The Lamentation, that is — and what we have here is an abiding, inexhaustibly accentuated lament of the most painfully Eccehomo kind — the Lamentation is expression itself; one may state boldly that all expressivism is really lament; just as music, so soon as it is conscious of itself as expression at the beginning of its modern history, becomes lament and ‘lasciatemi morire’ [die Klage ist der Ausdruck selbst, man kann kühnlich sagen, dass aller Ausdruck eigentlich Klage ist, wie denn die Musik, sobald sie sich als Ausdruck begreift, am Beginn ihrer modernen Geschichte, zur Klage wird and zum ‘Lasciatemi morire’], the lament of Ariadne, to the softly echoing plaintive song of the nymphs. It does not lack significance that the Faust cantata is stylistically so strongly and unmistakably linked with the seventeenth century and Monteverdi, whose music — again not without significance — favoured the echo-effect, sometimes to the point of being a mannerism. The echo, the giving back of the human voice as nature-sound, and the revelation of it as nature-sound, is essentially a lament: Nature's melancholy ‘Alas!’ in view of man, her effort to utter his solitary state. Conversely, the lament of the nymphs on its side is related to the echo. In Leverkühn's last and loftiest creation, echo, a favourite device of the baroque, is employed with unspeakably mournful effect.
Thus, says Mann, when the choral music of the Middle Ages, the music of community, gives way in the Renaissance to opera, with its celebration of the individual, this is, for music, not entirely a matter for rejoicing. It is no coincidence that Monteverdi's first and greatest opera, Orfeo (1607, usually seen as the first opera tout court), should take as its subject one of the ancient world's main legends of irreparable loss, a legend that has haunted modern artists from Rilke to Birtwistle as it haunted the Renaisssance. Like Dowland's almost contemporary Lachrymae (1605), recently so beautifully touched into life by Birtwistle in his Semper Dowland, Semper Dolens, and, like countless Renaissance sonnets, it is specifically about the loss of a beloved woman, but the reason it has exerted such a hold is clearly that, like Monteverdi's ‘Ariadne's Lament’, it is about some deeper, more primal and all-encompassing loss. The Middle Ages, of course, had their fair share of poems and songs about the loss of a loved one, but these songs have a kind of upswing and energy that belies their subject-matter. What is so extraordinary about ‘Ariadne's Lament’ and Dowland's Lachrymae is the way the music seems to enact the very loss it laments. The Middle Ages also had a central place for a story of darkness and death, the story of Christ's Passion. But that story, whether expressed in the Easter liturgy, in the miracle plays or in stained glass windows across Europe, does not stop with Christ's death on the cross. That death, terrible though it is, is but a moment in a larger story, one that will end with the Resurrection and the Last Judgement, a story the Middle Ages would have called, as Dante called his poem, a comedy, because it starts badly but ends well. When, in the sixteenth century, religion takes its inward turn, the shape of that story is lost. The world becomes a colder place.
Some will dismiss all this with the boo-word ‘Hegelianism’ and accuse me, along with Heller, Mann and the rest, of nostalgia or, worse, of proto-fascism, in our longing for an ordered world of community to contrast with the fragmented, liberal and individualistic world in which we live. Even Frank Kermode, a scholar noted for his openness to the new, once accused Eliot of being a closet Romantic for his notion of a moment when unity fragmented and ‘sensibility’ grew ‘dissociated’. That there is a real issue here, and one that has to be faced head-on, is attested to by Eliot's career. His prose writings of the 1930s and 1940s do seem to spring from a longing for a once-unified Europe, and it is there that some of his most notorious anti-Semitic remarks occur. Does that then invalidate his insight into seventeenth-century poetry and culture? Does not everyone who responds to poetry know what he means when he contrasts Marvell's ‘unified sensibility’ with that of the poets who followed him? Is it not possible to separate the cultural critique from the nostalgia and the prescriptiveness of how a once-lost unity can be found again? T.J. Clark, the art historian, puts the problem most clearly when, in an early footnote to his splendid Farewell to an Idea: Episodes from a History of Modernism, he writes:
I realize that I shall be taken here and elsewhere to be idealizing pre-modern society, and inventing a previous watertight world of myth and ritual, agreed-on hierarchies, implicit understandings, embodied places, and so on. There is no easy way out of this dilemma. Of course pre-Modern societies (and certainly the ones existing in Europe immediately before the spread of mercantile capitalism and the seventeenth-century crisis) were conflicted and ideologically incomplete. I am on the side of historians who have fought against the picture of a pre-modern Europe characterised by absolute cultural uniformity, immovable religious consensus, the unthinkability of alternative views of the world, etc. Nonetheless, if we do not make a distinction between societies built, however inefficiently, upon instanced and incorporated belief, with distinctions and places said to be inherited from time immemorial, and societies driven by a new kind of economic imperative, in which place and belief are subject to constant revision by the very forces that give society form, then I reckon we forfeit the chance of thinking critically about the past two hundred years. To call such comparative thinking ‘nostalgia’ (or in the present techno-ecstatic conjuncture, ‘Luddism’) is just the latest form of philistinism about history in general.
Thomas Mann himself was well aware of the problem. In fact Doctor Faustus is nothing other than his desperate and impassioned struggle with it (as, in its way, is The Magic Mountain, written twenty years earlier). The source of Leverkühn's power as a composer, as well as his despair, is his recognition of the truth of Hegel's vision of a present in which the oracles are dumb, the social structures which made their existence possible having long since given way to modern capitalist individualism. On the other hand the Germany he inhabits, which is in the grip of a party which believes that it is possible to forge a new cultic and communal society in the post-industrial world, appals and terrifies him, as much as it does Zeitblom. Can one retain the critical insights, feel the loss as real, without at the same time opting for the demented Nazi vision of a new cult? This is the question out of which the tortured novelist, writing in distant California as the Nazi dream drags Europe to its destruction, forges one of his greatest works.
2. What Shall We Have To Drink In These Deserts?
Let me try to give a little more life to that striking phrase, ‘the disenchantment of the world’, by focusing on the work of a few artists, working from the early sixteenth to the early nineteenth centuries. I could have chosen others, but these will do both as examples and as a way of introducing some of the themes that will come into prominence when we turn to the modernism of our own time.
I want to begin with three sixteenth-century artists, and, first, with a visual artist and with a work made in 1514, three years, that is, before Luther nailed his ninety-five theses to the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg. I do this because I want to show, among other things, that these intuitions of a change in man's relation to the world are not dependent on external events such as the Protestant and French revolutions, though of course these are important contributory factors, but that all are part and parcel of the same thing, the coming to the surface of tensions which had been growing for some time and which finally burst out into the open. In that year, 1514, Albrecht Dürer, recognised even in his lifetime as the greatest Renaissance artist of the North, made an engraving to which he gave the enigmatic title Melencolia I [figure 1]. An enormous brooding woman in flowing robes, with wings and a crown of leaves, sits leaning her head on her hand in an indeterminate space next to a ruined house against which a ladder is propped. An eerie moonlight blankets the scene and on the left, above a sheet of water, an ugly-looking bat spreads its wings, on which the mysterious title of the engraving is displayed. In her right hand the woman holds a compass and all around her lie other measuring instruments and tools: a pair of scales, a turned sphere of wood, a truncated rhombo-hedron, pliers, nails, a saw. On the wall behind her is an hourglass and next to it a magic square with a bell above it. From her belt, in equal disarray, hang a bunch of keys and an open purse. Sitting a little above her is a putto, busily scribbling. The two figures convey the overwhelming impression of tension and anxiety in the midst of what we paradoxically experience as both stasis and chaos.