Indolent thoughts

Under the “killing sun”1 of Romanticism, an individual is reborn through love and empathy, their creative imagination kindled, and art, poetry and music thrive for the benefit of us all: “I never should have sung as I do had I never seen you; I never should have composed at all. . . You then liv'd in my heart, in my head, in every idea…”. And months, or minutes later, the same person feels they have been cheated into a fire: “I fly with HORROR from such a passion….”2

John Henry Fuseli, The Nightmare (1781) Image source: Wikipedia

In the spring of 1798, the eldest daughter of the Tragic Muse was reconciled to the man she truly loved, an artist who was the slave of the feeling of the moment, who....

Among Tigers and Panthers...

Part Two

Anti-heroine or victim?

FRIDERIKA VON MECKLENBURG STRELITZ by Schadow

Terracotta bust, 1794, by Schadow. Nationalgalerie, Berlin. Image source: Web Gallery of Art

  

The younger sister of Queen Louise had a tarnished career compared to the Prussian Madonna, in a much longer life circumscribed by unlucky marriages of convenience and necessity. Aged 15, she drew the short straw in the double marriage of the princesses of Mecklenburg Strelitz to two Prussian princes, the virtuous, strictly monogamous heir to the throne, Frederick William, and his more brilliant but dissolute younger brother, Louis Charles, who died three years later.

Amid the usual double standards about male and female adultery, there were salacious rumours that during her marriage, Friderika, instead of meekly suffering her unfaithful husband's neglect, retaliated by having an affair with one of his uncles, Louis Ferdinand, who was only a year older than him, and six years her senior.......

National mourning

RETURN WITH SHAME

 TO THE PLACE FROM WHICH [YOU] CAME

 

No, all taxpayers should not have been forced to pay their contribution to Thatcher's funeral, not morally nor financially. Those who think it is appropriate to pay respects should pay the rest of us respect, too. We are mourning, too, not her, but our "lost country, bought and sold", a collective soul murdered by the State, too blinded by greed to see the price of gold, in her name. Nothing could be more provocative or than the penalty of paying for this embarrassing ceremonial, confounding transient political personality with lasting national identity, when so many people are living on "the wine of desolation".
There is no point ranting further here, I'm just registering my own silent scream, hoping that all the screams and laments will rage like a torrent on the heads of colluders and collaborators, drowning out their funeral orations and that the only music heard will be the sound of Drake's drum calling sleeping Britain to arms, not against a foreign enemy, but the one within. Let all divisive politicians have unmarked graves. Let us shake our chains till tyrants quake with fear. Come, poets like Shelley, come Danny Boyle, give us the anti-Masque to this "ghastly masquerade".

(Every quote from Shelley's The Mask of Anarchy, 1819 - proving yet again that under different clothes and names, the nature of tyranny does not change.)

Romantic despite herself

PART THREE

"I fly with HORROR from such a passion"

 

Sarah Martha Siddons, in a print made by Robert Graves in 1832 after Lawrence, mid 1790s. © The Trustees of the British Museum

Jane Austen was revising the first version of Sense and Sensibility (called Elinor and Marianne) in 1797-98, while the sisters Sally and Maria Siddons’ lives were being “embittered and disturbed”[4] by the portrait painter Thomas Lawrence, who could not decide which of Sarah Siddons' daughters he should love, and transferred his attentions from the elder to the younger and back again, all the while confiding in his close friend, their famous mother....

Romantic despite herself

PART TWO

"no open country, no fresh air, no blue hill, no bonny beck..."

Charlotte Brontë's accusation that there is “no open country, no fresh air”1 in Austen’s polite world is untrue. Austen incorporates the natural world as her characters would see it, and their perceptions change over the years under the influence of Romanticism. Elizabeth admires Pemberley’s woods hanging over a winding stream with an 18^th century appreciation of the picturesque; she is not emotionally uniting with nature; but a few years later, in about 1816, Anne Elliott, thinking of her own lost happiness, walks through the November fields quoting poetry about autumn to herself, glutting her sorrow on the mellow beauty around her, three years before Keats’ Ode to Autumn was published.

