SOURCE: Goslee, Nancy M. “Plastic to Picturesque: Schlegel's Analogy and Keats's Hyperion Poems.” Keats-Shelley Journal 30 (1981): 118-51.

[In the following excerpt, Goslee considers the insight that Schlegel's A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature provides into the poetry of John Keats.]

In a series of lectures on literature from 1811 through 1818, Coleridge drew upon the attempts of Schiller, Schelling, and most extensively A. W. Schlegel to define the relationship of ancient to modern culture through analogy to the plastic and visual arts. “The spirit of ancient art and poetry is plastic, and that of the moderns picturesque,” Schlegel declares in John Black's 1815 translation of his lectures.¹ In an 1811 lecture on Shakespeare, Coleridge, too, virtually translates Schlegel: “The Shakespearean drama and the Greek drama may be compared to statuary and painting. In statuary, as in the Greek drama, the characters must be few, because the very essence of statuary is a high degree of abstraction, which prevents a very great many figures being combined in the same effect. … Compare this same group with a picture by Raphael or Titian … an effect is reproduced equally harmonious to the mind, more true to nature with its varied colours, and, in [almost] … all respects, superior to statuary.”² Such a scheme may well have suggested to Keats, as it suggests to us, a model both for reevaluating his Miltonic inheritance and for interpreting the theme of power and the structure of action in his poems. Schlegel's contrast between the ancient arts as “plastic” and the modern as “picturesque” corresponds closely to Keats's contrast between statuelike Titans and the more pictorially defined Apollo in his Hyperion. Further, Coleridge's and Schlegel's terms can explain, if not fully resolve, the apparent contradiction between Oceanus' scheme of cosmic historical development from Titan to Olympian, to “some fresh perfection” beyond them, and the actual, more complex development of all the gods from beginning to end of the poem. Finally, the same development from “plastic” to “picturesque” seems to shape Keats's own development as poet from the “naked and Grecian Manner” of his epic Hyperion to the subjective dream-vision of The Fall of Hyperion. Within these broad developmental categories, moreover, Keats tests the significance of each art—of sculpture, and then of painting—as models for validating imaginative vision. Each, in turn, proves inadequate and troubling; yet painting, in its oxymoronic representation of contraries and in its acceptance of natural and human mortality, becomes a truer and more valid analogue than the static and immortal beauty of sculpture.

Because the argument for an aesthetic development in history is central to Hyperion, this essay will [begin by discussing] Schlegel's historical model of the development from “plastic” to “picturesque.” …

Schlegel's idea of contrast or contrariety in fact gives energy to his historical categories. Beginning his defense of modern art in the first lecture, he explains, “there is no fundamental power throughout the whole range of nature so simple, but that it is capable of dividing and diverging into opposite directions. The whole play of living motion hinges on harmony and contrast. Why then should not this phenomenon be repeated in the history of man?” Though he goes on to add, “Those who adopted [this contrast] gave to the peculiar spirit of modern art … the name of romantic” (i, 8), it is evident that his own fundamental contrast between ancient and modern, plastic and picturesque, is itself a romantic formulation—more a dialectic of opposites than a continuing evolution from one form to another to still a third. In the same way, Keats's contrast between Titan and Olympian in his first Hyperion suggests such a dialectic of opposites more than the continuing process Oceanus prophesies in order to comfort his Titans.

As they force the audience to rely on the visualizable contrasts of his analogies instead of specific analysis of how one spirit or culture gives rise to its successor, the broad assumptions of historical causality to which Schlegel attributes the two cultural “spirits” point further to a polar, not an evolutionary, pattern. The determining forces for the transformation from plastic to picturesque, “statuary” to painting, as symbolic analogues for their cultures are Christianity and the northern climate. The “refined and ennobled sensuality” of the Greeks led to a “deification of the powers of nature and of the earthly life” (i, 12) and in human life to a “perfect concord and proportion between all the powers,—a natural harmony” (i, 16). “The stern nature of the north,” however, “drives man back within himself” and makes him aware of “internal discord” as he yearns for something beyond his external limits. “The feeling of the moderns is … more intense, their fancy more incorporeal, and their thoughts more contemplative,” he writes (i, 13, 16). Thus his category of the “picturesque” modern is clearly more than a visual one.³

