part of anything uncompleted.”2 The fragment inhabits a potentially wide range of materials, both

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visual and textual, architectural and literary, while, at an extreme, it speaks for the central epistemological problem at the heart of the very conception of totality: for as Byron lamented in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, “Thou seest not all, but piecemeal thou must break / To separate contemplation the great whole.”3 The fragment leads us directly to a confrontation with the materially invisible, at the same time as it directs our attention toward the elusive, the incomprehensible, and the ideal. While it appears to take on, through the Romantic period, a certain generic uniformity, the fragment must also be seen as the form of formlessness, as that which challenges and indeed deforms form. The fragment became, through the eighteenth century and beyond, eminently popular and fashionable—and so widespread a cultural feature that in 1813 Francis Jeffrey, editor of The Edinburgh Review, was prompted to remark that “the taste for fragments, we suspect, has become very general; and the greater part of polite readers would now no more think of sitting down to a whole Epic than to a whole ox.”4 In part, the fashionableness of the fragment drew from its place in a number of popular aesthetic discourses, such as the picturesque and the sublime, and their associated viewing practices. Elsewhere, fragments occupied a central place in the pursuits of antiquarians and archaeologists, who both used and collected fragments as a key source of information about the past. In such cases, fragments contributed much to historical reconstruction, and to an increasing awareness of the importance of historical knowledge. The fragment is in these instances a visual motif, but one rich with imaginative implications. Broken pieces of objects, artifacts, or of ruined buildings, are highly suggestive, but what they suggest is largely a matter of imaginative reconstruction; metaphorically, such pieces represent the inaccessibility of the past, its very pastness in time. The picturesque, though emphasizing the creation of a pleasingly unified view, privileged the roughness of texture introduced by fragmentary forms, and regarded the derelict and the ruined as a source of “natural” beauty. Gilpin argued that the ideally picturesque landscape included varied and contrasting terrain and partial concealments of the view. Nothing completed this “picture” more effectively, however, than a fortuitously located ruin—“the elegant relics of ancient architecture; the ruined tower, the Gothic arch, the remains of castles, and abbeys”—with its evocative antiquarian appeal.5 Ruins are inherently better suited to picturesque representation, by this logic, than intact examples of classical beauty: Should we wish to give it [an elegant piece of Palladian architecture] picturesque beauty, we must use the mallet, instead of the chisel: we must beat down one half of it, deface the other, and throw the mutilated members around in heaps. In short, from a smooth building, we must turn it into a rough ruin. No painter, who had the choice of the two objects, would hesitate which to chuse. (7)

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Ruins are a particularly potent form of fragment, as we shall see in the next chapter; in the realm of the picturesque, they were celebrated for their capacity to please and engage the eye, and with it, the imagination of the viewer, while rendering a scene (imaginatively) pictorial. The fragment found a place in other aesthetic discourses of the eighteenth century, most notably in that of the sublime, largely because it also indicates or represents what eludes representation, and conveys a sense of limitlessness that cannot be reduced to a concrete, finite, or present object. Edmund Burke, in his treatise of 1757, had identified obscurity, vastness, infinity, and terror as key producers of sublime effects, and these were rapidly absorbed into eighteenth-century aesthetic discourse. The first three particularly relate to situations in which the whole is impossible to see or grasp, where boundaries or limits have been effaced or obscured. Typically, the sublime could be experienced in the midst of alpine scenery (such as before a lofty mountain range whose peaks were obscured by cloud, darkness, or a storm), where the viewer is overwhelmed by a momentary sense of the limitless or unbounded. Burke also argued that a pleasurable experience of the infinite could be aroused by an unfinished object, such as an artist’s sketch, because “the imagination is entertained with the promise of something more, and does not acquiesce in the present object of the sense.”6 The infinite or the unlimited is akin to creative incompletion (an absence of visible ends) and engages the imagination of the beholder accordingly. A rudimentary explanation of the sublime power of the fragmentary can be advanced along these lines. In Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Judgement (1790), which explored the sublime with rather more philosophical rigour, the sublime involves the overwhelming of the imagination such that its inadequacy for grasping and presenting the idea of a whole or totality is exposed. It demonstrates, on the one hand, a breakdown or failure in what can be clearly thought or perceived, but on the other there emerges, through the intervention of reason, a recuperative concept or idea of the whole. As Kant argued, the sublime can be found in an object, even one lacking in form, as long as it entails a representation of limitlessness, along with a suggestion of its wholeness: “the sublime is to be found in an object even devoid of form, so far as it immediately involves, or else by its presence provokes, a representation of limitlessness, yet with a super-added thought of its totality.”7 The paradox of unlimited totality, or totalized limitlessness—which relates to the inherently negative presentation characteristic of the sublime—suggests the epistemological problem posed by the part and the whole, in which the one can be known or conceived of only through the other.8 Because fragments are materially indeterminate and evoke more than the part they present, they are a potent source of the sublime—neither whole nor part, they exhibit an inexhaustible potentiality. At stake too, however, is the relationship between the visible and the imaginary, which will be explored at length here when we revisit the sublime in Chapter 5: for that

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which is infinite and limitless is also largely invisible as well as unrepresentable. While the pursuit of scenery for its picturesque or sublime qualities fuelled the tourist industry both at home and abroad (crossing the Alps, en route to Italy, became even more firmly established as the quintessential sublime experience), antiquarian interests similarly encouraged the commodification and domestication of various fragmentary forms. At home, antiquarianism popularized an interest in the historical features of the English landscape, which extended from the superficial remnants of early settlements, to their domestic, religious, and cultural remains thrown up or dug up from long burial underground. This interest had a literary component too, for example, in Percy’s published Reliques of Ancient English Poetry, or in Walter Scott’s ballad collecting. The impulse to collect demonstrates the power of part objects to represent, even recover, lost cultures through their artifacts.9 The profusion and popularity of sculpture galleries in the eighteenth century attests, in a similar vein, to the broad interest among the wealthy in acquiring and displaying objects, relics, from their experience abroad on the Grand Tour. This demonstration of taste and cultural authority encouraged a flourishing trade in casts and copies, but it also underlay serious collecting, such as that of Charles Townley, whose extensive gallery of classical marbles was purchased by the British Museum in 1805. A more problematic example, however, would be Lord Elgin’s acquisition, as controversial then as now, of marbles from the Parthenon in Athens. In the early years of the nineteenth century, Elgin collected various fragments of figures and friezes from the site, with the permission of the Turks who then controlled Athens, and he subsequently offered them for sale to the English government (a transaction finalized in 1816). It is likely that this expensive venture saved them from destruction, but it was denounced by many at the time—by Byron, for example, in The Curse of Minerva—as an act of vandalism. The ambivalent response in London to these broken sculptures from a distant time and place attests to the power of the fragmentary, as well as to how objects with a powerful purchase on the imagination—such as those remnants of Classical antiquity—can have an equally disturbing effect on the eye. On the lighter side, a more frivolous expression of the fragment’s fashionability in the eighteenth century informed garden design, and the wealthy regularly erected faux-classical temples and sham ruins, in accordance with a picturesque vision of the landscape. The paradoxical idea of building a ruin was taken seriously, as we shall see in the next chapter, and fooling the viewer was an important measure of success. The vogue for sham ruins and their associated fragments had a direct literary equivalent: not only were fragmentary texts increasingly published and read on their own terms, but sometimes, as in Thomas Chatterton’s Rowley poems of 1777, which claimed to be the recovered work of a fifteenth-century monk found secreted away in a rural church, they were actually hoaxes or forgeries—modern compositions contrived to look like ancient texts. Similarly, James Macpherson’s

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Ossian poems were supposed to be the rediscovered and translated relics of a blind Scottish poet from the third century. These were popular texts, and they gained additional notoriety in the storm of controversy that surrounded the revelation that they were hoaxes. Marjorie Levinson, in her study of the Romantic fragment poem, has argued that the phenomenon of the hoax poems contributed to the popularization of the fragment, by bringing out its potential literariness. She suggests, no doubt correctly, that it helped to cultivate a sympathetic readership, one willing to engage creatively in the reading process as an act of imaginative completion.10 Certainly, by the end of the eighteenth century, fragments had become marketable in a way that made it possible for serious writers to publish their own literary remains while they were still very much alive. Meanwhile, popular sentimental novels of the eighteenth century, such as those of Sterne and Mackenzie, which skillfully made use of the fragment for both comic and emotional effect, also fed the fashion for fragments. Scraps of found manuscript, digressions, strategic ellipses, and the interpolation of apparently unrelated stories: these are all meta-fictional devices of long standing. The explicit use of fragments in sentimental novels, though, emphasized (and often satirized) qualities of spontaneity and immediacy, values much privileged by the eighteenthcentury cult of sensibility. The ruin industry, and its attendant sentiment des ruines—which, though not new to the eighteenth century, nevertheless reached new heights—served to enhance the imaginative possibilities of the fragment, now being artfully deployed as a consummately artless form.11 There is, of course, a long tradition of writing in brief and/or broken forms, from Montaigne’s essays to Pascal’s Pensées and the English and French moralists, that stands clearly behind the deliberate use of fragments in the (later) eighteenth century, a use that takes positive advantage of what might otherwise be the result of contingency and accident. German Romantic writers of the Jena circle (chiefly August and Friedrich Schlegel, Novalis, Tieck, and Schleiermacher) took a particularly radical approach to the fragment and made it a central feature of their literary theory and practice. For them, the fragment was the Romantic genre par excellence, and, appropriately, their arguments were made in series of remarkable philosophical fragments published in The Athenaeum (the journal founded by the Schlegel brothers) in the brief period of 1798–1800. Many of these fragments convey an often ironically stated reflection on the fragment itself, and thus on contemporary writing practices: “Many of the works of the ancients have become fragments. Many modern works are fragments as soon as they are written.”12 Or: “In poetry too, every whole can be a part and every part really a whole” (CF 14). Written as a series of evidently complete statements, their fragments urge the independence of the fragment from other forms, as well as from each other, as in the oftcited: “A fragment, like a miniature work of art, has to be entirely isolated from the surrounding world and be complete in itself like a hedgehog” (AF 206). These fragments are at once monadic and radically incomplete.

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No melancholy ruin, they contain a positive, future-oriented kernel, while displaying an insistent presentness. At its limit, the work of the Jena circle questions the very possibility of a whole, while celebrating the fragment as the only effective mode of engagement with a subject that exceeds presentation: an ideal form for the Ideal, so to speak, the elusive “literary absolute.”13 Their fragments play explicitly on a dynamic of complete incompletion, insofar as each fragment is thought to enfold completion and incompletion within itself. But perhaps the best way to think of them, as Athenaeum Fragment 22 suggests, is as each containing or conveying an idea or “project”—defined as “the subjective embryo of a developing object.” These “projects,” both fully distinct and distinctively partial (because they must await carrying out in the full realization or completion of what they embryonically contain), are the fragments of the future, and the feeling for them, Schlegel argues, is distinguishable from “the feeling for fragments of the past only by its direction: progressive in the former, regressive in the latter” (AF 22). The Jena romantics advanced the view of Romantic poetry as perpetually in the process of self-achieving, but never achieved in the sense of being finished, fixed, or finite: “the romantic kind of poetry is still in the state of becoming; that, in fact, is its real essence: that it should forever be becoming and never perfected” (AF 116). The fragment thus comes, in its apparent affinities to a larger Romantic project, to be seen as the best possible representation of the impossibly ambitious work that the mind aspires to but is unable to achieve, at least not now, and as the “perfect” Romantic form: the most appropriate signifier of sublime, visionary excess. The theoretical problems and enticements of the fragment were an important part of German Romantic discourse: less so in England, where there was, however, no shortage of explicitly fragmentary works.14 Readers of Romantic period literature encounter a surprising number of canonical literary texts that are fragmentary, though for many different reasons. Many of Coleridge’s works were famously fragmentary, among them “Christabel” and “Kubla Khan,” which was allegedly truncated by the untimely visit of a person on business from Porlock. At another extreme, at least in terms of length, is his Biographia Literaria, which was undertaken in the first instance as a preface to a volume of poems and is bedeviled by the question of where it should end. Wordsworth’s Prelude, also a long work, was also intended as a preface—to his incomplete work, The Recluse. Keats’s Hyperion and The Fall of Hyperion were both incomplete attempts to write on the same subject, neither of them fragmentary by design. Shelley was the author of the rather playful Posthumous Fragments of Margaret Nicholson, but The Triumph of Life was cut short, with terrible irony, by the poet’s death. Any full edition of the poetic works of Romantic authors reveals a surprising number simply titled “fragment.” In some instances, these were published by the author in his or her lifetime, to capitalize on the popularity of the form noted above; in others, because posterity deemed such fragments to

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contain something of the distilled essence of the author’s “finished” work. In many cases, however, these fragmentary texts, unlike those of the Jena Romantics, were not conceived as fragments, but held out the promise of future completion; and although their authors often claimed to have every intention of finishing them, that completion often became either practically or inherently impossible. Coleridge’s poem “Christabel” is an excellent example of such a fragmentary text. Though compared by a contemporary reviewer to a “mutilated statue, the beauty of which can only be appreciated by those who have knowledge or imagination sufficient to complete the idea of the whole composition,” the poem is in fact not one fragment, but an assemblage or sequence of fragments.15 To each of its two main parts, written at a threeyear interval, Coleridge appended concluding poems that were, in one case at least, composed for an entirely different occasion. In addition to this problem of integrating a group of fragments into something resembling a whole work, readers of the poem have often remarked upon an apparent gap or void lurking somewhere in the conception as well as the execution of the poem—something not just missing but also concealed. Its gothic central drama, of the encounter of the virtuous young Christabel with the spellbinding and demonic figure of Geraldine, whom she encounters while praying at midnight in the woods, is not only left unresolved, but also inflected throughout by paralysis, anomaly, and a sense of things disturbingly out of place. For reasons arising arguably from the poem itself, Coleridge found himself unable to go on. And yet, projected endings abound and the poem has always invited speculation not only about if, but about how, it could continue. Although Wordsworth would deny that Coleridge ever had a specific conclusion in mind, a number of phantom endings—by turns appealing and implausible—have been passed down by Coleridge’s son Derwent, and his biographer James Gillman. Coleridge, for his part, persistently claimed to have the whole poem in his head, and attached a brief preface to the poem to this effect when he first published it in 1816: “As, in my very first conception of the tale, I had the whole present to my mind, with the wholeness, no less than the liveliness of a vision; I trust I shall be able to embody in verse the three parts yet to come.”16 In spite of this optimism, it is clear that Coleridge ultimately felt himself to be thwarted or blocked by the poem’s central “Idea,” which he identified as “the most difficult, I think, that can be attempted to Romantic Poetry—I mean witchery by daylight.”17 Part of the difficulty, clearly, is in how to make certain forms of the imaginary visible, never mind whole. There is no doubt a substantial difference between the fragments of the Athenaeum and fragments such as “Christabel,” Wordsworth’s Prelude, and others in the English Romantic canon. At their simplest, the former have been dismissed as “pithy, ironic aphorisms,” in comparison to the latter, those high-Romantic fragments that were the result of “some disproportion

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between idea and execution”—those famous long poems “conceived in terms that made conclusion impossible” (Harries, 2). Let us consider, however, that the effectiveness of Schlegel’s fragments draws precisely from their capacity to invoke several “degrees” and “kinds” of fragmentation simultaneously: they intermix the generic conventions of the aphorism with inherently inconclusive reflections (sketches of a systematic philosophy of literature) on the fundamental conditions, the supreme potentiality, of the fragment. Coleridge, by contrast, would never have relinquished his belief in the possibility of the whole, and did not claim to invest his fragments with the possibilities such a relinquishment could offer. It is nevertheless the case, however, that the form and content of his best-known works threaten and thwart this faith at key junctures. Ultimately, we do not read “Kubla Khan” as a fragment because of its expedient designation, nor chiefly as a result of Coleridge’s own prefatory explanation, but because the poem, in effect, presents an “active and dialectical subject” that proves uncontainable within the bounds of the completed text.18 Coleridge’s fragments, like many others in the Romantic canon, found fuller meaning as fragments than as completed wholes—as the long critical debate over the fragmentary status of “Kubla Khan” illustrates. Schlegel’s conception of art, as articulated in the period of the Athenaeum, is that it must be deliberately fragmentary: for it is only in this incompletion that “the ideal presents itself in the real.”19 In the same way, the presence of the philosophical system can only be intuited through the form of the fragment. There is a dialectical relationship between fragment and system, as between fragment and whole: “It’s equally fatal for the mind to have a system and to have none. It will simply have to decide to combine the two” (AF 53). Novalis, as Azade Seyhan notes, argued explicitly that systemlessness had to be introduced into a system for a genuinely philosophical stance to be achieved. In this way, the shortcomings of a system are avoided, as is the anarchy of systemlessness. However, lurking behind the marked emphasis on the artistic whole in aesthetic theory (and on system in philosophy) is the implicit problem of the fragment as an embodiment of the forces of chaos or disorder.20 This is partly because fragments disturb categorization—even such categorization of the fragment as a form. For the fragment’s mode of fulfillment is other than through the unified whole. Questions of historical reconstruction that are announced or imagined through the fragment are also caught up in that generative but disturbing resistance—which is also the resistance of the invisible, of what is hidden from sight and inaccessible to understanding. For the fragment is where the invisible presents itself in the visible—but invisibly. The invisible also, intriguingly, militates against totality, suggesting a cognate difficulty—perceptual as well as conceptual. What Kate Flint refers to as the “sufficiency” of the visible in the Victorian period challenged, if in different terms, the “adequacy” of representation. That which is invisible is “‘representation’s supplemental excess and its failure to be totalizing’”

28 Romanticism and Visuality (Flint, 25). Yet the visible “clings” to the invisible, as does the thinkable to the unthinkable, to recall Novalis’s formulation. Clearly, these are analogues: different ways of thinking about what are fundamentally similar problems around perception, conception, and representation. Keats’s poems are alive to these difficulties as well as to the connection between fragmentation and visuality. Fragmentation in Keats’s poems is not a function of playful formal experimentation, nor is it particularly related to a chronic incapacity to complete his projects, as we might say of Coleridge. Rather, one would locate its potency in the poet’s interest in the ruined forms of the past, evident in the imaginative possibilities opened up by the visual arts, understood in historical as well as aesthetic terms; and in a contrasting awareness of the poet’s belatedness, his—and our—inadequacy when it comes to envisaging these possibilities with clarity and insight.

II Both of the Hyperion poems raise, in their fragmentary form and in their engagement with the ruins and remnants of the classical past, the problem of the fragment in relation to time and history; but a significant number of Keats’s poems address that problem through a thematics, and a metaphorics, of sight, in which the visible, the visual, and the visionary are suggestively interrelated. This body of work thus offers us a preliminary opportunity to disentangle these interrelated terms, and I would like to begin the second part of this chapter by surveying the visual field that so many of Keats’s poems invoke. Perhaps it is not surprising that some of these poems are about Keats’s relationship to works of art, in which questions of perception are difficult to separate from the imaginative world of the work. It is remarkable, nevertheless, that Keats so often characterises that relationship in explicitly visual ways. Books are something to be looked into, as in the title of “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” and objects seen (such as the Elgin Marbles) suggest wonders whose weightiness forces shut the “eye” of normal human wakefulness.21 Both of the early sonnets I’ve just referred to are in an explicit dialogue with the visual. In the first, “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,” the poet’s travels through literature are presented as voyages through landscapes that are experienced visually (“Much have I travelled in the realms of gold, / And many goodly states and kingdoms seen”). The experience of reading Homer, that “wide expanse” that the poet had yet to set eyes on, is described as a series of heightened visual encounters. In the first, the poet is like a “watcher of the skies,” an astronomer perhaps, who suddenly sees a new planet that swims “into his ken”—not only into his field of vision, but also into his understanding, since “ken” has a convenient double meaning. It refers first, as the OED makes clear, to “the distance that bounds the range of ordinary vision,” but second, to the “range of knowledge or mental

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perception.” Both sight and the condition of its possibility are clearly implicated, and the OED cites this very couplet from Keats’s sonnet to convey this.22 A full or compound vision is also achieved in the second of Keats’s metaphors, in which he imagines the figure of “Cortez” and his men at a moment of discovery that is similarly geographic and visual, when they survey the Pacific Ocean for the first time. Cortez’s “wond’ring” eyes in an early draft of the poem are later changed to “eagle” eyes, and sight is decidedly spatial: the scrutinizer of the sky stands below, but Cortez and his men, who “stare” at the ocean and look at each other “with a wild surmise,” stand silent, “upon a peak in Darien” (13–14). Keats’s Pacific explorers are in a position not only of literal height and its attendant power, but implicitly of insight; their startling experience, however, stuns them into silence in a way that clearly bears on the poet’s capacity to remain “above” his own discovery, and keep his own speechlessness at bay. The poet’s ability to speak back—back to the past but also against its burden—is the subject of another sonnet, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles.” Here, the experience the poet describes involves seeing in a literal rather than a metaphoric sense; and yet the poem is not about looking at the newly acquired Elgin Marbles, to which his friend Haydon introduced him in 1817. Rather, it charts a response to that event that reconfigures the act of looking in complex ways. In an inversion of the metaphoric stance of the earlier poem, this one starts out from a state of utter defeat, above which it does not much rise. It is, in the first instance, human mortality that “weighs heavily . . . like unwilling sleep”—that preempts sight by forcing the eyes wide shut, so to speak. What oppresses the poet further, however, is the sight of heights (“each imagined pinnacle and steep / Of godlike hardship”) that his death will prevent him from scaling. All that is overhead, all that overlooks the poet (who most pointedly describes himself as “Like a sick eagle looking at the sky”), leaves him in a state of irresolvable distress. This is an interesting spatialization of a temporal problem: that such experience will be lost, unremembered, in time. The poem’s sestet qualifies the poet’s sense of disturbance—“a most dizzy pain”—that gives rise to a distressing apprehension of things “mingling.” The things that are said to mingle involve the crossing of the physical and the conceptual, the visible and the imagined: prized objects and their wasting, things and their shadows: “Grecian grandeur with the rude / Wasting of old Time—with a billowy main, / A sun, a shadow of a magnitude” (12–14). The “indescribable feud” that such “dim-conceived glories of the brain” are said to “bring round the heart” speaks of an affecting ambivalence that relates not only to what the poet sees, or yearns to see (like Endymion’s “feud / ’Twixt Nothing and Creation” (III.40–41)), but to how he is placed in relation to that sight. The poem is commemorative of a visual encounter that is experienced as paradoxically negative: it is not about what he sees at all, since what he sees is really an absence of sight. The poet is alive to that revelation, but it is after all the revelation of his own death, an event

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that similarly may be imagined but not seen. This mingling of sight with the conditions of its own erasure is captured effectively by the metaphor of the sick eagle who can only look at the sky, who finds himself on the sidelines of what he sees as his proper domain. This bears directly on the poet’s sense of his task. For a “seer,” or a “visionary” (terms of course traditionally associated with “poet,” particularly the Miltonic blind poet), the threat of invisibility is as devastating as its attendant speechlessness. These are problems that Keats addresses in a number of other poems, among them the Hyperion poems, where the figure of the poet is an onlooker who knows his task involves a kind of participation that is by definition impossible—impossible because the event he must witness belongs to a past of which only the ruins remain. In this context, looking and speaking become particularly fraught with contradiction. “[E]very man whose soul is not a clod,” remarks Keats in the opening passage of The Fall of Hyperion, “hath visions, and would speak,” at least if he were properly nurtured “in his mother tongue” (I.13–15). Many a “fanatic’s” dream, however, has failed to be captured by what Keats describes as the “shadows of melodious utterance” proper to poetry alone, which can save the imagination from the eternal fate of “dumb enchantment.” What are our visions then (poet’s or fanatic’s, as death will show), if the “shadows” of language are their only form of hope? A curious intersection of hearing and seeing is operative here, in which the spell of silence is broken by the apparently visual mediation of a shadow. The fragmentary state of The Fall of Hyperion is, even more than the fragment of Hyperion that it repeats and displaces, a function of its insistence on paradox. Is the poet a madman or a dreamer, and is he awoken, or rather stupefied by “that full draught” of transparent liquid, into the enigmatic world of his vision? The poem tells his story in terms of what his senses tell, but his encounters are invariably marked, on the one hand by ruin, emptiness, and sublime obscurities, and on the other, by the palpably solid resistance of broken, sculpted form. Its central encounter with Moneta, a figure of memory who presides over the defeats of the past, is nevertheless to be understood as prophetic. Intended to celebrate the potential and saving power of poetry, this is the very mire in which the poem appears to flounder. As the poet moves toward that central encounter, scenes of ruin—shadows of a magnitude indeed—seem to condition not only the poem’s structure, but also its key events. After the opening passage that introduces the related themes of poetry and dreaming, and sets these against the silence of the past, the poet positions himself with modest uncertainty (“Methought I stood”) in a lush landscape, in which he sees an arbour set out with a sumptuous feast—or rather, with its remains. For plenty is evoked here by its remnants, the very refuse of the feast, the emptiness on which plenty depends: “Still was more plenty than the fabled horn / Thrice emptied could put forth . . .” (I.35–36). But this is principally a point of entry into the equally paradoxical visionary world of

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the poem: the poet drinks of the transparent liquid that stood “thereby,” and finds himself curiously solidified. He sinks down “Like a Silenus on an antique vase” into a deep slumber, from which he wakes into a cold marble temple, through which he advances to an altar at the foot of a colossal statue (described initially as “an image, huge of feature as a cloud”). It is as though he has himself become an object of the visual, like one of the figures on the Grecian urn, but strangely alive. The “eternal domed monument” in which he finds himself is a world of, on the one hand, precise, sculptural definition, evident in the carved sides, the embossed roof, the black gates shut against the east; but on the other, it is so massive as to invoke sublime infinitude, in “the silent massy range / Of columns north and south, ending in mist / Of nothing” (I.83–85). It is also impossibly old: old in excess of any earthly structure the speaker has ever seen, or rather remembered having seen: older than any “gray cathedrals, butress’d walls, rent towers” (I.67). In comparison to that “eternal, domed monument,” neither such familiar ruined structures—the “superannuations of sunk realms”—nor “Nature’s rocks toil’d hard in waves and wind” are anything more than the apparent “faulture of decrepit things” (I.68–71). “Faulture” (Keats is the only citation for this term in the OED) makes doubly decrepit: it indicates the failing of decaying things, of already decayed remnants, and makes an effective counterpoint to the “eternal” aspect of the temple, where time cannot have any effect. Permitted to wander in this artifactual world of hard, cold marble because, it turns out, he is of the “dreaming” tribe, the poet is very nearly made one with it by a numbing, petrific chill that begins to overtake him physically, and against which he must struggle. Commanded by a voice emanating from the altar’s billowing smoke to ascend the marble stairway to the altar, he hears, he looks, and perceives the difficulty of the task: “ . . . two senses both at once, / . . . felt the tyranny / Of that fierce threat and the hard task proposed” (I.118–20). It is only as he reaches the bottom step that his sense of deathlike suffocation is relieved, that he has, in the world of the “veiled Shadow” attending the smoking altar, deferred his death by having, in effect, survived it. The poet’s dream becomes something that is also like a posthumous experience, though it is primarily the suffering he has already borne that has qualified him to stand “safe beneath this statue’s knees” (I.181). It places him, in spite of the lengthy dialogue that debates the use and value of the poet’s efforts, in a position uncannily like that of his interlocutor and guide, Moneta, who, when she unveils her wan face, reveals a “visage” that is “deathwards progressing to no death” (I.261–62). Moneta’s fate is clearly to preside over the “superannuations of [other] sunk realms,” to safeguard, and tell of, their “afterlife” to those who are able to see and hear. This is the poet’s task as well, and he confronts Moneta as a mirror, a revealing mirror, of himself and his art, since he too defers, or “dates on,” his doom by being “suffer’d” in those very temples of ceaseless sorrow. His capacity to live on is a function of something that is itself

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inherently ruinous, and the power of the ruins of the past is also the power that makes art live by its fragmentation; it prevents its end, by keeping it in a perpetual state of animated suspension in which the quick are the dead. But what is especially interesting about this paradoxical encounter, with its complex play on the interdependence of life and death, of the ruins of the past and the life of art, is the equally complex relation of the visual to the visionary in which the power of the latter is constituted by the conditions of the former, which it thus designates, and denigrates, as wanting. Keats’s poet in The Fall of Hyperion appears to make the visionary visualizable, if I may put it that way, by combining seeing with the function of the seer: the visionary world of the poem is, at the same time, thoroughly visual.23 The idea of the poet as a visionary, or prophet—a seer—is an old one, and one that is dependent on nonvisual media for its expression (the voice, the text). Perhaps the concept of sight is so implicit in the function of seer as to be taken for granted; nevertheless, the OED does indicate that in the nineteenth century the hyphenated term “see-er” (“one who sees or beholds”) entered the English language in contradistinction to “seer,” which retained its principal meaning, indicating someone of supernatural insight, especially into the future—someone able to “see” visions, to prophesy, to predict events, and so on. Why the hyphenated term was found necessary is open to speculation, but it suggests that a need was felt to restore a sense of sight to the term, or to make it possible to designate a viewer or beholder in a more literal way. Meanwhile, though the notion of the poet as “seer” or visionary, with its emphasis on prophecy, is fundamentally future oriented, we nevertheless find the poet’s visionary powers to be often directed toward the recovery of the past. This can mean anything from a studied effort to exert one’s power of recall over moments of particular beauty or meaning (as, for example, in Wordsworth’s dancing daffodils, flashed up again upon the poet’s “inward eye” in moments of vacancy) to the attempt to reconstruct or revisit what one has never in fact seen at first hand—to regain, for example, the perceived perfection of a lost classical world. Vision has, in this sense, an essential relationship to what is not (because no longer) visible at all, to a simulacrum of the visible, that depends on absence and loss—in short, on memory—for its reconstitution. In The Fall of Hyperion, the poet’s encounter with Moneta (“Shade of Memory!”), set in the priestess’s ruined Greek temple, is conveyed in language that emphasizes, from the outset, the visual. To be a “shade of memory” is already to be a derivative and barely visible reflection of the invisible, so perhaps it is fitting that the poet emphasizes and worries over his own powers of sight throughout the encounter. In the context of the dream, in which the poet situates himself, seeing is of course virtual. What is visible is a function, in effect, of what is visionary: the visible is perhaps only a shadow, to borrow from the poem’s metaphorics, of the visionaryand-hence-invisible world of the dream. This rather Platonic state of affairs might explain the undecidability of everything that is seen, which gives rise

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to much of the poem’s insistent questioning. Moneta, or memory, is not only the poet’s guide, but also his chief resource—the one who directs his sight, and the one of whom he asks: “Majestic shadow, tell me where I am, Whose altar this, for whom this incense curls; What image this whose face I cannot see For the broad marble knees; and who thou art, Of accent feminine so courteous?” (I.211–15)

Words, poetry’s shadows of “melodious utterance,” are vision’s necessary supplement. What cannot be seen, must be told, and hence the poem’s marked emphasis on what is spoken and heard. But since hearing, in the poem, remains more or less unimpaired, the poet’s acute distress arises directly from what he is unable to see. Moneta is herself the remnant of a fallen race of gods, left to be “sole priestess” over Saturn’s desolation. The temple is all that has been spared the ravages of war, and in it, Moneta lives the posthumous life of the event. She is its memory, and lives in bondage to the “scenes / Still swooning vivid” through her “globed brain” (I.244–45). She cannot stop seeing and it is these “sights” that she will permit the poet’s “dull mortal eyes” to behold. Her own eyes, crucially, are what “hold” him back, what stop his flight, at this moment of her unveiling. They do not do so, however, by fixing him actively: rather, it is their blind passivity that rivets him to the spot. They are “half closed”—neither open nor shut—and “visionless entire they seem’d / Of all external things” (I.267–68). Her eyes comfort the poet without actually seeing him, with what he describes as their moonlike, “blank splendour,” with the power of their unseeing vision. The poet, on the other hand, strains in the manner of one trying to trace, with the eye alone, a grain of gold to its source, to its “sullen entrails rich with ore,” deep in the impenetrable rock. He “ached to see” what she sees. Moneta appears, in fact, to inhabit the world of a private, internal theatre. Her brain is “hollow,” and in an inversion of outside and inside, a “high tragedy” is acted out in its “dark, secret chambers” (I.276–79). The poet emits an eloquent plea for entry that appeals to the state of these things as the last remnants of things past: By all the gloom hung round thy fallen house, By this last temple, by the golden age, By great Apollo, thy dear foster-child, And by thyself, forlorn divinity, The pale Omega of a wither’d race, Let me behold . . . (I.284–89)

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This plea, referred to as an act of “conjuration,” has its effect and the poet finds himself, with her, “Deep in the shady sadness of a vale”: deeper inside the poem’s visionary world, but as yet another threshold is traversed, also further outside, because prior to, his own point of entry. Here, he encounters another “image huge” which he identifies with the colossus in Saturn’s temple. It is Saturn, as he was, when he had lost his realms. This curious revisiting of the past, but as a simulacrum of itself, turns the poet into a fullfledged visionary: . . . whereon there grew A power within me of enormous ken, To see as a god sees, and take the depth Of things as nimbly as the outward eye Can size and shape pervade. (I.302–6)

This power is, first of all, a power within. An inward, rather than an outward eye, it sees what is literally invisible: the material depths, rather than only the surfaces (size and shape) of things. And yet, like ordinary sight, it requires a point of view. The poet sets himself “Upon an eagle’s watch, that I might see, / And seeing ne’er forget” (I.309–10). Its godlikeness is analogical rather than, perhaps, actual (it is to see as a god sees). Such sight is memory’s raw material, proof against forgetting. What the poet sees is perceived, and remembered, as art. Or, to put it differently, the poet is primarily in a position of spectatorship that both responds to and constitutes its object. At the beginning of the poem, he could not see up beyond the knees of the statue at whose feet he stood— dwarfed by the gigantic form, or “image huge” of Saturn. By the end of the first canto, the vision he has mastered is not only Moneta’s, which he has come to share and inhabit, but also his own, for it is from the heights of an “eagle’s watch” that he now sees Saturn and Thea, after an excruciating and protracted period of “eternal quietude,” begin to move. The “fixed shapes” of the three figures (counting Moneta among the statuary) are a burden he must master by his watchfulness, which is rewarded by Saturn’s brief speech. In an echo of the first scene on the temple steps, it is the poet’s capacity to endure agony that is transformational. At first, the figures are like “sculpture builded up upon the grave / Of their own power” (I.383–84). But the poet must watch a “whole moon,” without “stay or prop, / But [his] own weak mortality” (I.388–89) for any change to occur, for the tableau to become vivant. The effort brings him, once again, close to death, which he begins, in desperation, to desire: And every day by day methought I grew More gaunt and ghostly. Oftentimes I pray’d Intense, that death would take me from the vale

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And all its burthens—Gasping with despair Of change, hour after hour I curs’d myself: Until old Saturn rais’d his faded eyes And look’d around, and saw his kingdom gone. (1. 395–401)

The poet’s apparent success here in bringing the past, or the dead, to life, is now qualified, however, by the poem: the substantiality of still, silent stone is lost in the process of its animation. Saturn, in his waking lamentation, bemoans the pain of encroaching feebleness, which he experiences as a kind of terrible thawing. Finally, the three figures “melt” from his sight, into the woods. Keats’s general preoccupation with sleep, death, and poetry is explicitly overlaid by a metaphorics of vision and visibility, in which looking is a potentially powerful act (as in the sonnet on Chapman’s Homer), but where things can be lost from view. Indeed, the power of sight is asserted in what seems a vain attempt to preempt such loss. What are the implications of the poet’s presence, as spectator, conjuror, and participant in this scene? The poet must learn to activate this scene, his sight, and make it speak—speak not directly to so much as through him to the readers he now addresses: “ye . . . who can unwearied pass / Onward from the antechamber of this dream” (I.464–65). The poet’s watchfulness becomes, by the end of the canto, an effort at remembering. He has seen so as not to forget, but now he lingers at the antechamber’s doors for a last glimpse, in order to “glean” his memory of her “high phrase” (I.467–68). The dream has become a part of memory, now gone, yet living on. The architectural metaphor of the antechamber suggests that what seems the end is really only the beginning, a preparatory space that by definition precedes another, but its materiality reminds us of the artifactual world of Moneta’s temple, that must be seen, in a sense, before it can be envisaged. Keats’s use of this term in Hyperion is the first recorded by the OED—“to envisage circumstance, all calm, / That is the top of sovereignty” (II.204– 5)—and it suggestively defines “seeing” as a literal and as an imaginative act. Its first meaning is to look “straight at” something, to look in the face of (as its French source, en visage, suggests): thus, the figurative meaning, to face danger and so on. But it also, again from the early nineteenth century, means “to obtain a mental view” of something, to set it for contemplation “before the mind’s eye.”24 Moneta’s unveiled face, in that early scene of the poem, is initially as important as her eyes as an object of the poet’s sight, and the source of poetic insight: thus do the visionary and the visible appear to interrelate. And yet this is something that the poem, as much as the poet’s vision, fails to sustain. The poem’s fragmentary status implies that these are incommensurate, if related, acts. The poet’s vision makes the past present to the eye, but this is far from straightforward in a fragmentary poem that commemorates the narratives of a distant classical past. More accurately, what the poet anxiously evokes is the very pastness of past events.