Painting, even the most familiar of places and weather, is another word for feeling: 

The Close, Salisbury oil by Constable,  

Victoria & Albert Museum. Image source: Web Gallery of Art

Constable, for whom painting was "but another word for feeling”2, was put on table mats...

Almost wild

The Painter's Daughters Chasing a Butterfly, one of Gainsborough's intimate studies of his daughters made in the late 1750s, that take 18th century sensibility forward into a Romantic awareness of individual development through the senses.
He sees beyond the fragile innocence of two little girls, in the glancing light of a Rousseauian childhood idyll, to a more profound understanding, to the anxiety already showing in their faces as they move rapidly through the disturbing darkness of a wood, that is both catalyst and externalization of their unconscious minds. 
Happiness is always out of their reach; they experience, as Keats described, "the feel of not to feel it". I try to imagine again the first impression of this painting, first seen in childhood visits to the National Gallery, before knowing that both little girls suffered from a genetic mental disorder, and grew into deranged middle-aged women; wouldn't our hearts still ache for them, some knowledge intuitively divined, "without irritable reaching after fact and reason?"1

Image © copyright The National Gallery London

THE RELUCTANT ROMANTIC

She has no "warmth or enthusiasm"; she has nothing "energetic, poignant, or heartfelt"; "nothing profound." (Charlotte Brontë writing of Jane Austen)

"'She really looked almost wild'" (Mrs Hurst speaking of Miss Elizabeth Bennet)

Jane Austen has been cast outside and parallel to Romanticism, sometimes seen as its enemy, a purse-lipped spinster castigated thirty years after her death by Charlotte Brontë and many subsequent readers for putting sense and convention above passion and romance. 

Brontë was perplexed, almost enraged, by Austen's reputation as a great novelist. She had no "warmth or enthusiasm"; she has nothing "energetic, poignant, or heartfelt"; "nothing profound."

After forcing herself to read more of Austen's novels, at G.H.Lewes' suggestion, the highest qualities Brontë grudgingly allowed her predecessor,  were "clear common sense and subtle shrewdness." but "...the Passions are perfectly unknown to her; she rejects even a speaking acquaintance with that stormy Sisterhood; even to the Feelings.."2

This is unfair to Austen and to pre-Victorian Romanticism, that engaged in constant debate with itself, neo-classicism and the Enlightenment....

Among Tigers and Panthers....

Neoclassical goddesses and Romantic Heroines: 

Part One

LOUISE OF PRUSSIA by Tischbein

Louise of Prussia, when Crown Princess, 1796, by Tischbein. Image source: damals.de

Louise, queen of Prussia (1776 - 1810), was one of the last and most accomplished of the Enlightenment's children among the European ruling class, educated under the principles of Rousseau, her imagination and taste fed on Schiller, Goethe and Shakespeare, a princess who could say after climbing the Schneekoppe mountain that she felt nearer to her god, and mean it.

During the Napoleonic Wars, in which Prussia, that had seemed invincible a generation earlier under Frederick the Great, was conquered by the French, Louise provided inspiration to the nation and to her husband, who relied upon her resolution and courage to the extent that Napoleon mockingly called her "the only real man in Prussia".

During her lifetime she was given more adulation than any other German queen consort; when she died aged thirty-four in 1810, frozen in time as a young mother, she was instantly mythologized, and became a symbol of German national unity and womanhood over a century before those ideals were perverted by the Nazis.

She was born on 10 March, 1776, into the minor ducal family of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in Northern Germany that was related to the Hanoverians by the marriage of her aunt Charlotte to King George III. The family's prestige continued to be raised by the next female generation on the  marriage market. 

The youthful beauty of Louise and her three sisters excited Romantic intellectuals like Goethe, who optimistically welcomed their appearance as a "heavenly vision" of aesthetic ideals, as much as prosaic German princes on the look-out for dynastic breeding mares.

The eldest sister, another Charlotte, later admired for her singing voice and literary patronage, was married off aged sixteen to the boorish Duke of Saxe-Hildburghausen, and it was her younger sisters, Louise and Friederike, who were snatched up later for the greater marital prizes, both eventually becoming queen consorts. The unamiable characters of all their husbands amid the upheavals of European war pre-empted fairy-tale endings for any of the sisters. 

