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Revolution
and the Romantic Theater
by Brian Johnston
Edmund Burke on the Histrionics of Revolution
"Culture
is to set man free and to help him to be equal to his concept."
(Friedrich Schiller, On the Sublime: 1801)
I. Edmund Burke on the Histrionics of Revolution
In 1789, Edmund Burke, an enthusiast of the theater of David Garrick and Mrs. Siddons, observed with revulsion a new form of drama entering the world: the French Revolution and all that it foreboded. "What Spectators and what Actors" he wrote to Lord Charlemont. A century later (in 1889) the theater critics of London, led by Clement Scott, were to react with at least comparable horror to the appearance of A Doll House and, later, Ghosts, plays that rudely awakened the British theater from its long slumber. The two events though distanced by time, are thematically connected. Edmund Burke reverted to the metaphor of theater to describe the revolution in Paris while Ibsen's critics described the impact of his new dramaturgy in terms of social revolution. ("If any repetition of this outrage be attempted, the authorities will doubtless wake from their lethargy.") What occurred between those two dates was the evolution of a whole new supertextual structure of references that created the terms of Romantic and post Romantic drama and of its critical reception. By 'supertext' I mean a visual and verbal vocabulary and iconography by which ideas of reality are shaped, promulgated and sustained which then becomes a public domain of cultural discourse drawn upon, often unconsciously, by thinkers and artists.
For Burke, the French Revolution was an onslaught upon church, state, rank, property, law and order, in the name of a principle he repeatedly derided: "the rights of man." This latter was an "armed doctrine" against which censorship and repression at home and ruthless war abroad were fully justified. He published his most famous attack upon the revolution, Reflections on the Revolution in France in 1790 and it quickly was hailed as "the manifesto of the counter-revolution." Reflections, still a favored document of reaction, presents an example of all that the radical theater of Romanticism had to fight. Burke's frequent and vivid use of theatrical metaphors to berate the revolution, therefore, still is of interest to students of the modern theater. Much of the power of the Reflections comes from its (often florid) use of the rhetoric of the older literature and theater: a rhetoric that was to be displaced, in the intellectual world at least, by the rhetoric of Romanticism. In the imagery of Burke's attack on the revolution, and in that of Thomas Paine's reply, The Rights of Man (1791 one might see an 'Hegelian moment' of one theatrical vocabulary in intellectual decline and new one struggling to be born.
Unashamedly standing for the existing social order, its power-base and its privileges, the wealthy proprietor of Beaconsfield admonishes:
The body of the people must not find the principles of natural subordination by art rooted out of their minds. They must respect that property of which they cannot partake. They must labour to obtain what by labour can be obtained; and when they find, as they commonly do, the success disproportioned to the endeavor, they must be taught their consolation in the final proportions of eternal justice. Of this consolation, whoever deprives them, deadens industry, and strikes at the roots of all acquisition as of all conservation
Burke opposes "natural subordination" to "art" and so claims that revolutionary ideas, which the Romantics were to insist were rooted in those principles of 'Nature' present in every individual , were an artificial intrusion into the natural order of hierarchical society. Any disagreement with this divinely sanctioned social dispensation will be countered by force. "We have prisons strong as the Bastille, for those who dare to libel the queens of France." With brutal honesty Burke reveals conventional society's twin pillars of indoctrination and force which the rhetoric of its complaisant theater softened and glamorized.
But, reactionary though he was, Burke possessed a vision of society that profoundly was to become part of Romantic lore: that a nation is extended back in time and that much of its essential 'identity' inheres in institutions and traditions drawing upon loyalties that transcend critical reason. Burke repeatedly appealed to his readers' consciousness of this network of allegiances and traditions which the 'Cartesian' logic of the philosophes failed to understand. He wished to preserve for all time the hierarchical social structure of his own age, stopping the clock of social progress at the hour of his writing.
