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Revolution
and the Romantic Theater
by Brian Johnston
Thomas Paine on Burke's Histrionics
II. Thomas Paine on Burke's Histrionics
Even though, in his rejoinder The Rights of Man, Thomas Paine derided Burke's "theatrical exaggerations for facts", his assessment of the value of the theater itself as an institution in an age of radicalism was as fatal as Burke's to the British theater's significant modern development. Both his non-conformist and his Rousseauist allegiances would encourage Paine to hold the theater in contempt. He writes of Burke's essay:
I can not consider Mr. Burke's book in any other light than a dramatic performance; and he must, I think, have considered it in the same light himself, by the poetical liberties he has taken of omitting some facts, distorting others, and making the whole machinery bend to produce a stage effect.
It is not just Edmund Burke's, but theatre's practice in itself, that Paine holds in disesteem. The Playwright, as it were by definition, cannot be a thinker: a doctrine also held by the heirs of Burke in the popular theater of the nineteenth century and of today. And yet Paine himself not only resorts to a rhetoric, but also employs metaphors that were to be taken up and developed by the new Romantic and radical theaters on the continent, especially in Germany and Scandinavia.
One of Paine's most vehement objections is against Burke's profound sense that the life of the present is governed by the past. Paine objects:
Every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the ages and generations that preceded it. The vanity and presumption of governing beyond the grave is the most ridiculous and insolent of all tyrannies... it is the living and not the dead, that are to be accommodated...I am contending for the rights of the living.. and Mr. Burke is contending for the authority of the dead over the rights and freedom of the living.
Paine shares the Rousseauist conviction that there is a natural humanity which historical cultures distort and to which we should revert. "...there have been upstart Governments, thrusting themselves between and presumptuously working to un-make man." The "natural subordination" that Burke appealed to, therefore, had in itself no authority for Paine who cited La Fayette's injunction, "Call to mind the sentiments which Nature has engraved in the heart of every citizen, and which take a new force when they are solemnly recognized by all: for a Nation to love liberty, it is sufficient that she knows it; and to be free, it is sufficient that she wills it." Nature and the general will, in this Rousseauist tradition, are alone adequate guides to the creation of an ideal society. Such a conviction practically erases the past from significant political consciousness. Paine seems to inhabit that innocent threshold to Romanticism when it still was possible, before the ghosts repossessed the modem mind, to proclaim, "We hold these truths to be self-evident."
It is an innocence that we might envy today. If, on the continent, the terms of the Burke-Paine dialogue were to undergo a tremendous deepening and extension, this extension was into sinister as well as exhilarating areas. Burke's sense of the 'irrational' continuity of a people's identity was to evolve into a 'cultural nationalism' of the right, in the lethal myths of 'blood, race, and soil' still plaguing our world, and in every way as disastrous as the abstract rationalist ideologies of the left that were to become its opponents on the cultural battlefield of Europe. It has been claimed that the second world war was fought between the left and right wings of Hegelian philosophy: which is to say that it was the quarrel between Burke and Paine taken to its limits.
Burke's belief in the binding power of tradition and Paine's rationalist rejection of it both were to develop into a far more profound dialectic in the hands of European dramatists and thinkers: in Schiller's, Kleist's and Hebbel's historical dramas, in Hegel's endeavor in the Phenomenology of Spirit and in The Philosophy of History, to recover the total past within the fabric of the present, in Ibsen's long struggle against the ghosts that haunt the life of the present, in Karl Marx's pronouncement in the 18th Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, "The tradition of all the dead nations weighs like a nightmare on the brain of the living. " This sense of the power of the past, for example, lies behind the action of Schiller's Don Carlos where the forces of renewal, of light and life and the future - Carlos, Elizabeth and Posa - are defeated by the forces of death and darkness, their symbolic opposites from the 'dead' past, of Alba, Philip and the blind Grand Inquisitor: a 'victory' for reaction that spells the spiritual death of Spain. Such a dialectical idea of reality, where, contrary to the Shakespearean vision, disorder is the healthy disquietude of the spirit, the condition of dynamic, evolving life, was to dictate the form, structure and content of Romantic and post-Romantic drama, leading to a new concept of tragedy. Instead of the 'closed' social, ethical and metaphysical structures with their punitive nemeses for the transgressor, within which Edmund Burke's vision was at home, Romanticism's tragic hero was the honorably restless transgressor whose rebellion called into question the entire structure of given reality and its sanctions. And not only was the structure of the present to be questioned and undermined: the past, too, could be seen as a subversive reservoir of values, tabooed by the present, whose resurrection could serve the cause of liberating our full humanity.
