CIVILIZATION by KENNETH CLARKA personal view
CHAPTER 8
THE LIGHT OF EXPERIENCE
The Berckheyde painting of the square at haarlem one could almost walk into. The revolution that replace divine authirity by experience, experiment and observation.
I am in holland not only because dutch painting is a visible expression of this change of mind, but because Holand - economically and intellectually - was the first country to profit fromt he change. When one begins to ask the question 'does it work? or "does it pay?" instead of "is it gods will?" one gets new answers. one is that to try to suppress opinions which one doesn't like is less profitable than to tolerate them. The protestants should have known this but didn't. They persecute eachother right up to the middle of the 17th century. Trials of witches positively increas in this age of reason. It seemed as ifthe spirit of persecution was like some kind of poison that couldn't be cured by the new philosophy, it had to work itself out of the system. But this said holland was remarkably tolerant, and one proof is that nearly all the great books which revolutionised thought were first printed in Holand.
We know more about what the seventeenth century dutch looked like than we do about anyother society, except the first - century romans. These are individuals who are prepared to join in a corporate effort for the public good. For the most part they are solid, commonplace people, as they would be today, and the y were portrayed by commonplace artists. But from this dead level of group portraiture there arose one of the summits of European painting Rembrant.
The tulip shows how 17th century dutch combined their two chief enthusiasms - scientific investigation and visual delight. When the bottom fell out of the tulip market in 1637 the Dutch economy survived for another fifty years based on silver cups and bottles, gold-stamped leather walls and pottery imitated from the Chinese (done with such skill it could be sold back to the chinese) But unfortunately this kind of visual self-indulgence very soon leads to ostentation andthis, in bourgeois democracy, means vulgarity.
One could say this is what they get from a materialist interpretation of society. But they also got Rembrandt.
In studying the history of civilisation one must try to keep a balance between individual genius and the moral or spiritual condition of a society. However irrational it may seem, I believe in genius. Ibelieve that almost everything of value which has happened in the world has been due to individuals. Nevertheless, one can't help feeling that the supremely great figures in history - Dante, michelangelo, shakespear, newton, geothe - must be to some extent a kind of summation of their times. They are too large, too all embracing to have developed in isolation.
Rembrandt was the great poet of that need for truth and that appealt o experience which had begun with the Reformation, had produced the first translations ofthe Bible, but had had to wait almost a century for visible expression. Rembrandt spent alot of time in synagogues to learn something new about the bible, but in the end the evidence he used for interpreting the Bible was the life he saw around him. In his drawings one often doesn't know if he is recording an observation or illustrating the scriptures. The psychological truths in his painting go beyond any other painter. We used to be told that painting should't compete with literature. Rather the literary element should not obtrude itself till it has taken the right shape. But when form and content are one, what a heavenly bonus this kind of human revelation can be. This is seen in his Jewish Bride and Bathsheba.
The greatest of his contemporaries were looking for a different kind of truth-truth that could be established by intellectual, not emotional means.
This could be done either by the acccumulation of observed evidence or by math. and of the two mathematics offered to the men of the 17th the more attractive solution. Math was the religion of the finest minds of the time. Bacon was the only philosopher of the period who was not a mathematician. he thought he could solve everything by material evidence. But compared to the great thinkers who succeeded him - descartes, pascal, spinoza - there is something disreputable about him because he lacked faith in math.
Descartes is an extremely sympathetic figure. He started as a soldier and wrote a book on fencing. But soon he discovered that all he wanted to do was to think. He went to holland where he said everyone was concerned with making money and so would leave him alone to think. He had to move 24 times to be alone. He examined everything like Da Vinci. He thought that all matter consisted of whirlpools, with an outer ring of curving vortices, and an inner core of small globules sucked into the center. Descarte had a French tidy-mindedness and alll his observations were made to contribute to a philosophic scheme. It was based on absolute scepticism - ala montaigne's summing up 'what do i know" he answered "I know that i think' and visa versa.
Descarte wanted to cut away all preconceptions and get back to the facts of direct experience, unaffected by custom and convention. We see this in the paintings of Vermeer. Vermeer wrote "study to be quiet" and inthe same period two religious sects came into being quietism and the quakers.
One characteristic of Vermeer is his passion for light. it is in this more than anything else that he is connected with the scientists and philosophers of his time. All the greatest exponents of civilisation, from Dante to Goethe, have been obsessed by light. But int he seventeenth century light passed through a crucial stage. The invention of the lens was giving it a new range and power.h The telescope 9invented in Holland, although developed by Galileo) discovered new worlds in space; the microscope showed new worlds in a drop of water. And Spinoza polished these lenses (he was the greatest lensmaker in Europe) In holand Descartes studied refraction and Huygens invented the wave theory. Finally newton put forward his corpuscular theory, which was wrong, or at any rate, less nearly right than Huygen, but held the field till the 19th.
The scientific approach to experience ends in poetry. And I suppose that this is due to an almost mystical rapture we feel in the perception of light. Dutch painters achieved a spiritualization of matter in their still lifes. The aesthetic equivalent of that passion for accurate observation that impelled their great scientists.
But the coordination of society and art isn't so tidy Valesquez painted realistically in crazy Spain 5 years before vermeer.
1660 was the zenith.Spinoza's tractatus was printed in 1670. During that decade the leadership of of intellectual life passed from Holland to England. The change began in 1660 when charles II embarked from the Dutch beach to return to england, and ended the isolation and austerity which had afflicted England for almost 15 years.
As so often happens, a new freedom of movement led to an outburst of pent up energy. The Royal society with Robert boyle, the father of chemistry, hook who perfected the microscope and halley who predicted the comet. we waiting , with Newton at the head for the moment of expansion.
Newtons principia gave a mathematical account of the universe which for three hundred years weemed irrefutable. It was both the climax of the age of observation and the sacred book of the next century.
Christopher wren was a geometer and astronomer anda member ofthe royal society who became an architect at the age of thirty. One of his buildings is the greatest architectural unit built in England since the Middle Ages. It is sober without being dull, massive without being oppressive. HE became the most famous architect in England, met bernini.
The fire of london endd on sept 5 1666. Six days later Wren submitted a plan for reguilding the city. Ingenious is the word for the results that folowed. The thirty new churches are each a solution of a different problem. And the crown, ST Pauls, he made the chief monument of English classsicism.
Wren's buildings show us that mathematics, measurement, observation (the things of the philosophy of science) were not hotile to architecture; nor to music (for this was the age of englands great Henry Percell)
But what of poetry. Without Galileo's discoveries Milton's universe would have taken a less grandiose form. Milton was an anarchronism, a survivor from the belated English Renaissance. The year of Paradise Lost, 1667, the supreme example of anti-poetic rationalism - Sprat's history of the royal society - said Poetry is the parent of superstition.
Not all members were so hostile to the imagination. Infact Newton spent or wasted alot of time on biblical stories. But these men didn't believe in constellation. And so began that division between scientific truth and the imagination which was to kill poetic drama, and give a feeling of artificiality to all poetry during the next hundred years. However there was a compensation: the emergence of a clear workable prose. The strange thing is that none of these mid-century writers (except for Carlyle and Ruskin) seemed to notice that the triumph of rational philosophy had resulted in a new form of barbarism. If, from the balcony of the Greeenwich observatory, I look beyond the order of Wrens's hospital I see the squalid disorder of industrial society. Industrial societies nemesis' were population the greedy getting greedier, the ignorant lost touch with traditional skills, and the grand designs became waste of money that no accountant could condone.
CHAPTER NINE - THE PURUIT OF HAPPINESS
By the year 1700 the German speaking countries have once more become articulate. For over a century the disorderly aftermath of the reformation, followed by the thirty years war kept them from playing a part in civilisation.
This program is primarily about music; and some of the qualities of 18th century music - its melodious flow, its complex symmetry, its decorative invention - are reflected in the architecture; but not its deeper appeal to the emotions. And èt the ROCOCO style has a place in civ. Serious-minded people used to call it shallow and corrupt because it was intended to give pleasure; well the founders of America weren't frivolous and thought to include the pursuit of happiness as a goal for mankind. That and the puruit of love are apparent in rococo.
Before we plunge into rococo a word about the austere ideal that had preceded it. For 60 years France's rigidly centralised authoritarian government and classic style had dominated Europe. IT produced Racine, poussin and magnificent architecture. But it was stiff and of authoritarian granduer illuminated.
But the high Baroque of Rome was exactly what the north of Europe needed because it was elastic and adaptable. German musicians built on Scarlatti's international style and the architect Borromini did architecture that fit Germany's social order (the reverse of Frances centralization).
The formative element in German art and GErman music lie in the multiplicity of regions and twons and abbeys. Zimmerman is the german for carpenter. The finest buildings we look at are local pilgrimage churches. The backs were a family of local musical craftsman.
The sound of Bach's music remind one of a cruious fact that people don't always remember- the great art of the 18th century was religious. The thought was anti-religious; the way of life profane. But in the arts, what did this rationalism produce? One adorable painter Watteau, nice furniture; but nothing to set beside the Messiah or the abbeys and pilgrimage churches of Bavaria and Franconia.
Another contributer to German music was that though luther (himself a singer) forbid art, he encouraged music. Organs have played a variable role in European civ. In the 19th they were symbols of newly-won affluence; but in the 17th and 18th they were expressions of municipal pride and independence. ?They were the work of the leading local craftsman.
