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VISUAL INTERLUDE I |
Double Visions: Pre-Raphaelite
Objectivity and Its Pitfalls
Music proceeds from sensations to determinate ideas; the visual arts from determinate ideas to sensations. . . . [Painting] can penetrate much further into the region of ideas, and in conformity with them can also expand the realm of intuition more than the other visual arts can do.
Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment
But poets should
Exert a double vision; should have eyes
To see near things as comprehensively
As if afar they took their point of sight,
And distant things as intimately deep
As if they touched them.
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora Leigh
DOUBLE DISTANCE
The previous chapter laid out a possible Kantian basis for semi-detachment and examined ways in which Mill—in his correspondence with Carlyle, in his writing on poetry, and in later texts such as On Liberty—reworked in a distinctively post-romantic way the categories of reflection and reception, and thus of aesthetic judgment. Nonetheless, novelists and other artists who explore the parameters of semi-detachment are not seamlessly aligned with Kantian or post-Kantian meditations on the imagination’s power to register the coexistence of reflection and reception. Explicit theories of the epistemology of reverie or the absorption of aesthetic enthrallment will never be precisely congruent with the works themselves—vide the gap between Henry James’s theory and practice of fiction.
Realist fiction’s struggle with the experience of being “of two minds” never occurred in a vacuum. Accordingly, this book’s three Visual Interludes explore problems of distraction, absorption, and critical distance playing out in various media that, for all their formal distance, share with fiction certain narrative aspects and storytelling impulses. This chapter focuses on two Victorian painters whose work and critical reception provide a way of thinking about semi-detachment and partial absorption as a painterly problem: founding Pre-Raphaelite John Everett Millais and, around four decades later, Lawrence Alma-Tadema, a popular Academic painter who specialized in “classical studies.” Semi-detachment proves useful in explaining why Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite ethos of “truth to nature” was understood as both excessively cold (dry and overly objective) and also uncomfortably hot (too somatic, too productive of embarrassingly physical responses among its viewers). It also illuminates Alma-Tadema’s fascination with very Victorian-looking classical scenes (a 1973 Metropolitan Museum exhibition of Alma-Tadema paintings from the collection of Alan Funt bore the telling title “Victorians in Togas”) as well as his unexpectedly subtle approach to representing art-induced states of reverie.
There are various ways to make the crossing from textual problems such as pseudo-interpolation and (partial) suspension of disbelief into the realm of painting. Later in this chapter, I argue that one revealing moment comes with Charles Dickens’s strange and strenuous early attack on Millais’s realism, when his Christ in the House of His Parents debuted at the Royal Academy in 1850. The chapter ends by comparing Alma-Tadema’s paintings about reverie and absentmindedness to Victorian fiction by way of the most mundane of details: what it means when figures in a painting or characters in a novel clasp hands. The chapter begins, though, by taking a step outside of the 1850s to consider one art historical paradigm that clarifies the ways in which a painting might be like fiction in its relationship to semi-detachment: David Summers’s capaciously diachronic account of what he calls “double distance” in painting.
In Real Spaces, Summers proposes thinking about a painting as doing two things at once: on the one hand, it acknowledges its material existence as a planar image; on the other, it strives to “specify the observer as a viewer and itself as something seen in a virtual space.”1 The effect is that the viewer will respond to a painting in two ways: both by remarking on the object’s beauty and by asking how her own self and social relations are implicated within the depicted world.
Images on surfaces entail a double distance. . . . To see an image either as “in” a virtual space or “on” a planar surface is to see it also involved in one or another set of embracing relations, which may be more or less explicitly developed, and which may be endlessly varied.2
A painting presents itself to viewers both as a colorful surface and a depicted social world. The point is not to choose; rather, it is that coexistence, that doubleness that must be grasped—just as in Kantian terms the aesthetic judgment is what makes sense of the fact that our minds both receive empirical data and reflect on the meaning of such sensoria, striving to make meaning of it.
As I argued in the introduction, the doubleness of the painting (it occupies real space and creates virtual space) is an indispensable part of the conceptual encounter that viewers will have with the artwork. That makes such a painting a machine for thinking about the coexistence of the actual and virtual. By the account this book offers, a machine that helps its viewers to grasp what it means to be semi-detached: not only from the virtual world called into being by a painting but even from one’s own ordinary social world. Summers’s account works against oversimplified models either of painterly intent or of audience reception, arguing it is a mistake to presume that visual art
presupposes an essentially like subjectivity as a “viewer.” . . . Such response on our parts makes us, not just viewers, but observers of the definition of subjectivity, and this observance tends to deny double distance, thus to conceal the social spaces presupposed by our behavior.3
Summers presumes we never simply have a purely somatic “taste” reaction to artworks, but always a conceptual response, as well. Misleading presumptions about shareable subjectivity lead us to miss the crucial aspect of aesthetic experience that connects us to past (or geographically distant) viewers: that they too are viewing paintings at a “double distance.”4
By Summers’s account, painters implicitly (and at times explicitly) work through the implications of what it may mean for their work to strike viewers both as a planar artifact and also as a living, interacting part of their social world. Take, for an early modern example, Hans Memling’s 1481 Christ Blessing (Fig. 3.1). The detail that once seen cannot be ignored is Christ’s hands, resting on the bottom of the painting itself, available to touch in the way the rest of the painting is not. He seems to be acknowledging the canvas on which he is painted, yet looking out at us calmly, from what his fingers acknowledge is the other side—perhaps of a window ledge, perhaps of something more, a gateway between worlds.5
FIGURE 3.1. Hans Memling, Christ Blessing (1481, oil on panel, 35.1 × 25.1 cm, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; bequest of William A. Coolidge. Photograph © 2017, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston).
The concept of double distance helps make clear that in Christ Blessing Memling has focused on the simultaneous proximity and distance of Christ: both are established by the simple fact of his fingers, not quite tangible but still pushing against the pictorial plane.6 Memling’s painting seems to disavow the idea that a viewer’s pleasure in an artwork comes from the sensation of connection or an immediate immersion into the shared reality. What those fingers on the ledge suggest instead is that any such intimacy is founded on an original illusion: the pressure of fingers on the frame declares both that the subject is here and that the subject is in another world. The very moment that Memling’s Christ marks that he is on one side of the pictorial divide and we on the other serves to heighten our sense of the intimacy between us.
