The culture of Enlightenment, I argued, bears witness to a deep and recurring conflict. The free individual, motivated by reason, and guided by universal ideals, at the same time longs for community, for locality and for the warmth and protection of the tribe. Hence the era which saw the ‘rational’ reforms of the Emperor Joseph II in Austria, the Revolution in France, the birth of modern democracy in America, and the programmes for universal education, saw too the rise of the Masonic and Rosicrucian Orders, with their closed doors, their mysteries and their rites of passage. Study that sublime masterpiece of Masonic art – The Magic Flute of Mozart – and you will see that the two conflicting impulses of Enlightenment have a common emotional source.15 The priest Sarastro, who offers freedom, truth, and the community of moral beings, is also an excluder, who offers these universal goods at the end of ordeals, and through mysteries which speak once again of the tribe, its comfort, and its all-enveloping darkness. The marriage of Pamino and Tamina is not a contract but a vow, the subject-matter of an elaborate rite which purges the individual of his wilfulness and subjects him to a moral order beyond the reach of reason. That which the Enlightenment drove from the public world – superstition, ceremony and the rites of the tribe – has been resurrected as a mystery, the exclusive property of the enlightened few. And, in a certain measure, this symbolises the role of high culture in the newly enlightened world.
At about the time of The Magic Flute, Goethe and Schiller were pondering the distinction between ancient and modern art. For Schiller the poetry of the Greeks was the voice of Nature. Through the verse of Homer the beauty and purity of man’s childhood can be re-imagined. Such poetry – which Schiller called naïve – shows man at home in the natural world, whereas the ‘sentimental’ poetry of modern times is a poetry of seeking, in which Nature is invoked from afar.16 Goethe likewise saw Greek art as imbued with a freedom, naturalness and order which have since gone from the world. In their place we have inwardness, sentiment and Sehnsucht – the longing that is never appeased.17
Already the terms ‘classic’ and ‘romantic’ were being used to contrast ancient and modern art, and by the time of Hegel’s Lectures on Aesthetics (published posthumously between 1832 and 1840), the distinction was everywhere acknowledged as fundamental to the understanding of contemporary art and music. The Romantic movement defined itself in the terms made canonical by Hegel: as the exaltation of the subjective over the objective, and the inner yearning over the outward form. The lesser Romantics thought of themselves as reacting to the good taste and decorum of their predecessors; hence the term ‘classical’ soon came to denote both the art of the ancient Mediterranean, and also the poetry, painting and music of aristocratic Europe: specifically that of the late seventeenth and earlier eighteenth centuries. The greatest of the Romantics – Goethe, Schiller, Wordsworth, Beethoven, Schubert and Keats – were, in this sense, also classical. They were masters of the Enlightenment styles, expressing the haunted longings of the artist with the clarity and melodiousness which they admired in ancient poetry and sculpture.
Romanticism was less a reaction to the Enlightenment than an attitude concealed within it. Only against the background of emancipation does the poetic Weltschmerz make sense. In the lasting monuments of Romantic art we encounter the artist-hero, for whom freedom is both an absolute value and an intolerable burden. In plumbing the depths of his soul he is also, like Beethoven in his late quartets and the Choral Symphony, like Wordsworth in the Prelude, like Hölderlin in his poems of travel, invoking the community which he offends through his transgression, and to which he will somehow mysteriously come home. The course of Romantic art is one of ever deeper mourning for the life of ‘natural piety’ which Enlightenment destroyed. And from this mourning springs the Romantic hope – the hope of recreating in imagination the community that will never again exist in fact. Hence the importance of folk poetry, folk traditions, and ‘ancestral voices’. Beneath the rational culture of Enlightenment, the Romantics searched for another and deeper culture – the culture of the people, rooted in mystery, and surviving in the inner sanctuary of the poet’s self.
It is appropriate that the first attempt to give form to this ‘folk’ culture was a fabrication, recognised as such by that great champion of the classical spirit, Dr Johnson. Macpherson’s Poems of Ossian purported to be translated from a Gaelic original; in fact it invented a lost community of heroes, in which nature and man were in harmony, in which human life was idealised and sanctified, and in which the burden of freedom was happily put down. The Scottish Border ballads, Herder’s anthology of folk poetry, von Arnim and Brentano’s Das Knaben Wunderhorn – all such collections were put together as much from bourgeois dreams and parlour games as from real folk traditions. But that only testifies to the power of the longing which inspired them – the longing inimitably captured by Mozart in his last operatic masterpiece, for the rites of passage that would rescue us from freedom, by making freedom into a new form of membership.
