30
The Great Reversal of Values – Romanticism
The French composer Hector Berlioz was a remarkable man. ‘Everything about him was unusual,’ says Harold Schonberg in his Lives of the Composers. ‘Almost single-handedly he broke up the European musical establishment. After him, music would never be the same.’1 Even as a student he stood out in a way that many people found shocking. ‘He believes in neither God nor Bach,’ said the composer-conductor-pianist Ferdinand Hiller, who described Berlioz in this way: ‘The high forehead, precipitously overhanging the deep-set eyes; the great, curving hawk nose; the thin, finely cut lips; the rather short chin; the enormous shock of light brown hair, against the fantastic wealth of which the barber could do nothing – whoever had seen this head would never forget it.’ Indeed, Berlioz was almost as well known for his head, and his behaviour, as for his music. Ernest Legouvé, the French dramatist, was at a performance of Weber’s opera Der Freischütz one evening when a commotion broke out. ‘One of my neighbours rises from his seat and bending towards the orchestra shouts in a voice of thunder: “You don’t want two flutes there, you brutes! You want two piccolos! Two piccolos, do you hear? Oh, the brutes!” Amidst the general tumult produced by this outburst, I turn around to see a young man trembling with passion, his hands clenched, his eyes flashing, and a head of hair – such a head of hair. It looked like an enormous umbrella of hair, projecting something like a moveable awning over a beak of a bird of prey.’ Contemporary cartoonists had a field day.2
Berlioz was no mere show-off or exhibitionist, though there were those who thought that he was. Mendelssohn was one who found him affected. After their first meeting, he wrote: ‘This purely external enthusiasm, this desperation in the presence of women, the assumption of genius in capital letters, is insupportable to me.’3 This does no justice to Berlioz’s grand ambition, in particular his vision for the orchestra, which Yehudi Menuhin attributes to a new view of society.4 By common consent, Berlioz was the greatest orchestral innovator in history. By the 1830s, orchestras rarely consisted of more than sixty players. As early as 1825 Berlioz had brought together an orchestra of 150 but his ‘dream orchestra’, he confessed, would consist of 467, plus a chorus of 360. There were to be 242 strings, thirty harps, thirty pianos and sixteen French horns.5 Berlioz was far ahead of his time, the first of music’s true romantics, an enthusiast, a revolutionary, ‘a lawless despot’, the first of the conscious avant-gardists, as Schonberg puts it.6 ‘Uninhibited, highly emotional, witty, mercurial, picturesque, he was very conscious of his romanticism. He loved the very idea of romanticism: the urge for self-expression and the bizarre as opposed to the classic ideals of order and restraint.’7
Romanticism was a massive revolution in ideas. Very different from the French, industrial and American revolutions, it was no less fundamental. In the history of Western political thought, says Isaiah Berlin, though he is using ‘political’ in its widest sense, ‘there have occurred three major turning-points, when by turning point we mean a radical change in the entire conceptual framework with which questions have been posed: new ideas, new words, new relationships in terms of which the old problems are not so much solved as made to look remote, obsolete and, at times, unintelligible, so that the agonising problems and doubts of the past seem queer ways of thought, or confusions that belong to a world which has gone.’8
The first of these turning-points, he says, occurred in the short interval at the end of the fourth century BC between the death of Aristotle (384–322) and the rise of Stoicism, when the philosophical schools of Athens ‘ceased to conceive of individuals as intelligible only in the context of social life, ceased to discuss the questions connected with public and political life that had preoccupied the Academy and the Lyceum, as if these questions were no longer central, or even significant, and suddenly spoke of men purely in terms of inner experience and individual salvation’.9 This great transformation in values – ‘from the public to the private, the outer to the inner, the political to the ethical, the city to the individual, from social order to unpolitical anarchism’ – was so profound that nothing was the same afterward.10 The transformation was discussed in Chapter 6.
A second turning-point was inaugurated by Machiavelli (1469–1527). This involved his recognition that there is a division ‘between the natural and the moral virtues, the assumption that political values not merely are different from, but may in principle be incompatible with, Christian ethics’.11 This produced a utilitarian view of religion, in the process discrediting any theological justification for any set of political arrangements. It too was new and startling. ‘Men had not previously been openly called upon to choose between irreconcilable sets of values, private and public, in a world without purpose, and told in advance that there could in principle exist no ultimate, objective criterion for this choice.’12 Machiavelli’s political ideas were outlined in Chapter 24.
The third great turning-point – which Berlin argues is the greatest yet – was conceived toward the end of the eighteenth century, with Germany in the vanguard.13 ‘At its simplest the idea of romanticism saw the destruction of the notion of truth and validity in ethics and politics, not merely objective or absolute truth, but subjective and relative truth also – truth and validity as such.’ This, says Berlin, has produced vast and incalculable effects. The most important change, he says, has come in the very assumptions underlying Western thought. In the past, it had always been taken for granted that all general questions were of the same logical type: they were questions of fact. It followed from this that the important questions in life could be eventually answered, once all the relevant information had been collected. In other words, it was taken as read that moral and political questions, such as ‘What is the best way of life for men?’, ‘What are rights?’, ‘What is freedom?’ were in principle answerable in exactly the same way as questions like ‘What is water composed of?’, ‘How many stars are there?’, ‘When did Julius Caesar die?’14 Wars have been fought over the answers to these questions, says Berlin, but ‘it was always assumed that the answers were discoverable’. This was because, despite the various religious differences that have existed over time, one fundamental idea united men, though it had three aspects.15 ‘The first is that there is such an entity as a human nature, natural or supernatural, which can be understood by the relevant experts; the second is that to have a specific nature is to pursue certain specific goals imposed on it or built into it by God or an impersonal nature of things, and that to pursue these goals is what makes men human; the third is that these goals, and the corresponding interests and values (which it is the business of theology or philosophy or science to discover and formulate), cannot possibly conflict with one another – indeed they must form a harmonious whole.’16
