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"Art is the tree of life. Science is the tree of death" - William Blake.
Fan of William Blake though I am, I'd not agree with him there. I'd say he's created a false binary and that science AND art can both exist in the world, side by side with each other, and in fact do both exist in the world - and that the world, our human world at least, is all the better for that.
People contain multitudes and though some ideas are best expressed through the rational measures of science, others are best processed via artistic mediums like painting, poetry, literature, and, most strongly for me, music. I've wrestled with thoughts about the passion/ration debate for years, not least because an ex-girlfriend accused me of prioritising rational thought and putting facts before feelings - if you know me that's patently untrue, but have never really had the eloquence or insight to articulate those feelings.
Luckily, Simon Schama was on hand to do so for me in his recent three part series The Romantics And Us With Simon Schama (BBC2/iPlayer) and to do so in a way that was fascinating, entertaining, nuanced, moving, and educational. What I'd feared may have been a drab history lesson was anything but. Thoughts and ideas that emerged during the Romantic era have more relevance now than ever and Schama never missed a chance to show us just how so.
With poetry readings by David Attenborough, Christopher Eccleston, the hip-hop MC Testament, and Fairground Attraction's Eddi Reader and a slightly unnecessary interview with Pete Doherty, Schama sketched out a story that took us from the Parisian galleries of Eugene Delacroix to the Nazi invasion of Poland, from the battle of Peterloo to the couch of Sigmund Freud, and from the wide open spaces and dramatic vistas of the Wye Valley to the interior of William Blake's fantastical mind.
Eugene Delacroix - Liberty Leading The People (1830)
The journey began with Schama showing us how the Romantics were able to convert the traditions of pilgrimage and veneration into those of processions and marches for freedom, for justice, or even for insurrection. Delacroix's 1830 painting Liberty Leading The People, which celebrates the end of the Bourbon monarchy and the toppling of King Charles X of France, became (and remains) an iconic image of people power rising against unjust rulers.
It has been repurposed countless times in the nearly two centuries since Delacroix painted it - during both the Paris '68 uprising against Charles de Gaulle's conservatism and, more recently, again as part of the gilets jaunes protests against Emmanuel Macron and for, ostensibly, economic justice. Delacroix and the other Romantics believed painting and poetry had the power to electrify masses and shake regimes to their very core. Delacroix was an early example of an artist as activist, as rebel, and as prophet.
As the French counterculture reimagined Delacroix for their own ends, London's own late sixties/early seventies alternative community did the same for William Blake. Blake was loved by hippies and beats and, in Los Angeles, The Doors named their band after a Blake quote:- "If the doors of perception were cleansed everything would appear to man as it is, infinite".
Via its, The Doors of Perception, use as a title for a 1954 Aldous Huxley book where the author describes a psychedelic experience under the influence of mescaline. Excerpts from Blake's poetry would appear in graffiti form on West London walls. The Westway boasted the legend "the road to excess lead to the palace of wisdom" while just down the road in Notting Hill passers by could learn that "the tigers of wrath are wiser than the horses of instruction".
Graffiti, Notting Hill (1971)
William Blake - The Ancient Of Days (1794)
Blake lived almost all of his life in London and here he observed extremes of wealth and deprivation but he saw, also, visions. Blake refused to be tethered to an absolute notion of reality and instead, reaching for the heavens, he saw angels emerging from the soot and filth of industrial London. He celebrated the French Revolution as a chance for society to be reborn but he saw the Enlightenment, and its embrace of pure reason, as the enemy of true art.
He believed reason prevented men from reaching their true potential, from limiting them in their ascent, and his villains were the mathematician and astronomer Isaac Newton and the philosopher and physician John Locke. More so still the world they inhabited. The world of 'measurement'.
To counter the likes of Newton and Locke, Blake invented his own revolutionary cosmology in which an eternal, Manichean, struggle is played out between leading characters Urizen (representing reason and repression which in Blake's fevered mind are the same thing) and Orc, the destroyer of these tyrannies.
