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(MUSIC) TCHAIKOVSKY: Francesca Da Rimini

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(Clock chiming musically)

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A finite, reasonable world.

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Symmetrical. Consistent.

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Enclosed.

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Well, symmetry's a human concept,

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because, with all our oddities
we are, more or less, symmetrical.

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And the balance of a mantelpiece by Adam,
or a phrase by Mozart,

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reflects our satisfaction with our two eyes,
two arms, two legs, and so forth.

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And consistency. Again and again in this series
I've used that word as a term of praise.

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But enclosed - that's the trouble.

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An enclosed world
becomes a prison of the spirit.

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One longs to get out. One longs to move.

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One realises that symmetry and consistency,
whatever their merits

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are the enemies of movement.

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(MUSIC) BEETHOVEN: Leonora Overture

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And what is that I hear? That note of urgency,
of indignation, of spiritual hunger.

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Yes, it's Beethoven.

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It's the sound of European man once more
reaching for something beyond his grasp.

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We must leave this trim, finite room
and go to confront the infinite.

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(Waves crashing)

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(Music continues)

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We've a long, rough voyage ahead of us,

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and I can't say how it will end,
because it isn't over yet.

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We're still the offspring
of the Romantic movement

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and still victims of the fallacies of hope.

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I've used the metaphor of the sea,

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because all the great Romantics,
from Byron onwards,

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have been obsessed
by this image of movement and escape.

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"Once more upon the water!

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And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows his rider. Welcome to their roar!

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Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er they lead!"

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(Music resumes)

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This escape was also an escape from reason.

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In the 18th century, philosophers had attempted
to tidy up human society by the use of reason.

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But rational arguments weren't strong enough
to upset the huge mass of torpid tradition

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that had grown up in the last 150 years.

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In America it might be possible for a new
political constitution to be achieved by reason,

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but it took something more explosive
to blast the heavy foundations of Europe.

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Towards the end of the 18th century,
as rational argument declined,

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vivid assertion took its place.

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Rousseau: "Man was born free
and is everywhere in chains."

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Robert Burns: "A man's a man for a' that."

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Or, more explicitly:

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"It's coming yet for a' that,

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That man to man, the world o'er
Shall brithers be for a' that."

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In 179O, an obscure English poet
named Mordaunt wrote

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"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
Through all the sensual world proclaim,

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One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name."

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These are the impulses

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that showed themselves
like spray flying off a rock during the 1780s.

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Then, as we know, came the tidal wave.

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(Music resumes)

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It was because this need for freedom

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had for so long been boiling
under the surface of the 18th century

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that the French Revolution evolved
from the protest of a few disgruntled lawyers,

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through the honourable grunts and groans
of bourgeois constitutionalism,

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to the raw cry of a popular movement.

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None of the intervening solutions would do.

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In June 1789
the members of the National Assembly

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had found themselves locked out of their
usual meeting place - accidentally, it seems -

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and went off, full of virtuous indignation,
to this covered tennis court

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where they swore an oath
to establish a constitution.

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David, the painter of republican virtue,
was commissioned to record the scene.

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In the centre is a group symbolising the union
of the Church and the better aristocrats.

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Actually, the monk wasn't present.

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Like all propaganda pictures,
it's not strictly accurate.

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Here are figures in an ecstasy of enthusiasm
for constitutional government.

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And here - this is historically correct -

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is the one delegate
who wouldn't swear to support it.

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To our eyes, disenchanted
by 150 years of democratic eloquence

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and 50 years of propaganda painting -
none of it as good as David -

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the whole thing may seem slightly absurd.

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And in fact, these first steps towards revolution
were pedantic and confused.

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The constitutional phase of the French
Revolution belonged to the Age of Reason.

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Three years later,
we hear the sound of the new world

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when some honest citizens of Marseilles
grow impatient at an executive that doesn't act,

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and undertake the amazing feat of marching,
in a sweltering July,

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all the way from Marseilles to Paris,
tugging three pieces of cannon,

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and singing a new song.

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(MUSIC) RED ARMY SINGERS: La Marseillaise

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(MUSIC) Le jour de gloire est arrivé!

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(MUSIC) Contre nous de la tyrannie

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(MUSIC) L'étendard sanglant est levé!

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(MUSIC) L'étandard sanglant est levé!

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(MUSIC) Entendez-vous dans les campagnes

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(MUSIC) Mugir ces féroces soldats?

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(MUSIC) Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras

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(MUSIC) Égorger vos fils, vos compagnes

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(MUSIC) Aux armes, citoyens!

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(MUSIC) Formez vos bataillons!

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(MUSIC) Marchons, marchons!

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(MUSIC) Qu'un sang impur

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(MUSIC) Abreuve nos sillons!

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(MUSIC) Aux armes, citoyens!

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(MUSIC) Formez vos bataillons!

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(MUSIC) Marchons, marchons!

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(MUSIC) Qu'un sang impur

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(MUSIC) Abreuve nos sillons!

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Breathes there a man with a soul so dead

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who can listen to that marching song
without emotion, even today?

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No wonder that the finest spirits of the time
were enraptured;

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that Blake began a poem
on the French Revolution, which nobody reads;

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and Wordsworth wrote the lines
that everybody quotes,

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and I must quote again.

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"For great were the auxiliaries which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!

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Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven!"

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And Wordsworth goes on to say
how the Revolution seemed to bring

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Rousseau's dream of natural man and travellers'
tales of his enchanted existence into reality.

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It was no longer confined to
"Some secluded island, Heaven knows where!

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But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us."

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At this point, the Revolution
was the Romantic movement in action.

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And perhaps its greatest legacy to posterity
has been its message to the young:

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that those who are strong in love
may yet find a way of escaping

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from the rotten parchment bonds
that tie us down.

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I can see them still through the window
of the University of the Sorbonne,

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impatient to change the world, vivid in hope,

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although what precisely they hope for,
or believe in

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I don't know.

