Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity (review)

Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity by David S. Ferris. Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. xxix+247. $49.50 cloth; $18.95 paper.

Silent Urns is a difficult, complex, and challenging book that requires considerable intellectual stamina from its reader. It is also an original and compelling critical study that breaks important new ground in a variety of areas, including European Romanticism and its relation to the past, the relation of aesthetics to politics, and contemporary historicist theories of literature and culture. As its subtitle suggests, the book's argument is sweeping, and part of the difficulty of the study rests in Ferris's effort to construct a critical and theoretical strategy capable of containing the reach of that argument: there is simply no easy way to distill the range of issues that Ferris seeks to connect and explain.

The study is organized around the issue of Hellenism. Ferris contends that Romantic Hellenism is not simply a question of Romanticism's relation to ancient Greece. Rather, it is a historically specific phenomenon that arises in the eighteenth century under the profound influence of Johann Winckelmann, whose History of Ancient Art (1764) sought to integrate and explain various pressing and emergent issues of the period, ranging from aesthetics, to history, to the quest for freedom. As the focal point of Winckelmann's study, Hellenism is constructed as the original cultural expression within which these issues are reconciled, and it therefore assumes the identity of an authoritative standard of value and category of explanation; that is to say, it is constructed and represented not as identical with the historical reality of Greece, but as the definitive concept of culture that governs and mediates historical understanding. In its role as a perfect form of cultural expression, Hellenism becomes the ideal against which both Romanticism and modernity itself are measured for their cultural and aesthetic achievements.

But even as he constructs Hellenism as an ideal standard for Romanticism and modernity, Winckelmann at the same time binds that point of reference to the national context of Greece itself, and thereby ties it to the fate of the Greek nation. Thus, although Hellenism is an ideal standard of measurement, it is also framed by its historical situation. The historical embeddedness of Hellenism is crucial to Winckelmann's argument, for by linking Hellenic culture and Greek history, aesthetics and nation, as he does, Winckelmann assures the inimitability of Hellenism, and thereby solidifies its unique and ideal status. Because the supreme accomplishments of Hellenism are inextricably tied to the failure of the Greek nation to sustain its artistic authority without end, they come to occupy a sort of protected and unapproachable cultural zone that subsequent history can only imagine but never truly capture. This argument has significant repercussions for art and culture in modernity in another way as well; just as the failure of the Greek nation assures the unique status of the Hellenic past by isolating it as an ideal moment ostensibly out of time, it also assures that modernity cannot repeat the successes of Hellenism without also repeating its complete ruin. In this view, paradoxically, Greece provides the first example of modernity, while at the same time pointing toward the characteristic feature of modernity: a return to Greece, or to an ideal in the past, is impossible.

What matters for Ferris in this view of Hellenism is that ancient Greece, as a geographic and historically specific country, is less important than the fact that its cultural achievement provides a point of reference for critical judgment, and thereby an authority with which the present must contend in seeking its own identity. It is not as history but rather as a model of history that Hellenism matters. Specifically, Hellenism is a model of history that, according to Ferris, "owes its existence to an account of how style develops as an indicator of historical change" (54). With its emphasis on the link between history and style, Hellenism represents an ideal form--an aesthetic model--of historical...