Dutch competition informed the attitudes that fueled Johann Sebastian's rise. His family had been professional musicians for 100 years. So in certain districts 'bach' meant musician. He belongs to all time. Small principalities rulers competetive ambitions benefited architecture and music in a way that the democratic obscurity of the Hanoverians in England did not.
I felt some scruples in comparing the music of Bach with a baroque interior. No such hesitations need prevent me from invoking the same for George Frederick Handel.
Great men have a way of appearing in complementary pairs. So often it probably wasn't invented by symmetrically minded historians; but represents a need for ballance.
Both Bach and Handel were born in 1685; they both went blind from copying musical scores and were unsuccessfully operated on by the same surgeon, but otherwise they were opposites.
In contrast to BAch's timeless uiversality, Handel was completely of his age. Instead of BAch's frugal, industrious career, handel made and lost several fortunes. He went to rome and as a youth and was immediately taken up by good society.
I have called Handel a Baroque composer, and Neumann's buildings northern Baroque. I could almost equally well have called them Rococo- in areas the terms overlap. But there is a real diffference.
Baroque, however modified in Germany and Austria, was an Italian invention. Baroque first came into being as religious architecture and expressed the emotional aspirations of the Catholic church. Rococo was to some extent a parisian ivention, and provocatively secular. It was superficially a reaction against the heavy Classicism of Versailles. INstead of the static orders of antiquity, it drew inspiration from natural objects. Rococo was a reaction, but it was not negative. It represented a real gain in sensibility. It achieved a new freedom of association and captured new and more delicate shades of feeling.
All this is expressed by Watteau (1684). He saw transitoriness and so a feeling of the seriousness of pleasure.
Watteau died in 1721 at 37. By that date the Rococo style was begining to affect decoration and architecture. Ten years later it was as international as early 15th gothic. And like gothic the art of small courts, an art of elegance rather than greatness, an art in which religious motives were treated with grace and sentiment rather than solemn conviction.
An international style overrides convienience or functionalism. No one supposed that rococo knife handles were easy to hold or the soup tourins easy to hold or clean. They had to be like rocks and shells. Walter Pater said that all art aspired to the condition of music. Probably not applied art. But it is true of Rococo
In rococo churches the faithful are persuaded not by fear, but by joy. To enter them is a foretaste of paradise: sometimes rather more like the islamic paradise than the disembodied paradise of Christianity.
In Haydn's early works, particularly those for small orchestras and strings, his music does seem to be in exactly the same style as the Rococo rooms in which it was performed.
And yet to pronounce the name of Mozart in one is dangerous. It gives color - pretty color - to the notion that Mozart was merely a Rococo composer. Fifty years ago this was what most people thought about him, and the notion was supported by horrible little plaster busts which made him look the perfect 18th century dummy.
I like the story of Mozart sitting at table absentmindedly folding and refolding his napkin into more and more elaborate patterns, as fresh musical ideas passed through hius mind. But this formal perfection was used to express two characteristics which were very far from the rococo style. One a peculiar kind of melancholy amounting almost to panic that haunt the isolation of genius (mozart felt it young) The other was a passionate interest in humans and their relations.
Dr Johnson is said to have called opera "an extravagant and irrational entertainment" True. It seems strange that it was brought to perfection in the age of reason. But just as the greatest art of the early 18th was religious, so the greatest artistic creation of the Rococo is completely irrational. Opera had been invented in the 17th. It came to the north from Catholic itoly and flourished in Catholic capitals- Vienna, munich and prague. Indignant protestants said rococo churches were like opera houses. true but backwards. Opera came in when churches went out. They expressed the new profane religion and are often the biggest and best buildings in catholic countries.
Why do folk still spend 3 hours seeing something they don't understand? Why devote a large portion of German and Italian budgets to it? Partly due to skill. But chiefly because it is irrational" what is too silly to be said may be sung.
At the beginning of Mozarts Don Giovanni each character sings their feelings. It is complex. The pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of love, which had once seemed so simple an dlife giving, have become complex and destructive, and his refusal to repent, which makes him heroic, belongs to another phase of civ.
CHAPTER 10 - THE SMILE OF REASON
The 17th century with all its outpouring of genius in art and science still had senseless persecutions and brutal wars waged with unparalled cruelty. By 1700 people had begun to feel that a little calm and detatchment wouldn't come amiss. The smile of reason may seem to betray a lack of emotion; but it didn't preclude strongly held beliefs - belief in natural law, belief in justice, belief in atonement. The philosophers of the Enlightenment pushed civ uphill. Theis gain was consolidated throughout the nineteenth. Up to the 1930s people were not supposed to burn witched and other minorities, extract confessions by torture or go to prison for speaking the truth. We owe this all to the enlightenment and voltaire.
Although the victory of reason and tolerance was won iin France, it was initiated in England and the French philosophers never concealed their debt to the country that produced Newton, locke and the bloodless revolution. And though intellectuals there got hard nocks in print they weren't beaten up or put in prison. But this happened to voltaire and he took refuge in England in 1726.
18th century england was the land of the amatuer. Wren was an amatuer that made himself professional. In a way they inherited the Renaissance ideal of universal man. Amateurism ran through chemistry, philosophy, botany and natural history.
The dark side; 18th century england made two societies (urban and genteel country).
In talking about the 12th and 13th I said how great an advance in civ was then achieved by a sudden consciousness of feminine qualities; the the same was true of 18th century france due to its salons. Conversation is life giving and can only flourish in a small company where no one is stuck up. That is a condition which cannot exist in a court. And, fortunately, the court and government of France wasn't in Paris but in versailes.
Another thing that kept the 18th century salons free from too much pomposity is that the French upper classes were not oppressively rich. They had lost a lot of money in a financial crash. A margin of wealth is helpful to civilisation, but for some mysterious reasongreat wealth is destructive. Ssplendour is dehumanising, a sense of limitation seems to be a condition of good taste.
The people who frequented the salons of 18th century france were not merely a group of gashionable good-timers they were the outstanding philosophers and scientists of their time. They wanbted to publish their views on religion, change government.
The dynamo of the encyclopedia was Diderot. The aims of the Encyclopedia seem harmless enough to us. But authoritarian governments don't like dictionaries. They live by lies and bamboozling abstractions and can't afford to have words accurately defined.
The encyclopedia was twice suppressed and by its ultimate triumph the polite reunions in these elegant salons became precursors of revolutionary politics. They were also precursors of science. In the illustrated science supplement are pictures by Wright of Derby. His picture of an experiment shows the natural philospher with his long hair and dedicated stare, the little girls who can't bear to witness the death of their Cocattoo and a sensible middle age man who tells them that such sacrifices must be made in the interest of science. It shows that science was to some extent an after dinner occupation, like playing the piano in the next century. Voltaire did amatuer science.
In the 18th emerged a country where civilisation still had the energy of newness - scotland. The scottish character shows an extraordinary combination of realism and reckless sentiment. Adam smith David Hume, joseph Black and James Watt soon after the year 1760 changed the whole current of European thought and life. If on the practical side the scene must change to Scotland, on the moral side we must return to France. The remarkable thing about the frivolous 18th century was its seriousness. It was, in many ways, the heir to Renaissance humanism, but there was a vital difference. The renaissance took place within the church. A few humanists had shown signs of scepticism but not about christianity as a whole. People had the comfortable moral freedom that goes with an unquestioned faith.
The encyclopediest were total materialists whothought that moral and intellectual qualities were due to an accidental conjunction of nerves and tissues. It was a courageous belief to hold in 1770, but it was not (and will never be) an easy one on which to found or maintain a civ. So the 18th was faced with the task of making a new morality without christianity.
This morality was built on two foundations: one of them was the doctrine of natural law: the other was the stoic morality Rome. The belief that the simple goodness of natural man was superior to the artificial goodness of sophisticats. The complement to this agreeable delusion was an ideal of virtue drawn from Plutarch.
The romans who sacrificed for the state were made more memorable by the pictorial imagination of Jacques Louis David. In his Oth of the horatii (1785) the melting outlines and poos of sensuous shadow are gone and instead is a firmly outlined expression of will. Two years later he painted a more grimly Plutarchian picture, Brutus having his two dead sons, who were convicted of treachery, being brought to him. These incidents in Roman history do not appeal to us but were in harmonsy with the mood of and explain the next 5 years.
Well again we must look at a young underpopulated country. And we look at Thomas Jefferson. He crated monticello with inventiveness: Doors that open as one approaches them, a clock that tells the days of the week, a bed so placed that one gets out of it in either of two rooms. All this shows a man of inginuity working alone outside any accepted body of tradition. But Jefferson wasn't a crank. He was the typical universal man of the eighteenth century, linguist, scientist, agriculturist, educator, town-planner and architect. Almost the reincarnation of Leon Battista Alberti. Jefferson wasn't the architect as alsberti, but then he was also the president of the united states. And as an architect he wasn't bad. MOnticello was the beginning of that simple almost rustic classicism that stretches up our eastern seaboard. It lasted for 100 years producing a body of civilised, domestic architecture equal to any in the world.
The establishment of religious freedom that earned him so much hatred and abuse in his own day we now take for granted. But the university of Virginia is still a suprise. He designed the whole thing himself. There are ten pavilions for ten professors and the students rooms behind them but all within reach; the corporate humanism. Jeffersons romanticism is shown by the way he left eh fourth side of his courtyard open so young scholars could look across to the mountains still inhabited by his fathers friends the indians.