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The moving fact about the first revolutionaries

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is that their dream of a new world
was sharply defined.

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They wanted to change everything,
even the calendar

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making the year 1792 year one,
and renaming the months.

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The change of years was a nuisance,
but the new names of the months -

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Ventose, Thermidor, Brumaire, and so forth -
the windy one, the hot one, the misty one -

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were charming, and I wish they'd survived.

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They expressed the love of nature

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that had become so closely entwined
with the Revolution.

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The same desire to return to nature
affected women's fashions.

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All the artificial framework of the 18th century
is thrown away,

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and the dresses follow the lines of the body
with graceful simplicity.

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No more high, powdered wigs,
but flowing locks, with a simple bandeau.

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And Madame Récamier, the most famous
and inaccessible beauty of her time,

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posed for David with naked feet.

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Of course, there was a good deal
of profanation and blasphemy,

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and a vast amount of destruction.

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Cluny, St-Denis,
many of the sacred places of civilisation,

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were horribly knocked about.

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It was even proposed
to pull down Chartres Cathedral,

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and build in its place a Temple of Wisdom.

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The revolutionaries wanted
to replace Christianity with the religion of nature,

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and there is something rather touching

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about this print of baptism
according to the rites of nature,

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taking place in a de-Christianised church.

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People who hold forth about the modern world
often say that what we need is a new religion.

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It may be true, but it isn't easy to establish.

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Even Robespierre,
who was an enthusiast for new religion,

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and had powerful means of persuasion
at his command

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couldn't bring it off.

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And on the name Robespierre,

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one remembers
how horribly all this idealism came to grief

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in the prisons of the Terror.

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Most of the great episodes
in the history of civilisation

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have had some unpleasant consequences,

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but none have kicked back sooner and harder
than the revolutionary fervour of 1792,

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because in September
there took place the first of those massacres

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by which, alas,
the Revolution is chiefly remembered.

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No-one's ever explained in historical terms
the September massacres,

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and perhaps, in the end,
the old-fashioned explanation is correct:

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that it was a kind of communal sadism.

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It was a pogrom,

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a phenomenon with which we became familiar
in the 19th century.

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And it was given fresh impetus
by another familiar emotion - mass panic.

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"La patrie en danger." The country in peril.

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In 1792 France was fighting for her life,
against the forces of ancient corruption,

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and for a few years her leaders suffered
from the most terrible of all delusions:

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they believed themselves to be virtuous.

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Robespierre's friend Saint-Just said,

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"In a republic,
which can only be based on virtue,

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any pity shown towards crime
is a flagrant proof of treason."

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But reluctantly, one must admit

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that a great many of the subsequent horrors
were simply due to anarchy.

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It's a most attractive political doctrine,
but I'm afraid it's too optimistic.

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The men of 1793 tried desperately
to control anarchy by violence,

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and in the end were destroyed by the evil means
they had brought into existence.

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Robespierre himself, and many, many others,

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followed the members of the old regime
onto the scaffold.

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With what mixed feelings one looks
at David's picture of Marat, murdered in his bath.

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David painted it with deep emotion.

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The picture was intended
to immortalise the memory of a great patriot,

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worthy of the traditions of Brutus.

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Few propaganda pictures
make such an impact as a work of art.

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Yet Marat cannot escape responsibility
for the September massacres,

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and thus for the first cloud
to overcast Wordsworth's dawn

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and darken the optimism of the first Romantics
into a pessimism that has lasted to our own day.

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The revolutionary spirit lived on after his death,
as we see it in this picture by David,

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painted in 1795,

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but it had no leaders.

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French politics was exactly the same melee
of self-seeking in-fighting

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that it was to become so often
in the next 150 years.

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Then, in 1798
the French got a leader with a vengeance.

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(MUSIC) Le Champ D'Honneur

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With the appearance of General Bonaparte,

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the liberated energies of the Revolution
take a new direction -

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the insatiable urge to conquer and explore.

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His council chamber at Malmaison

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where the first great plans of conquest
were worked out

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is a soldier's room
with a ceiling made to look like a tent -

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a fashion that was followed all over Europe
for the next 50 years.

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And this is the actual council table.

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On the doors are trophies of arms
of the warlike peoples of antiquity -

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Carthaginian, Roman, Greek,

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the Middle Ages.

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Then beyond the doors
is Napoleon's library and study,

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and, painted on the ceiling,
portraits of his favourite authors,

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beginning with the Gaelic bard Ossian.

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What a charming room!

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Of course, it's an adaptation of an antique room,

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but made livable, almost comfortable.

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And this is his actual desk.

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Military glory. Conquest.

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What have they to do with civilisation?

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War and imperialism,
so long the most admired of human activities,

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have fallen into disrepute,

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and I am enough a child of my time
to hate them both.

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But I recognise that,
together with much that is destructive,

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they are symptoms of a life-giving impulse.

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"And shall I die with this unconquered?"

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How many great poets and artists and scientists

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could have spoken those words that Marlowe
put into the mouth of the dying Tamburlaine?

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In the field of political action,
they have become odious to us.

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But I've an uneasy feeling
that one can't have one thing without another;

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that Ruskin's unwelcome words

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"No great art ever yet rose on earth
but among a nation of soldiers,"

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seems to be historically irrefutable...so far.

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The need to conquer was only one part
of Napoleon's paradoxical character.

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There was also the political realist,
the great administrator,

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the author - or at least the editor -

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of that classic corpus of law,
the Code Napoléon,

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00:18:42,108 --> 00:18:44,058
written at this very desk.

231
00:18:47,160 --> 00:18:51,190
In his portraits
we can watch the young revolutionary soldier

232
00:18:51,269 --> 00:18:56,858
dissolve into the First Consul
with traces of revolutionary intensity in his head,

233
00:18:56,960 --> 00:19:01,710
and in two years he becomes the successor
of Childeric and Charlemagne.

