Metaphorical Representations of the French Revolution in Victorian Fiction

Metaphorical Representations of the French Revolution in Victorian FictionAuthor(s): Kurt Tetzeli von RosadorSource: Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 43, No. 1 (Jun., 1988), pp. 1-23Published by: University of California PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3044978 .

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Metaphorical Representations of the French Revolution in Victorian Fiction KURT TETZELI VON ROSADOR

. . . the figurative style. We do not admit it into history, for too many metaphors are hurtful, not only to perspicuity, but also to truth, by saying more or less than the thing itself.

-Voltaire

JJKEN with the siege and fall of the Bastille in 1789 the phenomenon of revolution

burst shockingly on the European consciousness, both the actors and spectators of this historical drama resorted to similar literary strategies to account for what seemed unaccountable because totally new.' As ever, the absence of comprehensive theories, adequate concepts, or exact terms for the thing itself released an abundance of metaphorical descriptions. Soon the discourse of

C 1988 by The Regents of the University of California IFor a well-considered study of the definition of revolution see Karl Griewank,

Der neuzeitliche Revolutionsbegriff: Entstehung und Entwicklung (Weimar: Europaische Verlagsanstalt, 1955). The problem of how to treat something unprecedented has recently been discussed by the University of East Anglia English Studies Group, "Strategies for Representing Revolution," in 1789: Reading Writing Revolution, ed. Francis Barker et al. (Colchester: Univ. of Essex, 1982), pp. 81-100, and, most stimulatingly for the visual arts, by Ronald Paulson, Representations of Revolution (1789-1820) (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1983).

1



2 NINETEENTH-CENTURY LITERATURE

revolution was to a considerable extent carried on with the help of various strands of traditional imagery and the fact that the new constitutional assemblies conducted their business publicly put an additional premium on rhetoric and its flowers. Three of these fields of traditional imagery deserve special mention, the choice of which was to be employed in a particular situation being quite transparently governed by the perspective and intention of the speakers. Searching for a model of some authority for what they were thinking and doing, the active supporter of the Revolution, his conservative opponent, and the stand-aside liberal commen- tator all went to antiquity, to classical literature and art, and to the Roman republic. Hence Solons and Gracchi people the revolutionary scene, the Phrygian cap becomes the headgear of every right-thinking citizen who never swears but by the head of Brutus ("Je jure sur la tete de Brutus").2 If, however, revolutionary self- consciousness is preponderant-and self-consciousness is not a quality normally lacking among revolutionaries-stage-imagery is an adequate vehicle for its expression, evoking with Robespierre "the theatre of our revolution" or envisioning with Sieyes a multitude of thetatres nationaux for the education and edification of the people.3

Important as these two metaphorical fields are for the understanding of the revolutionary mind and its fictional portrayals, it is a third that dominates the depiction of revolution. In the words of the man who profited most by the Revolution, the exiled Napoleon:

And here is the remarkable thing: the obstacles that made me fail did not come from men; they all came from the elements. In the south, the sea has been my undoing; in the north, the burning of Moscow and the cold of winter. Thus water, air, and fire, all of Na- ture, nothing but Nature-these have been the enemies of a uni- versal regeneration which Nature herself demanded!4

2See Harold T. Parker's detailed account, The Cult of Antiquity and the French Revolutionaries: A Study in the Development of the Revolutionary Spirit (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1937), p. 179.

3See Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1963), p. 102 and passim; and Joseph Butwin, "The French Revolution as Theatrum Mundi," Re- search Studies, 43 (1975), 141-52.

4Quoted in Melvin J. Lasky, Utopia and Revolution (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1976), p. 481.



THE FRENCH REVOLUTION IN FICTION 3

A way of viewing history, as old as the hills and omnipresent not only in Western thought, is here succinctly expressed. Nature and history are not distinct: the one mirrors the other, the one stands in for the other, the one is the other. No wonder that the selfsame Napoleon, musing rock-bound on his small island in the Atlantic Ocean, was led to view the French Revolution specifically in terms of natural history:

The French Revolution was a nation-wide convulsion as irre- sistible in its effects as a volcanic eruption. When the mysterious molten substance in the entrails of the earth has reached its explosive point, the lava escapes and the eruption takes place. The hidden travail of the masses follows an identical course: when their suffer- ings are ripe, they explode in revolution.'

This is, in the early nineteenth century, a commonplace thought and a commonplace metaphor. Whether the speakers are moti- vated by utopian longing or cataclysmic fear, whether praise or vituperation is their intent, whether their attitudes are conservative or progressive-all-nourishing Nature provides her children indiscriminately with metaphors. Naturally, these are metaphors as polymorphous and ubiquitous as great Nature herself.6 The Republican calendar with its Ventose, Pluviose, Nivose, Fructidor, and Thermidor is perhaps the best-known result of such natu- ralization. But metaphors were drawn not only from the seasonal cycle. All aspects of growth and decay, of birth, death, and rebirth fed the imagination equally, as did the subject of natural catas- trophes, of disease and healing, or, most prominently, the analogy between the realms of human and animal life (an analogy which, after Darwin had spoken, tended towards the nightmare).

5The Mind of Napoleon: A Selection from His Written and Spoken Words, ed. and trans. J. Christopher Herold (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1955), p. 64. The history and function of this particular strand of imagery have been dealt with by Lasky, Utopia and Revolution, pp. 69-70 and passim, and George P. Landow, Images of Crisis: Literary Iconology, 1750 to the Present (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1982).

6See the rich compilation of material by Alexander Demandt, Metaphern fur Geschichte: Sprachbilder und Gleichnisse im historisch-politischen Denken (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1978). The revolutionaries' attitudes toward nature have been well abstracted in the introductory pages of Lee Sterrenburg's analysis of Mary Shelley's novel, "The Last Man: Anatomy of Failed Revolutions," Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 33 (1978), 324-26.




