History and Legend
THE SUBJECTS OF POETRY AND PAINTING
The working definition of medievalism adopted at the outset of this essay in cultural history included a historical or textual component, so that a work might not be considered part of the Medieval Revival if it referred to a world of Gothic fantasy rather than to a historical or textual Middle Ages. The reverence for a historical Middle Ages felt by some artists and poets, if not the general public, reached a high-water mark in 1851, when the ‘Mediæval Court’ won plaudits at the Great Exhibition. This was also the year in which Ruskin, at the prompting of Coventry Patmore, wrote his letter to The Times defending the Pre-Raphaelites, an intervention which began the process of their acceptance.1 Soon they were being asked to paint everywhere.
It might seem tempting to regard the restoration of the English Catholic hierarchy in 1850 as part of the Medieval Revival. In England, Catholicism can seem medieval. Yet the Catholic Church existed before and after the Middle Ages, and is not limited to the millennium in which it helped to form England. The installation of Wiseman as Archbishop of Westminster, and of other Catholic bishops in England and Wales, was met by violent public protest. ‘Papal Aggression’ was represented as political, even territorial.2 Wiseman’s response was that the only subjects of Queen Victoria he coveted were the poor who clustered in the ‘rookeries’ of Westminster. What Newman in a sermon of 1852 called ‘The Second Spring’ of English Catholicism (the first being Augustine’s conversion of Saxon England) was mocked by The Times as ‘the Italian mission to the Irish’. In the course of the controversy surrounding the restoration of Catholic bishops there was much appeal to history, especially to the rights and wrongs of the English Reformation.
Since Pugin had published Contrasts (1836), and its second edition in 1841, he had been a leading public advocate of medieval ideals. In 1851 he published An Earnest Address, on the Establishment of the Hierarchy, which includes a surprising retractation. By some, Pugin writes, ‘All, anterior to the Reformation, is regarded and described as a sort of Utopia: – pleasant meadows, happy peasants, merry England . . . bread cheap, and beef for nothing, all holy monks, all holy priests, – holy everybody. Such charity, and such hospitality, and such unity, when every man was a Catholic. I once believed in this Utopia myself, but when tested by stern facts and history it all melts away like a dream.’3
This dream of the charity and piety of pre-Reformation England had inspired Pugin’s own ‘Contrasted Residences for the Poor’ of 1836 (see Plate 8). With one sweeping gesture, Pugin confesses that his youthful dream of the Middle Ages cannot stand up against history. What led him to apply the test of ‘stern facts and history’ may have been a new fact, the restoration of the hierarchy. After three penal centuries, English Catholics were permitted to practise their faith openly. A few penalties remained – they could not leave money to the Church, for example, or attend Oxford or Cambridge – but they had their bishops, the heirs of the apostles. For Pugin, this new fact melted an old dream: something of what England had lost was now to be restored to her, or to her Catholics. This retractation may also acknowledge that the Medieval Revival had won public acceptance. Pugin died in the next year, having done his work.
It was from about this time that a younger generation of Gothic Revival architects felt at liberty to move away from archaeological exactitude and to develop new forms.4 In a kindred development, medievalist poems and paintings were henceforward less likely to start from a medieval text or event than from a legend. Medievalism did not now have to be based on copying medieval things accurately. The decision that the Palace of Westminster would be Gothic led to Pugin’s success at the Crystal Palace. Since medieval ways were accepted as part of modern life, a new ‘medieval’ venture no longer had to take careful bearings from attested precedent, or to reproduce medieval forms in the manner of a brass rubbing. The academic history of the Middle Ages developed, with the researches into English charters of William Stubbs, later Bishop of Oxford. Scientific philology had already begun to recover more and more of the texts of Old and Middle English literature, as in the editions of Beowulf and Sir Gawain. The publications of the gentlemen of the Bannatyne Club and the Roxburgh Society gave way, under the impetus of F.J. Furnivall and Walter Skeat, to the editions of the Early English Text Society. Germanic linguistic science would eventually be instituted in university courses in the new subject of English. Medieval Revival literature now derived less from medieval history than from medieval story.
