The near and the far
by Colin Wilson
[ opinion - december 08 ]
In 1905 the Czech composer Vitezslav Novak wrote a tone poem called Of the Eternal Longing. Based on a story by Hans Andersen, it is intended a symbolise his own sense of loneliness. A swan migrating with its flock to warmer climes falls from the sky with exhaustion, and floats all night on the sea. But as the dawn rises, she recovers her strength and flies on alone. The beautiful, sad music evokes the 'eternal longing' of the title, the composer's own sense of isolation.
My own Czech recording of the piece has a cover painting as beautiful as the title, showing a view over a medieval city square on a starlit night, with pointed rooftops and towers. The jester Till Eulenspiegel, whose tone poem by Strauss shares the record, sits with his feel dangling over the parapet of a high tower. This picture seems to me to capture the essence of the eternal longing, which can be expressed in music so much more effectively than in words.
Now it so happens that we can give an exact date for the birth of musical romanticism, more than two centuries ago.
It was in the summer of 1793 when two young men set out on a tour of southern Germany. They were a strangely contrasted pair: one physically robust and full of vitality; the other slender, pale and effeminate. The stronger of the two, although only 20, had already begun to acquire himself a reputation as a writer, and would eventually become one of the most influential storytellers of his generation; his friend - who has been described as a "girlish, helpless creature" - was a musician and a dreamer. Their names - which have been virtually forgotten in our own age - were Ludwig Tieck and Wilhelm Wackenroder. That tour of ancient cities - like Bamberg and Nuremberg - was to have a tremendous impact on these two young men, and, through them, on the rest of Europe.
Tieck, the son of a Berlin ropemaker, had been a friend of Wackenroder since childhood. Strictly speaking, Wackenroder was socially his superior, since his father was a senior civil servant. As far as Wackenroder was concerned, this was a misfortune, for his father was determined that the son should become a success in life; young Wilhelm regarded the very idea of 'success' as revolting. He was shy and melancholy, happy only when listening to music. His friend Tieck was altogether less sensitive to music; his taste was for stronger meat - tales of blood and horror, with a strong infusion of the supernatural. Nevertheless, the two adored one another with an abandonment that would nowadays lead to an assumption of homosexuality, and which was, in fact, almost certainly innocent.
Franconia is the home of the excellent steinwein, sold in flat circular bottles, and no doubt the friends drank their share of it in that summer of 1793.
I can well understand the impact on the two young men, for I experienced it myself in the summer of 1957, a year after the publication of The Outsider. Driving down the Rhine, with its ancient towns, was like being transported back five centuries.
For Tieck and Wackenroder, what made that trip memorable was not just the wine, but visits to old churches and mediaeval towns, many of them still looking much as they had in the days of the minnesingers of the Middle Ages. For Wackenroder, all this came as a revelation; the Berliner fell in love with the romantic charm of southern Germany, and was overwhelmed by the magnificence of mediaeval art. And when he returned to Berlin in the following year, and was forced to enter the Prussian civil service by his father (who was to become Minister of Justice), he spent many tearful hours daydreaming of ancient cobbled streets, gabled houses and Gothic cathedrals. And in due course, he and Tieck consoled themselves by collaborating on a book called Heart-pourings of an Art-loving Monk (Herzensergiessungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders), which was published anonymously - no doubt to prevent their fathers from finding out what they had been doing - in 1797. The sickly Wackenroder had only one more year to live; bored and depressed by the life of a civil servant, he died of typhoid at the age of 25.
Tieck was plunged into grief. In the following year, he published Wackenroder's posthumous papers - with contributions by himself - under the title Fantasies on Art.
The impact of the Heart-pourings of an Art-loving Monk - with its essays on Dürer, Michelangelo, Leonardo and Raphael - was tremendous; it became the bible of a generation, the most influential book since Goethe's Sorrows of Young Werther two decades earlier.
