ROMANTICS: the Ministry of Fear

DREAD

Angst reveals man's fundamental ontological situation, his connection with non-being, so that all fear is not just dread of death, but of the nothing on which all being is based.

(Pan and the Nightmare: James Hillman 1974)

Sade's gospel of cruelty was an inversion of the once-fashionable view holding the 'natural' to be fundamentally good. During the mid-eighteenth century, Jean Jaques Rousseau (1712 - 1778) had ushered in a change of attitude towards the wild and the tame. Civilisation, he declared, was rotten and corrupt. Once gathered together in cities, men proceeded to dirty their souls in industry and commerce. With ever-increasing greed and acquisitiveness, they leeched the earth, fouled rivers, created moutains of refuse and spread urban blots across the countryside. They were prepared to deceive and exploit, make fortunes out of catastrophes, reap profit out of shipwreck, famine and war.

Contrast the civilised debauchee with primitive man. After he has eaten, the latter is well-inclined towards his fellow-men. If he does have an argument with anyone, it's usually over something basic like food. Well, he can settle that with a quick fist fight after which the winner will go back to his meal and the loser seek his game elsewhere. But with civilised man, it's different, for he can never be satisfied whatever his gain. First he acquires essentials like food and clothing and then his hunger graduates to luxuries like fine wines and expensive carriages. Next he wants to own entirely superfluous things like exotic ornaments, paintings and plants. Steadily his passions and appetites grow more absurd, more elaborate, and yet such is his power standing that he is able to satisfy them. In order to fulfil his needs and whimsies, "our hero" makes slaves of more and more people, so that after amassing a fortune by pillage and exploitation, he is able to cut the throat of every single living being and make himself "sole master of the Universe" - that is the "secret pretension" of every civilised man.

Instead of a synonym for a cannibal or hairy untutored oaf, under the spell of Rousseau's prose, 'savage' became a term of approbation. The 'noble savage' was held up as an exemplar because he had not been cruelly or decadently educated. His accomplishments emerged out of a two-way discourse between himself and the environment of which he was an expression. This environment had not been over-cultivated or prettified but left to itself. For savage, untamed landscapes had a unique ability to elevate the soul. The pure air of a mountain region moved men to noble thoughts. What was sublime and terrible in Nature - cataracts, gorges, gloomy precipices, volcanic eruptions - reminded him of his puniness in the mighty scheme of things. "It would seem that in raising ourselves above the abodes of men," Rousseau wrote of mountains, "we leave behind us all base and terrestrial sentiments, and that, in proportion as we approach ethereal regions, the soul contracts something of their unalterable purity."

Rousseau's analogy was apt, for it was an age of justification and explanation. Paintings were subjected to acres of analysis and, for the first time, the word terror came to be used in an aesthetic context. What had made stout men tremble and cower was now a word conveying a pleasant shiver down the spine of gentleman who beheld a sight like a foaming cataract on the Pyrenees or a high glacier in the Alps. Terror was as desirable thing to feel as love or religious joy.

In 1795 the Scottish geologist, James Hutton published The Theory of the Earth, a ground-breaking textbook discounting the old 'catrastrophist' idea that changes in rock strata denoted that catacylsms, eruptions, floods and earthquakes had taken place in the past. Instead Hutton explained that earth-building was still going on, only infinitely slowly, for rocks move through deep time. A waterfall could take several million years to get worn away and a mountains might grow an inch in a thousand years. Hence the Georgian and Regency periods were not just times when men like Wordswoth and Coleridge praised landscape for the repose it brought to the human soul; they were also able to anatomise and classify its bedding planes and alignments.

The following year (1796) Edward Jenner developed a safe vaccine against smallpox and Meikle pioneered the threshing machine. Inventions like the steamboat, the cotton gin, lithography, the electric battery, the gas lamp, glider and steam locomotive, were all pioneered and developed in the succeeding century. The increased pliability and abundance of available materials had released an enormous and diverse inventive potential.

Gothic Ripples

Whenever dramatic changes occur in society, men and women start to balk at novelty or complain of losing touch. Next they reach for their rose-coloured spectacles and look back to times when things had a satisfying if primitive candour. Hence the myths of the Middle Ages which are periodically revived: from Arthurian knights galloping out of fairy castles to murky dragon-haunted wastelands ruled by dark lords and brooding barons; from monks cultivating herbs or shading illuminated manuscrips in quiet cloisters to the burning of witches; from wimpled ladies meekly sewing to a torturer sharpening his blades in a dungeon. Barbaric, civilised, sadistic, domestic, chivalric - all possiblities are contained here.

