To discuss Retzsch in literary texts blazes a trail. In his study on German Romanticism and English Art, William Vaughan derives from “the accounts of contemporary [nineteenth-century] novelists” the idea that the rather “peculiar attraction” of Retzsch’s outlines was a sign “of mere superficial appeal,” “an essential adornment of the cultivated lady’s drawing-room.”1 Vaughan crucially addressed the intense interest of English artists and poets in Retzsch. Conversely, his summary view of novels hardly resists textual analysis and the intricate symbolism often emanating from writers’ handling of Retzsch, especially in fiction. He did not name the “contemporary novelists,” and his otherwise excellent critique refers only to Disraeli. Without pretending to exhaust the subject, I want to advance in this chapter several new names forming an array of cases, whilst re-investigating Disraeli’s. I mean to show how and why Heinrich Heine, Benjamin Disraeli, Edgar Allan Poe, Théophile Gautier, Walter Herries Pollock, even Charles Dickens (in David Copperfield) and his regular illustrator, Phiz, all sampled Retzsch at various moments in their own creations. They did not just confirm or enhance a fashion. They exploited the graphic benchmark in intricate ways that show how literature turns to art to fortify or extend plot, complement style, and vie for prominence in aesthetic appeal.2
10.1 Devilish Relish of Converted Israelites
Two such uses occur in inaugural prose works by daring young men, Heine’s Die Harzreise (The Harz Journey, written in 1824, published in 1826), and Disraeli’s first novel Vivian Grey (1826). The former alludes to only two plates introducing the Brocken sequence as “Master Retzsch’s pretty Faust images” (auf den hübschen Faustbildern des Meister Retzsch, 116).3 The latter accommodates Retzsch’s entire set in chapter X of Disraeli’s Book Two of the novel and projects onto it several Château Desir characters. Although both allusions to Retzsch seem but minor textual details, their multiple implications enrich analytical reading when examined more closely.
Heine only embarked on his own hike from 12 or 13 September to 11 October 1824, but in his playful account the narrator ascends the Brocken on the night of 30 April to 1 May. He makes a point of honour to match the date of ascent with the traditional Walpurgis Night, which gives The Harz Journey a mysteriously supernatural tinge. True to such playful deceit, Heine tricks his readers. The introductory reference to Retzsch is a picture (Bild) of what will neither happen nor be shown in his future Travel Pictures (Reisebilder). Irony is predominant, no witchery occurs. Instead, Heine parallels the Eucharist to a sunset, a scene contemplated from a platform by numerous students, craftsmen and middle-class holidaymakers, a lay gathering defiantly treated like a Catholic mass (119). Furthermore, the narrative ends with his arrival at Ilsestein, a locality cited by Goethe in the Walpurgis Night, yet only at the onset of the witches’ congregation (F 3968). The pretence deflates the expectancy of a storyline centred on their revelry, and works rather as an X-ray of the motley poetics at work in a heterogeneous text. It critically substantiates its distinct design.
The Harz Journey lays claim to the status of fragmentary and rambling narrative, contrary to and competing with two of Goethe’s travelogues, Letters from Switzerland and the Italian Journey, explicitly or implicitly mentioned (120 & 128). Besides, his actual hike took Heine further, to Weimar, where he indeed met Goethe on 1 October. The Harz Journey is therefore much more than the travelogue of a genuine journey. Its autobiographical facet, rich in associations of ideas, assesses Heine’s Göttingen studies, mocks his tutors, refers to his recent opportunistic christening, and unravels his souvenirs of places, women, and books. It is also an analytical tour of opinions, beliefs, and judgments. It weaves a complex pattern of literary references and genres in which allusions are not to be taken at face value. It is tempting to see this varied array as a literary equivalent of Retzsch’s Walpurgis orgy in plate 22 (cf. Fig. 5.7): an attempt to recompose the picture by learned means and through varying roles.
As the narrator ascends the Brocken amid animated nature, glimpses of tales that will never be, although he would have loved to write them, mingle with vibrant descriptions and cultural allusions. To take but one example, the souvenir (after a well-known German legend) of huge granite blocks thrown like magic bullets by evil spirits during the Walpurgis Night spurs the writer’s desire to compete with Goethe (115–16). Mockingly, Heine chooses the most modern part of the witchery in Faust, the jeering allusions to several Enlightenment philosophers and thinkers, particularly Goethe’s “Buttock Fantasist” or Proktophantasmist (F 4144–71). No coincidence that, in Goethe’s blatant satire of this part of Walpurgis, “Buttock Fantasist” proudly asserts finding “travel-material” even in the orgy, and ambitions to control poets and devils. The prototype, Friedrich Nicolai, indeed a prolific travel-writer, supplies a counter-model. Yet, Heine’s own satire is not aimed at persons but literary trends and self-irony. His is a gathering of bluestockings, a supremely literary high court, half-animal half-human, mildly drinking tea and judging poetic works, including two of Heine’s own plays, favourably assessed, since he is henceforth deemed a pious and Christian author. The facetiousness is all the more obvious as this scene proves to be but a frightening nightmare. Extended to the full narrative, the sudden change of mood, taunting tone, piled-up references, and disorder reflect the wild and mixed carousing of Retzsch’s plate 22, and its leering orgiastic devils at odds with the decapitated and pitiful Margaret.
Expelled from University and even excluded by the innkeeper, the narrator is an outcast. The Brocken becomes his individual revel, his appropriate tribune to act out an unruly threefold part: as traveller-cum-reader, he holds in check Faust, “the grand, mystical, German national tragedy” (116); as a performer, he joins in the action and dramatically stages it; and as an interpreter, he indirectly plans his own chapter on Faust in a future title tackling Mme de Staël. Indeed, Heine’s De l’Allemagne (On Germany), initially published 1834 in French, includes a chapter on Johann Faust’s legend, centred in point of fact on Mephistophela, the female devil of his ballet to be, Der Doktor Faust, ein Tanzpoem (first authored 1847). Years before, on his solitary Brocken tour, the pert narrator transpires as Faust a number of times. He ascends alongside a jocular, out-of-breath, Mephistopheles imparting to him his humorous “cloven foot” spirit (116). As professor-cum-huckster or silver-tongued devil, he gives lectures, particularly to a beautiful young lady met on the Brocken (118 & 120). And, in one of the closing paragraphs, he declares “But now it stirs again and presses in my breast” (137), citing Goethe’s verses on the two souls dwelling and competing in his Faust’s breast (F 1112–13).
One last striking feature is the optical dimension of these pages. They were perhaps influenced by a phenomenon known as the Brocken spectre (Brockengespenst), the magnified shadow of an observer, surrounded by a halo and cast upon clouds heading into the sun. Heine’s idiosyncratic treatment seems to play with this, yet again in a literary sense. He makes of the Blocksberg a map of Northern Germany that allows scrutiny of his Vaterland (and its foremost “national” tragedy, Goethe’s Faust). He also turns Brocken, its highest summit, into a magic prism transforming the world at its feet. The panoramic view delivers two contradictory readings: the Blocksberg may be as calm and rational as a Philistine, and at the same time as wild and passionate as a Romantic, foremost proof being the 1 May anniversary, i.e., night of the Walpurgis revel itself (118). The Harz Journey is Heine’s prose début. As such, it bears already the hallmark of a style surprising for his contemporaries but characteristically spanning the gamut from irony to sublime. Despite its derisive manner and abrupt changes of tone, it offers an original depiction of the country’s complexity, emulating Retzsch’s orgiastic print 22.
Disraeli too, like Heine, converted to Christianity for social advancement and professional advantage but, unlike Heine’s variegated Walpurgis, introduced Retzsch’s set (and the reader) to the exclusive English upper crust. In Vivian Grey (1826), the very name Château Desir pictures a sire’s castle as a place of amorous and political cravings, amidst social gatherings and intrigues, with the ambitious Vivian Grey as main hero. Machinations revolve around electoral power and sexual gratification. With his sensational début, Disraeli had cut a winning succès à scandale in glittering style. In its richly woven pattern, frequent allusions to Goethe, nearly matching Disraeli’s worship of Byron, foster his interest in German romanticism. Vivian, extoling Lord Alhambra (a Byron alias), follows “the oldest poet in Europe,” that is, Goethe (70).4 He even boasts recognizing his style in an anonymous article of “the Weimar Literary Gazette” (a fictitious title he subscribes to), pretending to read it in the original.