Pugin’s retractation applied the modern distinction between history and story, history and legend, fact and fiction, fact and interpretation. It is a distinction easy to grasp but hard to apply to large questions. A major instance of this problem arose for Victorian Christians in the new challenge offered by geological findings to literal readings of the two accounts of Creation given in Genesis, Chapters 1 and 2. Some Victorian Protestants read Scripture very literally. A founding Protestant principle is sola scriptura: all that is necessary to salvation is to be found in the Bible, its truth guaranteed by divine inspiration and available to the individual reader. A more extreme position is that every sentence in the Bible is literally true: every brick in the wall. Such an implicit faith in the inspiration of (translated) words now clashed, in Britain and in the United States, with the prevailing assumption of Anglo-Saxon culture that the truth of any proposition was to be ascertained empirically or historically, by the tests of natural science. Recent geological discoveries forced the conclusion that if the universe was created in the year 4004 BC, it had been created with rocks and fossils designed to make it look very much older. The 4004 BC calculation accepted in the Anglican Church was that of Archbishop Ussher, who in the 1650s refined an old calculation based on figures given in the Old Testament.5 It was now clear, however, that sedimentary rocks held what were evidently fossils of life-forms many thousands, perhaps millions, of years old. The accounts of Creation given in the opening chapters of the Bible failed the empirical test of truth favoured in England. The faith of John Ruskin, a lover of rocks, was seriously troubled by geological proof that scripture could not be literally true. He wrote to his friend Henry Acland, M.D., on 24 May 1851: ‘If only the Geologists would let me alone, I could do very well, but those dreadful Hammers! I hear the clink of them at the end of every cadence of the Bible verses – and on the other side, these unhappy, blinking Puseyisms; men trying to do right and losing their very Humanity.’6 For Catholics, trusting not to a literal reading of scripture but to the consensus of the community from which these writings came, geology could not threaten foundations; nor did the later findings of Darwin. Newman wrote that he ‘could go the whole hog with Darwin’.7 The Catholic Church takes the New Testament as the witness of her early members, and its essential implications as having been defended in the Ecumenical Councils.
In the 1970s, the validity of the distinction between history and story was denied by French post-structuralists who insisted upon the primacy of language in representation, and on language’s indeterminacy. In British universities this denial was taken less seriously in philosophy departments than in departments of language and literature. Using a linguistic theory to reclassify history as a form of story is a modern expression of ancient scepticism as to the possibilities of knowledge and the limitations of language. In practice, of course, the most unphilosophical and fact-grubbing historian is well aware that each attempt to write history is regarded, at least by other historians, as no more than a version of the truth. Conversely, the most historically ignorant of theoretical sceptics relies in practice on the reality of historical events, such as, for example, the German defeat of France in 1940.
The English language contains both ‘history’ and ‘story’, two words from one root. Like other technical words in English, ‘historia’ was a Greek term adopted by Romans. It came into English twice, first crossing the Channel as ‘estoire’, which in the thirteenth century produced ‘story’. ‘History’ came from Latin in the fifteenth century and gradually attracted the meanings associated with the true relation of historical events, leaving ‘story’, which had previously included these senses, to indicate ‘anecdote, entertainment, fiction’. Words such as ‘myth’ and ‘legend’ show a similar semantic split. A history is now expected to be a connected narrative of past events, derived from records, and scholarly history is based upon empirical evidence. A story, whether oral or written, is simply a narrative, either fictional or with some relation to real events. Thus English has different and distinct terms for factual and fictional narratives. In romance languages, however, the word derived from ‘historia’ includes both aspects: the Italian ‘storia’ and the French ‘histoire’ designate narratives which can be either factual or fictional.
