A personal view by Kenneth Clark
'Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive' wrote Wordsworth of the early days of the French Revolution, but the storming of the Bastille led to the Terror, the dictatorship of Napoleon and the 19th-century bureaucracies.
Kenneth Clark traces the progressive disillusionment of the artists of the Romantic Movement through the music of Beethoven, the poetry of Byron, the paintings of Gericault, Turner and Delacroix, and the sculpture of Rodin. '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... Sandwiched between a corrupt aristocracy and a brutalised poor it had produced a defensive morality, conventional, complacent, hypocritical. On the other hand were the finer spirits - poets, painters, novelists, who were still heirs of the Romantic Movement, still haunted by disaster.
If ever a man deserves an Oscar for presentation on TV it is Sir Kenneth Clark for the series 'Civilisation.' Every one was a masterpiece. Never a dull moment and every detail explained minutely. (Daily Express)
