Antiquaries in the Age of Romanticism: 1789-1851 - Queen Mary ...

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as an evocative background for his novels, Hugo used a single building to unify the plot and to carry the argument. In doing this he closed the emotional distance between his material and the expectations of his contemporaries that Scott, in his introduction to Ivanhoe, made no apology for keeping open. Hugo thereby overtook, in a single stride, the British, Georgian view of Gothic, arriving at once at that fusion of fabric and meaning that would come to English architecture with the work of A W N Pugin later in the decade. ‘ΑΝΑΓΚΗ’, ‘Fate’ is literally the writing on the wall in the cathedral. Every part of it speaks. ‘Vaste symphonie en pierre, pour ainsi dire; oeuvre colossale d’un homme et d’un peuple, tout ensemble une et complexe.’ [Great symphony in stone, as it were, the colossal work of one man and of a people, a unity, both one and complex.] 136 Meaning is embodied in the very stones and it is communicable. Notre Dame can, like a sentient creature, comfort Esmeralda as she takes sanctuary: L’église, cette vaste église qui l’enveloppait de toutes parts, qui la gardait, qui la sauvait, était elle-même un souverain calmant. Les lignes solonnelles de cette architecture, l’attitude religieuse de tous les objets qui entouraient la jeune fille, les pensées pieuses et sereines qui se dégagaeient, pour ainsi dire, de tous les pores de cette pierre, agissaint sur elle à son insu. [The church, that vast church which enfolded her on every side, which protected her, which saved her, was itself an unfailing calmative. The solemn contours of that architecture, the religious aspect of every object that surrounded the young girl, the pious, serene thoughts that were, so to speak, exhaled from every pore of that stone, worked on her, unsuspected.] 137 In Hugo’s vision all of the material past, from the cathedral downwards, could be made to speak, if one had the requisite, antiquarian, knowledge. ‘Quand on sait voir, on retrouve l’esprit d’un siècle et la physionomie d’un roi jusque dans un marteau de porte.’ [When you know how to look you may find the spirit of an age and the likeness of a king in a door knocker.] 138 In Notre-Dame the concept of the Gothic as a metaphysical force, an idea that grew in England from the 1790s onwards, arrives fully formed, as does the concept of the Renaissance as a falling off, a death rather than a rebirth or, in Hugo’s words: ‘Ce soleil couchant que nous prenons pour une aurora.’ [This sunset we mistake for dawn.] 139 The sentence comes in the 136 Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, p.194. 137 Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris p.530. 138 Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, p.229. 139 Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris p.292. 144
chapter that Hugo omitted from the earliest editions of the book ‘Ceci Tuera Cela’ [‘This Will Murder That’]. It embodies the argument of the novel and also demonstrates the ways in which Britain and France differed in their attitudes to the past in general and to Gothic architecture in particular. The premise of ‘Ceci Tuera Cela’ is that in the late Middle Ages the printing press usurped architecture as the primary expression of culture. The same point is made, almost in passing, in a few paragraphs in Quentin Durward. 140 It is not implausible I suggest that Scott’s brief episode was the spark for Hugo’s whole novel. Typically what is period detail for Scott becomes the cue for a traumatic rupture in history for Hugo. In Hugo’s fiction the past is both closer and further away than in the Waverley novels. It is closer in its implications, the spring for an arc of history that was completed in 1789. As the novel moves to its conclusion Louis XI sits in his private chamber in the Bastille watching the rioters burning Paris. The hosier, Coppenole, tells him that if he succeeds in suppressing this unrest it means only that ‘l’heure du peuple n’est pas venu’ [the people’s time is not yet come]. 141 It will come, however: Quand le beffroi bourdonnera, quand les canons gronderont, quand le donjon croulera à grand bruit, quand bourgeois et soldats hurleront et s’entre-tueront, c’est l’heure qui sonnera.’ [When the belfry tolls, when the canons thunder, when the keep falls with a great crash, when the citizens and soldiers are screaming and killing each another, then the hour will have come.] 142 Louis, patting the walls of the Bastille reassures himself: ‘tu ne crouleras pas si aisément, ma bonne Bastille?’ [You won’t fall so easily, good old Bastille?]. 143 The symbolism of 14 July 1789, present from the first page of post-Revolutionary French antiquarianism in Millin’s Antiquités nationals here completes the journey from documentary account to narrative. 140 Scott, Quentin Durward, pp. 154-55. Martiville the astrologer warns Louis that in ‘this new-fashioned art’ he saw another tree of knowledge which would bear fruit ‘as fatal, yet as precious, as that of the Garden of Eden’. He reassures the King, however, that this will not happen in his time and the theme is dropped. 141 Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, p.632. 142 Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, pp. 632-33. 143 Hugo, Notre Dame de Paris, p.633. 145
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Antiquaries in the Age of Romantici
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Abstract The thesis concentrates on
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List of Illustrations 1 The Antiqua
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Acknowledgements I would like to th
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Definitions Chapter One Don Quixote
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It was a change of emphasis that wa
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e but a Crosse or stone footstool i
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embankment or fortification. Perhap
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part of the understanding of the pa
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classical antiquity, was increasing
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e performed in historic costume.
