You may think our modern world was born yesterday.
But it wasn't. Not even the day before yesterday.
Democracy in the streets and the rise of people power...
..the raw passion of national belonging...
..good and bad...
..our obsession with the self,
with our own psychology
and the dark recesses of the human mind...
..even our love of nature,
without concern for the future of the planet...
..all of this was the creation of the Romantics...
..a generation of artists living and working 200 years ago,
around the time of the French Revolution.
Their art was created over nearly a century of upheaval and change,
and it speaks to us now with as much ferocious power as it did then.
I mean, they should have been our leaders, really, you know.
They should have been our political leaders.
Imagine that we lived in one of the richest countries on Earth,
but kids are being exploited just down the street.
The Romantics lived hard, worked feverishly,
and many of them died young.
But we still think with their mind,
we feel with their emotional heartbeat,
we see with their eyes
and we listen with their ears.
As surely as if we saw them walking down the street,
they are still with us, right here, right now.
Romanticism was bored and looking for trouble.
It wasn't some airy change in taste.
What many of the Romantics wanted was to change the world -
by revolution, if it came to it.
But what happened if this...
..became this?
When the romance of revolution ended in political failure
and bloody disenchantment.
Well, you can go somewhere like this -
the island of Guernsey - where, retreating from
the tragic uproar of public life,
you take a journey into your own mind
where you create another revolution -
the discovery of the subconscious, something which would have
a profound effect on our modern world.
This is what happened to one demoralised revolutionary -
France's most celebrated novelist and poet, Victor Hugo.
In 1856, Victor Hugo moved into this house
overlooking St Peter's Port in Guernsey.
Not a holiday home -
a place of exile.
After falling foul of the French Emperor Louis Napoleon -
who, in 1851, had seized power and turned France into a dictatorship -
Victor Hugo felt he had no choice but to leave his beloved country.
The interiors were designed entirely by his own hand,
reflecting every period of France's history.
Walking through them is like moving through the chambers
of his restless, melancholy mind.
I like that kind of mournful figure with the beard...
..staring gloomily out
into this extraordinary interior.
You know, the room is a room, really, where you go to bed
and fail to sleep.
You pace madly around
these impedimenta.
Nobody's ever had a good night's sleep in that bed,
you know for sure, least of all Victor Hugo.
It was here at the top of the house, looking out over the sea to France,
where Victor Hugo wrote his masterpiece, Les Miserables -
his epic novel about the passions of the poor, the cruelty of injustice
and the righteousness of revolution.
But it was also here where, at night, his pen went sleepwalking
into a very different universe, where he created images transcribed
from his dreams and nightmares,
visions pulled from the depths of his unconscious.
These are really some of the most startling and extraordinary images
I have ever seen.
And I think one of the things that makes them amazing, as coming
from Victor Hugo, is that he's a fine-tuned engineer,
an architect of enormous novels,
but these are not laborious at all.
They are products of impulse and intuition.
You know, the work of pure unconscious instinct.
And one of the Romantic impulses is you just go with the flow.
Liberated from any 19th-century notion of what art should be
or how it should be made,
Victor Hugo used whatever physical materials he could lay
his hands on - coffee or soot, spat from his mouth,
deliberately mutilated quills
which made the ink spatter and blot,
drawing using his left hand, without looking at the page.
All images we think of as having been born with modern expressionism,
even surrealism.
This is the sort of one where he's really just doing shapes.
He's sort of pouring ink and then working it up into something,
so that he's letting chance do its thing,
which is then worked up into a phantasmagoria.
So he's using his fingers and nails and possibly one of his smashed-up
goose quills to create this capering outsized wolf,
with these strange kind of dancing hooves at the bottom
and plugged-in eyes and a kind of...
..just a sort of awful orifice there for a mouth.
I think we've all played around, really, with ink blots,
and then creating these kind of shapes,
but this goes way beyond that.
