Note: numbers divided by a slash within brackets, such as "[111/112]", indicate the page numbers of the original Routledge print edition. They have been included for readers wishing to cite the print rather than the internet version of the book.
For those who do not believe, however, there is no ark, and they find themselves alone while the waters rise. Byron thus contemplates the history of Napoleon in the fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and sees "An universal Deluge, which appears/ Without an ark for wretched Man's abode,/ And ebbs but to reflow!" (ll. 826-28). Byron implores "Renew thy rainbow, God!" (l. 828), but he has no faith that He will renew His covenant with man, and in Byron all the rainbows are illusive and delusive. The rainbow that comes after the storm in Don Juan thus brings no safety and salvation for the shipwrecked men. In fact, it stands as a paradigm of capricious flux and not any eternal Christian covenant; and appropriately when a white bird appears, it is no dove of peace, hope, and grace, but potential food for the starving men: [139/140]
And had it been the dove from Noah's ark
Returning there from her successful search
Which in their way that moment chanced to fall
They would have eat her, olive-branch and all. [canto 2, st. 95]
In the Byronic conception of things, nature smiles while men perish and men, not surprisingly, grant no credence to Covenants of grace and arks of salvation.
The other major transformation of the Deluge, which takes the form of questioning its justness and morality, is even more radical. By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century, even this most definite, most unmistakable example of devil punishment of guilt man had become problematic and ambiguous. Benjamin West's wash drawing of The Waters Subsiding After the Deluge (c. 1791, Boston Museum of Fine Arts) introduces us to the common Romantic and post-Romantic vision of this event. In the immediate foreground the heaped bodies of men, women, and children command our attention; and looking past them, we perceive the ark come to rest on high ground beneath an overarching rainbow. The artist's thrusting forward the bodies of the slain, who in death bear no trace of any evil nature or action, creates a powerful image of the aftermath of the Deluge, which its meaning becomes intensely problematic The very presence of the rainbow, a commonplace type of Christ and the new covenant of grace, makes the entire scene appear ironic.
Francis Danby's magnificent and terrifying Deluge (1837-40, Tate Gallery) makes the problematic nature of this event even more obvious, for rather than allowing us to stand emotionally outside the events and Judge the supposedly guilty who perish, the canvas forces us to sympathize with these victims of fate. Danby's representation of the Flood thus subverts its traditional religious meaning in two ways. First of all, making a recognition that became increasingly common in the Victorian period, Danby places major pictorial emphasis upon the fact that the innocent are killed. As the protagonist of J. A. Froude's The Nemesis of Faith (1849), who explains his loss of belief, points out "The sucking children of the unchosen were not saved in Noah's flood." The painter also shows us terrified dying children, thus making us doubt the ethical nature of such an event and the God who prompted it. In fact, moral revulsion against the cruelty of both such instances of divine punishment in history and the doctrine of eternal damnation played a major role in the mid-nineteenth-century crisis of belief. As Josef L. Altholz argues in "The Warfare of Conscience with Theology," "The issue on which the intensity of Victorian religion first began to turn inward on itself was not an external challenge of science or criticism, but a felt conflict between the morality
which evangelicals have cultivated and the theological doctrines which they taught." [follow for Altholz's discussion of the ethical basis for Victorian rejections of Christianity.]
Whether or not leading nineteenth-century artists consciously took art in such a spiritual conflict, their works present the Flood from the vantage-point of one who has ethical objections to the usual interpretation of it as an instance of just punishment. Danby, for example, not only makes the common point that God destroyed innocent children but he also subverts Christian conceptions of the Flood by emphasizing the selflessness and even heroism of the victims. We thus find none of the savagery one might expect when maddened men and animals strive desperately to save themselves. No mothers loose their hold on loved ones to secure their own safety; no fathers hurl children from higher grounds to save their own lives. Instead, we have a somewhat sentimentalized vision of all too sympathetic suffering human beings trying wherever possible to save one another.
In this emphasis the painting differs markedly from most earlier -- and a few contemporary -- representations of the Deluge and the Last Judgment, such as those by the Northern Renaissance painters, which stress the sinfulness of the sufferers. To be sure, there were painters of the Renaissance and after who sympathetically depicted the victims of the Flood; and since preachers in word and paint often emphasized that those God punished in the Deluge were not entirely evil, it was therefore quite orthodox to show these victims acting with some nobility. The artist
was on sure theological ground when he tried to make the spectator identify with these earlier objects of divine wrath because such identification made their punishment immediately relevant. Poussin's Winter -- in the Louvre cycle of The Four Seasons (1660-64) exemplifies such a generally sympathetic view of the Flood by a pro-Romantic painter who was clearly a devout believer. At the centre of the canvas a man prays, too late, to the raging heavens as his boat capsizes, while at the right a father passes his child down to the safety of a boat. Although Poussin's figures do not act heroically, they do not do anything markedly unheroic or bestial either; and, indeed, were it not for the presence of the ark, which appears in the left distance, and the fact that the other three pictures in this series depict Old Testament subjects, his version of the Flood could be interpreted as any inundation and not the archetypal one.