Its most influential chapter was a story called 'The Remarkable Life of the Musician Joseph Berglinger'. Berglinger, says the art-loving monk, was a friend of his youth. His mother died in giving birth to him, leaving the father, a poverty-stricken doctor, to bring up a family of six. They grew like "weeds in a neglected garden". But the young Joseph, "whose whole life was a beautiful fantasy and a heavenly dream", was obsessed by music. When he went to church to hear sacred oratorios, he stood there amidst the crowd, "his brain paralysed with empty earthly trivialities". But as soon as the organ sounded, "long drawn and mighty as a wind from heaven", "it seemed to him as though his soul had unfurled great wings; he felt himself raised up above the barren heath... and he soared into the radiant sky." To us, the image sounds commonplace enough; to Wackenroder's young contemporaries it was new and strange and unutterably exciting. "The present sank away before him; his soul was cleansed of all the pettiness of this world - mere dust on the soul's lustre; the music set his nerves tingling with a gentle thrill, calling up changing images before him with every change in the music." "At certain passages, an isolated beam of light fell on his soul; at this, it seemed to him as though he all at once grew wiser and was looking down, with clearer sight and a certain inspired and placid melancholy, on all the busy world below." (Wagner was later to speak of "art that makes life appear like a game, and withdraws us from the common fate.") But then comes the problem - the problem that was to torment all the great Romantics: that the moment Berglinger walks out into the street, "the rapture vanished like a gleaming cloud."
"His whole life long he was tormented by this bitter dissension between his inborn lofty enthusiasm and our common mortal lot, which breaks in daily on our reveries, forcibly bringing us down to earth."
And so it goes on, for page after page, describing the ecstasies that Berglinger experiences through music, and the intense misery of being forced to return to the trivialities of everyday life.
Finally, Berglinger decides to follow his 'inner voice', and runs away from home to make his way to the nearest great city. There he eventually becomes Kapellmeister in the palace of a prince of the Church.
But it is a disappointing life. He performs great works of art, even performs his own symphonies; yet he feels that these German philistines fail to understand him. Instead of fellow spirits ennobled by great music, he finds only spite and envy. "In my youth I thought to avoid the misery of earthy life; now, more than ever, I have sunk into the mire." Then he is called to his father's deathbed, and is appalled to see the poverty in which his sisters are living. From then on, "his tortured heart would not let him recover himself: In one final tremendous effort, he composes a great oratorio in which he expresses all his sufferings and all his ecstasies. "His soul was like that of the invalid who, in a strange paroxysm, exhibits greater strength than the healthy man." The performance of his oratorio on Easter Sunday leaves him weak and exhausted, and he dies soon after. "Oh why," asks the art-loving monk, "did heaven ordain that the struggle between lofty enthusiasm and the common misery of this earth make him unhappy all his life, and in the end tear apart the twofold nature of his mind and body?"
This story, scarcely a dozen pages long, would become perhaps the most influential work on music ever written.
It was sad that Wackenroder had to die to inspire a generation, but that is more or less the truth of it. For as a dead writer, he passed into legend in a way that is impossible for the living.
It was in 1797, the year before Wackenroder's death, that Tieck made the acquaintance of another brilliant young writer, Friedrich von Schlegel, who was intended for a career in banking before he persuaded his parents to allow him to go to the University at Göttingen. Fascinated by the ancient Greeks, he had already done for them what Wackenroder did for the Italian Renaissance, holding them up as an ideal society where artists and poets can feel at home. Tieck and Schlegel were impressed by one another - Tieck was already famous as the author of some remarkable melodramatic novels and ghost stories - and when Schegel moved to the University of Jena, to join his elder brother August, Tieck was also inspired to move there.
