The Romantic Revolution Page 8
Further evidence of the essentially enlightened message is provided by the animals who appear. In version one there is a donkey, symbolizing ignorance; a dog with his tongue hanging out, symbolizing avarice; bats, symbolizing hypocrisy; and a lynx, identified by a contemporary Spanish dictionary as “one who has very keen vision and great sagacity and subtlety in understanding or in inquiring into very difficult matters.”42 In the final version, the donkey and dog have gone, but a black cat has appeared, as a diabolic opponent of the lynx. But what of the owls? Are they the creatures associated with Athena and Minerva and hence with wisdom? Or are they búhos, associated with ignorance and the forces of darkness? So, when, in the third and final version, the owl offers Goya the chalk, is it a benign source of inspiration, encouraging him to exercise the imaginative powers released from his subconscious? In that case, sueño would be better translated as “dream.” Or is it an evil seducer, tempting him into the paths of madness that open up for the imagination uncontrolled by reason? In that case, sueño should indeed be “sleep.”
Goya himself did not make his intentions clear. The commentary usually ascribed to him—“imagination forsaken by Reason begets impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the source of their wonders”—was very likely written by someone else (his friend, the playwright Moratin).43 Another plausible scenario runs as follows: Goya was undoubtedly a man of the Enlightenment. The company he chose to keep consisted in part of enlightened intellectuals—ilustrados—such as Gaspar Melchor de Jovellanos, their friendship immortalized in one of Goya’s greatest portraits.44 The first part of his career had been conventional—training in Saragossa, a long stay in Italy, followed on his return by patronage from the state (cartoons for the royal tapestry factory and portraits of the royal family), the Church (altarpieces and frescoes), and aristocrats (portraits). He became a member of the Royal Academy at Madrid in 1780, its deputy director five years later, and official painter to the king the year after that.45
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters (1799) (AKG)
In 1792, however, at the age of forty-six, Goya suffered a serious and prolonged illness that left him stone-deaf. Among other harrowing side effects were fainting fits, spells of semi-blindness, and hallucinations.46 When he came out the other side, his creative priorities had changed radically. As he told his friend (and vice president of the Royal Academy) Bernardo de Iriarte, he had decided to paint a series of “cabinet pictures” [cuadros de gabinete], depicting “themes that cannot usually be dealt with in commissioned works, where capricho and invention do not have much of a role to play.” Six of the twelve paintings in question portrayed bullfighting, to which Goya was greatly attached, and the others feature victims of a fire at night, survivors of a shipwreck, a highway robbery, a group of strolling players, the interior of a prison, and a lunatic asylum.47 The last-named was based on personal experience: He described it to Iriarte as “a courtyard with lunatics, in which two naked men are fighting with their warden, who beats them and others with sacks (a scene I saw at first hand in Zaragoza).”48 However, the painting may well have been as much an expression of Goya’s troubled state of mind as a piece of reportage.
By this time, Goya was beginning to move away from the academic context in which he had worked hitherto. In 1792, just before he fell ill, he presented to the Royal Academy his thoughts on the reorganization of its teaching program. Although he firmly stated his belief in the central axiom of a mimetic aesthetic, identifying the sole aim of painting as “Nature’s exact imitation,” he was equally resolute in rejecting academic didacticism. “Academies should not be restrictive,” he stated. Every element of compulsion and servility must be eradicated, as must a compulsory timetable to be followed by all students, for “there are no rules for painting.” Even the greatest artist could not explain “how he reaches that deep understanding and appreciation of things, which is necessary for great art.” Nature must indeed be imitated, but the process of imitation “is truly a deep and impenetrable mystery!”49
Seven years later, when he came to write the advertisement for the Caprichos, he had moved still further toward an expressive aesthetic:
The author has not followed the precedents of any other artist, nor has he been able to copy Nature herself. It is very difficult to imitate Nature, and a successful imitation is worthy of admiration. He who departs entirely from Nature will surely merit high esteem, since he has to put before the eyes of the public forms and poses which have only existed previously in the darkness and confusion of an irrational mind, or one which is beset by uncontrolled passion.50
Although that seems unequivocal enough, Goya stressed that his primary purpose was moral improvement: “It is as proper for painting to criticize human error and vice as for poetry and prose to do so.” His objective was to satirize “the innumerable foibles and follies to be found in any civilized society, and … the common prejudices and deceitful practices which custom, ignorance or self-interest have hallowed.” For good measure, he concluded the advertisement with as good a definition of art as imitation as can be imagined: “Painting (like poetry) chooses from universals what is most apposite. It brings together in a single imaginary being, circumstances and characteristics which occur in nature in many different persons. With such an ingeniously arranged combination of properties the artist produces a faithful likeness, but also earns the title of inventor rather than that of servile copyist.”51
Among the eighty etchings that make up the Caprichos, there are certainly many that satirize contemporary targets—monks, friars, the Inquisition, and the queen’s lover Manuel Godoy, for example. But as one nightmarish image follows another, whatever didactic purpose there might have been recedes into the distance. Goya has allowed his rational faculties to fall asleep and in his dreams has gone inside himself to explore his subconscious mind. What he then brings to the surface and visualizes in his utterly unique manner justifies all too well Alexander Pope’s fears:
With terrors round, can Reason hold her throne,
Despise the known, nor tremble at the unknown?