How confidently the Founding Fathers assumed the mantle of republican virtue and put into practice the french enlightenment. The greatest sculptor, Houdon, who did the Voltaire with the smile, Did the Richmond Va Washington. The smile is gone on this republican hero.
Washington DC was laid out by a French engineer named l'Enfant, under the direction of Jefferson and is certainly the most grandiose piece of town planning since Sixtus V's rome.
CHAPTER 11 - THE WORSHIP OF NATURE
For almost a thousand years the chief creative force in western civilisation was Christianity. Then in about the year 1725 it suddenly declined and in intellectual society practically disappeared. This left a vacuum. There are said to be 52 meanings of nature in 18th century it meant common sense. The first stage in this new direction of the human mind was very largely achieved in England. In 1730 Montewquieu noted: There is no religion in England. If anyone mentions religion people begin to laugh. It appears in minor poets and provincial painters and fashions like the one that changed straight formal gardens into twisting paths with pseudo-natural prospects. What were known all over the world for a hundred years as English Gardens. Englands biggest effect on Europe outside of early 19th clothes fashions.
Trivial? Well all fashions seem so but are serious.
Then in about the year 1760 this English prelude of melancholy, minor poets and picturesque gardens touched Rousseau. Though he got high on Swiss mountains. For over 2000 years mountains had been considered simply a nuisance: unproductive, obstacles to communication, the refuge of bandits and heretics.
Other than one 1340 hike by Petrarch to see a view and a trip by Leonardo to see botany no other mountain climbs are recorded. And to ERasmus, montaigne, descartes, or newton practically all ofthe great civilisers the thought of climbing a mountain for pleasure would have seemed ridiculous. People who crossed the alps never thought to admire the scenery until 1739 when the poet Thomas Grey did. This started a small swiss tourist industry.
Rousseau was a hounded genius. He said I feel therefore I am. Hume reached the same conclusion by logical means. It was an intellectual time-bomb, which after sizzling away for almost two hundred years has only just gone off.No one, except the marquis de Sade, saw through the new God or goddes. "Nature averse to crime" he said in 1792 "I tell you nature lives and breathes by it, hungers at all her pores for bloodshed, yearns with all her heart for the futherance of cruelty.
Rousseau's view was partly a survival of the old myth of the Golden Age and partly a feeling of shame at the corruption of European Society. Voltaire said "no one has ever used so much intelligence to persuade us to be stupid. After reading your book one feels that one ought to walk on all fours. unforunately during the last sixty years i have lost the habit."
On whether primitive man is good or evil: Polynesia produced no Dante, michelangelo, shakespeare newton or Goethe. And we perhaps had disasterous consequence for them, perhaps the very frailty of those Arcadian societies shows that they were not civilisations in the sense of the word which he has been using.
Far the greatest man to approximate nature and truth was Goethe. He saw all living things as striving for fuller development through an infinitely long process of adaptation. But this analytic aproach to nature had less immediate effect on people's minds than the purely inspirational approach of the English Romantic poets coleridge and wordsworth.
Wordsworth's approach to nature was religious in the moral Anglican manner. He had seen alot though. He left the revolution to England tlaking only to trapmps and begars and discharged prisoners. He was crushed by man's inhumanisty to man. In 1793 he realized only total absorption in nature could heal and restore his spirit. HE had earned the right to be retracted in nature. Sympathy with the voiceless and the oppressed, humna or animal is the prerequisit tot ehworship of nature from st francis on.
Robert Burns noted that animals often show more courage and loyalty and unselfishness than sophisticated people, and also a greater sense of the wholeness of life.
What was it that made Wordsworth turn from mman to nature? it was going to live with his sister. The burning heat of reomantic egoism. Both Byron and Wordsworth fell deeply in love with their sister. The inevitable prohibition was a desaster for both of them. IT made Byron restless and cynical and he wrote Don Juan. Wordsworth lost inspiration.
Then Constable appeared with his landscapes. We have got so used to this approach to painting that it is difficult for us to see how strange it was to love shiny posts and rotten banks more than heroes in aromor. A picture like his Willows by a Stream is the forerunner of a quantity of mediocre painting, just as wordsworth's poems to daisies aticipated a quantity of bad poetry. It was rejected from the academy.
The simple life; it was a necessary part of the new religion of nature, and one instrong contrast to earlier aspirations. civ, not from a monestary or palace or salon, but from a cottage. This worship was connected with walking. And so, for over 100 years, going for a country walk was the spiritual as well as the physical exercise of all intellectuals, poets and philosophers.
Turner was the supreme exponent of the picturesque sublime; and sometimes his storms and avalanches seem preposterous, just as Byrons rhetoric is. But all the time Turner was perfecting for his own private satisfaction and entirely new approach to painting which was only recognised in our own day. Briefly it consisted of transforming everything into pure color. One must remember that for centuries objects were though to be real because they were solid. Color was considered immoral - perhaps rightly so, because it is an immediate sensation and makes its effect independently of those ordered memories which are the basis of morality. Turner declared the indepencdence of color and thereby added a new faculty to the mind.
Nobody takes seriously Ruskins belief that nature illustrates moral law. All the same when he says "the power which causs the several portions of a plant to help each other we call life. Intensity of life is an intensity of helpfulness. The ceasing of this help is what we call corruption" He defended turner and accumulated acurate observations of nature to show nature worked according to law.
This religion is shown in the sky in the paintings.
Constable said" I never saw anything ugly in my life" Landscaping was popular for almost a hundred years. Then came photography and the three great lovers of nature of the late 19th, Monet, cezanne and VAn gogh had to make a more radical transformation. The enraptured vision that first induced Rousseau to live in sensation had one more triumph in the 19th from Monet and Renoir.
A long time simce Hume said all was an impression but Monet said "light is the principle person in the picture" gave them a philsophic unity. It changed our way of seeing, was very short movement. The period which men can work together happily inspired by a single aim last only a short time. This is a tragedy of civilisation.
Monet painted two rooms of the Nympheas in Paris going blind. Total immersion: this is the ultimate reason why the love of nature has been for so long accepted as religion. It is a means by which we can lose our identity in the whole and gain thereby a more intense conscousness of being.
CHAPTER 12 - THE FALLACIES OF HOPE
The reasonable world of an 18th century library is symmetrical consistent and enclosed. Symmetry is a chuman concept, because with sll our irregularities we are more or less symmetrical as reflected in Mozarts phrases. Consistency and enclosure can be a prison, they are the enemies of movement.
Beethoven is the sound of spiritual hunger and European man once more reaching for something beyond his grasp. We must leave the trim, finite interiors of 18th century classicism and go confront the infinite.
Byron, like all great romantics was obsessed with the sea.
IN america it might be possible for a new political constitution; but it took something more explosive to blast the heavy foundations of Europe, just as it had in the reformation.
Towards the end of the 18th rational declineds and vivid assertions take its place. William Blakes Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1789) is a handbook of anti-rational wisdom comparable to Neitzsche's Zaranthustra. Robert Burns was the Scottish equivalent
In June 1789 the first phase, the liberal bourgeois phase of the revolution came to a climax. The members of the National Assembly had found themselves locked out of their usual meeting place and went off to a tennis court where they swore an oath to establish a constitution. The constitutional, one might almost say the American phase of the French Revolution belonged to the age of reason
Three years later we hear the sound of a new world of citizens marching marching all the way from mareilles to paris, tugging three pieces of cannon and singing a new song - the Merseillaise
Perhaps the romantic movements greatest legacy is the message to the young that those who are strong in ove may yet find a way of escape from the rotten parchment ponds that tie us down. Early on mens belief in a new world was so strong that they changed the year 1792 to the year 0. and the month names to names that express the love of nature. Also womens huge clothing get thrown out for simple dresses.
A more formidable job was to replace christianity. They wanted to tear down chartres and build a temple of wisom in its place. Not even robespierre could pull of a new religion. And then the Committee of Public Safety started killing people. "in a republic which can only be based on virtue, any pity shown towards crime is a flagrant proof of treason" Many of the subsequent horrors were due to anarchy. The men of 1793 tried to quell it by violence. Communal enthusiasm may be a dangerous intoxicant; but if humans were to lose altogether the sense of glory, I think we should be the poorer and when religion is in decline it is an alternative to naked materialism.
What happened to the heroes that spoke for humanity during this time? Nothing can be more depressing than the withdrawal of the great romantics. Wordsworth saying he'd give his life for the Church of England. Goethe saying it was better to support a lie than admit political confusion in the state.
But two did not retreat and so became architypal Romantic heroes. Beethoven and Byron. Both held an attitude of defiance to convention and believed unshakably in freedom. Byron, couth and charming, was expelled. Beethoven uncouth and argumentative was accepted. perhaps because genius was more valued in vieena than london. maybe beethoven was a better symbol.
Beethoven liked napoleon until he was proclaimed emporer. As a young man he saw mozart's Don giovanni and was shocked by its cynicism. He determined to write an opera in which unwavering love and freedom were associated: Fidelio.
When the Bastille fell in 1792 it was found to contain only seven old men who were annoyed at being disturbed. Beethoven was an optimist. Then in the 1790s real horrors came and by 1810 all the hopes of the 18th century had been proved false: the rights of man, the discoveries of science, the benefits of industry, all delusion.