And this bearded, haunted character comes out again of blotting
and staining and smudging, when, somehow
just through these abusive techniques,
one of those romantic figures of desperate solitude
emerges from the shadows.
Over the years, Victor Hugo created thousands of these drawings
and it's hard to escape the feeling
that they are all really self-portraits -
a sustained exercise in therapeutic autobiography.
Allowing his subconscious to take over, Victor Hugo came face-to-face
with the deepest trauma of his life...
..the death of his 19-year-old daughter, Leopoldine -
who, a decade earlier, had drowned in a boating accident
when she was pulled under by the weight of her dress.
Grief and guilt dragged Hugo's mind into the watery abyss.
It was there that immense dramas now played out
in his nightmares and dreams.
Sea creatures spelling out the initials of his name.
His daughter reaching for a star from beneath the tide.
Marooned on Guernsey,
confronted by the endless expanse of sea and sky,
it was the ocean that became the defining metaphor for the risks
he was willing to take by plunging into his own mind.
He was obsessed with the sea and, when he wanted to describe
his own romantic destiny, represented it as an immense wave
on a seashore like this one.
He would ride that great curling wave of destiny,
or he knew it might crash and break,
dropping his broken body
into the abyss.
The other image which obsessed him was of a path
or a way to an unknown destination.
Where would that place be?
Well, it might be a place exactly like this,
where the sun and the sea
and the sky and the clouds
and the shifting sands and the water
all melted together.
A place where you could perhaps have a deep, profound, ecstatic,
spiritual kind of vision,
but a place of great peril, too,
because it could actually engulf you.
You could get swallowed up by the waves.
We tend to think of the discovery of the unconscious as the legacy
of Freud and Jung.
But in fact, long before the invention
of psychology, it was the Romantics who became the first explorers
of the darker, deeper regions of the human mind.
Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment,
in which reason was seen as the supreme human faculty,
separating man from the animals.
But the Romantics knew there was another kind of reality
just as powerful...
..that dwelled in the darkness of sleep, and came to life
in dreams and nightmares.
This was the true site of the creative imagination.
And if you dared to go there, somewhere in that labyrinth
was the real you.
But you also undertook that journey at your peril,
for it could take you to places you'd rather not go...
..to childhood traumas and repressed desires...
..even to potential madness,
where you could end up trapped in the maze of the mind.
Well, welcome to one of the most extraordinary nightmares
in all of European art.
The first artist to open up the door to this parallel world
was Giambattista Piranesi in the late 1740s.
A young Venetian architect and engraver,
Piranesi made his name creating etchings of Rome's classical ruins
and palaces.
Crumbling though they were,
those buildings remained the Enlightenment ideal
of mathematical beauty and order - reason in stone.
But Piranesi also produced these fantastical images
that he called his prisons, etched from his dreams.
Incredulous critics said they could only have been produced
by malarial fever.
In these antebuildings, sculpted out of darkness,
classical architecture is turned inside out.
Not a house of reason, but a house of horror.
It's very important he's an architect because
these are full of architecture, but architecture of hell, really,
architecture which doesn't work,
spaces which don't add up, make no sense at all.
He's exploding all the rules of his architectural education.
They are galleries which lead to nowhere.
There are dead ends wherever you look.
There are hanging levers and pulleys, machinery, upper recesses -
all the things you would normally use
when you were figuring out the arithmetic of your profession,
which are here blown up completely
in order to create this extraordinary kind of psychodrama
of incarceration.
And the whole thing is utterly a kind of a universe
of the exploding imagination.
Created at the beginnings of our machine-tooled world,
Piranesi gives us a frightening vision...
..all the more unnerving because so prophetic about our modern world.
For the Enlightenment mind, machines were benevolent,
liberating, transformational.
But here, ropes, wheels and chains have become instruments
not of liberation, but of imprisonment and torture.
Ghostly figures wander in and out of the gloom,
as if they've been lobotomised or controlled by some omniscient force.
These images have become shorthand for almost every dystopian world
in modern cinema...
