|
| |
Words into Pictures: Millais and Tennyson
From: Science Museum
| By:
Malcolm Warner |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
The Pre-Raphaelite artist John Everett Millais (1829-96) drew inspiration from the poetry of Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809-92) on more than one occasion. He took the subject of his painting Mariana from Tennyson, contributed illustrations to the celebrated Moxon edition of Tennyson's poems, had discussions with the poet on artistic matters, and conceived what is arguably his greatest work, Autumn Leaves, as a Tennysonian image of loss and nostalgia. In this feature, drawing on text and audio from a paper delivered at the "Locating the Victorians" conference in London, Malcolm Warner of Yale University examines Millais's contacts with Tennyson, his reading of the poems, and the important part these played in his development as an artist. |
 hen Tennyson heard that the young John Everett Millais was painting a scene from Coventry Patmore's poem "The Woodman's Daughter,"  he remarked to Patmore "I wish he'd do something from me." Whether or not in direct response, Millais was doing something from Tennyson within a few months, his Mariana, based on Tennyson's poem of the same title. When this was shown at the Royal Academy exhibition in 1851, the catalogue gave the poem's refrain in the version that ends three of its seven stanzas:She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said
She said, I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!
Tennyson took his yearning Mariana from Measure for Measure, in which the character of that name has been living a lonely life in a moated grange for five years, having been rejected by her fiance Angelo when her dowry was lost in a shipwreck. She still loves Angelo, who becomes the severely legalistic Deputy to the Duke of Vienna, and longs to be reunited with him. In Shakespeare's play this comes about, but neither Tennyson nor Millais gives any clue that such a happy ending might be in store. |
Tennyson changes Shakespeare's "Mariana," remaking her in his own despairing image, and Millais changes Tennyson's. One of the more interesting ways in which the painter departs from his given text is in using imagery from other Tennyson poems, including "St Agnes Eve." The nun in "St Agnes Eve" stands yearning at a window like Mariana, looking on a winter landscape and longing for purity and union with Christ through death. She prays to Christ:Make Thou my spirit pure and clear
As are the frosty skies,
Or this first snowdrop of the year
That in my bosom lies.
The image Millais picks up from this related poem and works into his reading of "Mariana" is the snowdrop, which is the birthday flower for St Agnes Eve. In the painting it does not lie in Mariana's bosom but hovers above, as part of the stained-glass window design in the side of her casement. The motto over it reads "In coelo quies," "In Heaven there is rest." |
So Millais, who at this time aspired to be a religious painter and devoted the best part of his time to scriptural subjects, puts a distinctly religious construction on the secular Mariana, largely through analogies to other Tennyson poems with openly religious content, "Mariana in the South" and "St Agnes Eve." He knew Tennyson's poetry well, and felt free to extrapolate and interpret as well as to illustrate. On its easiest level the poem "Mariana" is about frustrated love in the romantic sense, about Mariana's hopeless longing for Angelo. On another level--Millais is saying--it is about frustrated spirituality, a yearning for holy revelation and consolation that may never come. We might take the "He" in "He cometh not" as Angelo, or as the archangel Gabriel, bringer of sacred fulfilment, or even as Christ himself--"the Heavenly bridegroom" as the nun calls him in "St Agnes Eve." The idea of life as a half-life of waiting and doubt, of weariness and longing for a faith that is lost, of despair in the broad Christian sense: this is, after all, one of Tennyson's mighty, melancholy themes. |
In the dead sycamore leaves strewn over Mariana's embroidery and the floor, another addition of Millais's, the artist may again have been remembering imagery that struck him elsewhere in Tennyson, where autumn and dead leaves are associated with time, mortality and grief. Autumn was Tennyson's season, and Millais was inspired by the Tennysonian view of autumn in his best painting, Autumn Leaves. |
<i>Autumn Leaves</i>