This reliance on metaphor as a means of imaging the Rev- olution accords well both with the oxymoronic feeling of the Vic- torians toward revolution7 and with the literary development of the novel in the nineteenth century. The French Revolution may, for the Victorians, no longer have been "the master theme of the epoch," as Shelley claimed it to be when writing to Byron in 1816.8 Against a background of frequent riots, revolts, and revolutions at home and abroad, it remained one of the master themes of the age. The not inconsiderable number of direct fictional representations of the French Revolution and the even longer list of in- direct, symbolic treatments of revolution bear ample witness to the persistent interest of Victorian authors and readers in the subject, an interest climaxing not surprisingly in the early thirties, around 1848, and in the late sixties.9

Above all, it is the state and development of novel-writing in the early decades of the nineteenth century that help to explain the Victorian novelists' attraction toward the French Revolution as a subject in need of metaphorical representation. With only a small pinch of salt it may be said that the novel contemporary with the French Revolution was simply not capable of coping with an event that was at once recreated metaphorically by both the

7For a brief account of Victorian attitudes from widely differing angles see Michael Wolff, "Understanding the Revolution: The Arena of Victorian Britain," in Liberations: New Essays on the Humanities in Revolution, ed. Ihab Hassan (Middle- town, Conn.: Wesleyan Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 41-54, and Malcolm I. Thomis and Peter Holt, Threats of Revolution in Britain 1789-1848 (London: Macmillan, 1977).

8The Letters of Percy Bysshe Shelley, ed. Frederick L. Jones, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clar- endon Press, 1964), I, 504.

9The realization that not a single study has systematically or exclusively treated the presentation of revolution in Victorian fiction will therefore come as somewhat of a surprise. Since studies of the Romantic poets and their attitudes toward the French Revolution are plentiful, since even Jane Austen's novels have been studied at book length in order to show that their concern with revolution tends toward zero, the dozens of Victorian novels dealing directly with revolution deserve closer scrutiny. Valuable material and interesting observations, though thickly encrusted with methodological jargon, can be found in Dagmar Malik's doctoral dissertation Die Franzisische Revolution im Diskurs des neunzehnten Jahrhunderts (Diss. Bochum, 1983). What is needed are works on the lines of those collected by John Lucas in Literature and Politics in the Nineteenth Century (London: Methuen, 1971): here, to single out but two approaches, the revolutionary meaning of Little Dorrit is analyzed by William Myers, "The Radicalism of 'Little Dorrit,'" pp. 77-104, and the year 1848 in its consequences for (love) poetry by John Goode, "1848 and the Strange Disease of Modern Love," pp. 45-76.




actors in, and the spectators of, it. Thus, despite the subtitle of Ann Thomas' Adolphus de Biron: A Novel Founded on the French Revolution (1795), not a single historical event or-some vilifying comments on Voltaire and Thomas Paine excepted-person is de- picted. The Revolution is, for one thing, nothing but a backdrop against which the fortunes of various families unfold in romance- fashion; for another, it is the target of highly conservative, indeed reactionary, moralizing summarized by the novel's epigraph taken from Pope's Essay on Man that "Order is Heaven's first law." Sim- ilarly, Charlotte Smith's Desmond (1792), like so much literature of the time a revision of Burke's Reflections, eschews the representation of specific events and verbosely discusses basic social and moral principles, especially the rights of the throne and the three estates (before the novel turns to a somewhat hackneyed plot of patient female suffering and equally patient male service). If the following decades abstained on the whole from portraying the concrete events of the French Revolution directly and mimetically in the form of the novel, it is surely the lack of means, not of interest, that is responsible. That Romantic poetry depends for its presentation of the French Revolution so much on the rather lim- ited metaphorical means of hyperbole and personification, with the unlovely Goddesses of Liberty and Reason striding majestically across its pages, and with metaphor proper an undervalued third, is proof from a different perspective. And that a picaresque novel of 1825, L. B. Picard's The Gil Blas of the Revolution, or The Confes- sions of Lawrence Giffard, privileges plot, situation, and a satiric point of view and manages to do almost totally without metaphorical embellishments will surprise nobody.

With Mrs. Gore's The Tuileries, however, published anony- mously in 1831 but written before 1827,10 a radical change has taken place. No doubt, Mrs. Gore deploys metaphors mainly or- namentally, highly selectively, and rather inconsistently. This is, to give but one example, how the beginning of the fateful year 1789 is evoked:

... the spirit of revolutionary excitation ... was slowly gathering to its full ripeness of mischief: like fatal vapours which condense their

'0See the reference in Mrs. Gore's novelette, The Reign of Terror (London: J. Andrews, 1827), pp. 303-4.




mephitic influence in the lowest depths of darkness, it brooded in ambushed expectation of its future prey."

This fairly typical example of a somewhat mixed metaphor-a spirit subject to organic growth is first compared to volcanic or hellish rumblings to be then turned into a beast of prey-clearly demonstrates whither the undisciplined striving after rhetorical effect and a metaphorical texture may lead. Still, it is such striving that distinguishes early Victorian novel-writing. A process of metaphorization has set in. It coincides with the urge, furthered by both the novel's budding realist tendencies and the age's spirit of reform, to present the events and protagonists of the French Rev- olution mimetically in their particularity. That metaphors of revolution are used for that purpose does not deserve much critical attention-they are the well-known, traditional ones-but rather their selection, distribution, and function. It is with such selection, distribution, and function of metaphors for representing revolution in three Victorian novels, John Sterling's Arthur Coningsby (1833), Anthony Trollope's La Vendte (1850), and Charles Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities (1859), that this paper is concerned.