..from Fritz Lang's Metropolis, where he memorably portrays workers
trapped in an underground world
as slaves to the machine and the clock...
..to Christopher Nolan's epic Dark Knight trilogy,
where Batman's fight against tyranny and evil
plays itself out in Piranesi-inspired worlds.
Piranesi's terrifying images haunted the imaginations
of a whole generation of Romantics
growing up during the Industrial Revolution...
..and they would kick-start a revolt against a mechanical world
that they thought cut humanity off
from the deepest wellsprings of creativity.
In the 1790s, the Romantic who would take that message most to heart -
one who would cherish his own album of Piranesi prints -
was a young English poet living on the Somerset coast.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Disappointed by the failure of the French Revolution
to deliver political liberty,
Coleridge dreamed of setting up a utopian commune in America.
But when his plans fell through,
he retreated in 1796 to the village of Nether Stowey in Somerset.
Here, with his wife and young son,
he was joined by a group of like-minded writers and poets,
including William Wordsworth and his sister, Dorothy.
Together, they resolved to turn their back on the material world.
They would grow their own food.
More importantly, they conceived of a way to transform humanity
through the power of the poetic imagination...
..beginning with the exploration of their own lines.
From revolution, then, to revelation.
But for this, they needed another kind of liberty,
the freedom for their bodies to roam, along with their minds,
across the moors and coastal paths of the Somerset coast,
often covering up to 40 miles in a single day.
Away from the trappings of modern civilisation,
Coleridge could use the glorious landscape
to trigger the journey deep into his imagination.
He's off on his endless walks - mile after mile after mile.
And, I mean, walking here, you can't blame him
cos it is so superbly beautiful, between these rolling hills...
..that see their cliffs.
So you imagine this loud, clumsy, extroverted, exuberant
but, in this case, solitary man tramping along,
falling down, lying on his back under the sky.
It's so easy to imagine, and just sort of drinking all this in,
internalising, and this great rush of sensation.
For Coleridge, imagination wasn't bound by the conventions of logic.
It had, you might say, a mind of its own.
His brain, he said, was like a "Surinam toad",
reproducing thoughts and sensations like little toads
sprouting out of its back, side and belly.
In what seems like a Romantic manifesto,
he thought it was only by opening one's mind
to the full onrush of sensory perception
that one could have a more poetic - and therefore deeper -
sense of the self and the world.
He sees everything really at once, and it irradiates him.
You know, he's just in a state of utter creative lift-off here.
It was on one of those long walks, when falling into what he described
as a "reverie brought on by two grains of opium", that Coleridge
discovered another way to access the power of his creative mind.
And it would lead him to write what would become his most famous poem -
Kubla Khan.
It was said by Coleridge that there was a storm,
or he needed at any rate to take shelter in a lonely farmhouse -
and it could be the farmhouse that's over there, Ash Farm -
and he is suffering. He's full of aches and pains.
He may have been suffering from dysentery or something.
He has a hit of laudanum.
And the laudanum, the opium, does two very important things.
He feels drenched in a kind of golden emotion,
but at the same time, opium makes him sharp and clear-headed
and exacting in his imagination.
That's the kind of wonderful thing, too.
Opium doesn't sort of make you flat and drowsy.
It excites you to a kind of thrilling clarity,
to translate a vision inside your head into perfect verse.
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan a stately pleasure-dome decree.
"Where Alph, the sacred river, ran through caverns measureless to man
"Down to a sunless sea.
"So twice five miles of fertile ground
"With walls and towers were girdled round.
"And there were gardens..."
On his walk, Coleridge had been reading a 17th-century book
documenting the voyages of sailors to exotic lands,
including the China - or the Mongol - emperor Kublai Khan.
In his dope-assisted dream, visions of this far-off land
merged with the rocks and chasms of the Somerset coast
to become the dramatic landscape of his mind,
as it followed the unpredictable paths of the poetic imagination.
