Art Et Littérature À L'époque Victorienne. Home Sweet Home Or

Home , The Awakening Conscience

HOME, SWEET HOME OR BLEAK HOUSE ? Art et littérature à l'époque Victorienne Dans la même série, les Annales Littéraires de l'Université de Besançon ont publié en 1977, sous le numéro 198 : THE ARTIST'S PROGRESS Art, littérature et société en Grande-Bretagne Sommaire : PELTRAULT Claude, L'Enfer ou l'architecture de l'illusion. HAMARD Marie-Claire, L'enfant dans l'art anglais du XVIe au XVIIe siècle. CARRÉ Jacques, Alexander Pope et l'architecture. FERRER Daniel, A The Rake 's Progress, Hogarth-Stravinsky. LEHMANN Gilly, L'art de la table en Angleterre au XVIIIe siècle. TATU Chantal, Présence, fonction et signification des arts dans Les Mystères d'Udolphe d'Anne Radcliffe. MARTIN Jean-Paul, Comment Constable peint la peinture. ROSSITER Andrew, La critique d'art de William Thackeray : un aperçu sur la Royal Academy aux alentours de 1840. Cet ouvrage de 161 pages, illustré de 11 planches, est distribué par Les Belles Lettres, 95, Boulevard Raspail, Paris VIe, au prix de 120 FF.

Les Annales ont aussi publié en 1982, sous le numéro 267 : LIFT NOT THE PAINTED VEIL... Recherches sur la peinture anglaise et américaine. Sommaire : CARRÉ Jacques, Un aristocrate et son image les portraits de Lord Burlington. BRUCKMULLER-GENLOT Danielle, Un intransigeant victorien : William Holman Hunt, ou la voie étroite du préraphaélitisme. LEHMANN Patrick-André, «Hughes vs Hughes» ou le premier illustra- teur de Tom Brown 's Schooldays. HAMARD Marie-Claire, Les premières années du New English Art Club. HAMARD Marie -Claire, Les illustrateurs du Yellow Book. MARTIN Jean-Pierre, Ce que peint Francis Bacon (tentative de description). TRAXEL David, Rockwell Kent. FERRER Daniel, Parrhasios américain, la surface et le fond dans la peinture aux États-Unis. Cet ouvrage de 165 pages, illustré de 15 planches noir et blanc, est distribué par Les Belles Lettres, au prix de 130 FF.

Sont parus aux Annales également : Le Marchand de Londres par G. LILLO édition critique, traduction, préface et notes par Jean HAMARD. 1965.158 p. (66 FF). La Caste par Thomas William ROBERTSON traduit par André RAULT. 1974. 143 p. (72 FF). AVANT PROPOS

Le groupe de recherche pluridisciplinaire «Art, Littérature et Société dans les pays anglophones» de la Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Besançon remercie les Annales Littéraires de l'Université de lui avoir permis la publication de ses travaux antérieurs dans deux recueils, The Artist's Progress (1977) et Lift not the Painted Veil (1982). L'acceptation d'un troisième volume, dans un contexte défavorable aux publications scienti- fiques, est un geste de compréhension envers un groupe de jeunes chercheurs auquel ceux-ci sont extrêmement sensibles. Le groupe ayant organisé en 1981 une modeste «journée victorienne» sur le thème du livre illustré pour la jeunesse, il n 'avait pu joindre à son second volume qu 'une seule des communications faites sur ce sujet ; aussi s'est-il doublement réjoui lorsque la Société Française d'Études Victoriennes et Édouardiennes a accepté de tenir son sixième colloque international à Besançon les 29 et 30 janvier 1983 et de lui confier le soin d'en éditer les Actes. Le présent volume qui rassemble les communications du colloque bisontin et deux communications de la journée victorienne de 1981 trouve son unité à la fois dans le choix de la période et dans celui du thème traité, «Arts et Littérature». L'importance des études sur le roman de Dickens, Bleak House, dont les illustrations sont par ailleurs largement évoquées dans la communication du professeur Andrews, conférencier invité par le British Council et la S.F.E.V.E, a conduit la responsable de l'édition à proposer pour le volume, selon la tradition de la série qui veut un titre anglais, une interrogation sur le cadre de vie victorien : Home, Sweet Home or Bleak House ? Combien de foyers véritables dans les textes et dans les tableaux que nous évoquent les divers articles ? L'adolescent de la public school supervisé par un «housemaster» n 'a pas plus grande nostalgie du foyer fami- lial que la jeune femme de The Awakening Conscience peinte par W. Hol- man Hunt et décrite par Ruskin. Le confort douillet de la maison victorienne est reconstitué à l'intérieur même de la diligence par les jeunes voya- geuses d'Augustus Egg et elles ne regardent pas défiler par la fenêtre le pay- sage méditerranéen. C'est que l'étranger, lieu d'aventures exaltantes pour le lecteur adolescent des romans de Henty, est vu par les peintres préraphaé- lites et les romanciers victoriens comme un ailleurs qui ne résoud aucun problème. La somptueuse demeure vénitienne de Milly Theale est un cadre aussi étouffant que Chesney Wold où Lady Dedlock cache son angoisse sous le masque de l'ennui. Bleak House comprend plus de demeures prisons que de demeures refuges ; du taudis de Tom All Alone's (l'illustration de la couverture) à la maison patricienne devenue étude de notaire où Tulking- horn est assassiné, il n'est pas, dans le roman, d'abri contre le malheur. On vient jusque chez les Bagnet, famille modèle, arrêter un innocent. «Home, Sweet Home», hymne officieux de la période, semble au mieux l'illusion de l'exilé, au pire une moquerie. Même impression de claustrophobie dans Dubliners. C'est une situation que les filles de Leslie Stephen vivent dans la réalité et dont la mort du père ne les délivrera pas totalement, du moins tant qu'elles n'auront pas trouvé, Vanessa dans la peinture, Virginia nette- ment plus tard dans l'écriture, un mode de création artistique où l'esthétique abstraite, primant sur l'image du réel, permet d'échapper à l'obsession de la mère. M. C. HAMARD

