When Oscar Wilde celebrates orientalism as a route to art’s freedom from the representation of nature, he effectively encapsulates orientalism’s most significant aesthetic function in the nineteenth century. The present chapter will show, through readings of poems by Wordsworth, Leconte de Lisle, Gautier, Landor, Moore, Hemans, and Tennyson, as well as Wilde, how the Orient’s affiliation with the artful enables it to play a role approximating that which Wilde theorizes for it in retrospect. The Orient’s crucial part in nineteenth-century poetics’ movement away from an essentially romantic view of the purpose of literary art and towards aestheticism and the belief in the value of art for art’s sake consistently depends upon the presumption that the Orient is characterized by unnaturalness, as discussed in the preceding chapter. Playing equally important roles, however, are the perception that the Orient is allied with art against nature and the assumption that Islamic Middle Eastern art is essentially antimimetic.
As this chapter will explain, orientalism provides a precious arena in which poets elaborate their attitudes towards art (per se and in contradistinction to nature). Orientalism also supplies poets with a variety of models, drawn from oriental textiles and architecture as well as literature, upon which to base a modified poetics. As orientalism comes increasingly to guide and structure the evolution of poetics, the particular characteristics stereotypical of the Orient — so important earlier in the century — begin to recede in significance; the luxuriance and obsession of romantic-period orientalist writing fades. What remains instead in the art for art’s sake movements in both Britain (aestheticism) and France (Parnassianism) is an orientalism that is superficially suppressed yet fundamental to the poetics of the time.
Grudgingly and with skepticism, William Wordsworth’s “The Haunted Tree” takes a first, essential step towards the destination Wilde announces seventy years later.1 Wordsworth’s unstated starting point is an assumed opposition between nature and the East. To this he applies a second assumption, that of an affiliation between the East and art. The poem opens with praise for various features of a distinctly English landscape. The speaker mentions “rocks, fields, [and] woods” (5) before narrowing his focus to two types of vegetation heavily associated with England but not with the Orient: “the time-dismantled Oak” (7) and the “heath, which now, attired / In the whole fulness of its bloom” (8–9). Beneath the oak, the flowering heath “affords / Couch beautiful as e’er for earthly use / Was fashioned” (9–11). Although the pastoral scene described is eminently natural, beautiful couches can be fashioned either
by the hand of Art,
That eastern Sultan, amid flowers enwrought
On silken tissue, might diffuse his limbs
In languor; or, by Nature, for repose
Of panting Wood-nymph, wearied with the chase. (11–15)
Wordsworth’s figuring of art in the domain of an eastern sultan both confirms and capitalizes upon the association between the Middle East and art, while at the same time reinforcing the disjunction between the Middle East and nature. Wordsworth gives several clues to the unnaturalness of this sultan, who becomes a pivotal figure in the poem’s aesthetics. The scene in which he appears, for instance, is clearly meant to be indoors, whereas nature is presented as an outdoor phenomenon throughout the remainder of the poem. Further, the sultan’s languor appears unnatural, especially by comparison with the wood nymph’s recent exertion, or even with the more stately exercise of the “Lady” who is the poem’s true object of admiration. Although the wood nymph’s mythical identity might seem at first to place her too in the category of the unnatural, she is closely affiliated with the European literary tradition in which the presence of such mythical figures is understood (paradoxically) to enhance the naturalness of a scene. Her participation in this tradition allows the poem to call upon nature not only as environment (as in the first eleven lines) but also as the premier standard of moral rightness — a standard that the languid sultan would be unlikely to meet.2
In “The Haunted Tree” and elsewhere, the alliance between the Orient and art is to a degree one of convenience: if both art and the Middle East are defined ontologically in terms of their opposition to nature, an association between them becomes inevitable.3 The linkage of East and art is specified in “The Haunted Tree” in the image of the “flowers enwrought / On silken tissue.” While the sultan is, like the speaker on the heath, surrounded by flowers, the sultan’s flowers are not fresh, natural blossoms. Art’s ability to make the silk bloom suggests the extent to which art in the Middle East usurps the place of nature, which is responsible for producing flowers elsewhere.4 Art and the Middle East stand together in this poem, juxtaposed to nature, which is, in the guise of oak and heath, all “our human sense [doth] / Ask, for its pleasure” (5–6). This usurpation is quickly terminated as the poem proceeds to elide even the most innocuous aspects of the supernatural and instead casts the natural landscape as the self-sufficient observer both of the Lady and of its own beauties. By removing the speaker as observer, the poem posits the possibility of what Saree Makdisi terms in another context “a non-artistic form of natural poetry,”5 a mode sharply divergent from that represented by the languid sultan in his ornamented surroundings. Thus nature’s primacy is once again asserted, but only after the artful Orient’s brief intrusion has played its key role in crystallizing the poem’s aesthetic stance.
While Wordsworth recognizes a connection between the Middle East and art, he rejects both rather than explore the potential this connection might have.6 In contrast, when Leconte de Lisle describes nature in light of his own confederation of the Middle East and art, his poems reveal a consistent and significant appreciation of the resulting aesthetic possibilities. For Leconte de Lisle, the Orient’s link with art positions it as an important source of inspiration; the artful East is a poetic origin for him, much as the pastoral landscape is for Wordsworth.
The centrality of the Orient to Leconte de Lisle’s poetics becomes clear in analysis of two poems, both entitled “L’Orient” [“The Orient”] but written at opposite ends of his career.7 Although the two poems share a single sensibility to a remarkable degree, the earlier one is more exuberant and more confident in its ability to reach the aesthetic ideal it projects:
Comme un rubis superbe aux vives étincelles,
Vous brillez aux regards, poétiques et belles,
O rives d’Orient!
Sur vos sables dorés l’onde est bleuâtre et claire,
Tous vos jours sont de feux et vos nuits de lumière,
Vous êtes le Levant.
Vous êtes le Levant aux merveilles humaines,
Aux vieux harems d’amour où la vie est sans peines,
Au splendide turban,
Au costume idéal, au noble cimeterre
A l’arabe coursier volant dans la poussière
Aux combats du Croissant!
O rives d’Orient, mon âme vous devine,
Vous murmurez ainsi que l’onde crystalline
Qui coule en nos vallons,
Vous êtes le doux vent qui fraîchit nos prairies
Et fait couler au loin leurs surfaces fleuries
En de légers festons.
Quand vient l’ombre du soir, comme une palme blanche
Qui couronne vos bords, la vague qui s’épanche
Et rit sur votre sein,
Semble, aux lueurs des cieux, une écharpe brodée,
Sur votre humide cou négligemment jetée,
A replis de satin.
Vous êtes le palais de brillante féerie,
Vous êtes le seul vase où l’on puise la vie,
Et le droit de l’aimer;
De l’empire d’amour vous êtes la richesse.
O rives d’Orient, le regard ne vous laisse
Que pour vous rechercher!
[Like a superb ruby of vivid brilliance, / You sparkle on sight, poetic and beautiful, / Oh shores of Orient! / On your gilded sands the water is bluish and clear, / All your days are of fire and your nights of light, / You are the Levant.
You are the Levant of the human marvels, / Of the old harems of love where life is without cares, / Of the splendid turban, / Of the ideal costume, of the noble scimitar, / Of the Arab charger flying through the dust / To the battles of the Crescent!
Oh shores of Orient, my soul understands you, / You murmur just like the crystalline water / That flows in our vales, / You are the gentle wind that cools our meadows / And makes their flowered surfaces flow far and wide / In waving festoons.
When the shadow of evening comes, like a white palm tree / That crowns your edges, the wave that overflows / And smiles on your breast / Seems, in the heavens’ gleam, an embroidered scarf, / Negligently tossed on your moist neck / In folds of satin.
You are the palace of sparkling enchantment, / You are the only vessel from which is drawn life / And the right to love it; / You are the wealth of the empire of love. / Oh shores of Orient, the gaze never leaves you / Except to seek you again.]
After delineating the stereotypical marvels of oriental nature, humanity, and splendor in the first two stanzas, the speaker demonstrates in the third stanza that the origin of beauty lies in the East. He begins with a simile (“O rives d’Orient [...] / Vous murmurez ainsi que l’onde crystalline / Qui coule en nos vallons” [Oh shores of Orient ... / You murmur just like the crystalline water / That flows in our valley]) that creates a parallel between the Orient and an almost Wordsworthian, rural, European landscape. Leconte de Lisle’s speaker posits this correspondence with the absolute confidence of spiritual authority: “mon âme vous devine” [my soul understands you]. He then restates the Orient’s role unmediated by any figure of speech: “Vous êtes le doux vent qui fraîchit nos prairies / Et fait couler au loin leurs surfaces fleuries / En de légers festons” [You are the gentle wind that cools our meadows / And makes their flowered surfaces flow far and wide / In waving festoons]. The Orient now becomes responsible for creating beauty from the raw material of the Occident. Without the gentle wind of the Orient, the meadows merely grow flowers; with it, they are festooned.
Leconte de Lisle’s choice of this particular image is important. The flowery meadows would, of course, have natural beauty, but the oriental wind offers a different option, one that is artful rather than natural even while it enhances the natural beauty of the meadows. If Wordsworth’s search for “a non-artistic form of natural poetry”8 entails rejecting the East, Leconte de Lisle’s vision of an artistic form of natural poetry requires welcoming and exploiting it. The aesthetic ideal Leconte de Lisle expresses in this poem corresponds in its essential respects with the position outlined by Jacques Derrida in discussion of Hegel: “artistic beauty is superior to natural beauty, as the mind that produces it is superior to nature. One must therefore say that absolute beauty, the telos or final essence of the beautiful, appears in art and not in nature as such.”9 In the context of this poem, the transformation from flowers to festoons indicates the creative power of the Orient, its ability to convert natural material into artificial, decorative structure.10 Thus the oriental(ized), not the natural, assumes the role of the beautiful, and orientalism, as the producer of the beautiful, takes on the status of “the mind [...] superior to nature.”
The subsequent stanza supplies another example of the Orient’s transformative powers. The starting point is again a natural scene: a wave coming up over the shore’s edge at evening. However, because the scene is set in the Orient, it connotes from the outset artistic as much as natural beauty. The wave is compared to a palm tree, that quintessential element of conventionalized Middle Eastern nature. This palm/wave “couronne” [crowns] the shores; the term alludes both to architecture and to the splendid ornaments of royalty. In either case, a presumably natural (and geographically generic) image of waves washing ashore has become not only specifically orientalized but also thereby reinterpreted through simile as a product of human art rather than of natural forces.11
To this already complex image, Leconte de Lisle adds yet another simile; the wave now “semble [...] une écharpe brodée, / Sur votre humide cou négligemment jetée, / A replis de satin” [seems ... an embroidered scarf, / Negligently tossed on your moist neck / In folds of satin]. Here again, the natural image is displaced through a comparison with a work of art: an embroidered scarf. Like the first simile, this one has a definitely oriental flavor; we might remember the “flowers enwrought / On silken tissue” with which Wordsworth surrounds his “eastern Sultan” in “The Haunted Tree,” or the many nineteenth-century paintings of supposed odalisques, draped or surrounded with folds of cloth (no doubt “négligemment jetée” as well). Moreover, richly decorated clothwares such as this embroidered scarf are, like ornamented architectural details, classic representatives of oriental art.12 The scarf supplements the previously described crowning so as to entirely overwhelm the initial natural image of the wave with a specifically oriental artfulness. In this context, the orient(al), including the Orient’s natural environment, appears as fully and inherently artful.
“L’Orient” ends with an even grander assessment of the East’s importance. The Orient is, the speaker concludes, “le seul vase où l’on puise la vie / Et le droit de l’aimer / De l’empire d’amour vous êtes la richesse” [the only vessel from which is drawn life / And the right to love it; / You are the wealth of the empire of love.]13 In short, it is the spiritual origin and destination of humankind.14 Yet even this extraordinary status is grounded in the Orient’s association with art; the Orient is “le palais de brillante féerie” [the palace of sparkling enchantment]. To identify the Orient as a palace inevitably recalls the poem’s related earlier allusions: to ornamented architecture, to luxurious harems. A palace is, moreover, a work of art in itself. That this should be a palace of “sparkling enchantment” is only to be expected, for Leconte de Lisle’s Orient is nothing if not sparkling, and enchantment too is an art. If, as the poem’s final line says of the Orient, “le regard ne vous laisse / Que pour vous rechercher” [the gaze never leaves you / Except to seek you again], that is very much in keeping with the Orient’s role as an aesthetic origin. It is, in effect, the point of reference to which the poet must always return.
Thus not only does this first “L’Orient” assume that art flourishes in and defines the East — two important suppositions in themselves — but it also gives the East a virtually unlimited sphere of influence. Once the Orient has been accepted as a source for art, it must also inform (if not actually dictate) the sort of art to which it gives rise. Leconte de Lisle implements this notion here in a supremely confident but relatively superficial fashion, embroidering his poem like the embroidered scarf of the fourth stanza. His second “L’Orient,” a sonnet, adopts a more measured approach and reveals a greater awareness of orientalism’s competitors, but it shares its predecessor’s basic tenets, presenting the Orient as a spiritual and aesthetic source.
Vénérable Berceau du monde, où l’Aigle d’or,
Le soleil, du milieu des Roses éternelles,
Dans l’espace ébloui qui sommeillait encor
Ouvrit sur l’Univers la splendeur de ses ailes!
Fleuves sacrés, forêts, mers aux flots radieux,
Ame ardente des fleurs, neiges des vierges cimes,
O très saint Orient, qui conçus tous les Dieux,
Puissant évocateur des visions sublimes!
Vainement, à l’étroit dans ton immensité,
Flagellés du désir de l’occident mythique,
En des siècles lointains nos pères t’ont quitté;
Le vivant souvenir de la Patrie antique
Fait toujours, dans notre ombre et nos rêves sans fin,
Resplendir ta lumière à l’horizon divin.
[Venerable cradle of the world, where the eagle of gold, / The sun, from the midst of the eternal roses, / In the dazzled space that was slumbering still, / Opened the splendor of its wings onto the Universe!