Historical knowledge of a reliable kind was the justification given by eighteenth-century scholars for their interest in an earlier literature with no classical prestige and of questionable Christian value. It will be remembered that Bishop Hurd held that romances provided evidence of the ‘facts and manners’, following Caylus: ‘fabuleux pour les événements, historique pour le reste’. Walter Scott might have thought of his own historical romances in this way. But after Scott history played a diminishing role in the Medieval Revival, as literature began to divide into imaginative and non-imaginative. The later fiction of the Author of Waverley became less historical the more of it he produced. The Scottish novels are historical, but the romances are set in periods much further back, in a pre-modern past known to Scott only through literary and historical texts. His early Scottish verse and prose had been set in a world whose traditions, local beliefs and social and religious attitudes he had himself experienced. But the formal structure of Scott’s thinking and learning derived from his Enlightenment education. The intellectual part of Scottish society had modernised itself so fast that by 1800 curious minds in Edinburgh had around them in their native land a hugely varied social landscape to observe and to understand. Walter Scott had, at an impressionable age, been sent to older relatives in the Border country to recover his health, and he profited from his stay. When in the Borders, he read Percy’s Reliques, but he also received an informal education from the stories and ballads he heard, and in the process recovered more than his health.
Subsequent historical novelists such as Bulwer Lytton and Harrison Ainsworth rarely set their stories in the Middle Ages, though Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Conan Doyle were to continue Scott’s medieval adventures. ‘Medieval’ stories in prose became adventure stories set in an exotic land of knights, ladies and castles, with decorative historical detail, often concentrating upon arms. This prose tradition informs the imperial adventure fiction of Rider Haggard, John Buchan and (in mutant form) Ian Fleming. Many poets had followed Tennyson into the enchanted world of Arthurian legend. Malory’s unhistorical prose replaced verse romance as the ultimate source of subjects for poet and painter. Medieval literature was no longer valued for the social history which could be extracted from it, but for the magic casements it opened onto the world of legend. Indeed, the literature upon which the mid-Victorian writers of the Medieval Revival depended for their immediate inspiration was no longer, generally speaking, the medieval ballad or romance, the writings of Chaucer or even Malory’s Le Morte Darthur, the most influential among the medieval texts then coming into circulation. For the Medieval Revival is typically a mediated thing. Byron was right to call Scott the Ariosto of the North, for Scott’s romances are more like Ariosto than like Percy. Malory was freshly available in modern spelling, yet Victorian versions of Arthurian subjects are often not taken direct from his pages. The immediate source was often not the Morte but what Tennyson had made of it.
Arthur aside, amateurs of the Middle Ages after 1850, in poetry as well as in painting, found their subjects either in the writings of the Romantic poets or in Shakespeare, who was treated as a Romantic poet. (To Elizabethans, Shakespeare was a ‘poet’; the word ‘playwright’ is first recorded in English in 1605, ‘dramatist’ in 1678.) To the Romantic poets, Shakespeare was not the rapt Bard of the 1760s but the National Poet: the author of dramatic poems, romances better performed in the reader’s imagination than on public stages. Charles Lamb and Coleridge liked the theatre but held that Shakespeare was far richer on the page. Poetry, Wordsworth thought, was ‘the rock of defence of human nature’; Shelley held that poets were our ‘unacknowledged legislators’. Since then, Shakespeare has more often been taught as literature than as theatre.
