9/1/07 - History of Art - What is Classicism?

The 'Middle Ages' did not exist as such. This is just a label for the period between Antiquity and the Renaissance. The Middle Ages do not have a definite start or finish date. They could be said to begin around 300 AD and end around 1492 upon the discovery of America, but these dates are equally contested. Out of the concept 'Middle Ages' comes the notion that these are 'Dark Ages', as opposed to 'light ages.' Yet this would be an inaccurate image, for the conception of light was important in the Middle Ages, in terms of large windows, reflective mosaics and an appreciation of jewels. There were many important figures at that time who were also seen as 'light' figures.

S. Maria Maggiore was built under Popes Celestine I and Sixtus III, c. 422-40. It has a nave of twenty columns on each side, and an elegant entablature. In fact, it is on the whole a very elegant building. According to Krautheimer's 'The Architecture of Sixtus III: A Fifth-Century Renascence?' in his book De Artibus Opuscula XL. Essays in Honor of Erwin Panofsky, first published 1961, buildings that are related to Sixtus III are 'light'. The Lateran Baptistery in Rome, first built under Constantine c. 313 and remodelled under Sixtus III 432-40, is one other example. Krautheimer considered it very Classical. S. Sabina c. 422-32 and S. Stefano Rotondo c. 470, were also Classical buildings, the latter due to its regularity and use of entablature.

So why was there a kind of Renaissance in the fifth century? Krautheimer claimed it was due to the upheaval of the Christian church by Constantine. Despite the urgency that Constantine felt to change his kingdom into a shrine of Classical Christianity, it took a long time for Rome to become a Christian city. This was because it had been such a stronghold for paganism. Paganism was finally pronounced dead and Rome named a Christian city. Symbolically, Christian buildings drew their strength from the foundations of Imperial Rome by pilfering materials from imperial architecture.

Despite all this, the new architecture was in fact very un-Classical.

So what is Classical Antiquity? Conventionally it was the period between the Persian Invasion to 338 BC. Classical art is the name given to art informed by the Roman principles of strength, beauty, stability, the power of reason and simplicity. The transmission of these qualities from Antiquity to new objects is generally known as the Classical Tradition. The past became for Renaissance Europe the place from which to learn. This wished to imitate the values of art of Classical Antiquity, including clarity, self-control, reason and simplicity. These were considered to be the greatest universal values, not simply the values of Rome. By taking these values, however, something more original was created. The resulting art was a more emotional and personal response to the values of the Classical Tradition.

The earlier examples are not really examples of the Classical Tradition. They have been altered and remodelled from the original Classical versions, although sometimes pieces were taken directly from Classical buildings.

Deliberate recreations of Classical art in the Renaissance included bronze castings, marble and sarcophagi. They had to be recreations and not exact imitations because it was impossible to know the original method of production. Hence the new art was a 'rebirth' and not a direct copy. Panofsky defined the difference between 'birth' and 'rebirth' as a fixed distance of time. Because of the time delay, there developed a systematic way of looking at the past. In the Middle Ages it was not that people were unaware of Antiquity, it was just that they felt no nostalgia for it, like the people of the traditional Renaissance.

The renewed interest of Classical Antiquity reached its peak in the Carolingian Renaissance, in the ninth century. The arts of this period were associated with a patron, Charlemagne, although he was not the only patron. We should remember that Classical Antiquity was an inspiration throughout the ages for goldsmith work, illuminated manuscripts and coins and seals.

The baptistery pulpit by Nicola Pisano, c. 1260, is very different compared to earlier pulpits, such as the pulpit by Guido da Como. This is because Pisano was more influenced by Classical Antiquity than Guido da Como. The arches of Pisano's pulpit remind us of triumphal arches. The number three was significant to Christianity, symbolising the Holy Trinity, hence the trefoil arches of the pulpit, reflecting the number of arches on the Arch of Constantine.

Pisano's figure of Fortitude, 1260, seems to be based on ancient sculptures such as the sarcophagus carvings of Hippolytus and Phaedra, from the second century. It could also be based on images of Hercules, who represented strength.

Pisano was a great sculptor because he did not merely copy the images of Classical Antiquity. He used them as sources of inspiration. Pisano's relief sculpture of The Adoration of the Kings on the pulpit matches the images of Hipolytus and Phaedra in terms of figure size, occupied space, composition and voluminous bodies.

Pisano's image of the Nativity, from the pulpit, shows Mary reclining on a couch like the figures of Antique sculptures.

In his Presentation in the Temple, Pisano uses examples of images from NeoAttic vases, yet interprets them in a more voluminous way.

Michelangelo made sketches of Pisano's work for his statue of Moses on the Sepulchral Monument of Pope Julius II, c. 1515. Interestingly, he does what Pisano does when researching for a sculptural project; he takes inspiration from Pisano and ends up producing something completely different. Michelangelo refers to Pisano's Fortitude for his own statue of Bacchus, 1496, taking the softness of the flesh from him. For David, 1501-4, Michelangelo copies the muscular stature of Fortitude.

Giovanni Pisano's pulpit with the Cardinal Virtues is an interpretation of the Venus de Medici of the first century AD. The Venus was probably an inspiration for the virtue Prudence, as she has been made more modest and her expression has been taken from Giovanni's own time, made more emotional and original. Emotionality was typical of Giovanni's work. He was a source of inspiration for Michelangelo, such as the Delphic Sybil, which Michelangelo seems to have taken from Giovanni's Sybil from the S. Andrea pulpit of 1301. Giovanni also interpreted Pisano's Fortitude for his own version of 1302-10, which he has made more agitated and emotional. This shows how differently Classical Antiquity was interpreted and used within the same era.

The style of Antiquity have been copied for manuscripts and frescoes. Sometimes Classicism appears in tiny details of paintings and frescoes, such as the one of Assisi, from the thirteenth century. The architecture in Giotto's Expulsion of Joachim from the Temple, c. 1305-15 is inspired by Classical Antiquity. Emotionality has been depicted by way of the emptiness of space into which Joachim is being pushed. It serves also as a metaphor for the emptiness of Joachim's life.

In the fresco Last Judgement by Pietro Cavallini, 1290s, the figures are wearing togas. Moreover, their bodies are indicated through the clothes in the way that the bodies of Antique figures do. Cavallini's use of light also indicates the art of Classical Antiquity.

Jacopo Torriti's Coronation of the Virgin in S. Maria Maggiore, c. 1290-95, has decorative 'scroll' shapes and depictions of birds and figures that are clearly inspired by or directly copied from examples of Classical Antiquity.

14/11/07 - English Literature - Byron

Byron was described by Lady Caroline Lamb as "Mad, bad and dangerous to know." He was the best-known man in all English-speaking countries. He was born into a colourful family. His mother was abandoned by his father. He went to Aberdeen Grammar School and then to Harrow and never returned to Scotland. In fact he was outspoken about his derogatory opinion of Scotland. His early life was one of disappointment and failure. He invested the family fortune in developing his estate house, only for it to be ruined by a water leak. He was not popular with university officials and never attended his work.

He began to write poetry as a student. In 1808 he wrote "Hours of Idleness" and in 1809, "English Bards and Scotch Reviewers," in which he took voice against the establishment. He began "Childe Harold" around this time. The poem could be described as a veiled autobiography or as his attempt to create a public persona. In 1810 he swam the Hellespont, a potentially fatal feat. In 1812 he wrote speeches for the House of Lords, and they give us a sense of his early radicalism. He met his future wife and had several affairs, including the national scandal of his relationship with Lady Caroline Lamb, who was already married. He had an affair with his half-sister who suspiciously gave birth the following year. He married Anne Isabella Milbanke, who had refused his first proposal of marriage but later accepted. The marriage broke up in 1816, and Byron left England forever. He had an illegitimate child by Claire Clairmont. He published "Manfred" in June of the same year. In 1818 he published "Beppo." Shelleys then arrived in Italy and stayed with Byron for nine months. In 1819 Byron had an affair with the Countess Teresa Guiccioli and wrote "Don Juan". In 1820 he rejoined politics, this time in Italy, and got involved in various scandals. After Carbonari was defeated, Byron moved to Pisa and wrote and published many works. Percy Shelley drowned in 1821. Byron got involved in a struggle between Greece and Italy, courageously rallied the Greek army, but died of a cold. "Don Juan" cantos XV and XVI were published posthumously.

"Childe Harold's Pilgrimage" has great themes tied up in the life of the author. His art seems to be a working out of himself, for the great characteristics of his poetry are: (i) authorial self-invention; (ii) the itinerant consciousness; (iii) the birth of the Byronic hero (a dramatic type later absorbed by popular culture; and (iv) (anti)Romanticism - Byron could even be described as pre-Romantic due to his earlier Classical style and Augustan mode.

(i) Authorial self-invention
Byron's texts are inseparable from him. According to Foucault, Byron should come under the type of author "creator of discourse." Byron's transformative self is discussed by Pushkin. Byron always deals with transitional versus amorphic modes. Byron celebrates his own mutability, which Wordsworth never did. Here never returns to a more grounded self, he is always moving. Performativity plays a large role in Byron's poems.

(ii) The itinerant consciousness
There is a constant form of movement in "Don Juan". And also, Childe Harold is frequently concluded to be a surrogate for Byron himself.

(iii) Birth of the Byronic hero
The 'Byronic' hero was a post-Enlightenment phenomenon. He was passionate, anti-rationalism, a cultural outsider (Byron forsook his Scottish origins), in flight from society, deeply subjective, against the dominant moral code (Byron was outside of politics and engaged in more romantic episodes) and physically appealing.

The cult of Napoleon was brought in by Byron. The cult is unlikely to have happened after Napoleon's death, if it was not for Byron. Byron travelled in a gold carriage in pretence of Napoleon and signed documents with the initials 'NB', as he revelled in the fact that he shared the same initials as the great man himself. In fact, it would not be far off the mark to say that Byron was obsessed with Napoleon.

(iv) Against Romanticism
Byron frequently insulted popular Romantic poets. He wrote lyrics for parlour songs, but they were unpopular because of their supposed pettiness and lack of profundity. There is a 'new realism' in Byron's work, a return to the mundanity of everyday life, although his life was far from mundane.

There is much orientalism in Byron, although his was not the only work imbued with oriental references, for other poets did this too, such as Coleridge in "Kubla Khan." Byron's "Court of Ali Phasha plays on the imperial fantasy of the oriental 'other'. He objectifies the oriental 'other' in a classical way, as figures in a landscape. In a sense, Byron is conventional, however, there is another side to him. He was outspoken about the acquiring of other cultures' artefacts. In a poem about the "Elgin Marbles" he is strictly anti-imperialistic. It is difficult to nail him down politically.