234
00:19:03,200 --> 00:19:05,868
This extraordinary portrait by Ingres

235
00:19:05,960 --> 00:19:09,500
makes conscious reference
both to Roman ivories

236
00:19:09,588 --> 00:19:12,818
and tenth-century miniatures
of the Emperor Otto Ill.

237
00:19:14,588 --> 00:19:16,420
So, in one mood

238
00:19:16,509 --> 00:19:21,578
Napoleon believed that he was reviving
the great traditions of unity and stability

239
00:19:21,680 --> 00:19:25,750
by which the ideas of Greece and Rome
were transmitted to the Middle Ages.

240
00:19:25,828 --> 00:19:29,338
To the end, he maintained
that Europe would have been better off

241
00:19:29,440 --> 00:19:32,390
if it had been united under his rule.

242
00:19:32,480 --> 00:19:36,019
That may be true, but it could never happen,

243
00:19:36,108 --> 00:19:42,140
because the realistic ruler
was dominated by the romantic conqueror,

244
00:19:42,240 --> 00:19:46,750
and the static, hieratic Emperor
painted by Ingres

245
00:19:46,828 --> 00:19:50,900
is forgotten when we look at David's
Bonaparte Crossing The Great St Bernard.

246
00:19:51,920 --> 00:19:55,150
There he is truly the man of his time.

247
00:19:56,240 --> 00:20:01,910
For 50 years the great minds of Europe
were enchanted by a poem called Fingal,

248
00:20:02,000 --> 00:20:06,230
said to have been written by Ossian,
a Gaelic bard.

249
00:20:06,308 --> 00:20:09,460
Actually, it was a kind of fake,
put together out of scraps of evidence

250
00:20:09,548 --> 00:20:12,778
by an enterprising Scot named Macpherson.

251
00:20:12,880 --> 00:20:19,108
But this didn't prevent Goethe from admiring it,
nor Ingres, the high priest of Classicism,

252
00:20:19,200 --> 00:20:23,348
from painting an enormous picture
of Ossian's dream.

253
00:20:23,440 --> 00:20:30,348
And Fingal was Napoleon's favourite poem.
He took an illustrated copy on all his campaigns.

254
00:20:30,440 --> 00:20:35,150
Its heaven was not tarnished
by the approval of the old regime.

255
00:20:35,240 --> 00:20:38,990
He ordered the glossiest of his painters, Girodet,

256
00:20:39,068 --> 00:20:42,608
to depict the souls of his own warriors,
his marshals

257
00:20:42,720 --> 00:20:45,788
being received by Ossian in Valhalla.

258
00:20:45,880 --> 00:20:48,788
Painfully reminiscent of Hitler and Wagner.

259
00:20:48,880 --> 00:20:54,108
And yet one can't quite resist the exhilaration
of Napoleon's glory.

260
00:20:54,200 --> 00:20:56,868
(MUSIC) BEETHOVEN:
Eroica Symphony, Second Movement

261
00:22:20,640 --> 00:22:24,150
Communal enthusiasm
may be a dangerous intoxicant,

262
00:22:24,240 --> 00:22:28,548
but if human beings
were to lose altogether the sense of glory,

263
00:22:28,640 --> 00:22:31,200
I think we should be the poorer.

264
00:22:31,269 --> 00:22:33,220
(Music resumes)

265
00:23:09,200 --> 00:23:12,348
Napoleon's tomb in the church of Les Invalides,

266
00:23:12,440 --> 00:23:15,980
the most grandiose memorial to any ruler
since Ancient Egypt.

267
00:23:16,680 --> 00:23:20,630
And what, in all this glory,
had happened to the great heroes

268
00:23:20,720 --> 00:23:24,630
that spoke for humanity
in the revolutionary years?

269
00:23:24,720 --> 00:23:29,660
Most of them were silenced by fear -
fear of disorder, fear of bloodshed

270
00:23:29,750 --> 00:23:35,298
fear that, after all
human beings were not yet capable of liberty.

271
00:23:35,400 --> 00:23:40,519
Few episodes in history are more depressing
than the withdrawal of the great Romantics -

272
00:23:40,588 --> 00:23:44,368
Wordsworth saying that he would give his life
for the Church of England,

273
00:23:44,480 --> 00:23:50,150
or Goethe that it was better to support a lie
than to admit political confusion in the state.

274
00:23:50,788 --> 00:23:52,778
But two of them did not retreat

275
00:23:52,880 --> 00:23:56,028
and so have become
the archetypal romantic heroes -

276
00:23:56,108 --> 00:23:58,568
Beethoven and Byron.

277
00:23:58,680 --> 00:24:02,348
Different as they were -
and it's hard to think of two more different men -

278
00:24:02,440 --> 00:24:06,470
they both maintained an attitude of defiance
to social conventions

279
00:24:06,548 --> 00:24:09,980
and they both believed unshakably in freedom.

280
00:24:11,348 --> 00:24:13,650
Beethoven wasn't a political man,

281
00:24:13,750 --> 00:24:17,450
but he responded
to the generous sentiments of the Revolution.

282
00:24:17,548 --> 00:24:23,259
At first he admired Napoleon, because he
seemed to be the apostle of revolutionary ideals,

283
00:24:23,348 --> 00:24:27,180
the inheritor
of the early revolutionary urge to freedom,

284
00:24:27,269 --> 00:24:30,058
symbolised by the storming of the Bastille.

285
00:24:30,160 --> 00:24:33,588
The Bastille was subsequently knocked down,
stone by stone,

286
00:24:33,680 --> 00:24:36,190
but repression did not come to an end.

287
00:24:36,269 --> 00:24:41,900
On the contrary, Napoleon organised
the most efficient secret police in Europe.