Arthur Coningsby, written by Sterling for re- laxation after his and Frederick Denison Maurice's unsuccessful struggle to make The Athenaeum profitable and published anony- mously some three years later in 1833, may lay claim to be one of the earliest English Bildungsromane, if not indeed the very first one. The neglect it has suffered is most certainly due both to its discursive long-windedness and to the misleading account Thomas Carlyle gave of its contents in his otherwise impressive Life of Ster- ling.12 That the novel deals with the French Revolution the future

IICatherine Gore, The Tuileries, 3 vols. (London: Henry Colburn & Richard Bentley, 1831), I, 89.

'2The Life ofJohn Sterling, vol. 11 of Works, ed. H. D. Traill (London: Chapman and Hall, 1897), p. 94. Carlyle's account has been still further elaborated by Rich-




master historian of it does not mention at all, nor does he, the master metaphorician, treat of its strategies of presentation. The plot of Arthur Coningsby is quickly told: it is the story of an idealistic and impressionable young man who has been subjected to all the conventional stages and advantages of a good English education with special emphasis on the fine arts. He joins one of the secret revolutionary societies in London and has to flee to Paris when it is betrayed from within. There he falls in love with the immensely rich, beautiful, and refined Marquise de Valence, who sympathizes with the revolution. Disillusion comes for both when the massacres start. A secluded castle of the Marquise's provides an idyllic love- nest for a brief period before both have to pay their respective poetic penalties: the Marquise dies and Coningsby, utterly disillusioned, asks the question that becomes increasingly unanswer- able in Victorian times and therefore reverberates insistently through the Victorian novel: "What, then, shall I do?" (III, 378). A "vision of the American wilderness" (III, 392) is what is left to him.'3

The bare outline of what is no more than a string of stock situations makes it clear that plot possesses little interest for Ster- ling. For him, the plot serves the theme and the theme the moral intent. Of course, nothing else is to be expected of the leading Cambridge Apostle of the late twenties and the close friend of Frederick Denison Maurice, Richard Chevenix Trench, and, later on, Thomas Carlyle. What Sterling is after in Arthur Coningsby is an answer to the question of all Victorian Bildungsromane-what

ard B. Ince, Calverley and Some Cambridge Wits of the Nineteenth Century (London: Richards & Toulmin, 1929): there Arthur Coningsby has to suffer a "divinely ordained shipwreck" that leads to his regeneration "by the aid of Coleridge's phi- losophy" (p. 190). After such fanciful misreadings it is doubly unfortunate that Arthur Coningsby is not even given a footnote in Lionel Stevenson's magisterial survey, The English Novel: A Panorama (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1960), and that the one important book-length study of Sterling's spiritual and artistic progress, Anne Kimball Tuell's John Sterling: A Representative Victorian (New York: Macmillan, 1941), pp. 176-78, 186-87, devotes so little space to the discussion of the literary problems of the novel.

13Arthur Coningsby, 3 vols. (London: Effingham Wilson, 1833), III, 378 and 392. Further references are to this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.




does the morally decent and socially useful life consist of? The historical dynamics of the French Revolution, the problem of mass rule or the aesthetic difficulty of depicting a mob have little, if any, interest for him. What is of almost exclusive interest to him, as it is to John Stuart Mill at about the same time,'4 is the moral essence of the Revolution, which is shown to be utterly rotten. The titular hero is the vehicle of thesis demonstration. He is char- acterized as a youth whose "meditations were of millions to become suddenly happy by legislative enactments" (I, 45) and who "looked forward to a future unconnected with the past, and more radiant than it; and which, centred no where, embraced the world" (I, 127). In France of the early 1790s such utopian dreams were supposed to have found a local habitation; France, consequently, is made the testing-ground for them.

The revolutionary cult of antiquity serves Sterling to give shape to these ideal aspirations of the Revolution. The main attraction in the palace of the Marquise de Valence, besides herself who flaunts "the virtues of Cornelia and the charms of Lais" (II, 32), is a sculpture gallery of extraordinary beauty and variety. The variety is such that appropriate statues exist for all sorts of people and occasions: Dumourier-Sterling's spelling-stands next to a statue of Alcibiades, Barbaroux near a faun, Condorcet is matched against Euripides, while Marat is "the modern Ther- sites" (II, 70). A love-scene, not unexpectedly, takes place "near a group of Eros and Psyche" (II, 254), while all heart-wringings are relegated to an inner sanctuary that contains nothing but the Laocoon. The French Revolution, its actors, its essence, is thus turned into what it itself aspired to be, a thing of beauty outdoing antiquity, a classical palace of art. Matching revolution and (classical) art, Sterling is able to test the realms of both art and politics and their inherent claims to provide alternative, better worlds.

14In his review of Archibald Alison's History of the French Revolution, first published in The Monthly Repository for 1833, Mill had written: "All political revolutions, not effected by foreign conquest, originate in moral revolutions. The subversion of established institutions is merely one consequence of the previous subversion of established opinions. The hundred political revolutions of the last three cen- turies were but a few outward manifestations of a moral revolution, which dates from the great breaking loose of the human faculties commonly described as the 'revival of letters'" (Collected Works of John Stuart Mill, ed. J. M. Robson, 25 vols. [Toronto: Univ. of Toronto Press, 1963-86], XX, 118).




But in exact correspondence with Tennyson's soul and her lordly pleasure-house ("The Palace of Art"), Coningsby, the Mar- quise, and all the revolutionaries cannot live in art. For one thing, it is an ironical, truth-telling palace they inhabit, foreshadowing the treachery of Dumourier by placing him against Alcibiades, or the moral nature of the pleasure-loving, faun-like Barbaroux. For another, it is, in its aesthetic opulence, based on the exploitation of the people, removing its occupants from the sphere of common duties to household gods and fellow-men. This is what the Mar- quise finally recognizes, when, anticipating the soul's reaction in Tennyson's poem, the statues appear to her

threatening spectres and ministers of vengeance. While I was feed- ing my luxury with the life-blood of hundreds of peasants and ar- tisans, it was amid these forms that I withdrew myself from the hum- ble and momentous duties of life. These shadows have intercepted the view of all realities. (II, 250)

The comparison between the two seemingly different worlds stresses nothing but their similarities. The revolutionary dream of human, world-encompassing happiness and the aesthetic ideal of perfect beauty converge. A retreat from everyday reality, a neglect of duty, the poses of artificiality: in short, the element of inhu- manity inherent in all the blueprints of ideal states/States, belongs to both.