Survey both worlds, intrepid and entire,
In spite of witches, devils, dreams, and fire?52
Francisco de Goya y Lucientes, All of Them Will Fall (1797–98), No. 19 of Los Caprichos series (1799) (AKG)
Goya’s world is a pre-Newtonian world peopled by cripples, criminals, whores, monsters, devils, witches, magicians, and lunatics doing unspeakable things to one another. What is one to make of plate nineteen—All of Them Will Fall53—for example? In a tree sits a decoy bird with the bust and face of a voluptuous woman. Around her flutter male birds with human faces. Their eventual fate is illustrated below, as two prostitutes and an old woman insert a stick into a plucked bird’s anus as his mouth dribbles vomit. Truly, the sleep of reason does produce monsters. Goya might well have agreed with Hamann that dreams are “journeys to the Inferno of self-knowledge.”54 He himself wrote that he “drew his dreams.”55 Around a quarter of the Caprichos deal with witches, an interest of Goya’s that bordered on obsession. Nor does he seem to have brought to the subject the disdainful skepticism of a Voltairean philosophe, for he also wrote: “As soon as day breaks, they fly each one his own way, the witches, the hobgoblins, the visions and the phantoms.… No one has ever been able to find out where they hide and lock themselves up in the daytime.”56 In short, if Goya really was pursuing an enlightened agenda, he was doing it by means of a romantic vocabulary. As we shall see in the next chapter, experience of the armed wing of the Enlightenment, in the shape of Napoleon’s armies, gave him the raw material for images just as dark and even more compelling.
In the same year that Goya published the Caprichos (1799), Goethe was writing the “Walpurgis Night” episode of Faust. On the night before May Day, Faust and Mephistopheles make their way up the Brocken, the highest point of the Harz mountains, to attend the Witches’ Sabbath. Along the way to Satan’s throne, th
ey meet creatures just as fabulous as anything that Goya imagined, among them a will-o’-the-wisp, salamanders, owls, of course, trees that stretch out their roots to ensnare passersby, witches of every shape, size, and age, including “Mother Baubo” riding on a sow, a general, a minister, a parvenu, a red mouse that jumps out of a pretty young witch’s mouth when she sings, and so on. It is an episode that cried out to be turned into a film directed by the late Federico Fellini, not least in its eroticism:
FAUST [dancing with the young witch]
A pleasant dream once came to me:
I saw a lovely apple-tree,
And two fine apples hanging there;
I climbed to pick that golden pair.
THE FAIR ONE
You men were always apple-mad;
Adam in Eden was just as bad.
I’ve apples in my garden too—
How pleased I am to pleasure you!
MEPHISTOPHELES [with the old witch]
A naughty dream once came to me:
I saw a cleft and cloven tree.
It was a monstrous hole, for shame!
But I like big holes just the same.
THE OLD WITCH
Greetings, Sir Cloven-Hoof, my dear!
Such gallant knights are welcome here.
Don’t mind the outsize hole; indeed
An outsize plug is what we need!57
While giving free rein to his imagination, Goethe also takes the opportunity to take revenge on the doyen of the Berlin Enlightenment, Friedrich Nicolai, who had been unwise enough to publish a clumsy satire of Goethe’s novel Werther. At the Witches’ Sabbath he appears as “Proktophantasmist,” imaginatively (but appropriately) translated by David Luke as “Mr. Arsey-Phantarsey.” This grumpy old pedant is enraged that his world has been invaded by figments of Goethe’s imagination:
MR. ARSEY-PHANTARSEY
Damned spirit-rabble! Stop this insolence!
Hasn’t it been quite clearly proved to you
You don’t exist as proper people do?
.....................
This is outrageous! Why are you still here?
The world has been enlightened! You must disappear!
.....................
