4/9/09 Victorians and religion continued; pre-Raphaelites 1

So far:

• In In Memoriam 56, we've seen a statement of how the scientific discoveries of the day would lead to religious doubt. The fossil record shows that nature isn't even careful to preserve species, much less individuals; perhaps even humans will become extinct. This would suggest that nature, far from being the benevolent Presence of Wordsworth, is a site of ceaseless and ultimately pointless struggle: Nature is "red in tooth and claw," and "the spirit does but mean the breath." Humans by implication are unredeemed by their belief in God as love, and are in fact (presumably because of their capacity for evil) worse than the dinosaurs fighting in the prehistoric mud. So either God is not good, there is no God, God is good but humans aren't worth preserving; either way, the only "hope of answer, or redress" is "behind the veil," i.e. it is unknown and perhaps unknowable.
• Arnold's "The Study of Poetry" refers to another source of religious doubt: the higher criticism of the bible. "Our religion has materialized itself in the fact," he says, "and now the fact is failing it"; that is, the historical research of the Bible, far from confirming the truth of the Bible as was originally intended, was actually undercutting it. Arnold's solution in the essay is poetry, which he claims might serve as a substitute for the Bible without its debilitating weakness of depending on fact: increasingly we "will discover that we have to turn to poetry to interpret life for us, to console us, to sustain us."
• In "Dover Beach," we saw a poetic version of a similar argument. Now that the Sea of Faith has receded, the world, which once seemed like a land of dreams, various and beautiful and new, appears to be bereft of joy, love, and certitude, a "darkling plain/...Where ignorant armies clash by night." Depending on how we read the word "true," Arnold's solution to this problem is either love between individuals or poetry.

Pick up with "Karshish." In going to this poem, we are going back to the perspectivism that we saw as being characteristic of the Victorian era. We have a dramatic monologue in which we get a non-Christian view of a Christian figure, Lazarus. In the book of John, Lazarus is raised from the dead by Jesus--so establishing whether or not this event actually happened would go a long way towards established or undermining the truth of the Bible. Rather than describe the event directly, which would almost certainly tip his hand, Browning chooses to represent the event by means of an intermediary--Karshish, the Arab physician. Karshish, as I say, is not Christian, but he is a believer--presumably the "God" he mentions repeatedly throughout the poem would be, if untranslated, Allah. Ultimately, the questions we want to ask ourselves are 1) does Browning represent the resurrection of Lazarus as an event that happened? and 2) either way, what's the point of representing it from the POV of a Muslim?

• opening lines--what does this lengthy salutation establish about the character of the speaker?
• 79-101: short description of the case: what does this tell us about Karshish's approach to the world?
• 102-117 what's different about Lazarus that makes Karshish not dismiss his story outright?
• 126 - 145, 146 - 177, 178 - 201 - What are the qualities and causes of Lazarus' childlike state?
  • 126-145: the beggar grown rich metaphor: knowledge beyond human capacity
  • 145-177 apparent confusion of priorities
  • 178-201 existence in two worlds simultaneously
  • 202-212 submission to God's will
  • 213-219 doesn't proselytize
  • 220-231 how L deals with potential calamity
• Given all of the above: should we believe in the resurrection of Lazarus or not?
• 243-282: Jesus as learned leech; Lazarus the madman; J's divinity of less import than a medicinal flower. Again, should we believe in the resurrection of Lazarus or not?
• what do we make of the final verse paragraph? Is the beginning of belief, or just intellectual curiousity about what a falsehood would mean if it were true?

Pre-Raphaelites

today: overview of PR painting, Rossetti. Next week: we'll definitely take a day on Christina Rosettii, and during our other day we'll probably focus primarily on either Morris or Swinburne--what's your preference? If Swinburne, which--the slightly weird one or the much weirder one?

117 Their blood runs round the roots of time like rain:
118 She casts them forth and gathers them again;
119 With nerve and bone she weaves and multiplies
120 Exceeding pleasure out of extreme pain.

121 Her little chambers drip with flower-like red,
122 Her girdles, and the chaplets of her head,
123 Her armlets and her anklets; with her feet
124 She tramples all that winepress of the dead.

Like many movements in art and/or literature, pre-Raphaelite art is difficult to characterize because it evolved, and furthermore evolved in different ways depending on the artist. George Landow argues, in fact, that there were "two different and almost opposed" pre-Raphaelite movements, the second of which grew out of the first. I would disagree only in that I'm not convinced that the later pre-Raphaelite movement is coherent enough to be considered one movement. I've tried to finesse the issue by calling this group "PRs and fellow travellers."

Start with the first movement. The pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was originally started in 1848 by seven artists, including Dante Gabriel Rosetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais. From the beginning, the movement was concerned with both poetry and the visual arts, but their definition of themselves were more concerned with the visual arts, as you can tell from the name "pre-Raphaelite."

Why "pre-Raphaelite"? Here's John Ruskin, an art critic who was immensely influential for the pre-Raphaelites and was also the first major critic to write approvingly about them. He's describing the education of painters.