Summers describes the advent in Memling’s near contemporaries Jan van Eyck and Hieronymus Bosch of “pictorialization of the imagination;” in Bosch’s paintings, “impossible new forms appear as if in a natural light . . . but they have a horizon of the world to themselves.”7 That observation sheds light on how certain other Memling paintings also play with the painting as planar surface and the painting as virtual world. His Diptych of Maartin Van Nieuvenhove (1487), for example, plays with mirrors and the logic of framed easel painting to achieve a related effect. The diptych itself physically divides the world in two: the pious praying Martin is in one painting and the object of his devotion, the Virgin, in another. However, in a mirror visible over the Virgin’s right shoulder, the Virgin and Martin clearly occupy a single, shared space; the effect (two paintings, but a single shared world) is both to place the Virgin in a world apart from the man praying to her and to reinsert her into his own world.8 It is not an isolated instance.
As we turn from Memling to Millais, Michael Fried’s influential categories of “theatricality” and “absorption” offer a quite different way of considering what sorts of attachment between viewer and subject are feasible—or intended—in European painting of the nineteenth century.9 Fried’s influential account of the involutions of consciousness designed ultimately for public view sheds useful light on the tension between absorption into a narrative work (getting lost in a story) and staying detached from it, or located outside it, looking down upon it.
The key connection comes with Fried’s observation that midcentury painters are growing skeptical of a visual effect of interiority that serves, ironically, as an improved form of theatricality. His account of the intimate access that viewers are offered by the advance of the bare backs of Caillebotte’s 1875 “Floor Scrapers,” and his acute analysis of the role that “optical glisten or dazzle” plays in gesturing at and yet withholding knowledge of others’ interiors attest to his subtle understanding of dual challenge: to make absorption itself into a kind of theatricality. The problem that I have been describing as semi-detachment, the experience of being invited into an aesthetic world while also being reminded of your material distance from that world, Fried approaches from a different direction in his acute focus on moments in which painters like Caillebotte think through the theatrical allure of seemingly absorbed figures who at once move forward into visibility and seem to recede, to shrink away from the viewer’s gaze. The movement back into a distant pictorial world and, simultaneously, forward into an uncomfortably intimate relationship to the viewer takes a very different form in Millais, yet a suggestive underlying congruence persists.
PERMANENT EVANESCENCE, WRETCHED LINGERING
John Everett Millais may seem an unlikely candidate for studying problems associated with the idea of a painted surface that offers itself to its viewers both as a virtual world and as material object. Millais soldiered on through the second half of the Victorian era, a consummate professional and eventually president of the Royal Society, pleasing Lady Lever with works like Cherry Ripe and A Child’s World, (better known under its soap commercial name, “Bubbles”). By Raymond Williams’s account, he forsook Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (PRB) radicalism for a “new and flattering integration” that allowed not the essence of PRB radicalism but merely its “style” to “become the popular bourgeois art of the next historical period.”10
To understand Millais’s relationship with double distance, we might start with the question of temporality, although that topic might seem better suited to history painting than to Millais’s paintings of the early 1850s, such as Christ in the House of His Parents, Mariana, and Ophelia. On the one hand, Millais’s viewers confront the problem of the evanescent moment, the (time-consuming) capture of fleeting, ever-changing actuality; on the other, they must make sense of the frozen permanence such capture implies. In the early 1850s, Millais understood painting as capable of capturing something incredibly ephemeral, brief, and fragile (life as it is lived)—but also as bound up with the time-consuming labor of capturing such a moment, the hours of work to exempt a single instant from time’s flow.11
Both Andrew Sanders and Isobel Armstrong have stressed the Pre-Raphaelite attachment to extremely well-known texts—to the Bible, to Shakespeare, and to Boccaccio filtered through Keats and Tennyson—and Armstrong emphasizes that it was poetry (rather than fiction) that played the most explicitly rivalrous role for Millais (poetry by Tennyson and Keats, especially).12 Worth stressing as well is that Millais’s interest in narrative—often marked by subject matter taken from lyric poetry or from Boccaccio—was often defined by the tussle between a forward-moving narrative drive and the problem of “wretched lingering”—that is, between a storytelling impulse and the problem of treating the instant in its timelessness.13 Many Millais paintings shed light on the era of the realist novel by engaging with what it means to be caught inside a moment, not to be able to move out of that moment toward action. The implications of Millais’s paintings for the narrative logic of the day relate to the ways in which they depict frozen moments of the greatest beauty that unmistakably also exist within an ordinarily onrushing life.
This account of Millais’s struggle with how the ephemeral turns into and yet remains apart from the permanent links him to Walter Pater’s proposal that “to burn always with a hard gemlike flame . . . is success in life.”14 Without quite spelling out the paradox, or the tension woven into the notion of a “hard gemlike flame,” Pater’s essay defines a desirable state of aesthetic permanence, a kind of immortality, as being made up of pulsations, constantly flickering and mutable contingencies of matter and energy: “This at least of flamelike our life has, that it is but the concurrence, renewed from moment to moment, of forces parting sooner or later on their ways.”15 Art succeeds, then, when it turns the ephemeral and constantly mutable into a “hard gemlike flame”; a flickering eternity.
The three paintings I mentioned previously all explore the way in which an instant (a drowning, a wounding, a yawn in the middle of a featureless day) can contain an eternity—without losing its ephemeral quality. Christ in the House of His Parents (Fig. 3.2) is on one level a banal incident, a minor accident in a carpenter’s shop; on another level it is typologically laden, pulling the viewer out of the actuality of a life to the foredoomed crucifixion of Jesus, the inescapable woe of his mother Mary. Ophelia (Fig. 3.3) is about the instant the doomed young woman rests right on the water’s surface before plunging in. Mariana (Fig. 3.4) captures a woman stretching before a confining window, a micro-event that sums up all the tedium of a life lived without event (a captive’s isometrics). All three unpack a single fraught moment; more than that, all three overtly explore what it means to snatch a moment out of time and to linger with it, as the permanence of canvas permits. Here, ephemerality and permanence are intimately connected to one another, and in his overt awareness of that fact, the artist implicitly takes on the role of onlooker and critic, as well.16
FIGURE 3.2. John Everett Millais, Christ in the House of His Parents (1849–50, Tate Britain). Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.