Tennyson shows the dependence of Medieval Revival poetry upon previous literature. Keats wrote poems ‘on first looking into’ Chapman’s Homer, and ‘on sitting down to read King Lear once again’. One of Tennyson’s best early poems, ‘Mariana’, makes a minor character in Measure for Measure into the protagonist of a poem of eighty-four lines (see Plate 16). Browning holds the record for literary expansion with ‘Childe Roland to the dark tower came’. This line in King Lear, quoted from a lost ballad, became a verse romance of thirty-four six-line stanzas, ending in a line which repeats the title. The magnification of poetic detail is the source of much Medieval Revival painting. ‘King Cophetua and the Beggar Maid’ is among eighteen ‘Ballads that illustrate Shakespeare’ in Percy’s Reliques. Quoted or alluded to in four Shakespeare plays, and the subject of an early poem of Tennyson, it gave to Edward Burne-Jones both the title and the layout for one of his most famous paintings.8
From their preoccupation with Christian painting before Raphael, the Pre-Raphaelites moved on to scenes from poetic literature. Subjects were taken from the verse romances of Coleridge, Scott and Keats, but more often from the romances of Tennyson and of Shakespeare. Scott paved a path for Keats and Keats for Tennyson, and their medieval tales in prose and verse inspired Pre-Raphaelite paintings and stained glass (see Plates 6 and 15). Whereas medieval revivalists of the 1760s had claimed that early literature was a useful source of historical evidence, revivalists in the 1850s evacuated legendary subjects of historical content. The titles of poems by Tennyson and Browning show how miscellaneous were the subjects they picked from history, literature, legend and myth. Whereas Scott’s historical romances in verse and prose are set in the past, and loosely based on real characters and events, this is less true of Victorian verse, though Browning is an exception. Tennyson’s chief source is legend. Rossetti admired the pictorial qualities which made the Laureate’s poetry ‘the Bible of the Pre-Raphaelites’. Rossetti had already done a Mariana in the South, and in 1857 he was happy, along with Millais and Holman Hunt, to accept the invitation of Tennyson’s publisher, Moxon, to illustrate a grand edition of the Laureate’s Poems.9 Much Pre-Raphaelite and Victorian art is illustration, either of literary classics or of topics from history and mythology.
Before he associated himself with the Pre-Raphaelites, Ford Madox Brown produced a number of history paintings, tableaux from the pageant of English history: The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots, Wycliffe reading his Translation of the Bible to John of Gaunt and Chaucer at the Court of Edward III, which was exhibited in 1851. In the original version of this last painting, entitled The Seeds and Fruits of English Poetry, now in Oxford’s Ashmolean Museum, the Black Prince, England’s military hero, places a friendly hand on the shoulder of the Father of English Poetry, who (like Madox Brown’s Wycliffe) is reading to the court. The idea for the subject presumably came from the famous frontispiece of an early fifteenth-century manuscript of Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde (now at Corpus Christi, Cambridge). This full-page illumination shows the poet reading to courtiers in an emblematic landscape.
In 1845 Madox Brown had begun Seeds and Fruits by dividing the canvas into three arches, evoking the format of the medieval triptych, a tripartite icon painted on hinged wooden panels, with the outer leaves opening to reveal the centrepiece. Brown idealises the role of the poet, but not in the manner of the illustrator of the Corpus Christi manuscript, though neither seeks to depict an actual event. If the Black Prince knew Geoffrey Chaucer, it is unlikely that he would have shown such public favour to a junior member of the royal household simply because the fellow was a poet in his spare time. (Not one of the four hundred instances in which Chaucer’s name is found in surviving contemporary records suggests that he was a poet.) It is even less likely that Wycliffe should have read aloud to a willing John of Gaunt from the extremely literal running gloss on the Bible which not he, but some of his followers, had produced. Such improbabilities are, however, evident only to a historical knowledge which developed after Madox Brown’s paintings were made. Few early viewers would have raised a pedantic eyebrow.
Seeds and Fruits presents English poetry as an organic growth which springs naturally from the earth of England – much as French commentators saw the Gothic arch as springing from that of France. The scheme is genealogical: a family tree, like the Tree of Jesse (a sacred subject common in stained-glass windows), with Geoffrey as Jesse. Jesse is the father of David, from whom Joseph of Nazareth is descended. The offspring of Chaucer’s metaphorical seed are (left arch) Milton, Spenser and Shakespeare and (right arch) Byron, Pope and Burns, with, in the roundels above, Goldsmith and Thomson. Below, ‘the names of Campbell, Moore, Shelley, Keats, Chatterton, Kirke White, Coleridge and Wordsworth appear in the cartouches held by the standing children in the base’.10 In the larger version, Chaucer at the Court of Edward III, now in the Tate Gallery, Chaucer’s poetic offspring have disappeared and the Gothic frame has been replaced by a sunny English Pre-Raphaelite landscape. History and genealogy give way to Nature. Brown’s patriotic history conceived as a pageant – as in Walter Scott’s Tales of a Grandfather – is absent from the work of the PRB proper. They were more interested in religion, nature and literature, especially poetry.
