Abstract
It is the fate of our modern sensibility, argued Friedrich Schiller, to be alienated from nature. In his 1795 essay, Über naive und sentimentalische Dichtung, Schiller describes how the modern poet “seeks nature, but as an ideal and in a perfection in which she has never existed, when he bemourns her at once as something having existed and now lost” (my emphasis).1 Nature, for Schiller, is synonymous with classical art, called “naïve.” Consequently, we experience our difference from antiquity as we do our estrangement from nature, in the form of personal loss: the ancients “are what we were.” The psychological consequence of modernity as difference—as the alienation of modern European sensibility from its natural origins in antiquity—Schiller calls die Sentimentalität, “sentimentality.” The affective symptom of sentimentality is die Wehmut, “melancholy,” a particular affliction of eighteenth-century Grand Tourists. “Lingering] before the monuments of ancient times,” according to Schiller, rendered one particularly vulnerable to sentimental symptoms. A generation after Schiller, William Hazlitt offered a vivid account of antiquarian melancholia. He observed that English students in Rome, confronted by “ancient greatness,” experienced their “sinews of desire relax and moulder away, and the fever of youthful ambition [turn] into a cold ague-fit. There is a languor in the air, and the contagion of listless apathy infects the hopes that are yet unborn.”2
“People are rather fond of listening to declamations about the Greeks. But if someone were to come and say, here are some, then nobody is at home.”
—F Schlegel, Athenaeum Fragments
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Notes
On the Naive and Sentimental in Literature and On the Sublime, trans. Julius A. Elias (New York: Frederick Ungar, 1966), 127. My work on Romanticism and Hellenism was first inspired by a seminar with David Ferris at the CUNY Graduate Center in New York. Though his subsequent book, Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999) was published too late for close consideration in this study, I owe much to David for the development of my readings in this chapter, those of Winckelmann and Keats in particular.
“English Students at Rome,” The Complete Works of William Hazlitt, ed. P. P. Howe (New York: AMS Press, 1967), 17:141.
Polymetis, or An Enquiry Concerning the Agreement between the Works of the Roman Poets and the Remains of the Antient [sic] Artists (London: R. Dodsley, 1747), 3.
Conversations with Eckermann, trans. John Oxenford (San Francisco: North Point Press, 1984), 110.
The History of Ancient Art, trans. G. Henry Lodge (Boston: J. R. Osgood, 1872), 4:292.
Poetics, Speculation, Judgment: The Shadow of the Work of Art from Kant to Phenomenology, trans. Michael Gendre (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1993), 89.
E. M. Butler, The Tyranny of Greece over Germany (Boston: Beacon Press, 1935), 11–48.
Alex Potts, Flesh and the Ideal: Winckelmann and the Origins of Art History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1994), 66.
Ruines et paysages: salons de 1761, ed. Else Marie Bukdahl, Michel Delon, Annette Lorenceau (Paris: Hermann, 1995), 338 (my translation).
Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and Beholder in the Age of Diderot (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1980).
England’s Ruins: Poetic Purpose and the National Landscape (New York: Basil Blackwell, 1990), 1.
Marc Eli Blanchard, “Writing the Museum: Diderot’s Bodies in the Salons,” in Diderot: Digression and Dispersion, ed. Jack Udank and Herbert Josephs (Lexington, KY: French Forum Press, 1984), 31–33.
The Broken Column: A Study in Romantic Hellenism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1931), 13–14. Other general surveys in English on Romantic Hellenism include Butler’s The Tyranny of Greece over Germany; B. H. Stern, The Rise of Romantic Hellenism in English Literature, 1732–86 (Menasha, WI: George Banta, 1940); Timothy Webb, English Romantic Hellenism 1700–1824 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982); and Rediscovering Hellenism, ed. G. W. Clarke (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New York: Routledge, 1995), 6.
The Tourist: A New Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Schocken Books, 1976), 84.
“Valéry Proust Museum,” Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1981), 175.
The Diary of Benjamin Robert Haydon, ed. Walter Bissell Pope (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1960), 2:76.
The Autobiography and Memoirs of B. R. Haydon, ed. Tom Taylor (London: Peter Davies, 1926), 67.
Report from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Earl of Elgin’s Collection of Sculptured Marbles &c. (London: John Murray, 1816) [addendum].
William Sharp, The Life and Letters of Joseph Severn (London: Sampson Low, Marston & Co., 1892), 32.
Keats’ Elgin Marbles sonnets and the late Hellenist odes are products of the Regency fashion for ekphrastic poetry. By the time Keats published the marbles sonnets—first in The Examiner (9 March 1817) and later, at Haydon’s behest, in the Annals of the Fine Arts (vol. 3, April 1818)—the subject of ancient sculpture was a commonplace in the popular literature of the day and had a well-established set of conventions. For example, in 1805, both Oxford and Cambridge inaugurated poetry competitions on the theme of antique sculpture: a symbolically resonant moment in the historical shift from literary classicism in England to its modern, material-visual phase. See Grant Scott, The Sculpted Word: Keats, Ekphrasis and the Visual Arts (Hanover, NH: University Press of New England, 1994), chapter 2.
Keats’s Life of Allegory: The Origins of a Style (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1988), 249.