An early death seemed appropriate for Byron. The British knew him as a poet who published cheap editions of songs. But mass tourism owed a lot to Byron, for he was much written about, for example by Bulwer-Lytton and Charlotte Bronte. The latter was shocked by Byron and advised others not to read the works of that "evil" man. Her warning probably had the opposite effect.

In anthologies Byron has gone down the estimation compared to his contemporary poets. In "Palgrave's Golden Treasury" he comes last with only eight pages, and "Don Juan" and "Childe Harold" do not feature. By the Norton Anthology, Byron gets the most page space with 159, Wordsworth comes second with 155, Shelley 105, Keats 74, Blake is introduced for the first time with 57 pages, and Burns comes last with only 15. This shows that recently lyric poets such as Burns have not been credited as significant literary figures.

9/11/07 - English Literature - Percy Bysshe Shelley

Is it possible to write about death? Or arbitrarily, is it possible to write death? Poetry is obsessed with consolation and recuperating life. Among the Romantic poets, only Shelley grapples with death directly in his poetry. He is a unique poet, with an imagination unrivalled by contemporary poets. Radical and political philosophy are the objects of his discussions, and he does this by combining the power of imagination with the power of death.

Shelley draws equally between two intellectual traditions: the Enlightenment and the Romantic. Both were well established by the time he wrote his poetry. He was linked to both by (a) rationalism and scepticism (Enlightenment) from Hume and Godwin, and (b) irrationalism and organicism (Romantic) through Coleridge and Schlegel. According to the Enlightenment view: language is arbitrary signs of thought; history is contingent, with gradual improvement (Godwin); politics are radical, and about maximising representation; and writing is satirical irony, where content determines form. Conversely, the Romantic view is this: that language is the informing principle of thought; that history is necessary and in decline since the time of the Ancients; politics are quietist, problematising representation; and the writing is 'philosophical' irony, where form and content are mutually determining.

But Shelley cannot be pigeon-holed into either category. He has an Enlightenment scepticism and hatred of religious orthodoxy. He maintains the belief that humans can improve their own lot, so writing can change political circumstances. But also he believes that reason alone cannot do this; he thinks there can be an excess of rationalism. He believes that history is in decline, and thinks we have lost the sense of our roots, of organic unity. He thinks that we need to recover it through poetry. Shelley therefore moves to a Romantic idea of improvement.

So can poetry express imagination without the philosophical enquiry of Coleridge, or the quietude and passiveness of Wordsworth?

Shelley wrote his "Ode to the West Wind" while on war commission, after a time of great massacres and confusion amongst the police and military forces. He was furious about this, and the poem is a response to the massacre (his other responses are less direct). He can be read as a fatalist, but it would not be wholly true. The appearance of autumnal Paris is a source of inspiration to Shelley. The lyre is associated with Romantic poetry. There is an expression of powerful consciousness through the wind and lyre of the reawakening of spring. It shows originality; the ode is "to" the west wind, rather than "on" the west wind. It was a traditionally Greek or Roman trope to treat the wind as a deity. While Wordsworth and Coleridge were known for their lack of personification, Shelley's paganism is quite controversial. But he is sceptical of transcendentalism in the Wordsworthian sense and he takes on a sense of time in terms of death and regeneration which has little to do with individuals or consciousness. Shelley is obsessed with death, with the fundamental belief that the principle of all life is within matter itself. So he is a materialist, but also an idealist. He disconnects materialism from mechanism: reality is not like a machine. He takes this idea from Lucretius, the idea that a purely material universe may not run on things that are mechanical by nature.

For Lucretius the universe is wholly composed of atoms and void. Matter cannot be created or destroyed. Matter is like "invisible winds."

"Therefore I say again and again, there are unseen bodies of wind, since in deeds and ways they are found to rival great rivers, which possess a body which can be seen. […]"
[Lucretius, De rerum natura, (‘On the Nature of Things’) 1st C. BC, Book I]

The soul is composed of atoms that reform outside the body after death; life is even dependent on death.

"For so many first-beginnings of things in so many ways, smitten with blows and carried by their own weight from infinite time up to the present, have been accustomed to move and to meet together in all manner of ways . . . . that it is no wonder if they fell also into such arrangements […]. [T]he world was certainly not made for us by a divine power: so great are the faults with which it stands endowed. […] Therefore, when I see the grand parts and members of the world being consumed and born again, I may be sure that heaven and earth also once had their time of beginning and will have their destruction. […] [T]he earth is diminished and is increased and grows again."
[Book V]

The last line states that the principle of life is death. The tendency of the universe is towards decay (we see empires falling throughout history).

"So therefore the walls of the mighty world in like manner shall be stormed all around, and shall collapse into crumbling ruin […] nature does not supply as much as is necessary. Even now the power of life is broken, and the earth exhausted scarce produces tiny creatures, she who once produced all kinds […]."
[Book II]

Atoms are clustered together, according to Lucretius, because of "swerving." He offers no explanation for swerving; it cannot be comprehended. In Shelley's poem is a simplification of Lucretius' theory. The wind pulls apart and creates at once. There is a central paradox in the poem: it is an affirmation of the power of imagination affecting political change, yet it assumes that human nature is fundamentally passive. Shelley is optimistic but restricted to non-violence. The power of imagination is life the decaying power of the wind, the power that is within everyone. The old order must decay to allow a new society to be reborn. Shelley can be linked with feminism in a proto-feminist way, as beings are subverted into a dispersal of atoms, rather than based on a phallic central view like Wordsworth. This puts Shelley in contact with the female concern of birth. He comes to terms with something critics say Romantics deny:

"[‘The Triumph of Life’] warns us that nothing, whether deed, word, thought, or text, ever happens in relation, positive or negative, to anything that precedes, follows, or exists elsewhere, but only as a random event whose power, like the power of death, is due to the randomness of its occurrence."
[Paul de Man, "Shelley Disfigured: 'The Triumph of Life'," in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom (1979)]

Shelley internalises death and the full negativity of life. But he is not politically nihilistic. Shelley attached unjust systems of life.

"I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away."
[‘Ozymandias,’ 1817]

In Ozymandias Shelley is deceptively ambivalent. Lucretian imagery is still at work: in the sands of history sweeping away the vanity of kings. Their vanity is therefore atomised and dispersed. This is usually described as Shelley's way of escaping temporality, and suggests we see the poet as an immortal being also. But this is a misconception.

"[T]he mind in creation is as a fading coal which some invisible influence, like an inconstant wind, awakens to transitory brightness […] when composition begins, inspiration is already on the decline, and the most glorious poetry that has ever been communicated to the world is probably a feeble shadow of the original conception of the poet."
[A Defence of Poetry (1821), Norton II, pp. 798-99]

Here are the Lucretian winds once more, and they are even decaying poetry. Poetry and poets are therefore not immortal in the eyes of Shelley.

In conclusion, in his desire to affirm materiality and political change, and to do this as an imaginative being, Shelley uses a non-transcendental and non-radical form of Romanticism. Chaos of order must exist in order to create enlightenment. This view leads to something new: the rejection of both the Enlightenment view of historic progress and of the Romantic view of historical decline. It is a decay and rebirth system. This power of contingency is a secret power of creation and destruction, symbolised by winds. There is a power in Shelley's work that is strangely impersonal, but it is explained by this Lucretian theory. Shelley attempts to redefine the human. He is thus the only Romantic poet to directly discuss death.

7/11/07 - English Literature - Mary Shelley: Frankenstein

In the 1810s people began to question how it was possible for people to make a rational decision about the world. How could one tell what was natural? It was an issue much debated in literature, interestingly enough, manifested through Gothic language.

"Deprived of the old Government, deprived in a manner of all Government, France, fallen as a Monarchy, to common speculators might have appeared more likely to be an object of pity or insult, according to the disposition of the circumjacent powers, than to be the scourge and terror of them all. But out of the tomb of the murdered Monarchy in France, has arisen a vast, tremendous, unformed spectre, in a far more terrific guise than any which ever yet have overpowered the imagination and subdued the fortitude of man. Going straight forward to its end, unappalled by peril, unchecked by remorse, despising all common maxims and all common means, that hideous phantom overpowered those who could not believe it was possible she could at all exist, except on the principles, which habit rather than nature had persuaded them were necessary to their own particular welfare and to their own ordinary modes of action."
[Edmund Burke, ‘Letters Addressed to A Member of the Present Parliament, on the Proposals for Peace with the Regicide Directory of France’]

Here the French revolution is described as a kind of Frankenstein's monster. The monster is "against nature." Burke blamed philosophers for the revolution, and said its supporters were unnatural because they were creatures of habit rather than nature. They think in social and conventional ways. And note also that Burke's monster is female.

"But, by the habitual slothfulness of rust intellects, or the depravity of the heart, lulled into hardness on the lascivious couch of pleasure, those heavenly beams are obscured, and man either appears as an hideous monster, a devouring beast; or a spiritless reptile, without dignity or humanity."
[Mary Wollstonecraft, The Origin and Progress of the French Revolution]

Wollstonecraft uses the same language as Burke but she takes the opposite view, when opposing the French royalty rather than the supporters of the revolution. She thinks royalty cannot think properly because it is obscured by luxury. Paine discusses his view that the inheritance of property to the oldest child is like a monster also, like a "cannibal feast."

The possibility of knowledge was consistent and natural. The "wisdom of nature," according to Burke. The reformers wanted new forms of knowledge but Burke reacted against this, saying that knowledge must be passed from generation to generation, and that the reformers were monstrous.

Wollstonecraft had said that women were deflected from knowledge by social pressures.

"Everything new appears to them wrong; and not able to distinguish the possible from the monstrous, they fear where no fear should find a place, running from the light of reason, as if it were a firebrand; yet the limits of the possible have never been defined to stop the sturdy innovator's hand."
[Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Women]

She says it is possible to think new thoughts, while Burke thought this was false. Women could not think new thoughts because they were told that the alternative to conventional thinking was monstrous.

Is it possible to think new things for yourself? Shelley is ambivalent about the value of reason. Frankenstein seems to value to monster's independent thinking. When the monster hears Saffy reading to her mother he applies her words to himself; he therefore has innate reason.