All my life I’ve tried to sweep away
This superstitious junk. It’s an outrage I say!58
THE OPIATE OF THE ARTISTS
Neither Goethe nor Goya needed artificial stimulants to release the demons from their subconsciousness. Nor did John Keats, who in “Ode on Melancholy” explicitly advised against them:
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine.59
It was his poetic sensibility that allowed him to induce a trancelike state, as in the opening lines of “Ode to a Nightingale”:
My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk.60
Four stanzas later, he explicitly turns his back on artificial assistance:
Away! away! for I will fly to thee,
Not charioted by Bacchus and his pards,
But on the viewless wings of Poesy,
Though the dull brain perplexes and retards.61
Others were more inclined to take advantage of the ready availability of narcotics. They were sold over the counter without restriction, chiefly in the form of “laudanum,” an alcoholic tincture of opium. In England, many household medicine cupboards contained a bottle, to serve as a painkiller.62 The most candid user was Thomas De Quincey, who began taking laudanum to dull the pain of a gastric complaint, became hopelessly addicted, and published his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater in 1821. The title notwithstanding, this was less an awful warning than an account of the interior life of someone whose natural bent for introspection was intensified by the drug. De Quincey stated that his main purpose was “to reveal something of the grandeur which belongs potentially to human dreams,” including “those trances, or profoundest reveries, which are the crown and consummation of what opium can do for human nature.”63
Another user, although, fortunately for him, only occasionally so, was Hector Berlioz. Among the many romantic traits he personified was intense introspection. In 1830, aged twenty-six, he wrote to his father: “I wish I could find a specific to calm the feverish excitement which so often torments me; but I shall never find it, it comes from the way I am made. In addition, the habit I have got into of constantly observing myself means that no sensation escapes me, and reflection doubles it—I see myself in a mirror. Often I experience the most extraordinary impressions, of which nothing can give an idea; nervous exaltation is no doubt the cause, but the effect is like that of opium.”64 He was certainly very sensitive: The mere news that his favorite Gluck opera, Iphigénie en Tauride, was going to be performed was enough to start his legs trembling, teeth chattering, head swimming, and even nose bleeding.65
It is very likely that Berlioz was familiar with De Quincey’s Confessions in the French version of 1828. This contains an episode added by the translator, Alfred de Musset, in which a hero under the influence of a drug imagines that he has committed a terrible crime and hears himself being sentenced to death. It thus anticipates the fourth movement of Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique, written in 1830 and titled “An Episode in the Life of the Artist.”66 His own program note reads: “In a fit of despair he [the artist] poisons himself with opium; but instead of killing him, the narcotic induces a horrific vision, in which he believes he has murdered the loved one, has been condemned to death, and witnesses his own execution. March to the scaffold; immense procession of headsmen, soldiers and populace. At the end the melody reappears once again, like a last reminder of love, interrupted by the death-stroke.”67 Despite the emphatic sound of a falling guillotine blade, this is not the end. In the following and final movement, marked “Dream of a Witches’ Sabbath,” the artist “is surrounded by a hideous throng of demons and sorcerers, gathered to celebrate the sabbath night.”
The Symphonie fantastique has good claims to be regarded as the summit of French romanticism. Its immediate inspiration was Berlioz’s unrequited passion for the Irish actress Harriet Smithson, with whom he had fallen in love when seeing her performance as Ophelia in an English-language production of Hamlet (of which he understood very little). It also marked his declaration of artistic independence: “Now that I have broken the chain of routine, I see an immense territory stretching before me, which academic rules forbade me to enter.” The agent of his emancipation had been “that awe-inspiring giant Beethoven.”68 In a highly charged letter to his sister, he even managed to give an erotic flavor to his new departure: “You cannot imagine what pleasure a composer feels who writes freely in response to his own will alone. When I have drawn the first accolade of my score, where my instruments are ranked in battle array, when I think of the virgin lands which academic prejudice has left untouched till now and which since my emancipation I regard as my domain, I rush forward with a kind of fury to cultivate it.”69 Apart from Shakespeare, de Musset, De Quincey, Beethoven, and Goethe, the other major influences on the work read like a roll call of the French romantics—Chateaubriand, Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, and Gérard de Nerval.70
Berlioz’s status as the supreme French romantic was also sustained by the kind of opposition he aroused from the old guard. In 1832, the doyen of French music critics (although Belgian by birth), François Fétis, poured scorn on Berlioz’s claim that he was a revolutionary who had discovered secrets hitherto concealed to everyone else. On the contrary, Fétis wrote, he had tried to run before he could walk—and was now too old to learn better.71 Fétis’s son édouard returned to charge two years later, asking how it was possible that such an indifferent composer should be lauded by the public as a sublime genius on a par with Beethoven and Weber? His answer was that Berlioz had been very cunning. Realizing
that youth was on the side of the romantics in their struggle with the classicists, he had aligned himself with the former, speaking their language and packing his work with self-consciously romantic allusions. So he was worshipped as the great original by ignoramuses who could not see that this so-called originality was nothing more than the exaggeration of long-standing musical forms and that Berlioz was incapable of developing a melodic idea beyond twenty bars.72 A more perceptive critique of the Symphonie fantastique was offered by Robert Schumann, who wrote that he had gone through the score many times, “at first bewildered, then horrified, and finally astonished and admiring.”73
GREAT WITS ARE SURE TO MADNESS NEAR ALLIED
Chemically assisted or not, introspective journeys to the subconscious mind could cross boundaries into realms so dark as to be no longer just individual or bizarre, or even weird, but downright mad. It was no coincidence that the turn of the century witnessed a paradigm shift in attitudes to insanity. Of course, the belief that the creative mind is of necessity an odd mind goes back at least to the Greeks. This was one thing on which Plato and Aristotle could agree, opining respectively: “In vain does one knock at the gates of poetry with a sane mind” and “poetry demands a man with a special gift … or a touch of madness.”74 More recently, John Dryden had written: