Civilisation (1969) s01e12 Episode Script

A finite, reasonable world.
Symmetrical.
Consistent.
Enclosed.
Well, symmetry's a human concept, because, with all our oddities we are, more or less, symmetrical.
And the balance of a mantelpiece by Adam, or a phrase by Mozart, reflects our satisfaction with our two eyes, two arms, two legs, and so forth.
And consistency.
Again and again in this series I've used that word as a term of praise.
But enclosed - that's the trouble.
An enclosed world becomes a prison of the spirit.
One longs to get out.
One longs to move.
One realises that symmetry and consistency, whatever their merits are the enemies of movement.
And what is that I hear? That note of urgency, of indignation, of spiritual hunger.
Yes, it's Beethoven.
It's the sound of European man once more reaching for something beyond his grasp.
We must leave this trim, finite room and go to confront the infinite.
We've a long, rough voyage ahead of us, and I can't say how it will end, because it isn't over yet.
We're still the offspring of the Romantic movement and still victims of the fallacies of hope.
I've used the metaphor of the sea, because all the great Romantics, from Byron onwards, have been obsessed by this image of movement and escape.
"Once more upon the water! And the waves bound beneath me as a steed That knows his rider.
Welcome to their roar! Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er they lead!" This escape was also an escape from reason.
In the 18th century, philosophers had attempted to tidy up human society by the use of reason.
But rational arguments weren't strong enough to upset the huge mass of torpid tradition that had grown up in the last 150 years.
In America it might be possible for a new political constitution to be achieved by reason, but it took something more explosive to blast the heavy foundations of Europe.
Towards the end of the 18th century, as rational argument declined, vivid assertion took its place.
Rousseau: "Man was born free and is everywhere in chains.
" Robert Burns: "A man's a man for a' that.
" Or, more explicitly: "It's coming yet for a' that, That man to man, the world o'er Shall brithers be for a' that.
" In 1790, an obscure English poet named Mordaunt wrote "Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife! Through all the sensual world proclaim, One crowded hour of glorious life Is worth an age without a name.
" These are the impulses that showed themselves like spray flying off a rock during the 1780s.
Then, as we know, came the tidal wave.
It was because this need for freedom had for so long been boiling under the surface of the 18th century that the French Revolution evolved from the protest of a few disgruntled lawyers, through the honourable grunts and groans of bourgeois constitutionalism, to the raw cry of a popular movement.
None of the intervening solutions would do.
In June 1789 the members of the National Assembly had found themselves locked out of their usual meeting place - accidentally, it seems - and went off, full of virtuous indignation, to this covered tennis court where they swore an oath to establish a constitution.
David, the painter of republican virtue, was commissioned to record the scene.
In the centre is a group symbolising the union of the Church and the better aristocrats.
Actually, the monk wasn't present.
Like all propaganda pictures, it's not strictly accurate.
Here are figures in an ecstasy of enthusiasm for constitutional government.
And here - this is historically correct - is the one delegate who wouldn't swear to support it.
To our eyes, disenchanted by 150 years of democratic eloquence and 50 years of propaganda painting - none of it as good as David - the whole thing may seem slightly absurd.
And in fact, these first steps towards revolution were pedantic and confused.
The constitutional phase of the French Revolution belonged to the Age of Reason.
Three years later, we hear the sound of the new world when some honest citizens of Marseilles grow impatient at an executive that doesn't act, and undertake the amazing feat of marching, in a sweltering July, all the way from Marseilles to Paris, tugging three pieces of cannon, and singing a new song.
Breathes there a man with a soul so dead who can listen to that marching song without emotion, even today? No wonder that the finest spirits of the time were enraptured; that Blake began a poem on the French Revolution, which nobody reads; and Wordsworth wrote the lines that everybody quotes, and I must quote again.
"For great were the auxiliaries which then stood Upon our side, we who were strong in love! Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive But to be young was very heaven!" And Wordsworth goes on to say how the Revolution seemed to bring Rousseau's dream of natural man and travellers' tales of his enchanted existence into reality.