To hammer home his moral Sterling changes his metaphoric paradigm. Having criticized revolutionary aspirations by exposing what the cult of antiquity and beauty really means, he sets out to reveal metaphorically the true nature of the Revolution. Tradi- tional organic metaphors, those of the elemental forces of nature and of nature denaturalized, are his means. What was but briefly hinted at by the enemies of the Revolution early in the novel is now expressed as the insight of the disillusioned protagonists. The Marquise realizes that the revolutionaries "are bringing down an avalanche on their own heads.... As for France, the malady, fear- ful though it be, will have its way" (III, 120). This is the time when the tumbrils roll along "as the surging torrent" (III, 69) and the revolutionaries are metamorphosed into "raging beasts of prey, or loathsome reptiles" (III, 315-16). By evoking the irre- sistible forces of nature and by reducing man to his lowest com-




mon denominator, his animal core, Sterling turns history into natural history and the realm of man-made politics and freedom into that of cyclical natural necessity. Goethe and Wordsworth had described the French Revolution in identical, if less pessimistic, terms,'5 a tradition continued by the historian Eyre Evans Crowe, who, writing about the same time as Sterling, unhesitatingly con- cluded that, by the French Revolution, "Man... is thrown back into a state of nature."'16

The remedy Sterling proposes for the perversions of his two alternative worlds of ideal politics and beauteous art (to which a third, that of mutual love, can be added) is very modest in scope and very Victorian indeed. It is a moral of self-abnegation, of practical charity, of sympathy with one's neighbor, of doing one's duty where duty like charity begins, namely at home. And it is stated quite explicitly early in the novel as the norm against which all the subsequent action has to be set and judged. After the mischief caused by his joining the secret revolutionary society, Con- ingsby is warned by his best friend: "you have neglected the one great duty, the subjugation, namely, of yourself. Attend to that, and you will thereby become an instrument for the real improve- ment of others also" (I, 259). The advice is not heeded. Instead, reality, the French Revolution, is metaphorized and transformed into a palace of art, the splendid isolation of which sets free what might otherwise have been controlled by self-abnegation and the fulfillment of duty, namely the bestial in man. 17 History is thus guiltily returned to Nature, a Nature red in tooth and claw.

However, what has been fully spelled out here in its consequences is but implicit in Sterling's novel. Not that the moral is not made perfectly clear. It is the imagery that lacks volume, weight, and consistency. It is there, but only, as it were, in statu

'5See Goethe's letter of 9 March 1802 to Friedrich Schiller and Wordsworth's The Prelude, X, 610-13.

16The History of France, 3 vols. (London: Longman, Rees, Orme, Brown & Green, 1830-31), III, 36.

'7The identical message is somewhat shrilly preached by Sir Walter Scott in The House of Aspen, written about the same time as Arthur Coningsby and first published in London in 1830: "Wo to those who would advance the general weal by trampling upon the social affections! they aspire to be more than men-they shall become worse than tigers" (The Poetical Works of Sir Walter Scott [Edinburgh: Bal- lantyne, 1834], vol. XII, act V, scene i).




nascendi. Central episodes receive rich meaning through it, while it is relegated elsewhere to the novel's background or totally dropped for discursive reasoning, digressive discussions, or Boc- caccio-like in-set tales.18 Still, the process of metaphorizing the French Revolution for more than ornamental reasons has set in. The use of two contrasting, conflicting metaphorical paradigms, too, may be called seminal. It is taken up and further developed in a novel as interesting and as faulty as Sterling's, Anthony Trol- lope's La Vendtoe.

AQ~D

The place where Trollope's only historical novel is from time to time critically devalued is the footnote. Echo- ing Trollope's own statement from the Autobiography that he "knew, in truth, nothing of life in the La Vendee country"''9 and blaming the novel's "crude hostility to the Revolution," critics have tended to dismiss it in a very few lines as "the worst book [Trol- lope] ever wrote."20 Of course, there is no gainsaying the critical judgment of La Vendee as a rather minor work. But if one is prepared to accept the novel as apprentice work and to forgo for once the subtleties of complex characterizations and thematic in- tricacies, intimations of what was to come and of what went into the making of Trollope, the major novelist, can be discerned. An examination of the admittedly scanty imagery can show that La Vend&e is not quite the crude piece of conservative special pleading it is unanimously held to be.21

What lifts the novel out of the sphere of ideological simpli- fication is an awareness that the different levels of fictional dis-

'8There is a pointed reference to Boccaccio and his manner of story-telling, when the circle of the Marquise apes the Florentines while Paris is stricken by the social plague of revolution (II, 125). The story-telling certainly enriches the novel's theme of art versus reality but disrupts both the plot and the metaphoric conti- nuity.

'9An Autobiography, ed. Michael Sadleir and Frederick Page (Oxford: Oxford Univ. Press, 1980), pp. 80-81.

20Avrom Fleishman, The English Historical Novel: Walter Scott to Virginia Woolf (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1971), p. 177; R. M. Polhemus, The Chang- ing World of Anthony Trollope (Berkeley: Univ. of California Press, 1968), p. 20.

