The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [468]
Revolution and Romanticism: The unleashing of the ego
The theme of this chapter has been the most obvious of the ways in which, since far back into prehistory, human beings have tried to reconcile the psychic split which arose from the moment they began emerging from a state of nature. Its central importance to human civilisation could be seen in how its symbolic structures dominated the settlements of almost every culture in the world, from the cathedrals of Europe to the ziggurats and minarets of the Middle East, from the pagodas of Asia to the carved totems of North America.
Closely allied to religion, however, as these structures showed, was that other chief means whereby human beings had used imagination to connect their conscious lives with the ego-transcending realm of the unconscious: through the power of art.
During the Middle Ages the art form which most dramatically expressed this desire for re-connection to the Self was architecture, in those Gothic cathedrals. But over the centuries which followed the central focus of that imaginative effort had moved at different times from one art form to another. As the European imagination broke out from its mediaeval frame, it initially found its most complete psychological expression in the new styles of painting which produced the glories of the fifteenth and early sixteenth-century Renaissance. By the early seventeenth century, the focus had moved to literature acted out on a stage. It was the plays of Shakespeare which now showed the greatest ability to penetrate to the objective level of the human psyche (although the isolated genius of Rembrandt, a little later, matched his depth of insight). By the eighteenth century, literature and painting were no longer capable of reaching such psychological and spiritual depths. The form which now most profoundly conveyed the power of the Western imagination to express psychic totality was music. In the age first of Bach and Handel, then of Haydn and Mozart, finally of Beethoven and Schubert, it was music, the most inward and abstract of all the arts, which most completely expressed that power by which great art harmonises consciousness with the Self. And no composer was more consciously aware of the significance of this than the towering figure who stood at the end of this period when, psychologically, music stood unrivalled among the arts. In Beethoven's own words:
`like all the arts music is founded on the exalted symbols of the moral sense; all true invention is a moral progress. To submit to its inscrutable laws, and by means of these laws to tame and guide one's own mind, so that the manifestations of art may pour out: this is the isolating principle of art ... so art always represents the divine, and the relationship of men towards art is religion: what we obtain through art comes from God ... thus every genuine product of art is independent, more powerful than the artist himself ... connected with men only inasmuch as it bears witness to the divine of which they are a medium. Music relates the spirit to harmony.' 25
In fact, at a less rarified level, the same principle governed those more popular forms of art which had entertained and uplifted the great mass of ordinary people for thousands of years, from the songs and dances associated with all the world's rich traditions of folk music to the skills of the popular storytellers.26 It is no accident that so much of this book has been taken up with discussing stories derived from folk tales, those anonymous products of the collective imagination of mankind whose origins are so mysterious that we can usually only track them down to the forms in which they were first collected. By the time at the end of the seventeenth century