In the last chapter I pointed to the ascendancy of the aesthetic in Enlightenment thinking. It is precisely this which made the Romantic movement possible. For the aesthetic attitude is already a kind of mourning. It places a frame around its object and looks upon it as something spiritual, transfigured – and therefore dead. The primary object of aesthetic experience, for Kant, was nature, and in the aestheticising of nature we glimpse the Romantic movement in its deepest impulse. Nature had ceased to be the unnoticed background to life, and become instead an object of concern. The eighteenth century identified nature through the picturesque – in other words, through its image in art. The woods and vales celebrated in Augustan poetry were self-evidently the work of man, and bore the imprint of a way of life. The aesthetic gaze which freezes these things intends thereby to immortalise the life which produced them. The search for natural beauty is at the same time an attempt to preserve the old way of life – the rooted, pious, unquestioning and obedient life – which Enlightenment inevitably destroys.
This complex attitude to the natural world has survived into our time, and lies at the heart of our culture. The natural beauty of the English countryside, invoked and lamented by the poets, painters and composers of our century, resides precisely in those features that memorialise a vanished industry: the hedgerows, copses, bridleways, green lanes, stone walls, barns and cottages tell of small-scale farming, mixed crops and the warm proximity of dependent animals. We cannot, it seems, protect that way of life from modern agribusiness; but we strive nevertheless to conserve its visible record. The aesthetic gaze immortalises, and sees in every change the threat of desecration.
In Romantic art, therefore, nature gains a new importance. It is the supremely threatened thing, the long-lost home from which we have been sundered, the symbol of an Edenic innocence that manufacture, materialism and Enlightenment have jointly destroyed. From Wordsworth to Hopkins, from Beethoven to Vaughan Williams, from Constable to Cézanne, the image of nature returns with its promise of a more than worldly consolation. And invariably it is associated with membership in its vanished or vanishing forms: the pious routines and rites of passage of a folk culture at peace with itself.
From the very beginning of the Romantic movement, however, consciousness stands apart from the natural world. The Romantic artist is a wanderer. The old moral order that lies enfolded in nature has withdrawn from his grasp. Goethe’s Faust typifies this stance, and nothing is more prophetic of the course of modern culture than Faust’s relation to Gretchen, the innocent girl whom he casts from the orbit of her natural piety. Mephistopheles transports Faust, who has encountered Gretchen only in the street, into the girl’s virginal room. As he rhapsodises over the innocent life that surrounds him, Faust throws himself into an old leather armchair, a Väterthron (throne of fathers), as he describes it, and imagines the generations of children who had played around it, the grandfather’s hand kissed in gratitude by Gretchen, the motherly routines of the young maid, as she busies herself in furnishing her home. The passage (lines 2687–2728) is saturated with the thought of reproduction: father, grandfather, mother, children – all pass in delirium through the rapturous verses, as Faust contemplates the life that he is about to destroy.
Goethe accurately identifies in this passage the source of the Romantic Weltschmerz. Fulfilment for Gretchen lies in marriage, which will confer full membership in her closed community. All the sublime artifice which shows itself as artless simplicity and tender concern, has been but a preparation for the rite of passage, the vow that will bind her to the father of her children. But Faust’s love removes her from the sphere of natural piety, and makes of her an aesthetic ideal. Precisely because she belongs to that old world, the world before Enlightenment, she is unobtainable, a creature of the imagination, who is etherealised and placed out of reach. What is obtained is not Gretchen, for whom faithful marriage is the only goal, but the debauched remnant of Gretchen, the body in which the soul is no more than an anxious memory, and which is cast loose from the moral order.
The theme is a Leitmotif of Romantic literature. Consciousness lies outside the moral order, observing, regretting, tragically sundered from the thing that it would possess. But possession, when it comes, is both supremely erotic and also a desecration, a removal of the object from its domestic shrine. The tragedy of Enlightenment is enacted in every erotic adventure, as love runs free from marriage to become a personal acquisition, a mark of distinction, with no rite of passage into the moral community. From object to object the observing consciousness wanders, never satisfied, never at home, animated by an incurable nostalgia which feeds on beauty wherever it is found. This is the experience humorously recorded by Byron in Don Juan, and warned against in the sagacious novels of Jane Austen.