As incapable as Burke of developing this dialectic, Paine remains fixed to a facile rationalist rejection of the "musty records and mouldy parchments" of the past; as limiting, from its opposite perspective, as the massive complacency with which Burke defended the world-view that sustained his landed estate, Beaconsfield. Paine is scathing in his deflation of the outmoded theatrical rhetoric of Burke's traditional idea of society:
When we see a man dramatically lamenting in a publication intended to be believed that, "The age of chivalry is gone! That The glory of Europe is extinguished for ever! That the unbought grace of life if any one knows what it is, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprise is gone!" And all this because the Quixotic age of chivalry nonsense is gone, what opinion can we form of his judgment, or what regard can we pay to his facts?
Deriding Burke's histrionics, Paine writes: "His hero or his heroine must be a tragedy-victim expiring in show, and not the real prisoner of misery, sliding into death in the silence of a dungeon." Paine, here, 'releases' one of the powerful emblems of Romantic-revolutionary art and dramaturgy: one of the many images of spiritual and mental incarceration. The dungeon-rescue melodramas of revolutionary France, (or, e.g. Beethoven's Fidelio) were to make this emblem a common-place of Romanticism. As the metaphor of the prison expanded, so it came to comprise all forms of 'imprisoning' reality, (viz. Blake's "mind forg'd manacles") including the past of Europe, that confined the aspiring Romantic-radical spirit. And Paine seems to be smuggling in a new radical histrionics when calls to mind the figure of the people's uprising - a radical image we can put beside Burke's reactionary set-piece on Marie Antoinette:
The mind can hardly picture to itself a more tremendous scene than what the city of Paris exhibited at the time of the taking the Bastille, and for two days before and after, nor conceive the possibility of its quieting so soon. At a distance this transaction has appeared only as an act of heroism standing on itself, and the close political connection it had with the Revolution is lost in the brilliancy of the achievement. But we are to consider it as the strength of the parties brought man to man, and contending for the issue. The downfall of it included the idea of the downfall of despotism and this compounded image was become as figuratively united as Bunyan's Doubting Castle and Giant Despair.
Paine is trying to get his readers to 'see' in terms of a wholly new form of revolutionary imagery. Following the 'close-up' image of the prisoner "sliding into death in the silence of the prison," there next is presented one of the most powerful counter-metaphors of the new dramaturgy, from Schiller to Eisenstein: the crowd storming the symbol of oppression. This already had become a central action of French radical melodrama, and had been imported onto the London stage in John Dent's The Bastille performed at the Royal Circus theater in 1789, before the reactionary authorities took alarm and banned all such 'Jacobinical' "repetitions of this outrage."
Jean Genet's ironic treatment of these contending symbologies in The Balcony (1956) contains, expands and sardonically concludes the whole Burke-Paine opposition: of the costumed symbols of endangered church, state, law and police, (the conventional roles of our socially sanctioned histrionics), rallying round the beleaguered and beautiful queen against the revolutionary crowd which storms the palace/brothel. And this whole huge action is perhaps no more than a fantasy acted out by the brothel's patrons: a dream of the deluded historical/political consciousness 'psycho-analyzed' by the most Romantic but disenchanted of twentieth-century dramatists.
Paine's isolated prisoner is linked to the tremendous scene which is communally heroic and seen not to "stand on itself" but shown to have "a close political connection" with the larger issue of the Revolution. Action now embodies a radical idea by taking on symbolic figuration. Isolated situation and larger communal event can be connected in the way Eisenstein will juxtapose an isolated image, (e.g. the baby carriage tumbling down the Odessa steps), to the larger communal action heroically 'figured' in the Potemkin revolt. The parties are brought "man to man and contending for the issue" and there is great suspense as to which of the contesting parties in this agon would gain the "prize." The scene also is symbolic, for it includes "the idea of the downfall of despotism" or "a compounded image... as figuratively united as Bunyan's Doubting Castle and Giant Despair."
Paine's reply to Burke, therefore, inverts the conservative's use of the metaphor of the theater. Burke had derided and deplored the new 'revolutionary drama' or drama of the revolution, by calling to mind the form and content of the older theater and the social hierarchy it sustained. Paine in response invalidates, by deriding, the imagery of this older theater, (e.g. the tragedy-queen), and invokes images that were to be major weapons in the arsenal of the new revolutionary dramaturgy. From the beginning, there had been a theatrical quality behind the manner in which the French National Assembly sought to define and appropriate the revolution as neoclassical drama: whereby the classical gestures of David's The Oath of the Horatii (1784) would be repeated in the sketches for the revolutionary The Oath of the Tennis Court (1791) And, as the riots attending conservative and radical productions on the Parisian stages demonstrate (including the struggle for the ideological control of the Comédie Française) the revolutionary battles often were to be fought within the theater buildings as well as on the streets. The revolution dramatized itself onstage as it proceeded.