In such a context, Retzsch’s outlines, hardly “an essential adornment of the cultivated lady’s drawing-room,”5 are a powerful cultural mediator (52–57). The scene does not take place in Julia’s own salon but at an aristocrat’s guest-filled summer mansion.6 Ironically referring to the portfolio as “anything so old, and so excellent” (53)— in 1826 Boosey’s version is only five years old but has already sold three editions—Vivian swears by a recent publication for several reader categories. The outlines’ presence in the silver-spoon castle residence settles of course Retzsch’s credit amongst aristocrats. Yet, more importantly, it also spreads the idea of its standing within a much larger middle class, fascinated by the fashionable world of Disraeli’s novel itself, titillated by the anonymity of its first edition, and boosted by merchant publisher Colburn’s puffed-up advertising. In 1826, Retzsch’s copied prints feature crucially as cultural surrogate. They contribute to establishing Goethe in England, but also disclose the plot’s Faustian thread. It seems no coincidence that the album sits cheek-by-jowl with Tremaine; or, A Man of Refinement, Robert Plumer Ward’s novel, also published anonymously a year beforehand (1825), and known to be Disraeli’s model for Vivian Grey. Retzsch provides the talisman surrogate any young man of refinement should rely on to succeed, and launches the Faustian track, hinting at the scene’s meaning and characters’ impulses.
Thanks to Retzsch’s prints, Vivian stages his courtship of Julia Manvers after two patterns, a Faust with Margaret and a Faust with devil (52–57): “the fashion has gone out of selling oneself to the devil,” boasts he (56). The course of the chapter invites us to deduct that young ladies, innocent or not, may well supply the fiend’s part. Vivian, alone with fair Julia, is the scheming young Faust of this chapter, having driven off his potential rivals thanks to a Machiavellian trick. His flippant chat revolves around the prints more than once. Margaret’s loveliness is a pretext to sit next to Julia and leaf with her through Boosey’s Faustus (presumably third) edition. His comment actually pays her a compliment: “‘How beautiful Margaret is!’ said Vivian, rising from his Ottoman, and seating himself on the sofa by the lady. ‘I always think, that this is the only Personification where Art has not rendered Innocence insipid.’” (54). Meaningfully, in the draft manuscript, this retort ended with “the only personification where Innocence does not look—insipid” (580). The adjunct on Art gratifies Retzsch’s skill and conceptual talent. A sudden opening and closing of the door then disrupts the idyll, giving Disraeli’s Vivian occasion to make of the intruder, the mysterious Mrs Felix Lorraine, a very incarnation of Retzsch’s evil spirit: “‘Mephistophiles, or Mrs. Felix Lorraine; one or the other,—perhaps both.’” (55) The prints also work as visual allusion, inciting readers to picture in their mind’s eye the invasion just described. The incident reads as Mephistopheles’s brutal incursion on the lovers passionately kissing in the summerhouse (pl. 15, cf. Fig. 7.17) or spying on them in the garden (pl. 14, cf. Fig. 10.3), Moses duly attenuating. Still, even this obstacle is turned to advantage by Disraeli as Vivian resorts to a more general Faustian scheme, Julia’s coax to Incantation. She plays the she-spirit that grants Faust-Vivian his wishes, culminating in a camouflaged marriage proposal, until a second (motherly) intrusion in the next chapter, induced by Mrs Lorraine, takes Julia away, bringing Vivian’s courtship to an abrupt end.
Behind this spirited hoax, the scene confirms Vivian as a charmer; it exposes his rival, Mrs Lorraine, as an arch-schemer; more importantly, as the first to introduce a Faustian matrix, it provides a plausible reading of charmer’s and schemer’s incessant contention through that trend. To wit, Vivian is a flattering manipulator, a psychic Faust, conquering men’s and women’s souls and spirits. In the original edition, the Retzsch chapter is entitled “Marriage,” but a later (spurious) heading in an American edition runs “Vivian Instructs an Ingénue,”7 disclosing an editor’s preconceptions, and predisposing other readers’ reception. Mrs Lorraine, of German origin, imbued with German folklore, fantasies, and beliefs, laden with numerous Gothic tales, is a devious Mephistopheles, a “female fiend” (108 & 159), “a d—d odd woman!” (128). Later editions have dully filled in the unreported word: “deuced” (601), given that deuce is the devil. Intrigue replaces bargaining for souls. Yet, Vivian and Mrs Lorraine are each other’s double, as Vivian admits (“I have met a kind of double of myself”). He muses: “the struggle between two such spirits will be a long and a fearful one” (108–9). In their deceitful hide-and-seek, they are interchangeable, Faust and Mephistopheles in turn. It comes as no surprise that upon finally defeating her, Vivian “watched his victim with the eye of a Mephistophiles” (161).
The citation of Retzsch’s prints in Vivian Grey is tentacular. The chapter devises Mrs. Lorraine’s sly marring of Vivian’s amorous expectations, a foretaste of her wrecking his political ambitions. Still, this roguish female role does little justice to Disraeli’s brilliance in contriving dramatic episodes after Retzsch. Since Mrs Lorraine is also a “negative double” of the protagonist,8 the analogy stresses the inter-changeability of Faust and Mephistopheles. Parallel attitudes and comparable costumes in Retzsch (cf. Fig. 1.8 and 8.4) surely strengthened Disraeli’s inspiration. Just as Heine cites Faust’s soliloquy, Disraeli recalls Goethe’s lines, later translated as “Two souls, alas! within my breast abide, | The one to quit the other ever burning” (F 1112–13, trans. A. G. Latham).
Disraeli and Heine alike feature a female fiend. Heine’s Mephistophela is a complex poetic and aesthetic creation that renews the Faust myth and competes with Goethe. Contrariwise, Mephistopheles in skirts seems but a detail of Disraeli’s dashing writing but confirms his talent for creating minor characters and promoting femaledom. Mrs Felix Lorraine substantiates the novel’s feminine cast. It has been said that her “motivation remains a mystery,”9 but the Faust template, subtly evoked through Retzsch’s graphic medium, conceivably points at an elusive Goethe intertext backed up by Retzsch’s prints, woven more finely than so far estimated.
10.2 Théophile Gautier from Travelogue to Aesthetics
Théophile Gautier’s mentions of Retzsch are several and varied. Ranging from stereotype to core aesthetic idea, they form a challenging artistic assortment to investigate Retzsch’s impact in France. Importance derives from the generous range of Gautier’s writings (fiction, travel, theatre and art criticism) that have renewed critical assessment of his work.
His last mention of Retzsch to date10 occurs in Loin de Paris (Far from Paris), certainly not the best nineteen- century travelogue. Gautier penned its various sections on diverse occasions and put them together as a travel anthology only in 1865, presumably at his publisher Michel Lévy’s request. A motley work, it has received sparse and unequal attention, in line with commentators’ or editors’ specific interests. Loin de Paris combines an 1845 picturesque tour of Algeria (critically edited in 1973 by Madeleine Cottin), an 1852–53 series of articles on Italy published in the newspaper Le Pays, and an account of Gautier’s journey through German States after attending an August 1854 Faust performance in Munich.11 As his boat descends the Rhine, narrative is random and cumulative, subservient to passenger incidents, sights, and landscape. A short description of ladies boarding the steamship closes with an unsophisticated Gretchen, recalling “the type of Margaret in Reschz’s [sic] illustrations.” As shown (Chap. 9.8), the choice of term (type) signals a characteristic shape, extorted from the prints, to be compared conversely with English and French maids, respectively a lady and a soubrette. Rather than a persona, this Margaret is a cast figure, an emblematic sample, a model incarnate.12 As such, she has no bearings on the development. Still, she serves to elaborate a comparative European paradigm duly placed in a travelogue, which confirms the sway that the engravings held over collective imagination.
Gautier had already confessed to it while discussing Goethe’s creativity in crafting female characters. On 17 November 1851, in a theatre review of a French comedy based on Mignon, he notes that all that Gretchen does or says in Faust would not fill ten pages, if put together. Yet by contrast she has made an “indelible impression” (em- preinte ineffaçable) on imagination. Tellingly he adds: “Who would ever forget Margaret! You would sooner forget your first mistress.” Her common retorts, simple songs, and attitudes are “yet so true, so right, yet so deeply female that they get to be engraved within the heart.”13 The verb seems not randomly chosen, Retzsch’s originals or copies being mostly engravings. It endorses a blending of stereotype and genuinely significant details, hallmarking Gautier’s figures after Retzsch.
