Display Time

Display Time: Art, Disgust, and the Returns of the Crystal PalaceAuthor(s): JONAH SIEGELSource: The Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1/2, THE ARTS IN VICTORIANLITERATURE (2010), pp. 33-60Published by: Modern Humanities Research AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/41059780 .Accessed: 05/06/2014 22:50

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Display Time: Art, Disgust, and the Returns of the Crystal Palace

JONAH SIEGEL Rutgers University

The End of the Exhibition, or 'Here we are again'

One measure of the success of the Crystal Palace that stood in Hyde Park for six months in 1851 is the difficulty nineteenth-century culture had in letting go of the structure at the end of the epochal Great Exhibition it was built to house. For this reason, I might have chosen as an epigraph for this essay the lines of Keats that decorated the central hall at a later palace, the one housing the Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition of 1857: 'A thing of beauty is a joy forever', the contrast between the resounding claim for permanence and the temporary structure on which it was inscribed being one Ruskin developed with force, as I shall discuss below. But I have found another, far less resonant, tag or refrain at the Crystal Palace rebuilt at Sydenham in 1854 a statement the significance of which I shall hope to clarify during the course of this brief study: 'Here we are again'. The phrases may be taken to stand for two apparently contradictory visions of pleasure: the fantasy of permanence (that a thing of beauty should be a joy for ever) and of repetition (that our pleasure resides in returns, that we can indeed recuperate a prior place and moment, even a prior common identity, a 'we' that returns). Driving both visions, however, and suggesting their essential congruity, stands a shared antithesis: the vexed question of an ending. I shall therefore focus on the cultural force of the conclusions of the two greatest exhibitions of the nineteenth century, one literary and the other, at least apparently, far more concrete.

It bears saying that a number of claims about time are implicit in any art exhibition. Not only are we generally to understand that what is on display is material that has lasted or will last, but that what is on view can be experienced in some significant way in the time of a visit, the duration of an exhibition. Art in a modern museum will generally only ever be subject to the attention of a limited encounter, but the time of an exhibition is in itself circumscribed, a distinction with important implications for the experience of the art object and its place in memory. I can expect to return to Leonardo's John the Baptist when I am next at the Louvre, and I know I shall be able to consider it again in relation to the Bacchus which may or may not be his and which is generally hung near it. But the Vermeer that New York's Metropolitan Museum borrowed for a


34 Art, Disgust, and the Returns of the Crystal Palace

temporary exhibition some years back has been returned to the Netherlands, and it may never again be placed in proximity to the painting that it anticipates, echoes, or perhaps adapts that lives at the Museum or was borrowed from a private collection. So there is a kind of temporal pressure on the exhibition that is precisely the opposite of the temporal confidence we may take from the apparent permanence of the museum and its collection.

Even though the fine arts were a small part of what the Crystal Palace presented to the world, the building's history sheds light on the complex relation between time and display, and therefore illuminates the ways in which the troubled desires of the period were manifested in the interplay of the arts and exhibition.1 To note that the Crystal Palace has always been understood to mark an epoch is to say that its value was recognized from the outset to reside not simply in the experience it afforded visitors in its day, but in the afterlife of the structure and event. And yet a key issue in the selection of a design for the building meant to house the Great Exhibition was that it be impermanent: not only that it be liable to quick construction, but that it be removable immediately and without a trace. 'Among the principal causes which had removed the obstacles in the way of the erection of the Crystal Palace,' Lord John Manners reminded Parliament in the course of debate about its fate, 'the most cogent was the assurance and specific undertaking that the building should be of a temporary character, and should be immediately removed after it had served its purpose.'2

A notable indication of the success of the event, however, was the rapidly felt desire to go back on the understanding Lord Manners cites: to preserve the impermanent structure beyond the end of the Exhibition. Thus a mere three months after the nobleman's confident assertion, we find the contrary position forcibly maintained: 'Whatever be the uses to which the Crystal Palace be devoted, [. . .] it must be preserved: We must first labour to secure this object, then consider how it can be most advantageously arranged.'3 Save it first, then figure out what it can be used for: the anonymous author of this article in the Art-Journal could not be clearer in expressing the desire that led to the adapted reconstruction of the structure at Sydenham, where the building became a permanent part of the landscape until it burned down in the 1930s.4

1 Useful recent sources on the Exhibition include Jeffrey Auerbach, The Great Exhibition of i8ji: A Nation on Display (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999), and Victorian Prism: Refractions of the Crystal Palace, ed. by James Buzard, Joseph W. Childers, and Eileen Gillooly (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). 2 Illustrated London News, 1 May 1852, p. 339. This is an accurate paraphrase of Manners's position. For a more extended version of his remarks see Hansard, 3rd ser., 20 (1852), 1359-69. The broader Parliamentary debate that he was ioininsr is also germane; see Hansard, pp. 343 and pp. 1348-85. 3 'Proposed Preservation of the Crystal Palace', Art-Journal (1 August 1851), p. 20. 4 The most thorough study of the topic is Jan Piggott, Palace of the People: The Crystal Palace at Sydenham, i8j4~igjo (London: Hurst, 2000).


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The relation between accumulation and time can seem a merely practical question, or one tending towards a general sense that exhibitions of admired art are the material result or residue of the passage of time (the protective gathering in of so many foster children of silence and slow time). However, reflection on the response to temporary exhibitions such as this one should allow us to go much further.5 After all, the amount of material gathered for exhibition in the nineteenth century - and today for that matter - results in a notable temporal crisis, one provoked by the sense that there is not enough time for items to be experienced individually, for the experience to be of the works on display rather than of an overwhelming whole. The cumulative effect of the exhibition itself will tend to come to the fore (a response attested by so many contemporary accounts of the Great Exhibition and its descendants). Still, to consider the challenging relationship between accumulation and time in relation to the exhibition of admired objects is evidently not simply to think about practical matters, about simple contingent accidents of display. To demonstrate that this is the case, I shall place in evidence the greatest exhibition ever assembled in nineteenth-century English literature, one that anticipates the Crystal Palace by almost twenty years.

