The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century [1st ed.] 9783030400811, 9783030400828

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The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century Edited by Elizabeth Ludlow

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture Series Editor Joseph Bristow Department of English University of California, Los Angeles Los Angeles, CA, USA

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture is a monograph series that aims to represent the most innovative research on literary works that were produced in the English-speaking world from the time of the Napoleonic Wars to the fin de siécle. Attentive to the historical continuities between ‘Romantic’ and ‘Victorian’, the series will feature studies that help scholarship to reassess the meaning of these terms during a century marked by diverse cultural, literary, and political movements. The main aim of the series is to look at the increasing influence of types of historicism on our understanding of literary forms and genres. It reflects the shift from critical theory to cultural history that has affected not only the period 1800-1900 but also every field within the discipline of English literature. All titles in the series seek to offer fresh critical perspectives and challenging readings of both canonical and non-canonical writings of this era. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14607

Elizabeth Ludlow Editor

The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century

Editor Elizabeth Ludlow Anglia Ruskin University Cambridge, UK

Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture ISBN 978-3-030-40081-1    ISBN 978-3-030-40082-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © ‘Light of the World’, The Chapter of St Paul’s Cathedral This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Acknowledgments

I would first of all like to thank all of the contributors for their commitment to this project. It was a conversation with Valerie Purton that inspired me to organise a conference on the theme in 2016 and, since then, it has been a pleasure to participate in and witness so many further conversations on the exciting and new developments in scholarship on religion and literature. It has been especially helpful to spend time discussing the project and the shape of the introduction with Jo Carruthers, Clare Walker Gore, Christopher Rowland, and Andy Tate. Many of the contributors have taken their work in new directions since the conference and I have really valued the opportunity of bringing together their insights that attend to the vital significance and longevity of the debates surrounding the figure of Christ in the literature, art, and theology of the long nineteenth century. One of the outcomes of this project has involved seeing anew the continuity between these debates and our contemporary discussions about Christ, creation, and the self. In addition to the contributors, I would also like to thank the many others who have been conversation partners and have played a part in the development of the project, especially Mark Knight, Hilary Marlow, Simon Marsden, Sam Raynor, and Lesa Scholl. I would also like to thank the staff at Palgrave Macmillan for seeing this book into print. I could not have imagined a better editorial assistant than Camille Davies and am grateful for all her assistance in the early stages of putting this collection together. I am very grateful to colleagues and students at Anglia Ruskin University for supporting both this project and the work of the Nineteenth v

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Century Studies Unit. I am especially indebted to Kirsty Harris and Kathy Rees for their enthuasiasm for the project and for their contributions to the volume and am also grateful to Zoë Bennett, Nigel Cooper, Cassie Gorman, John Gardner, and Tory Young. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Sandra and Gordon Ludlow, for their support and encouragement over the past few years as I’ve worked on bringing this collection together. Thanks to the National Gallery of Art, Washington; the Yale Center for British Art; the Tate, London; and The National Gallery for granting permission to reproduce images in this volume.

Praise for The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century “This innovative interdisciplinary collection explores the manifold interpretations of the figure of Christ in nineteenth-century Britain. Organised in dialogic pairs, the essays seek to articulate rather than resolve competing images of the saviour Christ and the historical Jesus. Ranging from high art to popular culture, The Figure of Christ compellingly demonstrates the transformative impact these theological debates had on art, literature, ecology, and politics.” —Brian H. Murray, Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Kings College London, UK “This collection uniquely recovers evolving representations of Christ in literature, theology, and visual art from across the (especially British) nineteenth century, offering an indispensable new resource for scholarship and teaching. The thematic units form genuinely interdisciplinary conversations between literary critics, theologians, biblical critics, historians of religion, and art historians. The figurations of Christ that emerge are in flux and multiply significant, vitally related to nineteenth-­ century understandings of apocalypse, gender, radical politics, personhood, historical consciousness, ecology, disability, and debates over the very nature and future of Christian community. While diverse, these contributions by seasoned and rising scholars sustain a coherent discussion, and the introduction expertly situates them within major conversation topics in nineteenth-century Christology.” —Joshua King, Associate Professor of English and Margarett Root Brown Chair in Robert Browning and Victorian Studies at Baylor University, USA “In this beautifully constructed and consistently stimulating volume, Elizabeth Ludlow and her contributors do a wonderful job of explaining why Christ was such an important figure in nineteenth-century thought. The collection is marked by its rich discussion, cohesive lines of argument, and interdisciplinary range.” —Mark Knight, Professor, Lancaster University, UK “The Figure of Christ is a compelling collection of essays that explore the intersections between the supernatural, cultural, metaphysical, and material representations of Christ in the long nineteenth century. The rich, interdisciplinary scope incorporates literature, poetry, art history, and theology in powerful conversations with ironic recurring motives of shattering, breaking and fragmentation, a kind of

divine iconoclasm that reflects the dual destructive and creative image of Christ’s presence and hiddenness in nineteenth-century constructs. Elizabeth Ludlow has woven together a narrative of ‘Christ on the threshold’, challenging the understanding of Christ historically and theologically through interfaces as diverse as ecology, gender, disability, politics, and the instability of belief. The result is a profound complexity of representation that provokes a fresh and radical Christology.” —Lesa Scholl, Head of Kathleen Lumley College, University of Adelaide, Australia “The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century is a fascinating volume that fills a gap in nineteenth-century scholarship, and restores to us a sense of how central, how vigorous, and at the same time how contested the portrayal of Christ was in this period. From the apocalyptic and visionary writing and art of Blake to the vivid re-imaginings of novelists and children’s writers, from the poetry and art of central and established figures like Tennyson and Holman Hunt to the radical re-appraisals of the Chartist poets, these studies show how the imaginative portrayal of Christ became a powerful way of expressing and symbolising the great themes and controversies of this period. Elizabeth Ludlow has done a fine job in selecting and editing these essays and her own work in the field also makes a strong contribution to this volume.” —Malcolm Guite, Chaplain of Girton College, Cambridge, and author, poet, and singer-songwriter

Contents

1 Introduction: Confronting the Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century  1 Elizabeth Ludlow Part I William Blake and Visionary Revelation  21 2 Blake, Enoch and the Emergence of the Apocalyptic Christ 23 Christopher Rowland 3 “As the Eye Is Formed”: Seeing as Christ in Blake’s Bartimaeus 39 Naomi Billingsley Part II Textual and Visual Fragmentation and the Form of the Vortex  53 4 Fragmented Images of Christ in Romantic Maritime Poetry 55 Kirsty J. Harris

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5 Milton’s Christ and Passive Power in Melville and Turner 69 Laura Fox Gill Part III The Incarnation and the Redemptive Role of Art  83 6 “Real Visions of Real Things”: The Light of the World, Incarnation and Popular Culture 85 Andrew Tate 7 Tennyson, Lacan, and the Raising of Lazarus 99 Valerie Purton Part IV The Figure of Christ in Tractarian Theology 115 8 Tractarian Reserve and the Veiled Figure of Christ: Ascension, Mystery, and the Limits of Imagination117 Ralph Norman 9 The Masculinity of Jesus and the Doctrine of the Real Presence133 Carol Engelhardt Herringer Part V The Ecological Jesus and the Good Shepherd 147 10 Considering the Lilies: Christina Rossetti’s Ecological Jesus149 Emma Mason 11 Reimaging Personhood Before the Figure of Christ in the Victorian Early Christian Novel163 Elizabeth Ludlow

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Part VI Figures of Christ in the Victorian Novel 177 12 “The Sanctity of Our Sex”: Refiguring the Fallen Woman and the Passion of Christ in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–55)179 Jo Carruthers 13 “Our Ordinary Lot”: The Cross, the Crutch and the Theology of Disability in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge195 Clare Walker Gore Part VII Renewing the Social Order and Imagining the Church of the Future 209 14 The Godlike Nazarene and the People-­Christ: The Figure of Christ in the Chartist Imaginary211 Mike Sanders 15 “Strauss-Sick”? Jesus and the Saints in the Church of the Future227 Gareth Atkins Part VIII Christological Fictions of the Late Nineteenth Century 243 16 Christly Children, Affect, and the Melodramatic Mode in Late-Victorian Fiction245 Leanne Waters 17 “Jesus and Pan Held Sway Together”: Christological Resonances in Edmund Gosse’s The Secret of Narcisse: A Romance (1892)261 Kathy Rees Index275

Notes on Contributors

Gareth  Atkins  is a fellow in history at Queens’ College, Cambridge, UK.  He works on religious culture and politics in eighteenth- and nineteenth-­ century Britain and the wider Anglophone world, ranging from maritime Christianity to Protestant and Catholic constructions of heroes (and villains) from history. His edited book, Making and Remaking Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain, was published in 2016. He has written widely on Anglican Evangelicalism and is completing a monograph, Converting Britannia: Anglican Evangelicals and British Public Life, c. 1770–c. 1840. A new project uses the reception of King David to explore debates about masculinity, sexuality, the Bible, archaeology, and empire in Victorian culture. Naomi Billingsley  is a scholar of eighteenth-century British art and religion. She has published on Blake and on art and the Bible more broadly. She now works in research development in the cultural sector. Jo Carruthers  teaches at Lancaster University, UK, and has published in the areas of literary studies, aesthetics, and religious and national identities. She has published two monographs, England’s Secular Scripture: Islamophobia and the Protestant Aesthetic (2011) and Esther Through the Centuries (2008), the edited collection (with Andrew Tate) Spiritual Identities: Literature and the Post-Secular Imagination (2011), and co-­ edited, with Mark Knight and Andrew Tate, Literature and the Bible: A Reader (2014).

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Laura Fox Gill  is a lecturer in the School of English and Journalism at the University of Lincoln, UK.  Gill’s research focuses on influence and interdisciplinarity in the nineteenth century; her book project examines the influence of John Milton on Victorian literature and visual culture. She has been the recipient of an AHRC Doctoral Scholarship and a Huntington Library Fellowship, and her article has appeared in the open-access journal Victorian Network. Kirsty J. Harris  holds a PhD on ‘In Peril on the Sea: Shipwreck and Loss in Poetry 1805–1822’ from Anglia Ruskin University, UK, in 2016. Her articles have appeared in the Byron Journal and the German Society for English Romanticism. She is working on the Gothic Sea, as well as exploring women’s narratives of the sea during the Romantic period, working on authors, including Mary Robinson, Felicia Hemans, and Charlotte Smith. In addition to the intersections between maritime history and Romantic period poetry, her interests include the history of piracy, queer narratives, literary feminism, and the influence of German Romanticism. Carol Engelhardt Herringer  is Professor of History at Georgia Southern University, USA. Her work focuses on religious and cultural history. She is the author of Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England, 1830–85 (2008), as well as of a number of articles on the religious and cultural history of Victorian Britain. She is the co-editor (with Rowan Strong) of Edward Bouverie Pusey and the Oxford Movement (2012). Her book project examines the religious and cultural significance of the Eucharistic debates in the Victorian Church of England. Elizabeth  Ludlow  is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. She is the author of Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints (2014) and a number of journal articles. She is working on a monograph entitled Prayer and the Body in Nineteenth-Century Women’s Writing and a project on nineteenth-century representations of Early Church women. Emma Mason  is Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick, UK.  Her work focuses on poetry and ­religion. Her publications include Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (2018), Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Rethinking Religion and Literature (2014), Elizabeth Jennings: The Collected Poems (2012), and The Cambridge Introduction to Wordsworth (2010). With Mark Knight,

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she edits the monograph series New Directions in Religion and Literature, published by Bloomsbury. Ralph Norman  is Principal Lecturer in Theology and Subject Lead for Religion, Philosophy and Ethics at Canterbury Christ Church University, UK.  A number of his more recent publications have explored interdisciplinary approaches to the philosophical and theological contexts of the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins, and have appeared in journals as diverse as The Hopkins Quarterly, Collingwood and British Idealism Studies, and Religion and the Arts. His book, Negative Theology and Christology: Ascension and Eucharist, is forthcoming. Valerie  Purton  is Emerita Professor of Victorian Literature at Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK. She is editor of the Tennyson Research Bulletin and author of Dickens and the Sentimental Tradition (2012). She has published widely on the Victorian period, including, with Norman Page, the Palgrave Literary Dictionary of Tennyson (2010). She is the editor of Darwin, Tennyson and Their Readers (2013) and Ruskin and Victorian Education (2018). Kathy Rees  is a college research associate at Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK. She undertook her PhD entitled ‘Reading Gosse’s Reading: A Study of Allusion in the Work of Edmund Gosse’, at Anglia Ruskin University, and she is a member of the ARU Nineteenth Century Research Studies Unit. Her articles have appeared in various journals, including Peer English, Oxford Bibliographies Online, The Dickens Quarterly, Nineteenth Century Prose, and Translation and Literature, as well as a book chapter in Writing Lives Together: Romantic and Victorian Auto/ biography (2018). Christopher  Rowland  was Dean Ireland Professor of the Exegesis of Holy Scripture at the University of Oxford, UK, before his retirement. The focus of his research and writing has been the visionary tradition in the Bible and in Christian history, and the history of apocalypticism, especially the interpretation of the Book of Revelation and the texts and images of William Blake. He has also written on political theology and liberation theology. His most recent books are In a Glass Darkly: The Bible, Reflection and Everyday Life (with Zoë Bennett, 2016) and Radical Prophet: The Mystics, Subversive and Visionaries Who Strove for Heaven on Earth (2017). Mike Sanders  is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth Century Writings at the University of Manchester, UK. He is the author of The Poetry of Chartism:

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Aesthetics, Politics, History (2009), as well as numerous articles on the Chartist movement which he finds an endless source of fascination and inspiration. He is finishing a monograph on the role of religion in Chartism and has just started work as a co-investigator on a new AHRC-funded project entitled, ‘Pistons, Pen & Press’, which explores the ways in which the industrial working class engaged with literary culture in the long nineteenth century. Andrew Tate  is Reader in Literature, Religion and Aesthetics at Lancaster University, UK.  He has published widely in the fields of nineteenth-­ century and contemporary literature. His books include Contemporary Fiction and Christianity (2008), The New Atheist Novel, co-authored with Arthur Bradley (2010), and Apocalyptic Fiction (2017). He also co-edited, with Jo Carruthers and Mark Knight, Literature and the Bible: A Reader (2014). Clare Walker Gore  holds a junior research fellowship at Trinity College, Cambridge, UK.  She studied for her BA, MPhil, and PhD at Selwyn College, Cambridge, writing her doctoral thesis on disability and characterisation in nineteenth-century fiction. Her articles have appeared in Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies, Nineteenth-Century Contexts, and Victorian Literature and Culture, and she has published book chapters in collections, including Queer Victorian Families (2015) and The Variable Body in History (2016). She is editing a collection of essays on the life and work of Charlotte M.  Yonge, and is pursuing a new project on nineteenth-century life writing. Leanne Waters  is a tutor and lecturer in the School of English, Drama and Film at University College Dublin (UCD), and she is an instructor in the award-winning UCD Writing Centre. She is pursuing the publication of her first monograph, God in the Marketplace: Christianity, Melodrama, and the Late-Victorian Bestseller, for which she has received research funding from UCD and from the Royal Irish Academy’s Charlemont Grants. In 2021, she will be beginning research at DePaul University in Chicago for her second monograph, Transatlantic Frontiers: The Emergence of the Western in Nineteenth-Century Popular Boys’ Fiction, which is being funded by a Fulbright NUI Scholar Award.

List of Figures

Fig. 2.1 Fig. 3.1 Fig. 3.2 Fig. 5.1

Fig. 5.2 Fig. 7.1

William Blake, Enoch before the Great Glory (c. 1824/1827). Rosenwald Collection 1944.14.8, National Gallery of Art, Washington. 52.6 × 37 cm. Graphite on laid paper William Blake, Christ Giving Sight to Bartimaeus (c. 1799–1800). Yale Center for British Art. 26.0 × 37.5 cm. Tempera with pen and ink on canvas William Blake, Abraham and Isaac (c. 1799–1800). Yale Center for British Art. 26.7 × 39.4 cm. Tempera with pen and ink on canvas Joseph Mallord William Turner, A Harpooned Whale (1845). From Ambleteuse and Wimereux Sketchbook [Finberg CCLVII]. © Tate, London 2018. 238 × 336 mm. Graphite and watercolour on paper Joseph Mallord William Turner, Snow Storm: Steam-boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842). © Tate, London 2018. 914 × 1219 mm. Oil paint on canvas Sebastiano del Piombo, The Raising of Lazarus (1517–1519). © The National Gallery, London. 381 × 289.6 cm. Oil on canvas, transferred from wood

32 40 47

71 72 100

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CHAPTER 1

Introduction: Confronting the Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century Elizabeth Ludlow

Representations of Christ and Christ-figures were ubiquitous throughout the long nineteenth century. Turning to them now, at a time when we are witnessing ongoing and vital conversations about religion and the arts, means not only attending to some of their particularities in fresh ways and through new disciplinary lenses but also asking new questions about them in light of recent concerns with “reading … religious and theological texts as part of the world that the modern academy seeks to understand” (Branch and Knight 2018, 499). The contributors to this volume attend to the expansive means by which—taking the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins in his sonnet “As Kingfishers Catch Fire”—“Christ plays in ten thousand places” (12). They recognize that these “places” include the spaces of literature and art, and, in their attention to literary and artistic form, they explore how text and image can function in ways that highlight the interconnectedness of the sacred with the material. One of the

E. Ludlow (*) Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_1

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outcomes of this project has been a greater recognition of the manner in which an engagement with the figure of Christ and with Christ’s presence in individuals, communities, and creation can challenge and destabilize perceptions of humanity and of the world. While scholarship on nineteenth-century religion and arts has been moving beyond staid challenges to the secularization thesis with sophisticated considerations of issues, including the gendering of God (e.g. Turley Houston 2013), ecology and religion (e.g. Mason 2018), and reading communities (e.g. King 2015; Walker Heady 2016), representations of the figure of Christ have remained relatively unexplored. Despite ongoing work charting the difficulties that different religious groups encountered in depicting Christ, there has been no previous attempt to bring the variety of divergent perspectives, embedded in a variety of literature and painting, into conversation with one another. Neither has there been any attempt to offer a sustained critique of how theological, artistic, and literary responses to the question Jesus asked Peter, “But whom say ye that I am?” (Mark 8:29), involve different definitions of what it is to be human and live in—or resist— the community he calls into existence. Theologian and ethicist Stanley Hauerwas argues that an apprehension that Jesus is not only the Christ but also the Suffering Servant who must suffer and be killed before rising again means putting the cross at the heart of Christology and recognizing the inseparability between understanding Jesus’s life and living life as a Christian (1981, 52). Although not all of the writers and artists discussed in this volume can be described as Christian, the cross nonetheless remains as either a cornerstone (Eph. 2.20) or a stumbling block (1 Cor. 1:23) that informs their paintings, novels, novellas, poems, hymns, and sermons. This volume explores the variety of ways in which the interface between understanding the figure of Christ, the place of the cross, and the contours of lived experience were articulated through the long nineteenth century. Collectively, the chapters respond to the theological turn in postmodern thought by asking vital questions about the way in which representations of Christ shape understandings of personhood and of the divine. In the introduction to their collection, Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens (2006), Gavin Hopps and Jane Stabler describe “the fall of onto-theology” and the declaration by the German philosopher Frederich Nietzsche of the “death of God” as “something of a fortunate shipwreck” (2). Their reading illustrates how, throughout the nineteenth century, narrow understandings of the divine gave way to an undelimited and more embodied and open Christology within

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theological, literary, artistic, and cultural spaces. This volume traces this process and, as it does so, affirms the complex model of secularization that philosopher Charles Taylor offers in A Secular Age (2007), which considers both the losses and the lively reinterpretations of religious forms through the nineteenth century (see, in particular, pp. 383–419). I have chosen to structure the volume in loose chronological order and to organize the sixteen chapters that follow into eight thematic sections that bring the contributors into conversation and highlight the breadth of approaches that were available through the nineteenth century in articulating the person, role, and place of Christ. Reading the chapters within and across the paired sections involves abiding with—rather than resolving—the conflicts around the figure of Christ and the issues relating to identity and personhood. Throughout, paradoxes and tensions emerge in the recognition of how Christ has been defined: by William Blake both as a radical non-conformist (Christopher Rowland) and as radical and gentle (Naomi Billingsley); by Tractarian clergy as representatively masculine (Carol Engelhardt Herringer); by Christina Rossetti as a figure of ecological inclusion (Emma Mason); by Charlotte M. Yonge as a “disabled body” (Clare Walker Gore); by Chartists as the “People-Christ” (Mike Sanders); and by late nineteenth-century authors of melodramatic novels as childlike (Leanne Waters). The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century offers a space for all of these definitions to exist in tension and illuminates the openness of its subjects to finding representations of Christ and manifestations and echoes of his presence in unexpected critical, literary, and artistic spaces. In 1948, Swiss Reformed theologian Karl Barth reflected on the nineteenth century as a period when the “historical in religion, the objective element” led to an understanding of “the Lord Jesus [as] a problem child (Sorgenkind)” (qtd. Keuss 2002, 10). German Higher Criticism, which sought to interpret the historical origins of biblical texts, was first practiced in the Enlightenment era by Hermann Samuel Reimarus (1694–1768) and taken up in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century by Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834), David Fredrich Strauss (1808–1874), Ludwig Feuerbach (1804–1872), and Ernest Renan (1823–1892). Particularly after the publication of George Eliot’s translations of Strauss’s The Life of Jesus (1846) and Feuerbach’s The Essence of Christianity (1854), these ideas—and the new understandings of Jesus as a “problem child” that came with them—took hold in Britain. As Theodore

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Ziolkowski explains in his study of fictional heroes who were patterned on Jesus during this era, the views of Voltaire and Thomas Paine (who described Jesus “as great ethical teacher rather than the divine Son of God”) made space for “a more critical appraisal of the reliability of the Gospels” (1972, 31). In The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination, 1860–1920 (Stevens 2010), Jennifer Stevens extends Ziolowski’s study as she charts the huge rise, concurrent with the dissemination of Higher Criticism, of representations of the life of Jesus in British Fiction from 1860 onward (34). Sue Zemka’s Victorian Testaments: The Bible, Christology and Literary Authority in Early-Nineteenth-Century British Culture (1997) provides a helpful context for understanding the growing influence of Higher Criticism on shifts and developments in the perceptions of the figure of Christ through the literature and art of the early nineteenth century. Her first chapter places in dialogue the very different conceptions of Christ taken by Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Edward Irving, a Scottish clergyman who was accused of heresy when he announced the Second Coming of Christ. For Coleridge, Zemka suggests, the approach to Christ was metaphysical: he “shied away from the carnal body of Christ” and instead explored “metonymic figurations of the body and the book, of Christ and the word.” Christ’s body, for Coleridge, “is figured as a textual physicality, a body that is best understood as the counterpart of a literary revelation” (62). By contrast, Zemka explains how Irving’s representation of the full embodiedness of Christ in The Orthodox and Catholic Doctrine of Our Lord’s Human Nature (1830) marks an important point of transition in the overall picture between early Evangelicalism’s obsession with sinfulness and the pervasiveness later in the century of an emphasis on Christ as a noble exemplary. She also comments on the implications of this theological shift of focus more widely. Her later chapters pay particular attention to both the “manly” Christianity promoted by clergyman and author Charles Kingsley and lawyer, author, and reformer Thomas Hughes, and attends to the associations between Christ and femininity and Christ and childhood that were visible elsewhere in Victorian culture. In A Poetics of Jesus (2002), Jeffrey F. Keuss extends Zemka’s project into the later nineteenth century. He explains how, in translating the work of both Strauss and Feuerbach, George Eliot “had established herself, along with Thomas Carlyle and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, as one of the ambassadors of German thinking in England” (179–80). In her novels,

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Eliot explores the potential of the textual embodiment as she offers a new conception of Jesus: one that “is not formed, fixed, nor exposed but is constantly forming, transient, and strangely veiled within the poetic space” (Keuss 2002, 101–02). Keuss’s vision of a “poetics of Jesus,” in terms of how the spaces of literature and art can embody or incarnate the subject and the sacred, provides an illuminating framework in which to reflect on the shaping of an embodied and open Christology with which this volume is concerned. In Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible (LaPorte 2011), Charles LaPorte turns attention from Eliot’s novels to her poems and reads them alongside the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Robert Browning, Arthur Hugh Clough, and Alfred Tennyson to indicate how the project of “higher criticism helped to inspire a great range of poetic experiments” from the 1840s (22). While LaPorte’s study provides a valuable context for understanding the interface between Higher Criticism and artistic practice through the second half of the nineteenth century, the chronological and thematic scope of this volume will, I hope, lead the reader to a greater understanding of the development of a more open and undelimited Christology. The present volume extends the important work of scholars including Ziolkowski, Stevens, Zemka, Keuss, and LaPorte by combining a recognition of the effect of Higher Criticism on perceptions of the figure of Christ with a recognition of the broadening influence of the discovery of eschatology (or hope for a new age on earth), the increased interest in apophaticism (which stresses God’s unknowability and transcendence), the debates about gender and childhood, and, above all, the ongoing discussions about what it means to be human. What makes The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century distinctive is the way in which a range of artists, theologians, and authors are brought into dialogue and, taken together, are shown to disrupt any straightforward understanding of the move from Atonement to Incarnation narratives in the mid-nineteenth century and to refute any dualistic separation between Christ as a historical personage of the first century and a divine figure of the present. In editing the chapters that follow, I am aware that some of the usual suspects in discussions about the figure of Christ in the nineteenth century (e.g. Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Thomas Carlyle, and George Eliot), who have been considered by Zemka and Keuss, occupy lesser space than might be anticipated from the title. One of the outcomes of this project has been a recognition of how the ubiquitous presence of Christ figures throughout the long nineteenth century complicates any straightforward division

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between the sacred and secular. This process of extending and challenging ideas and boundaries becomes clear when the chapters are brought into conversation with one another. In his introduction to The Routledge Companion to Religion and Literature (2016), Mark Knight comments on how the type of conversation that “might configure our understanding of, and approach to, literature and religion” is not only one that “tests and probes” but one that “remains open to being led in a new direction” (4, 6). This is the type of hospitable conversation that I had in mind while reflecting on the new directions this volume was taking. While the paired chapters speak to each other, there are other synergies that run through the volume, such as the concerns with broken bodies, powerful passivity, the sacramental, and the embodiment of Christ in art, literature, and culture. In what follows, I bring the chapters into further conversation and offer some reflection on the ways in which they illuminate the ubiquity and diversity of representations of the figure of Christ. In Part I, “William Blake and Visionary Revelation,” Christopher Rowland (Chap. 2) and Naomi Billingsley (Chap. 3) attend to Blake’s imaginative engagement with the figure of Christ. Where Rowland considers Blake’s representation of Christ as a radical dissenter, Billingsley focuses on his artistic depictions of Christ “as a relatively passive figure, whose presence signifies his identity as Imagination, as a universal spiritus immanent in the world and the proper mode of being for humanity—as Imagination, he is that which allows others to be Christ-like” (49). Bringing the two chapters into dialogue accentuates Blake’s redefinition of holiness and his vision of the divinity inherent in humanity; such divinity is glimpsed as human actors work to bring about the kingdom of heaven. In Chap. 2, Rowland indicates the crucial role of eschatology—or the hope for a new age on earth—in the quest for the historical Jesus. Likening Blake’s reading of “Jesus as the leader of an iconoclastic challenge that seemed to fail” (28) to Reimarus’s (“the pioneer for of the quest for the historical Jesus” (28)), Rowland stresses the political dimensions of his Christology. He then suggests that it was Blake’s commitment to “being part of ‘building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land’” that led him to value the message that he found in the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible and in later Jewish sources of human actors bringing in the messianic age (30). Following a discussion of Blake’s role as the first commentator on one such source, the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Enoch, which “was a catalyst for the burgeoning interest in the apocalyptic Christ in the nineteenth century” (36), Rowland traces his legacy in the growing

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perception among nineteenth-century theologians that Jesus and Paul were affected by apocalyptic and eschatological ideas. By taking an approach that spans the long nineteenth century, Rowland suggests how this perception influenced the theology of Karl Barth and Albert Schweitzer in the early twentieth century. For Schweitzer, he explains, it was “following Jesus in the midst of life” that was the way one could learn about him and come to understand the significance of his apocalyptic and eschatological message for the modern world (34). In Chap. 3, Billingsley considers this inextricability between the perception of Christ and lived experienced as she stresses that, for Blake, Imagination is an “ontological reality” and “mode of being” which Christ embodies and that believers enter into (39). However, rather than focus, as Rowland has done, on Blake’s representations of “the radical Jesus who ‘acted from impulse: not from rules’ (Marriage of Heaven and Hell, E43),” Billingsley’s focus is instead on Blake’s concurrent representations of the gentle Jesus who told his disciples: “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven (Matt. 19:14; cf. Mark 10:14, Luke 18:16)” (49). Through an analysis of several works, including two that she identifies as a “typological pair”—Christ Giving Sight to Bartimaeus and Abraham and Isaac—she suggests that Blake calls upon individuals to accept Christ as if they were children and “to be like Bartimaeus: to recognize the truth of Christ and to emulate it; to become a member of the Divine Body of Jesus, the Imagination” (50). It is the active response of individuals to Christ’s healing and miracles that, Billingsley explains, enable recognition of what Blake imagines as the “human form divine” (50). In Part II, “Textual and Visual Fragmentation and the Form of the Vortex,” the chapters by Kirsty J. Harris and Laura Fox Gill continue to interrogate the understandings of the “human form divine” and trace the creative influence of John Milton on early to mid-nineteenth-century representations of Christ figures and on the growing commitment to ideas of Christian heroism. In Chap. 4, Harris considers reconfigurations of Milton’s representation of the whirlwind in Paradise Lost (1667, revised 1674) in maritime poetry from the Romantic period. She discusses how Felicia Hemans represents a fragmented figure of Christ in “Casablanca” (1826) (the ballad commemorating the death of Giocante de Casabianca, the son of the Captain of the ship Orient after it went up in flames in the battle of the Nile in 1798), and how Percy Bysshe Shelley represents a whole figure of Christ but in his fragmented and inconclusive poem “A

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Vision of the Sea” (1820) (which tells the story of a devasting shipwreck). Harris argues that both Hemans and Shelley use their poems to call for renewed understandings of the Atonement. She explains how, when the fragmented body of the young boy Casablanca is paired with the vanishing figure of Christ, the reader is left seeking in “that liminal space between tomb and paradise” (59). Her reading of the unidentified nameless child survivor of the shipwreck in Shelley’s “A Vision” as both a figure of Christ and as a symbol of promise for growth recalls Billingsley’s recognition of how Blake pointed to children as characterizing the Kingdom of Heaven. However, rather than stressing the role of humankind in bringing about renewal in this world, as Rowland explains Blake had done, Harris argues that while Shelley did look for renewal of the world, the vision he offers in his poem can be best aligned with the idea of the endless—and thus incomplete and circular—search for absolute perfectibility that William Godwin discusses in his Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793). Harris suggests that whereas Hemans represents a fragmented and vanishing child as a figure of Christ to express a sense of absence, Shelley’s use of the form of a fragmented and unfinished poem is indicative of the ongoing search for a saviour who will usher in a better future. In Chap. 5, Laura Fox Gill traces how John Milton’s representations of the whirlwind motif are recalled by English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner and American writer Herman Melville and suggests how the association of the motif with the “power that that draws the edges into an engagement with the centre” informs the structures of their work (72). She argues that the “paradoxically powerful passivity” of the figure of Christ is key to the work of both Melville and Turner and can be understood in common visual terms as a vortex that “consists of an actively passive centre around which an external other revolves, over which the passive centre has power” (70). By suggesting that it is the representation of this passivity in vortical form that is specifically Miltonic, Gill explains how both the narrator of Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” (1853) and Turner, in his self-mythologizing, can be understood to be modelled on and exert power in a way that is akin to Milton’s Christ. Gill’s discussion of the figure of Christ  in terms of the dynamic and generating power of textual and visual vortices can be mapped onto what Graham Ward in Christ and Culture (2015) describes as the site of conflict around the figure of Christ. Ward takes the phrase “broken middle” from the philosopher Gillian Rose to speak of the way the site of Christ’s presence can only be known through webs of relations (22). Rather than

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attempting, as Karl Barth had done, to negate the existence of the space through a negative dialectic that involves “a certain non-identity (of both Christ and ourselves),” Ward offers a vision of “how in and across this broken middle there is constructed a set of relations, a divine and dynamic operation that constitutes an embodiment (the body of Christ, the body of the Church, the sacramental body, the social body and the physical bodies of each of us)” (22). By understanding Christ as already “encultured” in the physical world, Ward stresses the impossibility of separating Christ from culture. His emphasis on the significance of relationality and embodiment runs through the book, and, in the final chapter, he suggests how the ungraspable nature of Christ’s embodiment in the incarnation challenges and extends an understanding of personhood. If, he argues, Christ can be understood as the second Adam, then “the incarnation does not just characterize his body but, in some sense, all bodies” (156–57). Considering these ideas in the light of the opening chapters of this collection—which suggest how Blake, Milton, Melville, and Turner all represent the figure of Christ in terms of the passive and generating power that brings the other into the movement of desire and activity—leads to a greater recognition of the manner in which new approaches to the embodiment of Christ can produce innovative understandings of the self, the community, and the world. Rather than subscribing to the Atonement doctrines that Boyd Hilton, in The Age of Atonement (1988), associates with belief in the first half of the nineteenth century, the subjects discussed in Parts I and II can be seen as paving the way towards the acceptance of more Incarnation-inflected understandings of Christ. The development of this understanding is explored in Parts III and IV. Here, the contributors show how their subjects engage with some of the phenomena that Hilton identifies as significant markers of the age of Incarnation in the mid-nineteenth century whereby “worldly Christian compassion, initiated by the life of Jesus … alleviated such stark evangelical doctrines such as those of eternal and vicarious punishment” (1988, 5). Throughout his study, Hilton focuses on the phenomena of increased fascination with Jesus as an exemplary man, and the worship of a compassionate Christ of “almost feminine tenderness and humility” (1988, 333). The chapters by Andrew Tate and by Valerie Purton that constitute Part III, “The Incarnation and the Redemptive Role of Art,” offer significant insights into this orientation towards Incarnation in mid-century art and poetry and consider the implications for understanding the place of the figure of Christ in art today.

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Both Tate and Purton attend to the significance of William Holman Hunt’s painting The Light of the World (1851–53). As Tate explains, the painting retains to this day a disquieting force despite its familiarity to students of Victorian art. By using as a springboard Ward’s discussion of how the person of Christ cannot be separated from his role and his presence in the world, Tate recounts the pursuit of the presence of Christ by Hunt in his search for subjects to paint and by John Ruskin in his search for paintings, which supersede the expectations set by the establishment. He describes how Ruskin championed Hunt’s The Light of the World as an example of a painting that superseded a staid tradition and represented “Christ as a living presence among us now” (qtd. 92) and how, along with Turner’s landscapes, he saw The Light of the World as an indication of the “the birth of a dynamic and authentic tradition of sacred art” (91). By considering Hunt’s struggle to represent Christ as a threshold figure in a new “living” way alongside the contemporaneous concern with historical accuracy, Tate reflects on the mid-nineteenth-century anticipation of our “contemporary recognition that the man of sorrows is not easily contained by the limits of historical discourse or institutional forms of faith” (96). While The Light of the World may have “lost its sense of aura” for contemporary viewers, Tate suggests that it nonetheless remains unsettling in serving to underline the need for new and “living” representations of Christ that express the participation of all bodies in the incarnation (97). He identifies one such contemporary representation in Mark Wallinger’s white marble sculpture, Ecce Homo (1999), which was installed on the previously empty “fourth plinth” in Trafalgar Square. He explains that this sculpture is not only “an act of artistic interpretation, a kind of modern icon, one that might encourage its spectators to remember their own frail humanity” but also “a reminder of the chilling ease with which a person is transformed from a flesh and blood human being into an object without voice or rights” (96). In Chap. 7, Purton returns to and extends the argument that she made in her 2003 article on “Tennyson and the Figure of Christ,” where she reads Tennyson’s representation of his deceased friend Arthur Henry Hallam in In Memoriam (1850) as both a Christ figure and, in Lacanian psychoanalytical terms, the ideal Other. What she adds to her previous analysis is both an engagement with recent criticism that comes out of the turn to religion and a recognition of how Tennyson’s engagement with gentle Christ figures can be understood in the long tradition of interpreting Christ as Divine Mother. Throughout the chapter, she reads Tennyson’s

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engagement with the tradition of championing Christ figures, Prince Albert included, as “potently androgynous” in the way they reflect Paul’s declaration that “there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus” (105). After commenting on the androgyny of Hunt’s Christ in The Light of the World, Purton describes how Hunt “internalized the lesson” from Carlyle’s critique when he came to paint The Shadow of Death (1870–73) and represented a very obviously male Christ (104). She records that, in a conversation with Carlyle, Tennyson remarked that “The Christ I call Christ-like is Sebastian del Piombo’s in the National Gallery” (104). The painting Tennyson refers to is The Raising of Lazarus (Fig. 7.1). Anticipating Blake’s Lazarus-like motifs in which, as Billingsley indicates, “Jesus and the patient [are] mutually engaged in the act of healing” (Chap. 3, 45), the figure of Lazarus in del Piombo’s painting is depicted in the dynamic movement of removing his grave clothes while the figure of Christ remains in a more static position with his arms outstretched. In the conclusion to her chapter, Purton balances an analysis of del Piombo’s painting as an “emblem of the longed-for reunion, just beyond the scope of In Memoriam—Christ, through Hallam, calling his benighted friend back to life from the depths of mourning (‘I am so dark and thou so bright’),” with a discussion of Tennyson as the Christ figure who can make his beloved friend rise from the dead “at the intersection of the Imaginary and the Symbolic where, through the redemptive role of Art, the Word can be made Flesh” (113). The figure of Christ is ultimately “encultured” in both readings because the Incarnation is brought to life and holds out the possibility of Redemption. In her recent book, Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith (2018), Emma Mason considers how, in Hunt’s The Light of the World, “the hovering bat, creeping ivy, brambles, nettles, and corn become sacramental symbols of the totality and completeness of God” and how the “‘light of the world’ (John 8:14)” is indicative of “an ecological mode of interconnection” (79). The four chapters that constitute Parts IV and V of this volume, including Mason’s, shift the focus from the Word made Flesh in art to an engagement with responses to the sacramental and its symbols and illuminates how they shape not only identifications with and in Christ but also understandings of the interconnectedness between Christ, the self, and all of creation. In Part IV, “The Figure of Christ in Tractarian Theology,” the chapters by Ralph Norman and by Carol Engelhardt Herringer indicate how, for many clergy in the High Anglican tradition, Eucharistic devotion and

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discussions surrounding the Real Presence enabled expressions of the figure of Christ and of personhood in relationship with Christ and the world. In Chap. 8, Norman argues that, for John Keble, the bread and wine of the Eucharist serve as a foundation for a Christian poetry that  seeks to reveal what is otherwise apocalyptically veiled while respecting the limitations of what can be made known through language. Unlike the subjects discussed by Harris and Gill in Part II, who draw on Milton’s work as they shape responses to revelations of the figure of Christ, Norman explains how, in his formulation of the doctrine of Reserve, Keble refutes Milton’s depictions of heaven and instead draws on Dante’s more repressed representations of the Ascended Christ. Such representations, Norman argues, enable a revision of the traditional view that Keble’s theology of the doctrine of Reserve circulates around a “blank space” and instead draw attention to the way in which the ascended and hidden Christ continues to “represent himself through his activity as the poetic creator of sacramental realities” and through his presence in the Eucharist (128). If there is a blank space, Norman explains, it is the place where the imitative poet Keble himself stands. In Chap. 9, Herringer considers how, for “advanced Anglians” (the Tractarian, Ritualist, and Anglo-Catholic clergy who were “advancing” towards Roman Catholicism in their ideas and practices), the articulation of the doctrine of the Real Presence enabled a renewed definition of Jesus and, by association, a renewed understanding themselves as imitations of him. In response to the increasing emphasis in the mid-nineteenth century on Christ’s characterization in terms of humility, mercy, and self-­ abnegation, the response of the advanced Anglicans with whom Herringer is concerned was to construct Jesus in terms of mainstream masculinity, as a plain-spoken and Christian man, a result of which was the erasure of his Jewish identity. Moreover, in their discussions of the crucifixion, Herringer describes how these clerics repeatedly represented Jesus as a triumphant and heroic victim with whom they could identity when they were persecuted and forbidden to preach. The strategy of developing an individual identification with Christ as “‘Mighty Victim’ … whose suffering leads to power” is one of the ways in which Julie Melnyk, in her article on Victorian writers and the feminization of Christ, suggests women writers sought to claim greater spiritual and moral authority (2003, 132). However, in their eschewal of individual identification, Melnyk proposes that Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Josephine Butler found greater success in turning “identification with

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Christ into political empowerment” for women by espousing a model of “group identification” and thereby reimagining “the earthly reign of Christ … as the site of social salvation” (2003, 153). F. Elizabeth Gray comes to a similar conclusion in an article on Alice Meynell’s project of “making Christ.” In this regard, she suggests that Meynell’s poetry explores issues of identification of the self with Christ: “the God in every one, the dignity of the individual, her debt to community, and the constructed nature of that community” (Gray 2003, 116). The chapters by Mason and by myself that constitute Part V, “The Ecological Jesus and the Good Shepherd,” extend these ideas as they consider how Christina Rossetti, John Henry Newman, and Nicholas Wiseman imagine the reach of the community of Christ beyond  temporal,  political, and social groupings. In Chap. 10, Mason demonstrates how, through her poetry and devotional prose, Rossetti reflects on the particularity of creation and embraces “plant thinking as an alternative to the calculative and possessive thinking of humans” (151). By broadening out the “group identification” that Melynk describes to include the whole of creation, Mason explains how, for Rossetti, plants are “fellow beings” who embody “a faithful mode of existence from which humans might take instruction” (154). With this in mind, she considers how Rossetti perceives Jesus to model his immersion in creation in “his own plant-like being, one emptied of ego and always on the side of the weak” (159). Through a focus on Rossetti’s response to the Sermon on the Mount and to Jesus’s direction to “consider” the lily (Matt. 6:25), Mason points to the ways in which the poet’s vision of Christ and of those who live in common with Him underline a sense of the importance of all things, including plant life. In Chap. 11, I consider how Nicholas Wiseman and John Henry Newman, Roman Catholic Cardinals who wrote Early Church novels for the Catholic Popular Library that Wiseman ran with the publisher James Burns between 1854 and 1861, stress  how renewed perceptions of the figure of Christ as Good Shepherd and Suffering Servant can transform an understanding of personhood. Focusing on Wiseman’s novel Fabiola (1854) and Newman’s novel Callista (1855), I attend to the disruptions to the traditional chronological drive of historical fiction  that occur through invocations of the presence of Christ. In considering their eschewal of contemporaneous ideas about personality that were popularized through Higher Criticism, I explain how both Wiseman and Newman  use fiction to represent personhood in a sacramental-inflected

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way. Following Norman’s recognition of how John Henry Newman stood apart from Charles Kingsley in his understanding of the way in which the “theology of the religious imagination” proceeded from “within the limits set by the Gospel, disclosing the veiled, sacramental reality of the Word of God in the world” (Chap. 8, 124), I show how Newman’s method of characterization differs from Kingsley’s. By taking the words of his characters who are Christ figures from the Bible or from hagiography, I indicate how Newman (like Wiseman), refuses them the complex subjectivity and individuality that Kingsley gives his characters in his historical novel Hypatia (1852–53) and instead represents them in relation to Patristic-­ inflected representations of personhood and of the Church Triumphant. Part VI, “Figures of Christ in the Victorian novel,” brings together chapters by Jo Carruthers and by Clare Walker Gore, both of whom investigate the Christological and providential aspects of the Victorian novel. Throughout their analyses, they extend Jan-Melissa Schramm’s discussion of how protagonists in the Victorian novel “stand in a complex relation to the Christ who died for the sins of mankind: they seek to appropriate his example but they appreciate the hermeneutic complexity involved in the reading of his life” (2012, 8). In Chap. 12, Carruthers situates Elizabeth Gaskell’s engagement with the “hermeneutical complexity” of reading and imitating the life of Christ in the context of the Unitarianism she practiced. In her reading of Gaskell’s novel North and South (1854–55), Carruthers focuses on how the valences of the term “passion” are expressed and explains that Gaskell’s attention to them enables association “between seemingly irreconcilable narratives of the fallen woman and Christ’s sacrifice” (180). Unlike the figures in the Early Church fiction of Newman and Wiseman who stand as figurative Christs, in North and South the protagonist Margaret Hale is not so much a “literal ‘figure’ as a living body who resembles Christ” (181). Significantly, Carruthers argues, it is through Margaret’s “passion”—a term that brings together emotion, sexuality, suffering, and the crucifixion narrative—that this character most resembles Christ. In drawing on both the Unitarian concern with an understanding of Christ as a noble exemplar and the associations between the spiritual, emotion, and sexual, Carruthers highlights how Gaskell is able to renegotiate female sexuality and the Christ-like body in relation to one another. Christ’s Passion and Christ-like bodies are the two themes also at the centre of Gore’s chapter. Discussing the popular Victorian novelist Charlotte M. Yonge’s representation of disability in relation to her Anglo-­ Catholic theology, Gore considers how, in The Daisy Chain (1856) and

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The Pillars of the House (1873), disability is placed at the heart of Christian experience. Like Margaret Hale in North and South, the characters in both of Yonge’s family chronicles learn to resemble Christ through maturity and suffering. For  the heroine of The Daisy Chain, who is also named Margaret, terminal illness speeds up the process of what Tractarian clergyman Edward Pusey had described as “learning to be crucified” (qtd. 197). As Gore explains, Yonge’s engagement with both Keble and Pusey informs her treatment of how illness and disability shape Christ-like characters. While Pusey had explained that suffering is “our ordinary lot” and a means through which the cross might be made manifest so too, in Yonge’s novels, the experiences and pivotal positioning of disabled characters means that they embody the suffering of Christ and of all Christians. In Part VII, “Renewing the Social Order and Imagining the Church of the Future,” the chapters by Mike Sanders and by Gareth Atkins consider how the figure of Christ was compelling for radicals and dissenters— including Chartists, freethinkers, heterodox believers, and Liberal Protestants—who were imagining what shape the church of the future would take. In Chap. 14, Sanders considers how many of the writers who emerged from the Chartist movement (which was established in 1836 and strove, over the next decade, for political rights for the working classes) shared Blake’s view of Jesus as a man who challenged the existing political authorities. By considering how Christ was represented in the poetry column of English Chartist Circular, Thomas Cooper’s The Purgatory of Suicides (1845) and Gerald Massey’s verse, Sanders outlines two versions of Christ in the Chartist imaginary. The first, he explains, is the “Godlike Nazarene” who “emphasizes the ethical teachings of Jesus which are used to support Chartism’s demands for a transformed social order” (212). The second, the “People-Christ,” is characterized by “identification of the working classes with the crucified Christ and the invocation of Messianic possibilities” (212). What all the Chartist poets under consideration have in common is their insistence on understanding the figure of Christ in terms of “deeds not creeds” and their perception of the potential for man to work alongside God in transforming the world (214). The story that Sanders tells of the Chartists’ response to J.R. Stephens’s call to attend to the life of Jesus and of their subsequent engagement with Jesus’s practical ministry can be read in parallel with the growing concern with the historical Jesus. Strauss, in Das Leben Jesu (1835–1836), distinguishes the Christ of faith and the Jesus of history with his argument that “much of the New Testament is in the last analysis fiction and that, as

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such, it belongs to Christian faith but not to historical fact” (Ziolkowski 1972, 36). His book was certainly influential in informing debates about methods of biblical interpretation. However, Ernest Renan, the author of Vie de Jésus (1863)—a book that did more than Strauss’s to popularize and bring the historical Jesus to the British public—complained that “The historian finds it too devoid of facts; the critic, too uniform in its processes; the theologian, founded upon a hypothesis subversive of Christianity” (qtd. Eliot 2005, 446; cf. Pelikan 1985, 199–200). In Chap. 15, Atkins recounts how George Eliot found the work of translating Strauss crushing, and his dissection of the story of the crucifixion so troubling, that she became “Strauss sick” (228). However, rather than abandoning Christ and the story of the crucifixion alongside their orthodox faith, Atkins demonstrates how Eliot and others of her generation engaged critically with both the figure of Christ and notions of sainthood in their search for universal principles. For Matthew Arnold, Atkins explains, “the moral truths [to which Christianity] bore witness were eternal, universal and indestructible” (235). Such a vision, when considered in terms of shaping a church of the future, invariably gave rise to new understandings of personality and saintliness. Following on from Atkins’s account, the chapters by Leanne Waters and by Kathy Rees that constitute Part VIII, “Christological Fictions of the Late Nineteenth Century,” continue to complicate any straightforward understanding of belief and unbelief. Both chapters point to the affective power of Christ figures and indicate how the forms of melodrama, historical fiction, and romance might work to evidence something of the challenge of his broken body. In Chap. 16, Waters stresses the affective potency of Christly children in bestselling melodramatic novels, demonstrating how they bring together “Christian purity (Christ’s Passion) and human depravity (the perpetration of the crucifixion) … in one body, in order to achieve an accessible, moral synthesis for readers” (248). In Marie Corelli’s The Master-Christian (1900) and Richard Marsh’s A Second Coming (1900), emotion and reflection are cultivated in both the adults that these Christly children come into contact with and the readers. By placing the children in scenes of violent spectacle, Waters suggests that they distil the “temporal limitless” of the crucifixion and reinforce the message that Christ’s sacrifice is always present and applicable (252). When the insights that Waters offers are brought into dialogue with the earlier chapters by Billingsley and Harris, we can grasp the longevity of the Romantic idealization of childhood as a time of innocence and closeness

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to God. More significant, however, is Waters’s attention to Corelli’s and Marsh’s responses to the need that Tate explains John Ruskin recognized: the significance of representing Christ as a threshold figure whose presence will speak into and unsettle the perceptions of each new generation (Chap. 6). The subject of Rees’s chapter, the critic Edmund Gosse, was, like Ruskin, unsettled and moved by Hunt’s The Light of the World. Gosse, like Ruskin, had been denied access to fairy-tales during a childhood raised in the Plymouth Brethren but he embraced the genre in later life. As Rees explains, Gosse moves beyond historical romance into fairy-tale when he imports both the figure of Christ and the god Pan into the genre in his novella, The Secret of Narcisse: A Romance (1892). In her discussion of the Christ figures in the novella, which includes two sculptures and the protagonist Narcisse who creates and forfeits his life for one of them (the clockwork mechanism which he names the White Maiden), Rees illustrates how Gosse imagines what it means to figure Christ in a world of “Ovidian instability” (272). Throughout, she considers how Gosse responds to and eschews Hunt’s representations of Christ in three other paintings besides The Light of the World: The Finding of Christ in the Temple (1860), The Scapegoat (1856), and The Shadow of Death (1870–73). She argues that while Narcisse is figured as both Christ and the “he-goat,” who signifies Pan (the god who “held sway” over Gosse’s mind in equivalence with Christ (271)), he also signals further tensions between “male and female, innocence and guilt, transparency and secrecy, revolution and orthodoxy, and familiarity and strangeness, until his body is ‘broken up’ and his spirit is extinguished” (272). As was the case for Hemans’s Casabianca, who features in Chap. 4, there can be no hope of the resurrection for this protagonist. His violent death makes him a scapegoat and represents a potent call to reflect on the treatment of the Other for both his sixteenth-century persecutors and for readers. Among these readers, Rees includes the Brethren whom Gosse rebukes for being ready to pronounce the Other utterly forsaken. To conclude, I want to return to Ward’s use of Rose’s term “the broken middle” in order to suggest that it can serve as an apt descriptor of what the figure of Christ and his presence in the world and in “living” art stand for in terms of its breaking down of temporal and individual boundaries and producing an unsettledness that ripples out. This unsettledness is experienced in the sharing in the Eucharist and in coming, as Jeremy Begbie writes, to “an acute sense that we have not yet reached our ‘rest’ (Heb. 4)” (2000, 166). Taken together, the chapters that constitute this

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collection attest that imagining the figure of Christ in the long nineteenth century involves unsettling theological, cultural, historical, philosophical, and phenomenological dialogue with—rather than resolutions of—the ultimate broken body of God made man. Moreover, they recognize our active, real, and ongoing conversation with the voices of the nineteenth century in our search for the presence of Christ in the world and for the renewed understanding of personhood and creation that this search involves.

References Begbie, Jeremy. 2000. Theology, Music and Time. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Branch, Lori, and Mark Knight. 2018. Why the Postsecular Matters: Literary Studies and the Rise of the Novel. Christianity & Literature 67 (3): 493–510. https://doi.org/10.1177/0148333117743825. Eliot, George. 2005. Selected Essays, Poems and Other Writings. Ed. A.S. Byatt and Nicholas Warren. London: Penguin Classics. Gray, F.  Elizabeth. 2003. ‘Making Christ’: Alice Meynell, Poetry, and the Eucharist. Christianity & Literature 52: 159–180. https://doi. org/10.1177/014833310305200204. Hauerwas, Stanley. 1981. A Community of Character: Toward a Constructive Christian Social Ethic. Notre Dame; London: University of Notre Dame Press. Heady, Emily Walker. 2016. Victorian Conversion Narratives and Reading Communities. Farnham: Ashgate. Hilton, Boyd. 1988. The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865. Oxford: Clarendon. Hopps, Gavin, and Jane Stabler. 2006. Introduction: Grace Under Pressure. In Romanticism and Religion from William Cowper to Wallace Stevens, 1–25. Aldershot: Ashgate. Houston, Gail Turley. 2013. Victorian Women Writers, Radical Grandmothers, and the Gendering of God. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Keuss, Jeffrey F. 2002. A Poetics of Jesus: The Search for Christ through Writing in the Nineteenth Century. Aldershot: Ashgate. King, Joshua. 2015. Imagined Spiritual Communities in Britain’s Age of Print. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Knight, Mark. 2016. Introduction: Literature, Religion, and the Art of Conversation. In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion, 1–12. London; New York: Routledge. LaPorte, Charles. 2011. Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible. Charlottesville: University of Virginia.

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Mason, Emma. 2018. Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Melnyk, Julie. 2003. ‘Mighty Victims’: Women Writers and the Feminisation of Christ. Victorian Literature and Culture 31 (1): 131–157. https://doi. org/10.1017/S106015030300007X. Pelikan, Jaroslav. 1985. Jesus through the Centuries: His Place in the History of Culture. New Haven, CT; London: Yale University Press. Purton, Valerie. 2003. Tennyson and the Figure of Christ. Tennyson Research Bulletin 8 (2): 85–100. Schramm, Jan-Melissa. 2012. Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stevens, Jennifer. 2010. The Historical Jesus and the Literary Imagination, 1860-1920. Liverpool: Liverpool Univeristy Press. Taylor, Charles. 2007. A Secular Age. Cambridge, MA, and London, England: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. Ward, Graham. 2015. Christ and Culture. Hoboken, New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Zemka, Sue. 1997. Victorian Testaments: The Bible, Christology and Literary Authority in Early-Nineteenth-Century British Culture. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Ziolkowski, Theodore. 1972. Fictional Transfigurations of Jesus. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

PART I

William Blake and Visionary Revelation

CHAPTER 2

Blake, Enoch and the Emergence of the Apocalyptic Christ Christopher Rowland

William Blake holds an unusual position in the emergence of modern biblical interpretation. He was part of a tradition of biblical interpretation deeply rooted both in English non-conformity and in aspects of radical Reformation hermeneutics, which is both humanistic and mystical. It is humanistic in that it presupposes a universal possession of the divine spirit, awareness of which is to varying degrees independent of the ideology of church and state. It is mystical in the sense that it is indebted to the influence of the legacy of the left-wing Reformation writers like Hans Denck, and the founder of the Familists, Henrik Niklaes, whose work was available in English translation from the seventeenth century onwards. In Denck’s hermeneutic, priority was given to the interpreting subject and their experience over the Bible. Blake was mounting his critique of the Bible at the same time as a different kind of biblical criticism was emerging, historical in its orientation and deliberately cultivating detachment, the German higher criticism. As Mark Goldie has argued, Blake’s work

C. Rowland (*) University of Oxford, Oxford, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_2

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evinces an awareness of the emerging higher criticism of the Bible by Alexander Geddes, though it is laced with a deliberately self-involved imaginative critical reading (2010, 69). Blake shared with the higher critics the suspicion of miracles and offered a more nuanced account of them, which posits a subtle interplay between miracle worker and recipient: “Jesus could not do miracles where unbelief hindered” (“Annotations to Watson’s Apology,” Blake 1988 E616–17). While his views anticipated the kinds of development which are commonplace in modern biblical theology, Blake’s inclinations were not primarily, if at all, historical. His attitude to the growing historical interest is well exemplified by some annotations he made to a book written by the Bishop of Llandaff, Richard Watson, who wrote a response to the second part of Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1795): I cannot concieve [sic] the Divinity of the books in the Bible to consist either in who they were written by or at what time or in the historical evidence which may be all false in the eyes of one man & true in the eyes of another but in the Sentiments & Examples which whether true or Parabolic are Equally useful. (E618)

Blake recognized that the Bible is part of the problem for the modern world as well as supplying the resources which might contribute to a solution. His critique of divine monarchy, his espousal of divine immanence and preference for inspiration over memory, to use his contrast, evince typical features of modern biblical criticism. Yet, there is also a strong and explicit political dimension to his reading often missing in modern biblical criticism. References to Jesus and his life are dotted throughout the Blake corpus. His remarks on this subject are always clear and pungent. Even if Blake was not aware of the emphasis on the fulfilment of Jewish messianic hopes as key to Jesus’s message, he did see Jesus as a dissident who challenged the political authorities (“Everlasting Gospel,” E519–20; cf. Paley 2003, 185) and whose apocalyptic characteristics he depicts in his images. For example, there are several depictions of the Baptism of Jesus (B415 tempera and B475 watercolour). The version in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, includes Jesus’s heavenly vision with the host of witnessing angels (Blake inscribed Matt. 3:16 on the mount). It is the kind of scene in which the clouds are rent and a heaven of light bursts through the gap opened up in the clouds. It is a scene we find in several of Blake’s images. All give

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pictorial expression to Blake’s words: “When the Sun rises do you not see a round Disk of fire somewhat like a Guinea O no no I see an innumerable company of the Heavenly Host crying Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty” (Vision of the Last Judgment E566). The climax of what is arguably the most radical of Blake’s illuminated books, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, touches very directly on the theme of this chapter. It is one of Blake’s most outspoken statements about Jesus and is placed on the lips of a devil who, in his dialogue with an angel, is presenting not as a quiet conformist but an antinomian who challenged the status quo (Paley 2003, 183): [D]id [Jesus] not mock at the sabbath, and so mock the sabbaths God? murder those who were murderd because of him? turn away the law from the woman taken in adultery? steal the labor of others to support him? bear false witness when he omitted making a defence before Pilate? covet when he pray’d for his disciples, and when he bid them shake off the dust of their feet against such as refused to lodge them? I tell you, no virtue can exist without breaking these ten commandments: Jesus was all virtue, and acted from impulse: not from rules. (The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, 23–24, E43)

Though Blake does not use the word “impulse” very frequently, he probably meant “divine impulse,” perhaps inspired by John Milton’s words in Samson Agonistes (222–23 cf. 421–23; 300–20). Jesus lived by the inspiration of the Spirit and exhibited the kind of religious enthusiasm which was despised by the wise of the world, as seen in this passage from “Everlasting Gospel”: Like dr. Priestly & Bacon & Newton— Poor Spiritual Knowledge is not worth a button! … For thus the Gospel Sir Isaac confutes: ‘God can only be known by his Attributes; And as for the Indwelling of the Holy Ghost Or of Christ & his Father, it’s all a boast And Pride & Vanity of the imagination, That disdains to follow this World’s Fashion.…’ (“Everlasting Gospel,” punctuated as in Keynes 752, E519)

The inner conviction of the prophet and non-conformist refuses the easy pact with tradition and culture, reflecting Blake’s challenge to what he

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perceived to be a dominant and arid literalism and a moralistic religion which quenched the “Spirit of Prophecy and the Poetic Genius” (“All Religions are One,” Principle 5, E1). Jesus’s activity is pervaded with a lack of concern for the propriety of custom and law. He did not respect the requirement to “honour his father and mother” (E518; cf. Luke 2:49). As dissidents, John and Jesus suffered for their disobedience when “the Cruel Rod” descended on them (E520; cf. “John for disobedience bled” E523). What Jesus did was break the shackles imposed by culture and tradition, which Blake elsewhere calls the “mind-forg’d manacles” of religion (“London,” E27). One of the longest sections of verses found in Blake’s Notebook known as “The Everlasting Gospel” comprises a re-telling of the story of the Woman taken in Adultery in John 8:2–11. This section of the poem falls into four parts and I shall focus on the first, Jesus’s challenge to Moses’s law. It offers an unequivocal challenge to conventional wisdom, which is implicit in the story in the Gospel of John and which echoes the sentiments in the passage already quoted from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: The morning blush’d fiery red: Mary was found in Adulterous bed; Earth groan’d beneath, & Heaven above Trembled at discovery of Love. Jesus was sitting in Moses’ Chair, They brought the trembling Woman There. Moses commands she be stoned to death, What was the sound of Jesus’ breath? He laid his hand on Moses’ Law: The Ancient Heavens, in Silent Awe, Writ with Curses from Pole to Pole, All away began to roll: The Earth trembling & Naked lay In secret bed of Mortal Clay, On Sinai felt the hand Divine Putting back the bloody shrine, And she heard the breath of God As she heard by Eden’s flood: ‘Good & Evil are no more! Sinai’s trumpets, cease to roar! Cease, finger of God, to write!

