Class 10: Between Reason and Romance

A. William Blake and the Crisis of Faith

1. Title Slide 1 (Blake: Newton) 2. Phillips: William Blake (1807, London, National Portrait Gallery)

I have shown pictures before by William Blake (1757–1827)—his Ezekiel in last week’s class, for instance. He keeps on cropping up whenever you look at the turn of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries, the passage from Reason to Romance. And yet he is difficult to fit into any continuity before or after: a maverick, a genius, a mystic, or simply a madman. I struggled a lot with the shape of today’s class, until I realize that it was this quality—Blake’s refusal to fit in—that made him such a perfect entry into what appears to have been a very troubled time.

3. Blake: “The Lamb,” video reading 4. Blake: “The Lamb” (1789, Library of Congress)

Blake was a Christian—or at least he began as one. When looking at his early poetry collection, Songs of Innocence (1789), we might think of his faith as rather simplistic, as exemplified, for instance, in his poem “The Lamb.” The images in this video enhance the poem’s apparent naiveté, though hardly any more than Blake’s own hand-tinted engraving. Blake apprenticed as an engraver before studying at the Royal Academy; his work as a poet is entirely that of an amateur, though he published his poetry and art together as integrated artwork.

5. Blake: “The Tyger,” video reading by Tom O’Bedlam 6. Blake: “The Tyger,” detail (1795, British Museum)

Blake followed up Songs of Innocence in 1794 with Songs of Experience, in which the naïve images are replaced by altogether more disturbing ones. “The Lamb” is answered by “The Tyger,” apparently the most anthologized poem in the English language. Let’s compare the two poems. It is tempting to think of them as a simple contrast of good and evil. But there is a strong sense that Blake admires the Tiger, who has a wild magnificence in his words even more than in his drawing. Blake apparently saw the coexistence of Lamb and Tiger as an example of the opposites that must be first grasped and then reconciled in any system of belief. Note also his wonderful lines, “When the stars threw down their spears, And water’d heaven with their tears,” a cosmic vision that seems to come straight from Milton, and that would become increasingly important in his later apocalyptic work.

7. Blake: Newton (c.1804, Tate Britain) 8. — the same, with quotation from Jerusalem

Here again is the image I used for the title slide, an engraving representing Sir Isaac Newton (1643– 1727). It bears a certain similarity to the picture of God the Creator I showed in the first class: the all-

— 1 — powerful figure bending over the world with his compasses, Newton as the Divine Architect. However, this was not Blake’s view of Milton at all. Look at these lines from his poem Jerusalem: “Cruel works with cogs tyrannic, moving by compulsion each other.”

9. Blake: Urizen (c.1818, Library of Congress) 10. Blake: The Four Zoas from Milton (c.1810, Library of Congress) 11. Blake: Milton Annihilating the Selfhood of Deceit from Milton (Library of Congress)

And in fact, by identifying the Architect figure with God in our first class, I was making a deliberate mistake. For this is not God but Urizen, one of four primal figures in Blake’s highly idiosyncratic mythology called the Four Zoas. Urizen represents order and design, yes, but he also embodies laws and written rules, that he uses to trap and bind mankind in a huge net. Blake did not want to be tied by the rules of conventional religion any more than his life was constrained by the ties of conventional morality. He had, by all accounts, a happy marriage; he taught his wife to read and write and to color in his illustrations; they remained devoted until his death. But at the same time, he railed against the sexual conventions that take one “who burns with youth” and binds her “in spells of law to one she loathes. Must she drag the chain of life in weary lust?” In his long poem, Milton (1804–10), Milton returns from Heaven and is eventually united with Blake himself, entering him through the foot. In Plate 18 from the poem, Milton attacks Urizen directly; note the presence of what look awfully like the Ten Commandments in Hebrew!

