In his essay on Verdi's naïveté Berlin identifies this with Schiller's use of the term in his contrast between the ‘naïve’ and the ‘sentimental’, but that seems to me misleading. Schiller's ‘naïve’ artist is one who belongs to what I have described as the world before its disenchantment in the sixteenth century. There are of course candidates for the term working long after 1600 — Benjamin examines one such in his essay on Nikolai Leskov, and the stories of Johann Peter Hebel would also probably qualify. The naïveté of Dickens, Balzac and Verdi is of a quite different kind. They were, after all, amongst the canniest operators ever known in their pursuit of popularity and success. I think John Bayley puts his finger on it in a brilliant essay on Oliver Twist. ‘No novelist has profited more richly than Dickens from not examining what went on in his own mind’, Bayley remarks. And though he rightly loves this aspect of Dickens, he is aware of its limitations. Dickens' novels, he suggests, lack the objectivity of the greatest art; their appeal is precisely that they remain in the realm of childhood nightmares, powerful precisely because such nightmares never really leave us:
Iago and Verkhovensky are monsters because they know what they are doing; their actions let us loathe them and recoil from them into freedom, but we cannot recoil from Dickens' villains: they are the more frightening and haunting because we cannot expel them for what they do; they have the unexpungeable nature of our own nightmares and our own consciousness.
This is very fine. It catches the childish aspect of Dickens (as indeed of Verdi and Balzac) implied in the term naïve, in all its strength and its weaknesses.
Not having doubts is a blessed state, but it is not the same thing as having genuine authority. There is something hollow about Balzac, Dickens and Verdi compared with Dante or Shakespeare, but even compared with their older contemporaries, Beethoven and Wordsworth. It doesn't rest on their frequent clumsiness, for that is to be found in Beethoven and Wordsworth. It rests more on the very thing that is the root of their strength as artists and their enormous success as entrepreneurs: their inability to question what it is they are doing. In that sense they are the first modern best-sellers and in their work one can see the beginnings of that split between popularity and artistic depth which is to become the hallmark of modern culture.
But even as Balzac and Dickens were writing their spirited works, others were anxiously assessing what was really at issue. Chief among them, as I have suggested, was Søren Kierkegaard. His book On Authority and Revelation, though it deals with what he sees as a vital religious issue, is nevertheless a key work for understanding the artistic problems of the age. The book examines a curious case which had come to Kierkegaard's attention and which he felt to be, despite its superficial absurdity, exemplary. In the preface to a published volume of sermons a certain priest, Magister Adler, made the following claim:
One evening I had just developed the origin of evil [sic], when I saw, illuminated by a flash of lightning, that everything depends, not upon the thought but upon the Spirit. That night a hateful sound went through our chamber. The Saviour bade me stand up and go in and write down the words.
However, when the authorities, in alarm, asked him to explain himself, he began a series of complicated defences, both insisting on the accuracy of what he had recounted and somehow diluting it, so that by the end it was no longer clear if what he had had was just a profound thought or an actual visit and instruction from Jesus. Kierkegaard saw this as what he called a ‘bitter epigram upon our age’, and wrote his book to tease out its implications. Essentially the point he is making is that we have today confused a genius and an apostle, a ‘very great man’ or a ‘very great writer’, and one who speaks with authority. If St Paul were to say to someone: ‘Go, and do this’, we could analyse his words till we were blue in the face and they would in the end turn out to be no different from the injunction you or I might give to someone: ‘Go, and do this.’ The difference lies in who we are, not in what we say. The difference lies in the fact that St Paul has authority and you and I have none. Kierkegaard sees what Dürer and Cervantes saw, that without authority we are reduced to claiming authority for ourselves when we know deep down that we have none. But, Kierkegaard feels, our age has not only lost access to authority, it no longer even recognises the crucial distinction between one who has authority and one who only has genius.
It is his preface that is of immediate relevance to us in our attempt to understand the nature of this new form, the novel. ‘For it is one thing that a life is over, and a different thing that a life is finished by reaching its conclusion’, he begins. A man, he goes on, may perhaps one day decide to become an author. But, says Kierkegaard,
he may have extraordinary talents and remarkable learning, but an author he is not, in spite of the fact that he produces books … No, in spite of the fact that the man writes, he is not essentially an author; he will be capable of writing the first … and also the second part, but he cannot write the third part — the last part he cannot write. If he goes ahead naively (led astray by the reflection that every book must have a last part) and so writes the last part, he will make it thoroughly clear by writing the last part that he makes a written renunciation to all claim to be an author. For though it is indeed by writing that one justifies the claim to be an author, it is also, strangely enough, by writing that one virtually renounces this claim. If he had been thoroughly aware of the inappropriateness of the third part — well, one may say, si tacuisset, philosophus mansisset [had he kept quiet he would have remained a philosopher].
It could not be put more clearly. In our modern age, an age without access to the transcendental and therefore an age without any sure guide, an age of geniuses but no apostles, only those who do not understand what has happened will imagine that they can give their lives (and their works) a shape and therefore a meaning, the shape and meaning conferred by an ending. The task of those who have grasped the implications of this will be to try and bring home to those who haven't what it is that has been lost. Kierkegaard brings this part of his argument to an end with a pregnant aphorism: ‘To find the conclusion it is necessary first of all to observe that it is lacking, and then in turn to feel quite vividly the lack of it.’
This dialectical movement is typical of Kierkegaard, and of Modernism. In his last great pseudonymous work, the Concluding Unscientific Postscript (1847), he describes, partly tongue in cheek, how, as a young man in Copenhagen, he would often sit in the beautiful Frederiksberg Gardens and ask himself what he should do with his life. The world is full of great new inventions, he would think, the telegraph, the steamship, the railway; what is there left to do for mankind? And then the thought came to him: what he could do was to make men aware of what they could not do! He could become the spokesman for the negative in this world that worshipped so many positives! However, he goes on, negativity is a very delicate thing; all too often even those who talk of negativity, by talking, turn it into its opposite: