“...you opened the seas before my ship, whose track led me across the waters to a place I had never dreamed of...” —Thomas Merton, The Seven Story Mountain (Ch.3)
eorge Landow’s Images of Crisis from 1982, which is beautifully rendered in hypertext on the Victorian Web, presents a host of mostly Victorian writers and painters who are searching for belief and trust in something or someone they can accept as being true. The crisis of the title arises when the quester fears their search will be in vain, which leads to a feeling of “helplessness,” and this has been expressed over centuries through images of rough seas, shipwreck and natural disasters that threaten to destroy life. Most of the images involve the sea. In fact, I felt as if I was at sea as I read and looked. The book’s subtitle is “From 1750 to the Present,” but this sea stretches back many more years than that. Landow explains in Chapter I that “The journey of life is one of those few metaphors whose variations should command the attention of the student of Western culture. The notion that life is a journey has provided one of the most pervasive commonplaces of Western thought for two and a half millennia, and it is easy to see why. The figures of voyage, progress, or pilgrimage all enable us to spatialize and hence visualize — our existence.”
Moving through time with Landow’s prose, which refers to ancient figures like Moses, Aeneas and Odysseus, one feels the sea is constant and has been travelled always with the same questions. What’s more, Landow and the Victorian Web are pioneers of hypertext so the links provided to contemplate passages and paintings more deeply make the book an eye-opening cyberspace journey. For instance, in a key chapter called “The pole-star vanishes,” Landow documents the feeling of many in the nineteenth century that a beacon that had previously guided believers (or sailors on the sea of life) was gone. The blue hyperlinks brought me to connections like “Moses’s Vision from Mount Pisgah,” the Olney Hymns of 1779 and Yevgeny Yevtushenko’s, "Ballad about False Beacons" from 1952. At the end of my journey I felt rewarded because, and here I borrow Landow’s words in Chapter 2 about the gift of Swinburne’s poetry, using hypertext “rescues certain significant moments from the devouring ocean... [and can] enrich these instants of illumination, making them true centers for our lives.”
I do part ways with Landow when he expresses the view that modernist artists — and their audiences — who are drawn to victims who face a crisis without a deity to turn to have a harder journey than artists and audiences who are believers. Whether a person depends on divine guidance during their voyage or feels that the journey must be faced alone, the sea is always dangerous. In that chapter about the vanishing pole-star, Landow does allow for the universality of dangerous seas when he brings in the French Romantic poet Victor Hugo and says,
When the traveler perceives that the stars by which he guides his course have vanished, ...then he feels something akin to panic, for the loss of these guides leaves him disoriented and in danger. Such moments of recognition occur to believers and unbelievers alike. In "The Bridge," for example, Victor Hugo, a man of faith, feels himself lost in the silent, mute infinity of the abyss, but, suddenly, "In the depths, across the shadows, through the impenetrable veil, God is seen like a somber star." With such a star to provide his bearings, the otherwise helpless worshipper can then use prayer, which is the "bridge" of the title, to reach his Lord.
Silhouette de château illuminé par un orage (Silhouette of a Castle Struck by Lightning), 1855-56. Album, dessins à la plume. Crédit: Bibliothèque nationale de France.
When I researched Hugo myself (which is exactly what hyperlinks encourage the reader to do), I was surprised that besides this poem in which he does solve a crisis of faith, he also felt inspired to depict unresolved anxiety in a modernist way — through visual art. A hand-cut stencil entitled Silhouette of a castle struck by lightning which Hugo made around 1855 would no doubt have caught Landow’s eye because it shows Nature overwhelming a human structure. John Dorfman explains that in works like this one that he displayed to acclaim, Hugo’s “wild, untethered experimentation with techniques and materials” featuring “jagged,” “irregular” black shapes on a white ground expresses bare anxiety that is resolved by nothing more than a teetering balance of the forms and the four sides of the frame. From his own emotional need this nineteenth-century Romantic created work like a mid-twentieth century Abstract Expressionist.
Whether searchers join the faithful or go it alone as “modernists,” their searches have important similarities.