REMERCIEMENTS Nous remercions les auteurs de nous avoir confié leurs manuscrits et nous remercions les musées qui nous ont autorisé à reproduire des œuvres d'art de leurs collections : le City Museum and Art Gallery de Birmingham (pl. II ), la Tate Gallery de Londres (pl. V ), la Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens (pl. III ) et le Musée des Beaux-Arts de Besançon (pl. ). NARRATIVE VERSUS TABLEAU : LITERATURE AND PAINTING IN EARLY VICTORIAN ENGLAND par Malcolm Andrews Professeur à l'Université de KENT (G. B.)

Much of Victorian art — fiction, melodrama and painting — is founded on the assumption that narrative and tableau are compatible partners. Occa- sionally the wrong partner seems to get the upper hand. Some examples of Victorian fiction strike one more as causally related sequences of tableaux than as novels. Popular melodramas of the period, likewise, can seem more a series of histrionic poses stitched together with some functional dialogue than a subtle revelation of character in action or complication of relationships under pressure. Some Victorian paintings, conversely, present a single tableau and ask the spectator to reconstruct the narrative context by interpretation and association of the wealth of significant detail contained in the picture. So painting aspires to the condition of the novel and the melodrama ; and these two, at crucial points in their narrative, build scenes fit for the painter. I am going to examine some of the tensions in this Victorian partnership of the sister-arts, tensions between the flow of a story-line and the arresting visual realisation of specific moments in that narrative. The issue is raised in an engagingly self-conscious way by George Eliot at an early point in her novel Daniel Deronda (1876). The novel's heroine, Gwendolen Harleth, an intelligent, beautiful but curiously naive girl, distinguishes herself in an archery contest to which the foremost fami- lies in the county have been invited. There is a dinner and dance that evening, the main interest of which, for Gwendolen, is the opportunity to meet the fascinating Mr. Grandcourt. Gwendolen's mother says : «I am sure you ought to be satisfied today. You must have enjoyed the shoo- ting. I saw you did». «Oh, that is over now, and I don't know what will come next,» said Gwendolen, stretching herself with a sort of moan and throwing up her arms. They were bare now : it was the fashion to dance in the archery dress, throwing off the jacket ; and the simplicity of her white cashmere with its border of pale green set off her form to the utmost. A thin line of gold round her neck, and the gold star on her breast, were her only ornaments. Her smooth soft hair piled up into a grand crown made a clear line about her brow. Sir Joshua would have been glad to take her portrait ; and he would have had an easier task than the historian at least in this, that he would not have had to represent the truth of change - only to give stability to one beautiful moment. (Book II, Ch. II) Here is the novelist (or historian) envying what she feels to be the simpler task of the painter who does not need to consider what lies behind the beautiful appearance of his subject, and can simply lift her up free from the stream of time. But for the historian, the «truth of change» cannot be avoided while the subject remains carried along by the narrative current. The reference to Sir Joshua Reynolds provides us with a useful starting point. Let us look at a Reynolds portrait and assess George Eliot's understanding of the painter's task. This is a portrait entitled Lady Cockburn and her three eldest sons (1773). To what extent is Reynolds's portrait simply the result of stabilising one beautiful moment in his subject's appearance ? It is much more than that. This is an idealised portrait ; and the means of idealising the subject is to represent her in a pose deliberately reminiscent of some high Renais- sance paintings. In this case the prototypes of ideal motherhood would be Raphael's Bridgwater Madonna and Salviati's Charity. Analogy portraiture is one way of deepening and enriching the response to a painting, beyond the idea of simply stabilising a beautiful moment. It gives a public, universal dimension to a private individual, and flatters by association. The practice does however rely on a shared cultural background : analogy portraiture only works if the analogy is recognised. The same applies to the recourse to classical allusion in the poetry of the period. The subsequent broadening of the educational background and the wider spread of literacy meant that