The pursuit of glory, p.67
The Pursuit of Glory, page 67
The second event occurred one night in June 1764 when Horace Walpole, fourth son of Sir Robert, had a nightmare. In a letter to his friend William Cole, he explained what had happened:
I waked one morning…from a dream, of which all I could recover was, that I had thought myself in an ancient castle (a very natural dream for a head filled like mine with Gothic story) and that on the uppermost bannister of a great staircase I saw a gigantic hand in armour. In the evening I sat down and began to write, without knowing in the least what I intended to say or relate.
The stream of consciousness continued for two months until his novel–The Castle of Otranto, A Gothic Story–was complete. When he published it the following year, Walpole pretended that it had been found ‘in the library of an ancient Catholic family in the north of England’, having originally been printed in Naples in 1529. In the preface he also speculated that it had been written by a priest of the old school ‘to confirm the populace in their ancient errors and superstitions’ at a time when they were under threat from the light of reason shed by the Renaissance. Perhaps because it was such an immediate success, Walpole claimed ownership in his preface to the second edition, which came out later the same year, describing the exercise as ‘an attempt to blend the two kinds of romance, the ancient and the modern. In the former all was imagination and improbability: in the latter, nature is always intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success. Invention has not been wanting, but the great resources of fancy have been dammed up, by a strict adherence to common life.’ Walpole certainly gave his own resources of fancy full rein, including such extravagances as a portrait that stepped down out of its frame, a statue that bled, a sword so massive that it needed fifty men to wield it, giant severed body parts, a sundry cast of magicians, goblins, friars and other agents of the supernatural, and so on. Both the original dream and the writing of the novel took place in the ideal environment, for in the course of the previous fifteen years or so, Walpole had turned his house at Strawberry Hill near Twickenham into a Gothic extravaganza, if not the very first example of the ‘Gothic revival’ then certainly the most influential.
The third turning point was Goethe’s journey to Strassburg in March 1770, at the age of twenty-one, to study law at the university there. So it was on German-speaking but French-ruled soil that Goethe experienced his cultural conversion. The agent was the cathedral, the first great Gothic building he had seen. Like most educated Europeans, he had been taught to think of medieval architecture as the epitome of barbarism. Representative of German opinion was the definition offered by Johann Georg Sulzer in his very popular encyclopaedia of the arts, first published in 1771: ‘The epithet “Gothic” is frequently applied to the fine arts to designate a barbarous taste, although the meaning of the expression is seldom defined exactly. It seems to be used principally to indicate clumsiness and lack of beauty and good proportions, and originated in the clumsy imitations of ancient architecture perpetrated by the Goths who settled in Italy.’
According to his autobiography, published in 1811, Goethe’s first reaction to Strassburg Cathedral was to see its spire only as the ideal vantage-point from which to view the surrounding countryside. Gradually, however, it began to arouse an aesthetic response which was as powerful as it was difficult to articulate. In thinking through the problems posed by the discrepancy between his anti-Gothic prejudices and the building’s irresistible appeal, Goethe revolutionized his aesthetic code. All the classical canons were refuted by this irregular, asymmetric, idiosyncratic pile, which was not even finished, for one of the two projected spires had never been built, and which resembled an organism that had grown rather than a structure that had been built. What he had been taught to find offensive, he found just the reverse–it was nothing less than ‘a new revelation’.
It was a revelation he shared with the world in an essay entitled Concerning German Architecture, dedicated to Erwein von Steinbach, Strassburg Cathedral’s main architect. Here he used his new enthusiasm for the Gothic to preach a new aesthetic credo. Any idea that beauty could be found by joining schools, adopting principles or following rules was emphatically rejected: they were so many chains enslaving insight and energy. The ghastly good taste, harmony and purity demanded by classical aesthetics did violence to nature’s untamed spontaneity. In the essay’s key passage Goethe defined his alternative: ‘The only true art is characteristic art. If its influence arises from deep, harmonious, independent feeling, from feeling peculiar to itself, oblivious, yes, ignorant of everything foreign, then it is whole and living, whether it be born from crude savagery or cultured sentiment.’ The crucial adjective is ‘characteristic’ (karakteristische), by which he meant art which grows naturally and spontaneously from the culture within which it is produced, not something that has been imitated. In the case of Strassburg Cathedral, it was not only characteristic art, it was also art that was characteristically German. It had been produced on German soil ‘in authentically German times’ (in echter deutscher Zeit) and only gained in stature by virtue of being treated with contempt by the Italians or the French. The great tower was all the more wonderful for looking like something that had grown: ‘a lofty, wide-spreading tree of God, declaring with a thousand branches, a million twigs, and with leaves as numerous as the sands of the sea, the glory of the Lord, its Master’.
