Civilisation (1969–1970): Season 1, Episode 12 - The Fallacies of Hope - full transcript
(CLOCK TICKS)
(CLOCK CHIMES)
A finite, reasonable world,
symmetrical, consistent,
enclosed.
Well, symmetry is a human concept,
because, with all our oddities,
we are more or less symmetrical.
And the balance of a mantelpiece
by Adam or a phrase by Mozart
reflects our satisfaction with our
two eyes, two arms, two legs and so forth.
And consistency -
again and again in this series,
I have used
that word as a term of praise -
but enclosed, that's the trouble.
An enclosed world becomes
a prison of the spirit.
One longs to get out.
One longs to move.
One realises that symmetry
and consistency, whatever their merits,
are the enemies of movement.
(# BEETHOVEN: Leonore Overture 3)
What is that I hear?
That note of urgency, of indignation,
of spiritual hunger?
Yes, it's Beethoven.
It's the sound of European man once more
reaching for something beyond his grasp.
We must leave this trim, finite room
and go to confront the infinite.
We've a long, rough voyage ahead of us,
and I can't say how it will end,
because it isn't over yet.
We're still the offspring
of the Romantic movement
and still victims
of the fallacies of hope.
I've used the metaphor of the sea
because all the great Romantics
from Byron onwards
have been obsessed by this image
of movement and escape.
"Once more upon the water!
"And the waves bound beneath me
as a steed
"That knows his rider.
Welcome to their roar!
"Swift be their guidance
Whereso'er they lead!”
This escape was also
an escape from reason.
In the 18th century, philosophers
had attempted to tidy up human society
by the use of reason.
But rational arguments
weren't strong enough
to upset the huge mass
of torpid tradition
that had grown up in the last 150 years.
In America, it might be possible
for a new political constitution
to be achieved by reason,
but it took something more explosive
to blast the heavy foundations of Europe.
Towards the end of the 18th century,
as rational argument declined,
vivid assertion took its place.
Rousseau - "Man was born free
and is everywhere in chains.”
Robert Burns -
"A man's a man for a" that.”
Or, more explicitly,
"It's coming yet for a' that
"That Man to Man the world o'er
Shall brothers be for a' that."
In 1790, an obscure English poet
named Mordaunt wrote,
"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife
"Through all the sensual world proclaim,
"One crowded hour of glorious life
"Is worth an age without a name."”
These were the impulses
that showed themselves
like spray flying off a rock
during the 1780s.
Then, as we know, came the tidal wave.
It was because this need for freedom
had for so long been boiling
under the surface of the 18th century
that the French Revolution evolved
from the protests
of a few disgruntled lawyers,
through the honourable grunts and groans
of bourgeois constitutionalism,
to the raw cry of a popular movement.
None of the intervening solutions
would do.
In June 1789, the members
of the National Assembly
had found themselves locked out
of their usual meeting place,
accidentally, it seems,
and went off full of virtuous indignation
to this covered tennis court
where they swore an oath
to establish a constitution.
David, the painter of republican virtue,
was commissioned to record the scene.
In the middle is a group
symbolising the union of the Church
and the better aristocrats.
Actually, the monk wasn't present.
Like all propaganda pictures,
it's not strictly accurate.
Here are figures in an ecstasy of
enthusiasm for constitutional government.
And here -
this is historically correct -
is the one delegate
who wouldn't swear to support it.
To our eyes, disenchanted by
150 years of democratic eloquence
and 50 years of propaganda painting -
none of it as good as David -
the whole thing may seem slightly absurd.
And in fact, these first steps towards
revolution were pedantic and confused.
The constitutional phase
of the French Revolution
belonged to the Age of Reason.
Three years later,
we hear the sound of the New World,
when some honest citizens of Marseilles
grow impatient
at an executive that doesn't act
and undertake
the amazing feat of marching -
in a sweltering July -
all the way from Marseilles to Paris,
tugging three pieces of cannon
and singing a new song.
# Allons enfants de la Patrie
# Le jour de gloire est arrive
# Contre nous de la tyrannie
# L'etendard sanglant est leve
# L'etendard sanglant est leve
# Entendez-vous dans les campagnes
# Mugir ces feroces soldats
# Ils viennentjusque dans nos bras
# Egorger nos fils, nos compagnes
# Aux armes, citoyens!
# Formez vos bataillons!
# Marchons, marchons
# Qu'un sang impur
# Abreuve nos sillons!
# Aux armes, citoyens!
# Formez vos bataillons!
# Marchons, marchons
# Qu'un sang impur
# Abreuve nos sillons! #
Breathes there a man
with a soul so dead
who can listen to that marching song
without emotion, even today?
No wonder that the finest spirits
of the time were enraptured,
that Blake began a poem on
the French Revolution, which nobody read
and Wordsworth wrote the lines
that everybody quotes,
and I must quote again -
"For great were the auxiliaries
which then stood
"Upon our side, we who were
strong in love
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
"But to be young was very heaven."
And Wordsworth goes on
to say how the Revolution
seemed to bring Rousseau's dream
of natural man,
and traveller's tales of his
enchanted existence, into reality.
It was no longer confined to some
secluded island heaven knows where
but in the very world,
which is the world of all of us.
At this point, the Revolution was
the Romantic movement in action.
And perhaps its greatest message
to posterity
has been its message to the young,
that those who are strong in love
may yet find a way of escaping
from the rotten parchment bonds
that tie us down.
I see them still through the window
of the University of the Sorbonne,
impatient to change the world,
vivid in hope,
although what precisely they hope for
or believe in, I don't know.
The moving fact about
the first Revolutionaries
is that their dream of a new world
was sharply defined.
They wanted to change everything -
even the calendar,
making the year 1792 "Year 1"
and renaming the months.
The change of years was a nuisance,
but the new names of the months -
Ventose, Thermidor, Brumaire
and so forth,
the windy one, the hot one,
the misty one -
were charming,
and I wish they had survived.
They expressed the love of nature
that had become so closely entwined
with the Revolution.
The same desire to return to nature
affected women's fashions.
All the artificial framework
of the 18th century is thrown away,
and the dresses follow the lines
of the body with graceful simplicity.
No more high, powdered wigs
but flowing locks with a simple bandeau.
Madame Recamier, the most famous
and inaccessible beauty of her time,
posed for David with naked feet.
Of course, there was a good deal
of profanation and blasphemy
and a vast amount of destruction.
Cluny, St Denis,
many of the sacred places of civilisation
were horribly knocked about.
It was even proposed
to pull down Chartres Cathedral
and build in its place a Temple of Wisdom.
The Revolutionaries wanted to replace
Christianity with a religion of nature,
and there is something rather touching
about this print of baptism
according to the rites of nature
taking place in a de-Christianised church.
People who hold forth
about the modern world
often say that what we need
is a new religion.
It may be true,
but it isn't easy to establish.
Even Robespierre,
who was an enthusiast for new religion
and had powerful means of persuasion
at his command,
couldn't bring it off.