no such easy assumption of a shared cultural background could be made by the writers and painters in the Vic- torian period. Other methods were employed to complete the meaning of a painting and to direct the spectator's understanding. Constable and Turner used exhibition catalogues as an opportunity to attach quotations to their landscapes — a circumstance we are too often inclined to forget in judging their work. This enlistment of one art to enhance or elucidate another was sometimes felt to be an unwarranted intrusion. Such objections are very clearly expressed by a contributor to Dickens's magazine All The Year Round. In the December 14th 1867 issue a painting entitled A Florentine Procession by Mrs. Benham Hay was reviewed in favourable terms. But the writer took great exception to Mrs Hay's reliance on catalogue information : Mrs. Benham Hay invites us to discover abstruse symbolical meanings in the principal figures of her picture. In plainer words, she aspires to express abstract qualities, by the purely concrete means of brushes and paint. To take an instance. We are charmed by one of her figures - a girl dressed in blue, playing on a musical instrument. What Art can do (within Art's limits) is shown in this figure. It is full of the charm of innocence and youth and beauty ; there is true feeling in the face, and true grace in the attitude. These all-attractive qualities having produced their full effect upon us in the picture, we happen to look into the catalogue next, and find - what no human being, without the catalogue, could possibly discover - that our charming girl in blue repre- sents «a servant of the Ideal» (whatever that may be), «absorbed in the meaning of the music she is playing». In other words, here is something which the picture, confessedly, cannot express for itself, and which the catalogue is obliged to express for it. The general spectator looks up again at the figure, sees no more in it than he saw before : arrives inevitably (prompted by the catalogue) at the false conclusion that there must be some defect in expression which he ought to have noticed before ; and underrates the work which he would have appreciated at its proper value if the picture had been left to exercise its legitimate influence over him. The cultivated spectator takes a shorter way. He simply closes the catalogue ; knowing perfectly well that it is claiming for the art of painting something which that art is, by the nature of it, absolutely incapable of accomplishing. In both cases, the picture suffers from being perversely weighted with a meaning which words alone can convey, and which no picture whatever can carry. Mrs. Benham Hay may rest assured that the worst obstacle her work will have to encounter on its way to success, is the cloudy symbolism which puffs out upon it from the catalogue. I can imagine many painters taking exception to this patronising insistence on the intellectual limitations of their art, its legitimate influence. The writer seems to have much the same general prejudices, in this respect, as George Eliot. Why shouldn't the painter «aspire to express abstract qualities» by the use of brushes and paint ? Reynolds had insisted upon the painter's striving to express «intellectual dignity» in his work, and demons- trated one way of achieving this by analogy portraiture. The All The Year Round reviewer is specifically objecting to the application of words to pictures, rather than pictures to pictures, in order to bolster meaning. Analogy portraiture, quotation accompaniments to paintings, or bald interpretative directions — these were means of enlarging the intellectual scope of pictures for periods which enjoyed a story didactic flavour in their art. Another means is well exemplified in one of the best-known paintings of the mid-century, Holman Hunt's The Awakening Conscience (1854). This is a case of a painting which, in George Eliot's terms, tries both to stabilise one crucial moment as well as suggest the «truth of change». Narrative and tableau are brought into close relationship. The subject was inspired partly by a narrative — by Hunt's reading of the Peggotty-Emily- Steerforth story in David Copperfield. The choice of exactly what moment to portray as the girl's conscience begins to excite remorse in her, must have been a difficult one. The difficulty is ironically reflected in the changing title to this famous painting. It was exhibited as The Awakening Conscience, but later in the century it became The Awakened Conscience, a morally gratifying stage further towards remorse and possible redemption. I wonder if the All The Year Round reviewer would have objected to that title ? It has, after all, much the same explanatory function as Mrs. Hay's catalogue note. Hunt has to portray a psychological drama, a period of agonising change in the girl's life, and he cannot do it with just the two figures. The man could be the girl's husband just as well as her caddish seducer. The girl's beatific expression (originally anguished, before Hunt was persuaded to alter it) is open to several interpretations. So Hunt needs to close down the meaning of the picture. He does