Believers and Unbelievers
In Chapter 4, Landow contrasts two nineteenth-century paintings to show the complexity of the idea that life is like a journey by sea. In Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa from 1819, “the absence of a divinity who watches over the victims of shipwreck appears with particular clarity.” This is “an image of human isolation and helplessness” and in a modern way its composition implicates “the spectator in the situation.”
Left: Gericault’s Raft of the Medusa, 1819. [Click on this image for a discussion of the painting.] Right: Delacroix's Christ on the Sea of Galilee, 1854. Reproduced from the Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, on the Creative Commons (CCO) licence.
On the other hand, in Delacroix’s Christ on the Sea of Galilee of 1854 (mentioned in Chapter 4), though the sailors are “imperiled,” and the ship “in danger,” the presence of Christ is an absolute assurance. Matthew 4: 35-41 describes this particular sea-crisis and its religious solution:
A furious squall came up, and the waves broke over the boat, so that it was nearly swamped. Jesus was in the stern, sleeping on a cushion. The disciples woke him and said to him, "Teacher, don’t you care if we drown?" He got up, rebuked the wind and said to the waves, "Quiet! Be still!" Then the wind died down and it was completely calm. He said to his disciples, "Why are you so afraid? Do you still have no faith?" They were terrified and asked each other, "Who is this? Even the wind and the waves obey him!"
But the two paintings share something symbolically because, after all, we see the same sea. The idea that a believer can find a Christian solution more easily than an anxious person facing the sea alone is belied by the entire story of Christ’s journey in human form which from the start is beset by violence, threats, and doubt.
Among Landow’s first examples of a believer’s sea journey are those found in the Victorian homes where faith was a bulwark. The discussion of hymns in Chapter 2 links usefully to a discussion by J.R. Watson of the University of Durham, who says that “we have to imagine” books of Christian hymns “resting on the piano during the week and taken to church or chapel on Sundays.” Hymnals were and are a family’s guide to the “divinely sponsored, continuous ... pilgrimage to God.” Fellowship in a Christian “community of which God is the center” provides “meaningful continuity, connection, and duration.” Landow calls this “an ancient paradigm,” explaining that “For Augustine, for Dante, for Chaucer, the journey of life was primarily a movement towards God, a voyage to the second Eden.” There will be doubts, and Landow shows how life-changing these can be, but in Chapter 4 he highlights the optimism of Disraeli’s 1844 protagonist, Henry Coningsby, who declares, "I float in a sea of troubles, and should long ago have been wrecked had I not been sustained by a profound... conviction that there are still great truths." (As you see, the metaphor of a shipwreck is now making its appearance.)
In hisConfessions in AD 400, Augustine describes life as a journey by sea in which he “conceives of himself as a second Odysseus or second Aeneas.” Landow quotes the moment of his decision to believe: “‘In my pride I was running adrift, at the mercy of every wind,’ he tells God. ‘You were guiding me as a helmsman steers a ship, but the course you steered was beyond my understanding.’” Following this motif, Victorian hymns “frequently emphasized that no matter how endangered the Christian voyager believed himself, he still had some sort of divine presence with him in his vessel.” Landow’s hyperlinks illuminate the supports that surrounded Victorian believers: “liturgies, the church calendar, stained-glass windows, eucharistic vessels, altar frontals, Bible commentaries, sermons.” Here is “the notion of Christ as pilot, guide, or vocal presence” in John Newton’s “The Disciples at Sea” from the Olney Hymns:
We, like the disciples, are toss'd,
By storms on a perilous deep;
But cannot be possibly lost,
For Jesus has charge of the ship.
Though billows and winds are enrag'd,
And threaten to make us their sport;
This pilot his word has engag'd
To bring us safely to port.
James Grant's “O Zion, afflicted with wave upon wave” assures the singer that although Christians are, “With darkness surrounded, by terrors dismay'd,” they do not have to fear: “Still, still I am with thee, My promise shall stand, / Through tempest and tossing, I'll bring thee to land.” The fundamental need to ensure that one’s family is safe prompted Victorian believers to strenuously defend their faith — and not only against non-believers and Science but against other Christian denominations:
Christian! Dost thou see them On the holy ground, How the troops of Midian Prowl and prowl around?
