Gothic Art in Four Romantic Authors
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Anne A. Davenport Boston College Gothic Art in Four Romantic Authors To Pablo and William-Manuel Abstract. Benjamin Disraeli remarked in 1833 that a key dereliction of modern belief–systems (such as Utilitarianism in political philosophy and Unitarianism in religion) was to omit the imagination.1 Why did he and other XIXth century authors turn for remedy in this particular regard to Gothic art? Four examples – drawn from Wordsworth (1798), Keats (1819), Stendhal (1830) and Disraeli (1845)2 – suggest that Gothic art was invoked by a few prominent Romantic authors, not to thrill us with haunted castles,3 but for a more complex purpose. Their goal was to bring a repressed religious imagination out in the open while also guarding against solipsism. All four authors saw in Gothic architecture a model of transcendent unity based on harmonizing, rather than suppressing, heterogeneous elements. At once naturalistic and mystical, Gothic cosmophilia (love of beauty) offered a welcome alternative both to an increasingly bleak secularism and to a narrow Evangelical 1 Disraeli, Letters, ed. J.A.W. Gunn, John Matthews, Donald M. Schurman, and M.G. Wiebe (Toronto: 1982), I, 447: “The Utilitarians in Politics are like the Unitarians in Religion. Both omit Imagination in their systems, and Imagination governs Mankind.” Cited by Gertrude Himmelfarb in The Moral Imagination (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2006), 93. 2 Note that all four examples predate John Ruskin’s Seven Lamps of Architecture, 1852. 3 I interpret Horace Walpole’s delight in “Gothick” and Ann Radcliffe’s novels to embrace medievalism precisely as a lost cause, following the demise of the Jacobite faction. Anne A. Davenport, « Gothic Art in Four Romantic Authors », Jean-François Chassay et Bertrand Gervais [éds], Paroles, textes et images. Formes et pouvoirs de l’imaginaire, Université du Québec à Montréal, Figura, Centre de recherche sur le texte et l’imaginaire, coll. « Figura », no 19, vol. 1, p. 107-131. GOTHIC ART IN FOUR ROMANTIC AUTHORS moralism. Gothic cathedrals spoke of the soul’s vertical dimension against democratic leveling, while Gothic abbeys spoke of human equality before God. Gothic imagery thus allowed our authors to rekindle a distinctly religious imagination without forsaking key commitments of the modern project. Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey” When Wordsworth wrote “Tintern Abbey” in 1798,4 Gothic architecture had been revived for playful make-belief,5 but had for the most part been repeatedly discredited as a religious venue. Gothic shrines had been demonized by Puritans during the Reformation as idolatrous,6 replaced by Baroque domes and façades during the Counter-Reformation, ridiculed by the Enlightenment as irrational, and, in Wordsworth’s own memory, savagely defaced by French Jacobins as politically loathsome.7 Why then did Wordsworth choose to evoke Tintern Abbey in the title of his poem? Why not “Lines Written On The Banks of the Wye?” What, in short, does Tintern Abbey add to Wordsworth’s communion with nature? 4 Chateaubriand’s Génie du Christianisme was not published before 1800 in London and 1802 in Paris. His Essai sur les Révolutions, published in London in 1797, expressed a quasi-atheist worldview, concluding with the question: “What religion will replace Christianity?” 5 For some of the uses of Gothic in 20th century literature, see Patrick R. O’Malley, Catholicism, sexual Deviance, and Victorian Gothic Culture (Cambridge, UK. and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2006). 6 Eamon Duffey, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992). 7 As Dennis Taylor points out in “Wordsworth’s Abbey Ruins,” Wordsworth saw history repeated by the French sans culottes, who manifested the same hostility to Catholic buildings as the English Puritans had during the Reformation. J. Robert Barth, S.J., ed., The Fountain of Light: Studies in Romanticism and Religion, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2002), 14. [108] ANNE A. DAVENPORT As Coleridge’s “Religious Musings” of 1794 attests, the problem of religious emotion vitally shaped Wordsworth’s emerging understanding of his vocation.8 Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”, in which this vocation is embraced with new conviction, commemorates an earlier excursion with his sister to the same site five years earlier and thus describes a personal pilgrimage. But a pilgrimage to what? After “many wanderings,” (MW, lines 157-158) disillusioned by radical politics, anxious about the passage of time, Wordsworth returned to a site that tied him to domestic history and to himself with special affective bonds. The poem is a double home-coming. The “dark sycamore” under which he “again reposes” serves as a personal landmark in the wilderness, a privileged site of (no)return, like a family tomb. The poet’s memory is revived