The Cave and the Light

by Arthur Herman

  But what if one day the giant decided to reach down to those chattering dwarfs? What if the poet, having captured the light of truth in his imagination, turned back like Socrates or the god Prometheus (the crucial Greek myth for Shelley) and went down into the cave to share his fire from heaven with the masses?

  The effect would be, to use a metaphor the Romantics loved, electric. “A great and free development of the national will,” Shelley predicted, would be the result, “as if from a new birth.”37 This, Shelley decided, had been the problem with political revolutions like France in 1789. They had been put together not by men of artistic genius, but by lawyers like Georges Danton and Robespierre, who for all their rhetoric about virtue and freedom were no different from their predecessors—or in Shelley’s mind, the British politicians of his own day. Their imaginations were just as limited, their thirst for material power just as insatiable, their reliance on brute force to resolve conflicts (Shelley was a vegetarian and pacifist) just as oppressive.

  What was needed instead was a revolution led by poets and artists like Shelley and his friends. Then, he believed, humanity would achieve the future Kant had foreseen, a world of perpetual peace and harmony. Mankind would witness the overthrow of intellectual as well as political tyranny and the establishment of the rights of man and—with a nod to Mary Wollstonecraft—the rights of woman. The dream that had haunted the Platonic imagination since Saint Augustine, of an Eternal City united by love and equality and justice, would be realized, with the poets (as opposed to God or the theologians) leading the way.

  Shelley himself never got the chance. On July 8, 1822, Shelley and a friend boarded his sailboat, the Don Juan (Shelley chose the name as a tribute to Byron’s most famous amoral hero), and set out from the port of Leghorn under a lead gray sky with thunder and rain threatening. The Don Juan was never seen again.38 Eleven days later, the two men’s bodies washed up on the beach between Viareggio and Massa. Mary Shelley and a small knot of friends, including Byron, pulled Shelley’s putrified corpse up from the temporary grave where Italian authorities had buried it and placed it on a funeral pyre along the beach.

  As the flames slowly caught and the smoke rose over the heartbroken circle, Byron threw off his clothes and leaped into the sea. He swam over to his own boat, the Bolivar. Already an outrageous plan was taking shape in his mind, of which a poem published the year before offered a clue:

  The isles of Greece! the isles of Greece!

  Where burning Sappho loved and sung,

  Where grew the arts of war and peace,

  Where Delos rose, and Phoebus sprung!…

  I dreamed that Greece might still be free;

  For standing on the Persians’ grave,

  I could not deem myself a slave.

  That previous April, the word had spread through the English colony in Pisa: “Greece has declared its freedom!”39 Since the fall of Constantinople nearly four centuries earlier, Greece had labored under the domination of the Ottoman Empire. In the spring of 1821, Greek guerrillas rose up in arms against their Turkish masters. The revolt became an instant Romantic cause célèbre. The prospect that the original home of democracy, the land of the Parthenon and Homer and Plato’s Academy, might once again gain its liberty prompted men and women across Europe to open their pocketbooks in support. Committees were formed, funds raised, arms and ammunition purchased. Shelley himself had talked of going to join the Greek rebels, but he never made an effort to leave his Pisa apartment.

  Byron, on the other hand, did. On December 29, 1823, he set sail from Italy with a small ship packed with livestock, four horses, medicine for an army of one thousand men, and chests full of gold coin and forty thousand British pounds in bills of exchange. He headed for the port town of Missolonghi, headquarters of the Greek insurgent government.40 Arriving on January 4, he expected to find a setting of sunlit temples and an army of modern-day Homeric heroes waiting to be led in the fight for their freedom and the rebirth of European culture from its ancient roots.

  Instead he found a miserable fishing hamlet, its streets running with stale fish offal and human excrement. A cold rain fell incessantly and the Greek rebel leaders quarreled and schemed for power—much like politicians everywhere. Missolonghi was also a cesspool of disease, and in mid-February, Byron was struck down with a violent fever.

