Other formats

    TEI XML file   ePub eBook file  

Connect

    mail icontwitter iconBlogspot iconrss icon

Versions of the Sublime: Illustrating Paradise Lost

3. The Expulsion

3. The Expulsion

The Expulsion from Paradise, which marks the beginning of history and the definitive separation of the human from our origin in a world of perfected nature unsupplemented by technology, also marks allegorically another historical moment, that of colonisation. In this section, I want to speculate on the translation of this event, particularly in its representation by John Martin, to New Zealand.

Walter Mantell's arrival in Wellington in 1840 on the Oriental, one of the first four New Zealand Company ships, established an early and close connection between New Zealand and the world of ideas so powerfully represented in John Martin's illustrations. Walter Mantell was a son of Gideon Mantell, the prominent geologist and paleontologist who praised Martin's abilities as a painter and included an engraving by Martin of an iguanodon as the frontispiece to his The Wonders of Geology, published in 1838. Walter sent extensive collections of geological and paleontological samples back to his father, showing a particular interest in the moa. Included in the Mantell collection in the Turnbull Library are copies of catalogues for two of Martin's paintings, The Destruction of Pompeii and Herculaneum and The Deluge, both of which were very influential and exemplified Martin's conception of the principles governing illustration of historical and literary subjects. In the catalogue to the former he writes:

The tragic fate of the two cities of Pompeii and Herculaneum is a subject which requires no embellishment from the pen of the poet or the pencil of the artist; indeed whoever considers the simple historical fact of these cities ... must soon convince himself that the most successful effort of the poet or of the artist, must fall far, very far short of the awful sublimity of the simple reality of that dreadful visitation ....

Although he has sedulously consulted every source of information within his reach, which might enable him to complete his task with strict attention to historical truth; yet, with all his research, with all the valuable and interesting illustrations he has been enabled to collect from gentlemen of high intellectual attainments, who have made accurate observations on the spot, he is fully sensible that the attempt which he now submits to inspection must require the indulgence of a candid and liberal reader. 25

His absorption in catastrophe and cataclysm is not only a moral interest. Bulwer praised his paintings for their achieving 'the most magnificent alliance of philosophy and art', and illustrations like that of the Expulsion confirm his estimation.

Martin's illustration (Fig. 6) is another instance of the material sublime and differs from Westall's (Fig. 5) in all the ways previously discussed. While they both show

Figure 5. Richard Westall, illustration to Book 12.640.

Figure 5. Richard Westall, illustration to Book 12.640.

Figure 6. John Martin, illustration to Book 12.641, Adam and Eve Driven out of Paradise. 39

Figure 6. John Martin, illustration to Book 12.641, Adam and Eve Driven out of Paradise. 39

Adam's and Eve's profound grief and sense of loss, this is Westall's principal concern, his illustration having the effect of Milton's description of their response to the Archangel Michael's announcement of God's judgement in Book 11:

Adam at the news
Heart-struck with chilling sorrow stood,
That all his senses bound; Eve, who unseen
Yet all had heard. with audible lament ...
'O unexpected stroke, worse than of Death!
Must I leave thee Paradise ... from thee
How shall l part, and whither wander down
Into a lower World, to this obscure
And wild, how shall we breathe in other Air
Less pure, accustom'd to immortal Fruits?' (269-85)

At this moment in the poem, Adam and Eve occupy the whole foreground, just as they do in Westall's picture. Adam is depicted by Westall as the pivotal figure, looking up to the source of judgment and exemplifying 'manly grace' while Eve's 'beauty' (4.490) is marked by her sorrow and, one might infer, by her originating the act of disobedience which has brought about their expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Together, their postures and expressions register human powerlessness when faced with the overwhelming power of God; the obscurity of the scene both enforces the totality of that power and its singularity of focus on the human figures.

Although Westall's conception of the scene suggests the emptiness of the world into which Adam and Eve are expelled, it is Martin's picture which is definitively located at the final moment of the poem, in which Adam and Eve enter a plain, not otherwise described because it is their utter solitariness as the first humans and the manifestation of human society and sociability in their holding hands which are of most importance as the concluding motifs of the poem. What Martin adds is a very specific representation of the beginning of history as a moment in which the human enters a world which has already existed without them for a very long time. The scene is one of wild and fearful grandeur, making the notion that the two humans have been given dominion over nature as part of their birthright seem profoundly ambiguous. It is the dinosaurs in the middle distance who seem at home and unaware of the intrusion into their world of this new class of being and their God-given role as 'Lords [to] Possess ... all the earth' (8.338-40), and their fulfillment of that role through their bringing that space of wild nature into conformity with the imperatives of human society. 26

Another arrival on the New Zealand company's ships in l840 was William Golder. He settled in the Hutt Valley and has the distinction of being the first settler poet to be published in New Zealand. In 1867, he published an epic poem, The New Zealand Survey (Wellington, 1867), which both describes the prehistory of New Zealand and envisages its future as the completion of the universal process of civilization through literature and science. His writing shows that the paradox of the fortunate fall was repeated in the experience of colonisation as an expulsion into a wild world from a place, however unparadisal, which was known as home. It also shows that Martin's interpretation of Paradise Lost, with its concentration upon the vast spaces of the material world, the incredibly long durations and cycles of geological time, the powers and energies of organic and intellectual being, and the transformative capabilities of the human race (rather than the human individual), locates a cultural matrix which powerfully informed the British settlement of New Zealand.