By the time he painted Autumn Leaves, Millais knew Tennyson. In November 1854 he visited him at his home, Farringford, on the Isle of Wight. Millais was beginning to make his designs for the illustrated Moxon edition of Tennyson's poems, which appeared with contributions by Millais, Rossetti, Holman Hunt and other artists in 1857. (There's plenty to say about the Moxon Tennyson. Given the time constraint, however,  I've chosen to focus in this paper on Millais's paintings from Tennyson, because I think they bear a more interesting relation to the poetry.) While at Farringford, Millais engaged in some Tennysonian garden work. The poet's wife noted in her diary that he had been "beguiled into sweeping up leaves and burning them." He and Tennyson had what the poet's son calls "talks as to the limits of realism in painting." Tennyson was not deeply interested in art. We don't know the details of his talks with Millais, but we might guess he found the tight details in a hard-line Pre-Raphaelite picture such as Mariana to be more in the spirit of prose than poetry. Millais was already moving towards a broader manner of painting, and his Autumn Leaves--with its slightly looser brushwork and diffuse atmospherics, its sunset light and smoke--does show him attending more to overall effect and less to the accumulation of details. |
In Tennyson's poetry, the feeling of melancholy traditionally assocaited with autumn in English verse becomes more of an agony. Another of his best early poems, the "Song" beginning "A spirit haunts the year's last hours," contains the lines:My very heart faints and my whole soul grieves
At the moist rich smell of the rotting leaves Fainting of the heart, grieving of the soul--the same intensity of feeling, along with a touch of Tennysonian death-longing, are found in Rossetti's "The Fall of the Leaf:" Know' st thou not at the fall of the leaf
How the heart feels a languid grief...
And how death seems a comely thing
In Autumn at the fall of the leaf. Another member of the Pre-Raphaelite circle, William Allingham, also wrote melancholy autumnal poetry in Tennyson's vein. Millais may have had a number of autumnal poems vaguely in mind when he composed Autumn Leaves. But there is good reason to believe that he was thinking of one above all, Tennyson's "Tears, idle tears." |
As he was finishing his painting, Millais wrote a letter to Holman Hunt speaking of the changes that had come about in their circle of friends while Hunt had been away in the Holy Land. It is a matter, he says, of "the days that are no more." This is the phrase that ends each of the four stanzas of "Tears, idle tears," the autumnal song set into Tennyson's long poetic medley, "The Princess." I believe the phrase was in his mind because he was painting Autumn Leaves as a kind of illustration to the first stanzaTears, idle tears, I know not what they mean,
Tears from the depth of some divine despair
Rise in the heart, and gather to the eyes,
In looking on the happy Autumn-fields,
And thinking of the days that are no more.
There are no girls building bonfires in the poem. They are in the painting partly as the result of thoughts Millais was having at the time about the nature of beauty. In a letter to another artist friend, he explains how he has come to count beauty in adults lower than the beauty of children because adult features are marred by character and expression. A child's face is perfectly beautiful because not yet imprinted in any particular way. "With years," Millais writes, "features become so much more decided, expressive, through the development of character, that they admit of more or less appreciation--hence the difference of opinion about beauty. A child represents beauty more in the abstract, and when a peculiar expression shows itself in the face, then comes the occasion of difference between people as to whether it increases or injures the beauty." He goes on to say that the expression most people accept as beautiful in a child is a "tender" one, even though some will still object to it as pained or unhappy. What better vehicle for this ideal of beauty than some girls with those becoming dreamy, staring and melancholy looks that come over people around bonfires? |
Millais's Autumn Leaves was painted in late 1855, in Perth, Scotland. Malcolm Warner discusses the events which prompted the painting, and the artistic idea of autumn. |
The girls are not crying tears, which in Millais's aesthetic would break the perfection of their features. He wants the "Tears, idle tears" of the poem to be ours as viewers, although the girls' "tender" expressions certainly help prepare us. In the beauty of their youth, the girls are set against a landscape that says "all things must pass." It's a gentler variation on Death and the Maiden, with four maidens and no skeleton. We reflect that they must share the same fate, which they appear on the verge of realizing themselves, as the day that ends at sunset and the leaves that fall and die in autumn. Their presence works like the word "happy" in Tennyson's phrase "happy Autumn-fields." Neither the autumn-fields nor the girls are happy in the common sense of the word. But they are happy in that they are beautiful ("happy" in the sense of fortunate) and at another level in the sense that they suggest memories of pleasant times in the past. With the painting, it is as if we had been enjoying a happy memory of children, or ourselves as children, having fun building a bonfire--then had thought in a melancholy way how that time had gone for ever, at which the children in our vision had all turned melancholy too. |