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The Heavens are not clean in thy Sight. Thou art Good, & thou Alone; Nor may the sinner cast one stone. (E521)

Blake interprets Jesus’s actions as earth shattering; they not only challenge but also revolutionize the hegemony of the religion of law. With the words “Cease finger of God to Write,” Jesus pronounces the end of the era of law (cf. Rom. 10:4)—that had been written on Sinai with the finger of God (Exod. 31:18)—and condemns its policing by the priests and scribes. Blake’s Jesus questioned one of the foundations of religion as it is found in both Old and New Testaments, as well as in subsequent Christian orthodoxy. He challenged Christianity’s preoccupation with holiness. For Blake, “everything that lives is holy” (italics added). He redefined holiness, protesting against its cruelties (J68: 59, E222) and falsehoods (J69: 40, E223). The story of Jesus means sitting loose to boundaries and resistance to following unquestioningly the norms which had been handed down, for Jesus “scourg’d the Merchant Canaanite / From out the Temple of His Mind” (E524): And Jesus’ voice in thunders’ sound: ‘Thus I sieze the Spiritual Prey. Ye smiters with disease, make way. I come your King & God to sieze. Is God a smiter with disease?’ The God of this world raged in vain: He bound Old Satan in his Chain, And bursting forth [with del.], his furious ire Became a Chariot of fire. (E523–24)

Like Elijah, Jesus mounts a “Chariot of fire,” reflecting Blake’s view of the gospels as an ongoing struggle between the forces of conformity and the spirit-filled prophet. Jesus was no servile and obedient citizen but one who “comes your King & God to sieze” challenging it “Even to the temple’s highest Steeple,” promoting a theology of divinity in humanity (“Thou art a Man, God is no more, Thy own Humanity learn to adore”). “Christ died as an Unbeliever,” wrote William Blake (Ann Watson 5, E614). At first sight this might be deemed an example of Blake’s overblown rhetoric. A moment’s thought will remind us that at the crucial moment in

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his confrontation with the semi-autonomous Temple hierarchy (Mark 14:62–64), Jesus was accused of blasphemy. What he said had put him beyond the pale of his community, at least according to the judgement of the High Priest and the kangaroo court assembled for the purpose of gaining evidence to delate Jesus to the Roman governor. Blake was right; Jesus was an outcast, as well as an enthusiast. Indeed, central to the story that the early Christians told about Jesus was that he was an outsider and had been consigned thither by the political powerbrokers of his day, in which the Roman colonial power colluded. Blake continues to find in Jesus’s words a protest at what he sees as the attempt to subject the Bible to priest and king and the hierarchical polity that they propagate, echoing the kind of virulent criticisms that had run through the illuminated books of the 1790s. Blake’s reading of the gospels betrays little sign of the influence of emerging historical criticism. In one respect Blake was like H.S. Reimarus (1694–1768), the pioneer of the quest for the historical Jesus (cf. Schweitzer [1911] 1931a). Blake too saw Jesus as the leader of an iconoclastic challenge that seemed to fail. Blake did not need to resort to suspicion of the veracity of the gospels, as an apostolic fabrication, to maintain his view of Jesus as a radical dissenter. Rather, like so many non-conformist interpreters before and since, he read the gospel narratives as realistic portraits of the events surrounding Jesus and found in them the picture of a non-conformist Jesus who offended hierarchy and political authorities and paid the penalty for his non-conformity. While modern students of the New Testament have questioned whether we can any longer polarize Jesus with the Judaism of his day (cf. Sanders 1985), Blake made Jesus the archetypical antinomian: “Wherefore did Christ come? Was it not to abolish the Jewish imposture? Was not Christ murder’d because he taught that God lov’d all Men & was their Father and forbad all contention for Worldly prosperity, in opposition to the Jewish scriptures?” (“Annotations to Watson’s Apology,” punctuation as Keynes 387, E614). “From impulse not from rules” summarizes something which is absolutely essential to the gospels, namely, that Jesus’s authority was not based on human wisdom passed down from generation to generation by authoritative teachers such as we find enunciated in the early rabbinic text Pirke Aboth (1:1). The impulse which took Jesus up to Jerusalem was not, to use Blake’s words, a matter of “memory” but “inspiration.” Indeed, the phrase “impulse not from rules” characterizes a pervasive apocalyptic/prophetic strand in Judaism, which prioritized vision rather than adherence to traditional wisdom.

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1   The Growing Preoccupation with Apocalyptic Apocalyptic is one of those words which has been put to various uses. Its presence in the title of this chapter deliberately reflects the ambiguity in usage, the more familiar sense of the “catastrophic” and the more accurate sense of being about that which is revealed in visions or dreams. In 1832, Friedrich Lücke, a German biblical scholar, started a trend which has proved extremely influential in which “apocalyptic” is understood as “a special expression of eschatology” characterized by a contrast between the present age and a new transcendent age, which breaks in from beyond through divine intervention and without human activity, and which is imminent (Schmidt 1969, 98–119). The sudden irruption and destruction of the present age to be replaced by an otherworldly realm, as opposed to any kind of evolution of the future out of the present is deemed to be the essential characteristic and what distinguishes Christian from Jewish eschatology. That view has pervaded most modern biblical and theological scholarship. Meanwhile, in England, Blake’s contemporary, Samuel Taylor Coleridge assessed his writings and judged that they were produced by a man who was both “apocalyptic” and “mystic.” Coleridge called Blake: A man of Genius—and I apprehend, a Swedenborgian certainly, a mystic emphatically. You perhaps smile at my calling another Poet, a Mystic, but verily I am in the very mire of commonplace common-sense compared with Mr. Blake, apo-, or rather ana-, calyptic Poet, and Painter! (Rowland 2010, 241; 2015)

Coleridge uses the words “mystic” and “apocalyptic” virtually synonymously. He understood very well what the mystical and the apocalyptic were about having been steeped in Revelation and in the visionary experience (if his poem “Kubla Khan” and “Religious Musings” are anything to go by). Moreover, he saw these as related ways of talking about a similar phenomenon, which he found in Blake’s work. What we find in the use of “apocalyptic” in these passages from Coleridge and Lücke is that they pick up on different aspects of Revelation: Coleridge stressing the visionary revelatory and mystical, Lücke the cataclysmic and eschatological. It is worth adding that both approaches have been intertwined in its reception history through the centuries.

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In the light of this contrasting understanding of the word “apocalyptic” at the beginning of the nineteenth century, one has to ask whether such usage is influenced by the apocalyptic form of the Book of Revelation (so about the disclosure of divine mysteries) or to its contents, its catalogue of disasters and hope for heaven on earth. Even if “apocalypse” is deemed to be the obvious word turned to by headline writers in describing the cataclysm after 9/11 and the Japanese tsunami, there is also another dimension to be borne in mind, namely, the opening word of Revelation, “apocalypse,” which refers to the kind of writing which purports to disclose divine mysteries. As I shall indicate, I part company from Albert Schweitzer who, like many since the nineteenth century to the present day, thought that “apocalyptic eschatology” is about the unexpected irruption of the divine in which there is no part for humans in the establishment of a world beyond this one. But in my view the evidence suggests that a messianic age in this world, brought in by human actors such as we find in the prophetic texts of the Hebrew Bible and in later Jewish sources, is exactly what we find in the earliest Christian sources.

2   Enoch and Apocalyptic As Blake’s most famous words indicate, he was committed to being part of “building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant land.” Hope for the future was central to him, but he did understand the message and ministry of Jesus eschatologically, though in his watercolour The River of Life (B525), inspired by Revelation 22, Jesus is depicted leading the way to life in the new age. The recovery of the apocalyptic and eschatological message of Jesus is part of the story I wish to tell, and to which the Book of Enoch made a signal contribution. Enoch is mentioned in some enigmatic words in Genesis 5:24: “Enoch was not for God took him.” This set in train a welter of speculation about Enoch in ancient Judaism, inherited by early Christianity. The speculation concerned his role as an intermediary between God and humanity after an ascent to heaven. In an 1807 lithograph, Blake depicted Enoch surrounded by humans and angels presiding over the arts. In the open book on Enoch’s lap there appears just one word, Enoch, written in Hebrew. There are also two figures on the right of the picture examining a writing which contains words from Genesis 5:24. What was as important in giving a stimulus to the rediscovery of apocalyptic and eschatology was the discovery of a book, which remains part of

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the canon of scripture of the Ethiopic church, the Apocalypse of Enoch. It was translated into English in 1821 by the Regius Professor of Hebrew at Oxford, Richard Laurence, and a decade or so later into German. Long before the nineteenth century, the Book of Enoch was influential, and it has been great ever since (cf. Hessayon 2006; Szönyi 2011). The affinities of parts of this text with parts of the New Testament heralded the recognition that eschatology, the hope for a new age on earth, was part of the thought world of the New Testament and perhaps Jesus himself. The influence of the Enochic literature bears witness to an underworld of apocalyptic, mystical and eschatological ideas in ancient Judaism— perhaps in the view of some, a counterpoint to the mainstream traditions—which found expression in both the Bible and later rabbinic sources. The Apocalypse of Enoch starts with the stories of the angelic seduction of the women in Genesis 6, their judgement and Enoch’s ascent to heaven to intercede for them. That is followed by descriptions of Enoch through the world, reporting briefly on what he had seen, including an account of a visit to the Garden of Eden. The next major section is full of future predictions centring on the Son of Man, or Elect One. This section, in particular, which is only in the Ethiopic version, has attracted much attention and has many affinities with the New Testament gospels, for example, “that Son of Man has appeared and has seated himself on the throne of his glory; and all evil shall disappear from before his face” (1 Enoch 69:28; cf. Matt. 25:31–32). It is likely that Blake was one of the earliest commentators on this Book in the presumably unfinished sketches some of which clearly bear the title “Book of Enoch” (National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1944.14.9, B827 5) (Fig. 2.1). The affinities between parts of the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Enoch with the New Testament heralded the recognition that apocalyptic visions and the hope for a new age on earth were central to the New Testament, not least Jesus himself. In 1892, the first edition of a little work by Johannes Weiss on the preaching of Jesus appeared, which still forms a central component of the discussion of the gospels. In it he challenges the theological liberalism of his day (of which Adolf Harnack is the most prominent representative, Harnack 1986) by denying that Albrecht Ritschl’s (Weiss’s father-in-law) understanding of the kingdom of God corresponded to the teaching of Jesus. Ritschl’s concept of the moral society evolving over the years in accordance with providence was far removed from the world of the Jewish

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Fig. 2.1  William Blake, Enoch before the Great Glory (c. 1824/1827). Rosenwald Collection 1944.14.8, National Gallery of Art, Washington. 52.6  ×  37  cm. Graphite on laid paper

apocalypses, which Weiss considered the proper context for the understanding of the teaching of Jesus. If one studied the likely setting of Jesus’s proclamation of the reign of God, he argued, it provided none of the comfort of moral progress towards a more civilized society. Rather, there was a longing to see a new world come about and the end of a corrupt age.

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As a result, the myth of the respectable Jesus disappeared. In its place was a strange apocalyptic figure, a man possessed by the belief that the end of all things was at hand. Convinced, as a New Testament historian, that there was no other responsible way of reading the evidence, Weiss reluctantly conceded that exegesis—namely, the interpretation of the New Testament in the light of its historical context—had to separate from theology. As a religious person one might wish to espouse a modern understanding of the kingdom of God. However, historical biblical exegesis disclosed a very different world of ideas and practice from that envisaged by the theologian and preacher (cf. Lannert 1989). Although in key respects Weiss’s work had been anticipated by David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835–36), Weiss’s short study was groundbreaking in the evolving story of the apocalyptic Christ, a point made by Schweitzer: He lays down the third great alternative which the study of the life of Jesus had to meet. The first was laid down by Strauss: either purely historical or purely supernatural. The second had been worked out by the Tübingen school and Holtzmann: either Synoptic or Johannine. Now came the third: either eschatological or non-eschatological! (1931a, 237)

In a generous tribute, published a year after Weiss’s death in 1914, F.C. Burkitt made a point which has become a foundation stone in modern biblical studies, that eschatology is “the belief in the intervention of God to deliver His people in the near future” and “it is God, not man, whose work it will be to bring it in” (Burkitt 1915, 293–94; Chapman 2001, 81–101). The strand of interpretation of apocalypticism which goes back to Lücke was coming to fruition at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth century, and was to be the motor of the major and continuing influential critique of theology by the Swiss theologian Karl Barth in his commentary on the Letter to the Romans published in 1919 but written during World War I. Part of the inspiration for Barth’s critique of his theological teachers in his commentary owes much to the growing interest in the centrality of apocalyptic and eschatology as the key to understanding the New Testament. Much of twentieth-century New Testament interpretation since Weiss has been concerned either to bridge the gap between ancient text and contemporary thought, or to relegate the eschatological and apocalyptic

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elements to a marginal significance. It is an issue which was recognized by Franz Overbeck who, like his friend Fredrich Nietzsche, thought that Jesus was the only true Christian as no one else was able to live according to the conviction that this age was passing away and that one should live in earnest expectation of another world. Schweitzer followed in this tradition. Not only did he chart the story of modern biblical scholarship’s agony over the discovery of the apocalyptic Christ but he also stands as one of the giants of New Testament theology in this century. Just before World War I, he left behind a career both as a musician and as a biblical exegete to work as a missionary doctor in West Africa. There is the same heroic quality about his life as about his picture of Jesus. Schweitzer saw Jesus as one who was fired with apocalyptic zeal and who was led to accept death in the earnest expectation of forcing the wheel of history so that the kingdom of heaven might be realized on earth. Like many others, Schweitzer struggled to see how the apocalyptic Jesus could relate to the modern world. In the first edition of The Quest of the Historical Jesus, he deemed eschatology to be the key: “that which is eternal in the words of Jesus is due to the very fact that they are based on an eschatological worldview” ([1910] 1930, 400). That view changed in the second edition when the words “that which is eternal in the words of Jesus” were omitted (Carleton Paget 2006). The ending of the book was almost completely rewritten possibly in response to those who questioned the very existence of Jesus (like Arthur Drews’s The Christ Myth, 1909). Schweitzer turned to the human will as a means of bridging the gap between the historical Jesus and the contemporary Christian, whereas the apocalyptic/eschatological mind-set made him irrelevant. So at the end of the second edition of The Quest it is his will, here conceived—along with Schopenhauer—as the unchanging part of a person, which has the capacity to transcend the particularity of its setting. It is this union between one will and another will, a mutual willing for the kingdom, which Schweitzer regarded as Jesus’s mysticism and is also found in Paul’s writings (Carleton Paget 2011). There is much of Schweitzer’s own autobiography in the final pages of his book. Indeed, he finishes with a brilliant summary of how he related to Jesus, summarizing his own vocation and his life’s work, and he wrote to a colleague that the conclusion to the Quest was the key to his philosophy. In it we see how following Jesus in the midst of life is the way in which one learns about him (1931a, 401). Essentially, Schweitzer’s portrait of the apocalyptic Christ has been the dominant one in the last century. What is

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striking about most modern depictions of the apocalyptic Christ is that he is a rather lonely messenger of catastrophe, preaching a message of doom, individual repentance and the irruption of a new world to take the place of the old. There is little room for any future this-worldly historical perspective. It is a message addressed to the individual and there is little sign of the Hegelian-Marxist philosophical tradition in which social history is the context of eschatological fulfilment. Indeed, it is largely thanks to the writings of Ernst Bloch, appropriated particularly by Jürgen Moltmann, that tradition has gained any foothold in discussions of the New Testament (e.g. Bloch 2009; Käsemann 1969; Chester 2012; Rowland 2002).

3   Dealing with Eschatological Convictions A pressing issue for interpreters in the light of the recognition of the importance of apocalyptic and eschatology was the problem posed for the first Christians when fervent hopes remained unfulfilled and disappointment set in. In 2 Peter, we have the clearest indication that the community which Peter addressed had to wrestle with the issue (2 Peter 3:3–7). The demise of significant actors from the first generation of Christians probably contributed to a sense of bewilderment. For example, Paul thought of himself as an—perhaps the—eschatological agent, like the twelve, who were told by Jesus that they would sit on twelve thrones judging the twelve tribes of Israel (Matt. 19:28). John 21:23 suggests the shock which a community suffered when the death of one who had contact with Jesus took place. Paul, like the Beloved Disciple, places himself as part of the special group who “had seen the Lord” (cf. 1 Cor. 15; 9:1). What emerged was a structure to preserve the faith of the apostles, to prepare people for heaven, rather than the coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. Church life, worship and doctrine were the means of enabling the faithful to remain within the scope of the divine saving activity and ensure that their journey to the eternal abode was successful. Albert Schweitzer’s book on Paul (1931) is a good example of an attempt to illustrate how one influential early Christian writer dealt with the problem of the apocalyptic Jesus. He argued that Paul shared a longing for the Kingdom of God but also offered consolation for the fact that its fulfilment was delayed (Schweitzer 1931b, 396). He paved the way to a solution of the problem posed by the non-appearance of the Kingdom of God and facilitated the assimilation of the Gospel of Jesus by the Greco-­ Roman world. He discerned the truth of that which was temporally

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conditioned to extract what was of permanent religious value, namely, that dying and rising with Christ connected with the values of the Kingdom of God which Christ preached and which he believed offered a pattern of faith just as true today as it was in Paul’s time (385–56). By dying and rising with Christ the believer experienced in everyday life what it meant to take up their cross and follow Jesus (Luke 9:23).

4   The Emerging Apocalyptic Figure of Jesus Apocalyptic and eschatology have always formed part of Christian theology. What happened in the nineteenth century was the growing perception that Jesus and Paul were influenced by such ideas. In my view this stands as the greatest contribution of historical exegesis to an understanding of the New Testament. Blake’s writings do not lack that hope for a better world, but “the Religion of Jesus, Forgiveness of Sin, can never be the cause of a war” (Jerusalem 52, E201). The apocalyptic Jesus is there but it is an apocalyptic visionary Jesus rather than an eschatological Jesus. In Plate 17 of his Illustrations of the Book of Job, Jesus in the Gospel of John is seen as the apocalypse of God (John 1:14; 18; 12:41; 14:8). Like Enoch, Blake was an apocalyptic visionary and a pioneering explorer of the visionary imagination, who spent his life seeking to enable those who dwelt in darkness to see the light through the imaginative exercises in epistemological transformation which are involved in engaging with his illuminated books. So, it is fitting that Blake is one of the earliest commentators on the Book of Enoch, a book whose importance he grasped and whose import he succeeded in communicating. While the dominant understanding of “apocalyptic” is now the cataclysmic end of the world, Blake is symptomatic of a different tradition which saw future hope being centred on this world, the realization of which might involve human agency. In sum, “apocalyptic” includes not only the sense of catastrophe associated with the end of the world but also visionary revelation. As already indicated, it is the second, less familiar aspect of “apocalyptic,” which Coleridge recognized in Blake’s work. The first has dominated scholarship since the beginning of the nineteenth century, as well as the popular imagination. This chapter started with a consideration of Blake’s understanding of the figure of Christ and his role as the first commentator on the Ethiopic Apocalypse of Enoch, which was a catalyst for the burgeoning interest in the apocalyptic Christ in the nineteenth century. Blake’s theology is

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symptomatic of a different tradition in Christianity with its roots deep in the Bible, namely, a future hope centred on this world, the realization of which involved human agency. Blake’s well-known words, “building Jerusalem in England’s green and pleasant lands” echo the language of hope, which was commonplace in Christianity before the beginning of the third century CE. The rediscovery of such apocalyptic and eschatological ideas as central to their understanding of early Christian texts, as well as the figure of Christ, is the most important result of two hundred years of biblical scholarship.

References Blake, William. 1988. William Blake The Complete Poetry and Prose of William Blake. Ed. David V.  Erdman. Berkeley: University of California Press. (References E followed by page number). http://erdman.blakearchive.org. ———. 1991–5. William Blake’s Illuminated Books. Ed. David Bindman. London: Thames and Hudson. Bloch, Ernst. 2009. Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. London: Verso. Burkitt, F. Crawford. 1915. Johannes Weiss: In Memoriam. Harvard Theological Review 8: 292–297. http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/1507502. Butlin, Martin. 1981. The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. 2 volumes. (References B followed by page number). Carleton Paget, J. 2006. Albert Schweitzer’s Second Edition of The Quest of the Historical Jesus. Bulletin of the John Rylands Library 88: 3–39. https://doi. org/10.7227/BJRL.88.1.1. ———. 2011. Schweitzer and Paul. Journal for the Study of the New Testament 33: 223–256. Chapman, Mark D. 2001. The Coming Crisis: The Impact of Eschatology on Theology in Edwardian England. Sheffield: Sheffield Academic Press. Chester, Andrew. 2012. Future Hope and Present Reality. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. 1956. S.T. Coleridge, Collected Letters. Ed. Earl Leslie Griggs. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goldie, Mark. 2010. Alexander Geddes at the Limits of the Catholic Enlightenment. The Historical Journal 53: 61–86. https://doi.org/10.1017/ S0018246X09990483. Harnack, Adolf von. 1986. What is Christianity? Philadelphia: Fortress Press. Hessayon, Ariel. 2006. Og King of Bashan, Enoch and the Books of Enoch: ExtraCanonical Texts and Interpretations of Genesis 6:1–4. In Scripture and

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Scholarship in Early Modern England, ed. Ariel Hessayon and N. Keen, 5–40. Aldershot: Ashgate. Käsemann, Ernst. 1969. Primitive Christian Apocalyptic. In New Testament Questions of Today, ed. Ernst Käsemann, trans. W. J. Montague, 108–137. London: SCM. Lannert, Berthold. 1989. Die Wiederentdeckung der neutestamentlichen Eschatologie durch Johannes Weiss. Tübingen: Francke. Paley, M. 2003. The Traveller in the Evening; The Last Works of William Blake. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Reimarus, Hermann Samuel. 1971. Fragments. London: S.C.M. Press. Rowland, Christopher. 2002. Christian Origins: An Account of the Setting and Character of the Most Important Messianic Sect of Judaism. rev. ed. London: SPCK. ———. 2010. Blake and the Bible. London: Yale University Press. ———. 2015. British Interpretation of the Apocalypse: A Historical Perspective. In The Book of Revelation: Currents in British Research on the Apocalypse, ed. Garrick V. Allen, Ian Paul, and Simon P. Woodman, 225–244. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Sanders, Ed Parish. 1985. Jesus and Judaism. London: SCM. Schmidt, Johann Michael. 1969. Die jüdische Apokalyptik: Die Geschichteihrer Erforschung von den Anfängen bis zu den Textfunden von Qumran. Neukirchen-­ Vluyn: Neukirchener Verlag. Schweitzer, Albert. (1910) 1930. The Quest of the Historical Jesus: A Critical Study of its Progress from Reimarus to Wrede. London: Black. ———. (1911) 1931a. The Quest of the Historical Jesus. 2nd ed. London: Black. ———. 1931b. The Mysticism of Paul the Apostle. London: Black. Szönyi, György E. 2011. Promiscuous Angels. Enoch, Blake, and a Curious Case of Romantic Orientalism. The Romanian Journal of English Studies 8: 37–53. Weiss, Johannes. (1892) 1971. Jesu’s Proclamation of the Kingdom of God. Edited and translated by Richard Hyde Hiers and David Larrimore Holland. London: SCM.

CHAPTER 3

“As the Eye Is Formed”: Seeing as Christ in Blake’s Bartimaeus Naomi Billingsley

For William Blake, the figure of Christ epitomizes Imagination. In Milton, A Poem (c.1804–11), Blake writes: “Imagination is not a State: it is the Human Existence itself” (32:32, E132). In other words, Imagination is an ontological reality—a mode of being. Indeed, it is the ontological reality that Christ himself embodies and which is the proper mode of being for all humanity. When we embody Imagination, we are members of the Divine Body of Jesus, the Imagination. In a letter to Revd Dr Trusler, Blake explains his concept of how Imagination affects the way that an individual sees the world: This World Is a World of Imagination & Vision … to the Eyes of the Man of Imagination Nature is Imagination itself. As a man is So he Sees … To Me This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination. (Blake to Revd. Dr. Trusler, 23 August 1799, E702)

Trusler had commissioned the watercolour Malevolence (1799, Philadelphia Museum of Art, B341)1 from Blake, but on delivery complained that the

N. Billingsley (*) Independent Researcher, London, UK © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_3

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design was too fantastical.2 Blake’s reply lambasts Trusler; he opens with an sardonic statement that he is “really sorry” that Trusler has “falln out with the Spiritual World” and goes on to claim that the problem is Trusler’s perception rather than his own artistic vision. Blake argues that to see as Trusler does is only to see the superficial, whereas to see the “World of Imagination,” the world as “One continued Vision of Fancy,” is to see reality (E702). As Christopher Rowland writes in Chap. 2 of this volume, Blake “presupposes a universal possession of the divine spirit”—that divine spirit is Imagination (23). Having seen something of Blake’s characterization of the Jesus of the Gospels as a nonconformist rebel in Chap. 2, this chapter focuses on another aspect of Blake’s idea of Christ. It explores how Blake’s theory of imaginative perception as the true and Christ-like mode of being and way of seeing is expressed in a painting by Blake from the same period as the letter to Trusler: Christ Giving Sight to Bartimaeus (c.1799–1800, Fig. 3.1). This picture was one of about fifty small tempera paintings of biblical subjects that Blake produced for Thomas Butts, a Civil Servant

Fig. 3.1  William Blake, Christ Giving Sight to Bartimaeus (c.1799–1800). Yale Center for British Art. 26.0 × 37.5 cm. Tempera with pen and ink on canvas

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who was one of Blake’s most important patrons. The biblical temperas were the first works that Butts commissioned from Blake, in 1799, and Blake worked on the pictures into 1800 (Butts would continue to purchase works from Blake over the following two decades). Thirty of the paintings are now extant, dispersed in collections in Britain and the USA, but most can be viewed online via the Blake Archive, and all in Martin Butlin’s catalogue raisonné of Blake’s paintings and drawings (B379–432). The subjects of other, now lost paintings are known from records such as the catalogue compiled by William Michael Rossetti for Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake (1863, 1880). There is little documentary evidence detailing the commission and the extent to which Butts exerted control over the biblical temperas project, but a revealing passage in a letter from Blake to Butts in 1803 suggests that this patron gave the artist relative freedom in his work: “I am inflexible & will relinquish Any engagement of Designing at all unless altogether left to my own Judgment. As you My dear Friend have always left me for which I shall never cease to honour & respect you” (To Butts, 6 July 1803, E731). Even if Butts specified individual subjects, it seems that Blake was allowed to exercise his own vision in the work that he produced for this patron, in the way that Blake had insisted on doing in the picture for Trusler, thereby baffling that patron. Butts was either more sympathetic to Blake’s vision than Trusler or read the works that he commissioned as “mere” illustrations to the Bible. The biblical designs can indeed be read at such a straightforward level, as well as expressions of Blake’s personal vision. Given that Butts was a friend as well as a patron, and owned copies of some of Blake’s illuminated books in which he articulates his personal vision in verbal form, it is difficult to believe that he was oblivious to Blakean meanings in the designs. The healing of Bartimaeus is a story in Mark’s Gospel (10:46–52): And they came to Jericho: and as he went out of Jericho with his disciples and a great number of people, blind Bartimaeus, the son of Timaeus, sat by the highway side begging. And when he heard that it was Jesus of Nazareth, he began to cry out, and say, ‘Jesus, thou son of David, have mercy on me.’ And many charged him that he should hold his peace: but he cried the more a great deal, ‘Thou son of David, have mercy on me.’ And Jesus stood still, and commanded him to be called. And they call the blind man, saying unto him, ‘Be of good comfort, rise; he calleth thee.’ And he, casting away his garment, rose, and came to Jesus. And Jesus answered and said unto him,

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‘What wilt thou that I should do unto thee?’ The blind man said unto him, ‘Lord, that I might receive my sight.’ And Jesus said unto him, ‘Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole.’ And immediately he received his sight, and followed Jesus in the way.

This is a relatively unusual subject in art; artists have more frequently favoured similar narratives in which Jesus restores sight to the blind elsewhere in the Gospels. Two key aspects of the Bartimaeus story distinguish it from these other Gospel stories: first, Bartimaeus is named, whereas other blind patients are anonymous; second, Bartimaeus is healed simply by asking Jesus to restore his sight, rather than by a physical action performed by Jesus. It is probably this latter aspect of the Bartimaeus narrative that has made it less appealing to artists than the stories in which Jesus heals the blind by touching their eyes (Matt. 9:28–30; 20:30–34) or anointing them with spittle and dust (Mark 8:22–25; John 9:1–7). In these other narratives, Jesus is the principal actor, whereas in the Bartimaeus story, it is the action of the healed—his casting off his garment—that is the most visual aspect of the episode that is narrated. Blake’s depiction of this narrative should be seen in relation to his attitude to the miracles of Jesus, and in turn in the context of eighteenth-­ century debates on this topic. Annotating his copy of Richard Watson, Bishop of Llandaff’s, Apology for the Bible (first published 1796; Blake owned the eighth edition, 1797), Blake wrote: Jesus could not do miracles where unbelief hinderd … The manner of a miracle being performd is in modern times considerd as an arbitrary command of the agent upon the patient but this is an impossibility not a miracle neither did Jesus ever do such a miracle. (E616–17)

As seen in Rowland’s chapter, Blake’s comments here are a direct, albeit private, engagement with contemporary debates about miracles. Watson’s Apology was published in response to Thomas Paine’s The Age of Reason (1794, 1795),3 which, as its subtitle proclaimed, challenged the “Fabulous Theology” of institutional Christianity and the authority of the Bible. Paine’s scepticism led him to reject the very notion of miracles. His thinking emerged from a climate of post-Enlightenment rationalism, which resulted in criticism of religious belief and in biblical texts being read in new ways. Again, as discussed by Rowland in Chap. 2, higher criticism, which studied the historical origins of biblical texts, questioned the status

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of these texts as inspired scripture, and narratives such as the miracles of Jesus that described supernatural events were particular targets for rationalist critics. Perhaps the most influential critique of the idea of miracles had been David Hume’s essay on the subject in his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748). Hume argued that the evidence against a miracle will always outweigh the evidence for it, and that therefore miracles are not credible occurrences. Meanwhile, early Methodists and others were reporting contemporary miracles, as defended by John Wesley in The Principles of a Methodist Farther Explain’d (1746). Conversely, Emanuel Swedenborg denied that miracles still occurred because he thought that miracles compel belief, and that their happening would therefore take away humanity’s spiritual freedom, turning the individual into a mere “natural Agent” and destroying his/her capacity to have faith through the Word (Swedenborg 1781, 123). The manifesto of Swedenborg’s New Church, which Blake and his wife Catherine signed when attending one of its meetings in London in 1789, included among its resolutions, “Miracles do not occur” (Bentley 2004, 52). In Blake’s Bartimaeus, we see that Blake denies the occurrence of miracles which compel belief, but thinks that belief can compel miracles, and makes the individual Christ-like. Biblical painting was finding its feet in Britain in the eighteenth century. With the efforts of the Royal Academy (founded 1768) and other bodies to foster a national school of history painting, artists were increasingly exploring what Protestant biblical painting could look like. While there was no official policy on the matter from the Church of England or other authorities, some trends can be observed in the sorts of biblical subjects that were generally preferred or avoided by artists and their patrons. Subjects with strong visual narratives and moral messages were apparently generally deemed to be more acceptable than single-figure subjects, such as the Crucifixion—the former having a didactic function, and the latter being more readily susceptible to idolatrous viewing. Reflecting this broader trend, depictions of Christ healing appeared in a variety of contexts in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth century. In these subjects, multiple figures avoided the viewer’s eye stilling on any one individual represented, and the narratives had strong messages about the importance of faith. A prominent example of such a painting was William Hogarth’s The Pool of Bethesda (1735–1736) at St Bartholomew’s Hospital4; this story in John’s Gospel in which Jesus heals a lame man was one of two paintings by Hogarth (the other was The Good Samaritan

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(1736–1737)) as part of an extensive renovation scheme at Bart’s. In Blake’s own lifetime, numerous paintings of healings were exhibited at prominent venues such as the Royal Academy and (from 1806) the British Institution (see Paul Mellon Centre 2018; Graves 1908). Blake himself depicted Jesus’s miracles in a variety of projects throughout his career; healing miracles are the most prevalent type, but he also depicted the miraculous draught of fish (B330.488) and the wedding at Cana (B330.534) in a series of illustrations to Edward Young’s poem Night Thoughts (1795–1797), and one of the Butts temperas depicted the feeding of the multitude (1799–1800, B416). In these multiplication and transformation miracles, the focus is less on the individual respondent to Jesus than in the healing miracles, where the emphasis is on the belief of the patient, as expressed in Blake’s annotations to Watson. Healing miracles make several appearances in Blake’s early works prior to his depiction of the Bartimaeus narrative. Blake’s earliest depiction of a healing miracle is a vignette that appears to allude to the raising of Lazarus in “The Divine Image”5 in Songs of Innocence (1789). The image appears at the bottom of the plate and is closely linked to the final two stanzas of the poem, which it sits alongside; the image and the verses are enclosed together in a loop in the arabesque flame that swirls across the plate: Then every man of every clime, That prays in his distress, Prays to the human form divine Love Mercy Pity Peace. And all must love the human form, In heathen, turk or jew. Where Mercy, Love & Pity dwell, There God is dwelling too (E13)

The arrangement of image and text on the plate that puts the vignette in the same pictorial space as these lines implies that the man being raised is one “in distress.” His raised arm suggests a “prayer” to “the human form divine” (the Christ-like figure), which signifies his belief in this divinity— that his state of perception embodies the Divine Image. The poem does not explicitly state that the prayer is answered, but the design affirms that

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“Love Mercy Pity Peace” will answer distress. “The Divine Image” of the title is displaced in the text by “the human form divine,” a concept that is essentially synonymous with Blake’s idea of Imagination as the true mode of being—the latter term begins to be important in Blake’s writings from the time of the letter to Trusler (1799). As an ontological reality, the human form divine is all-encompassing, manifesting in both the perception and the action of the individual. “The Divine Image” then presents the figure of Christ both as Jesus, who is the supreme embodiment of the human form divine in Blake’s personal belief system, and as the human form divine embodied in any wo/man. Blake used the Lazarus-like motif again as the frontispiece to There is No Natural Religion, Copy L (c.1795)—an augmented version of an illuminated book originally composed in about 1788 (the earlier printings extant do not include the Lazarus plate).6 Here, Blake invokes the subject against the deists’ denial of miracles—another example of Blake engaging with contemporary debates about miracles, and expressing his own position that miracles are engendered by belief, by Imaginative perception. A similar image appears in Blake’s designs for Edward Young’s poem Night Thoughts, for which Blake produced 537 watercolour designs (1795–1797), and engraved forty-three of these for an edition of the first four (of nine) “Nights” of the poem, published in 1797 (the remaining three planned volumes were never realized). The Lazarus-like design appears in Night IV, depicting line 689: “That Touch, with charm celestial, heals the Soul Diseas’d” (Young 1797, 90).7 This passage describes being “touched” by the cross (l. 679), which is called “sovereign, through the whole | Long chain of miracles which hangs | From heaven” (ll. 684–86). Instead, Blake shows Christ literally touching a Lazarus-like figure in an act of healing. Blake rejected the idea of the Crucifixion as Atonement, and this is one of the several designs for Night Thoughts in which Blake displaces Young’s celebration of the cross with other motifs. Instead, Blake here emphasizes Jesus’s earthly ministry; the figure being raised is not a passive recipient of Jesus’s aid, but an active participant in the act of healing, reaching upwards and looking directly at Christ. In his early uses of Lazarus-like motifs of raisings and healings, Blake depicts Jesus and the patient mutually engaged in the act of healing. The notion of the individual embodying Christ-like perception as effecting his/her transformation reaches its fullest expression in Christ Giving Sight to Bartimaeus. Blake’s idea that “Jesus could not do miracles where unbelief hinderd” (E616) resonates with Jesus’s own statements to his supplicants that it is

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their faith which heals them (Mark 6:4–6). Jesus’s parting words to Bartimaeus are one such example: “Go thy way; thy faith hath made thee whole” (Mark 10:52). Blake’s emphasis on the need for the individual to form his/her own Imaginative perception, such as his comment to Trusler that “As the Eye is formed such are its Powers” (E702), parallels his take on miracles. In Christ Giving Sight to Bartimaeus, Blake’s ideas about miracles and imaginative perception coalesce in a depiction of a miracle that is about the perception of the patient. Whether chosen by patron or painter, this particular healing narrative, often eschewed by other artists in favour of those in which Christ was the principal actor, resonated with Blake’s attitude to miracles—a correspondence that Blake made the most of in his design. Blake’s picture demonstrates an attentive reading of Mark’s narrative. He depicts Bartimaeus “throwing aside his garment” and simultaneously rising from the roadside stone on which he had been sitting (10:50). Bartimaeus’s half-standing pose, with his left arm casting off his garment behind him and his right arm reaching forwards, towards Jesus, is elegant and almost balletic. Standing fully upright opposite him, Jesus mirrors Bartimaeus’s outstretched arm, reaching towards his patient, but his legs are static, thus making clear that he is responding to Bartimaeus’s more active gesture. Bartimaeus’s pose is a partial echo of the figure of Isaac in Abraham and Isaac (c.1799–1800, B382, Gen. 22:9–13, Fig. 3.2), one of the Old Testament subjects in the biblical temperas. That image depicts the narrative in which, accepting a command from God, Abraham takes his son Isaac to a place of sacrifice to offer him to God. Having prepared an altar, and laid his son upon it, Abraham hears the angel of the Lord telling him not to sacrifice the boy, and then sees a ram caught in a thicket, which he gives as a burnt offering instead of his son. Departing from the biblical text, Blake depicts Isaac, rather than Abraham, discovering the ram to be sacrificed in his place. This transfer of the role of discovering the ram from father to son reflects Blake’s celebration of child-like perception as exemplifying Imagination. Another passage in the same letter to Trusler that was quoted earlier expresses this attitude; Blake writes: “I am happy to find a Great Majority of Fellow Mortals who can Elucidate My Visions & Particularly they have been Elucidated by Children who have taken a greater delight in contemplating my Pictures than I even hoped” (To Trusler, 23 August 1799, E703). Thus, Abraham and Isaac expresses Blake’s idea that children embody Christ-like Imagination.

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Fig. 3.2  William Blake, Abraham and Isaac (c.1799–1800). Yale Center for British Art. 26.7 × 39.4 cm. Tempera with pen and ink on canvas

Although the circumstances of the original display of Butts’s Blake collection are not known, it is a fair assumption that the biblical temperas were intended to be hung together as a group. In this context, the similarities between Christ Giving Sight to Bartimaeus and Abraham and Isaac would have been readily visible, with these New and Old Testament subjects acting as a typological pair. By a happy coincidence, having parted ways in the mid-nineteenth century in the dispersal of the Butts collection, the two pictures were reunited a century later in the collection of Mrs A.B.  Clifton; both were subsequently bought by Paul Mellon and now reside in the Yale Center for British Art. However, the idea of reading the pictures as a pair does not seem to have been proposed until now. While the boy Isaac and the youthful Bartimaeus are presented in similar terms, as exemplars of perception, the other protagonists in these pictures have differing responses. Whereas, as seen above, Christ partially mirrors Bartimaeus, echoing his outstretched arm, Abraham is still looking mournfully up to heaven, lamenting the task he had been charged with and not yet noticing what his son shows him. The mirroring of Christ and

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Bartimaeus is further reinforced by Blake’s depiction in the middle-ground in the centre of the picture of two trees leaning towards each other, echoing the gestures of healer and healed, and implying that this miracle is in harmony with the natural order. This detail could be a critique of contemporary definitions of miracles as violations of nature, and it reflects Blake’s idea that “This World is all One continued Vision of Fancy or Imagination” (To Trusler, 23 August 1799, E702), and hence that Jesus, who is Imagination itself, is immanent in it. The depiction of Bartimaeus casting off his garment is, as noted above, a direct illustration of the biblical narrative. The notion of casting off error is also a key idea in Blake’s personal belief system and is a motif that recurs in both textual and visual forms in his works. An early instance is in the annotations to Watson that were quoted from earlier, where Blake asks: “Who does the Bishop call Bad Men[?] Are they the Publicans & Sinners that Christ loved to associate with[?] Does God Love The Righteous according to the Gospel or does he not cast them off[?]” (E619). The concept is most succinctly expressed in Blake’s draft description of a now lost painting, A Vision of the Last Judgment (1810): “All Life consists of these Two: Throwing off Error & Knaves from our company continually & receiving [sic] Truth” (E562). A visual example from a similar period is plate 13 of Blake’s illuminated book Milton, A Poem (c.1804–1811), where a full-page image depicts Milton taking off “the robe of the promise,” representing his “ungird[ing] himself from the oath of God” (14:13). This oath is the Thirty-Nine Articles that defined the beliefs and practices of the Church of England, to which one then had to subscribe for admission to the University of Cambridge.8 The act of Bartimaeus discarding his garment represents his rejection of his blindness—of that which obscures imaginative perception—while his striding and reaching forwards to Christ demonstrates his embracing imaginative vision. The title by which the picture is known, Christ Giving Sight to Bartimaeus, is then, at one level, misleading. It is not an act of Jesus, but the faith of Bartimaeus that effects the giving of sight. However, at another level, Bartimaeus’s sight is restored by his becoming Christ-like, or more precisely, in a model expressed in an aphorism from the so-called Laocoön plate (c.1826–27), by his becoming a member of Jesus’s Divine Body:

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Bartimaeus becomes Christ and so he sees as Christ, with the eyes of Imagination. While the three onlookers in the picture appear to be fairly disinterested and even alarmed at the event, Bartimaeus recognizes the reality that Christ embodies, and through this response Bartimaeus himself enters the Divine Body of Jesus, the Imagination. Thus, the figure of Christ in Blake’s Bartimaeus is both the relatively passive figure of Jesus himself who represents the ontological reality of Imagination, and the youthful Bartimaeus who sees as Christ in his recognition of that actuality. This design reflects a broader trend in Blake’s depictions of Jesus, where he is depicted as a relatively passive figure, whose presence signifies his identity as Imagination, as a universal spiritus immanent in the world and the proper mode of being for humanity—as Imagination, he is that which allows others to be Christ-like. As noted at the start of this chapter, this pictorial trend gives a rather different impression of Blake’s Christ in texts such as The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1790) and later The Everlasting Gospel (c.1818) that emphasize Jesus as a radical prophet and rebel against the establishment, as discussed by Rowland in Chap. 2 of this volume. Blake was not a systematic theorist, and he delighted in contradictions: “Without Contraries is no progression,” as he wrote in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell (E34). Nor, of course, do the Gospels give a uniform account of the personality of Jesus. Blake’s Christ is simultaneously the radical Jesus who “acted from impulse: not from rules” (Marriage of Heaven and Hell, E43), and the gentle Jesus who, for example, told his disciples: “Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven” (Matt. 19:14; cf. Mark 10:14, Luke 18:16) (Blake depicted this episode, which resonated with his own celebration of child-like perception, in another of the biblical temperas, Christ Blessing the Little Children (1799, B419, Tate)). In the description of his Last Judgment painting quoted above, Blake wrote: If the Spectator could Enter into these Images in his Imagination approaching them on the Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought … or could

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make a Friend & Companion of one of these Images of wonder … then would he arise from his Grave then would he meet the Lord in the Air & then he would be happy. (E560)

Blake is here expressing an intensely audience-focused aesthetic, in which his painting invites the viewer to enter imaginatively into the world that it depicts. At the centre of that vision, and the end of the imaginative engagement that Blake describes here, is Christ (the Lord). It is through him and to him that the individual enters “into these Images in his Imagination.” As the viewer is the audience of Blake’s Last Judgment, Bartimaeus is the audience of Jesus’s ministry. As Morris Eaves explains, for Blake, Jesus presents a model for how the artist should engage with his/her audience. Jesus’s public acts such as miracles and parables are his “art,” and their effect is to change the way that the receptive audience sees the world (Eaves 1982, 186–98). Sometimes, Jesus achieved that aim through radical action; on other occasions, he simply allowed others to exemplify the human form divine, such as pointing to children as characterizing the Kingdom of Heaven in the episode mentioned above, and telling Bartimaeus that he is healed by his faith. Blake seeks to achieve the same end through his art; he wants his audience to see the world as “a World of Imagination & Vision” (E702), the perspective that he believes that Jesus embodied. Blake’s is a vision of Christianity that eschews the idea of institutional religion, instead calling for the individual to be like Bartimaeus: to recognize the truth of Christ and to emulate it; to become a member of the Divine Body of Jesus, the Imagination.

Notes 1. Unless stated otherwise, references to Blake’s paintings and drawings are given with the catalogue numbers in the text volume of Butlin’s The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake (1981) and are designated with “B” followed by the catalogue number. The Butlin numbers are also helpful for locating works in the Blake Archive: http://www.blakearchive.org/, Accessed: 25/04/2020, which includes these references in its metadata. The plate numbers for the biblical temperas in the plates volume of Butlin are: 402–03, 485–510, 515–16, 1193. 2. The image can be viewed on the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s website at: http://www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/59861.html, Accessed: 25/04/2020. 3. A third part was published in 1807.

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4. The image can be viewed on the Art UK website at: https://artuk.org/ discover/artworks/christ-at-the-pool-of-bethesda-50409, Accessed: 25/04/2020. 5. “The Divine Image” in Copy F of the Songs can be viewed via the Blake Archive: http://www.blakearchive.org/copy/songsie.f?descId=songsie.f.ill bk.24; other copies can be viewed via the “Objects from the Same Matrix” tab on this webpage. Accessed: 25/04/2020. 6. The plate can be viewed via the Blake Archive: http://www.blakearchive. org/copy/nnr.l?descId=nnr.l.illbk.01, Accessed: 25/04/2020. 7. A copy of Blake’s engraving of this design can be viewed via the John Rylands Library’s online collections: https://luna.manchester.ac.uk/luna/ servlet/s/t54d44, Accessed 25/04/2020. The watercolour design is B330.148 and can be viewed via the British Museum’s online collections: https://research.britishmuseum.org/research/collection_online/collection_object_details.aspx?objectId=7005&partId=1&searchText=butlin+330 (148)&page=1, Accessed: 25/04/2020. 8. This plate, from Copy C of Milton, can be viewed in the New  York Public Library’s Digital Collections at: https://digitalcollections.nypl. org/items/510d47db-b5e7-a3d9-e040-e00a18064a99, Accessed: 25/04/2020.

References Bentley, G. E., Jr. ed. 2004. Blake Records: Documents (1741–1841) Concerning the Life of William Blake (1757–1827) and his Family, 2nd ed. New Haven and London: Published for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art by Yale University Press. Butlin, Martin. 1981. The Paintings and Drawings of William Blake. New Haven and London: Yale University Press for the Paul Mellon Centre for Studies in British Art. 2 Volumes. (References B followed by catalogue number). Eaves, Morris. 1982. William Blake’s Theory of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Graves, Algernon. 1908. The British Institution, 1806–1867: A Complete Dictionary of Contributors and their Work from the Foundation of the Institution. London: G. Bell and Sons and A. Graves. Hume, David. 1748. Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding. London: printed for A. Millar. Paine, Thomas. 1794. The Age of Reason. Being an Investigation of True and Fabulous Theology. Paris and London: printed by Barrois. ———. 1795. The Age of Reason. Part the Second. Being an Investigation of True and of Fabulous Theology. London: printed for H.D. Symonds.

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Paul Mellon Centre. 2018. The Royal Academy Summer Exhibition: A Chronicle, 1769–2018. https://chronicle250.com/. Accessed 22/04/2020. Rossetti, William Michael. 1863. Annotated Catalogue of Blake’s Pictures and Drawings. In Life of William Blake, Alexander Gilchrist, vol. 2/2, 201–255. London: Macmillan and Co. ———. 1880. Annotated Catalogue of Blake’s Pictures and Drawings. In Life of William Blake, New ed., ed. Alexander Gilchrist, vol. 2/2, 205–277. London: Macmillan. Swedenborg, Emanuel. 1781. True Christian Religion; Containing the Universal Theology of the New Church, vol. 2/2. London: sold by J.  Phillips and J. Denis & Son. Watson, Richard. 1797. An Apology for the Bible, in a Series of Letters Addressed to Thomas Paine. London: printed for T. Evans. Wesley, John. 1746. The Principles of a Methodist Farther Explain’d. London: printed by W. Strahan. Young, Edward. 1797. The Complaint, and the Consolation; or, Night Thoughts. London: printed by R. Noble, for R. Edwards.

PART II

Textual and Visual Fragmentation and the Form of the Vortex

CHAPTER 4

Fragmented Images of Christ in Romantic Maritime Poetry Kirsty J. Harris

Partial or fragmented figures of Christ appear frequently in Romantic-­ period maritime poetry. In this chapter, I explore the breakdown of these figures in two shipwreck poems of the early nineteenth century: Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca” (1826) and Percy Bysshe Shelley’s unfinished “A Vision of the Sea” (1820). Shipwreck narrative in poetry of the late eighteenth century often takes the form of a redemption arc, such as Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” (1798), or a conversion story as found in William Cowper’s “The Castaway” (1799). The eponymous mariner in Coleridge’s poem commits a sin, suffers, and is relieved once he remembers to pray for forgiveness, while Cowper’s castaway sailor experiences the overwhelming power of the sea as an allegory for the omnipotence of God. In his work on literary iconography, Images of Crisis, George P.  Landow considers the various paradigms associated with the shipwrecked sailor in some depth, claiming that shipwreck in literature “always possesses a definable, describable structure” ([1982] 2014, 29). This structure is evident in examples such as those from Coleridge

K. J. Harris (*) Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_4

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and Cowper in the 1790s, where “the image of shipwreck that first appears to present the speaker in a Godless universe can, with equal suddenness, be converted into reassurances of divine presence” (26). I offer an alternative analysis of the later poems of the 1820s, arguing that the definable structure that Landow details also becomes fragmented, while the figure of Christ, so often present in shipwreck narratives, is used for purposes other than revelation or salvation.

1   Casabianca as the Figure of Christ Felicia Hemans’s “Casabianca” was first published in August 1826 in The New Monthly Magazine. The poem depicts the death of the boy Giocante de Casabianca, son of Captain Luc-Julien-Joseph de Casabianca of the burning ship Orient after the battle of the Nile in 1798, in memorable ballad form. As I will demonstrate, Hemans builds a symbolic connection between the young boy and the figure of Christ. From Isobel Armstrong’s critique of the “patriarchal imperatives of heroism” (1993, 330) inherent in the poem that were ultimately responsible for young Casabianca’s death to Michael O’Neill’s assertion that “the air is full of a pyrotechnical display at the centre of which is the fragmented body of the son” (2007, 28), Casabianca’s death has been viewed as secondary to some larger sense of didacticism or spectacle in the poem. If this is the case, the boy’s death becomes essentially meaningless: an action that remains secondary to the criticism of heroism that Armstrong argues for, or a breakable component of a grand scene in O’Neill’s analysis. In what follows, I ask what happens to the parallels between the “fragmented” body of the disappearing boy and the salvific figure of the vanishing Christ, if the death of young Casabianca in the poem is read as a pointless act of self-sacrifice. From the opening stanza onward, Casabianca embodies a variety of Christ-like attributes. Hemans immediately portrays him with a halo formed by the fire when “The flame that lit the battle’s wreck / Shone round him” (3–4) and continues to show Casabianca being complicit in a moral behavioural code linked with both nineteenth-century Christian pedagogies and with the figure of Christ himself. The fact that his death is a result of the fact “he would not go / Without his Father’s word” (9–10) gives Casabianca a level of obedience towards figures of authority which would be in line with moral and instructive children’s literature of the period such as Mrs Sherwood’s The Fairchild Family (1818). However, there is a deeper dimension to this obedience when Casabianca is

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considered as representative of the figure of Christ himself. The Gospel of Luke reports that “the child [Jesus] grew, and waxed strong in spirit filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon him” (Luke 2:40), before relaying the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus’s disappearance from the caravan after Passover and his subsequent discovery in the Temple. Just as Casabianca “would not go / Without his Father’s word” (9–10), Jesus says to Mary “How is it that ye sought me? Wist ye not that I must be about my father’s business?” (Luke 2:49). Neither Jesus’s diversion to the Temple at the age of twelve nor Casabianca’s remaining at his post at the age of eleven are acts of rebellion or ignorance of their own safety or the concern they cause to others. Instead, both boys are acting according to their “father’s business” or “word.” Since this is the only incident of Christ’s youth recorded in the Gospels (between his birth and the beginning of his ministry at age thirty), his age is important—at twelve, Jesus was still a year shy of becoming a “man” under Jewish Law. The Gospel’s exactitude on him being twelve years old (Luke 2:42) implies that this lack of official maturity is noteworthy. Similarly, Casabianca’s youth is repeatedly emphasised by Hemans with references to “the boy” (1), his “child-­ like form” (8), and “young faithful heart” (40). Just as Luke’s Gospel points out that despite Jesus being only twelve, “all that heard him [in the Temple] were astonished at his understanding and answers” (Luke 2:47), despite Casabianca’s youth, Hemans also imbues him with a degree of such charisma when she writes how “beautiful and bright he stood, / As born to rule the storm; / A creature of heroic blood” (5–7). Hemans also has Casabianca ask three times for his Father’s permission to leave his duty. This call to the father figure at the point of death is reminiscent of Christ on the Cross. The synoptic gospels depict Christ invoking God before dying: Luke describes Christ’s last words as “Father, into thy hands I commend my spirit” (Luke 23:46), while both Matthew and Mark record Christ “with a loud voice” crying “Eli, Eli, lama sabachthani? that is to say, My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?” (Matt. 27:46; see also Mark 15:34). Therefore, we have three accounts of Christ calling for his Father God at the moment of his death on the Cross, and Hemans has Casabianca call for his father three times too, at his own moment of death on the wooden promontory of his burning ship. The surroundings and cause of death are different but both Christ and Casabianca are held up as exemplary figures for doing their duty, both call out to their father/God in their last moments, and both die suspended on a wooden structure above the world. Casabianca’s “lone post of death”

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(23) becomes a substitute for the Cross in this moment with the duplicate inferences of “post”—the Crucifix as a literal “post” and Casabianca’s naval “post” are both implied in the same sentence. Additionally, Hemans carries the association with the crucified figure of Christ further at the end of “Casabianca,” with line 34: “The boy—oh! where was he?” Christ’s disappearance from the sepulchre after his death— described in the synoptic gospels again with the phrase “he is not here, he is risen”—is echoed here in Casabianca’s disappearance after the fire. In the answer to the presumed question from her readers of “where was he,” Hemans instructs us only to “Ask of the winds” (35). In the Gospels, we are repeatedly told that Christ’s whereabouts at the moment of his disappearance should not be questioned either, being told simply that “he is risen.” Only John includes the scene with Jesus telling Mary Magdalene that “I am not yet ascended to my Father” (John 20:17), which only serves to place him in a liminal realm—neither living on Earth as man, nor yet in Heaven with God. The disappearance of Casabianca plays a similar role in Hemans’s text, with the instruction to “Ask of the winds” for his location mimicking the lack of any concrete answer to the whereabouts of Jesus after leaving the sepulchre. The winds are unable to answer, and the question implies that—like Christ in spirit—Casabianca is everywhere and in everything after death.

2   Fragmentation The crucial difference, of course, is that Giocante de Casabianca did die in 1798, and Hemans’s readers know it. The poem emphasises the finality of Casabianca’s fate despite Hemans neither showing nor explicitly describing it. The combination of her readers’ knowledge of the historical inspiration (supplied in Hemans’s note to the text) and the fact that the poem has a definitive end point does that work for her. Even if we read the poem in the context of Paul’s promise of bodily resurrection for all believers (1 Cor. 15:1–5), the story of Giocante de Casabianca remains as an endnote to the poem reminding readers that, for all his parallels with the figure of Christ, the boy has not yet returned after vanishing in presumed death. As Tricia Lootens explains, since the poem “never fully defuses the horror of the history it evokes,” what remains at the end is all fragmented (1994, 241). As a result of this fragmentation, Casabianca can only ever represent the figure of Christ in the poem, he is not able to embody the role entirely because his human body has not become a resurrected one. Hemans

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suggests an appeal to nature rather than a prayer or lamentation in “Ask of the winds.” Following Casabianca’s thrice-unanswered call to his “Father” this implies a certain loss of reassurance to be found in prayer. Assuming that the boy’s cries are prayerful as well as dutiful, that “Father” refers to God as much as the dead paternal figure of Luc-Julien-Joseph below deck. God’s failure to respond to the boy’s cry, Hemans suggests, leaves us turning to nature and the elements for the answers to our questions instead. This loss or lack of hope is also intertwined with the finality of the poem’s ending. Paradoxically, its completion is the key to its hopelessness. The shipwreck of the soul, when there is no more evidence of divinity or Godly benevolence after the loss of the figure of Christ, is what Hemans leaves us with at the end of “Casabianca” when “the noblest thing which perished there / Was that young faithful heart” (39–40). Giocante de Casabianca is the human figure of Christ before the resurrection in the poem but he is not made Messianic. The resolution of the text and its footnote leaves no space for a resurrection, and there is no notion of apocalypse in the scene of shipwreck which Hemans offers either. Something has been destroyed, but nothing has been reborn. In the boy Casabianca, Hemans offers readers a glimpse of the figure of Christ. However, she ends the poem with him adrift in that liminal space between tomb and paradise: an unfinished journey which cannot now be finished because the textual door has been closed. Fragmentation, on the other hand, allows scope for the liminal space to remain open, as we see in Shelley’s unfinished 1820 poem, “A Vision of the Sea.” Marjorie Levinson describes a fragmented poem as one “whose irresolution invites assimilation as a formal directive and this functions as a semantic determinant” (1986, 14), and I follow Levinson’s understanding of fragmented poems as a critical method wherein form can reflect subject. I understand her “semantic determinant” as the dialogue between text and reader, and my investigation into fragmentation asks what happens to that discourse when it is interrupted by textual fragmentation, such as in this case with Shelley’s poem. “A Vision of the Sea” is an unfinished, fragmented text which was published in 1820 with Shelley’s long political poem Prometheus Unbound. Unlike “Casabianca,” the shipwreck in “A Vision” is fictional. Prometheus Unbound and its revolutionary connotations have been studied extensively by Shelley scholars, while “A Vision of the Sea” has received fewer critical appraisals, in spite of it containing many of the same allusions to ideas of revolution being crucial to an act of

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regeneration. Such allusions are complicit in the poem’s representation of the figure of Christ. The poem is full of references to the Bible, from the eight uses of the word “Heaven,” to allusions to passages from Genesis and Exodus, and to Shelley’s continual references to Revelation. Even the landscape of the poem provides an image of earthly, manmade religious structures and institutions being stripped away to reveal a pure faith left without the trappings of organised religion. Shelley fragments a physical concept of faith in 1820 as storm clouds come to represent the church, reaching “to Heaven upcurled” (108) as spires and steeples reach up to God. At the same time, they are encircling and maintaining the central destructive force of the storm—“Like columns and walls did surround and sustain / The dome of the tempest” (109–10)—implying that these structures of faith are in fact brewing and attempting (but failing) to restrain their own destruction. Instead of the “columns and walls” of a place of worship being consecrated to God, it is the storm itself that caps them with a “dome” in this meteorological structure of power. Shelley then brings the metaphorical institution down from within, when: The dense clouds in many a ruin or rag Like the stones of a temple ere earthquake has passed, Like the dust of its fall on the whirlwind are cast; They are scattered like foam on the torrent. (112–15)

In the phrase “the dust of its fall” Shelley not only imagines the fall of the church, he also alludes to the fallen angels in John Milton’s Paradise Lost (1667). Milton’s recurrent whirlwind that “overwhelm’d” the rebellion and trapped them “under yon boiling ocean” is replicated here (I.76, II.183). Where Milton’s Satan and his followers found themselves in an empty space “sublimed with mineral fury” (I.235), in “A Vision” Shelley has the “dust” and the “scattered” temple stones working to echo that place (114–15). Whereas for Milton’s Satan “the fiery surge / from the precipice of heaven received us falling” (I.173–74), there is nothing to receive what is fallen in “A Vision” but “the torrent” (115). The protective walls of the metaphorical church are brought down by the very force they were containing, symbolising Shelley’s idea that the institution of the church is capable of causing its own fragmentation and subsequent downfall and giving the tempest in “A Vision of the Sea” the eschatological power that the destruction in “Casabianca” lacked.

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3   Baptism and the Eschatological Figure of Christ Following the imagery of destruction, Shelley describes the dawn after the tempest with language that is full of openings: “The wind has burst out” and the “sunrise flow[s] in” (116–17). There is a “gate” (119) and a “breach” (121); morning is “unimpeded” (118). This is a passage of “encounter” and “widening” aspects (120, 121). “The caverns of cloud” which previously represented the corrupt church are “torn up” by the new day (122), showing the rebirth of the world, Genesis after the flood, destroying the remains of the old regime. When Scott McEathron points out that Shelley gives his characters in “A Vision” no history which, he argues, subsequently “removes ontological culpability and with it the suggestion of original sin,” he does not consider the layers of cleansing present in the text; nor the references to baptism by water and by spiritual rebirth, all of which imply a history even if it remains untold (1994, 179). Baptism, of course, serves as an act of regeneration, a concept of cleansing, and a forging of identity. Rather than a ritual washing with water, Paul teaches that to be baptised is to belong spiritually to the body of Christ by being identified in his death and resurrection (Rom. 6:3–5). While the child in “A Vision” does undergo baptism by water as well when it is washed by the “lashing rain” (98) and the “mountainous vale of the wave” (96) because this occurs during the apocalyptic storm it also functions as the apostolic doctrine regarding baptism by the Holy Spirit. Paul implies baptism is first the initiation, that “we were buried with him by baptism into death” (Rom. 6:4), however, the consummation of being baptised into the resurrection of Christ will occur with Revelation. Shelley moves into Revelation with the eschatological world in the poem. Because his figure of Christ survives the storm and the wreck, the Kingdom of Heaven remains “at hand” as it does in the synoptic gospels owing to the physical presence of the King in the person of Jesus (Matt. 3:2). Even the title of Shelley’s poem, “A Vision of the Sea” makes reference to the “last days” since Peter tells us in Acts, quoting Joel before him, when describing the “great and notable day of the Lord” that “saith God, I will pour out of my Spirit upon all flesh: and your sons and your daughters shall prophesy, and your young men shall see visions” (Acts 2:17–20). As Jesus indicates that his return will occur when the human race is destroyed (Matt. 24:22), the fact that the poem’s child figure of Christ is

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the only survivor of the shipwreck implies that the storm is also representative of the “last days,” having destroyed the rest of the human race on board. While McEathron is correct in identifying the lack of history given to the characters in the text, this connection to the Kingdom of Heaven along with the layers of baptismal inference suggest that—at least for the surviving child—the need for ontological culpability has been left behind after spiritual rebirth. In this aspect, Shelley’s symbolism is more clearly defined than Hemans’s, culminating in images of hope and peace in the newborn Kingdom, while the fragmentary nature of the text in its unfinished state parallels the ambivalence with which the scriptures speak of the “nearness” of the Kingdom (Matt. 24.36). Conversely, in “Casabianca” we do not experience any calm after the storm and the poem ends not only with a decisive final stanza but an explanatory footnote so that Hemans’s readers are left in limbo with the absence of Christ as the boy Casabianca vanishes. Shelley’s readers of “A Vision” are allowed to move into the moment of resurrection, which takes the poem a step further in a Christian paradigm. In discussing the politically antagonistic Prometheus Unbound with which “A Vision of the Sea” was first published, Bryan Shelley explains that: The state of spiritual rebirth in the New Testament points back to the flood story, in which safe passage through the waters of death was guaranteed by the hand of God. In the New Testament the ark’s survival of the great flood is a picture of baptism, of rising from the waters of death—symbolic of the old sinful nature—into the new life made possible through the resurrection of Christ. (1994, 98)

“A Vision” contains the same image. If “the ark’s survival of the great flood is a picture of baptism,” so is the child’s survival of the storm and shipwreck. Bryan Shelley’s choice of words—“rising from the waters of death”—mimics the “one fragment alone … Of the wreck of the vessel,” which “peers out of the sea” at the end of “A Vision” (157–59), with the woman and child clinging. Once more, the child represents the figure of Christ. The storm is the baptismal water, the old world of the ship is destroyed, and the “clear surface” (131) of a “wide world of waters” (135) remains as “the beams of the sunrise flow in” (117). When the storm first begins to calm, the image of the cross becomes visible as a sailor is “pierced through his breast and his back” with an “oak-­ splinter” (64), which literally creates the shape of the cross as well as

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symbolically being a man who dies when strung up on a piece of wood. Shelley alludes to the crucifixion at the same time as depicting the newborn Christ—thus encompassing both the extremes of Christ’s life: the hope and glory of the infant Messiah, and the hope and glory of the Passion all at once. The entire scene contains a collection of hints towards resurrection, and subsequently salvation. The figure of the newborn Christ works with the baptismal waters of the storm to cleanse the world, while the figure of the crucified Christ symbolises the salvation from sin and the chance for rebirth. As a result, Shelley represents Revelation in “A Vision of the Sea” by providing an image of both “the beginning and the end,” as opposed to Hemans’s lack of resolution in “Casabianca.” Where her focus was on the forsaken self with the loss of the child and therefore the figure of Christ in the text, Shelley’s concern is for the potential for growth in the aftermath of destruction. He moves the story onward whereas Hemans cuts it short.