"But 'Paradise Lost' excited different and far deeper emotions. I read it, as I had read the other volumes which had fallen into my hands, as a true history. It moved every feeling of wonder and awe that the picture of an omnipotent God warring with his creatures was capable of exciting. I often referred the several situations, as their similarity struck me, to my own. Like Adam, I was apparently united by no link to any other being in existence; but his state was far different from mine in every other respect. He had come forth from the hands of God a perfect creature, happy, and prosperous, guarded by, the especial care of his Creator; he was allowed to converse with and acquire knowledge from beings of a superior nature, but I was wretched, helpless, and alone. Many times I considered Satan as the fitter emblem of my condition, for often, like him, when I viewed the bliss of my protectors, the bitter gall of envy rose within me."
[Frankenstein]

But the last sentence indicates that he can only understand the reason in terms of himself. Elsewhere, he has to learn how to apply Paradise Lost to the world. Shelley subverts the novel's notions.

"Remember that I am thy creature; I ought to be thy Adam, but I am rather the fallen angel, whom thou drivest from joy for no misdeed. Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend."
[Frankenstein]

The problematic result of this in the monster is that he cannot recognise who is who; he identifies with both Adam and Satan. He cannot work out the difference between good and evil. Like Eve he was created out of others' body parts.

"I had admired the perfect forms of my cottagers--their grace, beauty, and delicate complexions; but how was I terrified when I viewed myself in a transparent pool! At first I started back, unable to believe that it was indeed I who was reflected in the mirror; and when I became fully convinced that I was in reality the monster that I am, I was filled with the bitterest sensations of despondence and mortification. Alas! I did not yet entirely know the fatal effects of this miserable deformity."
[Frankenstein]

The monster knows what he looks like. The passage is a reference back to Paradise Lost, when Eve admires her reflection in a pool of water.

As I bent down to look, just opposite,
A shape within the watery gleam appeared
Bending to look on me, I started back,
It started back, but pleas'd I soon returned,
Pleas'd it returned as soon with answering looks
Of sympathy and love; there I had fixt
Mine eyes till now, and pined with vain desire,
Had not a voice thus warned me, What thou seest,
What there thou seest fair Creature is thy self..."
[Milton, Paradise Lost]

Both Eve and the monster "start back." Shelley wanted to take away the original sin that blames Eve for the Fall, as did Wollstonecraft.

"We must get entirely clear of all the notions drawn from the wild traditions of original sin: the eating of the apple, the theft of Prometheus, the opening of Pandora’s box, and the other fables, too tedious to enumerate, on which priests have erected their massive structures of imposition, to persuade us, that we are naturally inclined to evil."
[Wollstonecraft, The Origin and Progress of the French Revolution]

Shelley does this by saying that good and evil can be contingent, not fixed. Modern Enlightenement thought and reason are commingled with the murdering nature of the monster.

The same also applies to Victor. He is single-minded, using science to achieve his goals. He sees the world only in terms of himself. He wants to reproduce himself in his monster. Both Victor and Walton are narcissistic. Victor also holds the idea that women are his possessions. If anyone compliments his wife he takes it personally because he sees her as an extension of himself. "I pursues Nature to her hiding places": Shelley plants pointers towards Victor's project, which is patriarchal and misogynistic. He ea second monster, but after his work is done he lists a number of problems with creating a female monster. He believes she will lack provocation in murdering; she will lack reason; she may not compact with her creation, i.e. she may not marry the male monster, "they might even hate each other"; and ugliness in women is far worse than ugliness in men. His final reason is that his female monster might desire him rather than his monster. He is afraid of female sexual autonomy and female reasoning. All the female characters die by the end of the novel. Left behind is an all-male community, the mutual dependence of Victor and the creatures. Victor is in love with his creature in a narcissistic way. His father even thinks he has neglected Elizabeth as if he is having a love affair. Well, in a way, he is. The ending is written like a Romantic novel, with a touching reunion of a man and his creation. Victor is a solipsist and for him, women are basically replacements for each other.

Does Shelley resolve the issue? She is interested in the mutually supportive bourgeois family. Children are mutually supportive and obedient to their family. There is something coercive in this enlightenment ideal; the family violently drive away the monster. If is difficult to say how people can react rationally to the world. Shelley debates the issue but does not offer a resolution.

5/11/07 - English Literature - Romanticism and Anti-Humanism

Nietzsche wrote about modern culture and art. His work radicalises issues that were commonly thought to be common sense, such as What is thought for? What are values? Is morality innate or historical?

Nietzsche discusses 'nihilism', in which he thought modern society was fraught. Nihilism is the sense of emptiness or nothingness in a culture which has lost faith in its values, but which cannot find new values to replace them. This is a western cultural problem. Post-Christianity, people lacked the creativity to make a new moral system.

"They have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more to Christian morality."
[Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 80]

This links to his statement about the death of God.

"The greatest recent event - that "God is dead," that the belief in the Christian god has become unbelievable - is already beginning to cast its first shadows over Europe. For the few at least, whose eyes - the suspicion in whose eyes is strong and subtle enough for this spectacle, some sun seems to have set and some ancient and profound trust has been turned into doubt; to them our world must appear daily more like evening, more mistrustful, stranger, "older." But in the main one may say: The event itself is far too great, too remote from the multitude's capacity for comprehension even for the tidings of it to be thought of having arrived as yet. Much less may one suppose that many people know as yet what this event really means - and how much must collapse now that this faith has been undermined because it was built upon this faith, propped up by it, grown in it; for example, the whole of our European morality. This long plenitude and sequence of breakdown, destruction, ruin, and cataclysm that is now impending - who could guess enough of it today to be compelled to play the teacher and advance proclaimer of this monstrous logic of terror, the prophet of a gloom and an eclipse of the sun whose like has probably never yet occurred on earth?"
[Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 279]

Nietzsche here uses overwrought rhetoric. There is the same sense of gloom in Marlon's thoughts about London at the beginning of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness.

Reactiveness is a nostalgic reference back to a transient system of moral value by which to live. So by losing faith in Christianity, people go back and live by it even more closely. Ideas raised above life which are transcendental are looked to, and made to become the new moral system. So by looking back, we also look up.

"Morality is merely sign-language, merely symptomatology; one must already know what it is about to derive profit from it.”
[Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 66]

But morality is a mode of translation. It is a collection of symptoms, referring back and judging present behaviour according to past values. Activeness is just such imposing of a strong interpretation on others.

Nietzsche divulges how we might respond to nihilism.

"What has happened, at bottom? The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of “aim,” the concept of “unity,” or the concept of “truth.” Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking; the character of existence is not “true,” is false. One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. Briefly: the categories “aim,” “unity,” “being” which we used to project some value into this world – we pull out again; so the world looks valueless.”
[Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 13]

He says that when people perceive the death of the moral system, they question the meaning of morality, and even of life. People struggle for success of authority over their own perception of the world. One perception is that of the priests: that Jews and Christians took those values that were anti-aristocracy and made them into a new vision of life that was about passiveness, charity, meekness and introspection. In a word, everything that the aristocracy was not. Nihilism arises when we consider moral perceptions to be historical and mere interpretations. Perceptions of life are only strong or weak, but all are false because they derive from only one point of view. People soon realised that all judgement can be challenged. Think how perception in Hogg's Confessions of a Justified Sinner is conveyed: all belief systems are shown to be false. Hogg forces the reader to take responsibility for the meaning of his own novel. We must determine the truth of the novel. As Nietzsche says,

"'Truth' is therefore not something there, that might be found or discovered – but something that must be created and that gives a name to the process, or rather to a will to overcome that has in itself no end – introducing truth, as a process in infinitum, an active determining – not a becoming-conscious of something that is in itself firm and determined. It is a word for the 'will-to-power'."
[Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 298]

So one's creative view cannot be subtracted. There must be an 'active determining' on each individual's part.

Blake talked of something similar to Nietzsche's 'will-to-power' in his poem, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.

"Without contraries there is no progression. Attraction and repulsion, reason and energy, love and hate, are necessary to human existence.
From these contraries spring what the religious call good and evil. Good is the passive that obeys Reason; Evil is the active springing from energy.
Good is Heaven; Evil is Hell."
[William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 105]

Blake thinks that love and hate, good and evil, are both necessary to life. All life is a universal struggle. Blake picks up this struggle and makes it reactively codified.

"The ancient Poets animated all sensible objects with Gods or geniuses, calling them by the names, and Adorning them with the Properties, of woods, rivers, mountains, lakes, cities, nations, and whatever their enlarged and numerous senses could perceive.
And particularly they studied the genius of each city and country, placing it under its mental deity.
Till a system was formed, which some took advantage of & enslaved the weak by attempting to realise or abstract the mental deities from their objects. Thus began priesthood – choosing forms of worship from poetic titles.
And at length they pronounced that the Gods had ordered such things.
Thus men forgot that all deities reside in the human breast."
[William Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 111]

Here he expresses proto-Nietzschean sentiments. He believes in a premoral and prereligious perception of life. He says that people named the gods; the gods did not name the people. The ancient poets had seen strong human capacities and exteriorised them by giving them name and calling then divinities. They created the world for themselves. So morality is the radical forgetting of human and inhuman potential.

Virginia Woolf gives the reaction of one person to the loss of truth and reality, which is like a blank space in a picture.

"With a curious physical sensation, as if she were urged forward and at the same time must hold herself back, she made her first quick decisive stroke. The brush descended. It flickered brown over the white canvas; it left a running mark. A second time she did it – a third time. And so pausing and so flickering, she attained a dancing rhythmical movement, as if the pauses were one part of the rhythm and the strokes another, and all were related; and so, lightly and swiftly pausing, she scored her canvas with brown running nervous lines which had no sooner settled there than they enclosed (she felt it looming out at her) a space. Down in the hollow of one wave she saw the next wave towering higher and higher above her. For what could be more formidable than that space? Here she was again, she thought, stepping back to look at it, drawn out of gossip, out of living, out of community with people into the presence of this formidable ancient enemy of hers – this other thing, this truth, this reality, which suddenly laid hands on her, emerged stark at the back of appearances and commanded her attention.”
[Virginia Woolf, To The Lighthouse, 148]

2/11/07 - English Literature - Keats and History

How can Keats be studied historically? He is not a historical writer.

There are three models of history - Enlightenment, Romantic and Hegelian. Keats would have been familiar with the former two. Enlightenment historicism takes the view that history is linear, progressive and universal. Hegel argues that particular events contribute to history in an organic relationship. Both Enlightenment and Hegelian historicism assume the universal value of truth. But Romantic historicism tries to uncover this truth; it is a recuperative theory. Hegel's historicism actually makes truths, and so it assumes that history just is. Romantic historicism, on the other hand, has been seen as anti-history for the past twenty years. Romanticism tries to escape history, tries to transcend it. Keats' poetic reputation did not suffer in the early twentieth century like Wordsworth and Byron's. Brooks's book, Well-Wrought Urn is about New Historicism (or Formalism) and he used Keats's poetry as exemplifications of his theory, and even took the title from Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn." Keats's poetry does lend itself to historicist reading.