It was also in Strassburg that Goethe met Johann Gottfried Herder (1744–1803), who edited the collection ‘Of German identity and art’ [Von deutscher Art und Kunst] in which the essay on Strassburg Cathedral appeared. Together they formed the distinguished core of a movement that came to be known as ‘Sturm und Drang’, usually translated as ‘Storm and Stress’, which took its name from the eponymous play by Friedrich Maximilian von Klinger (1752–1831). This was very much an angry-young-man movement against what was perceived as the stultifying rationalism and classicism of the older generation. Instead the Stürmer und Dränger stressed the primacy of the ‘inner light’ they derived directly or indirectly from Pietism. Their heroes were lonely outsiders, still kicking vigorously against the pricks even as they were sent down to perdition by the forces of convention. Subjectivity, originality and passion were their ideals. As Herder’s mentor, the Prussian Pietist Johann Georg Hamann put it: ‘passion alone gives hands, feet and wings to abstractions and hypotheses; gives spirit, life and voice to images and symbols’.
Within little more than a decade, Sturm und Drang had burnt itself out, but not before Goethe had published two highly influential masterpieces: the play Götz von Berlichingen in 1773 and the novel The Sufferings of Young Werther in 1774. Frederick the Great dismissed the former as ‘an abominable imitation of those bad English plays’, but it had a colossal impact, because it was a great libertarian manifesto, both in what it said and the way that it said it. Stylistically it was a revolution, not so much abandoning the unities of time, place and action–the defining features of the dominant French model–as turning them on their head. The action sprawls over several months, there are dozens of scene changes, and there are at least two main plots. Also calculated to grate on the classical ear was the language, for Goethe drew on two early sixteenth-century sources, Luther’s translation of the Bible and the historical Götz’s autobiography, as well as the Upper German dialect spoken in his home-town of Frankfurt am Main. The result was a wonderfully expressive idiom but one which was also colloquial, ungrammatical and generally rough-hewn. Substantively, the main message anticipated Kant: any kind of authority that was not self-generated but was imposed from outside was to be rejected. In the most important single line of the play, the anti-hero Adelbert von Weislingen says: ‘One thing is for certain: happy and great alone is the man who needs neither to command nor to obey to amount to something!’ Werther was even more of a sensation, the first international best-seller written by a German. The plot is quickly recounted: Werther, a young man of middle class but respectable station, meets and falls in love with a girl who returns his feelings but has already committed herself to another. Unable to come to terms with his frustrated passion, Werther shoots himself. The challenge it thrust in the face of cultural convention was so fierce that indifference was impossible. On the right, clerical conservatives found its glamorization of suicide repugnant; on the left, enlightened progressives found its disparagement of reason equally offensive. But the book’s admirers drowned the criticism with paeans of emotional praise worthy of Werther himself. The journalist Christian Daniel Schubart (1739–91) told his readers: ‘Here I sit, my heart melting, my breast pounding, my eyes weeping tears of ecstatic pain, and do I need to tell you, dear reader, that I have been reading The Sufferings of Young Werther by my beloved Goethe? Or should I rather say that I have been devouring it?’ Within a year there were eleven editions in print, most of them pirated; by 1790 there were thirty. Translated into French and English almost at once, by the end of the century it was available in almost every European language.
From the insights of individuals such as Rousseau, Walpole and Goethe, a new world-view was created. What eventually became known as the ‘romantic revolution’ opposed emotion to reason, faith to scepticism, intuition to logic, subjectivity to objectivity, historicism to natural law, and poetry to prose. In the view of the romantics, the Enlightenment and its scientific method had analysed and analysed until the world lay around them in a dismantled, atomized and meaningless heap. It was a common accusation that the Enlightenment ‘could explain everything, but understand nothing’. Johann Heinrich Merck, a member of the Sturm und Drang group complained of the Enlightenment:
Now we have got the freedom of believing in public nothing but what can be rationally demonstrated. They have deprived religion of all its sensuous elements, that is, of all its relish. They have carved it up into its parts and reduced it to a skeleton without colour and light…and now it’s put in a jar and nobody wants to taste it.
Reason had looked like a liberator but had turned out to be a particularly demanding tyrant. Hamann asked angrily: ‘What is this much lauded reason with its universality, infallibility, certainty, and over-weening claims, but an ens rationis, a stuffed dummy, endowed with divine attributes?’ In Rousseau’s view, the philosophes committed the fault of his lover, Madame de Warens, of whom he wrote in The Confessions: ‘instead of listening to her heart, which gave her good counsel, she listened to her reason, which gave her bad’. It was in this spirit that Heinrich von Kleist (1777–1811) sneered that Newton would see in a girl’s breast only a crooked line, and in her heart nothing more interesting than its cubic capacity, while William Blake (1757–1827) proclaimed that ‘Art is the Tree of Life. Science is the Tree of Death’. In the place of the arid abstractions of rationalism, the romantics called for a remystification of the world. Against the natural aesthetic laws of classicism, they opposed the spontaneity and originality of the inner light of genius. As the greatest of the romantic painters, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), put it: ‘The painter should not just paint what he sees in front of him, but also what he sees inside himself. But if he should see nothing inside himself, then he should stop painting what he sees in front of him. Otherwise his pictures would become mere screens behind which one expects to find only the sick or even the dead.’ This precept was given visual expression by his friend Georg Friedrich Kersting (1785–1847), who depicted Friedrich in a bare studio isolated from the outside world.