It was this basic idea that gave rise to the notion of natural law and the search for harmony. People had been aware of certain inconsistencies – Aristotle, for example, observed that fire burned in the same way in Athens and Persia whereas moral and social rules varied. Nonetheless, down to the eighteenth century people still assumed that all experience in the world was capable of harmonisation once enough data had been collected.17 The example Berlin gave to underline this point were the questions ‘Should I pursue justice?’ and ‘Should I practise mercy?’ As any thoughtful person could see, situations could arise when to answer ‘Yes’ to both these questions (which most people would go along with) would be incompatible. Under the traditional view, it was assumed that one true proposition could not logically contradict another. The rival contention of the romantics was to cast doubt on the very idea that values, the answers to questions of action and choice, could be discovered at all. The romantics argued that some of these questions had no answer, full stop, period. No less originally, they argued further that there was no guarantee that values could not, in principle, conflict with one another. To argue the contrary, they insisted, was ‘a form of self-deception’ and would lead to trouble. Finally, the romantics produced a new set of values, in fact a new way of looking at values, radically different from the old way.18
The first man to glimpse this new approach was Giambattista Vico (1668–1744), the Neapolitan student of jurisprudence we first met in Chapter 24 and who, with stunning simplicity, sabotaged Enlightenment ideas about the centrality of science. In 1725, it will be recalled, he published Scienza Nuova, in which he claimed that knowledge about human culture ‘is truer than knowledge about physical nature, since humans can know with certainty, and hence establish a science about, what they themselves have created.’ The internal life of mankind, he said, can be known in a way that simply does not – cannot – apply to the world man has not made, the world ‘out there’, the physical world, which is the object of study by traditional science. On this basis, Vico said, language, poetry and myth, all devised by man, are truths with a better claim to validity than the then central triumphs of mathematical philosophy. ‘There shines the eternal and never failing light of a truth beyond all question: that the world of civil society has certainly been made by men, and that its principles are therefore to be found within the modifications of our own human mind. Whoever reflects upon this cannot but marvel that the philosophers should have bent all their energies to the study of the world of nature, which, since God made it, He alone knows: and that they should have neglected the study of the world of nations, or the civil world, which, since men made it, men could come to know.’19
Very important, if very simple, things followed from this, said Vico, but man had been too busy looking outside himself to notice. For example, people share a nature and must therefore assemble their cultures in similar or analogous ways.20 This made it possible, even imperative, he said, for careful historians to reconstruct the thought processes of other ages and the phases they go through.21 He thought it was self-evident that in any civil society men should hold certain beliefs in common – this is what common sense was, he thought. And he found that there were three important beliefs that were shared everywhere. These were a belief in Providence throughout history and in all religions, in the immortal soul, and a recognition of the need to regulate the passions.22 Man, he said, has expressed his nature throughout history and so it must follow that the record of myth and poetry ‘is the record of human consciousness’.23 In saying all this, Vico transformed the human sciences, promoting them so that they were on a par with the natural sciences.
Vico’s innovations were not picked up elsewhere for several decades, and it was not until Kant that the new approach began to catch on. Kant’s great contribution was to grasp that it is the mind which shapes knowledge, that there is such a process as intuition, which is instinctive, and that the phenomenon in the world that we can be most certain of is the difference between ‘I’ and ‘not-I’.24 On this account, he said, reason ‘as a light that illuminates nature’s secrets’ is inadequate and misplaced as an explanation.25 Instead, Kant said, the process of birth is a better metaphor, for it implies that human reason creates knowledge. In order to find out what I should do in a given situation, I must listen to ‘an inner voice’. And it was this which was so subversive. According to the sciences, reason was essentially logical and applied across nature equally.26 But the inner voice does not conform to this neat scenario. Its commands are not necessarily factual statements at all and, moreover, are not necessarily true or false. ‘Commands may be right or wrong, corrupt or disinterested, intelligible or obscure, trivial or important.’ The purpose of the inner voice, often enough, is to set someone a goal or a value, and these have nothing to do with science, but are created by the individual. This was a basic shift in the very meaning of individuality and was totally new.27 In the first instance (and for the first time), it was realised that morality was a creative process but, in the second place, and no less important, it laid a new emphasis on creation, and this too elevated the artist alongside the scientist.28 It is the artist who creates, who expresses himself, who creates values. The artist does not discover, calculate, deduce, as the scientist (or philosopher) does. In creating, the artist invents his goal and then realises his own path towards that goal. ‘Where, asked Herzen, is the song before the composer has conceived it?’ Creation in this sense is the only fully autonomous activity of man and for that reason takes pre-eminence. ‘If the essence of man is self-mastery – the conscious choice of his own ends and form of life – this constitutes a radical break with the older model that dominated the notion of man’s place in the cosmos.’29 At a stroke, Berlin insists, the romantic vision destroyed the very notion of natural laws, if by that was meant the idea of harmony, with man finding his place in accordance with laws that applied across the universe. By the same token, art was transformed and enlarged. It was no longer mere imitation, or representation, but expression, a far more important, far more significant and ambitious activity. A man is most truly himself when he creates. ‘That, and not the capacity for reasoning, is the divine spark within me; that is the sense in which I am made in God’s image.’ This new ethic invited a new relationship between man and Nature. ‘She is the matter upon which I work my will, that which I mould.’30
We are still living with the consequences of this revolution. The rival ways of looking at the world – the cool, detached light of disinterested scientific reason, and the red-blooded, passionate creations of the artist – constitute the modern incoherence. Both appear equally true, equally valid, at times, but are fundamentally incompatible. As Isaiah Berlin has described it, we shift uneasily from foot to foot as we recognise this incompatibility.