But, oh, that deep romantic chasm
which slanted down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover.
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
as if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
a mighty fountain momently was forced,
amid whose swift half-intermitted burst
huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail
or chaffy grain beneath the thresher's flail.
And mid these dancing rocks at once and ever
it flung up momently the sacred river.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion through wood and dale
The sacred river ran...
..then reached the caverns measureless to man,
and sank in tumult to a lifeless ocean.
The shadow of the dome of pleasure floated midway on the waves...
..where was heard the mingled measure
from the fountain and the caves.
It was a miracle of rare device,
a sunny pleasure-dome with caves of ice.
As we're kind of travelling through this landscape of imagination,
we go with Coleridge into this deeply penetrating world
of the creative mind.
And at the very end of the poem, there is this sense for Coleridge
that it's a very difficult, dangerous place to be.
That with music loud and long, I would build that dome in air,
that sunny dome, those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there...
And all should cry, "Beware! Beware!"
His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice, and close your eyes with holy dread
For he on honey-dew hath fed, and drunk the milk of Paradise.
Some have used these drugs to journey into the uncharted tunnels
of the mind.
In the '60s and '70s, you couldn't move for dangerous poets
with flashing eyes and floating hair, drinking the milk of paradise.
Sometimes...I went into lights that are brighter than the sun.
They were all Coleridges reborn, especially in their belief
that it was poetry and art that could offer an antidote
to an increasingly ugly world.
Shall we have a look what's there?
But it's an idea that has lost none of its potency in our own times.
"Samuel Taylor Coleridge, selected by James Fenton."
Let's have a look who James Fenton is.
Oh, The Romantics Collection. That's handy, isn't it?
They were brave men.
I mean, this is from a generation
that went into unknown realms, you know?
They're not just poets. They can't really be pigeonholed as poets.
They are... I mean, they should have been our leaders, really, you know?
They should have been our political leaders.
The Romantics, I read mostly when I was younger, yeah.
It was the one place where I could be free, you know?
Blake and Wordsworth and Coleridge.
Blake's vision of Albion rising up, you know, it was...
It was everything to me, really.
Forming the band was about getting people together, en masse.
And when people are en masse, like, anything is possible.
Like, any ideas you've got about changing the world,
changing society, has to start with getting people together, you know?
Words are very, very powerful things. And poetry was everything...
Well, it still is everything to me.
And the ugliness of the world around me, I couldn't accept it.
But music, poetry, literature, culture, they are...
They are the life rafts, you know, in this world.
They are... They are the answer, you know? That's the solution.
A beautiful poem, a beautiful song, cannot come from an ugly place
and can only make an ugly place better.
Coleridge believed that it was in our dreams, assisted by opium,
that our true self was revealed to us.
And by the early 1800s, his church of the imagination got converts.
One of them was Thomas De Quincey,
whose use of opium to explore his dreams
would take our understanding of the mind way beyond Coleridge
and into the realms of modern psychology.
De Quincey had fallen under the spell
of Coleridge and Wordsworth's poetry
at school. It inspired him to run away to become a poet.
After living homeless on the streets of London, in 1807,
at the age of 22, he travelled all the way to Dove Cottage
in the Lake District to meet his heroes.
The cottage has now become known as Wordsworth's Romantic idyll...
..but when Wordsworth moved out in 1809, De Quincey moved in...
..and for the next 24 years, it became his addict's lair,
where, at the peak of his habit, he'd take up to 12,000 drops
of laudanum a day - enough to kill a horse.
His addiction would lead him to write
one of the most startling texts in Romantic literature...
..the world's first drug memoir -
Confessions Of An English Opium-Eater.
Well, he's sailing into uncharted waters in terms of literature.
And he's writing very fast - it's full of crossings-out -
and this page here is full of coffee stains.
And it's a huge gamble, it's a huge risk in writing this.
He apologises for doing something coarse and unseemly,
but he wants to do it nonetheless. He thinks it will be remarkable.