Romanticism was forcefully to reject this static concept of history and society, but it, too, became more and more aware that the existing social structure and its historically evolved institutions could not just immediately be dismantled. Writing in 1795 and after the Revolution had run much of its violent course, Friedrich Schiller, the first major dramatist of the new 'radical' theater, warned against risking the very theoretical (even if morally necessary) idea of society. "The great consideration is, therefore, that physical society in time may not cease for an instant while moral society is being formed in idea.... The living clockwork of the state must be repaired while it is in motion." Schiller was concerned not to endanger, (by theoretically erasing), that variegated human identity involved, however imperfectly, in existing social traditions and institutions: a concern reflected in his idea of the theater as well as in his political and aesthetic writings. An awareness of an ineradicable substratum to our conscious human identity, instinctual, irrational and often existing subconsciously, is an essential Romantic 'deepening' of Enlightenment rationalism. It is the keynote of its art and writing making the Romantic theater radically different from that which preceded it. Evolving from Schiller, through Kleist, to Ibsen and Strindberg, this invisible, but powerful 'underworld' to our conscious selves will, variously, provide a 'counterpoint' to the drama of rational consciousness.
Burke adulated the state in terms more extravagant than Hegel would utter: but Hegel, while remaining loyal to revolutionary and Romantic aspirations, was to incorporate much of Burke's concept into his own philosophy of the state. Hegel, however, saw states as evolving by acknowledging and overcoming, through dialectical conflict, their institutional contradictions and he commended both Goethe and Schiller for depicting in their historical dramas, such as Egmont and Don Carlos, just such actions at times of dialectical transition within states. In the history of the world, in Hegel's view, a succession of such conflicts, from ancient times to the present, constituted the evolution within the world of the concept (or consciousness) of freedom: a concept that found its extreme political expression in the French Revolution and its philosophical self-understanding in German Idealist philosophy. Consciousness of historical process, of human identity as the result of long cultural evolution, anticipated by Vico, came into its own in Germany at this time. It is no accident, then, that a dramatist within this culture, Schiller, was to inaugurate modern tragedy as a tragedy of historical consciousness, of individuals, such as the Marquis of Posa in Don Carlos, not only trapped in historically limiting circumstances, but lured, fatally, into the hubristic attempt to influence the historical process.
For Burke, a current generation is a temporary custodian, only, of a culture whose humanity extends back far into the past. "People will not look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors," he observed. Against Rousseau's concept of the 'social contract' as the expression of the general will at any moment of deliberation, Burke asserted:
As the ends of such partnership cannot be obtained in many generations, it becomes a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born. Each contract of each particular state is but a clause in the great primaeval contract of eternal society, linking the lower with the higher natures, connecting the visible and invisible world…
The conflict between the 'dead' past and the 'living' present (with 'Nature' as the increasingly ambiguous arbiter between them) constitutes the major argument of Romanticism, creating a wholly new theatrical symbology. For various reasons, neither England nor France were intellectually to develop this argument to its fullest, so that its more consequential life within Romanticism will proceed in Germany and Scandinavia and will at the same time beget a much more radical idea of the place of the theater within a modern society. The quarrel between Burke and Paine presents this conflict between past and present in embryo, as it were, with all its potentialities unguessed at: but perhaps this allows us to see the conflict with greater clarity.
Even the histrionics of revolution in the actual world were offensive to conservative ideas of social propriety. Like a neoclassical critic confronted by 'Gothic" or Stürm und Drang drama, Burke finds the French revolution, in its crass indifference to historical tradition, breaking all the rules of dramatic decorum:
The most wonderful things are brought about in many instances by means the most absurd and ridiculous; in the most ridiculous modes; and apparently, by the most contemptible instruments. Every thing seems out of nature in the strange chaos of levity and ferocity, and of all sorts of crimes jumbled with all sorts of follies. In viewing this monstrous tragicomic scene, the most opposite passions necessarily succeed, and sometimes mix with each other in the mind; alternate contempt and indignation; alternate laughter and tears; alternate scorn and horror.
Absurd and indecorous, the innovative revolutionary 'dramaturgy' is the indication of deplorable new melodramatic tastes in the public:
Plots, massacres, assassinations, seem to some people a trivial price for obtaining a revolution. A cheap, bloodless reformation, a guiltless liberty, appear flat and vapid to their taste. There must be a great change of scene; there must be a magnificent stage effect; there must be a grand spectacle to rouse the imagination, grown torpid with the lazy enjoyment of sixty years security....