In contrast, Schlegel's definitions of the “plastic” and objective qualities of ancient poetry emphasize at first glance the “corporeal beauty” of sculpture. Like Johann Joachim Winckelmann he suggests that “the best means of becoming imbued with the spirit of the Greeks, without a knowledge of their language,” is “the study of the antique. … These models of the human form require no interpretation,” as does literature, since no one will be “insensible to genuine corporeal beauty” (i, 45-46; Lecture 2). “The best key to enter this sanctuary of beauty, by deep and self-collected contemplation,” he continues in phrasing that seems to anticipate The Fall of Hyperion, “is the history of art of our immortal Winkelmann.”⁴ Such a study is appropriate, Schlegel writes, not simply because these statues have outlasted much of their culture, but because

The whole of their art and their poetry is expressive of the consciousness of [a] harmony of all their faculties. … Their religion was the deification of the powers of nature and of the earthly life … this worship … cherished the arts by which it was ornamented, and the idols became models of ideal beauty.

(i, 12)

Thus, to understand the “dignity” and “theatrical animation” of “their idea of the tragic,” we need “to have always present to our fancy the forms of their gods and heroes”; “we can only become properly acquainted with the tragedies of Sophocles, before the groupes of Niobe or Laocoon” (i, 46-47).

Yet as he develops his analogy of sculptural group to tragedy, he suggests an almost Platonic idea of beauty surely beyond even the “refined and ennobled sensuality” to which he earlier limits Greek art:

… in the distinctly formed groupe, as in tragedy, sculpture and poetry bring before our eyes an independent and definite whole. To separate it from natural reality, the former places it on a base, as on an ideal ground. It also removes as much as possible all foreign accidental accessaries, that the eye may wholly rest on the essential objects, the figures themselves. These figures are wrought into the most complete rounding, yet they refuse the illusion of colours, and announce by the purity and uniformity of the mass … a creation not endowed with perishable life, but of a higher and more elevated character.

(i, 87; Lecture 3)

In its unity, accentuated by its placing on a pedestal as “ideal ground,” then, sculpture both affirms its objectivity and begins to move beyond direct and realistic visual representation. This view of sculpture as an ennobling, purifying ideal remained dominant in England, supported by Sir Joshua Reynolds in his Tenth Discourse to the Royal Academy and continued by John Flaxman in his own lectures to the Royal Academy between 1810 and 1827.⁵

In such a cool distancing, however, the “higher and more elevated character” of sculpture seems to move farther away from the direct representation of human suffering, even if ennobling suffering, in Greek tragedy. To reunite these on a level beyond but including the corporeal, Schlegel has recourse to Winckelmann's controversial analysis of the Laocoon in his Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks (1755). More surprisingly, however, he also draws—though tacitly—upon Winckelmann's antagonist G. E. Lessing, whose polemical Laocoon: An Essay Upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry (1766) challenged the theory of ut pictura poesis. Like Winckelmann, Schlegel bases his description of cultural unity upon just this theory of significant similarities among the sister arts of poetry, painting, and sculpture.⁶ He incorporates some of Lessing's objections to Winckelmann, however, in redefining the representation of action in art; and this redefinition suggests a way of analyzing Keats's handling of narrative action in Hyperion.

Winckelmann's analysis of the Laocoon provoked controversy precisely because it saw both “corporeal beauty” and spiritual nobility. Both Greek sculpture and its literature, he argued, show the essential characteristics of “noble simplicity and sedate grandeur” (pp. 30-34), and these characteristics appear most clearly in the sculptural group of Laocoon and his sons attacked by serpents. In spite of his intense physical struggle, Laocoon's face is not distorted in pain, but almost calm. This “tranquillity” gives evidence of a nobility and grandeur of soul, for “the more tranquillity reigns in a body,” Winckelmann writes, “the fitter it is to draw the character of the soul; which, in every excessive gesture, seems to rush from her proper centre, and being hurried away to extremes becomes unnatural” (p. 32). Yet Winckelmann betrays a romantic tendency which clearly appeals to Schlegel by choosing as his paradigm a group in which “body” is scarcely tranquil; in this work, it is tension between “struggling body” and “supporting mind” that prompts Winckelmann's praise as much as the more specifically sculptural reign of “tranquillity … in a body.”⁷