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The poem breaks off soon after its second canto is under way. The first vision has been terminated, and the poet and his guide have returned to the opening space of the temple: the plight of Hyperion, who rushes by in the poem’s last lines, his fall, for which we still wait, will clearly be the next subject. But back in the temple, the poet is re-engaged by the luxurious materiality of what he sees. The “lucid depth” of polished stone reflects pure form (the instance is “Mnemosyne’s” priestess garments, which are reflected mirrorlike by the square of stone on which she sits). Like the figure of Hyperion, the poet’s “quick eyes ran on / From stately nave to nave, from vault to vault” (II.53–4). And on Hyperion flares, but the poem ends here and the poet’s eyes cannot or do not follow. For all the visual saturation experienced by the poet, certain things nevertheless escape his sight, and with it, elude imaginative visualization. As The Fall of Hyperion draws to its untimely close, the problematics of the visual also implicate questions of time and fragmentation. To grasp this fully, we must turn back to Hyperion, the fragment Keats attempts to envisage through the process of its revision as The Fall. Moneta’s sudden change of name, in favour of her precursor Mnemosyne in Hyperion, recalls the earlier poem, the poet’s equally fragmentary attempt to compose an epic poem on the theme of Apollo’s rise, the birth of the true poet, for which Hyperion’s defeat is only the preface or preparatory first act. Much of the later poem recalls the first, since it not so much reviews as rewinds, and begins at a point temporally prior Hyperion’s opening scene— “Deep in the shady sadness of a vale”—in which Thea awakens the motionless Saturn. The first Hyperion begins, peculiarly suspended, in medias res, in which the main narrative action (the defeat of the Titans) has already taken place, and is replaced by a series of tableaux, or a frieze perhaps, that nevertheless conveys—in W. M. Rossetti’s memorable phrase—“a Stonehenge of reverberance.” The main players are artifacts (“ . . . motionless, / Like natural sculpture in cathedral cavern” (I.85–6)), or remnants even of themselves (Saturn claims that he is gone from himself: “I have left / My strong identity, my real self, / Somewhere between the throne, and where I sit / Here on this spot of earth” (I.113–16)). They do, however, speak for themselves: the poem lacks the mediating frame narrative of the poet’s entry into the world of the fallen Titans, which we are to suppose as actual, rather than seen or envisaged by a particularized or participant speaker. The scene changes of its own accord as the relative inaction of the first two cantos unfolds, until finally we arrive at the fragmentary third book. Here, an encounter between Apollo and the goddess Mnemosyne is staged, an encounter that is replayed in The Fall as taking place between Moneta and the figure of the poet himself. The two poems converge in this scene in revealing ways. Apollo is referred to, but doesn’t appear, in The Fall. He is replaced, apparently, by the figure of the poet who is permitted into, or “suffered” in, Moneta’s temple only because he is one of “those to whom the miseries

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of the world / Are misery, and will not let them rest” (I.148–9). However in Hyperion, Apollo is the compelling figure of the melancholic poet, consumed by his knowledge of woe, his paralyzing sympathy with suffering, or particularly, with a sense of his own thwarted aspirations, a sense of being both powerful and somehow “curs’d.” “For me,” he says, . . . dark, dark, And painful vile oblivion seals my eyes: I strive to search wherefore I am so sad, Until a melancholy numbs my limbs; And then upon the grass I sit, and moan, Like one who once had wings. (III.86–91)

Apollo, prototype of the striving, suffering poet, knows intuitively that Mnemosyne has come to call him to his task. He knows, but has never seen her: he has, rather, “dream’d” her eyes, her calm face, in his “grassy solitudes” and upon awaking (she reports) given birth, upon a golden lyre, to “new tuneful wonder” (III.58–67). He raves on, however, in his agony, while she falls mute. Her muteness is perhaps necessary, for he now reads “a wondrous lesson” in her silent face: “Knowledge enormous makes a god of me” (III.113). There is, in this lesson, an intersection with the later poem, for it is the same lesson gleaned by the figure of the poet from Moneta’s brain, permitting him entry to the “high tragedy” acted out there, in its dark secret chambers. The poet in The Fall of Hyperion, we recall, experiences a sudden expansion into visionary knowledge; there grows upon him a power of “enormous ken, / To see as a god sees . . .” (I.302–3). What he sees, what follows, takes him into the far reaches of history, with Moneta as his Dantesque guide. The content of this history has, however, been enacted in the first two books of Hyperion, before Apollo’s parallel moment of revelation, placing the two poems in not only an inverted but an enbedded temporal relation to each other. Keats perhaps reaches back through his later poem, to sound the depths of the former, even as he abandons it. The Fall, to use Keats’s own visual metaphor, explores with the outward eye—envisages, in effect—the depths of the earlier poem by enacting it from a different point of view, by restoring it to the inward eye as an act of mental theatre. While the poet in The Fall of Hyperion acquires the ability to see as a god sees, Apollo’s “knowledge enormous” in Hyperion makes him a god and has a precisely specified content: “Names, deeds, gray legends, dire events, rebellions, Majesties, sovran voices, agonies, Creations and destroyings, all at once

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In Hyperion, history, or historical knowledge, comes at the end and brings Apollo to the brink of death.25 He is shaken by “wild commotions,” as though he were “at the gate of death”—or rather, “liker still to one who should take leave / Of pale immortal death, and with a pang / As hot as death’s is chill, with fierce convulse / Die into life . . .” (III.124–30). The semimortal poet of The Fall of Hyperion passes this barrier, or some form of it, much earlier in the poem by deferring or “dating on” his death: by only half rotting, as Moneta puts it, on the temple steps. In Hyperion, vision (enormous ken) and its content strike with devastating simultaneity, whereas in The Fall the capacity for such vision precedes and facilitates its content. Hyperion “ends,” however, with the anguished Apollo on the verge of a frightening transformation, during which Mnemosyne “upheld / Her arms as one who prophesied.” Finally, Apollo shrieks, “and lo! from all his limbs / Celestial ******” (III.133–36), the poem abruptly ends. There is a link here between fragmentation and metamorphosis, between breaking off (or giving way, as the Titans must, in Oceanus’s view of historical progress in Book II) and creation. This approach to fragmentation in Keats is supported by remarks he makes in his letters: “innumerable compositions and decompositions . . . ,” he asserts, “take place between the intellect and its thousand materials before it arrives at that trembling delicate and snailhorn perception of Beauty.”26 Developing energies accompany all dissolving motions, and one must often be content with “half-seeings,” although this is a state of affairs that one laments and resists as well. Certainly the fragment of Hyperion ends on a note of distress, as well as frantic possibility, that counterbalances the poem’s static opening—as though the statuary of the Titans, or the Titans-as-statuary, are the necessary precondition for a living poetry—or for history conceived in aesthetic terms, for history as a visual art. Both Hyperion poems are fragmentary in ways that appear inherent and inevitable. The poems’ subject matter and mode inhibit development, though perhaps for different reasons in each case.27 Hyperion was described by a contemporary reviewer as “the greatest of poetical Torsos,”28 no doubt with the Belvedere Torso in mind, and this suggestion lives on in the prevailing view that the monumental narrative models of the past that Keats resorted to are shown to be inadequate, if not unavailable, and that they break down in the process of recuperation. Martin Aske suggestively remarks that this has the effect of making that earlier poem an “epitaph to its own fragmentation.”29 This is doubly true of The Fall of Hyperion, where writing on, while looking back, applies as much in relation to the first Hyperion as it does to

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the distant past. That what Keats looks back to is irretrievably imprecise is conveyed by the increased importance of the visual in the second poem, in which Keats transposes the earlier attempt at epic into a scene of seeing, or rather, envisaging, in which things have a disturbing tendency to fade altogether from view. Fragmented, ruined forms litter the Keatsian landscape in a paradoxical way, often obscuring what is no longer there with suggestions of substance. This is of course one of the things that fragments appear to do so well: they imply or suggest wholes of which they (or we) are no longer in possession, which are also the very wholes that they inherently negate. In The Fall of Hyperion, the relation of the visual to the visionary is similarly disturbed and disturbing. What is seen (the visible) not only suggests what is not (the visionary) but supplies it too, and becomes the visible sign of its invisibility. The poet’s dependence on metaphors of sight underscores the central vacancy, or blindness, that he strives to repair and replenish—or simply remember. The visionary stands thus in an analogous relation to the elusive whole that we know only through the supplementation of the fragment, while the language of visuality mediates a conceptual problem, related ultimately to the poet’s historicity, his belatedness. There is in this a corresponding anxiety, present in the poet’s aching need to see, that makes the “shade of memory,” if not a fulfilling, then at least a necessary substitute. The next chapter further examines the way instances of fragmentation and ruin challenge the possibility of a full and authentic relation to either the past or to the whole. Mock and reconstructed ruins suggest a playful attitude to the materials of history, and to the irretrievability of its past forms, while making a visible statement about their impact on the cultural forms of the present.

3

The Fragment in Ruins

In March of 1818, an extensive array of architectural fragments arrived on English shores, aboard H.M.S. Weymouth, from Leptis Magna on the Libyan coast of North Africa. The shipment contained twenty-two granite columns, fifteen marble columns, ten capitals, twenty-five pedestals, seven loose slabs, ten pieces of cornice, five inscribed slabs, and various fragments of sculptured figures (for example, “Statue in halves Head and Feet deficient”).1 Such large-scale plundering of ruins abroad was not an unusual activity at the time—this is, after all, only a few years after Lord Elgin acquired a number of marbles from the Parthenon—but these, it seemed, had no obvious destination. They languished in the courtyard of the British Museum until 1826 when King George IV’s architect, then Jeffry Wyatt, came up with a plan to erect them in the King’s gardens, on the southern shores of Virginia Water, an artificial lake in Windsor Great Park. Wyatt refashioned them into what he referred to as his “Temple of Augustus,” a loose arrangement of columns intended to convey the impression of a temple in ruins, though bearing no direct relation to their original disposition at Leptis. These were grouped in two sections, separated by a road that was elevated upon a bridge, under which the King could pass on his private ride from the lake to Fort Belvedere. The group on the south side formed a semicircular apse, and on the north, a parallel colonnade. In places, pieces of entablature were hoisted on top of groups of two or three complete columns, but in general the shape, which suggested a submerged structure, was indicated by broken column shafts, and by fallen columns, or simply their remaining bases (Figure 3.1). The ruin was unusually large for an artificial one: roughly 225 feet long and 100 wide. With columns towering more than thirty feet above the viewer, it has been remarked that the ruin departs completely from the eighteenthcentury picturesque tradition and may, in fact, “be the only example of the philosophy of Sublimity . . . applied to an artificial ruin in England.”2 Statuary allegedly captured from a French ship during the Napoleonic Wars was later brought from Wolsey Chapel at Windsor to adorn the arrangement, however these figures were apparently “shamefully abused and mutilated” when William IV opened the park to the public after George IV’s

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Figure 3.1. Leptis Magna ruins, Virginia Water. Author’s photo.

death. To preserve the remnants, these were taken away to a distant part of the park and so well concealed that one report at least maintains that they were never recovered.3 One act of vandalism, it seems, replaces another, for it has been noted that the original plan to further excavate the site at Leptis was met by much local opposition. Many of the columns and statues were damaged while they awaited transport to London, and a number were left behind on the beach at Lebida.4 Wyatt’s “Temple” is now in a state of considerable decay; had its fragments been left in their original location, it seems likely they would have eventually become building material for new structures. As it stands, the ruins of the ruin remain.5 The story of the Leptis Magna ruins is one I shall return to again below. This brief sketch, however, introduces questions that are central to the first part of this study. The first, and most obvious, is the territory—theoretical and physical—shared by ruins and fragments, for ruins present the fragmentary to us in an accessible, material form. Thinking about ruins, moreover, illuminates the broader eighteenth-century cultural context with which this study begins, and draws attention to particular questions about the relation of ruins to history—questions raised quite pointedly by the Leptis Magna ruins in their Surrey location. Mock and reconstructed ruins suggest that historical understanding is itself always fragmentary: rediscovered and reassembled in parts, something to be simultaneously done, undone, and redone. Thus, the central instances discussed here are those, often impelled by the forces of Romantic antiquarianism, where fragmentation and ruin are copresent, each emphasizing and illuminating the other in their purchase on

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historicity. More general questions surrounding the relation of ruins to history, and of history to ruins, will be addressed later in the chapter: these are important because they relate, in turn, to different ways of thinking about fragmentation, and because they assist in bringing an historical perspective to bear upon the fragment. The importance of time—a view not just of the past but also the future—will become apparent, for if fragments and ruins appear to have transcended time (and with it, history), they are also its clearest markers.

I. RUINS AND FRAGMENTS Ruins are, I suggested above, an accessible form of the fragment. They are, by definition, fragmentary, but they are nevertheless only one potential form of the fragmentary. Since forces of ruin and fragmentation interanimate each other in the cases of mock or assembled ruin that are the focus of this chapter, I’d like to begin by considering the degree of overlap and of difference between the terms “ruin” and “fragment. ” Essentially, ruins are highly evocative forms of the fragment, and they operate according to its logic: they suggest an absent whole, and indeed occupy an ambivalent space between the part and the past whole, whose presence they affirm and negate (affirm, paradoxically, by negation). In their present state of decay, ruins signify loss and absence; they are, moreover, a visible evocation of the invisible, the appearance of disappearance. And yet, to the extent that they are themselves preserved, they suggest perseverance: the possibility, at least, of endurance against the odds of time and history. Notions of hope, memorialization, and restoration all thus adhere to the ruin as an object of contemplation, however framed or constructed that object might be. As an object, even an object in ruins, the ruin is a material thing. On the other hand, to speak of the fragment, to which any of the features just mentioned might also apply, is arguably to engage the problem of the incomplete, or the partial, in more abstract or conceptual terms (although both fragment and ruin can refer to a state, an object, or an act). However, while all ruins are, by definition, fragments, the opposite does not necessarily, or always, hold true. A fragment might well be still awaiting its completion in the future, whereas for a ruin, completion is generally a feature of a state long past. The ruin could be viewed then as an exemplary if limited fragment: a particularly immediate and familiar form of the fragment, and one conditioned and constituted by that participation in illuminating ways. Cases where both fragmentation and ruin are explicitly present are particularly interesting because that co-presence compounds or multiplies those effects, and brings the paradoxes of the fragment into clearer focus. This is certainly true for the larger question of history. Ruins have been thought to have more apparent links to an historical context, while the more radical detachment of the fragment in general might seem to render

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it, by comparison, ahistorical. This is a claim made, for example, by Anne Janowitz in England’s Ruins,6 and it is one I will explore briefly below, in order to specify more clearly what it is that makes each distinct. Ruins share the overall logic of the fragment, but it might be suggested that they have a clearer relationship to time and to totality: the wholes they evoke are generally those, as suggested above, that have passed away. Although the possibility of restoration remains, the restored object would remain an artifact or monument from the past: an historical object. Considered as fragments, though, such ruins can also seem curiously timeless: detached from their original contexts, they are also in some sense isolated from the present and achieve or project a sense of wholeness through this apparent self-containment. By contrast, the fragment is more fluid in this respect; by relating to the past or to the future, it appears less historically specific. Like ruins in the landscape, a fragment can refer back to a whole that has passed away—indeed to a past that was perceived to be more in possession of the whole (for example, classical antiquity or the Christian Middle Ages). But it also has a uniquely forward-looking aspect. For certain German Romantic writers, as noted in the previous chapter, the fragment had a special relationship to futurity, a relationship linked in no small part to its status as a figure for coming into being, as the perfect expression of their view of Romantic poetry as, on the one hand, all-encompassing, but on the other, always in a state of becoming and never to be achieved. This is a complexity that the ruin, even in its more radical and revolutionary orientations, cannot fully convey. It is easy to see how much territory the fragment and the ruin may share, but perhaps less easy to determine which is the larger conceptual category. Janowitz reverses the order of priority that I have suggested here, and reads the fragment as a subset of the ruin. In England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape, she explores an emergent link between the image of ruin in its picturesque benignity (from castles to cottages) and a particular notion of “Britishness”—a way of framing history, the past, and the nation, in which the landscape ruin clearly emerges as an icon of British heritage. This emergent link was especially visible in the early Romantic period, a period during which she argues that national aspirations often conspired with “ruin sentiment” in literary texts. In tracing a genealogy of ruin poetry, she observes a tendency in the late eighteenth century toward de-historicization and de-contextualization, a shift away from narrative forms in favour of more spatially inflected lyric forms. Moving from fragmented objects to fragmented texts, Janowitz argues that the Romantic fragment poem in effect internalizes ruin, so that “the temporality of ruin—a whole now worn away—gives up poetic space to the shape of a fragment” (10). Literary fragments, somewhat counterintuitively, are thus seen as spatialized versions of ruins. The relationship between ruin and fragment evolves in her account so that memory (driven by a sense of, or for, the past) is largely superseded by longing: a dialectic by which temporal degeneration, once spatialized,

44 Romanticism and Visuality begins to generate hope. In this way, through this intriguing dynamic of mutual transformation, the fragment and the ruin are seen to “meet and modify” one another in the Romantic period. The fragment, however, comes to take over, and preoccupy, the domain of the ruin; by the end of Janowitz’s study it would seem that it cannot be constrained any longer within the rubric of the ruin. This has less to do with its inherent expressive excess (although it certainly can appear intractable to definition) than with the fact that the fragment is, more plausibly, the overriding conceptual category. The key point to take forward though is the way in which the interplay between fragmentation and ruin, confounding as it sometimes is, can generate (new) significance. The juxtaposition of fragments on the same picture plane, for instance, can produce a number of intriguing effects. One visual example of interest, for its spatial manipulation of the ruin-fragment, is the architectural capriccio. Capricci, as the name suggests, are invented landscapes that often bring ruined monuments together into the same visual field, though these may in reality be far apart. Or, they may simply pile up fragments for visual or imaginative effect. In some instances, such as Pannini’s “Capriccio of Roman Monuments” (Figure 3.2), the impulse is less capricious than documentary: the painting offers a visual compendium, a kind of exhibition catalogue of Rome’s finest sculptures and architectural ruins in an apparently natural, or at least uncontrived, setting. Pannini’s “Imaginary Gallery of Ancient Roman Art” (Figure 3.3), by contrast, brings the outdoors in and paints an exhibition of other paintings, covering every available inch of wall, that depict a rich variety of ruined Roman structures and temples. Here too, famous sculptures are arranged in appropriate corners and admired by a small group of viewers.7 Though capricci of this kind dated back to the seventeenth century, Pannini popularized the form in a way that reveals much about the mid-eighteenth century fantasy of the aesthetic ideal that Rome represented. Interestingly, these assemblages of souvenir pieces, these montages of fragments, could be custom designed according the taste of the client, to form a sort of “ideal cabinet,” or, perhaps, cabinet of the ideal.8 Pannini’s capricci bring before the viewer sights of monumental ruin that may actually be seen. In other cases, however, the ruling premise is thoroughly imaginary, in keeping with the capriccio’s designation of what falls outside the norm, bordering even upon the bizarre.9 Clérisseau’s “ruin room” at SS Trinità dei Monti in Rome (Figure 3.4), in which an intact interior room was painted to look as though it were permeated by ruin, attests to the imaginary force of ruins, and shows them to be a subject peculiarly well suited to illusionism and the creation of trompe-l’oeil effects.10 In such a case, we have a sham ruin that is not a ruin at all. Another modification of this general scheme is to be found in Robert Adam’s “Trompe l’oeil composition of sketches of Roman ruins” (Figure 3.5) that anticipates myriorama, those collections of uniformly sized pictures of classical monuments and landscape views that could be laid out to create a partially or wholly

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Figure 3.2. Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Capriccio of Roman Monuments. Ashmolean Museum, Oxford.

fictional visual field.11 As if to emphasize the distance from their “actual” subjects, Adam’s drawings were composed after his return from Italy, and involve two levels of deception. First, each of the drawings depicts what appears to be a real ruin, but is actually a sophisticated arrangement of fragments; second, the drawings appear to be scattered like postcards on a

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Figure 3.3 Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Imaginary Gallery of Ancient Roman Art [Galerie de vues de la Rome Antique]. Louvre Museum, Paris. Photo RMN / © RenéGabriel Ojéda.

Figure 3.4 Charles-Louis Clérisseau, Design for the Ruin Room at SS Trinità dei Monti, Rome. c. 1766. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

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Figure 3.5. Robert Adam, Trompe l’oeil composition of sketches of Roman ruins, c. 1759. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Sloane’s Museum.

tabletop, while offering themselves collectively as a picturesque presentation. All of this indicates Adam’s “imaginative transformation of Antiquity” into something dynamic and malleable.12 The response elicited by Rome’s ruins is the subject of the next chapter. Of primary interest here is the effect of piling fragment upon ruin, and ruin upon fragment: the compounding, but also the creation of effect; the recycling of fragments and/in the fabrication of ruin, where the result, so often a folly, plays with our sense of the real and of thus of the historical. Many artificial ruin structures, such as Wyatt’s “Temple of Augustus,” contained the fragmentary remains of others. This could offer symbolic significance, were the provenance of the parts to be foregrounded or made an obvious feature of the “new” ruin. In this vein, Diderot, in his Salon of 1767, remarked that

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the use of well-chosen fragments within scenes of ruin produced greater depth of meaning, and a stronger sense of historical transport. For example, if a painter wished to include a relief fragment, Diderot urges that it depict action “from a period antecedent to the flourishing peak of the ruined city.” For “you’ll transport me that much further back into the past, and you’ll awaken within me all the more veneration and sorrow for a people that had brought the fine arts to such a degree of perfection.”13 Such imaginary scenes and spaces thus lend themselves to historical representation as well as historical revision, while creating contrapuntal temporal effects. With this in mind, we turn to a closer examination of how a Romantic sense of history came into view, but was also manipulated, by the insistent (and often insistently visual) indeterminacy of the ruin-fragment.

II. HISTORY IN RUINS Modern historical consciousness—when, as Stephen Bann has argued, “the whole range of our contemporary concerns with the past first became accessible to representation”—is generally held to have come into being in the Romantic period.14 At this time, historical data ceased to be the preserve of a small group of, for example, “committed ‘antiquarians,’” and became available and meaningful to a mass reading and viewing public (5). Even more important, a quantitatively and qualitatively different sense of history came increasingly to inform diverse cultural activities, across disciplinary boundaries, and “history” became more self-conscious. The increased interest in ruins (the sentiment des ruines, or Ruinenlust) that was such a marked feature of eighteenth-century culture clearly played one part in this, involving as it did an imaginative response to the relics and remnants of the past. It answered, at the very least, to one of Nietzsche’s tripartite historical attitudes, the antiquarian, for which the historical relation is marked by conservatism and reverence.15 The representations of history that the antiquarian view allows do function, however, differently in the later eighteenth century than in earlier periods. Bann argues that what he calls the “full-blooded historical-mindedness of the Romantic epoch” is indebted to the antiquarian for its range of historical representations and, perhaps more important, for its articulation of a subjective stance in relation to the past.16 The antiquarian model, it has been argued, provoked a “revolution” not only in taste but also in historical method, and indeed eroded the distinction between antiquarian and historical studies.17 It has, moreover, an ancient pedigree, descending from the Varronian view of “antiquitates” in ancient Rome, which held that a civilization could be recovered through the “systematic collection of all the relics of the past.”18 Within the larger system of the collection, the key feature that distinguishes the antiquarian view is its emphasis on the part, and on the particular, as a key to the understanding of the whole. This enhances, of course, the value of the historical object,

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in a way that perhaps risks its fetishization: the part takes on a particular potency, a potency enhanced by its status as fragment and/or ruin. All historical models must address the problem of assimilating their elements into a coherent narrative whole—by organizing the parts systematically, perspectivally, so that, as Bann puts it, “limited but immediate perceptions of ‘the past’ can be integrated into an overall awareness of history as a separate, but accessible dimension of experience” (The Inventions of History, 116). The antiquarian interest in the part, however, involves a range of subjective and psychological motivations. Desire for the full apprehension of the historical whole arises from the lack of it, its irretrievable loss, and this state of affairs impels the creation of imaginary or fantasized “histories” that in their own particularized way tell us a great deal about the construction of history in general. Winckelmann is an important and familiar figure here, for his reconstruction of classical history around its sculptural remnants, but the cult of the past that the antiquarian fostered was full of less well-known figures who contributed no less to the late eighteenth-century preoccupation with historical resuscitation. One such figure, explored at some length by Stephen Bann, is Bryan Faussett, an antiquarian from Kent, who collected and displayed his recuperated objects in a purpose-built pavilion.19 Like many such collectors at this time, his aim was not just to salvage and preserve the relics of the past in all their historical otherness, but to restore them, after a fashion, to historical status, by labeling each with a Latin inscription that conferred upon it a source, and identity, and a somewhat personalized narrative of the author’s role in the object’s recovery. On the one hand, “history” is put on view—organized, in the manner of the modern museum, by both representing and filling in (filling in by representing) its gaps—while on the other, the eclectic view of history Faussett offers remains “provisional and lacunary”: the very “pastness” of each fragment, which justifies its retrieval both physically and rhetorically, is precisely what is displayed (Romanticism and the Rise of History, 91). Fantasies of retrieval explicitly compensate, Bann suggests, for “our sense of the irrecoverable loss of the past” (106). There are, clearly, a number of ways in which ruins, and fragmentary ruins, speak to, or of, the past. In all cases, ambivalent effects are created by the way ruins float between the past and present (the same way fragments are suspended between the part and the idea of the whole), but belong fully to neither. It is just as possible, for example, to view the anachronism of the ruin as bearing a message from the past, as it is to see it operating, as Michael Roth suggests in Irrestible Decay, as “an active site of life in the present.”20 Although, or rather because, it has what Alois Riegl referred to as “age value” (as opposed to art value or historical value),21 the ruin is a surplus, and a superfluous, object: it is without a use or function in the present, except insofar as the meaning of a ruin can be adapted to the needs—often political ones—of a particular present.22 The paradox of the ruin as a site of preservation in decay corresponds, then, to another paradox by which

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history, or historicity, is acknowledged, while full historical knowledge is precisely what is lacking. The peculiar temporality of ruins underscores this paradox. Visitors, for example, to the city of Pompeii, which was effectively frozen in time by the volcanic eruption of Vesuvius in 79 AD, are frequently struck by the sense of walking back into the past, while at the same time experiencing, in the present, the overwhelming presence of death.23 Time is, on the one hand, suspended—and history in abeyance—while on the other, the very transience of time is captured. What attracted Freud to Wilhelm Jensen’s 1903 novella Gradiva, set in the city of Pompeii, was this very idea of the past locked into and embedded in the present, which could provide suggestive spatial and archaeological analogies for the aims and procedures of psychoanalysis. Freud frequently made recourse to archaeological metaphors, perhaps most pointedly in his case history of Dora, where he claims to have felt constrained “to follow the example of those discoverers whose good fortune it is to bring to the light of day after their long burial the priceless though mutilated relics of antiquity.”24 The analyst “restores what is missing,” using the models known to him from other analyses. Excavation and restoration are both, in this view, necessary: ruins must be worked upon, worked through, their fragmentary elements brought into and made part of the present. This process depends on, although it also aims to efface or resolve, the double temporal identity of the ruin. Or, to put it differently, it evokes a model of the mind like the one advanced in Civilization and Its Discontents, in which memory, like the multilayered ruins of Rome, is seen to contain still all that it once contained: under the right conditions, any single element could be brought to light in the present.25 What begins to emerge, so to speak, is the possibility that the historicity of the ruin is a function of the present (itself, of course, an historically relative series of moments). Ruins thus represent the historical relation, rather than history “itself.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in what has been called the ruin industry: the popularity, in eighteenth-century culture, of ruins as an essential element of picturesque beauty, which gave rise to the building of artificial or sham ruins—follies—in the gardens or parks of (primarily) the wealthy. The French terms used for these “show” buildings—fabriques, or bâtiments d’effet—emphasize how much their constructed nature is in the service of visual effect.26 Better-known examples include William Kent’s “Temple of Modern Virtue” (ironically constructed out of disordered piles of stone) in the gardens at Stowe, Buckinghamshire, 27 and the Roman arch designed by William Chambers at Kew, reportedly one of the first mockRoman ruins in Britain (Figure 3.6). Richard Wilson’s painting of this structure, which judiciously added in a sketching figure and Italian cypresses on the skyline, was so deceptive that when an engraving was made from it in the early nineteenth century, it was retitled “Villa Borghese.” The actual subject of the sham painting (itself of course of a sham ruin) was forgotten, and not reidentified until 1948.28 An intriguing instance from elsewhere in

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Figure 3.6. Richard Wilson, Ruined Arch in Kew Gardens, c. 1761–1762. The Trustees of the late Sir R. B. Ford. Photograph: John Webb.

