Among British travelers to the eastern Mediterranean, James Stuart and Nicholas Revett had an especial importance. They were the first to make entirely accurate measured drawings of the principal classical remains in Athens, and when the second
Figure 18.2 Kedleston Hall. Photo: © NTPL / Matthew Antrobus
And most important volume of their Antiquities of Athens was published in 1787, they made the Greek Revival possible. As an architect, Stuart’s own use of his discoveries was eclectic: an Ionic order added to what was otherwise a Palladian facade; one garden building modeled on an Athenian building of the fifth century BC, another on an Athenian monument dating from several centuries later. But as the passion for Greece grew hotter in the early years of the nineteenth century and as revivalism became an ideal, a purist architecture came into being, aimed at reproducing the forms of the fifth century bc as closely as was possible in modern conditions. In England itself this vogue did not last long. In Germany there was some feeling that the Greek Revival might be a patriotic style, the Germans and the ancient Greeks having some kind of spiritual affinity. In the United States, the argument was put that the austere, masculine architecture of the Greeks fitted a young, vigorous nation that had cast off the fripperies of the Old World. In England, it was instead to be the Gothic Revivalists who played the patriotic card.
In Scotland the story was somewhat different. Even more at the periphery than England, the Scots had long prized the classical attainments that gave them access to the central tradition of European culture. Indeed, the Christian names Alexander and Hector acquired a distinctly Scottish flavor; at one time even the name Aeneas enjoyed some favor, inspired by a spurious etymology linking it to Angus. Another element of Scottish classicism came about half by accident. In the seventeenth century the notion that whereas the Ionian Greeks were sophisticates and city-makers, the Dorians were simple mountain folk led to the half-jocular application of the adjective ‘‘Doric’’ to rustic speech, and then to Scottish dialect. The notion of the Dorians as rude highlanders helped this idiom to take root. And as the Athens of the North, the Edinburgh of the Enlightenment staked a claim to be not only ‘‘Doric’’ but Ionian too. The Greek style thus came to seem fitted to the Scottish character, and it lasted longer north of the border. To some observers, the Grecian buildings of Edinburgh only served to show how unsuited the classical vocabulary of architecture was to the north. ‘‘The very climate,’’ wrote Hippolyte Taine, ‘‘seems to revolt against shapes proper to a dry, hot country; and the needs, tastes and ways of northern men are even more hostile to them’’ (Taine 1957: 286). Others have felt that Edinburgh’s Greek buildings blend well with the plain Georgian style of the older New Town to form one of the masterpieces of European urbanism.
The adoration of ancient Greece that began in the eighteenth century, reached its zenith in the Romantic age, and endured through the nineteenth century was a phenomenon that affected all Europe, but in Britain it had some local characteristics. The early champions of Hellenism were Germans - Winckelmann, Lessing, Goethe among them - and to some extent this made the British engagement with Hellenism also an engagement with modern German thought. A. W. von Schlegel’s lectures on the drama, first translated into English in 1815, were especially influential in popularizing German ideas. From here came the conception that Greece could be set against the modern world in terms of a series of contrasts: between sculpture and music as master arts of the epoch, between classic and romantic, south and north, pagan and Christian. To these contrasts Britain, as the first industrialized nation, added one more: between the grime, smoke, and materialism of the present age and the pure, radiant light of Hellas. Another local variant of Hellenism came about more accidentally: the arrival of the Elgin Marbles in London disturbed old preconceptions. Winckelmann had declared the nature of Greek sculpture (and indeed literature) to be ‘‘a noble simplicity and a calm greatness’’ (Winckelmann 1987: 33); but the pedimental figures from the Parthenon seemed thrillingly emotive. Hazlitt rhapsodized over their passionate fluidity, and Keats wrote a sonnet declaring that they made him swoon, dizzying him with their grandeur. The Marbles made classicism romantic.
These ideas, and above all the sense that ancient Greece stood in contrast to the modern world, came to infuse much of Victorian literature and thought: it is recurrent, for example, in Ruskin and Pater, in Matthew Arnold and Swinburne, and in the novels of George Eliot. Greece became a yardstick against which contemporary life was measured and, more often than not, found wanting. Nowhere perhaps in Britain could one find the idea, sometimes found in Germany, that ancient Greece and the modern nation were spiritually kin. With Rome the case was different, for Britain was also distinguished from other nations by its empire, and the parallel between the Pax Britannica (British peace) and the Pax Romana (Roman peace) was inescapable. In fact, political comparison between Rome and England was not new, and can be traced back to the seventeenth century, though at first the resemblance was found in the Roman Republic rather than the Roman Empire. In an age of absolute monarchies, the parliamentary constitution of England, with a monarch sharing power with representatives of an aristocracy and gentry in part elected by a form of public suffrage, could seem to be a modern instance of the ‘‘mixed constitution’’ on which the Romans had prided themselves. Besides, in an age when education was dominated by the Latin and Greek classics, it was natural for a statesman’s cast of mind to take on a Roman color. ‘‘Otium cum dignitate is my object,’’ wrote Lord Chesterfield in a letter of February 9, 1748, upon resigning political office, referring to Cicero’s gentlemanly ideal of freedom of action combined with public esteem. Lord Holland ventured to suppose that the principles of a liberal Spaniard could be likened to ‘‘those of Cicero and Mr Fox’’ (Mitchell 1980: 226); and in the middle of the nineteenth century the economist Nassau Senior was told by an Italian acquaintance that Cicero’s letters were akin to the correspondence of a British statesman: ‘‘All the thoughts, all the feeling, almost all the expressions, are English.’’
