Review

Reviewed Work(s): Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity by David  Ferris

Review by: Jennifer Wallace
Source: Modern Philology , Vol. 101, No. 4 (May 2004), pp. 630-633
Published by: The University of Chicago Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/423647

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630 MODERN PHILOLOGY

and the law courts. His close readings are uniformly interesting and
complex, and, taken together, they represent a new and illuminating
contribution to the history of the novel as well as to the field of law
and literature.
Kieran Dolin
University of Western Australia

Silent Urns: Romanticism, Hellenism, Modernity. David Ferris. Stan-

ford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2000. Pp. xix+247.

“We are always talking of the Greeks and Romans—they never said
anything of us,” quipped William Hazlitt in 1816. 1 In a way, of course,
he was right. The work of the younger generation of Romantic writ-
ers was dominated by contemporary images of ancient Greece—
drawn from travel narratives, recently acquired sculpture collections,
or newly translated classical texts—which silenced their subject matter
and erased the historical context of its depictions. William Haygarth’s
picture of nineteenth-century travelers admiring the Athenian acrop-
olis in an empty landscape stripped of modern inhabitants (Greece
[1814]) is a typical example. But, in another sense, Hazlitt was wrong,
given the complexity of the relationship between antiquity and mo-
dernity in the early nineteenth century. The way that the Romantics
constructed the ancient Greeks in their imaginations actually often
served to silence them (take a look at Henry Fuseli’s striking sketch
The Artist in Despair over the Magnitude of Ancient Fragments [ca. 1770–
80]) and they either internalized their own idealizations or struggled
self-consciously to resist the prevailing philhellene ideology. “The
Greeks,” in other words, as reimagined in the late eighteenth century,
could respond to the legacy of the Romantics.
David Ferris confronts the complicity between classical antiquity and
early nineteenth-century Romanticism in no uncertain terms. He main-
tains that historians have been guilty either of idealizing ancient Greece
and emphasizing its beauty or of mercilessly debunking its mystique
and eschewing its aesthetic in favor of a politicized or historicized
picture. Instead, he argues, critics should explore the historical pro-
cesses by which the aesthetic account of Greece came to predominate
in the late eighteenth century and thus reach an understanding of the

1. William Hazlitt, review of Lectures on Dramatic Literature, by Friedrich von Schlegel,

in Selected Writings, ed. Duncan Wu, 9 vols. (London: Pickering and Chatto, 1998), 1:279.

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 Book Reviews 631

connections between aesthetics and history in our culture today. This

argument holds implications for new historicist criticism, which seeks
to replace aesthetics with history, and Ferris engages pugnaciously with
the work of Jerome McGann, Marjorie Levinson, and others through-
out the book.
At the heart of the Romantic hellenic movement, Ferris places the
work of Johann Winckelmann. He argues that in History of Ancient Art
(1764), Winckelmann drew on the Greek example to make a wider
claim about the function of the aesthetic in the history of any culture.
Winckelmann’s writing about Greece thus becomes crucially impor-
tant not just for the study of Hellenism, but also for our understand-
ing of Romantic culture and modernity: “It is more profitable to read
Winckelmann’s History of Ancient Art as the production of a sense of
history for modernity, a sense articulated through a system that takes
the name of Greece” (p. 23). The hallmarks of Winckelmann’s aes-
thetics for Ferris are, not surprisingly, familiar Romantic terms: fail-
ure, inimitability, fragmentation. The “failure” of modern writers to
imitate the Greeks, to turn art objects into words, to describe ade-
quately missing works of Greek art becomes itself aestheticized, so that
modern historical consciousness is the product of ahistorical idealiza-
tion. This argument leads to some tortuous, paradoxical tongue-and-
mind twisters: “The History of Ancient Art is an account of how the
failure of a concept of the aesthetic becomes the sign of what the con-
cept failed to account for” (p. 34).
Having set the terms for his notion of Hellenism through an analysis
of Winckelmann, Ferris proceeds to a reading of seminal poems by
John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Friedrich Hölderlin. Keats’s “On
First Looking into Chapman’s Homer” (1817) is read as an oscillation
between “looking” and “breathing” or, by extension, between respond-
ing to the visual legacy of Greece and substituting that with reading
texts, with history. This oscillation, Ferris argues convincingly, leads to
a disorientation that parallels the dislocation of translation or the
“swimming” into view of a new planet: “Antiquity, rather than being
the return of what is old, is presented by Keats as the arrival of the
not yet known, the new, the modern” (p. 74). Ferris’s interpretation
of Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) revolves around his reading of
Prometheus’s attempted revocation of his curse. In that moment, Pro-
metheus proves that judgment is always caught up in history and that
to attempt to free Greece from its past in fact binds the modern writer
to Hellenic ideology: “To be so unbound is to be bound to the myth
of Prometheus” (p. 157).
The difficulty with Ferris’s book is its emphasis on Winckelmann and
other German writers—Friedrich Schelling, Immanuel Kant, G. W. F.

