The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  Since the previous summer, the Reign of Terror had claimed some seventeen thousand victims by firing squad or the guillotine.2 On this day, the guillotine’s body count would be more than eighty. But this time those going to their death were the Terror’s own architects. Like its later imitators in Russia and Iran, the French Revolution proved best at devouring its own children.

  The sea of humanity parted to let the cart enter the Place de la Concorde—exactly where Louis XVI had been executed in 1793, and Marie Antoinette and Madame Roland a year later. Guards roughly shoved the prisoners out. One by one they staggered up the scaffold steps. Couthon, former interrogator in chief of the Committee of Public Safety and a deformed cripple, had to be dragged out and his head inserted sideways through the guillotine’s wooden block. The cherubic-faced Louis-Antoine Saint-Just, popularly known as the Angel of Death, was next. He had dreamed of turning France into Rousseau’s Sparta. Instead, he wound up one more headless victim of a utopian vision turned blood-soaked nightmare.

  The last prisoner to die was “the Incorruptible” himself, Maximilien Robespierre. Thirty-six years old, the most powerful man in France had become the most hated by virtue of his thirst for blood. Before his arrest, he had tried to commit suicide with a pistol but succeeded only in shattering his jaw. Now, as the executioner yanked away Robespierre’s bandage, the jaw was pulled from its socket. The Incorruptible let out a scream of surprise and pain that filled the crowded square with a sound more animal than human.

  The crowd roared as the blade rose and fell for the last time. When Robespierre’s head was held up to the mob’s cheers, “it presented the most horrendous spectacle imaginable, a monstrous, inhuman face”—the final ghostly face of Rousseau’s Republic of Virtue.3

  Far away on the other side of the English Channel, another man was walking the serene hills of rural Somerset. It was a bright and warm, sunlit day. Clouds flew along the wind and washed the trees in shadows. Larks sang in the meadow below as insects buzzed past his head. As the man stopped and sat in the shade of trees to contemplate the scene, thoughts ran through his mind, which he recorded in a poem:

  To her fair works did Nature link

  The human soul that through me ran;

  And much it grieved my heart to think

  What Man has made of Man.

  Although he was English, William Wordsworth had been a keen supporter of the French Revolution. In 1791, he had gone to France to see what all the excitement was about. He had fallen in with a revolutionary army officer named Beaupuy who had set Wordsworth to reading Rousseau. They had discussed the author of the Discourse on Inequality at length as they walked the shady banks of the Loire River in Orléans. One day they passed a homeless girl, her figure wasted with starvation. Beaupuy pointed. “That,” he said, “is what we’re fighting for!”4

  That was what Wordsworth wanted to fight for as well. When he moved to Paris in October 1792, he had the chance to see the Revolution in full vigor. The crowds and the excitement were everywhere; the sense of founding a greater future for man was palpable. “My heart was all / Given to the people, and my love was theirs,” he remembered later. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive, but to be young was very heaven!”5

  Wordsworth even hoped to establish a friendship with the Rolands and their circle of fervent Rousseauians. It was just as well he didn’t. When the Reign of Terror came, Wordsworth escaped arrest by a miracle and returned to England in December a sadder but wiser man.

  He had left with no faith in his own government and still less in the society he saw taking shape around him. It was an England of factories and smokestacks, of hard-faced merchants and manufacturers with bulging pocketbooks and factory workers with blackened faces, dull eyes, and sunken cheeks: the dark underside of commercial society. He had hoped to bring to England the same sweeping hopes for liberation he had experienced in France. Then the gruesome course of the Reign of Terror—soon to be followed by the cynical corruption of the Directory and the dictatorship of Napoleon in 1798—killed Wordsworth’s love affair with revolution. It did the same for many other intellectuals in Germany (Beethoven and the poet Hölderlin), in Spain (the painter Francisco Goya), and in America, where the ranks of the disillusioned included Thomas Jefferson.