FIGURE 3.3. John Everett Millais, Ophelia (1851–52, Tate Britain).
FIGURE 3.4. John Everett Millais, Mariana (1851, Tate Britain). Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.
Millais’s encounter with the problem of durable ephemerality also produced another sketch that never made it to canvas. Millais himself glossed his 1849 Eve of the Deluge (Fig. 3.5) as a reminder to remember that “in life we are in death,” that even a wedding feast may be broken by the news of imminent demise. As far as we can tell, these (like the supernumerary figures in Christ in the House of His Parents) are ordinary folks, grieving, weeping, witnessing, despairing, panicking, and being calmed. Yet all of them are already doomed; drowned men walking (actually almost all are drowned women). These are the others, the lost folk whom we only know as those who did not take Noah’s narrow path to survival. We are witnessing a death that will not take long but could nonetheless be called lingering, since we see them (horrible to depict and to consider) between the moment that they know they are doomed and the moment their doom ends in their simple extinction.17
FIGURE 3.5. Drowned men walking: caught on paper at the moment they realize the flood is upon them, perpetually dying and about to die. John Everett Millais, The Eve of the Deluge (Sketch, 1849–50, The British Museum). Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.
Finally, though nothing by Millais actually appears in the Pre-Raphaelite house journal, The Germ, his son reports (in the posthumous Life and Letters) that he began one story, intended for its fifth issue.18
He also wrote a story for [The Germ], which would have appeared in the fifth number had the periodical survived so long. The following is a brief outline of the tale: A knight is in love with the daughter of a king who lived in a moated castle. His affections are returned but the king swears to kill him, if he attempts to see his lady-love. The lovers sigh for each other, but there is no opportunity for meeting till the winter comes and the moat is frozen over. The knight then passes over the ice and, scaling the walls of the castle, carries off the lady. As they rush across the sounds of alarm are heard within, and at that moment the surface gives way and they are seen no more in life. The old king is inconsolable. Years pass by and the moat is drained; the skeletons of the two lovers are then found locked in each other’s arms, the water-worn muslin of the lady’s dress still clinging to the points of the knight’s armour.19
Two illicit young lovers who, flying for freedom instead find themselves drowned in a frozen moat, locked forever in a first/last kiss that at once dooms them but spares them the indignity of getting old.20 Keats ends The Eve of St. Agnes with the lovers successfully fleeing, but in this story, Millais’s lovers find that the freeze is not deep enough. The result is that final, haunting, horrible image; that the king after many years of not knowing the fate of his daughter, discovers her frozen in that instant of transient bliss (or horror) from the only active night of her life. It is telling to place this story of eternally intertwined corpses, frozen out of sequence and succession, into a snapshot of eternal devotion, alongside Millais’s paintings of drowned Ophelia, stalled Mariana, and the prefigured crucifixion of the boy Jesus. What comes through most of all is a sense of Millais’s struggle with the challenge of keeping fidelity toward both the present moment and permanence.
FEELING THE BURN
Grasping the significance of these Millais paintings—and, later in the chapter, the depictions of reverie and aesthetic absorption that run through Alma-Tadema—requires a sense of the larger cultural context into which Pre-Raphaelitism emerged in 1850. Anne Helmreich reports being “repeatedly struck by ways in which the aims of early photography and Pre-Raphaelitism were described in analogous terms that pointed to a shared intellectual project . . . in particular . . . a concern with truth to nature.”21 That is an argument for attending not just to the movement’s specific relationship to photography but more generally the rise of the new “epistemic virtue” of “objectivity” in the mid-nineteenth century.22 One valuable piece of evidence for the novelty of that approach is the outrage sparked by Pre-Raphaelite paintings that seemed (to contemporary viewers) to embody new and objectionable ways of attaining the Ruskinian beau ideal of “truth to nature.”23 That outrage—as evidenced by the virulent reviews that greeted Millais’s Christ in the House of His Parents—frequently seems to arise from the novelty of the aspiration toward a sort of accuracy that is caricatured as anatomical, mercantile, or soulless: painters are accused, rather than credited, with deploying a kind of “mechanical” or “surgical” precision understood as incompatible with genuine emotional experience.