Sacred rivers, forests, seas with shining waves, / Fiery soul of flowers, snows of untrodden peaks, / Oh most holy Orient, which conceived all the gods, / Powerful summoner of sublime visions!
In vain, constricted within your immensity / Flagellated by desire for the mythic Occident, / In distant centuries our forefathers left you;
The living memory of the ancient country / Always makes, in our shadow and our endless dreams / Your light resplendent on the divine horizon.]
Like its predecessor, this poem introduces the Orient in the context of an otherwise undistinguished natural image — in this case, the sunrise. Playing on the word “Orienf’s related meaning, “east,” the speaker offers the Orient as the “vénérable Berceau du monde” [venerable cradle of the world], incorporating into his depiction conventional terminology such as “or” [gold] and “splendeur” [splendor].15 This Edenic Orient then appears as a primary creative force: “O très saint Orient, qui conçus tous les Dieux, / Puissant évocateur des visions sublimes!” [Oh most holy Orient, which conceived all the gods, / Powerful summoner of sublime visions!]. The implicit linkage between the Orient and the idea of Paradise recalls Leconte de Lisle’s “Le Désert” (discussed in chapter 3), but the Orient’s aesthetic function here has more in common with that of the first “L’Orient.” As there, the East is both a source for art and a persistent point of reference.
On the other hand, this poem’s East is far more starkly and explicitly distinguished from the Occident than its predecessor’s, in which there is no substantial discontinuity between the speaker’s own occidental world and the Orient to which he looks with such admiration. When he proclaims that the Orient is the sole vessel in which life and love are possible, he does not appear to deny himself entry into that vessel. In contrast, the second “L’Orient” presents Orient and Occident as mutually exclusive alternatives. The speaker seems resigned to his ancestors’ abandonment of the Orient in favor of “l’occident mythique” [the mythic occident] — an abandonment that Leconte de Lisle mirrors by choosing the strictly occidental sonnet form for this poem rather than the more expansive (and perhaps more orientalized) form of the first “L’Orient.”
Leconte de Lisle also comes much closer in this poem to the conservative orientalism exemplified by Hugo’s “Novembre” (discussed in chapter 2). Like Hugo, he indicates that memories and impressions of the Orient continue to guide aesthetic and spiritual life in the Occident, even while true participation in the world of the Orient seems beyond the speaker’s reach.16 However, “Novembre” lacks the sense of regret evident in this poem, which appears to long for the Orient rather than welcoming the return to the Occident. In the end, Leconte de Lisle presents the Orient as an origin from whose heights the Occident has fallen. Although the story of such a fall is of course fundamental to the history of Western culture (from the biblical Eden onwards), its particular aesthetic significance is foregrounded here through Leconte de Lisle’s orientalism.
By resorting to the Orient, Leconte de Lisle articulates, in both poems, a specific and powerful aesthetic vision, in which the Orient assumes a formative role in both the genesis and development of art. That this conception of the Orient was useful to him at both ends of his career, despite evident changes in his aesthetic philosophy, suggests once again the potency of the East as a standard in literary art. Whether this standard is attainable, as in his earlier poem, or not, as in his later one, the Orient continues to dominate Leconte de Lisle’s poetics.
At the heart of the Orient’s status as aesthetic source is the notion of the imagination, the ability to envision and express in artistic form what does not exist in empirical reality. Leconte de Lisle alludes to this in his second “L’Orient” when he calls the Orient “Puissant évocateur des visions sublimes” [Powerful summoner of sublime visions], but he does not devote particular attention to it. His colleague Théophile Gautier, on the other hand, places the imagination and its relationship with orientalism right at the center of his poem “Les Souhaits” [“The Wishes”] (1830).17 This poem presents an imagination turned free to desire whatever it would; the result is a distinctly orientalized vision of art as well as of love.
“Les Souhaits” begins with a relatively generic fantasy:
Si quelque jeune fée à l’aile de saphir,
Sous une sombre et fraîche arcade,
Blanche comme un reflet de la perle d’Orphir,
Surgissait à mes yeux, au doux bruit du zéphyr,
De l’écume de la cascade,
Me disant: Que veux-tu? larges coffres pleins d’or,
Palais immenses, pierreries?
Parle; mon art est grand: te faut-il plus encor?
Je te le donnerai; je puis faire un trésor
D’un vil monceaux [sic] d’herbes flétries (1–10)
[If some young fairy with sapphire wings, / Under a somber, cool arcade, / White as a reflection of the pearl of Ophir, / Appeared before my eyes at the sweet sound of the breeze, / Of the waterfall’s froth,
Saying to me: What do you want? Large chests full of gold, / Immense palaces, gems? / Speak; my art is great: what more do you need? /1 will give it to you: I could make a treasure / From a worthless heap of withered grass]
Only the casual mention of Ophir identifies this fantasy of a wish-granting fairy as oriental.18 The opulence of the wishes she proposes does conform to the stereotype of the oriental, and her position under an “arcade” could be construed as oriental since arches are commonly associated with Middle Eastern architecture, but neither of these elements has an explicitly oriental cast. However, the remainder of “Les Souhaits” is orientalist in the conventional nineteenth-century fashion. As the speaker answers his hypothetical fairy, he spins a broadly imperialist fantasy that presents the Orient in all its stereotyped glory:
Je lui dirais: Je veux un ciel riant et pur
Réfléchi par un lac limpide,
Je veux un beau soleil qui luise dans l’azur,
Sans que jamais brouillard, vapeur, nuage obscur
Ne voilent son orbe splendide;
Et pour bondir sous moi je veux un cheval blanc,
Enfant léger de l’Arabie,
A la crinière longue, à l’oeil étincelant,
Et, comme l’hippogriffe, en une heure volant
De la Norvège à la Nubie;
Je veux un kiosque rouge, aux minarets dorés,
Aux minces colonnes d’albátre,
Aux fantasques arceaux d’oeufs pendants décorés,
Aux murs de mosaïque, aux vitraux colorés
Par où se glisse un jour bleuâtre;
Et quand il fera chaud, je veux un bois mouvant
De sycomores et d’yeuses,
Qui me suive partout au souffle d’un doux vent,
Comme un grand éventail sans cesse soulevant
Ses masses de feuilles soyeuses.
Je veux une tartane avec ses matelots,
Ses cordages, ses blanches voiles
Et son corset de cuivre où se brisent les flots,
Qui me berce le long de verdoyants îlots
Aux molles lueurs des étoiles.
Je veux soir et matin m’éveiller, m’endormir
Au son de voix italiennes,
Et pendant tout le jour entendre au loin frémir
Le murmure plaintif des eaux du Bendemir,
Ou des harpes éoliennes;
Et je veux, les seins nus, une Aimée agitant
Son écharpe de cachemire
Au-dessus de son front de rubis éclatant,
Des spahis, un harem, comme un riche sultan
Ou de Bagdad ou de Palmyre.
Je veux un sabre turc, un poignard indien
Dont le manche de saphirs brille;
Mais surtout je voudrais un coeur fait pour le mien,
Qui le sentit, l’aimât, et qui le comprit bien,
Un coeur naïf de jeune fille! (11–50)
[I would tell her: I want a pleasant, clear sky, / Reflected in a limpid lake, / I want a beautiful sun that shines on the azure, / Without fog, mist, (or) dark cloud ever / Veiling its splendid orb;
And to bound beneath me I want a white horse, / Fleet offspring of Arabia, / With a long mane, with brilliant eye, / And, like the hippogriff, flying in an hour / From Norway to Nubia;
I want a red kiosk, with gilded minarets, / With slender columns of alabaster, / With fantastic arches of hanging decorated eggs, / With walls of mosaic, with stained-glass windows / Through which the bluish daylight glides;
And when the weather is hot, I want a moving woodland / Of sycamores and ilexes / That follows me everywhere on the breath of a gentle wind, / Like a great fan ceaselessly raising / Its masses of silken leaves.
I want a tartan with its sailors, / Its rigging, its white sails, / And its copper hull where the waves are dashed, / That rocks me the length of verdant islets / By the feeble light of the stars.
I want to wake up and fall asleep, morning and evening, / To the sound of Italian voices, / And throughout the day to hear whispering far away / The plaintive murmur of the waters of Bendemir, / Or of Aeolian harps;
And I want, her breasts bare, an Almah waving / Her scarf of cashmere / Above her forehead sparkling with rubies, / Some spahis, a harem, like a rich sultan / Of either Baghdad or Palmyra.
I want a Turkish saber, an Indian dagger / Whose haft glitters with sapphires; / But above all I would like a heart made for mine, / That would be sensitive to it, love it, and understand it well, / A young girl’s naïve heart!]
Although the speaker’s fantasy includes substantial elements unrelated to the Orient, it is to the Orient that he returns time and again. Furthermore, the last two stanzas’ focus on the East provides the framework for the speaker’s final and supreme wish, even though the wish itself (for an innocent young female lover) appears universal rather than specifically Middle Eastern. As a result, the Orient emerges from “Les Souhaits” as the dominant force structuring the speaker’s desires, a force that both supports and subsumes his other, nonoriental aspirations.
But ultimately the Orient is more than this, for “Les Souhaits” is about imagination and art as well as love and desire. Although the yearned-for “jeune fille” [young girl] is mentioned only in the poem’s last line, she echoes strongly the “jeune fée” [young fairy] of the first line. Alliteration aside, both the “fée” and the “fille” are presented as hypothetical, archetypal figures, as is confirmed by the use of “quelque” [some] (for the fairy) and the indefinite article (for the girl). The girl’s innocence is prefigured by the fairy’s pearly whiteness. Most importantly, the girl’s only named feature is her heart, which is “fait pour le mien, / Qui le sentît, l’aimât, et qui le comprît bien” [made for mine, / That would be sensitive to it, love it, and understand it well]. In other words, this is a girl who will understand his heart’s desire — yet that is exactly what the fairy is now also able to do, thanks to the speaker’s list of his desires. With the functions of the girl and the fairy essentially duplicating one another in this crucial respect, the speaker’s professed desire for the girl becomes a restatement of his desire for the fairy, the same desire that leads him to postulate the fairy’s existence in the first place. To use the terms of the poem’s final stanza, what the speaker really wants most (“surtout je voudrais”), then, is the fairy. For him, the fairy represents the capacity not only to desire but also to conceive of what he desires: to imagine.19
Through the figure of the fairy, “Les Souhaits” defines this ability to imagine as oriental in origin and in character. Although, as noted above, the fairy’s association with the Orient is initially slight, it becomes inevitable and potent in the context of the poem as a whole. The oblique orientalist suggestions of the first two stanzas are taken up and affirmed later in the poem. The reference to the arcade, for instance, is reflected and enhanced in the detailed description of Middle Eastern architecture in the fifth stanza. Similarly, the second stanza’s allusion to opulent wealth becomes firmly grounded in the Middle East in the penultimate stanza as the speaker lists a rich sultan’s possessions. Finally, as the speaker’s desires are channeled through the fairy, they become concentrated around the Orient, suggesting a specific link between the East and the fairy’s identity.20 Another version of this link appears in the speaker’s subsequent request for an Arabian horse able to fly, “comme l’hippogriffe, en une heure [...]/ De la Norvège à la Nubie” [like the hippogriff, ... in an hour / From Norway to Nubia].21 Through its supernatural powers, the Arabian horse has very much the same empowering effect on the speaker as the fairy does. It can be no coincidence that the speaker wants the horse, like the fairy, to take him to the Middle East — and to a part of the Middle East (Nubia) that is about as far as one can get from Norway.22
Both the vehicle (the fairy) and the content of the speaker’s imaginings are, then, fundamentally oriental. If we take as a premise that in claiming to desire a “jeune fille,” the speaker is actually also restating his desire for a “jeune fée,” we must conclude that the object of his desire is, at bottom, what the fairy represents — the ability to imagine — and further, that this ability is oriental in essence. “Les Souhaits” becomes, in this respect, a statement of aesthetics as much as of personal desire, reframing carnal desire as desire for imagination and then linking the gratification of the desire for imagination with the Orient.23
Further, in at least two instances, the poem suggests a connection between the Middle East and art in a more general sense. First, the fairy’s opening speech describes her skill in terms of art: “mon art est grand” [my art is great]. This is the fairy’s only definitive statement in a stanza that consists mostly of suggestions to the speaker; as a result, these four words acquire a status they might not otherwise. As evidence of her art’s greatness, moreover, she explains that she is able to take the uninspiring material of nature and transform it into something of value and beauty: “je puis faire un trésor / D’un vil monceaux [sic] d’herbes flétries” [I could make a treasure / From a worthless heap of withered grass]. The fairy’s depiction of her art conforms to the notion that art is to operate upon the raw material provided by nature. However, her view rejects the imitation of nature and asserts instead the superiority of art. Thus not only does the fairy’s brief statement identify the Middle East with imaginative art, but it also projects a vision of art highly consistent with avant-garde orientalist poetics.
Second, “Les Souhaits” reinforces the linkage of East and art in its elaborate description of the marvels of Middle Eastern architecture. It was, of course, not at all unusual for nineteenth-century Europeans to identify the Islamic Orient with its architecture, especially the arches, columns, domes, and minarets of its mosques. William Thackeray, for instance, says of Islam that “Never did a creed possess temples more elegant.”24 In poetry, as I have shown, the depiction of specifically Middle Eastern architectural forms plays an important role in defining the unnaturalness of oriental nature and in demonstrating the Orient’s transmutation of nature into art.25 “Les Souhaits” itself is only one of a number of Gautier’s poems in which Middle Eastern architectural elements appear as a privileged motif.26 The speaker of “Les Souhaits” grants Oriental architecture a prominent position by making architectural elements the first items he requests after (symbolically) arriving in the Middle East on the back of his Arabian horse. As the poem’s first detailed and specific image of the Middle East, the speaker’s depiction of Middle Eastern architecture here is in a position to define the terms of the poem’s representation of the Middle East.