To gain access to what really mattered, the romantics believed, reason and its main instrument–the word–were not so much inadequate as misleading, instilling a false sense of precision and clarity. If nature was not an inert mass, governed by the blind, mechanical Newtonian laws, but a vibrant organism pulsating with life, then it could be understood only by allowing the other human faculties to resume their rightful place. It was an indication of their rejection of the Enlightenment’s rationalism that they turned its central metaphor–light–on its head. ‘The cold light of day’ was rejected as superficial, and in its place was enthroned ‘the wonder-world night’. Is the owl perched on the artist’s shoulder in Goya’s The sleep of reason begets monsters a monster to be feared, or is it perhaps the Owl of Minerva, the symbol of wisdom, who ‘flies only at dusk’ (Hegel)? From Novalis and his Hymns to the Night to Richard Wagner and Tristan und Isolde, the night was celebrated as ‘the mother of all that is true and beautiful’.
THE SACRALIZATION OF ART AND THE STATUS OF THE ARTIST
In the course of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, culture shed its representational or recreational function to become a sacralized activity to be worshipped in its own right. One clue is provided by comparing and contrasting two funerals dating from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. No one knows exactly when Mozart was buried, not even the day. He died in Vienna at 1 a.m. on 5 December 1791, according to his widow Constanze. At 3 p.m. on the following day or on the day after that (accounts conflict), the body was taken to St Stephen’s Cathedral, where it was blessed in front of the Crucifix Chapel and was then transported on a hearse through the Stubentor, along the Landstrasse to the new cemetery of St Marx. The actual interment may have taken place on the same day–the 6 or 7 depending on which authority one follows, or more likely on the next, i.e. the 7 or 8, given the lateness of the hour. If some of the crasser myths surrounding Mozart’s obsequies have been exploded, the fact remains that it was a very muted send-off. No one was present at the graveside, apart from the sexton and the priest, and no gravestone was erected to mark the spot.
How different was the treatment of Beethoven thirty-six years later. When he died in Vienna at around 5.45 p.m. on Monday, 26 March 1827, his friends had already selected an appropriate plot in the Währing cemetery. Once life was pronounced extinct, they set about arranging an autopsy, preserving Beethoven’s physical likeness for posterity through a drawing and a death-mask by Joseph Danhauser, and safeguarding his possessions. They also kept a vigil alongside the ‘polished oak coffin which rested on ball-shaped gilded supports’ and which was surrounded by eight candles, as the throngs of those wishing to pay their last respects filed past. Three days later the funeral took place, beginning at three in the afternoon, formal invitations having been issued. As the coffin was carried down into the courtyard of the House of the Black-robed Spaniard, nine priests from the Schottenstift intoned a blessing and a choir drawn from the Italian Opera sang a chorale by Anselm Weber. So dense had the crowd become that the procession had great difficulty in starting off, as one can see from Franz Stober’s celebrated painting, itself a significant phenomenon. When eventually it did get going, a second choir sang the Miserere to trombone accompaniment. Along the road, so many people ‘from all classes and estates’, as a newspaper report put it, had gathered, that the procession to the church of the Holy Trinity in the Alsergasse took one-and-a-half hours to cover the 500 yards (450 m). After the funeral service, the cortège, still numbered in thousands, formed up again for the journey to the Währing cemetery. At the gates, the classical actor Heinrich Anschütz delivered an oration written by the Habsburg Empire’s most celebrated dramatist, Franz Grillparzer. This became justly celebrated in its own right, and is indeed as commendable for its eloquence as for its brevity. Particularly striking was the complete absence of any reference to God. The deity to whom Grillparzer–and Beethoven–paid their homage was Art: ‘The thorns of life had wounded him deeply, and as the castaway clings to the shore, so did he seek refuge in thine arms, O thou glorious sister and peer of the Good and the True, thou balm of wounded hearts, heaven-born Art!’ No supernatural being was necessary, only a secular religion of aesthetics mediated by a supreme artist. As Schubert’s friend Gabriel Seidl put it in a poem dedicated to Beethoven’s memory:
He dominates and reconciles what is strange and incompatible.
He feels through his mind; he thinks through his heart.
He teaches us new jubilation, new laments, new prayer and new jests.
…
He lives! For his life is his music; no god will ever uproot that from the world’s breast.
Part of the explanation for the very different obsequial treatments accorded to Mozart and Beethoven lies in the establishment of art in general, and music in particular, as an independent, autonomous source of value and authority in human society. It was in Germany during the middle decades of the eighteenth century that aesthetics emerged as a distinct discipline. Lessing’s Laocoon, or The Bounds of Painting and Poetry of 1766 synthesized several different strands to form a tie that was to bind together succeeding generations of German intellectuals. Not for nothing was Lessing the son of a Protestant pastor, like so many other of his fellow writers. As Nicholas Boyle has aptly observed in his biography of Goethe, German aesthetic theory was ‘the ex-theology of an ex-clerisy’.