And here, he gives it to you straight.
"Opium-eating, if a sensual pleasure,
"and if I am bound to confess that I have indulged in it
"to an excess not yet recorded..." - he underlines "recorded" -
"..by any other man,
"it is no less true that I have struggled against
"this fascinating enthralment with a religious zeal."
And what you have at the beginning of this book in 1821
is an incredible drama of struggle with yourself.
Divided into the pleasures and the pains of opium,
the book lays bare the effects the drug has on the mind,
what De Quincey called with unflinching honesty
"the apocalypse of the world within".
And in a series of astonishingly detailed memories, stories
and visions, the book pulls the reader into the dreamscape
of an opium-juiced world.
It's an act of brutal courage, and he really is exploring a part
of our consciousness of what is the human mind.
How have I travelled with it, into it?
And it makes him an astonishingly modern explorer of the darker,
deeper parts of our consciousness.
In the early stages of my malady, the splendours of my dreams
were chiefly architectural.
As was never yet beheld by waking eye,
unless in the clouds.
To my architecture succeeded dreams of lakes and silver
expanses of water.
In London, after dosing up on laudanum, De Quincey would take
off through the city at night,
getting lost in the labyrinthine streets, scanning
the faces of the nameless crowds.
De Quincey really loved wandering.
He didn't really mind or care
where he was going on those Saturday opium nights, as he called them.
He described time and space folding in and out,
suddenly becoming elastic.
Buildings are exhibited in proportions so vast
as the bodily eye is not fitted to conceive.
This did not disturb me so much as the vast expansion of time.
I sometimes seemed to have lived for 70 to 100 years in one night.
And remember, this is a time in early 19th-century England
where everybody was supposed to be ruled by the clock.
The grandfather clock. Above all, the factory clock.
Workers were having to clock in,
beady-eyed manufacturers were trying to see how much they could get
out of a timed working day.
Now, what De Quincey was doing in these elastic moments where time
and space dissolved was a kind of ultimate Romantic
rebellion against that.
He had become, inside his head, inside his body, his own master
of time and space.
But what makes De Quincey such a modern figure
was not how he addressed
the pleasures of opium, but its pains.
When the trips could go very bad - and they did -
he describes the psychic freak show that laid siege to his sanity.
Visions of strange creatures and monstrous chimeras merged
with his childhood memories, which he said "swept in upon the brain
"with the power and grandeur of recovered life".
From now on, his anxious dreams dredged up the deepest traumas
from his past.
In particular, they merged the figures of his sister -
who had died when he was a child -
with a young streetwalker called Ann,
who he'd promised to look after while sleeping rough
on the streets of London, but who one day
had simply disappeared.
17 years later, she now returned to haunt his dreams.
"She fixed her eyes upon me earnestly,
and I said to her at length, "'So, then...I found you at last.'
"I waited, but she answered me not a word.
"Her face was the same as when I saw it last.
"And yet again, how different.
"And I now gazed upon her with some awe,
"but suddenly her countenance grew dim.
"In a moment, all had vanished."
Through opium De Quincey had discovered
what he called involutes -
strange combinations of concrete images recurring in dreams
that revealed our deepest desires and feelings.
A truism of psychoanalysis, he'd discovered
that it was the unconscious that was the most powerful shaper
of our personality and our happiness.
So, under the power of opium, to bring these ghosts back,
what's he doing? Well, it's a kind of therapy,
much as the talking cure would work for Freud.
But in his particular case -
specially because of Ann -
the moment of bringing her back
is a way for him to somehow exorcise from his haunted imagination
the overwhelming weight of guilt.
Both De Quincey and his friend Coleridge would end up hopelessly
addicted for the rest of their lives.
Increasingly trapped in their fantasies and dreams,
they no longer compared their minds
to the ecstatic visions of Kubla Khan,
but to Piranesi's Prisons, descending every night,
De Quincey tells us, into chasms
and sunless abysses, depths below depths,
from which it seemed hopeless they could ever reascend.