Millais's wife Effie wrote in her journal that in Autumn Leaves he was trying to paint "a picture full of beauty and without subject." The word "subject" in Victorian art usage meant "story." It was unusual to invest so much thought and seriousness in a picture with no narrative content. Tennyson and Millais took Mariana from a story (Shakespeare's) and used her not so much for her story as for her state of mind. Still, she remains a character. The girls by the bonfire in Autumn Leaves are not characters. They are no girls in particular. Their past and future are of consequence only in the universal sense that they are mortal like the leaves. This comes partly from Millais's theory of beauty: it's difficult to tell a story in a picture using just vaguely sad-looking children. It also makes the picture more poetic. Self-contained and static, it works as a metaphor rather than a narrative. |
Religion and nostalgia
In the letter I've mentioned, Millais uses Tennyson's recurrent phrase "the days that are no more" in speaking of the friendships, now dissolved, that he shared with Holman Hunt. This allows us, I think, to see his painting as partly to do with the ending, with his marriage and move to Scotland, of a phase of his own life. On a more general, public level, we can see his autumnal landscape as a symbol of nineteenth-century culture in a fallen and degenerate state, mourning "the days that are no more" in the sense of a past and lamented epoch in history. Millais held to the key Pre-Raphaelite belief that, for art, summer had ended in the Renaissance. But the fundamental meaning of the picture, as the artist himself said in another letter I shall quote in a moment, was religious. For Tennyson, Millais and most of their contemporaries, time, change and mortality were religious issues, and so was nostalgia. The sense of loss that moved Millais and his fellow Pre-Raphaelites to nostalgia for the Middle Ages, and fuelled nineteenth-century nostalgia in general, was a sense of lost religious faith. Millais wanted to touch feelings that came, like the tears in Tennyson's poem, "from the depth of some divine despair." |
Millais was especially pleased with one particular review of Autumn Leaves. Malcolm Warner describes why the review appealed to the artist. |
The visible signs of Millais's religious concerns are less obvious in Autumn Leaves than in Mariana. First, there is the air of solemnity about the four girls, as if they were carrying out a sacrament. This is something almost all the reviewers remarked on when the work was first exhibited. The sunset behind them gives the oldest three lines of light around their heads, natural haloes. Each holds an object, basket, clump of leaves, rake, apple, in the ceremonial way of saints with their attributes. The apple held by the youngest girl, on the right, reminds us of the origins of mortality, natural as well as human, in the Fall of Man. These gestures on Millais's part towards religious symbolism, along with the hieratic detachment of the girls from one another, and the way the two sisters to the left look out to us as if offering some kind of intercession, gently recall a company of saints in an altarpiece. |
Like all his Pre-Raphaelite brothers and more Victorian artists than is generally admitted, Millais tried to create a religious art for his time. I believe he found in the poetry of Tennyson a source of subjects and ideas as rich to this purpose as the scriptures themselves. This is because he was trying to create a religious art for his time. For Thomson in the eighteenth century, autumn is the season of "Philosophic Melancholy." Well, the nineteenth century was a season of religious melancholy: a longing for signs of grace that never come, a painful infatuation with beliefs untenable under scientific materialism, doubts about personal immortality, a sense of the Fall unrelieved by any firm faith in Redemption. This, at least, is the melancholy that fills Tennyson's poetry and Millais's great Tennysonian paintings, Mariana and Autumn Leaves. They are religious icons for their time, affirmations not of faith but of nostalgia, yearning, and "divine despair." |
|
| |
