The Oriental renaissance, then, was many things. It threw new light on religion, on history, on time, on myth, on the relations between the peoples of the world. In the middle of the Enlightenment, and the industrial revolution, it breathed new life into poetry and the poetic and aesthetic approach to human affairs. In the short run it was one of the forces that helped create the romantic revolution, the subject of the next chapter. But in the long run the discovery of the common origins of Sanskrit and Greek and Latin would form part of the modern scientific synthesis, linking genetics, archaeology and linguistics, which has taught us a great deal about the peopling of our world, surely one of the greatest and most important aspects of our history. This represents a significant mind-shift that, too often, is ignored against the backdrop of the other developments in the eighteenth century.
30
The Great Reversal of Values – Romanticism
The French composer Hector Berlioz was a remarkable man. ‘Everything about him was unusual,’ says Harold Schonberg in his Lives of the Composers. ‘Almost single-handedly he broke up the European musical establishment. After him, music would never be the same.’1 Even as a student he stood out in a way that many people found shocking. ‘He believes in neither God nor Bach,’ said the composer-conductor-pianist Ferdinand Hiller, who described Berlioz in this way: ‘The high forehead, precipitously overhanging the deep-set eyes; the great, curving hawk nose; the thin, finely cut lips; the rather short chin; the enormous shock of light brown hair, against the fantastic wealth of which the barber could do nothing – whoever had seen this head would never forget it.’ Indeed, Berlioz was almost as well known for his head, and his behaviour, as for his music. Ernest Legouvé, the French dramatist, was at a performance of Weber’s opera Der Freischütz one evening when a commotion broke out. ‘One of my neighbours rises from his seat and bending towards the orchestra shouts in a voice of thunder: “You don’t want two flutes there, you brutes! You want two piccolos! Two piccolos, do you hear? Oh, the brutes!” Amidst the general tumult produced by this outburst, I turn around to see a young man trembling with passion, his hands clenched, his eyes flashing, and a head of hair – such a head of hair. It looked like an enormous umbrella of hair, projecting something like a moveable awning over a beak of a bird of prey.’ Contemporary cartoonists had a field day.2
Berlioz was no mere show-off or exhibitionist, though there were those who thought that he was. Mendelssohn was one who found him affected. After their first meeting, he wrote: ‘This purely external enthusiasm, this desperation in the presence of women, the assumption of genius in capital letters, is insupportable to me.’3 This does no justice to Berlioz’s grand ambition, in particular his vision for the orchestra, which Yehudi Menuhin attributes to a new view of society.4 By common consent, Berlioz was the greatest orchestral innovator in history. By the 1830s, orchestras rarely consisted of more than sixty players. As early as 1825 Berlioz had brought together an orchestra of 150 but his ‘dream orchestra’, he confessed, would consist of 467, plus a chorus of 360. There were to be 242 strings, thirty harps, thirty pianos and sixteen French horns.5 Berlioz was far ahead of his time, the first of music’s true romantics, an enthusiast, a revolutionary, ‘a lawless despot’, the first of the conscious avant-gardists, as Schonberg puts it.6 ‘Uninhibited, highly emotional, witty, mercurial, picturesque, he was very conscious of his romanticism. He loved the very idea of romanticism: the urge for self-expression and the bizarre as opposed to the classic ideals of order and restraint.’7
Romanticism was a massive revolution in ideas. Very different from the French, industrial and American revolutions, it was no less fundamental. In the history of Western political thought, says Isaiah Berlin, though he is using ‘political’ in its widest sense, ‘there have occurred three major turning-points, when by turning point we mean a radical change in the entire conceptual framework with which questions have been posed: new ideas, new words, new relationships in terms of which the old problems are not so much solved as made to look remote, obsolete and, at times, unintelligible, so that the agonising problems and doubts of the past seem queer ways of thought, or confusions that belong to a world which has gone.’8
The first of these turning-points, he says, occurred in the short interval at the end of the fourth century BC between the death of Aristotle (384–322) and the rise of Stoicism, when the philosophical schools of Athens ‘ceased to conceive of individuals as intelligible only in the context of social life, ceased to discuss the questions connected with public and political life that had preoccupied the Academy and the Lyceum, as if these questions were no longer central, or even significant, and suddenly spoke of men purely in terms of inner experience and individual salvation’.9 This great transformation in values – ‘from the public to the private, the outer to the inner, the political to the ethical, the city to the individual, from social order to unpolitical anarchism’ – was so profound that nothing was the same afterward.10 The transformation was discussed in Chapter 6.
A second turning-point was inaugurated by Machiavelli (1469–1527). This involved his recognition that there is a division ‘between the natural and the moral virtues, the assumption that political values not merely are different from, but may in principle be incompatible with, Christian ethics’.11 This produced a utilitarian view of religion, in the process discrediting any theological justification for any set of political arrangements. It too was new and startling. ‘Men had not previously been openly called upon to choose between irreconcilable sets of values, private and public, in a world without purpose, and told in advance that there could in principle exist no ultimate, objective criterion for this choice.’12 Machiavelli’s political ideas were outlined in Chapter 24.
The third great turning-point – which Berlin argues is the greatest yet – was conceived toward the end of the eighteenth century, with Germany in the vanguard.13 ‘At its simplest the idea of romanticism saw the destruction of the notion of truth and validity in ethics and politics, not merely objective or absolute truth, but subjective and relative truth also – truth and validity as such.’ This, says Berlin, has produced vast and incalculable effects. The most important change, he says, has come in the very assumptions underlying Western thought. In the past, it had always been taken for granted that all general questions were of the same logical type: they were questions of fact. It followed from this that the important questions in life could be eventually answered, once all the relevant information had been collected. In other words, it was taken as read that moral and political questions, such as ‘What is the best way of life for men?’, ‘What are rights?’, ‘What is freedom?’ were in principle answerable in exactly the same way as questions like ‘What is water composed of?’, ‘How many stars are there?’, ‘When did Julius Caesar die?’14 Wars have been fought over the answers to these questions, says Berlin, but ‘it was always assumed that the answers were discoverable’. This was because, despite the various religious differences that have existed over time, one fundamental idea united men, though it had three aspects.15 ‘The first is that there is such an entity as a human nature, natural or supernatural, which can be understood by the relevant experts; the second is that to have a specific nature is to pursue certain specific goals imposed on it or built into it by God or an impersonal nature of things, and that to pursue these goals is what makes men human; the third is that these goals, and the corresponding interests and values (which it is the business of theology or philosophy or science to discover and formulate), cannot possibly conflict with one another – indeed they must form a harmonious whole.’16