Living on the edge always carried the risk of going right over it.
In their craving for deeper experiences, pushing their emotions
to the very limits of sanity,
very few Romantics, at one stage or other, didn't think
they were going mad.
But their innate sense that madness was actually an essential element
of creative genius also led to changing perceptions
of what madness actually was.
The early 19th century saw the beginnings
of modern psychiatric care.
Those who ended up in asylums were no longer seen as subhuman,
but part of us, our kin...
..lost in some dislocation of the mind, but living somewhere
we could all potentially go.
No Romantic was a more tragic casualty of this story
than the German composer Robert Schumann.
All his life, Schumann had pushed the boundaries of music as close
as possible to the expression of pure emotion,
regardless of where that led him.
In the early 1850s, Schumann composed this -
one of his final works.
Ethereal and delicate, as if spun by gossamer thread,
it almost sounds like a farewell.
Just five weeks later, Schumann checked himself into an asylum.
In the bravery of his imagination and his kind of visionary daring,
Schumann had always walked the brink.
20 years earlier, in 1833, he'd had the most terrible panic attack
when two members of his family had died within a short
time of each other.
He had a curious set of convulsions.
He stopped being able to breathe properly.
And he said that he thought the worst thing he could ever think
of was to lose his mind.
Well, it had happened to him.
Here he was, in 1854, in the mental asylum declaring himself -
in those first few months
where he was both up and down - as an honorary member of heaven.
What happened to Schumann then as he went downhill is best
documented by the medical records of the asylum itself.
"September, 1854. Spoke a lot in the night, softly
"moving his fingers on the blanket as if playing the piano.
"Asked the attendant if he was doing stupid things.
"March, 1855. An attack of fear with convulsions in the limbs.
"Fears his language is hampered, toneless, incomprehensible.
"Fears the nemesis is following him.
"Complains the demon is taking over his speech.
"May, 1855. Went to the garden.
"Consciousness of self gradually diminishing.
"Also in the garden, lively gesticulations.
"Later, very wild and confused.
"May, 1855. During evening meal was violent with the attendant,
"was dismissed and sent to his room. Threatening the attendant
"with his chair.
"During the night, completely sleepless, persistently
"speaking loudly, even threatening the attendant."
PIANO MUSIC PLAYS
Schumann first began to study music seriously
23 years earlier in 1830...
..when, aged 20, he was sent to live with a notoriously strict piano
teacher, Friedrich Wieck, and his daughter Clara,
a famous piano prodigy.
Inevitably, it wasn't long before Robert and Clara were hit
by the overwhelming delirium of romantic love.
But, enraged by the match, Clara's father banned them
from seeing each other.
Over the next six years, Robert and Clara poured their feelings
into a never-ending stream of passionate letters.
Using music as a secret form of communication,
Robert began to compose pieces for her, containing hidden messages
in the melodies, even spelling out her name in the notes.
The moment which really tells you everything about how deep
and serious their relationship is going to be - a relationship
really of partners in music as well as love - is in the spring of 1837.
She's come back from a tour to play in Leipzig and she can't see him.
And she does something very brave - defiant, really.
She knows nasty father is listening and looking.
She plays three of Schumann's pieces and he literally is standing
at the back of the hall in the shadows.
And then almost immediately after, there's an exchange of letters.
And she writes to him, "Did you not know I was playing
"for you because I had no other way of showing
"you all that is in my heart?
"Didn't you realise I was trembling?"
That does it. Robert snaps.
He says, "All I want from you is yes.
"Do you still love me? Just say yes."
And she writes back one of the great documents
of romantic love, I think.
"All you need, then, is a simple yes?
"Such a little word. So important.
"Should not a heart so full of inexpressible love as mine
"save this little word?"
She goes on. "With my whole soul,
"I do so, and whisper it to you from my deepest self forever.
"I, too, have felt for a long time
"it must be. Nothing in the world can change me."