I built my soul a lordly pleasure-house', begins Tennyson's 1832 poem 'The Palace of Art',

Wherein at ease for aye to dwell. I said, 'O Soul, make merry and carouse,

Dear soul, for all is well' (11. 2-4).6 From the outset, the fantasy of a perfect museum is connate with an imagination of ideal aesthetic separation. Poem, display space, and self-division come into play simultaneously. For the lordly pleasure-house to exist, self and soul must divide, the former becoming designer and builder, the latter tenant or patron. Identity (T) gives way to possession ('my'), which opens out to an eternity ('aye') that homonymically repeats or subsumes the self, which begins to speak as soon as construction is over ('I said'). The doubling self-alienation is formally bound to the expectation of permanent dwelling ('for aye to dwell'). We may understand one of the principal missing homonyms, 'eye', to be present by implication in a palace of art: the self, possession, and eternity are the elements that the experience of the eye puts into play. And indeed the bulk of the poem is composed of the elaborate description of the decoration of the Palace of Art the self constructs.

5 For an evocative account of the history of temporary display see Francis Haskell, The Ephemeral Museum: Old Master Paintings and the Rise of the Art Exhibition (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2000). b Alfred, Lord Tennyson, The Poems of Tennyson, ed. by Christopher Ricks, 2nd edn, 3 vols (Berkeley: Univer- sity of California Press, 1987), 1, 436-56. Tennyson's extensive revisions of 1842 did not materially alter the passages I cite. Subsequent references are to the Ricks edition and will be given in the text.


36 Arty Disgust, and the Returns of the Crystal Palace

The crisis comes when the ekphrastic movement of the poem along with the ease, enjoyment, and sense of an untroubled relationship to permanence ('at ease for aye') is interrupted by an abrupt, apparently unmotivated turn and the introduction of a hitherto absent actor:

Lest she [the soul] should fail and perish utterly, God, before whom ever lie bare

The abysmal deeps of Personality, Plagued her with sore despair. (11. 221-24)

The deity enters into the poem in order to muddy further the sources of what is at once a moral and a psychological crisis. An inborn despair comes to rescue the soul from selfish isolation by revealing something disgusting always already present in what had seemed so perfect a space:

[. . .] in dark corners of her palace stood Uncertain shapes; and unawares

On white-eyed phantasms weeping tears of blood, And horrible nightmares,

And hollow shades enclosing hearts of flame, And, with dim fretted foreheads all,

On corpses three-months-old at noon she came, That stood against the wall. (11. 237-44)

The crisis is not merely spiritual or even ethical - the two options the allegor- ical drives of the poem might tend to suggest.7 While the Palace remains an object of unmistakable force throughout, from the moment of crisis the source of its power is seen to reside no longer in its describable beauty and wonders, nor even in the careful designs of the speaking self, but in the structure's foundation within the soul's earliest desires and knowledge. The active verbs of the opening (CI built', 'I said') make way for passive forms ('built for me', 'were laid'):

'What! is not this my place of strength,' she said, 'My spacious mansion built for me,

Whereof the strong foundation-stones were laid Since my first memory?' (11. 233-36)

The soul's anxious question is never answered directly, although it throws into doubt the originating premise of the opening lines of the poem. Indeed, the insistent conjunction in the stanzas describing the grim discoveries of the soul

7 Cf. the dedication of the poem: 'I send you here a sort of allegory, | [. . .] of a soul | [. . .] | That did love Beauty only [. . .] | [. . .] | And he that shuts Love out, in turn shall be | Shut out from Love, and on her threshold lie | Howling in outer darkness' ('To - . With theFollowing Poem', Tennyson, 1, 435-36, 11. 1-16). Critics have tended to respond with impatience to the advertised moral of the poem. Christopher Ricks writes of a despair that is 'grimly disproportionate to the soul's error of aestheticism', and Herbert Tucker identifies an 'extraneous moralism' deforming the poem's conclusion: see Christopher Ricks, Tennyson, 2nd edn (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), pp. 86-88; and Herbert Tucker, Tennyson and the Doom of Roman- ticism (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), pp. 118-25. For a more sympathetic engagement of the project of the poem in context see Richard Cronin, The Palace of Art and Tennyson's Cambridge', Essays in Criticism, 43 (1993), 195-210.


JONAH SIEGEL 37

suggests the shock not of unexpected intrusion, but of the sudden unpleasant discovery of things that were always there, festering though hidden. It is little wonder that the soul is finally driven out of the Palace of Art and down to the valley where the rest of humanity dwells. She dedicates herself to remorse and prayer. And yet her ambivalence towards the structure she has escaped is in no way resolved: 'pull not down my palace towers', she declares,

[. . .] that are So lightly, beautifully built:

Perchance I may return with others there When I have purged my guilt' (11. 293-96).

To engage with the relation among admiration, disgust, and hope in this poem is to address not only the suddenness of the swerve away from a fantasy of perfect enjoyment, but also what we may understand as the further fantasy of an improved return. The text opens up into questions that become only more pressing as the development of museums and exhibitions gains momentum, in part because it anticipates them. How is the hope of perpetuity (the Tor Aye') related to the more common form of experience - the uncertain possibility of repetition ('I may return')? What I aim to suggest in the balance of this article is the force of this question in relation to later palaces of art. In this context Tennyson's poem becomes recognizable as more than an exercise in navigating the unstable border between social commitment and disinterested culture. It is a representative instance of a set of anxieties whose sources are perhaps even more evident today than they were in the 1830s or 1850s. In order to recognize the conceptual weight of Tennyson's fantasy, it is worth dwelling briefly on the preposterous luxury entailed in creating such a sumptuous Palace and then leaving it untenanted, especially given the fact that in 1832 the British Isles were a museal backwater, with no important public art collection to speak of. The National Gallery, founded in 1824, was st^ housed in cramped quarters at a domestic residence in Pall Mall at the time the poet was writing. Indeed, 'The Palace of Art' is contemporary with the beginning of construction of a dedi- cated building at Charing Cross, which itself would never be described as palatial. To cite the absence of any kind of objective correlative for Tennyson's Palace is not to assume that fantasies are based on reality in any direct way, but to suggest that it is likely to prove more fruitful to read the poem as a complex manifestation of desire rather than simply as a vision of ethical correction. The same cultural drive that led to the building of the new gallery is at play in the poet's verse, the drive to identify and fix value by assembling and arranging admired art. The written word has substantially more leeway for the manifestation of ambivalence, of course, but, as the conflict about the fate of the Crystal Palace with which I opened indicates, related feelings may make themselves manifest even in more concrete settings.



