Browning's Palace of Art

DONALD S. HAIR Browning's Palace of Art I One of the more interesting intellectual endeavours of the nineteenth century - an endeavour which recurs frequently enough to make it a characteristic of nineteenth-century thought - is the attempt to contain within a single structure the whole of human knowledge and experience .' Such a claim to totality within a single body of thought had traditionally been made by theology, and indeed Newman reasserted that traditional claim in the nineteenth century when he argued, in The Idea of a University, that 'Religious Truth is not only a portion, but a condition of general knowledge." Newman's image for the various disciplines that make up the university is the circle of knowledge, and it suggests that the disciplines are to be seen, not as fragments of knowledge , separate and distinct, but as parts of a whole. In presenting this image and idea Newman, as Dwight Culler has pointed out, owes a great deal to Coleridge's concept of an encyclopedia, in which the various arts and sciences would 'lose their former insulated character, and organize themselves into one harmonious body of knowledge.'3 This synthetizing , this drive towards comprehensiveness, is a major characteristic of nineteenth-century thought: so much so that George Steiner has argued that Marxism and Freudian psychology, both products of the nineteenth century, and both claiming to give 'a complete picture of "man in the world": represent 'attempts ... to fill the central emptiness left by the erosion of theology." In literature the claim for such comprehensiveness was advanced by the major Romantic poets, and especially by Blake and Shelley. In A Defence of Poetry Shelley wrote that works of literature are not to be seen as 'fragments and isolated portions: but as 'episodes to that great poem, which all poets, like the co-operating thoughts of one great mind, have built up since the beginning of the world.'s And when Blake asserted that the Bible is 'the Great Code of Art,'6 and proceeded, in his own way, to recreate its complete account of human life in a remarkable series of poems and paintings, he was proving himself very much a man of the nineteenth century. The recurring image for such an encyclopedic view is the palace of art. lt is that structure which contains the whole of human experience in artistic form; which presents discrete works as part of a single comUNIVERSITY OF TORONTO QUARTERLY, VOLUME XLVIII , NUMBER 2, WINTER 1978/ 9 0042-0247/79/0200-0115 $01.50/0 © UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS 1979 116 DONALD S. HAIR prehensive summary of man's life in this world. The most familiar version of the image is Tennyson's poem of 1833. His palace, a square with four courts, is built high upon a rock. Each gallery within is 'a perfect whole / From living Nature' (58-9); the gallery of landscape paintings, for instance, contains every landscape fair, As fi t for every mood of mind, Or gay, or grave, or sweet, or stern. (89-91) The gallery with paintings based upon myth and legend presents 'every legend fair' (125), and the mosaic in the great hall presents all myths as part of one great myth which is circular in structure: Below was all mosaic choicely planned With cycles of the human tale Of this wide world, the times of every land So wrought, they will not fail. (145- 8) The portrait gallery has pictures of those writers who have, more than any others, presented a comprehensive view of human experience: Milton , Shakespeare, Dante, and Homer. The immediate antecedent for Tennyson's poem (as Robert W. Hill, Jr, points out in his edition7 ) is Coleridge's 'Kubla Khan.' Tennyson describes his palace as a 'lordly pleasure-house: and the label seems to echo Coleridge's 'stately pleasure-dome': In Xanadu did Kubla Khan A stately pleasure-dome decree: Where Alph, the sacred river, ran Through caverns measureless to man Down to a sunless sea. (1-5) The dome may not be built until the poet revives within himself the song of the 'damsel with a dulcimer'; if he can remember that song, he will become the divinely insane poet...