12. Blake: Jerusalem, plate 76 (1806–20) 13. Blake: Satan before the Throne of God from Job (c.1805, NYC, Morgan Library)

Like almost all the artists we shall look at today, Blake believed in God. While dismissing most of the works of the Church, he did not dismiss Christ. But his vision was generally a fiercer one, certainly in his verse. However, very few of his religious works come from the Gospels. When he is not illustrating his own mythology, he tends to choose subjects that take place as much in heaven as on earth. One such is the Book of Job, which he began illustrating in 1805 and published in print form in 1826. The Bible story begins, as we know, when Satan challenges God, betting that even the devout Job will lose his faith if he is stricken with enough misfortunes. Around 1930, the choreographer Ninette de Valois (1898–2001) asked Ralph Vaughan Williams (1872–1958) to write the music for a “Masque for Dancing” based on the Blake illustrations. I had the privilege of seeing it in the late 1950s, but it is not done now, and there is no footage available. But I have put together a sequence from near the end of the work, together with some of Blake’s watercolors. I wanted to get in more of them, so they don’t necessarily follow the events in the music, but the sections you will hear are Pavane of the Sons of the Morning, Satan’s Expulsion from Heaven, Galliard of the Sons of the Morning, and Altar Dance.

14. Vaughan Williams: Job, a Masque for Dancing, excerpt

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B. The Tree of Reason

15. Benjamin West: The Expulsion from Paradise (1791, Washington NGA) 16. Denise Levertov: “Contraband” (with West painting) 17. — the above, continued

I have shown you this painting before. It is The Expulsion from Paradise (1791) by the American painter Benjamin West (1738–1820), one of a cycle of religious paintings for George III that he never got to complete; it is now in Washington. I show it partly as one of the very few large-scale religious paintings of the period that comes over as anything other than a dusty echo. But mainly I am using it as a background to the poem “Contraband” by Denise Levertov (1923–97), whose father, a German Hasidic Jew, emigrated to England, converted, and eventually became an Anglican priest! Levertov herself emigrated to America, and made her own spiritual journey from agnostic Jew to committed Christian. This poem relates to all that, but it also speaks to the general problem of reconciling Reason with Faith. And the later Eighteenth Century was the principal battleground for that conflict.

18. Joseph Wright of Derby: A Philosopher Lecturing on the Orrery (c. 1766, Derby) 19. Joseph Wright of Derby: An Experiment with the Air Pump (1768, Tate Britain)

The Eighteenth Century was of course the Enlightenment. Faith, on the whole, was replaced by Reason. Although entirely secular in subject, paintings such as these two by Joseph Wright of Derby (1734–97), might almost be seen as sacred, in tribute to the new god of Scientific Knowledge, that Blake railed against. Almost none of these new philosophers, however, were Atheists. Most were Deists—that is to say, people who believe in God as the Prime Mover and Creator of the world, but also that he did not intervene in his creation thereafter. Hence they reject such things as miracles, the doctrine of the Trinity, and the need for an organized church. Deeper understanding is to be achieved by study rather than by prayer.

20. Denis Diderot: pages from the Encyclopédie (1751–72)

Principally, this philosophy developed in France. And one of its first fruits was the Encyclopédie issued between 1751 and 1772 under the principal editorship of Denis Diderot (1713–84). The first step towards understanding the world is to make an objective record of what is in it—something we now take for granted in our obsession for catalogues and lists, but revolutionary in its time.

21. Voltaire and Rousseau, with poem by Blake

Two of Diderot’s contributors were Voltaire (François-Marie Arouet, 1694–1778) and Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–78). The two knew and respected one another. Both were Deistss, though they different in personality, Rousseau being the more emotional, Voltaire the more cynical. Voltaire, in fact, was so unspoken in his anticlericalism and opposition to any kind of magical thinking that his works were often banned, and he himself was imprisoned for more than a year. But he gave us Candide, which is one of the sharpest pieces of social and religious satire ever written. The innocent Candide and his not-so-innocent foster-sister Cunegonde are brought up by their tutor Pangloss to believe that, since

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God made the world, he must have made everything in it, and even apparently bad things must have their purpose. Of course, an alarming succession of bad things immediately start happening, some of them historical. Candide gets nearly killed several times, and Cunegonde is raped, then becomes the mistress, on alternate nights of the week, of the Grand Inquisitor and Chief Rabbi. This is equal- opportunity satire! Here is Dr. Pangloss teaching his class at the beginning of the operetta Candide by Leonard Bernstein (1918–90); it is a semi-staged production conducted by Marin Alsop.