In a Saturday supplement devoted to the Great Exhibition published in September 1851, the Illustrated London News included an article on a novel genre. Entitled, 'The Literature of the Exhibition', its topic is what its author describes as 'the literature that has already grown from the Exhibition and is an insepa- rable part of it'.8 This is a category of writing, he or she goes on to postulate, that is significant because it will be more by the influence which the Exhibition now exercises over it, and more by the subsequent influence of literature over the public, than by any other means, that the permanent character of the Exhibition will be established. It will live in print, and by print hereafter will its effects be known. To identify the literary legacy of the Exhibition as the only way of establishing its 'permanent character' is to acknowledge the temporary nature of the Exhibition as a concern. And indeed, negotiating the interplay of permanence and transience was a vital part of the activities of supporters of the Great Exhibition. From inception through execution and beyond, the promoters of the Exhibition faced a vexing but inescapable challenge in relation to time: to establish the permanent benefits of a temporary exhibition. The impermanent nature of the Crystal Palace was a necessary condition for its existence - there would have been no permission to build it in Hyde Park, otherwise. But the commitment of resources involved in the project required some faith in its lasting effects (the 'permanent character' our Illustrated London News author describes). My argument is that repetition became the particular and peculiar form of permanence granted the Exhibition, and that it is repetition that aligns the event most interestingly both with the periodical press and with some notable diagnoses of culture in modernity, namely those of John Ruskin in the nineteenth century and Walter Benjamin in the twentieth. It is, of course, the uncertain possibility of repetition that the bathetic hope of Tennyson's conclusion also identifies.

Reflecting back on the Great Exhibition, it is easy for the astonishing practical fact of the Crystal Palace and the remarkable material achievement it represented to capture the imagination. (See Figure 1.) How could it be otherwise with a project involving not only Joseph Paxton's innovative design, but so much energy, so many objects, so many people, gathered together and then dispersed? And yet no matter how many people went to the Exhibition, their number was dwarfed by those who were affected by it through the print media. It was, for all its glass, steel, and crowds of humanity, not principally a material event, but a conceptual one, though one whose conceptual force depended on its overwhelming materiality.

The active lifespan of the Great Exhibition was six months, from 1 May to 11 October 1851. But the project had a significant presence in the press even

8 'Exhibition Supplement', Illustrated London News, 6 September 1851, p. 289.


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during the development stage that preceded construction. (It is characteristic of its history that the name 'Crystal Palace' was conferred by a journalist -

Douglas Jerrold of Punch - even before the structure was completed.9) I want to focus, however, on media response to the last days of the Exhibition, the period when attempts were made not only to sum up its lessons, but also to negotiate a mournful sense of an ending. Of course, we can understand the projects to be related: the need to draw lessons at the close of something important is as much an acknowledgment of an approaching end as of an inability or unwillingness fully to accept termination.

It is the Palace itself that becomes the locus of the difficulty of marking an end, which is to say, of resistance to the event's essentially temporary nature. The language of the Art-Journal cited above demonstrates quite clearly that it was not simple utilitarian ends that drove the desire to save the Palace:

* Whatever be the uses to which the Crystal Palace be devoted, it must be preserved. We must first labour to secure this object, and then consider how it can be most advantageously arranged' (my italics). That the desires driving this emphasis are more than practical is made evident by the wistful tone of an article in the same journal a month later: There is something solemn in the feeling that strikes me every time I enter the singular edifice; - that this wondrous undertaking, which will be the fruitful parent of so many consequences whose form and magnitude it is yet impossible to conjecture, can give birth to nothing like itself; and that neither we, nor those who come after us, can hope to live through another event like this.10

Unique parent of unknown consequences, event never to be repeated - we can hear in this passage an aspiration to commemorate that includes, paradoxically, the fantasy of continuation (at least as 'fruitful parent') along with that characteristic trope of every memorial, the insistence that the object mourned for is so special that no repetition is in fact possible. The tone of melancholy celebration is typical, as will be clear from this long passage from the following month's Illustrated London News:

Although the press, with a rare unanimity was loudly and earnestly in favour of retaining it as a permanent addition to the few public buildings in London of which an Englishman cares to boast, and although the people were so convinced that such an act of Vandalism as its demolition was so incredible that they did not even take the trouble to petition or remonstrate against the designs or whims of the few who entertained a contrary opinion - the Building must come down. The fiat of destruction appears to have gone forth, and we suppose that in a few months the glittering Palace of iron and glass, the most unique and remarkable building in the world, will be as entirely a thing of the past as the ice-palaces of the Empress of Russia that thawed in the summer sun, or the hanging gardens and glittering halls of Babylon, shorn of its glory three thousand years ago.11

9 The naming of the Crystal Palace is typically traced to the 2 November 1850 issue of Punch. Earlier sources have been suggested but all are traceable to the periodical press. 10 'Wanderings in the Crystal Palace - no. IIP, Art-Journal, 1 September 1851, p. 230. 11 'Close of the Exhibition', Illustrated London News, 11 October 1851, p. 441.