It was no longer confined to "Some secluded island, Heaven knows where! But in the very world, which is the world Of all of us.
" At this point, the Revolution was the Romantic movement in action.
And perhaps its greatest legacy to posterity has been its message to the young: that those who are strong in love may yet find a way of escaping from the rotten parchment bonds that tie us down.
I can see them still through the window of the University of the Sorbonne, impatient to change the world, vivid in hope, although what precisely they hope for, or believe in I don't know.
The moving fact about the first revolutionaries is that their dream of a new world was sharply defined.
They wanted to change everything, even the calendar making the year 1792 year one, and renaming the months.
The change of years was a nuisance, but the new names of the months - Ventose, Thermidor, Brumaire, and so forth - the windy one, the hot one, the misty one - were charming, and I wish they'd survived.
They expressed the love of nature that had become so closely entwined with the Revolution.
The same desire to return to nature affected women's fashions.
All the artificial framework of the 18th century is thrown away, and the dresses follow the lines of the body with graceful simplicity.
No more high, powdered wigs, but flowing locks, with a simple bandeau.
And Madame Récamier, the most famous and inaccessible beauty of her time, posed for David with naked feet.
Of course, there was a good deal of profanation and blasphemy, and a vast amount of destruction.
Cluny, St-Denis, many of the sacred places of civilisation, were horribly knocked about.
It was even proposed to pull down Chartres Cathedral, and build in its place a Temple of Wisdom.
The revolutionaries wanted to replace Christianity with the religion of nature, and there is something rather touching about this print of baptism according to the rites of nature, taking place in a de-Christianised church.
People who hold forth about the modern world often say that what we need is a new religion.
It may be true, but it isn't easy to establish.
Even Robespierre, who was an enthusiast for new religion, and had powerful means of persuasion at his command couldn't bring it off.
And on the name Robespierre, one remembers how horribly all this idealism came to grief in the prisons of the Terror.
Most of the great episodes in the history of civilisation have had some unpleasant consequences, but none have kicked back sooner and harder than the revolutionary fervour of 1792, because in September there took place the first of those massacres by which, alas, the Revolution is chiefly remembered.
No-one's ever explained in historical terms the September massacres, and perhaps, in the end, the old-fashioned explanation is correct: that it was a kind of communal sadism.
It was a pogrom, a phenomenon with which we became familiar in the 19th century.
And it was given fresh impetus by another familiar emotion - mass panic.
"La patrie en danger.
" The country in peril.
In 1792 France was fighting for her life, against the forces of ancient corruption, and for a few years her leaders suffered from the most terrible of all delusions: they believed themselves to be virtuous.
Robespierre's friend Saint-Just said, "In a republic, which can only be based on virtue, any pity shown towards crime is a flagrant proof of treason.
" But reluctantly, one must admit that a great many of the subsequent horrors were simply due to anarchy.
It's a most attractive political doctrine, but I'm afraid it's too optimistic.
The men of 1793 tried desperately to control anarchy by violence, and in the end were destroyed by the evil means they had brought into existence.
Robespierre himself, and many, many others, followed the members of the old regime onto the scaffold.
With what mixed feelings one looks at David's picture of Marat, murdered in his bath.
David painted it with deep emotion.
The picture was intended to immortalise the memory of a great patriot, worthy of the traditions of Brutus.
Few propaganda pictures make such an impact as a work of art.
Yet Marat cannot escape responsibility for the September massacres, and thus for the first cloud to overcast Wordsworth's dawn and darken the optimism of the first Romantics into a pessimism that has lasted to our own day.
The revolutionary spirit lived on after his death, as we see it in this picture by David, painted in 1795, but it had no leaders.
French politics was exactly the same melee of self-seeking in-fighting that it was to become so often in the next 150 years.
Then, in 1798 the French got a leader with a vengeance.
With the appearance of General Bonaparte, the liberated energies of the Revolution take a new direction - the insatiable urge to conquer and explore.