22. Bernstein: Candide, “Best of all possible worlds” 23. Oppenheim: Lavater and Lessing Visit Moses Mendelssohn (1856, UC Berkeley)

My equal-opportunity remark was more than a joke. One of the most attractive things about several of these Enlightenment philosophers was that, by rejecting dogma in the religion of their birth, they were more open to tolerating the beliefs of others. The German philosopher and playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–81) wrote: “How can miracles continue to be used as a base for Christianity when we have no proof of miracles? Historical truths which are in doubt cannot be used to prove metaphysical truths, such as God's existence. That is the ugly great ditch which I cannot cross, however often and however earnestly I have tried to make that leap." Yet he was a very good friend of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn (1729–86)—patriarch of an extraordinary family and grandfather of the composer—whose character inspired his greatest play, Nathan the Wise (1779), which sets out to show an equal value in both religions, when interpreted in a spirit of humanism.

24. Beethoven and Schiller

Humanism, that is the key. With the individual sectarian flavor of any particular religion banished by the Deist philosophy, what was left was the Highest Common Factor, our shared existence as human beings. Ludwig van Beethoven (1770–1827) wrote a Mass and a not-very-successful oratorio, but when he added voices to his Ninth Symphony (1824), he turned to another German playwright, Friedrich Schiller (1759–1805) for his “Ode to Joy,” which might more accurately be described as a Hymn to Humanity.

25. Beethoven: Ninth Symphony, 4th movement, first vocal entrance 26. Masonic symbols, black and white 27. Masonic symbols, color

Why did Blake construct his own elaborate mythology? Why the popularity of such mythologies today, at least in books and movies? I think this happens when, for whatever reason, people have given up the more conventional beliefs, but still feel the need for ritual. I apologize to anybody here who may be Masons, but I suspect that the arcana—combined with considerable philanthropy—is one of the attractions of Freemasonry. Although medieval in origin, its development as a fraternal order for people who were not physical masons, and generally not even workmen, is an 18th-century phenomenon, a semi- underground Doppelgänger of the Enlightenment. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) was a Mason, and his last great opera, The Magic Flute, combined a covert mirroring of Masonic rituals with an overt humanism that shows most clearly in the philosophy of the High Priest, Sarastro.

28. Mozart: Die Zauberflöte, “In diesen hiel’gen Hallen” 29. Title slide 2 (Die Zauberflöte)

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C. Nature and Nature’s God

30. Gainsborough: Landscape in Suffolk (c.1750, Vienna)

In an earlier class, we played the “New-created World” section of The Creation (1798) by Joseph Haydn (1732–1809). Following its success, he was commissioned to write a second oratorio, The Seasons, based on the long four-part poem by the Scottish poet James Thomson (1700–48). As before, however, it was first translated into German, then cut and diced by Haydn’s librettist, to the point where it bears almost no relationship to the original. Like its predecessor, The Seasons was provided with a parallel English text, with a view to performances in London as well as Vienna.

It is interesting, however, in that while The Creation was overtly religious, The Seasons is a description of ordinary life in the countryside, interrupted every now and then by a reminder that this is a reflection of the Creator. It is thus Deism in music, with God revealed in Nature. In the words of the Declaration of Independence, “Nature and Nature’s God.” Here is the opening of the final section of Spring. The soprano and tenor soloists exclaim at the beauties of nature. The chorus joins in. There is some wonderful tone-painting from about 2:45, describing the lambs, the fish, the bees, and the birds. Then the bass enters to remind them that this is all the bounty of God, and everyone pauses to honor him. The movement will end with a big invocation and a grand fugue, but we can stop here; the secular has become sacred.