  For two months the poet shivered in the filthy sheets of his bed, passing in and out of consciousness while ignorant doctors applied leeches and bled him so profusely that his immune system collapsed. On April 19, 1824, Byron closed his eyes for the last time. He was just thirty-six. The first experiment in a revolution led by poets had ended in misery and squalor.

  It was only a foretaste of what was about to come.

  * * *

  * This was the title of the collection of essays by ex-Communists, including Stephen Spender and Arthur Koestler, published in 1949.

  † Needless to say, his contemporaries weren’t taken with the result. His submissions to the Royal Academy’s annual exhibits toward the end of his life became known as “Mr. Turner’s little jokes.”

  ‡ These were unity of action (the plot should form an organic whole with no loose ends), unity of time (the plot should, if possible, take place in a single day), and unity of place (no sudden shifts of location), according to sixteenth-century interpreters of the Poetics.

  Georg Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831): He taught his disciples that the modern state would save us all from ourselves.

  Twenty-four

  VICTORIAN CROSSROADS: HEGEL, MARX, AND MILL

  Change in any society begins with class strife.

  —Plato, Republic, Book VIII

  The proletarians have nothing to lose but their chains. They have a world to win.

  —Karl Marx

  The sole end for which mankind are warranted, individually or collectively, in interfering with the liberty of action of any of their number is self-protection.

  —John Stuart Mill

  One by one, the trees came down—“as though of their own accord,” as Alexis de Tocqueville, an eyewitness, put it. The lofty oaks and poplars that lined Paris’s boulevards fell under the blows of hundreds of axes, while teams of men and women grimly wrestled them into the roadway. Others were pulling up paving stones.

  The populace of Paris “went about their business silently, regularly, and hurriedly,” Tocqueville wrote while watching the work of destruction from his window.1 By morning on February 24, 1848, there were more than fifteen hundred barricades blockading the city’s streets, made from four thousand felled trees and (it was estimated later) one million paving stones. No one gave Paris’s working people orders; no one had given them an agenda. They were, however, in full revolt against the monarchy of King Louis-Philippe, whose troops had made the mistake of firing on protesting crowds the day before, killing forty. By the afternoon of February 24, Louis-Philippe realized he had no choice but to flee the city and abdicate in favor of his son.

  Great crowds had gathered at Paris’s city hall, the Hôtel de Ville. At their head was a tall willowy man with a stentorian voice and dramatic gestures. He was Alphonse Lamartine, France’s most popular poet and a leading political radical. On the steps of the Hôtel de Ville, Lamartine proclaimed the end of the monarchy and the establishment of the French Second Republic, with the 1792 tricolor as its flag. The new republican government promised workers a national living wage, the right to organize unions, and universal male suffrage—a step even Robespierre had shied away from. “We are making together the sublimest of poems,” Lamartine told the cheering crowd.2

  The revolution of the poets Percy Shelley had prophesied had begun.

  It did not stay in France very long. By March, the revolutionary fervor spread to Germany and Austria. In Berlin, crowds forced the king of Prussia to grant a new constitution; in Vienna, they clashed with troops and compelled Prince Metternich, chief architect of the conservative European order since the defeat of Napoleon, to resign and flee.
In Rome, the pope was expelled and a new Roman republic was proclaimed. The Venetian republic was restored in the city of gondolas and canals. Very suddenly, liberty and the rights of man swept Europe with (compared to the original French Revolution) hardly any shots being fired. As historian Alan Taylor later put it, heaven and earth never seemed closer than in 1848; or man’s redemption by a great moral ideal more fully within reach.3

  Then the poetry and music died. To the shock of Lamartine and his middle-class allies, the new French national assembly elected on the democratic principle of one man, one vote, turned out to be more conservative than its royalist predecessor. Millions of peasants and small-town shopkeepers were determined to keep their hard-won property against any radical threat and to rein in the demands of Paris’s workers for higher taxes on the haves and “the right to work” at government expense for the have-nots.