I referred previously to Ophelia’s accomplishment as lying in the painting’s capacity to gaze at the instant of death, at the last minute that Ophelia herself participates in the world both as object of contemplation and as contemplative subject. The immense time that Millais spent painting both foliage and female form (months of modeling that almost killed Lizzie Siddal when the bath she floated in was too cold) becomes, somehow, part and parcel of the instantaneous quality of the painting.24 To look at it from a modern perspective (in a world that has had photography for almost two hundred years) is to feel oneself drawn into the moment of suffering but also to linger with the overall acuity with which the natural world is made present: a viewer’s semi-detachment made of equal parts pathos and scrupulous objectivity. Yet this is also one of the Millais paintings that a Times critic in 1860 damned for its “too equally distributed elaboration.”25 That criticism of what we might call Millais’s “all-over” ambition—the paramount importance of analytical objectivity, every inch of the canvas rendered suitable for up-close scrutiny—is intimately aligned with the praise given to Ophelia because “a certain Professor of Botany, being unable to take his class into the country and lecture from the objects before him, took them to the Guildhall, where [Ophelia] was being exhibited, and discoursed to them upon the flowers and plants before them, which were, he said, as instructive as Nature herself.”26
In fact, the mixed reception accorded to the botanical accuracy of Ophelia—“too equally distributed elaboration” or “as instructive as Nature”—helps connect this painting to Jennifer Roberts’s recent argument that Pre-Raphaelite realism could be perturbing to its contemporary audience because it struck audiences as, on the one hand, scientifically cool and yet, on the other hand, committed to evoking “an immediate physical response to the painting” or even “producing exaggerated sensory responses in the viewer.”27 Studying critical responses to Ford Madox Brown’s Pretty Baa-Lambs (1852), Roberts focuses on the nurse’s sunburned cheeks, arguing that when The British Quarterly Review’s critic fumes about this “sunburnt slut” he is marking the success of a Pre-Raphaelite aim to “relay the powerful truth-effects of sunlight from the landscape into the gallery, where it might register on the bodies of viewers [so that they] feel the burn.”28
Recent scholarship helps illuminate ways in which Millais too may have generated discomfort by this kind of somatic invitation to feel the world of the painting. In praising “problematic and ambiguous . . . physical and psychological interaction” in Christ in the House of His Parents, Barlow draws our attention to the way that the figures seem drawn together and yet also remain apart: where it would seem natural for mother and child to touch one another, Mary holds her own shawl, and Jesus puts a warding hand across his own body.29 The “awkwardly alienated proximity” (Barlow’s acute phrase) between the members of the holy family (Mary touching not her son but herself, Jesus with his hand up not in affection but as a barrier to entry) has something to do with the painting’s efforts to convey both the fragile ever-shifting subtlety of the momentary position of a body in the grip of strong emotion—and also something deeper, the inner feelings that accompany a moment of high tension.30
In the contemporaneous criticism of Millais paintings generally—but of Christ in the House of His Parents, especially—a similar and similarly revealing discrepancy arises between the clinical, dispassionately accurate, anatomical details and the depth of supersensible feeling that a religious subject is meant to evoke. Christ in the House of His Parents offers a striking version of the linkage problem of ephemeral and eternal—of the holy world and of our own world explicitly conjoined by the typology of the crucifixion. Many critics objected to the minutely rendered particularity of the holy family’s bodies in situ, a particularity they judged incompatible with a properly spiritualized presentation of Christ. The notice in Punch describes the holy family as “specimens which we may vainly endeavor to keep in spirits” and jokes that “it will be a pity if this gentleman does not turn his abilities—which, in the mechanical way, are great—to the illustration of Cooper’s Surgical Dictionary; and leave the Testament alone.”31
No detail escaped criticism: reviewers even carped that “he exerted his talent in a wrong pictorial economy, wasting it on the representation of wood-shavings.”32 It is worth noting, though, some variation in how Millais’s capacity to capture minute details of the world is received. For example, a review in The Builder denounces “this painful display of anatomical knowledge, and studious vulgarity of portraying the youthful Saviour as a red-headed Jew boy, and the sublime personage of the virgin a sore-heeled, ugly, every-day sempstress.” Yet it goes on to praise “the extraordinary depiction of shavings. If the artist will adhere to this manner, there are other subjects more fitted to his love of, and great power in, imitation, requiring less refinement and appreciation of the lovable.”33 Those shavings, the vivid index of the ongoing carpentry, are in a sense like the painting itself, proof of the care that the young worker (Jesus, or Millais) lavishes on the material surface (planks in a shop, or the painting itself) that lies before the viewer.34
The challenge posed by the painting, then, is how to reconcile an immediate physical response to the pointedly, painstakingly realistic details with the reverence that a religious subject ought to require. In the main, the criticism judged the experiment a failure. Blackwood’s announces that “[s]uch a collection of splay feet, puffed joints, and misshapen limbs was assuredly never before made within so small a compass.”35 The Times similarly emphasizes the incongruous yoking together of carnal suffering and high spirituality, declaring that “the attempt to associate the holy family with the meanest details of a carpenter’s shop, with no conceivable omission of misery, of dirt, of even disease, all finished with the same loathsome minuteness, is disgusting.” The same Times review also makes a different point: not only is the physicality of the holy family disgusting, the paintings is also “dry” and “conceited” and thus merely imitative rather than lifelike: “With a surprising power of imitation, this picture serves to show how far mere imitation may fall short, by dryness and conceit, of all dignity and truth.”36 Not only has Millais been excessively lifelike, he has also failed to infuse the purely carnal details with the sentiment required to achieve truth. Moreover, it is the leading realist writer of the age who brings the case against Millais to a magisterial climax.
HORRIBLE UGLINESS: DICKENS CONTRA MILLAIS
This chapter began by considering the conceptual possibilities raised by Millais’s various ways of depicting lingering ephemerality—especially the challenge of depicting a banal moment in the boyhood of Jesus that typologically foreshadows the crucifixion, gesturing upward to eternity. Roberts’s insight about audiences “feel[ing] the burn” on a subject’s face, Julie Codell’s account of implicit physiological experimentation about body posture, and Barlow’s notion of “awkwardly alienated proximity” all uncover aspects of the odd mixture of visceral engagement and distance that Millais’s paintings not only produce but also explore and comment on. The most memorable early attack on the Pre-Raphaelites, though—Charles Dickens’s response to Christ in the House of His Parents—changes the rules of the game.