Europe (for this was by no means an exclusively English fashion) is to be found in the gardens at Hohenheim, in Stuttgart, where in 1785 the park was laid out as though built over the ruins of an ancient city, so that fragments of it appeared to protrude from below.29 An equally evocative, though in some ways rather different case, is the Temple of Philosophy at Ermenonville, close to the burial place of Rousseau, which is presented as a ruin not because it has been abandoned to decay, but because it is incomplete, and cannot be completed in the present: as a monument to human progress, it invites philosophers of the future to “restore” it to a finished state.30 While sham ruins can be the product of idleness, decadence, and frivolity, they can nevertheless make powerful symbolic statements, and have the effect of illuminating the ways in which ruins function more generally. In particular, they reveal aspects of the ruin’s necessarily constructed relationship to questions of history, and its importance in the creation of the present. Sham ruins share the general characteristics of any ruin, insofar as they require a simultaneous or double vision whereby the building is perceived both in its ruinous state and in its formerly whole one. In the case of a sham ruin, however, it is necessary to conceive of a building that has never existed (aligning it thus with the looser and more abstract logic of the fragment). The very idea of building a ruin is, of course, contradictory. Normally, buildings are designed with permanence in mind, and to resist the forces of nature, whereas a successful built ruin does its best to render artifice

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natural, indeed to efface the line between artifice and nature—hence William Gilpin’s assertion that a ruin unadorned by the appropriate vegetation is “incomplete.”31 Gilpin’s observations, relative to the creation and appreciation of picturesque beauty, emphasize the difficulty of this enterprise: “to give the stone its mouldering appearance—to make the widening chink run naturally through all the joints—to mutilate the ornaments—to peel the facing from the internal structure—to shew how correspondent parts have once united . . . are great efforts of art.” Moreover, after all that art can accomplish, “you must put your ruin at last into the hands of nature to finish,” and induce the ivy and the “long, spiry grass” to encroach. It is time alone that can confer “perfect beauty” upon a ruin, and bring it “to a state of nature” (74). In the view of some commentators, the construction of a sham ruin according to an agenda such as Gilpin’s is a reparative gesture that has the effect of healing an historical breach: by attempting to stage, or represent, the harmonious coming together of nature and culture, one symbolically repairs the damage inflicted by human history.32 If one considers the building of a ruin as a gesture of mastery or control over the past (another expression, perhaps, of the historical compulsion to repeat), this is because of the way ruins and fragments suggest the inevitable decline of empires, the forces of decay and disorder that beleaguer all human endeavour, and moreover, remind us of the partiality of human understanding, the necessary incompleteness of all knowledge. And yet, while ruins evoke conservative nostalgia and urge the need for preservation (to shore up ruin against ruin, to echo and modify T. S. Eliot), they also, as Elizabeth Harries pointedly suggests, may be seen as a “quarry and resource” from which to draw for the future: and even, a symbolic site for radical or revolutionary expression and activity.33 This potential ambivalence, politically speaking, was a feature of Volney’s attentiveness to the language of “reason” in which, for him, ruins spoke. Not merely to be seen as figures for a destructive human history, as evidence of tyranny and short-sightedness, spectacles of ruin instead conveyed a comprehensive degree of historical understanding that in turn imparted lessons of sympathy for mankind and hope for futurity.34 Harries’ analysis of the vogue for the appreciation and construction of sham ruins raises, however, important questions of class. Nostalgia for the (mutilated) remnants of antiquity was a genteel preoccupation that marked the ruin industry in the same class terms as the culture the ruins themselves belonged to. Conceived as a meditation on the fall of empires, the artificial ruin, Harries observes, “reflects the continuing power of one imperial class to dictate what should be seen and valued as history”; moreover, while intended to provoke a meditation on the transitoriness of man’s works, the ruin industry provided a rather rich opportunity for “ostentatious display and conspicuous consumption” (Harries, 82). And yet, the ironic dimension of mock ruins may still be understood in terms of ideological change. Ruins offer an obvious site for mourning lost cultures, but also, if we have attended to Volney’s “les-

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sons,” offer a certain reflective distance from the past that can inform the construction of new ones—that speak for a certain freedom from the past and the constraints that its traditions impose on the present. Building a ruin involves an imitation of “the past,” but with the awareness that the past is available not just to pillage but also to reconfigure anew. Susan Buck-Morss, in The Dialectics of Seeing, makes a similar point about Benjamin’s interest in ruins in the Arcades Project (the specific example is Baudelaire’s allegorical poetry), suggesting that the ruin is: “ . . . the form in which the wish images of the past century appear, as rubble, in the present. But it refers also to the loosened building blocks (both semantic and material) out of which a new order can be constructed” (Buck-Morss, 212). The very mutability of the past facilitates this, and makes it available to the future. To deliberately fragment things is, as Harries points out, to recognize their “constructed and historical character” and at the same time to loosen the hold of “the historical” over us (Harries, 85). At an extreme, to expose the historical character of a ruin is also to expose hegemonic power, in keeping perhaps with Diderot’s (prerevolutionary) remark that “one must ruin a palace in order to make it an object of interest.”35 This impulse is to be found in the late eighteenth-century practice of imagining existing buildings as ruins, which, Harries suggests, at least implies the recognition that those structures (and we ourselves) are historically placed and conditioned. In some cases, this practice extended to imagining an imaginary building in ruins (part, perhaps, of the process of its design), as in William Chambers’ 1751–1752 project for a mausoleum for the Prince of Wales. The first painter to depict an existing building in ruins was Hubert Robert, whose well-known pair of paintings of the Louvre—one depicting a renovated gallery, the other, its thorough ruin—are less whimsical than they are wryly political, as Paula Radisich argues (Figures 3.7 and 3.8).36 Released in 1794 from imprisonment for, ostensibly, a lapsed certificate of “civisme,”37 by 1796, the date of these paintings, Robert was involved with the museum’s reorganization into a permanent exhibition space (the Louvre, Radisich reminds us, was a child of the French Revolution, mandated to display its spoils on behalf of the nation). The paintings operate as two voices, the second mocking not only his own project, but with it, the “high-minded civic ideal of art for the people” on which the museum was founded (131). A public institution in imagined ruin is the subject of another well-known painting, Joseph Gandy’s representation of the rotunda of the Bank of England. Gandy was the masterful illustrator of Soane’s architectural designs— his “visualising amanuensis” for more than thirty years.38 The depiction of the rotunda in ruins can be paired with his view of the same interior, this time intact, and conveyed with the empty grandeur of a monumental Roman structure (Figures 3.9 and 3.10). Both paintings also date from 1796, although the view imagined in ruins was not exhibited until 1832, when it was shown at the Royal Academy with an accompanying extract from The Tempest that made explicit the ruin’s implicit warning against the

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Figure 3.7. Hubert Robert, Project for remodeling of the Grand Galerie of the Louvre, 1796 [Projet d’aménagement de la Grand Galerie du Louvre]. Louvre Museum, Paris. Photo RMN / © Gérard Blot / Jean Schormans.

vanity of mortal aspirations: “The cloud-capt towers, the gorgeous palaces, / The solemn temples, the great globe itself, / Yea, all which it inherit shall dissolve.”39 The gloomy scene, which shows the influence of Piranesi’s views of ruins, imagines an uncertain future for the accomplishments of the present. The ruins are given the sublime grandeur of all ancient ruins, but the presence of men with pick-axes—though dwarfed by the sheer size of the rotunda—nevertheless suggests the calciatori of Rome who plundered ruins for marble that could be burned into lime. It has been suggested that the delay in exhibiting this work might be related to Soane’s sense of professional persecution, for no one, Woodward remarks, was more distrustful of posterity than he (Woodward, 160).

III. RUINS IN FRAGMENTS Sir John Soane was a central figure in the collection and display of fragments of ruins, and his extensive collections of architectural and sculptural fragments are still on view in his former house in Lincoln’s Inn Fields

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Figure 3.8. Hubert Robert, Imaginary View of the Grand Galerie of the Louvre in Ruins, 1796 [Vue imaginaire de la Grande Galerie du Louvre en ruines]. Louvre Museum, Paris. Photo RMN / © Gérard Blot / Jean Schormans.

(Figure 3.11). They suggest not only a melancholic and regretful, but an ironic sensibility, which is especially apparent in a few of Soane’s projects that involved artificial ruins. One of these, referred to as the “Monk’s Yard,” was an adjunct to his London house that Soane claimed was the medieval remains of a monk’s hermitage. Far from a fortuitous discovery, which Soane claimed took place when he was digging the foundations for his new house, these remains were in fact assembled by him from genuine architectural fragments salvaged from the old Houses of Parliament during his time as architect there.40 The monk, allegedly named Padre Giovanni, was clearly a playful alter-ego for Soane himself, and his “yard” contained a tomb inscribed with the expostulation, echoing Sterne, “Alas Poor Fanny.” Fanny, as it happens, was not the lost beloved for whom the monk pined in melancholy seclusion, but Mrs. Soane’s much-loved dog, whose coffin remains there to this day (Figure 3.12). A second such project involved the ruins of a Roman temple that Soane built at his country house in Ealing, Pitshanger Manor. These included a sham structure and a faked document, and were, like the Hohenheim gardens, constructed so as to appear to be the protruding fragments of a submerged ruin. Soane released a document in 1802 announcing their discovery: “There has

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Figure 3.9. Joseph Gandy, View of the Rotunda of the Bank of England, 1978. By courtesy of the trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

lately been discovered in the Manor of Pitshanger at Ealing the remains of a very ancient Temple, which for the satisfaction of all lovers of antiquity, I shall describe.”41 These appeared to be the remnants of a Roman colonnade, which were allegedly uncovered by Soane during the clearing of brambles (Figures 3.13 and 3.14). The manuscript of this announcement took the form of a pastiche of an antiquarian’s letter to Gentleman’s Magazine. Soane stated that one of his objects was “to ridicule those fanciful architects and antiquarians who, finding a few pieces of columns, and sometimes only a few single stones, proceeded from these slender data to imagine magnificent buildings” (30). In an elaborate parlour game, visitors to Pitshanger, including J. M. W. Turner, were presented with the manuscript and various drawings (such as Soane’s own hypothetical reconstruction of 1804) and invited to offer their own completions or reconstructions. A final footnote to the project was composed in 1835, two years before Soane’s death and after the folly had been demolished by a subsequent owner of the estate (Soane sold the house in 1810 and moved its contents to Lincoln’s Inn Fields), when he published a volume of views

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Figure 3.10. Joseph Gandy, View of the Rotunda in Ruins, London, 1978. By courtesy of the trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

showing the site excavated to reveal a lower arcade complete with floor mosaics, and mutilated statues. Soane’s pastiche of gothic sensibility extended rather pointedly to the posturing of antiquarians, and in an earlier example took the form of a fictional text, rather than an actual structure. “Crude Hints Toward the History of My House,” which dates from the summer of 1812, is set in the future when an imaginary antiquarian sifts through the remains of Soane’s house, looking for clues as to its earlier purpose and inhabitants (Soane imagines that after his death the house is first occupied by lawyers, after which, being presumed haunted, it falls into disuse). What begins whimsically ends on a more bitter personal note as the ruins are discovered by the antiquarian not to have been a “Heathen Temple to Vesta . . . or the palace of an Enchanter” but the home of a persecuted artist, who “went on from a pure love to promote the interests of Art, until at last he had raised a nest of wasps about him sufficient to sting the strongest man to death.”42 The antiquarian finds himself overcome by his discovery, which he suggests offers an admirable picture of “the vanity & mockery of all human expectations.” The final variant ending concludes: “Oh what a falling off do these ruins represent—the subject becomes too gloomy to be pursued—the pen drops from my almost palsied hand. . . .” (74). Soane’s concerns are clearly with posterity, with the afterlife, so to speak, of buildings and of individual lives, as well as a lament for his own frustrated hopes.43 His investment in ruins springs from a melancholy pleasure in them, that situates him closer to eighteenth-century culture than to his own place in the early nineteenth, so that even his career has

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Figure 3.11. Dome area of the Sir John Soane Museum, Lincoln’s Inn Fields, London. Richard Bryant / arcaid.co.uk.

elements of ruin and anachronism attached to it. His extensive collections of architectural fragments preserved at Lincoln’s Inn Fields, which have been evocatively referred to as “treasures salvaged from a shipwrecked dream,” suggest a wishful sympathy with Francis Bacon’s description of antiquities as “remnants of history which have [by chance] escaped the shipwreck of Time.”44 But his experiments with artificial ruins arguably show kinship with Freud’s later view that the fragments of ruins must be rediscovered

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Figure 3.12. Joseph Gandy, View of the Monk’s Yard. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

in the place they occupy in the present, and that this is less a rediscovery of something preexistent, than an act of deliberate placement that must be brought to consciousness. The Pitshanger example shows that there is no difference between what has been discovered, and what has been put there

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Figure 3.13. George Basevi, View of the Ruins at Pitshanger, 1810. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

in order to be discovered. “History” appears, in this view, as a matter of creative interpolation. Soane’s fragmentary citations of “whole” architectural models at Pitshanger—his “couplets and quatrains of classical architecture, quotations fractured from the original text” (Woodward, 166)—anticipate Wyatville’s extensive folly at Virginia Water, where recycling also played an important role. The original site of the Leptis Magna ruins, apparently buried and thus well-preserved under dry desert sands, had been extensively mined, from the seventeenth century on, for building materials in Europe. Much of it went to France, where Louis XIV reportedly made good use of more than six hundred marble columns in his palaces in Paris and at Versailles (there were also columns used in the Church of St. Germain des Prés, which disappeared during the Revolution).45 Even within the confines of Windsor Park, as we have seen, a certain amount of dispersal took place, and with it has come uncertainty about either the fate or the identity of some of its elements, none of it helped by the Gilpinesque encroachment of natural debris and foliage. Given the provenance of the ruins, this is either entirely appropriate, or an ironic commentary on the occasion of their removal. Interestingly, too, the ruins were often misidentified: referred to casually as part of the Elgin Marbles, too

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Figure 3.14. C. J. Richardson, Bird’s Eye View of Pitshanger Manor, 1832. By courtesy of the Trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.

large to exhibit to advantage in the museum, or merely as “brought from the shores of the Levant.”46 Historical specificity is, it seems, less important than a brush with historicity, if indeed historical consciousness was even on the minds of those captured in, for example, intriguing Victorian photographs of parties amid the ruins.47 The ruins create a pleasurable illusion of an historical encounter—a spectacle even of historicity—while articulating the absence of any actual historical reference, which in this case would include the subjection of the North African coast of the Mediterranean to successive waves of settlement and colonization. Ruins such as those at Virginia Water function, rather, as a signifier that can be emptied and filled at will. More pointedly, they monumentalize, in spatial terms, the very condition of the historical as a form of assemblage—and assemble the remnants of history into an (anti-)monument to the historical condition of the fragment.

IV. RUINS AND HISTORY The prominent place of fragments and ruins in the Romantic period is linked to a wide range of cultural and philosophical preoccupations—from changing aesthetic ideals to the increasing historical self-consciousness for which Bann has argued. In many instances, ruin and fragmentation are themes rather than physical features of the work. They may be linked to

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the aspirations and limitations of the human condition, to historicity as a general theme or problem; or, their presence may reflect an acute awareness of the writer or artist’s historical moment. In these cases, a number of possible responses are evident. A sense of melancholy, and conservative nostalgia, may well be implicated. On the other hand, the ruin may be seen more positively as a sign that decline is an inevitable feature of oppressive, authoritarian institutions (the monastery, the baronial pile), and may reorient the viewer’s thoughts toward ideas of progress and change. In this way, the ruin motif in English poetry has important political and historical dimensions; as Janowitz has argued, “ruin” has done much to shape British national identity, and to encourage nationalist feeling—feeling of the very kind now, ironically, prompting Greece to argue for the return of the Elgin Marbles. Two well-known literary responses to physical ruins, both (complete) Romantic sonnets, articulate a key distinction between veneration of ruin on the one hand, and disavowal on the other. Keats’s sonnet discussed briefly in the previous chapter, “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles,” charts the poet’s reaction to his first sight of the fragmentary sculptures in 1817.48 The marbles epitomize the achievement of classical art, but the poem, while implicitly celebrating their impossible perfection, is not about how they look, but rather about thoughts of death and poetic inadequacy—which would make Henry Fuseli’s “The Artist Overwhelmed by the Grandeur of Antique Ruins,” of 1778–1779, in which the figure of the despondent artist is dwarfed by the fragments of a colossal hand and foot, the perfect visual counterpart to Keats’s poem. The broken sculptures are, it seems, experienced by the poet as a source of distress: these “dim-conceived glories of the brain” (9) are oppressively burdensome. The poet sees in them heights (“each imagined pinnacle and steep / Of godlike hardship”(3–4)) that his inevitable death will prevent him from scaling. Indeed, human mortality “weighs heavily . . . like unwilling sleep” (2). In his distress, he compares himself to “a sick eagle” that can only look impotently at the sky, powerless and marginalized in his own domain. The poem’s sestet reflects pointedly on the force of such fragments (“these wonders”) by linking the sense of disturbance they evoke—“a most dizzy pain”—to the mingling of beauty and decay, to prized objects and their wasting: “Grecian grandeur with the rude / Wasting of old Time” (11–14). By contrast, Shelley’s sonnet “Ozymandias” presents not the force but the farce of the fragment: impotence is not the poet’s problem, but that of the tyrant, who builds himself up (literally) and believes he is immortal.49 Inscribed, with terrible irony, on the pedestal upon which his massive statue once stood, is the declaration “My name is Ozymandias, king of kings, / Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!” (10–11). Ozymandias derives from a Greek version of the name for the Egyptian pharaoh, Ramses II, and it is thought that Shelley’s poem was inspired by the sight of the colossal granite head of the pharaoh, which was hauled across the desert from the

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temple at Thebes, brought to England with the ruins of Leptis Magna, and put on display in the British Museum. In the sonnet, the statue’s frowning face, with its “sneer of cold command” (5) lies shattered and half sunk in sand; his “vast and trunkless” (2) legs still stand, looking faintly ridiculous, but in the unfrequented expanse of desert in which he is said to lie, “nothing beside remains” (12). The artist is cannier than the ruler in this vignette, as the work of the sculptor, who “well those passions read” (6), has outlasted the works of the pharaoh himself. The fragments here function as an ironic warning against the dangers of self-aggrandizement, as well as a reminder of the evitable decline and fall of empires. But perhaps there is also an element of satire in the lightness of the poem’s treatment of its subject, directed against the melancholic view of the ruin as the repository of inaccessible truths, one that leads to the veneration of old tyrannies. Both of these sonnets were composed in the wake of the French Revolution, and that event was central to the larger historical shift that radically affected how ruins were viewed. The shift, which underscores the increased historical consciousness of the Romantic period examined by Bann, was from a largely aesthetic appreciation of fragments to a more historically nuanced one, in which evidence of given historical moments is valued for the difference it marks from others, rather than as part of a reassuring continuum, or cycle, of decline and regeneration. After the revolution and the Napoleonic wars, ruins came increasingly to be seen as the products, not of nature, but of man-made disasters of a political or economic kind: of miscalculation, pollution, destruction, apocalyptic catastrophe. The first type of ruin, ruins of nature, or of time, derive from a gradual undermining; but as Chateaubriand pointed out, the second, ruins of history, “exhibit nothing but the image of annihilation, without any reparative power.” The “destructions of man,” he notes, are “much more violent and much more complete than those of time.”50 His view is nuanced by antirevolutionary feeling, fed by horror at how the effect of revolution was to ruin ruins, to destroy utterly and indiscriminately the vestiges of the past preserved in its remains. Nevertheless, at stake here is a revolution, precipitated by the events of 1789, in how both time and history were viewed by all sides. Peter Fritzsche’s work on the coming into being of a modern sense of time and its historical implications makes a persuasive case for locating this upheaval in the French Revolution and its aftermath—in its wholesale disruption of prevailing, Western conceptions of historical continuity.51 Contemporary commentators and witnesses frequently expressed a sense of its events as deeply astonishing and unnatural. Things happened quickly: they were impossible often to understand, and people experienced an at times apocalyptic sense of things overturned, and of the present as utterly cut off from the past. This was not the first time that a population experienced the events of their historical moment as bewilderingly new, and not assimilable to known, past models—Fritzsche notes that writers in postReformation England, who witnessed the extensive destruction of Catholic

64 Romanticism and Visuality sites, expressed similar views about “irreparable loss and the eruption of new time” (8). However, the scale of the upheaval across Europe, and its political and ideological repercussions, mark the turn of the nineteenth century as an important “moment of innovation,” even if to claim this risks repeating the prevailing “conceit” of modernity, which is that “history is the relentless iteration of the new” (8). What Fritzsche shows, however, is how this apparent historical cataclysm gave rise to a particular, and particularized, historical worldview, the legacy of which is identifiable in our own time, and fuelled a “common endeavour to think historically and to possess the past” (10). The main features of this narrative are largely familiar, and are arguably already present, if in nascent or ambiguous form, in some of the eighteenthcentury examples of collectors, antiquarians, and ruinists mentioned above, in their attention to locating and preserving the relics and artifacts of the past. The point to consider in more depth now is how all these tendencies historicized the perception and preservation (or otherwise) of ruins: how, that is, the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries differed on this point, and what that difference might mean. Fritzsche’s view is that the eighteenthcentury appreciation of ruins was largely aesthetic, though this fascination was not without precise archaeological interest and knowledge. By and large, ruins found their place, as we have seen, in the imaginary landscapes of the European aristocracy, in views of nature—or art—directed by picturesque values and viewing practices, and by an overall sense of the ruin as a reclaimed work of humanity. As such, they “insinuated the frailty of the edifices of society” (98), and the inescapable impermanence of human endeavour. Ruins implied an important moral lesson (humility) at the same time as they spoke for “the restorative and ameliorative power of nature over human sin,” and the subjection “of all worldly things to the cycle of death and birth, degeneration and regeneration” (99). Though often evoking a melancholic response, ruins nevertheless implied a fundamentally harmonious order, one largely derived from religious or at least “superhuman” forces. Because the material of the ruin was generally stone, art and nature also blended and harmonized. Consequently, Fritzsche remarks, ruins were really rather homogeneous: they “appeared old and faraway but lacked historical specificity” (99). Though the clear counterpoint to this argument is, as I have shown above, that this stance is itself historically specific and bears in revealing ways on larger questions of historicity, there is much evidence to support Fritzsche’s admittedly broad-brush account. Little care was taken to preserve or tend ruin sites largely because they were interchangeable: they represented “ruin” and were not valued for their individual or distinctive features. An element of this indifference was also present in the widespread practice of collecting Greek and Roman antiquities, where what mattered most was the exemplarity of a given piece: its status as an exquisite specimen, rather than, as Bann has pointed out, its value as a recovered relic.52 For this reason,

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a cast of an ancient artifact was as indicative, and thus as valuable, as the original piece. And the sources of such pieces, the excavated sites of ancient settlement, were of comparatively little interest: for much of the eighteenth century, they received no particular care or attention, and were exposed to an astonishing degree of unregulated plundering. The ruins of Pompeii, discovered in 1748, are used by Fritzsche as a revealing example of this attitude and its replacement around the turn of the century by an interest in the historical specificity of the site. Treated initially as a repository of precious objects, to be mined and carted away, the preserved town was later viewed as a site of historic interest, “an historical terrain to be explored and mapped out in detail, with as much regard for broken pots and fallen stones as works of art.”53 Historical difference is a feature of the latter view, in which curiosity about the past, and about how people lived, plays a new part. Madame de Staël’s 1807 novel Corinne, or Italy conveys this fascination succinctly: she distinguishes between Rome, with its remains of predominantly ancient monuments that recall “only the political history of past centuries,” and Pompeii, where what is exhibited is “the private lives of the people of ancient times.” These are set before the viewer “just as they were.”54 Because life appears to have been suspended, rather than ended, things are preserved in their disconcertingly pristine beauty. These objects, as Staël notes, appear to have escaped time. Ruin is more explicitly layered here, so that “there are ruins upon ruins and tombs upon tombs.” The history of the world is expressed as the accumulation of successive periods of ruin, and before the visible evidence at Pompeii, the duration and magnitude of human life, suffering, and death, can be momentarily grasped. This is a melancholy view that draws on the predominant eighteenth-century view of ruin noted above, but Corinne also conveys the inherent fragility of these relics because of their unbroachable historicity. The traces of past peoples and their accomplishments, although visible, are lost to us and the present is a threat to their survival: “as you pass by those ashes which art manages to bring back to life, you are afraid to breathe, in case a breath carries away the dust perhaps still imprinted with noble ideas” (199). Just as these material vestiges might be felt to contain, however residually, some living element of the past (and once again the possibility that ruins raise, of the past locked into the present), they came to be reanimated as historical objects. In the wake of the French Revolution, Fritzsche argues, a ruin became valuable precisely because of new interest in its historical context, and was thus an object to be “exhumed in the open field of literary and scientific study”: “it was rediscovered, unearthed, preserved, and studied for its messages” (Fritzsche, 101). Implicit here is a new sense of what a museum could be, apart from a collection of objects stripped of that context. Chateaubriand, attuned like de Staël to the situatedness of Pompeii, wondered why the “household utensils, implements of divers trades, pieces of furniture, statues, manuscripts, etc. [were] promiscuously carried to the

66 Romanticism and Visuality Portici Museum” when they might have been carefully restored and preserved on the spot: “would not this have been the most interesting museum in the world? a Roman town preserved quite entire, as if its inhabitants had issued forth but a quarter of an hour previous!”55 Perhaps this new spirit reflected a recognition that ruin had come to the present, for as Chateaubriand claimed, society in the period of 1789–1790 could effectively be likened “to the collection of ruins and tombstones of all ages which were heaped pell-mell . . . in the cloisters of the Petits-Augustins: only,” he continued, “the ruins of which I speak were alive and constantly changing.”56 The distinction Fritzsche draws between eighteenth- and nineteenthcentury perspectives on ruins is also implicit in Didier Maleuvre’s Museum Memories, where he distinguishes between a Romantic and a Balzacian ruin (epitomized by the extraordinary antique shop in La Peau de chagrin), where the former refers to the ruin in nature, and the latter to its uncomfortable place in the museum.57 The Romantic ruin is quintessentially the tomb, and the reassuring obsolescence, of the past. Maleuvre notes that for Chateaubriand, the “vanitas ingrained in the physiognomy of ruins mostly has the effect of confining the dead to their graves.” History in the Romantic “tomb” is at one “with the wisdom of natural cycles” (275). The museum, on the other hand, wrenches the ruin from its symbolic ties to nature. Instead of merging logically with its setting, the ruin (here, understood to include the fragments of a collection—“the membra disjecta of history”) is unmoored and detached from that setting: “translocated,” such that the ruin “loses its roots in nature” (276). Memory is lost too, for while the ruin in nature is poised always “on the redemption of memory,” the museum actually destroys memory, because everything has been recalled and made inextricably present. A museum collection, that “Pandora’s box of cultural fragments,” even ruins the continuity of time (276–7). This is, in part, because the past no longer sleeps peacefully, but mingles with the present in unsettling ways (the graves open, and historical layers “ooze” into one). For Balzac, the ruin, history’s “rag-bag of disconnected details,” was experienced as a kind of “death threat against the living.” The spectacle of “‘so many worlds in ruin’” leads the viewer (here, the hero of La Peau de chagrin) to wonder “‘if it is worth living at all if we are to become, for future generations, an imperceptible speck in the past.’” Indeed, “‘uprooted from the present, we are already dead’” (276). At a limit, the museum-ruin enacts the destructive character of historical preservation, according to the logic of “retrogressive Apocalypse” (272). It is not surprising, then, that the period of the French Revolution, also the period of the establishment and consolidation of many major museums, was so emphatically an era of interest in ruins. On the surface, this has much to do with how contemporary Europe became “a vast landscape of ruins” in the wake of violent political and ideological upheaval (Fritzsche, 97). The French revolutionaries were not the first to destroy churches, Fritzsche concedes, but the marks of “revolutionary conflagration” stood

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out everywhere: after the revolution and the Napoleonic wars, “ruins were more proximate and more dense, and they evoked more precise and terrifying sentiments” (98). The debris of specific historic events “met and modified,” to recall Janowitz’s formulation, the familiar ruins of imperial Rome and ancient Greece, and brought the past and the present into unfamiliar proximities. A strong perception of rupture, of “abrupt endings and new beginnings” (98), affected the perception of both history and time—but as Fritzsche’s study reveals (though this is not a point he emphasizes), archaeological recovery informed the construction of historically inflected national identity in ways that created and constructed alternative continuities. This construction of alternative continuities is a central feature of the historical assemblage effected in the case of sham ruins examined above, in which the past is simultaneously read, rearranged, and (re)invented. Historical awareness is of course no guarantee of historical authenticity, particularly when it is linked so clearly to the shifting viewpoint of another historical moment. That history is a site of conflict, as well as conflict’s site of study, is implicit in the shift Fritzsche charts from history as “the operation of fundamental, general rules” to history as “the result of ‘antinomies’ and ‘counter-working tendencies’” (104). Ruins provide evidence of counter forces, of “counter lives” that speak for otherwise silenced differences. Even though history might threaten ruin with further ruin, the fragment is now heard to speak “through history” in a way that “the silence of nature’s reclamation had not permitted.” In this view, the historical framework operates very differently from a cabinet of “antique curiosities”: it gives “testimonial power” to “ruptures, disasters, and defeats” (104–5). Ultimately, it is because the ruin is fragmentary that its particular broken profile can mark its individuality and autonomy. Fritzsche supposes that such fragments were beheld as though possessing “a sort of half-life, the power to inspire and frighten”—rather than as mere “signs of death and decay,” according to the conventional eighteenth-century view. Rome’s ruins, the subject of the next chapter, offered compelling sites for reanimation fantasies that responded, explicitly, to the fragment’s disturbing “half-life.” The experience of Romantic travelers through the historical palimpsest of ruins in Rome illustrates effectively the thesis that the eighteenth-century view of ruins, “in which the continuous stream of time inevitably left behind obsolescent forms and steadily realized the perfectibility of civilization,” was replaced over the turn of the next century by a view of the past as “the site of anguished memory work and the location of alternative identities” (107). Literary and visual responses to Rome speak for a new and heightened sense of the ruin as “a haunting relic of historical possibility,” but with, I argue, an equally heightened sense of the presence of death and decay. The shadow of their inescapable effects remains a silent double to an apparently more positive nineteenth-century view of ruins: a visible double that coalesces disturbingly around the problem of what ruin obliterates, and what fragments conceal from view.

