In Turner’s paintings human beings appear as tiny insignificant dots. They and their pitiful works are swallowed up in great spiraling vortices of disaster. “Hope, fallacious hope,” Turner wrote, “where is thy market now?” The pessimism that arose from the failure of the French Revolution soon found a new home in a Romantic pessimism about man’s fate when face-to-face with nature. If Plato is the original pioneer of pessimism—a belief that man’s greatest achievements must inevitably be overwhelmed by the forces of corruption and decay and, like Atlantis, subside back into the timeless sea—then nineteenth-century Romanticism is its messenger into the modern era.
J.M.W. Turner (1775–1851), Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth
Some were crushed by this lack of hope. Suicide became an occupational hazard for young Romantics. The writer Schopenhauer even recommended it to his readers. Others like Turner and Francisco Goya were inspired by their pessimism. Still others like Lord Byron positively embraced it. “Let me be,” his Childe Harold tells the dark storm, “a sharer in thy fierce and far delight, a portion of the tempest and of thee.” Just as the Romantics became fascinated by storms and lightning (and by the famous scene on the heath in act III of Shakespeare’s King Lear quoted above), so the Byronic impulse produced another stock character from the Romantic inventory: the solitary hero who rides off to death with a smile and cheerfully accepts his doom.
The land of honorable death
Is here …
A soldier’s grave, for thee the best:
Then look around, and choose thy ground,
And take thy rest.
What separates Byron’s hero from Rousseau’s is that while the latter rides the storm and risks death for others, the former risks it only to gratify himself. He is the emblematic antihero. His real battle is not against corruption or enemies or even conventional values, as in Byron’s Don Juan. It is against the Absolute itself, as he dares to pit his own will against the Immense All. It may be disturbing, even outrageous: but it is also heroic. As in the westerns of Sergio Leone, however much we regret the hero’s three-day beard, his cynicism, and his ruthless brutality, we have to admire his single-minded yet casual defiance of fate. Middle-class man seems to shrink to triviality beside the Man with No Name.
No wonder, then, that despite their best democratic instincts, the Romantics became fascinated by Napoleon, and still more by the figure of Lucifer. The line from Milton, “better to reign in hell than serve in heaven,” became a catchphrase for Romanticism’s Byronic mood, even as Mephistopheles serves as alter ego for the age’s greatest hero, Goethe’s Faust.
And so I turn to the abyss
Of necromancy, try if art
Can voice or power of spirits start,
To do me service and reveal
The things of Nature’s secret seal.14
Doctor Faust’s insatiable desire for absolute knowledge to the point of selling his soul to the Devil will make him emblematic of Romantic striving for the ultimate thrill, a willingness to break all conventional rules, even to the brink of nihilistic self-destruction. As Mephistopheles says, “All that exists, deserves to be destroyed.” It is a sentiment that became Karl Marx’s favorite quotation and it animates all the works of Friedrich Nietzsche.
Faust’s author, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, saw where all this was going. He had lived through the French Revolution and Napoleon’s conquest of Germany. He tried to head things off with his famous pronouncement “Classicism is health, Romanticism disease.” No doubt he was thinking of Romanticism’s brooding pessimism, the craving for intensity of experience, however immoral or bizarre, which in his mind stood in such contrast with the timeless serene stability of Greek and Roman art. Indeed, Goethe’s remark set off a debate about the meaning of classic and Romantic in the arts that has kept critics and historians occupied ever since.15 Yet it is also profoundly misleading.
The real split is, again, between the legacy of Plato and Aristotle. Because all the rules that Romantic artists and poets yearned to shatter, the conventional neoclassical rules that governed every art in eighteenth-century Europe from painting and opera to architecture and poetry, actually stemmed from a single source: Aristotle’s Poetics.