Hume was confident that there was universal truth outside of history.

"It is universally acknowledged that there is a great uniformity among the actions of men, in all nations and ages, and that human nature remains still the same, in its principles and operations."
[David Hume, Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748)]

Implicit in Hume's theory is the assumption that inner reflection is all that is needed. Rousseau found problems in this, however.

"Before art had new moulded our behaviours, and taught our passions to talk in an affected language, our manners were indeed rustic, but sincere and natural; and the difference of our behaviours in an instant distinguished our characters. - ’Tis true, that human nature was not then any wise better in the main than now: but man found a security in the ease with which he could dive into the thoughts of man; and this advantage, on which we seem to set no price, exempted them from many vices."
[Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Arts and Sciences (1751)]

Here is the consideration of 'improving' history. Rousseau suggests that perhaps history is not an improving force; perhaps we have even lost something in our progression through history. So maybe there is not an 'absolute' outside of history.

Scott's Waverley is shaped by events, it does not shape the events itself. In Romanticism there is a sense of disappointment in history.

Jerome McGann talks of history as a recuperative, healing division and refers to this as 'Romantic ideology.'

"[I]deology […is] a coherent or loosely organized set of ideas which is the expression of the special interests of some class or social group."
Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (1983)]

Marx and Engels see Romantic ideology as an illusion of thought. Life is not determined by the consciousness, but the consciousness is determined by life. With Marx and Engels, reason and thought is combined with feeling and imagination.

"Ideology is a process which is indeed accomplished consciously by the so-called thinker, but it is the wrong kind of consciousness. The real motive forces impelling him remain unknown to the thinker; otherwise it simply would not be an ideological process. Hence he imagines false or illusory motive forces. […] He works exclusively with thought material, which he accepts without examination as something produced by reasoning, and does not investigate further for a more remote source independent of reason; indeed this is a matter of course to him, because, as all action is mediated by thought, it appears to him to be ultimately based upon thought."
[Frederick Engels, letter to Franz Mehring (1893)]

Keats's odes, point at one point to be universal, can be studied using historicist and formalist theories. William Walsh was writing at a time when New Historicism was at its height. He wrote that the ode of Keats was aesthetic and autonomous, and that it achieved impersonality and objectivity. McGann also wrote of Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" and said that it was historic, deriving meaning from social and historical situatedness, i.e. material conditions, not form. All these speculation leads back to considering what a poem is. Is it words on a page or a historical work?

"There are three sorts of statement used in the ode: address, question, and something vaguer which I shall call generalization or reflection. These three modes of statement are alike in this, that they all direct the flow of attention on to the object and away from the speaker. […] This poetic use of syntax brings to Keats’s rich language the authority of a more than subjective validity. It is also an example of what Matthew Arnold spoke of in Keats as ‘character passing into intellectual production."
[William Walsh, ‘John Keats,’ The New Pelican Guide to English Literature (1957)]

Walsh praises Keats's so-called objectivity. He places emphasis on syntax, technique, and the value of impersonality and objectivity. For Walsh, the meaning of the poem is self-contained.

"What leaf-fring’d legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?"
[John Keats, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn,’ (1819)]

Walsh's response to this passage was:

"‘Legend’ suggests first the mythical content, a development this of the sense latent in ‘historian’; but legend also implies the intricacy of the carving - it is to be read, to be interpreted and not just seen; the lightness of sound of ‘legend’ is carried on in the aerial and ghostly ‘haunts about thy shape’. And evokes the fineness and delicacy of the carving, a suggestion which is strengthened by the muted and exact rhythm of the whole phrase and by the sense in ‘haunts about thy shape’ of hardly touching the surface; the work ‘about’ involving a slight labial effort in speech and with a full and open sound rounds out for us the circle of the vase’s shape."
[William Walsh, ‘John Keats’]

Again, language is his main interest in the poem. His take on the poem is textual. He tries to do for Keats what Keats does for the urn: he treats the poem as an object, as something in itself of perfect form. But the urn is more about sexual violence and is a part of Keats's imagination rather than a real object. We are left wondering what the urn would be life if considered in a more historical context. The poem instead posits its own contemporary view of aesthetic value onto the urn, so the poem is shaped by context. It is not objective.

McGann attacks New Historicism in his introduction to The Romantic Ideology.

"[T]he scholarship and criticism of Romanticism and its works are dominated by Romantic Ideology, by an uncritical absorption in Romanticism’s own self-representations."
[Jerome McGann, The Romantic Ideology (1983)]

McGann tries to reveal poetry's involvement with history, which is inescapable. The poem is beautiful to McGann because of its historical content, and he detracts from Formalist interpretations of poetry. He looked at the same three lines of the poem that Walsh did, and noted that it does not matter whether the urn is real or not. It is the poetry that matters. However, McGann wondered where the poem was published and when. The poem was printed in a journal to try to promote appreciation of Greek art, which was held to be the most singular and complete beauty. Probably Keats had some real urns in mind, conveyed in the word "legend," a pun meaning an inscription or a classical myth. The vagueness of the phrase "leaf-fring'd legend" could also mean illegible words.

"[T]he poem [i.e. ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’] itself insists that we react to its historical dimensions, and in so doing it forbids that we understand its ‘universality’ outside of the ode’s special historical context. To see this elementary point more clearly all we need to do is imagine that the poem was written before or after 1819. It would make a difference."
[Jerome McGann, The Beauty of Inflections (1985)]

The poem cannot speak to us outside of history. All this adds up to the fact that our view of the poetic form is based on poetry as an autonomous, formalist, and therefore romantic entity. But also historicism comes out of Romanticism, because people had to know where the poetry came from, they had to know its context, an idea taken up by historicism and demonstrated in early critics' fruitless search for the urn in the poem. These ideas of Romanticism and historicism come together in Keats's poem.

31/10/07 - English Literature - Walter Scott: Waverley

It is difficult to imagine just what a phenomenon Waverley was when it was first published. There is no parallel in contemporary society to the significance and scale of Scott's work. He was the biggest writer since Shakespeare, including in terms of imaginative scope. He signalled the turning point of the history of the novel and imaginative literature in the world. The novel was brought into a historical context. He had worried about genre because his genre was new, a conglomeration of the best bits of many genres, particularly in the first and last chapters. Scott allowed a genuine historicity into his novel - his characters are shaped by their context. He decorates the history of the real world with imaginative dressing.

There are undeniably realistic and historical dimensions to Waverley. But a more imaginative element runs with, and sometimes against the historical aspect. Scott opens up a metacritical reflection of the possibility of the storytelling of history and the consequences of this. Scott's history is sequential, progressive and dialectical. Scott conveys a time of civil war, bringing to life the passions of the time but being careful not to create more. He glorifies the present and so glorifies the past, because it has led up to the present, and holds up the past like a moral essay. He uses narrative progression to imitate history moving from past to present, mapped in novel form. The novel is also mapped geographically: the Highlanders, representing one form of history, conflict with Lowlanders, who represent another. Edward experiences both forms and so is best placed to see the best aspects of both cultures. According to a critic, Alexander Welsh, the hero is a blank, a cipher, which means he can understand both sides. Edward is the sympathetic observer. He is morally weak and impressionable, as detailed in the early chapters.

"My intention is not to follow the steps of that inimitable author, in describing such total perversion of intellect as misconstrues the objects actually presented to the senses, but that more common aberration from sound judgement, which apprehends occurrences indeed in their reality, but communicates to them a tincture of its own romantic tone and colouring."

Edward sees clearly enough to depict the world to us, but his descriptions have a romantic tincture; he is Romantic in an imaginative sense. Edwards lacks balance and proportion of reality. The novel is a Bildunsroman, meaning that Edward grows from naive to mature.

"I have already hinted, that the dainty, squeamish, and fastidious taste acquired by a surfeit of idle reading, had not only rendered our hero unfit for serious and sober study, but had even disgusted him in some degree with that in which he had hitherto indulged. […] From such legends our hero would steal away to indulge the fancies they excited. In the corner of the large and sombre library, with no other light than was afforded by the decaying brands on its ponderous and ample hearth, he would exercise for hours that internal sorcery, by which past or imaginary events are presented in action, as it were, to the eye of the muser."

Edward's reading space is as deep and gothic as the books he reads. There is a difference between actual events and that way Edward perceives them.

"It was about noon when Captain Waverley entered the straggling village, or rather Hamlet, of Tully-Veolan, close to which was situated the mansion of the proprietor. The houses seemed miserable in the extreme, especially to an eye accustomed to the smiling neatness of English cottages. […] Three or four village girls, returning from the well or brook with pitchers and pails upon their heads, formed more pleasing objects; and, with their thin, short gowns and single petticoats, bare arms, legs, and feet, uncovered heads and braided hair, somewhat resembled Italian forms of landscape. Nor could a lover of the picturesque have challenged either the elegance of their costume, or the symmetry of their shape."

Edward focuses on the beauty rather than the poverty of the women. There is an ironic distance between Edward and the narrator. The reader has a different reaction to Edward, because we must make up our own minds about what is really happening. For example, Edward naively does not recognise the treason he has committed by giving his seal to Donald Bean Lean and is not alarmed by Donald's excessive knowledge about him.

Scott criticises the map of history. He finds ways of registering the parts that history left out. The death of Gardiner catalyses Edward's moral development, and romance is left behind after this point.

"Ere Edward could make his way among the Highlanders, who, furious and eager for spoil, now thronged upon each other, he saw his former commander brought from his horse by the blow of a scythe, and beheld him receive, while on the ground, more wounds than would have let out twenty lives. When Waverley came up, however, perception had not entirely fled. The dying warrior seemed to recognise Edward, for he fixed his eye upon him with an upbraiding, yet sorrowful look, and appeared to struggle for utterance. But he felt that death was dealing closely with him, and resigning his purpose, and folding his hands as if in devotion, he gave up his soul to his Creator. The look with which he regarded Waverley in his dying moments did not strike him so deeply at that crisis of hurry and confusion, as when it recurred to his imagination at the distance of some time."

In the heat of battle Edward does not realise the furiousness of the Highlanders. (In history they were known for their great discipline; Scott bends the truth a little.) The Highlanders are evil in this scene so that Gardiner dies like a saint. Scott reminds us that the Highlanders belong to the violent and bloody past.