Jena, and its sister-town Weimar were Germany's cultural centres. That was largely because, in 1775, when Wackenroder and Tieck were only two years old, Goethe had moved to Weimar. Two years earlier, he had published The Sorrows of Young Werther, a novel that made all Europe weep and caused an epidemic of suicides. Duke Karl August, who had brought Goethe to Weimar, was delighted to find that the 26-year-old poet was a man of practical judgement, appointed him Privy Councillor. Weimar soon became the literary capital of Germany (or of the conglomeration of states that later became Germany.) Twelve years later, Goethe was joined by the brilliant and rebellious poet Schiller, an ex-army surgeon whose play The Robbers (1780) had caused as great a sensation as Young Werther. Oddly enough, Goethe and Schiller were at first hostile to one another, and Goethe found Schiller a job as a professor of history at nearby Jena simply to get him out of Weimar.
In 1794, the year after Tieck and Wackenroder had made their momentous tour of Franconia, Goethe and Schiller met at a session of the Natural History Society in Jena, and quickly became close friends. Schiller had recently signed a contract to edit a literary magazine called Die Horeon (Horae, in Greek mythology, were the goddesses of the seasons). He asked a gifted young literary critic, August Wilhelm von Schlegel, to come and help him edit it, and in due course Schlegel's younger brother Friedrich joined him. Now Friedrich became the chief theoretician of the new 'romantic' movement - he virtually invented the word - and the house he shared with his brother became the meeting place of like-minded enthusiasts. The poet Novalis, one of the most extreme and gifted of the romantics, joined them in Jena in 1799. And in the same year, Tieck also moved to Jena.
The most famous of his novels, Blond Eckbert, (written before Wackenroder's death) is a preposterous but oddly moving piece of nonsense about a man who accidentally marries his own sister and ends by going mad; its basic message seems to be that life is a dream or a cruel hoax. And in 1798, Tieck had published an unfinished novel which he had planned with Wackenroder, Franz Sternbald's Wanderings, about a young painter, a pupil of Dürer, who wanders off to Italy in search of his true identity. This is an odd mixture of Wackenroder's idealisation of the Middle Ages - the "age of faith and art" - and Tieck's favourite scenery - mountains, crags, impenetrable forests and ruined castles. The hero is initiated into the delights of love, and this, in turn, is nourished by music, "the most heavenly of all the arts". "If one is to believe in purgatory, where the soul is purified and chastened by pain, so, on the contrary, music is a pre-heaven, in which this purification is effected by melancholy bliss." And when the hero encounters a beautiful girl he has seen in childhood visions, and sinks to his knees in front of her, a horn proceeds to "improvise with the most thrilling tones" - an anticipation of film music - until he is not sure whether he is awake or dreaming.
All this explains why Tieck was received with open arms by the Jena romantics, and why his friend's tale of the musician Joseph Berglinger became the book they loved most.
Now it so happened that another influential new recruit had also joined the Schlegels in Jena: Friedrich von Schelling, the author of a remarkable work called Ideas Towards a Philosophy of Nature (1797). In 1798, he was appointed to the chair of philosophy in the university. And at the time when Wackenroder's ideas on music were filling the romantics with a delicious sense of melancholy, Schelling's writings on nature were conjuring up equally moving visions of distant hills and far horizons, and of a great spiritual force that conceals itself behind the face of material reality.
As strange as it sounds to modern ears, few people in the 18th century regarded nature as beautiful. In fact, most people looked upon mountains and forests as rather sinister. Even Tieck, that archpriest of romanticism, uses them as mere stage scenery against which to set his hair-raising melodramas.
Schelling's Philosophy of Nature changed all that that, plus an exraordinary novel called Hesperus by an eccentric humourist named Richter who became famous all over Europe under the name Jean Paul. A clergyman's son who had spent his childhood and youth in extreme poverty, and even as a student at Leipzig came close to starvation, Jean Paul Richter was past 30 when Hesperus burst upon the world, and turned him into a cult figure worshipped by the new generation.