Aristotle wrote very little about painting or music and nothing about architecture, and he left behind a Poetics that was woefully incomplete. Still, he also gave us a chest of analytic tools for understanding poetry and art to which critics have helped themselves ever since.16 Nearly everyone who talked about art from Roman times on drew one crucial lesson out of Aristotle: that the basis of the best art was based on an imitation of nature, or mimesis. In short, what Plato had said was the artist’s biggest sin—that his work is a mere copy of material reality, which is itself a copy of the Forms—Aristotle made his leading virtue.17
Imitation was, Aristotle said, natural to human beings and a constant source of pleasure.18 To create a painting of clouds that actually look like clouds and trees that look like trees, or to craft a dramatic scene of horror (as in Oedipus Rex) or a happy scene such as a family reunion that vividly captures real-life emotions, is what connects an artist’s or poet’s work to his audience. Aristotle called the experience katharsis, which was the most important benchmark of artistic skill. This meant that an Aristotle-influenced art was above all a spectator-driven art. Whether he was painting a picture or cutting statues, writing a poem or composing a drama, Aristotle’s artist aimed at presenting a picture of “nature as it is, or ought to be” that would move an audience in much the same way Aristotle wanted his public speaker to do.19 Eventually, the rules of the Poetics became a subgroup of the Rhetoric, since both rested on the same principle. Above all, every poet or artist (like the orator) needed an inspiring message to communicate to his audience, so that their emotions can be moved by virtue and away from vice.
The Roman poet Horace summed up this Aristotle-based approach with a simple maxim, Ut pictura poesis, which we can translate as Every picture should tell a story. Every poem or story should therefore paint a verbal picture, which will be, Horace added, dulce et utile, or “both beautiful and useful,” meaning morally uplifting.20 For nearly three hundred years, from the High Renaissance until Jacques-Louis David, the fine arts in Europe followed Horace’s advice. It was the foundation of all so-called academic art (named after Raphael’s academy, not Plato’s), while Aristotle’s insistence that the most beautiful art imitated nature “as it is, or ought to be,” became a fundamental axiom of neoclassicism.21 “Nature as it ought to be” turned into imitation of the most ideal—which after the Renaissance clearly meant the Greeks and Romans.
Since the ancients had notably executed the most perfect human forms, the most harmonious architectural proportions, and the most stirring poems and dramas, they were obviously the ones to imitate. Nature herself, with her occasional warts and farts and sagging breasts, and clouds when there should be sunlight, and cowardice where there should be heroism, could wait.
She waited for three centuries, while art students spent their time examining ancient statues and buildings and writers practiced writing verse like Pindar and Horace and Virgil. The guru of eighteenth-century neoclassicism, J. J. Winckelmann, was succinct: “The only way for us to become great … is [by] the imitation of the Ancients.”22 Critics like Winckelmann drew a firm line between creative imitation and mere copying. All the same, art on these terms inevitably turned into a relentless training on how to reproduce the techniques of the Greeks and Romans and not much more. The result was office buildings done up as Greek temples; statues of scientists (including Isaac Newton) and statesmen like Napoleon and George Washington dressed in Roman togas; plays meticulously written in classical meter and adhering rigidly to Aristotle’s three unities;‡ and paintings in which every figure was painstakingly derived from some Roman sarcophagus or Hellenistic statue.
In the hands of a master like Jacques-Louis David, the results could be breathtaking. However, the academic approach also served as an excuse f
or the pedantic and second-rate—as anyone who looks at the paintings of Joshua Reynolds or Raphael Mengs, or reads the dramas of Voltaire, soon realizes.
To the Romantics, it became apparent something was missing. It took some time, but they eventually found it, perhaps not surprisingly, in the pages of Plato.
The source was Plato’s dialogue Ion, and Percy Bysshe Shelley was the first to stumble on it one afternoon in Pisa, in the early winter of 1821. Not yet thirty, Shelley had seen plenty of tumult in his short life. He had been expelled from Oxford for writing a pamphlet advocating atheism. He had then quarreled with his father and eloped with a sixteen-year-old waitress. When the marriage collapsed, Shelley had run away with the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, the feminist writer. This daughter, also named Mary, would write one of the classic Romantic expositions of the dark side of nature, Frankenstein.