Through his attack upon Winckelmann's analysis of the Laocoon, Lessing began a more fundamental attack upon Winckelmann's idea of a unified culture expressed through several arts. The plastic and pictorial arts are fundamentally spatial, visual, and limited to the laws of corporeal beauty, he argued; only in the temporal, sequential arts of poetry and music can spiritual value be expressed. Laocoon's face is undistorted in his suffering not because Greek culture valued the stoic moral quality of “sedate grandeur” but because—in a striking anticipation of Keats's Oceanus—“… among the ancients beauty was the supreme law of the imitative arts. … The first law of art [is] the law of beauty” (pp. 11, 13). Now as Schlegel develops his argument for the sculptural, plastic nature of Greek culture, he concedes to Lessing the formal aesthetic point that “Beauty is the object of sculpture, and repose is most advantageous for the display of beauty. Repose, alone therefore, is suitable to the figure” (i, 87). He goes on to argue:

But a number of figures can only be connected together and grouped by one action. The groupe represents beauty in motion, and the object of it is to combine both in the highest degree. This can only be effected when the artist finds means, in the most violent bodily or mental anguish, to moderate the expression by manly resistance, calm grandeur, or inherent sweetness, in such a manner that, with the most moving truth, the features of beauty shall yet in nowise be disfigured … conflicting sufferings and anguish of the body, and the resistance of the soul, are balanced with the most wonderful equilibrium. …

(i, 87-88)

Finally, “the sight of these groupes [leads to a] composed contemplation” in the perceiver as well as in the central figures (i, 89). Thus, though he concludes that the “observation of Winkelmann on this subject is inimitable” (i, 88), his distinction between static single figure and active group allows him to salvage that observation, and to incorporate it as “composed contemplation” into the configuration of central figures, subordinate figures, and living observer. For the “action” of the group which Schlegel describes as “beauty in motion” is what we might describe in a post-Coleridgean, formalist vocabulary as “tension.” Though we do not see the figures move in a temporal sequence of acts, we do see a dramatic conflict held momentarily in tension, as several figures respond to the same stimulus or situation. Schlegel never explicitly says that he seeks to challenge Lessing's split between the spatial and temporal, static and progressive arts, yet it seems apparent that his redefinitions of “action” and “motion” do just that.

He develops several other ways of relating sculpture and tragedy through a common relationship to “action” or “motion,” and all of these shape, I think, Keats's sculptural analogues in Hyperion. One of the broadest of these, noted by Roy Park, is the emphasis upon the plastic and the picturesque as eras in the temporal progression from, or dialectic between, ancient and modern.⁸ Even if sculpture and painting were simply static representations of a single moment—a view that Schlegel, as we have seen, only partially accepts—those representations are themselves caught up in a stream of time, a pattern of half-natural, half-cultural necessity. This conception of a determinism that is both external and yet internally compelling for each artist in his cultural milieu is to some extent drawn from Winckelmann's History, in which he had argued that Christianity and an inhospitable climate made the north incapable of imitating, much less surpassing, Greek achievement in the arts.⁹ As we have already seen, Schlegel concedes Winckelmann's point: he acknowledges these determining factors, but makes them the basis for his celebration of the picturesque and romantic powers of the north.

The internal structure of a tragedy, whether ancient or modern, displays for Schlegel a similar pattern of necessity revealing itself in temporal sequence. Unity of action, he argues, cannot be simply a linear sequence of cause and effect, as Aristotle claims, for there is no artistic or psychological sense of a whole in such an unlimited, continuous series. To this limited, somewhat mechanical assessment of Aristotelian causality he opposes an idea of the recognition of fate as the shaping action of tragedy. As fate provides an external shaping, the recognition of that shaping by the characters provides an internal action converging toward the external one. He finds “the unity and integrity of tragedy in the sense of the ancients [that is, the dramatists themselves]; namely, its absolute beginning is the proof of liberty, and its absolute end the acknowledgement of necessity” (i, 333; Lecture 9).

Because in this lecture Schlegel is seeking a common ground for unity of action in all tragedy, ancient and modern, he does not apply his antithesis between plastic and picturesque. We might use it, however, to see in each tragedy a development from classical self-sufficiency to romantic recognition of man's smallness in a vast and impersonal universe of from a statuesque focus upon a heroically scaled figure or group to a picturesque recognition of figures within a context of biological and historical process.

