This letter sent just before Christmas, to my pal Peter, a fellow member, many moons ago, of a resistance movement against petty academic tyranny.
Dear Peter,
Thanks for the card, and interesting musings.
As you well know, “the sleep of reason produces monsters” was a notion first advanced by Goya in the 1790’s – “La sueno de la Razon produce monstruos.” The online Wikipedia comment is as follows:
“The viewer might read this as a portrayal of what emerges when reason is suppressed and, therefore, as an espousal of Enlightenment ideals. However, it also can be interpreted as Goya's commitment to the creative process and the Romantic spirit—the unleashing of imagination, emotions, and even nightmares.”
Fair comment, I think you would agree. A growing appetite for the sublime, the exotic, and the scary is discernible in the 18th century in both literature and the graphic arts. William Beckford, author of Vathek is a v. interesting forerunner, esp. in his Dreams, Waking Thoughts and Incidents (written during a continental tour of 1781) where illusion and “reverie” figures as prominently as reality, and where the joys of leading “an Indian life amongst the wilds and mountains” are jumbled up with a more conventional appreciation of “that delightful classic region” i.e. Italy. When he went on the Grand Tour in pursuit of the picturesque he took with him in his retinue the watercolourist John Robert Cozens, son of Alexander – advocate of an unconventional technique of painting involving blots– and recipient of the letters. JRC, a particularly fine painter, who died young, is cited by Simon Schama as a case of gloomy genius to madness near allied, though I’m not sure I buy that theory. I think he may be, though, a case of painterly sensibility being channeled in a certain direction by a literary one, i.e. that of his patron, WB. JRC is wonderfully atmospheric, and maybe that’s a new thing in art – anticipating Constable’s interest in clouds, the Turnerian sublime and so on.
In letter 27 of Dreams Beckford offers some “Reflections on the Economy Politics and Fine Arts of Several European Nations”. What he says about the militarization of the German states may interest you, in the light of what you said about romanticism unleashing the reign of terror: “If I may be allowed a conjecture upon this occasion I should not hesitate to assign, as a principal one, the increase of infidelity and extreme dissolution of modern manners, caused by the Encyclopaedic philosophy.” …The philosophy, as it is called, of the Encyclopedie, has, doubtless, contributed abundantly to the relaxation of our old obligations, and the licentiousness of manners; so that the suspension of the sword over the head of civil society, has some appearance of being naturally introduced, in consequence of things being in such a state.” Not too fanciful to see this as anticipating the rise of Napoleon to power, and also perhaps the Hobbesian predisposition of the likes of de Maistre.
I know you’d agree that the “relaxation of old obligations” is only part of the explanation of the Terror. A more potent cause is the casual contempt for the lower orders (for all the men in velvet suits declaring that never in human history had there been such douceur de vie) that underlies the aristocratic privilege of the Ancien Regime. Dickens has a keen sense of that – I suspect he was confirmed in his view by Carlyle, who hammers away in the early chapters of The French Revolution on the theme of the misery and degradation of “that dark living Chaos of Ignorance and Hunger, five and twenty million strong.” For what it’s worth my feeling is that the Terror is explicable mainly in terms of a dehumanizing mind set, a chronic history of oppression, and by an understandable thirst for revenge on the part of the oppressed. Having been discounted as a different species by the aristocrats, it’s not surprising that when the world turned upside down those same aristocrats should be demonized in turn and strung up on lamp posts. Once that omnivorous and dispassionate machine, the guillotine, had been set in motion it set about devouring not solely those perceived to be impeding progress, but those, like Robespierre, who had stoked up the Terror in the first place.
Edward Gibbon, in some ways the embodiment of Enlightenment values, was, according to Lord Sheffield “at first… pleased with the prospect of the reform of inveterate abuses”. But he was no friend of what he regarded as democratical tyranny. He characterises the revolutionaries as by turns wild, eccentric, mischievous, extravagant, fickle, visionary, bogus, misguided, mad, despotic, sanguinary, uncivilized, ferocious and cannibalistic. None of that is consistent with Gibbonian rationality – though it’s worth noting that in Gibbonian rationality there is no place for “wild ideas of the rights and natural equality of man”. Or perhaps any such ideas in domesticated form either. This is the point at which romantic ideas and ideology begin to gain credibility. Would it be too much of a paradox to suggest that the sleep of Gibbonian reason produces the monster of human rights? Or that the emergence of human rights exposes the limitations of Gibbon’s moral compass?
A fascinating question, and one I’d like to know your views of, is why, unlike the French Revolution, the English Revolution of the 17th century, while it had plenty of bloodshed, had no Terror – or at least nothing on the same scale. Was it because the populace never seized control in the same manner? Or because grassroots radicalism was snuffed out at an early stage? Or because the lower orders were less oppressed and alienated in the first place? Or was there less bloodshed simply because the revolution was carried out in the name of religion? Interesting, at any rate, that Gibbon attributes the downfall of the French monarchy to the crumbling of “the triple aristocracy of the church, the nobility and the parliaments”. He may not have had much time for the church himself, but he evidently thought it had a stabilizing and useful role to play in society at large – which is also what Beckford seems to intimate.
Let me know what you think. Meanwhile have a good Christmas, and a Happy New Year,
G.