"'Nay, I cannot tell what to make of you,’ answered the Chief of Mac-Ivor, ‘you are blown about by every wind of doctrine. Here have we gained a victory, unparalleled in history – and your behaviour is praised by every living mortal to the skies – and the Prince is eager to thank you in person – and all our beauties of the White Rose are pulling caps for you, -- and you, the preux chevalier of the day, are stopping on your horse’s neck like a butter-woman riding to market, and looking as black as a funeral.’
‘I am sorry for poor Colonel Gardiner’s death: he was once very kind to me.’
‘Why, then, be sorry for five minutes, and then be glad again; his chance to-day may be ours to-morrow. And what does it signify? – the next best thing to victory is honourable death, but it is a pis-aller, and one would rather a foe had it than one’s self.’"

Here Fergus Mac-Ivor offers the rewards of a chivalric knight to Edward, but these belong to the past and Edward is moving into the present. His reply is simplified and more modern. The world of Fergus is one where honourable death is preferable to dishonourable life. In Scott's footnote on the death of Balmawhapple, he mixes fiction and reality, and uses the striking motif of himself playing on the grave of the soldier. The past is left behind because it is outmoded, yet in the image that Scott paints the past cannot be left behind. It is like the grass. Scott knows he is treating the Highlanders badly by consigning them to the past, so these little hints of the dialectic of Enlightenment, where the past becomes the present, are scattered throughout the novel. Scott uses imagination to allow us to see both the past and present at once. He needs the past, although in the book he leaves it behind.

The closing image of the novel is when the ravaged home of the Baron Bradwardine is restored to its original glory. Scott smooths out the labour of building, making use of his literary power. But one thing changes.

"There was one addition to this fine old apartment, however, which drew tears into the Baron’s eyes. It was a large and spirited painting, representing Fergus Mac-Ivor and Waverley in their Highland dress; the scene a wild, rocky and mountainous pass, down which the clan were descending in the background. […] the ardent, fiery and impetuous character of the unfortunate Chief of Glennaquoich was finely contrasted with the contemplative, fanciful, and enthusiastic expression of his happier friend. Beside this painting hung the arms which Waverley had borne in the unfortunate civil war."

The painting contrasts Edward's innocence with Fergus's impetuous nature, which are befriended and framed for the wall. The figures almost step out of the painting. Scott knows his work is fictional, but there is a danger that he may revive the war by his reconstruction of history. The past is forever threatening the present - it is this principal issue that the novel deals with.

30/10/07 - Architectural History - France in the Seventeenth Century

With the seventeenth century came the emergence of a distinctly French classicism. The new style mingled classicism with the proud French tradition. Architecture came to be symbolic of French power.

France finally emerged from the Civil War . Henri IV was intent on redeveloping the economy of France and so building projects commenced with force. The Place des Vosgues (attributed to Louis Metezeau) was built for public spectacle and promenade, and was ringed by bourgeois homes. It was used as a place of industry, for the silk works were built to the side. The Pavilion of the King and Pavilion of the Queen surround the public space. The houses are simple and modest, each with its own roofline. The houses were made of brick with a decorative 'chain' design.

Florent Fournier built the Chateau de Grosbois, c. 1600. It is an example of rural house architecture. It contrasts with the square in grandness, because it was built for a member of the nobility.

Jean du Cerceau's Hotel de Sully (1624-29) has a main block of old-fashioned decor and classical elements. The front is enclosed, but the back is opened out and looks more public.

Salomon de Brosse was born in 1571. His father was an architect, and his mother was the daughter of Jacques Androuet du Cerceau the Elder. In 1610 he established himself as an architect in Paris. He died in 1626. One of his major designs was Luxembourg Palace. In design it is an extension of Cerceau's hotel, which also has a traditional chateau design. The wings are lower than is typical. The garden is more clearly enclosed; 'in the round'. There is rustication on the horizontal axis of the building. It has a true attic. It emphasises clean lines. This became a typical French style.

In de Brosse's Chateau de Blerancourt, c. 1619, he emphasises some of the aspects he used in his earlier designs. The wings are gone, leaving freestanding blocks of building. There are standard accurate classical elements on the facade. Once again, simplicity is key to his work. He develops a unique decorative style.

Brosse's Palais de Parlement, 1618, uses restrained classical features and heavy rustication. It has a tall unbroken French roof.

Jacques Lemercier was born in 1580. His father was a master mason. Aged fourteen, he travelled to Rome. In 1618 he was appointed royal architect. His work combined French traditions with Roman classical and baroque developments. He died in 1654.

He planned the Church of the Sorbonne (1635-42) which has a basilica plan that was unusual in France at the time. It expresses Lemercier's mixture of French and Roman tendencies. The side aisles are akin to Roman, but the transepts are French because they do not project much out of the building. The dome acts as a centralising force, with naves of equal length each side to make the building symmetrical.

Francois Mansart was born in 1598. His father was a master carpenter and he died when Francois was young. Francois trained with his brother-in-law Garmain Gaultier, who was assistant to de Brosse at Rennes. Francois died in 1666.

Mansart uses a specifically French style of classicism. He was a precautious architect and a difficult person, leading to the loss of many major commissions. The Chateau de Balleroy, of the late 1620s, has courtyard pavilions that are unconnected to the main building. It emphasis separateness with the use of defined separate roofs. But despite the roofline, the building has a unified composition, because it has a hierarchical structure like a pyramid.

Mansart designed the Gaston d'Orleans wing at Blois which was to house a member of the royal family. Mansart is a good example of the reason why French architects were renowned for being able to build well in restricted and pre-existing sites which tend to be difficult to negotiate. The back of the building was not equal in length to the front and the level of the garden was slightly lower than the level of the courtyard. Mansart dealt with this using a staircase and garden, solving both problems of centring and ground level at once. It also gave the building a new unity. Loose classical features such as pilasters and a single roof were used, but these are still distinctly French. The pilasters were used on the corners where the tradition was not to, and the roof is typically high-pitched.

Mansart's Chateau de Maisons Lafitte (1642-46) is a freestanding building, yet still complex in design. It is not decorative by French standards, simply appropriate to the level of the family's importance. It consists of a dome with a hidden light source, which became common in French architecture.

Ste Marie de la Visitation, built by Mansart between 1632-34, is monumental yet restrained. its plan is centralised with a dome, with side chapels which the Italian architects were experimenting with at the same time. The building deliberately draws on existing French traditions such as the chapel at Anet.

From the middle of the century, Louis le Vau became one of the principal French architects. He was born in 1612. His father was a mason, and Louis trained in the same trade. He was a brilliant architect of aristocratic hotels until 1655 when he became the architect of Louvre. Many other royal or courtly projects were given to him, including Vaux-le-Vicomte, College de Quatre Nations in Paris, Church of St Sulpice in Paris and Chateau de Versailles. He died in 1670.

Vax-le-Vicomte was designed for a finance minister (1657-61). It began the establishment of the chateau as a freestanding object. A single order unites both floors, and it has a central domed space. Its gardens and design later became the basis for Versailles.

Bernini was invited to design the Louvre in 1664. The finished proposal was rejected by the French because it was too grand, too Italian for them. He had surprisingly little lasting impact of French architecture. Louis le Vau was given the job of designing the east front of the Louvre. He made a real post-and-lintel construction, i.e. load-bearing columns. Despite having commissions in Paris, Louis did not move to Paris but to Versailles.

An original building on the site of Cour de Marbre had been built years ago for royal hunting parties. But the Cour de Marbre was a completely new building with twenty-five bays. It was le Vau's last building. The architecture was simple and restrained. He used a balustrade on the roofline and brought forward porticoes. But King Louis wanted it to be bigger. Le Vau died at the beginning of the new project and was replaced by Jules Hardouin Mansart. The building expanded the original facade to six hundred metres. It was meant to overlook a vast landscape. Its architectural quality was never questioned, but its monumentality was.

Place Vendome, Paris, built 1698, was designed by Jules Hardouin Mansart. The space was not meant to be economical or important, only the statue, for it was built to celebrate royal power (right before the deposition of the monarchy).

29/10/07 - Architectural History - French Renaissance 1500-1600

Between 1494-1525 the French went on a campaign to invade Italy. The Gothic style reached its height in the fifteenth century, while Italy was ahead of this in terms of perfection, particularly with Bramante's Tempietto of 1508. King Francois I decided to emulate and surpass the achievements of Italian culture, but despite his keenness, the process was gradual, and spread over five hundred years.

The key architects and masons of the French Renaissance were: Domenico da Cortona, Gilles le Breton, Sebastiano Serlio, Pierre Lescot, Philibert de l'Orme, Primaticcio, Jean Bullant and Jacques Androuet du Cerceau the Elder.

The major chateaux of the time were situated on the Loire Valley and in the area around Paris.

It may seem unlikely, but the Chateau at Gaillon, 1508, emulates the Tempietto. It has classical pilasters placed atop each other to give a classical appearance. This was the humble beginning of the French Renaissance movement.

Chenonceau, begun in 1515, exemplified the beginning of an orderly and structured French Renaissance style. Italian straight staircases did not suit the French very well, as they tended to build Gothic spiral staircases. The building as a whole is square and simple.

The chateau at Bury is more sophisticated. The buildings are arranged around a central courtyard, with a main facade called a corps-de-logis.

Classical elements were used by the French for their visual effects rather than for accuracy. Azay-le-Rideau (1518-27) has an ordered facade with classical elements integrated into more grand aspects such as windows.

Francois I's chateau at Blois shows a clear horizontal design, with classical pilasters interspersed between windows. It demonstrates a more integrated use of the classical language. The courtyard staircase, for instance, is three-dimensional, sculptural and expressive. It is much more decorative and idiosyncratic than any Italian Renaissance building. The north-west facade has a certain depth and monumentality yet it uses classical detail more accurately than the staircase. Its finesse, structural skill and decoration was praised, but an Italian writer criticised the chateau for poor use of Classical language.

The chateau at Chambord (begun 1519)is a political statement of French authority. It was built at Francois' hunting lodge. It was designed from scratch on a virgin site, so it is more regular in design than any previous French architecture - or perhaps it owes its regularity by its Italian architect, Domenico da Cortona. It is partitioned into four sections, which later became the standard design of French architecture. It is however still very French: the roofline is triangular and prickly and busy, which is an architectural feature singular to France. One of the chimneys could almost pass for an antique salvage. The chateau has a double-helix staircase, or rather, two staircases which intertwine around each other. It is attributed to Leonardo da Vinci.

Gilles le Breton, in Fontainebleau has a west gate (La Porte Doree) that takes remnants from the chateau at Gaillon, such as pedimented windows and the use of pilasters.

