The Seven Basic Plots - Christopher Booker [471]
A generation later, lecturing in On the Living Poets (1818), William Hazlitt recalled how:
`There was a mighty ferment in the heads of statesmen and poets, kings and people. According to the prevailing notions, all was to be natural and new. Nothing that was established was to be tolerated ... authority ... elegance or arrangement were hooted out of countenance ... everyone did that which was good in his own eyes ... the licentiousness grew extreme ... it was a time of promise, a renewal of the world.'
One of the poets about whom Hazlitt was writing, Wordsworth himself, had written in the immediate aftermath of the French Revolution of how:
'A multitude of causes, unknown to former times, are now acting with a combined force to blunt the discriminating powers of the mind, and ... to reduce it to a state of almost savage torpor. The most effective of these causes are the great national events which are daily taking place, and the increasing accumulation of men in cities, where the uniformity of their occupations produces a craving for extraordinary incident which the rapid communication of intelligence hourly gratifies. To this tendency ... the literature and theatrical exhibitions of the country have conformed themselves. The invaluable works of our older writers ... are driven into neglect by frantic novels, sickly and stupid German tragedies, and deluges of idle and extravagant stories.' 29
Nothing indeed was more expressive of Hazlitt's `mighty ferment' than that great fever which had already begun to sweep through the artistic imagination of Europe and that was to be associated with all the dreams, delusions and excesses we associate with the phenomenon known as Romanticism. And nowhere was this upheaval more evident, as we have already seen, than in the shift which was taking place around that time in the psychic centre of gravity from which writers imagined stories. It is here we can see more clearly reflected than anywhere else how what was happening in Western civilisation was a new kind of split developing between the ego and the Self. As all the cultural framework of beliefs and customs which provided people with a spiritual and mental centre to their lives was being dismantled, what was emerging was storytelling of a kind which had never been seen before.
The ego was slipping its leash. It was the beginning of that new phase in the psychic evolution of mankind with which we are still living two centuries later.
`When the Way was lost, there was virtue; when virtue was lost there was benevolence; when benevolence was lost there was rectitude; when rectitude was lost there were the rites; the rites are the wearing thin of loyalty and good faith and the beginning of disorder.' Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching, XXXVIII
W. B. Yeats, The Second Coming
Ulysses, Troilus and Cressida, Liii
There is one mythological tradition in human history which stands separate from all the others. This is the web of myths which we can piece together from various epics of the pre-Christian peoples of northern Europe, which show the whole adventure of life on earth ending in a mighty, all-consuming catastrophe: the Teutonic Gotterdammerung, the Norse Ragnarok, the passing of the gods and the destruction of the world. There is one particular feature of this story which makes it an apt prologue to our final chapter, which looks at how storytelling has reflected the evolving consciousness of Western civilisation over the past 200 years.
Like many others before it, the Norse mythology saw the world as divided into three levels. That inhabited by mankind was Midgard or Middle Earth. Above it, in the heavens, was Asgard, home of the gods, the Aesir, presided over from his great hall, Valhalla, by the wise All-Father' Odin. The dim underworld of Helheim (from which we get our word `hell') was where all human beings went after their death, except those killed in battle who ascended to Valhalla. In addition to these three familiar