Anyone who is tempted to borrow a copy of Hesperus from the library to see what all the fuss was about will be sorely puzzled. For this 1,000-page monster was influenced by Sterne's comic masterpiece Tristram Shandy, and at least half its length is taken up with rambling digressions on anything that takes the author's fancy. What made it so popular was its highly romantic plot about two close friends who are in love with the same girl - who finally turns out to be the sister of one of them.
Victor and Flamin have been educated together in England, and regard one another with a romantic passion that would nowadays lead to the suspicion that they are gay. (But in the late 18th century, close male friends were always flinging their arms round one another and bursting into tears.) When the handsome Victor returns from another stint of education at medical school, Flamin takes him to the top of an ivy-clad tower (another staple of Romanticism) and confesses that he is in love with a beautiful girl called Clotilde, the daughter of the local prince, and is terrified that she will prefer Victor. Victor tenderly assures him that nothing is less likely. But when Victor meets Clotilde at a garden party, he is instantly smitten. And the girl seems to feel the same. What is to be done?
Later that evening, Victor's father, Lord Horion, reveals a strange secret. Flamin is actually the son of the local prince, and therefore Clotilde's brother. Clotilde already knows this, and has been sworn to silence. The explanation of the deception is that Horion, an Englishman who is the prince's chief minister, is afraid that Flamin will become as corrupt as his libertine father, and has spirited him away with Victor to be educated in England. And now Flamin wants to marry his own sister, it is a somewhat delicate situation.
Then Victor and Clotilde meet by chance in the woods and confess their love. And Flamin, who finds them in one another's arms, assumes he has been betrayed and tries to kill Victor. He fails, but Victor feels obliged to renounce his love and go travelling in Europe. Flamin, tormented by guilt, becomes a recluse. Finally he learns the truth, and is contemplating suicide by flinging himself from the ivy-covered tower when he hears a sound, and turns to find Clotilde and Victor behind him. Both put an arm round his waist and lead him back home, and so all ends more or less happily.
We find it hard to imagine how this preposterous concoction achieved such popularity. So did I - until I actually tried reading it, and found it all so oddly moving and exciting, and I could see exactly why it swept across Europe just as Richardson's Pamela had in 1740. It is full of exquisite little scenes of natural beauty, and together with Schelling's Philosophy of Nature, created a passion for woods, mountains and moonlit ruins.
For the impecunious Jean Paul, its success represented salvation. It came at just the right time, when failure to find a publisher had led him to return home to live with his mother, who had only a widow's pension, and he was 32 when Hesperus made him famous. From then until his death 30 years later (1825) he was one of Germany's best-loved writers, and novels like Titan (on which Mahler based a symphony) may be said to have taught Europe to surrender to "the eternal longing".
But even by the time of Jean Paul's death, Romanticism was encountering a predictable problem. Dreams of starry nights and quaint mediaeval towns were all very well, but what happened when you woke up the next morning and had to go to work? The dreams made it twice as hard to put up with everyday trivialities. Many would-be poets whose fathers wanted them to go into commerce must have felt that Wackenroder was well out of it. Novalis, a young aristocrat whose real name was Friedrich von Hardenberg, became engaged to a beautiful 14-year-old girl, and lost the will to live when she died of a liver complaint. That, and his brother's death shortly thereafter, had the effect of turning him into a religious mystic, whose work would have an immense effect on the young generation.
His Hymns to the Night are the classic expression of the poet's longing to return to the darkness. The hero of his unfinished novel Heinrich von Ofterdingen spends his life in a vain search for a blue flower that he has glimpsed in a vision. Novalis would die at the age of twenty-nine.