The spokesman of this pessimism was Byron. From Goete to t he most brainless schoolgirl his works were read with hysterical enthusiasm. His bad poetry made him famous. The positive side of Byron's genious was a self-identification with the forces of nature: not wordsworth's daisies but colossal storms: with the sublime.
Consciousness of the sublim was a faculty that the Romantic movement added to the European imagination. It was an English discovery, related tot he discovery of nature: not the truth-giving nature of Goethe, or the moralising nature of wordswoth, but the savage incomprehensible power outside orselves that makes us aware of the futility of human arrangements. Blake gave this memorable expression. Turner painted it (and loved Byron) in slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying - typhoon coming on. At almost the same date Gericault the most byronic of all painters, had also made his name with medusa.
In romantic imagery the horse is the complement to the shipwreck. Gericault died riding the most unruly horses he could find. Forturnately, he left a spiritual heir hous pessimism was supported by a more powerful intellect. He had the utmost contempt for th eage in which he lived, for its crass materialism and complacent belief in progress; and his art is almost entirely an attempt to escape from it into romantic poetry. Delacroix had a small circle of friends including Chopin the only man he loved without reservation. Though not a christian he was the only great religious painter of the nineteenth century. Delacroix valued civilisation all the more because he knew that it was fragile and he would never have been so naive as to go to Tahiti for an alternative like Gauguin. He heroically stuck to his Tahiti dream despite grotesque incidents and his paintings make up for it.
The early 19th created a chasm in the european mind as great as that whicfh had split up Christendom in the 16th and even more dangerous. On the one side the new middle class (hopefull and energetic without values. sandwiched between a corrupt aristocracy and a brutalised poor. It produced a defensive conventional hypocritical morality) on the other side of the chasm were the poets, painters of the romantic movement. But what could they put in placfe of middle-class morality? They themselves were still in search of a soul.
The search went on throughout the nineteenth century: in Kierkegaard, in Schopenhauer, in Baudelaire, in Nietzsche and in the visual arts in Rodin. He was the last great romantic artist.
His statue of Balzac is the greatest piece of sculpture of the nineteenth century - indeed since michelangelo. Balzac, with his prodigious understanding of human motives scorns conventional values, defies fashionable opinion, 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.
CHAPTER 13 - HEROIC MATERIALISM
New york being built sped up is godless, brutal and violent but has energy strength of will. The cathedrals were built to glorify god, New york for mammon - money gain (the new god). Luxury and squalor. One sees why heroic materialism is still linked with an uneasy conscience. It has been from the start. Historically the first discovery and exploitation of these technical means coincide with the first organised attempts to improve the human lot.
The early pictures of heavy industry are optomistic. The only people who saw through industrailism were the poets. (the workers didn't object cause they were afraid the machines would replace them.
I have often heard it said by people who want to seem clever that civilisation can only exist on the basis of slavery. And in support of their thesis they point to 5th century Greece. If one defines civilisation in terms of leisure and superfluity, there is a grain of truth in this repulsive doctrine. I have throughout this series tried to define civilisation in terms of creative power and the enlargemnet of human faculties; and from that point of view slavery is abominable. The masses of poor people have always had a hard time up through the 19th. Nobody thought they could be cured: St Francis wanted to sanctify poverty, not abolish it. Laws concerning the poor were made to control them.
But slaves and the trade in slaves that was different. It was contrary to christianity; Most people didn't see it as much as local poverty and it was much more horrible. 9 million died on the middle voyage. So the anti-slavery movement became the first communal expression of the awakened conscience.
In its early stages the Industrial Revolution was also a part of the romantic movement. Iron foundaries were used to heighten romantic effect. However the influence of the industrial revolution on Romantic painting is a side issue almost an impertinence when compared to cruel degredations for 60 or 70 years. Arkwright's spinning fram , invented about 1770 is said to start it and it is painted by Wright of Derby and it produced dehumanisation. Long before Carlyle and Marx Wordsworth described the night shift.
Malthus' text said "man has no claim of right to the smallest portionof food" When I call them sacred text I am not joking. Malthus and Ricardo were taken as gospels by the most serious and pious men. The 19th, with its insecure middle class produced hypocrisy on an uprecedented scale. Hypocrisy has been attached tot he 19th as frivolity has been to the 18th. The reaction against this has done more harm than good by making pious respectable worthy joke words. Mass hypocrisy is often referred to as victorian but infact dates from the beginning of the century.
Marx read Engels - I don't know who else did: that was enough. Everybody read Dickens. His novels produced reform in the law, in magistrates courts, in the prevention of public hanging - in 12 more ways. But his description of poverty did no good because the problem was too big and he took a kind of sadistic pleasure in the horrors he described.
The early reformers struggle with industrialised society ilustrates what I believe to be the greatest civilising achievment of the 19th , humanitarianism. Ask americans what matters most and they will say "kindness: Its not a word that would have crossed the lips of any of the earlier heroes of this series. St Francis would have said chastity, obedience and poverty. Dante or Michelangelo: disdain of baseness and injustice: Goethe - to live in the whole andthe beautiful. We forget that horrors were taken for granted in Victorian England. Army and navy lashings, chained workers.
Certain philosophers, going back to Hegel, tell us that humanitarianism is a weak, sloppy, self-indulgent condition spiritually much inferior to cruelty and violence.
At the very beginning of this series I said that I thought one could tell more about a civilisation from its architecture than from anything else it leaves behing. Painting and literature depend largely on unpredictable individuals. But architecture is communal. Judged by its architecture the 19th doesn't come off so well. The public buildings are mostly lacking in style and conviction, perhaps because the strongest creative impulse went into engineering.
Smiles wrote the lives of the engineers. Isambard kingdom Brunel was a born romantic. His every bridge and tunnel was a drama, demanding incredible feats of imagination, energy and persuasion. Brunel is the ancestor of new york. The Brooklyn Bridge was built by Roebling in 1867 and was long the tollest building in new York. The crystal palace was built on Brunel's principles and it housed art for the Great exhibition. The art was weak but the crystal palace wasn't.
Ingres and Delacroix had grown old. In France Gustave Courbet an Millet emerged and did communist art. Courbet's pictures of workers in the fields influenced Van gough.
Throughout this series I have used art to illustrate various phases of civ. But the relationship isn't neat and predictable. A pseudo-Marxist approach works well for decorative arts and mediocrities, but not artists of real talent.
Never before in history have artists been so isolated from society and from official sources of patronage as were the so called impressionists. Their sensuius approach to landscape via the medium of color seems to have no connection with the intellectual currents of the time. In their best years 1865-85 they were ignored.
Before one makes gloomy generalizations about the late nineteenth century. its well to remember that two of the most beautiful pictures of the period are renois boating party. No awakened conscience, no heroic materialism, marx or frued. just ordinary humans enjoying themselves.
The only painter who longed for popularity was Van Gogh. Early awakened conscience had been practical and involved reformers. But later 19th needed atonement. Van Gogh expressed this completely. He set out to be a preacher in the worst areas. He was going to paint poor people ala Millet (his god).
Van Goghs other hero was Tolstoy. Tolstoy towered above his age as DAnte or Michelangelo or beethoven. His novels are marvels of sustained imagination but he was inconsistent. He loved the peasants but lived like an aristocrat. His last words were how do peasants die? His funeral is a filmed riot.
that was in 1910. Within two years Rutherford and Einstein made their discoveries and so, even before WW I a new era, our era, began. Of course science had achieved great triumphs in the 19th, but all were practical in nature. But from the time of Einstein and Niels Bohr science no longer existed to serve human needs but in its own right. When scientists could use a mathematical idea to transform matter they had achieved the quasi magical relationship with the world as artists. When I look at karsh's photograph of an aged Einstein I ask where have i seen that face before; the aged rembrandt.
The incomprehensiblity of our new cosmos (Haldane said "my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose")seems to me, ultimately, to be the reason for the chaos of madoern art. machines have ceased to be tools and have begun to give us direction (Uzi to the computer). Our other specialty is our urge to destruction.
And yet I don't think we are entering a new dark ages. On the universities the inheritors of our catastrophes look cheerful enough Very different from the melancholy late romans. In fact I should doubt if so many people have ever been as well fed, as well read as bright minded as curious and as critical as the young today.
One mustn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans. They question institutions. But civ needs institutions.
At this point I reveal myself in my true colors, as a stickin the mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time I believe that order is better than chaos, creation is better than destruction. I prefer gentlenss to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole knowledge is preferable to ignorance and sympathy more important than ideology.
I believe that in spite of the tiumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last tow thousand years and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves. I also hold one or two beliefs that are more difficult to put shortly. For example I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other's feelings by satisying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.
This series has been filled with great works of genius. There they are; you can't dismiss them. And they are only a fraction of western man's output. Often after setbacks and deviations. Western civ is a series of rebirths. Surely this should give us confidence.
I said at the beginning that it is a lack of confidence, more than anything else that kills a civilisation. we can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as efectively as by bombs.
"the best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
True between the wars. The trouble is that there is stillno cneter. The moral and intellectual failure of marsxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism and that isn't enough. One may be optimistic, but one can't exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.
THE END
THE LIGHT OF EXPERIENCE
The Berckheyde painting of the square at haarlem one could almost walk into. The revolution that replace divine authirity by experience, experiment and observation.