4

Seeing Past Rome Ruins, History, Museums

Just as in Rome, besides the Romans, there was also a people of statues, so, too, apart from this real world, there is also an illusory world, mightier almost, where the majority live. Goethe, Maxims and Reflections1

As a city of ruins where the layers of past time are palpable in their decay, Rome—especially as constructed by the Romantic beholder—could be regarded as a virtual city, a “place” hovering in disconcerting and at times imaginary ways between the present and the past. For many travelers, fictional or actual, for whom Rome had already been mediated by a plethora of cultural representations, the city’s most pressing feature was arguably its status as a “land of shadows,” as Samuel Rogers said of Italy more generally, where “the memory sees more than the eye.”2 Not that the eye, in Rome, languished: quite the contrary, for the eye is everywhere teased by what is visible as well as by what is invisible. Although Rome is experienced and described as both haunted and haunting, a place that leaves “a vast space for the shades of the departed,”3 it contains an abundance of sights. Indeed, in Rome, the material and the visual intersect in a particularly insistent way—and not least, paradoxically, because the Rome travelers flocked to in droves (during, for example, the height of the Grand Tour) was a Rome that could no longer be seen. Here, then, site and sight operate in a dissonant relationship to one another. One often-noted feature of this phenomenon is the resistance on the part of travelers to seeing “modern” Rome as it is (or was), preferring instead to perceive the city through the suggestive remnants of its ancient forms. Goethe’s sense of Rome as “form confusing” (das gestaltverwirrende Rom) points to a widely-shared experience of disorientation linked to the city’s multiple historical identities, where received images compete with historical actuality. Studies devoted centrally to the eighteenth- and early nineteenthcentury response to Rome have drawn attention to the sense of being overwhelmed by “the power of the visible past”: by a kind of unpleasure that results from the sense of surfeit, of excessiveness, that seems often to have arisen in the confrontation of the “vast aesthetic and historic spectacle” that

Seeing Past Rome 69 Rome presents.4 Travelers not uncommonly lapsed into exhaustion if not outright disaffection at the bewildering number of sights to behold. Bewilderment seems in fact to be a common response to seeing Rome, as evident in Eliot’s Middlemarch, where nineteenth-century Rome is described as an “oppressive masquerade of ages,” its galleries characterised by “long vistas of white forms whose marble eyes seem to hold the monotonous light of an alien world.”5 Not only is Rome itself other, alien, and always elsewhere, it puts palpable pressure on the language of sight for it is primarily the act of seeing that gives rise to a sense of impossible strain that is at once psychological, imaginative, and conceptual. This is connected on the one hand to the way Rome is perceived as a vast museum containing a superabundance of important works of art, thus foregrounding looking as a conscious and deliberate activity. On the other, though, it is a function of ruin: a response to the peculiar difficulty of seeing what is not, or no longer, visible—of visiting a Rome that is emphatically not the one on view. “What I want to see,” Goethe asserted, “is the Everlasting Rome, not the Rome which is replaced by another every decade.”6 This chapter will link the anxiety-laden language of visuality that surrounds Rome’s fragmentary fabric (and which that fabric perhaps necessitates) to the implicit place of ruin in Romantic discourses of historicity, thus examining the relationship of “eternal” Rome to the historical self-consciousness of Romanticism. The apparent magnitude of Rome, its multilayered shadows, and the problem of visibility that interposes itself in between, are vividly conveyed in Goethe’s Italian Journey, making that account a useful point of departure. It offers a number of visual metaphors that are in turn transformed and deployed in a group of texts by Percy Shelley, Mary Shelley, and Byron in which Rome is a key setting. In these narratives, the status of the past and the effort to understand the present in relation to it are focused on sites of ruin, such as the Coliseum. Moreover, the fragmentary logic of the ruin plays as decisive a part as Rome itself. Because ruins have a double life, they point out (while crossing over) the boundary between the visible and the invisible, the material and the imaginary, the past and the present, and this is evoked in a series of reanimation scenarios, in which an element or artifact of the past appears to come to life in the present. Later sections of the chapter broaden the discussion to address questions about viewing that ruins raise—on the ground and in the museum, as well as in literary and imaginative contexts. Straining after the sight of Rome, in order both to see it and to see beyond it, speaks volumes for the Romantic idealization of antiquity, and for its inherently elusive—invisible—character as something projected, constructed, even made up. The final section of the chapter will explore the way the double life of ruins informed the phenomenon of the double-view, the popularity of paired scenes of Rome that depict it at two distinct historical moments: ancient and modern—“as it was” and “as it is.” Such pendants, which might be viewed as attempts to mark out and control the seepage of history that Maleuvre attributed to

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the “translocation” of ruin, nevertheless underscore the incipient uncanniness lurking at the intersection of the material and the visual, and in their (imaginary) products.7

I Goethe’s travels to Italy in 1786 were part of a highly self-conscious attempt to develop what he called “a new elasticity of mind.” This elasticity he relates explicitly to his powers of observation, which he was keen to stretch: “Can I learn,” he asks, “to look at things with clear, fresh eyes? How much can I take in at a single glance? Can the grooves of old mental habits be effaced?” His primary preoccupation is, he states, “with sense-impressions to which no book or picture can do justice” (Goethe, 21). This makes him a particularly self-conscious, indeed self-observant, viewer. His first sight of Rome, however, induces a sense of visual disorientation as picture-book images stored up in memory compete with actual sense impressions. All those fragmentary Roman views depicted in the engravings hung in the hallway of the family home, and indeed everything he has known, as he says, for so long “through paintings, drawings, etching, woodcuts, plaster casts and cork models [are] now assembled before [him].” The effect is one of uncanny disjunction for, as Goethe notes, “wherever I walk, I come upon familiar objects in an unfamiliar world” (116). Goethe’s account of his time in Rome repeatedly draws attention to the importance of looking, and to its limits as well. He regards himself as at a disadvantage to the artist, who comes closer to imitating “these great visions” than those who (like him) merely look and think (160). In Rome, the sheer profusion of points of interest defeats the efforts of the writer: many things can be sketched together on a piece of paper but they cannot be written that way. Everywhere one looks, “every kind of vista confronts you”: “One would need a thousand styluses to write with. What can one do here with a single pen? [ . . . ] one feels exhausted after so much looking . . .” (121). It would be better, Goethe proposes, to “observe a Pythagorean silence” (121, emphasis mine). Yet even the image-making powers of the mind are implicated in this crisis, where what is at stake is the adequacy of representation. Goethe urges the necessity of seeing things for oneself before they can be brought to life by written description or commentary, but he also notes that looking requires repetition. To enjoy an object “fully,” first impressions must be replaced by repeated acts of looking. Otherwise (his examples are “the loggias of Raphael, the huge paintings of the School of Athens,” which he had seen only once) it is “much like studying Homer from a faded and damaged manuscript” (122). Metaphors such as these, which evoke visually compromised conditions while emphasizing the attempt to grasp the visual graphically, suggest an

Seeing Past Rome 71 idealization of looking—but an idealization that is constantly challenged because the effort produces such fleeting results. Concerted, repetitive looking is intended to lead to a more complete understanding of the object, and yet certain things cannot be retained as images. The example Goethe uses is the sheer size of the Coliseum, which one loses sight of from one viewing to the next, and so is astounded by each time (125). Clearly the figures of memory and imagination are as prone to erosion as the material fabric of the surrounding city: the solution to the problem that Rome represents slips further and further from view. Goethe asserts that there is simply a “lack of provision” for those who, like him, wish to study Rome seriously (that is, as a “whole”). He is, rather, “compelled endlessly to piece it together from fragments, though these are certainly superabundant” (152). No provision: nothing has been foreseen. The task is painstaking, infinite. There is something overwhelming, and more than faintly suffocating, in all this. Indeed, well into the account of his first visit to Rome, Goethe notes that he finds it increasingly difficult to give an account of his stay. “The more I see of this city,” he writes, “the more I feel myself getting into deep waters” (153). Clear-sightedness is for the future: it is “then” that he will “see [his] way more clearly” (155). To try to understand the present is to be constantly aware of losing ground, to be aware of the need for more time, fewer distractions, and a better grasp of the past. His stated desire, to find it within his means to make insightful distinctions about what he sees (namely, following Winckelmann, judgments about style in relation to historical development), requires, he surmises, a specialist training of the eye. As things stand, “little spade-work has been done; . . . but the details remain uncertain and obscure” (156). Earlier, Goethe had described it as a “difficult and melancholy business” to separate out the old Rome from the new: “one comes upon traces both of magnificence and of devastation, which stagger the imagination” (120). The most striking metaphor used to convey this is, interestingly, of blindness. The effort required is of penetrating darkness, as the writer “gropes” his way along “this half-hidden track” (120). Later, reflecting on his aesthetic education, Goethe comments that he looks eagerly forward to returning in the hope that next time he shall see clearly these masterpieces, “after which I was, until now, groping like a blind man” (152 [January 22, 1787]). Groping, or feeling out [herauszufühlen], is a formulation that recurs, and it suggests an invisible or elusive object of touch. 8 A responsive echo of this state of things is to be found in W. H. Auden’s introduction to his 1962 translation of Goethe’s text, where he suggests that his translation should be understood as a Braille rendition of an original that one will never read (or thus see), and not as a “crib,” which he says merely offers spectacles for the weak-sighted (xxiv). That dark (and even tactile) struggles are to be preferred to bright spectacles (surely in both senses) responds to, perhaps translates, Goethe’s own efforts to delineate for himself the visible representations of pastness in the present: those remnants carried across by history that make it impossible to see the past for its (w)holes.

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Goethe’s Journey explores in highly suggestive and personal terms what it means to be an onlooker in Rome, and articulates the peculiarly visual struggle that ruins evoke. Percy Shelley’s “The Colosseum,” a brief prose fragment, stages this very struggle but with telling modifications that dramatise anxieties latent in Goethe’s account.9 For Shelley too, the vistas of Rome had been anticipated—most closely perhaps by Barker and Burford’s Panorama of Rome in the Strand, which the Shelleys had seen in February of 1818, before their departure for Italy. Intriguingly, Shelley passes no comment upon it, leaving the field open, one infers, to other cultural commentators such as the popular travel writers who purvey the “shew-knowledge” about the ruins of Rome, as he put it—“‘the common stuff of the earth.’”10 Shelley’s letters home from Italy to Thomas Love Peacock, by contrast, contain vivid descriptive passages, including a remarkable account of the Coliseum itself, which combine close observation with an imaginative form of “associative impressionism” that is characteristic of Shelley’s travel writing and central to his “aesthetic vision.”11 These letters inform the fragment of a narrative begun on his first visit to Rome later in 1818, and continued early the following year when he and Mary made daily visits to the Coliseum. The central premise of the story, which is fundamentally about seeing past, or beyond, ruin, is doubled or at least intensified by the presence within the ruin of an old blind man and his daughter. The pair has taken refuge from “the great feast of the Resurrection,” that spectacle of “the most awful religion,” for which all and sundry have flocked to the Vatican, and they are seated on a fallen column, in a “solitary chasm among the arches of the southern part of the ruin” (224). It is clearly important for the visionary tenor (and psychological significance) of the piece that they are so explicitly situated inside the recesses of the ruin, as in a bower, rather than commanding the field of vision from a prospect or elevated viewing point.12 As they rest, the daughter’s eyes are said to be fixed upon her father’s lips, while his countenance, “motionless as some Praxitelean image of the greatest of poets, filled the silent air with smiles not reflected from external forms” (224). The father, a visionary, prophetic figure (metaphorically elevated here to the status of an artwork), has no need of eyes, for his daughter translates the visible for him into a language that he in turn transforms according to what she calls the “more serene” vision of his eye (226). What she conveys in descriptive terms (“around us lie enormous columns, shattered and shapeless—and fragments of capitals and cornice, fretted with delicate sculptures” [225]) he concludes in the language of sublime transport: “It is because we enter into the meditations, designs, and destinies of something beyond ourselves that the contemplation of the ruins of human power excites an elevating sense of awfulness and beauty . . . This is the religion of eternity . . . O Power!” (227). The old man can only contemplate the monument “in the mirror of [his] daughter’s mind” but is nonetheless filled with “astonishment and delight”; “the spirit,” he enthuses, “of departed generations seems to animate my limbs and circulate through all the fibres

Seeing Past Rome 73 of my frame” (228). The efficacy of the poet is dramatised and celebrated here in the figure of this venerable blind man, whose words “image forth,” as his daughter says, what she would have expressed but could not (226, my emphasis). If this were not enough, the scene in the empty Coliseum is witnessed by a third party who functions at first glance as catalyst and audience. Happening upon the pair, this mysterious figure mistakes the old man in particular for one who is “blind in spirit” (228) and unable to respond properly to “the spectacle of these mighty ruins” (225). The irony of this presumption is exposed as the stranger witnesses, and is moved by, the scene of contemplation just described—by the power of the old man’s visionary sketches, and by the “beauty and goodness” of his daughter. But this mysterious figure is himself intriguingly anomalous. Nothing is known of his origins or occupation, but the fact that he has solitary habits, speaks fluent Latin and Greek, and dresses his “emaciated” form in an ancient garment suggest he is to be understood as a ghost or spirit of the classical past.13 Further details of Shelley’s description suggest, moreover, that he could be understood as an animated sculpture or artifact, the inverse, perhaps, of the frozen figure of the Praxitelean father. His form displays “the elementary outlines of exquisite grace” while the “moulding” of his face resembles “the eager and impassioned tenderness of the statues of Antinous” (224). Even more precisely, his “snow-white” feet were “fitted with ivory sandals, delicately sculptured in the likeness of two [winged] female figures” (224). The Coliseum has been, for many writers, a place that gives flight to fancies that often involve the revival of the past. The fantasy of art speaking or coming to life has had, and still has, a potent appeal—an appeal that informs ekphrastic texts such as Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” in which the historical object is induced to speak, however enigmatically, to the present. But there are innumerable apposite examples. A later text, Freud’s discussion of Jensen’s Gradiva, in which a young archaeologist falls in love with a woman whom he believes to be the modern living double of a young woman depicted walking in a fragmentary bas-relief from Pompeii, shows this appeal to be determined by complex mechanisms of desire, by the overdetermined coincidence of illusion and delusion.14 In the late eighteenth century, the suggestive crossing between art and life was dramatised with theatrical literality by Emma Hamilton’s “attitudes,” which she first performed in Naples in the 1780s and 1790s. These were living imitations or representations of revered antique sculptures, and of scenes depicted in Herculanean and Pompeian frescoes and on the ancient vases in William Hamilton’s collection (such as Medea, Niobe, Isis, Agrippina the elder, Cassandra, Cleopatra, and so on). Hamilton’s success depended on achieving the precise degree of animation required to bring art to life (and vice versa), and intriguingly, some of these impersonations became in turn the subject of paintings, such as Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun’s “Emma Hamilton as a Bacchante” (1790).15

74 Romanticism and Visuality These examples deploy ancient artworks as sites of potential resurrection in the present, and mediate an urge to penetrate and possess the past—in imaginative and visual terms. The desire to reimagine the past as living is certainly present in the appearance of Shelley’s mysterious and haunting figure in the Coliseum, where, rather like Valerius—Mary Shelley’s “reanimated Roman” in her story of that name16—he serves to highlight the impoverishment (both political and imaginative) of the present. At the same time, he plays a part in a narrative of transformative potentiality where commemoration and death become important themes. The Coliseum is equally an important site in Mary Shelley’s tale, which, though a more developed narrative, is internally fragmentary and, like Shelley’s piece, inherently inconclusive. Since her story is also thought to have been written in 1819, perhaps it is not surprising that there are such suggestive crosscurrents between the two figures and the vignettes in which each plays a role.17 “Valerius” is, like Percy Shelley’s curious interloper, a figure out of place in time, but his status as a returnee from the glory days of the Roman republic is made explicit. His advent in the present, however, is unexplained and is complicated by his origins in a Rome that predates imperial buildings such as the Coliseum. He comes from a time even before “Rome as it was” and surveys the ruins of Rome from a temporally distinct and unusual vantage point. His distress at the sight of what comes after far exceeds the distress of those who come after but look back. In a shift that resonates with the opening premise of Percy Shelley’s prose fragment, the figure of Valerius is initially shadowed by an old Catholic priest whom he quickly shakes off, and then repairs alone to the Coliseum. Here he is found and befriended by the young wife of the fatherly Lord Harley; she herself, significantly, comes from a “distant” country, and entreats him to consider her “as an old acquaintance—not a modern Italian, for indeed I am not one, but as one of those many strangers which your antient [sic] city drew to gaze on her” (338). The father–daughter scenario of Percy’s fragment is explicitly duplicated here as Isabell urges Valerius to consider her as his daughter, “if a Scotch girl may pretend to that honour” (338). His friendship with her becomes “the only hope and comfort” of his life, in a variation of the reanimation motif. The first segment of the narrative is related by Valerius himself to a companion, an English gentleman to whom he has promised to tell his story, as they row out from Naples to Cape Miseno. The story breaks off however, and is taken up, in a second fragmentary section, by Isabell Harley herself. She recounts her attempts to show Valerius Rome—a Rome, that is, to which he might see himself linked—and in this she is a kind of tutor and tour guide in one. He appears, she laments, “to regard every thing around him as a spectacle in which he had no concern” (339–40): everything he sees in fact feeds an insatiable melancholy. The Rome she attempts to engage him with is, though, the Rome of “those mighty ruins which tell of [its] antient greatness” (340)—relatively deserted, and overrun by vegetation, this is Rome at the height of its

Seeing Past Rome 75 picturesque appeal. This Rome is neither strictly of the present nor of the past. As they tour these sites, she attempts to gage his feelings, but finds that he “for ever cast[s] his eyes up to the sky.” “I like to look at the heavens,” he remarks, “and only at them, for they are not changed” (341). Isabell takes Valerius to her favorite spot, a viewpoint from which all Rome, with the windings of the Tiber, may be surveyed. This is, of all others, the place she delights in most because “it joins the beauty and fragrance of Nature to the sublimest idea of human power; and when so united, they have an interest and feeling that sinks deep into my heart.” Valerius, however, has an entirely different viewing experience: “Strangers flock to it and wonder at the immensity of the remains,” he says, “but to me it all appears void” (341, my emphasis). What for her is a “singular and beautiful sight” is for him nothing: what Goethe in his Italian Journey strains to see, but only gropes toward blindly, is here a matter of—matter for—avoidance. As the narrative breaks off definitively, Isabell muses on Valerius’s uncanny other-worldliness, his arousal in her of unnameable but repulsive sentiments. Death lives on uncomfortably in Valerius, who cannot look at Rome’s ruins because he himself is one. Mary Shelley dramatises two conflicting views of the past, and though her personal investment in Isabell’s response to Rome is clear, her portrait of Valerius seems to offer a corrective to the idealization of the past implicit in the sentiment des ruines: it reintroduces and emphasizes historical and political context. Yet the psychological force of her account is weighty in the extreme. In addition to being an uncanny body, Valerius is made literally to embody the uncanny spectacle of human power in ruin. As a projection of the anguished spectator, he reminds us of Byron’s “Childe Harold” who, though of his own time, presents himself as standing apart from it at every point—geographic and imaginary—of his pilgrimage. Melancholic, displaced, and in despair, Harold is a modern-day Valerius who sees clearly what he imagines others cannot: the shadow thrown by the past over the present, and more pointedly, the continuing action of the past, and of past human action, upon the natural and political landscape of contemporary Europe. Everywhere he travels, he views the spectacle of the present through an acute awareness of historical stratification, across the invisible dimensions of time and space. Ruins offer for Byron and his poetic persona Childe Harold, as they did for Volney, a nodal point for conceptual, imaginary, and historical actualities to interact. In his response to Rome in Canto IV of Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the quality of this interaction is shown to be deeply perplexing, thus radically qualifying the sublime transport experienced by Mary Shelley’s Isabell in the face of Rome’s ruins. Anne Janowitz has argued, in England’s Ruins, that the typical eighteenthcentury responses of “ruinists” in Rome emphasize rationality and intelligibility: Rome is approached with an eye to its inherent aesthetic organization, so that in effect “Rome rises as a museum out of the Junkyard of history” (Janowitz, 32). Aesthetic order prevails over chaos and decay. The example Janowitz discusses is John Dyer’s “The Ruins of Rome” of 1740, where his stance is seen as typical of “the moralizing position of the speaker in the eigh-

76 Romanticism and Visuality teenth-century ruin poem, whose eye constitutes a frame and the ruin the horizon” (40). Regarded in this way, ruins are transparent because they are visible: the past, presented as a foundation and moral reservoir for the present, can be framed and kept at bay. The Romantic counterpoint to this stance, exemplified for Janowitz by Byron’s rather more anguished meditations among the ruins, responds on the contrary to what is invisible, unknowable, and hence subversive about ruins. As we have noted, the poet’s persona in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage faces these historical wastes from the heightened awareness of his own historical moment, and we see that his perspective, like that of Shelley’s blind man, is visionary rather than visual. Byron’s poem, as has been often remarked, moves effortlessly between past and present, as well as between public and private history, where suffering is to be experienced in apparently equal measures. The speaker’s state of mind is observed to fit its location so that in Italy he can declare himself to be, as he meditates “amongst decay,” a “ruin amidst ruins” (IV.218–19). For this he famously declares Rome the “city of the soul!” to whom all “orphans of the heart” must turn (694–5). His task has a psychological dimension—namely to understand the mechanism by which repressed grief, associated with painful events in the past, resurfaces (resurges) unbidden in the present “like a scorpion’s sting” (200). We may try but we cannot, Byron writes, “trace / Home to its cloud this lightning of the mind” (208–9). By analogy, the ruins that he contemplates present a similar challenge: “there to track / Fall’n states and buried greatness, O’er a land / Which was the mightiest in its old command” (219–21). The task requires a kind of penetration that involves, metaphorically, the visual, echoing Goethe’s blind groping along “half-hidden” tracks, the potent traces of the past in the present. Byron’s account articulates a state akin to Goethe’s sense of “form confusion.” Making orderly sense out of Rome’s “Chaos of ruins!” (718) proves to be difficult, as the monumental and the trivial are hard to tell apart—both in the speaker and in what he observes. “Who shall trace the void,” he asks, “O’er the dim fragments cast a lunar light, / And say, ‘here was, or is,’ where all is doubly night?” (718–20). As a result, “we but feel our way to err” (723). Rome is like a desert, blank and empty, across which, without chart or map, . . . we steer, Stumbling o’er recollections; now we clap Our hands, and cry ‘Eureka!’ it is clear— When but some false mirage of ruin rises near. (726–29)

It is not only the case here that meaning is obscure and prone to misconstruction, but also that ruin involves a pull toward sameness. Rehearsing the past, the course of empires from freedom and glory to corruption and barbarism, Childe Harold proclaims in stanza 108 that “History, with all her volumes vast, Hath but one page . . .” (968–69). Rome is itself such a

Seeing Past Rome 77 page where it seems we write, or rewrite, at will. But it is also a haunting, apparitional presence, that is vestigially alive: “ . . . we pass / The skeleton of her Titanic form, / Wrecks of another world, whose ashes are still warm” (412–14). Byron’s use of the Coliseum brings this out, once again. The Coliseum is marked by but also resistant to the torments of history; both wreck and shrine, it remains “this long-explored but still exhaustless mine / Of contemplation” (1150–51). It is, here too, a place for the convergence of past and present: the profundity of response elicited in the viewer is part of “ . . . a sense so deep and clear / That we become a part of what has been, / And grow unto the spot, all-seeing but unseen” (1240–42). The Coliseum, in “the shadow of the midnight hour” and under the rising moon, appears to come back to life, as the poet sees the past rise again before him, in the figure of the dying gladiator whose last moments are vividly reimagined. Chloe Chard, in Pleasure and Guilt on the Grand Tour, notes that from the mid-eighteenth century on, there is a tendency to view the relation of past to present as one in which “the past is always poised to resurge disquietingly within the contemporary topography,” using “various repositories of memory, such as ruins, antique fragments, and ghosts, as sites or vehicles for such resurgence.”18 This sense of the past as latent, even potentially alive (or a still living potentiality), is as implicit in the reanimation scenarios envisaged by the Shelleys in 1819, as it is by Byron in the final Canto of Childe Harold. On the other hand, Mary Shelley’s 1826 novel, The Last Man, appears to invert such fantasies.19 The novel tells the story of the extinction of humanity by an uncontainable plague. It is narrated from the perspective of its only survivor, Lionel Verney, the last man, ostensibly in the late twenty-first century. His narrative, however, is in fact pieced together from fragments translated and reordered by an editor who discovers them in a cave near Naples in 1818. But this is not just any cave: the author-editor claims it is the cave of the Cumaean Sibyl, and these fragments of a futuristic story are in fact the subject of ancient prophecies. These are contained in verses inscribed on bits of bark and leaves, in several languages—some old (“ancient Chaldee, and Egyptian hieroglyphics”) and, stranger still, some modern (English and Italian). This is a situation that at first sight recalls the linguistic range of the mysterious figure in Percy Shelley’s fragment, “The Coliseum,” who is as fluent in modern languages as he is in Latin and Greek. More pointedly, however, the fragments of Mary Shelley’s prefatory narrative raise the possibility of an event that has folded the past into the future, thus allowing it to “resurge.” Or, perhaps it is rather the future that has been rediscovered in the past.20 The possible reappearance of the future in the past is played out quite clearly in the last ten pages of the novel, which take place in Rome, where lastness becomes suggestively akin to pastness: here, the “last” man is also the “past” man whose obscure futurity is relocated to antiquity, to a city of which every part is “replete with the relics of ancient times” (357). The novel’s climax is also the final destination of the Grand Tour, and it is that very route that this futuristic novel retreads. The onward course of

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time, then, is also a rolling back, an infinite return. The choice of Rome is significant for several reasons, one of which is that it evokes Lionel’s early (pseudo-pastoral) life as a shepherd, “as uncouth a savage, as the wolf-bred founder of old Rome” (360). Now, at the “end” of his life, he rambles in “undiminished grandeur”; he seeks oblivion amid the fragments of an ancient culture, fragments that, however empty and ruined, are nevertheless full of significance as the signs of cultural continuance. For a time, he occupies himself by reading volumes contained in the libraries of Rome. Then, upon the chance discovery of the necessary materials in an author’s study, he sets about writing, so that he may “leave in this most ancient city, this ‘world’s sole monument,’ a record . . . a monument of the existence of Verney, the Last Man” (362). On one level at least the implied author revisits the past in order to rewrite the future. The past is thereby kept alive in new, prospective forms, and in a manner suggestively akin to Walter Benjamin’s view of history as not dead but living, and in possession of its own future—a suppressed future (or futures) that can be recovered precisely and only by looking back.21 On another, however, the past is an empty place—Rome is presented as always already deserted, and thus a suitable location for the desertion (literally) of the present. Lionel Verney presents himself self-consciously as a witness to the already witnessed, as the “Diorama of ages passed across [his] subdued fancy” (358). And yet this vacant space is the space of self-encounter in the present, into which he wakes up as into “self-knowledge.” Rome is the place where Verney must encounter, fully and finally, his own historical moment and its implications. It is also the perfect place to embark upon the afterlife of living that constitutes the culminating textual act of the “last” man.

II Goethe, in his Italian Journey, clearly regarded our sense of sight as a weak organ in need of exercise. The eye delineates the limits of our powers, and used metaphorically, conveys as well the force of the desire to strain against those limits—a desire that Rome, for its material and visual richness, activates (perhaps to excess) and frustrates in equal measure. This struggle to see properly, so palpable in Goethe’s text, is conveyed vividly in Madame de Staël’s Corinne, when the title character advances the possibility that the Tiber River contains a number of “beautiful artistic monuments,” lying concealed beneath its waters. The idea that only a keener eye could spot them produces, she says, an “indescribable emotion which, in many guises, is continually revived in Rome.”22 But the difficulty of seeing Rome, never mind seeing past Rome, is elsewhere expressed as resistance to seeing at all. There is an element, in such expressions, of the antivisuality prevalent in that strain of canonical Romanticism that privileges the imagination over what Wordsworth disparaged as the “despotism” of the eye. This sentiment

Seeing Past Rome 79 is aptly captured by the English Lord Nelvil’s remark, in Corinne, that “in my country . . . we have acquired the habit of being wary of everything that is made visible” (205). Rome, rather awkwardly, shows too much and not enough: moreover, even the not enough is too much on display. Such ambivalence is a function of Rome’s material immateriality, of its status as both a living museum and a virtual, imaginary place. A place of surfeit, but also of the absence of the object. The idealization of antiquity had always, moreover, gone hand in hand with that absence.23 Given that very little archaeological excavation had actually taken place in Italy, and in Greece particularly, by the mid-eighteenth century (compared, certainly, to what came after), the student of antiquity often had to work from archival sources and reproductions. As Gillen D’Arcy Wood has pointed out, this historical and geographical remove fed the fashion for prints and drawings of ancient sites (and other forms of their imaginative duplication), while contributing to the popularity of neoclassical architectural styles, and the attention of European academies to “classical themes and statuesque principles” (Wood, 123). But Rome, seen through this lens, was also a substitute for the inaccessible ideality of ancient Greece. Winckelmann’s work on Greek art in the 1750s and 1760s was drawn largely from verbal descriptions and Roman copies—copies that were not seen as merely servile, but as “the perpetual signifiers of an absent original.” As Winckelmann lamented, “‘We too have, as it were, nothing but a shadowy outline left of the object of our wishes, but that very indistinctness awakens only a more earnest longing for what we have lost, and we study the copies of the originals more attentively than we should have done the originals themselves.’”24 For this reason, even, the extant Roman copy is prized above the lost Greek original. Moreover Hellenism, Wood suggests, as “the idealization of an imagined past,” or perhaps an imagined place, “becomes a cipher of modernity itself and its pathologies” (124). Winckelmann never in fact visited Greece, just as Volney had never visited Palmyra (his description, discussion, and illustrations were drawn from other texts),25 and indeed, the preservation of the distance between ancient and modern worlds is crucial to the sentimental longing that fuels a pleasurable investment in substitute, compensatory objects. From Schiller’s theory of the sentimental poet to Freud’s work of mourning, the ideal object of antiquity is not the external object, but an inner one.26 Rome, as both a viewing space and a virtual place corresponding uneasily to an “inner” equivalent, can be seen in this light as a diorama of history that turns back toward the viewing or imagining subject. Its inscrutability contributes to the sense of placelessness with which we began, and the specific pressure it places on the viewing subject involves, though these are not our primary focus, a number of psychoanalytic determinations of the kind later explored by Freud. Freud’s series of four dreams on not seeing Rome suggest that the “inner” Rome is an even more elusive and constructed place, never exactly where, or what, you think.27 In the first of these dreams, Freud finds himself looking at the city out of the window of a train, which

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begins to move off before he has had a chance to disembark. The view of the city that he sees, of the Tiber and the Ponte Sant’ Angelo, is in fact that of a well-known engraving he had seen in the sitting room of one of his patients the previous day: the long-desired sight of the city is replaced by a famous picture. In another, he finds himself on a hill. Rome is far away and partially obscured by mist, and yet appears surprisingly clear. The city he finds himself looking at is not however Rome, and the view as a whole is composed of prototypes drawn from elsewhere (the town of Lübeck, and the hill at Gleichenberg). Freud analyses the material of these dreams at some length, but for our purposes, the important point is that his narrative affirms the difficulty experienced by Romantic writers in placing Rome: there is on the one hand the fear, and indeed the inevitability, of not seeing it at all, and on the other, an expression of the desire to see beyond the city’s mediations and displacements, and to fully possess—visually—the past. Such a desire, with all its attendant anxieties, includes possession of the subject of, and in, the present. The desire for antiquity, and the desire to restore the sight of ruin, thus emphasize the historical situatedness of the viewing subject. It is, paradoxically, the historical specificity of Rome that makes it the consummate site for sightseeing, while the ahistorical condition of its ruins turns looking into something more like self-regard. For some Romantic figures such as Hazlitt and Schiller, the ancient ruin was indeed an unreadable form or representation of antiquity, and one through which we can only sense or construct the limitations of our own condition. While it may seem counterintuitive to view the remains of the past as the mirror of the present, it must be noted that ruins are by definition paradoxical: they represent only negatively a notional whole and are in any case the modern form of the past. They tell us how the past looks now, because of the inherent anachrony discussed above. As Maleuvre notes, the past, “as a product of the present, is always a ruin because it always appears anachronistically, in the present.” The present may not enter the past, although the past can only exist through the present: in this sense, the past is always close to the present, but at the same time, it is invariably remote because it can never be grasped “as what it authentically was.” The past is not only past, but is always a ruin, insofar as it is “an element that signifies its presence in the present as a damaged, inauthentic image of what it really was in the past” (Maleuvre, 61). This is a problem illustrated rather effectively by popular scenes of antiquity that situated characters and events amid ruined structures that would have been in perfect condition at the putative time represented. But it is also what makes the ruin an inscrutable and unapproachable bearer of the historically inaccessible, while making visible the act of bearing the past. Extending the logic of the fragment, the fact that the ruin is shaped as much by what remains as by what has been subtracted over time, means that what appears in the ruin is passedness itself: the very process of passing, of historicity. When Robert painted his “Imaginary View of the Grande Galerie of the Louvre in Ruins,” he not only put “the caesura of historical distance into the picture of art’s

Seeing Past Rome 81 exhibition,” but also made explicit the fact that “all museums are necessarily tied to the dialectic of ruins” (Maleuvre, 85). Moving for a moment from the ruins of Rome to the representation of (those) ruins, in paintings and in the space of the museum, the appearance of ruin in relation to spatial and temporal context further articulates the link between ruin and visibility: it offers another perspective on the difficult sight of ruin that proved so suggestive to Romantic writers in Rome. On balance, Maleuvre views the ruin as indicative of the suffering, the necessary suffering, of the past on its way to the present. It is in fact the “image” of this necessary suffering. Historical content and historical transmission are thus thought to coincide in the “look of ruins” (naturally), but in the museum, historical presentation is no longer consistent with historical appearance, and they are destructively wrenched apart (273–77). Context is important now in two senses: not only when the ruin is “collected” and brought under the roof and rubric of the museum, but also when it is framed as the subject of art. The perplexity engendered by the ruin may have different effects, but it is certainly not diminished. If anything, the right way of representing a ruin—how a ruin should look— becomes more contested, as the real object itself becomes more distant. Diderot, in his commentary on Hubert Robert’s paintings in his Salon of 1767, criticizes Robert’s ruin paintings for being insufficiently sentimental and too picturesque: they contain too many figures, for example. Diderot would prefer evidence of a viewer more like himself within the view, and addressing Robert, he muses: You have the technique but you lack the ideal. Don’t you sense there are too many figures here, that three-quarters of them should be removed? Only those enhancing the effect of solitude and silence should be retained. A solitary man who’s wandered into these shadowing precincts, his arms across his chest and his head inclined, would have made a greater impression on me; the darkness alone, the majesty of the building, the grandeur of the construction, the extent, serenity, and muted reverberation of the space, would have set me shuddering.28

Silence and solitude, the effect of de-populating the scene, are emphasized in Diderot’s “first tenet of the poetics of ruins” because they lift otherwise distracting temporal and historical anchors (197). Indeed, on the evidence of these remarks, it is not among the ruins themselves that Diderot’s meditations (or Freud’s, for that matter) arise, but in front of inadequate representations of ruin: ruin can only be “thought” in association with such representations. Diderot’s poetics of ruin (articulated most fully, nevertheless, in response to Robert’s work) would wish to elevate it from the discourse of the picturesque to that of the sublime:

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Romanticism and Visuality The ideas ruins evoke in me are grand. Everything comes to nothing, everything perishes, everything passes, only the world remains, only time endures. How old is this world! I walk between two eternities. Wherever I cast my glance, the objects surrounding me announce death and compel my resignation to what awaits me. (198)

This evocation of grandness and the eternal in association with ruins engages, properly speaking, the response of the viewing subject, who sees himself looking—another ruin amid ruin—and it thus throws the subject of ruin back upon the present of the viewer. Clearly, Diderot’s poétique des ruines is about the representation of ruins, not about ruins as such—and the result, perhaps, of his early and close reading of Winckelmann. Nevertheless, his critique of Robert maps onto the contrasting views of ruins sketched here in the last chapter. Diderot’s somewhat existential and heroic approach to ruin is consistent with the eighteenth-century view that regards ruins in terms of larger and often abstract historical forces, whereas Robert’s more anecdotal depictions, with their inclusion of the quotidian—of people going about their ordinary business—are arguably a closer representation of historical actuality.29 Diderot’s reflections on ruins, however, lead us straight to a consideration of their defining paradoxes, and the effects of these upon the viewer. His poetics of ruin articulate, ideally, a “paradoxical encounter between ancient ruins and ‘the viewer who passes by what is past.’”30 But instead of passing the past, the viewer is compelled to linger, caught in a contre-sens, which suggests not just the wrong direction but the wrong meaning as well. The viewer is caught here in a perilous zone, a lieu-péril, where the very adequacy of seeing is at issue (Diderot, 199). In part, this captures the experience of the museumgoer, who very literally passes by the displaced relics of the past, and for whom the unbridgeable gulf between the eternities of the ancient and the modern world is institutionally inscribed. Wood argues that in this new context, the objects on display have a shocking force because they are no longer mediated representations, but are too apparently “real”; the materiality of the past, given the de-historicizing effects of the museum context, makes for an uncanny confrontation with the present. The view of the Parthenon marbles, for example, once they were enshrined in the British Museum, produced a range of dizzying effects—captured rather evocatively, as noted above, by Keats in his sonnet “On Seeing the Elgin Marbles.”31 For Keats, a safe sentimental distance was no longer sustainable; moreover, the effect of such museum collections was to suggest or stage the return of antiquity from its grave (Wood, 129). The sentimental ideology of the eighteenth century was arguably brought to a crisis by the birth of museum culture in the early nineteenth, as was “the vision of a unitary antiquity.”32 At a discreet distance, Jonah Siegel has argued, the fragmented figures of antiquity “maintained their coherent unity.” Once, however, these were collected and examined closely, it was difficult to regard them the same way,

Seeing Past Rome 83 “not only because of the loss of the desire that had motivated the search, but because of the troubling nature of the objects themselves.” On the positive side were arguments such as those made by Joshua Reynolds in the 1770s, that “‘a mind enriched by an assemblage of all the treasure of ancient and modern art, will be more elevated and fruitful in resources’” (55). Later, however, this very abundance was clearly a source of psychological strain, and even established systems of judgment were threatened by new knowledge about the provenance of certain canonical sculptures.33 Siegel’s account of how bewildering the Elgin Marbles turned out to be, for connoisseurs, sheds a fascinating light on the realignments in taste and aesthetic judgment that the fragmentary sculptures necessitated in the early nineteenth century, largely because they departed from a Hellenic ideal articulated in their absence. As Hazlitt recognized, “The realism and vitality of the Elgin marbles were directly contrary to neoclassical principles of ideal nature” (60). They were, moreover, more fragmentary, more damaged and generally ruined, than viewers, accustomed to the smooth finish of restored statues such as those of Charles Townley’s collection, were prepared for (Figures 4.1 and 4.2).34 Crudely put, the crisis engendered by the Elgin Marbles derived from basing a (neoclassical) visual ideal on something that could never (and perhaps ought not to) be seen, and arguably, the confusion surrounding the reception of the marbles in London had as much to do with that as anything else.