Only Louise, who became a mother of ten, was to achieve domestic happiness, with the determination of a mission.  She was pregnant for most of her seventeen-year marriage to Frederick William III of Prussia, and still found time to promote government reform, defy Napoleon and rally the nation during wartime defeat.

One of the most famous images of feminine beauty in German neoclassicism, JG Schadow's Prinzessinnengruppe of the sisters Louise and Friederika of Mecklenburg-Strelitz. Sculpture, 1795, collection of the Nationalgalerie, Berlin. At the time, both sisters were married to princes of Prussia. Louise's husband succeeded as king in 1796. The casual intimacy of the pose and the fashionably clinging dresses of real-life princesses shocked some contemporaries, used to more pompous formal presentations of royalty.

Early lessons in a cycle of matriarchal loss and replacement informed Louise's personal quest for emotional stability and her adult sense of maternal and social responsibility. Her mother died when she was six; after two years, her mother's younger sister stepped into the gap as step-mother to the young family, but she died in childbirth only a year later.  

Her grandmother, Marie Luise Albertine of Darmstadt, took over the care and education of the children of both the daughters who had predeceased her, bringing them up in a more affectionate and relaxed environment than was usual in contemporary aristocratic families.

Intelligent, strong-willed and energetic, sustained by moral purpose and a belief in her historical destiny, Louise welcomed the power her royal status gave her to perform charitable works and practise the liberal ideas of the 18th century philosophers and support military and social reformers within the absolutist Prussian government.

She was both typical of her time and ahead of it, a once and future heroine, whose natural warmth and spontaneity escaped caste boundaries, even at the repressive Berlin court. Instinctively pleasure-loving and light-hearted, she proved her fortitude and capacity for self-denial in exile for three years in Koenigsberg, in the far eastern reaches of Prussian territory, near the Russian border. 

During the French occupation, Louise expressed solidarity with the Prussian people through the simplicity of her dress and life-style, though she still tried to keep up with French fashions. She loved clothes extravagantly for their own sake, and also for their iconic value to her official position as queen and leader of neoclassical fashion in Germany.

Louise performed a balancing act as wife, mother and leader, scrupulously combining her career as chief political adviser to her husband with being his outwardly obedient consort, reining in reforms that she knew would exceed his tolerance, and matching her gentleness as a mother with the fierce resolve of a war leader.  

With foresight, she fought for the country's independence from the opposing threats of imperial French and Russian power, and died when the cause still looked hopeless, before the Allied victories of 1812 to1815.  Her husband and the nation sanctified her as a Prussian sacrifice to the Corsican Monster. 

From then on, her personality was distorted by popular culture and nationalist politics. Recently, historians, novelists and bloggers have attempted to disentangle the real Louise from all her various incarnations, domestic goddess, warrior queen and benevolent saint. who remains one of those historical figures on whom we continue to project our own aspirations and prejudices, shifting the focus as it suits us.

LOUISE OF PRUSSIA 

part one: The Eternal Feminine

part two: The Husband Who Loved Uniforms

part three: Adornment and Concealment
part four: The Eternal Feminine II

No end of words

By writing this for a poetry competition
about the end of days,

I’m colluding with spiritual genocide,
vicarious, of course,

all perpetrators’ hands clean of blood.

There’s nothing cheers the disaffected more

than bringing down a world that’s rejected them.

For twenty-five pounds I’d betray my species

with a spiteful sentiment classically columnized,

my disillusionment disguised as edified.....

Art and Friendship

"It is humanity that interests me" (Zola, A New Manner in Painting: Edouard Manet, 1867) 

Thirty years before he risked his own safety and reputation in the Dreyfus case, Zola had taken up his pen in another passionate public defence, in this case of the painter Manet, whose early works were misunderstood and condemned by the art establishment for their alla prima technique and stark realism of their subject-matter, flouting the academic rules and allegorical ideals that had determined post-Revolutionary French art.

Manet's paintings were geuninely shocking to a respectable bourgeoisie unused to seeing a nude looking like a real woman just before or after having sex rather than a neo-classical goddess representing an unattainable virtue or abstract idea. For Zola, they represented a new analytical truth in art, the visual counterpart of the literary realism first introduced to the reading public in the 1830s by Balzac.