4   The Kingdom of Heaven While eschatological, Shelley also takes a philosophical approach to this building of the Kingdom of Heaven on Earth by encouraging continual regeneration in “A Vision,” a constant cycle of revolution, which is more in keeping with his self-proclaimed atheism and the principles of the revolutionary sublime (cf. Duffy 2005). This concept of a world continually being rebuilt reflects his belief in William Godwin’s principle of mankind’s perfectibility. In his Inquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), Godwin asserts that “the idea of absolute perfection is scarcely within the grasp of human understanding,” yet he also argues that “if we could arrive at perfection, there would be an end to our improvement” (1976, 145). This suggests the same circular, continual regeneration which Shelley advocates in “A Vision.” “Man is perfectible,” Godwin explains, but his perfectibility is endless, altering with the world around him (144). For Shelley, perfectibility is an ongoing process modelled by Nature, and in “A Vision” this becomes manifest in the child survivor “yet smiling and playing” during what may be its last moments of life (166). This child is “not merely an unknowing victim of disaster, but an example of the awareness of good that it is possible to seek even in the present,” as Carl H. Ketcham points out (1978, 57). Christ as the redeemer was a symbol of mankind’s perfectibility for Shelley, who praised “the profound wisdom and the comprehensive morality of his doctrines,” in his Essay on Christianity, another

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fragment from 1819 (Clark 1954, 198). It is significant that the child not only survives the shipwreck in “A Vision” but that it is the last creature cited before the fragment breaks off. Bernard Beatty comments: The Bible ends with an image of marriage. The image of the marriage feast is the most important of all images of the coming kingdom of heaven. But neither marriage nor feast, both of which suggest realisation, can be final images for Shelley. That lies with the child and with potentiality as the final fact. (2009, 454)

In “A Vision,” the hope for the regenerated world which Beatty identifies here as the “coming of the kingdom of heaven” rests with this innocent infant, following a poetic tradition of responses to the Nativity, such as Milton’s hymn in his poem On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity in 1629: The winds with wonder whist, Smoothly the waters kist, Whispering new joys to the mild Ocean, Who now hath quite forgot to rave, While birds of calm sit brooding on the charmed wave. (4–8)

The sea becomes allegorical for both Milton here and Shelley in “A Vision,” where the water which caused the rebirth reflects the child’s contentment: “like a sister and brother / The child and the ocean still smile on each other” before the fragment finishes (167–68). Where Hemans ends “Casabianca” with questions aimed at the natural world in the fresh absence of the figure of Christ, Shelley turns the power of the natural world directly on to his figure of Christ. He grants the child the same power as the ocean: having described it smiling, he then states that “so smiled / The false deep ere the storm” (166–67). The power to recreate the world which the storm possessed is therefore found anew in the child which it left alive. Shelley describes how “the heaped waves behold / The deep calm of blue Heaven dilating above” (128–29), Heaven itself expanding to include this reformed world; literally becoming Heaven on Earth. For Shelley, then, Heaven is a symbol of beauty and purity; a promise of something better to come in life rather than after death. By having his figure of Christ be an unidentified human child, nameless and therefore

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potentially anybody, rather than an indication of divinity witnessed by or resident in an identified character, Shelley makes the post-tempest regeneration a human possibility. Because “Casabianca” describes a real historical event, Hemans’s allegorical figure of Christ must fall short of the biblical purpose and value of Christ. Shelley’s “A Vision,” on the other hand, being fictional, has scope to include more of the hope and promise of salvation found in the figure of Christ—in the same way as the fictional shipwrecks of Coleridge and Cowper allowed them to present pious or sanctimonious messages about repentance, prayer, and atonement. Shelley uses the same techniques in “A Vision” but presents an eschatological message which is more fitting with his own views on the person and teachings of Christ. Like Coleridge and Cowper, his poem comes closer to the Paleyan or Butlerian style, which Boyd Hilton describes as showing “natural disaster as analogous to cruelties of scriptural Christianity” (Hilton 1986, 176). Hilton points to the “necessary and purgative retribution on society” seen in natural disaster by early- to mid-nineteenth-century thinkers, yet these Romantic writers show how the same scenes of destruction may instead be illustrative of positive Christian elements of change such as conversion or revelation (375). Rather than encouraging faith through the implication that catastrophe is evidence of God’s plan and the only hope for salvation is found in the Atoning act of Christ, poets like Shelley use catastrophe as an impetus to regeneration and new hope on a wider communal scale, despite writing in the middle of what Hilton identifies as the “Age of Atonement.” The works of Romantic writers were already critical of the Atonement model before the mid-nineteenth-century shift to which Hilton points. Even “Casabianca,” while remaining caught up in the actuality of shipwreck and the absence of Christian hope or humanity which Hemans sees in scenes of war, offers a critical view of the Atonement. If the boy Casabianca is the figure of Christ, then Hemans is painting a picture of a world where Christ’s sacrifice, his “duty,” was not enough: he is gone from the tomb and there is no hope of resurrection. Christ-as-Casabianca remains a representative of the human figure of Christ, and his death is less a pointless act of suicide than a symbol of lost Christian humanity during war time. Hemans’s Christ figure continually seeks God the Father and yet ends in tragedy, whereas Shelley shows a Christ figure that is divorced from any desire for paternal or theistic reassurance and presents a positive image of hope for apocalyptic reform. Although Hemans is more engaged with the idea of the Atonement than Shelley’s poem, “Casabianca” still

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questions the idea of personal sacrifice and thereby suggests a futility in the concept of Atonement itself. Hilton mentions evangelical “virtues of suffering and restraint” (1986, 374), but there is no sense of Casabianca’s death being a “virtue” of suffering in the poem. It is simply tragic. Shelley’s vision works because his text is fragmented, which allows his figure of Christ to remain whole and the regenerated world to maintain the mystery surrounding the “last days.” Because Hemans’s world is our reality she fragments instead the figure of Christ itself, since she cannot give Giocante de Casabianca divine attributes such as grace or eternal life, and the world at the end of “Casabianca” feels hopeless—the boy’s unanswered calls to his father (or the Father) echoing and emphasising a futility of inactive faith that prayer will eventually be answered. Hemans uses the vanishing figure of Christ in “Casabianca” to illustrate the loss of faith in scenes of war, while Shelley suggests an eschatological scene with a Christ figure at its centre embodying hope for a reformed world. However, the message at the heart of both texts is the same: that in order to see a better future, mankind must stop seeking out the numinous and accept instead the humanity and hope of the figure of Christ.

References Armstrong, Isobel. 1993. Victorian Poetry: Poetry, Poetics, and Politics. London and New York: Routledge. Beatty, Bernard. 2009. P.B. Shelley. In The Blackwell Companion to the Bible in English Literature, ed. Rebecca Lemon, Emma Mason, Jonathan Roberts, and Christopher Rowland, 451–461. United Kingdom: Blackwell Publishing Ltd. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. (1798) 1996. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In Selected Poems, ed. Richard Holmes, 81–200. London: Harper Collins Publishers. Cowper, William. (1799) 1810. Poems by William Cowper, Esq, of the Inner Temple, vol. 3. Baltimore: P.H. Nicklin & Co. Duffy, Cian. 2005. Shelley and the Revolutionary Sublime. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Godwin, William. (1793) 1976. Enquiry Concerning Political Justice. London: Penguin. Hemans, Felicia. (1826) 1872. The Poems of Felicia Hemans. Edinburgh and London: Blackwood & Sons. Hilton, Boyd. 1986. The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought 1785–1865. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Ketcham, Carl H. 1978. Shelley’s A Vision of the Sea. Studies in Romanticism 17: 51–60. https://doi.org/10.2307/25600114. Landow, George P. (1982) 2014. Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present. Oxford and New York: Routledge. Levinson, Marjorie. 1986. The Romantic Fragment Poem: A Critique of a Form. Chapel Hill and London: University of North Carolina Press. Lootens, Tricia. 1994. Hemans and Home: Victorianism, Feminine “Internal Enemies,” and the Domestication of National Identity. PMLA 109 (2): 238–253. https://www.jstor.org/stable/463119. McEathron, Scott. 1994. Death as “Refuge and Ruin”: Shelley’s A Vision of the Sea and Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Keats-Shelley Journal (XLIII): 170–192. http://www.jstor.org/stable/30210474. Milton, John. (1629) 1866. On the Morning of Christ’s Nativity. In Milton’s Paradise Regained and Other Poems, vol. 78. Boston: Ticknor & Fields. ———. (1667) 2004. Paradise Lost. Ed. Stephen Orgel and Jonathan Goldberg. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Neill, Michael. 2007. The All-Sustaining Air: Romantic Legacies and Renewals in British, American, and Irish Poetry Since 1900. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shelley, Percy Bysshe. (1819) 1954. Essay on Christianity. In Shelley’s Prose, or, The Trumpet of a Prophecy, ed. David Lee Clark. 196–214. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press. ———. (1820) 1970. Complete Poetical Works. Ed. Thomas Hutchinson. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Shelley, Bryan. 1994. Shelley and Scripture. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

CHAPTER 5

Milton’s Christ and Passive Power in Melville and Turner Laura Fox Gill

Much has been said about the influence of John Milton and J.M.W. Turner on Herman Melville. Melville alluded to and annotated Milton intensively, and noted in the front of his copy of Beale’s Natural History of the Sperm Whale that “Turner’s pictures of whalers were suggested by this book.” Turner also illustrated Paradise Lost and appended Milton’s poetry to his paintings. Previously, these lines of influence have been followed separately; in this chapter, thinking about these figures together allows for a new articulation of the relationship between Turner and Milton, an extension of our understanding of Milton’s influence on mid-nineteenth-­ century culture, and an acknowledgement of conceptual connections between Milton, Turner, and Melville which cross boundaries of period, nationality, and genre. My reading is concerned with a particularly spatial construction of power and energy: these writers and artists convey a shared concern with a dynamic system of “passive power” which bears relation to a broader

L. F. Gill (*) University of Lincoln, Lincoln, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_5

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Christian heroism. Critics have noted the centrality of weakness or refusal to Milton’s poetry, and I argue that not only is this powerful passivity also key to the work of Melville and Turner, but it can be understood in common visual terms as a vortex. This vortex consists of an actively passive centre around which an external other revolves, over which the passive centre has power. For Milton, Turner, and Melville, the vortex is, in Robert K.  Wallace’s words, both a shared “structure of psychic experience” (1992, 13) and a shared structure for portraying power. At the centre of these visual and textual vortices is the figure of Christ. In what follows, I identify forms of the vortex in the work of Milton, Turner, and Melville before considering Miltonic “passive power” as a vortical form of active inaction that generates power over an external other, addressing demonstrations of affinity with Miltonic passivity in Melville’s marginalia. I then turn to instances of passivity in Melville’s fiction, arguing that the refusal to work that is at the centre of Melville’s 1853 story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” and the violent silence of Moby Dick both demonstrate an engagement with Milton. Melville’s texts illustrate the maddening effect that passivity has on the revolving other—on the narrator, the critic, and Ahab—mirroring Satan’s frustrated circular oscillation around Jesus in Milton’s Paradise Regained. Lastly, I address the mythological margins of Turner’s vortical paintings, in which Turner imbues himself with a Miltonic powerful passivity.

1   The Vortex Wallace argues that Melville and Turner “each eventually found the vortex to be the deep structure of his own psychic experience” (1992, 13); in Moby-Dick (1851) the vortex “helps Ishmael to open up the invisible psychic spheres as well as the visible liquid ones” (567). Critics have identified the dynamic geometry of the vortex as central to Melville’s writing from the early works onwards. Wallace writes that “whirlpools and vortices—at once aquatic, psychic, and indistinct—whirl through [the waters in Mardi] to the very end” (91). Forms of the vortex appear as early as Omoo (1847), in which “eddies were whirling upon all sides” and (during a whale hunt) “nothing was seen but a red whirlpool of blood and brine” (Melville 2007, 31, 78). A vortex marks the end of Moby-Dick: “concentric circles seized the lone boat itself, and all its crew, and each floating oar, and every lancepole, and spinning, animate and inanimate, all round and round in one vortex, carried the smallest chip of the Pequod out of sight” (Melville

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2013, 623). The vortex is undoubtedly also a visual signature for Turner, as many of his works depict elemental, vortical turmoil. To illustrate the overlap of these vortices, we might append the line from Omoo quoted above—“a red whirlpool of blood and brine”—to Turner’s A Harpooned Whale (1845) from the Ambleteuse and Wimereux sketchbook (Fig. 5.1). Here, the eye follows Turner’s curved lines from the faint outline of a ship and whale’s flukes into a swirling mass of bright red, an off-­centre nucleus, from which circular ripple-like brush strokes emanate outwards. In Turner’s Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (exh. 1842) the mixed elements of water, air, clouds, and steam twist inwards in a circular motion to the boat at its centre (Fig.  5.2): as Wallace comments, “the pitch of the sea, the whirl of the snow, the flares from the boat, and the smoke of its stack are all caught up in one swirling vortex of storm” (1992, 63). I want to extend the attribution of this shared aesthetic-psychical investment to Milton, in whose poetry the vortex appears in several guises. Christopher Ricks notes the recurring whirlwind in Paradise Lost, which is “always one of the torments that pursue the fallen angels” (1963, 44). Satan’s host are “o’erwhelmed / With floods and whirlwinds of tempestuous fire” ([1667/1674] 2007b, I.76–77); they are “the sport and prey / Of racking whirlwinds, or for ever sunk / Under yon boiling ocean, wrapped in chains” (II.181–83). Christ on his chariot, rushing towards them on the third day of battle in heaven, “forth rushed with whirlwind sound” (VI.749). In all of these instances, the whirlwind is associated with a power that draws the edges into an engagement with the centre. Fig. 5.1  Joseph Mallord William Turner, A Harpooned Whale (1845). From Ambleteuse and Wimereux Sketchbook [Finberg CCLVII]. © Tate, London 2018. 238 × 336 mm. Graphite and watercolour on paper

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Fig. 5.2  Joseph Mallord William Turner, Snow Storm: Steam-boat off a Harbour’s Mouth (1842). © Tate, London 2018. 914 × 1219 mm. Oil paint on canvas

There are both classical and biblical sources for Milton’s whirlwinds: Alistair Fowler notes that the “racking whirlwinds” (II.182) recall Virgil’s Aeneid, in which “to punish Ajax’ frenzy, Pallas ‘caught him in a whirlwind and impaled him on a spiky crag’” (Milton 2007b, 118); Christ rushing “forth … with whirlwind sound” can be read as a typological fulfilment of Elijah (2 Kings 2:11: “behold, there appeared a chariot of fire, and horses of fire, and parted them both asunder, and Elijah went up by a whirlwind into heaven”). The Bible is obviously a primary source for both Milton and Melville. The book of Job provides one of the strongest biblical parallels for Moby-Dick, particularly the “whirlwind poem” (Job 38–41) or, as Ishmael describes it, “The awful tauntings in Job” (Melville [1851] 2013, 147). Ilana Pardes, who reads Melville’s writing as part of a lifelong aesthetic-hermeneutic endeavour, suggests that “[i]f Melville were asked to single out the most sublime moment in Job he undoubtedly would have pointed to the whirlwind poem” (2008, 23). I argue that vortical passive power as outlined below is a particularly Miltonic formulation, but it should also be considered as part of Milton’s exegetical project, and subsequently Melville’s and Turner’s engagement with Miltonic vortical passivity is also partly a response to the Bible. It is not simply the whirlwind, nor the vortex, that links Melville to Turner to Milton; it is more specifically the vortex as a structure of power. In a study of William Faulkner, Marilyn R. Chandler repeatedly returns to the vortex as involving an empty space that draws narrative action inwards. The action she identifies “is centripetal: a ‘round orifice in nothingness’

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becomes a magnetic force. … all action is reaction—a response to the negative or lack” (1987, 120). Chandler writes: The compelling absence is, ultimately, an invitation to death: a maelstrom drawing those at its edges into oblivion, sucking them into an ever-­narrowing circle. We see them circling: much of the action moves round and round … pointlessly encircling the thing that is not there in an effort either to escape or to break the pattern. (122)

“The thing that is not there” in this chapter is action—of Milton’s Son, Melville’s Bartleby, and on Turner himself. This “compelling absence” results in an “encircling” of the “compelling absence” by the agents or causes that stand in relation to these actively inactive beings. This absence of action is magnetic and draws the action of others towards it and against it. The visual and textual effects and manifestations of this vortical powerful passivity, and their relation to the figure of Christ, will become clearer below.

2   Passive Power Erik Gray has explored what he calls “the Might of Weakness” in Anthony Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire novels and Matthew Arnold’s poetry, suggesting that “Trollope’s narrative imitates Milton most closely in its fascination with this paradox: that the way to achieve power is to refuse it,” and Arnold’s writing often “depends upon the idea that the best policy is to stand and wait, or even to withdraw” (2009, 62–63). The phrase comes from Milton’s lines from Paradise Regained: “His weakness shall o’ercome Satanic strength / And all the world” ([1671] 2007a, I.161–62). This Miltonic principle of power in weakness, as Gray notes, is earlier identified by Stanley Fish who, in Surprised by Sin, discusses how “the reader comes to understand heroism by repeatedly adjusting his idea of what makes one hero heroic” (1967, 184). Both recognize that Christian heroism “more often requires one to stand still than take action” and that “to do nothing—or rather, to do one thing (be obedient), which usually means to stand and wait, or to sit in order serviceable … is the key to everything” for Milton (Gray 2009, 64). This passivity must result from intention to not act, or to refuse, or to stay silent. It is, as Gray puts it, “active nonparticipation” (2009, 83). I suggest that one way in which this

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passivity in Melville and Turner can be usefully identified as Miltonic, rather than more broadly Christian, lies in its vortical form. Milton’s heroes conquer their enemies not in combat, but through resistance and refusal: The Lady in Comus repeatedly refuses to drink and “Samson’s early career [is] a demonstration of the futility of direct fight” (Gray 2009, 72). Even the Son’s heroic defeat of the rebels in Paradise Lost can be read as an example of powerful passivity, as Melville’s annotations to the poem highlight. Melville notes the Son’s restraint in this moment of violence, marking the following with a double line: “Yet half his strength he put not forth, but checked / His thunder in mid-volley, for he meant / Not to destroy, but root them out of heaven” (2007b, VI.853–55). This comes directly after the rebel angels are described as “drained / Exhausted, spiritless” (VI.851–52), so that their involuntary loss of strength is juxtaposed with the Son’s intentional reduction of his own. These recurring instances of refusal peak with the representation of Jesus’s resistance of Satan’s temptations in Paradise Regained, “a nearly plotless poem consisting of a series of refusals but ending, nevertheless, with triumph” (Gray 2009, 62). This series of refusals draws its structure from the Gospels, but as I will discuss below, in rewriting the biblical narrative, Milton emphasizes Jesus’s immovability and details the effect this has on Satan. The power in Miltonic passivity does not always align with goodness and for Milton “self-destruction is a sin,” while “winning by weakness … is an attribute as much of the evil characters as the good” (Gray 2009, 73). Gray notes that Milton addresses “the difficulties attendant upon weakness” as well as its virtues (73). This highlights a useful distinction in Melville’s and Turner’s engagement with the Miltonic: the replication of Christ in Bartleby and the whale does not recreate his goodness, but his power; the sublime power of Turner’s seascapes is secular. Thus, passive power, irrespective of Christian goodness, is strength characterized by weakness that results from an active refusal held in relation to an external force.

3   Melville’s Miltonic Passivity Two types of text testify to Milton’s influence on Melville: Melville’s early works and his annotated editions of Milton’s poetry. Melville’s early works (Typee, Omoo, Mardi) all attempt in some way to return or connect to a prelapsarian human existence, and Eden haunts these sea-stories—for

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example, the South Sea island Typee is a fragile Paradise, and as Leslie Sheldon writes, though the protagonist—“Western man”—“might seem worlds apart from a voyaging demon bent on the ruination of a primeval Garden,” he “is nevertheless accompanied by Satanic echoes” (1980, 175–76). Unsurprisingly, it is Moby-Dick that has drawn the most attention in terms of Milton’s influence—specifically Paradise Lost. Critics have repeatedly aligned Ahab with Satan and the white whale with Christ; Ahab and Satan are both trapped in a fight with an inevitably pre-determined victor: “Vindicating his pride against almightiness, Lucifer is overthrown but unsubdued; by vindicating his perverted spirit against a malignity not less perverse, Ahab is slain by the White Whale” (Freeman 1926, 116–17). Sheldon draws our attention to one of the most interesting moments of parallel passivity in Moby-Dick, when a rope-ladder is thrown down to Ahab so he may climb aboard the Samuel Enderby. The peg-legged Ahab encounters his own incapability in this scene, which replicates the image in Paradise Lost of Satan lingering at the bottom of the “towering, insurmountable ladder” to Heaven (Sheldon 2002, 36). Sheldon writes that Ahab—like Satan—confronts a “tantalizing ladder … which insults his pride, tempts him with succor almost within reach, and yet reminds him of his physical and spiritual loss” (36). Both moments of physical immobility are witnessed from above: two mariners look down upon Ahab from the deck; Satan is watched by God and the Son. This moment illustrates the distinction between inactive and active passivity, as although both scenes depict an almost palpable passivity, inaction is forced by circumstance or higher power: this passivity is not self-imposed. Despite the fact that their physical incapacity results directly from their own actions—Ahab is immobilized because of his obsession with the white whale and Satan is unable to climb to heaven because he has been cast out by the Son—it involves no embrace of passivity. Annotations in Melville’s copy of Milton record his interest in a complex passivity. Of particular interest is a checkmark next to the final line from Milton’s Sonnet 19: “They also serve who only stand and wait” (ll. 7–14) (Grey 2004, 204). This is Milton’s declaration, in the voice of Patience, that though he is unable to actively serve God, there is great value placed in his inaction. Melville’s simple annotation supports the view at the centre of this chapter, that he felt affinity with Miltonic active passivity. Contrary conclusions have been drawn from addressing Melville’s marginalia: Robin Grey writes on Melville’s annotations of Paradise Regained that “clearly, Melville disagreed with, even despised, the choices of the Son in rejecting

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[Satan’s] temptations” (2004, XXV). Grey suggests that Melville found Satan’s alternative paths to salvation attractive and that the possibility of an active rather than passive Son of God appealed to him. Grey’s reading is based on these extant fragments from Melville’s annotations: Who can read … w … g … without … discerning / What Milton … this time … there seems … of the … no Paradise / Regained. Essentially ^ it is little more than a … of the Gospels. His … grand … there and of his … Left but some proper names. Subjects that mainly constitute … Lost … J. M. and enough. (Grey 2004, XXIV)

Grey’s interpretation, that Melville thought Paradise Regained offered “only an inadequately reworked version of the Gospels” (XXIV), finds fair basis in this disordered segment of text, but I argue that Melville’s response to Jesus’s (in)action is more ambiguous. There is enough consistency in Melville’s marks to suggest a lasting interest in Milton’s representations of strength and weakness. Melville’s marking of the line “They also serve who only stand and wait” seems to be an uncomplicated instance of his tendency to mark “passages that were meaningful for him in his work as an author” (Robillard 2002, 113). The strength of this simple checkmark is further solidified by Melville’s translation of “passive power” into Bartleby’s repeated sentiment “I would prefer not to.” As Gray writes that “God always works by relinquishing his power” and, paraphrasing Fish, that “Milton works by apparently refusing to work” (2009, 64), Bartleby gains power by relinquishing his work. Christopher Kendrick observes that “Bartleby” is, at least in part, a retelling of Paradise Regained “as an allegory of capitalism” (2008, 903), writing that “Bartleby is like Milton’s Jesus, fasting and saving, one gathers, for an uncertain future, holding to his vocation even as he discovers it, a vocation of this world that consists in resisting the world” (916). Kendrick aligns Melville’s narrator with Milton’s fallen Satan, as he is the figure whose temptations Bartleby resists. Kendrick’s commentary on “Bartleby” and Paradise Regained also maps onto Moby-Dick: each pair—the narrator and the scrivener, Satan and the Son, Ahab and the white whale—“are interchangeable somehow, both monsters, both riddles” (919). This plays upon a mixture of identification and difference in which the shared differentiating factor is passivity: one tempts, or acts; the other refuses, is passive. The text of “Bartleby” is rich both with connections to Paradise Regained and the Bible (for early work interpreting Bartleby as Christ, see

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Franklin 1963 and Fiene 1970). More generally, the text is imbued with the power of Bartleby’s physical passivity. He is relentlessly motionless and is first described as “a motionless young” who simply appears at the door one morning, “the door being open” (Melville [1853] 2009, 10). Bartleby’s limited language and corporeal stillness are contagious. Bartleby’s colleagues and the narrator are affected and infected by his maddening refusals—“Bartlebian passivity leaves its mark on everything it touches,” as Peggy Kamuf writes (2012, 34). Paralysis or enforced silence is the form that Bartleby’s power over the other takes. There are moments like this littered through the tale with increasing regularity as the narrator and his workers are contaminated. The narrator recognizes this and is struck by fear at the sudden infiltration of the word “prefer” into everyone’s vocabulary: “I trembled to think that my contact with the scrivener had already and seriously affected me” ([1853] 2009, 24). Bartleby’s effect on the other characters is important: he remains stationary, while they whirl and oscillate around him. After Bartleby’s first declaration that he “would prefer not to,” the narrator “sat awhile in perfect silence, rallying [his] stunned faculties” (12). When Bartleby next repeats the phrase, the narrator is found “rising in high excitement, and crossing the room with a stride,” and when the event is repeated days later, he states that “for a few moments I was turned into a pillar of salt”— like Lot’s wife (12–13). Bartleby keeps the narrator in a vortical spin, fluctuating between “high excitement” and immobility. Andrew Knighton writes that “the attorney is drawn into a vortex of uncertainty and fear [where] he equivocates between hostility and sympathy” (2007, 193). Gilles Deleuze suggests that Bartleby “can survive only by whirling in a suspense that keeps everyone at a distance” (1997, 71); I argue it forces them away at the same time as drawing them in. In what follows, I will show how this mimics the structure of Milton’s Paradise Regained. The response “I would prefer not to” is practically impossible to respond to. As J. Hillis Miller writes, “There is nothing you can do with it. It is like an endless loop in a process of reasoning” (1990, 156). The circle returns and we (narrator and readers alike) are kept in an “endless loop.” This infectious lack of vocal control mirrors the way in which Melville’s whale renders its “audience” speechless. Despite the white whale’s violence, he is mute. Melville asks “Has the Sperm Whale ever written a book, spoken a speech? No, his great genius is declared in his pyramidical silence” (2013, 380). This dualism comes to the fore when Ishmael describes the sight of a tormented (and voiceless) whale:

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[T]he fear of this vast dumb brute of the sea, was chained up and enchanted in him; he had no voice, save that choking respiration through his spiracle, and this made the sight of him unspeakably pitiable; while still, in his amazing bulk, portcullis jaw, and omnipotent tail, there was enough to appal the stoutest man who so pitied. (388)

Melville’s whale does not speak, and yet maintains its power and ability to “appal the stoutest man.” In fact, the terror of the whale in pain is so much as to transfer this denial of language to the audience, as “the sight of him” was “unspeakably pitiable.” Silence is enforced upon the viewer. It is in his silence—in addition to his whiteness and sublimity—that Moby Dick resembles Milton’s Christ. In contrast with Satan’s extensive rhetoric in Paradise Lost, important moments of the Son’s speech in the same text are often silent or simple: conversation between God and the Son is barely extended from the text of Genesis chapter: verse. After the speech in which he volunteers to sacrifice himself for mankind, the message flows beyond his words: “His words here ended, but his meek aspect / Silent yet spake, and breathed immortal love / To mortal men” ([1667/1674] 2007b, III.266–68). The Son is the quiet centre of Paradise Lost. Paradise Regained affirms the power of speech. Yet, at the same time, it highlights the weakness of Satan’s rhetoric in the face of Jesus’s resistance, and the power of a reserved wisdom to overcome active temptation. Although Jesus has much to say, his dialogue with Satan firmly positions him as the passive party. Most significantly, the effect that Jesus’s refusals have on Satan provides a model for that of Bartleby on Melville’s narrator. When he rejects Satan’s temptation of wealth, “Satan stood / A while as mute confounded what to say, / What to reply, confuted” ([1671] 2007a, III.1–3) before attempting to tempt with glory, after which he “had not to answer, but stood struck / With guilt of his own sin” (III.146–47). Again, at the beginning of the final book, “Perplexed and troubled at his bad success / The tempter stood, nor had what to reply, / Discovered in his fraud” (IV.1–3). Satan’s temptations are also met with motionlessness, but Milton’s Jesus is “unmoved” rather than “confounded”: “To whom our Saviour answered thus unmoved” (III.386); “To whom the Son of God unmoved replied” (IV.109). Satan’s final challenge places Jesus on a mountain peak, inviting Jesus to leap: echoing the Gospel accounts, he simply responds “tempt not the Lord” (IV.561). The last refusal takes the form of intentional physical immobility, as atop the mountain he amplifies the unmoving power of the mountain.

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The primary function of Jesus’s speech here is not to inform but to match and repel that of Satan. The result is his repeated paralysis. Jesus temporarily rids Satan of his words: each moment in which Satan is struck still is followed by a line such as “Yet of another plea bethought him soon” (III.149). Momentary arrest is followed by a renewal of action and aggression. The recurring form of this interaction, which makes up the bulk of the poem, follows the form of the vortex, as Satan is kept in a revolving cycle of motion and arrest around the still centre of Jesus’s refusals. Both Satan and the narrator of “Bartleby” are left “rallying [their] stunned faculties” (Melville [1853] 2009, 12), and likewise, the effect Bartleby has on the narrator takes a vortical form.

4   Turner’s Vortical Self-Mythology The relationship between Melville and Milton expressed in terms of vortical, powerful passivity offers a way of identifying the Miltonic in Turner’s work, which goes beyond his Milton illustrations and appending extracts from Paradise Lost to his paintings. In turn, this connection extends our understanding of the influence of Turner on Melville. Turner’s self-­ mythology is vortical; anecdotal narrative whirls around his work. Both the beginning and end of Turner’s life are marked by his awareness of his own mythology. James Hamilton suggests that as an adult he selected his birth date as St George’s Day, “a good day for a true patriot to choose, after some reflection, to be born upon” (1997, 11–12), while Phillipa Simpson cites his “final ‘exhibition’” as the ultimate end to an artist’s life indivisible from anecdote (2013, 163). This is the display of his body in his gallery at Queen Anne Street, surrounded by his paintings, in the days before his funeral. Simpson comments that the image “underscores a crucial aspect of his work’s reception—the central place of the man himself” (ibid.). Turner’s self-mythology can be considered a supplement appended to the image both at the moment of making and in ongoing storytelling about the process of its creation. These anecdotal appendages give us new ways to think about form and production: connecting them to Milton’s Christ allows us to think through the functions of power and passivity in Turner’s images. The most repeated anecdote about Turner is that his most famous work Snow Storm was conceived whilst he was tied to the mast of the ship Ariel during a storm. Fifteen years after the painting was made, John Ruskin

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recorded a conversation supposedly held between Turner and Reverend William Kingsley: [Turner] then said, “I did not paint it to be understood, but I wished to show what such a scene was like; I got the sailors to lash me to the mast to observe it; I was lashed for four hours, and I did not expect to escape, but I felt bound to record it if I did.” (Riding and Johns 2013, 246)

Regardless of the truth of the story (Hamilton calls it “a deliberate invention, intended both to confuse and impress” 1997, 290), this image of Turner as a passive observer of violent seas “was to become vital to the subsequent reception of his marine paintings” (Simpson 2013, 173). The story has not lost force: a scene of Turner tied to the mast of a ship in a storm was included in Mike Leigh’s recent biopic Mr. Turner (2014). Other instances of Turner’s physical immovability when watching the sea in stormy weather include Cyrus Redding’s recollection that on a journey at sea, while other passengers on the vessel were ill, “Turner sat watching the waves and the headlands, ‘like Atlas, unremoved’” (1852, 152). (This last phrase is a misquotation of Satan in Paradise Lost, IV.987.) The public image of Turner is that of a painter subjecting himself to the sublime force of marine nature whilst choosing to be physically restrained. These anecdotes can be easily read as a demonstration of Turner’s dedication to his creative work within the framework of the Kantian sublime (an aesthetic category itself deeply associated with Milton). Turner places himself in a position which would normally be one of subjection to observe a natural event which would reveal to him simultaneously the power of nature and the power of the human mind and substantiate his claim to artistic truth. Physical weakness is transformed into creative power. Although the simplest reason for Turner’s lashing himself to the mast would be to allow him two hands free to scrawl in a notebook—and not be carried away by the storm—it is also through this self-restraint that Turner opens himself to sublime experience. The Ariel anecdote taps into another powerful literary image: that of Ulysses in the twelfth book of the Odyssey, who resists the mesmerising song of the sirens by stuffing the ears of his crew with wax and having himself bound to the mast of his ship. The image of Turner evokes the same sense of defeat of the hostile other through self-imposed immobility. In addition to Milton’s Christ and Melville’s Bartleby, we might add “Turner’s Turner” as a passive being at the centre of a vortex of oscillating

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action and arrest. In his self-mythology, Turner is a passive being at the centre of a vortex. Christine Riding argues that the three snow storm paintings exhibited between 1812 and 1842 “focus on man’s vulnerability in the face of the sublime forces of nature” and that “this is underlined above all by the dramatic vortex that dominates each composition, suggesting overwhelming elemental motion” (2013, 258). The texts I have considered in this chapter all convey an omnipresent concern with the vortex—in weather, dialogue, and psychological events—as a form of “overwhelming elemental motion.” However, beyond this, these nineteenth-­century vortices also make manifest a system of power modelled at least in part on Milton’s Christ and a more general Miltonic concern with passivity. The recurring form of the vortex signals at once Milton’s creative influence, and a shared preoccupation between Milton and his nineteenth-century successors.

References Chandler, Marilyn R. 1987. The Space Makers: Passive Power in Faulkner’s Novels. College Literature 14 (2): 120–127. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/25111731. Deleuze, Gilles. 1997. Bartleby; Or, The Formula. In Essays Critical and Clinical. Translated by Daniel W.  Smith and Michael A.  Greco, 68–90. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fiene, Donald. 1970. Bartleby the Christ. American Transcendental Quarterly: A Journal of New England Writers 7: 18–23. Fish, Stanley Eugene. 1967. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. Franklin, Bruce. 1963. The Wake of the Gods: Melville’s Mythology. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Freeman, John. 1926. Herman Melville. London: Macmillan and Co. Gray, Erik. 2009. Milton and the Victorians. Ithaca; London: Cornell University Press. Grey, Robin, ed. 2004. Melville and Milton: An Edition and Analysis of Melville’s Annotations on Milton. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press. Hamilton, James. 1997. Turner: A Life. London: Hodder and Stoughton. Kamuf, Peggy. 2012. ‘Bartleby’, or Decision: A Note on Allegory. In To Follow: The Wake of Jacques Derrida, 34–42. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Kendrick, Christopher. 2008. Un-American Milton: Milton’s Reputation and Reception in the Early United States. University of Toronto Quarterly 77 (3): 903–922. https://doi.org/10.3138/utq.77.3.903.

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Knighton, Andrew. 2007. The Bartleby Industry and Bartleby’s Idleness. ESQ: A Journal of the American Renaissance 53 (2): 184–215. https://doi. org/10.1353/esq.0.0004. Leigh, Mike. 2014. Mr. Turner. Entertainment One. http://sonyclassics.com/ mrturner/. Melville, Herman. (1847) 2007. Omoo: A Narrative of Adventures in the South Seas. Ed. Mary K. Bercaw Edwards. New York: Penguin. ———. (1853) 2009. Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street. In Billy Budd, Sailor and Selected Tales, ed. Robert Milder, 3–41. New York: Oxford University Press. ———. (1851) 2013. Moby-Dick. London: Penguin. Miller, J. Hillis. 1990. Who Is He? Melville’s ‘Bartleby the Scrivener’. In Versions of Pygmalion, 141–178. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Milton, John. (1671) 2007a. Paradise Regained. In The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton, ed. William Kerrigan, John Peter Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon, 635–97. New York: Modern Library. ———. (1667/1674) 2007b. Paradise Lost, 2nd ed., ed. Alastair Fowler. London; New York: Longman. Pardes, Ilana. 2008. Melville’s Bibles. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. Redding, Cyrus. 1852. The Late Joseph Mallord William Turner. Fraser’s Magazine, 45, 150–56, February. Ricks, Christopher. 1963. Milton’s Grand Style. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Riding, Christine, and Richard Johns, eds. 2013. Turner & the Sea. London: Thames & Hudson. Robillard, Douglas. 2002. Melville’s Marginalia: Milton’s Poems. Leviathan 4: 113–116. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-1849.2002.tb00058.x. Sheldon, Leslie E. 1980. The Illimitable Ocean: Herman Melville’s Artistic Response to Paradise Lost in Moby-Dick, Typee and Billy Budd. Unpublished PhD, University of Toronto. ———. 2002. Messianic Power and Satanic Decay: Milton in Moby-Dick. Leviathan 4: 29–50. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1750-1849.2002.tb00054.x. Simpson, Phillipa. 2013. Turner on Show. In Turner & the Sea, ed. Christine Riding and Richard Johns, 163–200. London: Thames & Hudson. Wallace, Robert K. 1992. Melville and Turner: Spheres of Love and Fright. Athens, Georgia: University of Georgia Press.

PART III

The Incarnation and the Redemptive Role of Art

CHAPTER 6

“Real Visions of Real Things”: The Light of the World, Incarnation and Popular Culture Andrew Tate

“[T]he Christological question,” argues Graham Ward in Christ and Culture, “begins not with who is the Christ or what is the Christ; it begins with where is the Christ” (2005, 1; italics in the original). This primary theological challenge, prompted by Thomas Aquinas’s Summae Theologiae, makes a realist assumption about the presence of God in the world. It also shifts the quest for Christ from the intellectual sphere of history to that of geography, from time to space. It is a query that has no straightforward answer if we apply it to the realm of culture, especially in an era of simulation, imitation and repetition: iterations of Jesus/Christ are found everywhere, often outside of the boundaries of traditional Christian belief, including fiction, film and television. The challenge of representing the Christ of faith (as well as the “Jesus of History” to borrow the language of demythogizing biblical criticism) troubles popular culture like a bad conscience. Versions of the gospel narrative have been re-written continually by late twentieth-century and post-millennial novelists including Philip

A. Tate (*) Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_6

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Pullman, Naomi Alderman, Richard Beard, C. K. Stead and Colm Tóibín (see Holderness 2014; Maczynska 2015; Tate 2016). The geographical search for Christ is one that resonates strongly with the life and art of William Holman Hunt (1827–1910). Hunt—founding member of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, spiritual itinerant and seeker after truth—turned to the figure of Christ as the focus of many of his paintings. In his pursuit of spiritual and aesthetic authenticity, the artist abandoned London and spent a number of years in the Holy Land engaging with the culture and landscape of the world of biblical narrative. These long sojourns in Palestine—totalling almost seven years, taken as four tours between 1854 and 1892—led to the production of richly symbolic paintings that explore Christ’s identity, most notably The Finding of Christ in the Temple (1854–60), The Scapegoat (1854–56) and The Shadow of Death (1870–73) (see Tromans 2008, 135–59). This chapter will focus on Hunt’s most famous painting of Christ, one that predates his pilgrimages to Palestine. In the spring of 1854, a work of art that interpreted a constellation of scriptures and sought to represent the ambiguous man of sorrows went on public display for the first time. Hunt’s The Light of the World (1851–53) was exhibited at the Royal Academy, then housed in the east wing of the recently founded National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, and was greeted with, at best, a mixed critical reception. Angered by the lack of serious attention being paid to Hunt’s painting, John Ruskin published a letter in The Times that castigated the poor taste of the public and described The Light of the World as “one of the very noblest works of sacred art ever produced in this or any other age” (12:330). In a late nineteenth-century appraisal of “religion in recent art,” the theologian P. T. Forsyth identifies Hunt’s work as singularly powerful: “Hunt paints with an exuberant realism and a defiance of tradition which betray the faith that God’s Revelation is not the closed appanage of a particular church, but pulsates, always and everywhere, in the world and in man” (1889, 171). Forsyth connects the painter’s “exuberant realism” with a spirituality that exceeds the bounds of sectarian limits. He takes a theological approach that emphasizes the presence of the divine in the quotidian world: “God is not an abstraction lost in the depths of space and time. He is of all beings the most concrete, most here and now, most interwoven with the passions of men and the courses of things” (176). This orientation towards incarnation—a theology routed in embodiment rather than abstraction—informs my own reading of Hunt’s art.

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The painting, eventually donated to Keble College by the widow of Hunt’s patron, Thomas Combe, soon became one of the most widely recognized images of Christ. It inspired sermons and was seen in cheap, reproduced form by many who never saw the original. Hunt eventually produced a much bigger version of the painting—completed with the aid of his pupil, Edward Hughes—that was to be seen by millions during a world tour; this vast iteration of The Light of the World was gifted to St Paul’s Cathedral by a wealthy philanthropist. The chapter will explore Hunt’s representation of Christ in relation to debates about the incarnation, eschatology and the mobility of Christ in what Walter Benjamin once named the age of “mechanical reproduction” (2008).

1   Hunt and Apocalypse The Light of the World engages with two biblical narratives: one, printed beneath the frame: “Behold, I stand at the door and knock. If any man hear my voice, and open the door, I will come in to him, and will sup with him, and he with me” (Rev. 3:20). Hunt’s Johannine title echoes Jesus’s words: “I am the light of the world: he that followeth me shall not walk in darkness, but shall have the light of life” (John 8:12). Hunt’s painting represents the risen Christ, standing at a doorway that is overgrown with weeds, bearing a lamp in his hand and a crown of thorns on his head, has become one of the most commonly recognized and reproduced works of religious art in British history and, since its donation, it has remained housed in a side-chapel at Keble College, Oxford. For Michael Wheeler, the painting is “Adventist in its symbolism and atmosphere” but it also “defeats sectarian readings by presenting a Christ who appeals to every human heart and by making no overt reference to the contentious issues of church authority or biblical authority” (2000, 111, 117). As John Wolffe argues in God and Greater Britain, the stylistic approach taken by Hunt for The Light of the World could scarcely be more markedly different to that of John Martin’s vast eschatological pictures, including The Great Day of His Wrath, inspired by the book of Revelation, and also painted between 1851 and 1853 (1994, 159). Martin’s tryptich of the “four last things” were enormously influential and seen by millions. They anticipate the late twentieth-century turn to end of civilization narratives in cinema, television and fiction. Global catastrophe as entertainment is now very popular and, ostensibly at least, a devoutly secular form of narrative. Blockbusters in which life on earth is threatened by a merciless and,

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apparently, insuperable cosmic phenomenon, such as Deep Impact (1998) and Armageddon (1998), echo the element of gleeful destruction that is part of this kind of eschatological vision. Martin’s paintings, in Wolffe’s terms, were “cosmic, awesome and hostile”; Hunt’s painting, by contrast, he describes as “human in scale, serene and gentle in its setting,” yet it also carried a “disquieting spiritual message” (Wolffe 1994, 159). The painting recuperates the primary signification of apocalypsis as revelation, an uncovering of that which has been hidden (cf. Mangina 2010, 37; Tate 2017, 12). Hunt, like William Blake, a vital influence on the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, viewed the world in apocalyptic terms, and his paintings of Jesus are similarly concerned with the ways in which the divine might be revealed in everyday contexts. However, Hunt’s visual interpretation of the scriptures does not appear to share the radical antinomian ideas of Blake and the regal figure that appears in The Light of the World may endorse the kind of spiritual and social hierarchy that the visionary artist-­ poet abhorred. Yet, there is a shared desire to humanize the divine. The figure of Christ waits patiently by the door, illuminating a shadowy space, offering kinship rather than death or destruction. The Light of the World is an iteration of the apocalyptic tradition that depends on intimacy and relationship rather than the threat of violence.

2   Ruskin, Hunt and Scripture Hunt also produced a smaller version of the painting currently housed at Manchester Art Gallery. In his account of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood (1905), Hunt narrates the history and source of The Light of the World. He recalls that one night during November 1851 he explained to Millais the inspiration for a new painting that he was impatient to begin work on: there is a text in Revelation, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” Nothing is said about the night, but I wish to accentuate the point of its meaning by making it the time of darkness, and that brings us to the need of the lantern in Christ’s hand, He being the Bearer of the light to the sinner within, if he will awaken. (1905, 1:289)

Hunt maintains that he intended the meaning of the work to be clear: “The symbolism was designed to elucidate, not to mystify, truth” (1:351). He also contrasts the religious approach he came to take towards the scriptures with that of his fellow Pre-Raphaelite Brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti

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whom, he suggests, “treated the Gospel history simply as a storehouse of interesting situations and beautiful personages for the artist’s pencil” (1:172). Hunt’s art was energized by what Lindsay Smith describes as a “desire for an extreme literality” (1995, 93). He wanted to create a form of religious art that would redefine the vocabulary of traditional iconography, rejecting slavish imitation of the old masters and establishing a new realism. Hunt claims that years before his major “Christian” paintings he was already seeking a new, “living” language to replace a dead artistic idiom. The great religious art of the past was, Hunt suggests, part of a radically different social and religious order than that of the 1840s. Giotto, Tintoretto and Raphael painted for the Roman Catholic Church, and were commissioned to create art that perpetuated Catholic ideals. Protestant England during the 1840s and 1850s was culturally and spiritually far removed from this art and a new “alphabet” was needed: Many of these were poetic and affecting; but with the New Testament in our hands we have new suggestions to make. If I were to put a flag with a cross on it in Christ’s hand, the art-galvanising revivalists might be pleased, but unaffected people would regard the work as having no living interest for them. (Hunt 1905, 1:85)

Hunt was an admirer of Ruskin’s revolutionary theories of art history and, in particular, of the potential of modern painters to supersede establishment ideals. Ruskin argued that the value of religious art, including that of both the ancient Pre-Renaissance and Raphaelesque traditions, had been defiled by misuse and misinterpretation. He asserted, for example, that the use of “sacred paintings” as an aid to personal devotion was indicative of a lack of genuine spirituality: the dependence, in any great degree, on the presence or power of a picture, indicates a wonderfully feeble sense of the presence and power of God. I do not think that any man, who is thoroughly certain that Christ is in the room, will care what sort of pictures of Christ he has on its walls. (Ruskin 5:84)

The tone of Ruskin’s argument is distinctly Evangelical. There is an equal emphasis on the positive belief in the immediacy of Christ in everyday life and on his intensely Protestant distrust of the use of imagery in worship.

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Ruskin contended that the respective positions of art and faith had been reversed, and that aesthetic sensibility had become confused with authentic piety. He also maintained that all art designed “to excite certain conditions of religious dream or reverie” was, in fact, detrimental to faith: “it is throwing subtle endearments round foolish traditions, confusing sweet fancies with sound doctrines, obscuring real events with unlikely semblances, and enforcing false assertions with pleasant circumstantiality” (5:84–85). Writing of what he perceived to be the largely worthless, and often duplicitous traditions of West European sacred art in Modern Painters III (1856), Ruskin argued that the crucial difference between the painting of Pre-Renaissance Europe and that which followed it was the reversal of the religious and aesthetic function of art: “In early times art was employed for the display of religious facts; now, religious facts were employed for the display of art” (5:77). This transformation, argued Ruskin, although “imperceptible,” was absolute in influence, and entirely debased the worth of painting. Ruskin interpreted the change in starkly biblical terms: “It was passing from the paths of life to the paths of death” (ibid). In his lecture, “Pre-Raphaelitism” (November 1853), Ruskin locates the specific moment in which the purpose of art was reversed. This argument is typical of the literalist hermeneutic of Ruskin’s early work, which cannot accommodate a neutral position. He states that the fall and “degradation” of the religious art of Italy occurred when the twenty-five-year-­ old Raphael, “having until that time worked exclusively in the ancient and stern medieval manner,” decorated the Vatican for Pope Julius II.  The “fall” occurred in the design of the first chamber which he decorated, where he “wrote upon its walls the Mene, Tekel, Upharsin of the Arts of Christianity”: On one wall of that chamber he placed a picture of the World or Kingdom of Theology, presided over by Christ. And on the side wall of that same chamber he placed the World or Kingdom of Poetry, presided over by Apollo. And from that spot, and from that hour, the intellect and the art of Italy date their degradation. (12:148)

It was not only the division of the aesthetic from the religious that Ruskin believed was indicated by Raphael’s design but his elevation of “the creations of fancy on the one wall, to the same rank as the objects of faith upon the other” (12:149; italics in the original).

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Ruskin concluded that the Christian faith as objective reality had been mocked by the major traditions of post-Raphaelite religious art. Turner’s landscapes were, he believed, an important exception, and he interpreted them as belonging to the highest sacred tradition. In 1851, the year of the great artist’s death, Ruskin began his advocacy of a group of young painters with the “somewhat ludicrous name of “Pre-Raphaelite Brethren” (12:134). Ruskin recognized in the Pre-Raphaelites a desire to transform the priorities of art and a common aim of re-establishing the precedence of religious truth over aesthetic perfection. Art, he asserted, needed to reassess the importance of Pre-Renaissance objectives, which he argued were “to impress upon the popular mind the reality of the objects of faith, and the truth of the histories of Scripture, by giving visible form to both” (12:348). In Ruskin’s reading of history it was Raphael who was principally to blame for the degradation of religious art. “Of the False Ideal” contains a detailed narration of Raphael’s representation of Christ’s Charge to Peter. Ruskin’s interpretation of the painting is similar in style to his 1854 reading of The Light of the World. It is sermonic and also parallels the content of the painting with a reading of the biblical text that inspired the work. His empathic engagement with the gospel narrative is a vital part of Ruskin’s rhetoric as he parodies the “infinite monstrosity” of Raphael’s painting. Just as he had praised the imaginative realism of Hunt’s work, and for painting Christ as “a living presence in the world,” so does he censure Raphael for undermining a literal belief in the scene that he paints: The simple truth is, that the moment we look at the picture we feel our belief of the whole thing taken away. There is, visibly, no possibility of that group ever having existed, in any place, or on any occasion. It is all a mere mythic absurdity. (5:82)

Ruskin advances the radical, though typically hyperbolic conclusion that “religious art, at once complete and sincere, never yet has existed” (5:87). Yet, the synthesis of technical brilliance and profound belief represented by The Light of the World, and the work of Turner, indicated to Ruskin the birth of a dynamic and authentic tradition of sacred art: “those bright Turnerian imageries, which the European public declared to be “dotage,” and those calm Pre-Raphaelite studies which, in like manner, it pronounced “puerility,” form the first foundation that has been ever laid for true sacred art” (5:87). Cook and Wedderburn record a significant note

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made by Ruskin on the copy of the work he used to make revisions. Beneath the chapter title he had written “Give all this chapter as root of Pre-Raphaelitism” (5:70n). The Light of the World received a very swift public defence by Ruskin, an early defender of the Pre-Rapahelite Brotherhood (in ways that became more personally, and scandalously, complicated) since 1851. Writing to The Times on 4 May 1854 Ruskin detailed the strong claims of “the principal Pre-Raphaelite picture in the Exhibition of the Royal Academy this year,” arguing that if this painting was “rightly understood” that it would have a profound and spiritually enriching influence on the spectator. His desire to educate the eye of Victorian England is demonstrated in the account he gives of observing the (non) spectators of the gallery: Standing by [The Light of the World] yesterday for upwards of an hour, I watched the effect it produced upon the passers-by. Few stopped to look at it, and those who did almost invariably with some contemptuous expression, founded on what appeared to them the absurdity of representing the Saviour with a lantern in his hand. (12:328)

Ruskin narrates The Light of the World as a preacher might interpret an individual parable and argues the meaning of the symbols to be clear: Christ approaches [the door] in the night-time,—Christ, in his everlasting offices of prophet, priest, and king. He wears the white robe, representing the power of the Spirit upon him […] the rayed crown of gold, inwoven with the crown of thorns; not dead thorns, but now bearing soft leaves, for the healing of the nations. (12:329)

A couple of years later, in Modern Painters III (1856), Ruskin returns to Hunt’s painting of Christ standing at the door to exemplify the legitimacy of artistic visions of the future life: the more they are considered, not as works of art, but as real visions of real things, more or less imperfectly set down, the more good will be got by dwelling upon them. The same is true of all representations of Christ as a living presence among us now, as in Hunt’s Light of the World. (5:86)

Almost 30 years later, in a lecture on Hunt and Rossetti, delivered in 1883, Ruskin praised the former for basing his practice of art on a subversively literalist approach to the Bible:

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To Rossetti, the Old and New Testaments were only the greatest poems he knew; and he painted scenes from them with no more actual belief in their relation to the present life and business of men than he gave also to the “Morte d’Arthur” and the “Vita Nuova.” But to Holman Hunt, the story of the New Testament, when once his mind entirely fastened on it, became what it was to an old Puritan, or an old Catholic of true blood,—not merely a Reality, not merely the greatest of Realities, but the only Reality. (33: 271)

3   Conversion, Culture and History The possibility of conversion is the central drama of The Light of the World. Significantly, Ruskin’s interpretation of the painting, in the letter to The Times, progresses from a reading of the figure of Christ, and the meaning of the individual symbols of his clothing, to a reflection on the nature of the personal relationship between the Messiah and the individual believer, emphasizing the promise of salvation: “Now, when Christ enters any human heart, he bears with him a twofold light: first, the light of conscience, which displays past sin, and afterwards the light of peace, the hope of salvation” (12:329). Ruskin, raised in an atmosphere of Evangelical piety, was, even before his break with this militant Protestant tradition, critical of the aesthetic sensibilities of his fellow believers: The group calling themselves Evangelical ought no longer to render their religion an offence to men of the world by associating it only with the most vulgar forms of art. It is not necessary that they should admit either music or painting into religious service; but, if they admit either the one or the other, let it not be bad music nor bad painting: it is certainly in nowise more for Christ’s honour that His praise should be sung discordantly, or His miracles painted discreditably, than that His word should be preached ungrammatically. Some Evangelicals, however, seem to take a morbid pride in the triple degradation. (5: 88)

The Light of the World, however, and Ruskin’s interpretation of it, belong to what Callum Brown, in The Death of Christian Britain names “the salvation economy.” He borrows this vivid soubriquet from Albert Bradwell’s Autobiography of a Converted Infidel (1844) to define “the machinery of ideas and agencies by which discursivity of evangelical piety dominated public culture” (Brown 2001, 36). The “salvation economy,” in Brown’s terms, is a product of “Conversionist Evangelicalism” which “laid stress

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on faith in the context of the individual as a “free moral agent” (36). Conversionism (“the belief that lives need to be changed”) has been identified as one of the defining priorities of Evangelicalism (Bebbington 1989, 2–3). This “salvation economy” also provides a useful way of addressing the complex relationship between institutional creeds and forms of independent expression, including the visual arts. Marcia Pointon has argued that as a result of the application of historicist criticism to the Gospels, the 1850s and 1860s were deeply problematic decades for painters working within the traditions of Western sacred art (1989, 30). She argues that the representation of the body of Christ was particularly difficult in this “era of authenticity” and that the painting attempts to deny the physical aspect of Christ and specifically to represent him as an “ungendered presence” (34). Herbert Sussman, like Pointon, reads The Light of the World as a radically ungendered representation of Christ, noting Hunt’s “inability to incorporate Jesus within the hegemonic Victorian construction of manliness” (1995, 125). In fact, Hunt employed both men and women to sit as models for the figure of Christ. Elizabeth Siddal originally sat to model for the hair and Christina Rossetti was later employed as a model for the head of Christ (Maas 1984, 31). Hunt even furtively used Thomas Carlyle as a male model for the head. There is some irony in this choice. If Ruskin was the painting’s most prominent and public apologist, Carlyle was certainly its most fierce critic. George Landow notes that Carlyle’s “chief argument” against the work was that although its symbolism was readily identifiable by “the mass of men,” it emphasized “just those things which will mislead them in the nineteenth century: what is important to the Victorian age is an image of Christ, not as king, but as Man” (217). Carlyle’s acerbic critique of the painting is described by Hunt in some detail in his memoir. The monologue begins with Carlyle’s scorn for the painting and the reasons why he believed it to be a failure: You call that thing, I ween, a picture of Jesus Christ. Now you cannot gain any profit to yourself, except in mere pecuniary sense, or profit any one else on earth, in putting into shape a mere papistical fantasy like that, for it can only be an inanity, or a delusion to every one that may look on it. It is a poor misshaped presentation of the noblest, the brotherliest, and the most heroic-­ minded Being that ever walked on God’s earth. (Hunt 1905, 1:355)

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Carlyle’s rebuke is informed by a Nonconformist abhorrence of elaborate imagery; his immediate condemnation of Christ’s clothing has a specific contextual resonance in the Tractarian controversy. Hunt was not a Tractarian but he did have a growing sympathy for aspects of the Oxford Movement. Thomas Combe, Hunt’s most important patron, was an active supporter, making an endowment to St Paul’s Oxford, a Tractarian church. Hunt became acquainted with the vicar of St Paul’s, the Reverend Alfred Hackman, and, in 1852, was commissioned by Combe to paint Hackman’s Curate, the Reverend John David Jenkins. Ann Clark Amor notes that two were to become close friends, and Jenkins is believed to have made a strong impression on the artist (1989, 94). Hunt recalls protesting not only the sincerity of his belief but also an attempt to persuade Carlyle that his writing was proof that he too shared this same, fundamental conviction: “he raised his voice well-nigh to a scream” (1905, 1:356). The encounter was bruising but significant: Carlyle’s uncompromising form of historicism, locating Christ as suffering labourer, has been read by some critics as the argument that prompted Hunt’s first journey to the Holy Land (Clark Amor 1989, 105). By the time that The Light of the World was exhibited, Hunt had departed England for a long trip to the Holy Land. John Dixon Hunt has argued that the “pragmatic and historicist instinct in Hunt,” characterized by his lengthy journeys to the Middle East and his desire to “make more tangible Jesus Christ’s history and teaching,” is offset by a strong belief in the validity of “imaginative vision” (1968, 25). Hunt’s representation of Christ on canvas was to change with his deepening realist aesthetic. The Shadow of Death (1869–72), the product of a later trip to the Middle East, features a semi-naked Christ, being looked upon by Mary, and the painting focuses on his physical identity. Pointon argues that in The Shadow of Death Hunt was presented with the challenge of moving beyond The Light of the World. The acknowledgement of human pain and historical accuracy indicated that a “new pictorial solution was required” (1989, 40–41). In the chapter that follows, Valerie Purton suggests how, in The Shadow of Death, Hunt internalizes Carlyle’s advice and criticism through his representation of a very obviously male Christ. In a letter written in 1883, more than thirty years after completing the painting, Hunt observed that a transformation followed his reading the Bible “critically determined if I could … to find out the flaws for myself or its inspiration”:

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The figure of Christ standing at the door haunted me, gradually coming in more clearly defined meaning, with logical enrichments, waiting in the night—ever night—near the dawn, with a light sheltered from the chance of extinction, in a lantern necessarily therefore, with a crown on His head bearing that also of thorns; with body robed like a priest, not of Christian time only, and in a world with signs of neglect and blindness. You will say that it was an emotional conversion, but there were other influences outside of sentiment. (qtd. Maas 1984, 15)

4   Conclusion: Contemporary Echoes William Holman Hunt’s lifelong struggle to represent Jesus as a threshold figure anticipates the contemporary recognition that the man of sorrows is not easily contained by the limits of historical discourse or institutional forms of faith. One hundred and fifty-five years after Hunt’s painting was first exhibited, but barely more than a few hundred metres away, another artistic interpretation of Jesus was unveiled in Westminster. In July 1999 Mark Wallinger’s white marble sculpture, Ecce Homo, a slight but oddly bold figure, was installed on the previously empty “fourth plinth” in Trafalgar Square. The statue is, superficially at least, very different from Hunt’s painting: instead of rich, regal robes, Wallinger’s figure is almost naked; in place of vivid, luxuriant colour, Ecce Homo is striking in its alabaster lustre. Its biblical title and its crown of barbed-wire thorns are the only hints of this vulnerable figure’s potential religious significance. Ecce Homo shares a title with Friedrich Nietzsche’s late nineteenth-century, posthumously published autobiography (1908), but in both cases the name is an allusion to a passage from the Gospel of John in which the captive Jesus is presented by Pontius Pilate to a mob who calls for his execution (John 19:5). Wallinger’s statue is an act of artistic interpretation, a kind of modern icon, one that might encourage its spectators to remember their own frail humanity. However, it is also a reminder of the chilling ease with which a person is transformed from a flesh and blood human being into an object without voice or rights. The steps towards such a reverse miracle are simple: forget that the individual shares an identity with every person who ever walked the earth; ignore their pleas for mercy; and imagine that their hopes, desires and fears are somehow less real than our own. This is a process that takes place in the story as told in Matthew’s gospel. As Francis Spufford writes of Jesus’s treatment after his arrest and trial, “[t]he ordinarily bad things that happen to prisoners happen to

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him … It’s just a consequence of his new position as an object, a still-living being which is already pretty much a thing as power acts on it” (2012, 142). Hunt returned to The Light of the World at the end of the century, producing a third, much bigger version that toured the world and was later donated to St Paul’s cathedral. Hunt’s painting was included in Seeing Salvation (2000), an exhibition at the National Gallery in London that explored two millennia of Christian art. For Neil MacGregor and Erika Langmuir, The Light of the World presents “a Christ viewers can at once identify, but are not asked to identify with, who remains at a distance from daily life; it is Christian image for a world that feels itself bereft of Christ” (2000, 77). In the age of “mechanical reproduction” and apparent secularization, the image may have lost its sense of aura. However, though it, like all “great art” is now easily circulated, turned into pastiche or archaic allusion to a lost past, the painting retains a subtly unsettling quality.

References Bebbington, D.W. 1989. Evangelicalism in Modern Britain: A History from the 1730s to the 1980s. London: Unwin Hyman. Benjamin, Walter. (1936) 2008. The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction. Translated by J. A. Underwood. London: Penguin. Brown, Callum. 2001. The Death of Christian Britain: Understanding Secularisation, 1800–2000. London: Routledge. Clark Amor, Anne. 1989. William Holman Hunt: The True Pre-Raphaelite. London: Constable. Dixon Hunt, John. 1968. The Pre-Raphaelite Imagination: 1848–1900. London: Routledge. Forsyth, P.T. 1889. Religion in Recent Art. Manchester: Heywood. Holderness, Graham. 2014. Re-Writing Jesus: Christ in 20th-Century Fiction and Film. London: Bloomsbury. Holman Hunt, William. 1905. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Vol. 2. London: Macmillan. Landow, George P. 1972–1973. William Holman Hunt’s ‘The Shadow of Death’. Bulletin of the John Rylands University Library of Manchester 55: 197–239. https://doi.org/10.7227/BJRL.55.1.9. Maas, Jeremy. 1984. Holman Hunt and the Light of the World. London: Scolar Press. MacGregor, Neil, and Erika Langmuir. 2000. Seeing Salvation: Images of Christ in Art. London: BBC.

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Maczynska, Magdalena. 2015. The Gospel According to the Novelist  - Religious Scripture and Contemporary Fiction. London: Bloomsbury. Mangina, Joseph L. 2010. Revelation. London: SCM Press. Pointon, Marcia. 1989. The Artist as Ethnographer: Holman Hunt and the Holy Land. In Pre-Raphaelites Re-Viewed, ed. Marcia Pointon, 22–44. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Ruskin, John. 1903–12. The Works of Ruskin, 39 volumes. Ed. E.T.  Cook and Alexander Wedderburn. London: George Allen. Smith, Lindsay. 1995. Victorian Photography, Painting and Poetry: The Enigma of Visibility in Ruskin, Morris and the Pre-Raphaelites. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Spufford, Francis. 2012. Unapologetic. London: Faber. Sussman, Herbert. 1995. Victorian Masculinities: Manhood and Masculine Poetics in Early Victorian Literature and Art. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tate, Andrew. 2016. The Challenges of Re-writing Sacred Texts: The Case of Twenty-First Century Gospel Narratives. In The Routledge Companion to Literature and Religion, ed. Mark Knight, 332–342. London: Routledge. ———. 2017. Apocalyptic Fiction. London: Bloomsbury. Tromans, Nicholas. 2008. Palestine: Picture of Prophecy. In Holman Hunt and the Pre-Raphaelite Vision, ed. Katharine A.  Lochan, Jan Marsh, and Carol Jacobi, 135–159. Toronto: Art Gallery of Ontario. Ward, Graham. 2005. Christ and Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Wheeler, Michael. 2000. Ruskin’s God. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolffe, John. 1994. God and Greater Britain: Religion and National Life in Britain and Ireland, 1843–1945. London: Routledge.

