All language subtitles for Civilisation.12of13.The.Fallacies.of.Hope.720p.BluRay.YIFY

(MUSIC) TCHAIKOVSKY: Francesca Da Rimini

(Clock chiming musically)

A finite, reasonable world.

Symmetrical. Consistent.

Enclosed.

Well, symmetry's a human concept,

because, with all our oddities
we are, more or less, symmetrical.

And the balance of a mantelpiece by Adam,
or a phrase by Mozart,

reflects our satisfaction with our two eyes,
two arms, two legs, and so forth.

And consistency. Again and again in this series
I've used that word as a term of praise.

But enclosed - that's the trouble.

An enclosed world
becomes a prison of the spirit.

One longs to get out. One longs to move.

One realises that symmetry and consistency,
whatever their merits

are the enemies of movement.

(MUSIC) BEETHOVEN: Leonora Overture

And what is that I hear? That note of urgency,
of indignation, of spiritual hunger.

Yes, it's Beethoven.

It's the sound of European man once more
reaching for something beyond his grasp.

We must leave this trim, finite room
and go to confront the infinite.

(Waves crashing)

(Music continues)

We've a long, rough voyage ahead of us,

and I can't say how it will end,
because it isn't over yet.

We're still the offspring
of the Romantic movement

and still victims of the fallacies of hope.

I've used the metaphor of the sea,

because all the great Romantics,
from Byron onwards,

have been obsessed
by this image of movement and escape.

"Once more upon the water!

And the waves bound beneath me as a steed
That knows his rider. Welcome to their roar!

Swift be their guidance, wheresoe'er they lead!"

(Music resumes)

This escape was also an escape from reason.

In the 18th century, philosophers had attempted
to tidy up human society by the use of reason.

But rational arguments weren't strong enough
to upset the huge mass of torpid tradition

that had grown up in the last 150 years.

In America it might be possible for a new
political constitution to be achieved by reason,

but it took something more explosive
to blast the heavy foundations of Europe.

Towards the end of the 18th century,
as rational argument declined,

vivid assertion took its place.

Rousseau: "Man was born free
and is everywhere in chains."

Robert Burns: "A man's a man for a' that."

Or, more explicitly:

"It's coming yet for a' that,

That man to man, the world o'er
Shall brithers be for a' that."

In 179O, an obscure English poet
named Mordaunt wrote

"Sound, sound the clarion, fill the fife!
Through all the sensual world proclaim,

One crowded hour of glorious life
Is worth an age without a name."

These are the impulses

that showed themselves
like spray flying off a rock during the 1780s.

Then, as we know, came the tidal wave.

(Music resumes)

It was because this need for freedom

had for so long been boiling
under the surface of the 18th century

that the French Revolution evolved
from the protest of a few disgruntled lawyers,

through the honourable grunts and groans
of bourgeois constitutionalism,

to the raw cry of a popular movement.

None of the intervening solutions would do.

In June 1789
the members of the National Assembly

had found themselves locked out of their
usual meeting place - accidentally, it seems -

and went off, full of virtuous indignation,
to this covered tennis court

where they swore an oath
to establish a constitution.

David, the painter of republican virtue,
was commissioned to record the scene.

In the centre is a group symbolising the union
of the Church and the better aristocrats.

Actually, the monk wasn't present.

Like all propaganda pictures,
it's not strictly accurate.

Here are figures in an ecstasy of enthusiasm
for constitutional government.

And here - this is historically correct -

is the one delegate
who wouldn't swear to support it.

To our eyes, disenchanted
by 150 years of democratic eloquence

and 50 years of propaganda painting -
none of it as good as David -

the whole thing may seem slightly absurd.

And in fact, these first steps towards revolution
were pedantic and confused.

The constitutional phase of the French
Revolution belonged to the Age of Reason.

Three years later,
we hear the sound of the new world

when some honest citizens of Marseilles
grow impatient at an executive that doesn't act,

and undertake the amazing feat of marching,
in a sweltering July,

all the way from Marseilles to Paris,
tugging three pieces of cannon,

and singing a new song.