Their return obeys a complex mechanism: the more characteristic the type, the more evanescent. It may be imprinted and reproducible, yet, hardly scrutinized, it vanishes, shadow-like. Disappearance and reappearance are watchwords for what is deeply engraved in the heart. The Gradiva complex works no differently. However, the same trope of figures carved in everybody’s memory may also be conveyed by other than an etching, such as a “familiar sketch (croquis familier) drafted with the pencil tip,” as in a comment on a French Charlotte and Werther drama,14 or through sculptural metaphor—the artist’s thumb modelling clay, while commenting Goethe’s Egmont.15
Have then Retzsch’s etchings influenced Gautier’s idea of Margaret as an “indelible impression” or not? On 22 August 1843, Gautier concluded his review of Delacroix’s Hamlet lithographs, regretting that French artists hardly composed after the poets, and commended a literal application of ut pictura poesis: “The Germans have made numerous such drawings: Reshtz’s [sic] outline engravings on Faust, on Fridolin are known by all.” His first-hand acknowledgment of their notoriety shows cognizance of effect and efficacy of printed object on readers. He adds: “Nothing stirs the mind like leafing through one of these portfolios in which the idea of a poem or a play is summarized (se résume) in a few plates.”16 Although the etching and printing metaphor may seem either hackneyed or emblematic of his art-inspired store of tropes, Margaret is not just a typecast. In January 1847, its strong rebound (“they are etched in indelible lines in all memories”) blends with the pictorial metaphor to convey again his admiration for Goethe, “the greatest painter of women ever extant,” his creations spawning from only a couple of brushstrokes. His female characters are simple, Margaret is even “almost silly,” yet nimble and vivacious: “They are not literary types, but live creatures we think we once met and knew.”17
In Gautier’s thinking, Goethe’s blending of type with creative verve may well correspond to a sophisticated view on the creation of characters in literature. If a few meaningful strokes suffice to fix female personae, some of these appear in either writer’s fiction. The idea that Gautier’s are mainly cast as types, as upheld by Gautier criticism,18 needs nuancing. In his “La Toison d’or” (“The Golden Fleece”), however suggestive, a heroine named “Gretchen” expertly blends with the Argonauts’ myth and Rembrandt’s Mary Magdalene, far from any Faustian template. Conversely, an encoded allusion within a text may hide a construction expertly devised.
Gautier’s familiarity with Retzsch’s work may have been from modified versions of the original series. His frequently flawed transcriptions of the artist’s name (Reschz, Reztch, Reshtz, or even Roetzsch—the equally faulty Retsch being commonly used at the time, even on the original Cotta portfolio) suggest laxity, negligence, or plain incapacity to deal with five consonants in a row. Such are not only Gautier’s trademark, and not all may be attributed to dodgy typesetting. In 1853 La Presse even once prints Kretzch (!). Misprints frequently occur either in the press or from the pen of other writers too, though rarely to such extremes. Yet, correct spelling in Gautier’s case is negligible. In his Les Beaux-arts en Europe—1855 (The Fine Arts in Europe—1855), the elaborate and over-detailed Retzsch plate of the witches’ Sabbath (pl. 22, cf. Fig. 5.7) serves a comparison with the luxuriance and intricacy of Joseph Noel Paton’s famous 1847 painting The Quarrel of Oberon and Titania.19 The example testifies to Gautier’s trained eye, grounded awareness, and masterly knowledge. In a theatre review of April 1852 on Palmyre Wertheimber, performing Pygmalion’s part in a light opera (a sexual inversion that certainly enchanted the author of Mademoiselle de Maupin), the mention is latent, tacit, but unmistakable: “The young girl with a slender and supple waist, with a bowed head, like Marguerite in Martha’s garden” can only correspond to Retzsch’s plate 14 (cf. Fig. 10.3) and his petal-plucking heroine.20 Goethe’s play includes neither such stage direction nor textual hint. In 1853, commenting on another actress’s “melancholic charm” and “ailing grace,” Retzsch’s prints become, as if Gautier owned them, “our delicate outline engravings by Reztch [sic] in the Goethe and Schiller illustrations.”21 Did he possess a set or merely wish to acknowledge the artist’s adoption by the French public? Whatever the case, his ideal of the pure young German girl was incarnate in Retzsch’s Margaret. As frequently cited in his theatre criticism, he knows particularly well Goethe’s play (including Faust II), read in a translation by either Blaze de Bury or his bosom friend Gérard de Nerval. He is fascinated by Margaret’s bedroom, by the cathedral and prison scenes. The scarlet line on her throat when appearing in the witches’ revel has made an indelible impression on his mind. They are all regularly recalled or used in comparison. Evaluation of Retzsch was certainly backed by such familiarity, his exceptional memory, but also copies and other artefacts. He surely had in mind Pinéas’s pirated copy of plate 4, the frontispiece to Nerval’s 1828 translation of Goethe’s Faust (cf. Fig. 6.4). When he assessed in 1854 the Munich Faust performance, he condemned the décor of Margaret’s chamber, expanding on the appropriate furnishings in the following terms:
A stage set badly made or badly chosen robs this adorable scene of all its intimacy. How would you have us accept this big bazaar deprived of its furnishings, where an old chest strolls along a dusty wall, for Margaret’s chamber, that chaste and white retreat, that lilied interior, that paradise of freshness and innocence? It is in vain we look for the little virginal bed whose hangings Faust lifts, the oak armchair polished with such care, the wax-rubbed wardrobe, the figure of the Virgin, the two flower vases, the spinning wheel with its lustrous flywheel, all this poor household of a young girl, where mediocrity smiles with such a happy look, where the purity of a humble life shines with such artlessness, where love, abashed, dithers on the threshold. Retsch’s [sic] outline engraving, with its minute details, so naively German, of such deep feeling, simply ought to have been reproduced. It has thwarted us to see Margaret take the earrings brought by Mephistopheles from a dirty and dusty piece of furniture, and walk about in such a room.22
What he missed, and lyrically craved for, was stirred by a stage set he had presumably observed in France, previously based on Schinkel (hence the Virgin, spinning wheel, and flower vases), and originally inspired by Retzsch (Fig. 9.5). As noted, that décor had travelled afar from Berlin and lasted a hundred years. Similarly, in his 1839 “La Toison d’or” (“The Golden Fleece”), he develops a detailed room description for his own Gretchen, his Antwerp Margaret rid of Faust and devil (793).23
Whether first- or second-hand, Gautier’s grasp of Retzsch is indisputable and particularly wide-ranging in its applications. The inspiration he draws from the German artist concerns primarily Margaret (embodying Innocence) and Mephistopheles (epitomizing Cunning and Intrigue), the two characters prominent within the French tradition, rather than the titular figure. Similarly, Disraeli’s Vivian Grey, while faking a Washington Irving autograph, flippantly blots the album entitled Faustus. The blot stains both title and protagonist. In his “Toison d’or,” Gautier refers to Rembrandt’s famous etching The Alchemist, related to Faust since Goethe’s Faust: Ein Fragment (1790), only to incongruously compare a love letter received by his Antwerp Gretchen to a luminous etched detail (800). As in Disraeli, both the disproportion and voiding of Faust connections are ironic in Gautier, successfully echoing the overall tone of the “Toison d’or” short story. Additionally, light-handed witty treatment of Goethe’s Faust informs another 1841 short story, “Deux acteurs pour un rôle” (“Two Actors for One Part”).24 In this, the black poodle escorts Katy, a Viennese Margaret in satin and furs. Her lover Henrich (short of an i compared to Goethe’s Heinrich), a young scholar rather than a disillusioned thinker, has merely studied theology, and spurned a learned and quiet existence to perform Mephistopheles on the stage. The tongue-in-cheek treatment excludes Goethe’s protagonist. To square the circle, Mephistopheles in person contests Henrich his very part on stage. The demon incarnates it brilliantly himself, particularly thanks to his impressive laughter—rather more reminiscent of Frédérick Lemaître’s performance than of Retzsch’s sinister Mephistophelean grin. Gautier’s genius thus draws on interdependent influences, of which Retzsch is certainly central, more or less prominent depending on plot and aim. Gautier’s encrypted aesthetic inventions are thus particularly remarkable.
How to counter a “Werther-like sentimentality?” Gautier’s Les Roués innocents (The Innocent Profligates) poses this very question and provides a crafty answer (1051).25 This short novel in ten chapters, published 1846 by instalments in La Presse, twists the very style and scope of the sentimental genre. Over-hasty reading may explain why it has received scarce critical attention. Its apparent conventionality has discouraged more complex evaluations. The feigned sentimental narrative, ending offhandedly and in a somewhat burlesque manner with the happy marriage of two young people, is based on a well-kept mystery and a series of reversals and vagaries. The title builds on an oxymoron and the novel itself is a clever pastiche of mawkish creations of the time. By making opposites meet, it warns readers that nothing is really as it seems. Gautier plays here with stereotypes at the level of novel construction and genre, thanks to a subtle strategy that makes of The Innocent Profligates a much more complex work than meets the eye.
