Martin Meisel. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and
Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England *
Joseph
Viscomi **
Realizations brings quickly to mind two
comments from Biographia Literaria XVII.
First, that “the educated man chiefly seeks to discover and express those connections of things, or those relative
bearings of fact to fact, from which
some more or less general law is deducible.” Second, that the perception of
pictures in nature has preconditions, for “if the changes, forms, and incidents
of nature are to prove a sufficient stimulant” and not “pictures to the blind,
and music to the deaf,” then, like Wordsworth and unlike the Welsh mountaineer,
the viewer must be educated in the language which makes such perception—and
effects—possible. [1]
As a
theatre historian well versed in fiction, painting, graphic art, and English,
German, and French art history, Meisel is just such a man. In the five sections
of part I, he examines the technical and theoretical problems of representation
in painting, theatre, illustration, narrative, and the art of effect; these
facts, or, as he calls them, “Coordinates,” he demonstrates in the fourteen
sections of part II, aptly entitled “Conjunctions,” to intersect in varying
degrees in works by Wilkie, Martin, Turner, Bryon, Ainsworth, Dickens, Holman
Hunt, Madox Ford, W.P. Frith, and Henry Irving. Though Meisel begins with
Diderot's theatre criticism and the early stage productions of Hogarth's
progresses, discussed as much as influences as foils, his primary concern is
with the nineteenth century, from David Wilkie's coming to London in 1805 to
Henry Irving's departure from the Lyceum Theatre in 1902. These events “bracket
a distinctive set of relations between narrative and picture” in which he
discerns “the foundation of a [period] style” (3).
In
each of his analyses, Meisel is concerned with how pictures were made and read.
The title refers to the concrete perceptual form given a literary text, the
“move from mind's eye to body's eye,” as “when words became picture, or picture
became dramatic tableau” (30). Realization “meant both literal re-creation and
translation into a more real, that is more vivid, visual, physically present
medium,” with the effect depending on the “apparent literalness and
faithfulness of the translation, as well as the material increment” (30). The
effect, of course, also depended on artists and audiences sharing the same
cultural matrices that made recasting pictures with actors and props an
acknowledged stage effect. By examining the techniques and conventions by which
pictures on boards and between boards were embodied on the boards, Meisel not
only offers new readings of productions, novels, and paintings, but moves back
from material to mind, illuminating a way of perceiving and representing
reality that differed from the ways of the ages before and after it.
Discussions
of structural matrices and cultural schemata aside, the effect of a tableau,
like a scene in nature, depended first and foremost on the image being
recognized as “an imitation of art” (438). Unlike the landscape realized in a
Claude glass, however, the scene in the theatre had to be recognized by an
entire audience, not just an astute few. Meisel illuminates the connection
between the technical advances in graphic reproduction, advances like steel
engraving, wood engraving, and lithography, all of which produced high quality
impressions quickly and in vast numbers, and mass recognition. The theatre was
thus freed to move from an allusive to a specific pictorialism, with tableaux
no longer of traditional emblems, like Motherhood or Justice, but of
contemporary works that had “achieved enough current success to have been
engraved, displayed in print-shop windows, discussed and illustrated in
periodicals, and sometimes pirated” (93).[2]
The
advances in mechanical reproduction that made the nineteenth century a print
culture not only made possible the specificity of theatrical allusion, but
contributed to the idea that a translation could function as a version of the
original, rather than an imitation or copy once removed. Indeed, of the 220 illustrations in Realizations, most are of engravings rather than the original
paintings, not just because these were the versions most widely known, but also
because, as Dickens notes, engravings suggested the “delicacy, finish, and
refinement, as belonging to the original” (xvii). This is a sentiment much
removed from the eighteenth century; Jonathan Richardson, for example, believed
a print was the mere “echo” of “an original,” which was itself “the echo of the
voice of nature.” Meisel admits that genre, form, and style are not fully
transferable, existing integrally with medium and mode, and can influence but
not become one with a sister art, and that the tension between two versions
marks the “limits of convertibility” (98). Yet he argues that the realization,
or “conversion,” was not experienced platonically, not as something secondary
and necessarily distorted by the new medium and codes, but as a valid
recreation. He argues persuasively that the “audience marvels at how ‘real’ a
painting can be made to seem in another, actually living medium; more real than
it could have been in the first place ... the seeming truth of the imitation
will be primary” (93). The awareness of the machinery and materiality of the
theatre only contributed to the immediacy of the event, while the specificity
of allusion transformed realizations into “illustration, the direct extension
of an existing text and an authenticating and clarifying reinforcement” (97)
The
effect of painting on plays was so direct and pervasive that productions, if
not quite extensions, were by contemporary critics thought of as
collaborations: “. . . Mind has whispered to mind. The pencil becomes a pen,
and this drama is the illustrative letter-press which ought for the future to
accompany the picture” (Atlas 7
[1832]: 143). The drama reviewed is
Douglas Jerrold's The Rent Day (1832), whose first act begins and ends with
tableaux vivants (“animated realization”) of David Wilkie's “The Rent Day”
(1807) and “The Distraining for Rent”
(1815). The metaphor for translation
(pencil to pen) reveals the extent to which the pictorial dramaturgy had taken
hold. In contrast to Lamb—who found Boydell guilty of “confin[ing] the
illimitable,” and performances of Shakespeare “to embody and realize
conceptions which had hitherto assumed no distinct shape,” a “juvenile
pleasure” for which we pay “dearly ... all our life after” (3o)—the Victorian
reviewer welcomed the move from sketch to more finished drawing, one
necessarily given more time and attention and whose lines are more determined,
clear, and distinct. The mind listening is not only privileged, but also has the
last word, the cost of which, as Lamb knew, was a mental or material image
irrevocably altered. The theatre not only appropriates images in the popular
mind, but when generated by narrative paintings necessarily offers an
interpretation that “accompanies the picture.”