His council chamber at Malmaison where the first great plans of conquest were worked out is a soldier's room with a ceiling made to look like a tent - a fashion that was followed all over Europe for the next 50 years.
And this is the actual council table.
On the doors are trophies of arms of the warlike peoples of antiquity - Carthaginian, Roman, Greek, the Middle Ages.
Then beyond the doors is Napoleon's library and study, and, painted on the ceiling, portraits of his favourite authors, beginning with the Gaelic bard Ossian.
What a charming room! Of course, it's an adaptation of an antique room, but made livable, almost comfortable.
And this is his actual desk.
Military glory.
Conquest.
What have they to do with civilisation? War and imperialism, so long the most admired of human activities, have fallen into disrepute, and I am enough a child of my time to hate them both.
But I recognise that, together with much that is destructive, they are symptoms of a life-giving impulse.
"And shall I die with this unconquered?" How many great poets and artists and scientists could have spoken those words that Marlowe put into the mouth of the dying Tamburlaine? In the field of political action, they have become odious to us.
But I've an uneasy feeling that one can't have one thing without another; that Ruskin's unwelcome words "No great art ever yet rose on earth but among a nation of soldiers," seems to be historically irrefutableso far.
The need to conquer was only one part of Napoleon's paradoxical character.
There was also the political realist, the great administrator, the author - or at least the editor - of that classic corpus of law, the Code Napoléon, written at this very desk.
In his portraits we can watch the young revolutionary soldier dissolve into the First Consul with traces of revolutionary intensity in his head, and in two years he becomes the successor of Childeric and Charlemagne.
This extraordinary portrait by Ingres makes conscious reference both to Roman ivories and tenth-century miniatures of the Emperor Otto III.
So, in one mood Napoleon believed that he was reviving the great traditions of unity and stability by which the ideas of Greece and Rome were transmitted to the Middle Ages.
To the end, he maintained that Europe would have been better off if it had been united under his rule.
That may be true, but it could never happen, because the realistic ruler was dominated by the romantic conqueror, and the static, hieratic Emperor painted by Ingres is forgotten when we look at David's Bonaparte Crossing The Great St Bernard.
There he is truly the man of his time.
For 50 years the great minds of Europe were enchanted by a poem called Fingal, said to have been written by Ossian, a Gaelic bard.
Actually, it was a kind of fake, put together out of scraps of evidence by an enterprising Scot named Macpherson.
But this didn't prevent Goethe from admiring it, nor Ingres, the high priest of Classicism, from painting an enormous picture of Ossian's dream.
And Fingal was Napoleon's favourite poem.
He took an illustrated copy on all his campaigns.
Its heaven was not tarnished by the approval of the old regime.
He ordered the glossiest of his painters, Girodet, to depict the souls of his own warriors, his marshals being received by Ossian in Valhalla.
Painfully reminiscent of Hitler and Wagner.
And yet one can't quite resist the exhilaration of Napoleon's glory.
Communal enthusiasm may be a dangerous intoxicant, but if human beings were to lose altogether the sense of glory, I think we should be the poorer.
Napoleon's tomb in the church of Les Invalides, the most grandiose memorial to any ruler since Ancient Egypt.
And what, in all this glory, had happened to the great heroes that spoke for humanity in the revolutionary years? Most of them were silenced by fear - fear of disorder, fear of bloodshed fear that, after all human beings were not yet capable of liberty.
Few episodes in history are more depressing than the withdrawal of the great Romantics - Wordsworth saying that he would give his life for the Church of England, or Goethe that it was better to support a lie than to admit political confusion in the state.
But two of them did not retreat and so have become the archetypal romantic heroes - Beethoven and Byron.
Different as they were - and it's hard to think of two more different men - they both maintained an attitude of defiance to social conventions and they both believed unshakably in freedom.
Beethoven wasn't a political man, but he responded to the generous sentiments of the Revolution.
At first he admired Napoleon, because he seemed to be the apostle of revolutionary ideals, the inheritor of the early revolutionary urge to freedom, symbolised by the storming of the Bastille.