actually add a catalogue quotation or two, and a quotation on the picture frame ; but these do not explain the narrative background nor, very precisely, the full significance of the depicted moment. This Hunt chooses to do allegorically, within this picture. He wrote later «" The Awakened Conscience" is an example of my view of the degree to which secondary meanings may be used in natural subjects» (1). He gives the articles and decorations in the room an expressive function. The evil- looking cat has just trapped and killed a bird under the table. Both in expression and tilt of the head he resembles his seducer master. A light, ro- mantic Tom Moore love song is being played and sung to, while the musical setting of Tennyson's «Tears, Idle Tears» lies neglected on the floor. The tapestry behind the girl is an allegory, as Hunt himself later explained : «The corn and vine are left unguarded by the slumbering cupid watchers and the fruit is left to be preyed upon by the thievish birds» (2). The painting was, not surprisingly, misunderstood when first exhibited, so much so that an indignant Ruskin was moved to write to The Times on May 25th 1854 : I cannot persuade myself to leave it thus misunderstood. The poor girl has been sitting singing with her seducer : some chance words of the song, «Oft in the stilly night», have struck upon the numbed places of her heart ; she has started up on agony ; he, not seeing her face, goes on singing, striking the keys carelessly with his gloved hand. Nothing is more notable than the way in which even the most trivial objects force themselves upon the attention of a mind which has been fevered by violent and distressful excitement. They thrust themselves forward with a ghastly and unendurable distinctness, as if they would compel the sufferer to count, or measure, or learn them by heart. Even to the mere spectator a strange interest exalts the accessories of a scene in which he bears witness to human sorrow. There is not a single object in all that room - common, modern, vulgar (in the vulgar sense, as it may be), but it becomes tragical, if rightly read. That furniture so carefully painted, even to the last vein of the rosewood - is there nothing to be learnt from that terrible lustre of it, from its fatal newness ; nothing there that has the old thoughts of home upon it, or that is ever to become a part of home ? Those embossed books, vain and useless - they also new - marked with no happy wearing of beloved leaves ; the torn and dying bird upon the floor ; the gilded tapestry, with the fowls of the air feeding on the ripened corn ; the picture above the fireplace, with its single drooping figure - the woman taken in adultery ; nay, the very hem of the poor girl's dress, at which the painter has laboured so closely, thread by thread, has story in it, if we think how soon its pure whiteness may be soiled with dust and rain, her outcast feet failing in the street ; and the fair garden flowers, seen in that reflected sunshine of the mirror, — these also have their language —. Twice in his letter Ruskin mentions how much story the picture has in it, and how full of tragical meaning every object in the room becomes if rightly read. Elsewhere he cites it as an instance of painting's taking «its proper position beside literature» (3). He sees it as a moment in high drama, with a beginning, a middle and an end, and congratulates it on its moral didacticism. Here as elsewhere in his art criticism Ruskin is evaluating a painting according to his peculiar criteria : «The greatest picture is that which conveys to the mind of the spectator the greatest number of the greatest ideas» (4). His response involves a kind of quantitative assessment of the wealth of ethically significant objects and appearances. He can piece together a didactic narrative from a tableau of human action and its contextual cluster of emblematic details. An alternative pictorial means to the same end is, instead of relying on one packed canvas, to produce a number of paintings in a narrative sequence. This was the principle of the Hogarthian «progress». Augustus Egg's three paintings Past and Present (1858) are an example of this. Illicit love is again the theme. Ruskin, again, explained the picture : In the central piece the husband discovers his wife's infidelity : he dies five years afterwards. The two lateral pictures represent the same moment of night a fortnight after his death. The same little cloud is under the moon. The two children see it from the chamber in which they are praying for their lost mother , and their mother, from behind a boat under a vault on the river shore (5). These pictures can afford to be, individually, less crowded with tel- ling details than Hunt's single canvas, because the «truth of change» can be represented by the sequence. Even so, it relies on the iconographically sensi- tive spectator : the apple, half on the table and half on the floor is discovered to have a rotten core ; and the children's precarious card castle has for its foundation a French novel, the significance of which, I'm afraid, would have been hideously apparent to the Victorian