The ethos of the present moment of The New Zealand Survey, the moment of settlement in the wilderness, is strikingly like that of Martin's illustration of the Expulsion. The view of the Tararua range is one of 'savage grandeur'(4), and the effect of the 'broken ridges, rugged with deep dells/And steep declevities' (3) is to suggest both that the mountain range is like 'the backbone of some huge/Unweildly monster petrified, o'ergrown/With vegetation' and that, within the hills, in the distance, there are 'fertile valleys, hitherto unknown,/As hid from view in lonely solitudes/Untrod by man'(4). There is only a past and a future, the present being both the record of the past and the 'wild scene' which will be progressively transformed by 'the march/Of civilization’, (5) as the future is realized.

The poem opens with a question which both defines an identity for the reader and the project of the poem:

Who may look back on unrecorded time,
And feel unawed at the momentous view;
When nothing but what is sublimely great
Unfolds itself in every phase and form?

The sublime is associated with poetry, science, and philosophy, but its perception depends upon a certain orientation or position of the self in reiation to the natural world:

So here, though clothed in Nature's vernal robes
This scene delightful, calling forth our praise,
And admiration, still, all speak of change
And revolutions buried in the past;
But which oblivion fails such things to veil,
Though such might 'scape the less enquiring eye
That doats on beauty, willing to admire!
'Tis well should we with sense of the sublime,
Endeavour information to increase
From nature and her works! (12)

This emphasis on a history of change, and on the need for deep perception and understanding which only 'th'enquiring mind' and poets, ‘Nature’s interpreters’(1) may possess, is elaborated through Cantos 2-4 in such a way that the sequence of geological stages in New Zealand's history, from total immersion in the sea through to being completely forested, parallels the main phases of the creation of the world as Milton tells it in Books 7 and 8. Central to Golder's conception is the belief that this sequence of change and revolution is guided by providence, but not in such a way that linear progress occurs. The ‘agencies’ of nature which do the work of providence do not necessarily produce comprehensible results:

Though mountains must be levelled, or the plains
Be raised to mountains, or submerged in lakes,
Or pop'lous cities be o’erthrown and sunk,
Wholesale entombed! - With dread commotions tossed
Earth must its features change, remodeled be
To best advantage, as transformed to more
Of usefulness, in time to be complete! (22-23)

This account of the cycles of change in the material world, incorporating human life and society as signified by the city, provides a pertinent reading of Martin's work, especially the scenes of catastrophe. Given Martin's commitment to historical accuracy in his paintings, they may well be motivated by much more than moral judgments about human pride. The material sublime becomes the way in which these new conceptions of the length of history, the fact of revolutionary change in nature, and the discovery of new powers able to be put to human use through new technologies, 27 are represented in the first phase of their circulation through society. It would make a significant difference to the interpretation of Martin’s pictures if Golder's conviction about even destructive change being part of a larger plan for progress were part of Martin's thinking as well.

The art of colonisation is one of realising the depictions of the fancy 28 both in writing and in the civilising of the wilderness. An example occurs towards the end of Canto 4, which is the account of the achievement of ‘native grandeur’ by the covering of 'elemental rudeness with the garb/Of vernal beauty' (33). The prospect of the Mungaroa swamp leads to various reflections, including a moment of picturesque imagining followed by a precise account of mental models according to which the landscape of New Zealand has been actually transformed:

But lo! this swamp,- as from this height ‘tis view’d
It bears the semblance of a level lawn;
Or meadow, clothed with a luxuriant sward,
Of large extent, begirt with birch clad hills,
A place attractive for sequestered life,
As from the world apart, but yet within
The reach of social fellowship, when such
Is felt desirable! Here, fancy might
Depict a scene of happiness and ease
'Mid flocks and herds, which undisturbed might graze
In rural quiet ...
Such fancied pleasures, as embodied here
In all reality, would one remind
Of paradizian joys found in that vale
Where Rassless lived, in ancient story famed! (45-46)

It is Canto5 which considers the span of time marking the history of human habitation of New Zealand and which shows that the transformation of the wild to the civilized is an inclusive process, an action of the human race on nature and human nature which is contributed to in a small way by each individual. The best expression of the core ideas which recur in various combinations through the canto is to be found at the end of Canto 4:

civilization's power,
In industry, in enterprise, and skill,-
All three with ardent energy combined,
Must rise and conquer nature's wildness, and
Upon her work far other changes bold
To bring her to subjection; thus, must mind,
As aided by pecuniary means,
Be stamped on stubborn matter, as a die
An image would impress on plastic things;
The while effecting in reality,
What fancy paints, a pleasing happy scene! (49)

These lines return attention to the scene of the expulsion and to the foreshadowed overcoming of the original loss of Paradise by the conversion into a copy of it of the wilderness beyond the gate of the Garden of Eden. Golder's anticipation of the achievement of civilisation in a transformed landscape and society is expressed near the end of the poem in terms which foreground a specific meaning for the sublime in the context of colonisation and recall the contrast between the sublime and the beautiful which is illustrated by the pictures discussed above. In Golder's view, the sublime and the sentiments associated with it are the attributes of that which is beyond the boundaries of the social; to expand the domain of the social over (wild) nature, including wild human nature, is to see

the work of bliss begun,
Appearances display a wonderous change
Upon surrounding scenes, in clearings new,
Like Melancholy's glooms transformed to smiles:
Yea smiles of promise and realities
Conjoin'd, the fruits of hardy enterpnze,
And well aimed energy ... (62-63)