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The writer works to establish a proleptic nostalgia by means of two disjunct strategies: the evocation of a disaffected public, of one heart in its affections but let down by the whims of a cold elite on the one hand, and on the other the allusion to two quite different models of sumptuous loss. After all, no matter how elaborate, a palace of ice will always be expected to melt away; that is part of the magnificent excess it represents. The halls and gardens of Babylon were fixed structures that stood for centuries; it is only the long period of their existence that allows their destruction to enter the register of recognized cultural losses. The Crystal Palace, in other words, shares more than a physical resem- blance to the palace of ice. Both edifices were meant to be evanescent gestures of magnificent impermanence. The author nevertheless would like his readers to imagine the dismantling of the structure in Hyde Park as in some measure comparable to the disappearance of one of the wonders of the ancient world.

In spite of the hyperbolic sense of loss he works hard to establish, the author offers three sources of comfort. One is the reminder that the Exhibition 'does not die childless'; that is, the hundreds of thousands of pounds made by the event were intended to produce related public benefits (as indeed they did, principally in the shape of what came to be the Victoria and Albert Museum). The other two sources of cheer are intriguingly contradictory: on the one hand the author makes the sophisticated suggestion that the demolition of the Crystal Palace might itself contribute to the romance of the event, and on the other he raises the hope that, rather than being demolished, the structure will be moved. As we shall see, both of these hopes were in some measure realized.

Nostalgia is certainly evident in the visual record: an illustration of a proposed monument to the Great Exhibition graced a page of the Illustrated London News in October 1851 (see Figure 2). More evocatively, the periodical would run an image of the remains of the Crystal Palace by moonlight almost a year later, the scene represented with all the characteristics of an antique ruin visited by a solitary sentimental tourist. Indeed, the suggestion is made in the article that accompanies that illustration that 'the Coliseum itself by moonlight is not so grand a sight'.12 As its title suggests, 'The Old Crystal Palace by the Ghost of the Exhibition of 1851' imagines the spectre of the event haunting its devastated home. (See Figure 3.) Unsurprisingly, the author suggests that that protoplasmic entity will not follow the public as it moves to another site of return: the structure to be rebuilt at Sydenham and opened in 1854 The image facing the evocative ruins of the original palace, it is worth noting, showed the festive placement of the first pillar for the new building, suggesting not only the close relationship between nostalgia and repetition in the reception and afterlife of sites of exhibition, but the overdetermined place of commemoration in the process of their conception, construction, and use (see Figure 4). 12 'The Old Crystal Palace: By the Ghost of the Exhibition of 1851', Illustrated London News, 14 August, 1852,

p. in.



Figure 2 'Proposed Monument in Commemoration of the Great Exhibition'. Illustrated London News, 25 October 1851.


JONAH SIEGEL 43

Figure 3 'Remains of the Crystal Palace in Hyde Park'. Illustrated London News, 14 August 1852.

The Crystal Palace was not moved, of course; rather, a new version of the structure was built at Sydenham, now no longer a display of contemporary arts and manufactures, but a version of the perfect museum where Greek courts featuring casts of all the major classical statues (see Figure 5) gave way to Egyptian vistas dominated by colossal replicas of the statues at Abu Simbel (see Figure 6), and where Medieval courts coexisted with Moorish and Babylonian. At Sydenham, the Crystal Palace returns as a limitless Palace of Art, owing as much to the sensibility represented by the speaker in Tennyson's poem as to the technological breakthroughs of Paxton.



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'Here we are again1 ' or the Unending Exhibition

The nineteenth century saw resistance to, as well as celebration of, those things for which the Crystal Palace and the exhibition it housed were seen to stand. 'You believe in a palace of crystal that can never be destroyed', runs one famous denunciation, a palace at which one will not be able to put out one's tongue or make a long nose on the sly. And perhaps that is just why I am afraid of this edifice, that it is of crystal and can never be destroyed and that one cannot put one's tongue out at it even on the sly.13 The criticism of Dostoevsky's underground man may be read as part of his challenge to an optimistic, totalizing, post-Enlightenment view of human progress, or to the distinct but related nineteenth-century bourgeois version of that sentiment, and that is certainly an important motivation. Nevertheless, it is striking that the underground man's disgust emphasizes not simply the self- evident wonder of the glass structure, but its permanent nature - that 'it cannot be destroyed', as he notes twice in two sentences.14 What the second half of the nineteenth century discovered is that the Crystal Palace is indeed indestructible, not so much because it is an idea, but because it is recurrent. The Russian novelist never saw the Great Exhibition, of course; he was too late for that. The Palace he saw, and at which his character would have liked to stick out his tongue, was the one in Sydenham, which had been flourishing for nine years by the time he visited England in 1863.

Similarly, and for reasons that will soon become clear, most of Ruskin's comments about the Crystal Palace are made in relation to the structure that was reconstructed in Sydenham in 1854. The architecture of both palaces was, as is well known, not to his liking, but it is worth citing a postscript he added to the end of the first volume of Modern Painters on the Great Exhibition itself, as it indicates that his problem is not so much with a design he disdained as with the consciousness of the public that thronged its halls. Ruskin is moved, as he was to be more than once, by the coincidence of Turner's death and the year the Crystal Palace originally opened. Exercised by a banal line in The Times suggesting that Turner's works are missed at the current exhibition at the Royal Academy, the critic responds heatedly: We miss! Who misses? The populace of England rolls by to weary itself in the great bazaar of Kensington, little thinking that a day will come when those veiled vestals and 13 Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes from the Underground (1864), trans, by Constance Garnett (New York: Dover, 1992),

p. 24 (my emphasis). The well-known passage is cited in Auerbach, who includes a useful compendium of skeptical responses to the Palace: Great Exhibition of 1831, pp. 206-10; on the afterlife of the Exhibition, see pp. 193-231; on Sydenham, see pp. 200-11. 14 A more literal, recent translation emphasizes the disturbingly redundant timelessness the underground man identifies in a crystal structure that is 'forever indestructible'; see Fyodor Dostoevsky, Notes fiom Underground, trans, by Boris Jakim (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 2009), pp. 33. Important context for this particular manifestation of the rage of the underground man is to be found in Isobel Armstrong's magisterial Victorian Glassworlds: Glass Culture and the Imagination, 1830 -1880 (Oxford University Press, 2008).