spectator. Interestingly these paintings were hung out of the proper narrative sequence. The scene of the grieving older daughters precedes the moment of dreadful revelation of infidelity when they were children. In a way this obstructs the spectator's interest in imaginatively extending the biographical narrative. The lives of these characters are effectively over. A «Progress» is a misnomer. It is as though the broken family is paralysed by grief and year- ning : only the object of their separated gazings, the moon, unites them across that dreadful event. The problems of creating a graphic narrative sequence lead us to consider the problems of illustrating an existing narrative text. Here we can choose one text and several attempts to illustrate it. The Pre-Raphaelites were united by their enthusiasm for Keats' poetry and especially for his me- dieval narrative poem «The Eve of St. Agnes». What moments do they choose from a sequence of several appetising scenes in Keats' narrative ? Millais and Maclise go for the voluptuous, erotic heart of the poem, Madeline's undres- sing. Arthur Hughes tries to recover the narrative's excitement and paints a triptych of tableaux. Hunt, characteristically, draws a moral from the whole poem : «The story in Keats' Eve of St. Agnes illustrates the sacredness of honest responsible love and the weakness of proud intemperance» (6). This is a surprising but unmistakably Victorian interpretation of the poem. The moral interpretation, however, does give a firm structure to Hunt's de- piction of the poem's conclusion : the «honest responsible» lovers slip away on the right of the painting, while on the left, and down on the floor «proud intemperance» is portrayed. These separate antagonistic elements are formally linked in the one painting with some skill, by the statutory S-shaped ground-line and the direction of the limbs of the sprawling porter. But here, unlike the case of The Awakening Conscience, the spectator can always supply the known, original narrative — the Keats poem. The painting was the freezing of an important moment in that narrative, like the tableaux in melodrama. Mrs. Leavis has said of the Dickens illustrations that they «give us the means of knowing with certainty where Dickens meant the stress to fall» (7). The dramatists introduce tableaux for much the same reasons. They will freeze the action for a few seconds having carefully worked the characters into position, so that the tableau composition often approxi- mates to a history painting in the grand style. Here is an example from Douglas Jerrold's popular play Black-Ey'd Susan (1829). The sailor-hero William is thought to have drowned — at least that is the story which the villainous Smuggler Hatchet wants Susan to believe. Susan is William's sweet- heart, but Hatchet himself has an interest in her. Susan is nearly persuaded of her lover's death when suddenly William appears. He and Hatchet draw cutlasses and fight. Here are the stage directions : Music. - [H] runs at WILLIAM [...] who catches his R. arm - they struggle round. WILLIAM throws him off, and stands over him. HATCHET on his knee ; same time LIEUTENANT PIKE appears inside of door in flat — two MARINES appear at window in flat. Tableau. (8). The tableau could be captioned something like «Fraud Vanquished» or «The Triumph of True Love». It gives stability for a few seconds to the culmination of one line of dramatic narrative. It then dissolves, as Lieutenant Pike hauls off the Smuggler, and William and Susan are blissfully reunited. The playwright manages both to stabilise one moment and also represent dramatic change. The effect of the tableau, the suspension of the action, is to lodge the moment firmly in the audience's mind. The Dickens illustrations have the same effect. Another example is the final curtain tableau for Lady Audley's Secret (1863), Colin Hazelwood's stage adaptation of the novel by Mary Braddon. Lady Audley's Secret is that she deserted her devoted, first husband George when he lost his money, by counterfeiting her own death. In her changed identity she then married the wealthy 70-year-old Sir Michael Audley. The grieving George appears one day at Audley Court and recognises his wife in her new guise. At a discreet moment Lady Audley hits him on the head and pushes him down the well. But, of course, at the end of the play he reappears, much to everyone's surprise, and the shock turns Lady Audley's mind. She collapses and dies then and there, and what is called a «tableau of sympathy» forms itself, with George kneeling over her. The curtain falls. The tableau is not dissolved back into the narrative. The final impression of moral retribution is firmly stamped on the audience's mind. I have so far considered, in brief, a variety of ways in which narrative and tableau have enlisted each other's help, usually in order to enhance the didactic purposes. I would like now to focus the issue on Dickens. Dickens is a particularly interesting case of the interaction between literary and graphic art, an aspect of his work which has attracted considerable attention in recent years from the critics. John Harvey, Michael Steig and