'Love of Life & Love of Death'

As far back as I can remember, I have found myself profoundly moved by the various expressions of the Romantic movement in art—long before I knew that term—to the point that my interest in and fascination with the subjects of that art early on became inextricably bound up with my perception of them through a Romantic lens. What I mean to say is that when in life I see a wild landscape and or a mediæval ruin, I immediately perceive it as a Romantic, or at least a ‘post-Romantic’, and certainly not as anyone of an earlier epoch would have done. Similarly, when I came across various Romantic artworks, such as Friedrich’s ‘Couple Gazing at the Moon’ (1807) above, or Brahms’s Hungarian Dance No. 5 in F# minor (watch a quartet play it here), or Wordsworth’s ‘Upon Westminster Bridge (here), I felt these things resonate inside me like a familiar voice. So it’s long been interesting to me to read descriptions of or theoretical and critical references to the Romantic movement, because I feel someone is putting into words something about myself that I always found rather ineffable. Here is a wonderful such passage from Sir Isaiah Berlin’s Mellon Lectures of 1965, published as The Roots of Romanticism, ed. Henry Hardy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton U, 2001), pp. 16-8:

Romanticism is the primitive, the untutored, it is youth, the exuberant sense of life of the natural man, but it is also pallor, fever, disease, decadence, the maladie du siècle, La Belle Dame Sans Merci, the Dance of Death, indeed Death itself. It is Shelley’s dome of many-coloured glass, and it is also his white radiance of eternity. It is the confused teeming fullness and richness of life, Fülle des Lebens, inexhaustible multiplicity, turbulence, violence, conflict, chaos, but also it is peace, oneness with the great ‘I Am’, harmony with the natural order, the music of the spheres, dissolution in the eternal all-containing spirit. It is the strange, the exotic, the grotesque, the mysterious, the supernatural, ruins, moonlight, enchanted castles, hunting horns, elves, giants, griffins, falling water, the old mill on the Floss, darkness and the powers of darkness, phantoms, vampires, nameless terror, the irrational, the unutterable. Also it is the familiar, the sense of one’s unique tradition, joy in the smiling aspect of everyday nature, and the accustomed sights and sounds of contented, simple, rural folk—the sane and happy wisdom of rosy-cheeked sons of the soil. It is the ancient, the historic, it is Gothic cathedrals, mists of antiquity, ancient roots and the old order with its unanalysable qualities, its profound but inexpressible loyalties, the impalpable, the imponderable. Also it is the pursuit of novelty, revolutionary change, concern with the fleeting present, desire to live in the moment, rejection of knowledge, past and future, the pastoral idyll of happy innocence, joy in the passing instant, a sense of timelessness. It is nostalgia, it is reverie, it is intoxicating dreams, it is sweet melancholy and bitter melancholy, solitude, the sufferings of exile, the sense of alienation, roaming in remote places, especially the East, and in remote times, especially the Middle Ages. But also it is happy co-operation in a common creative effort, the sense of forming part of a Church, a class, a party, a tradition, a great and all-containing symmetrical hierarchy, knights and retainers, the ranks of the Church, organic social ties, mystic unity, one faith, one land, one blood, ‘la terre et les morts’, as Barrès said, the great society of the dead and the living and the yet unborn. It is the the Toryism of Scott and Southey and Wordsworth, and it is the radicalism of Shelley, Büchner and Stendhal. It is Chateaubriand’s aesthetic medievalism, and it is Michelet’s loathing of the Middle Ages. It is Carlyle’s worship of authority, and Hugo’s hatred of authority. It is extreme nature mysticism, and extreme anti-naturalist aestheticism. It is energy, force, will, life étalage du moi; it is also self-torture, self-annihilation, suicide. It is the primitive, the unsophisticated, the bosom of nature, green fields, cow-bells, murmuring brooks, the infinite blue sky. No less, however, it is also dandyism, the desire to dress up, red waistcoats, green wigs, blue hair which the followers of people like Gérard de Nerval wore in Paris at a certain period. It is the lobster which Nerval led about on a string in the streets of Paris. It is wild exhibitionism, eccentricity, it is the battle of Ernani, it is ennui, it is taedium vitae, it is the death of Sardanopolis, whether painted by Delacroix, or written about by Berlioz or Byron. It is the convulsion of great empires, wars, slaughter and the crashing of worlds. It is the romantic hero—the rebel, l’homme fatal, the damned soul, the Corsairs, Manfreds, Giaours, Laras, Cains, all the population of Byron’s heroic poems. It is Melmoth, it is Jean Sbogar, all the outcasts and Ishmaels as well as the golden-hearted courtesans and the noble-hearted convicts of nineteenth-century fiction. It is drinking out of the human skull, it is Berlioz who said he wanted to climb Vesuvius in order to commune with a kindred soul. It is Satanic revels, cynical irony, diabolical laughter, black heroes, but also Blake’s vision of God and his angels, the great Christian society, the eternal order, and ‘the starry heavens which can scarce express the infinite and eternal of the Christian soul’. It is, in short, unity and multiplicity. It is fidelity to the particular, in the paintings of nature for example, and also mysterious tantalising vagueness of outline. It is beauty and ugliness. It is art for art’s sake, and art as an instrument of social salvation. It is strength and weakness, individualism and collectivism, purity and corruption, revolution and reaction, peace and war, love of life and love of death.

Obviously, there is much here that does not appeal to me, whether æsthetically, intellectually, or, certainly, morally. But there is also much that does appeal to me, but which I cannot reconcile with what I either know or believe after careful reflection to be true or good. For instance, the æsthetic ideas of Fr Pavel Florensky—with which I am primarily acquainted through Victor Bychkov’s The Aesthetic Face of Being: Art in the Theology of Pavel Florensky, trans. Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky (Crestwood, NY: St Vladimir’s Seminary, 1993)—and Photios Kontoglou—in Meetings With Kontoglou and Byzantine Sacred Art (both available here, from the Institute for Byzantine & Modern Greek Studies)—have convinced me to regard Romantic landscape painting as suboptimal art, and yet I still admire it! So anyway, consider this paragraph as an invitation to explain to me what is wrong with Romanticism, either in general or in its various expressions. You will find me an attentive and sympathetic audience!

I’ll conclude by sharing an interesting experience I had. I have known Friedrich’s ‘Wanderer Above the Mists’ (view it here, if you don’t know what I’m talking about) since I was perhaps 10 or 11 from a Bantam edition of Frankenstein (‘Couple Gazing’, above, was the cover art of the Bantam Dracula). Years later, in 2003 to be exact, I saw a scene wonderfully similar to it in the mountains of Epirus, on the road to Metsovo, when the car we were in emerged from a thick fog just before sunset. It was of course, impossible for me to view the scene except as an approximation of Friedrich’s painting.