And on the name Robespierre,
one remembers how horribly
all this idealism came to grief
in the prisons of the Terror.
Most of the great episodes
in the history civilisation
have had some unpleasant consequences,
but none have kicked back
sooner and harder
than the Revolutionary fervour of 1792,
because in September, there took place
the first of those massacres
by which, alas,
the Revolution is chiefly remembered.
No-one's ever explained
in historical terms
the September massacres, and perhaps
the old-fashioned explanation is correct
that it was a kind of communal sadism.
It was a pogrom,
a phenomenon with which we became
familiar in the 19th century.
And it was given fresh impetus
by another familiar emotion - mass panic
"La patrie en danger."
The country in peril.
In 1792, France was
fighting for her life
against the forces of ancient corruption
and for a few years, her leaders
suffered from the most terrible
of all delusions -
they believed themselves to be virtuous.
Robespierre's friend Saint-Just said,
"In a republic,
which can only be based on virtue,
"any pity shown towards crime
is a flagrant proof of treason.”
Reluctantly, one must admit that many
subsequent horrors were simply due
to anarchy. It's a most attractive
political doctrine,
but I'm afraid it's too optimistic.
The men of 1793 tried desperately
to control anarchy by violence
and in the end were destroyed by the evil
means they had brought into existence.
Robespierre himself
and many, many others
followed the members
of the Old Regime onto the scaffold.
With what mixed feelings
one looks at David's picture
of Marat murdered in his bath.
David painted it with deep emotion.
The picture was intended to immortalise
the memory of a great patriot
worthy of the traditions of Brutus.
Few propaganda pictures
make such an impact as a work of art.
Yet Marat cannot escape responsibility
for the September Massacres,
and thus for the first cloud
to overcast Wordsworth's dawn
and darken the optimism
of the first Romantics
into a pessimism that has lasted
to our own day.
The Revolutionary spirit
lived on after his death,
as we see it in this picture by David,
painted in 1795,
but it had no leaders.
French politics was the same melee
of self-seeking infighting
that it was to become
so often in the next 150 years.
Then, in 1798, the French
got a leader with a vengeance.
(# Le Champ d'Honneur)
With the appearance
of General Bonaparte,
the liberated energies of the Revolution
take a new direction -
the insatiable urge
to conquer and explore.
His council chamber at Malmaison,
where the first great plans
of conquest were worked out,
is a soldier's room
with a ceiling made to look like a tent
a fashion that was followed
all over Europe for the next 50 years.
This is the actual council table.
On the doors are trophies of arms
of the warlike peoples of antiquity -
Carthaginian, Roman, Greek,
the Middle Ages.
And beyond the doors is
Napoleon's library and study,
and painted on the ceiling,
portraits of his favourite authors,
beginning with the Gaelic bard, Ossian.
What a charming room.
Of course, it's an adaptation
of an antique room
but made liveable, almost comfortable.
And this is his actual desk.
Military glory, conquest -
what have they to do with civilisation?
War and imperialism, so long
the most admired of human activities,
have fallen into disrepute.
I am enough a child of my time
to hate them both.
But I recognise that,
together with much that is destructive,
they are symptoms
of a life-giving impulse.
"And shall I die with this unconquered?"”
How many great poets
and artists and scientists
could have spoken those words
that Marlowe put into the mouth
of the dying Tamburlaine?
In the field of political action,
they have become odious to us.
But I've an uneasy feeling that one
can't have one thing without another.
That Ruskin's unwelcome words -
"No great art ever yet rose on Earth
but among a nation of soldiers” -
seem to be historically irrefutable...
so far.
The need to conquer was only one part
of Napoleon's paradoxical character.
There was also the political realist,
the great administrator, the author -
or at least, the editor -
of that classic corpus of law,
the Code Napoleon,
written at this very desk.
In his portraits, we can watch
the young Revolutionary soldier
dissolve into the First Consul with traces
of Revolutionary intensity in his head,
and in two years, he becomes the
successor of Childeric and Charlemagne.
This extraordinary portrait by Ingres
makes conscious reference
both to Roman ivories
and 10th-century miniatures
of the Emperor Otto III.
So, in one mood,
Napoleon believed that he was reviving the
great traditions of unity and stability
by which the ideals of Greece and Rome
were transmitted to the Middle Ages.
To the end, he maintained
that Europe would have been better off
if it had been united under his rule.
It may be true.
But it could never happen,
because the realistic ruler was dominate
by the Romantic conqueror,
and the static, hieratic emperor
painted by Ingres
is forgotten when we look at David's
Bonaparte Crossing The Great St Bernard.
There he is truly the man of his time.
For 50 years, the great minds of Europe
were enchanted by a poem called Fingal,
said to have been written
by Ossian, a Gaelic bard.
Actually, it was a kind of fake,
put together out of scraps of evidence
by an enterprising Scot named Macpherson
But this didn't prevent
Goethe from admiring it,
nor Ingres, the high priest of classicis
from painting an enormous picture
of Ossian's dream.
And Fingal was Napoleon's favourite poem.
He took an illustrated copy
on all his campaigns.
Its heaven was not tarnished
by the approval of the Old Regime.
He ordered the glossiest
of his painters, Girodet,
to depict the souls
of his own warriors, his marshals,
being received by Ossian in Valhalla,
painfully reminiscent
of Hitler and Wagner.
And yet one can't resist the exhilaration
of Napoleon's glory.
(# BEETHOVEN: 2nd Movement of Eroica)
Communal enthusiasm
may be a dangerous intoxicant,
but if human beings were to lose
altogether the sense of glory,
I think we should be the poorer.
Napoleon's tomb
in the church of Les Invalides,
the most grandiose memorial
to any ruler since ancient Egypt.
And what, in all this glory,
had happened to the great heroes
that spoke for humanity
in the Revolutionary years?
Most of them were silenced by fear.
Fear of disorder, fear of bloodshed,
fear that, after all, human beings
were not yet capable of liberty.
Few episodes in history
are more depressing
than the withdrawal
of the great Romantics.
Wordsworth saying he would give
his life for the Church of England,
or Goethe, that it was better
to support a lie
than to admit political confusion
in the state.
But two of them did not retreat
and so have become
the archetypal Romantic heroes -
Beethoven and Byron.
Different as they were - it's hard
to think of two more different men -
they both maintained an attitude
of defiance to social conventions
and they both believed
unshakeably in freedom.
Beethoven wasn't a political man,
but he responded to the generous
sentiments of the Revolution.
At first, he admired Napoleon
because he seemed to be
the apostle of Revolutionary ideals,
the inheritor of
the early Revolutionary urge to freedom
symbolised by
the storming of the Bastille.
The Bastille was subsequently
knocked down stone by stone,
but repression did not come to an end.
On the contrary, Napoleon organised the
most efficient secret police in Europe.
This place is the dungeon
of the Castle of Vincennes
where political prisoners of all sorts
have faced the firing squad,
right up to the end of the last war.