others (9) have shown that Cruikshank and Phiz contribute much more to Dickens's art than servile, faithful illustrations of select moments in the stories. These artists inherited a tradition of graphic satire from Ho- garth, via Gillray, which enabled them in their vignette illustrations to early Dickens not simply, in George Eliot's terms, to give stability to one moment from the story. They did not restrict themselves to the precise visual realisation of Dickens's narrative description, like the melodrama tableaux, but added independent commentary on the central action by including a wealth of contextual emblematic detail. Two famous examples are «Coming Home from Church» from Dombey and Son and «Martha» from David Copper- field, both by Phiz . In the Dombey illustration, as the newly-weds pass into the house on the left, a hearse drives off on the far right of the picture, past a Punch and Judy show where puppet wife and husband are perpe- tually squabbling. This lively, ironic counterpointing of the main action is barely glimpsed in Dickens's text. In the «Martha» plate, wholly absent from Dickens's narrative are the two pictures featured in the room. One shows a penitent Mary Magdalene at the feet of Christ, abased in much the same way as Martha before her visitors. This is almost a kind of analogy portraiture ; as if Reynolds had included prints of his Raphael and Salviati Planche I, Page avec vignette de la première édition de The Old Curiosity Shop models on the wall behind Lady Cockburn. The other half-concealed picture is of Eve's temptation, possibly foreshadowing Emily's seduction. Critics have felt that Phiz's art of illustration and enrichment of Dickens's text declines after Copperfield. This is partly because the nature of Dickens's own fiction is changing, and partly because tastes in painting in the mid-century were also changing. Prosaic domestic realism was beco- ming popular, and the Pre-Raphaelite vogue for decorative medievalism and a peculiarly idealised naturalism was displacing the Hogarthian mode and Regency caricature. Cruikshank and Phiz were coming to seem old- fashioned. The transitional novel in this context is Bleak House. With a few exceptions most critics are disappointed with Phiz's work for this novel. Mrs. Leavis regrets there was no illustration for the great fog opening. Others register a loss of vitality in the figure groups (10). Most people, I would imagine, feel that the illustrations in the novel are largely superfluous. They have the effect more often than not of inhibiting the extraordinary activity of Dickens's narrative and of reducing its imaginative power. If you col- lected all the illustrations together (apart from a few of the dark plates) and isolated them from the text, would you gather from them anything of the power and complexity of Bleak House ? Surely not. Whereas if you tried the same experiment with some earlier novels you would find a much closer stylistic correlation : think of the illustrations to Pickwick, The Old Curiosity Shop, Martin Chuzzlewit. Unlike Mrs. Leavis I am glad that Phiz was not asked to do an illustration for the opening fog description. Neither the conventional engraving nor the dark plate technique could have adequately represented or impro- ved upon that passage. For one thing it would be quite inappropriate to give stability to any one scene here, the essence of which is the absence of any stability at all. The focus never holds on anything for long. Dogs, horses and people slip and slide in the mud as they grope their way through the streets. The instability is worked into the prose itself which has to function without any main verbs. Sentences slip and slide into each other on the uncertain surface of the participles. Moreover Dickens's descriptive method here gives to fog - and mud-bound London a surreal quality which prepares us for its symbolic function announced in the fourth and fifth paragraphs. An illustration would literalise all this. Phiz's art cannot match the resource- fulness of Dickens's prose. Even when Dickens employs fleeting emblematic detail in his narrative, something in the manner of the Hogarthian mode, it has a complexity and economy which the illustrator would find hard to translate into visual terms. I will take an example from the second chapter of Bleak House, after the description of rain-sodden Chesney Wold, the Dedlock family seat : My Lady Dedlock (who is childless) looking out in the early twilight from her boudoir at a Keeper's lodge, and seeing the light of a fire upon the latticed panes, and smoke rising from the chimney, and a child, chased by a woman, running out into the rain to meet the shining figure of a wrapped-up man coming through the gate, has been put quite out of temper. My Lady Dedlock says she has been «bored to death». This is like a little vignette itself, and brilliantly expressive, through imagery, of some of the fundamental motifs in the novel. The Keeper's cottage seems an oasis of family warmth and brightness in the gloomy, swampy acres of Chesney Wold. That adjective «shining» is quite plausible on a literal level : the sheen on the man's soaked