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Breaking Out: The English Assimilation of Continental Thought in Nineteenth-Century Rome

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Extract

Rome was central to the Anglo-American imagination; for Isabel Archer “in a world of ruins the ruin of her happiness seemed a less unnatural catastrophe. She rested her weariness upon things that had crumbled for centuries and yet still were upright; she dropped her secret sadness into the silence of lonely places, where its very modern quality detached itself and grew objective.… Small it was, in the large Roman record, and her haunting sense of the continuity of the human lot easily carried her from the less to the greater.” James here records (in the preterit tense) an occurrence which can be recovered from the past definite and replicated in the present and future progressive tenses – Isabel needs only to position herself before the “large Roman record” and the experience of soothing Time, Time as continuum, becomes a possibility once again. This replicable consciousness may be further specified “how it feels when one is in the happening of experiencing Time as the fluid medium of all lived experience.” Rome occasions the consciousness of an alternative time sense, one which might lighten the burden of living within a deterministic temporal dimension where past actions condition present and future actions to such an extent that one feels hopelessly locked into an imprisoning narrative pattern of before and after, cause and effect. James obviously believed that such temporal epiphanies offered root room for the psyche, a possibility of returning to the actual with renewed or composed psychic energies. (Other interpretations were, of course, possible-the complacent and self-satisfied traveller was often troubled by this extension of consciousness.) However interpreted, one finds this shock of recognition everywhere – in Canto 4 of Childe Harold, in The Education of Henry Adams, in Middlemarch and Romola, The Marble Faun, in the verse of all the major poets from Wordsworth and Keats and Shelley through both Brownings, Rogers, and Tennyson, in The Stones of Venice, Dipsychus, Amours de Voyage, and dimly in Rienzi and The Last Days of Pompeii, not to mention Harriet Beecher Stowe's less-than-immortal Agnes of Sorrento.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1984

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References

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There lie the Stuarts! – There lingers Walter Scott!

Strange congress of illustrious thoughts and things!

A plain old moral, still too oft forgot, –

The power of Genius and the fall of Kings.

18. I am indebted to Augustus Hare's Memorials of a Quiet Life for much of this information. (This Hare was a prolific writer of guidebooks – his Walks in Rome went through four American editions and many printings in Great Britain by 1874.)

19. Flaxman's designs for Hesiod were engraved by William Blake in 1817. Flaxman was made a member of the Royal Academy in 1801.

20. Shelley's “Ode to Naples” was composed in 1820 to celebrate the rising of the Carbonari in Naples against their Bourbon King. The Holy Alliance sent an Austrian army to suppress the Neapolitan Constitution – and Gladstone was the horrified witness of the end of this savage repression after the 1848 revolt in Naples. Byron was deeply involved with the Carbonari of Ravenna in 1821. The Hare family had always been political liberals as regards Italy.

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27. Alton Locke speaks: “I knew enough of the great man in question [‘the Ambassador’] to stand in awe of him for his own sake having lately read a panegyric of him, which perfectly astounded me, by its description of his piety and virtue, his family affection, and patriarchal simplicity, the liberality and philanthropy of all his measures, and the enormous intellectual powers, and stores of learning, which enabled him, with the affairs of Europe on his shoulders, to write deeply and originally on the most abstruse questions of theology, history, and science.“ Lady Ellerton, a society hostess, then adds: ”You will see one who, once perhaps, as unknown as yourself, has risen by virtue and wisdom to guide the destinies of nations – and shall I tell you how? Not by fawning and yielding to the fancies of the great; not by compromising his own convictions to suit their prejudices. … he owes his greatness to having dared, one evening, to contradict a crown-prince to his face, and fairly conquer him in argument, and thereby bind the royal heart to him forever.”

28. Appendix D to the Life and Correspondence of Thomas Arnold contains Dr. Arnold's travel diaries. The entries of April and May 1827 give a vivid account of his first exposure to the Roman antiquities under the guidance of Bunsen. This was the first meeting, and almost immediately a long correspondence commenced. The same passage records Arnold's visit to Savigny and Niebuhr. Bunsen and Arnold met next in England in 1839. In November 1859 the American protestants established Grace Church (Episcopal) within the U.S. Legation, Palazzo Simonetti on the Corso. The papal gendarmes were stationed outside to mark the names of those who attended. It was not until 1873 that St. Paul's (American) Church was established outside legation. See Langdon, William Chauncy, “Recollections of Rome during the Italian Revolution,” Atlantic Monthly 52 (10 1883), 503–07.Google Scholar

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30. Much has been written on the subject. It was a scheme to establish in Jerusalem, under the joint protection of Prussia and Great Britain, a bishopric which would minister to all Protestants, Jewish converts and other sects in the area. France and Russia were already represented in Jerusalem as protectors of the Roman Catholic and Orthodox communities. A book by Bunsen's friend, the chaplain at the Roman Legation, Abeken, H., Das evangelische Bisthum in Jerusalem (Berlin, 1842)Google Scholar, is useful. A more recent account is Greaves, R. W., “The Jerusalem Bishopric, 1841,” English Historical Review, 64 (1949), 328352.CrossRefGoogle Scholar See also the article by K. Schmidt-Clausen below.

31. See on this subject, Aarsleff, Hans, The Study of Language in England, 1780—1860 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1967), Chap. 6Google Scholar, “English Philology in 1860: The Philological Society of London and the Project for a New English Dictionary.”

32. Vaughan, William, German Romantics and English Art (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 85.Google Scholar Eastlake translated August Kestner's Uber die Nachahmung in der Molerei, significant for its sympathetic account of “pre-Raphaelite” Italian painters. Joseph Severn – who accompanied the dying Keats to Rome in 1820 –was intimate with many German painters and sold to German patrons. His vision of St. John the Evangelist was the only painting by a Protestant placed in a Catholic Church in Rome (San Paolo Fuori le Mura). The German community gave a farewell banquet when he left Rome in 1838. See Vaughan, , p. 179.Google Scholar