Much of the painting of the Pre-Raphaelites during the three years in which they were a Brotherhood owed its inspiration to medieval or medievalist romance, as can be shown by listing some of their canvases from this period.
1.William Holman Hunt, The Eve of St Agnes (1848); based on Keats’s verse romance, discussed in Chapter 3. (Porphyro and Madeline were illustrated with more success by Arthur Hughes in 1856, in a triptych with the same title: see Plate 6.)
2.John Everett Millais, Isabella (1849); based on Keats’s Isabella, or the Pot of Basil (1820), itself taken from a story in Boccaccio’s Decameron of c. 1350.
3.Millais, Ferdinand Lured by Ariel (1849); from Shakespeare’s The Tempest.
4.Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Dante drawing an Angel on the First Anniversary of the Death of Beatrice (1849); a scene from Dante’s Vita Nuova (1290–4), later translated by Rossetti.11
5.Holman Hunt, Claudio and Isabella (1850); from the scene in Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure in which the novice nun is asked by her brother to save his life by agreeing to go to bed with the judge who has condemned him to death.
6.Walter Deverell, Twelfth Night (1850); from Shakespeare’s play.
7.Holman Hunt, Valentine Rescuing Sylvia from Proteus (1851); an incident from Shakespeare’s Two Gentlemen of Verona.
8.Millais, Mariana (1851); based on Tennyson’s ‘Mariana’ [‘in the Moated Grange’], an expansion of a detail of Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure. See Plate 16.12
Shakespeare contributes directly or indirectly to five of these eight paintings. In every case the source is a romance comedy, a love-tangle ending in marriage. Each tableau illustrated shows love or attraction between the sexes (Ferdinand is lured by Ariel to meet Miranda). This is true also of the three other paintings, which illustrate incidents taken from Keats, Dante and Tennyson. I drew up this list to demonstrate the Pre-Raphaelite preoccupation with medievalist romance. A second look at the list shows much overlap in the subjects and genres of the PRB: poetry, romance and drama. A third look shows that the Brotherhood’s interest in illustrating the literature of medieval, or medievalist, romance took a naturalistic form not very surprising in a group of twenty-year-old men. Some of these narrative paintings, notably numbers 1, 5 and 7 in the above list, fix the reader’s interest pointedly upon What Happened Next, or what might have happened next. Porphyro elopes with Madeline; Claudio is tempted to wish that his sister would accept Angelo’s corrupt and indecent proposal; and Proteus, had Valentine not intervened, was about to ravish Sylvia. All three works are by Holman Hunt, a man who hated sin as much as Rossetti gazed at femmes fatales.
Millais’s Mariana (Plate 16) is the most assured and successful of these eight paintings, and the only one whose subject is a single figure. The young woman is bored: what happened next was nothing; Mariana waited for her fiancé for five years in the moated grange. Mariana shows also that an interest in the stained glass of the Middle Ages was not confined to the middle-aged, any more than it had been for the youthful author of ‘The Eve of St Agnes’. The storied windows of Madeline’s bedchamber pour colour into the central panel of Arthur Hughes’s triptych of 1856, although their focus is less sensual than the coloured beams of Keats’s poem. It was The Lay of the Last Minstrel and ‘The Eve of St Agnes’ which put romance of a more and a less innocent kind into the modern medievalist romance. Young love became an essential ingredient of medievalist poetry and of Pre-Raphaelite painting. In ‘The Lady of Shalott’, Tennyson used medieval imagery to treat the subject of the sudden sexual attraction felt by a woman for a man – the female gaze. The love of Elaine le Blank for Sir Lancelot is the basis of the original medieval romance. (Another casualty of love is shown in Millais’s Ophelia, in the Tate Gallery.) Tennyson’s version is so satisfactory because he did not give the romance motif the raw naturalistic treatment often found in the paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, who have their share of Victorian bad taste. Rather, he thoroughly reimagined the original situation and story, and was not too explicit. For later Romantic poets, the Middle Ages provided a dark glass in which dangerous matters could be dealt with by means of images, symbols and allegories.