  Across the rest of Europe, Germans, Czechs, Poles, Hungarians, Italians, Ukrainians, and Serbs quarreled over the borders and ethnic makeup of their newly liberated nations. Eventually, troops had to be called in and the barricades knocked down. The old crowned heads, including the pope, gradually restored their power. Even Metternich eventually returned to Vienna, deftly stepping from his carriage with imperial éclat.

  In France, the last stand of the poets came in the last days of June. Alphonse de Lamartine was an unabashed admirer of the French Revolution of 1789. He had written a book about it, praising the Rolands and their fellow Rousseauians.* However, when he and his colleagues refused to give in to the workers’ demands for the right to work, they found themselves besieged and cut off by barricades just as Louis-Philippe had been. They had to call on the rest of France to help put down the revolt. The rest of France (still smarting from memories of the Reign of Terror) was all too happy to help.

  The fighting lasted for four days, from June 24 to 28. More than fifteen thousand Paris workers desperately fought street to street, house to house, against infantry armed with muskets and cannon. There was no quarter on either side. The archbishop of Paris stepped into the firing line to stop the slaughter. He was killed by a stray bullet. More than four thousand Parisians died in the fighting, many of them unarmed. Another twelve thousand were thrown into prison. Three thousand of those were summarily shipped to France’s colony in Algeria.4

  The revolution of the poets had ended in a bloodbath. The Second Republic had been saved—but by shooting down the working poor, whom it claimed to protect. A chastened Lamartine did stand for president in the election that December. He came in dead last. The winner was the great Napoleon’s nephew, Louis Napoleon, who would soon overturn the Second Republic and crown himself Napoleon III, emperor of France.

  The promise of liberty and democracy in 1848 had not drawn people together, it had driven them apart. Alexis de Tocqueville became convinced the June Days were not a political struggle at all, but “a sort of slave war … the revolt of one whole section of the population against the other.” A German observer called it “the first great battle between the two classes that split modern society.”5

  Unlike Tocqueville, he had not witnessed the bitter fight. He had visited Paris in March as a reporter for a local German newspaper. Thickset and hirsute, with a greasy beard and an untidy mane of salt-and-pepper hair, he had watched the crowds’ excitement and sense of exaltation in the early weeks of the 1848 revolution, and their belief that the establishment of a republic meant the nation’s poorest and neediest would finally be free. He returned to Germany to see the same expectation sweep workers, students, and the peasantry of that country. He spoke to open-air meetings in support of revolution and a workers’ democracy.

  Then, as in France, the middle class in Germany and Austria closed ranks with the aristocrats and monarchs against the radicals. The poets and intellectuals left the working poor to their fate—including the firing squad.

  For the young reporter, the events in Paris in June were the final straw. He was done listening to talk about the rights of man and liberty. And he perceived in the Paris workers’ desperate struggle the outline of a larger, more decisive conflict to come.

  “The Paris workers were overwhelmed by superior force,” he wrote in the pages of the Neue Rheinische Zeitung, “but not subdued. They have been defeated, but their enemies have been vanquished.” His pen dripping with rage and sarcasm, he went on: “The momentary triumph of brute force has been purchased with the destruction of all the delusions and illusions” of the poets and their middle-class allies. Above all, it marked “the division of the French nation into two classes, the nation of owners and the nation of workers.”

  “The victory of the people is more certain than ever,” the headline of his article bellowed. “The second act of the French Revolution is only the beginning of the European tragedy”—and the inevitable victory of the working class, or what he called the proletariat.6 Then he signed the article with the byline Karl Marx.

  But how would this proletariat win? Marx already had the battle plan, written with his friend Friedrich Engels. It was titled The Manifesto of the Communist Party, penned between December 1847 and February 1848. At the time, their Communist “party” consisted of exactly two people, Marx and Engels. However, Marx was confident that once the workers of Europe realized that their struggle was not against kings or despots, but against commercial society itself and its keystone, private property, they would rise up in such numbers and with such a fury that no one could stand in their way.