  The French Revolution was the first God That Failed.* But the liberal disillusionment with communism in the 1950s was nothing like the unprecedented, and hence more devastating, brutal exposure by the Reign of Terror of what painter J.M.W. Turner called “the fallacies of hope,” the emptiness of Rousseau’s utopian vision. The crucial question became, What would take its place?

  For Wordsworth, the answer came in those long walks, and later in the cottage he shared with his sister Dorothy in the beauties of the Lake District.

  For I have learned

  To look on Nature, not as in the hour

  Of thoughtless youth; but hearing oftentimes

  The still, sad music of humanity …

  And I have felt

  A presence that disturbs me with the joy

  Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

  Of something far more deeply interfused,

  Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

  And the round ocean and the living air,

  And the blue sky, and in the mind of man …

  (Tintern Abbey, 1798)

  In the end, what replaced the spirit of revolution was the spirit of Romanticism. The Romantic, a term that the Enlightenment had associated with the picturesque and/or merely foolish (which still lives on when we talk about someone as an incurable romantic), assumed after 1800 a powerful cultural force—so powerful that it persists, almost unrecognized, as the foundation of popular Western culture today. At its center was Nature with a capital N. Faith in the rights of man yielded to a faith in Nature—“the nurse, the guide,” Wordsworth wrote, “the guardian of my heart and soul of all my moral being.” The German poet Hölderlin said the same: “Boldly forget what you have inherited and won—all laws and customs—and like new born babes lift up your eyes to godlike nature.”6

  This belief in an eternal and beneficent Nature bore a striking resemblance to the belief in Christianity it replaced, and not by accident. After 1725, orthodox Christian belief faded from the intellectual scene, as the Enlightenment drove out the last remnants of medieval Neoplatonism. By a strange twist of irony, opponents of Enlightenment like Rousseau and Wordsworth would rediscover in Nature what Neoplatonists had found in the God of revelation: the radiant presence of a transcendent moral order, of an Absolute ready to guide humanity to illumination (artists like Goethe and Turner became as obsessed with the study of light as they were with the study of clouds and mountains) and ultimate knowledge.

  The Romantics’ worship of Nature turned what the Enlightenment had celebrated as man’s power of outer observation into a form of inner contemplation. “ ‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty,’ ” John Keats would write, “—that is all Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.” Man’s senses, which Plato treated as the source of error and Locke the source of useful knowledge, were transformed by Romantic artists and poets into the source of divine truth. In one dramatic stroke, the nineteenth century discovered in the sensate world of forest, hills, waterfall, and pasture, as well as in sex and opium, the knowledge of the Good and the One.

  The Romantics, both progressives and conservatives (and there were politically conservative Romantics, like Samuel Taylor Coleridge and the French poet Chateaubriand), still stuck to Rousseau’s critique of capitalism. Commercial society was still soulless, hard, and unjust. The war with Aristotle’s Enlightenment was just as intense, and its celebration of a self-centered artificiality still offended as a betrayal of the innocence and promise of Rousseau’s natural man. As German poet Friedrich Schiller put it, in modern society “the essential bond of human nature has been torn apart, and a ruinous conflict [has] set its harmonious powers at variance.”7

  Far back in 1778, Rousseau’s fri
end Denis Diderot actually set up the debate in terms of Plato’s cave:

  Do you wish to know in brief the tale of almost all our woe? There once existed a natural man; there has been introduced within this man an artificial man and there has arisen in the cave a civil war which lasts throughout life.8

  The Romantics yearned for a way to end this war in the cave. They wanted some way in which our Aristotelian instinct to engage our reason in the material world and our Platonic desire to realize our spiritual inner nature could be, if not finally reconciled, at least overcome. Of course, this wasn’t going to be easy. As we’ve seen, the creative drive of Western civilization had arisen not from a reconciliation of the two halves but from a constant alert tension between them. But that didn’t stop the Romantics from trying.