In the opening chapter, the traitor, Mr Rudolph, initiates proceedings by ordering the centrepiece to be taken off the dinner table during an overnight carousal. Once removed, the epergne discloses two rival beauties, apparently both of loose morals, in reality representing the battle of good (Florence) and evil (Amine). Yet the reader will discover Florence’s real role only in the last chapter. The sequence of events emulates this initial device thanks to a series of volte-faces and masks of character, situation, intention, and correspondence. Nothing is certain until the very end, except for the innocent profligates’ love (Henri Dalberg and Calixte Desprez) and the villain’s malignity. No coincidence, Rudolph is twice compared to Mephistopheles. He is the authentic rake of the story, a sophisticated devil rid of Faust, while Dalberg is but a guiltless roué. First, Rudolph is “the Mephistopheles of the Ghent boulevard” (1063), street-talk for the Boulevard des Italiens during the Hundred Days War, a meeting place for dandies in the heart of Paris. Second, confirming all Rudolph’s devilish traits, “I detest him and represent him to myself as the Mephistopheles of the Faust illustrations” (1110) could point again to Retzsch. The phrase is typical of Gautier’s nod at the outlines but for the explicit identification—a likely part of the novel’s encrypted strategy.
Captivatingly, the simile emerges in a letter addressed by young Calixte Desprez to Florence, her long-standing friend from the convent, all along covertly defending Calixte’s and her lover’s interests against the malicious Amine, Rudolph’s co-conspirator. While the analogy singles out Rudolph as the touchstone of malignity, Calixte’s command of both Goethe’s tragedy and the consecutive prints is clearly part of the novel’s encoded design not so readily fathomed. Similarly, Calixte is no stereotype of respectable young girl, no “insipid” Margaret in her chamber (albeit a purposefully misleading description), but a knowledgeable and intelligent young female, a chaste rouée, matching the title. In chapter two, she collects clandestine correspondence through her prayer book and writes back messages in sympathetic ink, which should have alerted the reader. Besides, she reads poets in foreign languages (1043), and nothing could have hindered her familiarity with Goethe’s Faust. Such a subtle use by Gautier, who puts no name to the Faust images, underlines their fame and the extent to which their diffusion had informed, even inspired young girls of the bourgeoisie.
More significantly, Retzsch’s creations nourished Gautier’s aesthetic defence of dumb shows and ballet. He was champion, promoter, and admirer of the performing arts, including those regularly deemed minor by mid-nineteenth-century standards, and authored himself ballets, six staged, two un-staged, including the famed Giselle. The associations implied in his arguments are therefore all the more meaningful. In December 1851, condemning Saint-Léon’s tempestuous and brilliant ballets,26 that he deemed lacking in clarity and visibility of action, Gautier heralded Retzsch’s outlines as a mode of writing: “A ballet libretto should be ably written through a series of outline drawings, like Rœtzsch’s [sic] illustrations for Goethe’s Faust and Schiller’s Fridolin.”27 In just over a year, in January 1853, his critique had developed into an innovative poetical stance. Adolphe Adam’s Orfa, a mime show-cum-ballet and its novel Nordic mythology belong to “those silent poems where the idea is only manifest through plastic appearances and which should be written alongside a series of outline drawings, like Kretzch’s [sic] illustrations on Goethe and Schiller.”28 Retzsch had become an aesthetic benchmark, the very example and mode of writing a “silent poem.” Setting absent words off against plastic expressiveness and extolling outline as writing, Gautier had surpassed even August von Schlegel’s view of the technique as hieroglyph in arousing readers’ imaginations. He had seen in Retzsch the very expressiveness of avant-garde poetry without text, or even future film directors’ and screenplay writers’ modes of working. Ten years later, outline would provide an ideal mode of writing as bodies moved across the stage in action or passion devoid of words: “Surely the best ballet script would be an album of outline scenes like Retsch’s [sic] illustrations for Goethe’s Faust, whose story a child would understand from the pictures, without reading a word of the text.”29 Retzsch had found an advocate in a man and writer spellbound by animated statues.
10.3 Visual Traps in Prose
Setting subject matter aside, Gautier saw in Retzsch’s outlines parameters for new creative modes: mute poems in gesture and action, and silent shows through motion and sequence. Modern art and silent film would occur half a century later. Still, Gautier’s “writing through” (écrire par) and “writing alongside” or “with” outlines (écrire avec) heralded pioneering ways of combining visual, textual, and performing arts. He was not the only writer to gather inspiration from visual spurs or heighten prose with their effects. Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” (1840) and Walter Herries Pollock’s short novel The Picture’s Secret (1883) both constructed character or triggered plot through Retzsch. In his 1799 Athenaeum essay on Flaxman and drawing after poetry, Schlegel had stressed outlines’ suggestive power: they set spectators’ and readers’ imaginations in motion. Poe and Pollock epitomize how they also sparked writers’ inspiration.
In a stimulating 2010 article on “Retzsch’s Outlines and Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’,” Kevin J. Hayes drew on a variety of sources to show the extent of Poe’s knowledge of Retzsch, the artist’s cultural notoriety in the United States, and the place he holds in Poe’s and other writers’ criticism. His remarks on the “ramifications” of Retzsch’s work “in terms of Poe’s visual imagery and his aesthetic theory” are a welcome contribution to the points discussed in this chapter. Hayes stresses the appeal on Poe of “Retzsch’s combination of clear outline with dense symbolism,” the “dramatic quality” of his conceptions, and his capacity to depict “active, dramatic moments.”30 He aptly singles out a passage in Poe’s review of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s Ballads and Other Poems, in which Poe pits imaginative effect, suggestion and brevity against truth and realism, mentioning Retzsch and Flaxman in the following terms:
That the chief merit of a picture is its truth, is an assertion deplorably erroneous. Even in Painting which is, more essentially than Poetry, a mimetic art, the proposition cannot be sustained. Truth is not even the aim. Indeed it is curious to observe how very slight a degree of truth is sufficient to satisfy the mind, which acquiesces in the absence of numerous essentials in the thing depicted. An outline frequently stirs the spirit more pleasantly than the most elaborate picture. We need only refer to the compositions of Flaxman and of Retzsch. Here all details are omitted—nothing can be farther from truth. Without even color the most thrilling effects are produced.31
Hayes also discusses the use Poe makes of suggestion, and the problematic relation between outline (exterior appearance) and inner self (true nature) to conclude on the visual and stylistic influence of the German artist on the American writer. In his words, “Retzsch’s work taught Poe economy of style.”32 The remark is of course crucial in understanding the aesthetics of a writer whose fame rests on the bearing and power of the short story.
Hayes has convincingly established how Poe used outline in “The Man of the Crowd” and “Metzengerstein” by using shadow, illumination, and outlining with darkness. The former story bears on a mysterious individual, pursued by the narrator in overcrowded London streets without piercing his secret motivation, except that of his seeking swarming masses to mingle with them. Hayes’s study may be extended further. Indeed, I argue that Poe did not only follow Retzsch, he competed with him, and implemented outline as a screen to thwart readers’ attempts to solve the puzzle. In short, he constructed a mystery tale on an open challenge: to read what cannot be read, or rather “does not permit itself to be read,” as per his own translation of the German opening the tale: “er lasst sich nicht lesen” (506).33 Attracting the reader into it, the story makes him stumble over enigma. The narrator brings up Retzsch on discerning the protagonist in the throng, indeed presenting him, while the writer himself claims to out-Retzsch him:
With my brow to the glass, I was thus occupied in scrutinizing the mob, when suddenly there came into view a countenance (that of a decrepid old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age,)—a countenance which at once arrested and absorbed my whole attention, on account of the absolute idiosyncrasy of its expression. Any thing even remotely resembling that expression I had never seen before. I well remember that my first thought, upon beholding it, was that Retzch [sic], had he viewed it, would have greatly preferred it to his own pictural incarnations of the fiend. (511)
The plural “pictural incarnations” hints not only at Mephistopheles in Faust but also at Retzsch’s allegorical The Chess Players (Die Schachspieler), widely reproduced, diffused, and well-known in the United States. No coincidence: the devil fights man for his soul over a game of chess and the overall meaning tallies with Goethe’s tragedy.