288
00:24:56,308 --> 00:24:59,660
This place is the dungeon
of the castle of Vincennes

289
00:24:59,750 --> 00:25:03,618
where political prisoners of all sorts
have faced the firing squad,

290
00:25:03,720 --> 00:25:05,390
right up to the end of the last war.

291
00:25:05,480 --> 00:25:07,470
Hateful.

292
00:25:07,548 --> 00:25:11,660
And would have been equally hateful
to both Byron and Beethoven.

293
00:25:11,750 --> 00:25:15,019
When Beethoven heard that Napoleon
had proclaimed himself Emperor,

294
00:25:15,108 --> 00:25:18,420
he tore off the dedication page
of the Third Symphony,

295
00:25:18,509 --> 00:25:22,098
and was with difficulty prevented
from destroying the score.

296
00:25:22,200 --> 00:25:28,230
Later he was to write, in his opera Fidelio,
the greatest of all hymns to liberty,

297
00:25:28,308 --> 00:25:33,170
as the victims of injustice struggle up
from their dungeons towards the light.

298
00:25:33,269 --> 00:25:36,740
(MUSIC) In freier Luft

299
00:25:36,828 --> 00:25:41,740
(MUSIC) Den Atem leicht zu heben!

300
00:25:43,269 --> 00:25:46,460
(MUSIC) O welche Lust!

301
00:25:46,548 --> 00:25:54,778
(MUSIC) Nur hier, nur hier, nur hier ist Leben

302
00:25:54,880 --> 00:26:00,710
"O happiness to see the light," they say,
"to feel the air and be once more alive.

303
00:26:00,788 --> 00:26:05,650
Our prison was a tomb.
O freedom, freedom, come to us again."

304
00:26:05,750 --> 00:26:11,618
This cry has echoed through all the countless
revolutionary movements of the last century.

305
00:26:11,720 --> 00:26:14,150
(MUSIC) In freier Luft

306
00:26:15,160 --> 00:26:18,828
(MUSIC) In freier Luft

307
00:26:19,920 --> 00:26:24,430
(MUSIC) Den Atem leicht zu heben!

308
00:26:24,509 --> 00:26:28,500
(MUSIC) Nur hier, hier ist Leben

309
00:26:29,548 --> 00:26:33,980
(MUSIC) Nur hier, nur hier

310
00:26:34,068 --> 00:26:38,740
(MUSIC) Nur hier, nur hier ist Leben

311
00:26:38,828 --> 00:26:41,288
(MUSIC) Ist Leben

312
00:26:41,400 --> 00:26:43,778
(MUSIC) Der Kerker eine...

313
00:26:43,880 --> 00:26:48,390
(MUSIC) Der Kerker eine Gruft

314
00:26:51,068 --> 00:26:56,700
(MUSIC) Nur hier, nur hier

315
00:26:56,788 --> 00:27:01,940
(MUSIC) Nur hier ist Leben

316
00:27:03,588 --> 00:27:06,298
(MUSIC) O welche Lust

317
00:27:07,400 --> 00:27:11,630
(MUSIC) O welche Lust

318
00:27:25,750 --> 00:27:32,980
(MUSIC) Wir wollen mit Vertrauen

319
00:27:33,068 --> 00:27:37,618
(MUSIC) Auf Gottes Hilfe

320
00:27:37,720 --> 00:27:41,868
(MUSIC) Auf Gottes Hilfe bauen

321
00:27:41,960 --> 00:27:49,868
(MUSIC) Die Hoffnung flüstert sanft mir zu

322
00:27:49,960 --> 00:27:55,028
(MUSIC) Wir werden frei

323
00:27:55,108 --> 00:27:57,980
(MUSIC) Wir finden Ruh'

324
00:27:59,068 --> 00:28:01,180
(MUSIC) Wir finden Ruh'!

325
00:28:01,269 --> 00:28:04,578
(MUSIC) O Himmel!

326
00:28:04,680 --> 00:28:06,390
(MUSIC) Rettung!

327
00:28:08,028 --> 00:28:10,618
(MUSIC) Welch ein Glück!

328
00:28:10,720 --> 00:28:16,390
(MUSIC) O Freiheit, O Freiheit

329
00:28:16,480 --> 00:28:18,750
(MUSIC) Kehrst du zurück?

330
00:28:19,440 --> 00:28:24,630
(MUSIC) Kehrst du zurück?

331
00:28:33,068 --> 00:28:34,940
As far as freedom is concerned

332
00:28:35,028 --> 00:28:39,380
I'm afraid that recent revolutionary movements
haven't got us far forward.

333
00:28:39,480 --> 00:28:44,868
On the fall of the Bastille in 1792
it was found to contain only seven old men,

334
00:28:44,960 --> 00:28:47,068
who were annoyed at being disturbed.

335
00:28:47,160 --> 00:28:52,348
But to have opened the doors
of a political prison in Germany in 1940,

336
00:28:52,440 --> 00:28:54,788
or Hungary in 1956,

337
00:28:54,880 --> 00:28:57,548
or Spain or Greece today...

338
00:28:57,640 --> 00:29:01,068
then one would have known the meaning
of that scene in Fidelio.

339
00:29:02,828 --> 00:29:06,940
Beethoven
in spite of his tragic deafness', was an optimist.

340
00:29:07,028 --> 00:29:11,420
He believed that man had within himself
a spark of the divine fire,

341
00:29:11,509 --> 00:29:15,460
revealed in his love of nature
and his need for friendship.

342
00:29:15,548 --> 00:29:20,380
He believed that man was worthy of freedom.

343
00:29:20,480 --> 00:29:23,430
The despair
that poisoned the Romantic movement

344
00:29:23,509 --> 00:29:25,460
had not yet entered his veins.

345
00:29:26,509 --> 00:29:32,460
But by about 1810 all the optimistic hopes
of the 18th century had been proved false.

346
00:29:32,548 --> 00:29:38,940
The rights of man, the fall of tyrants,
the benefits of industry - all a delusion.