Je veux un kiosque rouge, aux minarets dorés,
Aux minces colonnes d’albâtre,
Aux fantasques arceaux d’oeufs pendants décorés,
Aux murs de mosaïque
[I want a red kiosk, with gilded minarets, / With slender columns of alabaster, / With fantastic arches of hanging decorated eggs, / With walls of mosaic]
No architectural element goes undecorated, and the decoration is absolutely Middle Eastern, even perhaps arabesque. The artful ornamentation on which Gautier insists in this passage is, moreover, inseparable from the major art form depicted here: the architecture itself. The speaker presents his Middle East as dominated and defined by ornamented architectural forms. His attention to architecture emphasizes not only the Orient’s divergence from nature and natural forms but also the great extent to which such divergence is marked as specifically artful (rather than unnatural in the sense of supernatural, for instance). Further, by portraying every oriental architectural element as decorated, from the gilded minarets to the mosaic walls, he allows for a double and even triple artfulness. The architecture is an art form to which yet other art forms (gilding, eggs, mosaic) can be applied as ornamentation; in turn, the decoration applied to the eggs represents a third level of ornamentation.27 The result has nothing to do with nature, nothing to do with the representation of nature, nothing to do with mimesis — but everything to do with beauty and with art existing unto itself and for its own sake. Rae Beth Gordon argues that “[w]hat Gautier [...] seek[s] in ornamental confusion is a second creation that will rival nature”;28 in “Les Souhaits,” it seems, he attempts to materialize the object of this quest.
In the context of the poem as a whole, the fairy’s dual allegiance to art and to the Middle East identifies the Middle East with art; the depiction of Middle Eastern architecture strengthens and specifies this connection. Such a connection is also consistent with the fact that the poem mentions no art that is not Middle Eastern in origin, beginning with architecture and following with dance and ornamented weaponry. By privileging architecture in particular, though, Gautier is able to offer a model for art as neither the art-less Occident, nor even the fairy, can do. Art appears exclusively attached to the East, and the East aesthetically central as an origin of art. More significantly, through the beauty of its ornamented architecture, the Orient provides a way towards an art more purely a beautiful product of the imagination: l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake.
“Les Souhaits” was written early in Gautier’s career, well before he had articulated a philosophy of “l’art pour l’art,” which, like the Middle Eastern architecture he describes in this poem, prefers to dispense with the imitation of nature in favor of purer devotion to beauty and art. Yet it appears that the fundamental inclinations on which he would base this philosophy were, even at this early stage, remarkably secure. His notion of the Middle East as inherently artful allows it to emerge at the very heart of this developing aesthetic philosophy. His ideal of art for its own sake finds a source in the Orient, and specifically in the Islamic Middle East as a place defined by nonrepresentational art forms.
The idea of Middle Eastern art as a model for European artists is taken up by nineteenth-century poets in a variety of ways. Gautier’s approach is at once among the grandest and the most subtly complex. At this stage of his career, however, Gautier gives little credit to Middle Eastern literature’s potential as a model. He is attracted instead to a more generalized notion of art and to the plastic arts in particular. A number of English poems follow a different course, modeling themselves specifically upon Middle Eastern literature, which comes to serve as an important poetic source in its own right. My discussion of such poems begins with two based on the famous Persian trope of the nightingale’s unrequited love for the rose: Walter Savage Landor’s “The Nightingale and Rose,” and Thomas Moore’s “Beauty and Song.”29
Landor’s poem tells the story of a “maid” who is saddened by the tale of the besotted nightingale bleeding to death from the wounds inflicted by his beloved rose’s thorns.30 Landor carefully sets the scene before introducing the maid:
From immemorial time
The Rose and Nightingale Attune the Persian rhyme
And point the Arab tale: Nor will you ever meet
So barbarous a man, In any outer street
Of Balkh or Astracán, In any lonely creek
Along the Caspian shore, Or where the tiger sleek
Pants hard in hot Mysore, As never shall have heard
In tower or tent or grove Of the sweet flower’s true bird,
The true bird’s only love. They’re known wherever shines
The crescent on the sword And guiltless are the vines
And Bacchus is abhorr’d. (1–20)31
Landor’s approach here is conventional. He presents the Orient as a timeless place in which natural and man-made features are intermingled; the “street” (7) parallels the “creek” (9), and “tower,” “tent,” and “grove” are all placed in the same category (14). He asserts the area’s Muslim identity with reference first to the crescent (18) and then to Islam’s prohibition of wine (19–20).
While the diverse places he mentions in these lines are united by these stereotypical characteristics, they all share a more important trait as well: their inhabitants know the story of the nightingale and the rose.32 The poem’s first four lines declare the story’s centrality to Middle Eastern literature — “the Persian rhyme,” “the Arab tale” — but the rest of the speaker’s introduction portrays the nightingale and the rose at the heart of Islamic culture as a whole. By so doing, Landor also grants literary art (of which the nightingale and rose story has become for this purpose the prime example) an exalted status within that culture. In turn, this move implicitly but forcefully characterizes Islamic culture in terms of its literary art, rather as Gautier’s “Les Souhaits” does in terms of architecture.
Having thus established the story’s oriental identity in the poem’s frame, the speaker is ready to begin his narrative:33
There was (we read) a maid,
The pride of Astrabad,
Who heard what song-men said,
And, all that day, was sad.
The moon hung large and round;
She gazed ere forth she went;
[...]
She hasten’d to the wood
Where idle bushes grew,
The Rose above them stood,
There stood her lover too.
Close were they, close as may
True lovers ever be! (21–6,29–34)34
The complex position of empirical reality in these lines has substantial aesthetic consequences. Initially, there is no indication that “what song-men said” is anything but completely fictional. Yet when the maid goes outside that evening she finds that the “song-men” are describing a phenomenon that really exists. Thus not only does poetic or literary art characterize the world of the Islamic Orient, as suggested by the poem’s introductory frame, but it also represents the reality of that world. In effect, then, there is no distinction between the Middle East’s art and its reality: art is reality.
The interchangeability of art and reality is underpinned by the role of nature in this poem. Although nightingales and roses are both natural phenomena, the poem presents them first and foremost as deriving from literature rather than nature. When the maid goes out to the wood, they are then discovered in nature. This represents a nearly Wildean reversal of the classical pattern, in which a natural phenomenon makes its way into literature — not vice versa. Moreover, the “nature” in which the maid finds the nightingale and the rose itself originates in literature. Landor’s parenthetical “we read” (21) makes clear that the maid and her surroundings are as much a product of literary art as is the story that moves her. Ultimately there is no oriental nature depicted, only layers of oriental literature.35 Once again, art’s dominance is complete.
The precedence of art over nature is reaffirmed in the subsequent section when the maid’s versified prayer turns out to be at least as powerful as the original tale of the “song-men.” God grants the maid’s request to preserve the rose after its lover’s death, to “Protect at least the one / From what the other bore” (69–70). Whereas nature would dictate not only the death of the wounded nightingale but also the drooping of the rose, the artful speech of the maid averts this outcome. Art’s potency is reinforced further in the poem’s final section, in which the speaker implies that only a “deaf man” would favor the “low unvarying voice / Of Cuckoo” over “the Rose’s bird” (89–92). These lines suggest a clear choice between oriental literary art and a dull (“unvarying”) version of European nature; the nightingale and oriental art are evidently to be preferred.
Landor’s presentation here corresponds generally with Gautier’s in “Les Souhaits.” For both poets, the Orient is fundamentally artful and (therefore) preferable to a staid Europe. By identifying the art(fulness) of the Orient in terms of literature rather than architecture, though, Landor appropriates the Middle East as a model for his own literary efforts in a more direct fashion than Gautier. The heart of Landor’s poem is the Persian story of the nightingale and the rose, upon which he layers the story of the “song-men” who tell that story, upon which he layers the story of the maid who hears the story the “song-men” tell, upon which he layers the fact that “we read” the story of the maid. The outermost layer, his poem “The Nightingale and Rose,” thus becomes his own rendition of the story we have supposedly read.36 In a sense, then, Landor is placing himself within his own verse narrative, as an oriental rather than orientalist literary artisan. Landor’s insertion of himself in his Middle Eastern model is also a manifestation of his larger effort to experiment at the edges of a mainstream romanticism with which he was never quite comfortable.37 Joseph Kestner, Pierre Vitoux, and others have seen this effort in terms of a (neo)classical impulse, to which Landor was no doubt vulnerable.38 However, orientalism gives him a more effective means to this end. In “The Nightingale and Rose,” he carefully delineates an aspect of the Arabic/Persian literary tradition and then reproduces it. As he does so, he devalues one of the key tenets of romanticism, the privileging of nature for aesthetic purposes. More importantly, he proffers in its stead a vision of oriental literary art set free from the constraining relationship with reality assumed in Western poetics.
The Persian story of the nightingale and the rose also provides the basis for Thomas Moore’s short poem “Beauty and Song.”39 Like Landor, Moore uses the story as a framework for the development of an aesthetic position. Although his position differs significantly from Landor’s, his topic — the correct relationship between art and nature — is the same, and he shares with Landor and the other poets discussed thus far the presumption that there is an integral connection between the East and art.
“Beauty and Song” is structured around an exchange of conversation between the rose and her lover, and concludes with a statement of Moore’s poetics. Both the nightingale’s opening comments and the rose’s reply are introduced with references to a conventionalized version of nature:
Down in yon summer vale,
Where the rill flows,
Thus said a Nightingale
To his loved Rose: —
“Though rich the pleasures
“Of song’s sweet measures,
“Vain were its melody,
“Rose, without thee.”
Then from the green recess
Of her night-bow’r,
Beaming with bashfulness,
Spoke the bright flow’r:—
“Though morn should lend her
“Its sunniest splendor,
“What would the Rose be,
“Unsung by thee?” (1–16)
The structure of “Beauty and Song” resembles that of Leconte de Lisle’s “L’Orient” poems in its use of generic European images of nature to set the scene for the oriental elements. And like Leconte de Lisle’s first “L’Orient” and Gautier’s “Les Souhaits,” Moore’s poem then posits the Orient as the origin of beauty and as the force responsible for creating beauty from the natural (European) landscape. In Moore’s rendition, however, the emphasis falls more heavily on the interdependence of art and nature, where the rose represents nature (more specifically, natural beauty) and the nightingale stands for art (song). Art, the nightingale says, needs nature as its subject. In turn, the rose responds that nature needs art to achieve its greatest beauty, for the simple enhancement of even the sunniest morning is not enough.
Moore expresses the inadequacy of the morning in the vocabulary of stock romantic nature imagery: the “summer vale,” “rill,” “green recess,” and “night-bow’r.” Yet the sentiment is certainly not that of Wordsworthian romanticism, which would instead extoll the sunny morning. The strikingly conventional vocabulary seems to emphasize the artful rather than the natural — quite the opposite of its usual romantic function. Indeed, the artful/poetic takes precedence over the natural throughout these lines. This is evident, for instance, in the placement of the rose’s defense of art in the second stanza so that it appears to supercede the nightingale’s praise of nature in the first. Although Moore does not stress the literariness of the rose as Landor does, the fact remains that this rose is derived from literary tradition; to interpret it as a purely natural phenomenon would be to miss much of its significance. Thus by selecting the rose as nature’s standard-bearer, Moore is from the beginning placing nature under the aegis of art.
The relative positions of nature and art become more difficult to ascertain in the poem’s final stanza, however:
Thus still let Song attend
Woman’s bright way;
Thus still let woman lend
Light to the lay.
Like stars, through heaven’s sea,
Floating in harmony,
Beauty shall glide along,
Circled by Song. (17–24)
“Song” begins and ends the stanza, in a sense “circling” it as the final line prescribes. Its identification with art here appears fairly straightforward, since song has been the figure for art throughout the poem. But nature — whether in the form of conventionalized landscape or in the persona of the rose — is not mentioned in this stanza. Its place is taken first by “Woman” and then by “Beauty,” each of which has essentially the same relationship with song/art that nature has in the first two stanzas. If nature were valued mainly for itself (as Wordsworth would value it, for instance), such an exchange would be impossible. Instead, the substitution of woman and beauty for nature suggests that nature is, from the start, esteemed chiefly for its poetic or aesthetic function. The substitution also reflects Moore’s continued reliance on his understanding of the original Persian story, in which the rose plays the role of a female beloved.40 By inserting a woman (albeit a generic one) in the place of the rose, he not only removes the rose even farther from a purely natural status but also implicitly restates the power of the Persian model as art.
However, the final stanza also limits the elevation of art and song over nature (and its substitutes, woman and beauty). Beauty, for instance, is a more active player than song; it is given a real verb (“shall glide”) rather than a mere participle (“circled”). More importantly, beauty/woman is the subject of all but the first and last lines of the stanza. In short, while the poem may at one time or another appear to privilege either art/song or nature/woman/beauty, overall it maintains the value of each and posits for them a relatively balanced relationship, skewed perhaps in favor of art but mediated by beauty’s alliance with both. Thus where Landor’s rendition of the Persian legend dispenses with nature, Moore’s holds open a place for nature so long as it is remains “circled” within art’s orbit.
Unlike Landor, Moore does not make a point of his poem’s orientalism. He neither mentions the East nor acknowledges the oriental source of the love story of the nightingale and the rose. Yet the Middle East remains significant in Moore’s exhibition of his poetics in “Beauty and Song.” The poem attempts to present an idealized world in which art and nature will coexist in a mutually supportive and clearly defined relationship distinct from the romantic one. By choosing the nightingale and rose as the channel through which to express this relationship, Moore is in effect claiming the Orient as the world in which his ideal is realized. He does not join the other poets so far discussed in this chapter in seeing the Middle East as exclusively the province of art, as a domain in which nature is relegated to a subordinate function, if not banished entirely. Nonetheless, he shares with these other poets the notion that nature’s place in the Orient is not the supreme one that it is in romantic Europe. By presenting art and nature as intertwined and interdependent in the Orient, Moore indicates the great extent to which he shares the other poets’ attachment to an artful East, one that offers a point of departure from a romanticism too bound up in nature and from a classicism too narrowly devoted to mimesis.