And out of that moment, Schumann embarks on a torrential outpouring
of extraordinary music.
MUSIC: Andante Un Poco Maestoso
Listening to it is like eavesdropping on his tumultuous
inner world.
Music as ultimate confessional.
In it, Schumann declares to Clara everything
he is and everything he feels
with astonishing, almost frightening openness.
"Who ordered you to love me?
"Who ordered me to love you?
"Truly, it is you, you angel of joy, who hold me under your wings.
"And if you left me, I would sink back down into desolation
"and darkness."
At times so overwhelmed
was he by the force of his feelings that he channelled them into two
separate characters called Florestan and Eusebius - the two
extremes of his own personality that spoke for him through the music.
In these little verses to Clara, we encounter Florestan
and Eusebius again. So...
HE SPEAKS GERMAN:
Florestan, the wild. Eusebius, the mild. Yeah, very good.
So, that's these two characters in him, which he also transfers
to music. In Carnaval, there are two movements.
Eusebius's movement is dreaming and floating, and then comes
the impulsive Florestan with lots of dissonance, as well,
so ending in dissonance. Freud would have loved this, I'm sure.
Yeah. I don't think Freud knew it, but he would have loved it. Yeah.
And so it suggests really that he himself felt in the grip
of these two contradictory instincts, really.
Almost to the degree it might have been bipolar, but...
Yeah, they were his way of coping with his sort of bipolarism. Yeah.
So, if Clara wanted to love him, she had to accept both sides.
Both sides. Both Florestan and Eusebius. And I think she did.
Yeah. She knew him well. I think she did, too.
Clara and Robert finally married in 1840, after taking Clara's
father to court.
But despite the hope that love and music would keep
the demons at bay...
..as Clara's star rose - not just as a performer but as a composer -
Robert fell deeper and deeper into what he called the afflictions
of his own mind.
In 1853, now the father of six - soon to be seven - children...
..he wrote the hypnotic Gesange der Fruhe -
The Songs of Early Morning.
I think what I love most about him is fragility,
and the way he assumes it,
so he doesn't hide his fragility,
which is very uncomfortable often to listen.
There's something I do feel in late Schumann, where you feel a collapse
of something and a decay.
And yet there are these moments of extreme lucidity and I think
that they are connected, you know. Mm.
There's a certain innocence in this music and there is almost childlike
quality in the best sense.
It's music that goes directly into your heart.
There is no filters.
That's almost kind of the perfect romantic wish, actually,
for it to be unmediated, to come out of the head and onto the page.
Just a few months after writing this haunting piece of music,
Clara reported in her diary that Schumann's mental condition
was gradually growing worse.
He was having terrible nights.
He was getting melodies sent to him by angels, but she then reported
that in the morning those angels would change to demons,
they'd change to terrible, feral ravening beasts, tigers and hyenas
that would tear at him.
And he'd spend the mornings shrieking and crying and howling.
And nobody in the family knew quite what to do.
On February 27th 1854,
in the middle of Carnival,
Robert left his house in his dressing gown and slippers,
walked calmly to the bridge crossing the Rhine, and threw himself in.
It's a crowded city.
There are boats everywhere.
Boatman immediately fish him out of the river.
And they drag him back to the house.
And of course, he is headed for the mental hospital
and will never leave it.
The next time Clara saw him was two years later -
just two days before he died.
The romantic craving to explore the depths of human emotion, wherever
it might lead, had been meant as a revolt against the brutal
materialism of the modern world.
But in their search for the real self,
deep in their unconscious, it was inevitable that many of them
would get pulled under.
One Romantic poet, however, found an answer on how to avoid the fate
of so many of his fellow artists and friends.
He realised that it was by anchoring the mind to something
bigger, outside of itself,
to nature, that one could escape the irrational forces
of darkness and self-obsession that threatened to overwhelm him.
In 1798, while living in Somerset, close to Coleridge,
William Wordsworth set out on a
journey to follow the River Wye in Wales.