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632 MODERN PHILOLOGY

Hegel—for a reading of British Romantic Hellenism. It is not clear how

well Keats or even the better-read Shelley knew the work of Winckel-
mann, much less the other writers. Mary Shelley records in her jour-
nal that Shelley read a French translation of History of Ancient Art in
late December 1818 and early January 1819, but there is no record of
him actually reading Schelling or Hegel or other Winckelmann texts.
At the time Keats and Shelley were writing, only Winckelmann’s Re-
flections on the Painting and Sculpture of the Greeks had been translated
into English (by Fuseli in 1765); the History of Ancient Art was not trans-
lated into English until 1850. While his work did filter through into
cultural discourse through indirect means—through Fuseli, through the
translation of Friedrich von Schlegel’s lectures on tragedy—it was off-
set by many other, more concrete versions of the Hellenic aesthetic
reaching Britain. Martin Aske is probably correct when he argues that
the “systematic deviancy” of Keats’s poems “confirm[s] the radical ex-
tent to which they begin to question some of the assumptions of
Winckelmann’s Hellenism” (Keats and Hellenism [Cambridge Univer-
sity Press, 1985], p. 6). Ferris admits at one point that “none of these
poets can be easily fitted within the Hellenism so frequently associated
with Winckelmann” (p. 86). It would have been good, therefore, to
have had a serious discussion of just why Winckelmann did not take
off in Britain as he did, for example, in France. Why was History of An-
cient Art not translated? Who was reading him and who was not?
Probably because German writers dominate Ferris’s notions of Hel-
lenism, his book is very abstract. Repeatedly, he tries to abstract state-
ments or facts still further. Rather than citing the discoveries at
Pompeii and Herculaneum as decisive in the development of Helle-
nism, Ferris prefers “the reconfiguring of the aesthetic as a source of
historical knowledge” (p. 2). And he wants to move away from the
historical or geographical particularity of Greece: “The significance
of Hellenism does not lie in its occurrence as a historical phenome-
non but rather in its establishment of a concept of culture that went
by the name of Greece” (p. 17). British Romantic Hellenism, how-
ever, was caught in a tension between the abstract and the concrete,
between the timeless idea of Greece and its contemporary historical
specificity. Events like the arrival of the Elgin Marbles or the outbreak
of the Greek War of Independence demanded a reassessment of more
abstract ideas of antiquity and modernity and gave the new celebra-
tion of the aesthetic a topical, political urgency.
If Silent Urns provokes a new edition of Winckelmann in English, it
will have done a good service. At present, if students wish to read
him, they can turn only to David Irwin’s good but abridged selection
of Winckelmann’s writing (Winckelmann: Writings on Art [London:
Phaidon, 1972], out of print). A new translation of Winckelmann, with

One Line Long

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 Book Reviews 633

a historically sensitive survey of his impact and influence on European

Romanticism, would be most welcome.
Jennifer Wallace
Peterhouse, Cambridge University

Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870.

Nicholas Dames. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.
Pp. x+298.

Near the end of Price and Prejudice (1813), Elizabeth Bennet gives Darcy
a playful lesson about how to look back on the rocky history of their
courtship. “You must learn something of my philosophy,” she coun-
sels; “Think only of the past as its remembrance gives you pleasure.” 1
In Amnesiac Selves: Nostalgia, Forgetting, and British Fiction, 1810–1870,
Nicholas Dames argues that something like this ethos lies at the heart
of the British nineteenth-century novel. From Jane Austen to the mid-
Victorians, Dames finds an overwhelming preference for controlled
recollection or even forgetting, a mode equally distant from the free-
wheeling mnemonic associations of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy
(1760–67) and the cascading remembrances of James Joyce or Marcel
Proust. More than the novels that precede and follow it, Dames con-
tends, British fiction from 1810 through the 1860s emphasizes and
produces a mind-set focused on an edited and useful rather than an
unwieldy or traumatic past. Often reading novels in tandem with
schools of nineteenth-century psychological theory, Dames delineates
versions of this amnesiac orientation from Austen’s comedies to Wilkie
Collins’s sensation fiction, tracing it not only in characters such as
Elizabeth Bennet but more critically in the very shapes of nineteenth-
century narrative.
In a splendid opening chapter, “Austen’s Nostalgics,” Dames inves-
tigates the transformations of “nostalgia” from late eighteenth-century
medicine, in which it denoted a diseased homesickness powerful
enough to prove fatal, to Austen’s novels, which turn it into something
like modern nostalgia, a gentle, vague sense of the past, “at once a
form of memory . . . and a form of forgetting, for it dispenses with
the vividness that the past had previously held” (p. 23). Identifying
Marianne Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility (1811) as suffering from
the older, pathologized nostalgia, Dames analyzes her illness and the

1. Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813; reprint, Oxford and New York: Oxford
University Press, 1990), p. 326.

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