William Michael Rossetti called Charles Dickens’s July 1850 Household Words diatribe “most virulent and audacious”; he might have added “disgusted.”37 Dickens fulminates:
You will have the goodness to discharge from your minds all Post-Raphael ideas, all religious aspirations, all elevating thoughts, all tender, awful, sorrowful, ennobling, sacred, graceful, or beautiful associations, and to prepare yourselves, as befits such a subject Pre-Raphaelly considered for the lowest depths of what is mean, odious, repulsive, and revolting. . . . [Jesus] is a hideous, wry-necked, blubbering, red-headed boy, in a bed-gown, who appears to have received a poke in the hand, from the stick of another boy with whom he has been playing in an adjacent gutter, and to be holding it up for the contemplation of a kneeling woman, a kneeling woman, so horrible in her ugliness, that, that (supposing it were possible for any human creature to exist for a moment with that dislocated throat) she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest ginshop in England. . . . Such men as the carpenters might be undressed in any hospital where dirty drunkards, in a high state of varicose veins, are received. Their very toes have walked out of Saint Giles’s.38
A certain amount of the vehemence here accords with a general chorus of critical disapproval.39 By Bullen’s account, Dickens “caricatures” Christ as “a low-life realist genre piece”40 largely because he sees Pre-Raphaelite nostalgia for archaic values as linked to the religious retrogression Dickens fears is threatening English Protestantism.41 And certainly in understanding what irked Dickens about “wry-necked” Jesus and Mary’s “dislocated throat,” we might recall Codell’s point about the PRB interest, circa 1850, in “emphatic rendering of bodily motion” by way of a careful physiological study.42
However, this contextualization risks understating the essay’s visceral force.43 There is certainly no comparison, in terms of intensity, between what Dickens writes here and the (amused) contempt he displays for the English genre painters (William Mulready and Charles Robert Leslie among them) he sees exhibited in Paris in 1855. By comparison to French and Belgian painters, he writes,
It is no use disguising the fact that what we know to be wanting in the men is wanting in their works—character, fire, purpose. . . . There is a horrid respectability about most of the best of them—a little, finite, systematic routine in them. . . . Mere form and conventionalities usurp, in English art . . . the place of living force and truth.44
The criticism developed here, in fact, makes it surprising Dickens goes after Millais’s painting with such ferocity. There is certainly in Millais no trace of the systematic flatness and predictability that Dickens is denouncing in Mulready. Instead, he faults Millais for being too sensual, which is to say too attached to capturing the surface of life, the minute details of a particular model. Yet he is also denouncing Millais for failing to penetrate to the depicted subject’s true emotional core: “All religious aspirations, all elevating thoughts, all tender, awful, sorrowful, ennobling, sacred, graceful, or beautiful associations” are missing. This painting is at once too much (particular details) and not enough (inward emotional reality).
We might even say that there is something downright Dickensian about this very impulse in Millais. Dickens is committed by this juncture in his career to a realism that works by making a composite picture that says something unsettling to viewers who want their types simple. Dickens attacks Mulready on account of his “little, finite, systematic routine . . . mere form and conventionalities.” By contrast to Mulready’s patly systematic routine, Dickens’s fiction is filled with moments that break with finite mimesis. Such breaks (in chapter 5, I discuss one telltale moment of narratorial oscillation between representing an inward prayer and an outward burst of physical activity in Our Mutual Friend) suggest that there are more layers of reality than can ever be expressed by simple storytelling.
Dickens, then, might well have responded positively to some of the very things in Millais’s painting that he instead denounced: the toes, the awkward pose of the body, the wounded, Phil Squod-like commonness in the figures. Instead, his attack lines up not just with contemporaneous critical comments about Millais’s penchant for “specimens” and his “surgical” predilections but also with Buchanan’s famous 1871 attack, on Pre-Raphaelitism as the “fleshly school of poetry.” Buchanan argues that Rossetti’s paintings resemble poetry in their
thinness and transparence of design, the same combination of the simple and the grotesque, the same morbid deviation from healthy forms of life, the same sense of weary, wasting, yet exquisite sensuality; nothing virile, nothing tender, nothing completely sane; a superfluity of extreme sensibility, of delight in beautiful forms, hues, and tints, and a deep-seated indifference to all agitating forces and agencies, all tumultuous griefs and sorrows, all the thunderous stress of life, and all the straining storm of speculation.45
That is, Rossetti stands accused of sensory excess coupled with an absence of the “healthy forms of life” that permit a spiritual rather than a somatic bridge to the “agitating forces and agencies” that others experience. We might expect Dickens to applaud the capacity of Millais’s realism to instantiate its subjects as suffering, bodied creatures; instead, he is disgusted (by toes, by throat, by blood) and eager for a space apart.
In Kantian terms, we might understand Dickens as seeking a way to reflect on Millais’s painting, rather than merely reacting to it. His disgust may be triggered by his conviction that there is no space between himself and the subjects of the painting: their awkwardness and discomfort become his own. That disgust may be a covert impulse on Dickens’s part to keep the “exactness” that fiction attains distinct from the kind of spiritual reliability that painting ought to supply. Or it may be a revealing form of misrecognition, whereby the novelist fails to see ways in which realist tactics in his own form might translate to another art. In either event, this vehemence about the excessive somatic demands made by Millais (his anguished plea to be allowed to detach himself from its visceral appeal) suggests that in the 1850s Pre-Raphaelite painting posed some of the same problems that realist fiction did. Both art forms in their very efficacy threatened to overstep the bounds of art and work directly upon its audiences in ways that made it unethical or monstrous.
In making sense of the conceptual space that fiction and Pre-Raphaelite painting might have shared or tussled over, circa 1850, it helps to know that at least some of the criticism of Christ in the House of His Parents had to do with the fact that “heads and bodies of the figures would have seemed inconsistent to contemporary viewers: neither recognizably sensitive intellectuals nor robust country people.”46 This occurred at least in part because Millais sought out individuals who “looked distinctive or even idiosyncratic enough to convince viewers that they existed in reality” and juxtaposed working-class bodies with bourgeois head and hand models.47 Rossetti’s Mary, modeled on his sister, read as unmistakably genteel; Millais’s figures, working class in body and middle class in heads and hands, were not so readily legible.
Prettejohn makes the point that such an “artfully crafted amalgam of . . . the working-class body of the real carpenter and the head of a middle-class man” arose from the conviction that heads ought to be modeled by bourgeois subjects (in the case of Joseph, Millais’s own father), since “individualism was the preserve of the middle class.”48 Millais’s amalgamation is a tricky one. It aims to achieve composite realism by conjoining artisanal corporeal authenticity with signs of inner life and the traces of mental anguish. Yet its impulse toward amalgamation proceeded from the same sort of practical division that led him to combine plein air and indoor modeling in the painting of Ophelia. Out of various mimetic frameworks, a single “truth to nature” emerges—but with its seams very much in view. Similar seams between one way of construing reality and another can be found elsewhere in Millais’s work of this period. Think for example of Ferdinand Lured by Ariel, in which Ferdinand blindly attends to Ariel and his fellow fairies, who are invisible to him but plain for viewers to see. A similar argument might be made about the halos in Ford Madox Brown’s paintings, painted so as to be visible to the painting’s audience, yet not necessarily perceptible by figures within the painting.49
The complex relationship between pictorial space and viewer’s involvement here perhaps relates to Giebelhausen’s description of the “timelessness” in Millais’s painting that stems from “a notion of period that depended on fragmentation rather than synthesis.”50 What seems to be a paradox—how can timelessness depend on fragmentation?—comports well with the notion that Millais aims both to embed his viewers within and detach them from the painting. The temporal fragmentation (like the “all-over” indexicality of the natural world in Ophelia) leaves the viewer unsure how to take these figures, whether to sympathize warmly or gaze critically.51 If the viewer’s embroiled relationship to the boy Jesus produces vociferous responses (Dickens is the most striking), those responses speak to the painting’s capacity to make viewers at once enter into the scene and recognize their actual distance from it.