I am in holland not only because dutch painting is a visible expression of this change of mind, but because Holand - economically and intellectually - was the first country to profit fromt he change. When one begins to ask the question 'does it work? or "does it pay?" instead of "is it gods will?" one gets new answers. one is that to try to suppress opinions which one doesn't like is less profitable than to tolerate them. The protestants should have known this but didn't. They persecute eachother right up to the middle of the 17th century. Trials of witches positively increas in this age of reason. It seemed as ifthe spirit of persecution was like some kind of poison that couldn't be cured by the new philosophy, it had to work itself out of the system. But this said holland was remarkably tolerant, and one proof is that nearly all the great books which revolutionised thought were first printed in Holand.
We know more about what the seventeenth century dutch looked like than we do about anyother society, except the first - century romans. These are individuals who are prepared to join in a corporate effort for the public good. For the most part they are solid, commonplace people, as they would be today, and the y were portrayed by commonplace artists. But from this dead level of group portraiture there arose one of the summits of European painting Rembrant.
The tulip shows how 17th century dutch combined their two chief enthusiasms - scientific investigation and visual delight. When the bottom fell out of the tulip market in 1637 the Dutch economy survived for another fifty years based on silver cups and bottles, gold-stamped leather walls and pottery imitated from the Chinese (done with such skill it could be sold back to the chinese) But unfortunately this kind of visual self-indulgence very soon leads to ostentation andthis, in bourgeois democracy, means vulgarity.
One could say this is what they get from a materialist interpretation of society. But they also got Rembrandt.
In studying the history of civilisation one must try to keep a balance between individual genius and the moral or spiritual condition of a society. However irrational it may seem, I believe in genius. Ibelieve that almost everything of value which has happened in the world has been due to individuals. Nevertheless, one can't help feeling that the supremely great figures in history - Dante, michelangelo, shakespear, newton, geothe - must be to some extent a kind of summation of their times. They are too large, too all embracing to have developed in isolation.
Rembrandt was the great poet of that need for truth and that appealt o experience which had begun with the Reformation, had produced the first translations ofthe Bible, but had had to wait almost a century for visible expression. Rembrandt spent alot of time in synagogues to learn something new about the bible, but in the end the evidence he used for interpreting the Bible was the life he saw around him. In his drawings one often doesn't know if he is recording an observation or illustrating the scriptures. The psychological truths in his painting go beyond any other painter. We used to be told that painting should't compete with literature. Rather the literary element should not obtrude itself till it has taken the right shape. But when form and content are one, what a heavenly bonus this kind of human revelation can be. This is seen in his Jewish Bride and Bathsheba.
The greatest of his contemporaries were looking for a different kind of truth-truth that could be established by intellectual, not emotional means.
This could be done either by the acccumulation of observed evidence or by math. and of the two mathematics offered to the men of the 17th the more attractive solution. Math was the religion of the finest minds of the time. Bacon was the only philosopher of the period who was not a mathematician. he thought he could solve everything by material evidence. But compared to the great thinkers who succeeded him - descartes, pascal, spinoza - there is something disreputable about him because he lacked faith in math.
Descartes is an extremely sympathetic figure. He started as a soldier and wrote a book on fencing. But soon he discovered that all he wanted to do was to think. He went to holland where he said everyone was concerned with making money and so would leave him alone to think. He had to move 24 times to be alone. He examined everything like Da Vinci. He thought that all matter consisted of whirlpools, with an outer ring of curving vortices, and an inner core of small globules sucked into the center. Descarte had a French tidy-mindedness and alll his observations were made to contribute to a philosophic scheme. It was based on absolute scepticism - ala montaigne's summing up 'what do i know" he answered "I know that i think' and visa versa.
Descarte wanted to cut away all preconceptions and get back to the facts of direct experience, unaffected by custom and convention. We see this in the paintings of Vermeer. Vermeer wrote "study to be quiet" and inthe same period two religious sects came into being quietism and the quakers.
One characteristic of Vermeer is his passion for light. it is in this more than anything else that he is connected with the scientists and philosophers of his time. All the greatest exponents of civilisation, from Dante to Goethe, have been obsessed by light. But int he seventeenth century light passed through a crucial stage. The invention of the lens was giving it a new range and power.h The telescope 9invented in Holland, although developed by Galileo) discovered new worlds in space; the microscope showed new worlds in a drop of water. And Spinoza polished these lenses (he was the greatest lensmaker in Europe) In holand Descartes studied refraction and Huygens invented the wave theory. Finally newton put forward his corpuscular theory, which was wrong, or at any rate, less nearly right than Huygen, but held the field till the 19th.
The scientific approach to experience ends in poetry. And I suppose that this is due to an almost mystical rapture we feel in the perception of light. Dutch painters achieved a spiritualization of matter in their still lifes. The aesthetic equivalent of that passion for accurate observation that impelled their great scientists.
But the coordination of society and art isn't so tidy Valesquez painted realistically in crazy Spain 5 years before vermeer.
1660 was the zenith.Spinoza's tractatus was printed in 1670. During that decade the leadership of of intellectual life passed from Holland to England. The change began in 1660 when charles II embarked from the Dutch beach to return to england, and ended the isolation and austerity which had afflicted England for almost 15 years.
As so often happens, a new freedom of movement led to an outburst of pent up energy. The Royal society with Robert boyle, the father of chemistry, hook who perfected the microscope and halley who predicted the comet. we waiting , with Newton at the head for the moment of expansion.
Newtons principia gave a mathematical account of the universe which for three hundred years weemed irrefutable. It was both the climax of the age of observation and the sacred book of the next century.
Christopher wren was a geometer and astronomer anda member ofthe royal society who became an architect at the age of thirty. One of his buildings is the greatest architectural unit built in England since the Middle Ages. It is sober without being dull, massive without being oppressive. HE became the most famous architect in England, met bernini.
The fire of london endd on sept 5 1666. Six days later Wren submitted a plan for reguilding the city. Ingenious is the word for the results that folowed. The thirty new churches are each a solution of a different problem. And the crown, ST Pauls, he made the chief monument of English classsicism.
Wren's buildings show us that mathematics, measurement, observation (the things of the philosophy of science) were not hotile to architecture; nor to music (for this was the age of englands great Henry Percell)
But what of poetry. Without Galileo's discoveries Milton's universe would have taken a less grandiose form. Milton was an anarchronism, a survivor from the belated English Renaissance. The year of Paradise Lost, 1667, the supreme example of anti-poetic rationalism - Sprat's history of the royal society - said Poetry is the parent of superstition.
Not all members were so hostile to the imagination. Infact Newton spent or wasted alot of time on biblical stories. But these men didn't believe in constellation. And so began that division between scientific truth and the imagination which was to kill poetic drama, and give a feeling of artificiality to all poetry during the next hundred years. However there was a compensation: the emergence of a clear workable prose. The strange thing is that none of these mid-century writers (except for Carlyle and Ruskin) seemed to notice that the triumph of rational philosophy had resulted in a new form of barbarism. If, from the balcony of the Greeenwich observatory, I look beyond the order of Wrens's hospital I see the squalid disorder of industrial society. Industrial societies nemesis' were population the greedy getting greedier, the ignorant lost touch with traditional skills, and the grand designs became waste of money that no accountant could condone.
CHAPTER NINE - THE PURUIT OF HAPPINESS
By the year 1700 the German speaking countries have once more become articulate. For over a century the disorderly aftermath of the reformation, followed by the thirty years war kept them from playing a part in civilisation.
This program is primarily about music; and some of the qualities of 18th century music - its melodious flow, its complex symmetry, its decorative invention - are reflected in the architecture; but not its deeper appeal to the emotions. And èt the ROCOCO style has a place in civ. Serious-minded people used to call it shallow and corrupt because it was intended to give pleasure; well the founders of America weren't frivolous and thought to include the pursuit of happiness as a goal for mankind. That and the puruit of love are apparent in rococo.
Before we plunge into rococo a word about the austere ideal that had preceded it. For 60 years France's rigidly centralised authoritarian government and classic style had dominated Europe. IT produced Racine, poussin and magnificent architecture. But it was stiff and of authoritarian granduer illuminated.
But the high Baroque of Rome was exactly what the north of Europe needed because it was elastic and adaptable. German musicians built on Scarlatti's international style and the architect Borromini did architecture that fit Germany's social order (the reverse of Frances centralization).
The formative element in German art and GErman music lie in the multiplicity of regions and twons and abbeys. Zimmerman is the german for carpenter. The finest buildings we look at are local pilgrimage churches. The backs were a family of local musical craftsman.
The sound of Bach's music remind one of a cruious fact that people don't always remember- the great art of the 18th century was religious. The thought was anti-religious; the way of life profane. But in the arts, what did this rationalism produce? One adorable painter Watteau, nice furniture; but nothing to set beside the Messiah or the abbeys and pilgrimage churches of Bavaria and Franconia.
Another contributer to German music was that though luther (himself a singer) forbid art, he encouraged music. Organs have played a variable role in European civ. In the 19th they were symbols of newly-won affluence; but in the 17th and 18th they were expressions of municipal pride and independence. ?They were the work of the leading local craftsman.
Dutch competition informed the attitudes that fueled Johann Sebastian's rise. His family had been professional musicians for 100 years. So in certain districts 'bach' meant musician. He belongs to all time. Small principalities rulers competetive ambitions benefited architecture and music in a way that the democratic obscurity of the Hanoverians in England did not.
I felt some scruples in comparing the music of Bach with a baroque interior. No such hesitations need prevent me from invoking the same for George Frederick Handel.