Both Felicia Hemans, writing at the cusp of the Victorian era, and Alfred Tennyson, a true Victorian, join Landor and Moore in turning to the literatures of the East as a venue in which to elaborate their own poetics. To a greater or lesser extent and with varying degrees of enthusiasm, both also model poems on oriental (or orientalist) literature. Although Hemans’s characteristic ambivalence makes its mark on both “An Hour of Romance” and “The Mourner for the Barmecides,” the two poems I will treat before moving on to Tennyson, her acceptance of an intimate linkage between the Orient and literary art remains solid and unquestioned as the basis for the aesthetic approach evolved in these poems.
“An Hour of Romance” is based not on a Middle Eastern literary tradition, as Landor’s and Moore’s poems are, but on Walter Scott’s 1825 novel The Talisman, which is set in the Levant during the time of the Crusades.41 The poem describes the experience of the speaker, an English reader of Scott’s novel.
There were thick leaves above me and around,
And low sweet sighs, like those of childhood’s sleep,
Amidst their dimness, and a fitful sound
As of soft showers on water; — dark and deep
Lay the oak shadows o’er the turf, so still
They seem’d but pictur’d glooms; a hidden rill,
Made music, such as haunts us in a dream,
Under the fern tufts; and a tender gleam
Of soft green light, as by the glowworm shed,
Came pouring through the woven beech-boughs down,
And steep’d the magic page wherein I read
Of royal chivalry and old renown,
A tale of Palestine. (1–13)
The reader is seated outdoors, in a conventionally natural setting. However, as in Moore’s “Beauty and Song,” the conventionality of the depiction of nature challenges its naturalness. Hemans’s piling of natural features bears some resemblance to Gautier’s in “In deserto.” Directly or through simile, she includes so many natural elements that they become more symbolically representative — even quintessential — than visually compelling. The process of abstraction from reality is furthered by the scene’s association with altered states of consciousness (“childhood’s sleep” and “dream”) and with the supernatural (“magic”). Thus, while the scene first appears to ground the poem in a concrete reality, that reality turns out instead to be insecure. On the other hand, whereas Gautier builds a composite landscape which ranges beyond the perception of any individual, Hemans describes a scene which could be observed by a single person. This visual accessibility (however diffuse) enables the scene, unlike Gautier’s, to remain more or less within the realm of the natural.
The hold of the natural is confirmed in the subsequent section, as the speaker retreats mid-line from “the magic page” to resume a conventionalized depiction of the English scene. In the next six lines, Hemans adds even more elements stereotypical of English nature: bees, flowers, “blue skies, and amber sunshine,” a dragon fly, and a “lone wood-pigeon” in a “dell.”42 Yet this quintessential image eventually succumbs to the power of the orientalist tale:
But ere long,
All sense of these things faded, as the spell,
Breathing from that high gorgeous tale, grew strong
On my chain’d soul — ‘twas not the leaves I heard;
— A Syrian wind the lion-banner stirr’d,
Through its proud floating folds — ‘twas not the brook,
Singing in secret through its grassy glen —
A wild shrill trumpet of the Saracen
Peal’d from the desert’s lonely heart, and shook
The burning air. — Like clouds when winds are high,
O’er glittering sands flew steeds of Araby,
And tents rose up, and sudden lance and spear
Flash’d where a fountain’s diamond wave lay clear,
Shadow’d by graceful palm-trees. (20–33)
As the tale overwhelms its reader, images derived from Scott’s novel transform and replace the natural landscape of the reader’s surroundings. Nature does not exactly disappear, but it undergoes a kind of ontological mutation; for example, the speaker still notices the leaves rustling but hears them not as leaves but as “the lion-banner” stirring in a “Syrian wind.” In effect, nature is supplanted through the (re)interpretive framework provided by the orientalist novel.
The novel takes precedence here, but only temporarily. The conclusion of “An Hour of Romance” reveals once again Hemans’s ambivalence towards the power of orientalism. A child’s laugh — “A voice of happy childhood!” (41), “the shout / Of merry England’s joy” (33–4) — breaks through the speaker’s literary illusion. Hemans presents this intrusion in virtually the same way that she presented the Orient’s infiltration of English nature earlier in the poem. Both English and Eastern scenes are typified by their blue skies (16, 36) and each “fades” (21, 39) as the other threatens it. In neither case, moreover, is the fading immediate; rather, the threatened scene, whether English or oriental, hangs on for a few moments, as if resisting its eviction. In the end, Hemans’s speaker also appears unsure of whether to resist, claiming to welcome the English child’s laughter but perhaps protesting too much (and with oddly contorted syntax): “Yet might I scarce bewail the vision gone, / My heart so leapt to that sweet laughter’s tone” (43–4).
At its most basic, “An Hour of Romance” is about the conflict of nature and present-time reality with an orientalist literary art that acknowledges neither. To a degree, Hemans’s exploration of this conflict is independent of the orientalism of the literary art in question. She tells us, for instance, that the page is magic before she tells that the content of the page is orientalist. On the other hand, Hemans frames the poem’s fundamental aesthetic conflict (between art and nature) in terms of a struggle for the speaker’s attention and imagination, divided here between an explicitly, emphatically English scene and an equally explicitly, emphatically orientalist one. The remarkable impact of The Talisman’s story on the speaker has to do with its orientalism specifically, not simply with its appeal as a tale. Moreover, through its orientalism, the world depicted in Scott’s novel is distinguished completely and successfully from the English world of nature. As in the poems of Moore, Landor, Gautier, Leconte de Lisle, and Wordsworth already discussed, the Orient in “An Hour of Romance” is an ally of art rather than of nature. Hemans’s respect for the power of such art is obvious, but it is tempered by her continuing devotion to England and nature. However strongly attracted she might be to the art of the Orient, she resists adopting it directly as a model for her own poetic production.
This resistance is substantially diminished in “The Mourner for the Barmecides” (1828), another orientalist poem in which Hemans’s association of literary art with the Middle East remains firm. This poem is set entirely in the Middle East, eliminating the English component on which the aesthetic statement of “An Hour of Romance” relies. In England’s absence, there is no opportunity for the poem to stage a conflict between English nature and orientalist art, as “An Hour of Romance” does so insistently. Instead, the ascendancy of oriental art as a poetic model becomes sharper.
“The Mourner for the Barmecides” tells the story of an old man, raised in the house of the Barmecide vizirs, who takes it upon himself to keep alive the memory of their heroic deeds, “By song or high recital” (26). To an ever-increasing and appreciative audience, he tells “Many a glorious tale” (22). When Haroun, the caliph who had sacked the Barmecides, hears of these performances, he summons the old man and sentences him to death.43 The aged orator asks for and is granted one last chance to speak, which he uses to welcome the opportunity to join the Barmecides in death. He praises them once again and predicts that their name will never “from earth depart” (60), for it will be taken up and proclaimed by the surroundings, from the wind to the fountains: “The very walls your bounty rear’d [...] / Shall find a murmur to record your tale, my glorious dead!” (73–4).
Haroun is so moved by the old man’s last words that he lifts the death sentence:
while the old man sang, a mist of tears
O’er Haroun’s eyes had gathered, and a thought —
Oh! many a sudden and remorseful thought —
Of his youth’s once loved friends, the martyr’d race,
O’erflow’d his softening heart. — “Live! live!” he cried,
“Thou faithful unto death! live on, and still
Speak of thy lords — they were a princely band!” (81–7; emphasis hers)
The narrative of “The Mourner for the Barmecides” announces the broad power of words to move and persuade. Yet even more than in “An Hour of Romance,” this message is so thoroughly couched in orientalist tropes and conventions that it assumes a great specificity. To begin with, Hemans establishes the centrality of storytelling to this Middle Eastern social setting; the speaker notes, for instance, that the old man is able quickly to amass a large and eager audience. More important, though, are the less tangible aspects of Middle Eastern storytelling. The old man explains in detail how the surroundings are actively involved in the recitation of the Barmecides’ story. Moreover, many elements of these surroundings are depicted as identifiably, even exclusively oriental (in connotation if not in origin): “desert sands” (68), “the many gushing founts” (69), and “the grass [...] where lute and cittern rung” (75). Hemans presents an environment in which every feature can be — and is — almost automatically turned to the purpose of art. This is equally true of natural phenomena (air, wind, midnight), of man-made ones (walls), and of natural features that have been marked by human activity (battlefields, springs). Unlike the English nature of “An Hour of Romance,” the environmental features of the Middle East seem to have no independent purpose or value. Instead they exist in service to the Barmecides’ tale.
This devotion of the environment to art is far from unique to the content of the old man’s final speech; in fact, that speech reflects the relationship between his recitation and his surroundings that is established earlier in the poem. Just after explaining that “The songs had ceased / The lights, the perfumes, and the genii tales, / Had ceased” (10–12), the poem’s speaker announces that the fountain’s “voice” continues to sing. As it turns out, though, that voice is not entirely alone:
And still another voice! — an aged man,
Yet with a dark and fervent eye beneath
His silvery hair, came day by day, and sate
On a white column’s fragment; and drew forth,
From the forsaken walls and dim arcades,
A tone that shook them with its answering thrill
To his deep accents. (16–22)
In a striking example of the presumed unnatural interconnectedness of Middle Eastern people and places discussed in chapter 3, the old man’s voice is made to correspond with the fountain’s, and his body to stand as a counterpart of his surroundings. His white hair matches the color of the column; indeed as he sits on the column he seems almost an extension of it. Furthermore, his recitation is presented as both originating in and returning to the structures that surround him. While he speaks for himself, they also speak through him. Even if he is executed, the poem predicts, his surroundings will continue to tell the story he now recites.
In establishing perpetuity as the single most important feature of this oriental(ist) tale, Hemans of course relies upon such standard orientalist conventions as the timelessness of the East. For her contemporary readers, furthermore, any such tale with the power to enable its own continuation would inevitably recall what was, for the nineteenth century, the quintessential work of oriental(ist) literary art: the 1001 Nights. Hemans may not give her old man the exotic sexual appeal of Shahrazad, but she does grant him the ability to sway Haroun, the most powerful ruler of his time. Like Shahrazad, the old man earns his reprieve with his ability to tell. Even more to the point, his stay of execution, like hers, is intended to permit the continuation of the tale: as Haroun proclaims, “live on, and still / Speak.” This circumstantial link between the old man and Shahrazad is further reinforced by Hemans’s choice of sovereign; Haroun is the same caliph who plays a great part in Shahrazad’s tales, although he is of course not the king who nightly threatens her life.
“The Mourner for the Barmecides” ascribes to oriental literary art a uniquely permanent potency to which, Hemans implies, poetry in general might aspire. This model of poetry in perpetuity derives from the notion that art in the Orient is all-encompassing. The Middle East offers an ideal literary world in that each of its elements, from the convict to his sovereign to the environment (natural or constructed), participates in the production of art. No aspect of Oriental “reality” stands outside art.
Tennyson’s idealization of the Islamic Orient as an aesthetic origin has much in common with those already described, as becomes evident in his 1830 poem “Recollections of the Arabian Nights.”44 The 1001 Nights is first and foremost a model for “Recollections,” but it becomes also Tennyson’s standard for an idealized realm in which there are no restraints on the imagination. As the poem’s speaker inserts himself into the world of the 1001 Nights, envisioning himself in Baghdad during “the golden prime / Of good Haroun Alraschid,” he provides a rich, elaborate, and stereotypical description of the sights that greet him. The speaker’s experience of his travels along the Tigris into Baghdad and finally into the halls of the caliph is framed as a retrospective, a fantasized adventure of youth vividly recalled:
When the breeze of a joyful dawn blew free
In the silken sail of infancy,
The tide of time flowed back with me,
The forward-flowing tide of time;
And many a sheeny summer-morn,
Adown the Tigris I was borne,
By Bagdat’s shrines of fretted gold,
High-wallèd gardens green and old;
True Mussulman was I and sworn,
For it was in the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid. (1–11)
This treatment of the Orient is unexceptional overall. Tennyson’s presentation of this journey as a child’s fantasy is consistent with the 1001 Nights’s wide acceptance as children’s literature.45 The characterization of this fantasy as a reversal of the flow of time can scarcely be new when both fantasies generally and the Middle East in particular are conventionally held to be timeless.
Further, “Recollections” closely follows nineteenth-century orientalist poems’ tendency to present Middle Eastern nature as artful. The overwhelmingly detailed descriptions of the scenes surrounding the speaker consistently elide distinctions between natural and man-made. The second stanza establishes this mode, juxtaposing natural scenery with ornate interior settings. In the next stanza, the two no longer appear side by side; instead, nature itself is ornamented:
all
The sloping of the moon-lit sward
Was damask-work, and deep inlay
Of braided blooms unmown, which crept
Adown to where the water slept (26–30)
The ornamentation of the natural setting is explicitly artful; “damask-work,” “inlay,” and “braided” all entail human craft — and craft that is, moreover, the particular specialty of the Orient. The term “damask” derives from the name of the Syrian city of Damascus; so too, Middle Eastern artisans are (at this time and still today) famous for their fine inlaid work.46 Throughout the poem, Tennyson reasserts the ornamentation of Middle Eastern natural phenomena, from “Imbowered vaults of pillared palm” in the fourth stanza to “The hollow-vaulted dark” in the twelfth. Even where his descriptions of natural scenery are relatively straightforward, he piles them up, one conventional image upon another, draped in archaisms and general verbal preciousness, so that they become something of their own ornamentation.47
The aesthetic value of the Middle Eastern setting is evident from these artificed descriptions; its source in “Recollections” is the Eastern world’s separation from the universe of ordinary experience, as the seventh stanza demonstrates:
The living airs of middle night
Died round the bulbul as he sung;48
Not he: but something which possessed
The darkness of the world, delight,
Life, anguish, death, immortal love,
Ceasing not, mingled, unrepressed,
Apart from place, withholding time,
But flattering the golden prime
Of good Haroun Alraschid. (69–77)
Like Landor and Moore, Tennyson characterizes bulbul/nightingale as a singer.49 However, his nightingale’s place is quickly filled by “something” else, an unidentified singer characterized (like the conventionalized Orient itself) by the perpetual coexistence of grand opposites. Most important, though, are the traits mentioned last: “Apart from place, withholding time.” By making this stereotypical trait the culminating feature of the unknown singer, and by justifying it as “flattering the golden prime / of good Haroun Alraschid,” Tennyson makes this trait also the defining element of Middle Eastern literary art.