William Blake - Urizen (c.1818)
The Child Orc With Enitharmon And Los (c.1796)
William Blake - London (1826)
In his 1794 poem (1826 artwork reproduction above), London, Blake called for an early form of social justice:- "In every cry of every man, in every infant's cry of fear, in every voice, in every ban, the mind-forg’d manacles I hear" but the revolution he so desperately hoped would arrive from France never came and London remained, and still does, a grimly unequal city where homeless people sleep in the back doorways of luxury flats that are often empty inside.
Other Romantics, such as William Wordsworth, Thomas Paine, and Mary Wollstonecraft were not content, like Blake, to wait for revolution to reach Britain and instead travelled to Paris to get amongst it. Wollstonecraft specifically hoped that under 'liberte, egalite, fraternite' women's rights in France would finally be considered equal to those of men.
Instead of great emancipation, however, she witnessed the very worst excesses of Jacobin rule as revolution hardened into dictatorship and a reign of terror took hold of the French capital that resulted in over ten thousand deaths by guillotine. The language of liberty, not for the last time, had been debased and put to use as propaganda for an ever more powerful state.
People were made non-citizens, dehumanised, and called enemies of the people, Jacobins banned women from public life and told them to stay at home and look after their children, and foreigners, etrangers, became widely distrusted and were accused of spreading fake news.
French First Republic propaganda poster (1793)
Daily Mail (2016)
On Wollstonecraft's return to Britain in 1795 she found the mood had changed. William Pitt the Younger's Tory government instigated a 'war' against revolutionary sympathisers that lasted almost continuously for the next forty years through the (Tory) administrations of Henry Addington, William Cavendish-Bentinck, Spencer Perceval, Robert Jenkinson, George Canning, Frederick Robinson, and, finally, Arthur Wellesley, the Duke of Wellington.
Press freedom was ended and many writers were arrested and sent to the colonies but even under this autocratic and dictatorial regime radicalism still stirred. Not least in the in the person of Percy Shelley who wrote, from Oxford where he was a student at University College, the 1811 essay The Necessity of Atheism.
For which he was expelled and placed under government surveillance. Only twenty years old, he moved with his teenage wife Harriet Westbrook, first to Ireland and then to Wales and then to Devon. During his tour of the British Isles he published his Declaration of Rights which called to an end to the Act of Union, Catholic emancipation, and the end to the oppression of the Irish poor.
Shelley demanded equality, freedom of religious belief (or non-belief), and people power and he called for an arising and an awakening. His call was clarion enough but on 16th August 1819 events in Manchester electrified Shelley. The Peterloo massacre saw a cavalry charge into a crowd of protestors and resulted in eighteen deaths and several hundred injuries.
From Italy, Shelley responded to events with The Masque of Anarchy. A vision of non-violent resistance that would go on to inspire Gandhi and Martin Luther King:- "Rise like lions after slumber
in unvanquishable number! Shake your chains to earth like dew which in sleep had fallen on you. Ye are many—they are few!"
Theodore Gericault - The Raft Of The Medusa (1819)
The Masque of Anarchy was not published in Shelley's short lifetime, he died three years later aged twenty-nine, for fear it would have incited an uprising but, the same year, in France, Theodore Gericault's Raft of the Medusa and its startling imagery of starvation, murder, and cannibalism had an equally powerful effect.
The painting shows the aftermath of a shipwreck of a boat that was taking four hundred settlers to the then French colony of Senegal. One hundred and forty-seven of which were set adrift on a hurriedly constructed raft resulting in the deaths of all but fifteen of them. An event that was seen as a microcosm for how the French state had failed its people.
A France that, post-Napoleon, was struggling ever harder under the yoke of the hard right Royalists who had taken over the reins of power. The toffs were saved on what remained of the Medusa but the hoi-polloi and, noticeably, those of colour were placed on an unsafe raft and forced into hell and division. Gericault also uses the painting to make a timely nod to the slave trade that, at the time, was coming under pressure from a growing anti-slavery movement whose motto was "am I not a man and a brother?". A reminder, even in the midst of this pandemic we are all living in, that when we dehumanise one person we dehumanise all people.