clothing reflecting the light from his cottage. But the intensity of light in that word seems also to have a symbolic force : the scene is suddenly irradiated. Its full effect becomes clear when, eight paragraphs later, Dickens meticulously describes old Mr. Tulkinghorn, the Dedlocks' legal advisor : One peculiarity of his black clothes, and of his black stockings, be they silk or worsted, is, that they never shine. Mute, close, irresponsive to any glancing light, his dress is like himself. Now that cottage scene, so crisply detailed, so sparing of commentary and yet so resonant in the larger context of the novel, seems ideal subject- matter for the illustrator. But how on earth would he convey the peculiar force of that «shining» ? How also would he give the cottage scene the right weight in his composition ? In the text it is relegated to a sequence of subor- dinate clauses, sandwiched between the subject, «childless» Lady Dedlock, and the main verb, «has been put quite out of temper». Translated into a picture this would mean that a languid Lady Dedlock would have to occupy the dominant foreground position and the little cottage tableau somehow recessed as the distant object of her gaze, thus making it even harder for the artist to do justice to its symbolic richness. Again and again in Bleak House ravishing possibilities for the illustrator arise, which on closer inspection prove to be subtly dependent on the larger context, so much a part of the fine mesh of the novel, that a little engraving would become a crude oversimplification. This is tantamount to saying there are no isolated moments in the novel, which of course is not true ; and Phiz does have some successes with the vignettes, with Mr. Chadband, for instance. Michael Steig has skilfully drawn attention to the graphic parallels between the Chadband and Turveydrop plates which subtly link the two as hypocrites of a special type. But these are satirical figures from an older Dickensian mode (Pecksniff, Stiggins) and Phiz would naturally feel more at home with them. Phiz, I'm sure, recognized how difficult his task as illustrator to Bleak House had become, and how impossible it was to compete with Di- ckens's text. Hence his mixtures of illustrative modes. The old-style vignette is, in the later part of the novel, mixed with the «dark plates», and the two together do go some way towards meeting the challenge of Dickens's complex novel. But they work in very different ways. I am thinking here not so much of iconography as of format and structure in the two kinds of illustration and their relation to text. In one or two casual references to Dickens earlier I implied that all the various illustrations were tableauesque markers of important moments in the narrative : but I now want to emphasize the distinction between vignette and dark plate, and it is a distinction in the way each co-operates with the text. The special advantage of the vignette book illustration is the lack of a frame. The eye passes between text and illustration quite easily. There is nothing formally to stop it meandering back and forth. Dickens's books made some interesting experiments in trying to integrate illustration and text. Sometimes the text was wrapped around a woodcut vignette, as in The Old Curiosity Shop. Sometimes the illustration wrapped itself around the text, as in The Chimes. But more usually the Dickens illustration occu- pied a separate plate, which, when the monthly parts were bound up together in a single volume, took its place next to the relevant passage in the novel. In the vignette illustration the central human action takes place in the centre, and the eye goes straight to the characters. There they are, in position, striking particular expressive attitudes, rather like the melodrama tableaux. Their dialogue can be supplied from the adjacent page of text. The effect is like that of a cartoon frame without the speech ballons. Transitions between narrative and illustration and back to narrative again are not abrupt. A second or third glance at the plate will then take in a number of emblematic details scattered in the area between the central figures and the rough circumference of the vignette : these details can rein- force the central drama or act as ironic commentary on it, and they may or may not correspond to significant descriptive details in the main text. Either way,text and illustration are very closely related. The registering of the vignette is akin to a literary exercise. It does not unduly disturb the main literary activity of the reader's mind. The reading of emblematic detail together with the easy visual access from written page to illustrated characters in tableau and back again to story reduces to a minimum the interruption to the reading momentum. The dark plates however make different demands. Bleak House has ten of these, all in the last half of the book, except for the frontispiece portrait of Chesney Wold. Most of them evoke the deadened, decaying world of the Dedlocks and the London slum, Tom-All-Alone's. They don't inform with clusters of significant accessory detail. They are not to be read, like the