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prancing amazons, and goodly merchandize of precious stones and gold, will all be forgotten as though they had not been, but that the light which has faded from the walls of the Academy is one which a million of Koh-i-Noors could not rekindle, and that the year 1851 will, in the far future, be remembered less for what it has displayed than for what it has withdrawn.15 Ruskin's concern is with the memory of the public in relation to exhibition - the way the 'far future' will remember 1851. His rage is driven by a sense that, the anodyne sentimentality of The Times notwithstanding, the crowd filing into the Palace is not aware that it is engaged in something that is in its form deeply forgettable.

The rebuilding of the Crystal Palace at Sydenham may be taken as an act of memory, or preservation, or it may be taken as an act of forgetting related to the one Ruskin identified from the outset. Forgotten is the fact that the Palace was meant to be transitory. Indeed, to make the Palace a permanent structure is to acknowledge that it needs to be rebuilt precisely because memory is not enough. When Ruskin came to write his pamphlet 'The Opening of the Crystal Palace Considered in Some of its Relations to the Prospects of Art', he had the reopening in mind. (See Figure 8.)

The critic's text begins with a contrast: Ruskin is in Switzerland as he reads about events in England, and he finds in that nation a pastoral emblem of a relationship to the past lost in his own. He juxtaposes his fantasy of the unchang- ing lives of Swiss peasants 'retaining', as he says, 'the same quiet thoughts from generation to generation', to the forms of frenzied inattention or distracted amnesia characteristic of his own native land.16 The natural support of memory Ruskin identifies in his dream of Switzerland ('the same quiet thoughts from generation to generation') is also, it bears saying, the principal function of ideal places of exhibition throughout his work. The reason that he argues for accretion rather than displacement as the museum develops is because of his sense of the role of the institution in sustaining memory: 'after a room has been once arranged', he will write about museums in 1880, 'there must be no change in it'. Stasis is the perquisite for a memory that is deeply personal not because it reflects individual experience, but because it can be made familial: 'after twenty years' absence - coming back to the room in which one learned one's bird or beast alphabet, we should be able to show our children the old bird on the old perch in the accustomed corner'.17 The form of the institution is designed to support its fundamental role: to reinforce memory

15 John Ruskin, The Works of John Ruskin, ed. by E. T. Cook and Alexander Wedderburn, 39 vols, Library Edition (London: George Allen, 1903-12), in: Modern Painters, vol. 1 (1903), p. 631 (emphasis in the original). Subsequent references to Ruskin are to this edition. 16 Ruskin, Works, xn: Lectures on Architecture and Painting (Edinburgh 1853); with Other Papers (1904), p. 417. 17 Ruskin, 'A Museum or Picture Gallery: Its Function and its Formation', in Works, xxxrv: The Storm-Cloud of the Nineteenth Century; On the Old Road; Arrows of the Chace; Ruskxniana (1908), p. 247.



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In The Ethics of the Dust' (1866) Ruskin's contrast to the transience of the Great Exhibition is not national (Swiss versus British) but temporal. He bemoans the passing of old-fashioned fairs; his instance of these is the festival represented in 'St. Catherine's Hill', from Turner's Picturesque Views in England and Wales. This fair, which takes place on a site commemorating the namesake of Ruskin's own mother, is the traditional and popular pastoral the critic juxtaposes with those centrally produced celebrations of modernity bound in iron and glass.18

Traditional celebrations or commemorations are, of course, popular markers of time, significant returns generating and supporting social memory. The returns of the Crystal Palace perform precisely the opposite function for Ruskin, however, which is what makes the giant mechanical clown placed in the Sydenham Crystal Palace in the 1860s to celebrate Christmas particularly disturbing.19 (See Figure 10.) That piece of sculpture', notes Ruskin, was the face of the clown in a pantomime, some twelve feet high from brow to chin, which face, being moved by the mechanism which is our pride, every half-minute opened its mouth from ear to ear, showed its teeth, and revolved its eyes, the force of these periodical seasons of expression being increased and explained by the illuminated inscription underneath, 'Here we are again.'20 The gigantism of the clown and its repetitions are all evidently meant to compensate for the vacuity of what it is expressing, which is no more than the fact of shared repetition. The need for a caption reveals the hollowness of 'seasons of expression' that are neither seasonal nor truly expressive. (See Figure 11.)

Fittingly, Ruskin mentions this contraption twice. I have drawn the above quotation from Aratra Pentelid (1880), where it plays a part in his comparison of the Crystal Palace - 'verily the Metropolitan cathedral of this century' - to the cathedral in Pisa. The laughing mechanical face is an emblem of the crisis of consciousness and memory represented by the perpetual returns of the Crystal Palace, a crisis Ruskin links directly to the heterogeneous and incoherent art lessons of the palace at Sydenham: When it is assumed, and with too good reason, that the mind of the English populace is to be addressed, in the principal Sacred Festival of its year, by sculpture such as this, I need scarcely point out to you that the hope is absolutely futile of advancing their intelligence by collecting within this building [. . .] examples of sculpture filched indiscriminately from the past work, bad and good, of Turks, Greeks, Romans, Moors,

18 Ruskin, Works, xviii: Sesame and Lilies; The Ethics of the Dust; The Crown of Wild Olive; with Letters on Public Affairs, 1 850-1866 (1905), pp. 242-43. 19 1 am grateful to Ingrid Beazley of the Dulwich Picture Gallery and Dulwichonview.org.uk for help locating an image of the clown, which is reproduced and discussed in Piggott, Palace of the Peoble, p. i6q. 20 Ruskin, Works, xx: Lectures on Art and Aratra Pentelici; with Lectures and Notes on Greek Art and Mythology (1905),

pp. 236-37.