Hateful!
And would have been equally hateful
to both Byron and Beethoven.
When Beethoven heard that Napoleon
had proclaimed himself Emperor,
he tore off the dedication page
of the 3rd Symphony
and was, with difficulty, prevented
from destroying the score.
Later, he was to write,
in his opera Fidelio,
the greatest of all hymns to liberty,
as the victims of injustice struggle up
from their dungeons towards the light.
(# BEETHOVEN:
Prisoners' Chorus from Fidelio)
# ...In freier Luft
Den Atem leicht zu heben
# Nur hier, nur hier
# Nur hier ist Leben... #
"Oh, happiness to see the light,"”
they say, "to feel the air
"and be once more alive.
Our prison was a tomb.
"Oh, freedom, freedom, come to us again.
This cry has echoed through all the
countless revolutionary movements
of the last century.
# ...O welche Lust
# In freier Luft
# Den Atem leicht zu heben
# Nur hier, nur hier ist Leben
# Nur hier, nur hier
# Nur hier, nur hier ist Leben
# Ist Leben
# Der Kerker eine Gruft
# Der Kerker eine Gruft
# Nur hier, nur hier
# Nur hier, nur hier
# Nur hier, nur hier ist Leben
# O welche Lust
# O welche Lust
# Wir wollen mit Vertrauen
# Auf Gottes Hilfe
# Auf Gottes Hilfe bauen
# Die Hoffnung flustert sanft mir zu
# Wir werden frei
# Wir finden Ruh
# Wir finden Ruh
# O Himmel! Rettung!
# Welch ein Gluck!
# O Freiheit! O Freiheit!
# Kehrst du zuruck?
# Kehrst du zuruck...? #
As far as freedom is concerned,
I'm afraid that recent revolutionary
movements haven't got us far forward.
On the fall of the Bastille in 1792,
it was found to contain
only seven old men,
who were annoyed at being disturbed.
But to have opened the doors
of a political prison in Germany in 1940
or Hungary in 1956,
or Spain or Greece today,
then one would have known
the meaning of that scene in Fidelio.
Beethoven, in spite of his tragic
deafness, was an optimist.
He believed that man had within himself
a spark of the divine fire
revealed in his love of nature
and his need for friendship.
He believed that man
was worthy of freedom.
The despair that poisoned
the Romantic movement
had not yet entered his veins.
But by about 1810, all the optimistic
hopes of the 18th century
had been proved false.
The rights of man, the fall of tyrants,
the benefits of industry...
all a delusion.
The freedoms won by revolution
had been immediately lost,
either by counter-revolution
or by the revolutionary government falling
into the hands of military dictators.
In Goya's picture of a firing squad
called 3rd May 1808,
the repeated gesture of those who have
raised their arms in heroic affirmation
becomes the repeated line
of the soldiers' rifles
as they liquidate a small group of
liberals and other inconvenient citizens.
Well, we're used to all this now.
We're almost numbed
by repeated disappointments.
But in 1810,
it was a new experience,
and all the poets and philosophers
and artists of the Romantic movement
were shattered by it.
The spokesman of this pessimism
was Byron.
He would probably have been a pessimist
anyway, it was part of his egotism.
But appearing when he did,
the tide of disillusion carried him along,
so that he became, after Napoleon,
the most famous name in Europe.
From great poets like Goethe and Pushkin
down to the most brainless schoolgirl,
his works were read with
an almost hysterical enthusiasm,
which, as we struggle through the
rhetorical nonsense of Lara or The Giaou
we can hardly credit,
because, although Byron
wrote quite a lot of good poetry,
it was his bad poetry
that made him famous!
Byron, who was very much
a man of his time,
wrote a poem about
the opening of a prison -
the dungeon of the Castle of Chillon on
the Lake of Geneva, just behind me there.
He begins with a sonnet
in the old revolutionary vein -
"Eternal spirit of the chainless mind
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty!"
But when, after many horrors, the prison
of Chillon is at last released,
a new note is heard -
"At last men came to set me free
I ask'd not why and reck'd not where
"It was at length the same to me
"Fettered or fetterless to be
"I learned to love despair.”
Since that line was written,
how many intellectuals,
down to Beckett and Sartre,
have echoed its sentiment?
But this negative conclusion
was not the whole of Byron.
The prisoner of Chillon
had looked from his castle wall
onto the mountains and the lake
and felt himself to be part of them.
This was the positive side
of Byron's genius,
a self-identification
with the great forces of nature -
in short, with the sublime.
(# BERLIOZ: King Lear)
Consciousness of the sublime
was a faculty that the Romantic movement
added to the European imagination.
It was an English discovery
related to the discovery of nature -
not the truth-giving nature of Goethe,
nor the moralising nature of Wordsworth,
but the savage, incomprehensible
power outside ourselves
that makes us aware
of the futility of human arrangements.
As the Revolution turned
into the Napoleonic adventure,
the sublime became visible
and within reach.
This was the feeling that was given
popular expression by Byron.
He was irresistible,
because he had identified himself
with the fearful forces of the sublime.
"Let me be..." he says to
the stormy darkness on this very lake,
"Let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight
"A portion of the tempest and of thee!”
But participation of the sublime
was almost as much of a strain
as the pursuit of freedom.
Because de Sade was right -
nature is indifferent
or, as we say, cruel.
No great artist has ever observed
these violent, hostile moods of nature
as closely as Turner.
And he was without hope.
These are not my words
but the final judgement of Ruskin,
who knew him and worshipped him.
Turner was a great admirer of Byron
and used quotations from Byron's poems
in the titles of his pictures.
But Childe Harold was not
pessimistic enough for him,
so Turner wrote a fragmentary poem
to provide himself with titles.
He called it The Fallacies Of Hope.
Bad poetry, good pictures.
Here's one of the most famous of them.
It represents an actual episode
in the slave trade,
another of those contemporary horrors
that troubled the Romantic imagination.
Turner called it
Slavers Throwing Overboard
The Dead And Dying, Typhoon Coming On.
For the last 50 years,
we've not been in the least interested
in the horrible story
but only in the colour of the black leg
and the pink fish surrounding it.
But Turner meant us
to take it seriously.
"Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope," he wrote,
"where is thy market now?"
About 20 years earlier, Gericault,
the most Byronic of all painters,
had also made his name
with a picture of a disaster at sea.
The frigate Medusa
foundered on her way to Senegal.
149 of the passengers
were put onto a raft,
which was to be towed
by sailors in the pinnaces.
After a time,
the crew got fed up and cut the ropes,
leaving the raft to drift out to sea
and condemning the passengers
to almost certain death.
Miraculously, there were a few survivors
from whom Gericault learned
the full horrors of the episode.
He even found the ship's carpenter
who had made the raft
and had him make
a model of it in his studio.
He took a workroom near a hospital
so that he could study dying men.