Modeling the vision of oriental literature that it expresses, “Recollections” positions itself likewise “apart from place, withholding time.” In the first stanza, for instance, the speaker presents his recollections as habitual throughout his youth rather than grounded in any one particular time. So too, he completely omits reference to any place outside of his oriental fantasy. We can deduce from the title and first stanza that this is a poem based on a reading experience, but Tennyson never asserts the position of the reader — unlike Hemans, for example, who so firmly asserts the geographical and cultural position of her reader in “An Hour of Romance.” More significant in this context is the complex structural relationship between “Recollections” and the literary work it claims to recollect. Tennyson reinforces the connections between his poem and its inspiration in various ways. The speaker imagines himself in the world of the 1001 Nights, even positioning himself as a character in a tale. The action of the poem is explicitly described as taking place at night (“anight” [12]), and even more to the point, in a sequence of nights (“another night in night” [37]). While the action of tales embedded in the 1001 Nights is of course not limited to the nighttime, the essential action of the frame tale (Shahrazad’s telling of stories) certainly is.
The structure of “Recollections” also replicates, on a small scale, that of the 1001 Nights. In both content and syntax, each stanza forms a distinct and separate whole, punctuated by the repetition of the refrain: “the golden prime / Of good Haroun Alraschid.” Despite this emphatic separation between stanzas, the continuity between them is strong. Just such a combination of continuity and separation is a dominant feature of the narrative of the 1001 Nights. In order to preserve her life, Shahrazad breaks up her stories into night-long sections, yet her strategy works because each night’s segment continues the previous one. Thus while “Recollections” seems to pose as a tale from the 1001 Nights, it is clear that it owes as much, if not more, to Shahrazad’s part of the 1001 Nights: the frame tale. Tennyson’s interest in the 1001 Nights’s frame tale is, at bottom, an interest in how such tales as Shahrazad’s come about, in the process by which literary art — oriental literary art — is produced.
“Recollections of the Arabian Nights” begins by offering itself as a poem about the experience of reading — specifically, the experience of reading a book excellently suited, as Robert Southey says, “to induce a love of reading.”50 But as my analysis shows, “Recollections” turns out to be also about writing, about the production of literature that will do for a reader what Tennyson and Southey, among many others, recognize that the 1001 Nights has done for them. The reading experience that Tennyson both recollects for himself and seeks to replicate for his readers is one that frees the imagination to enter a world of fantasy, totally escaping the real-world surroundings with which Hemans and her speaker struggle in “An Hour of Romance.” Like Gautier’s “Les Souhaits,” “Recollections” identifies this freedom of imagination with the Orient, but Tennyson differs from his French contemporary in specifically indicating Middle Eastern literary art — whether the 1001 Nights or Persian poetry — as a guide and model for this aesthetic stance.
Unlike Landor, who persistently reminds the reader of his oriental model’s standing in relation to its domestic counterpart, Tennyson entirely omits any such domestic point of reference, keeping “Recollections” within the bounds of the literary universe of the Middle East. Yet one could easily read “Recollections” as a response to poems such as Coleridge’s “To Nature,” which mentions with disdain the artful and classically oriental “fretted dome” and “incense,” and announces instead its enthusiastic preference for the natural “blue sky” and “the sweet fragrance that the wild flower yields.”51 Yet by so pointedly eliminating such standard natural, domestic — and romantic — elements from “Recollections,” Tennyson effectively declares his independence from them, proclaiming instead the absolute sufficiency of his oriental model of literary art and of the poetics he derives from it. Of the poems discussed in this chapter thus far, “Recollections” exemplifies the most radical and most specific incorporation of orientalism into its poetics.
The great depth of Tennyson’s reliance on the Orient as a foundation for his poetics can be gauged from his longer poem “The Palace of Art.”52 The position of the Orient in this complicated poem is itself far from straightforward. While the poem contains many references to the East, it is not orientalist as a whole. Critics have generally disregarded the understated orientalism of “The Palace,” except perhaps to note the unmistakable similarity between the poem’s first lines and the beginning of one of the nineteenth century’s most famous orientalist poems, Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”53 But Tennyson’s engagement with the Orient in “The Palace” does not end with “Kubla Khan.” Rather, the Middle East becomes the essential grounding element of a much larger poetics, which finally subsumes it to a degree unmatched in “Recollections of the Arabian Nights” or any of the other poems yet discussed.
After stipulating his soul’s splendid and absolute isolation from “the world” (13), the poem’s speaker describes the glories of the palace he has built for his soul.54
Full of great rooms and small the palace stood,
All various, each a perfect whole
From living Nature, fit for every mood
And change in my still soul (57–60)
Despite the prominent reference to nature, each room contains a certain kind of art. Although Tennyson does not allude specifically to the Orient, the overwrought language and the wealth of sumptuous detail have much in common with his descriptions of Hârûn al-Rashîd’s Baghdad in “Recollections.”55 As Tennyson continues his depiction of the palace its orientalism comes even more clearly into view. The soul asks herself,
And who shall gaze upon
My palace with unblinded eyes,
While this great bow will waver in the sun,
And that sweet incense rise? (41–4)
The soul’s arrogance in attributing the sun’s brightness to her own palace recalls that of the stereotypical oriental despot, especially coming as it does directly after Tennyson’s orientalized description of the palace and its surroundings.56 The reference to incense, an Eastern commodity, also enhances the stanza’s orientalism.57
As the speaker goes on to describe the contents of the soul’s palace, the Orient continues to play an important role. The speaker begins with a series of outdoor scenes. The first of these to be granted a full stanza is clearly Middle Eastern, though not identified as such. Not only is this landscape characterized by that essential Middle Eastern feature — sand — but its sole occupant is, as in so many such scenes, a lone and lonely wanderer:
One seemed all dark and red — a tract of sand,
And some one pacing there alone,
Who paced for ever in a glimmering land,
Lit with a low large moon. (65–8)
Contrasting sharply with the desert scene is the final image in this group:
And one, an English home — gray twilight poured
On dewy pastures, dewy trees,
Softer than sleep — all things in order stored,
A haunt of ancient Peace. (85–8)
Because of their placement, these two images serve to frame the entire group, as if “every landscape fair” (89) could be contained within the bounds set by these two extremes. In this context, the Middle East, like England, functions as a kind of aesthetic guidepost, a marker at the edge of art’s range.
The next group of images focuses on religious belief and includes an explicitly Islamic stanza:
Or thronging all one porch of Paradise
A group of Houris bowed to see
The dying Islamite, with hands and eyes
That said, We wait for thee. (101–4)
In contrast, the third group of images, that of “wise men” (131), makes no mention of any Middle Eastern figures.58 Yet when he introduces the wise men in the 1832 version of the poem, Tennyson’s speaker gives the entire group a Middle Eastern cast:
And underneath freshcarved in cedarwood,
Somewhat alike in form and face,
The Genii of every climate stood,
All brothers of one race. (1832; 137–40)
This stanza unifies the world’s wise men under a single oriental umbrella. In a poem where artisanship is so strongly identified as oriental, the mention of carving serves this end, as does the choice of cedarwood, with its Levantine associations. Most importantly, all the wise men (most of whom are artists and men of literature) are designated “Genii,” a word that would almost certainly have evoked a strong sense of the oriental in the minds of Tennyson’s readers. By casting these men as “Genii,” he gives them, and the art they represent, a common Middle Eastern origin.59
The remainder of “The Palace of Art” describes the soul’s enjoyment of the palace and of its contents, and then her descent into anguish as she recognizes her loneliness. In the last two stanzas she exposes this change of heart:
She threw her royal robes away.
“Make me a cottage in the vale,” she said,
“Where I may mourn and pray.
“Yet pull not down my palace towers, that are
So lightly, beautifully built:
Perchance I may return with others there
When I have purged my guilt.” (290–6)
The soul’s new dream of refuge has an unmistakable English flavor to it, especially when amplified by the speaker’s earlier description of “an English home” as a place of “all things in order stored, / A haunt of ancient Peace” (85, 87–8). The speaker’s tormented soul clearly has in mind just such a place of order and tranquillity in which she might recover. As the final stanza indicates, she does not intend her retreat to be permanent but maintains instead the future possibility of a less narcissistic enjoyment of the pleasures of her palace.
Brian Goldberg argues that in “The Palace of Art,” “Tennyson wishes to picture an institutionally unbound utopia through the beautiful pleasures of his moral aesthetic.”60 As my reading of the poem shows, this utopia finds its closest approximation in the East. By the poem’s end, the orientalized palace of art has become the aesthetic destination towards which the poem aims in retrospect, and in a far more complex and humble way than when the palace was first presented.61 Through the palace and its art, orientalism remains an aesthetic model, but the poem’s ending suggests that it must be given a fuller life than that of an individual’s fantasy, however elaborate. In short, to be a successful aesthetic strategy, orientalism must be integrated into a complete aesthetic approach; if it exists only unto itself, it will be, to recall Hugo’s “Novembre,” a fantasy destined to fade.
Thus in this era, Tennyson’s conception of art is inseparable from his interest in the Orient.62 The soul, who is both the principal guardian and principal admirer of art, is, by extention, an oriental despot. The palace in which she keeps and appreciates art appears as the product of oriental design — even while it is the work of the speaker’s own imagination. The speaker’s role becomes symbolically equivalent to that of the unmentioned oriental designers, builders, and artisans who would create a despot’s palace. In this way, the entire process of the production of art is orientalized, even presented as fundamentally oriental in origin.63 To the extent that “the poetic act” is to be “reveal[ed] as artifice” in Tennyson’s poetry, as Isobel Armstrong charges,64 it is also to be exposed as essentially (although perhaps not obviously) orientalist in its artifice.
Critics have not usually seen Tennyson as an advocate of art for its own sake, but his use of the Orient in “Recollections” and “The Palace of Art” brings him surprisingly close to such a position.65 Not only is the Orient exalted in general terms as a place of art, but it becomes a model for poetic art in particular, more directly so in “Recollections” but in more important ways in “The Palace.” In choosing this model, Tennyson pulls away from romanticism’s assumptions about poetry; these poems neither imitate nature nor express inner emotion with sincerity. Rather, they imitate other art, oriental or orientalized, creating a universe in which there is, in the end, only art, existing unto itself. In “Recollections,” the result is recognizably orientalist, since unlike “The Palace,” that poem does not explore the larger implications of the poet’s aesthetic choices. For Tennyson, orientalism means freedom of imagination, and concomitantly freedom from the literary models provided by his romantic elders. “Recollections” simply delights in this freedom, while “The Palace” demonstrates both its extraordinary potential and its risks if indulged improperly. The soul’s “guilt” is not only merely guilt at her own immoral selfishness. It is also guilt at the exaltation of art that exists in isolation: art for art’s sake.
That Tennyson rejects the option of art for its own sake does not mean that he rejects orientalism, however. At the end of “The Palace,” he posits his oriental palace as an aesthetic goal, symbolic of an unrestricted imagination and of art for its own sake, but he maintains that this goal must not be sought in isolation or as an escape. Instead, orientalism, along with the artifice it represents, must become part of a larger aesthetic program. This program is domestic rather than exotic, as can be deduced from its point of origin in the “cottage in the vale.” By subsuming orientalism within this new cultural and aesthetic framework, while at the same time rejecting its value as pure fantasy, Tennyson not only allows orientalism to retain its position at the center of his poetics but in fact also grants it an influence it does not have when it is held within the limits of its own borders.
Tennyson’s contemporary Théophile Gautier derives his own robust poetics from a similar assimilation of the Orient. The development of Gautier’s avant-garde poetic vision is manifested with particular clarity in Émaux et camées [Enamels and Cameos], a celebrated collection “often considered the poetic model par excellence of the idea of art for art’s sake,” as L. Cassandra Hamrick observes.66 Émaux et camées takes its cue from the early nineteenth century’s grandest collection of orientalist poems: Hugo’s Les Orientales. Les Orientales revels in the great allure of the East but ultimately discards it in favor of a return to Paris. Gautier’s Émaux et camées is framed like Les Orientales, with an initial “Préface” to signal the collection’s orientalism and a final poem that makes a definitive aesthetic statement. However, Émaux et camées does not conclude by renouncing orientalism. Instead, like Tennyson, Gautier reveals his orientalism as an integral part of a larger aesthetic strategy, a strategy both farther reaching and more fully articulated than Tennyson’s.
The basis of this strategy is spelled out in Gautier’s prefatory sonnet.67 Like Tennyson’s “The Palace of Art,” Gautier’s “Préface” begins with an old assumption about the Orient and oriental(ist) literature: that they offer a retreat from the world. The example Gautier chooses is Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832), who was writing his famous orientalist work, the West-Ostlicher Divan, during the Napoleonic upheavals of 1811.68
Pendant les guerres de l’empire,
Goethe, au bruit du canon brutal,
Fit le Divan occidental,
Fraîche oasis où l’art respire. (1–4; italics his)
[During the wars of the empire, / Goethe, to the sound of the brutal cannon/canon, / Made The Occidental Divan,/ Cool oasis where art rests.]
From the outset, though, this is more than simple escapism. By naming the sound of the cannon as the sole concrete manifestation of the oppressive imperial wars, Gautier raises the possibility of a double meaning. While “canon” in the sense of “cannon” is a weapon, the line makes no distinction between this meaning and “canon” in the sense of literary “canon.” If we incorporate this second meaning into our reading, Goethe’s composition of the West-Ostlicher Divan becomes, in Gautier’s interpretation, a response to literary as well as military events of the time. Gautier’s subsequent depiction of Goethe’s work as a “Fraîche oasis où l’art respire” [Cool oasis where art rests] confirms such a reading. The stereotypical image of the oasis here acquires an aesthetic function as a place where art too may find relief, whether from the intrusions of worldly troubles or from the constraints of literary tradition.69
The following stanza specifies the literary role of the Orient in Goethe’s Divan:
Pour Nisami quittant Shakspear,
Il se parfuma de çantal,
Et sur un mètre oriental
Nota le chant qu’Hudhud soupire. (5–8)70
[Leaving Shakespeare for Nisami, / He scented himself with sandalwood, / And in an oriental meter / Noted the song that the Hudhud sighs.]