Figure 4.1. Reclining Dionysus / Herakles. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

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Figure 4.2. William Chambers, Charles Townley’s House at Park Street. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

Museum culture offered an increasingly full visual experience, but of sight without site, so to speak. Seeing (past) Rome, in spite of its inherent difficulties, including its own confrontation with virtuality, was still to be preferred. The importance of place or situation was paramount, as Quatremère de Quincy had argued in the 1790s: all of Rome, he claims, is a museum that is “immovable in its totality” and this includes not only monuments and artworks, but an entire network of geographical, visual, and traditional connections extending from their relationship to one another, to the features of the surrounding environment.35 To understand Rome properly, it must be experienced—viewed—in context. Moreover, as Madame de Staël’s Corinne taught many of its later readers, including Byron and the Shelleys, the power of Rome had to be witnessed, and witnessed imaginatively: because the eyes are “all powerful over the soul,” the sight of Rome, de Staël argues, produces “memories of the imagination” that are more powerful than the “intellectual memories” acquired by study—by the reading of Rome as an historical text, to which one might add, Rome in a picture or in a museum. After seeing Rome’s ruins, she suggests, “we believe in the ancient Romans as if we had lived in their day”; we become, “as it were, witnesses of what we have learned.”36 Nevertheless, with the growing insistence, after Winckelmann, on the priority of Greece, and with the rise of important art collections in other cultural centers, Rome lost some of its centrality—and of course, during

Seeing Past Rome 85 the Napoleonic wars, its accessibility. At that time, in the first decade of the nineteenth century, the Louvre would become—if only briefly—the “greatest museum in history . . . made up of the booty Napoleon’s troops methodically gathered from all over Europe, including Rome” (Siegel, 37). De Staël’s views, expressed by her heroine in 1807, are no doubt a reflection on this state of affairs, and the continuation of an argument begun by Quatremère in the 1790s against the dismantling of sites of artistic importance, and specifically against the French army’s removal of artworks from Italy to France. For much of this period, the conventional patterns of the Grand Tour had been thoroughly interrupted, and then altered, as tourism resumed on the continent in the nineteenth century; the tour of Italy undertaken by the Shelleys and by Byron in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars is inflected by this period of political turmoil and Rome’s historical inaccessibility. And yet, certain features of viewing and locating Rome explored above, from frustrated desire to distraction and puzzlement, have become features of museum culture, for museum and city both give rise to the “breaking apart of attention” that Valéry argued was the very condition of modern life.37 For us as for the Romantics, Rome is a living museum—but one, with its “form confusing” surfeit of architectural and artistic ruins, where something more always remains disturbingly hidden from view, which subverts any idealized view of the past.

III Literary texts of the Romantic period, as texts, were an appropriate medium through which to explore the way Rome was resistant to visual appropriation; writing rises thus to the challenge of vision in all its material, temporal, and historical instability. Visual representations, however, found their own means to address the way Rome’s fragments and ruins troubled the possibility of representational stability, the possibility of a unified and coherent visual field. The urge to complete or to complement, though necessarily affirming the importance and value of the ruin-fragment as it is, was clearly one force behind the practice of creating two views of Rome, at different temporal and historical moments, and these double scenes of Rome are of particular interest in the context of this chapter’s attention to fragments, ruins, and visual difficulty. The painting of pendants would often have had a primarily comparative, illustrative, and explicitly didactic point, as in the juxtaposition of classical and romantic renderings of a given scene. In the case of Rome, ancient (pagan) and modern (Renaissance, Baroque, and Christian) monuments were often carefully distinguished from one another: Pannini’s “Imaginary Gallery of Ancient Roman Art” had just such a “modern” equivalent (Figure 4.3). In such pendants, visual order is provided to counter the chaos of Roman monuments and artifacts in their natural locations. More intriguing are the pendants that re-create a past Rome that is

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“now” only partially visible and in need of imaginative supplementation or reconstruction. The widespread popularity of contrastive scenes of this kind speaks for their inherent appeal, and indeed the visual evidence of time passing (and of past times), remains a source of interest and wonder, for reasons not too distant from those that engage viewers of ruins. Rome has always lent itself to “picturing,” and the acquiring (and creating) of sketches and views was, in itself, an important part of the Grand Tour. A common strategy of tourists visiting Rome’s principal sites was to choose viewing conditions under which the given sight would be most like a picture, most like its familiar representations—in imagined or existing artworks—or at least emptied of the visual distractions of the present. This would seem to express the urge to find or recover, within the view of “modern” Rome, its latent, ancient counterpart: to reconcile two views as one in a primarily pictorial synthesis or experience. Such an urge derived, in part, from a prevailing sense of disappointment with modern Rome, and also informed the popularity of viewing the Coliseum by moonlight, or the Apollo by torchlight. The comparative emptiness of the sight at night was one advantage, but another was a greater sense of visual unity; moonlight, as Chateaubriand noted, tended to “compose features of the topography

Figure 4.3. Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Imaginary Gallery of Modern Roman Monuments, 1759 [Galerie des vues de la Rome Moderne]. Louvre Museum, Paris. Photo RMN / © Thierry Le Mage.

Seeing Past Rome 87 into pictures, and so elevate them to the status of framed sights.”38 A potential chaos of fragments was thereby brought to visual order, and offered up as a pleasing aesthetic whole. Turner’s evocative painting of the Coliseum by moonlight (Figure 4.4) stands as an exemplary pictorial rendering, while Byron’s Manfred, recounting a solitary youthful visit to the “gladiators’ bloody circus,” captures precisely the supplementary qualities of a moonlight that “ . . . cast a wide and tender light, / Which soften’d down the hoar austerity / Of rugged desolation, and fill’d up, / As ’twere, anew, the gaps of centuries . . .”39 Modern Rome was often effaced in the effort to “recover” the city. It is a remarkably consistent feature of Romantic accounts of travel through Italy to Rome, that contemporary Italian culture was marginalized if not disparaged. Worse, while its landscapes were reanimated by the people and events of the storied past, contemporary Italy was portrayed as largely dead or vacant: between roughly 1775 and 1825, it has been argued, Italy went from being Europe’s “museum” to its “mausoleum.”40 This view largely informed the preponderance, in visual representations of Italy in the early nineteenth century, of graves and ruins, and of scenes markedly devoid of any actual Italians. In this vein, a not untypical remark is made by P. B. Shelley in a letter to Peacock: Rome is a city, as it were, of the dead, or rather of those who cannot die, & who survive the puny generations which inhabit & pass over the spot which they

Figure 4.4. J. M. W. Turner, The Colosseum by Moonlight, 1819. © Tate, London 2007.

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This is, Shelley notes, a “delusion” made possible by the relative sparsity of the population. Thus the ruins and monuments of the Italian landscape, with their associations of death and decay, are said to inspire his mind to “people [ . . . ] with its wishes vacancy and oblivion.”42 Of the “two Italies” identified by Shelley, one has to be re-created, the other overlooked. Writing this time to Leigh Hunt, Shelley remarks: There are two Italies; one composed of the green earth & transparent sea and the mighty ruins of antient times, and aerial mountains, & the warm & radiant atmosphere which is interfused through all things. The other consists of the Italians of the present day, their works & ways. The one is the most sublime and lovely contemplation that can be conceived by the imagination of man; the other the most degraded disgusting, & odious.43

The tension captured here informed a great many representations, verbal and visual, of Rome in the period, and even documentary representations of the city’s ruins that were especially sensitive to architectural detail were prone to a degree of idealization (if not outright imaginative embellishment). It is entirely appropriate that ruins, as a subject, would elicit such a response, as it is the power of imaginative possibility, juxtaposed with the actual, that captures the interest of the beholder. Piranesi is an important and influential figure here, for his imaginary as well as actual views of Rome’s architectural ruins undertaken in the mid-eighteenth century. In his hands, the veduta became a fully articulated vision, “a poetic synthesis of culture, verification, and imagination” (Figure 4.5).44 Precise architectural and archaeological knowledge informed Piranesi’s prints, and yet they are intensely atmospheric; in his depictions of ancient Roman ruins, the viewer is caught especially forcefully by chiaroscuro effects, by a sense of shifted perspective and by amplified or intensified proportion. These renditions of the city, in contrast to those of modern Rome, “contain the visionary suggestion of a resurrection seeking its own epiphany.”45 Piranesi’s project was in an important sense a recuperative one, intended to show his contemporaries that what had been consigned to oblivion, often beneath the ground, still possessed a great and exemplary authority that ought to be exposed to the present.46 Like the printmaking process itself, Piranesi’s depictions cut through the layers of their subjects and opened them to view: he has, Barbara Maria Stafford speculates, “applied surgical procedures taken . . . from medical illustrations, to turn the still living fabric of architecture inside out.”47 And indeed there is an “intimate connection” apparent between the activity of etching and “the exploration of hidden physical or material topographies” (70): his technique, more pointedly, would have involved a

Seeing Past Rome 89 corrosive process that Richard Wendorf suggests enacted its own analogous form of ruination.48 Piranesi’s project, in general terms, was to grasp and display the diverse layers and structures of ruins—all at once, so to speak. Another method would of course be to divide the task, as later painters did, and take a sequential approach to place and time. The double form of the pendant was especially well suited to the historical autopsy elicited by Rome’s ruins, though our first example occupies a more metaphoric place on the line between comparison and composition. Turner’s “Ancient Rome; Agrippina landing with the ashes of Germanicus” (Figure 4.6) and its pair, “Modern Rome—Campo Vaccino” (Figure 4.7), were exhibited at the Royal Academy in 1839. In the manner of a pair of paintings Turner had exhibited the previous year, “Ancient Italy—Ovid banished from Rome” and “Modern Italy—the Pifferari,” an episode or incident from the ancient world is chosen for its topical significance to the present, and either invites comment on (or suggests a certain continuity with) contemporary Italy. The virtuous act referred to in “Agrippina landing,” Agrippina returning with the ashes of her husband (poisoned by order of the Emperor Tiberius), highlights Rome’s impending decline in the Imperial period; the subject of “Modern Rome,” the ruins of the Forum, was associated by many commentators with abandoned values (typified by Cicero, who was the subject of a third painting with a Roman theme exhibited by Turner in 1839—“Cicero at his villa”).49 In the exhibition catalogue, Turner accompanied the entry for “Modern

Figure 4.5. Giovanni Battista Piranesi, Interior of the Colosseum. Veduta di Roma / Views of Rome, 1748–1778. © The Trustees of the British Museum.

90 Romanticism and Visuality Rome” with lines adapted from Byron’s Childe Harold (IV.235–36), which suggest that modern Rome, as a moral emblem for the contemporary world, exists in a kind of eternal twilight that evokes its past grandeur as well as its subsequent decline, and current decay: “The moon is up and yet it is not night, / The sun as yet divides the day with her.” In “Ancient Rome,” Turner exercised a certain poetic or painterly license—with historical detail (Agrippina did not land in Rome) and with the historical topography. In “Ancient Italy,” Turner moved the Arch of Constantine (which had not yet been built at the time of the incident depicted) to the banks of the Tiber; in “Ancient Rome,” as the second subtitle indicates, Turner reconstructed the Bridge and Palace of the Caesars, signaling the important imaginative element of the whole exercise. In the previous year, Samuel Palmer, also following what had become something of an established convention, had exhibited a pair of paintings at the Royal Academy: “A View of Ancient Rome” and “A View of Modern Rome during carnival” (both 1838, Figures 4.8 and 4.9). Both views, however, were in fact of Rome in 1838, and the distinction between ancient and modern has to do with choice of subject matter, for as this pairing shows, ancient and modern coexist. “Ancient Rome” takes its viewpoint from the Campanile of the Palazzo Senatorio on the Capitoline Hill, and looks over and across the Forum toward the Coliseum, San Giovanni in Laterano, and out beyond the aqueducts to the distant Alban Hills. Excavations around the Column of Phocas in the foreground show by contrast how buried were the remnants of the ancient world, and how vacant and pastoral the Forum

Figure 4.6. J. M. W. Turner, Ancient Rome; Agrippina landing with the ashes of Germanicus, 1839. © Tate, London 2007.

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Figure 4.7. J. M. W. Turner, Modern Rome—Campo Vaccino, 1839. Private collection on loan to the National Gallery of Scotland.

Figure 4.8. Samuel Palmer, A view of Ancient Rome, 1838. © Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.

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Figure 4.9. Samuel Palmer, A view of Modern Rome during carnival, 1838. © Birmingham Museums & Art Gallery.

was in the early nineteenth century (the Campo Vaccino, its contemporary name, indicated its use as a cattle pasture). Palmer’s companion painting of “Modern Rome” depicts contemporary human activity during the period of Carnival, and overlooks (in nearly the opposite direction to “Ancient Rome”) the seventeenth-century Piazza del Popolo. On the left, where the two churches of Santa Maria dei Miracoli and Santa Maria in Montesanto mark the entrance to the Corso, Palmer shows a popular carnival tradition: the racing of riderless horses each evening along its one-mile length. More interesting than this depiction of local colour, however, is Palmer’s

Figure 4.10. Arthur Asphitel, Rome as it was, restored after Existing Remains, 1858. V&A Images / Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

Seeing Past Rome 93 approach to composing the view, which combines what is visible from two adjacent viewpoints, but fully visible from neither: as Palmer noted, “I had introduced more matter than could be seen from any one station though with only moving a few yards to the right or left.”50 His view of ancient Rome also overcame a particular visual challenge. Although the viewpoint was endorsed by the guidebooks, few pictures were composed there because of the particular problems thrown up by the perspective at such an elevation. Palmer had, he said, “a hard grapple with ancient Rome—for I was determined to get the whole of the grand ruins, which I believe has not yet been done.”51 Palmer worked on his composition at home, “as I imagined it ought to come if all of it could be seen,” then filled in the details from the tower of the capitol. In both cases, the visible view is supplemented by the invisible. A slightly later pair of pictures, by Arthur Ashpitel (dating from 1858 and 1859, Figures 4.10 and 4.11), takes an altogether more documentary view of the city: his views are notably devoid of any romantic or idealizing tendencies. Trained as an architect, Ashpitel devoted much of his later life to antiquarian and archaeological studies. His view of “Rome as it was,” composed first in 1858, offers a full restoration of late Imperial Rome. Using the evidence of surviving remains, and of current archaeological knowledge, Ashpitel constructed a topographically and historically convincing panorama of the city from a well-known viewpoint. His result might indeed remind us of recent books on Rome (and many other ancient sites) that make use of transparencies to overlay landmarks of the ruined present with vivid restorations and reconstructions of the past; his too have an estranging, even artificial, effect though they visibly eschew artifice of any kind. Ashpitel’s slightly more lyrical “Rome as it is,” composed the following year, is taken from the very same viewpoint, the Palatine Hill. In contrast to the examples from Turner and Palmer, it is possible in this case for the viewer to trace a ruin back to its previous whole, which, rather like the Parthenon marbles brought up close, becomes surprisingly unfamiliar and virtually unrecognizable. Taken together, both views offer an insight into

Figure 4.11. Arthur Asphitel, Rome as it is, from the Palatine Hill, 1859. V&A Images / Victoria & Albert Museum, London.

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how mid-century viewers saw Rome (in spite of increased archaeological activity, the Forum and other parts of the city are still obscured by layers of debris accumulated over time) and how they visualized its Imperial past. Ashpitel’s pairing accomplishes explicitly what the other two “appear” to do by re-creating views of the past. Curiously, one of the effects of Ashpitel’s pairing is that, in some instances, what in nineteenth century Rome is now exposed and outside, was formerly inside and concealed from view. This turning inside out indicates a different perspective on the past, one that emphasizes the vantage point of the historical subject in the present, in response to what is buried or obliterated by time. As Goethe remarks in his Italian Journey: “From this vantage point, history especially is read differently from anywhere else in the world. In other places one reads from the outside in, here we imagine we are reading from the inside out, everything lies spread out around us and also extends out from us” (29 December 1786). Arguably, the opening up of Rome to view in visual reconstruction corresponds to the idea of Rome as an historical vantage point that is temporally inverted and interiorized. The re-envisaging of the past that such a gesture, such reading, could accomplish involves a very literal form of “making visible.” The double act of restoring and creating ruin responds to a desire for intensified representationality that the historical palimpsest of Rome evokes. The double view, while making two distinct visual statements, suggests nevertheless a possible reconciliation—analogous to what the stereoscope, popularized in the 1850s,52 accomplished in spatial terms—where a hidden dimension could be brought into view. Yet, the desire for visual continuity is largely impossible to satisfy: as in Freud’s memory model of Rome in Civilization and Its Discontents, all the elements might be present, but the phenomenon ultimately cannot be represented “in pictorial terms.”53 Like De Quincey’s famous description of the human brain as a “natural and mighty palimpsest,” a kind of scroll upon which experience writes and rewrites itself, a (visual) image is suggested—metaphorically—that defies exact visualization.54 We encounter again the paradox of the visibly invisible embodied in the ruin, which so entranced Romantic visitors to Rome, by which what has apparently been obliterated nevertheless leaves a ghostly trace.

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Romantic Idealism and the Interference of Sight

You know I always seek in what I see the manifestation of something beyond the present & tangible object. Shelley, Letters1

Writing to Thomas Love Peacock from Italy in 1818, Shelley refers to a form of seeing past that is habitual, rather than occasioned by any one particular sight or event, such as that experienced by visitors to Rome. Shelley’s remark, indeed, was prompted not by another Italian landmark, but rather by the sight of the handwriting of the great poets, Ariosto and Tasso, whose manuscripts were on display in Ferrara. Shelley examines these specimens of writing for the qualities of mind they might reveal, and his attention to the manuscript poems stands out in his account of the visit, with its description of everything from Ariosto’s tomb to his writing chair and inkstand, and of Tasso’s dungeon, from which Shelley discreetly removed a fragment of the door. This chapter, likewise, shifts attention more fully to the text—to the ideology and rhetoric of vision in Romantic poetry, which brings into clearer focus the tension in Romanticism between the visual and the visionary, the material and the imaginary. This relationship, I suggest, is one of productive antagonism: the activity of the imagination depends largely on the inference of sight, while resisting (or indeed falling half prey to) its interference—the way seeing both inhabits and inhibits the desired trajectory and outcome of the imaginative process, as writers such as Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, who will be the focus of this discussion, defined it. The chapter begins with an account of how for Wordsworth and Shelley the sight of nature, as a “present & tangible” object, ideally informs the growth of the poet’s imaginative, and intellectual, powers. The desire to grasp the “manifestation of something beyond” however leads toward a more complex encounter with the imagination, and with the sublime, that the process of composition records and explores, or, makes visible. In Wordsworth’s account of his travels through the Alps in The Prelude, in Coleridge’s “Hymn Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni,” and Shelley’s “Mont Blanc,” the poet is seen to struggle with a central epistemological problem: the relation of the mind or imagination to the material world,

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and the correspondent integrity and ideality of the poet’s activity (here one notes with interest that the Greek root of “ideal,” idein, means “to see”). The struggle to understand the invisible is also the struggle to unify, visually and conceptually, a disparate and finally unknowable field of experience, one that tends alarmingly toward the dissolution of both the view and the viewing subject. I In Wordsworth’s Prelude, the autobiography of the poet includes a close examination of his visual apprenticeship in nature. His reflections in Book Eleven of that poem, on the “despotic” tendencies of the eye in relation to the viewing practices of the picturesque, have already been considered above; in earlier books of The Prelude, however, we find the poet relating key incidents from his youth in an attempt to understand the effects, the imprint, of the natural scene upon the mind of the maturing poet. Wordsworth’s effort to grasp the impact of what he has looked at, steadily or otherwise, upon his powers of thought, is remarkable, even though his interest in the reciprocity of image and thought leaves the image behind as finally instrumental in a long process of imaginative maturation. In Book Two of The Prelude, for example, Wordsworth examines how the “common range of visible things” (1805; 2.182) engendered sympathy, pleasure, and joy in the increasingly conscious awareness of the growing boy. But this is only the first step: in order to “drink the visionary power” (2.330) imparted by a more porous engagement with the natural world—a mind laid open “to Nature’s finer influxes” (2.298)—all senses must be quickened and it is in fact hearing that is often emphasized over the incipient profanity of “form or image”: . . . For I would walk alone In storm and tempest, or in starlight nights Beneath the quiet heavens, and at that time Have felt whate’er there is of power in sound To breathe an elevated mood, by form Or image unprofaned; and I would stand Beneath some rock, listening to sounds that are The ghostly language of the ancient earth, Or make their dim abode in distant winds. (2.321–29)2

The trajectory of the poet’s growth, then, is away from possible fulfillment in the world of visual sensation, toward an apprehension of a certain “universal power” and “fitness” in “the latent qualities / And essences of things” (2.343–45). Nevertheless, the visual is to some extent internalized

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or mirrored inwardly, as a later passage suggests. Finding himself alone upon “some jutting eminence” in the early hours of the morning, the poet recounts a moment of such “holy calm” that he forgets that he has “bodily eyes”; what he sees “Appeared like something in myself, a dream, / A prospect in my mind” (2.362–71). The view of the landscape produces, in a manner reminiscent of the camera obscura, its inner double. In The Prelude, Wordsworth examines himself closely in order to understand more clearly the process by which the object world establishes— informs—the architecture of the mind. Elsewhere, he explores it in other figures who he idealizes and closely identifies with, such as those living “amid the simpler forms of rural life,” whose essential passions “speak a plainer language.”3 Wordsworth’s “Wanderer,” introduced in Book I of The Excursion, is a character through which he also explores aspects of his childhood in nature. Indeed, some of the lines cited above, which Wordsworth included in the 1805 version of The Prelude (from 2.322–41), were first written in 1798, and probably for the description of the narrator of The Ruined Cottage—the Wanderer of The Excursion. As a boy, it is what the Wanderer experiences, and sees, when alone in nature, that lays down “the foundations of his mind” (The Excursion, 1.132). As with the youthful Wordsworth in early episodes of The Prelude, who scales windswept cliffs to rob the nests of birds, or steals a rowboat at dusk, these experiences are “not from terror free”; the watchful face of nature appears, in turn, to see. So deep are the impressions of the “presence and the power / Of greatness,” that their associated objects “lay / Upon his mind like substances, whose presence / Perplexed the bodily sense” (132–39). The early sense of being confounded has its later analogue in the dynamic of the sublime. One might say, meanwhile, that in early life, looking is a belated activity: the child sees indirectly, absorptively, unconsciously, while the adult, looking over or back, strains to perceive the effect of past perception. The “foundation” of the Wanderer’s mind is, if not a mirror, then an impression of the “lineaments” of nature: a certain line, conceptually and ethically, can then be followed. As he ages, he compares new impressions with “All his remembrances, thoughts, shapes, forms,” and from this he attained “An active power to fasten images / Upon his brain.” Over their “pictured lines” he broods intensely, “even till they acquired / The liveliness of dreams” (141–48). Once again (for this statement recalls the Prelude lines noted above, in which a view becomes a dream, or a prospect, in the mind), a dream-image is granted representational, living power, where the effect is to emphasize the continued life of things seen in the mind. The Wanderer, as a growing youth, indeed has a similar epiphany upon “the naked top / Of some bold headland”: . . . He looked— Ocean and earth, the solid frame of earth And ocean’s liquid mass, in gladness lay

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Romanticism and Visuality Beneath him:—Far and wide the clouds were touched, And in their silent faces could he read Unutterable love. Sound needed none, Nor any voice of joy; his spirit drank The spectacle: sensation, soul, and form, All melted into him; they swallowed up His animal being; in them did he live, And by them did he live; they were his life. (200—210)

The force and magnitude of the visible world are seized upon by spirit, through “intercourse” such as this, in which thought is suspended. All things “breathed immortality, revolving life, / And greatness still revolving.” The smallest, the least of things “Seemed infinite; and there his spirit shaped / Her prospects, nor did he believe,—he saw” (228–32). To see, in this way, is precisely that visionary tendency that Ruskin celebrated in Modern Painters as a rare gift: a synthesis of poetry, prophecy, and religion. Intriguingly, however, Wordsworth’s sketch of the Wanderer’s formative experiences in the visible world leads directly into his account of the “ruined cottage.” This is a narrative of invisible things, drawn from the landscape of memory but shaped by the material vestiges of the cottage and the remnants of its garden, among which the Wanderer and the primary narrator of the poem take refuge on a hot day in summer. The ruined remains are the visible sign of an otherwise latent story, present partly in “the useless fragment of a wooden bowl” (493) that the narrator spots, for example, but resident mainly inside the head of the Wanderer. Indeed, the gap between the narrative suggested by the visible scene of the “tranquil ruin,” and the narrative conveyed by the poem, is significant, as Harold Bloom has remarked. The story of illness, poverty, and Margaret’s final decline after her husband enlists is a warning, he suggests, against the destructive possibilities of the imagination: for it is the sheer strength of her hope and love that destroys her capacity to live, effectively producing ruin. And only the “eye of the mind” could in fact link together the visible tokens remaining around the ruined cottage, in order to perceive this alternative revelation.4 “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, July 13, 1798” is a poem that also follows the familiar Wordsworthian trajectory from the seen world into the unseen: from present visual detail to an imaginative consideration of both past and future. The poet assesses first what these scenes have meant in the past, during his absence from them. They have not been, he states, “as is a landscape to a blind man’s eye,” but have been vividly and frequently recalled amid far other scenes, as in the “din / Of towns and cities.”5 Indeed he owes to them his poetic vocation, his “blessed mood” in which the “weary weight” of “all this unintelligible world, / Is lightened” and in which, most important perhaps, “ . . . with an eye made quiet by the power / Of harmony, and

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the deep power of joy, / We see into the life of things” (37–49). Turning back to the present from these reflections, the poet experiences a certain sense of “sad perplexity,” as memory mixes, disturbingly, with the visible, and “the picture of the mind revives again” (61).6 The contest between the remembered and the viewed scene is resolved by looking forward: comparing how he once looked at nature (viewed in the picture of memory), to how he looks upon it now, the poet envisages a similar sense coming to animate his “sister,” whose presence has until this moment been unacknowledged. The thematic oscillation between gain and loss, as the poem moves between past, present and future—all the while mediated by the memory of images—is driven fundamentally by the question of absence: even what is visibly present is treated as though it has already been lost. The site (or sight) of absence mapped by the poem corresponds both to its location and to Wordsworth’s compositional practice. “Tintern Abbey” has become a convenient abbreviation of the poem’s long title, a suggestive locating image, but the poem is in fact “situated” a few miles above it—indeed the Abbey’s absence from the poem recalls Wordsworth’s own long absence from the scene, and the importance of memory in the poem’s struggle toward an apprehension of presence. Wordsworth did not, moreover, write at the scene, as the poem seems to suggest. Rather, the actual sight was perhaps an impediment, for as Bate reminds us, “Tintern Abbey” was not composed on the spot from which the poet speaks: “according to his own account, he felt the poem a few miles upstream from the abbey, began composing it in his head after leaving Tintern, and concluded it on entering Bristol at the end of the day; not one line was written down until he reached Bristol.”7 At first sight, the visually “matter of fact” supplies the mental image that in turn transfigures the real.8 A certain distance from the event is essential for this, implying even the relative unimportance of the natural object, which complicates the common view of Wordsworth as a “nature” poet. What matters for Wordsworth, as Hartman and Bloom concur, is not the visually remembered world, but “that world taken up into the mind and seen again by the eye of the mind” (Bloom, 41). The visual world, then, would seem to exist most powerfully in the form of “memory” pictures, the reviving pictures of the mind. Heffernan, in a discussion of Wordsworth’s “Elegaic Stanzas” on Beaumont’s painting of Peele Castle, links Wordsworth’s preference for his own (imagined) memory-picture of the castle to comments he later made about Scott’s habit of taking detailed notes as preparation for writing poems about landscape. Scott should rather, Wordsworth asserts, fix his eye on his surroundings, take them into his heart, and allow a certain amount of time to elapse (perhaps a few days) before “interrogat[ing] his memory as to the scene.” He would then discover that while he retained much that was admirable in the scene, other parts of it were “wisely obliterated”: “That which remained—the picture surviving in his mind—would have presented the ideal and essential truth of the scene, and done so, in a large part, by discarding much which,

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though in itself striking, was not characteristic.”9 Wordsworth’s theory of poetic composition draws from a double mode of vision, in which a secondary process “interprets the language of sense in the picture of the mind.”10 This secondary moment, as Foakes suggests, gives rise to certain confusions, not least confusions in emphasis. First, there is a strong element of overlay or usurpation in the activity of the “seeing” mind, which is as much, or more, a feature of the act of composition as of the initial experience. “Resolution and Independence” provides a striking example of how—even as a sight is ostensibly seen—the prospect of the mind overtakes what the eye observes, as the view of the old leech gatherer in the speaker’s “mind’s eye” blinds him briefly to the presence and speech of the old man before him. Second, there is a certain hesitation over the question of priority: does the eye itself not half perceive and half create? The “watchful eye” of The Prelude, Book Eight, not satisfied “with the outside of our human life / . . . must read the inner mind” (8.66–68). These are clearly competing realms that interfere with each other, and that resist resolution, not least into a unified “visual” field.11 Ultimately, perhaps, an oppositional model of the visual and the visionary gives way under pressure of a shared resistance, which both shapes and shifts. That Wordsworth formulates so frequently this central dilemma suggests a compelling fascination with the resistance not just of the visible to moral and metaphysical speculation, but of the invisible to acts of imaginative penetration. The “Ruined Cottage” example shows that there is no necessary correspondence between the visual and the actual, such as it may be understood. This underscores the dissonance between the visual and the imaginary, for they are ultimately incommensurable. It is not, then, simply the case that Wordsworth uses instances of the naturally visible as a springboard into the imagined, but rather as a way into, at a limit, things that repudiate visualization altogether. These are things that imply access to an always unvisited place, the realm of the “something ever more about to be,” and that resist, as Bloom argues, the contrapuntal interaction of the visual and the visionary. In this, what I am proposing as the joint action of the inference and the interference of the visible come into play, by inviting and confounding the poet, and arguably what Wordsworth seeks to grasp is the relation of that joint action to something ever more other, and other in its habitual invisibility. In a loose sense at least, this general view of the naturally visible as a conceptual pathway to the materially inaccessible, to what impedes and resists visualization, is shared by Shelley. In Shelley’s case, however, the poet’s relationship to sight is less marked by conflict: Wordsworth’s entanglements with the visible are displaced by a comparatively less anxious exploration of the “unseen” and its shadows, to borrow Shelley’s terms from his “Hymn to Intellectual Beauty.”12 Shelley of course laments the inconstancy as well as the intangibility of intellectual or nonmaterial “beauty,” translated in that poem as “the awful shadow of some unseen Power” (1). But he openly

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courts this twice-displaced force (for not only is it the shadow of something invisible, it also floats “unseen among us”) without any apparent impulse to avert his eyes. The relationship in question is, as with Wordsworth, between the mind’s capacity for imagining and the (visible) world of things, but here it is unambiguously situated beyond the world of sense. The central mystery, splendour, or beauty in nature, and its correspondent human or poetic meaning, remains inherently inexplicable—and yet, although it operates at a double remove, it is intuitively perceptible. Shelley’s emphasis on this paradox serves, as the poem develops, to keep the grounds of that mystery resolutely in the dark, even as the poet reaches toward a more constant and mature understanding. In the poem’s pivotal central stanza, “intellectual beauty,” an agent perhaps rather than an object of revelation, that which activates rather than constitutes meaning, is a force that both feeds the flame and lets it die in darkness: “Thou that to human thought art nourishment, / Like darkness to a dying flame!” (44–45). The terms of Shelley’s analogy are as perplexing as they are equivocal: “intellectual beauty” nourishes thought, one infers, not necessarily by extinguishing it, although this is implied, but absorptively—and invisibly. The poet must search in the shadows for knowledge of the ideal, a knowledge that is both intuitive and structurally analogical. The search is carried on in another major poem written in the summer of 1816, “Mont Blanc,” where the mysterious power abiding in nature, a power both generative and forming, is approached in a more speculative and less ecstatic key. Like Shelley’s “Hymn,” the poem teases out and explores an unverifiable hypothesis, postulating the existence in nature of a universal mind, and perhaps more immediately, it seeks the location or composition of the human mind in relation to it. This is developed initially in the poet’s address to the ravine before him, and within it, the river Arve. The river, he muses, functions in relation to the ravine as the ravine does to the human mind: the river’s movements reflect and animate the ravine, lending it colour, motion, splendour, in the same way the mind is affected by sensory impressions—impressions to which it in turn lends its own colouring. Gazing on the “Dizzy Ravine,” the poet seems “as in a trance sublime and strange / To muse on my own separate fantasy, / My own, my human mind” (34–37). This mind both renders and receives “fast influencings”; it holds “an unremitting interchange / With the clear universe of things around” (38–40). In spite of the apparent tangibility of this process, it seeks among passing shadows, “ghosts of all things that are,” for some “shade,” “phantom,” or “faint image” (45–47), of the power that is attributed to the ravine, a power that descends, in form or “likeness” of the Arve, from its secret source. Shelley is, here, comparatively unconscious of the visual process, passing rapidly as he does from sensory impression to thought. Nevertheless the understanding he seeks is located firmly amid invisible things, and an analogy suggests itself between the mind and the mountain on the one hand, and the visible and the invisible on the other: for here, too, “unremitting

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interchange” holds sway, and the poet is caught in a loop where these two stand in a relationship of mutual interanimation. The visible, geological features of the ravine structure the poet’s conception of the invisible, which returns upon the ravine in the form of a ghostly understructure. The analogy is, furthermore, not only constructed but constantly dissolved or undermined by a relationship of haunting, by “likeness” that can never be anything more than ghostly, abiding—“thou are there”—in the phantoms and images issuing from the poet’s imagination (48). We will return to this aspect of the poem later in the chapter, but should note now that as the poet turns his attention from the ravine to the mountain in stanza IV, the remoteness and indifference of the physical world is stressed: the “power” inherent in the mountain “dwells apart in its tranquility, / Remote, serene, and inaccessible” (96–97). Meanwhile, cycles of natural creation and destruction are implicitly compared to the capacity for creation proper to the human imagination.

