It is possible to recount a story of art and how it has developed since the 1790s which parallels this story of politics and people. Looking at music one could ask why it is that a composer like Haydn could write a hundred symphonies and only a few years later a composer no less gifted, no less industrious, Beethoven, could write only nine. The answer, quite simply, is that Haydn didn't feel he needed to start from scratch each time. Haydn is the last major composer to work as Dürer showed St Jerome working: at ease within a tradition. What he had to do, to put it schematically, was to fill in a form. That he filled it in supremely well, far better than any of his contemporaries except Mozart, is neither here nor there. In a wonderful passage in Mann's Doctor Faustus, Adrian Leverkühn tries to explain to his friend and future biographer how what happened to sonata form at this time encapsulates what happened to music at large. When the form first developed, he explains, there were clear rules governing its deployment: first came an introduction, followed by a first theme, a second theme, a development section, a recapitulation, and finally a coda. What happens with Beethoven, argues Leverkühn, is that the development section, which had been ‘a small part of the sonata, a modest republic of subjective illumination’, grows out of all proportion to the rest till it overwhelms the whole, its growth synonymous with the expression of the composer's demonic subjectivity. Even today Beethoven's symphonies stand in the public imagination for the most powerful expression of an individuality we all believe we possess but which it is given to few of us to be able to express.
Unfortunately, after Beethoven (who, it will be observed, plays in this story the role that Napoleon played in the previous one — ‘In the plenitude of his resource, every obstacle seemed to vanish’, etc.) composers were left with nothing to hold on to except for their individuality, and, without Beethoven's dynamism or optimism, this gradually led, in the course of the nineteenth century, to an art more and more prone to stasis, dreaminess and disintegration. Technically what happened was that the key system, on which the classical sonata form had depended for its articulation, was first tweaked in the interest of colour and originality, and then gradually lost its power to control and started to seem unnatural and artificial, yet without any other system being found to replace it. The composer at the start of the twentieth century, an Arnold Schoenberg or an Adrian Leverkühn, was thus caught between repeating forms he could no longer believe in or trusting a subjectivity that was growing daily more problematic. And the same trajectory could be described for the other arts, with Eliot and Joyce, Cézanne and Picasso, taking the place of Schoenberg and Leverkühn.
I will come to them in good time. For the moment I want to stay with the paradoxes that emerged in the wake of the French Revolution and Napoleon. The person who can best help us understand them, to my mind, is a reclusive genius who lived on the edge of Europe in the middle of the century, the Dane Søren Kierkegaard. In a dazzling torrent of works that seemed to burst out of him like a natural force in the decade between 1840 and 1849 (he was born in 1813), he produced what is in effect a kind of Divine Comedy of the nineteenth century. Dante, working in an age when an ordered universe was taken for granted, could build his poem out of a hundred cantos precisely (three canticles of thirty-three cantos plus a prologue) and place his sinners and saints in carefully graded positions in both Heaven and Hell, while drawing on a rich tradition to bring home to the reader how each of us can be saved and what steps need to be taken to find our way up the mountain of Purgatory. By 1840 all that has long gone. All Kierkegaard can do is to try and explore in every way imaginable the troubled heart and soul of nineteenth-century man, one who has been given his freedom twice over, first by God and then by the French Revolution, but who does not know what to do with it except torment himself with the sense that he is wasting his life.
Already in his first mature work Either/Or (1842), he had begun to explore what it might mean for a youth with brains and imagination to grasp that he was free to do what he wanted and to grasp at the same time that that freedom condemned him to a life of melancholy and inaction, as though the plethora of possibilities made all actualities seem pale and insubstantial. Coleridge of course had already sketched out such a fate in his examination of and identification with Hamlet. Kierkegaard carries on the work in a much more rigorous but also much more ironic manner, since the Hamlet-like young man who ostensibly writes the essays that make up Part I, the ‘Either’ of the title (it is probable that they were Kierkegaard's own early essays, given new life by being set in a new context), is pitted against a mature married man, a Judge, who speaks in Part II (‘Or’), arguing that all the young man has to do is make just one choice, that of a partner for life, and all his problems will be solved, his agony and frustration will drop away and happiness will be his for ever. In a sense this was the alternative Dürer presented in his two engravings, but one feels that St Jerome is at least an imaginative possibility for Dürer, whereas the Judge is a wooden figure in whom neither the reader nor the author can quite believe. And that for a simple reason. He has really no response to the young man's question: What determines my choice of partner, and, if it is simply a matter of choosing rather than of the person one chooses, how is one to decide whom to choose? To say that God will provide, or that when that person turns up it will be obvious, is not to answer the young man at all; on the other hand, to say that it doesn't matter whom one chooses, that once she is chosen and becomes a partner for life all will be well, still does not answer the question and, besides, is not quite the sort of thing the Judge seems to want to endorse. On the other hand, in an abstract way, it is clear to the young man that the Judge is right: if only he himself was on the other side, had already chosen, he too would be like the Judge and all would be well. But he is not, and he doesn't know how to get to the other side, given his ironic and sceptical attitude to all choice.