The dichotomy was shown first and most clearly in Germany. The turn of the nineteenth century saw Napoleon’s great series of victories, over Austria, Prussia and several smaller German states, and this advertised the economic, social, and political backwardness of the German-speaking world. These failures created a desire for renewal in the German lands and, in response, many German-speakers turned inward, to intellectual and aesthetic ideas as a way to unite and inspire their people.31 ‘Romanticism is rooted in torment and unhappiness and, at the end of the eighteenth century, the German-speaking countries were the most tormented in Europe.’32
In the 1770s cultural and intellectual life centred on the many local courts scattered across greater Germany and it was in one of these that the tradition of Vico and Kant was built upon.33 Duke Karl August of Saxe-Weimar employed both Johann Wolfgang Goethe and Johann Gottfried Herder at his court. Goethe we shall come to shortly, but first Herder. He had studied theology and then under Kant at Königsberg, where he had been introduced to the works of Hume, Montesquieu and Rousseau.34 Under their influence he was moved to produce the four volumes of his Ideas for the Philosophy of the History of Mankind, between 1784 and 1791. In these books, Herder consciously expanded the ideas of Vico, arguing that the growth in human consciousness, as shown in literature and art, were part of a (generally rosy) historical process.35 ‘We live in a world we ourselves create.’36 For Herder, it was the ‘expressive power’ of human nature that had produced some very different cultures across the world, which were demonstrably shaped also by geography, climate, and history. It followed for him that human nature could only be understood by means of the comparative history of different peoples.37 Each Volk, Herder said, had its own history, producing a characteristic consciousness and a particular form of art and literature, not to mention its very language.38 ‘Has a nation anything more precious than the language of its fathers?’ Poetry and religion, he said, unite a Volk and these truths are therefore to be understood in a spiritual or symbolic way rather than as merely utilitarian. (Ancient poetry, he said, was a form of fossil.)39 After Herder, as Roger Smith says, the study of the humanities – notably history and literature – became central elements in the new way of understanding society.40
An important factor in the creative act was the will. This was first and most vividly introduced as an idea by Johann Gottlieb Fichte.41 Taking up where Kant left off, Fichte argued that ‘I become aware of my own self, not as an element in some larger pattern but in the clash with the not-self, the Anstoss, the violent impact of collision with dead matter, which I resist and must subjugate to my free creative design.’ On this account, Fichte portrayed the self as ‘activity, effort, self-direction. It wills, alters, carves up the world both in thought and in action, in accordance with its own concepts and categories.’ Kant had conceived this as an unconscious, intuitive process but for Fichte it was instead ‘a conscious creative activity . . . I do not accept anything because I must,’ Fichte insists, ‘I believe it because I will.’42 There are two worlds, he says, and man belongs to both. There is the material world, ‘out there’, governed by cause and effect, and there is the inner spiritual world, ‘Where I am wholly my own creation.’43 This insight (itself a construct) brought about a radical change in the understanding of philosophy. ‘My philosophy depends on the kind of man I am, not vice versa.’ In this way the will assumed a larger and larger role in human psychology. All people reason in essentially the same way, says Fichte. Where they differ is in their will; and this can and does produce conflict whereas reason is unable to, because logic is logic.44
The effects of this were momentous. For one thing, the understanding of work changed. Instead of being regarded as an ugly necessity, it was transformed into ‘the sacred task of man’, because only by work – an expression of the will – could man bring his distinctive, creative personality to bear upon ‘the dead stuff’ of nature.45 Man now moved ever further from the monastic ideal of the Middle Ages, in that his real essence was understood not as contemplation but as activity. In a sense, and among the German romantics in particular, the Lutheran concept of vocation was adapted to the romantic ideal but instead of God and worship being the object of activity, what mattered now was the individual’s search for his freedom, in particular ‘the creative end which fulfils his individual purpose’.46 What matters for the artist now is ‘motive, integrity, sincerity . . . purity of heart, spontaneity’. Intention, not wisdom or success, is what counts. The traditional model – the sage, the man who knows, who achieves ‘happiness or virtue or wisdom, by means of understanding’ – is replaced by the tragic hero ‘who seeks to realise himself at whatever cost, against whatever odds’.47 Worldly success is immaterial.
This reversal of values cannot be overstated. To begin with, man creates himself and therefore has no identifiable nature, which determines how he behaves, reacts and thinks. And unlike anything that has gone before, he is not answerable for the consequences. Second, and arguably more shocking, since man’s values are not discovered but created, there is no way they can ever be described or systematised, ‘for they are not facts, not entities of the world’. They are simply outside the realm of science, ethics or politics. Third, the uncomfortable truth is that the values of different civilisations, or nations, or individuals, might well collide. Harmony cannot be guaranteed, even within one individual whose own values may shift over time.48
Here too the importance of the change in thinking cannot be exaggerated. In the past, if a Christian killed a Muslim, say, in a crusade, he might regret that such a brave adversary had died for a faith that was false. But, and this is the central point, the very fact that the Muslim, say, held his false faith sincerely only made the situation worse. The more the enemy was attached to his false faith, the less he was admired.49 The romantics took a completely contrary view. For them, martyrs, tragic heroes, who fought gallantly for their beliefs against overwhelming odds, became the ideal.50 What they valued above all else was defeat and failure when it arose in defiance of compromise or worldly success.51 The artist or hero as outsider is born in this way.
It is an idea that leads to a form of literature, painting and (most vividly) music that we instantly recognise – the martyred hero, the tragic hero, the outcast genius, the suffering wild man, rebelling against a tame and philistine society.52 As Arnold Hauser rightly says, there is no aspect of modern art which does not owe something important to romanticism. ‘The whole exuberance, anarchy and violence of modern art . . . its unrestrained, unsparing exhibitionism, is derived from it. And this subjective, egocentric attitude has become so much a matter of course for us, so absolutely inevitable, that we find it impossible to reproduce even an abstract train of thought without talking about our own feelings.’53
The very beginning of the romantic movement, the decade of the 1770s, saw the phenomenon of Sturm und Drang, ‘storm and stress’, a young generation of German poets who rebelled against their strict education and social conventions to explore their emotions.54 The best-known of these ‘ill-considered’ works was Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774).55 Here we have the perfect romantic scenario, in which the individual is set against and is at odds with society. Werther is a young, enthusiastic, passionate individual isolated amid strict, desiccated, pious Lutherans. But Goethe was only the beginning. The despair and disillusion, the sentimentality and melancholy of Chateaubriand and Rousseau kick-start romanticism, alongside Goethe, exploring the ways in which conventional society is unable to meet the spiritual needs of its heroes. The vast, the sprawling panoramas of Victor Hugo and the ‘Bohemian groves’ of Théophile Gautier and Alexandre Dumas, in which political and personal ambitions are intertwined, confirm Hugo’s argument that ‘romanticism is the liberalism of literature’.56 The approach of Stendhal and Prosper Mérimée, viewing art as a ‘secret paradise forbidden to ordinary mortals’, highlights one of the aims of romanticism, which became know as l’art pour l’art, art for art’s sake. Balzac stressed the ‘unavoidable necessity’ of taking sides in the great questions of the day, the argument that one could not be an artist and sit on the sidelines.57
Whereas French romanticism was essentially a reaction to the French Revolution, the English variety was a reaction to the industrial revolution (Byron, Shelley, Godwin and Leigh Hunt were all radicals, though Sir Walter Scott and Wordsworth remained or became Tories). As Arnold Hauser frames it, ‘The romantics’ enthusiasm for nature is just as unthinkable without the isolation of the town from the countryside as is their pessimism without the bleakness and misery of the industrial cities.’58 It is the younger romantics – Shelley, Keats and Byron – who adopt an uncompromising humanism, aware of the dehumanising effects of factory life on life in general, and even the more conservative representatives, Wordsworth and Scott, share their ‘democratic’ sympathies in that their work is aimed at the popularisation – even the politicisation – of literature.59 Like their German and French counterparts, the English romantic poets believed in a transcendental spirit which was the source of poetic inspiration. They wallowed in language, explored consciousness, and saw in anyone who had the power to generate a poetic form of words an echo of Plato’s contention that here was some sort of divine intention. This is what Shelley meant by his famous epigram that ‘poets are the unacknowledged legislators of mankind’. (Wordsworth feared an ‘apocalypse of the imagination’.60) In a sense the poet became his own god.61 Shelley is perhaps the classic romanticist: a born rebel, an atheist, he saw the world as one great battle between the forces of good and evil. Even his atheism, it has been said, is more a revolt against God as a tyrant, than a denial of Him. In the same vein, Keats’ poetry is imbued with a pervading melancholy, a mourning for ‘the beauty that is not life’, for a beauty that is beyond his grasp. The mystery of art is in the process of replacing the mystery of faith.