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JONAH SIEGEL 53

Figure io 'Christmas Entertainments at the Crystal Palace'. Illustrated London News, 7 January 1865.

and Christians, miscoloured, misplaced, and misinterpreted; here thrust into unseemly corners, and there morticed together into mere confusion of heterogeneous obstacle; pronouncing itself hourly more intolerable in weariness, until any kind of relief is sought from it in steam wheelbarrows or cheap toyshops; and most of all in beer and meat, the corks and the bones being dropped through the chinks in the damp deal flooring of the English Fairy Palace.21

The meaningless repetition of the clown punctuates a frenzied modernity incapable of recognizing or maintaining the sacral quality of commemoration

21 Ruskin, Works, xx, 237.



Figure i i Clown's face, detail from 'Christmas Entertainments at the Crystal Palace'. Illustrated London News, 7 January 1865.

even at Christmas.22 The appetitive consumption Ruskin evokes (of beer, meat, corks, and bones) is of a piece with the unstructured experience of a heterogeneous assortment of ancient art. In Ruskin's lecture of 1867 'On the Present

22 The feeling of an irredeemably confused variety is evident even in a positive contemporary description of the festivities overseen by the face of the clown: 'The Illustration on our front page represents a scene in the Christmas entertainments which have been going on, for the last week or two, in the south transept of the Crystal Palace. The Platform in front of Shakspeare's [sic] House has been converted into a stage for the


JONAH SIEGEL 55

State of Modern Art, with Reference to the Advisable Arrangements of a National Gallery', the legacy of the Crystal Palace, as manifested in the great Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition and the Crystal Palace at Sydenham, runs counter to the model of the art gallery the critic endorses, precisely because of the inconstant relation to time that legacy vividly demonstrates: For when we are interested by the beauty of a thing, the oftener we can see it the better; but when we are interested only by the story of a thing, we get tired of hearing the same tale told over and over again, and stopping always at the same point - we want a new story presently, a new and better one - and the picture of the day, and novel of the day, become as ephemeral as the coiffure or the bonnet of the day. Now this spirit is wholly adverse to the existence of any lovely art. If you mean to throw it aside to- morrow, you never can have it to-day. If any one had really understood the motto from Keats, which was blazoned at the extremity of the first Manchester exhibition building, they would have known that it was the bitterest satire they could have written there, against that building itself and all its meanings - 'A thing of beauty is a joy for ever'. It is not a joy for three days, limited by date of return ticket.23 Art in Ruskin should work against the pressures of oblivion to create social memory, a steadily accumulating mass of what he calls 'true ancestral treasure, in which [. . .] history should be inscribed' wherever people congregate, 'houses, streets, churchases, places of public resort'. It is impossible for this memorializ- ing function to be manifested, however, when art has become only the most notable (because most degraded) element in a constant stream of barely discrim- inated stimulants: 'art is the monster of a caravan; our exhibitions are neither more nor less than bazaars of ruinously expensive toys, or of pictures degraded to the function of toys' (xix, 210).

While Ruskin is emphatically clear on the need for places of public pleasure, he challenges an entire line of nineteenth-century support for rational amuse- ment when he argues that the confusion of a place meant for the display of art with a place intended for fun exposes a crisis in values that is not so much the result of British mass culture as its condition: The British lower public has no very clear notion of the way to amuse itself - does so at present in a very dismal and panic-struck manner; it has a notion of improving its manners and getting useful information at the same time, and so it makes its way to the Crystal Palace, and, with its own instincts principally tending towards ginger-beer, hopes also to have its mind enlarged by the assistance of Greek sculpture, (xix, 216)

gambols of Harlequins with Columbines and Clowns, or for the dangerous feats of highflying gymnasts on the trapeze; the graceful evolutions of Mr. Jackson Haines, the American Skater; the grotesque contortions of Herr Willio, "The Flexible Gnome;" the rope trick, performed in a closed cupboard or watch-box by the Brothers Nemo, without any diabolical aid; or the intelligent dog whom Jean Bond has taught to behave like a thinking animal. A pantomimic ballet, composed by Mr. Nelson Lee, was the concluding spectacle on the evening of Boxing Day; and it is this which has formed the subject of our Illustration. The Gigantic Clown's head, which overlooks the roof of the Shakspeare's [sic] dwelling, is a fit president for this occasion'; 'Christmas Entertainments at the Crystal Palace', Illustrated London News, 7 January 1865, p. 2. Ruskin, Works, xix: The Cestus of Aglaia and The Queen of the Air; with Other Papers and Lectures on Art and Literature, 1860-1870 (1905), p. 209. Subsequent references will be given in the text.



It is typical of Ruskin's irony to take literally the clichd idea that the great Crystal structures built for exhibition might be understood as the cathedrals of the modern age. When Ruskin looks down the apse of the Crystal Palace, as he would at any great cathedral, to find 'the close of the great aisled vista as the principad joy of one's heart' (xix, 216), he sees not an altar, but the clown face he will still be describing in Aratra Pentelici and a catchphrase derived from the mid-century pantomime celebrated every Christmas: One has a natural tendency to look also to the apse of this cathedral of modern faith to see the symbol of it, as one used to look to the concha of the Cathedral of Pisa for the face of Christ, or to the apse of Torcello for the figure of the Madonna. Well, do you recollect what occupied the place of these - in the apse of the Crystal Palace? The head of a Pantomime clown, some twelve feet broad, with a mouth opening from ear to ear, opening and shutting by machinery, its eyes squinting alternately, and collapsing by machinery, its humour in general provided for by machinery, with the recognised utterance of English Wisdom inscribed above - 'Here we are again', (xix, 216) We may understand 'Here we are again' as the thinnest description of commemoration possible, a stark untextured declaration of shared activity amounting to nothing more than repetition.24 In this lecture Ruskin notes two things in particular: that the big grinning head provokes no laughter, and that the audience it is designed for does not even have enough attention to wait to see it move. 'Do you recollect?' he asks his readers, but his point is that that is an unlikely even- tuality, given the fact that the image, for all its gargantuan size, is paid little heed by those it is meant to amuse. This is precisely not an object tending to create or support recollections.