And,
Through many a day of darkness, Through many a scene of strife, The faithful few fought bravely, To guard the Nation’s life.
Two Paintings and a Novel
But the European crisis of belief grew, and nineteenth century depictions of the sea journey and natural disasters began to show “a transformation of the previously dominant cultural paradigm.” Instead of reliance on heavenly direction and God’s role in reward and punishment, depictions expressed insecurity. Popular paintings of the time are interpreted now as Landow presents them: while showing seemingly objective events, a storm, an avalanche, shipwreck, they afford students of the nineteenth century a view of how Victorians felt.
J.M.W. Turner’s The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grissons, 1810. [Click on the image for a discussion of the painting.]
For example, in J.M.W. Turner’s The Fall of an Avalanche in the Grissons, discussed early in Chapter 1, it is not the heavens that are angry but the sky — and even more specifically, Turner’s gray oil paint. And in the poem Turner wrote for it, it is not God who destroys, it is human hope that is failing:
towering glaciers fall, the work of ages
Crashing through all! Extinction follows,
And the toil, the hope of man — o'erwhelms.
In the early 1850s, John Martin’s huge canvas, The Great Day of His Wrath, discussed a little later in this first chapter, toured England and America expressing danger on the horizon. The kinetic energy of Martin’s dark forms communicates “a situation in which human beings are engulfed by natural forces totally beyond their control.” The question for Victorians would have been, Is this about the last days of Creation or more basically about a society or planet in jeopardy? And since views of the same painting change over time, I imagine that in our time this scene might serve simply as entertainment like a video game!
John Martin's The Great Day of His Wrath, 1851-53. [Click on the image for a discussion of the painting.]
Turning to literature in this same chapter, Landow writes that “Edward Bulwer-Lytton's novel, The Last Days of Pompeii (1834) “which was enormously popular in the nineteenth century, provides a catalogue of ...structures of cataclysm and crisis.” He reminds us through a quote from Laurence Goldstein that the discovery of the ruins of Pompeii “played an important role, as a social phenomenon and as a metaphor by compelling a personal identification with its victims.” Reflect on the phrase “personal identification” which implies a direct, modern relationship between real people which is different than identifying with figures from the Bible. By the time this novel appeared, Pompeii was decidedly not a religious event, it was a natural one and no longer up for debate. Archaeologists and historians indisputably identified the eruption, dated it to 79 AD and tourists were flocking to the reconstructed city. Landow explains the novel’s popularity: “artists and audiences clearly took such situations of extreme crisis to be relevant because they could see them as analogous to their own situations in some way.... Bulwer-Lytton's imagined history of Pompeii's last hours .... conveyed something of importance to artist and audience alike.... and permitted ... members of a particular society to communicate something of interest to one another.”
The question about these three works is, What was being communicated?. Landow has described the general effect of any image of destruction: “The ... situation in which these people find themselves ... immediately separates their old, everyday existence from the new terrifying one that has just sprung into being.” This is a primitive feeling whenever a stable environment collapses. In our current images of destruction in different arenas of war we witness and feel it every day. But the social conditions in which artists live, their era’s mainstream conversations and shared anxieties affect what artists create and how audiences perceive it. And an aspect of Victorian life that must have affected how they perceived images of crisis was that their whole society was in crisis: rapid change, ruptures in belief and modernism just ahead. Matthew Arnold, quoted at the end of Chapter 1, called this
Wandering between two worlds, one dead,
The other powerless to be born.