21See the representative statements in Bill Overton, The Unofficial Trollope (Brighton: Harvester Press, 1982), pp. 24-25.




course can be used to serve a variety of purposes and not merely the single one of a melodramatic unity of effect. Thus there is, first, the level of scenic presentation, of dialogue, situation, and action. On this level, the revolutionary history is dramatized as it is experienced and suffered by the participants. Yet not all the participants are presented that way. Scenic presentation is Trol- lope's way of depicting, above all, the Vendeans, who thus acquire a quality of lifelikeness and emotional immediacy largely denied to the revolutionary party. In addition, the revolutionaries, with the one exception of Robespierre, are also denied the consolations of female company and hence the one Victorian highroad to in- stant sympathy: female love and female tears (of which the Ven- deans have plenty). Scenic presentation, as is well known, is a narrative procedure with a tendency toward, or possibly a pretense of, objectivity, even if in La Vendge the stark contrast between feeling, loving, and dutiful Vendeans on the one hand and reasoning, power-thirsty, and brutal revolutionaries on the other undoubt- edly directs the reader's judgment and sympathy toward the loy- alist insurgents.

On a second level, that of metaphorization, a better balance is achieved. Right from the beginning of the insurrection the Ven- dean army is presented as God's own. A holy war is to be waged by it: "You, my children," a village-priest exhorts his parishioners, "are now God's people; if you are truly faithful, you shall as- suredly prevail; if you go out to battle firmly, absolutely, entirely trusting in the strength of His right hand-that right hand, that Almighty arm shall be on your side."?22 Vendean after Vendean describes the army and the war in these terms. It is a view acted out in the historically documented episodes around the self-styled Bishop of Agra and incarnated in General d'Elbee, who never speaks but providence is on his lips (an idiosyncracy for which the historical d'Elbee was dubbed General la Providence by his soldiers): " 'Providence can give us the victory over tried veterans as well as over untried conscripts; it were a sin to doubt it,' said M. d'Elbeee" (I, 272). The repetitive insistence with which these for- mulae are applied seems to leave no doubt: a battle between good

22La Vend&e, 3 vols. (London: Henry Colburn, 1850), I, 214. Further quotations are of this edition and appear in parentheses in the text.




and evil appears to be going on, history seems to be providentially oriented (the more so, since the maxim so dear to the Victorians that "God will temper the wind to the shorn lamb" is hardly ever out of the Vendeans' mouths).

The forces of God must needs combat those of evil. Meta- phorization in La Vendte therefore follows necessarily Blake's principle: "None can see the man in the enemy; ... I cannot love my enemy for my enemy is not man but beast or devil."23 Because of its importance within Trollope's view of the Revolution this principle is made quite explicit in La Vendde when the psychological mechanism of one of the (fictional) leaders is laid bare:

He was a light-hearted and kind-hearted creature, although he always considered it necessary to have mortal enemies-horrid, blas- phemous, blood-thirsty fellows, men devoid of feeling, without faith, hope, or charity, who would willingly slaughter women and children for the mere pleasure of doing so. Such, in Chapeau's imagination, were all his enemies;-such had been the aristocrats during the time of his revolutionary fervour;-such now were the republicans.

(I, 161-62)

Consequently, the revolutionaries are turned into "monsters," "noxious animal[s]," "wolves of Paris," and "demons" (II, 38, 39, 61, 146)-the traditional vocabulary of vituperation is employed. And the revolutionaries return the compliment. For Santerre the Vendeans are "noxious vermin," for Barrere "mean curs," and Cathelineau, the Vendean leader, is a 'jackal" (II, 169, 171). The mutuality of recrimination makes clear the principle behind Trol- lope's use of metaphor. Neither the sanctification of the Vendean war nor the bestialization of the revolutionary forces can claim authorial sanction. It is the Vendeans who see themselves fighting in a holy cause within providential history and who see their opponents as belonging to the forces of evil. Metaphors serve to lend plausibility to one's own perspective. Thus they are rhetorical strategies, weapons making for persuasion, delusion, and self- delusion, generally employed in direct speech, only very rarely endorsed by the omniscient narrator.

23Marginalia in Lavater's Aphorisms, in William Blake's Writings, ed. G. E. Bentley, Jr. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1978), p. 1361.




The narrator's stance serves to foreground this problem: moving on a third level of discourse, he explains his own attitude towards the historical events and figures. His main function con- sists of providing the necessary historical data as a skeletal frame for the actions, both private and public-and the footnotes are in Trollope as elsewhere a symptom of the Victorian novel's affinity for realistic documentation-and then he stands back in ironical equidistance. The narrator's long explanation of his view deserves to be quoted in its entirety:

When years have rolled by, and passions have cooled, the different motives and feelings of the persons concerned become known to all, and mankind is enabled to look upon public acts from every side. Not so the actors; they are not only in ignorance of facts, the knowl- edge of which is necessary to their judging rightly, but falsehoods dressed in the garb of facts are studiously brought forward to de- ceive them, and men thus groping in darkness are forced to form opinions, and to act upon them.

Public men are like soldiers fighting in a narrow valley: they see nothing but what is close around them, and that imperfectly, as everything is in motion. The historian is as the general, who stands elevated on the high ground, and, with telescope in hand, sees plainly all the different movements of the troops. (III, 44-45)

This is a remarkable insight into his own working procedure (and it is a strategy that Trollope is to perfect in his major satirical novels). The narrator's stance serves to frame the other literary strategies used. Within this frame the use of conflicting metaphors for the historical process, for the revolutionary civil war, is ques- tioned, the problem of perspective is raised. Indeed, in La Vendge metaphors and metaphorical thinking are implicitly under attack. The merely strategic use of metaphors by both Father Jerome, the Vendean priest, and Santerre, the revolutionary leader, demonstrates their potential for deluding others and for self-delusion. And the narrator can do nothing but, smiling grimly, let this spec- tacle of human foolishness and blindness proceed.24

