Consciousness, Literature and the Arts
Archive
Volume 6 Number 1, April 2005
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Isham, Howard. Image of the Sea: Oceanic Consciousness in the Romantic Century. New York: Peter Lang, 2004. pp xxiii + 415. ISBN 0-8204-6727-8. $81.95 (HB).
Reviewed by
University of Durham
Howard Isham’s book provides a long-overdue study of an important feature of the Romantic imagination. The sea, both as reality and as figurative device, held a powerful grip on the consciousness of most nineteenth-century writers, painters, composers and philosophers. Given the potentially enormous scope of his ambitions, Isham is understandably reticent regarding his terminology: the titular phrase ‘romantic century’ is wisely acknowledged as “a useful convention rather than a defining epithet”, while the always-troublesome term ‘Romanticism’ is used in a general sense as “the culture of the nineteenth century”. Although these are insufficient expositions in strictly critical terms, they are nevertheless adequate for Isham’s broad intentions. For this is not merely an account of Romantic art but a far-reaching commentary on the historical, sociological, cultural, scientific, industrial and economic backgrounds to nineteenth-century artistic perceptions of the sea. Especially good on minor details (Byron, for example, was a strong swimmer; Keats was not; Shelley never learned), the author thus provides an excellent introduction to both maritime representations in romantic art and to its means of production. Some high quality explications of literary and pictorial texts are used to illuminate Isham’s thesis, while the book is handsomely and generously illustrated throughout. This extensive and erudite study encompasses themes and ideas ranging from myth to trade routes and the sea’s role in colonialism, often resurrecting long-forgotten artists and writers who are then contextualised with regard to the more familiar names of Romantic art.
Isham’s general purpose is to explore the relations that have inhered historically and politically between man and the sea as depicted in art. Throughout the nineteenth century the sea was considered a symbol of “the hazards of life”, while the ships that sailed it “became symbolically associated with the individual...community or state”. The metaphorical image of “life’s voyage on storm-tossed seas” became a familiar one across the artistic spectrum. As a result, the oceanic consciousness took on mystical and psychological significance as a source of religious sensibility. Yet while divine power was linked to the ability to control the waters, man remained incapable of doing likewise, and the sea became a correlative of the soul’s eternal movements in a rapidly changing and violent world. Subsequently, many Romantic artists viewed this instability as a reason for personal insecurity, and conventional notions of deism and monotheism came under challenge from religious dissent. The emergence of pantheism (as practised by Robert Southey, Tennyson and, for a brief time, William Wordsworth), transcendentalism (as envisioned by Baudelaire), and atheism (the attitude of the ever-sceptical Percy Shelley) can all be traced to the loss of faith caused by the social and economic instability engendered by the French Revolution. Indeed, the rise of Romanticism itself paralleled the increasing secularism felt across Europe in the wake of the Revolution. Isham writes that, “The legacy of that first romantic generation was unprecedented: the spontaneous expression of the human spirit faced with a world to be reconstituted and a new sense of freedom and individual choice”. Isham subtly conveys the intersections between spirituality, morality and existential liberty that inhered in Romantic sensibilities. The French Revolution also coloured the Romantic image of the sea by way of its tempestuous lurching and the casting adrift of reason. Once the French Revolution had shattered traditional beliefs and ways of thinking, replacing stability with flux, the sea provided the perfect metaphor for representing this shifting world-view. The sea thus came to exemplify the sublime, the aesthetic category that epitomises and values the power of violent and unfocused emotions.
Oceanic imagery and allusion were encompassed by all the different strains of Romanticism, which are characterised variously by Isham as “the fusion of classical traditions with new intellectual-emotional content”, “the consciousness of a world in flux”, “the isolation of the individual in an alien world”, and, most importantly, “the imaging of a mystical union between nature and humankind”. Although traditional spiritual values had not disappeared completely, Romantic artists still concerned themselves with what Isham terms “the restless search for values with which to connect the past with the present and future”. Wordsworth stands as the pre-eminent British figure behind this quest. Among Wordsworth’s poems, one in particular, ‘Ode on Intimations of Immortality’, alludes to the “immortal sea” which mirrors the eddies of the soul. By contrast, Turner’s paintings illustrate the battle between fragile humans and the inordinate might of the sea in the absence of God. While man struggles against nature in one of its purest forms, the sea represents an increasingly secularised world divorced from the possibility of divine intervention. But Isham does not simply limit his study to the British oceanic tradition: chapters on French and German Romanticism comprehensively illustrate the contrast between French notions of freedom and liberalism, while in the hands of German artists such as Friedrich and Heine the sea became a symbol of individualism, which in turn gave rise to many of the ideas contained in Nietzsche and existential philosophy.
By the end of the nineteenth century, the predominant mode of sea-travel had shifted from sail to steam. While artists continued to imagine and depict the ‘golden age’ of sailing ships, industrialisation and the machine age began to eclipse the oceanic consciousness. Isham describes technology’s effect on man’s mystical relationship in terms of usurpation: where once the imagination submitted to the power of the sublime, it now sought to take control over it. Indeed, by the twentieth century, the sea was increasingly seen as a place of escape from “urban-industrial environments – and as an ideal place for contemplation and self-discovery”. The sea had once been considered a place of origins (an idea traceable to Homer and Hebrew scripture), but had become transformed into a final destination. Isham charts the transition from an oceanic consciousness in thrall to the sublime to a sensibility reared on notions of the picturesque.
Following his expositions on the branches of European Romanticism, Isham broadens his horizons to take account of American artists’ responses to the sea’s effects on the imagination. Although Turner’s tempestuous seas are no less turbulent than those of Winslow Homer, Homer’s watercolours contain far less mystery. Nevertheless, Isham argues convincingly that Homer’s paintings still retain the tensions between man and sea, “setting in motion the chords of remembrance and recognition”, while sounding a plaintive note of nostalgia for a world irrevocably changed.
Isham concludes that, in the work of Homer and Conrad at least, “oceanic feeling was still alive in the early years of the twentieth century”. These artists carried on a tradition that perceives the sea as both a source of life and a cause of absolute terror. It is both the natural destination of a quest for origins and a “graveyard of human hopes and ambitions”. The sea remains associated with, but still manages to transcend, religious impulses, and its lure promises to continue unabated as long as its deepest reaches stay uncharted. As Auden (whose The Enchafèd Flood or the Romantic Iconography of the Sea provides the “pivot” on which this book revolves) puts it, “The sea is the real situation and the voyage is the true condition of man”.