Yet, in Poe’s story, viewing has already been thwarted before these “pictorial incarnations” prompt recognition. Even so, the pictorial quality of “The Man of the Crowd” can by no means be denied. In Le Peintre de la vie moderne (The Painter of Modern Life, 1863), as Hayes recalls, Baudelaire called this very story “a painting (verily, it is a painting!).” The device employed, a large bow window in which the narrator sits, functions as a display case to view, inspect, and diagnose the various social groups and types by gaslight. To view them is to read them like as many stories: “and although the rapidity with which the world of light flitted before the window, prevented me from casting more than a glance upon each visage, still it seemed that, in my then peculiar mental state, I could frequently read, even in that brief interval of a glance, the history of long years” (511, my emphasis). Two details under the anonymous protagonist’s cloak, the diamond and the dagger, build up tension, and tickle the reader’s curiosity, suggesting enigma and crime. The narrator’s stalking of the man, street by street, invites the reader into the story, incites him to build it alongside himself, while the central character’s attitude and reasons remain obscure. The face that even Retzsch “would have greatly preferred to his own pictural incarnations of the fiend” works as a guiding device for deciphering, yet stimuli fail. Poe marshals visual qualities and rhetorical techniques to enigmatic purpose. They rouse the reader but to trip up on the undecipherable. Not only may the external not signify the exterior, as Hayes would have it, what is more, the exterior serves (outline-like) to deceive. It may lure but also elude. The story concludes with the very words it opened: “‘er lasst sich nicht lesen’.”
The riddle of “The Man of the Crowd” is the very inscrutability of everyman’s story, the problematic legibility of the protagonist. The answer is there from the beginning, as in “The Purloined Letter” by Poe, hidden because it is extremely noticeable. Thomas Mabbott, Poe’s reference editor, wondered whether he should substitute er (he) by es (it) in the opening and closing German phrase (518). He did keep er, and es could also be possible. Seemingly indicating a book’s or this story’s title (it), the phrase refers to the protagonist (he) as well. Beyond Poe’s own cryptic translation “It does not permit itself to be read,” another decoy, the translation could also run “He does not permit himself to be read.” In “The Man of the Crowd” suggestion is a misleading veil, the outline a deceitful drapery, indeed perhaps a shroud. The central character is in Mabbott’s felicitous phrase “unknowable apart from the crowd” (505): one of many and one in or through many, both in the crowd and of the crowd, everyman in the throng, ordinary and exceptional all in one.
A riddle also sits at the core of Walter Herries Pollock’s The Picture’s Secret (1883), a straight upshot of the Gothic craze for animated or fatal pictures.34 In Gautier, who had discarded the palette for the pen, visual imagery heightens impressions, enhances purple patches, and impacts the plot without being the only process. In Pollock, the visual leaning is central and decisive: the witches’ Sabbath scene inspired by Retzsch (pl. 22, cf. Fig. 5.7) triggers the plot. Paintings, a painter, two art lovers, visual props, and symbolism all bear on storyline and riddle. What is the true nature of young Lilith, daughter to acclaimed painter von Waldheim? She grows into the typically destructive femme fatale of the story, heartbreaker of men: her talented musician husband, Cecil 13th Earl of Falcon; his bosom friend, Arthur Vane, lured into loving her, who proves treacherous to Falcon and dies tragically; and at the end of the story, even her own father, unremittingly “dabbling a dry brush on an empty canvas, and appealing to imagined crowds of admirers whether his work was not the best that he had ever done” (222–23). The disastrous end is carefully prepared.
Also an amateur fencer, Pollock wielded the stylus in a number of genres (fiction writing, songs, theatrical adaptations and amateur theatricals, criticism, biography, memoirs, and review editing). A translator from the French of Alfred de Musset and Denis Diderot, he was prominent in Victorian literary circles and lectured (among other subjects) on Théophile Gautier whose works he knew well. A close friend of Henry Irving, the sensational interpreter of Goethe’s Mephistopheles in a memorable red costume after Retzsch at the Lyceum commented by himself (cf. Fig. 9.18 to Fig. 9.20), Pollock composed the detailed article on Faust illustrations already referred to. His novel’s action is set both in aristocratic circles and a rich aesthetic context, recalling those of Disraeli, yet without the latter’s vim. Several textual, pictorial or musical works on the fantastic, “diablerie” and the supernatural (59) are called to mind, contributing to the enigma of Lilith, the child of a painter, also born from a picture of his:
“Yes,” said Vane, “that is fine [Faure interpreting Gounod’s Faust]. I see, Mr. von Waldheim, you have chosen the moment of Lilith’s appearance for your picture. Retzsch, if I am not mistaken, has taken the apparition of Gretchen for his outline drawing.”
“Yes,” replied the artist, “it may have been because I was afraid of copying Retzsch; but I think the real fact was, that the idea started into my head. A picture strikes me suddenly, and takes possession of me until I have transferred it to canvas. Whether it is worth the trouble of transferring or not, is a question which never occurs to me at the time.” (34–35)
The Retzsch reference may here seem a mere pretext, pure cultural innuendo, if it was not for a careful and crafty shift on the part of the novelist. Both Gretchen and Lilith are present at Goethe’s Walpurgis. Lilith, “Adam’s first wife” and her ensnaring hair, a “net” that “can catch young men,” come into view as she features among the witches a she-demon (F 4118–23), long before Gretchen’s disturbing spectre. In the opening pages of Pollock’s novel, von Waldheim’s substitution of his daughter for Retzsch’s Margaret enriches Lilith’s covert nature. In Waldheim’s picture, doubly fathered, she is swathed in Gretchen’s garb, in an elaboration on Retzsch’s pl. 22. Subsequent works of art, such as Gabriel Max’s ominous Gretchen (Fig. 10.1), may have also stirred Pollock’s imagination, yet retouched in melodramatic fashion:
In the very centre of the picture was a rift in the clouds, through which a ray of moonlight streamed on to a woman’s figure draped in long gauzy robes, from whom the surrounding goblins and witches seemed to have shrunk in terror or subjection, so that she walked entirely alone. Her face could not be distinguished; but the artist had infused a spirit of disdain into her attitude, which would by itself account for her solitude. (33)
![Gabriel Max, “Es ist ein Zauberbild, ist leblos, ein Idol,” in Faust-Illustrationen von Gabriel Max: Zehn Zeichnungen, in Holz geschnitten von R[ichard] Brend’amour und W. Hecht (Berlin: G. Grote, 1880), pl. 10](/skin/9190644141f8381450a0870d0300f67383d6669a/img/Blank.svg)
Gabriel Max, “Es ist ein Zauberbild, ist leblos, ein Idol,” in Faust-Illustrationen von Gabriel Max: Zehn Zeichnungen, in Holz geschnitten von R[ichard] Brend’amour und W. Hecht (Berlin: G. Grote, 1880), pl. 10
Courtesy HAAB, F gr 5768, Weimar
Lilith von Waldheim is thus another combination of outline with dense symbolism but purposefully complicated and reworked to carry the figure’s ambiguity in absentia and in presentia of both Gretchen and Lilith. In a way, Pollock outshines Goethe’s Lilith, part and parcel of the witches’ revel in Faust, and one of Retzsch’s most complex prints, now infused with new symbolism. This is no chance sleight of hand but a game of hide-and-seek around the heroine’s true identity, central to the novel, whose dénouement unravels itself again through a picture. Later on, Falcon, Lilith, and Arthur Vane, the trio bonded in love and betrayal, embody the fatal triad of husband, wife and lover shown in an old picture hanging in an allegedly haunted room in Falcontree Hall. They incarnate similar roles in life; they exemplify them when disguised for a masked ball; and fatally, play them out in a tableau vivant before the picture, precipitating Vane’s tragic death and Falcon’s separation from Lilith. In that second picture, the expression on the woman’s face is the ultimate key to Lilith’s cruel and deceitful nature, prepared by the clever subversion of Retzsch’s composition. Pollock’s novel, rather obvious but culturally rich, makes of Retzsch the very spark that prompts the narrative. Additionally (though this is an aside), the names Arthur Vane and Lady Emmeline Grey, Falcon’s sister, pre-monitor James Vane, Sybil’s brother in Dorian Gray, the famed novel by Oscar Wilde, a close friend of Pollock. The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891) was elaborated on well-tested foundations.
10.4 Pictures within the Picture in Illustrated Books
In illustrated editions, drawings and plates certainly add extra significance, when inserted, to the story. Gautier in The Innocent Profligates, Poe in “The Man of the Crowd,” and Pollock in The Picture’s Secret, all utilize Retzsch to hint at the hidden through merely textual means. The previously seen is put to work to show the presently unseen, and the capacity of outline to suggest is optimized in skilled narrative constructions. However, Retzsch’s outlines may also be solicited as visual means, images within images in relation to fiction. They may even unexpectedly bring and knot together several symbolic trends of a novel in one seemingly secondary episode.
Such is the case in chapter XXII of Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield, when Miss Mowcher, the dwarf dealer in cosmetics and beautifiers, grooms Steerforth’s hair and whiskers while showering him and Copperfield with gossip on patrician society (271–90).35 Hablôt Knight Browne, known as Phiz, has granted this scene an illustration, captioned “I make the acquaintance of Miss Mowcher,” in which four other pictures hang on the wall (Fig. 10.2). However, what we see and read and what broods behind the scenes (and will eventually happen) do not coincide, the wall pictures being instrumental in hinting at covert purposes.