vignettes, but understood in different terms. Phiz is now experi- menting, as Michael Steig observes, with the possibilities of form, tones, pattern and structure. In these cases the reader wishing to take full account of the illustrations has to make a considerable adjustment. Figures and objects emerge more subtly from a dark background into light, instead of appearing vignette-wise in dark outline scribbled against the light background of the page, as is the text itself. Further, these plates are distinctly framed off. The vignette gradually emerged out of the page, to gather its principal action in the centre, like the tableau, congealing the action for a moment. There was no formal barrier between the page of text and the activity in the plate. Its margins were uncertain. The dark plates appear at first glance as black or grey rectangles on the page, strikingly separate from the page of text. Often the rigid geometry of this format is reinforced by the composition of the illustration. In «Tom-All-Alone's» the two dark masses of the foreground houses act as repoussoir devices, and the heavy wooden brace at the top seem to close off the area. This picture has always been acclaimed as a powerfully expressive portrait of the Dickens setting. «What a sermon that little drawing preaches»( 11), Beatrix Potter remarked in her Jour- nal. As didactic art it was evidently just as expressive as the more vigo- rously detailed vignette, but it works in a different way. Its impact is not dependent on the quasi-literary idiom of the vignette (though the church tower and hanging doll may be so interpreted). The full horror of this crazy, confined alley, the only outlet from which appears to be the graveyard, is conveyed by more orthodox pictorial methods — chiaroscuro, tone and structure. Phiz could not have realised this foul incubator of disease in a vignette. Cattermole might have done, but his line is rather too fussily pic- turesque. The artist is working on his own terms here, I feel. The illustration has ceased trying to be a vivacious graphic vehicle for the narrative, and offers instead an alternative way of entering the world of Bleak House. Ostensibly co-operative, it is actually more competitive. In order to avoid being a reductive, literalist adjunct to the text, the illustration develops a poetry of its own by deploying the painter's vocabulary of tone and composition to conjure expressive atmosphere. Framed off and pictorially more complex, illustration is no longer easily assimilable into the reading experience. We now return to Daniel Deronda. George Eliot's description of the painter's task — to give stability to one beautiful moment — is too simplified as we have seen. But we have also seen how the «truth of change» — the historian's task — perplexes the artist who has to try various ways of giving contextual meaning to his tableau. And we have seen one famous partnership of writer and artist beginning to disintegrate, as illustration becomes inadequate or generically inappropriate. I shall finish with the opening sentence of George Eliot's novel, where Gwendolen's appearance puzzles Deronda as he watches her at the gaming table : Was she beautiful or not beautiful ? and what was the secret of form or expression which gave the dynamic quality to her glance ? was the good or evil genius dominant in those beams ? Probably the evil ; or else why was the effect that of unrest rather than of undisturbed charm ? Adapting this to my theme in this paper, I can hear, behind these lines, George Eliot saying to an imaginary illustrator : «I dare you to capture my heroine in a simple portrait». «Character», she had said in Middlemarch, «is a process and an unfolding» (12). The truth which the «historian» knows is that the stability of one moment, beautiful or otherwise, is quite illusory. Illustration is not only inadequate, it is misleading. Life is not to be simplified into a sequence of tableaux. Life is unpunctuated narrative.

NOTES

1. William Holman Hunt, Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1913), vol. II, p. 403. 2. Ibid. 3. John Ruskin, Modern Painters, vol. III (1856), ch. VII, par. 18. 4. Ibid., vol. I (1843), ch. II, par. 9. 5. John Ruskin, quoted in Great Victorian Pictures (Arts Council, 1978), p. 32. 6. Holman Hunt, op. cit., I, 59. 7. Q. D. Leavis, «The Dickens Illustrations : Their Function», in F. R. and Q. D. Leavis, Dickens the Novelist (1972), p. 435. 8. Douglas Jerrold, Black-Ey'd Susan, Act. II, Sc. 2 : in Nineteenth Century Plays, ed. G. Rowell (2nd edition, 1972), pp. 22-3. 9. John Harvey, Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators (1970) ; Michael Steig, Dickens and Phiz (1978) ; Jane Cohen, Charles Dickens and his Original Illus- trators (1980) : there is a particularly interesting study of Phiz's David Copperfield illustrations by Stephen Lutman in Reading the Victorian Novel : Detail into Form (1980), ed. Ian Gregor, pp. 196-225. 10. Q. D. Leavis, op. cit., p. 463. 11. Beatrix Potter, Journal, entry for 15 December 1883 : quoted in Jane Cohen, op. cit., p. 110. 12. Middlemarch, ch. 15.

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