Last night we watched the second programme in the series presented by the historian Simon Schama, on the subject of “Romanticism”. I think it is he best thing I’ve seen by him. Often he can seem a bit “full of himself”, so that he diverts attention away from his subject-matter. In this series he does seem to have a genuine sympathy with his material, and this came over particularly in this second film. I reckon that really, at heart, Schama is actually an old Hippy.
Seriously, however, I have found it all very thought-provoking. It has been with me all day in one way or another. (Well, you have to think of something when cutting back the ivy.) I’ve been chewing over the celebrated distinction between “romanticism” and “classicism”, and it has been an instructive experience. I’ve never thought of myself in these terms before, but I am beginning to think that I might be an inveterate “romantic”. Of course, I don’t mean this is the hackneyed “Mills and Boone” sense, but in terms of essential habits of thought and a way of looking at the world.
The “classical” mind is very much occupied with the idea that there are rules which, if understood and followed correctly, can enable us to approximate to the ideal. It is possible to design and construct buildings which conform to ideal proportions and balance, for example. The “romantic”, on the other hand is always striving against the belief that the ideal is perpetually beyond attainment.
Coleridge’s “Alph, the sacred river”, comes into my mind. It ran “Through caverns measureless to man/Down to a sunless sea.”* Both its course and its destination are necessarily beyond our imagination. It is a good metaphorical image of the artist, I think, who might be struggling to make visible, and part of direct experience, something that is perpetually just out of reach.
*Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kublai Khan.