The Bastille was subsequently knocked down, stone by stone, but repression did not come to an end.
On the contrary, Napoleon organised the most efficient secret police in Europe.
This place is the dungeon of the castle of Vincennes where political prisoners of all sorts have faced the firing squad, right up to the end of the last war.
Hateful.
And would have been equally hateful to both Byron and Beethoven.
When Beethoven heard that Napoleon had proclaimed himself Emperor, he tore off the dedication page of the Third Symphony, and was with difficulty prevented from destroying the score.
Later he was to write, in his opera Fidelio, the greatest of all hymns to liberty, as the victims of injustice struggle up from their dungeons towards the light.
"O happiness to see the light," they say, "to feel the air and be once more alive.
Our prison was a tomb.
O freedom, freedom, come to us again.
" This cry has echoed through all the countless revolutionary movements of the last century.
As far as freedom is concerned I'm afraid that recent revolutionary movements haven't got us far forward.
On the fall of the Bastille in 1792 it was found to contain only seven old men, who were annoyed at being disturbed.
But to have opened the doors of a political prison in Germany in 1940, or Hungary in 1956, or Spain or Greece today then one would have known the meaning of that scene in Fidelio.
Beethoven in spite of his tragic deafness', was an optimist.
He believed that man had within himself a spark of the divine fire, revealed in his love of nature and his need for friendship.
He believed that man was worthy of freedom.
The despair that poisoned the Romantic movement had not yet entered his veins.
But by about 1810 all the optimistic hopes of the 18th century had been proved false.
The rights of man, the fall of tyrants, the benefits of industry - all a delusion.
The freedoms won by revolution had been immediately lost, either by counter-revolution, or by the revolutionary government falling into the hands of military dictators.
In Goya's picture of a firing squad, called 3 May 1808, the repeated gesture of those who've raised their arms in heroic affirmation becomes the repeated line of the soldiers' rifles, as they liquidate a small group of liberals and other inconvenient citizens.
Well, we're used to all this now.
We're almost numbed by repeated disappointments.
But in 1810 it was a new experience, and all the poets and philosophers and artists of the Romantic movement were shattered by it.
The spokesman of this pessimism was Byron.
He would probably have been a pessimist, anyway - it was part of his egotism - but appearing when he did, the tide of disillusion carried him along, so that he became, after Napoleon, the most famous name in Europe.
From great poets like Goethe and Pushkin down to the most brainless schoolgirl, his works were read with an almost hysterical enthusiasm, which, as we struggle through the rhetorical nonsense of Lara or The Giaour we can hardly credit, because, although Byron wrote quite a lot of good poetry, it was his bad poetry that made him famous.
Byron, who was very much a man of his time, wrote a poem about the opening of a prison - the dungeon of the castle of Chillon on the lake of Geneva just behind me there.
He begins with a sonnet in the old revolutionary vein: "Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind! Brightest in dungeons, Liberty!" But when, after many horrors, the prisoner of Chillon is at last released, a new note is heard: "At last men came to set me free; I ask'd not why, and reck'd not where; It was at length the same to me, Fetter'd or fetterless to be; I learn'd to love despair.
" Since that line was written, how many intellectuals, down to Beckett and Sartre have echoed its sentiment? But this negative conclusion was not the whole of Byron.
The prisoner of Chillon had looked from his castle wall onto the mountains and the lake and felt himself to be part of them.
This was the positive side of Byron's genius, a self-identification with the great forces of nature - in short, with the sublime.
Consciousness of the sublime was a faculty that the Romantic movement added to the European imagination.
It was an English discovery, related to the discovery of nature.
Not the truth-giving nature of Goethe, nor the moralising nature of Wordsworth, but the savage, incomprehensible power outside ourselves, that makes us aware of the futility of human arrangements.
As the Revolution turned into the Napoleonic adventure, the sublime became visible and within reach.
And this was the feeling that was given popular expression by Byron.
He was irresistible because he had identified himself with the fearful forces of the sublime.