II The discourse surrounding the imagination in the Romantic period has been exhaustively studied for its dialogue with a number of aesthetic debates, and largely for its important bearing on the theory of the sublime. Before developing further the poetics of alpine encounter, and specifically, the precarious position of the viewing subject, I’d like to pause on the question of the imagination in Romanticism, and position it in relation to “vision,” with specific attention to its function as a unifying discourse, a discourse haunted by the complementary logic of the sublime and of fragmentation. It was for many years a critical commonplace that the imagination was the “quintessence” of Romanticism, a central principle on which the entire movement depended—a common denominator for all its divergent projects, and one that guarded them from incipient dissolution.13 The implicit claim that the theory of the imagination itself possessed a unified centre has hardly proved tenable, yet it remains the case that for a number of canonical Romantic poets and thinkers, the imagination was the faculty of choice for theorizing questions of wholeness, or unity. This places it, oppositionally, in close relation to the fragment, for the imagination is equally implicated in the double play of suggestion and resistance, presence and absence, that characterises the fragment. As both a “principle of coherence” and a “principal site of its division and disjunction,” the imagination has, as Forest Pyle remarks in The Ideology of the Imagination, its own double logic.14 Perhaps this relationship is primarily analogical, since both the fragment and the imagination are themselves “linking” figures: the fragment articulates a relationship between part and whole without, in any concrete or material sense, enacting it; while the imagination in the wake of Kant oscillates between reason and sense. As Pyle observes, the imagination is intended to supply a link between the mind

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and the world, while this very intention, the articulation it is to undertake, presupposes “the prior existence of a rift, a fissure, a disjunction that must be crossed or healed” (3). For the fragment, as for the imagination, the linking function is really the occupation of a space between two things, neither of which it can fully identify with or share in, in the way that a bridge both passes over and asserts the distance between two sides of a river, bringing those sides into contact while leaving their separateness intact. Writers in the Romantic period argued in what are now established terms for the imagination as a powerful, liberating force, but much of the strength of the argument drew from a thoughtful redefinition of an old concept. This included, as Paul Hamilton has noted, emancipating the imagination from an empiricist metaphorical language that defined it in visual terms, as in Hume’s principle that “our ideas are images of our impressions.” To be properly “sympathetic,” the imagination had to side-step the epistemology of the visual, as Blake showed by asserting “the independence of imaginative language from empiricist criteria of perception.”15 This attempt to position the imagination “beyond” visuality informs Coleridge’s distinction between the imagination and mere “Fancy,” in which the imagination is redefined as as a rigorously philosophical entity with profound religious and metaphysical dimensions. On the one hand, it is a reenactment, even a partaking, of divine creation that fully realizes man’s spiritual nature; and on the other, a means of discovering a transcendental order—and thus standing in an essential and privileged relation to truth. These claims for the imagination naturally assumed a special significance for poetic theory. Indeed, they were made on behalf of poetry, which was clearly the most fitting medium for their articulation. In Chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria, Coleridge concludes that the nature of poetry approximates a definition of poetic genius (the questions “what is poetry?” and “what is a poet?” being very nearly the same): “The poet, described in ideal perfection, brings the whole soul of man into activity . . .” But crucially, the imagination must be its (or the poet’s) central, regulating principle: “He diffuses a tone, and spirit of unity, that blends, and (as it were) fuses, each into each, by that synthetic and magical power, to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of imagination.”16 The imagination, Coleridge continues, is the very soul of poetic genius, and in its exercise the poet engages with the spiritual world, both discovering and representing its harmonious—and otherwise invisible—truths. Thus it is the job of the poet to penetrate and represent the nature of things—to articulate an ulterior reality, such as Shelley’s “intellectual beauty” or the latent power of “Mont Blanc.” In “A Defence of Poetry,” Shelley describes this very process as one of stripping “the veil of familiarity from the world” in order to “[lay] bare the naked and sleeping beauty, which is the spirit of its forms.”17 For Blake, too, the exercise of the poetic imagination gives access to a sort of real behind the (visibly) real, and the reality it reveals arises from the unimpeded energy of the self’s divine activity:

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“One Power alone makes a Poet: Imagination, The Divine Vision.”18 The imagination discovers what the familiar world hides; visible, living things are the symbols of the unseen, the language of the invisible. The poet is the seer who renders this “language” transparent to others and yet, as the language of the divine, it must be both infinite and eternal. In “A Vision of the Last Judgement” he writes: This world of Imagination is the world of Eternity; it is the divine bosom into which we shall all go after the death of the Vegetated body. This World of Imagination is Infinite and Eternal, whereas the world of Generation, or Vegetation, is Finite and Temporal. . . . All Things are comprehended in their Eternal Forms in the divine body of the Saviour, the True Vine of Eternity, The Human Imagination. (545)

Coleridge shares Blake’s assessment of the visionary importance of the imagination, emphasizing its eternal and infinite aspects in his well-known definition of the primary imagination: “The primary IMAGINATION I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM” (BL, I:304). And for Wordsworth as well, the limitlessness of the imagination is empowering: “even in poetry it is the imaginative only, viz., that which is conversant [with], or turns upon infinity, that powerfully affects me—. . . limits vanish, and aspirations are raised.”19 Key terms, such as repetition and infinity, suggest that poetic activity is on the one hand all-consuming, but on the other, never to be consumed. As Shelley argues in “A Defence,” “All high poetry is infinite; it is as the first acorn, which contained all oaks potentially.” But this infinitude, comprehensive though it is, is also inexhaustible, for as he continues, “veil after veil may be undrawn, and the inmost naked beauty of the meaning never exposed.”20 This aspect of the imagination is close to, if not indistinguishable from, the experience of the sublime. As Coleridge develops his theory of the imagination in The Statesman’s Manual, the main problem with the fancy and the faculty of the understanding is that they are unable to “represent totality without limit.”21 Reason, meanwhile, “is the knowledge of the laws of the WHOLE considered as ONE. . . . [it] is the science of the universal, having the ideas of ONENESS and ALLNESS as its two elements or primary factors” (59–60). Reason and the imagination both strive, in different ways, for full apprehension of the infinite, but man is said to exhibit a natural tendency toward reason, as “Reason first manifests itself in man by the tendency of the comprehension of all as one. We can neither,” Coleridge continues, “rest in an infinite that is not at the same time a whole, nor in a whole that is not an infinite” (60). These statements assert the proximity of reason and the sublime, since Coleridge also conceives of the sublime as “endless allness.”22 The main economy of the Kantian sublime was briefly outlined previously in the second chapter, where it was noted that the experience of the

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sublime is one of limitlessness, or at least a representation of limitlessness, with an implicit apprehension of totality (Kant, 90). The imagination, seeking out this apprehension, “striving . . . towards progress ad infinitum” (97), finds itself overwhelmed. However, while the imagination is faced with its limits, the faculty of reason is able to recover itself, indeed confirm itself, through this failure. Reason offers recuperative, rational terms with which to grasp the experience, which “redeems” the imagination by rescuing it from collapse. The experience as a whole thus follows a redemptive trajectory: “this thrusting aside of the sensible barriers gives [the imagination] a feeling of being unbounded”; it presents the infinite (however negatively), and thus “expands the soul” (127). But to feel, if only for a moment, unbounded is a different matter entirely from the totalizing impulse so often invested in the Romantic imagination. Kant makes it clear that the imagination cannot have access to a whole: “For here [the example is St. Peter’s in Rome] a feeling comes home to him of the inadequacy of his imagination for presenting the idea of a whole within which that imagination attains its maximum, and, in its fruitless efforts to extend this limit, recoils upon itself, but in so doing succumbs to an emotional delight” (100). While we are moved (transported, perhaps) by the sublime, and enjoy a certain emotional satisfaction in having our imaginative faculties not only expanded but finally overwhelmed, the experience is still marked by a fundamental ambivalence. Brought about by a moment of blockage followed by one of powerful discharge, the emotions associated with the sublime “seem to be no sport, but dead earnest in the affairs of the imagination” (91). As the imagination offers a conceptual language for expressing an idealized totality, and is claimed as the faculty above all others that contains and synthesizes, the persistence of the fragmentary in Romanticism is an apparent affront to the coherence or full intelligibility of the Romantic theory of the imagination. Viewed from a wider perspective, this problem is age-old, as writers from Longinus to Benjamin (and certainly beyond) have been interested in what Neil Hertz has called the sublime turn, “a recurrent phenomenon in literature” that is “the movement of disintegration and figurative reconstitution.”23 This “turn” has been configured in various ways. It is present, for instance, in the supposition that the imagination must fragment in the interests of reunification; the imagination “dissolves or dissipates because the artist can neither copy nor assimilate in wholes: the whole is an obstacle to selection and change, and destruction is the first step in recreation.”24 Or again, the imagination, which is supposed to make the invisible world visible, can only do so through its parts. Maurice Bowra subscribed to this view, suggesting that “the powers which Wordsworth saw in nature or Shelley in love are so enormous that we begin to understand them only when they are manifested in single, concrete examples.”25 This amounts, however, to little more than the organicist postulate of knowing the whole through the part: “The essence of the Romantic imagination is that it fashions shapes which display these unseen forces at work, and there is no other

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way to display them, since they resist analysis and description and cannot be presented except in particular instances” (10). It is only in this manner that we may apprehend something, some fragments perhaps, of the poet’s original vision. But like the sublime, this mode of presentation arguably presents the impossibility of presentation. Veering between the fragment and the putative whole, we might recall Derrida’s suggestive remarks in “Parergon” that the sublime, properly speaking, refuses all adequate presentation: it disrupts its own presentation so that what it presents is really the inadequacy of that presentation.26 The representational logic supplied by the sublime, with its dialectic of deprivation and redemption, of aspiration and limitation, is thus predicated on the inevitability of its disintegration. Paul Hamilton, among others, has seized upon the aesthetics of the sublime as an exemplary theoretical expression of the wider dilemma facing the Romantic poet.27 He points out that “Romantic poets often describe the failure of poetic vision as a necessary part of the definition of the vision itself,” and the point of this is not to suggest that such visions are delusory, but rather, that they are constructed and artificial (165–6). In poems of alpine encounter, such as those of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley, we find that the imagination is itself unmasked, if not as artificial, at least as constructed—composed—in the very moment of its breakdown. These encounters, reconfigured in the displaced geography of the literary text, likewise displace the (often ambiguous) visual basis of the encounter, in the name of an illusory “visionary” recuperation. Wordsworth’s narrative of crossing the Alps in Book Six of The Prelude, which records his dramatic encounter with the imagination in the sublime landscape of the Simplon Pass (and, one might add, that of poetic self-inscription), is an example that involves all of the threads of this discussion so far. It is moreover a passage constructed from fragments of text, and contained within a text that was itself conceived as a fragment of a larger work (as a preface to The Recluse); in this it exemplifies formally the problem of presentation with which it is largely preoccupied.28 It has received extensive critical commentary for these reasons as well as for the biographical, compositional, and psychoanalytic dimensions of the poet’s presentation of the event. In this general vein, two of the most intriguing and often-discussed aspects of Wordsworth’s Alps crossing are, first, that the crossing took place without Wordsworth realizing that it had, and second, that the incident, with its thus subsequent visitation (or perhaps invasion) of the “awful” power of imagination, was recorded during the composition of the 1805 Prelude (in 1804)—constituted or reconstituted, that is, some fourteen years later. The artificiality of vision, of the Romantic poet’s sublime dilemma to which Hamilton refers, is nowhere more apparent than in Wordsworth’s recomposition of his anticlimactic Alps crossing, which was subject to remarkable reorganization on a textual as well as imaginative level.29

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The narrative circumstances surrounding Wordsworth’s disappointment have proved well suited to an investigation of the relationship between the imagination and sublimity, but they also speak volumes for the deceptions of the visible. These circumstances are well known: when their path breaks off abruptly at the edge of a stream, Wordsworth and his companion choose the wrong path, one that ascends a “lofty mountain.” After an hour’s climb, they are informed that they must redescend to the spot that had “perplexed” them, and take up another road farther along the stream: . . . our future course, all plain to sight, Was downwards, with the current of that stream. Loth to believe what we so grieved to hear, For still we had hopes that pointed to the clouds, We questioned him again, and yet again; But every word that from the peasant’s lips Came in reply, translated by our feelings, Ended in this,—that we had crossed the Alps. (1850; 6.584–91)

Famously, the crossing was over before it had even begun, exposing the ambiguous status, the indeterminacy even, of such crossings. Crossing here also implicates (recalling the linking function of the imagination discussed above) the poet’s desired movement from a sensible to a higher, supersensible realm—that of the mind, and the imagination.30 But such transcendence was, by chance, lost to conscious, visible experience. Perhaps as a consequence, Wordsworth seems to have let the crossing pass without full comment, at least until the composition of The Prelude’s second major draft in 1804, when we find that the economy of the sublime has finally taken over: loss is recovered as gain, defeat as triumph. Sublimity is found, finally, in the written rather than in the physical passage, such as it was: Imagination!—lifting up itself Before the eye and progress of my song Like an unfathered vapour, here that power, In all the might of its endowments, came Athwart me. I was lost as in a cloud, Halted without a struggle to break through, And now, recovering, to my soul I say ‘I recognize thy glory.’ In such strength Of usurpation, in such visitings Of awful promise, when the light of sense Goes out in flashes that have shewn to us The invisible world, doth greatness make abode, There harbours whether we be young or old.

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Wordsworth is brought to a halt, arrested, his faculties “usurped,” and his apprehension of the “invisible world” is partial—accomplished by flashes of sense, and accompanied by the characteristic overstraining and collapse of the imagination. Only upon recovering can he label his experience a visiting “of awful promise,” which, by virtue of exceeding his grasp, will remain forever imminent and beyond full cognition. In the 1850 version, even the term Imagination is deemed inadequate—“the Power so called / Through sad incompetence of human speech” (6.592–93)—in a sublime collapse of language that, while clearly commenting on the process of composing the earlier version, also laments the difficulty of adequate presentation. Again and again, the poet must write himself into the trajectory of his vision, while the imperative force of this impulse is in no small measure accounted for by the elusiveness of that vision, and its threat to a notion of a unified, adequate and presentable self. This moment of halting, however quickly overcome, is present in other Wordsworth poems, and Geoffrey Hartman has shown that in such moments it is possible to observe or discover “something significant about the relation of poetry to the mind.”31 The sudden awareness experienced by the poet of a double or supervening consciousness, otherwise known as imagination, turns out to be consciousness of the self raised to an “apocalyptic pitch,” and its effects are always the same: “a moment of arrest, the ordinary vital continuum being interrupted; a separation of the traveller poet from familiar nature; a thought of death or judgement or of the reversal of what is taken to be the order of nature; a feeling of solitude or loss or separation” (17–18). In the Alps episode, the poet comes “face to face” with his imagination; the story is again told “of a failure of the mind visà-vis the external world,” but the failure is doubly redeemed. First, by the sublime views Wordsworth later encounters in his crossing, for example in the overwhelming Vale of Gondo, but more important, one could say that “across the gulf of time, his disappointment becomes retrospectively a prophetic instance of that blindness to the external world which is the tragic, pervasive, and necessary condition of the mature poet.” In 1790, “rebuffed not by nature’s presence but rather by its strong absence,” Wordsworth discovers what now overwhelms him: the “independence of the imagination from nature.”32 Thus it is that the imagination draws the poet into nature while secretly frustrating the dependence of the poet on the apparent immediacy of the natural world. To the ideal notion of the imaginative function as able to

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penetrate and synthesize nature with the mind of man, we must admit the capacity of the imagination to obfuscate and mislead. With this tendency toward enticement and bafflement, we see that the disjunction between the imagination and nature is supported by the theory of the sublime. The trajectory Hartman describes is itself not unlike the movement leading to the moment of the sublime, where incommensurability intervenes. As he points out, “It takes the poet many years to realize that nature’s ‘end’ is to lead to something ‘without end,’ to teach the travellers to transcend nature” (44). While this seems analogous to the elevation characteristic of the sublime when it arises out of an encounter with nature, it also confirms the sublime as something comprehended and represented by unnatural or artificial means—unnatural insofar as the sublime must arise out of this very rupture between the imagination and its supports in nature. All of this suggests that Wordsworth’s rhetorical staging, in the theatre of nature, of a struggle between the eye and the imagination, largely misses the point. For it is not the case that the imagination must win out over the eye, but rather, that the activity of the poetic imagination also rises out of a rupture, this time between the imagination and its supports in the visible world.

III Coleridge’s “Hymn Before Sun-rise, in the Vale of Chamouni” presents us with a situation similar to Wordsworth’s in Book Six of The Prelude, but the experience Coleridge describes is an even greater missed passage, since Coleridge was never actually there.33 His explanatory note, or preface, that accompanied the poem’s first publication in the Morning Post of September 11, 1802, suggests that any of its readers who had visited that Vale would, he was confident, not find its sentiments and feelings extravagant. He paints in extraordinary geographic detail the features of that mountain valley, but neglects to mention that the poem is an expansion and translation of another: Friederika Brun’s twenty-line “Ode to Chamouny,” later addressed to Klopstock. Coleridge’s rewriting, or repetition, of Brun’s ode might be, in terms he begins to elaborate that very year in his letters to William Sotheby, defended as a quintessentially imaginative act (critics seem to agree that the plagiarism was more a function of his omitting to name his source, than in the nature of the actual borrowing, since the source is unanimously deemed inferior to Coleridge’s reworking of it). In 1802, Coleridge identifies the imagination as the “modifying, and co-adunating Faculty”34; but it would not be inappropriate to think of what he later calls a “repetition in the finite mind” as itself a kind of translation. Kant, as Paul de Man reminds us, characterises the “task” of the imagination as “precisely to translate the abstractions of reason back into the phenomenal world of appearances and images whose presence is retained in the very word imagination, Bild in the German ‘Einbildungskraft.’”35

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Coleridge’s hymn to the mountain is itself, in fact, a “translation” of an earlier experience on Scafell, on August 5 of that year, where he claims, in a letter to Sotheby, to have “involuntarily poured forth a hymn in the manner of the Psalms” (Letters, II:864). Indeed the composition of Coleridge’s poem seems to have been the result of the convergence of his own alpine adventures with a chance textual discovery. As he put it to Sotheby, he found “the Ideas &c [of his hymn] disproportionate to our humble mountains—& accidentally lighting on a short Note in some swiss Poems, concerning the Vale of Chamouny, & it’s [sic] Mountain, I transferred myself thither, in the Spirit, & adapted my former feelings to these grander external objects” (865). The imagination is the conveyance for Coleridge’s “adaptation,” which is also a kind of transference or carrying over from a real event to one that can only be performed imaginatively. Incidentally, Coleridge’s 1802 ascent of Scafell included its own moments of crisis, as in his vivid account of being “baffled” during the descent: as a consequence of a miscalculation, he found himself lodged on a ledge, unable for a time to either continue or go back. He turns this experience to good account, making the all-too-real decidedly, sublimely, unreal. Lying on his back, allowing the sight of crags and clouds overhead to “overawe” him, he transports himself to “a state of almost prophetic Trance & Delight—& blessed God aloud, for the powers of Reason & the Will, which remaining no Danger can overpower us! O God, I exclaimed aloud—how calm, how blessed am I now / I know not how to proceed, how to return / . . .”36 The poem to which this event is transferred culminates in a proclamation of the sublime, appropriate perhaps to a hymn, in which the song of the poet is explicitly directed to another. The poet addresses features of the landscape in turn, rousing them to a collective address. In the words of the poem’s concluding line, “Earth, with her thousand voices, praises God,” but this message, to which God is as deaf as the mountain is silent, must be carried across to him by the mountain itself, “Thou dread ambassador from Earth to Heaven” (85, 82).37 And yet the message does not go to God directly, but rather to, or through, “the silent sky,” “the stars,” and “yon rising sun” (83–84). Indirect address, so much a feature of the poem, seems to extend beyond it too, if one takes into account not only Brun’s dedication, but also the poem’s place in Coleridge’s letters: in the detailed account of the walking tour addressed to Sara Hutchinson, and the letter to Sotheby of a month later. Related to the question of address is that of reply, and indeed, given the necessary silence of those addressed in this vortex of articulation, one might say the anxiety of a reply, since written address is clearly what fills in the white blank of Mont Blanc. Coleridge’s poem, through its reliance on prosopopoeia, gives a voice to the mute, and reads flowers, goats, eagles, and lightning as “Ye signs and wonders of the element!” that shall “Utter forth God” (64–69). In Coleridge’s “Hymn,” Mont Blanc functions as a go-between or bridge from earth to heaven—a literal, physical, link that suggests a metaphoric

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one between man and God, matter and spirit. The linking function of the mountain appears, in this poem, to make the imagination both the object and subject of address, and this doubleness is present in Wordsworth’s Book Six account of his encounter with an “Imagination” that comes athwart him like a “fatherless vapour,” and to whom he addresses his exultant song of praise. Coleridge’s mountain rises before him like a “vapoury cloud,” like something sublimely immaterial—and at which, it turns out, he has not even been looking. As the mountain materializes in the early dawn light, the poet confesses that he has, in effect, been addressing his feet, as his head has been “bowed low / In adoration” (75–76). It is only as he raises his eyes from the mountain’s base that it “seemest, like a vapoury cloud, / To rise before me—Rise, O ever rise,” (78–79), so that the mountain’s looming presence is both a function of the poet’s gaze as well as of his summons, and the product of a curiously attentive inattention. Perhaps the status of Mont Blanc in Coleridge’s poem, the result chiefly of something we might call blind avowal, makes sense in light of Coleridge’s own actual absence from the scene. Both that absence, and the nature of the avowal, though, are entirely appropriate to his later view of the imagination as something that dissolves in order to reconstitute its object—a view that takes shape early in the poem when he stresses that the mountain, while remaining present to “the bodily sense,” has in fact vanished from his thought and been replaced (or written over) by “the Invisible alone” (14– 16). By this logic, the poet must apprehend the mountain as blank before it can be made to speak: in contrast to the passive imagination, which is only “the image-forming or rather re-forming power,” Coleridge emphasizes the “poetic Imagination. . . . the fusing power, that fixing unfixes & while it melts & bedims the Image, still leaves in the Soul its living meaning.”38 The poetic imagination is the exercise of a displacement that, in its reconstitutive operation, might be seen to include translation, and indeed to gather up within it things that apparently originate elsewhere, while leaving in its wake a residue of “meaning.” But this dissolution of the boundaries of objects or images, their allegorical bedimming, which leaves behind a whole that could only be described in the terms I have advanced here as a fragment, has an echo or repetition in Coleridge’s view of the sublime, where neither the whole nor the parts must be seen, where sublimity is a function of invisibility of the kind envisaged by the poet in the imagined and imaginary face of Mont Blanc.39 For Wordsworth and Shelley, Coleridge’s verse description of Mont Blanc—with its adoption of the orthodox voice of the religious sublime— was a text to depart from, if not to echo.40 Coleridge’s poem functions as a text to be written over, a Mont Blanc to be filled in once again—and this is fitting since the poem is itself a writing over, or a filling in, its materials borrowed in order to be recombined. Given Coleridge’s moving response to the mountain, however, Wordsworth’s description of Mont Blanc, which comes just before his Alps crossing, is noteworthy for its expression of

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disappointment: “That day we first / Beheld the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved / To have a soulless image on the eye / Which had usurped upon a living thought / That never more could be” (1805; 6.452–56).41 Intriguingly, the sight of the object threatens to kill off the idea to which it had been previously attached. The following day, however, it was the “wondrous Vale of Chamouny” that made “rich amends,” with its “dumb cataracts and streams of ice—/ A motionless array of mighty waves” (6.455–60). These qualities, if Coleridge’s (and later, Shelley’s) deployment of similar language is to be trusted, have been displaced from the now blank text of Mont Blanc, carried over or forward to the experience of the descent through the Vale. It is Coleridge’s “Hymn,” after all, that first exclaims at the “Motionless torrents! silent cataracts!” of the mountain’s dramatic “Ice-falls” (53). If Wordsworth’s descriptions of the Vale of Chamounix contain elements otherwise associable with, and perhaps displaced from, the unforthcoming Mont Blanc, this is surely because the sight of the mountain has a surprisingly negative effect on the poet: it is not a magical presence, but a terrifying vacancy. The question of “vacancy” is raised by the mountain for Shelley as well, and in turned “filled,” though with somewhat different matter. In the third part of “Mont Blanc,” we find the poet confounded by the possibilities raised by a set of disturbing speculations about the relation of a remote to a present world, of sleep to waking, of death to life. The net effect is that “spirit fails,” and is “Driven like a homeless cloud from steep to steep / That vanishes among the viewless gales!” (57–59). Above this morass of mortal ignorance, however, “Far, far above, piercing the infinite sky, / Mont Blanc appears,—still, snowy, and serene” (60–61). The mountain reigns sublimely over an unfathomable and eternal landscape, and is in possession of a power—a voice—capable of repealing “Large codes of fraud and woe,” for those gifted with sufficient understanding or feeling to grasp it (80–84). By the end of the poem, the mountain floats above the expanse of glacial destruction below, and is so remote that its snows fall invisibly, winds howl around it inaudibly: it exists in a separate and untouchable sphere, its manifestations unseen and unfelt, harbouring nevertheless “the secret Strength of things / Which governs thought” (139–40). And yet, the poem ends with a searching question, addressed to the mountain: what does all this amount to, “If to the human mind’s imaginings / Silence and solitude were vacancy?” Without our imaginings, natural phenomena would be meaningless to us: they would continue to exist, but would lack human significance, and their vacancy would be our own.42 Thus what appears to be blank or vacant in the scene of nature is filled by a sense of presence provided by the imagination. This premise is in keeping with the language of religious experience, and more pointedly, with a tradition of inspiration and conversion associated with the Alps. In her study Shelley and the Sublime, Angela Leighton remarks that the infinite vistas of the Alps traditionally indicate or embody a presence, a Deity, “whose nature exceeds the scope of human comprehension, but who may be affirmed by that very

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excess” (Leighton, 48). Shelley’s poetic record of an attempt to see beyond the visible and to apprehend an originating power, a hidden presence within the landscape, suggests that he is drawing on this tradition. But while he might make use of the language of mystical rapture, it is also the case that Shelley questions the object of his address, and emphasizes the inscrutability of natural phenomena. As a skeptical poet of the sublime, he entertains the possibility that imaginative visionariness, by which the obscure is made visible, may do little more than obscure the already obscure. The structure of visibility, moreover, is implicated here, for as Derrida has suggestively remarked, the visible has an invisible inner framework, which functions as its other, its secret counterpart. Inscribed within the visible, this “nonvisible” does not denote a phenomenon that exists elsewhere (as “latent, imaginary, unconscious, hidden, or past”), and nor does it constitute another visible, one that has either disappeared or not yet appeared, as in the late lamented “visionary gleam” of Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode (“The things which I have seen I now can see no more”). Rather, its “inappearance” is of another order.43 Shelley’s poem posits the existence of such a secret counterpart—the “secret strength of things / Which governs thought . . .” (139–40)—without however compromising its invisibility, and in this “Mont Blanc” can be said to argue the question both ways. The poem affirms that there is indeed an unbridgeable gap between man and the secret power of which the mountain is an emblem: and the presence of that power is radically separate from the imagined power of presence. And yet, even to posit this is to demonstrate the interdependence, however incompatible, of mind and mountain. The “power” of Mont Blanc is apparently independent of its material or visible manifestations, and yet, to decode its meaning, the poet must make (visual) sense of a necessarily baffling—and vacant—landscape. For Shelley, moreover, the terms of understanding need themselves to be redefined, for the scene of nature is not one of religious or personal instruction, but a horrific source of ruin and desolation, utterly indifferent to man’s imaginings. The imagination must indeed be an active, linking power, poised as precariously between unity and fragmentation, as is the “visionary” between the inference and the interference of sight. The capacity of the invisible not only to structure but haunt the visible must be seen to inform the debate about the status and function of the imagination, and this is clear in a variety of Romantic poems that interrogate—as do the alpine poems of Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Shelley—the response of the poet to the inscrutability of the physical world. Hence, an investment in “visionariness” relates not simply to anxious compensation for an inability to truly see, in Ruskin’s compound sense, but also explores the cultural and human territory of the visual in a nuanced and philosophically informed way. Literary texts provide an inherently more imaginative forum for representing sight, and for advancing the ideology of vision that is associated (paradoxically perhaps) with Romantic poetry. However, the scenes of seeing explored in Romantic poetry express an anxiety about the

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value of “show knowledge,” as Shelley put it with respect to Rome, that was not shared by all. The next chapter explores a visual media—rather than place, or poetic idiom—where the visual is self-consciously staged, and dissolved, against a backdrop largely taken up by the spectacle of ruin, and concerned with exploring and exploiting the borders of vision. In popular visual technologies of the period, with their overt manipulations of the visible field, a fascination with the haunts of the unseen underwrites what is at first sight an entertainment predicated on delight and surprise. At the Diorama, the enticements of place, both geographical and historical, are mediated by means of art and its possible (re)constructions. The illusion of the spectacularly visible, however, reveals an inherently uncanny relationship to the invisible, present in the Diorama’s choice of Gothic subject matter as well as in its innovative technological procedures.

6

Making Visible The Diorama, the Double, and the Gothic Subject

For those without the means to travel, or who lacked Coleridge’s capacity to imagine himself in places he had never been, there was always the Diorama. Of the pictures opening at the Diorama in Regent’s Park in 1830, The Times made the following note: The views at the Diorama are again changed, and France and Switzerland are once more placed before our eyes without our encountering the nausea of crossing the Channel, the roguery of continental innkeepers, and all the other innumerable and indescribable miseries of foreign travel. Thanks to the contrivances of modern ingenuity, the “long drawn aisles and fretted vaults” of the Cathedral at Rheims are now fixed snugly in the Regent’s-park, and the rocks of Mont St. Gothard, torn from their old foundations, are reposing quietly in the same vicinity. All this is owing to the magic pencil of Messrs. Daguerre and Bouton, who, if they have not given us the realities of these magnificent objects, have at least given us imitations of them so wonderfully minute and vivid, as to appear more like the illusions of enchantment than the mere creations of art. (22 April 1830)

The continued appeal of the London Diorama, after seven years in business, is neatly conveyed here: questions of convenience aside, the Diorama as a form of popular visual entertainment retained an impressive power to create and control the field of the visible, and to produce illusions so convincingly “real” that they appeared to be the result of magic rather than the “mere” work of art. Not for nothing was the Diorama referred to as a “temple of optical delusion.”1 If the experience of the Diorama took on religious overtones, this was not only because of the awe-inducing nature of the spectacle itself, but also because many of the scenes involved specimens of religious architecture. Churches, cathedrals, cloisters—all offered apparently fitting sites for miraculous (visual) transformations, where the stillness of art could be brought to life through subtle changes of light. But more noteworthy still was the marked preference at the Diorama for “the elegant remains of

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Gothic architecture.”2 One of the pictures on display in 1827, “Ruins in a Fog” was described at some length in a contemporary guide to the sights of Regent’s Park: [The scene was] a Gothic cloister in decay, situated at the extremity of a narrow valley; where all appeared sombre and desolate. All was enveloped in fog and in icy stillness. The fog gradually dispersed and was succeeded by beautiful sunlight. The fine Saxon arches and mouldering cloisters of this picture were greatly admired.3

A scene exhibited the following year, “Interior of the Cloisters of St. Wandrille, in Normandy,” offered a similar scene of desolation and decay—of “monastic melancholy and mouldering silence” (40). This impressive depiction of a Gothic convent in ruins also exploited, to great effect, the space of the cloister as a point of mediation between the inside and the outside, and its state of physical decay (with ruin clearly exacerbating the permeation of the inside by the outside) as a visual anchor for the scenic transformations on display. Because such scenes were still fashionably picturesque in the early nineteenth century, little critical attention has been paid to this perhaps obvious choice of subject. The variegated and visually indeterminate nature of much Gothic architecture, particularly but not always in a state of ruin, clearly lent itself to the special effects aimed at by the technological means of the Diorama. This chapter, however, while attending to the display of visuality as such that was central to the spectacle, will also probe more deeply the intriguing link, or secret affinity, between the Diorama and its Gothic spaces, extending this engagement to other features of the Gothic than architectural style, although there are important links to be explored there too. William Galperin has pointed out that by choosing Gothic scenes Daguerre favoured a subject that was not only materially, but also “theoretically in ruins—a subject that, as Erwin Panofsky describes it, ‘enclose[d] an often wildly and always apparently boundless interior, and thus create[d] a space determinate and impenetrable from without but indeterminate and penetrable within.’”4 The bafflement of the eye, as it is led beyond the immediate and present object, corresponds again to the enticements of the sublime. Moreover, there are thematic and psychoanalytic determinations attaching to the Diorama, in both means and matter, that make this subject choice peculiarly apt, particularly where its Gothic preoccupations (understood also in a literary and theoretical sense) raise questions of aesthetic representation. Its oppositional mode of presentation involves elements of doubling and repetition, alongside a preoccupation with the uncanny grounds of illusion. The Diorama, as a revelatory visual technology that exploits the penetrable indeterminacy of Gothic interiority, apparently puts the visible clearly on display; but as this chapter will show, its presentation of (in)visibility reveals the hidden as caught up in the spectral presence of the dead. Like the

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reanimation scenarios enacted in the ruined spaces of Rome, the Diorama draws attention to the place of what has been buried and obliterated—by time, by history, and even by the force of a visual realism that triangulates the relationship between nature, art, and death.