So how were Turner’s avalanche, Martin’s Great Day and Bulwer-Lytton’s Pompeii interpreted? To use Landow’s term in Chapter 1, what was the “cultural code” that conveyed “something of importance to artist and audience alike”? We assume that when the painters and the writer completed these works they knew what they meant, but they actually might not have been sure. And as for the audience, the state of their belief or unbelief would affect how the two paintings were perceived, and this would also be true for readers of the novel if the excavations and the book’s romantic characters made them feel they knew the victims not from a distance but on a first name basis. Today, imagine how we might feel facing one of these crisis artifacts. We can watch the scene at Pompeii in Rosellini’s 1954 movie, Journey to Italy where in a classic mid-twentieth century way the ruins are the background for an existential crisis. A well-to-do British couple is visiting Italy when they realize their marriage is failing. Near the end, just when the husband says the word “divorce,” their guide whisks them to the excavations at Pompeii where they come upon an archaeologist in a pit dusting off plaster casts of lovers who died in the eruption. The wife flees in shame, her husband runs after, and the scene ends with both of them staring into space as frozen as the plaster casts. But then at the end, apropos of our discussion about the shock of alienation versus the solace of religion, the couple is caught up in an outdoor religious celebration and, surrounded by dancing celebrants, they find the hope to reunite. Tracing why an image of crisis was created as well as how the world has reacted to it over time helps us to understand our human journey.
The Great Change
As an example of “isolation and helplessness,” in Chapter 2 Landow presents Stephen Crane’s story of 1898, “The Open Boat” about a shipwrecked mariner and three mates stranded at sea in a dinghy, and I remember the importance my teacher and I gave this story in high school around 1967 and how students in my day in liberal-leaning school districts were brought up on these existential situations. Landow writes that in Crane’s story, “the castaway's experience in the waste ocean not only ... disproves the relevance of the Christian scheme of things but it also goes further and wears away at our most basic conceptions of self and causality.” I assume it was different in other parts of the United States, but now this feels like a blunt and potentially frightening curriculum choice for teenagers. It happens that I have built my own approach to life’s journey from experiences like this, yet I wish I had learned at that time that there are other experiences from which to build a philosophy. That chance to compare would come in college and now again in reading Landow’s book.
In the experience of John Ruskin, the Victorian aesthetic philosopher, we see the modern point of view being created. As a Ruskin specialist, Landow is eminently qualified to guide us through the development of his thinking. In Chapter 3, first, we meet Ruskin the believer reminding his readers in 1851 that, “in the minds of all early Christians the Church itself was most frequently symbolized under the image of a ship, of which the bishop was the pilot.” Ruskin instructs them to “consider the force which this symbol would assume in the imaginations of men to whom the spiritual Church had become an ark of refuge ... raised up ... in the midst of the waters.”
Then comes the change. “Unfortunately,” Landow tells us, “even at the time that Ruskin was writing, ... he was beginning that long, painful process which resulted, finally, in his abandonment of his childhood faith. The man, in other words, who had so emphasized that societies could only survive by making the worship of God their ark, found, soon enough, that he could find no God, and no ark.” In Chapter 4, section II of Landow's book on The Aesthetic and Critical Theories of John Ruskin, Landow quotes Ruskin himself as explaining that
It had never entered into my head to doubt a word of the Bible, though I saw well enough already that its words were to be understood otherwise than I had been taught; but the more I believed it, the less it did me any good. It was all very well for Abraham to do what angels bid him, — so would I, if any angels bid me; but none had ever appeared to me that I knew of.
Linked to this thought is the fact that many of those Victorian parlors with hymnals would soon also have Darwin on their shelves. To explain this change, in a footnote to the first oart of Chapter 3, comments, Landow quotes Josef Altholz:
The theology espoused by most evangelicals, and generally by most others...posited the sterner and harsher Christian doctrines.... How could a benevolent and sensitive conscience accept the morality of a Jehovah who behaved, as the young Darwin put it, like a "revengeful tyrant" and who condemned the majority of his human creatures to an eternity of torment disproportionate to their wickedness or based on no personal fault at all?
Landow comments, in the text itself, that it feels as if Ruskin joined “that company of ‘melancholy Brothers’ whom James Thomson described in “The City of Dreadful Night,” ‘battling in black floods without an ark.’" Fortunately, Ruskin found he could exult over Turner’s painting The Slave Ship and find spiritual meaning in how the painter embraced the interrelation of light and waves and spread outdoor color across his canvas in an “all-over” effect that predicts Jackson Pollock’s 1950’s drip paintings.