The
relation between original and recreation becomes more problematic when the
collaboration becomes more deliberate, as between novelist and illustrator and
illustrated-novel and playwright. Illustrations, Meisel states, are to novels
what realizations of paintings are to theatrical productions: both stop the
flow of the story and “epitomize” the situation. The relation between movement
and moment, or “kinesis” and “stasis,” are structurally similar, and the
meaning of the scene or interpersonal relations is crystallized, revealed in a
moment of stasis. A dramatization of an illustrated novel is structured as much
by images as text when the visual moments realized are those already frozen as
illustrations, in which case the illustrator has some right to claim
co-authorship of the story. This is, at any rate, what Cruickshank claimed in
regards to Harrison Ainsworth's Jack
Sheppard, but not Dickens's Oliver
Twist, which he also illustrated and which was dramatized by many of the
same playwrights, and appeared in the same theatres. According to Meisel,
Cruickshank's lack of modesty was well deserved. All versions of Ainsworth's Jack Sheppard “are faithful to the
pictures, and rather free with the text. They rely on the pictures for effect,
but even more for authenticity, as a realization of the novel” (271). This
priority of image over word was determined in large part by the Sheppard illustrations having been
themselves influenced by stage techniques. The procession from Old Bailey to
Tyburn, for example, was executed as a sequence of pictures and translated as a
diorama (a long moving backdrop), which was a kind of spectacle quite popular
in the exhibition halls of London that influenced its form. The diorama was
occasionally stopped and individual illustrations of the strip represented as
tableau. Meisel finds that the priority given word or image in a dramatization
is analogous to that in the novel, which means that stage productions can
reflect the diverse ways apparently similar kinds of fiction were originally
read.
Making images and ideas distinct is the
theatre's great strength and weakness. In a chapter entitled “The Material
Sublime,” Meisel contrasts the painting styles of John Martin and Turner, which
used light in dramatic but diametrically opposed ways. Both artists were much
influenced by scene painters, especially de Loutherbourgh and his Eidophusicon
(1781), with Turner in turn
influencing the “transformation scenes” of William Beverley, a type of
back-drop painting used in the pantomimes and fairy plays of Planche in which
different scenes are painted on the front and back of canvas and dissolve one
into the other as the light source is changed from front to back, creating a
grand metamorphosis, “the spectacle of form in flux” (185). Martin used light and color to emphasize the grandeur of material
form and dizzying perspective; large paintings, like the “Fall of Ninevah”
(realized at the end of Byron's Sardanapalus
[1834]), were used to suggest the
diminution of ego and to effect the apocalyptic. Turner, on the other hand,
used light and color to dissolve material and perspective; without distinct
lines there is no differentiation, and thus the notion of single identity is
destroyed. Consequently, Turner was used for paradisal scenes to effect a sense
of union between perceiver and perceived. His “Golden Bough” (1837) was used as the backdrop in Kean's
productions of A Midsummer Night's Dream (Act
II, scene I: A Wood Near Athens. Moonlight; 1856). In what is one of the book's most fascinating though least
developed sets of analogies, Meisel suggests that these pictorial styles are
similar to the linguistic styles of Byron and Shelley. Meisel makes a
convincing case that Manfred, Byron's
seemingly unactable metaphysical drama, was inherently pictorial and
“realizable through material illusion” (170), while Prometheus Unbound, even
with Turner as a pictorial analogue, was not translatable because forms and
figures continually dematerialize, rather than transform. Productions of Manfred, which were “the embodiment of
the sublime as spectacle” (178), shed
light on contextual borrowings. Martin's engraved illustrations to Milton's Paradise Lost were realized and
transformed; “Satan Presiding at the Infernal Council,” for example, became
“The Hall of Arimanes—Arimanes on his Throne, a Globe of Fire, surrounded by
the Spirits.”