(MUSIC) RED ARMY SINGERS: La Marseillaise

(MUSIC) Le jour de gloire est arriv�!

(MUSIC) Contre nous de la tyrannie

(MUSIC) L'�tendard sanglant est lev�!

(MUSIC) L'�tandard sanglant est lev�!

(MUSIC) Entendez-vous dans les campagnes

(MUSIC) Mugir ces f�roces soldats?

(MUSIC) Ils viennent jusque dans vos bras

(MUSIC) �gorger vos fils, vos compagnes

(MUSIC) Aux armes, citoyens!

(MUSIC) Formez vos bataillons!

(MUSIC) Marchons, marchons!

(MUSIC) Qu'un sang impur

(MUSIC) Abreuve nos sillons!

(MUSIC) Aux armes, citoyens!

(MUSIC) Formez vos bataillons!

(MUSIC) Marchons, marchons!

(MUSIC) Qu'un sang impur

(MUSIC) Abreuve nos sillons!

Breathes there a man with a soul so dead

who can listen to that marching song
without emotion, even today?

No wonder that the finest spirits of the time
were enraptured;

that Blake began a poem
on the French Revolution, which nobody reads;

and Wordsworth wrote the lines
that everybody quotes,

and I must quote again.

"For great were the auxiliaries which then stood
Upon our side, we who were strong in love!

Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive
But to be young was very heaven!"

And Wordsworth goes on to say
how the Revolution seemed to bring

Rousseau's dream of natural man and travellers'
tales of his enchanted existence into reality.

It was no longer confined to
"Some secluded island, Heaven knows where!

But in the very world, which is the world
Of all of us."

At this point, the Revolution
was the Romantic movement in action.

And perhaps its greatest legacy to posterity
has been its message to the young:

that those who are strong in love
may yet find a way of escaping

from the rotten parchment bonds
that tie us down.

I can see them still through the window
of the University of the Sorbonne,

impatient to change the world, vivid in hope,

although what precisely they hope for,
or believe in

I don't know.

The moving fact about the first revolutionaries

is that their dream of a new world
was sharply defined.

They wanted to change everything,
even the calendar

making the year 1792 year one,
and renaming the months.

The change of years was a nuisance,
but the new names of the months -

Ventose, Thermidor, Brumaire, and so forth -
the windy one, the hot one, the misty one -

were charming, and I wish they'd survived.

They expressed the love of nature

that had become so closely entwined
with the Revolution.

The same desire to return to nature
affected women's fashions.

All the artificial framework of the 18th century
is thrown away,

and the dresses follow the lines of the body
with graceful simplicity.

No more high, powdered wigs,
but flowing locks, with a simple bandeau.

And Madame R�camier, the most famous
and inaccessible beauty of her time,

posed for David with naked feet.

Of course, there was a good deal
of profanation and blasphemy,

and a vast amount of destruction.

Cluny, St-Denis,
many of the sacred places of civilisation,

were horribly knocked about.

It was even proposed
to pull down Chartres Cathedral,

and build in its place a Temple of Wisdom.

The revolutionaries wanted
to replace Christianity with the religion of nature,

and there is something rather touching

about this print of baptism
according to the rites of nature,

taking place in a de-Christianised church.

People who hold forth about the modern world
often say that what we need is a new religion.

It may be true, but it isn't easy to establish.

Even Robespierre,
who was an enthusiast for new religion,

and had powerful means of persuasion
at his command

couldn't bring it off.

And on the name Robespierre,

one remembers
how horribly all this idealism came to grief

in the prisons of the Terror.

Most of the great episodes
in the history of civilisation

have had some unpleasant consequences,

but none have kicked back sooner and harder
than the revolutionary fervour of 1792,

because in September
there took place the first of those massacres

by which, alas,
the Revolution is chiefly remembered.

No-one's ever explained in historical terms
the September massacres,

and perhaps, in the end,
the old-fashioned explanation is correct:

that it was a kind of communal sadism.

It was a pogrom,

a phenomenon with which we became familiar
in the 19th century.

And it was given fresh impetus
by another familiar emotion - mass panic.

"La patrie en danger." The country in peril.