Turner's Slaveship, exhibited 1840. [Click on the image for a discussion of the painting.]
When he described Turner’s vision in Modern Painters, Vol. 1 (1843), Ruskin became joyous:
... the fire of the sunset falls along the trough of the sea, dyeing it with an awful but glorious light, the intense and lurid splendor which burns like gold and bathes like blood. ... the tossing waves ... lift themselves.... three or four together in wild groups, fitfully and furiously ... leaving between them treacherous spaces of level and whirling water, now lighted with green and lamp-like fire, now flashing back the gold of the declining sun, now fearfully dyed from above with the indistinguishable images of the burning clouds, which fall upon them in flakes of crimson and scarlet, and give to the reckless waves the added motion of their own fiery flying. Purple and blue, the lurid shadows of the hollow breakers are cast upon the mist of the night.... (completing thus the perfect system of all truth, which we have shown to be formed by Turner's works) — the power, majesty, and deathfulness of the open, deep, illimitable Sea. [Section V, Ch. 3, Pt 2]
Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Jonah, 1885-95, from the Smithsoniam American Art Museum on the Creative Commons (CC0) licence. [Click here for a discussion of the painting.]
In Albert Pinkham Ryder’s Jonah of 1885, the American gives us the traditional and the modern together and the sea changes again. God is above in a special light as if He directs the story. But the rest of the painting is modern. The brushwork of the waves that bend the boat almost to breaking remind us of van Gogh who was painting at the same time. These waves seem to be directed not by a deity but by the emotions of Jonah — and the artist himself.
What I Learned
Landow reminds us consistently of historical changes in thinking, being and experiencing in the Western world and he almost always illustrates this with images of journeys on the sea. He tells us that, “In the late eighteenth century, long before widespread religious crisis in the West, Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France had accurately warned that ‘when ancient opinions and rules of life are taken away, the loss cannot possibly be estimated. From that moment we have no compass to govern us; nor can we know distinctly to what port we steer.”
Towards the end of Chapter 2, Landow also brings to our attention William Cowper, the English poet who in 1799 said he believed that “God had abandoned him.... His despair thrust Cowper into the modern imaginative landscape in which God has disappeared.... In 'The Castaway,' a man is washed overboard, and his shipmates watch without being able to help him.... The poem concentrates on the consequences of God's absence.... Several times, in fact, he expresses the conviction that he is a castaway. Cowper has no confidence that God will ‘swell the sails.’”
Here too we learn of Arthur Hugh Clough whom Landow calls, “one of the most famous Victorian victims of spiritual crisis, ... [who] described himself in “Blank Misgivings” in 1841 with, “sails rent,/ And rudder broken, — reason impotent, —" And in 1849 Clough wrote,
Looking around on the waste of the rushing incurious billows,
"This is Nature," I said: "we are born as it were from her waters;
Over her billows that buffet and beat us, her offspring uncared-for,
Casting one single regard of a painful victorious knowledge,
Into her billows that buffet and beat us we sink and are swallowed."
This was the sense in my soul...
“According to Clough, as according to Melville,” Landow writes, “man exists an ‘offspring uncared-for,’ an orphan, a waif. Like the situation of the castaway, that of the waif struck men who had lost their religious belief as a fitting metaphor for the human condition.”
In 1994, Marianne Moore wrote, “The world's an orphans' home.” Landow emphasizes that “such moments of recognition occur to believers and unbelievers alike.” Emily Dickinson appears in this wide-ranging chapter as well, telling of the
little Brig . . . o'ertook by Blast —
....
The Ocean's Heart too smooth — too Blue —
To break for You” (no. 723)
But here I pause. For me as a painter, blue is the color to hold onto. It does seem to break for us. Bursting upon the retina and opening our eyes, blue make its own argument against that depressing opening line of Crane’s “The Open Boat,” “None of them knew the color of the sky.” Whether on a robin’s egg or in blue eyes that are unforgettable, or more simply the sun radiating through clear air, blue stands for a new day. There are two Turner paintings of the church of Maria della Salute in Venice. The strength of the unfinished one, Venice with the Salute, is that it leaves out the familiar outlines of the church and commercial buildings and focuses on light. And with good reason; an argument could be made that the light came first.