Three year old Alan Kurdi lying dead on the beach in Turkey (2015)
Daily Express (2016)
The romance of revolution, be it a revolution for increased social justice or one that serves only the already powerful, often ends in bloody failure and disenchantment. The poet Victor Hugo was a demoralised French revolutionary who fled Louis-Napoleon's dictatorship to find safe haven in the Channel Island of Guernsey.
There he wrote Les Miserables (1862), widely considered one of the greatest novels of all time, and he also experimented with automatic drawing, spitting coffee and soot all over his drawings as he sat consumed with guilt and grief over the drowning of his nineteen year old daughter. Hugo became obsessed with the sea as a source of either destiny or destruction but it was another emigre to Britain, this time an Austrian one, who really set about trying to understand the reasons for our often seemingly irrational impulses and desires.
The Romantics predated Sigmund Freud and the concept of psychoanalysis and already some of them believed in alternative labyrinthine realities, of dreams and nightmares, of repressed desires as motors for life's path, and of childhood trauma as a weighty factor in adult decisions and actions. It was believed that you could easily end up trapped in a maze of the mind. Freud was the man who believed he had the keys that could unlock our minds and help us find our way out of that maze.
But it was the Venetian artist Giambattista Piranesi who showed us, for perhaps the first time, an idea of what this maze may look like. In the 1740s and 1750s the artist and architect moved away from the images of crumbling, but orderly, Roman architecture that he'd been creating and embarked on a series of dark inescapable prisons, caprices of hopelessness, that many believed could only have come from the depths of a mind infected with malarial madness.
Victor Hugo - Octopus With The Initials V.H. (1866)
Max Halberstadt - Sigmund Freud (c.1921)
Piranesi - The Smoking Fire (1745-1761)
Christopher Nolan - The Dark Knight Rises (2012)
Piranesi was, it seems, creating allegorical prisons to resemble those our minds sometimes find themselves trapped in. They've inspired similar images by film makers like Fritz Lang (Metropolis) and Christoper Nolan in his Dark Knight trilogy and stand, still, as testament to how a furtive imagination can be both a blessing and a curse. A brain that won't stop ticking can feel like a bomb inside your head as easily as it can a non-stop party.
A big admirer of Piranesi was the poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge who, in the 1790s and already disappointed by the failure of the French Revolution to change society for the better, withdrew to the Quantock hills in Somerset and set up home in Nether Stowey with his friend, and fellow poet, William Wordsworth.
Coleridge and Wordsworth would grow their own food, attempting a form of self-sufficiency, and set about attempting to transform humanity through poetic revelation. They would walk, sometimes, up to forty miles a day and their perambulations and company would trigger deep journeys into the imagination. With a hit of laudanum inside him and several miles behind him, Coleridge wrote 1979's Kubla Khan.
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea" may sound like the ramblings of an opium fuelled madman, partly because it is, but it also gives us an idea of how words, how ideas, and how dreams help us to reveal ourselves, to open up, and to take an Inner Flight (Schama's team chose that Primal Scream song to soundtrack this section) into our own potential.
Beach at Quantock's Head
Thomas de Quincey took it even further than Coleridge. As a young man he ran away from home to live, homeless, on the streets of London and then in 1807, aged 22, he travelled to Dove Cottage in the Lake District to meet his hero:- Wordsworth.
In the Lake District, de Quincey took enough drugs to kill a horse. At one time it is said he was consuming twelve thousand drops of laudanum each day and by 1821 he was so experienced in the world of pharmaceuticals he produced the world's first drug memoir, Confessions Of An Opium Eater. He would venture into London on Saturday nights and lose himself in both the capital's busy streets and avenues and in a haze of self-administered opium.
At a time when most folk were still 'clocking in' and people were being viewed more as units of productivity than living feeling human beings, de Quincey rebelled by putting his mind into an elastic state and journeying deep into self-discovery. Some would say he was selfish but these journeys were not all positive. Monstrous chimeras swept into anxious nightmares and mixed with de Quincey's repressed trauma to create a perfect storm of personal hell.
