Poetical Dust by Prendergast Thomas A.;

Author:Prendergast, Thomas A.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press, Inc.
Published: 2015-04-24T16:00:00+00:00

We have seen, again how extremely unequal and uncertain is the commemoration of our celebrated men. It is this which renders the interment or notice within our walls a dubious honour, and makes the Abbey, after all, but an imperfect and irregular monument of greatness. But it is this also which gives to it that perfectly natural character of which any artificial collection is entirely destitute. In the Valhalla of Bavaria, every niche is carefully portioned out; and if a single bust is wanting from the catalogue of German worthies, its absence becomes the subject of a literary controversy, and the vacant space is at last filled. Not so in the Abbey, there, as in English institutions generally, no fixed rule has been followed. Graves have been opened or closed, monuments erected or not erected, from the most various feelings of the time.14

At least initially, Stanley wishes to claim that, as the admission of burials and monuments into the Abbey is not a regularized process, admission into the Abbey is thus “a dubious honour”—something that, he later claims, devolves not so much from greatness, but from “political and ecclesiastical prejudice.”15 At the same time, he cannot resist supplementing the supernatural “charm” of poets’ corner by comparing it with the “artificial collection” in the Valhalla of Bavaria.

The Valhalla, or Walhalla, was built over a twelve-year period (1830–1842) in Donaustauf bei Regensberg by King Ludwig I of Bavaria. Modeled on the Parthenon, the building contains busts of the “greats” that were initially chosen by Ludwig, but eventually selected by the Bavarian Academy of Sciences (fig. 10). As Stanley suggests, these busts are placed at regular—one might say geometric intervals. In fact, everything about the Walhalla is entirely regular, and it is this regularity that Stanley apparently feels is artificial. There is, one gets the feeling, a kind of organic quality to Stanley’s commentary. For what guides the burial and commemoration of persons in the Abbey are “the most various feelings of the time.” The Abbey’s history thus becomes a kind of affective history of the nation that in its co-extensiveness is natural, if imperfect. In this way, Stanley also critiques the relatively recent construction of the Walhalla. The Abbey had, of course, been around since 1065 and thus mirrored the complete post-Conquest history of the English nation. The Walhalla had been completed only twenty-six years before Stanley wrote. Further, its geographical reach was somewhat attenuated by the fact that it had been built by the king of one part of a patchwork of small states that had not yet coalesced into one nation. Though Stanley does not press the issue, he clearly sees the Walhalla, with its classical origins, well-ordered statuary, and provincial roots as an attempt to create a feeling of national pride where there was as yet no nation.

If we return for a moment to the connection between harmonious aesthetics and harmonious politics that I discussed briefly in the introduction, we can see why Stanley would need to respond to this German ideal of the well-ordered Walhalla.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.