  Still, for the first time Western man was aware of the conflict. The hope for working out some final synthesis—a way of living in the modern world without being devoured by it—charts the course of the rest of European and Western culture, even down to today.

  And it starts with a man walking alone in a forest.

  One impulse from a vernal wood

  May teach you more of man,

  Of moral evil and of good,

  Than all the sages can.

  Wordsworth’s belief that nature embodied a genuine transcendent moral law—in Plato’s terms, the Good in Itself—came to him slowly beginning around 1793. Naturally he didn’t come up with it entirely by himself. It had antecedents in various other poets and thinkers, especially in England. But Wordsworth was by far its most articulate spokesman, and by 1798 he had a full-fledged creed to be communicated to others.

  “O glide, fair stream! forever so, / Thy quiet soul on all bestowing, / Till all our minds for ever flow / As thy deep waters now are flowing.”9 The idea that nature’s creatures, plants, and even its rivers and mountains embody an unselfishness, a wisdom and an intensity of life, shared with those human beings who live closest to nature, may seem naïve. But not if we are members of Greenpeace—or followers of Plotinus. The Romantics’ fascination with nature led them to rediscover the Great Chain of Being and Plotinus’s World Soul with passionate excitement.

  Wisdom and Spirit of the Universe!

  Thou Soul, that art the Eternity of thought!

  That givest to forms and images a breath

  And everlasting motion!…

  (The Prelude, 1798)

  The difference was that the Romantics saw the One of creation less as a rational hierarchy than as a powerful feeling of connectedness and serenity that at times seems entirely Zen. To quote William Blake:

  To see the world in a grain of Sand

  And a Heaven in a wild flower

  Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

  And Eternity in an hour.

  Except the origins were not Zen at all, but the writings of Rousseau. Back in the early summer of 1765, Rousseau had fled from his enemies, both imaginary and real, to a tiny house on an island on Lake Bienne in the Swiss Alps. There he had an experience so intense that it changed his life.

  Sitting and listening to the rhythmic flux and reflux of the waves outside his window, he found he became completely at one with nature. As he described it later, all pain from the past and fears for the future faded away, leaving nothing except an intense awareness of nature’s permanence and of Being in Itself. “I realized,” he wrote in his description of the experience in Reveries of the Solitary Walker, “that our existence is nothing but a succession of moments perceived through the senses.” In the solitude of nature, “my soul, exalted by these sublime contemplations, rose into the presence of the Divinity.”10

  At the time it was a revolutionary, even subversive, concept—more subversive than his attack on capitalism or his version of the social contract. The philosophers of the Enlightenment had built their understanding of human identity on the premise that man was, to paraphrase Aristotle, a social animal.11 We instinctively hate being alone and crave interaction with others, they taught. Locke’s theory of knowledge had the same thrust. Verifying the truth of our own ideas requires constantly comparing them with the experience and judgment of others.

  And the best place to get this kind of knowledge through interaction, said Montesquieu, Hume, and others, was in commercial society. It was when you allowed people to go off on their own, to become isolated and brood over their own thoughts—the solitary hermit in his cave, the monk in his cell, or (one could add) Rousseau in his cottage—that they start confusing fantasy with reality and end up getting us all in trouble.

  Rousseau reversed the Enlightenment formula. Solitary man is best. Mingling with others brings out our competitive urges and our false self-regard, which (as the Discourse on Inequality explained) inspires all the corruptions of commercial society. For Rousseau, the final cure had to come through the social contract and submitting to the General Will. Until then, however, nature in all its silent vastness would do. Starting two decades after Rousseau’s death, the Romantics were delighted to take him up on his offer.

  The remote cottage on the heath; the lonely walk through the mountains, often for hours; the serene contemplation of a rainbow or a sunset across the waves of the sea: These became the characteristic setting for Romantic writers, poets, and painters and all those who wished to participate in this new form of inner enlightenment through nature—an enlightenment so analogous to the experience of knowing Plato’s Good in Itself that it seems superfluous to point it out.