Manet's 'Olympia', 1863:When our artists give us a Venus, they 'correct' Nature, but Edouard Manet has asked himself, 'Why lie, why not tell the truth?' He has made us acquainted with Olympia, a contemporary girl, the sort of girl we meet every day on the pavements... 

(Zola, A New Manner in Painting: Edouard Manet, 1867). Image source: Wikipedia

As a Realist novelist and art critic, Zola dismissed preconceived and philosophically pompous ideas about absolute beauty in his sweeping rhetoric - "It is humanity that interests me" - and argued that all kinds of artistic interpretation of reality were valid, contributing to a vast and varied "epic of human creation"....

TRUTH part 2

Monet: "Water-Lily Pond," c.1915-1926.Oil on canvas, diptych in the Chichu Art Museum. Image source: Wikipedia
ART AND CONSCIENCE

"I have but one passion: to enlighten those who have been kept in the dark, in the name of humanity which has suffered so much and is entitled to happiness" (Zola, J'accuse).

 

Glass vase "Les hommes noirs" by Émile Gallé and Victor Prouvé, engraved with monstrous mutations coming out of the darkness of human nature displayed in Paris at the 1900 Exposition Universelle. 

Image source: Wikipedia Commons.

Within two weeks of the publication of J'accuse in the newspaper L'Aurore, edited by Clemenceau ('le tigre' of French republican politics and future war leader, who was also an admirer of the Impressionists), Zola was prosecuted by the government for libel on 23 February, after a trial described at the time by the Manchester Guardian as "a mockery of justice", he was condemned to the highest penalty of a year's imprisonment and a fine of 3,000 francs. There was a further humiliation when he was removed from the Légion d'honneur.  He avoided hearing his final sentence at a second trial in July by fleeing to England, where he stayed in exile until June 1899, returning when he saw signs that "truth was marching on" under the pressure of the Dreyfusards, with the government's collapse and the appointment of a more sympathetic president. His prime objective, the retrial of Dreyfus, was ordered at last....

Imaginary Palaces and Garden Theatres

Giuseppe Valeriani's set of designs for a stage set. 

The Samuel Courtauld Trust, The Courtauld Gallery, London

Theatres were built to look like palaces, and palaces looked like theatres....

Truth

7th February,1898: opening day of Zola's tumultuous libel trial in Paris after the publication of J'accuse....

Art and Conscience

'Why lie, why not tell the truth?' (Zola, A New Manner in Painting: Edouard Manet, 1867)  

Truth appears as a plastic commodity to people in power as it does to most of us in our everyday life. This is one of the reasons we need art, including fiction and history: to correct a short circuit in our moral brains. We despise liars in fiction, and we expect dramatized accounts of real life to be true. 

Manet's 'Olympia', 1863:When our artists give us a Venus, they 'correct' Nature, but Edouard Manet has asked himself, 'Why lie, why not tell the truth?' He has made us acquainted with Olympia, a contemporary girl, the sort of girl we meet every day on the pavements... (Zola, A New Manner in Painting: Edouard Manet, 1867). 
Image source: Wikipedia

Truth wouldn't mean so much to any of us if we hadn't been conditioned to think of it as a deity, secular and spiritual, personified as a solid figure, often paired with Justice; without it our human experience would descend to scrabbling about without a compass in primal mud. We are far more worried about whether other people are being truthful than if we are, because we are not in control; our own adjustments of the truth do not count as lies; they are corrections. We have our eye on a greater truth transcending ordinary means, whether it's saving our careers or the peace of mind of someone we love; we think a self-constructed truth, made up of our intentions and deletions, is as valid as the actual truth.  Like successful businessmen and ambitious politicians, we end up feeling that the more virtuous duty is not to be found out.

It is true that a lie can save lives. It is true that a lie can cost lives. Dr David Kelly was a casualty of "reasons of State". Hundreds of badly cared for hospital patients are casualties of institutional lies, and everywhere in government and businesses there are managements inciting or covering up lies and making scapegoats....