Phiz (Hablôt Knight Browne), I make the acquaintance of Miss Mowcher, etching, final plate C, Dec 1849, 12.8 × 10.78 cm, in Charles Dickens, David Copperfield, Ch. XXII, “Some Old Scenes, and Some New People”
Author’s collection and file
Dickens’s plot meets indeed a turning point: David Copperfield looks bewildered at the embellishment of his friend’s locks and listens to the dwarf beautician’s curious lingo, while in preparation is little Emily’s seduction by Steerforth and their elopement, aided by Littimer, his butler. In the foreground, Copperfield and Steerforth leave Yarmouth, while the text sparsely hints at the backstage fate of little Emily. As chapter XXXII of the novel will reveal, Miss Mowcher will herself be instrumentally deceived into approaching Emily with the letter that will ultimately cause her downfall (394–96). The “illustration” itself divulges the secret, thanks to the pictures on the wall.
In his study on Victorian Novelists and their Illustrators, John R. Harvey suggests that Miss Mowcher, standing on the table to spruce up Steerforth’s locks, bears a direct analogy to Retzsch’s garden scene (Fig. 10.3), best known in English as “The Decision of the Flower.” Faust leans over the petal-plucking Margaret in the foreground, while Mephistopheles leers behind. In Phiz’s “illustration,” Mephistopheles has been brought forward and shadows Faust. Phiz represents this by the large framed picture in Miss Mowcher’s immediate background, just above her head. Harvey astutely remarks that the feather on the dwarf’s hat echoes a pictorial feature common to Faust’s and Mephistopheles’s headgear, a detail evident in the embedded picture.36 The visual parallel presses ominous portent into a burlesque scene. The picture within the picture signals Emily as an innocent Margaret, Miss Mowcher as a potential Mephistopheles, and Steerforth as Faust, the seducer. An important shift in use of outline is to be stressed. The mustered image discloses, rather than implies, unsavoury truths: the suggestive power of the medium (Schlegel) has been subverted, even overturned. The aesthetic reversal highlights the illustrated novel as a strong twofold instrument laden with complex meaning.
Moritz Retzsch, Garden scene, Umrisse zu Goethe’s Faust gezeichnet von Retsch (Stuttgart & Tübingen: Cotta, 1816), pl. 14
Courtesy HAAB, F 3487, Weimar
Such interpretation is all the more convincing as Dickens’s novels came out serially, in illustrated monthly instalments on which both writer and artist cooperated closely.37 The writer is known to have repeatedly given instructions to Phiz, his regular illustrator for the shilling-apiece parts, each containing three chapters and two full-page etched illustrations. These were not just luring adjuncts for their middle-class readers but combined media issues elaborating implicit meanings through word and image in lockstep. In Mowcher’s instance, their joint agency lifts the veil on clandestine deeds and stealthy schemes revealed much later. The question as to which of the two, writer or artist, had the idea or took the lead becomes important (but is all the more tricky to determine) for three reasons: there have been a few changes both in the novelist’s intention and the artist’s preliminary studies; direct evidence of who suggested what is lacking; and Harvey’s reading has been at least partially challenged by Michael Steig.38 The former’s study insists on Dickens’s exceptional visual memory, acute vision, and power in treating scenes as complete pictures. Harvey grants him the leadership of the writer-artist tandem, considers the illustrations as “produced to Dickens’s specifications,” and concludes: “The illustrations participate in a larger play of visual imagining which, in Dickens’s writing, is inseparable from the total drama.”39 Conversely, in his expert study on Dickens and Phiz, Michael Steig concludes on “a high degree of independence on the part of Phiz.” His view is supported by Phiz’s emblematic use of embedded pictures laden with symbolism. Precisely in the background picture inspired by Retzsch, Phiz adds a crucial third character, Mephistopheles, between the initial and final versions, a detail not discussed by Harvey. Although the alteration cannot be attributed with certainty either to writer or artist, Steig inclines to think that “Browne invented it on his own” because “the Faust detail in the drawing would probably be unintelligible to Dickens when first submitted to him for approval.”40
The actual situation proves however far more complicated. The small background change has major reading implications for the episode in hand, and depends on prior knowledge of further developments in the novel. Moreover, there are in fact three preserved stages of Phiz’s plate, and not just the two considered by Steig: a) a preparatory drawing with marginal sketches, namely A, now in the Berg Collection, added to an original edition of David Copperfield (cf. Fig. 10.4); b) a first version of the final plate, namely B, now in the Free Library of Philadelphia (cf. Fig. 10.5), that Harvey and Steig have both compared to C, the latter with welcome additional remarks; and c) the published plate, namely C, that is, the final etching with three characters in the background picture, two of which wear a feather (cf. Fig. 10.2). All three show conceptual development of the four embedded wall pictures, never attributing agency to either Dickens or Phiz. In all three, the background treats differently Miss Mowcher’s role, the novel’s evolution, and the message intended for the reader. Last, but not least, both Harvey and Steig agree on the garden scene and its origins in Retzsch, which may however be challenged, if compared to the pictures’ and the novel’s elaboration.
Phiz (Hablôt Knight Browne), I make the acquaintance of Miss Mowcher, original pencil and crayon sketch A with extra sketches, added to the original edition of Dickens, The Personal History of David Copperfield (London: Bradbury and Evans, 1850), copy 9, facing p. 232
NYPL, Berg Collection
Phiz (Hablôt Knight Browne), original illustration for I make the acquaintance of Miss Mowcher, version B of the final plate, graphite on paper, image 13 × 10 cm
Courtesy Rare Book Department, Elkins-Copperfield cdc389917, Free Library of Philadelphia
On Dickens’s side, “Mrs. Seymour Hill, a dwarf working as a chiropodist,” the real-life model for Miss Mowcher, protested upon recognizing herself in the novel (XLI). The writer had to tone down her intended part. He originally meant her to be a procuress but ultimately turned her into a duped figure. In the text, Mowcher’s seemingly chance question on the prettiest woman in town answers to Emily, “the prettiest and most engaging little fairy in the world” in Steerforth’s words. Details of name, employment, dwelling, and engagement are intended to give the shady beautician the information needed to approach her (283–84). Besides, Steerforth’s “I’ll quench the curiosity of this little Fatima [Miss Mowcher]” (284) pictures himself as a seducer, a Bluebeard with many conquests “done with” in a secret chamber. Dickens was a lover of fairy tales, often recycled in his own novels, and to name Fatima the inquisitive female is indeed typical of English versions of “Bluebeard.”
In Phiz’s preparatory sketch A, only the large frame behind Miss Mowcher displays an image. This cursorily reveals two rather than three figures, in female rather than male attire, facing each other. From the remaining three frames, one shows an unclear shape (a female sitting at a mirror?), the two others being nearly blank, as if awaiting inspiration, hints or instructions (cf. Fig. 10.4). In the more finished B drawing, the large frame distinctly shows only two figures in dresses, one bending towards the other, neither sporting a feather (cf. Fig. 10.5). The remaining three all now harbour a scene. Two of them show a female portrait full-frontally and a ship in the tempest, matching the published version C. In the fourth frame, yet another female figure has also taken shape perhaps with a companion. The main changes between B and C concern the “Mowcher frame,” and this fourth image, finally replaced in C by a diminutive man on a table surrounded by giants.
