EXHIBITION

China to this day when a high official comes under attack) that he was licentious: ‘I have often said of myself that there is no one in the country who dislikes sex as much as I do.’ I have emphasised Yongzheng and his scrolls because, like so many of the 400 objects drawn from the palace in Beijing’s Forbidden City, rather than relying on our aesthetic senses, as we do on the art of earlier periods, Qing art requires explanation. It is the exclusive subject of the Royal Academy show, whose date was advanced by two months to coincide with the arrival of China’s President Hu Jintao. London was illuminated in red for his visit and the Queen accompanied Mr Hu to the Royal Academy. In her comments to the press, and on television, Dame Jessica Rawson, Warden of Merton College and the chief curator of the exhibition, emphasised the grandeur and power of the alien Manchus: their longevity, the extent of their empire, and their conquest of the Han Chinese and non-Han peoples like the Mongols and Tibetans who still chafe under Chinese rule. Dame Jessica was right to underline the power of the Manchus. As she guided the press through the Royal Academy she paused here and there to point out details in some of the enormous horizontal scrolls, teeming with tiny figures, in which, if you peered closely, one or other of the three emperors was killing tigers, spurring horses, receiving subject peoples, or holding an audience. Or, in the case of Yongzheng, he is seen dressed as a hermit in a cave. Few of the Qing objects in the exhibition would attract connoisseurs for their refinement. Most Qing paintings are crammed with detail. Qing ceramics are notable for their decoration, and other objects – boxes, the numerous implements for calligraphy, the imitations of ancient bronzes – are usually complex, elaborate, and many-coloured. The Manchus were keen to broadcast their qualifications not only as awe-inspiring, obediencedemanding rulers and warriors, but as exemplars and champions of the highest taste. Hence their vast workshops and studios, hence, too, their habit of impressing their own seals, their comments, and their poems on the works of the great painters of the past. I have on my wall a silk-screen of a portrait of the Tang poet Li Bai, painted by the thirteenth-century Song master Liang Kai; it has plenty of empty space, on which Qianlong has pressed his mighty seal. In my judgement, the seal, which is bigger than Li Bai’s head, balances the painting splendidly, but it is also a mark of supreme self-confidence and authority. I somewhat annoyed the curators by mentioning that much of the palace collection was moved to Taiwan in

Blast off

1949 and that what remained were the less beautiful objects. I was politely informed that I had been biased by traditional views of what constituted beauty. Certainly beauty is a matter of taste in part, but traditional connoisseurship was also a value for the Manchu rulers. As Gerald Holzwarth observes in his enlightening essay on Qianlong as art patron, the core of the original palace collection – paintings, calligraphy, bronzes, jade, and ceramics – reached back to the eighth century. ‘These objects were admired and eulogised by the imperial collectors, they were not in general intended to be exhibited and displayed but were

wrapped in silk cloths and kept in boxes.’ The Chinese term for such a collection is biji, secret book-box. Some of these boxes were never opened; in the Taiwan Museum I was allowed, many years ago, to look into two of their seventy-odd biji, and saw bowls from the eleventh and twelfth centuries still wrapped in imperial golden-yellow silk and silk floss. Most other objects in the Manchu collection, Holzwarth says, were intended for display or to ‘convey a political message’. Regina Krahl writes in one of her well-informed essays that ‘the quality of porcelains in the Forbidden City has never been matched.’ This cannot be disputed. Such porcelain is very high-fire and rings clearly when struck, and the flowers and other subjects on it are painted with closely observed skill. But if one compares a Qing vase with its original Ming model, as illustrated in the catalogue, the ultimate difference is plain: the pear-shaped Ming vase is subtly curved and balanced and is painted in slightly faded cobalt blue. The Manchu copy is stocky, thick-necked and thick-waisted, and the mustardy colour is slightly unpleasant. Or compare the tenth-century-BC bronze ritual wine vessel with its Qianlong-period bamboo copy. As Dame Jessica, an authority on such bronzes, says, the bronze lent itself to fine surfaces and sharp profiles. The Qing reproduction was ‘of necessity softened, on the other hand the bamboo piece is a fairly exact copy of the original bronze’. Just so. I know which one I prefer. I suspect Qianlong would have admired the bamboo repro, but would have loved the original of almost three thousand years before. In the end there can be no final judgement. As was emphasised to me by the curators, the Royal Academy is exhibiting art from a particular period of the Qing. It tells us volumes about those three great rulers. For the beauty that need not be explained, that moved Qianlong who kept it just for himself and a few other gentlemen of traditional taste, visit the museum in Shanghai or go to Taiwan.