Byron was probably the most famous romantic. (Describing ‘the romantic moi’, Howard Mumford Jones aptly notes that whereas Wordsworth’s egotism was internalised, Byron’s was ‘there for all Europe to see’.62) In his work, Byron’s portrayal of the hero as an eternally homeless wanderer, partly doomed by his own wild nature, is by no means original. But earlier heroes of this type invariably felt guilty or melancholic about the fact that they were outside society, whereas in Byron the outsider status becomes transformed into ‘a self-righteous mutiny’ against society, ‘the feeling of isolation develops into a resentful cult of solitude’, and his heroes are little more than exhibitionists, ‘who openly display their wounds’.63 These outlaws, who declare war on society, dominate literature in the nineteenth century. If the type had been invented by Rousseau and Chateaubriand, by Byron’s time it had become narcissistic. ‘[The hero] is unsparing towards himself and merciless towards others. He knows no pardon and asks no forgiveness, either from God or man. He regrets nothing and, in spite of his disastrous life, would not wish to have anything different . . . He is rough and wild but of high descent . . . a peculiar charm emanates from him which no woman can resist and to which all men react with friendship or enmity.’64
Byron’s significance went wider even than this. His idea of the ‘fallen angel’ was an archetype adopted by many others, including Lamartine and Heine. Among other things, the nineteenth century was characterised by guilt, at having fallen away from God (see Chapter 35), and the tragic hero of Byronic dimensions fitted the bill to perfection. But the other changes wrought by Byron were equally significant in their long-term effects. It was Byron, for example, who encouraged the reader to indulge in intimacy with the hero. In turn this increased the reader’s interest in the author. Until the romantic movement, the private life of a writer was largely unknown, and of little interest, to readers. Byron and his self-advertisements changed all that. After him, the relationship between a writer and his audience came to resemble, on the one hand, that of therapist and patient and, on the other, that of a film star and his fans.65
Associated with this was another major change, the notion of the ‘second self’, the belief that inside every romantic figure, in the dark and chaotic recesses of the soul, was a completely different person and that once access to this second self had been found, an alternative – and deeper – reality would be uncovered.66 This is in effect the discovery of the unconscious, interpreted here to mean an entity that is hidden away from the rational mind which is nonetheless the source of irrational solutions to problems, a secret, ecstatic something, which is above all mysterious, nocturnal, grotesque, ghostlike and macabre.67 (Goethe once described romanticism as ‘hospital-poetry’ and Novalis pictured life as ‘a disease of the mind’.) The second self, the unconscious, was seen as a way to spiritual enlargement and was expected to contribute to the great lyricism that was such a feature of romanticism.68 The discovery of the unconscious is the subject of Chapter 36.
Furthermore, the idea of the artist as a more sensitive soul than others, with perhaps a direct line to the divine, which went back to Plato, carried with it a natural conflict between the artist and the bourgeoisie.69 The early nineteenth century was the point at which the very concept of the avant-garde could arise, with the artist viewed as someone who was ahead of his time, ahead of the bourgeoisie certainly. Art was a ‘forbidden fruit’, available only to the initiated and most certainly denied to the ‘philistine’ bourgeoisie. And it was not far from there to the idea that youth was seen as more creative than – and as inevitably superior to – age. The young inevitably knew what the coming thing was, inevitably had the energy to embrace new ideas and fashions, being naturally less familiar with more established patterns. The very concept of genius played up the instinctive spark in new talent at the expense of painfully acquired learning over a lifetime of effort.
In painting romanticism produced Turner, whose pictures, said John Hoppner, were like looking into a coal fire (a metaphor adopted for the music of Berlioz), and Delacroix, who said that a picture should above all be a feast for the eyes. But it was in music that romanticism surpassed itself. The great generation of romantic composers were all born within ten years of one another – Berlioz, Schumann, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Verdi and Wagner. Before all these, however, there was Beethoven. All music leads up to Beethoven, says Mumford Jones, and all music leads away from him.70 Beethoven, Schubert and Weber comprised a smaller grouping, of what we might call pre-romantic composers, who between them changed the face of musical thought, and musical performance.