Both Phiz and Dickens knew Retzsch’s prints well. Steig defines Phiz as “a literate man, widely read and fully conscious of his predecessors in English graphic art, from Hogarth through John Doyle (‘HB’) and the Cruikshanks.”41 He backs Harvey’s evidence of Phiz having previously used Retzsch’s garden scene in illustrating Charles Lever’s novel Roland Cashel a year before David Copperfield.42 The illustration for Lever is literal: it corresponds to a scene of rose-petal plucking and indirect love-declaration on a visit to a picture gallery, one of the pictures being the very garden scene in Faust.43 However, Lever’s style, likened by Trollope to his conversation, has none of the subtleties involved in David Copperfield. Nevertheless, Phiz’s image testifies to his good knowledge of Retzsch and ability to use him accordingly. In the frontispiece of Dickens’s Dombey and Son (1848), he further borrows an outline from Retzsch’s trilingual Fancies and Truths, published in 1831.44 Dickens, on the other hand, was also well aware of Retzsch’s prints, interestingly alluded to in personal and emotional circumstances. Joyously greeted by the family pets upon his return from the United States, he spiritedly writes in a 25 May 1868 letter about his elder daughter’s dog, Mrs Bouncer by name, that she “tore round and round [him], like the dog in the Faust outlines.”45 This is a clear allusion to Retzsch’s pl. 2 (cf. Fig. 2.22).46 Further, in David Copperfield, the Mowcher scene is not the only one pregnant with Faustian allusions: Doctor Strong in his study with Annie at his knee, pictured by Phiz in chapter XVI, may be seen as a Faustian figure among his zoological samples high up on a shelf, his many books on the walls, the disordered folios on the floor, and a wall-hung world map replacing Faust’s iconic globe. However the Mowcher scene is laden with pictorial and textual innuendo, the background outline bearing the key to the riddle. In the published plate, the four wall-hung pictures not only lift the veil on secret aims, they also foretell the conclusion of the Emily subplot. Steig’s excellent comment runs: “The plate has three emblematic details: a ship in a storm (probably representing Emily’s impending fall but also conceivably foreshadowing Steerforth’s death in a shipwreck), a comic reference to Miss Mowcher’s size and performance in a print showing Gulliver performing for the Brobdingnagians, and a scene from Faust.”47
His fine reading may be extended: the uncommented fourth detail, the female portrait, answers to the “pretty woman in town” motif and points (along with the text) at little Emily. It is an additional illustrative device singling out the subplot’s heroine. The Gulliver scene also alludes to Miss Mowcher herself performing for an aristocratic clientele, the social giants who condescendingly look on her as a fairground freak, albeit indispensable. Its comic side becomes touching when Dickens sets the social comment (and very image) in Miss Mowcher’s mouth, as if to redeem her: “‘If I am a plaything for your giants, be gentle with me.’” (395). As for the Faust image, the insertion corresponds in fact to two differing versions. I argue indeed that any identification with the garden scene may be incorrect; and that versions B and C correspond to two different Retzsch outlines suffusing Phiz’s plates with two different meanings at distinct but successive stages of conception.
Retzsch’s idyll in the garden (cf. Fig. 10.3), “The Decision of the Flower” in Moses’s copy (cf. Fig. 11.2), pictures true love, harmony and union between the lovers. A strange match for Dickens’s narrative line, it makes a rather poor candidate, though not to be excluded (a tree may be seen on the right-hand side). Instead, Phiz may have drawn inspiration from Faust approaching Margaret in the street, the scene of their first meeting, while observed by Mephistopheles in the background (Retzsch’s pl. 8, cf. Fig. 1.8). Phiz has brought the devil closer for a telling parallel, as Harvey and Steig argue regarding the garden scene. In all the previous examples in this chapter, a free treatment of Retzsch’s plates, to endow them with further connotations, is common. Such a conjecture fits better the meaning intended by the novel: Mowcher is circuitously asked by Steerforth to approach Emily, just as Faust approaches Margaret in Retzsch’s etching.
Steerforth has of course already met Emily but there is no contradiction. The outline discloses the covert plan of a future secret meeting that Miss Mowcher is asked to set up. Such is never narrated (but, in the same chapter, the episode of Martha, pleading Emily for help, introduces the fallen-woman motif both textually and pictorially). Besides, Dickens went a long way to later restore a duped Miss Mowcher to the intrigue, once his life-model had complained of cruelty. Her indirect role of shadow Mephistopheles is finally played by Steerforth’s butler, absent from the plate. Still, her care for Steerforth’s looks recalls Mephistopheles’s rejuvenation of Faust by the witch’s potion, turned here to cosmetics, an allusion more playful than vile. Miss Mowcher could however also be Copperfield’s Mephistopheles: Steerforth repetitively calls David “Daisy” (“Marguerite” in French!) to stress his youth and innocence. In English, Daisy is also an occasional diminutive for Margaret. In the published version, the background image hints at Copperfield’s education inasmuch as the episode is also part of his Bildungsroman: an initiation to the subtle troika of temptation, seduction and abuse. By finely combining the inserted outline and slight textual allusions, Phiz’s published plate brings these various options together. It does even more: it utters Steerforth’s secret desire, reveals his covert intention, and weaves the hidden intrigue beneath the reader’s very eyes thanks to a scene doubling the narrative: Faust (Steerforth) will meet Margaret (Emily) under the plumage of some Mephistopheles or other, the wicked intention of the lover connecting likewise with the malevolent action of his purveyor (whomsoever it may prove to be) under the same feather.
What then of version B, now in the Free Library of Philadelphia? This is further illuminating but in a different sense. It does not refer to Faust and Margaret (as Steig supposes), but to Goethe’s Martha, Margaret’s neighbour, who convinces her to keep the casket against her mother’s advice. In Retzsch’s pl. 12, Martha adorns Margaret with the jewels provided by Mephistopheles (Fig. 10.6). I argue that it is this outline that Phiz imported in version B. In his drawing both figures are female, the one on the left leans towards the other (as Martha bends towards Margaret in Retzsch), and none wears a feather. Phiz, who drew inspiration from Retzsch now and then, may have thought of this plate because it matches Dickens’s text. Miss Mowcher’s traffic in beauty wares is analogous to Goethe’s Martha decking Gretchen with jewellery and textually arranging her first rendezvous with Faust. In addition, female trinket-pedlars and beauty suppliers have traditionally been bawds of loose morals. Such a background would allude to Miss Mowcher as procuress: easily approaching little Emily, she would introduce an offer from Steerforth, tempting the young girl desirous to be a lady. Understandably, Harvey could not detect the Faust-scene in B, and considered it “a late addition” to C.48 It is nevertheless still there but cribs a different outline.
Moritz Retzsch, Martha adorns Margaret with the jewels, Umrisse zu Goethe’s Faust gezeichnet von Retsch (Stuttgart & Tübingen: Cotta, 1816), pl. 12
Courtesy HAAB, F 3487, Weimar
Such choice by Phiz may have incited Dickens to further spice up the scene by introducing an even clearer allusion to Faust, bringing into the picture two male figures, Faust and Mephistopheles, instead of Goethe’s Martha, in the final version C. Version B had also sketched a plausible scenario. With its dramatic changes, the final illustration however alludes to a far more complex situation, involving three characters instead of two. It inverts and complicates the series of events in a way that further masks overt meaning. It is this last quality—along with the impact of the image on a subplot—that shows a sophisticated use of the image as a tantalizing screen, both veiling and unveiling what is not narrated, the quintessence of Anglo-Saxon eroticism indeed. The images hint at events that the reader may credit or not, while his own imagination speculates on how Emily’s seduction came about.
We may never know which of the two, Dickens or Phiz, authored the ingenious arrangements in either final (published) or B versions, but my intuition is that Dickens well understood the Faust allusion made by Phiz in the latter. He probably further enhanced it by suggesting the Faust-Margaret-Mephistopheles trio in C (whether meeting or garden scene) instead of the Martha-Margaret duo in B. Certainly the choice has added to the complex nature of this secondary episode. Phiz may have followed suit, elaborating in parallel Miss Mowcher as Gulliver amongst the Brobdingnagians, a detail taken up again by Dickens in the dwarf’s pathetic textual appeal. The intricate and evolving development of implanted images as in I make the acquaintance of Miss Mowcher displays not only an expert use of iconographical tropes, but also awareness of later text developments, not to mention an acute use of the borrowed image to unveil masked realities. The C (published) image may safely be deemed the result of both writer’s and artist’s complex collaboration.
10.5 Games of Fiction, Tricks and Screens
Retzsch’s outlines prove a sample case of pliable goods in fiction. Their remarkable resilience lies in easy recognition. Copies, and copies of copies, have established them as stereotypes, coined typecasts in writer-reader give-and-take. Disraeli’s Vivian Grey and Gautier’s Les Roués innocents share a (male or female) Mephistophelean figure, a malevolent snoop of Germanic origin. Although cultivated men in Vivian Grey, such as Frederick Cleveland, have a double education, English and German, Mrs Felix Lorraine bears the Anglo-French name for the disputed Rhineland territory of Teutonic origin (Lothringen). Her connexion with Mephistopheles operates through a prominent German text (Goethe’s Faust) thanks to Retzsch’s prints. No obvious double agent, her true character is ambiguously implied by the word “friend,” a “monosyllable full of meaning” (154), the suggestion rather being fiend. Similarly, in Gautier’s Les Roués innocents, Baron Rudolph is a sinister schemer, presumed German, two qualities that melodramatically underscore his diabolical nature. In Disraeli, a future Prime Minister, the political tinge takes stock of the Napoleonic wars’ aftermath differently. It forebodes in Gautier proto-imperial Franco-German rivalry in an era of mounting anticipation of future hostilities. Yet, Gautier’s reversible use of stereotypes in travelogues, reviews, or ironic fiction, shows their ability to metamorphose and adapt while they maintain a small stock of traits that make them recognisable.
