The last book of The Prelude begins with a different kind of vision. The poet has decided to climb Mount Snowdon at sunrise with a group of friends. A thick fog hangs over the mountain as they begin the ascent. He is in the lead,
When at my feet the ground appeared to brighten,
And with a step or two seemed brighter still;
Nor was time given to ask or learn the cause,
For instantly a light upon the turf
Fell like a flash, and lo! As I looked up,
The Moon hung naked in a firmament
Of azure without cloud, and at my feet
Rested a silent sea of hoary mist.
The tops of the mountains rise up like so many hills out of this sea of mist, but the sky is wonderfully clear; the Moon has banished the stars and seems to gaze
Upon the billowy ocean, as it lay
All meek and silent, save that through a rift –
Not distant from the shore whereon we stood,
A fixed, abysmal, gloomy breathing-place –
Mounted the roar of waters, torrents, streams
Innumerable, roaring with one voice!
Heard over earth and sea, and, in that hour,
For so it seemed, felt by the starry heavens. (XIV. 35–62)
The Prelude does not quite end here. As always, the poet wishes to place the vision within the continuum of human life. And this is important. Joseph Koerner has some remarkable pages, in his book on Friedrich, about the painter's fondness for what he calls the Rückenfigur, the figure who is and is not the painter, who is and is not the viewer, who stands at the limit of the picture, with his back to us, so that what we see is not what he sees, but him seeing. It is very important to Friedrich, Koerner points out, that this figure should be there, for he reminds us that vision is always vision at a particular moment, from a particular place, and that though vision may be the goal it does not subsume life but is only one moment, one experience, within life. And it is also very important that this figure should be, as he is for Wordsworth on Snowdon, bathed in mist, for mist is what unites the elements of the picture, what brings individual and vision into one orbit. It is also, of course, a figure for paint itself, which conceals the canvas and reveals figures, yet is the medium in which the entire scene exists. ‘Wanderer above the Sea of Fog’ (figure 3), writes Koerner, ‘stands suspended between two notional paintings: on the one hand, the total replication of a valley in all its detail that has been overpainted in white; on the other hand, a blank canvas in which have begun to appear, here and there, the fragments of a scene.’ What this is saying, I take it, is that such Romantic artists as Friedrich (and Wordsworth) are not so much visionaries as explorers of what it means to see and what it means to paint or write. They approach the final vision, the apocalyptic covering of the earth by water, the merging of self and landscape, with mingled excitement and apprehension, but something tells them to stop, to wake up before the earth is engulfed, to remain on firm land gazing into the mist beyond. ‘In the end,’ Kierkegaard had written in The Sickness Unto Death, ‘it seems as though anything were possible, but that is the very moment that the self is swallowed up in the abyss.’ Friedrich and Wordsworth point us to that moment but step back from the final annihilation. Perhaps it is their eighteenth-century roots. Perhaps it is their temperament. The result is to leave them — and us — with a sense of loss at what has not quite been surrendered to, but also exaltation at the memory of what was experienced. It leaves a place, too, for art, which is the activity by which the vision can be recaptured and the sense of loss anchored. In a difficult passage Koerner makes the case for Friedrich, relating his view of him to the later history of art. What he says holds also for Wordsworth, and gives us a template for assessing the complicated dance of art and vision, hand and eye, which is one central aspect of the history of Modernism: ‘In the framed nothingness of From the Dresden Heath, or into the passage into loss plotted by Fog’, he writes,
figure 3 Caspar David Friedrich, Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog, c. 1818.
Romantic landscape seems to prefigure the blinding and blinded project of twentieth-century abstraction, which is why Friedrich can figure as the origin of such histories as, for example, Robert Rosenblum's controversial Modern Painting and the Northern Romantic Tradition. If we submit Friedrich's art to the semiotics of Romanticism, however, we discern a far more complex state of affairs. Abstraction will always be only a passing moment in our experience of the image, just as Friedrich himself is often compelled to raise a cathedral above the last horizon of his spiritual ‘histories’, as modernity's return of the repressed. Yet neither does this return fully eradicate the moment of blankness.
II. MODERNISM
5. It's A Quick Death, God Help Us All
If Wordsworth and Friedrich abandon genre they nevertheless produce works which immediately assert that they are art and not something else, Wordsworth because he writes in verse, Friedrich because he paints in oils and frames his pictures. The novel's denial of genre was more radical. For the novel is precisely the form that emerges when genres no longer seem viable. From the start it pretended or pretended to pretend to be something else: a translation from a lost Arabic manuscript, the true account of the wreck of a boat on a desert island, the memoirs of a whore, a rake or an orphan. At the same time novels asserted, like Descartes at the start of his
Discourse
, that their creators would bow to no authority, would rely on nothing but themselves as honest and reasonable men. Genres were the sign of submission to authority and tradition, but the novel, a narrative in prose, was the new form in which the individual could express himself precisely by throwing off the shackles that bound him to his fathers and to tradition. It is no coincidence that so many eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century novels are precisely about young men refusing to do what their fathers wish, refusing to take on the roles that their fathers have mapped out for them. Yet usually the hero ends up inheriting after all, though on his own terms. And this alerts us to a paradox faced by the novel. For if it throws off all external authority, where does it get its own authority from? The answer has to be: from the inspiration or experience of the novelist himself. But who confers this authority upon him? No-one but himself. From the beginning, then, the novel was caught in the same double-bind as Don Quixote in giving himself a name and an epithet, asserting its truth and the value of what it was doing (which genre-derived works had
never needed to do since it was the tradition that provided them with these things), yet knowing at heart that these were assertions and nothing more. Or perhaps not knowing but believing in the ability of the self to produce, and in the meaning and value of what is produced — that is what gives the works of Balzac and Dickens their sense of magisterial authority, and has made them the envy of many later novelists. Isaiah Berlin once called Verdi the last naïve artist, and in a sense the same could be said of Dickens and Balzac: none of them ever had any doubts about the nature of his vocation or his own ability.