In 1792 France was fighting for her life,
against the forces of ancient corruption,

and for a few years her leaders suffered
from the most terrible of all delusions:

they believed themselves to be virtuous.

Robespierre's friend Saint-Just said,

"In a republic,
which can only be based on virtue,

any pity shown towards crime
is a flagrant proof of treason."

But reluctantly, one must admit

that a great many of the subsequent horrors
were simply due to anarchy.

It's a most attractive political doctrine,
but I'm afraid it's too optimistic.

The men of 1793 tried desperately
to control anarchy by violence,

and in the end were destroyed by the evil means
they had brought into existence.

Robespierre himself, and many, many others,

followed the members of the old regime
onto the scaffold.

With what mixed feelings one looks
at David's picture of Marat, murdered in his bath.

David painted it with deep emotion.

The picture was intended
to immortalise the memory of a great patriot,

worthy of the traditions of Brutus.

Few propaganda pictures
make such an impact as a work of art.

Yet Marat cannot escape responsibility
for the September massacres,

and thus for the first cloud
to overcast Wordsworth's dawn

and darken the optimism of the first Romantics
into a pessimism that has lasted to our own day.

The revolutionary spirit lived on after his death,
as we see it in this picture by David,

painted in 1795,

but it had no leaders.

French politics was exactly the same melee
of self-seeking in-fighting

that it was to become so often
in the next 150 years.

Then, in 1798
the French got a leader with a vengeance.

(MUSIC) Le Champ D'Honneur

With the appearance of General Bonaparte,

the liberated energies of the Revolution
take a new direction -

the insatiable urge to conquer and explore.

His council chamber at Malmaison

where the first great plans of conquest
were worked out

is a soldier's room
with a ceiling made to look like a tent -

a fashion that was followed all over Europe
for the next 50 years.

And this is the actual council table.

On the doors are trophies of arms
of the warlike peoples of antiquity -

Carthaginian, Roman, Greek,

the Middle Ages.

Then beyond the doors
is Napoleon's library and study,

and, painted on the ceiling,
portraits of his favourite authors,

beginning with the Gaelic bard Ossian.

What a charming room!

Of course, it's an adaptation of an antique room,

but made livable, almost comfortable.

And this is his actual desk.

Military glory. Conquest.

What have they to do with civilisation?

War and imperialism,
so long the most admired of human activities,

have fallen into disrepute,

and I am enough a child of my time
to hate them both.

But I recognise that,
together with much that is destructive,

they are symptoms of a life-giving impulse.

"And shall I die with this unconquered?"

How many great poets and artists and scientists

could have spoken those words that Marlowe
put into the mouth of the dying Tamburlaine?

In the field of political action,
they have become odious to us.

But I've an uneasy feeling
that one can't have one thing without another;

that Ruskin's unwelcome words

"No great art ever yet rose on earth
but among a nation of soldiers,"

seems to be historically irrefutable...so far.

The need to conquer was only one part
of Napoleon's paradoxical character.

There was also the political realist,
the great administrator,

the author - or at least the editor -

of that classic corpus of law,
the Code Napol�on,

written at this very desk.

In his portraits
we can watch the young revolutionary soldier

dissolve into the First Consul
with traces of revolutionary intensity in his head,

and in two years he becomes the successor
of Childeric and Charlemagne.

This extraordinary portrait by Ingres

makes conscious reference
both to Roman ivories

and tenth-century miniatures
of the Emperor Otto Ill.

So, in one mood

Napoleon believed that he was reviving
the great traditions of unity and stability

by which the ideas of Greece and Rome
were transmitted to the Middle Ages.

To the end, he maintained
that Europe would have been better off

if it had been united under his rule.

That may be true, but it could never happen,

because the realistic ruler
was dominated by the romantic conqueror,

and the static, hieratic Emperor
painted by Ingres

is forgotten when we look at David's
Bonaparte Crossing The Great St Bernard.

There he is truly the man of his time.

For 50 years the great minds of Europe
were enchanted by a poem called Fingal,

said to have been written by Ossian,
a Gaelic bard.

Actually, it was a kind of fake,
put together out of scraps of evidence

by an enterprising Scot named Macpherson.