In the next stage of his analysis of unity of action, Schlegel emphasizes even more strongly the concept of recognition as a symbolic action. It is in fact the dramatist's and then the audience's recognition that creates unity: “The idea of one and of whole is in no manner derived from experience, but arises out of the original free-activity of our mind. … The external sense perceives only in objects an indefinite plurality of distinguishable parts; the judgment, by which we comprehend these parts in one entire and perfect unity, is always founded on the reference to a higher sphere of ideas … the organical unity of a plant and an animal consists in the idea of life; and the inward contemplation of life, which is itself uncorporeal, although it appears through the medium of the corporeal world, is brought by us to the individual living object, otherwise we could not obtain it through that object.” Therefore, he goes on, “The separate parts of a work of art, and consequently … of a tragedy, must not be received by the eye and ear alone, but be taken in by the understanding. They are all subservient to one common aim, namely, to produce a joint impression on the mind. The unity consists … in a higher sphere, in the feeling or in the reference to ideas” (i, 336-337). Not only does this neo-Kantian definition move well beyond the isolation of the arts proposed by Lessing; but it has also moved from the objective, universally valid and visual criterion of plastic corporeal beauty, the stone with which Lessing beats Winckelmann, to the highly subjective realm of “feeling,” though a feeling qualified by its reference to “ideas.” Even within the realm of the classical, plastic spirit, then, Schlegel discovers in the process of his analysis a development from objective sculptural group to subjective apprehension of an organic unity of action, a pattern like the larger development from plastic to picturesque.

Another way in which Schlegel's definition of the “plastic” or sculptural spirit may contain the seeds of a more romantic spirit lies in the overlapping range of meanings expressed by the words “plastic” and “feeling” in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Schlegel's use of the word “plastic” probably follows that of J. G. Herder in his Plastik (1768-78) and Critical Groves (Kritische Wälder, 1769), where he associates the sense of touch with the art of sculpture. He in turn follows Daniel Harris, who hypothesized in his Three Treatises (1765) that each art was based on a corresponding sense. In 1796 George Cumberland continued English speculation about sculpture as an art of touch in Thoughts on Outline, Sculpture, and the System that Guided the Ancient Artists in Composing Their Figures and Groups.¹⁰ As we see in Wordsworth's “Tintern Abbey,” however, physical touch or “feeling” leads through his associative, affective psychology to emotional feeling. Like Schlegel, he then finds an organic, shaping unity in the perceiver's emotional feeling. This continuity between the tactile qualities of the object and the emotional responses of the subject suggests a perception of sculpture that is indeed more romantic than classical and that has close affinities with Keats's use of tactile images in his poetry.

Notes

1. Augustus William Schlegel, A Course of Lectures on Dramatic Art and Literature, trans. John Black, 2 vols. (London: printed for Baldwin, Cradock, and Joy, 1815), i, 9. Because my essay argues that Keats may well have known this translation, I have used it as the basis for my discussion of Schlegel; further citations to this work will appear in the text. These lectures were first given in Vienna in 1808 (p. vii). For the origin of his ideas and earlier versions of his thesis, see René Wellek, A History of Modern Criticism, ii (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1955), 57ff.

2. Almost all Keats critics have noted the sculpturesque quality of the Titans, Ian Jack even quoting a passage from Schlegel's lectures in support (p. 174); Jack also notes the pictorial, Titian-like qualities of Book iii. No one, however, has applied Schlegel's and Coleridge's developmental model to the structure of these poems. Geoffrey Hartman probably comes closest in his essays “Spectral Symbolism and Authorial Self in Keats's Hyperion,” in The Fate of Reading and Other Essays (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1975), p. 69, and “Blake and the Progress of Poesy,” in Beyond Formalism (1970; rpt. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1971), pp. 193-205. My own essay has grown from a discussion of sculpture in Blake's Milton, appearing as two articles: “From Marble to Living Form: Sculpture as Art and Analogue from the Renaissance to Blake,” Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 77 (1978), 188-211; and a second one forthcoming in Blake Studies. I read a shorter version of this Keats paper at a conference of the South Atlantic Modern Language Association in the fall of 1977. For Coleridge's passage, see Coleridge's Shakespeare Criticism, ed. Thomas Raysor (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1930), ii, 159-160. A later version (1813) is on ii, 262. The parallel passages in Schlegel are on i, 9ff. of Black's translation. For Schelling's use of this analogue, see his “On the Relation of the Plastic Arts to Nature,” trans. and abr. J. E. Cabot (1913; rpt. in Hazard Adams, ed., Critical Theory since Plato [New York: Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1971]), p. 455; Wellek, History, ii, 79; Thomas Munro, The Arts and Their Interrelationships (1949; rpt. Cleveland: Western Reserve University Press, 1967), p. 173; Raysor, Coleridge's Shakespeare Criticism, i, xxvii-xxviii. In Coleridge's Miscellaneous Criticism, ed. Raysor (1936; rpt. Folcroft, Pennsylvania: Folcroft Press, 1969), the report of Coleridge's 1818 lecture based on Schelling omits this crucial analogue—though perhaps because he had used Schlegel's version of it so frequently earlier in his lectures that year. For Coleridge's earlier use of “statuesque” and “picturesque,” see Stephen Larrabee, English Bards and Grecian Marbles (New York: Columbia University Press, 1943), p. 135.