He'd walked the same route before. In 1793, when having fled
revolutionary terror in Paris,
he was in a deep depression caused by the collapse of his political
dreams and by the abandonment of his lover and daughter in France.
Now, five years on, he realised how much this place, the memory
of it lodged in his mind, had saved him from despair,
and this realisation would lead him to write one of the greatest poems
of romantic literature.
DAVID ATTENBOROUGH: Five years have passed.
Five summers with the length of five long winters.
And again, I hear these waters rolling from their mountain springs
with a soft inland murmur.
Once again, do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs that on a wild,
secluded scene impress thoughts of more deep seclusion and connect
the landscape with the quiet of the sky.
This isn't just a report from some perfectly picturesque spot.
It's a poem about time, memory, presence and absence.
And some of its most beautiful and powerful lines are set in places
where we're missing this scenery.
But we somehow have internalised it.
"Amid the din of towns and cities I've owed to them in hours
"of weariness, sensations sweet felt in the blood
"and felt along the heart."
Fantastic phrase.
Here I stand not only with the sense of present pleasure,
but with pleasing thoughts that in this moment there is life
and food for future years.
So what happens when you actually internalise this,
when nature actually gets inside your body?
For a start, it makes us happier.
Secondly, it helps you cope with the craziness, he says,
"..of all this unintelligible world."
Then there's a sudden change in key.
Wonderful, this great building symphonic composition.
Wordsworth remembers what it was like to experience nature
when he was a kid.
It's all about, as he says, "dizzy rapture", but that's no longer
important to him.
"For I have learned to look on nature
"not as in the hour of thoughtless youth,
"but hearing often-times
"the still sad music of humanity.
"I felt a presence that disturbs me with the joy of elevated thoughts,
"a sense sublime of something far more deeply interfused..."
Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns and the round ocean,
and the living air and the blue sky.
And in the mind of man -
emotion and a spirit that impels all thinking things,
all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things.
That is a great kind of anthem of our connectedness with the vast,
expansive universe and the cosmos. Of this interdependence
between nature and all of humanity.
This idea, forged at the very beginning of our modern
understanding of the human mind, has become one
of Romanticism's greatest legacies.
And it feels as relevant now in our helplessly tumultuous times
as it ever did.
But as we become ever more materialistic at the expense
of our own happiness and the health of the natural world, questions
remain as to whether it's something we've come to realise too late.
We're living in a epoch of self-obsession for which a kind of
communing with something which is not simply
about finding oneself,
that actually is an essential curiousness.
It seems to me so.
And the notion that we are a part of the natural world and not divorced
from it, lies at the heart of that.
There were plenty of people who maintained that we were separate
from the natural world.
And yet I think people in their heart know
that's a falsehood.
But it's a battle, isn't it,
really? A battle the Romantics started.
And it's for our own wellbeing that nature prevails, right now.
The pressures on the natural world have never been as great as this,
as they are at the moment - the destruction of the natural world.
And of course, the ignorance that we have of the natural world,
of the way it works, means that we don't care
about how we treat it.
And this breaking of our relationship with the natural world
has had terrible effects, in my view. Mm.
We depend upon nature for every breath we breathe,
and every mouthful of food we eat.
And some people would say we depend upon it for our very sanity.
As our world rushes to some kind of inevitable reckoning,
perhaps we need the lessons the Romantics left us more than ever.
Up, up,
my friend, and clear your looks.
Why all this toil and trouble?
The sun above the mountain's head, a freshening lustre
mellow through all the long green fields has
spread his first sweet evening yellow.
Come, hear the woodland linnet,
How sweet his music!
On my life,
there's more of wisdom in it.
And hark how blithe the throstle sings!
He, too, is no mean preacher.
Come forth into the light of things.
Let nature be your teacher.
One impulse from a vernal wood may teach you more of man,
of moral evil and of good, than all the sages can.
Next time, how the Romantics created our idea of national belonging -
for better or worse.