CHAPTER 7

Tennyson, Lacan, and the Raising of Lazarus Valerie Purton

“The Christ I call Christ-like,” observed Tennyson in 1879, in discussion with Thomas Carlyle, “is Sebastian del Piombo’s in the National Gallery” (qtd. Tennyson 1897, 2:235). The comment suggests the importance of the figure of Christ as an imaginative paradigm, both to the poet and to the mid-Victorian reading public. This chapter explores the complex ways in which Tennyson and his readers constructed this figure, beginning with the example of the cultural apotheosis of Prince Albert, after his early death in 1861.1 Tennyson saw the Prince as (in the medieval sense) a “type” of Christ, a reading he shared with Queen Victoria (see Landow 1980, 8–9; Ludlow 2014, 5–6). This chapter then considers more generally the anxieties—particularly about gender—evident in the period as to how Christ should be portrayed, thus giving a cultural context within which to examine Tennyson’s presentation of the figure of Arthur Hallam in In Memoriam (1850), both as a Christ figure and, in Lacanian terms, as the ideal Other. This leads to a Lacanian rereading of Tennyson’s earliest sonnets to Hallam. Finally, the chapter returns to the Sebastian del Piombo painting in the National Gallery (Fig. 7.1), the painting to which Tennyson

V. Purton (*) Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_7

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Fig. 7.1  Sebastiano del Piombo, The Raising of Lazarus (1517–1519). © The National Gallery, London. 381 × 289.6 cm. Oil on canvas, transferred from wood

himself so often, both literally and poetically, returned, and attempts to draw together Christian and Lacanian readings. Tennyson was appointed Poet Laureate in 1850. According to Hallam Tennyson, the appointment was “owing chiefly to Prince Albert’s admiration for In Memoriam” (1897, I:334). A tragic irony is that, just over a decade after his reading of the poem, Prince Albert in death was to displace Hallam as its subject, for his royal widow at least. Even the

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biographer Robert Bernard Martin, not noted for his tendency to sentimentalise Tennyson, acknowledges much in common between Poet Laureate and Prince, and suggests that “the two men would have become closer … on a man-to-man basis,” had the Prince not died so young (1980, 403–04). Tennyson’s own fascination with Prince Albert is shown in a dream he reported the night before the letter arrived containing the royal invitation to become Poet Laureate: he dreamt that the Queen and Prince Albert visited him, were extremely kind to him, and that Prince Albert kissed him. “Very kind and very German” was his gruff awakening disclaimer (qtd. Martin 1980, 351–52), in much the tone, one imagines, in which he disavowed intimacy with Hallam: “If anybody thinks I called him ‘dearest’ in his life, they are much mistaken. I never even called him ‘dear’” (qtd. Pitt 1962, 117). The following year the Tennysons were offered the Queen’s Box at the Crystal Palace, Prince Albert being well aware of Tennyson’s interest in science. Albert paid an informal visit to Tennyson at Freshwater and later wrote, just like any other admirer of the Great Poet, to ask for an autograph in his own (enclosed) copy of Idylls of the King. Then, in December 1861, at the age of 42, he suddenly died. Following Albert’s death, Tennyson wrote to the Royal Family: I trust that somehow and at some time I may be enabled to speak of Him as He Himself would have wished to be spoken of—surely as gracious and noble and gentle a being as God ever sent among us to be a messenger of good to his creatures. (1981–90, 2:291)

Interestingly, references to Albert—“He Himself”—are capitalised in this letter (a practice the Queen was to make official) but Tennyson forgets to capitalise God’s “h,” the H of “his creatures.” Within a fortnight of Albert’s death, Tennyson had finished the “Dedication” to his memory for a new edition of Idylls already in the press. These to His Memory—since he held them dear, Perchance in finding there unconsciously Some image of himself—I dedicate, I dedicate, I consecrate with tears— These Idylls.    And indeed He seems to me Scarce other than my king’s ideal knight, “Who reverenced his conscience as his king;

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Who spake no slander, no nor listened to it; Who loved one only and who clave to her….” (1969, 1–10)

Tennyson was not the only one to link Albert and King Arthur. As Norman Vance writes: Prince Albert, noble and romantic but also practical and public-spirited, a man of science interested in drains and the Great Exhibition, helped to link essentially bourgeois values with the traditions of chivalry. Landseer painted him many times, in the robes of medieval chivalry. (1985, 20)

Line 6 of the Dedication, “scarce other than my king’s ideal knight,” had originally been “scarce other than my own ideal knight”—but Tennyson altered that very personal line because, according to Hallam Tennyson, the link between King Arthur and Prince Albert was already current in society: “The first reading [he says] … was altered because Leslie Stephen and others called King Arthur a portrait of the Prince Consort.” There was inevitably some cynicism in reactions to the Dedication. Swinburne sardonically suggested that the central poem of the Idylls be retitled “La Morte D’Albert or Idylls of the Prince Consort” (Jump 1967, 339). Meanwhile, in the days immediately after Albert’s death, Queen Victoria had been reading and rereading In Memoriam. She changed the genders in her own copy to fit her own case (changing “widower” to “widow,” for example, and “her” to “his” in Lyric XIII) and took great comfort, she informed Tennyson, in noticing that both Albert and Arthur Hallam had blue eyes: “Next to the Bible In Memoriam is my comfort” the Queen famously said, as so often speaking for large numbers of her subjects (qtd. Dyson and Tennyson 1969, 69–70). At their first meeting after the death, Tennyson recorded that: I lost my head. I only remember saying to the Queen—big fool that I was— what an excellent King Prince Albert would have made. As soon as it was out of my mouth I felt what a blunder I had made. But, happily, it proved to be the very right thing to have said. The Queen replied that that had been the constant sorrow of her life—that she was called to govern, while he who was so worthy of the first place was obliged to take a secondary position. (qtd. Dyson and Tennyson 1969, 70)

This sense of inferiority to the Lost Beloved in both Victoria and Tennyson suggests the notion of worship and returns us to the figure of Christ. The

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worship of the Prince Consort became a religion to the Queen. Against his stated wish when he was alive, she set about commissioning statues in towns and cities throughout the land. A cult of the Prince Consort developed quickly: there was a Tomb, a Cenotaph, there were idealised portraits, statues, and monuments which were to all intents and purposes shrines. George Gilbert Scott admitted that he designed the Albert Memorial, the most prestigious monument of the Victorian period, “on the principles of ancient shrines” (qtd. Darby and Smith 1983, 2–6). Through this desperate campaign of apotheosis, the Queen seemed to be trying to regain through art some sense of Presence; to recoup the Lost Beloved in stone as Tennyson had endeavoured to recapture Hallam in words in In Memoriam. Mid-Victorian artists engaged in a parallel discourse in representing the figure of Christ, the Lost Beloved of the Christian church, and were equally beset by an anxiety they expressed in very similar terms. “Gentleness” was the key word, as it was, for Tennyson, the key to understanding the Prince. Choice of clothing was crucial. In 1851, Ford Madox Brown painted Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet. Here, Christ was originally portrayed semi-nude, but, according to the artist, “people could not see the poetry of my conception and were shocked by it,” so the figure was eventually clothed (qtd. Bowness 1984, 101). A combination of professional models and friends was used, with Elizabeth Siddal being a model for the head of Christ. That same year, William Holman Hunt painted The Light of the World, in which the kind, wise figure of the loving Christ stands patiently at the door of the human soul awaiting admittance. This painting—the second version of which appears on the cover of this volume—caused Hunt enormous problems. His aim, as Andrew Tate explains in the previous chapter, was to include both feminine and masculine qualities in the Christ figure, and he therefore looked for a virginal female model. In his own words, “Appreciating the gravity and sweetness of expression possessed by Miss Christina Rossetti, I felt that she might make a valuable sitter for the painting of the head … She kindly agreed” (Hunt 1905, 1:254). Elizabeth Siddal put in another appearance to sit for the colouring of Christ’s face, and there were also male sitters, including Millais and, unexpectedly, Thomas Carlyle whom, as Hunt put it, “I modelled from, furtively, to secure the male character of the head” (qtd. Sussman 1995, 125). Hunt’s anxiety about the mixture of genders he saw in Christ is evident in this wide range of models. Despite the noble ideal, however, he seems in the end to have lost his nerve, as to the final version of the face he belatedly added an unambiguous full beard,

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a feature that Carol Herringer in Chap. 9 of this volume associates with Victorian concepts of masculinity. John Ruskin’s response at least was reassuring: he saw the nimbus round Christ’s head as “full of softness … yet so powerful” (Hunt 1905, 1:301). Ironically, however, Carlyle himself attacked the painting on the grounds of its failure to accord with his ideal of heroic masculinity: “It is a poor misshapen presentation of the noblest, the brotherliest, and the most heroic-minded Being that ever walked God’s earth … You should think frankly of His antique heroic soul” (Hunt 1905, 1:260). Carlyle evidently wanted an all-male hero. Hunt responded by becoming the all-male artist, trekking alone through the Holy Land and putting his life in danger in order to paint The Scapegoat. He returned to the subject of Christ only in 1870, with The Shadow of Death, for which his models posed on the roof of his house in Jerusalem. There were four sitters whose identities have not been recorded; presumably all were male, considering the following comment from the painter: “I must depend upon this [the head] to shew people the personage it represents, for the originality of the treatment would lead people away from recognising it—yet I want to get into the head too much that is different from the conventional head, which always seems too weak for me” (qtd. Bowness 1984, 222). He had obviously internalised the lesson from Carlyle: this young Christ with his well-toned torso is very obviously male. Carlyle, however, was hard to please. Hallam Tennyson’s Notebook includes the following snippet, referred to at the beginning of this chapter: “One day Carlyle was full of Holman Hunt’s ‘Shadow of the Cross’. Carlyle: ‘I think, poor fellow, he painted that picture in a distraction.’” It was at this point that Tennyson commented, as he so often did: “The Christ I call Christ-like is Sebastian del Piombo’s in the National Gallery” (qtd. Tennyson 1897, 2:235). Hallam Tennyson notes here that his father’s other favourite representation of Christ was Leonardo da Vinci’s sketch in the Brera in Milan, surely an even more feminised vision than the del Piombo. Certainly, on the available evidence, Tennyson and Queen Victoria were not at all embarrassed, as the Victorian artists seem to have been, by any perceived conflict between masculinity and femininity in their Lost Beloveds. There is a long Christian tradition, exemplified by Bernard of Clairvaux in the twelfth century and Julian of Norwich in the fourteenth, of extolling the feminine and indeed of recognising Christ as a Divine Mother (cf. Ludlow 2014, 82). In the Victorian period, however, this tradition was linked to Mariology and therefore to Roman Catholicism and the complete collapse of gender distinction in the mourning process

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of two such noted Protestants as the Monarch and the Poet Laureate seems in context strangely powerful and moving. To them, the figures of Prince Albert and Hallam are not weakened at all by being called “gentle.” They are presented rather as potently androgynous, a characteristic both mourners specifically associate with Christ, perhaps recalling Galatians 3:28  in which Paul declares: “There is neither Jew nor Greek, there is neither bond nor free, there is neither male nor female: for ye are all one in Christ Jesus.” Hallam Tennyson reported his father’s belief in “what he called the man/ woman in Christ, the union of tenderness and strength” (1897, 1:326n.) and recorded his comment to Frederick Locker-Lampson: “they [the Materialists] will not easily beat the character of our Lord, that union of man and woman, sweetness and strength” (2:69). This is much more complex, indeed, a more twenty-first-century notion of gender fluidity, than the “Gentle Jesus meek and mild” of the children’s hymn or Swinburne’s “pale Galilean” who so infuriated the proponents of “Muscular Christianity.” C.H.  Spurgeon in A Good Start: A Book for Young Men and Women (1898) takes Carlyle’s objection to the feminisation of Christ to its logical limit: When I say that a man in Christ is a man, I mean that, if he be truly in Christ, he is therefore manly. There has got abroad a notion, somehow, that if you become a Christian, you must sink your manliness and turn milksop. (qtd. Vance 1985, 26)

In contrast to Spurgeon, Tennyson wonderfully ignores gender divisions. Many readers have, like Alan Sinfield, noted in In Memoriam a “complex series of slippages of gender” evoking “the whole gamut of family relationships—father, mother, lover, child, deserted maiden, wife,” and have found this “baffling” (1986, 146). It is less baffling, though, if seen in the context of Queen Victoria’s anguished tribute to her husband shortly after his death: He, my angel—Albert—my life, the life of my life, he was husband, father, mother, my support, my joy, the light in our deprived home, the best father who ever lived, a blessing to his country. (qtd. Darby and Smith 1983, 18. Italics added)

Such deep mourning seems, then, on the evidence of In Memoriam and of the Queen’s letters, to involve a collapse of gender oppositions, indeed, a

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collapse of most of the binaries upon which everyday life is built. Tennyson observed in one of his letters to the Queen, “the dead, as I have often felt, though silent, [are] more alive than the living” (3:351. Italics added). Life and death are reversed, then collapse together, fuse, as in Lyric XCV of In Memoriam: So word by word and line by line, The dead man touched me from the past, And all at once it seemed at last The living soul was flashed on mine And mine in this was wound … (XCV, 33–37)

Past and Future are then reversed and then collapse together: Yet less of sorrow lives in me For days of happy commune dead; Less yearning for the friendship fled, Than some strong bond which is to be. (CXVI, 13–16)

All hinges on a Christ figure, seen, like King Arthur, as the Past and Future King: ‘Ring out the darkness of the land, Ring in the Christ that is to be.’ (CVI, 31–32)

Eventually, in what, depending on your point of view, is either a final surrender or a final triumph, identity itself dissolves: He that died in Holy Land Would reach us out the shining hand, And take us as a single soul. (LXXXIV, 42–44)

This “unselving” can be read within the Christian discourse familiar to both mourners: they are recognising in their loss the Christ-like qualities of the person lost; they are reminded of the loss of Christ, the permanent state of absence on this earth brought about by the Fall, the expulsion

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from Eden. What in Christian terms they are really yearning for, in their collapsing of time, gender, and identity, is that lost Eden, that lost wholeness with God, that unity which Tennyson finally proposes at the point at which “we close with all we loved, / And all we flow from, soul in soul” (CXXXI, 981). At this point, in an effort to come to a better understanding of both the process and the poetry, I would like to reread Tennyson and Queen Victoria’s “unselving,” not in terms of nineteenth-century Christianity, but in terms of the twentieth-century ideas of Jacques Lacan. Even in their own time there were critics ready to castigate both the monarch and the poet for unhealthy mourning—to see their grief as a love affair with death, a regression from individual responsibility. Lacan provides a theoretical framework for this process. In his terms, both Tennyson and his Queen would be condemned for retreating from the Symbolic to the Imaginary. Lacan’s notion of the move from the original Imaginary to the later Symbolic stage begins as a model of child development and becomes a theory of language and a philosophical system. The unity of the preverbal child with its mother is ended at the moment when the child sees an image of itself—a mirror image or an older child—and creates from that an idea of selfhood which precipitates it into language and into the sense of a separate identity. The mirror image of the ideal Other is thus crucial in the construction of the Self. The process is so perfectly captured in Lyric XLV of In Memoriam that Terry Eagleton has mischievously declared that “it is obvious from this section that Tennyson has read Lacan’s Ecrits” (in Sinfield 1986, ix): The baby new to earth and sky, What time his tender palm is prest Against the circle of the breast, has never thought that “this is I”; But as he grows he gathers much, And learns the use of “I” and “me,” And finds “I am not what I see, And other than the things I touch. So rounds he to a separate mind From whence clear memory may begin, As through the frame that binds him in His isolation grows defined. (XLV, 1–12)

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Sinfield’s paraphrase of Lacan is useful here: Initially the infant experiences a sense of wholeness which it derives from the security of the relationship with the mother. The entrance into language and identity is founded on the loss of that imaginary wholeness: the belief that there must be a point of harmony and certainty persists, but attempts to locate it inevitably incorporate the split which they would heal. (1986, 67)

In these terms, once the “point of harmony and certainty” represented by Hallam and by Prince Albert has been removed, the process of “selving” goes into reverse and there is a desperate desire to be unselved, to lose the identity which separates the mourner from the Beloved. This can only be achieved (in Lacanian terms) in a return to the boundless preverbal Imaginary state, the place where it is possible to “unite with all we loved, / And all we flow from, / soul in soul.” Malcolm Bowie, in his account of Lacan, gives the following definitions of the Imaginary and the Symbolic which strongly suggest the rival discourses in In Memoriam and, I would argue, in Tennyson’s poetry in general: “The Imaginary is the order of mirror images, identifications and reciprocities … The Symbolic order … is the realm of language, of an otherness that remains other” (1991, 92). Critics have recognised in different terms these rival discourses in Tennyson’s poetry that debate enacted most clearly in “The Two Voices.” Sinfield sees the positive voice in that poem as Tennyson “wanting desperately to assert an ultimate reality, and to discover a means of apprehending it through poetic language” (1986, 86), though the stress in his subsequent argument seems to be more on the desperation than on the apprehension. Aidan Day opens up the possibility of a parallelism between Lacanian and Christian readings in the poem: “the ideal Other … is to be gained only at the self-contradictory cost of dying out of the self and out of the language in which that self is constituted” (1992, 83). Tennyson must have been very familiar with the Christian re-encoding of that idea: “For whosoever will save his life shall lose it: and whosoever will lose his life for my sake shall find it” (Matt. 16:25). Lacan’s reading at this point then seems not necessarily inimical to the Christian reading: both posit a lost wholeness, an Imaginary or Edenic state, and a disjunction between that and the differentiated Symbolic or Fallen domain. The key difference, of course, is that Lacan’s reading privileges the latter, the Fallen state, rather than the former. For Lacan, holding on to “an otherness that remains other” is not “fallen” but rather an admirable assertion of

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individuality which is identified with, in Bowie’s terms, “the realm of language.” It is worth recalling that the speaker in In Memoriam explicitly gives up language and thinks of himself as an infant (“infans,” Latin: “without language”): … but what am I? An infant crying in the night: An infant crying for the light: And with no language but a cry. (LIV, 17–20)

In Tennyson’s Christianised reading, then, the aim is to give up the burden of differentiated Selfhood and to become, as Christ demands, “little children” again (Matt. 18:3); for Lacan, in contrast, it is the gaining of Selfhood, the Symbolic, the acquisition of the power of words, which is the ultimate sign of human maturity. In both the Lacanian and the Christian readings, however, a Word has to be made Flesh—a mirror set up—between the two spaces. The paradox, of course, in both approaches, is that the more Tennyson argues for Hallam’s continued individuality (“I shall know him when we meet”), the more he confirms the separation between them. Articulation of the desire for union itself, as Day argues, splits the speaker “by his very articulation, from the object of his desire” (1992, 82). In both Lacanian and Christian thinking, the desire for lost wholeness is a part of the construction of the human subject, part of the human condition. In this sense, Tennyson had “lost” Hallam before they ever met. J. Hillis Miller explains it: “Hallam’s death did not generate Tennyson’s feeling of loss. Rather, the death gave him an occasion to personify a loss he already felt” (1992, 282). The point is effectively made by three of Tennyson’s early sonnets, all addressed, according to Christopher Ricks, to a Hallam who was then very much alive. In this chapter, I will focus on the first of the three: Me my own Fate to lasting sorrow doometh: Thy woes are birds of passage, transitory: Thy spirit, circled with a living glory, In summer still a summer joy resumeth. Alone my hopeless melancholy gloometh, Like a lone cypress, through the twilight hoary, From an old garden where no flower bloometh,

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One cypress on an island promontory. But yet my lonely spirit follows thine, As round the rolling earth night follows day: But yet thy lights on my horizon shine Into my night, when thou art far away. I am so dark, alas! and thou so bright, When we two meet there’s never perfect light. (1969, 1–14; Published Oct 1831. Tennyson’s Notebook 23 (1830))

Composed while Tennyson was still very much under the poetic and personal influence of his father, this sonnet is similar to several of those by George Clayton Tennyson. It is tempting to think of it as having been written in his vicarage garden, the “old garden” at Somersby. It is a poem about self-definition, beginning with “Me,” but “me” is an Object, not a Subject, passive not active. Even by the end, the “I” that has been reached in the penultimate line is only a twilight figure, not able to exist alone but only as one of a series of binary oppositions. Winter is set against the Summer of the Beloved’s presence, stasis against movement, loneliness against companionship, night against day. The mixed Petrarchan and Shakespearean structure and rhyme scheme which, according to Ricks, is unique in Tennyson’s poetry suggests the pulling of opposites. There is resistance against the iambic rhythm in the effortful opening stresses on lines 1, 2, and 3—“Me,” “Thy,” “Thy,” and finally in line 13, “I,” suggesting rhythmically the construction of the speaker’s identity only against the Other—from Me to I via Thy. Already the figure of the Beloved is glorified, like the head of Christ, “circled with a living glory.” In In Memoriam there are several instances of such silent visual deification, notably in Hallam seeing “His own vast shadow glory-crowned” (Lyric XCVII). Most interestingly, there is already in place the movement of endless loss and desire—the hopelessness of night’s continual pursuit of day “round the rolling earth”—an anticipation of “Tithonus.” Here already is Tennyson’s fascination with liminal states, the notion of the horizon as the ultimate barrier, but a barrier which is in fact unreal, non-existent—simply the limit of vision. Here is the movement in “Tears, Idle Tears,” with its wonderfully bewildering reversal “that brings our friends up from the underworld” (7), and “Ulysses”’s “untravelled world whose margin fades / For ever and forever when I move” (20–21). This seems very much in line with the notion that the Other is crucial in delimiting the Self: holding

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out a promise of plenitude and fulfilment, which, as the flat and unsuccessful final line suggests, is always and inevitably deferred, out of reach. Joshua King discusses Tennyson’s “fear of separation” from the dead Hallam in In Memoriam and his attempt to overcome this through the notion of “the Christ that is to be” (2014, 124). However, from the evidence of this early sonnet, Tennyson seems rather to use the Christ-like figure of Hallam as an imaginative paradigm for a sense of loss which predates the historical death of Arthur Hallam and is intrinsic to his own self-­ formation. Lacan would argue that this act of self-formation, though inevitable, is a chimaera. There is ultimately no Self to hold on to. As Margaret Reynolds comments, for Lacan, “the ego subsists in a world of mirrors, of doubles, of reflected selves where the purpose is at once to differentiate and to endorse, to be separate, and to be the same, in a measuring of subject and object which blurs the boundaries of each” (2001, 20). Christianity, in contrast, holds out the hope of redemption for the individual Soul. Yet, it too deconstructs, in its demand for loss of selfhood in Christ: “He who would save his life must lose it” (see above). What these apparently opposed accounts of the self, the Christian and the Lacanian, have in common is the figure of a self that is always incomplete, always reaching out for a wholeness, which Lacan believes to be illusory and Christianity believes to have been lost in the Fall, the expulsion from Eden. Both therefore posit an endless cycle of loss and desire. The Christian view of the ideal Other is that officially espoused by Tennyson at the end of In Memoriam: in Christ, the Beloved is regained in grander form, beyond individuality: That friend of mine who lives in God That God who ever lives and loves          One God, one law, one element       And one far off divine event To which the whole creation moves. (141–44)

The Lacanian view, more bleakly, is that there is no Other to reclaim, nor even properly a unified Self to reclaim it, but only “floating signifiers.” The Christ figure, according to this view, is simply the transcendent signifier who appears to make meaning. The anxieties I have been exploring about the representations of Christ in art and literature suggest a recognition in Victorian culture of the importance of setting up such a “point of

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harmony and certainty” through the arts. Kirstie Blair points out that in the Victorian age “religion was poetical and vice versa” (2012, 117). The belief seemed to persist, in an age when Christianity was under threat from science and industrialisation—perhaps it still persists today—that it is Art, the experience of poetry or of painting, that can momentarily and tantalisingly give a glimpse of presence, of something beyond itself: can, in In Memoriam’s language, bring Lazarus back from the Dead. I want to return in my conclusion to the National Gallery. Hallam Tennyson records that: In the summer as children we generally passed through London on our way to Lincolnshire and [my father] would take us for a treat to Westminster Abbey, the Zoological gardens, the Tower of London, … or the National Gallery. In the last he much delighted and would point out us out the excellencies of the different Masters; he always led the way first of all to the “Raising of Lazarus by Sebastian del Piombo. (Tennyson 1897, 1:371)

This painting had been acquired by the original National Gallery at 100 Pall Mall in 1824. Almost certainly, Arthur Hallam and Tennyson visited it together in the new National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, probably in 1832. It is still there, in Room 8, “Italian Renaissance paintings from 1500 to 1600,” strikingly displayed so that it is visible through the central arch from three rooms away. It is a massive painting and must, as Leonee Ormond has observed, have had a part to play in the imaginative creation of the “Lazarus” sections of In Memoriam, probably written in the immediate aftermath of Hallam’s death (1989, 7). Here the notion of the Ideal Other, the heroic figure variously embodied for Tennyson in King Arthur, Prince Albert and Hallam himself, finds visual expression in the commanding figure of Christ, “The Christ I call Christ-like.” It is easy to read into the face a likeness to Hallam. Here is the “manhood fused with female grace” which Tennyson saw in his friend; here is the light shining on “the brow of Michael Angelo.” Christ is summoning back from the darkness the huge, gauche, dusky-skinned figure of Lazarus, a figure not unlike the young Tennyson, whose form in the composition of the painting balances and completes His own. It is tempting to see this as an emblem of the longed-for reunion, just beyond the scope of In Memoriam—Christ, through Hallam, calling his benighted friend back to life from the depths of mourning (“I am so dark and thou so bright”). Hallam in death is more real than he was in life—he is the transcendent signifier, the guarantor of

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meaning, the sun whom Tennyson’s “lonely spirit” followed, “as round the rolling earth night follows day,” in those earliest sonnets. And yet, tantalisingly, an opposite and equal reading offers itself. In a balancing movement, Tennyson himself, as Victorian artist, becomes the Christ figure, the one who alone can draw the Beloved, if only for a moment, back from the dead, through Lacan’s Mirror, at the intersection of the Imaginary and the Symbolic where, through the redemptive role of Art, the Word can be made Flesh.

Note 1. This chapter is developed from an earlier article, “Tennyson and the Figure of Christ,” published in the Tennyson Research Bulletin 8.2 (2003): 85–100.

References Blair, Kirstie. 2012. Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bowie, Malcolm. 1991. Lacan. London: Fontana. Bowness, Alan. 1984. The Pre-Raphaelites. London: The Tate Gallery. Darby, Elisabeth, and Nicola Smith. 1983. The Cult of the Prince Consort. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Day, Aidan. 1992. The Archetype That Waits. In Tennyson: Seven Essays, ed. Philip Collins, 76–101. London: Macmillan. Dyson, Hope, and Sir Charles Tennyson. 1969. Dear and Honoured Lady. London: Macmillan. Holman Hunt, William. 1905. Pre-Raphaelitism and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. Vol. 2. London: Macmillan. Jump, John D., ed. 1967. Tennyson: The Critical Heritage. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. King, Joshua. 2014. Christianity: Introduction. In Reading the Abrahamic Faiths: Rethinking Religion and Literature, ed. Emma Mason, 117–129. London: Bloomsbury. Landow, George P. 1980. Victorian Types, Victorian Shadows: Biblical Typology in Victorian Literature, Art and Thought. Boston, MA and London: Routledge, Kegan and Paul. Ludlow, Elizabeth. 2014. Christina Rossetti and the Bible: Waiting with the Saints. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Martin, Robert Bernard. 1980. Tennyson: The Unquiet Heart. Oxford: Clarendon Press and Faber.

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Miller, J. Hillis. 1992. Temporal Topographies: Tennyson’s Tears. Victorian Poetry 30 (3–4): 277–289. https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40000142. Ormond, Leonee. 1989. Tennyson and the Old Masters. Tennyson Society Occasional Papers No. 7. Lincoln: The Tennyson Society. Pitt, Valerie. 1962. Tennyson Laureate. London: Barrie and Rockliff. Reynolds, Margaret. 2001. Tennyson and Sappho. Tennyson Society Occasional Papers No. 11. Lincoln: The Tennyson Society. Sinfield, Alan. 1986. Alfred Tennyson, Rereading Literature Series. Oxford: Basil Blackwell. Sussman, Herbert. 1995. Victorian Masculinities. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tennyson, Hallam. 1897. Tennyson: A Memoir. Vol. 2. London: Macmillan. Tennyson, Alfred Lord. 1969. Poems of Tennyson. Ed. Christopher Ricks. London: Longman. ———. 1981–90. The Letters of Alfred Lord Tennyson, 3 vols. Ed. Cecil D. Lang and Edgar Shannon. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Vance, Norman. 1985. The Sinews of the Spirit. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART IV

The Figure of Christ in Tractarian Theology

CHAPTER 8

Tractarian Reserve and the Veiled Figure of Christ: Ascension, Mystery, and the Limits of Imagination Ralph Norman

1   The Ascension of Christ and Poetics: Two Axes of Reserve The Prayer Book Collect for Ascension Day is a petition that “like as we do believe … Jesus Christ to have ascended into the heavens; so we may also in heart and mind thither ascend, and with him continually dwell.” In The Christian Year (1827), Keble’s poem for “Ascension Day” represents this searching ascension of “heart and mind” after Christ with cautious reserve. The soul is envious of the physical eye, for at least the eye can see the “bright veil” of “Soft cloud” drawn “across the heavenly way” (1867, ll.1–5). The heart—once disencumbered of its chains—is encouraged to “pursue the bright track” (1.11) until it has “trac’d” Christ to the “glory-­ throne” (l.30). In doing so, however, the heart’s eye reaches an epistemological boundary—the heavenly “sea of light” (1.16)—beyond which

R. Norman (*) Canterbury Christ Church University, Canterbury, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_8

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Keble restricts himself to biblical tropes and some (tightly compressed) Dantesque cosmological imagery: “Though on unfolding Heaven our gaze we bend,” the figure of Christ—the incarnate mediator at the right hand of the Father—is “lost behind the bright angelic throng” (ll.34–35). “We must not stand to gaze too long” (l.33). The mind’s eye cannot penetrate heaven where Christ is hidden, concealed, veiled. He will not be seen, writes Keble, until “Our wasted frames feel the true sun and live” (l.40). As an eschatological phenomenon, the vision of Christ is deferred (or reserved) for the other side of death; in the interim dispensation of expectant hope and longing, the “new-created heart” is to be drawn towards the invisible Christ “in worthier love and praise” (ll.43–44). The “soft cloud” of the “bright veil” in Keble’s “Ascension Day” is a conflation of two biblical images: Acts 1:9 (“a cloud received him out of their sight”) and Hebrews 6:19–20 (“hope … entereth into that within the veil; Whither the forerunner is for us entered, even Jesus”). In both sources Christ is a hidden figure. In Acts, Christ’s reception into the cloud is followed by an angelic injunction not to gaze into heaven, for “this same Jesus, which is taken from you into heaven, shall so come in like manner as ye have seen him go into heaven” (1:11). In Hebrews, the veil referred to is the veil of the heavenly sanctuary behind which Christ performs his role as high priest, “higher than the heavens” (7:26), in the true holy place, the transcendent temple “not … made with hands” (9:24). Keble’s running together of the images is characteristic: in his prose and poetry, the words “veil” and “cloud” are often found used together, sometimes interchangeably. If the key theological motifs developed by Keble in The Christian Year dwell on the physical absence and hiddenness of the ascended Christ—and on faith, hope, and love as mystical means of reaching out through the veil in prayer—his Ascensiontide sermon, “Christ the King of Angels,” is even more emphatic that the ascended Christ in heaven is simply unimaginable: It is most certain that, when we have done our best, we cannot lift up our minds and hearts fully to understand the unspeakable glory which the Son of God, as He is also the Son of Man, obtained as on this day … We cannot, I say, realize this in our thoughts, even as we cannot know or imagine the place, where the visible though spiritual Body of our Blessed Lord now is; or how, or which way, He was received up through the air when he hid himself in a cloud from the sight of His servants … They saw him departing, yet they could no more imagine the manner of His departure than we now can. (1876, 1–2)

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Keble’s insistence that the Ascension of Christ is beyond imagination is remarkable: “we cannot realize in our thoughts,” “we cannot know or imagine,” where or how Christ now is in heaven. The present, risen, and ascended Christ—the Christ to whom Keble addressed his prayers, the object of his devotion—escapes imaginative figuration and depiction. Keble’s deliberate purgation of the imagination demands attention, for it suggests that he was possessed of a strong and restrictive sense of correlated Christological and poetical boundaries: as Christ practiced reserve in heaven, Keble practiced an analogous reserve in poetry and religious devotion. The motifs of “veiling” and “reserve” developed in Keble’s Praelectiones (originally delivered in Latin, 1832–41, and first published in 1844) are familiar features of Tractarian poetics (see Tennyson 1981; Mason 2004). In his lectures, Keble described the “essence of Poetry” as the placing of a “poet’s deepest and most intimate feelings … in a kind of sanctuary, behind a veil” (1912, 2:97). George Herbert provided him with an example of a poet who “hides [his] deep love of God … behind a cloud of precious conceits.” According to Keble, “it was Herbert’s modest reserve which made him veil under these refinements his deep piety” (99). (The original Latin text of the Praelectiones is actually more suggestive than the translator allows: Keble had Herbert’s love for God hidden in “nescio qua nube,” a phrase which evokes, surreptitiously, the mystical Cloud of Unknowing (1844, 472).) When Keble returned to the theme at a later stage in the lecture series, he argued that “true religious reserve” should be “carefully protected,” for “genuine piety is not exposed to the eye … yet is present, hidden behind a veil” (1912, 2:314). Keble’s application of motifs associated with the ascension of Christ to poetics is complex: in his thought, a line of Christological imagery intersects with a line of literary theory. Two lines of veiling here cross: a horizontal axis of poetical veiling in reserve and a vertical axis of Christ’s veiling by the clouds of heaven.

2   The Christological Architectonics of Keble’s Poetics The transfer of metonyms of “clouds” and “veils” is a densely darkening example of metalepsis; it is also a crux on which Keble presses, represses, and purges his own passionate love of God. It invites a deeper theological reading of Tractarian poetics paying particular attention to the

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Christological vertical axis, and relating the notion of reserve to the figure of the ascended Christ. From heaven, the hidden Christ represented himself under the veil of sacramental mysteries (sacramental theology always begins with the ascension; see Keble 1876, 42–52). The logic of a Christological poetics, properly considered, should seek to understand Christ’s representation of himself in the sacramental symbols as the prototype of poetry, the archetypal making-of-meaning through symbolic utterance that makes possible all subsequent Christian poetry. The poetry of the Christian believer then becomes an imitative activity stimulated by the prior creative activity of the Word of God. And as that same Word of God is also the creator-poet of the world of nature, the world is a world of symbols. As Keble argued in Tract 89, Christ has a “Poetry of His own, a set of holy and divine associations and meanings, wherewith it is His will to invest all material things” (1841, 144). The “whole has its meaning,” for, according to St. Paul, “The invisible things of Him from the creation of the world are clearly seen, being understood by the things that are made” (Rom. 1:20). Keble concluded that St. Paul’s words “would seem to lay down the principle or canon of mystical interpretation for the works of Nature” (185). The world itself veiled a secret meaning, hidden behind each cloud, forest, or face. He understood that there was in the Bible “direct encouragement” for “the symbolical use of things natural,” and that this use presupposed the use of “poetical forms of thought and language, as the channel of supernatural knowledge to mankind” (185). He continued: Poetry, traced as high up as we can go, may almost seem to be God’s gift from the beginning, vouchsafed to us for this very purpose: at any rate the fact is unquestionable, that it was the ordained vehicle of revelation, until God Himself was made manifest in the flesh. And since the characteristic tendency of poetical minds is to make the world of sense, from beginning to end, symbolical of the absent and unseen, any instance of divine favour shown to Poetry, and divine use of it in the training of God’s people, it would seem, as far as it goes, to warrant that tendency; to set GOD’s seal upon it, and witness it as reasonable and true. (Keble 1841, 185–86)

With the words “[as] far as it goes,” Keble respects the limits placed on the poetic imagination by the Word made flesh. The poetic symbols Christ himself created formed “part of the clouds and darkness that He gathers round about Him: which if we can at all penetrate by the help of other

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revelation, it is well; if not, at least we may adore in silence” (1841, 120). When poetry is “traced up as high as we can go,” the Christian reaches the “bright veil” of “soft clouds” which hide the ascended, absent Christ. The “intense Christology” of The Christian Year, looked to the heavens, where Christ was “compared to light and radiance … and … to the sun” in “dazzling radiance” (Tennyson 1981, 103). But that which dazzles, blinds. The ascended Christ dwelling in unapproachable light could not be depicted. Once understood Christologically, poetic representation was controlled and restrained by the doctrine of the ascension.

3   Tractarians and the Limits of the Religious Imagination The Tractarian refusal to imagine Christ in heaven was an expression of theological and poetic reserve. More, it was a subjective response to Christ’s own objective self-reservation and concealment. At once, the injunction on the imagination set the Tractarians against other Victorians. It set them against Ludwig Feuerbach, who claimed that “The second Person in God … is the nature of the imagination made objective,” being the “satisfaction for mental images,” “known personally… even after his ascension” ([1854] 1957, 74, 144). It also set them against Broad Churchmen like Charles Kingsley, who in an Ascension Day sermon invoked imagination as a faculty for realizing Christic presence: “let us specially to-day, as far as our dull feelings and poor imaginations will allow us … adore the ascended Saviour, who rules forever, a Man in the midst of the throne of the universe” (1878, 123). For the Tractarians and their successors, one senses, the reality of Christ’s concealment only served to disrupt subjectively imagined pictures of him. Such subversion was enacted by Henry Parry Liddon, who argued that the “objective character” of the Apostolic witness to the ascension far outweighed any merely subjective “consciousness of the believer” yearning after Christ (1876, 287–88). If Jesus “drew … their imaginations … from the earthly scene towards Himself,” this only “quickened and enlarged their capacities for work and suffering here on earth” (296). The deferred vision of God would not be realized by fancy, but through a life of patient service in imitation of the self-limiting and self-restraining Christ. For his part, and as if in answer to Feuerbach, Newman was dismissive of the thought that Christianity was “man … worshipping his own mind,

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his own dear self and not God” (1899, 220). He was emphatic that “the idea of God” was no “passing sentiment or imagination” (ibid.). For Isaac Williams, meanwhile, the theological imagination was itself a punishment for sin: it only further obscured the vision of God. It was because people “were not willing to retain God in their knowledge” that “He gave them up to follow their imaginations, and hid Himself from them” (1870, 94). If “some bright ray” of revelation ever broke through the clouds, it only tended “to reveal that thick darkness wherein God is hid” (100). Revelation itself disclosed that God was hidden, unknown, mysterious: “the more … God is revealed to us, the more do we become sensible how much He conceals Himself from us: the more light there is, the more visible does it render the obscurity; the brighter the sun, the darker becomes the shade” (99).

4   Casting Down Imaginations The injunction on the imagination in Keble’s sermon represents a corrective to that English Romantic tradition stemming from Samuel Taylor Coleridge which sought to understand religion as an essentially imaginative phenomenon. According to Coleridge, imagination was “the prime agent of all human perception and a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am” ([1817] 1985, 2:156). Douglas Hedley has pointed out that this means Coleridge was all along “assuming a consubtantiality of God and the human mind” (2011, 48). Unsurprisingly, Coleridge’s unorthodox claims for the “imagination” set him apart from Keble. According to Stephen Prickett, Keble followed instead Wordsworth’s “weak” use of imagination, taking the word to represent “the power of drawing attention to hidden likenesses by means of metaphor and simile” (1976, 117). One suspects there may have been strong theological reasons for this. For one thing, Bishop Butler had defined imagination as “that forward delusive faculty, ever obtruding beyond its sphere … the author of all error” ([1736] 1900, 17). For another, the translators of the King James Bible typically associated imagination with wickedness. As Cruden’s Concordance showed, the words “imagine,” “imagination,” “imaginations,” “imagined,” “imagineth” occurred twenty-nine times. With only two exceptions (1 Chron. 28:9 and 29:18), the vocabulary of imagination was always used negatively. From Genesis 6:5 (“And GOD saw that the wickedness of man was great in the earth, and that every imagination of his heart was only evil

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continually”) to 2 Corinthians 10:5 (“Casting down imaginations … and bringing into captivity every thought to the obedience of Christ”), the imagination was vain, false, and evil. Given his own negative understanding of the role of imagination in the life of faith, Keble was never likely set himself against the pronouncements of the English Bible and kept within what he believed to be his proper limits. Although Prickett recognizes that Coleridge’s “pseudo-Kantian” vocabulary of “imagination” was at some point replaced by a Victorian (and apparently Keble-inspired) vocabulary of “Poetry,” he fails to provide a satisfactory explanation for this change (1976, 118). If one wishes to account for the Tractarian preference for “poetry” over “imagination,” it is reasonable to argue that it was justified with reference to sacramental theology: after all, Christ was not a dreamer of fanciful vanities, but the poetic maker of sacramental realities. Poetry was imitative rather than illuminative, for human creativity—itself created by God—flourished when it imitated the originary work of the Creator (see Abrams 1953 for discussion of the poetics rejected by Keble). When Christ took bread and wine and made them his body and blood, symbols became more than symbols.1 Thus, Christ made possible the vision of poetry expressed in Keble’s Lectures: “Poetry lends Religion her wealth of symbols and similes: Religion restores these again to Poetry, clothed with so splendid a radiance that they appear to be no longer merely symbols, but to partake (I might almost say) of the nature of sacraments” (1912, 2: 481). Turning to Newman, it is important to acknowledge that his use of “imagination” developed with time. As an Anglican (in 1829), Newman had argued that the wayward imagination needed to be corrected by poetry, for “Poetry … recreates the imagination by the superhuman loveliness of its views, [and] provides a solace for the mind broken by the disappointments and sufferings of actual life” (1881, 9–10). In light of this it is unsurprising that the University Sermons maintained “a very negative tone regarding the imagination” (Ferreira 1993, 131). The original 1832 MS title of Sermon VII was “On the influence of the world upon the imagination, in seducing us from a strict religious course” (Newman 2006, 330). Even as a Roman Catholic, Newman retained his ostensibly Anglicaninspired caution over the “imagination,” writing in 1857 that “imagination, not reason, is the great enemy to faith, vid what Bacon and Butler say against imagination, vid my sermon about the world in University Sermons” (1976, 47). It took time for Newman to start regarding it more positively. By 1869, the vocabulary of “imagination” had eventually gone

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through a “striking change” to become the “active power of the illative sense” (Prickett 1976, 194)—the faculty by which “an object of real apprehension … is able to exert … living mastery over the mind” (Newman 1939, 126). Although the later Newman risked running together the vocabularies of Coleridge and Keble, the earlier critical caution never entirely disappeared. It made sense for him to write of a theologically disciplined “trained imagination” (Browne 1733, 315).2 Thus, what Newman meant by the word “poetry” when he was an Anglican was much the same as what he meant by the phrase “theology of the religious imagination” after he became a Roman Catholic. Compare the following sentences from the younger and the older Newman: “Poetry then is our mysticism; and so far as any two characters of mind tend to penetrate below the surface of things, and to draw men away from the material to the invisible world, so far they may certainly be said to answer to the same end; and that too a religious one” ([1839] 1881, 1:291); “the theology of a religious imagination … has a living hold on truths which are really to be found in the world, though they are not on the surface” (1939 [1870], 117). “Poetry,” or the “theology of the religious imagination,” was distinct from the Coleridgean “imagination” because it proceeded within the limits set by the Gospel, disclosing the veiled, sacramental reality of the Word of God in the world.3 In Keble’s case, however, it is necessary to speak of a theological poetics more doggedly resistant to Romantic preoccupations with the imagination. Although his poetry was concerned with the apocalyptic theme of the heavenly Christ, his poetics did not provide another example of that “apocalypse by imagination” which M.  H. Abrams found in Blake and Shelley (1973, 340–44). Rather, as Shaw has argued, Keble’s devotional poetry stands apart from the “overlapping contexts” of some Victorian theories of language and knowledge: it is one of those “exceptions” that is better studied in a “single context” (1987, xvii). In his own reading of Keble’s poetics, Shaw connected the theory of reserve to “displacement,” reading it as a “response to the blank space at the centre, which is the frightening void of … a loved one gone” (48). The examples he gave were of elegies by Coventry Patmore and Thomas Hardy, but the observation also extends to those Tractarian sermons on the ascended Christ that contained an elegiac element describing the loss or absence of a beloved friend.4 For Shaw, Keble’s “displacement and reserve” was at once “conservative,” “theological,” and (ironically) “revolutionary.” Indeed, Keble’s

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desire to avoid poetic representation made his poetics radical: in his work, “direct representation” of his “master passion” was “neither possible not desired” (67).

5   Keble and the Limits of the Apocalyptic Imagination In his 1852 essay on “Sacred Poetry,” Keble briefly compared representations of heaven in Milton and Dante. He complained that in Paradise Lost Milton had, “with very little selection or refinement,” transferred “imagery of Paradise and Earth” to the “neighbourhood of God’s throne” (1877, 104). In Keble’s view, Milton had let an all-too-this-worldly imagination run wild and therefore failed as a religious poet. Dante, in contrast, was “as simple as possible in his imagery, producing intense effect by little more than various combinations of three leading ideas—light, motion, and music” (104). Dante’s repression of imagination and restriction of imagery focussed Keble’s poetics when he adopted a similar poverty of invention in his own “Ascension Day” poem: here Keble limited himself to the same combination of ideas of light, motion, and music, compressed within the crushing restraints of stanzas 4–8. Keble’s extensive discussion of Lucretius across four lectures of his Praelectiones demands special attention here, for one senses that Lucretius’s Epicurean vision of astronomy might have provided an alternative paradigm for Keble’s interpretation of the ascension of Christ to heaven. The Lucretian doctrine of limitless space represented a complete break with the Christian and Aristotelian cosmology of Thomas Aquinas and meant that heaven could no longer be conceived as a super-celestial transcendent realm of the type depicted at the conclusion of Dante’s Paradisio. Keble’s interest in Lucretius could have led him into expansive cosmological speculation over the location of heaven. That it did not says something about his doctrine of reserve. In his Lectures on Poetry, Keble wrote that “the sum and essence of Lucretius’s poetry [was] centred in a sort of passion for the Infinite.” This poet, he said, “delighted pre-eminently in all that is mysterious, vast, and boundless” (1912, 2:334). His “mind roamed through the extremest spaces of the universe”; “the mere love of his freedom and of his power to range where he would [carried] him along” into the “region bounded by no limits … the limitless void” (300). Despite Lucretius’s adherence to an Epicurean disinterest in the gods, Keble took pains to argue that his work

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should nevertheless be of interest to Christian critics. Lucretius was, in fact, an example of what Christian poetic sensibilities could make of pagan literature. His delight in contemplation of the infinite was appropriated and rehabilitated as a form of natural religion. In Keble’s reading, “the immense and limitless range of the heavens” allowed “some mysterious notion of divine greatness [to be] impressed on all men’s minds.” The “Mighty Space” of which Lucretius wrote allowed a glimpse of “the Gods, and [the] Happy seat” (358). But to an even greater extent Keble’s interests focussed on the symbols Lucretius used—on the imagery which hinted at the infinite. As Keble observed, “no one has ever more finely and exquisitely painted the form, colour, and movement of clouds” (322). Clouds represented indeterminate flux, changing “utterly and constantly even while we gaze at them” (323). More than that, they represented concealment. In the case of clouds, Keble suggested, “there is something specially attractive to those who love mystery and infinity” (323). The “changing vision and scene of cloudland” showed kinship with “Epicurean theories concerning Images”—“in the same way as those who gaze upon the depths of the blue air … are … inevitably reminded of the vast and boundless void” (325). Of Lucretius, Keble wrote, “Things secret, infinite, obscure, in a word, all that is mysterious, he fastens upon whenever met with, or pursues when sighted afar off.” The chief tokens of such things were visible cloudscapes. So, “when a poet is drawn by the glamour of whatever is mysterious and infinite, he will take pleasure, not only in what lies plain to view, such as the vast ocean and the far-off constellations, but also in the deeps of cloudland” (329–30). Shaw has interpreted Keble’s reading of Lucretius as an example of the application of the former’s “theory of displacement and reserve” in critical practice, arguing that Keble had to draw to the surface something otherwise hidden in De rerum natura. Lucretius’s passion for the infinite was, according to Shaw, “artfully veiled,” glimpsed “indirectly, out of the corner of the eye,” and “preserved by being disguised, by not being named directly” (1987, 67). Its concealment or elision was exactly what made it important. But when Shaw suggested that Keble took Lucretius’s “passion for the Infinite” as one of the “most permanently interesting features of poetry,” he underestimated the density of the veil of reserve operating in Keble poetics (67). For Lucretius represented only the cosmological features of a journey through the heavens (and a pagan one at that). If his pagan cosmology were to be appropriated by Christian theology, one would have to say Lucretius offered poetic depiction of something of

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secondary interest only: the empty pathway once taken by the nowdeparted Christ through the infinite expanse of the heavens—what Shaw otherwise called the “dark firmament of agnostic poetry” (152). Interestingly, for all that Keble praised Lucretius in his Praelectiones, he refused to imitate him in his own ascension sermons. As such, Keble’s theory of poetic reserve accounted for his double rejection of the Lucretian representational paradigm in favor of a theology of the veiled Christ: both the Christ and his imagined path through the heavens were elided. The Lucretian passion for the infinite was suppressed as Keble deliberately restricted himself to a more limited scope of theological vision. In place of Lucretian excess, therefore, Keble deployed poetic symbolism of “clouds” and “veils” within the parameters set by Christian tradition. His use of such symbols was as precise and controlled as that which we find at earlier and later stages of Anglican poetic convention: in line with George Herbert’s earlier words of symbolic prohibition, “Each Cloud distils thy praise, and doth forbid | Poets to turn it to another use” (“Sure Lord, there is enough in thee to dry,” ll.4–5), and in line with Christina Rossetti’s later insistence that “Each common cloud in this our cloudy climate may serve to remind us of the cloud of the Ascension, and of the clouds of the second Advent” (1892, 20). “Clouds” and “veils” were to be interpreted Christologically, and chiefly with reference to the epistemic limits set by Christ’s ascension. As Newman taught in an early sermon, although Christ was veiled under the figure of the cloud, such language could not be explained as merely figurative: Clouds and darkness are round about Him. We are not given to see into the secret shrine in which God dwells. Before Him stand the Seraphim, veiling their faces. Christ is within the veil. We must not search curiously what is His present office, what is meant by His pleading His sacrifice, and by His perpetual intercession for us. And, since we do not know, we will studiously keep to the figure given us in Scripture … We will not neglect it, because we do not understand it. We will hold it as a Mystery. (Newman [1824–43] 1898, 2:211)

6   Veiled Figures Earlier in this chapter I referred to Shaw’s reading of Keble’s poetics in which the doctrine of reserve is equated with the repression of something “too painful to face,” namely, “the mourner’s response to the blank space at the centre, which is the frightening void of … a loved one gone” (1987, 48). According to Shaw, “the picture at the centre” ultimately “turns out

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to be a hole in the canvas or a mere empty space” (ibid.). And if this is viewed as “revolutionary” (as Shaw for one thought), it is because Keble is taken to have anticipated some intriguingly Barthean insights: “For Keble’s poet of reserve … language is only a residue, the trace of a meaning that has passed. It is the trace of something unsayable, and therefore “unceremonious,” something which the elegist … can never quite put into words” (74). The resulting picture represents Keble as a poet of repressed and subliminal awareness. Considering the line of argument just taken, what are we to make of this? The major conclusion is that any such reading needs to be revised with reference to Keble’s Christology and Eucharistic theology. The one great hidden figure shaping and forming the doctrine of reserve was the veiled Christ, himself reserved in heaven until the eschatological second coming. The “loved one gone” had not left a “blank space”; rather the ascended Christ continued to represent himself through his activity as the poetic creator of sacramental realities. As argued above, Keble’s poetry was imitative rather than illuminative: it represented an attempt to imitate the poetic activity of the ascended Christ who represented himself under the symbols of bread and wine (and thereby provided an ontological and metaphysical foundation for Christian poetry). As such, Keble should not be taken as an example of the “penetrative imagination” in poetry, a writer confident in his own ability (as Blake was) to see what is otherwise apocalyptically veiled. Rather, Keble provides an example of the “Eucharistic imagination” in poetry, a writer who allows the Sacrament to set the limits and scope of poetic mimesis. These limitations need not be regretted for they made Keble the writer he was. This leads to a second, minor conclusion: as an imitative poet, it should come as no surprise that Keble was not given to glory in his own genius. If there was a blank space in Keble’s work, it was the poet himself, carefully self-effaced. Read in light of the above argument, Shaw’s reference to the “hole in the canvas” unintentionally yet suggestively recalls Newman’s elegiac tribute to Keble—a tribute which, in turn, echoed Keble’s own earlier description of George Herbert as a poet whose “modest reserve” led him to “veil” his own “refinements” in the cloud of his “deep piety” (1912, 2: 97–99). According to Newman, Keble was effectively a new Herbert: a poet whose “innate modesty and … habitual disregard of self” meant that his achievements remained carefully hidden “underground and out of sight” (Keble 1877, xii–xiv). “How can I profess to paint a man who will not sit for his picture?,” he begged. Such was one Tractarian’s

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reverential tribute to another. It appears to have been reciprocated. As Anne Moberly later recalled, “The sight of Dr. Newman’s miniature bust on Mr. Keble’s study table with a white veil always placed over it was very mysterious” (1911, 182).

Notes 1. Having prohibited attempts to imagine the glorified Christ in heaven, Keble elsewhere authorized the re-imagining of that which Christ himself sanctioned and instructed to be memorialized and re-enacted (1 Cor. 11:23–26). In his sermon on “Eucharistical Offices,” Keble allowed the Christian imagination a strictly limited scope of vision, restricted to the “the Consecration of the Holy Communion, and the offering of [Christ] Himself on the Cross.” It was Christ’s will that “we should fix our whole attention” on “those two moments of our Lord’s earthly and visible life.” By “Keeping these two scenes before you in thought and imagination, fixing on them the eye of a strong faith, you will by God’s blessing be enabled to cast all your burthen upon Him … and to come into His Holy Place” (Keble 1848, 269–71). This is one example where Keble allows for a legitimate (if strictly limited) role for the Christian imagination. It may perhaps be better understood as a “Eucharistic imagination,” focussed on what Christ sanctioned and sanctified as a figure of himself. 2. Newman’s “trained imagination” may be compared here with Archbishop William King’s teaching that theological analogy functioned to “correct our imaginations.” The relevant text (originally from 1709) was reproduced in the Bampton Lectures of Newman’s one-time mentor, Richard Whately (1833, 503). King’s teaching received clarification and development in the work of his associate, Bishop Peter Browne. According to Browne, “we always find Analogy us’d to Inform the Understanding, as Metaphor and other Figures are, to Affect the Imagination … In Divine Metaphor the Resemblance … is Imaginary; ’tis pure Invention and mere Allusion alone, and no way founded in the Real Nature of the things compared. But in Divine Analogy … the Correspondency and Proportion is Real” (Browne 1737, 136–37). Because metaphor was “the result merely of the Imagination,” it was held to be “altogether Arbitrary” (Browne 1733, 3). 3. What Coulson calls Newman’s “principle of limitation” in religious language (“that the senses convey truth and reality but only up to a certain point—they betoken the unknown, they do not reveal it; and acting as they do like figures of speech, they can be pushed too far”) is informative here (Coulson 1970, 59). For further examples of comparisons of “imagination”

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in Coleridge and Newman, see Coulson (1981, 9–11) and Drive (2018, 26–27). 4. The likening of the Ascension of Christ to the absence of a dear friend taken away was hinted at in Keble’s “The Nearness of the Unseen World” (Keble 1876, 105). It was also deployed by Pusey in “The Ascension our Glory and Joy” (Pusey 1883, 386), and several times by R. W. Church (Church 1902, 1:106; 2:194; 3:162–63).

References Abrams, M.H. 1953. The Mirror and the Lamp: Romantic Theory and the Critical Tradition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. 1973. Natural Supernaturalism: Tradition and Revolution in Romantic Literature. New York: Norton. Browne, Peter. 1733. Things Divine and Supernatural Conceived by Analogy with Things Natural and Human. London: Innys and Manby. ———. 1737. The Procedure, Extent, and Limits of Human Understanding. 3rd ed. London: Innys and Manby. Butler, Joseph. (1736) 1900. The Analogy of Religion Natural and Revealed to the Constitution and Course of Nature. Ed. J. H. Bernard. London: Macmillan. Church, Richard William. 1902. Village Sermons. Vol. 3. London: Macmillan. Coleridge, Samuel Taylor. (1817) 1985. Biographia Literaria, vol. 2. Ed. J. Engell and W. J. Bate. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Coulson, John. 1970. Newman and the Common Tradition. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. 1981. Religion and Imagination. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Drive, Bernard. 2018. John Henry Newman and the Imagination. London: Bloomsbury. Ferreira, M.  Jamie. 1993. The Grammar of the Heart: Newman on Faith and Imagination. In Discourse and Context, ed. Gerard Magill, 129–143. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Feuerbach, Ludwig. (1854) 1957. The Essence of Christianity. Translated by George Eliot. New York: Harper and Row. Hedley, Douglas. 2011. Sacrifice Imagined. London: Continuum. Keble, John. 1841. On the Mysticism Attributed to the Early Fathers of the Church. London: Rivington. ———. 1844. Praelectiones Academicae, tom. II. Oxford: J. H. Parker. ———. 1848. Sermons, Academical and Occasional. Oxford: J. H. Parker. ———. (1827) 1867. The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays Throughout the Year. 104th ed. Oxford: James Parker. ———. 1876. Sermons for Ascension Day to Trinity Sunday. Oxford: James Parker. ———. 1877. Occasional Papers and Reviews. Oxford: James Parker.

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———. 1912. Lectures on Poetry, 1832–1841, vol. 2. Translated by Edward Kershaw Francis. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Kingsley, Charles. 1878. All Saints’ Day and Other Sermons. London: C. Kegan Paul. Liddon, Henry Parry. 1876. University Sermons. London: Rivingtons. Mason, Emma. 2004. ‘Her Silence Speaks’: Keble’s Female Heirs. In John Keble in Context, ed. Kirstie Blair, 125–139. London: Anthem Press. Moberly, Catherine. 1911. Dulce Domum. George Moberly, His Family and Friends. London: John Murray. Newman, John Henry. (1829) 1881. Poetry, with Reference to Aristotle’s Poetics. In Essays Critical and Historical, vol. 1, 1–26. London: Pickering. ———. (1824–43) 1898. Parochial and Plain Sermons, vol. 8. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. (1849) 1899. Discourses to Mixed Congregations. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. ———. (1870) 1939. Grammar of Assent. London: Longmans, Green and Co. ———. 1976. Theological Papers on Faith and Certainty. Oxford: Clarendon Press. ———. (1843) 2006. Fifteen Sermons Preached Before the University of Oxford. Ed. J. D. Earnest and G. Tracey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Prickett, Stephen. 1976. Romanticism and Religion. The Tradition of Coleridge and Wordsworth in the Victorian Church. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pusey, Edward Bouverie. 1883. Sermons for the Church’s Seasons: From Advent to Trinity. London: Kegan Paul, Trench and Co. Rossetti, Christina. 1892. The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse. London: SPCK. Shaw, W.  David. 1987. The Lucid Veil: Poetic Truth in the Victorian Age. London: Athlone. Tennyson, G.B. 1981. Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Whately, Richard. 1833. The Use and Abuse of Party Feeling in Matters of Religion. 3rd ed. London: James Parker. Williams, Isaac. 1870. Thoughts on the Study of the Holy Gospels. London: Rivingtons.

CHAPTER 9

The Masculinity of Jesus and the Doctrine of the Real Presence Carol Engelhardt Herringer

As this volume shows, Britons produced multiple overlapping and competing images of Jesus in the long nineteenth century. Clergymen had a particular investment in these images, for their professional identity was closely linked to the figure of Christ. However, this investment became particularly problematic from the 1830s when the shift in Evangelicals’ emphasis from the Atonement to the Incarnation led to a greater emphasis on Jesus’s humanity and mercy (cf. Hilton 1988, 5, 299, 332). As Andrew Tate and Valerie Purton explain in Part III of this volume, representations of Christ often emphasized characteristics that Victorian texts frequently categorized as feminine, even when manifested by males: he counselled humility, forgiveness, and self-abnegation. Especially problematic were images of Jesus in children’s literature and in Frederick William Farrar’s Life of Christ (1874) as an obedient, loving child, a figure that Meredith Veldman has described as a “Dutiful Daughter” (Veldman 1997) and that Leanne Waters, in Chap. 16 of this volume, analyses in her discussion of

C. E. Herringer (*) Georgia Southern University, Savannah, GA, United States e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_9

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Christly children in the late nineteenth-century bestselling novels of Marie Corelli and Richard Marsh. These representations of Jesus complicated the attempt of clergy to craft an identity that conformed to mainstream models of masculinity, which defined men as brave, intellectual, physically strong, honest, and successful in the public sphere. Clergymen’s identities were further affected by the movement towards professionalization, which, given the nature of clerical work and the new higher standards for clerical behaviour, associated the work of the clergy with the feminine sphere of the home and removed it from the masculine world of clubs, pubs, and playing fields. Some clergymen—most famously, John Russell, the “Sporting Parson” (1795–1883)—flamboyantly ignored these challenges, while others sought to combine manliness and Christianity, most famously in muscular Christianity, which advocated combining a vigorous Protestant Christianity with robust activity and engagement in the public sphere. Tractarian, Ritualist, and Anglo-Catholic priests were arguably the clergymen who found it most difficult to conform to a mainstream masculine identity Tractarians and Ritualists formed in the 1830s when, from bases in Oxford and Cambridge respectively, they defined the Church of England as solely Catholic and not Protestant. Although Tractarians were, in general, more concerned with theology and Ritualists more concerned with liturgy and church design, they shared many beliefs and attitudes, a high view of the priesthood, a belief in the efficacy of the sacraments, and a respect for the authority of church tradition. After about mid-century, they can be jointly described as Anglo-Catholics. In recognition of the consistency of their fundamental beliefs, assumptions, and goals throughout the Victorian era, I describe all three types as “advanced Anglicans,” a term that references the fears of even some who were sympathetic to them that they had “advanced” too far towards the Roman Catholic Church.1 Advanced Anglicans’ insistence that clergymen should exhibit high standards of behaviour required them to relinquish some traditional pursuits of the gentleman, including hunting, shooting, playing cards, and gambling (cf. Heeney 1976, 118; Vance 1985, 16). As a group, they were not especially physically vigorous, and in a culture in which a full beard was a sign of masculinity, most were clean-shaven. In addition, their preference for Catholic ritual and their support of vowed clerical celibacy meant that they appeared “UnEnglish and Unmanly,” as David Hilliard has described them.