Goethe’s models are, Gautier asserts, Eastern ones in both form and content; Goethe follows the example of the Persian poet Nizâmî rather than Shakespeare, and in doing so he not only uses an oriental meter but depicts the song of the Hudhud, a bird whose appearance in the Qur’an gives it an explicitly Islamic connotation. Gautier’s choice of the English Shakespeare instead of a German writer suggests an assumption on his part of a pan-European literary tradition, rather than a national one (e.g. English or German), against which the oriental and Islamic traditions stand in opposition. While Gautier is by no means unique in making such an assumption — we might remember, for instance, the coalescence of French and English in Wordsworth’s “Septimi Gades” (chapter 3) — his inclusion here of three of the most prominent European national literatures (Goethe’s German, Shakespeare’s English, his own French) gives the polarization of European and Eastern an unusual solidity.
Goethe is, in Gautier’s rendition, fashioning himself and his work after Islamic Middle Eastern models, having determinedly rejected European ones. In turn, Gautier fashions his own artistic image after Goethe’s:
Comme Goethe sur son divan
A Weimar s’isolait des choses
Et d’Hafiz effeuillait les roses,
Sans prendre garde à l’ouragan
Qui fouettait mes vitres fermées,
Moi, j’ai fait Émaux et camées. (9–14; italics his)71
[As Goethe on his divan / At Weimar isolated himself from things / And stripped the roses of Hafiz,
Without paying mind to the storm / That was lashing my closed windows, / Me, I have made Émaux et camées.]
With this modeling in mind, it is not difficult to find correspondences between Gautier’s collection and Goethe’s — from the superficial (both mention Hâfiz in the first poem) to the essential (both show a sustained preoccupation with poetry and poetics). Moreover, by patterning his own work upon that of a poet who patterned his on the oriental, Gautier is, by extension, casting Goethe as oriental. At the end of the stanza, Goethe even appears to outdo his Middle Eastern model, stripping from the great poet Hâfiz the roses that symbolize his poetry. Gautier orientalizes Goethe yet further here, situating him “sur son divan” [on his divan]; Gautier’s punning choice of words at once reflects the title of Goethe’s text and poses him as a Middle Eastern sultan reclining on a couch. Goethe’s isolation from “des choses” [things] is appropriate to such a figure, stereotypically removed from the cares of the world, but it is also an implicit reference to the antimimetic tendency of orientalism, the freedom that orientalism offers from the representation of things.72
Once Goethe is revealed to be at least as oriental as his Middle Eastern models, Gautier can introduce himself as Goethe’s own follower. Like Goethe, he takes no notice of things; in the course of his disregard, he produces Émaux et camées just as Goethe produces his Divan. The particular thing on which he focuses his disregard is not, however, the “bruit du canon brutal” [the sound of the brutal can(n)on] but rather the storm, a natural phenomenon. Yet this storm can be related to the “canon” in both its senses. First, like cannon fire in war, it is an outside force, loud and intrusive, about which the poet can do nothing. More importantly, though, the literary canon traditionally incorporates a certain notion of nature’s aesthetic role. By choosing pointedly to ignore a natural phenomenon, a phenomenon that is moreover clearly hostile, Gautier is reinforcing the distinction he has already drawn between his own poetry and the (canonical) literary art that depends upon the representation of things in nature.
A look back at Les Orientales’s concluding poem, “Novembre,” confirms this reading. For Hugo, the damp, stormy weather of Paris defines that city, and by extension Europe as a whole, in contradistinction to the warm, sunny East. In turn, it is through confronting — through not disregarding — this particular climatic trait that Hugo’s speaker comes to terms with his aesthetic shift away from the Orient and back to a domestic universe and to the mimetic representation of nature. So while Gautier’s storm may at first seem to have little to do with the cannon/canon against which Goethe presents his Divan, it is in fact very much part of the same concern with the matter of literature. Mentored by Goethe, Gautier argues for closed windows, muffled ears, and blinkered eyes. Art rests undisturbed in the isolation of an oasis, imitative not of nature but of art itself. This is the vision of art that gives rise to the idea of art for its own sake — the aesthetic philosophy of which Émaux et camées is one of the cardinal texts.73
Given the prefatory sonnet’s great effort to define Émaux et camées as profoundly and essentially orientalist, it is at first surprising that so little of the collection deals specifically with oriental material, especially when compared with either Hugo’s Les Orientales or Goethe’s Divan. To be sure, there are a few quite characteristically orientalist poems, including “Nostalgies d’obelisques” [“Nostalgia of Obelisks”] and “La Fellah” [“The Fellah”]. In most cases, though, orientalist references appear in poems that are in no other way orientalist.74 Even these references are not overwhelmingly common. On the other hand, Gautier’s indirect, understated approach is very much in keeping with the significance he accords orientalism. As his “Préface” tells us, orientalism comprises much more than subject matter, however rich; rather, it is the original and defining feature of the collection’s poetics. Given this, there is no need for him to luxuriate obsessively in the details of a fantastical East. That such a fantastical East underlies Émaux et camées is evident from such lines as these from “Le Poème de la femme” [“The Poem of the Woman”]:
Sur un tapis de Cachemire,
C’est la sultane du sérail,
Riant au miroir qui l’admire
Avec un rire de corail;
La Géorgienne indolente,
Avec son souple narguilhé,
Étalant sa hanche opulente,
Un pied sous l’autre replié. (41–8)
[On a carpet from Cashmere, / It is the sultana of the seraglio, /
Smiling at the mirror which admires her / With a coral smile;
The indolent Georgian woman, / With her supple narghile, /
Displaying her opulent hip, / One foot folded under the other.]
Conventionalized orientalist images of this sort do not sustain Gautier’s interest through the collection, however.
Such details are, moreover, entirely absent from the final poem of Émaux et camées, in which Gautier spells out his aesthetic program. Indeed, this last poem, boldly entitled “L’Art,” includes nothing identifiably orientalist.75 “L’Art” begins with an assault on “contraintes fausses” [false constraints] (5), “rythme commode” [convenient rhythm] (10), and other instruments of poetic tradition. Gautier announces that instead the production of art should be a struggle:
Statuaire, repousse
L’argile que pétrit
Le pouce,
Quand flotte ailleurs l’esprit;
Lutte avec le carrare,
Avec le paros dur
Et rare,
Gardiens du contour pur;
[...]
Peintre, fuis l’aquarelle,
Et fixe la couleur
Trop frêle
Au four de l’émailleur.
Fais les sirènes bleues,
Tordant de cent façons
Leurs queues,
Les monstres de blasons (13–20, 29–36)76
[Sculptor, reject / The clay that is kneaded by / The thumb, / When the spirit drifts elsewhere;
Vie with the carrara marble, / With the paros marble hard / And rare, / Guardians of the pure contour;
Painter, flee the watercolor, / And fix the too fragile / Color / In the enameler’s kiln.
Make blue mermaids, / Twisting in a hundred ways / Their tails, / Monstrous blazons]
The result will be “L’art robuste” [Robust art] (41), art that survives the decline of cities (44), the fall of emperors (48), and even the death of gods (49): “les vers souverains / Demeurent / Plus forts que les airains” [sovereign verses / Remain / Stronger than bronze] (50–2).77 The final stanza is a command to the artist:
Sculpte, lime, ciselle;
Que ton rêve flottant
Se scelle
Dans le bloc résistant! (53–6)
[Sculpt, polish, chisel; / That your drifting dream / Affix itself / To the resistant block!]
When this poem is reconsidered in light of the collection’s “Préface,” the extent to which orientalism is the foundation for Gautier’s aesthetic statement in “L’Art” becomes clear. The primary purpose of both the prefatory sonnet and the concluding “L’Art” is to announce and advocate a departure from contemporary preoccupations, whether geopolitical or aesthetic. As Gautier’s introduction to Émaux et camées, the “Préface” sets the terms of the discussion; they are the terms of orientalism. The prefatory poem’s insistence on Goethe’s adoption of Nizâmî and Hâfiz rather than of Shakespeare or of current events — and in turn on Gautier’s adoption of Goethe — prefigures the position expressed in “L’Art.” Further, the orientalism entailed in the “Préface” provides the means by which the artists (plastic, visual, or literary) scolded in “L’Art” might discard the conventional constraints that Gautier evidently disdains.
Thus if we join generations of critics in taking “L’Art” as an important statement of Gautier’s aesthetic philosophy, we must at the same time recognize this philosophy’s origins in orientalism. Pierre Lardoux argues that “L’Art” “is truly a text of synthesis, a poetic art where Orient and Occident find themselves associated in a sublime fashion. The true victory of the Orient is undoubtedly connected with the fact that, in a fashion which seems irreversible, arabesque, decoration, and imagination are henceforth tightly associated with art.”78 Lardoux deserves great credit for acknowledging (as few critics have) the presence and importance of orientalism in “L’Art.” However, it is crucial also to emphasize that the Orient’s “true victory” is achieved in this poem from behind the scenes. The absence of orientalism from the surface level of “L’Art” reflects orientalism’s complete absorption into Gautier’s aesthetics; orientalism permeates, but invisibly. By allowing orientalism to operate from this point of virtual occlusion in the text, Gautier thereby opens for it a vastly broader aesthetic plane. The orientalism of “L’Art” is entirely abstracted from any empirically verifiable Middle East and liberated from any dependence on the Middle East as a subject; it has become an orientalism belonging solely to the world of the aesthetic, of poetics. “L’art pour l’art” evolves as a phenomenon independent from orientalism, but the notion of art for its own sake takes orientalism as its starting point and retains it as its point of reference.
When at the turn of the nineteenth century Wordsworth calls for a return to nature, he is proposing a remedy that could reinvigorate poetry and restore it to what he presents as its true purpose. His neoclassical predecessors looked to classical texts with much the same goal in mind. In this sense, the nineteenth-century poets who use the Orient as Wordsworth uses nature are following a well-used trajectory. As art for art’s sake emerges from orientalism in the second part of the century, the Orient’s aesthetic potency appears on a par with nature’s or the classics’. Oscar Wilde’s poem “Athanasia” (1879) expresses this potency succinctly.79 The poem’s originating incident is one repeated often enough in the nineteenth century, that of an Egyptian mummy being unwrapped in a museum in Britain.80 The poem begins:
To that gaunt House of Art which lacks for naught
Of all the great things men have saved from Time,
The withered body of a girl was brought
Dead ere the world’s glad youth had touched its prime,
And seen by lonely Arabs lying hid
In the dim womb of some black pyramid.
But when they had unloosed the linen band
Which swathed the Egyptian’s body, — lo! was found
Closed in the wasted hollow of her hand
A little seed, which sown in English ground
Did wondrous snow of starry blossoms bear
And spread rich odours through our spring-tide air.
With such strange arts this flower did allure
That all forgotten was the asphodel,
And the brown bee, the lily’s paramour,
Forsook the cup where he was wont to dwell (1–16)81
The (stereotypically) “lonely” Arabs’ responsibility for retrieving the mummy assimilates pharaonic Egypt to the Islamic Orient; the mummy and her flower carry the exotic force of both. The mummy’s flower is a “wondrous” one that has an effect unlike that of any flower in nature. Its “rich odours” code it as oriental; they pervade the English atmosphere. The flower’s “strange arts” make it capable of outdoing nature within nature’s own sphere. The flower disrupts the usual workings of the natural environment; the bee loses interest in the lily (stanza 3), the dragonfly in the narcissus (stanza 4), the nightingale in the hills, and the dove in the woods (stanza 5). Yet the flower is disruptive to art as well; virtually all of the apparently natural phenomena disturbed by the flower are laden with classical or conventional poetic connotations that make them as significant to art as to nature.
The mummified girl herself assumes a similarly subversive function. She penetrates the “House of Art,” the domain of “all the great things men have saved from Time,” even though it is not clear that she is either a “great thing” or really “saved from Time.” Indeed, such categories are hardly relevant to her. Already dead “ere the world’s glad youth had touched its prime,” she has escaped the bonds of time by preceding them; she is without time, timeless in the true sense. By implication, then, she stands outside history and therefore, despite her physical location within the museum, outside the history of art and culture that the museum represents. Her flower shares her dissociation from history:
to this bright flower a thousand years
Seemed but the lingering of a summer’s day,
It never knew the tide of cankering fears
Which turn a boy’s gold hair to withered grey,
The dread desire of death it never knew,
Or how all folk that they were born must rue. (43–8)
Both the flower and the dead girl are, then, ontologically other in relation to their naturally derived and historically bound European counterparts.
With the metaphor of the mummy and her seed, “Athanasia” captures the aesthetic essence of the Islamic Orient for later-nineteenth-century poets. The Orient is an exotic other, but it flourishes when “sown in English ground.” Once rooted, it has the power to destroy Western assumptions about art that have been circulating for centuries; the culturally overdetermined asphodel ceases to appeal. As Wilde’s later essay “The Decay of Lying” (chapter 3) shows, this destruction presents a strongly attractive opportunity for the development of a new aesthetic, generated on “English ground” but grounded in orientalism. Like Gautier, to whose young girl/fairy (“Les Souhaits”) Wilde’s Egyptian girl has a certain resemblance, Wilde formulates the new aesthetic as one of art for its own sake, unrestricted by either nature or the classical artistic tradition.
Throughout the nineteenth century, there is a striking consistency in the characteristics that French and British poets, including Wilde, ascribe to the Orient, ranging from the grand (the Orient as a place of art) to the mundane (Arabs as lonely wanderers in a sandy desert). The Orient’s single most important trait is its ontological unnaturalness, which guides orientalist poetry in a movement away from the representation of nature in any strict sense. The unnaturalness of nature in the Middle East is manifested particularly in human beings’ relationship with the environment and in the absence of a sharp distinction between the natural and the unnatural, whether supernatural or artificial. The incorporation of the artificial into Middle Eastern nature violates the division between the concepts of nature and art that is otherwise assumed through the beginning of the nineteenth century. The notion that art imitates and represents nature depends upon this assumed separation, upon the ideal of a pure nature, unadulterated by human design. The integral linkage of the Orient and art in nineteenth-century aesthetics undermines the position of nature and raises the possibility of alternatives to mimesis, whether in emulation of oriental art forms or not.