But this didn't prevent Goethe from admiring it,
nor Ingres, the high priest of Classicism,

from painting an enormous picture
of Ossian's dream.

And Fingal was Napoleon's favourite poem.
He took an illustrated copy on all his campaigns.

Its heaven was not tarnished
by the approval of the old regime.

He ordered the glossiest of his painters, Girodet,

to depict the souls of his own warriors,
his marshals

being received by Ossian in Valhalla.

Painfully reminiscent of Hitler and Wagner.

And yet one can't quite resist the exhilaration
of Napoleon's glory.

(MUSIC) BEETHOVEN:
Eroica Symphony, Second Movement

Communal enthusiasm
may be a dangerous intoxicant,

but if human beings
were to lose altogether the sense of glory,

I think we should be the poorer.

(Music resumes)

Napoleon's tomb in the church of Les Invalides,

the most grandiose memorial to any ruler
since Ancient Egypt.

And what, in all this glory,
had happened to the great heroes

that spoke for humanity
in the revolutionary years?

Most of them were silenced by fear -
fear of disorder, fear of bloodshed

fear that, after all
human beings were not yet capable of liberty.

Few episodes in history are more depressing
than the withdrawal of the great Romantics -

Wordsworth saying that he would give his life
for the Church of England,

or Goethe that it was better to support a lie
than to admit political confusion in the state.

But two of them did not retreat

and so have become
the archetypal romantic heroes -

Beethoven and Byron.

Different as they were -
and it's hard to think of two more different men -

they both maintained an attitude of defiance
to social conventions

and they both believed unshakably in freedom.

Beethoven wasn't a political man,

but he responded
to the generous sentiments of the Revolution.

At first he admired Napoleon, because he
seemed to be the apostle of revolutionary ideals,

the inheritor
of the early revolutionary urge to freedom,

symbolised by the storming of the Bastille.

The Bastille was subsequently knocked down,
stone by stone,

but repression did not come to an end.

On the contrary, Napoleon organised
the most efficient secret police in Europe.

This place is the dungeon
of the castle of Vincennes

where political prisoners of all sorts
have faced the firing squad,

right up to the end of the last war.

Hateful.

And would have been equally hateful
to both Byron and Beethoven.

When Beethoven heard that Napoleon
had proclaimed himself Emperor,

he tore off the dedication page
of the Third Symphony,

and was with difficulty prevented
from destroying the score.

Later he was to write, in his opera Fidelio,
the greatest of all hymns to liberty,

as the victims of injustice struggle up
from their dungeons towards the light.

(MUSIC) In freier Luft

(MUSIC) Den Atem leicht zu heben!

(MUSIC) O welche Lust!

(MUSIC) Nur hier, nur hier, nur hier ist Leben

"O happiness to see the light," they say,
"to feel the air and be once more alive.

Our prison was a tomb.
O freedom, freedom, come to us again."

This cry has echoed through all the countless
revolutionary movements of the last century.

(MUSIC) In freier Luft

(MUSIC) In freier Luft

(MUSIC) Den Atem leicht zu heben!

(MUSIC) Nur hier, hier ist Leben

(MUSIC) Nur hier, nur hier

(MUSIC) Nur hier, nur hier ist Leben

(MUSIC) Ist Leben

(MUSIC) Der Kerker eine...

(MUSIC) Der Kerker eine Gruft

(MUSIC) Nur hier, nur hier

(MUSIC) Nur hier ist Leben

(MUSIC) O welche Lust

(MUSIC) O welche Lust

(MUSIC) Wir wollen mit Vertrauen

(MUSIC) Auf Gottes Hilfe

(MUSIC) Auf Gottes Hilfe bauen

(MUSIC) Die Hoffnung fl�stert sanft mir zu

(MUSIC) Wir werden frei

(MUSIC) Wir finden Ruh'

(MUSIC) Wir finden Ruh'!

(MUSIC) O Himmel!

(MUSIC) Rettung!

(MUSIC) Welch ein Gl�ck!

(MUSIC) O Freiheit, O Freiheit

(MUSIC) Kehrst du zur�ck?

