Appendix III
Vision-like effects and vision-inducing devices have played a
greater part in popular entertainment than in the fine arts. Fireworks, pageantry, theatrical spectacle -
these are essentially visionary arts.
Unfortunately they are also ephemeral arts, whose earlier masterpieces
are known to us only by report. Nothing
remains of all the Roman triumphs, the medieval tournaments, the Jacobean
masques, the long succession of state entries and coronations, of royal
marriages and solemn decapitations, of canonizations and the funerals of
Popes. The best that can be hoped for
such magnificences is that they may 'live in Settle's numbers one day more'.
An interesting feature
of these popular visionary arts is their close dependence upon contemporary
technology. Fireworks, for example, were
once no more than bonfires (and to this day, I may add, a good bonfire on a
dark night remains one of the most magical and transporting of spectacles. Looking at it, one can understand the
mentality of the Mexican peasant, who sets out to burn an acre of woodland in
order to plant his maize, but is delighted when, by a happy accident, a square
mile or two goes up in bright, apocalyptic flame.) True pyrotechny
began (in
Mobile
ponderibus descendat pegma reductis
inque chori
speciem spargentes ardua flammas
scaena rotet
varios, et fingat Mulciber orbis
per tabulas impune
vagos pictaeque citato
ludant igne
trabes, et non permissa morari
fida per innocuas
errent incendia turres.
'Let the counterweights be removed,' Mr Platnauer
translates with a straightforwardness of language that does less than justice
to the syntactical extravagances of the original, 'and let the mobile crane
descend, lowering on to the lofty stage men who, wheeling chorus-wise, scatter
flames. Let Vulcan forge balls of fire
to roll innocuously across the boards.
Let the flames appear to play about the sham beams of the scenery and a
tame conflagration, never allowed to rest, wander among the untouched towers.'
After the fall of
During the Renaissance
fireworks re-entered the world of popular entertainment. With every advance in the science of
chemistry, they became more and more brilliant.
By the middle of the nineteenth century pyrotechny
had reached a peak of technical perfection and was capable of transporting vast
multitudes of spectators towards the visionary antipodes of minds which,
consciously, were respectable Methodist, Puseyites, Utilitarians, disciples of Mill or Marx, of Newman, or Bradlaugh, or Samuel Smiles. In the Piazza del Popolo,
at Ranelagh and the Crystal Palace, on every Fourth
and Fourteenth of July, the popular subconscious was reminded by the crimson
glare of strontium, by copper blue and barium green and sodium yellow, of that
Other World down under, in the psychological equivalent of Australia.
Pageantry is a
visionary art which has been used, from time immemorial, as a political
instrument. The gorgeous fancy dress
worn by Kings, Popes, and their respective retainers, military and ecclesiastical, has a very practical purpose - to impress
the lower classes with a lively sense of their masters' superhuman
greatness. By means of fine clothes and
solemn ceremonies, de facto domination is transformed into a rule not
merely de jure, but positively de jure divino. The crowns and tiaras, the assorted
jewellery, the satins, silks, and velvets, the gaudy uniforms and vestments,
the crosses and medals, the sword hilts and the croziers,
the plumes in the cocked hats and their A clerical equivalents, those huge
feather fans which make every papal function look like a tableau from Aida
- all these vision-inducing properties, designed to make all-too-human
gentlemen and ladies look like heroes, demigoddesses, and seraphs, and giving,
in the process, a great deal of innocent pleasure to all concerned, actors and
spectators alike.
In the course of the
last two hundred years the technology of artificial lighting has made enormous
progress, and this progress has contributed very greatly to the effectiveness
of pageantry and the closely related art of theatrical spectacle. The first notable advance was made in the
eighteenth century, with the introduction of moulded spermaceti candles in
place of the older tallow dip and poured wax taper. Next came the
invention of Argand's tubular wick, with an air
supply on the inner as well as the outer surface of the flame. Glass chimneys speedily followed, and it
became possible, for the first time in history, to burn oil with a bright and
completely smokeless light. Coal gas was
first employed as an illuminant in the early years of
the nineteenth century, and in 1825 Thomas Drummond found a practical way of
heating lime to incandescence by means of an oxygen-hydrogen or oxygen-coal-gas
flame. Meanwhile parabolic reflectors
for concentrating light into a narrow beam had come into use. (The first English lighthouse equipped with
such a reflector was built in 1790.)