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Most controversially, advanced Anglican priests championed a new view of the Eucharist (as they called the sacrament that the Book of Common Prayer called “Holy Communion” or “the Lord’s Supper”). Their doctrine of the Real Presence held that Christ was really, although not corporally, present in the consecrated bread and wine, that he was received by all communicants, and that he was present in the consecrated elements even after the communion service ended. The term “Real Presence” had been used in Anglican tradition and in the Roman Catholic Church, but advanced Anglicans’ definition of it, that Christ was “really” but not corporally present, was new. Historically the Church of England had allowed two understandings of the sacrament: virtualism, which the consecrated bread and wine were used as but did not become Christ’s body and blood, and receptionism, which only worthy communicants received Christ spiritually when they received the consecrated bread and wine (cf. Nockles 1994, 236–38). Although advanced Anglicans argued that their doctrine of the Real Presence was supported by Scripture and tradition, those who advocated it faced severe professional consequences, including being prohibited from preaching, losing their livings, being tried in ecclesiastical and civil courts, and even being jailed. In 1855, Archdeacon George Anthony Denison was prosecuted for preaching on the Real Presence, and Alexander Forbes, Bishop of Brechin, was tried for heresy in 1860 following his 1857 Charge to his clergy. Those who lost their livings included William James Early Bennett, who was forced to resign from St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, in 1850, and Patrick Cheyne, a priest of St Andrew’s, Aberdeen, after he was found guilty of false teaching by the diocesan synod in 1858. The Public Worship Regulation Act (1874), an attempt to eliminate liturgical practices associated with the doctrine of the Real Presence, led to the imprisonment of five priests, including Richard William Enraght, vicar of Holy Trinity, Bordesely, who was imprisoned for almost two months in 1880–81. In spite of these penalties, advanced Anglican clergymen continued to preach and practise the doctrine of the Real Presence. It is clear from their sermons and other writings that it sustained them spiritually, and it was part of their argument that the Church of England was solely Catholic. This chapter examines another way in which the doctrine was useful: it allowed them to define Jesus, and by association themselves, as conforming to a mainstream masculine identity.

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1   A Masculine Jesus Victorian culture offered a variety of masculine ideals, as Norman Vance, James Eli Adams, John Tosh, and Paul Deslandes have shown. These varieties of masculinity often shared characteristics, including being truthful and plainspoken, at ease with and in the company of other men, and Christianity. These characteristics were related and mutually supporting, and they owe much to the legacy of the influential educator Thomas Arnold and the ethos of Victorian family life (cf. Newsome 1961, 46–49). The Jesus advanced Anglicans described when they taught the doctrine of the Real Presence evinced these three important qualities, and so, in opposition to the popular and more feminine images of Jesus, conformed to mainstream models of Victorian masculinity. Advanced Anglicans based the doctrine of the Real Presence on the literal interpretation of Jesus’s words of institution at the Last Supper, and so they described Jesus as a man who “meant what he said and did” (Enraght 1872, 37; italics in the original). Their primary evidence for this characterization was that the words recorded in the Synoptic Gospels— “This is my body” and “This is my blood” (Matt 26:26–28, Mark 14: 22–25, Luke 22:17–20)—should be understood in “their plain and literal meaning” (Cheyne 1858, 23) because “our Lord’s words are not figurative” (Enraght 1872, 10). At the Last Supper, “Our Lord’s awful words do not refer to bread and wine at large, but to that which He held in His hands, and which He had blessed” (Wilberforce 1853, 7), which was clear from his failure to explain that the words of institution meant anything other than their plain meaning (Forbes 1857, 20; Pusey 1853, 21). To understand Jesus’s words otherwise would be, they warned, to make him a liar (Forbes 1857, 7; Hammond 1885, 15; Neale 1871, 49). His obvious use of metaphors elsewhere—as when he called himself “the Bread of Life” (John 6:35); “the Door of the sheep’ (John 10:7), “the Vine” (John 15:5), “the Way, the Truth, and the Life” (John 14:6), and “the Resurrection and the Life” (John 11:25)—they argued, reinforced the plain truth of the words of institution. As Edward Bouverie Pusey said: the vine is an image of Christ, not Christ of the vine: the branches express our relation to Christ, we (it is almost too simple to state) are not images of the branches. … In our Blessed Lord’s words of Institution, ‘This is My Body,’ there is no mention of any symbol. (1871, 20)

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The depiction of Jesus as plain-spoken associated him with a key component of manliness. The all-male setting of the Last Supper also underscored Jesus’s masculinity. While the focus on Jesus’s words meant that his dining companions were rarely discussed in debates over the Real Presence, Christians would have known that Jesus had shared the Last Supper with his twelve disciples (Davidson 1871, 80; Hammond 1885, 18). Besides evoking an all-male meal, which some first experienced in boarding schools and adult men experienced daily in clubs and pubs throughout Britain, the Jesus described here was a leader of men, confident that they would understand his teaching and disseminate it. Advanced Anglicans also described Jesus as a Christian, for his Jewish identity was potentially problematic in their culture. Jews comprised a very small percentage of the British population and were becoming more culturally assimilated and prosperous for much of the century (until the arrival of new immigrants from Eastern Europe after 1870), but reflexive anti-Semitism characterized English public and private discourse (cf. Lipman 1990, 7, 28, 68–72, 80–84; Endelman 2002, 79–88). Stereotypes of Jews as unmanly, unclean, and un-English were widespread in Victorian culture, including in Farrar’s Life of Christ, Charles Kingsley’s novels and sermons, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist (1837–1839), and Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds (1871) and Phineas Redux (1873). This stereotype also shaped the public characterizations of the Prime Minister Benjamin Disraeli, whose Anglican baptism was insufficient to counteract popular depictions of him an un-English striver. Although he was a favourite of Queen Victoria, she along with other aristocrats regretted the presence of Jews, even the Rothschild brothers, in the Prince of Wales’s inner circle (Endelman 1990, 101). Most advanced Anglican clergymen ignored Jesus’s Jewish identity in their discussions of the doctrine of the Real Presence. They described Jesus as essentially a Christian man who was instituting a Christian sacrament. While the erasure of Jesus’s Jewish identity has a long tradition in Christianity, here—where the interpretation of words required knowledge of the context and in an era of growing interest in the historical identity of Jesus—it suggests that Jesus’s Jewish identity was too problematic to be acknowledged. Some advanced Anglican clergymen acknowledged Jesus’s Jewish identity but only to replace it with a Christian identity. Following Paul (Rom. 12:1, Heb. 3:1, 5:5, 6:20), they identified him as a High Priest (cf. Anglo-­ Catholic Priest 1848, xvi; Bramley 1879, 8; Enraght 1872, 7, 10; Pusey

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1874, 10; Wilberforce 1853, 249, 278, 280) who marked the end of one tradition as he instituted a new one: he was the “One High Priest” (Pusey 1851, 44), “our Great High Priest” (Pusey 1867, 11) or “the great High Priest” ([Hamilton] 1867, 48). Similarly, those who acknowledged that the Last Supper was the Passover meal described Jesus as shedding his Jewish identity when he replaced a Jewish ritual with a Christian sacrament (cf. Carter 1835, 7, 8–9; Davidson 1871, 7, 8, 9, 16–17, 22, 63, 80, 90, 93; Gore 1901, 172; Hammond 1885, 15–16). Thus, they continued the Christian tradition of understanding Judaism as prefiguring Christianity, as John Mason Neale did when he described the manna given to the Jews after their escape from Egypt as prefiguring “our True Manna” (1871, 28). These clergymen acknowledged Jesus’s Jewish identity primarily to defend practices associated with the Real Presence. They believed that communion should be received fasting, so they opposed the evening communions that were introduced in the nineteenth century primarily to cater to domestic servants and the working classes. Acknowledging that the Last Supper was an evening Passover meal was part of their argument for morning communion services, for the ritual and not the meal setting was to be repeated (cf. Ashwell 1876, 7; Dawson 1875, 3–4). It also allowed them to defend the use of unleavened disks of bread (Mills 1894, 3–4), popularly derided as “wafer bread,” similar to the bread used at the Passover meal. Most important for their Eucharistic theology, they argued that the Jewish context of the Last Supper meant that Jesus’s disciples would have known that he was instituting a sacrifice (cf. Gore 1901, 34–35; Willis 1879, 13–16, 22–23; Hammond 1885, 14–18), in contrast to the majority of Anglicans who believed that communion was a commemoration of Jesus’s sacrifice on the cross. A few advanced Anglicans evinced a strong hostility to the New Testament Jews, defining them as infidels who doubted Jesus (cf. Keble 1857, 28, 63–64; Cheyne 1858, 51). This was the approach Pusey most consistently took, in spite of his references to Jesus as the definitive High Priest. In his major sermons on the Real Presence, Pusey described the Jews of Jesus’s time as doubters and betrayers of Jesus (1843, 3, 15) who did not understand him (1843, 8; 1867, 3–4, 11–13, 15–16, 18–20, 1871, 13, 22), even though he was teaching doctrines that “The Jews, in the time of our Lord, had already learned from Isaiah, Daniel, and the Psalms, [such as] the doctrine of everlasting punishment” (1864, 3). Pusey’s harsh depiction of the Jews of Jesus’s time is shocking, especially because nowhere else does he express such anti-Semitism. It seems likely

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that for him, as well as for Keble and Cheyne, the Jews were standing in for the “infidels” they saw as their own enemies: both Anglicans who opposed them for their doctrine of the Real Presence as well as the secularists and rationalists who opposed Christianity generally. This seems to be particularly true for Pusey, who was engaged in confrontations over ritual and belief throughout his adult life (including sometimes with Ritualists, whose insistence on particular vestments and ritual gestures he did not appreciate). Pusey was never one to walk away from a fight over religious doctrine, and he must have seen in Jesus’s enemies a parallel for his own enemies. The prevalence of Victorian anti-Semitism made the Jews of Jesus’s time ready substitutes for Pusey’s enemies. Pusey’s anti-Semitism would have been widely disseminated in these published sermons, which often went through multiple editions. However, the approach advanced Anglican clergymen took with respect to Jesus’s Jewish identity demonstrated a form of anti-Semitism. While each approach to Judaism was part of Christian tradition, all are puzzling given the growing interest in the historical context of the Bible in this period. In this era of Higher Criticism—which Pusey rejected but a later generation that included Gore did not—historical approaches to Jesus including David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu (1835–36), the popularity of Bible painting especially among the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, and— later in the century—Zionism, it is significant that advanced Anglican clergymen either ignored Jesus’s Jewish identity or subsumed it to Christianity. Their erasure suggests not only that they had no way to incorporate Jesus’s Jewish identity into their role model for masculinity, but that they had a particular reason for rejecting Jesus’s Jewish identity. Like the Jews of these anti-Semitic stereotypes, they, too, were popularly stereotyped, visually as well as verbally, as effeminate, untrustworthy, and not entirely British, although their allegiance was insinuated to be to Rome. Their rejection of Jesus’s Jewish identity can be seen as their refusal to be associated with any group that was considered to be untrustworthy, foreign, and effeminate. In rejecting Jesus’s identity as a Jew, they were also asserting their identity as British men.

2   The Manliness of Advanced Anglicans Having established an image of Jesus as a plain-spoken Christian man, advanced Anglican clergymen then used the doctrine of the Real Presence to identify themselves closely with him as priest, asserting that they, too, as

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Neale expressed it, shared “the fearful responsibility of being a priest” (1871, 11). They believed that Jesus had been both priest and victim and that the Eucharist was a sacrifice, a characterization that many other Anglicans did not share. By repeating Jesus’s words of institution, the means by which they believed Jesus became present in the Eucharist, they stood as his representative as priest. Their preference for weekly and even daily, in contrast to the norm of thrice annually or quarterly, celebrations of the Eucharist further emphasized this identification. In addition, the need to educate people on the Real Presence made them, like Jesus, teachers: Denison advocating educating clergymen about the Real Presence so that they “guide and instruct the people with no hesitating or uncertain voice” (Denison 1855, 13, italics in the original). Defending the doctrine of the Real Presence also allowed advanced Anglican clergymen to define themselves as educated, authoritative, and combative Christian men. While theology continued to be gendered male in this period, the terms of this debate restricted access to elite men who could read the New Testament in Greek and the Latin and Greek Church Fathers. These languages were taught at the endowed grammar schools, with the superior programmes being at the ancient public schools, which were most likely to send boys to Oxford and Cambridge. As professionals, some elite men continued to use these languages as markers of their status. At Oxford Keble, in his capacity as Professor of Poetry, followed the practice of giving his lectures in Latin, and Members of Parliament sprinkled Latin and Greek quotations into their speeches. The debates over the Eucharist gave clergymen the opportunity to display publicly their fluency with classical languages and prevented those without the same knowledge from participating fully in the debate (cf. Bennett 1867, 24–25; Denison 1855, 110; Pusey 1853, 33). Ancient Greece and Rome had a cultural significance in Victorian England that reached far beyond those who actually knew the languages. Britons took their warrior ideals, contributions to representative forms of government, artistic and intellectual achievements, and (especially for Rome) imperial achievements as models for their own imperial age, a fact reflected in the popularity of neoclassical architecture in Britain (cf. Turner 1986, 578; Dowling 1994, 31). The use of Greek and Latin thus allowed advanced Anglican clergymen to associate themselves with the glories of the Greco-Roman period and to assert their erudition, with the result that debates over Latin and Greek translations were fierce. Clergymen often fought over whether “sacrifice” meant “offering” or “memorial” and

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whether that sacrifice occurred once or was continuous (Hammond 1885, 11–12, 14–15; Forbes 1857, 39), whether τοντο ποιειτε, as used by Paul and St Chrysostom, referred to Jesus’s actions with the bread and cup or to the entire meal (cf. Bramley 1879, 3–10; Ince 1879a, 3–16; Ince 1879b, 3–14) and the meaning of “Sacramentum” (Grueber 1856, 7–12). These fierce debates over the interpretation of Latin and Greek suggest that the often pugnacious tone was one way that these clergymen, who were not usually physically active and who sometimes suffered from ill health, could shape a vigorous intellectual identity to compensate, in a culture era in which physical prowess was a key component of masculinity. This conventionally masculine portrait was incomplete, however, for it ignored Jesus’s suffering and death that were at the heart of Christian belief and the foundation of the Real Presence. Advanced Anglican clergymen were uniquely positioned to incorporate this most problematic part of Jesus’s history into their self-image, because they often faced “systematic persecution” (Grantham 1872, 22) as they fought for their beliefs in ecclesiastical and civil courts, against mobs inside and outside churches, and in the press. They paid a price in terms of status and income when their beliefs cost them their livings, and they were humiliated when they were forbidden to preach, as Pusey was from 1843–45 and Neale was from 1847–63 (although he continued to preach privately and to publish those sermons). However, they turned their struggles into triumphs when they emphasized Jesus’s suffering and death and identified themselves with him, as triumphant victims. Although images of the crucifixion were often deemed “idolatrous” and “pagan” (Janes 2008, 239) even by most Anglicans, advanced Anglicans regularly invoked the crucifixion in their texts and, more controversially, included images of the crucifixion in some of their published works and in the windows of churches they built or restored, including at St Saviour’s, Leeds (the funds for which were donated anonymously by Pusey) and St John the Baptist, Frome (the church to which Bennett was appointed after he resigned from St Paul’s, Knightsbridge, and which he restored). Bennett also erected an outdoor “Via Crucis,” or seven sculptures depicting the events of Good Friday from Jesus’s condemnation by Pilate to his crucifixion, outside St John the Baptist. Advanced Anglican depictions of the crucifixion were controversial partly because they seemed to be indicative of Roman Catholicism and to divert the mind from Christ’s sufferings to an object (Janes 2009, 111–19), but also because it seemed impossible to reconcile the figure of the crucified Jesus with Victorian ideals of masculinity, as Janes argues:

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Since ‘normal’ sexuality and gender roles were equated with dominant/ submissive positioning in which the man was meant to be in control, Christ’s passivity in the face of physical abuse was read as problematic for His manliness. Moreover, the semi-nudity in which Christ was normally depicted in the crucifixion was seen as adding to the ambivalence of the image and increasing his humiliation. (2008, 242)

Advanced Anglicans’ willingness to depict and discuss the crucifixion shows most dramatically how the doctrine of the Real Presence allowed them to define Jesus as conforming to Victorian masculine ideals and then to associate themselves with his masculine identity. They reconfigured suffering and victimhood to be a triumph by describing Jesus’s death as an example of his strength and not of passive victimhood: he was “a willing victim for our sins” (An Anglo-Catholic Priest, The Holy Oblation, 3) and the one who “offer[ed] Himself, with the consent of His whole inward being, for the sins of men” ([Hamilton] 1867, 48). This dwelling on the crucifixion, which was integral to defining the Real Presence, allowed them to take on for themselves the prize of heroic suffering. Thus, even when they lost in secular terms, they won. For them, suffering persecution linked them even more closely to Jesus, whose suffering, like theirs, was a triumph.

Note 1. For further discussion and use of this term, see my Victorians and the Virgin Mary: Religion and Gender in England 1830–85 (Manchester University Press, 2008), esp. p. 14 and chapter 2.

References An Anglo-Catholic Priest. 1848. The Holy Oblation; A Manual of Doctrine, Instructions, and Devotions Relative to the Blessed Eucharist. London: W.J. Cleaver. Ashwell, A.R. 1876. Evening Communions: The Argument Against them Briefly Stated. London: W. Skeffington and Son. Bennett, William J. E. 1867. A Plea for Toleration in the Church of England, in a Letter to the Rev. E.B. Pusey, D.D., Regius Professor of Hebrew, and Canon of Ch. Ch. Oxford. London: J. T. Hayes; Froome-Selwood: W. C. & J. Penny.

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Bramley, H.R. 1879. How Did S.  Chrysostom Understand ΤΟΥΤΟ ΠΟΙΕΙΤΕ? A Letter Addressed to the Reverend the Regius Professor of Divinity. Oxford and London: James Parker and Co. Carter, Thomas Thellusson. 1835. The Blessings of the Sacrament of the Lord’s Supper Practically Explained, and the Duty of Frequently Communicating Enforced. London: J. G. & F. Rivington. Cheyne, Patrick. 1858. Six Sermons on the Doctrine of the Most Holy Eucharist. Aberdeen: A. Brown and Co. Davidson, J.P.F. 1871. The Holy Communion: A Course of Sermons Preached on the Sundays in Lent and Easter Day, 1871, in the Parish Church of Chipping Sodbury, Gloucestershire. London: Joseph Masters. Dawson, Arthur A. 1875. Catholic Worship: A Letter to the Very Rev. E.M. Goulburn, D. D., Dean of Norwich. Oxford and London: James Parker and Co. Denison, George Anthony. 1855. The Real Presence: Three Sermons Preached in the Cathedral Church of S. Andrew, Wells. 3rd ed. London: Joseph Masters. Dowling, Linda. 1994. Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Endelman, Todd M. 1990. Radical Assimilation in English Jewish History 1656–1945. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press. ———. 2002. The Jews of Britain, 1656 to 2000. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press. Enraght, R. W. 1872. The Real Presence and Holy Scripture. London: J. T. Hayes; Brighton: G. Wakeling. Forbes, A.P. 1857. A Primary Charge Delivered to the Clergy of his Diocese, at the Annual Synod. London: Joseph Masters. Gore, Charles. 1901. The Body of Christ: An Enquiry into the Institution and Doctrine of Holy Communion. London: John Murray. Grantham, George Peirce. 1872. A History of Saint Saviour’s, Leeds, with a Full Description of the Church. London: Joseph Masters; Leeds: Harrison and Son; Briggate: J. Smith. Grueber, C. S. 1856. A Rejoinder to the Rev. Alfred N. Bull, M.A. London: Joseph Masters; London and Oxford: J.  H. and J.  Parker; Bath: Peach; Taunton: Sutton, May; Bridgewater: West. Hamilton, Walter Kerr. 1867. A Charge to the Clergy and Churchwardens of the Diocese of Salisbury, at his Triennial Visitation, in May, 1867, 2nd ed. Salisbury: Brown and Co.; London: Rivingtons; Oxford: Parker. Hammond, C.E. 1885. Notes on the Sacrificial Aspect of the Holy Eucharist, with Special Reference to the Discussion by the Northampton Clerical Union, on March 2nd and 16th. Oxford: Parker and Co. Heeney, Brian. 1976. A Different Kind of Gentleman: Parish Clergy as Professional Men in Early and Mid-Victorian England. Hamden, CT: Archon Books.

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Hilton, Boyd. 1988. The Age of Atonement: The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1795–1865. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Ince, William. 1879a. The Primitive Interpretation of ΤΟΥΤΟ ΠΟΙΕΙΤΕ: A Letter in Reply to the Rev. H.R. Bramley, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of St. Mary Magdalen College, Oxford. Oxford and London: James Parker and Co. ———. 1879b. The Patristic and Liturgical Interpretation of ΤΟΥΤΟ ΠΟΙΕΙΤΕ: A Second Letter to the Rev. H.R.  Bramley, M.A., Fellow and Tutor of St. Mary Magdalen College, Oxford. Oxford and London: James Parker and Co. Janes, Dominic. 2008. The Shadow of the Passion: Protestants and the Suffering Christ in Nineteenth-Century British Art and Text. Icon 1: 237–244. https:// doi.org/10.1484/J.IKON.3.19. ———. 2009. Victorian Reformation: The Fight over Idolatry in the Church of England, 1840–1860. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keble, John. 1857. On Eucharistical Adoration. Oxford and London: John Henry and James Parker. Lipman, V.D. 1990. A History of Jews in Britain since 1858. NY: Holmes & Meier. Mills, William Wirt. 1894. The Blest and Proper Bread for the Blessed Sacrament. n.p. Neale, J. M. 1871. Sermons on the Blessed Sacrament: Preached in the Oratory of S. Margaret’s, East Grinstead, 7th ed. London: J. T. Hayes. Newsome, David. 1961. Godliness & Good Learning. London: John Murray. Nockles, Peter B. 1994. The Oxford Movement in Context: Anglican High Churchmanship 1760–1857. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pusey, Edward Bouverie. 1843. The Holy Eucharist a Comfort to the Penitent: A Sermon Preached before the University in the Cathedral Church of Christ, in Oxford, on the Fourth Sunday after Easter. New York: D. Appleton; Philadelphia: Geo. S. Appleton. ———. 1851. Letter to the Right Hon. and Right Rev. The Lord Bishop of London, in Explanation of Some Statements Contained in a Letter by the Rev. W. Dodsworth. Oxford and London: John Henry Parker. ———. 1853. The Presence of Christ in the Holy Eucharist: A Sermon, Preached before the University, in the Cathedral Church of Christ, in Oxford, on the Second Sunday after Epiphany, 1853. Oxford and London: John Henry Parker; London: Francis and John Rivington. ———. 1864. Dr. Pusey on the Privy Council Judgment. Reprint of letter to the Record, February 19. London: n.p. ———. 1867. Will ye Also Go Away? A Sermon, Preached before the University of Oxford, on the Fourth Sunday after the Epiphany, 1867. Oxford and London: James Parker; London, Oxford, and Cambridge: Rivingtons. ———. 1871. This Is My Body: A Sermon Preached before the University at S. Mary’s, on the Fifth Sunday after Easter 1871. Oxford: James Parker; London, Oxford, and Cambridge: Rivingtons.

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———. 1874. The Proposed Ecclesiastical Legislation: Three Letters to “The Times”. Oxford and London: James Parker and Co. Turner, Frank M. 1986. British Politics and the Demise of the Roman Republic: 1700–1939. The Historical Journal 29 (3): 577–599. https://doi. org/10.1017/S0018246X00018926. Vance, Norman. 1985. The Sinews of the Spirit: The Ideal of Christian Manliness in Victorian Literature and Religious Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Veldman, Meredith. 1997. From Dutiful Daughter to All-Boy: Jesus, Gender and the Secularization of Victorian Society. Nineteenth-Century Studies 11: 1–24. Wilberforce, Robert I. (1853) 1885. The Doctrine of the Holy Eucharist. New York: E. and J. B. Young and Co. Willis, E.F. 1879. The Sacrificial Aspect of the Holy Eucharist Considered in Relation to the One Atoning Sacrifice upon the Cross: An Eirenicon. 2nd ed. Oxford and London: James Parker and Co.

PART V

The Ecological Jesus and the Good Shepherd

CHAPTER 10

Considering the Lilies: Christina Rossetti’s Ecological Jesus Emma Mason

Perhaps more than any of the countless biblical passages that Christina Rossetti habitually reworked in her verse and devotional prose, Matthew 6:28 was her favourite. Jesus’s words, “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin,” part of his Sermon on the Mount, served to remind Rossetti that she was one of a various and divine creation that went beyond the human to embrace the other-than-human. Her understanding of this diverse creation interconnected in a divine kinship was modelled on the figure of Christ. Rossetti’s Jesus was not only God made flesh, but God made into all things, a composite of multiple species, beings, and substances. A Jewish human from Nazareth entwined with God and the Holy Spirit, Jesus was also an animal (“Behold the Lamb of God!” John 1:36), a plant (“I am the vine,” John 15:5), a grain (“I am the bread,” John 6:35), a rock (“the chief corner stone,” Eph. 2:20), a light (“I am the light of the world,” John 8:12), and water or wine (“If any man thirst, let him come unto me, and drink,” John 7:37).

E. Mason (*) University of Warwick, Coventry, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_10

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Rossetti followed Paul’s reading of Jesus as a divine body (1 Cor. 12:12) and perceived him as the embodiment of all things floral, faunal, mineral, elemental, and cosmic, an ecology in which creation is held in grace. A believer in “Prevenient Grace,” which sustains life from its inception, Rossetti conceived of creation as always already graced (1892, 547). But while she recognized that the other-than-human remains firmly within this grace, the human was cut off from it and therefore Christ because of its behaviour towards the rest of creation. Rossetti’s work spotlights the other-than-human as comprising a perfected nature, an example of how to live in a graced creation. The human might have access to such perfection through prayer, but tends towards a distracted and needless toiling and spinning on its attempted journey towards grace. The other-than-human, Rossetti shows, exemplifies graced behaviour in its essential interconnectedness with all of creation. This chapter focuses specifically on Rossetti’s interest in the lily as a species Jesus instructs the human believer to “consider” and reflect upon. As an Anglo-Catholic, Rossetti understood creation as essentially entangled: the non-binary structure of the Trinitarian God implicitly suggested the ontological inseparability of things that remain both distinct from each other even as they are interconnected in the divine. The incarnational nature of God’s being in Jesus was also a reminder to Rossetti that all of creation is made of the divine, a belief that underlined her sense of the importance of all things, including plant life. In her chapter on “Green Things” for her study of the Benedicite, Seek and Find (1879), for example, she established the vegetal as a stay against the degradation of pollution, “fogs and clouds” and “combustible gases” (96). She argued that the “case” for the “study of ‘all green things’” was that in considering the lilies and their communal, joyful being, the human is engaged in “an exercise of thankfulness” that connects it back with creation (97). Now part of such thankful neighbourliness, the human is “weakened” from its egoic position over the other-than-human and in becoming part of a shared creation is simultaneously connected back to Christ. The chapter establishes Rossetti’s reading of Jesus’s lily as a model of non-egoic thought and love, one that teaches the human how to act and be in relation to the creation of which it is part. It begins by linking religion and ecology through the figure of Rossetti and suggests that the Sermon on the Mount offered her a politics of ecological inclusion. By reworking Matthew 6:28 in poems like “They toil not, neither do they spin” and “Consider the lilies of the field,” she envisioned the lily as more than a symbol and granted it an

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agency to speak and act both reverently and relationally. In doing so, Rossetti anticipated modern philosophers of plant consciousness and thinking in which the vegetal is celebrated as that which perceives and moves in relation to its environment and those with whom it shares this space. The chapter concludes with reference to Rossetti’s Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied (1881) and Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885) as texts that embrace plant thinking as an alternative to the calculative and possessive thinking of humans. Rossetti ultimately elevates Jesus as a being who is both human and lily, and who directs the former to consider the latter as an epitome of compassion and peace. The critical reluctance to read Rossetti ecologically can be traced to both her place within Victorian studies and a more general hesitance to recognize an ecological agenda in Christian writing. As Jesse Oak Taylor suggests, Victorian studies came late to ecocriticism, a largely historicist field nervous of imposing present concerns on the past (2015, 877). Yet there is a clear historical dialogue between nineteenth-century industrial capitalism and a modern fossil fuel economy to which ecologists now attribute current environmental problems (cf. Parkins 2018). As Taylor notes, the Victorians are as much part of the Anthropocene as the planet’s twenty-first-century population, and motivated changes in industry, labour, and science, as well as aesthetics and religion. But where Victorianists have pursued ecocritical questions, Christianity has been excised from the debate as that which is perceived to refuse the material reality of nature by embracing it in a cosmic vision in which “earth” is left behind to prioritize “heaven.” Rossetti’s reading of Revelation makes clear the scriptural premise that the earth is not destroyed to give way to heaven at the end of time, but rather that heaven comes down to earth to transform it. But the dominance of the view that Christianity is the “cause” of the modern ecological crisis, as Lynn White Jr.’s much-quoted 1967 article asserts, still haunts ecocriticism. For White, Christianity is a dualistic system that produces a worldview in which nature is wire-cut from the human. White, in fact, nuanced his reading by concluding his analysis with a discussion of the now patron saint of ecology, Francis of Assisi, a major influence on Rossetti (Mason 2018, 116–119). He could equally have concluded with reference to Rossetti, for whom the ecological was an urgent aspect of her faith. Her dedication to Anglo-Catholicism in particular was one in which she identified with a series of doctrinal and moral

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statements about the significance of the other-than-human, embodied, alongside the human and the divine, in the figure of Christ. Far from a poet who sought heaven at the expense of earthly existence, Rossetti explored a material and social nature through a focus on the specifics of the environment. She was as fascinated by the bracken and maidenhair ferns she collected in Derbyshire as she was by “galaxies” of “distinct luminaries,” “belts and atmospheres,” “interstellar spaces,” and the “force of suns and more than suns” (Rossetti 1879, 37; 1881, 446). All material phenomenon, floral and cosmic alike, were “types,” symbols and shadows of “real things unseen,” as John Henry Newman noted, and her poetry praised an ecosystem that was inclusive of spirit and matter, grace and nature (Newman [1864] 1994, 37). As an Anglo-Catholic, Rossetti believed that the physical forms that reveal the intangible content of faith are all sacred types. They help the believer comprehend the multiple forms God created over seven days, an event that Rossetti understood by equating the “days of creation not as days of twenty-four hours each, but as lapses of time by us unmeasured and immeasurable” (1879, 87). As this event was ongoing, God’s creation comprised species both discovered, yet to be found, and still to evolve on this planet and others. For Rossetti, “creation” was a process that developed over time towards the end of time. During this period of evolution, or “probation” as she called it, creation’s human and other-than-human members are called to receive grace through relationship with each other (1892, 374). At the end of “time,” creation would be restored as a “new” creation or New Jerusalem, in which God would enter into the world and pitch his tent with all things. Revelation was not a prophecy of destruction, then, but rather a promise to reveal a material reality in which all things participate equally. Renewed and restored, the new creation promised in the Sermon on the Mount would promote “Absolute unanimity amongst all creatures,” Rossetti wrote, and evolve a “love of kindred” for the “whole human family” into an all-inclusive “fellow-creaturely sympathy” (1892, 185, 189, 201). For Rossetti, the end of time meant a shift from chronological time into a cyclical, aeonic time, an eternity in which there is no beginning or end, before or after. Her concern, then, was not that time would end, but that it would not, and that human action obstructed the flow of grace between things through which God might re-enter the world to initiate it into new life. She argued in The Face of the Deep that only grace could “expand” human life from its “concentrated” being into a state of “delighted welcome” of diverse and emergent others (1892, 185). The problem was how the human might access grace in relation to the other-than-human at a

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time when the former appeared increasingly hostile to the latter. Rossetti found the answer in Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount, her reading of which is ecological in its presentation of Christianity as an argument for the entanglement of things in God as the basis of a material renewal of the earth. Her contribution to nineteenth-century ecological debate was to resituate this renewal in a theological and ethical framework in which grace, not capital or profit, keeps things in circulation with each other and so with Christ (see Tanner 2005). As she wrote in her poem for The Face of the Deep, “Tune me, O Lord,” the faithful Christian desires to be tuned into a single “harmony” comprised of the combined notes of multiple beings that are sounded in “one full responsive vibrant chord” (ll: 1–2). In her note to the poem, Rossetti argued that the immortal state of the new creation is dependent, not on the actions of the few in the future, but on the interdependence of human and the other-than-human in the present joined in God’s “heart.” As a free gift that the believer is “free to accept or decline,” God’s grace is eternally available, and blocked only by its opposite: egoic self-preoccupation in which the human is dominated by its own life and outcomes at the expense of other things (1892, 489). This over-identification with self-centric emotion and behaviour was a symptom of a society that no longer functioned within grace for Rossetti. The alternative to this mindset was a non-egoic form of being, one she saw modelled in the unassuming existence of the lily. Rossetti read Jesus’s Sermon on the Mount as evidence of God’s indiscriminate and life-giving love for all the things of creation. But she also focused on his directive to “consider” the lily. As Richard Bauckham argues, the Sermon on the Mount is part of a tradition of wisdom instruction, and in it Jesus asked those present to “behold” the environment, not simply to reflect on it, but to attend and learn from it (2009, 81). The “lilies of the field,” like the “fowls of the air,” are examples of beings that teach through a connection with the world founded on their refusal to exploit the land that sustains them: they do not sow, reap, toil, or spin in relation to the earth (Matt. 6:26–33). By trusting God to provide them with everything they need, the lilies and birds remind humans that they are one species among many, all of which depend on God for sustenance. Bauckham also points out that the sermon betrays the way in which humans ignore their reliance on “the divine provision” of “the resources of creation” and instead become obsessively preoccupied with their own labour and capabilities to produce food (2009, 83). In contrast, the birds and lilies are more immediately reliant on God for whom all things are kin.

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In her poem, “They toil not, neither do they spin,” reprinted in Verses (1893) after first appearing in The Face of the Deep, Rossetti referred to God as the “Father of the fatherless” to underline the importance of this divine kinship. The poem’s narrator relates the message of the Sermon the Mount through a ternary God whose form as Father, Son, and Holy Ghost becomes “Father,” “Clother of the lily,” and “Feeder of the sparrow” (ll: 1–2). But while the other-than-human is commended for its closeness to God, the narrator castigates herself as an example of the human will to assume dominion over the rest of creation. This egoism is finally levelled in the poem—it is physically “ploughed up” by God—in order that the human be brought back into relationship with grace. Echoing the Trinitarian focus of the “not quickly broken” “threefold cord” of Ecclesiastes 4:12, Rossetti figures this relationship as binding and eternal: “As a captive in Thy cord, / Let that cord be love” (ll: 6–7). Compelled into grace through God’s love, the narrator experiences what it feels like to be fully incorporated into creation. Rossetti returned often to the question of how to capture the feeling of entering grace by thinking non-egoically and found a model in the lily. Like many educated women in this period, Rossetti was a gardener as well as amateur botanist, and even stayed with the established fern collector, Swynfen Jervis, at Darlaston Hall in Staffordshire during a time when “Pteridomania” or fern-fever was at its height (Mason 2018, 135–136). But Rossetti’s interest in the floral and vegetal went beyond finding in them symbols of emotions or virtues. As fellow beings in God’s creation, plants embodied a faithful mode of existence from which humans might take instruction. What it is like to be a lily is an experience made accessible precisely because its creator translates it for human understanding: “Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these” (Matt. 6:25–29). Jesus does not ventriloquize the lily in his sermon: he instead asks his listener to attend to the way it develops and exists in its graced mode of existence. The lily undergoes the sacred work of growing into itself in order to find relation with the world around it rather than to labour for the sake of profit. As Felicia Hemans and John Keble both noted in their poems on lilies, the flower is aware of its “graced” being (Hemans 1872, 602), content in its lived relationship with God in the present and disinterested in “tomorrow’s light” (Keble 1829, 233). But Rossetti goes further in her recognition that plants have agency, consciousness, and faith. In her 1853 poem, “Consider the lilies of the field,” for example, Rossetti defied the Aristotelian belief that plants are

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imperfect animals to present them as preachers to whom humans should attentively listen: Flowers preach to us if we will hear:— The rose saith in the dewy morn: I am most fair; Yet all my loveliness is born Upon a thorn. The poppy saith amid the corn: Let but my scarlet head appear And I am held in scorn; Yet juice of subtle virtue lies Within my cup of curious dyes. The lilies say: Behold how we Preach without words of purity. The violets whisper from the shade Which their own leaves have made: Men scent our fragrance on the air, Yet take no heed Of humble lessons we would read. But not alone the fairest flowers: The merest grass Along the roadside where we pass, Lichen and moss and sturdy weed, Tell of His love who sends the dew, The rain and sunshine too, To nourish one small seed.

While the flowers all speak here, Rossetti’s narrator suggests that their sermonizing is available only to those willing to “hear” them. She avoids classificatory language to allow the flowers a space in which they can articulate what they value—Jesus’s love that “sends the dew,” fairness, loveliness—and what they do not—judgement, pride, and those who refuse to attend to the “merest” and “small.” As Cynthia Scheinberg argues, the rose, poppy, lilies, violets, grass, lichen, moss, and weed are each allowed to “make an intricate statement of religious faith” because Rossetti assigns the flowers the authority to “preach” (2006, 172). Human readers of nature either misread this authority by holding it “in scorn” or simply choosing to “take no heed” of the “humble lessons” plants might offer. But Rossetti’s narrator does heed these lessons, and in doing so finds that

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the vegetal is aware of its own existence as a being that owns agency—it creates shades where it needs it, and fragrance to attract attention—and also consciousness—it is able to reflect on and think about its relation to environment and meteorology. The lilies in particular embody, rather than describe, Jesus’s reading of them as spiritual guides. They collectively preach together “without words of purity,” a phrase that intimates their insight that their spiritual lesson cannot be given in language nor has anything to do with unreachable standards of moral or aesthetic “purity.” Rather the lilies demand the reader attends to them—“Behold how we / Preach”—to see into the way they perceive and think. While humans tend not to identify with plants as they do animals, the former physiologically more “other” and seemingly devoid of consciousness or memory, Rossetti anticipated a modern response to plant life as the basis of creation itself. As Matthew Hall argues, earth itself is a “plantscape”: “Whether they walk in human transformed habitats or in wilderness, human beings are far more likely to encounter plants than any other type of living being … the bulk of the visible biomass on this plant is comprised of plants” (Hall 2011, 3). Many critics like Hall—Daniel Chamovitz (2012), Craig Holdrege (2013), Eduardo Kohn (2013), and Richard Mabey (2015), for example—argue for plant intelligence, thought, memory, communication, and cognition. They give a host of examples. Trees not only have the potential to combat climate change by soaking up floods and purifying city air, but they also use fungi to send out messages to other plants and trees about the possibility of aphid attacks thus functioning like “an organic internet.” Plants can also react to sounds and emit them meaningfully. The roots of young corn plants, for example, act acoustically as transmitters and receivers, and emit frequent clicking sounds while bending towards the source of sounds of particular frequencies (Mabey 2015, 336). Some plants also have a distinctly better memory than some animals, such as the mimosa pudica. The mimosa or “sensitive plant” folds up its leaves at night or if it is touched, establishing it as a confirmed example of plant sensibility in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. More recently, the Australian ecologist Monica Gagliano configured an experiment wherein she potted fifty-six mimosa plants and then rigged up a system to release the pots from a height of six inches every five seconds (in Mabey 2015, 332–333). Each training session involved sixty drops. All the plants started by shutting their leaves while falling, but many started to reopen after four or five descents having learned the drop and jolt stimulus was one they could safely ignore. The

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plants were not fatigued—when manually shaken, their leaves immediately closed. But put through the drop test again, none of them opened. Gagliano repeated the experiment with the same plants after one week and then one month and the plants had “remembered” what they had learned. Similar experiments on bees suggest they forget what they have learned within forty-eight hours. Perhaps the most useful source for reflecting on how the lilies consider their world, however, is Michael Marder’s Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life (2013). Marder’s insight is that plant thinking is non-­ ideational: plants, he argues, have non-intentional consciousness in which they think, not about themselves, but outward in multiple directions at once. The mimosa, for example, responds to touch or absence of light because it stores nonrepresentational memories. Where humans remember what has appeared in the light, plants keep the memory of light itself. “Plant-thinking” thinks with rather than for or about. As Marder states: “Plant-thinking neither grasps its object—it has none!—nor impassively freezes in sheer inaction but instead operates by the multiplication of extensions, by contiguity with and by a meticulously adumbrated exposure to that which is materially thought in it” (2013, 159). In other words, plants respond to their environment relationally rather than appropriatively: they perceive and move without ego or identity and always grow towards the other. Embedded in an interconnected biosphere, plants think with the environment, and act in relation to the changes around them as part of a mutual cultivation. They depend on one another for nourishment, but do not indiscriminately consume whatever is around them, taking and giving only what is needed. The existence of vegetal life in a slow, hospitable, botanical time is violated by human time because of its dependence on the “temporality of capital” (Marder 2013, 183) or, as Jesus described it, toiling and spinning. Like Jesus’s command to “consider” the lilies, Marder’s moral imperative that humans can benefit from reflecting on how the vegetal thinks also includes within it a concern for beings who signify as insignificant, passive, and without value in a logic of profit and excess. As he argues in Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives (2016), co-written with Luce Irigaray, the non-egoic and receptive thinking of the plant offers a way to explore plant being and becoming as the ground of “loving encounter” with the other-than-human world (2016, 198–199). It is this loving encounter that Rossetti explores as one initiated and secured by the figure of Christ.

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The legacy of the disconnect between religion and ecology means that not everyone is as subtle as Marder when it comes to exploring plant being. Stefano Mancuso and Alessandra Viola, for example, begin their book Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence with a chapter called “Plants and the Great Monotheistic Religions,” in which Noah is castigated for not taking any plants on the ark. Mancuso and Viola write: “All three of the Abrahamic religions have implicitly failed to recognize that plants are living beings, in effect grouping them with inanimate objects” (2015, 3–4). During “the Inquisiton,” they add, “plants believed to be used in potions by women accused of witchcraft—garlic, parsley, and fennel—were put on trial along with the witches!” (5). But their insistence that religion completely ignores “the vital quality of the plant world in general” (4) contradicts the agency a plant must be given to be put on trial, and even their own account of Genesis reveals that plants are central to Genesis, the olive branch and grape vine both associated with the value of rebirth and life. Mancuso and Viola’s confused and biblically oblivious account is typical of modern commentaries on plants and marks a striking shift in attitude from their nineteenth-century predecessors. Many of Rossetti’s contemporaries not only valued plant life as inherently graced but acknowledged it as the foundation of creation. J. H. Balfour (1857), William Groser (1888), and George Henslow (1895) all engage with plants in relation to their sacred, biblical, etymological, and botanic meanings. Rossetti’s own contribution to the field, Young Plants and Polished Corners (1876), is at once theological and botanical, influenced as it was by Richard Phillips (1810) and Peter Parley (1839). Later titled Called to Be Saints, Rossetti’s “devotional reading-­book for the red-letter Saints’ Days” (Kooistra 2002, 143–144) works through the minor festivals of the Church Calendar by bringing together sacred text, prayer, hagiography, and a flower chosen from those in bloom on the relevant feast day, but retains enough detail to pass as botany on first glance. In writing a book that would teach the reader about both plants and their divine meaning, Rossetti embraced plant thinking as an alternative to a thinking based on ego and self-righteousness. By disavowing a form of strong thinking for one of weakness, she positioned herself on the side of those without power, particularly those who were part of her community. For example, Rossetti did not explicitly champion her charity work with “fallen women” at the St Mary Magdalene Penitentiary in Highgate in Called to Be Saints, but her repeated use of a language of flowers used to

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describe female sexuality in the period implicitly includes them in her narrative. In doing so she not only avoided the charge of pride for her good works but also connected her fellow sisters to the saints by referring to both in relation to local flora and fauna. For Rossetti did not imagine the saints through the flora of Palestine, but rather in relation to the plants she observed around her neighbourhood in Highgate and Regent’s Park, London, and on her travels to Staffordshire, Hastings, Brighton, and Birchington-on-Sea: daisies, ivy, holly, mistletoe, St John’s wort, chickweed, gorse, snowdrops, violets, wood sorrel, cowslips, honeysuckle, rushes, harebells, ferns, marigolds, and blackberries. She wrote: “I even think that a flower familiar to the eye and dear to the heart may often succeed in conveying a more pointed lesson than could be understood from another more remote if more eloquent. ‘Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow’” (1881, xviii). In exploring the makeup and specificity of these local flowers, she aimed to create the kind of intimacy and attention Jesus invited in his Sermon, one that requires the human to relinquish control over creation and become immersed within it. Finally, Rossetti recognized that Jesus even modelled this immersion in his own plant-like being, one emptied of ego and always on the side of the weak. In her entry for “December 25. Christmas Day” in Time Flies: A Reading Diary (1885), Rossetti imagined Jesus as a lily from the moment of his birth: A baby is a harmless thing,   And wins our hearts with one accord, And Flower of babies was their King   Jesus Christ our Lord: Lily of lilies He Upon His Mother’s knee; Rose of roses, soon to be Crowned with thorns on leafless tree. (1885, 248)

Mary is more usually associated with lilies and roses—“I am the Rose of Sharon, the lily of the valleys” (Song of Songs 2:1)—and Rossetti often cited the two flowers in her Marian poems. But Jesus is not compared to the lily and rose here: he is not like them, but rather is them: “Lily of lilies He,” “Rose of roses, soon to be.” Jesus is one with these flowers because he is part of an interconnected fabric of creation, communal and reciprocal. This cosmic unity is not a blurring of species and beings, but rather a

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coordinated mutualism in which all things have subjectivity and independence while being simultaneously connected to everything else. Difference between things—humans, lilies, roses, thorns—allows for relationship and communion, but Jesus’s sameness with all of these things grants them significance and being. But there is also something specific about his association with a self that has subjectivity without ego, one that replaces the “I think” with a holistic and participatory immanence. While the poem ends with an image of thorny crucifixion, the narrator’s focus on the living Jesus figures him as a lily whose actions should be considered and reflected on. Her ecological Jesus is, like the lily, entangled with all things and so embodies a patient, gradual, and gentle reality that encourages “an exercise of thankfulness” in God’s divine ecology (Rossetti 1879, 97).

References Balfour, J.H. 1857. The Plants of the Bible: Trees and Shrubs. London: T. Nelson and Sons. Bauckham, Richard. 2009. Reading the Sermon on the Mount in an Age of Ecological Catastrophe. Studies in Christian Ethics 22 (1): 76–88. https://doi. org/10.1177/0953946808100227. Chamovitz, Daniel. 2012. What a Plant Knows: A Field Guide to the Senses. Oxford: Oneworld. Crump, Rebecca. 1979–1990. The Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti: A Variorum Edition. 3 volumes. Baton Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press. Groser, William. 1888. Scripture Natural History: The Trees and Plants Mentioned in the Bible. Religious Tract Society. Hall, Matthew. 2011. Plants as Persons: A Philosophical Botany. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hemans, Felicia. 1872. The Lilies of the Field. In The Poems of Felicia Hemans, 601–602. Edinburgh: William Blackwood and Sons. Henslow, George. 1895. The Plants of the Bible. London: The Religious Tract Society. Holdrege, Craig. 2013. Thinking like a Plant: A Living Science for Life. Great Barrington, MA: Lindisfarne Books. Keble, John. (1827) 1829. Fifteenth Sunday After Trinity. In The Christian Year: Thoughts in Verse for the Sundays and Holydays Throughout the Year, 231–233. Oxford: J. Parker. Kohn, Eduardo. 2013. How Forests Think: Toward an Anthropology Beyond the Human. Berkeley; Los Angeles; London: University of California Press.

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Kooistra, Lorraine Janzen. 2002. Christina Rossetti and Illustration: A Publishing History. Athens: Ohio University Press. Mabey, Richard. 2015. The Cabaret of Plants: Botany and the Imagination. London: Profile Books. Mancuso, Stefano, and Alessandra Viola. 2015. Brilliant Green: The Surprising History and Science of Plant Intelligence. Washington; Covelo; London: Island Press. Marder, Michael. 2013. Plant-Thinking: A Philosophy of Vegetal Life. New York: Columbia University Press. Marder, Michael, and Luce Irigaray. 2016. Through Vegetal Being: Two Philosophical Perspectives. New York: Columbia University Press. Mason, Emma. 2018. Christina Rossetti: Poetry, Ecology, Faith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Newman, John Henry. (1864) 1994. Apologia Pro Vita Sua. London: Penguin. Parkins, Wendy, ed. 2018. Victorian Sustainability in Literature and Culture. London: Routledge. Parley, Peter. 1839. Tales About Plants, with Numerous Engravings. London: Thomas Tegg. Phillips, Richard. 1810. The Young Botanists; in Thirteen Dialogues, with Twelve Coloured Engravings. London: Richard Phillips. Rossetti, Christina G. 1879. Seek and Find: A Double Series of Short Studies on the Benedicite. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. ———. 1881. Called to Be Saints: The Minor Festivals Devotionally Studied. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. ———. 1885. Time Flies: A Reading Diary. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. ———. 1892. The Face of the Deep: A Devotional Commentary on the Apocalypse. London: Society for Promoting Christian Knowledge. Scheinberg, Cynthia. 2006. Victorian Poetry and Religious Diversity. In The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Poetry, ed. Joseph Bristow, 159–179. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Tanner, Kathryn. 2005. Economy of Grace. Minneapolis: Fortress. Taylor, Jesse Oak. 2015. Where Is Victorian Ecocriticism? Victorian Literature and Culture 43 (4): 877–894. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150315000315. White, Lynn, Jr. 1967. The Historical Roots of Our Ecological Crisis. Science 155 (3767, Mar. 10): 1203–1207. https://doi.org/10.1126/ science.155.3767.1203.

CHAPTER 11

Reimaging Personhood Before the Figure of Christ in the Victorian Early Christian Novel Elizabeth Ludlow

In his novel Callista: A Tale of the Third Century (1855), John Henry Newman has his narrator describe the dream that the eponymous heroine has the night before she is martyred. In it, Callista watches as Chione, her Christian slave-girl who had died young, is “arrayed more brilliantly than an oriental queen” and as she takes on a look of “tenderness, which bespoke both Maid and Mother” before being transformed into a figure of Christ (Newman [1855] 1881, 355): The face, the features were the same; but the light of Divinity now seemed to beam through them, and the hair parted, and hung down long on each side of the forehead; and there was a crown of another fashion than the Lady’s round about it, made of what looked like thorns. And the palms of the hands were spread out as if towards her, and there were marks of wounds in them. And the vestment had fallen, and there was a deep opening in the side. (355–56)

E. Ludlow (*) Anglia Ruskin University, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_11

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As she looks at the stigmata that appear on Chione, Mary and the saints, Callista becomes conscious of receiving the imprint on herself and of becoming an androgynous figure of Christ. Rather than hearing a single voice welcome her into the fold, she listens as the saints repeat the words of Luke 15:6: “Rejoice with Me, for I have found My sheep” (356). In his discussion of the life of Ignatius of Antioch, Rowan Williams suggests that martyrdom should be understood in terms of “the natural culmination of a… prosaic process of un-selfing”. It nonetheless, he argues, remains “a climax… the final stamping upon the human coinage of the likeness of God in Christ” (1990, 27). Echoing the pattern that Nicholas Wiseman had established in his novel Fabiola, or the Church of the Catacombs (1854), Newman’s Callista reimagines personhood through a series of moments of revelation that occur as a result of gazing on and contemplating the figure of Christ as the Good Shepherd and the Suffering Servant and on the Communion of Saints who have become a part of Christ’s body. As a result, the ideal Catholic reader—to whom both novels are addressed—is invited to counter the perception that personhood is self-sufficient and to see it instead in terms of Patristic theology that, according to Nicholas Lossky, understands personhood to be “revealed by God to humankind” and “in communion … with Christ and in Christ with all creation” (1996, 79). Both Callista and Fabiola were published as part of the Catholic Popular Library that Wiseman ran with the publisher James Burns between 1854 and 1861 (Crawford 1950, 219). Fabiola was the Library’s inaugural volume and Callista was the 12th of the 22 books that constituted the series. Charlotte E.  Crawford explains that Fabiola, “if not the entire series, was probably intended to correct from a Catholic point of view the picture of church history” that is offered in Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face (1852–53, 219). Recent criticism has focused on how all three novels engage with the theological disputes of the 1850s: Royal Rhodes establishes how Kingsley, Wiseman, and Newman comment on the reinstatement of the Catholic hierarchy, the value of celibacy and the place of martyrology and Vincent A. Lankewish explores their treatment of gender and sexual tensions. In developing their insights, I suggest how Wiseman and Newman challenge the chronological drive and the gender boundaries that occur in the Victorian realist novel as they detail the reimaging of personhood in devotional terms; a reimagining that has the figure of Christ at the centre. While the paragraphs below introduce the novels and explain how they seek to encourage readers to reimagine a

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Christ-like personhood among the Communion of Saints, Part Two, “The Good Shepherd and the Lost Sheep”, considers how they engage with the figure of Christ as the Good Shepherd and Part  Three, “The Suffering Servant”, considers how they demonstrate the process whereby a martyr becomes a figure of the Suffering Servant.

1   Reimagining Personhood in the Community of Saints Kingsley’s Hypatia was first published in instalments in Fraser’s Magazine between January 1852 and April 1853. It charts the background to the conversion and murder of the eponymous Neoplationic philosopher by the corrupt monks of early fifth-century Alexandria. Although the novel reinforces the persistence of the human temperament as it shows “New Foes under an old face- your own likenesses in toga and tunic, instead of coat and bonnet” (Kingsley  [1852–53] 1888, 345), it critiques the Catholic commitment to living with an active apprehension of the Church Triumphant. For Kingsley, the martyrs of the early church belong in the past: they cannot intercede in the present with Christ on our behalf. The character who can most accurately described as a figure of Christ in Hypatia is would-be nun Victoria who converts her lover Raphael from Judaism to Christianity; the clerics, by contrast, remain far from Christ-­ like. As Rhodes explains, the novel’s depiction of Cyril of Alexandria as a scheming cleric who draws on legend and miracle for his own political ends does more than criticise “the Church of the Fathers, the theocracy of Alexandria, and the gap between the ideal and the practice in the Catholic Church” (1995, 91). It offers, he argues, “an assault on the idea of the communion of saints, intercessory prayer and the mediation of grace, cultic veneration, and the use of the saints … as the only proper models for the Christian life” (91). In response to this  perceived assault, Wiseman and Newman use their own historical fiction to offer a Christology that is rooted in both eternal communion and supernatural revelation. Susann Dorman explains that the similarities between Hypatia and Callista—in terms of “plot, theme, characterization and detail”—are “numerous enough to argue for Newman’s knowledge of Kingsley’s work on the strength of internal evidence alone” (1979, 175). The difference between the novels lies in their theology. She suggests that whereas for Kingsley the individual’s relationships work to bring him closer to Christ,

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for Newman (as also for Wiseman), the individual “comes to a true understanding of the spiritual almost in spite of” the ties of the world (186). As the Christians in Callista and Fabiola learn to live their lives entirely in anticipation of the eternal, they detach themselves from the temporal and enact the shift that Emma Mason describes in the previous chapter: “from chronological time into a cyclical, aeonic time, an eternity in which there is no beginning or end, before or after” (152). While Callista finds a self-reflection in the ongoing life of Chione, her Christian slave-girl who had died four years back (see above), so Fabiola begins to understand the communal nature of personhood when, also in a dream, she watches from the other side of a deep water-filled ravine as her cousin Agnes, her slave-girl Syra, and the blind pauper Cæcilia occupy an Edenic space and enjoy “some felicity which she had never known or witnessed” (Wiseman [1854] 1886, 86). She then sees “a bright genius … in whose features she fancied she traced a spiritualized resemblance to Sebastian” come to guide her into the fellowship of believers (87). Significantly, it is only after Sebastian, Agnes and Cæcilia have died that Fabiola finds a renewed sense of personhood in communion with them and the rest of the saints in the higher, aeonic space and time that she could previously only dream of entering. When, at the end of the novel, the priest-physician Dionysius prepares Fabiola for baptism, he recalls that he had baptised her mother in the hours before her death and exclaims: “her spirit has been hovering about you through life by the side of the angel who guards you, guiding you unseen to this blessed hour” (524). The only other time the word “hovering” is used in the novel is to describe Syra’s protective position directly when, in an explicitly Christological move, she uses her body as a shield to protect Fabiola from her brother Fulvius’s dagger (508). It is emphatically the “hovering” of the saints both past and present that, foregrounding the imminence of eternity, mediate with Christ on Fabiola’s behalf and enable her to cross the deep ravine of death that she had glimpsed in her dream. Fabiola’s eventual choice to live as a monastic echoes the “un-selfing” that she had seen Sebastian, Agnes, Syra and Cæcilia  enact through their lives and their martyrdoms. As Williams explains, monasticism came to be understood as “a kind of substitute for martyrdom” under a baptised emperor (1990, 103). Like the martyr, the monastic renounces the world and her own sense of individual boundedness in order that she may claim citizenship with and in Christ. The characters in Fabiola who become martyrs and monastics encompass the richest and the poorest in society,

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life-­long saints and returning prodigals, and old and young. Wiseman stresses that the potential to find identity with and in Christ—and to thereby to realise the purpose for which one is created—is latent in all and is activated by divine grace. It is not, as Kingsley would have it, enabled by human fellowship on earth. Rather than  criticse  Wiseman for creating characters who appear as “little more than incarnations of the breviary and martyology accounts” (Rhodes 1995, 100), I suggest that they should be judged not as individuals but as emblems of the Catholic theology of personhood. Through Callista, Newman seeks to edify the “Catholic readers” to whom, he writes, the novel is “specially addressed” ([1855] 1881, ix). His insistence, that the novel prioritizes the “idea and apprehension of Primitive Christianity” over the strictly historical (viii), echoes the desire that Wiseman expresses in his preface to Fabiola: to familiarise the reader “with the usages, habits, condition, ideas, feeling, and spirit of the early ages of Christianity” ([1854] 1886, viii). Wiseman writes that “chronology has been sacrificed” in his tale in order that “occurrences of different epochs and different countries [might be] condensed into a small space” (ix). In a chapter describing the early Christian cemeteries, Wiseman’s narrator comments that, in contrast to the “more historical” customs of current day England, “while so few ancient Christian inscriptions supply the year of people’s deaths, thousands give us the very day of it.” He explains that this is because “annual commemoration had to be made, on the very day of their departure” (236). Thus, the typological is privileged over the historical and the rhythms of liturgy are shown to be of more significance for the early Christians than chronology. As Brian Murray comments, the terms in which Wiseman appraises the truth of liturgical texts reflects his own approach to the characterisation of saints in the novel: an approach akin to the visual “form of the medieval stained glass window (or its contemporary Gothic revival equivalent) [in which the Christian artist] must communicate through ‘distinct and characteristic forms’ recognizable to a community literate in the signifiers of hagiography and the distinctive attributes of the saints” (Murray 2014). In Callista, the emphasis on prayers and dream-visions means that the charting of progressive consecutive time that is so privileged in the Victorian realist novel is rendered insignificant next to what Newman terms the “eternal now” (qtd. Wheeler 1990, 307). Christ is the crux upon which personhood is understood and the characters learn to identify more with the virtues of the Saints—that remain fixed—than with a particular

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historical or local grouping. At the start of the novel, the distance between the past of the setting and the present of the Victorian reader is collapsed when sympathy is invoked for Agellius, the Christian man who courts Callista. After describing the loneliness of his situation on a remote farm, the narrator breaks into prayer: “Be of good cheer, solitary one, though thou art not a hero yet! There is One that cares for thee, and loves thee, more than thou canst feel, love or care for thyself” (Newman [1855] 1881, 29). What makes Agellius a hero at the end of the novel is his response to divine love—as a child to God as parent—as he becomes a bishop and is martyred for his faith. For him, as for the other Christians in the novel, the revelation of divine love remains imminent and is never imagined in isolation from the virtues of the members of the Church Triumphant. This vision of the self is a distinguishing feature of the Catholic vision of personhood of Newman and Wiseman and contrasts with the Broad-Church vision of Kingsley, for whom a firm line is drawn between the between Church Militant and the Church Triumphant: the goal for most of his Christian characters is to live well in the world rather than to find affinity with and to imitate the virtues of the Saints who have gone before.