Given the relative consistency of orientalist depictions of the Islamic Middle East, the Orient’s versatility in nineteenth-century poetics is remarkable. While the Orient offers Gautier and Wilde a route towards a defined aesthetic ideal, it gives other poets (Arnold, Hemans, Landor, Leconte de Lisle, Moore, Musset, and Tennyson) a means by which to establish their positions vis-à-vis major contemporary and recent trends in poetry and poetics. For still other poets (Hugo, Shelley, Southey, Wordsworth), the Orient is a space of experimentation as they work to articulate attitudes towards certain poetic concepts. Yet all thirteen of these poets seem to assume without question that the Orient is an appropriate and productive site for the exploration of aesthetic problems, including the crucial relationship between nature and art. Each poet’s work confirms that the Orient constitutes a greater gift than exotic subject matter. Orientalism offers a standard against which to react, a guide to follow, an example to imitate or to exceed. At times, as in Gautier’s “Les Souhaits” or Tennyson’s “Recollections of the Arabian Nights,” orientalism’s trace is heavily laid. At other times, as in Gautier’s “L’Art” or Tennyson’s “The Palace of Art,” the trace is obscured or drops away. Yet it is there that we must look for the culmination of orientalist poetics, for there it has become an invisible center of gravity, holding the poem in a secure orbit around it. For the last half of the nineteenth century, from Gautier’s “L’Art” in 1857 to Wilde’s “The Decay of Lying” in 1891, it is this version of orientalist poetics that underpins the crucial idea of art for art’s sake and thereby is able to structure, often from a point of virtual invisibility, the aesthetic developments of these decades.
1 Probably composed in 1819, “The Haunted Tree” was first published in 1820.
2 Wordsworth’s choice of “languor” as the sultan’s chief characteristic creates an additional point of contrast between the sultan and the nymph. Because “languor” is normally coded as feminine in English literature, Wordsworth’s attribution of “languor” to the sultan feminizes him. A feminized sultan is a more unnatural one. Moreover, if there is no longer an absolute distinction of gender between the sultan and the nymph, the difference in the two figures’ relations with the natural becomes all the more determinative of their identities, and the sultan’s unnaturalness is thus brought even further into relief.
3 Another poem in which Wordsworth relies upon an opposition between nature and art is his sonnet beginning “A Poet! He hath put his heart to school” (1842). This poem advocates a close relationship between poetry and nature. “Art” is presented as detrimental to poetry; let “[t]hy Art be Nature,” he urges poets. The poem has no orientalist component.
Abrams would see the opposition of art to nature as characteristic of Wordsworth’s critical philosophy. He argues that “‘ornament’ in Wordsworth’s criticism becomes an entirely pejorative term,” for “all art [...] was in his phrase ‘the adversary of nature’” (Abrams, The Correspondent Breeze: Essays on English Romanticism [New York: Norton, 1984] 9, 12). Abrams does not acknowledge the oriental associations of either ornament or art, but they are more than clear in “The Haunted Tree.” Other critics contest or complicate Abrams’s view of Wordsworth’s aesthetic devotion to nature; see for example Jones, “Double Economics”; Latimer, “Real Culture and Unreal Nature” esp. 46; and Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism 14–15.
4 Byron’s The Bride of Abydos depicts a similarly unnatural and artful interior scene; Zuleikha too has a “silken Ottoman,” and “round her lamp of fretted gold / Bloom flowers in urns of China’s mould” (2.64, 78–9).
5 Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism 20.
6 The Dream of the Arab episode of The Prelude (bk. 5) implies a somewhat more receptive attitude. Both the Arab’s possession of books while traveling through a desert wasteland and his identification with a character from Cervantes suggest this figure’s link with literary art. Still, the speaker welcomes the Arab, showing little of the hostility evident both in “The Haunted Tree” and thirty years earlier in “Septimi Gades” (see chapter 3).
7 The first of these poems is of uncertain date (1836?), but was definitely composed early in Leconte de Lisle’s life. It was not published until 1899, five years after his death. The second, written in 1886, was probably intended for his announced collection Poèmes byzantins [Byzantine Poems], which he did not live to complete. This later “L’Orient” first appeared in collection in the posthumous volume Derniers poèmes [Last Poems]. See for more information Oeuvres de Leconte de Lisle 3: xx, 228; 4: 21.
8 Makdisi, Romantic Imperialism 20; emphasis mine.
9 Derrida, The Truth in Painting 25.
10 For a technical discussion of festoons and of their connection with the arabesque, see Wilhelm Worringer, Abstraction and Empathy: A Contribution to the Psychology of Style, 1908, trans. Michael Bullock (New York: International Universities P, 1967) 73–6.
11 Leconte de Lisle’s approach here is comparable to that in another of his early poems, “Le Palmier” [The Palm Tree] (publ. 1899). Again, the Middle Eastern natural scene is construed as inherently artful: “Oriental, / Original, / Féérique même!” [Oriental, / Original, / Enchanting even!].
12 Arnold, for instance, uses a similar reference to clothwares when he establishes the oriental setting at the beginning of “The Sick King in Bokhara.” Gautier’s inclusion of a cashmere scarf in his “Les Souhaits” (to be discussed shortly) offers yet another example.
13 It is significant that Leconte de Lisle shifts from the “nous” [we] of stanza 3 to “on” [one] here. “Nous” implied an opposition between the Orient (“vous” [you]), and the Occident of “nos vallons” and “nos prairies” [our vales, our meadows]. The opposition between “vous” and “on” is much weaker and suggests at least the possibility of an occidental self being incorporated into the oriental; this possibility is very much in keeping with the poem’s optimism about the speaker’s relationship with the Orient.
14 There is of course also a literal component of this idea of the Orient as origin, embedded particularly in the term “Levant.” The Orient is the place of the rising sun, symbolically the birthplace of the world. The Christian mythology of a holy land in the Levant adds further depth to these classical associations.
15 Leconte de Lisle’s formulation here again reflects the convention of the Levant as the place of the rising sun and origin of the world.
16 The fact that the speaker of the second “L’Orient” uses “tu” [you, familiar form] rather than “vous” [you, formal form] to address the East, despite the greater distance between speaker and Orient in this poem than in the first “L’Orient,” suggests an intimacy unaffected by distance or inaccessibility.
17 “Les Souhaits” was first published in Gautier’s early collection Poésies.
18 Ophir is a place of unknown location in the biblical East; Solomon is supposed to have sought gold there.
19 Brahimi says that for Gautier, “[t]he Orient is desire, desire is the Orient”; Lardoux claims that Gautier “makes of the Orient a veritable allegory of his desire” (Brahimi, Théophile et Judith vont en Orient 75; Lardoux, “L’Orient dans les poésies de Théophile Gautier” 215). Neither critic, however, notes the aesthetic dimension of this linkage between desire and the Orient.
20 The association between “féerie” [enchantment] and the Orient is familiar from Leconte de Lisle’s first “L’Orient,” discussed above, and from his “Le Palmier,” also noted above. Bulgin observes Gautier’s repeated prose use of the term when describing the appeal of Arab Spain; see Bulgin, “L’Appel de l’Orient au voyageur en Espagne” 155.
21 This steed bears more than a slight resemblance to “Al-Borak” of Leconte de Lisle’s “Le Désert” (chapter 3).
22 Nubia is an area of the Nile valley in southern Egypt and northern Sudan.
23 Lisa Lowe cites a related example from Gustave Flaubert’s L’Éducation sentimentale (1869). She describes the appearance of several oriental objects in the novel, arguing that “[t]he motifs are all heterogeneous fragments [...], incomplete allusions to disparate orientalisms, and their fragmentary qualities as motifs call attention to their importance as signifiers, and as marks of desire. Furthermore, the orientalist texts themselves, to which these motifs refer, also represent postures of incompletion, ultimately sentimental paradigms that constitute the invented Orient as a sublime ideal, a lost otherness, a time and space removed from the occidental world. The oriental motif [...] is an emblem of the desire to signify desire” (Critical Terrains 97).
24 Cited in Cotsell, Creditable Warriors 36. A thorough discussion of the role of Islamic architecture in nineteenth-century European conceptions of and representations of the Islamic Middle East is provided by Çelik, Displaying the Orient. See also Jean-Claude Brunon, “Arabesque, baroque, caprice: essai sur la portée des Grotesques dans l’esthétique de Gautier,” L’Art et l’artiste, vol. 2 (Proc. of International Colloquium, Sept. 1982, Montpellier) esp. 372–3, 377; Grossir, L’Islam des Romantiques 95–9; and MacKenzie, Orientalism ch. 4.
25 This process is at odds with that preferred by more skeptical poets such as Wordsworth, whom Wesling describes in this context as having a “love of the assimilation of architecture to nature,” rather than vice versa; see Wesling, Wordsworth and the Adequacy of Landscape 71.
26 Distinctly Middle Eastern arches appear in Gautier’s “La Jeune fille” (9), “La Basilique” (16–19), and “A l’Alhambra Moresque...” (1–4) [“The Young Girl,” “The Basilica,” “To the Moorish Alhambra...”]. Other Gautier poems that feature Middle Eastern architectural elements include “Moyen âge,” “Ballade,” “Portail,” “Ce que disent les hirondelles,” “L’Hirondelle,” and “L’Amour” [“Middle Ages,” “Ballad,” “Portal,” “What the Swallows Say,” “The Swallow,” “Love”]. Also worth noting is Gautier’s prose work Spirite [Spirit] (written 1865), whose protagonist has an interest in Arab architecture; see Brahimi, Théophile et Judith vont en Orient 104. Elwood Hartman explores Gautier’s fondness for architecture in general, but emphasizes the poet’s preference for oriental architectural styles, both for their forms and for their decorations; see Hartman, Three Nineteenth-Century French Writer/Artists and the Maghreb: The Literary and Artistic Depictions of North Africa by Théophile Gautier, Eugène Fromentin, and Pierre Loti (Tübingen: Narr, 1994) esp. 17–19.
27 Gordon observes that “Gautier admires Moslem invention for its figures that ‘decompose ad infinitum in ever-new combinations and meanderings; they serve to express dreams of the infinite.’ The intense interest in the Orient [...] prove[s] to be of great importance to the evolution of ornament in the realm of the Imaginary” (Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire 13; the Gautier citation is from 1852). See Hartman, Three Nineteenth-Century French Writer/Artists 19–20, for a brief analysis of Gautier’s admiration for Islamic Arab art, particularly its “new colors and forms — ornaments and arabesques, as exemplified in calligraphy and embroidery.” For a discussion of connections between visual and literary “arabesques” elsewhere in Gautier’s work, see Jean-Claude Brunon, “Arabesque, Baroque, Caprice” 369–79.
28 Gordon, Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire 16. For additional discussion of Gautier’s rejection of nature in favor of art, see Pierre Laubriet, “Théophile Gautier, un annonciateur de l’esprit ‘fin de siècle’?” Bulletin de la Société Théophile Gautier 13 (1991): 18–20; Schick, “A Case Study of Descriptive Perversion”; and Tennant, Théophile Gautier 20–3, 36, 103–4.
29 As John D. Yohannan points out, this Persian story was well known in nineteenth-century England, with Byron, Tennyson, and Wilde making particular use of it; see Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America 67, 88–9, 97, 219.
30 “The Nightingale and Rose” was published in Landor’s Works in 1846; as most work on this edition was completed by 1840, the poem was probably composed by that date; see R.H. Super, Walter Savage Landor: A Biography (New York: New York UP, 1954) 289. Landor’s engagement with the Middle East began more than four decades before this, with his influential long poem Gebir (1798; see chapter 1), and Poems from the Arabic and Persian (1800), which contains nine imitations. Landor also has a few orientalist prose works; for more information, see Smith, Islam in English Literature 168–71. For further discussion of these works, and of Landor’s literary interest in the Middle East, see Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism ch. 1; and Super, Walter Savage Landor esp. 40–6,48–51, 67–8.
My source for Landor’s poetry is The Poetical Works of Walter Savage Landor, ed. Stephen Wheeler, 3 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon, 1937).
31 Balkh is a town in northern Afghanistan. Astracán (mod. sp. “Astrakhan”) is a city in eastern Russia near the Kazakh border. Mysore is a city in southern India.
32 Landor’s emphasis on the shared knowledge of this story blurs any functional distinctions among the various Eastern groups mentioned. As I noted in my discussion of Southey in chapter 1, such blurring is typical of nineteenth-century European poets, although it defies the careful efforts of prominent scholarly orientalists such as William Jones and, later, Edward Lane to delineate characteristics of specific groups.
33 Joseph Kestner proposes that Landor’s use of a framed narrative in Gebir indicates the poem’s affiliation with a particular classical genre, the epyllion; see Kestner, “The Genre of Landor’s Gebir,” The Wordsworth Circle 5.1 (1974): 45. However, given the presence in the 1001 Nights not only of a frame (as in “The Nightingale and Rose”) but also of numerous embedded tales (as in Gebir), it is more likely that such framing marks instead the works’ important relationship with orientalism.
34 Astrabad (mod. sp. “Asterabad”; now known as Gorgan or Gurgan) is a city in northern Iran.
35 Landor’s instinct to represent the Orient solely in terms of texts is typical of nineteenth-century orientalism, as mentioned above; see for elaboration Mitchell, Colonising Egypt 31 and Said, Orientalism 23, 177.
36 This multiple embedding is of course also reminiscent of the narrative techniques of the 1001 Nights, as Landor himself would almost certainly have recognized.
37 On Landor’s relationship with romanticism, see for instance Robert Pinsky, Landor’s Poetry (Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1968) esp. 24–32.
38 See Kestner, “The Genre of Landor’s Gebir”; and Vitoux, “Gebir as an Heroic Poem,” The Wordsworth Circle 7.1 (1976): 51–7. Landor was, after all, far more accomplished as a Latinist than an orientalist.
39 “Beauty and Song” appeared in Moore’s own collection of his Poetical Works in 1841 (London: Longman, Orme, Brown, Green, and Longmans, vol. 5). It was not included in an 1829 Poetical Works (Paris: Galignani); we may presume that the poem was written at some time during the intervening twelve years, but the exact date of composition is uncertain.