W.J. Bate calls the poem “almost comic” in his critical biography, John Keats (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1963), 147. Judgments on the Elgin Marbles sonnets reached a nadir in the late 1960s: from “half-inarticulate” (Douglas Bush, John Keats [New York: Macmillan, 1966], 39); to “disappointing” (Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967], 35); to “dismally thin” (John Jones, Keats’ Dream of Truth [London: Chatto & Windus, 1969], 162).
Keats’ Poetry and the Politics of the Imagination (Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1989), 28.
Keats and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 13.
“Sacred Objects and the Sublime Ruins of Art,” in Beyond Romanticism, ed. Stephen Copley and John Whale (London: Routledge, 1992), 226. Paul Fry has suggested Paradise Lost as an intertext for these lines. A Defense of Poetry: Reflections on the Occasion of Writing (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 147–52. According to Fry’s reading, Keats’ “pure serene,” already a reference to the world of the blind poet Homer, echoes the “drop serene” that leaves Milton in “dim suffusion veiled” (Paradise Lost 111:25–26). This intertextual blindness further ironizes the positive visual expectations established by the sonnet’s title, and anticipates the “universal blank” of Cortez’s vision in the concluding lines. It is, as Fry suggests, a “non-epiphanic” moment.
Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black (New York: AMS Press, 1973), 27.
The Letters of John Keats, 1814–21, ed. H. E. Rollins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1958), 2:212.
Dark Interpreter: The Discourse of Romanticism (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980), 163.
The Fate of Reading (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1975), 83.
The sculptural character of the imagery in the Hyperion poems is not a recent insight. Thomas De Quincey compared Keats’ epic fragments to “a Grecian temple enriched with Grecian sculpture.” For Leigh Hunt, the poems were “like a ruin in the desert”; for George Gilfillan, “the most magnificent of poetical Torsos”; and for Richard Woodhouse, “that in poetry which the Elgin and Egyptian Marbles are in sculpture.” Almost no commentary on the poems since the Victorian era has neglected to reiterate the comparison. De Quincey, Collected Writings, ed. David Masson (Edinburgh, 1889–90), 11:389; Hunt, quoted in Theodore Redpath, The Young Romantics and Critical Opinion, 1801–24 (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1973), 499; Gilfillan, A Gallery of Literary Portraits (Edinburgh: W Tait, 1845), 372; Woodhouse, quoted in Keats and the Mirror of Art, 161.
Martin Aske, Keats and Hellenism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 53–72.
“Many a work of art whose coherence is never questioned is, as the artist knows quite well himself, not a complete work but a fragment, or one or more fragments, a mass, a plan.” Philosophical Fragments, trans. Peter Firchow (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 12.
For example: Tillotama Rajan, Dark Interpreter, 143–203; and Thomas Reed, “Keats and the Gregarious Advance of Intellect in Hyperion,” ELH 55 (1988): 195–232.
Alan Bewell, “The Political Implications of Keats’s Classicist Aesthetics,” Studies in Romanticism 25 (1986): 220–29; Theresa Kelley, “Keats, Ekphrasis, and History,” Keats and History, 212–37.
The Visionary Company (New York: Doubleday, 1961), 388.
The trial transcripts are at the Scottish Records Office in Edinburgh. Here I rely on the generous transcript of the proceedings in Theodore Vrettos, A Shadow of Magnitude: The Acquisition of the Elgin Marbles (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974), 188–217.
Medwin’s Conversations of Lord Byron, ed. Ernest J. Lovell, Jr. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1966), 211. Medwin attributes the couplet to Martin Archer Shee’s Rhymes on Art, which went through four editions from 1805–21. But the couplet does not appear in any of these editions. Furthermore, in a footnote in the 1809 edition, now bearing the title Elements of Art, Shee, a one-time president of the Royal Academy, describes himself as “one of those who think that the noble proprietor deserves well of the Arts for their [the marbles’] introduction to this country” (120). Given that Elgin had enemies enough among the art establishment, it is difficult to believe a venereal joke would come from his own corner. Any number of factors could explain the confusion: Medwin’s gift for fanciful recollection, or Byron’s habit of baiting Medwin with misinformation—there is probably no final answer.
Report, 92–93. The irony is that Payne Knight had plenty to say about the marbles, most of it the prejudicial opinion one would expect from the Society of Dilettanti’s champion in an emergent bourgeois museum culture. Most damaging was his challenge over dinner at Lord Stafford’s: “You have lost your labour, milord Elgin. Your marbles are not Greek at all, but from the time of Hadrian.” Sydney Checkland, The Elgins 1766–1917: A Tale of Aristocrats, Proconsuls and their Wives (Aberdeen: Aberdeen University Press, 1988), 82. The ignorance of this remark did not disqualify Payne Knight’s influence with the Select Committee nor the meanness of the financial settlement ultimately offered to Elgin, as he had many friends in Parliament.
Smith, “Lord Elgin and his Collection,” Journal of Hellenic Studies 36 (1916): 262.
The Plundered Past (New York: Atheneum, 1973), 174–75.
The “other name” is Mary Elgin’s, boldly inscribed next to her husband’s on a column in the summer of 1801. As William St. Clair records, Lord Elgin’s name was soon erased, though Mary’s was still legible in 1826. Lord Elgin and the Marbles (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1967), 198.
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© 2001 Gillen D’Arcy Wood
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Wood, G.D. (2001). Ruins and Museums. In: The Shock of the Real. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-06809-5_5
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