I The key figure in the development of the Diorama was Louis Jacques Mandé Daguerre, whose career, before his ground-breaking role in the invention of photography, involved set painting and stage design for the theatre, and panorama painting with Prévost, where his noted skill for producing naturalistic effects was put to good use (his scenery for productions at the Théâtre Ambigu-Comique and the Opéra was famous for its trompe l’oeil realism). Possibly the idea of the Diorama drew from an exhibition of diaphanoramas—transparent pictures—in Paris in 1821.5 Daguerre’s Diorama opened in Paris 1822, for which he designed not only the concept but also his own building: like the panorama, the Diorama required a purpose-built space, though in this case the structural template was closer to a conventional theatre. Within a year, plans were in place to open a Diorama in London, which led to the opening of the Diorama in Regent’s Park in the autumn of 1823. Daguerre and his partner, Charles Bouton, exhibited a fresh set of pictures each year, which would open in London after a successful run in Paris.6 Daguerre’s brother-in-law, John Arrowsmith, patented the design for the Regent’s Park Diorama in early 1823. The terms of the patent were ambitious and precise: the aim was to offer “an improved mode of publicly exhibiting pictures or painted scenery of every description, and of distributing or directing the daylight upon or through them, so as to produce many beautiful effects of light and shade, which I denominate a ‘Diorama.’”7 As the patent stipulated, the scenes were to be painted on translucent material in such a way that daylight from high windows and skylights invisible to the audience, intercepted and altered by “a number of coloured transparent and moveable blinds or curtains,” could create the naturalistic illusion of three-dimensional space. The manipulation of these blinds by an assortment of lines and pulleys introduced “many surprising changes in the appearance of the colours of the painting or scenery” (Arrowsmith, 2)— thus transforming the image from a static object into a site of unexpected change, often of a temporal nature, such as from nighttime to daylight. The use of both reflected and mediated light gave rise to the impression that the scene was brilliantly illuminated entirely from within. The pictures were very large, roughly seventy by forty-five feet, and were displayed in pairs with only one visible at a time. One of the more innovative aspects of the building design was a rotating “saloon”; the seating area for the audience was to pivot around a central well, revolving “through an angle of 73° between scenes” (5, see Figure 6.1). A complete show would take about

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Figure 6.1. Diorama, Park Square, Regents Park: Plan of the Principal Story, 1823. Designed by A. [Auguste Charles] Pugin and built by J. Morgan.

thirty minutes, with fifteen minutes per picture, but viewers could stay on and see the sequence repeated. The range of subjects depicted was relatively narrow, generally of either landscapes or architectural interiors (most shows consisted of one of each, one painted by Daguerre—usually the interior scene—and the other by Bouton). Unlike the panorama, which often displayed scenes of topical interest, the Diorama devoted itself more or less exclusively to “the public taste for romantic topography, the stuff of picturesque art and of sentimental antiquarianism” (Altick, 166). Altick suggests these shows functioned as a spectacular counterpart to the albums of engraved scenes that were popular at the end of the Regency period. To a great extent, this is borne out by the pictures on display at the London Diorama in the 1820s and 1830s: in 1823, the Valley of Sarnen and Canterbury Cathedral; in 1824, Brest and Chartres Cathedral; in 1825, Holyrood Chapel; in 1826, Roslyn Abbey and Rouen Cathedral; in 1827, Ruins in a Fog and St. Cloud, Paris; in 1828, the Valley of Unterseen and the Cloisters of St. Wandrille, and so on.8 This list

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of subjects, however, and the dynamic dimension of the Diorama, suggests an appeal of a different kind as well, though one that refers equally to lingering eighteenth-century aesthetic preoccupations—to the aesthetics of the sublime, and its correlative, the obscure horror assigned to Gothic subjects and scenes. The latent possibilities of the Diorama as a technology (for in its choice of subjects, latency is continually dramatised, as I shall argue below) were exploited by a short-lived competitor Diorama, the “British Diorama” at the Royal Bazaar, Oxford Street. Its producers attempted to create more spectacular effects, assisted by gas, which lent itself more readily, and often rather too effectively, to the creation of firelight. In 1829, for example, a scene of “The Burning of York Minster” was displayed, of which a vivid description was offered by a contemporary viewer: A faint reddish light betrays itself through some of the windows of the minster; by degrees it increases in vividness; until at length the flame from which it proceeds bursts fiercely forth, illuminating the adjacent towers, and mingled volumes of smoke, and masses of brilliant sparks, now rapidly ascend to the skies; a great portion of the roof of the building falls in; and the dreadful conflagration is at its height when the scene closes. (Altick, 167)

A month after this scene was first presented, the bazaar burnt to the ground when some ignited turpentine set fire to the transparency on show. Even in Daguerre’s Diorama, which in its dependence on natural light was arguably closer to the preoccupations of conventional painting, fire was a constant hazard: not only was his Paris Diorama building twice destroyed by fire, but along with it, much of his store of pictures. Helmut and Alison Gernsheim suggest that competition and waning interest eventually put Daguerre and Bouton’s Diorama, the “first and most famous in Britain,” out of business in the early 1850s (Gernsheim, 41). Nevertheless, in its final years, the Diorama exhibited some intriguingly experimental “pictures.” One of these was the spectacle of midnight mass in Catholic churches. Initially, these interior views were made popular in England by Bouton, and involved the materialisation of a congregation, along with light and music (a popular choice was the Gloria from Haydn’s Mass No. 1), out of apparent gloom and emptiness. Bouton’s successor in London, Charles Rénoux, created a much-lauded exterior view of Notre Dame in 1843, which re-created the changing effects of evening light— from sunset, to moonrise, and finally to the illumination of street lamps— and culminated in the emanation of song and prayer from the Cathedral, to reportedly transcendent effect.9 Daguerre’s later collaborator, Diosse, staged some even more explicitly spectacular visual displays. Chief among these was the explosion of Mount Etna, which presented the volcano under three distinct aspects. According to the account in The Athenaeum:

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Alongside Mount Etna, Diosse showed a picture by Nicholas Meister of Cologne, of “The Castle of Stolzenfels.” This latter featured a thunderstorm so convincing that one member of the audience allegedly put up her umbrella (Gernsheim, 40). Impressive as these pictures were, however, they were the last to be shown at the Regent’s Park Diorama, which reopened as a Baptist chapel in 1855.

II The Diorama was only one of an extraordinary number of “oramic” displays to capture the popular imagination throughout the nineteenth century. The cosmorama, the pleorama, the myriorama (to name only three)—all in various ways sought to make the visible spectacular.11 Its nearest relative and rival, in scope and popularity, was the panorama, although technologically, with its use of projected light and transparencies, the Diorama descended more directly from the magic lantern, the phantasmagoria, and from de Loutherbourg’s Eidophusikon—which is apposite, given de Loutherbourg’s own background in the theatre, and interest in the dramatic possibilities of light. His Eidophusikon in Leicester Square, which was especially popular in the 1780s, consisted of a scene displayed on a small stage (six by eight feet) and accompanied by ingenious lighting and sound effects. One of his scenes from Milton’s Paradise Lost—“Satan Arraying his Troops on the Banks of a Fiery Lake, with the Raising of the Palace of Pandemonium”—was accompanied by dramatic vocal and instrumental music, as well as changes of light. Behind the proscenium, De Loutherbourg had fixed Argand oil lamps, and manipulated this light source using techniques similar to those later adopted by the Diorama: “By manipulating slips of coloured glass that he had mounted in front of the lamps, lights of various hues were thrown onto the picture, changing the scene from sulphurous blue, to red, to a pale, vivid light, and so on.” 12 The show was accompanied by appropriately preternatural sounds, by thunder and groans, as though issuing from infernal spirits. The panorama was nevertheless an important stimulus to the development of the Diorama, and it is often supposed that the arrested movement

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and static atmospheric conditions of panoramic representations contributed directly to the invention of the Diorama, although innovations to the panorama itself, such as the moving panorama, also went some way to compensate for the inherent stillness of the panoramic image. The principal innovation and novelty of the panorama, discussed above, was that it presented a full 360-degree view of its subject, on the circular interior walls of a purpose-built rotunda. It aimed to simulate as completely as possible—from the viewing platform—the experience of a given scene as though the viewer were on the very spot. Interestingly, Arrowsmith’s specifications for the Diorama explicitly related it to the panorama, noting that in the case of the Diorama, the space between the viewing area and the pictures would need to be enclosed all around by “light screens, forming a kind of vista, . . . so as effectually to conceal the margins or boundary of the pictures, and thereby produce in a certain degree the effect of panoramic pictures” (Arrowsmith, 3). Both the Diorama and the panorama shared the impulse to create a complete illusion, but there are key differences between them. Topographical accuracy, so much the point of a panorama, was clearly, in the case of the Diorama, secondary to the creation of convincing atmospheric effects. The Diorama aimed to provide an aesthetic rather than an educational experience, hence the shift of emphasis from completeness of representation to fullness of illusion (Hyde, 33). One might say that in the Diorama the intensity rather than the immensity of the illusion is stressed; and indeed, with the simulation of time-induced change, that space becomes uncannily temporal as well as—like Gothic ruins—temporary (the subject of, and subjected to, disappearance). But this is a point I shall return to below. In the name of greater visible verisimilitude, panoramas often included three-dimensional objects as props in the foreground, though this often had the unintended effect of actually increasing the viewer’s awareness of an unnatural lack of movement in the scene. Certain experiments with the Diorama also involved inserting objects in the space before the picture, perhaps most notably Daguerre’s 1832 “Sal de miracle”—his “View of Mont Blanc taken from the Valley of Chamonix”—for which he apparently “imported a complete chalet with barn and outhouses and put on the stage a live goat eating hay in a shed” (Gernsheim, 28). This “performance,” which emphasized the status of the Diorama as hybrid of painting and theatre, was accompanied by the sounds of goats’ bells, the blowing of an Alp-horn, and local song; meanwhile, girls in peasant dress served the audience a country breakfast. To some extent, by so shamelessly mixing nature and art, Daguerre was mocking his own accomplishments, as well as confounding his audience. Some viewers professed actual uncertainty about whether or not the goat was real; others supposed, tongue-in-cheek, “that only the front half of the goat was real and that the rest formed part of the back-cloth” (30). More important, however, this display of illusion raised the stakes of artistic propriety. While some viewers were delighted by such an extraordinary

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mixture of nature and art, others were uncertain about whether to praise or cast aspersions on Daguerre’s additions “to the means which painting gave him, artificial and mechanical means, strangers to art, properly speaking.”13 Other Dioramas that adopted special effects produced by mechanical devices came in for similar criticism, and were dismissed as a “pantomime trick to astonish and be pointed at by children, [rather] than to deceive or give pleasure to an artist.”14 The Diorama was clearly held to have a certain aesthetic integrity that sensationalism undermined; or, to put it differently, attempts to complete or augment the illusion (this could extend as much to music and other sound effects as well as to the mechanical introduction of motion) tended to emphasize, and thus detract from it. As the Repository of Arts argued, the Diorama “ought to stand upon its own ground—to afford a more irresistible deception to the eye, and through the eye to the understanding, than any other arrangement in the art of painting, but beyond this it should not attempt to go.”15 Others, however, were less disturbed by the Diorama’s manipulations of the “real.” Baudelaire, in his chapter on landscapes in his Salon of 1859, celebrated explicitly the deception at the basis of the Dioramas that made them such an exemplary artform: “their total and far-reaching magic perpetrates an illusion that serves a useful purpose. . . . Because they are false, they are infinitely closer to reality; whereas the majority of our landscape artists are liars, because they have in effect neglected to lie.”16 In the often fierce debate about the status of such visual entertainment in relation to the serious visual arts, the Diorama found itself positioned (as did the panorama, though arguably to a greater extent) at an uneasy meeting point of popular culture and the domain of self-styled connoisseurs of the arts. In the case of the Diorama, this is clearly a function of its status as a hybrid of painting and theatre, or as a strange combination perhaps of tableau vivant and still life. Some aspects of the Diorama, though apparently contrary in their tendencies, are indeed remarkably like the conventions of still-life painting in their effects. The perfect still life presupposes the absence of the subject, and in the motif of the memento mori, announces its death. In its reification of detail, the still life compensates for the object’s lack of solidity. 17 In the case of the Diorama, as with the still life, the more evocative French term nature morte cuts closer to the heart of viewer unease: illusion in the Diorama is uncannily disturbing not only because of its particular configuration of art versus nature, but also because this configuration is explicitly underwritten, or doubled, by the more apparent tension between the living and the dead. Not surprisingly, audience reception was often characterised by either total entrancement or repudiation, where incredulousness of response could be at the next moment supplanted by a sense of disgust, arising from the realization that everything on view is nothing other, in the words of one contemporary viewer, than “mocking ghosts and untruths.”18 To put it somewhat differently, the Diorama dramatically triangulated the relationship between nature, art and death. From the very beginning,

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the reviews identified death as an important “presence” in the Diorama. A Times reviewer, writing on “The Valley of Sarnen” in Daguerre and Bouton’s opening exhibition in London (1823), emphasized the more disturbing underside of the scene on view: on the one hand, “the whole thing is nature itself. . . . You have, as far as the senses can be acted upon, all these things (realities) before you”; but meanwhile, on the other: “ . . . there is a stillness, which is the stillness of the grave. The idea produced is that of a region—of a world—desolated; of living nature at an end; of the last day past and over.”19 This was a feature most apparent in the early Dioramas, and one critics were keen to note. Of Daguerre’s view of Unterseen, for example, The Athenaeum remarked that “the absence of anything like animal life . . . gives a stillness to the scene that would almost make one suppose it a deserted village.”20 If Daguerre went to the other extreme with his “Sal de miracle” in 1832, with its living supplements, it is noteworthy that he did not linger long over the experiment, and instead developed his “double effect” Dioramas, which enabled not just a modification but a thorough transformation of a scene, and purely by means of painting.

III While a conception of oneness or totality of vision characterised the panorama (the term, derived from the Greek, means to “see all”), doubling and doubleness appear at the very heart of the dioramic enterprise.21 It has been supposed that the inventor of the term also derived it from a Greek compound, of “dia” (through) and “orama” (scene). Alternatively, “di” has been thought to come from “dis,” twice, referring to the practice of displaying two pictures at once.22 But “di” can in fact be both of these things, so that “two-ness” and “throughness” suggestively correlate.23 Each dioramic scene, moreover, by shifting the image between multiple oppositions, was based increasingly on a principle of doubling: before/after, day/night, winter/summer, light/dark, vacant/occupied, surface/depth, and so on. What goes around, comes around, in the manner of the revolving saloon itself, so that the “‘di” of the Diorama might rather evoke the diurnal round (from the Latin dies)—a hastening of being, through the day, the seasons, and toward an end that can be both passed through and undone.24 In this, it has a circular structure reminiscent of the panorama. But the achievement of the Diorama is to take us through the barrier of the perimeter wall, the barrier of the visible—darkly, perhaps, but also doubly. The technology of the Diorama evolved to incorporate doubling more directly, in Daguerre’s introduction of the “double effect.” This involved painting both sides of the picture, which compounded, as well as doubled, the effects that could be achieved through the deployment of colour and light. The first stage of the scene or effect was painted on the front in both opaque and transparent tints, the second on the verso with the aid of transmitted

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light, so that the transparent spaces could be either preserved or modified by transparent coloured paint; gradations of tone were achieved by variations in the opacity of the paint used, and the picture was coloured finally in an array of transparent tints. Effectively, two paintings of the very same scene were superimposed upon each other (Altick, 170). Daguerre achieved, in this way, what he referred to as “the decomposition of form,” on the grounds that “if a green and a red part of the painting are illuminated by red light, the red object will vanish while the green one will appear black, and vice versa” (Gernsheim, 32). Thus was created the apparently magical appearance of objects or figures that were previously invisible; and this innovation made it possible to present the oppositional transformations noted above, such as a shift from day to night, which were features of many of the scenes shown in London from 1835 on, including the much praised midnight mass scenes. Two of the earliest double-effect Dioramas were seen and written about by Lady Morgan in 1836: Bouton’s “Interior of the Church of Santa Croce” and “The Village of Alagna, Piedmont,” which dramatically re-created the avalanche at Monta Rosa that descended upon the Swiss village in 1820. Having been at the very site the day after the avalanche, Lady Morgan sees at the Diorama a different kind of double view, and compares the scene on display against the “real” scene mediated by memory. Her account of the Diorama in The Athenaeum (13 August 1836; 570–72) claims that the effectiveness of the illusion is heightened by firsthand knowledge of place. While for many in the audience the Diorama was merely a “show box,” for her, the representation is more substantial and all the more impressive—the scene is somehow real. This accounts to some extent for her essay’s attention to the undermining of illusion that results from certain features of the viewing experience: that one is not there, and moreover not alone. On the one hand, Lady Morgan celebrates the Diorama as the epitome of perfection and excellence in creating illusion in visual art: “the Dioramas of the present time have at last produced that miracle of optic illusion, to which the senses yield, and before which the imagination lies captive” (570). On the other hand, her “sketch” spends as much time on the shattering of illusion by the interruption of the banal and the ludicrous, as it does arguing for its art-historical significance. Indeed, the essay is often cited for its comical, if snobbish, reflections on the disruptive behaviour of fellow audience members. The offences Lady Morgan recounts are primarily verbal, as though the impulse to running commentary presents an unwelcome (textual) supplement to the visual—involving not only a doubling but also a dissipation of focus. Some of this comes naturally enough from disoriented spectators entering the darkness of the saloon (at the climactic moment of the avalanche, one confused spectator allegedly boomed out, “in the words and accent of an Irish hero of the Tarpean, ‘Jesus, where am I going to’”; another growls “‘I’ll trouble you Miss, to remove your humbrella off my toe’” [571], and so on). More disturbing perhaps are the sustained commentaries, such as that of a lady narrating to her companion every sundry detail of her own

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trip to Italy, “beginning with the loss of her dressing-box at Tower Stairs, and ending with her coup de soleil at Naples.” Or that of the devoted wife reading the details of the programme aloud to her deaf and blind husband, beginning each time with “‘Now, dear, you are going to see . . . ’” (571– 72). William Galperin views the emphasis on distraction in Lady Morgan’s account as indicative of resistance—not just on the part of the viewer, but on the part of the Diorama itself—to illusionism. The subject is as much displaced here as the image, so that “failure to be absorbed—to stand in imaginary, stable relation to the image—is accompanied by an absorption in that failure” (Galperin, 70). These are intriguing difficulties that prefigure the containment of viewers, and the agency of the image, in cinematic spectatorship. But there is another angle that I’d like to pursue here, related to the uncannily overdetermined motivations that could be seen to inform, and transform, the place of the (in)visible in the scenes on view. Lady Morgan’s extended accounts of viewing both scenes, “The Village of Alagna” and “The Church of Santa Croce,” convey the experience of space as well as elapsed time, but what is important about that evocation of threedimensionality is that it makes room for the unseen: the buried, the obliterated. In short, the dead. In the case of “Alagna,” her description tells us, the show begins after night falls; day has been extinguished and the Alpine scenery, “more sublime and picturesque than terrible, is now seen reposing in the moonlight” (see Figure 6.2). At the height of this segment, while the village sleeps peacefully, the moon sets and a storm approaches, building slowly to the unleashing of the avalanche. This is dramatized largely by sound effects, followed by total darkness and a pause—and then slowly by daybreak. As the day “revives” the full extent of devastation is revealed: an incipient sense of resurrection is offset by the indication of things (homes, people) resolutely buried (again). This is, we are to understand, nearly as frequent an event in the natural world as it is in its repetition at the Diorama, because of how the “tyranny of habit” operates in the lives of the village’s inhabitants, mainly labourers in nearby mines: through “want of forethought” and “density of temperament,” “no provision against the future (but certain) catastrophe is made. . . . and new generations expose themselves to those devastating phenomena, which from time to time overwhelmed the old, as far as the ruin extended” (571). Since “density of temperament” is ascribed in equal measure to the Diorama’s audience, we see in Lady Morgan’s account of the eternal return of this historical misfortune an element of the human condition—an aspect perhaps of the Freudian death drive—not only displayed but endlessly replayed. Thus, in this oft-repeated spectacle of repetition, we observe in action a kind of “fort-da” game for adults.25 In the wake of the avalanche, the inhabitants of Alagna are said to have been “awakened to sleep—for ever!” The sole visible remnant of the village, bathed now in a subtle and tranquil morning light, is the lone spire of the chapel in a sea of heaving snow (see Figure 6.3). The illusion is said to be so impressive in every detail that the mind is also restored to its initial

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Figure 6.2. J. L. M. Daguerre, double illustration of Alpine scene with chalet. Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin.

cheerfulness: “ . . . a thousand details—all appropriate, and in the truth of nature, restore the mind to its cheerful contemplation of the beautiful and sublime, which first struck it on entering the magic circle of the Diorama” (571, emphasis mine). The circular motif is carried forward into the next stage of the show, as the saloon turns on its axis—like “‘La ronde machine’ (as Rabelais calls the earth)”—to face the next picture, the church of Santa Croce in Florence, where again the illusion corresponds startlingly to Lady Morgan’s extensive memories of the place. “How often,” she notes, “has the writer of this sketch, at all hours and seasons, raised the dark heavy cloth curtain which hangs before its vast and ponderous portals”—surely there is an apposite theatrical touch here—“and took a look up its immense nave and side aisles, and beheld their noble Gothic arches and octagon columns, tinged with hues of all light [ . . . ]—sometimes by the red hues of sunset, sometimes by the silver tinge of moonlight.” If her memory of the place makes it sound like a Diorama, the Diorama clearly looks like the place: The long perspective which breaks upon the spectator of the Santa Croce, in the Diorama, is as the place itself;—the noble and ancient edifice, one of the finest specimens of the ecclesiastical architecture of the thirteenth century, comes

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Figure 6.3. J. L. M. Daguerre, double illustration of Alpine scene with chalet. Gernsheim Collection, Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, The University of Texas at Austin. forth to the imagination in all the lustre and brightness of a sunshiny Italian noon—nothing escapes the bright and searching light which falls in a thousand coloured hues from the high narrow casements of stained glass, or penetrates with a long yellow glare from the uncurtained portals. (571)

From the lustre of noontime, this scene also turns full circle: what was once bright and distinct becomes less so, though the changes are “so gradually alternated as to be scarcely observed.” Twilight descends, and to the shades of evening “succeeds the deepest obscurity of midnight.” Suddenly, the scene is illuminated by chandeliers and candelabras, the empty chairs fill, and high mass is in full swing—complete with the whiff of incense and the pealing of the organ. Eventually, this climactic scene fades; the lights are extinguished and after a grey cold dawn, a flood of morning light restores the church to the state in which it was first seen. Resurrection and restitution are perhaps more strongly implied in this account, with its unambiguously religious context. But Lady Morgan’s attention is drawn repeatedly to details that convey the presence of the dead. Initially, the “long yellow glare” falls “fully on the sarcophagus of Michael Angelo.” Other tombs, statues, and effigies come into view: that of Petrus Michalius, and “the noble statue of Mourning Italy, which weeps over the tomb of Alfieri”; on the left, “that

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of the unfortunate Galileo.” These monuments fade from prominence as the world turns, and night falls, but in the full flood of morning sunshine, it is these monuments, along with the nave and the aisles, that are “discovered” as they had been not only before, but all along: the presence of the dead, the monumental persistence of death, is reasserted by the light of day. Lady Morgan’s essay illustrates, though perhaps without fully intending to, the importance of death to the Diorama argued above—its uncanny habit of always turning up. With these examples of double-effect Dioramas in view, it is possible to revisit the relationship of the Diorama to the panorama, and to make a few further observations. I suggested above that the Diorama was characterised by intensity rather than immensity of illusion. The panorama, by contrast, creates an illusion that is to be prolonged: with the infinite stillness, perhaps, of death, the effect lasts without changing. The panorama is arguably uncanny in relation to space in another sense as well, at least in the cases in which the inside walls of the rotunda revealed a mechanical replication of the invisible vistas of home (as in Horner’s London, for Londoners). By contrast, the Diorama suggests an uncanny relation to time, insofar as past, present, and future are not only controlled and replicated, but also repeated. In the Diorama, illusion is created and removed, and creation and removal are explicit features of the exhibition—are dramatised by the exhibition— rather than being merely its invisible precondition, and inevitable fate. It could be said that while the panorama stages the visible, the Diorama, through the repetition of concealment and revelation, dramatises the invisible-within-the-visible, but with a curious effect: no corresponding demystification, but rather the opposite, as its “magic” holds sway. The charm of the Diorama draws not only from the artistic excellence of its illusion making capabilities (contentious as that was), or from its apparent participation in the repetition compulsion (in association with the death drive), but also from its ability to put the spectre into the spectacular.

IV Gothic subjects were already a favourite for the transparencies that were fashionable as window decorations in the period, before the advent of the Diorama. John Imison’s instructions for painting such transparencies point out their innate suitability: No subject is so admirably adapted to this species of effect as the gloomy Gothic ruin, whose antique towers and pointed turrets finely contrast their dark battlements with the pale yet brilliant moon. The effects of rays passing through the ruined windows, half choked with ivy, or of a fire amongst the clustering pillars and broken monuments of the choir, round which are figures

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of banditti; or others whose faces catch the reflecting light: these afford a peculiarity of effect not to be equalled in any other species of painting.26

These same effects can be created by views of cathedral interiors, as some of the examples discussed above reveal. In general, religious architecture is a potent subject, capitalizing as it does on both sublime and picturesque effects. Certain Diorama images, such as “The Ruins of Holyrood Chapel by Moonlight,” could serve as illustrations to any number of late eighteenth-century Gothic novels, in their evocation of certain stock settings: monasteries, cloisters, churchyards. Even the dioramic enactment of Catholic midnight masses might, for an English audience, evoke the suspicion of Catholicism that is a central thematic in many Gothic novels.27 The success of Daguerre’s “Holyrood Chapel” (see Figure 6.4), exhibited in 1825, illustrates effectively the intrinsic appeal of Gothic spaces in the Diorama (Gernsheim claims that the chapel was “the most popular subject during the first decade of the Diorama’s existence” [25]). As the review in The Mirror of Literature (which came complete with a woodcut of the Diorama) helpfully points out, the church was originally Norman, dating from 1128, and was “Gothicised” in the fifteenth century (26 March 1825). The picture as a whole was hailed as “perhaps, the greatest triumph

Figure 6.4. L. J. M. Daguerre, Ruins of Holyrood Chapel. © Walker Art Gallery, National Museums Liverpool.

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ever achieved in the pictorial art” (196), and the reviewer captures in detail the subtle atmospheric effects of nighttime, from “the stars [that] actually scintillate in their spheres,” to the moon that “gently glides with scarcely perceptible motion, now through the hazy, now through the clearer air.” The reviewer for The Times also emphasized the effectiveness of the night scene, and particularly the use of moonlight (as “better calculated than any other to display the ingenious application of the scientific principles upon which the Diorama is constructed”).28 As The Mirror of Literature claims, however, there is more at stake here than meets the eye: “if this be painting, however exquisite, it still is something more . . .” (196, emphasis mine). This “something more” is related to the manner in which the scene appears preternaturally self-possessed: “for the elements have their motions, though the objects they illuminate are fixed, and the ether hath its transparency, the stars their chrystalline, and the lamp its vital flame, though the ruin and its terrene accompaniments have their opaque solidity.” If this be description, moreover, it too is “something more,” and indeed much could be said about the ekphrastic power of the reviews, which evocatively paint these scenes in words for readers who may or may not visit the Diorama themselves. In spite of the extraordinary sense of self-sufficiency that the building, as a weighty “oblong Gothic pile” (The Times), conveys to viewers, much of the picture’s force comes from the fragmentariness of the structure. A playful sense of inadequacy affects the Mirror reviewer, who laments his incapacity to capture it whole: It is impossible to convey by words any adequate idea of the fascination and perfect illusion of this magical picture. The scene itself is picturesque in the highest conceivable idea of architectural representation; far more so, indeed, from its dilapidated state . . . , than can possibly consist with any entireness, however accompanied, of the most complicated and magnificent edifice. (195–96)

The marvellous self-containment of the scene comes across not only, somewhat paradoxically, in its fragmentariness, but also in the kinds of details the pictures tended to include. Reviews often convey, in their own attention to specific parts or objects, an element of fixation as we shall see again below. In this scene (as in the discussion of “Santa Croce” above), the moonlight happens to fall upon an area of the chapel that contains several tombstones and monuments, notably, the burial place of Lord and Lady Rae.29 Daguerre’s “Interior of Roslyn Chapel” (see Figure 6.5), shown the following year, contains a number of the same powerful ingredients. First of all, there is the inherent architectural interest of the chapel itself (the ruin, as The Times claims, is remarkable for being one of the most elegant specimens of Gothic architecture, “in its internal decorations, which our kingdom contains” [21 February 1826]). Second, there is the overall excellence

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Figure 6.5. Roslin Chapel. Engraving after a painting by L. J. M. Daguerre, published in The Mirror of Literature, 1826, Vol. 7, p. 129. © The British Library Board. All rights reserved (PP.5681).

of the painting, the subtle effects of light, and the perfection of the illusion, which The Times reviewer suggests will be impossible to surpass. There is detailed attention to apparently minor elements of the scene, which nevertheless stand out, not least because of the “striking accuracy” of the representation: “a basket, some broken stones, the fragments of the floor, a scaffold and some ropes, with the abrupt and scattered lights that fall upon them” (ibid). There are, once again, family traditions of death and burial associated with the chapel, and more particularly, a legend with an intriguing supernatural dimension. The superstition, recounted by Walter Scott in The Lay of the Last Minstrel, held that on the eve of the death of a Lord of Roslin, the chapel would appear full of red flames, as though on fire, but show no signs of damage afterwards. In fact, this illusion was created by the rays of the setting sun, passing through the windows—Diorama-like—when the sun was low in the sky.30 Two other Dioramas from this period, both mentioned briefly above, merit further attention for their related choice of subject. The first presented an imaginary design rather than an existing place or object. This was “Ruins in a Fog” (1827), which showed a decaying Gothic gallery enshrouded by thick fog. The second, “The Interior of the Cloisters of St. Wandrille, in

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Normandy,” was painted by Bouton. It offered another ruin scene, this time of a “convent of the Gothic order,” partially lit up by the sun, and partially conveyed with “the appearance of cavernous chilness [sic].”31 It too included a range of realistic touches—stunted grass, an evergreen entwining the “decaying mullions of the windows,” and in the foreground, “with its relics and piecemeal decay, a rope hanging from a portion of an arch, mouldering plans and supports, furrowed with dust, and overgrown with the ‘green mark of antiquity,’ complete the illusion of the scene which may be pronounced one of dioramic perfection.”32 The scene was however criticized for the more obviously mechanical effects of motion and change introduced. Leaves moved, and a door opened and closed without obvious cause, in an “unnatural,” if not uncanny, manner. This group of Dioramas that were on display from 1825 to 1828, with their use of ruined Gothic structures, evoke the more literary and thematic aspects of the Gothic revival in the eighteenth century, and in this are somewhat distinct from the dioramic representations of intact Gothic cathedrals such as Chartres and Canterbury (1823–1824).33 The Diorama, however, in both its subject matter and its mechanisms, offers a place to consider a literary Gothic sensibility alongside features of Gothic architecture and art. In some of the Dioramas discussed above, there is at least a latent link between architecture and experience, between physical structures and mental states associated with Gothic fiction, such as terror, uncertainty, and (psychological) extremity. Not only does the “phenomenological instability,” as Galperin puts it, of dioramic representation, echo the indeterminacy of the Gothic church (Galperin, 64), the Diorama could be said to allow these two apparently distinct dimensions of Gothic to converge. A number of features of Gothic are strikingly relevant to the Diorama as a technology. First of all, Gothic texts rely heavily on contrast, on stark oppositions including juxtaposed states of extremity. As Linda Bayer-Berenbaum argues in The Gothic Imagination, this has the effect of magnifying reality. “Between the greatest extremes,” she proposes, “lies the greatest breadth.”34 And this is precisely the territory that the Diorama explores, but in visual terms—the terrain of the unperceived, made visible in the wake of those extremes, both at, and in between, their limits. BayerBerenbaum is not thinking of visual technology or even of the visual in her account, but what she says about the Gothic and technology in general is also apposite here. Gothicism is, she notes, the “art of the incredible” particularly in relation to technology, which has brought about “a general expansion and intensification of consciousness consistent with the gothic sensibility,” along with an expansion of the “real” (14). The importance placed on shock or surprise (and, at an extreme, terror), because it allegedly gives rise to refined perception through heightened sensitivity, recalls the experience of viewers not only of the Diorama but also of other visual spectacles in Georgian England, prized for their capacity to elicit or create the “shock of the real.”35 Partly, this involves showing the familiar in a new

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light, where its proportions are different or monstrously unregulated; but it is also a revelation of what is immanent or latent in the world around us (as well as in ourselves, as much recent work on the Gothic argues). This experience of (imaginative or sensible) “enlargement,” characteristic of Gothic, often fixes on forms that are ruined, decaying, or incomplete because they are unrestricted, disordered, and thus more dynamic—chaotic, even, and prone to motion and change. This is as much the reason why structures such as Holyrood Chapel made such compelling subjects for the Diorama, as it is that such structures have thematic value (often of a psychological nature) in literature. The restless energy that characterises Gothic texts is also a feature of intact Gothic buildings (in their emphasis on limitlessness and uncontainment, it could be said that the basic premises of Gothic architecture already and in any case include the incomplete), and Bayer-Berenbaum’s account of Gothic art in relation to Gothic literature is instructive. In the case of the twelfth-century Chartres Cathedral, or any example of High Gothic cathedral architecture such as Sainte-Chapelle, Cologne, or Amiens, a wide range of design strategies (conveyed in sweeping, rising lines, in “soaring verticality”) effect a dematerialization of solid form. The point of this, in these examples, is an explicitly spiritual experience, but it clearly implicates the visual, or the optical, in its experiments with proportion, diminution, and so on. The weightiness of Romanesque forms is effectively disembodied, and this was also facilitated by the effect of stained glass windows, which, as Bayer-Berenbaum notes, “create a sense of illusion through the colours and patterns they cast upon the stone” (55). In this way, the Gothic cathedral may be seen as not just a subject but also a prototype for the Diorama: or, even, its double.