Indeed, once replaced and analysed in complex worlds of fiction, Retzsch’s outlines are not just visual accompaniments to text or commentaries. They belong to a vast array of visual and verbal techniques capable of bearing multifaceted allusion, symbolism, metaphor or analogy. Quoting a Retzsch in fiction is not just cultural sophistication. Beyond typing naive characters (villains and lovable maidens), his images prove a key to oxymoron as embodied by Calixte Desprez. The (literally) “fairest (Calixte) of the meadows” (des près) is a young chaste profligate hoarding in her virginal chamber not diabolic jewels but Retzsch’s seminal prints.
Outlines cited in fiction also excel through their aesthetic qualities. They may be visual models for an impertinent and motley narrative emulating the depiction of a convoluted orgy (Heine). They expertly teach brevity, suggestion, and imaginative effect. As such, they have no realistic ambition and make no pretence at “truth.” Their value is to make believe, and draw the reader into the game of fiction. Even so, their visual immediacy may stand at loggerheads with their rhetorical value. In Pollock’s The Picture’s Secret the plot may seem mechanically combined from one fatal picture to the next, were the novelist not an image-blurring trickster substituting a wicked for a harmless heroine, thereby making of her a conundrum. Edgar Allan Poe does not even bother with such devices (somewhat crude in Pollock’s fiction). He uses the outline as a refined screen to bemuse, hoax, and puzzle readers with a riddle, only answerable to and solvable by his own text, an enigma devised to trick them.
The capacity of outline to suggest fiction and the ability of writers to use visuals and coax guesses at the unseen (Dickens and Phiz), are thus outshone by poetics of the hidden. That strategy is a sophisticated policy of authors to veil motivations and events, while dazzling through blatant visual means. If “It is the glory of God to conceal a thing,” writers are indeed creators of worlds, and readers challenged as “kings [whose] honour is to search out a matter.” (Prov. 25:2). The boldest of writers conceal and withhold in order to efficiently lure and ensnare in their fictional universes. They are Makers in competition.
Lastly, that inspired champion and promoter of performing arts, Théophile Gautier, still considered mere storyteller and inadequately assessed for the span of his creative capacities, saw in Retzsch’s outlines a vanguard mode of writing dumb shows and ballet as silent poems, with ideas posturing as plastic apparitions. The way to early cinema, experimental shows, and abstraction was open.
This chapter establishes the Faust outlines’ full capacity to convey veiled messages. Printed matter qualifies as cultural envoy in a literary bargain between the arts and in nations’ political negotiations. So strong and complex were such visual symbols that they would also be tendered by hero-poets to lovable ladies. What more intimate messages, then, did outlines carry in Goethe’s and Byron’s hands?
Vaughan, German Romanticism, 123.
In this chapter, pages from the literary works in reference editions (including Théophile Gautier’s fiction) appear in the main text, except for his press reviews referenced in footnotes.
Heine, “Die Harzreise,” in Briefe aus Berlin. Über Polen. Reisebilder I–II (Prosa), ed. Jost Hermand, in Historisch-kritische Gesamtausgabe der Werke (Hamburg: Hoffmann & Campe, 1973), 6:81–138.
The Early Novels of Benjamin Disraeli, vol. 1, Vivian Grey (1826–7), ed. Michael Sanders (London: Pickering & Chatto, 2004).
Vaughan, German Romanticism, 123.
Vaughan’s presentation has influenced the following report, even further than the scene staged in the novel: “She shows her sophistication by possessing and displaying a copy of Retzsch; he [Vivian Grey] shows his by recognizing it.” See Kevin Hayes, “Retzsch’s Outlines and Poe’s ‘The Man of the Crowd’,” Gothic Studies 12, no. 2 (Nov 2010): 31.
The Works of Benjamin Disraeli, Earl of Beaconsfield, vol. 1, Vivian Grey, A Romance of Youth, Intr. Edmund Gosse, Biographical Preface Robert Arnot (New York: M. Walter Dunne, 1904), 75.
Luisa Villa, “Mrs Felix Lorraine and Lady Caroline Lamb: Byronic Lore in Vivian Grey, Part I,” L’Analisi linguistica e letteraria 27, no. 1 (2019): 41–52.
Sanders, in the novel’s introduction, LIV.
Unless the on-going critical edition of Gautier’s theatre and art reviews should disclose further mentions. I have used Gautier’s criticism up to May 1866 as edited by Patrick Berthier, also personally helpful.
Wolfgang Drost and Marie-Hélène Girard, eds., Gautier et l’Allemagne (Siegen: Universi, 2005), 8.
Gautier, Loin de Paris (Paris: Michel Lévy Frères, 1865), 314.
“Feuilleton de La Presse du 17 novembre 1851,” in OC, pt. 6, vol. 10, Novembre 1851–1852, ed. P. Berthier (Paris: Champion, 2018), 46, my emphasis.
“Feuilleton de La Presse du 27 juillet 1846,” in OC, pt. 6, vol. 6 (2015), 342.
“Feuilleton de La Presse du 15 août 1854,” in OC, pt. 6, vol. 12 (2019), 166–67.
“Feuilleton de La Presse, 22 août 1834. Hamlet illustré. Treize lithographies, par M. Delacroix,” in OC, pt. 6, vol. 4 (2012), 356.
“Feuilleton de La Presse du 25 mai 1847,” in OC, pt. 6, vol. 6 (2015), 782.
Anne Geisler-Szmulewicz, “Gautier, lecteur du Faust de Goethe (1831–1841),” in Gautier et l’Allemagne, 34–36.
OC, pt. 7, Critique d’art, vol. 4, Les Beaux-arts en Europe—1855, ed. M.-H. Girard (Paris: Champion, 2011), 167.
“Feuilleton de La Presse du 19 avril 1852,” in OC, pt. 6, vol. 10 (2018), 403.
“Feuilleton de La Presse du 2 mai 1853,” in OC, pt. 6, vol. 11 (2019), 202, my emphasis.
“Feuilleton de La Presse du 3 août 1854. Théâtre royal de Munich. Faust, de Goethe,” in OC, pt. 6, vol. 12 (2019), 160.
“La Toison d’or,” ed. J.-Cl. Fizaine, in Romans, contes et nouvelles (Paris: Gallimard, 2002), 1:773–815. All page references for Gautier’s fiction in main text after this edition.
“Deux acteurs pour un rôle,” ed. P. Whyte, in Romans, contes et nouvelles, 1:867–77.
“Les Roués innocents,” ed. Claudine Lacoste-Veysseyre, in Romans, contes et nouvelles, 1:1025–118.
Saint-Léon (1821–70), born Charles Michel, a dancer and violinist, was the choreographer, business partner and husband of Fanny Cerrito, the renowned dancer.
“Feuilleton de La Presse du 1er décembre 1851,” in OC, pt. 6, vol. 10 (2018), 67.
“Feuilleton de La Presse du 3 janvier 1853,” in OC, pt. 6, vol. 11 (2019), 15.
“Revue des théâtres,” Le Moniteur universel, no. 200 (18 July 1864): 1a (on Ludwig Minkus’s ballet Néméa). Kindly imparted by P. Berthier.
Hayes, 33.
Poe, “Ballads and Other Poems. By Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,” in Essays and Reviews, ed. G. R. Thompson (New York: Literary Classics of the United States, 1984), 695.
Hayes, 39.
Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, ed. T. O. Mabbott (Cambridge, Ma.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978), 2:505–18.
Pollock, The Picture’s Secret: A Story, to Which is added an Episode in the Life of Mr. Latimer (London: Remington and Co., 1883), 3–224.
Dickens, David Copperfield, ed. N. Burgis (Oxford: At the Clarendon Press, 1981).
Harvey, Victorian Novelists and Their Illustrators (London: Sidgwick & Jackson, 1970), 148–49.
David Copperfield in monthly parts, May 1849–November 1850; The Personal History of David Copperfield, with Illustrations by H. K. Browne (London: Bradbury & Evans, 1850).
Michael Steig, Dickens and Phiz (Bloomington / London: Indiana University Press, 1978).
Harvey, 159.
Steig, 19–20.
Steig, 5.
Harvey, 226; Steig, 19.
Charles Lever, Roland Cashel (London: Chapman and Hall, 1850), 204.
Steig, 111.
The British Academy, Pilgrim edition. The Letters of Charles Dickens, vol. 12, 1868–1870, ed. G. Story et al. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002), 119.
Alfred Heinrich, “Charles Dickens und die Faust Outlines,” Anglia: Zeitschrift für englische Philologie, n.s., 37 (Jan 1926): 353–55.
Steig, 19.
Harvey, 150.