347
00:29:40,068 --> 00:29:43,980
The freedoms won by revolution
had been immediately lost,

348
00:29:44,068 --> 00:29:45,858
either by counter-revolution,

349
00:29:45,960 --> 00:29:51,028
or by the revolutionary government
falling into the hands of military dictators.

350
00:29:51,108 --> 00:29:56,618
In Goya's picture of a firing squad,
called 3 May 1808,

351
00:29:56,720 --> 00:30:01,740
the repeated gesture of those
who've raised their arms in heroic affirmation

352
00:30:01,828 --> 00:30:05,098
becomes the repeated line of the soldiers' rifles,

353
00:30:05,200 --> 00:30:09,509
as they liquidate a small group of liberals
and other inconvenient citizens.

354
00:30:09,588 --> 00:30:13,288
Well, we're used to all this now.

355
00:30:13,400 --> 00:30:16,910
We're almost numbed
by repeated disappointments.

356
00:30:17,000 --> 00:30:19,950
But in 1810 it was a new experience,

357
00:30:20,028 --> 00:30:23,568
and all the poets and philosophers
and artists of the Romantic movement

358
00:30:23,680 --> 00:30:25,430
were shattered by it.

359
00:30:25,960 --> 00:30:28,190
The spokesman of this pessimism
was Byron.

360
00:30:29,440 --> 00:30:33,308
He would probably have been a pessimist,
anyway - it was part of his egotism -

361
00:30:33,400 --> 00:30:37,828
but appearing when he did,
the tide of disillusion carried him along,

362
00:30:37,920 --> 00:30:42,108
so that he became, after Napoleon,
the most famous name in Europe.

363
00:30:42,200 --> 00:30:47,348
From great poets like Goethe and Pushkin
down to the most brainless schoolgirl,

364
00:30:47,440 --> 00:30:51,190
his works were read
with an almost hysterical enthusiasm,

365
00:30:51,269 --> 00:30:55,818
which, as we struggle through
the rhetorical nonsense of Lara or The Giaour

366
00:30:55,920 --> 00:30:57,269
we can hardly credit,

367
00:30:57,348 --> 00:31:00,460
because, although Byron
wrote quite a lot of good poetry,

368
00:31:00,548 --> 00:31:03,500
it was his bad poetry that made him famous.

369
00:31:07,480 --> 00:31:13,108
Byron, who was very much a man of his time,
wrote a poem about the opening of a prison -

370
00:31:13,200 --> 00:31:17,990
the dungeon of the castle of Chillon
on the lake of Geneva just behind me there.

371
00:31:18,068 --> 00:31:21,338
He begins with a sonnet
in the old revolutionary vein:

372
00:31:21,440 --> 00:31:26,868
"Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty!"

373
00:31:26,960 --> 00:31:31,470
But when, after many horrors,
the prisoner of Chillon is at last released,

374
00:31:31,548 --> 00:31:33,578
a new note is heard:

375
00:31:33,680 --> 00:31:39,269
"At last men came to set me free;
I ask'd not why, and reck'd not where;

376
00:31:39,348 --> 00:31:44,098
It was at length the same to me,
Fetter'd or fetterless to be;

377
00:31:44,200 --> 00:31:46,660
I learn'd to love despair."

378
00:31:47,720 --> 00:31:52,430
Since that line was written, how many
intellectuals, down to Beckett and Sartre

379
00:31:52,509 --> 00:31:54,338
have echoed its sentiment?

380
00:31:54,440 --> 00:31:58,220
But this negative conclusion
was not the whole of Byron.

381
00:31:58,308 --> 00:32:02,700
The prisoner of Chillon had looked from
his castle wall onto the mountains and the lake

382
00:32:02,788 --> 00:32:05,170
and felt himself to be part of them.

383
00:32:05,269 --> 00:32:08,500
This was the positive side of Byron's genius,

384
00:32:08,588 --> 00:32:12,368
a self-identification
with the great forces of nature -

385
00:32:12,480 --> 00:32:14,910
in short, with the sublime.

386
00:32:15,000 --> 00:32:16,950
(MUSIC) BERLIOZ: King Lear

387
00:32:49,720 --> 00:32:52,308
Consciousness of the sublime was a faculty

388
00:32:52,400 --> 00:32:55,990
that the Romantic movement
added to the European imagination.

389
00:32:56,068 --> 00:33:00,058
It was an English discovery,
related to the discovery of nature.

390
00:33:00,160 --> 00:33:06,190
Not the truth-giving nature of Goethe,
nor the moralising nature of Wordsworth,

391
00:33:06,269 --> 00:33:10,660
but the savage,
incomprehensible power outside ourselves,

392
00:33:10,750 --> 00:33:14,778
that makes us aware
of the futility of human arrangements.

393
00:33:14,880 --> 00:33:17,950
As the Revolution
turned into the Napoleonic adventure,

394
00:33:18,028 --> 00:33:21,538
the sublime became visible and within reach.

395
00:33:21,640 --> 00:33:25,548
And this was the feeling
that was given popular expression by Byron.

396
00:33:25,640 --> 00:33:27,509
He was irresistible

397
00:33:27,588 --> 00:33:33,338
because he had identified himself
with the fearful forces of the sublime.

398
00:33:33,440 --> 00:33:37,140
"Let me be,"
he says to the stormy darkness on this very lake,

399
00:33:37,240 --> 00:33:43,868
"let me be a sharer in thy fierce and far delight,
a portion of the tempest and of thee."

400
00:33:44,920 --> 00:33:47,348
But participation in the sublime

401
00:33:47,440 --> 00:33:52,710
was almost as much of a strain
as the pursuit of freedom,

402
00:33:52,788 --> 00:33:54,700
because de Sade was right:

403
00:33:54,788 --> 00:33:58,700
Nature is indifferent, or, as we say, cruel.