3. These musical analogues are probably derived from his brother Friedrich Schlegel and from Schiller. See Raysor, Coleridge's Shakespeare Criticism, i, xxx-xxxi; Wellek, History, i for Schiller and ii for Friedrich Schlegel; and Friedrich von Schiller, Naive and Sentimental Poetry and On the Sublime, trans., intro., and notes by Julius A. Elias (New York: Ungar, 1966), p. 133 and n.

4. Winckelmann's Geschichte der Kunst des Alterthums (History of Ancient Art), first published in 1764, expanded his Gedancken über die Nachahmung der griechischen Wercke in der Mahlerey und Bildhauer-Kunst (1755). Henry Fuseli translated the latter into English as Reflections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks; all citations to this work are to this translation (London, 1765; facsim. rpt. Menston, Yorkshire: Scolar Press, 1972). The only English translation of the History began to appear in 1849; further citations to this work, trans. G. H. Lodge (Boston, 1880; rpt. New York: Ungar, 1968), will appear in the text. A French edition, Histoire de l'art chez les anciens, trans. Huber, rev. Jansen (Paris: Bossange, Masson, et Besson, 1802-03), was available. For Keats's knowledge of French, see Bate, Keats, p. 25.

5. Sir Joshua Reynolds, Discourses on Art, ed. Robert W. Wark (1959; rpt. New York: Collier, 1966), pp. 155ff. and 240; John Flaxman, Lectures on Sculpture (London: John Murray, 1829), pp. 170, 191, 225-226; and Jean Hagstrum, The Sister Arts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), p. 144.

6. Though of course available to Schlegel, Lessing's Laocoon was not even partially translated into English until 1826; Henry Fuseli's Royal Academy lectures of 1801, however, discuss his arguments. See Wilhelm Todt, Lessing in England, 1767-1850 (Heidelberg: Carl Winters Universitäts-buchhandlung, 1912), p. 41, and Marcia Allentuck, “Henry Fuseli (Johann Heinrich Füssli) and Lessing,” Lessing Yearbook, i (1969), 179-180. Citations to the Laocoon in my text are to Ellen Frothingham, trans. (n.d.; rpt. New York: Noonday, 1961).

7. Winckelmann, Reflections, pp. 31-32; see Wellek, History, i, 149, and Margaret Bieber, Laocoön: The Influence of the Group since Its Discovery, rev. (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1967).

8. See Park, Hazlitt and the Spirit of the Age: Abstraction and Critical Theory (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), p. 119.

9. Winckelmann, History, i, 60-61. In this passage he argues that “Milton's greatness” is “absolutely unfit to be painted.”

10. Harris, Three Treatises, 2nd ed., rev. and corr. (1765; facsim. rpt. New York: Garland, 1970); for Herder, see Robert C. Clark, Jr., Herder: His Life and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1955); Joe K. Fugate, Studies in Philosophy: The Psychological Basis of Herder's Aesthetics (The Hague: Mouton, 1966); Wellek, History, i, 165; and Munro, The Arts and Their Interrelationships, p. 166. There is no English translation of these works of Herder; see Sämmtliche Werke, ed. Bernhard Suphan (Berlin: Weidmann, 1877-1913), vols. 3, 4, and 8. Cumberland's Thoughts on Outline (London: W. Wilson, 1796) has engravings by William Blake.