In England, the spirit of Romanticism made one of its an earliest appearances in the person the William Blake, also a poet and mystic. Born in 1757, Blake had published The Marriage of Heaven and Hell in 1793, when Jean Paul was writing Hesperus. Blake's parents were members of a congregation in Fetter Lane, London, presided over by a strange German mystic called Count Ludwig von Zinzendorf, whose religious teachings were held in high esteem by the parents of Novalis. It was not until 2003 that the American scholar Martha Schuchard revealed just how peculiar were the doctrines of the mystical count. In Why Mrs Blake Cried: The Sexual Basis of Spiritual Vision, we learn that Zinzendorf went through a spiritual crisis that culminated in the realisation that there is a close connection between religious ecstasy and sexual ecstasy. Members of this Jesus-oriented congregation, like Blake's father and mother, were initiated into sexual ceremonies which induced a mystical/sexual state that often lasted all night. In effect, they were practising a kind of sexual yoga. The mystic Emanuel Swedenborg, another member of the sect, had arrived independently at the same conclusions about the connection between religion and sex.
Blake was still a baby when his parents ceased to be members of the congregation, so there can have been no direct influence. But Zinzendorf was convinced that children can be taught even in the womb, and it is tempting to speculate that Zinzendorf's sexual doctrines - and the sexual yoga of Mr and Mrs Blake - influenced him before he was born, and explains the powerful sexual teaching of works like Visions of the Daughters of Albion. The reason 'Mrs Blake cried' was not simply because her husband proposed going to bed with the maid, but because he held views about the delights of promiscuity that must certainly have shocked her. It would be another century and a half before such views were promulgated by the liberated hippies of the 1960s.
Even by the time of Blake's death at the age of 70 in 1827, the doctrines of sexual freedom had come to play a central part in Romanticism. Driven out of England in 1814 by Anglo-Saxon puritanism, Byron and Shelley became symbols of sexual dissipation, and spent the remainder of their lives abroad. Byron, the embodiment of romantic rebellion, became the most celebrated poet in Europe and America. (He noted that in spite of his popularity in England, his sales in France, Germany and America were even larger.)
Yet when Byron died in 1824, fighting with the Greeks against the Turks, Romanticism virtually died with him. It was the same in Germany after the death of Jean Paul in the following year. His work lost its popularity almost immediately. And the death of Goethe in 1832, at the age of 83, might be regarded as the full stop that brought the epoch of blissful heart-pourings to an end.
This was not, of course, because the 'eternal longing' suddenly evaporated. On the contrary, it remained more powerful than ever. What had evaporated was the optimism that had bubbled out of Hesperus, and that had made Wordsworth write of the French Revolution "Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive". It was the collapse of belief in the power of the human spirit to conquer, to achieve new levels of freedom. The pessimism that was already inherent in Young Werther and The Robbers and the Hymns to the Night had become the spirit of the age. The Industrial Revolution only made things worse, for it made the poets and artists feel that if this was what conquest was all about, then they preferred defeat. The liebestod of Tristan and Isolde was a rejection of everything the 19th century stood for.
So the end of the century, the 1890s saw the Romantic quest end in gloom and defeat. Yeats called them "the tragic generation", all those poets and artists who died of drink or dissipation or discouragement: Lionel Johnson, Francis Thompson, Aubrey Beardsley, Oscar Wilde, James Thomson, Ernest Dowson, Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud. Yeats's alcoholic friend Dowson symbolises the spirit of the Nineties in all its elegiac sadness when he wrote in 'Dregs':
The fire is out, and spent the warmth thereof
This the end of every song man sings...'
The poets of Yeats's 'tragic generation' certainly believed in those glimpses of bliss that illuminate the human spirit, and bring a sense of freedom; but they felt we have no control over them. The spirit of man is like an oxy-acetylene flame that can burn under water. But sooner or later, the water will close in and extinguish it.
What destroyed Romanticism, as much as anything, was a sense of increasing realism. Those early romantics, like Rousseau and the young Goethe and Schiller and Jean Paul, felt that freedom was just around the corner. After the death of Byron, this seemed to be an illusion. Yeats summarised it all in a sad little poem 'The Wheel':
Through winter-time we call on spring,
And through the spring on summer call,
And when the abounding hedges ring
Declare that winter's best of all;
And after that there's nothing good
Because the spring-time has not come -
Nor know that what disturbs our blood
Is but its longing for the tomb.