He'd been a dandy,
but he gave up his life of pleasure,
shaved his head
and locked himself in a room
with corpses from the morgue.
He was determined
to paint a masterpiece.
And he succeeded.
(# BERLIOZ: King Lear)
To us, it looks like a piece
of grandiose picture-making,
but the raft was intended
and originally accepted
as a piece of what we call social realism.
Gericault's last works
were a series of portraits of lunatics,
which I think are among
the great pictures of the 19th century.
They carry a step further
the Romantic impulse to explore
beyond the bounds of reason.
His intense effort to penetrate
into their disordered minds
has led him to grasp more fully
the complete physical character
of their heads.
By this time, Gericault
was dying of some internal injury,
which he aggravated by riding
the most unruly horses he could find.
No strong man has ever sought death
more resolutely.
He died at the age of 33,
a little younger than Byron,
considerably older
than Shelley and Keats.
Fortunately, he left a spiritual heir,
whose pessimism was supported
by a powerful intellect -
Delacroix.
The first picture in which
Delacroix is entirely himself
is The Massacre Of Chios.
As with almost all the masterpieces
of Romantic painting,
it represents an actual event -
the slaughter by the occupying Turks
of the inhabitants of a Greek village.
And it reflects the generous sentiments
of those liberals like Shelley and Byron
who dreamed that Greece
might yet be free.
While Delacroix was painting it
came the news of Byron's death
on campaign at Messolonghi.
There is protest and compassion
in this picture,
more perhaps than Delacroix
was ever to show again,
because he came to despair
of all attempts to change society
and retreated into painting subjects
from Romantic poetry.
Some of his greatest pictures
were inspired by Byron.
This is The Prisoner Of Chillon.
As luck would have it, one of Delacroix'
friends became Prime Minister
and gave him many public commissions,
including the library
of the French parliament house.
At one end of the room,
he painted the scene of Attila the Hun
trampling on the remains
of antique civilisation.
What an incredible choice for a library!
And made all the stranger
by Delacroix's obvious sympathy with
this embodiment of destructive energy.
No-one realised better than Delacroix that
we'd got through by the skin of our teeth.
And he would have added,
"Was it worth it?"
But in the end, somewhat reluctantly,
he would have answered, "Yes!"
He valued European civilisation
all the more
because he knew it was fragile.
The 19th century revealed
a split in the European mind
as great as that which afflicted
Christendom in the 16th century
and even more destructive.
On the one hand was the new middle class
created by the Industrial Revolution.
It was hopeful and energetic
but without a scale of values.
Sandwiched between a corrupt aristocracy
and a brutalised poor,
it had produced a defensive morality -
conventional, complacent, hypocritical.
Never was a class better documented
by the admirable cartoonists of the day.
On the other hand
were the finer spirits like Delacroix,
who were still heirs
of the Romantic movement,
still haunted by disaster.
They felt themselves,
not without reason,
to be entirely cut off
from the prosperous majority.
But what could they put
in place of middle-class morality?
They themselves were still
in search of a soul.
The search went on throughout
the 19th century and it continues today
and leads to the same sense
of isolation and despair.
In the visual arts, its chief interpreter,
was the sculptor, Rodin.
He was the last great Romantic artist,
the direct heir of Gericault and Byron.
Indeed, his greatest disappointment was
that he didn't win the competition
to do the Byron memorial in Hyde Park.
Like them, his abundant
animal spirits didn't allay
but rather enhanced his view
of mankind's tragic destiny.
And like them, there is sometimes,
in his expressions of despair,
a trace of rhetorical exaggeration.
But what an artist he was!
Incredible that only 20 years ago,
he was still under the cloud of
critical disapproval. What is posterity?
He was an inventor of symbolic poses
that stay in the mind, and like all...
oversimplified statements
that spur men on to action,
they are sometimes rather too obvious.
But in the originals,
his figures are saved from banality
by a really stunning force
and freedom of modelling.
"Every form thrusting outwards
at its maximum point of tension.”
Those were Rodin's own words.
Look at the back of this figure of Eve.
You see how the vitality is conveyed
by the touch of Rodin's hands.
He was one of those sculptors
who communicate
through the movement of his fingers.
And for that reason, all his best
figures were modelled quite small,
enlarged afterwards by other artists.
This is the largest scale
on which Rodin ever worked.
If some of his gestures look
a little forced, one must also admit
that Rodin's power of representing figures
under the pressure of violent emotions
links him with a whole line
of modern art from Munch to Francis Bacon.
These are his Burghers Of Calais,
staggering out of the beleaguered city
and offering their lives
to the brutal English king,
in order that the people may be saved.
They are still with us -
Romantic man at the end
of his pilgrimage.
(# RICHARD STRAUSS: Festliches Praludium)
Rodin did one work which is dateless -
very ancient or very modern,
depending on how you look at it.
This is his monument
to the great French novelist, Balzac.
Of course, Balzac had been dead for many
years when Rodin received the commission
and the commemorative figure
had to be an ideal likeness -
a serious obstacle to Rodin,
as he always worked direct from nature.
All he had to go on was the knowledge
that Balzac was short and fat,
and worked in a dressing gown.
Yet he had also to make Balzac
look immense,
as the dominating imagination of his age
and yet transcending his age.
He set about the problem
in a peculiar way.
He made seven naked figures of Balzac
to satisfy his sense
of Balzac's physical reality.
And some of them are here
in his studio near Paris.
You can see that he didn't make
any concessions to the classical ideal!
After contemplating them
for several months,
he decided on one of them
and tried to cover it
with a cast of drapery
indicative of the famous dressing gown.
In this way,
he contrived to give the figure
both monumentality and movement.
The result is, to my mind, the greatest
piece of sculpture of the 19th century.
Perhaps, indeed,
the greatest since Michelangelo.
But this isn't the way in which
Rodin's contemporaries saw it
when it was exhibited
at the Salon of 1898.
They were horrified!
Rodin was a hoax, a swindler.
They even raised the cry of,
"La patrie en danger!”
Which shows how seriously
the French take art.
The crowds surging round it,
threatening it with their fists,
were unanimous on one point of criticism
that the attitude was impossible,
and that no body could exist
under such draperies.
Rodin, sitting nearby, knew that he had
only to strike the figure with a hammer
and that the draperies would come off,
leaving the body visible.
Hostile critics said that
it was like a snowman, a dolmen,
an owl, a heathen god.
All quite true, but we no longer
regard them as terms of abuse.
Balzac's body has the timelessness
of a prehistoric stone,
and his head is like a bird of prey.
And the real reason
why he made people so angry
is the feeling that
he could gobble them up
and doesn't care a damn
for their opinions.
Balzac, with his prodigious understanding
of human motives,
scorns conventional values, defies
fashionable opinions, as Beethoven did,
and should inspire us
to defy all those forces
that threaten to impair our humanity -
lies, tanks, tear gas,
ideologies, opinion polls, mechanisation
planners, computers, the whole lot.