The great difference between Beethoven (1770–1827) and Mozart, who was only fourteen years older, was that Beethoven thought of himself as an artist. There is no mention of that word in Mozart’s letters – he considered himself a skilled craftsman who, as Haydn and Bach had done before him, supplied a commodity. But Beethoven saw himself as part of a special breed, a creator, and that put him on a par with royalty and other elevated souls. ‘What is in my heart,’ he said, ‘must come out.’71 Goethe was just one who responded to the force of his personality, writing, ‘Never have I met an artist of such spiritual concentration and intensity, such vitality and great-heartedness. I can well understand how hard he must find it to adapt to the world and its ways.’72 Even the crossings-out in his autograph music have a violence that Mozart, for example, lacked.73 Like Wagner after him, Beethoven felt that the world owed him a living, because he was a genius. At one stage, two Viennese princes settled some money on Beethoven, to keep him in the city. After one of them was killed in an accident, Beethoven took the man’s estate to court, to enforce payment. He felt it was his entitlement.74
In a lifetime of creating much beautiful music, two compositions stand out, two works which changed the course of music for all time. These were the Eroica symphony, which had its premiere in 1805, and the Ninth symphony, first performed in 1824.75 Harold Schonberg wonders what went through the mind of the audience on the momentous occasion when the Eroica was first performed. ‘It was faced with a monster of a symphony, a symphony longer than any previously written and much more heavily scored; a symphony with complex harmonies, a symphony of titanic force; a symphony of fierce dissonances; a symphony with a funeral march that is paralysing in its intensity.’76 This was a new musical language and for many the Eroica and its pathos were never surpassed. George Marek says it must have been an experience similar to hearing the news of the splitting of the atom.77
Beethoven was a romantic enough figure anyway but the hearing difficulties that began to afflict him around the time that Eroica was first performed and would in time develop into complete deafness, also drove him inwards. Fidelio, his grand opera (though perhaps with too many characters), the great violin and piano concertos, the famous piano sonatas, such as the Waldstein and the Appassionata, all had their mysterious, mystic, monumental elements. But the Ninth symphony was pivotal, and was always held in the highest esteem by the romantics who came after. By all accounts, its premiere was disastrous, after only two rehearsals and when many of the singers could not reach the high notes. (The lead singers begged Beethoven to change them, but he refused – no one had a more magnificent will than he.78) However, what the Eroica and Ninth symphonies have in common, what made their sounds so new and so different from the music of, say, Mozart, was that Beethoven was concerned above all with inner states of being, with the urge for self-expression, the dramatic intensity of the soul. ‘Beethoven’s music is not polite. What he presented, as no composer before or since, was a feeling of drama, of conflict and resolution . . . The music [of the Ninth] is not pretty or even attractive. It merely is sublime . . . this is music turned inward, music of the spirit, music of extreme subjectivity . . .’79 It was the Ninth symphony, its gigantic struggle ‘of protest and release’, that most influenced Berlioz and Wagner, that remained the (largely unattainable) ideal for Brahms, Bruckner and Mahler.80 Debussy confessed that the great score had become, for composers, ‘a universal nightmare’. What he meant was that few other composers could match Beethoven, and perhaps only one, Wagner, could surpass him.
Franz Schubert has been described as ‘the classical romantic’.81 He had a short life (1797–1828), all of which he spent in Beethoven’s shadow. But he too felt that he could only be an artist, telling a friend that ‘I have come into the world for no purpose but to compose.’ He began life as a boy singer in a choir and then as a schoolteacher after his voice broke. But he hated that and turned to composing. Like Beethoven, he was small, five feet one and a half inches, as compared with five feet four. He was nicknamed Schwammerl (‘Tubby’) and as Beethoven’s hearing was bad, so Schubert’s eyesight was poor. More important, he was the perfect example of the romantic with two selves. While, on the one hand, he was very well read and made his name by setting many poems – of Goethe, Schiller and Heine – to music, he drank more than he should, contracted venereal disease and in general let his craving for pleasure drag him down. This showed in his music, especially his ‘Song of Sorrow’, the symphony in B minor.82 He was also the master of music for the unaccompanied voice.83
Schubert died in the year that followed Beethoven’s death. By that time, much of the modern world was coming into existence. New railways were connecting people rapidly. Thanks to the industrial revolution, vast fortunes were being made by the bourgeoisie, alongside desperate poverty. Aspects of this rubbed off directly on the world of music. It was no longer simply a court experience but was now enjoyed by the newly-emerging bourgeoisie. They had discovered dance music, with the waltz, in particular, becoming a craze at the time of the Congress of Vienna, in 1814–1815. In the 1820s, at the time of Carnival, Vienna offered as many as 1,600 balls in a single night.84 But the city also had four theatres which offered opera at one time or another, and many smaller halls, at the university and elsewhere. Middle-class music-making had arrived.
Besides the new theatres, for concerts and opera, for example, the new technologies had a profound impact on instruments themselves. Beethoven had increased the size of the orchestra and, as was mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, Berlioz would increase it still more. At the same time, the new metal technology greatly improved the otherwise unreliable wind instruments of the eighteenth century. Keys and valves were devised which enabled horns and bassoons, for example, to play more consistently in tune.85 The new metal, articulated keys also enabled players to reach holes their fingers couldn’t otherwise span. The tuba evolved and Adolph Sax invented the saxophone.86 At the same time, as orchestras grew in size, there emerged the need for someone to take control. Until then, most ensembles could be controlled either by the first violinist, or whoever was playing the clavier. But after Beethoven, around 1820, the conductor as we know him today emerged. The composers Ludwig Spohr and Carl Maria von Weber were among those who conducted their own music with a baton, together with François-Antoine Habeneck, the founder of the Paris Conservatory Orchestra (in 1828), who conducted with his bow.
It was around this time, too, that the modern piano emerged. Two elements were involved here. One was the evolution of the steel frame, steel being developed as a result of the industrial revolution, which enabled pianos to become much more massive and sturdy than they had been in, say, Mozart’s day. The other factor was the genius (and marketing) of Niccolò Paganini (1782–1840), who debuted at nineteen and may just have been the greatest violinist who ever existed.87 A superb technician and a flamboyant showman, who liked to deliberately break a string during a performance, and complete the evening using only three strings, he was the first of the supervirtuosi.88 But he did expand the technique of the violin, introducing new bowings, fingerings and harmonics, in the process stimulating pianists to try to emulate him on their new, more versatile instruments.89
The man who most emulated Paganini, on the piano at any rate, was Franz Liszt, the first pianist in history to give a concert on his own. It was partly thanks to these virtuosi that so many concert halls were built all over Europe (and, in a small way, in north America), to cope with the demand from the newly enriched bourgeoisie, who were eager to hear these performers. In turn a raft of composer-instrumentalists emerged to take advantage of this development: Weber, Mendelssohn, Chopin and Liszt were the four greatest pianists of their time and Berlioz, Mendelssohn, Weber and Wagner were the four greatest conductors.90
‘Within one decade, roughly 1830–1840,’ says Harold Schonberg, ‘the entire harmonic vocabulary of music changed. It seemed to come from nowhere, but all of a sudden composers were using seventh, ninth, and even eleventh chords, altered chords and a chromatic as opposed to classical diatonic harmony . . . the romantics revelled in unusual tone combinations, sophisticated chords, and dissonances that were excruciating to the more conventional minds of the day.’91 Romantic music thus had its own sound – rich and sensuous, its own mood, mystical – but it was also new in that it had a ‘programme’, it told a story, something that had been unthinkable hitherto.92 This development underlined the new, close alliance between music and literature where its aim, often enough, was to describe – as Beethoven had pioneered – inner states of feeling, or states of mind.