404
00:34:00,640 --> 00:34:05,470
No great artist has ever observed
these violent, hostile moods of nature

405
00:34:05,548 --> 00:34:07,930
as closely as Turner.

406
00:34:08,030 --> 00:34:10,179
And he was without hope.

407
00:34:10,280 --> 00:34:13,550
These are not my words,
but the final judgement of Ruskin,

408
00:34:13,630 --> 00:34:16,300
who knew him and worshipped him.

409
00:34:16,400 --> 00:34:18,670
Turner was a great admirer of Byron,

410
00:34:18,760 --> 00:34:23,750
and he used quotations from Byron's poems
in the titles of his pictures.

411
00:34:23,840 --> 00:34:27,909
But Childe Harold
was not pessimistic enough for him,

412
00:34:28,000 --> 00:34:33,750
so Turner wrote a fragmentary poem
to provide himself with titles.

413
00:34:33,840 --> 00:34:37,268
He called it The Fallacies Of Hope.

414
00:34:37,360 --> 00:34:39,630
Bad poetry. Good pictures.

415
00:34:40,630 --> 00:34:42,699
Here's one of the most famous of them.

416
00:34:42,800 --> 00:34:45,670
It represents an actual episode
in the slave trade

417
00:34:45,760 --> 00:34:50,510
another of those contemporary horrors
that troubled the Romantic imagination.

418
00:34:50,590 --> 00:34:56,690
Turner called it Slavers Throwing Overboard
The Dead And Dying - Typhoon Coming On.

419
00:34:57,960 --> 00:35:02,349
For the last 50 years, we've not been
in the least interested in the horrible story,

420
00:35:02,440 --> 00:35:07,869
but only in the colour of the black leg
and the pink fish surrounding it.

421
00:35:07,960 --> 00:35:11,869
But Turner meant us to take it seriously.

422
00:35:11,960 --> 00:35:16,710
"Hope, hope, fallacious hope," he wrote,
"where is thy market now?"

423
00:35:19,190 --> 00:35:23,219
About 20 years earlier, Géricault,
the most Byronic of all painters,

424
00:35:23,320 --> 00:35:26,268
had also made his name
with a picture of a disaster at sea.

425
00:35:26,360 --> 00:35:30,829
The frigate Medusa
foundered on her way to Senegal.

426
00:35:30,920 --> 00:35:33,869
149 of the passengers were put onto a raft,

427
00:35:33,960 --> 00:35:37,550
which was to be towed by sailors
in the pinnaces.

428
00:35:37,630 --> 00:35:41,018
After a time
the crew got fed up and cut the ropes,

429
00:35:41,110 --> 00:35:44,059
leaving the raft to drift out to sea,

430
00:35:44,150 --> 00:35:47,179
and condemning the passengers
to almost certain death.

431
00:35:48,320 --> 00:35:52,230
Miraculously, there were a few survivors,

432
00:35:52,320 --> 00:35:55,510
from whom
Géricault learnt the full horrors of the episode.

433
00:35:55,590 --> 00:35:58,420
He even found the ship's carp, enter,
who had made the raft

434
00:35:58,510 --> 00:36:00,809
and he had him make a model of it in his studio.

435
00:36:00,920 --> 00:36:05,230
He took a work room near a hospital,
so that he could study dying men.

436
00:36:05,320 --> 00:36:07,268
He'd been a dandy,

437
00:36:07,360 --> 00:36:10,230
but he gave up his life of p, leasure,
shaved his head

438
00:36:10,320 --> 00:36:13,989
and locked himself in a room
with corpses from the morgue.

439
00:36:14,070 --> 00:36:16,940
He was determined to paint a masterpiece.

440
00:36:18,510 --> 00:36:20,460
And he succeeded.

441
00:36:20,550 --> 00:36:22,500
(MUSIC) BERLIOZ: King Lear

442
00:36:52,510 --> 00:36:56,130
To us it looks
like a piece of grandiose picture-making,

443
00:36:56,230 --> 00:36:59,929
but The Raft was intended
and originally accepted,

444
00:37:00,030 --> 00:37:03,059
as a piece of what we call social realism.

445
00:37:04,480 --> 00:37:08,099
Géricault's last works
were a series of portraits of lunatics,

446
00:37:08,190 --> 00:37:11,659
which I think are among the great pictures
of the 19th century.

447
00:37:11,760 --> 00:37:17,670
They carry a step further the Romantic impulse
to explore beyond the bounds of reason.

448
00:37:17,760 --> 00:37:21,380
His intense effort
to penetrate into their disordered minds

449
00:37:21,480 --> 00:37:26,230
has led him to grasp more fully
the complete physical character of their heads.

450
00:37:27,440 --> 00:37:30,670
By this time,
Géricault was dying of some internal injury,

451
00:37:30,760 --> 00:37:34,750
which he aggravated
by riding the most unruly horses he could find.

452
00:37:34,840 --> 00:37:38,949
No strong man
has ever sought death more resolutely.

453
00:37:39,960 --> 00:37:42,469
He died at the age of 33,

454
00:37:42,550 --> 00:37:46,460
a little younger than Byron,
considerably older than Shelley and Keats.

455
00:37:47,510 --> 00:37:50,219
Fortunately, he left a spiritual heir,

456
00:37:50,320 --> 00:37:54,150
whose pessimism
was supported by a more powerful intellect -

457
00:37:54,230 --> 00:37:55,340
Delacroix.

458
00:37:56,630 --> 00:37:59,900
The first picture
in which Delacroix is entirely himself

459
00:38:00,000 --> 00:38:02,230
is The Massacre Of Scios.

460
00:38:02,320 --> 00:38:05,510
As with almost all the masterpieces
of Romantic painting,

461
00:38:05,590 --> 00:38:07,619
it represents an actual event -

462
00:38:07,710 --> 00:38:12,570
the slaughter by the occupying Turks
of the inhabitants of a Greek village.

