W2A-010 Romantic nationalism-0.txt
'A SHADOWY NARRATOR': HISTORY, ART AND ROMANTIC NATIONALISM IN IRELAND 1750-1850

Luke Gibbons II

Davis's enlisting of the aura of classical antiquity in the cause of a national art movement is ironical, given that the whole basis of the neo-classic revival in the eighteenth century was that it addressed universal themes, allowing artists to escape the limiting horizons of a particular culture of society. Davis's reading of Sir Joshua Reynolds's Discourses on Art (1769-90) would have reminded him that in specifying native topics such as 'The Landing of the Milesians' or 'St Patrick brought before the Druids at Tara' (not to mention 'Molyneux's Book Burned' or 'Tone, Emmet and Keogh') as fit subjects for the gravitas of history painting, he was contravening the precepts of the grand style as outlined in Reynolds's canonical treatise. In his Fourth Discourse, Reynolds takes issue with Dutch painting for lowering its sights from the general to the particular, and for dwelling on the surface details of local experience rather than the underlying constants of the human condition:

"The painters of the Dutch school have still more locality. With them, a history-piece is properly a portrait of themselves; whether they describe the inside or outside of their houses, we have their own people engaged in their own peculiar occupations; working, or drinking, playing, or fighting. The circumstances that enter into a picture of this kind, are so far from giving a general view of human life, that they exhibit all the minute particularities of a nation differing in several respects from the rest of mankind... The painters of this school are excellent in their own way; they are only ridiculous when they attempt general history on their own narrow principles, and debase great events by the meanness of their characters."

In these disparaging remarks on Dutch art, it will be seen that the grounds for discouraging the servile imitation of everyday life also rule out the very possibility of a national art. For Reynolds realism means an attachment to the local, to particular details, and national difference are the political equivalent of the trifles and ephemera of daily existence. The equation of the attention to detail in realist art with the constraints imposed by custom and locality on human nature was part of the common fund of neo-classical wisdom, due mainly to the magisterial influence of Dr Johnson's critical writings on literature. Painting, however, was better placed than literature to address universal themes, and hence was under greater pressure to distance itself from the confines of local experience. In this lay one of the main obstacles to the appropriation of the visual arts for nationalist ends - the obstacle which Davis attempted to surmount in his forays into art criticism.

Painting was considered to be well disposed towards the universal for a number of reasons. Primary among these was its deployment of what might be referred to as 'the esperanto of the eye'." It was a truism in eighteenth-century aesthetics that pictorial expression was not bound by the sort of cultural constraints which limited the intelligibility of language. 'A Picture bears a real Resemblance to its Original, which Letter and Syllables are wholly void of,' wrote Joseph Addison. 'Colours speak all Languages, but Words are understood only by such a People or Nation.' As critical debates progressed throughout the century, the analysis of the contrasting merits of words and images took the form of aligning language with time, and vision with space: verbal expression facilitated the passage of time through narrative, whereas visual form, by contrast, allowed an exploration of space within the three-dimensional limits of the pictorial frame. In Lessing's Laokoon (1766), one of three great landmarks in the history of aesthetics, this distinction amounted to the virtual exclusion of any sense of temporal succession from pictorial representation, the emphasis instead being placed on heightened action, the kind of elevated moments which compress an event or even a whole epoch into a concentrated point in time. It was in this manner that history painting came to articulate the heroic mode, capturing those turning-points in the affairs of men which constituted the loftiest expressions of human character. Universalism in form and style thus gave rise to the universal in subject-matter.

The dignified concept of human nature eulogized in history painting owed its origins to a tradition of civic humanism which entered English political discourse from Renaissance political theory. Central to this tradition, as J.G.A. Pocock points out, was a concept of virtue based on the classical republican ideal of a dedication to the common good through full participation in political life. The common good in this sense was not to be identified with any particular interest, whether it be that of a private individual or even a particular nation. This was another way of saying it did not exist in the real world but was an ideal, an abstraction from the interests of the various individuals and social groupings which comprised the body politic in the most general understanding of the term. It was at this point that the aspirations of history painting coincided with the republican ideal, for both eschewed the particular in pursuit of a general norm, what John Barrell refers to as 'the republic of taste'." This convergence between the aesthetic and the political, both grounded in a universal humanism, received its classic formulation in Reynolds's Discourses:

"We pursue the same method in our search after the idea of beauty and perfection in each; of virtue, by looking forwards beyond ourselves to society, and to the whole; of arts, by extending our view in the same manner to all ages and all times."