2   The Good Shepherd and the Lost Sheep In the dream vision that she has the night before she is martyred, Callista hears the saints sing out words from the parable of the lost sheep: “Rejoice with Me, for I have found My sheep” (see above). They are evidently among those who rejoice “in heaven over one sinner that repenteth” (Luke 15:6). The invocation of this verse—rather than of the Good Shepherd passage in John 10—is perhaps determined by the fact that Cæcilius gives Callista a parchment containing the Gospel of Luke as he flees from the violent mob. He tells her that in it she will see “whom we Christians love” (Newman [1855] 1881, 226). When Callista eventually opens the Gospel parchment, she is brought into a “new state of things” and “into the presence of One was simply distinct and removed from anything that she had, in most imaginative moments, ever depicted to her mind as ideal perfection” (326). Her recognition that “He came to save the lost sheep” (345) articulates her complete re-imagination of self: from proud Grecian beauty to humble prodigal in need of redemption. Through both Callista and Fabiola, the image of Christ as the Good Shepherd is conflated with the parable of the lost sheep and works as a powerful tool to convict the sinner. Michael  Wheeler suggests that the

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“the conflation or confusion” that often occurs between the Parable of the Lost Sheep and the Good Shepherd passage is particularly significant for understanding Victorian religion because, “taken separately, the two texts fall naturally into two contrasting or sometimes conflicting categories of Christian story … first, that of the individual soul (the lost sheep) in relation to ‘my’ Saviour, and secondly, that of the Church (the flock or fold) in relation to ‘our’ Lord” (2012, 4). He explains that whereas “the Lucan passage could reflect Evangelical individualism and personal salvation … the Good Shepherd in John is more amenable to a Catholic understanding of the faith” (5). While Newman and Wiseman draw on the Good Shepherd passage to articulate their Christology and to emphasise the significance of the Christian fold, they ensure that the parable of the lost sheep is amenable to a Catholic understanding by focusing not on the individual but on the heavenly company who rejoice over the salvation over the lost. The voices of their saints embody the words of Psalm that, as Newman explains, the Church says as part of its Daily Office: “We are his people and the sheep of his pasture” (Psalm 100:3; Newman [1824–43] 1907, 8:242). In Fabiola, Torquatus confuses the everyman in the parable of the lost sheep with the Good Shepherd when he is examining the pictures in the catacombs: “I see … a shepherd with a sheep over his shoulders—the Good Shepherd; that I can understand; I remember the parable” (Wiseman [1854] 1886, 253). His mistake is left uncorrected but, to biblically literate readers, it testifies to his rudimentary understanding. The focus on the image of the Good Shepherd corresponds with the fact that, according to an article published in The Rambler in 1849, there are 500 Good Shepherds in every 1000 pictures in the Roman catacombs (1859, 6). Drawing on J.S. Northcote’s earlier letters in The Rambler, the author of the article explains that a key reason for the limited selection of subjects painted in the catacombs was the disciplina arcani, or the discipline of the secret: Early Christians “would not present the doctrines and mysteries of the Christian faith, even under signs and symbols, to the eyes of those who were not received as members of the Christian household” (12). A further reason for the repetition of Good Shepherd images is accounted for by the fact that they “belong chiefly to the time when the Novatian heresy so much plagued the Church” and stand to correct the limitation it put on God’s mercy (Wiseman  [1854] 1886, 257). As the group in the catacombs gaze on the image of the Good Shepherd who stands “ready to run into the wilderness, to bring back a lost sheep,” Pancratius explains that a

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limiting of Christ’s mercy leads to “the very crimes, which the Novatians insult the Catholics for admitting to pardon” (258). Although this explanation moves Torquatus to tears, he quenches his impulse to confess at this first opportunity. Torquatus’s eventual confession and reintegration back into the Christian community works to capture the radical swerve of the parable from ordinary to extraordinary. Raymond Chapman comments that in his recognition of how “Apostates like Torquatus may turn traitor and harm the Church”, Wiseman had the case of Giacinto Achili in mind (1970, 153). In 1850, Wiseman had upheld the truth of the allegations made against Achili in the Roman Inquisition for sexual offences and for lying about his own history. When Newman repeated Wiseman’s charges in the fifth of his Lectures on the Present Position of Catholics in England (1851), Achilli called on the support of the Evangelical Alliance and successfully sued him for libel (see ODNB). While Achilli was certainly on the minds of both Wiseman and Newman in the years preceding their novels, I suggest that rather than focusing on how a traitor may harm the church, their concern was instead to articulate a Christology of radical forgiveness in which the sinner is welcomed back into the very community that he had betrayed. A pivotal moment in Torquatus’s return to the Christian community comes when, after spending a night lost in the “subterranean labyrinth” of the catacombs, he is driven to a recognition of his sinfulness. As a procession of mourners pass before him, they chant a Psalm. Hearing the final verse of Psalm 4, which in the King James Bible is rendered: “I will both lay me down in peace, and sleep: for thou, Lord, only makest me dwell in safety,” Torquatus exclaims “that is for me” (Wiseman [1854] 1886, 376). Creeping along the gallery, he lights his taper and “a picture of the Good Shepherd looked brightly down on him” (378). But, like the publican in the parable (Luke 18:13), “he would not pass the threshold, where he stood striking his breast and praying for mercy” (378). When he eventually comes to the procession, he is stunned by the news that the funeral is for Cæcilia whom he had betrayed. The only words he can utter are those of the Prodigal: “Father, I have sinned before heaven, and against Thee, and I am not worthy to be called Thy child” (Luke 15:21). The Pontiff immediately welcomes him home and Torquatus publicly avows “the whole of his guilt” (378). He is then “enrolled in the class of penitents, where years of expiation, shortened by the intercession of confessors— that is, future martyrs—would prepare him for full readmission for the

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privileges he had forfeited” (379). Wiseman’s advice, in the accompanying footnote, that readers consult the writings of St. Cyprian for his recommendations about the reintegration of the prodigal into the church anticipates the way that Newman represents him as the sage-like Cæcilius in Callista. Newman engages with the details of the Novatian heresy when he has Cæcilius articulate his belief in God’s desire to reconcile all people to himself. In the final chapter, Cæcilius exhorts the underground congregation to reflect on the journey of Callista and to remember that “from the most heroic down to the humblest beginner, from the authoritative preacher down to the slave or peasant”, there might be “a miracle of mercy, and a vessel, once of wrath … now of glory” (Newman  [1855] 1881, 378). While the hymn that follows his homily describes what “angel eyes behold” and speaks of watching “These from the sheepcote sternly cast, / Those welcomed to the fold” (379), it is clear that Cæcilius includes every sinner who repents, however serious their offence, as a member of the fold. It is because of his concern for the “lost sheep” of the world that Cæcilius does what he can do to offer Agellius’s brother Juba the opportunity of repentance. One of the ways he does this is to emphasise the radical mercy of the Good Shepherd. Cæcilius describes in Juba’s hearing the story of a man he once knew; having completely “abandoned himself to the service of the evil one”, this man was thought to be without hope. When, in illness and old age, Cæcilius met him, he made him contemplate a picture of the Good Shepherd. In an attempt to save the lost sheep who had forced its way through the “prickly fence” surrounding the fold, he explains that, “though He had to wound His own hands in the work”, the shepherd disengaged the sheep from the aloe and brought it back to the fold (165–66). In contemplating this picture of the shepherd’s care, the man came to a recognition of his own sinfulness: “He came back; he lived a life of penance at the Church’s door; he received the peace of the Church in immediate prospect of persecution, and has within the last ten days died a martyr’s death” (166). While Juba is visibly moved at Cæcilius’s story, his conversion is slow in coming. After experiencing a season of demon possession and madness, he is transformed into a state of silence in the presence of Callista’s sacred relics. Ten years later, on the night before his death, he suddenly recovers his speech and reason and receives baptism (383). Callista is a Christ figure for him: she takes on the role of the Good Shepherd of whom Cæcilius speaks in that she leads and brings rescue. In her death, she becomes an

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exemplar of faith and incites what the narrator describes as “the resurrection of the Church at Sicca” (382). When the “lapsed asked for peace” and “heathens sought to be received,” they testified to the effect of Callista’s history (ibid.).

3   The Suffering Servant The book of Acts records how  Philip the Evangelist  explains to the Ethiopian eunuch that the one whom Isaiah describes as “oppressed and … afflicted” and “brought as a lamb to the slaughter, and as a sheep before her shearers” finds typological fulfilment in Christ (Isa. 53:7; Acts 8:32). In accepting Christ as the ultimate suffering servant and in perceiving the crucifixion as the supreme act of love, the martyr—by definition— imitates the suffering servant and witnesses to the reality of what he believes by placing himself “completely at the disposal of God, radically unifying an act of love with the act of being taken from oneself in confrontation with man’s … denial of the love revealed by God” (Rahner 1975, 938). In this final section, I explain how Wiseman and Newman represent their heroes and heroines as figures of the suffering servant and as representatives of Christ’s incarnate presence in the world. Whereas Kingsley eroticises his heroine’s naked “snow-white” body and “golden locks” at the moment of her death ([1852–3] 1888, 322), Newman expresses a typological concern to associate Callista to the suffering servant who has “no form nor comeliness” and “no beauty that we should desire him” (Isa. 53:2). When Callista is brought out of the jail to be martyred, her assailants describe her as “black as Orcus” and formless, “like a bundle of clothes” (Newman [1855] 1881, 366). It is emphatically the higher beauty of Christ—that she had glimpsed in the lives of Chione, Agellius, and Cæcilius—that she comes to exemplify. Newman’s representation of Callista’s martyrdom has its seeds in some of his earlier work. In a sermon he published in 1835, he offers a commentary on Hebrews 11:37 (“They were stoned, they were sawn asunder, were tempted, were slain with the sword”). Investigating “what it was … to be a [primitive] Martyr”, he identifies two salient characteristics. Firstly, he specifies that martyrdom involves “voluntary suffering”; the martyrs of the Early Church were faced with the likelihood that witnessing to the Gospel would lead to death but nonetheless chose the path of profession. The second characteristic he describes is shame: “the sufferings of martyrdom were for the most part public, attended with every circumstance of

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ignominy and popular triumph, as well with torture” (Newman [1824–43] 1907, 2:48). These characteristics are central to the representation of Callista’s martyrdom: she receives the sacraments of baptism, confirmation and Holy Eucharist in the full knowledge that this step will lead to “the angry multitude, their fierce voices, the brutal executioner, the prison, the torture, and the slow, painful death” (Newman [1855] 1881, 348). In an essay that Wiseman published in the Dublin Review in 1851, he explains that it is the intense focus on the suffering of Christ that distinguishes the Catholic from the Protestant vision. Critiquing what he sees as the Protestant tendency to regard Christ’s act of redemption as a “mere abstraction” leading to selfish application (Wiseman 1851, 240), he offers an analogy in which he compares the response of two spendthrift sons to receiving a surety to pay their ransom. While one is “cold and calculating”, the other “watches with the intensest gaze every particle” of the offering (241). Of the characters in Fabiola, it is Pancratius who most fully embodies what Newman describes as the characteristics of martyrdom and what Wiseman describes as the painful recognition of the cost of salvation. As a fully developed saint from youth, Pancratius’s journey is one of ongoing “un-selfing.” When Sebastian dispatches him away to save him from being punished for tearing down the edit that demanded the sacrifice of Christians, he explains that if he had been seized he would have been “singled out for a triumph” and “would have been spared that ignominy which forms the distinctive merit and special glory of dying for simply being a Christian” (Wiseman  [1854]  1886, 416). When Pancratius is eventually brought into the forum to be martyred, he rejoices that, in the scourging he receives, he “suffer[s] some of the same punishment as was inflicted on my Lord” (401). As a figure of Christ, the suffering servant, he is confident in his vindication of the claim to another citizenship and, like Sebastian who “bore with him a double palm” after his “ignominious end before the world,” actively welcomes the disgrace of martyrdom because of his rootedness in the Passion (462). The joy of Pancratius and Sebastian in sharing Christ’s sufferings is also experienced by the female saints in Fabiola. As Cæcilia is transformed from a bride of Christ into a figure of Christ through her martyrdom, she is represented as a model Christian. As she dies, she declares how sweet “it is to be like Thee, stretched upon Thy Cross” (362). Rather than an isolated episode, her martyrdom comes as the long process of un-selfing. When the persecution against the Christians was beginning to gather force, Cæcilia had taken the step, along with Fabiola’s cousin Agnes and

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her servant girl Syra, of receiving the consecration to perpetual virginity. This involved both choosing the “same chaste path to heaven which the Incarnate Word chose for His own Mother” and imitating Christ in the “oblation of self”, a move signalled by the laying of their heads upon the altar (305). Whereas Agnes and Syra come to the holy nuptials with wreaths of flowers, Cæcilia provides “a bare, thorny branch, twisted into a circle” (307). This crown of thorns foreshadows her declaration to the judge before she is martyred: “I thank God”, she says, “that I am poor and meanly clad, and fare not daintily, because by all these things I am the more like Jesus Christ, my only spouse” (360). While, as an extra-canonical saint, Syra is denied martyrdom in the usual sense, her life embodies a similar process of “un-selfing”. When Fabiola recognises Christ in this dying slave-girl whom she had once wounded out of hurt pride, she lies at her feet in “self-humiliation” (522). It is in this act of humiliation that she recognises the proximity of the eternal and begins the process of that will lead her to monasticism. Notwithstanding his repetition of the situation whereby a Christian slave girl converts her mistress, Newman’s use of sparse dialogue—rather than sensational description—distinguishes his approach from Wiseman’s and enables him to respond to Kingsley in more pointed way. Rather than the extended description that occurs in the scenes of martyrdom in Fabiola, Callista’s martyrdom is conveyed largely through dialogue. As she is tortured, she cries out words that echo the Song of Songs: “Accept me, O my Love, upon this bed of pain … make haste and come” (Newman [1855] 1881, 370). By putting these words into Callista’s mouth, Newman extends his critique of the conflation of divine and human desire in Hypatia. Whereas Kingsley insists on reading the Song of Songs in terms of married love as he celebrates the marriage of the converted Jew Raphael with the would-be nun Victoria, Newman implies that the book should be read foremost in terms of the soul’s response to God. Newman’s invocation of the Song of Songs testifies to his engagement with what Paul Ricoeur terms the “fusional and totally reciprocal character” of the love that is celebrated (1998, 291). That the mystical interpretation of the book “was carried out principally” in a setting “marked by asceticism” means that the use of the words to mark Callista’s entry into the Communion of Saints through her martyrdom is particularly apposite for Newman’s intervention into the mid-century debates about the value of celibacy and monasticism (292). Whereas Kingsley’s Protestant-­ inflected vision of the final renunciation of the worldly by Philammon and

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his long-lost sister Pelagia is marked by isolation, renunciation for Newman and Wiseman leads to a celebration of the soul’s mystical union with Christ. Reaching authentic personhood for their characters involves a willingness to empty oneself of self-interest in imitation of God’s emptying of himself in the Incarnation (Phil. 2:7). This process of self-emptying was to be defined later in the nineteenth-century with the doctrine of kenosis (Law 2010).  I suggest that Newman and Wiseman  contribute to the developing understanding of this doctrine in their novels by stressing the centrality of images of Good Shepherd and the Suffering Servant in their delineations of the un-selfing that is involved in becoming a figure of Christ.

References [Anon]. 1859. The Symbolism of the Catacombs. The Rambler 2: 1–17.  Chapman, Raymond. 1970. Faith and Revolt: Studies in the Literary Influence of the Oxford Movement. London: Weidenfeld. Crawford, Charlotte E. 1950. Newman’s ‘Callista’ and the Catholic Popular Library. The Modern Language Review 45 (2): 219–221. https://doi. org/10.2307/3719440. Dorman, Susann. 1979. Hypatia and Callista: The Initial Skirmish Between Kingsley and Newman. Nineteenth-Century Fiction 34 (2): 172–193. https:// doi.org/10.2307/2932907. Gilley, Sheridan. 1885–2004. Achilli, (Giovanni) Giacinto (b. c.1803). In Oxford Dictionary of National Biography, 60 vols. Prepared under Various Editors. New York: Oxford University Press. http://www.oxforddnb.com/. Kingsley, Charles. (1852–53). 1888. Hypatia, or New Foes with an Old Face. London: Macmillan and Co. Lankewish, Vincent A. 2000. Love among the Ruins: The Catacombs, the Closet, and the Victorian ‘Early Christian’ Novel. Victorian Literature and Culture 28 (2): 239–273. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1060150300282016. Law, David R. 2010. Kenotic Christology. In The Blackwell Companion to Nineteenth-Century Theology, ed. David Fergusson, 251–279. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444319972.ch12. Lossky, Nicolas. 1996. The Oxford Movement and the Revival of Patristic Theology. In From Oxford to the People, ed. Paul Vaiss, 76–82. Hertfordshire: Gracewing. Murray, Brian. 2014. Apocryphal Tales: Martyrology and the Victorian Novel (Unpublished Presentation). Delivered at “Fictions of Antiquity: The Biblical and Classical Past of the Nineteenth-Century Novel”, Cambridge. http:// www.crassh.cam.ac.uk/events/25683.

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Newman, John Henry. (1855) 1881. Callista, A Sketch of the Third Century. London: Burns, Oates, & Co. http://newmanreader.org. ———. (1824–43) 1907. Parochial and Plain Sermons, 8 vols. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. http://newmanreader.org. Rahner, Karl. 1975. Encyclopaedia of Theology: A Concise Sacramentum Mundi. London and New York: Burns & Oates. Rhodes, Royal W. 1995. The Lion and the Cross: Early Christianity in Victorian Novels. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1998. The Nuptial Metaphor. In Thinking Biblically: Exegetical and Hermenutical Studies, ed. Andre LaCocque and Paul Ricoeur, 265–303. Translated by David Pellauer. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Wheeler, Michael. 1990. Death and the Future Life in Victorian Literature and Theology. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ———. 2012. ‘That They Might Have Life’: The Good Shepherd and the Victorian Church. International Journal for the Study of the Christian Church 12 (1): 3–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/1474225X.2012.650597. Williams, Rowan. 1990. The Wound of Knowledge: Christian Spirituality from the New Testament to St. John of the Cross. 2nd ed. London: Darton, Longman & Todd. Wiseman, Nicholas. 1851. The Actions of the New Testament. The Dublin Review 31: 175–244. ———. (1854) 1886. Fabiola, or the Church of the Catacombs. Illustrated Edition. New York; Cincinnati; St. Louis: Benziger Brothers.

PART VI

Figures of Christ in the Victorian Novel

CHAPTER 12

“The Sanctity of Our Sex”: Refiguring the Fallen Woman and the Passion of Christ in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–55) Jo Carruthers

The riot scene in North and South (1854–55), in which Margaret Hale protectively embraces the endangered Mr Thornton, is one of the most celebrated scenes in Elizabeth Gaskell’s oeuvre. Where literary critics (and those watching the scene within the novel itself) have been vocal about its sexual connotations, Gaskell’s Victorian readers would undoubtedly also be sensitive to the scene’s Christological overtones. While the act of sacrifice in and of itself invokes the Christian story, Gaskell makes more direct references to the crucifixion narrative, including direct quotations and allusions that would inevitably chime strongly with her biblically literate readership. After outlining the more obvious ways in which Margaret is presented as a Christ figure, this chapter goes on to focus specifically on the multivalency of the term “passion” that Gaskell seems

J. Carruthers (*) Lancaster University, Lancaster, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_12

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to exploit in order to draw together emotion, sexuality, suffering and the crucifixion narrative to complicate the relationship between the fallen woman and redemption. Gaskell’s own Unitarian theological context is explored in some detail in order to demonstrate the resources it offered Gaskell to produce a link between seemingly irreconcilable narratives of the fallen woman and Christ’s sacrifice. In its emphasis on the Passion narrative as a moment invoking divine and human sympathy, Unitarianism, in distinction to its reputation as an intellectual creed, privileged a certain kind of simultaneous emotional and intellectual response that Gaskell puts to use in her novel. The riot scene occurs when Margaret goes to the mill owner John Thornton’s house with a request on behalf of her ill mother and walks unexpectedly into a site of unrest. Thornton’s men have been on strike and have come to protest about Thornton’s hiring of Irish hands. Margaret is intimately knowledgeable about the desperate conditions of the starving workers because of her friendship with the Higgins family who work for Thornton. She sees familiar faces in the crowd; acquantances pinched by starvation, and made desperate by their struggles. While fearing that she may be cowardly when faced with danger, she instead “felt only an intense sympathy—intense to painfulness” (Gaskell [1854–55] 2005, 159) suggesting perhaps Christ’s own simultaneously compassionate and painful response to “the multitudes”, evident in the crucifixion and in Matthew 9:36, where “he was moved to compassion on them, because they fainted, and were scattered abroad, as sheep having no shepherd”. Mr Thornton, in contrast, is unsympathetic towards the men and, indeed, is irritated by their challenge to his authority. Margaret herself challenges Thornton about his moral duty to speak to the men for their own safety so that they may disperse before the arrival of police, entreating him: “Save these poor strangers” (161). She calls on Thornton to act as protector in his position as factory owner, and when Margaret realizes that he himself is in danger, she intuitively takes on the role of a saviour figure. She “thought how she could save him” and throws herself between the violent crowd and Mr Thornton. Before the watching crowd, she embraces Thornton to form a sacrificial barrier to their violent intent: “she made her body into a shield from the fierce people beyond” (163). Thus, she gestures towards the bodily sacrifice of the crucifixion and the orthodox theology of Christ’s body as mediation, as immanent connection between God and humanity. It is an act of bodily protection anticipated by the superlatively angelic Nelly in Gaskell’s  “The Heart of John Middleton” in which physical

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shielding is augmented by a Christ-like silence and death (Gaskell 1850b), characteristics also invoked in North and South as we will see. As a “figure of Christ”, Margaret is not a figurative Christ but very much a literal “figure” as a living body who resembles Christ. As the female body was overwhelmingly perceived as a sexual body by the Victorians, Gaskell not only has to negotiate Margaret’s inherent sexuality in order to present a convincing Christ-like body, as she does with the angelic Nelly, but seems to provoke a sexualized reading. The depiction of Margaret’s attempted sacrifice is a far cry from the angelic, Christ-child of Manuel, as discussed by Leanne Waters in Chap. 16 of this volume. As this chapter will demonstrate, the depiction of Margaret does not merely distract from or overlook the difficulty of her sexuality but instead explicitly negotiates female sexuality and the Christ-like body in order to resignify female identity. The allusions to Margaret’s Christ-like status so far referred to have been vague and subtle, but more direct invocations of the biblical narrative of the crucifixion layer up in the riot scene, pushing the attentive reader towards understanding Margaret as a Christ figure. She implores the crowd to avoid violence, claiming “You do not know what you are doing” (163), repeating Christ’s words on the cross in which he calls for forgiveness for his attackers: “Father, forgive them; for they know not what they do” (Luke 23:34). Taking account of ignorance in the judgement of a perpetrator seems central to Gaskell’s formulation of who deserves forgiveness as we see in Mary Barton  that Christ’s words are central to Carson’s epiphany about forgiveness when he sees a small girl explain that her assailant “did not know what he was doing” (Gaskell [1848] 2008, 318), a phrase that John Barton has previously applied to himself: “I did not know what I was doing, Job Leigh, God knows I didn’t!” (317). Gaskell frames Margaret’s risk on behalf of Thornton clearly in terms that imitate Christ’s life-giving sacrifice, so that “She lay like one dead on Mr Thornton’s shoulder” ([1854–5] 2005, 163). That Margaret appears to be dead is reiterated, leaving the reader in no doubt about the level of threat, and her likeness to Christ: it is later repeated by Mrs Thornton (“I could almost fancy her dead”, 164), by the hysterical Fanny (“I have never been in a room with a dead person before”), and even the servant Jane (“she looks like a corpse now”, 167). The description of the crowd’s response to Margaret’s wound focuses on the shedding of blood in which

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the term passion, albeit applied to the workmen, provokes the reader towards theological associations if they have not made them already: They were watching, open-eyed and open-mouthed, the thread of dark-red blood which wakened them up from their trance of passion. (163)

Margaret’s arms are in the shape of a cross, her body a mediating shield, she appears dead, and the invocation of the word passion associates her action with the familiar theological terminology for the suffering Christ. When Margaret has been struck, her appearance is reminiscent of the pietà, so that the crowd are touched by “the sight of that pale upturned face … still and sad as marble” (164). That the pietà would be known primarily through sculpture (such as that by Michelangelo) is suggested by the fact Margaret is limned as a marble statue. Tears flow and the scene strongly invokes Christ’s death: “heavier, slower plash than even tears, came the drip of blood from her wound” (164). The next day, in the scene in which Mr Thornton proposes to Margaret, the reader sees her through Thornton’s eyes as an object of romantic affection but in terms that invoke the biblical Christ. His devotion is made sacred in his recognition that “for all his savage words, he could have thrown himself at her feet, and kissed the hem of her garment” (178). The “hem of his garment” is the King James’s phrasing, repeated in Matthew 9:20 and 14:36, to describe the devoted actions of Christ’s worshippers, who are “made perfectly whole” (14:36) through touching their saviour. It is a phrase Gaskell placed in the mouth of her protagonist of “The Heart of John Middleton” in his moment of desperate need for God’s strength (“I prayed to cling to the hem of His garment, and be borne over the rough places when I fainted” (1850b, 330)). References to Christ reveal Margaret’s strength. When Mr Thornton describes his response to her “clinging defence of him”, it is in terms that invoke her divinity. In his reflection on the events, he claims that his resolution is melted by her, “as if it were wax before a fire” (Gaskell [1854–55] 2005, 175), invoking Micah 1:4, “And the mountains shall be molten under him, and the valleys shall be cleft, as wax before the fire, and as the waters that are poured down a steep place.” The scene intimates that Margaret is “fire”, the passionate woman, who produces a melting force, so that the normally brusque Thornton is emotionally transformed by Margaret’s strength. The theological overtones of the riot scene have been overlooked by critics who instead focus on Margaret’s symbolic fall and the way in which

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it is read within the novel, as Deborah Epstein Nord explains, “according to a sexual script” (1995, 174). Critics recognize the way in which Gaskell underlines the unorthodoxy of Margaret’s positioning of herself between a riot of working, passionate men and the factory’s owner, Mr Thornton. Barbara Harmon goes so far as to suggest that the scene is one in which Margaret is “symbolically deflowered” (1988, 43). Characters in the novel demonstrate to the reader how to read Margaret’s action: Mrs Thornton and Mr Thornton respectively fear and hope that the act is proof that Margaret loves him. Margaret herself recognizes the apparent loss of her chastity and, despite knowing her own pure, heroic intentions, she nonetheless feels “a deep sense of shame”, a phrase that she repeats almost immediately for emphasis, as “a sense of shame so acute” (Gaskell [1854–55] 2005, 174). She has a sense of a vulnerable exposure in the “unwinking glare of many eyes” (174), a sentiment repeated in the next chapter after Mr Thornton’s marriage proposal interprets her selfless act in terms of personal desire so that she feels “shame and trouble” (178), descriptors that associate Margaret with the fallen woman. Despite her feelings of being shamed, she does not denounce the action, as she determines, “I would do it again, if need were” and yet declares “how low I am fallen” (173), making explicit that which has been simmering close to the surface: that her public embrace of Thornton makes her “fallen”. Margaret returns to her suffering family and is Christ-like again in her silence, reminiscent of Jesus during his trial with Pilate in which he is likewise unfairly criminalized. Gaskell echoes Matthew 27:14, “And he answered him to never a word; insomuch that the governor marveled greatly” in her line: “With sweet patience did she bear her pain, without a word of complaint” (174). The scene’s attention to visceral detail indeed provokes intimations of sexuality that overlap and spill into the no less bodily and bloody Scriptural passion. While the sexual overtones of the scene are obvious to spectators and critics alike, the persistent biblical references make Margaret’s concurrent representation as a figure of Christ hard to ignore. Furthermore, Gaskell insists on the peculiarly feminine character of Margaret’s sacrificial act. When she comments explicitly on the scene in her conversation with Thornton, Margaret rejects personal motivations and insists instead that it was a “natural instinct” and grounded in her sex: “any woman would have done just the same. We all feel the sanctity of our sex as a high privilege when we see danger” (176), and, again: “any woman, worthy of the name woman, would come forward to shield, with her reverenced helplessness, a man in danger” (177).

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Literary texts present a privileged site through which we may observe the change in attitudes to the fallen woman that occurred through the nineteenth century. While the assumption is that women in fiction were more likely to be inheritors of Eve’s curse than Christ’s saving legacy, female Christ figures are not uncommon. In Chap. 13 of this volume, Clare Walker-Gore demonstrates that central to much Victorian theology was the assumption that all Christians could take on the Christ-role of sacrificial giving, whether male or female, strong or weak. Indeed, the weak seemed especially suited to the Christ role. One of the most celebrated and clearly Christological female saviour figures is Christina Rossetti’s Lizzie. In her redemption of the fallen Laura in Goblin Market (1862), Lizzie gives her body for and to her sister in what have been repeatedly recognized as strongly sexualized images of self-sacrifice for the fallen woman. In George Eliot’s Adam Bede (1859), a novel written while Eliot was re-reading Mary Barton, Hetty Sorrel is saved by the Christ-like, fervently devout Dinah Morris, whose “affective power” is discussed by Gareth Atkins in Chap. 15 of this volume (236). The saving of the fallen woman by a feminized Christ was controversial enough at the time and so it begs the question as to why, and how, an author might represent the fallen women herself in Christ-like terms. Rather than merely invoking the weak female, the Christ-like fallen woman produces a controversial moral dissonance. This representation of Margaret Hale as dually sexualized and Christ-­ like reflects the inevitability that the bloody female body may strike a Victorian readership as sexual before they recognize any spiritual significance. Yet the novel’s repeated invocation of biblical references to Christ suggests that Gaskell was aiming to make representable that which, at the time, was considered reprehensible: that there may be a connection between the sexualized woman and the crucified Christ. Victorians were quite aware of gospel narratives of Christ’s eating with sinners and especially his anointing at the hands of a sinful woman and of the story of the woman “taken in adultery” (John 8), even if ongoing association of the female sex with an unregenerate state often held more traction. Key to Gaskell’s agenda seems to be the term “passion”. The word passion is now best known for its more salacious meanings but, in the Victorian period, its connotations would have been more mixed. Its meaning of romantic emotion or sexual feeling would have been tempered by its theological and original denotation of suffering. The term “passion” originally referred to the suffering of a martyr and became ascribed to the suffering

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of Jesus specifically, taken from the Vulgate’s post passionem suam, “after his passion” of Acts 1:3. The term came to refer to the specific gospel narrative of Jesus’s suffering in the twelfth century and then to strong emotion or love only from the thirteenth century. The triad of sexuality, femininity and Christ-like sacrifice are all brought together in the term “passion”, and the ongoing overlap of associations suggests that Gaskell is deliberately drawing together the tripartite associations of the word passion in order to re-signify both women’s role in public life as well as the significance of the Christ figure in Victorian Britain. The novel repeatedly plays on the valence of the term passion— which becomes notably prominent in the riot scene—and the way it easily slips between religious, emotional and sexual registers. The term’s multiple connotations are suggestive in bringing together these three realms— the religious or spiritual, the emotional and the sexual. Commonly articulated claims about the specific affinity of women and strong emotion, often in the most pious of works, opened up the potential for bringing closer than was otherwise comfortable the passionate woman and the Christ figure. The term “passion” expresses sexual desire and strong, unwieldy emotion that unsettles the seemingly chaste and reserved Margaret Hale: it is in her passion that she breaks the norms of feminine behaviour but also when she is at her most heroic. It is also in her passion that she most resembles Christ, and the novel suggests, may take on his saving role for her community. Femininity has been carefully policed historically, of course. In the early modern period, so the story went, if a woman engaged in exercise or emotions that rendered her too hot, unbalancing her humours and turning her from a feminine coldness to a masculine warmth, she would physically turn into a man (see Laqueur 1990, 25–35). Strong emotion was physically dangerous. Although nineteenth-century medical science had quelled fears of such monstrous metamorphoses, many in Victorian society continued to experience anxiety over breaches of female decorum that may have appeared as frightful as the fear of physical mutation. As North and South itself makes clear, part of the expectation of polite society was the suppression of strong emotion and sexual passion, or of the expectation of moderate emotion and passivity in the right-minded and natural woman. The novel opens after all on the image of a reclined, sleepy Edith, an ideal of femininity, “lovely in her white muslin and blue ribbons” (Gaskell [1854–55] 2005, 7): beauty embodied in passivity. In contrast to Edith, Margaret is markedly less feminine. She is aligned with the biblical Vashti,

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a figure who in the nineteenth century epitomized female rebellion in her refusing of a King’s command in the Bible’s story of Esther. In Charlotte Brontë’s novel, Villette, published the year before North and South, Vashti is an actress whose subversion of feminine norms through her public display invokes the fallen woman and the satanic rebel revered in Romantic poetry (see Carruthers 2007). Gaskell’s depiction of Margaret as a Vashti-­ figure may well draw on both Brontë’s novel as well as the Bible and such a brief reference to Vashti presumes a biblically literate readership. Margaret becomes like Vashti when she expresses a moment of anger, an emotional breach of feminine norms. When provoked, “all the latent Vashti in Margaret was roused, and she could hardly keep herself from expressing her feelings” (Gaskell [1854–55] 2005, 339). It is Margaret’s passionate nature that reminds her mother and servant, Dixon, of her exiled brother Frederick, so that it becomes a sentimental, positive sign of what might otherwise be considered a negative emotion. For Frederick, and by extension Margaret, being passionate means that he acts for truth rather than according to the law in his treasonous, yet heroic, mutiny. Margaret’s passionate strength is further made positive in contrast to the women of Milton North who shock Margaret with their forwardness. The deviance or unusualness of female passion and strong emotion are noted, then, but the novel ultimately works to normalize and endorse Margaret’s brand of female strength and strong emotion. The positive moral emphasis on emotion and sympathy that grew through the nineteenth century alongside social reform created a new context in which to understand female passion. It is this context of the re-­ evaluation of cultural expectations that Gaskell invokes when she alludes to Christ’s Passion in her narrative about a woman of strong feeling who seemingly falls when she embraces a man in public. It was precisely the familiar narrative of the crucifixion, of Christ’s Passion, that provided a resource for Gaskell to resignify wider understandings of passion and the passions more generally. By deviating the issue of female behaviour through Christology, Gaskell drew on a narrative that was authoritative enough to challenge the social norms that many Victorians would instinctively affirm. Where attitudes towards the monstrosity of female passion— whether excessive emotion or sexuality—would be affirmed unthinkingly as the “done thing”, it was perhaps only Christian theology that held enough authority and, just as importantly, dramatic impact, to challenge these intuitively held norms.

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Yet what this narrative—and indeed what a “Christ-figure”—was differed across the Christian spectrum in Victorian Britain according to one’s sectarian affiliation, from Catholicism through high, broad and low church Anglicanism to the many faces of nonconformism. Gaskell’s approach to the passion was strongly influenced by her Unitarian background, although her own position is of course nuanced. She came from a Unitarian family (her father, William Stephenson, was a minister), and married a Unitarian minister, William Gaskell. Unitarianism was distinct within Victorian Christianity in its rejection of the divinity of Christ and many considered it not even to be within the scope of the term Christian. As such, the Christ-figure for Unitarians was not a divine being who pays a debt or atones for sin, but a great human who brings salvation through an act that invokes God’s sympathy. Unitarianism is most commonly characterized in critical overviews of Victorian religion as an intellectual sect, and as Timothy Larsen has demonstrated, was overwhelmingly “biblicist” until the late nineteenth century (2011, 138). As Emma Mason and Mark Knight rightly note, it was also a sect marked by “sympathy towards any religious position expressed with conviction” (2006, 53). Notably tolerant and open-minded, it was a sect that privileged and promoted rational reading of the Bible in which emotional or supernatural excesses were to be curbed. The general emphasis upon Unitarianism’s rationality, although undoubtedly true, belies the fact that it was nonetheless a tradition that deeply valued emotion and for which sympathy was a key theological principle, a theme admittedly brought out most fully in fictional writings by Unitarians such as Gaskell. The deft negotiation, rather than rejection, of emotion within Unitarianism is demonstrated in an article published in The Unitarian, an American journal, in which the author directly contests the accusation that Unitarianism is “corpse-like and cold” (CAB 1834, 207). Writing against “fiery and unregulated zeal” (209), he questions the opposition of “feeling and reason” (207). He seems to do little to challenge such oppositions in his defence of “a zeal that is calm, orderly, self-subsistent, and abiding” (209), yet argues that such a calm surface covers over a “heart fit to bursting” (210) that prioritises “affection”, “sympathy” and “love” (210), arguing for the mutual influence of feelings and reason (211). He calls for those “who will have a warm, practical, earnest, and even agonizing sympathy with human souls, those who can weep, as did the Saviour over the devoted city” (212). The very attempt to combat accusations of coldness

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demonstrates at the very least the intellectual commitment and privileging of sympathy in Unitarian theology. The commitment to emotional response is evident throughout mainstream American and British Unitarianism, two strands that were in close communion throughout the nineteenth century. Michael Wheeler classifies Unitarianism as “grounded” in “rationalism” (1992, 30) and yet identifies Gaskell’s faith as shaped by her “sensitivity to the emotional and spiritual needs of others” (28), her emphasis, I would argue, merely an amplification of the attention to sympathy and emotion characteristic of Unitarian belief and practice. The common Christian image of illumination—a term often associated with rational enlightenment—demonstrates that emotional principles did intercept into its more obvious commitment to the rational. James Yates, reflecting on the biblical phrase “light of the world” (John 8:12), indicates the dual referents of intellectual enlightenment and emotional, felt truth in the image of illumination and the importance of interpersonal connection. Yates comments: “Jesus Christ, then, according to the scriptural representation, saves the world inasmuch as he brings light into it; that is, inasmuch as he gives to mankind the knowledge of God and of themselves, the knowledge of their duty, and of the means of obtaining happiness here and hereafter” (1835, 36; italics in the original). Illumination increases knowledge, but it also brings interpersonal knowledge, experience of God and the self; and it brings not merely knowledge but emotional wellbeing in “happiness”. Christ’s passion was best understood rationally, yet the key to Unitarian theology of the crucifixion was its emotional force: its power to transform humans through emotional connection and sympathy. Sympathy was an emotional expression perfectly in line with the rationalist emphasis of Unitarianism that rejected the divinity of Jesus as an irrational and indefensible interpretation of the Bible and reality. Arguing against the orthodox doctrine of the Atonement—that Christ pays a debt for the sinner—Joseph Priestly, one of the most influential early Unitarians, argued it was a cold, calculating idea that he considered to be based on pecuniary “satisfaction”. He offered instead as a model for God’s attitude to humanity an emotionally charged rendition of the parable of the prodigal son: What satisfaction did the father of the prodigal son require, but his return to his duty? Did he not, even when his son “was yet a great way off,” run to meet him, fall upon his neck and kiss him? [Luke xv. 20]. (1833, 22; italics in the original)

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As a scientist, Priestly was analytical in his approach to religion and advocated reason, but his writing expressed quite eloquently and feelingly a commitment to the emotional aspect of religion. Orthodox Christianity and Unitarians alike identified the crucifixion and suffering of Christ as the key factor in a Christian’s experience of redemption, yet how the crucifixion was understood differs hugely between them. As Elizabeth Ludlow comments in the introduction, the nineteenth century saw what Boyd Hilton describes as a shift from a preoccupation with Atonement narratives to a focus on an Incarnation-­ inflected teleology. As Jan-Melissa Schramm notes, the 1850s were a time of the “great Atonement debates” (2012, 146) and the years in which North and South was first published in periodical issues, 1854–5, saw the publication of key works by F.D.  Maurice and Benjamin Jowett (2012, 147). The crucifixion deals with sinfulness, but theologians debated over whether Christ’s death acted as the penal substitution of orthodox Christianity or a moral exemplar, as claimed by Unitarians and suggested in the writings of Maurice and Jowett. Paul Fiddes writes of the relation between Christ’s death and salvation as a “mystery” that throughout Christian history “cried out for explanation” (2007, 742). A chasm exists between sinfulness or the breaking of God’s law and redemption through Christ’s death. What had to be explained was the logical step of exactly how this death and resurrection deals with the breaking of law and its consequent punishment, which is not straightforward or easily conceived. How does this person’s death in Palestine two thousand years ago produce salvation for all subsequent human beings? Fiddes draws a history of the “logic” of the passion from medieval texts to the present day, demonstrating the historical centrality of the passion to God’s salvation of humanity. For Unitarians, Christ’s suffering worked through provoking God’s sympathy for humankind. The Unitarian belief in a fully human Christ produced an emphasis upon the suffering of Christ as the crux of salvation, the bridge over the gap between the crucifixion and deliverance. God’s response is a sympathy that is also called for from the Christian, so that sympathy becomes perhaps the principal emotional foundation of Christian belief in Unitarian theology. This emphasis upon the suffering of Christ is a marker of Unitarian theology in the nineteenth century and resonated with Unitarianism’s marked social interest and their focus on present human suffering. The Unitarian James Yates illustrates this focus on present suffering in 1822 in his contention that the theological term salvation represented in its “most common scriptural sense, deliverance not from

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eternal misery in the next world, but from guilt, ignorance, and wretchedness in this” (1835, 6; italics in the original). Unitarian belief was strongly tied to the Bible and it explicitly encouraged studious yet thoughtful biblical interpretation. Gaskell’s representation of passion pushes the reader to weigh interpretations instead of merely presenting an answer for her reader. Her invocation of passion encourages readers to critique versions of Christian orthodoxy they would have been taught through their own understanding of the world and of the Bible. By emphasizing the ties between Christ’s Passion as an act of suffering and love and passion’s more everyday connotations of strong emotion and sexual feeling, Gaskell could provide a web of meaning that would work to complicate and enrich understanding of all three subjects. The Unitarian prioritization of rational discussion as a means towards theological truth provides a positive model for a willingness to think and rethink established positions. The emphasis in Unitarian theology upon the suffering of Christ as a provocation for sympathy results in the slippage apparent in the word passion as used in Gaskell’s depiction of the passionate Margaret Hale. It produces an emphasis on the emotional facets of God that is then refracted through the emotional world of women to reinvent the meaning of the passionate, and by extension sexually passionate, woman as well as to emotionally reinvigorate theology. Passion is re-evaluated in order to overwrite a negative breaking of law, either the fallen woman’s breaking of moral law in her fornication or of social law in her breaking of norms of femininity. It is for these reasons, then, that Gaskell draws on Christ imagery in her depiction of the passionate Margaret Hale, a woman who not only demonstrates but acts on strong emotions that connote sexual passion. As already discussed, Margaret is an unusual and wilful woman who is notably more emotional than her female companions. She acts as women are apparently not supposed to. It is the riot scene at Thornton’s mill that is invariably turned to as a reference point to exemplify Margaret’s passionate, strong emotion. But Gaskell is doing more here than demonstrating that sexual and emotional love can lead women to heroic acts, I think. In depicting Margaret in clearly Christ-like ways, Gaskell produces a heroism that spills over into sexual imagery, but in ways that draw on theologies of salvation that create Margaret as a Christ figure whose saving power lies precisely in her passion figured as excessive emotion. Passion is the source of salvation, forcing a

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reconsideration of passion’s cultural meanings and challenging negative assumptions about female emotion and sexuality. I will turn now to giving closer attention to the ways in which the term passion is used repeatedly in the riot scene. It is first invoked in relation to Margaret’s emotional response to the pitiful crowd, where she is described as “shaking all over with her passion” ([1854–55] 2005, 161). It is also, as already noted, a term used of the rioting men, expressing the emotional excess of their suffering. Margaret notes the danger to Thornton when she sees “the stormy passions would have passed their bounds” (162), leading her to entreat Thornton to address them. Their “reckless passion had carried them too far to stop” (163), leading to the blow that hits Margaret. When they see the “dark-red blood” on Margaret, they are “wakened” from “their trance of passion” (163). The term passion returns in the scene in the next chapter in which Thornton proposes so that his voice is lowered “to such a tender intensity of passion” (177), indicating sexual and emotional feeling. Margaret, in her offence, sheds “passionate tears” (177), suggesting overwhelming emotion. Passion is aligned with Margaret’s sympathy and overpowering emotion, with the crowd’s unconstrained suffering and with Thornton’s uncontrollable romantic and sexual feelings for Margaret. In all three valences, passion is something excessive and not entirely controlled. It is something that overpowers the human and in a limited sense represents something that transcends the rational self. This overlap and intertwining of emotional and religious registers of meaning produces a resignification of sexual transgression. Pulled from its association with the fall, the term “passion” is instead placed closer to connotations of love, suffering and self-sacrifice. Perhaps Gaskell is attempting to use the Passion to mediate a judgement on sexual transgression: that the woman who gives herself up to sexual passion, or rather is persuaded to give herself up, like Esther in Mary Barton, merely acts upon a form of self-giving love that has at its source a pure intention. Esther Barton, and Mary after her, as well as Lizzie Leigh (1850a) and Gaskell’s most prominent fallen woman, Ruth ([1853] 2008), do nothing more than believe and act lovingly towards their heartless suitors. But more tantalising, and more in-keeping with what her audience may have found acceptable, is the possibility that Gaskell, and others who depict fallen women in Christ-like terms, are presenting them not merely as a corrupt society’s sacrificial victim. Indeed, the fallen woman’s suffering is redemptive for society as a whole because it is founded in love. The fallen woman, in giving herself

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sexually, is a sacrificial lamb, the innocent yet punished victim of current Victorian society. Rather than sanctifying suffering, the fallen woman epitomizes a divine, self-giving love that is blemished by a corrupt society that enables and enacts a sacrifice. In Gaskell’s novels, it is the seducer who is at fault, the seduction itself a consequence of society’s depravity in which rich men unthinkingly use and abuse poorer women. The fallen woman in these terms is not only a victim. Through association with the passion of Christ, she is not merely the locus for sympathy but her transgression, as an act of love that provokes the sympathy necessary for mercy and grace to be activated, is promissory for salvation. The figuration of the fallen woman in her peculiarly feminine emotionality as a Christ-like figure of self-giving love is no longer a passive figure but, like Margaret before the rioters, gives herself willingly. Through the agency ascribed to Margaret and the Christ-like fallen woman, Gaskell achieves what Amanda Anderson deems impossible for the fallen woman, an “authentic, private, or self-­ regulating identity” (1993, 2). Recognising the overlap of sexual and theological discourses at work in Gaskell’s writing invokes a logic that plays on mainstream and Unitarian theology’s privileging of the weak and the scorned in order to complicate the status of the fallen woman. Invoking specifically the Passion, the suffering love of Christ, alongside the passion of the suffering rioters in Margaret’s most passionate scene, Gaskell conflates feminine emotion and sacrificial suffering in terms that demand a reconfiguration of the seemingly antithetical categories of salvation, strong emotion and female sexuality. By placing alongside each other the unbounded love of God and the love of women that defies cold rationality, reveals women’s, and the fallen woman’s, proximity to the compassionate and redemptive love of Christ.

References Amanda Anderson. 1993. Tainted Souls and Painted Faces: The Rhetoric of Fallenness in Victorian Culture. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1993. CAB. 1834. True and False Zeal. The Unitarian. Conducted by Bernard Whitman. Vol. 1.5. Boston, CA. Carruthers, Jo. 2007. The Liminal Becoming of the Rebel Vashti. In Mapping Liminalities: Thresholds in Cultural and Literary Texts, ed. Lucy Kay, Zoë Kinsley, Terry Phillips and Alan Roughley, 91–109. Bern: Peter Lang. Gaskell, Elizabeth. 1850a. Lizzie Leigh. Household Words 1: 2–6, 32–35, 60–65. ———. 1850b. The Heart of John Middleton. Household Words 2: 325–334.

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———. (1853) 2008. Ruth. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ———. (1854–5) 2005. North and South. New  York and London: Norton Critical Edition. ———. (1848) 2008. Mary Barton. Ed. Thomas Recchio. New York and London: Norton Critical Edition. Harmon, Barbara Leah. 1988. In Promiscuous Company: Female Public Appearance in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South. Victorian Studies 31: 351–374. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3828096. Knight, Mark, and Emma Mason. 2006. Nineteenth-Century Religion and Literature: An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Laqueur, Thomas. 1990. Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Larsen, Timothy. 2011. A People of One Book. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nord, Deborah Epstein. 1995. Walking the Victorian Streets: Women, Representation and the City. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Paul Fiddes. 2007. The Passion Story in Literature. In The Oxford Handbook of English Literature and Theology, ed. Andrew Hass, David Jasper and Elizabeth Jay, 742–759. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. Priestley, Joseph. 1833. Unitarianism Explained and Defended in a Discourse, Delivered in the Church of the Universalists at Philadelphia, 1796. London: Printed for the British and Foreign Unitarian Association. Schramm, Jan-Melissa. 2012. Atonement and Self-Sacrifice in Nineteenth-Century Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wheeler, Michael. 1992. Elizabeth Gaskell and Unitarianism. The Gaskell Society Journal 6: 25–41. Yates, James. 1835. The Scriptural Meaning of the Title “Saviour” as Applied to Our Lord. A Sermon Preached at Glasgow, July 28, 1822, at the Annual Meeting of the Scottish Unitarian Association. 2nd ed. Printed for the British and Foreign Unitarian Association.

CHAPTER 13

“Our Ordinary Lot”: The Cross, the Crutch and the Theology of Disability in the Novels of Charlotte M. Yonge Clare Walker Gore

In one of the last and greatest of the family chronicles for which is she is best remembered, The Pillars of the House (1873), Charlotte M.  Yonge follows the fortunes of a large family of orphaned children, as they struggle to make their way in the world. Before killing off their clergyman father, however, she allows him, from his deathbed, to impart a crucial piece of wisdom to the eldest of the children, Felix, who is about to take his place at the head of the family. Struggling to accept the news that Felix must give up his academic future and financially support the family by going into trade, Mr Underwood turns to the family motto, “Under wood, under rood,” reminding himself that burden and blessing are inextricable for the Christian. So far, we might say, so predictable: the idea that Christians must “take up their cross” is a familiar one, and the virtue of self-sacrifice is widely touted in nineteenth-century fiction. However,

C. Walker Gore (*) University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_13

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there is something far less familiar, and far more challenging, in the turn Mr Underwood gives this motto as he explains its significance. Noting the visual similarity of the “cross potent” on the family shield to a crutch, he directly compares his disabled daughter Geraldine’s crutch to the cross of Christ: Mr. Underwood opened the first leaf of a volume of St. Augustine, beside him, a relic of former days, the family shield and motto within—namely, a cross potent, or crutch-shaped, and the old English motto, “UNDER WODE, UNDER RODE.” “Under wood, under rood,” he repeated. “It was once but sing-song to me. Now what a sermon! Bear thy cross, and thy cross will bear thee, like little Geraldine’s cross potent—Rod and Rood, Cross and Crutch—all the same etymologically and veritably.” (Yonge [1873] 1889b, 1.35)

This startling image puts impairment and prosthesis at the very centre of Christian experience, calling upon the reader to imagine all Christians as disabled, in need of the Cross as Geraldine is in need of her crutch. Imagining Christ’s cross as a crutch encourages us to think about the broken Body of Christ as a disabled body, to picture Christ in Geraldine’s position, and she in his. Whereas Charles Dickens’s Tiny Tim in A Christmas Carol (1843) asks us to imagine him as a recipient of Christ’s healing touch, hoping that “the people saw him in church, because he was a cripple, and it might be pleasant to them to remember upon Christmas day, who made lame beggars walk” ([1843] 2006, 50), Geraldine is not imagined as being especially in need of charity, but rather, as especially close to Christ. In this analogy, disabled Geraldine is made the type of the Christian subject; rather than being treated as aberrant or set apart from others by her non-normative embodiment, her experience of physical frailty and her need for her prosthesis in the form of a crutch are taken as emblematic of all Christian experience. For the modern reader, the way Yonge asks us to think about disability in this passage is deeply counter-intuitive. The category of disability exists, after all, to cordon off impairment, inadequacy and suffering, simultaneously attributing these experiences to a deviant minority, and then defining those deemed to belong to this category entirely by these experiences. If, as Yonge demands, we truly imagined all persons as suffering, as incomplete, as broken and in need of assistance, then the dis/abled binary would be broken down. It is not simply that the stigma attached to disability

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would wither, but that there would no longer be, to borrow Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s phrase, “definitive human beings” against whom to define “the disabled” (1997, 8). Without what Garland-Thomson calls the “normate position,” the abnormality of disability would cease to be absolute: instead, we would be faced with an array of human beings on a spectrum of ability, all of them vulnerable to suffering and all of them in need of assistance, at different times and to different degrees. Today, this is a radical way of thinking about dis/ability, albeit one which is gaining traction among disability theorists.1 For Charlotte Yonge, however, it was a natural consequence of her theology, which was, in turn, strongly shaped by the Oxford movement. One of its major exponents, John Keble, was her parish priest; she called him “the great influence of [her] life,” claiming that “no one else, save my own father, had so much to do with my whole cast of mind” (Yonge 1871, 3–4). Looking back over her career as a novelist in 1893, Yonge took satisfaction in the thought that she had acted as “a sort of instrument for popularizing Church views that might not have been otherwise taken in” (Romanes 1908, 190). One of those potentially unpalatable “views” is surely the attitude to suffering— something Esther T.  Hu describes as “central to Tractarian theology” (2010, 156)—exemplified by Edward Bouverie Pusey’s sermon, “The Cross borne for us, and in us,” in which he argues that “our life from Baptism to death should be a practice of the Cross, a learning to be crucified” ([1841] 1883, 3:50). This view of suffering as a vital part of the natural order enabled Pusey to see physical disability as a relatively unproblematic aspect of the providential scheme. In his sermon on “The Value and Sacredness of Suffering,” for example, disabled people feature prominently: What need one speak beside of those whom we meet every where? How many traces of suffering! The halt, the maimed, those who have endured very acute pain, and parted with limbs to save life; and others are hidden from our sight, who are every where even now suffering the like. This is our ordinary lot; not to take into account the dreadful scourges of Almighty God—war … famine, pestilence, conflagrations, mangling of limbs, and the worse cruelties which man inflicts on man. (3:120)

In Pusey’s worldview, “the halt and the maimed” (echoing Luke 14:21) are at the centre of Christian life, appearing not as aberrations from but as part of “our ordinary lot,” explicitly set apart from the man-made catastrophes he then lists as adding to the sum of the world’s sorrow.

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Rather than seeing disability as a problem to be solved, he accords it a place in God’s plan, listing it as just one of the many ways in which the Cross might manifest itself in a person’s life. Moreover, while he goes on to suggest that suffering may be a form of punishment for sin or warning of spiritual peril, he also claims that it is also “allotted most to those whom He most loves” (3:123). The meanings of disability, in Pusey’s account, can be as various as disabled people themselves. This Tractarian view of disability was antithetical to the currents of eugenic thought which gathered momentum as the nineteenth century progressed. As early as 1877, Harriet Martineau, who had abandoned the Christianity of her youth and embraced scepticism, was railing against books “which describe the sufferings of illness, and generate vanity and egotism about bodily pain and early death,” claiming that they have “shockingly perverted our morals, as well as injured the health of Christendom” ([1877] 1983, 148). In Martineau’s view, only “disobedience to the laws of nature” produced disability; seeing it as a part of the natural order of things was not merely misguided, but actually unhealthy (150). A similar idea runs through Q.D. Leavis’s hatchet job on Yonge’s work in the pages of Scrutiny in 1944, in which she claims that through “selecting the anti-life elements in Christianity for stress and idealization,” Yonge created a “picture of human action [that] is not only impracticable but morbid,” without “any kind of health” (1944, 154). Yonge’s positioning of disabled characters is singled out for opprobrium: Consider the typical pattern of her novels. There is a permanent invalid who is a hero or heroine; tubercular invalids are peculiarly saintly and frequently an idiot is idealized; the most blessed marriages are those in which one party is diseased or physically incapable. (154)

Although Leavis’s essay displays an uncompromisingly hostile attitude to Yonge’s fiction, it usefully illustrates the close connection between wider attitudes to disability and attitudes to Yonge’s work, and in highlighting the inextricability of Yonge’s theology and her representation of disability. The “typical pattern of her novels” does indeed illustrate her view of Christian life, and it does place disability at the heart of Christian experience. Almost all of Yonge’s novels contain representations of physically disabled characters; in the remainder of this chapter, I will focus on just two, examining the treatment of disabled characters in a pair of her best known “family chronicles,” The Daisy Chain (1856) and The Pillars of the

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House (1873). As I will demonstrate, Yonge depicts physical suffering as a vital part of character’s soteriological trajectory, with terminal illness consistently treated as a necessary prelude to the Christian’s achievement of a final resemblance to Christ. Less drastically, she depicts an ongoing experience of impairment as enabling disabled characters to enjoy particularly close relationships with her Christ-like figures, essentially turning disability into a sign of special discipleship. Because disability merely represents a heightened form of something all characters must experience, however, disabled characters tend not to be set apart from others: we find them at the centre of families and plots rather than in peripheral positions, their experiences made very much a part of the “ordinary lot” of Yonge’s fictional world. This pattern is exemplified in Yonge’s treatment of Margaret May, the eldest daughter of the May family whose lives are “chronicled” in The Daisy Chain. Injured in the carriage accident at the beginning of the novel which kills her mother, Margaret spends seven years confined to her bed and couch, her health growing gradually worse, until she eventually succumbs to consumption. The description of the final stages of her terminal illness make it clear that she achieves an ever-greater detachment from the world, “often perfectly still, living, assuredly in no ordinary sphere of human life,” until, purified by the final agonies which her family “trust” to be “but her full share of the Cross,” she dies “with a consoling smile” and the words, “‘Over now!’” ([1856] 1873, 646). The close echo here of Christ’s last words in John 19:30 (“It is finished”), coming so soon after the reference to the cross, strongly implies that at the end of her life, Margaret has achieved the likeness to Christ for which all the characters have striven. We have been led to expect that Margaret will go on first, not simply because she is physically frail, but because her experience of disability has been shown to speed up the process which all her siblings are undergoing: what Pusey called “a learning to be crucified, a crucifixion of our passions, appetites, desires, wills, until, one by one, they be all nailed, and we have no will, but the will of our Father” ([1841] 1883, 3:50). When we first meet Margaret, she is an attractive but not an exemplary character. Described as a “fine, tall, blooming girl of eighteen,” she has her mother’s “calm eyes” (3), but is as yet unwilling to take her advice, resisting her warning against “seeking to be first” by insisting that “there is always some person with whom one is first” (12), with a blush that suggests she is thinking of her sweetheart, Alan Ernescliffe, rather than her favourite brother, as she claims (18). It is through her experience of

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disability that Margaret is able to move towards an acceptance of her mother’s perspective. Gradually, she accepts that she must give up the active management of the household that she so enjoys, that she must resign her place as their father’s chief confidante to Ethel, and that she and Alan will never be married. Every one of these sacrifices is shown to yield rich spiritual rewards, and to bring her closer to the Christ-like patience and detachment she finally achieves. As she tells her favourite brother Richard, while observing the preparations for their sister Flora’s marriage, her disability has saved her from the temptations which she believes would otherwise have overwhelmed her: This wedding has brought my real character before me. I feel what I should have been. You have no notion how excited or elated I can get about … all the external show and things belonging to station—I naturally care much more for them than even Flora does. … And government, and management, and influence—you would not guess what dreams I used to waste on them, and now here am I set aside from it all, good for nothing but for all you dear ones to be kind to. (411)

In “setting her aside” from these temptations, the “cross” of her immobility and frailty is clearly a “crutch” to her moral development. At the end of her life, she reflects that “the temptation of her character had been to be the ruler and manager of everything, and she saw it had been well for her to have been thus assigned the part of Mary, rather than of Martha” (633). In what at first seems the cruellest deprivation of all, Margaret’s marriage to her lover Alan is made dependent upon her recovering her ability to walk. As this prospect recedes into impossibility, she is at first grief-­ stricken, and considers breaking off their engagement (409–10). However, as the couple give up their hopes of being together in this life, they fix their sights instead on the life to come, a sublimation of their romantic attachment given material form in their church-building plans, a “topic [that] seemed to suit them better than their own future, for there was no dwelling on that without an occasional misgiving” (307). The ultimate worth of the spiritual union which the couple develop in place of the physical relationship they are denied is clearly revealed when tragedy strikes: having “inwardly dwelt on the truly certain hopes” (307), Margaret is able to greet the news that Alan has been lost at sea with the declaration, “It is unbroken!” (498). Her own death, soon after, is depicted as a reunion with him:

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Now, what was mortal of him lay beneath the palm tree, beneath the glowing summer sky, while the first snow flakes hung like pearls on her pall. But, as they laid her by her mother’s side, who could doubt that they were together? (648)

The perfect nature of this celibate, spiritual union is in sharp contrast to the decidedly imperfect marriages we witness in the novel, and its connection to Margaret’s disability is underscored when the paralysed schoolteacher Cherry Elwood, another disabled woman who has been forced to give up her hopes of marriage, comments, “I do see how some, as are married, seem to get to think more of this world; and now and then I fancy I can see how it is best for me as it is” (311).2 Moreover, the failure of Margaret’s marriage plot is made essential to the success of the church-­ building plot: it is because they cannot marry that Alan goes to sea, having endowed the church at Cocksmoor in his will, and because he dies at the sea that the church can be built. The point is underscored when Margaret requests that her engagement ring be set into the stem of the chalice, the ceremony at which the church is consecrated becoming a direct substitute for the wedding the couple will never have. The sacrifices which enable Margaret to achieve her Christ-like character, then, are depicted as the direct result of her disability. However, the example she sets is one which all her siblings are destined to follow. Her earlier comparison between herself and Flora is revealing: with nothing to hamper her marriage or interfere with her worldly career, Flora seems at first to have evaded all the suffering which forms Margaret’s character, but nothing could be further from the truth. She, too, achieves better self-­ understanding and true humility, but only after she has entered into an unsatisfactory marriage, lost her first child through unwitting neglect and suffered agonies of guilt. Her initial unwillingness to give up her “aspirations” (the novel’s subtitle) costs her very dear. The novel’s heroine, Ethel, is from the beginning more open to Mrs May’s teachings about the dangers of ambition, and accordingly has less to suffer, but the life she ultimately embraces is closely modelled on Margaret’s. She champions the church-building project at Cocksmoor that Margaret comes to care so much about, voluntarily commits herself to celibacy—a vow which the narrator clearly admires, emphasising that it is made “in her heart of hearts … where [she] had treasured her resolve to work for Cocksmoor” (393)—and ultimately becomes the mainstay of the household. This last role is the most difficult one for her to embrace; whereas piety and celibacy

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seem to come to her relatively naturally, giving up her ambitions to focus on housekeeping and child-rearing is shown to be a real struggle. Margaret’s influence is crucial here: it is at her urging that Ethel recognises the incompatibility of her classical studies with “being a useful, steady daughter and sister at home” (181).3 Accepting that she cannot keep up with her brother that “the time has come for Norman to pass beyond [her]” is clearly Ethel’s cross, and it is by following Margaret’s advice that she is able to bear it. Ethel’s exclusion from academic life is also shown to be her crutch, as the academic ambitions Norman has been allowed to foster lead him to the brink of nervous breakdown and—worst of all fates in a Yonge novel— the loss of his faith. Even when he partially recovers from the crisis precipitated by his over-ambitious studies at Oxford, Norman feels that he must “leave this world of argument and discussion … and go to the simplest, hardest work” (519), a decision which leads him to embrace what is depicted in the novel’s sequel, The Trial (1864), as a grindingly hard life as a missionary in New Zealand. Brothers, then, are in no way exempted from the demands made of sisters in Yonge’s fictional world; in fact, as June Sturrock and Claudia Nelson both point out, values coded “feminine” are consistently celebrated, whatever the gender of their bearer (Nelson 1991, 20; Sturrock 1995, 100). The connection between this valorisation of femininity and the exemplary role of the invalid was noted by contemporary commentators. One reviewer, writing in 1866, suggested that the “angelic being with a weak spine, who, from her sofa, directed with mild wisdom the affairs of the family or the parish” was “a favourite creation of our lady-novelists of the pre-Braddonian period,” because this valorisation of the house-bound invalid’s influence “tends in some degree to redress the balance of power between the sexes” (“Novels, Past and Present” 1866, 438–39). The idea that for a mid-Victorian author, a theology centred around disability might be an inherently feminist theology is worth noting, despite Yonge’s stated “full belief in the inferiority of woman,” which runs through her conduct manual and book of advice, Womankind (Yonge 1876, 1). The “redress of the balance of power between the sexes” can be seen still more clearly in Yonge’s later family chronicle, The Pillars of the House, in which disability becomes a near-ubiquitous experience. As Elizabeth C. Juckett puts it, the novel’s “vast victim count helps to bring Yonge’s disciplinary ideology more sharply into focus: ascetic, other worldly, idealising physical weakness, suppression and self-sacrifice for males as well

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as females” (2009, 131). Here, the role played by Margaret in The Daisy Chain is effectively split between several siblings, with the younger sister, Geraldine (nicknamed Cherry), sharing Margaret’s experience of bearing the “cross” of immobility and pain over an extended period of time, while it is Felix, the initially healthy eldest son, who shares her narrative fate. Felix has already sacrificed his every worldly ambition to promote his family’s welfare, and in the end, he pays the ultimate price for his selfless service, succumbing to consumption after years over-work. Felix’s death-­ bed scene strongly recalls Margaret’s; like hers, it occurs just before the end of the novel, and, like hers, it is replete with references to the Cross. Felix’s last words, “Father, may I come now? Isn’t it done?” (Yonge [1873] 1889b, 2:492), collapse together two Gospel accounts of Christ’s death, echoing Christ’s last words in John 19:30 (“It is finished”) and in Luke 23:46 (“Father, into your hands I commit my spirit”). Like Margaret, then, Felix becomes a figure of Christ in his final illness—but, also like her, he has spent most of the novel before this last illness as a striving and imperfect Christian, struggling alongside his brothers and sisters, and it is here that his relationship to his permanently disabled siblings becomes significant. As my opening quotation makes clear, Felix’s many brothers and sisters (he is the eldest of thirteen children) do at times appear to be his “cross,” and the burden of their support ultimately costs him his health. Yet, as that same quotation shows, the “cross” that crucifies is also the “crutch” that upholds, and this becomes especially clear in Felix’s dealings with his most obviously needy siblings: Geraldine, who is made “delicate” and “lame” by her arthritic ankle (1:6, 1:80), and his youngest brother, Theodore, who cannot speak and has learning difficulties. At the beginning of the novel, Geraldine is struggling to come to terms with her physical impairments, and often feels useless, but as readers we can see that her need for care is in itself useful to her siblings, especially Felix. When he is urged by his uncle to break up the family, and thereby make it possible for him to continue with his own education, this alternative never seriously occurred to him, for were they not all bound to him by the cords of love, and most closely the weakest and most helpless? Yet his first reply did not convey the weight of his determination. It was only “Geraldine is too delicate.” (1:156)

At this early stage in his guardianship of the family, when he is still vulnerable to bad advice, Geraldine’s disability gives Felix the pretext he

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needs for doing what he knows to be right. Not so much despite as because of her disability, she acts as the family’s “axis” (1:92), a role that she grows into as she becomes Felix’s confidant and best support. When it looks as though she might leave the family to be married, Felix is devastated, feeling, “with a sense of a jewel being dragged away from him,” that “to lose Cherry from his hearth would quench its most cherished spark” (2:129–30). In fact, Geraldine’s disability gives her a pretext to turn down her eligible proposal and enable her to stay close to her beloved Felix, embracing a “peaceful and happy” life as his favourite sister and companion (2:172). Indeed, we might say that, while being an interesting and engaging character in her own right who stars in several of her own storylines, Geraldine also acts as a “crutch” for Felix, her disability enabling his moral growth, and her need for his care upholding him in his duty towards the whole family.4 Geraldine herself explicitly understands her disability as her “cross,” expressing uncertainty at one point about whether it would be right to attempt to be free of it. She wavers about whether or not to have her foot amputated, writing to Felix: I am trying to be good; but indeed I feel as if I may be wrong to try to be rid of my cross. So I abide by your decision, dear Felix. You are my king, and I put myself in your hands. (1:357)

Not only does this letter illustrate the closeness of the relationship between Geraldine and Felix, and the extent to which she sees herself as his subject or disciple (seeming only to be half-joking when she calls him her “king”), it also demonstrates how thinking about her diseased ankle as her “cross” enables Geraldine to value her disability, as well as to live with it. In fact, Felix promptly replies that she should feel free to alleviate her pain in any way she can, and Geraldine thoroughly enjoys the increased mobility that her prosthetic foot gives her. The flexibility of Yonge’s thinking about the roles disabled characters might play is clearly shown by the fact that talented Geraldine goes on to have a successful career as a painter, and although she endures “a widowhood of the spirit” when Felix dies (2:498), we leave her with an apparently bright future, with another celibate brother as a life partner, an orphaned nephew to parent, and work that she loves.5 The role Geraldine vacates as she becomes more independent is filled by her younger brother, Theodore. Although she does not endow him

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with the same complexity and interiority as Geraldine, Yonge encourages us to see Theodore as a valuable member of his family and of the Church. He is confirmed into the Church at the same time as his twin sister Stella, his family’s concerns about his lack of understanding “met with encouragement not to debar the innocent from his Christian privileges because of his lack of power of expression” (2:320). Although his tombstone is marked with “Ephphatha” (the healing word spoken to the deaf-mute man by Christ in Mark 7:34), suggesting that his family prefer to think of him as “cured” in the next life, Yonge goes to some lengths to stress that he is a valuable member of the Body of Christ in this life. After Theodore’s death in a boating accident at the age of sixteen, Felix feels that he has lost his greatest tie and support; he survives Theodore by a matter of days, having mourned his brother as “The son of my right hand, as Father said! So he has been; I only know now what an incentive his dependence was, and how this loosens me from the world” (2:201). The idea that Felix was in some way upheld by Theodore encourages us to see both brothers as cross- and crutch-bearers, the weaker supporting the stronger even as he is carried by him. In her depiction of the Underwood family, Yonge not only celebrates interdependence but also suggests that affliction and gift are often inextricable, just as the cross and the crutch are “all the same.” By fostering awareness of this reality, and embodying the dependence and suffering which all Christians need to experience, disabled characters are given important work to do in Yonge’s novels. From saintly Margaret May to stoical Cherry Elwood, from talented Geraldine to silent Theodore, all her disabled characters are shown to play vital roles in their fictional families and communities. Yet they are not simply made into “crutches” for other characters’ development; they are shown, too, as Christians in their own right, bearers of the cross potent, upheld as well as burdened by the affliction that is never, for Yonge, without ultimate meaning.