463
00:38:12,670 --> 00:38:17,980
And it reflects the generous sentiments
of those liberals like Shelley and Byron

464
00:38:18,070 --> 00:38:20,530
who dreamed that Greece might yet be free.

465
00:38:21,590 --> 00:38:27,619
While Delacroix was painting it came the news
of Byron's death on campaign at Missolonghi.

466
00:38:27,710 --> 00:38:31,900
There is protest and compassion in this picture -

467
00:38:32,000 --> 00:38:34,829
more, perhaps,
than Delacroix was ever to show again,

468
00:38:34,920 --> 00:38:38,989
because he came to despair
of all attempts to change society,

469
00:38:39,070 --> 00:38:42,768
and retreated
into painting subjects from Romantic poetry.

470
00:38:42,880 --> 00:38:46,070
Some of his greatest pictures
were inspired by Byron.

471
00:38:46,150 --> 00:38:48,099
This is The Prisoner Of Chillon.

472
00:38:50,110 --> 00:38:53,619
As luck would have it, one of Delacroix's friends
became Prime Minister

473
00:38:53,710 --> 00:38:55,860
and gave him many public commissions,

474
00:38:55,960 --> 00:38:58,949
including the library
of the French Parliament House.

475
00:38:59,030 --> 00:39:02,730
At one end of the room
he painted the scene of Attila the Hun

476
00:39:02,840 --> 00:39:06,349
trampling on the remains of antique civilisation.

477
00:39:06,440 --> 00:39:09,469
What an incredible choice for a library!

478
00:39:09,550 --> 00:39:11,460
And made all the stranger

479
00:39:11,550 --> 00:39:15,860
by Delacroix's obvious sympathy
with this embodiment of destructive energy.

480
00:39:16,880 --> 00:39:21,820
No-one realised better than Delacroix
that we got through by the skin of our teeth.

481
00:39:21,920 --> 00:39:24,789
And, he would have added, was it worth it?

482
00:39:25,920 --> 00:39:30,909
But in the end, somewhat reluctantly,
he would have answered, "Yes."

483
00:39:32,000 --> 00:39:36,989
He valued European civilisation all the more
because he knew it was fragile.

484
00:39:39,190 --> 00:39:42,940
The 19th century
revealed a split in the European mind

485
00:39:43,030 --> 00:39:47,420
as great as that which afflicted Christendom
in the 16th century,

486
00:39:47,510 --> 00:39:50,139
and even more destructive.

487
00:39:50,230 --> 00:39:55,380
On the one hand was the new middle class
created by the Industrial Revolution.

488
00:39:55,480 --> 00:40:00,750
It was hopeful and energetic,
but without a scale of values.

489
00:40:00,840 --> 00:40:04,670
Sandwiched between a corrupt aristocracy
and a brutalised poor,

490
00:40:04,760 --> 00:40:11,869
it had produced a defensive morality -
conventional, complacent, hypocritical.

491
00:40:11,960 --> 00:40:16,949
Never was a class better documented
by the admirable cartoonists of the day.

492
00:40:19,480 --> 00:40:23,230
On the other hand were the, finer spirits,
like Delacroix

493
00:40:23,320 --> 00:40:29,420
who were still heirs of the Romantic movement
still haunted by disaster.

494
00:40:29,510 --> 00:40:32,500
And they felt themselves, not without reason,

495
00:40:32,590 --> 00:40:36,260
to be entirely cut off
from the prosperous majority.

496
00:40:37,800 --> 00:40:41,949
But what could they put in place
of middle-class morality?

497
00:40:42,030 --> 00:40:45,099
They themselves were still in search of a soul.

498
00:40:46,230 --> 00:40:50,619
The search went on throughout the 19th century,
and it continues today,

499
00:40:50,710 --> 00:40:54,739
and leads to the same sense
of isolation and despair.

500
00:40:55,880 --> 00:41:00,429
In the visual arts
its chief interpreter was a sculptor, Rodin.

501
00:41:00,510 --> 00:41:06,739
He was the last great Romantic artist,
the direct heir of Géricault and Byron.

502
00:41:06,840 --> 00:41:10,309
Indeed, his greatest disappointment
was that he didn't win the competition

503
00:41:10,400 --> 00:41:13,429
to do the Byron memorial in Hyde Park.

504
00:41:13,510 --> 00:41:16,659
And like them
his abundant animal spirits didn't allay,

505
00:41:16,760 --> 00:41:21,230
but rather enhanced his view
of mankind's tragic destiny.

506
00:41:21,320 --> 00:41:25,989
And like them, there is
sometimes, in his expressions 'of despair,

507
00:41:26,070 --> 00:41:28,860
a trace of rhetorical exaggeration.

508
00:41:28,960 --> 00:41:31,190
But what an artist he was!

509
00:41:31,280 --> 00:41:34,349
Incredible that, only 20 years ago,

510
00:41:34,440 --> 00:41:38,030
he was still under the cloud
of critical disapproval.

511
00:41:38,110 --> 00:41:39,659
What is posterity?

512
00:41:40,670 --> 00:41:44,179
He was an inventor of symbolic poses
that stay in the mind,

513
00:41:44,280 --> 00:41:49,869
and like all oversimplified statements
that spur men on to action,

514
00:41:49,960 --> 00:41:52,518
they are sometimes rather too obvious.

515
00:41:52,590 --> 00:41:56,500
But in the originals,
his figures are saved from banality

516
00:41:56,590 --> 00:42:00,059
by a really stunning force
and freedom of modelling.

517
00:42:00,150 --> 00:42:06,579
"Every form thrusting outwards
at its maximum point of tension."

518
00:42:06,670 --> 00:42:09,539
Those were Rodin's own words.

519
00:42:09,630 --> 00:42:12,059
Look at the back of this figure of Eve.

520
00:42:12,150 --> 00:42:17,980
You'll see how the vitality is conveyed
by the touch of Rodin's hands.