Great men have a way of appearing in complementary pairs. So often it probably wasn't invented by symmetrically minded historians; but represents a need for ballance.
Both Bach and Handel were born in 1685; they both went blind from copying musical scores and were unsuccessfully operated on by the same surgeon, but otherwise they were opposites.
In contrast to BAch's timeless uiversality, Handel was completely of his age. Instead of BAch's frugal, industrious career, handel made and lost several fortunes. He went to rome and as a youth and was immediately taken up by good society.
I have called Handel a Baroque composer, and Neumann's buildings northern Baroque. I could almost equally well have called them Rococo- in areas the terms overlap. But there is a real diffference.
Baroque, however modified in Germany and Austria, was an Italian invention. Baroque first came into being as religious architecture and expressed the emotional aspirations of the Catholic church. Rococo was to some extent a parisian ivention, and provocatively secular. It was superficially a reaction against the heavy Classicism of Versailles. INstead of the static orders of antiquity, it drew inspiration from natural objects. Rococo was a reaction, but it was not negative. It represented a real gain in sensibility. It achieved a new freedom of association and captured new and more delicate shades of feeling.
All this is expressed by Watteau (1684). He saw transitoriness and so a feeling of the seriousness of pleasure.
Watteau died in 1721 at 37. By that date the Rococo style was begining to affect decoration and architecture. Ten years later it was as international as early 15th gothic. And like gothic the art of small courts, an art of elegance rather than greatness, an art in which religious motives were treated with grace and sentiment rather than solemn conviction.
An international style overrides convienience or functionalism. No one supposed that rococo knife handles were easy to hold or the soup tourins easy to hold or clean. They had to be like rocks and shells. Walter Pater said that all art aspired to the condition of music. Probably not applied art. But it is true of Rococo
In rococo churches the faithful are persuaded not by fear, but by joy. To enter them is a foretaste of paradise: sometimes rather more like the islamic paradise than the disembodied paradise of Christianity.
In Haydn's early works, particularly those for small orchestras and strings, his music does seem to be in exactly the same style as the Rococo rooms in which it was performed.
And yet to pronounce the name of Mozart in one is dangerous. It gives color - pretty color - to the notion that Mozart was merely a Rococo composer. Fifty years ago this was what most people thought about him, and the notion was supported by horrible little plaster busts which made him look the perfect 18th century dummy.
I like the story of Mozart sitting at table absentmindedly folding and refolding his napkin into more and more elaborate patterns, as fresh musical ideas passed through hius mind. But this formal perfection was used to express two characteristics which were very far from the rococo style. One a peculiar kind of melancholy amounting almost to panic that haunt the isolation of genius (mozart felt it young) The other was a passionate interest in humans and their relations.
Dr Johnson is said to have called opera "an extravagant and irrational entertainment" True. It seems strange that it was brought to perfection in the age of reason. But just as the greatest art of the early 18th was religious, so the greatest artistic creation of the Rococo is completely irrational. Opera had been invented in the 17th. It came to the north from Catholic itoly and flourished in Catholic capitals- Vienna, munich and prague. Indignant protestants said rococo churches were like opera houses. true but backwards. Opera came in when churches went out. They expressed the new profane religion and are often the biggest and best buildings in catholic countries.
Why do folk still spend 3 hours seeing something they don't understand? Why devote a large portion of German and Italian budgets to it? Partly due to skill. But chiefly because it is irrational" what is too silly to be said may be sung.
At the beginning of Mozarts Don Giovanni each character sings their feelings. It is complex. The pursuit of happiness and the pursuit of love, which had once seemed so simple an dlife giving, have become complex and destructive, and his refusal to repent, which makes him heroic, belongs to another phase of civ.
CHAPTER 10 - THE SMILE OF REASON
The 17th century with all its outpouring of genius in art and science still had senseless persecutions and brutal wars waged with unparalled cruelty. By 1700 people had begun to feel that a little calm and detatchment wouldn't come amiss. The smile of reason may seem to betray a lack of emotion; but it didn't preclude strongly held beliefs - belief in natural law, belief in justice, belief in atonement. The philosophers of the Enlightenment pushed civ uphill. Theis gain was consolidated throughout the nineteenth. Up to the 1930s people were not supposed to burn witched and other minorities, extract confessions by torture or go to prison for speaking the truth. We owe this all to the enlightenment and voltaire.
Although the victory of reason and tolerance was won iin France, it was initiated in England and the French philosophers never concealed their debt to the country that produced Newton, locke and the bloodless revolution. And though intellectuals there got hard nocks in print they weren't beaten up or put in prison. But this happened to voltaire and he took refuge in England in 1726.
18th century england was the land of the amatuer. Wren was an amatuer that made himself professional. In a way they inherited the Renaissance ideal of universal man. Amateurism ran through chemistry, philosophy, botany and natural history.
The dark side; 18th century england made two societies (urban and genteel country).
In talking about the 12th and 13th I said how great an advance in civ was then achieved by a sudden consciousness of feminine qualities; the the same was true of 18th century france due to its salons. Conversation is life giving and can only flourish in a small company where no one is stuck up. That is a condition which cannot exist in a court. And, fortunately, the court and government of France wasn't in Paris but in versailes.
Another thing that kept the 18th century salons free from too much pomposity is that the French upper classes were not oppressively rich. They had lost a lot of money in a financial crash. A margin of wealth is helpful to civilisation, but for some mysterious reasongreat wealth is destructive. Ssplendour is dehumanising, a sense of limitation seems to be a condition of good taste.
The people who frequented the salons of 18th century france were not merely a group of gashionable good-timers they were the outstanding philosophers and scientists of their time. They wanbted to publish their views on religion, change government.
The dynamo of the encyclopedia was Diderot. The aims of the Encyclopedia seem harmless enough to us. But authoritarian governments don't like dictionaries. They live by lies and bamboozling abstractions and can't afford to have words accurately defined.
The encyclopedia was twice suppressed and by its ultimate triumph the polite reunions in these elegant salons became precursors of revolutionary politics. They were also precursors of science. In the illustrated science supplement are pictures by Wright of Derby. His picture of an experiment shows the natural philospher with his long hair and dedicated stare, the little girls who can't bear to witness the death of their Cocattoo and a sensible middle age man who tells them that such sacrifices must be made in the interest of science. It shows that science was to some extent an after dinner occupation, like playing the piano in the next century. Voltaire did amatuer science.
In the 18th emerged a country where civilisation still had the energy of newness - scotland. The scottish character shows an extraordinary combination of realism and reckless sentiment. Adam smith David Hume, joseph Black and James Watt soon after the year 1760 changed the whole current of European thought and life. If on the practical side the scene must change to Scotland, on the moral side we must return to France. The remarkable thing about the frivolous 18th century was its seriousness. It was, in many ways, the heir to Renaissance humanism, but there was a vital difference. The renaissance took place within the church. A few humanists had shown signs of scepticism but not about christianity as a whole. People had the comfortable moral freedom that goes with an unquestioned faith.
The encyclopediest were total materialists whothought that moral and intellectual qualities were due to an accidental conjunction of nerves and tissues. It was a courageous belief to hold in 1770, but it was not (and will never be) an easy one on which to found or maintain a civ. So the 18th was faced with the task of making a new morality without christianity.
This morality was built on two foundations: one of them was the doctrine of natural law: the other was the stoic morality Rome. The belief that the simple goodness of natural man was superior to the artificial goodness of sophisticats. The complement to this agreeable delusion was an ideal of virtue drawn from Plutarch.
The romans who sacrificed for the state were made more memorable by the pictorial imagination of Jacques Louis David. In his Oth of the horatii (1785) the melting outlines and poos of sensuous shadow are gone and instead is a firmly outlined expression of will. Two years later he painted a more grimly Plutarchian picture, Brutus having his two dead sons, who were convicted of treachery, being brought to him. These incidents in Roman history do not appeal to us but were in harmonsy with the mood of and explain the next 5 years.
Well again we must look at a young underpopulated country. And we look at Thomas Jefferson. He crated monticello with inventiveness: Doors that open as one approaches them, a clock that tells the days of the week, a bed so placed that one gets out of it in either of two rooms. All this shows a man of inginuity working alone outside any accepted body of tradition. But Jefferson wasn't a crank. He was the typical universal man of the eighteenth century, linguist, scientist, agriculturist, educator, town-planner and architect. Almost the reincarnation of Leon Battista Alberti. Jefferson wasn't the architect as alsberti, but then he was also the president of the united states. And as an architect he wasn't bad. MOnticello was the beginning of that simple almost rustic classicism that stretches up our eastern seaboard. It lasted for 100 years producing a body of civilised, domestic architecture equal to any in the world.
The establishment of religious freedom that earned him so much hatred and abuse in his own day we now take for granted. But the university of Virginia is still a suprise. He designed the whole thing himself. There are ten pavilions for ten professors and the students rooms behind them but all within reach; the corporate humanism. Jeffersons romanticism is shown by the way he left eh fourth side of his courtyard open so young scholars could look across to the mountains still inhabited by his fathers friends the indians.
How confidently the Founding Fathers assumed the mantle of republican virtue and put into practice the french enlightenment. The greatest sculptor, Houdon, who did the Voltaire with the smile, Did the Richmond Va Washington. The smile is gone on this republican hero.