Nor is Millais the only painter of his era for whom that question of partial entry and “awkwardly alienated proximity” has resonance. The range of ways to conceive of that problem of an aesthetic experience that operates at a “double distance” takes on a series of distinctively midcentury forms not only in fiction (as chapters 4 and 5 explore in detail) but also in the visual arts that flourish after the apogee of Pre-Raphaelite experimentation in the 1850s. This Visual Interlude concludes, therefore, with a jump forward into the 1880s to consider Alma-Tadema’s quite different approach to the problem of partial absorption into a virtual world: by way of the problem of inaudible music—and the allure of holding hands.
SAPPHO, HOMER, HOLDING HANDS
Anne Leonard has recently remarked on the number of European paintings of the 1880s that depict music as embodying the “emotional force and . . . capacity to command sustained attention” that painting (by virtue of its incapacity to depict interiority or mark the passage of time) lacked.52 By her account, the turn toward representing music among the painters of the 1880s represents a straightforward attempt to “appropriate for painting qualities peculiar to music.”53 Similarly, Elizabeth Helsinger maps what listening looks and sounds like in Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s poetry and painting both: “Music rendered ideas of sense and sensation intensely perceptible through the body, heard and felt in the vibrations of breath from throat, the touch of the hand or body moving to music, the peculiar penetrating power of music-borne language.”54 Both accounts suggest the vital role that the representation of a different art may play in delineating the exact ambit of one’s own art.
The value of such sideways glances at the potentially inaccessible reaches of another form of art is a persistent concern of the paintings of Lawrence Alma-Tadema. Dutch-born in 1836 but practicing in England from 1870 on, Alma-Tadema is neither a French “Academic” painter (though the linkage to the French Academician Jean-Leon Gérôme is clear) nor exactly a Pre-Raphaelite, nor does he make it into Elizabeth Prettejohn’s recent book on Victorian aestheticism.55 Caught between pillar and post, Alma-Tadema was accused of sterile classicism by Ruskin and an even more sterile presentism by the curators of a recent retrospective: to call his antique figures “Victorians in togas” is no compliment.56 But Prettejohn is right to describe certain Alma-Tadema paintings as having a “peculiar doubleness” displaying “comforting signs of survival and disconcerting traces of loss”; and to suggest that such paintings work because they create a “pleasurable friction between the ephemeral and the lasting.”57 The man who called himself an “archaeological genre painter” turns out to be surprisingly attuned to the challenge of representing absence—showing experiences available to the depicted figures, but withheld from the painting’s audience.
Rather than attempting to “bridge or overcome those fundamental differences” between a painting’s capacities and those of music (or poetry), Alma-Tadema’s actually underscores a painting’s distinct representational capacity—a capacity that inheres precisely in pulling up short. Alma-Tadema paintings, such as A Reading from Homer (1885), Sappho and Alcaeus (1881), and A Favourite Poet (1888), struggle to convey not so much the presence of music (or lyric poetry) as a sense of its recessive quality. The subtleties are different in each case: in A Favourite Poet the figures actually recline against the lines of Horace’s poetry (inscribed on a wall) that they are presumably also reading aloud, a kind of tactile encounter that underscores poetry’s quasi-tangibility. In A Reading from Homer (Fig. 3.6), the performer (the title is ambiguous, perhaps deliberately, about whether this is meant to be Homer himself) leans forward toward the reverent, vibrating intensity of his listeners. In this case, what makes the music almost audible is the intertwined hands of those listening—and the fact that one of the hand-holders is also touching a lyre, as if waiting to go next.58
FIGURE 3.6. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, A Reading from Homer (1885, Philadelphia Museum of Art). Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.
FIGURE 3.7. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Sappho and Alcaeus (1881, Walters Museum, Baltimore). Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.
Sappho and Alcaeus (Fig. 3.7) may be Alma-Tadema’s most striking work of virtual ekphrasis. The painting’s two halves are divided by its calm white center and the receding blue sea: one side is filled up with “Sappho’s girls” (as one contemporary review put it) and with the scratched names of various lovers whom Sappho commemorated in her poems. The other primarily holds the fiery, somewhat petulant Alcaeus, who gazes passionately past Sappho. We might reckon with the absorption of a poet (and her presumptive pupils) into another poet’s craft—an absorption whose intensity is measured by the fact that none of those intense, highly focused gazes truly meet, nor do any two characters appear to be looking at the same thing.
Most interesting of all, finally, is the light touch of the beloved on Sappho’s back, a touch that neither she nor Sappho overtly acknowledges. The duality of the painting turns on Sappho as absorbed subject and also as tangible surface upon which the hand of her beloved rests. Painting can represent the physical emplacement of all its subjects and, in a very different way, it can convey what Sappho is hearing, or what she sees as she hears it. The touch that connects Sappho and her beloved (yet which also acknowledges the experiential divide between them) marks another version of Barlow’s “alienated proximity.” Applied to Millais, that phrase describes the way in which a social setting forces two figures together (Mary and Jesus) yet also renders them (for some difficult-to-discern reason) unable to touch. Here the proximity initially appears total, in that the figures are touching. Yet they are gazing off into different distances, responding to the same music in ways that may well not converge.
