Living Forms: Romantics and the Monumental Figure

Chapter 7: Fortune’s Rhetoric: Allegories for the Dead

Wonder not, Mortal, at thy quick decay— See! Men of Marble piece-meal melt away; When whose the Image we no longer read, But Monuments themselves Memorials need. —George Crabbe, The Borough MONUMENTAL ALLEGORY Figures like Wordsworth’s Shepherd, Cumberland beggar, and discharged soldier are living forms because they are not simply memorial ones—portraits of persons once known, now gone. They are intended to live permanently in his (and our) memory by their identification with the lasting forms of nature. Their life is the “intermediate” image in the poet’s, then the reader’s, imagination. These forms are symbolic, and the symbol, Goethe wrote, “remains forever active.” Noting Goethe’s remark, Tsvetan Todorov adds: “In allegory meaning is complete, final, and thus in some sense dead.”1 The completeness, or definitiveness, of the allegorical message is its finality, which gives it the aura of death. Walter Benjamin’s Origin of German Tragic Drama argues that whereas the ultimate use of the Romantic symbol was to idealize history’s destruction and to “redeem” nature from time, “in allegory C H A P T E R S E V E N
Fortune’s Rhetoric: Allegories for the Dead 147 the observer is confronted with the facies hippocratica [the withered image of a dying body] of history as a petrified, primordial landscape. Everything about history that, from the very beginning, has been untimely, sorrowful, unsuccessful, is expressed in a face—or rather in a death’s head.”2 The passage, like Benjamin’s essay as a whole, conveys “a relentless sense of history as death,” as Denis Donoghue comments.3 Monumental allegory—popular, we have seen, in the eighteenth century and into the nineteenth—dignified the deceased subject by representing her or him in terms of abstract universals and in the company of rank and privilege. As when on opulent tombs, it bespoke power and conferred power. But poetic rhetoric often employed it ironically to depict the passing of traditional power and privilege. In the new, leveling age in politics and literature, Hazlitt remarked, “capital letters were no more allowed in print, than letters-patent of nobility were permitted in real life” (Works 5: 162). The same scorn for rank and its didactic imagery is reflected in Gray’s “Elegy,” where the poet asks rhetorically if Honor and Flattery on prominent church monuments can “provoke the silent dust” or “soothe the dull cold ear of Death.” Allegory or personification is most appropriate to convey the semiotic emptiness of certain monumental shapes, those honoring or flattering power and privilege. A funerary monument itself signifies the dead. To allegorize it poetically , as Gray does, emphasizes the position of that sign as subsequent to its signified. That is, it denotes the new, overlaid personified figure as existent after the original memorial sign, which has now become a dead, silent object. In this way it comments on “the biographical historicity of the individual” (Benjamin 166). Because it constitutes a language, or carries it in the form of figures or inscriptions in which the sign refers to the signified, sign and signified are destined to become more and more alien to each other with time. (An emblem of this is the disjoining of inscription and figure in “Ozymandias.”) “The connection between a monument and what it stands for—or is believed to stand for—is peculiar and intimate,” writes Philipp Fehl in The Classical Monument. It is almost as if the monument had a double identity: its own, as a man-made object, and, in a shadowy and yet more immediately striking manner, the identity of the event or person it recalls. This is evident in the relation between tombstone and tomb: the immediate effect upon the sensibility of the viewer of the stone erected over a tomb is more compelling than the one it may have in the museum or in the stone carver’s workshop.4 This divided impression probably belongs only to memorials of persons. Without an extraordinary imaginative exertion, people are not likely to 148 LIVING FORMS sense any identity at all for a plaque commemorating the establishment of a town’s first schoolhouse. The “double identity” is the envisaged presence of a signified person contending with the viewed presence of the object-shape. I suggested in the last chapter that something like this often occurs in Wordsworth’s poems, but with the imagination successfully merging human figure and stone object...