24Trollope's attitude may be thrown into relief by contrasting it with another novelist's on the same subject. While Trollope, as pointed out, presents General d'Elbee scenically and refrains from authorial comments and moral judgment on his misuse of the providential view of history, John Mason Neale proceeds quite differently. Neale's narrator explicitly condemns the General's use of Providence:




This is the novel that Trollope might have written a quarter of a century later as The Way They Lived Then had he again decided to take up a historical subject. As the novel stands, the view of the psychological dynamics of the French Revolution and of the power of metaphor is engulfed, indeed all but swamped, by the plotting of emotional climaxes and the decent exposure of several love-interests. Trollope is not prepared to accept the consequences, such as a tragic or satiric view of history, inherent in his presentation of the use and abuse of metaphor. Instead, he breaks off when, with the defeat of the Vendeans, a historical analysis of the causes and the meaning of the French Revolution and the Vendean rising could no longer be forgone. One of the feeblest endings of any novel by any major Victorian novelist, a jump forward in time in order to look back in sentimental nostalgia, is the result. The novel's metaphorization and the narrator's stance, however, are an earnest of what was to come.

In Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities both the metaphoric impulse of the early and mid-Victorian novel and the steady progress of metaphorizing the French Revolution coalesce and come to full fruition.25 Much of the novel's power derives from the fact that its concepts of history and its rhetorical strategies are indivisibly fused. To quote the most telling example:

Crush humanity out of shape once more, under similar hammers, and it will twist itself into the same tortured forms. Sow the same seed of rapacious licence and oppression over again, and it will surely yield the same fruit according to its kind. (p. 399)

"A more serious fault was his making use of religion as a means of acquiring popularity. He was a man of piety, and no one could doubt it, but he brought in religious references without sense or reverence; and, in particular, the word Prov- idence was scarcely ever out of his mouth" (Duchenter: or, The Revolt of La Vend&e [London: Joseph Masters, 1848], p. 32).

25For the following interpretation I am reusing in a much concentrated way material from my article "Geschichtsrhetorik und Geschichtsauffassung in Charles Dickens' 'A Tale of Two Cities,'" Germanzsch-Romanische Monatsschnrft, 66 (1985), 301-16. All quotations from the novel are taken from the Penguin English Library edition, ed. George Woodcock (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1970).




This is not just a statement of the novel's concept of history, pro- posed with a sententious air of finality (and therefore frequently taken to represent Dickens' summing up26). It is also a statement of Dickens' narrative and metaphorical program. What the narrator by all the rhetorical and metaphorical means of his craft and the Revolution in real, terrible earnest are doing is to crush humanity out of shape.

Deindividualization is a first step towards this goal. Hence revolutionary humanity is robbed of its name and the nobility is re- duced to type-"Monseigneur in Town" and "Monseigneur in the Country" are the characteristic headings of two chapters-while the people become an isonymous mass of "Jacques One, Jacques Two, Jacques One Thousand, Jacques Two Thousand, Jacques Five-and-Twenty Thousand" (p. 245). But this is a mere beginning. The metaphors Dickens employs serve far more radical ends. With powerful insistence and consistency, the inhabitants of both the towns are turned into animals. With the exception of Charles Darnay and Dr. and Lucy Manette, none escapes such metaphorical transformation. Still, distinctions are to be made. While the English, both the individuals and the mass, are by and large only likened to animals, the French, one and all, are metaphorically identified as such. Thus Jerry Cruncher sits at his breakfast "growling over it like any four-footed inmate of a me- nagerie" (p. 88), the relationship between Mr. Stryver and Sydney Carton is the professional one of "lion" and 'jackal", Mr. Lorry, leaving the coach, is "rather like a larger sort of dog" (p. 48), and the mob of spectators at Darnay's trial at the Old Bailey buzzes "as if a cloud of great blue-flies were swarming" (p. 97).27

The difference between the treatment of the English and that of the French can be clearly seen in that, at the parallel trial in Paris, Charles Darnay is indeed tried by "a jury of dogs" (p. 345).

26 See, for instance, John Gross, "A Tale of Two Cities," in Dickens and the Twentieth Century, ed. John Gross and Gabriel Pearson (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962), p. 192, or William Oddie, Dickens and Carlyle: The Question of Influence (Lon- don: Centenary Press, 1972), p. 63.

27Had Dickens come across the remark of George Savile, Marquis of Halifax, that "the angry buzz of a multitude is one of the bloodiest noises in the world"? See "Political Thoughts and Reflections," in Halifax: Complete Works, ed. J. P. Ken- yon (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1969), p. 203.




If comparisons are employed early in the novel to characterize the revolutionaries and their aristocratic opponents, metaphors in- sisting on identity soon prevail: Gaspard possesses a "wolfishly practical character" (p. 63), of Madame Defarge it is said that "op- portunity had developed her into a tigress" (p. 391), the members of the aristocracy are "birds, fine of song and feather" (p. 62), and the people, erstwhile "common dogs" (p. 354) and "miserable beasts" (p. 64), are finally "changed into wild beasts" (p. 263). The situation is made brutally clear: humanity in the shape of Darnay and the Manettes is pitted against bestiality in the shape of the beast-like English and the bestial French. This, I suggest, is the basic conflict of A Tale of Two Cities. Small wonder that so many critics have complained about the novel's lack of social, econom- ical, historical, or political particularity.28

Yet metaphors not only serve to show up the nature of both the individual and the mass in revolutionary times. The Revolu- tion itself, its essence and its dynamics, is presented by means of organic metaphors. The Revolution announces itself through thunder and lightning breaking into the idyllic nature "north of the Oxford-road," where "forest-trees flourished, and wild flowers grew, and the hawthorn blossomed" (p. 123) and whither man has taken refuge. And throughout, the Revolution is presented as a thunderstorm, earthquake, raging fire, and all-destroying ocean. Chapter-headings like "The Sea Still Rises," the title of the third volume, "The Track of a Storm," the Carlylean "living sea" for the enraged mass besieging the Bastille (p. 245)-all, and many more examples to be found on almost every page of the novel, announce that human time and history have been usurped by natural time and history:

In such risings of fire and risings of sea-the firm earth shaken by the rushes of an angry ocean which had now no ebb, but was always on the flow, higher and higher, to the terror and wonder of the beholders on the shore-three years of tempest were consumed.