(MUSIC) Kehrst du zur�ck?

As far as freedom is concerned

I'm afraid that recent revolutionary movements
haven't got us far forward.

On the fall of the Bastille in 1792
it was found to contain only seven old men,

who were annoyed at being disturbed.

But to have opened the doors
of a political prison in Germany in 1940,

or Hungary in 1956,

or Spain or Greece today...

then one would have known the meaning
of that scene in Fidelio.

Beethoven
in spite of his tragic deafness', was an optimist.

He believed that man had within himself
a spark of the divine fire,

revealed in his love of nature
and his need for friendship.

He believed that man was worthy of freedom.

The despair
that poisoned the Romantic movement

had not yet entered his veins.

But by about 1810 all the optimistic hopes
of the 18th century had been proved false.

The rights of man, the fall of tyrants,
the benefits of industry - all a delusion.

The freedoms won by revolution
had been immediately lost,

either by counter-revolution,

or by the revolutionary government
falling into the hands of military dictators.

In Goya's picture of a firing squad,
called 3 May 1808,

the repeated gesture of those
who've raised their arms in heroic affirmation

becomes the repeated line of the soldiers' rifles,

as they liquidate a small group of liberals
and other inconvenient citizens.

Well, we're used to all this now.

We're almost numbed
by repeated disappointments.

But in 1810 it was a new experience,

and all the poets and philosophers
and artists of the Romantic movement

were shattered by it.

The spokesman of this pessimism
was Byron.

He would probably have been a pessimist,
anyway - it was part of his egotism -

but appearing when he did,
the tide of disillusion carried him along,

so that he became, after Napoleon,
the most famous name in Europe.

From great poets like Goethe and Pushkin
down to the most brainless schoolgirl,

his works were read
with an almost hysterical enthusiasm,

which, as we struggle through
the rhetorical nonsense of Lara or The Giaour

we can hardly credit,

because, although Byron
wrote quite a lot of good poetry,

it was his bad poetry that made him famous.

Byron, who was very much a man of his time,
wrote a poem about the opening of a prison -

the dungeon of the castle of Chillon
on the lake of Geneva just behind me there.

He begins with a sonnet
in the old revolutionary vein:

"Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty!"

But when, after many horrors,
the prisoner of Chillon is at last released,

a new note is heard:

"At last men came to set me free;
I ask'd not why, and reck'd not where;

It was at length the same to me,
Fetter'd or fetterless to be;

I learn'd to love despair."

Since that line was written, how many
intellectuals, down to Beckett and Sartre

have echoed its sentiment?

But this negative conclusion
was not the whole of Byron.

The prisoner of Chillon had looked from
his castle wall onto the mountains and the lake

and felt himself to be part of them.

This was the positive side of Byron's genius,

a self-identification
with the great forces of nature -

in short, with the sublime.

(MUSIC) BERLIOZ: King Lear

Consciousness of the sublime was a faculty

that the Romantic movement
added to the European imagination.

It was an English discovery,
related to the discovery of nature.

Not the truth-giving nature of Goethe,
nor the moralising nature of Wordsworth,

but the savage,
incomprehensible power outside ourselves,

that makes us aware
of the futility of human arrangements.

As the Revolution
turned into the Napoleonic adventure,

the sublime became visible and within reach.

And this was the feeling
that was given popular expression by Byron.

He was irresistible

because he had identified himself
with the fearful forces of the sublime.

"Let me be,"
he says to the stormy darkness on this very lake,

"let me be a sharer in thy fierce and far delight,
a portion of the tempest and of thee."

But participation in the sublime

was almost as much of a strain
as the pursuit of freedom,

because de Sade was right:

Nature is indifferent, or, as we say, cruel.

No great artist has ever observed
these violent, hostile moods of nature

as closely as Turner.

And he was without hope.

These are not my words,
but the final judgement of Ruskin,

who knew him and worshipped him.

Turner was a great admirer of Byron,

and he used quotations from Byron's poems
in the titles of his pictures.

But Childe Harold
was not pessimistic enough for him,

so Turner wrote a fragmentary poem
to provide himself with titles.