How are Alma-Tadema’s figurations of absent music connected to the alienated proximity bodied forth in that moment of oblivious touch between Sappho and her beloved? In “The Metaphysics of Tragedy,” Lukacs describes the moment of pure form as transcendent silence; the formal logic of these paintings, however, relies on impurity, on the mixing together of physical and metaphysical contexts, of visible and invisible stimuli. The failure of the various characters in Sappho and Alcaeus to meet one another’s eyes, or even to share the same object in their gazes suggests one way of reading their absorption: they are lost in perennially inaccessible thoughts, in particular experiences. The touch that unites them, though, (the same could be said of the listeners in A Reading from Homer) suggests another interpretation—that they are socially, metonymically linked, sharing a crowd experience. The painting’s accomplishment lies not in purifying either formal claim at the expense of the other but holding the two in a feasible relationship.
In a sense, these Alma-Tadema paintings aspire to failure: they succeed not by appropriating the power of music, but by definitively failing to convey the sensation of listening to lyric poetry. You might think of this as a kind of moiré effect that marks the interference patterns between visual and acoustical arts. The subject’s absorbed listening is the negative space that the painting simply corrals by failing to reproduce it. Another pair of phrases applies to these deliberately imperfect ekphrastic moves. One is mediated immediacy; as if Alma-Tadema depicted the painting’s struggle to capture the perfect purity of the relationship to the poet’s recital. The other is unmediated mediation, as if the medium had been made tangible and palpable by an interference pattern between what painting can capture and what poetry can express.
Alongside the unseen music, tangential touch like that hand on Sappho’s back looms large in Alma-Tadema’s work generally. Unconscious Rivals (1897; Fig. 3.8) is rife with the “peculiar doubleness” of temporality Prettejohn describes: determinedly classical and archaic, and yet also so evidently of its own day. True, there is the barrel vaulting modeled on the ceiling of Nero’s golden house and the half-leg of an enormous statue of a seated gladiator.59 Yet this space is like late Victorian railway stations, as well. So, are these rivals waiting for a Roman gladiator or someone about to arrive on a 5:03 commuter train from Birmingham?60 At once ancient and modern, these two women leaning out over that (PRB-inflected) frieze of a wall into deep space are palpably listening for something that at once unites them and divides them. The marker of that double state, of joint attendance and separation? A handclasp.
FIGURE 3.8. Lawrence Alma-Tadema, Unconscious Rivals (1893, Bristol City Museum and Art Gallery). Courtesy of Bridgeman Images.
The not-quite-acknowledged touch between the two women (and the garland of flowers, serving not only to aestheticize but also to blur the meaning of that contact, as if to allow each woman a sort of plausible deniability) is related to the way that the two subjects, leaning out from flatness into depth, are both thinking, though neither knows it, of the same absent figure. The interplay of knowledge and ignorance that defines this tableau (they both know their own intention in waiting, neither knows the other’s) is underscored by an external fact: the painting’s title—as unknowable to the figures within the painting and the title of a novel to its characters—makes viewers privy to an intersubjective fact that’s not known to the rivals themselves.61
This chapter has made the case (via the concept of “double distance”) that Millais struggles with a cognate problem about the audience’s relationship to the depicted world—am I part of their world, or is their world nothing more than a piece of art hanging in my world? Four decades further on, Alma-Tadema’s invisible music and his handling of the problem of tangential touch is still signaling his interest in the doubled state, not just of his figures but of his audience: at once detached from their everyday social lives and present in them, at once absorbed in an alternative world and conscious of the ordinary social constraints that define their footing in the world beyond that which they see in the artwork.
In both artists, links to problems of fiction and of narrative are discernible. Millais’s approach to the material reality of the carpenter’s shop where Jesus grew up implies a realism just akin enough to Dickens’s own to infuriate the novelist. In the case of Alma-Tadema, one link that bears mentioning grows out of that significant yet underplayed handclasp at the center of Unconscious Rivals, which has more than a little to do with the memorable handclasp between Rosamond and Dorothea very late in George Eliot’s Middlemarch—a hard-to-read moment of carnal and perhaps psychic connection, in which Dorothea’s diffusive influence both does and does not flow into the waiting Rosamond’s soul. I say the contact is hard to read: despite the readerly impulse to parse this moment as one of great intimacy and sympathetic connection, Eliot goes to great lengths to point out gaps in this moment of seeming fusion. When Dorothea reflects on the pleasures of taking poor Rosamond by the hand, the narrator drily observes that “she felt a great outgoing of her heart towards Rosamond for the generous effort which had redeemed her from suffering, not counting that the effort was a reflex of her own energy.”62
Moreover, the scene is one of hand-unclasping as much as it is of handclasps. Dorothea actually ends up taking Rosamond’s hand three times because it keeps being withdrawn from her grasp:
[Dorothea] was beginning to fear that she should not be able to suppress herself enough to the end of this meeting, and while her hand was still resting on Rosamond’s lap, though the hand underneath it was withdrawn, she was struggling against her own rising sobs.63
Eliot is not exactly blaming Dorothea for failing to notice when Rosamond’s hand is withdrawn and withdrawn again. Yet she is certainly reminding the reader that the act of noticing, upon which all these edifices of sympathy are built, is always partial and not directly controllable even by the parties involved. Readers, unlike the characters themselves, are aware that the two women are seeing images (of Will, mainly, but also of Lydgate and of themselves in hypothetical social encounters) that differ quite radically from one another. Eliot wants the reader to be acutely aware of the forms of detachment, even of withholding, that are woven into moments of seemingly comprehensive clasp and conjunction.64 Many of the same ideas structure Unconscious Rivals.
CONCLUSION: BROWNING AND THE PROBLEM OF SEQUENCE
There is not a simple, unified story to be told about the relationship between the forms of realism, or truth to nature, that shaped Millais’s Pre-Raphaelite painting and the ones that gave structure to the fiction of Dickens, Eliot, and their contemporaries. Following the logic of Julie Codell’s argument about the Pre-Raphaelite interest in using physiognomy and anatomy as a way of capturing subjective states, we might even want to find in Millais’s later widely praised illustrations of Trollope’s Barchester novels (Fig. 3.9) traces of his eventual attunement of his own art to the formal requirements of the Victorian novel.