I want to propose two ways of understanding Ruskin's returns to the Crystal Palace. They remind us, for one, that for Ruskin art is not simply a marker of the moral health of a culture that makes good art or preserves it - though it is that. His engagement with the accumulation of art needs to be understood as a sophisticated response to a modernity characterized by an inexorable increase of claims on the attention, by the pressures of excess, of an ever-increasing ubiquity resulting in devaluation, which in turn provokes attempts to find satisfaction by means of a characteristically modern concept of novelty, one ultimately dependent on forgetting what came before. The critic's treatment of display and accumulation, his insistence that important things are those that are lasting, is closely related to the passions expressed by the periodical press at the close of the Crystal Palace. But Ruskin helps us to recognize these emotions as part of the complex and problematic nature of pleasure in modernity - a period in which satisfaction is to be sought not by living in a world of beauty,

24 The expression is said to have been originated by the famous clown Harry Payne, who opened each Boxing Day Harlequinade at Drury Lane with a somersault (itself an energetic but meaningless return on the self) followed by those words. See Eric Partridge, The RoutUdge Dictionary of Historical Slang, abridged edn by Jacqueline Simpson (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973), p. 439.


JONAH SIEGEL 57

but by experiencing or anticipating unavoidable and generally unsatisfactory returns. The emphasis on the fine arts and on art history (which, after all, played only a small part in the original Great Exhibition) in the returns of the Crystal Palace suggests that the display of art objects - or art treasures, as they were sometimes called - and the creation of Palaces of Art more generally were cultural attempts to return to a form of valuation that the Palaces themselves were ever fated to undermine.

We may relate Ruskin's sense of the failure of the Great Exhibition to be permanent or to end - its need to return - to the ideas of a later thinker on art and the public. Walter Benjamin's account of the loss of aura is sometimes still too simply identified with technological developments. He himself, however, is careful to identify what he calls 'the social bases of the contemporary decline of the aura', which he traces to 'the desire of contemporary masses to bring things "closer" spatially and humanly, which is just as ardent as their bent towards overcoming the uniqueness of every reality by accepting its reproduction'.25 Technology puts into play, it does not generate, the aspiration of emergent mass culture. Like Ruskin, Benjamin proposes as an antithesis to the modern experience of art a pastoral fantasy of ritual use - hence the mystical nature of the term ('aura') the later critic arrives at for describing what is lost between the traditional experience of art and the modern.

Still, the role of repetition in relation to aura can appear simpler than it in fact is. While the reproduction of an image is the kind of iteration that most concerns Benjamin, and is a topic of real interest to Ruskin as well, the returns entailed in the Crystal Palace demonstrate the complexity of the issue with particular force, in part because of their incongruous nature. How can something that involved the marshalling of so many distinct resources in such large numbers be repeated? How can a one-off event reoccur? The answer to both questions is self-evident: a unique event can, by definition, never be repeated. The Crystal Palace would never again be the site of the Great Exhibition. But the answer only opens up on to a more fundamental question: what do we want from repetition, if it is not more of the same?

While critiques of the popular effects of media have revolved around its transient nature and its generation of unsatisfiable desire since at least the first decade of the nineteenth century, what I think Ruskin's response to the Crystal Palace illustrates, like those of the anonymous journalists I have cited, is the manner in which even so apparently material and unique a structure as the Crystal Palace can share in these qualities. The press worked hard to make the Crystal Palace in some ways analogous to itself, or periodical, but that may be

25 Walter Benjamin, 'The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction', in Illuminations, ed. with an Introduction by Hannah Arendt, trans, by Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1968), pp. 217-52 (p. 225, my emphasis).



less of an achievement than may at first appear. Ruskin identifies the way in which iteration in modernity is an unavoidable condition rather than a choice. The question is how to make the act of return one that results in memory supported and sustained, rather than in repetition as a hollow challenge to the attention such as Ruskin saw in the pantomime clown.

We may recognize Ruskin's treatment of display and accumulation to be closely related to that in Tennyson's 'Palace of Art' if we engage with the strange promise of return at the close of the poem, and allow ourselves to understand the text's lesson to reside not solely in its treatment of self-consciousness or in the ethical crises provoked by a selfish aestheticism. We may read Tennyson's poem for what it suggests about the complex forms of pleasure in modernity, for the sense that what satisfaction is possible is to be achieved not by living in a world of beauty but by carefully modulated and controlled returns.

It may have seemed forced, at the outset of this essay, to propose Keats's A thing of beauty is a joy forever' as a contrast to 'Here we are again'. But it is Ruskin himself who suggests the antithesis as he develops his project of finding the treasure at the heart of each palace of art. The critic not only returns to the phrase from Endymion in his 1867 essay on the arrangement of the National Gallery, he gives it new life in 1880 when his reissue of the lectures he delivered on the occasion of the 1857 Manchester Art Treasures Exhibition, 'The Politi- cal Economy of Art', is provided a new title: '"A Joy For Ever" (And Its Price in the Market)'. All of the critic's terms, as he explains the reason for the change, play on the difference between repetition and permanence that preoccupies him when he thinks about exhibitions. Indeed, the change is evidently designed to provide the opportunity for this rumination on memory and repetition: The title of this book, - or, more accurately, of its subject; - for no author was ever less likely than I have lately become, to hope for perennial pleasure to his readers from what has cost himself the most pains, - will be, perhaps, recognised by some as the last clause of the line chosen from Keats by the good folks of Manchester, to be written in letters of gold on the cornice, or Holy rood, of the great Exhibition which inaugurated the career of so many, - since organized, by both foreign governments and our own, to encourage the production of works of art, which the producing nations, so far from intending to be their 'joy for ever', only hope to sell as soon as possible. Yet the motto was chosen with uncomprehended felicity: for there never was, nor can be, any essential beauty possessed by a work of art, which is not based on the conception of its honoured permanence, and local influence, as a part of appointed and precious furni- ture, either in the cathedral, the house, or the joyful thoroughfare, of nations which enter their gates with thanksgiving, and their courts with praise.26 If the clown that occupies what should be the sacred and defining space at Sydenham is a grotesque instance of mere recurrence, the hope Keats expresses

26 Ruskin, Works, xvi: 'A Joy for Ever3 and the Two Paths; with Letters on the Oxford Museum and Various Addresses, 1856-1860 (1905), p. 11.