Notes 1. For example, disability theorist Lennard J. Davis has argued that “strategic essentialism” needs to give way to “a new ethics of the body,” which will “begin with disability rather than end with it” (2013, 269, 271). 2. There is a strong echo here of 1 Corinthians 7:8–9: “I say therefore to the unmarried and widows, it is good for them if they abide even as I. But if they cannot contain, let them marry: for it is better to marry than to burn.” This

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view of marriage as a lapse from celibacy was particularly associated with the Tractarian movement, which was seen by many critics as perverse in its support for celibate religious communities and tolerance for celibate clergy. For further discussion of this controversial aspect of Tractarianism, illustrated by Charles Kingsley and J.H. Newman’s published disputes, see Buckton (1992). 3. There is an echo of Margaret and Ethel’s relationship in The Clever Woman of the Family (1865), in which the tactless and wayward Rachel Curtis learns from the ideally feminine invalid Ermine Williams “how intellect and brilliant powers can be no snares, but only blessings” (Yonge [1865] 1889a, 367). 4. The idea of a disabled character acting as a “crutch” to another calls to mind David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder’s argument that disability functions as a form of “narrative prosthesis” in literature, but as it cannot be said that Yonge fails to “take up disability as an experience of social or political dimensions,” her work is not readily assimilable to Mitchell and Snyder’s model (2000, 48). 5. The especially close relationship between Geraldine and Felix echoes, in a more realistic and restrained form, that of the invalid Charles Edmonstone and his Christ-like cousin, Guy Morville, in The Heir of Redclyffe (1853). There, too, the seemingly healthy hero succumbs to terminal illness, while the permanently disabled Charles goes on to a long and contented life at the centre of his family, “of wonderful use to every body” as surrogate parent to his niece, private secretary to his brother-in-law, and adviser to his parents (Yonge [1853] 1888, 363). In both cases, the disabled character occupies an especially close relationship to the Christ figure, without having to share their ultimate fate of an early and self-sacrificing death.

References Anon. 1866. Novels, Past and Present. Saturday Review 21 (546): 438–440. Buckton, Oliver S. 1992. ‘An Unnatural State’: Gender, ‘Perversion,’ and Newman’s ‘Apologia Pro Vita Sua’. Victorian Studies 35 (4): 359–383. https://www.jstor.org/stable/3828462. Davis, Lennard J. 2013. The End of Identity Politics and the Beginning of Dismodernism: On Disability as an Unstable Category. In The Disability Studies Reader, ed. Lennard J. Davis, 4th ed., 262–277. New York and London: Routledge. Dickens, Charles. (1843) 2006. A Christmas Carol and Other Christmas Books. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Garland-Thomson, Rosemarie. 1997. Extraordinary Bodies: Figuring Physical Disability in American Culture and Literature. New  York: Columbia University Press.

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Hu, Esther T. 2010. Christina Rossetti and the Poetics of Tractarian Suffering. In Through a Glass Darkly: Suffering, the Sacred & the Sublime in Literature & Theory, ed. Holly Faith Nelson, Jens Zimmermann, and Lynn Szabo, 155–167. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Juckett, Elizabeth C. 2009. Cross-Gendering the Underwoods: Christian Subjection in Charlotte Yonge’s The Pillars of the House. In Antifeminism and the Victorian Novel: Rereading Nineteenth-Century Women Writers, ed. Tamara S. Wagner, 117–136. Amherst, NY: Cambria Press. Leavis, Q.D. 1944. Charlotte Yonge and ‘Christian Discrimination’. Scrutiny 12: 152–160. Martineau, Harriet. (1877) 1983. Autobiography, 2 vols. London: Virago. Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. 2000. Narrative Prosthesis: Disability and the Dependencies of Discourse. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Nelson, Claudia. 1991. Boys Will Be Girls: The Feminine Ethic and British Children’s Fiction, 1857–1917. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Pusey, Edward Bouverie. (1841) 1883. Parochial and Cathedral Sermons, 8 vols. London: Walter Smith. Romanes, Ethel. 1908. Charlotte Mary Yonge, an Appreciation. London: A. R. Mowbray & Co. Sturrock, June. 1995. “Heaven and Home”: Charlotte M. Yonge’s Domestic Fiction and the Victorian Debate Over Women. Victoria, BC: University of Victoria Press. Yonge, Charlotte M. 1871. Musings over the “Christian Year” and “Lyra Innocentium”. Oxford: James Parker. ———. (1856) 1873. The Daisy Chain: Or, Aspirations: A Family Chronicle. London: Macmillan and Co. ———. 1876. Womankind. London: Mozley and Smith. ———. (1853) 1888. The Heir of Redclyffe. London: Macmillan and Co. ———. (1865) 1889a. The Clever Woman of the Family. London: Macmillan and Co. ———. (1873) 1889b. The Pillars of the House: Or, Under Wode, Under Rode, 2 vols. London: Macmillan and Co.

PART VII

Renewing the Social Order and Imagining the Church of the Future

CHAPTER 14

The Godlike Nazarene and the People-­ Christ: The Figure of Christ in the Chartist Imaginary Mike Sanders

Addressing a largely Chartist congregation in Stalybridge in February 1839, the Rev. J.R. Stephens lamented the lack of interest in the historical Jesus: Can you call to mind any such book written of late years … in which the question is proposed and answered, “who and what this Jesus Christ was, and in what capacity, and in what sense he really was the Saviour of the world—the friend of sinners?” I know of no such book. ([1839] 2001, 1:224)

He continued by denouncing the Christian writers of his time for preferring to speculate about the “abstract, independent, aboriginal existence, the kind of existence, and the mode of existence, of a Being whom no man hath seen” instead of attending to “the description which Christ himself has given of his own person and character, and the object of his mission”

M. Sanders (*) University of Manchester, Manchester, UK e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_14

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(1:225). Moreover, Stephens insisted, this was not a privileged area of enquiry because the significance of the New Testament was available to “any unlearned man, any unadulterated unsophisticated mind” (1:225). For Stephens, studying the life and actions of Jesus was a democratic as well as a Christian practice. This chapter traces a number of the ways in which the Chartist movement responded to Stephens’s call to attend to the figure of Christ. It begins with a survey of the various ways in which Christ was represented in the poetry column of the English Chartist Circular, continues with an analysis of Thomas Cooper’s fascination with the figure of Jesus in his Chartist epic The Purgatory of Suicides (1845), and concludes with a consideration of Gerald Massey’s investment in a messianic Christ in the aftermath of the European revolutions of 1848. The chapter argues for the presence of two contrasting versions of Christ in the Chartist imaginary. The first, the Godlike Nazarene, emphasizes the ethical teachings of Jesus which are used to support Chartism’s demand for a transformed social order. In a decisive break with Evangelicalism, this current focused on the Incarnation rather than the Atonement. The second trend, the People-­ Christ, is characterized by an often intense identification of the working classes with the crucified Christ and the invocation of Messianic possibilities.

1   The English Chartist Circular Christianity played a key role in Chartist attempts at self-legitimation. Writing in the English Chartist Circular (ECC), Henry Vincent declared: But so far from Radicalism being infidelity it is precisely the reverse,—IT IS CHRISTIANITY REDUCED TO PRACTICE…RADICALISM IS THE PRACTICAL APPLICATION OF THE CHRISTIAN RELIGION TO THE PURPOSES OF SOCIETY AND GOVERNMENT. (1841, 136)

Such statements were driven by much more than tactical, or even opportunist, considerations. For the early Chartist movement in particular, two of the three persons of the Trinity were central to their sense of their mission. God the Father served as their imaginative counter to the reality of State power. As the Israelites had been saved from the might of Pharaoh’s pursuing army, so too would the labouring classes of Britain be redeemed— most probably by the power of God manifesting itself in and through “the

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People.” Once the “promised land” of the Charter had been reached, the social order would be rebuilt according to the social teachings and example of Jesus. A good example of the imaginative possibilities furnished by the figure of Christ is provided by T.B. Smith’s “Chartist Hymn” (1841, 104). The hymn begins with a direct address to the powerful, “Ye kings and judges of the earth”; however, it quickly undercuts their inflated self-image by reminding them that they are both mortal and subject to an even higher authority. The hymn’s second verse affirms that the “GREAT REDEEMER” will save “the captive exile … / From proud Oppression’s wrong” and will use his strength for “all the poor and needy.” In the third and final stanza, Smith calls on the earthly rulers to ensure that “every exercise of power / [is] A type of His command.” Thus, the figure of Christ is the pivot on which this hymn turns; his appearance in the second stanza undercuts the pretensions of the powerful and elevates the claims of the dispossessed, while in the final stanza “His command” provides the template for good earthly rule. The importance of Christ’s ministry in underpinning Chartist demands is suggested by “Doth Justice Claim No Fees?,” a poem from Spartacus (a pen-name of William James Linton) (1841, 120). This poem opens with a clear allusion to the Lord’s Prayer, “We’re hungry, Mother, give us bread!,” and its account of economic suffering builds to the death of a child in the poem’s fourth, and penultimate, stanza. The grieving parent is unable to bury their child in sacred ground because it is unbaptized as a result of the family’s inability to pay the Church’s fee. The verse concludes: The HOLY CHILD is unbaptised: “CHRIST’S” Church must have its fee.

The complicated typography of these lines (capitalization, italicization and the use of scare quotes) performs a complex cathexis. Not only do these lines seek to ironize, and thus contest, the Anglican church’s claim to legitimacy, they also suggest an affinity between the dead working-class child and the infant Jesus—insofar as the title “HOLY CHILD” refers to both. The claims of the suffering working classes are clearly validated by this identification. Similarly, Thomas Cooper’s “Chartist Hymn” (“O Thou who didst create us all”) places great emphasis on the incarnation and ministry of Jesus (1842, 104). Cooper begins by comparing aspects of Christ’s

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ministry with the behaviour of the contemporary clergy. For example, in verse two, Christ’s healing ministry is contrasted with the obscurantist desire of the clergy “to keep for ever seal’d / The free born powers of mind!” In verse three, Christ’s selfless work amongst and on behalf of “the humble poor” is set against the uncharitable actions of priests who “scorn the widow and her child.” In verse four, Christ’s readiness to feed the “multitudes” is opposed to the Church’s desire for gold and disregard for the starving. Having pointed out the hypocrisy of the prelates, Cooper calls (in the hymn’s final two verses) on his Chartist audience to ensure that their deeds are consistent with their words: Let every heart like Jesu’s move Like Jesu’s bosom glow! That while we say we goodness love, Our lives may prove we do.

Indeed, Chartism’s insistence on “deeds not creeds” anticipates many aspects of the developments in religious thinking identified by Gareth Atkins in Chap. 15. A number of key themes emerge from a consideration of these hymns. Firstly, they demonstrate the ways in which the figure of Christ empowered Chartist activity. Christ not only offered a standing rebuke to temporal power, his example was understood as undermining the legitimacy of most of the existing Churches, especially the Anglican establishment. The hymns also emphasize the fact of Christ’s love which is expressed in his practical actions of healing, teaching and feeding the poor. This last activity is particularly important, the cry of “Give us this day, our daily bread,” recurs frequently in Chartist hymns (and in Chartist discourse more generally) and its status as the only prayer given by Jesus to his disciples is understood by Chartists as giving divine approval to their political as well as their economic demands. Chartist hymns also insist on Christ’s closeness to the poor, frequently drawing attention to his own poverty (see, for example, William Jones, “Hymn,” ECC, 2 (113), 244). At times, as, for example, in Spartacus’s “Doth Justice claim no fee?,” this comes very close to identifying the working classes with Christ.

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2   Thomas Cooper: “The Purgatory of Suicides” and the “Godlike Nazarene” Thomas Cooper’s spiritual career—from Primitive Methodism through skepticism, Wesleyan Methodism, Straussism, to Baptism—was marked by a series of intense emotional and intellectual commitments. Cooper’s encounter with Chartism, in particular, exerted a profound influence on his religious ideas. As he recalls in his autobiography, while he was initially shocked by the “coarse atheism expressed by some of the stronger spirits among working men,” he soon found such ideas and opinions were finding a receptive echo in his own mind ([1872] 1971, 260). In a striking vignette, Cooper records a moment of “anti-conversion”: [At a Chartist meeting] A poor religious stockinger said, – “Let us be patient a little longer, lads. Surely, God Almighty will help us soon,” “Talk no more about thy Goddle Mighty!” Was the sneering rejoinder. “There isn’t one. If there was one, He wouldn’t let us suffer as we do.” (173)

Cooper, who was at the time the editor of a Chartist hymn book, observes that his “‘religious conscience’ began to receive a new ‘form and pressure’ from [these] surroundings” (260). In particular, he finds that he can no longer preach the doctrine of hell to “poor starving stockingers” and, as a result, begins to doubt the “consistency” of the doctrine of the Atonement (260). In addition, Cooper recalls how his exposure to the terrible sufferings of the poor, the gross inequality of society, and the persecution (current and historical) of those who seek justice and righteousness (including his own treatment at the hands of the authorities), combine to erode his belief in an “Almighty and beneficent Providence” (261). However, in spite of this “morbid condition of feeling and thought,” Cooper insists that he “never ceased to worship the perfect moral beauty of Christ … never ceased to enthrone the goodness and purity and love of Christ in the minds and hearts of the Leicester poor” (260–62). In addition, he also maintained that the miracles and resurrection of Christ were historical facts. It is precisely this tension between Cooper’s intellectual concern that there might be no underlying moral order in the universe and his equally strong emotional attachment to the figure of Christ which provides one of the central themes of his epic poem The Purgatory of Suicides (hereafter Purgatory) published in 1845. Thus, Cooper’s

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preoccupations anticipate many of the concerns addressed by middle-class intellectuals in the second half of the nineteenth century as detailed in Atkins’s chapter. Purgatory combines accounts of Cooper’s waking thoughts whilst a prisoner in Stafford Gaol with a series of dream visions in which he enters the purgatory of suicides and observes and encounters a series of historical figures. When he first enters into his dream-vision, Cooper hears the Spartan Lycurgus discuss two very different histories of religion. The first of these, “priestcraft,” is an oppressive tradition in which religion destroys human happiness and promotes tyranny by inculcating fears of “some dread future” which can only be prevented by obedience to the “smooth and crafty priest who consecrates the throne” (Cooper 1845, I:cxxi). However, Lycurgus also offers an alternative emancipatory vision in which “Mind’s progression” ultimately guarantees a future where “love fraternal” will triumph and identifies “the godlike Nazarene” as someone who anticipated that future (I:cxxviii–cxl). At the beginning of Book Three, Cooper himself develops Lycurgus’s ideas about the historical development of religious belief, arguing that fear of death causes human beings to create the idea of an after-life modelled on the daily rebirth of the sun: And thus, my brother-worms, in days of eld, Looked on thy resurrection, and believed …[the sun was] a symbol for them weaved Of glorious life to follow death: (III:xvi)

Cooper proceeds to trace this idea across a wide range of world religions, “from Babel to Stonehenge … Parsee … Osiris … Mithras … Thammuz … Hyperion … Apollo … Sovereign fire! / The young soul’s natural god!” (III:xvii–xx). Rather more reluctantly, he expresses his concern that Christ’s resurrection is yet another version of the solar myth: I hesitate, demur, surmise, and glean, Daily, new grounds to doubt the Mythic dress! Phoenician woof, once more! – through which is seen, I fear, thy ancient face … He whom the Arimathean’s tomb enclosed, – The good, – the toiling one, – the Crucified, –

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… Is he not, – Magnific beam! thy power personified, – (III:xx–xxi)

The most likely source for this idea of Christ as solar myth is Volney’s Ruins of Empires (published in 1791, translated into English in 1796) which has a section titled “Christianity, or the Allegorical Worship of the Sun under the cabalistic names of Chris-en or Christ, and Yesus or Jesus” (161). It is possible that Cooper might have encountered this idea through the work of Rev. Robert Taylor, an English Deist who championed the ideas of Charles Dupuis, another proponent of the “Christ myth” (Campion 2016, 65). Cooper’s choice of verbs—“Hesitate, demur” and “fear”—suggests the emotional cost of his intellectual enquiries into religion. The stanza which follows Cooper’s discussion of the solar myth theory confirms the depth of his emotional attachment to the figure of Christ: I love the Galilean; – Lord and Christ Such goodness I could own; and, though enshrined In flesh, could worship; If emparadised, Beyond the grave, no Eden I could find Restored, – though all the good of humankind Were there, and not that yearning One, – the Poor Who healed, and fed, and blest! Nay to my mind, Hell would be Heaven, with him! horror no more Could fright, – if such benignant beauty trod its shore! (III:xxii)

As is frequently the case with Cooper, a good many ideas are packed within his lines. Crucially, Cooper declares his “love” for, and willingness to worship, the figure of Jesus regardless of his divinity; Jesus “though enshrined / In flesh” is still a fit object of adoration. Indeed, Cooper declares that without Christ’s presence even a future paradise which contained “all the good of humankind” would be incomplete for him; conversely, his presence would be sufficient to transform Hell into Heaven. In keeping with the English Chartist Circular, it is the practical ministry of Jesus (healing, feeding, blessing), rather than his divinity which makes him worthy of veneration. Shortly after this confession, Cooper returns to his dream vision and finds himself “Upon the brink / Of a wild lake” (III:xxv). In a passage

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which registers the psychic cost of his loss of belief, Cooper undergoes a form of splitting. His spirit body, now cold and shivering, wanders on the shore, while his mind dwells “on One who stilled / The waves, and fed the hungry.” Moreover, the split between the somatic and the mental appears to widen: …the more My spiritual sense with hunger thrilled And cold, – the more that Form [Jesus] my inward vision filled.

Next, Cooper imagines “what joy succeeded fear / In the poor fishers” when Christ stilled the waves, and returns to the contradiction wherein his desire to believe in Christ is thwarted by his inability to believe in the miracles, “Worship I, on this strand / Would give the Nazarene—did He these waves command” (III:xxvi). At this moment, Cooper has his most dramatic encounter with any of the suicide spirits, “A face that did astound / My spirit met me,” as he finds himself face to face with Judas Iscariot. Judas begins by upbraiding Cooper for his “foul unbelief” and rejects his company, “Depart, proud unbeliever! … No sceptic spy / Shall bide with me” (III:xxxiii). When Cooper proves unable to leave, Judas offers to provide him with a fit companion and leads Cooper through a labyrinth composed of living snakes until they encounter Castlereagh. There then follows a grimly comic contest between Iscariot and Castlereagh as to which of them is the more despised creature in the eyes of the world. In response to Judas’s accusation that he served a morally corrupt monarch, Castlereagh retorts that if this is so, then how much deeper must Iscariot’s guilt be for betraying the “Blessed One”? (III:xc). After a tremendous inner struggle, Judas accepts this charge and acknowledges his own guilt. However, Judas claims that his guilt did not consist in betraying Christ to his death, as he argues that the rich and powerful would have killed him anyway, rather his great crime was his “vile thought of gain,” his love of money (III:xciii). Judas continues by offering a lengthy excursus on Christ’s goodness, insisting on his sublimity by means of a series of negations. For Judas, Christ is the expression of: “Goodness unmeasured, undescribed, untold” (III:cv). Indeed, Judas deploys an imagery of overflowing liquidity to describe Christ’s attempt to transform the created world and humanity alike through a superfluity of goodness:

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…as if [he] would the wide world melt Into a sea of bliss, and deluge heart Of man with joy!… Goodness that glowed with inexhaustless zeal To spread, enhance, perfect, eternize human weal! (III:cv–cvi)

Judas then argues that it is his subsequent awareness of his own failure to recognize the love manifested by Christ, and his permanent separation from that same love, which constitutes his greatest punishment, “I deserve not now to find / The love I slighted then” (III:cvii). Indeed, Judas prophesies the eventual victory of love throughout the world (III:cxii). Book Three then contains a lengthy statement of Cooper’s own religious doubts and a trenchant defence of Christ’s goodness delivered (somewhat improbably) by Judas Iscariot. It opens with Cooper firmly in the grip of suicidal thoughts brought about by his loss of faith, yet ends with him re-embracing life: … Me, dismay And terror woke; and, from soul-quelling dread Set free, I blessed the morn, upon my prison-bed. (III:cxxv)

Thus, Book Three of Purgatory offers a paradoxical cathexis and catharsis centred on the figure of Christ. Cooper’s doubts as to the divinity of Christ, but certainty as to his moral sublimity, underpin an imaginative identification with the figure of Judas insofar as both figures deny Christ whilst recognizing his superabundant goodness. Cooper’s imaginative identification with Judas not only indicates the psychic cost of his infidelism but also enables him to affirm the importance of Christ as an example of the potential of love to transform the whole world, thereby keeping alive his political aspirations.

3   Gerald Massey: “The People-Christ” In Chap. 2, Christopher Rowland discusses William Blake’s view of Jesus as a man who challenged the existing political authorities. As this chapter has shown, this view is shared by many Chartist writers. Yet these writers differ from Blake by using the “revolutionary” Jesus to ground a demand

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for the ethical renewal of society rather than its apocalyptic transformation. However, at moments of acute crisis—such as 1839, 1842 and 1848— apocalyptic voices can be heard within the Chartist movement. One such voice belongs to the last of the Chartist laureates, Gerald Massey who first became involved in the Chartism as a young man in Uxbridge in the revolutionary year of 1848. Massey quickly rose to poetic prominence within the Chartist movement contributing poems to important Chartist journals such as the Northern Star, the Red Republican, The Friend of the People and Cooper’s Journal. In addition, he was involved in the Christian Socialist movement as paid secretary of the Working Tailor’s Association (Shaw 1995, 31). In 1851, Massey produced a shilling volume of his poetry entitled Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love (hereafter Voices of Freedom) which received attention beyond the Chartist press, gathering positive reviews in, amongst other periodicals, the Leader and Fraser’s Magazine. Voices of Freedom contains fifty-five poems, of these forty mention “God” directly, eleven make explicit reference to “Christ,” while one further poem offers a clear and unmistakeable allusion to Christ. Thus, there is a much greater degree of religiosity in Massey’s collection than in the poetry column of the English Chartist Circular; three-quarters of Massey’s poems refer to God, while just over a fifth refer to Christ: the corresponding figures for the poetry column of the English Chartist Circular are just under a third and around one-tenth, respectively. Massey’s religiosity was not always welcomed by his Chartist comrades. When George Julian Harney (the editor of The Red Republican and The Friend of the People) reviewed Voices of Freedom, he complained: In the course of eighty pages the name of God is employed upwards of a hundred times. This cannot but be offensive both to believers and unbelievers. There is far too much of “Christ’s blood,” “Christ’s tears,” “God’s immortal wine” &c. (Harney 1851, 186)

Given Harney’s criticism and the reluctance of the Chartist press to reprint his more messianic poems, despite acknowledging their power, it is tempting to regard Massey as a lone, even an idiosyncratic, voice within Chartism. However, as the following paragraphs will show, Massey’s attitudes are largely continuous with earlier Chartist ideas. It is only the messianic dimension of his poetry which seems exceptional, and it can be argued that in its immediate context—1848—this aspect of Massey’s poetry is

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unexceptional. It certainly resonates strongly with the themes and concerns of the French workers’ movement in early 1848 which, as Iorwerth Prothero has shown, emphasized “the revolutionary and vengeful Christ identified with the crucifixion and resurrection of the French people, the People-Christ” (Prothero 1997, 257). There are three aspects of earlier Chartist representations of Christ which are also present in Massey’s poetry. He shares his predecessors’ hostility to priestcraft. “Priest” invariably carries negative connotations in Massey’s poetry. For example, in “The People’s Advent,” they are depicted as the enemies of intellectual progress—“Out of the light ye Priests, nor fling, / Your dark, cold shadows, on us longer!” (24)—while in “A Call to the People,” they are seen as the bloodthirsty allies of Kings, “Vampyres have drain’d the human heart’s best blood, / Kings robbed, and Priests have curst us in God’s name” (34). Finally, in “’Twas Christmas Eve,” Massey repeats the charge that the priests have perverted Christ’s message by preaching a patient submission to poverty: False priests, dare ye say ’tis the will of your God (And shroud the Christ’s message in dark sophistry) That these millions of paupers should bow to the sod? (20)

Like the poets of the English Chartist Circular, Massey also emphasizes Christ’s identification with the poor. In “The Three Spirits,” for example, while the first two spirits respectively seek wealth and military glory, the third spirit “trode the world’s face poor as Christ … [and] trimmed love’s lamp in poor men’s homes and hearts” (4–5). The third aspect which Massey shares with the poets of the English Chartist Circular is a conviction that Chartism is entirely consistent with genuine Christianity. This belief is expressed in a variety of ways. In the “Preface” to his collection (addressed to his fellow Christian Socialist, Walter Cooper), Massey contrasts a perverted faith which brings only death, with a genuine living faith which demands that its adherents attempt to revolutionize society: Aye, it is a degradation to live in a country where religion is converted into a state machine for the purposes of crushing the soul out of the People, where the Christ-preached, and Christ-lived gospel of fraternity is only acknowledged, by the trampled clutching their tramplers in the ghastly

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embrace of Cholera, and vindicating that they are Brothers, and flesh of one flesh, by killing them with the same disease—for all who are not employed in revolutionising it. (1851, ii)

Similarly, in “We Know There’s Something Wrong,” a knowledge of Christ’s teachings provides the basis for judging the faults of the existing social order, “We read what Christ the master said, / And know there’s something wrong” (46). A different note is struck in “Peace” where Massey condemns the apparent apathy and quiescence of his fellow “slaves” and, referring to the present, asks: “Ah Christ! was it for this, thou sudden sun, / Did’st lamp these centuries with thy dying smile?” (49) Later in the poem, the crucifixion furnishes Massey with a powerful symbol of (potential) revolutionary transformation: Lord God Almighty! what a spring of freedom Awaits to burst the winter of our world! Worn, wasted, crucified between the thieves, Ere night-fall ye might sup in paradise! (49/50)

In these lines, it is the “world” which hangs crucified, thereby imaginatively identifying revolution as the equivalent of the resurrection and the means of achieving collective redemption. It is precisely Massey’s emphasis on the crucifixion, and its attendant trope of martyrdom, as ways of figuring apocalyptic transformation which separates his Christology from that of the earlier Chartist poets. As demonstrated earlier in this chapter, the poets of the English Chartist Circular rarely alluded to the crucifixion and their reticence on this matter appears to have been widely shared across the movement (the National Chartist Hymn Book, for example, contains no references to the crucifixion). In contrast, Massey’s poetry returns frequently to the crucifixion and ideas of martyrdom. Indeed, it would not be an exaggeration to say that where both the poets of the English Chartist Circular and Thomas Cooper are predominantly interested in the figure of Jesus, the “Nazarene,” Massey is exclusively interested in the figure of the Christ. It is noticeable that the word “Jesus” does not appear anywhere in Voices of Freedom. A recurrent theme in Massey’s poetry is the inevitability of martyrdom for those who aspire to change the world. In four poems, Massey explicitly identifies the martyred worker with Christ. This idea first occurs in “The

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Kingliest King” whose opening stanza invokes the crown of thorns which rewards the martyr in all of the stanzas which follow: Ho! ye who in a noble work, Win scorn, as flames draw air, And in the way where lions lurk, God’s image, bravely bear; Though trouble-tried and torture-torn, The kingliest kings are crowned with thorn. (11)

“To a Worker and Sufferer for Humanity” makes the connection between the suffering activist and the crucified Christ even more explicit, declaring: All Saviour-souls have sacrificed, With nought but noble faith for guerdon, And ere the world hath crown’d the Christ, The man, to death hath borne the burden. (52)

In similar fashion, the “Song of the Red Republican” opens by offering the plaiting of the crown of thorns as an emblem of the present day tyrants who “Still, as on Christ’s brow, crowns of thorn, for Freedom’s martyrs twine” (76). However, an even more audacious and sustained identification of the revolutionary with the crucified Christ occurs in “The Martyrs of 1848 and 1849” where, surveying the fallen soldiers of the revolution, Massey writes: There they lie in shrouds of blood! Murder’d, where for right they stood, Murder’d, Christ-like, doing good! (53)

While the first three stanzas of this poem emphasize loss (each verse begins “They are gone!”), the final three stanzas affirm the presence of revolutionary hope by insisting “They are here!” Indeed, the final three stanzas rework the despair of the first three, transforming the crown of thorns into “a glory” in verse four and offering a vision of collective resurrection in the poem’s closing lines:

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Yet shall these proud Martyrs come, Myriad-fold from their heart-tomb! In the Tyrants’ day of doom. (54)

Many of these ideas and images coalesce in “Song of the Red Republican,” the poem which Massey chose to end his collection (and which Harney used as the frontispiece to The Red Republican). The poem, as noted earlier, opens with an image of martyrdom (“Still as on Christ’s brow… twine”). It also extends its identification of the workers with Christ beyond the fact of suffering/ martyrdom to include the idea of the working class as moral exemplar: “I see the Toiler hath become a glorious Christ-like preacher, / And as he wins a crust, stands proudly forth, the great world-teacher” (78). More importantly, the coming revolution is identified with the Parousia: The herald of our coming Christ leaps in the womb of time; The poor’s grand army treads the age’s march with step sublime; Ours is the mighty future! (78)

These lines leave open the possibility that the “poor’s grand army” and “our coming Christ” are one and the same phenomenon. The association of Chartism with the Second Coming is not in itself unprecedented in Chartist writing. However, the urgency and intensity of Massey’s invocation of the Parousia is new, as a comparison with an earlier usage by T.B.  Smith demonstrates. Writing in the ECC in early 1842, Smith sounds an unusually apocalyptic note by claiming that the “desolations of these days” are portents of the Second Coming. He continues, “[Prophecy] has told us that in the midst of this unheard of tribulation, the son of man shall appear in a cloud with power and great glory” (Smith 1842, 46). However, Smith proceeds to interpret these words allegorically, rather than literally, arguing that they refer to the “development of man’s intellectual powers” and subsequent realization of “truth … [which has] a power to regenerate and bless the nation” (2:64, 46). For Smith, the apocalypse becomes a gradual unfolding of human potential (process) rather than a moment of profound historical rupture (event). Although Massey’s poetry encodes ideas of process (“the age’s march”), it is also shot through with notions of event: “the coming Christ leaps in the womb

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of time” (italics added), “Earthquakes leap in the Temples, crumbling Throne and Power” (“A Call To The People”) (34), and “When Hope’s blossoms many-number’d, / Into flower burst” (“The Martyrs of 1848 and 1849”) (53). Similarly, where Smith’s allegorical apocalypse is peaceful, Massey’s is a bloody conflict. The imitation of Christ plays an important role in the Chartist imaginary. For the ECC and Thomas Cooper, it is the ethical teachings and example of Jesus, which are to be emulated. For Massey, it is the power of the crucified Messiah which provides an example capable of inspiring and sustaining a movement in victory and defeat alike. In “It Will End in the Right,” Massey offers his readers a vision of the redemption of oppression by means of a resurrection which reveals the truth of God through human agency: What tho’ the martyrs and prophets have perish, The angel of life rolls the stones from their graves; … Slaves cry unto God! but be our God reveal’d In our lives - in our works - in our warfare for man (62)

For Massey, the ethical values of the godlike Nazarene can only be realized through the actions of the People-Christ.

References Campion, Nicholas. 2016. The New Age in the Modern West. London: Bloomsbury. Cooper, Thomas. 1842. Chartist Hymn. English Chartist Circular 2 (78): 104. ———. 1845. The Purgatory of Suicides. London: Jeremiah How. ———. (1872) 1971. The Life of Thomas Cooper. Old Woking: Leicester University Press. Harney, George Julian. 1851. Poetry for the People. The Friend of the People 1 (21): 185–187. Jones, William. 1842. Hymn. English Chartist Circular 2 (113): 244. Linton, William James (Spartacus). 1841. Doth Justice Claim No Fees? English Chartist Circular 1 (30): 120. Massey, Gerald. 1851. Voices of Freedom and Lyrics of Love! London: John Watson. ———. n.d. National Chartist Hymn Book. Rochdale: National Chartist Association.

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Prothero, Iorwerth. 1997. Radical Artisans in England and France, 1830–1870. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Shaw, David. 1995. Gerald Massey: Chartist, Poet, Radical and Freethinker. London: Buckland Press. Smith, T.B. 1841. Chartist Hymn. English Chartist Circular 1 (26): 104. ———. 1842. Chartist Sunday Schools. English Chartist Circular 2 (64): 46. Stephens, Joseph Rayner. (1839) 2001. The Political Pulpit No. 3. In The Chartist Movement in Britain 1838–1850, ed. Gregory Claeys, 6 vols, 1st ed., 222–253. London: Pickering & Chatto. Vincent, Henry. 1841. To the Chaplain of Fisherton Gaol, Salisbury. English Chartist Circular 1 (34): 136. Volney, Constantin-Francois. 1796. The Ruins: Or a Survey of the Revolutions of Empire. London: Joseph Johnson.

CHAPTER 15

“Strauss-Sick”? Jesus and the Saints in the Church of the Future Gareth Atkins

The 1846 translation by Mary Ann Evans—the young George Eliot—of David Friedrich Strauss’s Das Leben Jesu, kritisch bearbeitet (1835–36) was both a scandal and a sensation (Larsen 2004, 43–58). “This century has been rich in books that create epochs,” remarked the Congregational theologian A.M. Fairbairn, “but no one was more destructive, more indirectly creative, than the Leben Jesu. The only one that can be compared with it in importance and revolutionary force is the ‘Origin of Species’” (Fairbairn 1876, 951). It also formed an epoch in the life of Eliot, setting the seal on her break with the fervent evangelicalism of her teens, under the influence of the freethinking Unitarian circle around Charles and Caroline Bray in Coventry. To see this as a loss of faith pure and simple is, however, a radical over-simplification. It was not that Eliot doubted the conclusions to which Strauss’s demythologizing approach pointed: she no longer believed that Jesus had been anything other than a man. But having set out expecting to finish the task within eight or nine months, it became

G. Atkins (*) Queens’ College, Cambridge, UK e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_15

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a two-year process of “soul-stupefying labour” (Eliot 1954–1978, 1:185). Quite aside from the headaches induced by translating German academic prose in a still-unfamiliar language, Eliot found the cold-bloodedness of Strauss’s approach crushing. Her enthusiasm ebbed in the face of what Philip Davis calls the “slow and minute subtraction of feeling” that sapped the Gospel accounts of the humanity and emotion that gave them appeal and meaning (2017, 89). She was not alone in remarking on this. Even as James Martineau in the radical Westminster Review nodded approvingly at Strauss’s deconstruction, he conjured a phantasmagoria of it as an unravelling of religious history. “It is the pride of Strauss that he un-creates,” he observed. “At his spell, the warmth of every faith, the accumulated glow of old ages, that alone renders the Present habitable, suddenly becomes latent: the facts, the scenes, the truths that re-absorb it, run down in liquefaction, pass off in vapour, and restore the world to a nebular condition” (Martineau 1847, 138). Eliot was more prosaic. “She said she was Strauss-sick,” reported Caroline Bray. “It made her ill dissecting the beautiful story of the crucifixion, and only the sight of her Christ-image and picture [a statue of the risen Jesus by the Danish sculptor Bertel Thorvaldsen, and an engraving of a painting by Paul Delaroche] made her endure it” (Eliot 1954–1978, 1:206). There can be few more apt pictures of how compelling the figure of Jesus remained, even and perhaps especially among those freethinkers, heterodox believers and Liberal Protestants for whom higher biblical criticism, psychology, the study of comparative religions, and scientific naturalism were coming to render the Christ of the churches untenable. The denizens of these overlapping milieux sought on the whole to praise Jesus of Nazareth, not to bury him. Broadly speaking they welcomed publishing causes célèbres such as J.R. Seeley’s Ecce Homo (1865), treating his agnosticism about miraculous accounts, his application of scientific historical scholarship and his analysis of the gospels as mythic narratives—and the controversies that surrounded them—as a necessary ground-clearing exercise. While the Earl of Shaftesbury condemned Ecce Homo as “the most pestilential book ever vomited from the jaws of hell,” predictably boosting sales, Charles Kingsley’s wife Fanny and his eldest daughter Rose wrote to the publisher, Alexander Macmillan, to thank him for the spiritual sustenance they took from it (Hesketh 2017, 96–98, 90). To be sure, it was possible to go too far: if Strauss’s exposure of the mythical Christ left room for belief in the figure thus revealed, Ernest Renan’s anti-­ supernaturalism was adjudged by many to be ultimately inimical to

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Christianity. The liberal churchmen John Tulloch and F.D. Maurice said so in strong terms (ibid., 48–52). Nevertheless, such work was seldom purely sceptical nor was it understood as such by sympathetic readers. Michael Ledger-Lomas has shown how epic treatments of Christ by idiosyncratic heterodox believers in the later nineteenth century—Edwin Arnold’s The Light of the World: Or, the Great Consummation (1891) and George Barlow’s The Pageant of Life: An Epic Poem in Five Books (1888)—“combine[d] devotion to a human Jesus with the conviction that the religion he founded [was] … progressive and universal rather than narrow and revealed” (2009, 174). Arnold meditated on a Jesus whose ethics paralleled and thus fulfilled Buddhist and Hindu teaching, while Barlow lionized an earthy “Christ of Shelley and Hugo,” “freed from the swaddling bands of ages, simply and majestically human, and therefore in the highest sense divine” (Ledger-Lomas 2009, 184). Working-class spiritualists who delighted in proclaiming “deeds, not creeds” still revered Jesus Christ, once they had scrubbed off the accretions accumulated during centuries of priesthood, superstition and collusion with political authority (Oppenheim 1985, 103–07). This chapter offers a brief examination of a neglected aspect of this phenomenon: the place of Jesus and, more broadly, the notion of sainthood, in what its protagonists referred to as the “religion of humanity.” Offering a sharp warning against seeing “belief” and “unbelief” as stable, coherent, sharply bounded categories, it focuses on a loose set of sages, savants and men and women of letters, including George Eliot, Harriet Martineau, Elizabeth Gaskell, Francis Newman, James Anthony Froude and Matthew Arnold. They did not form a coherent group, being important for this chapter rather because they represent a generation “distracted between the intense need of believing and the difficulty of belief” (Acton 1885, 485). In what follows, I argue, though, that they engaged so critically with the Christianity of the past because they sought to distil from it the faith of the future. That process of re-imagination was envisaged in terms of fulfilment rather than rejection. Hence, the reverence of such thinkers for the Bible, for it traced a grand, gradual narrative: of how humanity first came to hanker after moral perfection; of the stories it evolved to express the superiority of the common good over that of the self; and of the “immortality” of those who first came to appreciate this. Scripture was, as Eliot once put it, “like a parental hearth quitted but beloved,” and from its particularity emerged a universal narrative of moral and “spiritual” growth that continued in the present (Qualls 2001, 120).

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This chapter is, however, concerned less with biblical criticism than how freethinkers conceived the role of affect and personality in linking together the faithful of the past with those seeking to live ethically in the present, and those in the present with one another and posterity. In that sense it deals as much with “Catholic” as with “Protestant” subject matter: saints as well as the “Saviour”; cults as well as scripture. Far from seeking to deny the reality of religious sentiment, freethinkers wanted to exalt it by revealing it for what it really was. Influenced by the positivism of Auguste Comte, as well as the rationalist idealism of Strauss and Ludwig Feuerbach, they saw Christian myths as evidence of deep-seated human needs. Above all, they discerned a desire to follow an embodied pattern: to engage not just with abstract principles but to commune somehow with like-minded “souls” across time and space.

1   Making a Rational Religion It would be easy to assume that the use of the language of sanctity among freethinkers was a quaint or ironic survival: a shell of practices and beliefs that had already been outgrown. Think, for example, of how fans of George Eliot suggested that excerpts from her works should be hung in schoolrooms and railway stations as an antidote to “the banal and often preposterous bible texts” often to be found there (LaPorte 2011, 229–30). Think, too, of how Gladstone dubbed John Stuart Mill “the Saint of Rationalism”: “Of all the motives, strings, and stimulants that reach men through their egoism in Parliament, no part could move or even touch him. His conduct and his language were, in this respect, a sermon” (Courtney 1889, 141–42). In one sense, this bespeaks the elision of sanctity and character in a culture that effectively canonized Carlylean Great Men and, to a lesser extent, Great Women. For saints were not the preserve of gothic revivalists in art and architecture, the Anglo- and Roman Catholics who believed that they lived and interceded for them. Witness the interpretative frameworks that surrounded textual memorials, such as Samuel Smiles’s Self-Help, and physical shrines, such as the National Portrait Gallery (both 1859), which encouraged observers to reflect on the attributes of extraordinary figures and to absorb something of their excellences in the process (Atkins 2016, 4–5, 15–16). The promiscuous employment of metaphors of sanctity also evinces a broad shift towards ethical inclusiveness among even orthodox Christians. By the time he died, Darwin could be buried in Westminster Abbey, not just because he

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was a national icon but because Liberal Protestants saw in his honest enquiry evidence that he was a kindred spirit (Wolffe 2000, 138–45). Similar points could be made about how John Henry Newman was posthumously embraced as a fearless seeker after truth. If freethinkers were to some extent products of mid-century liberalism, their charged engagement with religious or quasi-religious figures also betrays their debt to the pietistic intensity of earlier decades, whose dogmatic certainties they rejected but whose emotional energy they frequently retained. The bluestocking rationalist Harriet Martineau, for instance, wept while translating Auguste Comte’s rigorous materialist treatise, the Cours de Philosophie Positive (1839), in 1853. Despite contemporaries’ incredulity that such an arid text could inspire anything, let alone devotion, Martineau’s autobiography paints the process as a semi-ecstatic encounter with a master whom she described in suggestively Christlike terms. “The relation was a blessed one,” she enthused. She wept. Her mind was kept in “a perpetual and delightful glow”. “Many a time did I feel almost stifled for want of the presence of some genial disciple of my instructor,” Martineau gushed, “to whom I might speak of his achievement, with some chance of being understood” (1877, 2:71–72). Eliot, for her part, could still sound like the evangelical she had once been. The creed that she repudiated, David Hempton cautions, “was far from uniform, and her rejection, though superficially complete, was complex and variegated” (2008, 37). In November 1846, having just completed her translation of Strauss, she told Sara Hennell that she had been thinking “of that most beautiful passage in Luke’s Gospel—the appearance of Jesus to the disciples at Emmaus”. How universal in its significance! The soul that has hopefully followed its Jesus—its impersonation of the highest and best—all in despondency; its thoughts all refuted, its dreams all dissipated. Then comes another Jesus— another, but the same—the same highest and best, only chastened, crucified instead of triumphant—and the soul learns that this is the true way to conquest and glory. And then there is the burning of the heart, which assures that “this was the Lord!” (Eliot 1954–1978, 1:228)

“I am not become a Methodist” she wryly assured Hennell (ibid.). Rather, she was tracing out ideas derived from Strauss and from the writings of Sara’s brother Charles Hennell: that “faith” consisted not in adherence to a historical figure but in distilling and internalizing the yearnings to which

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the myths surrounding him bore witness. Or, to put it another way, personality and community might be ways to bridge the vast gulfs dividing past from present which historicist scholarship was opening up. As she was to write in 1863 regarding Renan’s Vie de Jésus, “We can never have a satisfactory basis for the history of the man Jesus, but that negation does not affect the idea of the Christ either in its historical significance or in its great symbolic meanings” (Qualls 2001, 120). In coming to this conclusion she and others derived their ideas from a range of idealist thinkers, including Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas Carlyle, whose vaguely theistic take on Great Men as mirrors of the divine (or of the best of humanity: it is not always easy to tell) was influentially set forth in On Heroes and Hero Worship, published in 1841. Another important text in freethinking circles was Eliot’s 1854 translation of Feuerbach’s Das Wesen des Christentums [The Essence of Christianity] which argued that “God” was a name human beings gave to projections of their own traits and ideals. Perhaps the most direct stimulus to thought came from Auguste Comte. His scheme for a scientific “Church of Humanity” purged of the supernatural was a dismal failure numerically: in Britain it attracted only a few hundred worshippers and was derided when even these meagre congregations split over the issue of ritual (Wright 1986, 88–99). Yet his attempt to envision the rites that a resolutely rational society might require was significant nonetheless. It was championed by Mill and George Henry Lewes and circulated in the works of Eliot, Thomas Hardy and George Gissing, predictably attracting the attention of literary figures, such as Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater and Leslie Stephen. It also appealed to less obvious commentators, such as the theologian and bishop Brooke Foss Westcott, who saw in Comte an etiolated but noble vision of Christian morality on which he based his social gospel. Unlike Westcott, Comte did not place the historical Christ at the centre of his scheme. Little wonder, though, that T.H. Huxley called Positivist religion “Catholicism without the church”: Comte’s 1849 Calendrier Positiviste retained Gregory the Great and Francis of Assisi alongside mythical heroes, philosophers, literary greats, scientists and statesmen in a radically re-imagined version of the Catholic calendar. Each day had its own figure, and the year was divided into thirteen lunar months, organized in order of ascending religious and moral truth, beginning with Moses, Aristotle and Archimedes and moving through the months of St Paul, Shakespeare and Descartes to the late eighteenth-century anatomist Bichat. Churches of Humanity were hung with images of thirteen luminaries, with a Madonna-esque image or statue of “Humanity” and her

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child placed centrally. At meetings, the congregation might sing as a hymn Eliot’s poem “O May I Join the Choir Invisible.” It eloquently invoked the “immortal dead who live again / in minds made better by their presence,” exulting in deeds motivated not by the hope of the hereafter but the needs of fellow humans in the here-and-now. “Immortality” thus lay in the ability to inspire others to bear suffering and to live lives of self-­ sacrifice (ibid., 73–104). Comte’s was not the only such pantheon: the working-class radicals whom Mike Sanders considers in Chap. 14 placed the heroes and martyrs of labour struggles in similarly eclectic imagined empyreans, where they rubbed shoulders with champions of freedom and religious equality. Jesus often remained central to such schemes. But in placing him there, there was often a deliberate ambiguity: was this a “divine” figure? The best of all historical men? Or a powerful construct whose mythos had inspired some of the highest endeavour?

2   The Communion of the Saints Comte’s characteristically clunky formulation of the “subjective assimilation” that tied his humanist saints together was hardly inspiring: “Intellect and emotion … may pass into another brain so as to be fused with the results attained by that other brain itself, supposing the two beings to be in sufficient harmony” (1875–1877, 4:90). Yet one did not have to admire his prose to share his point: that individuals might inspire behaviour in ways that abstract principles could not. There was nothing supernatural about this: indeed, it tended to suggest that if the story of Jesus had had an unusual impact on human affairs, it had done so through “conventional” channels, such as affection and reverence. This perhaps helps to explain why, even in rational and agnostic circles, there was such a widespread fascination with the saints’ cults of the past. For even if the claims that hagiographers made about their subjects were suspect, sociological or psychological analysis could distil useful insights from them. The historian James Anthony Froude was one who was fascinated by humanity’s need for saints. His participation as a young don in John Henry Newman’s disastrous Lives of the English Saints series (1844–45) played a key part in his move away from orthodox belief: he resigned his fellowship, scandalizing Oxford with a semi-autobiographical novel, The Nemesis of Belief (1849). Yet he returned to saints throughout his long career. His 1850 essay on “The Lives of the Saints” combined something like Newman’s awe at the “faith of fourteen hundred years” with a Carlylean or Feuerbachian sense that they were projections of deep human needs, “the

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heroic patterns of a form of human life which every Christian within his own limits was endeavouring to realise.” Christianity itself, he argued, was as much the product of legendary construction as of Christ or his disciples: “the devout imagination, possessed with what was often no more than the rumour of a name, bodied it out into life, and form, and reality.” This was similarly true of saints’ lives. Were they true? Froude sneered at the enquiry: “Doubtless the “Lives of the Saints” are full of lies. Are then none in the Iliad?” he asked, “in the legends of Æneas?” Patrick was real enough, Froude observed, for Irish peasants completing pilgrimages on bleeding knees (1867, 366). The question was not, then, whether saints existed but what they had been invented for. In the conclusion to a later essay on Teresa of Avila, Froude drew a sharp contrast between her behaviour and that of her Catholic admirers. While the saint’s simple faith had driven her to strange but ultimately humane deeds, her followers’ veneration earthed that energy, turning an ethical exemplar into a magical idol. Given Froude’s famously pro-Protestant historical writings such sentiments were hardly surprising, but he took pains to point out that he was not trying to score sectarian points. Great men and women were given, or created, he insisted, for the good of society: to inspire others to follow in their footsteps. To venerate their remains was to sidestep that imperative, transforming them into something at once more than and less than human that was impossible to emulate. If Catholic saints’ cults were obvious examples of this, Protestants, too, he maintained, were also prone to it (Froude 1892, 242–48). In stressing the connection between saints’ humanity and the ethical demands they made, Froude was in many ways swimming with the tide. A defining feature of Liberal Protestantism in the 1850s and 1860s was the questioning of received moral and theological frameworks. One expression of this was revulsion at the notion of vicarious punishment inherent in atonement theology (Hilton 1988, 255–97). Another was discomfort at the idea that a supposedly loving God might condemn large portions of humanity to eternal punishment (Wheeler 1994, 175–218). Crucially for those such as Froude, there was also a sense that the sanctions deployed to enforce these ideas were in themselves immoral. The promise of heaven and the threat of hell rendered purportedly noble self-­ denial and service tawdry, transactional and ultimately selfish. This was a broad shift that affected orthodox believers as well as the freethinkers examined here. A new emphasis on the incarnation of Jesus Christ

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underlined his command to “follow me,” lending a fresh interest to sanctity and stimulating its study. One response to this shift, as we have seen, was to scrape away later “supernatural” explanations in search of the “authentic” stories and sayings that lay behind them. Yet this was a risky business. For even if inherited ideas were ultimately unsustainable, they at least provided common values around which society might cohere. Hence the attempts of various thinkers to engineer the process in reverse, by deciding what society needed and then discovering or creating new “saints” for the task. Seeley advanced a blueprint for civic duty and morality that fused Coleridge with Comte in re-imagining the Anglican clergy as curators of a patriotic pantheon for the modern age. Instead of pointing to obsolete, irrelevant or fictional exemplars, the new clerisy would derive its authority from its cultivation of a specifically British story: “we should form, as it were, a national calendar, consecrate our ancestors—keep their images near us, and so reap the inestimable advantage” (Seeley 1868, 266–67). Not everyone sounded so utilitarian. But there were plenty of commentators who sought similar remedies for the same malaise. “[T]he power of Christianity,” wrote Matthew Arnold, “has been in the immense emotion which it has excited; in its engaging, for the government of man’s conduct, the mighty forces of love, reverence, gratitude, hope, pity, and awe” (1875, vii). This pointed to two conclusions: “One is that men cannot do without it; the other, that they cannot do with it as it is.” For Arnold, the dogmas, miracles and resurrection stories that animated “popular Christianity” and provided its opponents with critical ammunition were based on misapprehensions. They rendered gross an essentially moral and poetic system. The religion of Jesus Christ, Arnold asserted, revolved around simple precepts: in the Old Testament, the “immortal truth” that “righteousness is salvation”; and in the New, the “secret of Jesus”: “He that will save his life will lose it, he that will lose his life shall save it” (ibid., 235, italics in original; cf. Matt. 16:25). Christianity did not need to worry about the erosion of its historical foundations because the moral truths to which it bore witness were eternal, universal and indestructible.

3   Incarnate Ideals Among the most suggestive and influential statements of “subjective assimilation” are to be found in the novels of George Eliot. To her readers, observed one contemporary reviewer, her works are “more … like Bibles

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than books of mere amusement; and they have been treated and read with a reverence that was perhaps never before accorded to any works of fiction” (Mallock 1879, 290). In part, this can be ascribed to the presentational ambiguities between Eliot’s humanism and Protestant pietism more generally. For, if Eliot sympathized with aspects of Comte’s “religion of humanity,” she did not embrace it wholeheartedly. When Frederic Harrison suggested that she write a Comtean novel, she replied that in writing Romola she had taken pains to make her ideas “thoroughly incarnate,” eschewing ossified doctrinal rigidity by developing them in a historical rather than an abstract context (Eliot 1954–1978, 4:300). Instead of becoming a prophet of positivism, her relentless but sympathetic exposition of human frailties gained her a reputation as a shrewd student of human nature. Her emphasis on the “meeting of minds” was also highly significant, not least in her hugely successful first novel, Adam Bede (1859). In its first year, it sold over 10,000 copies, being read avidly by Queen Victoria and making Eliot’s name. Central to Adam Bede is Dinah Morris, a young Methodist modelled on Eliot’s aunt, Elizabeth Evans, a pioneering female preacher in her day. Among the most famous passages from the novel is when Morris preaches to the assembled villagers on Hayslope Green: a warm moment that draws affectionately on Eliot’s evangelical childhood. So taken were Victoria and Albert with the scene that they commissioned the royal painting instructor, Edward Henry Corbould, to produce a watercolour of it. It was not a success: critics lacerated its “teeming conceptions” and Corbould later complained that the royal household treated his paintings like “furniture” (Marsden 2010, 142). Nevertheless, Corbould’s composition makes explicit a theme running through the novel: Dinah Morris as a saint. While her plain and even shabby Quakerish clothes underline her simplicity and modernity, her arrangement echoes that of the Virgin Mary as mater misericordiae: mother of mercy. The composition is almost rigidly triangular, drawing the eye from her open, welcoming hands to her face, the tree and sky behind creating a quasi-halo around her head. “It was one of those faces,” wrote Eliot, “that make one think of white flowers with light touches of colour on their pure petals.” (1859, 1:35) Like Mary, Dinah radiates affective power—old and young, male and female, different social classes listening to her with rapt attention. “‘Dear friends,’ she said, in a clear but not loud voice, ‘let us pray for a blessing’” (36). Her impact in the painting is all the more marked because she alone gazes directly out at

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the viewer. “Paint us an angel,” exclaims Eliot’s narrator, “but paint us yet oftener a Madonna” (2.7). It is no coincidence that Eliot completed Adam Bede during a stay in Dresden, during which she and George Henry Lewes paid several visits to the Picture Gallery to see the famous Sistine Madonna. From both, it evoked an overwhelming reaction. “I sat down on the sofa opposite the picture for an instant,” she wrote in her journal, “but a sort of awe, as if I were suddenly in the living presence of some glorious being, made my heart swell too much for me to remain comfortably, and we hurried out of the room” (Cross 1885, 2:48). Two days later Lewes found himself gazing at the painting until he felt “quite hysterical” (Cheeke 2016, 18–19). Raphael’s painting became for them “this sublimest picture,” “the Einzige Madonna,” “the matchless Madonna di San Sisto,” and the sense of mystical reverence it inspired lies behind references in Mill on the Floss and Romola (Cross 1885, 2:62). None of this is to say that Eliot thought that she had encountered something supernatural: her “as if” is important. Yet her employment of the language of religion is also significant: Dinah Morris, like the Sistine Madonna, is divine precisely because she is human. It is this that gives her such influence over the other protagonists: the Bede brothers, rivals for her hand in marriage, whose anger and impatience is restrained by calling her to mind, and Hetty Sorrel, whose penitence stems from the compassion Dinah shows her. “I could worship that woman,” remarks another character: a comment that smacks not of idolatry but the veneration due to a saint (Eliot 1859, 3:198). Eliot’s relationship with inherited beliefs was not straightforward, as we have seen, and there is insufficient space here to trace its full development. Suffice it to say, however, that she sought less to erect the religion of the future on the ruins of past beliefs than to show the affinities between them. “I have too profound a conviction of the efficacy that lies in all sincere faith, and the spiritual blight that comes with No-faith, to have any negative propagandism in me,” she told Barbara Bodichon in 1862 (Eliot 1954–1978, 4:64). To the conservative political philosopher and satirist W.H. Mallock, this was so much obfuscation. Eliot, he opined, was “the first great godless writer of fiction that has appeared in England”; and the message she peddled was “modern atheistic pietism”: devotion to man hidden within familiar values, forms and morals (Mallock 1879, 290). Eliot’s appeal, he suggested, was fundamentally dishonest: it tacitly turned God into an abstract construct, quietly undermining the divine foundations that underlay human aspirations. Readers thus unwittingly supplied

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their own light, “carry[ing] with them the lamp of their own religion into that tender but gloomy world into which the author leads them” (291). The lofty principles she sought to inculcate—renunciation, thankfulness, self-denial—were thus essentially meaningless, not to mention bleak. Her attempts to incarnate them only compounded the problem. “[H]er higher characters, which she holds up to us as the salt of the earth and the examples of right action,” Mallock complained, “are hardly, as she presents them to us, human characters at all” (273). His comments show how Eliot’s carefully chosen parallels—the Madonna, saints, Jesus himself— might be understood as mere metaphors: so much smoke and mirrors that served only to cover up her essential unbelief. As we have seen, there was more to it than that.

4   Conclusion Were there, then, flesh-and-blood freethinking saints on whom to build the faith of the future? One candidate was Eliot herself: the Liberal Catholic historian Lord Acton regarded her teaching as “the highest within the resources to which Atheism is restricted” (1885, 485). Yet in another sense the question is misleading. For Eliot as for most of those examined here, saintliness was synonymous with humanity in its fullest development. It required no canonization process, being notionally within anyone’s grasp. Nevertheless, it was difficult to disentangle it from inherited frameworks, even if there had been the desire to. Francis William Newman, brother of John Henry, is a vivid example of how hagiographical freethinking language could be. Francis is often remembered as the black sheep of his family. Among his friends, however, the enfant terrible was regarded very differently. For W.M. Thackeray, he was “a very pious loving humble soul … with an ascetical continence … and a beautiful love and reverence,” while George Eliot called him “our blessed St Francis” “whose soul is a blessed yea” (Ray 1945, 1:581; Cross 1885, 2:193–94). “He is so holy!” sighed Elizabeth Gaskell: “The face and the voice at first sight told ‘He had been with Christ’” (Gaskell 1966, 87–88). His funeral address was explicit: “Without depreciating in the least his illustrious brother, it may truly be said that while one was a saint in the cloister, the other was a saint in the very thick of life’s battle” (Sieveking 1909, 345–49). Newman’s The Soul: Its Sorrows and Aspirations (1849) set out

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an austere, rational faith that sternly eschewed props such as atonement and forgiveness: those who wished to follow Christ should seek to emulate him, and aspire after union with God in the spirit, without any of the superstitions that intervened. Newman himself did not entirely dismiss the appeal of individual sanctity. To his friend Robert Braithwaite, a gradual convert from Catholicism to “pure Theism,” he wrote repeatedly on this subject. “I congratulate you that your wife has found that the Catholic church cannot be esteemed emphatically the home of saints,” he remarked (Newman to Braithwaite, 25 Apr. 2016, Armstrong Browning Library). Nonetheless, he despised the idea that sacredness might reside in a particular place or culture or religious framework. Against his friend James Martineau, he deplored the idea of the so-called Holy land as “mawkish sentimentalism”; a form of idolatry that had to be sloughed off (Newman to Braithwaite, 8 Dec. 1888, Armstrong Browning Library). To be sure, he recognized the appeal of communion with others. “The individual feels his purblindness concerning matters supramundane, and longs for the confirmation of his fellows. To be isolated in belief seems like a refutation. Each longs (not least when most spiritual) for the fellowship of saints. To go through life without it, is a painful isolation.” Yet such was the lot of the few who threw away such crutches in order to follow the guiding light of private judgment. This, Newman considered, was the “chief novelty” in Christianity, the “‘grain of mustard seed’ planted by Jesus” (Newman to Braithwaite, 25 Apr. 1888, Armstrong Browning Library). Herein lay the tension that lay at the heart of freethought: the desire for intercommunion on the one hand, and on the other the knowledge that it might be illusory; that the route to enlightenment was fundamentally a lonely one. For Eliot and others, as we have seen, one way of at least embodying that tension was to emphasize the importance of personality in binding together seekers after truth across time and space. The figure of Jesus was central because his actions and utterances already performed this function, shaping Western ethics and offering patterns that, if not strictly divine, were sanctified by long use. Hence also the significance of “saints,” however defined, for they too could be rearranged, augmented or re-interpreted while being used to point up universal principles. Jesus and the saints were not a way of bypassing life’s struggles or agonies, but they offered a lantern for the journey for which even freethinkers were grateful.