He came to believe that the unconscious, or subconscious, was the most powerful force in our lives. Both Coleridge and de Quincey lived on the very edge of their times (and sometimes crossed over it) but their behaviour, their trips, led to a new understanding of psychiatric help. Where people with mental health issues had once been considered subhuman and treated accordingly, they were now, quite simply, people who thought too much, thought too deeply.
Josef Kriehuber - Robert Schumann (1839)
One of which was the German composer Robert Schumann. Schumann aimed for 'pure emotion' in his music but it was a quest that become so monomaniacal it soon drove him insane. Moved to an asylum, Schumann suffered panic attacks, took to speaking in a toneless incomprehensible language which he believed was due to a demon taking over control of his speech, and sensed that his consciousness of self was rapidly diminishing.
A Romantic in more than one sense of the word, Schumann and his future wife Clara Wieck had hidden romantic messages to each other in their compositions but love was not enough to save Schumann from his demons and in 1854 he jumped from a bridge into the Rhine in a failed suicide attempt that saw him interred for the final two years of his life in the aforesaid mental asylum.
Schumann failed in his attempt to 'survive the truth' but Wordsworth, like Coleridge before him, still felt the secret to surviving the devastating truth of life and the modern effects of dehumanisation could be found in nature and he took to taking long walks along the beautiful Wye Valley to save himself.
Swiss Alps
Alexander Nasmyth - Portrait Of Robbie Burns (1787)
Burns, the son of an Ayrshire tenant farmer, became a star in Scotland. From Kelso to Kilmarnock, from Dundee to Dumfries, and from Perth to Portree they sang Burns' songs and Burns himself toured the countryside and castles of Scotland and what he saw was not merely an outdoor museum of Scottish history but a land where revolution could still arise.
More than two hundred years later, and with Scottish independence looking ever closer to a certainty, not much has changed. The Scottish demand for self-determination is as strong as ever and made stronger still by the disasters of Boris Johnson's premiership, the pandemic, and a Brexit most of them didn't vote for. The English political class will try to deny Scotland this opportunity but, hopefully, they won't go as far as they did in 1793 when following the arrest of a group of Scottish radicals two of them were sentenced to death.
The rest were sent to the colony of Australia. Another European region that was brooding on the loss of its culture and tradition was Germany. Or, because Germany as a nation did not yet exist and was in fact a crazy quilt of city states and federations united by a shared language, the German lands. Napoleon had taken the German lands easily and left the German people shell-shocked and searching for a shared ancestral past for a sense of who they were.
They looked back to the ideas of the 18c philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder who refuted the idea that we could free ourselves from our folklore and become rational creatures and believed that we were, in fact, complex products of generations of costume, culture, poetry, and music. The culture of our lands was not just around us but was in us.
Anton Graff - Johann Gottfried Herder (1785)
Caspar David Friedrich - Wanderer Above A Sea Of Fog (1818)
Herder celebrated Germany because he was German and not because he felt the German people were exceptional. If he'd been Swiss, he'd have celebrated Switzerland and if he'd been Italian he'd have celebrated Italy. He was a nationalist, in lower case, but he was not an exceptionalist. He believed all 'tribes' felt an attachment to their own kind and needed anchorage in the collective imagination for their mental well being.
Before these ideas were twisted and warped by the Nazis and others, they'd have seemed less problematic than they do now in a world where we often accuse people of living in bubbles and echo chambers. Growing up in and around Rugen Island on the Baltic Sea off the north coast of Germany, Caspar David Friedrich was inspired by Herder's writings and he created works that celebrated the Gothic ruins of the German lands and used his art to fortify the German people with romantic and melancholy images of their shared medieval past.
Caspar David Friedrich - Graveyard Under Snow (1826)
The Abbey In The Oakwood (1808-1810)
Not least the stark and haunting, yet beautiful, Abbey In The Oakwood which could easily be an illustration for one of the dark fairy tales that were being collected, around the same time as Friedrich was painting, from around the German lands by the brothers Wilhelm and Jacob Grimm.