(# RICHARD STRAUSS: Till Eulenspiegel)
(CLOCK CHIMES)
A finite, reasonable world,
symmetrical, consistent,
enclosed.
Well, symmetry is a human concept,
because, with all our oddities,
we are more or less symmetrical.
And the balance of a mantelpiece
by Adam or a phrase by Mozart
reflects our satisfaction with our
two eyes, two arms, two legs and so forth.
And consistency -
again and again in this series,
I have used
that word as a term of praise -
but enclosed, that's the trouble.
An enclosed world becomes
a prison of the spirit.
One longs to get out.
One longs to move.
One realises that symmetry
and consistency, whatever their merits,
are the enemies of movement.
(# BEETHOVEN: Leonore Overture 3)
What is that I hear?
That note of urgency, of indignation,
of spiritual hunger?
Yes, it's Beethoven.
It's the sound of European man once more
reaching for something beyond his grasp.
We must leave this trim, finite room
and go to confront the infinite.
We've a long, rough voyage ahead of us,
and I can't say how it will end,
because it isn't over yet.
We're still the offspring
of the Romantic movement
and still victims
of the fallacies of hope.
I've used the metaphor of the sea
because all the great Romantics
from Byron onwards
have been obsessed by this image
of movement and escape.
"Once more upon the water!
"And the waves bound beneath me
as a steed
"That knows his rider.
Welcome to their roar!
"Swift be their guidance
Whereso'er they lead!”
This escape was also
an escape from reason.
In the 18th century, philosophers
had attempted to tidy up human society
by the use of reason.
But rational arguments
weren't strong enough
to upset the huge mass
of torpid tradition
that had grown up in the last 150 years.
In America, it might be possible
for a new political constitution
to be achieved by reason,
but it took something more explosive
to blast the heavy foundations of Europe.
Towards the end of the 18th century,
as rational argument declined,
vivid assertion took its place.
Rousseau - "Man was born free
and is everywhere in chains.”
Robert Burns -
"A man's a man for a" that.”
Or, more explicitly,
"It's coming yet for a' that
"That Man to Man the world o'er
Shall brothers be for a' that."
In 1790, an obscure English poet
named Mordaunt wrote,
"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife
"Through all the sensual world proclaim,
"One crowded hour of glorious life
"Is worth an age without a name."”
These were the impulses
that showed themselves
like spray flying off a rock
during the 1780s.
Then, as we know, came the tidal wave.
It was because this need for freedom
had for so long been boiling
under the surface of the 18th century
that the French Revolution evolved
from the protests
of a few disgruntled lawyers,
through the honourable grunts and groans
of bourgeois constitutionalism,
to the raw cry of a popular movement.
None of the intervening solutions
would do.
In June 1789, the members
of the National Assembly
had found themselves locked out
of their usual meeting place,
accidentally, it seems,
and went off full of virtuous indignation
to this covered tennis court
where they swore an oath
to establish a constitution.
David, the painter of republican virtue,
was commissioned to record the scene.
In the middle is a group
symbolising the union of the Church
and the better aristocrats.
Actually, the monk wasn't present.
Like all propaganda pictures,
it's not strictly accurate.
Here are figures in an ecstasy of
enthusiasm for constitutional government.
And here -
this is historically correct -
is the one delegate
who wouldn't swear to support it.
To our eyes, disenchanted by
150 years of democratic eloquence
and 50 years of propaganda painting -
none of it as good as David -
the whole thing may seem slightly absurd.
And in fact, these first steps towards
revolution were pedantic and confused.
The constitutional phase
of the French Revolution
belonged to the Age of Reason.
Three years later,
we hear the sound of the New World,
when some honest citizens of Marseilles
grow impatient
at an executive that doesn't act
and undertake
the amazing feat of marching -
in a sweltering July -
all the way from Marseilles to Paris,
tugging three pieces of cannon
and singing a new song.
# Allons enfants de la Patrie
# Le jour de gloire est arrive
# Contre nous de la tyrannie
# L'etendard sanglant est leve
# L'etendard sanglant est leve
# Entendez-vous dans les campagnes
# Mugir ces feroces soldats
# Ils viennentjusque dans nos bras
# Egorger nos fils, nos compagnes
# Aux armes, citoyens!
# Formez vos bataillons!
# Marchons, marchons
# Qu'un sang impur
# Abreuve nos sillons!
# Aux armes, citoyens!
# Formez vos bataillons!
# Marchons, marchons
# Qu'un sang impur
# Abreuve nos sillons! #
Breathes there a man
with a soul so dead
who can listen to that marching song
without emotion, even today?
No wonder that the finest spirits
of the time were enraptured,
that Blake began a poem on
the French Revolution, which nobody read
and Wordsworth wrote the lines
that everybody quotes,
and I must quote again -
"For great were the auxiliaries
which then stood
"Upon our side, we who were
strong in love
"Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
"But to be young was very heaven."
And Wordsworth goes on
to say how the Revolution
seemed to bring Rousseau's dream
of natural man,
and traveller's tales of his
enchanted existence, into reality.
It was no longer confined to some
secluded island heaven knows where
but in the very world,
which is the world of all of us.
At this point, the Revolution was
the Romantic movement in action.
And perhaps its greatest message
to posterity
has been its message to the young,
that those who are strong in love
may yet find a way of escaping
from the rotten parchment bonds
that tie us down.
I see them still through the window
of the University of the Sorbonne,
impatient to change the world,
vivid in hope,
although what precisely they hope for
or believe in, I don't know.
The moving fact about
the first Revolutionaries
is that their dream of a new world
was sharply defined.
They wanted to change everything -
even the calendar,
making the year 1792 "Year 1"
and renaming the months.
The change of years was a nuisance,
but the new names of the months -
Ventose, Thermidor, Brumaire
and so forth,
the windy one, the hot one,
the misty one -
were charming,
and I wish they had survived.
They expressed the love of nature
that had become so closely entwined
with the Revolution.
The same desire to return to nature
affected women's fashions.
All the artificial framework
of the 18th century is thrown away,
and the dresses follow the lines
of the body with graceful simplicity.
No more high, powdered wigs
but flowing locks with a simple bandeau.
Madame Recamier, the most famous
and inaccessible beauty of her time,
posed for David with naked feet.
Of course, there was a good deal
of profanation and blasphemy
and a vast amount of destruction.
Cluny, St Denis,
many of the sacred places of civilisation
were horribly knocked about.
It was even proposed
to pull down Chartres Cathedral
and build in its place a Temple of Wisdom.
The Revolutionaries wanted to replace
Christianity with a religion of nature,
and there is something rather touching
about this print of baptism
according to the rites of nature
taking place in a de-Christianised church.
People who hold forth
about the modern world
often say that what we need
is a new religion.
It may be true,
but it isn't easy to establish.
Even Robespierre,
who was an enthusiast for new religion
and had powerful means of persuasion
at his command,
couldn't bring it off.
