Ideas in the Air-part 3

Ultimately, as Peckham first observed, we see how the tree does in fact become a significant metaphor for the Universe and replaces the clock or clockwork of the Enlightenment.  Wagner’s great ash tree exemplifies this use.  In fact, for many of these artists, Nature becomes the religious center of their universe. Visualize the paintings of Caspar Friedrich or listen to the poem of Wagner’s Hans Sachs sung to him by the people of Nuremburg in the final act of Die Meistersingers.   Emerson was able to discuss an immanent spirit that still transcended everything.  The Oversoul united all living things. The Germans spoke of the noumenal world in which all things were one. As we will see, for most artists in a world that valued change, growth, and development, the images of the journey, the voyage, and the path take on great significance.  While Frodo Baggins, unlike Sydney Carton, could not make the last leap of faith on his own at the end of his journey, the concept of sacrifice and rebirth still fascinates and excites us, and in the midst of the twentieth century Tolkein wrote a novel about a journey on a path that could 

not be forsaken in order to suffer and sacrifice to save the world—the story still holds us in the twenty-first century.

This blog is not an attempt to prove that any artist influenced another.  Rather it is an attempt to show how the ideas identified by Morse Peckham in the 1950s were in the air during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries (and perhaps still are).  We will look at common themes that seem closely related which made their ways into the works of many artists and often explain what many anti-Victorian critics of the last century cited as flaws in these works.  We are going to take a journey together.  This will be a quest for understanding.  We will start with the failure of the rules of the Enlightenment, move to the reaction of artists seeking something more (Peckham’s new way of thinking), trace the radical thinking (a loaded term) of the German thinkers, and find resolution by exploring the themes of unselfish love and sacrifice, which free us from the self and the ego to move on to the Everlasting Yea.  

          I do not expect everyone to agree with my conclusions and analyses.  This is a battle I have fought for forty years.  What I hope to do is show that there is a theme that unites the art of the last two centuries, which is very different than that which had gone before.  It is a theme that explains aspects of these works which have seemed to be weaknesses or mysterious inconsistencies.  

          Ten years after his PMLA article, Morse Peckham published Man’s Rage for Chaos.  In this work, Peckham takes to task those critics who speak in broad terms about the common traits of works that make them “Baroque,”  “Classical,” or “Gothic.”  He points out that these traits are imposed on the works by the critics; that these traits are a very small part of each work, and that to concentrate on these traits is to deny the valuable traits of each work which make it unique and valuable.  Thoughout the book, Peckham seems to deny traditional criticism based on chronological periods.  Yet, at the end of the book he identifies and describes the common traits of works in such periods and provides a further refinement of his definition of Romanticism.  In fact, he restates the basis for identifying the ideas in the air at the beginning of the nineteenth century; ideas “so novel and so profoundly revolutionary” they were unlike anything that “had emerged in human culture since the early Neolithic period or perhaps even before” (291). These are the ideas worth pursuing.