Carl Maria von Weber was, like Schubert, another very romantic figure, if not quite in the Beethoven or Berlioz sense. He had a diseased hip and walked with a limp but, on top of that, he was a consumptive, perhaps the illness of the romantic age, a slow, tragic, wasting-away (the heroines of La Traviata and La Bohème are consumptives). Weber was also a virtuoso of the guitar and an excellent singer, until he damaged his voice by accidentally drinking a glass of nitric acid. But he also had enormous hands, which meant that he could play certain passages of his music that cannot be played by ordinary mortals.93 He was summoned to Dresden to take control of the opera house there, where he made the conductor (himself) the single most dominant force, setting a fashion. But he also worked hard to counter what was then a craze for Italian opera, based mainly on the works of Rossini. It was thanks to Weber that a German operatic tradition emerged that was to culminate in Wagner. Weber’s own opera Der Freischütz, first performed in 1820, opened up a new world. It dealt with the supernatural, with the mystical power of evil, a form of plotting that would remain popular throughout the nineteenth century. He himself said that the most important line in the opera is spoken by the hero, Max: ‘Doch mich umgarnen finstre Mächte!’ (‘But the dark powers enmesh me’).94
Berlioz was the first composer in history to express himself in music in a frankly autobiographical way, though he also ‘took his fire’ from Shakespeare, Byron and Goethe.95 He has been described as ‘the first truly wild man of music’, eclipsing even Beethoven on this score. A revolutionary, a mercurial figure who shared with Beethoven a self-consciousness about his genius that would become the hallmark of the romantic movement, he wrote a vivid autobiography but his music was autobiographical too. His first great work – and perhaps the greatest of his life, his ‘opium nightmare’, the Symphonie fantastique – recorded his passionate love affair with the Irish actress Harriet Smithson.96 The affair was hardly romantic to begin with, at least in the conventional sense. He saw her on stage and began to bombard her with letters before they had even met. These letters were so passionate and so intimate that she became bewildered, even frightened. (He would go to the theatre to watch her, only to scream in rage and leave when she was embraced by her stage lover.) So distressed was he by her behaviour that when he heard rumours that she was having an affair, he put her into the last act of his symphony as a whore. When he learned that the rumours were false, he changed the music. The afternoon when she finally consented to be seen in public at one of his performances set the seal, says David Cairns, ‘on one of the high dates of the romantic calendar’.97 Until Berlioz, music had never been made to tell a story to quite this extent and such an idea changed composers and audiences. Among those who was most impressed was Wagner, who thought there were only three composers worth paying attention to – Liszt, Berlioz and himself. This does little justice to Schumann and Chopin.
Robert Schumann was in some ways the most complete romantic. Surrounded by insanity and suicide in his family, he was worried all his life that he too would succumb in one way or the other. The son of a bookseller and publisher, he grew up surrounded by the works of the great romantic writers – Goethe, Shakespeare, Byron and Novalis – all of whom exerted a great influence on him. (He burst into tears when he read Byron’s Manfred, which he later set to music.98) Schumann tried to write poetry himself and emulated Byron in other ways too, embarking on numerous love affairs. In the early 1850s he suffered a week of hallucinations, when he thought that the angels were dictating music to him, while he was threatened by wild animals. He threw himself off a bridge but failed to kill himself and, at his own request, was placed in an asylum. His best-known, and perhaps best-loved, work is Carnaval, in which he paints pictures of his friends, his wife Clara, Chopin, Paganini and Mendelssohn. (Carnaval was a great influence on Brahms.99)
Though he was a friend of many of the great romantics, including Delacroix (who was the recipient of many letters regarding the love affair with George Sand), Chopin affected to despise their aims. He was polite – rather than enthusiastic – about Delacroix’s painting, he had no interest in reading the great romantic authors, but he did share with Beethoven, Berlioz and Liszt the awareness that he was a genius. Polish by birth, he moved to Paris in the 1830s and 1840s, when that city was the capital of the romantic movement, and at the musical evenings held at the salon of the musical publisher Pleyel he would play four-handed piano with Liszt, with Mendelssohn turning the pages.100 Chopin invented a new kind of piano playing, the one that we are familiar with today. He had certain reflexes in his fingers which set him apart from other players, at that time at least, and this enabled him to develop piano music that was both experimental and yet refined. ‘Cannon buried in flowers’ is how Schumann described it. (The sentiment was not returned.)101 Chopin introduced new ideas about pedalling, fingering, and rhythm, which were to prove extremely influential. (He preferred the English Broadwood pianos, less advanced than some available.)102 His pieces had the delicacy and yet the vivid colourings of impressionist paintings, and just as everyone knows a Renoir from a Degas, so everyone knows Chopin when they hear it. He may not have thought of himself as a romantic but his polonaises and nocturnes are romanticism implicit (after him and his polonaises, music was invaded by nationalism).103 The piano cannot be fully understood without Chopin.
Or without Liszt. Like Chopin he was a brilliant technician (he gave his first solo at ten), and like Beethoven (whose Broadwood he acquired) and Berlioz, he had charisma.104 Good-looking, which was part of that charisma, Liszt invented bravura piano playing. Before him, pianists had played from the wrist, holding their hands close together and near the keyboard. He, however, was the first of the pianists whose performance would begin with his arrival on stage. He would sit down, throw off his gloves, dropping them anywhere, hold his hands high, and then attack the keyboard (women would fight to obtain one of Liszt’s gloves).105 He was, then, a showman, and for many people that has made him a charlatan.106 But he was undoubtedly the most romantic of piano players, arguably the greatest there has ever been, who absorbed the influence of Berlioz, Paganini and Chopin. He invented the solo recital and pianists from all over Europe flocked to study with him. He influenced Wagner enormously, introducing new musical forms, in particular the symphonic poem – one-movement programme music with great symbolism inspired by a poem or a play.107 In his bold chromaticism, he introduced dissonances that were copied by everyone from Chopin to Wagner. Liszt grew into the grand old man of music, outliving most of his contemporaries by several decades. One of ‘the snobs of history’, his flowing white hair and ‘collection of warts’ gave his head as distinctive an appearance in old age as it had had in his youth.108
Felix Mendelssohn was possibly the most widely accomplished musician after Mozart. A fine pianist, he was also the greatest conductor of his day and the greatest organist. He was an excellent violinist and was well read in poetry and philosophy. (He was the romantic classicist, says Alfred Einstein.109) He came from a wealthy Jewish banking family, and was the grandson of the philosopher Moses Mendelssohn. A fervent German patriot, he believed that his compatriots were supreme in all the arts. Indeed, if there is such a thing, Mendelssohn was over-cultured. As a boy he was made to get up at 5.00 am to work on his music, his history, his Greek and Latin, his science and his comparative literature. When he had been born his mother had looked at his hands and remarked ‘Bach fugue fingers!’110 Like so many of the other romantic musicians, he was a child prodigy, though he was doubly fortunate in that his parents could afford to hire their own orchestra and he could have them play his own compositions, where he would conduct. He went to Paris and met Liszt, Chopin and Berlioz. For his first work he took as his inspiration Shakespeare: this was A Midsummer Night’s Dream, a fairyland that was perfect romantic material (though Mendelssohn never had much in the way of internal demons).111 After Paris, he went to Leipzig as musical director and in a short while made it the musical capital of Germany. One of the first conductors to use the baton, he employed it to turn the Leipzig orchestra into the foremost instrument of music of the day – precise, sparing, with a predilection for speed. He increased the size of the orchestra and revised the repertoire. In fact, Mendelssohn was probably the first conductor to adopt the dictatorial manner that seems so popular today, as well as being the main organiser of the basic repertoire that we now hear, with Mozart and Beethoven as the backbone, Haydn, Bach (whose St Matthew Passion he rescued from a hundred years’ slumber) and Handel not far behind, and with Rossini, Liszt, Chopin, Schubert and Schumann also included.112 It was Mendelssohn who conceived the shape of most concerts as we hear them: an overture, a large-scale work, such as a symphony, followed by a concerto. (Until Mendelssohn, most symphonies were considered too long to hear at one go: interspersed between movements there would be shorter, less demanding pieces.)113
The seal was set on the great romantic onslaught in music by developments in what is possibly the most passionate of all art forms – opera. The nineteenth century produced the two great colossi of opera, one Italian, the other German.