A later and fictional Italian observer of the English scene is Henry James’s Prince Amerigo, described in the first sentence of The Golden Bowl (1904) as ‘‘one of the modern Romans who find by the Thames a more convincing image of the truth of the ancient state than any they have left by the Tiber.’’ In France, similarly, Francois Guizot, historian and statesman, spoke ofthe Romans and the British as the only two governing nations of the world. Palmerston traded on the comparison in a famous speech on the Don Pacifico affair, quoting the words Civis Romanus sum (I am a Roman citizen) from Cicero’s denunciation of the corrupt provincial governor Verres. And Disraeli coined the phrase Imperium et Libertas (Empire and liberty), which enjoyed currency for a while. But the analogy between Rome and Britain was equivocal. Some readers remembered that Vergil - who could now be seen, in Lord Bryce’s words, as ‘‘the national poet of the Empire, in whom imperial patriotism found its highest expression’’ (Bryce 1901: 1:72) - had set the Roman supremacy in conquest and government against the Greeks’ superiority in such arts as sculpture, oratory, and astronomy. It was easy to feel that Britain was now in Rome’s position, better than the countries of the Continent at winning and ruling an empire, but inferior to one or the other of them in artistic or intellectual power.
Most of Britain’s public architecture was in the broad classical tradition for most of the Victorian age, Italianate in its middle years, turning to a revival of Wren’s style later; once again, an engagement with the classical tradition was at the same time an engagement with another story. Through their echoes of Wren, the buildings of late Victorian and Edwardian Whitehall, for example, use the classical vocabulary to express a native patriotism. It is hard at any time to spot allusion to ancient Rome in such public monuments. It was partly, perhaps, that Roman imagery would have looked too Napoleonic. But it may also have been that the comparison with Rome was not altogether comfortable. Enemies of imperialism claimed that empire had led to economic parasitism and moral enfeeblement in ancient Rome, and was now doing the same in Britain; the apologists for empire tended to dwell as much upon the differences as the similarities.
The classical tradition was to be revitalized in the twentieth century above all through the influence of Nietzsche and Freud, so that once more the British response to the classical was also a response to the thought of the German-speaking world. This is a rich story, but it belongs in another place (see ch. 8, ‘‘Modernism’’), as it is hard to see that the British now differed much in their response from other peoples. To be sure, one can think of occasions when writers have given their responses to classical literature a regional or national slant; the two most conspicuous examples, perhaps, are works by authors who, although born British subjects, may be thought to be British only in an extended sense: James Joyce’s Ulysses and Derek Walcott’s Omeros. But these are particular and personal experiments. For the most part, in the twentieth century the British engagement with the classical tradition was representative of the west as a whole rather than being tinged with local color, and that is hardly surprising. For the Britons were no longer sundered from the whole world; indeed, the language of this once remote island had become the medium by which nation spoke to nation, inheriting the role that Latin had enjoyed for so long.
FURTHER READING
The classical tradition in Britain preponderates in most of the essays in Jenkyns (1992). The books of Thomson (1948, 1951, 1956) are slight but can be useful as jumping-off points. Martindale (1988) and Martindale and Hopkins (1993) deal in the first case largely, and in the second case entirely, with the influence of the poet in question on English literature. Two other useful books are Bush (1932) and Ogilvie (1964). For the eighteenth century see Erskine-Hill (1983) and Weinbrot (1978). On aspects of Romantic Hellenism: Spencer (1954) and St. Clair (1967). Crook (1972) surveys Greek revival architecture and is amply illustrated. For the Victorian age as a whole, see Jenkyns (1980); Turner (1981) focuses on the intellectual legacy, principally examining historiography and philosophy; Jenkyns (1991) considers the legacy in terms of the visual arts; and Vance (1997) mostly addresses literary culture.
A Companion to the Classical Tradition Edited by Craig W. Kallendorf Copyright © 2007 by Blackwell Publishing Ltd
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