both acoustically (“Again I hear/These waters”) and visually (“Once again/Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,”), giving rise to an immediate, sensorial faith that earth and heaven are one (“and connect/The Landscape to the quiet of the sky”). The poet has carved out a place of imaginative meaning for himself, a place of origin. He seeks to commune, not with nature’s “wild seclusion” so much as with the “deeper seclusion” of place, of nature “a few miles above Tintern Abbey.” The ruined Gothic shrine presides over his home-coming not only because it mirrors his own intimate sense of dilapidation, but because it symbolizes the transcendent promise of spiritual gestation. Tintern Abbey once gave birth in this wilderness to the imagination 8 Thomas McFarland, “The Symbiosis of Coleridge and Wordsworth,” Studies in Romanticism, xi (1972), 263-303. As Stephen Gill remarks, “Tintern Abbey echoes at a vital moment Coleridge’s earlier use in ‘Religious Musings’ of the word ‘interfused.’” Stephen Gill, ed., William Wordsworth: The Major Works, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), xvii. Further references to this text will be given in parentheses after the quotation, preceded by the abbreviation MW. The poem can be found online at: http://www.thetalisman.org.uk/ tintern/ [109] GOTHIC ART IN FOUR ROMANTIC AUTHORS of heaven, perfecting human nature without contradicting it. Half-returned to the earth, the abbey’s crumbling vaults speak of a buried hope – of an “old religion” that subtends the poet’s modern faith in progress (Figure 1). Figure 1. Tintern Abbey (photo Dennis Taylor) Tintern Abbey is never described.9 “Vagrant dwellers” half-sheltered in its ruins, like God’s proverbial poor, or ghosts of Cistercian monks, remind the poet of the fragility of home, of the risk of being cut-off from history, meaning, hope, sacraments. Wordsworth recalls his own despair in “lonely rooms, mid the din of towns and cities” and how he nursed himself back from anomie by evoking “sensations sweet,/Felt in the blood.” (MW, lines 26-31.) Religious imagination stems from the experience of loss and the fear of annihilation. 9 This feature of the poem has long attracted the attention of scholars, notably of Peter Brier in “Reflections on Tintern Abbey,” Wordsworth Circle 5 (1974), 5-6, and more recently of Dennis Taylor, “Wordsworth’s Abbey Ruins,” in The Fountain of Light, 37-53. [110] ANNE A. DAVENPORT Tintern Abbey lies beyond the horizon of visibility, image of a ruined unity, “alpha and omega,” bridging birth and death. The poet feels himself to be “gently led” to a supreme destination. He imagines death, when, he says, we will be “laid asleep in body” and “become a living soul.” (MW, lines 36-47.)10 In this ultimate birth and awakening, the eye will be “made quiet by the power/Of harmony, and the deep power of joy,” and we will “see into the life of things.” In other words, Tintern Abbey impresses a transcendent promise on the landscape, which nature, as such, caught in the cycle of its seasons, is powerless to supply.11 The poet’s religious imagination grows out of the paradox of home-coming, which reveals the impossibility for humans to return. We are not grass. We are not flesh. There is, in this impossibility, a higher sense of home – a “sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused.” (MW, lines 96-97) The child’s “coarser pleasures” and “glad animal movements” are relinquished in favour of a spiritual coming of age that lies, always, ahead. “Nature and the language of sense” are the poet’s nurse – but not the poet’s destiny. John Keats interpreted “Tintern Abbey” to mark a new awareness on Wordsworth’s part of the mystery that exceeds rational understanding.12 Keats also characterized Wordsworth’s poetic genius as a form of “egotistical sublime.”13 10 “Until, the breath of this corporeal frame,/And even the motion of our human blood/Almost suspended, we are laid asleep/In body, and become a living soul”. 11 For a nice study of the relevance of Wordsworth’s Anglican upbringing to “Tintern Abbey”, see Mary Herrington-Perry, ““Tintern Abbey” and the “Spiritual Presence of Absent things,”” on the Web at: http://prometheus.cc.emory.edu/panles/5C/M.Herrington-Perry. html. 12 John Keats, Letter to Reynolds, May 3, 1818; cited and nicely analyzed for its bearing on The Eve of St. Agnes by Earl Wasserman in Twentieth Century Interpretations of the Eve of St. Agnes (Englewood Cliffs: Prentice Hall, 1971), 27-28. 13 John Keats, Letter to Richard Woodhouse, October 27, 1818; cited [111] GOTHIC ART IN FOUR ROMANTIC AUTHORS Two features of “Tintern Abbey” invite us to qualify Keats’s assessment. First, by citing the abbey in the title, Wordsworth transformed a private pilgrimage site into a collective, shared, ancestral site. The poet’s intimations of immortality inspire him to abandon the first person singular and speak collectively: not I, but we, are “laid asleep in body” and born to eternal life.