Three themes therefore dominate Romantic art: nature, erotic love, and the world before Enlightenment. And the three belong together. Each presents a haven for the pilgrim soul, a place of refuge and homecoming. But it is an unreal refuge: aestheticised, removed from the material world, and frequented by ghosts. The landscape is not a means of production, but an elaborate tomb, a monument to the vanished world of piety. Erotic love offers a vista into that world, but it is no more than a vista: the passage back to the moral order has been closed and the rites discarded. The world before Enlightenment is also etherealised; it is a ‘dream of fair women’, a gothic shrine where pre-Raphaelite females bless the visitor with wan insipid smiles. By the time of Tennyson the romantic dream is supremely conscious of its emptiness. In Morte d’Arthur the dying king is all of us, and the hand which rises from the lake – ‘clothed in white samite, mystic, wonderful’ – waves farewell from the tribe. Once or twice thereafter we hear ‘the horns of elfland faintly blowing’ – in Mahler, in Vaughan Williams, in Walter de la Mare, even in Stefan George. But the Romantic movement is over.
The Romantic period was artistically the richest that our civilisation has known. To summarise its achievement is a task far beyond my present purpose or ability. Nevertheless, we should try to understand the ambivalence that modern people feel towards the Romantic impulse, since it has helped to shape both modernism in the arts and modern culture generally. The high culture of the Enlightenment, as I described it, involved a noble and energetic attempt to rescue the ethical view of human life – the view of life which flourished spontaneously in the old religious culture, but which demanded to be snatched from the ruins, when that culture collapsed. The rescue was a work of the imagination, in which the aesthetic attitude took over from religious worship as the source of intrinsic values. And the greatest artistic achievements of the Enlightenment fulfil the promise that inspired them. In Mozart, Goethe, Schiller, Blake and Rousseau the ethical vision of our nature outlasts the closed community. Thereafter art becomes a continuous meditation on our loss – a melancholy acknowledgement that the primary source of moral feeling has dried up, and that only the aesthetic remains. Subjected to the extreme pressures of a secular and materialistic way of life, art begins to compromise, to lose itself in wishful thinking and in dreams. Ready-made fantasies replace the work of imagination, and firm moral sentiment gives way to vapid sentimentality. The romantic hero begins to lose confidence in the ethical vision which created him. Like Byron’s Don Juan he begins to glory in his isolation, and to use his outsider status in order to disrupt the membership enjoyed by other and more innocent people.18 Erotic love becomes a destructive force, precisely because its true object is imagined, etherealised, and rendered unobtainable. Thereafter marriage is seen more as a bourgeois weakness than as the sacred rite of passage upon which the ethical life depends. The ethical vision, entrusted to the aesthetic gaze, is bit by bit betrayed by it.
In a remarkable and prescient work the Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard foretold this process, invoking marriage as the core of ethical life, and the foundation of enduring communities. Either/Or (published in 1843) presents the Romantic yearning in the form of a dilemma. In the first part is invoked the aesthetic way of life, in which the moment is elevated above all long-term commitments, and duty surrendered to delight. Mozart’s Don Juan is the acknowledged hero, and the centre piece is the celebrated ‘Diary of a Seducer’, in which an innocent girl falls under the aesthetic gaze of a writer for whom her innocence is both a promise of redemption and a challenge to destroy. In the second part a mild mannered judge moralises over the ethical life, and spells out the dull routines of marriage as the true redemption: the passage to community upon which life depends.
There is no doubt where Kierkegaard’s sympathies lay. The unutterable tediousness of the ‘Or’ contrasts with the intellectual, poetic and – yes – ethical exhilaration of the ‘Either’; and the reader is not surprised to learn that Kierkegaard himself, pressed to marry the girl whose life he had ruined by his promises, would never give ‘yes’ for an answer.
Kierkegaard was nevertheless a deeply religious man, and his exploration of the aesthetic way of life should be seen against the background of his faith in the Christian God. His attitude to faith was itself a distillation of the Romantic yearning. For Kierkegaard faith is profoundly irrational, a leap into the unknown, a gesture of complete ‘subjectivity’ in which the norms of Enlightenment are cast peremptorily aside. Indeed, if a word could summarise the peculiar character of Kierkegaard’s Christian commitment, it would be ‘aesthetic’. The plea for the ethical way of life is an elaborate sham. Like his contemporaries, the philosopher saw the aesthetic as the one true path to man’s redemption, the posture towards the world which preserved, as best it could, the ethical vision which makes sense of our time on earth. In dressing up the aesthetic gaze in the attributes of holiness, Kierkegaard showed us the meaning of high culture.
While the high culture of our civilisation meditated on its spiritual legacy it became, as in Tennyson, more and more remote from the real world, more and more Arcadian and dreamlike. The real world was the world of commerce and manufacture. It had its own culture, in which advertising and salesmanship were more important than art or meditation. If we are to understand the modern movement – the originating impulse of modern culture – we should not see it as a reaction to Romanticism, but as the final shocked awakening of high culture to the truth of the modern world – the world in which everything, the sacred included, is for sale.