Washington DC was laid out by a French engineer named l'Enfant, under the direction of Jefferson and is certainly the most grandiose piece of town planning since Sixtus V's rome.
CHAPTER 11 - THE WORSHIP OF NATURE
For almost a thousand years the chief creative force in western civilisation was Christianity. Then in about the year 1725 it suddenly declined and in intellectual society practically disappeared. This left a vacuum. There are said to be 52 meanings of nature in 18th century it meant common sense. The first stage in this new direction of the human mind was very largely achieved in England. In 1730 Montewquieu noted: There is no religion in England. If anyone mentions religion people begin to laugh. It appears in minor poets and provincial painters and fashions like the one that changed straight formal gardens into twisting paths with pseudo-natural prospects. What were known all over the world for a hundred years as English Gardens. Englands biggest effect on Europe outside of early 19th clothes fashions.
Trivial? Well all fashions seem so but are serious.
Then in about the year 1760 this English prelude of melancholy, minor poets and picturesque gardens touched Rousseau. Though he got high on Swiss mountains. For over 2000 years mountains had been considered simply a nuisance: unproductive, obstacles to communication, the refuge of bandits and heretics.
Other than one 1340 hike by Petrarch to see a view and a trip by Leonardo to see botany no other mountain climbs are recorded. And to ERasmus, montaigne, descartes, or newton practically all ofthe great civilisers the thought of climbing a mountain for pleasure would have seemed ridiculous. People who crossed the alps never thought to admire the scenery until 1739 when the poet Thomas Grey did. This started a small swiss tourist industry.
Rousseau was a hounded genius. He said I feel therefore I am. Hume reached the same conclusion by logical means. It was an intellectual time-bomb, which after sizzling away for almost two hundred years has only just gone off.No one, except the marquis de Sade, saw through the new God or goddes. "Nature averse to crime" he said in 1792 "I tell you nature lives and breathes by it, hungers at all her pores for bloodshed, yearns with all her heart for the futherance of cruelty.
Rousseau's view was partly a survival of the old myth of the Golden Age and partly a feeling of shame at the corruption of European Society. Voltaire said "no one has ever used so much intelligence to persuade us to be stupid. After reading your book one feels that one ought to walk on all fours. unforunately during the last sixty years i have lost the habit."
On whether primitive man is good or evil: Polynesia produced no Dante, michelangelo, shakespeare newton or Goethe. And we perhaps had disasterous consequence for them, perhaps the very frailty of those Arcadian societies shows that they were not civilisations in the sense of the word which he has been using.
Far the greatest man to approximate nature and truth was Goethe. He saw all living things as striving for fuller development through an infinitely long process of adaptation. But this analytic aproach to nature had less immediate effect on people's minds than the purely inspirational approach of the English Romantic poets coleridge and wordsworth.
Wordsworth's approach to nature was religious in the moral Anglican manner. He had seen alot though. He left the revolution to England tlaking only to trapmps and begars and discharged prisoners. He was crushed by man's inhumanisty to man. In 1793 he realized only total absorption in nature could heal and restore his spirit. HE had earned the right to be retracted in nature. Sympathy with the voiceless and the oppressed, humna or animal is the prerequisit tot ehworship of nature from st francis on.
Robert Burns noted that animals often show more courage and loyalty and unselfishness than sophisticated people, and also a greater sense of the wholeness of life.
What was it that made Wordsworth turn from mman to nature? it was going to live with his sister. The burning heat of reomantic egoism. Both Byron and Wordsworth fell deeply in love with their sister. The inevitable prohibition was a desaster for both of them. IT made Byron restless and cynical and he wrote Don Juan. Wordsworth lost inspiration.
Then Constable appeared with his landscapes. We have got so used to this approach to painting that it is difficult for us to see how strange it was to love shiny posts and rotten banks more than heroes in aromor. A picture like his Willows by a Stream is the forerunner of a quantity of mediocre painting, just as wordsworth's poems to daisies aticipated a quantity of bad poetry. It was rejected from the academy.
The simple life; it was a necessary part of the new religion of nature, and one instrong contrast to earlier aspirations. civ, not from a monestary or palace or salon, but from a cottage. This worship was connected with walking. And so, for over 100 years, going for a country walk was the spiritual as well as the physical exercise of all intellectuals, poets and philosophers.
Turner was the supreme exponent of the picturesque sublime; and sometimes his storms and avalanches seem preposterous, just as Byrons rhetoric is. But all the time Turner was perfecting for his own private satisfaction and entirely new approach to painting which was only recognised in our own day. Briefly it consisted of transforming everything into pure color. One must remember that for centuries objects were though to be real because they were solid. Color was considered immoral - perhaps rightly so, because it is an immediate sensation and makes its effect independently of those ordered memories which are the basis of morality. Turner declared the indepencdence of color and thereby added a new faculty to the mind.
Nobody takes seriously Ruskins belief that nature illustrates moral law. All the same when he says "the power which causs the several portions of a plant to help each other we call life. Intensity of life is an intensity of helpfulness. The ceasing of this help is what we call corruption" He defended turner and accumulated acurate observations of nature to show nature worked according to law.
This religion is shown in the sky in the paintings.
Constable said" I never saw anything ugly in my life" Landscaping was popular for almost a hundred years. Then came photography and the three great lovers of nature of the late 19th, Monet, cezanne and VAn gogh had to make a more radical transformation. The enraptured vision that first induced Rousseau to live in sensation had one more triumph in the 19th from Monet and Renoir.
A long time simce Hume said all was an impression but Monet said "light is the principle person in the picture" gave them a philsophic unity. It changed our way of seeing, was very short movement. The period which men can work together happily inspired by a single aim last only a short time. This is a tragedy of civilisation.
Monet painted two rooms of the Nympheas in Paris going blind. Total immersion: this is the ultimate reason why the love of nature has been for so long accepted as religion. It is a means by which we can lose our identity in the whole and gain thereby a more intense conscousness of being.
CHAPTER 12 - THE FALLACIES OF HOPE
The reasonable world of an 18th century library is symmetrical consistent and enclosed. Symmetry is a chuman concept, because with sll our irregularities we are more or less symmetrical as reflected in Mozarts phrases. Consistency and enclosure can be a prison, they are the enemies of movement.
Beethoven is the sound of spiritual hunger and European man once more reaching for something beyond his grasp. We must leave the trim, finite interiors of 18th century classicism and go confront the infinite.
Byron, like all great romantics was obsessed with the sea.
IN america it might be possible for a new political constitution; but it took something more explosive to blast the heavy foundations of Europe, just as it had in the reformation.
Towards the end of the 18th rational declineds and vivid assertions take its place. William Blakes Marriage of Heaven and Hell (1789) is a handbook of anti-rational wisdom comparable to Neitzsche's Zaranthustra. Robert Burns was the Scottish equivalent
In June 1789 the first phase, the liberal bourgeois phase of the revolution came to a climax. The members of the National Assembly had found themselves locked out of their usual meeting place and went off to a tennis court where they swore an oath to establish a constitution. The constitutional, one might almost say the American phase of the French Revolution belonged to the age of reason
Three years later we hear the sound of a new world of citizens marching marching all the way from mareilles to paris, tugging three pieces of cannon and singing a new song - the Merseillaise
Perhaps the romantic movements greatest legacy is the message to the young that those who are strong in ove may yet find a way of escape from the rotten parchment ponds that tie us down. Early on mens belief in a new world was so strong that they changed the year 1792 to the year 0. and the month names to names that express the love of nature. Also womens huge clothing get thrown out for simple dresses.
A more formidable job was to replace christianity. They wanted to tear down chartres and build a temple of wisom in its place. Not even robespierre could pull of a new religion. And then the Committee of Public Safety started killing people. "in a republic which can only be based on virtue, any pity shown towards crime is a flagrant proof of treason" Many of the subsequent horrors were due to anarchy. The men of 1793 tried to quell it by violence. Communal enthusiasm may be a dangerous intoxicant; but if humans were to lose altogether the sense of glory, I think we should be the poorer and when religion is in decline it is an alternative to naked materialism.
What happened to the heroes that spoke for humanity during this time? Nothing can be more depressing than the withdrawal of the great romantics. Wordsworth saying he'd give his life for the Church of England. Goethe saying it was better to support a lie than admit political confusion in the state.
But two did not retreat and so became architypal Romantic heroes. Beethoven and Byron. Both held an attitude of defiance to convention and believed unshakably in freedom. Byron, couth and charming, was expelled. Beethoven uncouth and argumentative was accepted. perhaps because genius was more valued in vieena than london. maybe beethoven was a better symbol.
Beethoven liked napoleon until he was proclaimed emporer. As a young man he saw mozart's Don giovanni and was shocked by its cynicism. He determined to write an opera in which unwavering love and freedom were associated: Fidelio.
When the Bastille fell in 1792 it was found to contain only seven old men who were annoyed at being disturbed. Beethoven was an optimist. Then in the 1790s real horrors came and by 1810 all the hopes of the 18th century had been proved false: the rights of man, the discoveries of science, the benefits of industry, all delusion.
The spokesman of this pessimism was Byron. From Goete to t he most brainless schoolgirl his works were read with hysterical enthusiasm. His bad poetry made him famous. The positive side of Byron's genious was a self-identification with the forces of nature: not wordsworth's daisies but colossal storms: with the sublime.