(p. 263)

28This position has most succinctly and most influentially been stated by George Lukacs, The Historical Novel, trans. Hannah and Stanley Mitchell (London: Merlin Press, 1962), pp. 243-44.




What governs a revolution metamorphosed into a catastrophist natural history and carried out by bestialized man is the law that governs all natural history, the law of cyclical inevitability and eternal recurrence. Supporting images of the seasonal cycle, of sowing and garnering, of the mill and the wheel, thus abound in A Tale of Two Cities. Appropriately, it is the blood-smeared grindstone on which the revolutionaries whet their murderous arms that serves as emblem of the essence of a revolutionary natural history, its brutalizing inevitability, in all its horror. Its emblematic importance is emphasized by the fact that "The Grindstone" was one of the titles considered by Dickens for his novel.29 Moreover, the emblem is extended so as to leave no doubt that it is, in times of revolution, all-inclusive. The grindstone of the revolutionaries is but the epitome of "the great grindstone, Earth" (p. 93).

From a world of history viewed as natural history, from a revolutionary realm of cyclical inevitability, no escape is possible- except by means of the "natural and not to be alienated inherit- ance" of man (p. 44), by death, which under such conditions may even appear to be beneficial: "Death is Nature's remedy for all things" (p. 84). No other of Dickens' novels is therefore so death- ridden as A Tale of Two Cities, and this not only because a mass execution all but closes it. The narrator's musings at the beginning of the novel, in the third chapter, already tend gravewards: "My friend is dead, my neighbour is dead, my love, the darling of my soul, is dead" (p. 44). A fair number of people, Damiens, Gas- pard's child, Charles Darnay's son, all the family of Madame De- farge, die senselessly and brutally before the guillotine and the grindstone turn the Revolution into a shambles. Thus the presid- ing deities of the two terrestrial cities are, in the very first chapter, correctly named as "Woodman Fate" and "Farmer Death." What they preside over is the "Republic One and Indivisible, of Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, or Death" -a description, the ironic ade- quacy of which Dickens insists on by reiterating it.

29See Philip Collins' important article on the genesis of the novel, "A Tale of Two Novels: A Tale of Two Cities and Great Expectations in Dickens' Career," Dickens Studies Annual, 2 (1972), 342. The emblem is prefigured in chapter 4 of Dickens' full-dress rehearsal of A Tale of Two Cities, Barnaby Rudge, where Simon Tappertit has visions of "human gore" while-"whirr-r-r-r"-working at a grindstone.




Yet this view of the essence and dynamics of the French Rev- olution and of the nature of revolutionary man, be he individual or part of a mass, insisted on as it is by the sheer number of organic images, is not the only one offered in A Tale of Two Cities. There is the alternative world of Charles Darnay, of Dr. and Lucy Manette, of those three who have not been metaphorized into the bestial. Lucy's "golden thread" (p. 240) that binds them together also connects them with a transcendental realm. "I am supported from above" (p. 363), Lucy can claim with confidence. From such a position terrestrial history may be seen to partake of sacred history, and Dickens carefully intersperses allusions to the Last Judgment30 and interweaves the theme of resurrection into the texture of his novel to endorse such a view.3' Of course, it is Syd- ney Carton's two visions of the "beautiful city" and his sacrificial death that most clearly prove that there is a world beyond natural history, that history is apocalyptically directed toward eternity.

That Dickens refrains from propounding this view of history by means of direct statement, that he mediates his vision through rare allusions, implied thematic parallels, and subjective prophecy, is surely due mainly to the age's skepticism, its loss of firm belief. (After all, the year that saw the publication of A Tale of Two Cities also saw the publication of Darwin's Origin of Species.) It may, however, also be due to a literary tradition of presenting the French Revolution. For in many novels after Mrs. Gore's The Tuileries some kind of transcendence, specifically Christian or more vaguely metaphysical, exists. It is firmly established in Mrs. Gore's The Tuileries, in Bulwer's Zanoni (1842), or in the Rev. G. D. Hill's Scenes of 1792 (1848), to name but a few, through apostrophizing Providence, through Biblical allusion, apocalyptic imagery, and Christ-analogues, which are frequently acted out as sacrificial deaths. Zanoni's death functions sacrificially, as does that of the French officer in Henry Kingsley's Mademoiselle Mathilde (1868):

30See, for example, pp. 94 and 249. 31Surprisingly enough, no comprehensive account of Dickens' religious views,

or at least of the religious element in A Tale of Two Cities, exists. But see William H. Marshall, The World of the Victorian Novel (New York: A. S. Barnes, 1967), pp. 337-51, and Janet L. Larson, Dickens and the Broken Scripture (Athens: Univ. of Georgia Press, 1985).




He stood alone between the ranked enemies, with his arms stretched out, like a tall white cross .. .: "Yesterday I had a new life given me, and I will give it to-day for France. It is well that one man should die for the people."32

The meaning of all this is quite apparent: an absolute, transcen- dentally legitimized norm is evoked that suggests that human history still partakes of sacred history. It provides the true perspective for the strutting and fretting of revolutionary humanity. Measured against this norm of sacred history, the French Revo- lution is, in all these novels, as in A Tale of Two Cities, like its emblem, the Carmagnole, nothing but a "fallen sport" (p. 307). The French Revolution presented as natural history stands re- vealed as the work of fallen man, corrupted to such an extent, that only a cataclysmic purging and a sacrificial death can provide subdued hope-a hope expressed through one individual's vision that memory, the memory of one surviving human family, pre- serves.