A curious final instance of the end of the historicist phase of ‘medieval’ art is Millais’s large painting A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford (see Plate 17). It was first exhibited in 1857 at the Royal Academy, accompanied by lines from ‘A Metrical Romance of Sir Ysumbras’. An elderly knight uses his horse to give two frightened children a lift across a river, against an evening sky, in a chivalric analogue of the legend of St Christopher and the Christ child. The painting, with its humanity and pathos, and its broadly painted picturesque background, had an obvious appeal for family-minded Victorians, who appreciated Millais. He was the youngest ever entrant to the British Academy Schools, at the age of eleven. At fifteen, he won the gold medal for painting The Young Men of Benjamin seizing their Brides, a prophetic choice of subject; as his Mariana was also to prove. By 1853 he had become Ruskin’s candidate for the mantle of Modern British Painter relinquished by J.M.W. Turner, who had died in 1851. But in 1855 Millais had become the husband of Ruskin’s former wife, Effie. Despite the scandal attaching to the court proceedings by which, at her suit, Effie’s marriage to Ruskin had been annulled, Ruskin still pinned his hopes for British art on Millais. ‘I am not sure,’ he wrote in 1856, ‘whether [Millais] may not be destined to surpass all that has yet been done in figure painting, as Turner did all past landscape.’ But Ruskin disliked Sir Isumbras, and pronounced judgement: ‘The change in [Millais’s] manner from the years of Ophelia and Mariana to 1857 is not merely Fall – it is Catastrophe; not merely a loss of power, but a reversal of principle.’13 The principle Millais had betrayed was that of fidelity to nature, nature observed in detail. This tenet was one which some Pre-Raphaelites had begun to leave behind, but their public champion had adopted it before 1848 and was not going to give it up. It is a constricting principle, but in seeing the change in Millais’s work, and interpreting it, Ruskin showed his acuteness of vision and trenchancy of judgement.
Confirmation that the Medieval Revival’s historicism had passed its peak came with the advertisement exhibited with the painting. This suggests that Sir Isumbras at the Ford is an illustration of the metrical romance exhibited below it; an authenticating reference in the manner of Walter Scott. But although the incident can be found in Sir Isumbras, the lines Millais exhibited cannot. He had commissioned them from Tom Taylor, a journalist.14
Earnestness and intensity are characteristic of much of the work not just of Holman Hunt or of the PRB but of the Victorians; who had too many styles to choose from. Architects were conscious of this problem, and Pugin tried to solve it. It seems, as Mordaunt Crook argues in The Problem of Style, that this problem, a consequence of the explosion of knowledge, is one which cannot be resolved. Now that history provided a museum of styles, none seemed authentic. This was among the preconditions for the Romantic Revival and for Victorian earnestness. Millais and Rossetti had been caricaturists since their days at the Academy Schools. Millais’s mock-source for Sir Isumbras suggests that a venerable textual origin was not really needed to authenticate this kind of painting, and also that a painting did not need to be ethically sourced in history or in a real text. The booster rocket of literature falls away from artistic medievalism. Millais’s facility took him to success, the Presidency of the Royal Academy, a baronetcy, and the production of the winsome Bubbles, advertising Pears Soap. He was thus the first British pop-artist, perhaps the first post-modernist. This Ruskin had sensed.
In 1857 the artist Frederick Sandys, a friend of Millais, produced a caricature of A Dream of the Past: Sir Isumbras at the Ford, entitled A Nightmare (see Plate 18). The knight is replaced by Millais, the children by Rossetti and Holman Hunt, and the noble steed by a braying ass branded with the initials ‘J.R. / OXON.’ This in-joke relieved a debt of ingratitude. But it also suggests both that the medieval had lost its kick, and also how useful Ruskin’s vocal support had been for these young artists: it was Ruskin who had got them across. Ruskin’s first major publication had been Volume I of Modern Painters, by a Graduate of Oxford. Underneath A Nightmare appeared the unkind verse:
A Tournor’s asse he annes had bene,
Millare him cleped Russet – skene,
But dames y wis and men konninge,
Cleped him Graund Humbugge.15