And on the name Robespierre,
one remembers how horribly
all this idealism came to grief
in the prisons of the Terror.
Most of the great episodes
in the history civilisation
have had some unpleasant consequences,
but none have kicked back
sooner and harder
than the Revolutionary fervour of 1792,
because in September, there took place
the first of those massacres
by which, alas,
the Revolution is chiefly remembered.
No-one's ever explained
in historical terms
the September massacres, and perhaps
the old-fashioned explanation is correct
that it was a kind of communal sadism.
It was a pogrom,
a phenomenon with which we became
familiar in the 19th century.
And it was given fresh impetus
by another familiar emotion - mass panic
"La patrie en danger."
The country in peril.
In 1792, France was
fighting for her life
against the forces of ancient corruption
and for a few years, her leaders
suffered from the most terrible
of all delusions -
they believed themselves to be virtuous.
Robespierre's friend Saint-Just said,
"In a republic,
which can only be based on virtue,
"any pity shown towards crime
is a flagrant proof of treason.”
Reluctantly, one must admit that many
subsequent horrors were simply due
to anarchy. It's a most attractive
political doctrine,
but I'm afraid it's too optimistic.
The men of 1793 tried desperately
to control anarchy by violence
and in the end were destroyed by the evil
means they had brought into existence.
Robespierre himself
and many, many others
followed the members
of the Old Regime onto the scaffold.
With what mixed feelings
one looks at David's picture
of Marat murdered in his bath.
David painted it with deep emotion.
The picture was intended to immortalise
the memory of a great patriot
worthy of the traditions of Brutus.
Few propaganda pictures
make such an impact as a work of art.
Yet Marat cannot escape responsibility
for the September Massacres,
and thus for the first cloud
to overcast Wordsworth's dawn
and darken the optimism
of the first Romantics
into a pessimism that has lasted
to our own day.
The Revolutionary spirit
lived on after his death,
as we see it in this picture by David,
painted in 1795,
but it had no leaders.
French politics was the same melee
of self-seeking infighting
that it was to become
so often in the next 150 years.
Then, in 1798, the French
got a leader with a vengeance.
(# Le Champ d'Honneur)
With the appearance
of General Bonaparte,
the liberated energies of the Revolution
take a new direction -
the insatiable urge
to conquer and explore.
His council chamber at Malmaison,
where the first great plans
of conquest were worked out,
is a soldier's room
with a ceiling made to look like a tent
a fashion that was followed
all over Europe for the next 50 years.
This is the actual council table.
On the doors are trophies of arms
of the warlike peoples of antiquity -
Carthaginian, Roman, Greek,
the Middle Ages.
And beyond the doors is
Napoleon's library and study,
and painted on the ceiling,
portraits of his favourite authors,
beginning with the Gaelic bard, Ossian.
What a charming room.
Of course, it's an adaptation
of an antique room
but made liveable, almost comfortable.
And this is his actual desk.
Military glory, conquest -
what have they to do with civilisation?
War and imperialism, so long
the most admired of human activities,
have fallen into disrepute.
I am enough a child of my time
to hate them both.
But I recognise that,
together with much that is destructive,
they are symptoms
of a life-giving impulse.
"And shall I die with this unconquered?"”
How many great poets
and artists and scientists
could have spoken those words
that Marlowe put into the mouth
of the dying Tamburlaine?
In the field of political action,
they have become odious to us.
But I've an uneasy feeling that one
can't have one thing without another.
That Ruskin's unwelcome words -
"No great art ever yet rose on Earth
but among a nation of soldiers” -
seem to be historically irrefutable...
so far.
The need to conquer was only one part
of Napoleon's paradoxical character.
There was also the political realist,
the great administrator, the author -
or at least, the editor -
of that classic corpus of law,
the Code Napoleon,
written at this very desk.
In his portraits, we can watch
the young Revolutionary soldier
dissolve into the First Consul with traces
of Revolutionary intensity in his head,
and in two years, he becomes the
successor of Childeric and Charlemagne.
This extraordinary portrait by Ingres
makes conscious reference
both to Roman ivories
and 10th-century miniatures
of the Emperor Otto III.
So, in one mood,
Napoleon believed that he was reviving the
great traditions of unity and stability
by which the ideals of Greece and Rome
were transmitted to the Middle Ages.
To the end, he maintained
that Europe would have been better off
if it had been united under his rule.
It may be true.
But it could never happen,
because the realistic ruler was dominate
by the Romantic conqueror,
and the static, hieratic emperor
painted by Ingres
is forgotten when we look at David's
Bonaparte Crossing The Great St Bernard.
There he is truly the man of his time.
For 50 years, the great minds of Europe
were enchanted by a poem called Fingal,
said to have been written
by Ossian, a Gaelic bard.
Actually, it was a kind of fake,
put together out of scraps of evidence
by an enterprising Scot named Macpherson
But this didn't prevent
Goethe from admiring it,
nor Ingres, the high priest of classicis
from painting an enormous picture
of Ossian's dream.
And Fingal was Napoleon's favourite poem.
He took an illustrated copy
on all his campaigns.
Its heaven was not tarnished
by the approval of the Old Regime.
He ordered the glossiest
of his painters, Girodet,
to depict the souls
of his own warriors, his marshals,
being received by Ossian in Valhalla,
painfully reminiscent
of Hitler and Wagner.
And yet one can't resist the exhilaration
of Napoleon's glory.
(# BEETHOVEN: 2nd Movement of Eroica)
Communal enthusiasm
may be a dangerous intoxicant,
but if human beings were to lose
altogether the sense of glory,
I think we should be the poorer.
Napoleon's tomb
in the church of Les Invalides,
the most grandiose memorial
to any ruler since ancient Egypt.
And what, in all this glory,
had happened to the great heroes
that spoke for humanity
in the Revolutionary years?
Most of them were silenced by fear.
Fear of disorder, fear of bloodshed,
fear that, after all, human beings
were not yet capable of liberty.
Few episodes in history
are more depressing
than the withdrawal
of the great Romantics.
Wordsworth saying he would give
his life for the Church of England,
or Goethe, that it was better
to support a lie
than to admit political confusion
in the state.
But two of them did not retreat
and so have become
the archetypal Romantic heroes -
Beethoven and Byron.
Different as they were - it's hard
to think of two more different men -
they both maintained an attitude
of defiance to social conventions
and they both believed
unshakeably in freedom.
Beethoven wasn't a political man,
but he responded to the generous
sentiments of the Revolution.
At first, he admired Napoleon
because he seemed to be
the apostle of Revolutionary ideals,
the inheritor of
the early Revolutionary urge to freedom
symbolised by
the storming of the Bastille.
The Bastille was subsequently
knocked down stone by stone,
but repression did not come to an end.
On the contrary, Napoleon organised the
most efficient secret police in Europe.
This place is the dungeon
of the Castle of Vincennes
where political prisoners of all sorts
have faced the firing squad,
right up to the end of the last war.
Hateful!
