Exiled in Modernity by David O'Brien

Author:David O'Brien
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Pennsylvania State University Press

FIG. 56 George Stubbs, Horse Attacked by a Lion, 1768–69. Oil on panel, 25.7 × 29.5 cm. Yale Center for British Art, Paul Mellon Collection, New Haven. B1977.14.71.

FIG. 57 James Ward, Lion and Tiger Fighting, 1797. Oil on canvas, 101.6 × 136.2 cm. Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge.

FIG. 58 James Northcote, Tiger Hunt, 1806. Mezzotint with etching (proof impression) by W. T. Annis, from the painting exhibited in 1804, 58 × 65 cm. Royal Academy of the Arts, London. 07/1663.

Whether or not the rise of this subject matter in Romanticism is attributable to the emergence of sociological and economic models that emphasized competition, self-interest, and fitness, there can be no question that Delacroix sometimes saw in animal violence a metaphor or allegory for struggle in human society. One entry in his journal begins by describing a peaceful village at night: “I saw the moon floating tranquilly over dwellings apparently plunged in silence and calm. The stars seemed to hang in the sky over peaceful abodes.” Suddenly, however, the tone changes: “The passions that inhabit them, the vices and crimes, are only sleeping or staying up in the shadow and preparing arms. Instead of uniting against the horrible evils of mortal life in a communal and fraternal peace, men are tigers and wolves pitted against one another in a battle of mutual destruction” (625). There follows an extended description of various types of maleficent men who surround the few “noble and generous” ones.

At another moment he meditates on the proposition that “man is a sociable animal who detests his own kind.” After defending the idea, he concludes, “The crimes one sees committed by a crowd of unfortunate people living in the state of society are more horrible than those committed by savages. A Hottentot, an Iroquois, chops off the head of the person he wants to skin; with cannibals, they cut someone’s throat in order to eat him, like our butchers do with a sheep or a pig. But these perfidious, carefully planned plots, which hide behind all kinds of veils, of friendship, of tenderness, of little kindnesses, are only seen in civilized people” (613). Delacroix apparently found his imagined savage preferable to civilized man because he was supposedly less dissembling and more frank in his motives. The Iroquois and Hottentots would find better defenders than Delacroix, whose anthropology was deeply misanthropic, but the point is that Delacroix saw a ruthless animal existing under a veil of civility.

In still another of his maudlin ruminations, Delacroix contemplates “the many degrees of what we agree to call civilization.” After the passage cited in chapter 1 in which he asserts that “barbarians are not found only among savages” but also in Europe, and goes on to criticize the “new barbarism” of modernity, he compares men to animals: “If man is [God’s] work of predilection, why abandon him to hunger, to the filth, to massacres, to the terrors of an uncertain life next to which that of animals is incomparably preferable, despite the anxiety, the fear, of

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