The longing for freedom is seen as a futile craving for change, the view Schopenhauer had expressed in his nihilistic World as Will and Illusion.
In the 20th century, this mood of sadness and defeat turned into something more like gloomy stoicism. In Villiers de Lisle-Adam's Axel, the hero says contemptuously: "As for living, our servants can do that for us." He is declaring that 'real life' is too crude and stupid to be worth the effort. In Ulysses, James Joyce seems to have accepted the world's brutal materialism and crude reality - EM Forster described it as "a determined attempt to cover the universe in mud" - yet this is really disappointed romanticism. The surrealistic Night Town scene is full of a kind of violent rage, as if he is shaking his fist at the world of matter - like Dylan Thomas raging against the dying of the light.
The dilemma is expressed with unusual clarity in LH Myers's 1935 novel The Near and the Far. In the opening chapter, the young Prince Jali looks out from the battlements of a castle in the capital of Akbar the Great; he and his family have travelled there for a great conference. As he looks over the desert towards the magnificent sunset, Jali reflects that there are two deserts, one of which is a glory to the eye, and the other of which is a weariness to the foot. And there is no way of bringing these two together. If he now rushed downstairs and ran towards the sunset, he would merely get his shoes full of sand. The 'near and the far' remain irreconcilable. Or, as Yeats put it:
Nothing that we love over-much
Is ponderable to the touch.
What happened in the first half of the 20th century was that the sad defeatism of the 1890s gave way to a kind of grim stoicism. This new philosophy called itself Existentialism, a term that had been invented in the mid-19th century by the Dane Soren Kierkegaard as a criticism of German philosophy, particularly Hegel. Kierkegaard complained that what ordinary people need is not some gaseous, idealistic philosophy about history and the universe, but an answer to the question of what we ought to do with our lives. Its basic question is: what am I doing here? As a Christian, Kierkegaard felt that the answer was: searching for salvation. But a century later, a new generation of existentialists like Jaspers, Heidegger, Sartre and Camus declined religious consolations and insisted that man must learn to stand on his own feet. And in the Introduction to a collection of existentialist texts The Search for Being (1962), Walter Kimmel uses the phrase "the fundamental alienation of beings from the source of power, meaning and purpose", which is perhaps the best encapsulation of the problem that has been achieved. In short, the aim - the basic human aim - is to regain contact with "the source of power, meaning and purpose" - what I have labeled 'power consciousness'.
In his early book The Myth of Sisyphus, Camus says that Sisyphus, as a punishment from the gods, has to keep on rolling a rock uphill, and watch it roll down again for ever - yet, he says, we must imagine Sisyphus happy, because in spite of physical servitude, he still possesses internal freedom. And here we can immediately see the connection between Romanticism and Existentialism. Byron, in the The Prisoner of Chillon, had written:
Eternal spirit of the chainless mind
Brightest in dungeons, liberty thou art!
which makes us aware that Existentialism is simply, you might say, 'Romanticism Mark 2', and that its starting point is a recognition of the reality of human freedom - for example, Sartre made the interesting comment that he had never felt so free as when he was in the French Resistance, and was likely to be arrested and shot at any moment. But it also takes it for granted that human life is totally meaningless. Hemingway summarised his own version of this 'existential stoicism' when he wrote "A man can be destroyed but not defeated."
But what if - like myself - we have a powerful bias in favour of being neither destroyed nor defeated?
Philosophically speaking, I have devoted all my writing life to trying to create what might be called 'Romanticism Mark 3' - a positive existentialism, that declines to accept this 'premise of meaninglessness' that is found in Sartre, Camus, Foucault, Derrida and other fashionable thinkers of the past 50 years. This 'new existentialism', based upon the phenomenological method of Edmund Hussserl, is the intellectual foundation of my own 'non-pessimistic existentialism.'