He called it The Fallacies Of Hope.

Bad poetry. Good pictures.

Here's one of the most famous of them.

It represents an actual episode
in the slave trade

another of those contemporary horrors
that troubled the Romantic imagination.

Turner called it Slavers Throwing Overboard
The Dead And Dying - Typhoon Coming On.

For the last 50 years, we've not been
in the least interested in the horrible story,

but only in the colour of the black leg
and the pink fish surrounding it.

But Turner meant us to take it seriously.

"Hope, hope, fallacious hope," he wrote,
"where is thy market now?"

About 20 years earlier, G�ricault,
the most Byronic of all painters,

had also made his name
with a picture of a disaster at sea.

The frigate Medusa
foundered on her way to Senegal.

149 of the passengers were put onto a raft,

which was to be towed by sailors
in the pinnaces.

After a time
the crew got fed up and cut the ropes,

leaving the raft to drift out to sea,

and condemning the passengers
to almost certain death.

Miraculously, there were a few survivors,

from whom
G�ricault learnt the full horrors of the episode.

He even found the ship's carp, enter,
who had made the raft

and he had him make a model of it in his studio.

He took a work room near a hospital,
so that he could study dying men.

He'd been a dandy,

but he gave up his life of p, leasure,
shaved his head

and locked himself in a room
with corpses from the morgue.

He was determined to paint a masterpiece.

And he succeeded.

(MUSIC) BERLIOZ: King Lear

To us it looks
like a piece of grandiose picture-making,

but The Raft was intended
and originally accepted,

as a piece of what we call social realism.

G�ricault's last works
were a series of portraits of lunatics,

which I think are among the great pictures
of the 19th century.

They carry a step further the Romantic impulse
to explore beyond the bounds of reason.

His intense effort
to penetrate into their disordered minds

has led him to grasp more fully
the complete physical character of their heads.

By this time,
G�ricault was dying of some internal injury,

which he aggravated
by riding the most unruly horses he could find.

No strong man
has ever sought death more resolutely.

He died at the age of 33,

a little younger than Byron,
considerably older than Shelley and Keats.

Fortunately, he left a spiritual heir,

whose pessimism
was supported by a more powerful intellect -

Delacroix.

The first picture
in which Delacroix is entirely himself

is The Massacre Of Scios.

As with almost all the masterpieces
of Romantic painting,

it represents an actual event -

the slaughter by the occupying Turks
of the inhabitants of a Greek village.

And it reflects the generous sentiments
of those liberals like Shelley and Byron

who dreamed that Greece might yet be free.

While Delacroix was painting it came the news
of Byron's death on campaign at Missolonghi.

There is protest and compassion in this picture -

more, perhaps,
than Delacroix was ever to show again,

because he came to despair
of all attempts to change society,

and retreated
into painting subjects from Romantic poetry.

Some of his greatest pictures
were inspired by Byron.

This is The Prisoner Of Chillon.

As luck would have it, one of Delacroix's friends
became Prime Minister

and gave him many public commissions,

including the library
of the French Parliament House.

At one end of the room
he painted the scene of Attila the Hun

trampling on the remains of antique civilisation.

What an incredible choice for a library!

And made all the stranger

by Delacroix's obvious sympathy
with this embodiment of destructive energy.

No-one realised better than Delacroix
that we got through by the skin of our teeth.

And, he would have added, was it worth it?

But in the end, somewhat reluctantly,
he would have answered, "Yes."

He valued European civilisation all the more
because he knew it was fragile.

The 19th century
revealed a split in the European mind

as great as that which afflicted Christendom
in the 16th century,

and even more destructive.

On the one hand was the new middle class
created by the Industrial Revolution.

It was hopeful and energetic,
but without a scale of values.

Sandwiched between a corrupt aristocracy
and a brutalised poor,

it had produced a defensive morality -
conventional, complacent, hypocritical.

Never was a class better documented
by the admirable cartoonists of the day.

On the other hand were the, finer spirits,
like Delacroix

who were still heirs of the Romantic movement
still haunted by disaster.

And they felt themselves, not without reason,

to be entirely cut off
from the prosperous majority.