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References Acton, Lord. 1885. George Eliot’s ‘Life’. Nineteenth Century 17: 464–485. Armstrong Browning Library. 2016. Uses of ‘Religion’ in Nineteenth-Century Studies Digital Exhibit. Baylor University, Waco, TX. https://browninglibrary. omeka.net/exhibits/show/uses-of-religion-exhibit/gareth-william-atkins. Arnold, Matthew. 1875. God and the Bible. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Atkins, Gareth. 2016. Making and Remaking Saints in Nineteenth-Century Britain. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Cheeke, Stephen. 2016. Transfiguration. The Religion of Art in Nineteenth-­ Century Literature Before Aestheticism. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Comte, Auguste. 1875–1877. System of Positive Polity, 4 vols. Translated by Richard Congreve and others. London: Longmans, Green, and Co. Courtney, W.L. 1889. Life of John Stuart Mill. London: Scott. Cross, J.W. 1885. George Eliot’s Life as Related in her Letters and Journals, 3 vols. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. Davis, Philip. 2017. The Transferred Life of George Eliot. The Biography of a Novelist. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Eliot, George. 1859. Adam Bede, 3 vols. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. ———. 1954–78. The George Eliot Letters. Ed. Gordon S. Haight, 9 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fairbairn, A.M. 1876. David Friedrich Strauss: A Chapter in the History of Modern Religious Thought. Contemporary Review 27: 950–977. Froude, J.A. 1867. The Lives of the Saints. Froude, Short Studies on Great Subjects, 2nd ed., 363–383. London: Longmans. ———. 1892. Saint Teresa. Froude, The Spanish Story of the Armada, and Other Essays, 178–249. London: Longmans Green. Gaskell, Elizabeth. 1966. The Letters of Mrs Gaskell. Ed. J.A.V.  Chapple and A. Pollard. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Hempton, David. 2008. Evangelical Disenchantment. Nine Portraits of Faith and Doubt. New Haven, CT and London: Yale University Press. Hesketh, Ian. 2017. Victorian Jesus. J.R.  Seeley, Religion, and the Cultural Significance of Anonymity. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Hilton, Boyd. 1988. The Age of Atonement. The Influence of Evangelicalism on Social and Economic Thought, 1786–1865. Oxford: Clarendon Press. LaPorte, Charles. 2011. Victorian Poets and the Changing Bible. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Larsen, Timothy. 2004. Contested Christianity. The Political and Social Contexts of Victorian Theology. Waco, TX: Baylor University Press. Ledger-Lomas, Michael. 2009. The Great Consummation: Christ and Epic in the Later Nineteenth Century. Journal of Victorian Culture 14 (2): 173–189. https://doi.org/10.3366/E1355550209000770.

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Mallock, W.H. 1879. Review of Impressions of Theophrastus Such. Edinburgh Review 150: 557–586. Marsden, Jonathan. 2010. Victoria and Albert: Art and Love. London: Royal Collection. Martineau, James. 1847. Strauss and Parker. Westminster and Foreign Quarterly Review 47: 136–174. Martineau, Harriet. 1877. Autobiography. Ed. Maria Weston Chapman, 3 vols. London: Smith, Elder and Co. Oppenheim, Janet. 1985. The Other World. Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Qualls, Barry. 2001. George Eliot and Religion. In The Cambridge Companion to George Eliot, ed. George Levine, 119–137. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ray, Gordon, ed. 1945–1946. The Letters and Private Papers of William Makepeace Thackeray, 4 vols. London: Oxford University Press. Seeley, John R. 1868. The Church as a Teacher of Morality. In Essays in Church Policy, ed. W.L. Clay, 247–291. London: Macmillan. Sieveking, Isabel Giberne. 1909. Memoir and Letters of Francis W.  Newman. London: Kegal Paul, Trench, Trübner. Wheeler, Michael. 1994. Heaven, Hell, and the Victorians. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wolffe, John. 2000. Great Deaths: Grieving, Religion and Nationhood in Victorian and Edwardian Britain. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright, T.R. 1986. The Religion of Humanity: The Impact of Comtean Positivism on Victorian Britain. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

PART VIII

Christological Fictions of the Late Nineteenth Century

CHAPTER 16

Christly Children, Affect, and the Melodramatic Mode in LateVictorian Fiction Leanne Waters

“But Jesus said, Suffer little children, and forbid them not, to come unto me: for of such is the kingdom of heaven.” (Matt. 19:14)

In his social history of the English novel, Peter Keating outlines some of the common literary features that appeared during the emergence of bestseller culture.1 Quoting the British author and playwright, Lady Florence Bell (1851–1930), Keating notes that early bestsellers of the late nineteenth century usually featured “something about love, with a dash of religion” (1989, 441). Such qualities, he argues, enabled novels to participate “with their readers in spiritual rituals that promised to heal the sufferings of the temporal world and purge the horror of unbelief” (443).

L. Waters (*) University College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_16

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As such, the “dash of religion” one discovers in the popular fiction of this period is hugely significant for critics across disciplines because it points to the ways in which bestsellers engaged readers in wider, cultural discourses on morality and values that had distinctly Christian undertones. This is unsurprising, given the extent to which Christian subject matters and theological debates dominated Victorian literature throughout the nineteenth century. Part of the function of this volume is to offer a critical reassessment of nineteenth-century Christology that contributes to the growing interest in religion, literature, and art and to the recognition that, rather than a time of doubt and apostasy, the nineteenth century was defined by its competing, heterogeneous belief (and active non-belief) systems. Authors, publishers, and playwrights alike were in a process of religious renegotiation, examining how society appropriated the significance and lived experience of religion—and Christianity specifically—at the dawn of modernity. Moreover, Keating’s coupling of religion with love underpins the fact that religious narratives relied on the appeal to and production of a heightened emotionalism, which tapped into the desires, fears, and hopes of the reading public. What one discovers by the end of the century, then, is a lingering sense of the sacred that had not yet been extinguished, and which was felt more than thought. In this chapter, I consider how Christian feelings are generated through representations of Christly children in the work of bestselling authors, and the significance of the melodramatic mode to such affectively charged figures. While I refer to a number of contemporaneous texts, my analysis is focused substantially on two novels: Marie Corelli’s The Master-Christian (1900) and Richard Marsh’s A Second Coming (1900). Although Corelli (1855–1924) has been the subject of a small number of studies (Bullock 1940; Ransom 1999), her works and those of Marsh (1857–1915) have been largely neglected, despite each author’s tremendous commercial success at the turn of the century. Mapping Marsh’s sales success after the 1897 publication of his best-remembered horror novel, The Beetle, Minna Vuohelainen notes that: While The Beetle cannot compete with the forty or more editions that some of Marie Corelli’s novels, for example, reached at the same time, it did achieve immediate high sales, featuring on the Bookman’s best seller lists from December 1897 to May 1898, peaking at number six in December 1897, and outselling its close contemporary and chief rival, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, well into the twentieth century. (2014, 284)

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Further insisting on the importance of Marsh’s inclusion in surveys of literature of this time, Vuohelainen notes that under his real name (Bernard Heldmann), his pseudonym, as well as anonymously, Marsh published eighty-three fiction titles, “placing him among the most prolific 2.7 percent of novelists. Marsh also published a host of articles in periodicals throughout his career and thus was just as much a journalist as he was a novelist” (2013, 402). Thus, for Vuohelainen, Marsh’s “literary output makes him simultaneously exceptional (because of his unusually high production rates) and representative (because authors like him were responsible for the bulk of nineteenth-century fiction)” (2013, 402–03). Corelli also consistently topped bestseller lists. In their evaluation of British book sales between 1891 and 1906, Troy J.  Bassett and Christina M.  Walter note that The Master-Christian was the number-one selling novel on booksellers’ lists in 1900, appearing on thirty-six lists in five months (Bassett and Walter 2001, 230). Regarded as a “monster best-seller”, the novel had “a pre-publication printing of 75,000 copies” and, within a few years, it had sold 260,000 copies (Waller 2006, 770; Altick 1957, 313, 386). These kinds of figures were common for Corelli, who enjoyed annual book sales of 100,000 (Waller 2006, 789). Part of the success of authors like Marsh and Corelli was their ability to touch upon certain emotional nerves, which were often rooted in deeper feelings about God, the divine order, and religious belief on earth. Christly children, I argue, are central to the textual and extratextual cultivation of affect in these novels, and consequently, to their appeal and popularity. More importantly, their presence in popular fiction contradicts simplistic paradigmatic interpretations about this period, which mistakenly identify a loss of faith as the essential Zeitgeist. Rather, the melodramatic Christ-child indicates a desire to affectively keep faith alive (and “young”) for the late nineteenth-­ century reading public.

1   Affect, Melodrama, and Children Affect theory, which attempts to address and understand the charged emotional impulses that exist in the “‘outside’ realms of the pre-/extra-/ para-linguistic”, has a long-standing relationship with the literary mode of melodrama (Gregg and Seigworth 2010, 8). As Michael R.  Booth has pointed out, melodrama appeals “directly to the most elemental feelings of the audience and to their instinctive desires for a better and more exciting world”, because it “always goes straight to its emotional and physical

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point and never deviates from there” (1965, 38). Like the theatrical form more generally, the mode of melodrama has the capacity to appropriate nascent, yet potentially powerful, feelings and directly relate them to human action and behaviour. Thus, as Peter Brooks asserts: “Emotions are given a full acting-out…. Such moments provide us with the joy of a full emotional indulgence” (1995, 41). Moreover, melodramatic emotionalism in the nineteenth century is almost always tinged with a Christian hue. David Mayer, for instance, maintains that “theatrical and recitation melodrama expressed a rarely fulfilled desire—and need—to reconcile human behaviour… with Christian morality” (1996, 231). This reconciliation is achieved through the figure of the Christ-child, who brings Christian purity (Christ’s Passion) and human depravity (the perpetration of the crucifixion) together in one body, in order to achieve an accessible, moral synthesis for readers. Therefore, analysing the novels’ adoption and use of the melodramatic mode is critical to grasping fully the emotional and moral gravitas of the Christ-child within these novels. The figure of the Christ-child remains an understudied facet of nineteenth-­century literature, something that, in part, may be a result of critical discomfort with the mawkishness of suffering, holy infants. And while the Christ-child figure may not be a common Victorian archetype, childlike innocence and purity are quite typical of Victorian literature and melodrama in particular, providing both characters and readers with a moral and emotional sense of security. As Brooks points out, melodrama puts children: at centre stage as tests of other characters’ reactions to patent virtue. For catalysts for virtuous or vicious actions. Through their very definition as unfallen humanity, they can guide virtue through perils and upset the machinations of evil, in ways denied to the more worldly. Their actions, as their very existence, take on an aura of the providential: they suggest the workings of a higher, more enlightened design. (1995, 34)

Yet, children of late-Victorian fiction are often denied happy conclusions and indeed many of them come to tragic ends.2 For example, in Guy Thorne’s 1903 novel, When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy, Basil recalls baptising a “tiny child of shame with its thin cry of distress” (1904, 130). In Hall Caine’s 1897 bestseller, The Christian, John Storm endeavours to help the poor women and children in Soho, and exposes a plethora of suffering and violated children, from the “woman in the East

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End of London… attempting to sell her daughter”, to Booboo, “a silent child with cunning eyes and pasty cheeks… being brought up to help in the shop and to dodge the inspector of the School Board” ([1897] 1905, 63, 130). In Corelli’s earlier and equally successful 1895 novel, The Sorrows of Satan, Lucio Rimânez tells Geoffrey Tempest: “a child was run over here, just opposite this hotel. It was only a poor child—mark that ‘only’. Its mother ran shrieking out of some back-street hard by, in time to see the little bleeding body carted up in a mangled heap” ([1895] 1998, 63–64). Significantly, Lucio asks Geoffrey, “do you feel for them? Do their griefs affect you?” (63). The emphasis placed on the “you” of this question calls to the reader, as well as to Geoffrey, and it attempts to incite an emotional response by putting affect into extratextual circulation.

2   The Suffering Christ-Child: Marie Corelli’s The Master-Christian Even Christly children are not excluded from the tribulations that faced other late-Victorian children in fiction. In The Master-Christian, a direct denunciation of both the Church of Rome and the Church of England, we follow the story of Cardinal Felix Bonpré, who, after praying to God to redeem humanity, discovers an orphan called Manuel. Together, the two travel from Rouen to Paris, and then to Rome. The novel is densely populated by the lives of those who cross Bonpré’s path across Europe. Among a host of other characters, we meet the sinful, but deeply contrite, Abbé Vergniaud. We also meet Bonpré’s devout artist niece, Angela Sovrani, as she romantically entangles herself with the villainous Florian Varillo. At the heart of Corelli’s novel is the orphan, Manuel, who is the physical reincarnation of Christ, and whom we find again and again being placed in scenes of melodramatic spectacle, the fictional equivalent of mid-­ Victorian “sensation scenes”. One such scene involves a sermon given by Abbé Vergniaud, who publicly confesses to taking advantage of a young woman many years before, and who fathered a child. Mid-way through, Vergniaud’s son from that encounter bursts in on the sermon, shooting at his father and causing a riot in the church. A great deal of this scene’s success in generating affect lies in its orchestration of spectacle, combined with Catholic austerity. The seriousness of the rather lengthy speech is reflected in how Cardinal Bonpré is “deeply moved”, in the way in which Angela Sovrani looks at Vergniaud in “amazed compassion”, and by the

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fact that the entire congregation listens “with an almost breathless attention” (Corelli 1900, 186–89). Corelli, therefore, builds the narrative suspense long before this explosive scene, as characters and readers alike are caught in a protracted and solemn moment of tension and of public moral purging. When the shooting finally explodes onto this otherwise reverent, even tender, episode, Corelli uses visual disorientation to amplify the frantic confusion that ensues: At the last words the loud report of a pistol sounded through the building… there was a puff of smoke, a gleam of flame, and a bullet whizzed straight at the head of the preacher! The congregation rose, en masse, uttering exclamations of terror. (1900, 189)

Onlookers are blinded with smoke, and Corelli relies on frenetic sounds— the ringing of the pistol as it echoes through the church, the anonymous exclamations of terror—to generate panic and thrills. The scene’s affective intensity is partly a result of the “absolute centrality of mystery”, which Nicholas Daly argues is an integral narrative feature of sensation (2012, 41). For instance, the location, identity, and motive of the shooter are entirely unknown, making the confusion of the scene two-fold. It is only after the smoke has cleared that the congregation, and readers, can get a better sense of what has just occurred. The instantaneous switch from Vergniaud’s emotional confession, to the unknown shooter’s violence within the otherwise sacred atmosphere of the church is jarring, but typical of melodrama’s tendency towards suspense, peripety, and “situations of astonishment” (Brooks 1995, 54). It demonstrates the “emphasis on sensational and rapid action”, which is part of melodrama’s “concentration on externals” (Booth 1965, 14). The juxtaposition of the morally cleansing confession and the lurid tenor of an attempted murder of an Abbé in the confines his own church produces the “high emotionalism and stark ethical conflict” that is so essential to the melodramatic enterprise (Brooks 1995, 12). At the end of the commotion and violence, Vergniaud’s confession is perceived as “ecclesiastical dignity”, while the assassin is endowed with “the power of a demon, so fierce and frantic” (Corelli 1900, 190). The moral polarisation of these characterisations creates what Brooks describes as “a ‘drama’ of emotional and spiritual reality” between the two, especially when we later discover that the shooter is Vergniaud’s own son (1995, 4). When the smoke clears, we see Manuel standing at the pulpit, shielding the guilty Vergniaud:

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in front of him stood the boy Manuel with arms outstretched, and a smile on his face. The bullet had split the pulpit immediately above him. An excited group assembled round them immediately…. Manuel was equally unhurt, and waived aside all enquiries and compliments. (Corelli 1900, 189–90)

The body of the smiling boy with open arms alters how we understand and experience threats of violence in the novel. Theoretically, and by definition, the little Christ-child has already been proleptically crucified for the great purpose of Christianity—the redemption of humanity’s sins—and Manuel’s outstretched arms are a reminder of the outstretched arms of Christ on the cross. This image of the infantile, holy body within such violence functions like a melodramatic tableau; it is a moment of suspension amidst the scene’s sensational action, and it marks the transition from panic to relief. The image of Manuel’s outstretched arms signifies an important point of change in the scene, what Russell Jackson would call “the transformation scene” of melodrama (2004, 53). More broadly, his presence throughout the novel provides something of a safety net for characters and readers alike by implying that, despite the violence therein, all will ultimately be as it should. Indeed, one early reviewer of the novel states that Corelli’s “treatment of the Christ-child is done with all reverence”, and praises Manuel’s “simple, yet deep, sayings”, his “unquestioning belief in the all-embracing love of God”, and his “unfailing optimism”, which “all appeal powerfully to the conscience” (The Belfast News-Letter 1900, 9). A kind of marked sigh of relief attaches itself to Manuel throughout Corelli’s text: Wherever Manuel went, there brightness followed; the sick were healed, the starving were fed, the lonely and desolate were strengthened and encouraged, and the people… began to watch eagerly for the appearance of the Cardinal’s foundling, ‘the child that seemed to love them,’ as they described him,—and to long for even a passing glimpse of the fair face, the steadfast blue eyes, the tender smile, of one before whom all rough words were silenced—all weeping stilled. (1900, 584)

Without knowing that he is the embodiment of Christ, characters nevertheless “feel” Manuel’s otherworldliness, the fact that he is beyond the realm of normal childhood. He fits into Keating’s literary paradigm of the “solitary child, usually the orphan, of Victorian fiction [who] becomes late in the century the prematurely aged… children who have no affinity with their community of peers” (1989, 221). Manuel is prematurely aged because he, as the physical manifestation of Christ, has lived before and is

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inscribed metaphorically with the wounds the world has already inflicted on him. Although rare in later literary eras, the image of the suffering Christ-­ child, which Theresa M. Kenney calls “the Proleptic Passion”, had been in popular use since the second half of the sixteenth century (2003, 415). Kenney writes that the “Christian imagination perceived no incongruity in such an image” because those who participated in the liturgy were already accustomed to “the idea that they had access to the God who exists outside of time and that both Incarnation and Passion were present in the Eucharistic Christ” (2003, 415). Manuel’s sufferings are those of another time (yet still present), and they are of a higher order. His return signals the spiritual failure of modern society and affectively suggests that the suffering of the already-crucified Christ-child is ongoing. The emotional weight he brings to the text, therefore, is timeless. John Storm of Hall Caine’s equally successful 1897 novel, The Christian, is particularly fascinated with the endlessness of Christ’s suffering and states: “it is not enough that Christ died once. He must be dying always—every day—and in every one of us” (1905, 266). What Storm draws attention to here is the emphatically repetitive nature of Christ’s Passion, his corporeal death, and spiritual rebirth. In order for the divine, Christian purpose to be triumphant and the sins of all mankind to be ever-forgiven, Christ must be continually crucified and resurrected. For every sin of humanity, Christ undergoes crucifixion anew in a kind of metaphysical time-loop. This temporal limitless is distilled perfectly in the figure of the Christ-child, who “collapses temporal sequences in Christ’s life, merging his birth and death, and makes his sacrifice present and applicable” (Kenney 2003, 416). Moreover, the Christ-child’s youth is an emotional distillation of the perpetual freshness of Christ’s Passion, the fact that humanity continues to sin in the face of divine sacrifice. Thus, Manuel enables Corelli to deepen readers’ emotional response to Christ’s Passion and suffering, as well as mourn the violation of childhood innocence simultaneously.

3   Christly Children and Irresponsible Adults: Richard Marsh’s A Second Coming Richard Marsh’s novel, A Second Coming, envisions the return of Christ to a modern, turn-of-the-century London. It follows Christ around the metropolis and neighbouring countryside, as he befriends the worthy, performs miracles, and equally rejects those who seek him out of

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arrogance or entitlement. When rumours that a Stranger who performs miracles spread around the city and its hinterlands, angry crowds, demanding his help, begin to gather and threaten Christ, culminating in a violent mob at the end of the novel. As in Corelli’s text, the affinity between Christ and the inherently pure, religious body of the child persists. Christ repeatedly self-identifies as the “friend of little children”, recalling Matthew 19:14 (Marsh [1900] 2010, 27). Upon first meeting Christ (who is described as a Stranger by most characters within the novel), the little boy Charlie tells him “I like the look of you”, as if to acknowledge this natural affinity immediately (27). However, this is not to suggest that the accord implies some form of infantile feebleness or powerlessness. Rather, for Kenney, the use of the image of the Proleptic Passion demonstrates “the fundamental Christian connection between love and sacrifice”, and it reinforces the idea that “the shivering Child in a manger was in fact the Lord of the universe, who had all power and authority” (2003, 445). The affective power of Christly children is evident in relation to Charlie’s adulterous mother, Doris, who discusses running away with her lover and abandoning her children in the process. At the mention of her children, however, she alters her tone: Her voice sank lower, as if this time she spoke of something sacred. [Her lover] noted the difference in the intonation; apparently he resented it. He struck more vigorously at the bracken, as if actuated by a desire to relieve his feelings. (Marsh [1900] 2010, 28)

Here, both parties respond in action to the emotions that the blessed children generate. Doris’s contrition plays out on her body through the noted difference in her voice, while her lover’s resentment moves him to a small act of violence. The use of the descriptor “sacred” further suggests that these emotions have a deeper root that corresponds to Christian morality, which at once condemns the adulterous relationship, while also speaking to more primal emotions related to Doris’s “sacred” duty as a mother. The lovers’ physical responses betray the differing degrees of their religious devotion: Doris is remorseful and therefore repentant, while her lover is resentful, apparently without regret. During this conversation, the lovers come upon Doris’s children and Christ, the latter of whom they do not recognise. At the sight of her children, Doris “drew back, as if afraid” (29). Here, as before, it is Doris’s emotional awareness of her damaged Christian morality that causes her body to recoil so. As such, the little

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figures, who have already established their affinity with Christ, recognising him as being of their own kind, possess the same affective and moral potency as he. The emotional gravitas of the meeting is typical of melodramatic scenes involving children. Lothar Fietz argues that such scenes activate the emotional potential inherent in a situation in which a married couple has separated at the expense of “innocent children”…. The liberation of this emotional potential reaches its high point when the children, the victims of this shattered marriage, are brought on. (1996, 96)

Unsurprisingly, Doris’s meeting with Christ and her own children finally brings her to see the error of her ways, and she returns home to her husband. As such, the Christly children act as vehicles that at once cleanse Doris of her adultery and bring her back to her Christian duties. They are the affective means by which the moral order of Christian matrimony and family values are re-established and preserved. The text concludes with sensational scenes of a violent mob, best described in the words of Marsh’s fictional socialist, Henry Walter: We’ve heard of taking the kingdom of heaven by violence. I believe that it has been recommended by high authorities as a desirable method of procedure. I propose to try it.… If our just prayer is quickly heard, good. If not, the kingdom of heaven must be taken by violence, and shall be… if he won’t do his best for us, we’ll do our worst to him. (Marsh [1900] 2010, 141–42)

The doubt and violence of the mob are reminders of the Passion story itself (indeed, the final chapter title, “The Passion of the People”, makes this connection in no subtle terms). The novel’s mob recalls that of Matthew 27:21–35, in which the tumultuous crowd gathers in front of governor Pontius Pilate and, determining to crucify Jesus, proceeds to “spit upon him” and “smote him on the head” with a reed (Matt. 27:30). Similarly, Marsh’s text depicts a spectacle of rioting, brawling, and stone-­ throwing, while the sergeant of police tells Christ’s protectors that the “crowd will tear him to pieces if they get him” ([1900] 2010, 165). Marsh’s novel not only portrays a second coming, therefore, but more significantly the threat of a second crucifixion. Ultimately, Christ does not endure a repetition of his ordeal, but a heavy price is paid nevertheless when a police officer brings a bundled body from the mob to Christ,

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stating: “This child’s dead. Sir William Braidwood says most of the bones in its body are broken; it’s crushed nearly to a jelly. It doesn’t seem to have had any friends or anything” (165). Christ holds the nameless child to his bosom until its eyes open. The two then disappear together, with the child laughing in Christ’s arms, and neither is seen again. The soteriological implication here is obvious, in that, like the first crucifixion, an innocent must be sacrificed in order that God’s will for humanity be realised. In place of Christ-the-man is the Christ-child, who is also resurrected. This scene hinges on what Sianne Ngai calls affective amplification. Building on the work of Silvan S. Tomkins, Ngai writes: Affective amplification produces ‘an increase in gain’ of something other than “signal”, and, moreover, an increase that introduces difference into the system…. Affective amplification does not simply turn up the volume on what is already there, but points to the presence of something “separate”. (2005, 74)

The affective amplification at the end of Marsh’s novel is the emotionally provocative difference between the killing of a man and the killing of an innocent child. The scene not only recalls the crucifixion, but it also escalates the emotive onslaught with the graphic and grotesque description of the child’s body, which is at once connected to but still separate from the body of Jesus. The affectivity of this scene is also largely related to the familiarity of the people who comprise the child-murdering mob. The violent collective is populated by ordinary citizens whose lives are otherwise marked by banality. Almost like the stock characters of melodrama, Marsh’s collection of what Lucio Rimânez might call the “onlys” includes shoemakers, trade unionists, students, labourers, homemakers, police officers, and preachers. As the novel progresses, Marsh begins to identify people by their occupations rather than their names, and eventually abandons all individuating identifiers entirely. The result is that, incrementally, workaday citizens from all classes of society become anonymous, until they have all finally morphed into a single, faceless body politic: the mob. It is worthwhile here qualifying the expanse of Marsh’s readership and how such familiarity was established. He wrote for Alfred Harmsworth’s penny weekly Answers, which “had since its inception in 1888 reached a readership of half a million” (Vuohelainen 2014, 283). As a popular fiction author, Marsh’s work appealed to a mass readership that spanned significant class disparities and

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social divisions. The scale and diversity of his readership is not unlike the multiplicity one discovers in the audiences of melodrama, which is highlighted in Jim Davis and Victor Emeljanow’s extensive work on London theatregoing. They note, for example, that prominent theatres in the nineteenth century, such as the Surrey, deliberately adopted production policies that would widen the market of playgoers; by the last twenty years of the nineteenth century, “jingoistic autumn melodramas and Christmas pantomimes” in theatres such as Drury Lane succeeded in “creating a surrogate or symbolic community, comprised of people with few geographic or spatial ties, but linked by a sense of belonging and common values” (Davis and Emeljanow 2001, 225). Like Marsh’s readers, audiences of melodrama emerged from varying tiers of society and found a mutual affinity in, as Davis and Emeljanow suggest, a set of universal values. In the case of A Second Coming, these common values are jeopardised by the very people who make up the body politic: ordinary readers and playgoers. This familiarity adds a sensationalised sense of (self-)betrayal to an already atrocious act. Thus, as audiences of melodrama were presented with a heightened, hyperbolic version of their own reality, so readers of Marsh’s near-deicide were presented with “something written for them, appealing to their own interests and emotions, set in a world simultaneously that of their own dreams and of the life they lived” (Booth 1965, 61). The crowd that tramples the Christly child could include any reader with an emotional connection to Christ and the Passion story already intact. As such, the scene gives readers pause for reflection. The reader is made complicit in the death of the child, whose mangled body becomes the empirical, emotionally charged symbol of society’s failing Christianity, and its shame on a broader, cultural level. In a way, one could go so far as to argue that the familiarity of Marsh’s mob means that the reader becomes akin to “the older generation of uncles, guardians and sovereigns” of melodrama who are morally implicated in the mob’s “errors of perception and judgement committed by those who should rightfully be the protectors of virtue” (Brooks 1995, 33). Again, the success of the Christ-child is its ability to generate emotion beyond the confines of the narrative, and the novel suggests that virtue and innocence will be protected only by the right kind of Christian.

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4   Conclusion Christly children in late-Victorian bestsellers, who are often placed in scenes of violent spectacle, provide an affective sense of security. They call back to and are fresh reminders of the Passion of Christ, and its continuing relevance in the late nineteenth-century context. Moreover, their inherent—and often victimised—innocence allows them to act as vehicles of moral regulation, encouraging other characters (often adults) to behave according to Christian codes of morality. Extratextually, the affective amplification that Christly children bring to such novels as The MasterChristian and A Second Coming offers readers a channel for rumination; the placement of uncorrupted innocents within adult contexts full of vice and violence demands reflection, both individually and collectively. Christly children also function beyond the processes of emotional buttonpushing; their prominence in the work of such bestselling authors as Corelli and Marsh, among others, speaks to the central and ongoing place of Christology in the popular imagination during this period.

Notes 1. As Keating stresses, early bestsellers of the late nineteenth century should not be confused with the paradigm of “‘best-sellerism’ which, in Britain at least, is a later phenomenon and has been well-described by John Sutherland” (1989, 441; cf. Sutherland 1981). 2. Keating argues that James, Hardy, Butler, and Corelli, among other popular authors, are “representative of one strand of late Victorian fiction in which children are portrayed as the victims of modern intellectual and moral restlessness. They are forced by parental indifference to come to terms with patterns of adult behaviour which their inexperience of life makes incomprehensible. If they do survive to reach some degree of understanding, it is paid for by the brutal destruction of childhood innocence” (1989, 217–19).

References Altick, Richard D. 1957. The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public 1800–1900. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. [Anon]. 1900. A Pulpit Criticism of ‘The Master Christian’. The Belfast News-­ Letter, 26603 (Nov. 7). British Library Newspapers, Part I: 1800–2 Document Number: BA320232586.

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Bassett, Troy J., and Christina M. Walter. 2001. Booksellers and Bestsellers: British Book Sales as Documented by The Bookman, 1891–1906. Book History 4: 205–236. https://doi.org/10.1353/bh.2001.0003. Booth, Michael R. 1965. English Melodrama. London: Herbert Jenkins. Brooks, Peter. 1995. The Melodramatic Imagination: Balzac, Henry James, Melodrama, and the Mode of Excess. New Haven and London: Yale University Press. Bullock, George. 1940. Marie Corelli: The Life and Death of a Best-seller. London: Constable & Co. Ltd. Caine, Hall. (1897) 1905. The Christian. London: William Heinemann. Corelli, Marie. 1900. The Master-Christian. Edinburgh: Morrison and Gibbs Ltd. ———. (1895) 1998. The Sorrows of Satan. Oxford and New  York: Oxford University Press. Daly, Nicholas. 2012. Fiction, Theatre and Early Cinema. In The Cambridge Companion to Popular Fiction, ed. David Glover and Scott McCracken, 33–49. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Davis, Jim, and Victor Emeljanow, eds. 2001. Reflecting the Audience: London Theatregoing, 1840–1880. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Fietz, Lothar. 1996. On the Origins of the English Melodrama in the Tradition of Bourgeois Tragedy and Sentimental Drama: Lillo, Schröder, Kotzebue, Sheridan, Thompson, Jerrold. In Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, ed. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, 83–102. New  York: St. Martin’s Press. Gregg, Melissa, and Gregory J. Seigworth, eds. 2010. The Affect Theory Reader. Durham and London: Duke University Press. Jackson, Russell. 2004. Victorian and Edwardian Stagecraft: Techniques and Issues. In The Cambridge Companion to Victorian and Edwardian Theatre, ed. Kerry Powell, 52–69. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keating, Peter. 1989. The Haunted Study: A Social History of the English Novel, 1875–1914. New York: Harper Collins. Kenney, Theresa M. 2003. The Christ Child on Fire: Southwell’s Mighty Blade. English Literary Renaissance 43 (Sept. 3): 415–445. https://doi. org/10.1111/1475-6757.12013. Marsh, Richard. (1900) 2010. A Second Coming. Kansas City: Valancourt Books. Mayer, David. 1996. Parlour and Platform Melodrama. In Melodrama: The Cultural Emergence of a Genre, ed. Michael Hays and Anastasia Nikolopoulou, 211–234. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Ngai, Sianne. 2005. Ugly Feelings. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Ransom, Teresa. 1999. The Mysterious Miss Marie Corelli: Queen of Victorian Bestsellers. Stroud: Sutton Publishing Ltd.

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Sutherland, John. 1981. Bestsellers: Popular Fiction of the 1970s. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul Ltd. Thorne, Guy. (1903) 1904. When It Was Dark: The Story of a Great Conspiracy. London: Greening & Co., Ltd. Vuohelainen, Minna. 2013. ‘Contributing to Most Things’: Richard Marsh, Literary Production, and the Fin de Siècle Periodicals Market. Victorian Periodicals Review 4 (3): 401–422. https://doi.org/10.1353/vpr.2013.0022. ———. 2014. From ‘Vulgar’ and ‘Impossible’ to ‘Pre-Eminently Readable’: Richard Marsh’s Critical Fortunes, 1893–1915. English Studies 95 (3): 278–301. https://doi.org/10.1080/0013838X.2014.897087. Waller, Philip. 2006. Writers, Readers, and Reputations: Literary Life in Britain 1870–1918. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 17

“Jesus and Pan Held Sway Together”: Christological Resonances in Edmund Gosse’s The Secret of Narcisse: A Romance (1892) Kathy Rees

In his autobiographical work, Father and Son (1907), Edmund Gosse recalls the first time that he ever saw “a subject-picture”: aged twelve, he accompanied his father, Philip Gosse, “to examine Mr Holman Hunt’s Finding of Christ in the Temple which at this time was announced to be on public show at our neighbouring town” (2004, 136). This anecdote reveals several pertinent aspects about Gosse’s life and writing. Growing up in a narrowly religious Brethren household, Gosse was “most carefully withdrawn… from every outside influence whatever,” particularly from the aesthetic spheres of art and literature (22). Due to his mother’s peculiarly “powerful scruple” (177), all forms of fiction were forbidden: “Never, in all my early childhood, did anyone address to me the affecting preamble, ‘Once upon a time!’” (17). Although Gosse’s mother died in

K. Rees (*) Wolfson College, Cambridge, UK © The Author(s) 2020 E. Ludlow (ed.), The Figure of Christ in the Long Nineteenth Century, Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-40082-8_17

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1857, her embargo on all things imaginative was dutifully maintained by his father, but he occasionally relaxed his guard if the subject was as edifying as Hunt’s religious composition. The Finding of Christ in the Temple (1860) depicts the moment during the Feast of the Passover when Mary and Joseph, after three days of anxious searching, discover Jesus, aged twelve, conversing with the rabbis (Luke 2:41–50). The correspondence in age between Christ, the subject, and Gosse, the viewer, is the hidden crux of this anecdote. Gosse mentions the painting in order to illustrate a more personal theme, that is, to highlight and mock his parents’ desire, inflected by their typological reading of scripture, that he, their only son, should be “a type” for Christ.1 Similarly artful is Gosse’s characterisation of his parents as Elkanah and Hannah, thereby casting himself as their son, who in 1 Samuel 1:28 was “lent unto the Lord” ([1907] 2004, 153). The contrived nature of Gosse’s reference to Hunt’s painting is, furthermore, verified by the fact that it was The Light of the World (1853) that was exhibited in Torquay in 1861, when Gosse was twelve, whereas The Finding of Christ was not shown there until 1865. Although Gosse was notorious for forgetting details, this “mistake” is too strategic to have been accidental.2 Gosse invariably manipulated facts in order to express what he considered to be a more poignant “truth,” in this case, his parents’ steadfast desire that their son “should be exclusively and consecutively dedicated, through the whole of [his] life, to the manifest and uninterrupted and uncompromised service of the Lord” (153): he was expected, in short, to become a Victorian “figure” of Christ. Since the cover of this volume displays the 1904 version of The Light of the World, it seems fitting that its final chapter is devoted to the work of a writer who as a child attended a viewing of the 1853 version of that painting, and who, as I shall suggest, remained haunted by its resonances into adulthood. Gosse’s Father and Son has long been read as a paradigm of Victorian de-conversion and an aesthetic critique of non-conformist Protestantism (cf. Barbour 1994; Downing 2001). Much less well known is Gosse’s publication of The Secret of Narcisse: A Romance (1892) (henceforth Secret), and this chapter seeks to peel away the layers of ambiguity that influence Gosse’s figuration of Christ in that work. A novella set in sixteenth-­century France, Secret makes diverse and complex representations of Christ and, at the same time, exposes the pedantry and intolerance of religious communities. The genre of the historical romance had by the 1890s been revived and re-interpreted so that, more than any other mode of Victorian fiction, it evinced the spurious, the unnatural, and the

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unreliable; Gosse’s choice of this form is fundamental to his innovative portrayal of Christ. The romance also had commercial potential: the combination of the themes of love and religion were, as shown in the previous chapter, very popular. I approach the idea of the Christ-figure in Secret from three perspectives: first, sculptural representations of Christ and the Christian spirit, second, Gosse’s construction of Narcisse using biblical and mythological imagery, and third, his synthesis of the concept of ritual atonement with self-­sacrificial Christian martyrdom. Because Secret is so little known, I shall start with a synopsis. The story is set in 1548 in the Barrois town of Bar-le-Duc where, within the course of one week, misunderstandings between two lovers, Rosalie Mercillat, a gun-maker’s daughter, and Narcisse Gerbillard, a sculptor, escalate into an act of judicial execution. Our first encounter with Narcisse is in the church, where he stands transfixed by the tomb-sculpture of René de Châlons, the work of Ligier Richier (1500–1567), a historical figure whose sculptures are still extant in the Lorraine region. Narcisse is a southerner, brought north by Richier as his apprentice but, unable meet his master’s high expectations, left behind to earn his living as a metal worker and carpenter when Richier moved his workshop to St Mihiel. Narcisse seeks to regain Richier’s approval by the creation of the White Maiden, a clockwork-­ operated figure that plays the zither. Narcisse creates it in secret, hoping to astonish his audience all the more when he demonstrates it. At the same time, Narcisse develops a “tender” friendship with the Duke’s trumpeter, a relationship that complicates his feelings for Rosalie. The jealous Rosalie, angered by Narcisse’s lack of attention, mistakes the White Maiden for a real female rival and accuses Narcisse of sorcery, a crime punishable by death. Rumours spread quickly, and the mob hounds Narcisse: accusations against this alien figure confirm the townspeople’s suspicions against foreigners. The religious authorities intervene, and Narcisse is condemned to be strangled and then burned as a witch.

1   Shape-Shifting Sculptures in Secret The first sculpture in Secret is a “colossal” medieval crucifix outside the walls of Bar-le-Duc; its post is insecure in the loose soil, making it lean forward “as though its heavy arms and the terrible load they bore would descend upon the passer-by” (Gosse 1892, 17). Not only was it thus physically threatening, but also emotionally oppressive, given its “lamentable dripping clusters of red hair, and the crimson trickle of blood drawn like a

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thread from the wounds in the crossed feet” (17). The emphasis is on suffering, sin, and guilt, and the fact that this isolated location is the customary meeting place for Rosalie and Narcisse immediately casts an ominous shadow over the two lovers. On one occasion when Narcisse fails his rendezvous, the atmosphere feels so menacing to Rosalie that she runs away, but “as she fled, she heard behind her the great crucified figure from the cross itself pursuing her, limping after her on its pierced and naked feet, stretching to seize her with those coarse arms from which the blood was trickling” (19–20). This guilty vision is fuelled by her indoctrination into Bar-le-Duc’s mind-set of moral absolutes: life and death, heaven and hell, good and evil, submission and rebellion. Having ventured into “Heathenesse” beyond the town-walls (and by implication, into the arms of a foreigner) Rosalie feels guilty and therefore “forsaken” by God (15, 28). By having the crucified body “limp after her,” Gosse takes the reader beyond historical romance into fairy-tale, importing the Christ-figure into the very genre that had been denied him during childhood. Rosalie’s flight from the ungainly medieval Christ-figure in the wilderness to the church at Bar-le-Duc, where she finds Narcisse gazing at Ligier Richier’s tomb-sculpture of René de Châlons, implicitly aligns and contrasts those two sculptures. The latter is a ghoulish cadaver with ragged flesh hanging from its bones: Carefully carved out of two blocks of the creamy white stone of St Mihiel, and relieved against an ermine-dotted shroud of black basalt, a statue of the skeleton of the soldier-prince, whose actual bones were growing green within the tomb below, leaped into the light. At his own special desire, the prince was represented not as he was when he died, but as he would be three years after his decease that is to say, with the osseous structure still lightly covered, here and there, as by veils of gauze and webs of gossamer, by the last filaments of skin and flesh. (23–24)

Richier was regarded as a “magic-working master,” for despite his evocation of bodily decay in the sculpture, the figure is infused with the spirit of the resurrected Christ: “the whole figure seemed vitalized and elastic. It was Death itself, but in an ecstasy of life” (10, 24). This “living corpse,” writes Kathleen Cohen, “is no longer passive food for worms, but… actively affirms its faith, offering its heart to God in a gesture of devotion” (1973, 118). The triumphant gesture attests to the glory of Christ’s defeat of death. The medieval focus on sin and expiation has given way

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to a Renaissance revelation of triumph and resurrection. Both sculptures thus defy the natural properties of inert material by manifesting human actions and emotions, conjuring a world where nothing is anchored or predictable.

2   “Jesus and Pan Held Sway Together”: Narcisse as a Composite of Biblical and Mythological Imagery When Gosse, aged thirteen, came across some steel engravings of statues of the Greek gods, he felt a “violent” attraction for them, but Philip with “blazing fury” denounced the classical legends that those figures represented (Gosse [1907] 2004, 146). This incident inflamed rather than inhibited Gosse’s interest, and during his adolescence, an inner struggle mounted until “Jesus and Pan held sway together” over Gosse’s troubled mind (171). This phrase suggests that Gosse felt himself to be “controlled” or “ruled” (Oxford English Dictionary) in equal measure by Christian restraint and nature-inspired indulgence. Accordingly, in Secret, Narcisse is characterised by a fusion of Judeo-Christian and mythical imagery, specifically the legend of Narcissus from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Philip disapproved of the pagan Ovid; the only Antique writer recognised by the church was Virgil and Philip’s copy of the Eclogues had “followed him in all his wanderings” as a naturalist overseas (Gosse [1907] 2004, 96). The father–son tension between Philip and Edmund Gosse is mirrored in the relationship between the grave and monumental Virgil, who advocated responsibility and self-­sacrifice, and the witty and sophisticated Ovid who tells stories about indulging in sensual love regardless of risk. Secret embodies a religious, familial, and literary dynamic where Jesus/Philip/ Virgil is being undermined by Pan/Gosse/Ovid. By his very name Narcisse is, of course, associated with Ovid’s Narcissus. He has a pale complexion, reiterated six times in Secret (Gosse 1892, 11, 111, 137, 152, 155, 175), echoing Ovid’s reference to Narcissus’s “ivory neck” (Ovid 1977, 3.422), and he blushes “very red for anxiety” (Gosse 1892, 25, 175, 48), also recalling Narcissus’s blush “that mingled with [his] snowy white” complexion (Ovid 1977, 3.423). When Rosalie finds Narcisse in the church, he is gazing “rapt” at the tomb, with “his hand and arm raised with a wide gesture” in a pose that not only copies Richier’s cadaver-figure (Gosse 1892, 22) but also mimics the transfixed gaze and a reflected pose of his mythical alter ego who seems, Ovid says, to be “carved

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from Parian marble” (1977, 3.419). Just as the sculptures in Secret acquire human vitality, so Narcisse/Narcissus seems to turn to stone: Gosse is imitating Ovid’s transformative impulse and inhabiting Ovid’s unstable world. Ovidian imagery also prefigures death: Narcisse “loosen[s] his girdle and unfasten[s] the points of his jacket, as though the pressure of his garments suffocated him. His shirt was tied low in the throat, but he pulled the loop of it and threw it open” (Gosse 1892 110). Behaving thus, Narcisse copies Narcissus who “plucks away his tunic at its upper fold and beats his bare breast with pallid hands” (Ovid 1977, 3.491), and by the connotations of such words as “girdle” and “loop,” Gosse’s lexis simultaneously portends Narcisse’s strangulation. The White Maiden is in many ways a reflection of Narcisse’s own self. “She” strums a zither, an instrument from Narcisse’s southern home-­ town that is hitherto unknown in Bar-le-Duc. This zither was a “token of his alien fortunes,” reflecting and amplifying Narcisse’s status as a stranger (Gosse 1892, 29). He feels such profound love for his skeleton that even when threatened by the hostile mob, he forgoes his only chance of escape, declaring, “I could not leave her behind” (141). Alex Potts, using Rousseau’s skit on the archetypal Pygmalion legend as a model, reads such behaviour as an emanation of a male narcissistic phantasy: the sculptor’s attitude says “I adore myself in what I have made” (1999, 38). Narcisse thus re-enacts his precursor’s fate: “I burn with love of my own self; I both kindle the flames and suffer them”; he adores what he sees of himself in the sculpture, and this love engenders his awful doom (Ovid 1977, 3.464–65). Eventually the roles of creator and subject become reversed and the sculpture experiences her creator’s emotions and anticipates his fate. By the time the White Maiden is presented to the court as evidence, she has been partially dismembered and thrust into a sack. Rough handling by the court attendants “broke the central spring of the machinery. There was one loud ringing note from the corner where the sack was ignominiously thrown, and the heart of the Musical Skeleton was broken” (Gosse 1892, 173–74). The fairy-tale notion of the skeleton having a broken heart almost obviates the mechanical explanation for her cry. That “loud ringing note” contrasts markedly with Narcisse’s final silence. His only comfort when facing execution was that the White Maiden might be taken to Richier for his own posthumous vindication, but on learning that the sculpture had been burned, Narcisse capitulates to sorrow, lying “sunken on his straw without a word” (189). In an ironic imitation of Ovid’s Echo,

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Rosalie “called on him by name, over and over again, [but] there was no answer” (189). In Ovid’s stories, conscious and sentient figures like Narcissus are turned into objects of nature and finally deprived of speech. Gosse’s Narcisse is silenced but cruelly lacks the sylvan memorial that Ovid bestows on his protagonist: “in place of his body they find a flower” (Ovid 1977, 3.509–10). Ironically, Narcisse’s death is more hopeless than that of his pagan counterpart and more silent than that of his sculpted maiden. Like Narcissus who attracted “many youths and many maidens” (Ovid 1977, 3.353), Narcisse wins the affection of both Rosalie and the Duke’s trumpeter. The latter is a “laughing Esau” and “red-blooded braggart child of the Barrois” (Gosse 1892, 52, 61), with whom Narcisse exchanges hidden “caresses” and engages in “hot horse-play” (52, 79). The trumpeter wears “a scarlet feather” in his cap (74) and this colour identifies him with his biblical pseudonym, Esau, foregrounding notions of blood inheritance and connoting ideas of passion and danger. At birth, the biblical Esau “came out red,” and as an adult he sold his birth-right to his twin, Jacob, for a “mess of red pottage” (Gen. 25:25, 30). The land that Esau settled came to be known as “Edom” meaning “red” (Hebrew: admoni) after its founder. Although an Adamite and a Semite, Esau distressed his parents by marrying outside his racial group (Gen. 26:34–35), and in Secret, the trumpeter, like his namesake, allies himself with Narcisse who is not only racially but also sexually Other. Narcisse’s effeminacy emerges when he imagines activating his White Maiden to play her zither “with his dear friend the trumpeter; and he smiled to think of the figure with its docile white bones accompanying the brazen notes of the trumpet, while Narcisse stood by anxiously superintending and applauding” (Gosse 1892, 163; italics mine). Narcisse is suggestively positioned between male “brazen” strength (connoting both the hard brass material of the trumpet and a sense of “shamelessness”) and female yielding “docility.” By this androgynous figuration of Narcisse, who is a type for Christ, Gosse may have been thinking of the painting that he would later suppress in Father and Son: Hunt’s The Light of the World, an image that was reproduced in print-­ form in thousands of Victorian homes. Valerie Purton and Andrew Tate have already discussed Hunt’s meticulous blending of male and female models to produce Christ’s face (Chaps. 6 and 7). It was a strategy that proved extraordinarily successful; as Jeremy Maas notes, it became thereafter the face by which many Victorians imagined Christ (1984, 224). The androgyny of Hunt’s Christ-figure seems to energise and almost endorse Gosse’s bisexual characterisation of Narcisse.

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As Secret moves towards its climax, Ovidian motifs gradually give way to gospel imagery. Narcisse’s creation of the White Maiden is a God-like act, as in Genesis 1:26–27. He invests “her” with human attributes, always using the female pronoun: Narcisse claims that he “could not leave her behind… she is part of my life… where she is, I must stay” (Gosse 1892, 180–81). Also, her “docile white bones” literally spring into action whenever Narcisse triggers their performance. Having activated the clockwork mechanism, Narcisse retreated to a distance of eight or nine feet, and put a flute to his lips. As he blew the first note, the fingers of the skeleton struck the same note on the strings of the zither, and continued to the end of the tune to accompany the flute with surprising exactitude. (122–23)

In this scene, sculptor and sculpture mirror each other, performing together in a synchronicity of sound and timing. However, although Narcisse may be God-like in his act of creation, the “rude and childish” form of his sculpture also makes him Christ-like, preordained to forfeit his life for a flawed creation (156). Narcisse positions himself as a son of the Virgin Mary, venerating “Our Mother, to whom I pray every night and noon,” while his tendency to speak “in riddles” is also analogous with Christ’s use of parables (116, 48). Narcisse’s handling of sycamore wood in his workshop prompts parallels with Christ’s employment as a carpenter (Mark 6:3). In the physic garden beside his house, Narcisse distinguishes “the sweet, light scent of herb frankincense” from “that coarser, heavier perfume [of] the precious gum opoponax” [myrrh], and their scents make “one great altar-mist of perfume” (112–13). The allusions to two of the gifts of the magi, frankincense which symbolised Christ’s priestly role, and opoponax representing Christ’s sacrificial death, in connection with “the altar,” the place of blood sacrifice, clearly evoke crucifixion symbolism. The magi’s third gift of gold, symbolising kingship, is subjected to an ironic substitution during the scene of a party game where Narcisse has to wear a makeshift crown, a head-dress with strong resonances. It isolates Narcisse as a target of ridicule; it recalls the malicious wreathing of Christ with a crown of thorns (Mark 15:17), and it reveals Gosse’s act of subjecting the long-hallowed circlet to gentle scorn within a historical romance. On the night of his completion of the sculpture, Narcisse’s physical gestures connote the crucifixion. Firstly, Narcisse “stretched out his arms,

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as though exhausted with a long and critical exertion, which was now over, altogether done with and completed” (112): not only do his extended arms convey the iconic crucifixion pose, but also Narcisse’s sense that the work “was done” echoes Christ’s final utterance: “It is finished” (John 19:30). The crucifixion posture has been discussed several times in this volume, but compared with its use by Percy Bysshe Shelley, John Henry Newman, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Marie Corelli, Gosse’s image of the crucified Narcisse is closer to that of the carpenter-Christ in Hunt’s The Shadow of Death (1873). The 1874 exhibition pamphlet (apparently written by the artist) explains that “the Divine Labourer pours forth His soul in fervent gratitude to His Father that the welcome hour of rest has come” (Bennett 1969, 49). In this painting, Christ stands stretching his tired limbs in front of a wall-mounted rack of tools that is crossed by a vertical shaft or mandrel; raising his arms aloft, Hunt’s Christ casts a shadow onto the “cross” behind him, presaging the crucifixion. The tools depicted are “types” of those used to torture Christ, while a hand-saw casts a shadow onto the wall, previsioning the spear that pierced his side. Hunt depicts the Virgin Mary kneeling on Christ’s right hand, engaged in packing the magi’s gifts into a basket, and her body language suggests that at this moment she suddenly notices the ominous shadow. Narcisse’s posture in Secret, the references to the magi’s gifts and to the Virgin, and the atmospheric prefiguration of death all correspond to Hunt’s narrative.

3   The Synthesis of Ritual Atonement with Self-­Sacrificial Christian Martyrdom Gosse’s description of Narcisse’s arrest and sentencing follows the events of Christ’s Passion. It starts with a clamouring mob that besieges Narcisse’s home. Unlike the mob depicted in Richard Marsh’s A Second Coming (1900) and discussed by Leanne Waters in the previous chapter, which constitutes anonymous citizens, Gosse emphasises the leadership of the “grim, unsavoury… and exceedingly cruel” sacristan of St Maze (Gosse 1892, 146–47). At first the Bar-le-Duc mob seems to resonate with Charles Kingsley’s Hypatia (1852–1853) in which the eponymous heroine is attacked by a vicious crowd “brandishing flints, shells, fragments of pottery,” and is murdered in the Catholic Church (1922, 444–45), as well as with Walter Pater’s mythological protagonist Denys (Dionysus) in “Denys L’Auxerrois,” one of his four Imaginary Portraits (1885–1887)

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who, accused of sorcery, was “borne along in front of the crowd, and… torn at last limb from limb” (1910, 76). Narcisse, however, is not murdered by the mob, but subjected to a ritual that recalls observances delineated in Leviticus 16. When the sacristan of St Maze brings acolytes with incense and “a pan of burning coals,” he emulates the Old Testament rite of atonement, and by accusing Narcisse of being “steeped in the blood of he-goats” identifies him as the ritual scapegoat (Gosse 1892, 183; cf. Lev. 16:12, 21–22). Whether Narcisse’s guilt lies in having used his “secret” craft to animate a sculpture, or in having nurtured an unnatural passion for the trumpeter (Rom. 1:27), or in simply being a foreigner, is deliberately ambiguous. The reader also starts to question whether this witch-hunt reflects sixteenth-century superstition or nineteenth-century bigotry. Narcisse’s violent end is now driven by the gospel. After the mob attack, Narcisse is marched on a via dolorosa through Bar-le-Duc, where he is denied three times. His friend the gun-smith “turned away, shamefaced”; Rosalie’s sister, “gibber[ed] at him with a gesture which was at once an outrage and a curse”; and “a lawyer who owed Narcisse money… roughly refused [to help him] and passed away” (Gosse 1892, 166–67). Like Pontius Pilate, the local Duke “sought in vain to protect him” but Narcisse was handed over to the church authorities, to be judged by “a harsh old pedant” (180, 174–75). Just as three days and three nights separated Jesus’s death and resurrection, so Narcisse had lived in Bar-le-Duc for three years, he was in prison for three days, and the interval between sentencing and execution was three hours (166, 182). While in prison, the trumpeter (again associated with biblical blood) passed bread and wine through the bars, suggesting Eucharistic metaphors of brokenness as the bottle cracks and a “red tributary” trickles forth (165). Narcisse’s fate is inevitable from the beginning, whatever form his crucifixion takes. Broken by physical and verbal violence, Narcisse gradually assumes a burden of guilt: “I have come to think that I may have been—what they say I am” (286). Narcisse becomes increasingly animal-like, “sunken in his straw,” unconsciously complying with the mob’s belief that he is “steeped in the blood of he-goats” (183). Narcisse thereby relieves the town of its guilt, colluding with the process that René Girard named “the scapegoat mechanism” in Violence and the Sacred (2013 [1972], 313–14), by which religion ensured the process of human evolution by controlling the violence caused by mimetic rivalry. According to Girard, the sacrificial victim had to be a noteworthy person in the community (various characters including Rosalie’s father commended Narcisse’s work) but also an

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outsider who would have no avenger (Narcisse originated from the south). The ritual elimination of Narcisse allows Bar-le-Duc to return to a state of calm. Gosse indicates this by beginning and ending the novella with a procession commemorating the death of René de Châlons: this measured re-enactment of death frames the explosion of passion and violence contained within the week-long duration of the plot. By associating Narcisse with the “he-goat,” Gosse not only invokes the figure of Pan, who is also a he-goat, and more significantly, the god which “held sway” over Gosse’s mind in tense equivalence with Christ, but also fifth-century Athenian tragedies known as “scapegoat plays.” The etymology of the word “tragedy” is thought to be τράγος (he-goat) + ᾠδή (song) (Oxford English Dictionary), either because a tragedy is a narrative that is pleasing at the beginning but destructive in its outcome or because goats were sacrificed to poets who described “noble and sublime things” (Kelly 1993, 149, 139). Just as by being a scapegoat, Sophocles’s Oedipus secured the greater good of the community, so Narcisse’s sufferings restore peace to Bar-le-Duc. Through the lens of Pan, Narcisse’s demise is a tragedy. Through a religious lens, however, the scapegoat is a necessary evil. Its function was popularised in the nineteenth-century imagination largely through Hunt’s The Scapegoat (1856). This painting, which perplexed contemporary reviewers, was intended to teach the viewer that God had instituted the practice of animal sacrifice in order to demonstrate that mankind was failing to fulfil moral law and therefore needed some means of expiation. The red fillet wound around the horns of the scapegoat denotes the custom of Jewish ceremonial law and symbolises the burden of sin. Seventeen years after painting The Scapegoat, Hunt “quoted” this red fillet in The Shadow of Death, as a part of Christ’s head-dress, thrown to the floor in his act of exhausted stretching, but alluding to Christ’s future role as a scapegoat for mankind (Heb. 9:12–14). Its colour resonates with Gosse’s association of “red” with racial and Eucharistic blood, conveyed through the figure of the trumpeter. The Scapegoat depicts the pathetic drooping animal, symbolically weighted by sin, standing isolated in the slime of the Dead Sea. The setting recalls Secret’s “Heathenesse,” the wilderness where Rosalie felt abandoned by God. Narcisse the scapegoat is left similarly desolate at the end: unlike Christ whose crucifixion leads to resurrection, and unlike Narcissus who metamorphoses into a flower, and even Denys l’Auxerre whose “tortured figure” Pater afterwards “seemed actually to have seen… in the streets” (1910, 77), Gosse’s text disavows any hope of resurrection for his protagonist. It is particularly

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poignant that Narcisse, inspired by Richier’s sculpture, is denied the resurrection that it so powerfully enacts. Gosse’s sharpest irony emerges here, directed at exclusive communities like the Brethren that do not simply humiliate the perceived Other but pronounce him utterly forsaken.

4   Conclusion Gosse’s seemingly deliberate eschewal of the popular Light of the World suggests a profound resistance to Hunt’s Christ-figure, who asks the viewer/reader to open the door and receive Him (Rev. 3:20). In Secret, Gosse presents a very different Christ-figure, one which is equivalent in its influence to the mythical Pan, for in his mind these two figures “held sway together.” Gosse’s Narcisse is thus a Christ figure trying to survive in a world of Ovidian instability. It is notable that on Narcisse’s first appearance in the text, he is as motionless as the sculpture that he contemplates. In this guise he resembles the two sculptured Christ-figures which, in Secret’s “spurious and unnatural” mode of romance, are able to confound the boundaries between their fixed and inert qualities and their fairy-tale vitality. The real–unreal duality of Secret’s sculptures becomes more complicated in the figure of Narcisse because he encompasses tensions between Jesus and Pan, male and female, innocence and guilt, transparency and secrecy, revolution and orthodoxy, and familiarity and strangeness, until his body is “broken up” and his spirit is extinguished. At times, even the romance mode struggles to contain the various transfigurations within Secret, and Gosse strays into the realm of fairy-tale. In the cause of Christian “truth,” Gosse’s mother had denied him fiction: now Gosse reduces the gospel and its protagonist to the vagaries of that same genre.

Notes 1. Gosse’s parents admired the writings of Andrew John Jukes which “were in no small degree responsible for the typology that later became second nature” to the Plymouth Brethren (Coad 1968, 78). 2. Gosse would have been fully aware of the chronology of these paintings, as from 1875—when he married Ellen Epps (pupil of Ford Madox Brown and sister-in-law of Lawrence Alma-Tadema)—he moved in artistic social circles that included Holman Hunt. The interaction between the two families was sufficiently close that Gosse’s children attended parties at the Hunts’ home (Thwaite 1985, 335).

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References Barbour, John. 1994. Versions of Deconversion, Autobiography and the Loss of Faith. Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia. Bennett, Mary. 1969. William Holman Hunt: An Exhibition, March–April 1969. Liverpool: Walker Art Gallery. Coad, Frederick Roy. 1968. A History of the Brethren Movement: Its Origins, Its Worldwide Development and Its Significance for the Present Day. Exeter: Paternoster Press. Cohen, Kathleen. 1973. Metamorphosis of a Death Symbol. Berkeley: University of California Press. Downing, Crystal. 2001. The G(l)ossing of Religion: A Victorian Father and Son. Religion and the Arts 5: 155–171. https://doi. org/10.1163/156852901753498160. Girard, René. (1972) 2013. Violence and the Sacred. Translated by P.  Gregory. London: Bloomsbury. Gosse, Edmund. 1892. The Secret of Narcisse: A Romance. London: Heinemann. ———. (1907) 2004. Father and Son. Oxford: Oxford World Classics; Oxford University Press. Kelly, Henry Ansgar. 1993. Ideas and Forms of Tragedy from Aristotle to the Middle Ages. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kingsley, Charles. (1852–53) 1922. Hypatia: New Foes with an Old Face. New York: Crowell. Maas, Jeremy. 1984. Holman Hunt and The Light of the World. London: Scolar Press. Ovid. (1916–17) 1977. The Metamorphoses. Translated by F.J.  Miller. London: Heinemann. Oxford English Dictionary. 1989. 2nd ed., 20 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Continually updated at http://www.oed.com/. s.v. “tragedy, n.”; “sway, n.”. Pater, Walter. (1885–87) 1910. Imaginary Portraits. London: Macmillan. Potts, Alex. 1999. Male Fantasy and Modern Sculpture. Oxford Art Journal 15 (2): 38–47. https://doi.org/10.1093/oxartj/15.2.3. Thwaite, Ann. 1985. Edmund Gosse: A Literary Landscape 1849–1928. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Index1

A Angels, 24, 25, 30, 46, 60, 71, 74, 105, 118, 166, 171, 225, 237 Apocalypse, 30–32, 36, 59, 87–88, 124, 224, 225 Ascension, 117–129 Atonement, 5, 8, 9, 45, 65, 66, 133, 188, 189, 212, 215, 263, 269, 270 B Baptism, 24, 61–63, 137, 166, 171, 173, 197, 215 C Crucifixion, 12, 14, 16, 43, 45, 63, 141, 142, 160, 172, 179–181, 186, 188, 189, 199, 221, 222, 228, 248, 252, 254, 255, 268–271

E Ecology, 2, 150, 151, 158, 160 Eschatology, 5, 6, 29–31, 33–36, 87 Eucharist, 12, 18, 135, 140, 173 Evil, 26, 31, 74, 122, 123, 171, 248, 264, 271 F Forgiveness, 36, 55, 133, 170, 181, 239 G Grace, 57, 66, 112, 150, 152–154, 165, 167, 192 H Heaven, 6, 7, 12, 24, 26, 27, 30, 31, 34, 35, 45, 47, 49, 50, 58, 60–66, 71, 72, 74, 75, 117–121,

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

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INDEX

125–128, 129n1, 151, 152, 168, 170, 174, 217, 234, 254, 264 Higher criticism, 4, 5, 14, 23, 24, 42, 139 I Imagination, 6, 7, 14, 25, 36, 39, 40, 45, 46, 48–50, 117–129, 234, 252, 257, 271 Incarnation, 5, 9–11, 87–88, 133, 167, 175, 212, 213, 234, 252 L Liturgy, 134, 167, 252 M Martyrdom, 164, 166, 172–174, 222, 224, 263, 269–272 Mary, mother of Jesus, 57, 58, 95, 164, 191, 200, 236, 262, 268, 269 Miracles, 7, 24, 42–46, 48, 50, 93, 96, 165, 171, 215, 218, 235, 252, 253 P Prayer, 44, 59, 65, 66, 117–119, 150, 158, 165, 167, 168, 213, 214, 254 Pre-Raphaelitism, 90, 92

R Resurrection, 17, 58, 59, 61–63, 65, 136, 172, 189, 215, 216, 221–223, 225, 235, 265, 270–272 Roman Catholicism, 12, 104, 141 S Saints, 151, 159, 164–169, 173, 174, 227–239 Sculpture, 10, 17, 96, 141, 182, 263–266, 268, 270, 272 T Time, 1, 17, 23, 24, 36, 42, 45, 57, 60, 63, 65, 76–78, 85, 86, 88, 90, 95, 96, 102, 107, 122, 123, 130n4, 138, 139, 151–154, 157, 166, 167, 169, 184, 189, 197, 202, 203, 205, 211, 215, 220, 224, 225, 230, 231, 239, 246, 247, 249, 252, 253, 261–263, 265, 266, 269, 270, 272 Tractarian, 3, 15, 95, 117–129, 134, 197, 198, 206n2 Typology, 7, 47, 72, 167, 172, 262, 272n1 U Unitarianism, 14, 180, 187–189