And would have been equally hateful
to both Byron and Beethoven.
When Beethoven heard that Napoleon
had proclaimed himself Emperor,
he tore off the dedication page
of the 3rd Symphony
and was, with difficulty, prevented
from destroying the score.
Later, he was to write,
in his opera Fidelio,
the greatest of all hymns to liberty,
as the victims of injustice struggle up
from their dungeons towards the light.
(# BEETHOVEN:
Prisoners' Chorus from Fidelio)
# ...In freier Luft
Den Atem leicht zu heben
# Nur hier, nur hier
# Nur hier ist Leben... #
"Oh, happiness to see the light,"”
they say, "to feel the air
"and be once more alive.
Our prison was a tomb.
"Oh, freedom, freedom, come to us again.
This cry has echoed through all the
countless revolutionary movements
of the last century.
# ...O welche Lust
# In freier Luft
# Den Atem leicht zu heben
# Nur hier, nur hier ist Leben
# Nur hier, nur hier
# Nur hier, nur hier ist Leben
# Ist Leben
# Der Kerker eine Gruft
# Der Kerker eine Gruft
# Nur hier, nur hier
# Nur hier, nur hier
# Nur hier, nur hier ist Leben
# O welche Lust
# O welche Lust
# Wir wollen mit Vertrauen
# Auf Gottes Hilfe
# Auf Gottes Hilfe bauen
# Die Hoffnung flustert sanft mir zu
# Wir werden frei
# Wir finden Ruh
# Wir finden Ruh
# O Himmel! Rettung!
# Welch ein Gluck!
# O Freiheit! O Freiheit!
# Kehrst du zuruck?
# Kehrst du zuruck...? #
As far as freedom is concerned,
I'm afraid that recent revolutionary
movements haven't got us far forward.
On the fall of the Bastille in 1792,
it was found to contain
only seven old men,
who were annoyed at being disturbed.
But to have opened the doors
of a political prison in Germany in 1940
or Hungary in 1956,
or Spain or Greece today,
then one would have known
the meaning of that scene in Fidelio.
Beethoven, in spite of his tragic
deafness, was an optimist.
He believed that man had within himself
a spark of the divine fire
revealed in his love of nature
and his need for friendship.
He believed that man
was worthy of freedom.
The despair that poisoned
the Romantic movement
had not yet entered his veins.
But by about 1810, all the optimistic
hopes of the 18th century
had been proved false.
The rights of man, the fall of tyrants,
the benefits of industry...
all a delusion.
The freedoms won by revolution
had been immediately lost,
either by counter-revolution
or by the revolutionary government falling
into the hands of military dictators.
In Goya's picture of a firing squad
called 3rd May 1808,
the repeated gesture of those who have
raised their arms in heroic affirmation
becomes the repeated line
of the soldiers' rifles
as they liquidate a small group of
liberals and other inconvenient citizens.
Well, we're used to all this now.
We're almost numbed
by repeated disappointments.
But in 1810,
it was a new experience,
and all the poets and philosophers
and artists of the Romantic movement
were shattered by it.
The spokesman of this pessimism
was Byron.
He would probably have been a pessimist
anyway, it was part of his egotism.
But appearing when he did,
the tide of disillusion carried him along,
so that he became, after Napoleon,
the most famous name in Europe.
From great poets like Goethe and Pushkin
down to the most brainless schoolgirl,
his works were read with
an almost hysterical enthusiasm,
which, as we struggle through the
rhetorical nonsense of Lara or The Giaou
we can hardly credit,
because, although Byron
wrote quite a lot of good poetry,
it was his bad poetry
that made him famous!
Byron, who was very much
a man of his time,
wrote a poem about
the opening of a prison -
the dungeon of the Castle of Chillon on
the Lake of Geneva, just behind me there.
He begins with a sonnet
in the old revolutionary vein -
"Eternal spirit of the chainless mind
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty!"
But when, after many horrors, the prison
of Chillon is at last released,
a new note is heard -
"At last men came to set me free
I ask'd not why and reck'd not where
"It was at length the same to me
"Fettered or fetterless to be
"I learned to love despair.”
Since that line was written,
how many intellectuals,
down to Beckett and Sartre,
have echoed its sentiment?
But this negative conclusion
was not the whole of Byron.
The prisoner of Chillon
had looked from his castle wall
onto the mountains and the lake
and felt himself to be part of them.
This was the positive side
of Byron's genius,
a self-identification
with the great forces of nature -
in short, with the sublime.
(# BERLIOZ: King Lear)
Consciousness of the sublime
was a faculty that the Romantic movement
added to the European imagination.
It was an English discovery
related to the discovery of nature -
not the truth-giving nature of Goethe,
nor the moralising nature of Wordsworth,
but the savage, incomprehensible
power outside ourselves
that makes us aware
of the futility of human arrangements.
As the Revolution turned
into the Napoleonic adventure,
the sublime became visible
and within reach.
This was the feeling that was given
popular expression by Byron.
He was irresistible,
because he had identified himself
with the fearful forces of the sublime.
"Let me be..." he says to
the stormy darkness on this very lake,
"Let me be
A sharer in thy fierce and far delight
"A portion of the tempest and of thee!”
But participation of the sublime
was almost as much of a strain
as the pursuit of freedom.
Because de Sade was right -
nature is indifferent
or, as we say, cruel.
No great artist has ever observed
these violent, hostile moods of nature
as closely as Turner.
And he was without hope.
These are not my words
but the final judgement of Ruskin,
who knew him and worshipped him.
Turner was a great admirer of Byron
and used quotations from Byron's poems
in the titles of his pictures.
But Childe Harold was not
pessimistic enough for him,
so Turner wrote a fragmentary poem
to provide himself with titles.
He called it The Fallacies Of Hope.
Bad poetry, good pictures.
Here's one of the most famous of them.
It represents an actual episode
in the slave trade,
another of those contemporary horrors
that troubled the Romantic imagination.
Turner called it
Slavers Throwing Overboard
The Dead And Dying, Typhoon Coming On.
For the last 50 years,
we've not been in the least interested
in the horrible story
but only in the colour of the black leg
and the pink fish surrounding it.
But Turner meant us
to take it seriously.
"Hope, Hope, fallacious Hope," he wrote,
"where is thy market now?"
About 20 years earlier, Gericault,
the most Byronic of all painters,
had also made his name
with a picture of a disaster at sea.
The frigate Medusa
foundered on her way to Senegal.
149 of the passengers
were put onto a raft,
which was to be towed
by sailors in the pinnaces.
After a time,
the crew got fed up and cut the ropes,
leaving the raft to drift out to sea
and condemning the passengers
to almost certain death.
Miraculously, there were a few survivors
from whom Gericault learned
the full horrors of the episode.
He even found the ship's carpenter
who had made the raft
and had him make
a model of it in his studio.
He took a workroom near a hospital
so that he could study dying men.
He'd been a dandy,
but he gave up his life of pleasure,
shaved his head
and locked himself in a room
with corpses from the morgue.