But what could they put in place
of middle-class morality?

They themselves were still in search of a soul.

The search went on throughout the 19th century,
and it continues today,

and leads to the same sense
of isolation and despair.

In the visual arts
its chief interpreter was a sculptor, Rodin.

He was the last great Romantic artist,
the direct heir of G�ricault and Byron.

Indeed, his greatest disappointment
was that he didn't win the competition

to do the Byron memorial in Hyde Park.

And like them
his abundant animal spirits didn't allay,

but rather enhanced his view
of mankind's tragic destiny.

And like them, there is
sometimes, in his expressions 'of despair,

a trace of rhetorical exaggeration.

But what an artist he was!

Incredible that, only 20 years ago,

he was still under the cloud
of critical disapproval.

What is posterity?

He was an inventor of symbolic poses
that stay in the mind,

and like all oversimplified statements
that spur men on to action,

they are sometimes rather too obvious.

But in the originals,
his figures are saved from banality

by a really stunning force
and freedom of modelling.

"Every form thrusting outwards
at its maximum point of tension."

Those were Rodin's own words.

Look at the back of this figure of Eve.

You'll see how the vitality is conveyed
by the touch of Rodin's hands.

He was one of those sculptors

who communicate
through the movement of his fingers.

And for that reason
all his best figures were modelled quite small,

enlarged afterwards by other artists.

This is the largest scale
on which Rodin ever worked.

If some of his gestures look a little forced,
one must also admit

that Rodin's power of representing figures
under the pressure of violent emotions

links him with a whole line of modern art
from Munch to Francis Bacon.

These are his Burghers Of Calais,
staggering out of the beleaguered city

and offering their lives to the brutal English King,
in order that the people may be saved.

They're still with us -
Romantic man at the end of his pilgrimage.

(MUSIC) RICHARD STRAUSS: Solemn Prelude

Rodin did one work which is dateless -

very ancient or very modern,
depending on which way you look at it.

This is his monument
to the great French novelist Balzac.

Of course, Balzac had been dead for many
years when Rodin received the commission,

and the commemorative figure
had to be an ideal likeness -

a serious obstacle to Rodin
as he always worked direct from nature.

All he had to go on was the knowledge
that Balzac was short and fat

and worked in a dressing gown.

Yet he had also to make Balzac look immense
the dominating imagination of his age,

and yet transcending his age.

He set about the problem in a peculiar way.

He made seven naked figures of Balzac,
to satisfy his sense of Balzac's physical reality.

And some of them
are here in his studio near Paris.

You can see that he didn't make
any concessions to the classical ideal.

After contemplating them for several months,
he decided on one of them

and tried to cover it with a cast of drapery,
indicative of the famous dressing gown.

In this way, he contrived to give the figure
both monumentality and movement.

The result is, to my mind, the greatest piece
of sculpture of the 19th century -

perhaps, indeed,
the greatest since Michelangelo.

But this isn't the way
in which Rodin's contemporaries saw it,

when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1898.

They were horrified.

Rodin was a hoax, a swindler.

They even raised the cry
of "la patrie en danger",

which shows how seriously the French take art.

The crowds surging round it,
threatening it with their fists,

were unanimous on one point of criticism:

that the attitude was impossible,

and that no body
could exist under such draperies.

Rodin, sitting nearby, knew that he had only
to strike the figure with a hammer,

and the draperies would come off,
Leaving the body visible.

Hostile critics said
that it was like a snowman, a dolmen

an owl, a heathen god.

All quite true,
but we no longer regard them as terms of abuse.

Balzac's body
has the timelessness of a prehistoric stone,

and his head is like a bird of prey.

And the real reason
why he made people so angry

is the feeling that he could gobble them up,
and doesn't care a damn for their opinions.

Balzac, with his prodigious understanding
of human motives

scorns conventional values
defies fashionable opinions, as Beethoven did,

and should inspire us to defy all those forces
that threaten to impair our humanity:

lies, tanks, tear gas,

ideologies, opinion polls,
mechanisation, planners, computers -

the whole lot.

(MUSIC) RICHARD STRAUSS: Till Eulenspiegel