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transformation. The eccentric, obse
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But wad ye see him in his glee, For
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interesting to him and his readers
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actor Charles Kemble on historic co
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considered view of Noviomagus, that
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eplaying the episode in The Antiqua
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Chapter Two ‘To stones a moral li
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Within architectural history there
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workings of this little commonweal
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Salisbury Cathedral and Wyatt ‘th
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from altering them in ways destruct
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philosophy of the Picturesque which
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about his protests at Salisbury, a
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within Milner’s position’. 51 H
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about Gothic architecture and its m
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Figure 10 St Peter's Chapel, Winche
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In addition to his Dissertation and
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Bright and cheerful mornings are no
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unning battle between the proprieto
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It constitutes at once a beautiful
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face amidst solemn azure and fleecy
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Britton could not resist pointing o
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Figure 16 Salisbury Cathedral from
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Secretary he addressed the third se
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measured details of medieval buildi
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exhortations to accuracy and appeal
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Some years later in 1840, when he w
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Figure 18 Toddington Manor, Glouces
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study of the last forty years’ of
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towards academic architectural hist
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expensive and elaborate.’ 170 Tha
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a small doorway in the south east c
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Her criticism of Michelangelo’s L
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The iconography of the east end of
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a church was a symbolic building, a
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Page 99 and 100: Chapter Three Revolution to Restora
Page 101 and 102: at least one French scholar. 5 Ther
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Page 107 and 108: est, for the Tapestry remained inac
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Page 127 and 128: Dawson Turner could set out the sam
Page 129 and 130: You remember how admirably the Lay
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Page 139 and 140: details seriously. Delacroix was am
Page 141 and 142: Costume balls were wildly popular b
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Page 153 and 154: Figure 34 Frontispiece to Langlois
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the Blessed Virgin and the four Lat
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domestic culture, more people than
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Chapter Five ‘Nothing but a Popis
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The first part of this chapter will
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surrender my crozier into the hands
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Milner’s relationship with histor
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which Edward designed, was Gothic.
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From sacred emblem of the division
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evealed to him increasingly his dis
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prying eyes of his household; and w
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so dangerous’. 41 In a very simil
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view of the Reformation, had caused
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e-discovery and presentation of his
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oyal regalia. It was only in the lo
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Figure 42 The Honours of Scotland,
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Prebble points out, was just about
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First saw them from the window; two
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An article he sent to Mac Millans M
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and the exhibition at the British M
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order to satisfy the taste of a lat
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Illustrations of Shakspeare and its
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could be earlier and that the title
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his own particular ‘fairy system
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Figure 47 Douce's illustrations of
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Although Field demanded that his or
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manners and habits’ to fill the l
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It discovered King John dressed as
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Not surprisingly perhaps this ambit
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novelist, the painter, and the acto
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from meretricious commercial produc
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Kenilworth, the novel in which Shak
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Sir Walter has found out... that th
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had created monuments for Garrick
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The more I look at it the more I fe
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Their infinite variety. 130 It conj
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Figure 50 Shakespeare's monument at
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attempt at an antiquarian excavatio
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I was not prepared to see it look s
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It was in 1849, when Brunel’s Sha
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While Alexandrina Buchanan is certa
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to have no acknowledged part. 11 Th
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Britton, John, An Address from John
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Gunn, William, BD, An Inquiry into
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Pugin, A.W.N., Collected Letters, e
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Auberbach, Jeffrey A., The Great Ex
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Couve de Murville, M. N. L., John M
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_____ ‘Stitched Up: Eliza Stothar
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_____ Richard Parkes Bonington, The
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Strong, Roy, And when did you last
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Appendix John Britton (1771-1857) T
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were published posthumously. His ma
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foundation of the British Archaeolo
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distinction in the universities, Wi
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