How the old Romantics were true pioneers of the ‘woke’ generation
Simon Schama shows how many great writers and artists fought for our planet and people, says James Rampton
TO MISQUOTE Monty Python’s Life Of Brian, what have the Romantics ever done for us? Quite a lot, as a matter of fact.
More than two centuries ago, the Romantic movement popularised the ideas – which still remain highly relevant today – of people power, peaceful street protest, national belonging, a focus on ourselves and our imagination, a passion for nature and a concern about the future of our planet.
As Sir Simon Schama asserts in his new BBC Two series The Romantics And Us, “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. They are still with us right here, right now.”
We can see the Romantics’ influence all around. Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People – celebrating the Revolution dethroning King Charles X of France and which depicts a woman leading a charge over the barricades – has inspired France’s best-known street artist, Pascal Boyart, known as PBOY.
Last year he adapted Delacroix’s work into a mural on a Paris rooftop, portraying Liberty leading a group of demonstrators wearing gilets jaunes (yellow vests), the clothing adopted by protesters against President Macron.
In 2015 British street artist Banksy reimagined Théodore Géricault’s renowned radical Romantic painting The Raft Of The Medusa – in which a group of shipwrecked sailors on a raft desperately signal to a distant ship – on a Calais wall with the words: “We’re not all in the same boat.”
It is not just Romantic visual art that has had an impact on people today. Poetry has been equally significant. Percy Bysshe Shelley’s The Masque Of Anarchy, a poem catalysed by the tragic events of the Peterloo Massacre in 1819 and deemed too incendiary to be published in his lifetime, has become an emblematic verse of revolt.
Its splendidly uplifting lines (“Rise like lions after slumber in unvanquishable number. Shake your chains to earth like dew which in sleep had fallen on you. Ye are many – they are few.”) have been quoted at such historic protests as Martin
Luther King’s March to Selma and in the pro-democracy demonstrations in Tiananmen Square.
It is fascinating that the poem foreshadows the idea of peaceful protest. Schama reflects that, “At one point in The Masque Of Anarchy, Shelley tells protesters, ‘Stand ye calm and resolute, like a forest close and mute, with folded arms and looks which are weapons of unvanquished war’. He is saying that by doing nothing except standing there, you can’t actually be defeated. Mahatma Gandhi and Black Lives Matter come out of that.”
SCHAMA, 75, is well aware that the series, which looks at how modern thinking has been shaped by such Romantic titans as Delacroix, Géricault, Shelley, Mary Wollstonecraft, William Blake, William Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Robert Burns, Victor Hugo, Frédéric Chopin, the Brothers Grimm and Robert Schumann, might be seen as self-consciously “woke”.
He insists that was never his intention; the Romantics were naturally “woke” (alert to issues of racial and social injustice) long before that term existed. Schama, who presents with a captivating mixture of scholarship and passion, says: “The headline is that I didn’t want this series to be artificially ‘woke’. But so much of what the Romantics had to say speaks directly to us and our own time that we didn’t have to make it vulgar, crude or stupid.
“It was natural, for example, that that Pascal Boyart would paint his version of The Raft Of The Medusa to speak to his own generation. None of that is fakely trendy.”
The Romantics And Us outlines the many ways in which the Romantics got there long before us. For instance, they were way ahead of the game on environmental concerns.
Schama, professor of history and art history at Columbia University in New York, says: “Wordsworth has this beautiful moment of instinctive euphoria in the middle of his famous
1798 poem Tintern Abbey where he recalls his delight at nature as a child, ‘When first I came among these hills; when like a roe I bounded o’er the mountains, by the sides of the deep rivers, and the lonely streams, wherever nature led’.
“This poem is an extraordinary moment which anticipates all of environmentalism.wordsworth has this realisation that we are not put on Earth as conquerors of nature, but as an integral part of it.
“From that come writers like Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, John Muir and Thomas Hardy. Wordsworth had this sense of cherishing nature as inseparable from our own destiny rather than something we just casually use. That poem is absolutely the point of origin of those sentiments.”
The series shows that the movement predicted the importance of nationalism, too. Schama, who has also fronted such landmark series as A History Of Britain and Civilisations, says: “The German Romantic philosopher Johann Gottfried Herder said that if you dig into the inherited folk language, music and culture that millions of illiterate people can access, then you understand that it’s part of our humanity to feel that we not all the same.”
Of course, those urges have sometimes been distorted into something darker – look no further than the Nazis. Schama says he is very concerned about the rise of nationalism and troubled by the ascendance of nationalistic leaders such as Viktor Orbán in Hungary.
“Whether we are on the Right or the Left, we take certain
things for granted, like the independence of the judiciary and the free press. You only know how catastrophic it is to have those things taken away from you when it’s too late.
“Sometimes history works this way. Sometimes things come slowly at you, and sometimes it’s like being in the trenches in the First World War; you just have an artillery barrage of crisis after crisis after crisis. That’s when you find out who a good leader is and you discover it’s the New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern.”
Schama, who is married with incompetent. He doesn’t believe it’s part of his job to produce a national strategy.
“Having criticised Barack Obama for spending too much time on the golf course, Trump is off again today playing golf. By the time he’s finished his first round of golf today, 180 people will have died of Covid.”
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