The influence on
pageantry and theatrical spectacle of these inventions was profound. In earlier times civic and religious
ceremonies could only take place during the day (and days were as often cloudy
as fine), or by the light, after sunset, of smoky lamps and torches or the
feeble twinkling of candles. Argand and Drummond, gas, limelight, and, forty years
later, electricity made it possible to evoke, from the boundless chaos of
night, rich island universes, in which the glitter of metal and gems, the
sumptuous glow of velvets and brocades were intensified to the highest pitch of
what may be called intrinsic significance.
A recent example of ancient pageantry, raised by twentieth-century
lighting to a higher magical power, was the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II. In the motion picture of the event, a ritual
of transporting splendour was saved from the oblivion which, up till now, has
always been the fate of such solemnities, and preserved it, blazing
preternaturally under the floodlights, for the delight of a vast contemporary
and future audience.
Two distinct and
separate arts are practised in the theatre - the human art of the drama, and
the visionary, other-world art of spectacle.
Elements of the two arts may be combined in a single evening's
entertainment - the drama being interrupted (as so often happens in elaborate
productions of Shakespeare) to permit the audience to enjoy a tableau vivant,
in which the actors either remain still or, if they move, move only in a
non-dramatic way, ceremonially, processionally, or in
a formal dance. Our concern here is not
with drama; it is with theatrical spectacle, which is simply pageantry without
its political or religious overtones.
In the minor visionary
arts of the costumier and the designer of stage jewellery our ancestors were
consummate masters. Nor, for all their
dependence on unassisted muscle power, were they far behind us in the building
and working of stage machinery, the contrivance of 'special effects'. In the masques of Elizabethan and early
Stuart times, divine descents and irruptions of demons from the cellarage were
a commonplace; so were apocalypses, so were the most amazing
metamorphoses. Enormous sums of money
were lavished on these spectacles. The
Inns of Court, for example, put on a show for Charles I which cost more than
twenty thousand pounds - at a date when the purchasing power of the pound was
six or seven times what it is today.
'Carpentry,' said Ben Jonson sarcastically, 'is the soul of masque.' His contempt was motivated by
resentment. Inigo
Jones was paid as much for designing the scenery as was Ben for writing the
libretto. The outrages laureate had
evidently failed to grasp the fact that masque is a visionary art, and that
visionary experience is beyond words (at any rate beyond all but the most
Shakespearean words) and is to be evoked by direct, unmediated perceptions of
things that remind the beholder of what is going on at the unexplored antipodes
of his own personal consciousness. The
soul of masque could never, in the very nature of things, be a Jonsonian libretto; it had to be carpentry. But even carpentry could not be the masque's
whole soul. When it comes to us from
within, visionary experience is always preternaturally brilliant. But the early set designers possessed no
manageable illuminant brighter than a candle. At close range a candle can create the most
magical lights and contrasting shadows.
The visionary paintings of Rembrandt and Georges de La Tour are of
things and persons seen by candlelight.
Unfortunately light obeys the law of the inverse squares. At a safe distance from an actor in
inflammable fancy dress, candles are hopelessly inadequate. At ten feet, for example, it would take one
hundred of the best wax tapers to produce an effective illumination of one
foot-candle. With such miserable
lighting only a fraction of the masque's visionary potentialities could be made
actual. Indeed, its visionary
potentialities were not fully realized until long after it had ceased, in its
original form, to exist. It was only in
the nineteenth century, when advancing technology had equipped the theatre with
limelight and parabolic reflectors, that the masque
came fully into its own.
