David Lambourn revisits The Roots of Romanticism by Isaiah Berlin.
Do you remember jumping on or off a bus while it was moving? For me, an Isaiah Berlin lecture has a similar excitement – and risk! Re-reading the lectures – transcripts from the audio recordings, published by Chatto and Windus in 1999 – I immediately respond to an infectious sense of urgency and passion; I meet the person long before I begin to garner the ideas which so inspired him. He began the final lecture: ‘I now propose to say, however rash it may seem…what the heart of romanticism appears to me to be.’ There is so much in this first sentence which speaks of the person: modest, passionate, risk-taking and, perhaps above all, entirely congruent with his subject matter. He will not go on to tell his hearers the facts about the world: ‘The universe must not be conceived of as a set of facts, as a pattern of events, as a collection of lumps in space…’ He speaks instead of how things appear to him and he will tell a story constituted of a myriad of other stories. He prefers visual metaphors, he speaks of ‘a view’, of things ‘appearing to be’, rather than of knowledge – a word which will quickly be undermined.
Although first given in the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC in 1965, I came across the lectures when they first appeared in print two years after his death, too late to incorporate into my thesis. Perhaps that was to the good, because I could now imagine a conversation between the giver of those lectures and the writer of my thesis – that conversation continues in the present. Conversation is exactly the right word. It is his conversation for which he is praised by his admirers and maligned by his detractors; when Isaiah received his knighthood a friend wrote congratulating him ‘…for services to conversation’.
Born in Riga, Latvia – a Russian province – in 1909, into a Hassidic family, who later moved to Petrograd due to the German / Russian hostilities of WW1, the seven-year-old Berlin witnessed the revolutions of 1917 including a street incident that ‘gave me a permanent horror of violence, which has remained with me for the rest of my life.’ The family moved to Streatham, London, in 1921 and, via St Paul’s School, Isaiah went to Oxford, taking a Double First, becoming the first unconverted Jew to be elected to a fellowship at All Souls – a position which gave him access to other fellows, some of whom were government ministers.
Although initially turned down for war service by virtue of being a Latvian, nevertheless, by a series of misunderstandings, he eventually found himself part of the British Information Services in New York employed, in effect, to help get the United States into the war in Europe. This involved not only scrutinising the American press and making weekly reports to the Foreign Office, but also negotiating with British and American trade union leaders and many of the opinion informers of the day. He was an academic who experienced much for which he was unprepared.
For me, it is very telling that it was a poet who saw something in Berlin which perhaps others had not seen. Posted to the British Embassy in Moscow in 1945, he had taken the opportunity to travel to Leningrad where, browsing in a second-hand bookshop, he learned that Anna Akhmatova, perhaps the poet of the Stalin era, was still alive and living nearby. A telephone call resulted in an invitation to visit – which lasted for some 11 hours until 3.00 in the morning. In perhaps her most important work, A Poem without a Hero, she then wrote of Berlin as ‘a guest from the future’. I find that phrase very perceptive and very moving: not a visitor from the future, but a guest with all that that implies by way of care, engagement, commitment and, in Akhmatova’s case, risk: the very next day, Stalin knew of the meeting with the ‘British spy’. Later, Akhmatova was to suggest that the Cold War started from that date! Perhaps much of what she saw in Berlin is to be found in these lectures on Romanticism.
Whether or not there was anything which could be named a romantic movement was, and perhaps still is, contested. Berlin’s approach was novel in that he contrasted romanticism not with its forerunner, classicism, but with monism, with universalism. Let me give you a taste of his writing and claims:
‘I should like to go back again to a theme which I introduced earlier, namely the old tradition which is at the heart of all Western thought for at least two thousand years and more, before the middle of the eighteenth century – that particular attitude, those particular beliefs, which, it appears to me, romanticism attacked and gravely damaged. I mean the old proposition that virtue is knowledge, a proposition which was explicitly enunciated, I suppose, for the first time by Socrates in the pages of Plato, and which is common to him and to the Christian tradition. What kind of knowledge, one may disagree about: there are battles between one philosopher and another, one religion and another, one scientist and another, between religion and science, between religion and art, between every kind of attitude and every kind of school of thought and every other, but the battle is invariably about what that true knowledge of reality is, the possession of which makes it possible for men to know what to do, how to fit in.’
You will have noticed the use of lists – strictly speaking, redundant but very helpful for his listeners as illustrations of his argument. His critics also speak of the frequency of hyperbole; no doubt this is true, but also unfair. How is one to speak of undermining the basic intellectual assumptions of two thousand years when only the vocabulary of the Enlightenment is going to be heard? You will also have noticed how Berlin allies Plato and the Christian tradition – he does not speak of the New Testament. At one level, this strikes me as odd, for elsewhere Berlin lays great stress on the importance of myth and story, but in choosing to speak only of the institution, whose values will be seriously undermined by the Romantic Movement, he leaves the story and stories of the New Testament free from attack – a very encouraging distinction from my point of view.
Berlin’s aims are perhaps best illustrated in his notes in preparation for these lectures:
‘I hope to show that this revolution is the deepest and most lasting of all changes in the life of the West, no less far-reaching than the three great revolutions whose impact is not questioned – the industrial in England, the political in France, and the social and economic in Russia with which, indeed, the movement with which I am concerned is connected at every level.’
Berlin’s method is to tell stories: ranging widely across the arts and sciences: Bach, Bacon, Blake, Byron, to Wordsworth and beyond, telling and linking their stories. He returns again and again to a common theme:
‘Science is submission, (it) is being guided by the nature of things … non-deviation from the facts, understanding, knowledge, adaptation. Opposing this, the Romantic Movement is seen as: not knowledge of values, but their creation. One creates goals and ends and we create our own vision of the universe “exactly as artists create works of art”.’
This opposition to the Western tradition provides a stark tension: how does one even begin to ‘understand’ reality? The answer offered is by means of myths which:
‘are at one and the same time images which the mind can contemplate, in relative tranquillity. But the old myths are largely dead for us: since there are no modern myths, because science has killed them, or at any rate has made the atmosphere unpropitious to them, we must create them.’
Berlin goes on to speak of how Shakespeare’s plays become myths, how Don Quixote becomes a myth – and by implication the rise of the novel in Europe – and he extends this into opera, giving an explanation by way of the history of performances of Mozart’s Don Giovanni.
I am not as ‘at home’ with Shakespeare and Cervantes as is Berlin, I have read far fewer novels, but I see their relevance in this context. It is in trying to cope with reality and yet recognise the claims of romanticism, that I have developed the practice of thinking, speaking and acting ‘as-if’, which enables me to adopt a multitude of views, possibilities, and idealisations – limited only by my imagination, by the time available and by membership of the groups among whom I live. Fortunately for me, one of the lasting effects of the Romantic Movement has been the emergence of sincerity as a virtue in itself. This gives me the hope that, if my behaviour is at some variance from that of the groups of which I am a member, I might still be acceptable! Berlin, a ‘guest from the future’? Akhmatova speaks for me – I continue trying to be a good host.
David Lambourn is a retired Anglican priest, former Membership Secretary of SOF and wrote a PhD thesis – Metaphor in Social Thought.