JONAH SIEGEL 59

with such ringing clarity is, in this context, an immediately ironized claim to permanence. Ruskin cannot really have expected his readers to identify the quotation cited in his title with the location it graced for less than half a year decades earlier. But that is precisely the point. The passage from Endymion written into a structure that itself is a return (the Great Exhibition coming back as another Palace of Art) expresses the impossible wish for permanence even as it registers the fact that that wish is only to be fed by repetition. Thus it is that Ruskin's elaborate locution identifies the Great Exhibition not as an end in itself or as even having an end, but as that 'which inaugurated the career of so many, - since organized, by both foreign governments and our own'.

In The Seeds of Time Fredric Jameson identifies 1857 as a watershed in the history of time. The critic's improbable precision is traceable to the publication of Baudelaire's Les Fleurs du mal and Flaubert's Madame Bovary in that year, texts that Jameson reads, applying Weber, as registers of the recognition of the desacralization of time: What happens in the West to the existential [. . .] can most instructively be observed in the realm of time, which on the one hand is seized upon in its measurability [. . .] and on the other becomes the deep bottomless vegetative time of Being itself, no longer draped and covered with myth or inherited religion. It is this new and unadorned experience of time that will generate the first expressions of the modern in the West - in the crucial year 1857, the year of the poems of Baudelaire and of Flaubert's first published novel.27 Ruskin also returns to 1857 in order to find his instance of temporal crisis. From the vantage of 1880, he identifies a characteristic moment, not in the creation of a new literature of ennui, as Jameson does in his passages on Baudelaire and Flaubert, but in illustrating the crisis between the irreconcilable aspiration towards permanence (joy that is for ever) and the fact of unsatisfactory repetition. It is not necessary to endorse entirely Jameson's bold dating of the moment of disenchantment in order to use his insight into the dual nature of time in modernity: on the one hand the instrumental measure of the clock, on the other an intimation of a deeper but unreachable sense of time associated with Being itself, an intuition made awful by being stripped of all cultural forms (sacred or at least communal commemorations) through which it might be experienced.

Tennyson's 'Palace of Art' may seem quite literally preposterous (in the sense of reversing the normal order of events) in its imagination of an un- satisfactorily great art museum in English letters years before a more than mediocre one existed in the British Isles. But the poet's apparent prescience is traceable to the fact that the sacralization of art as an alternative to the unsatisfactory nature of time in modernity is not a result of the experience of sites

27 Fredric Jameson, The Seeds of Time (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 84.


6o Art, Disgust, and the Returns of the Crystal Palace

of display so much as itself a characteristic modern development that anticipates and drives the emergence of such sites. The aura of art may be a necessary antithesis to the drives of modernity, but it is not for that reason protected from the effects of those drives. Its vulnerability is the source of its value, which is the reason that, although modernity invents more aura than it can ever destroy, that quality is fated perennially to appear on the verge of being lost.

'The Palace of Art' was extensively revised before its republication in Poems in 1842, but it was only the content of the Palace, not the structure of either poem or building, that saw significant changes. The text itself may license us to read Tennyson's revisiting of the place as a version of the soul's anticipated return with others. Both revisitings suggest that a Palace of Art (or 'The Palace of Art') offers less in the way of satisfaction than as an occasion for registering the unavoidable need for repetition. Tennyson, driving his poem to a crisis that is undermined by his inability not to imagine a hope for return, himself then enacting that tentative recuperative desire a decade later, Ruskin returning to the impermanent claim to permanence written into the Art Treasures Exhibi- tion, or the periodical press creating the necessary sense of nostalgia that reality cannot meet as the Crystal Palace is disassembled: we may understand these as so many instances of the ways in which the force of return is at once a confes- sion of weakness and a manifestation of the reed hope that art and exhibition have to offer modernity.

So: Here we are again.


Article Contentsp. [33]p. 34p. 35p. 36p. 37p. 38p. 39p. 40p. 41p. 42p. 43p. 44p. 45p. 46p. 47p. 48p. 49p. 50p. 51p. 52p. 53p. 54p. 55p. 56p. 57p. 58p. 59p. 60

Issue Table of ContentsThe Yearbook of English Studies, Vol. 40, No. 1/2, THE ARTS IN VICTORIAN LITERATURE (2010), pp. i-xi, 1-325Front MatterGUEST EDITORS' PREFACE [pp. v-vi]ABSTRACTS [pp. ix-xi]The Arts in Victorian Literature: An Introduction [pp. 1-7]Dickens Extra-Illustrated: Heads and Scenes in Monthly Parts (The Case of "Nicholas Nickleby") [pp. 8-32]Display Time: Art, Disgust, and the Returns of the Crystal Palace [pp. 33-60]Women and the Art of Fiction [pp. 61-82]'Of marble men and maidens': Sin, Sculpture, and Perversion in Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Marble Faun" [pp. 83-102]George Eliot and the Prima Donna's 'Script' [pp. 103-120]'Sick-sad dreams': Burne-Jones and Pre-Raphaelite Medievalism [pp. 121-140]Song's Fictions [pp. 141-159]Swinburne's Galleries [pp. 160-179]Caught between Gautier and Baudelaire: Walter Pater and the Death of Sculpture [pp. 180-195]Walter Pater's Acoustic Space: 'The School of Giorgione', Dionysian "Anders-streben", and the Politics of Soundscape [pp. 196-216]Whistlerian Impressionism and the Venetian Variations of Vernon Lee, John Addington Symonds, and Arthur Symons [pp. 217-245]Icons of Desire: The Classical Statue in Later Victorian Literature [pp. 246-272]'Music is not merely for musicians': Vernon Lee's Musical Reading and Response [pp. 273-294]'Lessons in sensibility': Rosa Newmarch, Music Appreciation, and the Aesthetic Cultivation of the Self [pp. 295-318]ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 319-320]Review: untitled [pp. 320-322]Review: untitled [pp. 322-324]Review: untitled [pp. 324-325]

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