He was determined
to paint a masterpiece.
And he succeeded.
(# BERLIOZ: King Lear)
To us, it looks like a piece
of grandiose picture-making,
but the raft was intended
and originally accepted
as a piece of what we call social realism.
Gericault's last works
were a series of portraits of lunatics,
which I think are among
the great pictures of the 19th century.
They carry a step further
the Romantic impulse to explore
beyond the bounds of reason.
His intense effort to penetrate
into their disordered minds
has led him to grasp more fully
the complete physical character
of their heads.
By this time, Gericault
was dying of some internal injury,
which he aggravated by riding
the most unruly horses he could find.
No strong man has ever sought death
more resolutely.
He died at the age of 33,
a little younger than Byron,
considerably older
than Shelley and Keats.
Fortunately, he left a spiritual heir,
whose pessimism was supported
by a powerful intellect -
Delacroix.
The first picture in which
Delacroix is entirely himself
is The Massacre Of Chios.
As with almost all the masterpieces
of Romantic painting,
it represents an actual event -
the slaughter by the occupying Turks
of the inhabitants of a Greek village.
And it reflects the generous sentiments
of those liberals like Shelley and Byron
who dreamed that Greece
might yet be free.
While Delacroix was painting it
came the news of Byron's death
on campaign at Messolonghi.
There is protest and compassion
in this picture,
more perhaps than Delacroix
was ever to show again,
because he came to despair
of all attempts to change society
and retreated into painting subjects
from Romantic poetry.
Some of his greatest pictures
were inspired by Byron.
This is The Prisoner Of Chillon.
As luck would have it, one of Delacroix'
friends became Prime Minister
and gave him many public commissions,
including the library
of the French parliament house.
At one end of the room,
he painted the scene of Attila the Hun
trampling on the remains
of antique civilisation.
What an incredible choice for a library!
And made all the stranger
by Delacroix's obvious sympathy with
this embodiment of destructive energy.
No-one realised better than Delacroix that
we'd got through by the skin of our teeth.
And he would have added,
"Was it worth it?"
But in the end, somewhat reluctantly,
he would have answered, "Yes!"
He valued European civilisation
all the more
because he knew it was fragile.
The 19th century revealed
a split in the European mind
as great as that which afflicted
Christendom in the 16th century
and even more destructive.
On the one hand was the new middle class
created by the Industrial Revolution.
It was hopeful and energetic
but without a scale of values.
Sandwiched between a corrupt aristocracy
and a brutalised poor,
it had produced a defensive morality -
conventional, complacent, hypocritical.
Never was a class better documented
by the admirable cartoonists of the day.
On the other hand
were the finer spirits like Delacroix,
who were still heirs
of the Romantic movement,
still haunted by disaster.
They felt themselves,
not without reason,
to be entirely cut off
from the prosperous majority.
But what could they put
in place of middle-class morality?
They themselves were still
in search of a soul.
The search went on throughout
the 19th century and it continues today
and leads to the same sense
of isolation and despair.
In the visual arts, its chief interpreter,
was the sculptor, Rodin.
He was the last great Romantic artist,
the direct heir of Gericault and Byron.
Indeed, his greatest disappointment was
that he didn't win the competition
to do the Byron memorial in Hyde Park.
Like them, his abundant
animal spirits didn't allay
but rather enhanced his view
of mankind's tragic destiny.
And like them, there is sometimes,
in his expressions of despair,
a trace of rhetorical exaggeration.
But what an artist he was!
Incredible that only 20 years ago,
he was still under the cloud of
critical disapproval. What is posterity?
He was an inventor of symbolic poses
that stay in the mind, and like all...
oversimplified statements
that spur men on to action,
they are sometimes rather too obvious.
But in the originals,
his figures are saved from banality
by a really stunning force
and freedom of modelling.
"Every form thrusting outwards
at its maximum point of tension.”
Those were Rodin's own words.
Look at the back of this figure of Eve.
You see how the vitality is conveyed
by the touch of Rodin's hands.
He was one of those sculptors
who communicate
through the movement of his fingers.
And for that reason, all his best
figures were modelled quite small,
enlarged afterwards by other artists.
This is the largest scale
on which Rodin ever worked.
If some of his gestures look
a little forced, one must also admit
that Rodin's power of representing figures
under the pressure of violent emotions
links him with a whole line
of modern art from Munch to Francis Bacon.
These are his Burghers Of Calais,
staggering out of the beleaguered city
and offering their lives
to the brutal English king,
in order that the people may be saved.
They are still with us -
Romantic man at the end
of his pilgrimage.
(# RICHARD STRAUSS: Festliches Praludium)
Rodin did one work which is dateless -
very ancient or very modern,
depending on how you look at it.
This is his monument
to the great French novelist, Balzac.
Of course, Balzac had been dead for many
years when Rodin received the commission
and the commemorative figure
had to be an ideal likeness -
a serious obstacle to Rodin,
as he always worked direct from nature.
All he had to go on was the knowledge
that Balzac was short and fat,
and worked in a dressing gown.
Yet he had also to make Balzac
look immense,
as the dominating imagination of his age
and yet transcending his age.
He set about the problem
in a peculiar way.
He made seven naked figures of Balzac
to satisfy his sense
of Balzac's physical reality.
And some of them are here
in his studio near Paris.
You can see that he didn't make
any concessions to the classical ideal!
After contemplating them
for several months,
he decided on one of them
and tried to cover it
with a cast of drapery
indicative of the famous dressing gown.
In this way,
he contrived to give the figure
both monumentality and movement.
The result is, to my mind, the greatest
piece of sculpture of the 19th century.
Perhaps, indeed,
the greatest since Michelangelo.
But this isn't the way in which
Rodin's contemporaries saw it
when it was exhibited
at the Salon of 1898.
They were horrified!
Rodin was a hoax, a swindler.
They even raised the cry of,
"La patrie en danger!”
Which shows how seriously
the French take art.
The crowds surging round it,
threatening it with their fists,
were unanimous on one point of criticism
that the attitude was impossible,
and that no body could exist
under such draperies.
Rodin, sitting nearby, knew that he had
only to strike the figure with a hammer
and that the draperies would come off,
leaving the body visible.
Hostile critics said that
it was like a snowman, a dolmen,
an owl, a heathen god.
All quite true, but we no longer
regard them as terms of abuse.
Balzac's body has the timelessness
of a prehistoric stone,
and his head is like a bird of prey.
And the real reason
why he made people so angry
is the feeling that
he could gobble them up
and doesn't care a damn
for their opinions.
Balzac, with his prodigious understanding
of human motives,
scorns conventional values, defies
fashionable opinions, as Beethoven did,
and should inspire us
to defy all those forces
that threaten to impair our humanity -
lies, tanks, tear gas,
ideologies, opinion polls, mechanisation
planners, computers, the whole lot.
(# RICHARD STRAUSS: Till Eulenspiegel)