Tableaux of this kind, plucked from an idealised past, were planted within the context of a novel or piece of poetry that attempted to rekindle an antique theme. In such writing, the ruin was a potent symbol whose crumbling beauty was redolent of sadness and impending dissolution. As Mrs Ann Radcliffe observed in Gaston de Blondeville (1826), it pointed the finger of mortality at those who observed it: "Generations have beheld us and passed away, as you behold us, and shall pass away. They have thought of the generations before their time, as you now think of them, and as future ones shall think of you. The voices, that revelled beneath us, the pomp of power, the magnificence of wealth, the grace of beauty, the joy of hope, the interests of high passion and of low pursuits have passed from this scene for ever; yet we remain, the spectres of departed years..."

Evocations of grandeur and decay - of bloody melodramas enacted in crag-perched castles and black ravines - aroused an excitement in the reader streaked with fear and apprehension. Contradictorily, it also imbued a feeling of safety. The heros, heroines and villains of the Gothic novel were propelled through a symbolic reality in which they underwent torture, terror and privation, to which only the reader - sharing the excitement yet evading the gruesome consequences - was privvy. In a sense the reader was the true survivor: hence the safety.

Fear and Trembling

Perhap it is apt to pause here and consider what fear meant to people like Byron, Keats or Mary Shelley, for it is a sensation of an entirely different order than that known by medieval man. In the latter, fear was fear - of a tangible nature perhaps - but with the Romantics, it had a thrill or frisson attached to it. Surrounded by machines and industry, by contrivances that subdued man like a workhorse, they sought escape from such oppressive securities into upland regions where they could experience elemental emotions: terror, awe, sublime stupefaction and religious reverence.

Of the various flavours of dread, fear, despair and anguish, Kirkegaard devoted whole books in the 1840s: Fear and Trembling, The Concept of Dread and The Sickness unto Death, saying of one variety that it "belongs to the child so essentially that he cannot do without it; even though it alarms him, it captivates him nevertheless by its feeling of swift apprehension. In all nations in which the childish character is preserved as the dreaming of the spririt this dread is found, and the deeper it is, the more pround is the nation."

If the Danish theologian's explanation is a little fluid and copious, the gist of his argument may be translated. In discovering freedom, the individual confronts a void - a void of choice and possibility which he must tranform into a 'concretion' or aim. In trying to find his way, the sheer prolixity of phenomena overwhelms and alarms him, so he shrinks back in dread. Dread, then, is yet another manifestation of Pan, or the unknowable abyss that during the course of history yields many secrets and consolations, extending to humans choice, piquancy and variety, yet witholding its raison d'etre or ultimate significance.

Similar to Kirkegaard's insight was that of George Borrow who, in Lavengro (1851), analyses this soul-stalking dread and suggests it endows life with a necessary tension. It urges the aware to complete their given tasks and not whittle away the years. "O that dark feeling of mysterious dread," he writes, "which comes over the mind, and which the lamp of reason...is unable to dispel. Art thou, as leeches say, the concomitant of disease? Nay, rather the principle of woe itself, the fountainhead of all sorrow co-existent with man, whose influence he feels when yet unborn... Fool...how dost thou know that this dark principle is not thy best friend? It may be, for what thou knowest, the mother of wisdom, and of great works: it is the dread of the horror of night that makes the pilgrim hasten on his way. Courage! build great works -'tis urging thee... What great work was ever the result of joy, the puny one? Who have been the wise ones, the mighty ones, the conquering ones of this earth? the joyous? I believe (it) not."

Leap of Faith

Either one stood perpetually on the threshold, trembling with uncertainty and foreboding, or one made a "leap of faith" and landed securely in the lap of the Christian God - that was Kirkegaard's solution. But not Byron's or Shelley's, who sought inspiration in the dread and trembling, in the fear inmixed with awe, reverence and wonder.

Wild scenery formed a background for walking and meditating. Having a clubfoot, Byron was more handicapped in this area, but Coleridge, Wordswoth and Shelley were magnificent striders. In her journal (1816) Mary Shelley records a visit to the spectacular Mer de Glace, the confluence of three glaciers, below the slopes of Mont Blanc. At the time her husband, Percy, had been reading "a sublime but gloomy theory" that the earth would revert to a mass of frost, and when she looked upon the glacier, with its dirty white surface traversed by blue-sided crevasses, she thought it "the most desolate place in the world".

Stark desolation helped peel away layers of social pretension. Intercourse with pure mountain air rendered one's insights equally uncontaminated. If lightning, storm and thunder shook up the scene, that enhanced the drama for the solitary poet who stood on the bridge of being and faced Nature in her implacable indifference."There is in man," wrote Friedrich Schlegel, "a terrible unsatisfied desire to soar into infinity; a feverish longing to break through the narrow bounds of individuality."

Back to Homepage