Cour du Cheval Blanc at Fontainebleau (1528-40) signified a new type of French chateau. It has a jutting pavilion, bi-axial symmetry and overruling order. The application of exterior classical motifs continues inside.

The chateau at Villandry (1532) is another example of a coherent ensemble. Its roofline is straight and more Italian although still not entirely free of the old French roofline.

By the 1540s France rejected Italian architecture, mainly because of Sebastiano Serlio's treatise of architecture. Serlio was the designer of the chateau at Ancy-le-France. It is in a sense very Italian, because it is completely regular and proportioned with the correct use of Classical language. But the high-pitched French roof and other French details were included that had been unforeseen by Serlio. He designed the Doric Order to be used for the courtyard, but someone else saw fit to put Ionian columns there instead.

Pierre Lescot was the architect of the Louvre's square court. The design is distinctly Classical. There is much sculpture to create a lively and delicate surface, something that the French were good at. Here the fusion of French and Italian architectural features works well.

The French architect Philibert de l'Orme was the first to study Italian architecture at length. He travelled to Rome and published a treatise of nine bodies, called simply Architecture, in 1567. In it he proposed a new set of French orders. They are superficially similar to the Italian orders, but they have added decoration that makes them look closer to Mannerism than High Renaissance.

The chateau at St Maur was de l'Orme's and France's first attempt to decorate a building completely in one order. It consists of a single storey of rooms around a central courtyard.

The chateau of Anet (before 1550) by de l'Orme has a three-storey pavilion entranceway with the correct use of Roman orders. He was more learned by this stage and applied the classical principles accurately. The dome of the chapel was based on a basilica. He used the idea of the circle as perfection and therefore made the chateau the ideal place to worship God. Inside, the dome is spectacularly decorated with the emphasis on play of light. As a result of all his efforts, de l'Orme was hailed as the greatest French architect.

The architect Primaticcio brought the most mature form of classicism to France. He was more Italian than any other French architect had managed. De l'Orme's tomb of Francois I is proper and traditional while Primaticcio's tomb of Henry II is more powerful, muscular and manneristic.

Jean Bullant was one of the confident French architects of new design. He designed the chateau at Ecouen. He is indebted to de l'Orme, but developed a style more sophisticated than ever. He leans towards mannerist style. His Petit Chateau at Chantilly (c.1560) is more adventurous. The arch pushed into the pediment. He shows an equal degree of flair and fancy. He had the idea of adding new buildings like wings, to create a trapezoidal shape.

Cerceau the Elder designed Charleval, a chateau with windows pushing through the entablature, a building with a frieze and rusticated details. After designing the chateau c. 1570, exuberance gave way to soberness and maturity in the Place des Vosgues, begun in 1605, and Solomon de Brosse of 1616.

29/10/07 - English Literature - Romanticism and Historicism

Historicism usually means some account of human society that believes it is changing fundamentally in some way over time. History proceeds in such a way that each period will have its own history, historical circumstances and events. Historicism also refers to types of practice that see the location of a text in a particular historical moment as fundamental to its meaning.

Neoclassical culture refuted the first definition of historicism, for it saw that history was just a repeat of itself, that all civilisations are basically versions of Roman civilisation. In moving beyond medieval social organisation, a neoclassical ‘Renaissance’ imagines itself as returning to what had come before: to classical culture and values.

Enlightenment thinking about society was more radically historicist. According to the 'stadial' history of David Hume, Adam Smith and William Robertson, societies are shaped by their mode of existence. These are hunting, herding, agriculture and commerce progressively. These modes of existence refer to particular stages in history, with commerce being the most advanced and hunting the most primitive. These modes, determined by their stage in history, in turn determine social, political and especially legal institutions.

In moving beyond the medieval, characterised in terms of superstition and feudal oppression, the ‘Enlightenment’ imagines itself mediating the emergence of quite a new type of society, based on commercial and scientific reason. The object of property came to mean money, rather than land. The Enlightenment was linked to a limited monarchy system of government. This materialistic concept of history is not about ideas but impersonal advancement. This theory discounts religion and other concepts. Instead, the necessary conclusion of the theory is that human nature, i.e. feeling, imagination and consciousness, remains the same throughout history.

In Waverley, Walter Scott describes Tully-Veolan in agricultural terms; in terms of a pre-capitalist culture. In the novel, Edward travels through history as he travels geographically, moving from agricultural to pastoral systems of government. As retrospective readers, we know that the pastoral system is doomed because society must necessarily develop and move away from this system. The Jacobites must decline. Nevertheless, there is something human-like persisting through this progression. There is the idea that human nature is consistent and able to be preserved, for example in Ossian, despite social changes.

According to Hugh Blair, it is possible to access the poetry and art of 'primitive' cultures, yet these cultures are able to express the aspects of human nature better than the 'modern' society. This informs the ideal of 'aesthetic' as being apart from politics, religion and other mundane things. Poetry is higher than systems of society because it has not been shaped by processes of modernity. It represents uncorrupted and unchanged human emotion. The role of the past in novels conveys the same idea. For example, in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, Catherine's idea of an abbey is the instance of modern subjectivity of someone brought up in a modern society fantasising about the past in a particularly aesthetic way. Ruined abbeys are associated with superstition, Roman power and monarchical power, yet it has been made available to Catherine in a positive aesthetic term of sublime. Access to the past gives her a certain fear. The ruined abbey transcends political and economic change to be made available for aesthetic perception and experience.

In the eighteenth century the French revolution looked like an imaginative reaction, the reversal of cyclable history. However, absolute change occurred rather than a repetition of the old pattern. It was without precedent. It cannot be explained by materialistic or economic reasons. Hegel argued that history works in the exact opposite way to the theories proposed by the Scottish Enlightenment. For Hegel, history is the way in which human consciousness develops in itself and its relation to the world, driving the economic, political and social realm. He named this geist, which refers to a continually changing perception of the world which drives yet more changes. It is idealist, because it is ideas that change history rather than material things.

Wordsworth's "Tintern Abbey" presents two problems: firstly, place, and secondly, time. The poem is not about Tintern Abbey at all, for there is no description of the ruins themselves. It is about consciousness rather than a particular place. The location of the poet as he writes the poem does not matter. The natural scenery described in the poem is not simple fact, but the media through which the poet experiences the supernatural.

"For I have learned
To look on nature, not as in the hour
Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes
The still, sad music of humanity,
Nor harsh nor grating, though of ample power
To chasten and subdue. And I have felt
A presence that disturbs me with the joy
Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime
Of something far more deeply interfused
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,
And the round ocean and the living air,
And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:
A motion and a spirit, that impels
All thinking things, all objects of all thought,
And rolls through all things. Therefore I am still
A lover of the meadows and the woods,
And mountains; and of all that we behold
From this green earth; of all the mighty world
Of eye, and ear, - both what they half create,
And what perceive; well pleased to recognise
In nature and the language of the sense,
The anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse,
The guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul
Of all my moral being.
[Wordsworth, "Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey," 1798, lines 88-111]

The absence of a particularised scene does not matter because the poem is about supernatural spirit. So why did Wordsworth name the poem "Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey"? Wordsworth is proposing a recovery of spirituality that has been threatened by the modern conceptions that led to demolishing the abbey. The abbey is a spiritual place, stripped of Christian meaning and given aesthetic meaning instead: a post-Enlightenment spirituality. Human emotion cannot be disguised in the same way as economic change. History is transcended; the mind is not trapped into its historical and social context. The poet's mind is free to range over any history. The poem is therefore outside of history. It is a similar view of history to Hegel's, but for Wordsworth the changes take place in his mind, rather than in fact. So why did Wordsworth tell us the date (July 13 1798) is the poem transcends history? July 14 was the fourth anniversary of the Fall of the Bastille, the anniversary of King Louis' loss of control over the kingdom of France. The consideration of Britain's role in the world is placed in the poem.

"Once again I see
These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone."
[14-22]

By the word "uncertain" the poet claims he does not know where the smoke comes from. But in fact, he does. It comes from charcoal-burning for the nearby ironworks. The valleys around Tintern Abbey ar laden with poor people in the middle of an economic crisis, looking for work. What Wordsworth sees is the historical problem he is trying to deal with by looking for a transcendent ideal elsewhere in history. While Wordsworth tries to dehistoricise his poem to make it transcend the fickleness of time, he paradoxically historicises it.

New Historicism takes one poem and juxtaposes it with another poem, attempting to shed light on both of them. Alternatively, Marxist approaches involve an intellectual context. Marx targeted Hegel by taking his version of historical progression and turning it upside down: Marx says that material change affects consciousness, consciousness does not change the material. For Marx even human nature is not constant; it must change. It cannot escape its historical context. He cannot quite see that consciousness must be able to detach itself in order to make his own kind of writing possible, to allow him to step outside his world and describe and contrast different types of history.

Raymond Williams pointed out the problems with the terminology of history, which originated in the meaning of "literature" and "culture", as the conception of these ideas also changed over time. Their meaning is different now when we use them to refer to things in the past, when their meaning was something else.

26/10/07 - English Literature - Wordsworth: The Prelude

Wordsworth's Prelude was the great unread of the time. It was a great early document of English Romanticism. Wordsworth lived a long time and wrote and wrote and revised the Prelude, unlike Keats, Shelley and other Romantic poets.

The Prelude is a recuperative piece of poetry, fascinated with childhood (which many Romantics were) as they opened windows of light on perception. When Wordsworth says: "That time is past ... and all its aching joys are now no more", and "Bliss was it in that door to be alive," he refers to the democratic revolution. His work is laden with significant retrospect. He attempts to reconstruct childhood event and experience, sometimes successful in terms of reconstructing child development, but we are too aware that the adult speaker is aware of the reconstructed nature of his work. Wordsworth discovered a creative way to write the historical subject: historical subjectivity. The Prelude could be considered iconic or as an example of the movement and/or progression from childhood into maturity.