Giuseppe Verdi (1813–1901) was unlike most of his musical contemporaries in that he was no child prodigy. His piano playing was weak and he failed to get into the Milan conservatory at his first attempt. His first opera was a modest success, his second a failure but his third, Nabucco, made him famous throughout Italy. During rehearsals for this opera no work was done off-stage because the painters and machinists were so excited and so moved by the music they heard being put together that they left their tasks to crowd round the orchestra pit. Besides the music, and the fact that Verdi used a larger than conventional orchestra, Nabucco became popular in Italy because it was seen as symbolic of the Italian resistance to Austrian domination and occupation of the country. ‘The “Va, pensiero” chorus, which concerns the longing of the Jewish exiles for home, was identified by all Italian listeners with their own longing for freedom.’114 On the first night the audience stood up and cheered.115 Verdi was a fervent nationalist himself, who lived to see the unification of Italy, and later became a (reluctant) deputy in the new parliament. The letters V.E.R.D.I., scratched on a wall in any Italian town under Austrian occupation, were understood to mean: ‘Vittorio Emmanuele, Re d’Italia’.116
In the operas that followed Nabucco – I Lombardi and Ernani, and in particular Macbeth – Verdi produced a type of opera music that hadn’t been heard before, but took as its cue what was happening among the romantic composers. Instead of pretty, melodious, controlled music, Verdi was looking for the sounds produced by the singers’ voices to reflect their inner states, their turmoil, their love, their hate, their psychological stress and distress. Verdi himself explained this explicitly in a letter he wrote to the director of the Paris Opera just as Macbeth was about to go into rehearsal. Among other things, he objected to the choice of Eugenia Tadolini, one of the great singers of the day. ‘Tadolini has too great qualities for this role [as Lady Macbeth]. Perhaps you think that is a contradiction! Tadolini’s appearance is good and beautiful, and I would like Lady Macbeth twisted and ugly. Tadolini sings to perfection, and I don’t wish Lady Macbeth to sing at all. Tadolini has a marvellous, brilliant, clear, powerful voice, and for Lady Macbeth I should like a raw, choked, hollow voice. Tadolini’s voice has something angelic. Lady Macbeth’s voice should have something devilish . . .’117 Verdi was moving toward musical drama, melodrama, in which raw emotion is presented on stage ‘in great primary colours: love, hate, revenge, lust for power’.118 It was led by melody rather than the harmony of the orchestra and so has a humanism that is lacking in Wagner.119 Even so, it was quite different from anything that had gone before, and meant that while his operas were hugely popular with audiences (the doors for the first performance had to be opened four hours in advance, the crush was so great), they received an unprecedented critical onslaught. For one performance of Rigoletto, in New York in 1855, two men tried to take the production to court, to have it banned on grounds that it was too obscene for women to see it.120
At the end of his long life, when he was an institution in Italy, Verdi returned to Shakespeare, with Otello and Falstaff. As in the original Shakespeare story, Falstaff is both a comedy and a tragedy, perhaps the hardest of genres to pull off (it was in Verdi’s contract that he could withdraw the opera after the dress rehearsal if it wasn’t right). We do and we do not like Falstaff. It is hard to feel that a fool can be a tragic character, but of course he is to himself. Verdi’s music – its very grandeur – adds to Shakespeare’s stories, to enable us to see that tragedy can indeed take place, even when there is no tragic hero in an obvious way. In this sense, Verdi’s Falstaff, premiered at La Scala in Milan in February 1893, brings romanticism to a close.121
By then Wagner and his brand of romanticism were already dead. Whether or not Wagner is a bigger musician than Verdi, he was certainly a bigger and more complex man, Falstaffian in dimensions and perhaps as hard to warm to. Character-wise, Wagner was in the Beethoven/Berlioz mould, even eclipsing them, and always very self-conscious about his genius. Drama was in his very bones.122 ‘I am not made like other people. I must have brilliance and beauty and light. The world owes me what I need. I can’t live on a miserable organist’s pittance like your master, Bach.’123 Like Verdi he was a slow starter and it was not until he heard Beethoven’s Ninth symphony, and Fidelio, when he was fifteen, that he decided to become a musician. He could never do more than tinker with the piano, and admitted he was not the greatest of score readers. His early works, says Harold Schonberg, ‘show no talent’.124 As with Berlioz, Wagner’s intensity filled some of his early lovers with fear, and as with Schubert he was constantly in debt, at least in the early years of his career. In Leipzig, where he received some tuition (but was dismissed), he was known as a heavy drinker, a gambler and a compulsive and dogmatic talker.