31. Haydn: The Seasons; Spring. Duet with chorus, “O, wie lieblich!” 32. Constable: sketch with Wordsworth quotation 33. Turner: Landscape near Kirby Lonsdale, “Ruskin’s View” (1822)

Deism seems to have left a vacuum: a vague notion of “God” that still needs to be filled with particulars. Beethoven and Schiller had their Humanism, Mozart his Freemasonry, Blake his private mythologies. Haydn sees God reflected in Nature, a God probably identical to the one worshipped in Church. But William Wordsworth (1770–1850), dean of the English Romantics, goes further, suggesting that so long as you turn to Nature you do not need any other God. However fresh Haydn’s writing may sound, James Thomson’s images are conventional. Wordsworth tells you to look around you, and take in the spontaneous detail of foliage and light that you actually see. His approach is perfectly mirrored in the sketches of John Constable (1776–1837). Or in this sonnet of 1802, where he urges us to believe in any kind of God, rather than accept indifference to Nature; the painting is by JMW Turner (1775–1851)

I acknowledge the overlap with my In Nature’s Mirror class, in turning now to two painters from the earlier Nineteenth Century who tackled religious themes through landscape. One is a German pessimist, Caspar David Friedrich (1774–1840), and the other an English optimist, Samuel Palmer (1805–81).

34. Friedrich: Tetschen Altarpiece (1808, Dresden)

One of Friedrich’s first major commissions for was for the altarpiece of a family chapel in Tetschen, Bohemia. The result was his Cross in the Mountains (1808). How is this a religious work? And if so, what is its message?

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35. Friedrich: Morning on the Riesengebirge (c.1811, Berlin) 36. Friedrich: The Abbey in the Oak Wood (c.1810, Berlin Charlottenburg) 37. — comparison of the above

Friedrich would return to the theme of the isolated mountain cross, as in his Morning on the Riesengebirge of 1811. Could this be used as an altarpiece? If not, why not? And what happens if the symbol is changed, as in The Abbey in the Oak Wood of 1810? Let’s compare them.

38. Friedrich: Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (1818, Hamburg) Friedrich: Man and Woman Contemplating the Moon (c.1824, Berlin)

One difference is that the picture of the ruined abbey contains human figures, which imply something about the relationship of Man to Nature. Or more likely, Man to Eternity. So what do we make of it when the figures are no longer mere detail, but clearly in some kind of relationship with their surroundings, as in these two pictures from the artist’s middle period?

39. Friedrich: The Stages of Life—Beach Scene in Wieck (c.1834, Berlin Charlottenburg)

Other than that first altarpiece, none of these pictures are specifically religious; we just have a sense they are—that Nature holds some kind of message that Man would do well to heed. But in his later years, Friedrich did paint a few works whose religious—or perhaps only philosophical—sentiment is quite explicit. One such is his Beach Scene in Wieck of 1834, otherwise titled The Stages of Life.

40. Palmer: Self-portrait (1826, Oxford Ashmolean) Palmer: The Magic Apple Tree (1828, Cambridge Fitzwilliam) Palmer: A Hilly Scene (1830, London Tate)

Samuel Palmer was introduced to William Blake in 1824, and fell strongly under his influence. Here is a self-portrait and a couple of other quite small paintings he did over the next few years. How do they compare with Friedrich? Both artists paint landscapes that seem too overcharged to be quite natural. Neither is specifically religious, but both include images which often have religious connotations: the flock of sheep, the field of ripe wheat, and of course the church.

41. Palmer: The Valley Thick with Corn (1825, Oxford Ashmolean) 42. Palmer: The Gleaning Field (1830, London Tate) Palmer: The Bright Cloud (1830, London Tate)

Here is a work Palmer created in Blake’s own medium—etching—the year after he met the older artist. Now the religious content is made clear by the title, The Valley Thick with Corn, a reference to Psalm 65. Knowing that one of his themes was God’s bounty, it is not hard to see even Palmer’s apparently straight landscapes in a religious light also.