In the Prelude is a radical subjectivity discovering how perception is shaped. Also in "Tintern Abbey", "all the mighty world of eye and ear, both what they half crate and half perceive." Memory becomes the ground for cognition; perception is a historical construction. The existential present is always affected by historical experiences. Wordsworth had to find a way to realise his theory, hence his obsessive revison of his work. He based the Prelude on Milton's Paradise Lost, because all the other epics seemed to have been done already. So he chose Milton, an epic of individualism, a single subjective "I". This was a story that no one else had told, until Freud came along with his theories of the unconscious. The first lines of the Prelude echo those of Paradise Lost:

"Oh there is blessing in this gentle breeze
That blows from the green fields and from the clouds
And from the sky: it beats against my cheek,
And seems half-conscious of the joy it gives.
O welcome Messenger! O welcome Friend!
A captive greets thee, coming from a house
Of bondage, from yon City's walls set free,
A prison where he hath been long immured.
Now I am free, enfranchis'd and at large,
May fix my habitation where I will.
What dwelling shall receive me? In what Vale
Shall be my harbour? Underneath what grove
Shall I take up my home, and what sweet stream
Shall with its murmur lull me to my rest?
The earth is all before me: with a heart
Joyous, nor scar'd at its own liberty,
I look about, and should the guide I chuse
Be nothing better than a wandering cloud,
I cannot miss my way. I breathe again;
Trances of thought and mountings of the mind
Come fast upon me: it is shaken off,
As by miraculous gift 'tis shaken off,
That burthen of my own unnatural self,
The heavy weight of many a weary day
Not mine, and such as were not made for me.
Long months of peace (if such bold word accord
With any promises of human life),
Long months of ease and undisturb'd delight
Are mine in prospect; whither shall I turn
By road or pathway or through open field,
Or shall a twig or any floating thing
Upon the river, point me out my course?"
[1-32]

Wordsworth articulates that there is a shaping entity out there, constructing a "house of bondage"; echo of Milton. The word "enfranchis'd" had unmistakable political overtones for its association with the right to vote - a right denied to most British people at the time. The last lines of Milton are "The earth is all before me." There is in these lines hope of redemption. Incipient religiosity and spirituality are in us all and we are in it, allowing Wordsworth to detail the development of the "I". He takes the strategy of revival. Keats' "egoistical sublime", like Wordsworth's poetry, is self-questioning and interrogative, and as a result transcended his own experience. There is the sense that we all reach out beyond ourselves. The Prelude is a kind of autobiography (although it has no mention of an illegitimate child or of Wordsworth's affair). Wordsworth 'makes', he does not simply record. The act of writing, although true to events, is also a rewriting.

Wordsworth invented the concept of "spots of time", a crucial determinant of development.

"Fair seed-time had my soul, and I grew up
Fostered alike by beauty and by fear;
Much favour'd in my birthplace, and no less
In that beloved Vale to which, erelong,
I was transplanted. Well I call to mind
('Twas at an early age, ere I had seen
Nine summers) when upon the mountain slope
The frost and breath of frosty wind had snapp'd
The last autumnal crocus, 'twas my joy
To wander half the night among the Cliffs
And the smooth Hollows, where the woodcocks ran
Along the open turf. In thought and wish
That time, my shoulder all with springes hung,
I was a fell destroyer. On the heights
Scudding away from snare to snare, I plied
My anxious visitation, hurrying on,
Still hurrying, hurrying onward; moon and stars
Were shining o'er my head; I was alone,
And seem'd to be a trouble to the peace
That was among them. Sometimes it befel
In these night-wanderings, that a strong desire
O'erpower'd my better reason, and the bird
Which was the captive of another's toils
Became my prey; and, when the deed was done
I heard among the solitary hills
Low breathings coming after me, and sounds
Of undistinguishable motion, steps
Almost as silent as the turf they trod.
Nor less in springtime when on southern banks
The shining sun had from his knot of leaves
Decoy'd the primrose flower, and when the Vales
And woods were warm, was I a plunderer then
In the high places, on the lonesome peaks
Where'er, among the mountains and the winds,
The Mother Bird had built her lodge. Though mean
My object, and inglorious, yet the end
Was not ignoble. Oh! when I have hung
Above the raven's nest, by knots of grass
And half-inch fissures in the slippery rock
But ill sustain'd, and almost, as it seem'd,
Suspended by the blast which blew amain,
Shouldering the naked crag; Oh! at that time,
While on the perilous ridge I hung alone,
With what strange utterance did the loud dry wind
Blow through my ears! the sky seem'd not a sky
Of earth, and with what motion mov'd the clouds!"
[305-350]

With the words "natural growth", "soul" and "fostering", which means parents but also encouragement, Wordsworth moves into the realm of symbolic birth and development from the natural. The idea of aesthetics is evoked in the line "beautiful and the sublime." The lovely and attractive is juxtaposed with a terrifying notion of nature. Wordsworth naturalises classical theory of the beautiful. Wordsworth's sublime is taken directly from nature and planted within us. Wordsworth has a guilty conscience after raiding the birds' nest which is manifested in natural sounds and subjectivity. The child's experience of stealing eggs is followed by a different lexis of reflecting upon the significance of the "spot of time" just related.

One of Wordsworth's most famous "spots of time" is the boat stealing episode. A moral sense is henceforward instilled in him after he has stolen the boat. A fantasy adventure turns into a horror adventure, causing the boy's moral horizon to widen.

"One evening (surely I was led by her)
I went alone into a Shepherd's Boat,
A Skiff that to a Willow tree was tied
Within a rocky Cave, its usual home.
'Twas by the shores of Patterdale, a Vale
Wherein I was a Stranger, thither come
A School-boy Traveller, at the Holidays.
Forth rambled from the Village Inn alone
No sooner had I sight of this small Skiff,
Discover'd thus by unexpected chance,
Than I unloos'd her tether and embark'd.
The moon was up, the Lake was shining clear
Among the hoary mountains; from the Shore
I push'd, and struck the oars and struck again
In cadence, and my little Boat mov'd on
Even like a Man who walks with stately step
Though bent on speed. It was an act of stealth
And troubled pleasure; not without the voice
Of mountain-echoes did my Boat move on,
Leaving behind her still on either side
Small circles glittering idly in the moon,
Until they melted all into one track
Of sparkling light. A rocky Steep uprose
Above the Cavern of the Willow tree
And now, as suited one who proudly row'd
With his best skill, I fix'd a steady view
Upon the top of that same craggy ridge,
The bound of the horizon, for behind
Was nothing but the stars and the grey sky.
She was an elfin Pinnace; lustily
I dipp'd my oars into the silent Lake,
And, as I rose upon the stroke, my Boat
Went heaving through the water, like a Swan;
When from behind that craggy Steep, till then
The bound of the horizon, a huge Cliff,
As if with voluntary power instinct,
Uprear'd its head. I struck, and struck again,
And, growing still in stature, the huge Cliff
Rose up between me and the stars, and still,
With measur'd motion, like a living thing,
Strode after me. With trembling hands I turn'd,
And through the silent water stole my way
Back to the Cavern of the Willow tree.
There, in her mooring-place, I left my Bark,
And, through the meadows homeward went, with grave
And serious thoughts; and after I had seen
That spectacle, for many days, my brain
Work'd with a dim and undetermin'd sense
Of unknown modes of being; in my thoughts
There was a darkness, call it solitude,
Or blank desertion, no familiar shapes
Of hourly objects, images of trees,
Of sea or sky, no colours of green fields;
But huge and mighty Forms that do not live
Like living men mov'd slowly through the mind
By day and were the trouble of my dreams."
[372-489]

Wordsworth gives nature a capital "N", signifying the idea of Mother Nature and fostering, as above. Fantasy themes are explored - elves, moon shining, water droplets. The band of the horizon represents boundaries both physical and moral. Then the language turns to that of terror. As he rows, the boy sees something appearing above the cliff, a trick of perspective where as he rows further away, the things seems to get bigger. He becomes afraid and feels guilty for 'stealing' the boat. The incident itself is rewritten from motion, to "struck and struck" again. The boy does not know what he has learnt, but the adult does and meditates on it. The boy has learned conscience.

In the skating episode, the child Wordsworth is skating on a lake with his friends. It is about the passage of time, which is in itself a difficult concept.

"And in the frosty season, when the sun
Was set, and visible for many a mile
The cottage windows through the twilight blaz'd,
I heeded not the summons:---happy time
It was, indeed, for all of us; to me
It was a time of rapture: clear and loud
The village clock toll'd six; I wheel'd about,
Proud and exulting, like an untired horse,
That cares not for his home.---All shod with steel,
We hiss'd along the polish'd ice, in games
Confederate, imitative of the chace
And woodland pleasures, the resounding horn,
The Pack loud bellowing, and the hunted hare.
So through the darkness and the cold we flew,
And not a voice was idle; with the din,
Meanwhile, the precipices rang aloud,
The leafless trees, and every icy crag
Tinkled like iron, while the distant hills
Into the tumult sent an alien sound
Of melancholy, not unnoticed, while the stars,
Eastward, were sparkling clear, and in the west
The orange sky of evening died away.
Not seldom from the uproar I retired
Into a silent bay, or sportively
Glanced sideway, leaving the tumultuous throng,
To cut across the image of a star
That gleam'd upon the ice: and oftentimes
When we had given our bodies to the wind,
And all the shadowy banks, on either side,
Came sweeping through the darkness, spinning still
The rapid line of motion; then at once
Have I, reclining back upon my heels,
Stopp'd short, yet still the solitary Cliffs
Wheeled by me, even as if the earth had roll'd
With visible motion her diurnal round;
Behind me did they stretch in solemn train
Feebler and feebler, and I stood and watch'd
Till all was tranquil as a dreamless sleep."
[452-489]

Wordsworth uses animal imagery in all the episodes of the Prelude, e.g. "untired horse", "swan." The line "alien sound of melancholy" reflects the reality that echoes die. Wordsworth uses open vowels to catch the dying cadence of the last words in each line, like an echo. The boy does not know he is learning about time and transience, but the adult does. "All was tranquil as a dreamless sleep" refers to the dying of day, and other images also signal this: the church clock, the sun setting, images of circles like the boy spinning in circles on his skates, to signify the harmonious movement of the universe.

In terms of the poem Wordsworth enacts nature as a formative shaper of conscience.

Book 6 is about the turmoil in France. Wordsworth is in church and England declares war on France. The greater infanticism (England) declares war on an insipient republic (France). Wordsworth holds onto his republicanism, but his personal opinions make him a traitor in the light of the war.