Turner, Venice with the Salute, 1840-5. [Click on the image for a discussion of the painting.]
The impetus of Landow’s book is that through crisis we can find something true. The optimistic power of blue along with our experience of living under one sky with light from one sun underscore the possibility that we are in this together. My hypertext journey suggests that there should be a theory of uniformitarianism for people. In the nineteenth century the new theory of uniformitarianism solidified geology as a science, the idea that changes in the earth's crust over eons are not due to causes specific to a moment but to the same causes always. It seems to be the same with us: we have always felt the same, reacted the same and run from and to the same things. The journey is the same, the water is the same and the sky is above. Crisis happens. Things are built and things fall.
It also occurs to me that a significant fact these images have in common is that they are not real. They are not materially dangerous. The crisis is in our minds. As we look or read, Turner’s crashing sea, Martin’s cataclysm and Bulwer-Lytton’s Pompeii are harmless. They probably didn’t even look like that. The significant thing is that they are true and a chance for contemplation, goads to thoughtful action, new conclusions and renewal.
In Landow’s chapter “The pole-star vanishes,” he offers lines from Conrad Aiken’s “Preludes” of 1931 as evidence that for many in the nineteenth century and after that star has disappeared. Aiken writes:
turned for terror,
Seeking in vain the Pole Star of my thought;
Where it was blown among the shapeless clouds,
And gone as soon as seen, and scarce recalled,
Its image lost and I directionless;
Alone upon the brown sad edge of chaos,
In the wan evening that was evening always.
Landow always writes with empathy for this view. “The basic structure of this situation,” he says, “is formed by a recognition that the goal, the intended end, of a pattern of movement has disappeared, and therefore the one moving loses suddenly a previous certainty about what to do.” In support of this existential fact, he also quotes W.H. Auden’s “The Voyage.” Yes, Auden concludes with the disillusioned line that, “the journey is false,” but not without letting us enjoy the question right before that gives us hope:
alone with his heart at last, does the traveler find
In the vaguer touch of the wind and the fickle flash of the sea
Proofs that somewhere there exists, really, the Good Place,
As certain as those the children find in stones and holes?
Then at the end of Landow's Images is the quotation about Swinburne which I used at the start. Swinburne’s circular thinking sees ideas coming and leaving and then coming again. As I said, for me Landow’s words about the poet capture the power of hypertext searching as I experienced it. The search “rescues certain significant moments from the devouring ocean... [and can] enrich these instants of illumination, making them true centers for our lives.” In “The Triumph of Time,” Swinburne seems to know what we are talking about:
Consider the seas listless chime:
Time's self it is, made audible, —
The murmur of the earth's own shell.
It is not much that a man can save
On the sands of life, in the straits of time,
Who swims in sight of the great third wave
That never a swimmer shall cross or climb.
Some waif washed up with the strays and the spars
That ebb-tide shows to the shore and the stars;
Weed from the water, grass from a grave,
A broken blossom, a ruined rhyme.
Turner knew blue’s power, and as in Venice with the Salute, he pried it loose from being a setting for ships and buildings to stand on its own. Since then, abstract painters (de Kooning, Mitchell, Diebenkorn, Frankenthaler, Motherwell) have borrowed this blue and proclaimed it modern. In fact, in their own ways, each Romantic outsider and hesitant Victorian I met on my hyperlink journey with George Landow has given me a way to declare my freedom.
Bibliography
Dorfman, John. "A Writer's Wordless Visions: The Artwork of Victor Hugo is Revealed in the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles." Art and Antiques. 2020. https://www.artandantiquesmag.com/victor-hugo/
Further Reading
Landow, George. Hypertext 3.0: Critical Theory and New Media in an Era of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006.
Remembering George P. Landow, Founding Editor-in-Chief of the Victorian Web
Created 13 May 2025