The French Assembly itself (of which Paine was to become an actual, an Schiller an honorary, member) has become a troupe of low comedians, acting before the people "the farce of deliberation with as little decency as liberty. They act like the comedians of a fair before a riotous audience." As an example of the true old dramaturgy with which to reproach these deplorable new histrionics, Burke now wheels onto the stage his tragedy-queen in the famous set-piece on Marie Antoinette. Now, the point about this passage is that it is the debasement of a once-living theatrical rhetoric that did proceed from intense loyalty to traditional institutions: to the monarchy, the aristocracy, the Church and the forms and ceremonies that maintained these roles in power. The piece is too long to quote in full and a selection of phrases cannot do justice to the rhetoric of sentimentality that Burke sustains for two pages; but the following passage will provide an idea of Burke's procedure. The queen is one of those "beings made for suffering" and "surely never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision":
I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just began to move in - glittering like the morning star, full of life, and splendor, and joy. Oh! What a revolution! and what an heart must I have, to contemplate without emotion that elevation and that fall!....little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fallen upon her in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honour and of cavaliers. I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards to avenge even a look that threatened her with insult. - But the age of chivalry is gone - That of sophisters, oeconomists, and calculators, has succeeded; and the glory of Europe is extinguished for ever. Never, never more, shall we behold that generous loyalty to rank and sex... The unbought grace of life, the cheap defence of nations, the nurse of manly sentiment and heroic enterprize is gone! It is gone, that sensibility of principle, that chastity of honour, which felt a stain like a wound, which inspired courage whilst it mitigated ferocity, which ennobled whatever it touched, and under which vice itself lost half its evil, by losing all its grossness.
Thomas Paine was quick to see the Shakespearean origins of this rhetoric: "Mr.Burke... may continue his parody to the end, and finish with exclaiming: "Othello's occupation's gone!" The extent to which Burke 'reads' the revolutionary events as theater is truly remarkable, as a sample of his phraseology (on one page alone) reveals:
"When kings are hurled by the Supreme Director of this great drama...if such a spectacle were exhibited on the stage.. .with such a perverted mind I could never venture to shew my face at a tragedy...the tears which Garrick or that Siddons have exhorted from me... poets have to deal with audiences not yet graduated in the school of the rights of man... in the theater men follow their natural impulses..."
The principles of the French revolution would be rejected by a decent audience "on the modern, as they once did on the ancient stage... no theatric audience in Athens would bear what has been borne.... In the theatre, the first intuitive glance, without any elaborate process of reasoning..." would serve to reject the 'cold' principles of the revolution. And Burke positively rejoices that British audiences have not been infected by the new intellect and its "process of reasoning":
"We are not the converts of Rousseau; are not the disciples of Voltaire." Burke declares, sounding the familiar British note in intellectual matters. Burke's attitude represented what was to become, in the British theater, a political consensus amounting to self-censorship, abetted by the legal censorship of the Examiner of plays, and the patent (licensing) system. It not surprising, therefore, that serious drama - the drama of post-revolutionary consciousness - was to be absent from Britain for over a century after this was written, making the period, one of the most fertile in English literature, the most barren in serious dramatic output since middle ages. As the reactionary theatrical consensus also sought the lucrative patronage of the great public ("giving the public what it wants") a native, serious modern drama could not emerge. For over a century both the popular and the fashionable theaters in London, while encouraging all the arts of the theater and of acting, fought against the evolution of a serious modern dramatic tradition. From economic considerations, theater-managers feared alienating any section of the heterogeneous "great public" by the infiltration of alarming 'ideas' (let alone a sustained dramatic argument) into the theater. A serious modem drama in Britain could occur only if a dramatist emerged independent of the economic terms of fashionable London productions and intellectually capable of extending the limited terms of the Burke-Paine dialogue into the full Romantic-radical 'argument'. This inevitably meant it would have to be a dramatist from the continent who could be employed as a form of intellectual 'fifth column' against the establishment, and this goes a long way towards explaining the phenomenal success, among intellectuals in England, of Ibsen in the 1890's.