Such an account might emphasize that the novels of Trollope, Dickens, and others succeeded not only by sequencing episodes one after another but also by choosing moments to dive deep down into the experience of particular characters, isolating their strong feeling in a kind of fictive tableau vivant that aligns well with Millais’s own mode of representing the anguished body. The problem of semi-detachment in Millais and Alma-Tadema is that of the coexistence of ephemeral instants and longer arcs, the relationship between the instant or episode and the “whole story.” Millais’s turn toward novels and novelists later in his career (not just those remunerative commissions from Trollope but also a cordial reconciliation with Dickens) also serves as a reminder that accounts of the era’s painting illuminate the other arts, as well. John Stuart Mill articulates something very important about nineteenth-century conceptions of lyric poetry when he declares that we call someone “a poet, not because he has ideas of any particular kind, but because the succession of his ideas is subordinate to the course of his emotions.”65 It is a verbal art form, yet by Mill’s account it refuses sequence and instead abides inside the precious moment. One way for this project to turn back from the visual to the verbal arts, then, is by considering poets who can shed light on this problem of perennial semi-detachment from a past that both shapes us and recedes from us.
FIGURE 3.9. Dejection visible: the almost occulted profile performs absorption, allowing the viewer to fabricate the character’s inward life out of absence. John Everett Millais, “Lady Mason after Her Confession,” illustration for Anthony Trollope, Orley Farm (London, Chapman, and Hall, 1862. Houghton Library, Harvard University).
Browning’s 1855 “Memorabilia” offers one fascinating way of thinking about the relationship between the momentary and the ongoing.
Ah, did you once see Shelley plain,
And did he stop and speak to you?
And did you speak to him again?
How strange it seems, and new!
But you were living before that,
And you are living after,
And the memory I started at—
My starting moves your laughter!
I crossed a moor, with a name of its own
And a certain use in the world no doubt,
Yet a hand’s-breadth of it shines alone
‘Mid the blank miles round about—
For there I picked up on the heather
And there I put inside my breast
A moulted feather, an eagle-feather—
Well, I forget the rest.66
Dickens’s distaste for the ungainly limbs and pathological toes of Millais is not going to be resolved by looking at how poetry grapples with the tension between instant and eternity. Nonetheless, the core moment of this poem—the rejoinder to the speaker’s awe—“but you were living before that / And you are living after” and the laughter that accompanies it—illuminates the hold that fiction’s command of sequence-as-mimesis had on the audiences of the 1850s. Browning’s first two stanzas grapple with the relationship that any single moment has to its surroundings: the speaker registers the fallacy associated with summing a life up in any given moment and, in effect, accepts a rebuke for his excessive excitement about one event, overlooking its milieu—both what led up to the event and what followed from it.67 In effect, the speaker and poem both stand accused of not following fiction’s recipe for reality: one thing after another.
Browning has a remaining trick up his sleeve: the latter two stanzas of the poem essentially recoup the event from the first two stanzas, with the feather taking the place of the meeting with Shelley. This is a second pass through the problem and yet Browning’s conclusion is neither sequential nor additive; “I forget the rest” registers (perhaps ruefully, perhaps not) the tendency not to establish a sequence, a legible and orderly milieu, even when the same sort of event recurs. At this moment, the problem of making sense of events as sequential, one leading to the other and shaping the meaning of the other, becomes redoubled: the speaker now proves incapable of making the first pair of stanzas stand in a productive relationship to the second pair.
Browning is playing with a persistent problem for lyric poetry: How to render, concurrently, the experiential intensity of a moment and the passage of time. In a sense, lyric poetry here aligns with both painting and with prose. Novelists and painters and poets alike are grappling at this moment with the artwork’s capacity to be present in two ways at once: as the instantiation of an ephemeral instant and as durable artifact—like that Paterian paradox, a “hard gemlike flame.” The implications of such balancing acts between sequence and instant, between coherent order and momentary sensation, run deep for Browning. In “The Dead,” Joyce has Gabriel Conroy call Robert Browning’s poetry “thought-tormented music”: that odd duality captures Browning’s commitment both to the palpable “thinginess” of a work of art (its musicality) and to its detachability from that “mere” materiality (hence its thought-tormented quality).
Browning is not, as early critics charged, aiming for a directness of experience that eludes him. With all of poetry’s formal props and aids put on display rather than hidden away for elegance’s sake, the poem in Men and Women that most perfectly works through the implications of thought-tormented music is “A Toccata of Galuppi’s,” which takes the form of a paean that effectively mimics or mirrors the piece (by a long-dead composer) it purportedly describes.68 On the one hand, the reader of the poem is meant to feel the thrum of the music just as the speaker does: “In you come with your cold music till I creep thro’ every nerve” (l.33). The overlap between imagined musicality and the verbal fabric of the poem itself is made explicit: the musical rhythm described in the poem is also meant to take (imperfect) hold of the reader in the very words that describe that rhythm.
What? Those lesser thirds so plaintive, sixths diminished, sigh on sigh,
Told them something? Those suspensions, those solutions—Must
we die?
These commiserating sevenths—‘Life might last! We can but try!’69
On the other hand, even at such moments of aural harmony, the semantics of the sentence generate uneasiness. The ventriloquized resolution, “We can but try!” is assigned to some particular imagined speaker, the unmarked, unspecified we of “Must we die?” Browning aims at producing an indeterminate sort of solidarity between reader, speaker, and the imagined originator of the musical idea. Suspensions and solutions both are tentative and partial at best, which is precisely what allows them to reach out to implicate the reader, as well. In the poem’s quasi-intangibility, its materiality lies.
The poem can neither satisfactorily impersonate an object, nor can its words be granted sufficient musicality to make the question of tangibility seem temporarily irrelevant. Poetry’s virtuality works by suggesting that all such intangible experiences bring readers to inconceivable heights only by forfeiting their durability across time.70 Browning presumes that audiences respond both to his poetry’s music and to its thought; this produces a persistent tension between considering the words of others (as thoughts open to critical reflection) and feeling those words enter one’s body uninvited and impossible to be expelled. Those centuries-old notes still impossibly hanging on the air have some of the same paradoxical attributes that Millais’s paintings do. A moment frozen into art cannot be at once durable and evanescent. Yet not all lingering is wretched: in the half-light of aesthetic experience, the moment both goes and stays.