With Dickens' A Tale of Two Cities the metaphorization of both the French Revolution and the Victorian novel reaches its apogee, if one keeps within the bounds of nationality and excepts Victor Hugo's Quatre-vingt-treize (1873), an extraordinary blend of traditional Romantic and very modern means of presentation, employing realistic documentation, constructivist techniques of contrast, and organic imagery and raising the Rev- olution to mythic status as a "form of the eternal phenomenon which presses upon us from every quarter, and which we call Ne- cessity."33 As usual in history, literary or otherwise, this apogee is followed by a fairly long drawn-out decline. The sixties see a not inconsiderable number of novels dealing with the French Revo- lution, such as Walter Thornbury's Wildfire (1864), Henry Kings- ley's Mademoiselle Mathilde, or Margaret Roberts' On the Edge of the Storm (1869), echoing and mirroring both the social restlessness

32Mademoiselle Mathilde, 3 vols. (London: Bradbury, Evans, 1868), III, 22. 33Ninety-three, trans. Frank Lee Benedict and J. Hain Friswell, 3 vols. (London:

Sampson Low, 1874), II, 152.




of the time and Dickens' masterly account. And all of these make use of organic metaphors, especially catastrophic ones. None of them, however, can lay any claim to artistic success.

It is not only the lesser skills of these authors that must bear the blame for this failure: (literary) history has bypassed them, the powers and privileges of metaphorization are on the wane. The old prejudice against metaphorical thinking and writing, fos- tered by Hobbes, Hume, Locke, and Voltaire, again threateningly rears its head. This is a prejudice that, though dormant during the early parts of the nineteenth century, had ever and again found expression especially with regard to the French Revolution. This is William Cobbett in 1804:

We have so often been told about the earthquake, the volcano, the burning lava of the French revolution, that some of us seem, at last, to have taken this figure of speech in its literal meaning, and to believe, that, in good sooth, our power has been crippled by some convulsion of nature.34

The danger of confounding reality with the verbal image of it, fact with fiction, implied in Cobbett's warning had been one of the main themes of John Sterling's Arthur Coningsby. Small wonder that the idea is there taken up as a means of criticizing the leading idealistic and theory-bound revolutionaries, men like Condorcet. These men, the Marquise states,

whose minds have received any liberal cultivation, and retain any generous and honourable feelings, are thinking about Greece and Rome, not France, and trying to found institutions and govern na- tions by metaphor and antithesis. (II, 94-95)

Of course, they fail and become the victims of those who act. What begins to emerge here is the dichotomy of fact and fiction, art and politics, writing and doing, with which our century has been so much obsessed.

Hence the criticism of metaphorization continues throughout the Victorian age. It is fed by the tradition of skepticism to which both Cobbett and Sterling belong and which makes George Eliot generalize in Middlemarch that "we all of us, grave or light, get

34Cobbett's Weekly Political Register, 17 Nov. 1804, cols. 741-42.




our thoughts entangled in metaphors, and act fatally on the strength of them."35 And it is, from the sixties onward, fed by the new realist orientation of both historiography and novel-writing. Now the historians spurn all florid and vivid description and strive for positivist sobriety and documentation. Leopold Ranke's "wie es eigentlich gewesen" (the way it really was) demands an authen- ticity and objectivity not necessary either to Carlyle's subjective metaphorical vision or to Macaulay's lively Whig narrative.36 The same urge makes novelists like Gissing or W. H. Mallock relegate metaphors to fourth or fifth place in their hierarchy of techniques: concrete documentation, be it of social or psychological facts, analysis, (scenic) discussion, and the acting out of a fateful plot take pride of place. If the French Revolution is seen as a class struggle,37 as a sociological fact and problem, the inadequacy of the traditional imagery becomes apparent: "The weltering out of fiery lava, the growth of a typhoon, the rising of an inundation, are but feeble images to which to compare the progress and fury of that stupendous protest of a nation."38 What had been behind so much of the earlier descriptions and metaphorizations of the French Revolution, namely the possibility of seeing it as the terrestrial appearance and corruption of a transcendental process, as a character of the great apocalypse, is fast disappearing. Now the metaphors' mythic, biblical, or organic connotations are considered to lessen, not to enrich, the potential meaning of the historical event. Metaphors are no longer welcome or needed to de-

35Middlemarch, ed. W. J. Harvey (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1965), p. 111. 36The various Victorian uses of history have been well analyzed by A. Dwight

Culler, The Victorian Mirror of History (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1985). 37Such is the case in Margaret Roberts' The Atelier du Lys; or, An Art Student in

the Reign of Terror, 2 vols. (London: Longmans, Green, 1876), where it is said that by 1793 the "Revolution had become a war of class against class; in every rank men tried to destroy those a step above them" (I, 187).

38Walter Thornbury, Wildfire, 3 vols. (London: Hurst and Blackett, 1864), I, 256. The distrust of metaphorical representation is apparent in Thornbury's ac- cumulation of dates and catalogues of factual, documented details, even though, in his case, the metaphors are undercut only to be then surpassed: "The Revo- lution was a vast conflagration, in which convents, chateaus, palaces, priests, and princes were to melt and pass away" (I, 256).




scribe a history autonomous, immanent, and man-made. For such a history the year 1863 produces the adequate catalyst-dynamite. And the novel of revolution is superseded by the novel of terrorism.39

University of Miinster

39For a useful survey from the literary point of view see Barbara Arnett Mel- chiori, Terrorism in the Late Victorian Novel (London: Croom Helm, 1985); for one from a historical perspective see H. Oliver, The International Anarchist Movement in Late Victorian London (London: Croom Helm, 1983).



Documents

Metaphorical Representations of the French Revolution in Victorian Fiction