But after a series of adventures, when his creditors pursued him from pillar to post, he eventually produced the five-act Rienzi and this made him famous, as Nabucco had made Verdi famous.125 It was staged at Dresden, which immediately secured the rights to Der fliegende Holländer, after which Wagner was appointed Kapellmeister there. Tannhäuser and Lohengrin followed, which were well received, the latter especially, with its novel blend of woodwind and strings, though he himself had to flee Dresden after he sided with the revolutionaries during the uprising of 1848.126 He decamped to Weimar, staying with Liszt and then moved on to Zurich, where for six years he produced next to nothing. He was trying to work out his artistic theories, familiarised himself with Schopenhauer, and this eventually generated a number of written works, Art and Revolution (1849), The Art Work of the Future (1850), Judaism and Music (1850) and Opera and Drama (1851), but also a big libretto based on the medieval Teutonic legend, Nibelungenlied. This was Wagner’s concept of what he called the Gesamtkunstwerk, the unified art work, in which he claimed that all great art – words, music, settings and costumes, fused together – must be based on myth, as the first recorded utterances of the gods, as a modern (and romantic) gloss on holy scripture. For Wagner, it was necessary to go to pre-Christian traditions because Christianity had perverted what had gone before. One possibility, as the Oriental renaissance had shown, was the Aryan myths of India but Wagner, following the German Indics, preferred the Northern tradition, which played counterpoint with the classical Mediterranean tradition. This was how he arrived at the Teutonic Nibelungenlied.127 In addition to the new myth, Wagner developed his ideas of a new form of speech, or rather he recreated on old form, Stabreim, which recalls the poetry found in the sagas, in which the vowels at the end of one line are repeated in the first syllables or words of the next line. On top of this came his new ideas for the orchestra (even bigger for Wagner than for Beethoven and Berlioz). Here he developed his concept of music unbroken throughout a composition. The orchestra thus became as much a part of the drama as the singers. (Wagner was proud of never having written ‘recitative’ over any passage, and he himself called this ‘the greatest artistic achievement of our age’.128)
The effect of all this, says one critic, is that while Europe was whistling Verdi, it was talking about Wagner. Many people hated the new sounds (many still do), and another (British) critic dismissed Wagner as ‘simply noise’. But others thought the composer was ‘an elemental force’ and when Tristan und Isolde was produced this view was confirmed. ‘Never in the history of music had there been an operatic score of comparable breadth, intensity, harmonic richness, massive orchestration, sensuousness, power, imagination and colour. The opening chords of Tristan were to the last half of the nineteenth century what the Eroica and Ninth Symphonies had been to the first half – a breakaway, a new concept.’ Wagner later said he had been in some sort of trance when he produced the opera. ‘Here, in perfect trustfulness, I plunged into the inner depths of soul-events and from the innermost centre of the world I fearlessly built up to its outer form.’ Tristan is a relentless work, ‘gradually peeling away layers of the subconscious to the abyss within’.129
Wagner’s unique position was revealed most clearly in the last phase of his life when he was saved, appropriately enough, by the mad King Ludwig II of Bavaria. Ludwig, a homosexual, was certainly in love with Wagner’s music, and may just have been in love with Wagner himself. In any event, he told the composer that he could do more or less what he wanted in Bavaria and Wagner didn’t need to be asked twice. ‘I am the most German of beings. I am the German spirit. Consider the incomparable magic of my works.’130 Although he was forced into exile for a while, on account of his extravagance and a scandalous foray into politics, his involvement with Ludwig did lead eventually to the culmination of his career and another culmination of romanticism. This was his idea of a festival theatre dedicated to his works alone – Bayreuth, and to the Ring. The first Bayreuth Festival was held in 1876, and it was here that Der Ring des Nibelungen – the fruit of twenty-five years’ work – was first performed.131 For the first festival, some four thousand disciples descended on Bayreuth, along with the emperor of Germany, the emperor and empress of Brazil, seven other royals, and some sixty newspaper correspondents from all over the world, including two from New York who were allowed to use the new transatlantic cable to get their stories published almost immediately.132
Although he had his critics, and would always have his critics, the magisterial sweep of the Ring was another turning-point in musical ideas. An allegory, a ‘cosmic drama of might redeemed by love’, which explained why traditional values were the only thing which could rescue the modern world from its inevitable doom, it also gave no comfort to Christianity.133 Though set in myth, it was curiously modern, and this was its appeal. (Nike Wagner also says the story has many parallels with the Wagner family itself.) ‘The listener is swept into something primal, timeless, and is pushed by elemental forces. The Ring is a conception that deals not with women but Woman; not with men, but with Man; not with people, but with the Folk; not with mind, but with the subconscious; not with religion, but with basic ritual; not with nature, but Nature.’134 Wagner lived from then on like a cross between royalty and deity, fêted, lauded, dressed in the finest silks, doused in the finest incense, and took the opportunity to develop his writing as much as his music. These views – on the Jews, on craniology, on the claim that the Aryans had descended from the gods – have weathered less well, much less well, than his music. Some of them were frankly ludicrous. But there is no question that Wagner, by his very self-confidence, his Nietzschean will, by his creation of Bayreuth as an asylum from the everyday world, did help to establish a climate of opinion, particularly in Germany at the end of the nineteenth century (see Chapter 36).135 In music he was a strong influence on Richard Strauss, on Bruckner and Mahler, on Dvořák, and even on Schoenberg and Berg. Whistler, Degas and Cézanne were all Wagnerians, while Odilon Redon and Henri Fantin-Latour painted images inspired by his operas. Mallarmé and Baudelaire declared themselves won over. Much later, Adolf Hitler was to say, ‘Whoever wants to understand National Socialistic Germany must know Wagner.’136
An unfortunate comment. The real aim of romanticism, the underlying aim, had been set forth by Keats, who wrote poetry, he said, to ease ‘the burden of the mystery’. Romanticism was always, in part, a reaction to the decline in religious conviction, so evident in the eighteenth century, and then throughout the nineteenth. Whereas the scientists tried – or hoped – to explain the mystery, the romantics relished it, made the most of it, used it in ways that many scientists could not, or would not, understand. This is why poetry and music were the chief romantic responses – they were better at easing the burden.
This dichotomy, what Isaiah Berlin calls this incompatibility or incoherence, between the scientific world-view and the poetic, could not continue. The world of the romantics, the inner world of shadows and mystery, of passion and interiority, might produce a redeeming beauty, might even produce wisdom, but in a practical Victorian, nineteenth-century world of new technologies, new scientific breakthroughs, when the external world was expanding as never before, being conquered and controlled as never before, a new accommodation was needed, or at least was bound to be attempted. This accommodation led to two developments, which will close this book. In literature and the arts, in music, poetry and painting, it led to the movement we know as ‘Modernism’. And on the other side of the divide it led to what is still perhaps the most extraordinary phenomenon of modern times. This was the attempt to make a science of the unconscious.