In 1818, Shelley had moved from England to Italy in order to escape from what he saw as modern society at its most corrupt and commercial. So had several of his friends. Renaissance Pisa, once the hometown of Galileo, was now a refuge for English Romantic poets: “a nest of singing birds,” as one of them called it. Lord Byron lived just down the road in a large country house. Shelley himself, however, preferred to live in town, in rooms that he and Mary had filled with cheap furniture, plants, and books.
One of those books, the dialogues of Plato, was in his hands now. Outside, the weather had turned chilly. Inside, however, a fire burned in the grate, and with greenery filling every window, “the sunny winter,” he told a friend, “is turned into spring.”23 Shelley was as fascinated by ancient Greece as he was contemptuous of his own society. He had used Greek myth for the setting of his most famous poem, Prometheus Unbound, and had done a translation of Plato’s Symposium.24 However, it was turning the pages of another Plato dialogue, the little-known Ion, that changed his view of his poetic art—and reoriented the direction of nineteenth-century Romanticism.
Shelley had his finger on the specific passage and read it again. It was where Socrates praises the art of poetry as “a power divine,” in which the inspiration of the Muse is passed not just to the poet, but to his audience as well. “For a poet is a light and winged thing,” Socrates says, “and holy, and never able to compose until he has become inspired, and is beside himself, and reason is no longer in him.” His works “are not of man or human workmanship, but are divine and from the gods.” Indeed, so long as the poet has this divine power, “it is God himself who speaks, and through [the poet] is conversing with us.”25
This, Shelley realized, was precisely what had been missing from the old academic canon of art that he and his friends despised. It was the role of inspiration, and the Plato-derived idea that the true poet and artist is someone with an inner vision imbued with divine truth. Shelley had encountered some of that notion already in the Symposium and Phaedrus, as had the Renaissance. William Blake expressed something very similar when he said, “One power alone makes a poet, Imagination, the divine Vision.” Immanuel Kant had chimed in: “Where an author owes a product to his genius, he does not know how the ideas for it have entered his head” because they clearly come through an inspiration beyond calculated rational judgment.26
Shelley also knew William Wordsworth’s definition of poetry as “the spontaneous overflow of feelings” aroused by our unmediated encounter with nature.27 What Shelley saw in the Ion was the outline of a far more powerful idea. Great poetry is not just an expression of an unfettered imagination or feelings, but “the center and circumference of knowledge” itself. The poet was the living intermediary between mankind and the eternal Forms of Plato.
Shelley dashed to his desk and began writing. What came out was his A Defence of Poetry, a full-fledged rewriting of the history of the West with the poet and artist at its center. Little read today, it in fact set the forward trajectory of the arts in the West for the next two centuries. Shelley’s poet is the inspired genius whose contact with the Eternal via imagination reflects a higher timeless reality more accurately and incisively than does Nature herself. “A poet,” Shelley wrote, “participates in the Eternal, the Infinite, and the One,” while his works “[are] the very image of life expressed in its eternal truth.”28
Shelley’s definition of poetry included much more than writing verse. Like the Greek poesis, meaning “creation,” it included all forms of art, everywhere and at all times in history. What words and meter, allegory and simile, are for the poet, paint and canvas are for the painter, notes for the composer, and marble for the sculptor and architect. They are the means of reflecting a higher reality, of “redeeming from decay the visitations of the divinity in man.” Art in this sense transmutes all it touches and immortalizes everything it encompasses. Poetry, he wrote in a famous passage, “lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the world and makes familiar objects be as if they were not familiar,” but rather beautiful emanations from the Godhead, “clothed in its Elysian light.”29
“Poetry is not like reasoning” or logic, Shelley argued. It springs from a realm of intuitive feeling “beyond the control of the active powers of the mind.”30 And in a world that has systematically lost touch with its true inner self like the materialist commercial society of the nineteenth century, with its “satanic mills” (Blake’s phrase) and Wedgewood porcelain factories, those who can rediscover that intimate connection with the divine once known to Plato and the Greeks will enjoy a special status and social value.