521
00:42:18,070 --> 00:42:20,059
He was one of those sculptors

522
00:42:20,150 --> 00:42:23,500
who communicate
through the movement of his fingers.

523
00:42:23,590 --> 00:42:28,219
And for that reason
all his best figures were modelled quite small,

524
00:42:28,320 --> 00:42:30,750
enlarged afterwards by other artists.

525
00:42:30,840 --> 00:42:35,030
This is the largest scale
on which Rodin ever worked.

526
00:42:37,030 --> 00:42:41,699
If some of his gestures look a little forced,
one must also admit

527
00:42:41,800 --> 00:42:46,820
that Rodin's power of representing figures
under the pressure of violent emotions

528
00:42:46,920 --> 00:42:52,070
links him with a whole line of modern art
from Munch to Francis Bacon.

529
00:42:53,320 --> 00:42:57,909
These are his Burghers Of Calais,
staggering out of the beleaguered city

530
00:42:58,000 --> 00:43:03,829
and offering their lives to the brutal English King,
in order that the people may be saved.

531
00:43:04,880 --> 00:43:10,190
They're still with us -
Romantic man at the end of his pilgrimage.

532
00:43:10,280 --> 00:43:12,230
(MUSIC) RICHARD STRAUSS: Solemn Prelude

533
00:44:23,110 --> 00:44:26,730
Rodin did one work which is dateless -

534
00:44:26,840 --> 00:44:30,619
very ancient or very modern,
depending on which way you look at it.

535
00:44:30,710 --> 00:44:35,460
This is his monument
to the great French novelist Balzac.

536
00:44:35,550 --> 00:44:39,300
Of course, Balzac had been dead for many
years when Rodin received the commission,

537
00:44:39,400 --> 00:44:43,179
and the commemorative figure
had to be an ideal likeness -

538
00:44:43,280 --> 00:44:47,059
a serious obstacle to Rodin
as he always worked direct from nature.

539
00:44:47,150 --> 00:44:51,219
All he had to go on was the knowledge
that Balzac was short and fat

540
00:44:51,320 --> 00:44:53,150
and worked in a dressing gown.

541
00:44:53,230 --> 00:44:58,780
Yet he had also to make Balzac look immense
the dominating imagination of his age,

542
00:44:58,880 --> 00:45:01,550
and yet transcending his age.

543
00:45:01,630 --> 00:45:03,860
He set about the problem in a peculiar way.

544
00:45:03,960 --> 00:45:11,710
He made seven naked figures of Balzac,
to satisfy his sense of Balzac's physical reality.

545
00:45:11,800 --> 00:45:16,469
And some of them
are here in his studio near Paris.

546
00:45:16,550 --> 00:45:20,820
You can see that he didn't make
any concessions to the classical ideal.

547
00:45:21,920 --> 00:45:26,780
After contemplating them for several months,
he decided on one of them

548
00:45:26,880 --> 00:45:33,110
and tried to cover it with a cast of drapery,
indicative of the famous dressing gown.

549
00:45:33,190 --> 00:45:38,210
In this way, he contrived to give the figure
both monumentality and movement.

550
00:45:38,320 --> 00:45:43,550
The result is, to my mind, the greatest piece
of sculpture of the 19th century -

551
00:45:43,630 --> 00:45:47,059
perhaps, indeed,
the greatest since Michelangelo.

552
00:45:51,480 --> 00:45:55,469
But this isn't the way
in which Rodin's contemporaries saw it,

553
00:45:55,550 --> 00:45:58,380
when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1898.

554
00:45:58,480 --> 00:46:00,510
They were horrified.

555
00:46:00,590 --> 00:46:03,219
Rodin was a hoax, a swindler.

556
00:46:04,280 --> 00:46:08,059
They even raised the cry
of "la patrie en danger",

557
00:46:08,150 --> 00:46:11,099
which shows how seriously the French take art.

558
00:46:11,190 --> 00:46:15,099
The crowds surging round it,
threatening it with their fists,

559
00:46:15,190 --> 00:46:18,139
were unanimous on one point of criticism:

560
00:46:18,230 --> 00:46:20,579
that the attitude was impossible,

561
00:46:20,670 --> 00:46:24,699
and that no body
could exist under such draperies.

562
00:46:24,800 --> 00:46:29,429
Rodin, sitting nearby, knew that he had only
to strike the figure with a hammer,

563
00:46:29,510 --> 00:46:32,940
and the draperies would come off,
Leaving the body visible.

564
00:46:34,000 --> 00:46:38,829
Hostile critics said
that it was like a snowman, a dolmen

565
00:46:38,920 --> 00:46:41,030
an owl, a heathen god.

566
00:46:42,110 --> 00:46:46,619
All quite true,
but we no longer regard them as terms of abuse.

567
00:46:46,710 --> 00:46:51,099
Balzac's body
has the timelessness of a prehistoric stone,

568
00:46:51,190 --> 00:46:53,860
and his head is like a bird of prey.

569
00:46:53,960 --> 00:46:57,579
And the real reason
why he made people so angry

570
00:46:57,670 --> 00:47:03,460
is the feeling that he could gobble them up,
and doesn't care a damn for their opinions.

571
00:47:03,550 --> 00:47:07,820
Balzac, with his prodigious understanding
of human motives

572
00:47:07,920 --> 00:47:13,550
scorns conventional values
defies fashionable opinions, as Beethoven did,

573
00:47:13,630 --> 00:47:20,500
and should inspire us to defy all those forces
that threaten to impair our humanity:

574
00:47:20,590 --> 00:47:23,420
lies, tanks, tear gas,

575
00:47:23,510 --> 00:47:29,139
ideologies, opinion polls,
mechanisation, planners, computers -

576
00:47:29,230 --> 00:47:31,179
the whole lot.

577
00:47:31,280 --> 00:47:33,349
(MUSIC) RICHARD STRAUSS: Till Eulenspiegel