"Such was my then belief, that there was one,
And only one solicitude for all;
And now the strength of Britain was put forth
In league with the confederated Host,
Not in my single self alone I found,
But in the minds of all ingenuous Youth,
Change and subversion from this hour. No shock
Given to my moral nature had I known
Down to that very moment; neither lapse
Nor turn of sentiment that might be nam'd
A revolution, save at this one time,
All else was progress on the self-same path
On which with a diversity of pace
I had been travelling; this a stride at once
Into another region. True it is,
'Twas not conceal'd with what ungracious eyes
Our native Rulers from the very first
Had look'd upon regenerated France
Nor had I doubted that this day would come.
But in such contemplation I had thought
Of general interests only, beyond this
Had [never] once foretasted the event.
Now had I other business for I felt
The ravage of this most unnatural strife
In my own heart; there lay it like a weight
At enmity with all the tenderest springs
Of my enjoyments. I, who with the breeze
Had play'd, a green leaf on the blessed tree
Of my beloved country; nor had wish'd
For happier fortune than to wither there,
Now from my pleasant station was cut off,
And toss'd about in whirlwinds. I rejoiced,
Yea, afterwards, truth most painful to record!
Exulted in the triumph of my soul
When Englishmen by thousands were o'erthrown,
Left without glory on the Field, or driven,
Brave hearts, to shameful flight. It was a grief,
Grief call it not, 'twas anything but that,
A conflict of sensations without name,
Of which he only who may love the sight
Of a Village Steeple as I do can judge
When in the Congregation, bending all
To their great Father, prayers were offer'd up,
Or praises for our Country's Victories,
And 'mid the simple worshippers, perchance,
I only, like an uninvited Guest
Whom no one own'd sate silent, shall I add,
Fed on the day of vengeance yet to come?"
[228-275]

Wordsworth looks back on his younger radical self and calls it "ingenuous". He uses Miltonian language such as "uninvited guest" - signifying Satan in Paradise - to express his republicanism. He is true to his earlier memories.

25/10/07 - Architectural History - Sir Christopher Wren and the English Baroque

In France, the Baroque was associated with the great absolutist kings, while in Italy it reflected the beliefs of Christianity. In France it was empowering (for example, at the palace of Versailles), but in England it was more restrained.

In the 1640s Civil War broke out between the Monarchy and Parliament. In 1660 the Monarchy was restored. And in 1688 the 'Glorious Revolution' occurred, in which the Stuarts were deposed. The Baroque in England coincides with the latter period.

In 1660 England did not have a strong Classical background, except for Inigo Jones. Wren replaced Jones' design of St Paul's Cathedral in London.

St Paul's Cathedral
The theoretical basis of Wren's architecture is based on the philosophy of empiricism. This had a long English tradition stretching back to Francis Bacon in the early seventeenth century: "Nothing exists which is not accessible to the senses." This was very different from the ideals of the Italian Renaissance or Inigo Jones, in which there was no absolute criteria; everything was relative; and there were no absolute rules of architectural beauty.

"...The Corinthian order became the most delicate of all others, and though the column was slenderer, yet bore a greater weight of entablature than the more ancient orders."
[Christopher Wren, Tracts on Architecture, Tract 2]

"Beauty is a Harmony of Objects, begetting Pleasure by the Eye. There are two Causes of Beauty, natural and customary. Natural is from Geometry, consisting in Uniformity (that is equality) and Proportion. Customary Beauty is begotten by the use of our Sense to those Objects which are usually pleasing to us for other Causes, as 'familiarity' or particular inclination breeds a Love of Things not in themselves lovely. Here lies the great Occasion of Errors; here is tried the architect's judgement: but always the true test is natural or geometrical beauty."
[Christopher Wren, Tracts on Architecture, Tract 1]

The Old St Paul's Cathedral was a typical Gothic building, as seen in books of the time. Wren went to Rome in 1655. There he met Bernini and studied the French architects. He came back to England full of ideas for the new St Paul's. His first design included a huge dome, and he sketched a plan of this before the Great Fire of 1666. Within a few weeks of the fire, Wren drew his proposal for rebuilding London. The plan embodies his notions of what a church should be made of: a portico, the main body, and a dome. Wren's first design for St Paul's is lost, but the second was based on the Greek cross form with a central dome reflecting Michelangelo's plan for St Peter's Cathedral. The second is almost a Latin cruciform and it is vast in scale. This design, called the Great Model, was approved by the king, but criticised by the clergy because it was too much like St Peter's, and so was thought to be too Catholic. So Wren went away and designed something that would please everybody. The Warrant Design, made in 1675, is more familiar. It is an old-fashioned classicised gothic building. The design included a spire on top of the dome; an attempt to reconcile the gothic with the classical. It takes a basilica form, with a nave and second storey aisles. But he made another design, known as the Definitive, the same year. This one was a compromise between his second and third proposals. It had two balanced naves on either side of the dome. The dome itself was closely related to St Peter's, and it was gigantic in scale. It takes influence from the Tempietto. The dome would have flattened its supports; it was so heavy.

The building was criticised because it was dishonest and gothic. Nowhere does the building reveal its internal structure; in fact the exterior is very misleading. The first storey wall has been rusticated to make it appear antique. There is a frieze running between the second storey capitals, expressing Wren's originality. Inside, there is a clear division of space, indicated by the arches. The arches of St Paul's crossing are in fact fake. They merely give the impression that the dome is resting on the arches, but it actually rests on a lower arch. The dome is not the same on the outside as inside. There is another interior dome with an oculus which allows light from the outer dome to filter into the central space. On the facade the lower portico is wider than the upper one, which echoes the proportions of aisle and nave on the interior. The dome stands out well against the skyline. It is particularly distinct from the smaller church steeples around it which merely pierce the air rather than dominate it.

The City Churches
Eighty-seven churches were destroyed by the Great Fire of London in 1666. Fifty-one were rebuilt. Wren headed a board of commissioners which was appointed to oversee the rebuilding of the churches. It was the first post-reformation church building programme in England. Wren and his associates had no obvious precedents to draw on. There was no elaborate ceremonial. The Protestant church was thought of as a 'preaching box' and this affected the final designs. Wren changed many of the small churches into centralised plans. Larger churches tended to be based on basilicas with surprisingly little emphasis on the altar.

St Bride on Fleet Street was rebuilt between 1671 and 1678. The new version had a gothic clerestory. Wren drew on his own ideals for new churches when constructing St Bride and his other commissions.

"A moderate voice may be heard 50 feet distance before the preacher, 30 feet on each side and 20 feet before the pulpit ... By what I have said, it may be thought reasonable that the ... Church should be at least 60 feet broad and 90 wide."

St James in Piccadilly (1676-84) has slim columns supporting the aisles. Wren said this of Catholic worship:

"... It is enough they hear the murmur of the mass, and see the elevation of the host, but ours are to be fitted for auditories."

St Lawrence Jewry, 1671-7, had an east end with clear emphasis on the altar which was unusual for Wren. Another unusual characteristic in this church is that Wren used abstracted language on the exterior. He gave the exterior a flat and thin veneer.

At Antholin on Watling Street (1678-82) Wren put a beautiful feature inside and emphasised it.

St Stephen, in Walbrook (1672-87) is a large church and Wren used it to explore the dome cross church juxtaposed with a basilica design. We get the sense of transepts, but this is deceptive. Again, the corner arches are deceptive and look awkward like those in St Paul's Cathedral. Wren did not make much emphasis on the exterior.

Classical language was adapted to gothic needs in some of Wren's churches, including St Mary-le-Bow (1670-7), St Bride's and St Stephen.

Nicholas Hawksmoor
Nicholas was born in 1661. Aged eighteen he entered Christopher Wren's service. In 1682 he designed the Chelsea Hospital. Throughout the 1680s he supervised the rebuilding of the city churches under Wren. In 1689 he designed Hampton Court Palace. In 1691 he became Wren's Amanuensis at St Paul's. In 1699 he began a collaboration with Vanbrugh. In 1707 be began to take commissions on his own account. He died in 1736.

By 1711 London still need more churches. Nicholas Hawksmoor stepped in to design Christ Church in Spitalfields. The church has a triumphal arch entrance design, topped by a medieval rope spire. His interests in architecture were more sculptural and three-dimensional than Wren's, even though he was influenced by Wren when they worked together. He uses Wren's typical deceit, for example, with barrel vaulting continuing through the building although they are not real, only trans-barrel vaults. He used light well, for example, in the gallery of the church. He reconciled the Classical language of the exterior by adding a very medieval spire. Outwardly, the church looks like it follows the basilica plan. The composition of elements on the west front include an open portico, flat classical facade and the medieval broach spire. An arched, vaulted central bay of portico ties in with the window on the east front. This gives the impression of a barrel-vaulted interior which is not the reality, although short sections of the vaulting make up the aisles of the church.

Hawksmoor's use of the Gothic connects but contrasts with Wren. The latter used an empirical approach which led to a certain cross-cultural approach to architecture and therefore Wren was not attracted only to the classical past as a source of information for modern architects. He had an interest in the Gothic, which he linked to Islamic (Saracenic) architecture. Hawksmoor also stressed the roots of Gothic architecture in the east but his focus was on Byzantine, early Christian roots and it was its christianity that was the essential characteristic. This allowed him to disengage Gothic architecture from Roman Catholicism (because its early Christian roots were pre-Roman Catholic) and to connect Gothic and Roman - stressing native English Norman, i.e. Romanesque. This avoidance of Roman Catholicism allowed him to argue that his churches were Christian, English and Protestant. Structurally and stylistically, the roots of this architecture he saw in the Byzantine round arch, not the pointed Gothic arch. In his Gothic work, he noticeably avoids ever using the pointed arch. He managed to combine all religions, past and present, in the spire of St John Horsleydown, built 1727-33.

James Gibbs 1682-1754
Gibbs was born and educated in Aberdeen, a Catholic. In the late 1690s he studied in Holland. In 1703 he entered Scots College in Rome to study for priesthood. He gave this up and entered the studio of Baroque architect Carlo Fontana. He returned to Britain in 1710. He gained patronage from the Earl of Mar, Secretary of State for Scotland. It resulted in his inclusion as one of the architects of the fifty new churches proposed under the 1711 Act. He was suspected of Jacobite sympathies after the 1715 uprising which was led by Mar. He produced the definitive and most influential of all English protestant churches, St Martin in the Fields.

Gibbs had a different approach to both Wren and Hawksmoor. Neither the tasteful classical veneer of Wren, not the more dramatic modelling of Hawksmoor. He was more interested in complex rhythmical patterns on his facades, seen in the side elevation of St Mary-le-Strand (1714-17). He developed this to a high degree in building like the Radcliffe Camera in Oxford.

Thomas Archer c. 1668-1743
Archer was said to be "...the least English and the most Baroque" by Marcus Whiffen. He was a gentleman amateur, who had gone on the Grand Tour twice, in the 1680s and 1690s. There he gained a first hand experience of Roman Baroque architecture. He designed St Philip's Church, Birmingham (1709-15) which is now a cathedral. He was appointed for the 1711 commission and designed two churches, St Paul's Deptford (1730) and St John's Smith Square (1714-28). He took for his designs direct influence from Roman Baroque.