“The poet, as he is the author to others of the highest wisdom, pleasure, virtue, and glory,” is therefore “the happiest, the best, the wisest, and the most illustrious of men.”31 His outward circumstances may not reflect it (Shelley’s own health was bad, several of his children died early, and his wife, Harriet, ended her life in suicide), but as with Socrates, his special gift of insight imbues him with an inner felicity that those who stand outside the arts—mere businessmen and soldiers and politicians—can never hope to achieve. The poet handles the True and the Beautiful and the Good firsthand; and through their works, others are able to enjoy some connection with that eternal wisdom.
By his works, Shelley was saying, ye shall know him—meaning the poet and artist. And through the power of art, human beings might still find a redemption that the decline of Christianity (and Shelley despised organized religion almost as much as he despised capitalism and parliamentary government), or the failure of revolution in 1789, still denied them.
The redemptive power of art. Others in the Romantic movement shared the same vision, especially in Germany, where under the influence of Immanuel Kant they had come to see the creative imagination as an essential bridge between man’s objective analytic reason—in short, his Aristotelian side—and his subjective judgment.32 The poet Friedrich Schiller, for example, had foreseen a future society in which art would be the very center of education. His 1794–95 Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man took their motto from Rousseau: “If reason makes the man, it is the emotions which lead him”—while the key to training the emotions is art.
Through the experience of art, Schiller argued, the child can share in the same awareness of grace and beauty as the great artist. By showing us how directly in Aristotle’s terms matter and form become one, art resolves the modern conflict between our natural self and the self fashioned by reason. Diderot’s civil war in the cave is suddenly over; man is restored to himself. Until he achieves that harmony, Schiller insisted, man can never be truly free. But once he has, a glorious new era for humanity will emerge, forged by imagination and beauty.33
Shelley, however, decided to take this magnificent vision a stage further. The poet’s ability to dream the impossible dream yet make it reality through his work applies not only to the arts, but to every form of human creation. Shelley’s poets included “not only the authors of language, and of music, or the dance, or architecture, and statuary, or painting; they are the institutors of law, and the founders of civil society and the inventors of the arts of life.”
Pythagoras, Plato, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton; Moses, Jesus Christ, and Luther: All share for Shelley the same transformative power of imagination as Homer, Michelangelo, Shakespeare, and Dante (by comparison, Locke, Hume, and Voltaire come out looking very much second best). For Shelley, there is no distinction between the poet and other great agents on the world stage, in politics, religion, or other forms of life. Everywhere and at all times in history, they express the same spiritual truth and power, “the influence which is moved not, but moves.”34
If all great men are poets, then are all poets great men? Aristotle’s logic would say no, but Shelley enthusiastically proclaimed yes. This is what led him at the conclusion of the Defence of Poetry to dub his poets “the unacknowledged legislators of the world.” They are in fact Plato’s Philosopher Rulers in the flesh, for a world desperately needing the emanations of their genius.
That may seem far-fetched (except to poets), but the important word for Shelley is “unacknowledged.” Whether a society knows it or not, its artists are the advance guard of the human spirit (avant-garde was coming into vogue in the 1820s as an artistic rather than military term). They are able to see farther, grasp with deeper insight, reconcile the conflicts in the human soul more fully, and then chart a course forward that the rest of humanity later only dimly and imperfectly follows. Schopenhauer put it differently but more vividly: “Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is the marksman who hits a target others cannot even see.”35
As Socrates had warned in the Republic, such cultural sharp shooters are bound to be scorned and resented by their duller neighbors. Their personal lives will probably be a mess, as Shelley’s and Byron’s and Coleridge’s were, with plenty of disorder and loose ends (all those mistresses, unpaid bills, illegitimate children, and addictive drugs). Dazzled as they are by the light of higher truth, not a few will appear insane. Nonetheless, for Shelley and his generation, they are now the true makers of history and civilization. The rest, including the Enlightenment’s middle-class man, merely sponge off their imaginative creations, from the Parthenon and the Republic to the Sistine Chapel ceiling and the Principia. The picture is vividly summed up by Friedrich Nietzsche’s later image of civilization as essentially a history of geniuses, in which “one giant calls to another across the desert intervals of time and, undisturbed by the chattering dwarfs who creep about beneath them.”36
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