Consciousness of the sublim was a faculty that the Romantic movement added to the European imagination. It was an English discovery, related tot he discovery of nature: not the truth-giving nature of Goethe, or the moralising nature of wordswoth, but the savage incomprehensible power outside orselves that makes us aware of the futility of human arrangements. Blake gave this memorable expression. Turner painted it (and loved Byron) in slavers throwing overboard the dead and dying - typhoon coming on. At almost the same date Gericault the most byronic of all painters, had also made his name with medusa.
In romantic imagery the horse is the complement to the shipwreck. Gericault died riding the most unruly horses he could find. Forturnately, he left a spiritual heir hous pessimism was supported by a more powerful intellect. He had the utmost contempt for th eage in which he lived, for its crass materialism and complacent belief in progress; and his art is almost entirely an attempt to escape from it into romantic poetry. Delacroix had a small circle of friends including Chopin the only man he loved without reservation. Though not a christian he was the only great religious painter of the nineteenth century. Delacroix valued civilisation all the more because he knew that it was fragile and he would never have been so naive as to go to Tahiti for an alternative like Gauguin. He heroically stuck to his Tahiti dream despite grotesque incidents and his paintings make up for it.
The early 19th created a chasm in the european mind as great as that whicfh had split up Christendom in the 16th and even more dangerous. On the one side the new middle class (hopefull and energetic without values. sandwiched between a corrupt aristocracy and a brutalised poor. It produced a defensive conventional hypocritical morality) on the other side of the chasm were the poets, painters of the romantic movement. But what could they put in placfe of middle-class morality? They themselves were still in search of a soul.
The search went on throughout the nineteenth century: in Kierkegaard, in Schopenhauer, in Baudelaire, in Nietzsche and in the visual arts in Rodin. He was the last great romantic artist.
His statue of Balzac is the greatest piece of sculpture of the nineteenth century - indeed since michelangelo. Balzac, with his prodigious understanding of human motives scorns conventional values, defies fashionable opinion, 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.
CHAPTER 13 - HEROIC MATERIALISM
New york being built sped up is godless, brutal and violent but has energy strength of will. The cathedrals were built to glorify god, New york for mammon - money gain (the new god). Luxury and squalor. One sees why heroic materialism is still linked with an uneasy conscience. It has been from the start. Historically the first discovery and exploitation of these technical means coincide with the first organised attempts to improve the human lot.
The early pictures of heavy industry are optomistic. The only people who saw through industrailism were the poets. (the workers didn't object cause they were afraid the machines would replace them.
I have often heard it said by people who want to seem clever that civilisation can only exist on the basis of slavery. And in support of their thesis they point to 5th century Greece. If one defines civilisation in terms of leisure and superfluity, there is a grain of truth in this repulsive doctrine. I have throughout this series tried to define civilisation in terms of creative power and the enlargemnet of human faculties; and from that point of view slavery is abominable. The masses of poor people have always had a hard time up through the 19th. Nobody thought they could be cured: St Francis wanted to sanctify poverty, not abolish it. Laws concerning the poor were made to control them.
But slaves and the trade in slaves that was different. It was contrary to christianity; Most people didn't see it as much as local poverty and it was much more horrible. 9 million died on the middle voyage. So the anti-slavery movement became the first communal expression of the awakened conscience.
In its early stages the Industrial Revolution was also a part of the romantic movement. Iron foundaries were used to heighten romantic effect. However the influence of the industrial revolution on Romantic painting is a side issue almost an impertinence when compared to cruel degredations for 60 or 70 years. Arkwright's spinning fram , invented about 1770 is said to start it and it is painted by Wright of Derby and it produced dehumanisation. Long before Carlyle and Marx Wordsworth described the night shift.
Malthus' text said "man has no claim of right to the smallest portionof food" When I call them sacred text I am not joking. Malthus and Ricardo were taken as gospels by the most serious and pious men. The 19th, with its insecure middle class produced hypocrisy on an uprecedented scale. Hypocrisy has been attached tot he 19th as frivolity has been to the 18th. The reaction against this has done more harm than good by making pious respectable worthy joke words. Mass hypocrisy is often referred to as victorian but infact dates from the beginning of the century.
Marx read Engels - I don't know who else did: that was enough. Everybody read Dickens. His novels produced reform in the law, in magistrates courts, in the prevention of public hanging - in 12 more ways. But his description of poverty did no good because the problem was too big and he took a kind of sadistic pleasure in the horrors he described.
The early reformers struggle with industrialised society ilustrates what I believe to be the greatest civilising achievment of the 19th , humanitarianism. Ask americans what matters most and they will say "kindness: Its not a word that would have crossed the lips of any of the earlier heroes of this series. St Francis would have said chastity, obedience and poverty. Dante or Michelangelo: disdain of baseness and injustice: Goethe - to live in the whole andthe beautiful. We forget that horrors were taken for granted in Victorian England. Army and navy lashings, chained workers.
Certain philosophers, going back to Hegel, tell us that humanitarianism is a weak, sloppy, self-indulgent condition spiritually much inferior to cruelty and violence.
At the very beginning of this series I said that I thought one could tell more about a civilisation from its architecture than from anything else it leaves behing. Painting and literature depend largely on unpredictable individuals. But architecture is communal. Judged by its architecture the 19th doesn't come off so well. The public buildings are mostly lacking in style and conviction, perhaps because the strongest creative impulse went into engineering.
Smiles wrote the lives of the engineers. Isambard kingdom Brunel was a born romantic. His every bridge and tunnel was a drama, demanding incredible feats of imagination, energy and persuasion. Brunel is the ancestor of new york. The Brooklyn Bridge was built by Roebling in 1867 and was long the tollest building in new York. The crystal palace was built on Brunel's principles and it housed art for the Great exhibition. The art was weak but the crystal palace wasn't.
Ingres and Delacroix had grown old. In France Gustave Courbet an Millet emerged and did communist art. Courbet's pictures of workers in the fields influenced Van gough.
Throughout this series I have used art to illustrate various phases of civ. But the relationship isn't neat and predictable. A pseudo-Marxist approach works well for decorative arts and mediocrities, but not artists of real talent.
Never before in history have artists been so isolated from society and from official sources of patronage as were the so called impressionists. Their sensuius approach to landscape via the medium of color seems to have no connection with the intellectual currents of the time. In their best years 1865-85 they were ignored.
Before one makes gloomy generalizations about the late nineteenth century. its well to remember that two of the most beautiful pictures of the period are renois boating party. No awakened conscience, no heroic materialism, marx or frued. just ordinary humans enjoying themselves.
The only painter who longed for popularity was Van Gogh. Early awakened conscience had been practical and involved reformers. But later 19th needed atonement. Van Gogh expressed this completely. He set out to be a preacher in the worst areas. He was going to paint poor people ala Millet (his god).
Van Goghs other hero was Tolstoy. Tolstoy towered above his age as DAnte or Michelangelo or beethoven. His novels are marvels of sustained imagination but he was inconsistent. He loved the peasants but lived like an aristocrat. His last words were how do peasants die? His funeral is a filmed riot.
that was in 1910. Within two years Rutherford and Einstein made their discoveries and so, even before WW I a new era, our era, began. Of course science had achieved great triumphs in the 19th, but all were practical in nature. But from the time of Einstein and Niels Bohr science no longer existed to serve human needs but in its own right. When scientists could use a mathematical idea to transform matter they had achieved the quasi magical relationship with the world as artists. When I look at karsh's photograph of an aged Einstein I ask where have i seen that face before; the aged rembrandt.
The incomprehensiblity of our new cosmos (Haldane said "my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose")seems to me, ultimately, to be the reason for the chaos of madoern art. machines have ceased to be tools and have begun to give us direction (Uzi to the computer). Our other specialty is our urge to destruction.
And yet I don't think we are entering a new dark ages. On the universities the inheritors of our catastrophes look cheerful enough Very different from the melancholy late romans. In fact I should doubt if so many people have ever been as well fed, as well read as bright minded as curious and as critical as the young today.
One mustn't overrate the culture of what used to be called "top people" before the wars. They had charming manners, but they were as ignorant as swans. They question institutions. But civ needs institutions.
At this point I reveal myself in my true colors, as a stickin the mud. I hold a number of beliefs that have been repudiated by the liveliest intellects of our time I believe that order is better than chaos, creation is better than destruction. I prefer gentlenss to violence, forgiveness to vendetta. On the whole knowledge is preferable to ignorance and sympathy more important than ideology.
I believe that in spite of the tiumphs of science, men haven't changed much in the last tow thousand years and in consequence we must still try to learn from history. History is ourselves. I also hold one or two beliefs that are more difficult to put shortly. For example I believe in courtesy, the ritual by which we avoid hurting other's feelings by satisying our own egos. And I think we should remember that we are part of a great whole, which for convenience we call nature. Above all, I believe in the God-given genius of certain individuals, and I value a society that makes their existence possible.
This series has been filled with great works of genius. There they are; you can't dismiss them. And they are only a fraction of western man's output. Often after setbacks and deviations. Western civ is a series of rebirths. Surely this should give us confidence.
I said at the beginning that it is a lack of confidence, more than anything else that kills a civilisation. we can destroy ourselves by cynicism and disillusion, just as efectively as by bombs.
"the best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
True between the wars. The trouble is that there is stillno cneter. The moral and intellectual failure of marsxism has left us with no alternative to heroic materialism and that isn't enough. One may be optimistic, but one can't exactly be joyful at the prospect before us.
THE END
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