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LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006 GENERAL

P ETER W ASHINGTON

ISLANDS UNTO THEMSELVES

C RUSOE ’ S S ECRET : T HE A ESTHETICS OF D ISSENT

★By Tom Paulin (Faber & Faber 400pp £20)

T OM P AULINTELLS us in his introduction to Crusoe’s Secret that the book had its genesis in a desire to write about Defoe, but many of the essays he reprints here began as reviews of other writers. This is a louring prospect for reviewers, not least because it involves them in the postmodern cliché of reviewing a book of reviews which are themselves about reviewers reviewing reviews ad infinitum. Fortunately, a germ of the Defoe book survives in the theme linking these essays, which explore dissent in English and Anglo-Irish culture. This is a fascinating, wide-ranging brief which takes Paulin from seventeenthcentury religion to twenty-first-century politics. The subtitle derives from the author’s attempt – halfhearted, it must be said – to formulate a general theory of art as dissent, not a simple task when you are dealing with figures as disparate as Emily Dickinson and David Trimble (who isn’t often mentioned in the same sentence as the word ‘aesthetic’). It can also be difficult to tell what Paulin means by dissent. At times he narrows it down to a specific tradition of English political writing; at others he widens it to include any resistance to an authority perceived as unjust. The first meaning carries the embarrassing luggage of Puritan authoritarianism, while the second makes it too easy to equate serious rebellion with a five-year-old’s refusal to eat spinach. Like the good liberal he is, Paulin opts for something in between, while occasionally flirting with the fun of putting up two fingers for the sake of it. Many of Paulin’s subjects – Lawrence, Dickinson, Hopkins – resist inclusion in any scheme, aesthetic or otherwise, since they are inclined not so much to dissent as to bloody-minded individualism or indifference to prevailing ideologies. Others are members of recognisable minorities, and it is really with minorities that Paulin concerns himself. The problem is that minorities define themselves as such in relation to the majorities they wish to change. But how do they achieve their ends without losing their identity as minorities, or becoming oppressors in their turn? Perhaps the solution to this problem is to be an Irishman. Everyone knows that the English and the Irish are inextricably entangled by history, by blood (in every sense), by culture and by language. Above all, they are united by their arguments with and about each other, which are

now so far advanced that the two peoples have, as it were, started to exchange identities: more often than not, the English now find themselves in a minority, both within the UK and internationally. Paulin claims an interest in invisible borders, especially in Ireland and Palestine (the Arab–Israeli conflict being the subtext of this book), and borders are permeable: Israel is full of Arabs, England of Irishmen. The English in this book often turn out to be closet Irishmen (Hazlitt and Tony Blair both had Irish mothers), while the Irish – Burke, Yeats, even Synge – could be said to have achieved their fulfilment not only in the English language but on the hated mainland itself. Their transformation from dissidents to conformists is completed when they are translated to the even greater mainland of America, where the English are outsiders, the Irish a culturally ascendant minority. Majority and minority statuses need each other. They can even be different hats worn by the same person. Paulin the Oxford don may be in a persecuted minority, but the wild Irish poet and the media star belong unmistakably to fashionable majorities. Such doubleness is exemplified by the Englishman who haunts every essay in this book, even when he isn’t mentioned. Milton’s work and its influence form the basis for Paulin’s shots at an aesthetic, and it is Milton who strengthens the author’s thesis while undermining it. Milton is a notoriously ambivalent figure: hierarchical libertarian, Puritan aesthete, exquisite turned iconoclast, uxorious denouncer of female weakness, republican celebrant of God’s absolute monarchy. Above all, he was an English patriot of the most uncompromising kind, the laureate of the new Israel who vindicated Cromwell and by implication his Irish policy – that bloody crushing of a Catholic ‘minority’ (a majority, of course, in their own country) which has stood as a symbol of oppression ever since. Had the Commonwealth survived in 1660, Milton would surely have been a pillar of its Establishment. Thus he might be said to embody in his own person the problem of formulating a politics and an aesthetics of dissent. Both involve the dissenter in an unresolvable contradiction between rebellion and domination, if only because the very act of positing a theory implies a will to power which is at odds with the eternally fugitive, protean nature of dissent. Paulin would have us believe that the Miltonic contradiction itself can provide the basis of his proposed theory by making aesthetic virtues of conflict and instability, change, fluidity and openness. These take the place of what he sees as the essentially static, backward-looking qualities of establishment culture exemplified by writers such as Eliot – though he does scant justice to the revolution in English poetry effected by this self-proclaimed conservative, AngloCatholic royalist. Paulin’s theory is hardly new (step forward Heraclitus), but he puts his own spin on it. In one essay he describes Lawrence as a celebrant of the present, one who

LITERARY REVIEW Dec 2005 / Jan 2006

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