The pictorial theatre was an
extension of the romantic's belief in the concrete and particular; as Blake
said, mental deities do not exist unembodied. But there is a point when scenes
are rendered so distinct that despite their detailed realism—or, rather,
because of it—the image moves back to the ideal and abstract. Such are the
paintings of the Pre-Raphaelites, who rejected the aesthetics of effect
(especially the theatrical grouping of figures), and with it many of the tricks
of their own trade, like the manipulations of light and shade, atmosphere and
perspective. Meisel analyzes a few early paintings by Millais and Hunt
(particularly the former's “A Huguenot, on St. Bartholomew's Day. . .”[1852]) and the productions in which they were
realized. He succeeds in showing that the pictures are more dramatic than
previously thought, particularly those which capture a moment of inner change,
but not necessarily effective as paintings. The PreRaphaelite technique of
painting thin layers of oil paint on a wet white ground, in simulation of
fresco, produced intensely bright and pure colors, but also necessitated
working up one small part of the design at a time, which allowed them their
“analytic, even microscopic attention to the particularity of things” (351-52).
But accuracy was at the expense of immediacy, and detail at the expense of
composition. All areas are tied not to one another but to the model;
consequently, all areas tend to be equally detailed, which may be objectively
and scientifically true, but not perceptually true for any viewer outside a
dream state. Whistler well understood where such love of detail and technique
would lead. On the back of an artist in St Marco's Square, who had been working
on a painting in the PreRaphaelite manner for six years, he pinned the sign: “I
am totally blind.”
Realizations is a beautiful book, though
not in the sense of the elegant coffee-table book it superficially resembles;
no illustration is in color, few are full page, and most are of dark engravings
rather than oil paintings. Yet, with illustrations reproduced with excellent
half-tone screens on heavy-weight off-white paper and on the same page as text,
and labels and footnotes in three-inch margins, it is both distinctive and
attractive. If anything, the elimination of the usual flipping about stresses
the encyclopediac over the argumentative nature of the book, reinforcing its
resemblance to Richard Altick's The Shows
of London. True, both are studies in the history of popular culture, with
Altick doing for “exhibitions” (public nontheatrical entertainments) what
Meisel does for “realizations.” Exhibitions, Altick says, gave “practical
realization to Bacon's advocacy of things over words as instruments of
knowledge” (I). Stripped of any pretense of instruction, the same is true of
realizations, with the emotive power of pictures privileged over text. But
Meisel has not written a history of productions; the intimidating amount of old
and new detail in each analysis, from reviews, reports, letters, playbills, and
stage directions, some of which at first seems superfluous, are facts whose
connections are slowly exposed to reveal a dominant pattern of creation and
expectation shared by artist and audience. Realizations
is a slow-moving, interdisciplinary book of great importance to literary
theorists concerned with narrative and the generative power of images, as well
as to historians of theatre, painting, novel, and Victorian culture.
No, if Realizations has a counterpart, it is not the equally detailed Shows of London, but “What is Poetry?”
(1833), a brief essay by John Stuart Mill. Mill declared that the “faculty of
the poet and that of the novelist are . . . distinct,” with “no natural
connection,” and that poetry, which is not limited to words but occurs in every
medium, is concerned with the “inward man,” and narrative with “outward things
... actions and events,” with the former of interest to literate adults, and
the latter to children and the child-like. He does admit that narrative and
poetry can be combined in drama, but adds: “even there, the two elements are
perfectly distinguishable.” Meisel does not mention the essay, but Realizations is, nonetheless, its brilliant complement, in the sense of
counterargument, thoroughly demonstrating that the tension between a “detailed
and documented rendering of reality” (13) and an expression of “inward
signification” (the term is Bulwer Lytton's), was resolved in the theatre, in
“what was surely the most paradoxical of aesthetic enterprises, the Realization
of the Ideal” (13). Realizations punctuated the narrative by compressing within
one static moment the drama of the scene; like Pygmalion's Galatea, paintings
and illustrations were “brought to life,” but like the Grecian Urn, they were
frozen in and out of time. The audience's reliance on arrested images to
narrate and reveal character and theme, on the nonmoving remove, however, was
abundantly compensated by an intense clarity of vision—and a blurring of the
distinction between original and copy, ideal and real, literate and illiterate.