V The Picturesque Guide to Regent’s Park observed that architecture and landscape are both fortunate subjects for the Diorama because “the effects of perspective and distance are peculiarly well adapted for dioramic representation” (41). In the popularity of Gothic architecture, however, additional factors come into play that link the oppositional mode of presentation in the Diorama to key features of the Gothic. These include the attention to contrary states (to, for example, the minute and the infinite, of the detail and the totality of effect), and the way Daguerre’s technological innovations deconstruct the visible through light and colour, amplifying both the intensity and range of the visibly real. Repetition plays a dual role here—spatial, in the case of Gothic architecture, but temporal in the Diorama—though arguably in both cases driven by the urge to represent coherently the plight, and perception, of fragmented subjectivity. The structures of (un)consciousness are everywhere implicated, not least in the translation back into architecture, in the case of the Gothic revival of the eighteenth century, of an apparently

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“new literary appetite for melancholy, horror, gloom and decay,”36 so that the re-creation (in both senses) of the Diorama can be related to the impulses that took the preoccupations of the Gothic novel into the eighteenth-century picturesque country park, with its strategically placed temples and mock ruins. As Jerrold Hogle has argued, an element of fakery has always attended the Gothic, with its explicitly counterfeit nature. Its grounding in a falsified antiquity (as in Walpole’s Otranto, or Macpherson’s “Ossian” poems) is only the beginning of the emptying out of the sign, followed by its mechanical duplication for the market.37 Hogle links this kind of simulation to the insights of Baudrillard: The turning of the sign’s past referent into an empty relic, however nostalgic, which then has to be duplicated to be marketed, means that the grounds of signification must eventually become mechanical “production,” where discourse is based on the possibility, albeit one that conceals itself, of “producing an infinite series of potentially identical beings (object-signs) by means of technics,” “the serial repetition of the same object.”38

Walpole’s attraction to the Gothic, as Hogle reminds us, was precisely to “the relics of ‘centuries that cannot disappoint one,’ because ‘the dead’ have become so disembodied, so merely imaged . . . , that there is ‘no reason to quarrel with their emptiness’” (298, emphasis mine).39 Hogle’s “ghost of the counterfeit” (a kind of spectral doubling-up) comes about by means of a progression, by which Gothic fictions are seen to have been first governed by ghosts, then by simulacra, and finally by “simulations of what is already counterfeit in the past” (302). All this links the Gothic to the simulations of the Diorama, which could be viewed as an architecture of this very progression—not only in its visual imaging, with its particularly “transparent” form of illusion production, but also because of its repetitive enactment and indeed temporal collapse of this progress (or doubling) of the Gothic sign. Perhaps in this the Diorama doesn’t simply respond to, or capitalize on, the popularity of Gothic forms, but creates a space with a view (so to speak) to mastering or capturing the abject remainders of the counterfeit’s ghostly productions. Bernard Comment argues, in The Panorama, that the invention of the panorama responded to a strong nineteenth-century need for dominance, and that the visual illusion it provided satisfied a double dream: of totality and of possession. Even more pointedly, the shift implicit in the technology of the panorama, a shift from “representation to illusion,” introduces “a new logic” with its own consequences. In the case of the panorama, Comment suggests that one of these is the rise of a collective imagination that is readily colonised by propaganda and commerce (Comment, 19). Insofar as the Diorama shares in this shift from “representation to illusion,” and is driven by the desire to make the real visible, one might see how Comment’s

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case could be extended—not only to the attraction of but also to the resistance generated by the Diorama. Visual realism is, as Hegel teaches us, but a symptom of the loss of reality, and moreover realism (in which we can include the strategies of illusionism) and melancholy can be seen to share certain features: the urge to see or show things “as they are” does not reveal an intimate link to the object, but rather, “an alienation that pits the object against consciousness.” 40 Finally, though, if the panorama is implicated in the panoptic fantasy of an all-seeing vision, then the logic of the Diorama (though similarly preoccupied by the enticements of illusion) must be expressed differently. Its uncanny doubleness, its relationship to death, its element of phantasmagoric spectrality, and the connections between these and the impulses of Gothic: all suggest an engagement with illusion that involves seeing (through) the deceptions of the visible in general, and the fantasy of possession in particular. The audience at the Diorama is not merely, as Crary would argue, a mechanical component of the scene41—a cog in the wheel of Rabelais’s ronde machine—but able, disconcertingly, to see itself turning, in the seeing of turning that is itself on display. The deceptions of the visible were consciously manipulated at the Diorama, as they were at a host of other visual entertainments in Georgian England, but clearly its engagement with the force of the unseen was more subtle than its denigrators allowed. The visual is revealed as made, as manufactured; and this observation, if one may put it that way, is present in the engagement with the visual apparent in other cultural spheres. The next chapter develops this premise in the direction of the theatre, where a poet—Coleridge—“makes visible” his exploration of the relation of seeing to both knowing and imagining, and does so through the medium of pictures on stage. Coleridge’s Remorse engages his theory of dramatic illusion and comments, particularly in its powerful dialogue with Schiller’s The Robbers, on the superficial enticements of visual spectacle that so captivated his contemporaries. The imagination’s privileged relationship to truth in the effort to “see things as they are” is no doubt what Remorse is meant to show, but Coleridge’s self-conscious relationship to visuality, in the text as well as in the staging of the play, is far reaching in its implications for how the play may be read as well as positioned in the wider cultural obsession with all things visual.

7

Seeing Things (“As They Are”) Coleridge, Schiller, and the Play of Semblance

Coleridge is not best known as a playwright, or even as a theorist of the stage, in spite of the extended critique of late eighteenth-century theatre that is familiar to readers chiefly through his lectures on Shakespeare. Nevertheless, Coleridge did make serious attempts to write plays, largely in response to the state of English drama in the 1790s, which was perceived by Coleridge and by other public commentators, such as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt, to be in need of resuscitation. Contemporary plays were often dismissed as sentimental, formulaic, and highly melodramatic—or, as Wordsworth famously declared in his preface to Lyrical Ballads, “sickly and stupid German tragedies.” This dismissal derived from a highly idealized view of what theatre could accomplish, in political as well as dramatic terms. To reinvigorate the productions of the English stage would be not only to elevate it again to the level of its “golden age,” in Elizabethan and Jacobean culture, but to fulfill an agenda related to a nationalist impulse that, if not explicitly revolutionary, was often politically reformist.1 Thus the familiar narrative of Coleridge’s involvement in the theatre focuses on his early radicalism (evident in so much of his work in the 1790s, not least in his 1797 play Osorio, and in The Fall of Robespierre, cowritten with Robert Southey), and with a sense of the theatre as an ideal space not only to represent and engage current events—chiefly of course the French Revolution and the English reaction to it, and thus larger questions of freedom and censorship—but also to influence public response to those events. Beyond this, though, the political ambivalence of Coleridge’s maturity, and the critical pronouncements he would later make on the state of the theatre, tend to confirm the view that “highbrow” Romantic theatre was either fixated unproductively on old models, classical or Shakespearean, or obsessed by subjects that were fundamentally unsuitable for the stage—fit only for the closet, or specimens of what Byron was to call a “mental” theatre.2 Coleridge’s practice however tells a slightly different story. In 1813 Remorse, a highly successful revision of his 1797 play Osorio, was performed to considerable acclaim, and ran for nearly three weeks at Drury Lane. As far and away the most financially rewarding production of Coleridge’s career, this turn of events was remarkable enough. But more

Seeing Things (“As They Are”) 137 remarkable still, though rarely mentioned in discussions of Coleridge’s theory of dramatic illusion, is how a play written by such an adamant critic of Georgian stagecraft could unreservedly accept and deploy its conventions, which tended increasingly toward an emphasis on the spectacular.3 The paradox here draws from Coleridge’s assertion that while Shakespeare’s stage was effectively bare—merely “a naked room, a blanket for a curtain”—his appeal to the imagination could fit it out as “‘A field for monarchs.’”4 By contrast, theatre productions of Coleridge’s day, including those of Shakespeare’s plays, appealed not to the imagination, but to the senses and chiefly to the eye, through an emphasis on visual display and special effects. They were thus felt by Coleridge to be inappropriate not only for Shakespeare’s genius, but for any serious drama. Meanwhile, the 1813 production of Coleridge’s own play, at the newly rebuilt Theatre Royal, Drury Lane, was state-of-the-art: the theatre itself had been re-equipped with the latest in lighting and stage technology, and for Remorse, there were lavish sets and startling effects, in keeping with the kind of exotic popular fashion created by Byron’s Eastern tales.5 The play may have been vilified by many critics for its awkward emphasis on description in place of action—what we might consider to be an emphasis on the written over the visual—and for its attendant abstractions, but it was unanimously appreciated for its stage effects, and particularly for the “coup d’oeil” of the famous “sorcery” scene. Thomas Barnes, writing in the Examiner, exclaimed: We never saw more interest excited in a theatre than was expressed at the sorcery scene in the third act. The altar flaming in the distance, the solemn invocation, the pealing music of the mystic song, altogether produced a combination so awful, as nearly to overpower reality, and make one half believe the enchantment which delighted our senses.6

If Coleridge embraced the spectacular possibilities that arose in the process of staging Remorse, it was not simply because a judicious dose of the sensational would secure popular and critical approval; rather, these possibilities intersected productively with the thematic content of the play and its overriding preoccupation with the visible, as I shall argue below. Coleridge was no stranger to contradictory impulses, of course, nor to revisions of both his radical past and his past work (often at the same time): certainly the revisions required of Osorio were part and parcel of Coleridge’s well-documented attempts to disavow his radical political past—to create, in effect, an illusion of a rather different kind about himself and his convictions. An analysis of the political implications of these revisions is thus central to most discussions of the play—indeed this is the very thing the criticism most discusses.7 But Remorse stands in an intriguing relationship to Coleridge’s revisionist tendencies insofar as the action of the play itself turns upon contradictory impulses related to the nature and function of illusion. Coleridge distinguished, as noted above, between imaginatively

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created dramatic illusion and mere stage illusion, produced by stimulating and tricking the senses—a distinction that, taken to a limit, suggests that the most thorough dramatic illusion must be a function of reading rather than performance. Nevertheless, Coleridge’s engagement with visuality in Remorse raises complex questions about the relationship of dramatic illusion to truth telling, or, to put it differently, about the relationship of “play” to personal and political reform, and to a clear understanding of the past and its significance for the present (“illusion” derives, one might note, from the Latin ludere, to play). The relationship between semblance and actuality, the seen and the known, indeed the formative influence of the one upon the other, is explored and overturned in the play through the creation and dissolution of illusion: although the stakes are arguably higher, this very process is staged deliberately for the viewer, as it would be at the Diorama. Coleridge’s engagement with the nature of illusion stands out prominently in one of the play’s most important and fascinating scenes, the climactic “incantation scene” of Act Three (that famous “sorcery scene” to which Thomas Barnes refers), in which a complex deception about past events is to be revealed. The play’s hero, Alvar, who is presumed dead by his family, returns home with a plan to confront his brother over his misdeeds and lawless ways, which involve not only creating the illusion of Alvar’s death at sea, but also a real attempt to have him murdered—an attempt the palpably evil younger brother, Ordonio, believes was successful. Alvar, disguised as a sorcerer, contrives to have himself hired by Ordonio, who has in turn hatched a plan to conjure up the spirit of his dead brother (that is, Alvar) for the benefit of Teresa, Alvar’s betrothed. Ordonio hopes that with definitive proof of Alvar’s death before her eyes, she will be prevailed upon to transfer her affections from Alvar to him. Several threads of the plot converge here, but the scene was felt by contemporary viewers to be, on its own terms, the most astonishing of the play. Certainly it was the most visually dramatic. In a darkened corner of the stage, the figure of the sorcerer is to be seen working before his altar, accompanied by eerie music, a chanting, incantational song, and smouldering incense. All of these details are emphasized by the reviews, as in the Barnes example cited above. But there is more: suddenly and unexpectedly, a brilliant flash of phosphorous illuminates a large and imposing painting suspended over the altar. The painting depicts the murder attempt, and is intended to reveal the hidden truth that underlies the play’s plot, as well as its ethical agenda. Coleridge’s use of a painting as an agent of representation—of a past action, and within a play—is for those very reasons extremely complex. Whether or not the detailed contents of the painting were visible to the audience is unclear (certainly they could be readily inferred), and it seems no information survives about the actual painting that was used in performance. The fact of the painting is astonishing enough, not because the deployment of an image-within-a-play was unique, for one might think of instances of this in The Tempest, where questions of memory and recanta-

Seeing Things (“As They Are”) 139 tion, or renunciation, are also at issue, but rather in the context of remarks Coleridge makes on the differences between painting and dramatic illusion, and their respective relationships to the real. When we view a painting, Coleridge suggests, we know we are looking at a picture and not at something real.8 In a play, on the other hand, what is presented is presented as real. Thus a forest scene, for example, “is not presented to the Audience as a Picture , but as a Forest,” and as such, it acts upon our feelings differently, involving what Coleridge calls an “analogon of deception.” True stage illusion, Coleridge goes on, consists “not in the mind’s judging it to be a Forest, but in its remission of the judgement, that it is not a Forest” (Lectures, I:130). And drama, by definition, must “produce as much illusion as its nature permits”: “These and all other Stage Presentations are to produce a sort of temporary Half-Faith, which the Spectator encourages in himself & supports by a voluntary contribution on his own part, because he knows that it is at all times in his power to see the thing as it really is” (I:134). What happens, then, when a painting becomes part of stage presentation, when pictures, as pictures, become part of the fabric of dramatic illusion? Is the picture of the assassination attempt only a painting, or does it provide the means to see something “as it really is”? Arguably, the insertion of the painting disrupts illusion by foregrounding, among other things, the act of seeing, as well as of creating, illusion.9 These remarks, understood in relation to the central “sorcery” scene and its place in Remorse, raise central questions about illusion, revelation, truth, and the role of the visual in their articulation. At issue are the ethics, and efficacy, of sight (of seeing things “as they are,” with all the political force that phrase suggests), played out visibly in the theatrical dramatisation of sight, and of scenes of seeing. A prevailing anxiety about truth is implicated at moments in Coleridge’s Remorse where the visual is foregrounded—anxiety about the persistence of the past, and of past guilts, in the perception of the present (in the sense both of what is “now” and of what appears, in a sense, before the viewer). The visual functions as a figure for the confrontation with the apparent visibility of the past, as both its metaphor and its effective agent: the buried truths of the past will be revealed, but chiefly by visual means. In this, Remorse resonates powerfully with Schiller’s play The Robbers, which had been popular in England in the 1790s, and with Schiller’s notion of the “play” of semblance.

I One of English literature’s most memorable (and most memorably documented) scenes of reading took place in November of 1794 when Coleridge, then a young man at Cambridge, came across the English translation of Schiller’s first play, Die Räuber (The Robbers). According to his own report, the play held him in its grip until past one in the morning, then left him

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trembling “like an Aspen Leaf.” The encounter produced, in rapid—in fact, immediate—succession, a sonnet addressed “To the Author of ‘The Robbers’” and an impassioned letter to Southey: “My God! Southey! Who is this Schiller? This Convulsor of the Heart? . . . Why have we ever called Milton sublime?” (Letters, I:122). Five years later, this encounter was also to produce Coleridge’s own translation of Schiller’s Wallenstein trilogy from manuscript copy. But by 1799, of course, Coleridge had written a play of his own: Osorio (1797). The case for Schiller’s pervasive, if subtle, effect on Coleridge has certainly been made, though not in sufficiently strong terms.10 Wilkinson and Willoughby, the English editors and translators of Schiller’s epistolary treatise On the Aesthetic Education of Man, suggest that the influence of German Idealist philosophy on Coleridge has been overemphasized at the expense of the less immediately apparent effects of a figure such as Schiller, whom Coleridge read extensively in these early years, and whose cast of mind was clearly congenial to his own.11 Much of the evidence for this, as readers of Coleridge’s notebooks will know, is internal: Coleridge copied and translated many passages from Schiller, passages that, as Wilkinson and Willoughby tactfully state it, “precipitated the quintessence of his thought” (cliv). But much of it is external too, played out, so to speak, in the comparatively open space of the theatre. Julie Carlson argues that Coleridge’s early ideas about the inseparability of mind from action, and from the activity of national reform in particular, derive from his early passion for Schiller.12 Putting Schiller before Kant, Carlson makes the case that Coleridge’s translations (or “imitations”) of Wallenstein prepare the ground for his “nationalist” activities. Not only does Wallenstein thematize revolutionary action in terms that would have appealed to Coleridge at a time when he himself argued for the importance of poetics to politics, but Schiller’s play, particularly when read alongside his letters On the Aesthetic Education of Man, theorizes “play” in ways that suggestively include both politics and theatre. The potential efficacy of “the semblance of play” (from Schiller’s ninth letter) to educate and, moreover, to effect serious change, finds its ideal outlet on stage. Carlson, however, says relatively little about, and in fact minimizes, the relation of The Robbers to Remorse, the first version of which (Osorio) came after Coleridge’s first reading of Schiller, and before his work on Wallenstein.13 On one level at least, the dialogue (if I may call it that) between The Robbers and Remorse is not especially subtle. Both plays, particularly Schiller’s, are the expression of radical youthful ideals in a revolutionary age (contending, for example, with issues of personal freedom in the face of tyranny and injustice). Both treat popular themes original to neither. The hero of The Robbers, Karl Moor, has been banished and disinherited through the devious machinations of a younger brother, who goes so far as to convince their ailing father that Karl, the eldest son, is dead, and thus that he, Franz, is now heir not only to title and estate, but to the hand in marriage of

Seeing Things (“As They Are”) 141 Karl’s beloved Amalia. Thus marginalized, Karl lives his outlaw status to the full as the captain of a band of robbers. In the manner of Robin Hood, he embraces lawlessness as a means of exposing the blind slavery of law to corrupt forms of power; in effect, he breaks the letter of the law in order to uphold its spirit, which is of course to enforce genuine justice. Karl eventually stages a return home, suitably disguised, where he learns of his brother’s web of deceptions and of Amalia’s continued loyalty. Franz, meanwhile has all but murdered their father, who has been locked away to starve in a tower coincidentally near to where the robber band sets up camp. The father is liberated only to be finished off by the unmasking, in several senses, of Karl; Franz commits suicide as the robber forces storm the family castle; and Amalia regains her Karl only to lose her life, sacrificed by Karl himself as the confirmation of his commitment to his band and their cause. The excessive nature of the sacrifice, however, exposes a rift between Karl and his horrified band, and prompts him to declare himself the only fit sacrifice for his offences, arguing that he must cling to his “one remaining merit, of dying for justice of my own free will.”14 Coleridge’s Remorse revisits much of this ground, and is also set in the sixteenth century.15 He recycles the brothers theme, pitting a ruthless and remorseless younger brother (Ordonio—an extreme type of Godwinian man) against an ostensibly more virtuous, and ethically minded, elder (Alvar). Ordonio has gone so far as to plot his brother’s assassination, disguising it as an accidental death at sea, so that he may succeed his duped father and oblige Teresa (the Amalia figure of this play) to renounce her now dead lover. The “Moors” are present here, but the struggle that took place between Schiller’s brothers of that name is transformed by Coleridge into a subplot involving the political revolt of a persecuted people against their religious oppressors during the years of the Spanish Inquisition. Coleridge’s play, however, begins at the moment of Alvar’s return from the dead, disguised, significantly, as a Moor (in the robes of a “Moresco cheftain”), and takes as its main focus the process by which Ordonio’s guilt is to be revealed. In effect, Coleridge’s play is a rewriting, indeed a reconceiving, of Schiller’s last two acts, dispensing entirely with any earlier action such as the free movements of the robber band might give rise to, in favour of a profoundly psychological drama of revelation, restitution—and remorse.16 But both plays contend, in ways more compelling than any of these parallels suggest, with the nature of truth and the form of its appearance. Both plays present, in their use of visual forms on stage, and in their deployment of the rhetoric of vision, the veiled and illusionary nature of the very truths they are driven by. At key points in each play, when, for example, a character’s real identity, or an incident from the past, is to be revealed, further illusions are resorted to: in the form of conjuring acts, pictorial representations, disguises, and so on. Anxieties, if not about truth then about the form and semblance of truth, come through at these junctures, and are only intensified by being the material of an already illusionary situation, that of

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the theatre itself. In effect, the viewer of these plays is presented with the illusion of a process of disillusionment that remains illusionary through and through. What this suggests for a politics as well as an aesthetics of “vision” is precisely what needs disentangling, but we should first look more closely at this process of disillusionment in and through illusion, which plays on familiar oppositions between “being” and “seeming,” and brings Schiller’s concept of the play-drive, or Spieltrieb, into literal contact with the problem of dramatic illusion. The Robbers opens with Franz von Moor skillfully misleading his father about the activities of his eldest son, Karl. In a manner reminiscent of the Gloucester subplot in King Lear, Franz does this with the help of a letter he himself has written, full of counterfeit allegations, which he successfully dissuades his father from perusing with his own eyes, so distressing are its contents. Against the old Count’s lamentations, Franz insists (without a trace of irony) that he must “learn to see it as it is! if only,” he continues, “the scales would fall from your eyes!” (31). Already the truth of the situation is disguised as visible, and the Count is, not inappropriately, compelled to conclude that his son must therefore remain out of his sight: “he shall not show his face before me” (31). Karl meanwhile has written a genuine letter of repentance to his father, to which he receives, again in Franz’s hand, his father’s unambiguous rejection. This compound deception is turned, by Karl, into a moment of revelation: “See,” he exclaims, “the scales have fallen from my eyes! What a fool I was, to seek to return to the cage” (49). Karl continues, however, to have a presence at his father’s castle through the prominence of his portrait on the wall, and through the “image” of him that the characters retain, and refer to. His being, then, is conveyed verbally, pictorially, and even in the “living form” of Amalia, whom Franz suggests is “Karl himself, his echo, his living image!” (54). This suggestion comes at the end of an argument or contest over Karl, in which Franz has tried and failed to obscure or deform the image she retains of “his true self”: “oh,” asserts Franz, “and if only you knew everything, if only you could see him, as he is now” (52). The battle over the obscured truth of Karl’s being only escalates with Franz’s ineffectual attempts to win over Amalia for himself. In the third act, he threatens to tame her “blind obstinate pride” with a convent’s cell, a threat she eagerly embraces so as to be spared his “basilisk’s look” forever (95). This eagerness suggests to Franz, however, the best means of tormenting her: namely, by keeping her in his sight so that “the sight of me shall scourge this everlasting fancy of Karl from your head . . . , the bogey-man Franz shall lurk behind your lover’s image like the dog in the fairy-tale, that lay on the underground treasure . . .” (95). The disturbing effects of superimposing one image upon another are indeed felt by Amalia, but in a later context. When Karl has returned, in disguise and posing as an old friend, she reflects on the turmoil she feels over the “deceitful” image (or is it the person?) of Karl. Drawn mysteriously to this stranger, whom her soul seeks against her will, she asks

Seeing Things (“As They Are”) 143 herself “Why does he stand so close beside the image of my own, my only one?” (121). This confusion over the real and the image, and over the life of the image apart from any actual reference to the real, is of course complicated by the adoption of disguise by a character already leading a double life. Karl’s return to the family home is revealing in this regard. The very first scene of pseudo-recognition takes place in the castle’s picture gallery, with Karl and Amalia wandering among the family portraits, looking for images of Karl: “And do you believe,” she asks as the scene opens, “that you can recognize his likeness amongst these pictures?” (108). He claims he can, and does, but she, on the other hand, doesn’t recognize his likeness among the “real.” The work of recognition is taken up by Franz who enters moments after they have left, and who, thinking aloud before Karl’s portrait, suddenly realizes who the stranger is. He remembers having observed his expression in an unguarded moment: “Yes,” says Franz, “I saw it, saw it in the mirror with my own two eyes” (110). A second encounter before a portrait takes place soon after this, when Karl finds Amalia alone in the garden, gazing at a small portrait miniature in her possession, in an attempt to reassert its primacy against the incursions of this stranger on her love. A conversation ensues here too, in which the real significance of what is exchanged must be disguised: Karl is unable to reveal himself, and constructs a fictional situation, exactly like the “real” one (its mirror image perhaps), through which he conveys the tragic position of (his) Amalia, and the impossibility of their love. But isn’t there a better world hereafter, she asks, where lovers will recognize each other again? “Yes,” he replies, “a world where all veils are rent, and love sees itself again, in terror—Eternity is its name” (123). Their reunion is ultimately a virtual one, unable to withstand exposure to the real. For similar reasons, Karl is reluctant to reveal himself to his father, and in their last encounter, each finds the absolution he needs by pretending that the other is the very person that, in fact, he is. “Imagine that it is a father’s kiss,” says the old Moor, “and I will imagine I am kissing my son—can you also weep?” (153). All too often in The Robbers, truth must be masked by illusion, and some element of illusion appears necessary or essential to its representation. In many cases, the plot is driven by anxiety about what lies behind disguises and masks, about what will be revealed when the “shadow-play ends,” when all veils are torn away, and so on. Moreover, revelation, when it comes, has an uncanny way of turning up in a mirror. On the eve of Franz’s suicide, he has a terrifying dream of a final judgment in which a massive mirror is held up, a looking glass that “is truth: masks and hypocrisy shall be no more” (142). It seems the “deceitful image” will have its day. In Coleridge’s Remorse, the visual is emphasized in equally striking ways—striking because the stage is already a fundamentally visual medium (even though he writes for it), and because the emphasis, with its play on “being” and “seeming,” points constantly to the very nature of theatrical

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illusion. Alvar, the play’s hero, is both a painter (in character) and a conjurer (in disguise), and a key figure in the circulation of images that, though they explicitly counterfeit the real, are intended to be repositories of truth: the truth of identity and the truth of the past. Pictures, such as Teresa’s portrait and the painting of the assassination attempt, function as conveyances of meaning that cannot be conveyed by other means. This staging of the visual implicitly questions the adequacy of both seeing and appearing for the settling of ontological problems, since seeing must be supplemented in various ways. If, as Coleridge suggested, painting is the closest thing to dramatic illusion (in which we see but do not feel the distinction between semblance and reality), then here we have illusion within illusion, and theatre in a sense “doubled” by its doubly visual economy of representation.17

II Before looking more closely at the status of the visual in Remorse, I would like to pull some of the threads of this discussion together by reconsidering Coleridge’s pronouncements on the nature of illusion, and its relationship to theatricality. Contemporary productions of Shakespeare’s plays were greeted with disdain because, as Coleridge and other commentators charged, they substituted stage illusion for dramatic illusion: they made too much visible. As Coleridge put it, visual exhibition now takes over, whereas in the Elizabethan theatre, “the audience was told to fancy that they saw what they only heard described; the painting was not in colours, but in words.”18 This distinction was most felt in the case of the supernatural, which was all too often represented in ludicrous ways. Hazlitt, writing about A Midsummer Night’s Dream, addresses the more general problem about representing the unreal that this raises: . . . the imagination cannot sufficiently qualify the actual impressions of the senses. Any offence given to the eye is not to be got rid of by explanation. Thus Bottom’s head in the play is a fantastic illusion, produced by magic spells: on the stage it is an ass’s head, and nothing more; certainly a very strange costume for a gentleman to appear in. Fancy cannot be embodied any more than a simile can be painted; and it is as idle to attempt it as to personate Wall or Moonshine.19

Coleridge did, in the case of the supernatural elements of Remorse, facilitate the attempt, though it can be no accident that “visual exhibition” is itself quoted in the effort. Coleridge’s suggestions about the status of the “real” in aesthetic or imaginatively dramatic representations are helpful here, as is his distinction between a “copy” and an “imitation”—a favourite distinction that was itself

Seeing Things (“As They Are”) 145 imitated (if not copied) from his reading of Schelling, Kant, and Schiller.20 Briefly, a copy is a mechanical reproduction: it duplicates the original object so effectively that it can be mistaken for it. An imitation, on the other hand, encapsulates what is essential in the object but necessarily contains something additional, supplementary even, related to the conditions of reproduction, which registers a shift in medium or materials, or which relates to the mediation of the artist’s genius in the process. An imitation is a living and legitimate form of representation, whereas a copy is a dead and deceitful one. Coleridge brings this distinction to bear on dramatic representation: . . . a moment’s reflection suffices to make every man conscious of what every man must have before felt, that the Drama is an imitation of reality not a Copy—and that Imitation is contra-distinguished from Copy by this, that a certain quantum of Difference is essential to the former, and an indispensable condition and cause of the pleasure, we derive from it; while in a Copy it is a defect, contravening its name and purpose. (Lectures, II:264)

By way of example, Coleridge suggests that we find more satisfaction in a still life depicting fruit than in a marble peach on a mantelpiece, and that we prefer an historical painting (such as one of Benjamin West’s) to a wax-figure gallery: in both cases, the former is an imitation, the latter a slavish copy.21 The inference to be drawn is that Shakespeare’s plays are imitations, whereas contemporary plays merely copy life. We have no desire to witness a copied reality (“if we want to witness mere pain,” he suggests, “we can visit the hospitals”). Rather, “it is the representation of it, not the reality, that we require, the imitation, and not the thing itself” (Lectures, II:474). We prefer to see its “essence” through the lens of difference that imitation provides: the copy, that is, merely replicates the real, while the imitation transforms it imaginatively into the ideal. Imitation is an important feature of any art form, but Coleridge’s definition of the theatre claims for it a privileged status as the consummate example: . . . the STAGE . . . may be characterized (in its Idea, or according to what it does, or ought to, aim at) as a Combination of several, or of all the Fine Arts to an harmonious Whole having a distinct end of its own, to which the peculiar End of each of the component Arts, taken separately, is made subordinate and subservient: that, namely, of imitating Reality (Objects, Actions, or Passions) under a Semblance of Reality. (Lectures, I:133)

Such a definition accommodates music, poetry, and even painting, as the component parts of a fully realized dramatic production. But is this what makes drama a special example of illusionary representation? Or is the question of illusion so important here because it becomes a compound

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problem, doubled (at the very least) from the start by the complexity of a visual economy where “imitation,” or “semblance,” are everywhere to be seen? The visual is on display throughout Remorse, though I would like to approach it by going back to the sorcery scene, which not only includes supplementary images but suggests something of how they are to be perceived. Coleridge was of course perfectly aware that the scene’s spectacular visual effects were precisely the kind of thing the audience had paid to see. Frederick Burwick suggests, in relation to the sorcery scene, that Coleridge’s “metadramatic exploitation and repudiation of stage trickery” explicitly ironizes the audience’s response by having the audience within the play (Teresa, that is) walk out halfway through, while the hero-in-disguise whispers in her ear that she is right to do so.22 One must, after all, eschew delusion, in which reason is surrendered to emotional sensation without the assent of the will. Burwick interprets this ironic undermining of the central event as responding to “the prevailing rivalry between the aesthetics and the mechanics of illusion,” and this is clearly the case (268). But there is more to be said about the status and function of the visual, and it is worth noting that in Osorio, the conjured ghost of Alvar (“Albert” in that version) was to produce only a small picture of the assassination. Coleridge doubted that the audience would be able to see it at all clearly, and supposed they would dismiss it as a “trick”; this would be, he thought, “miserably undramatic.”23 Viewers must, it seems, be able to see; the aesthetics of illusion are still to some extent a question of their materials. The sorcery scene involves the presentation of ye