Winter

Through the window I see ghostly rain 
blown like a mad woman trailing veils across the lawn

under an exhausted sky;

contrary man-made wet and cold, out of rhythm,  
confuses birds and plants,  
dispirits us.
My mother’s old hibiscus plant, totem I have tended,  
is alight with amber flames for a day,
magnificat that leaves me cold.

Extract from At World's End © Pippa Rathborne 2013 written for and included in the anthology End of Days - A Collection of Poetry, to be published by Forward Poetry in April, 2013.

Guest Post: Sarah Vernon writing about Ellen Terry

Image © Sarah Vernon

Starting with an old theatrical photograph in her possession, Sarah Vernon penetrates the world of last century's professional actresses, their dedication to truthful interpretation of character and to stage-craft, and also their friendships with one another, that linked generations. Sarah has always believed in the importance of passing on the lessons of past actors and actresses' performances. This extract from her post quotes from Ellen Terry's memoirs, containing invaluable insights into playing Volumnia and deploring the non-existent or, at best, underwritten mother-daughter relationships in Shakespeare:

'"The critics who wrote their notices at the dress-rehearsal, and complained of my playing pranks with the text, were a little previous. Oh, how bad it makes one feel to find that they all think my Volumnia ‘sweet’, and I thought I was fierce, contemptuous, overbearing. Worse, I felt as if I must be appearing like a cabman rating his Drury Lane wife!” By 20 April, however, she feels she is “beginning to play Volumnia a little better.”

The actress later comments on parents in Shakespeare’s plays: “How many times Shakespeare draws fathers and daughters, and how little stock he seems to take of mothers! Portia and Desdemona, Cordelia, Rosalind and Miranda, Lady Macbeth, Queen Katherine and Hermione, Ophelia, Jessica, Hero, and many more are daughters of fathers, but of their mothers we hear nothing. My own daughter called my attention to this fact quite recently, and it is really a singular fact. Of mothers of sons there are plenty of examples: Constance, Volumnia, the Countess Roussillon, Gertrude; but if there are mothers of daughters at all, they are poor examples, like Juliet’s mother and Mrs. Page.”

READ SARAH VERNON'S FULL POST

Reblogged from First Night Design with many thanks to Sarah Vernon

The Faery Prince and Winged Time

A Jacobean Tragedy

 Jacobean fantasy and hope for the future cut off before fruition:
Henry, Prince of Wales (1594-1612), armoured and hatted, rides on horseback, 
with winged Time walking beside him.  Oil painting by Robert Peake the Elder, c.1606-08. Peake (born c.1551) was the prince's official painter, producing iconography in the Elizabethan tradition, at odds with the bravura realism of contemporary European baroque art, already old-fashioned in England at the time of his appointment, and soon officially superseded by Isaac Oliver (of refugee Huguenot parentage) and Dutch and Flemish-born portraitists, but providing a transitional allegorical vision of royal mystique. This image is made poignant by our knowledge that death overtook the prince in the flower of youth.  Image source: Wikipedia

On January 13th, 1605, Ben Jonson and George Chapman, two of the authors of Eastward Ho!, were arrested and imprisoned on charges of sedition after a performance of the play at the Blackfriars Theatre. The third playwright involved, John Marston, fled London to avoid arrest. The new King, James I, had only been in power for two years and the government was particularly sensitive to criticism of the court; it was the same year as the Gunpowder Plot. Jacobean political censorship was motivated by immediate propaganda needs, trying to second-guess the reactions of domestic factions and foreign powers, rather than by a programme of ideological oppression. The king, a published author, who regarded himself as a benevolent intellectual patriarch, believed in the power of disseminating words to convince minds, and his queen, Anne of Denmark, passionately loved theatre and performance...

Blogger's Block/Commemorative Post 2

JANUARY 13TH

Some posts are linked so tenuously to matters of any weight or substance, that if I didn't know better, I'd suspect a case of Blogger's Block. For instance, consulting a calendar of historical events in the hope of spinning a Universal Truth makes me cringe because I despise anniversaries. Birthday, Smurfday. There's no date in the year with a better guarantee of a marital bust-up than a Wedding Anniversary. A calendar, as the Mayans knew better than we do, should be a strictly utilitarian device, not obscured with silly layers of superstition and nostalgia.

