To my view, there have been at least three major epochs of Western Civilisation that have celebrated the ideal of heroism for its own sake: the Ancients of the Near East and Mediterranean, popularised by the Homeric Epic; the Early Middle Ages of Northern Europe, with its own form of epic or Saga; and the Age of Romanticism, though for that much of it was too entangled with corresponding political idealism coming out of the Revolutions to remain untainted when those ideals went unrealised. (As an aside, it’s also interesting they never produced a successful epic of their own.)
While visions of perfect liberty and brotherhood were quickly shattered (as they, being immature beliefs, always are) by the ambitious Few and the iconoclast Many, even in their ruin remained a sense of the unconquered Self. I do not suggest that the Self had been unrealised to that point, though it certainly had been sublimated to the Mass from the rise of medieval Christendom through to the end of absolute monarchy. Oddly, Imperial Rome likewise sublimated self-will, and yet the idealised beauty of the individual will has rarely been so championed as in Romanticism.
There was a time–oddly enough in my youth–when Romanticism held little appeal to me, and still I regard it with misgivings because of its unfettered political idealism, but in terms of art as expression of self-will, I look on it now with a certain respect. There is a reason I chose “Wanderer Above the Mists” by Caspar David Friedrich to visually represent my site:
There are several worthwhile interpretations of this painting. Contextually, it is a self-portrait of the artist, but radically so: with back turned to the viewer, he is not the subject of the painting, he is in the painting. Even without knowing it’s a self-portrait, we can still see that the painted figure’s own experience trumps that of the viewers, since he’s hiked out to the promontory and been rewarded with the awe-inspiring view that we on only minimally appreciate here on the other side.
Adding to that interpretation but going beyond it, what I see is the lone individual standing out above the Formless Void, the Nothing itself. While the motion of the scene draws the viewers into the center of the storm of Chaos, the individual, the very principia individuationis, superimposes himself above it; perhaps defiantly, perhaps even triumphantly, but he is there nonetheless, and while we are not we want to be. That, I think, is a model of heroism.
There are other, greater, models of the heroic ideal than the self-assertion of Art contra Nature of the Romantic Age, which I hope to explore as time allows, but it is a good enough place to begin since they were often the ones who brought those models back into the Modern era, even if not always for the right ends.