"We begin by telling the youth of fifteen or sixteen that Nature is full of faults, and that he is to improve her; but that Raphael is perfection, and that the more he copies Raphael the better; that after much copying of Raphael, he is to try what he can do himself in a Raphaelesque, but yet original manner: that is to say, he is to try to do something very clever, all out of his own head, but yet this clever something is to be properly subjected to Raphaelesque rules, is to have a principal light occupying one seventh of its space, and a principal shadow occupying one third of the same; that no two people's heads in the picture are to be turned the same way, and that all the personages represented are to have ideal beauty of the highest order..."

Note that Ruskin's contempt here is not for Raphael, but rather for slavish imitation of Raphael. Which brings us to the first of the qualities of PR art:

1. the P-R movement was in large part a revolt against the conventions of art of the time, especially those of the Royal Academy. To an extent, this meant doing pretty much exactly the opposite of what the Royal Academy taught. George Landow: "if the Royal Academy schools taught art students to compose paintings with (a) pyramidal groupings of figures, (b) one major source of light at one side matched by a lesser one on the opposite, and (c) an emphasis on rich shadow and tone at the expense of color, the PRB with brilliant perversity painted bright-colored, evenly lit pictures that appeared almost flat." Compare <http://www.artchive.com/artchive/R/raphael/raphael_selfportrait.jpg.html> with <http://artchive.com/artchive/H/hunt/hunt_conscience.jpg.html> or <http://persephone.cps.unizar.es/General/Gente/SPD/Pre-Raphaelites/Big/BowerMeadow.jpg>
2. One of the conventions that the PRB revolted against was the idealization of the subject. The pre-Raphaelites felt that what Ruskin called "fidelity to Nature" had been lost. One of the tendencies in PR art, then, is a tendency towards realism--in particular, fidelity to the model and a precise, near-photographic rendering of small objects in the foreground.
3. The fact that the PR's called themselves PRE-Raphaelite, rather than, say, ANTI-Raphaelite or anti-academy, betokens a strong anti-modern undercurrent in their art, and not least a reaction against the materialism of the age. MERELY realistic art would have been no better than photography, which was beginning to come into its own during the PR era. The PRs therefore combined realism with a strong tendency toward symbolism. See <http://www.abcgallery.com/R/rossetti/rossetti2.html>. The lily = purity; palm and thorn in the foreground foretell the Passion; St. Joachim is tending grape leaves in the background; wine is symbol of Christ. Or see <http://www.abcgallery.com/R/rossetti/rossetti3.html>. The lily is Mary's symbol; what's her attitude towards being chosen?
4. The PR's believed in the unity of the visual and literary arts, and encouraged one another to try out each others' arts. Of the early PR's, only Rossetti can be said to have succeeded in this, but there is very strong crosstalk between the paintings and poetry--many of the paintings are of poetic subjects, and some of the poems make reference to visual arts. Examples: <http://www.abcgallery.com/M/millais/millais22.html>, Ophelia. We saw last week two representations of the lady of Shalott. Here's Keat's "Belle Dame Sans Merci": <http://composer.mryantaylor.com/media/blogs/artsongs/LaBelleDame/LaBelleStudy-WaterhouseLarger3.jpg>

Not all of these principles translate very well into poetic terms, but in Rossetti's poetry, at least, there tends to be a strong pictorial element, a marked tension between the ideal and the real, and considerable symbolism of a pictorial character.

The later pre-Raphaelites went in different directions from the early PRB.

• One strand of PR moved in the direction of something akin to the worship--or perhaps the fear--of eroticism. Rossetti, for example, turned more and more to images heavily dominated by the eroticized image of a woman. Examples: <http://www.victorianweb.org/painting/dgr/paintings/4.jpg>. Swinburne, often classified as a later PR, takes the erotic as his major theme.
• An overlapping strand moved toward the revival of the Medieval Gothic. The strongest and most systematic proponent of this version of PR is William Morris, who advocated a revival of medieval craftsmanship--not just in poetry or in illustration, but in the useful arts such as furniture. Morris wanted to create useful objects that were not the dead products of machinery but imbued with the attention and care of a craftsman. This was not only an aesthetic theory; Morris was a socialist.
• In both strands, there is a strong element of aestheticism which would lead, ultimately, to the Aesthetes and Decadents of the 90's. Here's the contradiction Landow speaks of--it's true that the PRs, rather than altering their subjects to conform to an abstract ideal of beauty, wanted to paint their models as they were, but it is also true that the models they chose were, in their terms, "stunners." What began in part as a movement against art which sacrificed truth to beauty fairly quickly became focussed on beauty as a central value. One model: Keats.

Rossetti, "The Blessed Damozel"

<http://www.abcgallery.com/R/rossetti/rossetti45.html>

• Rosetti's poetry in general, and this poem in particular, was attacked by Robert Buchanan as an example of "the fleshly school of poetry": Heaven is occupied by material objects like a gold bar and physical bodies, which Buchanan associated with lewdness and sensuality. What's "fleshly" about this poem? What do you think Rossetti was getting at in portraying the damozel this way?
• What points of view are represented in this poem? (How can the lover-speaker know the thoughts of the damozel?)
• What does this poem imply about heaven? About love?
• From what you've heard about PR art, does this seem like an poetic equivalent?