Reynolds took his own idealism to heart by admitting candidly that in his practice as a painter, he could not live up to the exalted standards of history painting and hence was forced to make do with portraiture - a self-imposed limitation which was not without its financial rewards. The republic of taste had to await the dawning of revolutionary consciousness in France of the 1780s to find its most forceful political expression. The emblematic images of this intensification of republican ideology are David's monumental paintings, The Oath of the Hoaratii (1784-5) and the Brutus of 1789. The Oath of the Horatii represents the ultimate affirmation of patriotic virtue: in it the three sons of Horatius pledge loyalty to Rome, even though it entails a fight to the death with their opponents, the Curatii, to whom they are related twice over by marriage. The fatherland takes precedence over the family, in keeping with the anti-domestic bias of history painting. If this exhausted the meaning of the painting, it would be simply a manifestation of patriotism, and hence might even be consistent with a pledge of loyalty to the king (the incident was wet, after all, in the pre-republican period when Rome was still a monarchy). The very fact of invoking a distinguished Roman precedent, however devoid of any historical connection with the present, converted it from being an act of local, political expedience into the kind of universal vindication of the civic ideal that made sense only within republican ideology. This covert republicanism, and subordination of the family (and hence the aristocratic means of transmitting power) to an abstract conception of the state, is made more explicit in David's Brutus, a historical tableaux which pays homage to Lucius Junius Brutus, who sacrificed his own sons in the course of overthrowing the tyrant Tarquinius Superbus, and establishing the Roman republic. It was exhibited in the momentous year of 1789, the strangely absent centre of the painting itself testifying to a world in which the centre could no longer hold.

It is hardly coincidental that in asserting the constancy of a virtuous human nature, and in devaluing localized expressions of historical change, David's great set-pieces should transform the (narrative) flow of historical time into abstract configurations of spatial form. The geometrical precision exercised in the arrangement of figures, the angular display of the bodies and the rigorous demarcation of emotional space, all point to the moral equivalent of the metric system, precisely the type of Euclidean politics which Edmund Burke was to equate with the abstract theorizing of republicanism. But the rarefaction of classical republicanism into the austerity of form at both the aesthetic and political levels served another purpose. It denied, as we have seen, a historical link or continuum between ancient Rome and France, suggesting at the most that antiquity furnished moral exemplars rather than the historical foundations of virtuous actions. The neo-classical concept of the past was not bound up with the search for origins or remote ancestry which fired romantic antiquarianism and, by extension, cultural nationalism. Such was the blithe disregard to unearthing the original sources that one imaginative critic, George Turnbull, could devote an entire treatise to a meticulous comparison of the paintings of the great Greek painter Apelles with those of Raphael - despite the fact that not a single trace of Apelle's work had survived the classical age. From this perspective, the use of the past in republican imagery, or its French variant, at any rate, was not incompatible with a political philosophy which set its eyes firmly on the present, if not the future. As Thomas Crow has argued, the eventual outbreak of the revolution obviated the need to camouflage republican sentiments in antique costume: in David's Oath of the Tennis Court (1791), the Oath of the Horatii is re-enacted on a mass scale as a declaration of the popular will, complete with contemporary dress. As with all forms of idealism, the very success of history painting led to its own dissolution. Its exposure to lived history proved its undoing.

The cult of antiquity, then, was governed by moral rather than strictly historical imperatives, and it was precisely for this reason that the earliest advocates of the visual arts in Ireland ruled out native mythology and subject-matter from the hallowed precincts of history painting. In his 1767 pamphlet, An Essay on Perfecting the fine Arts in Great Britain and Ireland, Thomas Campbell argued that native or traditional culture does not afford a sufficient basis for cultivating 'the learned eye'," or acquiring 'that second sight we call taste'." The case of music was instructive in this regard. Someone might grow up 'in the country' appreciating 'the street madrigal or itinerant violin'," but when he was equipped with a genuine musical sensibility, 'what before was melody will now prove discord to him'." Campbell returned to this theme in his acerbic Philosophical Survey of the South of Ireland, published ten years later. In the intervening period, his hostility to native culture had somewhat abated - a temporary aberration, as we shall see, and a consequence, perhaps, of the renewed interest in Irish history prompted by the publication of works by Thomas Leland and Sylvester O'Halloran. Campbell defended the claim against the aspersions of historians such as David Hume, that Ireland was one of the oldest civilizations in Europe and was particularly keen to vouch for the Irish credentials of Ossian against the posturings of Macpherson: not alone is there no mention of Ossian in Scottish history, Campbell argued, but his songs are still 'familiar to the aboriginal natives of Ireland' and are not simply embalmed in historical texts. Yet his enthusiasm for ancient Ireland was qualified, since it lacked those elements of moral purpose and narrative coherence which attracted others to the study of classical antiquity. In pre-Christian Ireland, as depicted in the surviving records:
There is no variety of events, no consecutive series of action, no motive to war, or inducements to peace, but the adultery of some queen, the rape of some virgin, or the murder of some chief. In fine, there is no exemplary morality, no colour of just history.
This was said more in the way of an aside, but Campbell's commonsense aversion to historical speculation - a trait which grew more emboldened following his acceptance in Dr Johnson's distinguished literary coterie - led him gradually to consider the avid researches of contemporary Irish antiquarians as having more in common with the fiction of Macpherson than with the dispassionate, polemic published in the changed circumstances of 1789, when the Catholic issue had polarized Protestant public opinion, he ridicules the special pleading of native historians such opinion, he ridicules the special pleading of native historians such as Charles O'Conor and Sylvester O'Halloran who sought to confer respectability on the pre-historic past by arguing, not alone that the ancient Irish were conversant with classical civilization, but that they actually introduced, by virtue of the Phoenician origins, the use of letters to Greece. Such was the credulity of O'Halloran, Campbell writes, that he was prepared to believe that Ireland was entitled 'the island of saints' even before the coming of Christianity - a perverse misreading on his part of the tag 'insula sacra' which classical commentators applied to Ireland.