"Let me be," he says to the stormy darkness on this very lake, "let me be a sharer in thy fierce and far delight, a portion of the tempest and of thee.
" But participation in the sublime was almost as much of a strain as the pursuit of freedom, because de Sade was right: Nature is indifferent, or, as we say, cruel.
No great artist has ever observed these violent, hostile moods of nature as closely as Turner.
And he was without hope.
These are not my words, but the final judgement of Ruskin, who knew him and worshipped him.
Turner was a great admirer of Byron, and he used quotations from Byron's poems in the titles of his pictures.
But Childe Harold was not pessimistic enough for him, so Turner wrote a fragmentary poem to provide himself with titles.
He called it The Fallacies Of Hope.
Bad poetry.
Good pictures.
Here's one of the most famous of them.
It represents an actual episode in the slave trade another of those contemporary horrors that troubled the Romantic imagination.
Turner called it Slavers Throwing Overboard The Dead And Dying - Typhoon Coming On.
For the last 50 years, we've not been in the least interested in the horrible story, but only in the colour of the black leg and the pink fish surrounding it.
But Turner meant us to take it seriously.
"Hope, hope, fallacious hope," he wrote, "where is thy market now?" About 20 years earlier, Géricault, the most Byronic of all painters, had also made his name with a picture of a disaster at sea.
The frigate Medusa foundered on her way to Senegal.
149 of the passengers were put onto a raft, which was to be towed by sailors in the pinnaces.
After a time the crew got fed up and cut the ropes, leaving the raft to drift out to sea, and condemning the passengers to almost certain death.
Miraculously, there were a few survivors, from whom Géricault learnt the full horrors of the episode.
He even found the ship's carp, enter, who had made the raft and he had him make a model of it in his studio.
He took a work room near a hospital, so that he could study dying men.
He'd been a dandy, but he gave up his life of pleasure, shaved his head and locked himself in a room with corpses from the morgue.
He was determined to paint a masterpiece.
And he succeeded.
To us it looks like a piece of grandiose picture-making, but The Raft was intended and originally accepted, as a piece of what we call social realism.
Géricault's last works were a series of portraits of lunatics, which I think are among the great pictures of the 19th century.
They carry a step further the Romantic impulse to explore beyond the bounds of reason.
His intense effort to penetrate into their disordered minds has led him to grasp more fully the complete physical character of their heads.
By this time, Géricault was dying of some internal injury, which he aggravated by riding the most unruly horses he could find.
No strong man has ever sought death more resolutely.
He died at the age of 33, a little younger than Byron, considerably older than Shelley and Keats.
Fortunately, he left a spiritual heir, whose pessimism was supported by a more powerful intellect - Delacroix.
The first picture in which Delacroix is entirely himself is The Massacre Of Scios.
As with almost all the masterpieces of Romantic painting, it represents an actual event - the slaughter by the occupying Turks of the inhabitants of a Greek village.
And it reflects the generous sentiments of those liberals like Shelley and Byron who dreamed that Greece might yet be free.
While Delacroix was painting it came the news of Byron's death on campaign at Missolonghi.
There is protest and compassion in this picture - more, perhaps, than Delacroix was ever to show again, because he came to despair of all attempts to change society, and retreated into painting subjects from Romantic poetry.
Some of his greatest pictures were inspired by Byron.
This is The Prisoner Of Chillon.
As luck would have it, one of Delacroix's friends became Prime Minister and gave him many public commissions, including the library of the French Parliament House.
At one end of the room he painted the scene of Attila the Hun trampling on the remains of antique civilisation.
What an incredible choice for a library! And made all the stranger by Delacroix's obvious sympathy with this embodiment of destructive energy.
No-one realised better than Delacroix that we got through by the skin of our teeth.
And, he would have added, was it worth it? But in the end, somewhat reluctantly, he would have answered, "Yes.
" He valued European civilisation all the more because he knew it was fragile.
The 19th century revealed a split in the European mind as great as that which afflicted Christendom in the 16th century, and even more destructive.
On the one hand was the new middle class created by the Industrial Revolution.