The Brothers Grimm, who lived in the then French speaking satellite kingdom of France - Westphalia, were, like Friedrich, disciples of Herder and knew the power of folk/volk so, of course, they wrote in German rather French. They made it their mission to collect as many Germanic folk tales as they could find from all over the 'nation' and though many of them have now passed into legend in sanitised versions the originals were incredibly dark.
In Hansel and Gretel, Gretel kills a cannibal witch who was trying to eat her in a house made of gingerbread, the original Cinderella had her toes cut off so her slippers would fit, and the queen in Snow White demands the removal of the titular character's heart so that she can eat it. The Willful Child even seems to have inspired the final, shocking, scene of Brian Da Palma's 1976 adaptation of Stephen King's Carrie.
Brothers Grimm - Hansel And Gretel (1812)
Brian Da Palma - Carrie (1976)
The German people believed their national character was forged in the forests where many of these fairy tales were set and it was Friedrich whose painting of a stranded French soldier defeated by a stout German forest who drew on these beliefs and emboldened them in the national psyche. The chasseur has lost his horse, he's lost his regiment, and he's lost the war. Defeated by the primal force of Deutsch woodlands.
A raven, the messenger of death, perches in the foreground of the painting. As if to warn any other invading forces that Germany was becoming a nation, it wouldn't finally be declared one until 1871, and a powerful nation at that. The raven, with hindsight, could also act as a warning of the atrocities that would be enacted by the German nation when they elected the Nazi party of Adolf Hitler to power in 1933.
An event that led directly to the deaths of over seventy five million people. Hitler and the Nazis perverted and destroyed everything the liberal Romantics of Herder's era had believed and scarred the German body politic and the story of humanity in a way which can never fully heal. So great was the damage. Nazi hatred seeped into every facet of German life. Even its fairy tales, which saw Little Red Riding Hood recast as a 'pure' German and the wolf portrayed as an evil Jew.
Otto Kubel - Little Red Riding Hood (1930)
Anselm Kiefer - Margarethe (1981)
Generations later, the German people are still attempting to demystify and detoxify the Nazi's forest fetish and one artist, Anselm Kiefer, has made a career out of it with vast, often impenetrable, works that depict dark and despoiled trees that line up sombrely as if to mourn a tragedy they were forced to observe.
The people of the lands that were conquered by the Nazis also found solace in collective culture and in Poland they rallied around the work of the composer Frederic Chopin who had died nearly one hundred years earlier. In Chopin's lifetime Poland had also been invaded (by Austria and Russia) and, at one point, no longer existed on the map.
But, through Chopin's work - mostly made in exile in Paris, Poland still existed in the mind and in the soul of the Polish people. His classical compositions incorporated traditional mazurkas, polonaises, and folk dances so that Polish culture could survive until the nation regained its independence. Which it did, briefly, in 1918 before later being taken by the Nazis.
The Nazis tried to eradicate Polish culture and Chopin's music was banned. The statue of the composer in Warsaw was the first one felled by the Nazis. It echoed an earlier battle over Chopin. When he died, aged 39, his body was interred in the Pere Lachaise Cemetery in Paris but his heart, as he requested, was preserved in a vase of alcohol, and returned to Poland.
A place, you could say, it never really left. What Chopin would make of the 'proud' Polish patriots who now march for intolerance and race hatred in his native Poland and elsewhere in the World (the Capitol Building in Washington DC this time last week) is uncertain but I'd like to think Chopin's nationalism, as with Blake's, Hofer's, and Herder's, would have been an inclusive nationalism rather than a populist, exceptionalist, and hateful one that seeks to other and destroy anybody who doesn't confine to its strict parameters.
I believe, and so it turns out does Simon Schama, that art, good art, can connect us to a deeper truth about ourselves. Schama's firm belief is that that truth about ourselves doesn't have to be a divisive truth. On that, I'm not so sure. Not judging by the times we now live in. We'll see. I have a feeling that these figures from our shared Romantic past still have a few lessons for us yet.
Bisson - Chopin (c.1849)
2021 storming of the United States Capitol Building
Simon Schama
Thomas Jones - The Bard (1774)
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