Most critical discussion of Moore’s orientalism has centered on his best-known orientalist poem, Lalla Rookh (1817; see chapter 3), see for example Wallace Cable Brown, “Thomas Moore and English Interest in the East,” Studies in Philology 34 (1937): 576–87; Sharafuddin, Islam and Romantic Orientalism ch. 3; Smith, Islam in English Literature 195–201; Thérèse Tessier, La Poésie lyrique de Thomas Moore (Paris: Didier, 1976) pt. 4; and G.M. Wickens, “Lalla Rookh and the Romantic Tradition of Islamic Literature in English,” Yearbook of Comparative and General Literature 20 (1971): 61–6.
My source for Moore’s poetry is The Poetical Works of Thomas Moore (New York: A.C. Armstrong and Son, 1884).
40 The Persian language does not use grammatical gender; this legend does not necessarily specify the sex of either the rose or the nightingale. The story’s English interpreters seem to have been most comfortable with a female rose and a male nightingale.
41 Scott’s 1832 introduction disavows The Talisman’s orientalism. Citing Southey’s Thalaba and Moore’s Lalla Rookh, Scott announces that since “the Eastern themes had been already so successfully handled by those who were acknowledged to be masters of their craft,” he would not attempt to “enter [...] into competition with them” (Scott, introduction [1832], The Talisman [New York: Dodd, Mead, 1929] 8). Be that as it may, The Talisman clearly takes advantage of contemporary British interest in orientalism. Hemans, whose poem was written at least six years before the appearance of Scott’s introduction, accepts the novel as orientalist without question.
42 Hemans’s admiration for English nature is virtually inseparable from the domestic patriotism at which she is particularly adept. See for instance “The Homes of England” (1827), one of her best-known poems. For further discussion, see Tricia Lootens, “Hemans and Home: Victorianism, Feminine ‘Internal Enemies,’ and the Domestication of National Identity,” PMLA 109.2 (1994): 238–53; Mack et al., “Literary History, Romanticism, and Felicia Hemans” 223–33; and Nanora Sweet, “History, Imperialism, and the Aesthetics of the Beautiful: Hemans and the Post-Napoleonic Moment,” At the Limits of Romanticism: Essays in Cultural, Feminist, and Materialist Criticism, ed. Mary A. Favret and Nicola J. Watson (Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1994) 170–84.
43 Haroun [Hârûn al-Rashîd] ruled the Abbasid empire in Baghdad from 786 to 809; he beheaded the powerful Barmecide vizir Giafar [Ja’far] in 803. Although the immediate basis for Hemans’s story is historical, not literary, this Haroun is the same one who figures in the 1001 Nights, as any informed nineteenth-century reader would probably have recognized.
44 For sources, see Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson 1: 225; and Paden, Tennyson in Egypt 130–2, n. 103. “Recollections” has been much noted by critics; Herbert Tucker gives it particular attention in his Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988) 78–87. Compare Leconte de Lisle’s 1842 poem “Une nuit d’Orient” for a partial French counterpart of “Recollections.”
45 See Ahmed, Edward W. Lane 12–14; Beer, “Fragmentations and Ironies” 262; and Richardson, Literature, Education, and Romanticism 116–7, 123, 126.
46 This poem’s flowered slope prefigures the slippage between meadows and festoons or a coastal wave and an embroidered scarf in Leconte de Lisle’s first “L’Orient.” It has, however, little in common with the woven flowers of Wordsworth’s “The Haunted Tree,” for example, since those flowers always already belong to the domain of artifice rather than to that of nature.
47 See particularly stanza 10. Gordon’s comments on “accumulation and aggregation” as aesthetic strategies are relevant here; see Ornament, Fantasy, and Desire 21. Harold Bloom interprets “Recollections” as a “voyage [...] through nature in search of a center transcending nature,” and acknowledges that for Tennyson (in his early years) the destination of this voyage was the Orient. Bloom does not comment on Tennyson’s imposition of the artful upon the natural, however. See Bloom, ed., Alfred Lord Tennyson (New York: Chelsea, 1985) 6–7.
48 Tennyson footnotes “bulbul” as “the Persian name for Nightingale”; see Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson 1: 228. The same word is used in Arabic.
49 Both Bloom and Tucker observe that these lines also recall Keats’s “Ode to a Nightingale” (1819); see Bloom, ed., Alfred Lord Tennyson 7; and Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism 82–3. Bloom and Tucker are among the numerous critics to note the special importance of this section of “Recollections.” See also Fletcher, Gardens and Grim Ravines 48–9; John Hollander, “Tennyson’s Melody,” Alfred Lord Tennyson, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Chelsea, 1985) 107–8; and Yohannan, Persian Poetry in England and America 87–8.
50 Southey, “To Henry Southey,” Aug. 25, 1800, The Life and Correspondence of Robert Southey 2: 110.
51 “To Nature” was first published in 1836 and was probably written in 1820. See The Poetical Works of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Ernest Hartley Coleridge (London: Henry Frowde, 1912) 429.
52 First published in 1832, two years after “Recollections,” “The Palace” was extensively revised for republication in 1842. I will use the 1842 text, with reference to 1832 as needed. See The Poems of Tennyson 1: 436–56. For other substantial discussions of this poem, see Armstrong, Victorian Poetry 77–83; Brian Goldberg, “A Sea Reflecting Love’: Tennyson, Shelley, and the Aesthetics of the Image in the Marketplace,” Modern Language Quarterly 59.1 (March 1998): 90–7; Kerry McSweeney, Tennyson and Swinburne as Romantic Naturalists (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 1981) 47–50; Ricks, Tennyson 86–8; and Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Romanticism 118–25.
53 “Kubla Khan” was published in 1816, sixteen years before Tennyson’s “The Palace of Art.” The poem begins: “In Xanadu did Kubla Khan / A stately pleasure-dome decree / Where Alph, the sacred river, ran.” Tennyson renders his version in the first person: “I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house, / Wherein at ease for aye to dwell” (1–2).
54 Fletcher interprets this isolation in terms of the depiction of the palace’s surrounding landscape rather than of the palace itself; see Fletcher, Gardens and Grim Ravines 51.
55 In addition, Ricks suggests that some of Tennyson’s description may be related to an image from H.J. Weber’s Tales of the East (1812); see The Poems of Tennyson 1: 439.
56 The soul’s granting of the sun’s characteristics to her palace echoes Coleridge’s mention of “That sunny dome!” in “Kubla Khan” (47); a connection between these two images would confirm the orientalism of Tennyson’s.
57 This reference is repeated from the description of the palace (39); another line two stanzas later (45) mentions incense yet again.
58 Several biblical figures appear in the 1832 version of the poem as well, but it would be inappropriate to consider such references orientalist in any meaningful way. Christopher Ricks notes that Tennyson considered including Averroes, but the Hispano-Arab philosopher does not appear in either version. See Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson 1: 447.
59 Even if Tennyson intended “genii” as the plural of “genius” rather than “genie,” the oriental resonance would be inescapable. His usage of the word here resonates with Wordsworth’s in The Prelude; the passage in question also finds larger echoes in “The Palace”:
(I have quoted from the 1805–06 version of the poem, but this passage remains substantially unchanged in 1850; see also The Prelude [1850], 7.456.)
60 Goldberg, “Ά Sea Reflecting Love,’” 97.
61 Isobel Armstrong’s reading of the poem emphasizes the jumbled coexistence of occidental and oriental cultural artifacts: “All is contemporary, simultaneous, available, and thus all is estranged” (Armstrong, Victorian Poetry 79). Although cogent, her interpretation underestimates both the palace’s orientalism and the repeated polarization of English and Eastern that places that orientalism in a position of aesthetic significance.
62 To place Tennyson’s orientalism at the center of his poetics during this period is not to deny the imperialist and antioriental, even racist bent of some of his later poems. For further discussion, see Shaw, “Tennyson’s Dark Continent”; and John McBratney, “Rebuilding Akbar’s ‘Fane.’” As McBratney points out, even Tennyson’s earlier poems are “part of the Orientalist project to master the East” (412); however, this in no way diminishes their significance in the evolution of Tennyson’s poetics.
63 It is worth remembering here the importance ascribed by the European imagination to architecture as an oriental art form; see my discussion of Leconte de Lisle and Gautier above.
64 Armstrong, Victorian Poetry 46. Armstrong does not address orientalism in this context.
65 McSweeney goes so far as to describe as “embarrassment” Tennyson’s reaction to art for art’s sake tendencies in his poetry; see McSweeney, Tennyson and Swinburne as Romantic Naturalists 46.
66 L. Cassandra Hamrick, “Gautier et l’anarchie de l’art,” Relire Théophile Gautier: Le plaisir du texte, ed. Freeman G. Henry (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1998) 110. For a general discussion of Gautier’s connection with “l’art pour l’art,” see Franck Ruby, “Théophile Gautier et la question de TArt pour l’Art,’” Bulletin de la Société Théophile Gautier 20 (1998): 3–13.
Émaux et camées was first published in 1852 and was well received from the start. Gautier added to the collection over his lifetime, more than doubling the number of poems by the time of the final edition in 1872; see Charles de Lovenjoul, Histoire des oeuvres de Théophile Gautier, vol. 2 (Paris: Charpentier, 1887) 26–7; and Tennant, Théophile Gautier 58–9.
67 “Préface” was included in the original 1852 edition of Émaux et camées. For a brief discussion of sources, see Gautier, Poésies complètes 1: xciii.
68 The Divan (the word is Persian for “collection of poetry”) did not take its final form until 1827, although portions were published beginning in 1819. For more information, see Alexander Rogers’s introduction to the Divan in Goethe’s Reineke Fox, West-Eastern Divan, and Achilleid, trans. Rogers (London: George Bell and Sons, 1890) 197–8. Some sense of the Divan’s huge influence in Europe can be gained from Raymond Schwab, The Oriental Renaissance 6, 208–9.
69 Historically, these particular worldly troubles have everything to do with the nineteenth century’s advancing imperialism. That Gautier deflects them suggests a strong desire to maintain the Orient as a place of fantasy, safe from the intrusion of military imperialism but open to exploration and exploitation as an aesthetic site.
70 Nisami (Nizâmî; 1140–1202) is one of Persia’s most eminent and influential poets. Although he has a collection of lyric poems, he is best known for his five epics. The Hudhud, or hoopoe, is a bird with a reputation for piety and a role in several versions of the Solomon legend, including that contained in the Qur’an (Sura 27). See A.J. Wensinck, “Hudhud,” The Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed.
71 Hafiz (Hâfiz; 1325–1390) is among the most important Persian poets. He devoted himself particularly to the lyric ghazal form and to panegyric. According to G.M. Wickens, Goethe knew Hâfiz’s poetry through an 1812–13 German prose translation; see Wickens, “Hâfiz,” The Encyclopedia of Islam, 2nd ed. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1958-).
72 For an interesting and relevant analysis of how Gautier’s travel writing shows his resistance to mimesis, see Schick, “A Case Study of Descriptive Perversion.”
73 Lowe offers a comparable observation about Flaubert: “The oriental motif is the distinguishing mark of [...] a sentimentalism that longs for a memory of earlier innocence, an impossible union, a lost wholeness in which European culture is faithfully reflected in its oriental Other” (Critical Terrains 95). It is interesting that she is later able to make so similar an argument about Roland Barthes, despite the century separating him from Flaubert: “The imagined Orient — as critique of the Occident — becomes an emblem of his ‘poetics of escape,’ a desire to transcend semiology and the ideology of signifier and signified, to invent a place that exceeds binary structure itself (154).
74 See for example “Contralto” [“Contralto”] (73–6) and “Ce que disent les hirondelles” [“What the Swallows Say”] (41–4).
75 “L’Art” first appeared in 1857 in the periodical L ‘Artiste; it was entitled “A Monsieur Théodore de Banville; réponse à son Odelette” and was composed in reaction to Banville’s 1856 poem “A Th. Gautier”; see Poésies complètes de Théophile Gautier 1: cxxviii–cxxix. “L’Art” was included, with some revision, in the 1858 edition of Émaux et camées; see de Lovenjoul, Histoire des oeuvres de Théophile Gautier 2: 137. Gautier specified that “L’Art” always be printed as the final poem of Émaux et camées, although he seems otherwise to have given little attention to the arrangement of the collection. “L’Art” has been much noted by critics; see for example Hamrick, “Gautier et l’anarchie de l’Art” 112–4; Lardoux, “L’Orient dans les poésies de Théophile Gautier” 222; Richardson, Théophile Gautier 152–5; Tennant, Théophile Gautier 59, 66–7; and Peter Whyte, “‘L’Art’ de Gautier: genèse et sens,” Relire Théophile Gautier 119–39.
76 As the nonmetallic colors on heraldic coats of arms are termed “émaux” [enamels], there is a technical link between “blasons” [blazons] and the reference to the enameler’s kiln.
77 Gautier’s assertion of the permanence of art here echoes Shelley’s in “Ozymandias” (1818), a poem whose affiliation with the Middle East (pharaonic Egypt specifically) is much more obvious.
78 Lardoux, “L’Orient dans les poésies de Théophile Gautier” 222. Hartman also links Gautier’s orientalism with “l’art pour l’art,” but sees the two as deriving from the same impulse (Hartman, Three Nineteenth-Century French Writer/Artists 6). As my readings of both the “Préface” and “L’Art” demonstrate, it is more fruitful to see orientalism as generative of “l’art pour l’art.”
79 For a reading of this poem in relation to imperial decline, see Nick Frankel, “‘Ave Imperatrix’: Oscar Wilde and the Poetry of Englishness,” Victorian Poetry 35.2 (1997): 122–3.
80 Many mummies were transported to England and unwrapped during Wilde’s lifetime; the journal Archaeologia, for instance, describes numerous unwrappings in painful scientific detail.
81 Henry David Thoreau alludes to a similar event in Walden (1854), observing that “we will not forget that some Egyptian wheat was handed down to us by a mummy” (Thoreau, Walden; or, Life in the Woods [New York: Anchor, 1973] 26).