An unfortunate comment. The real aim of romanticism, the underlying aim, had been set forth by Keats, who wrote poetry, he said, to ease ‘the burden of the mystery’. Romanticism was always, in part, a reaction to the decline in religious conviction, so evident in the eighteenth century, and then throughout the nineteenth. Whereas the scientists tried – or hoped – to explain the mystery, the romantics relished it, made the most of it, used it in ways that many scientists could not, or would not, understand. This is why poetry and music were the chief romantic responses – they were better at easing the burden.
This dichotomy, what Isaiah Berlin calls this incompatibility or incoherence, between the scientific world-view and the poetic, could not continue. The world of the romantics, the inner world of shadows and mystery, of passion and interiority, might produce a redeeming beauty, might even produce wisdom, but in a practical Victorian, nineteenth-century world of new technologies, new scientific breakthroughs, when the external world was expanding as never before, being conquered and controlled as never before, a new accommodation was needed, or at least was bound to be attempted. This accommodation led to two developments, which will close this book. In literature and the arts, in music, poetry and painting, it led to the movement we know as ‘Modernism’. And on the other side of the divide it led to what is still perhaps the most extraordinary phenomenon of modern times. This was the attempt to make a science of the unconscious.
31
The Rise of History, Pre-history and Deep Time
In May 1798 one of the most extraordinary expeditions in the history of ideas set out from Toulon, in France. No fewer than 167 chemists, engineers, biologists, geologists, architects, painters, poets, musicians and doctors were gathered together, referred to as savants by the 38,000 troops also collected in the southern French port. Like the troops, the savants didn’t know where they were headed, for their young commanding officer, Napoleon Bonaparte, had kept the destination secret. The average age of the savants was twenty-five, the youngest fourteen, but there were also well-known figures among the group which included: Pierre-Joseph Redouté, the flower painter, Gratet de Dolomieu, the geologist after whom the Dolomite mountains are named, and Nicholas Conté, a prominent chemist and naturalist.1
In fact, they were bound for Egypt, where Napoleon, hailed by Victor Hugo as ‘the Muhammad of the West’, landed at Alexandria on a ship called L’Orient. The venture was a mixture of colonialism and cultural/intellectual adventure. Bonaparte’s avowed aim was not merely conquest, he said, but to synthesise the wisdom of the pharaohs with the pieties of Islam and to that end everything the Armée did in Egypt ‘was explained and justified in precise Koranic Arabic’. Alongside the Armée, the savants were let loose to study the Middle Eastern world. The results of their endeavours were in many ways astounding. Conditions were harsh and they were forced to improvise. Conté invented a new kind of pump, and a new kind of pencil, without graphite. Larrey, a surgeon, turned himself into an anthropologist and made notes on the relations between the mixed population of Jews, Turks, Greeks and Bedouin. Every ten days or so they published a periodical, partly to keep the troops amused, partly to record their own activities and discoveries. Debates were organised by Napoleon himself, as a form of sophisticated entertainment for the savants, where questions of government, religion and ethics were aired.2 Most important, in the long run, the savants collected material for what would become The Description of Egypt, twenty-three large volumes, each page of which was one metre square (the metre, remember, being a new measure) and published over the following twenty-five years. Many things were explored in the Description. It began with a one-hundred-plus-page introduction by Jean-Baptiste-Joseph Fourier, secretary of the Institut de l’Égypte, which Napoleon had set up in some secrecy. Fourier made it clear that the French saw Egypt as ‘a centre of great memories’, a focal point between Asia, Africa and Europe (as Alexandria had been in earlier ages) and as such was ‘saturated with meaning for the arts, sciences and government’, and of which great things were expected in the future. The Description went on to outline new fauna and flora, new chemical substances, which existed naturally in Egypt, new geological features. But what most caught the imagination of many of the savants – turning them into the world’s first Egyptologists – and then proved especially popular among the public back home, were the archaeological treasures, of such size and in such abundance that everyone who came into contact with them was entranced. Doubly so when a big block of granite was found at Rosetta, where a contingent of soldiers was clearing a piece of land which they intended to turn into fortifications. This stone bore three texts, one in hieroglyphics, one in a demotic, cursive form of Egyptian, and one in Greek. It promised the possibility that hieroglyphics would soon be deciphered. (See Chapter 29 above.)3
One could say that archaeology in the West began with this expedition and that we have Napoleon to thank for it. In fact, in the realm of ideas, we have Napoleon to thank for rather more than this. After his return from Egypt, he went on to mount a campaign against Germany and this too was, indirectly, no less beneficial. By the turn of the nineteenth century, some two thousand self-governing German-speaking units that had survived the Thirty Years War had been reduced to around three hundred. This was still a lot by the standards of elsewhere but, in 1813, and led by Prussia, the Germans managed at last to defeat Napoleon, in the process learning the virtues of order and respect for rules that was to pay so handsomely thereafter.4 This was an important step on the road to unification, which finally was to arrive in 1871.
Thought in the eighteenth century in the fragmented kaleidoscope of small German-speaking states had lagged well behind other countries – behind Holland, Belgium, Britain and France – both in terms of political freedom, trading success, scientific advance and industrial innovation. This had been brought home by Napoleon’s rapid advances before his final defeat. The nineteenth century would see the rise of Germany, not just politically but also intellectually. Until Napoleon cut his swathe through Europe, roughly speaking in the second decade of the century, the German universities had been notable by their absence. In the 1700s, only Göttingen could lay claim to any academic distinction. However, stung into action by Napoleon’s campaigns, and example, which humiliated many Germans, the Francophile Prussian minister Wilhelm von Humboldt (1767–1835), who had spent time in Paris prior to the rise of Napoleon, took it upon himself to push through a number of administrative reforms that had a profound effect on German intellectual life. In particular, Humboldt conceived the idea of the modern university, not merely as colleges which trained the clergy, doctors and lawyers – the traditional format – but as places where research was a primary activity. In parallel with this, Humboldt introduced the practice whereby high school teachers in Germany must have a degree in order to teach. This linked the universities to schools much more directly than hitherto and helped spread the ideal of scholarship, based on original research, throughout German-speaking society. The PhD, a higher degree based on original research, was introduced. German intellectual life was transformed and before long the effects were felt across Europe and in north America.5