It was hopeful and energetic, but without a scale of values.
Sandwiched between a corrupt aristocracy and a brutalised poor, it had produced a defensive morality - conventional, complacent, hypocritical.
Never was a class better documented by the admirable cartoonists of the day.
On the other hand were the, finer spirits, like Delacroix who were still heirs of the Romantic movement still haunted by disaster.
And they felt themselves, not without reason, to be entirely cut off from the prosperous majority.
But what could they put in place of middle-class morality? They themselves were still in search of a soul.
The search went on throughout the 19th century, and it continues today, and leads to the same sense of isolation and despair.
In the visual arts its chief interpreter was a sculptor, Rodin.
He was the last great Romantic artist, the direct heir of Géricault and Byron.
Indeed, his greatest disappointment was that he didn't win the competition to do the Byron memorial in Hyde Park.
And like them his abundant animal spirits didn't allay, but rather enhanced his view of mankind's tragic destiny.
And like them, there is sometimes, in his expressions 'of despair, a trace of rhetorical exaggeration.
But what an artist he was! Incredible that, only 20 years ago, he was still under the cloud of critical disapproval.
What is posterity? He was an inventor of symbolic poses that stay in the mind, and like all oversimplified statements that spur men on to action, they are sometimes rather too obvious.
But in the originals, his figures are saved from banality by a really stunning force and freedom of modelling.
"Every form thrusting outwards at its maximum point of tension.
" Those were Rodin's own words.
Look at the back of this figure of Eve.
You'll see how the vitality is conveyed by the touch of Rodin's hands.
He was one of those sculptors who communicate through the movement of his fingers.
And for that reason all his best figures were modelled quite small, enlarged afterwards by other artists.
This is the largest scale on which Rodin ever worked.
If some of his gestures look a little forced, one must also admit that Rodin's power of representing figures under the pressure of violent emotions links him with a whole line of modern art from Munch to Francis Bacon.
These are his Burghers Of Calais, staggering out of the beleaguered city and offering their lives to the brutal English King, in order that the people may be saved.
They're still with us - Romantic man at the end of his pilgrimage.
Rodin did one work which is dateless - very ancient or very modern, depending on which way you look at it.
This is his monument to the great French novelist Balzac.
Of course, Balzac had been dead for many years when Rodin received the commission, and the commemorative figure had to be an ideal likeness - a serious obstacle to Rodin as he always worked direct from nature.
All he had to go on was the knowledge that Balzac was short and fat and worked in a dressing gown.
Yet he had also to make Balzac look immense the dominating imagination of his age, and yet transcending his age.
He set about the problem in a peculiar way.
He made seven naked figures of Balzac, to satisfy his sense of Balzac's physical reality.
And some of them are here in his studio near Paris.
You can see that he didn't make any concessions to the classical ideal.
After contemplating them for several months, he decided on one of them and tried to cover it with a cast of drapery, indicative of the famous dressing gown.
In this way, he contrived to give the figure both monumentality and movement.
The result is, to my mind, the greatest piece of sculpture of the 19th century - perhaps, indeed, the greatest since Michelangelo.
But this isn't the way in which Rodin's contemporaries saw it, when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1898.
They were horrified.
Rodin was a hoax, a swindler.
They even raised the cry of "la patrie en danger", which shows how seriously the French take art.
The crowds surging round it, threatening it with their fists, were unanimous on one point of criticism: that the attitude was impossible, and that no body could exist under such draperies.
Rodin, sitting nearby, knew that he had only to strike the figure with a hammer, and the draperies would come off, Leaving the body visible.
Hostile critics said that it was like a snowman, a dolmen an owl, a heathen god.
All quite true, but we no longer regard them as terms of abuse.
Balzac's body has the timelessness of a prehistoric stone, and his head is like a bird of prey.
And the real reason why he made people so angry is the feeling that he could gobble them up, and doesn't care a damn for their opinions.
Balzac, with his prodigious understanding of human motives scorns conventional values defies fashionable opinions, 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.