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D. A Religious Revival

43. Mendelssohn: Elijah, title slide 44. Mendelssohn: Elijah, Baal chorus and Elijah’s prayer

Although it is almost impossible to trace a clear line of overtly religious painting in Britain through the first half of the 19th century, this is not the case in music. Britain developed a strong tradition of choral music—which in practice means sacred music—throughout the century, which essentially continues to this day. In fact, I have been able to bookend this second hour of the class with three choral works written for British performance: Haydn’s Seasons at the beginning of the century, Elgar’s Dream of Gerontius at the end of it, and this work: the oratorio Elijah written by Felix Mendelssohn-Bartholdy (1809–47) for performance in Birmingham in 1846. Although the grandson of the Jewish philosopher Moses Mendelssohn, whom we met earlier, Felix was baptized a Christian while still a child. It would be poetic to think of his Elijah as a return to his Jewish roots, but in fact he wrote Christian oratorios as well. I shall play the section where Elijah accepts the challenge of the priests of Baal, to see which god will accept the sacrifice by sending down fire. Elijah first mocks the Philistines, and then prays to the “Lord God of Abraham, Isaac, and Israel.” I shall cut off after the first few measures of the aria, however, since while Mendelssohn shows a nice sense of drama in the previous exchange, the actual aria, in my opinion, tends towards Victorian sentimentality.

45. Albert Joseph Moore: Elijah’s Sacrifice (1863, Bury)

The painting is by Albert Joseph Moore (1841–93), a rather minor painter, although it impresses me for its avoidance of the grandiose. But it is an example of the return of religious subjects to British art, starting around the middle of the century. People were beginning to hear the call of prophets like Wordsworth and Blake, and seek an alternative to materialism. One such force was the Oxford Movement, begun in the 1830s by a number of Anglican clerics seeking a return to traditional values, which in effect meant Catholic ones. One of their leaders, in fact, John Henry Newman (1801–90), left the Anglican Church and became a Catholic, being created Cardinal some decades later.

46. Millais: Christ in the House of His Parents (c.1850, Tate)

Something of a parallel in the world of art can be seen in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, a group of artists formed in 1848 at the home of the painter John Everett Millais (1829–96). Their goals were to return to the purity of quattrocento art, its clear drawing and meaningful detail, and above all its moral seriousness. It soon tended to become a rather cloying style, but the fresh vision of some of the Pre- Raphaelite painters in the early years, such as this by Millais himself, is really lovely.

47. Holman Hunt: The Light of the World (1853, Keble College Oxford) 48. Rossetti: Ecce Ancilla Domini (c.1849, London Tate)

I will show two more. The Light of the World by William Holman Hunt (1827–1910) has special importance to me, since a reproduction of it hung on my bedroom wall, as an illustration of Christ’s words in John 3:16, “Behold, I stand at the door and knock.” As an art critic, however, I find the dark

— 7 — tone rather oppressive, as though the colors already have the incense mixed in! But I rejoice in the Annunciation painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828–82) entitled Ecce Ancilla Domini or “Behold the Servant of the Lord.” Rossetti, like his sister Christina, also published as a poet.

49. Hopkins: The Wreck of the Deutschland, title slide Turner: Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842, London Tate)

There is a strong Anglo-Catholic flavor to the religious revival in later 19th-century England; Rossetti himself came from a mixed Catholic-Anglican marriage. My last two examples in this hour are explicitly Roman Catholic subjects. I have introduced the Jesuit priest Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–89) in at least two of my classes before, for his groundbreaking nature sonnets. Now, though, I want to play an excerpt from a longer poem, The Wreck of the Deutschland, written in 1875 at the suggestion of his superior to commemorate the loss at sea of a group of German nuns, fleeing to America to escape harsh anti-Catholic laws. Unfortunately, I have time only for two sections of three stanzas each, in the wonderful reading by Cyril Cusak. The painting in the background is Snow Storm—Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth (1842) by Turner.

50. Hopkins: The Wreck of the Deutschland. Stanzas 12–14 and 18–20 51. Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius, title slide

Finally, if we have time, The Dream of Gerontius, written in 1900 by Sir Edward Elgar (1857–1934) to a text by Cardinal Newman, the former leader of the Oxford Movement, now established as Britain’s leading Catholic cleric. The subject is death. The protagonist, an old man, dies at the end of the first part and is received into Purgatory in the second, for eventual ascension into Heaven. I shall play a short section at the end of the first part in which the Priest, sung by a bass, performs the last rites with the words “Go forth from this world, Christian soul.” It is a beautiful example of Elgar’s ability to write a vocal line that is neither recitative nor aria, flexible, melodic, and commanding at the same time.

52. Elgar: The Dream of Gerontius, bass solo from Part I 53. Title slide 3 (Burne-Jones: Easter)

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