Engraving by George Glover for the title-page to Robert Farley, 'Kalendarium humanae vitae, The Kalendar of Mans Life' (London, William Hope, 1638) 
 © The Trustees of the British Museum.

But take at random some news headlines for January 13th, and perhaps you will boggle that they are not from 2013. The details, the names of people and places, have changed, but not humanity, either for good or bad....

A year's blogging later, Twelfth Night or They Never Give Up

Undeterred by everything I've told them, the bear cubs are still dancing on the frozen lake, 

and the young angel is still climbing the starlit sky.

Blogger's block or Dido's Lament

The Death of Dido, marble by Claude-Augustin Cayot, 1711. Musée du Louvre. 

Image source: Web Gallery of Art

Some posts are linked so tenuously to matters of any weight or substance, that if I didn't know better, I'd suspect a case of Blogger's Block.

For instance, consulting a calendar of historical events makes me cringe because I despise anniversaries. Birthday, Smurfday. There's no date in the year with a better guarantee of a marital bust-up than a Wedding Anniversary. A calendar, as the Mayans knew better than we do, should be a strictly utilitarian device, not obscured with silly layers of superstition and nostalgia.

But, any excuse for a celebration is justified these austere January days, and who knows what happy coincidences we'll bump into if we start playing this game of almanac trivia, and see by how many Degrees of Separation we are brought back to this blog....

Power and Seduction, Marilyn and Juliette, Muse and Model, Artemis and Aphrodite...

 ....Atalanta and Daphne....a post brought on by too much Christmas Pudding and Stilton?

The Three Graces, empowered or exploited, by Canova, c.1799. Image: Web Gallery of Art
THE DANGERS AND DELIGHTS OF BEING DECORATIVE
part six of The Laurel Trophy

Immortalized as the dark-haired model in white chemise, peeping under her lashes at onlookers in Gérard's  meltingly sexy portrait, and forever associated with the sofa on which she reclines in the painting by David, in her lifetime Juliette Récamier was a discerning patron of literature and the arts. Her personal taste influenced fashion and interior design in western Europe, and she helped promote philosophical and political ideas in post-revolutionary French society. She was also famous for her virginity, that she is alleged to have given up, willingly, at the age of forty. The long wait is usually perceived as odd, a disorder, rather than a trumphant assertion of individuality through sexual discernment.  

The greatest loves of her life, consummated or not, were always worldly intellectuals, people addicted to using and defining power, whose inclusion of her in their observations gave her validation. Down this road lies the danger, fun but facile, of comparison to Marilyn Monroe and her symbiotic relationships with professional writers, teachers and analysts, all besotted with the ambivalent sweetness of her sex appeal, a vicarious affair that persists in the dozens of publications about her exploited or empowered femininity.....for more dangers, read on

Daughter of The Tragic Muse

Sarah Martha Siddons, c.1795, portrayed and betrayed by the Romantic painter, Thomas Lawrence.

Private Collection. Image source: Wikipedia

"Whenever I meet his eyes...it is like an electric shock to me"

Dutiful daughter and casualty of Romantic egotism
part of
 NEOCLASSICAL GODDESSES AND ROMANTIC HEROINES

SALLY SIDDONS

Sally (1775-1803) and her sister Maria (1779 -1798) were both in love with the gifted young portrait painter, Thomas Lawrence. He was a friend of their mother, Sarah Siddons, and the whole family had known him well for several years. In his mid-twenties, he appeared to fit the description of a romantic hero. He was graceful, dark and delicately featured, with soul-piercing eyes and a charming manner. He behaved with the destructive emotional immaturity found in many former child prodigies. 

He courted both girls in turn, initially forming an attachment to Sally, then deciding that he was in love with the younger girl, Maria, who was already showing symptoms of consumption. Months later, he confessed that it was really Sally he had loved all along, and his engagement to Maria was broken off. He seems to have been genuinely confused about his feelings - Mrs Siddons, always indulgent of him, thought he was being quixotic - but that wasn't really the point. The sisters had only a two dimensional existence for him. Their feelings were as far removed from him as those of supporting characters in a play, in which he was watching Mrs Siddons and himself in the leading parts...CONTINUED