Athanasius
Kircher's invention - if his, indeed, it was - was
christened from the first Lanterna Magica. The name
was everywhere adopted as perfectly appropriate to a machine, whose raw
material was light, and whose finished product was a coloured image emerging
from the darkness. To make the original
magic lantern show yet more magical, Kircher's
successors devised a number of methods for imparting life and movement to the
projected image. There were 'chromatropic' slides, in which two painted glass discs
could be made to revolve in opposite directions, producing a crude but still
effective imitation of those perpetually changing three-dimensional patterns,
which have been seen by virtually everyone who has had a vision, whether
spontaneous or induced by drugs, fasting, or the stroboscopic lamp. Then there were those 'dissolving views',
which reminded the spectator of the metamorphoses going on incessantly at the
antipodes of his everyday consciousness.
To make one scene turn imperceptibly into another, two magic lanterns
were used, projecting coincident images on the screen. Each lantern was fitted with a shutter, so arranged
that the light of one could be progressively dimmed, while the light of the
other (originally completely obscured) was progressively brightened. In this way the view projected by the first
lantern was insensibly replaced by the view by the second - to the delight and
astonishment of all beholders. Another
device was the mobile magic lantern, projecting its image on a semi-transparent
screen, on the further side of which sat the audience. When the lantern was wheeled close to the
screen, the projected image was very small.
As it was withdrawn, the image became progressively larger. An automatic focusing device kept the
changing images sharp and unblurred at all
distances. The word 'phantasmagoria' was
coined in 1802 by the inventors of this new kind of peepshow.
All these improvements
in the technology of magic lanterns were contemporary with the poets and
painters of the Romantic Revival, and may perhaps have exercised a certain
influence on their choice of subject-matter and their methods of treating
it. Queen Mab
and The Revolt of Islam, for example, are full of Dissolving Views and
Phantasmagorias. Keats' descriptions of
scenes and persons, of interiors and furniture and effects of light, have the
intense beamy quality of coloured images on a white sheet in a darkened
room. John Martin's representations of
Satan and Belshazzar, of Hell and
The twentieth-century
equivalent of the magic lantern show is [was] the coloured movie. In the huge, expensive 'spectaculars', the
soul of masque goes marching along - with a vengeance sometimes, but sometimes
also with taste and a real feeling for vision-inducing phantasy. Moreover, thanks to advancing technology, the
coloured documentary has proved itself, in skilful hands, a notable new form of
popular visionary art. The immensely
magnified cactus blossoms, into which, at the end of Disney's The Living
Desert, the spectator finds himself sinking, come straight from the Other
World. And then what transporting
visions, in the best of the nature films, of foliage in the wind, of the
textures of rock and sand, of the shadows and emerald lights in grass or among
the reeds, of birds and insects and four-footed creatures going about their
business in the underbrush or among the branches of forest trees! Here are the magical close-up landscapes
which fascinated the makers of mille-feuilles
tapestries, the medieval painters of gardens and hunting scenes. Here are the enlarged and isolated details of
living nature out of which the artists of the
And then there is what
may be called the Distorted Documentary - a strange new form of visionary art,
admirably exemplified by Mr Francis Thompson's film, '
Our ability to project
a powerful beam of light has not only enabled us to create new forms of
visionary art; it has also endowed one of the most ancient arts, the art of
sculpture, with a new visionary quality which it did not previously possess. I have spoken in an early paragraph of the
magical effects produced by the floodlighting of ancient monuments and natural
objects. Analogous effects are seen when
we turn the spotlights on to sculptured stone.
Fuseli got the inspiration for some of his
best and wildest pictorial ideas by studying the statues on Monte Cavallo by the light of the setting sun, or, better still,
when illuminated by lightning flashes at
The past is not
something fixed and unalterable. Its
facts are rediscovered by every succeeding generation, its values reassessed,
its meanings redefined in the context of present tastes and preoccupations. Out of the same documents and monuments and
works of art, every epoch invents its own Middle Ages, its private