  In 1848, Europe was emerging as a world of factories and mines, railroads and slums. Modern ideals of national sovereignty and majority rule were becoming common political coin, while modern science was poised for the next round of breakthroughs: four years earlier, Charles Darwin wrote out the 230-page outline for his On the Origin of Species.

  In the shadow of 1848 the next great battle between Aristotle and Plato was about to begin anew. “There is a specter haunting Europe,” the Communist Manifesto began, “the specter of Communism.” In truth it was the specter of Book VIII of Plato’s Republic. Those pages first spawned the idea of history as class struggle, a perpetual battle that Aristotle and his many followers over the centuries had sought to defuse but which Marx now yearned for—because, he dared to believe, it would create a new community more radiant and perfect than anything dreamed of by the Romantics or Plato and his Philosopher Rulers.

  Marx was more of a Romantic than he cared to admit. He was born in 1818, the year Mary Shelley published Frankenstein. In college, he dreamed of becoming a poet. His earliest extant work is a verse tragedy, titled Oulanem, which Marx hoped might become the next Faust.7 He also had a Byronic fascination with suicide pacts and pacts with the devil and enjoyed quoting the line from Faust’s Mephistopheles, “Everything that exists deserves to perish”—especially the middle-class capitalist society into which he had been born.

  Like Rousseau and the Romantics, he saw that society as selfishness run amok. Surely, he agreed with Shelley and others, man was meant for something more than a kind of perpetual Wal-Mart shopping spree, with everyone intent on buying the material goods they think will make them happy, but indifferent to the fate of everyone else—while ready to use their shopping cart on anyone who gets in their way.

  Marx believed that an event even more terrible and final than the French Revolution or the June Days would be needed to break the spell cast by commercial society. The man who helped Marx reach this conclusion was a figure he never met and whom he later bitterly repudiated: Georg Friedrich Hegel. But he was Kant’s rival and heir and the most consequential German thinker in half a century.

  For forty years, from 1795 until his death in 1831, Hegel taught first at the University of Jena and then in Berlin. A remote, even glacial figure, he was the German Sphinx—but also the first truly global philosopher. From America to Russia, Hegel was as controversial as he was influential. Schopenhauer attacked him as a “flat-headed, insipid, nauseating, illiterate charlatan.” A century later, Karl Poppe
r called his writings a “despicable perversion of everything that is decent.”8 Nonetheless, he dominated the continental academic mind like no one since Descartes. Marx, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Freud, Bergson, Sartre, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida: All of them carry, to one degree or another, the mark of Hegel, if only in some cases as a symbol of everything they detested.

  His written works, like The Phenomenology of Mind, are monuments of intellectual synthesis. But the real secret of Hegel’s success was his skill in fusing the moral fervor of Rousseau with the rigorous philosophizing of Plato, all expressed in a dense, almost incomprehensible, prose. If Hegel didn’t always know what he was talking about (as when he discussed planetary orbits9 or economics), he certainly sounded as though he did—and sounded as though he were also saying something new and profound. In fact, it was a shrewd reshuffling of a worn-out Neoplatonist metaphysics, cast as universal history.

  “Let us begin,” Rousseau wrote at the start of his Discourse on Inequality, “by setting aside all the facts.” This is precisely what Hegel does in his Philosophy of History and his Philosophy of Right, his most influential works. His subject was the history of civil society made famous by Scots like Adam Smith, or what the nineteenth century called “universal history.” Like Plato, Hegel was interested not in what happened, but why. Unless you could give a reason why something happened, Hegel argued, then it was of no interest: certainly not to the philosopher. Because then it had no significance in the story that Hegel really wanted to expound: the march of Absolute Reason toward perfection.