  The immeasurable height

  Of woods decaying, never to be decay’d,

  The stationary blasts of water-falls …

  The unfetter’d clouds, and region of the Heavens;

  Tumult and peace, the darkness and the light

  Were all like workings of one mind, the features

  Of the same face, blossoms upon one tree,

  Characters of the great Apocalypse,

  The types and symbols of Eternity,

  Of first, and last, and midst, and without end.

  (The Prelude, Book VI)

  Of course, there was also a darker side to this worship of nature, as Percy Shelley liked to point out:

  Swiftly walk o’er the western wave,

  Spirit of Night!

  Out of the misty eastern cave,

  Where, all the long and lone daylight,

  Thou wovest dreams of joy and fear,

  Which make thee terrible and dear,

  Swift be thy flight!

  Wrap thy form in a mantle gray,

  Star-inwrought!

  Blind with thine hair the eyes of Day,

  Kiss her until she be wearied out;

  Then wander o’er city, and sea, and land,

  Touching all with thine opiate wand—

  Come, long-sought!

  (“To Night”)

  Ironically, this darker side owed its start to Rousseau’s great rival Edmund Burke. In 1757, fresh from college, the young Burke had penned A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The notion of the sublime (literally the feeling of being raised up to a higher level) came from a Hellenistic philosopher and Plato admirer named Longinus, who defined it as a sense of grandeur and awe inspired by a work of art so beautiful that we feel ourselves in the presence of the divine.12

  The Renaissance Neoplatonists deeply admired Longinus and swept him up in their belief that art had the power to convey divine truth. With a single decisive stroke, Burke detached Longinus’s sublime from the standard classical ideal of beauty. The real source of our experience of the sublime, the youthful Burke argued, was our most intense feelings; and of these the most important were fear of pain and danger, especially from a nature beyond human scale and beyond man’s control.

  These included the awe-inspiring mountains and vertiginous valleys of the Alps; the destructive power of cataracts and avalanches and storms at sea; the deathlike “solitude and silence” of night; and “the roaring of animals” like lions and ti
gers (the big cats were soon to become the Romantics’ archetypes of Nature at her freest and most untamed).13

  Hence the statesman who warned the world about the danger of Rousseau’s politics became ironically one of the prophets of the Rousseauian worship of nature. Burke’s formula found its way into the poems and paintings of the early Romantics, as well as their novels, from Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. They still live on in their modern cinematic offspring, the horror movie.

  But they also pointed to another powerful lesson to be drawn from the contemplation of Nature’s dark side: the puniness of man and man’s efforts in the face of her destructive power.

  Blow, winds, and crack your cheeks! Rage! Blow!

  You cataracts and hurricanoes, spout

  Till you have drench’d our steeples, drown’d the cocks!

  You sulphurous and thought-executing fires,

  Vaunt-couriers to oak-cleaving thunderbolts,

  Singe my white head!

  And thou, all-shaking thunder,

  Strike flat the thick rotundity o’ the world!

  We see it in a painting like Caspar David Friedrich’s Wreck of the Hope, in which a ship trapped between icebergs is crushed and overwhelmed with the same lack of concern and pity as a child crushing a beetle. We also see it in the terrifying lightning-slashed landscapes of George Stubbs, and above all in the canvases of J.M.W. Turner, England’s greatest painter and greatest observer of the violent, hostile moods of nature as the Absolute.

  His pictures give us typhoons, snowstorms, and avalanches in vivid colors and light. Luminescent arcs of blue and green sweep the scene or drench the landscape with shimmering golds and bloodred scarlets. Turner’s nature is so immense and impersonal that it becomes abstracted from its normal visual appearance. In fact, Turner is the inventor of Abstract painting nearly one hundred years before the term was coined.†