The same generally sympathetic attitude colours Leandro Bassano's much more crowded representation of The Flood (c. 1600, Museo de Arte Ponce, Puerto Rico), for the victims are portrayed taking care of children and animals, and in the distance there is a particularly moving group in which a woman standing on a roof prays with outstretched arms to heaven. Again, there is nothing either heroic or sentimental about Bassano's conception of the actions of those soon to perish in the Flood; and the fact that many of the figures including the old man in the foreground, are shown still trying to save their worldly goods reveals that the painter places the traditional interpretation upon these biblical events. Similarly, the way most of the people in Bassano's painting seem almost unaware of the others surrounding them shows that he does not emphasize an ennobling fellow-feeling among the suffers in the manner of Danby.
In contrast, Danby's Deluge seems to have escaped its conventional meaning, for clearly it portrays more of a slaughter of the innocents than a punishment of the guilty. Danby's dying men, women children, and animals forced us, whatever preconceptions (or paradigm allegiances) we bring to the painting, to sympathize with them. And to sympathize with those the Lord punishes is to become one of the Devil's party.
Similarly, as the eye moves across Turner's Deluge (1813, Tate Gallery), one encounters images of men and women helping one another. We are carried from the kneeling Magdalen-like figure in the lower left corner to the group immediately beside and behind her in which a man upholds a nude woman to whom a young boy is changing. Next to this trio a leaning man tries to lift a woman from the water, while farther towards the contre we encounter the dramatic action of a parent trying to hold an infant from the waters. This emphasis upon saving children, which seems a characteristic of Romantic versions of the Deluge, appears in several other places in Turner's picture; and although helplessness and desperation colour his work far more than they do Danby's our final impression is of suffering innocents.
Gustave Doré's famous Bible illustrations (1865) make it even clearer that a savage nature destroys innocent beings. Doré, who (as [142/143] Ruskin pointed out) loved to depict sensational violence, devotes three plates to the Flood, each more destructive of traditional readings than the last. In The World Destroyed by Water, we come upon many examples of panic as the seventy or so figures desperately attempt to escape the rising waters, but again there is none of the viciousness and cruelty one expects in scenes of panic. Indeed, a sense of community and humanity characterizes the acts of these people. In the foreground, for instance, a father heroically tries to hold wife and child above the waters, while above him two parents strain to push their infants to higher points of safety. In the centre of the plate the arm of a drowning parent rises from the water and holds up a child to grant it a few more moments of life. Similarly, in the pyramid of men and animals on higher ground which dominates the major portion of the illustration, love, fellowship, and community prevail: innocent children are pushed to the heights, and supposedly guilty human beings sacrifice themselves to save innocents.
In The Deluge Doré brings us closer to the end as only a few remain on a small bit of rock while the drowning waters close in, but once again the same heroism and dying innocence prevail. When the artist presents his interpretation of The Dove Sent Forth from the Ark, the last plate in this series, we observe the white bird at the centre of the picture as it flies through a valley of corpses. This voyage through a nightmare landscape of death makes the bird seem not a messenger of hope and grace, but a predatory avenging creature. In other words, in Danby, Doré, and Turner the subject takes on a new, particularly bitter meaning. The need to present visual images of divine punishment makes that punishment seem cruel and unusual indeed until, finally, one wonders if God had anything to do with it. The nineteenth-century imagination here destroys the traditional Christian significance of the Deluge in these works, twisting it and transforming it into something blasphemous, for the need to use one's sympathetic imagination, feeling and perceiving as if one were inside the scene itself, has betrayed some artists into creating subversive images and encouraged others to do so. I assume that Turner, a skeptic, quite consciously subverted the usual significances of the subject, and the same could be true of Doré, but Danby's general artistic approach, more than any conscious programme, is probably responsible for the transformation of the Deluge he creates. At any rate, these artists' instinctive portrayals of the suffering inhabitants of earth result in images, not of men who suffer justly but of those who suffer and do not understand why -- and neither do we, the spectators of these events. We encounter images not of a universe in which God rules, but one in which nature runs rampant We move, in other words, from the universe of the Bible and Evangelical hymnody to that of Melville. As his Ishmael tells us in
Foolish mortals, Noah's flood is not yet subsided: two thirds Of the fair world it yet covers. . . . The sea dashes even the mightiest whales against the rocks, and leaves them there side by side with the split wrecks of ships. No mercy, no power but its own controls it. Panting and snorting like a mad battle steed that has lost its rider, the masterless ocean overruns the globe. [ch. 58]
Anyone who shares this vision of nature and this vision of the Deluge is unlikely to take the Flood as an instance, a paradigm, of just punishment.
Last modified 27 December 2004